The Winter of 2019 was a particularly rough time in my life. I had just aged out of my dad's health insurance plan, and was balancing an unpaid internship with a lousy retail supervisor job with a boss who refused to give me anything higher. He claimed "women don't belong in manager roles."
This was while simultaneously receiving verbal abuse daily from Crafter Susans over not being able to use fifty coupons for clearance yarn, a feat which I balanced with trying to avoid the shady loiterers who always frequented the shop after seven. Crying fits in the break room were a regular thing.
Around the same time, I happened to discover a phone game called Fate/Grand Order, all while having zero knowledge of what Gacha was. To this day, I credit it towards being the thing that got me through that time. No matter how loud or rude your typical Karens or Janets were about picture frame sales, I was always able to forget about it through adventures with Mash and King Arthur in Fate Grand/Order.
A Primer On Fate
For a quick background, Grand Order is a product of the Fate franchise, a series where Mages summon heroes of the past to engage in grand battles. The mobile game derails a little bit from the typical Holy Grail War-esque plot by making the player essentially one of the last people on Earth. You are summoned as a recruit to a security organization known as Chaldea, whose goal is to prevent the extinction of humanity by traveling through time and space to fix warped periods of history. You, along with the other recruits, are brought in for your potential abilities as a Master. Unfortunately, things don't go as planned, and you end up being the only Master left in Chaldea. Now, it's all up to you to level your servants and save humanity from incineration!
The other day I was playing as I always do and was leveling one of my favorite characters, Hassan of the Cursed Arm. He's not a particularly rare servant, but players have come to call him Uncle Hassan over the years for his role as a guide during the game's Camelot arc. See, when I started the game I wasn't able to get many assassin characters, so I had to rely on the lower-ranking units more often than not. Fortunately, I've been lucky enough to grow my roster exponentially since those days; despite now having characters like Semiramis and Jack the Ripper, I've never forgotten Cursed Arm's help, which is why I had to give him a Holy Grail.
Canonically, a Grail in Fate will grant any wish, but here it's for breaking a servant level ca. So if you have a lower rarity servant you like whose level is limited, you can power them up with a few Grails. As I got Cursed Arm to level 80, I couldn't help but feel oddly emotional all of a sudden, but why? It's just a game, after all - nothing more than coded pixels on a phone screen.
A Game That Grows With You
I've been playing Grand Order for almost two years now, and to say it's been a long road is an understatement. This is the main difference between the experience of a traditional game and a mobile game, whose story is continuous over a period of time. In a typical title, your content is limited and ends at a certain point, but in a game where the story is always being updated, time forces you to bond with your characters. After all those long hours of pumping in your blood, sweat, and tears into grinding power-ups and currency so you can have a chance to get the servant you want, you can't help but feel grateful to the ones always at your side.
This is the kind of game where getting good takes a lot of patience, and while I wouldn't call it really difficult, there is a hump of grinding you need to maneuver over if you want to get anywhere. Not to mention the difficulty hops from a 4 to a 17 at one point, and you're forced to figure out how to get through it with the squad you have.
Grand Order's Gacha rates are also so painful that people have been known to use 500 to 600 points worth of currency and still not get the servant they want. There are legends of players even using up to a thousand. I've had several occasions where I wished to uninstall the game - times when I got nothing at all, or pulled someone strong but not who I wanted. After being scammed by Tammano-No-Mae for the 3rd or 4th time, I realized something about Gacha games in general.
The fact of the matter is, you might never get someone you want, so why waste time lamenting when you most likely already have a decent set of servants in your roster?
Make Do With What You've Got
I'm a big believer in utilizing what you have. Let me look in the fridge, give me some pasta or rice from the pantry, and I can put something together for a meal in no time. When I lived in a shitty little ovenless apartment, I used to make rigatoni in the microwave with a bowl, some water, and a little salt. This was the era where mug cakes and mug mac n' cheese were all the rage, so when Tasty would share those videos on Facebook, I thought, well I can just do that with plain old noodles and a jar of sauce, right? As a lifelong creature of habit, my domestic skills carried over to my gaming methods, because why wouldn't they?
Unlike a lot of other Gacha titles, this one doesn't give out pity rates, makes you pay for guaranteed 5*s, and is more stingy with handing out game currency than your Grandmother with her coupon bag at the food store. While this definitely won't be everyone's cup of tea, I find it much more intimate to have a smaller roster of units than accumulating many different characters. You use the same characters sometimes for months or years at a time, and rely on what the Gacha decides to give you. After a point, when the salt of the lottery system finally sinks in, you develop gratitude towards those who did come home when you needed them the most.
This is especially true when you get to the gnarly boss fights in the later portions of the game, because what the heck would I have done without Jeanne D'Arc's noble phantasm to protect my team? I never imagined all those years of being dragged to church and falling asleep in Sunday school could be a catalyst to summon a holy maiden, but I'm definitely not mad about it.
Sympathy For The "Devil"
The way the servants are so well characterized, I can't help but empathize with them.
One of the North American servers recent additions, the avenger class Antonio Salieri, is a musician from history who was rumored to have killed Amadeus Mozart. Typically, avenger servants are aggressive and dark, they were hurt somehow in life. Salieri doesn't have that personality, yet the grail manifested him as one because the legends of him being a murderer ruined his reputation. His final form is that of a monstrous figure reflecting what the dark power of gossip and groupthink can do, and he tells you this is his true form and there's nothing you can do.
I've experienced gossip too, Mr. Salieri. I totally get it, so I'll accept you for whatever you are. Besides, these guys got me through the end of working retail and the urge to pelt wooden craft sticks at people, so why should I nitpick?