Home is Where the Heart is: Heaven's Feel Thoughts
That's a wrap on FSN, huh? You can find the other spoiler installments here (Fate) and here (UBW), or read my overall review of the game here. Now, on to Heaven's Feel itself:
- Obviously she gets a lot of focus since she's the main heroine of the route, but god it is funny how hard the game pushes Sakura. Everyone is rightfully a little suspicious of Saber, and Rin gets the "THAT SHE-DEVIL!?" reaction from most of Shirou's immediate circle. Sakura, though? The minute Shirou expresses any interest in her whatsoever, Taiga drops everything and is like "Oh you want her to stay here? Why didn't you say so? I'll help her move in tonight! Do you want her measurements, while I'm at it?"
- Making all of the early-game pushing funnier is that Sakura is just as hopeless as Shirou is. Now, she has a much more justifiable reason for it (mostly her thermonuclear levels of self-loathing), but until you actually learn what her deal is, it mostly comes off as "help how do make boy like me?" And frankly, even once you do know what's going on, it still has a lot of "help boy like me" mixed in there.
- While UBW is probably the better story overall, I think Heaven's Feel is the most satisfying of the three routes. Rin, Saber, and Shirou all get the benefit of being forced in the war regardless of which route you're on, but Sakura functionally doesn't exist until HF, and even then she spends the first ~80% or so of the route being a damsel. Both her establishing herself as a capable mage (even if it's as a result of Dark Sakura taking over), and the happy ending she gets after it's all said and done are very cathartic.
- Turning Sakura from a sex vampire into a literal one is kind of inspired, to be honest. You don't even really lose anything with the metaphor, so well done to the Type-Moon of 2006 for that particular cover-up.
- I'd say the game's attempts to do a deep dive into Shinji and Kirei fall flat, but frankly, it doesn't try very hard to justify their actions. When Kirei finally eats it at the Greater Grail, the game's "and no one wept" line is pretty on the nose.
- Finally, Last Episode is cute, but I don't know why they don't unlock it until you clear the other five main endings. It might as well just be the "true" Fate ending, where Saber finally gets to be happy (even if the idea that she fell in love with Shirou is one of the least believable things about the Fate route).
God help me, it's finally over. I'm really looking forward to Hollow Ataraxia, which I understand has a lot more downtime and is structured a lot like Witch on the Holy Night, but I'll be very happy if that's a while out considering I played Fate, Emio, UBW, and now HF more or less back to back.