The Summer 2016 Anime Preview Guide

Fate/kaleid liner PRISMA ILLYA 3rei!!

In the wake of the incidents of the third series, Illya has been enjoying comparatively peaceful days of doing homework, hanging out with her friends, and trying to dodge being Ruby's toy. Such days were bound not to last, however. The eighth Class Card was never recovered, and now the damage to the mountain seems to have been mysteriously repaired. When the team investigates, they witness the extradimensional arrival of two very magically powerful individuals – ones who know Miyu and whom she fears. They seize her and easily beat back opposition before departing with Miyu. In attempting to pursue, Illya suddenly finds herself in a setting which looks like where she was, but here it is winter instead of summer and no one is around, not even in the badly-damaged town. The one person she encounters seems to be a near-complete amnesiac, and worse, one of the girls who kidnapped Miyu eventually shows up, too. Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya 3rei!! is the fourth installment of a series based on a manga spin-off of the Fate/stay night visual novel and can be found streaming on Crunchyroll, Wednesdays at 11:30 AM EST.

Rating: 4

In my review of the third season, I was harshly critical of how the series piddled around for several episodes before finally doing something. We are definitely not going to see a repeat of that this season, though! The first episode picks up exactly where episode 10 of the last season left off – with the study session at Miyu's place wrapping up – but this time only a few minutes of casual shenanigans pass before the crap hits the proverbial fan. And as I've said before, when the crap hits the fan is usually when this series is at its very best.

Hints have been dropped before that Miyu is from a parallel world and that she was Someone Special in that world, but for whatever reason she didn't want to go back. Now we get a taste of why, with the arrival of two girls apparently from an Ainsworth family who are more concerned with retrieving her than sticking around to wipe out her friends and associates. Comments made here, put together with hints dropped in previous installments, seem to indicate that Miyu is her world's version of a Holy Grail vessel, and as anyone familiar with the franchise knows, being a Holy Grail vessel means you have a limited life expectancy. Somewhat surprisingly, she actually pleads for Illya's help rather than try to push Illya away for her own safety, which leads Illya to the predicament she's in throughout the second half of the series. The Next Episode preview suggests that she is going to wind up imprisoned, so seeing how she copes with both being alone and (presumably) having no access to her magic should both be interesting and add a whole additional dimension of tension to the story.

The new season doesn't disappoint on the action front, either. Despite not being the sharpest-looking of series, the animation, adept use of perspective shifts, and musical score always step up to help create intense, dynamic action sequences, and the initial battle against the newcomers, brief as it is, is no different. As long as the series continues to deliver on those, it can do pretty much anything else it pleases and still keep its viewers coming back. Fortunately the new plot hooks make it clear that the storytelling has no intent on relying just on that. On the downside, the loli elements are also still around, albeit in much more subdued form so far.

I've heard people who have read ahead in the manga say that the content which this season should be covering is some of the series’ best, and this episode definitely gives a strong start in the right direction.