Episode 10 – “Kaleidoscope”

I was curious as to how the fight with Berserker Alter would end. That pretty much just means I was wondering how Illya and Miyu would end up blowing him the hell up. It turns out that the two are able to draw out Saber’s power and launching multiple Excaliburs at him. I’m a little disappointed that we didn’t get to see more transformations, but there’s always more time in the future, right?

Man, it’s hard to put my satisfaction with this series into words, especially this last episode. A lot of times, a finale can make you feel empty or incomplete on the inside, but this one just did everything right for me. Not only did we have them collect all seven cards, but we also see a foreshadowing of the coming sequel. I personally want to know how Luvia and Rin ended up crashing their chopper in the jungle. There’s also a new important character who I’m pretty excited to see. She’s a certain woman from fate/hollow who sports a suit.

I think Miyu’s unintended wake-up kiss was the icing on the cake for this entire series. I love how it just leads into Miyu becoming an attached psuedo-girlfriend for Illya, and she just has to go along with it. Also, the scene where Miyu and Illya transform so that they can fly to school is something so stereotypical of a mahou shoujo series, and that’s what I love about it. It takes a series like this to remind us that it’s okay to have fun once in a while. Not everything has to be serious, innovative, or even all that thought-provoking.

Being pleasantly surprised is such a nice feeling, isn’t it? I went into this series thinking I’d get some good laughs with some interesting parody of the main series, and while I did receive what I anticipated, I also came out the other side with a lot more. Fate/kaleid has pretty much everything that I could have asked for from a mahou shoujo series and was a welcome breath of fresh air following the precedent that Madoka set up for the new generation of the genre.

The mixture of parody with the full-fledged mainstays of the genre is what makes the series great in my opinion. That, and all of the characters are just so likable too. Illya should pretty much be the new face of mahou shoujo. Forget Nanoha and Sailor Moon! Well, just kidding…kind of. There are a few things that held the series back for me though, which are the average animation and the lack of a complex plot. However, I think these are things that could be fix the second season! Whooo! Exciting! I love how creative they were with the name, too, using “2wei” (with 2 being pronounced as “tsu” in Japanese) to make “zwei.” And now we wait.

B.W.