>Q: In the first month of 2004 Fate went on sale. What was the reaction to it like?
>Takeuchi: He's speaking of the Sakura route. A lot of people were disatisfied with it. Hence, the hollow feeling.
>Nasu: Yes, although recently more people are warming up to it. When it first came out, people were so excited and pleased by the Saber and Rin routes that they expected to keep proceeding down the royal road. The Sakura route is not like that at all, and they had trouble accepting that when it first appeared. We learned a lot from that experience.

>After the release of the original game, how was the response to HF?
>After I had finished writing the scenario, I had a feeling of completion and thought "I've cleared a difficult task!", but after having received far more reactions and response to it than I had imagined or expected, I felt that I was able to learn a lot from it.
>To be precise, which kinds of reactions do you remember the most, Nasu-san?
>I felt that users want feel-good stories more than anything else. If you play Fate and UBW, you get to taste feel-good storytelling for roughly 40 hours. So I felt that there was no need for HF to be a feel-good story after all that, but then I learned that apparently not all users feel the same way. I reflected on this greatly, and came to the conclusion that for some works, it's okay to aim for being feel-good all the way through. I believe that if it weren't for my reflection back then, Type Moon wouldn't be the way it is today.

Back in 2005, the three main TM devs released their own character poll where Sakura was pretty much everyone's least favourite heroine.

Nasu just got upset at the fan reaction towards her as he is a massive perfectionist and HF and Sakura were far from perfect. He started pushing some really obvious lines trying to lessen the fan backlash towards her.