Audience reviews
20 · Sample from the first available page, separate from the total number of ratings.
Tea-O
As a casual fan, and not necessarily someone who is deeply knowledgeable about shonen anime or the entire *Fate* franchise, I genuinely enjoyed *Fate/strange Fake*.
Once again with this series, I think one of its biggest strengths is the animation. The fights are well executed, impressive, and perfectly represent what makes the *Fate* franchise so recognizable.
When it comes to the story, however, it follows a structure that feels quite familiar compared to previous entries in the franchise. We still have extremely powerful characters fighting each other, major stakes, mysteries, suspense, and confrontations between different ideologies.
Despite that familiar formula, the anime still manages to create interesting characters. Each one has strong personalities, personal goals, and unique…
Read at the sourceGrapeGoose
I was really hoping Fate/strange Fake would revitalize whatever interest I had in Fate before Emiya crushed it in Unlimited Blade Works. It didn't.
Strange/Fake ruins itself by immensely fucking up its premise. Like I get its the 17th Fate entry, but why does everything have to be so convoluted? Simply put, NOTHING MAKES SENSE. Number of things I have a full grasp of: ZERO. EVERY character and EVERY story element has AT LEAST 1 CAVEAT that makes it break away from the "rules". Air quotes there because the rules might as well not exist with how little heed the show gives them.
Ok, the premise is no good, but how do the characters fare? Do they save the show? They are, uh, alright I guess? Our "MC" Ayaka adds nothing. Flat and Saber are interesting. Everyone else is just a big meh.
OK b…
Read at the sourceTablekun
Fate/strange Fake unfortunately is a mish mash of nonsense for 13 episodes. It tries too much in too little of a time allowance. The pacing suffers immensely from including too many characters, too many factions, and involving a miniscule amount of fighting for a 13-episode series. I was invested after Fate/strange Fake Whispers of Dawn, but nothing in these 13 episodes resembles Whispers of Dawn. The animation, style, and intensity are all much different from Whispers of Dawn. Perhaps I would be singing its praises if this anime was aired consecutively through 24-28 episodes. It would seem the light novel was not finished when they started creating season 1. Thus, we get a half-baked cour of Fate that disappoints. It's unfortunate.
Animation 9/10
- Its good, but it is a downgrade from Fa…
Read at the sourceNelzyr
The more I think about Strange fake, the more I keep coming back to one word, and that is "complete". It is basically the most complete and perfected formula I've ever seen from the franchise.
I had a feeling Fate/strange Fake was going to become my favorite Fate long before I actually watched it. From what I knew about it, it seemed like the logical and natural evolution of everything I already loved about the franchise, and huge thanks to the author Ryohgo Narita for that. I didn't even wanna rush into it purely out of fomo and hype, so I watched some of the previous Fate entries that I hadn’t seen yet first. This felt like the kind of Fate entry that I needed to watch after seeing all the different sides of the franchise, and YOU should do that too.
I'm not completely new to Strange F…
Read at the sourceDunslax
More like Fate: Strange Fakeouts lmao.
This is quite a mess. The entire anime is about introducing a million characters and ATTEMPTING to make them fight against each other... except after 30 seconds someone will always interrupt their fight, and the characters would be like "eh, I don't feel like it anymore, maybe next time bye". Seriously. I'm not exaggerating, it happens every single episode. I do like the characters and what we see of the "fights", but man, this is SO frustrating... the animation mostly carried this season.
For people that are looking to start this, I recommend you just wait until next season and watch both back to back.
The only thing of relevance in this one happens in the literal last 2 minutes of the last episode, and the entire thing will just leave you constantl…
Read at the sourceRainfell_
Fate/Strange Fake is undoubtedly a true love letter to Type Moon that integrates countless references and in-universe concepts that would delight any Type Moon fan had it been executed well or edited in the production process by anyone sensible.
F/SF discards the most BASIC of fundamentals of story telling for useless "aura farming" eating up airtime to achieve nothing substantial. Neither studio nor author needed to go out of their way to hype up characters in half-hearted stake-less confrontations to convince the audience that these characters are cool, powerful, likeable, or what have you. Fate has always been able to achieve this without this nonsense. If anything, these confrontations achieved the opposite of what they intended to.
An incoherent mess throughout all 13 episodes. Co…
Read at the sourcelastnameEver
Episode six is a standout but the rest of it is a testament to why these Fate spinoffs don't work. They have no point, they're just kind of loose, and have no thing that they set out to do.
The original Fate/stay night is different in this respect and is mocked as being just a dating sim but that takes for granted just how seamlessly the integration was done. It also gave the original a purpose.
It has not struck me up until now just how boring of a character Gilgamesh is when you take him out of his natural environment. All this guy does is open his gates and never use Ea. He throws about six million swords at the guy who wears a carpet over his head even after being told that they're no good. 'Oh but he's arrogant' yeah, he's boring. There's no other mode that he's in. He's fine as a v…
Read at the sourceTangyAbleOrange
Aura farming, the show.
I know nothing of the wider work of "Fate" and so my judgement of this anime is purely based on what these 13 episodes provided. There is quite a lot of good world-building and character setup interwoven in the attention-grabbing action. The major problem is that most (if not all) of it has no payoff. Rather, the payoff is the aura exuding from the action set pieces, which is very flimsy. The over-reliance on cool vibes does make for a superficially entertaining show, but the absence of arcs, depth, or payoffs diminishes that entertainment. Which leads me to grant a "fine" rating to the overall show.
It's strange how characters are competently set up yet are incompetently handled, which might be where the "strange" part of the show's title comes form. One MC, Ayak…
Read at the sourceamberjones
genuinely didn't understand a single fucking thing about this anime. the animation was beautiful though. idk if this is a ''you need to have read the manga'' type of situation, but i was completely lost.
from what little that i got, i do think the story or idea is cool yk, summoning some legends etc. but my god was it all complicated or just badly explained i felt like i was just sitting still and getting a tsunami of confusing information thrown at me. even though i didn't understand anything that was going on, the fights were really well done, it looked great
Read at the sourceOtdoy12
I've read most of the negative reviews so I'm pretty confident to say that your enjoyment will vary a lot based on how familiar you are with fate.
only watched ubw, zero and/or heavens feel? 7-8 at most,you don't even know some of the characters thats supposed to make a big impact like enkidu, ishtar, flat ,etc. plus various other buzzwords you don't even know like what is a dead apostle? executors?? the anime is insanely rushed,too. so most of the time you don't even know what's going on
I'm not that familiar with fate, too. but this anime is a solid 10 for me since I already know most of these people so I do care a lot about them, every episode is full of excitement. if you love fate, you WILL love this anime.
Read at the sourceKimuraTheHatoru
I never thought i'd be dissapointed by a fate entry outside of the rushed grand order adaptations. But here i am. Honestly there's not much this grail war does even half as good as the worst of the previous entries.
Let's get the obvious out of the way first. The MC for this grail war.Weak. Very weak.Ayaka spends literally 12 out the 13 episodes keeping a stance that she doesn't want to even participate in this war.She is simply in the show to react to stuff happening around her,and as an MC she drags the whole show down with that.Especially when you compare her with literally every other MC in the verse.
Now... the fate series is known far more for action then for yapping. The studio who made this season doesn't seem to realize that,because we spend most of the time listening to pointle…
Read at the sourcereilove69
This show was a tremendous disappointment. Really lends credence to the phrase “less is more”. Proof that there can be such a thing as too much action. Also suffers from too many main characters syndrome. After the 5th environment shattering battle with no actual consequences, I found myself quickly not caring about the story at all. Turns out that constantly spamming your story with battles that don’t have consequence and cramming in tons of characters without backstories or clear motivations does not make for a strong or compelling narrative. Quite the opposite, much of the I found myself either half-checked out or rolling my eyes when I did pay attention to what was going on. A lot of ruined potential given that there was a fairly interesting premise at the beginning. 4/10
Read at the sourcehavrak
Fate/strange Fake is following the rule of cool to the letter. However, it's the only thing it's following. Animations is great, choreography is great, every single episode the stakes get raised and power levels scaled even higher. More mages, more heroes, more secret organizations, more expositions, more everything. Every single trope from the fate universe pumped up to the eleven - we have heroes, demigods, vampires, new realities, human experimentation...
The problem is that none of it makes any sense. Definitely not in 13 episode we have gotten to this day, and probably not even with second season/movie or whatever is in the works. There are too many characters, all of them go through some character progression just for the sake of it. On few parties have some kind of motivation for t…
Read at the sourceAhb9_0
The Fate series has always intrigued me because of its core concept, even though I’m not someone deeply invested in every entry or the visual novels. I’ve only watched Fate/stay night (Unlimited Blade Works and Heaven’s Feel) and what I consider the best part of the franchise—Fate/Zero.
Fate/Zero is, without a doubt, one of the best anime I’ve ever watched.
Now, moving on to Fate/strange Fake. I heard many people say it’s an important entry, comparable to Stay Night and Zero, which motivated me to start it.
At first, I was very optimistic. I won’t lie—the beginning was genuinely strong, and the setup was solid. The idea of a “fake” Holy Grail War, along with a large number of Masters and Servants, felt fresh and interesting.
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What I liked:
First, the core concept of strange Fake—a f…
Read at the sourcecolelouch
After numerous delays, the first season of Fate/Strange Fake turned out to be fairly solid. You can clearly see how earlier Fate works have influenced it as the series draws heavily from Fate/Zero, at times almost responding to its themes, concepts, and worldbuilding.
The music is excellent, as expected from Hiroyuki Sawano. However, the opening and overall soundtrack give off a more modern, high-energy feel, almost as if he is trying to push anime toward a faster-paced, more upbeat direction. It has a strong Solo Leveling-like vibe, which gives me the impression that A-1 Pictures is once again trying to reshape trends, similar to how they influenced the industry with Sword Art Online a decade ago. That said, while the soundtrack is impactful, some of the core tracks are reused a bit too…
Read at the sourceBalsamina
Aye...I am a long time Fate fan. I waited a very long time for Fate/strange fake to come out as an anime. I knew the novels existed, I know the spoilers IN THE NOVELS. I followed every entry in the Fate series, etc. BUT --- STOP!!
This review is NOT written for people who are already diehard fans of Fate and would gobble up any official material and are just looking for reaffirming of their belief that Fate/anything or Nasuverse anything is GOAT.
THIS REVIEW IS WRITTEN FOR PEOPLE WHO ARE NEW TO FATE OR LOOKING FOR GENUINE ENTERTAINMENT TO CONSUME. As such, per my grading rubric which explicitly demands that adaptations be able to stand on their own merit without requiring watching several hours of lore videos, reading the wiki for explanations for several hours, or consuming one or seve…
Read at the sourceSupersonic_Pain
tl;dr:
+ Good artstyle
+ Nice animation
+ Good music
~ Visually stimulating fights (even if it left me a little cold)
- Underbaked cast of characters, way too large
- Overreliance on previous Type-Moon works
- Feels like it's still building up the Holy Grail War for a lot of its runtime tbh
It's not the worst thing you can watch but the cast is way too large to give any character that much screentime or development and some just get absolutely NOTHING to work with. The fights are well-animated (as is the rest of the show), even if because of the lack of character development, it didn't do much for me. It's a well-produced show, I just didn't find the cast very grippable to latch onto and so once it finally DID get into full swing, it just left me kind of cold.
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When I watched Whispers…
Read at the sourceAlmightyLeek
I'm just confused to be honest.
I guess this is my bad, I have only watched fate 0, stay night and unlimited blade works, so I'm probably missing a lot of context.
The anime does have a good production value, the VA, the animation et soundtrack are all A-Tier.
I have no idea what's happening though, so much info dumping with terms i've never heard before and I don't know if I'm missing important knowledge or if it's just the style of the anime to try and be "mysterious".
It's still very much watchable, despite its biggest flaw being a too bloated cast with some of the cringiest characters i've seen in anime (Jester or the Francisca-something twins are a pain to endure every time they have screen time) but some others are so greatly interesting it's not a big problem.
I just wish I und…
Read at the sourceMarinate1016
After what seemed like 100 years of delays and anticipation, Fate Strange Fake finally arrived and not only delivered on the high expectations I had for it, but exceeded them. Recency bias and all that, but idc, to me this is the best Fate series ever. It feels like a culmination of decades of world building and lore and a true love letter to type-moon and its fans. I’ll say right now, this is NOT for newcomers to Fate. I don’t care what any YouTuber or “influencer” on Twitter tries to say, you will not appreciate this series to the fullest extent if you’ve not at a minimum read both the original Stay Night and Hollow Ataraxia visual novels as well as seen or read Fate/Zero and to be honest, you’ll want to have seen at least a little of Kara no Kyoukai and player Tsukihime. Yea, it’s a lot…
Read at the sourceIWearClothes
If there’s one thing the Fate series has established by now, it’s that nothing will ever play out as promised. There can never be just a straightforward, by-the-book Holy Grail War. Fate/strange Fake, then, doesn’t set out to subvert an expected formula, because Fate has never truly operated by such a formula in the first place. Subversion is already the franchise’s modus operandi, and so Strange Fake is simply the latest entry to herald the phantasmal parade of controlled chaos. Like its predecessors, it is an installment that bends, breaks, and totally disfigures the on-paper rules of the Holy Grail War. In Fate/stay night, the Grail is corrupted from the very beginning. In Fate/Apocrypha, the system is rendered malleable and basically turned into a team sporting event. Even Fate/Zero, w…
Read at the source