Media in Review: Fate/Stay Night Remastered
Fate/Stay Night is a relic. Not in a bad way, mind you; in a "they just don't make 'em like they used to" sense. Where the Tsukihime Remake modernized itself with Type-Moon's newfound piles of gacha money, FSN is a very old game, and the remaster doesn't try very hard to hide it. For all the dramatics and bombastic battles that the game does its best to portray, it is still, ultimately, just a visual novel from 2006. These days, the games are bigger, fully embracing the action and RPG elements that FSN merely describes, and there are big-budget adaptations of everything from FSN itself to spinoffs, prequels, and even specific chapters of the mobile phone game that has been running for almost a decade. Whether or not you consider these changes to be a good thing is left as an exercise to the reader, but the point is that Fate as a franchise is much larger and much different than it was when FSN released, and the remaster is a stark reminder of just how much has (and hasn't) changed in the years since.
FSN's main storyline follows Shirou Emiya as he navigates the treacherous mage battle that is the Holy Grail War. Each of the game's three routes (Fate, Unlimited Blade Works, Heaven's Feel) has a different main heroine, and explores a different aspect of both Shirou and the world of mages as a whole. To the game's credit, it does a pretty good job of presenting the characters as "complete" even when a given route really only focuses on a couple characters, but the actual events of the story are all completely mutually exclusive. Shirou is the strongest example of this method of characterization, where his arc covers the entire game - in Fate, he swears to move forward despite the tragedies of his past, in UBW he affirms his notion of heroism and rejects Archer's nihilism, and in HF he finally acts on those notions to save those most important to him. That said, there are limits to this style - if Rin's relationship with Sakura is a big part of her characterization, but Sakura basically only exists as a character in Heaven's Feel, then how much should that count toward Rin's character as a whole?
As for the plot itself, while FSN does a fine job of raising the stakes when necessary, I don't think it's a controversial take to say that its best parts are when it slows down and hits more of a slice-of-life vibe. The story is as silly and overwrought as you would expect from a game whose premise is "mages summon ancient heroes and battle to the death to win the holy grail," but it's the quiet dinners with Rin and Saber that ground it and make those big plot beats land. And I think it's pretty clear that Type-Moon understands that too, considering the immense popularity of things like Emiya Gohan, and how Hollow Ataraxia leans much heavier into that style (or so I understand, anyway; feel free to correct me on that point).
(Side note: You can find my route-specific thoughts here, here, and here, if you're curious)
On a technical level, the game looks and acts exactly like you'd expect a slightly spruced up 20 year old visual novel to. While there was a bug at release that caused the game to load characters and background at random (hilariously preserved as the "FSN Randomizer" mod), that's long since been patched out, and what remains is an artistically unrefined but immediately recognizable core. FSN was made long before Type-Moon came into the FGO money, and it shows - "fight scenes" are almost always one, maybe two backgrounds that get rotated a bunch and have white flashes layered over top, and the only real animations are the ones added in the 2006 Realta Nua release to cover up the sex scenes. The game doesn't look bad by any stretch of the imagination, but it does look like a budget game, because it is.
Also a quick note: The Switch version almost certainly has a memory leak because it consistently crashes when it tries to load the next scene after about three hours of continuous play. Save often, and consider taking the occasional break.
All things considered, I'm glad I played the VN. It would have been easy to fire up UBW on Netflix or whatever, but it's neat to see the game as it originally existed, not what they could be bothered to fit into 13 episodes (or just didn't want to animate). I think in the grand scheme of things, Mayoho is still my favorite of the Type-Moon trio (it certainly has my favorite main cast), but I suppose that remains to be seen until we get the rest of the Tsukihime remake. Until then, it's been fun, and I look forward to checking out Hollow Ataraxia once that gets translated.