Reviews

So, as everyone should know, Type-Moon is infamous for having poor adaptions of anything not named 'Kara no Kyoukai'. Tsukihime's was so bad its worth thinking of it as an entirely different franchise because the characters are nothing alike, and Fate/Stay Night decided 'hey, we can't decide what route we want, so let's remove defining plot points and replace them with akshun.' I decided to ignore this and went into Unlimited Blade Works hoping it'd be okay. After all, its just one route, right? They can get the important stuff in, right?

If the important stuff is action, then they did pretty good. All the good fights from the route are in, and done pretty well. One of my favourites from the visual novel remains one of my favourites in this movie, and it certainly is easier to convey a good fight scene via a movie than text. The sound, as well, is done pretty well, and certainly adds to these fight scenes. So, if you're a Fate/Stay Night fan and you just really want to see one fight in particular animated, you should probably watch this and get what you came for. Otherwise, its probably going to be a bit lackluster.

To make time for these fight scenes in such a short timespan relative to the amount of time the route contains, the vast majority of the plot points are thrown away to make room. This leads to the fight scenes being fairly poorly strung together, and if you're not familiar with the route (i.e. having not read the visual novel, only seen the anime, or even worse, going into this as your first F/SN experience), it's rather difficult to follow what's happening. A lot of character development for everyone was lost as well, which leads to many characters seeming very one-dimensional, even if you've seen the original anime. There are a few fights where the outcome seems highly unlikely to the viewer, and while this difference is explained in the visual novel both before and after the outcome occurs, in the movie it is simply left blank and you just have to assume the victor is more badass than you thought before.

All in all, if you've only seen the original Fate/Stay Night anime, then your expectations probably aren't too high in the first place, so you might as well watch this anyway. You probably won't be too disappointed since you don't know what you're missing. If you haven't seen the anime or read the original, then you'll likely be utterly confused, but if you like action and don't care too much about why the action is happening, it'll still be fine. If you liked the original VN, then you've probably already seen this and were disappointed and this review won't change much. Overall, I give it a 5/10 from my experience as a disappointed VN fan.