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Black, andLikes Comics and junk.


Unangbangkay
@Unangbangkay

It's out! My full review for RPG Site is here.

I really like the game, but while I reviewed it and organized my thoughts I really had to fight the kind of reflexive dismissal reviewers level at games with Warriors/Musou-based combat systems - and this is coming from someone who really likes Musou games! We've been trained for years by Mad Gamers who grew to hate the wave of branded Musou titles in the PS2 and PS3 eras to just react as if that style of combat was beneath serious consideration. And yeah, it's simplistic, but it it's by far the easiest character action control template to pick up without going full Devil May Cry-adjacent, and suffers the least from its simplicity. And for a Fate game, where you've naturally got a bunch of powerful characters that play differently in a flashy way, it's kind of a perfect fit.

It should be emphasized that while its combat is based on Musou it isn't a Musou game the way Fire Emblem Heroes Three Hopes or Zelda Age of Calamity are. It's closer to Persona 5 Strikers in the sense of using those controls and general encounter design on a more RPG-inflected template. And the template is used to power an honest-to-goodness, back-to-basics Fate story. It's as if Koei Tecmo sensed the fact that there aren't any real Fate games that aren't a weird spin-off of a spin-off, and took it upon themselves to make a perfect gateway title for people who can't bring themselves to start with a visual novel.

And it super worked. Even the most popular Fate spin-off stories are weird meta-stories that are reactions to other adaptations or caught up in their own lore. And if you can't make the time for Fate/Stay Night (or can't access due to not having an official localization available), you're SOL. Even the Fate/Stay Night Ufotable anime, which are superb, drift in their own weird way to become branch stories of Fate/Zero, slightly clouding the original story.

What KT have done here is reframe the whole thing. Instead of Shirou, you're following Miyamoto Iori, the disciple of Musashi (the real true history male one), who gets pulled into a pirated version of a Holy Grail War called the Waxing Moon Ritual. It's not a soft reboot of Fate/Stay Night - the franchise has always had an "everything is valid" approach to canon, but in many ways it is, combining a bunch of callbacks to key FSN plot points while keeping things new and fresh and also using famous FGO Servants to spice things up for oldheads.

I think the main place it falls short is in the combat, which is ironic considering the caping was doing for Musou games 2 paragraphs ago. They want you to be able to pull off some Lies of P parry bullshit, but frankly Dynasty Warriors combat just isn't built for that kind of "read the move and hit the button at the right time* because it's very visually loose and chaotic. Doesn't work, so most folks that don't have the reflexes of a 13 year old will probably end up healing their way through the tougher fights.

Anyway, if you wanna see what the fuss is about when it comes to Fate, I'd recommend trying this.


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in reply to @Unangbangkay's post:

This made me go from having no interest towards Fate/Samurai to thinking about checking it out eventually. I just need to get over my hangup of thinking I need to read the original VN if I want to get into any fate/ thing.