This is the anime that dares you to keep up and shrugs when you can't. It opens with the Longinus Dreizehn Orden being summoned out of the ash of Berlin in May 1945, then drops you in Suwahara City with Ren Fujii nursing the wound Shirou gave him, and it never once slows down to explain the German incantations being screamed at you. If you played Light's visual novel, you already know the vocabulary, the Ahnenerbe, Marie's guillotine, Reinhard standing at the top of it all, and you're here to watch it move. If you didn't, you're going to be lost by episode three, and the show genuinely does not care. The chuuni theology is real, the character designs are gorgeous, and the pacing is a wreck. Fans defend it anyway, because when it lands a duel it lands like nothing else, and because Shirou's line about everyone in this city eventually losing something turns out to be a promise.

A violent fight with his best friend Shirou lands Ren Fujii in the hospital, and once he is out he tries to hold on to what he has left and return to normal school life with the help of his childhood friend Kasumi and his upperclassman Rea. But something darker haunts him: recurring dreams of a guillotine, murderers and black-clad knights in pursuit. His friend's words echo in his mind: everyone who stays in this city eventually loses their mind. In May 1945, as Berlin fell, a group of Nazi officers performed a ritual meant to bring back the Longinus Dreizehn Orden, superhuman figures whose arrival would end the world. Now, as a string of beheading murders strikes Suwahara City near Christmas, the knights of the LDO return, and Ren is forced to take up the same unholy power as his enemies to protect what matters to him.