In light of the current extraction shooter trend, I was a bit surprised at the existence of Fate Trigger: The Novita. It’s an upcoming free-to-play hero shooter battle royale from Tencent subsidiary Saroasis Studios, which looks like a cartoony cousin of Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds with anime girls and a multi-island arena that’s placed in the sky. I recently attended a virtual session that offered a hands-off preview of the game, with the focus on showing off the mechanics and characters rather than simulating a proper match.
It’s a bit tricky to explain the game’s lore premise, so here’s an official blurb from the Steam page:
A massive, powerful spherical entity hangs high in the sky. The world is fragmented into floating islands, threatened by a spreading Paleblight disaster that can destroy the battlefield at any moment. You are the chosen warrior, the Awakener, and your mission is to uncover the deep-seated secrets of this new world by shooting your way to ultimate victory.
My main impression of Fate Trigger: The Novita is that it’s a cartoony combination of PUBG (it can be played in third-person with aim-down-sights or in first-person) and Apex Legends with a fluid prone system that enables 360-degree aiming — think the supine prone aspect of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6’s omnimovement — and a gliding device for descents. The glider, which reminded me of NieR: Automata’s pod-gliding due to its one-handed nature, is also one of the main means of traversing between the chunks of floating land that make up the arena. Other island-hopping methods include portals, updrafts, and cars that can activate thrusters to hover.
One of the islands has a large section of its bottom hollowed out with some architecture built into the resulting curvature, which makes for a striking sight during the initial air-drop phase. However, things became less exciting when we reached the ground. The town we landed in had a pleasant retro-futuristic vibe, but by the end of the preview, I was thinking that there were too many ordinary-looking houses and standard greenery on the map. The one structure that stood out did so because it looked like an Apex building.
I was more intrigued by the worldview concept art, which depict high tech facilities and a city built atop a tower and divided across stacked ring levels. In the announcement trailer and on the Steam page, there’s a ruined dome housing what seems to be a large research operation, but I worry that most of the fancy places will only exist in the background setting and not on the battlefield.
Fate Trigger: The Novita‘s character designs, although not instant classics, have much better visual personality than what I saw of the map thanks to their anime theme. The flexes of pretty strong character animations in the character and main lobby screens also helped — one fire-wielding, eye-patch-wearing character oozed incredible confidence and attitude with just two seconds of movement. Most of the characters previewed were anime girls, but there’s a burly wolf man in the lineup too. Aside from him, the most eye-catching was a bunny-eared girl with a massive bunny head accessory and an oversized jacket whose zipper is bigger than her head.
As revealed in the announcement trailer, the English voice cast includes names like Kira Buckland, Xanthe Huynh, and Judy Alice Lee. In Japanese, you’ll be able to hear seiyuus like Kana Hanazawa, Ayana Taketatsu, and Akari Kito.
Like in Apex, each playable character has a Passive, a Tactical, and an Ultimate ability. The naming conventions are also similar — where Apex has Alter, Void Breacher, Fate Trigger: The Novita has Eos, Light Whisperer. The gameplay preview opted for the third-person view and started with Huxley the Veiled Shadow. The femme fatale is focused on visual information, as she can scan enemies with her lipstick and learn the whereabouts of a player’s teammates by dealing an execution. Huxley’s Ultimate, Realm of Mist, can keep track of the enemies within it while also affecting line-of-sight.
On the other hand, the bunny girl, who’s called Kira the Starhopper, is about hunkering behind bright and colorful fortifications, with her standard active summoning a barricade made out of Tetris blocks. If that wasn’t showy enough, her Ultimate is a tower that twists itself into shape like a Rubik’s cuboid and can further enhance its parapet. I prefer being sneaky and low-key when playing a battle royale, but I enjoyed seeing Kira’s abilities in the preview and the announcement trailer.
For more mobility-minded players, the water-based Nase the Sapphire Seafarer, whose design gives me Pokémon trainer vibes for some reason, can increase her speed a little by gliding on a generated trail of liquid. Her Ultimate functions as an escape that triggers upon death, causing her to vanish into her water for a short while. During this time, she can still move while regenerating health, meaning that you’ll have to chase her down again after the first takedown. Quick peeks at other characters provided displays of energy beams, dashes, a LOS-blocking flame wall that wouldn’t be out of place in Valorant, and an Ultimate that uses the character’s wind powers to basically generate the effects of Apex’s Jump Towers.
Using an Ultimate causes a brief animation of the character to play in the left corner of the screen. I like the animations, less so the idea of them blocking part of my view for a couple of seconds in a PvP environment. Given how much space they take up, I imagine they’ll be even more annoying in first-person too.
Weapons in Fate Trigger: The Novita consist of the usual suspects: assault rifles, submachine guns, shotguns, marksman rifles, and so on. In addition to regular attachments like scopes and stocks (similar to Apex, loot on the ground have a beam of light sticking out of them for visibility), gun chips can be crafted from certain machines and slotted into guns to provide new effects.
For instance, the Healing Chip allows you to heal teammates by shooting them. Another chip that was shown turned a DMR into a laser weapon. I’m not sure how handy the Healing Chip will be when a short time-to-kill is one of the game’s highlighted features (easier respawns are also mentioned), though the chips theoretically add a decent extra layer to the formula in general.
I’ll need a hands-on session or a lengthy gameplay video to form a firmer opinion on Fate Trigger: The Novita, especially in terms of the characters’ toolkits and how they pair with the TTK. Right now, I find myself feeling more enthused with the lobby than the actual game. When we returned to the main lobby at the end of the preview, the orange-haired Eos, who seems to be the poster girl of the game, started to pace back and forth while delivering a brief monologue about two of Fate Trigger: The Novita’s factions and something called the “source.” Even though the same animation and dialogue were repeated a short while later (hopefully, there will be more variations in the full release), it still felt a lot more interesting than our visit to the battle royale map. The character designs are sufficiently appealing to me, but I just can’t muster much excitement over the neighborhood and forest areas we were shown.
The presenter emphasized that the game will have no pay-to-win elements, though there will be the expected character and weapon cosmetics to buy and a battle pass to grind. They also mentioned plans to deliver Fate Trigger: The Novita’s narrative across different media like comics and trailers. Saroasis wants to create a “multifaceted IP centered around the concept of ‘Awakeners’ as a collective” that will “explore themes of individual existence and collective destiny, encompassing character designs, personas, world-building, and storylines.” Should it deliver on that bold statement, or at least succeed halfway, there’ll be something for me to fall back on if the gameplay experience doesn’t click with me.
Release date: 2025
Platforms: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC, mobile