some real good stuff here. production-wise, you can see a lot of the structural quirks in the approach that were smoothed out and refined for fate stay night. overall it's a little thinner than the successor, both in the depth of the characters and the relationships that it wants to explore. the biggest failure when comparing the two directly is the protagonist. shiki, imo barely gets a chance to elevate beyond a boilerplate player stand-in, never getting the depth of character exploration that you get from shirou. there's some reasons for that in the text, but it thins the narrative impact of everything that happens to him.

i was gonna try to grit my teeth through the sex scenes but the first few made me legitimately want to hurl and i had to find a version of the game where they just cut to black and skip. as bad as they are in the OG fate before they were mercifully removed from the currently available version, these are immediately far worse, both narratively and content-wise.

very excited that the remake seems to want to go way further in-depth on each route, alongside an official localization.