Things that annoy you in TM

[Mcjon01]

But thin mints are the best

[Leftovers]

Was robo Hermes Trismegistus the beginning of that?

It's not a matter of lore getting rewritten or Tsukihime getting shafted. Everything about F/GO's initial premise is completely workable and could make a fantastic story that played on the strengths of the concept of Servants, their role as bastions/guardians of humanity, and humanity's own ontological standing and debt in the grand scheme of the setting. It just did everything wrong in the worst way possible and succeeded massively for it.

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Really the most reliable way to figure out what went wrong for your own personal definition of wrongness is to take up this line of thought that "there has been a genre/setting/narrative shift and it doesn't feel like it used to" and just follow it.

[Twelveseal]

Failing upwards happens sometimes. Unfortunately.

[Zurvan]

Fate
Extra

[asterism42]

Yeah, Fate Extra is where it really started, what with the alien moon computer

[Twelveseal]

Oof. Yeah... Servants are fine, most of... everything else in that? I mean, really? Did you have to make a new Rin that wasn't Rin, but Rin's niece, but is still called Rin? Or a fake Sakura that goes on to multiply and become even more lewd than the regular erotical black hole? Couldn't that have just been a new character? And Shinji, who's just some kiddo, but for whatever reason has the same name and appearance and behavior as...

Really.
Did you have to reuse all that stuff and then some?
And tbh, I'd prefer to keep the Sci-fi elements in TM to a minimum. The whole Velber thing still bothers me.

Extra is very much the point where I stopped paying much attention to the lore or trying to keep up with it. Hints aside in Melty Blood, that wasn't the kind of thing that drew me to the setting and it kind of leaves me put-off.

[Mcjon01]

Just remember that kid Shinji in Extra is simply proof that Fate Shinji was the perfect genetic specimen and model Elite Gamer

[Blastedspider]

Suddenly, they're not just inhuman, but alien robot mecha that don't really have any relation to their original myths, except that Zeus has electricity (probably) and Artemis shoots things (with an orbital cannon laser).

I think this isn't exactly fair criticism. The Pantheon encountered in LB5 are not the Greek Gods; they are creatures of alternative mythology. They share foundation to a degree (the war agains Kronus did happen, for example) but ultimately separate existences. Its like getting angry that Ivan the Fourth is a half-mammoth monstrosity.

Also they didn't bother to include Herc in a Greek lostbelt, which is just about the worst crime FGO could've committed.

The Berserker wouldn't add anything meaningful to the story.
The proper Archer version would overshadow most of the cast (and quite possibly solo'ed everything).
And Alcides would be just be out of place.

[Twelveseal]

Just remember that kid Shinji in Extra is simply proof that Fate Shinji was the perfect genetic specimen and model Elite Gamer

The thing is, that actually makes some sense. Shinji was noted for excelling at basically everything he did except being a mage... and Extra Shinji had Circuits, otherwise he wouldn't have been able to compete. So jacked up as it sounds, at least discounting his psychological issues, there's actually some merit to that.

[Reign]

Fate
Extra

I don't think I'll ever dislike anything out of this series more than I do Extra tbh
I can't even really put into words what my problem is with it, but I don't enjoy anything to do with the Extraverse. I only bought Extella because liking musous is my secret shame.

[Twelveseal]

Well, let's see... Extraverse does the following:

• Retroactively inserts heavy science fiction elements into a setting that had heretofore been a seemingly pure Fantasy setting, with only the vaguest hints otherwise in some of Melty Blood's dialogue and the Sci-Fantasy future presented in Notes. The Moon Cell, the Velbers, Digitizing the Soul and deleting it, rogue A.I.s and the concept of love between natural and artificial life are all deviations from the previous genre. Yet because of how the lore between the timelines intersects, these deviations are instead forced across all timelines to some extent, so it literally changes how every previous entry in the setting is viewed in relation to the rest of the world.

• Completely rejects the previous understanding of power balance in the setting. The Moon Cell is implied to have functionally unlimited power and can take things that were previously already extremely powerful and blows those old standards out of the water by allowing the Servants in that timeline to exploit the world in order to gain literally galaxy destroying power. The implications this has in terms of what could theoretically be done by anyone in the Moon Cell with the right skills is just dumb. It simultaneously makes Servants even more powerful and even less remarkable by saying that these beings who were theoretically considered perfect can still improve, and that anyone who can find a way to kill some Viruses in this giant computer could achieve the same results.

• Recycles old material in largely uninteresting ways. Rin, Shinji, Sakura, and even the Servants are reused in ways that are really kind of boring. Here's a bunch of characters you know who act like the ones you know, but actually aren't the same characters! It'd be more interesting to see their roles filled by new characters, like say, Rani, and leave these characters to their own franchises. I have a similar complaint about all the Pseudo Servants in FGO, and to an extent with Jeanne, since her Apoc appearance is now her canon one, despite that apparently being largely the look of her human vessel rather than her own... It just feels lazy, like it's both a cop-out and a cash-in. And I mean really, how do you even explain the existence of EMIYA in this thing? With no magical energy, he shouldn't have become a Counter Guardian or gained any supernatural powers... How does he even exist?

• Has boring gameplay, overall. I literally have never completed Extra despite owning the damn thing in hard copy because the gameplay is so damn boring. I inevitably get so tired of it that I drop before even facing Rin/Rani. Turn-Based Rock/Paper/Scissors with pattern prediction can only hold my attention for so long before I'm out.

• Begins the truly shameless genderbend trend. Saber I can understand; there's a fairly compelling story behind her concealing her gender. Emperor Nero? Nah, no real explanation there. Or why she's a Saberface. Sir Francis Drake? Outright acknowledged in-game as originally being male irl. Attila? Not even just female but also an alien. Of note, the Photon Ray might have been our first real hint that the Greco-Roman gods were going to be some weird Sci-Fi thing... This trend just kept going. Like, sure, I don't mind Jack the Ripper (though I wish she'd wear more clothes) because there's an in-setting and irl justification for her. But there's a lot of others, especially now, that have none besides a need to churn out waifus for thirsty NEET Incels with the money to drop on merch. This is where that horrible trend started.

• Just feels kind of bullshitty. Like, the justification for it is weird, and it almost feels like the dystopian, magic-less Earth would be as interesting, or more so, to explore as this weird cyber-fantasy realm.

• The writing doesn't feel particularly strong, to be honest. Probably part of this is because the MC is full tabula rasa. Normally this is fine for a VN, but in Extra, it just feels flat. It makes it harder to relate to the characters than anything else because Hakuno is basically just... empty. I haven't watched the anime, but I've heard Shaft changed this, so that's good at least, but in terms of the games... it's just kind of blah.

These are my thoughts on it. I see it as a point that turned the setting lore on its head, but not in a good way, and started a bunch of negative trends that plague us to this day.

Edited to make it look less textwall.

[Mcjon01]

Drake was the best genderbend in that there was no implausible gender concealing involved, just pure big dick energy

[Blastedspider]

I wouldn't call Extra to be "heavy" science fiction. Its about as scientific as comic books science is. If anything it just illustrates that in context of Nasuverse science and magic are just two different approaches to the same phenomenon.

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Take Moon Cell, for example.

You call it extemely sophisticated sentient machine which can interfere with the physical reality on the quantum level or you can say that it is an Eye of God which is capable of determining the path which the future would follow. Both would be correct from the perspective you're working from.

[Dullahan]

All efforts to find a 'point' at which things went downhill are misguided. All such determinations of specific 'points' will not stand up to scrutiny. The seeds of decline were present from the very beginning. What is essential is to see how they grew.

If you have recently experienced LB5 and thought 'wow, this is fucking retarded' - yes, exactly. Correct. But not sufficient. If, as left has drawn to attention, you were 'okay' with FGO up to this point, you must re-examine those experiences of being 'okay' with it. You will discover, if you're honest, that the fucking retardation was not a recent addition. The fucking retardation has been here from the beginning, and because it was fed, it grew and grew until - like mould, or cancer, or a yeast infection - it could no longer be ignored. The calls are coming from inside the house.

[Twelveseal]

@Blastedspider: I know, that's why I didn't refer to it as Hard Sci-Fi. It's not serious by any means in that regard. It's just that it takes something that was previously magical and reframes it as something that's scientific in a setting that'd previously implied a degree of conflict between scientific thought and magical thought, especially insofar as the way Mystery works. One moves forward, the other backward, and while its possible to amalgamate the two like with Kerry or the way Kirei viewed Tokiomi's tools vs. modern convenience, it's not really shown much that the two are fused in the previous entries in the setting.

Example: of all the magical things we see throughout Tsukihime and Fate, the only place we see tech show up is in modern creations of modern characters. Sion's Black Barrel Replica, Ciel's modifications to Nanako, Mech-Hisuis, etc... When Gilgamesh shows up, all of his weapons and items are far-removed from technological appearances with the exception of Vimana, and even that is depicted as a magic thing and not a scientific one. This is true of all the Servants up until Extra, where we start seeing Alien Technology that's basically magic and has been around since the early days of humanity at least... and is overwhelmingly powerful. One would think that the guy that has every notable weapon and a dislike of the gods would have seen fit to use something like it. And sure, Ea looks like a rock drill. Why is it that that's the only thing he seems to have that's like that? It's weird, and feels like a dramatic shift in theme and flavor from the rest of the setting when suddenly ancient alien tech is the new meta where before it was oldest relics of the gods.

I mean maybe this was all planned. There are things you can point at and say "well this was a hint that it was something else all along," but it really just feels like a massive change in tone, one largely out of left field. At least to me.

[LJ3]

I'm left wondering on when did it start or if it never stopped being dumb that ancient aliens are key part of TM cosmology

I remember being fascinated by the concepts introduced through Angel Notes and codified through Tsukihime. Extra in it self isn't the worst example of introducing weird comic book sci-fi ideas unless you consider the biggest sin for it to be the one that opened the gates to enable more of this.

[Rafflesiac]

and to an extent with Jeanne, since her Apoc appearance is now her canon one, despite that apparently being largely the look of her human vessel rather than her own

Conveniently, Laeticia and Jeanne look exactly the same save Laeticia having an extra centimeter around the bust.

[LJ3]

What an incredibly needed detail.

[Zork Knight]

It all started when Lu Bu Fengxian was a robot...

[LJ3]

Man, if I wanted this kind of blend of high stakes sci-fi trappings

I'd rather read a superhero comic right now.

Surely there are better renditions of what we're getting now.