I Will Become My Ideals

i guess it's to be expected but the star rail fate collabs might give players unfamiliar with fate some very distorted impressions of ubw and its tone. lol.

ultimately it's an improvement over the previous collab, where the charm of characters like saber and archer was absent throughout the majority of that story, and only saber's was adequately communicated at the very end. this more recent collab sells you rin and gilgamesh far more effectively. i could hear tomokazu seki monologue in character for ages, in no small part because the writers were able to make him delightfully arrogant and insightful as ever. but the devs still can't quite deliver on something that feels like an authentic fate/stay night experience for reasons involving the production process i can only speculate, aside from the obvious reasons honkai star rail is not 3d fate/stay night, and that the writers want to provide a light-hearted low-stakes collab to complement a high-stakes emotional main story. the theme of the collab is gaining and losing, and indeed unfortunately the collab series ends up on the losing side of this exchange (though it really doesn't have to).

unsurprisingly, the collab is very loyal to the time-honored tradition of kinoko nasu reminding you rin is his most special girl ever and everyone should like her, even characters who have only known her for 5 minutes before they disappear until the next trailblaze continuance. gilgamesh, despite being gilgamesh, is not immune to crazy flanderization, especially when a certain white-haired fashion disaster hero became involved. as richard would have us know, sparring with heroes from ancient mesopotamia is an activity where one puts their life on the line for right of entry. as much as i love phainon to death, acknowledgement from the king should not be so easily earned...

but back to rin, one thing i did enjoy was getting rin's feelings on both her fathers. it was rare and interesting to hear her share positive feelings towards the weird uncle who knocked her down a couple of tax brackets. in truth, for a long time kotomine was the only person who understood rin beyond her facade due to being part of the world behind it. to have her acknowledge this (despite his role in more than just decimating her fortune) so honestly in my opinion is a tasteful choice best appreciated by those who have been following the story for a long time and have always been more curious about how rin would approach that subject years after the end of the holy grail war.

i also found it interesting they also just decided to drop the "sakura is rin's sister" bomb to potentially uninitiated players right off the bat (heh), when that is beyond ubw territory. but in a conversation where rin discusses her relationship with her father, and how he and kotomine, being inadequate human beings in their own right, are the source of her own personal inadequacies, it was inevitable. that was perhaps the most interesting part of the collab and the one that really felt like fate/stay night character rin tohsaka was in honkai star rail. in a patch where astral express heroine himeko also gives her twisted father figure her sincere gratitude, it felt all the more fitting.