Fate/Extella: The Umbral Star

Fate/Extella: The Umbral Star manages to bring a fully-featured Musou game to the Nintendo Switch, and the intense combat and eye-popping visuals make it one of the better titles in the growing Switch library.

Overall, I’ve had a great time with Fate/EXTELLA thus far. The presentation is a bit rough around the edges, the story is incredibly confusing (I’m only really understanding bits since I’m familiar with the universe — I can’t imagine what it must be like playing this game with no context at all), and of course, Warriors-type gameplay can get repetitive and rarely is anything new done to shake up the general formula. However, the game provides plenty of ways to break up the monotony of the basic combat, and even if I need to take a break between sessions, I still have a blast just feeling like an overpowered one-man-army and defeating scores of enemies at a time. At the very least, it will tide me over until the more polished Fire Emblem Warriors arrives later this year.

A real treat for anime-action fans, Fate/EXTELLA is a lovably frantic hack-and-slash with a feeling all its own. Appealing characters and an irresistible sense of style draw you into its world, and addictive, satisfying gameplay and excellent writing keep things exciting throughout. It suffers from some common ails of the musou genre, like minimal enemy variety and subpar AI, and it’s far from a technical showcase for the system, but if you’re looking for a fun, fast-paced slash-‘em-up on Switch — or to seriously complicate your relationship with one of Rome’s most infamous sons — Fate is a perfect choice.

All in all, I really enjoyed Fate/Extella: The Umbral Star. The plot made less than no sense, which, I understand, is probably more my fault than the game's, but everything else was pretty solid. The warps and keys added a fresh twist to the seemingly deathless musou genre, and the sense of speed kept my interest long enough to finish the entire game pretty quickly. There are a TON of unlockables for those who don't think one playthrough is enough, including outfits, characters, modes and more, but with Fire Emblem Warriors on the horizon, I decided one solid musou playthrough was plenty for now. If musou games are your thing or you are just passing the time until Mario Odyssey and Fire Emblem Warriors, you could do a whole lot worse than Fate/Extella: The Umbral Star.

Overall, Fate/Extella is a fairly simplistic Warriors-style game with a visual novel component and pretty enough graphics. I was impressed that there’s never any slowdown, either in tabletop mode or on the TV. As I said, there’s already a better Warriors game on the Wii U and 3DS, but so far this is the best one on Switch. If you like anime nonsense and slaughtering robots, you could do worse than Fate/Extella.

As a huge fan of Dynasty Warriors, Fate/Extella: The Umbral Star is an exceptional video game. Although the graphics on the PlayStation 4 version of the game are superior to that of the Nintendo Switch, this port feels like the definitive version of the game. Fans of action games and Nintendo Switch owners should go out and buy Fate/Extella: The Umbral Star. It’s one of the best third party games currently on the console. I’ll definitely be playing this for the foreseeable future.