Welp, seeing how UBW's run is over and it looks like it's all MHA all the time until an inevitable and unceremonious sunsetting, I might as well throw out a couple cents towards the block-watching experience. The half of it that I stuck around for, anyways.
As a veteran viewer of SyFy Ani-Mondays and Chiller's failed take on a block of its own four years after its parent channel terminated the former, I was expecting worse treatment than what we actually got. The amount of commercial breaks was smaller and not nearly as excessive (plus the ability to skip ahead stopped them from feeling endless), it didn't appear that many scenes were cut for time constraints, with only a sped-up ED and presumably excised previews to stand as typical cuts... From what I hear, the Blu-Ray version of UBW had additional scenes that may have meant time cuts happened after all, but I hardly felt confused at their exclusion (callbacks to Fate/Zero aside), so I barely even noticed they were there, unlike on SyFy where scenes from Noein they used for interstitials never showed up in the actual broadcast, or on Chiller where Ayumu mentioned a breakdancing scene that never occurred as if it happened, and closed-captioning was given for scenes that never actually made it to the final cut.
Hell, AXS even left in what post-credits scenes there were; the removal of such being a recurring problem on [as], SyFy, and the viewing experiences of so many paid reviewers who think it's always wise to stop watching a show once the credits start rolling! Those were great. And what's more, there didn't appear to be that many cuts for content, either; you know SyFy or Chiller would've blurred out Ilya's butt in episode 4 and muted Shinji's S-bomb in episode 20. It almost felt like there wasn't as much oversight as there could've been, and I admire the broadcast for that. Unfortunately for my hyperfixation, they didn't even bother with the content ratings, which is all right because I fashioned up a set of my own (spoiler-marked so it doesn't feel like I'm forcing them on any one of you), adhering to my personal standards but loosely inspired by the more relaxed guidelines of SyFy's anime offerings.
Honestly, this may wind up being my favorite set of personalized content ratings this year, once it's over.
As for the show itself, while it did have the problem of dialogue-heavy scenes being hard to readily recall in memory, particularly if there was nothing plot-relevant in them, I wound up enjoying the show, to the point where I can recognize and consider it to be good. Could've done without some of the deaths, but hey, that's the kind of thing to be expected in a Holy Grail War. At least civilian fatalties were limited overall. (Because oh boy were there casualties.) I never thought I'd get into Fate, to the point that I told some dude that wouldn't stop asking me about it on Ask.fm (remember that?) as much. After this, though? I'm actually interested in venturing further into the Fate multiverse.
So, what's next? Fate/Zero, so all the callbacks in UBW make sense? Or how about DEEN/stay night, so I know how the original storyline went and where UBW diverged? As a hobbyist chef who's grown out of the death game genre of anime, you can't go wrong with Today's Menu for Emiya Family. But realistically, I think the next one I'm gonna watch, barring any more cable TV pickups, will be Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya, for this sole reason:
See you all again in this thread when Anime.com Hour shutters its doors!