The mobile gaming market is well known as a place where games are released to burn bright and brief, to make their fortunes and disappear before their shallowness is fully registered. Such was the intention of today’s title: a little project with a big licensed name on it, intended to part a few people from their money before riding off into the sunset. As of this year, it has been running for 10 years in Japan and 8 years globally. With such a long and unexpected legacy of continual success, combined with it being part of one of Japan’s most recognizable intellectual properties, it made for a perfect in-depth review topic. It was certainly a lot to ask to power through 8 years of mobile gacha game design over multiple months, but it was indeed accomplished by God’s Grace and the motivation of one simple hypothetical: “Wouldn’t it be funny if I maxed out St. George’s attack stat as much as possible?”

Developed by LASENGLE, co-published internationally by Type-Moon and Aniplex, and released worldwide in 2017, Fate/Grand Order is a fever dream of a roleplaying game available on mobile devices. Its premise involves a self-insert joining a band of time cops to save human history itself from temporal aberrations with the help of various historical and mythological figures of plausibly deniable accuracy to the source material. Players interact with the game through turn-based combat, a heavy dose of menuing to collect and upgrade units, and reading through a lengthy visual novel story. Please note that for the purposes of this review, I have played through the game up until the end of Cosmos in the Lostbelt (through the chapter called Nahui Mictlan), including Epic of Remnant, the “optional” Lostbelt chapters, and every Main Interlude. I have started on the first available Ordeal Call chapter to briefly examine it, but I won’t be considering its story content critically considering the arc isn’t finished even on the Japanese server.

The story of Fate/Grand Order takes place in the late 2010s at the Chaldea Security Organization and follows the player as a self-insert protagonist, who for the purposes of this review shall be referred to by his/her default name Ritsuka Fujimaru. Chaldea is a taskforce of mages dedicated to the preservation of humankind into the future, and has developed a technology called Rayshifting which allows them to travel back in time and correct Singularities which threaten to unravel the fabric of reality. You can think of a Singularity as a weird, cancerous pocket dimension where history has been altered by a font of magical power called a Holy Grail, and threatens to derail the timeline if it’s not corrected. Anyways, Fujimaru is for all intents and purposes a useless placeholder in the organization until a fatal error leaves him as the last viable field operative during Chaldea’s first major operation. With an internal betrayal leaving the director dead and the future of humanity literally incinerated, it’s up to the remaining employees of the organization to resolve seven Singularities across time, team up with historical figures and legends brought forth as powerful Servants, and solve the mystery of who incinerated humanity’s future and why.

This is about as simply as I can describe the main plot of the game, and really the overarching plot of the game serves less as a compelling narrative in its own right as it is the vehicle for the many, many different episodic encounters with various history-gone-wrong scenarios. Things like the Hundred Years War but France is suddenly attacked by dragons led by an imposter Joan of Arc, or The American Revolution but the divide is between East and West America and the East is largely spearheaded by warriors of Irish mythology. To break down the quality of every single story F/GO would require its own dedicated article, but I will still do my best to report on their general quality here. The first arc, named clumsily in retrospect Observer on Timeless Temple, never rises beyond dumb fun in all nine of its chapters, and generally reveals itself to be a messy product that aches of its initial cash-grab intentions. The second arc, Epic of Remnant, is mostly a four chapter filler. arc It surprisingly starts out with the first unironically good chapter in the game, but that’s only right before devolving into three straight chapters of near total depravity and bad faith depictions of its historical subjects. I feel like the writers should have shown up at my door to personally apologize and give me a free t-shirt that says “I Survived Epic of Remnant”.

The story genuinely begins to pick up in its third arc, Cosmos in the Lostbelt. It might be more objective of me to say that this arc is the most polarized, as out of its twelve chapters around half of them I found had major annoyances with none of them being dumb fun enough to escape my ire. The other half of the chapters tell some genuinely entertaining and thoughtful stories though, with one chapter in particular actually managing to genuinely touch on transcendental themes whilst weaving one of the most memorable fantasy stories I’ve read in quite some time. On the whole the greatest weakness of F/GO’s story which leaves it as a miss for me is the nature of its progression over the years, as while it can tell great individual stories, most of the good chapters are buried behind hours upon hours of total slop. I guess the game does feature a cutscene skip button if you’re determined to just read the good ones, but you’ll definitely lack context in some areas if you do so and it doesn’t allow you to skip the many hours of combat encounters which are mandatory to playthrough.

Combat is the main gameplay activity you’ll be doing outside of the cutscenes. You can deploy up to six playable Servants depending on your account level and the rarity of the ones you want to use, with three taking the field immediately and other three replacing your vanguard as they are defeated. From here the fights are turn-based, in which you select three of five cards randomly drawn from a virtual deck that represent different characters’ ability to attack. The attacks are divided between Buster, Arts, and Quick, which deal extra damage, charge their unique card faster, and generate more critical-hit stars respectively. The basic strategy is to look for straights or three-of-a-kinds in order to intensify their effects, such as three of the same kind of card being stronger when played together, three cards with the same hero on them allowing that character to attack a fourth time, one of each major card type granting a little bit of everything, and so on. Beyond the draw of the cards each character has a stable set of skills they can use centered around various buffs and debuffs to increase their efficiency, and an aforementioned unique card called a Noble Phantasm which is charged via a gauge and then used as part of any set of cards you play. Beyond these, the last major mechanic is the class system with each character’s classification having impactful matchups against different kinds of enemies, both for and against them. 

From beyond this point, the game’s core systems can actually be surprisingly complex. From sequencing your cards to switch attack targets after defeating your main target, to optimizing critical-hit star generation to guarantee crits and cash-in on big damage, to using multiple Noble Phantasms in a row to intensify their effects, there’s a lot of nuances you can learn overtime which are fun to explore. On balance though, the game struggles to present the right amount of intensity at any given part of its campaign. Most of the early chapters are very easy and can get quite repetitive if the enemies are not sufficiently varied on one hand, but later chapters sometimes present very frustrating gimmicks which feel needlessly punishing on the other hand. I get that the later chapters were probably balanced around players who had been playing for many years to sustain interest, but this came at the cost of the new player story experience that I went through having difficulty spikes that can only be described as vertical. The Support system which allows you to borrow another player’s character can be very helpful in mitigating this, but sometimes the game asks for even more than one overpowered ally can realistically handle. 

More than the inconsistent difficulty though, Fate/Grand Order’s gameplay suffers primarily from its optimal play patterns being very boring to execute. The ideal way to play is to invest heavily into characters with Noble Phantasms that hit all enemies and supports that amplify their damage and refill the NP gauge, which culminates in you basically ignoring all of the interesting adapt-on-the-fly decision making of the card system in favor of just immediately blowing up every encounter and moving on. Sure players who engage with this will need some single-target characters for the tougher bosses, and you can kind of opt into more interesting gameplay by investing in stall characters or damage dealers who explicitly get their value from using normal cards. Unfortunately these all-enemy attackers make-up the largest share of the game’s characters (especially recently), so chances are you’ll be pushed into arguably the least interesting playstyle by necessity.

Even the game’s overall combat content is pretty much geared towards these AOE characters by design because most of your time with the combat will be spent in farming nodes, and with a few exceptions like some of the repeatable Bleached Earth Missions in Ordeal Call these are generally tests of wave clearing. The only gameplay content that was significantly different in its design was the Grail Front mode, which Fate/Samurai Remnant clearly took inspiration from for its leyline fights, and not only is this mode limited time only but thanks to the time gap between the global and Japan servers I can say with certainty that we are two years and counting on getting another Grail Front at all! Overall the game’s combat systems really are a bit of a shame, for despite having some interesting ideas they exist in a context where the best bits get smothered in the name of optimizing clear times. I realize the game is trying to be time efficient enough for players to weave it seamlessly into their daily schedule, but if the measure of your game’s quality is how fast you can clear daily chores rather than how fun it is to play, then you’ve lost the plot somewhere along the way.

As for the upgrade systems surrounding the combat system, they’re a product of a simpler era of gacha RPG design. Most of the upgrades simply boil down to collecting the items you need from completing quests and spending them to level up whatever aspect you are working on. The old school use of consumable EXP items you have to individually feed to a Servant can get rather tedious, but paying costs for level-cap ascension and skill upgrades aren’t too bad. The true stinker here is Craft Essence (basically the game’s ‘weapon’ system) which aside from events doesn’t have dedicated level up fodder, and the techniques the community have developed to level them efficiently go right over my head. As for the act of farming these materials for upgrades, boring gameplay aside I do at least like it better than most modern gacha games. In the absence of an RNG relic system the game wins back its player retention by requiring a hefty amount of materials to max out a character, and not every optimal farming location guarantees a drop of the material you’re looking for. 

In practice though, the statistics generally came through for me and even if capping out a character is slow going it at least has a sense of incremental progress which more modern games tend to obscure with their nonsense relic-style systems. What I won’t praise the game for is the fact that certain very common leveling materials, the class gems and pieces, have their best farming locations locked to certain days of the real world week. How in the world would anyone find it satisfying to pull a Caster they’ve been saving up for on a Monday, only to find they can’t level them up until Friday? Sure every node type is available on weekends when you’re likely to have time to play anyhow, but at that point just make them available all week! Overall the progression system is demanding and has some baffling limitations, but compared to what we deal with in most free-to-play RPGs these days I found it rather refreshing.

None of this discussion ever truly starts if you don’t own the character you want to level in the first place though, and thus we come to Fate/Grand Order’s truly legendary gacha system. In order to pull for new characters and Craft Essences, you’ll need to accrue and spend a currency called Saint Quartz. 3 will get you one pull, while 30 gets you an eleven pull with 1 guaranteed 4-star item and 1 guaranteed playable Servant. Your tenth single pull also comes with a bonus eleventh pull, but has no assurances on what those items include. The odds of pulling a 5-star Servant is 1%, with the featured servant occupying about 80% of that 1%. That’s a pretty stingy rate all things considered, but it gets particularly bad when you realize just how hard it is to guarantee what you want. To my understanding there is no soft pity mechanic in the game, only a hard pity at 330 pulls (900 Saint Quartz’s worth). This is admittedly not a pity one generally needs to hit to get their target character due to the 5-star coin flip being 80/20, but the gross part is that once you do get the character this pity is completely disabled. Pulling duplicates certainly isn’t mandatory to play the game well, but if you really wanted to try out a character with a higher NP level then your two options at that point are to either wait for a rerun that might take literal years, or engage in genuine gambling. This 330 pity count does not carry over between banners either, so if you go pulling and fail to get to pity before the banner ends you are not compensated at all. 

To truly put the amount of money this system threatens to drain from you in perspective, let us imagine a player who is fresh out of Saint Quartz and just wants to buy a character outright with real money. How much does this player end up spending? The maximum available purchase is 167 SQ for $80, so the number of times one needs to buy the pack to get the character is 900/167 = 5.4, rounded up to 6. Multiply the $80 by 6 and you’re left with the theoretical market value of one 5-star character at… $480. That’s the most expensive price out of any gacha I’ve surveyed thus far, within an environment of particularly high FOMO! I think more than anything the real nail in the coffin here is that F/GO does not have a proper account binding system, so any player who accidentally loses their phone or deletes the app without (somehow) having the prescience to generate and write down a transfer number and password straight up loses any and all investments they made into the game. Honestly I’d call that comical if it weren’t so frightening. The only, and I do mean the ONLY notable positive of this gacha system is that since we are two years behind the Japanese server with minimal rushing, we can know ahead of time when our favorite Servants are going to be on rate-up and stockpile earnable in-game Saint Quartz accordingly. I myself have been rather lucky with this system as a F2P since I have gotten a fairly sizable roster of 5-stars, most of whom were capricious single-eleven-pull miracles (and even a one summon ticket miracle recently!), but objectively speaking it’s not hard to see why so many players of the game self-deprecatingly warn outsiders that the game is ‘hell’.

As for the game’s presentation, age and engine limitations prevent Fate/Grand Order from hitting the heights that it could have, but I would be remiss if I didn’t point out some of its triumphs. The big point to mention is the visual novel section, as the backgrounds are generally pretty well made whenever they go out of their way to not use stock assets and the characters feature fairly robust sets of facial emotes to help sell the story. This presentation naturally improves in later chapters with some light panning shots and cut-in panels creating more visual dynamics. The character designs themselves are nothing if not creative, though definitely prone to selling gacha pulls over tightly considered ensembles. Most characters come with three outfit variants to pick from so you can customize them to suit your tastes or even potentially use a character otherwise too immodest for you, and I do appreciate that. Immodesty is definitely a recurring problem in female character designs, so it behooves the prospective player to double check a lady Servant’s wardrobe before committing your hard earned Quartz to them. Combat animations are a bit varied in quality, with older characters often having stiff and unimpressive visuals and ear splitting sound mixing, while newer characters feature dramatic and sweeping attacks that land with a satisfying clang. Noble Phantasms in particular can have some truly showstopping moments. Occasionally older characters do have their combat animations updated to better fit the game’s evolution, and I hope they make the effort to do more of these in the future. The major limitation I think comes from the models of the enemies and servants themselves, as they have a very flat and flash-game-esque feel that perfectly explains why visual effects are so emphasized.

Musically, most of the game’s soundtrack is pretty memorable for the simple reason that you will hear most of the tracks ten-billion times over. Some of the game’s earliest cutscene and battle themes get re-used even in the most recent chapters, in spite of new compositions being crafted for them. The Anastasia chapter has one incredible diegetic piece included in it and Avalon Le Fae has some great highlights, but on the whole it can be tough to remember most of the tracks individually when so much of the runtime is dominated by the mainstays. At the very least the heavy emphasis on sweeping orchestral is right up my alley, so I’d give the music a thumbs up.

Finally for my spiritual analysis of the game, unsurprisingly there isn’t that much to praise unless I were to get really specific, so I’d rather speak on one of the game’s broader themes that have pervaded JRPG writing for a while now. Before that though, I should mention the game’s use of Catholic history in general. Surprisingly, across Fate/Grand Order’s entire 10 year run only 3 canonized Saints have been adapted to the fiction of its world, all of whom have been in the game since its initial launch: St. Joan of Arc, St. George, and St. Martha. At the very least all of them are depicted in heroic lights, but their depictions are not exactly the most well thought out either. St. George (or Georgios as he’s usually referred to in game) is one of the most under utilized characters in the whole game, but in a way this does mean he doesn’t exactly have enough screentime to be terribly misused which is a blessing in disguise. St. Joan of Arc (called Jeanne d’Arc) is about what you’d expect from a series made outside of Christendom, but her faith in God isn’t totally absent from her depiction (particularly in some of her Noble Phantasm lines). If anything F/GO is more interested in exploring and propping up the imposter version from the first Singularity since she turned out to be a surprise hit with the player base. St. Martha is probably done the most dirty, as by her visual design you can tell she was created as an excuse to have a character that looked like Sakura Matou from the original Fate/Stay Night in the game on launch. The character’s clothes are bafflingly immodest and her faith is actively downplayed regarding the legend of her taming the tarrasque, leaving it quite the relief that she is similarly irrelevant to the game as St. George outside of the fact she eventually got both a swimsuit variant and a Christmas variant. 

These characters are on balance more misses than hits, but if nothing else I felt it wasn’t done maliciously in the end. The same can’t be said, I think, for a few of the main story chapters’ depictions of people and events tied to Christian history, which often slid into lazy stereotypes and shock value. There are a handful of good examples to choose from, but I think the most notable one has to be Psudeo-Parallel World Shimousa. I don’t think I need to explain why a chapter where the summoning of demons is attributed to “dark Jesuit sorcery” whipped up by a cartoonishly evil depiction of a historical Japanese Catholic rebel leader Amakusa Shiro, whose minions going into battle invoking “the great Satan,” is just a little bit beyond what a reviewer from a Catholic website would consider good taste. To Shimousa’s credit there is Christian NPC side character who communicates to the audience that the villains of the chapter are bonafide blasphemers so it’s not like they’re suggesting Catholics are actually like this, however I’d argue the greatest sin of Shimousa is not the fact it is not to my tastes but that it is all too much to the taste of Japan’s historical narrative surrounding the Shimabara Rebellion. I mentioned this conflict in passing in my Samurai Remnant review before, about how it was a struggle of the people of the province against the Tokugawa Shogunate which came to be the last stand of the Japanese Catholics before they were thoroughly routed and pushed underground by the sheer might of the new dynasty. In the modern day we can generally look back on this event and recognize that despite their imperfections the Shimabarans were fighting justly, but Japanese media surrounding the subject tends to twist Amakusa in particular into an evil sorcerer figure and flatter the Shogunate as a rightful sovereign that just wanted peace in Japan. This pattern is repeated beat for beat in F/GO’s Shimousa chapter, and I think it’s tragic that these writers can’t or don’t have the courage to go beyond simply acknowledging the reasons the rebels were upset and truly commit to criticizing the Shogunate’s actions as a serious moral failing. This is one hatchet I believe that the Japanese and Christian communities could very realistically bury, but this storytelling trope is undoubtedly a cultural stumbling block which needs to be let go of. And ultimately this is the great irony of the Fate/ series as a whole: infamous for over-the-top interpretations of historical figures, yet never so edgy as to actually transgress interpretations of history as a whole that are more or less completely endorsed by the dominant culture. Except for Nero Claudius, for some inscrutable reason.

It is in that idea of acquiescing to the popular solution to a very serious problem that I dive into the true heart of the Catholic perspective I wish to share, and talk about Fate/Grand Order’s grappling with existential themes and the meaning of life. This theme has been present within the game’s story thanks to the presence of the game’s secondary protagonist Mash Kyrielight: a strange human-Servant hybrid who starts of the game with a fairly standard arc about a non-human anime girl coming to understand human emotions and experiences, but evolves into confronting the question of mortality as her shortened lifespan draws to a close. This theme appears briefly in other sections of the story too, but this early plot is where it is most prevalent. Unsurprisingly for this genre, in the face of a villain who seeks to recreate the world into a deathless place, Mash insists that the inherent tragedy of life’s end can be endured through choosing to live virtuously and leaving something meaningful behind like with the many Servants featured in the story. On its own this isn’t actually bad advice, but within the Fate/ universe the lore is very, very cagey about fully confirming or deconfirming the mythologies it draws from, but critically posits reincarnation as the ultimate fate of all souls rather than any true afterlife. Knowing then that all of men’s lives are doomed to be extinguished for good as they are obliterated in the in the process of recycling their souls into new people, this places F/GO among the surprisingly long list of JRPGs who set up existential nihilism as the ultimate truth of reality, but insist upon living bravely in spite of the end and focus on creating your own meaning in the time you have. A popular sentiment amongst committed non-theist types for sure, but wholly destructive feel-good nonsense in practice.

In order to best explain why this optimism is so counterproductive, allow me to make an analogy. Imagine you went to a restaurant and ordered a rice ball (onigiri) to eat but when your order comes up instead of being made of nourishing grains of rice, the ball is formed of feces. There are certainly a variety of strategies to make this dining experience more comfortable you could employ, but none of them truly solve the issue at hand. You could delude yourself into thinking the feces is rice, or convince yourself that eating it is the polite and moral thing to do, or cover it in white sugar so that it looks more like a rice ball, but none of these strategies are about to change the fact you’re about to get a mouthful of dung. The only realistic ways of avoiding this situation are to either cover the ball in such a great amount of sugar that you fail to ever touch the core of the dish before you fall into a sugar coma (hence harming yourself either way), or indignantly storming out of the restaurant despite the potential social repercussions. You might get criticized for your lack of manners, but when the restaurant has crafted a scenario that harms the customer no matter what there’s no logical reason to truly condemn their actions.

All of this is what I think of when existentialists try to suggest the idea of the fundamentally meaningless universe with no afterlife. Humans are undoubtedly born with a deep hunger for meaning, but when secularists try to deny them meaning through a deeper, spiritual, and universal reality, they effectively set humanity up for guaranteed misery. If humans are not born with meaning then they will need to find it elsewhere, but if the universe is just a collection of matter marching towards entropy with no explanation for why it exists, then finding that meaning becomes impossible. Even if we tried to be good little Nietzscheans and cultivated our will-to-power in the face of a godless world, the ultimate promise of creating our own meaning violates the Law of Proportionate Causality: St. Thomas Aquinas’ observation that in order for something to be the cause of an effect, the effect itself has to exist within the cause in some way. If one assents to the observation that an ice cube is not going to light my sleeve on fire because it does not itself contain the quality of heat, then it follows that a man with no inherent meaning who tries to proclaim his own meaning for life is quite literally just spewing empty words. And morality? Sure you could make an empirical judgement that we ought not to do things that hurt others, but the logical endpoint of this suggests that believing in the meaningless universe as a brute fact is itself too great a pain to inflict upon humanity and thus immoral. If we are to satisfy this hunger for meaning in our lives we must first accept that this is not just a tragically unfulfillable longing, but that it exists because something else exists capable of satisfying that ache, and then do everything in our power to seek out that something which can sate it. Or perhaps more likely, the Someone of whom we can partake of and live.

These observations do not in themselves prove that God exists but they do reveal just how strange and backwards the modern prevalence of existentialism truly is, and if anyone should seek to preach about the meaning of life they’re going to need much more than just an invincibly stubborn optimism. Returning to the subject of F/GO and JRPGs, this is what separates the good stories that touch on the afterlife and the nature of souls from disappointing ones. You can have a good RPG that includes an afterlife where people are more or less annihilated as a part of the setting, but the story needs to concern itself with something other than existential themes so the hopefulness of the story isn’t undermined by its own setting. My forever cherished The World Ends With You and its sequel are good examples of this. An RPG can also choose to cover existential themes just fine too, so long as the nature of the afterlife is kept enough of a mystery so as to at least let the player come to their own conclusions about the characters’ hope. Octopath Traveller II for instance never confirms what happens to the dead definitively, making the angst of the main antagonists realistic without inadvertently justifying them (even the cleric protagonist Temenos doubts the veracity of his own gods at one point, yet this doesn’t ruin his character arc even if I found it to be a bit of a loose end). Thus in the end, my ultimate response to F/GO’s spiritual themes is that it can’t fool me. Pretending that life doesn’t have inherent value and that we need to make our own meaning is an extremely convenient moral to attach to a game that is essentially a casino in all but name, and it shall have to offer more than that tired trope if I’m going to give them any commendations. Enough with the poop-igiri, start cooking with some rice!

In summation, Fate/Grand Order is truly a game which has survived off the back of its IP over the course of its long history. A handful of genuinely good story chapters cannot save it from a predatory business model, loads of drawn out and disappointing chapters, and gameplay which is actively less fun the better you get at it. Some of what I saw over the course of the game reminded me of the promise the series’ wacky premise holds to tell interesting stories, but the thought of making someone suffer through all the rest of it just to get to those parts feels plainly cruel. There’s plenty of other, better free-to-play options out there, and certainly better Fate/ titles to choose from if you’re willing to commit a few bucks. I’ll probably check in to admire the work I put into supercharging my St. George and keep my account from getting lost if nothing else, but really I just need him playable in a better video game.

About PeaceRibbon

A graduate in philosophy from a campus with Benedictine monks, "PeaceRibbon" is just an ordinary introvert looking to put his hours of playing games to good use. He's played games on every Nintendo console since the family Wii and later took up PC games once aware of Steam. He's explored a lot of genres, but his favorites have been story driven RPGs and fighting games. Often finds himself going deep into gaming culture and seeking out low-profile titles over keeping up with big releases.

When not gaming, he enjoys walking in beautiful places, and overthinking just about everything. Also serves as a cantor at Mass whenever he can. Has a twin brother who shares many of the same hobbies and passions.