Fate/Samurai Remnant Review

thesixthaxis.com:

I’m a huge Fate fan. Fate/Zero is one of my favourite anime series, I’ve put more time than I’m willing to admit into the Fate/Grand Order mobile game, and I own a staggering amount of Fate figures. For all my time spent exploring the corners of this multi-media franchise, though, it feels like there hasn’t really been a truly iconic Fate game since the PSP days. For all the world-building that the original visual novel does, all the lore, spinoffs and side stories, there is no grand adventure game set that lets you vividly experience all of that. Fate/Samurai Remnant looks to right this wrong.

If you don’t know your Fate/Zero from your Fate/Apocrypha or your Fate/Extella Link from your Everyday Today’s Menu for Emiya, you have nothing to worry about – a lot of Fate content is easy to just dive into standalone, and Fate/Samurai Remnant is no exception. This game brings us all the way back to Edo Japan in 1651 and into the life of Miyamoto Iori, a young swordsman in Asakusa struggling to make ends meet. When a mysterious red marking appears on his hand and an even more mysterious young woman appears in front of him to protect him from a violent masked warrior, it’s clear that he’s become involved in something much bigger than his usual day-to-day duties.

I love the way Fate/Samurai Remnant takes the traditional story beats of a Fate adventure and not only parallels them in the world of 15th-century Edo, but also betrays your expectations if you’re a familiar fan. In the world of Fate, magic fuels everything, and in many of these stories, seven modern mages will be chosen seemingly at random to compete for the Holy Grail, summoning ancient heroes to fight by their side. In Fate/Samurai Remnant, though, Iori has an ounce of