ANTITHE5IS said:@offcrack Yeah, I strongly disagree with all of this. Zero is a story about adults engaged in war, while Stay Night is a story about high schoolers pretending to fight a war while adults fight it behind the scenes; the former benefits from a mature tone befitting the narrative and this ties into better thematics including the overlapping ones, and better characterization. There's philosophical and ethical depth which all the characters play a central role in the debates of.
And I'll name Saber as an example: In Zero she has more conflicts. Her dynamic with Kiritsugu, how she's seen by the other kings and is pointed out for her hypocrisy, and her final scene with Lancelot. Meanwhile, in Stay Night she is dumbed down to the level of the high school cast despite being much older and experienced. Not to mention she's ultimately one of many waifubaits for the player to bed in the VN because it is what it is and this diminishes her character and her dynamic with Shirou imo. Kiritsugu is also way better as an MC.
If we are to include the FSN VN here, then yeah, it arguably does have better characterization because Nasu is allowed to ramble endlessly through the characters in a bloated piece of work that's around the same length as the Bible. But even if they're less fleshed out, FZ in a fraction of its length more intelligently utilizes its ensemble cast to contribute to its themes and create a more cohesive narrative than FSN struggled to in almost a million words; for the most part they all came into the narrative, contributed their part, then exited stage left.
Let's go over the retarded adult argument first. The masters in zero consist of 2 jobber traditionalist mages who exist to get humiliated and betrayed, a serial killer who is there to fulfill urobuchi's quota of tasteless gore, a dude whose motivation is wanting to fuck another's wife, a guy canonically referred to as a manchild, a downgraded version of kirei and finally waver. Comparing these characters to the cast of FSN it's very easy to notice that the zero "adults" often behave like idiots because nasu likely realized beforehand that having characters who exist to get humiliated in a grail war is not engaging unless you're underage. Servants are not used intelligently in zero, characters decide on retarded courses of action nonstop, several members of the cast exist only to die miserably without contributing anything to the plot (tokiomi, kariya, kayneth) and we need 20+ episodes to see how the manchild retard that is kiritsugu gets told that he is in fact retarded like it's some grand reveal and it's hammered into your face despite being something you should need a minute to realize, though considering how you've avoided speaking of any specific themes zero explored on its own I'm going to guess this is an upside to you. So despite being superficially adult that same cast is in fact filled with characters that are only on the lower end of the bell curve. FSN's cast has zero superfluous members on the other hand because everybody contributes to the development of the focus of the character study. And as an mc kiritsugu is very literally just an inferior shirou and written to be that way intentionally, it's a character that went through significantly less shit than him and somehow ended up fucked up almost just as much but in a stupider way. And on that topic deontology is also much better explored in both heaven's feel and UBW.
Saber does not have more conflict in zero, her conflict in zero is taking shit from two meatheads and acting out of character during it while FSN actually explored the whole "what is the behavior of a king" shit far better but not that you'd know. And the length of the work doesn't matter. The UBW anime adaptation completely destroys zero with the same number of episodes in absolutely every aspect because nasu is simply a superior writer.
Oh and I implore you to give examples for whatever unsubstantiated claims you've made about themes in zero because I'm really curious what it is you've found in there that wasn't just a setup for one of the many tied-in plot threads which FSN is meant to explore for real and find a conclusion of with the actual main character of the series that the entire setting was created for.