College Admissions Exam Name-drops 'Fate/Extra' And More Anime
Though anime fans are knowledge about their favorite medium, it was never put through the same [...]
Though anime fans are knowledge about their favorite medium, it was never put through the same level of testing some University prospects in Japan had to endure in order to prove their fandom education.
The National Center Test for University Admissions in Japan started on January 13, and it's an exam third year high school students take in order to be admitted to the university of their choice.
But students were surprised to find a number of anime and video game references hidden in the test. The history section of the exam cited many characters from the Fate/stay night and Fate/Grand Order series mentioning the Servants King Arthur, Gilgamesh, and Rama.
These three characters play a major role in their respective series, and would be definitely recognizable to fans of the series.
The confirmed cast list for the upcoming anime series, Fate/Extra Last Encore, includes Atsushi Abe as the main character Hakuno Kishinami, Takahiro Mizushima as the Saber class servant Gawain, Sakura Tange as the Saber class servant Nero, Urara Takano as the Rider class servant Francis Drake, Kousuke Toriumi as the Archer class servant Robin Hood, Ai Nonaka as the Caster class servant Nursery Rhyme (like Mother Goose), and Kunihiko Yasui as the Berserker class Li Shuwen (rather than the Assassin class he held in the video game series).
Studio Shaft is adapting the series with Akiyuki Simbo (Puella Magi Madoka Magica) serving as the chief director with Yukihiro Miyamoto (Puella Magi Madoka Magica) serving as series director. Masaaki Takiyama (Tokyo ESP) is designing the characters based on Rco Wada's original designs, and original Fate/stay night creator Kinoko Nasu and Satoru Kousaki of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzimiya are composing the music for the series.
For those unfamiliar with Fate/Extra, it's a spin-off of the Fate/stay night visual novel series from Type-Moon, written by Yuichiro Higashide and illustrated by Ototsugu Konoe. The video game series follows an amnesiac main character who wakes up in a virtual world and must fight others in a tournament where the winner is granted one wish. The main character is then given a Servant, a popular hero in history who has been summoned, in order to fight enemies and eventually strive for the Holy Grail and to figure out their own identity.
The series started as a dungeon crawling RPG developed by Type-Moon and Image Epoch for the PlayStation Portable system in Japan in 2010 and was later licensed for a release in the United States by Aksys Games.
If you're curious for more of the Fate series, Fate/Stay night, Fate/Stay night: Unlimited Blade Works, Fate/Zero, and Fate/Apocrypha are currently available to stream on various streaming platforms like Hulu, Netflix, and Crunchyroll.