YMMV / Fate/Grand Order

YMMVs with their own pages:

• Ensemble Dark Horse
• Fan Nickname
• Franchise Original Sin
• Game Breaker
• Goddamned Boss
• Hilarious in Hindsight
• Low-Tier Letdown
• Memetic Loser
• Memetic Mutation
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap
• Scrappy Mechanic
• Shocking Moments
• That One Boss
• That One Level
• Unexpected Character

A

• Adorkable:
  • Okita Souji. Her normal quotes are usually in a dead-serious tone, but when particularly happy, she drops her seriousness and starts exclaiming happily about her great victory in Third-Person Person and her body being healthy for the time... which is completely undone with her Incurable Cough of Death. Either way, it's adorable.
    "Okita-san's great victory! (Okita-san daishouri!) Yep, my body's all fine! I can keep going— COUGH!?"
  • Okita Alter. Despite being a more serious version of Okita, sometimes she ends up forgetting the name of her own Noble Phantasm and comes up with something else that ends with 'Beam'. Also, if her skill lines are any indication, she can fall asleep in the midst of battle. Adorable!
    "Umm... what was it? Hmmm... I forgot! Finisher!/Eat this! MAJIN-SAN BEEEAAAAAAM!!!/SOMEWHAT AMAZING BEEEAAAAAM!!!"
  • Like her sister, Ishtar tends to act much more loftily than she actually feels, speaking flowery prose about how superior she is to the protagonist before spilling out all of her feelings in earnest. This combined with her Butt-Monkey tendencies makes her oddly endearing as she struggles to maintain her feeling of superiority.
  • Fuuma Kotarou. He becomes super flustered when meeting Kintoki and begs for his autograph. In Shimousa, he's honored to meet so many famous swordmasters and is frequently teased by both the protagonist and Musashi. In his summer costume, his enjoyment of summer occasionally slips out before he corrects himself. This cute social awkwardness makes him endearing to the audience.
  • Nitocris (Assassin). Until you get her first ascension, she has an entirely different set of bond lines where she pretends to be Medjed. It's both hilarious and quite cute. When she finally sheds the sheet over her head, she's very disappointed that the protagonist was somehow not fooled by her perfect disguise.
  • Jeanne Alter, as a Berserker. She wants to be cool and badass and comprehensively superior to that dumb porpoise-loving saint whose manga keeps winning ServaFes. She wants it so badly. Sadly for her, though, she's never been quite as much of a "desperate little sister" as she is now... and it shows in pretty much everything she does.
  • Mysterious Heroine X (Alter). She happens to be a nerdy goofball that enjoys eating sweets and spends more time listening to music and reading manga and light novels more than her mission to defeat Mysterious Heroine X.
  • Once she's warmed up to her Master, the protagonist's version of Anastasia does things like beg them for Osakabehime's kotatsu, admit to considering them a secret agent, and faux-imperiously demand that they devote themselves to her. This haughtiness juxtaposed with her cuteness makes her very endearing to the audience.
  • Avicebron. His passion for making golems really shines through in the first Lostbelt. Should you choose to clear out the tunnel when building a new base with the rebel army the rocks inside are such high quality for both golem making and repairing the Shadow Border that he immediately and giddily declares he's found a new workshop. He's so enthused he ignores the horde of demonic boars already in the cave and has to ask the protagonist to kill them once they're pointed out to him. And even after that, he has to be reminded that he needs to help, which he's clearly annoyed by. He later apologizes for losing his composure. All this makes him very cute in a way.
  • Murasaki. When she was first encountered, Murasaki seemed like a very elegant, no-nonsense lady... a facade that quickly crumbles into a blubbering, clumsy, adorable mess because she made a mistake that became the basis of the Valentine 2019 event. Even in battle, she tends to accidentally end up playing the Cute Clumsy Girl trope accompanied by quotes like "Awawa~"
  • Scáthach-Skadi. Shown very prominently in her Bond 4 and 5 quotes, with the former quote having her turn incredibly tsundere after the protagonist notices her feeling hot, and the latter quote having her talk about being an Old Maid in a hilarious manner. Her battle lines are also rather lacking in the dignity you'd expect of a goddess and help make her more likable to the audience.
    "Eenie meenie miney moe~"
  • Sieg tries to portray himself as a solemn and wise dragon upon first meeting the protagonist at first, but he has to take a moment to think about how he should explain the crisis, trips himself up with which Japanese Pronouns he wants to use (switching between the rougher "ore" and the more dignified "ware" when referring to himself, for instance) (or in the English version whether or not to keep using Flowery Elizabethan English), and is so happy when the protagonist agrees to help that he lets out a roar which totally deafens them. He also gets embarrassed of his initial impression with the protagonist. As the shopkeeper for the Inheritance of Glory event, he shows concern for how many golden apples the player is eating, and gets excited about the idea of ninjas when talking about Chaldea and the Servants there with the player.^note This is most likely an Actor Allusion, as Natsuki Hanae also voices Fuuma Kotarou. Overall, his stuffiness contrasted with how embarrassed he gets makes for a very adorable and likable guy.
  • Even as an adult and as a more serious Zhuge Liang/Lord El-Melloi II, Waver still shows his cute nerdy side once in a while as evident in two of his My Room dialogues:
    "By the way, is the Far East affected by the change in history? Like Akihabara, or video games... Oh, there is none? I see..."
    "As you can see, I'm in the middle of a game. I don't mind you talking to me, but please don't play with my hair, it's very distracting...!"
  • Nagao Kagetora constantly puts on airs of being more serious and wise than she actually is, calling being besieged "boring" before correcting herself and saying that it isn't the wisest strategy.
  • Pārvatī. When she gets flustered, she devolves into acting and berating herself for being a klutz in a cute way.
    "I... may be a goddess, but I'm kind of a klutz."
  • Beneath Mandricardro's gloomy and pessimistic exterior is a Fanboy for Hektor who immediately Squees at the thought of meeting him and getting his autograph. Once he starts opening up to the protagonist, he makes goofy expressions and beaming smiles while sneaking them candy and asking them to "help him clean up the evidence". On Valentine's Day, he instantly assumes he's being fired when the protagonist walks up to talk to him alone and is desperately Trying Not to Cry in a sitcom version of Go Out with a Smile.
  • Marie-Antoinette's attempts at modern slang are embarrassingly endearing.
    "Wh... Whassup! My homies!"
  • The Prince of Lan Ling. He feels awkward without his mask for one, and quite often pledges his loyalty to the protagonist, which makes it endearing. Also, in his Valentine scenario, where he receives chocolate from the protagonist. At first, he takes the chocolate but gives it back because he wants to do it over without his mask. And then, he tries to give a sincere compliment on how his mask looks on his master, in the most grandiose way possible, which leaves said master disappointed, and him utterly embarrassed.
  • Subsequent bond lines with Sigurd will show that he is a massive nerd.
  • Romani has his moments, especially when his hobbies come up. He's even rerouted some unnecessary parts of Chaldea's power supply to power an idol simulation! Those moments were even present in his original existence as Solomon, whose High-Speed Incantation is ranked down to C because he gets anxious and makes mistakes in his chants.
  • Osakabehime (Archer). Her new exaggerated expressions, her attempts to act cute, cheering for herself in her skill animations... this version of Osakabehime noticeably lacks the air of ethereal mystery that her Assassin self can pull off and is instead a very cute and dorky girl instead.
  • Ereshkigal wants to be a hardass death goddess, but her enormous crush on the protagonist leads to her having a wealth of moments where she's both adorable and pretty silly. She notably has even more "goofy" expressions than Ishtar does, and her "delight" expression, for example, features twinkling happiness stars◊. As a playable Servant, she can't help but trip over her own silliness as early as her initial summoning, and her My Room lines can show off even more goofy facial expressions than she had during Babylonia. Some of her skill animations are an antelope messing with her and her complaining as a result. One of her lines is her whining that she was trying to be cool.
• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • Some people have interpreted Blackbeard as deliberately playing up his perverted Otaku antics as a way to keep others warry of him as his intimidation tactics from life wouldn't be as effective on the average Servant.
  • Jason's NP involving summoning his Argonauts to attack, with him only occasionally stepping in or getting thrown around by them, has fans split on whether it cements Jason as a Dirty Coward who has all his men do his dirty work or someone who's so thoroughly trusted as a leader that he's able to summon the people he trusts the most for his ultimate attack.
  • Kirschtaria Wodime after Olympus, some see him as a Wide-Eyed Idealist whose misplaced trust in humanity meant his plans to ascend humanity into gods for a better future was doomed on arrival. Or a man who simply believed in the better parts of humanity and trying his best to make the most out of a situation that is unwinnable for him.
• Aluminium Christmas Trees:
  • While one of the more famous demons, Mephistopheles was created for the original Faust play and has no ties to demonology traditions prior to it. He is, in short, not a "real" demon.
  • Yes, a Buddhist sex cult existed in the 12th century (and possibly today).
  • Noah’s long white hair and complexion are derived from Fragment of the Book of Noah chapter of the pseudepigraphal Book of Enoch. ^{The exact passage}Enoch 106: 2 — And his body was white as snow and red as the blooming of a rose, and the hair of his head and his long locks were white as wool, and his eyes beautiful.
  • While the originator of the Florence Nightingale Effect and nicknamed the "Angel of Mercy" by her patients, the historical Florence Nightingale was rather sharp-tongued, headstrong, and courageous, not too dissimilar to her Berserker self shown in the game. Doubly so as she said that she focused solely on the patient in front of her when treating someone in order to compartmentalize the stresses of being a battlefield nurse.
  • Her insistance on immediately jumping to amputation is exaggerated, but not made up. Before the era of antibiotics and antiseptics, amputating anything that was getting gangrene was the only way to save the patient from a lingering death.
  • Besides the lion head mutation, much of Edison's character and many of his zanier antics have basis in his very real and colorfully volatile history. Being empowered by the Presidents of the USA and possessing massive Patriotic Fervor? He shamelessly used Uncle Sam as a public domain mascot to promote his phonograph and actually met a number of America's heads of state throughout his life. Entrusted with leading the remains of the American Army during the Fifth Singularity? Edison was part of the United States Naval Board during the First World War. His boxing fighting style? He was quite intrigued by the pugilists whose fights he recorded for his kinetoscope films. Helping create an entire boar piglet civilization during the first Summer Event? He was an avid proponent and pioneer of cheap, fast, but durable concrete housing. His bizarre vehicle created alongside Tesla during the following Summer Event? Edison spent years trying to create the world's first commercially viable electric car. Using direct current to dig tunnels during that same Event? He spent much of the 19th Century's last decade in a largely unsuccessful ore mining venture.
  • While Bradamante is usually depicted with Boyish Short Hair in her other iterations, she did formerly fight with hair as long and beautiful as shown in-game, only to have it cut off by surgeons so they could attend to a head wound she received in battle.
  • Nemo's white skin has some basis in his story, as his character was originally from Poland (a refugee from the violent fallout of the Polish January Uprising of the 1860s) in Verne's initial drafts but had his nationality obfuscated due to it being politically problematic for him to critique Russia as it was an ally of France at the time. It was only in the sequel story The Mysterious Island that Nemo was given a real name and a concrete Indian nationality.
  • One has to wonder why Caesar, who lived during the 1st century BC, wears a necktie. It was actually a neck scarf worn by Roman legionaries. Additionally, there was a legend that the scarf was introduced based on the Column of Trajan built in 2nd century AD although that would be anachronistic in Caesar's case. Probably justified since in-game Caesar is a Composite Character of the Roman history.
• Americans Hate Tingle:
  • Blackbeard is much more base-breaking in the US as his Comedic Lolicon behavior is more creepy than amusing to NA players, compared to Japanese players who like his antics and his Otaku behavior. If the NA players liked him, it's usually because his creepiness is Played for Laughs by being the Butt-Monkey to the point of memes.
  • Elizabeth is very popular in Japan, with her design and dreams of being an Idol Singer making her someone the Japanese fans love to see more of. By contrast in the West, she's more of a Base-Breaking Character due to her overexposure through story chapters and yearly events, her debatable usefulness, more mixed outlook towards idol culture, and characterization compared to her myth as a result of both Continuity Lockout and No Export for You due to Extra CCC never being localized, and the only glimpses players in the west got was in Extella, which has her portrayed closer to how she appears here, as opposed to CCC which explored her identity. Notably, when the Halloween 2021 came out, the Japanese-based Appmedia placed her Cinderella version B+ in the High-Difficulty tier list, while the American-based Gamepress flat-out stated to put her in the Second Archive^note a fan term for low tier characters in spite of her decent kit.
  • The Shimousa chapter is universally popular in Japan, but much more controversial in the West, partially because of both stylistic and presentation differences from the rest of the game, partially because of the Character Select Forcing that makes some bosses harder than they need to be, and partially because huge chunks of it are based on Japanese history and mythology, and on the conventions of martial arts and samurai films and novels that helped inspire the Fate franchise, both of which many Western fans aren't necessarily into. It is controversial rather than hated, but it's certainly a much more mixed reaction.
  • As a Stealth Sequel to Shimousa Heian-kyō has gotten similar reactions from both areas with Japan having it consistently appear on top 10 favorite chapters polls while it's seen as a much weaker story in the West.
  • Kiyohime enjoys massive popularity in Japan, getting a major role in the first Halloween event and a summer variant in the first summer event on her popularity, and as of the seventh anniversary, has been grailed to level 120 by more players than any other 1-3-star in the entire game. She's more of a Base-Breaking Character in the West, due to Yandere tropes being less popular, and stalking being seen in a more negative light there, while her positive traits (like her desire to be a good wife) aren't as in line with gender ideals.
  • While Arcade has its own share of detractors in Japan due to its Player Versus Player nature and Character Tiers, mobile players outside Japan absolutely loathe it for “stealing” long-demanded characters such as Sita and Tiamat, as well as having a story so barebones that it would make Septem and Agartha masterpieces in comparison. The “Onore Arcade!” meme is not helping its infamy overseas either. The hatred also spreads to its exclusive Servants, with Saber Jacques de Molay (usually as an inverse of the Base-Breaking Character treatment that Foreigner Molay get), all forms of Beast VI/S, and Noah being the most notable targets.
• Angst? What Angst?: The Protagonist shows very little signs of having any actual trauma after all the murder and destruction they have gone through in the Singularities (unless it's Played for Laughs like being traumatized by Elisabeth's singing). Even when they started showing doubts like when they are presented with the fact that erasing the Lostbelts will erase the lives of innocents, they are able to get their conviction back rather fast. While it is initially mentioned offhandedly that the protagonist is possibly disassociating as a means of coping, the "Lady Reines' Case Files" turns this into a plot point, as Mnemosyne's entire plan is to erase the Protagonist's memories because they must have some kind of emotional baggage they would be better off not having. When the Protagonist tells her that it is their duty to bear the pain they have and that they are what they are because of it, Mnemosyne responds that they are too compromised to recognize the state of their own psyche. That being said, it should be noted that it was implied that Mnemosyne is projecting it's own feelings of grief onto the protagonist. Though later on, some interactions with characters, like Kama's interlude and Quirinus's Valentines indicate that the protagonist is actually a lot more mentally haggard then they let on.
• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • As the game progresses and newer and powerful units become available as supports, bosses that were previously seen as difficult in the game's early stages are now a cakewalk with the right units.
  • Caster Gilles is the true final boss of the Orleans singularity, but you fight him alone (Jeanne Alter was flanked by two high-level wyverns) and he's only slightly stronger than when you battled him in a previous chapter.
  • Out of all the bosses in Camelot, Tristan is considered to be the easiest. Tristan's "Reversal" might throw people for a loop, but you don't need a Saber to defeat him, as his attacks have a lot of hits so they charge your party's NP gauge's by quite a bit, and his NP charge skill actually makes it so that he can't use his NP on the same turn, so it's easy to defend against compared to Mordred and Gawain in the same chapter. Players that prepared for Gawain with anti-male units, especially Euryale, will find her just as effective versus Tristan.
  • While Babylonia is a difficult chapter overall, the boss battles with the main villains are easy compared to some of the other enemies you fight in the same chapter.
    • Tiamat's or rather, Tiamat-Gorgon's normal attacks have tons of hits and attack the whole party, which charges up your party's Noble Phantasms at an insane rate, which allows you to spam them with impunity. The only thing that may throw you off is that she may try to stun you at random, and her crits are a different animation and hit quite a bit harder than double normal.
    • Kingu has no particularly annoying skills, and has many hits in his attacks (only they can only hit one target), giving him the same drawbacks that Gorgon has. His Noble Phantasm is also easily telegraphed and is single target, meaning that Mash can block it with her 3rd and 2nd skills. Even in the final battle, the only thing that changes is that his class changes to Avenger (which arguably makes him easier since you don't have to worry about the class matchups outside of having Rulers warm the bench, if you even have any), and at the end of every other turn he gains an NP charge (which is still rather slow to charge and is still easily telegraphed).
    • Femme Fatale has no attacks and only throws out debuffs, relying on the two Lahmu with her to deal damage. Once you kill them off, you're free to whittle down her HP at your own pace. Justified, as she's not trying to fight back.
    • Tiamat's final form once again shares Gorgon's problem of having a normal attack that has tons of hits and attacks the whole party, allowing you to spam Noble Phantasms. In addition, you get a large permanent buff that makes things even easier, a stronger version of Merlin as story support for the second-last battle against her and she was preceded by a much more grueling battle against a horde of eleven Bel Lahmus.
  • In a way, the Demon Pillars at the Final Singularity. They all have 600,000 HP or more, but at this point, with your party's power (and supports) that is boosted further by Bond Level, it can go down easily in 2-3 turns. Not helping is that they each are now put into one of the classes, meaning you can build teams of Servants that specialize against that Servant class and essentially lock them down thanks to class advantage. This is especially notable because with the except of the Demon Pillar in Camelot, all the other Pillars were originally their own unique class, making it hard to beat them at first.
  • Archer of Shinjuku. After Avenger of Shinjuku, we fight him and an Avenger Demon Pillar. The Demon Pillar only has AOE multi-hit attacks that fill NP gauges easily and the Archer himself has several exploitable traits (male, evil, Archer) that Lancers like Swimsuit Tamamo or Vlad III (Extra) can easily take advantage of.
  • The assassin boss in S.I.N. Lostbelt, Yu Mei-ren, has some odd gimmicks. The fight involves her instantly charging her own NP at the start of her every turn where her Noble Phantasm deals damage to your entire team and inflicting Curse at the same time. Your team is given Guts buff at the start of every turn to survive the Noble Phantasm, but the Curse debuff she inflicts will tick at the end of the player's turn, instantly procing the Guts effect and leaving your servants vulnerable to their inevitable doom to her Noble Phantasm. While this fight may seem hard on paper, in reality, the fight is much easier than expected when factoring into the Command Code feature, where there are two Command Codes that can actually remove the Curse debuff (and one of them can be obtained from the Friend Point gacha). Even funnier for crafty players on knowing how the Guts mechanic work where it cancels all of your opponent's subsequent actions when Guts is activated on their first turn. This means the fight is such a laughingstock that it can be soloed with using one servant equipped with a Command Code that can remove the Curse debuff to prevent it procing the Guts buff, even with servants not designed for soloing (i.e. Support Party Member like Waver, Tamamo, Merlin, and Skadi, or healers such as Irisivel and Medea Lily) or using a Rider against her despite the Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors disadvantage.
  • The final floor of the EX Tower in "Rescue! Amazoness.com ~CEO Crisis 2020~" is a fight against Superhuman Orion and Artemis. The fight is very easy due the both of them lacking break bars and Superhuman Orion getting stunned randomly, so you can just end the fight in one or two turns with a strong AoE Lancer. On the one hand, due to how the event functions, you might not have a bunch of servants available if you do it quickly. On the other hand, 'it's the final floor', so there's no reason not to just wait until all your good servants are usable, and there have been many other quests prior in the event that are harder, one of which includes one of the servants you fight here.
  • The final boss of Lostbelt 6, Oberon Vortigern is an odd mixture of this and Goddamned Boss. On one hand, he's far simpler compared to the hellish nightmare that was Cernunnos, and while initially presented as a greater threat than all the major antagonists in Avalon le Fae, in gameplay he almost doesn't have any defenses whatsoever compared to Cernunnos curse buff stacking to defend himself. On the other hand, he does have a nasty tendency to inflict the Sleep status ailment alongside charging his NP once often, meaning that those without Debuff Immunity are absolutely screwed, because there he has permanent Debuff Success Rate up, and while his class being Pretender can initially throw people off, it becomes easier to deal with once you know its weaknesses, though it doesn't make it easier since Calvary classes only resist his damage and his true weakness comes from Foreigners, which is an incredibly rare class with one Welfare servant from this class (Mysterious Idol X (Alter)) being introduced from a event that you might have missed, and even then, because of her NP and skillset, she doesn't sync well with the forced Story Supports in the frontline. Speaking of which, another major factor of how annoying this fight is because you're forced to use Altria Caster and Mash Kyrielight in the frontline, and while Mash does gain a damage buff after two turns have passed, it doesn't make up for her main ability which is tanking, and stalling is not encouraged against him due to how dangerous he is. Finally, his HP break bars give him the ability to give random debuffs towards the party after his first HP bar breaks, his second HP bar break gives him additional damage against debuffed Servants, and upon his last HP bar break, he pulls a Goetia with him gaining various buffs that not only grant him Ignore Invunerability, but also Ignore Defense and also charges his NP to maximum, annhilating any Servants in the frontline unless you Buff Block him or use Altria Caster's NP to grant the entire party Anti-Purge, which does prevent him from damaging you but in return inflicts you with the Sleep debuff unless you, once again, have Debuff Immunity. Overall, this fight is less exciting and more annoying, but not frustrating to the point of insanely difficult.
  • The final boss of Halloween 2022 Four Corrupts Six Traitors is very easy to defeat in contrast with the previous event's true final boss. While they are a Berserker with 1,049,176 HP who stuns and poisons everyone except Huyan Zhuo and Nine-Tattoo Dragon Eliza, they're hit by a debuff that lowers their health by 99%. This makes it incredibly easy to break their first health bar, and just when the game fools you into thinking they're going to be a tough second phase, it proceeds to unleash its NP (which is incredibly weak thanks to the debuff gained from the bar break) and then gets knocked out afterwards. No, really. You get your permanent welfare and Holy Grail afterwards.
• Applicability: The "Samba Night, Holy Night" event features a wrestling match where Anastasia and Bradamante use extremely questionable calculations to put "tsarpower" levels on their attacks. Japanese fans immediately knew this was Shout-Out to Kinnikuman (indeed, one so close to the actual scene that it was widely believed that the creators threatened legal action and this is why the event was never re-run), but Western fans instead tended to see it as an homage to Scott Steiner's famous "the numbers don't lie!" promo.
• Arc Fatigue:
  • Compared to Fuyuki being considered a fairly strong opening chapter, Orleans trips at the starting line; most of the chapter is largely considered to be a slog that has the player facing off against hordes of wyverns and almost little else (apart from the odd gaggle of soldiers, Servant battles and Fafnir) to the point that some areas consist solely of wyverns. Even the Servant fights have abilities they can chain together to make fighting them a lot lengthier than necessary. The story also tends to meander about, leading to some areas feeling as though they have no purpose besides filling time. The chapter's proven to be such a slow start to everything that comes afterward that some players have outright given up and stopped playing.
  • Septem's plot is very dragged out with the majority consisting of a chain of fights with flat character interactions and constant Character Shilling for Nero by her enemies of all people in-between. It does progress the story by giving the player payback against Lev, but the chapter continues a little longer after that to accomplish nothing else.
  • London's story focuses heavily on the "mystery" of the antagonists, but in practice, it results in constant Bait-and-Switch about who the threat really was to little plot advancement. Even with several popular and well-used characters and the reveal of the Big Bad, the chapter is characterized by fighting through a lot of the same enemies while occasionally stopping to meet a Servant who does nothing of importance.
  • Salem is a well liked chapter, but unlike other story chapters, it was handicapped by a time-gate lock preventing players from progressing until actual real world days had passed, making it the first story chapter to do so until Lostbelt 6 (which was so massive it had to be split into three). A number of players on release felt this hurt the story since it dragged the pacing out and made the story a lot harder to keep the momentum going. Thankfully this isn't an issue after that first week of it's release since it was only when first released, but it notably soured some players opinion of the story.
  • While the actual story of the "Tokugawa Restoration Labyrinth" event is considered good with a nice lead in to Lostbelt 4, many players dislike the lengthy process of getting to the end. You have to explore five floors, each with dead-ends and story-less moments with only a few bits of story progression sprinkled through, fighting almost the same enemies, are forced to follow a path once you select it until you gain another lamp and are stuck with using only 3 units for all but the Free Quests, last battle and CQ. This leads to the event turning into a grind because you have to go through so much ground with almost nothing happening, all while the game tries so hard to build up Kama/Mara as a threat, which falls a bit flat because Mara reveals her true threat so late into the story. Worse, when the player has seemingly reached the end, the game then forces the player to go back to each floor and explore new secret hallways in order to progress to the final boss, making the event even longer to complete. It's a neat idea turning the game into a dungeon crawl, but many players admitted to being tired of the pacing and wishing it was more of a traditional event, with a common sentiment being that after you do the event the first time, it isn't fun to do it again.
  • The second half of Cosmos in the Lostbelt has been criticized for dragging thanks to a combination of a slower release for main story chapters and the influx of stories that take place between the Lostbelts that typically don’t do much to advance the story causing the Myth Arc to move at a snail's pace.
  • Unlike every other story chapter, Lostbelt 6, Avalon Le Fae was released into three separate chunks on a monthly basis throughout June-August. This means that a main story segment, that’s typically given around three weeks of focus was the only thing happening in FGO outside of an interlude campaign, anniversary memorial quests, and a rerun of Nerofest, for an entire season. While some are fine with it due to it’s length, others wish that it was simply released all at once, or at the very least only divided into two parts. Thankfully when the part came over to NA things were shuffled around so that the whole story would be released within the span of a month, cutting down on a lot of the waiting time for the story
  • "Ordeal Call" revealing a minimum of three more story chapters to go was met with much annoyance from players, seeing it as a blatant means of padding out the story so they don't have to deal with the story's end now that all seven Lostbelts are released in-game. Even in universe, the arc has Chaldea just sitting around until something happens.
  • The first chapter of Ordeal Call, Paper Moon is agreed to drag thanks to half of the story’s conflict being dedicated to Zouken and his multiple revivals with little variety until he’s finally put down in chapter 10 of 16.
• Ass Pull:
  • The idea that Xiang Yu can't be summoned due to nobody thinking he should be qualified to join the Throne of Heroes. Considering the multitudes of tyrants, serial killers, and actual monsters that have been summoned no problem with it making it seem like the Throne was just really picky when it came to him in particular.
  • Chaos appearing in the Olympus Lostbelt. After the heroes defeat Zeus this thing comes out of nowhere, and is stated to be the true mastermind behind Zeus, effortlessly kills Ares, forces Romulus to sacrifice himself to guide the Storm Border to it while Musashi wipes herself from existence to cut void and banish it. This only serves to add some backstory to the Greek gods and wipe out all the heavy hitters on the hero's side before they fight Kirschtaria. Which is especially noticeable since the much more built-up fight with Zeus ended up being a lot less of a problem for the heroes with the only casualties the Minerva AI's and Caligula paving the way for Mars and Romulus to be summoned to help out. While Chaos is mentioned during Olympus quite often, the context is usually just one of the Gods using it as part of their title, so it appearing right away after Zeus is beaten comes with no setup or hinting aside from Zeus himself expositing to Kirschtaria about how the Olympians abandoned their original purpose to Chaos when they chose to become the gods humans worshipped them as and that they all forgot this but him.
  • In Heian-kyō Nursery Rhyme gets mortally wounded and is noted by expert healer Medea Lily to not have long to live. However, she was able to make a miraculous recovery thanks to being empowered by Kintoki's presence due to him being a character found in children's stories in the East. This ability has never been brought up before or after this event and in the story, it simply gets shrugged off as a miracle.
  • Koyanskaya having nothing to do with Tamamo Vitch, while there are some "hints" that there was more to her than simply being a rouge member of Tamamo Nine, it feels like it was a twist for the sake of it, as the story offers no explanation for why she ended up taking the same name and job as Tamamo Vitch while seemingly having no idea of the latter's existence. Worse, what few attempts to "foreshadow" the twist had the opposite effect instead, because the developers were so vague/misleading about said "hints", that it instead doubled down on the idea she was Tamamo Vitch, making the reveal feel like it came out of nowhere even with the attempts at foreshadowing the reveal.
  • From Lostbelt 7 we have the survival of Meunière after being shot in the head and heart, two vital areas that would be fatal to nearly every Servant with the only justification being his family's Magic Crest healed him into a stable condition.
• Awesome Art:
  • Several Servants and CEs have had their artwork praised for their depictions of characters and are another reason people roll for them, gameplay usefulness notwithstanding.
  • As the game advanced, they began to use CGs to illustrate some of the more awesome moments in the game, for example, Camelot has Ozymandias crashing his temple into Camelot, Babylonia has Kingu restraining Tiamat with the Chain of Heaven, Shinjuku has Saber Alter ride in on her motorcycle to save the protagonist, and Shimosa has Muramasa preparing his Noble Phantasm and then slicing the entire castle in half.
  • In spite of the mixed opinions on the existence of Van Gogh as a servant, what has been agreed upon is her art, which incorporates Vincent van Gogh's famous paintings in each ascension. Van Gogh herself is also drawn in a way that is incredibly reminiscent of the painter's iconic painting style.
• Awesome Music: Enough to give the game its own page, especially after the game's budget increased over time.

B

• Badass Decay: The Beast Class as a whole has become perceived as this, after a while, which is ironic considering that they're supposed to be more impressive over time. With Beast I and II effectively being full-on apocalypses personified and taking some of Fate's heaviest hitters to be put down while Beast III/R is noticeable for killing the protagonist and requiring Meltryllis to travel back in time to form an appropriate counter as otherwise, she was unbeatable. However, by the time that Cosmos in the Lostbelt started the Beasts that appear ended up being less impressive with Beast III/L taking far less effort to beat and being outplayed far more often, albeit being one of the closest to having a Near-Villain Victory. Meanwhile, Beast IV:L Koyanskaya spends most of the story getting their ass beat by any named opposition and by the end of it, gets outplayed and permanently crippled before getting talked down by Chaldea and while Beast VII U-Olga Marie is absurdly powerful, she winds up being woefully ineffective when trying to deal with Chaldea. Thankfully by the end of the Lostbelts things have begun turning around with Beast I:L Camazotz, who was capable of outlasting ORT in a straight up fight and the strong implication that, not only is U-Olga Marie a vessel for the true Beast VII, but she never had the chance to reach her true potential, which is why the Count rebuilds her as a far more serious and dangerous threat who, albeit still nowhere near her true power, will steadily grow until she becomes completely unbeatable as her fragments are tested and overcome.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • The main character themself. There are fans who like them as an everyman hero who overcomes the immense challenges of the game's story without breaking under strain and trauma, armed with nothing but tactical smarts, guts, and charisma, and there are fans who dislike them as a transparent Wish-Fulfillment Escapist Character who gets all the credit and Character Shilling despite almost always relying on partners to do the fighting for them and frequently relying on allies to do the thinking for them; the player-as-strategist element doesn't translate well for them. Their critics also describe them as a boring cypher without much personality, making the shilling all the more galling, while their fans argue that over time the protagonist has grown into more of a character in their own right, with a (potentially) wacky goofball side and a serious, perceptive, and iron-willed side. Finally, there's the fact that just about all of the lady servants and a couple of the dudes are at the very least crushing on them. Fans see this as the logical culmination of an established character whose greatest talents are supposed to be charisma, perceptiveness, and open-mindedness naturally getting a fair bit of romantic attraction. Critics see this as the nadir of a boring, empty hole in the story for the player to self-insert onto being pandered to.
  • Elisabeth is divisive in the West, especially since the materials that introduced her are subject to No Export for You. Depending on who you ask, she is either a very entertaining character with fun Affably Evil quirks and an Idol Singer gimmick, or the same Idol Singer aspect and her general personality coming off as annoying. It doesn't help that her Breakout Character status gives her tons of screentime in the story and events, with her fans enjoying her focus but causing the people who don't enjoy her presence to see her as overexposed.
  • Emperor Nero has many fans and many critics. Those who like her appreciate her design, her endearingly boisterous ego and sense of infectious energy, and some of the fun humor that surrounds her in various events. Those who dislike her complain about her being whitewashed compared to both her origin in the EXTRA titles and herself in history, her being one of the most gratuitous Saberfaces in the franchise, and her being overexposed across multiple story arcs and events.
  • Chloe was hit with this once again, for the same reasons as in Fate/kaleid liner PRISMA☆ILLYA: she is Fille Fatale incarnate and the primary reason PRISMA☆ILLYA is seen as "lolicon bait". The game does a good job of glossing over this in most scenarios, but Chloe's interlude has her true behavior on full display, which came as an unpleasant shock to many Western players who were unfamiliar with her origin series. This leads to a divide between players who enjoy Chloe's meta-aware humor and status as one of the best Welfare Servants, and those who are uncomfortable with Chloe's behavior potentially to the point of burning her after seeing her Interlude. The reveal of Summer Chloe did no favors to her detractors, who were actively dreading the prospect of Chloe having Ascension art.
  • Despite her initial popularity, Musashi has become a polarizing character over time, largely due to her growing importance in the game's story. Since her introduction, Musashi has appeared in several stories as either the central character, or a major ally, which has split the community due to the amount of focus she gets compared to other characters as a result. Some like Musashi's importance, citing her fun personality yet still complex and layered character as part of the appeal of her, and that her appearances in the story as an ally (especially since she's the same Musashi in all cases) help the story out since she's a skilled combatant who avoids being too overpowered. Fans also like that Musashi is important since she often brings levity without being too much of a distraction due to her fun personality. Others feel she gets too much focus compared to other characters who need it, to the point of Creator's Pet, since she gets a lot of Character Shilling and her importance has been such that she is treated as effectively a main character in more than one chapter. It doesn't help that outside of Shimosa, her role in the story often has her being basically a solution to a Only the Author Can Save Them Now situation, the most infamous moment being in Olympus, as well as the game more often than not forcing you to use her as the Support in battles when she’s around, some of which don’t do the players any favors.
  • Foreigner Jacques de Molay as she is a genderbent version of an Arcade-exclusive servant with a completely different personality and class. While she has fans who like this different personality of hers in addition to finding her to be quite attractive (and a decently large LGBT Fanbase), detractors prefer Saber Molay and for him to be in FGO Mobile, with They Changed It, Now It Sucks! complaints as they feel her inclusion is rubbing salt over the wound in regard to Saber Molay not being in FGO Mobile and male servants in general being in shorter supply than female.
  • Koyanskaya is probably the most controversial of the main Lostbelt cast. Some love her for being a good source of comedy in the relatively darker arcs, and for consistently attractive designs. Others however find her more annoying than endearing, see her as so nonthreatening to the point that she’s arguably more of an ally than a supposed villain, and perceive her as the biggest victim of Depending on the Writer as some parts of her personality, overall competency and her relationship with Chaldea can vary widely between chapters. The base only divided further after her starring event Tunguska Sanctuary where her backstory and motivation were revealed, and her story line was concluded with some people being fine with her not being directly related to Tamamo and found her being talked down and leaving the plot on good terms with Chaldea to be a good breather after the dourness that was the end to Avalon Le Fey while other find her true origin to come right out of nowhere, and felt that ultimately letting Koyanskaya go after everything she did was more insulting then uplifting. There's also her last-minute split into a light and dark half to be summoned. With some people thinking that the two halves are a unique idea with them being more of a yin and yang of Koyanskaya rather than a simple good and evil version while others criticize splitting her up for trying to milk a character for alts before their story even ended and the two forms seeming like they really had no idea what to do with her.
• Best Boss Ever:
  • After a couple of those kinds of bosses in a row with Solomon's dodge spam and Goetia's incredibly busted turn 1 combo that turns the unwary player's entire frontline to ashes, we get the ultimate, and truly final battle with Human King Goetia. Not only is it extremely well-balanced as to be challenging but fair even to the most stacked or spare of parties, but it features arguably the single greatest music track in the game while being an amazing throwback to the fan favorite battle of Kirei vs Shirou in Heaven's Feel: after having become mortal and overwhelmed by the Protagonist, Goetia still stands, already one-and-a-half foot in the grave but with willpower left in him to spare, and challenges you to one last battle, no longer with the fate of the world at risk, just your life and his, with the earnest hope that you, his greatest adversary, will stay and watch the end of his story, of his short but finally real life. That it manages to make Goetia of all people infinitely sympathetic considering his past actions is just the icing on the cake for an amazing boss fight.
  • The final battle with Tiamat at the end of Babylonia is incredibly fun. While your party loses 4000 HP every turn, it's balanced out by the fact that your entire party is buffed to insane levels thanks to Merlin and Ereshkigal, basically boosting all your general stats and healing 4000 HP at the end of your turn, not to mention how satisfying it is to essentially beat down the mother of all life, who was established to be essentially invincible and unkillable, and King Hassan still manages to impose the concept of death upon her, still making her incredibly tough, but now killable. It is worth noting that while the boss is fairly easy, the sheer spectacle, story build up, and music, create a boss fight that even by the time of the Lostbelt storyline, is considered one of the best fights in the game.
  • It's immensely satisfying to beat the Final Boss of SE.RA.PH after all she's done both in the event story and in past events, with the Kiara Punishers forcing her onto a level playing field and an absolute god-tier orchestral remix of her battle theme playing. She's challenging but fair and players can have fun with her by choosing which Kiara Punishers to utilize in the battle to challenge themselves. Bringing Meltryllis or Passionlip enhances the experience, not just because they're the only ones who deal extra damage, but their character arc comes to a culmination as they finally overcome Kiara.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: Despite having the storytelling and lore on par with a fullblown console JRPG, and basically setting a new standard for mobile games since its debut, most people unfamiliar with FGO only know about it because of the collossal amount of erotic fanart of its numerous female characters (and a few male ones too). Even some fans admit that one of their main drives to keep playing is the "waifu appeal."
• Bizarro Episode: Most events are incredibly wacky. Surprisingly a lot of them are considered canon as the limited Servants from some of those events appear in the Final Singularity.
  • "GUDAGUDA Honnoji". The entire event was designed as an overblown parody of the game, promoting two gag characters from Koha-Ace being suddenly added to the game. Lots of fourth wall jokes, sudden events and overall strangeness ensues. "GUDAGUDA Meiji Revival" has the protagonist, along with Nobunaga and Okita, travel to Bakumatsu-era Japan which is being ravaged by a chibi Nobu army. Hijikata and Nobukatsu (Nobunaga's younger brother) appear to drag Okita and Nobunaga respectively against their will to fight.
  • The 2015 Christmas Event. The protagonist is kidnapped by Santa Alter to serve as her reindeer to deliver presents to F/GO characters, much lampshading and mockery ensue.
  • "Saber Wars" with Mysterious Heroine X coming straight from her humble April Fools origin in a non April Fools event! Where Heroine X must eliminate all Sabers! But first, she's going to train Saber Lily in utilizing her crotch blaster! Also, the main currency is Altria's ahoge.
  • The starting concept for "Garden of Order" was "a lot of Servants have started living in Ogawa Apartments, so Shiki will be going around collecting their rent." It’s not a gag story, no.
  • "Da Vinci and the 7 Fake Heroic Spirits" starts when someone started selling a counterfeit Mona Lisa CE because the ones in Da Vinci's shop were too expensive. Then it turns into an otome game with Jeanne Alter as the heroine halfway through the storyline, faithfully Lampshaded by an ex-galge protagonist.
  • "Starry Xuanzang Goes to India" is a full-blown parody of Journey to the West, with Servants as the characters!
  • The "Chaldea Summer" event starts off with Chaldea's crew and Servants off having a fun vacation on a tropical island (even with the onset of humanity's approaching destruction)... and then in part 2, players deal with a post-apocalyptic world run by intelligent boars.
  • The Prisma Illya event is essentially a Magical Girl show using the cast of F/GO.
  • The Halloween Event of 2016 steps up the weirdness of the previous event by being extremely generous with the in-jokes and shout-outs, how the map is based on Ghosts 'n Goblins, and how zany the dialogue is even compared to previous events.
  • Christmas 2016 starts off with Jeanne Alter, who in a moment of anger, drinks a potion of youth and becomes a ten year old Jeanne Lily who wants to spread happiness by being Santa, unfortunately, she doesn't have a very good grasp of what people want for Christmas...
  • "All the Statesmen" revolves around Riyo's gag Servant and the wackiness of Learning with Manga! comic strips.
  • The summer 2017 event, "Dead Heat Summer Race", is a Wacky Racing event with swimsuit-wearing Servants as the participants. And then it turns into the goddamn Great Escape with swimsuit Servants, and Medb of all people as the chief warden!
  • Halloween 2017 continues the 2015 and 2016 event, this time featuring a wholesome Shout-Out to Godzilla vs. Mecha-Godzilla and references with a fourth wall observer, Osakabe-hime.
  • Christmas 2017, although a story-centric event written by Nasu, has the protagonist with a sheep-riding, feverish Santa Altera visiting the Underworld, Irkalla, which Ereshkigal has decorated with Christmas knick-knacks.
  • Setsubun 2018 has the protagonist and Archer Inferno climb a hundred-story pagoda in which the air is filled with alcohol and various Servants with their various antics waits for them. The event also has various Onsen scenes of Servants interacting with one another.
  • Valentine 2018 has Chaldea ran out of chocolates for Valentine's Day when Semiramis and her Hanging Gardens of Babylon appeared and monopolizes all chocolates. She agreed to give Chaldea her chocolates, but in turn, they must work for her to build her own chocolate factory.
  • The GUDAGUDA Strange Tales of Imperial Holy Grail at least in its second part, has a Fuyuki-based Holy Grail parody which introduced some even more bizarre Nobbus.
  • Serva Fes 2018 has the Servants going on summer vacation in Hawaii and forming clubs to create Doujinshi, with the protagonist and their inner circle stuck in a Ground Hog Day Loop until they make the best possible manga. Though Summer BB's presence takes a dark turn in the second half.
  • Oniland (Halloween 2018) involves Oni-themed theme park and magical girl parody.
  • Holy Samba Night (Christmas 2018) has Quetzalcoatl of all people, become a Santa (wearing a samba suit because she misunderstood the word) and get involved in a wrestling tournament for the Holy Grail with her heel self.
• Breather Boss:
  • After three incredibly hard fights (Zeus, a Wodime backed Caenis, and Wodime himself), the final fight of Olympus is a straightforward duel with Caenis on their own. While they aren't really outright easy, they're simple in mechanics, can easily be beaten within roughly three turns, and they lack anything like Wodime's supports to make the fighter longer, Wodime's first turn insta-killing of your frontline, or the sheer mechanical difficult of Zeus. The only downsides is that you have to include Ortinax Mash on the frontline, and Holmes as a forced support (though in the case of the former, she can be quickly swapped or killed to prevent her from being an issue).
  • After the nightmare that was Demon Hound Barghest, you face off against Black Wolf, and while you're locked to three servants, with one being Mash Kyrielight, it's just enough to fit in both Altria Caster and Tamamo-no-mae, and that boss suffers from a status ailment that deducts his HP by 40,000 each turn, meaning that you can simply wait it out and watch as he self-destructs. Of course, the only things annoying about him is that upon breaking his first HP bar, he inflicts a party-wide stun that can't be removed for three turns except against Mash, though since he tends to target her unless he is using his NP, it kind off renders it moot, and while he does have a 5-use Guts, said Guts only revive him by 1 HP, meaning that it doesn't take long for him to fall after he self-destructs.
  • Surprisingly enough, the Challenge Quest for "Halloween Rebellion of 108 People", "Fierce Battle! Chaldea Mount Liang" is far easier compared to the 90++ Node. The main bosses have some gimmicks, such as Eliza having extended Debuff Immunity alongside having an "offensive buff removal on attack" buff, Huyan gaining an special Defense buff based on how many Mental Trait buffs her allies give her, and Yan Qing providing support for Huyan. However, all of those are easily bypassed thanks to the astonishing 200% damage buff given to the player's Huyan, which combined with her skills, an MLB Black Grail and Skadi, allows her to bypass many of the defense buffs such as Eliza gaining a 3-hit Invulnerability buff, allowing her to clear the Quest in three turns. The quest does become legitimately challenging if not using her, but other Challenge Quests don't include such workarounds.
  • Much like the "Halloween Rebellion of 108 People", at first glance, the Challenge Quest for "Johanna and the Unconfirmed Love" should be very intimidating at first glance, featuring Caren and Aŋra Mainiiu, and in theory, Aŋra Mainiiu should be the more dangerous of them due to his NP countering any damage done to him and his HP is huge enough to make anyone think twice, and breaking his first HP bar instantly maxes his NP gauge... Except, he doesn't have a Taunt buff for enemies to target him, meaning that players are free to target Caren instead whenever this happens, and the debuffs Caren can inflict are easily minor. And unlike the above example, any servant can steamroll them thanks to their below-average HP.
  • Despite being the closest thing to a proper battle with Beast VI/S in Mobile with a very scary set of buffs and debuffs, the fight against Beast VI/S Rebloomed is aided by a Support Tiamat with a baked-in Class advantage against it, and after the first phase you're joined by a Support Beast of Sodom/Draco who has so many damage modifiers against it that she can shred an entire Break Bar in one set of normal attacks. Unless you actively sabotage the Supports, it's extremely hard to lose.
• Breather Level:
  • The Salem chapter of Epic of Remnant is very story-centric with only nine chapters and several 0 AP segments, thus it has much easier and fewer battles compared to other EOR chapters. The only major stage-wide gimmick is that early fights will have both player and enemy levels halved.
  • Lostbelt Chapter 6.5: Traum is a more story-centric chapter like Salem and has fairly straightforward battles with some fairly fun gimmicks. While there are still some challenging fights, it's generally considered to be nowhere near the battles of attrition in Avalon le Fae and Tunguska Sanctuary.
  • Paper Moon is a more lighthearted chapter compared to the intense trials of Nahui Mictlan with mostly straightforward battles. While there are some challenging fights, their difficulty is below-average compared to the others.
• Broken Base:
  • While it's not a new issue for the Fate series, the question of whether the Historical Gender Flip Servants are overdone, silly Fanservice, or whether they do represent interesting takes on the source material and at least lend the cast a bit of gender balance.
  • The disparity between the treatment of the different servers, particularly the North American server, is a hot-button issue. One side is dissatisfied by lesser rewards for the same events, lack of professionalism by the NA staff during the very occasional livestreams, and nearly complete lack of communication on social media. Meanwhile, the other side is just happy that the game is in English and feels that the former perspective is outweighed by the many quality-of-life updates, particularly the lower quartz cost to roll the gacha for the first year of release. The gap has also significantly narrowed with time, and NA is more likely to receive updates chronologically earlier than JP did, cooling this divide with time.
  • The alterations made to Emiya Alter in the NA server are almost guaranteed to spark arguments whenever they get brought up. On one side, you have people who like the change because it makes him look less like a racial stereotype and argue that localization is not censorship and people shouldn't try to equate the two just because not localizing would offend someone. On the other side, you have people that dislike the change, see it as censorship, and argue that it goes against the claim by the NA team at launch that there would be no censorship.
  • Shimousa, easily the most popular Epic of Remnant chapter in Japan, is much more controversial in the West. For every fan who loves the presentation and cool sword fights, another complains that it spends far too long twittering in fight-jargon. It is written in a very different style from every other chapter in the game, and extensively references both Japanese fantasy and historical literature and Japanese history and mythology with an all-Japanese cast and no theme-breaking characters, meaning that while it made for a cool and deep story to those Western fans sufficiently familiar with Japanese culture and history to see what it was going for, some were left scratching their heads, bored and confused, leading to the criticism that the cast is largely random Japanese people no one outside of Japan knows or cares about who can't shut up about how cool each other are. Worse, it tinkered with the gameplay via Character Select Forcing, meaning some bosses were harder than they normally would be due to having to use a story-upgraded Musashi rather than the player's Support list. It all seems to boil down to whether or not you are familiar with and like the conventions of classic, spiritually infused martial arts movies and books.
  • Osakabehime's localization utilizing Fangirl Japanese has one camp finding it endearing, fitting, and funny while the other side feels that it hurt or doesn't work with her background and original characterization.
  • The Tokugawa Labyrinth event, in both gameplay and story. In the former case, fans enjoy the unconventional, experimental event structure, and appreciate that it is very merciful in terms of both AP and farming requirements, while critics dislike the drawn-out nature of the dungeon-exploration gameplay, especially if they prefer a more traditional mission structure and find the exploration scenes more Padding than atmospheric. In terms of story, some like that it gives spotlight to less-used characters like Mata Hari, Yagyu, and Scheherazade, letting the latter especially show off her Character Development after a controversial introduction, Nobutsuna and Kama as unconventional villains with an unconventional plot, and that the event is ultimately more momentous than it seems, being the battle with Beast III/L. Those who dislike it complain that Kama's Fatal Flaw of apathy undermines her ability to project threat and menace, and that disproportionate focus is given to Kasuga-no-Tsubone that could've gone to almost anyone else, a fairly obscure figure outside of her native Japan, but who is treated as one of the most famous and important women in Japanese history, even ending on a tease of her one day being a playable servant that international audiences know has yet to amount to anything.
  • Pseudo-servants as a concept. Essentially, whenever one shows up, there's dissension in the ranks between those who are glad to see a familiar face from the constellation of Type Moon mythology, especially when the spirit in question makes sense and is largely dominant (Muramasa fusing with Shirou was popular enough that fans clamoured for him to become playable for years, and Parvati and Kama each inhabiting the light and dark sides of Sakura's personality is widely seen as inspired) and those who feel that the mythological figure they've fused with is now "wasted" and never going to show up, since the "host" influences the being possessing them to some extent. This is most prominent with Zhuge Liang and Sima Yi, whose personalities are almost-entirely dormant after fusing with Waver Velvet and Reines Archisorte, respectively, but it also affects many others, especially after strange fake revealed that an Ishtar devoid of Rin's influence is effectively a completely different character.
  • While Mash as a character is generally well-received, her Ortinax kit from the Lostbelt arc has divided fans. It is unmistakably a Nerf to her previous Game-Breaker status, but no one can seem to come to a consensus on if she still has viable usage as a Buster-crit and taunter tank, or is now pretty much useless as a unit.
  • The concept of the Servantverse. Some people enjoy the much wackier world that often takes the piss out of Fate's tropes and characters while others find it unfunny and way to different from the main story to care about. Then there are those who are mostly fine with it on its own but would rather it not mix with the more serious stories.
  • If you were to ask about how canon events are, you would walk away with multiple different opinions. Some would say that none of the events are canon barring very specific ones such as Ooku and Imaginary Scramble. Some would say that all events are canon, such as how the Final Singularity has a section specifically for the event-specific Servants. Things get even more divisive if you were to ask which events are canon. While almost all of the events that happened during Observer on Timeless Temple and Epic of Remnant could fit in the timeline, Cosmos in the Lostbelt being stuck in Webcomic Time means that at most four different seasonal cycles would have happened within a span of one in-universe year, making it harder to just accept all events being canon and thus forcing people to handpick specific events.

C

• Captain Obvious Reveal:
  • The traitor of Chaldea being Holmes. The only other options besides minor side characters lacking narrative significance were Mash, who not only doesn't have the personality for it nor would it make sense with her backstory, Da Vinci, who was with the player since the very beginning and killed by one of the Disciples, Goredolf who was regarded as a disposable patsy by the Foreign God's forces and nearly killed by them a few times, and Sion, who has been nothing but helpful despite joining the latest and is an Alternate Self of a pre-established heroine. Holmes on the other hand once infamously pointed fingers at the indisputably good Dr. Roman, has been walking around without a Master, isn't a free Servant, and wasn't summoned by Chaldea, and has had numerous hints that he's not what he seems dropped all over the place. The real twist though isn't that he's the traitor, but that he himself isn't aware of it.
  • The reveal of the Count's identity, to the point where Id starts with Chaldea figuring it out with little fanfare. There's only so many famous figures that can be refered to as "the Count", which narrows it down to Count Dracula, the Count of Monte Cristo and Count Cagliostro, and the first two have already been met and while another mole like Holmes isn't out of the picture, their personalities just don't fit with how The Count has been acting. Most damningly though, he references the Affair of the Diamond Necklace in his appearance in Waxing Moon Clashing Swords Chronicles, and sure enough, Marie identifies the voice recordings of The Count as sounding like Alessandro di Cagliostro.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • Beating the crap out of Lev Lainur/Flauros is incredibly satisfying after his gruesome murder of Olga Marie and the fact that all the time, he constantly put up a smug Eyes Always Shut face or Slasher Smile and a lot of the lines coming from his mouth are smug declarations of what you did were futile and he'll beat the crap out of you (even after previously he was easily killed by Altera without any second glances during the Septem Singularity). Tellingly, during the Solomon Singularity, after players were done farming materials from Barbatos, they went straight to Flauros to make him pay for all of his slights. And just to be sure, the players still sometimes use the Battle Cry that sounded more like "And this is for Olga Marie, you son of a bitch!" to add up to the catharsis.
  • Do you have a playable Servant that you somehow hate (Columbus is a popular example for this)? Worry no more, watch as you call in Chen Gong and then sacrifice that hated Servant as a damage bomb to your enemy.
  • For many, the Cold-Blooded Torture exacted upon Koyanskaya in the third Lostbelt is this. After she viciously killed many members of Chaldea and spread misery and sorrow throughout the other Lostbelts, Qin Shi Huang takes it upon himself to essentially keep her trapped, helpless beneath his charms set on her and eternally tortured until he finds a way to properly seal her, and until he does find such a way, he'll torture her to the point she can't even consider doing anything else ever again. He ends it all off with a cold remark of "Remember the suffering of the people you've killed until now". Possibly doubles as a Crowning Moment of Awesome for Qin Shi Huang.
  • After over 3 years of ruining people's lives, turning Pepe's Lostbelt into a hellscape, and just being an absolute dick, Ashiya Douman at long last gets his comeuppance in Heiankyo, where you are able to beat the shit out of him with your servants along with Kintoki's giant mech.
  • Lostbelt 6 provides the agonizing Rasputinian Death of Beryl Gut, which after the shits he has done (especially backstabbing and murdering Wodime) and his very-very un-tragic past, which the players definitely appreciate (even at the cost of Pepe's Heroic Sacrifice).
• Character Tiers: As one might expect, and more heavily debated than many.
  • Almost every tier list has Waver and Merlin at the top because of a major consensus that they are useful for almost any fight.
  • One thing worth noting is that the free 4* Servants attached to events have tended to be pretty good - which, as time has gone on, has generated significant goodwill toward DelightWorks, especially after the game's rocky launch. Only Altria Lily, Assassin Scathach, Sieg, and Brave Liz are considered average, and that's just due to Lily's generally middling stats, Assassin Scathach having a weak kit for someone who's an Assassin with low HP (having a healing skill with a damage cut and a taunt, with her major redeeming value being, as a welfare that has an AoE Noble Phantasm, an incredibly rarity for an Assassin that allows her to clear waves of enemies ^note The only other Assassins in the game for budget players with AoE Noble Phantasm are Phantom of the Opera and Fuuma Kotarou, which the former is considered to have a kit far worse than Assassin Scathach, while the later is more known for critical star generation akin to Jack the Ripper), Sieg's own middling stats and anti-Dragon ability that only really exists for lore reasons (since Sieg is a Caster while most Dragons are Riders, which puts him in an incredible disadvantage against Dragons, though he thankfully has a strong niche in NP spamming) and the unpredictable nature of Brave Liz's third skill - and even then, they're still perfectly usable, just uninspired. Meanwhile, on the other end of the scale, Chloe von Einzbern from the Prisma Illya crossover, Rider Kintoki from the Onigashima event, and Ryougi Shiki from the The Garden of Sinners event can only be described as ridiculous (which itself says it all, really).
  • Another part of the game's design is that lower-rarity does not automatically mean the character is flat-out inferior. Yes, they start with lower level caps, and even at equalized level via Palingenesis their stats are usually lower... but a marked number of characters can still be very useful on teams due to their skills (and there's the class Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors). Some noted above under Bribing Your Way to Victory are so useful that they're often considered "low-rarity EX tier", in that even for a player with a strong gold lineup otherwise, their skills and NPs make them valid picks over even five-star characters.
  • Each of the card metas can be subjected to various tiers.
    • The Japanese version's metagame (for difficult gameplay content) for most of Observer on Timeless Temple and Epic of Remnant was heavily Buster-oriented, because between Buster-based supports, especially those who enabled Buster critical hits (Merlin is notably the last and strongest of these) and Buster-based damage dealers in general (Jeanne Alter, Musashi, Raikou, and Ishtar) players could tear through even high-level enemies and bosses, even after the introduction of break bars in an attempt to curb their destructive power. However, after the release of Altria Caster, the Buster meta was viewed less favorably as unlike a team of two Castorias or a team of two Skadis, a team of two Merlins cannot cause NP Loops to happen, but it gained more favor after Koyanskaya of Light came out since her skillset allows Buster NP Loops to happen.
    • Prior to the release of Altria Caster, Arts-based teams with damage dealers (Saber Lancelot, Nero Bride, Chloe, and Swimsuit Altria), general supports (Waver, Tamamo, and Holmes), and excellent tanks (Mash, Jeanne, and Georgios) were often seen as the "alternative" strategy, with "stall" teams based around grinding enemies down over time, and many tricks that worked even for players who sank less (or no!) money into the game. After the release of Altria Caster, the Arts meta started to be viewed as the top tier card meta as it is very easy for Arts damage dealers to spam their NP.
    • Due to an initial dearth of Quick supports, Quick-based Servants were left behind in the dust, with the only two major exceptions being Jack and Rider Kintoki. However, with the arrival of Scathach-Skadi from the third anniversary gacha, combined with various Rank Up Quests on various Quick servants, the Quick meta is back on par with the other two card types, allowing for more powerful and fun Quick team compositions. Edmond Dantes, Berserker Lancelot, and Parvati in particular went on to become some of the most wanted servants after Skadi's release, and the release of Kama, Ashiya Douman, and Taira/Yoshitune only helped raised the Quick meta even more so. After Altria Caster's release, the quick meta was viewed as the "alternative" strategy to NP Spam (at least prior to the release of Koyanskaya of Light).
• Common Knowledge:
  • The fandom pretty commonly states that the reason the Christmas 2018/2020 event was not rerun was because of legal reasons, claiming that the creators of Kinnikuman threatened legal action towards DW for how similar the story of the event was. Despite this being widely accepted as true, the developers never actually stated why beyond that they wanted to limit some of the reruns for reasons unknown, and no legal evidence came backing up this idea. Indeed, the 2020 Christmas event was not given a rerun in 2021 and would only be rerun in 2022, so even if legal reasons were at play, the developers have just decided not to rerun some events, likely for reasons such as development time. The developers later clarified that they sometimes don't rerun events right away to give variety and open up slots for new events instead.
  • When discussion about who's the strongest Lostbelt King gets brought up expect people to bring up Morgan due to a comment from Beryl where he says that Morgan is the strongest Lostbelt King. The thing is Beryl never said that, it was a mistranslation done by fan translations. What he actually said was that with the death of Zeus he believed Morgan was the strongest force around and how the two stack up directly never gets stated.
  • When talking about why Lostbelt 6 got heavily rewritten, a lot of people will simply say that it was simply so Nasu could incorporate Oberon Vortigern after seeing Umino's design into the plot. Nasu later explicitly stated that Oberon's characterization, lore, and role in the plot were all entirely pre-decided long before Umino's design was approved. It was the number of scenes featuring him that shot up in volume after seeing the design and imagining the character interacting with others. Furthermore, Umino's design was submitted even before he began rewrites and cited Mash's characterization in the original draft, a desire to do more with the Lostbelt concept, and lack of hints towards the finale that all required rewrites. It was these factors along with the number of Oberon scenes that resulted in the final version of Avalon le Fae that players got.
  • Due to the abundance of fan translators within the community, there are a number of commonly accepted facts about the story and characters that end up usually being wrong due to mistranslations, or people misunderstanding the context and using somewhat literal translations. A famous one was the idea that Altria Caster somehow couldn't see Saber Altria if you had both in My Room, when in truth Altria Caster directly references Altria in the story several times, and speaks about her in the sense of not being able to see herself becoming like her.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Most parties tend to just have Waver, Merlin, Skadi^note Either as her Caster self or her Ruler self, Tamamo, Koyanskaya of Light, Lady Avalon, Reines, or Altria Caster as the support party member on the frontline to take advantage of the high damage boosts and powerful NP gauge charges most of them offer. Oberon, on the other hand, is often put in the backline of battles only to brought in at the very last round of the fight via either an Order Change Mystic Code skill or by using Taunt CEs to the player's favor.
  • Starting NP Craft Essences are favored for equipping on Servants so they can activate their NP faster against the enemy or get a head start on buffing the party. Three, in particular, stand out: Kaleidoscope for simply having the highest value at 80%, Imaginary Number Magecraft which has the second highest value with max limit break at 75% and lower cost to boot, and Golden Sumo as an attack steroid with 15% boost to attack on top of its 50% starting gauge and high attack stat.
  • Typical team compositions for hard content such as challenge quests have one damage dealer of any class, and 2 supports (usually Casters) equipped with Fragments of 2030. The supports stack several damage-boosting buffs on the damage dealer and the damage dealer then in turn (with a probable crit boost given by Fragments of 2030 generating stars every turn) use their NP or Brave Chain to burst through the enemy's HP.
  • Most Riders have Mona Lisa equipped as support for farming the daily QP quest. Likewise, expect to see most Casters in the All or Caster slot with a Bond Point/EXP boost CE available to help speed up the level grinding.
  • If you're farming an event or the daily quests, expect to see Servants with targetable 50% charges (Such as Waver, Skadi, and Altria Caster) pop up a lot in the Caster support tab, thanks to their skills being insanely useful for fast farming, as mentioned in Game-Breaker.
  • The SSR Exchange Ticket from the 20M (JP)/17M (NA) Downloads campaign and the Sixth Anniversary allows the player to pick a 5 star rarity Servant from a list of Story Banner Servants released before the 2020 (JP)/2022 (NA) New Years event (with the first one strictly being non-story locks and the second one including the story locked Servants). Ignoring picking based off "waifu" or "husband" picks, the most common pick is Waver, on account of being one of the most valuable support characters in the game but being somewhat hard to get. If one has him, the second pick is often Tamamo for the same reason. Beyond those two, Saber Altria, Enkidu, and Ozymandias are often suggested due to the utility/power they offer an account lacking one of them, with Sitonai being suggested for the Sixth Anniverary for those who don't have her as well.
• Complete Monster: See here.
• Continuity Lockout:
  • While the game takes efforts to assume the player hasn't seen anything else in the Nasuverse before and explain things properly, certain aspects can be confusing without prior history of the Nasuverse.
    • Many servants retain memories of prior Holy Grail Wars, and therefore, prior installments of the franchise. Many times they'll make reference to events they experienced in these Wars, but without proper context, the references come across as cryptic. Some characters like Elisabeth even carry their Character Development with them, meaning that their portrayal might seem odd without knowing why they seem to act so differently from their historical selves.
    • Certain events act more as stealth sequels to other installments, such as SE.RA.PH to CCC and "Inheritance of Glory" to Fate/Apocrypha, meaning the events can come across as confusing without prior knowledge.
    • Made more egregious for the western fanbase however due to a case of No Export for You. The visual novel of Fate/stay night, Fate/hollow ataraxia, and Fate/Extra CCC do not have official translations for western audiences, meaning unless the player knows Japanese or played a fan translation, elements from those installments brought up in FGO will fly over the players heads.
  • The anime adaptation of the game goes straight from Fuyuki to Babylon, skipping six story chapters in between. Because of that, those who haven't played the game will most likely be lost going into the anime.
• Crack Pairing:
  • Olga Marie is shipped a lot with the protagonist. Though this becomes a lot less cracky by the time of Cosmos in the Lostbelt as Olga returns as U-Olga Marie and even spends Lostbelt 7 as one of the main allies where she and the protagonist spend a lot of time bonding with each other.
  • Dr. Roman and Da Vinci are close friends who fight Like an Old Married Couple, and their voice actors are married, but the pairing of Leonardo da Vinci and King Solomon is a bit cracky.
  • For fans of Greek Mythology out there, Asterios/Euryale, after some dubious comments made by Euryale. Doubles as Huge Guy, Tiny Girl, veering into Hot Skitty-on-Wailord Action.
  • After Londinium, some fans ship Jekyll/Mordred, Fran/Mordred, and Andersen/Nursery Rhyme.
    • Shipping of Fran/Mordred rose again with the Apocrypha crossover event, "Inheritance of Glory"; the CM, of which had a brief clip of the two sharing a celebratory fist bump while walking away from a pile of destroyed golems, being the first fuel to the ship's resurgence. The pairing also get hinted at once again in the 5th anniversary animation PV, where maid Fran gets tripped by Fou and is about to fall, but gets caught in one of Mordred's arms, after which Mordred looks at Fran and gives her a wink
    • Andersen/Nursery Rhyme deserves more elaboration, as while it seems like an odd Toy Ship at first, the reality is that Hans is a grown man in a boy's body while Nursery Rhyme is the living embodiment of children's stories, and they generally dislike each other. However, their obvious connection (Nursery Rhyme being partially composed of Hans' stories), in game synergy, and matching, cute designs (for the most part) have inspired fans to pair them together.
  • With America, some people actually liked Robin/Elisabeth due to them bickering Like an Old Married Couple.
  • After Prison Tower, people began shipping Jeanne/Amakusa, even though in Fate/Apocrypha they're bitter enemies. This also extends to shipping Dantes with either of the two and is sometimes shipped with Jeanne Alter instead.
    • Fans noted that Jeanne Alter Lily also has some resemblance with Amakusa, as seen in her mini Twin Arm Big Crunch attack, thus they joked that she is actually Jeanne and Amakusa's kid.
  • The pairing of Jeanne Alter/Brynhild came from absolutely nowhere in the Da Vinci event. In there, fake Brynhild became very obsessed with the former, this pairing then become very popular.
    • The 2016 Christmas event added Jeanne d'arc Alter Santa Lily. She looks exactly like Jeanne Alter, and shares some of her attack animations as well as her idle combat pose with Brynhild. The fandom promptly came to the conclusion that this wasn't actually a younger version of Jeanne Alter, but instead her child with Brynhild via, varyingly, magic, Chaldea's science, the Throne of Heroes, the Grail, sheer love, or some combination of the above.
  • Medb and Scathach, which came almost out of nowhere and is a bit strange considering the fact that canonically Scathach views Medb as a Manchild with sexual outbursts.
  • Robin Hood and Ibaraki have been getting fanart together shortly after the Halloween 2016 event, due to Ibaraki enjoying the sweets that Robin shoots down her mouth.
  • Avenger of Shinjuku (specifically Lobo) is shipped with Enkidu and Kintoki since the latter two have a close connection with animals (a wolf even summoned Enkidu in strange fake). It's less of a romantic relationship, though, and more of a master-pet bond. The former pair even got acknowledged in one of the summer 2017 Craft Essences.
  • Hijikata has a close relationship (possibly romantic) with Okita, yet it's not uncommon for him to be paired with Musashi or Carmilla since he's seen flirting with the two in his My Room lines. Andras is also not an unpopular pair for him.
  • Ozymandias and Da Vinci because of a R-18 doujin that featured them as a couple and when they were featured together in a Camelot rate-up banner, fans joked that even DW ships them. In-game, he does compliment her for her beauty and intelligence and says he wants her to be his concubine, but apparently he doesn't impress her much.
  • Learning With Manga has Tamamo tease Altera and Helena as a couple...and instead of denying it, they constantly blush and get awkward around each other. Jack and Nursery Rhyme at one point capture both of them and declare them "Dad" and "Mom" respectively. Outside of memes, the two actually do have pretty good synergy with each other in gameplay, which helps fuel the ship further.
  • Gorgon and Assassin Paraiso/Chiyome due to the latter being curious and wanting to become friends with the Avenger during the Setsubun event believing they're under the same curse and Gorgon being creeped out. With Gorgon already having some Tsundere tendencies, this led to fanart of them being shipped.
  • Since Arthur's "White Rose" costume was released, people began to ship him with Nero Bride since they look like a new couple in their wedding. Sometimes with Amakusa as the priest. Other times they'll pair him with Altria, since Extella gave her a "White Rose" costume of her own.
  • Some fans have a tendency to ship Lancelot with Raikou, since the two have character traits revolving around being parents ^ExplanationRaikou is obsessed with being the player's mother, although she can't distinguish between familial love and romantic love; as for Lancelot, he's an Amazingly Embarrasing Father towards Galahad/Mash, as well as having similar hair and outfit colors. Becomes somewhat of an Ascended Fanon during the "Murder at the Kogetsukan", as Lancelot and Raikou are the heads of the Violet family (as father and mother, respectively). However, it turns out they are not really paired and only wrongly assumed both in and out-universe since it is later revealed that Lancelot's "wife" is actually Euryale, and Raikou is one of their "daughters". Further reinforced with the "ServaFes" event as the 'Our Round Table' Craft Essence has Lancelot idly reading a magazine with Raikou on the cover.
  • Seemingly DW's nod to Scathach/Medb, the Medb and Skadi pairing was created due to a My Room line that Saber Medb has about Skadi, calling her cute and acting flustered and confused when Skadi acts shy and blushes. While not much attention was made to this, the pairing finally gained traction after being expanded further in the New Year 2019 "Sparrow's Inn Activity Log" Event, leading some fans to believe that Medb's secretly weak to Gap Moe due to Skadi and Medb's interactions.
  • Daybit Sem Void and ORT, the Ultimate One of Mercury (?) came about from the incredibly odd interaction of All There in the Manual, Epileptic Trees, and Daybit's status as a Memetic Badass. The pairing got started when it was revealed that Daybit's Lostbelt was located in South America, the same place where ORT has been sleeping for thousands of years, which drove lots of speculation that was further fueled by a certain piece of info revealed in the Olympus chapter. When the memes depicting Wodime calling Daybit for help exploded, the pairing also gained traction as one of Daybit's common responses was that he was too busy "fusing" with ORT-chan to answer. What makes it extra crack-tastic is that Daybit is a loner by nature and according to the Character Material book ORT is too alien to ever understand earthly concepts, and trying to romance it is just asking for trouble.
  • Arjuna Alter and Oberon quickly began to rise as a pairing, merely because of how similar their poses were in their Final Ascension artwork. Cue the "Can we pretend that airplanes in the night sky are like shooting stars" memes and edits putting them side by side, and even putting them together in one picture.
  • Before she got into the game, many players started to pair Dobrynya Nikitich with Sigurd due to Sigurd's voice actor being the same as Kaiba from Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Dobrynya's NP involves summoning a dragon that looks very similar to the Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon from the same anime.
• Crazy Is Cool: Gag Servants can fall into this, especially some of the wackier Altria variants; how else would one describe an evil genderbent King Arthur who's also a gunslinging biker maid in a swimsuit, or one who's also a Sith Lord otaku from space?
• Creator Worship:
  • Whenever Kinoko Nasu is announced to be directly writing a story, the fans react with extreme joy that he'll make the story, be it a Singularity or other Nasuverse works, epic and awesome (as proven with Camelot, Solomon and Avalon le Fae). Conversely, fans are more cautious whenever it's announced that the story will be written by either Yuuichiro Higashide (for the controversial state of Fate/Apocrypha, and while Orleans and Okeanos were still considered an improvement, it's still considered mediocre and paled to Nasu's works) or Hikaru Sakurai (for the Septem singularity, which even she considered lacking), but Nasu still lets them write stories, avoiding the more extreme version of the trope. Because of this, the only stories after Salomon that now officially disclose the writer are those written by guest writers like Keikenchi (who is easily distinguished with his Koha-ACE/GUDAGUDA stories) and Gen Urobuchi.
  • In regards to the artists of the game, pako^{characters he designed}Arjuna (Archer and Alter), Karna (Lancer and Santa), Edison, Ashwatthama, all versions of Nobunaga, Nobukatsu, Chacha, and Pepe is basically considered the best artist in the game with artworks that are ALWAYS a hit. Whenever anyone finds an artwork made by pako, expect comments like "god bless pako" or "pako delivers again" or something along these lines. People also hold similar views for Wada Arco (the main artist for Fate/EXTRA) and ReDrop (the main artist for Kama in addition to a bunch of CEs), though not quite as worshippy "can do no wrong".
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • The Altera The San(ta) Servant from the "Netherworld Merry Christmas" event. Altera in an even more Stripperific outfit than usual, riding a sheep? Sigh, whatever, DelightWorks. The sheep can fly by shooting rainbows out of its butt? What, are we referencing ancient Nyancat memes now? The actual Noble Phantasm involves shooting sheep missiles using Candy Star Photon Ray and they... shoot out in a Macross Missile Massacre? What the hell? Wait...are the sheep missiles baa-ing in Mamiko Noto's own voice? That is the point at which you're likely to collapse from laughter when seeing Christmas Altera in action for the first time.
  • The mechanic of "selling" cards for QP and Mana Prisms is called Burning. One of the Servants that you can obtain, and thus burn is Jeanne d'Arc.
  • The first Crypter and Servant team you face is Kadoc and Anastasia. Due to class advantage, one of the best Servants to battle them with is (Rider) Sakata Kintoki. Someone getting hit and run by a motorcycle? Tragedy. A princess getting hit and run with a motorcycle multiple times to save the world? Hilarious.
  • Someone being disillusioned with someone they looked up to is sad. Dr. Roman saying that his image of Marie Antoinette is "falling apart" after she makes it sound like she wants to sexually dominate both Jeannes and Atalante going through minor Heroic BSoD and having to use the Holy Grail as an excuse for why she won't be broken by finding out that Artemis is hopelessly romantic are both hilarious.
• Crossover Ship: As of late March 2018, fan works started having Belial together with Kiara due to both of them being similarly Too Kinky to Torture and having their events released at the same time in their respective games. This was fueled even further as the reruns of the Fate/Extra CCC event in Fate/Grand Order and "What Makes The Sky Blue II: Paradise Lost" in Granblue Fantasy occurred in a similar time frame in 2019, and then in Summer 2020 when Summer Kiara was announced just a few days after the announcement of Belial being playable in Granblue Fantasy Versus.
• Cry for the Devil:
  • The Lev Lainur met during the game is a monster, no question. However, the man he was before, and his fate warrant some sympathy. In many iterations of the Kaleidoscope, Lev always becomes the thrall of Goetia due to his family, the Flauros, being the descendants of the Demon Pillars like the Makiri. However, the Clock Tower 2015 short story illustrates what differs in other iterations compared to here. Lev is Driven to Suicide before he fully succumbs to his Face–Monster Turn, his death implied to be the reason Goetia isn't a threat in other iterations of the Kaleidoscope. The real Lev was a kind man who only wanted to help humanity, but after he became Flauros, That Man Is Dead. Now, Lev is remembered by both the characters and players only as a monster and agent of Goetia.
  • As reprehensible as Kiara is during the SE.RA.PH. event, she gains some sympathy from both her Dark and Troubled Past, and from just what happened to her before the event began. In that unlike her Fate/EXTRA version, she was a genuinely kindhearted woman working as a therapist on the Seraphix station, only to be driven insane by the Demon Pillar Zepar showing her the actions of her CCC self and desiring to replicate them herself. Several of the entry logs she left drive home the point that for quite some time, she was just a scared young woman that wanted to help people, only for Zepar to turn her into a Beast before he soon regretted it.

D

• Demonic Spiders:
  • The wyverns that make up about 70% of the enemies in Orleans became infamous for this during the first few weeks of playing, where their insurmountable stacks of HP and simply unfair damage, especially from their Razor Wind attack, made anyone who didn't run parties of Kojirou or Jeanne almost completely helpless if their Command Spells were unavailable. They were eventually nerfed and are now almost laughably easy compared to back at launch, although they have maintained their irritatingly high critical rates, which can spell trouble for unprepared players.
  • Chimera-type enemies. They are commonly Berserkers, meaning that only a few Servants can defend themselves against them, have a higher crit chance than most enemies and their skill either boosts their own Attack and Crit Strength or everyone's Attack and Crit Strength. They also generally have more health than most other enemies would have, so good luck killing them in one turn even if they are Berserkers. To make things worse, they tend to pop as mini-bosses in events, making farming harder.
  • Spriggan-type enemies are beefy Saber-class mini-bosses who love to spam their crit buffing skills, at which point they then start trying to one-shot your frontline. Their high HP means they often have to be taken out right away with an NP, or else they just start wrecking anyone they get their hands on.
  • The Enforcement Knights in Camelot are one of many foes that the player has to deal with, but they stand out as being some of the most frustrating enemies you'll come across. They have massive amounts of HP, making it seem as though they are better-fitting as bosses, but after the first few times you fight the Saber ones, the game throws them in groups at you, while also introducing Lancer, Archer, Berserker, and Ruler variations. The main reason they are so hard to kill though is the skills for the Saber, Lancer, and Ruler variations titled "Oath of Destruction", which increases their Attack and Defense for two turns, and three turns respectively. While frustrating on its own, they have a tendency to spam the skill in rapid succession, resulting in often a single Knight having their Defense up so high that even level 90 and above Servants with class triangle advantage will do virtually no damage to them, even if a Noble Phantasm is used. Not to mention buffing their damage means they can casually kill most Servants, especially Berserkers. Not helping is that they have other skills that can increase critical hit chance, or their special attack damage. In fact, Enforcement Knights are commonly cited as among the hardest enemies in the game, even years after release, simply because of how durable they are.
  • The Lahmus that appear in the latter parts of Babylonia aren't just demonic in appearances, but also in gameplay. They have a large amount of bulk, even compared to the already tough enemies that you've faced earlier in the chapter, they can remove buffs at will and slap a defense debuff on you while they're at it, and if they manage to get their special attack off, they slap a massive Buster debuff, which will be especially crippling since most Sabers, that you'll probably bring to take advantage of the Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors, have a Buster NP. And what's worse is that unlike most other enemies with their bulk, they'll attack in groups of at least 2, and once they start appearing, they'll be the most common enemy you'll face. At least they stop showing up after their story arc is over, and have not been reused for any Free Quests or subsequent events.
    • Their upgraded counterparts, the Bel Lahmus, are even worse. They couple NP drain with their buff removal, have even more HP, and they have an Arts debuff on their special attack instead to cripple any Archers that you might bring. The only saving grace is that you'll usually only have to fight one of them at a time. The one time you do fight a swarm of them, you do get King Hassan as story support, and his insta-kill effects will be more likely to trigger against them.
  • Hydras, introduced in Agartha, are Archer-type giant enemies, with an innately-high crit rate, critical hits that damage the entire party at once, a short charge bar for a party-wide poison breath attack that deals high damage, and they have a skill that not only increases their attack power but applies Buff Block to the entire allied team. Their variants, the Lancer-type Orochis in Shimosa and the Assassin-type Dyavol Trons in Anastasia spam NP and Skill seals respectively. And like chimeras, they are gold enemies and get three actions a turn.
  • Maha Naga from Lostbelt 4. Essentially a combination of Hydras and normal Dragons, these enemies not only have a lot of HP, but they have a nasty buff removal skill called Heavenly Tuning, which also buffs their own crit chance and which they always seem to lead off a combat with. They hit everyone with their normal attacks, they are incredibly tanky and hard to kill, and if you show up with a stack of buffs from farming out earlier rounds, they're seemingly guaranteed to lead off the battle by stripping them. What the game also doesn't tell you is that they have hidden coding that will have them focus on attacking Evil aligned characters, so if you don't plan for that you can end up losing a unit to them.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Many people view Karna as autistic due to a number of traits he displays both in this game and in Fate/EXTRA CCC. He has relatively subtle expressions compared to most other characters (including those by the same artist, so it's deliberate), has self-admitted dificulties in communicating or understanding how his statements may be received (he tries to compensate for this by taking Jinako's advice to verbally express all his thoughts but this still leads to people being taken aback), is notably fixated on a couple of very specific people (namely Jinako and occasionally Arjuna), has No Social Skills, odd trains of thought and sense of priorities, is a Living Lie Detector... Even if it's not specifically autistic, many fans agree that he's neurodivergent. Similar headcanons exist for Arjuna, as he is hyperfocused in appearing perfect and excelling at everything, and also has a tendency to treat situations with more seriousness than they're due.
• Difficulty Spike:
  • Orleans pre-patch was dramatically more difficult than Fuyuki with wyverns with very high attack and crit rate. And it being only the second chapter was what led the enemies to be significantly nerfed.
  • Okeanos is much more difficult than either post-patch Orleans or Rome, and unlike Orleans, it keeps its difficulty with enemy levels being significantly higher than in either of the first two chapters and introducing several new tough enemies. Presumably, this was to compensate for the long gap between Rome and Okeanos, since many players had been able to finish leveling most of their Servants. Still, it's a fairly minor step up compared to what came a few chapters later.
  • Camelot is much more difficult than any other story chapter up to it. Enemies that showed up in the previous chapter as a Boss in Mook's Clothing now show up in more plentiful amounts, the Servants themselves are as tough as ever, and the Knights of the Round Table, in particular, come with "gifts" that make them much tougher (ex. Gawain taking reduced damage and charging his NP faster, Mordred always having a fully charged NP at the start of each turn). Camelot is considered to be arguably the most difficult chapter in the game with the next chapter allowing you to opt-out of the more difficult boss challenges.
  • Epic of Remnant begins playing around with new mechanics such as multiple health bars, enemy taunt abilities, and more hazard effects. It's perhaps not quite as difficult as Camelot or Babylonia once you're used to it, but the new mechanics can throw people for a loop, especially as gauge breaks often clear enemy debuffs or cause them to instantly use a powerful skill without using their turn.
  • The Shimousa chapter of Epic of Remnant is currently the holder of the hardest chapter which is even harder than Camelot not only because of powerful bosses, but the most difficult battles in the chapter prevent players from using Friend Supports.
  • This was the purpose of the "Prison Tower" questline with several tough enemies and bosses and to make it more difficult for players, Edmond Dantes was your only support for six of the battles. To drive it home, to even participate you had to have already cleared the most recent Singularity in London.
  • Rashoumon has Saber Wars' Craft Essence attack boosting system up to eleven. It's a raid quest with only Ibaraki-douji as the only raid boss which all players attack to whittle down her massive HP bar in the trillions (at minimum two trillion) and you can do any of the three (four in the re-run) quests to fight her. The lowest one gives you 300,000 HP to shave off that trillions health bar, while the highest gives you 6 million. Up until the point it was rerun, it was considered probably the hardest event to date, to the point that players were required to have completed America (the 5th and most recent Singularity at the time) to participate in it. However, an evolving metagame made the event much more accessible to casual players.
  • Starting with the second Nero Fest, new events began adding in challenge quests that were completely optional but much more difficult than the free or main quests. Nero Fest and later Battle in New York, in particular, was considered particularly brutal with some fights like Gilgamesh or the final boss rush, which was quickly nerfed when it turned out even more difficult than expected, partially due to a few bugs like Nero granting infinite Guts to her teammates.
  • The CCC crossover is by far the hardest crossover event because it expects players to reach and defeat the Final Boss of Part One.
  • The Setsubun event is currently the most difficult "Challenge event" since it requires beating the Final Boss of Part One as well and the event itself not only bans Friend Supports but also demands players to have a lot of efficiently raised Servants as possible and carefully manage them.
• Discredited Meme:
  • Anyone bashing Parvati/Sakura's design became less acceptable after a certain incident with the artist.
  • Treating Dr. Roman like the Butt-Monkey he is in game has largely fallen out of favor after his Heroic Sacrifice against Goetia.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Kiyohime, which is somewhat impressive, given the game already gives her a decent amount of Historical Hero Upgrade. Despite her negative qualities already being played down and her positive ones being played up, a surprising number of fans push that to the extreme and basically act as though she has no negative qualities at all, when the game still doesn't shy away from the fact that she's extremely likely to murder her "husband" over a petty slight.

E

• Ending Fatigue:
  • You'd expect Septem to end after finally giving Lev his comeuppance. Instead, Altera shows up and the chapter continues for a little longer.
  • Atlantis appears like it’s going to end with the emotional climax of nearly every ally from the chapter sacrificing themselves to get Chaldea to Olympus with the peak of that being Orion killing himself to put down Artemis but then it continues on a bit longer with the fight against Posiden’s three cores that mostly act the same outside of the final one having Chiron defending it with the only story beat of note being Jason’s death at the very end. Many people agree it feels like a tacked on story beat that doesn’t add much.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game:
  • Response to the writing has been mostly positive, owing to the interesting narrative and the large amount of character interaction (especially Nasu-written ones). The gameplay, on the other hand, has been criticized for being full of repetitive and irritating fetch quests needed to power up Servants, poor game balance and an infamously frustrating gacha. For a long time, this naturally posed a problem for English speaking fans... at least until the below happened.
  • With the advent of the US version, this trope quickly occurred for most non-Japanese players as they were mainly playing to finally get access to story content that had been non-accessible for two years.
• Epileptic Trees:
  • Thanks to the The Stinger of the 2018 New Year OVA where someone actually found the Time Throne and took one of Solomon's rings (why didn't the person also take the 9 other rings on the throne as well will be a mystery for the likely duration of Chapter 2) combined with this single frame in the opening for Part 2 showing a cloaked man wearing a tattered lab coat with white pants and shoes made many speculate that Dr Romani has returned from non-existence!! After what happened with Galahad in Camelot and the Downer Beginning of Part 2, is it any wonder why fans want to believe it's the good doctor? Lostbelt 5 eventually reveals that it is someone who looks like Romani but is heavily implied to be Goetia, creating further speculation.
  • While Fou did sacrifice his powers and intelligence to revive Mash after her Heroic Sacrifice with a normal human lifespan, many questions if he will stay a mindless animal forever. A lot of people are left wondering if he's just faking it, because Sion notes that he's growing new sapience and events show him talking normally with no change whatsoever, or never lost it whilst being a Deadpan Snarker, and that it is possibly a trait he picked up from Merlin. And whether this possible regrowing of his powers will result in the same Fou or something closer in nature to Primate Murder.
  • The identity of the Foreign Priestess is largely an unknown, leaving her rife for guesswork as to who or what she is. One notable theory running around is that she is Olga Marie Animusphere, Back from the Dead thanks to the Foreign God. Evidence used for this idea is that she is depicted as reaching out to Mash in the opening for Cosmos in the Lostbelt, and that Riyo's Learning with Manga! FGO has a similar scene when Mash suggests a storyline involving her and Olga Marie, with Olga Marie mirroring the same pose. Lostbelt 5.2 Olympus revealed that the Foreign God is actually Beast VII, and apparently Olga is its current vessel, making this idea potentially wrong. "Potentially" since it's still unclear what Olga's relationship to the Foreign God is and still speculated on in-universe by Chaldea themselves. Meanwhile, after Lostbelt 7 revealed that the true Foreign God is CHALDEAS some people started speculating that the Priestess was actually the Ultimate One of CHALDEAS
  • The Foreign God itself has been subject to numerous speculations as to just how alien it actually is, with people wondering how literal the Lucifer/Satan comparisons by Amakusa in Shimousa should be taken, especially since Ashiya Douman flat-out states he only used Satan's name as a joke and indulged in it purely for Amakusa's theatrics. Another popular theory is that it possibly hails from the Solar System as some kind of Greco-Roman related entity, with supporters pointing towards that it's intentionally rigged the game entirely in favor of Wodime's Atlantis Lostbelt where the Greek Gods have reigned supreme for millennia and originally only wanted to bring that Lostbelt back with no competition whatsoever. Though ultimately most of these guesses were wrong as the Foreign God ended up being CHALDEAS
  • After his trial quest had him repeatedly refuse to answer whether he was a fictional character or the genuine article, many have begun suspecting that Sherlock Holmes is not who he claims to be.^note He tries to deceive the player by claiming there is little evidence any of the Heroic Spirits are people from history and not just fictional representations, only for the Archer of Shinjuku/James Moriarty to call him out on this later, saying the Magus Society has numerous artifacts proving the existences of Heroic Spirits, leading him to question Holmes on why he wouldn't give a straight answer. When Holmes tries to pass it off as his job as a Ruler making it so that he doesn't spoil all the mysteries in the world, Archer likewise calls bull saying Holmes had numerous ways to get around that. Holmes quickly changes the subject, however. He even explicitly tells Mash when they meet in Camelot that his true identity and essence is slightly different than what she believes. People have pointed out that his circumstances as a Ruler are rather suspect.^note Rulers are typically Catholic Saints, but the Chaldea Summoning System allows others to take the class, and the vast majority of non-Saint Ruler servants are either deities or leaders. Holmes meanwhile is not a deity, and was never a leader. Even in life, his official designation was as a consulting detective. Holmes says the Grail made him a Ruler rather than his standard Caster, since as a Ruler, he is forced to maintain the mysteries of the world and can't go around solving everything, but said claim comes across as odd. Add on his unexplained ability to travel through Singularities on his own, Bedivere's comment that he feels similar to Merlin, Holmes' lack of confirmation for his identity in the Epic of Remnant trailer^note While not confirmed, his voice and general demeanor have fans agree that he's the narrator, and the lack of identity is a striking contrast to Jeanne explicitly stating her name for Observer on Timeless Temple and Goetia stubbornly clinging to "Solomon" for Cosmos in the Lostbelt., his artist^note Kotetsu Yamanaka was contracted at the beginning of game development to design Goetia and was later asked to do Tiamat because of how good his monster designs were. The only characters Yamanaka has illustrated since then are Holmes and the Alien Priestess. and that Surtr says he is not a "pure" Heroic Spirit,^note He says this while possessing Sigurd and addressing both Mash and Sherlock. Mash is a Demi-servant bearing the Heroic Spirit of Galahad, albeit limited at the time due to their refusal to aid Chaldea requiring Mash be powered by the Orthenus armor and a command seal be used. and people are convinced Sherlock Holmes is either a Foreigner Servant in disguise^note Primarily because his coat heavily resembles the standard Foreigner card., or something else entirely, with Olympus's release having people point to him potentially being one of the Beasts ^note  When Tamamo-Vitch's nature as a premature Beast is revealed Holmes declares her to be his greatest enemy and conversations with Moriarity have him bringing up Holmes's willingness to go to extremes out of his love for humanity (echoing how most of the Beasts have a warped love for humanity) and that he hopes that Holmes will never stop seeing him as his arch enemy for that reason. After the conclusion of the Sixth Lostbelt, a lot of fans came to believe that Holmes is part of the Pretender class due to his change in class as well as having a lot of similarities to Oberon Vortigern^note They both have an antagonistic relationship with Tamamo Vitch Koyanskaya as Holmes declares her to be his greatest enemy while Oberon outright calls her disgusting, both are significant fictional characters from European literature, and they both have some relation to the Ruler class as Oberon's class was initially displayed with the Ruler card before being corrupted to a Pretender card.. His Bond 10 line in Fate/Grand Order Arcade has him outright apologizing for coming off suspicious and challenging you to solve the mystery surrounding him. Lostbelt Chapter 6.5 eventually reveals that he was actually an amnesiac Disciple of the Foreign God who was tasked to take care of Goetia.
  • There's a red-haired female gunslinger that briefly appears in the epilogue of Saber Wars 2 event for a dialogless conversation with Billy the Kid. She is most likely not a generic NPC as she appears to be illustrated by Koyama Hirokazu, the illustrator of Berserker Lancelot, Romulus, Scathach, Medea Lily and Musashi. Speculation about her identity is still rampant since it remains unanswered in the game.
  • Needless to say Daybit Sem Void brings a lot of theories. From exactly what his motivations are, especially since he's commonly assumed to be the one who threatened Marisbury to try to end Chaldea in Fate/Grand Order - Absolute Demonic Front: Babylonia to the exact relationship between him, his Servant (who's confirmed to be a Grand Servant), and ORT, who's implied to be in his Lostbelt. The fact that his name is a Significant Anagram of David Symbiot has also made people wonder if he's David Bluebook, and if so how he ended up seemingly time-traveled to the past to get recruited into Team A after seemingly being killed. The release of Nahui Mictlan has largely answered these questions by confirming that he indeed was the person to threaten Marisbury to shut off Chaldeas, his ultimate goal is to stop Marisbury's goals on a cosmic scale, and he knew about ORT and purposely placed his Lostbelt in South America with the express purpose of provoking it into eating Chaldeas. The name anagram is ultimately irrelevant as fan speculation goes because his name actually refers to his memory issues.
  • David Bluebook's storyline is actually inside Chaldeas. This was coined after players noted that his explanation of events did not line up with the explanation of events as explained by Sion, Kadoc, and Chaldea because neither side agrees on which order the Trees descending and the planet being bleached occurred in. This was given further thought after Ruler Moriarty reveals in Traum that Subject E is real and been around for 100 years, which does not seem reconcilable with the current assumed order of events. The main question is when Bluebook's story happens. The guesses are exactly 100 years in the future, which hinges on Subject E was being experimented on ever since it was found in 2016, sometime in the future, which hinges on Area 51 being founded in 1955 and Subject E was not actually found in 2016, or it is still in the present, which hinges on the land that makes up Area 51 halting all activity around 1918 and directly corresponds its 100 year figure with the current day time that Cosmos in the Lostbelt takes place in. Further complicating things are the possibility of there being two Subject Es, one for Earth and one for Chaldeas, therefore making at least two of these three scenarios for when the alien was found true. This was mostly confirmed as of the Memorial Prologue Chapter.
  • The very last minute namedrop in Nahui Mictlan of a final unknown Disciple of the Foreign God only going by the title of "Count" meant to accompany Holmes and Moriarty as a guide for Chaldea who will also be rebuilding U-Olga Marie has fans going rampant with speculation as to who this character is. Theories range from Cagliostro from the confirmation that he was meant to feature in Lostbelt Chapter 5.5 Heiankyo before being cut to Edmond Dantes for being one of the only Servants in the game who openly goes by that title and his active presence throughout the main storyline to Abe no Seimei on the logic that the other Disciples are paired rivals like Shirou and Kotomine, so Douman should have his own Disciple counterpart. Ultimately, it turned out to be Cagliostro, although he tries to pretend to be an Alter of himself at first.
  • Fate/Grail League, the 2023 April Fools' Day game, features Riyo art of Daybit Sem Void for the first time. He inexplicably has brown eyes instead of purple eyes. Combine this with the revelation of a pruned version of the protagonist and the game being supervised by Nasu, fans are now trying to discern this not as Inconsistent Coloring but a deliberate tip at something else.
• Estrogen Brigade: Despite the tendencies of the game to pander more to a male audience with the female servants, that hasn’t stopped female players from being nearly half of the entire player-base according to analytics from the Japanese AppStore and Google play.
• Evil Is Cool:
  • The Evil-aligned Darker and Edgier Alter versions tend to be more popular than their vanilla counterparts, evident with Altria Saber Alter and Jeanne Alter.
  • Oberon Vortigern has gotten this treatment as while he was the Final Boss and overall villain of the sixth Lostbelt, he committed a huge Pay Evil unto Evil moment by finishing the destruction of the Fairy Britain.

F

• Fan-Disliked Explanation: The revelation that Koyanskaya is neither Daji nor Tamamo Vitch, but instead the Tunguska Explosion itself after being deified by the prayers of the animals that died in the disaster was not received well by most of the fanbase with a lot of people feeling like the twist came out of nowhere, and are disappointed that Tamamo's long alluded potential to become a Beast ultimately only amounted to a Red Herring.
• Fandom-Enraging Misconception: Criticizing and dismissing the Tam Lins/Faerie Knights as mere "genderbends" of the Knights of the Round Table will earn you looks of disdain from the playerbase. Even just looking at the powers they wield should tell you that they are very distinct from their namesakes.
• Fandom Heresy: The preferred name for stay night Saber among fans and earlier official translations is Artoria. The name "Arthur" is potentially derived from the Latin family name Artorius, and Artoria would be the feminine version. Unfortunately, Kinoko Nasu vastly prefers it spelled Altria, and upon the international release of Grand Order this became the law in all localizations, to the frustration of both fans and official translators. The translation team has made their displeasure known by inserting subtle digs not present in the original Japanese like Moriarty calling Altria a corruption of Artoria in Shinjuku.
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • Tragically, developer decisions have created one within the FGO fandom, specifically JP vs NA. The game is the same and nobody is denying that, but the PR revolving around it has led to rifts. Players on the NA server feel as if the NA PR is short-changing them, cutting down on free Saint Quartz (free-to-play players feel this impact the hardest), mismanaging time (some feel the extra week for Accel Order wasn't necessary and let's not forget the infamous 2017 summer content drought), and asking too much for little rewards (the Twitter and Facebook campaigns). In retaliation, the JP players state NA gets "quality of life" improvements much faster (the game started with a bunch of them) and actually had more Saint Quartz in total during their first year (due to the presence of master missions and such). Time will tell if this will settle, but right now, arguments get can real messy, so we suggest staying far away. There is one thing that both sides can agree on: Not liking how the Arcade version gets exclusive servants.
  • FGO Mobile fans vs. FGO Arcade fans. Fans of the mobile version are incensed that what they previously saw as just a harmless alternate version of the game has been given highly-desireable exclusive content ranging from popular costumes, Servants, and even story content that might even tie back to mobile's story. This is especially prominent in the West, where the general phasing out of arcades means that there is no NA release of Arcade, and thus no way for them to access the content even if they wanted to. Fans of Arcade tend to point out how their game needs ways to incentivize people to play, especially since it is far behind the mobile game in terms of story and character content by nature of being newer.
  • The fandom rivalry also goes to the extent to fans of other gacha games such as Granblue Fantasy, Dragalia Lost, Epic Seven, Fire Emblem Heroes, and Arknights. Although it should be noted that Dragalia, Epic Seven and Arknights are mostly one-sided, especially when ex-F/GO players who branched into them bring up comparisons to this game, yet F/GO players are more passive against the three, with the reasoning that it is not justifiable to compare titles that have a very large gap in terms of content. Meanwhile, the discussions against GBF and FEH would deal with topics like draw rates, game mechanics, graphics, franchise longevity or popularity. Nonetheless, debates about gacha games encourage the curious players to try out the other "rival" games, spawning a fraction of both playerbases that fall into Friendly Fandoms below.
  • The second season of Granblue's anime and the Babylonia anime of F/GO appears to brew up into Dueling Works territory for both of them airing on October 2019. However, many fans do not treat this as a real competition by comparing the focus of each anime - the second season of GBF is seen as a direct continuation of the first, while the anime for F/GO is from a fan-favorite, Signature Series Arc of the game. Many fans who play both games agreed that in order for it to be a real fair-and-square rivalry, Granblue could have focused on adapting its Signature Series Arc - the "What Makes The Sky Blue" trilogy instead.
• Fandom-Specific Plot: There are a ton of fanfics that involve Mash and the protagonist encountering a Singularity or Lostbelt that require them to fight alternate versions of themselves, usually having it be that the alternate selves have been changed by the death of a character who survived Arc 1.
• Fanfic Fuel: For the Servant Summer Festival event, you are tasked with creating several doujins, which you receive as Craft Essences. Each one only has a brief story summary, but all of them have interesting concepts that fanfic writers/doujin artists could easily take advantage of.
• Fanfic Magnet: While any summonable Servant could technically qualify, Abigail from the Salem Singularity (not the summonable Alternate Self) is a stand-out. Her incredibly unique nature as a Servant allows her to not only survive the collapse of her Singularity without a Master or other outside help, but her skillset as a Space Master lets her go anywhere and everywhere she likes, freely spitting on any established In-Universe rules that would make including her in stories difficult. To an enterprising writer, Abby is Crossover fuel waiting for a spark. By extension, this also applies to the Cosmic-Travelling Gentleman who departed with Abigail at the end of the Salem Singulatiry, and since he is a Dimensional Traveler, he probably has a bunch of off-screen adventures before he ran into Abigail.
• Fanon:
  • It shouldn't come as a surprise that most fans depict the child Servants behaving like, well, children, even if it's not quite accurate for some.^Note Interestingly this has some actual merit In-Universe, as Marie Antoinette states (in the English version at least) that because she appears as she was during puberty, love and romance are always on her mind, suggesting that a Servant's physical age has some bearing on their mental state.
  • Due to the protagonist's designs being based on gender flips of Shirou and Rin, many fan works portray them as Shirou and Rin's child, often having both designs present as brother and sister.
  • In canon it's handwaved that the protagonist doesn't drink because with the state of the world it's hard to tell if they're actually of drinking age from an outside perspective. Some fans have decided that it's more that their bad experience with drinking in the Okeanos Singularity gave them an aversion to alcohol.
  • Many believe that Ereshkigal uses Fate/EXTRA Rin Tohsaka as a vessel due to being blonde, despite her ability to swap places with Ishtar indicating she also uses Fate/stay night Rin.
  • Depictions of Magi★Mari tend to have her resemble a female Merlin, or with the reveal of Proto Merlin, just be Proto Merlin in a fancy outfit or straight-up Proto Melin.
• Fanwork-Only Fans: Quite a few fans of the series openly admit to knowing nothing about Fate or GO in general, but they do like the doujins and learn from fan content. This also contributed to convincing the producers to localize the game after they saw just how many FGO cosplayers there were at Anime Expo 2016 despite the lack of official presence in the West.
• Fetish Retardant: A common complaint with Raikou, Murasaki and Ibuki, all designed by Raita, is that despite being very fanservicey characters they're drawn too elongated, with odd proportions and unnatural necks and fingers.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • There's a good deal of overlap between players of this and Granblue Fantasy. Both are mobile RPG games with large casts, many of which fall under Mr. Fanservice or Ms. Fanservice, each with their own separate voice actor.
  • Similarly, there's a fair bit of overlap with the Fire Emblem Heroes fanbase, especially in English. Both features, well, heroes who are well-loved and FE often takes cues from mythology, and the games are different enough in gameplay that they don't overlap or compete too much with each other.
  • Like the two gacha games above, F/GO has also spawned some overlapping players with Dragalia Lost and Epic Seven who try out the other games brought about by player recommendations or debates.
  • It's not uncommon for Magia Record and Fate/Grand Order fandoms to be on good terms with each other due to the gameplay similarities with each other and both being distributed by Aniplex.
  • There's an overlapping playerbase with the Arknights fandom. Or to be specific, it's those players who wanted to play a side game along with F/GO as their main game... Or simply to have another game to play while waiting for their Energy/Stamina resource to refresh here. Lastly, it includes the players who are just looking for something to help ease and shift away attention from the grind.
  • Outside fellow mobages, this game also has friendly fandom with other games that touch with mythology, but especially Smite, since many Heroic Spirits from legends and mythologies get included in the game's roster (and Smite is less than likely to do a Gender Flip). ^{Including these similar characters}Counting up, there has been Heracles (as Hercules), Medusa, Cu Chulainn, Artemis, Chiron, Rama, Tamamo no Mae (as her Chinese self Da Ji), Achilles, King Arthur, Merlin, Gilgamesh, Tiamat, a majority of Olympian Gods that appeared in Lostbelt 5 and 5.2 (They're not playable in F/GO, however, but Zeus, Aphrodite, Ares, Hades, Poseidon, Hephaestus/Vulcan and Athena/Minerva have made appearances or sorts), Cernunnos, Morgan le Fay, Lancelot, Ishtar, Surtr, Kukulkan and Camazotz. Both sides of the fandom have been clamoring if one day Hi-Rez Studios would collaborate with Type-Moon and include Fate Series-based skins for the matching characters over there (they have done so with other series).

G

• Gateway Series: The game has become the easiest way to get into Fate due to its free-to-play nature as a game, its separation from other works so it's not too bogged down with continuity and timeline issues, and it being one of the few officially translated works. It's gotten to the point where Nasu stated in a 2017 interview that probably only about 1/5 of the playerbase has read Fate/stay night.
• Genius Bonus: Or, at least, definitely bonuses for people who like to read The Other Wiki in their spare time.
  • The design for Saint Quartz is based on an illustration◊ Leonardo da Vinci did for the mathematician Luca Pacioli's De divina proportione.
  • "School of Chaldea", "Holy Maiden Leading Chaldea" and "Empieta" are a couple of slightly less obvious art references than the Mona Lisa.
  • The gag about chickens being everywhere in Hawaii and showing up as a random encounter in any possible battle for any free quest in the ServaFes event is based on an actual phemenenon where domestic chickens released from their coops in a hurricane bred with wild junglefowl resulting in a population explosion of feral chicken.
  • Whenever a Buddhist(-adjacent) Servant is discussed, expect syncretic connections between various sects, regional mythologies, and a deep dive into various Buddhist texts. Kiara and Tamamo alone have a complicated relationship solely on the basis of Kiara being a practitioner of Shingon Buddhism and Tamamo having syncretism with important figures from Kiara's sect.
  • And there's also the fact that a number of Servants are based on lesser-known historical figures. Do nightmares about Gilles de Rais keep you up at night? Is Nitocris your favorite vengeful Egyptian queen who Lovecraft wrote about? This may be the game for you.
  • The symbols seen on the shoulders of Sherlock Holmes' black cloak is called the endless knot, one of the most favorite symbols in Tibetian Buddhism that usually represents wisdom. It also shows Holmes' connection to his travels in Tibet during the Great Hiatus.
  • Hokusai is littered with these for any aficionado of Japanese art. Nearly every attack is a reference to one of Katushika's works (the NP and first Buster attack is The Great Wave off Kanagawa and the NP itself is Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, the second Buster attack is Phoenix, the third Buster attack is Dragon, Masculine Wave and Feminine Wave are part of her NP animation, and her Extra Attack is Rainstorm Beneath the Summit), the Third Ascension is a homage to his daughter's painting, Nightscene in the Yoshiwara, and its background is The Waterfall of Amida behind the Kiso Road. And to top it all off, the Trial Quest has Hokusai square off with several other famous Japanese artists and discuss their artwork.
  • Qin Shi Huang's artist, Tou Azuma, has stated how their involvement in the Cosmos in the Lostbelt perfectly reflects the writing about the historical him in Borges's La Muralla y Los Libros; The Great Wall of China was built by those who were branded as criminals for being scholars to strengthen Qin Shi Huang's rule, making it be the manifestation of him burning the books and erasing the history of China. So when one day someone will come and demolish the Great Wall, Qin Shi Huang himself will be erased from history, making them be his shadow and mirror, just like what happened in the Lostbelt.
  • The full map of Lostbelt 5: Atlantis is based on the Argo constellation.
  • During the "Board Games of the Apocalypse" event, Mozart makes mention of one of his compositions, The Queen of the Night Aria, which causes Voyager to chime in to note that he recognizes the song. The Queen of the Night Aria (also known as Hell's Vengeance Boils in my Heart) is a section of Mozart's famous opera, The Magic Flute, and was the movement chosen to be included in the Golden Record.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
  • While in Japan she's overshadowed by the other Fairy Knights Barghest's fanbase in North America is quite strong thanks to her Amazonian Beauty aesthetic being heavily appreciated over there as well as them finding the contrast with her imposing looks and her dorkier moments to be very endearing.
  • Quetzalcoatl is largely forgotten in Japan in favor of Ereshkigal and Ishtar. But in the West? She's very highly regarded and makes up for her personality both due to cultural differences of beauty genuinely appreciating her gorgeous Statuesque Stunner looks, her Funny Foreigner status being played positively, and while not as good as Ozymandias, is still a very solid 5-Star Rider and lore-wise one of the most busted characters in the setting. This is especially true in Latin American countries, who unilaterally adore Quetz even harder than most Westerners do, despite being a distillation of many Latino stereotypes in general.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Ghosts. They really like to drain your Servants' NP gauges, which is really annoying especially when you're working your way up to a boss. They were also known for the longest time to have needlessly long attack animations until around Halloween 2017 where their animations were sped up.
  • Berserker enemies in general, especially if they all prioritize killing one particular Servant.
  • Grimoire type enemies aren't all that powerful compared to other Caster type enemies, but they make fighting them annoyingly long because they usually have party wide healing skills or can give themselves or allies Guts, allowing them to turn what are somewhat bulky enemies into several long last enemies, especially if they cast Guts on themselves back-to-back or spam healing skills.
  • Agartha introduced the Torturers, which have a skill that applies a taunt to any Servant, causing them to attack only that one Servant, which can lead to lots of damage racked up very fast for whichever poor sod that was targeted. If that wasn't bad enough, their charge attack removes all defensive buffs from a single target, including evade and invincibility, meaning that if they are about to pull it off, someone is going to get hurt no matter what.
  • Salem has the Elder Ghouls which spams curse debuff and it stacks. It does not help that they seem to have higher than normal chances of doing crits, meaning that even with class advantage they can still easily kill whoever they target simply by critting back-to-back.
  • Avalon introduces human mors. There's a very good reason that, in-story, Pepe stops you from fighting them as you first encounter them. They're not particularly tough and don't have a lot of annoying skills, but they inflict Curse on their attacker every time they inflict damage, and they get the last laugh when defeated via plopping both Curse and Poison on their killer. Combined, this means that they pose a surprisingly nasty threat against many farming servants, who take a minimum of six curse stacks and three poison stacks just for burning down a wave of three with a Noble Phantasm, or when later waves include normal mors that can use skills that further amplify their curse damage. They are unlikely to actually kill anyone themselves despite their Berserker class, but they can do a lot of annoying chip damage on the way out.
• Goddamned Boss: Now with its own page.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • There's a bug that causes a BBA or BBQ chain to act like the last card generated overkill, which can also trigger for real for a second overkill bonus. This went largely unnoticed until people noticed that Musashi, who already had very good NP gen, could go from 0 to full with a single well timed BBA chain when using her first skill. DW seemingly has no intention of fixing the bug because it became one of the primary draws for what was already becoming a very popular character.
  • King Hassan's Noble Phantasm initially skipped over the death animation of whatever enemies it killed, making it look like he just annihilated them completely, something akin to a Dynamic Kill in Super Robot Wars. After it was patched, fans agreed that it was a cool visual effect and prefer it to the normal death animations, and so the effect was patched back in.
  • Players considered a bug that removes the frame of Servant and Craft Essence cards when zoomed in as this, since this bug shows the full artwork of the cards, especially those with good artwork. Instead of being patched, the developers decided to turn it into an actual feature.
  • During the launch time of the game, Robin Hood's Yew Bow had a glitch where instead of simply dealing extra damage if the enemy was poisoned, he instead dealt extra percentile damage for every debuff the enemy had. This meant that before he could be leveled past 70, Robin Hood was the highest damage dealing Servant at launch. Unlike other mentioned examples, this was removed because of how blatantly broken this was. His Noble Phantasm now only deals a fixed amount of extra damage if the enemy is poisoned, regardless of how many poisons are stacked.
  • There was a bug for a brief period of time that caused the music tracks that played for select Noble Phantasms that had unique songs play in them to continue playing after the attack had ended. Given how good these songs usually are, this was well liked, though sadly it was patched out.
• Growing the Beard:
  • The game got off to a rocky start to say the least, with problems including a wildly hated gacha, writing that was mostly mixed, poor game balance and a slew of technical issues that lead to many people being unable to play the game half the time. Around Okeanos, Delight Works' staff got the handle of managing a mobile game and ironed out the numerous balance and technical problems. The writing also improved dramatically, with stories that actually incorporated all the Servants of the story into the plot and gave them time to shine. And while the gacha itself hasn't improved much, there have been not only several "giveaways" for free 4* servants of the player's choice or random guaranteed 5* giveaways, but events that give out really solid 4* Servants as prizes for beating them, meaning even an F2P player can acquire a team of not just gold Servants, but good gold Servants.
  • With the Palingenesis system, F2P players can now stand toe-to-toe with P2P players with gold Servants. Most lower rarity Servants' usefulness, even if they had a good skillset, were hindered by their low levels and stats. With the increased level caps through Palingenesis, now lower rarity Servants can stand on par with gold Servants, their skills and low cost making them more effective than some gold Servants.
  • In general, the period after America's release saw the beard get especially thick and lush. The starting experience was made much better, with a more predetermined initial roll that guaranteed one of a number of fan favorite 4* Servants, the cost of the premium gacha itself was brought down, the bond system was expanded with a final reward of a unique Craft Essence for a Servant if you use one diligently, and the developers began a policy of re-running major events at major landmarks, to make sure newer players didn't completely miss out on some of the good, free 4* Servants from older events.
  • Another point for the game was the decision for the game to embrace its story-heavy direction, which happened during the Camelot and Babylon singularities. Prior to this, the story was basically an Excuse Plot to justify why new Servants and old ones were around, and why you had to care for the game. The ending of London dropped the big reveal of the Big Bad: Solomon, and the developers began to ramp their efforts. Word of God suggested a heavy re-write was done after London and/or America, and it shows. Camelot had a significantly longer storyline with a more fluid pacing of the story which includes a noticeable reduction of filler fights, an interesting story, and the usage of fan-favorites to expand the story instead of being just essentially cameos. This comes into its own by Babylon which introduced fightless arrows on the story node, significantly reducing the amount of filler story content, provided fun fights with good gimmicks, and heavily expanded the lore even more than before.
  • Interestingly, part of the reason GO's English version has done all right for itself so far is that it launched with these improvements already in place - while some of the Rank Up Quests and Interludes need to wait for appropriate chapters, Palingenesis and the Camelot-era system improvements were already in place. This meant people in NA could do things like rock a level 85 Cu Chulainn as early as the launch of Okeanos!
  • Earlier Events tend to have farming missions with multiple enemy classes and/or extremely tough bosses whose HP could reach more than 250,000, making it challenging to gather event materials. Later events tend more towards single-class nodes, and reduce bosses' HP to make farming easier even at higher levels.

H

• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • During Singularity F, the player can direct a great deal of snark towards Olga. When she dies at the end of the chapter, she laments that no one has ever appreciated her. This would come biting back years later at Olympus, she apparently is back as Beast VII with a vengeance.
  • In the Apocrypha event, Spartacus tells everyone not to worry about transporting him to Semiramis' Flying Gardens because he will fly like a bird to reach it. Come the third Lostbelt, and Spartacus performs a Heroic Sacrifice by flying into Emperor Qin's Malignant Star.
  • During the Las Vegas Championship Match, whether it was due to being Lost in Translation or not ^note 仙女, while translated as Fairy, can be sometimes translated as Sage, has Hokusai (Saber) stating to become a fairy as part of her wish from the Holy Grail. During Avalon le Fae, we get a close look on what fairies really are.
  • Ishtar somehow managing to lose the divine bull Gugalanna during the Babylonia Singularity is Played for Laughs. The reveal that another Ishtar stole it from the Babylonia Singularity and attempted to use it to kill the city of Snowfield just for the chance it will kill Gilgamesh and Enkidu is not as funny, especially with it meaning that Ishtar losing Gugalanna, the main basis behind her Useless Goddess status, wasn't even her fault.
  • In the Camelot Singularity, Dr. Roman laughs at Cursed Armed Hassan's poor record (when you consider his profession) of having a failure once every six months, to which Cursed Arm Hassan responds that Dr. Roman won't know if he will even be alive within six months. Six months after the release of the Camelot Singularity in the Solomon Singularity, Dr. Roman pulls a Heroic Sacrifice he had been planning for ten years since he became human.
  • Ishtar's antics in general are a lot harsher with the events of Fate/strange Fake. Ishtar there is a lot more vile and perfectly willing to kill innocents just to get her revenge. The version of Ishtar here however is tempered by the fact she is using Rin Tohsaka as her vessel, with her current personality described as being Rin and Ishtar's fused together. The only reason Ishtar from here is a Butt-Monkey is because of Rin. Without Rin, all of the treatment given to Ishtar would be Bullying a Dragon.
  • Anne and Mary's admiration of Christopher Columbus, in which they credit him for kickstarting The Golden Age of Piracy, becomes this when the man's true nature is revealed during Agartha. In short, Columbus would sooner string Anne and Mary along to make a profit, and casually sell them into sexual slavery once he gets bored of them. Thankfully, the actually-summoned Columbus, while still a duplicitous bastard, is capable of getting along well with them (Anne and Mary gets disappointed for other things) genuinely, but if the prospect of 'casually selling them into sexual slavery once he gets bored with them' manages to line up with his personal dream of maximizing profits for himself, then he would probably do so in a heartbeat.
  • The reasoning for Wodime's plan to turn everyone into a god hybrid is that he believed that by giving everyone a purpose and the power to achieve them a new and better humanity would emerge. Cue Lostbelt 6 where we encounter the Fae, super powered creatures that are born to fulfill a purpose. And we see them get driven to extinction because of it.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight:
  • After The Reveal regarding Dr. Roman, all of the Craft Essence artwork of him enjoying fireworks with Fou, engaging in Halloween silliness by dressing as a vampire and bantering with da Vinci, eating oranges and interacting with his favorite idol is a lot more heartwarming as this is the life that Solomon chose as a normal human of his own volition, enjoying it to the fullest. ^note  When he came to the end of his original life as King Solomon, as shown in the Book of Ecclesiastes, despite all his accomplishments he hated life.
  • The first summer event reveals that Karna likes elephants. Lostbelt No. 4 has the elephant god Ganesha as a Pseudo-Servant with Karna's former Master, Jinako, as the host.
  • During the Pre-Release Campaigns of Olympus, the player would receive Golden Apples from Kirschtaria himself as a part of their Log-In Bonus. It may be as a way of promotion at first but with The Reveal of Kirschtaria's true personality, you can see it as a genuine gift from him to the player.
• He's Just Hiding:
  • Some people believe that Musashi will come back, despite her fate seemingly leaving her Deader than Dead with the most common thing cited as evidence to support this being her her fifth anniversary NP buff giving her extra damage against Alter Egos and Mooncancer enemies, which Musashi has not really faced against in story. Though as time as gone on this line of thinking has died down thanks to Douman and Muramasa, the two antagonists she has the biggest connections with dying.
  • Many fans also believe Holmes will come back after his death in Lostbelt Chapter 6.5, due to some details about his purpose and his high servant components being unrevealed and the fact that his death is a reference to how he "died" in The Final Problem.^note The Final Problem was intended to be the final Holmes story as it ended with the detective's death. However, Arthur Conan Doyle was later persuaded to revive Holmes for additional stories and novels. His potential survival is even discussed In-Universe by both Chaldea and both versions of Moriarity with the Archer version even noting in an interlude that due to Holmes's status as the first apostle of the Foreign God he's in a role that can not be replaced or replicated.
• Ho Yay:
  • Due to the game often using the same script for both male and female protagonist, the female MC sometimes has the option to flirt with female Servants.
  • During Scathach's trial quest, Mash comments on her body tights and describes her figure as "objectively perfect".
  • In Medb's interlude, Mash seems a bit too interested in learning about how Medb's Noble Phantasm works - and is also the first to suggest fighting her, because she wants to see it in action. So much for her only being interested in the player character...
  • Anne Bonny and Mary Read. The two are always together, their NP subtitle is Bond of Lovebirds, and their final art shows them in a very intimate position. Finally, Mary spends "Chaldea Summer" full of jealousy because Anne attracts the Male Gaze from everyone. When you build the showers for Chaldea Summer Part 1, Anne and Mary want to see if they work. Under the excuse of "having as much eyes as possible to check around", not only they do decide to go in together, but also drag the MC along with them. The thing is, the showers don't have that much space available. So when the 3 go in together, and if you're playing as the female protagonist, she finds herself caught in a flesh sandwich between the two pirates.
  • In her second Interlude, Altera acknowledges her marriage to Kriemhild. Although she actually doesn't really care.
  • Hassan of Serenity's NP animation is her seducing and kissing a target to death. Using it against a female enemy plays out the exact same way it does for male enemies. A very Ho Yay bug happened when Serenity uses her NP on Swimsuit Altria. Instead of kissing her lips, she kissed Altria's thigh instead. It was patched out though.
  • Marie Antoinette has some... interesting interactions with Jeanne d'Arc in the France chapter chock full of Innocent Innuendo, with her often commenting on Jeanne's beauty and figure.
  • The Abigail/Lavinia pairing became very popular after the Salem chapter, as they have a Pseudo-Romantic Friendship going on there.
  • Because of Salieri's downright psychotic obsession with Mozart as an Avenger and their interactions in Anastasia, fans have run with that obsession in a much more romantic light. Not helped in the slightest by the things Salieri himself says about Mozart in his opening kind-of-flashback monologue:
    Salieri: I loved him. I envied him. I yearned for him. I respected him, admired him, looked up to him...
  • Swimsuit Medb finds herself a bit conflicted if you have Skadi, since on the one hand she's a Scathach, but on the other Medb thinks she's cute. Her normal version has a similar reaction when talking to Skadi in the New Year's 2019 event, even getting blushy during their conversation. Skadi's reaction to Swimsuit Medb calling her cute, meanwhile, is to start blushing and look down.
  • In the Dead Heat Summer Race event, Summer Raikou questions Sanzang about how much skin her outfit shows, citing how indecent it is for a monk to dress in such a way. In response, Sanzang mentions how Raikou's not really one to talk, and then goes off on a tangent describing how hot she thinks Raikou is. While blushing.
  • Ozymandias and Arash which is based on their interactions in Fragments and Salomon, with Ozymandias having high respect for Arash as a true hero and the former is willing to do anything for the latter, even while his peers like Nitocris can't get him to budge. It was acknowledged with the Halloween 2017 event CE which depicted the two as incredibly close, using another Ho Yay-filled duo, Reinhard and Kircheis as the inspiration.
  • If you have Ushiwakamaru or her summer version, Kiichi Hogen gets a My Room line where she is very cross with Ushi for seducing Kiichi's daughter.
  • In one of his My Room lines, Percival calls Bedivere a blooming flower and wonders what kind of flower he has become. He's completely earnest too.

I

• I Knew It!:
  • Fans of the Fate series were immediately assuming (correctly) that the red-headed female Lancer was Scathach, the witch of Dun Scaith, based on her spear alone.
  • Many also assumed correctly that the white-haired, rainbow bladed Saber would be Attila the Hun simply due to the comment that her wars "spanned an entire continent", and seeing as how Iskandar/Alexander is already in the series, that left only one person who fit the criteria.
  • Many fans believed "Mash Kyrielight" was actually Shielder's civilian identity. They were somewhat correct, just not in the manner they thought.
  • Many fans also guessed Shielder's name as a Heroic Spirit purely based on the shape of her shield: Galahad. Data-mining confirmed it to be true. Lampshaded in Fate/Accel Zero Order when Altria sees her shield and immediately deduces who she is.
  • Many fans assumed that the black-skinned, fire-breathing Berserker was Darius III on the account of him name dropping Iskandar and being ridiculously tall.^note Text on Darius mentions how he was three foot taller then Iskandar, who is already a big guy himself. They were proven right.
  • Most fans believed Professor Lev to be a villain, based only on his design, and boy, they were right.
  • After the Da Vinci event's first announcement, players speculated that there would be a new Alter Servant ("fake" Servant) and EMIYA would have some kind of role in this event (because he is a faker). Jeanne Alter is the main draw of the event and EMIYA is a main character of the story.
  • Many predicted that the Assassin EMIYA was Kiritsugu not only because of his debut event's name being a reference to his main magecraft, but because his actor was already in the initial datamine.
  • The entire fanbase predicted that Holy Grails would be used as an item to ascend Servants beyond their maximum levels, especially since datamining had found an extra, hidden fifth ascension level using them. Its implementation was much different from what fans expected though.
  • Many fans figured out that Dr. Roman was Solomon all along. Fewer people, though still a somewhat notable amount, figured out that he was really the "human" side of Solomon, and that Grand Caster was a version of Solomon without any human qualities.
  • Ever since the concept of the Grand Servants was revealed, fans speculated that Primate Murder had something to do with them, given how the game said that seven Grand Servants were needed to combat a threat to mankind and how past TYPE-MOON material said that seven Counter Guardians were needed to restrain Primate Murder. They were right, but the exact implementation of this character was completely unexpected.
  • Fans guessed that the Archer of Shinjuku's identity is James Moriarty based on his badge, which has the Irish St. Patrick's cross on it, connecting to Moriarty's origin as an Irish name and him being portrayed as the antagonist in the Shinjuku trailer juxtaposed to one of the good guys being Holmes. His identity was the first one to be revealed in-game, confirming the fan theory.
  • Fans had been guessing that Kiara would be a major antagonist in SE.RA.PH due to her VA being recently added to the game's website, Seraphix reports referring to a mysterious woman they would die for, Emiya Alter's presence as one of the Servants who would appear in the event and speculating that the "K" of the KP currency was referring to her name. They were right. Likewise, players had already been guessing that she would be playable when she showed up due to Kiara already having multiple stages of artwork like most Servants do, the suspicious lack of a profile for her in the Servant database after beating her and the planets being mirrored in her Noble Phantasm animation.
  • The fact that there was a Rashoumon event rerun made many savvy players guess that the next event afterwards would be a rerun of Onigashima since they were related via Kintoki. They were right.
  • When her design was first revealed, many people guessed that the Bedlah Babe Caster of Nightless City was Scheherazade from Arabian Nights. To no one's surprise, they were proven right.
  • The 10th announcement for the 2nd Anniversary campaign was speculated to be related to Riyo's Learning with Manga! FGO since the print version of the series was published the same day as the announcement and they were 100% right.
  • Fans noted the oriental clothing of Shirou as depicted in the Limited/Zero Over Craft Essence, and they guessed — correctly, in the third Epic of Remnant — that this was the pseudo-Servant Senji Muramasa.
  • Galahad's complete appearance was guessed way before he actually shows up. Even down to the way his hair comes down on his face, just like Mash.
  • Many a fan predicted that the third Lostbelt would have a connection to Tsukihime, whether directly or indirectly; this is because of its subtitle "Crimson Beauty Under the Moon", a clear allusion to Crimson Moon, the progenitor of True Ancestor vampires like Arcueid. While the story doesn't feature Arcueid herself, it does indeed focus on one of her fellow True Ancestors - Yu Mei-ren, known today as Hinako Akuta.
  • Most fans cottoned onto the fact that Beast III-L would appear in some capacity in the Tokugawa Labyrinth event because of the trailer stating "(D)III(Cadence)" and Kiara's presence (hitherto generally unacknowledged by Chaldea until this point), with further hinting in Kama having Independent Manifestation.
  • For the fourth Lostbelt, many fans correctly guessed that Jinako Karigiri would be a Pseudo-Servant of the Indian God Ganesha, after seeing a Ganesha-type statue wearing her iconic bow from one of the Hunting Quests. Likewise for the Lostbelt Berserker's identity who is Arjuna Alter due to having the same character designer (pako) and voice actor of Arjuna.
  • Many had guessed the brown-haired girl with a knife and an angelic familiar that appeared in the Cosmos In The Lostbelt opening to be Charlotte Corday as an Assassin. They were correct; however her rarity and debut event was not what anyone expected, she's a 1-star Assassin who was released as part of the fourth anniversary, with datamining her profile revealing she has a role in Lostbelt 5.
  • Due to the subtitle of the fourth summer event being "Tournament of the Seven Swimsuit Blademasters!", the logo for said event having 2 swords that looked exactly like the one Okita Souji used, as well as the fact that each summer event had at least 1 Saberface servant get a swimsuit variant^note with both non-Lily versions of Jeanne, Nero, Mordred, and both regular Altria and Altria Alter having gotten one, Okita was one of the most notable who hadn't received a swimsuit version, a lot of people began speculating that Okita would finally get a swimsuit version in said event. Sure enough, she shows up in the event trailer wearing a swimsuit, although she's a limited servant, as opposed to being the event's welfare servant (which, given the title of the event, is what many people guessed would be the case).
  • A lot of fans speculated that the huge, muscular figure who appeared below Xiang Yu in the Cosmos in the Lostbelt opening was the actual Orion and he might show up in the Atlantis Lostbelt. Turns out they were right as he debuts in the Atlantis Lostbelt.
  • People guessed as soon as he was revealed that Beryl was going to betray the rest of the Crypters.
  • Ever since the beginning of the game a lot of people guessed that Olga would reappear one way or another. which finally came true during Olympus Where Beast VII has used her body as a vessel.
  • Fans theorized that Caster Cu was in someway related to Odin. Lostbelt six would finally reveal he's actually a pseudo Servant of Odin, with Cu in control.
  • Many fans predicted that Iskandar's Shadow shall be added to the game within the Lady Reines Case Files Rerun as a Pretender servant.
  • Many fans also predicted that Bazett Fraga McRemitz shall be the Valentine's Day Servant for 2022 due to how Caren (a.k.a. the other major character that was introduced in Fate/hollow ataraxia) was the Valentine's Day Servant for the previous year.
  • When the Nakayoshi Sabers were revealed at Anime Japan 2022 fans were quick to identify the True Names of the new Servants as the Trung Sisters of Vietnam. And sure enough when the event started it showed that they had hit the mark.
  • Between the Ambiguous Situation with Sherlock Holmes and the hints throughout Cosmos in the Lostbelt that there is a traitor in Chaldea, players quickly theorized that these things were connected. They were right, though with a caveat: Holmes was supposed to betray Chaldea, but gave himself Laser-Guided Amnesia the moment he was summoned to avoid that outcome. The Holmes we know has been Good All Along.
  • A user on Reddit posted a fanmade Servant which predicted that Grand Rider is Noah, nearly four years before it was officially confirmed.
  • Ever since it was revealed that the final Lostbelt would be located in South America it was a popular fan idea that Type ORT would finally make their debut in it and after some hinting in Olympus and the second opening Lostbelt 7 confirmed this as ORT is one of the main focuses of the plot.
• Incest Yay Shipping:
  • There's a real lot of people who ship Karna and Arjuna, with it being fairly popular because of their rivalry and pretty boy looks.
  • If you are trying a look for fanart of Solomon on Pixiv, good luck on avoiding logs that don't imply he's shipped with his own father David.
  • Even though he hasn't appeared in the game yet, Lancelot's son Galahad is frequently paired up with this game's version of his father. Ironically, Lancelot is drawn having regular fatherly moments with Mash herself.
  • And let's not even go into Mordred and Altria, whether it be Mordred with the original, the Lily version (Mordred acting Tsundere around Lily only fueled this ship), either one of the Lancer versions (Lancer Alter tends to be used more since the "Journey to the West" event casted them as father and son). And Arthur outright says that this Mordred is cute (doesn't help that his world's Mordred is a Yandere). And some just go the full hog and have Mordred be in a relationship with all of them.
  • The Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, are shipped together though this is to be expected considering the Incest Subtext they have in canon. While it’s more ambiguous in Pollux’s case save for one line that implies she reciprocates her brother's obsession in a more subtle way, Castor is straight up an unabashed sis-con that doesn’t care about anything but Pollux.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: Around 2021, most of the Challenge Quests have gotten flack for being way too easy compared to the previous iterations where they did at least lived up to their name, but since then players felt that it's way too easy to finish them within a few turns using their farming composition, of all things.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!:
  • The later half of the Lostbelt arc has gotten complaints for cranking the difficulty too high in an attempt to encourage rolling for rare units as opposed to being perfectly manageable with low rarity Servants. The Demeter fight in particular became so infamous that many free-to-play guides simply gave up and told people they can't win without high-rarity units.
  • 90++ Free Quests in events have gotten similar flak, due to cranking the difficulty beyond tedious to curb some farming strategies. Making matters worse is that often not, they tend to put the best Bond points and Event Materials behind them, and even with top-tier supports, fully-raised Servants with bonus damage and CEs tend to do insufficient damage unless you have them at a high NP level and investment. Unsurprisingly, most event guides recommended avoiding it not just because of the high-rarities and NP levels needed to even consistently farm well, but because doing so is not good for your sanity.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!:
  • Lostbelt 3 is noticeably shorter than most other main story chapters and it's commonly agreed that its length works to its detriment as a good chunk of characters feel like they lack proper development, and the third act is noticeably rushed.
  • Heian-kyō is the shortest of the Lostbelt main stories, only having 15 missions, and unlike Lostbelt 3, it doesn't have a prologue chapter to setup the story, meaning the chapter doesn't have enough time to properly address many of the plotlines it establishes, and rushes through them without much fanfare, such as the Holy Grail War, and the Oni plots. This wouldn't be a major problem if it was just a normal story chapter, but it being the last chapter to feature Ashiya Douman, a recurring antagonist that people had been excited to finally defeat, caused it to feel like a let down that his dedicated chapter and send-off ends up so short and not very focused, especially when it is sandwiched between Lostbelt 5 and 6, which were both longer and gave more time for the story to move through the plot points it brought up.
  • A common problem that many people had with Tunguska Sanctuary was that despite being the conclusion to Koyanskaya, one of the story's longest-lasting villains and Beast IV it’s one of the shortest stories in the entirety of Cosmos in the Lostbelt, leading to a lack of exploration of most characters involved and Koyanskaya not even appearing until the last quarter of it making people wish that she had a proper main chapter to deal with her like Douman did.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Many people were quite annoyed of the amount of servants that were released in 2022 with AOE Noble Phantasms. Out of the 34 servants that were released that year, 21 of them had AOE NPs in contrast to the eight servants with single target NPs and the five with support NPs. Early 2023 seems to continue this tradition as the first eight servants released that year all have AOE NPs.
• It Was His Sled:
  • It was common knowledge that Mash's fused with Galahad of the Round Table, a secret exposed by datamining her bond profile, which quickly spiraled out of control. It's lampshaded in Camelot that everyone already knew before Sherlock reveals it.
  • Several unreleased Servants' profiles, Noble Phantasms, skills, personality, and even voice actors are already known after being shown in other Type-Moon media.
  • While we still assiduously spoiler tag it all here, the existence of Grand Servants, "Solomon", the true nature of the entity claiming to be Solomon, the existence and nature of the Beasts, various relevations about and the final fate of Dr. Roman and even who individual Beasts are has all been dreadfully hard to keep under wraps, especially for NA fans, who are two years behind the plot if they're playing the NA version exclusively but can easily stumble into things like Beast entries on many of the game's wikis and whatnot.
  • While it's still in spoiler tags over here, the True Name mechanic introduced in Epic of Remnant hasn't really done a very good job of hiding the identities of the Servants with hidden names. We're preeetty sure just about everybody knows that Archer of Shinjuku is James Moriarty, Caster of the Nightless City is Scheherazade, Berserker of El Dorado is Penthesilea, Caster of Okeanos is Circe, Archer of Inferno is Tomoe Gozen, Fairy Knight Gawain is Barghest, Fairy Knight Tristan is Baobhan Sith, and Fairy Knight Lancelot is Melusine/Albion. This comes to the point that post-Epic of Remnant content not only scrapped this mechanic, but events, interludes and the main story down the line stopped hiding the names of Servants that debuted with it, even if the player hasn't bothered to complete any Epic of Remnant chapter, and Archer of Inferno even had an alternate summer version available that didn't had her name hidden. Thus it was surprising it returned in Lostbelt 6 to hide the true identities of the Faerie Knights, but once again, it didn't do much to stop the whole players from referring to the characters with their real names once they knew of them.
  • As time has gone one it's been increasingly common for people to know Yu Mei-ren is the Crypter of the third Lostbelt, Akuta Hinako. considering how it's almost impossible for it to not be brought up when it comes to discussions involving her and that her first ascension (which is rather popular among fanartists) bring out the resemblance the most. By the time that her swimsuit version became the welfare for the 5th summer event some fans have completely given up on treating it as a secret.
  • Thanks to Lostbelt 6’s high amount of focus and their explosive popularity, Morgan being a Tragic Villain and Oberon the new Pretender class and the actual main villain for the Lostbelt are effectively common knowledge.

J

• Jerks Are Worse Than Villains:
  • In Lostbelt 6, while the majority of Faes were Ungrateful Bastards extraordinary, they're not actually the Arc Villain of the Lostbelt. But their inherent cruel, backstabbing nature that has been implanted on them since their creation along with all the cruel things they do without any tinge of regret at the cost of many has made many players want them dead possibly even more than they want a Hate Sink villain like Beryl (who instead develop a Love to Hate status), or even bigger villains like the Foreign God. They kinda got their wish in the end, though.
  • The primary antagonist of "Serial Mythological Theater: Mississippi Mythicizers" is Mary Anning, who prolongs the Singularity and acts antagonistic to the main cast. Despite this, her Inferiority Superiority Complex and comedic qualities earned her fans, to the point many wished the event had her as the main companion as opposed to the actual companion character Super Bunyan, who resembles a typical Mean Boss exploiting and mistreating her employees while having the protagonist and Mash clean up her own messes that's a little too realistic for comfort; even a more charitable read of Super Bunyan's actions still shows her to be a Pointy-Haired Boss more concerned with her social media totals and appearances than actually doing her job who relies on her subordinates to bail her out of the consequences of her own incompetence. The reveal at the very end that she secretly wants to be punished is seen as a hamfisted attempt at sympathy out of nowhere that comes too little, too late after several chapters of her jerk behavior played straight.
• Junk Rare: As one might expect of an RPG utilizing a gacha system, there are several 4-5 star Servants that are either bad, require a team to be built around them, have too situational a niche, or are otherwise underwhelming (see the Low-Tier Letdown page for this game for more details). There are 1-3 star Servants that are actually better than their 4-5 star counterparts. This is especially hold true if a Junk Rare servant happens to be a limited servant as well. And the chief offender is of course, Angra Mainyu, a 0-star. He may be the rarest Servant in the game, but he is very difficult to use effectively in most cases.
• Just Here for Godzilla: The game offers a diverse cast of Original Generation characters that have all become pretty popular in their own right, but most people going into Grand Order after seeing other Fate works are probably mainly interested in creating a team of their favorites and having a chance to see more of them.

L

• Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Expect the protagonist to be shipped with nearly everyone in the cast in fan works, regardless of gender.
• LGBT Fanbase:
  • Astolfo is very popular to the majority of the male Yaoi fans.
  • Napoleon and Iskandar are very popular among fans of the Bara Genre.
  • The female Jacques de Molay was warmly welcomed by the trans fanbase, after it was revealed she was voiced by Shiki Aoki, one of the few openly transgender voice actors in the Japanese industry.
• Like You Would Really Do It:
  • The reveal of U-Olga Marie is an odd retroactive case. In retrospect, the idea that Olga Marie would have a bigger role in the narrative than originally implied seems quite obvious, given the character's famous seiyuu and narratively significant role as the daughter of Chaldea's founder. However, given the gap of several years between said character seemingly being Killed Off for Real and returning as the avatar of the Foreign God, many people had come to believe that the character really was just a Red Herring.
  • The instant the Ordeal Calls were introduced, many fans immediately began pointing to this trope. The Extra Class Servants make up a large chunk of the playable roster and even the core cast, with both fan-favorite characters like Jeanne Alter and plot-critical ones like Edmond Dantes included among their number. Between this, the fact that the heroes were essentially one step away from actually confronting the Greater-Scope Villain of the second arc, and the fact that the issue of Chaldea using Extra Class Servants was being raised at the same time as characters like Kukulkan, Tiamat, and Draco were added to the gacha, no one actually took seriously the idea that the developers would rip away the Extra Class Servants. Which made it all the more surprising when Ordeal Call 2 revealed that they absolutely would. While the Avenger Servants are still present from a gameplay perspective, in-story the vast majority of them are gone, and the Ordeal Calls have very abruptly turned from inconsequential Padding to a tense battle with the fate of some of the game's most popular characters on the line.
• Love to Hate:
  • Some fans tend to value Columbus for this trope, mainly because of being a rare case of a Servant being held more accountable than many people even hold the real-life Columbus. This made him surprisingly refreshing compared to other Servants, especially since it’s not uncommon for historical figures who committed heinous crimes in life to have those actions downplayed in their Servant versions. Yes, Columbus is meant to be hated and is shown to be a disgusting person, but you can't help but love hating him and consider him a solid villainous character. And if it helps, beyond his two-faced personality, he's also quite smart. For his 'fans', Columbus equates to "The one guy you can always trust to be an evil asshole."
  • Ashiya Douman was originally just hated for his despicable actions but once karma finally caught up to him and he was defeated, the fanbase then embraced him wholeheartedly.
  • Beryl Gut is a despicable piece of shit responsible for the murder of the two most sympathetic Crypters, Wodime and Pepe but being a piece of shit is exactly what he was made for and the fandom wouldn't have it any other way.

M

• Magnificent Bastard: See here.
• Memetic Badass:
  • Sasaki Kojirou - The Savior of France, due to being a common but incredibly useful Servant who can trivialize the entirety of the Orleans singularity by cutting through the dragons with ease. A fandom Badass Boast also came out of it:
    "X are just bigger swallows."
    • This has become something of an Ascended Meme - if the Moon-Viewing event is anything to go by, Kojirou's hanging out with Saint Georgios and Saint Martha (and amusingly, Siegfried isn't invited, despite his role in Orleans being pertinent in bringing down Fafnir), respectively a legendary dragonslayer and dragon tamer. Seems they're letting him into a little clique of theirs.
    • Amusingly, Martha can't stop herself from belittling his achievements as a "dragonslayer" once it's implied he's there after Tarasque. And after that, Mash asks herself why he's there instead of Siegfried.
    • Not to mention, when grailed to level 100, he can actually defeat just about every boss from Camelot onward and has become a mainstay in many players' Servant parties due to his one-star cost allowing more wiggle room for more powerful CEs and Servants. Here are 2 players using him in their parties blowing away Tiamat, Goetia and even Kiara!! Here are a few examples. As fans say:
      X is just a bigger swallow.
    • For a short period of time Kojirou was actually known as something of a Memetic Loser. Partly because of his Butt-Monkey status in official lighthearted TYPE-MOON works, partly because the Assassin class in general is seen as kinda meh, but especially because of one player reporting on how they accidentally converted him into experience points◊, which gave him the nicknames like "XP fodder" and "Servant food".
  • Riyo Gudako. The female protagonist from Riyo's official gag manga has become one, as she casually bullies Servants, bosses, and even Solomon. Many people joke that she's the true villain that will doom humanity and the True Final Boss of FGO as a whole. Becomes Hilarious in Hindsight as she's the Arc Villain of "All the Statesmen". Also crosses over into Memetic Psychopath.
  • Chen Gong can instantly kill an ally even if they have Instant Death immunity or being someone who introduced the concept of death, like King Hassan. And suddenly, a lowly 2-Star Servant is considered more dangerous than a Grand Servant itself. In a sense, Chen Gong also becomes a Memetic Dreaded Servant thanks to his important contribution of the farming loop, that every important Support Casters (Zhuge Liang, Merlin, Tamamo, Scathach-Skadi, Altria Caster) practically feared him because their job description means they are always going to get painfully blown up on a daily basis by Chen Gong.
  • Daybit Sem Void is the most mysterious of the Crypters who hasn't had the chance to do anything yet, but the story has hyped him up considerably as a genius that even Da Vinci respects, a mage at least on par with Kirschtaria, and giving him a Grand Servant. Then the "DAYBIT, HELP ME" memes demoting Kirschtaria to Memetic Loser status also promoted Daybit to a hyper-competent badass who's constantly bailing out Kirschtaria, defying with reality with his insane skateboarding skills that make Tony Hawk weep in shame, and playing around with his Grand Servant and ORT.
  • Chevalier d'Eon has a Rank A Strength stat, placing them on the higher end compared to their dainty frame. The fandom takes this to its illogical extreme, from portraying d'Eon shocking more muscular Servants with feats of strength◊ to winning arm wrestling matches against far larger Servants.◊
• Memetic Molester:
  • The female protagonist. This comes from her appearance in the official Learn With Manga! FGO manga where she is depicted molesting Mash and Olga Marie (and lately, Helena) whenever she is upset with them. Many fan artists draw her with this face while doing something highly inappropriate.
  • Hassan of Serenity had a brief phase of this when a bug in Swimsuit Altria's sprite meant that Serenity would kiss her thighs instead of her lips when targeting her with her Noble Phantasm. As a result, at least before that bug was patched, there were quite a few jokes and pieces of fanart depicting Serenity as having a thigh fetish.
  • While more Memetic Pervert than anything, there are very few conversations with Merlin that don't involve him giving girls male genetalia, as a joke originating from Mordred's birth story where Merlin did just that to Altria so she could produce an heir. The fans simply rolled with the idea that Merlin has a futanari fetish in stride.
  • Lancelot (the Saber version, specifically) tends to be portrayed in fan works as a pervert who likes married women, and is often seen together with Gawain and Tristan lusting on various girls. This gets played up a number of times in various events.
  • Boggart immediately got this reputation when word came out that an amnesiac Mash is to be married to him as a figurehead, which when combined with the chaos of spoilers leaking out when the first part of Lostbelt 6 came out, resulted in fan portayals of him being willing to make the protagonist a victim of cuckoldry by marrying Mash.
• Memetic Psychopath:
  • The depiction of the female protagonist from Learning with Manga! FGO tends to spill over into depictions of her from the main game, ranging from a Psycho Lesbian to a gacha-obsessed maniac.
  • Mash Kyrielight, the resident Nice Girl who can get a bit pouty when she feels jealous, tends to jokingly be cranked up into a full-blown Yandere who burns other Servants who flirt with the protagonist and constantly stalks them. There's also her relationship with Saber Lancelot, which a lot of fans exaggerate from her berating him to her obliterating him on the spot for breathing in the wrong direction.
  • There's a common fanon depiction of Nursery Rhyme called "Nursery Crime" who discards all of the Cheerful Child aspects of the character in favor of portraying her as a foul-mouthed lunatic obsessed with guns.
• Memetic Troll:
  • The game's Trolling Creator is this. Due to the various problems the game has had (and still has), the fandom has reached the general consensus that the game is developed by none other than Kotomine Kirei. First, several CEs that bear his image or items associated with him are constantly being pulled by platers. Secondly, the company who was initially behind the game is named Delightworks, and a synonym for delight is, you guessed it, rejoice. In other words, every time something happens in the game that isn't in your favour, Kotomine is to blame for your suffering. His actual appearance during the prologue of part 2 further increased the idea.
  • Stheno is often treated as this. She is the game's premier Junk Rare, which leads to some pretty hefty disappointment whenever that gold Assassin card shows up, especially on banners featuring a considerably more desirable Assassin such as Jack, King Hassan, and Kama. It certainly doesn't hurt that Stheno is canonically The Gadfly, which encourages the idea that she shows up in your gacha rolls so she can mock you for pulling her.
  • Once players learned that Anastasia was historically naughty and earned the nickname 'Little Imp', fans like to portray her as a blatant prankster that goes way beyond any pranks she showed in-game and kind of forgetting her more tragic, Broken Bird part that continued to stay with her despite being allowed to showcase her original liveliness.
  • A common portrayal of Oberon is this, with his Oberon side being The Gadfly towards other servants while Vortigern straight up insults them, and either side could also be responsible for a prank or two. Anyone who has a My Room line for him or he has a My Room line for is a common 'target', though most of his 'trolling' towards Morgan have her retaliate violently.
• Mexicans Love Speedy Gonzales: Quetzalcoatl is a lot more popular in the West than Japan in general, but in Central American and South American servers, her popularity is insane, for much of the same kinds of reasons as listed above, only cranked up to eleven due to finding her an excellent Latino representative. This becomes amusing, especially when Quetz is a total distillation of many stereotypes with Mayincatec tropes, with her sole Christmas alt being with her having a form of dance that's not even native to Mexico but Brazil, but that hasn't stopped anyone there from widely considering her a fan favorite in the region.
• Mis-blamed:
  • The NA localization team tends to get blamed for some more unpopular translation choices, such as rendering Saber's name as "Altria" rather than "Artoria", or using the rather clunky title "Knight of Owner" for Lancelot's ability rather than something less silly sounding. Interviews with the translation team have revealed that Type-MOON keeps the localization on an extremely tight leash, and they are allowed practically no freedom in their choices at all, meaning these translations are entirely on Type-MOON's shoulders. Indeed, certain translated chapters poke fun at some of these choices they're forced to use, as when Moriarty uses logical deduction to determine that Altria Alter's name should be Artoria, before calling Altria a "corruption" of the original. Additionally, most of the translation team are on record as disliking having to use the name Altria over something like Artoria, but Type Moon's direct orders tie their hands.
  • On a similar note, Chief of Localization Albert Kao is often seen as the direct cause for many of the North American Server's issues, from reduced Quartz rewards to the redesigned Emiya Alter. However, it has been stated many times that he has absolutely no control over anything involving the game itself, only translations, and that the most he can do is make suggestions to the DW about certain features that should be changed or implemented early, and DW bears full responsibility for many of the changes.
  • Hikaru Sakurai is typically blamed for the unpopular writing decision of Chaos wiping out all of Chaldea's allies in the climax of Olympus.^note After harassment campaigns following Septem's release, chapter authors have been kept anonymous, but may still be deduced based on the author's preferred characters and tropes. Later on, interviews with Nasu revealed that he was the one who pushed for Chaos's inclusion and at the very least wanted it to be the one to cause Musashi's death.
• Moe:
  • Mash. She's never seen the outside world before the events of the game and constantly expresses her wonder at seeing all the things that inhabit it.
    • Her "Cha-ching... cha-ching!" whenever you get Saint Quartz Fragments? Absolutely adorable.
  • Marie, treating everything with kindness. Her swimsuit Caster version attacks using a beach ball!
    Marie: (after a battle is completed) "Everyone, I love you! Thank you! Vive la France!"
  • Medea Lily. Being the innocent version of Medea who was a princess, she always has a cute smile.
    • Nursery Rhyme is just as adorable as Medea Lily, having the same voice actress with an adorably sweet voice as Medea Lily also helps as well.
  • Chibi Nobus, drawn as the Koha-Ace version of Nobunaga, all they say is "Nobu!" in various cute ways. Even their death cry is adorable!
  • Santa Alter singing Jingle Bells with a cold smile, made some players' heart stopped instantly. She is so adorable!!
  • Jeanne Santa Alter Lily is even more adorable. She's all smile, calling the player "Mr. Reindeer", and sings Jingle Bells excitedly when using her NP.
  • Heroine X Alter. She's a Meganekko Saber in a Sailor Fuku, acting like a literature major university student. She even has a teary-eyed dialogue sprite! Oh, and she's a Star Wars nerd.
  • Chacha is moe personified. Her very high-pitched voice and cutesy dialogue aside, she acts like a clumsy elementary school kid... until she reveals her NP.
  • Abigail Williams (at least in her "normal form"). Her birthday song for you is outright diabetes-inducing adorable.
• Moral Event Horizon: See here.
• More Popular Replacement: In the "Dance Tournament in the Land of Shadows" event, the Grail Front battles are much more liked than the exhibition quests of previous years' events due to being more friendly towards beginners and F2P players, allowing the player to focus more of their time and resources into farming the event, and being a welcome Unexpected Gameplay Change and trying something new with the game's format. While there have been some complaints about the quests being too easy or the event only rewarding one lore in total, the reception has been mostly positive, enough where it has been brought back as its own thing thrice in the Et Tu, Brute, My Super Camelot, and the Holy Grail Front ~Moonsault Operation~ events.
• More Popular Spin-Off: Sweet jiggery-pokery. Fate/stay night was hardly unpopular, but the Fate franchise still tended to be a little obscure and mostly seen as a thing for a subset of otaku, and even highly successful entries like Fate/EXTRA only sold around 100-150k copies. Grand Order, meanwhile, is one of the most successful mobile RPGs in the history of Japanese videogames. It has introduced literal millions of people to Fate and Type-Moon, and is far and away the most successful thing Type-Moon has ever, ever made.

N

• Narm:
  • As a result of events sharing the same music as the story chapters with the exception of certain unique tracks, a good amount of unintentional comedy can arise when dramatic or intense music plays during lighthearted events like it would during a serious moment in the story. It makes it hard to take seriously because it comes across as the developers really trying to make something sound intense when it can't because it's tied to a mostly fun or comedic story that you know won't have any real consequences, since unless the event is directly tied to a story chapter in some form, it has no real consequences. Nothing seems unintentionally funnier than the same music playing during the Darkest Hour of a story chapter playing during a Christmas event where someone talks about how Christmas is in danger.
  • The name of the Scandinavian Tree of Emptiness is Sombrero. You'll be forgiven for giggling at the thought of Chaldea fighting a giant hat. Apparently even the devs thought it was silly, since the Tree's name is censored in-game until after it's destroyed, at which point Skadi quietly reveals its name before hastily changing the subject. As part of the Trees' Theme Naming, Sombrero is the name of a real galaxy...but there are literally billions of galaxies. Would it have been so hard to pick one with a name that sounded more threatening?
  • The Foreign God becomes a lot less intimidating once it arrives personally despite their massive power. With their ridiculous fashion, overly bombastic personality and the fact that every time they try to be proactive something happens to have the plan quite literally blow up in their face. The fact that Nasu confirmed that their full name is Ultra Olga Marie is just icing on the cake.
• Never Live It Down: Several Servants can't escape their historical actions or things that happened in previous Fate installments.
  • Poor David - after the release of the London chapter, he's only going to be remembered for being the worst parent ever, thanks to the way Solomon turned out. Though, to be fair, it's not really Solomon's fault.
  • Paracelsus - In spite of being a genuinely Nice Guy and The Atoner, many fans will never let go of how he betrayed Misaya and her father in Fate/Prototype Fragments.
  • Regardless of how useful Ishtar actually was in Babylonia, most of the fans will remember her as a Useless Goddess due to a gag caused by her not knowing where Gugalanna was when Gilgamesh asked her to summon it. Made worse when the gag appeared again in Summer 2017 due to her short-sighted plan to finally summon Gugalanna, causing more trouble than it would have been worth. She even gets a special sprite showing her holding a tablet labeling her as such. On an aside, it turns out that, in Fate/Strange Fake, the Ishtar appearing in that series stole it from the F/GO one.
  • Poor Lancelot (Saber). No matter how hard he tries to be a good dad to Mash after he failed as one for Galahad, nor no matter how good a servant he actually is, neither Mash nor the playerbase will think of him as anything more than a "deadbeat dad" who constantly lusts after married women.
  • Speaking of Galahad, regardless of whatever he did, whatever the fanbase most remembers him for is that one scene in Moonlight/Lostroom for its confusing nature that makes it unknown about if he was limiting Mash's powers or not. The fanbase instead took as Galahad being full Holier Than Thou and stating that Proper Human History should be burned, negatively affecting the perception of him in the process.
  • Fergus is often remembered as the "Lovable Sex Maniac" of the game at best and would be "Depraved Bisexual" at worst. Even when things come up such as him being a Boisterous Bruiser or his relationship with Medb, his libido will often be at the forefront of his character in the eyes of the fanbase. Come Agartha, the opposite take happened for him. His "Lily" version that appeared as a Non-Player Character began being remembered mockingly for his disparaging of his older self, him constantly either reminding the player he can't fight women or talking about training, and his Perverse Sexual Lust towards Caster of Nightless City interrupting his Rousing Speech. The reception to his "Lily" version ended up tainting his adult version's reception afterwards, with Fergus being negatively associated with those that dislike Agartha. It was so bad that Fergus has effectively been ignored by the writers since Agartha and has practically had no role in any event since.
  • Musashi gets disappointed upon meeting Fuuma, wishing he were "a little younger". The fandom joked that she must be into little boys and everyone ran with the idea that Musashi is a pedophile.
  • Despite all the actual mythological feats that Odysseus accomplished plus his pretty credible stint as an antagonist for Atlantis, he'll mainly go down as the guy who got an effortless surprise backstab from Charlotte Corday. Well, that or being the Rare Male Example of a prominent Cleavage Window to the point where it eclipses almost any other point of discussion about him.
  • After Tunguska Sanctuary, expect nearly every conversation about Koyanskaya to have at least one example of people being annoyed that she ultimately has nothing to do with Tamamo.

O

• Older Than They Think:
  • Although her personality is new, Minamoto no Raikou (who historically is male) getting a Historical Gender Flip, on the other hand... actually happened in the anime for New Getter Robo.
  • Xuanzang also getting gender flipped is nothing new; so many retellings and adaptations play with his character by flipping him, it's no surprise Type-Moon seized that opportunity the second they got the chance.
  • Pseudo-Servants — a summoned Servant manifesting in the form, and sometimes the actual body, of a living human — may have been given a Ret-Canon by this game, but they're not new to the franchise. The first case of it was seen in Fate/Apocrypha courtesy of Jeanne d'Arc being summoned into the human with the closest resemblance to her, a young French student named Laeticia. The possession was consensual on both sides, and measures were taken to ensure that Laeticia would be unharmed if Jeanne was struck down.
  • The game-original Foreigner class isn't the first time the Cthulhu Mythos has appeared in this franchise. That honor goes to Fate/Zero courtesy of Caster/Gilles de Rais and his Tome of Eldritch Lore, The Text of the Sunken Spiraled City, otherwise known as the R'lyeh Text. Furthermore, the class itself was mentioned in Fate/Extella Link on the third route of the game, with Archimedes referring to Altera as one and the Protagonist noting it wasn't a class they heard of before. Fate/Extella Link had released a year before Salem, when the first Foreigner, Abigail Williams, was released.
  • When the Fairy Knight's from Lostbelt 6 were shown having the title of "Tam Lin", people assumed it was a localization change. In truth, the characters being titled "Tam Lin" dates back to around a year prior to the localization's release, as the Tam Lin Tristian figure◊ lists her with the title in Japanese, making it something seemingly decided outside of the localization team's say.
  • This game isn't the first game to gender-flip Saika Magoichi. That would go to Sengoku Basara 3.
• One-Scene Wonder: When Wandjina finally appears in the Servant Summer Festival 2023 event, it is when her battle starts, and her only other screen time is her brief moment of silence in the aftermath. It's a notably suspicious amount of effort on the creators' part, since she's not even a Giant Ghost as is typical with unplayable characters, having an actual battle sprite and a full faceset of which many went unused. Sure enough, she was slated to be playable in the very next event just a month later, setting a new record for the fastest escape from NPC jail.

P

• Pandering to the Base:
  • While the main story has tried to integrate most of the Servants currently available into the plot, the events by and large integrate characters by popularity, with Ensemble Dark Horse and Breakout Character Servants appearing far, far more than less popular characters. Consequently, Darius and Mephistopheles, who were previously the poster characters for their respective classes in pre-release advertising, were swiftly Demoted to Extra. The two did get some screentime in events but their promotion is still negligible compared to the other five poster characters (Attila, Arjuna, Scathach, Jekyll and Ushiwakamaru - and that last example had to wait until the second year of the game's release, with the Onigashima and Babylon story arcs, to get into the spotlight).
  • Several popular-but-canonically-weak Servants were made 5* or 4* to milk money from their fans, dividing the fanbase on whether it makes sense for them to be gold from a story and power level viewpoint and angry because it makes them harder to get.
  • Servants already from a pre-existing work like Fate/Stay Night, Fate/Zero or Fate/Extra are far more likely to get alternate class variants than the game's homegrown servants.
  • Female Servants are pushed a lot more often in the game, with the females outnumbering males in terms of SSR units and feature more in event stories and often given more alternate versions than males.
    • The one place this really tends to grate is in the summer events — we now have, as of 2023, fifty-seven different summer-themed lady Servants, in swimsuits and other attractive outfits, and only eighteen male Servants (all of which are costumes, and only five of which wear swimsuits). There isn't even a Costume Dress option for Cu Chulainn to get his famous Hawaiian shirt outfit from Hollow Ataraxia and Carnival Phantasm (despite Summer Altria Alter being based on the maid episode of the latter)! The "Servant Summer Festival" event was particularly stand-out about this trend, as they heavily promoted and made merchandise of all the male Knights of the Round Table getting swimsuit alts... as NPCs. While fans of the Knights eventually got their outfits as costumes in the 2023 version of the event, the artists at least tried to mitigate the imbalance by showing swimsuit versions of the rest of the Servant boys through brief cameos and the events' Craft Essences.
    • This is also noticeable when comparing Valentine's Day events to their White Day counterparts: Valentines events usually have a campaign attached to the standard servant gacha and event CEs, while White Day typically has the latter two. 2018 saw a slight change, but only in that there was an additional week-long login bonus to obtain a new costume for Arthur. Full White Day campaigns (albeit with costumes for the focus character) wouldn't become a regular feature until 2019. It took until 2020, four whole years after starting the Valentines and White Day events, for the latter to have both a new event and a brand new non-costume Servant (Odysseus) attached to it like the former. At least the Valentine's Day event lets the player collect unique gifts and scenes for all servants, regardless of gender.
• Play-Along Meme: Following Miyamoto Musashi's Heroic Sacrifice in the climax of Lostbelt 5.2. "Olympus" which sees the character essentially Ret-Gone from existence, many fans and players have asked who exactly this character who sacrificed themselves is, or alternatively, refer to her simply as "Data Lost" due to the aforementioned actions.
• Player Punch:
  • Mash's death and subsequent inability to be used for the final battle. While she does come back in full after the battle is won, it really hits home that she's gone because without her 0 cost your party limits are so much harder to manage, and you probably took all of her skills for granted. Scrambling to create a new party that can fit your maximum cost drives home that your first and most reliable partner is gone when you need her the most.
  • The Lostbelt Prologue saw the player incarcerated by the Mages Association and United Nations, the two planning to disregard their accomplishment of saving humanity and treat them like a criminals and the Servants they formed bond with unsummoned and the methods to summon them back banned, and then the Crypters struck at Chaldea, destroying everything the players (and Mash) treated as home for so long and also destroyed their proper history. It was a massive gut punch that once the players somehow 'regained' the methods to summon their Servants back, many of them put themselves on a warpath in trying to make the Crypters (and the Mages Association) pay for how they struck at the players without regarding their background.
  • After Shimousa the fanbase was outright clamouring for Muramasa to be added. Some of the regulars for the Fate franchise as a whole expressed a desire to see Noriaki Sugiyama finally get to bring Shirou's voice to the game. For two years nothing happened until Muramasa finally appeared in game again. But not only was he not playable again, he's shown to be a servant summoned by and in service to the Foreign God to protect Atlantis' fantasy tree with Kotomine.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story:
  • There's a rather significant number of players who typically ignore the main story in favor of just pulling on the gatcha and doing events. It's gotten to the point that the devs have made multiple campaigns to motivate them to get through the main story most noticeably with the Road to Lostbelt 7 campaigns locking events behind the completion of the Lostbelt chapter they're highlighting.
  • The Arcade version is more focused on a high-fidelity action gameplay experience than the mobile version, and in fact initially doesn't have a story, only using basic text summaries to provide some context for battles until the end of Singularity 5. From this point on, however, the story diverges from the mobile version and has full-blown Visual Novel segments like mobile.
• Popular with Furries:
  • Thanks to Lostbelt No. 1, there's a portion of the players admitting to this. Having a well-written Wolf Man character definitely helped.
  • Kijyo Koyo's popularity outside Japan is mostly attributed to her base form, which is a dinosaur.

R

• Rooting for the Empire:
  • Wodime’s plan to use Atlas to turn every remaining humans on earth into gods has a decent number of supporters despite that his plan still ends with PHH wiped out.
  • After it's revealed in Part 2 of Lostbelt 6 that a good chunk of Fairies Morgan is oppressing are violent, manipulative, or both, and have betrayed Morgan countless times despite her attempts to save them and Britain, quite a number of fans quickly sided with Morgan believing she was right all along, and the Fairies deserved everything she subjected them to. Some have even gone so far as stating Avalon le Fae is the one Lostbelt that they have no reservations or regrets about completely destroying. Oberon Vortigern grants those players their wish of destruction.
  • In "Serial Mythological Theater: Mississippi Mythicizers", the intended heroine for the chapter is Super Bunyan, but she is so widely despised because of her Pointy Haired Boss personality that most players wished they could literally jump ship and join the intended antagonist Mary Anning, who is much better received, even though she's turned the Mississippi river into a modern Jurassic Age and spends the entire event picking fights with the player and refusing to explain herself.

S

• The Scrappy: Chaos is commonly hated for being a Diabolus ex Machina that appears out of nowhere during the Olympus story, but is responsible for the death of most of the remaining allies of Olympus including Musashi, with a lot of people wishing that he was never in the story and believing that their entire presence brings down the story quality of Olympus.
• Scrappy Weapon:
  • Any Craft Essence that features Shinji Matou are generally considered to be bad (since they are 3* Craft Essences anyways), but one particular Craft Essence that features him is the 4* Record Holder, which is generally one of the worst 4* Craft Essences to obtain since it boosts debuff success rate by 15% (20% of maxed out). While it does help certain servants with multiple forms of debuff and mediocre chances to get them to go off even at higher skill levels (Lancer Medusa and Mysterious Heroine X spring to mind), the player is often better off using another servant that has a 100% success rate of debuffing an opponent in their kit instead for more value. Not helping the matter that there is another craft essence of the same rarity that is more useful than Record Holder called A Tale of Burning Love which has an extra quirk to dealing bonus damage against Male servants, although it's limited to the Rashomon gacha.
  • Most banner event Craft Essences from year one of the game are considered some of the worst ones in the game. All of them have weirdly specific abilities, such as "GO WEST!!" from the Journey to the West event having a very tiny amount of crit star generation and NP damage up, while some like Mystic Eyes of Distortion from the The Garden of Sinners event have demerits that make them not useful. While some of them like GUDAGUDA Poster Girl and Magical Girl of Sapphire still rank highly years after their release, you'll find that almost all the banner event Craft Essences are overshadowed by other, easier to obtain ones from events. Furthermore, a large amount of them focus around buffing healing, or providing healing effects, something the game has moved away from being a really helpful mechanic due to sheer difficulty, meaning even ones that seem helpful lack a concrete idea of what they were made for. No doubt because of the developers still experimenting with ideas, but just about all of them, save specific few of these Craft Essences, have aged poorly.
  • Command Seal of Faintly-Corrupted Delusions from the Tokugawa event is commonly viewed as one of the worst Command Codes period. It inflicts Poison when used, already itself a niche skill, but it damages the user when used. Typically, there are much better ways to inflict Poison, the only Servants that really can use it effectively are Robin Hood and Locusta, but Robin's own Poison debuff lasts longer and debuffs the enemies' attack, and Locusta outside of her poison gimmick is niche at worst.
  • Demon King Gun from the 2020 GUDAGUDA event gives a hefty 25% crit damage buff, but only on Burning Field terrain. Not only is the Burning Field terrain rarer then something like Sunlight, Sand, or Water, but only two Servants (Avenger Nobunaga, and Berserker Nobunaga) have any kind of interaction with said terrain, meaning it was clearly meant to be used by either of them, but while Berserker Nobunaga is an okay Berserker to give it to, Avenger Nobunaga isn't a very good unit without Rank Up quests, and there are command codes that give out this benefit as well without the terrain condition like Mistress of the Heavens, making it one of the least useful Command Codes.
  • Paintbrush of the Train can only be truly beneficial when used by Van Gogh, and only her. Otherwise, outside of its small Crit star gain and low HP recovery, its self-curse infliction debuff can negate the benefits of the HP recovery if overused, and typically, there are better ways to gain crit stars and HP, even by Command Code standards.
  • Broadly speaking, any Command Code that increases NP damage is usually derided as impractical. As a rule, with few exceptions, it's recommended to use the NP first, and the Command Cards last to take full advantage of the NP's aftereffects, lest they be wasted. The only exception is Everyone's Girl, Da Vinci, which boosts the party's NP damage by 8%, and even that is situational at best.
• Self-Fanservice:
  • Common among the male Servants, surprisingly. Gawain in particular gets hit with it, with his extra muscle compared to his Fate/EXTRA appearance being upgraded to Top-Heavy Guy levels in fanart.
  • Raikou is already extremely busty, but it is very common for fanartists to draw her with even larger bust sizes often times rivaling Passionlip's.
  • Da Vinci, mostly the original adult one, tends to be depicted as a Hermaphrodite in most NSFW fan works, despite the fact that she is only male historically and mentally.
  • Despite Yu already being pretty hot in the game, fanartist feel the need to greatly increase the size of her breasts at every opportunity. The same can also be applied to many fanarts of Anastasia, who made her a lot more buxom than she usually is (for the record, while her figure was above average for someone her age, she wasn't as buxom as many other intentionally buxom ladies, such as the aforementioned Yu, or Raikou).
  • Expect most fanart of Baobhan Sith to give her a more normal skin tone rather than her borderline grey skin.
  • The Dark Young from "Halloween Rising" event is meant to be an evil entity possessing the Protagonist's body thanks to Molay, appearing as a hulking goat man. Fans, however, quickly turned this into being a Cute Monster Girl form of the protagonist, making it be more like Protagonist with fur and demon traits like wings, tails and horns. And while Dark Young is meant to be inspired by the male Protagonist due to the fur patterns, this is almost exclusively done with the female Protagonist.
• Ships That Pass in the Night:
  • Because of a certain comment he makes, Hijikata tends to get paired up with Carmilla fairly often, despite the basis for it being a single My Room line with no actual interaction in an event or story chapter (they even both make cameos in Summer 2017, but never share a scene). The closest thing that they "shares" a scene is in Summer 2019 when Hijikata along with Napoleon are lured in by Passionlip's boobs while she holds Carmilla, Osakabe-hime and Fuuma as hostages. Some shippers include Jack as their daughter.
  • Any pairing involving EMIYA, Muramasa or even Shirou Emiya himself with any Altria-clone besides Saber, Saber Alter and Altria Caster may also count since it uses Saber Altria's status as one of his heroines in Fate/stay night as basis, even though non-stay night Altria-clones hardly had contact with any incarnation of Emiya at any point in Nasuverse until Avalon le Fae has Altria Caster and Senji Muramasa interacting for nearly the entire chapter, up and including Muramasa pulling a Heroic Sacrifice for her.
  • After Taigong Wang remarks that he and Noah are “Grand Buddies” once during Tunguska Sanctuary, the two are practically joined by hips in fanworks. Nevermind the platform differences preventing both of them from meeting each other.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: Few will call the game's early chapters outright bad, but they show signs that the development team hadn't yet decided on the direction the story would take, with common Arc Fatigue and many characters who tend to just be around for fanservice without contributing to the plot. Around America however, the game's story finds its footing, culminating in the first story arc's powerful finale.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • To put it simply, certain Noble Phantasm and enemies which have sprites that are larger than the screen do not match, with the points where the sprite is cropped-off being incredibly obvious. A similar problem happens with Cernunnos for different reason. It has a full 3D model, but due to how humongous it is, it leads to some really weird Noble Phantasm animations.
  • Most single-target Noble Phantasms animations are clearly designed with humanoid figures of a certain height in mind, which can present a problem for enemies that don't match the mold. For some examples:
    • Archer of Inferno will throw the enemy into the air before firing an arrow at them. If the enemy is something giant like a Tree of Emptiness or Talos, somehow a Strength C Servant will be able to throw something over ten times her mass.
    • Okada Izo is intended to stab the enemy through the back and then slice them in half such that blood gushes from their head. However, if the enemy is too short, he will instead stab the air and cause blood to gush above his foe.
    • Charlotte Corday's NP should presumably show her stabbing a Servant target in the chest, but instead of hitting center mass, she targets the edge of the sprite, meaning she typically is stabbing a forearm or weapon.
  • Many Servants from the first two years of the game with Noble Phantasms that zoom into their face (i.e. Anne Bonny & Mary Read, Rider Ishtar) pretty clearly aren't designed for this, with the zoom-in just showing the low resolution of the sprite. Later Servants generally have the face be a much higher resolution than everything else, regardless of if a zoom-in is needed or not, to avoid this.
  • Summer BB's updated NP sprites to add her extra Ascensions clearly reused the same animation rig as her default Stage 3 NP with very little adjustment, as the movements that look fine with her Stage 3's big sleeves now make it look as if she's breaking her arms to lift out part of the ground, especially in Stage 2 where her arms are completely bare.
• Squick:
  • Mary and Anne's relationship. It would be appealing to most people only Mary is drawn with an extremely childlike design, while Anne is Ms. Fanservice incarnate whose card art renders her twice Mary's height (This is probably artistic license since their height difference is only 10 cm). The result looks uncomfortably like paedophilia. And especially ironic because Mary is ten years older than Anne.
  • Medb's Noble Phantasm is essentially her orgasming after trampling the enemy to death, regardless of what they are. This carries some uncomfortable rape undertones, especially when you consider that this NP could be used against characters like Nursery Rhyme, Jack, Alexander and Young Gil.
  • The Berserker Raikou cannot distinguish between different types of love (aka romantic/platonic/familial), and therefore sees 'child' and 'lover' as the same thing. Yikes.
  • Sanson, under Madness Enhancement, equating executions as sex to Marie — one of those he executed — is pretty damn creepy; considering that Marie didn't have a choice in being put to death, he sounds more like he's talking about raping her.
  • It's implied in Raikou's finish line for "Dead Heat Summer Race" and made explicitly clear in the Setsubun event reveals that Raikou's horse, Kyogoku is disturbingly attracted to her body. Even In-Universe his attraction creeps out fellow horses Bailong and Dun Stallion with Llamrei about to kick his face in for his comments.
  • Chloe's interlude has her deciding to power up via mana transfers which, as in her original work, she does via kissing girls. Given her age, that's bad enough, but it gets worse. Not only does it quickly become clear the power up is an excuse to let her make out with girls, but her ideal targets are girls her age. And the battle sections of the interlude occur because the girls don't want to be kissed, so Chloe is forcing herself on them with the player's help. So not only is the interlude about an underage girl sexually assaulting other underage girls, but the player is required to assist in the sexual assault.
• Strangled by the Red String: Lostbelt Xiang Yu's feelings for Yu Mei-ren. While Yu has enough reasons to be in love with a counterpart of her husband Xiang Yu only really interacts with Yu in one scene that at most takes a day that mainly involves Xiang Yu being given the information needed for him to understand why he did what he did in PHH with the emotional bonding between them kept to a minimum. So the fact that it ultimately ends with him falling for Yu and defying Qin Shi Huang after the latter has surrendered to Chaldea out of love for her feels cheap.
• Strawman Has a Point: During the Agartha chapter, Christopher Columbus stated that he was a product of his time, which is actually similar to many of the Servants you could summon from that time period, and slavery was actually a common thing in his time (and said Servants even committed to that) and no one made a big deal about it. While they differ in that they managed to move on from the time and changed for the better (or whitewashed by the Throne of Heroes), Columbus didn't want to move on, but that statement was still undeniable.

T

• Tainted by the Preview: The announcement of the Ordeal Call arc has been met with mixed responses, as several people claim that the arc only exists to pad out the story once the seven Lostbelts have been dealt with.
• That One Attack:
  • Any enemy that has Buff Removal as part of their skills or Noble Phantasm is guaranteed to be a massive pain, as servants that give out Buff Removal Immunity are rare and never available permanently. The only way to prevent them from doing so is to kill them before they can cast it, but some bosses are tanky enough to do it anyway, and because of this, it's often seen as an artificial way of increasing enemy difficulty, especially since most meta teams compose of stacking enough buffs to take down the enemy.
  • Similarly, enemies that have Death as part of their attacks or Noble Phantasm. While inflicting Death by the player's team is a bit awkward, the enemy has no such restrictions in place, forcing players to gamble their servants in a game of life and death when they are capable of inflicting it. And, much like Buff Removal above, very few servants give out Instant-Kill Immunity.
  • Enemies like ghosts have an annoying attack that allows them to drain one or more of your characters’ NP gauge. Annoying already, but they often seem programmed to spam said attack when any of your Servants have any NP charge, meaning you can sometimes have them go a full turn of them draining your parties NP meter with no way to counter it except refilling it the next turn. This is especially annoying for NP1 Servants who can’t have their Gauge go past 100%, creating a possibility for them to have their NP set after their turn attacking, only for such enemies to remove it entirely when NP2 would’ve allowed them to have more in their gauge and thus, potentially avoid this issue.
• That One Component:
  • Bronze Ascension Materials for Ascending Servants and levelling up their Skills are infamous for becoming less frequent as random drops as the story progresses and Silver and Gold Materials take priority, but still being needed in abundance by Servants both old and new. Evil Bones and Hero's Proof are notorious for many Servants needing over a hundred of them to be max out their Skills (series mascot Saber Altria needs 132 Proofs if one wishes to get the best performance out of her), but being very scarce in later portions of the story on account of newer Servants either not using them, or barely needing them, and having low drop rates even in the best farming spots. While the Pure Prisms added for the game's 5th anniversary do at least give the player the option to get a good amount, should the player do so, they'll need to still grind for them at some point since you only get 100.
  • Crystallized Lores are always required to raise any servant skill from level 9 to level 10 (the max) and they cannot be farmed at all - they are only given available from completing specific goals, event quests, or event shops in the game. Players can also purchase one per month from the game's shop for a cost of five rare prisms (which are themselves an extremely scarce resource). Even someone who's earned every available Lore since the game launched will only have enough to max out the standard skills of a fraction of the servants on their roster and the later introduction of append skills, which also require Lores to raise to max level, only made the problem worse. In an Appmedia survey conducted in 2021, players voted Lores as their #1 most-wanted item in the game.
  • Secret Gems. Most items will at least show up every now and again in event shops. Skill gems, though, never show up inside the event shop. The only events where they can be relliably earned are lottery events, and even then you only get one Shining Gem of each class per box (compared to the lower rarity Shining and Magic Gems, which you get two of per class of each). Outside of events, the most reliable place to farm them is the daily Class Training Ground, where the drop rate is spotty (even at the highest difficulty, you're more likely to get Secret Gems, or worse, Pieces and Monuments). And the worst part is that nearly every Servant (all seven standard Classes, Rulers, Alter Egos and Moon Cancers) require them for their skills. Alter Egos and Moon Cancers require two different classes at once, while Rulers require all seven.
• That One Sidequest:
  • In most of the events featuring a Mission List, clearing out all of the missions will unlock the Challenge Quest, meaning that clearing it isn't required to clear out the list. Saber Wars II, however, has the Challenge Quest unlocked with the 99th mission. The actual 100th mission requires you to clear the bounty "Dark Rounds Shadow", what many players consider to be the hardest non-Exhibition Quest quest in the game due to how big of a Luck-Based Mission it can turn out to be. And to be able to even try out the quest, you have to clear the Challenge Quest, adding even more of a complication to the problem.
  • Some events have missions where the player needs to defeat enemies with specific ranks in a stat, such as A rank Agility. While many events often make sure to include enemies who match that so the player can complete it, should it be outside of a Mission List (such as a Campaign event mission), the player has to spend time researching who has a rank in said stat just to complete it, making it an annoying set of quests to complete since the player may not have a consistent way of finding them if the stat rank itself is rarer than others.
  • Ember farming for Master weekly missions, which forces players to ask themselves if they want to conserve AP and get useless Embers or use up lots of AP for something that can actually level up Servants. Every Ember farming mission requires you to farm 30 Embers, and the cheapest node Beginner runs at 10 AP but gives you trash while the most expensive Expert runs at 40 AP but gives you 4-star Embers, and you always get 9 each run. Either way, you'll end up using 40 AP at min for no returns and 160 at most if you want actual EXP since the mission requires you to farm 30 Embers. To make matters worse, when the Extreme node (which gives the best 5 star Embers) was added early to NA, the missions weren't updated accordingly, forcing players to farm knowing that they weren't getting the best bang for their buck.^note The devs acknowledged this issue the first time it happened and promised that all future Ember collection missions would be updated to account for five-star Embers like had been done in JP from their first introduction. NA players get an extra dose of salt in the wound because of schedule differences between JP and NA, so the mission that would take place in a dead week in JP is now in the middle of an event in NA, forcing players to waste AP in an irrelevant side quest when events are limited by time and by extension AP, unless they want to use a Fruit.
  • "Road to 7" Super Recollection Quests go up against bosses previously fought in the story, but with their HP inflated to be in the millions for each health bar. Unfortunately some of them include various bosses as detailed in this section, meaning that you have to rely on a friend's support to bring them down (and good luck if they don't allow it!). Oh, and they also reward the incredibly valuable and rare Stargazer's Teapot, which offers one of the few ways to boost Bond Points.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Many players who started before October 2016 were upset about Risa Taneda being replaced by Rie Takahashi for the voice of Mash, though this sentiment has died down overtime with people feeling that Rie grew into the role and a large portion of players joining after the change being used to Rie as Mash.
  • Event-wise, there's a few cases that stand out:
    • One example on the NA server is the first Guaranteed SSR Gacha. Rather than have the gacha around New Years, the American branch of Delight Works moved it up to Thanksgiving...but didn't include the servants who hadn't been released yet, Jack the Ripper and Mordred, meaning anyone who wanted those servants was out of luck.
    • Replacing the Halloween event in 2019 with a sequel to "Saber Wars". The problem wasn't so much having a non-holiday event replace a holiday, but rather, the fact that "Saber Wars II" didn't come with a welfare servant; all the previous Halloween events, as well as the first "Saber Wars" event, had some form of Welfare servant^note 4 different versions of Elizabeth Bathory, an alternate version of Shuten Douji, and Saber Lily, yet the only new servants introduced here were exclusive to the gacha.
    • For 2019's Christmas event, not only was there no rerun of the previous Christmas event (meaning if you missed out on Santa Quetzalcoatl, you were out of luck), but Delight Works announced they would be limiting reruns in the future in general. Not helping is that this was around the same time as the Arcade Battle game had its own limited Christmas event...with a different Santa Servant, a Santa version of Helena.
    • The Korean Server artificially lowering summon rates led to an extreme amount of backlash, to the point there was a massive exodus of players from the game. What makes this one particularly notable is it was right in the middle of the Solomon raids, which the Korean Server was only able to complete because Netmarble (who managed the server) changed the rates the Pillars were killed - as a result, the Korean server is technically seen as having "lost" the fight against Goetia.
  • The English-speaking fandom generally doesn't like the official translation using the name "Altria" for Fate/stay night Saber as opposed to "Artoria" on the grounds that Altria does not sound like a female version of the name "Arthur", is hard to properly say, and sounds very similar to the name of fellow Saber Altera. The localization team have openly mentioned hating having to use it as well and have poked fun at it at times such as in the official translation for chapter 3 of More Learning with Manga! FGO,
  • While Hans Christian Andersen's sprite and animation rework was well-received for the most part (especially for replacing his infamous Caster Balls with animations referencing his stories), the removal of the final part of his Noble Phantasm's animation depicting a page appearing over the player's team has attracted some complaints, as it leaves the last few moments of the animation as just Hans levitating his book/tablet without any extra action like before.
  • Many fans took issue with Foreigner Jacques de Molay being a Gender Bender. It wasn't being one of many genderflips in the Fate series that bothered these fans, but how the series already had a male Jacques de Molay introduced in Fate/Grand Order Arcade they would have liked to be added to the mobile game instead of being replaced with a design appealing to entirely different set of tastes.
  • Year seven of the game had a drastic decrease of event reruns, with some of the new events filling out the otherwise dead weeks by having many of the events last three weeks instead of two. The general reception to this change has been poor as not only do both new and old players suffer from the lack of reruns due to not being able to gain old welfares and new Rare Prisms, but the new events don't have enough content to fill in the three weeks, using their gimmicks to justify the extended run time.
  • Much like with the aforementioned "Altria", To say fans were displeased when the NA release of Lostbelt 6 changed the title of Morgan's knights from the more understandable "Faerie Knights" to the "Tam Lin" is an Understatement. While the character of Tam Lin himself is an actual fairy knight, many people found it a bizarre choice for the name of a fairy knight to be used as a title instead of just calling them fairy knights to begin with. Like with Altria, the name seems to be something forced onto the localization, as "Faerie Knight" Tristian's model◊ released a year prior has "Tam Lin" listed as her title, and the Anime Japan 2022 merch featuring them has them all listed with said title.
  • The introduction of the pity system came with the unfortunate side effect of SR rate-ups no longer rotating to have a single unit on rate-up on a given day, as doing so would reset the roll count for the banner. Notably, the pity system coming to the NA server early meant that many banners with multiple SR units to rotate through now only had them all on rate-up at the same time.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Of the original cast of Fate/stay night, Medea gets very little time in the limelight. While the others have had major roles in both the main story^note Altria Alter in Fuyuki and Shinjuku, Cursed Arm Hassan in Camelot, Sasaki Kojirou in Shimosa, and Heracles in Okeanos and events^note EMIYA, Cu, and Medusa having recurring supporting roles, Altria being the first major Summer servant, and Gilgamesh headlining GilFest, Medea is constantly passed-over in favor of her Lily variant. Worse, when classic Medea looked like she was finally going to have a major story role in the Salem Pseudo-Singularity, her mentor Circe impersonated and replaced her instead. Valentine's Day 2021 was the first time Medea even appeared in a Craft Essence.^note Though the fact that the non-Lily version of Medea did finally get such an apparence gave her fans some hope, as did the fact that the CE referenes her close friendship with Atalante (Alter), opening up the possibility of more Medea interactions with either version of Atalante and other Argonaut characters.
  • Heracles himself has, for the entirety of the game's length save his Interludes, been treated more as a living hazard or tool than an actual character and has never shown any of his other possible classes. In the one Lostbelt where he was most likely to appear and has the single most character investment in, he was merc'd offscreen before the player ever arrives, despite the ultimate enemy of the Lostbelt being his own father.
  • While the Septem Singularity is largely regarded as both Arc Fatigue and They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot as a whole, even by the writers, some characters in particular were heavily squandered.
    • Similar to Boudica, Spartacus, famous for his leading a grand rebellion against the Roman oppressors, is also inexplicably an ally of Emperor Nero's. Most of his appearances are devoted to no one being able to understand what the hell he's saying aside from Boudica, and he's suddenly written out of the story towards the end alongside Lu Bu. It wouldn't be until the 3rd Lostbelt, over three years after the games launch, and subsequently three years after the Septem Singularity's release, that Spartacus would receive a more accurate depiction in the story.
    • Romulus, the founder of Rome, serves little more than as a boss fight. Due to lack of plot involvement and weak writing that doesn't show off how impressive he is supposed to be, even the staff at both Delightworks and Type-Moon have expressed disappointment at how he was handled in the story and gameplay, going as far as to wish they'd made him a 4* Servant to emphasize the importance he holds. Even his reappearance as the Grand Lancer suffers from this as he's the 11th-Hour Ranger of Olympus summoned in the middle of battle against Zeus meaning he gets little time to show off before running out of energy helping Chaldea with Zeus and Chaos.
  • Hektor. Despite having a interesting backstory with other Trojan War related Servants, and being The Ace for Troy, he's one of the least used Servants in the game period, only appearing in brief roles in events (if he does appear), and has only appears in the main story three times, his first appearance (Okeanos) being his most used time in the game since his introduction. The fact he is a 3 star rarity Lancer, despite in lore being the rival to Achilles, also means he sees little use because he frankly isn't that good compared to so many other options available. Sadly, while several of the characters wasted above have gotten the chance to be redeemed in events or later chapters, Hektor doesn't get much attention outside of cameos in events until Atlantis (but even then, he was more like an One-Scene Wonder in that chapter than playing a huge role in it).
  • Despite Solomon seemingly being the main villain of part 1, his father David has no more prominent a role than most other Servants. Even in the final singularity, where he specifically says he's going to fight hard because he feels responsibility for everything going on, he still doesn't actually ever confront the last boss. His Interlude goes into it a little, but David basically disappears from the story afterwards.
  • London is a bit infamous for its poor use of Altria Lancer Alter, who essentially appears as a Giant Space Flea from Nowhere to be the Final Boss. Her actual lore portrays her as an intriguing Anti-Hero who embodies Dark Is Not Evil (not to mention an Early-Bird Cameo for the villain of Camelot, who is depicted as the more malevolent of the two and the future she embraced corruption to avoid becoming), and Mordred is a major character in the London arc, meaning the two by all rights should have a ton of time to interact and a ton of interesting ways to conflict... and they don't. In fact, Altria is in a blind rage for her entire brief appearance and says nothing at all, despite the chapter having many extraneous characters she could've taken the place of. It's telling that her small appearance in Solomon is the most characterization she's ever received, outside of playing the Ox King of Fire Mountain in the Journey to the West parodies.
  • Many fans consider Nezha to be underutilized, as she is one of the few post-launch characters without a proper introduction and gets very little focus in her appearances in the main story. Even worse, her death early on in Lostbelt 4 means that she is barred for appearing in the main story again as per the rules established by the 4th anniversary Famitsu interview.
  • Lostbelt Poseidon as even though he is one of the Twelve Olympians, he pretty much only shows up at the end of Atlantis where he pretty much gets treated as a Flat Character who gets taken down very quickly while it took a huge amount of effort for Chaldea to take down both Lostbelt Odysseus and Lostbelt Artemis as pretty much all of Chaldea's allies in that chapter except for Jason died so they can kill-off Lostbelt Odysseus and Lostbelt Artemis. This gets quickly justified by how Drake managing to get rid of one of Poseidon's cores in which we never actually saw how Drake was able to do that. Not to mention even though Nemo (who is a Composite Character between Captain Nemo and Poseidon's own son Triton) was there when Chaldea fought him, Poseidon doesn't really say anything to Nemo as he pretty much lost all of his sanity after Drake stole one of his cores.
  • Ibuki-Douji, despite years of buildup and teasing, ended up being underused within her debut chapter. She appears basically three chapters before the end of the "Heiankyo" story, during which she mainly flaunts her status as a god like being, gets into one fight, and then gets backstabbed by Ashiya Douman and fed to his Tree of Emptiness so he can try to become a Beast. On her own, Ibuki easily could have been the Big Bad of the story, or at least a major one, but her late introduction, and hasty demise prevents her from doing much aside from the narrative shilling how powerful she is. Worse, Shuten-Douji, who is essentially a "younger version" of her, is a major character in the chapter, and yet their interactions amount to Shuten being annoyed Ibuki is there. It comes across as the writers wanting to bring up the teased concept of the character but having no idea what to do with her beyond that. Complicating matters further is that playable Ibuki-Douji is a distinctively different version from the "Heiankyo" one, closer to her Proper Human History version according to her profile, and thus this version will only really get a spotlight if you obtain her Costume Dress (and only really in her My Room lines).
  • Despite his buildup as an antagonist for the Sixth Lostbelt. Beryl doesn't really do as much compared to other Crypters thanks to his servant Morgan, tricking him and changing the Lostbelt to her liking leading him to just become one of the many side antagonists throughout the story.
  • Also from the Sixth Lostbelt we have the original Morgan Le Fey from Proper Human History as despite being the person responsible for the Lostbelt being the way it is as well as an antagonist built up for years throughout Fate media and the original planned villain for the Lostbelt she is long dead by the time the heroes get to her Lostbelt thanks to giving her memories to the Lostbelt version of herself, and while Lostbelt Morgan does have some parts of her personality given to her from her PHH self, she's ultimately way to different from her, most noticeably lacking the split personality to be considered the same person.
  • While he plays a major role in Lostbelt 6, the Alter Ego version of Senji Muramasa summoned by the Foreign God has been cited as a huge let down in terms of his role in the story. He only gets referenced as being a thing during Atlantis, appears sparing in Olympus, and then plays a large role in Lostbelt 6, but one that ends with him dying. By comparison, the other major allies of the Foreign God appear before, or during, the prologue of the Lostbelt storyline, make on and off appearances in other chapters, or get dedicated chapters to them where their story ends. Muramasa gets none of those, and since he is explicitly not the same Muramasa from the Shimousa story, the player gets barely any time to interact with him before he is Killed Off for Real, leaving a lot about his role only vaguely hinted at (such as the Divine Spirits he has as an Alter Ego). While his role in Lostbelt 6 is often praised, on a whole, it felt like he was a late inclusion and wasn't given time to be used compared to his fellow Alter Egos.
  • Many fans expressed disappointment that Rider and Assassin from Learning with Manga! FGO were implemented as assist characters for Super Bunyan's Stage 3 rather than being their own individual characters. While it's understandably for legal reasons so their assumed identities don't have to be revealed in the game (Rider flat-out said in one chapter of the manga that she wouldn't be able to get added to the game if she revealed her True Name), them sharing the playable slot with an alt for a character who was already playable and said character getting most of the spotlight is seen as a tough pill to swallow. The manga took a swipe at this by showing Rider and Assassin dissatisfied with how their playable status turned out.
  • Despite being painted as an important character for Traum, Kōnstantînos XI ends up as a minor antagonist who has little screen time, only serves in showing off Don Quixote and Charlemagne, and gets killed off rather quickly without even fighting Chaldea.
  • Altera is one of the more infamous cases of a wasted character. Due to the game coming out close to Fate Extella, the writers initially gave her little role outside of events, which made some sense as to not spoil Extella. Despite Extella being out for long enough that the big twists are already well understood however, Altera still remains relegated to comedy in events over anything else in the main story, despite having one of the most important roles in the entire Nasuverse as Velber-02, aka Sefar. Notably: Lostbelt 5 and 6 are built around Sefar's rampage in history being the Point of Divergence, making both seem like chances for her to be given focus, but Altera has not appeared in a main chapter since Septem (Solomon not counting), making it strange to some that Altera has not been given more story focus despite how massive her background is on the setting.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • In addition to Arc Fatigue, the Septem Singularity is heavily seen as nothing but wasted potential. While it has plenty of characters with the potential for being interesting for the setting and situation, such as the Roman-hating Queen Boudica and the oppression-hating Spartacus, most of the cast and setting is ignored in favor of endless Character Shilling for Nero, even if said shilling would be Out of Character for characters like Boudica. Most egregious of all being the detour to an island housing Stheno, Elisabeth, and Tamamo Cat,^note The latter two don't even do anything! where, aside from being where Caligula is finally killed and Stheno informing the group of the United Empire's Capital Location (it is never explained why she knows this), is entirely superfluous to the Singularity. Tellingly, the staff seem to share a similar opinion, as Septem is regarded by them as an Old Shame, and painstaking efforts have been taken to stealth retcon the personalities of most of the characters in the Singularity so that they'd be more true to their legends and continuity later on.
    • Queen Boudica's role in the singularity deserves special mention as she is famous for her rampage against the Romans after they raped and slaughtered her daughters, is an Enemy Mine ally of Roman Emperor Nero's, and mainly used only for being a Cool Big Sis or Marshmallow Hell jokes, with her rivalry with Nero only briefly touched upon. Fans and detractors alike agree that Boudica would have served better as an immediate or eventual antagonist in the Singularity, without having to discard her Cool Big Sis role to the player and Mash and allowing some more moral ambiguity when the player and Mash have to inevitably fight her.
  • The America Singularity features only four American Servants,^note Thomas Edison, Billy the Kid, Geronimo, and Nikola Tesla two of them dying very early on with little bearing on the plot^note Billy and Geronimo and the last having a last-minute Big Damn Heroes with little foreshadowing.^note Tesla Instead, a majority of the characters are Celtic,^note Medb, Fergus, Fionn, Diarmuid, Scathach, and Cu Alter British,^note Nightingale and Robin Hood, Russian,^note Helena Indian,^note Rama, Sita, Karna, and Arjuna, Germanic,^note Beowulf or a random assortment of Extra Servants who have no reason to be there besides popularity.^note Nero Bride, Elisabeth, Li Shuwen and again, Robin Hood And in the founding fathers' absence, Thomas Edison, a figure who has no connection to America's founding, is the "presi-king," a name clearly chosen by a culture that has no idea how Americans tend to feel about "kings." To add insult to injury, George Washington, one of the best known and loved American Presidents, is only brought up to let the player know he died offscreen, depriving the game of an actual President who would have filled the resistance leader slot much better than Edison. The dearth of American characters in the game was later mocked during the "All the Statesmen" event, where Altera appears channeling the phantoms of various American icons and heroes (Wyatt Earp, Buffalo Bill, Davy Crockett, Columbia), and the protagonist complains about how lazy the devs are not to implement any of them. ("Oh, COME ON! Wyatt Earp Servant when?!")
  • As well as the Camelot singularity has been received, there are a number of fans who expressed this in regards to the backstory for the singularity after Nasu revealed it. The Lion King forced herself into the events of the Third Crusade by summoning the Knights of the Round Table to fight for her against a fake Richard the Lionheart. Furthermore, after summoning the Knights, she made them either join her or die, during which a good half of the summoned knights chose to stand against her but were slain in the process. Upon learning of this, most players agreed that this backstory would have been amazing to play through, largely because several popular but absent knights like Gareth, Percival, and Kay could be introduced, and the false Richard, described as an incredibly powerful foe, could be fleshed out. While these events are described during the Singularity, more than one fan has bemoaned not being able to see them on-screen, but even years after release, none of these events have ever been truly referenced or represented.
  • In Lostbelt 3, Spartacus brings up the idea that some servants from Proper Human History might end up going against the heroes because they believe that the Lostbelt legitimately lead to a better world, with Spartacus noting that he will go against the protagonist if he couldn't find any real flaws in the Lostbelt, on account of the people seemingly being able to life free of any oppression. Despite this being an interesting point, nothing really gets done with this as the Chinese Lostbelt is a lot less pleasant than it looks, and Spartacus has this revealed very quickly after he makes his point. The following Lostbelts all are so awful to live in that none of them have Servants from Proper Human History who even entertain the idea of it being better than Proper Human History, to the point that there are several Lostbelt Servants who outright help the heroes because they are so bad. The only character who even remotely "defects" is Atalante Alter in the Russian Lostbelt, but considering this plot point was brought up after that chapter, it makes it feel like a pointless inclusion.
  • Section 7 of "Servant Summer Camp" reveals that Mash has been aware the whole time that something is off about the protagonist but doesn't want to say anything because she is worried that if she is being lied to now, it opens up the opportunity for many other things she knows to have been lies. What could have been an interesting character conflict, either from Mash fearing the senpai she's known for years has been a lie with her only seeing the real them now or feeling her trust in the protagonist has been broken, is never properly resolved as Mash is captured during the reveal and has apparently been caught up offscreen by the time we meet her again without us hearing how she felt about being with a doppelganger beyond the earlier inner monologue.
  • The Imperial Holy Grail War in Heian-kyō offers a unique spin on a typical Holy Grail War as all the servants in it are all Casters who due to the time period are often weaker than their masters and typically support them in an inverse to the typical Master and Servant relationship. However, by the time the protagonist joins in on it the war is practically over as two servants were Killed Offscreen and their masters incapacitated for the story while all but two of the remaining master-servant pairs decide to bunker down and try to avoid fighting in the war leading to Watanabe no Tsuna and Shuten Doji to be the only proactive Masters ^note and even then Shuten's only plan in it has less to do with the War itself and more with trying to awaken Ushi Gouzen in Raikou to destroy Heian-kyō with the war ending anticlimactically when Kintoki is able to get the Genji clan to stand against the war with three servants still standing.
  • The end of Danzo's Interlude implied Douman was going to target Fuuma to hurt Danzo. At the start of Heian-kyo, Fuuma and Danzo prepare to rayshift... and Fuuma is forbidden from entering and stays in Chaldea the whole time to render this plot point moot.
  • Avalon Le Fae brings up an interesting plot development where thanks to it becoming a Lostworld, it's possible to bring some people out of the Lostbelt without them disappearing when it disappears. However, nothing comes up from this development as the entire place gets nearly completely wiped out during the climax of the story, leading to the heroes leaving with the exact same amount of people they entered with.
  • The idea of a Beast born from Gaia's Vengeance who has to grapple with the fact that for all the chaos humanity causes, they are still a part of the natural order like every other animal on earth is one ripe with potential. Unfortunately that Beast is Koyanskya who spends the vast majority of her time aping Tamamo until the climax of her last story appearance which doesn't leave much room for exploring those ideas outside of giving Chaldea a way to talk Koyanskya into surrendering.
  • The proper collab event with Learning with Manga! FGO, "Mississippi Mythicizers", has gotten plenty of complaints, but the most prominent of them all is that it doesn't utilize the fact that it is a collab event at all. Most of the cast from Learning with Manga, up and including Gudako herself, are more or less absent from the story, and the characters who do appear in the manga do not act like they do in there (for example, Marie Antoinette acts like she normally does rather than being the yuri queen the manga characterizes her as). The manga's original Servants don't really bring with them the recurring jokes they had from there, with the additional insult being how Rider and Assassin are relegated to minor characters so that Super Bunyan can hog the spotlight. The event doesn't even use Riyo's usual artstyle beyond a few jokes, when that is one of few gags people consistently like about the manga.
• Tough Act to Follow:
  • Several main arcs are regarded as the gold standard for the others.
    • The Camelot Singularity has some of the game's strongest writing, and gameplay-wise has some of the toughest fights in the game. For those reasons, it tends to be very positively received by the community, to the point where most story chapters after are directly compared to Camelot. Not helping is that the next story Singularity, Babylonia, also was well received by the community, meaning any story chapter has to somehow equal the two to be considered good.
    • When it comes to story events the first one, SE.RA.PH is commonly viewed to the gold standard that every other story event is compared to. Providing some much-needed limelight to characters like Emiya Alter, Tamamo Cat, and Tristan while also giving its newcomers enough time to shine. A storyline that does well building up to the Lostbelt arc while also managing to tie in CCC to one of the Beasts. and having one of the best final battles in the game thanks to its customizable difficulty.
    • Some people feel that Olympus doesn't quite stack up compared to Atlantis. Atlantis had a great cast of allies, with many of them having interesting character arcs and all of their acts and deaths were gracefully pulled off. Not to mention, the death of Artemis being one of the most emotional scenes in the entire game, that was built up to for the entire chapter. While Olympus contains things that were praised by the fanbase like Wodime's arc, Aphrodite’s Mind Rape sequence, and the reveal of the Foreign God, some people consider the rest of the chapter as a let-down, considering all of the build-up.
    • Avalon le Fae casts a gigantic shadow over the remaining Lostbelt chapters being one of the most beloved stories in FGO. It’s also introduced some of the most popular characters in the entire game like Morgan and Oberon and was able to tell a story that despite its turbulent development had most people believe it lived up to the buildup it received throughout the Lostbelt storyline. Tellingly, the story chapters released between it and Lostbelt 7 were noted by some to be a step down in quality, even when accounting for the difference in length.
  • Many Servants, being Public Domain characters, find themselves being compared to other versions of themselves from other games or anime.
    • Invoked by Nasu in regard to Edmond Dantes. He admits that Gankutsuou had already made the older version of the character perfect in his eyes. As such, they wanted to try a different approach and design by making a younger Dantes.
  • Several events are much loved and constantly compared to events that come later.
    • The 2015 Halloween event was the first big event of the game with a free Servant for players, multiple Craft Essences that were obtainable in the shop that were considered useful even outside of the event, a new map with cosmetically changed enemies to fit with new music to boot, a hilarious story with several fan favorites and some neglected Servants getting their own time to shine, lots of quests to do, the release of the insanely popular Tamamo for the limited gacha, and most players managed to obtain all items in the shop, cementing this as one of the most fondly remembered events. The way the event currencies work is different then all later events, the player can simply farm the highest tier item and trade down a single item for 10 lower items. All later events do this in reverse, taking 10 lower items to trade up for a higher item. This makes the shop much easier to clear out and was kept on reruns.
    • "GUDAGUDA Honnouji" was loved mainly for its enemies, the Chibi Nobus who are drawn in the Koha-Ace artstyle and only say "Nobu." The hilarious story written by keikenchi, the author of Koha-Ace, was also well received. Okita and Nobunaga's popularity got the event a rerun, and later a sequel.
    • The Christmas events are unanimously loved for their raffle boxes, with easy farming of the tokens needed for it meaning it's an easy way of getting money, ascension items, apples and EXP. And every free Servant given out were incredibly helpful for farming and even general gameplay.
    • "Garden of Order" is liked for its mission-based system of unlocking nodes which many considered superior to grinding for points like the Honnouji or Saber Wars event. It was also the first proper crossover with another property and many players leaped at the opportunity to obtain Ryougi Shiki and the Craft Essences depicting their favorite Kara no Kyoukai characters. Some players even rolled for the Craft Essences only, since they were depicting characters in gorgeous art drawn by ufotable staff members.
    • "Fate/Accel Zero Order" is also loved because of how easy it was to farm QP because of the great exchange rates of event currency to QP. The story is also well-loved with fan favorites like Iskander, Zhuge Liang, EMIYA (Assassin), and Angra Mainyu having big roles.
• Toy Ship: Almost immediately after he was released, fans began pairing up Voyager with fellow child Foreigner Abigail Williams in an innocent, Puppy Love way. Also qualifies as a Crack Pairing, given one is the human embodiment of a space probe, while the other is the human host of an Outer God.
• Trans Audience Interpretation:
  • Leonardo da Vinci appears in this game as a woman resembling the Mona Lisa, explaining that she is what they consider the ideal of beauty. Needless to say, this turned a few heads in the trans community. This is further cemented by the fact that she chose to create a female backup body instead of a male one, thus leading to the creation of Rider Da Vinci.
  • Foreigner Jacques de Molay is canonically just a genderbent version of the historical Jacques de Molay who had already appeared as a Saber in Fate/Grand Order Arcade. But her being unable to see herself being summoned as a male Saber and her voice actor being a trans-man has made people see her as an actual trans-woman.

U

• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • The "hidden name" mechanic introduced in Epic of Remnant. This feature conceals certain spoiler-heavy Servants debuting in the EoR chapters. However, with the Cosmos in the Lostbelt storyline, the mechanic is dropped, and the game no longer conceals names even for Walking Spoiler characters and, as of the White Day 2019 event, the identities of Archer and Assassin of Shinjuku are blatantly given away. The True Names of Archer Inferno and Assassin Paraiso are also given away in Tokugawa Labyrinth event's page in the official website. And while it did return in Lostbelt 6 with the Tam Lin, it was implemented so haphazardly that character’s My Room voice lines would end up revealing their true names anyways. It was picked up as a selling feature for Pretenders, but there are only seven of them and three of them never even bother with the True Name Reveal.
  • There are actually a minor set of modifiers attached to Attributes, and a few Servants do have skills or NPs that selectively deal additional damage to specific Attributes, but on the whole the bonuses and modifiers are fairly minor, and their actual impact on gameplay is hard to notice because of how deeply-buried they are. Characters like Gilgamesh and Raikou are among the few Servants with skills that target these, so it sees little use in team modifiers or gameplay analysis because of that.
  • There have been servants with abilities that have additional effects based on hidden traits, but while the Divine trait (as opposed to the Divinity skill) is targeted by various effects fairly commonly, only Archer Oda Nobunaga and Britomart have an effect that targets a passive skill, namely Riding.^note To clarify, most Servants with Riding have a Trait as well, so while it does target them, it checks mainly by the skill
  • Several hidden Traits have extremely limited usage and exist for only one or two Servants. For example, the Roman trait only applies to roughly eight Servants, Argonaut only includes roughly five Servants, and Traits like Illya and Threat to Humanity fit only a narrow few.
  • Babylonia introduced dialogue options in the story that affect combat, such as during the trip to the Underworld where sucking up to Ereshkigal makes enemies easier compared to being harder if you picked Ishtar, or empathizing with bosses grants them permanent buffs. The community liked the ability to opt in for harder fights that made sense with the story, and it made players need to actually pay attention to the story so they could make the correct choice if they wanted to have an easier fight. Despite the positive reception, only a smattering of fights in Cosmos in the Lostbelt have used dialogue choices to affect gameplay, and never against Servants. Some Events have offered variable difficulty levels for bosses, but never using dialogue options.
  • Main Interludes. Ever since the release of the SE.RA.PH main interlude, the only events to be added are "Tunguska Sanctuary", "Tokugawa Kaiten Meikyū", and "Imaginary Scramble" two years later. This is especially evident during the Prisma Illya Licht Movie Release Campaign as that would have been an extremely good time to release the Prisma Corps Event as a Main Interlude...and yet all the players got were just a Craft Essence quest and some rank-up quests. When the Halloween Comeback Campaign was announced, people thought that the "Csejte Halloween Trilogy" would be released as Main Interludes, but instead it is played out as a Clip Show event where we are made to play through the past Halloween events to make us remember them.
  • Tower Events incentivise the player to actually use the many characters they've been collecting and strategize beyond just using the current meta team to power through every fight. Despite that, there's only been four tower events^note Setsubun, Amazones, Akihabara, and Mystic Eyes Symphony in the entire game.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic:
  • Kama/Mara, especially in her final moments. We're clearly supposed to see her as a petty, selfish, vindictive Spoiled Brat who nearly destroyed reality over what was essentially a selfish temper tantrum (with Parvati saying as much during her "The Reason You Suck" Speech at the end), and is only worthy of forgiveness after Kiara saves her and shows her the error of her ways. However, her final Villainous Breakdown is so pathetic and sombering that it made more than a few people sympathize with her.
  • Dagon is the main villain of "Sea Monster Crisis" event, being a horrifying sea monster who is responsible for creating the Singularity. Except that his motive all comes down to people's belief in him corrupting into the form he is now, and the original plan for the Singularity is to simply form a cult that will worship him as the god he is meant to be. The Con who inhabit the island and who are being consumed by the water monsters are fungi growing out of the giant Feng that is the true base of the island, meaning that his plan isn't affecting anyone what isn't just growing creatures as livestock. He tries to ignore the sympathy Ereshkigal tries to give him, but at that point Chaldea had ruined his benign plan enough where he really has no reason but to embrace his current status.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • Kadoc was meant to be seen as a Tragic Villain, as due to his underwhelming powers as a Magus, he was basically a nobody who found his chance at being something was "robbed" when he was nearly killed and had to be frozen. Many people don't really feel sympathy for him however, because he's acts like an asshole to the protagonist whenever he can be, and his jealously towards them doesn't come across as sympathetic or justified considering how hard the protagonist had to fight just to survive the Singularities, something Kadoc seems to just be ignorant of. Despite this, the game does all it can to frame him as a character you're supposed to feel for, and if not for moments like his interactions with Anastasia being considered well done, many would have outright preferred he died. Thankfully, his return in Traum showcases his Character Development and Heel–Face Turn, redeeming him in the eyes of many players.
  • The faeries of LB6 are intended to be seen as fundamentally innocent and guileless, and therefore seen as victimized by both the tyranny of Morgan and the apocalyptic Calamities looming over them, with their ultimate fate being a tragedy, since, thanks to the original sin of the ancient Faeries, and Morgan's tampering, many suffered because of something outside of their control, and their world wasn't like the other Lostbelts and they didn't need to die for Proper Human History to live. Unfortunately, the story stresses that Kids Are Cruel and Pure Is Not Good so thoroughly that most players find it impossible to see their plight as anything but a species-wide Karmic Death for constantly screwing over and betraying everyone who's ever tried to treat them with kindness or compassion, Morgan included.
• Unpopular Popular Character:
  • Merlin. Almost everyone except the protagonist and Mash seem to hate him because of his cocky, childish and deliberately unhelpful behavior. While the characters' reasons for hating him are entirely justified, that hasn’t stopped him from becoming one of the most popular servants. He is in fact so popular that his own popularity helped to ensure the popularity of his Prototype counterpart before she was even revealed.
  • BB is The Friend Nobody Likes due to her trollish tendencies to the point where the protagonist is allowed to throw her Valentine's gift back at her. The fans love her for the same trollish tendencies.
  • Ashiya Douman seems to be flat out despised by anyone not named Sei Shōnagon thanks to his vile personality and even worse actions, but the fanbase just loves him in a Love to Hate way.

V

• Values Dissonance:
  • Blackbeard's Comedic Lolicon behavior isn't too out-of-place in Japanese humor, hence why the trope is named after a Japanese term. Western viewers are more likely to find his antics uncomfortable than anything.
  • Emiya Alter had to be reworked entirely for North American release, due to Scary Black Man gangster stereotypes hitting very differently in a nation with an actual black population and persistent racial tension. See his entry under Woolseyism for details.
  • The release of Kama's first Interlude in the NA server included a sensitive content warning as its comical scenes of terrorists attacking schools and amusement parks aren't quite as easy to play for laughs where these kinds of incidents are a genuine concern for many compared to the low crime rates in Japan.
• Visual Effects of Awesome:
  • Many Servants added after launch have really well-animated attack and Noble Phantasm animations, far more so than the launch Servants.
  • That being said, Gilgamesh's updated animations added in time for the Fate/Zero event are truly impressive and capture his in-story sense of overwhelming power far more than his original animations did.
  • Jeanne, Waver, and Vlad have their animations upgraded and all of them are really awesome, but especially Vlad's.
  • Nero's new animations are fluid and reminiscent of her attack animations from Fate/Extra and Fate/Extella.
  • Altera's new animations portray her overwhelming power and grace as the Scourge of God.
  • All the updated animations for Servants from Fate/stay night have several attacks from the visual novel, ufotable's anime adaptations and even the fighting game all faithfully replicated in great detail.

W

• Wangst: How some people view Kadoc due to his dislike of the protagonist for saving the world and constant projecting of his own flaws on to the protagonist.
• Win Back the Crowd: The Fate/Grand Order: Waltz in the Lostroom and Learning with Manga! FGO crossovers were both met with lukewarm reception due to the seeming self-cannibalism of collaborating with the game's own spinoffs and said events having merely So Okay, It's Average writing, so players had low expectations set for the Arcade crossover. The reveal of Larva/Tiamat mollified those incensed by Arcade getting its own exclusives and assured them that Lady Avalon's presence wasn't an anomaly, which further increased by Sétanta and Queen Draco making the jump to mobile as well, the latter being the game's first playable Beast Servant. The event's release revealed it to be a deeply personal character story for Draco told in dead seriousness. That, along with a much higher audiovisual presentation compared to other events, and the surprise appearance of Kishinami Hakuno to tie the story to Fate/EXTRA with a Surprisingly Happy Ending had players eventually hailing it as one of the best crossovers in FGO history, up there with the CCC crossover.
• Woolseyism: Despite the occasional roughness of the official English translation, especially in the game's earliest days, there are some bits of dialogue that have become popular with many.
  • A notable example is Marie's "Wh... Whassup! My homies!".
  • Another example would be the English title of Xuanzang's event. The Japanese title was actually a reference to Coming to America ^explanationthe Japanese title roughly translates to Hoshi no Sanzang-chan, Tenjiku ni Iku; Coming to America was localized as "Hoshi no Ouji New York e Iku"; while many fans simply referred to it as Journey to the West, when it was localized, the event was given the name "Sanzang Coming to the West", keeping the reference and adding a multi-layered pun.
  • One TYPE-MOON related April Fool's joke involved bunch of idols, with one of them being a Lancer-themed band called YARIO, play on yari (spear) and Tokio. Since the joke was referenced in the first summer event, they instead translated the band name as Backspear Boys, keeping the joke while making it easier for native English speakers to catch the idea.
  • The second Halloween event parodying Ghosts 'n Goblins is originally named "The Great Pumpkin Village" in Japan, whereas it had been named as "Ghouls and Pumpkins"^note Ironically there are no ghouls in the event as they are introduced in the game a year after the event's original run in Japan. in English server. This reflects the reference game's Dub Name Change in the west as it is named "Demon World Village" in Japan.
  • On a somewhat more-serious note, Emiya ALTER has been redrawn in some official materials, and the localizers confirmed they received permission to change the infamous line dubbing him "Detroit Emiya" ("Demiya" for short) before launch. This is due to the obvious Values Dissonance between a largely-Asian-homogenous culture and a country that actually has a sizable black minority and a history of racial tensions. Indeed, the name they actually went with, "Edgemiya", fits better, not only given his more cynical nature, but also given that Alter versions of Servants are seen as "edgy" versions of the regular ones, with this particular Alter having a very grimdark and edgy attitude about his work.
  • On a similar note, the Agartha script was given a slight overhaul by the localization team due to the initial backlash received when it first came out in JP. The team altered bits of the story that seemed to fetishize the more uncomfortable moments of the story by instead playing up the horror that would naturally occur from some of those moments, and did their best to make the sheer amount of bad implications less extreme. The story chapter is still disliked, but it's generally agreed the changes make it less uncomfortable.
  • In a truly inspired bit of work, Osakabehime's cringeworthy otaku slang is rendered in the English version as equally cringeworthy fangirl Japanese, doubly funny or cringe since the person using it is herself a Japanese youkai and probably would not have come across it naturally. When she's trying to "put on an act" and pretend to be more regal than she actually is, this is also well-rendered as old-fashioned dialogue since her ultra-polite original dialogue would be hard to directly translate. Her Archer version puts a Gamer Chick spin on this, even having her say "poggers".
  • The localization team also does a fairly good job of accounting for the time differences between the JP and NA servers by altering dialogue to account for various elements that may have been new in JP, but are already out by that point in time. For example, during the "All The Statesmen" event, Siegfried shamelessly plugs the Fate/Apocrypha anime adaptation by mentioning where it can watched, since the event came out in JP during the shows run time. For NA however, the show had already been fully released and thus was available for viewing, so his dialogue was altered to allude to Netflix instead.
  • The localization team has also advanced the events from two years from the Japanese server. This is a case of Reality Subtext as the date of the age of extinction was supposed to happen with the date the final chapter release in the game (December 22 2016 in Japan, December 22 2018 in America)
  • The literal translation for the natural timeline lost to the Lostbelts, "Pan-Human History," created a bit of confusion. Since "pan" means "all," why would the Lostbelts be excluded from what's basically called "All of Human History"? The localization makes this clearer by changing "Pan-Human History" into "Proper Human History." Similarly, the "Alien God" was localized as the "Foreign God," adding a bit of thematic resonance to conversations about it, and making it sound grand and mysterious rather than matter-of-fact.
  • The original title for the Da Vinci Rerun Challenge Quest was Tokimeki Alter Memorial, a reference to the visual novel Tokimeki Memorial, which is famous in Japan. However, as the game is more obscure in the West, the localisation team changed it to... Doki Doki Alter Club. Not only is it a valid translation of the original title (Doki Doki and Tokimeki both translate to heart-pounding), it also becomes a reference to Doki Doki Literature Club!, another Visual Novel with a more... infamous reputation in the West. This leads on to Hilarious in Hindsight, however, as there are four Servants in the Challenge Quest which each have a counterpart with their Doki Doki Counterpart (Although Arjuna is harder to pair with Natsuki).
  • The Anastasia Lostbelt gave Billy the Kid a well-implemented classic Western drawl.
  • In the localization, Murasaki Shikibu would lose her direct "Awawawawa" since there is no absolute direct translation to that. While voice acting would say that word for word, it can get translation into anything similar that fits the context: She could be sobbing or blubbering (translated with just "*sob*"), or saying "Ohnononono..." (her 'stumble and drop a lot of book' Quick Attack animation quote)
  • Kiyohime's Interlude was adjusted slightly when localized to try and give her more Character Development. Originally she was called out by a shadow version of herself over how she killed Anchin, which ended with a Ignored Epiphany as the protagonist and Kiyohime called it a liar. The localized Interlude adjusts the story slightly to have Kiyohime acknowledge that she was wrong, but that she wants to work to prove the shadow wrong, which makes her seem more likeable by acknowledging that Kiyohime was still at fault and needs to move past it.
  • In the Japanese version, Van Gogh often refers to whatever puns she attempts as "Gogh Jokes". The localization changes this to "Van Goghks" as a portmanteu of her name and joke.
  • The Japanese version of the game gives Habetrot the nickname of Habenyan, as "nyan" is the Japanese onomatopoeia for a cat meowing. Since that doesn't work as well in English (not to mention that it would be nonsensical in-universe since Habetrot is Scottish), her nickname is changed to Habbycat, as a play on the term "tabby cat." One character tries saying "Habby-meow" at one point, and jokes that it doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
• Writer-Induced Fanon: The general consensus from the fandom for most of the servants labeled "Gender: Unknown" is that they’re regarded as what gender they appear as, or were introduced as before being brought into Fate/Grand Order, usually reinforced by gameplay mechanics, especially in the recent years.^note Some gender unknown characters aren’t buffed by gender specific buffs, while others are. For example, despite being listed as Gender Unknown, Ashiya Douman is not buffed by Gentleman’s Love For example, Avenger Nobunaga as a unit is listed as "Gender: Unknown", though two of her forms are treated as if they are female and Kippoushi is implied to be Nobunaga’s male form, despite claiming that he doesn’t know either way. Kippoushi being the only form of Avenger Nobunaga to appear in Chaldea Boys and the only one to give a return gift adds to this theory. Because of this, the fandom regards base Nobunaga and the third Ascension form as female and Kippoushi as male.
• WTH, Costuming Department?:
  • Swimsuit Altria's third outfit seems to mirror the regular version's third outfit with a cape and crown, except the Archer version's only wearing a swimsuit so the large fur-trimmed cape, crown, heels and multiple ribbons all look very out of place, to the point she looks more like a beauty pageant winner (referred to in Japan as a beach queen) than a fighting Servant... which may very well be the gag.
  • Parodied with Brave Liz's outfit. Not only is it a prime example of Chainmail Bikini, but the top half of it seems two sizes too big (in the card art, her gameplay sprite has it fit well enough, possibly to avoid a wardrobe malfunction). It's especially noticeable in that Liz usually wears puffy idol-inspired dresses that tend toward the modest side.
  • Archer Jeanne's third ascension is just weird when put next to the first two, which depict her as a dolphin trainer. The in-story justification is that she was inspired by Marie's glamorous outfits, but the final product would look more at home in a Christmas pageant than a summer event.
  • While it isn't unusual for Raita servants to receive mixed reactions based on their designs, Ibuki-Douji definitely raised a lot of eyebrows upon release due to how all over the place her design looks across her Ascensions and the odd color palette choice.
  • While Tezcatlipoca's Non-Standard Character Design is a topic of debate, his third Ascension is agreed to be utterly ridiculous, as it tries to fit to the Mayincatec design, but somehow does it in a way that negates those points, as he looks a lot like a figurine rather than a God in Human Form.