Fate/Stay Night (2006)
"There are two kinds of dreams. One for which the person is too small to grasp, and one which is too great for anyone to grasp."
-
Fate/Zero
This series was a bit of a mess. But it was the kind of mess that all animes should aspire to be. In the end, Studio DEEN was too small to grasp the dream, they weren't given the kind of budget they would have needed, they didn't have the talent they needed, and they weren't given the number of episodes they needed. But in many ways, the dream was too great for anyone to have grasped, unless the show was at least 3 (and probably 4) seasons of 13 episodes each in length and had the kind of budget a Gundam series normally would command. I don't think ufotable could have done that much better considering the limitations that DEEN faced in 2006. Fate/Stay Night was just a dream, but it was the good kind of dream, the kind that all animes would benefit from chasing if they at least tried and failed rather than have never tried at all. Once you've suffered through enough half-assed J.C. Staff animes, even an anime that puts forth effort and doesn't quite succeed is something noteworthy.
Within the limitations of the producing studio, and the budget, and the number of episodes given, this show was given all the effort that Studio DEEN could muster. They really tried to animate every fight to the best of their ability, they really tried to cover as much of the story as they could while condensing the 3 routes of the VN into an omnibus format, and they really tried to give the whole affair a life of it's own. I found Shirou insufferably annoying most of the way through, but without knowing the source material it's difficult to say how much of this was exactly as it was in the VN. The other characters were enjoyable, even if the anime didn't find it relevant or interesting to ever tell us what anybody's real motivations for their actions were for it's entire run.
Like the Servant a Master summons into the world, F/SN was both alive with it's own vibrance and yet fundamentally dead, because ultimately it couldn't cohesively convey the story of the VN without the viewer having previous knowledge of it beforehand. There is no way I would have known anything that was going on if I hadn't watched the first half of Fate/Zero before tackling this series, and that is pretty much the worst crime an adaptation of source material from another medium can commit. Having not read the VN, I can't speak to how well it stands as a companion piece to it, but as a standalone anime it puts forth a monumental effort and falls just short in key areas like explaining why people are doing what they are doing.
Therefore, the irony of the F/SN anime is that in 2006 it would have failed utterly to convert anyone to becoming a fan of the franchise or Type-Moon properties in general. In 2012, when viewed after the (far superior) F/Z anime, it is a reasonable continuation of the story begun in it's prequel. If nothing else, the maddening way the show just jumps from set piece to set piece without explaining why anything is happening will encourage people to go and read the VN so they find out. Maybe that was the goal all along, but annoying the viewer to death by having people do things just because they apparently feel like it isn't the right way to encourage that because most people will just get mad and quit.
I'm assuming the ending of the show matches the Fate route it mostly adapts, and so it's not really a happy ending, but it was a good ending. As a proud member of the All-Around Mustache Club, I don't really have a ton of criteria for judging how good an anime really is besides was the animation pretty and did it have a good ending. The animation wasn't pretty, and Shirou's character stood out as being exceptionally ugly though the other characters fared better. But I did cry several times at the end, and that always counts for something when I rate animes.
Fate/Stay Night
"Shirou's Law:
The dumber the shounen lead is, the more awesome his love interest will be."
Final Rating: 7.5
Sabers Rins Ilyas out of 10
