Lord El-Melloi II's Case Files: Rail Zeppelin Grace Note

"You've really done it this time Waver! What in the world is going on here?" My thoughts exactly Melvin. What in the world is going on in this series???? Ah, Lord El-Melloi II Sei no Jikenbo: Rail Zeppelin Grace Note, this is I think the first time ever I have given an episode 0 a higher score than the actual series!! I have long awaited this anime as a big fan of Fate anime series, and summer 2019 seemed like it was going to be an incredible season!! For nearly a year I looked forward to Lord El- Melloi, Vinland Saga, and Mo dao zu shiseason 2! You can imagine how heartbroken I was when all 3 of them were total busts. Fortunately the season did feature a couple sleeper hits in Given and O maidens in your savage season, but that's not what I'm here to talk about. Who would I recommend this series to? Well the answer is simple, readers of the light novel. That, and people who want more of the loli from Gosick, just with a bigger forehead this time. I couldn't at all make sense of the plot in this show. Episodes 6 and 12 especially were just moronically written. Perhaps if I had read the LN, and was familiar with every last corner of the Nasuverse, I may have enjoyed it more.... But that's a lot to ask of a viewer. Studio TROYCA though, I do not think is to blame. They have proved themselves time and time again as probably the strongest up and coming anime studio in Japan right now! In 2018 they animated two major domestic hits in Idolish7 and Bloom into you. Neither of these got very much attention in the west (aside from that ass Gigguk randomly shouting out Bloom into you as he does with every seasonal show), but were very popular in Japan. In fact I highly recommend both Idolish7 and Bloom into you. They were put together fantastically well. Lord El-Melloi II was as well, at least in terms of production. TROYCA alway animate faces extremely well, displaying a lot of emotion and subtle changes, this holds up in El-Melloi as one of the show's strong points. The voice acting is also really well done. “You are correct Magus. And I have no intent of listening to any more of your nonsense.” The above is a line that doesn't make any sense, just like the rest of this story!!! Sometimes you just gotta ask yourself, what the hell is this plot? The last 5 minutes of the series was the best part, as all I really wanted out of this show was to see more Waver/ Iskander banter. Even if you watched Fate/ Zero, there is absolutely no guarantee that you will understand this series. If you don't care about plot than this series is well put together otherwise. Waver also is very attractive which is a plus. Gray was nice but I don't really understand why they chose to keep her hood up the entire series, except for one short scene where Waver scolds her, for reasons that were either never explained, or simply went over my head. Some of the Mystic eyes introduced in this show were kind of cool, but the 6 episode arc concerning them was chalked full of inconsistencies which was truly a bummer for me. Plus the antagonist of this arc had two different colored eyes which always bugs me in anime. Edit: It really didn't help that the this show premiered every week immediately after Kimetsu no Yaiba lol. In conclusion, you should watch this show only if you've read the LN, or are some sort of Nasu expert. Just being a fan of the anime side of Type-Moon may not be enough...

-Spoiler free review, because I couldn't spoil this even if I wanted to- With a title that slips out of ones mouth as smoothly as corroded razor blades, Lord El-Melloi II Case Files: Rail Zeppelin Grace Note is a mystery thriller attempting to follow in the foot steps of it's much more successful and smarter step brother, Fate/Zero. Lord El-Melloi (I respect your time so I'm not going to use the full name) only fails to be smart, successful, and entertaining. It is blindingly obvious that the people behind this project wanted to work on any of TROYCA's other upcoming shows, or do accounting work, or doanything else. Although I think this show is bad, I believe that it is not the worst in the Fate franchise, that award rests firmly in the greasy, grimy hands of Fate/Extra: Last Encore, as Lord El-Melloi has the virtue of having 1 and a half good episodes. And now, since I'm not smart or creative enough to write a review normally, here is my MAL formatted review. Story: 2/10 If there are any major plot points, they sure aren't worth remembering. The Train arc is the only one that lasts for more than one episode, and all I can remember is that ___ died, ___ lost his eyes, ___ killed them, and there was maybe one or two fight scenes. Virtually nothing is memorable. It seems like this show's only reason for being is because someone thought a mystery in the Fate universe would "be pretty epic." And I think it could have been, were it in the hands of people who knew how to write a story instead of a plot. Watching Lord El-Melloi feels like you're watching a plot synopsis, with all the depth of a nano particle. Art: 8/10 It's Fate. It always looks good. Decent art is the only consistency in all of the Fate franchise. Good art should never be any shows best quality. Good art and a good soundtrack should complement the story, not be the only passable things present in the entire production. Sound: 5/10 Just take the last paragraph and replace the word art with soundtrack. Character: 2/10 Everyone present besides Waver and Gray are only present to give Waver and Gray an excuse to do things or are one of the three comedic relief sidekicks. If they had changed every characters name every time their name was spoken, I would be none the wiser. No one is worth remembering, especially when the revealed big bad guy at the end of the only arc that matters is a character you've never seen before. Enjoyment: 3/10 Like a prostitute made of Vaseline, it can barely grab your attention and it sure can't hold onto it. Overall: 2/10 The fact that this isn't the worst part of the animated Fate franchise really shows how far it's fallen since its inception. Also, a murder accomplice gets off immediately with a plea bargain and is not punished by the law or by their school. This doesn't really affect the quality, I just thought that it was funny.

Story: 10 What a great story, none less expected from a series of the Fate Franchise. The story revolves around Waver Velvet. The first half of the season acts as a build-up until the eventual climax on the train. The ending scene really touched me. Art: 8 TROYCA really did a great job with this series. The battle scenes are well polished. The character design is perfect, especially with Gray. The animation is smooth other than some stiff movements on certain parts. Sound: 8 The seiyuu did a great job on this series. Waver's seiyuu did a really great job on his voice. I wouldn't say I dislike it, butthe only thing I like less is Gray's engrish. The SFX and BGM sounds amazing! Props to the composer. Character: 9 What do you expect of a Fate Series? Waver is a well designed character. The contrast of Waver in Fate/Zero and Waver in this series is a great one. Gray's character was also really good. Enjoyment: 10 Overall: 9 Really great series. Amazing story, eyecatching art, outstanding BGM, one of my favorite Fate characters, and a marvelously enjoyable series.

...are we done here? No, seriously, are we done here? Have we, at last, reached the limit of how fucking ridiculous light novel names can get? Was it not enough to inquire after the morality of picking up girls in a dungeon? Were the rascals not satisfied by dreaming of bunny girl senpais? Didn’t we all suffer enough on the death march to the parallel world rhapsody? Must we now be tormented by this ungodly amalgamation of letters and symbols arranged loosely into some perverted fascimile of a descriptive title? What’s next? Are we going to start throwing in parentheses now? Percent signs? @ symbols, dareI ask? How deep does this rabbit hole go? When does this nightmare end? When do we wake up? WHEN DO WE WAKE UP?!?!?!?! *sigh* Anyway, let’s talk about the latest Fate spinoff, henceforth referred to as Detective Waver because fuck me if I’m indulging this bullshit any more. Gripes about the title aside, if there was any way to get me genuinely excited about a Fate side project, following the life and times of Waver Velvet would be it. The snot-nosed brat’s journey to maturation and humility was one of the best parts of the original Fate/Zero, telling a fantastic coming-of-age tale in the skin of the most enjoyable buddy comedy this side of Death Note. His story had tragedy, humor, heart, genuine pathos, all the building blocks that make this bloated franchise work so damn well at its best. And best of all, he was a character who still had so much to explore. Who wouldn’t want to follow this blubbering dork into adulthood and see him try to put everything he learned from Iskander into practice? Who wouldn’t want to peel back his psyche even further and explore how the boy he was influenced the man he became, and how deep those connections might run? Who wouldn’t want to see Waver Velvet move on, find closure, grow and evolve while still being the same lovable punching bag he always was? Honestly, I can’t think of many better places for a Fate spinoff to go than this. So it’s a real shame that it ultimately doesn’t work. And the problem, sadly, is simple: it’s a property in the Fate franchise, with all the frustrating, bloated baggage that brings with it. Structurally, at least, there’s a lot of promise to Detective Waver, which sees our favorite son inducted into the El-Melloi family as a way of repaying his debts to his mentor Kayneth, who you may remember as the least interesting part of Fate/Zero. Now a member of high mage society, Waver must balance his personal pursuits with the politics and backstabbing of the countless ruthless factions vying for power and influence. By day, he’s taken on Kayneth’s role as academy professor, but his real profession, as the name suggests, is acting as the Sherlock Holmes of the Fate world. The first half of the series is episodic in nature, each episode focusing on a new magical mystery that Waver is called out to solve. Meanwhile, a larger plot builds up in the background, eventually taking over the second half of the series for a massive, six-episode whodunnit. Accompanying him in his sleuthing are a handful of Fate crossover characters that you thankfully don’t need to be familiar with to enjoy their presence here (Luvia the wrestler is an absolute peach), a couple students from Waver’s class who enjoy tagging along his missions, some political wheelers and dealers, and Gray, a mysterious hooded girl who considers Waver her master and is easily the best part of the series. Seriously, she strikes such a great balance between adorable, goofy, badass and haunting, and every time she was on screen was a delight. In fact, there’s a lot I liked over the course of this show’s first half. I liked the overall aesthetic and animation, which does a damn fine job replicating the hazy grandeur of Ufotable’s Fate properties (Troyca in general is a damn fine animation studio). I liked the camaderie between the characters and how willing this show was to lean into the goofier sides of the franchise. I really liked Waver himself, who, while still recognizably being the Waver of Fate/Zero, has matured and taken on some incredibly interesting dimensions. There’s a running undercurrent of PTSD metaphor, how Waver’s obsessed with finding some way to speak with Iskander again and reconnect to the greater Grail War mythos, despite it clearly having a negative impact on his mental well-being. It’s a damn well-realized portrait of someone grappling with the past, trying to figure out where their place should be in the world now that they’ve decided they want to be part of it. For the most part, it was what I always wanted from a Fate spinoff. It was enjoyable, it was lighthearted without being devoid of weight, and it legitimately fleshed out the parts of the mythos I had emotional investment in. And then it got to the second half, and the whole thing fell apart. See, as much as I was enjoying myself in the first part of the show, there was one aspect that wasn’t clicking as well as everything else: the detective stuff itself. Which for a detective show is kind of a problem. See, because this is a Fate spinoff, all the detective stuff that should be the draw in any good mystery show- the clues, the misdirections, trying to piece the evidence together for yourself alongside the characters- is tied up in the mechanics of the Fate world and its magic systems. And I’m sorry, but let’s be frank here: Fate’s magic is bad. It’s a convoluted mess of pretentious-sounding phrases and ideas with no set rules outside of “whatever the fuck we want it to be”, which wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if it weren’t for this franchise consistently trying to build so goddamn much of its structure out of it. It’s impenetrably dense, unfairly obtuse, and you need a PhD in bullshit lorekeeping to even begin to understand it. And every single mystery in Detective Waver, from the murder weapons to the motive to the sleuthing mechanics to the reveal itself, is built out of that bullshit. Thus, there’s no way to get invested in solving the mysteries, because there’s no way for you to actually solve them, because the answer to any question is always just whatever magical bullshit sounds cool to do. Still, this wasn’t too annoying in the first half of the show. Because the adventures were all so episodic, it allowed the stories to flesh out the characters and have fun beats in between all the magic stuff, focusing more on the actions the cast took en route to the mystery than the mystery itself. They were character pieces that just happened to have dumb, nonsensical mysteries rolling around in them, and it made it easy enough to just enjoy the emotions driving the plot while appreciating the cool magical bullshit for what it was. But once you get into that six-episode mystery plot, everything collapses under the weight of too much bullshit. The obtuse mechanics and unreliable lore completely take over, shoving the characters to the sidelines as the plot piles on complication after complication, each question making less sense than the one before and each answer raising a million more questions in its wake. It gets bogged down in complication, and the easy charm of the first half is lost in favor of exhaustion and boredom. Even as Detective Waver tries to keep the character beats flowing, they’re squeezed out by the sheer amount of disconnected stuff this plot throws at you. So in the end, once again, the greatest weakness of a Fate spinoff is that it’s too bogged down by Fate Stuff(tm) to relax into being it’s own thing. Look, I’m a huge fan of the core Fate timeline. What Ufotable did in bring Zero and Stay Night to life wasn’t just epic, it was the kind of awe-inspiring urban fantasy that truly captures the grandeur and majesty this genre is capable of. But these classics weren’t built on mechanics and lore. They were built on characters and themes, emotions and hope, triumph and despair, stories of people with dreams and desires fighting to realize them in a world that sought to stamp them out. It was epic not because of the convoluted rules holding everything in place, it was epic because of the stories it told within those rules, the people that brought those rules to life. Detective Waver could’ve been the spinoff this franchise deserved, a story that truly did justice to the heart and humanity of Fate at its best. Instead, it gave into all of Fate’s worst instincts yet again, leaving crushing disappointment in its wake.