I wish I could tell you that this is a good introduction to the Fate universe or even that it's a great story filled with a ton of surprises, depth, and drama that Fate is currently know for. Sadly, Fate/Extella: The Umbral Star is not only just as wordy as most Fate works, but it just takes too long to get to it's point. Largely, the people that would have an interest in this kinda game already know some of the pre-established lore, and those here for the game itself are met with a mediocre version of a warriors game.

Basically, the main problem with a lot of Fate works simply have to do with establishing a lot of world building and lore that can often get to irritating levels. By all means, I get it, as a Fate fan now, you kinda need that super boring 10 minutes of explanation to really help set up the stage, but doing it in this type of game was simply the wrong choice. Story and character moments take a lot of the run time in Umbral Star, and when your core game mechanic takes roughly 20-30 minutes then diving into the next story bit makes for some rather odd lopsided story telling. I get that Fate was originally an ecchi visual novel, but with the way the story consistently dominants such an action game kinda screams that they were trying to have their cake and eat it too. This is, of course, on top of the fact that you have to play through 3 separate campaigns, 2 of which having the same sameness to each other but with a different character. It's honestly a shockingly tall order to give any person, much less a person that was trying to play this as an action game. Perhaps what's more frustrating though is that the third campaign, Dawn, is a really good story that helps dive into the new character, Altera. There is a shocking amount of depth and nuance to her that makes me happy that I played this game, but saying that the game's story gets good after 20 hours is a really hard ask for anyone, let alone wondering if it's even worth that amount of time.

On top of this The Umbral Star just did not understand the assignment. Not only are these stages shockingly frustrating to lock down, but they are also hard to navigate. There were just far too many times that I was trying to figure out where to go only for a choke point to be slightly hidden or mixed together in the background. Not every stage suffers from navigating, but nearly all stages have the problem of controlling all the territories due to high enemy spawn rates and special circumstances. Add this together with various bosses hunting you down once they are on the field, or being forced to address certain territories first leaves a lot to be desired of the usual brain dead capture fun that most warrior games are known for. There are plenty of dummy enemies to deal with, but with the constant rates at which to unlock the big bad that controls the area can be a real test of patience that really should be more of a one and done chore. Then we have the noble phantasms or rather the supers of this game. While I understand they wanted to make these supers "special" , the fact I have to collect them, sometimes to the point where I can't get them within a stage sometimes, is just really dumb. Largely, that kinda just sums up a lot of Umbral Star's gameplay, it's just really dumb. Not stupid good fun or like dumb in an unchallenged way, just dumb in a why way.

This is such a hard thing for me to say because, on one hand, there are a lot of endearing moments to The Umbral Star, a lot of character moments work, the whole 3rd campaign, Dawn, works, the bare bones combat works, the premise of the story works, but the sum of The Umbral Star, doesn't. It just takes too long to get any kind of interesting. Combat is both far too familiar yet foreign enough to be both off putting and lazy. The game is far too wordy for what it is, and also too frustrating for what it asks. It's so annoying to say that it's not good yet good at the same time. It's pretty much only something a fan of the works would like, and it's something that a lot of people in the fate community know they have to endure to get to the good parts, but I really wish it wasn't.

A musou game developed by people who didn't understand musou.
Despite the game's repetitive way of telling its storyline and combat which felt like a lot of lazy copying and pasting, I found the story enjoyable enough due to prior investment via Fate/Extra and/or CCC.
I would only recommend this to people who are hardcore fans of Fate, as this game is Altera's intended debut story. (A bit of trivia; Although Extella was supposed to release first, Altera appeared in FGO first due to scheduling mishaps.)

The dialogue are the worst . 'Your character' dialogue. it's constantly telling you how you feel and what's in your head. I ended up just skipping through all their dialogue because it felt like I was being bombarded with a teenage diary.

The combat is too basic, with limited attack options and little variety in the characters. The enemies are downright boring, with no real challenge except for the occasional playable character encounter.

The unlockables and character models are also pretty disappointing. Most characters are unlocked by simply beating the story mode, and the character models look like they were taken straight from the Vita version of the game. Not exactly what I was hoping for in terms of eye candy.\

Overall, Fate/Extella: The Umbral Star left me feeling bored and disappointed. It might be worth a try if you're a die-hard Fate fan or just looking for a simple Warriors-style game, but don't expect too much excitement or depth here.

Decent Virtual Novel game. A bit boring at times and its just your simple beat em up game. Altera easily the best character. Caster made me want to pull out my hair with her cringe dialogue. Her combat wasn't fun either. Nero was alright. Golden poem arc made her better for me (not coz of the nude battle armour lol). Switching characters and some side missions were nice. The constants enemies being produced and having to go back to re-obtain territories got boring after a while. Wish the combat was more immersive and story was more entertaining. This was my first fate game after watch many fates, so I expected something more rich and entertaining character arc. Nonetheless, it wasn't that bad . Altera had the best story arc and I thoroughly enjoyed that section and her gameplay. The story wasn't that long so it made it easy to keep up and before I got bored, I was onto the next character. That helped a lot.