Fate/Stay Night: Unlimited Blade Works

I didn’t know quite what to expect from Unlimited Blade Works, and for the first half thought it was just a remake, something along the lines of Evangelion 1.0, but with a series much less necessary to update. I shrugged off elements that I didn’t quite remember as my fuzzy memory of a series that honestly wasn’t all that memorable. But when Gilgamesh defeated Berserker and little Illyasviel was definitively taken out of the story, I knew that this was an alternate scenario from the game. And that was a good thing, because just retelling the original story but with a little more eye candy would have been unnecessary and quite annoying, especially as the first act was far too rushed.

Given that the story of a full season was squeezed into 105 minutes, that was no great surprise, but given that this film really makes little sense to the uninitiated and is purely for the fans, I thought the exposition could have been dispensed of altogether, preferably to give more time to Saber, who was altogether extraneous in this version, even being a damsel in distress for one chunk. The main storyline has a more satisfying ending, but the Unlimited Blade Works storyline focuses on the relationship between Shirou and Archer, which is a lot more complex than it may seem.

All the strengths of the series are here, and the faults are mostly only when the film is considered as a standalone work as opposed to a companion piece. And it is nice to see the characters, especially Saber, with a feature film production budget. Some sequences were utterly gorgeous, and there were some shots of Rin that showed subtle emotion in a way that was just perfect. On the other hand, the fight scenes were decidedly unimpressive and the stupid blob thing with the much stupider static Shinji head in it really let down the whole climactic section. Saving a fight with the assassin, who wasn’t a proper character at all, until right at the end also felt like awkward plotting.

But the purpose of the film wasn’t really great storytelling. It was putting a visual novel well-loved by a hardcore fanbase into motion, and if details are skipped, they know them all anyway. Too bad I just never liked Fate/Stay Night that much.