History FateGrandOrder / TropesAToC

* BalanceBuff: Servants have generally been fixed or made better in one of four ways.
** First is to simply change their hidden values or skills outright. For example, Waver was considered very low tier until he was remade into the best all-purpose support character at the time, while during the first summer event swimsuit Mordred and Altria didn't perform at the level DW wanted, so both had their NP gain per hit increased. This is used the least for balance reasons, as some Servants are designed with hidden values/skills being a certain way on purpose such as Assassin Kiritsugu having a purposely lower NP gain rate due to having a multi-hit Arts NP and two Arts cards that if Brave Chained could easily allow NP looping with a higher NP gain rate.
** Next, some interludes improve the NP damage multiplier[[note]]Usually by 1/3, so the 300% for Buster AOE would be 400% while the 1200% for quick ST would go to 1600%[[/note]], add or improve upon the [=NP's=] secondary effects, add a new skill such as Concept Improvement or improve an existing one to match the games current meta. These are also accompanied by a short story segment that is used to justify the characters increase in power, such as Altria having some of the seals on Excalibur removed. Brynhildr, for example, got both an NP interlude and a skill upgrade interlude, which jumped up her power significantly.
** Following that, there are storyless Rank Up Quests consisting of 3-5 rounds of combat, generally ending in a fight against Servants related to the Servant being improved. These are always accompanied by skill gain, improvement, or NP buff, but require the character to usually be fully ascended and to have reached a certain Bond level with the player. Most launch Servants below 4 star rarity require one to unlock their third skill.
** Last and rarest, is story chapter buffs. These are gained when reaching certain moments in the story, allowing the Servant to gain a buff. Due to how this works, Mash is the only character to consistently have this manner of buffing, with only two other characters having a buff in some form that is unblocked via the story.

* BeachEpisode: The first summer event ("Chaldea Summer Memory / Heat Odyssey") is this. You and several of your Servants have gone to a deserted tropical island and while relaxing there, have started your own tropical resort.

** From previous Fate works are Ozymandias, Hassan of Serenity, Iskandar, [[Literature/FateApocrypha Karna]], [[VisualNovel/FateStayNight Heracles and Cú Chulainn]][[note]]the fact that ''five'' versions of himself are in here actually put him behind ''Altria'' in most alternate versions of a single Servant[[/note]]. Some popular human characters also return as pseudo-Servants like Waver, Rin, and Taiga.

** From previous Fate works are Ozymandias, Hassan of Serenity, Iskandar, [[Literature/FateApocrypha Karna]], [[VisualNovel/FateStayNight Heracles and Cú Chulainn]][[note]]the fact that ''four'' versions of himself are in here actually put him behind ''Altria'' in most alternate versions of a single Servant[[/note]]. Some popular human characters also return as pseudo-Servants like Waver, Rin, and Taiga.

** This is not the [[Franchise/{{Blazblue}} first time]] Creator/MiyukiSawashiro voiced a character that hates their father's guts because of the latter's actions. If anything, Mordred was the ''luckier'' one even in the context of the Nasuverse version of Myth/ArthurianLegend.

** This is not the [[Franchise/{{Blazblue}} first time]] Creator/MiyukiSawashiro voiced a character that hates their father's guts because of the latter's actions. If anything, Mordred was the ''luckier'' one even in the context of the Nasuverse version of Myth/ArthurianLegend.

** During the Second Summer Event, while Nobunaga is planning her career as a Rock God, she talks about streaming concerts on [[Website/YouTube ChalTube]]

* BleachedUnderpants: Some of the artists who contributed to the game have drawn adult content artwork.

* ButThouMust: The player is regularly given options as to what dialogue the PlayerCharacter will say, but these are always limited to cosmetic differences that don't allow them to make any real choices. This naturally forces certain behaviors onto the player, sometimes contradictory ones. For example, in Kiyohime's Interlude, she's confronted with a shadow servant that calls her out on the less savory aspects of her personality. The player is given a choice of responses, but both of them object to the accusations and defend Kiyohime. However, in the first Summer event player interactions with Lancer Kiyohime force them to act afraid of her due to the same tendencies they had previously denied existing.

** Chapter 5 is set in 1783, but being a singularity, almost all of America's history has blended together with towns based off the Wild West, a castle in Denver wired with electricity and guarded by police with robot suits, Alcatraz and Washington D.C. are established locations, the U.S. has all 48 continental states with modern borders, and medieval Celts are battling the Theosophical Society with the Indians on different sides. The first thing that alerts the heroes of the anachronism is when Nightingale yells about sanitary procedures and the danger of bloodletting at [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Rush Benjamin Rush]].

** When progressing any sort of plot (main story or event), the mission will feature a GuestStarPartyMember in the form of [[GameplayAndStoryIntegration the NPC Servants that are with you in-story]] as temporary Support Servants. While inferior to a properly-invested Friend Support, these NPC Supports are still fairly strong and sometimes come with skills and stats that their summonable versions don't, and are (usually) set up with the tools you need to progress. In the event they aren't (or you don't have the Servants to support them), the game will occasionally hold "story progression" events that let you use Leyline Stones to fully revive your whole team without needing to use your Command Seals.

** The FinalBoss of Lostbelt 7 basically introduces a unique mechanic that makes it unlike any boss fought before. [[spoiler: It's a MarathonBoss that with a raid boss health bar that must be depleted over the course of several fights, and any Servant that dies against it cannot, except Mash, is "Data Lost" and cannot be fielded again.]] To compensate for this unique mechanic, and the fact that you can't bring friend summons to this fight, the player is given several advantages:

* CreatorsCultureCarryover: Even though Chaldea's employees and the Servants they summon hail from all over the globe, they all treat Japanese holidays like Golden Week and White Day as commonplace things to celebrate mainly because the developers and primary target audience of this game are Japanese and subsequently tailor the aforementioned holidays into the game.

** The NP gauge also decimal values that aren't displayed when gauge is generated through attacking/being attacked, and if it lands on 99.X%, the game throws you a bone and rounds it up to 100% to avert LastLousyPoint. It is actually ''very'' hard to see 99% in this game, unless either something has drained the NP gauge (which doesn't run the check), or the gauge hits 99.00% ''exactly''. The latter is usually only seen through underlevelled skills and passive charges; if you ''somehow'' accomplish this with attacks, [[BornUnlucky maybe reconsider walking underneath any ladders today]].

** It's almost impossible to have 99% NP charge unless you charge exactly 99% total using only skills (and an unleveled skill somewhere). If you hit it in normal gameplay with Cards, the game just bumps you up to a full 100% bar to avert LastLousyPoint, as there are hidden decimal values that are only rounded up when players are near an interval of 100%.

* AdaptedOut: Benkei, who is one of the Shadow Servants in the Fuyuki singularity, doesn't make an appearance in the ''First Order'' anime adaptation.

** The boar that killed Diarmuid. In myth, it was incredibly large for a boar, and evil, but the Type-Moon version outright hits AnimalisticAbomination [[https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/typemoon/images/d/d1/DemonBoar.png/revision/latest?cb=20151210181356 territory]], with its in-game profile describing it as "eating runes and putting even Dragonkind to shame".

** One of the Class Score upgrades allows you to boost your Servant's Attack and Defense for a single turn through using a Command Spell on them. Considering that Command Spells are TooAwesomeToUse and are only used as a free party revive, this is less useful that it sounds.

** The boar that killed Diarmuid. In myth, it was incredibly large for a boar, and evil, but the Type-Moon version outright hits AnimalisticAbomination [[http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/fategrandorder/images/7/76/Dboar.png territory]], with its in-game profile describing it as "eating runes and putting even Dragonkind to shame".

* AlternateSelf: Each summoned servant can be seen as this to the "original platonic ideal" residing in the Throne of Heroes. Under the normal rules, when a new Saint Graph is generated, only necessary memories and knowledge for this new occasion will be provided to the newly summoned Servant; they may retain a fuzzy sense of previous summons, if the Throne saw fit to grant them those memories. This Servant can go on to grow and change without necessarily affecting the real Heroic Spirit residing in the Throne. However, Chaldea's FATE summoning system scans Saint Graphs into a database instead of simply relying on the Throne's information, allowing them to retain memories between summons and even summon anomalies who were theoretically never part of the Throne, such as Cu Chulainn Alter, Assassin Emiya, and the various swimsuit Servants. Thus, playable alternative outfits for Servants (notably summer swimsuit and holiday event variants) seem to be literally summoned as another version of that Servant, joining the original Servant already in Chaldea who had participated in the event (and come back) in the first place. Kiyohime (Lancer) will comment that there's two of them in Chaldea to love the protagonist twice as much. Other summer Servants will [[WalkingSwimsuitScene bemoan that they've been summoned indefinitely in their swimsuits]], even in winter.

* AlternateTimeline: The game itself takes place in a separate timeline from ''VisualNovel/FateStayNight'', because their Fuyuki Holy Grail Wars are very different from the original timeline, like there being only one known Grail War to Chaldea. El-Melloi II's the first one to bring this up during "Fate/Accel Zero Order", because when he looked through Chaldea's records of them, they clashed heavily with what he remembers/the Association's records on them. [[spoiler: It's revealed in the Camelot chapter that Olga-Marie's father was the victor of the 2004 Fuyuki Holy Grail War.]]

** The GUDAGUDA Series is treated as being not just a spin-off of ''Fate/'' series, but is also considered to be a parallel timeline from the normal ''Fate'' timeline. In terms of lore, this is meant to be most apparent with the lore and characterization of Nobunaga and adjacent characters, Himiko, Counter Guardians, Sakamoto Ryouma, and Oryou. This generally means that what GUDAGUDA says doesn't mean mean that it is the case in the rest of the Nasuverse, though there hasn't been that many clear contradictions to tell what is the truth or not.

* AngelicAbomination: Lostbelt 7 introduces [[spoiler:exoanthropic "angels and daemons", bizarre alien beings from far beyond the observable universe who have somehow left a number of artifacts on Earth. Exactly why they're even called angels/demons is unclear--the one known artifact vaguely conforms to Semitic mythology, but they're explicitly stated ''not'' to be the angels/demons of human mythology, and the angels themselves resemble clouds of nebula gas with glowing pinpoint eyes]].

** The Grail summons a Servant based on in-universe perceptions, concepts, and historical fact, so Servants drawn from mythology or stories are often a hodgepodge of every single story told about them. Some profiles even admit that the Servant is fictional (i.e. Assassin of Shinjuku) or are in an ambiguous state on which stories were true or made up.
*** The case of the Volsunga saga versus the Nibelungenlied is an interesting one. Sigurd and Siegfried are shown to be different people who killed different Fafnirs,[[note]]In the Nasuverse, Fafnir is not a specific dragon but a LegacyCharacter who [[DemonicPossession takes over]] anyone consumed by their greed.[[/note]] despite the fact both heroes are ''obviously'' derived from the same legend. As such, Sigurd's Brynhildr was not the same woman as Siegfried's Brunhild, and Gudrun was not the same person as Kriemhild, with Attila/Altera/Etzel apparently only encountering the latter. That said, the similarities are certainly acknowledged, with Kriemhild instinctively hating Sigurd and Brynhildr when she is finally summoned to Chaldea.

*** The first GUDAGUDA event implies a post-Temple of Time status quo where Roman is out the picture and Da Vinci is in charge, but Mash is able to use her Shielder abilities and armor.
*** The fourth GUDAGUDA event "Final Honnoji", while lore-wise occurs after the third one as an immediate sequel, has two alternate scenarios which differs depends on the player's progress in the main story.
** If the player had cleared the Lostbelt 3 prologue, the second scenario plays with all of Chaldea's new members making cameos, Mash wears Ortenaus (but can still use her original kit in gameplay), and the Atlas connection in the story is played up a lot more because of Sion's presence.

* AlternateContinuity: The fourth GUDAGUDA event "Final Honnoji", while lore-wise occurs after the third one as an immediate sequel, has two alternate scenarios which differs depends on the player's progress in the main story.
** The first one is set in the original Chaldea, Da Vinci acts as the mission control, and Mash is in her original armor.

* AlternateSelf: Generally, most Servants differ in their appearances throughout the main story because the Heroic Spirit residing inside the Throne of Heroes is seperate from the copy created through a "Saint Graph" which contains various things like memories and information and can be modified by outside forces, unlike the Throne. However, not necessarily everything from a previous self is retained when summoning a Servant again, resulting in some minor confusion.
** Certain Servants do recall memories of their previous summonings but refer to them as their past selves. Those who had been loyal to their previous Master may remain loyal and claim them better than the Chaldean Master (like Tamamo-no-Mae), although some just let go and leave that to their past selves, and grow more attached to their current Master.
** Chaldea is able to summon anomalies like Cu Chulainn (Alter), Assassin Emiya, and the various swimsuit Servants since they scan their Saint Graphs into their database for summoning, allowing them to ignore the prerequisite conditions that created them in the first place for summoning. Thus, playable alternative outfits for Servants (notably summer swimsuit and holiday event variants) seem to be literally summoned as another version of that Servant, joining the original Servant already in Chaldea who had participated in the event (and come back) in the first place. Kiyohime (Lancer) will comment that there's two of them in Chaldea to love the protagonist twice as much. Other summer Servants will [[WalkingSwimsuitScene bemoan that they've been summoned indefinitely in their swimsuits]], even in winter.

** The Lion King in Camelot is an Altria Pendragon who never died after the Battle of Camlann [[spoiler:due to Bedivere not throwing Excalibur into the lake]] and instead ultimately became a goddess thanks to the holy spear Rhongomyniad influencing her. It's noted in-story that the circumstances of her existence make her unique amongst all other Altrias and that the summonable Lancer Altria Pendragon, while very similar, is still ultimately a different person.
** If summoned before Babylonia, Ishtar averts this as she recognizes the protagonist and reminisces about some of the feats they did in that Singularity, much to their confusion. However, this does not apply to summoning her after doing the Singularity.