Anime Sunday: Fate Babylonia Episode 00 Impressions

This week for Anime Sunday I’m back with one of the biggest series from Fall 2019. It’s my Fate Babylonia Episode 00 Impressions!

Plot: This is a very interesting Episode 00, it gives us a look at Mash’s life growing up which is something that isn’t really explored all that much, but is implied, in the original game. Frankly I thought this was an excellent episode, and definitely deserves watching before watching the rest of this series starting with Episode 01. As a final point I want to bring up I’d like to confirm that they are going to animate the final singularity of the Fate/Grand Order which takes place almost immediately after the events of Bablyonia so my hopes for such a thing occurring were correct!

Characters: Like I said above we get to learn more about Mash in this episode, but we also get to learn more about Roman and we get our first ever look at Marisbury Animusphere which is something we never got a chance to do in the original game. So all in all we get new looks at some of the major players in the Fate Grand Order series and it’s awesome.

Art: The studio who does the animation for Bablyonia is Cloverworks and they did an amazing job with this episode. I can only hope this quality continues for the rest of the series. They aren’t up to ufotable quality, but damn if they didn’t come really close and might be edging out SHAFT for my silver standard. I’ll be keeping an eye out for their works in the future to see if they will do that.

Music: The musical score is awesome, and takes many tracks from the game and uses them to devastating effect. I particularly loved how they used Shikisai for the final portion of the episode, it was an amazingly well done maneuver on their part.

Overall: A must watch series, Bablyonia is a masterpiece that deserves watching by everyone.

For those who like: Fate, Mythology, Action, Adventure, Drama, Amazing Plot, Fantastic Cast of Characters, Stupendous Artwork, Excellent Musical Score.

Not for those who don’t like: Any of the above, but seriously give this series a watch. It’s awesome.

Anime Sunday: Most Anticipated Fall 2019 Anime

This week for Anime Sunday I’m back with a look at the next season. It’s my Most Anticipated Fall 2019 Anime!

Assassin’s Pride: This is an adaptation of a Light Novel series that I have heard about in the community, but have not yet read myself. I’ll give it a whirl, but this could very well be a bust in terms of content. We’ll see, it might also be too much of a try-hard at a dark fantasy story, in which case I’ll not be interested at all if that happens.

Cautious Hero: This looks to be much more of a comedy series than anything else given it’s title, but given it’s billed as a an Adventure and Action series with no Comedy tag in sight I’m hoping it’ll be more like TenSura than KonoSuba. One is light hearted with it’s serious moments, while the other is just a satire of the Isekai genre.

Fate/Grand Order Babylonia: This is an adaptation of the seventh and penultimate Singularity of the first act of the mobile game. I loved playing through this Singularity myself and it’s incredible story line is going to be an absolute joy to watch. I’ve heard it’ll be a 2-cour series, so I’m looking forward to watching the entirety of this series. I just hope 2-cour will be enough to do the story justice, but I’m hoping it will. The only downside is that it won’t be animated by ufotable, but even still I’m looking forward to watching this.

High School Prodigies: This is another adaptation of a really long named Light Novel series, so we’ll see if it’s any good. Like with the first two it might be a bust, but I’m going to give it a shot. It might be an Isekai series, but considering that Arifureta is one of my most loved stories of all time and it is an Isekai I figure I’ll give it a shot.

Honorable Mentions:

Sword Art Online Alicization 2nd Cour: I’m not a particular fan of the novel series anymore, it was okay until I read much better series, but some people love the series still. Me I don’t particularly enjoy it all that much anymore.

That’s it for this week’s Anime Sunday!

Video Game Tuesday: The Importance of Timing

This week for Video Game Tuesday I’m going to talk about why doing certain things pisses off players and how to avoid them. It’s all about The Importance of Timing!

Timing? Yes, Timing. It’s pivotal in making the most money and keeping your player base happy. It’s also why people hate Bungie so much in regards to Destiny and it’s sequels content, or rather lack thereof.

Keeping to a schedule: If you commit to a schedule, and especially if you do so publically and on record, you have to keep to it to the best of your ability. Bungie for example promised frequent content updates for Destiny and it’s various sequels, but it’s frequently and often quite lacking. In particular is the dearth of meaningful content being released regularly, which is always a death sentence for an MMO. It’s why Wrath of the Lich King was the last great World of Warcraft expansion before the disaster that was Cataclysm. The content drought was incredibly long in between Wrath of the Lich King’s final patches and Cataclysm, and that was unacceptable in terms of business. The fact that Cataclysm was highly despised as well did not help matters and led to a significant decrease in subscription numbers for the game. And by regular releases, I mean in periods of no longer than two to three months, which is the acceptable amount of time most games have content updates. Final Fantasy XIV has a major patch about every 3 months, and in between those patches are smaller content patches that add additional content. Compared to a game like Destiny 2 whose first content update post launch happened 3 months and was universally despised and you can see why timing is everything in business.

So what about other games? Well other games, in particular games like Fate/Grand Order’s NA client which is two years behind the original JP client, the community has a general sense of what the hell is going on and what is coming out when. That all went to shit when Aniplex decided to move the Paid Gacha pull, where you paid ~$30 to get a guaranteed SSR servant, two months earlier and left out on two highly sought after servants in that banner, Mordred and Jack the Ripper. It’s a move that would have been acceptable if that was an NA exclusive event, but it was a replacement for the typical New Year’s Paid Gacha that occurs yearly for the JP client. So it pissed off a ton of people, including myself. Not only would it have made a ton of business sense to have both those Paid Gacha occur, in addition to the delayed Anniversary Gacha that just happened a couple weeks ago, but it alienated and upset many people.

In addition Fate/Grand Order’s localization team seems to think that announcing content updates at Anime Conventions is a smart move. That’d be acceptable if they lined up to the expected schedule that the community projected, but they didn’t. They let the NA Client fall 4 weeks behind schedule just to announce an event at an Anime convention that at most .01% of the player base went to. It was just another insult in a long line. Such things could’ve been avoided if they remembered how important Timing is.

So that’s it for this week’s Video Game Tuesday. I’ll close out with a quote from Wit from the Stormlight Archives that puts it best. “What is it we value? Innovation. Originality. Novelty. But most importantly…timeliness. I fear you may be too late, my confused, unfortunate, friend.” 

Video Game Tuesday: What’s Going On With F/GO?

This week for Video Game Tuesday I’ve got an open question to the people at both Aniplex of America and Delightworks. I’m asking What’s Going On With F/GO?

Huh?: So for my readers here’s a brief explanation. In the past few months, the Fate/Grand Order community in North America has been growing more and more upset with the handling of the game by Aniplex of America. In particular Albert Kao, the Localization director for the NA Client has been getting a ton of flak, not least of which occurred very recently when he handled the Anime Expo panel incredibly poorly and unprofessionally.

If you want some proof just go to the Grand Order subreddit and look at all the posts complaining about Albert and his absolutely unacceptable behavior at that panel. In addition many fans are upset at being treated like crap compared to other servers, like China, not to mention the blatant favoritism shown towards the JP players. The latest insult in a series going back to Thanksgiving is the fact that the playerbase was screwed out of 20 Saint Quartz, the in game currency that you can pay real money for, for the recent Anniversary. The issue with this is that the anniversary was pushed back from the actual anniversary date of June 28th to be announced at the Anime Expo panel. Another inflammatory move that makes no sense to many players of the game, including myself. There are possible reasons, but those reasons all come down to a series of events that could have been easily avoided if they didn’t do a certain thing. And that was announcing things at Anime conventions. But that’s a topic for next week.

So here’s my question to Aniplex of America, what the hell are you doing? Many people understand how poorly Japanese companies can treat foreign markets, the whole Gaijin bigotry plays a huge role in this. But this has gone on many times and frankly it’s insulting to not only the playerbase, who you ought to be keeping very happy, but also the people who you invited to your panels who were subject to a man who looked like he had just shown up after panhandling for a day in the seedier neighborhoods of Los Angeles heading the panel. Do I expect an answer to my question? Nope, because at the end of the day I’m just a small time gaming journalist who can be very acerbic at times.

That’s it for this week’s Video Game Tuesday.

Video Game Tuesday: Alignment

This week for Video Game Tuesday I’m here with a quick explanation on a subject I’ve been asked about recently. It’s Alignment!

Alignment?: This tends to be specifically for Characters, but it can be for organizations or religions or even companies in a game. There have been 9 archetypes that these fall under, and it’s determined by how they act and perceive the world as a whole. The above picture has two axes that you can place just about anyone or anything and determine their Alignment.

Starting from Top Left they are Lawful Good, Neutral Good, Chaotic Good, Lawful Neutral, True Neutral, Chaotic Neutral, Lawful Evil, Neutral Evil, Chaotic Evil.

Give me an Example!: Superman would be a Lawful Good character, where as Batman would be Chaotic Good. Both are people who believe in doing things to better the world, but the ways they go about it are completely different. Superman follows the law, as far it can go for him at least, while Batman doesn’t really care as long as he can solve the problem while sticking to his beliefs.

This system of character alignment has been around forever, but was really codified in Dungeons and Dragons. This system has lasted ever since and is used in all sorts of games today. One recent example that you might be playing is Fate/Grand Order on a mobile device. That game actually has an alignment for every character and sometimes during the weekly “Master Missions” you’ll be tasked with defeating certain aligned characters.

That’s it for this week’s Video Game Tuesday. What sort of alignment would you say your favorite game character is? Leave your answer with the character name in the comments below!