The Fate Series in general and Fate/Grand Order in particular have been around for a very long time, and while fans have picked up on lots of things to complain about, many of these issues have their genesis from the very beginning of both the game and the franchise.
- An issue that came to a head in Grand Order was the preponderance of Saberfaces, the very first of which dates back to the original Fate/stay night game, in the form of Altria's corruption-polluted form, Saber Alter, whose contrasting personality to her original self made a huge impression. Fate/Zero had Gilles de Rais mistake Altria for Jeanne d'Arc, making her technically the first Identical Stranger "Saberface," but Jeanne's legend is tied up with King Arthur's,note and Gilles was quite mad, with the two otherwise being very different in design and characterization, so the connection wasn't overpowering. Mordred from Fate/Apocrypha was a literal clone of her "father," but the story worked there by tying it into her issues with her own identity, gender, and family. Even Nero, the "Red Saber" from EXTRA, despite otherwise being by far the most gratuitous example in the franchise (being neither a joke nor a What If? incarnation of an existing character), had the meta-reason of her personality being meant to contrast the original, being far more prideful, loud and wild than Saber ever was. Okita from KOHA-ACE was intended to parody the already out-of-hand Saberface phenomenon. Grand Order's overuse of Alternate Self versions of popular characters, on the other hand, quickly got completely out of control in the first years of the game's lifespan, featuring not only the original Altria, Altria Alter, Jeanne, Mordred, and Nero, a new Jeanne Alter, Altria Lily (representing a young and innocent version of Altria), Altria Lancer and Lancer Alter (What If? incarnations of Altria who took up the lance Rhongomyniad instead of Excalibur and as a result grew up to have more sex appeal), Mysterious Heroine X (a meta-joke character who claims to come from a Bad Future overrun with Saberfaces who represents Altria wanting to kill off her clones and reclaim her position as the franchise's poster-girl), Alter and grown up versions of her, seasonal and swimsuit versions of many of the above, and Jeanne Alter Santa Lily, a composite of many of the trends with Saberfaces whose own profile complains about how out-of-hand the cloning has gotten. Things have died down considerably in later years, but even the India Lostbelt featured Lakshmibai, the "Jeanne d'Arc of India," as an Identical Stranger for Jeanne, a later anniversary released a Altria Caster that has an alternate self as part of her ascension, and the sixth Lostbelt includes Morgan Le Fey who is Altria's actual biological sister (and looks the part as well).
- The game's overuse of gender-flipping random historical and mythological figures has become a common criticism, with many gender-bent characters having little explanation for why they are done so or being given overly Stripperiffic designs. This issue began with Saber in Fate/stay night, who was well received in part because the creators were aware of the oddity of King Arthur secretly being a woman and treated it with some delicacy. Not only was she the only gender-flipped character in the cast, but her backstory was heavily informed by the differences that resulted from a girl assuming the role of King Arthur, with elements of the story being able to work with the alterations, such as providing additional context for Lancelot and Guinevere's affair and feeding her own feelings of inadequacy and failure. Combined with her having a modest design that could actually pass for a boy, and Arthur being more of a mythological figure than historical one, it was seen as a well thought out idea. Since then though, many characters became gender-flipped for weaker reasons, such Fate/EXTRA doing it to Emperor Nero and Francis Drake even though they're very well-documented historical figures and the roles they assumed would have been impossible for women in their societies; Nero in particular, as already mentioned, was gender-flipped not for any story reasons, but instead simply to act as a contrast to Altria in both design and personality, whereas Francis Drake was given the explanation that she might actually be Queen Elizabeth I, who did the achievements after having traded places with the original Francis Drake, however it was never later elaborated on specifically, given the possible Retcon of just being too manly to be documented as a woman, leaving it with a nebulous Early-Installment Weirdness. They were also both given racy and revealing character designs that left nothing of their gender to the imagination, making it impossible to imagine them ever passing for men. By the time of Grand Order, characters seemed to be gender-flipped primarily because it was now what the series was famous for, with the majority of the characters who got gender-flipped lacking the same nuances that the original Saber did—only a small handful have made any attempt to make any sense of how a woman in the original figure's position could have worked, or, like Sanzang Xuanzang, come from an existing tradition of gender-flipping the character far older than Nasu—on top of trying to include as much Fanservice as possible. As a result, any time a historically male person is introduced and appears to be gender flipped, even if the game explores and plays with the idea (such as Van Gogh not actually being gender flipped, but rather the Greek nymph Clytie using his memories and power), a decent bit of the community will react with annoyance because even if it isn't necessarily a gender flip, it often means a "true" version of the character will never materialize.
- The most common critique of the E. Pluribus Unum Singularity was that it felt less like an American story and more like a grab-bag of other themes. All the notable Celtic Servants appear, Mahabharata and Ramayana play out in miniature, and a few others from Fate/EXTRA return. But pretty much every Singularity before or since has had some characters who didn't fit the setting; most notably, the Hungarian Elizabeth Bathory's appearance in America, for example, was preceded by her popping up in France and Rome. The difference was that America was the first (and to-date only) Singularity where characters who didn't fit the theme far outnumbered ones that even arguably did: only three characters were actual Americans (Geronimo, Edison, and Billy the Kid), only two others have much connection to America (Helena Blavatsky and Tesla), and of those five, only Edison and Helena play significant roles in the story, with Tesla dropping in at the eleventh hour of the final battle and both Billy and Geronimo being unceremoniously bumped off soon after their introductions to instead concentrate on Nero, Elizabeth, and Robin Hood as primary allies. None of them even got the honor of being one of the three SSR characters introduced in America, who ended up being two Celts and an Englishwoman instead, and both Elizabeth and Nero are already often criticized as overexposed across multiple stories and events already; both of them had already received heavy story focus and got their own yearly events throughout Part 1, and Elizabeth got hers well into Part 2. In other words, the new characters who needed their screentime most were starved to instead feed two of the characters who needed it least.
- One common criticism of the Agartha chapter, written by Hazuki Minase, is its use of rape, slavery, and oppression in a gender-inverted fashion deliberately designed to imitate ways men have oppressed women throughout history, which comes across as gratuitous, and even in poor taste. Nasu himself has always used uncomfortable themes in his Nasuverse stories, and not always gracefully. Tsukihime and the original Fate/stay night had many characters with slavery and sexual assault in their backstories, many acts of sexual assault happen not only in the past but on-screen, and both going into detail on the long-term psychological damage this mistreatment caused to the cast. Even at the time, many complained that these things made these storylines too dark and depressing to properly entertain, or that the rape was unnecessary and used to add edge points that other, less extreme forms of abuse could just as easily do. But, unlike Agartha, such seriousness was always treated, well, seriously, with the characters clearly impacted deeply and even damaged permanently by the horrors they'd encountered and suffered. Agartha, unfortunately, instead tended towards Mood Whiplash, such as, for example, making jokes about the Ambiguous Gender of the chapter's allied servants or the silly and fragile ego of the Assassin who rules the Nightless City shortly after witnessing the horrific public torture of one of the city's male inhabitants for trying to escape. It made the social criticism and examination seem frivolous, like the story wasn't taking its themes seriously by letting them have an impact on the characters and was instead just throwing them in for gloom's sake.
- The Lostbelt Kings and Grand Servants (not counting the First Hassan, who came out years before them and was later buffed to match) are Purposefully Overpowered with limited availability, and each has taken a turn distorting the entire metagame around themselves upon release. The weakest among the group, Ivan the Terrible, is "only" the absolute best Rider, and only "weaker" because he is geared for rounded performance compared to his peers' specialized niches. This has attracted many complaints of greed-fueled Power Creep from the playerbase over time, especially since it feels like more and more Challenge Quests are designed to provide challenges for these rare, superpowered characters that a majority of players may not have access to. Such power creep is nothing new in this game. Waver, after his buffs, could help trivialize most farming, Tamamo is only not seen as just as overpowered as many of her support caster peers because her schtick is more useful for enabling the Arts stall meta than faster playstyles, and Merlin is a limited and powerful Servant who also distorted the entire metagame around himself upon release, all of them receiving complaints of power-creep that completely obsoleted many other servants. However, not only are two of those Servants in the general pool rather than limited, but the one who was not, Merlin, was originally advertised as the most overpowered servant the game designers would ever make... and he still showed up in pickups fairly often, as opposed to being potentially gone forever after his initial release, so it wasn't as if poorer and newer players would never see him again. Merlin was also seen as a one-off blip added at the conclusion of the game's first Myth Arc, rather than an overpowered monster of a servant literally added with each new individual story arc.note And, of course, Challenge Quests and other difficult content were originally intended to be friendly to free players; something even new and underdeveloped rosters could get through with luck, effort, and strategy, serving as fun challenges to overcome even if Merlin could sometimes trivialize them. But in trying to present difficulties that could challenge even a high-paying player's mighty Lostbelt Kings, the gamemakers have made it less and less possible to beat with a normal, free player's roster without hacking the system to its limits. Finally, many free Servants made somewhat obsolete after the release of earlier powerhouses would often receive Rank Ups, trying to, if not bring them into parity, at least carve them niches to differentiate them from the competition, like Florence Nightingale's upgraded NP allowing her to impose debuffs on enemies with buff removal or Invulnerability Pierce that would ignore Merlin's defensive measures, or Jeanne's Noble Phantasm losing its self-stun and adding a debuff cleanse to make her a premier defensive support despite Tamamo's stiff competition in Arts teams. But since at least one Lostbelt King comes out each story arc, such enhancements have become less and less common, since, after all, a new one's to keep on coming and helping the less-powerful servants keep up is a losing battle.
- To add salt to the wound, another group of servants are becoming known to be overtuned; the Anniversary servants (those released upon the FGO Anniversary Celebration event). Remember when Delight Works promised that Merlin would be the most powerful servant ever? Lasengle apparently decided that this vow did not apply to them. The release of Altria Caster blew the former premiere Arts support, Tamamo, out of the water. Her Noble Phantasm, that features a "super-invincibility" that could not be pierced, an attack buff and debuff cleanse for the entire party, can equal the entire skill line up of any other servant. Altria Caster's skills are also spectacular, with a powerful Arts buff, attack buff and NP gain... all packaged with a 50% NP battery. Also, remember Merlin? "The most powerful servant that would ever be created"? He's had more than enough rivals released since to put a laundry list of asterisks next to that title, like Koyanskaya of Light who finally enabled Buster teams to NP loop.
- A common complaint about story chapters following Atlantis in Part 2 is their difficulty, ranging from Difficulty Spikes that bottleneck progression to virtually entire chapters being considered unfair in design, requiring guides and/or specific combinations of Servants, Craft Essences, or even card distributions to proceed. Such difficulty spikes are nothing new; the Camelot chapter was infamous upon release for the bosses having unique buffs or abilities that made each major fight incredibly difficult. Still, Camelot was also meticulously designed to let even shallow-rostered players pass with proper preparation; Euryale could famously trivialize the first and hardest of these bosses in Gawain, for instance. But by the midpoint of Part 2, several fights began to be criticized for the sheer brutality of their difficulty all-but demanding the player have access to specific kinds of high-rarity Servants or Craft Essences that newer players simply won't possess. This isn't helped by the game's sluggish release pace when it comes to new low-rarity Servants; after Mandricardo's release back in December 2019, it took about two and a half for there to be another permanent low rarity servant added into the gacha.
- As time goes on the game has been criticized for the heavy number of female servants it releases in comparison to male ones with people noting that it's pandering to a base that is already invested in the game and is only turning away those who would like male servants. While before there was a preference for females as seen with the Valentine and Summer events, those were typically the only examples of a heavy female leaning with most events and main stories being much more evenly distributed with the male/female ratio. However, as time went on and main story chapters started to be released at a slower and slower rate, events began almost exclusively come with female servants to the point in 2021 where there was only one male servant released that wasn't involved in the main story. Even counting main story stuff the newly released females outnumber the males 5/1.
- After the revelation that Koyanskaya was not a member of the Tamamo Nine but an Original Generation Identical Stranger, a goddess born from the mass deaths of animals caused by The Tunguska Event with the only connections between her and her lookalike being the implication that Amaterasu blessed Koyanskaya's birth, fans have criticized the revelation for being an unsatisfying twist-for-twist's sake. Such Identical Stranger twists are hardly uncommon in the franchise; Fate/EXTRA debuted Nero as a doppelganger for Altria and featured alternative versions of many previous series characters, while Amakusa was introduced as "Shirou Kotomine" in Fate/Apocrypha before the surprising revelation of his true identity. Both of these twists happened in the context of smaller, self-contained stories that didn't overstay their welcome, and had solvable solutions at the end of their mysteries that the sharp-witted could have figured out. Comparatively, Koyanskaya's identity was hidden for about four years and over 10 in-game stories and events, with any foreshadowing that she was speaking as an original being rather than as a member of the Tamamo Nine desperately trying to separate herself from the original buried under deliberate misdirection intended to convince the audience of exactly that. And while in prior cases the identical strangers are completely different people, Koyanskya still takes a lot of cues from Tamamo to the point where her Noble Phantasm plays Tamamo's NP music and one of her profiles simultaneously compares the two and attempts to assert that they have nothing to do with each other. It doesn't help that the actual answer is often seen as, charitably, a bit of a letdown and less interesting than exploring the full ramifications of the fake-out would've been. The end result was that fans ended up frustrated that this multi-year buildup around the character's identity all amounted to a Clueless Mystery with a weak and unsatisfying conclusion.
- The preponderance of Japanese servants compared to literally any other country's is something that people have begun to complain about more and more, especially as the pace slowed down later in the game's lifespan. Before Grand Order, the Fate franchise was actually pretty good at avoiding this problem, as if anticipating the possibility that letting their own cultural mythology into the games would ensure it took over. Sasaki Kojiro was the only Servant from the original title with a Japanese background, as was Tamamo-no-Mae in Fate/Extra and Amakusa in Fate/Apocrypha. Only the Koha-Ace gag comics had a predominantly Japanese cast, and they were literal jokes. In the early years of Grand Order, things were still under control. Ushiwakamaru, Kiyohime, and Benkei were all launch servants, but they were just a drop in the bucket when it came to the entire cast. Later stories slowly introduced a drip-feed of new Japanese characters, themselves either from the broader constellation of Type-Moon media, like Nobunaga and Okita from Koha Ace or Kintoki (who was originally planned to be in Apocrypha). But Nobunaga and Okita's event, widely seen as a turning point for the game as a whole, became so popular that Japan-focused GudaGuda events became a yearly tradition, while Sakata Kintoki was so popular that new characters from his myth also started being added in many events. Between these factors (and the simple fact that they remained yearly events even as the pace of new content for the rest of the game slowed down), strongly Japan-focused story arcs like Shimousa and Heian-Kyo that dropped almost-entirely Japanese characters, and a lessened aversion to introducing new Japanese characters from folklore in events built around them (including the plot-important Ooku event where Kama even flat-out states that the event doesn't actually have to take place in Japan) have all combined to ensure that a decent chunk of all new content is Japan related, catering to their home audience at the expense of the rest of the world.
- Fate/Grand Order Arcade releasing exclusive to it characters has been a very unpopular decision, even back when it first came out. However, the first truly exclusive character was just a seasonal alt in Santa Helena, which while annoying, was not a big deal for most players. However, after the release of Santa Helena, the Arcade version would start getting unique/exclusive characters that weren't just seasonal alts, on top of getting many popular characters from the original game. This was bad enough, but the release of Foreigner Molay in the main game (who unlike Saber Molay from the Arcade version, ended up being a gender bent for no real good reason), combined with Arcade getting Tiamat (a.k.a. a highly requested servant), and Beast VI/S: The Beast of Sodom/Draco, was enough to make both sides of the fanbase (East and West) frustrated that the developers of Arcade were not only releasing unique characters that were likely never going to be released in the main game, but because Arcades are not only slowly losing popularity due to factors like the COVID-19 Pandemic, but also aren't popular in the West and thus almost never see an export or console release. Instead of coming across as a way to invite players to try a spinoff, it came across as a way to try and bait players to spend money on another game for unique characters.
- The Killed Off for Real rule which was stated in the 4th anniversary preview and implemented in Cosmos In The Lostbelt, was intended to add drama to the main story by making their deaths incredibly impactful, with Leonardo Da Vinci being impaled by Kotomine and forced into a backup body, effectively killing off the original Da Vinci and serving as a reminder on how Chaldea's new story was much Darker and Edgier, Spartacus' Heroic Sacrifice to save a village in the Chinese Lostbelt being a massive Dying Moment of Awesome as he was willing to put aside his rebellious philosophy to stop a Colony Drop on a village, and serves as compensation for his abrupt demise in the maligned Septem singularity. While this rule was received well at first, this was later deemed a detriment to the writing quality starting around Yugakshetra, in which Nezha gets abruptly killed by her Lostbelt counterpart without any chance to develop her potential character, various characters being unceremoniously Killed Offscreen in Atlantis and Olympus such as Heracles, and most infamously, Miyamoto Musashi getting erased from existence to stop Chaos from rampaging in the entire Greek Lostbelt. What was once seen as a way to escalate the stakes in the second story arc became the writing flaw it was meant to stop.
- Starting around the Lostbelt arc, many people believe that the story overall ends up having some Arc Fatigue issues as while it took two years to complete the first arc, it took about five years for Chaldea to take down the 7th Lostbelt. However, a lot of people didn't take a huge issue with it at first due to the excellent quality of the writing of the Lostbelt chapters, and the chapters that got released in 2020 can receive a pass due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. However, it became especially problematic with Avalon le Fae with the entire story arc was split into three parts and each was released like previous full chapters had been. With the dearth of events that took place in-between in those three parts, and the fact that players couldn't farm to get the new materials for the new servants until after the Lostbelt was completed, many people end up being frustrated with how long it took for the entire chapter to get fully released. The Memorial Chapter Prologue made things even worse as Chaldea pretty much got hit with a problem that many feel could have easily not been in the story with the implications being that the Ordeal Call arc was done to fix that problem. Even worse was the way it came was like inventing a problem for Chaldea to solve completely out of nowhere, since it had the audacity to list using Rulers as part of the problem. After that, many people were quick to believe that this was a blatant attempt at prolonging the story just to make sure Fate/Grand Order doesn't end soon, and wonder how long it would take to undo the bleaching of the Earth.
- Upon release of the first chapter of Ordeal Call, many players were critical about the story being underwhelming compared to previous chapters and felt like the quality is more akin to an average event story rather than a main story chapter. The thing is, the same could be said for FGO's first intermission arc, Epic of Remnant, since they also had a story of similar quality of Ordeal Call. Unlike Ordeal Call, however, it was written as if it was a Post-Script Season, and it did have a legitimate hook to fall upon- namely, the whereabouts of the Demon God Pillars after Beast I's fall, so it was excused for those reasons, and the well-received Fate/EXTRA CCC crossover chapter was only a cherry on the top. Ordeal Call, on the other hand, had to follow with a less plausible and completely out of nowhere plot point in which Chaldea is forced to undertake the trials to redeem themselves after misusing the Extra classes, and when combined with the mediocre reception of the first chapter alongside being introduced before what appeared to be the final battle, many have decried it as filler and began worrying about the state of the quality of the writing for Ordeal Call.
- The negative reception to Paper Moon also unveiled another flaw apparent since the game's release: the gameplay quality. Numerous issues to it exist- such as the numerous Scrappy Mechanics, older Servants not receiving animation updates or even Rank Up quests when they really need it, etc. However, at the very least, the story was at least agreed to be of good quality post-Camelot, so that was agreed to be an issue, that, while ignored, is understandable. Paper Moon being decried as filler to the point where it easily ranks as one of the worst chapters since Agartha became the straw that broke the camel's back and caused complaints about the gameplay to rise up.
