After finishing Tsukihime, Kagetsu Tohya, and partly of Melty Blood; I have finally gotten around to starting Fate/Stay Night and its sequel with the help of Lost Odyssey to get me into the mood of a visual novel. The game is broken down into three paths; Fate where you romantic interest is Saber, your servant. Unlimited Blade Works where you pursue the tsudere Tosaka Rin. Heaven's Feel involving the quiet, pure Mato Sakura who is abused by her brother. Having seen the anime awhile back which followed the main routine Fate. I never really liked the fighting chicken Saber a whole lot, and later into the series that date episode was unwatchable for me. With this resurgence of my love of anything Type-Moon related sparked from the Kara No Kyoukai ~Garden of Sinners movies really made me to give it a chance. Luckily I pick the game up at AnimeExp last year and there is a patch with voice acting that was ripped from the PS2 version of the game with the same voice actors as the anime.

I believe the game spans between the time of 30 days with a prologue of 3 days previously. I am only at day 5 but there is an insane amount of dialog with the prologue which took me a week to get through. Its rough and its not told from the main character Emiya Shiro view. On top of that there is a boring amount of text explaining the rules to the Holy Gail War and the lore behind it. Off the bat I already knew I wanted to do the Unlimited Blade Works route because of my love of tsunderes Tosaka = Akiha from Tsukihime - anger - brother complex. And the constant jokes on 4 chan about unlimited blades. I am annoyed at the main character Shiro for being very wishing washing but its not even involving the cliche anime harem attitude of being nice to everyone but have a neutral state. He is constantly contradicting himself whether to treat Saber as a girl or a Servant to helping random people out. Also this might have span from childhood trauma but I hate American super hero comics, the vigilante ****of fight crime cause of some childhood trauma and doing so in some stupid looking spandex tights. But Shiro says the when he grows up that he wants to be a super hero. Maybe not the American superhero ****but still in the same vein without the stupid costume. But I do like the he is a lone wolf, always analysing the everything, and when he does make a joke here and there.

Tosaka, I really like. She can see through Shiro and is always poking fun of Shiro. Reserved and elegant but not lacking the semi common sense of grounded in reality. She also like to argue. Its a stark comparison to Akiha who was over compulsive with her love with her brother Shiki but in alot of ways are carbon copies of having similar backgrounds. The dialog between Shiro and Tosaka is really interesting.

The fights in the anime were rather anti climax in a way. The visual novel has the luxury of having as much internal dialog as it wants and it definitely makes the fights more like extravagant epic fights between these spirits that are heroes from the past in depth. Describing how beautiful the way Lancer rotated his spear in words instead of watching awkward animations from the anime. Describing Shiro's actions during the fight while pointing out the he can not move while Servants are fighting because he knows he will die if he makes one step.

Summary is that this game is not recommend to people new to visual novels. There is alot of boring and mediocre text. I do not like the main character. Sub characters make up for that and the battle scenes are truly interesting. This is whats pulling me through what I would consider as a weak or medocre storyline and will definitely get me through the game. I will mostly play again to go down the Heaven's Feel route which involves Sakura and the Servant Rider.