Art: For 2006, this is the most beautiful and finely crafted art that I have seen. Fate/Stay Night was literally YEARS ahead of its time in this aspect. I loved how each character was significantly different and getting to know each of them was amazing. Being able to look at the vibrant colors and the fluid animation was just an absolute joy. One thing that I loved was the frame rate that this show seemed to have. I have seen some shows where frame rate is minuscule at best. There was clear emotion and clear effort put into this show and I really appreciated this. The one thing that I wasn’t quite a fan of was the colored hair of some of the characters. I’m happy that it wasn’t super drastic and that’s fine and well, but there was a scene where they notice the hair of another character and use it as reasoning to classify him as a foreigner. If you are going to use one person’s hair color to determine information at least keep it consistent. The beginning and ending animations were also amazing and fluid and just overall pleasing to look at.
Music/Sound: This soundtrack though! This series has yet to produce music that is not on par with an orchestral cinematic experience. The music in the opening and ending was powerful and moving, but also fit really well with the story. There were times that I could feel the emotion just bleeding out of the music and it made those powerful moments that much more important. There is no question here on the amazing soundtrack, and even moving past that; the sounds in general made this show so much more immersive. I’ve noticed strings of shows that just assume the story is engaging enough and Fate/Stay Night takes that and takes it one step further, and I fully support that.
Story: I was worried that this was going to be just a rehash (even though it came out 5 years before) of Fate/Zero and I was SO wrong. While there were a few characters that are the same from the prequel, there were several major differences, primarily the fact that this had a main character? I felt in the prequel, everyone had their own story, but this primarily focused on Shirou and Rin and how they interacted with their servants. While there was some conflict with Caster, I felt that a lot of the servants that had large roles in Fate/Zero were non-existent in this. Now this could be because this was made first and that was something they fixed, but still, it made it hard to get into at first.
Personal Reflection: after watching Fate/Zero I really didn’t want to watch Fate/Stay Night, mostly because I felt like I had seen all that I wanted to see from this storyline. But I was very wrong, in fact this is a whole new story all its own. Even though it took two episodes (one being “episode 0”) both at 47 minutes to introduce us to the main two characters, I felt like after those the show sped up and things got more interesting. However, I have to state that those first two episodes nearly turned me off to the whole series. I was so worried that it was going to drag and lag, but it picked up and things got really exciting. While I like the fact that there are definite main characters, I found that the removal of some other characters really didn’t make sense or they were relegated to a minor role in sometimes a single episode. While the music was outstanding and the art was incredible, I felt that this shift that put some characters in the limelight and others in the shadows really took it down a notch for me. A great show, but I liked the prequel more.
Overall Score: 8/10
