Fate/Grand Order: Lostbelt No. 4 – Yugakshetra

Saṃsāra of Genesis and Terminus

Lostbelt No. 4 – Yugakshetra is “finally” here after six months since the release of Lostbelt No. 3. I get it, the Japanese server went over a year between Lostbelt No. 5 and 6. But, they did have other “main story” chapters within that time.

I wouldn’t exactly say that I had high hopes for Yugakshetra going in. I’d heard that SIN was more difficult overall, but that Yugakshetra had one boss battle that was harder. And as for the story, I knew nothing going in other than that Arjuna Alter (God Arjuna) was the Lostbelt King.

With that in mind, I was hopeful for a good story, but my expectations for the gameplay were a bit low. If you’ve read my reviews of the previous two Lostbelts, I’m definitely a fan of hard content. I want Challenge Quest level difficulty when I go into boss fights.

As always is always the case with these Lostbelt reviews, there are going to be major spoilers. You’ve been warned. Now, let’s get into an overview of Yugakshetra.

Scandinavia Peperoncino is the Crypter of the Indian Lostbelt. However, this time around, he’s an ally for most of the chapter. That’s because his servant, Aśvatthāman, was stolen from him by the Lostbelt King God Arjuna.

God Arjuna’s whole thing is that he collected all of the Indian gods within himself to become the sole god. He then drastically increased the cycle of death and rebirth of the world so that he could eliminate everything he deemed “evil.”

The Good Parts

I’m not going to sugarcoat it; the good parts of Yugakshetra are far outweighed by the bad parts. So let’s quickly run through the few things I genuinely liked about this Lostbelt. First, I like God Arjuna (in theory). And second, I like the Yuga cycle.

God Arjuna (or Godjuna) is really cool. I’m actually not a fan of regular Arjuna. In fact, I burned the copy of Arjuna I summoned years ago. I regret that now, but at the time I knew I wasn’t going to use him because I had better Archers and there wasn’t yet another way to get Rare Prisms.

God Arjuna fixes every issue I have with regular Arjuna. Rather than looking like some class president nerd, God Arjuna is a complete chad. Plus, I’m always a fan of the dark skin/white hair combo. Also, rather than being pretty bad, God Arjuna is one of the best servants in the game.

The Yuga cycle is a pretty cool addition to Lostbelt No. 4. It doesn’t really have any effect on gameplay, though since it changes based on where you are in the story. But basically, it’s just a cool way to keep track of where you are within the world of the Indian Lostbelt.

The Yuga cycle is made up of 10 days split into four Yuga. The first Yuga is four days long, the second is three, the third is two, and the fourth is one. As the world progresses through the cycle, it gets increasingly more dangerous.

And at the end of the final Yuga, God Arjuna destroys the world and recreates it, thus starting the cycle over. When he does so, he also purges everything that he considers “evil” from the previous cycle. It’s cool to have a calendar like that so you always know where you stand compared to the reset.

The Bad Parts

There are a lot of things I don’t like about Yugakshetra. This might be my least favorite Lostbelt. But also I did skip through decent chunks of Lostbelt No. 1. So I don’t exactly have the full story of that. This is my least favorite of the ones I’ve reviewed.

Disappointing Art and Music

Yugakshetra has the Yuga cycle calendar which is cool. But other than that, the cool art of the series really only comes at the very end. Meanwhile, SIN had a bunch of cool art all throughout the chapter, not just at the end.

And by cool art, I don’t mean character sprites with backgrounds. Yes, God Arjuna has a very cool character sprite. But what I mean are all of the special scenes of characters doing cool things — like Napoleon disintegrating away or Spartacus shooting into the sky to fight a meteor head on.

Yugakshetra had Karna vs. God Arjuna at the end. I think there were a few other things, but that’s the only one I remember right now. And if I don’t remember them, were they that good?

The music is a bigger issue for me. While I didn’t like it at the start, the map theme for Yugakshetra has grown on me. However, SIN’s map theme is way better. And while Qin Shi Huang received an amazing theme in SIN, God Arjuna didn’t get the same in Yugakshetra.

I kept waiting for a cool song to start playing accompanying God Arjuna. But it never happened.

Low Difficulty Until the End

As I mentioned earlier, I had heard that this Lostbelt wasn’t as hard as SIN. Those rumors were correct. I was extremely disappointed in the difficulty level of this chapter. It did get harder at the end (which I’ll go into later on), but most of Yugakshetra was pretty easy.

Below, you’ll see a picture from one of the boss fights against Aśvatthāman. The team you see me using here is effectively the team I used for the whole Lostbelt until Verse 19 (the end).

Basically, I brought Qin Shi Huang, a support Merlin, and another random servant who had class advantage — in this case, Tamamo Lancer. Really, I think you could beat the majority of Yugakshetra with just Qin Shi Huang soloing.

Now, I get it. People are going to say that the team I used is kind of OP and not attainable for most players. But, my team isn’t as busted as you may think. Yes, I have Qin Shi Huang and Merlin on it, but there’s more to it you don’t see there.

First of all, there’s no real backline. In the back, I just had some unleveled servants who were there for bond XP. And second, none of the servants on my team, including the support, had “real” Craft Essences. They all had bond, master, or mystic code XP-boosting CEs.

I could have put my max limit broken 2030, Kaleidoscope, or whatever other top-tier CEs on my servants. But I didn’t need to. The fights were so easy that I didn’t actually build a team until the end. I even used Saber Lily in some fights.

Mostly Uninteresting Characters

Would anyone disagree if I said that Yugakshetra had the worst characters of any Lostbelt so far? I was very underwhelmed by everyone except probably Rama. Rama was great just because all of his dialogue eventually ended with him mentioning Sita.

Pepe was an alright character. I expected more from him, honestly. Karna is cool, but he wasn’t there most of the time. Jinako (Ganesha) was pretty cringe. And Lakshmi Bai existed, I guess. None of them wowed me like some of the allies in previous Lostbelts.

The enemies weren’t any better. Asclepius and William Tell each had their own little sections of the story. But I didn’t feel like they really had much of an impact. They were simply there as enemies to be defeated before reaching God Arjuna.

Aśvatthāman was better in that regard. However, I felt that his whole character being “I’m angry because if I stop being angry what will I have left?” was boring. He effectively had Madness Enhancement EX, but an Archer class.

And don’t even get me started on God Arjuna himself. He has such a cool design, and yet they gave him absolutely no personality. He didn’t even come across as a high and mighty god to me. He just seemed robotic. That was a huge waste of the coolest Lostbelt King so far.

A Plot Full of Holes

Time travel can be done well. But there are a lot of things that have to be done right for that to happen. The big concern whenever time travel occurs is the inclusion of paradoxes. And Yugakshetra was full of them.

For example, let’s look at Jinako’s whole story arc. It really makes no sense, which is kind of a big deal when you consider how central it was to the story of the Lostbelt as a whole.

At the start of the chapter, there are three things that are important to take note of: Jinako, Karna, and God’s Skyboulder. When Jinako joins your team, she also hints that there’s some history between her and Karna.

Fast forward to late in the chapter and we learn that Karna sent Jinako back in time to set up a way to defeat God Arjuna. This explains the prior connection between Jinako and Karna. We’re fine so far, but then there’s the Skyboulder.

After being sent back in time, Jinako is encased within the Skyboulder for thousands of years until you awaken her at the end of the story. But since Jinako was part of your team at the start, and the Skyboulder existed then too, there were technically two of her in the same timeline.

But, there’s more. This also means that the Jinako who recognized that she and Karna had a past connection wasn’t the Jinako who had that past connection. That Jinako was in the Skyboulder. It’s all just a big mess without any good explanation.

Verse 19: The Final Dark God

The last section of the chapter (aside from the epilogue) is Verse 19: The Final Dark God. I mentioned that Yugakshetra got difficult at the end — this is when it happens. There are three fights in this section, and they’re all pretty hard.

This is the only time throughout the whole Lostbelt that I actually built teams specifically to overcome a challenge. So, let’s go through how I did it quickly.

The first fight was against Limbo in the first wave and God Arjuna in the second. It took me a few attempts, tweaking my team each time, but the overall concept was the same: Smash Limbo on turn 1 with a Berserker, keep that Berserker alive as long as possible against God Arjuna with Taunters (and Merlin for the first NP), and then Cú in the back.

Fight number two is the one against God Arjuna in which you’re forced to use the support Karna. This can be a hard fight. However, once you realize that Karna is the key, it’s laughably easy. All you need to do is get Karna past God Arjuna’s first NP with his guts intact.

My team was Karna (obviously), Hans because I don’t have Waver, Georgios and Leonidas for taunting with NP battery on death CEs to help Karna, and Shakespeare and Mozart both with taunt CEs on them so they could double as taunters and single-turn buffers.

Yes, you can beat this fight with a team of 1-2 star servants.

The final fight against Aśvatthāman and the Tree was fairly hard. I used Tamamo Lancer, d’Eon, Merlin, Mash, Nero, and Qin Shi Huang. Tamamo was the damage dealer, everyone else had some way to protect her, and then Qin Shi Huang cleaned up solo at the end.

Cosmos Denied

I guess I need to discuss the end result of this Lostbelt chapter before moving on to the conclusion. This conclusion wasn’t as sad or bittersweet to me as the previous three were. And I think a big reason for that is that the outcome was always going to be the same anyway.

In Lostbelt 1, the people of that world were fighting for their future and we were fighting for ours. The reason that ending was good is that despite knowing their world was going to end, they still decided to fight for freedom.

Lostbelt 2 went in a sadder direction. It was an extremely peaceful world, and yet we destroyed it and everyone living in it simply because it wasn’t our own. The Scandinavian Lostbelt was innocent, and we denied it anyway.

With Lostbelt 3, we got in a fight against the Lostbelt King to determine which world was right. In the end we won, so Qin Shi Huang accepted that the Chinese Lostbelt wasn’t the right path for humanity. He tried his best to make the perfect world, but it didn’t work out.

God Arjuna’s world is very different from all of those. In Russia, the people fought for a better life. In Scandinavia, people lived short but peaceful lives. In China, people lived simple but peaceful lives. And in India, everyone gets erased in the end.

I really can’t feel bad about erasing the Indian Lostbelt and all the people who live in it when God Arjuna was already doing that to them. He was literally erasing people. So what’s the difference if I do it? It’s the same outcome, so I don’t really feel bad about it.

Conclusion

In the end, I think I have to give Lostbelt No. 4 – Yugakshetra a 6/10. I enjoyed playing it. But I didn’t enjoy it as much as the previous two Lostbelt chapters. There were just way too many things wrong with it that added up over the course of the chapter.

Also, I should mention that God Arjuna released for summoning today. I spent 540 Saint Quartz and 8 tickets to receive 0 copies of him. But, as a consolation, I did get NP5+ Asclepius, NP2 Aśvatthāman, and NP1 Beowulf, Suzuka Gozen, and Medusa Lancer.

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My review of Lostbelt No. 5 – Atlantis is available now.