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

From Bad CG to characters pulled from the franchise that wasn't explained, This movie was riddled with flaws.

But here's the thing, none of those matter when watching the movie.

The ending literally pulled me out of a deep episode of derealization, slapped me in the face, asked me if it was worth living, slapped me again, and said "Stupid question, go figure it out yourself, now CRY." This has not happened since I watched "A place further than the Universe". And any movie that can make me do what an entire season of anime did deserves a 10/10 and go watch it.

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 terms 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.

I enjoyed watching this movie, but not in the way that I expected. Terrible pacing, unexplained plot points, and just lots of inexplicable blank spaces where the characters just stand there longer than they should; it all just kind of melded into feeling like one big joke on itself which it obviously didn't intend to do.

First the art: The tentacle demon pillars looked pretty good actually, but they were effectively just cg backgrounds and the 7 Pillars you fight in the game don't ever even do anything besides get introduced, and then just wilt over off screen. Some of the animation was pretty good, but ... it felt wasted and like it was just trying to cover up the fact that even the director didn't know what was going on in the movie.

Now, to talk about the pacing and characters. There are a couple elephants in the room so to speak about this: first ever since the Unlimited Blade Works movie pre-Ufotable, the Fate series has always been trying to cram like 10+ hours of content into 90 minute movies, which is just never a good idea. Second, this arc in the game was supposed to be the player's big triumphant moment after a year long journey both in the game and in real time, with all of the characters you met and grew to love or hate coming to your aid, but the catch is that they only animated 2.66 out of 8 arcs, and even the characters you are supposed to be reminiscing about barely get screen time, so if you've never played the game you don't know who the heck any of these people are, and even if you know them only a handful actually get a chance to do something.

I also have complaints about the way that the story was not explained at all. I have played FGO since it came out on JP, played pretty much every Fate thing, and even read some of the novels, so I think it's fair to say that I have better understanding than the average viewer of what the story and concepts are about, but the utter lack of explanation on what was going on made me question if I was remember the story correctly. The pivotal moment of the entire first storyline of FGO didn't really get explained: like why a character walking up and sacrificing themselves actually accomplished anything, there were no visual or dialogue cues to suggest that it actually did anything and even the characters were like "cool, moving on". The movie also had this terrible habit of undercutting any tension or dramatic moment they were trying to build. I remember laughing hysterically because Ritsuka and the villain were having a dramatic argument on a static shot of them just standing there, the camera pans away suddenly, and then pans back to the same shot except there is a shield stabbed into the villain's stomach, and then it just lingers on that shot for like 5 more seconds. The final fisticuffs fight between Ritsuka and the villain which the entire fandom was kind of wondering how that even worked in the first place ended up being really lame, so that was another disappointment.

In conclusion, trying to tell multiple hours worth of story about 7 other stories in 90 minutes is a bad idea, but Fate keeps doing it anyways. This is movie is basically only for people who have completed Part 1 of the FGO story, anything less and you should probably save your time by skipping this. I at least wanted to see Ritsuka go full JoJo at the end but it seems like that wish will never be granted.