I am a Fate fan; pretty much everybody who knows me knows that much. I have watched every Ufotable anime, as well as Apocrypha, own all of the games, own most of the books, have several figurines, and even have the Fate/Extella and Extella LINK limited edition posters framed up on my wall.
The series has issues – oh, trust me, it does, but the writing simply captivates me. The characters, setting, plot, and stories simply hook me without any sort of release, as I simply cannot help but continue to consume everything the series puts out. I even sin by playing the mobile gacha game, Fate/Grand Order, which is famous – or infamous – for just how ridiculous it can become.And so, when coming to Japan this summer, I knew that I just had to try out the one Fate game I cannot experience anywhere else – Fate/Grand Order Arcade, and I’d like my first post after such a long hiatus to be about this game, as it cannot be played outside of Japan. At least, as far as my research has shown.
First, let me preface that this will not be a full on review. I have not been able to play the game for more than a few hours, nor can my wallet afford to play it for much longer. This will simply be a first impressions and thoughts after spending some time with the one Fate game that I have not been able to play until now.
In order to play the game, you will need some sort of a user card; a card that saves your progress and lets you play the game. The card can be bought pretty much in any Japanese arcade, through a machine. The card is put at the bottom left of the machine.When you put it on, if you have not yet played the game before, you will be taken through a tutorial and create your character. Please be advised that in case you want to change your name later on, you will need to pay money to do so.
The game itself is an action version of the mobile game; you go through the exact same Singularities the mobile game takes you through, with each area being complete-able three times, with different rewards for each clear, but with one clear being enough to advance. Each one of those areas is divided into two to three sections, and you can take a single character, or Servant by Fate's terms, of your choosing, and the game will provide two more Servants that will fight on their own.
The game is missing the biggest thing that makes Fate great for me, though; the stories. Each Singularity is just a random assortment of fights, with ties to the mobile game. Without knowing the story of the original Fate/Grand Order, you wouldn’t even be able to tell that there is something to connect those fights to begin with.
The controls are fairly simple; you get a Wii Nunchuck-like grip, with a joystick to move your Servant at the top, and two buttons for your pointing and middle finger; the button for the pointing finger is used to lock on to an enemy, and a double tap will change the enemy being locked on to, and the middle finger button will be used to either dodge – done with a flick of the joystick at the same time of pressing it – or run on the battlefield, with a long press of the button.
Other than that, it plays like an action version of the mobile game. The screen is a touch screen, and so you have five cards at the bottom left, and a skill each character can use that you can activate at any time, but has a cool down.
The cards are divided into three groups – Buster cards, which are the red cards, Arts cards, which are the blue cards, and Quick cards, which are the green cards. The cards work as such:
Buster cards are the ones that deal the most damage, but give less critical stars, and charges no Noble Phantasm gauge, or NP gauge.
Arts cards charge the most NP gauge, but deal medium damage and gives no critical stars.
And Quick cards give the most critical stars, but have a medium charge of the NP gauge, and deal the least amount of damage out of the three.
The critical stars gained will be spread among your next five cards, with each star giving ten percent chance of a critical attack for the card it was given to.
With each attack, you can choose three cards that will make your combo – or by Fate’s terms - Chain, and those color combinations can change the value of your attack; for example, the card you start your chain with will have give different attributes to the others – if you start with a Buster card, the rest of the chain will deal more damage; if you start with an Arts card, the rest of the chain will charge more NP gauge than they normally would; and if you start with a Quick card, the entire chain will gain 20% more chance of a critical attack. A chain with three different colors will give all of those effects combined.
A combo with a single color will give a heightened effect – a chain of Buster cards only, which is called Buster Chain, will give an extra bonus to the damage done; an Arts Chain will charge twenty percent of the NP gauge immediately, and a Quick Chain will give twenty critical stars to use on the next chain.
Or, you can just ignore all of that, press the big attack button to the right of the cabinet, and the button will pick a random chain for you out of the five cards available at the moment. That is usually enough to beat most non-boss encounters during my run, which only covered Singularities 0 and 1.
Once you’ve charged up your NP gauge, you can use your Servant’s Noble Phantasm, which is your Servant’s ultimate attack. Or try to. Press the big button in the middle, and your Servant will start charging their Noble Phantasm. The charge can be less than a second long, or several nerve-wrecking seconds long, with the time taken decided by the range and amount of targets the attack covers. Releasing the buttons stops the charge, and if you are attacked during your charge or have no targets in range when the charge ends, the NP has failed and you will not have access to your NP for another 10 seconds.
The Noble Phantasms themselves were a treat to experience for a mobile game player like me; they are full on CG versions of the mobile game’s Noble Phantasms, and done beautifully, at that. I was always trying to get them to trigger, just to be able to re-watch them again, but failing more often than not, unfortunately.
[The mobile game video is provided by Aniplex USA's YouTube channel]
Your Servants start at level 1, but can be upgraded with materials obtained by playing the game. Once a Servant hits a certain level threshold, which changes depending on the rarity of said Servant, it can be Awakened. Awakening a Servent can give an extra skill, changes the Servant’s appearance, and lets it being upgraded even further.
So up until now, I was talking about how to control your Servant, but how do you actually get Servants? Through the game’s horrible monetization, of course!
When you start the game, you can insert credits, with a hundred Yen being about enough to cover a one area run, or to do one Summon, that will generate either a Servant, or a Craft Essence, which is sort of an extra piece of equipment that you can put on a Servant. Craft Essences can give different effects, as well as an attack bonus, and/or an HP bonus.
Every pull done will print out a cards in the machine, which can be put in a hole at the left side of the controls, with up to 60 cards in a deck, and then the party can be edited using those 60 cards. Up to one Servant per each of the three slots, and each Servant having up to one Craft Essence on them. Each slot will be used in a section of an area, or in cases of bosses, the entire party will be used at the same area, one Servant at a time.
If you do not have enough Servants in your party, you will be given a random Servant for a section which requires it.
Seems about par for the course, right? So why would I call this game’s monetization horrible?
Well, dear reader, with the exception of the very first Servant you get, every card you want printed will cost you one hundred Yen, and every card you want used – you will have to print. For example, you just beat a Singularity; the reward you get for that is ten pulls, as well as an exclusive Craft Essence. Those will be stuck on your Gifts tab until you decide to pay one hundred yen each to print them. And so, you have pulls you can’t use unless you pay extra.
And let us not forget that that’s on top of having to pay to play the actual game to begin with.
Worse yet, is that this game’s pull rates seem to be about as good as the pull rates in the actual mobile game, which is infamous of its abysmal rates even among gacha games, but without the pity system the mobile game has. The mobile game has a horrible pity system, with a five star Servant only being guaranteed after three hundred pulls on a single banner – but at least a pity system exists!
Not only that, but remember how I talked about Awakening Servants a few paragraphs back? And remember how I said that it can change the Servant’s appearance? Well, in order to actually gain the card of the appearance change, you have to pay extra. Another 100 Yen in order to print the card. And considering each Servant can have an extra 3 cards, getting all of a Servant’s cards can stack.
I will give the game credit that it simply sends the Awakened cards to the Gift tab, and they seem to simply be cosmetic, so the Servant’s stats are saved to your user card, rather than having to print the new Servant cards in order to have access to an Awakened Servant. Moreover, you can choose to skip on printing an appearance if you dislike it, but asking for payment for that can still stack up to cost a pretty penny at the end.
The thing that makes me most annoyed with the game, though, is this; the game uses physical cards, and so I managed to find in a card shop physical cards of two of my favorite Servants – Ishtar and Astolfo. I bought them and took them to play at the arcade. After all, banners can have different Servants, and Servants I want aren’t always up for grabs, and that’s besides actually managing to pull them, which could cost quite a lot on its own.
So I put the cards in the slot, put the Servants in my party, and started playing. At the end of every area cleared, all of the Servants in the party receive Bond experience, which unlocks things such as information about the Servant, unique dialogue, and an exclusive Craft Essence when maxed out. And they did not get Bond experience. Looking it up, I realized – Servants who the user themselves have not pulled, will not receive any Bond experience whatsoever.
I was annoyed, but decided to move on. The Bond mechanic can be neat, but I figured I don’t have to interact with it in this game. And so I kept playing, cleared the zeroth and first Singularity, and went to upgrade my Servants. And that’s when I realized.
Servants the user themselves have not pulled cannot be Awakened.
This is where I stopped. I can get the game charging for printing cards. Those cost money, in the end. I can also get the game wanting people to pay to actually play it. Making money is the point of the game, after all. But the game will not let me use Servants that it has already printed and received money for before to to their full potential, even when Awakening Servants can make me pay more money in order to have more cards of the Servant printed.
This is honestly ridiculous, and way beyond what I will consider fair monetization practice, and was just utterly shocked by such an ask.
So... would I recommend it?
I think it’s a fun enough romp to try out for every Fate fan to try and experience, especially if they have played Grand Order before. Seeing those 2D Noble Phantasms come to life in really beautiful CGI rendering was a joy to behold, and the game itself was not un-fun. It reminded me a lot of other anime arena fighters, and I actually wish we have gotten a game along those lines to home consoles.But the blatant horrible monetization that the game forces on the player, the atrocious rates on the pulls, and the lack of being able to properly use Servants bought from other people, make me unable to actually recommend it for anyone who does not already play the mobile game, or wants to actually try playing for more than two or three Singularities.
It was a fun way to spend a few hours on a rainy day, but too greedy for my liking to be able to recommend you go out of your way to play.
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