PinkuBentoBox

Well, the Fate/Stay Night anime finished over the weekend. More importantly, I also decided to watch the rest over said weekend, and I thought I’d share my overall thoughts on the series, both the positive and the negative. Only, mainly negative, unfortunately.

It seems like it’s a bad idea to really anticipate anime nowdays. Everything for me from the past year or so that I’ve really looked forward to has been disappointing. Fate is just another notch in the belt as far as disappointment goes. While nowhere near as awful as Disgaea (what a letdown that was) it’s still not really what I was expecting at all.

For those unfamiliar with the game’s structure, Fate/Stay Night is divided into three distinct ’scnearios’. The first, considered the core plot, is Fate. The other two stories (I hesitate to call them side stories or anything, they’re separate stories in their own right) are Unlimited Blade Works and Heaven’s Feel. To sum it up very briefly, Fate is Saber’s scenario, UBW is Rin’s scenario, and HF is Sakura’s scenario. UBW’s main plot point involves Archer becoming a villain, and the revelation that Archer is in fact Shiro. HF involves Sakura having an evil ’seed’ placed in her by the head of her family which makes her fall to the ‘dark side’ and eventually end up taking Saber with her, only to have Shirou rescue her and set everything right. If you’ve been looking at a decent amount of fanart you will have seen Dark Sakura, Blacksaber and/or True Assassin, and HF is the only scenario where they appear. In both ‘alternate’ scenarios, Saber is not a major character, and given that she is easily the most popular from the series, primarily adapting the Fate scenario to the anime was pretty much a given.

I think one of the chief issues with the series itself was the constant assertions that they were going to ‘go their own way’ and make a plotline that somehow blended the three plotlines. When the series kicked off it seemed like that was exactly what they were doing - there were a number of scenes from the three. Unfortunately from about the point they introduced Rider onwards, they locked themselves into the Fate scenario. Despite their assertions that they would go off and do their own thing around ep 16 or so, nothing of the sort really happened, aside from a slight change to the Caster part of Fate to include Sakura in bondage gear. I’m still not sure why they did that.

It’s actually kind of odd, really. Why did they so frequently say they would blend the plotlines, when they never actually did so? It would not have been too difficult to incorporate all three - I’m reasonably confident that I could do it myself in a few hours. The optimist in me sort of hopes that this indicates they’ve got Unlimited Blade Works and Heaven’s Feel seasons in the works, but the realist in me very much doubts that.

Fate is generally considered to be the weakest of the three scenarios, plot-wise. It’s reasonably good up until they introduce Gilgamesh, who is generally a terrible villain. I may not be much of a writer, but I can say that if your villain’s motivation for being evil is ‘because they’re evil’ then your whole plot is going to be weakened. Even so, Fate is not a bad plot by any stretch, and the Fate anime actually adapts the Fate scenario very closely and accurately.

Why, then, is the anime so… boring at times? The main problem is pacing. The fact is that the game is just this side of being a novel. Novels have a different requirement for pacing than a TV or Movie production does - there is more description, more internal and external dialogue, and generally novels are just more verbose. This is why scriptwriters who have experience adapting written material to screenplays are paid quite handsomely for their services. Unfortunately I suspect that it is this critical step going from the game (which might as well be a novel) to the screenplay that has gone awry. The sad thing is that the reason it’s happened is likely that the staff wanted to adapt the game as closely and accurately as possible.

One part of me wants to say that the Fate plot is not enough on its own for a double-season’s worth (24-26) of episodes. This is actually true. However, it’s definitely too much for a single season (13 episodes). I’d estimate that, really, we only have about 16-18 episodes worth of plot. When this is spread out over the 24, pacing issues begin to appear. This is one of the reasons I was initially expecting to see a blending of the three scenarios - the added material would have easily padded it out to 24-26 episodes. The other, better option would have been to pad things out by extending and adding more action. When the series kicked off it seemed to take ages for anything to actually happen - contrast this against fellow game adaption Utawarerumono, which moves at lightning pace. Maybe if there had actually been things happening, even if they were minor things, it might have felt a little less slow.

Another contributing factor to the slow feel of the series which is often overlooked is the choice of music. Background music plays a vital role in video like this, and if the music is too slow or boring then the whole production is weakened. Unfortunately this is exactly what happened. I like Kenji Kawai as much as the next guy - he’s a great composer when he is working on the right series. His dreamy strings and dark sound is really good for a slow, character-based and mysterious show like Vampire Princess Miyu. The problem is that Fate is not Miyu. While it may be a dark show, it is certainly not supposed to convey the same feel as Miyu does. I bring up Miyu because a huge amount of the Fate soundtrack sounds like it was lifted directly from there. Only it was never as good, either, because Miyu was actually suited to Kawai’s style. A more ’standard’ anime composer like Yoko Kanno, Taku Iwasaski, Toshihiko Sahashi or a myriad of others would have worked far better.

I should also point out at this point that I watched 19-24 all in one go and noticed absolutely no pacing problems whatsoever, so it’s quite likely that if you watched in big chunks you’d never notice the bad pacing. Spreading it out to watching once a week makes the pacing issues a lot more obvious.

Content-wise, the other main issue I had with the series as presented is more of a personal peeve. As many are aware, the series was pre-licensed and partially funded by Geneon USA, so the US market will have been taken into consideration when working with some of the content. The fact is that Fate began as an Eroge, albeit an extremely good one. The game has a darker, more mature feel to it. And there’s the ‘mana regeneration’ stuff. While it was essentially originally just a convenient excuse for sex scenes with Saber, the fact that they went to such great pains to hide it from people does not work in their favour. I’m certainly not advocating that they actually leave the scenes in, intact - the only non-H anime I’ve ever seen to have gone that far is Kimi ga Nozomu Eien - but it should at least be made obvious that that was what was going on. Tsukihime did this correctly - cut away just before they kick off, come back when they’re done. Fate simply pretends it doesn’t happen. Replaced the Rin/Saber/Shiro scene from the game with Shiro’s soul getting eaten by a CG dragon in one of the most trippy sequences I’ve seen in quite a while. Even worse was towards the end of the series, where they suddenly cut away and then had Saber sitting up and announcing that her mana was regenerated. What the heck? This is not a series aimed at kiddies to start with, it would have actually improved the series had they not tried to cut these things out.

Note that this is a bit speculative, but it seems to me that given the timeslot the series ran in in Japan and the content they usually get away with, the chances are that it was deliberate design decisions for the US market.

Despite my griping, I have to say that Fate/Stay Night is still not a bad series, if you are able to watch large chunks of it at once rather than one episode a week, and if you keep in mind that despite what they say, it is just Fate and only Fate. You will not ever get to see Archer’s Unlimited Blade Works in its entirety (though what you do get was fucking awesome and easily the best part of the whole show). You won’t ever get to meet True Assassin or get to see Blacksaber or Dark Sakura. You also will have the fact that there was sex hidden from you. Still, it is well worth investing the time to watch.

Alternatively you could just wait for a translation of the game. Mirror Moon have already finished translating the Fate scenario. Yours truly is on their Tsukihime beta team and hopefully will do a good enough job to be invited back for Fate as well, so expect to see this pimped a lot here.

Fingers crossed that this won’t be the last Fate/Stay Night anime production we see. I leave you with this, ripped out of a Crazy Clover Club doujin. IMO it is the true ending for Fate, and would have made a much better epilogue than what we got in the game and the anime.