MMM - Teatime Tastes Taught to Timeworn Triggerman, Tracking Threatening Theriothropes (GudaGuda Shin Yamatai-Koku)

FGO “do not genderbend a major male Japanese historical figure” challenge (IMPOSSIBLE).

As of the time of writing, her later ascension forms and profile are still locked, so I frankly have no clue why she’s a Berserker. Maybe she gets really mad if you are shoddy at Tea Ceremony?

As an SSR Berserker, Rikyu comes packing with all the neat offensive perks of the class, which includes a high Attack stat. Even among her peers, she packs the 5th Highest Attack of her class/rarity, in exchange for the tied lowest HP.

So perhaps not a fair tradeoff, but as I always say, HP for Berserkers has diminishing returns from the get-go, so having a low HP score in exchange for more Attack is fundamentally a positive tradeoff. So what if every Servant with more Attack than her in her class also has more HP? She still hits pretty damn hard.

On the passives front, though, she’s got quite a collection. With 4 Unique passives, we’ll go over each in turn:

Madness Enhancement (Tranquil) is the typical moderate Buster boost you would expect from a Berserker, with the added benefit of a minor boost to Critical Damage on top. Though with Riyku’s BAQQQ card deck, it’s actually not as huge a boon as it is for most Berserkers. Still nice to have, though.

Territory Creation (Refined) provides her with a moderate Arts boost, which is again, not her primary card type, as well as a pretty sizeable bonus to her Mental Debuff Resistance, letting her shrug off Charm, Confusion, Terror and such similar debuffs easier.

Aesthetic Appreciation (Tea) is really just Item Creation in disguise, but who am I to complain? A boost to the consistency of the debuffs you apply is always useful, and often rare outside of the Caster class. Remind me why she’s a Berserker, again?

Last on the list is Freeform Thinking, providing a modest increase to NP gain with Quick cards passively. It’s no Quick booster passive, but having that multiplier constantly active for your primary card type is really nice, especially if you’ve got prospects for Quick looping farming in your future.

On the whole, Rikyu has a very solid lineup of base offenses and passives to supplement it, which will go far to aid her performance.

There’s something simply exhilarating about getting a new Servant with incredibly well-rounded NP gain. With a base NP gain of 0.70%, her base Arts gain comes out to 2.268 when her passives are factored in. For a single-Arts Servant, it’s about on average. However, her true source of NP gain comes from her trio of Quick cards, which are quite impressive. With 5 hits apiece, they hit a base NP gain of 3.85, well above the average for Quicks.

She doesn’t slack on the NP gain for her other cards, either. Her Buster is somewhat irrelevant, but her Extra is a solid 5 hits, providing above-average NP gauge, while her NP…well, we can cover that later.

As you might expect, with her Quick-focused card deck and high hitcounts, Rikyu is extremely good at star generation. Most chains from her will produce high sums of stars, while a Quick Brave chain is an assured 50 stars on the next turn, more or less. The Berserker class’s low base stargen may hold her back a little in this regard, but it’s still an impressive showing. She can almost carry a team’s star generation needs by herself.

So how is Sen no Rikyu overall? On one hand, she’s got a cultured palate, and leaves a distinguished taste in your mouth:

However, she’s also not seeing any upright stems in her cup:

If there’s an idiom I can provide for FGO as a whole, it’d probably go thusly:

It is very hard to make an AOE Quick/Arts Berserker bad.

I’m no poet, but hopefully you agree it’s true. I’m pretty sure it’s because Berserkers tend to have high base NP gain from their low Arts card counts, which in turn means their NP’s have higher refund than is typical, plus the offensive might of their class is simply a match made in heaven.

Our most recent Berserker additions prove that beyond doubt - Summer Ibuki is arguably the best farmer in the game, while Sen no Rikyu, while lagging behind in the damage field, is a very valuable addition to the Quick farming roster, and even somewhat performs similarly in how she pulls double duty for farming / difficult content and can provide vital support for a niche Servant in the right circumstance (Arcueid and Summer Skadi, respectively).

While I get a feeling her yet-to-be-revealed ascensions and profile will give me some whiplash, she’s otherwise a very well-rounded and respectable Berserker that can provide some essential farming aid should you have the roster to back her up. Rath™ Seal of Approval, with a recommendation.

Seems like we have the pretty boy quota for this event already filled. At this rate we’ll run out of named Shinsengumi members to implement full stop.

As a member of the Shinsengumi, Keisuke continues their tradition of having really poor base stats (though to be fair, that’s due to them all being near-modern Servants and how base stats are tied to Servants’ lore Parameters). With the 6th lowest Attack of the SR Sabers, and the 8th Highest HP, he’s defensively-leaned, but still lacking in stats overall - a good number of the Servants with higher HP than him also have higher Attack.

While we’ll be going over the structure of his kit in a moment, I will say he has a supportive NP, but definitely would like to have a good Attack stat, so this is something of a setback.

Keisuke’s passives are otherwise typical and fairly non-impactful. His Riding rank does…something to his Quick cards, and Magic Resistance provides a small boost to his ability to shrug off debuffs. But nothing crazy here.

Keisuke is a very vanilla Saber, even down to his NP gain and hitcounts. With 0.81% base NP gain and 2 2-hit Arts cards, his Arts NP gain is the exact average of 1.62. Nothing exceptional, but far from bad, either.

His other cards in his BAAQQ deck follow a similar trend, his Quicks having very modest hitcounts at 3 apiece, and his 5-hit Extra card being actually pretty good on the NP gain front, if typical by hitcount alone.

On the stargen front, he’s similarly well-rounded, but uninteresting. He has enough Quicks and a high enough hitcount on them as well as his Extra to produce some stars, but he’s not focused on stargen by any means.

Keisuke is just…very uninteresting in gameplay, thus far.

So how is Keisuke overall? Well it should be pretty obvious if you’ve been reading until now, but hey, I’ll throw him a bone:

But being serious, I’m shocked Okita’s the one that’s meant to be half-dead from tuberculosis, not him:

If there’s anything I can commend Keisuke for, it’s that he actually feels like how strong a Shinsengumi member would be in a Grail War versus titans like Gilgamesh. Except the Grail War is the metagame of FGO 7 years in, and he’d be crushed in an instant.

While a possibly fun Servant to roll out for a very suboptimal Arts team, and another component to stick in your Shinsengumi theme teams, Keisuke simply doesn’t do enough to make a splash in any conceivable way. He’s even outclassed by most 3* or Welfare supportive options in being a niche support for Shinsengumi Servants, which is simply sad.

If Himiko was so great, why isn’t there a Himiko Tw-

All joking aside, even if they’re the same class, successive monarchs to the same throne, and from the same event, they’re their own characters. But it’s still somewhat comedic to me that the sequel event also had a “sequel” Servant.

The SR Ruler lineup is shockingly pretty small all things considered, but thankfully there’s enough present to get a good judgement on Iyo’s base stats. With the lowest base Attack of her class and rarity, Iyo also packs the tied highest HP in return. While her Attack on the whole isn’t awful due to the Ruler class attack modifier, she still has lesser Attack than Ruler Da Vinci in exchange for the same HP, so she’s a little underpowered on the whole.

Naturally, the more attack the better when you have an offensive NP, but even with her less-than-average Attack for a Ruler, it’s higher than most SR’s Attack stats after attack modifiers are taken into account.

But moving on to Passives, Iyo has a fair few. Territory Creation and Magic Resistance are two common friends of ours that aid her Arts card damage / refund and resilience to debuffs alike, but she also packs two unique passives:

Natural Constitution provides her with an inherent immunity to Poison and Burn debuffs, something that saves her some HP in niche situations, and rarely will be a vital perk to ignoring dangerous aspects of difficult quests. While Incantation of Kunu is a straight offensive buff, providing modest boosts to Quick cards and Quick Crit damage alike, on top of giving her the Wild Beast trait.

While Iyo’s own kit interacts with the trait in some ways, that’s mostly a disadvantage, giving her additional weaknesses to a handful of enemies like Koyanskaya of Darkness or Proto Cu. It’s a neat bit of lore, though, being a kind of magical enhancement that provides the strength and grace of a beast that runs the risk of transforming into one wholly if overused.

Iyo might not pack the greatest offensive baseline out there, but she gets some decent compensation from her passive lineup, so she’s not doing too bad.

With a base NP gain of 0.41% and 4 hits on her two Arts cards, we see a stylish return to form of multi-hit Arts cards gimping the whole kit’s NP gain.

Ah, Lasengle, I knew you’d come through eventually with this round of Servants.

Once you factor in Iyo’s Territory Creation, this rounds out to 1.77 base Arts gain, slightly above average but far from great, especially when every other card in her BAAQQ card deck suffers for it. Her 4-hit Quicks don’t offer anything exceptional on the NP gain front, and her Extra has a fine hitcount, but ultimately doesn’t provide a lot of gauge due to her issue of low base NP gain.

On the stargen front Iyo performs far better. The hitcounts on her Arts and Quick cards alike are quite high, and with her passive boost to Quick cards as well, she is fairly capable of generating stars, if not to a crazy degree. Any Brave chain out of Iyo is bound to provide a solid sum of stars, but even more if it features her Quicks to any capacity.

So yeah, she’s definitely hurt hard by her base NP gain, but at the very least her Arts cards are functional at generating NP gauge, which is better than some Servants get.

So how does Iyo stack up on the whole? On one hand, she’s a beastly presence in battle, despite her appearances:

However, she’s also overshadowed by her inner darkness…didn’t Gaia do something like this?

All things considered, Iyo is one of the better welfares introduced to the game thus far. Her kit is quite effectively streamlined to provide both potent critical offence in challenging content and consistent, reasonably-high damage in farming content, paired with that little extra Wild Beast support / Curse damage spice that most Servants need to stand out.

Normally the Ruler class is something of a flaw when in a farming role, providing not much offensive payoff while robbing you of a common class advantage, but Iyo is quite fortunate to meet the damage benchmarks needed to breach the realm of universal farmers, and she’s all the better for it. She’s just frankly good to have as an option, even if she isn’t going to blow Servants with class advantage or big-name SSR farming options out the water.

Rath™ Seal of Approval.