The story is told from the playing character point of view. Despite this unfamiliarity, Capta has made its Japonese arcade and fighter Fate/Unlimited Codes available for the PSP via the PlayStation Network. Most Western audiences are unfamiliar with the manga, anime, and interactive visual novels of the Fate/stay Ultimate night, which deal with a struggle between powerful magicians and warriors for the Holy Grail. And because the language of punching, kicking, and performing insanely special moves is universal, anyone who's ever played a fighting game will feel immediately at home with it. It's not going to set the world of fighting games on fire, but Unlimited Codes is a fun fighter that stands on its own. Unlimited Codes assumes that players have knowledge of the characters and events in the Fate stories. Those who come to the game without this background knowledge will find it difficult to piece together any real sense of the characters, what each one is fighting for, and their relationships to each other. Of course, an understanding of the plot is hardly crucial to the enjoyment of a fighting game like this one, but nonetheless, it could have served as a better introduction to the universe. As it is, the dull story sequences, which include a lot of mystifying references to ancient orders, schools of magic, and events unseen, are more likely to frustrate players than draw them into the story. The mode you'll probably spend the most time with is the Arcade mode, in which you select one of 14 characters (an additional three can also be unlocked) and fight through a series of eight matches. These one-on-one fights take place in 3D environments, but while you can dodge enemy attacks with a side step, the action otherwise takes place on a 2D plane. There's a reasonable amount of depth to the fighting system. Strangely, though, you'll need to ratchet up the difficulty to the highest possible option before any of this depth starts to matter. On any other level, the AI is terribly passive, which makes it all too easy to spam your way to victory by using the same attacks over and over again. The AI doesn't even move around or fight back enough to make this interesting in a pure button-mashing sense. It's just dull. This is resolved easily enough by simply setting the difficulty to hard, but a broader range of difficulty levels that offered engaging combat would have made for a stronger package.