...

So as of yesterday I have finally completed Fate/Samurai Remnant, which I liked a lot. So I suppose this post will be a review of sorts. It's gonna be more or less spoiler-free (I don't have any deep meta to write about this game I feel like it tells you everything it wants to say without my input)so hey, here comes my thoughts.

First of all: man I can't believe they managed to make a fate game that is actually fun to play. The game is a Musou, which I guess is different from a Beat Them Up, but I'm not looking it up. It's not the kind of game I usually go for either way, but this was fun! The fighting is really smooth, with a bit more strategy involved than just "mash the circle button," (you can fight in different stances that each have their pros and cons, you can use magic, you can team up with your servants, ect) so while as someone playing on Easy mode I never died (my thanks for the game generous offer of healing items) at no point did I feel bored or annoyed. You also got basically Grail Fronts musou-style, which were pretty neat.

Outside of fighting, you're gonna be running around a lot. The environment of the game are pretty cool (I feel like the graphics in general are really good, the monster designs FUCK, way to take fgo sprite designs and make them terrifying) and you get quite a lot to do! Npcs to talk to, stat boosts from visiting toursit traps, food booths, Saber getting excited at modern tech, region-specific sidequests, and stuff like that. It's neat, personally I like to explore every nook and cranny of a new district for secrets, but this is all optional and you can skip it all if you want. I do have one complaint tho, being that my game consistently slowed down significantly when i entered an area with many npcs. I don't really know why because the game was fine when generating a much larger amount of enemies during fighting sections, but whatever man spaghetti code just be like that sometimes.

You also got various ways to improve your stats and equipment. Some of them involve minigames, even. I gotta say I'm not a fan of games that include minigames for every little tasks, because if I wanted to solve a crossword rn I would just be booting up a crossword game not whatever rpg of the day. The sword maintenance minigame is short and easy enough that I give it a pass, but the statue carving minigame is way harder. Which is an issue, because you need to succeed at least once at the hardest level for one of the sidequests. I don't mind losing access to the best stats & skills of the game (again, I'm playing on easy, idc) but I DO mind losing access to story content because I couldn't complete the rythm minigame in time. (Important context: I have poor fine motion control, so maybe the average person doesn't struggle with that minigame as much as I do. Either way I am dearly hoping someone will make a mod to either give more time or remove that game completely cuz Christ.)

There were a lot of little quality of life features I appreciated: a warning when you're about to progress the main story and thus lock some side content away from you, Saber starting more and more joint attacks as you further your bond with them, fast travel between major locations...) Though there were also a lot of design decisions I found... Kind of odd? (Why have the "dismantle mount" and "empower mount" on different tabs when they each require different buttons? Why that one minigame early on to break out a fight when it literally never comes up again? Why do some quests tell you to "search an area" without marking anything on the minimap, but still give you a button to just mindlessly follow the arrow to your destination?) but hey, I'd rather have redundant information than not enough of it.

But enough about the gameplay. What about the story? Is it good? Is it truly, as they say, too much like Fate/Stay Night?

Well yes, it's good, though it my opinion it could have used to be a bit more like fsn. The game features three endings, though I will personally argue that it features two main routes: the Saber route (your first gameplay, which will inform you for Saber, their deal, their ideal) and the Iori route (the new game plus, which will shed some more light on Iori as a character.) I wish they gave you a bit more on Iori on the first route honestly, cuz at the end of my first playthrough all I could think was "man. I know nothing about this dude. What's his fucking deal." With only two lines of dialogues as foreshadowing, which was a bit light imo. But I do get what they were going for, ie to give players some substancial differences for a new game plus. This is a Musou, not a VN, so you can't just hit skip until the branching point for your different endings. Might as well make the replay worthwhile.

I do wish they did a bit more with the side characters too. I don't care if a character from another fate work gets sidelined, they got their turn they can chill and sell candy all they want. But man, I got nothing on Dorothea unless I really take the shovel to dig. I spent the whole game expecting the fifteenth servant to have virtually any narrative relevance at all. I don't know man, I feel like it's a bit of a shame to introduce "sentient book passed down to you who clearly used to be a person and saw Jeanne d'Arc personally" and then have him solely be here for tutorial stuff. But maybe I'm asking too much of a Musou, again that's not a genre I'm used too. I'm used to vns where your mind is blown at the end because you realize that everyone and everything was connected all along. Maybe I'll change my mind once the game gets a bit more traction and people start posting 2k meta on Chieda and his relevance in the overall themes of fsr, who knows.

Nitpicking aside though, the game sets off to be a story about Iori and Saber (and more broadly Iori and Bitches With Opinions On Iori) and it manages that part wonderfully, so I'd personally call it a success since it achieved just what it thought it could achieve. Boy do I love Iori. He's a truly fascinating character. If there's anything in this game I could talk about for thousand of words, it'd be Iori, or Iori/Saber. But as I said, the game tells you everything you need to know about Iori. You don't need me to tell you.

Romance isn't a lens I normally use to analyse fiction. I'm sure many people would find its use odd for this game. But if I had to articulate my thoughts on this game, I'd say it's a tragic romance. A tragic romance between two asymptotic individuals, who are the closest to understand each other as possible, yet who never truly reach one another, doomed to devolve in completely opposite direction. Iori becomes what Saber stops being. Saber yearns for what Iori rejects. Their wishes could never be, not because the Holy Grail is corrupted, not because their times wouldn't allow it, but because for all their common traits they are also fundamentally incompatible with each other.