Fate/Grand Order might look like a straightforward game when you first start, with a simple combat system where picking three cards and occasionally hitting skills seems all you need. Early battles can feel easy enough if you just spam Buster cards, but that sense of simplicity doesn’t last.
Eventually, you’ll encounter battles that make you realize something’s missing: powerful enemies that soak up your hits, like an 800,000 HP Berserker in a current event that laughs off your 10,000 damage attacks. This sharp difficulty spike can leave you feeling stuck and frustrated.
Looking online for answers, you’ll see others performing astonishing combos, dealing over 100,000 damage and chaining multiple Noble Phantasms. Suddenly, it’s clear that the game never fully prepared you for what’s actually involved in mastering its battle mechanics.
The burning question arises: why didn’t Fate/Grand Order’s tutorial actually teach how to play properly?
The tutorial introduces you to what the different card colors do, how to activate skills, and what a Noble Phantasm is, but that’s about it. After these basics, you’re expected to learn the game’s deeper systems on your own, which can be baffling when the battles get tough fast.
Image showing Fate/Grand Order gameplay with battle cards and Noble Phantasm
The root of this problem lies in the fact that Fate/Grand Order today is a very different beast from the game released back in 2015. Over nearly ten years, the battle system and gameplay elements have evolved significantly, making a single, comprehensive tutorial complicated to create.
While the fundamental structure of selecting cards and using skills remains, dozens of changes—some minor, others monumental—have reshaped how battles work and how you’re meant to approach them. Covering all these nuances in a beginner tutorial would be overwhelming and confusing.
To put this into perspective, early on, the game didn’t even allow players to choose which enemy to target—your servants attacked whichever foe was in front. This was quickly changed after release because it was far too restrictive, with only the Orleans story chapter designed around that limitation.
Moreover, once you selected the attack button in battle initially, you couldn’t back out, so missing to use an important skill meant waiting until your next turn. This frustrating restriction was removed months after launch, reflecting the ongoing refinement the game has undergone.
Since then, many features have been added: seven support servants to choose from, enhanced character customization via Fous, double speed battle options, and an enemy class indicator for upcoming battles—all of which changed how you strategize and prepare for fights.
Alongside gameplay changes, the game’s appearance has matured. Early servants had rudimentary animations, but years of visual updates have brought many characters up to modern standards, though a few still await a revamp.
Despite all this evolution, the game has added tutorial components—for example, explaining the double battle speed feature—but full explanations of the current meta, support roles, and advanced techniques remain absent from the in-game tutorial.
What the tutorial can’t convey is the complex meta that has developed over years, centered around damage boosting and skill synergies that new players won’t intuitively discover without help. These layers of strategy define the challenge of late-game content.
Understanding why things have become so complicated means looking back at how the support servant meta evolved. Initially, limited servant choices meant players relied mostly on favorites or straightforward counters, with little meta to speak of.
The first seismic shift came with the arrival of the 5-star Caster servant Merlin in late 2016. Merlin could greatly accelerate Noble Phantasm charge rates, setting the stage for new combat strategies involving high burst damage and efficient skill use.
Before Merlin, supports like Zhuge Liang and Tamamo-no-Mae existed, but Merlin’s power to speed up allies opened up the possibility of using dupe servants from your friend list to stack buffs—a strategy that shaped the meta extensively.
After Merlin’s release, the game held steady for about two years before the third anniversary brought a revolutionary change: the introduction of Skadi. Skadi’s skills could instantly fill 50% of an ally’s NP gauge and boost Quick card damage by 50%, enabling the famous “double Skadi” setup.
This meta allowed players to loop their Noble Phantasms repeatedly with AoE Quick servants like Edmond Dantes and Lancelot, drastically cutting down battle times. While game-changing, this shifted competitive focus predominantly toward Quick-type servants.
Later, the 5th anniversary introduced Caster Artoria, known by fans as Castoria. She not only provided NP gauge boosts but also significantly enhanced Arts card damage and NP generation rates, creating a new, dominant “double Castoria” meta.
This allowed most AoE Arts servants to loop battles quickly and reliably, diversifying the meta beyond the Quick-focused strategies. As a result, the use of support servants like Castoria or Skadi became nearly mandatory for high-level play.
With this change to the meta, it became commonplace for players to exclusively rely on their AoE Quick-NP servants, with most others getting sidelined. This was the era of Edmond Dantes, Lancelot, and Parvati. While this was a major change to the meta, Quick servants weren’t always reliable due to inconsistent damage and NP gather rates.
Skadi undeniably changed the game forever, but she was still a niche that couldn’t be applied to every servant. However, presumably because of the success of Skadi, Lasengle would soon play into this new looping meta themselves with the release of the game’s 5th anniversary servant in 2020: Caster Artoria, affectionately called Castoria by the fanbase.
Castoria not only had the ability to raise ally NP gauges by 50%, but she could also raise their base attack by 20%, their Arts attack by 50%, and most vitally their NP generation rate by 30%. All of this, combined with the fact that Arts-type servants by default could raise their NP gauges faster than Quick-type servants, meant that a new meta would be formed.
While only a select few Quick-type servants could loop battles under the double Skadi system, nearly every AoE Arts-type servant in the game could loop battles under the double Castoria meta. The fanbase would quickly latch onto this, and the idea of using any servant other than Castoria or Skadi as a support became nearly nonexistent.