text: The first two-story arcs completed were Fate and Unlimited Blade Works; the latter was partially presented to the public in a preview booklet at Comiket in December 2001. Unlimited Blade Works was based on the idea of a character's confrontation with himself and his own ideals, something unrealized during the development of Tsukihime for the arc of Yumizuka Satsuki. In 2002, it was found that the content that was already written was nearly equal in length to Tsukihime, leading to proposals to divide the game into two parts. However, due to the high cost of releasing two products at once, the arcs of Illya and Sakura were partially combined, resulting in Heaven's Feel. Nasu original thought of extending the Fate route involving an alternative Fifth Holy Grail War where Shirou fought alongside Saber without a romantic relationship developing between them. Following their separation, Shirou would bond with Rin in a similar way to the true ending of Unlimited Blade Works. The main theme in Fate/stay night is "conquering oneself". There are three storylines in the visual novel; each has a different theme. The first one, Fate, is the "oneself as an ideal." The second one, Unlimited Blade Works, is "struggling with oneself as an ideal." The third one, Heaven's Feel, is "the friction with real and ideal".
  According to Nasu, the main theme of the resulting Heaven's Feel arc was chosen to apply the protagonist's ideas in practice. This is in contrast it with Fate and Unlimited Blade Works, which paid most attention to the demonstration of Shirou's ideals. Nasu wanted to portray him as a typical teenager while artist Takashi Takeuchi did not want him to have too much individuality to make players project themselves onto him. In 2002, Takeuchi suggested Gen Urobuchi, a well-known author of Nitroplus visual novels, to connect to the preliminary scenario of the game, but Urobuchi ultimately refused. Afterward, Nasu decided that Fate/stay night would be the most significant work in his life, created by him from beginning to end.
  Release history
  After translating the text into code, editing background images and sprites, and debugging audio-visual effects, on October 21, 2003, the game's demo version was released on a CD with the magazine Tech Gian from Enterbrain, and on November 1 was posted on Type-Moon's site. Fate/stay night was released in Japan on January 30, 2004, for Windows PCs. The opening animations were produced by Tatsunoko Productions.