Collaboration with Fate/Samurai Remnant. Written by Jin Haganeya.
The Waxing Moon Ritual nears its end, with only two Servants remaining. The Rogue Archer, Tomoe Gozen, fights valiantly against her foe... but ultimately falls to the might of Rider. But what should've been a victory is instead heralded by Edo's leylines shifting, summoning a new batch of Rogue Servants in place of the old. Rider's Master, Yui Shousetsu, is becoming annoyed — this pattern has been repeated several times now, and they're no closer to achieving their goal of a just world than before. Rider theorizes that the Waxing Moon will only be sated by Servants summoned by proper Masters, not the Rogues, but Shousetsu irritably points out that there are no other Masters...
Meanwhile, at the foot of Senso-ji Temple, lay Miyamoto Iori. He has no recollection of arriving here, nor why he would be laying on the ground like a corpse — in fact everything leading up to this point is a haze. He also notes that his chest feels oddly hollow, as if he's been robbed of a very important part of who he is. The only thing he recognizes is how beautiful the moon looks tonight...
With this divergence of events from the Waxing Moon Ritual that players are familiar with, it should perhaps come as no surprise that Chaldea has picked up a distortion in need of correcting. They have nothing to go on other than that it's similar to the Shimousa Pseudo-Lostbelt, requiring a Rayshift to enter and rejecting every Servant contracted to Chaldea, even Mash. With nothing but their combat summons, Chaldea on the comms, and the prospective aid of any Servants currently in Edo, the Protagonist goes it alone to unravel these mysteries.
Warning: spoilers for Fate/Samurai Remnant will be unmarked.
Tropes featured in this story:
- All There in the Manual: Supplementary material stated that the world of Samurai Remnant is a pruned timeline. Da Vinci quickly figures this out from the wild divergences from Edo's history, but keeps it to herself.
- Bait-and-Switch: Iori ends up in possession of the Waxing Moon after everything is said and done, understandably putting Takeru on edge... but he just hands the imitation Holy Grail off to the Protagonist, reasoning to himself that his still-missing memories were excised because he'd already gotten what he wanted to wish for before he died.
- Big Bad: Ushi Gozen feigns loyalty to her Master this time. She's a filthy liar. No one is surprised.
- Central Theme: Hell. While Chiemon's assertions that this Singularity is Hell could be dismissed as his typical ramblings, the assertions of Rogue Ruler are less easy to ignore when he points out that the Protagonist has travelled through several iterations of the Underworld by now. Additionally, every human character from Samurai Remnant that appears in the event is someone who died in the "Entreat the Darkness" route.
- Clone Degeneration: Shousetsu's clones all have memories from different points in her life, none of them with the complete story. This leaves the vast majority of them as barely functional Broken Records, the few sapient ones lacking the crucial knowledge of "Rider's" Chronic Backstabbing Disorder, and the one or two that do remember everything not realizing they don't actually have Command Seals to restrain Ushi Gozen.
- Closest Thing We Got: The Servants seen in Samurai Remnant have been switched up. Shousetsu and Chiemon are the only Masters to get their original Servants again, and Takeru is now a Rogue Servant; everyone else is a fill-in with ties to the original Servant (where applicable). The Protagonist realizes this even before they find Spartacus as the Berserker, because they know Musashi reprising her role is impossible.
- The Cloudcuckoolander Was Right: Chiemon, as usual, is a violent lunatic who insists that the Singularity they're in is Hell and that he's somehow the Only Sane Man after seeing how deep Iori's amnesia runs. Naturally no one pays his ramblings any mind... except Chiemon ends up being completely right; everyone in the Singularity except for the Protagonist is a Servant, and Chiemon is the ONLY "Master" who realized this.
- Crossover: With Fate/Samurai Remnant.
- Cutting Off the Branches: The story takes place after the "Entreat the Darkness" ending in Fate/Samurai Remnant, specifically implied to be following the "Ray of Light" path before the fateful diverging choice of Iori not destroying the Waxing Moon.note
- Debut Queue: Miyamoto Iori joins as the Welfare Servant, an SR Saber. Ushi Gozen and Yui Shousetsu are summonable for a limited time as an SSR Avenger and SR Caster respectively. (Yamato Takeru is excluded due to already having been the New Year's Servant just before the event.)
- Homunculus Resources: Servant Shousetsu has a second Noble Phantasm that embodies the ideal of a pure, heavenly world free of problems, which takes the form of it being filled with "perfected humans" — in other words, thousands of her homunculus self. She's being forced to deploy it against her will by Ushi Gozen to form the Pseudo-Tree of Emptiness in a horrifying scene that looks like it came straight out of The End of Evangelion.
- I Know Your True Name: The Protagonist naturally has no problem identifying Servants they're familiar with, but this gets flipped around on them when "Raikou" recognizes them as the Master of Chaldea. Even discounting that this Raikou should be a different entity than Chaldea's, it's a plot point in Samurai Remnant that Servants summoned by the Waxing Moon do not have extra memories implanted into them like in a traditional Holy Grail War, so "Raikou" being aware of Chaldea is a major sign that something isn't right.
- Jerkass to One: Not that Takeru was warm and fluffy to Iori before, but they are noticeably colder to him after the events of "Entreat the Darkness". They get better in the ending.
- Internal Reveal:
- Back in Samurai Remnant's "Entreat the Darkness" ending, the main characters weren't given the chance to learn Shousetsu's true nature as a Homunculus. They find out here.
- Longtime Fate viewers/players will also know that the Waxing Moon Ritual is a blatant ripoff of the Holy Grail War crafted by Tsuchimikado, but outside of Tsuchimikado himself, the rest of the Samurai Remnant cast in the event has no way of knowing that. They finally get the proper context after chatting with Chaldea.
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: After waking up, Iori behaves as he did at the beginning of Samurai Remnant, having no knowledge of the game's events. This is in contrast to Shousetsu and Chiemon, who are already fully familiar with Iori.
- Late-Arrival Spoiler: For both of the games involved in the crossover.
- The event requires you to beat just Fuyuki to play it, but the story takes place all the way in Ordeal Call. A new player isn't going understand Ushi Gozen mentioning Caster of Limbo or what a Tree of Emptiness is. On the flipside, any mention of the Count being the Greater-Scope Villain (along with dialogue from the man himself) is omitted unless the player has defeated Flare E-Olga Marie (the then-latest Main Story content), as that is where the Count is first introduced.
- There is no attempt whatsoever to hide plot elements specific to Samurai Remnant. Not only is it blatantly obvious which ending the crossover takes place after, but Internal Reveals are dropped left and right.
- Let No Crisis Go to Waste: Chiemon is the only Master in the Singularity who knows what's really going on and isn't part of the greater plot. But he's not obligated to help stop it, because the Waxing Moon going haywire and bleeding into the world outside the Singularity is exactly what Chiemon wants, so he opposes Chaldea anyway. It's only after the Pseudo-Tree of Emptiness begins to do something outside of his scope that he moves to stop it.
- Locked Out of the Loop: Given the ending of the "Entreat the Darkness" route in Samurai Remnant, Takeru and Gramps are understandably reluctant to fill in any blanks for the amnesiac Iori. The pensiveness triples when Iori remembers his swordplay from Samurai Remnant's endgame, confirming to Takeru that this is actually the same Iori and not an Alternate Timeline equivalent.
- Off the Rails: The story appears to be a Whole-Plot Reference to Fate/Samurai Remnant at first, but things swiftly derail in the second chapter when it's shown that Iori is not a Master and Takeru is instead a Rogue Servant. Discrepancies continue to mount from the apparent absence of Masters with only Shousetsu, Chiemon, and Tsuchimikado as a Giant Ghost making an appearance, as well as the Rogue Servants having been replaced with counterparts that don't match the original's Class.
- Post-Final Boss: The last Digression Quest, which unlocks Iori permanently, is a Duel Boss between Iori and a Shadow Servant of Musashi.
- Refused by the Call: Every Chaldean Servant is unable to enter the Singularity, even Mash. Interestingly this turns out to have been a good thing, because part of Ushi Gozen's master plan was to steal the Black Barrel and lured Chaldea to the Singularity to that end; da Vinci quickly puzzles out that either the Count, Rogue Ruler, or the Counter Force itself explicitly restricted Mash to stop this problem before it started.
- Sincerest Form of Flattery: The Singularity's similarities to Heian-kyo, both as measured by Chaldea and as seen by the Protagonist, are not a coincidence. The Count rehashed it on purpose.
- The Stations of the Canon: Despite the early derailing, the basic story formula of Samurai Remnant remains intact: learn the context of the Waxing Moon Ritual, take over Spirit Fonts, befriend Rogue Servants, fight off monsters/enemy Servants, rinse and repeat until the Final Boss Eldritch Abomination is taken down.
- Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Inverted. While this happens for most of the Rogue Servants in the Waxing Moon Ritual, Boss/Gilgamesh has been replaced by a completely new character who couldn't be any more different from the prideful King of Heroes: a calm and polite chap with golden-eyes, tanned skin, blue hair, and Indian-style clothing. This "Rogue Ruler" actually takes his role of observing and arbitrating the ritual seriously, and he knows a concerning amount of details about the Protagonist having brushes with multiple Underworlds.
- Tomato in the Mirror: Twice.
- Everyone is a Servant, including the "Masters" who aren't really Masters at all. The Protagonist is the only living being in the whole Singularity. Everyone is floored by this reveal, especially Shousetsu who outright shows us her Command Seals to prove it wrong... only for everyone else to see an empty wrist that Shousetsu insists isn't empty.
- Shousetsu then gets it even worse. Just before she dies, she learns that she's not even the real Servant Shousetsu; that one is currently sealed in the Pseudo-Tree of Emptiness deploying her clones en masse, and the one we see die is just another of the clones.
- Wham Shot: Musashi appearing as a Shadow Servant as the Post-Final Boss. This should be impossible, considering that Musashi was completely erased from reality at the end of Olympus and Iori has lost all memory of him/her. And yet she was somehow not only able to appear for one final duel against her prized student, but even guide him to Chaldea afterwards.
- You Can't Thwart Stage One: Once it becomes clear that Ushi Gozen is (once again) going by the beat of her own drum, Shousetsu uses her Command Seals to order Ushi Gozen to commit suicide effective immediately, an order that has no loopholes for her to exploit like last time... but it fails for an entirely different reason: Shousetsu never HAD Command Seals.
