izigame.me

First of all, I would like to say this right off the bat that I bought the deluxe edition on discount. I feel it's important for me to say this to keep note on what I will be saying about the game as a whole, especially the DLCs that comes along with it. And of course, potential spoilers that I will be going into so if you have the game and still haven't played it, don't read further from here.
So with that said, I'll start by saying that I absolutely LOVE Fate Samurai Remnant. I have done most of everything in the game now and yet, I still keep playing. It's a Musou game that I never thought it would stand out amongst the rest. I played games like Hyrule Warriors, Pirate Warriors, Kamen Rider Battride War, and so on. And among all of them, I feel like Samurai Remnant made themselves stand out due to quite a few reasons.
First off, I'll talk about the obvious and that is you playing the main character Iori. To me, this is quite a breath of fresh air since in other Musou games, they encourage you to play different characters and let you experience different playstyles, movesets, and more. But for this game, you most of the time are stuck with playing Iori for a good chunk of the game and surprisingly, that's not a bad thing. In this game's story, you get to play as Iori as the protagonist of Samurai Remnant, and right off the bat when you start playing as him, you can already tell how different the game feels compare to the other Musou games. First is his "Sword stance". This is essentially to me, Iori's bread and butter in his gameplay, which allows you to switch between different Sword Stances ON THE FLY during the battle. This is quite an incredible way to me that we get to use different fighting styles like how other games do like DMC and Yakuza. Giving you the incentive to switch between fighting styles that would fit for multiple situations.
Then we have what I think to be one of the game's best features, the "Spirit Font Conflicts". This is a minigame that's more turn-based than your usual beat up enemies type of schitck. In the minigame, you're on the map that shows you multiple "spirit fonts" that allows you to conquer in order for you to defeat the opposing enemies. This minigame adds in the "strategy" element to the game, making a very effective break from you pressing the same two buttons all the time to attack enemies. Granted, when you reach to the enemies' territories, you are obligated to take the enemies down under a certain time limit. Defeating all of them under a time limit will give you more rewards for you to upgrade numerous amount of things.
And now we got to the meat and potato of the game, the overworld, the OST and the story. The overworld itself is beautiful and amazing to explore. You can go to multiple cities as you progress, letting you take in its breath-taking graphics, architecture, and the overall vibe in the Edo period. the soundtrack itself is so amazing and it varies depends on whether you fight against a certain enemy, or explore a new city with a new soundtrack. And the story, I don't even know where to start. Kinoko Nasu has made another banger of a story once again. As much as I want to talk about how much I love Iori and Saber, I genuinely don't want to spoil the story because getting the game for the story is worth the price alone. Moreover, you can recruit more characters to play other than Iori and Saber, just in case if you do get tired of playing those two. Though I can't really say that it's a masterpiece on par with Nasu's other work such as Fate Stay Night, Tsukihime, Witch on the Holy Night and more, I still think that this Fate series stands above the rest of the spin-offs and proves to be a really great experience thanks to the well-written characters in the main cast, the overall pacing of the story, and the over-arching plot that will keep you intrigued from beginning to end.
And now, I have talked about everything in the vanilla game, and now I will talk about the 3 main DLCs. This is where my critique will become more on the disappointing side due to certain reasons, but I'll go over the positives first. The main content in all the 3 DLCs are the what-if stories, straying away from the main story of the game. The Episode 1 DLC is a what-if story about a certain character holding a tournament for all of the teams to compete for a wish granting item as a prize. In there, you can choose one of 7 teams and each of them have different stories to tell. To me, I had a good time in every of the teams, because we get to see more context and stories about certain characters that we may or may not have seen before. And when you reach the ending, every ending is different from each other, which makes it a very satisfying conclusion once you finish it. However, while I can say good things about getting endings from respective teams, the journey to get there is admittedly tedious once you realize that the overall structure of the story for each team, is essentially the same until you reach the ending. I understand that this kind of story is like playing the arcade mode of a fighting game, where you play as a character and you fight against different characters until you make it to the same final boss before reaching their unique ending, but I feel like there should have been more to this than just the same thing for the next 7 teams.
I will skip the second DLC for now and move on to the third one because I have nothing but negative feedback for the second one. The third DLC which is Episode 3, is another What-if story that I had a fun time playing. The plot is good and the story itself is good. This is not as complex as you choosing one of 7 teams like in the first DLC unfortunately, but much like the story in the first DLC, it is still a good time.
And then we get to the second DLC, which is honestly my biggest pet peeves in this DLC experience. Just like the other two, it is another What-if story that 10 minutes in, I already lost interest. The reason for this is that the pacing and the story itself is not a good time for me and nothing keeps me interested enough to even care. Most of the time, Iori would take a Death Note worthy of yapping session in his mind, and somehow that just ruins the overall pacing of the story. This is to the point I feel like this is their way to pad the entire DLC out and make it just Iori's yapping session in his own mind. It's redundant to the core to the point I just don't care what happened in the story. If anything, I did finish it and even without taking in the context from the cutscenes, I think I still understand the gist about what happened. Yes, the story is just. That. Boring.
After playing through all of the DLCs, aside from the second DLC, I overall had a good experience and I felt like it was worth playing through them... Is what I would have said until I looked back at the price of the DLCs and they cost 12$ EACH. Again as I mentioned from the beginning, I paid the Deluxe edition so that I can play the DLCs and overall the whole package experience and I never really considered the price of the DLCs. It was after I recently finished the DLCs is when I realized that all of the DLCs, is not worth your time and money at all. I know I said a lot of positive things for Episode 1 and 3, but the experience itself is NOWHERE NEAR as good as the vanilla game. Period. Not for the price of 12$ separately. Sure in every DLC, you can get new characters to play as, 2 for the first DLC, 1 for the second DLC, and 2 for the third DLC. And you also get a new skill tree for both Iori and Saber respectively in the second and third DLC. But once again, that alone, is not worth 12$ that you put your money into, and then expecting the DLC will give you an unforgettable experience, to only then get pissed on by the overall content of the DLCs. For a 12$ purchase, it is not worth the money at all because it simply doesn't have enough content to justify it.