Despite having the same premise, Fate stay/night: Unlimited Blade Works definitely has a different vibe than its predecessor…somewhat for the worse, I think.

I think the tone is so different because, in Fate/Zero, nearly everyone seemed like a Holy Grail War professional. Meanwhile, the masters in this iteration feel relatively messy. After all, three of them are high school students that act like high school students, one of them isn’t even interested in the war, and one of them breaks the rules all the time.

I think the biggest frustration with the Masters is that they keep sparing each other for seemingly no reason; at least, most times it feels like a genuine reason isn’t given. After a point, I expected it to the point where encounters stopped feeling like they had any weight to them. Sure, they flesh out relationships between characters, but that meaning was overshadowed by “Why did you let them go?”

Most of the Masters are less compelling in this one because the format focuses on Shirou and Rin a lot more. Fate/Zero had a focus on two characters, but it wasn’t as dominant. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; I like Shirou and Rin!

Shirou is The Goodest Boy, which made him pretty easy to like. He talks about wanting to save everyone A LOT though; it makes you wonder if they were afraid the viewer would somehow forget his ideals. It gets annoying but at least I get why they did it.

Meanwhile, Rin is more professional and tsundere at times. But I think Rin's tsundere side is written well. I think most tsunderes are written to act like like just for the sake of it, but Rin’s tsundere nature comes from her actually trying to be antagonistic towards people...but not being able to bring herself to do it. The two being paired together in an alliance worked out surprisingly well, I think.

However, the rest of the cast suffer. Generally they feel like they exist just so Shirou and/or Rin have someone to bounce off of. I had to look up a list of Masters and Servants for this review just to make sure I was remembering all of them correctly. This is partially because, as mentioned, the cast and their relationships aren’t as straightforward as Fate/Zero. However, I think they’re forgettable because they don’t get as much screentime as Shirou and Rin. In a “battle royale” setting where the intrigue comes from the idea that anyone could win, a heavy focus on a character or two from the get-go makes it hard to imagine anyone else will make it to the end.

Despite these issues, characters’ abilities, events, and fights are far from boring. Most of the characters were enjoyable enough to root for; only one character is downright unlikable and two were heavily underutilized (which apparently isn’t as much of an issue in the visual novel). I enjoyed the experience even if it’s hard for me to not compare it to Fate/Zero.