(10 episodes)
What’s it about ?
A comedy spin-off of Fate/stay night with Illya as a magical girl.
Characters
Illya, our prepubescent heroine, who lives in a weird parallel universe where the von Einzberg family is all happy, and especially her mother is stated not to be dead (although she’s on a business trip or something). She’s also got a random older sister, as well as Taiga acting as housekeeper and “cousin” Shirou living with them. Er, sure.
It turns out it was Rin who was originally given the magical girl powers, but since she kept using them to feud with her new rival Luvia (a haughty noble cliché) instead of their nominal goal of hunting “Class cards”, bother their power artifacts got fed up with them and left. (While they were battling in the sky. Ouch.)
Magical Ruby, Rin’s wand, has a LOT of personality (the same for Magical Sapphire, Luvia’s, but it gets less screentime). Unfortunately, when it stumbles onto Illya while looking for a replacement for Rin, that makes it sounds fishier than Kyubey having just binged on salmon. Ruby is a very nasty bugger who isn’t above tricking Illya if that suits its purposes.
The OP sequence makes it look like there’s going to be an age-appropriate rival for Illya (presumably powered by Sapphire), but that’s for future episodes.
Production Values
Well, it’s a bit hard to tell since the streamed pre-air had a lot of nasty blocking whenever there’s a little action, but this looks quite good indeed.
Overall Impression
Well, I’ll give it that : it’s funny, and you really don’t need to know anything about the Fate/ series to understand it. Let’s be honest : those are very shallow versions of the characters, put into new roles for comedic effect. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
Well, except that I don’t see the joke carrying 10 episodes ; and the genre-parody at work here is a bit too bad-natured for me to tolerate too long. It’s nasty for the sake of being nasty, and I can only laugh at that for so long.
If you’re a die-hard fan of the franchise, you’ll probably get more out of this than I do ; there are tons of easter eggs and it’s as good as such a comedy spin-off can be. But I already have a lot on my plate this season, and I can do without this one.
