Another review for those who hate money; Fate Grand Order.

Continuing in the vein of games designed to make you lay waste to your finances, Fate Grand Order is another phone game I’ve been getting into that released fairly recently. I will say I’m much less impressed by this one than I was with Brave Exvius, but it still has its good points. It’s also an anime if you’re a fan of the series but would rather just watch it.

Quick synopsis as always. In Grand Order, you as the protagonist are one of many individuals with the qualifications to serve as a master, chosen by the Chaldea Security Organization. They’re basically a group of scientists and mages whose job is to safeguard humanities existence. And because we need a plot point, they have discovered that humanity will go extinct in 2018. The reason for this? Some anomaly that occurred back in 2004 in Fuyuki City (where the original Fate/Stay Night took place). So to put it simply, it’s your job to go back and prevent history from going sideways.

Being a Fate game, you command multiple servants to fight in the different time anomalies. You get a few by default, primarily Shielder (shown above) and whatever you’re lucky enough to pull from your free summon. This is a phone game, so the easiest way to get better people is to sink cash into it, but you can accumulate the necessary currency (referred to as Saint Quartz) by playing the game as well.

What kinda sucks about this game is that summoning isn’t only for servants. The summon function also provides you with upgrading materials and utility cards called Craft Essences that can be equipped to your servants to make them stronger. Which is all well and good…until you spend money or finally farm up enough Saint Quartz to do a full summon and get two crappy servants and seven Essences of higher quality than your best people. Feels REALLY bad. Similarly to Exvius stars are used to show quality here, running from 1 – 5 with 5 being the best.

So far combat isn’t overly complicated. You get a random drawing of five cards at the start of each battle. The cards have three types: Buster (physical attack), Arts (charges Noble Phantasms) and Quick (boosts critical chance). Each hand will have a mix of the servants currently in your party. Every servant has a Noble Phantasm and up to three skills depending on their level. Skills must be used BEFORE going to combat (and I cannot say how many times I have screwed that up). You also have a few command spells for healing or buffing your team.

You get to bring two of your own servants and a friend into combat with a maximum of three back ups if you can afford it. Another thing I’m not crazy about in Grand Order is the party cost system. Every servant and craft essence have a value and you can only equip so many points worth of stuff. So early on you can only really use Shielder and one or two others. This goes up as you level, so it’s really only irritating at lower levels.

The game is still pretty new here as opposed to over in Japan, so there isn’t a whole lot to do just yet. The story so far only spans three chapters, though it does take the time you get through both because of the extensive (and occasionally poorly translated) dialogue and your stamina limit. Once you finish that it’s basically just down to doing daily missions and farming materials to power up your servants until they release more content.

All in all, Grand Order is a decent game if you’re a Fate fan and just want to play it for the experience. Despite what I said in the title you don’t actually need to spend anything to just play the game for the story. I give it about a 7/10 overall and hopefully, we’ll see more interesting content being added in the near future. That’s all from me today, happy gaming all and have a great week.