Fate/Zero Translation Complete

The Fate/Zero translation is complete! You can read the whole thing over at baka-tsuki. If you like Japanese fantasy, it's well worth reading. Make sure to thank the team over at Beast's Lair for their work!

If you'd like, here's a Fate/Zero pack I put together. It includes all 4 novels in PDF form (I got the files from bakabt) and the Fate/Zero artbooks at a decent resolution (which I resized from this pack of Fate Night artbooks). It does not include the translation of "Heart of Freaks", which was a side story about Kiritsugi's past and was not written by Urobochi Gen. The files I collected are zipped up and uploaded to mediafire.

Download the Fate/Zero Pack

Fate/Zero is a prequel story to the visual novel game Fate/Stay Night. Fate/Zero can be read without playing the game first. The novels cover the disastrous fourth Mage War only alluded to by Fate/Stay Night. As such, it's a tragedy. The novels are written by Urobuchi Gen, who collaborated with Kinoko Nasu, the creator of Fate Night. It's a gritty magic tournament story with great battle scenes, but the real magic of the story to me is the characterization. Urobuchi Gen does a good job of portraying the characters and showing why they make the decisions they make. I'm horrible at reviews, so I'll leave it at that.


And if you didn't know, Fate/Zero was adapted into a 26 episode anime by the awesome ufotable.  It's been fan translated by the folks at Unlimited Translation Works.  The anime is definitely worth the watch and there's fun bonus content in the blu-ray releases.

As for Fate/Stay Night... it's the only Visual Novel I've ever made it all the way through and I highly recommend it. A Visual Novel is kind of like a choose your own adventure story with lots of images and sound (music and character dialog), except there aren't that many choices to make. It is very lengthy and probably comparable to a full length novel if you do all the paths. There's also an anime (which I don't recommend), a movie (which I don't recommend), a Visual Novel sequel (which I never played, but doesn't sound interesting), and some PSP games.