User blog comment:Miskos3/Fairy Tail Wiki in Anime: Summer 2016/@comment-7418318-20161002174107

I only watched two new anime this season, but I'm not sure if one of them is actually new...

The first being Fate/Kaleid Illya... ect. (damn that long title). I really like this anime quite a lot. The first episode (of season 1) is an absolute atrocity, but once you're through that it get's better and better until episode 4 had me pretty much hooked. It is also for the most part quite faithful to the manga source. In season 1 they cut a few pieces of information out, most likely for the same reason that Gildarts was never mentioned in the beginning of the FT anmie, but after that it's quite accurate.

Most of the "filler" comes from the omake chapters of the manga, instead of being straight made up stuff.

The other anime I watched was Arpeggio of Blue Steele (or Aoki Hagane no Arpeggio), mostly because I wanted to know what those odd, brightly coloured ships in World of Warships were inspired by.

While I enjoy the manga, the anime I didn't like too much. Sure the animation is quite nice, but other than that... Well... to differentiate the series is quite okay from the story, even though it's a simplified version of the manga with all the political intrigue cut out and replaced by more fighting. The Humans are for the most part a unified force with just one group not playing nice, instead of having even the different governments of Japan compete with each other and doing back-room deals. And the strife within the Fleet of Fog (the antagonists) is attributed to the protagonists somehow corrupting them, instead of the strife being the result of the Fog emulating Humans and taking on their flaws along with the desired ability to predict and use tactics like in the manga source.

Not that I mind the fights, since they are well done, but in the anime they overstepped the saturation point in my opinion. Also the anime makes main protagonist seem less like a great tactician and more like someone who can literally see into the future by some magical means. They also took off from the manga source at roughly the half-way point to dive into an anime-only ending.

The movie that continues and finishes the anime-only story is just a terrible mess of confusion and stuff that makes absolutely no sense, coupled with a few plot conveniences that are just cringeworthy. Worse than any plot convenience in FT I can think of. If you plan to give this a spin, watch the series and skip the movie. Or better yet, ignore the anime adaption and just read the manga.