Fate Stay Night's "New Fourth Route"

Today, some more information about the upcoming Ufotable remake of Fate/Stay Night arrived. I must say that I've got some mixed feelings here. Honestly, I think that every Type Moon fan in the world was expecting an adaptation of Heaven's Feel. But rather than a Heaven's Feel adaptation, we got news that it's going to be a brand new story by Nasu, with an atmosphere closer to Fate/Zero than Fate/Stay Night. What do I think? I guess I'll list off my hopes and concerns here.

On the plus side, and let's start with the big picture, the two major reasons I, as a fan of Fate/Stay Night, want a good anime adaptation are as follows: 1. To see the amazing scenes of the visual novel (specifically action scenes, but also ones that would benefit from being animated - such as the hilarious mapo tofu scene) brought to the screen, 2. To enlighten new viewers into the awesomeness of the franchise.

Making something that is a whole new route could manage both of these. I think Heaven's Feel would probably be the best choice. They tried a heavy focus on Fate and that one ended up alienating many non-fans and making fans cringe due to the poor animation quality; then UBW was made as a movie that was pretty to look at but literally impossible for people who don't know the story to enjoy.  Also, there's the fact that Fate/Zero was so explosively popular that there are some people in the fanbase who refer to Gilgamesh as "Archer." Adapting something other than Heaven's Feel would bring people asking questions, mostly, "Where's Zouken?" But adapting Heaven's Feel would also have the Zero fanbase slightly upset I think, since Saber is largely ignored through that route - in fact, the Grail War itself is largely ignored. In less than a few days of Heaven's Feel, most of the Servants are gone.

So I would think that a new route would be able to patch up these points in the story, since the original visual novel is not meant to be taken separately. Each path builds on the story before it. But for an anime, that means adapting a single path will guarantee that the viewer doesn't get the entire thing and there more than likely will be questions left that are answered in the alternate routes. For example, after the "Fate/Stay Night" anime adaptation, I think most people have a ton of questions on their mind. The original anime only spells out the identities of four Servants, Gilgamesh included (though my memory might be a bit foggy on this). Even Heaven's Feel has the majority of Servants remain unknown Compare it to Zero, where Servant identities are known right from the beginning.

By the way, some light spoilers... Uh, two seconds ago.

I think the issue with adapting Heaven's Feel as an anime would just be in that a new Fate series would want to bring in not just the Zero crowd, but an entirely new crowd. The trailer itself spells this out as "The story continued for next generation children." The more surefire way to do that is to make an adaptation on Stay Night that works well as an entirely self-contained story. I think that's the key to this. You know, whenever someone has an issue with the Stay Night anime adaptation, the answer is, "Well, read the visual novel because it's in there." Most anime fans don't really have the patience to go through a long visual novel, regardless of how freaking perfect it is. In order to placate the modern anime audience, something they can digest without needing prior knowledge of any kind is best.

Besides, when a good portion of all the routes of Fate/Stay Night is exposition of some kind, it makes for a really interesting visual novel, but animation requires a bit more flair. At the same token, since having Shirou's internal narration is essential to understand the things he does (that would probably look a bit dumb without knowing what he's thinking) in all the routes, the choice is either to have loads of narration in the anime that would probably get a tad aggravating or have Shirou's personality be only vaguely defined. The main issue, I think, with adapting a visual novel to anime - or at least one of Nasu's visual novels - is that lots of times the things the audience sees and hears are only a tiny bit of the whole picture. Making a story that can manage to work merely with what the audience sees and hears is essential for any anime - or, heck, any story.

Another thing that makes me support the idea of a new story is also that I should feel excited as a guy who already knows what happens in Fate, Unlimited Blade Works, and Heaven's Feel. When a "fourth route" comes up, it means that I'll be left to experience the entire thing for the first time all over again. The first question I thought was "who is the heroine going to be?" I personally am thinking it might be the long elusive Ilya route, but I hope it's not another Saber route. No offense to Saber fans, but she's far from my favorite girl in FSN and far from my favorite Servant. I still like her, but it's just that I like other characters way more. Anyway, a new story means that there'll be plenty more mystery, more drama, new comedy, and a metric asston more awesome scenes. But the only thing that's been confirmed so far is "new costumes." Whatever.

Maybe we'll get more Glasses Rin. I hope.

But unfortunately despite having these, my first impressions on this apparent fourth route don't come without issues... Honestly it's just my personal preference that gets in the way. Mostly that rabid Type Moon fans - MYSELF INCLUDED - will probably lynch Nasu if he doesn't give us something that can top "Nine Lives" or "Shirou vs. Kotomine" in terms of awesomeness. If it's poorly done, we'll probably be slamming our heads into the door screaming, "WHY COULDN'T YOU GO FOR THE GUARANTEED GAR?"

The major problem I have is them saying it will be "more serious like Fate/Zero." Let me tell you, I really hope that doesn't mean it'll have the same grimdark "everyone's a bastard" sort of mentality that Zero had. Don't get me wrong, I like Zero, it's just that I was not so much a fan of the atmosphere. The best parts of Zero were the Waver and Iskander moments, mostly since they felt the most human. Fate/Stay Night is not all about darkness. Even the serious moments of Heaven's Feel surround scenes like Rider being self-conscious about her height. And that's part of the charm - no matter what's going on, people will still be people. Even in the midst of a war, they'll have downtime and not all of that downtime will be spent doing serious stuff like preparing for the next fight.

All in all, I guess that you could say I'm hopeful for the upcoming anime project. Initially I was disappointed, perhaps even angry, that it wasn't Heaven's Feel. But now I'm just glad that the fans finally get a new anime that most likely will be good. Nasu's got a real hands-on approach so it'll probably have some high quality. It's a bit too early to judge at this point, since we only know that it's a new story with a serious tone. Until the series comes along, I'll try and refrain from being negatively biased. Maybe if it succeeds then we'll finally get that Heaven's Feel adaptation. Who knows?