And lo and behold, they actually did.
Now before I get into this there's something I think needs clarifying: I will not make any comparisons or references to Fate/Zero in this review. It will be written as if this was in fact the first part of the Fate/ universe you watched. This is simply because despite the fact that Zero aired before this anime, its story goes under the assumption that the viewer is familiar with the events of F/SN first. In other words you are really supposed to watch UBW *before* Zero, unless you've played the original visual novel first of course in which case anything goes. Watching Zero first will sadly spoil numerous plot points of this anime's storyline. I will not go into further details on this subject however as it has been discussed to death, but will rather recommend people to check out the FAQ Sticky thread on the UBW subforum if you have any questions regarding viewing orders or anything else.
And with that finally out of the way; let's get into this shall we?
--Story--
In a nutshell, Fate/stay night can be labeled as a supernatural battle royale.
Roughly once in every 60 years, the one and only legendary artefact known as the Holy Grail will have gathered up enough magical energy from the Earth in order to allow an event called the Holy Grail War to commence. In this "war", seven mages (or maguses as they're called here) are chosen by the Grail to summon seven Heroic Spirits of legend. Heroic Spirits are people that have been labelled as heroes by the residents of the Earth after their death, and have consequently been taken to a place outside the flow of time where they can be summoned from by the Holy Grail.
The seven summoned Servants are by default divided into seven character classes: Saber, Lancer, Archer, Rider, Caster, Assassin and Berserker. Heroic Spirits can only be summoned as classes that would fit into the character setting that they had while they were still alive as humans, for example Robin Hood would surely be an Archer and Genghis Khan would most certainly be a Rider, etcetera. Once a Servant has been summoned, the responsible magus then takes command of him/her and takes on a role referred to as their "Master", and they join together as a team in order to try to bring down the other six teams of Master and Servant. The reason for all of this is that whoever wins the Holy Grail War gets possession of the Holy Grail itself, an artefact so powerful that it is said to be able to grant any wish its owner desires, and the Master and Servant get to share the reward if they're both alive at that point.
And with that, the premise of the story is created. In the grand scheme of things it is fairly straightforward as a whole, albeit not without its fair share of twists and turns along the way. What I always liked about F/SN is how it manages to intertwine great storytelling and intense action scenes, as those two aspects are generally pretty hard to mingle. It has this aura that makes every fight between Servants feel epic in execution but still maintain a constant sense of reason and purpose.
The pacing is very consistent, and more or less perfect. It gives you just enough breathing room in-between every peak of activity in order to give the characters time to develop properly, but without slowing down the action so much as to ever get boring. You'll always be eagerly looking forward to the next major event in the story, but it never rushes along the in-between segments just in order to jump straight into the action. As a result, it succeeds at providing episodes that are both fantastic on their own, but still steadily progresses the overarching story in order to get one step closer to the eventual conclusion.
It should be noted however that this anime only covers half the story, as the conclusion of UBW will air in spring 2015, and that this first half in all honesty contains more world building, character introductions and foreshadowing than actual revelations. However this is merely the calm before the storm in that sense as the best is yet to come.
--Characters--
The character cast of Fate/stay night is rather large and as an inevitable result it varies in quality from amazing to absolutely craptastic. I am not going to go into detail for all of them as that'd take an entire essay, but rather leave it at the four most important ones.
First and foremost, there's of course our ever so famous, lightly tsundere protagonist Emiya Shirou. He is one of the seven Masters of the war and has Saber as his Servant. Despite that fact, Shirou is actually not a fully trained magus, and is thus unable to provide Saber with enough magical energy to let her use her full strength. Shirou doesn't particularly care about any sort of reward the Holy Grail might be able to give him. He merely wants to make sure no one else gets it either just in case they'd use it for malicious purposes. To be perfectly honest, in a certain sense Shirou is a bit of an idiot. He has a certain idealism based around the idea that he has to be a superhero that he holds onto desperately which quite frankly can be extremely frustrating to watch at times because his actions tend to defy all common sense every so often. In this anime however, Shirou also has a huge amount of character development and his likability goes up constantly over the course of the story. Granted he's still definitely not the best protag you'll ever see but his role fits pretty well into the plotline of UBW so I can't really complain. Sometimes a character's true worth is not based on how much you might like him/her, but rather depending on how well written they are, and in that sense Shirou pulls it off just fine.
Secondly, there is Tohsaka Rin: the noble rich girl who is hopeless with all modern-age technical gadgets. She goes to the same school as Shirou, and is generally treated as the best honor student and perfect woman of it by all the other students. She is also a fellow Master and thus officially one of Shirou's enemies, however the pair of them tend to (for the most part) let each other off the hook in order to primarily focus on other, more dangerous foes instead. In addition, Rin is an exceedingly rare case of a generally approved-of and extremely popular tsundere, probably because she is actually very well written and just plain entertaining to follow, despite her extreme naivety. Rin is not someone who is only there for appearances however, but rather is a very competent magus in reality, fully capable of holding her own against most enemies, and also hopelessly outclassing Shirou when it comes to magical capability.
Thirdly, we have the ever so illustrious Saber, the so-called "strongest Servant" who serves as Shirou's sword and knight. Oftentimes she comes off as a robot-like "I'm so powerful and righteous I'll just beat everyone up without sweating a beat" kind of holy warrior, though she can be pretty cute every once in a while when her dere side emerges. Unfortunately for her however, since her Master, Shirou, is unable to provide her with the normal amount of magical strength due to his incompetence as a magus, Saber has to do her best at holding her ground in combat despite being in a very weakened state. As a result she's unable to ever show off her full potential as a warrior, but even so she's still far from a weakling.
And finally we have Rin's Servant, Archer. He is... well he's just badass throughout. I don't see how you could possibly dislike him. In all seriousness though, Archer is an extremely unpredictable, blunt and overall mysterious character in general, and trying to figure out what exactly he is thinking most of the time is a tall order. As far as combat goes, despite his name he normally fights with a pair of conjured short swords, dual-wield style (which I personally think is one of the coolest weapon setups you can use). Of course he has a bow as well but he only ever seems to use it when he gets really serious.
Now in case you didn't know, UBW at heart is Rin's route in the original visual novel, and hence she's the main heroine in this anime. Diehard fans of Saber might find that fact somewhat disheartening, but you'll just have to deal with it. Of course since Saber and Archer are Shirou's and Rin's Servants respectively, they obviously hang around the pair of them almost all the time as well so as far as actual screen time goes then there's plenty of it for all of them. I think it fits the tone of the story very well when Saber is actually being treated as the character she is, I.E: a heroic swordswoman; not just reduced to some mere sappy love interest. Rin on the other hand has a lot of natural chemistry with Shirou that never feels forced as they're actually both humans in similar positions, not to mention that they're both tsundere for each other. Hence I think the "main heroine" privilege is in fact a lot more suitable for Rin than Saber could ever hope to have in that sense.
The rest of the cast consists of various schoolmates and general acquaintances of Shirou and Rin, all the other Masters and their respective Servants, as well as the illustrious priest Kotomine Kirei who is arguably the most impactful character of the entire franchise depending on who you ask. As always, some are better than others, but as a whole the character cast of Fate/stay night is very intriguing due to the very specific setting they all have, and as a result they are (for the most part) very captivating to watch.
--Animation--
You know what, there's not really any point in beating around the bush here so I'll just say it: excluding movies, this is quite likely the best looking anime ever made.
Ufotable have always had top notch production value, but what they brought out this time is just unreal. There's this specific aura surrounding the entire anime, namely the aura... of money. Whenever you watch UBW you can straight-up feel the insane amounts of pure cash that has been poured into creating this beast. Especially the CGI effects used for all the magical spells and superhuman fighting moves during Servant battles are completely out of this world. A single episode of this anime probably cost more to create than an entire season's worth of your average series (though I don't actually have any numbers on that). It's just that high quality. You might as well rename the whole thing to Unlimited Budget Works. Should only be watched in 1080p or you're seriously missing out.
--Sound--
Honestly one of the best things about the fight scenes in the original F/SN visual novel was the soundtracks accompanying them. They livened up the atmosphere so much and made you pumped up and excited to find out what was going to happen next as a reader. When I look at the equivalent fight scenes in this anime though... I don't really get that kind of feeling, at least not to the same extent. Now instead since the animation in them is so out of this world gorgeous you don't really have time to think as much about the audio supporting it of course, but still as far as the audio itself goes it really doesn't have quite the same level of epicness that I remembered from the game. That being said, it's still Kajiura Yuki composing the whole thing so it's definitely very good for what it is, and by no means drags the series down if you don't give yourself any unreasonable expectations. It just could be even better.
The opening theme is called "Ideal White" by Mashiro Ayano, and the ending theme is called "Believe" by Kalafina. While they're both perfectly fine, neither are anything particularly special nor anything I would put into a music playlist.
The voice acting cast is the exact same one as it has always been for every other release from the Fate/ universe in the last decade across multiple mediums so at this point their voices are already burned into my brain and directly connected with the respective characters that they're voicing. Short version; while some are better than others of course, I can't think of anyone that doesn't live up to the respective character he/she is voicing. That in itself is enough reason for me to not complain about any of it.
--Enjoyment--
Fall 2014 was undoubtedly a great season for anime, but UBW was definitely the one series I always looked forward to the most every week. The fight scenes themselves look absolutely mesmerizing and are just a treat to witness every single time, and even when the anime has its more slice-of-life-esque segments it's still just as enjoyable to me, simply because of how likable the characters are. At the same time the overarching story keeps dropping subtle hints to you as a viewer, teasing you with what is yet to come in the second cour and making you curious about how things are going to turn out in the future.
As a whole, there's always this constant strive to keep watching as there are so many things just want to see unfold before you, be it for the sake of finding out what is really going on behind the scenes or just for getting to see more and more brilliant animation in potential upcoming Servant battles and similar. For myself at least, I like to say that one of the best ways to truly show the mark of a great anime, it's that whenever you finish watching an episode of it, you immediately want to see the next one, and then the next one, and then the next one etcetera, and UBW does this to the highest degree from start to finish. It's that ability to completely captivate you as a viewer that I'm always trying to find when it comes to anime.
--Overall--
I don't like to label myself as a Type-Moon fanboy. That would be an exaggeration. While I certainly like them they don't tend to completely blow me away. However I like to say that out of all their creations, Unlimited Blade Works is the one and only route that well and truly impressed me from start to finish back when I was reading the visual novel about a year ago. It has this constant atmosphere that makes you feel excited to see more, but it still maintains the pacing needed in order to not get ahead of itself. Ironically, sometimes this makes you a bit impatient as a viewer if you're desperately waiting for the next Servant fight or greater plot development to occur, but at the same time that exact feeling is what is going to make you stay captivated even during the most calm and relaxing moments. That being said if you are an impatient viewer, then I might recommend waiting with watching this anime until the second cour has aired in the spring as otherwise you'll be left hanging on a quite nasty cliffhanger at the end of this season.
As it is, "perfect" visual novel adaptations essentially do not exist, and make no mistake; UBW is not an exception to that rule. Despite everything there are still numerous things I could mention that could have been adapted better and made it easier for anime-only viewers to understand certain details of the overarching plot. That being said, UBW is still one of the absolute most faithful visual novel adaptations ever made, no doubt about it. I think it showcases once and for all that the most reliable formula for creating a magnificent anime is having a great (if possible finished) source material, a trustworthy animation studio and a shitload of money.
And that's about all I have to say about this. Now granted this is only the first half of the story as the second part is airing in a few months' time but I have no doubt that it will be even better than the first one was. The conclusion of UBW in the visual novel was fantastic, and I have a ton of faith in Ufotable at this point after they've come this far. I can't imagine them messing it up at this point. However that is a story for another time.
Spring can't come soon enough.
