ANI-MOVIES, *Fate/Grand Order: The Movie, Divine Realm Of The Round Table: Camelot

Picking up sometime where the First Order movie left off, Fate/Grand Order continued its story within the online game which mixes in characters and concepts from the entire Fate franchise into one huge multiverse. The task of heroes Ritsuka Fujimaru and Mash Kyrielight is to travel to separate time anomalies and resolve the paradoxes which includes getting that reality's version of the Holy Grail. By this point in the story, the crusaders of Chaldea are from a future where they're the last surviving members of the human race in a doomed timeline and the only Mage and Heroic Spirit available to handle the task. This 2-part movie is an adaptation of the sixth of seven singularities where Ritsuka and Mash continue their mission having already tackled five other singularities that have never been covered in any anime. The two movies of Divine Realm Of The Round Table: Camelot are titled Wandering; Agateram and Paladin; Agateram, both being released within six months of each other, the first one was animated by Signal.MD and the second by Production IG. The movies curtail the events of the Sixth Singularity from the game, where the Seventh Singularity managed to get its own TV series adaptation.

Trying to repair the proper timeline, Ritsuka and Mash are joined by a female version of Leonardo DaVinci as they go to an altered past in 13th Century Jerusalem run by an adult version of Saber(aka: King Arthur)who here is referred to as the Lion King. A new Camelot has been set up in the Holy Land run by Artoria and her knights who take over one of the last refuges in a desert wasteland, although the knight Bedivere teams up with the time travelers to dethrone the Lion King. They head to the kingdom of Ozymandias where the Holy Grail is in the Sun King's possession, and he sends them on their way with a gender-swapped Xuanzang from Buhddist history. Along with this Caster servant, Ritsuka and his crew journey to the village of the Hassans where Assassin from Fate/Stay Night: Heaven's Feel is in his nicer original form of Cursed Arm who gets help from Ritsuka and the others to rescue their spy, Serenity. Lancelot makes a play for the Chaldeans but is beaten into submission by Mash who finally discovers the Heroic Spirit she was given was none other than Lancelot's son Galahad. Lancelot is now on Ritsuka's side and has secretly been gathering his own army, and he allies himself along with the Hassans to assault the fake Camelot posing as a holy city which is a flying fortress armed with the gigantic Sacred Lance capable of destroying all life in the world. Ozymandias gives the Holy Grail to Ritsuka to even the odds and attacks with his flying pyramid. The Chaldean resistance individually takes down each of the corrupted Round Table knights while the rest of the world is being decimated. Ritsuka, Mash, and Bedivere reach the Lion King at last where it's revealed that the whole reason King Arthur has been on her dark path is because Bedivere didn't take the sword Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake when Arthur first died causing her to be remade into an unwavering soulless monster. Bedivere bestows Arthur with Excalibur which wakes her from her spell and the timeline begins to reset as the Chaldeans are returned back to their reality.

This duology is hard to break down. Each one is animated by a completely separate studio with Production IG handling the second one masterfully as it had more fight scenes, but the entire watching experience is difficult to get through with the contrast in style. Unlike the Fate/Grand Order: Babylonia TV series, the duology had to cram much more of the Sixth Singularity story from the video game into a collected feature that's less than four hours long, so a great deal of the story details gets axed, including an entire scene with the iconic Old Man of the Mountain who is regulated to a short flashback scene in the second movie that took place in between the two films. The first movie also has various plot cuts and a lower production value since there's less action in it. The main drawback for general audiences is that these movies were made solely for Fate fans, specifically players of the Grand Order game as there's little outside its own storyline that fans outside of the game could comprehend. The other downside to these movies is that they are each sold individually on special edition Blu-ray with an ensemble of extra swag but either one is at least $100 each. For having possible the longest title for a movie series ever, Divine Realm Of The Round Table: Camelot is for devoted Fate otaku and only worth a look if you rented it off streaming.