This week sees the release of a new Steam edition of Type-Moon and Kinoko Nasu's dark fantasy visual novel and dating sim Fate Stay/Night. I randomly watched one of Stay/Night's many anime spin-offs, Fate Zero, during the pandemic lockdowns. It triggered a short-lived obsession with the Fate series - I even dipped a toe in the long-lived mobile gacha game Fate/Grand Order.
As such, I think I'm the nearest thing RPS has to a Fate "expert". Join me for a brief and sporadically informed tour of a universe that has Shaped The Culture like few others. Stay/Night is the tale of Shirou Emiya, a schoolboy with the obligatory buried hero complex who gets himself embroiled in a war between mages for the Holy Grail.
The mages do battle by summoning legendary heroes to duel on their behalf. Shirou somehow manages to pair off with one of the elites - Saber, aka Artoria Pendragon, a blonde-bobbed, gender-flipped King Arthur. Saber is absolutely ubiquitous within the Fate universe and beyond.
Even if you haven't watched, played or read anything Fate-related, you will likely have come across a homage to the character, aka "saberface", in some other anime or manga. You will also likely have encountered a reference to Shirou's schoolfriend Rin Tohsaka, often referred to as the original twin-tail tsundere (a tsundere is a character, generally a girl, who shows affection towards the main character by being abrasive and standoffish). If Saber is the heart of the series, Fate doesn't want for alternative poster children.
Period celebs in Stay Night include a flashy take on Irish mythological hero Cu Chulainn whose tendency to get himself killed off is a running franchise joke, and a repulsive, lecherous interpretation of Sumerian king Gilgamesh. As the "first hero in history", Gilgamesh claims ownership of the legendary weapons wielded by every other hero, and is fond of firing those weapons out of a massive golden portal. He'd do well in Total War.
Gilgamesh might be an arsehole, but he is certainly a source of spectacle. When Fate heroes fight, it's an absolute bloodbath, especially when it comes to Ufotable's Unlimited Bladeworks adaptations - aka, Unlimited Budgetworks . These see heroes lobbing castles at each other and performing magic attacks that make Final Fantasy summons look like flicked rubberbands.
Later Fate stories like the multiple-period Grand Order series spice things up by introducing full-on gods and goddesses . That said, the bulk of Fate Stay/Night is about conversation. There's the opportunity to romance Saber, Rin or their extremely hard-done-by schoolmate, Sakura, and each of these romance plotlines broadly corresponds to a different ending for the overarching battle royale plot.
Stay/Night isn't a laidback play. It's extremely easy to make the wrong call and perish without warning - you are, after all, a puny human who has fallen in with various juggernauts from the ancient world. The narratives can be very disturbing - the Heaven's Feel plot path, in particular, is a ghoulish history of sexual abuse.
The original game also features some extremely cheesy, male-gazey sex scenes, but these have been removed from the Steam remaster (which is based on the intervening, non-adult Realta Nua adaptation). If the violence is too much, the Carnival Phantasm parodies are a nice, if deeply discombobulating introduction to the fundamental idiocy of a series in which Shakespeare gets to bandy words with Hercules and Jack The Ripper. There's also a cosy Fate cooking show , in which Saber, Shirou and co bond over omurice and curry.
I'm pretty sure there's a Fate-themed everything, at this stage. The new edition of Fate Stay/Night is out on Thursday 8th August on English, Japanese and Simplified Chinese. Here's the Steam page .
I will leave you with Berser-CAR ..
