At its best, Fate/Extella: The Umbral Star is loads of fun. It’s a Musou, or Dynasty Warriors-style brawler from Marvelous rather than Omega Force, confidently aping the style with an extra dash of over-the-top anime flair. At its worst, it feels like one of the least accessible brawlers I’ve played in a long time, with a cumbersome approach to its fiction and far too much visual noise for an action game. But ultimately the Fate/Stay Night nerd in me had a good time because the concept of famous figures from history and mythology duking it out anime style is some tasty cheese. But, genre fans who don’t have the scoop on what the Fate/Stay Night world may struggle to acclimate.

Here’s the part that bugs me: Fate/Extella is a sequel. Not only a sequel but a genre-crossing sequel to a game that came out in like, 2011. It’s a sequel, presenting itself as not a sequel, but is totally a sequel and makes little effort to facilitate new players. Even coming in as someone who had played the previous game, it was more of an effort to get a handle on what the heck was going on than it should have been.

I remember Fate/Extra fondly, a late PSP release that served as a sort of alternate universe version of the original Fate/Stay Night visual novel. Familiar characters and themes (even written by series creator Kinoko Nasu) carried a turn-based RPG with an odd, rock paper scissors-type combat system. It was strange, but so well-written and localized it was compelling all the way through. Check it out, especially if Fate/Extella sounds appealing.

Fate/Extella starts right where Fate/Extra left off. It introduces terms and situations, lore and characters, all carrying an assumption the players knows exactly who and what everything is. I played Fate/Extra back when it was new, and frankly, it’s been a while. I recognized the characters and was familiar enough with the general Fate/Stay Night pronoun collection to follow along enough, but the finer details were difficult to digest, especially with how vague and (perhaps) purposefully off-putting the opening segments are.

Eventually, Fate/Extella goes back and fills in the blanks, but at that point, the game has already started, pushing you off the edge of a cliff and just realizing you’re flapping your arms like a doofus and catching you right before you hit the ground. The prose still has that skillful edge to it, but it’s clear Nasu was not as all over this project as the previous one, and perhaps the emphasis on action set the bar lower than the RPG. It’s impossible to say from over here at my keyboard, but my question is: why a sequel? Why does the breezy brawler need to be connected to the dungeon-crawler from over five years ago?

Further adding to how cumbersome Fate/Extella can be is how it looks. The whole gimmick here is that rather than being set in the real world, this version of the “Holy Grail War” takes place on a digital battlefield. It’s kind of a “Fate/Stay Night meets .Hack” arrangement. Because of that, everything has that familiar neon-colored, wireframe look that is pretty common, especially in the lower-budget PSP/Vita JRPG realm. There’s nothing wrong with it, and it definitely makes for compelling visuals when you’re stomping around in countless dungeons.

But in an action game, everything being eye-sizzling wireframe models, environments and enemies all the same, things get janky. Enemies all blend in together with each other, and the general surroundings. Even the distinct boss characters can get lost in a sea of brightly-colored tube-people. Add to that all the cool visual flair of your character’s special attacks, and all the zipping around on the ground and in the air, and it’s understandable if the player loses their sense of control over what’s happening on the screen. This is especially true in the Vita version, with its lower resolution and slight dip in performance. I’m normally not a framerate snob, but it drags at times, which really muddles how Saber and company respond to your button presses, and the slight fuzziness makes the visual noise that much noisier.

That said, it’s an off-brand Musou game that does the Musou thing quite well, and adds a lot of its own local flavor. You have to level up your characters to get the full arsenal, but once all the tools are at your disposal everything blends so well together! Canceling from combo string to combo string, moving from the ground to the air and boosting from one point to another is such a satisfying, liberating feeling. Fate/Extella really puts an exclamation point on the full potential of freeing up a combo system, in contrast to a much more restrictive (but still just as valid) system such as the likes of a Ninja Gaiden or a Devil May Cry.

Fate/Extella even takes the growing territorial aspect of Musou games to a bizarre, logical extreme, twisting it into more wild anime stuff but with enough gusto it adds to the fun factor. Sections are separated by vast open space, and you get across with the press of a button that launches you across at high speed. It feels like part of the flow of combat, already at an unnatural velocity. Along with that comes new avenues of defense, mainly in special enemy types that send extra units to vulnerable areas.

So now the player not only has to deal with boss characters and territorial tug of war like in any other Musou, but there’s an added, frantic element of zooming around while focal points of enemy activity will spread like a virus. Extra decision-making opportunities popping up on the fly and having mechanics incorporated in that mix adds to the chaos in a way that doesn’t feel unfair or hard to deal with, just an added dimension to a formula that arguably needs unique shake-ups from game to game.

In a way, I wish Fate/Extella wasn’t Fate/Extella. By that I mean it would have had a much better chance at getting over with its audience as a new story, not a distant sequel that demands a bit too much of the player base’s memories. This game does not make a good first impression in a way many Japanese games struggle with, introducing far too many concepts and pronouns without doing the due diligence needed to help players digest it all, especially if they don’t have previous knowledge from somewhere else. It also kind of forces the world of the first game in a box it doesn’t quite fit into, muddling the action with a much more RPG-friendly aesthetic. Still, it’s a heck of a Musou clone, doing a lot with the formula to keep it feeling like a fast and frantic anime adventure, something that isn’t always a home run in the actual Musou/anime crossover titles. It deserves a lot of credit purely on how good it feels. Just…be prepared to be confused if you haven’t played the first game.

Hint: When equipping new skills, make sure to connect colors as much as possible as the skill tree expands. Bonuses stack up big time.

by Lucas White