Fate/Stay Night Remastered review: The OG has finally arrived

For the past twenty years, Type Moon’s Fate series has been a major presence in anime and games. Fate/Grand Order has been one of the biggest forces in mobile gaming, arguably responsible for gacha-style games being as strong as they are to this day. Other games such as Fate/Extra and Fate/Extella have been niche hits, while various anime series and movies have seen global success. So it’s wild that the original work everything else has been based on hasn’t been available in an accessible format. Instead, fans have had to rely on fan translations that are difficult to install and get running properly without diving into forums and following cumbersome instructions.

2024 has been a game-changer for Type Moon. Not only did a localized remake of Tsukihime (the studio’s debut work) come out a few months ago, but as we close out the summer Aniplex has also published Fate/Stay Night Remastered. Either of these by themselves would be notable, but both of them hitting in the same year feels impossible. For the first time in history, English-speaking fans of the surrounding works can check out the original Fate/Stay Night visual novel with the ease of simply buying it on Steam or the Nintendo eShop. And for newcomers, there’s no better entry point than one of the best visual novels of its kind.

The Holy Grail War

Fate/Stay Night is about a seemingly normal high school kid, Shirou Emiya. The twist is he’s an orphan, and his adoptive father was a magus. Magic in this world is a brutal, scary force that defies nature, such that even just trying to use it can kill a person if they underestimate it. Barely able to practice a single spell, Shirou ends up getting wrapped up in the Holy Grail War, a fight to the death between powerful magi over a relic that can supposedly grant any wish. Participants summon Servants, the souls of people both real and imagined who made impacts throughout fiction and/or history.

Despite being a reluctant participant, Shirou ends up partnered with Saber, arguably the most powerful Servant one can get. What follows is a story about Shirou’s idealistic values clashing with a world of violence and ritual. As his relationship with Saber and other characters involved in the War develop, Shirou’s desire to defy the strict rules governing this contest grows stronger, and we see how far he’s willing to go to stick to his guns. Written by Kinoko Nasu, Fate/Stay Night’s greatest strength is its prose, which even breaks through the difficult barriers of translation and localization. Despite the game’s battle anime-style premise, there’s a level of intensity and depth to every facet of the text, from violence to emotion, that’s unmatched in the medium.

Branching paths

One of the coolest parts of Fate/Stay Night is how it features three distinct “routes.” Visual novels are often seen as Choose Your Own Adventure-type stories, with many choices that lead to alternate paths and bad endings. That’s true here, but in a different kind of way. Each route is essentially its own story, using the prologue as a springboard into alternative scenarios with totally different conflicts and outcomes. Each route even has its own anime adaptation, kind of. There’s Fate, Unlimited Bladeworks, and Heaven’s Feel, the former adapted into an anime series (that most folks don’t like much), and the latter into multiple movies that have been well-received. This is the source material for all those adaptations, all told in one package.

Bad endings are a big part of Fate/Stay Night, with many choices having a right answer, and a “you’re dead now” answer. There’s a fun gimmick though, in which you’re taken to a fourth wall-breaking room that helps explain to you why your choice was incorrect, helping you make the right choice and giving you some extra insight into the characters as a little bonus. This version of the game also offers a “Flowchart,” which helps you skip around the story easier and fill in things you missed. It’s a great addition, since back in the day you’d have to simply fast-forward through stuff you’ve read already.

Remastered reading

Fate/Stay Night is a visual novel as we’ve gone over, which means in this “game” all you’re really doing is reading. You make choices at times, but it’s all in service of going through each route and taking in the story. What makes the medium distinct is all the trappings that turn reading a novel into something resembling watching an anime or listening to an audio drama. There’s music, voice acting, VFX, and illustrations that help breathe life into Nasu’s already quite vivid text. The “remastered” part mostly comes in the form of usability, and widescreen visuals (the original game came out in the early aughts). The bones of this thing are from a PlayStation Vita port from 2012, but since this is the first time we get an official localization, the details aren’t super important.

What’s really nice, coming from someone who has played the original fan translation on PC, is how simple it is to run and use this new version. Old Japanese PC games are a pain in the butt for several reasons. Combine that with UI buttons roughly translated by hackers and spotty controller support and you’ve got yourself a somewhat janky experience. Here you can just use a controller, press a button to access a legible, smoothly functioning menu, and navigate things like saving, automation, galleries, and other little bits and pieces with ease. It’s so nice, especially if you put this version directly against the original. Many folks experiencing Fate/Stay Night for the first time won’t know what they missed, and that’s absolutely for the best.

The bottom line is that Fate/Stay Night is a keystone work in a genre that’s never been more popular on our side of the globe. For decades, it seemed like this historically important (and good as heck by itself anyway) visual novel would never be readily available and professionally localized like this. Anyone with an interest in anime, gaming, and alternative forms of digital storytelling owes it to themselves to check this story out. It’s one of the all-time greats, and if you do take the time (and it does take a lot of time), you’ll easily understand why Fate is such a big deal nowadays. And if this is your first time, welcome to one of the most absurd, yet rewarding rabbit holes you can dive into.

Fate/Stay Night Remastered is available now for the PC and Nintendo Switch. A PC code was provided by the publisher for this review.

Lucas White

Contributing Editor

Lucas plays a lot of videogames. Sometimes he enjoys one. His favorites include Dragon Quest, SaGa, and Mystery Dungeon. He's far too rattled with ADHD to care about world-building lore but will get lost for days in essays about themes and characters. Holds a journalism degree, which makes conversations about Oxford Commas awkward to say the least. Not a trophy hunter but platinumed Sifu out of sheer spite and got 100 percent in Rondo of Blood because it rules. You can find him on Twitter @HokutoNoLucas being curmudgeonly about Square Enix discourse and occasionally saying positive things about Konami.