Reviews Anime / Fate Stay Night Heavens Feel

I suppose the only question worth asking here is: Why did you watch these films without doing any research into what they were about beforehand?

First of all, you shouldn\'t NEED to do research about a movie\'s plot before you watch it.

Second, I do understand the basic premise just fine: Seven Mages use magic to summon Servants, who are the embodiments of the legends of various historic/mythological/religious figures to participate in the Holy Grail War, in which the seven Master/Servant pairs fight all of the others to the death, and the winner is supposed to have a wish granted if they win. But this HGW is a total clusterfuck because most of the mages involved have no idea what they\'re doing or are part of some scheme that\'s trying to use the War to further some other goal. The main character, Shiro, summons by accident the Servant Saber, who is actually King Arthur, who was secretly a woman.

Thing is, on Heaven\'s Feel? Most of the premise I just typed doesn\'t matter. Most of the true identities of the Servants are never actually revealed. At best, they\'re hinted at. Saber is effectively killed at the end of the first movie, meaning Shiro is out of the War. The movies are instead focused on how Shiro\'s girlfriend\'s evil grandpa is trying to pull a Grand Theft Me by throwing her in a room full of rapeworms every night but threatens to destroy the world because she might give birth to Ahriman for reasons that involve many Info Dumps full of Magi Babble. And Grandpa Asshole died three different times, somehow.

Illyaswasimmer von Eisenbjorn going from a Creepy Child to an ally and actual friend of Shiro is a neat idea, but I feel like it didn\'t flow as well as it could have in these movies.

Look, I may have come off as flippant in my reviews, but I do think there\'s quite a bit good about these movies. However, an opaque plot and a lack of accessibility for people who haven\'t already seen one anime series or another when the movies are supposed to be telling their own story are flaws and they did reduce my enjoyment of the films.

I believe you're actually referring to Sakura's evil grandpa. Of course, he's not actually Sakura's grandfather(that's Tokiomi and Aoi's fathers) nor is he even Shinji's grandfather(Zouken's Shinji's ancestor from many generations back), but both of them call him "Grandfather," and it's important to get even minor details right.

While your review is well within the character limit, it's still not a good idea to waste an entire paragraph ranting about Illya's nonsensical name. The characters allotted to you are a precious resource, and should be spent on more meaningful aspects of the work you're reviewing.

It's fair to complain that Heaven's Feel and other adaptations of Fate Stay Night are inaccessible to newcomers, since other people have made that criticism. However, it's also advantageous for you to understand what you're reviewing, so it would be your and your readers' best interests to do some reading about it before passing judgment on it.

Lmao, this is tantamount to reading The Silmarillion before reading The Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit and then complain why things are confusing in The Silmarillion. It\'s not confusing, YOU are the problem for starting from the wrong place. Learn how to start a new series.

@Lilyh Chan: I read the Silmarillion first, and found it in no way confusing. Quite the contrary, it made a lot of things clearer in Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien wrote The Silmarillion (or at least the texts that would be gathered into the published book) long before he considered The Lord Of The Rings. Not a good simile.

I ignored this thread for two years because I was expecting an influx of defensive fans, and because I was embarrassed that I mixed up Shirou\'s and Shinji\'s names and came off as clueless. It\'s not nearly as bad as I thought, but Lilychan\'s comment was pretty rude.

Well, then to talk about some movies I\'ve never watched, I was kind of hoping they\'d take the opportunity to retcon away at least some of the edgy stuff that I felt didn\'t meaningfully improve the story. By all accounts it didn\'t.

I think most Fate stuff has kind of leaned on the idea that you\'ve watched all the other Fate stuff before it for a hot minute now, but these movies were probably most doomed to suffer from that because, conceptually, the Heaven\'s Feel story route is designed from the ground up for you to have gotten to know these characters across two previous entire stories so that the things that happen to them or are revealed about them will possess a weight and impact that simply can\'t exist experiencing it for the first time. I\'m sad to hear they couldn\'t move past that problem.