Fate/Grand Order: Lostbelt No. 5 – Atlantis

Ancient Ocean of the Dreadnought Gods

I hope you’re ready for a long review because I have a lot to say about Lostbelt No. 5 – Atlantis. I also hope you’ve already played through Atlantis, because I’m going to be spoiling just about everything in it.

Now, I want to get something controversial out of the way right here at the start of the review. I think Atlantis was the worst Lostbelt chapter in Fate/Grand Order so far. It’s also not even a close competition for that title. This is definitively the worst chapter.

However, I do realize that Lostbelt 5 isn’t finished yet. Atlantis is only the first half. The second half, Olympus, is going to release some time in April or May if I’m not mistaken. And, yes, I’m expecting Olympus to actually be good based on what I know of it so far.

It’s kind of disappointing that I feel this way about Atlantis, though. I really enjoy ancient Greece. In university, I studied ancient Mediterranean history (Greece, Rome, Egypt, and the Near East). And if you’re wondering, my area of focus was on how these cultures influenced each other’s art with their own.

But, anyway, I had high hopes for Atlantis based on the subject matter. And, unfortunately, it didn’t live up to my expectations for a number of reasons. I think the characters, plot, and gameplay of this story chapter were all sub-par.

Servants of Proper Human History

I can’t think of all the friendly servants we’ve partied up with throughout the Lostbelts so far. But, I don’t think any previous Lostbelt had characters I disliked as much as Atlantis did. I don’t think every character in Atlantis is bad, though.

Off the top of my head, the friendly servants from Proper Human History in this chapter were Super Orion, Charlotte Corday, Jason, Mandricardo, Achilles, Kiyome Mochizuki, Bartholomew Roberts, Paris, and Francis Drake (sort of).

Starting with Drake because she didn’t actually join our party, I think her character itself is fine. But the fact that she just happened to “find” one of Poseidon’s cores made no sense.

Next, let’s go over the good characters. There are two of these, and their names are Mandricardo and Jason. Look, everyone loves Mandricardo; he’s basically Ishigami from Kaguya-sama. But, I also really liked Jason because I felt that he had a good mix of comedic relief and serious character moments.

The characters I’m neutral on are Achilles and Kiyome. They both played their roles and didn’t do much more than that. I have no issues with them, but they didn’t stand out either.

The rest, I disliked. Orion, Bartholomew, and Paris were annoying. Orion and Bartholomew are just womanizers (and not in a charming way like Napoleon was). And Paris is a literal child who whines all the time.

I wasn’t a fan of how Corday was just constantly talking about how useless she was, either. But, the real reason I don’t like Corday is something I’ll get to later on.

Plot of Atlantis

At this stage in the review, I want to point out three issues I had with the plot of Atlantis. These are that Odysseus was a shounen antagonist trope, Caenis didn’t get a real story, and I didn’t care about the people of this Lostbelt.

Starting with Odysseus, he pulled the classic shounen battle series antagonist trope of constantly underestimating us while we made progress through the Lostbelt. Odysseus never really tried to defeat us at any point in the chapter.

He’d send some troops or a Cerberus our way. We’d defeat them. Then he’d say something like, “Well, there’s no way they’ll win in the end so we can just let them keep struggling on their way.” And this happened multiple times. Every time we won a battle, he just acted like it was no big deal.

Now, Caenis was the opposite of Odysseus personality-wise. She (he?) wanted to destroy us as soon as possible and actually attempted to do so. I like that. But, she’s defeated like halfway through the chapter and never gets a good character arc.

Caenis’s whole story was that she hates Wodime for forcing her to fight on the side of the gods. And Wodime views her as disposable in return. That’s it. Nothing more happens with her character. I would have loved it if we somehow recruited her to our side.

Lastly, there are the Atlanteans. The previous Lostbelts, I think, did a good job of making us empathize with the people who lived there. I really didn’t care at all about the Atlanteans. They played such a minor role that they don’t matter.

Gameplay of Atlantis

In this first of multiple gameplay sections of the review, I want to focus primarily on the difficulty of the chapter. Atlantis was the easiest Lostbelt chapter so far. And I can tell you right now, the same isn’t going to be true for Olympus.

But, just because there are going to be harder fights in the Olympus chapter doesn’t mean the Atlantis chapter should have been as easy as it was. In fact, one of the hardest battles of the chapter comes right near the start: the (first) Cerberus fight.

The first Cerberus fight isn’t the hardest. But Cerberus was kind of the hardest “real” enemy of the chapter until the Poseidon cores in the very last section. And, while I’ll discuss Poseidon more, later on, I don’t particularly think the Poseidon cores were hard either.

Cerberus (and most bosses, to be fair) couldn’t touch the team pictured above. Of course, you could argue that using Qin Shi Huang, Tamamo, and Jeanne is unfair in general. But, I think it’s on the game to pit me against opponents that make team compositions like that not effective.

For example, that team composition would never work against Xiang Yu and Yu Mei-ren. SIN had some challenging content that forced me to use a variety of different teams to clear the chapter. Atlantis didn’t really do that.

If Cerberus was a Berserker without the Berserker weaknesses, that would have been better. Or, it would have been cool if each Cerberus head was a separate enemy and they all had to be killed in the same turn. Those are just some of my ideas for how to make it a bit harder.

Forced Setup Battles

The true hardest battle of Atlantis is one I haven’t mentioned yet. But before I get to that, allow me to explain the way Atlantis adds difficulty. It’s not by putting your team up against challenging opponents. It’s by restricting your team formation.

Team formation restrictions aren’t inherently bad. In one of the Halloween events, formation restrictions added a lot of fun. For example, some battles had to be completed with an all-male or all-female team composition. It made players use servants they normally didn’t in order to build a full team.

Unfortunately, Atlantis’s restrictions aren’t like this. They do things like forcing you to use specific, NPC servants or removing your ability to use Mystic Code skills. Not being able to use Mystic Code skills isn’t really a problem, though, considering how easy the battles are. The battle pictured below is one such example.

With that in mind, what was the most challenging fight of the chapter? It was the one where you were forced to solo a fight against Chiron and two mobs with Achilles. Believe me when I say that was literally the only battle I wiped against.

You may have beaten that fight on your first try. That’s fine. However, that fight is entirely up to RNG. I think I did it four times before winning. There’s no strategy, though. You click the same cards every time and just hope to get lucky with the enemy attacks while saving Achilles’s Invulnerability skill for the mob NP before Chiron’s.

That fight illustrates the biggest problem with Atlantis’s gameplay. It’s extremely easy except for the one fight that’s completely reliant on RNG. That’s not fun.

Corday Ruined the Chapter

Moving away from the gameplay aspect of the chapter for a moment, let’s get into the fourth major issue with Atlantis as well as why I didn’t like Corday’s character. Corday makes up her own Deus ex machina to deny us a fight against Odysseus.

Throughout the entire chapter, I was waiting for the fight that would finally be against Odysseus. There was even one time that he said he was going to fight us, the enemy class showed as Rider (which he is), and then it turned out to be another Cerberus fight instead.

A fight against Odysseus could have actually been good and difficult. But, even if we ignore that part of it, don’t you think we should have gotten to fight against the main antagonist of the chapter? Just as I’ll never forgive FGO Arcade for all the servants they get that we don’t, I’ll never forgive Corday for killing Odysseus before me.

On top of everything Corday denied us, I also just wasn’t a fan of how she killed Odysseus. She uses her NP on him once, and he defends against it because he suspected that she might pull something like that. Fair enough, Odysseus.

But then Corday just uses her NP again and there’s nothing Odysseus can do to stop it. That’s so dumb. Okay, Achilles fighting Chiron while being literally dead but not feeling like dying was also dumb. But Corday’s double NP was probably the worst. At least we fought Chiron.

Oh, and I almost forgot, Corday also suddenly got amnesia at the end before disappearing. I really don’t understand why that was included. I guess to give her some sort of emotional goodbye? At that point, I just wanted her gone faster.

Orion Somehow Redeemed Himself

As I mentioned earlier, I really didn’t like Orion’s character. He was introduced with a pee joke, and he wasn’t much better than that for the vast majority of the chapter. Of course, I did like using him in battle thanks to his insane crits. But character-wise, he’s terrible.

I also didn’t really care all that much about his storyline involving the Artemis of the Lostbelt. At least, not until the end. Orion shooting down the Lostbelt Artemis was actually a good scene for a few reasons, and I do think it redeemed him in the end.

He didn’t shoot her down because that’s what needed to be done for Proper Human History. He did it for her. After recognizing that the Artemis he knew wouldn’t want to be up there all alone (and fighting against him), he basically put her out of her misery.

But, I think what really made this scene impactful, for me, was the narration. The narration during this scene was some of the best in all of FGO so far. That, combined with the final scenes we got of Orion and Artemis together really sold me on Orion in the end.

I still count him among the characters I dislike, though. That one scene isn’t enough to erase everything else he did throughout the chapter.

Also, I already knew that Orion was the Grand Archer going into this story chapter. But I thought it was odd that the first we actually heard of this was when he gave up his Grand status to shoot down Artemis. That seemed like a big deal and he just casually dropped that on us — and then it was never mentioned again.

Poseidon and Olympus

Finally, we get to Poseidon. Although I don’t think the Poseidon core fights were that hard (my Qin Shi Huang, Tamamo, and Jeanne team dealt with them easily), I do think these were the most enjoyable fights of the chapter.

I can definitely see these fights being difficult if you don’t have many servants leveled and skilled up. That would restrict your formation and you might not have the right servants leveled up to easily deal with the cores.

But, anyone can use a Support Jeanne. And Jeanne basically makes these core fights a joke. They have AoE NPs, but neither the cores themselves nor the mobs with them have any way of piercing or removing her party-wide invulnerability. As long as you use Jeanne’s NP whenever the core is about to NP, you shouldn’t have a problem.

Now, I think in one of the fights there was a mob that applied NP seal to your entire party. That can be an issue, for sure. But even with that AoE NP seal, I didn’t have any trouble. I think my team just tanked the core’s NP even without invulnerability. So maybe that was an Assassin-class core.

Anyway, the Poseidon core fights were a nice way to end the chapter, even if I wish there were harder fights. But, that’s where Olympus comes in. Poseidon and Artemis are destroyed now, however, there are other gods to be defeated.

I don’t remember what other gods there are left, though. I know there’s at least Zeus. And we also never fought against Dioscuri, who I’m assuming we’re going to face eventually. Also, Wodime has to be beaten after he styled on us by summoning meteors.

Basically, there should be a lot of big fights in Olympus and I’m looking forward to them. I can’t say I’m expecting much from the story after Atlantis, though. My prediction is that the fights are going to carry the chapter.

Conclusion

What did you think of Lostbelt No. 5 – Atlantis? Which characters were your favorites and least favorites? Did you find any of the fights to be hard? And, are you as disappointed as I am about not getting to fight Odysseus? Let me know in the comments.

If you enjoyed this review, remember to click the like button down below. Also, follow me over on Twitter @DoubleSama so you don’t miss out on any future content. And come join our Discord server if you’re interested in discussing anime with other members of the community.

Finally, I’d like to thank Roman and Key Mochi~ for supporting DoubleSama.com at the Heika and Senpai tiers respectively this month. To learn more about how you too can become a supporter of this blog, check out Patreon.com/DoubleSama.

My review of the Olympus chapter is available now.