What Could Have Been / Fate/Grand Order

Because of the game's long development cycle and Type-Moon's typical overambitious goals, there's a lot that ended up on the cutting floor throughout the game's lifetime.

Main Story

• The game originally was planned to be a PvP game on the PC (back when it was being shopped around as Fate/Apocrypha), where gamers' Jerkass behavior would directly create the Evils of Humanity they were tasked with destroying. Nasu decided in the end that he wanted to write a more optimistic and brighter game on the smartphone.
• The game was originally envisioned to be like Chrono Trigger, where all Singularities were meant to be accessible, with five available at the start. Scheduling issues and story changes ended up forcing the story to be completely linear, with several Servants meant to appear in the first storyline shuffled off to Epic of Remnant and Cosmos in the Lostbelt.
• The game was meant to be released in sync with Fate/stay night [Unlimited Blade Works] and the Tsukihime remake around the same time, with Nasu's intent being that the three would demonstrate various themes and ideas that intersect with each other. Production Lead Time for Unlimited Blade Works and the Troubled Production of both games meant this never really came to fruition but Word of God is that Gilgamesh revealing his plan in the anime was intended to coincide with Grand Order revealing the Beasts.
• From the game's promotion to the game itself, Chapter 6's location had been Jerusalem before it was suddenly changed to Camelot in the April 27 maintenance. It turns out this is an actual plot point as Chaldea would've been fighting the Crusaders who were stuck in an endless holy war over Jerusalem if it wasn't for the interference from Lion King and her knights. ^Explanation The original threat was someone from the Ninth Crusade getting ahold of the grail and becoming far more powerful, with the conflict escalating when Ozymandias was summoned, who took the grail for himself, and a Servant claiming to be Richard I with his False Crusaders taking over the crusaders. Lion King and her knights got rid of the latter, fundamentally changing the very nature of the singularity and renaming it from Jerusalem to Camelot. Jerusalem would later be used in the Arcade version in replacement for Camelot.
• Picts were supposed to implemented as enemies with the Camelot update with the in-story reason for their appearance being minions summoned by Nitocris to help attack Camelot but were cut for time. They would eventually see implementation as enemies in Avalon le Fae.
• Since Ashiya Douman basically amounted to a poor man's Abe no Seimei, even his writer thought he wouldn't amount to anything more than a mid-boss. It was only because the writers were so incredibly impressed by the character design Shouichi Furumi gave him that he ended up with such an important position in the story.
• SE.RA.PH's rerun was originally intended to have a longer scenario as its Plus Episode, but tight schedules ultimately led to just the small intro and outro for Kingprotea.
• Kirschtaria's Hopeless Boss Fight in Atlantis was originally going to have a special line for any players that managed to burst through all his HP bars, but they cut it for being too spoilery. Nasu posted it on his blog for players who cleared Olympus as they would now understand why Kirschtaria would say such a thing if defeated.
  Kirschtaria: Why, it's just a defeat or two. That doesn't lower a person's value.
• In the first few drafts for Atlantis Drake was planned on having a much larger role compared to the bit role she played in the final draft. The reason for the change was that Nasu thought that Drake detracted too much from the image of underdog heroes that the story was centered around.
• Comments from the author of Tunguska Sanctuary indicate that it wasn't in the initial draft as they thought Koyanskaya's plotline would have concluded in either Traum or Lostbelt 7.
  • On the topic of Tunguska Sanctuary, datamining the new characters from the event indicates that the initial plan was for it to release right after Avalon le Fae rather than at the end of the year.
• Ruler Moriarty wasn't originally planned to be in the game. The main reason why he was added in is because Takeuchi said he want to see a younger Moriarty. This had the knock-on effect of moving Holmes' reveals from the seventh Lostbelt to Ruler Moriarty's debut story, something Nasu later explained as being originally planned for the scene where Chaldea confronts Daybit as he tried to awaken ORT.
• Traum was originally meant to be a story about the French Revolution, but the writer decided to make it about a war between Servants featuring the Paladins.
• While the plan since the beginning was for Nasu to write Lostbelt 7, it was revealed in the seventh-anniversary interview that there was a backup plan for someone else to write it in case Nasu had to deal with real-life issues after Lostbelt 6 took more time than planned.
• While always planned to appear in Lostbelt 7, Tezcatlipoca was originally pitched as being less important when Nasu first planned to write it. This changed when he did further research into Tezcatlipoca, and saw the design for the character, which lead him to change his plans to give him more focus.
• The design for ORT differing from the original draft wasn't so much a case of redesigning for the narrative, rather than a miscommunication between Nasu and the artist PFALZ. The main body of ORT being its UFO section rather than the spider section, with one separate from the other, was always the plan. Nasu didn't clear up this mistake for over two decades, leading to him contacting a bemused PFALZ to quickly revise the design as work began on Lostbelt 7.
• Ordeal Call was originally envisioned as a singular chapter focusing on every extra class. However, this was changed to instead be a story arc with multiple chapters each dedicated to a singular class after realizing that providing an in-depth explanation to all the extra classes at once would lead to a very unfocused narrative.
  • In Paper Moon the original idea for the AI's running around would have been based on Sakura as a throwback to CCC, Nasu however vetoed that idea believing that leaning too far into the CCC element would be a detriment to the story. The author for Paper Moon then planned on Mash being the AI basis only for Nasu to veto her as well due to believing that making the various Mash A.I.s might hurt her character integrity, leading the author to then suggest Rani which Nasu complied with.

Avalon le Fae

• Nasu has openly admitted to the story for the sixth Lostbelt going through several changes as it was initially going to be far shorter and more generic. What made the difference? Nasu decided to delve into the history of the Lostbelt, which hadn't been really done for the previous Lostbelts, because it was his first crack at traditional fantasy, and he was excited. Additional plot elements and issues just kept dogpiling on from there — the biggest one was Oberon, of all things, being one of the characters that dramatically shifted the plot, turning what would've been a simple tale of "punch out the bad guy" into a lore-rich Doorstopper that needed to be split into three parts.
• Nasu revealed on his blog two spells that Beryl was planned to use in his boss fight, that they even got as far as recording voice lines for, but they had to be cut due to programming issues. The first was a Reality Marble called "Red Hood", and the second was a spell called "Slack Snark" — a name eerily similar to "Flat Snark" from Nasu's visual novel about witches, Witch on the Holy Night. Because these were cut, we may never know what they actually do. In addition, Beryl was meant to use his Command Spells on himself but that was also scrapped due to technical difficulties.
• It was revealed on Nasu's blog that Altria Caster's NP theme, "Land of Hope", was originally meant to be the map music for "Saber Wars II" but Nasu thought it suited her well, so he told the composer to use it for her and make a new map theme.
• Similarly, the original intent was for only 10 new pieces of music, but it ballooned into triple that length by the time production was finished.
• When Morgan was originally drafted to be playable it was originally going to be the PHH Morgan that would be implemented. But Nasu found that the planned design didn't fit what he believed Morgan looked like, so he instead decided to overhaul her to the Lostbelt Morgan we know today. Leftovers of this idea can be seen in things like Tristan's interlude alluding to Morgan being active in the FGO world and the rather sudden explanation of Morgan's three personalities in Lostbelt 6 even though she doesn't actually appear in it outside of a flashback.
• Cernunnos' design was originally conceived as far more demonic in look before Nasu requested the design be revised in favor of something cuter and less overtly evil to reflect how it was a benign god corrupted into Britain's greatest curse.
• Wryneck's entire plotline and character having an onscreen presence was noted by Nasu to have received the axe, due to a need to tighten up the length on Mash's story in the past, with much of it then shuffled off into supplemental material like Nasu's blog and various production pamphlets as they more or less chronicle the cliff notes of what Wryneck would have brought into the tale.
• This eventually culminated in Avalon le Fae Synopsis, a published booklet detailing two different versions of the story as conceived by Nasu in 2020 and 2017 respectively.
  • The 2020 Character Outline mostly adheres to the final product with the given exceptions:
    • Idea A for Mash featured Habetrot as Faerie Knight Galahad in the scenario where Mash travels back in time to Tonelico's era. Idea B featured Mash rendered amnesiac by faerie dust and presented as tribute to Queen Morgan. She would then become a Faerie Knight and Chaldea's enemy, only to rejoin the protagonist at the very end.
    • Diarmuid had a Lostbelt faerie counterpart as Cnoc na Riabh's trusty adjutant who would have cared little for PHH. Barghest killed his brother.
    • Tom Tit, an Earth faerie who would use Andersen's appearance. He is noted to be one of the characters who dies when Londinium is set on fire.
    • Nasu had the idea of Murian losing her purpose and committing suicide after wiping out the Fang clan and discovering Faerie Britain's secrets as an alternative scenario to being killed by Oberon Vortigern.
    • It's mentioned that Cnoc na Riabh was envisioned as showing up in battle unlike the final story where she remains only a story NPC. She would learn the name of Medb and die laughing about it.
    • While Muramasa's overall role was the same, the original intent for his appearance seemed more to be as an investigator for the Foreign God over being there to kill Morgan, joining the heroes because he was being lazy instead of being captured and purchased at an auction like in the released story.
  • The 2017 Alpha Draft features the first story idea, which entails in brief:
    • The introduction of Grand Saber Altria Avalon, Mash duelling Beryl, the rescue of Merlin from his prison tower, and Goredolf's further development with noted death flags all as mooted plot points with no clear context for their intended use.
    • The framework of using mythology as a Red Herring (in this case, Celtic) for the actual Point of Divergence from Sefar exterminating humanity was there from the start. However, in this draft, there were some surviving humans rounded up by faeries in general to be their pets and the faeries just made new humans out of nostalgia. The plot would entail a power struggle between Oberon's faerie faction, Morgan's faerie faction, and the human faction as Altria Caster went on her quest to forge the Holy Sword. In this iteration of Britain, it's explained that it doesn’t have the invisible revelation of order or any other source for the magnetism that ties people together, everyone lives only for their own self-interest. They all act thinking on their love, with good men casually killing someone else or evil men sacrificing themselves for the sake of such.
    • Faeries depended on the "Evergreen Oak" to live, which served as critical points in the Mêlée à Trois.
    • Galahad as the Knight of Heaven who found the Holy Grail and Gawain as the Knight of Earth who founded the Royal Court were originally marked as characters for the story.
    • The Tuatha Dé Danann would have shown up led by the giant Fomóire on an isle that appeared northwest of Britain.
    • Dethroned King Lot and the Green Knight would have been two faeries fused into a Nightcall and noted as a Gawain-killing machine.
    • Altria Caster's backstory was far more normal and less traumatic, referring to her as happy with her normal life. Her ending culminates in a Go Out with a Smile scene as she ruminates on her friends and their fun.

Servants

• The game's internal IDs for Servants seem to suggest that different Servants were meant to come out earlier than others, but their releases were pushed back for whatever reasons. Roland for example was effectively 80% done when he first appeared in Astolfo's Interlude, but the devs haven't found any good place to add him in so he kept on being pushed back until Traum finally gave them a reason to release him. He, Calamity Jane, and Red Hare unofficially form "The Three Musketeers of Being Planned From The Start and Not Having A Good Place to Be Included".
• Early gameplay trailers show in a Freeze-Frame Bonus that Archer EMIYA's Noble Phantasm was an Arts type attack, but in the final product, it's a Buster type attack.^note An Arts EMIYA in the current game would have been insane (his gauge refund in a multi-target situation would've been best-in-class by miles), and in retrospect it makes his launch kit make far more sense. It was probably nerfed at the time due to the very early design direction of the game (which wanted 5*s to be significantly better than any other Servant). Amusingly, this got brought back into the game proper for the 5th anniversary when he got a buff that allowed him to switch card types from Buster to Arts for his NP.
• After "GUDAGUDA Honnoji" was released, Nasu mentioned on his blog that Nobunaga was planned to be the limited SSR and Okita the freebie Servant. Traces of this seen in their kits, as Nobunaga has a powerful and mechanically unique skill set for a free Servant, while Okita has a fairly basic skill set.
• Storyboards for Francis Drake's Noble Phantasm animation reveal that she would have had her entire fleet show up for the attack but it was cut for time with only Golden Hind animated and cannon fire is instead shot from several unseen ships.
• Takeuchi had intended for Saber Ryougi's third Ascension to take cues from Shiki's look as a mother in Future Gospel, but since he felt that was out of place for the game, he instead decided to give her motifs from the legend of Princess Kaguya and went in a direction that was inspired by another Nasu-written work, Tsuki No Sango.
• Fate/Grand Order Material III reveals that Jeanne Alter was originally just planned to be a Palette Swap of Jeanne who would get distributed at a future event to players. This is actually quite notable in retrospect, as Jeanne Alter being shifted to Avenger meant that Avengers ended up outnumbering Rulers for a long stretch of time, the only regularly available Ruler was standard Jeanne, and Ruler ended up being one of the few Classes to not get a free version at all during the run of Observer on Timeless Temple and Epic of Remnant.
• Matsuryuu's early design of Helena Blavatsky was very different compared to the final design.
• There are rough drafts of unused third stage outfits for Aŋra Mainiiu in F/GO Material III, including him wearing a white suit, a cardboard box, or jeans.
• Irisviel wasn't planned to be a welfare 4* Servant and she was going to have the standard three costumes that all non-event Servants have. The outfit she's wearing is a combined version of all three outfits designed by Takeuchi. In addition, the Dress of Heaven she became was originally planned to be different incarnations of the Homunculus that became the Grail, ending with her. This is why her final ascension line has her shocked to be wearing the Dress of Heaven even though before she was already wearing it.
• Assassin EMIYA was one of the Servants who was planned to be available at launch but was pushed back for "Fate/Accel Zero Order". This appears to be why he is still included in the normal summoning pool, and regularly appears in Assassin themed banners, whereas other special event Servants only have appeared on specific banners related to the event, or anniversary like banners.
• Minamoto no Raikou was not originally planned to have a Historical Gender Flip; only after Takeuchi requested it and the writers discovered Ushi Gozen did they seriously decide to go with it.
• From the datamined list of Servants, it was stated that Hassan of Serenity would be voiced by Mamiko Noto, but within the game itself she is voiced by Sayaka Senbongi.
• According to that same list, Nitocris was supposed to be voiced by Rumi Ōkubo but she is instead voiced by Minami Tanaka.
• Nitocris was originally going to be a 3* Servant and artist comments indicate that she would've had significantly more clothing had she not been made a 4* Servant.
• Tiamat apparently had several designs, including a little girl version, which were all ultimately discarded in favor of the Tiamat we have now. The little girl version wound up being used in Arcade.
• Solomon was originally going to only wear nine rings as a hint to the grander narrative of the game. Nasu complained to Takeuchi that it tipped the hand too early for certain revelations so he added one silver ring to make it less obvious.
• Toshizou Hijikata was planned to have a Historical Gender Flip, which would've retconned previous mentions of him to be male in Okita's profile, but was ultimately left as male in the final product.
• Shi Huangdi's Lostbelt version was more in line with typical historical depictions before the writers told the artist to make him more ethereal and genderless in appearance.
• Toh Azuma later revealed in 2022 that another idea for Qin Shi Huang's Lostbelt version was for all three Ascensions◊ to be different ages with child, young adult, and elderly man to represent the figure's different stages in life. The writers told Azuma that only the young adult one would be needed as the foundation for the character's design.
• It was revealed in the 5th anniversary interview that Orion's human form was not originally planned to be released as an SSR Archer, but as a 1* Berserker.
• Shirabii stated on their twitter that Summer Tomoe Gozen was originally planned to have a fisherman outfit complete with overalls and bucket for her catches. Instead, her design was made to be a Gamer Chick, likely due to the joke with her original Archer form being a gamer becoming a popular part of her character.
• Miss Crane was originally going to have a more gothic design to her character.
• Her artist later revealed for Chaldea Breakroom when the event released in NA that she was originally meant to wield a sword as well with her staff but that was rejected for being too muddled.
• Koyanskaya was originally going to be released as a single Servant instead of being split into light and dark halves.
• Pako revealed in the Spotlight Lostbelt no. 4 stream that he had proposed a new version of Karna with 3 transforming motorcycles that didn't obey him after submitting the design for Arjuna Alter, but it never went through.
• Nasu was unsure if he wanted to Gender Flip Captain Nemo or not, he decided not to after seeing Dangerdrop's submitted design for the character.
• Ashiya Douman's original First Ascension◊ had most of his hair covered by a hood, his robe completely covered his torso and arms, and would have normal fingernails instead of claws, overall in order to give off a more gentler façade. His Second Ascension would become the current First Ascension, albeit the illustration having a different background.
• Datamining the game reveals that the original plan for a Beast Nero was to have her be called Mother Harlot.
• The twelth material book reveals that Senji Muramasa's Flame skill was originally supposed to also give anti-Evil and anti-Threat to Humanity special attacks and increase his NP damage in exchange for either stunning him for two turns (in the second draft) or outright killing him (in the first draft) after he attacked, but this was removed because he was released before Lostbelt 6 and that would have spoiled part of the ending where his Alter Ego version sacrifices himself in Altria Caster's place to create the sacred sword, on top of the drawback being too punishing.
• Saber Medusa was originally planned to be a 4 star, but was bumped to 5 star after seeing the illustrations for her.
• Kukulkan's artist, Rei Hiroe, originally drew Kukulkan with dinosaur like features, such as a tail and scales on her body. This idea was dropped in favor for the one seen in game. Her original design also had the primary colors as red and silver instead of what her final design had.

Events

• The first Halloween event was supposed to be about the Celtic traditions of the holiday and feature Caster Cu as the main character before being scrapped entirely and replaced with one starring Elisabeth Bathory because there wasn't enough time to put in what the original plan envisioned.
• Xuanzang's event was originally supposed to be a trial quest for Xuanzang like the other 5* Servants who had trial quests but Nasu decided to make it an event after seeing her artwork. Also related to that was the second set of event currency which came about after a database error prevented them from using the first set for the second shop.
• The Fate/Requiem event was supposed to be released in April, but due to the COVID-19 epidemic, it was put on hold till an appropriate time could be found to release it.
• The sixth Summer event was intended to be about volleyball, but the writing team couldn't come up with anything, so it got scrapped and replaced with the adventure theme in the final product.

Other

• Prior to Edmond Dantes' release, datamining showed that the Avenger class would take double damage from each of the seven standard classes, rather than lacking weaknesses to anything except for the standard 1.5x Berserker weakness that everyone but Shielder has. This was likely to represent Aŋra Mainiiu's weakness as a Servant, but instead of making the class itself weak the eventual Aŋra Mainiiu just had very weak traits by himself.
• Datamining found several unused lines for Servants using their Noble Phantasm. Ozymandias stands out since the lines are for his two other Noble Phantasms, Mesektet and The Sphinx of Abu-el-Hol, implying they were planned as his Noble Phantasm at some point.
• Similar to Avengers, Alter Egos were actually in the data files as a Class for a long time, and behaved as a kind of inverted Demon Pillar: they dealt double damage to the Rider-Caster-Assassin triangle, similar to the live game, but they took double damage from Saber-Archer-Lancer and hit them normally. DW either thought the defensive penalty was a little too punishing for player servants, the double damage for cavalry was too much, or both, and changed it so that Alter Egos are hit neutral by everyone save Berserker, and instead deal half to the knights, while their damage bonus against cavalry is 150% instead of 200%, similar to Berserkers, though they still hit Zerks (and as of December 2017, Foreigners) for 200%.
• The English localization team was originally going to use the fan-preferred "Artoria" for the translation of Fate/stay night Saber's name, but Type-Moon overruled them and mandated that "Altria" is the official English translation — despite Artoria having been used in official Fate products as recently as Fate/Extella: The Umbral Star.
• The 5th anniversary was originally going to be commemorated with a concert at Tokyo Dome, featuring pretty every single musician and performer who had worked on a Fate project in the last five years. It was cancelled due to the Covid-19 epidemic and had to be completely shelved because of the unfeasibility of gathering so many people while the virus was spreading.
• Append Skills were planned for launch with the first Lostbelt but had to be pushed back for several years until the sixth Lostbelt.

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