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Anime and Manga Thread.

Supersuavesky

By Supersuavesky
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I got back from the Fate/Stay Night Heaven's Feel premier in DC a couple hours ago. So I want to put my thoughts down on paper. This was the first time I've ever seen anime in the theaters. It was an interesting experience with pretty much all the audience being weebs/neckbeards. I see why anime gets such a bad rep :p. I was surprised to see there was actually a decent amount of women there, considering Fate is an action/guy orientated series in general. I bought this ticket a month and a half ago and still wasn't able to get a good seat. Next time the second the tickets go on sale I'm buying one so I can get a nice seat right in the middle. They also gave me a nice HF poster at the end of the movie. Anyways, on to Fate

 

So before I get into Heaven's Feel I want to talk about the franchise in general. First off, if you haven't seen Fate before, drop everything else you're watching and go watch Fate/Zero and Fate Stay Night: Unlimited Blade Works. In the post above this one, I posted an easy to follow guide for getting into Fate since it can be pretty confusing. A lot of people like long running Shonen series like Dragon Ball,  One Piece, and Naruto. Fate outclasses all of those series and arguably is the best action series in all of anime. It about a battle royal between 7 mages, each with their own motivations and ambitions, striving for the ultimate magical prize- an omnipotent holy grail, capable of granting any wish. Each of the masters gets to summon a hero from the past, present, or future to fight by their side in brutal hand to hand combat. So get ready to brush up on your myths and legends, you're in for a ride. The Fate franchise started out with one little eroge game by some unknown company in 2004 and has now become a sprawling mega-franchise with tons of books, video games, and multiple spin-off series. The most well-known series and the ones you all should really watch are Fate/Zero and Fate/Stay Night. Fate/Stay Night anime is an adaption of the original Visual Novel of the same name. Visual Novels are like a mix of a video game and those choose your own adventure books. They play out like a book that you read with art of the characters interacting and you are presented with various options of how to respond to the situation you are in. Most of the options will end up with you getting brutally murdered but it's actually quite fun and the writing in the Fate series VN is exceptionally good. In particular, some of the "bad" endings you get are amazing and could have whole routes based on what happens during them. Anyways, the original Fate/Stay Night was split into 3 routes with each route building off the previous ones. With the first route being Fate, then Unlimited Blade Works. The original Fate animation/first route was ruined by the studio that animated it. It was complete trash even though the source material was fantastic. Ufotable then animated Fate/Zero, a prequel to the Fate/Stay Night series that reigns supreme as the best action anime series of all time. Ufotable then got to animate UBW which was almost as good as Zero. Finally, we have reached the best, the most complex, and the culmination of all the other Fate routes. The true successor to Fate/Zero: Fate/Stay Night: Heaven's Feel.

I've spent quite a lot of time reading through the original VN, the first two routes were like 30 hours each and HF was at least 50 hours long, so I can say with authority that HF is the best Fate has to offer as far as the story goes. It very much builds off your knowledge from previous Fate iterations. If you come into these movies without having seen at least UBW you're going to be completely lost. Unlike Fate/Zero and Fate/UBW, Fate/HF is going to be a series of three movies instead of a 26 episode TV show. At first, I was a little confused about why they would do that, but after playing through the HF route it became much more apparent. Fate/Heaven's Feel is much darker and creepier than either of the previous shows. The content its self is even more mature with a lot more sex and gore then could be shown on TV. As I mentioned before Fate was originally an eroge game so it had sex scenes with the main heroines in each of the routes (Fate route: Saber, UBW: Rin, HF: Sakura/Illya). Ufotable famously shied away from any of the sexual content in Unlimited Blade Works and there was not even a shred of fan service in Fate/Zero. In Heaven's Feel, they don't really have a choice since the sex is so interwoven with the narrative. In fact, during the movie, Shirou got more from Rin than he did from her during the whole of UBW. Also, there is the gore. In the past Fate has shown some pretty gruesome deaths, with people being impaled by so many swords that their bodies aren't touching the ground, broken necks, and little girls getting their hearts torn out. In HF they stepped it up another notch with peoples stomachs getting sliced open and intestines rolling across the ground. Now, this gore isn't at the level of some crazy shows like Elfen Lied, Hellsing Ultimate, or Berserk but there is still enough that it isn't something you could broadcast on TV in Japan. It's just the right amount of gore for this series as each death is brutal and entertaining without being over-the-top like Hellsing was. The animation, as usual for Ufotable, is top notch. It's the same style as Zero and UBW had but is somehow even better. There were some scenes that were just breathtakingly done, like Shirou and Saber walking through a light dusting of snow. And the action scenes are bar none the best-animated action sequences in all of anime. Each swing of a lance or sword was painstakingly done, with the perfect combination of inhumanly fast fighting with fluid animation. Pure eye-candy. It's the type of fights that makes you gasp and cheer everytime someone swings. The sound design was also top notch. It really helped convoy the weight, speed, and power during each fight as well as complementing the fights with hardcore hype music. Now as I mentioned before, HF is the real successor to Zero as far as the tone of the story goes. It's quite a bit darker and grittier than UBW. As anyone who's watched Fate before knows, usually the first half of the show is spent world-building and plotting. Not much action happens during the first 12 or 13 episodes then everything starts ramping up from there. I was bit afraid the first movie in the HF trilogy was going to be just that, the prologue that all the routes share and world-building. Since this route was in a movie format, Ufotable decided to forgo the buildup and just hop right into it. It starts with an exploration of the relationship between Sakura and Shirou and how they met, something that never really examined in the previous series. But since Ufotable assumes you've watched at least UBW, they use the opening credits to do a kind of fast forwarding of the events that occur in all the routes( Lancer vs Archer, Shirou getting stabbed, Saber's summoning, Rin and Shirou meeting as masters for the first time.) After that they dive headfirst into the route. I won't elaborate too much on the specifics of the plot except to say There is plenty of new and interesting things in this route including a couple of new scary antagonists, new servants, and an enemy that you won't see coming.  So you won't be bored or disappointed in the plot. It suffices to say that they speed up the pacing of the plot to get it to fit into a movie format. This isn't a bad thing as the VN tend to ramble a little too much at times but some of the scenes could have been put off until the second movie. They essentially smashed the first three days of the VN into one night. Again not badly done just an interesting note.

Well, Ufotable started this Grail War off with a bang. This first movie was absolutely dead on and it's only the first of three movies. The even crazier stuff is yet to come. I can't wait to go see the next one and I couldn't recommend this movie enough when it drops on Blu-ray if you're a fan of action and complex plots. 9/10

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Tetsujin

Tetsujin

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I've really like Samurai Champloo, but the anachronisms bug me. It's trying to also serve as an entertaining history lesson of Japan's Edo period, but they bring in famous historical figures from the beginning of this 200+ year span along with figures towards the end of this period.

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3 hours ago, freak_of_nature said:

Just finished Madoka Magica. I'm gonna have to let that one sink in for awhile.

Yaaaasssss. There's a reason it's considered the new Evangelion, it's a mind blower for sure. It's one of my favorite anime's ever but no one I know watches it because they figure it's just anime girls doing anime things. In fact Shaft (the studio that produced it) marketed it that way. If you look at the trailers there are no hints about what is to come.  The first time I watched it I almost dropped it because I thought it was an anime for kids and I couldn't figure out why it was so highly rated. The labyrinths were really trippy and the combat interesting so I figured I'd just suck it up and watch the rest. Then I watched the third episode and my head exploded.

If you aren't already aware there is a movie that ties up the series. It's a must watch if you liked the series and has one of the coolest fight scenes in anime. 

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Tetsujin

Tetsujin

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I just finished Joker Game. 12 episodes and 2 cool OVA's. It's about a black sheep Japanese spy agency during WW2, although the last episode is still before the Pearl Harbor attack.

It's enjoyable as hell, but then series didn't really "conclude". No rumblings of a 2nd season, even though the manga story goes well beyond the anime.

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