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Trying to watch the Bofuri sub on Hulu and god, I’d forgotten how much I kinda hate some Japanese VA. The main character is just so squeal-y and breath-y and emoting every single little thing; sounds way too much like I’m watching hentai, lol. Also, there’s so much important on-screen text from the game UI and on-screen chats that I’m either missing or just getting the briefest snippets of :(

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The hardest thing to read is the other player’s comments on their 4chan equivalent. The manga has more of those if you wanted.

This is from ep 1 after the bunny scene. They are more explicit with the MMO aspect in the manga.

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I finished Hunter x Hunter’s Greed Island arc on Netflix. And there ends the english dub episodes I could find. That was a pretty satisfying ending too. If that was the end of the series, I’d be pretty happy walking away from it with that ending.

OTOH, the praise upthread for the insect arc has me thinking I’ll come back. I did fire up VRV and played Crunchyroll’s first episode after this one, just to see what the Japanese voice acting is like. Oh man, it’s rough. I’m sure I can get used to it if I give it some time, but right now, the change in voice cast is just too harsh for me. They don’t sound like the same characters at all. So I’ll give this a nice long break, since I’m at an excellent stopping point anyway.

And a few months from now, if the Subtitled version is still all that’s available, I guess I can start here. But if the insect arc becomes available in the English dub somewhere, that would be ideal.

Anyway, great series. Thanks again for the recommendation @TurinTur. It’s the first one you list in your separate recommendation thread.

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Yeah, I’m committed to the dub as well, so I’m looking forward to the day the rest of the series becomes available somewhere. Part of the problem is I like to multitask while I watch anime. Subs require my complete focus, but if I am watching a dub I can play a game on Vita/Switch/3DS/Laptop at the same time.

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I’d love to hear your opinions on the insect arc because so far all we have is my opinion and the blog article ranking the arcs.

I feel like if I had watched it as a standalone anime show unrelated to the first however many arcs of Hunter x Hunter I would maybe have liked it.

It feels like in the earlier arcs that there is an occasional sidetrack or scene where everything gets serious and deadly. The Chimera Ant arc is pretty much completely deadly serious with like two occasional sidetracks into not that.

There are scenes in it straight out of adult horror movies that I would never want to show my kids until they get more grown up, like mid teens.

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Obviously watching 70 episodes of something and then using another dub is going to be jarring, whatever the languages used. But I will say the Chimera Ant Arc is considered to have the highest points of the series, both in the drama department and in the action department. When the manga was published, it was a bit divisive because the slow pacing and frequent hiatus, and while the pacing issues remain somewhat (the Arc could have been 4 episodes shorter perfectly), it isn’t so bad anymore.

It ends in perhaps the best point it could end, given the manga is still unfinished.

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The 4th season is an excellent stopping point and completes the narrative. Season 5 hasn’t been terrible, but it has lost something. In being so rushed, it defers to montages of tournament battles. Whereas earlier seasons would show us every detail of the cooking and allow the meal itself to build tension and payoff in the story, here we rush past most battles like it’s a Karate Kid tournament (sorry, I’ve been watching too much Cobra Kai!) and only linger over one or two. The dishes themselves have still been thrilling, for the most part, but I feel less satisfied by the magic anime chefs, who don’t have to work for their food to be great, than I did with prior seasons’ toil towards the final plate. I suppose the entire show has been Soma’s toil towards this moment, and his final (I think?) dish definitely draws on things he’s accumulated… but so did season 4’s final plate. For what it’s worth, I think his actual dish is better in season 5, but the cooking was more central to the narrative in season 4.

I don’t think you’ll regret watching season 5, but you also won’t gain much from it.

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Started watching Fate/Zero, mostly because it’s available on Netflix and I’m lazy. Enjoying it so far! Doesn’t seem amazingly deep (at least early on), but good animation and fights. I definitely don’t totally understand the world (IE how magic fits in with a world that seems pretty similar to ours, but most people aren’t aware of it?).

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Trying to make too much sense of anything Fate related is a path to madness. That’s a fun series, though.

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Since we’re talking about Fate, does anyone have a link to a good summary of all the anime adaptations? There’s a list on Wikipedia but I have a hard time believing that’s complete. Wasn’t there some other stuff, like Fate/Zero? I vaguely remember seeing reference to some other Fate stuff too, but can’t remember any details.

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This took way longer to write up than I thought it would, since there’s more of this stuff than I remembered. Ugh.

The whole Fate franchise originally came from the Fate/stay night visual novel (which never got an official English release, still a surprise to this day as it would be a license to print money), so you’ve got a few series based on that, and then spin-offs of varying levels of legitimacy. The quick primer is probably along these lines:

Fate/stay night (TV, 2006) - The original Fate anime adaptation by Studio Deen from well over a decade ago. This is kind of the black sheep of the core Fate anime pantheon since it tries to combine all three of the main routes from the VN (Fate, Unlimited Blade Works and Heaven’s Feel) and doesn’t really do a great job of it. Decent, but largely obsolete given its relative age and it’s jumbled attempt to Do Everything.

Fate/stay night: Unlimited Blade Works (movie, 2010) - Studio Deen’s attempt to make a movie focusing on the core of the Unlimited Blade Works route from the original VN, this thing is completely obsolete in the modern era and was never very good in the first place. Hard pass in today’s age.

Fate/Zero (TV, 2011) - Based on a prequel novel to the visual novel, Fate/Zero was handed off to a different studio (ufotable) who previously adapted another Type Moon property (Kara no Kyoukai) and did a phenomenal job with that. From Fate/Zero onward, ufotable did much of the rest of this list. Fate/Zero is strange in that it’s a prequel written well after the original series by a different author, so it is a passable introduction to the franchise but largely expects the viewer to have a basic understanding of the world, the Holy Grail War, and many of the characters right from the start. Newcomers won’t get all of the references and such, but I’d still probably say this is the best starting point if you have no idea what you’re getting yourself into as this series is pretty solid. You may, however, be better served by starting with…

Fate/stay night: Unlimited Blade Works (TV, 2014) – Created by ufotable as something of a “sequel” to their own Fate/Zero, this is an adaptation of the entire Unlimited Blade Works route from the original VN that also links itself more heavily into Fate/Zero. Misgivings about some of the pacing in the latter half of the series aside, this is leaps and bounds better than F/SN 2006 at actually telling the baseline story of the original VN. F/Z will ruin some of the major reveals in UBW, but the same can be said of the reverse, so you have to take the hit on either one or the other.

Fate/stay night: Heaven’s Feel (3 movies, 2017-2020) – Again by ufotable, Heaven’s Feel is the third route from the original VN and this is the first real attempt to adapt the whole thing to an animated medium. I haven’t seen any of them yet since I’m waiting for the third one to be widely available so I can get them all in succession, but the more die-hard Fate fans I know swear by this as quite excellent. Only to be consumed after having seen some of the above, though, and definitely not in isolation as it assumes substantial core knowledge.

– Everything below this line isn’t really “Mainline Fate” any more –

Fate/Apocrypha (TV, 2017) – By A-1 Pictures rather than ufotable, Apocrypha is probably best described as a totally separate thing about a renegade Holy Grail War between two factions, with each faction getting a full batch of servants. This has some level of crossover with other elements of the greater franchise, but is largely meant as a standalone story. I didn’t much care for it, but if you just want more servants and the like, then you could do worse.

Fate/Extra: Last Encore (TV, 2018) – By Studio Shaft, this is based on (rather than a strict adaptation of) the Fate/Extra PSP game, featuring a virtual Holy Grail War being waged for control of a supercomputer on the Moon. Yeah, it’s weird. The series is also just not very interesting or engaging (kind of like the original PSP game). Play the remake game whenever that comes out in the year 20XX.

Fate/Grand Order (TV/movie, 2016 - ???) – Brought to you by every studio on the planet looking for money, these are all based on the Fate/Grand Order mobile game, where the grimdark future of 2015 has left mankind on the brink of extinction and their only hope is to send people back in time with artificial servants to find real servants and fight back against the forces of evil that seek to end the world. Also very weird, and requires significant knowledge of the mobile game that I neither have nor am able to offer to you in order to fully appreciate it.

Lord El-Melloi II Case Files: Rail Zeppelin Grace Note (TV, 2019) – By TROYCA, this series adapts a manga about Waver Velvet (of Fate/Zero) ten years after the end of Fate/Zero, the details of which I will selectively omit here. This is actually a pretty solid mystery series set in the world of Fate and is easily one of the better things on this list, featuring characters pulled in from Zero, Stay Night, Apocrypha, other Fate VNs that will literally never be translated (Hollow Ataraxia), Grand Order and other original characters. You don’t need to know any of them to watch, but just bear in mind that the mysteries aren’t Sherlock-types where the viewer can reasonably be expected to solve them independently. It’s more about the experience.

Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya (TV/movie/OVA, 2013 - ???) – An extended series from Silver Link based on an alternate universe where the Holy Grail War never really happens, characters get shuffled around, and a bunch of characters get turned into magical girls who collect servant cards. Different components of this franchise will vary from being light-hearted and fanservice-laden to some of the darker material in the greater Fate franchise. This series relies fairly heavily on high-level knowledge of the Fate franchise to understand most of the references that are scattered throughout the whole thing, and requires the capacity to put up with some extremely heavy fanservice elements compared to anything else on this list.

Today’s Menu for the Emiya Family (OVA, 2018) – From ufotable, this is basically a light, slice-of-life cooking series featuring the core Fate cast absent all the antagonism and any logical justification for everyone getting along. Watch Shirou and other characters cook stuff and generally be endearing for 13 half-length episodes. That either appeals to you or it doesn’t.

Carnival Phantasm (OVA, 2011) – A celebration of all things Type Moon (including Fate as a huge portion of it) from studio Lerche, Carnival Phantasm is an irreverent parody series that basically throws people from every Type Moon property (Fate, Tsukihime, Melty Blood, Kara no Kyoukai, etc.) into situations together for no other reason than comedic effect. Mileage is determined entirely by how familiar you are with anything that shows up within. Also has one of the catchiest opening songs of all time.

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Hollow Ataraxia actually has a complete unofficial English translation patch. But yeah, if they’re not gonna officially translate Stay Night, it would be baffling to do it for a sequel game.

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Even though I was a huge fan of the Fate VNs I never paid much attention to the Anime adaptions…and yikes, looks like a cluster after the adaptations. I sorta wish Fate never crossed into the mainstream as much as it did since it basically spelled the death of TYPE-MOON as a game developer.

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Holy crap, I had no idea there was that much! Thanks for the writeup @Otagan, that’s very helpful. I’ve seen that original 2006 TV series (many years ago) but I’ve forgotten most of it now anyway. Same with Fate/Zero, now that I look back at my viewing history, but again I’d have to rewatch if I wanted to actually remember it. Looks like the UBW series is worth checking out, and the Heaven’s Feel movies once they’re all available. Am I reading this right that there’s not a decent adaptation of the Fate route?

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Yeah, it forms the core of the 2006 series (with bits of UBW/HF content awkwardly grafted on), but your only other real alternative is to play the fan-translated VN. Nobody ever went back to remake it. I’m not the biggest fan of the Fate route anyway since the other two are more interesting and Shirou is less of a complete pain in the ass, but to each their own.

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I agree that Unlimited Blade Works (and what I’ve played of Heaven’s Feel) are more interesting, but I feel like that first route is important to set a baseline.

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Appreciate the thorough breakdown! Didn’t realize what a deep collection of works it is (though, sounds very hit or miss!).

Getting into the meet of Fate/Zero and it’s really growing on me. Have a much clearer handle on the different characters and their motivations. I definitely don’t understand the role of magic in the general world, but have a good idea of what the Grail War is and how it works (why the grail war is a thing… less clear). So guess I have a bit of wiki diving to do, but will try to get minimal spoilers.

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Huh, I kept thinking of trying to get into these obviously different and unrelated series, Fate/Stay Night and Fate/Zero, but, uh, reading @Otagan’s summary, I think maybe. . . no?

Just reminds me of the foolish attempt to watch the entirety of the Gundam television canon in release order, hah

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If you had to pick one of your two starting options then, F/Z or F/SN:UBW2014 (lol) which one would you start with? I did watch a few episodes of F/Z back in the day but remember approximately none of it except they did the historical figures are superpowered heroes thing, and there was a bit or two in the beginning which seemed really fucking dark.

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You’re going to lose something either way. If you watch F/Z first, then you’ll have all of that knowledge at your disposal for UBW and some of the things that would otherwise be twists will be extremely obvious to you from the start. If you watch UBW first, then you’ll already know exactly how F/Z is going to end, so you take the hit somewhere and it’s just a question of where.

If you want the overall experience closer to the original game, start with UBW. If you want the experience of one plotline from start to finish, start with F/Z. I’d tip the balance toward F/Z if you held a gun to my head since that’s also the release order.

And yes, you’re 100% right that F/Z is pretty dark at times. That’s a bit of a hallmark of the original F/Z novel’s author, Gen Urobuchi (affectionately nicknamed “Urobutcher” in some circles). The Madoka Magica series is probably the most iconic example of his approach.