It is time to bid farewell to Fate/Stay Night: Unlimited Blade Works. In many ways it almost feels like this is the animators saying goodbye as well as the audience. With Fate/Zero the pieces on the board have to be in a very specific state for the game to resume in Fate/Stay Night therefore you don’t have that much room to maneuver in. Here other than Fate/hollow ataraxia, which has a very deliberately fuzzy timeline, you really only have to hit a few key points to wrap things up. Everything past that is in the interpenetration of the last few pages of the visual novel. If episode 24 was almost religiously devoted to reproducing the climax of Unlimited Blade Works then the epilogue seems the most devoted to Ufotable wanting to leave their mark on how they want to be remembered as storytellers telling a narrative that is not of their inception but one they have made their own.
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Lies, lies, I can’t believe a word you say.

So I was wrong. I thought I could get this post out in time. Then life hit me square in the jaw. My apologies to my small, but dedicated, audience. Hopefully despite all the work on my plate I will be able to at least finish the epilogue episode in a proper fashion. We shall see. Only time will tell.

This is probably the most slavish I have seen the series be to the visual novel. Before this point I feel like Takahiro Miura went out of his way to stay true to the spirit of the visual novel while doing a good deal of work to bring out a bit of this own style where animation would let him express himself and add to the original narrative. You see that from all of the Ufotable staff to varying degrees. This was the first time I repeatedly saw very deliberate attempts to recreate iconic shots from the visual novel with as much fidelity as possible. It is not that Ufotable never tried that. The moment when Saber and Shiro first meet is almost always reproduced as closely as possible in any version to the Fate story (even when it is for comedic effect.) It is clear that they really wanted to capture the feel of the ending as closely as possible. At several points I felt like I was reading the visual novel again. It is not to say that nothing is modified or interpreted for anime. The final battle inside Unlimited Blade Works has a motion and dynamism that is only conveyed by the text in the original. It is just the first time the anime felt like it wanted to be as reverent as possible.

There are arguments about how good an idea this is with a decent amount of validity on both sides. Overall it seems they went with the most conservative option. I can’t really blame them for that. Considering how much flack I have seen the anime get for what it has changed or interpreted playing the ending fairly close to original did little to decrease those comments but it also did not aggravate them. Considering how much of a lasting impact the end of series has as opposed to the middle this decision will probably set a lot of the legacy of the series like it or not.

I’m personally curious to see how this all plays out when people look back on the series. Will it be remembered for what it added, what it removed, and/or what it changed and what sort of legacy will that be?
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