Fate/Extra Last Encore is a thirteen episode anime that is a loose adaptation of the Fate Extra RPG game. It has a confusing beginning as all you learn is that the protagonist is Hakuna Kishinami. He is attending school with Matou Shinji as his friend. Their teacher is warning all the students not to go to the Limbo, an abandoned building turned rubbish dump where anyone who goes there gets the urge to suicide. Then comes a few odd happenings with the revelation that this is a virtual world, candidates are being selected for something like a Master and the world is out of time. By the end of the first episode, the candidates are chosen and the world, with anyone left behind, is to be gone.
A mysterious being wearing scarlet armor and wielding a sword appears before Kishinami. She is his Servant, named Saber. Although this Saber looks similar to the Sabers that we are used to, she has a completely different personality and is a different character. She’s a lot more upbeat and frivolous, although as part of the Saber class of Servants, she is extremely powerful wielding her sword.
There are 128 Masters in a world where most people are NPCs. The Masters need to seek other Masters to fight and then head up the stratums. It’s like a massive dungeon in a game where the player fights their way up each floor to reach the top. However, you do notice the lack of characters other than the protagonists and their opponents, it feels like an empty world and it is explained in the anime why that is so.
Kishinami lacks an objective and a compelling reason to reach the top floor, the Angelica Cage. At the same time, he keeps having visions that seem to be his memory, hinting at something more in relation to his role in the grand scheme of things. He has some extraordinary powers that exceeds your expectations of what a supposedly inexperience Master should have. Even when the his true nature comes up, which is supposed to rock your understanding, it doesn’t seem like such a huge deal.
The tone of the anime is dark and slow paced which isn’t the best way to keep your attention. Information is revealed in a confusing way. It’s set in a depressing world, where it looks like the original organisation that had set everything up has collapsed, while the rest of the world has moved on but not in a good way. The storytelling can feel truncated, making it hard to follow the logic. At times, it feels as if the plot is trying to be clever but it is never quite articulated clearly enough on how it is clever, so it’s lost to the viewer. It feels too disjointed, even if it is not, for it to flow smoothly from one event to another.
Perhaps the thing that hits you first is the weird aesthetics of the character designs. The eyes on several characters look off, where it’s as if it was done in the style of anime over a decade ago. There are changing aesthetics in each of the floors, which give the visuals quite a variety. While Kishinami is travelling up the floors quite quickly, there is some time provided to give the background of each of the Floor Masters. The anime does not focus on the fight sequences, which are rarely more than the characters swinging their weapons and jumping around. There is a lot of flashy effects, grunting and yelling to give these scenes some excitement. It fills in all the extra time with plenty of dialogue resulting from flashbacks instead that happen either right before or after the fights.
You’re constantly reminded that this is a broken world. The one hope of breaking out of this virtual reality is to ascend to the top, beat the final master and wish upon the Holy Grail on a way out back to Earth. Surprisingly, the anime covers off the whole story. It gives us closure by the time the final episode ends. Granted, it’s a bit of a confusing and messy ending with a lot of dialogue, concepts and exposition. However, it still leaves a fair bit of emotional impact, especially since you’ve now gotten to know Kishinami, Saber and their circumstances.
Overall, Fate/Extra Last Encore is okay. It does not have the most robust story and the point of different being set in a virtual world isn’t used quite as much as it could have. due to the setting, there is a lack of characters in general but you end up learning quite a bit with the pair of protagonists, up to the point where the ending works in terms of what they had to do to win.
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