The path of devotion is a great labor. Do not ever mar it.
What They Say:
“Babylon, the Condemned, and the Memories of the King”
Waver Velvet, who fought side by side with Iskandar during the Fourth Holy Grail War, receives a visit from Reines El-Melloi Archisorte and Melvin Weins. Reines asks Waver to help her with something as payment for the debt.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
There is perhaps no franchise I have let consume me as much as Fate. I’ve poured thousands of dollars into it, not as rare a claim in the age of Fate/Grand Order, but I’ve never touched that game. The Fate franchise is so expansive that there is any number of ways to be a fan. My fandom is still primarily tied to the anime within it. Even within the subset of anime, there are not only many different favorite installments depending on the person, but even several different, equally valid starting points. While I was aware of previous works that I later went back and visited, my venture proper into the endless juggernaut that is Fate was the Fate/Zero anime when it began nearly eight years ago. To date, I haven’t found a Fate anime to surpass the second season of Zero for me, though the latest Heaven’s Feel movie came far closer than anything else, giving me hope for the final piece of the trilogy. In that time, many spinoffs have made their way to animation outside of the main ufotable canon, mostly following the massive success of Grand Order, but few of these have come close to comparing to any of that core material, with an unfortunate percentage of them not even being worthwhile.
At the center of the entire franchise, of course, is the original story of Fate/stay night, and as such, derivative works tend to use elements from that as a base. This has a great deal of overlap with Fate/Zero, but the latter includes one major character who survives the events of the series but, as a character not present in the original work, was doomed to appear less frequently than his contemporaries. This is of course the young Waver Velvet. However, a character of such importance to a prequel that has become firmly accepted into the canon, and a particularly beloved one at that, isn’t simply going to be ignored for that reason alone. So even anime viewers up to this point may have noticed a much more mature, serious Waver going by the name of Lord El-Melloi II popping up in series such as Prisma Illya and the ufotable adaptation of Unlimited Blade Works, clearly for Fate/Zero fans since, as mentioned, the character didn’t even exist in its source material. These appearances have served as little more than cameos and feature none of what made Waver so endearing, though, so the demand for a richer exploration of his life after the Fourth Holy Grail War has definitely been brewing.
In the ever-expanding sea of Fate spinoff material, then, it’s natural that we get a series with that express purpose. Where does Waver go after we last see him as an adorable young man in Fate/Zero, how does he become the uncharacteristically suave hunk with seemingly neither awkwardness nor a sense of humor, and what does he do in this world of mage craft going forward? Now that Fate has become an even greater hit than ever before thanks to its mobile game, it’s becoming more and more likely that any given work in the franchise will receive an anime adaptation, and after an “episode 0” TV special at the end of last year, here we are with the series proper. After the recent Emiya cooking show, there’s a precedent for even Fate anime series to not include “Fate” in the title, and I suppose it makes sense for those that operate outside of the primary Holy Grail War plots to omit it. Instead, enjoy a title so convoluted that it must be part of this franchise yet lacking the one common thread to identify it as such.
As a direct sequel to Fate/Zero (yes, it’s a sequel to a prequel, which still makes it a lot more straightforward than most of these spinoffs), I initially hoped that ufotable might take it on. Sure, spinoffs like this tend to go to other studios, but since ufotable handled that cooking show with similarly no “Fate” in the title, the least consequential story, and a world that can’t possibly exist in the same continuity as any previous installments, I felt like there was some hope. Alas, this was not to be, and thus the trend of a different studio handling nearly every Fate anime continued with TROYCA picking up this adaptation.
This seemed like the perfect first Fate anime for TROYCA to animate, though, because that’s precisely the studio that Fate/Zero director Ei Aoki left ufotable to found and direct for not long after Fate/Zero ended. That meant that Aoki wasn’t the director of any of ufotable’s adaptations of Fate/stay night, but with this pairing, he could still direct a sequel to Fate/Zero and keep Waver consistent throughout his starring roles. Despite that, though, Aoki seems determined to direct only original works at TROYCA, while Makoto Katou tends to be in charge of most of the studio’s adaptations, this one included. With Aoki credited in a nebulous supervising role, it appears that there’s some acknowledgment of this connection to this work, but it still seems like such a missed opportunity.
A more surprising piece of consistency that we got from Fate/Zero, though, is Yuki Kajiura returning as the composer. She didn’t even score Unlimited Blade Works, which I could only guess had to do with its first cour overlapping with Sword Art Online II’s second, but the same is now true for Kimetsu no Yaiba, so I’m not sure how it played out that way. I’m thankful for that, though; I consider the composer to be one of the most important people involved in an anime alongside the director and writer, and Kajiura’s Fate/Zero score is an iconic and essential element to achieving the tone of that adaptation.
There’s no mistaking this for a piece of ufotable’s hyper-detailed Fate metaseries, but for coming from such different sources, it does carry over a lot of that aesthetic, albeit slightly more simplistically. With its dark color palette, cinematography based around shadowy gradients, and smooth compositing, it feels believable enough for this to exist in the same world as the events of the Fate/Zero and Fate/stay night anime of the past eight years. When the series literally flashes back to events of Fate/Zero, it strikes a somewhat painful reminder that the production values were stronger in a series from close to a decade earlier, but this is still absolutely one of the more visually pleasing and well-produced Fate spinoffs to date.
There may be no Kajiura soundtrack I love as much as Fate/Zero’s, so there was little chance that this would live up to that or even its Heaven’s Feel counterparts, but Kajiura is still one of the most distinctive composers in the business, and she slaps her very welcome trademarks all over this. I look forward to seeing what else she pulls out, perhaps reprising more leitmotifs from Fate/Zero when appropriate. If the music can evoke the feelings of Waver’s eventful past, it will go a great length toward selling this series as a continuation of his story that fans can fully invest in.
Being the first episode, this is where we see the bulk of the bridge from Fate/Zero to the events that will follow Lord El-Melloi II going forward, and therefore the best chance to get callbacks to that series as well as seeing Waver at his most moe before he gets all hardened and ostensibly very serious. The biggest challenge of this series was always going to be making Waver as lovable without his delightful dynamic with Rider, so referencing back to Rider with this frequency makes this first piece a slightly easier pill to swallow. Throughout the process, Waver definitely still has a lot of characteristics of his younger self, so there’s plenty of fun to be had in this succinctly depicted journey. The true test will be whether the supporting cast only seen for seconds in this episode will be able to draw out sides of Waver that are anywhere near as endearing as the ones Rider did, especially since he appears much less fun.
In Summary:
Waver’s spinoff (or sequel tangential to the main story of the series, anyway) isn’t blowing me away at this point, but being the first episode of a story with few familiar faces and presumably no impact on any significant Nasuverse events, it was likely never going to. For what it is, I’m still happy overall and hoping that it scratches my Fate fanboy itch periodically throughout its run. It’s probably already the overall best Fate spinoff anime so far, though the bar for that was not very high.
Grade: B-
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
LG Electronics OLED65C7P 65-Inch 4K Ultra HD Smart OLED TV, Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K