Fate/Stay Night

yeah i know, it is old. and it is late. but i completed fate/stay night today, finally. after about 100 hours of gameplay. well the other time i said i replay fsn, because during my first play my computer crashed and i lost all data. it was much later that i got the mood to install the game again and to play it. reading depends a lot on the mood too.

well i think all of you would know. the game was released in 2004, with its anime adaptation released in 2006 (i knew about this whole fsn thing in 2006, of course), its visual novel completed its translation by mirrormoon in november 2008. hmm i have to admit though, by the time the visual novel was fully translated i had lost a lot of interests in that game. don't get me wrong, i really think mirrormoon staffs are great for undertaking this big project for the sake of all of us whose japanese belong to the 'cannot-make-it' category. i roughly started downloading the translation somewhere mid 2009 i guess, played halfway, had my computer crashed. then, stopped until december 2009, before i installed and played it again.

well, as expected, this game certainly lived up to its reputation and all the hype it had created. one of the reasons i played this game, was also because it was written by my favorite author - nasu kinoko. so i had a lot of confidence that this would be a very great game. and it turned out to be true.

the original game had no voice acting, so i patched it with realta nua's dvd to get the voices. yeapx, ueda kana's voice, like i said before, was just kawaii and sexy. her 'da~ka~ra!' is just simply unforgettable. hahahax.

story wise, i will not spoil it for you, if you have not played it. if you had already played it, i guess it will be a waste of time saying what happened in the plot. i found some interesting stuffs inside though, like how nasu tried to link his stories together. the puppet master who gave shirou his body, i guess it would definitely be aozaki toko (kara no kyoukai), zelretch appeared (tsukihime), the concept of the origin was mentioned a lot of times too (kara no kyoukai)... etc. i mean, if you didn't read any one his previous works you would have just read on without knowing its significance, since these are all little points made to give the readers the kind of 'ah! i know what he is referring to!' feeling. well, you will not miss out anything if you don't know. hmm how should i say? these are little bonuses that gives a plus to the story, not the minuses to the story if you don't know them.

graphics are well drawn. saber actually looked quite cute in some of the pictures. music also fits the story. i like the piece 'ever-present feeling' the most. totally fell in love with it.

my only regret is that caster was not given a big enough role in the stories. in all of them she had only minor roles and died pretty fast. even rider was given a big enough role in heaven's feel.

talking about them, i had tried to find their figurines online though. but i guess it is because they are too unpopular as compared to rin, saber and sakura, i don't really find any decent figures out there. there was this bikini rider though. it was sexy, but what i wanted was not that. as for caster, i had a little figure of her wearing office clothes in my cabinet. aw. not the kind i really wanted too. as for saber, of course there are tons of her figurines around. but i did not buy any of them. i did not want black saber, nor saber lily. her blue armored figure was floating around the market, but none of them was quite well done in my opinion. it was not something that i would go, 'woah! fantastic!' they were quite dull and not up to expectations though. don't get me wrong, i am not saying i can make a better figurine.

really, i wish i could write fantastic stories like that. but when i compared mine with the well-known writers i instantly see a big gap that almost can never be covered. aww. anyway, for now, i will still try and write as best as i can. who knows, maybe one day a miracle can occur? but then, i am a practical and realistic person too.

i am sure you heard of this cliche, 'a dream is a dream, because it can never be fulfilled.'

now, i will be off to find another visual novel to read. or maybe i should continue writing my story for a while.

no, before that, i want to put up a picture. my favorite picture out of the thousands of pictures (yes, i extracted every single background image, character image, soundtrack, sound effects and every single thing the game had). actually, few years ago, i had actually downloaded the cgi pack from somewhere, and so i had most of the pictures. i just extracted it myself to confirm that i have every single picture in the game.

this picture, when i first saw it, for some strange reason, i kind of felt a strange feeling. i like it a lot. despite many other pictures looking more colorful, or kawaii, or containing my favorite characters, i really like this a lot. i like illya, of course, but this picture gave off a different feeling that none other pictures gave. i think it is the same for many others too, as this particular image had also been floating around the web quite forcefully.

i have shrunk the picture to a size that can fit in.