Characters / Fate/Grand Order: Sabers

Saber, Heroic Spirit of the Sword, is one of the seven normal Servant classes summoned for the Holy Grail War and considered one of the Three Knight Classes along with Lancer and Archer. Servants placed within this class are agile and powerful melee warriors, boast high ratings in all categories, and often are heroes from the Age of Gods when magecraft was still commonplace. The qualifying conditions require the Heroic Spirits to have legends as swordsmen, and it is the class that requires the highest levels of attributes in all but Magic.

Shared Tropes

• Anti-Magic: From their Class Skill, Magic Resistance.
• Cool Sword: This is, unsurprisingly, the default Saber Noble Phantasm. The easiest way to qualify for this class if you're not a Master Swordsman is to be associated with a particularly famous sword.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: The Saber class is revered for producing consistently high-tier Servants. In Grand Order, only one Saber is bronze-rank and only four are silver.
• Knight in Shining Armor: The class card depicts a typical knight in full armor with their sword in position.
• Lightning Bruiser: Most Sabers have very high physical stats, making them well-rounded melee experts. The Saber class is often dubbed the "strongest class" because, while not necessarily home to the strongest Heroic Spirits, it's the most consistent in giving strong, sturdy, and fast fighters. They also tend to have fairly high stats in both HP and ATK compared to the other classes.
• Master Swordsman: This is the whole point of the class - give or take the occasional weird exception (because this is, after all, the Nasuverse, where technicalities and Loophole Abuse reign supreme), Sabers are historical/mythological figures famous for being really good with swords.
• Overused Copycat Character:
  • The "Saber Wars" event not only pulls a Lampshade Hanging on this trope, but plays the number of Saber-faces for laughs, with Mysterious Heroine X (who is definitely not Altria) hunting them down.
  • Additionally, most Sabers have the exact same card setup: QAABB, with about half of those having a Buster Noble Phantasm while the other half has an Arts Noble Phantasm. In fact, this card setup is often referred to as the "Saber deck".
• Planet of Hats: A somewhat broader hat than some others, but still there. Part of the reason Saber is a "stronger" class is that its candidates generally have more "Mystery", in the Nasuverse sense, about them - which is to say, they're older Heroic Sprits, with the general cut-off point being ~1500CE.
  • Most of the Sabers from after 1500 are either event-related joke characters or one specific crossover character for fans of another part of the Nasuverse. The remaining four who are serious characters despite being "younger" (d'Eon, Tajima-no-kami, Musashi, and Lakshmi Bai) are all treated as fairly remarkable, and in Epic of Remnant and Cosmos in the Lostbelt each one is given a narrative spotlight to show exactly why they make the cut as a Saber despite their relative age. Even the Joke Character Okita is repeatedly shown to be a great swordsman and a dangerous opponent in spite of her poor stats and perpetual illness.
  • More specifically, it is implied that any Knight of the Round Table, by virtue of their history, association with King Arthur/Altria, and combat skills, are likelier to be Sabers than otherwise. Other Knights who did not debut as Sabers within the franchise (like Galahad^note As an Alter in Fate/Requiem, Gareth and Lancelot) are eventually given Saber alternate forms. As of 2022, the only outliers are Tristan (an Archer who is explicitly noted to "actually" be a Saber), Percival (a Lancer) and Agravain (labeled as an Assassin in a promotional card).
• Poor, Predictable Rock: Lorewise, the biggest weakness of Sabers is that they're only really capable of head-on attacks (being the class of armored knights and whatnot), and excluding their Noble Phantasms their effective range is often only the length of their sword. While they might outclass other Servants in terms of general parameters, their lack of versatility makes it possible for the "weaker" classes (like Caster and Assassin) to maneuver around them and take them down with guile. Furthermore, it makes Sabers a poor match with Masters who favor a Combat Pragmatist approach for fighting. This isn't much of a factor in gameplay, though, since Sabers in-game are just one of many classes with advantages and disadvantages against others. It does however provide the basis for their weakness against Archers, as they are all largely projectile uses that can attack a saber multiple times in lore before they get close.
• Square Race, Round Class: While the Saber container is one of the most coveted and powerful in any Holy Grail War, a number of Servants who are compatible with it such as Jason and Caesar claim that they'd be more effective in a different Class.
• Sword Beam: Excalibur set the trend, and this is an extremely common thing for Sabers' swords to be capable of. Sometimes it'll be the main attraction, a city-wrecking Kamehame Hadoken that few can stand against, and sometimes it'll just be a minor part of a versatile arsenal.
• Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: Sabers are strong against Lancers, but weak against Archers. They are also both strong and weak against Berserkers, are resisted by Rulers, take extra damage from demon pillars and Pretenders and resist Alteregos.

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