(From what I hear, previous adaptations weren’t too good).
You probably already know all of this, but for the sake of completeness, IMHO (Thar be spoliers below!):
The original eroge novel had (as is the tradition) several endings and plotlines. The “Fate” plotline mostly dealt with Shirou/Saber; the “Unlimited Blade Works” (UBW) plotline resolves Shirou and Archer’s relationship while focusing on Shirou/Rin (and to some extent Shirou/Rin/Saber); and “Heaven’s Feel” focuses on Shirou/Ilya and explains Sakura’s backstory. Then there’s Realta Nua, an expansion of UBW that rewrites the ending into Shirou/Saber forever (literally). There’s also a sequel called Fate/hollow ataraxia which supplies a lot of the backstory and the metaphysics of how the grail war actually works.
As is the tradition will multi-ending visual novel adaptations, Fate/stay night (the original anime adaptation) tries to combine several elements of Fate with Heaven’s Feel, and hints of the ending of Realta Nua. The animation is not great e.g., most fights are still-shot montages and even if it were, there are few high-powered attacks in the fifth grail war, other than perhaps Archer’s version of UBW and Enuma Elish. For crying out loud, Enuma Elish is represented by flat red splotches.
People were rather unhappy that UBW got shafted, and so Type-Moon produced an OVA (now-confusingly also called Unlimited Blade Works) that tries to do too much from UBW in too little time with practically no budget. The animation quality is crappier than Fate/stay night and the plot hangs together with duct tape and string cheese.
Then ufotable came along, and Fate/zero was mindblowingly awesome.Some of this, IMO, is just because the heroes of the fourth grail war have attacks that are far greater in scope (Ionian Hetaroi, fully-powered Excalibur, Enuma Elish, For Someone’s Glory and Prelati’s Spellbook) than the fifth (shitty Excalibur, Archer’s UBW, Enuma Elish, Gae Bolg?). That and they had a vastly larger production budget.
You probably already know all of this, but for the sake of completeness, IMHO (Thar be spoliers below!):
The original eroge novel had (as is the tradition) several endings and plotlines. The “Fate” plotline mostly dealt with Shirou/Saber; the “Unlimited Blade Works” (UBW) plotline resolves Shirou and Archer’s relationship while focusing on Shirou/Rin (and to some extent Shirou/Rin/Saber); and “Heaven’s Feel” focuses on Shirou/Ilya and explains Sakura’s backstory. Then there’s Realta Nua, an expansion of UBW that rewrites the ending into Shirou/Saber forever (literally). There’s also a sequel called Fate/hollow ataraxia which supplies a lot of the backstory and the metaphysics of how the grail war actually works.
As is the tradition will multi-ending visual novel adaptations, Fate/stay night (the original anime adaptation) tries to combine several elements of Fate with Heaven’s Feel, and hints of the ending of Realta Nua. The animation is not great e.g., most fights are still-shot montages and even if it were, there are few high-powered attacks in the fifth grail war, other than perhaps Archer’s version of UBW and Enuma Elish. For crying out loud, Enuma Elish is represented by flat red splotches.
People were rather unhappy that UBW got shafted, and so Type-Moon produced an OVA (now-confusingly also called Unlimited Blade Works) that tries to do too much from UBW in too little time with practically no budget. The animation quality is crappier than Fate/stay night and the plot hangs together with duct tape and string cheese.
Then ufotable came along, and Fate/zero was mindblowingly awesome.Some of this, IMO, is just because the heroes of the fourth grail war have attacks that are far greater in scope (Ionian Hetaroi, fully-powered Excalibur, Enuma Elish, For Someone’s Glory and Prelati’s Spellbook) than the fifth (shitty Excalibur, Archer’s UBW, Enuma Elish, Gae Bolg?). That and they had a vastly larger production budget.