MMM - "Kakkoi" King and Killer Konsort to Kalamitous Knight Konfer Khaos (Traum Gacha Part 1)

Man, he’s so cool. He’s just so cool. But he’s also a nerd and possibly Gudao’s great, great, great, great, great, great, (...), grandpa.

That third ascension though… I suppose Charlie…resolving his issues with “that man” is technically a good thing for the heroic spirit, but it gives me mixed feelings regardless.

Part of me wants to say “Oh look, yet another Quick SSR Saber”, but in actuality the Quick Saber lineup was very limited until a year or two ago, with Summer Okitan and Charlie now filling out the roster immensely.

As for how he shapes up to the SSR Saber roster, Charlie is very middle-of-the-road. With the 8th best Atk stat and tied 6th best HP stat of his rarity and class, he has no real weaknesses, and leans toward the higher end of the base stat equation. In essence, he’s very solid offensively, but also possesses a pretty high HP stat, giving him a good balance, even if head-to-head with other Sabers his Attack may look slightly lacking.

On the passives front, Charlie is very typical. With A-rank Magic Resistance he’s assured to be resistant to typical debuffs with some consistency, and A-rank Riding gives him an essential +10% boost to his primary card type. While not flashy, not every Servant gets such a sizable boost to their main form of dishing out damage, so it’s a good package to work with.

While not spectacular in any way, Charlie has a fine baseline to work from for the remainder of his kit.

Ah, the curse strikes once more. With a BAAQQ card set and 3-hit Arts cards, you can probably figure where I’m going here. Charlie’s base NP gain of 0.48% means his Arts gain comes out to 1.44, notably below average by anyone’s metric. Without any real focus on Arts cards, that mediocrity is going to stick, meaning Charlie may have some issues getting his Arts cards to produce anything decent.

Like all struck by the curse of high-hitcount Arts cards, Charlie’s other cards also take a dip. His 4-hit Quick cards, when factoring in his Riding and other aspects of his kit, have decent NP gain, but his 5-hit Extra barely ekes out over average NP gain, and his Buster card, despite having a notably high hitcount, won’t produce more than 2-3% in an Arts chain.

On the flipside, those high hitcounts are good for one thing - stargen. Charlie just from the get-go is a pretty solid star-producer, having 4+ hits on his Buster, Quick cards, and Extra card, as well as his Riding and Quick focus on the whole bolstering how many stars he can spew out. He’s not going to compete with a Quick-focused Assassin even on a good day, but he’s certainly effective at setting up crits for both himself, and the team.

The contrast on Charlie’s generation stats is pretty startling, but thankfully his NP gain isn’t so bad as to cripple his viability entirely. As I like to say, support for stargen/crits is basically NP gain by proxy due to the +100% NP gain boost on crits, and he has that in spades.

So how’s Charlie on the whole? On one hand, he’s adventuring toward success, comrades beside him:

However, under the surface he’s struggling against a persona of tyranny:

You know, this specific MMM puts me in a bit of an awkward position. Why? Because Charlemagne and Okita Alter Summer are both very, very similar Servants. And compared to Okita Alter’s summer form, I’ve given Charlie a much more glowing review for one reason, and one reason alone - Reines’s NP upgrade.

It may not look like much, but her ability to act as a secondary Quick/Arts farming support by popping her own NP before the farming Servant’s on wave 1 and pass that juicy +50% NP gain buff essentially threw Quick farming back onto the table by accident, simply because it meant Quick farming teams could run a 50% gauge charger who didn’t have to throw the entire 50% in one go, and still provided similar offensive and refund boosts to Skadi.

Back when I reviewed Okita Alter Summer, a Black Grail setup on her was somewhat inconsistent, simply because you needed to run double Skadi + Nero Bride to get the necessary refund numbers, and that produced an awkward situation where you had Okita getting 80%+ refund per wave, but you only had access to your second Skadi’s singular 50% gauge charge. If you could divide it into 2 and use it twice, you’d be golden, but it simply wasn’t feasible.

Reines essentially became that necessary divided Skadi gauge charger, and as a result, I’m now kind of reviewing Okita Alter Summer by proxy, since her kit and Charlemagne’s, once you strip them to the essentials, are incredibly similar. Okita’s now immensely better than she was at release, and so is Charlemagne. Pretty much everything I’ve said for Charlie’s farming refund and damage output applies to Okita now with little deviation.

The reason I’ve gone on that diatribe against my past self is simply so I don’t look like a hypocrite. The game is constantly changing, and even buffs which don’t directly impact a Servant can shift the game around them so they become immensely more valuable. This is one of those cases.

Charlemagne excels in both farming and CQ’s alike, and does so while providing a small handful of interesting perks that further his uniqueness as a Quick AOE Saber. Even if you can’t provide the Black Grail farming setup which kicks him into overdrive, he remains a dependable farmer and a very fun tool to take for a spin on CQ’s where it’s appropriate. Rath™ Seal of Approval, with a recommendation.

Well, it’s the nudist knight himself. Frankly, with how long Durandal has sat around in the mindspace of the Fate series (having its own weapon profile in the F/SN VN, plus Hector’s own NP being Durandal’s precursor), it’s shocking it took this long for Roland to be given any sort of elaboration or profile, then again put in the game. With how many KotR are hanging about, it still feels criminal that we only have Roland/Astolfo/Charlie despite how many Paladins are easily famous enough to be worthy of introduction.

Roland, much like his King, takes a middle-of-the-road approach so far as stats go. With the 10th best Attack of any SR Saber and 7th best HP, Roland has a very typical attack score, but compensates with a HP stat that punches well above his offensive profile. While that doesn’t make him an offensive powerhouse, it does mean he’s a decent bit bulkier than competitors with similar offensive might are.

Those base stats are supplemented by an identical set of passives to Charlemagne - A-rank Magic Resistance and A-rank Riding. The passive debuff resistance remains a silent and thankless hero, as always, but the Riding is a little less impressive on Roland, as he isn’t Quick-focused like Charlie is. Regardless, a sizable boost to one of his cards is nothing to dismiss.

In general, Roland starts off very typical. His base stats offer nothing to complain about, but his passive lineup has basically 0 spice to it, or direct impact, measurable impact on his performance. Just boring, basically.

For the first time in what feels like forever, Roland comes to us with the typical, generic, very baseline 2-hit Arts BBAAQ card deck. With a base NP gain of 0.83%, that gives him the typical Arts gain of 1.66 exactly, and his other hitcounts of a 3-hit Quick, 3-hit Busters, and a 5-hit Extra result in a kit that isn’t particularly good at NP gain anywhere but his Extra.

But it’s not particularly bad anywhere, either. All of his cards have more or less average NP gain for their type, which is a breath of fresh air from kits with gimped base NP gain to balance their NP refund, or Arts hitcounts in the billions, resulting in good Arts cards but a completely crippled kit elsewhere. Sure, practically speaking, for many kits having good Arts cards and awful everything-else is better than what Roland has, but the aesthetic of a balanced kit soothes my soul.

So far as stargen goes, Roland is pretty poor. His Busters and Quick aren’t the worst stargen-wise, but they’re nothing special either, and his Extra is about as good as most Servants for stargen. Simply put, don’t depend on him for it.

So how does Roland stack up? On one hand, he’s baring all he has to offer to the world:

However, he’s also being arrested for indecent exposure to minors:

The bottom line is, Roland is outclassed offensively by a wide range of Servants, and doesn’t bring enough new to the table to distinguish himself. With 3 ST Welfare Sabers on the market, and ⅔ of them considered widely to be very good, Roland is already on a setback. But even if he were to have the same NP level as those competitors, he’d still largely be outclassed simply because he doesn’t have the damage numbers necessary to distinguish himself.

It’s a great shame, but he can liberate himself from the oppression of both his clothing and a presence in my team rosters.

Really, the more you read about all the circumstances surrounding Siegfried’s legend and you start to wonder if he was just something of a moron. All the business with the cursed ring and the Rheingold, then having pretty much everyone fight over him, gets himself assassinated, then causing Kriemhild to go on a vengeance bender for over a decade which eventually leads to her death.

All that, when you could’ve just settled for your big tiddy goth wife. Shame.

Leading things off with her base stats, it’s immediately clear Kriemhild is oriented to be a glass cannon. With the 4th highest Attack of her class and rarity, and the tied lowest HP, she finds herself in good company alongside Summer Jalter and Summer Sei. While on paper that means she’s got a poor stat total relative to other Berserkers, typically the difference in HP between Berserkers makes little difference, simply due to the immense sum of damage they tend to take in general.

Make no mistake - she’s still frail, it’s just the deviation between Berserkers in their HP stats is so minor it’s not much of a drawback. Having the high attack stat she has is far more important in the grand scheme of things.

Supplementing that is Kriemhild’s singular, but high-ranked passive, Madness Enhancement EX. Yup, another case of “Sure, they’re so mad it wraps around and they’re perfectly capable of communicating.” In any case, 12% extra Buster card damage is nothing to scoff at, even if Kriemhild is Arts-focused.

On the whole, Kriemhild is packing a very glass cannon offensive setup with little attention spared to anything else. While that’s pretty good on its own, it can make a Servant a one-trick pony. We’ll see.

Ah, back to business as usual. 3-hit Arts cards it is. With a base NP gain of 0.53% and two 3-hit Arts cards, Kriemhild comes in with a base Arts gain of 1.59, a little below average, but not cripplingly bad by any stretch.

However, as is tradition, the issue of her low base NP gain spreads to the rest of her cards. Her Busters produce…typical numbers, her Quick is pretty bad for NP gain, and her Extra is simply average for NP gain, despite its decent hitcount of 5. While Berserkers tend to be known for having solid NP gain on non-Buster cards simply because most of their card deck are BBBAQ, Kriemhild departs a little too far from this standard, and as a result her normal cards just have below-average NP gain in general.

And things aren’t any better on the stargen front. Her card deck isn’t built for star generation to begin with, and with middling hitcounts on all but her Extra card, that remains true. She doesn’t produce many stars, even with the ideal Brave chain.

So yeah, not looking too good in this department.

So how is Kriemhild in practice? On one hand, she’s got a thirst for vengeance and hell no am I going to get in the way of that:

However, she’s also running headfirst into her own death, as all avengers tend to do:

With Castoria’s support present in the game, it feels like the pool of viable offensive Arts Servants for CQ content expands by the day. It’s odd to think Vlad has 2 competitors for his class and niche so soon in succession, and even weirder that both are very competitive options for it.

While both Galatea and Vlad certainly have higher baselines for their performance as Arts NP spammers, Kriemhild displays a clear advantage in both accessibility and potential. Getting Kriemhild, as well as getting additional copies for NP levels, is far easier, and her tradeoff of a 50% gauge charger for lesser NP refund makes her more convenient to use in lower-investment, F2P-based rosters which can’t run double Castoria or similar setups.

Add in the general versatility of being an Arts Berserker, capable of being deployed versus almost any class enemy, and her notable niche for dealing huge damage to her given Effective Damage traits, and Kriemhild makes for a very worthwhile ST option to add to one’s collection, given one doesn’t already have her SSR brethren. Rath™ Seal of Approval.