But why should you care? Fate/stay night is the best selling visual novel in Japan. Quite frankly, the story is so deep and compelling that it’s very hard to stop once you’ve started reading it. And now the kind people at Mirror Moon have began translating it to English so that all may enjoy this game medium that rarely makes its way out of Japan. If you’ve never played a visual novel and are interested in the genre, I strongly recommend you start here. From Mirror Moon’s site:

Emiya Shirou, who became an orphan after losing his parents in a big fire, is adopted by someone who calls himself a magus. Emiya Shirou presses his unwilling foster father to start teaching him magic. But lacking talent, all he could master after a few years was just one type of magic.

And now. His foster father dead and only being an amateur magus, he is unexpectedly dragged into a battle between the magi called “Masters”. Against his will, Shirou becomes Master to one of the “Servants” Saber, and he is forced into the battle for the Holy Grail…

The game is divided into three parts each told by a different narrator. So far, only the first third is translated, but it is entirely playable by itself and presumably you can resume your save once the next section is translated. You can get the patch from their site. Of course, Fate is a commercially released game. So you’ll have to buy the game or use less than savory methods of acquiring a copy. Or you can try the demo which was released by insani a good while ago.

A small warning. I’m told this is an eroge (aka hentai) game. I’ve played through ten hours and have yet to come across anything of the sort. But I guess some scenes along those lines could emerge at some point in the story.

At any rate, try the demo. By the end you’ll be so captivated that you’ll have to get the full game. And once you do, be sure to stop my Mirror Moon’s forums to thank them for doing such a great job with the translation.