marrow #24 | posted 20 april 2026
so. fate/stay night (2004) huh.
strictly speaking i played fate/stay night [réalta nua] - ultimate edition (readily available on sukebei as a very convenient portable pre-install that ran perfectly in linux), so the year might become 2007, or maybe 2019, depending on how you look at it.
i kinda went back and forth on whether or not i'd play this one as part of my year of big name vns. on one hand, it's long as balls and doesn't hold any particular appeal for me. on the other. this is the 11th game ever registered on vndb, with a huge franchise associated with it. half the point of this little journey is playing games that are (or seem to be) influential within the medium of visual novels. so it called to me green goblin mask style, and i figured i'd at least check out the first route, and allowed myself to bounce if i really wasn't into it. i followed a flowchart and went straight to the true end of each route. there's a lot of dead ends in this game and while nothing would give me more joy than seeing shirou emiya beaten up and killed gruesomely, i have other hobbies.
also, while this patch has an h-scene toggle, i haven't read the alternative / réalta nua scenes either. i can justify it saying i wanted to read the original text and the new scenes are effectively retcons or something but truth is i'm just lazy and forgetful with my saves.
well. let's talk about the game then. this is the most i've written about a single piece of media. there's also my liveposting on tumblr if you wanna.
route time: around 6 hours.
ok so first of all, this vn has an enforced playing order, so that's how i'm gonna structure the post. also i'm writing this more or less while playing (i started the post some fifteen hours in, but nevertheless).
i'm not gonna summarize the whole vn throughout the post (it's long enough as it is), but i need to give you some context. so we start the game off following rin tohsaka, a teenage mage gearing up for the holy grail war, where seven masters (that's the mages, including our girl rin) and their servants (the summoned spirits of great heroes of myth) war amongst themselves to obtain the holy grail. it's really not complicated, except when it is, but don't worry about that yet.
the servants come in seven classes (it's a very rpg-y kind of story): archer, assassin, berserker, caster, lancer, rider and saber. rin is really vying for saber, thought to be the most powerful class. but her ritual goes kinda wrong and she summons archer instead. i call archer "dante from the devil may cry series" on account of his white hair and red color scheme and the fact that his first fight is with a blue character. there's some mysterious goings on with him, possibly due to the botched summoning.
anyway, events happen leading to said fight with vergil lancer. they fight at school at night, and a student sees them and must be killed because he's a witness to magecraft and that's against the rules. but rin feels bad about it. she sees him on the brink of death and heals / revives him.
in the first drafts of fate's story, the protagonist was a woman and saber was a man, but this was changed to better fit the bishoujo game market. i believe this is the single greatest mistake ever made in videogame history.
the first two hours of the game give us a glimpse into the beautiful world of a female protagonist. but turns out the guy rin revived, shirou, is the one we'll actually be stuck with for the rest of the long long narrative. he instinctively summons saber, becoming the seventh master in the war.
now let's get this out of the way: i really really hate shirou. him being a nobody who's never formally learned magic pisses me off, i strongly believed he only managed to summon saber because of rin's magic lingering on him upon revival, and while that's fine (and not even true) i guess and a common storytelling thing, i do resent him for replacing rin as the protagonist. it's just unshakeable. were he a woman, all would be forgiven. but he's not, so i desire his head on a spike.
also he's sexist in the exact way you'd expect, because he has the usual protagonist savior complex [1] and he can't stand that saber is meant to and wants to be protecting him, and is equipped to do so. he puts himself in danger and has to be rescued exactly because he goes out and tries to do everything by himself instead of relying on or even talking to the women supporting him. keel over and die.
so uh yeah i like rin, i miss her so bad. she's not gone, she's one of the three heroines (alongside saber and sakura, shirou's kouhai who makes breakfast for him and stuff and oh god i wish she'd poison his miso. girl you deserve better). but i miss her nonetheless. she allies herself with shirou and teaches him (and thus the player) about the mage world because shirou's an incompetent fuck who doesn't know anything. "it's not his fault he's not from an old and renowned mage family" i don't give a fuck. it absolutely does not help that when we switch to his pov we cover the same period of time as we just did with rin, which kinda kills the momentum for a while.
i promise i won't just shit talk shirou. i needed it out of my system and i needed to set the scene for you. i need you to picture myself sitting at my laptop, wanting to learn more about the female characters in this frankly rather boring story while killing the protagonist with mind beams the whole time. ok? with that, let's get to the meat of the game, starting with saber's route.
route time: around 15h30. total time: 21h30.
as the first route, there's a lot of... catching up with the setting? it's heavy on the infodumping, i felt, particularly for the first few hours. i kinda get that it's a looooong game and that's kinda the expected pace, but on the flipside it's so long because that's how it's paced, innit? overall it just feels like a 7/10 shonen. some of the fight scenes are fun (i liked vs assassin and vs rider) but i don't really love action scenes as a whole.
also i've called it a very rpg-y game (i'm not calling it a chuunige), and truly it does settle into a rhythm / routine akin to a gameplay loop: training with saber in the morning, learning magic with rin in the afternoon, fighting baddies at night. i feel it's all somewhat similar to persona. neutral statement but also like... i was already pretty bored overall yknow...
as for saber as a heroine, her whole vibe is that she starts off stoic and then kinda "melts". i'm not sure how coy i should be with her hero identity, because i feel that's the one thing everyone knows about fate. still, i'll give you the choice and keep her secret throughout this section.
saber is artoria pendragon — better known as king arthur. i was kinda thrown off by something she says early on, about not being as famous as berserker — hercules. girl the impostor syndrome.
anyway, she was born a girl and that was kept that a secret from all but merlin and her father, so she still ruled as king arthur, concealing her true identity and overcompensating by being The Perfect King.
ok so i have very limited experience with arthuriana, in particular when it comes to the big man himself so i unfortunately cannot go into a long and nonsensical tangent. boo tomato tomato a blogger with integrity would go read some version of le mort d'arthur before even considering talking about fate/stay night at any length.
but the game's decision to make her Thee king arthur in all aspects does raise some unserious questions, that i decided to venture the type-moon wiki for. if i get spoiled i get spoiled — that site is kind of a landmine, beware. well, though guinevere and lancelot aren't mentioned in this game, they exist within the franchise (political marriage and then a somewhat justifiable adultery [by a normative lens etc etc]), but that's low hanging fruit. what i was curious about was mordred, arthur's illegitimate son (by his half-sister morgause) who causes his downfall in the first place, and is not name dropped when talking about artoria's defeat — almost conspicuously so, since iirc belvedere does.
of course with arthuriana most things are ambiguous and contradictory, it's not like there's a Canon Text, and i'm confident fate uses the cultural miasma of the legend more than a specific telling. i'm not of the belief nasu was poring over academic sources for all of this (he should though). while i'm pretty sure the most common view of mordred nowadays is as arthur's son, he's a nephew in other sources.
anyway, mordred is also a character in the franchise, of course. she's in fate/apocrypha (and grand order, but who isn't in fgo), which is a parallel universe but apparently (according to the great minds of the wiki talk page) the split happens after the backstory events? idk dog i don't have time for this. but yeah she is, in fact, artoria's child (by morgan le fay). apparently artoria had a merlin-given dick for a bit "in order to consummate her marriage with guinevere", and morgan steals her sperm to make a "homunculous-like clone of artoria".
i hope this answers all of your burning questions.
she's 100% a trans woman. that's all. we all know this.
as such, her arc is pretty much this woman who was never really a girl — truthfully never even a person — kinda learning to become one... Through Heterosexual Love. this is quite textual and purposeful, and manifests through her becoming shy and bashful and self-conscious around shirou, especially after the first h-scene. and while i in general like the overall arc of learning to treat yourself as a person (don't read into it), the way the game goes about it is just sooo gross. from the frying pan into the fire: she gets to shed the armor, but through being condescended to by the worst men alive.
in other hands, in another story, shirou "realizing" saber doesn't enjoy fighting, but does it out of selfless duty, could be excellent. but shirou's desire to protect saber and let her live a "normal" girl's life has always read as extremely sexist. it makes the climax of their romance horrific, in fact. shirou even considering using the grail to let saber stay in the present makes me nauseous. the scene after their date, when shirou says this sort of thing to her, i was bracing myself for the worst, for saber's character to be destroyed. it's not that dire but it's not great either.
basically saber's route is a grave case of the love interest shackle. and it would not have happened were this a lesbian game.
the very very first h-scene (some 14 hours in btw. that took foreverrrr [2]) is a "oh nooo saber is weak and the only way to give her magical energy is through your sperm" setup which. yeah idk why i didn't see that coming once it was established she's not getting a steady supply of juice. that's not the point. the scene starts with rin volunteering to warm saber up for shirou. and yeah i'm not stupid, that's a veneer of lesbianism meant for male titillation, i'm used to it. but! i've been a lesbian rin tohsaka truther literally from the beginning and i think it's a beautiful piece of her arc. "i didn't think i swung this way"
, she says, on top of saber, having suggested this and being about to enthusiastically finger her. girl i did!! there's also "she must be excited from seeing saber. tohsaka is masturbating noisily behind me as if to match saber's breathing"
— okayyy.
i just think it's genuinely interesting to think of the game from rin's point of view. she's wanted saber from the beginning, from a power scaling standpoint. she doesn't summon her, being stuck with archer instead. then, she learns rando from her school is the one to have summoned saber, and turns out that the hero he has summoned is a beautiful girl around her age. so she has all these mixed feelings she can't quite sort out — she's envious that he got the best servant class while not even being a mage, but there's something else, isn't there?
i'd ordinarily be hesitant to put what's effectively a headcanon in such a prominent place in a review / analysis / whatever, but rin is so underexplored throughout saber's route that it's a fair game reading. i needed something to keep myself sane.
and yeah, let's talk about sex! it feels inaccurate to call this vn an eroge. sure, i knew it had — in vndb's words — low and late sexual content. but other than saber's bare ass there really aren't any suggestive moments leading up to that first sex scene, and the game is much more interested in the hype moments and aura of servant dogfights.
and that's fine with me but also rather surprising? i was expecting some shonen-typical ecchi throughout. i think it's for the better that isn't the case; i think with this game's tone and protag it'd be likely to piss me off more than anything else lol. there just isn't really time or space for it here idk. i think it'd read too much as gratuitous sexualization, in a way it didn't with yu-no. ecchi is a complicated art.
the sex scenes however. they might be long and late but there's a third tag. jesus christ they are long. i'm talking 15 minutes on auto easily. and they are not particularly good. for the most part they're just boring, not really egregious — "the pain stuffing my meat is like an awkward caress, and it drives me nuts"
was fucking horrendous though. i also overall really dislike the words "meat" and "slit", which abound. are "dick" and "cunt" just too crass? they're what i tend to use. of course, there's the matter of translation, but i don't think type-moon's hands are clean.
but yeah i've pondered before about whether or not you're "expected" to jerk off to these games. the rather unecessarily long scenes here make me think that was on type-moon's mind. idk. i don't see that you would if you were older than like 15.
ok now it's time for spoilers for the end of this route. i'm talking days 14 and 15.
this is your first spoiler warning. jump to ultimate blade works if you'd like. though naturally there will be spoilers over there as well... hm. you can go straight to the conclusion if you'd prefer.
the final boss is an eighth servant that shouldn't exist — the previous war's archer, gilgamesh. his master is kirei kotomine, a priest who's the overseer of this war (sorry i haven't mentioned him earlier, there wasn't much of a point) and who's also killed lancer's master to take his command spells. so he's dual wielding dudes.
in true shonen fashion gilgy here is power scaling personified. as humanity's oldest hero, 2/3 god and 1/3 human, he is undefeatable in a different way than berserker. his noble phantasm (signature weapon and ultimate ability), king's treasure, is every other noble phantasm because as the first hero, the king of heroes, he collected the original / prototype of every weapon that would become a legend. i hope that's a clear enough explanation. it doesn't even really matter.
the real reason i want to talk about him is that gilgamesh is introduced the day before that date i mentioned, and they also fight him pretty much directly afterwards. his presence sandwiches the romantic climax. and gilgamesh talks about / to saber the same way shirou does!!
during the last holy grail war, ten years ago, gilgamesh proposed to saber. when he talks to / about her, it's in terms of ownership, and also gendered condescension. he comes out and says it: you're a girl, you need to be taken out of the battlefield and put in your rightful place as a wife. do you think the scenario writer, nasu kunihiro, realized the irony of it all? do you think he wrote a horror story on purpose?
anyway. even putting aside his sexism, none of shirou's romance with saber feels earned; his falling for her feels like a matter of duty. no chemistry. for the second and final h-scene of her route, which is clearly meant as a proper intimate scene as opposed to the mana transfer, saber is completely stripped of any characterization: "with her hair down, there's no trace of her as a swordsman"
. it's fucking scary is what this scene is. it doesn't matter who these characters are, only that they're fucking, so saber is just this demure and pretty thing. "even i know how to make a man happy"
? dude.
i gotta say it and hope i haven't boy-who-cried-wolf'd too much: it's hetslop. it sucks.
as for the overall story, it's the epic all powerful finale you'd expect. the holy grail is cursed, and can only ever grant wishes through destruction — that's why shirou's adoptive father, kiritsugu, ordered saber to destroy it ten years ago, causing the fire that orphaned our protag in the first place. in fact, shirou only survived that because kiritsugu used saber's scabbard to heal him, and that connection is what let him summon her. also some other stuff.
well, kotomine, omnicidal freak, thinks destruction is pretty goated actually, and his wish is to fuck it up. they defeat kotomine and gilgamesh, saber destroys the grail again, the war is over, saber gets whisked back to her time.
uhh whoops i haven't explained that yet. the thing about saber is that she isn't dead yet — that's why she can't take her spirit form or get shirou's magical energy through conventional means. as she dies after the battle of camlann, she makes a contract with the world to become a heroic spirit on the condition that she gets the grail (her wish is to never have been the king at all, but to have someone else better take her place. i'm telling ya, the impostor's syndrome is dire). so she gets summoned when there's an opportunity to do so and stuff.
so it's a whole thing but yeah saber goes back to her time, and she's dying. she makes peace with her past and her perceived failure as a king and gives up on the grail, breaking her contract and dying for real. sir bedivere, the knight who's there in her final moments, talks about how he never once had seen his king's face kinda look human, but now she finally shows that side.
meanwhile yeah shirou's life is back to normal and he vows never to forget her.
it all keeps with the 7/10 shonen / rpg vibe, i don't really have anything to add...
route time: around 16h. total time: 37h30.
now let's go to ultimate blade works 💥🔥. we still have some unanswered questions i'm very curious about: what the hell is up with archer? what else was there to rin's chekhov's inherited magical amulet? what about the masters we haven't seen yet? can this vn still be good?
i'm not sure about the original release, but this version makes moving past read scenes really fast, with a handy pop-up at the start of each scene / chapter. maybe too handy, because just going ham on the ok button unceremoniously put me right at the route-entering choice and it was kinda jarring lol i should have been a little more careful and read that scene from the start. but no matter. it was nice going straight to the new route.
as i feared, it's still a bit of a repetitive start, because we get some of the same information for shirou's sake. oh well, i'm not sure that it could have been done better without being a straight up time loop story (not that there isn't some time bullshit going on, but that's at a greater scale), and two weeks is too long for a loop anyway... and this was stuff that imo already tanked the pacing the first time around. i think it's possible that there was new info mixed in there that i simply missed through speeding through text. there's an enforced playing order! we don't need to retread "saber can't get energy from shirou" or "where will saber sleep". let's move on.
we, of course, get a different set of servant fights. and since archer's not wounded at the beginning, he shows up a lot more. i think he's an interesting character.
the main new thing is caster becoming the first antagonist. yay for women!! it was already made pretty clear she had made the temple her base, but when saber gets there on her route, it's being guarded by assassin instead — we never see what's going on over there, or meet their masters.
i really like caster. berserker was, as you'd expect, a brute force kind of combat. so it was nice to start things off with an intelligent servant and someone who has a much different fighting style, making for scenes that have dialogue instead of just action. and she's really intriguing: she's a master in her own right, and assassin is her servant. i even got one of her dead ends for fun, since i hadn't seen any yet. small sample size, but i don't believe there's anything of substance in the dead ends, which was kind of a relief.
so yeah i found this route more interesting than saber's. we also get more interludes, and from more povs — on fate it was just saber, but here there's rin, archer and even caster. since we already have more context to the conflict, the story can (nay, must) free itself a little more from the protag that doesn't know anything. it's still shit in its romance though.
a rash judgement will lead one to claim rin tohsaka is a straightforward tsundere. i have opted not to argue against such a statement [3] but since she's the first character we meet, and we stick to her pov for a couple hours, i've never really seen her through that lens. i'm not sure that i can explain it well, but throughout saber's route, even as rin is blunt to shirou, she's very transparent. her model student persona is very much an affect, but it's not one she uses in her interpersonal relationships at all.
so yeah it was scary seeing her transmorgrify into a tsundere. a pedant would say that the tsundere by definition implies a transmorgrification, and i just don't like the tsundere trope (fair enough). but what's happening here is a flattening. we already know that no matter how much rin wants to present as a cutthroat mage, she cares about doing the right thing. she's still a practical and no-nonsense character, but she won't sacrifice her morals. it's a nice character archetype! you don't need to have her blushing when talking to shirou to show that she isn't as unfeeling as she likes to pretend to be.
also she's a lesbian. we've been through this.
and yeah like with saber, there's no real reason for shirou to be smitten with rin this time around. "omg she's a girl and the school idol and she's in my house!?" is so tiresome! he talks about archer's swords with more passion than either of his love interests [4].
although i will grant that i think rin's romantic arc is mostly better than saber's... specifically it's easier to ignore and for the most part there isn't that feeling of dread and horror at the very least. it's overall just lame.
my god. tohsaka proposes a date on her route and saber goes with them. she leaves archer at home but says "i don't mind if saber comes along". girl.
i don't care if that's the fantasy of going on a date with two girls at once. saber and rin have more fun together than either of them does with shirou. i'm gnawing at the bars of my cage over here.
they keep taunting me with yuriful images and texts... caster tortures saber and the scene is 100% erotically charged. smiles real big. and sure, she's not even in the cg, that's purely saber ecchi (sometimes fsn remembers about it) and damsel in distress shit that i don't really think they could pull off with her as the heroine, since it's keeping her away from shirou. but i think they do purposefully play a bit in predatory lesbian territory with caster, and that's kinda awesome for me [5] and more fuel to the "fate/stay night could and should have been a thoroughly lesbian game" fire.
ok so this route is a lot more eventful, so i'm gonna need to summarize things so i can actually give my thoughts on the game. the plot starts to thicken. fate was a straightforward route to kinda ease you into this universe, but now we're acquainted we don't need to waste our time fighting berserker over and over again lol. i'll split this into "soft" spoilers (from day 11 onwards) and the real ending spoilers of days 15 and 16 will come later on.
this is your first spoiler warning. jump to heaven's feel if you'd like. though naturally there will be spoilers over there as well... hm. you can go straight to the conclusion if you'd prefer.
so, lots of talk about caster. who's she? well, she's medea of golden fleece fame. my bet was that she was circe, so i wasn't off by far (the dragon tooth constructs put my mind to greece immediately ← read percy jackson). her noble phantasm, rule breaker, is a dagger that dispels any magic. and she uses it to sever the servant contract between saber and shirou, becoming her master. that's the context for the erotically charged torture scene, she's resisting a command spell used by caster. and she does the same to archer (sans torture, he willingly betrays rin).
worth noting about that last point: it's already been brought up multiple times that there's a difference between true heroic spirits and some of the servants being summoned right now. it's pretty damn confusing but i think at this point half the servants are "irregular" instead of proper heroes. i found it weird during saber's route, and archer and caster find it odd as well. there's Something afoot.
another change here is that rider gets killed offscreen by caster super early on, and shinji [6] goes to kotomine's church for protection. there, he contracts with gilgamesh. as for kotomine, caster kills him (and presumably lancer) to take control of the church and look for the holy grail — which she doesn't find, because the grail's vessel is illya, berserker's master [7]. illya is from the einzbern family, one of the three founding families who created the grail war system. the third family is tohsaka btw.
speaking of her, since both shirou and rin have lost their servants, their only way to keep fighting and rescue saber and shit is to ally themselves to another master, so they head to illya's castle. because she's like 12 (?) and a reasonably good person despite everything. well. tough luck because gilgamesh kills her. but lancer pops up to offer his alliance so potato potahto?
yuri interlude: rin contracts with saber and it's called "the contract that should have been"
and saber finally reaches her true strength potential. which could mean nothinggggg.
anyway. there's a bunch of events i don't think we really need to talk about: archer kills caster and her master and goes ronin style as was always his goal. he captures rin so shirou will fight him. the priest isn't actually dead, and he has some mysterious interest in rin — possibly using her as a vessel for the grail. lancer kills the priest, drives off shinji, rescues rin, dies. the important part is that we can answer some of the questions i posed at the beginning now.
what the hell is up with archer? he's shirou. specifically, a shirou emiya that made a contract to become a guardian, someone who could finally Save Everyone. but that doesn't quite work as he was expecting: instead of gallantly saving kittens from trees and trolley problem victims from the tracks, he's tasked with like. killing the person who's gonna tie people to the trolley tracks. so he endeavors to kill himself before he can make the contract, hoping that the contradiction in this will destroy him and let him rest. kinda. it's all convoluted and kinda stupid. idk man.
also, his phantasm is creating swords with magic [8]. shirou's thing is that he's very limited in magic, he can only do reinforcement and a little bit of projection (that's creating things from scratch, basically). he has an affinity for swords though, so he's good at that. so like. the blades are unlimited here because archer can project any sword he's seen. kinda like a bootleg gilgamesh.
what else was there to rin's chekhov's inherited magical amulet? this one's simple. ish. EMIYA (that's what archer's called) has the amulet from when he was revived, and it functions as a conduit — that's why he was summoned to / by rin. there's some wrinkles but it doesn't matter.
with that out of the way, shirou defeats archer, who gets doubly defeated by gilgamesh. because we're heading to the final moments of the war, and it's time to get power scaled. gilgamesh has put illya's heart into shinji to make a defective grail, and shit's about to get real.
but first we have a h-scene pit stop with rin acting weird and out of character again. the calm before the storm spot in the narrative isn't too bad for pacing, but the way you can see them switching rin into love interest mode is very jarring.
and you'll never fucking believe what the setup here is.
you guessed it, shirou's the only one who can stand up to gilgamesh because he's the sword freak and can use projection magic to copy his noble phantasm. but since he's not a powerful mage he needs to have sex with rin. for her magical energy.
well what do you want me to say. i never had shitty teen hetero sex but this is kinda how i envision it. the scene's bad and lasts like 20 minutes. i think the awkward conversation and bad sex are fun conceptually but the specific dialogue is pretty out of character for rin. what happened to the rin we saw in the saber h-scene? she's literally a lesbian oh my god it's all so fucking clear. and this is straight up dubious consent. she's crying in more than one cg.
and like. it's this setup where the magic circuit "fusion" is one-way only, with rin serving as a backup tank — her words, post-coitus. and during the whole scene it's all about what shirou wants. it's about how hard it is for him to restrain himself: "it must be difficult for tohsaka, but it's hard for me as well. it mentally tires me to go easy on her, and her vagina is constantly stimulating me"
. boo fucking hoo. rin is embarassed and in pain throughout, and he just does things on his own rhythm. "you should be able to take this"
. i'm telling you! i'm telling you this game is psychological horror!! the theme is right there, laid bare for all with eyes to see. can anyone hear me. it's so dark in here.
now let's talk about the last day and wrap things up.
this is your last spoiler warning. jump to heaven's feel or go straight to the conclusion if you'd prefer.
since shinji is weak as shit, the grail has overtaken him in a fucked up mass of meat. the billions of curses are starting to spill out, and when the grail fully manifests that's just the apocalypse in a way that reads as vaguely much worse than kotomine's omnicidal wish.
so while shirou dukes it out with gilgamesh with his infinite sword power (his ultimate blade works if you will), rin goes trudge through cursed mud to save shinji (i really wouldn't bother) and saber unleashes the last of her energy to destroy the grail, vanishing back to her time.
ubw has two endings, labeled in the spreadsheet as true and good, which is pretty weird but like yeah it makes sense. the good ending reads like a fix-it fic type of thing.
you get the true end, brilliant years, by spending time with rin whenever possible, basically. it's a month after the war, everything's fine, it's the last day of school and shirou and rin just kinda talk about their kinda ambiguous relationship. rin's teaching him magic and he wants to become a proper mage. she wants to do magerly things in london after graduating and invites him to go with her. it's just kinda sweet.
for the good end, sunny day, you gotta neglect rin and spend time with saber instead. there's a fun scene where they talk about the food she likes lol. and some foreshadowing for the next route too. anyway this one takes place the day after that final battle, and... saber's here, chilling in her casual clothes, despite the grail's destruction. rin's kept her contract with her and she's just hanging out as her familiar. no het explanation for this girl's actions. and they were roommates type shit. uh anyway obviously without the grail as an energy source, the only ways a heroic spirit can remain on earth are through eating people or through eating people. shame this innuendo only works in portuguese. so yeah omggg shirou has to help out teeheee. wonder how this reads if you don't have the h-scene context... whatever i'm choosing to ignore everything except the yuriful potential. nods sagely.
and with that, it's time to answer the last question: can this vn still be good? i for the most part liked ultimate blade works. keeping the shonen comparisons, i think it's something like the first season of demon slayer. since we already kinda have the basic reveals, there's more focus on the explanations and context behind the characters and the war. some of that context is kinda stupid though ngl. archer's whole deal is kind of an eyeroll from me.
and the romance here sucks and feels super tacked on. it truly could have been excised with no consequence, and it makes both endings feel rather unsatisfying and flat. honestly it's really not rin's route. if anything it's archer's [9]. there's also two whole damsel in distress moments, with saber and rin. ughhh it's just so lame.
route time: around 18h. total time: around 55h30 plus some 15 mins for the last episode
and we get to the third girl (agatha christie reference). sakura has been pretty absent so far, being taken out of the story pretty early on on both saber and rin's routes — makes sense, given that she's not a mage, right? as her brother loves to bring up, there's no reason for a younger child, and a daughter at that, to learn about magic. sakura's a regular wholesome girl that has nothing to do with the holy grail war and it's actually quite weird that she'd be the last route of the game, innit?
i was really anticipating and also dreading heaven's feel. anticipating because i really wanted to know how sakura was important and connected to the war. dreading because i knew it had a lot of h-scenes (not this game's strong suit), and i suspected her a victim of sexual abuse that wouldn't be handled well. and because i found her shallow character and plain devotion to shirou insufferable, and had no hopes of it being subverted.
well. we'll find everything out in time. let's get to it.
heaven's feel thankfully doesn't retread the start of the other routes. it's not just because sakura isn't really in the other routes, it starts off doing new things with the servants. i think it makes great use of the game's linear branch structure.
to set the scene: before learning anything about the war, shirou takes sakura home and meets her grandfather, someone he doesn't know exists, and certainly didn't live with the matou siblings when he visited them last year. he seems to know the name emiya, and asks him about illya eizbern.
so when rin proposes an alliance, shirou goes "ok cool but we're not fighting illya, right? there's something about her idk" and rin refuses. so they have this vague truce but she's a bit less present.
the other notable thing about the first few days is that servants are falling like flies. rider, assassin and caster die with basically no ceremony. and interestingly, what kills assassin is... the true assassin, clawing out of his body. we already knew things weren't right with sasaki kojirou assassin since he'd been summoned by another servant, and now that reveal really pays off. this is what i mean by a good use of the structure: it's not really a timeloop thing where different choices (based on knowledge or items [like in yu-no]) change the outcomes, they're more like entirely different events that aren't really under anyone's control.
despite that... i found my patience wearing thin with the game. and that's kinda to be expected, forty hours is a lot. but i wasn't getting nearly enough sakura development. in fact, when we get a sakura pov interlude it's all about how hot shirou and how she wants him all to herself and guilty masturbation [10]. get fuckeddd honestly but this is how i'll segue to the sex talk.
in this route we have frankly the natural development of ignoring a character's everything just to place her in a sex scene with our protagonist: the first h-scene is a dream sequence with rin tohsaka. "huh? wuh??" and so on. he wakes up with a fever too, so there's something afoot [11].
sakura has also been ill and feverish. zouken matou has extended his lifespan with penis shaped worms. ever since the whole tantric sex thing i had the dreadful suspicion shiji was raping sakura to obtain magical energy despite lacking a circuit — he certainly abuses his sister both verbally and physically. it's not looking good for her.
and yes. shinji does rape sakura, but that's unrelated. he laso coerces her into giving him control of rider. oh yes, sakura is rider's legitimate master, which isn't very surprising: we've seen her hide a bruise just like shirou had before it became the command spells (we've seen her recognize his bruise even) and we know shinji isn't a mage at all (his command spells are even a book, instead of part of his body).
as for how sakura is a strong mage when the matou have been in such decline that shinji has no magic at all, she's actually a tohsaka, rin's sister. mage families only train one heir, and as such she has been adopted out to the matou eleven years ago. personally, i think this is kind of a cop-out.
and eleven years ago, zouken implanted one of his penis worms into her magical circuit, feeding off her energy (hence her illness coinciding with the war — she has to supply both her servant and her parasite) and giving himself control over her. the game does not shy away from the fact she was sexually abused. i'd rather that statement not be immediately followed by the priest saying "sakura is not a pure virgin, but a woman who knows men"
, a sentiment that sakura echoes in her self-loathing.
and it goes without saying that this serves as motivation for shirou to be even more of a knight in shining armor towards sakura. a superhero, in his words. on the other hand, for a while we have rin fully intending to kill sakura as part of the war, since her puppet status makes her particularly dangerous, and rider has already attacked innocents for magical energy (the fact that was under shinji's orders seem not to matter). it's fucking wack is what it is.
...it goes doubly without saying that all of this (including a partial removal of the worm by the priest) is followed by an h-scene where sakura's like "oooh my worm is hungry for more magical energy, i need magus semen". that's 3/5 h-scenes with this premise so far, if you're counting. i am, and i'll give you the final count later.
the scene is above all utterly tasteless in its timing and presentation. if you're writing a character who's been literally and metaphysically abused by her adoptive family since childhood, for over a decade, you better be fucking careful. writing it so said abuse makes her all but require semen is 1) horrifying, like literal horror story type shit; 2) particularly delicate to put in your eroge about king arthur and hercules having shonen battles. to write a scene where she says "shirou look how disgusting and lewd and impure my body and my arousal are" before riding the protag's dick is just fucking tasteless.
and don't misunderstand me: i think sakura's self loathing is fine, to be expected from her situation honestly. but she's already so one-note and the emphasis being put into it... i think this is all just lurid. many things in this route feel like they're going for shock value, and while that's all fine and good for some of the plot twists and servant deaths and stuff, sakura absolutely should have been handled better. not to mention the "her life is a nightmare but just being near shirou is her only happiness :)" angle.
the only reason this scene wasn't worse is that, if you'll remember, the women in this game lose all personality when it comes to the sex scenes. so this is just the same average poorly written sex and the specifics of sakura's relationship to said sex get put aside [12].
we're still only halfway through the route btw.
so. let's put the sensitive topic away for a bit (it'll absolutely come back though) and go back to the shonen. i'm giving you a spoiler warning out of idk routine obligation. but you shouldn't heed it very much honestly.
this is your first spoiler warning. jump to the conclusion if you'd prefer.
so. saber fucking dies in this route.
okay. remember true assassin? guy who's been killing servants and eating their hearts with his long and nasty hand? he's zouken's servant, obviously. zouken's wish is to become truly immortal, since you can only penis worm so much. after five hundred years, he's constantly rotting.
he's also usually accompanied by this shadowy thing that seems to be evil incarnate and just fucking consumes servants, and is also draining regular people's energy at a scale even larger than caster's (it's so bad that gilgamesh of all people is worried about it). assassin lures saber into a trap and the shadow just consumes her. it's day 8 and saber's dead. worth noting that assassin does not eat her heart.
uh yeah. the whole sakura reveal slots in after that. shinji kidnaps sakura to get her to summon rider for him again and lure shirou out and kill him. rider covertly helps shirou out while beating him up so he can save sakura, and she revokes the false command spell. shinji still tries to get her to fight in his stead, but she refuses, triggering the worm that eats her from the inside [13]. so yeah this is when all that stuff to do with the worm happens.
so now sakura is more officially a master for the sake of the narrative, despite not wanting to fight, and wanting shirou not to fight, for his own safety. he can't abide by that because he's the protagonist, and also now he has a reason to pursuit the grail, since that's pretty much the only way to save sakura since the worm is so deeply entangled with her body. and with sakura comes more rider screentime, which is a big win for rider enjoyers like me. i haven't sung her praises before and i apologize. i like rider a lot :). i could not call her personality extant in the story so far, but she got my sympathy immediately from having to endure shinji. and while she has this very cold and serious demeanor she has moments where she shows some agency and is kinda nice and idk. sometimes you latch onto a side character. i'm glad for the extra slice of life moments we get with her. my blunt and not-good-with-people queen.
since he's still in the war, he needs allies, and it's gotta be illya. hopefully she won't be dead when he arrives at the castle this time lol.
she's not, but she's under attack from assassin and the shadow and a secret third thing... saber. or rather, shadow the saberhog black saber (better known on the wiki as saber alter), a changed and evil version of her with a cunty black and red armor and sword. on account of the evil shadow mud that got her ass.
we'll worry about saber later, because the thing for now is that shadow. it also gets shirou's ass a bit and he loses an arm and a dying archer offers his own as a graft (since they're the same person). kotomine does it because he's in surgeon duty this route. he uses a shroud to seal it and warns shirou that since the arm is so much more powerful than him, he can't really use it lest he be consumed and lose himself. it's a whole thing, he loses some chunks of time and all.
the second thing about the shadow is that it's devouring the town. and we get some interludes of its hunt that are... worrying.
so, remember how i said this route has a lot of h-scenes? besides the dream sequence, there are three. all with sakura, with the same magical energy premise (grand total isssss 5 out of 7). the third is really brief and nightmarish because shirou has the arm going on and he has not been well in the sex scenes in this route. it can't be justified by the mere act of energy transfer since he's done it before and it wasn't particularly draining.
sakura hasn't been well either, despite the worm-feeding sex. she's still collapsing all the time. she's not herself. her scenes and internal dialogue are monomaniacally focused on her suffering, how she believes she deserve to die but is to weak to do it herself. her nightmares of the shadow hunting and consuming. and ultimately her murder at gilgamesh's hands during one of these "nightmares", the shadow an evil so profound that even the big bad of the previous two routes needs to stop it. the death doesn't stick btw.
and you know what's funny? i had sakura pegged as a vessel for suffering before learning that she is quite literally a vessel. zouken took the fragments from the grail of the last war and embedded them into her, making her a holy grail just like illyasvel, a container for the souls of defeated servants, and ultimately a means to his immortality that'd die in the process. she's collected most souls instead of illya, and essentially there's no room for all of that plus her self. her obliteration is inevitable.
and the fucked up shadow that's killing people? that's the contents of the grail, more or less, giving form to something like sakura's shadow self. it acts out without her knowledge, but ultimately following her desires.
so sakura half-consciously using the shadow to kill her brother as he rapes her — as he has done for years —, is framed as her snapping and giving in to the evil shadow. which is in turn her grandfather's wish. jumping a bit to the last day, the power sakura gets from her evil transformation is what finally enables her to fully extract the worm from herself. the worm is zouken's main body btw, in case the whole situation wasn't horrible enough.
heaven's feel is fucked. sakura as this unhinged evil madwoman (who's also obsessed with shirou. for the record) is just such a tasteless fucking twist. and i love unhinged evil madwomen, but i cannot let go of the sequence of events leading up to that. sakura has been mostly absent from the game except as a vague cute kouhai, then had some utsuge bullshit happen to her throughout her whole route, only to have her character development replaced by "losing her mind" to evil possession. she's broken by her abuse and never allowed to be anything else.
heaven's feel has some high highs, i'll grant it that. i liked the shift into definite horror territory. but good god any coolness is undercut and impossible to really salvage from the misogynystic trainwreck that is the character of sakura matou.
last spoiler warning. jump to the conclusion if you'd like.
in fact, by day 14 i was sick of the hype moments and aura. it felt kinda fucked to me to have shirou epicly fight berserker alter with the power of archer's arm. i mostly skipped through this scene. idk, it felt so tonally inappropriate to have a jjba style power-scaling confrontation after sakura becoming a twist (of sorts) villain in the way she did. i wanted to rip the bandaid off.
so let's do it.
the reason the grail is cursed is that the eizbern summoned an illegal eighth servant during the third war (this game concerns the fifth war). avenger, angra mainyu, is the embodiment of all evil in the world ever, and he tainted the grail's magical energy. that's what's possessing sakura, and he'll manifest through her. it's a little unclear to me how much of her evil self is literally just the brewing evil, i view it as a holy spirit type thing (← raised catholic).
well okay so shirou, rin and rider go have their final faceoff with sakura in a cave underground where angra mainyu will be born. rider and shirou fight saber while rin goes ahead, to have a sister to sister talk and battle. rin has an opportunity to kill her but she can't do it, getting grievously wounded instead. the sisterly bonding kinda brings sakura's sanity / sense of self back. it all really hammers home how good it'd have been to have rin as a protagonist. and this is where we stand as shirou gets to sakura after defeating saber:
she's refusing it.
sakura's refusing the shadow.
she's hating herself, refusing the temptations from the shadow, and trying to kill herself.
to the end, sakura is defined by her self-hatred and utter suffering.
shirou projects medea's contract breaking dagger to sever the bond between sakura and avenger. it's a bit late to actually stop him though. rider takes sakura and rin to safety while shirou deals with the proper big bad. kotomine is here again for that, talking about good and evil and shit. whatever man.
we're heading towards the true end of heaven's feel. shirou fights kotomine. we have an intermission.
it's from zouken's pov. vaso ruim não quebra.
illya appears, in the ceremonial holy dress which is kinda like a slutty pope minidress which is insane. she asks him why he doesn't want to die. and we get the reason why he sought the grail in the first place. "there's only one thing he dreamed of. to eliminate all evils of this world"
. sighh. and then he dies for good.
kotomine has been dying for a bit (not unlike shirou), so he collapses. shirou is about to use his last strength to project a sword to destroy angra mainyu, but illya sacrifices herself instead, destroying the tainted great holy grail [14] for good.
the "return to dream" epilogue gives us rin's pov back yay. two years have passed, and she's living in london because of the magic association etc, and visiting japan. rider's here!! wooo!! even if i think it's kinda goofy for her to stick around as a familiar, i can't complain. i love her casual clothes... turtleneck and glasses... lesbo-himejoshi interlude: rin agrees.
also ugh shirou's alive and well. more or less. he did die badly but illya revived his soul in a new body. can't have shit. at least sakura is happy and it's not completely framed as a tradwifey thing. i'm taking the smallest victories but taking them.
as for the other ending — "cherry blossoms' dream", the normal end — shirou does project the sword to destroy the grail himself. we get sakura's pov for the epilogue. she wakes up with a hazy memory of pretty much everything after the last h-scene. "i'm freed from the chains that bound me for eleven years, but i lost my only guide"
. this epilogue is all sakura's memories of shirou and growing old still thinking to atone for her grievous sins of killing people due to being possessed by all the evil in the world after being raped literally and metaphysically. it's lame and miserable. whatever. i didn't expect the game to redeem itself by this point.
there's also kind of a third ending here, because réalta nua added an extra epilogue after getting all five endings. it's like. a saber amv. tbh. followed by her (in some sort of limbo?) pining for shirou and wishing to meet him again. then shirou and saber both wake up in a beautiful field and you can't fucking speed up or skip text here and i don't caaaare. saber is irrecognizably dainty in these cgs and it's just a stupid happy ending for the hets. who gives a shit.
i have nowhere else to put this and also let's have a little positivity break. i liked the art and music and voice acting. there aren't many cgs (much less unique ones), and i think not that many songs either, but that never really stands out or gets repetitive. the sprites have a lot of little expressions and they're positioned pretty dynamically, and the cgs also get some cool movement / position animations for action scenes. it makes the whole thing come together quite well. it's very good from a technical standpoint without feeling "overworked".
and again, it does have some good and cool moments, and ultimate blade works was even more or less good. i didn't dislike the game enough to drop it. but if you came here from skipping spoilers i'll let you know i don't recommend playing this game for yourself. so i personally think there's no harm in going back and reading what happens. it'll better contextualize what i have to say.
that being said. well. it's impossible to ignore the misogyny here, seeping through the game's pores, even before heaven's feel. oh some characters are purposefully sexist, whatever, but fact of the matter is that the writing hates women. it's so impactful it became my main axis of analysis, and entirely eclipsed the petty matters of the the overarching plot with the holy grail war (the chuunige all encompassing Ultimate Evil nature of it all is not something i'm fond of anyway). it's time to properly address the title of this post.
when you center women it really isn't hard to come to the same conclusion i did: while shirou emiya has his two weeks of shonen protagonist action, the women around him are going through varying degrees of gendered horror at the hands of The Narrative. i believe that's the premise of kevin can fuck himself. and also real life.
it's only natural that the romantic targets of each route would be the most affected, and the h-scenes the height of horror for each. that's how it goes: heterosexuality and gender are always entangled, and sex is pure heterosexuality. if i were more committed this is where i'd seek out feminist authors to quote on this. but i've already read some 56 hours of this game and written 10k words about it. let me exorcise this as fast as possible.
the language used in the scenes is, overall, grotesque. yes, that word gets used a lot to describe the penis, but that's also the tone. sex in f/sn is a rather unpleasant affair. when it calls bodies "meat", the image it evokes isn't a juicy steak, but some silent hill shit.
it's like a simple up and down movement, but it's actually a pot of meat that wriggles around from time to time to stimulate my manhood.
my grotesque member is wet with foaming love juice. her contracting walls suck on my blood congested penis. (...) sakura's crotch is covered with something viscid and is reflecting light like something about to emerge from a pupa.
i suppose i may be kinda cheating by quoting from a sakura scene (heaven's feel being a route that leans more into horror on purpose), and this specific part of my thesis might be affected by recency bias, but we also have "her vulgar juice overflows from her crevice"
and the like. and the aforementioned "pain stuffing my meat"
. and well, here's from rin's scene:
it feels like i'm ripping it rather than inserting it. her flesh is tearing as i push in further. (...) no, i'm wrenching open her pussy using my wet weapon.
and look. i need to add the caveat that these scenes are not officially translated. the fate franchise is now only allowed proximity to sex via bikini images on the gacha game grand order, since objectification doesn't count. but am i to believe these all arose fully-formed from the mind of the translator? if any japanese speaker has input on this, my email is solflo [at] pm [dot] me and i'd genuinely love to hear it.
and do the specifics even matter, in the end? there's a consistent thread of pain and discomfort happening to women in these scenes. the inserted penis is a foreign object, being rejected and pushed out by the vagina. and i've already talked about how saber is (de)characterized on her second scene, which also has the quote "i don't know if she's tired, but her eyes are empty and they're not focused on anything"
. honestly it feels like their orgasms are incidental to the whole proceedings.
because it's all about shirou, as a conduit for the presumed-male (and cishet) reader. because that's what's driving the characterization of these women, in particular the three heroines. their growth comes not from their own actions, but from being in his orbit. it's always the love interest shackle, though these characters are barely independent to begin with. it's a man's world, it's a man's story, and these women are trapped in it, and it's horrifying to see.
fate/stay night is full of women that are not people, but it's uninterested in what that could actually mean for them. saber is literally nonhuman in her role of servant [15], sakura is dehumanized as she's made into a grail, illya might not have been human to begin with [16]. the narrative ultimately spares rin of this fate, but she does have this quote, "the duty of a mage family is to take someone born as a person and, through long years of training, change them into something else"
(and some other similar moments) which shows some interest in this theme and could have been expanded upon imo. yes i am biased.
and especially when it comes to saber and sakura... saber goes from not being a person (because a king can't be a person) to being a different kind of non-person (a woman). sakura is only ever a woman, even as a child. would a son be treated as a pure vessel and tool the way she was? don't make me laugh.
also: remember sakura is a member of the fucking archery club? i wouldn't blame you for forgetting. why the hell does that never come up. idk she didn't need to be katniss everdeeing it up all the time but the story would do well to remember that she has more stuff going on in her life than sexual violence and shirou.
everything about this game smacks of gender. it drove me nuts. and it boils down to: none of this would be an issue if rin tohsaka was allowed to be the lesbian protagonist she is to me.
so. that's fate/stay night (2004). i'm sick of this bloody game. i don't even wanna discuss the whole "oneself as an ideal" bullshit because i don't wanna think about shirou. i gave it a 6 on vndb. hope you enjoyed going on this ride with me. you can toss me a couple bucks on ko-fi so i can buy the fate ip and remake this game but lesbianly.
and if you wanna read a long ass visual novel that actually cares about women and grapples with misogyny, go read umineko.
[1]: i knowww that's the point of his character arc. his desperate desire to save Everyone at his own expense, as if his life is the only one to be worthless, is pointed out as a flaw multiple times throughout the game. but just because it's a justifiable choice doesn't make it all any less trite in my eyes. i'm so sorry but i hate his stupid survivor's guilt too. how could you have saved anyone. you were seven. i know damn well that on paper this sounds like a cool tragedy but since it happened to shirou emiya thog don't caare, it sounds like going to a job interview and saying your biggest flaw is that you work too hard. i hate him.
[2]: i don't mention that for horny reasons but because i refused to give up on the game until i saw a nipple (and read its accompaning text) so i could judge my friend's opinion that it's not a good eroge. i don't think he's even seen this scene organically, because he says he only played some ten hours (that was around the time i saw saber's bare ass for the first time btw. 10h24 to be precise. yes i kept track.) and he's a self-declared slow reader. so his assessment might be based on the lack of erotic content. i'll ask for his testimonial [2b].
[2b]: his words: "that's just what people who'd played told me. when i started playing i didn't know it was eroge, then i didn't like the beginning and dropped it"
. so i just got secondhand information... well. those people were right. it's not good eroge.
[3]: if a tsundere connoisseur says she's one and he'd beeline to her route then i sit my ass down and listen. i suppose. also yeah maybe the first quote in the tsundere page on the dere types fandom wiki is by rin. but we'll fucking get to that next paragraph.
[4]: it's kinda funny that this route has some kinda yaoiful moments between shirou and archer. i say this in jest and just because archer princess carries shirou out of danger in a fight. this will become funnier a few hundred words from now.
[5]: as a self-appointed pervert lesbian with a gun, i say caster is absolutely sexy and a good and fun antagonist. i love being biased. i think she's truly compelling as a character though.
[6]: uh i haven't talked about them yet, have i? shinji matou is sakura's older brother, he's shirou's classmate. and rider's master. he comes from a family of mages, one of the Three Founding Families in fact, but their power has dwindled and he doesn't even have a magic circuit so he cannot perform magic. so far, we don't know how he summoned rider.
[7]: i could have mentioned this (and the previous note) during saber's route, but it wasn't really relevant info then. i'm not good at summaries, you should have seen me try to explain just the first route at the bar. it took over an hour. point is, i'm giving info as it becomes relevant to the things i wanna talk about. if i don't control the flow of information like that we're gonna be all day and it's gonna be so fucking overwhelming for you.
[8]: "why's he an archer though?" you can only summon one of each class and uhhh shirou used to be in archery club at school. don't worry kitten. that's also why gilgamesh is an archer (well idk about the school club thing though). maybe they should have just made saber a different class or something. or make gilgamesh a berserker and EMIYA a caster (though that may make his identity too obvious), and possibly make the freed up archer class into a second magic class for someone like medea to inhabit (or, better yet, warlock EMIYA and keep caster medea). because as it is they don't even really use bows in the game so what's the point lmao. what i'm saying is that there were options.
[9]: "is ultimate blade works fundamentally about selfcest yaoi", the greatest thread in the history of forums—
[10]: ok fine it's not all about that necessarily: it (day 8) rather mirrors the day 5 h-scene, with this idea of lust invading and attacking our characters from within. heaven's feel does lean more towards a "proper" eroge than the other two routes, imo. though of the erotic horror persuasion. but more about this on the upcoming sex subsection!
[11]: also because of the fever we have sakura doting on shirou housewife style and god how i wish this girl would just fucking snap.
[12]: mostly: later i'll discuss my half-facetious reading of fate's horrible descriptions of sex as part of the horror these scenes are for the women. the insistence on "grotesque meat"
isn't normal.
[13]: his method is drenching her in aphrodisiac, but the worm also activates when sakura neglects her role as a master regardless, so it feels like a weird and unnecessary addition this scene.
[14]: the great holy grail being the platonic grail that gets manifested into the "earthen" grails like illya during the war.
[15]: same goes for caster and rider, who could have been interesting to explore further, as comparison to saber. especially since rider is Thee allied servant in heaven's feel. as servants are kinda matched in nature to the masters who summon them, she could also have been a good way to develop sakura, were nasu interested in doing that at all. and to me caster's motivation and portrayal are very gendered as well. yes, she's kinda an archetypical seductress witch, but the fact that she claws herself some semblance of agency within this war where she must be the instrument of someone else's will? well.
[16]: i think she's always referred to as an homunculus, but she's also shirou's sister. older sister specifically, despite looking younger. the wiki says she is a homunculus but was conceived and born same as anyone else but that's info from zero and hollow ataraxia and outside my purview.