Fate Stay Night (2006) - So, you want to watch the Fate Route?

 I finished rewatching Studio DEEN's Fate/Stay Night adaptation from 2006. Here's a low spoiler review.

First off, Rest in Peace to the anime director of Fate/Stay Night, Yuji Yamaguchi.

Fate/Stay Night (2006) was my first Fate anime, so there may be some biases.

A super underrated and misunderstood adaptation, it's our only adaptation of the Fate route, many people tell you to skip it, but the Fate route is actually very, very important, and has some of the best character moments, sure, it can be cheezy, but isn't every Type-Moon work cheezy? That's why we love Fate. 

Deen's adaptation perfectly portrays the mysterious aspect of Fate/Stay Night, contrary to Ufotable's more bombastic and "movie-like" adaptation, of course, both are valid, they just portray different perspectives in the grand story of Fate.

A lot of people complain about the animation, sure, the CGI dragon was wack, but most anime CGI is iffy, of course the animation isn't as good as ufotable's adaptation, ufotable literally only does one 12 episode anime per year, they can spend more time and aren't as constrained budget-wise. Most animation studios can't compare to ufotable in terms of sheer animation quality and consistency

Though.. I feel as though many anime fans have a bias against Deen, I'm not the most familiar with Deen's works, but from what I've seen, their character designs are always great. Fate Stay/Night is not an exception, the character designs are simple, portray the character well, and are very nostalgic feeling, in my opinion, portray much more emotion than their designs in the Ufotable adaptations, many scenes in Deen's adaptation are actually animated really well, have unique coreography

The adaptation also spliced in many moments from the Unlimited Blade Works and Heaven's Feel route.. but it's not all bad? We get to see more development for Shinji, Sakura, Rin, and Caster in this route. I feel like splicing in moments from other routes is a very interesting thing to do. A visual novel is much longer than an anime, so an anime will never be able to 100% faithfully adapt a VN, especially now since animes are 12 eps per cour, and the anime medium doesn't allow for us to see the inner thoughts of characters, especially the main character as much as VNs, think about it this way, in the anime, you watch Shirou, while in the VN, you ARE Shirou.

The last thing I will be talking about is the music, the music is simply phenomenal, the anime implements both original music composed by Kenji Kawai, and music from the Visual Novel by Keita Haga. Tracks like Unmei no Yoru, and Kishi Ou no Hokori are amazing, and portray the mysterious feeling of Fate. The first opening is "Disillusion" the same as the Visual Novel, this version is sung by Sachi Tanaka, the lyrics: "Isn"t it enough to live for someone else, and let this moment be all there is?" Mean a lot in the story, don't they? The Ending songs are very beautiful too. The visuals in the OP/ED are very mysterious, which aligns with the atmosphere of Deen's adaptation.

Fate/Stay Night is a great adaptation that I believe every fan getting into Fate should watch. I've always believed the Fate anime to be a supplement to the Visual Novel, but I understand many people don't want to invest so much time into a VN, so they watch the anime instead.

Please, don't skip this anime. I'm sure you will enjoy it.

I'll be rewatching the Unlimited Blade Works Deen adaptation next, look out for that review, too.