Fate Grand Order Absolute Demonic Front Babylonia: 20% Noble Phantasms, 80% staring at Ishtar’s groin

All that fucking money and it still couldn’t save itself.

Spending week after week talking about how things will get way better down the line gave me a bad premonition of how things would go.

But hey, if you’re into creep shots of girls wearing high-leg panties and leotards, do I have a recommendation for you.

First impressions are important and I can say that I had two going into Babylon’s anime. One was episode zero and the other was the opening. Episode Zero did a proper job setting up for what was to come and it was in a curious timeline where Case Files more or less brought the Animusphere family back into the spotlight as Lostbelt 5’s primary antagonist, Kirschtaria Wodime was considered the true successor to the Animusphere family’s magic. I’m looking way too far ahead but it was an interesting piece of worldbuilding beyond just the chapter about to be animated so it helped add to the mystique of it all.

I will admit right now that the opening does nothing for me. It feels too light and the visuals, while having some shots that I really like, it doesn’t click with me since it only shows what I already know. The second version doesn’t do much either and if anything, I like the endings more than I do the openings but neither songs are something I’d find myself listening to again.

I remember how I kept saying that the good parts of Babylon would come with its second half and sure enough, I wasn’t lying about that since the stakes are raised incredibly high but in the end, I don’t believe the high notes were achieved by the anime adaptation. The noble phantasm showcases were pretty fantastic and all but that feeling of utter despair wasn’t there, and maybe I have no one to blame but myself for just knowing what was to come that lessened the impact. In my defense however, the consistency in the final action scenes were shoddy, the sound effects were poor, and the direction was way too disorganized. You could honestly say that everything rode on this last battle since this is where the most amount of cool shit happens and I can attest that the path to getting to Tiamat the first time was pretty cool since everyone staying aloft to fight Bel Lahmus was cool and Quetz’s “sacrifice” was a visual spectacle. What followed was just sadly not all too great.

I went over my gripes in the episode critique last week so no need to repeat myself here. Unsurprisingly, the end of Babylon was immediately followed up with a confirmation for Grand Temple of Time and I’m not really holding my breath for FGO adaptations anymore. Perhaps there would be better hope for Camelot and Part 2 prologue adaptations as they’re less “grand” in scale and Babylon showed me that not even the literal BILLIONS of FGO profits could not save Babylon’s finale, which was a shame because if that isn’t enough resources, I don’t know what is. This is a bit more disappointing than Azur Lane’s adaptation which already had a lot of things working against it while Bablyon at least had a set path on what to properly adapt. At the very least, Babylon doubled down on delivering its fanservice extensively which you can’t really fault them for.

There’s not much else to explain why I feel disappointed with Babylon’s adaptation. The first half only gets my praise for the scenes with Gorgon fighting Leonidas and Ushiwakamaru while the second half gets a slap on the back for a pretty good aerial confrontation in the first big attempt to halt Tiamat’s advance, what came after not so much. In the end, my general opinion of Babylon is that it’s only good for these two things: Noble Phantasm showcases and the metric ass-ton of Ishtar, Ana, and Mash butt and crotch shots.