YMMV / Fate/Samurai Remnant

• Alternative Character Interpretation: In the Entreat the Darkness ending, just how much of what Iori tells Saber before their duel is his true unabashed desire? While he undoubtedly tries to kill them and plunge Japan into war using the Waxing Moon to become a true master of the sword, the fact that he says he wants to cut down every person he sees doesn't make perfect sense, since there are people he genuinely does not want to/has no reason to kill (Kaya being the most obvious example). So could parts of what he says be merely an exaggeration to have the duel with Saber he desires? Had Saber recognized Iori having any kind of doubts, they might've tried to talk him out of it, but by fully embracing his Blood Knight urges and acting out the part of "just another sword demon" gives Saber no other choice. He also could've wanted to fulfill Saber's wish, as he ponders in his thoughts how wonderful it would be if he could realize their wish, he mentions after Saber defeats him that he's glad he was cut down, and the name of the Lunar Chronicle is called "All for You". All this suggests that while he was acting towards his own wish on the surface, he could've also been trying to fulfill Saber's wish in the event that he lost.
• Anti-Climax Boss: In any route other than "Flames of Resentment", Chiemon is defeated in cutscenes with Lancer dying by proxy. Chiemon's bio describing his role in the Snake Route even describes his end as unceremonious.
• Epileptic Trees:
  • Chiemon's status as a survivor of the Shimabara rebellion, combined with his unhealthy pallor and noticeable scar around his neck, has led some to believe that he may actually be a reanimated Amakusa Shiro, who was executed via beheading.
  • The fact that female Musashi is present at all raises a lot of questions about the setting itself, especially since this version of Musashi should be outright impossible to summon in the first place due to the events of Fate/Grand Order's Lostbelt No. 5. However, in the FGO 8th anniversary interview, Kinoko Nasu confirms that the story takes place before Olympus and after Shimosa.
• Fan Nickname: Due to the game never making clear on Saber's gender, it is common for fans to call them Theyber in response.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Iori and Saber have other characters they get Ship Tease with, the latter in particular having their historical wife appear and pretty much cement that they still love each other. In spite of that, Iori and Saber are more or less the default pairing for the two among the player base, with most fans preferring them together due to their relationship being a core part of the game's story making it easy to see romantic connections between the two, something that many characters in-game either pick up on or tend to see from their perspectives as well including, hilariously enough, the Pseudo-Servant host of Saber's wife who has paired them since their first meeting.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Iori's Void Stance blows his other four stances out of the water in terms of sheer damage, speed, and waveclear, and also deals the most damage to Shell Gauges. Its only condition is that Iori stay in high to full health, which is a lenient condition as long as you have healing items to spare, and dodging attacks is also easier thanks to the stance's incredible speed.
  • The first DLC adds Rider(Ushi Gozen) as a playable character, and they're quite the juggernaut, boasting high durability to tank most attacks, incredible damage output and shell gauge damage with their combos and Affinity Techniques. The only drawback is that they can only be used in Battle Recollections, but if you're farming for materials and money, they're a great option for faster clears.
  • As expected of a DLC Servant, Ibuki-Douji is utterly bonkers. She has amazing stats all around, fantastic damage, reach, and speed on all of her combos, and her Affinity Techniques all tear off humongous chunks of the Shell Gauge to really bring on the pain. Even better, once you complete her episode, she joins you permanently as a Rogue Servant who can fight by your side as early as Chapter II, and like Circe, will never leave your side when the other Rogue Servants get brainwashed later on. About her only real weakness is the fact that, being one of the biggest Servants in the whole game, she has a correspondingly massive hitbox, but with the damage she can inflict means most enemies will die or be too busy taking damage to actually hit her back.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • After a shaky start to their relationship at the start of the game, Iori and Saber eventually become close enough that they start teasing each other like friends and divulging their feelings to each other. It's a far cry from how Saber initially doesn't care whether Iori dies in the Waxing Moon Ritual.
  • In terms of being nice and treating their Servant(s) well, Dayu is one of the best Masters in the franchise on par with Ritsuka Fujimaru. She grants a high level of trust and freedom to both of her Berserkers despite Rogue Berserker being an unintelligible brute who initially caused a ruckus in Yoshiwara and Musashi's claims of being the same person as the recently deceased male Musashi Miyamoto coming off as dubious. While she has wishes, she isn't willing to become the victor in the Waxing Moon Ritual or take part in Tsuchimikado's dangerous schemes to achieve them and instead helps fulfill her Servants' wishes by helping Rogue Berserker forgive his hatred of Delilah and allowing Musashi to duel Iori to the death before she's forced to Rayshift.
  • Despite being the Ojou, Dorothea in her Digressions will still kneel down to pet cats and dogs similarly to Iori and Zheng. Unlike Saber and Archer though, Assassin won't partake together with his master.
• I Knew It!:
  • When Archer's Noble Phantasm, which involves arrows, fire, and chained ships, was revealed, it didn't take long for the fandom to guess that he's actually Zhou Yu, as all of these elements were key to the Battle of the Red Cliffs. And the fans are proven right.
  • With the appearance of Gilgamesh at the end of the third trailer, many fans speculated that he wasn't going to have a huge role in the game given that the positions of Rogue Archer and Rogue Caster were already taken. Some even joked that he was going to be an NPC who is a shopkeeper, similar to Kirei's role in Fate/EXTRA CCC. Then, this tweet from the Koei Tecmo official account confirmed that he's indeed a shopkeeper with his store being named "Babyloni-ya"
  • Fans predicted the identities of the Rogue Assassin and Caster being Li Shuwen and Circe. The Fate/Grand Order Chaldea Broadcasting Station lite version ~ Servant Festival 2023 stream confirmed it.
  • Many fans also have theorized that Rogue Berserker is Samson, due to having hair so long it could be mistaken for a cape (Samson's source of strength is commonly interpeted as being his hair), and having chains on his arms - which fans theorize are the ones that he used to tear down the temple of Dagon.
  • Lancer looks very similar to Jeanne d'Arc Alter; however, she has a slightly different design, different Noble Phantasm, and a different Class. While her Interlude in FGO explains how she could now be summonable outside of a Grand Order, and different Noble Phantasms and Classes aren't out of the ordinary, these differences raise the question of who she really is, with some thinking she's some form of imposter. Turns out she IS Jeanne d'Arc, as an ACTUAL Alter, as opposed to the wish-fulfillment version from the First Singularity in Fate/Grand Order.
  • From the moment the first trailer dropped, people correctly guessed that Saber would be Yamato Takeru.
  • A lot of fans had figured out the identities of Rider and Rogue Saber due to their character designers, RAITA (who drew Minamoto no Raikou) and shirabii (who did Tomoe Gozen) respectively. It's no surprise when their identities are revealed in the game as Ushi Gozen, Raikou's Split Personality, and Kiso Yoshinaka, Tomoe's husband, respectively.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Man of Culture".^Explanation Shortly after being re-acquainted with Iori at the beginning of Chapter 2, Iori tells Musashi of her male self and she expressses surprise that her Proper Human History counterpart grew old and became a 'man of culture'. Given the modern connotations of the phrase, many fans were quick to joke the elderly Musashi pursued rather "cultured studies" in his old age.
  • She has good taste.^{Explanation (Spoilers!)} With the revelation of the true identity of Rogue Saber being none other than Tomoe Gozen's husband Kiso Yoshinaka, several fans both jokingly and earnestly complimented the former on having good taste after seeing his loving devotion to his wife and his rather fetching appearance underneath the helmet.
  • Rogue Rider is high.^Explanation Rogue Rider, aka Tamamo Aria, has been noted for having a weirdly off default expression in her art that makes it look like she is staring lazily. Combined with her somewhat "sleepy" tone when she speaks, and many quickly joked that she was high on some kind of drug, with edits of her expression with her eyes adjusted appearing shortly after she was first shown.
  • Iori the Counter Force Guardian.^{Explanation (Spoilers!)} Due to his characterization as a Born in the Wrong Century Blood Knight, in particular during the "Entreat the Darkness" route where he is shown to have a desire to wish for Japan to go back to its more bloody past, fans jokingly say that unlike EMIYA from Fate/stay night who is depicted as being utterly miserable as being a Necessarily Evil agent for the Counter Force, Iori would thrive in such a occupation. The meme would continue to see use when it was announced that Iori would be be playable as a welfare servant as part of a collaboration event with Fate/Grand Order.
• Moe: Tamamo Aria is so cute which is even acknowledged by Musashi in the animated short presented in the Fate/Grand Order New Year's Eve 2024 special. In the short, Tamamo Aria tries to get her sword from her back but she can't reach it, causing her to spin around while saying "Ara?" in her cutesy voice, much to Musashi's joy.
• Older Than They Think: Many fans were shocked to see Jeanne Alter in the game because they expected the Servants would be all Japanese given it's set in the Edo Period. However, it's been shown in many Fate spinoffs that the Holy Grail Wars would have Servants from different nationalities. Even some of the Masters in the game's Holy Grail War are foreigners and one of them is a mage from the Clock Tower. It's also justified by the fact that without any direct catalyst to call on a specific one, Servants are summoned to a Master based on who they are as a person typically and seeing how Chiemon is a survivor of the Shimabara Rebellion, marking him as one of the few Japanese Christians alive, giving him basis to call upon a fellow Christian-based Servant and (barring Amakusa Shirou himself) there are very few noteworthy historical Japanese Christians that have made their mark on history, leaving summoning one from a foreign land as the most realistic option.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The shell gauge mechanic is a frustrating aspect of the game that many feel makes boss fights tedious and artificially long. The player has to whittle down a bosses protective armor to be able to do full damage, but the shell gauge's take so long to break that most of the fight consists of just trying to do so, before spamming a bunch of attacks to do as much damage as possible in the short window opened after. Some bosses also can refill their shell gauge right after it gets broken as well, and it makes switching to a Servant impractical unless done at the right time.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: On a whole the Rogue Servants are fairly underutilized in the story, fitting how they were added primarily for fanservice reasons more than anything, but still something some players felt was a disappointment. Most tend to have one or two brief roles in the story before not appearing for large portions of the game, and being relegated to optional content. The only ones to have semi important roles are Rogue Saber, Caster, and Berserker, but the rest have almost no impact on the main story, with Rogue Archer (Arjuna) in particular standing out as having only two appearances in the main story.
• Unexpected Character:
  • The second trailer has a shot of Jeanne d'Arc Alter. Not only is she French (sort of) it's implied she shouldn't even exist outside of a Grand Order. Surprisingly, this version of Jeanne Alter looks different from her Avenger form and her class is Lancer. Of course, that's because she's not actually the Jeanne d'Arc Alter from FGO, but the actual Jeanne d'Arc who willingly allowed herself to become an Alter, which still counts since all previous materials seemed to suggest it was impossible otherwise for her to do so.
  • During the FGO Fest 2023, it was revealed that the rogue Servants would include the original Cu Chulainn from Fate/stay night and Tamamo Aria of the Tamamo Nine from Fate/EXTRA CCC. Then on the second day of the fest, the third trailer revealed Arjuna and teased a certain Babylonian King at the end.
  • Li Shuwen (1864-1934) as the Rogue Assassin Class Servant in the Waxing Moon Ritual in 1651. The Throne of Heroes is a Place Beyond Time, so a Heroic Spirit can be summoned from the relative past or future, but summoning a future hero is very rare — not only is there no way of knowing what their catalyst might be, the pool of past heroes is simply far bigger.
  • Sasaki Kojiro's appearance in a flashback in the game is surprising because it shows him as an actual person and not a blended conglomeration of stories about various swordsmen who fought against Musashi. What's more, it reveals that he had actually survived his supposed fatal historical duel with Musashi and even managed to outlive the latter long enough to teach Iori his signature technique.
  • Ibuki-Douji's appearance in the first DLC caught fans by surprise; while a popular character, she doesn't have as much presence in the franchise as the other odd picks mentioned prior.