The first thing I was greeted with when I booted up the game was...A nag screen telling me to update my PSP to 6.39 or better firmware. Once I hunted down some new CFW and got that pain in the ass out of the way (I was rather mad as my PSP's battery was dead, and it takes fucking forever to charge off USB- I lost the wall charger ages ago) I booted up the game, hit new game, and immediately got dumped into a japanese highschool, with an assortment of recycled bits from Fate/Stay Night and some returning cast. A paragraph or so of description later and Taiga comes in and trips in a nearly exact recreation of the bit from Fate/Stay Night. This prologue goes on for a few days of nothing particularly interesting beyond some character introductions happening before the world gets all static-y, and after about a day of wandering around with static-vision you walk through a wall and die in a church.
This is the part where you get to actually make your character (Name, Gender Select), and select your servant, Saber, Caster, or Archer. Then you get dumped in school again and get to run through another day of japanese highschool life before running through the same wall as before and getting to do the combat/dungeon tutorial. Pretty standard, you go through some tutorial battles and have some more scripted to hell stuff, and eventually get whatever servant you selected at character creation. Then Bla bla welcome to the holy grail war go kill people. They managed to set the entire game in either dungeons or highschool. Japan really fucking loves highschool for some reason, if anime and games are to be believed, the entire nation is just a giant complex of highschools, trains, and love hotels.
I picked Saber for my playthrough since she's supposedly the easiest, and I'm a lazy fucker that doesn't feel like playing on the hardest possible way right off she isnt the same Saber as from the other Fate games, and I've actually found myself liking her more than standard saber, to be honest. That and supposedly you can Newgame+ to keep some of your items and enemy attack patterns, making shit way easier the second runthrough.
As for the actual game itself, I doubt it'll win over anyone that doesn't already like the Fate franchise, since the combat engine is rock/paper/scissors with some skills and items tossed in. Grinding on regular enemies is entirely about guessing/memorizing their attack sequences and pattern recognition (And the more enemies of the same type you kill, the more of the enemy's attack sequence you see). The fights against enemy servants are actually interesting and fairly fun, because they have enough variety of skills and item usage in the AI that it has a more interesting dynamic than you'd expect. The regular experience grind battles are pretty uninteresting(Not that grinding ever is), though I find rock/paper/scissors to be mildly more amusing than "Mash A until the enemies are all dead". Being unable to save in the middle of the dungeons is a huge fucking pain in the ass though, especially on a handheld, even a suspend type save would've been a huge help because I essentially can't play the game during the random short intervals (On the train, waiting for things, etc) I usually play handhelds.
The real entertainment factor for this game is the character interactions, most of the characters are amusing and distinctive enough that talking to them is actually interesting, rather than something you just mash the text-skip button through as fast as possible. The music is also pretty good, but most of the really awesome songs are one-off event songs and the background music will likely quickly just be completely forgettable.
The character interactions and boss fights make all the minor issues worth it, though. Be it completely absurd fetch quests from Taiga (Who keeps comic books in dungeons, seriously?) and things like this. (Thanks random dude that screencapped this, I couldnt get the PSP stream to PC plugin working worth shit)
