Sometimes I think we're the most reluctant Fate/Grand Order player ever. We're playing FGO under Kris's name, although to be fair, I'm the one with the strong emotional attachments to the Heroic Spirits. I've known Arthur and Mordred for a long time now! That is to say, I developed a childhood fondness for Arthuriana a long while ago, and I regard the Fate/ versions of Arthur &c. as valid interpretations of the mythos. Arturia Pendragon is "my" King Arthur—and yet, it's a genuine uphill struggle to make ourselves play the game she headlines.
I wonder if this is some consequence of my own fictive nature. I find that all fictive depictions of great gods and heroes now feel like they've got their share of these entities' power to stir the soul. Euripides's Herakles and Steve Reeves' Hercules are kindred; one is anguished and tragic and stained with his own family's blood, the other is a himbo who always gets the girl in the end, and yet they are both vessels for the true Herakles. Heck, there's power even in the most casual and cynical invocation of such timeless heroes. L. Ron Hubbard giving the name "Excalibur" to a ship in his private Sea Org navy is so infuriating because Excalibur hums with spiritual power. It feels like an insult that matters.
But back to Fate/Grand Order. My way into the Fate/ Universe was through anime; I was bowled over by Arturia because of Fate/Zero and Mordred because of Fate/Apocrypha, and my best friend Kaylin played FGO (but more on that later) and thus we tried to play the game ourselves. It felt like some sort of connection to characters we'd already developed a bond with—and no doubt that's partly what Type-Moon and the Nasu empire is counting on. "Oh dear! Do you feel like the Heaven's Feel movies kicked your emotions into little pieces? Don't worry, everyone you love can be found in a gacha game! Which you can play forever!"
In other words I've always been uncomfortably aware of how the Fate/ franchise and especially Fate/Grand Order, a game into which it's far too easy to dump thousands of dollars a night, relies upon an extreme degree of emotional exploitation. It's like bear-baiting—you may remember this nightmarish Elizabethan pastime of tying a bear to a pole and sending dogs after it (They have tied me to a stake; I cannot fly / But bear-like I must fight the course, to quote Macbeth), which must surely have attracted at least some sympathy for the bear in their hopeless fight. FGO has always felt a bit like that: the Earth is said to be destroyed (that's revealed at the outset, that's not a spoiler) and you're hoping that the timey-wimey magitek of the Fate/ universe will allow you to restore Earth, but I'm told that this never reliably occurs, and why would it? If you decisively saved Earth there'd be no reason to keep FGO going, and I think it's fairly safe to assume that like all corporate things, Fate/Grand Order is meant to go on forever. Great heroes and gods even, icons of strength and power and wisdom who have inspired the admiration and love of who knows however many millions of human beings, get to fight each other amid the ruins of Earth—forever.
(And then there's the pervy aspects of Fate/Grand Order...and the racıst aspects of Fate/Grand Order...and...well you know. That's all a bit much for one post.)
We used to go weeks without touching the game, always feeling massively guilty about it; only recently have we managed to establish a reasonably regular daily habit of spending at least a little time on FGO. Why are we bothering? To be honest, that's not entirely clear to me. Mainly it's because we have some especially strong emotional bonds with a number of the Heroic Spirits. To take one example: Medea, in the game, inspired us to return to Medea, the Euripides play, and Medea's also nudging us towards resuming the study of ancient Greek and also of magic. Medea's like an advisor and a friend, in other words, and thus it's genuinely helpful to visit her you could say, simply by playing Fate/Grand Order, as if the game were like a miniature shrine or Pantheon, an altar to the household gods in the form of a mobile game.
It's a pity we don't enjoy playing games more. It still feels more like work.
~Chara