Fate/Grand Order: Shuukyoku Tokuiten - Kani Jikan Shinden Solomon

After battling their way through all seven Singularities, the Chaldea Security Organization has finally arrived at the endpoint of the Grand Order: The Final Singularity, Grand Temple of Time: Solomon. Now is the time to defeat the root of all evil, Solomon, the King of Mages. Now is the time to reclaim the future. With the final operation looming large, Romani Archaman considers the choices he will soon have to make, Mash Kyrielight dwells on life's limitations, and Fujimaru prepares to receive a new Mystic Code. All their many encounters have led to this moment as Fujimaru and Mash at last embark on their final operation...

(Source: anime.fate-go.us)

Kyrielight, Mash Main

Takahashi, Rie Japanese

Archaman, Romani Main

Suzumura, Kenichi Japanese

Fujimaru, Ritsuka Main

Shimazaki, Nobunaga Japanese

Saber ing

Gilgamesh ing

Seki, Tomokazu Japanese

Mordred ing

Sawashiro, Miyuki Japanese

d'Arc, Jeanne ing

Sakamoto, Maaya Japanese

Saber ing

Tange, Sakura Japanese

Ishtar ing

Ereshkigal ing

Kurosaki, Shizuka Producer

Hatano, Shun Producer

Akai, Toshifumi Director

Nakamura, Ryousuke Episode Director, Storyboard

Reviews

Aug 15, 2021

Draculoid

Recommended

Having enjoyed the Babylonia anime, I was left feeling let down by this film sequel. While Babylonia buckled under the weight of it's own ambition at times, it was also this ambition that led to some surprisingly exciting and fun action set pieces and sequences. With this shorter "boss fight" singularity acting as both a film and a sequel to that series, my initial expectations were set rather high. Not only did they have much more time to polish and work on the animation, it's working with a film budget and adapting a hugely climactic battle. With all of that said, it is a competently ... made but pretty by the numbers Grand Order product at the end of the day. None of what the film did reached the highs in animation from the Babylonia Tv series and we're left with about 3 decent sequences which aren't even really that impressive and LOTS of CGI tentacles.

The story is generic, though there is a nice bit of tension in the final act and battle of the film. The character art is able. The backgrounds are pretty great. What you're really here for are the servants, and since it's adapting the climax of the first singularities there are a ton of cameos. Unfortunately, since there are so many servants showing up, most of their appearances are nothing more than that, an appearance. There were probably about 30-40 servants shown in this film, with about half simply being shown, another 15 or so launching a single attack and probably another 10 that were included in a mediocre action sequence. Still, if you are a big Fate fan, which are the only people I could really see watching something this far down the rabbit hole, you'll grin when your favourite servant appears.

Sorry this review is rather short and also not incredibly detailed, but it's also a film where I don't believe there much to be said. The animation is not of a quality that will bring anyone in for the spectacle, so we are left with the die hards that will probably eat up anything Fate related and enjoy seeing their favourite servant appear for 7 seconds. I really had hopes after seeing some of Babylonia's sequences and seeing much of the same staff working on this film that we might get one of the better Grand Order adaptations, but unfortunately for me at least, Grand Order has still proved to be pretty mediocre in the anime adaptation department.

Reviewer’s Rating: 7

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Jan 20, 2022

urumizawa

Mixed Feelings

This is the short version, a summary of sorts:
As Romani Said "this was a lost battle to begin with.", Solomon focuses on the action rather than the story (though it had it's emotional moments), but the action involved a lot of character each with their own established VA which wouldn't have been cheap or cost effective to bring them all to record a line or 2, they also had their unique noble phantasms. So making a good adaptation wasn't possible in the first place for monetary reasons. They still tried to make it as close as they could to the source material, but the result ... wasn't great, far from it.





The long version:
Story:
There isn't much in of story, even in the source material, this is the climax, this is where Chaldea finally meets the the final boss, this is where all the previous stories converge. As such, there wasn't much to be told, most of what we needed to know about this singularity have already been mentioned in the previous singularities.
With that said, they did make some changes to it, mostly removed scenes, but that is to be expected, there is the issue of voice actors which I will talk about in more details later, but they are also constrained by the movie format, if they included everything, it would have been way longer than this.


Art:
I am conflicted about this; on the one hand, the general art is easily a 9/10, it is similar to the art style of the Camelot movie and Babylonia.
On the other hand it didn't always deliver, it was the most noticeable for me on the noble phantasms(NP), they were mostly simplified and rushed (e.g. Mash's Lord Camelot, the walls materialized from an angle, then they didn't bother to remake them from another angle)

Realistically, there wasn't much they could have done to improve this, at least not with the direction they took for this movie. There were a lot of servants, each with their own unique noble phantasms, it would cost more than they can afford to make a visually appealing NP for each and every single servant that used their NP in this movie.
A better alternative IMO would be to remove even more servants than they did, down to just a few, maybe down to 1 from each singularity and give them better visuals and an actual voice. But that will undoubtedly make people unhappy if their favorite servant didn't make it.


Music:
Nothing to hate about it, we had a great sound track, some of which came from the game, and I don't think any of them felt out of place. In fact I would say that they were perfectly placed, they had even more meaning to them for those who played the game.


Sound effects:
Well... there wasn't really much sound effects to begin with and the ones that we got were generic SFX altered a little bit, at least that's how they felt to me. A laser beam, an ambulance siren for chaldea's emergency alarm and an explosion sound. Those are the only ones I can think of from the top of my head.


Voice acting (VA):
Oh boy! To start with the good as there is much less to say on it: It was great as always, BUT just for the following characters: Mash, Fujimaru, Da Vinci, Romani, Goetia/Solomon, Jeanne D'Arc and Gilgamesh. Even the unnamed chaldea staff had great VA.
Orion aside the rest of the characters fell into one of 2 categories:
The mute: this is where most of the servants are, they are just mute, not even a grunt.
The recycled: those used their voice lines from the game, I imagine this wasn't really the case but that is what it looked like, some lines didn't even fit in the moment.
Then there is Orion, I would prefer if they recycled his voices or made him mute altogether, they gave him a hamster squeak for a voice.
I mean, bringing in famous voice actors to record a line or 2 for each servant is clearly not a smart move so can't really blame them for going down that route. Still it must be said.


Characters:
As said above, Solomon isn't about the story so there is nothing much to say here either, I will use it to rant about general things instead.
*Spoilers below for those who haven't seen the movie and didn't play through Solomon*

If you ask FGO players about their most memorable scenes, there are a lot of memorable moments in the game but most would place Mash's demise high up in the list, and for a lot of them, it remains by far the saddest scene in the game. In the movie it looks like they chose to make her death less impactful for the viewer, the whole events leading to the scene were mediocre at best. we got a rushed Ars Almadel Salomonis followed by the aforementioned Lord Camelot and an Ars Nova that didn't even look like a NP as the cherry on top.


Enjoyment:
This is a movie made for FGO fans, but I wouldn't even recommend it to an FGO fan, there wasn't much to love about it. In a movie that is less about the story and more about the action they failed to deliver on both ends.


Overall:
I gave it a 5 not because it deserves it but because I am biased, I really love FGO.

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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Jan 20, 2022

ShinodaChan

Not Recommended

Not going to lie, I'm pretty sure that even Solomon with the ten rings wouldn't be able to fix this pacing nightmare of a film if he tried.

(MODERATE SPOILERS AHEAD, continue reading at your own risk)

Here we have the conclusion to Part 1 of FGO's storyline: 94 minutes of cameos, fanservice, and the absolute bare minimum of storytelling that Cloverworks could legally get away with. Going in I want to stress that there are at least two ways one can approach this film: as raw fanservice for FGO players, or as something more meaningful. If you're in the former camp you'll probably enjoy the movie ... solely from the cameos and animation alone, my review is catered more towards the latter camp.

My main problem with this adaptation is that the story not only feels rushed, it also feels painfully pointless and slow in some sections for no reason whatsoever. To give a few examples:

- Da Vinci explaining Mash's condition to Fujimaru even though he (and the audience by extent) knew about it already from prior films.
- Anything involving Lev Lainur, though ittedly I'm biased because I dislike his character in general.
- The horse riding scene where Mash needs to remind Fujimaru about why they've been fighting (as if he can't figure it out on his own) while stating for the 10th time that this is the end of their journey.
- Servants standing around doing nothing but looking cool; a certain someone's speech is the main culprit for this. This honestly wouldn't have been so bad if the movie had been longer, but it's not.
- Anything involving the Chaldea facility, because honestly just showing it under attack once is enough to raise the stakes and establish a kind of time limit; no need to reiterate after that.

Some of these might seem like petty nitpicks, but consider that when you're operating inside a ~90 minute timeframe (credits excluded) you need every moment you can get to properly flesh out the story and hit all your thematic beats. CloverWorks already had things stacked against them with the amount of fanservice they were expected to include, no need to worsen things by mes the pacing as well. Imagine if they had saved even an extra minute of footage, and used said minute to highlight an important part of the story instead of stuffing it into the credits. That alone would have arguably improved things by a fair margin, but instead it got sidelined for Lev Lainur being an obnoxious PoS. The story suffers considerably as a result of this, so while certain moments are still included I don't believe they're given the depth or flair they truly deserve.

Granted, this isn't my only issue with this movie. Other, more personal frustrations include:

- The fact that Mash and Fujimaru get a cool car...only for it to be totalled almost immediately. Why even bother introducing and animating the car at that point? Just have them walk on foot and come across Lainur sooner.
- The fact that CloverWorks had the perfect opportunity to have Mordred and Artoria fight together...only to have Nero team up with Mordred instead. I get that it's a Saber of Red deal, but Nero already had a scene prior and the father-son teamup would have been far more exciting IMO.
- Speaking of which: the fact that CloverWorks ALSO had the perfect opportunity to have Gilgamesh and Enkidu team up, only for Enkidu to do all the hard work while Gilgamesh is staring off into space on some random hill like Vegeta in the first Broly movie. I understand that CloverWorks probably wanted other servants to have the spotlight, but given what I've heard about Gilgamesh's role in the in-game version of this singularity I can't help but be disappointed by his virtual nonexistence here.
- The fact that Lainur takes time to hype up all of the singularities only for them to get used as background art for the rest of the film. Again, why even bother? It's like CloverWorks had plans to use these concepts in an exciting manner but had to ditch them due to lack of runtime (same as the car, probably).
- The fact that Act 1 is filled with some really random quarter-second shots that make no sense and serve no purpose but to disorient the viewer.


Then there's Goetia. I like Goetia's design, but frankly he comes off underwhelming here. Part of it is because I wasn't impressed by the second half of Ars Almadel Salomonis's animation (the build-up was incredible), and another part of it is because comes off as way weaker than Tiamat due to how easily he gets injured. Honestly this is where I feel like the fanservice was at its worst, because by allowing various servants to chip Goetia down (even when he gets serious) you're cheapening his capabilities and making it even harder for him to stack up to Tiamat. Ironic how CloverWorks making Tiamat super durable backfired on them in the long run.

So we have several minor things that irked me, a slew of drawn out scenes that (when added up) take away a critical chunk of runtime that was desperately needed in the second half of the film, and a suboptimally executed final boss. Is this really deserving of a 4? I believe so, for two reasons:

1. This is meant to be the conclusion to Part 1, meaning that it had a high bar to meet (especially after the unprecedented success of Babylonia's adaptation) from an animation and story standpoint. Failing to meet this bar is deterimental to the entire story arc as it undermines everything that's built up to this point, especially when so many things get crippled by the runtime.
2. The poor pacing cripples the film to the point where I'd argue that even the fanservice is underwhelming. Look, this is meant to be THE climax of Part 1. You have several singularities, a large assortment of powerful servants, and all the FGO money in the world. If you're already going down the line of 'fanservice first, story second' then the least you can do is make it an absolute slaughter that fans could revel in. I mentioned Gil not having a prominent role earlier, but really you can apply this to most of the servants that get shown here. The majority of servant moments comprise of bodies being thrown at a problem with a few getting exciting animations here and there; no interactions, no comedy to lighten the mood, nothing. Endgame's best moments worked as well as they did because they interspersed a lot of brief, but meaningful interaction inside the climactic action sequence. You basically don't get that here, and that's pretty disappointing. I'd be willing to forgive it if the time was used to deepen the movie's themes, but given the poor pacing it didn't do that well either.

Again, there are things to like about this movie: the animation is pretty good, the voice acting comes through when it matters (namely from Nobunaga Shimazaki), and the fanservice is just that: fanservice. What will really decide your enjoyment of the film is whether you believe the fanservice and key scenes create a satisfying conclusion to the story, and for me it doesn't work. With another half hour and some fine tuning this could have turned out leagues better than it did, but it is what it is. All that's left to do now is accept it and prepare for Mahoyo.

Reviewer’s Rating: 4

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