In an rare feat of fan frevor, I picked up the limited edition of Fate/Extra for the Playstation Portable. The limited edition extras of a sixteen-page artbook and soundtrack selection aren't worth the extra $10 but I don't care. It took me 33 hours and 19 minutes to fight my way through the Holy Grail War in the Serial Phantasm. The time I spent fighting and grinding levels was nearly equal to the time spent reading the text. Make no mistake, the main draw for this game is the story written by Fate/Stay Night creator Kinoko Nasu. The story contains the melodrama and philosphical ramblings I expect from Nasu and was satisfying for me. As for the battle system, it's a simple rock-paper-scissors system with skills and items to break up the three main commands. Successfully reading an enemie's pattern will reward you with a quick victory and barely any damage done to your servant. A misread can prove deadly and time consuming as enemies can hit as hard as you can. Worse is that there are no mid-dungeon saving so a few hours of grinding can be lost if you lose a gamble in any arena battle.

There are three servant classes to pick from in the beginning and I hope to try out the other two some time soon. I hope Fate/Extra sells well enough for Aksys games to bring over the sequel Fate/Extra CCC.