My Thoughts: Fate/stay night
While normally there are plenty aspects of a game to discuss that do not necessitate spoiling the reader on the story too much, that’s pretty hard for a visual novel. Since this isn’t a “FATE ENDING EXPLAINED!” video or a deep analysis, I’ve chosen to write this assuming that the reader has not experienced Fate/stay night in any way. This means I will be stating some obvious facts to anyone who has, but you’ll just have to deal with it.
Fate/stay night is a VN that has long been a favorite of some of my friends. About two years ago, I read the prologue, and while I was intrigued by its premise and characters I actually didn’t continue reading it. Recently, the Remastered version dropped on Steam, and in a rather quiet year for me I decided it was as good a time as any to actually read the whole thing. What I found was an incredible story which I felt engaged with on numerous levels.
The protagonist of FSN, Shirou Emiya, seems to have gained a reputation as a bumbling idiot among some people who have only watched the anime adaptations. I don’t really let such impressions color my perception, especially with fervent Shirou defenders as my friends, yet I have to mention just how wrong this reputation is. Shirou is the beating heart of the story, exactly as a protagonist should be; the three major routes represent the way in which he grapples with his ideals and survivor’s guilt. This seems like an asinine statement, but you’ll be surprised at how often a protagonist is someone who the story more so happens to, regardless of their actions. This is not a criticism of such stories, but it is a category that FSN does not belong in. The visual novel is actually about Shirou to such an extent that the elaborate world which it builds around him starts to feel like window dressing at times, despite this world having blossomed into a gazillion dollar giga-franchise.
It’s hard for me to speak about the characters much at all without spoiling, so I honestly don’t have much more to say about Shirou, but I do have one strong opinion on the matter: those who are not interested in Shirou as a character should not read Fate/stay night. He is not the only good or interesting character, he is not even my favorite or who I would probably consider to be the ‘best’, but he is the only character who is consistently focused on. Many Fate fans urge people to read the VN or at least watch the anime adaptations in order to ‘get into Fate’, which is a sentiment with which I do agree to some extent. That said, one must be careful not to treat it as just a vehicle for people to get caught up on basic worldbuilding and popular characters, as it’s not really as much of a problem to start with the popular anime or the gacha game as some might suggest. I do think you should read Fate/stay night, of course I do, but I would want you to be engaged with the work on its own. If you think of it as something you need to slog through to be ‘allowed’ to engage with the rest of Fate, you should just go to whatever anime or game you actually want to experience. More than likely, you’ll find time for stay night later, if only because you have met Saber along the way.
Saber, of course, being the best character in the visual novel, and perhaps the entire Fate franchise (final opinion pending for the day I somehow manage to have read a majority of Fate.) I absolutely adore Saber, to an extent that exceeds even her general popularity as a character. She is the mascot of TYPE-MOON and an endlessly popular Cute Girl character who cannot escape reference in any of their works. She is beloved most of all by Takashi Takeuchi, who designed her and is infamous for drawing many more “Saber-faced” characters over the years. One of my own friends also loves Saber, and it’s hard not to already feel positively about her when you go to meet her knowing that. Despite all this, I still managed to fall in love with Saber all on my own. None of the marketability of Saber prepares you for just how much she will pull at your heartstrings. Her relationship with Shirou in the Fate route is the highlight of the entire novel to me. Saber, in a sense, embodies Shirou’s ideals. She just does not do so in a way that is immediately apparent or agreeable to him, which forms the basis of a genuinely deeply interesting dynamic between the two. The route culminates in a series of truly heart-wrenching scenes, forming the greatest emotional impact the novel would ultimately have on me. I once again feel limited in how much I can talk about Saber without spoiling, but it doesn’t really matter. You’ll find that it’s hard to dislike her: you like Saber, as they say.
FSN has two more routes: Unlimited Blade Works and Heaven’s Feel. It is, once again, particularly difficult to make a meaningful comparison without spoilers, but I felt that each route was about equal in quality. After the impression given by the Fate route, the rest of the novel twists both Shirou’s convictions and the plot events in a way that keeps you consistently wanting to see more. There is little to no repetition to slog through, and the novel uses the changes in the narrative to highlight new subsets of characters. By the time you make it to the end, you will have spent significant time with all of them. To me, things like these are proof that while Fate/stay night doesn’t do anything too revolutionary, it is a very competently written story that actually utilizes its long runtime. We often see long stories in gaming that waste a lot more of your time, so I quite appreciate it. I must admit that I do not like the other two heroines, or their romances with Shirou, quite as much as I do Saber. Even so, both are excellent characters and I still feel invested enough in their relations to Shirou to appreciate them fully.
The 'deal' for me with these two routes is that they are the ‘popular’ parts of FSN. UBW may well be the same thing as “Fate/stay night” to a lot of people, with the Ufotable anime adaptation being as popular as it is. While their Heaven’s Feel movie trilogy doesn’t enjoy the same level of cultural impact, it seems that both are as good as a visual novel adaptation could be… yet the Fate route is left in the dust. The novel itself makes no such distinction (in fact, it can be argued that it is actually biased towards the Fate route), but it noticeably affects how I think about the novel afterwards. The Fate route feels simpler, almost quaint, as it is less concerned with the greater Lore and Implications of the world, but that seems to be synonymous with ‘less interesting’ in the eyes of some. I genuinely hope that, sooner or later, we might see a Fate route adaptation of equal quality to what the other routes have, one that does not feel the need to introduce ‘cooler’ or ‘hype’ elements from the other routes. Maybe such an adaptation could pull some elements from Garden of Avalon.
Garden of Avalon is a short light novel also written by FSN’s writer Kinoko Nasu, which concerns itself with Saber’s life before she became a Servant. While I can’t be very specific, as it would spoil a lot of the Fate route, it is this work that solidified the route as my favorite, and made me adore Saber as much as I do. If you want to truly appreciate the elements that make the Fate route my favorite, this is a must-read, and I will make it my mission to advertise it as an important part of the Fate/stay night experience.
Overall, I really adored Fate/stay night, and I recommend it to just about anyone who feels like they would ‘vibe’ with Nasu’s elaborate writing style. No matter which parts you end up enjoying more, it has a little for everyone, from slice of life scenes to elaborate rule systems that get broken in just the right ways.
If there is anything you take away from my read of Fate/stay night, though, it's that Fate route truly is peak. Thank you.