Watch the release date trailer on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqJkuQX6T1o
Some remakes are rushed out to cash in on nostalgia. Fate/EXTRA Record has taken so long that the nostalgia has had time to grow nostalgic for itself. TYPE-MOON announced its full remake of the 2010 PSP role-playing game back in July 2020, as a tenth birthday present for the original. Since then, it has been pencilled in for 2025, slipped to spring 2026, lost its publisher when Bandai Namco walked away in March, lost its director, Kazuya Nino, picked up a new publisher in Aniplex at the end of August and a new co-developer in Meteorise. Most Servants in the Holy Grail War have had an easier time of it.
The good news is that the game now has an actual date: 28 January 2027, on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Switch 2 and PC via Steam, with Marvelous Europe handling the release on this side of the Channel. Aniplex has also been busily putting out trailers since September’s State of Play, and the newest, a “Rival’s Side” video unveiled during the first Fate/EXTRA Record TIMES broadcast on 15 October, parades the Masters and Servants you will spend the game trying to eliminate.
It is quite the line-up. Shinji Matou arrives with Rider, followed by Alice, Run Ru (known to English-speaking players of the original as Lil’ Ronnie, a localisation choice that has aged like a pint of milk left on the dashboard), Julius B. Harwey with an Assassin, the elderly soldier Dan Blackmore with Archer, and Leonardo B. Harwey with a Saber. Gatou Monji turns up with a Berserker who is, in a crossover TYPE-MOON fans will savour, based on Arcueid Brunestud from Tsukihime. The second half of the trailer gives the most room to the headline acts: Rani VIII and her formidable Berserker, then Rin Tohsaka and Lancer.
For the uninitiated, and there is no shame in it, since the Fate franchise now has more branches than the Ordnance Survey: a supercomputer has been found on the moon, and inside its digital world, SE.RA.PH, 128 Masters and their Servants (heroes of myth and history summoned as fighting companions) battle it out in a knockout tournament for a Holy Grail that grants any wish. It is Tron by way of Highlander, with school uniforms. You play an amnesiac Master who must explore dungeons, dig up intelligence on each rival and uncover their Servant’s true name before the showdown, with Nero, Tamamo-no-Mae or the familiar Archer as your playable partner.
The biggest change is the combat. The PSP original relied on a glorified game of rock-paper-scissors; Record swaps that for a deck-building card system, which puts it closer to Slay the Spire than to anything you would have played on a handheld in 2010. Character designs come from Wada Arco, voicing is Japanese with English and other subtitles, and the Limited Edition includes a three-disc soundtrack in a SteelBook case plus an art book that the publisher, with admirable candour, warns is so full of spoilers you should leave it alone until the credits roll. Here at SFcrowsnest we admire a box set that comes with its own health warning.
Given everything this game has survived over the past six years, it could probably enter a Holy Grail War of its own. Its wish would presumably be a quiet January.
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