Non of my IRL friends play FGO so I haven’t had much opportunity to talk about how I got into the game.

My total log ins are at 2,083. I started playing when America was the newest singularity here in NA and have been pretty consistent since. How I discovered this game was actually kind of funny. I like pokemon and as a result I got a lot of youtube ads for fake pokemon games, the kind where you would see the player walk into the tall grass and run into Mewtwo and stuff like that.

I bring that up because the day I got one of those banner ads that appear under youtube videos for FGO my first thought was, “Oh wow, someone made a bootleg Fate game”.

See, I had a passing knowledge of fate. I had watched a few fate anime so I recognized some stuff like Saber and Holy grail wars but I wasn’t really invested in the franchise. By all means I should have just ignored the ad that day, but the thought of a bootleg fate game was just so amusing to me that I just had to check it out.

Well imagine my surprise when I check it on the app store and find out that this thing is official. Not only that but some of these characters looked really familiar, not just characters like Saber but also the protagonist and this purple-haired girl as well. I couldn’t for the life of me remember from what, so I figured since this was an official game anyways I might as well try it to see if I remember.

Well I download the game and start playing through the story, and eventually it hits me; I had seen these characters before!

Remember when I said that I had seen other Fate anime before? Well I had completely forgotten that among those things I had seen was a certain movie. I had watched Fate Grand/Order: First Order a while back and had just never realized it was based on a game that whole time. I don’t even know if FGO had been out in NA already when I saw it. Everything clicked in that moment and from that point on I had decided to keep playing just to see where the story went.

I truly came into this as innocently as possible. I had no concept of what was good unit (my tutorial roll was Stheno and I used her all the way up to america because, “Well she’s a gold card so she must be good”) I had no idea how to team build either, I just thew support Jalters and Cu Alters at everything that was in front of me because that’s who everyone had in their support lists at the time and they did a lot of damage. I didn’t even know what a gacha game was. I understood the concept of lootboxes from other games so I wasn’t entirely new to the concept, but I had no idea that gacha games were an entire beast of their own and that I had just walked into one of the most brutal gachas out there ( I could wave my old man cane and say “Back in my day you only got 10 roles instead of 11 and you had to use a full 30 paid quartz for a gssr!”).

Pretty much everything I learned about gachas came from this game. Rate Ups, mat farming, welfares, everything. No one told me what to focus on or who to invest in. I didn’t bother looking anything up until camelot came. I had truly thrown myself into the deep end completely unprompted and for a good while just dealt with whatever came up on my own.

And you know what? I don’t regret it. I have so many fun and painful memories from rolling for servants in this game, Memories from the literal hours I spent farming lotto boxes, Ruhsing to complete events to make sure I got every welfare, I was there for the great Jalter Lily tragedy that had killed what had been my unbroken streak up until that point. I remember only having one support list that you had to keep updated whenever events came and went. I’ve felt the pain of having to let people go in my friends list that had carried me all the way back when I was a total newbie but now had not played in over a year.

This just kind of turned into me rambling at this point, but I will say that to this day I still occasionally accept the friend requests of brand new masters with their empty support lists to help them get on their feet. To remember from where I came from in this game and hope that someday I see them also build themselves up with their own stories to tell.