Saber and the Fate Route of FSN
For context, I have never played the original Fate/Stay Night. I've played a lot of F/GO, dabbled in Fate/Extra and Extella, and even seen a couple of the animes, so I know at least some of the big spoilers; it's essentially impossible to not know who Saber or Archer are if you have any contact with the franchise at all at this point. Still, I figure I have no reason to not give the game a fair shake, and I recently finished up the Fate route. Thoughts are below:
- Overall, I liked it, but it's a bit too "Fate 101-ish" for my tastes. This makes sense! It's the first route of the first proper Fate game, so of course it has to lay down the rules for all this stuff. It's just kinda boring and repetitive if you've played literally anything else in the franchise.
- Because it has to do all that info dumping, the pacing is kinda fucked overall, but especially in the early game. Yes, it makes sense that Shirou needs all this magecraft explained, but like, Nasu, my man, there had to be a better way.
- With so much early focus on setting up the world, Saber doesn't really get a lot of focus until much later in the route. And honestly, she's not that interesting of a heroine? It is surely intentional that she and Shirou are the exact same flavor of hard-headed and self-sacrificing, but to what end? I'm sure there's more to explore with her character in the other routes (and Hollow Ataraxia exists), but Nasu has gone on record that he doesn't want to give her more in time in the spotlight because she had an entire route in FSN. And if this is the reason that we never get more Saber Classic content in something like FGO then that's...kinda sad. Rin is far more interesting and impactful, and it's not even her route yet!
- I knew Gil was in FSN, but I had no idea he was the final...boss, I guess(?) of the route lol. He's a good villain, and it's nice to see him in a format that allows for more nuance that FGO's tiny text boxes and sprites. I'm in a similar boat with UBW where I know a lot of big spoilers but none of the specifics or context, so that should be a good time when I get to it.
Having recently played TsukiR, I think Arc is a useful point of comparison for Saber. She's also the default route of her game that has to explain a bunch of shit about how everything works, but I think it works way better there.
For starters, Arc just has more of a personality in general, and that shows in how the game presents that info. Kirei and Rin dryly tell Shirou about how the Holy Grail War or Magic Circuits work, whereas Arc just whips out a fucking white board in the middle of a hotel room and is like "okay motherfucker let's talk about VAMPIRES." It certainly helps that Tsukihime has less overall lore that it needs to dump on you, but the way it's presented is so much more interesting than a fifth lecture about how Saber isn't getting any magical energy so she has to sleep to conserve hers.
Second (and way more importantly), Arc actually drives the plot forward in a way that Saber doesn't. She's here to kill a vampire, and she's going to do it with or without Shiki, but the cute knife boy is going to help her, RIGHT? You wouldn't back out on me now, would you Shiki? Saber, meanwhile, does her best to actively push Shirou away. No, you can't help, you're too weak. No, you need to hide, let me do the fighting. It isn't until the Berserker fight that she learns to rely on Shirou at all, and even then she and Rin are both like "Okay that was cool but literally never do that again or you will die." There's a lot of room to work with if their goal was "a more grounded and serious personality than Arc" - almost anything they wrote would have fallen under that umbrella. But what they actually wrote was a stick in the mud.