u/Auragau

In the pursuit of an ideal, one must not let their path lead them blindly into a fate that is less than. Fate/Stay Night: Unlimited Blade Works is the animated series produced by Ufotable as a television series adaptation of the visual novel Fate/Stay Night, produced by Type-Moon. Its subtitle, Unlimited Blade Works, refers to one of the many specific routes toward completing the visual novel through the player's choices changing the story. This route is concerned with the protagonist, Shiro Emiya, and his pursuit of becoming a Hero of Justice, and how this pursuit is challenged by, literally and particularly, his future self, among other critics and antagonists. Isolated from the other routes, regardless of adaptation, and other related Fate material, Unlimited Blade Works stands strong in its development of the protagonist's character arc and how it faces resistance, unexpected conveniences and exits from the story, and how it influences those around Shiro Emiya as he seeks to resolve the Holy Grail War which serves as the basic plot. His development is slow, and the show takes its time to explore various facets of it, but there are a few details which detract from the focus and delay the plot such that the pace dreadfully decelerates, and the audience experience braces itself for possible meandering. Unlimited Blade Works' most compelling content is in the relationship it builds between Shiro and Archer, his future self. The supporting cast closest to these two assist Archer in presenting a gradual scale of antagonism toward Shiro's naive dream to become a Hero of Justice.

Although there is violence inherent to the basic plot of Unlimited Blade Works, and it concerns itself with, presumably, fourteen individuals with their own ambitions to resolve the plot, the show is deliberate in how it founds and builds Shiro's character as a priority. The Holy Grail War is made explicit in Episode 2, although participants are already gathering strength before the events of Episode 1. The audience is led to believe that there are seven Master-Servant teams all vying to make a wish with the legendary Holy Grail. For it to manifest, only one Servant must remain manifested; given the Masters are the ones who sustain the summoned Servants in the world, this also means only one Master can remain as well. This War is the vehicle by which the real priority of Unlimited Blade Works is driven: Shiro Emiya's aspiration to be a Hero of Justice, and how this may conflict with his method of emodying that ideal through helping and saving everyone and anyone in need. Shiro's primary antagonists are Archer, Rin Tohsaka's Archer Class Servant, Medea, the Caster Class Servant, and Gilgamesh, the reincarnated Archer Class Servant from the previous Holy Grail War. This is true by virtue of the basic plot necessitating that they eliminate each other from the competition for the Grail. This is also true in terms of Shiro's character arc, and Archer is the most persistent and consequential of these three given that he is actually Shiro from the future summoned as a Servant, and theoretically embodies the end of Shiro's life in the pursuit of this ideal; put another way, Archer is the Hero of Justice Shiro strives to be. Medea does well to support this dynamic in that her method of going about the Holy Grail War is judged despicable and monstrous by Shiro's morals, but she offers to expedite the end of the War she, and many of the other participants, wage in this way so long as Shiro sacrifices his own Servant's autonomy and ambition. Gilgamesh is an interloper to the conflict, though he isn't obviously so until S2E9 (Season 2, Episode 9), and serves as a dramatic escalation to Medea's antagonism by explicitly seeking mass extermination instead of just the vague outcome of great suffering Archer framed her intentions as to Shiro in S1E7.

Shiro almost declines to be a part of the plot on S1E2, but the audience learns of several external factors beyond his own motivation which drag him in. Kirei instigates his membership by framing the War as something his ideal cannot ignore by the nature of its cruelty and potentially disastrous consequences. Illya's sense of vengeance against Kiritsugu, Shiro's adopted father, offloaded onto Shiro is a direct threat to his life through the War, and Shinji's baseline cruelty toward Shiro, which is then compounded by an evolving envy, also threatens Shiro's life through the power Shinji thinks he has through the War. External forces try to get him to non-lethally exit the plot as well: Medea's offer of an alternative end, Rin's insistence he bow out because he's too weak on several occasions, and Archer's similar insistence prior to his commitment to killing Shiro; however, as the plot and Shiro's character arc progress, Shiro becomes increasingly resolved to see the conflict through to the end.

Broadening out of Shiro's development, the basic plot's premise is shown to have a variety of exceptions. The Assassin Class Servant, Kojiro Sasaki, is revealed to have been summoned by Medea, meaning there are actually only six traditional non-Servant mage Masters instead of seven. Gilgamesh is first presented as an extra Servant by Kirei Kotomine, the priest overseeing the War, on S1E9, leading to the impression that there have been eight Servants in this war. However, Gilgamesh's reveal in S2E9, the twenty-first episode, as having been reincarnated through the previous War corrects the false impression the audience has for twelve episodes. Between Kirei's explanation of the War and the trend among Masters throughout the show, the audience is given the impression that every Master participating is someone external to the administration of a Holy Grail War. Cu Chulainn, the Lancer Class Servant, never has his Master shown until S2E7, the nineteenth episode, when it is revealed that Kirei Kotomine is actually his Master. Up until that point, through (seemingly) Gilgamesh and Medea, the audience could have reasonably assumed that Cu was some kind of wandering, Masterless Servant.

The series spans twenty-five episodes across two seasons, with all but the last comprising the core of the plot's events and the last serving as a neat resolution including a timeskip. Throughout the twenty-four episodes, there are eighteen battles which take place in which a Master, Servant, or both are at risk of being removed from the plot through death or other means. Of those eighteen, the Grail War first makes meaningful progress with the death of the Rider Class Servant in Episode 8. She dies without a single part of her identity being made transparent, and she is the only death of Season 1, which includes three more fights beyond it for a total of eleven that season.

Other means of plot advancement are presented as alternate resolutions are revealed. Medea presents her alternate ending to the Grail War in S1E7, and makes clear that she needs Artoria, the Saber Class Servant, to be allied or contracted with her for this to come about. Medea successfully steals Artoria from Shiro on S1E12, but her plan stalls because she needs to first break Artoria's will to get her to comply. This will-breaking process is thwarted at S2E5, the 17th episode, with Artoria's successful rescue, and Medea and Kuzuki's, Medea's Master's, deaths. Gilgamesh's alternate means of resolving the plot is introduced on S1E10, and he makes the first step toward it on S2E3, the 15th episode, by killing Illya and Berserker, and taking Illya's heart since it's meant to be the vessel for the Holy Grail. He is almost successful with his alternate resolution, but is ultimately thwarted on S2E12, the 24th episode, with his defeat at the hands of Shiro, Artoria's successful destruction of the manifesting Grail and its corrupted hole in the sky, and Gilgamesh's death through the Grail consuming him. By the time this final battle happens, Artoria is the last summoned Servant alive (save for Archer's persistent existence through unexplained means) and Rin is the final Master participating. It's through Artoria's defeat of Kojiro, thereby achieving the end of the basic plot, that Gilgamesh's alternate plan reaches its final stage because having just one Master and Servant remaining catalyzes the Grail's manifestation.

The Holy Grail War is at its best when the audience is engrossed within the dynamics of just three of its teams. The Archer team, Caster team, and, much later, Gilgamesh on his own, do well at challenging Shiro's beliefs both through direct antagonism and providing distorted mirrors of his motivation and path. Rin's arc of initial defiance and rage at Shiro's seemingly fetishistic selflessness transforms into an acceptance and even slight adoption of it. This is satisfying to track as a positive affirmation of Shiro's altruism. Archer's jaded attitude and extreme self-hate as the ultimate fate for Shiro to defy is great as a relationship to the protagonist. Also, his lack of intention for the Grail and the violent path taken toward achieving his ideal mirrors Kuzuki's background, psychopathy, and participation in the War. Medea's capability to accelerate the plot, and her ruthlessness in doing so, presents a difficult problem for Shiro's approach of saving all he can, and a great argumentative convenience for Archer's relatively pessimistic insistence on sacrificing the few for the many. All of this interplay happening while Rin gets a front-row seat at two different versions of Shiro Emiya, and becomes an active participant in effectively saving both, makes her adoption of Shiro's ideal at the very end a satisfying payoff for the relationship built over twenty-four episodes, and makes the events and implications of the twenty-fifth plausible and entertaining. Moreover, Archer's return at the end in a more optimistic and kind form at the very end provides a great relief from the bleak contradictions to the Hero of Justice ideal constantly facing Shiro; to see Shiro's future materially changed as a result of his dogged pursuit in a presumably more positive form than the old Archer makes the twnety-three preceding episodes-worth of development mean something to the audience.

The time the show takes to construct a solid foundation for Shiro's attachment to his ideal and complicate Rin's investment in solving the enigma of his lifestyle often comes at the expense of plot progression, but many of the scenes in service of this construction help earn the pivotal moments towards the end. The defeat of Medea and Kuzuki, the defeat of Archer, the defeat of Gilgamesh, and the thwarting of the Grail impact the audience as deeply as they do thanks to the delays in the plot made to flesh out the relationships between Shiro, Artoria, Rin, and Archer. It goes as far as to generate rewatch value once it's made explicit that Archer is Shiro to the audience and the characters, for it provides more context to the scenes shared between Archer, Rin, and Shiro.

That rewatch value, however, may not be able to negate the toll taken on the experience due to the content at the very beginning of the series which hardly finds relevance, let alone screentime, up until the end of the first and second seasons. Ultimate Blade Works' deliberately slow pace is tolerable within the scope constructed between the Saber team, Archer team, and Caster team, but becomes dreadful when the larger, actual scope is reintroduced far after its initial showing. Cu Chulainn's, the Lancer Class Servant's, first and final meaningful appearance in the first season is the first episode, and the Berserker team last appear at the start of the fourth episode. Both are completely absent for the remaining two-thirds of the show, and their brief reappearance right when Medea's plot is coming to fruition and promises to collapse the War into a narrower focal point through Kirei's possible death is enough to elicit a groan; the pacing with which Medea's antagonism has been handled instills a tacit promise to the audience that there may be just as much delay in resolving whatever drama there is to come through the Berserker and Lancer teams. This would be on top of whatever background plot has been brewing between Shinji's continued participation, and Gilgamesh's exterminatory intentions.

The Rider Class Servant's exit from the plot is both welcome on S1E8 as form of meaningful progression where there hasn't been any, and it serves well as a cautionary tale for Shiro and Artoria's relationship given the perception of Shiro as being a Master as weak and useless as Shinji. That Artoria is in a vulnerable position is a possibility reinforced by Rider's slaying despite actively hunting for power and a Bounded Field supporting her, things Shiro won't have Artoria do and Shiro can't do himself. For as great of a purpose as Rider serves to this end, however, how she dies becomes a sour spot the moment any piece of Fate media beyond Unlimited Blade Works is consumed. Learning of the great power that comes through the proximity to divinity and mystery, that Rider is literally Medusa from Grecian myth and therefore a Grecian servant with a proximity to mystery much closer than Medea, and learning of her Bounded Field makes her little screentime and pathetic death land poorly in memory and rewatch. This compounds given the direction of the first four episodes involving three characters which are absent for the rest of the season despite Illya having a definite, expressed motivation for being actively antagonistic against Shiro. Frustrations of Medusa's weak showing despite all the factors in her favor compared to Artoria aside, her employment earlier in the show as a more active threat, especially considering her apparent need to feed, would have been greatly appreciated as a vehicle to develop her identity at the very least. It would have been a better use of the first hundred minutes of the show.

Shinji far outlasts his nameless Servant, making it out alive at the very end despite his grotesque transformation into a host of the Grail, but this wretch of a character being the object through which Rin's adoption of Shiro's ideal is realized is frankly even more disgusting than the sentient tumor of time and space he transforms into. Characters far more sympathetic than he have been denied the grace and beauty inherent in the dream of the Hero of Justice by the twenty-fourth episode. Rin's trust in the beauty of that dream, and what this means for her character, could have shined its light upon a number of other characters instead of the fool who cried and gloated his way into sin-eating popcorn. Kuzuki is worthier of Rin's near-fatal effort than him, and being a mirror to Archer, would have been much more satisfying to watch as a recipient of the Archer team's saving. Delay through him, or a somehow surviving Medea, or somehow surviving Illya, or reused Fujimura, or re-introduced Sakura, would have been far, far more satisfying than the cockroach which cowered his way out of a minion swarm and the projection of their master, cowered away from the wrath of the strongest hero in the War, was spared by a spear which can reverse causality, and somehow survived the biological havoc of manifesting the Holy Grail.

In the characters which overstay their welcome, are criminally underutilized, and make the eyes glaze over with their reappearance, the audience can easily identify where the value of Unlimited Blade Works lies. It's in the picnic date. It's in the serving of meals. It's in the sharing of dreams and ambitions. It's in the tug-of-war between cold-bloodedness, and a generous extension of self. It's in the way a person may send themselves and receive others — be that by the saving of a life, the study of a personality, the devotion to love, or the surrender to another's will. This makes up the sweet bulk of these twenty-five episodes, and it's an experience worth the rough edges.

In the pursuit of an ideal, one must not let their path lead them blindly into a fate that is less than. Fate/Stay Night: Unlimited Blade Works is the animated series produced by Ufotable as a television series adaptation of the visual novel Fate/Stay Night, produced by Type-Moon. Its subtitle, Unlimited Blade Works, refers to one of the many specific routes toward completing the visual novel through the player's choices changing the story. This route is concerned with the protagonist, Shiro Emiya, and his pursuit of becoming a Hero of Justice, and how this pursuit is challenged by, literally and particularly, his future self, among other critics and antagonists. Isolated from the other routes, regardless of adaptation, and other related Fate material, Unlimited Blade Works stands strong in its development of the protagonist's character arc and how it faces resistance, unexpected conveniences and exits from the story, and how it influences those around Shiro Emiya as he seeks to resolve the Holy Grail War which serves as the basic plot. His development is slow, and the show takes its time to explore various facets of it, but there are a few details which detract from the focus and delay the plot such that the pace dreadfully decelerates, and the audience experience braces itself for possible meandering. Unlimited Blade Works' most compelling content is in the relationship it builds between Shiro and Archer, his future self. The supporting cast closest to these two assist Archer in presenting a gradual scale of antagonism toward Shiro's naive dream to become a Hero of Justice.

Although there is violence inherent to the basic plot of Unlimited Blade Works, and it concerns itself with, presumably, fourteen individuals with their own ambitions to resolve the plot, the show is deliberate in how it founds and builds Shiro's character as a priority. The Holy Grail War is made explicit in Episode 2, although participants are already gathering strength before the events of Episode 1. The audience is led to believe that there are seven Master-Servant teams all vying to make a wish with the legendary Holy Grail. For it to manifest, only one Servant must remain manifested; given the Masters are the ones who sustain the summoned Servants in the world, this also means only one Master can remain as well. This War is the vehicle by which the real priority of Unlimited Blade Works is driven: Shiro Emiya's aspiration to be a Hero of Justice, and how this may conflict with his method of emodying that ideal through helping and saving everyone and anyone in need. Shiro's primary antagonists are Archer, Rin Tohsaka's Archer Class Servant, Medea, the Caster Class Servant, and Gilgamesh, the reincarnated Archer Class Servant from the previous Holy Grail War. This is true by virtue of the basic plot necessitating that they eliminate each other from the competition for the Grail. This is also true in terms of Shiro's character arc, and Archer is the most persistent and consequential of these three given that he is actually Shiro from the future summoned as a Servant, and theoretically embodies the end of Shiro's life in the pursuit of this ideal; put another way, Archer is the Hero of Justice Shiro strives to be. Medea does well to support this dynamic in that her method of going about the Holy Grail War is judged despicable and monstrous by Shiro's morals, but she offers to expedite the end of the War she, and many of the other participants, wage in this way so long as Shiro sacrifices his own Servant's autonomy and ambition. Gilgamesh is an interloper to the conflict, though he isn't obviously so until S2E9 (Season 2, Episode 9), and serves as a dramatic escalation to Medea's antagonism by explicitly seeking mass extermination instead of just the vague outcome of great suffering Archer framed her intentions as to Shiro in S1E7.

Shiro almost declines to be a part of the plot on S1E2, but the audience learns of several external factors beyond his own motivation which drag him in. Kirei instigates his membership by framing the War as something his ideal cannot ignore by the nature of its cruelty and potentially disastrous consequences. Illya's sense of vengeance against Kiritsugu, Shiro's adopted father, offloaded onto Shiro is a direct threat to his life through the War, and Shinji's baseline cruelty toward Shiro, which is then compounded by an evolving envy, also threatens Shiro's life through the power Shinji thinks he has through the War. External forces try to get him to non-lethally exit the plot as well: Medea's offer of an alternative end, Rin's insistence he bow out because he's too weak on several occasions, and Archer's similar insistence prior to his commitment to killing Shiro; however, as the plot and Shiro's character arc progress, Shiro becomes increasingly resolved to see the conflict through to the end.

Broadening out of Shiro's development, the basic plot's premise is shown to have a variety of exceptions. The Assassin Class Servant, Kojiro Sasaki, is revealed to have been summoned by Medea, meaning there are actually only six traditional non-Servant mage Masters instead of seven. Gilgamesh is first presented as an extra Servant by Kirei Kotomine, the priest overseeing the War, on S1E9, leading to the impression that there have been eight Servants in this war. However, Gilgamesh's reveal in S2E9, the twenty-first episode, as having been reincarnated through the previous War corrects the false impression the audience has for twelve episodes. Between Kirei's explanation of the War and the trend among Masters throughout the show, the audience is given the impression that every Master participating is someone external to the administration of a Holy Grail War. Cu Chulainn, the Lancer Class Servant, never has his Master shown until S2E7, the nineteenth episode, when it is revealed that Kirei Kotomine is actually his Master. Up until that point, through (seemingly) Gilgamesh and Medea, the audience could have reasonably assumed that Cu was some kind of wandering, Masterless Servant.

The series spans twenty-five episodes across two seasons, with all but the last comprising the core of the plot's events and the last serving as a neat resolution including a timeskip. Throughout the twenty-four episodes, there are eighteen battles which take place in which a Master, Servant, or both are at risk of being removed from the plot through death or other means. Of those eighteen, the Grail War first makes meaningful progress with the death of the Rider Class Servant in Episode 8. She dies without a single part of her identity being made transparent, and she is the only death of Season 1, which includes three more fights beyond it for a total of eleven that season.

Other means of plot advancement are presented as alternate resolutions are revealed. Medea presents her alternate ending to the Grail War in S1E7, and makes clear that she needs Artoria, the Saber Class Servant, to be allied or contracted with her for this to come about. Medea successfully steals Artoria from Shiro on S1E12, but her plan stalls because she needs to first break Artoria's will to get her to comply. This will-breaking process is thwarted at S2E5, the 17th episode, with Artoria's successful rescue, and Medea and Kuzuki's, Medea's Master's, deaths. Gilgamesh's alternate means of resolving the plot is introduced on S1E10, and he makes the first step toward it on S2E3, the 15th episode, by killing Illya and Berserker, and taking Illya's heart since it's meant to be the vessel for the Holy Grail. He is almost successful with his alternate resolution, but is ultimately thwarted on S2E12, the 24th episode, with his defeat at the hands of Shiro, Artoria's successful destruction of the manifesting Grail and its corrupted hole in the sky, and Gilgamesh's death through the Grail consuming him. By the time this final battle happens, Artoria is the last summoned Servant alive (save for Archer's persistent existence through unexplained means) and Rin is the final Master participating. It's through Artoria's defeat of Kojiro, thereby achieving the end of the basic plot, that Gilgamesh's alternate plan reaches its final stage because having just one Master and Servant remaining catalyzes the Grail's manifestation.

The Holy Grail War is at its best when the audience is engrossed within the dynamics of just three of its teams. The Archer team, Caster team, and, much later, Gilgamesh on his own, do well at challenging Shiro's beliefs both through direct antagonism and providing distorted mirrors of his motivation and path. Rin's arc of initial defiance and rage at Shiro's seemingly fetishistic selflessness transforms into an acceptance and even slight adoption of it. This is satisfying to track as a positive affirmation of Shiro's altruism. Archer's jaded attitude and extreme self-hate as the ultimate fate for Shiro to defy is great as a relationship to the protagonist. Also, his lack of intention for the Grail and the violent path taken toward achieving his ideal mirrors Kuzuki's background, psychopathy, and participation in the War. Medea's capability to accelerate the plot, and her ruthlessness in doing so, presents a difficult problem for Shiro's approach of saving all he can, and a great argumentative convenience for Archer's relatively pessimistic insistence on sacrificing the few for the many. All of this interplay happening while Rin gets a front-row seat at two different versions of Shiro Emiya, and becomes an active participant in effectively saving both, makes her adoption of Shiro's ideal at the very end a satisfying payoff for the relationship built over twenty-four episodes, and makes the events and implications of the twenty-fifth plausible and entertaining. Moreover, Archer's return at the end in a more optimistic and kind form at the very end provides a great relief from the bleak contradictions to the Hero of Justice ideal constantly facing Shiro; to see Shiro's future materially changed as a result of his dogged pursuit in a presumably more positive form than the old Archer makes the twnety-three preceding episodes-worth of development mean something to the audience.

The time the show takes to construct a solid foundation for Shiro's attachment to his ideal and complicate Rin's investment in solving the enigma of his lifestyle often comes at the expense of plot progression, but many of the scenes in service of this construction help earn the pivotal moments towards the end. The defeat of Medea and Kuzuki, the defeat of Archer, the defeat of Gilgamesh, and the thwarting of the Grail impact the audience as deeply as they do thanks to the delays in the plot made to flesh out the relationships between Shiro, Artoria, Rin, and Archer. It goes as far as to generate rewatch value once it's made explicit that Archer is Shiro to the audience and the characters, for it provides more context to the scenes shared between Archer, Rin, and Shiro.

That rewatch value, however, may not be able to negate the toll taken on the experience due to the content at the very beginning of the series which hardly finds relevance, let alone screentime, up until the end of the first and second seasons. Ultimate Blade Works' deliberately slow pace is tolerable within the scope constructed between the Saber team, Archer team, and Caster team, but becomes dreadful when the larger, actual scope is reintroduced far after its initial showing. Cu Chulainn's, the Lancer Class Servant's, first and final meaningful appearance in the first season is the first episode, and the Berserker team last appear at the start of the fourth episode. Both are completely absent for the remaining two-thirds of the show, and their brief reappearance right when Medea's plot is coming to fruition and promises to collapse the War into a narrower focal point through Kirei's possible death is enough to elicit a groan; the pacing with which Medea's antagonism has been handled instills a tacit promise to the audience that there may be just as much delay in resolving whatever drama there is to come through the Berserker and Lancer teams. This would be on top of whatever background plot has been brewing between Shinji's continued participation, and Gilgamesh's exterminatory intentions.

The Rider Class Servant's exit from the plot is both welcome on S1E8 as form of meaningful progression where there hasn't been any, and it serves well as a cautionary tale for Shiro and Artoria's relationship given the perception of Shiro as being a Master as weak and useless as Shinji. That Artoria is in a vulnerable position is a possibility reinforced by Rider's slaying despite actively hunting for power and a Bounded Field supporting her, things Shiro won't have Artoria do and Shiro can't do himself. For as great of a purpose as Rider serves to this end, however, how she dies becomes a sour spot the moment any piece of Fate media beyond Unlimited Blade Works is consumed. Learning of the great power that comes through the proximity to divinity and mystery, that Rider is literally Medusa from Grecian myth and therefore a Grecian servant with a proximity to mystery much closer than Medea, and learning of her Bounded Field makes her little screentime and pathetic death land poorly in memory and rewatch. This compounds given the direction of the first four episodes involving three characters which are absent for the rest of the season despite Illya having a definite, expressed motivation for being actively antagonistic against Shiro. Frustrations of Medusa's weak showing despite all the factors in her favor compared to Artoria aside, her employment earlier in the show as a more active threat, especially considering her apparent need to feed, would have been greatly appreciated as a vehicle to develop her identity at the very least. It would have been a better use of the first hundred minutes of the show.

Shinji far outlasts his nameless Servant, making it out alive at the very end despite his grotesque transformation into a host of the Grail, but this wretch of a character being the object through which Rin's adoption of Shiro's ideal is realized is frankly even more disgusting than the sentient tumor of time and space he transforms into. Characters far more sympathetic than he have been denied the grace and beauty inherent in the dream of the Hero of Justice by the twenty-fourth episode. Rin's trust in the beauty of that dream, and what this means for her character, could have shined its light upon a number of other characters instead of the fool who cried and gloated his way into sin-eating popcorn. Kuzuki is worthier of Rin's near-fatal effort than him, and being a mirror to Archer, would have been much more satisfying to watch as a recipient of the Archer team's saving. Delay through him, or a somehow surviving Medea, or somehow surviving Illya, or reused Fujimura, or re-introduced Sakura, would have been far, far more satisfying than the cockroach which cowered his way out of a minion swarm and the projection of their master, cowered away from the wrath of the strongest hero in the War, was spared by a spear which can reverse causality, and somehow survived the biological havoc of manifesting the Holy Grail.

In the characters which overstay their welcome, are criminally underutilized, and make the eyes glaze over with their reappearance, the audience can easily identify where the value of Unlimited Blade Works lies. It's in the picnic date. It's in the serving of meals. It's in the sharing of dreams and ambitions. It's in the tug-of-war between cold-bloodedness, and a generous extension of self. It's in the way a person may send themselves and receive others — be that by the saving of a life, the study of a personality, the devotion to love, or the surrender to another's will. This makes up the sweet bulk of these twenty-five episodes, and it's an experience worth the rough edges.