Thoughts on Fate/stay night

I recently started playing the original Fate/stay night visual novel. I've never been a fan of the anime adaptations, always felt that they lacked something, but I'm really enjoying the VN so far. And while we're at it, I wanna test the img tag, so here's one aspect that really stood out to me:

Not only are the characters' faces much more expressive than in the adaptations, so are their hands. If you've ever talked to a character artist you probably already have an idea of how hard it is to draw hands; to make it a focus point in your character design is ballsy. The artist's name is Takeuchi Takashi.

This is only one of many aspects that speaks to me in a way the adaptations never did. A single pair of hands tells me more about a character than a whole lavishly animated movie with beautiful fight scenes. It's not just that, the writing is much stronger in this VN as well. Character relations that the adaptations barely acknowledge the existence of, such as Tohsaka's friendship with Mitsuzuri, suddenly become interesting, even valuable to the story.

Somehow, I'm more satisfied by lengthy musings on the nature of magic, and how it differs from our own concept of it, than the adaptations' attempt at cutting the fluff and "getting to the good part" which somehow backfires and becomes more boring than it would've been if left untouched. The fluff is the good part. The difference between Sakura clutching at her chest and Tohsaka letting her arms rest at her sides is what makes me care about these characters in the first place— without that it's just a collection of scenes of people talking and moving from place to place. End of rant.