u/astoriauser

Here's the thing: this is the third time I've tried to write about NHK. I lost the text of the first one. I'm still working on the second one; it's already ten pages long, I still haven't finished this damn text, and I'm extremely frustrated with it. Perhaps, if I get the urge to finish this text, I'll post it here or on r/anime. I don't know.

I feel it's impossible... Not impossible. It's dishonest to talk about Welcome to NHK. This anime has such ridiculously significant value. The price is so high that I've been listening to the opening and ending songs so far. I cried during the second opening. Writing this makes me happy I watched it, sad I can't express my feelings, and angry at myself for trying.This anime hit me hard during a terrible time in my life. This year has been hell for me. I was reclusive for about two months this year because of some very serious traumas I experienced.

All the characters are extremely relatable. I identified most with Misaki's emotional dependency storyline. The last episode of Welcome to NHK is an absolute heartbreaker. Sato wanted to have an affair with Hitomi, and Misaki interpreted everything in the worst possible way. She always had an extreme fondness for Sato, and the anime made that explicit; after all, what reason would anyone have to be with Sato besides affection?When she thinks she's been rejected, she falls apart. This is where God comes in. God, NHK, it's all just little conspiracies we create to avoid blaming ourselves or reaching the most serious conclusion of all: not everything necessarily has a culprit.

Throughout the entire anime, Sato is constantly being pulled away from Misaki's schemes by Sato. This time, it's Sato's chance to help Misaki.

If she feels rejected and he feels crazy, what was once an attempt to help each other quickly reverses. Sato wants to If God or NHK are plotting against our lives, all we can do is kill them. Kill NHK. Kill God. Jump into the entity and put an end to it. Sato fails to kill himself and ends up getting beaten up by Misaki? Yes. That scene is extremely funny and makes me want to cry until I break the TV? Yes. Hearing Misaki's story is incredibly sad, and this anime is unpredictable. I got every single thing I could have guessed about wrong.

That's the problem with NHK. When I watched NHK, I felt so embraced but at the same time destroyed that forming a rational thought about it seems futile. I'm crying a lot while writing this because, besides feeling embraced, I'm feeling defeated. NHK broke something in me that's hard to quantify. Not even Fate/Heavens Feel, which I'm reading, and I identified almost parasocially with Sakura and unintentionally triggered all my thoughts left me like this. Everything I try to write seems either so obvious or individual. That's it, I lost. My rationality lost. My brain lost. My analytical skills are lost. Faced with this anime, I'm just a crybaby again.

There's a quality about NHK that nobody talks about, and that's how NHK's message gets across. There's that AI song that became a meme, right? We only guzzle diesel. NHK theoretically has the same message as that song or that son-of-a-bitch uncle who humiliates you at the family gathering.You don't move because someone is with you and everything depends on you. There's an episode where Yamazaki says that Sato is involved in a bunch of MMOs and losing money. Yamazaki, who's developing True World with him, gives Sato a real dressing-down.He says MMOs are a lie, reveals that the girl in the game was him, creates all this chaos, but not exactly because he wants what's best for Sato: he does it because he wants Sato to work on the game.

The difference between the anime and Yamazaki saying it this way is that NHK says it, but it conveys it in such a painful way that the message just goes right through you. Then you see Sato starving and Misaki wanting to commit suicide because Sato didn't accept her contract. The contract was a marriage proposal, but Misaki doesn't know any other way to phrase it. I identified with that a lot, the search for something that is certain and certain because life is scary. The world is too big and too scary. The past was a mess and the future is a fog. NHK doesn't humiliate you for it; it puts it at the center of the story in such a beautiful, relatable, and respectful way that it melts away any protective layer you might have about your insecurities.

NHK teaches you in a brutal way, but at the same time in such a sweet and caring way that it's hard to describe. I felt like I was opening a box of chocolates that had a bomb inside. And it would be dishonest of me to only come here after a week with my heart bleeding because of this anime and submit a clean essay. I admire anyone who can talk about this anime without crying. Anyone who can put together a good and concise account of this anime.

And I disagree with whoever said that the ending of NHK wasn't happy. I think I heard that opinion somewhere before. The ending of NHK is extremely sweet and extremely happy. How can I say that an ending where Sato and Misaki are in a good moment of their lives, together, returning to normal after years, or in the case of Misaki a whole life disconnection It's "bittersweet, wow, what a real ending". For those who have experienced even a fragment of these two characters' lives, the ending of NHK is almost like a fairy tale. And all the other characters also end up happy. Yamazaki thought his life was going to be a mess, but he's doing really well on the farm. Hitomi participated in a suicide cult and now she's a mother and is with someone who loves her. The mere fact that everyone is living a normal life is an achievement.

And NHK delivers these messages in a way that will overwhelm your nervous and circulatory systems. Watching NHK made me feel so... It's even hard to describe. It's the pain, but at the same time the joy, of identifying with a character and seeing the situation represented with respect, but not in a sanitized way. This is my favorite anime.I don't have any truly relevant criticism of NHK, and even if I did, I'd still be talking about an absolute platinum rating.

Maybe I'll follow the ten-page text, maybe I'll publish it, or maybe I'll just keep it as a basis or personal record for something better. But it's incredible that even weeks after watching it, I'm still in a state of wonder about this anime. Talking about it the way I do in normal texts seems like trying to compress an ocean of feelings and stories —mixing those of the characters and things I've been through— into an ice cube. Well, about what one cannot speak, one must remain silent.

If you haven't seen NHK yet, for God's sake, watch it. I hope that the fact that I only knows how to cry doesn't ruin your experience. Perhaps you'll be able to talk about this anime rationally. I can't do that. Best anime I've ever seen. I have to read the novel.

Live happily!

TLDR: A crazy man liked UBW and is going to talk about it for seven pages. Extremely long text, containing heavy spoilers for UBW and, consequently, the Fate route.

A lot happened in the last 38 hours of reading. What do you mean, "a lot"? Well, you know everything you learned in the Fate route? Throw it away. Seriously. Okay, I'm proud of myself for managing to finish this route in three weeks, unlike the Fate route, which took me almost half a semester of my life to read.

It's funny. Ever since I finished the normal ending yesterday morning, I've been asking myself—and finally realizing—that the fact most people who watched the anime started with ufotable's UBW is a problem. The perspective of the events in UBW directly depends on you having read Fate. If you haven't gone through the endless explanations of how magic works in the Fate route, UBW loses half of its dramatic effect. Thinking about it now, I see that Nasu actually used—in a way I even think might have been intentional—one of his biggest flaws as a writer: the fact that he only knows how to explain his own systems in an extremely boring way sometimes. If you've never watched or read the Fate route, you have no idea what it's like to take hours for Shirou to actually learn about magic and the context of the Grail War, only to watch every single explanation about the theories of this world get knocked down one by one during UBW, and how that completely changes your view of the characters. The most didactic example I can give is Assassin: In the Fate route, he was just Sasaki Kojirou, a random servant commanded by someone we didn't know. In UBW, you develop an absurd admiration for his figure, because he goes from a random servant to an ordinary guy with a Washing Pole who goes toe-to-toe with extremely powerful servants. All this breaking of rules for what? For an extremely emotional story.

Shirou here in Unlimited Blade Works is essentially the same Shirou as the Fate route, but how he is presented during the route and how everyone around him treats him during the story is completely distinct. In Fate, Shirou is very much considered and helped by everyone: Saber is just as idealistic and broken as he is, and the two help each other overcome their pasts. Rin might think Shirou is a bit of an idiot, but even so, she is fighting by his side and teaching him magic—in fact, she's the one who hands over the AZOTH dagger to kill Kotomine Kirei. Even Archer, while never being friendly to the boy, gives him tips, including the fateful one about him being a creator who should only fight against himself in a cycle of self-improvement. In the end, the Fate route, despite still disagreeing with Shirou's way of life, values sacrifice for an ideal without expecting anything in return, just for the certainty of having done everything right before eternity and one's own conscience. It's a gentle route to Shirou.

UBW is basically the opposite of that. Here, his situation gets much worse, there's no one to teach him anything, and everything is crueler to him. Here was the first note where I actually had the impact of how suicidal Shirou is and how his ideal really harms him. In the Fate route, the ideal, partly because it was shared with Saber, was almost poetic. Here, Shirou puts himself in much worse situations due to his beliefs, and he pays for it, only recovering when he manages to resolve these issues in his own mind. This route is a huge show of sadism towards Shirou.

Honestly, I already knew Archer's true identity from the Fate route through deduction. But that still doesn't take away the impact of reading each dream. It's strange; you spend about forty hours seeing Shirou's ideal in a more romantic way. Here everyone, from Rin to Caster, confronts him for his beliefs, and it hurts him to let go of the bone—after all, to him, letting go of the ideal is letting go of his own existence. Did he pick up this ideal from his survivor's guilt? That's the excuse he gives, but for a knight dressed in red, the answer is much simpler.

Night of day 4. Fight against Berserker. Saber finds it difficult against the giant, but Rin and her servant go to help. Who is Rin's servant? Archer. If you doubted his power, the spirit probably wouldn't even be able to tickle Berserker's stone skin. He then shouts: CALADBOLG II. An extremely powerful shot creates a field of fire in the graveyard, and Illya withdraws to avoid further risk. A legendary hero with a weapon without a legendary counterpart whose great power is a field of fire? Interesting.

The next day, Shirou dreams of a desert with infinite blades stuck in the ground. Shirou dreams of this space several times, and hears about a hero who wanted to save everyone, but because of that, couldn't even save what was most precious to him. He will dream of this man and his life for several nights.

The man tried to save everyone, but was never rewarded for it. All he received in life was contempt and distrust. People used him as a tool, and when he stopped being useful to his compatriots, he was discarded. But in his heart there was still the will to be a hero and do good, and for this, he decided to sign a contract to protect humanity, but this only served to make him see reality: only humans themselves threaten humanity. He who wanted to save everyone then killed, killed, killed, and killed the innocent and the guilty an infinite number of times, only to return to his insignificance until humanity needed his brutal help again and again. He hated his own life, lost almost all his memories, and became dehumanized. And in the end, all that remained was that sterile place with infinite blades stuck in the ground like a battle cemetery and a brown sky full of gears. The slave of the world ends up being betrayed by himself, and he then begins to curse his past.

I am the bone of my sword

Steel is my body and fire is my blood

I have created over a thousand blades

Unknown to death

Nor known to life

Have withstood the pain of creating many weapons

Yet those hands shall never hold anything

So as I pray, UNLIMITED BLADE WORKS

He has died and lived so many times that he lost the value of his own life and that of others. An existence summarized in projecting his twin blade and any other weapon he needs and beating his enemies. An endless war for someone who dreamed of peace, eternally praying for his own crucible to spread his hatred over his enemies.

Although Archer's appearance in the Fate route had as its most iconic moment the advice he gives Shirou about him being a creator who should focus on doing what he was good at and fighting against himself in search of his own memory (which ends up sparing Shirou from the tragic fate that Archer had), I think the moment that marked me most about Archer was when, after the fight against Berserker, Rin tells you that Archer told her that if they won the Holy Grail War, he would probably ask for world peace. There you conclude that that cynical man who hated Shirou for being a sucker idealist was probably not so cynical deep down.

But following the trend of all UBW, Archer here is much less patient with Shirou. And Rin too, considering she wanted to cut Shirou's hand off so he wouldn't participate in the war. Understandable, we are talking about a civilian who barely knows magic and who knew basically nothing about his own circumstance, and although she is pragmatic, she also doesn't want to kill him—after all, she actually already likes Shirou for a while. Although the romance of the route is with Tohsaka, we see proportionally less drama from her compared to other characters like Archer and Caster. Why is that? Because Rin is closed off and has a stubborn, stuck-up facade that takes a while to break. She's probably my favorite tsundere. She has a lot of problems, but they aren't visible like Shirou's, and even when she exposes them it's in a different way—after all, Rin's personality isn't to break down, but to get pissed off. This makes her romance fascinating, after all, it is one of the few things that is not a problem within the route, at least for Shirou; for Rin, Shirou is a fucking headache, although he helps a lot, of course.

Maybe it's even because of this shift in perspective, from Saber to Rin, that we realize in this route how sick Shirou is. Rin even vocalizes how she thinks Shirou's way of life is wrong after Gilgamesh brutally kills Illya to use her heart as the core of the grail. "Valuing other people's lives more than your own isn't altruism, Shirou, it's suicide and hypocrisy," she tells Shirou. Shirou agrees with his head down and finally acknowledges—after losing his servant, receiving more than one death threat from Archer, and almost dying a few times—that even so, it hurts him to acknowledge this, because if he didn't save everyone, what was his worth? But not everyone can be happy, and when he tried for that, his situation only got worse. Where did he get this ideal? Was it from his survivor's guilt?

No.

The reality is that on that fateful day he was just an empty shell waiting for death. Then he saw Kiritsugu trying to save people and saving him right after, and thought that the ideal of that man he didn't even know was good. And ever since, he's been chasing it. What he didn't know was that Kiritsugu was a man tormented by his own past and who blew up the grail—which was actually just a receptacle for 5.8 billion curses, all the evil in the world—and set an entire part of the city on fire when trying to destroy it. The magus walked out tormented looking for someone alive that day and only found Shirou. The boy saw the smile on the magus's face, he looked so happy, and the boy wanted that happiness of being a hero of justice, because the magus taught him it was good, even if it was difficult. The boy borrowed the man's ideal because he had nothing else to follow, but that purpose hurt the boy too, and when the boy looks, he turned into a man who has no hobbies or sense of self-importance. Who is Shirou without anyone to help? And how will he end up if he keeps this mentality for the rest of his life or even eternity? AND WHO BRINGS UP THESE QUESTIONS IN AN ATTACKING TONE?! Archer, or rather, the Heroic Spirit Emiya.

This plot twist of Archer being Shirou is brilliant, not because it's unpredictable, but because of the dramatic weight that each of Archer's acts gains when you analyze it through this lens. Archer got tired of trying to argue with Shirou and then wants to kill him. Archer simply cannot stand Shirou's existence and hopes that the boy's death will free him from his burden. It is here that he uses his noble phantasm for the first time: Unlimited Blade Works, the reality marble, that is, the physical extension of Archer's consciousness, and consequently Shirou's.

The next day they finally meet to actually fight. Shirou can only project a few times theoretically; he burns his own magic circuits during the fight, there is no chance he will win, but then he sees that Archer's speech about their lives not being worth it and that they were just hypocrites with a borrowed ideal—this poisonous regret was what was really weakening Shirou, and then, almost dying and standing only by willpower, Shirou finally finds the answer: Yes, the ideal is borrowed, it's impossible, but this still cannot be the reason for Shirou to give up his own life. If the ideal is impossible, then let him know that it was, but let him not live in suffering because of it and let that not stop him from trying, closer and closer, to approach it, because this way he could finally find happiness. Shirou finally accepts his own contradiction as part of himself, and not as something he desperately wants to destroy, and Archer does the same. At this moment Shirou pierces Archer's chest, and the knight no longer recognizes his enemy in the boy.

Archer and Shirou, Yin and Yang, Kanshou and Bakuya. Two forgers, the same individual. Gilgamesh faces Archer and defeats him, but now Archer's look is no longer that of someone who wants to see Shirou fall, but rather of someone who wants to see Shirou win, because he has finally found peace in his own past.

And what was Rin doing? Being kidnapped by Kirei (whom we even thought had been killed by Caster), Gilgamesh, and Shinji. Kirei was the one who killed her father, and this is one of the only moments you actually see her almost losing control. Once again we have proof of Kirei's son-of-a-bitch-ery, because even though he raised her for years, he feels no remorse at the idea of using her as the grail's receptacle, even though he himself promised Shinji that he would have her afterwards.

Kirei first sends Lancer to execute her, but out of honor, he doesn't want to kill the girl. So Kirei simply orders Cú Chulainn to strike his own heart with Gae Bolg. And then, when Kotomine is about to kill Rin, Lancer simply strikes Kirei's chest. Afterwards, taking advantage of the fact that Rin is tied up, Shinji moves forward to rape Rin, and Lancer then strikes his shoulder with Gae Bolg and chases him off into the forest, where Gilgamesh awaits him. Here the knight in blue and the girl share a conversation. In the end, Lancer said he would have liked to have had Rin as a master. I don't have much to say about Lancer, but he is another great character. Basically he is the other face of Archer, a knight with battle ethics, honor, and who likes to fight, who has self-respect and therefore respects his adversary. You can even see this in his design, since he and Archer form that trope of Blue Oni and Red Oni. I love Lancer.

From this moment on, Shirou finally gets his head in the right place to defeat Gilgamesh, but his circuits are burned. What is the solution for this that Rin proposes? A MAGIC CREST TRANSFER, AN EXTREMELY RISKY PROCESS FOR SHIROU AND HER! Okay, I don't know what this scene is like in the anime, but I simply loved this scene in the VN. Here Shirou plunges into Rin's consciousness to see all of her magic crest. This scene, besides being where Rin accepts Shirou (in all possible senses), is also the first where Shirou sees Rin's real issues like the absence of her father and his own funeral, the weight of carrying the horrors of an entire lineage on her arm, and how little she complained about it or took it to heart—after all, should there be regrets? I think the most meaningful part was in a memory where, after school, she simply runs around. Something so normal, but basically an act of extreme rebellion for her. Shirou already knew some things, like the lack of freedom she had during her life, but everything was so casual to her, after all, this was the life she inherited.

Tohsaka wasn't the focus of the route in terms of drama, and although I want to complain about that because I wanted more drama scenes with her, I have to praise how this creates an extremely cool contrast: what is expected of a VN is usually that the protagonist supports the heroine with problems, but here what happens is the opposite. The cruelty of UBW doesn't come dryly at Shirou, but rather as a stone wall he leans on when he can. Despite having her problems, Rin is much more "resolved" than Shirou. If she initially wanted to get him out of the war, now they were going to win it together, as allies and a couple—after all, basically what Rin did with Shirou was put herself inside his vulnerabilities and his family, it was basically a marriage.

The final battle against Gilgamesh, the arrogant tyrant who, in this route, instead of wanting to eat Saber, wants to destroy humanity, mongrels, considering them morally inferior and impure. Great villain again, by the way. The grail is no longer Illya, but poor Shinji, who tested the king's patience so much that he simply decided to say, "Oh, you want the grail? THEN TAKE THE FUCKING GRAIL"... He turns into the core of the Grail, or rather, the receptacle of Angra Mainyu, and consequently, a grotesque mass of flesh that screams in pain.

Now the battle will split into three: Shirou trying to project against Gilgamesh, Rin trying to save Shinji, and Saber fighting Assassin at the temple gate. It is in Assassin's battle that his true nature is revealed, and instantly he goes from the most whatever servant of the war to the most badass, after all he is an ordinary man without powers who, even so, manages to fight toe-to-toe against servants theoretically much stronger than him. Upon losing to Saber, he doesn't curse, he doesn't try to make himself bigger than he is, he just acknowledges his opponent's skill and says he should have trained more. Simply an epic ending for the most underrated character in the game so far. Then Saber goes to help Rin.

About her, her goal is to save Shinji in the middle of the grail. She manages to protect herself; this shows how Tohsaka is a mentally resilient person, and well, she does this in her usual way: in an extremely pragmatic manner. She enters the cursed sludge, the same one Kirei used as a weapon in the last route. She manages to save Shinji, but can she resist long enough to get out of the grail? And then, like a silver rain, EMIYA, who also thought he was dead, enters the grail and saves the two as a final act of service to his true master.

As for Shirou, he fights Gilgamesh. His spirit is unbreakable, but his flesh is weak, and the circuits he received from Rin are burning. As a final desperate act against the Gate of Babylon, he invokes the seven-ringed shield, and as an act of honor to the knight who taught him how to integrate, he recites:

I am the bone of my sword

Steel is my body and fire is my blood

I have created over a thousand blades

Unaware of loss

Nor aware of gain

Withstood pain to create weapons

Waiting for one's arrival

I have no regrets

This is the only path

My whole life was unlimited blade works

This is the synthesis of the idealistic Shirou with the tired EMIYA. He recognizes Unlimited Blade Works, that is, himself—not as a burden that only has the right to exist when serving others, but as his own existential condition, and he manages to embrace this. Only when he embraces what is most destructive in himself can he defeat Gilgamesh. The copy surpassed the original. But Gilgamesh doesn't give up, he can't bear being defeated by a mere zasshu, so he draws the Enkidu chain to try to pull the copy to the same place of indescribable emptiness as the original, and then at the last moment, Gilgamesh is struck by a high-speed arrow right in the head. This is the end of the Holy Grail War, and the sun rises peacefully over a peaceful Fuyuki.

This is the final moment. Rin is crying while talking to Archer. He just asks Rin to take care of him so he doesn't turn into what he turned into, and Rin accepts: "I'll take good care of him so he doesn't become messed up like you," Rin says in tears. EMIYA then says goodbye with a last gentle and pacified smile. He is finally no longer his own enemy, and neither is Shirou.

In the neutral ending, Saber disappears after helping Rin. What remains? Normal life two months later, Shinji is still in the hospital and Rin wants to go to the magic school in England, and wants Shirou to go with her. He would have to hide the Reality Marble because it's considered heretical magic, but they will go on together come hell or high water.

In the good ending, you get at least two affection points with Saber, and because of that, Rin decides she will keep her on the earthly plane with Shirou's help (I, you, and especially she know what kind of help that is), and what remains for us is a wonderful everyday.

GOD, THESE ENDINGS ARE SO GOOD! I think what made me happiest—besides the natural and peaceful conclusion of the story—was how these endings remind me of Ciel's route. Seriously, the endings of her route in Tsukihime (the original, I don't know about the Remake) have basically the same structure. That, on top of everything else I said. Actually, Rin reminds me a lot of Ciel.

Is this route better than Fate? Yes, it is, even if by a small margin.

That's it. I'm simply loving Fate. Next stop: Heaven's Feel.

TLDR: Fate is an epic about overcoming the past that moved an insane man who wrote a whole text to praise the first route of F/SN. Contains spoilers.

Man, how long has it been since I last sat in front of the computer to write a review? Oh, it must have been just a little while, right? It’s not like it's been—FOUR MONTHS? I got completely rusty since a text of mine about Persona 5 that came out all messed up, and I spent all this time reading 40 hours?... Okay then. At least I'm here.

This text won't be an impartial analysis, but rather a passionate and kind of schizophrenic one. If I forget some event, important fact, or something like that, I sincerely apologize. Reading a dense and emotional 43-hour text in a language that isn't your own while your mental health is plummeting and you're trying to rebuild it at the same time wasn't easy. Here begins the actual text.

A boy is found in a field in flames. He looks up at the sky, expecting no one to save him, but when he looks again, he finds a worried and tearful man staring at his face. He saves him, though the boy doesn't know exactly how. He takes him in as his son, and during the years they live together, the man is absolutely good. The father passes his values down to his son, talking about how he wanted to be a superhero when he was younger, but as he grew up, it became hard to call himself a hero. The son says he wants to follow his father's dream. The father falls asleep never to wake up again. The boy then becomes a teenager who keeps walking in his father's footsteps. He holds deep within himself an enormous desire to become a hero to save people. He is someone with an appearance that might even be intimidating, but who apparently possesses a heart of gold, always helping others, even more than he should, even those who aren't good people, more than would be good for his own sake. He even uses his slightly weird power of seeing circuits to try to fix things, but usually, he loses his grip and his power does nothing. If he is a good person who is always available to help others, then… Why does he still have nightmares about that burning field? Why did the man decide to take him in if, for that to happen, everyone else had to die in a brutal way? He carries within himself a possible world where everyone could have been saved, and for that privilege, he scourges himself—after all, if he doesn't help others, how can he honor the memory of those who died in his place? What value does he have if he doesn't compensate for his sin? How is he to atone for it? In his mouth, mind, and heart, he has only one answer and one fate: “I want to become a hero of justice so I can save everyone.” The name of this boy? Emiya Shirou.

Shirou has a habit of training his magic in a shed on the grounds of his father's old mansion, where he still lives. One night, he returns home late due to some chores he was doing at school and ends up being chased by a man with a spear. Then he gets home, but the man with the spear invades his house. And in desperation, under the very same roof where he trains projection, a silver light deflects a blow. “Are you my master? I propose a contract: I shall be your sword as long as you give me what I need,” and without even really knowing what was happening, the boy's story changes forever.

This prologue already introduces the perspective that the player is going to see throughout the entire story. If I thought Shirou might be a somewhat liquid character, that expectation was buried. He manages to be even more distinctive than Shiki is in Tsukihime, for example. I think you realize this when you notice that you often have to mold yourself into performing acts that look like suicide just to avoid a dead end.

Well, the Fate route isn't just a Shirou monologue. There is a character who shares that spot with him: Saber. And holy shit, what a heroine Saber is.

Saber's entire route reminded me a lot of Arcueid's route in Tsukihime. The general themes are similar: immortality, repeating the past, a dream of a normal everyday life, killing a possessive villain, that sort of thing. But the similarities between her and Arcueid die at that basic outline and their hair color, because Saber's route and character are much closer to Hisui and Ciel. Saber is quite cold initially. She just makes the contract with Shirou, they go talk to Kirei at the church to get the war explained, and everything is fine—until a three-meter-tall giant with a child riding on top appears and challenges them to battle. Saber is strong! Remember what she did to Lancer… She takes a hit and bleeds a lot.

This event is the trigger that makes Shirou, initially out of pure instinct from not wanting to see others sacrifice themselves, ask Saber to stop fighting. Saber is unyielding on this matter; she has to get the Grail and won't stop fighting until she does or until the contract is over. Here, Fate shows its structure: by day, a calm routine, a shared everyday fantasy with Rin and Saber. Shirou begins to learn about battle and magic. At night, when everyone is asleep, the Servants take off and the city becomes a battlefield. This structure, though quite exhausting, illustrates well how everyone, in the end, was happy with the setup. The days repeat, nights of battle fall, plans are made, Saber becomes closer to Shirou, and he… doesn't achieve good results in magic, and still can't beat Saber. In fact, according to Rin, he doesn't even possess an inherited Magic Circuit. Why was Kiritsugu trying to teach him magic? Projection? To someone like Shirou? Why teach such a dangerous and destructive magic to someone so powerless?

The days repeat without much difference. Even when Rider is defeated, Saber finally uses the real power of Calibur for the first time. What day is today? The tenth? Saber and Shirou go to the city park, which happens to be the old burned field. Shirou tells Saber a bit about his past, and she, in return, tells him a bit about the Grail War. Shirou later leaves the house and runs into Illya. He wakes up tied up in the girl's mansion, but Saber, Rin, and Archer go to save him. Even though the infiltration is a success, they are intercepted at the mansion's entrance. In this text, I won't talk about Archer, especially because I know I'll have a lot to say about him in an eventual UBW text, but with his final breath, the cynical man speaks those words that moved me: "Shirou, you possess no external enemies. You are a creator; your true battle is against yourself. Never stop evolving." Archer dies as a hero, taking several of Berserker's lives while the rest of the gang escapes.

Shirou lives with this extremely firm hero ideal until Archer crosses his life. He is the first to plant a seed in Shirou's head that, perhaps, the true objective of his life shouldn't be a fight to the end against others, but rather a fight against himself in search of self-improvement and healing. Fate is also, why not, a reflection on the creative process itself. Shirou can only create something useful with his projection when, in a situation of desperation, he finally manages to truly concentrate on an idea of perfection that is palpable to him, which is Saber. Another thing that helps Shirou break this idea of the hero is when Saber recounted her experience with Kiritsugu in the last Grail War. He was a cold, focused magus who treated Saber poorly and forced her to destroy the Grail. Saber herself says she is impressed by how the guilt for his actions transformed this cold magus into someone who passed the purest heroism down to Shirou. But passing down this heroism also cursed him, and even so, Kiritsugu didn't escape the curse of Gae Bolg, or rather: he didn't escape his fate of dying drowned in guilt caused by the fire in the Grail. Shirou then finds his destiny. If he uses the Grail, won't he end up just like his father? Or even worse? Shirou is frightened by this shattering of the image; he doesn't want to fall victim to something that crushed his beloved father. He decides to change his own fate. Here, after what felt to me like around 30 hours of reading, is where Fate truly begins.

Here I stop narrating the story linearly to really talk about Saber, or rather, Artoria.

There is an old French saying: Noblesse oblige. Artoria was a young girl; she was warned by a wizard to stop trying to pull a sword from a stone. Even so, she did it, and the moment she did, she cast her humanity aside. Both figuratively—after all, a king cannot show vulnerability or mercy beyond a certain measure—and literally, since the sword made her immortal. The girl had to pretend to be a man to rule her country, but in the end, the people didn't care about the gender of their ruler, only that they were a protector. She and her knights won 20 battles and the king was glorious, but at the same time, he simply seemed detached from any human emotion. What is the point of having someone so cold as king? The population and his knights gradually abandoned him, until she was left with only one knight. He then attempts a coup, kills a good portion of the knights who once served him, and dies on the hill of Avalon. Before his final moment, the king sealed a pact with reality to become a Heroic Spirit so that, one day, he could go back in time to fulfill his royal duty in the most proper way possible, even if that in itself is contradictory. Why would the girl want this so badly? Didn't she already fulfill her duty? In reality, she did much more than she should have for a kingdom that abandoned her and saw her as a tyrant.

This final reflection is valid, until you remember that the person making it is Shirou—the boy who didn't even know Saber was going to fight in the first place because he hates the idea of a girl sacrificing herself for him. A relationship between a boy with no attachment to life and a girl who thinks she is a war machine. That is the Fate route. Shirou can only see this past in the form of dreams after, in Saber's deepest subconscious, killing the red dragon with the vision of a Saber made of light. And thus creating a psychological connection with her through Magic Circuits. He sees the girl's entire past and decides that no, she must not go back in time. Shirou wants Saber to stay, and he will do everything possible to convince her of it.

In everyday life, Shirou builds up an attraction to Saber—something theoretically inappropriate between a Master and their Servant—and Saber begins to notice, but because of her guilt, her goal remained the Holy Grail. The day that best demonstrates this is Day 14. Shirou takes Saber out for a walk around the city, they buy things he thinks she would like, since girls usually like stuffed animals, but Saber can't even see herself as a girl, because how could she? She was never treated like one; she sees herself only as a Servant, a king, or even a sword. The animal she chooses? A lion. Precisely the animal symbol of England that represents honor and royalty. They go to a café recommended by Rin, and Saber smiles. Shirou feels how well that environment suits her. It was an exhausting outing with uncomfortable moments, but it was Shirou's bargain. If she decided to live with him, their days could be like this. But Saber doesn't feel she deserves it; she failed in her duty as king and, therefore, must return to her time. Shirou simply snaps, saying that Saber's idea makes no sense and that she has already done more than enough for a people who never truly rewarded her, but Saber simply responds with, basically: "Shirou, who are you to point your finger at me for this? You are a fool who doesn't even care about his own life." Shirou gets even angrier at Saber trying to convince herself that she failed in her duty and leaves her on the way back home. But he regrets it and finds Saber paralyzed on the bridge, not knowing where to go.

The romance between Saber and Shirou is extremely interesting because these two are so similar. Shirou believes he has a duty that is worth more than his life, and therefore feels miserable. Saber believes she failed in her duty and has to go back in time, but if she goes back in time, she will probably feel the exact same thing, since the nature of her government led her to that, and she would probably keep going back in time infinitely. Neither of them can point their finger in the other's face about their perspective, but both can save each other. Shirou might never, in his view, make up for the deaths of all those who were saved in his place, but he managed to stop Saber from repeating the cycle. Saber might never win the trust of her country again, but she can manage to be Shirou's sword. Fate, a story I thought wouldn't have much substance, was in reality a great epic about healing past traumas. If Shirou and Saber are the sword because they see themselves as tools, then both are the sheath, because both manage to shelter each other inside that. "Shirou, you are my sheath!" Saber realizes in her mind something that Shirou didn't even understand was literal at first, but he understood what it implied. Saber finally accepts that she doesn't have to go back to the past because what she truly needed was already with her. The relationship between the two then stops being simply Master and Servant to become a couple. Even after being blasted by Gilgamesh, they hold on. Even after they understand that it is practically impossible for Saber to remain with Shirou, they make the most of these final hours. Shirou takes out what saved his life and hands it back to its original owner in order to increase her power for the hardest battle they would face. At the gate of the shrine, no one has the courage to say a final goodbye; they wanted to be able to pretend that everything would go on as normal, but they simply couldn't.

The opponents? Kirei and Gilgamesh, two truly fascinating characters. ESPECIALLY GILGAMESH! It took me a while to talk about him, but HOLY SHIT! GILGAMESH IS SO FUCKING COOL. I say this both in terms of his power concept and his connectivity to the legend. His powers are extremely badass; the Gate of Babylon is a lesson in ontology and how legends from different places mirror one another, while also being visually incredible. And Ea, his sword? I have nothing to say—Nasu took the Babylonian god of wisdom and creation and put him as a weapon in the hand of the King of Heroes. The fact that her Noble Phantasm is called Enuma Elish only makes it better. Enuma Elish is the Babylonian creation myth; this symbolizes that the blade's power is capable of changing the very structure of reality. All this power in the hands of a villain who is heavily reduced to just being a badass guy, but who is extremely tragic. In the original legend, Gilgamesh tried to go down to the underworld to save Enkidu—who was the only friend of the king of Ur—while trying to obtain immortality. In the midst of this, he gathered innumerable treasures, which would later be known by mongrel humanity as Noble Phantasms, but nothing fulfilled him. As the history of the world unfolded, he saw a proud queen and her downfall, and one day they fought. But Gilgamesh went mad for Saber, because while he saw her as the only thing with an honor similar to his own, he also saw in her the only power that could oppose his. At the same time that Gilgamesh saw Saber as a new Enkidu, he also saw her as the last treasure missing from his collection. The richest of heroes driven mad by a woman, just as Roa was driven mad by Arcueid in Tsukihime. His plan was to take Saber and submerge her in the black mud of the Grail, making her just like him. Here, Saber realizes: the King of Heroes was insane.

As for Kirei, he was a magus who was expelled from the Mages' Association and was one of the Masters in the Fourth Holy Grail War. He was responsible for everything; he caused the fire in the Grail that Shirou has nightmares about. He sacrificed a massive number of children to keep Gilgamesh on Earth after the war, selling himself as the great mediator of the war while harboring a Servant of his own. He is a man who can only feel alive when he sees the suffering of others and who views people as entertainment. He was effectively an evil person, and even so, Kiritsugu took pity on his life and let him walk away alive. And Kirei uses this as a way to disdain Shirou. Kirei bred such an enormous guilt in Kiritsugu that he turned the entire fire site upside down, causing him to find Shirou and teach him projection to try to rid himself of that guilt, and even so, he died prematurely. Kirei is the great ghost looming over the Grail War; he caused a disaster and wants to cause it again just for his own amusement.

The battle is extremely intense, being told from two perspectives: Shirou against Kirei underneath Illya in the corrupted chalice, and Saber against Gilgamesh at the entrance of the shrine. While Shirou sinks into the black mud of the Grail, Saber is almost actually taken by Gilgamesh. Shirou is then tormented by the curse while Saber tries to resist. Shirou sees that it was that curse, that repetition of sins, that brought his father to ruin, and then, in an impulse of resistance, Shirou remembers his father's ideal and the sheath that had been infused in his chest, and manages to copy it and give this copy to Saber. And so, in a vital burst, he shoots out of the mud and lunges at Kirei with the dagger given by Rin that very day—an object that had been hidden from the priest himself by her. Saber concentrates energy into a strike with Excalibur so massive that it even dematerializes her armor. And thus, at the exact same time, both defeat their enemies.

I think the most interesting thing here are Gilgamesh's final words to Saber. The driven-mad King of Heroes says that Saber is very disobedient, but that he forgives her, because some things are beautiful precisely because they are unattainable. And he turns to dust, finally managing to let go of his years-long obsession and returning to the Throne of Heroes in peace. The Grail War is over, but the Grail is still floating, generating darkness in the sky. But this time, the Grail will be destroyed correctly; a fire will not repeat itself. Shirou asks Saber if she doesn't want to go back in time, but she agrees to destroy the Grail. She positions herself beneath the deep shadow and, in a beam of light, ends this journey just as she began it. Illya sleeps peacefully beside Shirou, and they finally manage to say goodbye. And Saber, a second before disappearing into the wind, finally pronounces: "Shirou Emiya, I love you."

Shirou goes on with his life normally, and Saber, with the contract broken, finally manages to return to her time. She says she had a long dream and asks the last knight who remained faithful to her, Bedivere, to return Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake. Thus the king, initially seen as a savior and later as a sword, finally manages to die as a human. Thereby retelling the Arthurian legend, but with an ending that, given the context, means something else entirely.

MY GOD! HOW I CRIED AT THIS ENDING! The Fate route is basically perfect. It possesses an atmosphere that, like every good myth, lies somewhere between a great mythological epic and a very tasteful melancholy. Shirou and Saber are characters I didn't care much about at first. To be honest, I didn't expect much from Fate, even though I had read Nasu's Tsukihime as well and loved it. I went in knowing nothing and came out extremely hyped to read Unlimited Blade Works.

The message of the route—about honoring the past but not letting it become a weight that makes your life worse today, seeing the characters' evolution, how Shirou and Saber stop seeing each other as means to an end to develop a romance of mutual support, and how even so they manage to accept that they won't be able to live with one another—is so beautiful that it took me days to truly digest. This ending reminds me a lot of Arcueid's route in Tsukihime, but it has a very different tone. In Tsukihime, the loss of a possible everyday life due to Shiki's nature as a killer and Arcueid's as a vampire has a tone of pure, yet slightly bitter, resignation. Here, where the rules of the war fatally separate Artoria and Shirou, it is hopeful. Shirou didn't manage to save everyone, but he managed to save Saber from repeating her past, and Saber is finally going to be able to die as a human. It's the best possible ending for this romance.

My only critique of Fate might be its size and pacing, but at the same time, I also admit that my mental health wasn't great while I was reading this route. Plus, the fact that they keep bullshitting rules and that gets exhausting—but then, I know that's just Nasu's habit, and there probably won't be as much of it in the next routes. I went through some pretty heavy stuff that, without a doubt, slowed down my reading. It finally sank in that I managed to finish a route of Fate. I am finally free from the first route and can move on to Unlimited Blade Works. Score? Technically a 9, in my heart it's an absolute 10. Just for this route alone, if you like the Fate animes and are wondering if the VN is worth it, I say yes, it is. Mostly because the anime for the Fate route is kind of tragic.

I hope you enjoyed the review. This was probably the most difficult and, at the same time, most rewarding one I've ever done. I've been writing this text for a few days. I hope you guys like the result as much as I do.

Eu ontem fiz uma cagada: o meu computador descarregou mas deixou o jogo aberto. Nisso, o meu tempo de jogo que era de 38 horas subiu pra 60. Aí eu decidi mudar o tempo de jogo na área de risco pro normal na expectativa de que só ia contar isso normalmente. O problema é que eu joguei uma hora e o tempo do jogo não mudou. Como faz o tempo voltar a contar normal? Fiz uma cagada irreversível e pau no meu cu ou tem como corrigir?

This is a script. I'm tired of it. You enter the game, start growing your economy minimally, build a minimal army, and out of nowhere, a nation in the middle of nowhere that you didn't even know existed starts a war with you for no reason and invades your territory with at least twice the number of troops you have, in addition to an utterly nonsensical border, putting a far more evolved enemy literally on your doorstep. That sucked.I'm tired of this. I don't know if something similar happens in the others AoH's, but this in AoH 3 is awful. I fucking hate this game

A Fédération Internationale de Football Association, instituição criada na França que organiza torneios de Football para as olimpíadas, está organizando um torneio mundial de seleções. Devido à recente crise na bolsa de New York e o crescente cenário de tensões políticas, nenhum país europeu quis ser a sede do torneio. O Uruguai então decidiu aproveitar a oportunidade para trazer este evento para seu país, em comemoração ao centenário de sua constituição.

Neste exato momento, o estado uruguaio está construindo o Estádio Centenario, uma praça esportiva moderna, toda construída em concreto, com estilo Art-deco para cerca de noventa mil pessoas, a pretensão é que esta praça receba todos os jogos do torneio.

Devido ao tempo de locomoção da Europa para a América, muitos estados europeus se recusaram a enviar suas seleções. Os países representados neste torneio serão: Argentina, Brazil, Bolívia, Chile, Uruguai, Paraguay e Peru pela América do Sul. Pela América do norte, participarão México e Estados Unidos. Pela Europa, participação França, Bélgica, Romênia e Yugoslavia.

O Grande artilheiro da seleção brasileira será a Preguinho, jogador pelo Fluminense Football Club, e o Técnico será Píndaro de Carvalho, ex-jogador da Seleção brasileira de football.