Fate/stay night

• 1. Introduction

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  Fate/Stay Night began not as a game but as a story Kinoko Nasu wrote in college with no particular destination in mind. He only completed what would become one route out of three, set it aside in 1999, and then co-founded a small creative circle called Type-Moon with artist Takashi Takeuchi. The game that eventually emerged from that unfinished draft went on sale on the 30th of January 2004, and within the year had claimed the title of highest-selling visual novel on the adult game retailer Getchu.com. Two decades later, a remastered version arrived on Nintendo Switch and PC on the 8th of August 2024, marking the first official release of the visual novel outside Japan.

  What made a story that nearly never got finished into the foundation of a franchise grossing billions? How did a game built around a teenager named Shirou Emiya and a mysterious warrior called Saber become a cultural touchstone for an entire medium? And what does it mean that the game's three distinct routes can lead players through radically different emotional territory, from questions of idealism to the edge of horror?

• 2. The Boy and the War

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  Shirou Emiya is introduced as a hardworking teenager who survived a massive fire in Fuyuki City as a child, the sole survivor, later taken in by a retired mage named Kiritsugu Emiya. Kiritsugu had already died a few years before the story begins, leaving Shirou with a sense of obligation to those who perished and an earnest, if modest, gift for magecraft. His entry into the Fifth Holy Grail War is accidental. He witnesses two supernatural warriors fighting at his school and is chased home by the spear-wielding Lancer, nearly killed before a warrior named Saber intervenes.

  The Holy Grail War itself pits seven mages, called Masters, against each other, each accompanied by a heroic spirit called a Servant drawn from history and legend. Victory grants a single wish. Shirou's late guardian Kiritsugu had participated in an earlier war and, as the story eventually reveals, used his own Servant Saber to destroy the Grail in that conflict. Rather than granting a wish, that destruction caused the very fire that killed Shirou's family.

  The game's combat is not merely physical. Masters channel magical energy called Mana to their Servants, and a shortage of that energy limits a Servant's fighting capacity. Shirou's own magical circuits are severely limited, making him one of the weakest Masters in the War and forcing him to rely on ingenuity and alliances rather than raw power.

• 3. Three Routes, One Theme

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  Nasu settled on a central theme for the entire work: "conquering oneself." Each of the three routes expresses a different dimension of that idea. The Fate route carries the sub-theme of "oneself as an ideal"; Unlimited Blade Works is "struggling with oneself as an ideal"; and Heaven's Feel is "the friction with real and ideal." These are not arbitrary labels but structural commitments that shape what each route withholds and what it forces into the open.

  In the Fate route, Shirou fights alongside Saber and eventually learns that the Holy Grail is cursed. Saber, whose true identity is kept secret until the appropriate moment, was the victor of the previous war. When she ultimately rejects the Grail and accepts her own past, the route closes on a question about whether wishes should be granted at all.

  Unlimited Blade Works introduces Rin Tohsaka, described as a model student publicly and secretly a mage. Her Servant, Archer, is revealed to be an adult version of Shirou from an alternate timeline, bitter and disillusioned about the hero's path Shirou is only beginning. Archer challenges Shirou directly, hoping to extinguish that ideal before it hardens into the same misery Archer carries. Shirou refuses to abandon Kiritsugu's values regardless. The True Ending of that route sees Shirou and Rin move to London to study magecraft together.

  Heaven's Feel centers on Sakura, a quiet first-year student who is later revealed as Rin's long-lost sister, raised under abuse by the Matou family. She is infected with the malevolent entity Angra Mainyu and becomes Dark Sakura. Shirou, having fallen in love with her, abandons his abstract ideal of saving everyone in order to save one specific person. The darker tone of this route led reviewers to compare it to the horror genre.

• 4. A Draft That Sat for a Decade

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  Japanese writer Futaro Yamada's historical fantasy novel Makai Tensho gave Nasu the core impulse: a story where famous heroic figures from around the world could meet and clash. In Nasu's early conception, Saber was a man embodying King Arthur, and the Master was a woman. By 1999 Nasu had completed roughly a third of what would become the Fate arc, reaching as far as the battle with Sasaki Kojiro, before personal reasons halted the project for more than ten years.

  When Nasu and Takeuchi returned to the material after the commercial success of their first visual novel Tsukihime in 2000, a new problem emerged. Takeuchi worried that a female protagonist would not work in the bishōjo game market, where players typically project themselves onto a male lead. His solution was to swap the genders of the protagonist and Saber. That original version, with a female master and a male Saber, was eventually released as the short original video animation Fate/Prototype, bundled with the final volume of the Carnival Phantasm OVA series.

  By 2002, the written material had grown to roughly the length of Tsukihime, prompting discussions about releasing the game in two separate products. The cost of doing so made that impractical. The routes covering Illya and Sakura were partially merged to produce the Heaven's Feel arc as it exists today. In that same year, Takeuchi suggested bringing in Gen Urobuchi, already a well-known author of Nitroplus visual novels, to contribute to the scenario. Urobuchi declined. Nasu subsequently decided to write Fate/Stay Night entirely himself, calling it the most significant work of his life.

• 5. From Disc to Screen

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  A demo version of the game was distributed on the 21st of October 2003 on a CD packaged with the magazine Tech Gian from Enterbrain, and posted to Type-Moon's website on the 1st of November. The opening animations for the original release were produced by Tatsunoko Productions. The original PC version sold 400,000 copies.

  The PlayStation 2 version, Fate/Stay Night Réalta Nua, was delayed from a planned late 2006 release until the 19th of April 2007. It stripped the erotic content, added voice acting drawn from the 2006 anime series, and introduced an extended ending to the Fate route. Tatsunoko Productions produced three new opening animations, one for each branching storyline. The 2007 PS2 release sold 184,558 copies; a 2009 re-release on the same platform sold 21,937. A PlayStation Vita port in 2012 added three new opening animations by Ufotable and the ability to change the aspect ratio to 4:3, 16:9, or in-between; that version sold 58,157 copies in 2013 and 86,836 in 2014.

  The first anime series, a 24-episode production by Studio Deen, aired in Japan between the 7th of January and the 17th of June 2006, following primarily the Fate route. Composer Kenji Kawai wrote the score. The series received its English-language television premiere on Animax's English networks in Southeast Asia in June 2007. A film adaptation of Unlimited Blade Works, also by Studio Deen, followed in January 2010. Studio Ufotable then produced a second Unlimited Blade Works television series, airing between October 2014 and June 2015, and later directed the three-film Heaven's Feel trilogy: presage flower in 2017, lost butterfly in 2019, and spring song in 2020.

• 6. The Franchise It Built

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  Type-Moon released a direct sequel, Fate/hollow ataraxia, on the 28th of October 2005, set half a year after Fate/Stay Night and introducing new characters including Avenger, Bazett Fraga McRemitz, and Caren Ortensia. In December 2006, a light novel prequel titled Fate/Zero covered the events of the Fourth Holy Grail War. A spin-off magical girl manga series, Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya, began serialization in 2007.

  The fighting game Fate/tiger colosseum arrived in 2007, followed by its sequel in 2008 and Fate/unlimited codes in the same year. The RPG Fate/Extra launched in 2010. In 2015, a gacha mobile game titled Fate/Grand Order entered the market. By July 2021, Fate/Grand Order had grossed over $5.6 billion worldwide, placing it among the highest-grossing mobile games ever made and surpassing the Metal Gear video game franchise in revenue within four years of its release.

  The manga side of the franchise grew across multiple publishers. The original manga by Datto Nishiwaki, serialized in Shōnen Ace from February 2006 through December 2012, combined the Fate and Unlimited Blade Works scenarios across twenty volumes. North American publisher Tokyopop licensed it in 2007 but shut its North American publishing division in April 2011, leaving the series at eleven volumes. Viz Media's Viz Select imprint re-released the first ten volumes digitally in 2014. A Heaven's Feel manga by Taskohna began in May 2015 in Young Ace, and a third adaptation of the Unlimited Blade Works route by Daisuke Moriyama began in December 2021 in Dengeki Daioh.

• 7. What Critics Made of Shirou

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  Academic and critical attention to Fate/Stay Night has consistently focused on Shirou rather than the game's fantasy architecture. Kyoto University's Uno Tsunehiro compared Shirou's traumatic origin in the Fuyuki fire to the experience of survivors of the September 11 attacks, reading each route as a different mode of recovering from that trauma and becoming an independent person.

  Makoto Kuroda identified Shirou's aspiration to become a "champion of justice" as a direct analogy to the Mahayana Buddhist ideal of the bodhisattva, a figure who seeks to save others at the cost of personal suffering. Kuroda framed this in opposition to the faux-Christian ethics embodied by antagonist Kirei Kotomine, setting up Angra Mainyu as a creature that accepts and manifests the sins of others in the name of salvation.

  Novelist Shūsei Sakagami praised the experience of watching Shirou move "from a robot to becoming a human" across the three routes. Writers Chris Klug and Josiah Lebowitz, in their 2011 book Interactive Storytelling For Video Games, rated Fate/Stay Night a "strong" example of branching storytelling, comparable in depth to a traditional novel. They specifically credited the multi-route structure for giving players multiple emotional angles on the same characters and situation, while noting that the ability to skip already-seen scenes prevented fatigue from replaying.

  Gen Urobuchi, the author who declined to contribute to the game's scenario in 2002, later described the relationship between Shirou and Saber as resembling something closer to ancient Greek conceptions of love than to a conventional romance. Takeuchi himself said the Fate route is, in his own view, "Fate itself" as a statement of the work's essential themes.