Pinch, punch, first of the month

Hello lovely Patrons, thank you once again for your continued support of MoeGamer, and welcome to the new Patrons!

It's September! The year is flying by, and a new month, of course, means a new Cover Game to explore. Over the course of the next month, we'll be taking an in-depth look at the legendary visual novel from Type Moon, Fate/stay night.

I've wanted to cover Fate/stay night for a long time now because I think it's in a rather fascinating situation; it's one of the few well-known "classics" of the visual novel medium that has never actually received an official localisation, with it instead being brought to the West in a strictly unofficial capacity through the efforts of dedicated fan translation groups.

And yet, despite the original visual novel never receiving an official localisation and consequently needing a bit of effort to get up and running in English, the Fate series as a whole has gone on to become popular and influential here in the West, spawning numerous anime adaptations, video game spinoffs and, of course, recently released mobile game Fate/Grand Order.

Fate can be a daunting franchise to get involved with, but speak to anyone familiar with it and one of the most common things you'll hear them say is "read the VN". This makes sense, as the original VN goes "from the beginning", as it were, introducing the core concepts of the series as well as key recurring characters who show up in other related works.

And if you became familiar with Fate through those later works, discovering the original interpretation and depiction of these characters can be quite an eye-opening experience. I'll refrain from too many spoilers for now, but suffice to say those who found Illya particularly appealing in Fate/kaleid liner PRISMA ILLYA almost certainly haven't read the original VN, because OG Illya is genuinely frightening and horrific.

I'm looking forward to writing about Fate/stay night for the next month, as it's a hugely influential work that hasn't had a lot written about it over the years. It's also a rip-roaring tale of magic and adventure in its own right, with a nice balance between slice-of-life, comedy, fantasy, horror and tragedy, and the excellent fan-made localisation makes it very approachable while maintaining its distinctively Japanese character.

Due to the fact it never got an official release in the West, acquiring a copy can be challenging and somewhat legally questionable, so I can't point you in the direction of a specific link for now… but it's not hard to find the information and patches you need to get up and running, so if you want to read along for the next month and join the discussion, do feel free!

Thank you once again for your continued support. It means a great deal to me.