Fate/Extella: The Umbral Star (Review)

By: TheJewphinFate/Extella is a serviceable Dynasty Warriors style action game which borrows characters and concepts from the Fate series without managing to capture any of its tone or character. Fans of the series hoping for another great Fate story line may be disappointed. Alternatively, fans of the series just hoping to play as their favorite characters decimating hordes of worthless minions may just find what they are looking for in Fate/Extella.The overarching gameplay of Fate/Extella is based around map control. Missions are broken up into a series of interconnected rooms containing swaths of enemy soldiers. Each enemy-controlled room features an excessive number of enemies of minor enemies. Killing the minor enemies causes one of the rooms limited number of Aggressors - slightly stronger enemies - to spawn. Killing all of the aggressors in a room causes the player to take control of the room. Once the player has control of enough rooms, the boss servant spawns. The player must beat the boss servant to win the mission. If the opposing side takes control of enough rooms, the player automatically loses.The moment to moment gameplay of Fate/Extella is standard Dynasty Warriors fare. Alternate between light attacks and heavy attacks to eliminate large groups of soldiers. Use a special attack to clear the room and inflict heavy damage on the higher powered enemies. Characters may periodically perform transformations to significantly improve their damage, health, and resistance.  Finally, each character also has a Noble Phantasm - a super special attack that clears enemies and inflicts heavy damage on the higher powered enemies.While each character in Fate/Extella has a plethora of combination attacks based on the order or light and heavy attacks, there is rarely a reason to alternate between them. The player is constantly on a time crunch to take over rooms before the enemy does. This temporal mechanic coupled with the fact that almost ever battle situation is identical creates an incentive for a player to only learn and use one useful room clearing combo and one useful boss spamming combo. During the story mode when the player is using a single servant for multiple missions on end, the missions start to feel repetitive and tiresome due to the disincentive for the player to switch up their attacks.Fate/Extella differs from many Dynasty Warrior games in that map control is less strategic in Fate/Extella. The enemy team randomly spawns Plants in enemy controlled rooms. The Plants each select a player-controlled room and cause enemy soldiers to flow into the room until the enemy has captured it. While the player can only move to adjacent locations, a Plant can teleport soldiers to any player-controlled room. Because the enemy is free to spawn Plants in any room and attack any player-room, the player is unable to generate strategies that focus on quick map control or the slow pus of player-controlled minions to the enemy layer. Additionally, the player is often forced to run back through previously cleared areas (some of which can be quite large) in order to retake or defend an early room.One place Fate/Extella shines is in the use of Noble Phantasms. The Noble Phantasms invoke the feelings they do in the shows and manga of massive godlike attacks that are capable of wiping out full cities of enemies. Additionally, unlike the other attacks in the game, usage of Noble Phantasms is rare. In order to use the ability, the player has to collect three items that from rooms in the current mission. Once the items have been collected, the player is able to use the Noble Phantasm a total of once. Thus, the Noble Phantasm actually feels like a rare ultra-powerful attack that should be saved until absolute necessary.The story is where Fate/Extella starts to fall apart. Fate/Extella features the player character as the winning mage in the last Holy Grail war. As the game was obviously made for fans of the Fate series, there is no real explanation of what the Holy Grail war is or how it is fought. In fact, the game tends to assume a lot of knowledge on the side of the player. For example, the Archer from Fate/Stay Night (name omitted to avoid spoilers) makes an appearance in the game. When he is introduced, the characters make a big deal about the fact that no one knows who he is and from then on they refer to him as "Nameless." Given that his identity was a huge plot point in Fate/Stay Night, his addition as a nameless character requires the player to either know Fate/Stay Night ahead of time or to just not care.The player character - who I chose to be the diminutive female character over the strong looking male character and named "I AM THE END OF ALL THING" - exists as a mental projection inside the Moon Cell - the version of the Holy Grail from Fate:Extra (a fact I did not know in advance of writing this review). In the first story, she fights alongside Nero who - like Saber from most of the other Fate series - is depicted as a blonde woman with a sword. The two fight to conquer the land inside in the Moon Cell because they won the grail war so it must belong to them.The game strongly emphasizes relationships between characters, but instead of letting the player build a relationship or at least watch one be built, the relationships are already strongly established. Every interaction between the player character and Nero involves at least on of the two talking about their special bond, how great it feels to be next to each other, or how wonderful the other is. It has all the subtlety of someone ringing your doorbell while holding a sign that says "I am going to punch you in the face when you open the door" and then punching you in the face when you open the door. When the game gives you dialogue options, they tend to amount to different ways of the main character expressing his/her love for Nero.As a personal note, the passionate love between Nero and the main character make it hard to like either of them. It's like when your friend starts a relationship and you have to watch that friend and their significant other constantly coo back and forth "no, I love you more." This issue is exacerbated by the fact that the player character goes through this with each of the three female protagonists - for story reasons.The biggest issue is how divorced this type of story and these types of interactions feel from the Fate series. Even when Fate/Stay Night featured something akin to a love story, it still felt secondary to the entire plot. Next to the Holy Grail war where people were trying to come up with devious ways to kill each other, the connection between the main character and his or her servant always took a back seat. Yet in Fate/Extella, the love between the main character and Nero hits you hard from out of the gate and continues to pummel you throughout each scene of dialogue.While the game definitely borrows the characters and some of the lore from the Fate series, it fails to take on the tone one would hope for from a fate game. The stories of the Fate series tended to revolve around personal ambitions in a a competition that involves murdering other people so that the victor's wish may come true. Yet all of that is lost here. Death has no consequence for the majority of the characters because they are all Servants and therefore cannot permanently die. No other humans appear except for the main character and there is no sense that the main character has any sort of wish that would be worth killing for.If you're looking for a new Dynasty Warriors style action game and you've already played Hyrule Warriors, there are worse games to play than Fate/Extella. Just don't go in looking for anything beyond a surface level connection to the Fate series.[yasr_multiset setid=2]