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.

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.

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 want to discuss FGO (and anime, I guess) with other members of the community.

Finally, I’d like to thank Roman and Key Mochi~ (who rolled NP3 God Arjuna) for supporting DoubleSama.com at the Heika and Senpai tiers this month. To learn more about how you too can become a supporter of this blog, check out Patreon.com/DoubleSama.

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