izigame.me

I hate this game. I have been into the fate series for a very long time, I love this franchise an extreme amount. The stories that are told are almost always at least interesting to read. They bring deep character exploration, interesting perspectives on history and provide story experiences that truly could only exist within the intricate world of Type-Moon. The games always have in my opinion struggled to combine gameplay with that story.
This time they have chosen to do another musou style game but with a smaller combat scale compared to previous games like Extella. The story is about ancient japan and how a holy grail war would play out there. How does this game hold up?
Lets get the good out of the way

* The setting is really cool, historical characters are pretty much always relevant in Fate, but now we also get to be in a historical setting. It allows the developers to really explore that era and talk about different locations. An example is when 1 character speaks english, a different character assumes its dutch because the dutch were one of the only people allowed in the country at the time. Its generally just cool seeing these historical tie ins play out.
* Combat animations look good. You can play as servants and really feel their power when you hit enemies. There are a ton of servants so its impressive that they all got that amount of attention to detail in their combat.
* Pretty much the whole game is voice acted in japanese, which is pretty impressive for such a long game. All the voice actors do a great job.
* The 2D art and character design is some of the best the series has had yet. A lot of these designs don't only look good, but feel thematic to what these characters represent. You constantly want to learn about these characters due to how cool or interesting these characters sound and look.
* The story sometimes manages to capture that fate magic, when you figure out who a certain servant is on your own, or when a characters story finally reaches their climax. All of those moments are really magical and are the reason to play these kinds of games. There is 1 ending in particular that almost made me change my rating to recommend because its exactly the type of experience I was looking for.

As for the bad....

* Gameplay is a massive drag. What you experience in the first 5 hours is pretty much your entire experience for the entire game. Enemy variety is lacking. There is a huge amount of servants but they all practically play the same with similar combos and barely any noticeable difference in performance.
* The combat animations look cool but they suffer from a lack of proper telegraphing. Enemies can attack almost instantly without any warning. Your dodge feels like it only works half the time.
* Textures look bad. It does not look like a modern game. Environments are big but bland and repeat a lot of models.
* Maybe my biggest problem with the combat in this game is how tanky everything is. I started the game on the higher difficulties, but after experimenting for 20 hours, I decided to just play the game on the lowest difficulty because enemies just take way too long to kill otherwise. Most of the time you play as Iori, a human that is fairly weak in comparison to a servant. While playing as Iori, most of your attacks will bounce off of big enemies unless they finished a big attack or unless you use magical attacks which are limited in quantity. Higher difficulties don't make the game more fun, enemies will 2 shot you but their attack patterns don't change, so you are just playing through very simplified combat and waiting 10 seconds for the 2 second window you get to attack. Its a drag and it made me groan when I had to do any combat.
* The game is filled with bars that have to charge up. Wanna play as a servant? Wait for a bar to charge up to play as one temporarily. Wanna use magic? Here is a limited amount of resources that only recharge by killing certain types of enemies or spending money. Your special strong attacks? Here is a bar you charge by hitting enemies. The basic combat is boring enough as it is, but these bars just add even more tedium to it all. You wait for your bars to charge up, do big attacks and proceed to do your basic combat loop again of dodging and waiting for opportunities.
* The story has strong highlights but is overall really badly told. It feels like its actively wasting your time to get you to play the game for longer. A great example of this is chase sequences, there are so many moments where you are chasing someone, you beat them in combat, and they just run after the cutscene with 0 explanation how. Basic humans are somehow outspeeding legendary heroes boosted up by magic. Enemies will run away while our heroes just watch them and do nothing. If this would happen once or twice I would understand. But these kinds of moments happen more then 20 times, it got to the point I would be surprised when it didn't happen. The whole story it feels like your characters are just completely incompetent and the story will not progress because of them but because the writers finally feel like finishing a chapter.
* Talking about story. The game has 3 different endings. To get them all you have to play through the game 2 times. After I beat this game I was already completely bored with the game, I ended up watching the other endings online. New game plus also adds a couple of extra side quests that give more context on what other character are doing in the story. They are actually pretty cool, but them forcing you to play through the game again just killed all my motivation to try for it. Its another example of the game just not respecting your time.
*Side content in this game is repetitive and its all the same. You talk to 3 characters, do 1 fight and then get a mediocre reward. Another example is the endless amount of check lists, collect x amount of materials, beat x amount of enemies using a certain combat move. Im the type of person to seek out all side content, especially in a fate game. Because I want to learn more about the characters. But this game practically never feels rewarding to do side content in.
* Lastly, talking about characters. There are too many of them. A lot of them are purely here for fanservice, you will barely get any context to who these characters are unless you are deep into the fate world. Fanservice itself would be fine, but its so excessive that even the main characters just don't get all the time they need to flesh themselves out. This just feels baffling to me since they decided to spend so much time on filler chase scenes, like 10 hours of this games story could have been cut to spend more time exploring these characters. Now a lot of big scenes happen and the emotions the game wants you to feel end up feeling completely different because there was just no build up to it all. Again this is even more frustrating because the concepts of the main cast of characters is really interesting, I really wanted to learn more about these characters, but there just isn't any room for exploration.
Conclusion
I entered this game with high expectations. It reviewed high, it was the first fate game to cost 70 bucks right out of the gate, and combat looked really good in trailers. Sadly I am left with a lot of disappointment, when I finished the game the only thing I could feel was relief that I saw the story and don't have to play anymore. The story is fine but told in a horrible way. The gameplay is extremely repetitive. It feels like a 20 hour game that does its best to stretch its playtime to 60. Even if this game was half price, I still wouldn't be able to recommend this. Its just a boring game that felt more enjoyable to watch on youtube then to actually play through, in a way it feels like it being a video game was just the wrong way to tell this story. Asking 70 euros + DLC for this is criminal. I sadly can't recommend it.