Rabbit's Reviews #277: Nemo (5* Rider)

The Imaginary Scramble event brings with it two SSR Servants, one limited and one not. Nemo is the non-limited of the two, adding a longtime story ally to the general summon pool. Unfortunately, although Nemo’s a great character with great animations, his gameplay leaves a lot to be desired. Nemo is heavily dependent on a pair of pretty limited niches, going from pretty good within them to really bad without them. To make matters worse, he’s competing with a welfare and a 3* who are both pretty much strictly better, which leaves him as one of the more unappealing SSRs of the year from a gameplay standpoint.

Nemo has a pretty good stat spread, with reasonably high attack and pretty good HP as well. His internals are good too, with high-ish hit-counts and a pair of very strong Arts cards. Unfortunately, Nemo’s good internals don’t really carry over to his NP—he’s super dependent on cards to loop—but that’s pretty standard for ST Servants anyway. For passives, Nemo has Riding and Divinity (neither of which help him much), as well as a unique passive that increases his Arts Crit damage by a bit. The unique passive also gives Nemo a hefty 500 damage damage cut on Water and Imaginary Space fields, which is a solid bit of extra bulk when Nemo happens to be in niche.

Ascension Materials

Stage	Cost	Materials
2	100,000	x5 Rider Piece
3	300,000	x12 Rider Piece x8 Eternal Gear
4	1,000,000	x5 Rider Monument x10 Shell of Reminiscence x5 Aurora Steel
Max	3,000,000	x12 Rider Monument x10 Aurora Steel x12 Divine Pulse Spirit Orb

Skill Enhancement Materials

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	200,000	x5 Gem of Rider
2 → 3	400,000	x12 Gem of Rider
3 → 4	1,200,000	x5 Magic Gem of Rider
4 → 5	1,600,000	x12 Magic Gem of Rider x5 Shell of Reminiscence
5 → 6	4,000,000	x5 Secret Gem of Rider x10 Shell of Reminiscence
6 → 7	5,000,000	x12 Secret Gem of Rider x5 Eternal Gear
7 → 8	10,000,000	x10 Eternal Gear x4 Dawn Core
8 → 9	12,000,000	x11 Dawn Core x24 Divine Pulse Spirit Orb
9 → 10	20,000,000	x1 Crystallized Lore

Nemo asks for a ton of Lostbelt mats, which makes him pretty unfriendly for newer players. That said, assuming you’re caught up on the game’s story, he’s not actually all that hard to invest in.

Nemo’s skillset is where things start to fall apart—he just doesn’t have the tools he’d need to stand apart from his competition. Recommended skill order is 3>1>2.

Nemo’s an ST Arts Servant with good cards, so standard double-Castoria teams will be his best option, as usual. You can run Tamamo as your third support for maximum damage, Sherlock for maximum utility, or Waver/Reines for extra looping stability. Standard stuff.

It’s perhaps worth noting, though, that two of Nemo’s skills provide buffs to the whole team, which means he might have some value as a semi-support in fights where you really need multiple damage-dealers for one reason or another. His AoE buffs are quite low outside of niche, so this is only really at all valuable on Water or Imaginary maps. This does mean he has a bit of synergy with Summer Melt, though. Summer Melt can force a waterside field, and Nemo’s AoE Waterside offensive buffs aren’t all that far below what Tamamo provides—Nemo’s actually a little better than Tamamo in burst, in fact. You could run Castoria/Melt/Castoria/Nemo, plug one of the Castorias for Nemo on turn 1, use Nemo’s buffs to strengthen Melt, and then have Nemo handy to use his NP against a single high-HP enemy. This could potentially be a way to tackle a fight that’s mostly AoE but that has one target that needs an extra push of ST damage.

The Black Grail is the best CE for any Arts point Servant if you’re running Castoria, unless there’s an event damage CE available. Failing that, Sign of Smiling Face is also nice in that it makes looping a little easier while also providing damage, and Painting Summer can allow for even more reliable loopage, especially with a backup Waver/Reines.

Honestly, if you want to grail an ST Arts Rider and you don’t have Nemo at high NP levels, you’d get more mileage out of giving the resources to Mandricardo or Ryouma. I’d skip this one.

At first glance, Nemo might seem to be in a similar place as Hajime was a few weeks ago—ST Arts means Castoria synergy means good by default, but the free alternatives are generally better. There are a few key differences here, though, the most prominent of which is that Hajime is a really good servant in his own right, whereas Nemo’s value would be highly questionable even without the free alternatives. Nemo is strong on his favored fields, but so much of his kit is dependent on that niche that in the vast majority of cases he winds up as one of the weakest ST SSRs in the game. To make matters worse, Nemo has the disadvantage of being an SSR and therefore expensive. It’s a lot harder to bump Nemo’s NP levels to the point where he competes more effectively with the free competition than it is to do the same for Hajime or, say, Rider Murasaki. This is not a Servant I would recommend targeting even in a world where Ryouma and Mandricardo didn’t exist. With them around, though, Nemo’s a huge “why bother?”

Overall: 4/10
Single-Target DPS: 3/10 (outside of niche), 8/10 (in-niche)
AoE DPS: N/A
Survivability: 6/10
Offensive Utility: 2/10 (outside of niche), 7/10 (in-niche)
Defensive Utility: N/A
Farming Usefulness: 2/10
Crew Members: 16/16