Fate Grand Order / Tropes Q To Y

Tropes for Fate/Grand Order
Tropes A to C | Tropes D to I | Tropes K To P | Tropes Q to Y

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Q-R

• Quintessential British Gentleman: Appropriately for Londinium, the storyline is filled with Gentleman and a Scholar Servants who most of the time throwing passive-aggressive rhetoric before getting down to fights with so much class. Mordred, whose solution to a murder mystery is to punch the suspects until they squeal and if they're innocent, punch someone else until they cough up, is figuratively and literally out of place.
• Race Against the Clock: Several, actually.
  • The protagonist and their Servants have to finish off Cú Chulainn Alter, who possesses the E Pluribus Unum Holy Grail, before the Clan Calatin kills off the American army at the northern front.
  • In Babylonia, Gorgon announces that she and her Demonic Beasts will storm Uruk in ten days. When the protagonist manages to kill her, this threat is replaced by the even more unbelievably powerful Tiamat and her Sea of Life.
  • The Seraphix oil rig is sinking into the Mariana Trench and the protagonist only has ten days in SE.RA.PH to save it.
  • In Lostbelt 3, SIN, both the protagonist and Goredolf have been poisoned, and the group is racing to find the antidote in the Chinese Lostbelt before it kills them both in about ten days.
• Ragnarök Proofing: Atlas Academy is doing just fine despite the incineration of Earth killing the magi inside. Holmes theorizes that the several layers of protection in place must have allowed the institution and its various installations to survive.
• Rare Random Drop: The gacha initially lacks a pity system, leaving players to the mercy of the rates with no way to eventually guarantee a higher-rarity Servant. While the gacha in other games have similar rates of quality, it's especially bad here because, with how the game is designed (Craft Essences and Servants are included in the same gacha), it's important that you actually have the rare Servants, never mind that many fans just want to play with their favourite character. ^note The odds of getting a SSR Servant is 1% with the rate-up SSR Servant has 0.8% chance and the remaining 0.2% will be divided into the remaining permanently available 5-star Servants, each one has abysmally low chances and gets even lower the more permanent SSR Servants added. At least you can "borrow" your favorite Servant from the Friend List. With this abysmally low rates, incidents where hundreds of attempts failed to get a single copy of SSR Servants is not uncommon. It wasn't until New Years 2022 that a pity system is finally employed, only for quite a few notable complaints regarding its implementation to pop up.
• Random Drop: The only way to get money, EXP, Ascension materials and Servant skill items is this. During events, this is the only way to get special Craft Essences and event currency, the chance of getting more currency is either boosted by certain Servants or event CEs.
• Random Effect Spell: There's quite a few, to varying degrees:
  • Elisabeth Bathory (Brave) has the Legend of Crimson Heroine skill, which is the most extreme case in the game due to its risk-reward. At the cost of 100% NP gauge, it gives one random buff out of five (Party-wide Invincibility/Heal/Attack Up/Gain Critical Stars or Self Buster Up). The entire gamut of possibilities is lovingly written in a block of text that is longer than her actual Noble Phantasm description.
  • The Imperial Privilege line of skills, which is possessed by multiple Servants such as Nero Claudius, Romulus, and Ozymandias. The in-game description is simply "Apply random effects to yourself," but its actual effect downplays this trope: it's a guaranteed heal (as pictured by the green "healing sparkle" icon) with two separate, chance-based buffs to ATK and DEF. But at only a 60% chance to activate each buff, "random" isn't an inaccurate description.
  • Scáthach's Wisdom of Dun Scaith skill shares the same terse and unhelpful "random effects" description but with an Evasion icon and a different set of effects entirely: It's a guaranteed 1-turn Evasion with two separate, chance-based buffs to critical damage and Critical Star absorption. The absolute worst-case result would be to activate this skill offensively, but both 80% critical buffs fail and leave only the Evasion.
  • Hassan of the Hundred Personas' Wide Specialization has the "random effect" description with an "all card-types buff" icon. The skill's actual effect is that each card-type buff has a chance of activating for three turns (up to 80% chance for a 30% buff to that type), independently, while giving a guaranteed 1-turn Evasion.
  • Illya's Suspicious Medicine has the "random effect for one ally" description with a "healing sparkle" icon. Unlike the similarly labeled Imperial Privilege, however, this is a targetable skill that provides a guaranteed heal with two separate, chance-based buffs of one-time Guts for three turns and one-time Debuff immunity at a 70% chance to activate either buff.
  • Ishtar's Shining Majestic Crown has the "random effect" description with an NP charge icon. The skill's actual effect is that it's a guaranteed NP charge for 30-50% while giving two separate 80% chance-based buffs to provide Invincibility and Invincibility Pierce for one turn each.
  • Ereshkigal's The Secret Great Crown has the "random effect" description with an Invincibility icon. The skill's actual effect is that it's a guaranteed one-turn Invincibility with three separate, chance-based buffs to provide Debuff Immunity, Instant-Kill immunity, and Buff Removal Resistance (up to 80% chance for each) for one turn each.
  • Enkidu's Transformation skill has the clearest "random effect" description. It has a guaranteed chance to increase their Buster card effectiveness, but will also randomly either buff that of their Arts or Quick cards, all for one turn.
• Rare Candy:
  • Fou cards give Servants a stat boost with a cap of 2000 for both HP and Atk, but only 4* Fou cards can be used to level that stat boost from 1001-2000.
  • The Holy Grails you've been collecting from beating each singularity and certain events can level even a 1* Servant past their usual limit up to level 100 if you have enough. The game calls this "Palingenesis." It is rare, however as roughly only 10 grails are available per year through events and story quests. Since it takes 10 to max out a one-star to level 100, which Servant a player uses a Grail on is a limited and permanent decision.
• Rare Random Drop
  • For certain events, event Craft Essences also have a chance of dropping from enemies, with the indication of it dropping being a rainbow aura around the gold chest. Craft Essence experience cards are indicated by a yellow star next to the gold chest.
  • The very nature of the gacha.
    • The quartz gacha has pull rates of 40% 3*/R Servants, 3% 4*/SR and 1% 5*/SSR while for Craft Essences it's 40% R, 12% SR and 4% SSR. A ten-roll guarantees at least one SR card; but in practice, this will almost always be an SR CE if the game is forced to make a gold card appear, which generally aren't considered particularly desirable. The odds of getting a rated-up Servant or Craft Essence vary. Assuming a single rate up, SSRs have a 70% chance if you roll any SSR, SRs have a 50% chance, and SRs have a mere 10% chance while for CEs it's 70%, 33%, and 20% respectively. More rated up CEs and Servants at one time changes the odds. For example, if two SSRs are rated up at once, each one will have a 40% chance of appearing for a total of 80% between them, reducing the odds of a spook even though it decreases the chances of getting a particular one of them.
    • Compounding this are the "Limited" Rares, which are only available during their specific special event gachas and "story-limited" rares, which are only available during their specific special event gachas and the story gacha, which is pulled from as often.
    • The friend point gacha, while generally of little interest to most players due to how little value is in it, actually has the rarest drop of all. Aŋra Mainiiu, the game's only 0* Servant, is a very rare FP summon-only Servant who was added during the Fate/Zero collaboration event. The official rates of pulling him are unstated but are believed to be far lower than the odds of pulling even an SSR. However, he's a Junk Rare that is only as strong as a 2*/C Servant. As a nod to his rarity, he had a special line of dialogue in Christmas 2017 to acknowledge players who had managed to get him.
• Reaction Shot: Happens a few times:
  • At the end of "Super☆Ghouls 'n Pumpkins," the second Halloween event, Cleopatra reveals the one thing she wished for the most: to be reunited with her former lover Caesar. That Caesar who is being described in currently-inaccurate praises of handsomeness. Every single person besides Cleopatra has a pained, silent reaction shot, and they all huddle together to think about how to break the news to her.
  • At the end of the Agartha Pseudo-Singularity, Holmes verbally deduces that Scheherazade was one who housed the Demon Pillar and caused the singularity in the first place, cutting to a shocked reaction shot from every other character as they're completely blindsided by this revelation.
• Readings Are Off the Scale:
  • Some Servants have their Skills and Paramaters ranked at "EX", despite there being static ratings up to A+++ to quantify scale-breaking powers. The EX rank doesn't necessarily mean something broke the scale though, but rather that something is too erratic and variable to be properly measured; usually it means something broke A+++, but other times something can happen to make it as bad as a C rank.
  • The damage the Camelot singularity does to the timeline is unrelated to Solomon, so Chaldea has no idea what to expect; and the fact that it's becoming incredibly erratic, like the times when it disappeared from the map and separated from the timeline of humanity, has caused them to rank it EX in value to restoring humanity. The impossibility of the Lion King's presence is the direct cause.
  • The humanity foundation value of SE.RA.PH is "CCC". This is the entire franchise's single example of a "repeated letter" rank, and seems to just be a reference to Fate/EXTRA CCC with no real meaning in-universe.
  • This is what "Saber Wars" went for - pitting you against bosses with ludicrously high HP (including the first-ever enemy to break one million HP), but at the same time giving you Craft Essences to greatly multiply your Servants' attack power and overcome these foes by dealing ludicrous amounts of damage.
  • The three Void Ghosts in the Incinerated Remains area from "Garden of Order" each have 6,666,666 HP, which is much higher compared to any enemy encounter.
  • Rashoumon has the first raid boss of the game with a 2 trillion HP bar which the entire player base was required to attack and get rid of throughout the event. To boost your Servants' damage, they used the system of "Saber Wars". The highest HP Ibaraki you can fight has 6 million HP, accompanied by some-hundred thousand HP Giant Hands of Doom. This is used again for the Onigashima event.
• Recurring Element: Each Lostbelt in Part 2 has an Archer ally of some renown, culminating in Grand Archer Orion fighting alongside the protagonists in the fifth.
• Recurring Riff: The melody of the title screen music, "Grand Order", is used in every Grand Battle theme and is also remixed for the title screens of Epic of Remnant and Cosmos in the Lostbelt.
• Recycled Animation: Lampshaded. During the second Summer event, "Dead Heat Summer Race" kicks off with Frankenstein in an introductory cutscene as a racer with a unique cute logo featuring her labeled "The Fran Show." In the second half, "Death Jail Summer Escape", this logo is reused with Medb and "The Medb Show" label instead.
  "A rip-off? Don't be silly. That was 100% a Celtic design. Make no mistake about it."
• Recycled Soundtrack: The main story tends to keep minimal reuse of straight remixes of FSN tracks for maximum impact when they are used, but events go all in with the FSN remixes by using them as battle music for events and crossover events just straight up reuse as much of the source material's soundtrack as possible for the crossover^note Requiem is the sole exception because it did not have an adaptation with music when the event was implemented so it has an actual original set of music unlike the others.
• Redemption Demotion: Discussed, and slightly mocked, in Musashi's trial quest with Mysterious Heroine X's supposed Saber Ninja Technique.
  "Though extraordinarily powerful, it's a cursed technique that becomes almost useless once its user joins your side. I never thought such a technique would ever get implemented... I mean, it would actually exist!"
• Red Herring: In Cosmos in the Lostbelt it's assumed for much of the story that the plot was either masterminded or kickstarted by an Alien Invasion with the name of the main antagonist (in Japan) being the Alien God and the subplot of Subject E, a creature that landed on earth and was picked up and experimented on by Area 51 It isn't until Lostbelt 7 and the Ordeal Call Prologue that it gets clarified that The invasion came from Marisbury's plan using CHALDEAS and that Subject E was ultimately a human misidentified as an alien.
• Reference Overdosed: As evidenced by the dozens of Shout-Out entries in its own subpage, the writers keep on adding several pop culture references to manga, anime, video games and literature for almost every event.
• Related in the Adaptation: Although they lived centuries apart, Arjuna and Minamoto no Raikou are half siblings in this verse, as their father is the god Indra.
• Religious and Mythological Theme Naming: Shimosa's antagonists all use an afterlife as their moniker, with Lancer "Purgatorio", Archer "Inferno", Assassin "Paraiso", Berserker "Samghata Naraka"^note The "Crushing Hell" of ubBuddhism, Rider "Kalasutra Naraka"^note The "Hell of Black Threads" of Buddhism, Saber "Empireo", and Caster "Limbo".
• Remixed Level: Certain stages in later parts of the game are just altered versions of earlier and "more generic" stages like the "Babylonian forest" stage in Babylonia which is just a greener version of "Redwood Forest" stage from America, the "Subway" stage in Shinjuku which is an altered version of Camelot's "Temple" stage, and the Assassin of Nightless City's forecourt stage is a Chinese-style alteration of the "Throne Room" stage. "Merry Christmas in the Netherworld" intentionally uses this as the protagonist returns to the gloomy Babylonian underworld, only to find that there are Christmas trees and someone's strung up holiday lights all over the arches and Ereshkigal's cages.
• Renaissance Man: Leonardo da Vinci is a summonable Servant and each of Hundred Faces' personalities are said to have a different area of expertise. Also, some Heroic Spirits can materialize in more than one class. The gold medal has to go to Heracles, who is said to be summonable in all of the standard classes (and Avenger) barring Caster, with Geronimo having four distinct classes to his name coming in second. In-game, Medusa currently has the most classes available with three, Rider, Lancer, and Avenger.^note Altria, Cu Chulainn, Elisabeth, and Jeanne have that many and in the former's case even more, but only when counting gag Servants and Servants where they were put into a different class due to an external force.
• La Résistance:
  • Geronimo was leading one against the Celts before they were almost destroyed at the beginning of chapter 5. He and the remnants of it team up with the party.
  • For Chapter 6, the Hassans formed one against the Knights of the Round Table and Ozymandias, slowly trying to fight back, defend the oppressed and take back their land.
  • In Agartha, the men who managed to flee the three rulers of the area, formed their own and are led by the Rider of the Resistance.
  • The first Lostbelt has the protagonists help the Yaga's own resistance to overthrow Ivan and his oppressive Oprichniki. It starts to fall apart as the Yaga slowly learn more about Ivan and just what exactly will happen to them after Chaldea eliminates the Lostbelt.
• Resurrection Revenge: Penthesilea of Greek myth can be summoned as a Berserker-class Servant. She has an intense grudge against Achilles, the one who killed her in life; though it's mainly because Achilles slipped his tongue and said that she's beautiful right before her death, something that is seen as a major insult to the Amazon tribe (especially as she's the queen).
• Replay Mode: If you go to "My Room", then to "Materials", and finally to "Main Records", you have the option of rewatching every cutscene in the game up to the point you cleared, even the ones you skipped. Many players take advantage of this feature to rush through the chapters if they need to unlock the requirements for certain events, and then watch them at their leisure. There's also a section called "Event Quest Log", which allows you to watch the cutscenes of every event you participated in, also useful in case you were rushing through it to meet the deadline.
• Retcon:
  • The main plot hook of the story is that CHALDEAS gives humanity a year until the extinction event, so every adaptation dates the apocalypse depending on when it was originally made: for example, the original Japanese release of the game was in 2015, so CHALDEAS predicts humanity will be gone in 2016. The First Order OVA has the end-date as 2017, which is maintained through the other anime adaptations. In the US version of the game, it's 2018.
  • In previous Fate works, a fairly big deal was made of Servants not remembering their past summonings and if they did, it was only a vague recollection of events; Saber (Altria) in F/SN could, but her situation was extremely specific. In F/GO, however, the player-summoned Servants remember their previous summonings and will discuss them at points. It isn't completely consistent and may be limited to Chaldea-summoned Servants, however; when Saber Alter appears in Shinjuku, she explicitly tells the protagonist she does not remember their previous meetings in Fuyuki, and Mordred in Camelot similarly does not remember your adventures in London (to Mash's abject dismay). Other Servants summoned inside some Singularities, like Atalante and Xuanzang, both cite previous encounters with the protagonist, however. Ancillary material for the franchise explains this discrepancy, saying that a Servant's memories do always go back to the original Heroic Spirit, but the Throne of Heroes automatically adjusts what the Servant remembers for the next summoning to prevent confusion from having overlapping sets of memories. In other words, what a Servant does or does not remember is ultimately circumstantial, and if they happen to remember past events they will only remember how it played out in one timeline.
  • GO also carries forward a retcon previously put forward by Extra and Apocrypha concerning Assassins. In Fate/stay night, the only people who could be Assassins were explicitly members of Hashashin, preferably one of the 19 "Old Men of the Mountain". Kojirou was "Assassin", yes, but he was extraordinarily unusual because he had been summoned by another Servant and wasn't a true Servant himself. As this would limit the options GO would have for Assassin-class Servants, though, this concept has been abandoned entirely and now anyone with proper parameters and a talent for silent, agile killing can be an Assassin; the Hashashin now make up a minority (though still an important one) of the Class.
  • Moreover, previous Fate works, particularly Fate/stay night, leaned on the idea of most proper Assassins being bad at direct confrontation with even Kojirou needing a highly specialized battlefield to match the knight classes. GO's Assassins tend to have slightly lower HP totals, and a larger proportion of them are a low-rarity, but, in practical terms, Assassins can fight as well as anyone and have a typical place in a triangle. Several Assassins are counted as among the strongest units in the entire game.
  • There is also a minor retcon concerning "Alter" Servants and their eyes, thanks to the proliferation of Alter Servants in GO. In F/SN, Altria Alter's striking golden eyes are noted in her profile as being the result specifically of her dragon blood awakening. Jeanne Alter (and her related Santa Lily version), EMIYA Alter, and Dark Irisviel all have identical eyes to Altria, however, and none of them has dragon traits. While there is perhaps a dragon connection with Jeanne Alter through her "Dragon Witch" skill, there is no indication she has a physical relation to dragons, and neither EMIYA Alter nor Dark Irisviel has any kind of relation to dragons, period. The previous dragon connection to Altria's eyes is also not mentioned in GO. This retcon was carried further into Fate/Prototype Fragments, where a number of the re-manifested Alters of Servants like Ozymandias and Brynhild have gold eyes.
  • Relatedly, somewhere between a retcon, Arc Welding and Adaptation Expansion is the game's acknowledgment of the idea of "Alter" Servants entirely. F/SN did not use the term "Alter" at all; any Servants corrupted during the third route were referred to as "blackened", Altria included. And while Hollow Ataraxia and Unlimited Codes introduced the name of Saber Alter, no other Servant was called "Alter" before GO and Altria's situation was treated as essentially unique. GO, however, has embraced a long-running fan idea of the Alter state being a distinct mode of existence for a Servant, separate from their usual summoned state; the Shinjuku chapter, in particular, addresses the concept of Alter Servants at some length (thanks to there being no less than three of them running around), and even attaches a set of kanji to the term "Alter" (in furigana), the kanji essentially translating to "reversed".
  • The Alter form itself is also subjected to this. Originally, Altria was corrupted by The Shadow, which devoured her and turned her into a darkened version of herself, and it was made clear this was a different and unique form because of The Shadow wanting to use her to achieve its ends. FGO changes what an Alter means entirely; no longer is the form a specific state created by a specific entity, now it's a term for any Servant whose form represents one of the Heroic Spirit's different aspects, or altered fundamentally. As a result, the Alter form is now an excuse for variations of existing characters normally not possible.
• Retronym: After the release of Arc 1.5: Epic of Remnant, Arc 1 was retroactively assigned the subtitle Observer on Timeless Temple.
• Revenge Before Reason: According to Jeanne Alter, the defining characteristic of Avengers is that they have a great emptiness inside them that they try to fill through vengeance, but can never successfully cope with. For them, getting their revenge is not even about satisfaction or pleasure but just to keep going. She finds it quite pathetic even as she knows it applies to herself just as much as to Hessian Lobo, the enemy she's trying to kill or at least slow down.
• Revisiting the Roots: Players can expect new seasonal events each year to bring back the same tone and silly, lighthearted fun even as the main story progresses and stakes may get increasingly dire (and even these new seasonal events comment on the situation): Valentine's Day, a Summer event, a "Fest" of some sort (Nero Fest and then "Gil Fest") in autumn, a Halloween event, and a Christmas event.
• Rewatch Bonus: Revelations like Dr. Roman being Solomon, Mash having been fused with Galahad for several years, Fou being Primate Murder and a Beast, the circumstances behind how Olga's father funded Chaldea, and Goetia's nature and endgame put several things in a much different light on a reread of the game's story.
  • The very last shot of Part 2's opening shows CHALDEAS' core cracking the ice shell it was encased in at the start of the storyline. It also shows the Big Bad of the Part.
• Riddle of the Sphinx: The answer to this is one of two ways to enter Ozymandias' temple complex in Camelot.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter:
  • The boars from the first Summer event are also this, both in-universe and out. The demonic boars, not so much...
  • Fou, naturally, is also this, as a mobage RPG staple. He ends up having a much more important role in the plot and wider Nasuverse than anyone foresaw as Beast IV, also known as Primate Murder.
  • Ozymandias' sphinx cubs are adored by him and players alike.
• Rooftop Confrontation: The final two battles of the Garden of Order event take place on the rooftop of the apartment complex the event is centered around.
• Rule of Funny: Most events and some Interludes run on this.
• Rule of Three: A major plot point is that Chaldea had successfully summoned three Heroic Spirits before the game proper.
  • The first one you encounter is the third Servant summoned, Leonardo da Vinci, who's been staying at Chaldea for a while now.
  • The second is Galahad, who was fused with Mash ten years ago and lay dormant within her. It's noted that he was the only Heroic Spirit to respond to their fusion projects with Chaldea's designer babies, the rest refused.
  • The very first one is King Solomon, summoned before Chaldea even became the gigantic facility it is now, by Marisbury Animusphere for the Holy Grail War in Fuyuki.
• Runic Magic: Several Servants utilize the eighteen Primordial Runes received from Odin to perform magical spells. As magecraft from the Age of Gods, their might far outstrips modern magecraft. The etching of runes also allows users to bypass the chanting used by other styles of magecraft, making it suitable for direct combat. As a result, most of the users of Primordial Runes in the story are Magic Knights. The Caster version of Cu Chulainn, in particular, uses runes to send out fireballs, summon flaming giant wicker men, and even imitate his teacher's Noble Phantasm.
• Running Gag:
  • Various events have played Gilgamesh's crush on Altria as one through their different versions. The first Christmas event has Archer Gilgamesh hoping Altria Alter Santa would visit him by writing a letter, Alter and the protagonist instead decide to ignore him. The third Christmas event has Caster Gilgamesh anxious to solve the Sumerian Summer Flu so Altria Alter Santa can visit him this Christmas. Even after losing his memory in the third Summer Event, Caster Gilgamesh still suggests that the protagonist's group make a sequel to their Knight of the Round table AU doujin where the Lion King gets a love interest called the Oldest King.
  • Every event welfare servant has at least one line asking you not to disappointed in their lack of multiple Ascension costumes.
  • Various characters who have absolutely nothing to do with Mozart borrowing his 3rd Ascension mask as part of a Paper-Thin Disguise. Examples include Amakusa, Kojiro, Holmes, Menuiere...
  • One that gets lampshaded all the time is the protagonist always exiting reyshifting mid-air and having to free-fall. They never bring any gear.
  • For whatever reason, the GUDAGUDA servants have their living space next to the boiler room. Always.
  • Everyone loves to say "We've got wyverns!" after how overused it was in Orleans.
  • The Csjete-Pyramid-Himeji Castle, probably the most iconic landmark of the game's goofy side, regularly gets brought up in various events, to the utter confusion of anyone who wasn't there when it happened.
  • If you see Anastasia anytime after the Russian Lostbelt, you can expect her to complain that it's GODDAMN HOT!

S

• Sadly Mythtaken:
  • In Salem, "Elder Ghouls" have the appearance of Gugs. Justified in the plot saying that Lovecraft dreamed the idea right, but not necessarily the particulars.
  • Caster Cu uses Norse runes instead of Celtic. Author's Saving Throw has Scathatch explaining she taught him these because Odin likes warriors regardless of nationality and they were faster than Celtic ones. This even escalated into Scathach having a direct connection to the Norse Goddess Skadi. Lostbelt 6 reveals that Caster Cu is actually a pseudo-Servant of Odin himself, and has been since the Fuyuki prologue, so the runes are foreshadowing his real identity.
  • The game's lore seemingly omits Hermes as part of the 12 Olympians (as seen in the Atlantis Lostbelt), and puts Hades in his place, who in the myth wasn't part of the twelve (as he resides in the Underworld).
• Save Scumming: If you force-quit the game during a battle turn then open the game again, it resets to before you picked your command cards. This can be useful if you forgot to use a skill or the Random Number God ruins your plan. The effectiveness of this was decreased with a fix that let you return to the skill use section with a single button press, but would distribute stars at the beginning of the turn instead of redistributing them whenever you use a new skill. Now the only thing that changes crit chances is to use a star absorption skill or to generate more stars with a skill.
• Score Multiplier: Bonus Servants or event Craft Essences are used to boost the number of points gained in certain events like the Gudaguda events and Saber Wars.
• Scunthorpe Problem: The NA version introduced the messaging system in November 2018 and censors the entire message if there's any inappropriate word caught by the filter. This extends to mentioning Assassin, one of the game's seven basic classes. There's also no actual indication of censoring on the player's side, it only appears censored on friend lists.
• Sealed Cast in a Multipack: In the beginning of Cosmos in the Lostbelt, all Servants except for da Vinci and Holmes are forcibly sent away, depriving the protagonist of any way to fight. However da Vinci put all the Saint Graphs of your playable Servants in a briefcase, allowing you to bring them back with the appropriate ritual and resources.
• Secret Test of Character
  • In Babylon, Ziusudra tests the protagonist by appearing in front of them as an old, crippled beggar clearly in need of food. The protagonist buys bread and leaves it for the old man before starting to continue on his way, only for the seemingly crippled old man to reveal that it was a test of character: He did not overlook an old man in need of help, but he also didn't leave simple coins as an empty gesture of sympathy. Instead, he brought him exactly what he needed. In truth, he's probably not really Ziusudra, but the protagonist having earned their respect comes in handy at the end when he strikes down Tiamat so they have a chance to finally kill her.
  • Quetzalcoatl sets up a few before her boss fight.
    • First, she knew the protagonist's group was hiding in the jungle outside her temple, but pretended she didn't. The protagonist could either attack her immediately or wait for her to leave for Uruk and so far as they knew brutally kill a hundred people. She's pleased that she chose to confront her immediately despite having little chance, saying that if they'd taken the cautious approach of sabotaging her temple when she wasn't there she'd have immediately killed them all.
    • Second, she holds back during the fight to give them a chance to destroy the sun stone that is the center of the temple. There's every indication that she would really have let them do it too, but afterward would have simply killed them all despite the power nerf that would have resulted: She doesn't care about having her full Divinity because she doesn't feel she needs it. Instead, the protagonist works with the party to make a massive, crazy gesture by falling out of the sky in an attempted lucha move to make her admit that she wasn't willing to kill them so they could form an alliance instead. This comes in handy later when Quetzalcoatl and her full power are actually critical in slowing Tiamat just enough to save the day at the end of the chapter.
  • A multi-sided one in the second Halloween event, "Super☆Ghouls 'n Pumpkins." It turns out that Ozymandias was the one who crashed the pyramid into Elisabeth's castle and had offered Cleopatra a wish upon the grail if she was able to rule the pyramid-slash-castle. Elisabeth herself was neglecting her rule in favor of planning her idol concert for Halloween, so there was no preparation for Halloween festivities, leaving her people confused and leaderless. By the end of the event, Elisabeth has realized her wrongs, allowing Halloween to proceed as usual (and Ozymandias is strongly implied to have forced this test on Liz as well, since he's also looking forward to Halloween and his subordinate Vlad III had forced Liz to realize her wrongs) while Cleopatra fails to retain the castle but is able to let go of some of her guilt to seek her own desires as Ozymandias had secretly wanted.
  • In the Shinjuku chapter, Archer offering Cursed Arm Hassan a drink is one. Because the water quality is bad, the options are light beer or hard whisky. "Hassan" takes the whisky and gets roaring drunk, tipping off Archer that he is an imposter because drinking alcohol for pleasure is forbidden in Islam.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: Later events have the ability to rerun the most difficult fights as a way for players to challenge themselves, with no rewards for doing so after beating it the first time.
  • Some of them even go one step beyond, such as Kiara in the SE.RA.PH event. Normally you buy one item to make her not use her One-Winged Angel form and then an optional amount more to remove various buffs from her humanoid form, but it's also possible to challenge her in her demon form. The most difficult version of the fight, however, is to not allow her to transform but then allow her to use the rest of her overpowered buffs, which together halve all your Arts/Quick/Buster attacks, deal a thousand damage per turn, drain 5% NP so you can never reach 100% without being at NP2 or using a skill and so on.
  • Another way to make fights more challenging is to not use any of the top-tier buffers (Waver, Merlin, or Mash for example), especially when fighting difficult bosses.
  • Removing damage-boosting event Craft Essences is another method players do, to see whether they don't need to rely on a booster to take down bosses with several hundred thousand HP.
  • Epic of Remnant chapters have themed Servants which receive double bond points for every story battles. For Shinjuku, it's Evil-aligned Servants. For Agartha, females, Astolfo, d'Eon, and Enkidu. For Shimosa Province, the Knight Classes and for Salem, Casters. For story immersion, challenge, and maximum bond point allocation, players limit themselves by using only themed Servants.
  • Players can do a self-imposed solo Servant fight. Because the game forces the player to have at least three Servants for a fight, they choose a Servant they want to do the solo fight with and pair that Servant with two other low-level Cannon Fodder Servants to take the first few hits for him or her (preferably Leonidas and/or Saint George since they have the Taunt skill which forces the enemy to attack them first). After the two cannon fodders die, only the main Servant remains to do the challenge.
  • Or they can do the low-rarity run where players only use 1-3 star Servants and/or 1-3 star Craft Essences. It is borderline impossible to win in stages where the opponents cheat unless players get lucky critical hits or the opponents skip a turn without attacking.
• Self-Deprecation:
  • During the GUDAGUDA Honnouji event, Andersen mentions how people shouldn't grind and grind for currency but that's how the events are set up. Gilgamesh, of all people, complains about how you need lots and lots of money or luck just to get what you want from the gacha.
  • Dr. Roman and the protagonist call out how absurdly high the prices are for any of the Da Vinci Craft Essences during the Garden of Order Event. She still won't change them. This results in the Da Vinci and the 7 Counterfeit Heroic Spirits event, where someone starts selling cheap knockoffs to cater to those who don't have enough Mana Prisms to buy the real ones.
  • Riyo's "How to Play" comics are full of lampshades on all the problems in the game, including the horrendous gacha rates, the ascension material farming hell, the servers being unable to handle all the players, and the lack of a skip function for NP. Olga Marie and Mash are surprised that the author's allowed to get away with all this criticism.
    • In the official translation of Riyo's comics, when introduced with Altria, Gudako's comment about it got modified into "Man, something must be wrong with her parents to name her Altria" (instead of making the mistake that 'Pendragon' is her first name and thought her parents were delinquents to name her after a creature like that), indirectly poking fun on Type-Moon's verdict that Altria is spelled as such instead of the more preferred 'Artoria' (which Fate/Extella: The Umbral Star used)
  • "All the Statesmen" mocks the game repeatedly without remorse as the protagonist constantly asks for QP or rare materials with Mash having to say that, no, this event will unfortunately not give the protagonist those desired materials. She also starts to suddenly question why random materials like Gears and Proofs can enhance her skills.
  • In Sherlock Holmes' Trial Quest (coinciding with the "All the Statesmen" event, so maybe the writing might've rubbed off), the malfunctioning combat simulator computer mocks the game's logic of dropping Ascension materials from a simulation while raging about drops again.
    "We will never drop Ascension materials for you again! EVER! Why would real materials drop in a simulator, anyway!? To hell with Embers! To hell with Secret Gems!"
  • Chloe mocks the tendency for Servants to wear increasingly Stripperific outfits when you ascend them and refuses to do so herself...until her final Ascension.
  • Okita Alter has one My Room line where she whines for her terrible luck in gambling and other games of chance, mocking the nature of the Summoning gacha though ironically coming from someone who requires extreme luck to obtain.
• Self-Inflicted Hell: What Salem is more or less. To elaborate, Salem was created to cause as much 'pain' as possible by Räum so that Abigail, who has the ability to channel an Elder God, by using her guilt on the injustices that she caused and the fact that she doesn't remember what injustice she caused. Making her incapable of forgiving herself and humanity. In doing so literally creating a Christian Hell on Earth with Räum and Abigail as joint administrator
• Sent Into Hiding: Minamoto-no-Yorimitsu was kept hidden for years due to her supernatural heritage as the mortal-born daughter of Kitano-Tenjin and the Gozu Tenno, giving her oni blood. But her immense talents and her mortal father's lack of an heir led him to take her back and reveal her to the world as his "son".
• Sequel Escalation:
  • The third and final Halloween event starring Bathory goes this way, with three castles to invade instead of just Csejte Castle, two new variations of Bathory, and a more dramatic plot that isn't just about the protagonist trying to get to the castle and resolve the issue.
  • FGO in itself is this in comparison to previous Fate properties. What once started as a battle between only seven servants for a single omnipotent wish-granting device is now a story about hundreds of servants, with such a device obtained Once per Episode.
• Sequel Hook: Despite the sheer sense of closure that the ending provided, with the world being saved thanks to the collective efforts of Chaldea and the sacrifice of Dr. Roman, there are still threats for Chaldea to face. Gilgamesh's speech during the climax has him imply that at least one more Beast is currently active and that once one Beast makes an attack, events accelerate to an "ultimate conclusion" of some sort, and Holmes' theory that Goetia chose 2016 to destroy humanity because a greater threat was going to do something worse in either that year or soon afterward eventually gets confirmed. More directly, in the post-credits scene, da Vinci debriefs the protagonist and Mash saying that the Mage's Association will come knocking on their door soon, thanks to the entire planet missing a year and even the normies knowing something weird happened. True to form, SE.RA.PH shows that the Beasts are still emerging, and Part 2 begins with the threat of the Foreign God threatening to ruin all Chaldea has worked for.
• Sequencing Deception: The first Lostbelt's opening chapter establishes that 90 days have passed since December 31st and the Earth being bleached for the three major viewpoints of Cosmos in the Lostbelt, the Crypters, Chaldea, and David Bluebook. This is to hide that Bluebook's account given to the player of what happened (the Trees descend, then the Earth is bleached), differs from what Kadoc discovers in Wodime's computer (the Earth is bleached, then the Trees descend). This creates an irreconcilable difference between the two narratives that serves as a major mystery for the overall story.
• Sequential Boss: The Multiple Life Bars mechanic introduced with Shinjuku has facilitated these, with a health bar depletion triggering the next phase of the fight.
  • For Shinjuku, the Christine doll turns into a giant ghost.
  • In SE.RA.PH's extra story, Nero turns into Nero Bride, Tamamo turns into her Lancer version, and Shiki transforms into her Saber version.
  • Certain bosses also give themselves special unremovable buffs upon health bar depletion, forcing players to switch strategies on the fly, like Saber Empireo giving himself a 100% defense shield or Suzuka Gozen draining everyone's HP every turn.
  • Jekyll and Hyde are supposed to be a playable version of one: activating Assassin Jekyll's Noble Phantasm transforms him into Berserker Hyde with full health. It's a lot less practical in action since It Only Works Once, and his/their stats were mediocre even before Power Creep set in.
• Serial Homewrecker: Parodied. Lancelot's myth about being in love with Guinevere and (indirectly) ruining Camelot in the process makes him have a reputation for loving married women (or at least those who already have a lover). Cleopatra in Halloween 2017 event calls him "Sir Lances-a-lot-of-married-women".
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong:
  • The Holy Grail has appeared in several key points in Humanity's development, and the player has to travel to them all to either destroy or retrieve the Grail in order to set history back on course and prevent its demise in the future. At first the heroes assume this means that anyone who dies during a Singularity is revived once history is restored, but during Babylonia Gilgamesh replies that no, people who die stay dead, even if they didn't die in the original history. History is rewritten such that they died of some cause other than the Singularity, but the fact that they died at that specific time remains unaltered. However, the opposite is also true: anyone who lives (including those that died in the original history during that time) will survive past the point the Singularity takes place in.
  • The Saber Wars event. Heroine X comes from the future from another planet, the Planet Servant with a dystopian future dominated by the Sabers where Lancers are extinct and Archers are deemed criminals. So she came back in time to kill all Sabers and all Servants with Saber-faces. This storyline is continued in Mysterious Heroine X Alter's trial quest.
  • The Fate/Zero crossover is about Lord El-Melloi II and his determination to save the innocent lives lost to the Holy Grail.
• Seven Deadly Sins:
  • The theme of the Prison Tower quest bosses, with seven Servants corresponding to each sin. Jeanne is the only one who doesn't actually qualify.
  • In Babylonia, a set called the seven Evils of Humanity are brought up which are essentially disasters manifesting as Beast class Servants, brought about by humanity's beastly nature, which humanity's tasked with destroying. They don't quite match with the classical set, as the first is "Pity", the second is "Regression", the fourth is "Comparison", and another one is "Regret".
    • Beast III-R invokes a somewhat more classic Evil, that being "Desire". It is somewhat broader than the usual expression of such, as it includes things like "desiring salvation" (though certainly, she is quite willing to exploit that kind of "Desire" as well...)
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: In Salem, it turns out that monumental effort that Chaldea put into blending in with the townspeople with a play troupe identity, gathering public support, and hiding Servants' powers was moot since most of the villagers were Not Even Human by the time Chaldea arrived, as Räum (who was "Carter") had twisted these former humans into Ghouls and was merely hiding their appearance and forcing them to play a role in his plans. Notably, the death of Hopkins (one of the few humans) make the party's attempts to curry his favor for naught as the other villagers are just as bloodthirsty, just less subtle, and almost everyone they tried to help either died or were just Ghouls feigning sympathy. Thankfully, Abigail and Lavinia were worth befriending, and together with the Servants trapped in the Singularity they manage to succeed in their mission regardless.
• Shameless Fanservice Girl: There is a lot of female Fanservice in this game. Some of the girls know they are sexy and want others to know it to.
• Shared Dream: The protagonist often shares dreams with their Servants due to the nature of their contract. Oftentimes, this involves pulling them into a dreamscape where they confront the less savory parts of their Servants' personalities buried deep within their psyches. Other times these dreams can become muddled with reality as a result of an outside antagonist, such as the protagonist's meeting with Katsushika Hokusai.
• She's a Man in Japan: In the Japanese version, d'Eon and Astolfo are considered genderless and this affects them gameplaywise as far as skills go, such as gender-specific charms. They are allowed to participate in both female-only and male-only Challenge Quests regardless, and even get bonuses for being used in the Magical Girl themed crossover event. In the Chinese version, however, they are explicitly female and are treated as such for all gameplay mechanics and events.
• Shifting Sand Land: The first area the protagonists arrive in Camelot is this, with sandstorms, a pyramid and lots and lots of deserts. It's actually the Egypt of Ozymandias' time that was twisted into the singularity when he was summoned.
• Shining City: The holy city of Camelot built over the ashes of Jerusalem is this, as it stands as the last shelter in a shrinking singularity. Almost all inhabitants of the area have been attempting to get entrance into it.
• Ship Tease: In a story as long as this, there's a lot of relationship teasing to go around.
  • The protagonist gets the bulk of the ship tease:
    • Mash is clearly in love with the protagonist and tends to be very clingy if she sees any sign of the protagonist showing affection for other female Servants while as the story progresses the protagonist grows more protective and dialogue choices can show them being fond of her in return.
    • Roughly half the female Servants fall for the protagonist, though nothing much comes of this most of the time. These tend to be characters who did not have a relationship in a previous story, such as Euryale or Okita, but it does also happen to alternate versions of characters such as Swimsuit Tamamo or Nero Bride.
    • Finally, several story chapters also include a lot of romantic interactions, such as Hassan of Serenity's massive crush on the protagonist in Camelot and Ereshkigal's similar one in Babylonia (to the point Ishtar teases at a Love Triangle forming between the protagonist, Mash, and Ereshkigal), Jeanne Alter and Saber Alter's quasi-love triangle in Shinjuku, not to mention Moriarty's plan literally revolves around the protagonist becoming the closest person to him, and Meltryllis even playing the part of the heroine in the most serious event to date, SE.RA.PH.
    • Events tend to lay on the Fanservice particularly thick with Ship Tease. Most of the female Servants in the first Summer event "Chaldea Summer Memory / Heat Odyssey" treat the deserted island that they're all stuck on as a chance for a private date with the master; the male Servants even recognize this and go out of their way to leave the main camp. During the Valentine's Day events, even the coldest ice queen will defrost and be uncharacteristically shy or kind to the protagonist upon giving or receiving chocolate, such as Altria Alter Lancer. In the second Summer event, "Dead Heat Summer Race / Death Jail Summer Escape," Nero and Altria Alter are explicitly looking for the master for a private summer vacation before being roped into the main event's race, and meanwhile, Babbage has a throwaway line where he mentions that it's so hot in Chaldea with him and his steam around that all of Chaldea's staff and Servants would have to wear swimsuits all the time — "We could deal with that if it was just Master, but Blackbeard keeps staring at us, like, a lot, so..."
  • There's also a fair bit of teasing between various Servants:
    • Sanson, Mozart and d'Eon are all in love with Marie Antoinette, though she's kind of spacey and doesn't seem entirely aware of it.
    • Sasaki Kojirou seems to have a thing for Martha, who appears to find it kind of annoying. Still, fans eat it up so the writers started adding in more of it.
    • One of Altria's My Room lines has her reminiscing fondly about EMIYA while blushing, clearly remembering him more as Shirou from the Fate route.
    • Caesar and Cleopatra are very much in love with each other, as is only fitting. Cleopatra is initially shocked to see how fat he is, but after recovering she doesn't care, despite her usual vanity. Similarly, Irisviel and Kiritsugu are married in other continuities and while they don't know each other here, they're still drawn to each other.
    • Kintoki is caught between Shuten-douji and Raikou, which is really uncomfortable for him because he helped kill the former and considers the latter to be something like his mom, but she's crazy and considers that the same thing as romantic love. He appears to mostly love Shuten, but they always seem to end up bickering when they meet. Finally, Tamamo also flirts with him in London, but they both know she's only doing it to embarrass him. Kintoki knows perfectly well she actually loves someone else, namely Hakuno.
    • During Okeanos, Blackbeard loudly proclaims about how he's a lolicon and so forth and that Drake is an old hag. However, despite this, she's actually the one woman he's genuinely serious about and asks her to hold him as he dies in Okeanos, which is a request she grants. In case you're thinking it's too serious, his Interlude is also about getting explicit doujins about her.
    • Also during Okeanos, Euryale and Asterios have a Beast and Beauty type relationship going on, or at least teased at. Asterios is fighting to protect her from Jason, but is badly injured when he attacks your party because he and Euryale assumed you were with the Argonauts. When this happens, she rushes out intending to sacrifice herself for him despite her usual self-centred attitude. She's happy to see him again during their stand in Solomon's Temple.
    • Like in legend, Rama and Sita are heavily devoted to each other with a third of the America chapter revolving around their romance as Rama tries to rescue her and Rama's profile mostly focuses on the aspects of his legend with Sita.
    • There are several hints that the relationship between EMIYA Alter and Sesshouin Kiara is much deeper than either would admit too. Slaughtering her and her cult in one alternate timeline is what drove Emiya Shirou down this path, and Kiara when she becomes Beast III/R in the SE.RA.PH. chapter is able to bring him to her side not through force, but using said guilt to draw him over and corrupt him into a Beast Servant.
    • During the first Christmas event, Santa Alter gives Le Chevalier d'Eon a maid dress, much to their consternation. If this wasn't obvious enough, Alter also asks them for their contact information.
    • Nikola Tesla is immediately smitten with Tamamo upon meeting her in London. All of his dialogue with her involves him gushing over her, to the point that Tamamo has to actually remind herself to remain loyal to Hakuno.
    • When Hijikata Toshizou was released, he came with several lines complimenting female Servants (i.e. Musashi, Carmilla). Fan artists were all over the latter. And in the Halloween 2017 event with Carmilla's animation and voice updates, she also has a voice line with Hijikata, even calling him by his real name without any honorifics. Cue fans shipping them even further.
    • Musashi and Osakabehime started picking up steam in the months leading to "Battle in New York", even though they've had hints since the latter's debut in the third Halloween event. Musashi is known for her love of cute girls, while Osakabehime is known to collect Musashi merchandise, and their profiles from the material books have matching lines for each other where Musashi attempts to drag Osakabehime from her room. If the Chaldea Kitchen Truck CE is any indication, she succeeded, and the two have been touring New York together. They're also a Dual Boss during the event, and their title is "Princess and her Bodyguard", introducing a fairly popular dynamic to their interactions.
  • Roman and Da Vinci had significant amount of ship tease with her attempting to take care of him, often visiting him in the middle of work to remind him to eat, and they basically become the Chaldea crew's surrogate parents. Additionally, Dr Roman gets very emotional (and slightly tsundere) when Da Vinci gets into some peril in Camelot, and Da Vinci's interlude clearly implies she has feelings for him. Part of this is based on the fact that their voice actors are married and the two actors are playing an official couple in another Type-Moon series.
    • If there is romance between Romani and Da Vinci, it could also qualify them as Star-Crossed Lovers given what happened to Romani.
  • In and after Salem, they start shipping the Caster of Midrash and Romani as they are respectively Queen of Sheba and King Solomon. Caster of Midrash is very cutthroat when it comes to money but her demand when working with Mata Hari is that she describe Solomon's time as Romani (she figured out on her own that Romani is a reincarnated Solomon) with a huge blush on her face. Midrash is determined to defeat Raum to ensure that none of Solomon's legacy is being misused. David even asks that Midrash call him father if you have both of them in her My Room Lines.
  • Kadoc and Anastasia are shown to have a bond deeper than just Master-Servant, with Kadoc's fellow Crypters even worried that he'll prioritize her wish over expanding his Lostbelt. Sherlock even directly compares their relationship to the protagonist's and Mash. Anastasia sacrifices herself at the end to save his life and it's revealed she made Rasputin-Kotomine promise to protect him which he upholds in Lostbelt 5.2 Olympus.
  • There is some shipping for Ophelia and Wodime with Beryl stating Ophelia is surprisingly more deferential to Wodime now than before. When Wodime states he wishes that his and Ophelia's Lostbelts are the last two to survive, Ophelia is overjoyed. Lostbelt 2 Ragnarok has Ophelia on her deathbed realize she's in love with him because she refuses to even wish Mash luck as that would mean betraying him despite the fact Ophelia spent the entire Lostbelt trying to befriend Mash. Wodime's feelings are vaguer but he states he is saddened by her death and has her name as the password for his files showing that he did care for her.
• Shoo Out the Clowns:
  • In London, to establish just how much of a threat Solomon is and how serious the stakes have become, he kills all the Servants (Shakespeare, Tamamo and Kintoki) who were mostly providing comic relief.
  • Played for Laughs in Garden of Order, where MHX is terrified of Saber Shiki due to the latter emitting an aura that implies she can ignore the rules of Servant Universe (comical characters can't be killed).
  • In an overarching story example, Raikou's horse Kyogoku is first introduced as an actual character in the second Summer Event, "Dead Heat Summer Race / Death Jail Prison Escape". He is extremely perverted and openly ogles Raikou's chest and swimsuit... as a horse, using horse language. The next time he's canonically mentioned, it's in Shimousa, an actual main story Pseudo-Singularity, and Raikou is introduced as a villainous Rider who would go so far as to kill her beloved horse since he doesn't bear the Curse of Annihilation.
• Shoot the Medic First: Averted. Enemies, including enemy Servants, have honestly pretty pathetic healing, especially when used on the boss Servants they sometimes show up with. In Okeanos in particular, focusing on Medea Lily before attacking Demon Pillar Forneus is a good way to be ground into dust by the latter, especially its Charged Attack, while the former's Noble Phantasm is a minor inconvenience at best.
• Short Title: Long, Elaborate Subtitle: All Singularities have elaborate names that first give a description of the singularity, then the location itself, and lastly a nickname or alias for an ally. The Servant descriptor subtitle went away for Epic of Remnant as it used that spot to add a subtitle describing the plot instead of a Servant, and the original subtitle convention resumes for Cosmos in the Lostbelt, the first four Lostbelts swapping out the ally for the main enemy and the final three swapping out the ally for some kind of event. Of note there isn't a sharp difference in the titles across languages; care was made to make certain that the elaborate subtitles were just as elaborate in other languages.
  • Hundred Years' War of the Evil Dragons - Orleans - "The Holy Maiden Savior" refers to the Hundred Years War, Jeanne Alter's massacre of the French people using dragons, and the original Jeanne D'Arc herself saving the people who burned her at the stake as a witch.
  • Eternal Madness Empire - Septem - "Emperor of Roses" refers to the madness induced thanks to the United Roman Empire and Nero herself through her rose motif.
  • Sealed Ends of the Four Seas - Okeanos - "Voyager of the Storm" refers to the endless Atlantic Ocean the Singularity it takes place in, and Francis Drake's ability to cross any kinds of waters.
  • The Mist City - London - "Londinium Knight", something Lost in Translation is that the city is under threat by a Demonic Fog and Makiri Zolgen, while the Knight is Mordred come to defend Britain in its hour of need.
  • North American Myth War - E Pluribus Unum - "Steel Robes" refers to the sheer accumulation of mythological heroes running about in America fighting, the Latin motto of the US as a Central Theme, and Nightingale being tough as nails in her dedication to healing.
  • Divine Realm of the Round Table - Camelot - "Shining Airgetlám" refers to the Lion King's new kingdom that replaced Jerusalem, her plot to store the Lawful Good of humanity away, and Bedivere's arm, Excalibur transformed to look like Airgetlám.
  • Absolute Demonic Front - Babylonia - "The Chain of Heaven" refers to the warfront against Demonic Beasts in Uruk, and King Gilgamesh instead of Endiku, who'd do everything he can to ensure humanity's future following the fall of the gods.
  • The Grand Temple of Time - Solomon - "The Divine Zenith Meteor Shower" refers to Ars Pulina, Goetia's fusion of Noble Phantasm and Demonic Pillars that exists to turn the incinerated history of man into fuel in order to recreate humanity, and then the legions of Heroic Spirts summoned by Jeanne to do battle with the eight thrones, allowing Ritsuka and Mash to fight Beast I.
  • Quarantined Territory of Malice - Shinjuku - "Shinjuku Phantom Incident" refers to the isolated Shinjuku from time and space to only host Evil-aligned Servants and the Phantom Demon Alliance responsible for everything.
  • Abyssal Cyber Paradise - SE.RA.PH - "BB Strikes Back: Let's meet in the Digital Sea!" refers to the digitalization of Seraphix deep in the Atlantic Trench, BB's comeback and meta jokes, and Kiara's desire to become one with the earth to attain "Paradise".
  • Subterranean World of Folklore - Agartha - "Women of Agartha" refers to the Lady Land Fairy Tale Free-for-All that is entrenched in constant, brutal warfare due to opposing philosophies of chaos, strength, and order, against a resistance of men who have fallen into the underground world.
  • The Stage of Carnage - Shimousa - "Seven Duels of Swordmasters" refers to the brutal world of the alternate Shimousa, where human lives are constantly lost to the demonic beasts, and the Duel to the Death battles against seven nigh-unkillable sword users, who with the help of the Sorcerer, seeks to turn alternate Shimousa into a Hell on Earth.
  • Forbidden Advent Garden - Salem - "Heretical Salem" refers to the mysterious black expanse that within it has a Salem, filled with souls who feel sin and regret, that slowly falls into insanity over the course of a week, while Heretical Salem refers to both Abigail and the Salem filled with those who'd call outsiders "heretics", as well as the dark madness that would descend upon the village.
  • Eternal Frozen Empire: Anastasia - "The Princess of the Land of Beasts" refers to the endless winter that got so bad that Ivan had his court mages fuse the Russian people with Phantasmal Beasts just to survive, while the subtitle has a double meaning; one for the the Half-Human Hybrid wolfmen that live in the Russian Lostbelt, while the other is the relationship between Kadoc and his summoned Anastasia.
  • Endless Century Of Ice And Fire: Götterdämmerung - "The Jolly Fellow of the Unquenchable Flame" refers to the world created by an unfinished Ragnarok, where a never-ending winter coincides with the eternal flames of Muspelheim, and the Hot-Blooded manly man known as Napoleon Bonaparte, a Nice Guy who won't give up.
  • Land of Unified Knowledge: S.I.N. (Synchronized Intellect Nation) - "The Crimson Beauty Under the Moon" refers to the Lostbelt's advanced, singular empire that hoarded all knowledge for its king, turning humanity into glorified pets, and Yu Miaoyi, AKA Crypter Akuta Hinako, who is a Zhenren that only wishes to be with her love Xiang Yu.
  • Samsara of Creation and Destruction: Yuga Kshetra - "The Final Dark God" refers to the endless cycle of Samsaras that resets the Indian Lostbelt every ten days, and the titular Dark God is in fact the Lostbelt King and an alternate version of Arjuna that was possessed by his dark side, allowed himself to fuse with the entire Hindu pantheon, and became its top and only, god.
  • Ancestral Ocean of the Great Gods: Atlantis - "The Day God Is Shot Down" refers to the world where the Greek Gods never fell, still ruling the world to their today, and Orion's original form, with the power to combat the gods, as well as shooting down Artemis.
  • Interstellar Mountainous City: Olympus - "The Day God Is Shot Down" refers to Zeus's plan to turn Olympus into an interstellar space colony and leave the Earth for good and Mash using the Black Barrel to shoot down Demeter, Aphrodite, and Zeus, while also referring to the entire concept of godhood being potentially destroyed by Kirschtaria's plans to turn humanity into God-human hybrids for the sake of world peace.
  • Hell Realm Mandala: Heian-kyō - "Flash of Roaring Thunder" refers to the Hell on Earth that Caster of Limbo has created in Heian era Japan, as well as his own Tree of Emptiness. "Flash of Roaring Thunder" meanwhile refers to Kintoki, who is associated with lightning.
  • Fairy Realm of the Round Table, Avalon le Fae - "The Moment a Planet is Born" refers to how the British Lostbelt is the Land of Faerie with the Round Table in this Lostbelt being composed of fairies who stole the Spirit Graphs of the Round Table knights from Proper Human History. Meanwhile, Avalon le Fae refers to the fairy that is destined to correct the course of Britain from the sins and consequences of the Six Fae. Finally, "The Moment a Planet is Born" is a reference to how Morgan turns the British Lostbelt into a Lostworld, a timeline that ran completely parallel comparable to Proper Human History, and how folks who were born in the Queen Era of this world can exist within Proper Human History if they actually managed to escape there.
• Show Within a Show: The party performs several plays; one is about Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, another features the three Jeannes, the third one stars Medea Lily and Circe, and a Compressed Adaptation of "Starry Xuanzang goes to India" for the townspeople of Salem with the UI slightly altered to reflect it being a play.
• Significant Name Shift:
  • During the battle against Lostbelt King Zeus, Ares pulls a Heel–Face Turn and decides to is fight on your side along with the Roman god Romulus-Quirinus. The Lostbelt King acknowledges this betrayal by calling Ares with the Roman version of his name.
  • In the event "GUDAGUDA Ryouma's Close Call", Ryouma finds himself in the bottom of the ocean where Oryou rests, and a mysterious voice calls him "human" and commands him to kill her for the safety of the country. However, as the conversation goes on, the voice realizes that Ryouma and Oryou simply love each other too much to hurt each other or the world, and so they address Ryouma by his full name and entrust Oryou to him, even giving him their blessings.
• Simple Solution Won't Work: The initial idea for stopping Tiamat in her tracks was to evaporate the sea around her (they had a goddess who could do that), since Tiamat could only move in the water. They try it; and immediately afterwards it's revealed that she can create water so the "limitation" was a non-issue. The eventual plan for stopping and defeating Tiamat ends up being incredibly complicated, including things like digging a pit deep enough to reach the Underword, having a mage turn the water into flowers via Rules Lawyer-ing, and having the personification of death apply the concept of death on her. So much for just evaporating the water.
• Simple, yet Awesome:
  • Most events give you a free SR Servant and allow you to buy four more copies of them and all of their unique ascension items using easily grindable items in the event shop, meaning that you can get them to level 80 and their NP level to 5 very easily. They're all considered useful in some way (with a few considered absolutely absurd), though some of the early ones have been power-creeped.
    • Sakata Kintoki's Rider version gives everyone else in this list competition—having a single-target Noble Phantasm that runs over most bosses (especially the Caster and Berserker ones). His skills are all straightforward, so he's also very easy to use.
  • Medea's Rule Breaker doesn't seem too special, just being a dagger that removes buffs - except its self-recharging effect, combined with her High-Speed Divine Words skill that gives her at least 80% of an NP gauge with the press of a button, makes it a very reliable and deadly Spam Attack. It helps that she has three normal Arts cards, and that Rule Breaker is an Arts card itself.
  • After Camelot, Mash is considered one of the best SR Servants. She can tank reliably with her huge HP pool, taunt, and invincibility, has decent damage potential (as Shielder class deals normal damage to any Class), and support with her NP that adds two DEF buffs and a big ATK buff to the whole party. And she has 0 party cost. The only downside for using her is she doesn't get any bond points.
  • Paul Bunyan, full stop. She's a 1* unit with a very good skillset and short NP animation, born to be the ultimate farming unit.
  • Your starting outfit, Mystic Code Chaldea. Other Codes may look cool or have clever spells, but you really can't go wrong with the provided versatility of a strong heal, attack boost, and evade.
  • Some lower rarity servants are like this, as despite their lower than average stat-line, some of them have incredibly powerful and useful skill setup and/or useful Noble Phantasm that makes them more useful for their utility that outweighs their lower stat line. In fact, many of these servants are often referred to as "low-rarity EX tier" mainly because of their useful utility that can provide in many team composition and serve as cheaper alternatives to their respective higher rarity counterparts for those who don't want to spend real life money to get higher rarity servants. Some noticeable examples include Hans Christian Andersen, Euryale, Robin Hood, Billy the Kid, David, Julius Caesar, Bedivere, Lu Bu, and Georgios, as they have very straightforward skill sets in addition to them being a lower rarity.
  • Some of the 4* and 5* Craft Essence the player can obtain from events for free can be really good. While the earlier events have event Craft Essences that are either decent or too situational, some of the later events have free event Craft Essences that are incredibly good (one noticeable example is the Golden Sumo Wrestling CE from the Onigashima event, which grants the servant equipped with it 15% increased attack and starting with 50% NP charge when max limited break, arguably considered one of the best free event Craft Essences the player can obtain).
• Sir Not-Appearing-in-This-Trailer: Some Servants aren't announced or promoted to make their appearance in the story all the more impactful.
  • Lancer Altria Alter is the only antagonist for London that wasn't already shown in the trailer or promotional release gacha rate-up.
  • In America, Cu Chulainn Alter is never hinted at in the trailer or promotion, with his appearance in the chapter's cold open being the first time he appears. In addition, Li Shuwen didn't have any connection to the new Servants or prior appearance in the game, yet he debuts there.
  • Tiamat was never shown in trailers or promotion for Babylonia to hide her role as the actual Arc Villain, with her horns as the icon representing Babylonia being the only hint towards her existence before its release.
  • Shakespeare and Andersen are never shown in the Shinjuku trailer, but they have an important role for the story's finale.
  • Kiara Sesshouin is the only SE.RA.PH Servant not to show up at all in promotional materials prior to release, as it would be a major spoiler.
  • Medb, Quetzalcoatl and Gugalanna do not feature at all in the "Dead Heat Summer Race" event PV.
  • Caster Limbo, Sengo Muramasa, Amakusa Shirou and Sasaki Kojiro do not appear in the Shimosa PV.
  • The Queen of Sheba and Lavinia Whateley doesn't appear in the Salem trailer.
  • Billy the Kid doesn't appear in the Anastasia trailer.
• Situational Sword:
  • Many NPs provide bonus damage against certain targets, such as Lancer Tamamo dealing bonus damage to Males, Gilgamesh to Servants and Nobunaga to enemies with Riding. A related effect is providing a power up bonus vs certain targets, which has the same effect through a different mechanic. Scathach has a power up effect against undead and divine enemies on her third skill, while one of Nobunaga's has power up against Divinity, meaning the effects multiply against enemies with both Riding and Divinity such as Raikou or Caesar. The standard super effective multiplier is 50% on NPs while power up usually ranges from 50-100% as it's normally attached to skills, meaning the effect can be improved on.
  • Some skills provide extra effects to Servants with certain traits. Elisabeth and Medb, for example, provide double the effect to female and male Servants respectively on their improved Charisma buffs.
  • Other skills only work on certain targets. Charm effects usually only target one gender, for example. Stheno's NP also only works on males apart from the defense down effect, causing her to be one of the least popular Servants in the game.
  • Certain Craft Essences give the equipped Servant bonus damage against certain types of enemies, i.e. Origin Bullet gives the equipped Servant more damage against enemy Casters.
  • Some skills provide additional benefits depending on the terrain type. Ruler Martha gains an attack bonus in maps with water, Gawain gains a Buster buff on maps with sunshine, Jaguar Warrior has bonus star generation on forest maps, and Swimsuit Nobunaga has bonus attack on burning maps.
  • Each Servant has a series of append skills, with the final skill for non-Berserkers being extra damage against a specific class. The majority are for classes the Servant has no reason to fight, but some like Beni-Enma or Nobunaga deal extra damage against classes that often carry traits their skills or Noble Phantasm already target, and a lucky handful can stack it with actual class advantage.
• Slap-on-the-Wrist Nuke: Due to Gameplay and Story Segregation, Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors, and Noble Phantasm gameplay mechanics, a flashy, lore-wise devastating NP could deal a lot less damage compared to a more mundane, weaker, and less impressive NP for certain enemies, i.e. Gilgamesh's Enuma Elish is a lot less useful than Kojirou's Tsubame-gaeshi when it comes to taking on Rider dragons (when lore-wise, while the latter could inflict a serious if not outright One-Hit Kill if aimed properly, the former should flat-out wipe said dragons off the face of reality).
• Sliding Scale of Silliness vs. Seriousness: The storyline can switch between silliness and seriousness (although later chapters shift more towards the later). Certain events, however, shifts more towards silliness with a massive amount of either Breaking the Fourth Wall or Self-Deprecation, even events that are supposed to be "serious" such as the Garden of Order and Fate/Accel Zero events (which the later is lampshaded by Mash with a Break the Fourth Wall moment).
• Sneeze Cut:
  • In the intro of the third Nero Fest, Assassin of Nightless City offers Jack, Nursery Rhyme, and Ibaraki the chance to play... with a torture device. Nursery Rhyme is the only one who outright declines because it's a bit extreme for a "scary story" and because it makes her feel like a dragon. It cuts to Elisabeth Báthory sneezing (since she's a dragon girl and associated with torture).
  • In Lancelot (Saber)'s Interlude, he blames a "mage who has a deplorable tendency towards the ridiculous" who "is as sneaky as a snake in the grass" and who "only our king could ever command." The game cuts to an obvious silhouette of Merlin sneezing.
• Sniper Duel: In the Turas Realta manga adaptation of Okeanos, Artemis slugs it out in a long-range sniper duel with Anne during the battle between the crews of the Golden Hind and Queen Anne's Revenge. Despite Orion and Artemis' skills, Anne has the advantage due to being used to firing at open sea, requiring Fujimaru to use his Mystic Code to strengthen Artemis to close the gap. The duel ends decisively in Artemis' favor, as Anne is torn in half by the goddess' arrows.
• SNK Boss:
  • The Exhibition Matches of the Nero Festival and Battle in New York events are ultra high difficulty boss battles which pits the players against bosses packed with unfair and confusing advantages. Beating any of these is a Bragging Rights Reward as they are all optional, with the only reward being a single summoning ticket.
  • Other events since "GUDAGUDA Meiji Restoration" have the Challenge Quests which are similar to the above, although it requires the main event story and missions to be completed as well as beating the final Singularity if the event itself doesn't require it, to be unlocked.
• Socialization Bonus:
  • A friend's support Servant can be brought into battle, though only ones from your friend list can use their Noble Phantasm.
  • Friend Points work this way: you get them by using the Servants of people on your friend list, or providing useful Servants for them to use, and use them to summon 1-3-star Servants, Craft Essences, or enhancement cards.
• So Last Season
  • New fights often render old strategies useless as DW rebalances the game. For example, if Merlin stall is very popular and powerful, then skip the regeneration based tankiness of the party by adding in a special boss who has a chance to perform an Instant Kill ever turn, making one of the most challenging and obnoxious boss fights in the game. Or you can ramp up damage so high that slow regeneration is a luxury the player can't afford. In reverse, buff removal and pierce invulnerability are bothering the players? Introduce buff removal resistance and a special invulnerability that can't be pierced.
  • The introduction of a single Servant can often drastically change how the game is played and what they value. For example, the game was largely Buster based thanks to Merlin for several years until Skadi showed up as the new Quick support, ushering in an age of Servants built around Quick AOE Noble Phantasms that could regenerate at least 50% gauge per NP. After a few futile attempts to slow or stop this, DW gave up on seemingly embraced it, eventually shifting the game over to Arts instead with Altria Caster, who enables even more powerful spam NP gameplay because she can do what Skadi does, only much better and with a level of actual sustainability to go along with it. Now putting up Merlin on support is a little bit quaint when most people just want to have their easy three turn spam strategies.
  • Building on the changing value of the above for best support units, when units like Scathach were introduced they were considered extremely valuable as boss killers. With changes that have occurred in gameplay since, said Servants have become rather situational or niche at best while instead players have begun to favor units that were heavily disfavored before, such as Lancelot with Skadi or Fionn with Altria. Of course, gameplay isn't everything, but if you were to try rolling for someone like Okita Souji now because you wanted a good Saber, people would give you odd looks.
• Space "X": Taken to a ludicrous degree in "Saber Wars II" as the protagonist starts slapping "space" in front of the name of almost everything to distinguish them from their regular counterparts.
• Spam Attack: The two most powerful supports in the game are Skadi and Altria Caster, both of whom are built to enable their targets to use their Noble Phantasm several times in a row. This strategy only works on about half a dozen Servants each, but is immensely powerful, particularly for the latter: Skadi NP spam is reliant on the use of the Kaleidoscope Craft Essence, which limits damage output, but Altria allows for more flexibility by allowing for powerful CEs like the Black Holy Grail or Sign of Smiling Face, which boost NP damage by 80% for the former and Arts and NP generation by 15% and NP damage by 20%.
• Spanner in the Works: One of the biggest reasons the grand plan of King Goetia is derailed is Roman, aka Solomon showing up and using Ars Nova to erase himself from the Throne of Heroes and thus make Goetia unable to sustain his own existence. This was because Solomon was in possession of the final ring due to it being used as a summoning catalyst by his Master, Marisbury Animusphere. The reason Marisbury had it in the first place? God told Solomon to send the ring into the future where it would be needed. So, assuming that "God" isn't the Counter Force in disguise like what apparently might have been the case with the voices Jeanne heard, the Big Bad's plan was derailed because God foresaw what would happen (but considering this is God we're talking about, that's no surprise) and arranged for the right conditions for his defeat, by allowing Marisbury to win the Fifth Fuyuki Grail War and establish Chaldea, also allowing for Solomon to exist in the present day to act against Goetia, and also establishing the events that not only allowed the Protagonist and their allies to win in the first place, but also set things up so they have a fighting chance against the other big threats likely threatening to destroy humanity. So, basically, God ain't lazy, and He sure as hell knows how to set up a domino effect. Nor does He appreciate gifts he made being used by those who weren't meant to use them, especially demons.
  • Even more simply, the bombing meant to take out all of Chaldea's summoners at the beginning would have succeeded if you hadn't fallen asleep from jet lag during the Singularity F mission brief and been kicked out.
• Speed, Smarts and Strength: The 3 attack card types go like this - Quick are weak but speedy attacks that drop a lot of Critical Hit stars (which are required for scoring crits), Arts are controlled, medium-powered attacks that help charge the Noble Phantasm gauge, and Buster attacks are strong attacks that deal high raw damage but only drop few critical stars and do not fill the NP gauge at all. Thusly, characters who focus on Quick attacks (especially Assassin-class) are the speedy attacker types, those who focus on Arts attacks (especially Caster-class) are brainy/skilled types, and those who focus on Buster attacks (especially Berserker-class) are brawny/brutish types.
• Spell My Name With An S:
  • Kiara Sessyoin's name is usually spelled as such in Fate materials, this game included. This is an acceptable spelling for her name, but Sesshōin (or Sesshoin, or Sesshouin) are preferred in the more popular Romanization systems since it reflects the name's actual pronunciation.
  • FSN-Saber's name アルトリア (lit. Arutoria) has been spelled either as Altria or Artoria in official Type-MOON merchandise. It has also been spelled as Arturia in some fan translations. In Fate/Grand Order however, Type-MOON dictated that the game go with Altria over the localization team's protests.
  • The Near-Future Observation Lens was originally translated as SHIVA, but was later corrected to SHEBA after her appearance in Salem.
  • Type-Moon in general used more "native" names on certain Servants in which the katakana that sounded closer to the Servant's native name are used instead of the katakana of their "generic" names unlike other Japanese media do. The English version reflects this through changes in the Servants' spellings to better match the spelling from their original language. Some are minor like Atalanta and Hector being Atalante^note  The Japanese used アタランテ (Atarante) instead of アタランタ (Ataranta) for Atalanta's name. and Hektor^note Which used ヘクトール (Hekutoru) over ヘクター (Hekuta) which the usual katanaka for Hector is read as, while some are more noticeable like spelling Angra Mainyu as Aŋra Mainiiu ^note  reflecting his Japanese name アンリマユ (Anrimayu) instead of アングラマイニュ (Anguramainiyu).
  • In a more traditional version of the trope, more recent material, especially adaptations, of the Camelot chapter tend to have a problem with a certain name that features in the narrative. The story features an object that is very clearly meant to reference the Airgetlám of Nuada. However, both the stage and animated adaptation titles have a bad tendency of calling the object "Agateram", which is a meaningless name derived from a semi-direct romanization of the kana used for "Airgetlám" (アガートラム); this even cropped up in the promotional Craft Essence for the stage play, which gave the name in romanized letters. The English version of the chapter does retain the name Airgetlám, at least.
  • The way the game translates long vowels in Japanese names (i.e. ū and ō) is rather inconsistent. For example, while ō can be rendered as simply "o" or "ou", the game uses both ways such as translating "Ryōma" and "Oryō" as "Ryouma" and "Oryou", but then translating "Izō" as "Izo".
• Spoof Aesop: In "The Little Santa Alter", Santa Island Mask encourages Jeanne Alter Santa Lily to lie to other children even as she questions if lying is bad. But the context of why she has to lie and the immediate lampshade makes this throwaway Aesop a very absurd joke. In last year's Christmas event, Altria Alter Santa had given Nursery Rhyme and Jack the Ripper some genuinely nice presents by pretending to lose to them, so this year the pair are still under the impression that they have to beat Santa in a fight to get Christmas presents, forcing Jeanne Alter Santa Lily to continue this lie for their own happiness. Jeanne Alter Santa Lily's probably the closest thing to a genuine child (as she was just "born"), but she's trying to act like an adult for other "children", yet the whole lot of them have memories and experiences that normal children shouldn't.
  Santa Island Mask: "Christmas is a day where lies are okay! April Fools? What's that?"
• Stable Time Loop:
  • The Singularities in the first part of the story are this. According to Gilgamesh, in the grand scheme of things what happens in a singularity will still happen but history will record it differently. The example he gave was a dragon showing up in a singularity kills a man. Once the singularity is resolved and history is restored that man does not come back to life, instead, he gets killed by another more mundane cause.
  • Kiara creates one in SE.RA.PH, partially to provide the pseudo-Spiritrons to fuel her and SE.RA.PH but mostly just for her amusement at watching people suffer.
    • Meltryllis's character arc in the same chapter is basically her exploiting Kiara's loop to set up one of her own: To rescue you from Kiara, she launches herself back in time to your point of entry in SERAPH using Palladion Virgin Laser, and kills her past self to avoid suspicion. This allows her to help you defeat Kiara, saving you from your death at Kiara's hands.
  • After hearing the protagonist's description of their moonlit walk on the beach in "Murder at the Kogetsukan", Holmes realizes that there's a small gap in time between the protagonist dreaming at Chaldea and the two families arriving at the hotel, so he quickly rushes to assume the alias of the detective the Goldie family hired and arrives there as "Sheringham", leading to the protagonist seeing him as "Sheringham" in their dreams, directly setting up Holmes to become the detective when they inform him of their dreams.
• Starter Mon: In addition to Mash, every new player will perform a Starter Summon, a tutorial-type 10-summon which guarantees them at least one out of ten (later 14) available 4* Servant. The original ten Servants were Siegfried (Saber), Chevalier d'Eon (Saber), EMIYA (Archer) Elisabeth Báthory (Lancer), Marie Antoinette (Rider), Saint Martha (Rider), Carmilla (Assassin), Stheno (Assassin), Heracles (Berserker) and Tamamo Cat (Berserker). The Caster-class was notably the only main class not covered by the ten. In JP on July 3rd, 2019, five new Starter Servants were added to the Starter Summon pool, which were Suzuka Gozen (Saber), Atalante (Archer), Parvati (Lancer) Helena Blavatsky (Caster) and Nursery Rhyme (Caster). As of May 11th, 2022 in JP, nine new Starter Servants were added to replace some of the existing ones. Of the original ten, d'Eon, Siegfried, Marie, Martha, and Carmilla have been removed while the other five remain within the pool, and all five Servants added in the last change have also been removed. At present, each of the seven regular classes is represented by two Starter Servants. 5* Servants or other 4* Servants are not available for the Starter Summon. Random 3* Servants that are neither story-locked nor limited are available for the Starter Summon, thus the player is guaranteed to have at least three Servants in their party when they start out.
• Status Buff: Most units have the ability to grant themselves or allies temporary bonus effects, some stronger than others. For every buff, there is usually a debuff version.
  • Offensively, the three main categories are attack, card buffs and power bonuses. Card buffs are bonus effects to the damage of Buster, Arts or Quick cards on top of boosting the secondary effects like NP gain or star generation. Power is split between three effects. First is critical damage, which can apply to all attack. Second is Noble Phantasm power up, which only applies to Noble Phantasms. Finally is just straight power up effects, which are generally fairly rare and tend to be limited to activating against certain straights such as enemies tagged as Evil or Kings. However, despite the different effective targets for power buffs, they are all actually the same effect and have additive effects, not multiplicative, which makes NPs and crits less effective during raid events like Rashomon which provide large power bonuses to the party. There's also an added flat damage bonus from a few skills, but the effect is minor and rarely consequential.
  • Defensively there are two kinds of defense skill as well as two kinds of damage negation. First is defense up, which is the opposite of attack up. A related effect is damage cut, which is like attack up but much more valuable due to the lower numbers involved. Unfortunately, this isn't a common effect. The last two defensive skills are invincibility and evasion. Mechanically, these skills are identical except that invincibility effects are harder to ignore. There are also a few bosses only defensive abilities that force you into using certain strategies, but these are infrequent enough to not go into much detail about them.
  • Stars, health and NP can all be generated in flat amounts on a per turn basis. Merlin, for example, can provide 5+ stars every turn, 5% NP charge and 1000+ HP for five turns by using his NP. It's also possible to increase maximum health or increase healing received. All of these effects also have debuff versions that do the opposite.
  • Finally, there are various miscellaneous effects like increasing the chances of instant death affecting the target when using certain attacks, NP seal, skill seal and even an effect known as buff denial, which blocks attempts by the afflicted to receive any kind of buff until the effect wears off. This effect is actually the opposite of increased skill success rate, a rare effect that increases the odds that chance based skills such as Imperial Privilege will grant their full effect.
  • Tezcatlipoca is the first playable Servant that buffs Master Skills simply by being on the field.
• Status Infliction Attack: Some Command Codes and Craft Essences (which can be attached to Servants at will) allow for their regular attacks to become this, such as inflicting poison.
• Stealth Pun:
  • The "demonic fog" in Japanese is makiri, as in Makiri Zolgen, the villain of the chapter.
  • The 2017 Christmas event has Altera as the Santa stand-in, taking the role from the two Alters before her.
  • Saber Gilles's White Day present is his Jeanne fanzine. He has issues.
  • The first new Mystic Code given in the Lostbelts has fewer belts as opposed to the Too Many Belts of the standard Chaldea Mystic Code. The protagonist had lost belts.
  • The changes in My Room always goes with beds or anything that people can sleep on. Then during "Inheritance of Glory", the My Room background is a flower garden and doesn't have any beds in it, besides some flowerbeds. A lot funnier when Spartacus actually used one to sleep on during the event's story.
  • A running gag throughout the game is that Roman is very enamored with Magi☆Mari, an internet idol. In other words, Solomon, as he did in life, is committing idolatry.
• The Stinger: The -Moonlight/Lost Room- OVA's after-credits scene has someone approach Solomon's throne and take one of his ten rings.
• Subbing for Santa: Each Christmas, a Servant will don the Santa Hat and Hilarity Ensues... and life lessons.
• Succession Crisis: The Septem chapter takes place during Nero's turbulent reign, when a faction of pretenders raises up to knock Nero down from the throne faster than the historical record. Said pretenders are Nero's predecessors.
• Sudden Soundtrack Stop: Normally, the music never stops playing - rather to convey the mood it changes in accordance. However, during one of the summer events, Bedivere and Ushiwakamaru are having a conversation about the other Knights of the Round Table unleashing their inner children at the sight of the ocean. Ushiwakamaru then asks Bedivere what happened to his inner child, to which he responds that since his journey was longer than theirs, it's probably burried deeper inside. The music stops right there, to emphasize the completely unexpected Mood Whiplash in what's otherwise a humourous event, and even the protagonist can only respond with Visible Silence.
• Suddenly Voiced: The game only has certain cutscenes voiced for special occasions since if the entire game was voiced, its data would be incredibly bloated.
  • BB is voiced only for one cutscene at the start of the Fate/Extra CCC event, even acknowledging that she's voiced for this cutscene and it would be a good idea to be on headphones for this if you're in public.
  • The victors of each round of the "Dead Heat Summer Race" are voiced with three different variations of the same scene and the final round has an extended cutscene where a team basks in their victory.
  • Starting with the second Nero Fest, lottery draws are now voiced.
  • During the climax of Observer on Timeless Temple, Dr. Roman is voiced for the cutscene where he casts Ars Nova on Goetia.
• Superboss:
  • In Fuyuki, Caster Cu advises the player not to engage shadow Heracles as even though he's been weakened, he's still ridiculously strong. Shadow Heracles then becomes a one-time boss of an optional area for players. He's likely to be a challenge for early game players as he's level 40, but his difficulty lessens as players progress through the game.
  • With no warning, there is a level 50 repeatable Chimera in Germania, in the Rome chapter. The only clue being Germania is very off the beaten track.
  • After beating Babylonia, Ibaraki-douji (who was The Ghost of this chapter due to running away from Uruk to form a bandit gang) is an optional boss in a one-time-only free quest.
  • Ryougi Shiki appears as a Bonus Boss in SE.RA.PH as MONSTER after clearing all event missions, similar to her bonus boss status back in Fate/EXTRA. She turns into Saber Shiki after the first phase of the fight, paralleling how she had done so in Paradox Spiral after being sealed by Araya in The Garden of Sinners.
  • Completing the church free quest in Salem unlocks one final play the party performs for the townspeople, with an Ugallu, Nezha, and Asterios and Euryale as the bonus bosses.
  • There are a number of extra and generally optional boss fights for events. Some, such as in the "Chocolate Lady's Commotion" expanded rerun or the rerun of Dantes' event, are Boss Rush endurance fights while events like the CCC collaboration let you fight a more difficult form of the event's final boss. Often, there is no reward for doing so and at best it's nothing more than a single summoning ticket or a 4* Fou.
  • One transition into Epic of Remnant are events having one last challenge quest that pits the player against the extremely powerful boss(es), which requires finishing the Final Singularity to access.
• Super Move Portrait Attack: Every Noble Phantasm attack animation gives a close-up shot of the face of the Servant using it.
• Supernatural Fear Inducer: Demons have an ability called "Fear" that inflicts a critical damage debuff on a target for three turns. Caster Gilles' third skill, Prelati's Encouragement, inflicts the "Fear" status on all opponents for five turns with a chance of stunning them. Abigail's second skill also has the same effect.
• Supernaturally-Validated Trans Person: Characters with Ambiguous Gender (d'Eon and Enkidu) usually won't be affected with skills that target certain genders. For the Valentine and White Day events, they can both give chocolate (a feature for female Servants) and receive chocolate (a feature for male Servants).
• Super Title 64 Advance: Fate/Grand Order is often abbreviated to F/GO or even more blatantly, Fate/GO. The April's Fools app also follows this naming scheme by adding the subtitle Gutentag Omen.
• Surplus Damage Bonus: Getting Overkill on an enemy guarantees more critical stars and fills a little bit more of the Servant's NP gauge.
• Survived the Beginning: In "The Flame-Contaminated City Fuyuki", Olga Marie Animusphere is built up as a major character as the director of Chaldea. However, she gets unceremoniously killed off by the explosion and later permanently disposed of by Professor Lev. The fact that The Protagonist is the only available Master that survives it's quite the Plot Point. Only the player character can unravel the mystery behind the explosion, bond with Servants, and accomplish the task Chaldea was built for in the first place.
• Switch-Out Move: The Chaldea Plugsuit is the only way of swapping Servants from the frontline to the backrow.
• Sympathy for the Devil: The party sympathizes with Tiamat's extreme sorrow at having been thrown out and 'killed' after she served her purpose of creating the world and humanity in general, but still feel it was necessary for humanity to flourish. They do it again with no hesitation despite Tiamat being the literal mother of two of the party.

T

• Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: Some Classes have bonus damage and weakness to other Classes.
  • The Three Knight classes form a triangle with Sabers being strong against Lancers, Lancers being strong against Archers, and Archers being strong against Sabers.
  • The Three Cavalry classes, Riders, Assassins, and Casters form another triangle. Riders are strong against Casters, Casters are strong against Assassins, and Assassins are strong against Riders.
  • Berserkers exist outside both triangles. Instead, they deal 1.5x as much damage and take double damage from every class except Shielder, Foreigner, and every Beast besides Beast I. They deal half damage to and receive double damage from Foreigners.
  • Shielder equally damages and resists all Classes, including Berserkers.
  • The first three extra classes after Shielder form another triangle, with Avengers being strong against Rulers, Rulers being strong against Moon Cancers, and Moon Cancers being strong against Avengers. Rulers also take half damage from the Knight and Cavalry traingles, but deal neutral damage in return.
  • The final three extra classes form yet another triangle, with Alter Egos being strong against Foreigners, Foreigners being strong against Pretenders, and Pretenders being strong against Alter Egos. Each class also has its own interactions with the regular classes:
    • Alter Egos deal 1.5x damage to the Cavalry triangle, and deal half damage to the Knight triangle.
    • Pretenders deal 1.5x damage to the Knight triangle, and deal half damage to the Cavalry triangle.
    • Foreigners resist and deal double damage to Berserkers, and deal double damage to other Foreigners.
  • Each Beast has its unique triangles and weaknesses.
    • The "Unknown" type which Solomon and his demons belong to is actually Beast I, and they deal double damage to the Knight class triangle, take double damage from the Cavalry class triangle, and deal half damage to Avengers.
    • Beast II and Beast VII simply take and deal neutral damage to all classes.
    • Beast III-R is defensively neutral to all classes except Alter Ego and Moon Cancer, who deal a small amount of bonus damage to them. It is offensively neutral to all.
    • Beast III-L is defensively neutral to all classes except Alter Ego and Foreigner, who deal a small amount of bonus damage to them. It is offensively neutral to all.
    • The Treasured Beast/Beast IV:L has a double layer of this. The class itself deals half damage to Casters. The only one seen also has a passive that causes it to deal double damage to Hominidae Servants, and take double damage from Demonic Beast Servants. Neither of those traits are used or mentioned anywhere else in the game, and are distinct from the Human, Humanoid, Demonic, and Beast traits.
    • Beast VI/S deals extra damage to all seven normal classes, and takes extra damage from all the extra classes.
    • The Beast of Oblivion has the same interactions as Beast I, but also deals extra damage to Foreigners, and a 'takes double deals half disadvantage' against Moon Cancers.
    • Their only commonality is every Beast takes double damage from Aŋra Mainiiu when he has his Bond 10 Craft Essence equipped.
  • Beyond the Servant classes, there is a well-hidden second set of stats that sort Servants by what grade of Servant they are, with the designations Earth, Man, Sky, Star, and Beast. They're mentioned in EMIYA's interlude and near the end of Chapter 4 by Tesla and Da Vinci, and the damage is at most modified by 10%, so it's not something you'd notice in normal gameplay unless a Servant has a skill or NP that directly relates to it (Raikou's third skill and Tesla's NP do bonus damage to Servants with the Earth or Sky traits, for example).
    • Da Vinci in chapter 4 explains how the triangle between the first three works: Earth represents legends and stories, Man are those who existed in history or were completely unknown, and Sky are those who were Gods or Divine. Earth beats Man because they're more powerful then regular humans, Man beats Sky because humanity can rebel against the gods, and Sky beats Earth because gods have dominion over heroes in stories.
• Tagline: "Take back our future." for Observer on Timeless Temple, "Four fragments full of decadence and prejudice, love and lust. Rejoice. The myth of the Pillars of the Temple shall be revived here." for Epic of Remnant, and "This is our story of the battle against the future." for Cosmos in the Lostbelt.
• Take My Hand!: Mash, recently revived by Fou, manages to do this for the protagonist when the path they're on collapses before they make it to the exit to Solomon's Temple.
• Takes One to Kill One:
  • Berserkers having Mutual Disadvantage against most classes (except Shielder and Foreigner), has this towards other Berserkers.
  • Foreigners' weakness aside from Alter Ego is also itself.
  • Certain Servants have Kryptonite Factor against certain enemies due to their traits carries those traits themselves like Karna, Siegfried, Jack the Ripper and MHX, making them weak against their Noble Phantasms.
  • Lorewise, certain chapters in the main story involved non-Servant beings like human soldiers and Yagas who can fight off monsters and other summoned beings, yet completely helpless against Servants. Their only hope against them is to have some of them on their side.
• Take That!:
  • During Brynhild's Trial Quest, several Helter Skelters interrupted her dialogue, in which she commented that they must have been brought by "that damnable fire emblem..."^note which has since been changed to "that damnable blue flame" before focusing to kill them for interrupting her dialogue.
  • Da Vinci finds the idea of having put codes into her paintings to be both silly and demeaning.
  • During the "All the Statesmen" event, both Geronimo and Edison are disgusted by where they land in the singularity, the former calling it a dreadful place and the latter calling it the boonies. That place? North Dakota. In context, it's a bit less mocking, since Edison brings up the low population density even in modern times making it hard to ever find people in the forest they're stuck in.
• Teenage Wasteland: The nature of the Götterdämmerung Lostbelt is a variation on this. Here, the humans only have up to 25 years to live and once one reaches that age, the Valkyries will take them to be fed to the giants.
• Temporary Online Content: True to mobage tradition, certain Servants, Craft Essences, and Mystic Codes are only available for a limited time, as either missable event content or locked behind a limited-time gacha. However, the developers eventually put event content like the latter two in the Rare Prism shop. The former returning to the game remains dependent on when they decide to do another limited rate-up gacha or rerun the event. The Main Interlude feature averts this, as any old events with story quests that already had a Re-Run in the past are brought back into the game, but only the Main Quests of the corresponding events can be played, turning its respective event Servants permanently available (albeit costing Rare Prism).
• Thanatos Gambit: Roman/Solomon's secret plan to defeat Goetia is to erase himself from existence because Goetia is possessing his corpse, and thus stealing his power as the King of Mages.
  Goetia: As I thought, just empty words! You have always been nothing but talk, fool! Just die. I will send you to your death with your own Noble Phantasm.
  Solomon: That's the plan. I will be extinguished by my own Noble Phantasm. This is the end of King Solomon.
  Goetia: ...What?
  Solomon: Goetia. I'll teach you one last magecraft. You knew of King Solomon's final Noble Phantasm, but you didn't know its True Name... No, you could never know its True Name. "The Time of Birth Hath Come, I Am the Remedy of Eternity." "The Time of Coronation Hath Come, I Am the Beginning of Eternity." And finally... "The Time of Parting Hath Come, I Am He Who Surrenders the World." ...Ars Nova.
• That Was the Last Entry: Abigail's Bond CE description is a field report on the Silver Key. It starts out normally, expositing its function and where it's ended up in the present day. It slowly descends into insanity as the author is corrupted by its presence, proclaiming the end times with liberal usage of Cthulhu's Starfish Language, observing Abigail's ascension to Time Master status by connecting with Yog-Sothoth. Then it abruptly ends mid-sentence after one final lucid attempt at a warning about Abigail's powers before succumbing, with a note added by someone else that the entry ended here.
• Thematic Sequel Logo Change: The subtitle for Cosmos in the Lostbelt is in a white font to represent the bleached Earth. The "L" is partially made up of multiple diamonds coming together to form the letter, evoking the appearance of Trees of Emptiness, the tools of the Foreign God.
• Thematic Theme Tune:
  • "Shikisai", the theme song for part 1, is mainly written from Mash's perspective, or more specifically the mindset she has when going into the final battle, rejecting Solomon's vision of immortality even as she's dying, trying to live every moment to the fullest as a human.
  • The first theme song for Cosmos in the Lostbelt, "Gyakko", is stated to be the perspective of a character that will be fully understood by the end. The second theme song, "Yakudou", is said to be specific to a character in the sixth Lostbelt.
• Theme Music Powerup: Some Noble Phantasms get this treatment, temporarily replacing the soundtrack while the animation plays with a small snippet of their related theme.
  • Altria (her vanilla Saber version only) gets "Sword of Promised Victory" from Fate/hollow ataraxia when she uses Excalibur.
  • The original EMIYA gets his theme, "EMIYA" when he uses Unlimited Blade Works.
  • Nero has a choir version of her theme from Fate/EXTRA, "Everything is in Your Hands" (the version that plays in CCC to be specific) when she uses Laus Saint Claudius, and her Bride counterpart uses a different arrangement. Her Swimsuit version uses a new arrangement of the same song for her Noble Phantasm.
  • After the Chapter 5 update, Tamamo also has her theme music, "Extra Life with Anyone She Wants".
  • Santa Alter has... "Jingle Bells". No, really.
  • Ryougi Shiki (either one) gets her theme, "Seventh Heaven", from the The Garden of Sinners movie series.
  • Gilgamesh's updated animation gives him his Leitmotif from Fate/Extra CCC, "Cosmic Air".
  • Iskander has "You Are My King" and Dress of Heaven has "Silver Moon" from Fate/Zero.
  • Rider Kintoki has rock music play when using Golden Drive.
  • Mash's true Noble Phantasm, Lord Camelot, comes with a remix of the title theme.
  • Illya and Chloe have music from the Prisma Illya anime play when using their NP. Chloe has "Shoujo Yo, Hoshi ni Nare", which is, in turn, a remix of "Starlog", the original opening theme music.
  • After an update, Altera has her theme from Fate/Extella play when using Photon Ray.
  • After much requesting from fans and her voice actor, Bathory finally has her theme song, "Fresh Blood Demoness" from Extra CCC when using her NP.
  • BB gets a remix of the "BB Channel" theme.
  • Swimsuit Helena has an electronic theme, befitting the NP's cyberpunk aesthetic.
  • Swimsuit Nobunaga plays rock music on her guitar for her NP.
  • Osakabe-hime has soft Japanese music, enhancing the atmosphere of a Japanese princess walking on the castle roof at night.
  • Kiara has "Anima Ataraxia", her True Final Boss theme from Fate/Extra CCC.
  • Abigail has sickly-sounding string instruments play as she unleashes unworldly horrors on the enemy.
  • Scathach-Skadi's theme is imperious in tone, complete with a One-Woman Wail.
  • As part of the Magical Girl Affectionate Parody, Shuten-douji's Caster version has an upbeat Japanese tune.
  • In the story itself, "Sword of Promised Victory" plays in Shinjuku as Altria Alter destroys the meteor rubble above the city with Excalibur Morgan.
  • In Shimosa Province, Sengo Muramasa has a new arrangement of "EMIYA" play as he prepares his NP against Amakusa.
  • In the final boss of part 1, King of Demons Goetia, an instrumental arrangement of the main theme Shikisai plays.
• There Can Be Only One: SE.RA.PH once again operates by these rules in the CCC crossover, as the protagonist must eliminate the other 127 Servants to escape. Well, in theory, anyway...
• The Three Faces of Adam: Cu Chulainn's three alternate versions are modeled after this. The Prototype version is defined by his warrior feats against the near-infinite army of Connacht and explicitly referred to as younger than usual, making him the Hunter. His Alter is the Lord, a what-if scenario where he's a king and changes his land to fit his ideals for better or worse. His Caster version is the Prophet, preferring to watch the story unfold and acting as a guide for his Master when needed.
• Threshold Guardian: Nearly all enemy Servants are this; even ones that supposedly are helping Solomon. Altria Alter (both Saber and Lancer) openly comments that they are a barrier to prove whether the Main Character is worthy of moving forward.
• Thunderbolt Iron: One of the ascension materials, the Meteoric Horseshoe, is made from this. Its flavor text notes that though it's made up of the same materials any earthborn horseshoe would have, it's special because it wasn't forged on Earth and from a meteor.
• Time Crash: Normally sacrificing a Divine Spirit to the Ark would, at worst, just destroy the surrounding area but since it's in a singularity, this is what would happen.
• Time Travel: The plot involves traveling to singularities/Lostbelts, which are a kind of corrupted version of history that has been partially severed from the normal flow of time and needs to be repaired. Real-time travel to whenever you please is not possible without using something like Kaleidoscope.
  • Chaldea's version of time travel can only go to the past and BB's hacking is the only reason they could rayshift the protagonist to the future of 2030 AD for one special occasion in the CCC crossover. BB, however, reveals that Chaldea can rayshift to the future under normal circumstances, it's just that the "future" as Chaldea knows it still doesn't exist past 20XX AD despite defeating Goetia. She notes that doesn't matter for what's happening in the events of said crossover (all but stated to be due to the Foreign God's interference in Cosmos in the Lostbelt).
  • Due to the unique nature of SE.RA.PH's digitization of the ocean, a localized version of this can occur by going upwards through the path created by SE.RA.PH as certain heights corresponds to a certain point in time. Meltryllis uses Virgin Laser Palladion to launch her two hours in real-time back to her first meeting with the protagonist. BB pulls a similar trick by transporting everyone before they died to two minutes before that happened.
  • The enemies in Cosmos in the Lostbelt have removed humanity and imposed certain periods on Earth but they have to keep Alternate Universe stitched to each of their lines of time (their "lostbelts") via a Tree of Emptiness or else the timeline is denied and collapses. The new mobile base can enter the new timeline.
• Timey-Wimey Ball: Seemingly averted as at the end of Sasaki Kojirou's Interlude, you get scolded for letting him mark his name on the colosseum wall, saying that it could've caused issues in the future.
• Time Loop Trap: The plot of the Summer 2018 event turns out to be this. There's a "Groundhog Day" Loop that occurs every 7 days in Hawaii, which traps everyone, including our protagonist, within it. Near the end of the event's story, it's revealed that the culprit was BB, who borrowed powers from Nyarlathotep to set this all up. She did so in order to give everyone, and especially our protagonist, eternal bliss.
• Title Drop: Obviously, the mission to save humanity, which is known as the Grand Order. However, the mission was named for "the oldest and greatest order of mankind", a policy amongst mages to never commit suicide and to continue living so they can continue their bloodlines. The Final Order, however, reveals the very sinister truth about the original Grand Order: it is an Ancient Conspiracy to allow Goetia to seed himself across three thousand years in the form of seventy-two agents so that he can create the Singularities.
• Title Theme Drop:
  • At the end of the America chapter, the player fights Halphas while a remix of the main menu theme is playing in the background.
  • Mash's true Noble Phantasm, Lord Camelot, plays a remix of the title theme.
  • The Very Definitely Final Dungeon, Grand Time Temple Solomon, features a lot of remixes of the title theme, the main menu theme, and even the opening theme, "Shikisai".
• Tomes of Prophecy and Fate: Well, tablet actually (paper wasn't invented yet), but Caster Gilgamesh sends the heroes to search for one of these during the Babylonia chapter, in hopes that it might have information that could help them. After retrieving it, Gilgamesh uses it and his magic to show the protagonist a cryptic vision. It's later revealed to be a glimpse into "Solomon"'s motive for incinerating the Human Order.
• Too Awesome to Use: Several examples:
  • The Command Seals. When you have three of them activate, you can fully revive your party and fill up their NP gauge. While this is incredibly powerful, it takes 24 hours for a Command Seal to recharge, totaling about 3 days to fully recharge your Command Seals. Many would agree that this should only be used in the toughest boss fights as a comeback mechanic when your entire party is wiped.
  • Saint Quartz. Obtaining them is incredibly limited and there are finite ways to obtain them such as daily logins, weekly missions, increasing the Bond level of your higher tier Servants as a reward, doing quests and Interludes, compensation for maintenances, event rewards, or spending real-life money for them. They are used for particular Saint Quartz summoning events where the player can potentially get a Servant or a Craft Essence that is 4 stars or more. It is not uncommon for players to save up months worth of Saint Quartz for a specific Summoning Quartz summon event where a particular servant's drop rate is either increased or obtaining a limited Servant that cannot be obtained normally via the regular Summoning Quartz summon.
  • The Holy Grail item for Palingenesis. They are considered to be the rarest item in the game for Palingenesis where you can only obtain them either through completing singularities in the main storyline or completing certain special events. Many players will strictly use them in servants that are 4 star or above (or certain lower rarity servants that are Simple, yet Awesome).
  • Crystallized Lores are the material used to increase a Servant's skill to level 10 but they are only obtainable through the Rare Prism shop or events by either 1.) completing a challenge quest, 2.) using a high number of the rarest event currency to buy one, 3.) reaching the tenth raffle box, or 4.) grinding several million points.
  • Stargazer's Teapot doubles the amount of Bond Points gained from battle, with the catch being that they have an expiration date on when they are still usable. While the first set of Teapots were given right before the Tunguska Sanctuary event which features raid quests, some of them were given in a particular "lull period" with seemingly no "good" place to use them to the point that some players hoard them with the idea that there will be a right moment to use them.
• Too Dumb to Live: The scientists from Area 51 who retrieved and cruelly experimented on the Alien that was giving off radio signals which brought The Foreign God to Earth. They decided to do more horrific experiments in hopes of it getting here faster to experiment on. The result was The Foreign God unleashing a Curbstomp Battle.
• Total Eclipse of the Plot: There exists a circular band of light resembling a solar eclipse that can be seen in every Singularity. According to calculations, nothing on Earth exists that has enough energy to exceed the band of light. It's Solomon's third Noble Phantasm, Ars Almadel Salomonis. It's what he used to incinerate all of human history, and it contains all the energy he collected from burning 3000 years' worth of humans, so he can undo the Quantum Time Locks and travel 4.6 billion years to the past.
• Touched by Vorlons:
  • The Babylonia chapter reveals microorganisms from a meteor infected plants and animals in Mesoamerica, transforming the plants and animals into divine spirits and tying them into the prehistoric.
  • A major qualifications for the Foreigner class is having contact with an Outer God and resisting the madness that comes with it. Abigail Williams had been used as a vessel for the Outer God Räum attempts to summon, while Katsushika Hokusai had contact with another upon stumbling into a dimensional rift Abigail had created.
  • A bizarre inverted case. The Greek gods were originally alien machines that came to Earth, and upon having contact with humans, they worshipped the machines that then became gods.
• Tournament Arc:
  • The Nero Festival events (succeeded by the Battle in New York events) are these with several teams of Servants competing against one another to win the tournament. There were tiers of increasing difficulty that would change every 3 days of the event.
  • Mysterious Heroine X's interludes are about her participating in a tournament to defeat the most famous Sabers.
  • Kojirou's interlude is about him conquering Nero's colosseum.
  • Shimosa is set up as a tournament of Musashi against seven swordmasters, with the Final Boss as her final match and the ending text being "Grand Slam".
  • Quetzacoatl's interlude is about her in an MMA tournament arranged by Mash to entertain her, with her going up against Ruler Martha, Assassin of Shinjuku, and Sherlock Holmes.
• Trailers Always Lie: Several trailers have had false details in them, fooling players into assuming what's going to happen in the story.
  • The one for Garden of Order had Diarmuid in it but he doesn't show up anywhere. Likewise, Medea Lily plays no role nor do Azaka and Illya ever interact.
  • The one for America had Diarmuid wielding swords, hinting he would appear as a Saber, but you only fight him as a Lancer.
  • The "Fate/Accel Zero Order" trailer shows the iconic Lancelot and Gilgamesh dogfight, now with Mash and has young Waver with Kayneth, neither of which happens in the event story.
  • Shinjuku's PV has Dantes fighting against Yan Qing, which doesn't happen in the story. Nor does the group assembled at the end of the trailer come to be in the story proper as Holmes had disguised himself as Dantes, and the latter only shows up briefly for the final battle.
  • Nero Bride ultimately plays no role in SE.RA.PH, only providing a brief appearance at the start of the chapter and even then it's the original version of Nero. She appears in the second part only as OG Nero. Moreover, the original trailer lies and implies that the event is another funny gag event, whereas the second trailer, released after the event revealed itself as a gruesome gaiden chapter, is accurate.
  • Salem's PV depicts the male protagonist and Mash in circus attire with a circus tent in the background. However, in the game, the heroes aren't circus performers and are pretending to be part of an acting troupe.
  • Cosmos in the Lostbelt's trailer listed the fifth Lostbelt chapter as "Interstellar Mountainous City: ??? - The Day God Is Shot Down". However when the actual chapter is released, it turns out that it's two parts with the subtitle still applying to both parts, but the first part is in a completely different location.
  • The Openings aren't exempt from this either:
    • The first opening depicts seven servants, one for each class, implying they'll have large roles in the game. Of the seven, however, only Jekyll and Ushiwakamaru have real roles, being supporting characters in London and Babylonia respectively. Altera is the Final Boss of Septem but is less a character and more an obstacle, Darius and Mephistopheles are minor antagonists in Septem and London respectively, and Arjuna is a minor antagonist turned ally in E Pluribus Unum and Scathach is a minor ally in the same singularity. The opening also prominently features Altria and EMIYA, with Altria being Out of Focus overall, and EMIYA only having a supporting role in certain events. Lastly, Jeanne is shown using La Pucelle as a regular sword when using it is supposed to be a suicide attack.
    • The second opening shows Gao Changgong Dual Wielding blades, however, he only wields one blade. His other hand is usually holding his scabbard.
    • The third opening was explicitly confirmed in interviews to be drafted while various key details were either unfinished or explicitly forbidden to avoid spoilers, hence the big all-out fight scene between Chaldea and the Foreign God's forces being made entirely whole cloth for the opening and not something that will happen exactly as depicted in the game.
• Trailers Always Spoil:
  • For the Salem Pseudo-Singularity the trailer hints, and the in-game News post outright says, that there's more to Abigail Williams than meets the eye, the latter presenting her as a Servant directly manipulating the events of the Pseudo-Singularity. In Salem itself, Chaldea has no idea who in this village has any magical power whatsoever and the party has to theorize who might be a Servant or the Demon God Pillar they are hunting, and they are blindsided by the fact that the little girl they'd been helping all along has Servant-like powers. But her role is as a victim, not a perpetrator.
  • The Götterdämmerung trailer reveals that Surtr goes on the rampage and Sigurd has to fight him, which are major plot twists for that arc.
  • The Atlantis trailer shows several shots almost every heroic Servant's final moments in the Lostbel.
• Transformation Horror: In Shimousa, it turns out that the source of (some of) the monsters plaguing the province is from transformed villagers and townspeople. Near the end of the chapter, players are treated to a (dialogue and sound only) description of a woman's head swelling up and popping open with a squishing sound as she transforms into a monster, among other victims including children.
• Translator Microbes: Chaldea provides translation charms for their staff to allow them to understand anyone from any period.
• Trauma Button: Mash and the protagonist being only able to watch as Olga Marie died screaming about her failures and about nobody praising or loving her traumatized them. When Goredolf was doomed and begging for help, the Chaldean survivors were prepared to let him die, albeit reluctantly. When he started crying over the same lack of love and praise, Mash and the protagonist immediately rush to save him, despite the risk and the fact he's been nothing but trouble.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Played for Laughs all the time with the "child" Servants, the two core members being (mostly formerly) Creepy Child Nursery Rhyme and still Cute But Psycho Jack the Ripper. Everyone knows they're Servants and therefore darker and more mature than they superficially appear... but they still act like cute Cheerful Children enough of the time that Servants like Boudica and EMIYA explicitly call them children and consider making kids' meals for them during the third Nero Fest. Some rotating "child" friends include Jeanne d'Arc Santa Lily, Paul Bunyan, Medea Lily, Ibaraki-Douji, and Assassin of the Nightless City, with the latter being particularly alarming when she offers to let them all play with a torture device during the same event.
• Turns Red: Upon depleting a break bar, most bosses will get a free action to buff themselves and/or debuff the player.

U-V

• Underground Monkey:
  • Several enemies have multiple variations with different coloring like golems being made of different kinds of rock or crystal, or even snowmen and biscuits. The main difference between enemy types in gameplay is the skills they use and class.
  • In the Babylonia Singularity (which tries to avert this trope by introducing a wave of enemies with completely new animations), the player spars with Uruk Spartan Soldiers (Uruk soldiers trained by Leonidas), but they're just renamed Roman soldiers from the Rome Singularity, complete with gladius and scutum.
  • The four Irisviels that were created from the corrupted Holy Grail's essence are all recolored versions of Dark Irisviel with different skills, lines, and NPs.
  • Played for laughs in the gag Riyo event. Altera and Billy show up to play the role of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday respectively, but while Altera gets into it, Billy admits he's not entirely sure who he's supposed to be, or why they're reusing assets in such a half-assed way. Later, Altera comes back as Buffalo Bill. Naturally, she still looks and speaks the same as always. Or rather, the same as a meme version of her character.
• Under the Sea:
  • One of the stages in Agartha is the Undersea Dragon Palace, where the protagonist and co. have their final encounter with Dahut.
  • The entire setting of SE.RA.PH is technically one as it takes place in a sinking oil rig.
• Undying Loyalty: As Bond EXP goes up, some Servants will vow to always serve and protect their Master.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable: It is possible for a battle to become softlocked if two high-levelled Oberons use their "Eternal Sleep" skill on themselves while facing a low-level enemy, such as the Skeletons in the prologue, and are equipped with a Craft Essence that heals them for more health than the enemies can damage them for. The only way out if this happens is to exit the battle.
• Uniqueness Rule: While you can use two of the same Servant as long as one of them is the Support that's being borrowed from your friends list, you cannot put in two copies of the same Servant you own on the same team.
• Universal Chaplain: In the backstory, Kiara Sesshouin, normally a Buddhist, got a job as a multi-faith therapist in Seraphix, a facility owned by the Chaldea Security Organisation. One of her discarded journals expresses some confusion over this.
• Unlockable Content: Beating certain points in the game's story will give the player more content.
  • Each Singularity has a set of Servants associated with it that can be only summoned after beating it, and even then they can only be summoned from the main story gacha or event banners with them featured:
    • Caster Cu Chulainn and Saber Alter from Fuyuki.
    • Caster Gilles from Orleans.
    • Nero from Rome.
    • Medea (Lily) from Okeanos.
    • Nikola Tesla and Lancer Altria (Alter) from London.
    • Medb, Cu Chulainn (Alter), Li Shuwen and Thomas Edison from E Pluribus Unum.
    • Lancer Altria, Gawain, Tristan, and Bedivere from Camelot.
    • Quetzalcoatl, Gorgon, and Jaguar Warrior from Babylonia.
    • EMIYA (Alter) from Shinjuku.
    • Rider of the Resistance/Christopher Columbus from Agartha.
    • Kato Danzo and Saber Empireo/Yagyu Tajima-no-kami Munenori from Shimosa Province.
    • Caster of Midrash/The Queen of Sheba from Salem.
    • Antonio Salieri from Anastasia.
    • Sitonai from Götterdämmerung. Unique in that she only became available several months later during the Oniland event before being added to the story gacha.
    • Red Hare, Yu Miaoyi, and Li Shuwen (Old) from SIN. Doubly so in Yu's case since she's Hinako and has to die at the end of SIN to ascend to the Throne of Heroes as a Servant, while Shuwen is a similar case to Sitonai in that he becomes available several months later during the New Year 2019 event.
    • Ashwatthama and Asclepius from Yuga Kshetra.
    • Caenis from Olympus.
    • Fairy Knight Gawain (Barghest), Fairy Knight Tristan (Baobhan Sith), and Habetrot for Avalon le Fae. Habetrot is noticeable for being the first and so-far only story-locked Servant who can be found in the Friend Point Gacha.
  • Most events can only be done after beating Fuyuki, with others requiring players to go further and beat certain Singularities, usually since the major characters involved are related to that event. To play any Epic of Remnant chapter, you must clear Solomon Temple, the last episode of Arc 1.
  • SE.RA.PH, while a big crossover event meant to draw in new players like prior crossover events, is also an Epic of Remnant chapter, and so was only accessible upon beating Solomon Temple.
  • Some events include a Challenge Quest only accessible for players that beat Solomon Temple.
  • The third Christmas event, "Merry Christmas in the Netherworld", can be only participated by players who beat Babylonia before and during the event period, as its main story acts as something of an epilogue for several characters in Babylonia particularly Ereshkigal.
• The Unmasqued World: What Scheherazade was intending to do by crashing Laputa, effectively exposing magic and weaken it to the point where Servants could no longer be summoned, finally allowing her to rest at peace.
• Upgrade Artifact: The Holy Grails have been used as these for Servants throughout the game.
  • The Palingenesis mechanic lets you use them on Servants to go beyond the normal level cap and level them up to 100.
  • In America, Medb uses a grail to empower Cú Chulainn Alter, making him even more deadly.
  • In Babylonia, Gorgon uses one to make herself divine and also borrow one of Tiamat's authorities, making her more powerful than she usually would be.
• Urban Fantasy: Shinjuku is a return to the Nasuverse's roots with Servants duking it out in a densely populated urban environment. Also, the Servant antagonists have directly recruited Muggle gang members as their mooks, providing them with drugs that give them temporary Magic Circuits and have been given genetically engineered Chimeras as enforcement.
• Unreveal Angle:
  • Throughout the first segment of Moonlight/Lostroom, Dr. Roman is kept at specific angles that don't exactly show him, but the audience can hear him and see his hands.
  • The same also applies to the owner of the mysterious hands that take one of Solomon's rings in The Stinger of the aforementioned OVA.
  • Marisbury's possible murderer in "Initium Iter" is never seen fully in frame, with only their gun and boots shown to the audience. The scene instead focuses on Marisbury's side of the chat with them. However, the boots directly match up with Daybit Zem Void's boots from his artwork, which suggests but does not confirm that Void was at fault.
• Useless Useful Spell:
  • As a blanket statement, debuffs are very powerful in this game whenever they work — some have low success chance or only affect certain targets as a trade-off. However, the recurring victim of Contractual Boss Immunity is Instant Death. Actual bosses and enemy Servants are either immune or practically immune to this effect, making Servants that specialize in this debuff without any damage backing them up much weaker. But even in day-to-day farming, the rarity of an enemy target affects their total chance to die to Instant Death. Bronze rarity enemies have full susceptibility to Instant Death, so the advertised chance of inflicting Instant Death is accurate and Nitocris in particular profits as a class-neutral Bronze enemy sweeper. But Silver rarity enemies multiply this rate by only 80% susceptibility, Gold ones by 50%, and Mini-Bosses or Bosses only have 20 to 1% susceptibility, meaning that a supposed 300% chance of Instant Death could be as low as 3%. Lampshaded by Jaguar Warrior in her Interlude, as she insults Cú Chulainn's Noble Phantasm as an "instant death move that NEVER WORKS!"^note He has a mere 60% Instant Death chance that maxes out at 100% if it's at maximum Overcharge, and since it's single-target players will rarely if ever use it against a Bronze rarity enemy
  • For buffs that doesn't work as intended, there is C. Star Gather Rate Down. In theory, it should work as an inversion to Critical Star Gather Rate Up, meaning that the Servant with the buff should't receive any Critical Stars in benefit of the other party members. However, the way Critical Star distribution works isn't purely relied on the Servant's Star Gather Up Rate, but the game will also randomly select few cards in your hand to gain an additional increase in Star Gather Up Rate, making them more likely to gain the Critical Stars. C. Star Gather Rate Ups gets around the problem by having a particularly high Gather Up increase, starting at around 300%. But Critical Star Gather Rate Downs tend to only max out on 100%, making them not as effective as they should be. They tend to also be on Servants who either have really high Star Gather Up Rate like Assassin of Shinjuku, or the one who inflicts it on other party members have a really low Star Gather Up Rate like Chacha.
• Version-Exclusive Content: Fate/Grand Order Arcade introduced the concept of this with certain events, Craft Essences, skins and even units being only accessible through that version of the game. However, the inclusion and eventual exportation of Leonardo Da Vinci (Rider), who was originally an Arcade exclusive unit, into the main game with minor changes to her kit and new art set a precedent for certain skins and units potentially being ported over to Fate/Grand Order. For now, the list of Arcade exclusive units includes:
  • Leonardo Da Vinci (Rider). The version of her in Fate/Grand Order Arcade is different enough to be counted as a separate unit, though the concept itself was carried over to the main game.
  • Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (Christmas) (Rider)
  • Merlin (Prototype) (Caster)
  • Sita (Archer)
  • Suzuka Gozen (Santa)
  • Sétanta (Young Cú Chulainn)
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: Grand Time Temple Solomon, the Big Bad's fortress that has been summoned to the year 2016, right before the extinction of humanity, acts as this for the first arc.
• Video Call Fail: During the "GUDAGUDA 3" event, Chaldea's connection with the Singularity is being blocked, so whenever Da Vinci and Mash try to video call the protagonist, the call is always cut short just as Mash tries relay an important message to the protagonist. Over the course of several calls, Guest-Star Party Member Okita Alter gets the impression that Mash is overprotective and dislikes her... And when Mash finally gets to say what she was trying to without the call getting cut short, she says that she's glad Okita is there and trusts her to take care of the protagonist.
• Video Game Raids: A couple of events feature raids in order to unlock the story quests. Benefits of doing them include shop currency and materials used for ascension and skill upgrades.
• Villainous Mother-Son Duo: In Babylonia, Enkidu consistently refers to Tiamat as his "mother", alluding to the fact that he's Kingu, Tiamat's son and consort, using the hero's body. She ultimately discards him once she's freed and replaced with the Lahmu, prompting him to rebel in the finale by turning into the Chains of Heaven to temporarily bind her, buying the heroes valuable time.
• Virtual Celebrity: Magi★Mari is one that Dr. Romani obsesses over. In one of Romani’s Craft Essences, we get a glimpse of what she looks like.◊ As it turns out, it’s just Merlin managing the website presumably with the free time he has on his hands in Avalon.
• Virtual Paper Doll: Servants can be freely switched between three different outfits and a costume store introduced with the first Summer event rerun allows players to buy alternate costumes like swimsuits and casual outfits for Servants albeit certain conditions need to be fulfilled before unlocking the costumes, like beating a certain quest or having them at max level. Currently, only Mash (has two), Medb, 4* Saber Nero, Parvati, Astolfo, Jeanne Alter, and Arthur (Prototype) have these alternate costumes.
• Virtual Training Simulation: Chaldea provides several as part of their way to train Masters and Servants. It serves as the tutorial while you wait for entrance into the main building.
  • It's also explained later that the daily quests in Chaldea Gate are these as well. The game warns against thinking about why you get special drops from them in Sherlock's trial quest.
  • Several interludes have the Servants using the sim with varying degrees of success, like Fergus using simulations of several women to attempt flirting or Jing Ke going through a recreation of her assassination attempt to see if it could be pulled off successfully.
  • Edison has his own installed in his castle and goes through one before leading his army against the Celts.
• Visible Silence: Ellipses or even multiple exclamation marks are frequently employed to show that a character is thinking about something, but choosing not to respond. Mechanically, it's also a convenient way for the visual novel cutscenes to change a character's sprite and show the emotion on their face with placeholder text.
  • Gilles de Rais (Saber) emotes in "Saber Wars" this way, almost never speaking and somehow conveying meaning to Blackbeard.
  • The protagonist also has some chances to inject a "..." as a dialog option when otherwise given a chance to speak; usually, this silence conveys its own poignant meaning.
• Vitriolic Best Buds:
  • The Knights of the Round Table bicker, squabble and attack each other constantly, but there are no hard feelings on any sides anymore even though almost all of them betrayed or screwed over their beloved king in one way or another. Even setting that aside, Mordred killed Gawain while Lancelot killed his younger siblings.
  • Dr. Roman and Da Vinci constantly bicker, with him calling her a pervert and her threatening to "straight-up murder" him for being so annoying. They still clearly trust and care about each other anyway. There's also a sort of one-sided version of this in Dr. Roman's relationship with Mash: he's nice to her but can't help being annoying, so she never hesitates to completely roast him.

W-Z

• Wacky Racing: The theme for the second Summer event as various Servants, some in swimsuits, pair up to win the "Dead Heat Summer Race". The second part, "Death Jail Summer Escape", continues the theme as they race to break out of jail first with the explanation that Ishtar's still filming them and need something to keep the audience entertained. It's all an excuse Ishtar whipped up to get Servants to complete a ritual for her to remove the Singularity.
• Wake-Up Call Boss:
  • You fight Saber Alter at the end of the Fuyuki prologue, and if you don't kill her fast enough, you'll learn that unlike the shadow Servants you've faced thus far, enemy Servants can and will use their Noble Phantasms once they've charged up that bar below their HP bar.
  • The first Demon Pillar is fought near the end of the Septem chapter and sets the standard for future Demon Pillar fights to come, boasting a boatload of HP and weaknesses that the player won't know until they find out for themselves. Additionally, every attack it makes is AoE, spelling Total Party Kill for an underleveled and underbuffed party.
  • Camelot is notorious for having a whole bunch of these in quick succession, despite how relatively late in the game it is. Before that chapter, you can pretty easily plow through the game with any team of Servants as long as you respect the rock-paper-scissors mechanic. But with Camelot, Gawain reduces the damage of your attacks to the point where you either need to outlast him, use an entire team dedicated to stacking buffs on each other, or take advantage of traits to further increase damage. Mordred can use her Noble Phantasm every turn, so she'll chew through any team that can't kill her quickly, block NP usage or gauge, or stack defense against it. Tristan is weak to Sabers after a wave of very high HP Archers, forcing you to plan your team carefully. These three enemies are the first that require any sort of thought into team composition, warning the player that this is how all bosses are going to be from this point forwards.
• The Warlord:
  • Numerous historical warlords appear as summonable Servants throughout the game, including Alexander the Great and Atilla the Hun. The game pays a large amount of focus on Sengoku Period such as Nagao Kagetora and Oda Nobunaga, who sought to bring all of Japan under their control when they were alive, during the GUDAGUDA Events.
  • During the "GUDAGUDA Final Honnouji" event, the protagonist takes the role of a warlord who unites all of Japan under their rule in order to resolve a Singularity. Despite this, they retain their usual Nice Guy and All-Loving Hero attitude in how they treat their subjects and go about their conquest. They become wildly successful in this endeavor despite lacking the ruthlessness and ambition usually required for this trope, something that Nobbu is in disbelief over.
• Weather-Control Machine: Babbage and Paracelsus used the Grail to power one of these, spewing the demonic fog everywhere in London.
• Webcomic Time: The game is supposed to happen in real-time with each holiday marking that holiday passing by for Chaldea in the game, but production delays for events or the main story's chapters have caused the ratio of real-time to what's happening in-game to be a bit skewed. One such example would be the storyline for Cosmos in the Lostbelt as the three-month hiatus between its prologue and first major chapter did happen in-game, but the interval between the first chapter and second chapter is nigh-instantaneous in the story despite there being about two months in between release.
• We Come in Peace — Shoot to Kill: Setup as a joke in "Saber Wars". Emiya and Nero stumble upon Mysterious Heroine X's crashed rocket and Emiya is cautious. Nero dismisses his caution as pessimism and enthusiastically suggests that the aliens must be greeted with kindness, sincerity, and passion; after all, if they come from the sky they must be "overflowing with romance, passion, and a taste of the future!" and the owner must be a civilized person who hates war! This is X's cue to emerge roaring like a Berserker trying to kill Nero, the red one (a Saber).
• We Do the Impossible: Chaldea as a whole. They fix the Singularities, summon heroes of legend, kill gods and kings, and single-highhandedly save all of humanity. It actually causes them problems when reporting to their superiors, since their accomplishments are so unbelievable even after downplaying them that it sounds like they're lying.
• Weirdness Coupon: The Servantverse is so nonsensical that Holmes and da Vinci of all people adopt a 'grin and bear it' attitude rather than try and force it to make sense. It's so bad that the villain of the 2021 Valentines event went almost unopposed because everyone chalked up the plot to 'more Servantverse nonsense'.
• Weird Sun: It's observed that the sun in the second Lostbelt is seemingly much larger which is odd because the surface would be scorched if the sun really was that close to Earth and it also never seems to move from its position. It's because it was magically warped to serve as the prison for Surtr in this pruned timeline.
• Wham Episode:
  • London is the game's first true wham episode. It introduces the concept of Grand Servants, the original seven Servants who were meant to be summoned to fight against a threat against humanity. The Servant system used in Fuyuki is the toned-down version for summoning non-Grands as a mere backup to the Grand Servants; these Servants, these beings who are incomparably more powerful than human beings, are cheap, disposable familiars compared to Grand Servants and the things Grands are meant to fight. (And the phrasing of the explanation, and context of the chapter overall, is meant to make it clear that, yes, this is all meant to be back-ported to F/SN and other works.) And then we find out the Grand Caster, Solomon is the Big Bad and is working completely contrary to the purpose of his summoning. Oh, and those Grails you were collecting? Largely worthless in the grand scheme of things. Recovering them alone won't fix the problem.
  • The very end of America reveals that Mash's powers are killing her. Not slowly either, but rapidly.
  • Nasu talked in an interview about how Chapters 6 and 7 would be the turning point of the entire game. At the start of Camelot, Dr. Roman reveals Shielder's origins and place in Chaldea, how and why she became a Demi-Servant and the fact that Mash won't live past 18. It's also mentioned that this singularity is the only one not related to the Big Bad. Also in Camelot, Sherlock Holmes reveals Solomon incinerating humanity is part of a different plan, humanity was already going to die in 2016 due to something else and Olga Marie's father won the Fuyuki Holy Grail War of 2004 in GO's timeline.
  • Babylonia finally explains a concept long foreshadowed yet unexplained by the rest of the Nasuverse, the Beast-class. The Beasts are seven embodiment of humanity's evils and are the very threat that the Heroic Spirit Summoning system, and by extension the Grand Servants, are meant to combat, and they are by far leagues more powerful than everything faced before. This chapter introduces Beast II, Tiamat, representing the sin of Regression. The final chapter reveals that the Big Bad is Beast I, King Goetia, and that Fou is Beast IV, better known among Nasuverse veterans as Primate Murder.
  • Solomon, being the Grand Finale of the first arc, drops several major bombshells. The Solomon that's been acting as the Big Bad is Beast I inhabiting his corpse. Mash dies using Lord Camelot to defend against Goetia's Ars Almadel Salomonis. Dr. Roman reveals that he's the actual Solomon, who was summoned by Marisbury for the Holy Grail War and used his wish to become human, shortly before he uses Ars Nova to remove himself from the Throne of Heroes and remove Goetia's immortality. And Fou gives up his power and intellect as Beast IV to resurrect Mash with a normal lifespan.
  • Shinjuku reveals that Solomon's Ars Nova failed to wipe out all of Goetia's Pillars. Four of them are still around, coming up with various schemes. Hence the title, Epic of Remnant, as the story of dealing with the Demon Pillars' remnants.
  • The May 2017 crossover event with Fate/Extra CCC is also this. At the end of the event intro, right after BB has taunted you for thinking this would be easy, the "BB-chan's Revenge" banner shatters into the proper Epic of Remnant chapter title screen, revealing that this "event" is EoR Chapter Extra: The Deep Sea Cyber-Nirvana - SE.RA.PH. The event is a full-bore, no-nonsense story chapter, with the attendant slew of new graphics, maps, missions, Servants, game mechanics (including two new playable Classes), and a story mode as big as any other chapter's, doled out over a week.
  • Salem is an enormous wham episode, despite being quiet, tense Lovecraftian horror for most of it. In the opening, the singularity surrounding Salem and Danvers is manifesting in the present day and is seven kilometres across - in some ways, this is an even bigger masquerade breaker than the missing 18 months caused by the Goetia incident. Moreover, by the end of it, so much effort is required to contain the final threat of the singularity that Chaldea itself may have to be disbanded to keep things quiet. Oh, and let's not forget the wham of the confirmation that the Outer Gods that Lovecraft described do exist in the Nasuverse and they are not friendly. When one attempts to manifest using a certain medium in the singularity, it easily rises to be a Beast-level threat.
  • The prologue to the second storyline of the game is not kind to the player (you) and your team. The Mage's Association forcibly turns off the Chaldea summoning system, banishes all the protagonist's previously summoned servants, sends a whole new staff and a new head to Chaldea (Da Vinci and even you were fired) and brings in a PMC force to deal with any protests, basically shutting off any means to deal with any danger humanity will face for the time being. Worse, Kotomine Kirei himself joined the fray, meaning the church is involved in the mess too. Then they get attacked by Anastasia and her army, as both Kotomine and Konyanskaya are collaborating with them to take control of Chaldea, with the onslaught reducing the number of Chaldea's remaining employees from 40 to 8, Da Vinci gets brutally impaled by Kotomine with his bare hands, and the protagonists are forced to abandon the observatory, and the antagonists begin the process of erasing history. Even worse, seven Masters from Chaldea are revealed to be going along with this, with the aims of bringing back the Age of Gods. The saving grace is that Holmes secretly evacuated the servants and hid their Saint Graphs for insurance, da Vinci managed to get a backup body and she brought a backup Saint Graph database along with them so they still have access to their Servants, but for the time being things will be very bleak.
  • Lostbelt 3 provides several shakeups. Koyanskaya is revealed to be Tamamo Vitch (except not really), Sion Eltnam joins the team, the first True Ancestor who isn't Arceuid is introduced, and Spartacus is permanently erased from Chaldea's roster due to his Heroic Sacrifice severely crippling his Saint Graph, proving that not even Servants are immune to actual death.
  • Lostbelt 5 is described as a turning point in the Lostbelt storyline and it shows considering that it’s big enough to be separated into two full story chapters. The first half, Atlantis, has David Bluebooks plotline ending as he arrives to Area 51 and finds out about Subject E an alien life form that landed in 2016 that’s implied to be the reason the Foreign God invaded only to be shot to death by a mysterious figure before he can see it in person, the return of Grand Servants in the form of Orion the Grand Archer, The Olympian gods being robots with enough strength to launch anti-world level attacks, Muramasa reappearing as one of the Foreign God’s direct subordinates, the hint that something is wrong with the British Lostbelt as despite Beryl manipulating the natives to cut down their tree the Lostbelt still stands, and Wodime being revealed to be a mage capable enough to fight the gods and proves it by beating the entire allied party including Orion with him only sparing Chaldea at the behest of the mysterious Chaldean who’s revealed to be an unknown person possessing the body of Romani. Meanwhile, the second half, Olympus, has The reveal that Koyanskaya plans on becoming a Beast and is already capable of reaching a juvenile stage in that class, Mash acquiring a replica of the BlackBarrel to help in the fight against the Olympians, Wodime is revealed to be betraying the Foreign God and use the Tree of Emptiness to turn every human on earth into god hybrids only to be betrayed in turn by Beryl who was working as an agent of the British Lostbelt leaving Wodime fatally wounded, and the Foreign God finally descends revealing that not only are they Beast VII but they’re also unexpectedly Olga Marie now calling herself U-Olga Marie.
  • Lostbelt 6.5 provided a huge Wham Episode with that chapter's ending. It gets revealed that Sherlock Holmes was actually the first Disciple of the Foreign God (who subjected himself to Laser-Guided Amnesia), and Ruler Moriarty was sent as a Disciple of the Foreign World (as in that World's own will, not the Foreign God). Once Holmes finds out about it, he makes a Heroic Sacrifice to ensure that he won't be Chaldea's enemy. Then, after a battle with Ruler Moriarty, the Disciple of the Foreign World shows Chaldea that Subject E was the main cause of the singularity, and explains that the alien has been on Earth for 100 years (despite how David Bluebook's dialogue implies that the alien landed in the year 2016).
  • Lostbelt 7 changes everything about the current conflict Due to circumstances from the start of the chapter U-Olga develops amnesia and becomes an ally throughout most of the chapter. Daybit is revealed to also be going against the Foreign God by trying to awaken ORT in a bid to destroy the planet before their plan can be completed and reveals that U-Olga is nothing more than another apostle of the true force behind the Lostbelts, The Foreign World CHALDEAS and that whatever their end goal is would result in humanity being considered the worst species in the entire universe. During the battle against ORT U-Olga sacrifices herself to help destroy it and the end of the chapter reveals that ultimately CHALDEAS wanted Chaldea to destroy the Lostbelts and had three apostles of the Foreign God to help them out (Holmes, the Young Moriarty, and the currently unidentified Count), with the Count now planning on resurrecting Olga as a shell of her former self.
  • Ordeal Call 2 demonstrates that the Ordeal Calls will not be a Breather Episode. In order to resolve the Avenger Ordeal Call, Chaldea has to let go most of their Avengers. Their nature demands that they head immediately for Antarctica to uncover whatever injustice is going on there, whether Chaldea can follow or not. They leave behind their Shadow Servants to aid in battle (allowing them to still be playable), and Abigail is still on hand to protect the protagonist's mind in Dantes' place, the majority of Avengers are "LINK LOST". While this is much better than the alternative of getting rid of the Avengers entirely, nobody, especially the Avengers themselves, really likes that this has to be done.
• Wham Line:
  • Near the end of Solomon we have Fou explaining what he is to Mash in the void:
    I feed on humanity's battles, growth, envy, and regret and use it for my characteristic as a beast to "become stronger than the enemy". The beast of calamity, Cath Palug. In a different time and place, I might have been called the great killer of primates - Primate Murder.
  • Right as the story of Shimousa is capping off Caster Limbo reveals the existence of The Man Behind the Man who was simply using the parallel version of Shimosa as an experiment for future plans.
    Having it appear in Chaldea was a failure; however, it left behind some good sample data. Anyway, finally, finally I succeeded in discovering the lost history. This Shimosa is distorted compared to the original. A world that is terminated without being destroyed, a pruning event. It is not that. Then a parallel world? Ish. It's close but not the same. So this is different. This is something else. This Shimosa is human history but not human history. It is a different world that a different earth's god observes with their different eyes. An otherworld that is falsely similar to a singularity! Fuhahahahahah, no no no no. Using that temporary name was too funny and even more so using Satan!! I intended it to be a joke, but it went quite well. It was one of that Necromancer's favorite things. Even so, Doman, you were supposed to be above practical jokes right. So I was rude, my dear ally ——- sama
  • From Lostbelt 7 we have Daybit’s explanation for why he wants to destroy the earth. revealing the truth about who's the mastermind of the Lostbelts
  Daybit: Should all seven Lostbelts be excised, then it would mean his completion of his Securing of the Human Order. If that were to happen, then it would surely give Earthlings a bad name across the 13.8 billion light years around us. You’d be known as the most terrible intelligent life born in the universe. Before that happens, I will destroy Earth. That’s the only way I can destroy Chaldea — The only way I can destroy the origin of this problem: The Foreign World known as CHALDEAS.
• Wham Shot:
  • When the Chaldean finally reveals themself in Lostbelt 5. It's Doctor Romani... With Goetia's eyes.
  • Near the end of Olympus the Foreign God finally appears in person and they're Olga Marie.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: This is touched upon in London as Mash expresses discomfort at fighting homunculi as she empathizes with them since she too is technically an artificial human.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Mash really chews out her "dad", Lancelot for going along with the Lion King's plans despite knowing exactly what it entailed. She was influenced by Galahad, who was just as pissed at him.
• What Year Is This?: At the beginning of Salem, the protagonist asks Abigail what today's date is. She's surprised that the party not only ask the day, but also the year (1692), setting the stage for the Salem Witch Trials.
• When Dimensions Collide: A Lostbelt stitches on an Alternate History to Earth to rewrite reality in favor of the altered timeline.
• White Is Pure: Upon reaching her third Ascension, Marie-Antoinette's outfit turns from red to white. It symbolizes the purity she has from being a sweet All-Loving Heroine who's adored by many.
• Whole-Plot Reference:
  • The Shimosa chapter is pretty much "F/GO does Makai Tensho", straight down to using a whole bunch of the same characters (just swapping out Jubei for Musashi). This is extra hilarious as Makai Tensho was a major inspiration for Fate in the first place. It also may well be this in-universe, as the whole thing was constructed by Doman and it seems like he was largely just having a lark with his experiment concerning using Lostbelts.
  • Hilariously, the 2019 Japanese Summer Event, "Seven-Colored Showdown of the Swimsuit Blademasters!", is a whole Call-Back to Shimousa itself.
• Wolverine Publicity: Likely the main reasons why Altria Pendragon (Saber) and her clones, Gilgamesh, and EMIYA are promoted heavily in marketing and feature prominently in the opening, as they're the most known characters of the Fate franchise.
• Wooden Ships and Iron Men: As the setting of the Third Order, Okeanos, is the Age of Discovery, this is inevitable. Battles of cannon fires at point-blank range, sea monsters and bandits blocking the way, treacherous weather disturbing navigations, and several crews composed of Heroic Spirits, the main draw of this Order is just how action-packed it is.
• World of Mammals: The first Lostbelt the Shadow Border arrives in is a history inhabited solely by humanoid wolves. There are no humans besides Servants summoned there, the stationed Crypter, and Chaldea.
• World Tree: Each Lostbelt has its gigantic Tree of Emptiness which must be sustained until it can fully replace proper human history. It's noted by Holmes that these aren't a natural phenomenon and are probably not from this world.
• Wretched Hive: Shinjuku, a decaying modern city overflowing with mages, mercenaries, and monsters. It has a magic barrier meant to keep most Servants who aren't evil-aligned from entering. It would not be out of place in the Shin Megami Tensei franchise.
• Writers Have No Sense of Scale:
  • In the America chapter, while time does pass while moving between each stage on the map the writers still clearly underestimated just how much time it would take just due to America's sheer size. As an example, the journey from Denver, Colorado to Deming, New Mexico is treated as lasting overnight with the player sleeping through the journey. In reality, it takes about 200 hours to walk that distance. Possibly justified with the superhuman Servants, who could conceivably have carried the player and moved quicker than he/she could on these extremely long trips.
  • This has a hilarious Continuity Nod in Olympus where it seems the writers realized the improbability of travelling so fast as Kirschtaria complains in the America singularity simulation that having to travel cross-country would require vehicles and that there's no way using magecraft to enhance body performance to walk would hold up for so long.
• Writing Around Trademarks: When it comes to the Outer Gods from Cthulhu Mythos, the game almost never calls them by their actual names. Only one who gets namedropped in the context of the actual being is Yog-Sothoth, but it is along bunch of other monikers. This is justified per lore as Lovecraft was inspired to write his novels based on dreams he had about real eldritch beings, meaning that they probably don't have real names. Monsters from the mythos such as Shantak and the Dark Young are referred to as such, though.
• Wutai: While this game's setting is not a Constructed World unlike most examples of this trope are in, the Shimosa chapter was notably the only East Asia-themed main story chapter ^note While Fuyuki and Shinjuku are also set in Japan, it's modern-day or close enough to the point where Japanese elements aren't very prominent. for three years, with the introduction of SIN a year later. Both very much play up the Asian aspect, with a few token Western Servants and the Chaldea crew as the only foreign aspects of the story.
• Year Inside, Hour Outside:
  • In the first Summer event, the island from "Chaldea Summer Memory" is revealed to have this property in "Chaldea Heat Odyssey", meaning that in the short timespan that the heroes left the island, the boars on the island developed intelligence, formed a civilization using the leftover infrastructure as a base, and then for the civilization to fall apart before the heroes returned.
  • One hundred minutes spent in SE.RA.PH is equivalent to ten minutes in the outside world. The Seraphix staff dejectedly understand this means it would take over fifty years for them to get rescued by Chaldea.
• Year Outside, Hour Inside: Imaginary Number Space has this effect on the Shadow Border as the protagonists have only experienced a week inside, but by the time they leave, it's already been three months to the Crypters. Da Vinci notes it's entirely dependent on the tides and how it's acting up at the moment, so the exact ratio for Imaginary Number Space time to time on Earth is in flux.
• You Don't Look Like You: Bašmu who appear in Babylonia look like blue and yellow Palette Swap of the regular Dragon enemies, even though in Apocrypha the ones summoned by Semiramis look like green serpentine creatures. Especially notable in that when Semiramis was added into the game, she summons a Bašmu that looks like it does in Apocrypha.
• You Just Told Me: At the end of Salem, the protagonist has a dialog option for this (the other dialogue option implies that they've had suspicions for a while). Carter confronts the protagonist and Circe in jail and asks if they know who he is — the Demon God Pillar Raum. Raum-Carter will ask when did you figure it out.
  Protagonist: "I wasn't sure until you told me just now."
• Your Size May Vary: Besides Servants not necessarily scaling with each other according to their official heights, some of the larger enemies seem to be much smaller in the game than they really should be. For example, the Spriggan enemies normally appear as being twice as tall as a regular Servant. But "turas realta" shows that they are several stories tall.
• Zombie Apocalypse: The premise of Shimousa involves seven of Japan's most famous warriors rising from their graves as near-mindless, nigh-indestructible zombies and rampaging across Imperial Japan, butchering anything that stands in their path.

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