Anime I have watched in the last year or so - Fate Stay Night
Ten years ago - a devastating combat results in an enormous fireball which destroys an entire city block. The conflagration's only survivor is an orphaned young boy who is rescued by a man who later adopts him as his son. As the boy grows up his adopted father reveals that he is in fact a magus. The boy also gains a great desire to help people and make the world a better place.
In the present, the boy has become a young man and his father has since died. He lives alone in the house he has inherited, supported by a girl he has known since childhood and one of his teachers. He still feels the urge to improve the world but has learned that he has little or no magical talent of his own except for a single ability. However, he works hard to fulfill not only his own responsibilities but also those of people around him.
In the mean time, ominous events have started to re-occur. There is murder, sickness and death that the authorities seem unable to prevent or explain. An eerie young girl warns the boy that if he doesn't summon his Servant soon, he will die. At the same time other mages emerge and begin to summon Servants of their own. However, even the most gifted among them seem to be unable to summon the Servant who is reputed to be the most powerful of all - Sabre.
Fate Stay Night is the kind of show that is basically aimed right at me. It gets off to a relatively slow start but promises a range and depth of plot complications which it largely delivers on. It maintains a dark tone which isn't undermined as many other series do. There are moments of humour but they tend to be self-referential and in the background and usually serve to strengthen characterisation. On the minus side, Fate Stay Night is based on a computer game and, as a consequence, its plot structure is seriously flawed. Most threads are eventually resolved but it has a tendency to introduce characters and then lose track of them. The core characters are, however, so well defined that this generally makes up for this failing.
There is an unfortunate tendency in anime for main characters to be weak and ineffectual or otherwise unsympathetic, presumably to allow strong secondary characters to shine. The main male character of Fate Stay Night suffers from this to a certain extent. However, as regards the female lead this is certainly not the case. She doesn't appear until the end of the second episode (leaving me to wonder who the figure in the end titles actually was) but when she does arrive, she starts kicking ass right out of the gate! Don't be misled, this is not the loud-mouthed, arrogant, condescending, manic-depressive female character beloved of so many other shows. (Not that I have anything against that!) On the contrary, she is polite, reserved, serious, graceful, intelligent, competent and withdrawn to the point of being cold. But when it comes to combat and the fulfillment of her mission, her reputation for being second to none is fully deserved.
Dark, romantic, super-powered, urban fantasy.
Good music, good plot (if a little poorly structured), good production values, attractive character designs (relatively realistic), excellent characterisation (for main characters, anyway).
Overall, 8/10.