Fate/Samurai Remnant New Game Plus explained: what carries over and why you should do it
After completing Fate/Samurai Remnant for the first time, I strongly recommend playing through New Game+. Aside from obtaining other endings, various parts of the story are expanded upon that make more narrative sense now that you’ve seen the majority of the story. Let’s cover exactly what gets carried over in New Game+, roughly how long it’ll take you to get through it, and why you should even bother in the first place.
This New Game Plus gudie for Fate/Samurai Remnant is spoiler-free.
What gets carried over in New Game+
After you finish your first playthrough, you’re taken back to the main menu screen. A new ‘Sword Demon’ difficulty is unlocked and you can choose to start the story at the beginning of Chapter 2 on New Game+.
Carrying over your save data into New Game+ in Fate/Samurai Remnant brings over:
- Character levels
- Rogue Servants recruited
- EXP
- Items (the only exceptions here are plot-relevant items you obtain in the story)
- Skill points
- Learned actions, techniques, abilities, spells, & stances
- Acquired skills
- Completed Edo commissions (the mini missions from several NPCs)
- Completed Local Trials (the mini missions you can undertake when exploring towns)
- Monster Log progress
- Workshop Renovation status (this includes your magecraft workshop lvl & all upgrades you put into it)
- Digression (sub-story) completion
Pretty much everything gets carried over. There are several things that do get “refreshed” as well upon starting New Game+. Although the game will still mark their initial completion, players can obtain them again to get their bonuses.
The things that get refreshed in Fate/Samurai Remnant New Game+ are:
- Saber’s location spots (the places Saber runs over to in towns), so you can get an additional skill point for Saber by seeing them again
- Shop inventories are restocked
- Shrines, temples, and other hidden landmarks that give a full restore to your HP, affinity gauge, Valor Gauge, and Servant control meters can be re-obtained again
How long is a New Game+ playthrough
The first playthrough of Fate/Samurai Remnant will be your lengthiest one; it takes around 25-30 hours on average to get it done.
New Game+ goes by much faster because you not only have the option to start at chapter 2, but you gain the ability to automatically fast-forward through all text you’ve already read. The game will only go back to normal speed upon new lines of dialogue and if the upcoming scene contains new bits of dialogue interspersed in it.
Plus, you’re free to immediately skip a scene entirely and if it has any unread text, there will be a red text warning that informs you that the following scene still has unread text.
Zooming through New Game+ took me an additional 6-8 hours to experience all the new content and the rest of the endings. It’s well worth it too.
Why should I go through New Game+
New Game+ in Fate/Samurai Remnant adds new Digression side quests that aren’t available in a first playthrough. They fill in some deliberate narrative gaps and events that happened off-screen away from the player’s eyes. It makes sense in practice because slotting these specific segments all in the first playthrough would’ve definitely made it feel bloated and damage the pacing of what’s transpiring.
A lot of the playtime spent in your first playthrough will be reading story dialogue, experiencing character interactions for the first time, and uncovering new locations to explore all over Edo. On top of that, many side quests will gradually open up so you’ll already have an overwhelming amount of things to learn and attend to.
With a newfound understanding of the overall story from completing a playthrough, the new quests in New Game+ help connect the dots on various other Master and Servant’s perspectives away from what the player was seeing as Iori and Saber in their first run. A small inkling of this can be done on an initial playthrough, but the bulk of it is more intimately told with knowledge of events that have happened and have yet to happen.
Plus, New Game+ helps set the foundation for the game’s hidden third ending that can only be seen on a New Game+ run. New Game+ begins to include new lines, exchanges, and even entire cutscenes that help set the stage of another finale in this action RPG.
Fate/Samurai Remnant’s New Game+ playthrough is worth the experience, despite having to replay large chunks of it to see everything new it has to offer. It helps shed some light on a few Masters and Servants; you might find yourself having a newfound appreciation for several characters once you see it for yourself.