Summary: >

There is a sort of game that is played every few years. Seven masters are chosen with the chance to obtain the holy grail, which will grant a wish. Each master is given a "servant", who is a heroic soul sometime in history. Masters and Servants battle it out until only one master is left. And while a servant can be defeated, it is typically easier to kill the master. The only rule is really that no one can see the battles take place. Aside from that everything is fair game.

Ten years ago Shiro was caught in a catastrophic fire, but was rescued by a solitary man. He became a father to Shiro before eventually passing away. He taught Shiro a few things about "magic" which Shiro diligently practiced every day. Aside from his power that he kept hidden to himself, life was pretty simple for Shiro. Although strange events began to take place around town. Then one night Shiro witnessed a battle between two servants. He was almost killed but somehow managed to survive. Unfortunately one of the servants decided that Shiro would not be allowed to live and followed him to his house. After a brief fight, it looked as though Shiro would be done for, until a servant was summoned to him. A beautiful but brave knight named Saber would now be his servant, and he was now a master. That wasn't such a good thing because Shiro doesn't actually know much of anything about the game. Coupled with his bone-headed necessity to always try to protect people at the cost of his personal safety, it didn't seem like Shiro would stay in the game long. Yet with the help of Saber he persevered.

But the farther he gets into the game, the more Shiro learns about himself, the game, and the man he came to know as a father... who was actually a master himself. But Shiro begins to question why he wants the grail - to stop the catastrophe 10 years ago. And why does Saber want the grail? And more and more the biggest concern for Shiro is over Saber herself. At some point Shiro realized that he loved Saber, however once the game is over, the servant will disappear. Obtaining the grail may mean that he will lose Saber, however not obtaining it may mean that one of the other psychotic masters will have it instead. And Shiro would rather not see what sort of horrible wish they would unleash upon the world.

Thoughts: >

This is the second visual from Type-Moon, after Shingetsu Tsukihime. While Tsukihime became a big success, Fate Stay Night became one of the most popular visual novels in history. Seeing how the adaptation of Tsukihime had been poor, I didn't have high expectations of this anime. Thankfully it did turn out well enough, but not anywhere near as well as it should have. Hindsight being 20/20, I did check out the visual novel after the anime, and can see a few points where it went wrong.

The visual novel isn't one story, but has three significantly different plots that diverge after the beginning. The anime follows the Fate scenario, while cherry picking from the other two. Some times that worked well, such as digging into the fascinating story behind Caster/Soichiro, at other times it was half baked (Sakura's side story). I think the biggest failing of the anime isn't the way the story is done, but instead has to do with the characters.

Shiro is the protagonist of the series, who is bent on the ideal of becoming a hero. The visual novel had spent a lot of time on Shiro discussing and thinking on his ideal, why he thought that way, and justification of his actions. The anime skips all that, so with little explanations on his actions, Shiro nearly gets himself killed all the time like a total moron. He's not as much of an idiot as it seems, and he does get better later on in the title, but his development was poor.

His partner in all this is the girl sworn to be his sword, known by her class: Saber. Saber's cold personality makes her very distant, and hard to relate to for most of the series, although the anime made it a point to thaw her much more than the visual novel did. Still, Saber's character just didn't grab me as much as I would have expected. The rest of the characters fair alright, but there is nothing exceptional about any of them to even warrant worth talking about. They're not stock characters, but they get very close to that in the way they're presented.

It took me a little while to warm up to, but I did eventually feel that Fate Stay Night emerged a decent title. Considering the overwhelming popularity of the source material, that's not very impressive though. The animation and music did well and were conductive towards giving the appropriate feel to the title, but neither of these were exceptional either. Personally I was rather indifferent about this series.