Thoughts on Fate/Stay Night UBW

As someone who read and loved the original source material (visual novel), I thought it was decent. It covered the main plot points and I feel it delivered a compact version of the story well enough to make it superior to most VN adaptations that I've seen. However, from a personal perspective, yeah I was very underwhelmed. The main problem is that the source material is very much driven by monologues, and many anime adaptations, including this one, struggle to integrate monologues into the narrative. This, for example, completely changed Shirou's character. I watched a video on youtube a while ago that compared the perception people had of anime Shirou and VN Shirou, and they were completely different, because the monologues completely change his character. There hasn't been a Fate anime so far that has portrayed Shirou correctly in my opinion, maybe the Heaven Feel movies will change that, since the first one was, in my opinion, the best Fate anime since Fate/Zero. There were also some additions to the story that weren't in the visual novel and actually worked well character-wise, but at the expense of leaving things out that would have been important to keep. In general, I just recommend watching it to people who don't mind it being just a compact version or to people who just can't stand the visual novel, either due to its dated visuals or just because they don't like reading.

If you liked the characters and feel like you'd like to see them more developed, do give the visual novel a try. I'm sure you won't regret it.