I have been waiting for a while to finally experience the end of the Please! Einzbern Consultation Room specials. I already complained about the lack of subtitles with the first Aniplex box set so I won’t reiterate that whole rant. The problem was the delay to get a translation was far greater than it was with the first batch of episodes. But we got all the episodes and that is what matters.
The therapy sessions continue as Irisviel and Zecchan continue to try to console the Servants who have died in the Holy Grail War. It seems that most of them are in some form of denial about their life that Irisviel snaps them out of. But as the sessions go on Zecchan seems to notice that Irisviel seems less concerned about consoling these lost souls and more about pushing them to the harshest realizations about their life.
Coupled with her increasingly disturbing dream Zecchan eventually realizes that something is wrong with the Consultation Room. After a bit darker turn everything starts to fall apart and the heart of the story is finally revealed. In the end we get a bit of a bitter-sweet ending but it can’t be totally dark because Taiga is not that sort of character. But it can’t end supper happily because Irisviel is not that sort of character as well.
Of course the King of Conquerors was far too awesome to have to participate in all of this depressing rigmarole. But that is just the sort of hero that Rider is.
Caster’s episode was fairly amusing as we get to see him about a subdued as we will ever see him. If nothing else it means much more Joan of Arc which will surely please her growing fan base. Seeing him with normal looking eyes is pretty odd but amusing.
Lancer on the other hand might as well be a river in Egypt for the sheer amount he is suppressing in his episode. It also seems to be the episode were they clearly acknowledge all the 4th-wall material about the fan base. Lancer’s strong female fan following and the rampant Lancer/Saber shipping is clearly acknowledged.
Berserker actually get more lines in this omake then he does on all of the TV series. But such is the way of being a Berserker. The original Berserker only really gets dialog in Fate/Tiger Colosseum so I suppose that is a step up. They do use the episode to fill in a lot of the blanks that were in the original Fate/Zero light novel but were cut in the anime for time. This gives the audience a better insight into Lancelot’s motivations.
In many way the most important piece of this story is as a conclusion of Irisviel’s story. She pretty much disappears as a character after she is kidnapped by Berserker in the main story. This gives a bit of resolution to the darker and more resentful parts of her character that never fully get explored by her abrupt passing. That is a lot of weight for what is mostly a comedy omake but it pulls it off well.
But all of it accumulates it the creation of the most important part of Fate/Stay Night so everything was worth it. It was touching to see Taiga carry on the legacy of the person she respected so much. Although it did meant she was destined to fall into the orbit of additional members of the Emiya family who would eventually have tragic ends around her.
I checked out Dragon Ball (full-color) which had a short preview in WSJ USA. It is of course the same story with the novelty of digital coloring. It was not all that impressive. The coloring job is competent but bland making the interior seem more like coloring book pages than anything else. Also there is some amateur looking fades.
This is where a printed book could make a big difference depending on the paper used. If they go with something that has a bit of tooth and a more mild white, it might be nice. But if they go with a high gloss white, it will end up looking cheap like this online version.
The Ongoing Investigations are little peeks into what we are watching and reading outside of our main posts on the blog. We each pick three things that we were interested in a week and talk a bit about them. There is often not much rhyme or reason to what we pick. They are just the most interesting things we saw since the last Ongoing Investigation.
Reverse Thieves 