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For several years, it felt like if you’ve played one of Omega Force’s famed Musou action games, you’ve played them all. It seems the team took note of this souring sentiment, however, resulting in more nuanced takes on the formula in more recent titles such as Fire Emblem: Three Hopes and Persona 5 Strikers (the latter co-developed with P-Studio). It’s continued this push with Fate/Samurai Remnant, a new standalone entry in the sprawling Fate franchise that provides an engaging action RPG experience that can appeal to fans both new and old.
The Fate series has expanded to become a vast and confusing multimedia soup of various canon and non-canon works, which can make following the narrative a rather tricky proposition, but Fate/Samurai’s story can readily be enjoyed both by franchise fans and newcomers. The story takes place in Edo period Japan and primarily follows a young man named Miyamoto Iori, a skilled swordsman who finds himself haplessly dragged into a supernatural conflict called the Waxing Moon Ritual.
The idea here is that Iori is a ‘Master’ who stands to have his wishes granted if he can best the other six Masters who are all in the game for their own reasons. Masters are supported in their pursuits by partners called Servants, who are each the spirits of legendary warriors pulled from the past to aid their Masters, and Iori is soon joined by a plucky warrior named Saber. Hoping to protect the world from the nefarious wishes of some of his competitors, Iori sets out with his partner on a dangerous journey to defeat the other Masters while fending off attempts on his own life.
It’s certainly a cool premise, and the storytelling takes some genuinely shocking turns over the 30-40 hours it should take you to clear once. One time around won’t give you the whole story, though, as there are three routes you can take that lead to different outcomes. Still, we couldn’t help but feel just a little bit exhausted by the pacing of the narrative in some places. Up front, there is a lot of lore dumped on you in lengthy exposition cutscenes, and even once this levels off, there are still some dialogue sections here and there that can get a bit long in the tooth. You can always just fast forward or completely skip cutscenes if you choose, but we still wish the script here cut out some of the filler.
Gameplay clearly draws inspiration from Koei’s classic Musou framework, but here it’s been reworked into something much more dynamic than the grindy and repetitive battles common to games like Dynasty Warriors. Fate/Samurai is broken up into chapters, and each chapter consists of exploratory sections where you wander towns, fulfill quests, and talk to NPCs, punctuated by brawler-esque arena sections where you fight a few dozen enemies at once. This fine balance between combat and exploration goes a long way towards making Fate/Samurai feel much more like an expansive action RPG and not ‘just’ another Warriors game.
The world map is divided into various uniquely themed towns that slowly unlock as you make progress, and each one features a somewhat mazelike, bustling layout to explore that’s packed with pickups and little sidequests. These are mostly basic tasks like killing a certain amount of a given enemy or petting every cat in town, but many of them are quick to finish or fill out just by progressing the story. Plus, completionists will appreciate that every town offers additional rewards as you turn in more sidequests, giving you plenty to do in each location and incentivizing you to regularly return.
When you’re caught up in brawls, combat unfolds in typical Warriors fashion wherein you utilize a string of combos using light and heavy attacks to fend off waves of foes. Iori also has a variety of stances he can toggle between that are each effective in certain combat situations. The Earth stance, for example, provides you a small overshield for your health bar that lets you soak up more damage as you dish out heavy single-target damage, while the Water stance grants you a flurry of fast, wide-reaching attacks that are well suited to keeping large hordes of enemies in check. You unlock a few more of these as the story progresses, and we appreciated how each one adds a new layer to how you approach combat.
To spice things up further beyond swinging your sword, you can also cast a variety of equippable offensive and defensive spells to assist with things like crowd control, stat boosting, and health regeneration, while you can also call in Saber (or whichever other Servant you happen to have equipped) for link strikes and special attacks after you land enough basic blows on foes. Get enough hits in, and you can even play as a Servant for a brief period—each one does way more damage than Iori can muster himself. Combine these support features with the combo and stance system, and you’re left with combat that feels quite fast-paced and, most importantly, varied. There’s more to it than simply mashing basic combos and letting the fireworks play out.
Things get even more interesting with the one or two ‘big’ enemies that pop up in each fight. Not only do these guys have much larger health bars, but they often have super armor that lets them tank your attacks and harshly reply with their own if you aren’t careful. You thus need to watch their movements for openings, strike when you can, and if you’re especially daring, you can dodge at the last second to trigger a Witch Time-esque effect for landing a powerful riposte attack that can stun them. Aside from bosses, these larger enemies don’t put up too much of a fight, but they add just enough resistance to keep fights from feeling like you’re just knocking around a bunch of rowdy schoolchildren.
To add a little more strategy to the gameplay loop, the story will occasionally propel you into extended turn-based strategy battles on the world map where Iori vies for control of ley lines. Here, the world map basically turns into an interconnected game board where you want to ‘capture’ as many nodes as possible, with each one boosting your stats further. You can only take one step each turn, and every time you move, a few enemies placed elsewhere on the map will also move and claim more territories for themselves. You can either bump into these enemies head-on and trigger a battle, or you can try to outmaneuver them by going around them and cutting off their connection to their base, which instantly kills them.
These ley line sections are usually only a few minutes long, but they provide just enough of a break from the combat and exploration to meaningfully add something to the gameplay experience. It can be great fun to plan out a few turns in advance which nodes you want to take next, only for an enemy movement somewhere along the way to scupper your plans and force you to change course.
Character progression is handled via a skill upgrade system similar to the Sphere Grid from Final Fantasy X. Iori has a base skill tree with a smattering of stat upgrades and new spells or skills, and he can later unlock additional skill trees that correspond to each of his elemental stances. Each of your servants also has skill trees of their own to fill out, with progress speeding up the more you use them in combat. This skill system may not be anything that you haven’t seen before, but it adds to combat incentives by giving you more to shoot for than simply pushing numbers higher, and we appreciated how this gives you some limited leeway to craft builds for your characters according to how you most often use them.
Graphically, Fate/Samurai manages to seriously impress with its art style, executing a rich and detailed anime aesthetic that looks fantastic, especially considering the hardware. Whether you’re elbowing your way through a crowded marketplace or fighting foes beneath the pink petals of a cherry blossom tree, Fate/Samurai does a great job of presenting Edo period Japan in an appealing light. The problem, however, is that these pretty visuals come with a pretty hefty performance cost.
We noted many instances where loading times went beyond 30 seconds when loading new areas, but the pain is really felt here in the frame drops. Most villages will slump to a choppy sub-20 FPS mess that, though not massively affecting the gameplay here, drastically reduces the charm of these areas. Oddly enough, performance improves a bit more when you’re in battle with dozens of foes, but even combat portions are not immune to frequent frame drops that can impede the gameplay. Fate/Samurai is far from unplayable on Switch, but overall performance feels subpar — bad enough that we’d suggest you investigate other platforms if that’s an option for you.
Conclusion
Performance issues aside, Fate/Samurai Remnant is a hugely enjoyable action RPG that showcases a strong evolution of the very familiar Musou formula. Dynamic combat, rewarding exploration, loads of content, and an appealing art style all work in this one’s favor, though be warned that the story can get a bit too verbose at times. All the same, we’d give this one a recommendation both to anyone looking for a decent action RPG to add to their collection and to any fans of Warriors games. Fate/Samurai Remnant is well worth your time — if you can handle the performance dips on Switch.