“Fate/stay night,” the extremely well-received visual novel game by Type-Moon, has been adapted into two anime series, a movie and an entire prequel anime.
Thanks to the choose-your-own-adventure nature of visual novels, studios have been to produce a wide range of content without straying from the plotlines.
This season, animation studio Ufotable debuted its adaptation of another arc from the visual novel with “Fate/stay night: Unlimited Blade Works” Oct. 4. A film featuring the third and final arc, “Heaven’s Feel,” is slated to air within the next year.
“Fate/stay night,” the visual novel, is divided into three separate arcs, all with intertwining stories that are told from different points of view. You play as the character Emiya Shirou and make decisions that will determine your fate through the Holy Grail War. And, since this is an eroge, the game matches you up with a female character based on your choices.
The story centers around seven masters who summon heroic spirits who fight for possession of the Holy Grail. The heroic spirits range from legends like King Arthur to actual heroes of history such as Alexander the Great. The grail is said to grant any wish, and obtaining it is only possible after proving your worth by defeating the other masters.
Anime lovers are excited for the airing of “Unlimited Blade Works” thanks to the popularity of the story arc and the fact that Ufotable will be the ones producing it. The animation studio produced “Fate/Zero,” which was by far the most well-received animated adaption of the story, and fans are banking on them doing well again.
“Unlimited Blade Works” has actually been adapted in the past by Studio Deen, but the studio’s awful adaptation failed many followers. They attempted to condense more than 20 hours of gameplay into an hour and a half long movie. To seal the deal, the entire movie was a montage of video clips from the “Fate/stay night” anime, which had aired the season before.
Since the movie was horribly written and slapped together, it was impossible to have any idea what was going on if you weren’t already familiar with the story. You could barely keep up with what was happening, much less follow whatever story had been weaved into the video clip montage.
Ufotable’s “Fate/stay night: Unlimited Blade Works” is sure to go a different direction, with a powerful plotline and backed with the reputable skill of the studio’s producers, If you’re looking for a show full of action, mythology and mystery, “Fate/stay night: Unlimited Blade Works” is something you may want to pick up this season. It’s one of the most highly anticipated anime of the fall 2014 and is a guaranteed adventure.
Kaitlyn Peltzer is a junior English and criminology major and can be reached at kpeltzer@terpmail.umd.edu.