In the mid 2010’s, two expanded universes started for larger franchises there. One of those was Dragon Ball with the Battle of Gods film. The other one is kind of obvious considering what this post is about, Fate. That is the Fate/Grand Order mobile game. What is interesting is how both of them expanded in the same way, they dove deeper by adding more time dimensional madness.
Dragon Ball obviously added more gods into its network too, but there are now multiple universes in which these universes fight. Fate/Grand Order added more gods by making the servants not as stronger as they could have been by putting in ancient gods. Power levels have changed for both series and it’s fantastic and yet troubling at the same time here. All for their own specific and different reasons franchise wise here. Also a bit of that confusion factor too.
I feel like Fate/Apocrypha was a prototype for all of this. There is a red team vs black team with 7 servants on both sides in a holy grail war. There are a lot of unique servants with more expanded lore and then that influence became Fate/Grand Order once Nasu and some other writers got to work to make their mobile game. That is a theory and I can no way prove that and I doubt any research would uncover anything, but I just wanted to throw my theory out there.
Which makes it all strange considering that compared to the usual Fate series fight and other things, the Fate/Grand Order adaptations actually have an order you should watch them in. You know, even if those things aren’t fully available in English as of now. So obviously the order is:
-Fate/Grand Order: First Order
-F/GO Camelot films
-F/GO Babylonia
-F/GO Solomon
-F/GO Moonlight/Lost Room
All based on a mobile game of all things, so it has to be a linear order. The confusion still comes from how these anime were adapted completely out of order without any unit in them. I mean all of these are available right? Well, yes and no. Not all of these made it out into an English release yet. One is available to rent the first Camelot film from services, but the second film comes out in English in May and who knows when that will be available for rent. It’s crazy.
With all those expanded universes and fights against ancient gods and other servants in political things that are fun, the fate experience is still full there. The normal fate universe has a war over the grail in a death game and now the fight has literally turned to Fujimaru, Mash, and helpful servants, face against gods to save all of humanity. So it is still humanity being tested with all their gears and energy to explore all of that. Just more fate lore and that is what makes it fun. Even if some adaptations aren’t as strong, it’s still fun to check out.
Mechanical Anime Reviews 