The Awakened Fate Ultimatum follows Shin, an average human whom has been chosen to participate in a crazy war.
I seem to have this thing for playing sequels without playing the original lately. The Awakened Fate Ultimatum is a dungeon crawler with a lot of cutscenes. I mean a lot of cutscenes. While you may be in a dungeon for 20-30 minutes, you’ll be in cutscenes between them for around 40-50. They are at least pretty interesting cutscenes, though you definitely start hitting the point of “please just let me get to the gameplay again.”
The angels and devils are at war, and the angels are trying to create God to help fight for them. Enter Shin Kamikaze, a human. The devils show up one day as he’s heading home from school and kill him. He’s then saved by an angel and dragged into their war, powered by the Fate Awakening Crystal. Those previously mentioned extremely long cutscenes show his journey from being an unwilling God to eventually trying to save the angels.
Within the dungeons, all of the battles are done on the map. You explore around, pick up items off the ground, use teleporters to head up floors, and so on. Enemies spawn randomly, and often appear sleeping at first. Once you near them, unless you have a certain accessory on, they’ll wake up. The enemies tend to hit somewhat hard, even when you’re properly using the Angel/Devil system.
What’s the Angel/Devil system? Shin has the ability the change his form between the two which will provide him with stat bonuses and abilities. Angel will take extra damage from other angel enemies (lighter colored ones) but deal extra damage to devil enemies. Devil takes extra from other devil enemies (darker colored ones), but like with angel does extra damage to the opposite form. Almost action you do takes a turn except for changing between these forms, so make use of it the best you can. Well, as long as you have SP anyways!
To make your forms stronger, you’ll need to level up or choose certain choices in cutscenes. Your decisions in these scenes have a heavy role on how events play out in the following cutscenes. And depending on the choice, you’ll either get angel or devil cp. These can only be spent on those specific forms, however cp earned from leveling (one per level) can be used wherever you see fit.
What you can do is limited by several things. How much you can pick up is limited by your inventory, which I never found a way to expand it. Seeing as near the end you’ll have a large quantity of items you want to hold onto… Good luck picking anything up. Angel/Devil form and ability usage is limited by your SP, which drains fairly fast unless you equip something to slow the drain. Even then, using abilities or the form’s ultimate skill will quickly deplete it. And finally, how many actions you can take is limited by your AP. If this hits 0, it’ll start draining your HP. Should your HP hit 0 and you have no Revive Gems, the dungeon is deemed a failure and you are sent back to base and lose all your equipment. Basically, keep plenty of saves before you head into any dungeon.
If you put any amount of effort into upgrading your equipment, you’ll really not want to lose it. To upgrade equipment, 
you need two compatible items and money. Money is earned from killing enemies or selling your extra stuff. If you start to get to the point of “I just want to get through this dungeon and not explore” (or you just run out of inventory), money can start to get a bit tight. Of course, you could always buy more equipment in the dungeon but again… money does start to feel a bit tight.
The Awakened Fate Ultimatum is a somewhat difficult game that feels like it drags on a bit too long. With 15 chapters in the game, you’ll likely be feeling ready to be done with it around 10. I know I was. It was also hard for me to play it in long bursts with the high cutscene to gameplay ratio, and with how hard the dungeons could get. While it is a fairly decent game, it feels like it really does just drag on a bit too long with the high amount of long cutscenes.
The Awakened Fate Ultimatum Review Score
3/5
I would like to thank NIS America for providing me with a copy of the game for review.
