oh god i liked a fate game
The whole Fate franchise is something I’ve never really been able to engage with. It was first pushed on me in an old friend group. It was a toxic toxic group, the sort of group that just sort of forms with any batch of high school kids in a small town who don’t really know how to engage with a lot of things appropriately. One of those friends was a guy named Ryan, who was the sort of dude who considered it normal for every group to have a “resident asshole.” He spent a lot of time pitching Fate to me through the context of power levels and awesome fights and explicitly highlighted Gilgamesh as his favorite character because, paraphrasing, “he’s so powerful there’s nothing he can’t do.” I watched a few episodes of Fate/Zero and bounced off.
Years later, I would ask about Gilgamesh in a different friend group, describing Ryan’s pitch to me. They laid out some, uh, pretty heinous stuff Gilgamesh wants to do with that power and my lack of surprise indicated to them and myself that I should probably not be friends with Ryan.
Incidentally, the last time I saw Ryan, he spent most of our brief interaction complaining about the girls in our quickly splintering friend group who had cut him off. “They’re just too emotional to have a reasonable conversation without me looking like the bad guy.”
That’s a long way of laying down the way Fate has always left a bad taste in my mouth, despite the fact that most of my friends, particularly the many trans groups I’m happy to be included in, seem to like it. Most big anime franchises generally kinda flow through me like water at best and leave me just tired and annoyed at worst. So I sort of expected that, like dozens of other big anime rpg attempts, I’d play this for an hour and then drop it.
But uh. Fuck. It's really good actually.
From what limited grasp I have on the Fate franchise, this is basically an AU story that’s completely off the rails from the main canon. The central conceit is the same: various magic users from across the globe fight with magically powered historical/literary figures, all in the aim for a magic wishing cup. Many of those figures are gorgeous anime women now.
The key difference is that the real world’s magic has fallen apart, requiring the creation of a magi-tech AI to build a magi-tech digital world for the anime battles to keep going. Because of this, the number of potential servants/anime fighters are basically infinite and hundreds upon hundreds of magic hackers can all play in the Anime Battle War at once. A tournament system emerges to keep some semblance of order and now you’re off to the races.
The gameplay is… weird. It's not quite traditional rpg mechanics. It's like a game of rock paper scissors: Attack, Guard, and Break, each one beating the other. On the screen are six question marks, each one hiding a different Rock Paper Scissor/Attack Guard Break strategy. The more you fight these enemies, the more you learn their patterns. The question marks will eventually flip around to reveal their strategy, making them much easier to defeat.
The gameplay loop that emerges in this setting is instantly addicting. Once a week, you and your Anime Fighter are pit against your opponent and their Anime Fighter. But you aren’t just biding time: you need to spend that week getting as much info on the enemy as you can. Who are you fighting? What’s their powerset? The more info you gain, the more the question marks in the boss battle will be flipped around to reveal the boss’ strategy. Each week becomes a short little mystery drama as you try to figure out who your opponent could be. And within learning that gameplay strategy, you learn about the goals and motives of your enemy, drawing you deeper into the character work it's crafting.
I’ll offer more precise examples. Week 1 pits you against a shitty teen named Shinji and the hot anime fighter he’s managed to recruit. Shinji is arrogant, smug, and insufferable. As he won’t stop bragging about the Armada or the Fleet, you’ll eventually be able to learn that his anime fighter is Francis Drake and use that knowledge to curb stomp Shinji into the ground. Drake salutes you in her death, taking it gracefully as another fun pirate adventure. Shinji, who you’ve grown to just despise as an awful tool, instead drops this line as his teenage digital avatar, and his other self in the real world, dies pitifully.
“I’m only eight!”
Each round has these sorts of tragedies. The game starts with 128 different fighters, and you gradually see the crowd of NPCs in the digital landscape vanish from week to week. I regret not talking to all the NPCs from the start. Each day, the whole school has different dialogue, but I just sped through when it all seemed to be just general obvious statements. During the first week, I found a lovey-dovey couple flirting in the hallway. In week 3, I found a single NPC in that same hall, a young girl staring at the wall.
“I had to kill my darling. I didn’t want to but… I didn’t want to die. I… could kill anyone now.”
It's moments like this that add so much flavor to this game for me. I’ve always disliked the whole “secret magic hidden from the public eye” kind of setting and it's so nice that this game just doesn’t bother with that at all. Instead its about being trapped with a bunch of hackers, many of whom didn’t know what they were getting into, and the ideological, philosophical fights that emerge from it. They really make the battles and setting have such a weight to it. Before you select your protagonist, you actually get to play as one of the nameless NPC hackers in the prologue. After twenty minutes of tricking you into thinking this is your character, you die instantly in the preliminaries and get replaced by your real, slightly customizable protagonist. There’s dozens of corpses around you, demonstrating exactly how many people have bumbled into this without a plan and failed. It gives the game a sense of weight to its gimmick that imitators might lack.
It's just really charming character work, bundled up in a surprisingly fun package. There’s a remake coming that’s ditching the rock paper scissors stuff, and that's probably for the best. But its really easy to dig your teeth into in a way that catches you really off guard.
The whole Fate franchise is something I’ve never really been able to engage with. It was first pushed on me in an old friend group. It was a toxic toxic group, the sort of group that just sort of forms with any batch of high school kids in a small town who don’t really know how to engage with a lot of things appropriately. One of those friends was a guy named Ryan, who was the sort of dude who considered it normal for every group to have a “resident asshole.” He spent a lot of time pitching Fate to me through the context of power levels and awesome fights and explicitly highlighted Gilgamesh as his favorite character because, paraphrasing, “he’s so powerful there’s nothing he can’t do.” I watched a few episodes of Fate/Zero and bounced off.
Years later, I would ask about Gilgamesh in a different friend group, describing Ryan’s pitch to me. They laid out some, uh, pretty heinous stuff Gilgamesh wants to do with that power and my lack of surprise indicated to them and myself that I should probably not be friends with Ryan.
Incidentally, the last time I saw Ryan, he spent most of our brief interaction complaining about the girls in our quickly splintering friend group who had cut him off. “They’re just too emotional to have a reasonable conversation without me looking like the bad guy.”
That’s a long way of laying down the way Fate has always left a bad taste in my mouth, despite the fact that most of my friends, particularly the many trans groups I’m happy to be included in, seem to like it. Most big anime franchises generally kinda flow through me like water at best and leave me just tired and annoyed at worst. So I sort of expected that, like dozens of other big anime rpg attempts, I’d play this for an hour and then drop it.
But uh. Fuck. It's really good actually.
From what limited grasp I have on the Fate franchise, this is basically an AU story that’s completely off the rails from the main canon. The central conceit is the same: various magic users from across the globe fight with magically powered historical/literary figures, all in the aim for a magic wishing cup. Many of those figures are gorgeous anime women now.
The key difference is that the real world’s magic has fallen apart, requiring the creation of a magi-tech AI to build a magi-tech digital world for the anime battles to keep going. Because of this, the number of potential servants/anime fighters are basically infinite and hundreds upon hundreds of magic hackers can all play in the Anime Battle War at once. A tournament system emerges to keep some semblance of order and now you’re off to the races.
The gameplay is… weird. It's not quite traditional rpg mechanics. It's like a game of rock paper scissors: Attack, Guard, and Break, each one beating the other. On the screen are six question marks, each one hiding a different Rock Paper Scissor/Attack Guard Break strategy. The more you fight these enemies, the more you learn their patterns. The question marks will eventually flip around to reveal their strategy, making them much easier to defeat.
The gameplay loop that emerges in this setting is instantly addicting. Once a week, you and your Anime Fighter are pit against your opponent and their Anime Fighter. But you aren’t just biding time: you need to spend that week getting as much info on the enemy as you can. Who are you fighting? What’s their powerset? The more info you gain, the more the question marks in the boss battle will be flipped around to reveal the boss’ strategy. Each week becomes a short little mystery drama as you try to figure out who your opponent could be. And within learning that gameplay strategy, you learn about the goals and motives of your enemy, drawing you deeper into the character work it's crafting.
I’ll offer more precise examples. Week 1 pits you against a shitty teen named Shinji and the hot anime fighter he’s managed to recruit. Shinji is arrogant, smug, and insufferable. As he won’t stop bragging about the Armada or the Fleet, you’ll eventually be able to learn that his anime fighter is Francis Drake and use that knowledge to curb stomp Shinji into the ground. Drake salutes you in her death, taking it gracefully as another fun pirate adventure. Shinji, who you’ve grown to just despise as an awful tool, instead drops this line as his teenage digital avatar, and his other self in the real world, dies pitifully.
“I’m only eight!”
Each round has these sorts of tragedies. The game starts with 128 different fighters, and you gradually see the crowd of NPCs in the digital landscape vanish from week to week. I regret not talking to all the NPCs from the start. Each day, the whole school has different dialogue, but I just sped through when it all seemed to be just general obvious statements. During the first week, I found a lovey-dovey couple flirting in the hallway. In week 3, I found a single NPC in that same hall, a young girl staring at the wall.
“I had to kill my darling. I didn’t want to but… I didn’t want to die. I… could kill anyone now.”
It's moments like this that add so much flavor to this game for me. I’ve always disliked the whole “secret magic hidden from the public eye” kind of setting and it's so nice that this game just doesn’t bother with that at all. Instead its about being trapped with a bunch of hackers, many of whom didn’t know what they were getting into, and the ideological, philosophical fights that emerge from it. They really make the battles and setting have such a weight to it. Before you select your protagonist, you actually get to play as one of the nameless NPC hackers in the prologue. After twenty minutes of tricking you into thinking this is your character, you die instantly in the preliminaries and get replaced by your real, slightly customizable protagonist. There’s dozens of corpses around you, demonstrating exactly how many people have bumbled into this without a plan and failed. It gives the game a sense of weight to its gimmick that imitators might lack.
It's just really charming character work, bundled up in a surprisingly fun package. There’s a remake coming that’s ditching the rock paper scissors stuff, and that's probably for the best. But its really easy to dig your teeth into in a way that catches you really off guard.