Fate/stay night: Unlimited Blade Works – Review

Awww yeah, let’s start some fires. Yep, reviewed the newest Fate series for ANN, which has already sparked several pages of Type Moon-flavored forum shenanigans. Honestly, I don’t think my actual piece is controversial in the slightest, but you can’t really talk about Fate without making fans mad. As for the show itself, it’s a fun ride! I like how the character work builds off what we know from Fate/Zero, and the action scenes are goddamn fantastic. Hope you enjoy the review!

Unlimited Blade Works

8 thoughts on “Fate/stay night: Unlimited Blade Works – Review

  1. Fantastic review and good luck Bob! I know the Fate community isn’t the easiest to deal with at times…

  2. Your going to get a lot of VN fans angry by telling people to start with Fate/Zero. It casually spoils some major parts of Heaven’s Feel during it’s info dump first episode. Aside from that a great review. I will be interested to see if your opinion changes at all by the end of the second half of the show.

    • Yeah, they’ve already started. The comment section on this one is a treasure chest.

  3. How do you even deal with the ANN community’s needs? There are some times when I think that you’re conceding to the reader base and giving a show much more leeway than it deserves, and fans STILL complain that you’re not being fair. Props, Nick, I wish you well~

  4. I love almost everything Type Moon has produced, but that’s mostly because I do find lines like “impressive – I should have taken your head seven times, but it remains attached” incredibly hilarious.
    I thought you were more than fair towards the show, and I really don’t understand how people can be upset that you didn’t love the show as much as them. You clearly liked it, what’s the problem?

    When you already know more about the world, know where the story is going to and know everything there is to know about these characters then most of your points become moot, which is why this is a great show for people who already are fans. Most people aren’t already fans, they might have seen Fate/Zero at most, and I think this is a very good and fair review for people who haven’t already watched it.

  5. I caught episode one (not zero) at a convention recently, and oh my bloody hell I think it contributed to my current preference for western live action. It doesn’t help that I was (and am still) knee-deep in analyzing what types of storytelling techniques work for me through the lens of an excellently excecuted western live-action, and could actively see all of the ways episode one should have been done to not be the worst paced hour-drama I’ve ever seen. So much exposition and “character scene” fat could have been trimmed down to more graceful and dense delivery of content, to get to the actual good stuff. You should be getting to the promise of the premise by the end of the first act, if not the end the second act at the latest, and this show wasn’t getting there by, like, the middle of the second episode!

    And I didn’t even get to watch episode zero, which I probably would have given more leeway towards, given its Rin focus.

    In some ways, I think UFOTable’s luscious visuals only made me more irritated about the pacing. I like reading FSN fanfics, especially ones that get into nitty-gritty Type Moon world-building details and systems! But when that visual dimension comes into play, evidently I can’t stand having things so laboriously spelled out when a tightly-designed sequence can accomplish the same thing in a fraction of the space/time, and world-building should take a complete and visuals-only backseat to character action.
    And even the action scenes lose of a bit of their sheen when I can get the same PLUS better writing in Legend of Korra.

    Oh, wow, 124 ANN comments already. Am I going to succumb to my masochism…

  6. Bobduh, you are probably my single most trusted critic, and our interests are very closely aligned. I tend to like what you like, for the most part.

    And that is why it honestly does kinda sting when you express your huge dissatisfaction with the FSN visual novel, because that is one of my absolute favorite pieces of fiction. I have found myself imagining ways to convince you to read through it on multiple occasions. I honestly could say a lot more about FSN (I did a damn paper on FSN’s and Dune’s portayal of the Hero), but I’ll leave it at that.

    A bit ridiculous, but I am pretty attached to that thing.

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