"The only people a superhero can save are the people he sides with."

An entire review of the Fate/Stay Night anime adaptation can be boiled down to a single sentence; Shirou Emiya fucking sucks.

Seinen anime can easily be tanked by a terrible lead, and Fate/Stay Night is obviously no exception. The burden of Shirou Emiya is like wearing a full suit of armor while trying to go for a swim, no matter how strong a swimmer you are there is no chance of you keeping your head above the water. And no matter how good some of Fate/Stay Night's individual parts may be, it can't be saved when Emiya is constantly dragging it down. Then again, if you strapped Shirou in a suit of armor and tried to drown him he would inexplicably survive anyway since he is already wearing impenetrable and indestructible plot armor. Dude catches more certain death than Rasputin and just shrugs it off while being one of the most consistently stupid, selfish, and unlikable characters around. And that is his final form! At no point does he improve, learn anything, or develop.

The Emiyalbatross is a double shame, because Fate/Stay Night is a fantastic concept at its core. In the story, the Holy Grail appears every so often and some of the mightiest heroes in the history of our world are summoned to fight for their human masters in order to gain control of it. This leads to some really fun battles and great character designs that, if it weren't for the massive amount of missteps, would have been enough to make this an easy recommendation. Some missteps are on Studio DEEN's part due to how drab a lot of the animation gets outside of the battles, but most come as the plot is further revealed in the second half of the anime when the pace slows down considerably and twists are dumped on the viewer in some very unconvincing ways. Unconvincing twists are nothing new in anime, but when so much of Fate/Stay Night's second half revolves around the "romance" between Sabre and Shirou, oh boy does that second half drag.

The nature of Fate/Stay Night also works against itself. Considering it starts off in a hole by being an adaptation of one of those visual novels but with all the sex scenes removed - which leads to some painfully awkward scenes like "the place where the threesome probably went" and "the place where awful Shirou probably makes Excalibur puns while guilting Sabre into sex because he is just the worst" - it is just too much for the anime to recover from thanks to how truly terrible Shirou is as protagonist. I think I'm being generous by giving this an average score, but I don't think saying so is as controversial an opinion as it would have been when this was at the height of its popularity. The far superior, and completely Shirou-less, Fate/Zero did a lot to overshadow Fate/Stay Night while shining a light on its shortcomings.

WATCH if you have a unique form of blindness that renders you incapable of seeing any of Shirou's scenes. DON'T WATCH if you can just Youtube the two opening themes because they are pretty solidly the best part of every episode.