Fate/Samurai Remnant Fails to Distinguish Itself
Long held advice regarding any creative work is to try and balance the new with the familiar. With most fresh Fate content trapped within the whirlpool that is Grand Order, a stand-alone release piqued my interest. I hoped Samurai Remnant would use a familiar premise to explore new conflicts in a different setting. Instead it merely treads water by clinging to routine plot beats between stretches of tedium.
Prior to playing the game, I was curious because it looked like the kind of spinoff that I'd be interested in. In one of the postfaces for the Fate/Zero novels, Fate creator Kinoko Nasu notes that the setup of the Holy Grail War is easily applicable to various types of plots.
(Translation courtesy of Brynhilde over at Baka-Tsuki)
"So, this book talks about the story of the fourth Heaven's Feel.
The rules in the Fate version(?) Heaven's Feel is actually rather simple.
- A battle royale between seven magi and their Servants, acting as familiars.
- Servants are materialised in Heroic Spirit form, according to an appearance 'suitable to the era'.
- Master has three absolute commands of the Servant.
- The final survivor wins the right to possess the Holy Grail.
That's how it's like. Although there are other details, they are branches and leaves whose rules will be established as long as the root and trunk of the tree exists. In fact it is very simple and basic. Because of that, the kind of story created is completely dependent on the creator's outrageous imagination. It can be a cruel boy-meets-girl, or a vigorous tangled battle."
Alas, every spinoff that bothers to feature a Holy Grail War wants to put its own weird spin on the basic formula. Extra makes it a single elimination bracket, Apocrypha makes it team-based deathmatch, Grand Order abandons the pretense altogether. There's not really much (at least not easily accessible to me, a westerner) that is simply about a different Holy Grail War with a different cast. Samurai Remnant gestures towards the idea, but can't escape the gravity of fanservice.
Rather than Fate/stay night's modern milieu, Samurai Remnant takes place in Edo period, well, Edo. Miyamoto Iori, adopted son of famed swordsman Miyamoto Musashi, is dragged into the "Waxing Moon Ritual", a Holy Grail War by another name. Seven Masters and their seven Servants fight to the death across 1600's Edo to claim the Holy Grail Waxing Moon Vessel. Events are ripe for alliances, betrayals, drama, action, samurai duels, et cetera, as Iori and Saber fight to protect the peace.
Thing is, a Musou game involves playing as myriad different characters, carving your way through hordes of mooks. To this end, besides the seven Master/Servant pairs, an extra seven "Rogue" Servants are summoned to... hang out and be playable characters sometimes. Even more appear in the DLC. They don't even care about claiming the Waxing Moon! They're just there to fight more dudes, and there's always more dudes.
Edo is swarming with ronin who attack you in gangs of three dozen. Monsters of all stripes, either summoned by other characters or just "attracted by the Waxing Moon", wreak havoc no matter where you go. It's a wonder why Iori cares about collateral damage at all considering he's emptied all the houses by personally killing the entire population of Asakusa.
Combat feels extremely flat despite the number of characters on offer. Everyone has the same number of Light-Heavy combos that use the same damn inputs. Everyone has special moves that are only meaningfully differentiated by whether they use 1, 2, or 3 pips on your Affinity Gauge. Iori does have a stance switch mechanic that gives him a smidge more complexity, but that becomes a nonfactor once he unlocks his blatantly superior ultimate stance about 45% through the game. Anything stronger than a basic mob always has a replenishable armor shell that exists purely to slow down the fight.
As is perhaps a running theme in my wider criticism, it's a bit fraught to fault the game for this because of what the product is in the first place: a Fate branded Musou (for the record, I did not play Extella). I'm clearly not a fan of Musou games, so I don't necessarily intend to hold the game accountable for being a mash fest against mook hordes; I know what I bought. My actual issue is about whether it was a good idea to have a Fate plot in a Musou game in the first place.
The format is fundamentally at odds with a battle royale setup about impossibly powerful heroes duking it out. Samurai Remnant must not only establish all the characters, but give you a chance to play as them. Everyone's Noble Phantasms boil down to "big boom", because you can't represent weirder concepts like Bloodfort Andromeda or Rule Breaker in an action game. The Rogue Servants could add elements of coalition building and proxy fighting to the narrative if utilized well, but they rarely factor meaningfully into the plot because they inevitably must join up with Iori so you can try out their special moves against 30 giant snakes.
The whole game chafes with these contrasting goals. As an action game about fighting hordes of mooks, as many characters as possible need to be playable as long as possible. As a Fate story, characters need to kill each other until only one remains. The narrative drags its feet as a result. I appreciate the artifice of keeping some Servant identities secret for as long as they do, but it only meaningfully comes up one time with a Rogue Servant who isn't actually involved in the Ritual. It takes half the game before a single Servant falls.
Original Fate/stay night is a visual novel, a format fundamentally centered around telling a story. The narrative device of multiple diverging routes allows it to maintain stakes with a limited core cast; characters who die early or act offscreen in one route can take center stage in another. Samurai Remnant doesn't provide alternate outcomes until the back third of the game, and the only meaningful change is which bosses you end up fighting.
Why even use the Grail War premise in such a case? As odious as I find the concept, this would be far better served as a Fate/Grand Order spinoff. With that game's timeline-hopping setup, controlling multiple Servants against large groups of enemies is a matter of course. You could put as many Servants and enemies in as you wanted and nobody would bat an eye.
Even without taking this mechanical friction into account, the plot of Samurai Remnant just isn't anything special. Everything feels like a rehash of Fate/stay night, from Saber's wacky gluttony to Iori's secret technique to the Grail spewing out evil mud for some reason. My hope was that this would take the framework and come up with new, interesting clash of mages and heroes, not a rehash of all the same characters and conflicts.
Maybe that was an unrealistic hope in the first place. Are not all spinoffs echoes of the original? Are some of these concepts just considered tradition at this point, like how every Gundam show has a Char clone? It could be argued that it's fundamentally impossible for a game in the position of Samurai Remnant to evoke the same feelings as Fate/stay night or Fate/Zero. Why would you buy it in the first place otherwise? It's a Fate product, and surely you want to see shades of all your favorite tropes from Fate, right? I cannot in good conscience call that an unreasonable assumption.
Long held advice regarding any creative work is to try and balance the new with the familiar. I largely prefer spinoffs or sequels that are content to do their own thing without being too beholden to the lore or specifics of the original; I want at least bit more of the "new" than most franchises or creators seem willing to give. That's a frustrating place to stand these days.
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