YMMV / Fate/Extra Last Encore

• Awesome Art: The series is being animated by Studio Shaft, who previously did the openings for CCC and The Umbral Star. While their animation can be hit-or-miss sometimes, the trailers have shown stellar animation so far. Episode one demonstrates Shaft's brilliant use of colors and backgrounds to create one of the most visually impressive first episodes for the Fate series not made by ufotable.
• Awesome Music: The opening song, "Bright Burning Shout" by Takanori Nishikawa (a.k.a. T.M.Revolution) really pumps you up regardless of how you felt about the show.
• Epileptic Trees:
  • There is an unnamed astronaut servant that appears in episode 3. Many people assume that it's Neil Armstrong.
  • Because Amari is a Canon Foreigner exclusive to the anime and the many changes made from the original story in Last Encore, there are several theories on whether she is a Canon Character All Along but her backstory reveal in episode 6 makes it clear that she is her own character.
• Hilarious in Hindsight.
  • A bit of Black Comedy example. Back in Carnival Phantasm, there's a sketch where Grail-kun gives Shinji a "Friendmaker" (read: a knife) so that he can show Gilgamesh who's the boss. In the first episode of the anime, Shinji literally backstabs Hakuno after talking about how great of a friend he is.
  • When it was revealed the anime would be picking the male protagonist, there was a good number of fans who were upset that the show didn't use the more popular female protagonist. However at the start of episode 1, it was shown the female protagonist was actually part of the show, for a few minutes. Then by episode 8 we learned that the female protagonist actually was the original Hakuno, meaning that, technically speaking, the female protagonist was picked as Hakuno.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • NIKUI ^note Japanese word for "hate", and generally considered being Hakuno's Catchphrase due of how much he talks about hatred
  • [Sad Loli Noises] ^note  due to a certain fansubbing of episode 7, a certain sound effect regarding Alice's despair reached memetic status regarding how absurd it was as a joke
• Moe:
  • One look at Saber's face is enough to tell that this is what Studio Shaft was aiming for regarding her.
  • Alice, as introduced in episode 6, is simply an adorable little ball of Moe.
  • Female Hakuno also count as well, not only due to her adorable appearance but her voice as well.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • In the Action Prologue, a dying female Hakuno with a large amount of her left hip and legs missing. What's worse, Saber is unable to defeat Saver and ends up getting demolished by him as the result.
  • Shinji betrayed Hakuno by stabbing him in the chest, followed by stabbing him five more times in the back. He only wants to survive and become one of chosen Masters to win the Holy Grail War and doesn't care about anyone but himself. The expression he makes after he stabs Hakuno is very disturbing.
  • In one of the most gruesome scenes, when the Moon Cell system decides to purge the school of all NPC's and Students who did not make it into the Holy Grail War. All the students' deaths are very unpleasant and horrifying, as their bodies aren't shown, but their silhouettes can be seen with their bodies decapitated or impaled. Their corpses are seen around the school ground.
  • In episode 2, Shinji has somehow taken over the first level and become mayor, ruling the town with an iron fist and enforcing it with a gang of murderous women. He requires all Masters to surrender their Servants to be allowed to live in his town. He nonchalantly says the Servants are "recycled" so that their materials and energy can be put to better use, but saves a few and turns them into Berserkers.
    • At the end of the episode, Hakuno, after being stabbed multiple times and using The Power of Hate, activates something Rin calls Dead Face. Whatever this is, obviously it will not be pretty.
  • Episode 6 reveals Alice's Dark and Troubled Past. She was an ill girl who survived a war, and she had to stay in a hospital. She describes her days there as an endless cycle of pain and judging from the imagery provided, the doctors where utterly clueless regarding her case and the narcotics might not have worked as intended during the surgeries performed on her.
    • It's also possible that the doctors were experimenting on her since she couldn't protest. There's also some unsettling implications in the imagery of groping hands and undulating tubes and bizarre "centipedes" crawling into Alice as she lies beneath a sheet, followed by the clown-doctors clustered around her bed and hiding her from view as she says that the adults 'were always doing painful things.'
    • Alice starting to change into her monstrous form, especially as she appears to the appropriately horrified Masters and particularly the way her neck is so grotesquely long and thin that it droops over so she's actually looking behind her.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • A not uncommon complaint among fans of the original game is the fact that while this show was billed as being The Anime of the Game for Extra, Shaft and Nasu took the characters and basic premise, and then threw everything else out the window. Many fans are quite bummed at the fact that they won't be seeing their favorite scenes animated, or see the story reinterpreted in a new way. It also caused a lot of Extra's fans to be annoyed since now the changes result in a story that becomes hard to follow, which says a lot given how Extra's story was mostly pretty straightforward and easy to follow.
  • A particular sore spot is the change in Hakuno's general motivation. In Extra, Hakuno is primarily motivated by self preservation and a desire to know just what the hell is going on, before learning of the Moon Cell's systems, and undergoing Character Development to stop the Grail War from occurring again. Meanwhile in Last Encore, Hakuno has been painted as a person who hates everyone in the Moon Cell, constantly shows a Dull Surprise to everything around them, and is not given much in the way of motivation to do anything. For some, this makes it difficult to root for him since Hakuno just comes across as flat and not interesting.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Several.
  • Lancer/Cu Chulainn and Berserker/Lu Bu are killed off before the start of the series and show up in a single silhouette. While Rin and Rani's clones use their Servant's abilities, we never see the actual Servants in action, especially with Lu Bu as Rani's applications of his abilities are much different from how he actually functions.
  • Li Shuwen is shown only in his Berserker form and gets no chance to display any actual personality.
  • Misao Amari feels like a waste of time. While the third floor episodes fleshed out her motivations beyond being Shinji's girlfriend, she disappears completely afterward. Her final fate is only revealed in drama CD bundled with the first DVD boxset, leaving her inclusion and focus to stick out as unncessary.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The Fourth Floor. While fans speculated if the fourth floor's boss would be Li'l Ronnie and Vlad III or Monji Gatou and Arcueid, the script Nasu wrote reveals that the fourth boss would have actually been Tamamo, the playable Caster from the original games.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Similar to Fate/Zero, most of the characters have questionable methods, with the main character itself was fueled primarily by hatred and some characters from the original game was given an Adaptational Jerkass treatment. Not to mention that the Moon Cell Holy Grail War itself having been corrupted for years, causing viewers to not having care on what happens to them.
• Uncertain Audience: The show initially was presented and seemed to be an adaptation of the original Extra, but the story actually took place from the game's bad ending where Hakuno loses to Twice. As a result, fans of the original game are dismayed with this given the story's bleakness and the changes in the characters while the new viewers are completely clueless on what the hell is going on. This resulted in the anime having no real audience for it, causing it to be forgotten shortly after release.

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