![]() At the same time, though, the pursuit of the new and interesting may lead to overambition. We have, apparently, seven layers of heaven to get through and I hope each of them will have new and interesting designs. I’m pleased that Last Encore is shaking things up in the game we were stuck in the same bland high school corridors for basically half the game, and here’s an opportunity to do better. Last Encore is departing far away from its source game, and brings a radically different setting that SHAFT has to make pretty. ![]() In fairness, SHAFT brings more to the table than just cheeky censorship. No matter the gibberish, the audience won’t change the channel as long as they have something to look at. We need some distraction as the words are dumped on us. And the Monogatari staff know exactly what to do with a lengthy expositional dialogue sequence: fill it with fanservice! Why a bath in an elevator? Well, because by the time Marvelous Entertainment made Extella they had realised that Fate/Extra was all fanservice anyway, and because, well, it’s SHAFT. It’s basically exactly what the Monogatari Series was, and what is Fate/Extra but Monogatari with a few more swords? I mean, Araragi is still here chewing up the scenery, we have the one blonde - we’re set. Miyamoto and Shinbou’s team at SHAFT seem content with taking Nasu’s self-indulgent prose and slapping audiovisuals on top of it, and to their credit that’s what they’re good at. On the other hand, it may sometimes feel that the show is ignoring us and just talking to itself as broken Engrish and random symbolism fly over our heads. On the one hand, it keeps the mystery going, and the cryptic nonsense will eventually pay off later when the setting and mythology start to click. Compared to normal exposition, which is supposed to elucidate and clarify, Nasu exposition is rife with jargon, non-sequitur, and abuse of furigana (every episode title every week, I’m sure). ![]() Whereas previous adaptation of the Fate/ franchise, like Unlimited Blade Works and the currently-in-theatres Heaven’s Feel, tend to smooth out Nasu’s stylistic flair, Fate/EXTRA has applied him directly to the script without filter, for better or worse. But since this show is written by Nasu Kinoko, we get also Nasu-style exposition. So, in this episode of Fate/EXTRA Last Encore: exposition! There’s the stuff we expect, like formally introducing Saber ( Tange Sakura, intent on making my weekly Card Captor Sakura very weird). It’s a common technique, even outside of anime start with a slice of Act II, the interesting stuff, and fill in Act I, the busywork, at some later point. After a no doubt riveting pilot designed to hook viewers quickly, the second episode usually pulls back to do the setup required to actually take the story in any meaningful direction - setup often skipped in the pilot in favour of more action, drama, glitter, or whatever it is that the anime is relying on to wow the audience. Regular viewers of anime may have noticed that episode twos tend to slow down somewhat. OP: 「Bright Burning Shout」 by 西川貴教 (Nishikawa Takanori)
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