The grand finale of Type-Moon’s 50+ hour epic is not quite what one would expect. Coming after the dramatic battle of ideals in Unlimited Blade Works and the story of the fallen warrior and the king of heroes in Fate, it’s hard to imagine what kind of climax could do justice to the buildup.
Thankfully, Heavens Feel fills those shoes with ease.
In retrospect, though, there was something more to my enjoyment of the story than the simple fact that it ‘s a well-written conclusion. It touched me emotionally in a way that no Type-Moon work has. It’s hard to define it with a word, but there was something in particular that resonated with me in HF, something that has little to do with filling in the back story and tying in the themes. It’s the one thing that makes visual novels hit or miss, the often deciding factor that draws the line between melodramatic and heart-wrenching. It’s the difference between observing Shirou’s struggle as a fly on the wall and observing it as a participant.
Matou Sakura, the shy but kindhearted student who finds joy in making her senpai smile.
Matou Sakura, the broken heir to the Makiri family and the plaything of a twisted magus.
Matou Sakura is both of these things, and her story is a punch to the gut because of it. Had she begun as a victim, it would have been simple: after all, Type-Moon stories are known for their unorthodox choice of haremettes. We can only guess at how many humans Saber was forced to kill, but both Shirou and the viewer are forced to accept this from the beginning. Saber was always wounded on some level, but we know that she’s a heroic spirit with an admirable amount of honour, so we place her on a pedestal.
And along the same lines, if Sakura were made a victim only as the story progressed, her tragedy would not have been as cruel. Innocents are hurt throughout the game – the coma victims at school, Issei’s family, the shadow’s prey. Pain as a result of the Holy Grail War is acceptable, somehow. It feels, both to Shirou and to us, as something that we simply must fight against. It feels like something that can be stopped if we keep fighting.
But nothing can change the past. Nothing can change a victim who was broken 11 years ago.
This is where opinions may start to diverge. Those who found Sakura ordinary may view her “development” through merely sympathetic eyes; others who found her boring may simply not care. Luckily (or unluckily) for me, I felt in sync with Shirou for the first time, echoing his thoughts as he spoke them. Sakura had always been around, drifting from conversation to conversation, appearing in the occasional picture on the internet. She had always seemed mildly attractive and potentially interesting, but I never gave her much thought.
Or rather, I never gave her much thought until the game forced me to.
In a word, the pacing was perfect. The ordinary days of exposition and planning with Rin, with a light sprinkling of foreshadowing scattered on top, quickly led into the development of feelings between Shirou and his kouhai. Their ordinary conversations became slightly more than ordinary, finding beauty in the most mundane tasks. I was right there with him as he saw Sakura in her plain clothes for the first time, as she clung to his neck, half asleep. The developing love story was just like any visual novel, filled with the romanticized bliss of everyday life.
But as we now know, it wasn’t long before that bliss led to an unfortunate discovery….
In essence, the destruction of Sakura’s pure image is the main catalyst of the route. Like in a Shakespearean play, the climax is in Act 3 – the moment we realize that Sakura is broken and that her scars run deeper than even the protagonist can reach, the ending becomes inevitable. Along with Shirou, the viewer is forced to come to terms with the fact that the ending will not be pretty, and that we’ll be forced to compromise something if we want to heal her incurable wounds.
On the flip side, Sakura’s role in the story is to force Shirou to rethink everything. As the wiki attests to, the three routes represent Shirou’s growth, meaning that his ultimate fate is to compromise his ideal in the name of something more important. The two years of bliss he shared with Sakura were enough to change his heart, to make him realize that happiness exists in the world. When the time came to choose between the girl and the world, he realized that killing his loved one would be a worse crime than sacrifice the innocents… and by finding something tangible to protect, he overcame his guilt of 10 years and found his sense of self.
One of the many examples of how the route forces the viewer into Shirou’s shoes, moreso than the average visual novel
If Fate was the exposition that introduces us to the Holy Grail War and the meaning of the word “hero,” and if Unlimited Blade Works was the dramatic conclusion in which Shirou fights against the embodiment of reality in defense of his selfless ideal, then Heavens Feel is without a doubt the hopeless downward spiral that throws everything we thought we knew into the abyss. Fate/stay night is a story that begins with the beginning, develops with the climax, and concludes with the true climax.
In HF, much like Shirou, the viewer is forced to acknowledge the cruelty behind the Holy Grail War. We are forced to cast aside our admiration for Saber as a perfect warrior, we lose our ability to pin the blame on characters like Kirei and even Shinji… and in the end, we must recognize that beliefs and ideals pale in the face of true happiness. Shirou’s affection for Sakura was enough to make him throw everything away, to make him – the person who shouldn’t be alive – consciously choose to sacrifice the lives of others. However, instead of using his self-sacrificing nature in defense of the world, he uses it in defense of the most important person to him. It’s a 20 hour journey to reveal a simple truth: there are things in life that give us happiness, and in order to have some semblance of a human life, we must protect these things at the cost of all else.
In this manner, Heavens Feel leaves the last word on what it means to be a Hero. In the beginning, a Hero was a selfless warrior like Saber who fought in the name of others. In the middle, a Hero was a person who stood by their ideals until the very end, fighting against the cruelty of reality.
But in the end, a Hero is merely a person who resolutely defends the most important person to them. This is the truth that Shirou found when he killed Saber’s shadow and attempted to sacrifice himself, the truth that he found by taming Archer’s projection and mastering it despite the pain. As much as his future self tortured him, with his body of swords threatening to punish him for his betrayal, his burning desire to save his loved one triumphed.
The interesting thing about the concluding route is that the events are lined up perfectly to force our protagonist to regain his sense of self. Indeed, Shirou was a magus with the ability to “project” his mind into the real world; and when he found a person who he wanted to protect above all else, his determination set him free from the shackles of his past and allowed him to attain the happiness that his master threw away. His ideal was broken by his love for a broken girl in a broken world, but when his priorities forced him into action, he was rewarded with a happier future than he ever had the self-esteem to desire.
