what do you need to know to get into Fate ?

written By Ethan

Edited by Kwame Obiri-Addai 

So you have seen one of the billions of spin-offs, new servants or even the thing I’ve written, and it’s made you wanna check out this new Fate thing, but where do you start? Isn’t it super confusing? Well, to answer those questions, I'm going to explain what basic stuff you need to know to just jump into whatever Fate thing has caught your interest. And no it’s not confusing, it's a franchise that's been going for more than 5 years so it just seems daunting from the outside.

Ok, so first thing you need to know is that Fate has a lot of spin offs, but originally was just the visual novel Fate/Stay Night, set in the Nasuverse (the term used to refer to the universe of written works by Kinoko Nasu). It tells the story of Shirou Emiya - a young man that gets caught up in the 5th holy grail war, a battle royale between 7 mages and their summoned Heroic Spirit, with the winning team getting to make a wish with the holy grail. This visual novel ended up being crazy popular (hence all the spin offs), leading to all three of its anime routes getting anime adaptations - two by Ufotable and one by studio Deen. And already we have our first thing we need to expand on. 

Heroic Spirits are figures from myth and history, or fiction (if they were believed to be real.) When they are summoned the holy grail fills them in on what's happened since they died, and that they are now a Heroic Spirit. Normally, they can be categorized into one of 7 main classes those being:

Saber - sword users 

Lancer - people that fight with pole arms 

Archers - anyone that fights with any ranged weapons 

Riders - people that are known for having a mount or vehicle 

Assassins - your ninjas, and well, assassins 

Casters - mages, scholars, and generally most people that wouldn't fit into other classes tend to wind up here

Berserkers - people that get summoned as berserkers tend to have traded sanity for physical power, how much sanity can vary from heroic spirit 

Since the days of Stay Night, many additional classes have been introduced but for most Fate media, you don’t need to know about the extra classes in order to jump in. All you really need to know is that when a Heroic Spirit is summoned by someone, the summoner is given magic seals that they can use to make the spirit do things. The summoner is normally called The Master and the summoned spirit is called The Servant.  It’s also worth noting that heroic spirits can be summoned into more than one class. For example, Hercules is normally shown to be in the berserker class but he meets the qualifications to be summoned into any class. Additionally, across the many Fate spin-offs, Heroic Sprites are summoned from the same place. This can lead to Heroic Sprites popping up across multiple spin-offs after getting summoned. Unless specified otherwise, Servants lose their memories of their time summoned. 

The next most important thing you need to know is, most Fate stuff is relatively self-contained unless it’s a sequel to something or Fate/Grand Order (that mobile game kinda serves as a big franchise wide crossover). Each Fate thing is telling its own story, its own grail war with different Servants getting summoned. It might not seem like that, but it’s true. Some spin-offs take place in different timelines, or make reference to others (mainly Stay Night if i'm honest) but if you have this baseline knowledge, you will probably be fine. Most Fate spin-offs do take the time to explain things anyway because they know their spin-off might be someone's first experience with the franchise. Probably don’t start with Fate/Extra -  that one’s set in its own timeline in the moon that's also a super magic computer. Maybe work up to that one. 

Anyway, yes readers, expect more Fate content in the future from me. I hope this guide helps you to jump into that Fate thing you found and wanted to check out.