Fate/Samurai Remnant Reviews

good game

As a Fate fan, I find this game amazing. Its gameplay is fun, its visuals amazing, and learning the identity of new servants was intriguing. I loved all the characters and how they interacted with each other. I especially adore Iori and Saber's interactions, they were the highlight of most of the conversations. Also, the music was a bop and never missed. I hope we get more Fate games set in historical periods because that would be awesome.

Great story, Gameplay is ok,

Unless this game is on a deep discount, I recommend spending your money on another game like FF7 Rebirth, God of War, or even Dynasty Warriors Origins. Fate/Samurai Remnant is an action-RPG with a large focus on story and I HATED this game. It's so slow and boring. Let's start with the gameplay. It's your usual Koei Tecmo hack-n-slash but with significantly fewer enemies that's a mix of trash mobs and very tanky mini-bosses & bosses. I like Dynasty Warrior but why did I not like this game? Because this game focuses on the story and non-stop dialogue. Every mob fight is up to 3 waves of push-over enemies then straight to talking then walking to the next obvious open-area for ANOTHER mob fight and rinse and repeat, over and over and over again. It's mind-numbingly repetitive. I wanted to lose myself into the gameplay but the enemies are too few and too weak. In a Musou game like Dynasty Warriors, you would fight armies upon armies of trash mobs with a few officers and other named heroes mixed in. In the more action Final Fantasy, you would fight a small group of enemies that can inflict status effects and have their own weaknesses to elemental attacks or other status effects. Fate/Samurai Remnant, however, decided to just have a large group of trash mobs with little strategy to deal with other than to button-mash your way through with a couple of stronger enemies that are FAR tankier than they needed to be due to the 'Shell Gauge': a sort of "armor" that you need to deplete before you're able to deal full damage and reliably flinch the enemy. One of the saving graces for FSR is the boss battles that are typical of action RPGs, however even that isn't much of a positive due to the 'Shell Gauge' making them very tanky and how easy the game is in general (the enemies are not very aggressive). I fought the optional superboss of the game and very easily beat em without even risking a game over. In dealing with the tankiness of bosses though, you'll find yourself saving up your Noble Phantasm (your ultimate) and just using it whenever it's available just so you can get on with your day. I actually recommend lowering your difficulty settings at least 1 down from 'Normal' so the stronger enemies won't be as tanky. In terms of the characters you play, you mainly play as the main protagonist: Miyamoto Iori. Iori has up to 5 different stances he can switch between with different combat styles you can try out. However, his 5th stance is clearly far better than any other stances and you'll hardly ever use the other stances if you can help it. You wanna do damage? 5th stance. You wanna attack fast? 5th stance. You wanna do huge Area-of-effects? 5th stance. You wanna whittle down that Shell Gauge? 5th stance. It's so blatantly good that when you get into the late-game with Iori all leveled up and invested in, he clearly outperforms many other playable servants by a huge margin. Speaking of other servants, while you play as Iori you can temporarily play as a partner servant for like 30 seconds to do major damage to the enemies. They're clearly far more powerful and far more fun to play than Iori, at least until you unlock the 5th stance. There are also times when you just play as the Servants the entire time for their part in the story. However not all servants are made equal, there are quite a few servants whose damage output clearly pales in comparison to other servants (and even Iori) such as the servants the player has access to and can invest skill points in. Other times it's because their moveset is very slow and have a hard time dealing good damage to even trash mobs. Another gameplay element that FSR features is Spirit Font system: a sort of grid-based turn-limited strategy mode where you have to overtake your enemies nodes (Spirit Fonts) before they overtake yours and if you meet them on the same node, you simply battle it out... and I ABSOLUTELY HATE THIS MODE. It's not because it's hard or complicated or anything, it's just so painfully slow and slows the story's progress to a screeching halt as if the Devs realized having you simply go to the next town was too fast and had to make up some nonsense to make sure you don't blitz through the game. On to the story: It's good. That's the best I can say about it. I don't think it's great but I don't think it's bad either. The story consists of 3 main endings you can achieve and 1 joke/secret ending (it's related to the optional superboss). The first playthrough is going to be your longest playthrough as you achieve 1 ending which will then unlock the ability to can carry over your save to the next playthrough (New Game+). On your next playthroughs, the game allows a new feature that fast-forwards through already-read dialogue so you can just absorb the new events and dialogue changes from the first playthrough. A minor gripe of mine are these "new events" that show the player what the other characters were doing at the time of the story which I felt should've been included in the first playthrough for better understanding of the story without needing the player to be told before hand (through online guides) that they should've went through 1 specific ending first for better contextualization for the other ending. Another minor gripe is the servant side-quests (digressions) that don't cleanly fit into the pacing of the story at times. It'll go from a serious story moment that clearly wants you to progress to the next plot point but you decided to go ingredient shopping for a servant because you didn't want to miss out on a servant story. This game also suffers from the "We have 3D models with moving mouths and blinking eyes but we're still gonna use 2D character portraits every time they talk". Personally I think the game's story would be a lot more engaging if they actually ditched the 2D portraits and focused on their in-game camera angles more. There's even already a handful well-camera'd scenes that are held back by the large 2D portraits. There's a few characters that are just... there and don't contribute much and a few plot-points which seem pretty dumb or unnecessary and there were many times when the characters start talking, I started to pull out my phone and tune out but, again, I don't think the story is bad. The only reason you'd even think about getting this boring game is because you are a Fate or Type Moon fan already or if you thought this was an "anime dark souls" game (it's not). Even at a 50% discount, I do not recommend this game at that price. It was an absolute slog and I felt like I was only playing the game cause I paid a decent amount for it.

gameplay is alright, story is straight up peak (i mean its fate what did you expect)

engaging, fun game. a lot of mechanics tho.

Overall is good for me, with additional point because of Fate Series. DLCs is slightly not worth except DLC3 story is have the normal level. Encourage buy during discount. For full achievement run, is kinda repetitive to achieve it, not encouraged to aim for it unless you are very patience.

My first playthrough of this game made me feel like I was reading Fate Stay Night for the first time all over again. It recaptured some of the magic of the original, while also not just retreading all of the same ground as FSN. This is made extra special by the fact that you get to PLAY it, which integrates really well with some of the existing mechanics of the Fate universe (ex. being a normal human fighting a Servant is appropriately like being an ant fighting an elephant for a lot of the game). That said, the fact that this is paced like the original work (a pretty slow paced visual novel) makes this game an absolute slog to replay (and the game does expect you to replay it at least once to see the route you didn't choose the first time). By the time you hit a second playthrough, the action gameplay and running around the towns just become impediments to seeing the new content, and extremely repetitive impediments at that. Honestly, there probably shouldn't have been two routes at all, as most content is repeated between the two and it just leads to a lot of wasted time getting to the endings, both of which feel undercooked compared to the rest of the story. The alternate ending that you only get on NG+, however, is honestly pretty good and I liked how it juxtaposed with the "normal" endings. In that sense I was reminded a lot of how the routes in FSN so effectively contrasted each other in theme. For some reason I felt like 100%ing the game, which was especially painful as I had to replay large swaths of the game to track down easily missable Logbook entries. This didn't leave a great final impression, and I wouldn't recommend doing this for most people. My total playtime is 80 hours, but it probably could have been 55-60 if I just wanted to see all the story. I should also mention the DLC, which I completed. It's OK. The first DLC is easily the worst, focused primarily on Servant combat. For some reason players begged for more playtime as Servants, without realizing that they have extremely awkward and unsatisfying movesets compared to Iori, our protagonist. The devs acquiesced to player outcry, and the result is DLC that is a chore to play. The second and third DLCs are a little better, as they are actually more like long sidequests with their own story and characters. Even those two didn't quite live up to the main game, but good enough. All that said, that first playthrough really was a great time, even if it didn't have the most satisfying ending. I enjoyed the historical setting, the excellent 2D illustrations, the intrigue as different Masters/Servants schemed to outmaneuver each other, and the development of our protagonist Iori. The stance switching action RPG gameplay is at its best on that first playthough while it was still developing, with new skills and stances being unlocked at a gradual pace. Overall, great game that overstayed its welcome a bit.

Fate/Samurai Remnant is my favorite story about a Japanese boy in Edo Japan dealing with crippling survivor's guilt and sexual assault trauma after surviving a fiery catastrophe and summoning a legendary gender-fluid but primarily nonbinary warrior from ancient times to grant a wish from a weird moon ritual. He fights a psychopath who wishes for strife upon the land and Iori Miyamoto is somehow best friends with Cu Chullain and Gligamesh and his dead master/adopted father Mushashi Miyamoto who happens to be a young woman, dimension traveler now. Also every character, deutertagonist and side character, along with the two main characters, are gay. 10/10 greatest game I've ever played

fights are repetitive but the story was pretty nice. i love jalter <3