why were these two Fate Servants chosen to be in Melty Blood Type lumnia?

 written By Ethan

Edited by Kwame Obiri-Addai     

The latest installment of Type Moon’s Tsukihime fighting game Melty Blood Type Lumnia recently released some new free DLC characters. The new fighters include the Rider type servant Ushiwakamaru and Avenger servant Edmond Dantes, the Count of Monte Cristo himself. 

But why add them and not other Melty Blood original characters? I mean, other than this Melty Blood is based on the Remake of Tsukihime that’s only 2/5 routes done and Type Moon doesn’t want to risk confusing people thinking this is cannon to that. I mean, like from a Lore reason, why these two? Let's start with Edmond since there’s the most to say about him.  

We need to look at the Strange Tales of Heroic Spirit Lore ~King of the Cavern, Edmond Dantès~ Fate/Grand Order Drama CD (you can find it translated on youtube here) for the Lore in question. For those that don’t want to go watch it, the Drama CD tells the story of Edmond on a quest for revenge for the people that sent his mentor to the hellish prison Château d'If, sometime before his main quest for revenge in paris. The three people responsible for sending his mentor to jail were a cardinal, a church executioner (the Church's demon hunters that all use magic), and a particular reincarnating vampire who's now reincarnated into (and is pretending to be) a church executioner. 

After killing the executioner with little issue, Edmond moves onto the second, who as the last sentence hinted at, was actually Michael Roa Valdamjong - the reincarnating vampire and main antagonist of Tsukihime. During their fight, Edmond ends up activating the Monte Cristo Mythologie, a powerful magical item that was hidden among treasure that Edmond found on the island of Monte Cristo. This basically lets Edmond produce and control black hellfire that burns away sin.

With this, Edmond and Roa essentially end up having a DBZ slap fight in the middle of a Roman town square, with Edmond screaming about how God's vengeance made him manifest on this earth his flames beat the thunder Roa had been using to battle. These flames, as it turns out, burn Roa’s soul, meaning that Edmond outright kills that reincarnating vampire. 

This, by the way, is the explanation as to why Tsukihime takes place in an alternative universe to Fate stuff - the main villain died in the 1800s. This personal Lore connection is likely why Edmond was chosen to be part of Melty Blood, and I'm so happy he got in. 

Fun extra Lore tangent: Alexandre Dumas the author of The Count of Monte Cristo is actually summoned as a servant in Fate/Strange Fake as a Caster. From what he tells us about his past, we know he met Edmond, and he told Alexandre about his time vampire hunting and promised to write his story so that he would never be forgotten. From this, we can infer that in the universe of Tsukihime, Roa would have beaten Edmond, meaning he would have never met Alexandre and the novel The Count of Monte Cristo can't exist in Tsukihime. 

As for why Ushi was included into Melty Blood, idk she's cute? One of the devs plays FGO and is a big fan? Was part of the Anime an adaptation of Fate/Grand Order’s Babylonia chapter?  Imma be honest with you reader, I just wanted to talk about the Edmond Lore that I thought was neat and also get my theory out there about why The Count of Monte Cristo can’t exist in the Tsukihime universe. Anyways, happy holidays.

Fate:Lost Einherjar theory time

 written By Ethan

Edited by Kwame Obiri-Addai    

So announced  in October this year, and then pushed back to the very end of the year, was

Fate: Lost Einherjar - a new light novel series written by Hikaru Sakurai and illustrated by

Shirou Miw. The light novel is set 10 years after Fate/Apocrypha’s 7 Vs 7 team deathmatch

Holy Grail War, and sees a remaining member of the Yggdmillennia Clan of mages enter into

a new Grail War taking place in Oslo, Norway in 2014. Here, masters summon 2 servants each

and compete in what's Ostensibly a Holy Grail War duos, with the main character summoning

Aslaug(the daughter of the legendary dragon-slayer Sigurd), the Valkyrie Brynhildr (who is an

Archer class servant) and her husband Ragnar Lothbrok (legendary Viking king who shows up

as a Berserker Class servant). The story itself will be split into two parts - the present day grail

war and the past, telling us how these two met and fell in love. With its close release and not much

to go on, I'm going to attempt to theorize on who a handful of the 12 other servants are. 

It’s worth noting how this light novel came to be. Shirou Miw, after being asked to design Sigurd

and Brynhildr for Fate/Grand Order, kept designing other Norse mythology figures on their own.

After seeing how another artist’s own extra work on an alternative version of a character they

designed for Fate/Grand Order would be implemented into the game, following positive

reactions when they shared art of that alternative version online, decided to show Type Moon

the other Norse servants they had designed. In response, Type Moon greenlit this light novel

using these designs. From this, we know a lot of the servants present will be Norse. 

Okay, so first off, we aren’t going to be able to ID most of the servants that will be in this.

“How many will we be trying to ID then, Ethan?” I hear you ask like a dark god calling to me

in the night. Well, about 5 readers is the most we can really go on since that's about how

many we have any information on in the form of pre-release art work. 

So what info do we have going in ?

 Well we already know there will be a lot of Norse figures in this, due to how this light novel got greenlit. 

it’s a regular Holy Grail War so no divine servants - no Odin, Bragi, Loki, or Thor but Demigods are still possible .

Due to the Specifics of this Holy Grail War, we know know that there will be two of each class.

We also already know 100% that three of the servants in this series are Aslaug, Ragnar Lothbrok and the Lancer servant, Percivil 

For Percivil’s involvement this, we need not look further than this piece of promotion art that was dropped

when they announced the book’s delay from October till December:

See that person in the top left, next to some hooded guy? Well, that’s Percival. You can compare that

to this artwork from the artist that designed them for Fate/Grand Order’s twitter account: 

The first servant I would like to speculate on is the unknown Caster servant whose Slavic familiars

I mentioned in the prologue that was released with the announcement of this light novel. My first theory is that

this is the Baba Yaga, the famous cannibal witch from Slovic folklore. I think this mainly because there aren’t many Slavic figures that are as well known as the Baba Yaga that also would fit this class so perfectly. 

The other servants I would like to take a crack at IDing are the new faces on the cover for volume 1: 

Let’s start with the easy one - this red and gold shieldmaiden is Lagertha Ragnar’s second wife. We know this by looking at the art book Shirou Miw put out this year focusing on characters designed for Lost Einherjar. She's most likely a Saber servant.

Fans translated this image, revealing these 4 to be (from top left): Thora Borgarhjört Ragnar's second wife,

Lagertha Ragnar’s second wife, Sigmund Aslaug’s granddad and Regin, a blacksmith and

foster father to Sigurd Aslaug’s dad. 

Now let’s move on to talking about the one that probably caught your attention first - the wolf man. First, we need

to talk about how they are commonly speculated to be Sigmund. I disagree for two reasons:

1) The wolf man appears to not have the cape Sigmund is shown with in the art book, and

also has different spiked gauntlets. 2) Fans claim sigmund turns into a wolf in his legend.

This is something I'm not able to find myself. Instead, I’m only able to find tellings of

Sigmund's legend, where his mum turns into a wolf and not him. So with that out of the

way, my speculation on who that might be is Fenrir the demigod child of Loki. They would

fit into the berserker class. Other than them being the most prominent wolf in Norse mythology,

it would be insanely cool to see them appear, and designing Fenrir, I think, would be far too

tempting to pass up. 

Finally, the bard. He is also someone with a commonly theorized identity that I agree with.

Firstly, let me just say that I think they are the second Caster servant. This would track with other musicians like

Mozart appearing in the caster class. Now then, that commonly theorized identity is Bragi, a musician that was pals with Ragnar when alive and is described as looking very similar to the bard on the cover.

This is probably the most easy to lock in a guess for alongside Lagertha. 

I'm very excited for Fate:Lost Einherjar to release at the end of this year. It will be only officially be releasing

in Japan, though i'm sure fans will translate it, and when they do you can expect a review from me. 

what do you need to know to get into Fate ?

written By Ethan

Edited by Kwame Obiri-Addai 

So you have seen one of the billions of spin-offs, new servants or even the thing I’ve written, and it’s made you wanna check out this new Fate thing, but where do you start? Isn’t it super confusing? Well, to answer those questions, I'm going to explain what basic stuff you need to know to just jump into whatever Fate thing has caught your interest. And no it’s not confusing, it's a franchise that's been going for more than 5 years so it just seems daunting from the outside.

Ok, so first thing you need to know is that Fate has a lot of spin offs, but originally was just the visual novel Fate/Stay Night, set in the Nasuverse (the term used to refer to the universe of written works by Kinoko Nasu). It tells the story of Shirou Emiya - a young man that gets caught up in the 5th holy grail war, a battle royale between 7 mages and their summoned Heroic Spirit, with the winning team getting to make a wish with the holy grail. This visual novel ended up being crazy popular (hence all the spin offs), leading to all three of its anime routes getting anime adaptations - two by Ufotable and one by studio Deen. And already we have our first thing we need to expand on. 

Heroic Spirits are figures from myth and history, or fiction (if they were believed to be real.) When they are summoned the holy grail fills them in on what's happened since they died, and that they are now a Heroic Spirit. Normally, they can be categorized into one of 7 main classes those being:

Saber - sword users 

Lancer - people that fight with pole arms 

Archers - anyone that fights with any ranged weapons 

Riders - people that are known for having a mount or vehicle 

Assassins - your ninjas, and well, assassins 

Casters - mages, scholars, and generally most people that wouldn't fit into other classes tend to wind up here

Berserkers - people that get summoned as berserkers tend to have traded sanity for physical power, how much sanity can vary from heroic spirit 

Since the days of Stay Night, many additional classes have been introduced but for most Fate media, you don’t need to know about the extra classes in order to jump in. All you really need to know is that when a Heroic Spirit is summoned by someone, the summoner is given magic seals that they can use to make the spirit do things. The summoner is normally called The Master and the summoned spirit is called The Servant.  It’s also worth noting that heroic spirits can be summoned into more than one class. For example, Hercules is normally shown to be in the berserker class but he meets the qualifications to be summoned into any class. Additionally, across the many Fate spin-offs, Heroic Sprites are summoned from the same place. This can lead to Heroic Sprites popping up across multiple spin-offs after getting summoned. Unless specified otherwise, Servants lose their memories of their time summoned. 

The next most important thing you need to know is, most Fate stuff is relatively self-contained unless it’s a sequel to something or Fate/Grand Order (that mobile game kinda serves as a big franchise wide crossover). Each Fate thing is telling its own story, its own grail war with different Servants getting summoned. It might not seem like that, but it’s true. Some spin-offs take place in different timelines, or make reference to others (mainly Stay Night if i'm honest) but if you have this baseline knowledge, you will probably be fine. Most Fate spin-offs do take the time to explain things anyway because they know their spin-off might be someone's first experience with the franchise. Probably don’t start with Fate/Extra -  that one’s set in its own timeline in the moon that's also a super magic computer. Maybe work up to that one. 

Anyway, yes readers, expect more Fate content in the future from me. I hope this guide helps you to jump into that Fate thing you found and wanted to check out.

kamen rider zero one issue 1 review

written By Ethan

Edited by Kwame Obiri-Addai

 

Now, as you may have guessed from my last article, I'm a big fan of tokusatsu. After stumbling onto clips of Kamen Rider Ex-aid on instagram in 2017 and deciding to seek it out, I've watched Ultraman, Super Sentai and Kamen Rider weekly. You can imagine my excitement when they announced Kamen Rider Zero-One was going to get a 4-issue comic book miniseries written by Brandon Eastonwith art by Hendry Prasetya, published by StoneBot Studios and Titan Publishing. So does this live up to the hype ? No, I don't think it really does if I'm honest, and before this review is done I'm going to get into what I think might have happened. But before that, I should really summarise the story.

So the first issue opens with our main character Aruto hidden and his humagear (imagine the robots from Detroit: Become Human) secretary Izu being detained by A.I.Ms and interrogated by Yaiba and Fuwa, who are attempting to get Aruto on record as part of their investigations (and in case there's a civil suit filed against Aruto for the public damage caused by his superhero fights). Following the interrogation, Aruto and Izu get jumped in the park by some guy calling himself Ragnarok, who uses a red progrise key to take  a form that looks like Aruto’s Blazing Tiger form causing Aruto to transform and fight back, eventually Aruto manages to freeze him using one of his transformations.

This leads to Izu and Aruto having a conversation about Aruto’s conflict over whether or not he deserves to be named as his Grandpa's successor and take over as CEO of his company and the nanotech that Ragnarok is using in his suit. Ragnarok then (possibly reminded by Izu) uses their nanomachines to break out of the ice and continue the attack. The mystery person that sent Ragnarok to attack tries to override them to force a retreat, but Ragnrok overrides them and uses his tentacles to hack into Aruto’s driver. This seemingly locks Aruto’s ability to transform the normal way and raises his power to the point they actually look like the design on the cover and in all of the promo material. The issue ends with Ragnarok letting out a finisher move with his weapon and standing triumphant over a passed out Aruto, who was knocked out of his transformation.

Okay, let’s start with what I liked. While I had a couple of issues with it later in the issue, the art for the most part is really good, and the design of Ragnarok's powered up start is amazing. The fact that it looks like something they would make for the show is really just perfect.

Now for the things I didn’t like. Firstly, I understand that between this only being 4 issues long and a lot of people’s first exposure to Kamen Rider, this means you have a lot of exposition to cover to get people up to speed so that they can enjoy the story without having to wiki dive. Because of this, I can forgive the clunky interview scene. But one nitpicky complaint I have is that whenever Aruto tells a joke in the 40+ series & movies, he will say his catchphrase “Hai, Aruto ja naito!” (which translates to “Now that was the work of Aruto!” or “that's how you know it's Aruto”) and in the interrogation scene he doesn't say his catchphrase, which just felt weird as a fan. The other big thing i didn’t like is Ragnarok. While i adore the design, this guy just appearing out of nowhere and giving bland villain dialog about how he’s going to kill all Riders felt bland and generic to me. 

Aruto and izu being told to leave as they A pose out of the room 

Now at the start of this, I mentioned I had a theory as to why some of the problems I had with this comic and also that I had some issues with the art. Well, to get into them, I need to make a couple of things clear first:

1. This is a theory based on very little but speculative evidence. I'm not affiliated with anyone that worked on this comic book in any way.

2. I'm going to have to get into spoilers for the Zero One show and post series movies. If you wanna avoid them, skip to the last paragraph.

So, this comic seems to take place before episode 17, the debut of Kamen Rider Thouser. 

We can tell this because, well, Fuwa alive for one and according to the character index at the start of the issue, hasn’t found out he had his memories altered to think he was orphaned during the daybreak town incident. Not to mention, Aruto uses his freezing bear form but also has the flying falcon key (which he lost briefly around the time when he first used the freezing bear form but regained later). This is an odd time to set a comic that, for a lot of people, will be their first interaction with this world. Especially odd when everyone going into it assumed it would be set after the series, so why would this be? Also, why would Ragnarok’s weapon make the finisher sounds of one of the briefcase weapons used by the other riders when it's blatantly not a briefcase?  Well, my theory answers these questions. 

Now, during the credits, there's one name that I think is extra special to point out: “ Story and original characters by David Clark ''.David works with Team Rider to bring Kamen Rider to the west, by which they mean only America. ook, after the amount of times I've been disappointed to learn that they are getting more rider stuff over there and I'm still left out I get to be a little sassy over it) As well as this, David Clark is also a brand manager for Kamen Rider at Bluefin Brands. This would imply that David came up with the story and the comic publishers asked Brandon Easton to actually write the 4 issues. So my theory is that the reason why the comic is set in this early part of Zero One and why Ragnarok’s weapon makes the finisher sounds of one of the briefcase weapons is because Brandon didn’t watch all of Zero One - he watched just enough to get a feel for the characters and to be sure he could write them just fine. Which in and of itself is fine but someone should have caught the finisher sound thing at very least.

Speaking of sounds in this issue, I mentioned I had an issue with some of the art. The sequence before the finisher, you can see Izu throw Aruto the flying falcon key as the flaming tiger was activated and Aruto makes a quip about “fighting fire with fire”.... Was that meant to be Flaming Tiger? I ask because it’s a little confusing if it is or not. On one hand, it could be Ragnarok activating the flaming tiger key he used to turn into his base form, but if that is the case they still messed that up because it’s not clear when he turns into his base form as they didn't include any sound effect boxes for it like they do later in the issue. On the other hand, Aruto's fire quip doesn't work with the falcon key. Either way it’s not great. 

So to bring this review to a close, would I recommend you buy this issue? Yes but only to show that there's an audience outside of Japan for Kamen Rider. Although, we need to hold ourselves to higher standards . The Marvel-published Ultraman comics, for example, are fantastic and really make the problems I've described even worse by comparison. 

This issue, as well as the remaining 3, will be available digitally via amazon/comixology or from your local comic book store/online comic book distributor.