Hello everyone,
Here we are to talk about the 11th episode of the much anticipated "action" anime series of this fall season 2011 named Fate/Zero that is slowly coming to an end.
Why "action" you say? Well, because this episode was the lowest in terms of production quality (really bad drawn animation in some scenes) and quantity of action scenes (apart from the short Rider battle at the end).
I was expecting some crazy fight combination between Saber, Gilgamesh and Rider, but everything ended up with some random "let's bully Saber for her foolish dream" type of content.
The episode starts with Saber and Irisviel getting approached by Rider who instead of trying to fight and kill Saber in combat decide to bore her to death thanks to the help of his buddy Gilgamesh.
The whole majority of the episode was focused on the way of living of the three old heroes and the reason they have to pursue the grail.
Gilgamesh just want to keep all the treasures for himself, Rider want to get a new life in order to conquer the new world as well, Saber want to fix the past in order to save Britain.
Yes, the 90% of the episode was just focused on these three heroes talking, while drinking wine, about what is a "king" and why Saber is a bad one.
While I can understand that we need some separation between the various battles, I do think there are better way to put in fillers. Yes, because in the end everyone who watched Fate/Stay Night knows of Saber's dream and her whole situation.
The animation quality was really degraded in this episode and it makes me think that the studio tried to fool his way through one episode in order to get some time to prepare the last battles of the season.
The only remarkable scene was the final battle between Iskandar and the assassin's army. His special power (reality marble) allows him to call his army back from the world of the dead and use them as "low level" servant.
While I don't think any of them will have any chance fighting against a Saber or Archer (both Excalibur and Ea looks perfect to destroy the whole army with one hit), they are perfect to kill the army of powerless assassins!
Next episode will probably go back to talk about the Lancer/Kayneth/Sola-Ui pair and hopefully we'll finally get the demise of the creepy Caster together with his master.
Concluding, while extremely disappointed by this episode I'm still looking forward to watch and blog the final battle between Caster and Saber!
See you soon,
feal87