It’s become common knowledge in the Fate/stay night fandom—and the broader anime community in general—that the 2006 Studio Deen adaptation of Type-Moon’s 2004 visual novel is a frustrating disappointment on many levels. Certainly when compared to the stunning visuals and tight scriptwriting of ufotable’s Unlimited Blade Works and Heaven’s Feel adaptations (in 2014 and 2017-2020), the ’06 anime just falls apart.
With the release of Fate/stay night REMASTERED, fans worldwide have the first opportunity in twenty years to experience an official English localization of the beloved visual novel, and to find all the hidden details that writer Kinoko Nasu squirrelled away. But perhaps more importantly, this is the first time fans can understand what exactly makes the ‘Fate’ route of Fate/stay night stand on its own merits, and how the 2006 anime adaptation sorely deprived us of even better context for Unlimited Blade Works and Heaven’s Feel.
Spoilers ahead for large portions of Fate/stay night.
Iterative Gameplay
Visual novels are an engaging medium, standing out amidst their video game brethren. With the complexity of a novel and the interactivity and consequences of a game, audiences are exposed to a unique level of replay value.
Kinoko Nasu took the concept of replay value to the next level with Fate/stay night. His previous visual novel, Tsukihime, had several distinct ‘routes’ that branched from a central decision point, eventually snowballing into wildly different ending. Not only do these alternate routes provide opportunities to interact more with other characters, but they give the player the chance to witness “what-if?” scenarios that stem from the characters making different choices.
Fate/stay night takes this “butterfly effect” and runs with it. The three main routes—Fate, Unlimited Blade Works, and Heaven’s Feel—each have a thematic crux that builds upon the last. Playing the previous route is a requirement for accessing the next, since your knowledge of previous encounters will enhance your experience, subvert your expectations, and ultimately provide a narrative far more complex than a single storyline could offer.
The interplay between Unlimited Blade Works and Heaven’s Feel is a perfect example. After two seasons spent with the heroic Saber, the audience is heartbroken to see her corrupted and turned into an enemy in Heaven’s Feel. With the two routes (and anime) bouncing off each other, Heaven’s Feel: Presage Flower is able to skip right past the opening days of the Fifth Holy Grail War.
The overlapping routes in Fate/stay night are particularly geared towards showcasing the power scale of the characters, and it’s here where the missing ‘Fate’ route becomes more critical than you might think.
Creating a Power Scale
Power scaling is more than just arbitrary numbers on collectible cards. It’s an integral part of storytelling, responsible for grounding your characters in their world and giving the audience an understanding of the stakes.
A simple example comes from Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball Z. After an entire arc dedicated to the villainous Freiza (including the wholesale destruction of the planet Namek), readers know that Freiza represents the “biggest threat” to our heroes, and only Goku’s extreme transformation was able to best the enemy. When Freiza returns for revenge at the beginning of the Androids Saga, we already know just how dangerous he is.
So when a certain purple-haired swordsman appears and destroys Freiza in a single attack, and then says he’s fled from a nightmarish future where he’s been fighting far tougher enemies—well, it puts everything into perspective. If the terrible Freiza can be bested so easily because Trunks has dealt with worse—then just how dangerous are these Androids?
Effectively utilizing your power scale sets (and resets) the audience’s expectations, and is particularly useful in battle shonen or fantasy settings.
Fate/stay night uses this to great effect. In Unlimited Blade Works, Gilgamesh emerges as the biggest threat to our characters. With his overwhelming arsenal, he dominates the hulking Berserker, and later, Gilgamesh pushes Shirou to the very limits, forcing him to awaken his own reality marble (the titular ‘Unlimited Blade Works’) and accept his path as a ‘champion of justice.’
When Gilgamesh dies in Heaven’s Feel: Presage Flower, we understand how terrifying the Shadow/Angra Mainyu really is. How could the villain from the previous route be defeated so easily? And if it took everything our heroes had to defeat Gilgamesh, what chance do they have against this new foe?
Similarly, at the start of Unlimited Blade Works, Berserker gravely injures Saber. The combined efforts of Archer, Rin, and Saber just barely let them escape. In Heaven’s Feel, the corrupted Saber Alter engages in a spectacular but distinctly one-sided battle against Berserker, defeating him handily. This battle wouldn’t be anywhere near as impactful if we weren’t aware of how dangerous Berserker really is.
How, then, does Unlimited Blade Works provide the audience a power scale? Taken in isolation, without the 2006 anime or the 2011 prequel Fate/Zero, Unlimited Blade Works is forced to just present the characters as-is. It’s a perfectly fine approach, and with the tremendous writing skill of all involved, the finished product is an iconic anime with great characters, storyline, and battles.
But Fate/stay night REMASTERED tells us it could have been more.
The Fate Route
Playing through Fate/stay night REMASTERED is sometimes like one of the many dreams Shirou Emiya has—a hazy recollection of someone else’s memories. After years of watching and rewatching the various anime, playing Fate/Grand Order and other spin-off titles like Fate/Extella, getting to experience the original story as Nasu intended (or close enough to it) is truly beautiful.
The Fate route is by far the simplest and lowest-stakes route of the three, closely following Shirou and Saber. Where Unlimited Blade Works focuses on Shirou confronting his ideals in the form of Archer, the Fate route is simple exposing that ideal. It becomes quickly apparent that Shirou Emiya suffers survivor guilt from the fire that claimed his parents’ lives (an event beyond his control, and in fact, was caused by the ending events of Fate/Zero ten years prior). His view of the world has become twisted, and his hero-worship of his adoptive father puts him on a path that will lead to his own self-destruction.
Saber, meanwhile, is a perfect mirror to Shirou. As the legendary King Arthur, she ruled the fledgling nation of Britannia in the Dark Ages, taking on all the burdens of her nation. With the legendary swords Excalibur and Caliburn, she defeated all her kingdom’s enemies, but did so at the cost of her own identity and emotions, eventually becoming a single-minded king whose own people thought her heartless.
Pursuing the ideal of a ‘king’ led Saber to ruin—and with no small sense of irony, Shirou does everything in his power to free Saber from the shackles of her ideal; he recognizes his hypocrisy but refuses to actually deal with it (or any of his problematic traits).
This dynamic between Saber and Shirou—so poorly depicted in the 2006 anime, and completely absent in Unlimited Blade Works and Heaven’s Feel—could lead many viewers to think much worse of Saber as a character. And without seeing such a naive, stubborn Shirou, the monumental shifts he takes in confronting his ideology in the subsequent two routes loses a significant impact.
The Merger and the Root
Studio Deen’s adaptation also took some strange creative licensing which undermines some of the better aspects of the Fate route. In a misguided attempt to merge all three routes together, there are a few wayward episodes that distract from the character relationships. Shirou and Rin are meant to be an unlikely but unbreakable pair of companion mages in the Fate route; having their school battle brought forward from Unlimited Blade Works is just a distraction. Meanwhile, Rin and Sakura’s relationship is completely spoiled—ruining three whole routes of their character build-up; and Caster kidnapping Sakura not only doesn’t happen in the visual novel, but it greatly undermines her strength in Heaven’s Feel.
For everything the 2006 anime added, something else was lost in return. Fate/stay night REMASTERED provides all the missing context and more—the original blueprint for the incredible series that would follow. The visual novel provides a treasure trove of intricate details that not even ufotable found the room to squeeze into their adaptations.
Fate/stay night REMASTERED definitely isn’t the full re-release of Fate/stay night fans had hoped for—unlike Tsukihime: A piece of blue glass moon, this isn’t a rewrite or even a true remaster, given that most of the content comes straight from the PS2 and PSP Realta Nua version of the game. Fate/stay night didn’t even secure a physical release, something that even Witch on the Holy Night received.
That said, having an official English localization of Fate/stay night was once considered a pipe dream, and the story holds up remarkably well for something almost at the legal drinking age. Nobody ever said not to read Lord of the Rings just because it’s getting long in the tooth; some of the best, most fundamental stories only get better with age, and Fate/stay night REMASTERED is the perfect opportunity to revisit—or discover—a beloved, timeless series.
Anime Corner was provided a digital copy for review; all screenshots were taken on Nintendo Switch.
© Kinoko Nasu, TYPE-MOON.
The comments are temporarily unavailable for maintenance.