Originally Posted by
Ratman
I'm really tempted to agree, but it's hard to tell how much of it is the soundtrack and nostalgia, as well as how much of it is Kajiura fatigue. The only real competitor is UBW anime, and then you get into the weird territory where you open up by saying that it's an unfair comparsion because of budget, and that the stuff inserted into the story in DEEN Stay Night was better than what was effectively fanservice in UBW.
But you can do FAR worse when adapting a VN than just making Sakura project a knife and Shirou project a towel. At around the same time the Higurashi anime came out, and everyone loved it, despite it being an actual abhorrent monstrosity that missed the point of the original so hard I still don't quite understand how it's possible to be this tone-deaf.
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Not only that, the Higurashi anime actively ruined the best thing the author has ever written by showing Meakashi-hen from the outside, so that when someone read it after the anime, it became worse. I sometimes wonder if it was the starting point of ruining Ryukishi's work and making it into a soul-less appeal to emotion in the Umineko finale, which led to no one in Japan taking him seriously these days.
DEEN Stay Night is a shining paragon of faithfulness to the source next to that.
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I mean, we can laugh at JC Staff Tsukihime all we want, but can you imagine if it was good? An adaptation that misunderstands the point this hard, but is by itself something attractive to the lowest common denominator, so that the writer has to appeal to his new fanbase he never asked for by dumbing his future work down? Can you imagine if Nasu got the impression from JCTsuki-but-successful that people really like Twilight, and so everything he would write from then on would be a soapy love story?