If there’s any silver lining to the dense, dark cloud that is this endless viral pandemic, it’s that I’ve finally found time to read through some of the visual novels on my backlog. Who needs healthy human contact, extended family time or a social life? Not me! I’ve found a new 2D family of mythical heroes who demonstrate their love for one another via visceral mortal combat, bodily mutilation, mind control and sneaky betrayals. Just like any real family, then. Yes, we’re diving back into the original 2006 PC Fate/Stay Night visual novel, this time with the second route: Unlimited Blade Works.
Last time, I wrote about the VN’s first route, Fate, which focused on the relationship between protagonist and reader self-insert Shirou Emiya and his mystical “servant” Saber, a female version of King Arthur. Together they battled several other “masters” with their own servants to win the coveted Holy Grail, a magical wish-granting device that turned out to be corrupted. Shirou fought not just against his enemies, but against his reductive self-image and ideal of himself as hero.
Unlimited Blade Works ( UBW) takes the deconstruction of Shirou’s ideal even further, as he is confronted with the ultimate fate of someone who, like him, sacrificed his own life and self-worth for the sake of others. Even more so than Fate, UBW is really Shirou’s story, and to discuss this in depth will require me to reveal MAJOR SPOILERS that are already widespread in anime/VN fandom.
Everyone’s favourite tsundere Rin Tohsaka is the “main girl” in this route, and her initially nameless servant Archer is the main servant protagonist. The helpful scene skip function allows you to bypass most of the early scenes shared by all three routes, to get to the important stuff. The story diverges pretty early on, and it becomes obvious that although the starting circumstances are the same, this will be a very different story. For example, creepy little girl Illya Einzbern and her servant Heracles (Berserker) barely feature at all, except in her tragic (and violent) death scene towards the end of the story. Apart from an early battle, she and Shirou do not even interact.
Sinister Caster, who barely featured in Fate plays a far more prominent role, as does her master, whose identity remained a mystery before. Caster’s early intervention in the war completely changes the plot’s direction, as Shirou loses Saber and their relationship never develops in the same intimate way. This twist is tragic and shocking and shows that the reader can never rely on their assumptions — further revelations and inversions await.
Despite the loss of his master status, Shirou remains determined to fight and continues his alliance with Rin, and their relationship gradually thaws. Even though she claimed they were rivals and potential enemies, Rin was always protective of Shirou, and their friendship blossoms through trust and shared goals into a sweet romance. There’s a reason that Rin is many fans’ favourite character — she’s capable, smart and driven, yet empathetic and moral. That spiky “tsun” exterior and squishy, loving “dere” interior certainly helps. Her flustered and embarrassed expressions are adorable. Without Rin’s support, the clueless Shirou would have died early in both routes.
Red-clad warrior Archer has an iconic design, and his character is equally fascinating. None of the other servants know who he is, and initially the reader is left similarly mystified. We are led to believe that these “heroic spirits”, bound as “servants” by powerful mages to act as proxies in the Holy Grail Wars are heroes of old — such as Arthur, Heracles, Gilgamesh etc. Yet Archer seems unknown. The fascinating explanation is that he is a future hero, and the mechanics behind this are detailed more clearly than in the anime. When heroes die, their “original” resides in a place outside of time and space called “The Throne of Heroes”. During a grail war, the original stays put, but their essence is recreated in whatever time they are summoned to — whether past of future, it doesn’t matter. Each copy will disappear when defeated, and subsequent summonings are essentially a fresh copy. Archer has no idea how many times he has been summoned, but he is now trapped in eternal servitude, outside of the cycle of death and rebirth. When he was alive, he sacrificed his life for the good of others, but they spat in his face. When he essentially traded his soul for the chance to save others, the payment was too much to bear. He couldn’t save everyone, and saw only the worst of humanity, summoned to clear up humanity’s mess, not to save them. Understandably, Archer is pissed.
In Fate, Archer always seemed quite edgy and sarcastic, but UBW really goes to town illuminating why he is like this. Shirou and Archer have an instinctive dislike of each other and in UBW their relationship becomes explicitly antagonistic. A perceptive reader may be able to guess, long before the eventual reveal, that Archer is a future Shirou Emiya who curses his unrealistic, unlivable ideals. His goal is not to win the Holy Grail but to murder Shirou to prevent him from ever becoming a Guardian Spirit (slightly different to the other Heroic Spirits — but let’s not get into that here) and cause a massive time paradox that he hopes will end his own miserable, helpless existence. Well. That’s pretty heavy stuff. Interestingly, Rin deduces Archer’s identity long before Shirou ever does.
Shirou learns a great deal from Archer, mainly through observation, and upgrades his basic “reinforcement” magic into something more immediately useful — “projection” magic, or the ability to make temporary physical weapons from nothing but latent magical energy. As long as he has seen the original, he can replicate an almost identical copy. Archer has taken this technique to an obscene level — by conjuring a “reality marble” called “Unlimited Blade Works” he can overwhelm enemy servants with an infinite number of instantaneously created swords.
Archer and Shirou’s natural enemy — and rival — is smug, imperious Gilgamesh, King of Heroes, who once again only really makes a substantial appearance towards the end of the story. He has a fantastic fight with Archer and an even more epic brawl with Shirou as he learns to replicate Archer’s techniques. How do you fight the servant with a mystical vault spewing thousands of powerful swords? Replicate them all — and more, to overwhelm the enemy. Gilgamesh’s rage at being beaten by a mere “faker” is delicious.
Fate’s ultimate villain was corrupt priest Kirei Kotomine, but here he plays more of a background puppet-master role before meeting his comeuppance at the hand of his long-suffering servant Lancer (Cu Chulainn, from Irish mythology). Lancer himself plays a mostly “good” role here, aiding our heroes and hilariously terrorising Rin with his suggestive jokes. He clearly hates his master and when he is ordered to harm a pretty girl like Rin… well, that’s the last straw and he takes Kotomine screaming with him to his death. Lancer really is the unsung hero of this tale.
Our main antagonists for the early segment of the story are hateful little scrote Shinji Matou and his servant Rider (whose identity is hinted at but not explicitly revealed.) Rider seems particularly perverted (perhaps obvious from her choice in fetishwear) and tends to toy with her prey. Once he loses Rider, pathetic Shinji runs to Kirei and is given extra eighth servant Gilgamesh as a replacement. Gilgamesh can barely hide his distaste for the blue-haired little shitstain. Of course Gilgamesh is only using this poor excuse for human wreckage, and he meets a very moist, fleshy comeuppance later.
Caster poses a far more potent threat in this story — she’s sneaky, amoral, and after murdering her own master (he was “beneath” her), finds another more to her taste — Soichirou Kuzuki, a teacher at Shirou’s school who resides at the Ryuudo temple. Soichirou is not a mage, nor does he care about the Grail War — they seem to develop a twisted romance where she poses as his fiancée, and perhaps even develops feelings for him. Although Caster cannot fight in close quarters, Soichirou is a master of hand-to-hand combat, due to his previous training as an assassin. With Caster’s reinforcement magic, his fists become like supersonic iron weapons, easily able to fend off even servants like Saber. Caster’s signature weapon, the zig-zag blade Rule Breaker is what really causes the plot to veer off into uncharted territory as she uses it to sever Saber’s contract with Shirou.
One of the things I like most about this story is the way it takes the simple concepts of the Holy Grail War — seven servants with seven masters, fighting for a magical artifact — and finds new and creative ways to upend the status quo, or “break the rules”. What initially seems a fairly simple setup becomes increasingly complex with betrayals, murders and allegiance-changing. Not only does Caster summon her own servant, Assassin (using the leyline at the Ryuudo Temple to harvest magical energy from the populace of the surrounding Fuyuki City), but she steals Saber and acquires Archer after he apparently betrays Rin. Now that’s just greedy. Caster has a tragic backstory — as the Greek mythological figure Medea, she was repeatedly betrayed as a child and young woman, and forced to embody the identity of a “witch”. Her actions are driven by the deep psychological scars from this mistreatment. She’s almost sympathetic in that it seems that her ultimate desire is to be with the man she has come to love (Soichirou). It’s a shame that her wish requires wanton slaughter of an entire city of innocents. Oh, and dressing Saber in a pretty dress, tying her up and torturing her in order to break her spirit.
Ultimately, these other masters and servants are secondary threats compared to this story’s primary villain — Gilgamesh. Unfettered by a functioning master, in a heart-wrenching scene, after dispatching Heracles, he blinds Berserker’s master Illya then rips out her heart and leaves her to crawl across the floor to the dying body of her only friend, the hulking brute who tried desperately to save her. Although Illya was a very creepy little girl in the first route, we witness a vision of her troubled past as she slips away. It transpires that Illya was bred as a human vessel for the Holy Grail, that apparently needs flesh with which to manifest. Gilgamesh thrusts Illya’s heart into Shinji who then mutates into the hideous, malformed fleshy blob we all knew he already was inside. We also learn some more details about what is wrong with the grail — it’s apparently contaminated with something called “Angra Mainyu” or “All the World’s Evil”, which seems to be a concept borrowed from the ancient religion of Zoroastrianism. Any wish made upon the Grail will result in the outpouring of evil across the globe, perhaps bringing an end to Humanity. Gilgamesh reasons that the Earth is full of mongrels — imperfect human beings with no right to life. He sees himself as king over all, and wants to rule over only those subjects who could survive such a magical apocalypse. Basically, Gilgamesh is a fruitloop. Shirou’s final clash against him is tense and exciting, making a great climax to the story.
Unlike Fate, UBW has two endings — the “Good Ending” and the “True Ending”. These are achieved by making choices between Saber and Rin at various points during a playthrough. It’s very easy to go back to the beginning and skip through previously read segments to make different choices in order to see the other ending, as long as you’re using a flowchart (which I heartily recommend to save time). In some ways I almost prefer the “good” ending over the True ending, as that way Saber gets to stay with Rin and Shirou in an eternal threesome of mana-transferring bliss… Wait, what? Yes, this is “Polyamory — the ending” that builds upon Rin’s unexpected (to her) excitement witnessing Shirou and Saber’s… uh… “exchange” during one of the “H” scenes in Fate. Um… The excuse given is that without the Grail’s magic supply, it’s down to both Rin and Shirou to provide enough magical energy to Saber to stop her disappearing… with presumably regular synchronised naked menage-a-trois action… (This is not pictured.) I doubt this ending to Camelot’s myth was ever conceived by prominent Arthurian historians. Otherwise, in the “True Ending”, Saber disappears after sacrificing herself to destroy the Grail, leaving Rin and Emiya to got to London to study magecraft together at the Clock Tower. No threesomes, sadly.
Speaking of mana transfers, there’s only one “H” scene in the UBW route, and it’s still uncomfortable, but not as much as the weird first “H” scene in Fate. It’s between Shirou and Rin, and Rin acts uncharacteristically girlish and shy. It’s also uncomfortably voyeuristic, and although there is a good story reason for their coupling… it really doesn’t need to be as explicit as it is. Again, the anime made the right choice of cutting this out. It’s also not voiced unlike the rest of the story, and the seedy music is more irritating than scene-setting.
Overall, UBW is a better story than Fate. Fate was a great introduction to the world and concepts, but was comparatively straightforward and simple. Full of unexpected twists and turns, UBW interrogates Shirou’s character until it hurts and forces him to question his most basic of assumptions about himself, and the legacy left to him by his father, who seems more flawed the more we learn of him. Shirou learns to outgrow his survivor’s guilt and value himself as a person — loved and appreciated by his friends and by his lover. Rin is a fun heroine — multifaceted and motivated, her relationship with Shirou convincing. Their 3-person-date is a delightful break from the grim plot. As much as I loved Saber in the first route, Rin is closer to the women I like in real life. She’s more human, and ultimately more relatable.
Next time I’ll write about the final route — Heaven’s Feel — that’s infamous for its grim, dark tone and upsetting content. Look forwards to it!
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