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Story, Pacing, and Characters (continued)

Douman/Limbo

The first face-to-face introduction with Douman was—interesting—to say the least. He comes off as almost likable but was that an act? Was that actually Limbo hiding his true self, or was that the real Douman from that particular time?

In my humble opinion, I think this was a ham-fisted attempt to show the reader that Douman and Limbo were basically separate beings. When Abe-no-Seimei finally explains what happened, that first introduction makes sense. However, it’s not exactly a reveal at this point, if that’s what our first introduction to Douman was supposed to be.

The messed up part is that at the end, Douman was horrified by his Alter Ego self and there was a chance for him to redeem himself and take a different path but because of the nature of Singularities, he never had a chance to make amends or even redeem himself for all of the harm that he caused.

I think what the writers were doing—in very clumsy fashion—was trying to show that Douman and Limbo were essentially separate entities. Before Limbo, Douman seemed like he was a pretty decent guy—with low self-esteem and an inferiority complex (remind you of someone?)

Babbage and Murasaki

It was obvious early on that Murasaki was one of the Masters participating in the Imperial Holy Grail War. You barely get a hint of the relationship that Murasaki and Babbage had as Master and Servant. There was more there that could have been explored, but had to keep the plot moving forward.

The sudden shift to the death-match fight came as a surprise, but not really. There was very little build-up to the fight. At that point, Babbage had no reason to fight Kintoki, especially in light of the reveal that the HGW (yeah, I’m abbreviating it now) was really an evil plot. Babbage could have been another ally on our side, but I suspect that would have required digging into Babbage’s motivations and since at this point, we’ve only seen him a handful of times (London, Summer 2019, and Case Files—if there’s another one I’m forgetting, please let me know), doing that much character development on 3⭐ Servant that isn’t exactly popular would have been a waste of time.

The the first death-match fight against Babbage wasn’t difficult but it did drag a little bit. So far, this is one where only the servant participated. For this fight, I used double Castoria+Mordred (Rider). Even with that, it still took a little longer than I wanted (I’m impatient).

Shuten and Paracelsus

This section was just as much of a head-scratcher as the previous one was. One thing that did stand out was that Ibaraki didn’t like Paracelsus, and kept hoping that Shuten would eat Paracelsus. So, an oni is a Master in a HGW. The reasoning was solid but the relationship between Shuten and Paracelsus seemed forced.

My first encounter with Shuten, my team was Merlin+Castoria+Artoria (Alter) with Quetz (Ruler) and Mash in the back. Castoria was there for debuff clears—and thank god I had her there. Shuten kept hitting my front-line with debuffs, and thankfully, I was able to use Castoria’s NP every other turn to clear them. Merlin’s NP came in handy as well with the NP- and HP regeneration.

I kept this team in place when the death-match came up and it worked fairly well, except for some slight modifications. Instead of Salter, I used the support Kintoki because why not? And I had Okita (Alter) in the back-line in case I lost Kintoki.

Once again, Merlin’s heal+np regeneration worked out well when combined with Castoria’s debuff clear/atk-up NP. I did eventually lose Kintoki. However, I was lucky enough to keep him in place for all of Shuten’s breakbars. By the time he backed out, there was only like 100k left on Shuten’s final breakbar. Using Okitan’s NP for both damage and Buster-down debuff enabled me to finish the remainder despite Shuten’s atk-down and poison debuffs.