This Week in Anime

Is F/GO: Babylonia Anime as Popular as its Mobile Game?

The unstoppable visual novel Fate/Stay Night has spawned multitudes of media adaptations, including the highly successful Fate/Grand Order mobile game. In an interesting move, the staff decided to adapt one of the game's later story lines to create the mouthful that is "Fate/Grand Order Absolute Demonic Front: Babylonia." What does this mobage game have to offer non-players and is it worth watching? Steve and Nick dive in!

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network. Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead. NSFW: Fanservice shots & some language.

You can read our episode reviews of Fate/Grand Order Absolute Demonic Front: Babylonia here!

@Lossthief

@Liuwdere

@A_Tasty_Sub

@vestenet

Nick
Well Steve, we've put if off long enough. I swore after the last one that I was done with this franchise for a while, but the gods have seen fit to drag me back in. So let's just get this over with and start talking about heavy sigh
Fate/Grand Order Absolute Demonic Front: Babylonia

Yeahhhh, FGO's first arc really doesn't hit its stride until the 6th and 7th Singularities, which, surprise, are the ones getting adaptations. Although, Fate being Fate, of course we're getting the 7th arc before the 6th. Can't make things too easy on the audience now can we?

Really, I just feel bad for the crew tasked with adapting all this. Imagine being hired to direct, like, the first ever Harry Potter movie. But you have to start with Deathly Hallows and can't rewrite it to be standalone. So you just have to cram in some kind of exposition for why people can fly on brooms. Or in Babylonia's case, why Leonardo Da Vinci is an anime wife.

Welcome to Fate, where worldbuilding just means coming up with bespoke proper nouns for all your time travel shit.

True. Much as I rag on it Babylonia has a leg up on, say, Detective Waver because it's much easier to gloss over all the talks of Rayshifting and Shiva Programs and King Solomon when they're just plot devices instead of the physical mechanics for a murder mystery. Even as someone who avoided FGO entirely I felt like I had a good grip on the Whos and Whys after Episodes 0 and 1. Which allowed me to ask much more pertinent questions, like: why is Mash's butt like that?

Ah yes, episode 1 is very, ah, forthcoming about its priorities.

It's ironic that Fate's only managed to get more outwardly horny as it's tried to distance itself from its origin as a porn game. Like god damn.

And that does bring me to the point that, in the end, all of this plot and all of these Proper Nouns are just set dressing for an entry that digs deep into the true fundamental appeal of this franchise: a fantastical world in which all of your favorite historical, literary, and mythological figures are hot and here to smooch you..

Clothing very optional.

I kind of respect FGO being so upfront about itself. Other Fate shows might belabor over the mystery of why literal goddess Ishtar looks exactly like an already established franchise heroine, but with FGO they all but say it's so they can sell more Rin figures.

Though 10 episodes in we've yet to get single shot of Gilgamesh naked so I still have to condemn them as cowards.

He might not be nude but at least Gil's mellowed out a bit this time around!

Just saying, if we can get loving shots of Mash's asscheeks and Ushiwakamaru's...everything>

Then they can give us a glimpse of the King of Heroes' royal scepter. It's only fair.

Very true, but I do appreciate his abs being on constant display.

But yeah, Gilgamesh is a remarkably different character in Babylonia than he was in previous Fate entries. He's older, calmer, and only occasionally calls his subordinates mongrels.

Which is a pretty drastic shift from the ego driven solipsist of Zero or the literal psychopath from Stay Night, and honestly makes him my favorite character in the show so far.

Same! One of the begrudgingly neat things about Fate lore is that Servants can manifest as characters from multiple points in their lives and development. So in the main series, we only saw the younger, haughtier Gil. But here we have the real deal, striving for nobler means after the painful loss of his best clay friend.

He obviously took the loss of his closest companion hard. He must have been really fucked up afterwards.

Anyway, it's super interesting to see Gil, one of Fate's most iconic antagonists, be such a remarkably different person while still recognizable to his earlier characterization. He's a genuinely compassionate king who treats his people with kindness in the middle of an existential threat and takes pains to maintain normalcy for them wherever he can. Though he still justifies it with some Classic Gilgamesh logic.

It's also where Fate's tendency for self-referential storytelling really pays off. Seeing how much he's changed makes you wonder just what happened between him and Enkidu. What did they go through together or share to make Gil into the king he is here? Which feeds really well into Babylonia's first real antagonist.

Yeah, Gil and Enkidu's story is one of humanity's oldest surviving tragedies, and FGO builds on it both by making it central to Gil's character development, and by reuniting Enkidu and Gil in the most bittersweet way possible. Gil's solo outing with the gang is perhaps my favorite episode because it focuses on this, which consequently infuses the episode's obligatory action scene with a real sense of drama and sadness. Like, Enkidu's pain and confusion are palpable here.

Ep 5 is absolutely the strongest so far. While the exact truth of this Enkidu's existence (in classic Fate fashion, they're apparently an imposter but maybe not?) isn't entirely clear yet, the moment where Gil first meets them is kind of heartbreaking. His first instinct is just to reminisce about his old partner.

It's so upsetting! Gil's obviously better at hiding his feelings, but you can tell he's just cut up inside about it.

>I have no firsthand experience with the game, but I get the impression the anime's team has been trying their damndest to bring out the strengths of the material as best they can. Like hell, Episode 0 was the first time I've ever felt like Mash Kyrielight was an actual character and not just two water balloons stapled to a dakimakura.

I was legit bowled over by how much emotional resonance they packed into this anime's opening statement. It's an almost impeccably-directed episode too. I love, for instance, how it kept defaulting to these very voyeuristic shots to emphasize the pathos of Mash's role as (more or less) a prisoner of Chaldea.

There's a lot of very talented people working on this, and when everything clicks together, it can be sublime.

I also like the appropriately tiny efforts to integrate some of the past Singularities, like flashing back to Mash getting a pep talk from Mozart. Divorced from context, that's a wild statement to make, but it's also one of the components that can make Fate feel like something actually good—small snippets of shared humanity that transcend time and culture.

The flashy fights are obviously what puts butts in seats, but for my money the strongest moments of Babylonia have been quiet conversations between the cast confiding their secrets and dreams to one another. Heck they've even made this absolute bowl of Oatmeal into a fairly engaging protagonist.

I kind of hate how much they've been endearing me to Ritsuka. They're still cowards for not going with the female player avatar, but his desire to be buff speaks to my very soul.

Truth be told he's not like, an amazing character. But he's leagues ahead of most other mobile game self-inserts who make the leap to a non-interactive medium. He feels like a rounded person with worries and emotions and even a sense of humor!

Eh, I'm less than sold on that premise. Mostly because this is still Fate, a franchise built from the bedrock on the appeal of watching canonically super special people fighting other people's battles because they're just cooler and better at it.

But if nothing else I buy Ritsuka as a character and enjoy him interacting with the larger, wackier personalities of the cast. He's far from the draw of the show, but he's not weighing it down like I expected him to going in.

Yeah I feel like the showrunners have really put work into embellishing the show's quieter moments between him and the other characters. Like, what initially endears you to Ushiwakamaru isn't a spectacular battle scene but a small human moment of her realizing her story has survived a millennium. This scene could easily have felt rote, but they inject it with a lot of charm.

Unfortunately a lot of that is undercut by the sheer gaudy disasterpiece that is Ushiwaka's design. Like god damn this sucks hard.

In a 4.5-year-old gacha game fueled by ridiculously horny character designs, it says something that Ushiwaka's costume still sticks out as particularly egregious.

Which brings us to episode 8, this arc's first big turning point and a spectacularly animated sendoff for both her and Leonidas.

Once again, as someone familiar with the game, this chapter felt nowhere near as epic nor as tragic as they pulled off here.

So I mentioned before that a lot of this show's fights just feel perfunctory. They're there because that was where a fight happened in the game, and we need some action to keep the audience engaged, but rarely do anything to develop characters or progress the plot. But Episode 8 is where all the pomp and circumstance comes together to really sell the sheer power of these fighters.

There are some truly breathtaking moments contained here, but my favorite detail is surprisingly understated. After Leonidas falls, the entire palette becomes muted and monochromatic, as if the entire world is in mourning. It's such a classy and cinematic way of communicating the surviving characters' feelings.

It's spectacular, and the stellar direction complements action animation that's absolutely stunning. While not as visually striking, it reminded me a lot of ep 5 of Mob Psycho 100 II, in that these brilliant cuts just kept coming back-to-back-to-back until I wondered if they would ever end.

Babylonia is certainly another big-name animator exhibition along the lines of Mob Psycho, and this episode is proof that it can marry its technical prowess with emotional resonance in similar ways.
Also, importantly, the anime's big snek.

Ah right, another entry with Kiara and Kingprotea in the growing Giant Horny Monster Women menagerie Nasu seems to be building.

I'm not a huge fan of her CG rig but her faces are Very Good.

More to your point, tho, Nasu still has an entire airport's worth of luggage to unpack about how he writes women.

Yuuuuuuup. My "favorite" part is how they gloss over the rather pertinent part of Medusa/Gorgon's myth where her being turned into a monster was punishment for being raped by Poseidon.

Like hey guys, we've all seen Heaven's Feel. We know you're not too squeamish to bring that part up, and it might be useful in fleshing out your Vengeance Goddess villain. But whatever I guess.

Oh right, guess we gotta talk about that scene. So hey, Ushiwakamaru was pretty cool right? She's fun and endearing and has a unique connection with Ritsuka that motivates her to do something really impressive and selfless as a final moment. That's great right? Well too bad she's gonna get brutalized inside the snake womb while you stare at her underboob.

And while that's the most egregious moment in the show, I'd be lying if I said there wasn't some other patented Fate Bullshit that just gets on my nerves with Babylonia. Like until that scene by far the worst part of the show for me was episode 4 introducing maybe the dumbest character in the entire Fate multiverse.

Look, sometimes you really need a boss fight to close out your chapter, and sometimes you've got a spare minor character lying around. And truth be told, I can't hate not-Taiga's tokusatsu poses.

I get that this is a cheeky in-joke for fate diehards, but as somebody who has no attachment the Taiga in any form, having her show up and make bad puns for 10 minutes while constantly shouting did nothing but kill any tension this supposedly pivotal moment in Ritsuka's arc was supposed to have. Like in-story our heroes are being forced to abandon a city being held hostage by the villains, dredging up feelings of failure an inadequacy from when they failed to protect others. But it's delivered while a Tony The Jaguar hams it up and break dances.

It's not good, but it's an interesting place where Babylonia's desire to tell a story clashes with FGO's model of making money off characters fans either recognize or want. On some level, I gotta respect the hustle of derailing your story to appeal to all 14 hardcore Taiga fans out there. Just like I gotta respect this week's shameless shout out to all the Ishtar-lovers.

Ishtar's at least like, a character in her own right. Even if part of her character is just a joke flanderizing Rin as a Tsundere that transcends time & space.

Oh yeah she's deffo a much better character and much better integrated into the narrative. And even her role as comic relief gets tempered with some genuine thoughtfulness about the role of gods in Fate's (and our) universe.

See, that's all I ask. You can have your goofy fandom memes and flash your characters' crotches every time they fight so long as you also bother to give them dignity and interiority. Ishtar's still not yet developed as much as Gil or Mash, but she feels like a real person underneath all the marketing gimmicks and buttmonkey status.

It feels like the good outweighs the crap in a way Fate really hasn't for me since probably Apocrypha's finale. And the reason I get so bugged out by its failings is because the good stuff is really, genuinely engaging. Plus Merlin's just always fun to have around.

He's an absolute fluffy scumbag and I love him. The show has also been very good about accurately depicting what it feels like to use him as a support in the actual game.

So you're saying he was right.

Well he's good for another six-seven months until Scáthach-Skaði shakes things up with Quick meta (shoutout to my fellow brain-poisoned FGO players out there). Truly, tho, this anime's crowning achievement is gifting me so many different images of Da Vinci drinking coffee.

I mean if we're getting into the little stuff I appreciate that somebody at least made an effort to cover up Mash's wedgie for a couple episodes. I choose to believe Gilgamesh ordered it because the clap of her mashcheeks kept alerting the demonic beasts.

"Mashcheeks"