I do want more ambitious stories from HSR but I hope that they don’t do a storyline like this one for a long time until they *really* work out what they want to do. I know that the people working on this game are definitely capable of delivering something special… this just wasn’t it, chief.

Amphoreus overall isn’t a bad arc per say but its many issues drag down the good qualities it actually has. Its clear that the devs wanted to tell a story as ambitious and as compelling as Elysian Realm but they clearly were not ready to tell a story of that level.

As for the other Chrysos Heirs… they are, also, a mixed bag. Each one gets time dedicated to them in a patch, but only some of them actually flesh out the characters effectively. I like most of the Heirs on a surface level but I didn’t really get attached to them aside from a select few.

Unlike all the other variants in the game, who have unique designs that make them distinguishable from their counterparts, Cyrene's design is strikingly similar to Elysia's to the point that I have trouble telling them apart when scrolling through fanart.

Cyrene is a bland, underdeveloped, dollar store knock off of one of the best characters ever created by MiHoYo. She has no connection to any of the cast (aside from the Trailblazer, because of course) and she just ends up being a very marketable McGuffin for beating the bad guy and ending the story.

Amazingly, while Phainon works brilliantly as an homage to Kevin, Cyrene fails at being an homage to Elysia in just about every way possible, from her character to her design.

Star Rail already has issues with treating its blank self-insert protagonist as the "chosen one" in nearly all of its storylines but this is just so much worse than what came before since it is so blatantly at the expense of another character... the BEST character in the story.

This makes Amphoreus all the more frustrating when he is effectively removed from the second half of the story and the Trailblazer is forced to fill his spot as the "Deliverer".

Phainon is far and away the best character in Amphoreus if not the best original character in Star Rail. Despite being a variant of Kevin from HI3, he manages to stand tall as a character all on his own while still being a fantastic homage to Kevin.

I've already said my piece about the main story quests but overall they are a mixed bag. Most are pretty dragged out but I do think they get a bit better paced as it goes on. The big setpieces are incredible though, some of the best in the game so far.

Amphoreus itself is a pretty neat world with a good variety of environments, especially when compared to the other worlds in HSR currently. Exploring those environments, however varies between "kinda fun" and "tedious", though you could argue this is a problem with HSR as a whole.

A lot of Amphoreus works well on paper but it screws up a lot of its execution. It is super ambitious, but its WAY too long, the pacing is mostly awful, and half of the new characters are either underbaked or underutilized. On top of that, these are problems that Penacony mostly managed to avoid.

Individually, the things that F/Z spoils aren’t that big of a deal, but there are so many spoilers that it just ends up detracting significantly from experiencing F/SN for the first time.

Anyways, this show is great. Just don’t let it be your introduction to Fate, lol

9/10

The first episode alone spoils so much of F/SN that it was pretty mind-boggling, especially knowing that this was a lot of people’s introduction to Fate. It even spoils things that are only in Heaven’s Feel, which wouldn’t be animated until YEARS later!

This show succeeds extremely well as a prequel and greatly enhances the story of Fate/Stay Night. It, however, does NOT succeed as an introduction to F/SN.

Iskandar is as great as I’ve heard he is and quickly became one of my favorites in the series. His dynamic with Waver is fantastic and it makes you want to root for them despite knowing how it ends. Kariya might be the most tragic character here since he isn’t even *mentioned* in F/SN. Poor guy.

Its also fascinating seeing how Kirei was prior to participating in the Holy Grail War and how a certain Servant gaslit him into being a monster! The show even sets up Saber’s character arc in the Fate route! …Shame that most anime-onlies don’t see the conclusion to that since they skip that part.

It was also… much more tragic than I expected (though I really should have expected as much from Urobuchi). Kiritsugu is a character you hear of A LOT but hardly ever see in F/SN, so seeing him and what sets him on his path adds so much to the overarching story.