The biggest difference is without a doubt the biggest blow.
Shirou.
We follow around a single protagonist, a weak novice mage who accidentally gets puled into the Grail Wars. It’s a fairly typical start for a show with a complex world, allowing lots of explanations for both the viewer and the characters without reducing them to idiots. Unfortunately, this bozo is an idiot anyway.
It’s through him that this show bares its ugly teeth. It’s a power fantasy harem with a powerless, weakly characterised fool that can be self-inserted easily, because without that self-insertion, there is very little to go on.
Girls throw themselves at him without reason as he twirls around his harem on his fingers. I genuinely can’t see why they do this - his edginess is painful, he’s standoffish and blunt with his words, he has the inability to listen to anything Rin says and he has the most childish ideals. To top it all off he is constantly, and amusingly, enforcing his sexist beliefs on the female characters who are unimaginably stronger than he is, despite showing him multiple times as such - though, I really must commend the strength of his plot armour, allowing him to dodge unavoidable deaths at least three times. His design even reeks of such, with obnoxiously sharp eyebrows and buzzy red hair that wouldn’t be out of place in Yu-Gi-Oh!
There’s supposedly a romance going on throughout this series, but it’s hard to believe anything. Shirou has no chemistry with standing idly let alone any other characters let alone his love interest and ally in the Holy Grail War, Rin.
Rin is an okay character. Undeniably a tsundere and despite following a few tropes too many, she’s okay. She’s a powerful mage with a lot of independence. Supposedly, she is the strategist, but Shirou has the inability to take in any of these ideas and ruins them. She has great chemistry with her servant, Archer, and her forcefulness and pushiness actually makes for some hilarious moments. Her face is truly expressive, with a door being closed on her at one point genuinely making me laugh in this show that begs to be dark.
Expect to see ribs protruding from chests, limbs cut to pieces and impaling’s beyond niceties. Much like Zero, Unlimited Blade Works doesn’t pull its punches. Alongside its bleak colour scheme and shots of nightfall, Blade Works desperately wants to be taken seriously. But then it shows its schoolboy harem with comic side-characters that fall-flat, there’s a loli commanding a giant from time-to-time and one servant is killed in a bath of BDSM-ish chains. There’s a very specific audience for this show, to say the least of its inconsistencies in tone and pacing.
Aside from all this, I can say for certain that Unlimited Blade Works is a thing of production beauty; an epic soundtrack, industry-leading animation and great sound-editing go into making the expertly choreographed fight-scenes a joy to behold. That and a story that promises some interest, is enough to just about get through this weak season. It’s going to be hard to save Shirou unless he does actually finally (hopefully) die and we continue to follow Rin like in the prologue, but I pray that the second half has some more intrigue, and hopefully explores the depth of Archer’s character and we find out about the other masters.
