I like to give my first impression of Fate Zero, but it’s tainted; I read the fan-translation of the novels already. Is it a surprise that I had some problems initially keeping track of characters…in Hourou Musuko? I’d like to chalk that one for dropping the anime adaptation in the middle of the manga volume 3 or 4 or whatever. Can we do the same for dropping you in the beginning of a prequel? Or just the fact that this is truly an adaptation for an audience who probably already had access to a series of books by a mildly famous light novel writer, at least among the anime otaku crowd? I’m not sure. But I can imagine people new to Fate Zero having some trouble keeping everything straight and getting their attention span working fine during the middle stretch of the first episode. I suppose when I was reading the novels I had a little problem keeping everything straight, too. I guess blaming Urobuchi is always the safest thing to do.
Instead of complaining about Ei Aoki’s treatment of neophyte viewers, I would rather just complain about Aniplex’s distribution of information about their awesome simulcast. From what I can tell, here’s the thing:
1. Episode one of Fate Zero was a 2-ep length deal, or an hour long with ads. This means the simulcast’s 11 PM JST time lined up right when it ended its first airing in Japan. That was when ep1 went live today. Which is 9AM PDT or 12 noon EDT. It is right on target as far as Niconico’s English Fate Zero portal goes. Note that it is a nicovideo.jp site, and not associated with the nicovideo.com site.
2. On Aniplex USA’s site, it says 8:30AM Pacific. That’s 10:30 PM JST time right now, thanks to daylight savings. Soon that’s going to be 9:30AM Pacific so those west coast guys don’t have to wake up THAT early to catch the simulcast. This means to me that they will simulcast the next episodes right after the Japanese domestic first airing ends, so that is moving up by 30 minutes compared to today’s broadcast time.
3. From what I heard today on Twitter, there were some load issues from international viewers. Not sure what that was about; I refresh monkey’d at right around 11:59am Eastern and it worked like a charm.
Someone at AWA please go talk to the Aniplex reps? Or maybe they can answer my emails or something? :3
As for the show itself? It’s awesome. Especially the magi-stereo segment. That is almost Phantasmoon good.
Edit: Aniplex USA returns my email (On a Saturday night!) and confirms the 8:30 PDT time for next week. All’s well in the world.
October 1st, 2011 at 11:00 pm
while I m in japan
I cant streaming nico nico
T_T
October 2nd, 2011 at 1:15 am
Cool fuckin’ shit on the release time for next week. My load issues around the time that it actually went up were probably due to my connection and me frantically reloading so much that the page was breaking for me lol. It only took a couple of minutes to get right, though.
October 3rd, 2011 at 10:59 am
Yeah, I think if you took it easy and watch it today or whatever, it’s all good.
Hopefully I can find a couple hours today to rewatch it on a HD raw and then onto Nico for the comments. When I was watching it there were no comments at all :3
October 3rd, 2011 at 11:40 am
I think it’ll be best if there’s no comments on the episodes as they first come out, lol. But yeah I was anxious for it in HD too. Had to update my codecs n shit since it’s in 10bit (along with I guess a lot of this season).
October 3rd, 2011 at 1:00 pm
Yeah, I guess 10 bit is srsbzns. And semi-pirate-subbing. As always.