English Dub Review: Fate/Grand Order Absolute Demonic Front: Babylonia, “Fortress City: Uruk”

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Ritsuka and Mash continue to Uruk, meeting new faces and learning more about the place they find themselves in.

Our Take

Though the episode is titled “Uruk,” we don’t spend much time there. Most of what we get is just more expository dialogue constructing the characters and setting for the story at large.

The reveal that Enkidu is supposed to be dead was a bit of a surprise, but only in that we received a little plot twist like this so early in the story. I don’t doubt that this twist will end up becoming an important detail later in the story, but the set-up here feels a little awkward.

It also feels like an excuse to start a battle. In the context of the game, you would play said battle, but here we get to watch it and it’s pretty good. The animation is continuing with its trend of high speed, high impact battles. Even on my not-optimal audio setup, I can hear the bass thunder from the sound effects as heavy objects and blasts of magic are flying around the screen and crashing into the ground.  It’s fun, but sometimes the camera does get a little too crazy. There are a couple of shots where it follows an object flying through the air and it doesn’t hit anything for a while so we just see it whirl around. This is a bit disorienting, even for 2D animation, and occasionally you lose focus during the action. 

After that wraps up, we meet two new characters, Merlin and Ana.

Merlin is almost definitely a legacy character from the Fate series that fans would be familiar with. We get a fairly large information dump about his backstory and how he is able to exist in ancient Sumer. As a non-adherent to the Fate franchise, this was mildly interesting but just seemed like more forced exposition for me and more pandering for the fans. 

As for Merlin’s actual character, all the other characters have a low opinion of him. I found him enjoyable and refreshing so far. He seems the sort who is actually taking things seriously like everyone else deep down. However, unlike everyone else, he doesn’t have a whole lot personally at stake here, so he’s having more fun with this. This less reverent attitude amid all the straight-laced serious characters, even though it’s not much, lightens up the mood in a good way.  

Ana, on the other hand, receives zero exposition and we’re not left with very much. Her primary character trait is being a hardass little girl, which so far is only mildly compelling. How her rigid personality interacts with the looser Merlin generates a bit of good humor. And how she becomes stunned in the face of genuine kindness adds a bit of depth.   

The crew doesn’t enter Uruk itself until about the last five minutes of the episode. There, we finally meet the great king, Gilgamesh. Even as someone with little familiarity with the Fate series, I know Gilgamesh is usually a pretty big deal in it. That seems like it will be the case here too. He was briefly shown in the cold open of the first episode, as a lot of important characters in anime tend to be. There has also been a lot of dialogue alluding to him and his importance in just about every other scene of the show up until now  And he just straight-up challenges Ritsuka and Mash to a fight as soon as he meets them. This sounds like another excuse just to start a battle and I imagine the next episode will kick off by starting with another high-speed battle. 

Though these fights are pretty fun to watch, Ritsuka and Mash have basically just been on a glorified tour so far. They don’t any specific goals or motivations right now. The next episode should be beginning the actual plot, or this first arc will just be nothing but gratuitous battles couched between constant explaining.