Tag Archives: Unlimited Blade Works

Fate/stay night: Struggling with Oneself

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Unlimited Blade Works, the second of Fate/stay night’s three distinct narrative routes, concentrates on the concept of the struggle between oneself and an ideal.

It’s a story with an altogether different feeling to the Fate route, featuring a great deal more internal conflict.  And not just for the protagonist Shirou Emiya, either, but also for many of the people around him — most notably heroine Rin Tohsaka.

In fact, this time around, it’s only really Saber, who had plenty of her own struggles in Fate, who gets off relatively lightly (in terms of mental and philosophical challenges, anyway — though she does spend much of the story being physically and sexually tortured). Everyone else has a lot of very serious and meaningful questions to try and answer before the two weeks in which the story unfolds come to a close.

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Fate/stay night: Introduction and History

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To say that Type-Moon’s Fate/stay night is an influential work in Japanese popular media is something of an understatement.

Since its first appearance as an adults-only visual novel in 2004, the series has gone on to spawn a visual novel sequel and all-ages remake, numerous spin-off games for a variety of different console and handheld platforms, several anime series, manga volumes, light novels, movies and, most recently, a successful free-to-play mobile game.

The original game is regarded as one of the best visual novels of all time, and indeed was a bestseller in its year of release in Japan. And yet, for some reason, we’ve never seen an official localisation in the West, even from long-standing powerhouses of visual novel publishing such as JAST USA, MangaGamer or Sekai Project.

Thankfully, all is not lost, thanks to the continuing efforts of various fan translation groups, who have not only translated the original 2004 visual novel, but also the 2012 release of the Réalta Nua remake, including the ability to re-integrate the adult content from the original.

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