I’ve been in a bit of a rut in regards to anime lately. There just hasn’t been a lot of new stuff that has caught my eye. A recent exception to this is Fate/Stay Night, a series that is apparently closely-related to Tsukihime, a title that I just never got around to watching. As a series based upon a videogame and manga that are spin-offs from another video game, manga, and anime, this is a pretty good title.

The basic premise is that Emiya Shirou is an untalented sorcerer that gets thrust into a seven-way war between master sorcerers and their summoned servants. He has no knowledge of what the war is about or what these supernatural servants are, but comehow ends up reflexively calling forth a Saber-class servant. From the reaction of the other mages, this is a prestigious servant, especially for an unskilled knucklehead like Emiya. The plotline alternates between big supernatural battles with arcano-jargon speeches about legendary heros and the personal interactions between two of the competing sorcerers, who happen to be classmates.

So far I’ll give it a B-, the animation and character design are excellent for a television series, the characters are reasonably appealing, but the background details are presented in such a way that it’s obvious that the writers either expect the audience to already be fans of the setting or are willing and ready to perform all manner of research to figure out what’s going on. These aren’t obscure Japanese-culture references that we westerners wouldn’t be in on, but strange western lore about legendary figures like Cuchulain that I cannot imagine are common knowledge to the original Japanese audience. Odd.