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Wu Zetian
ID: No. 170
Alignment: Lawful Evil
Attribute: Man
Origin: China (7th century)
First appearance: Fate/Grand Order
Illustrated by: Takehito Harada
Voiced by: Shiori Izawa
The only empress in Chinese history, known as Wu Zetian, but she preferred her title of Sacred Divine Empress Regnant when she ascended to the throne.
Originally one of many concubines for Emperor Taizong of T'ang, she met with Taizong's son, Gaozong, and became his concubine after Taizong's death. She had his child but they quickly died.
She blamed Empress Wang for murdering her child and had both her and the favorite concubine Consort Xiao overthrown. She then took the seat of Gaozong's empress. To consolidate power, she had any relative who had become hindrances and her political enemies assassinated. After Gaozong's death, she changed the name of the country to Zhou, took the throne for herself, and granted herself the title of Empress Regnant.
She appears as an antagonist in Agartha.
- Affably Evil: She's rather friendly, aside from all the torture, and gives the protagonist multiple opportunities to work with her. She's quite confused when the protagonist calls her city the worst they've ever seen.
- Age-Inappropriate Dress: Her outfit in her second and third ascensions does not look very appropriate for someone of her appearance.
- Ambition Is Evil: Her desire to have control and power motivated her to learn martial arts, statesmanship and everything else she could think of so she could claw her way to the top, but she also poisoned and strangled any rivals or inconveniences until she could get there.
- Beware the Silly Ones: She's a squeaky voiced little girl obsessed with how great she is, but she also destroys the city of Ys pretty much singlehanded.
- Control Freak: She needs a perfectly orderly city with no crime or dissidence and is offended at the idea that the heavens had guaranteed her rise to the throne of ancient China. She scraped and clawed her way all the way to the top by herself with her need to be the one in power. On the other hand, she's quite willing to delegate work to her subordinates rather than keep a tight fist on everything herself, so long as the subordinates are competent.
- Faking the Dead: She gets squished by Megaros and her presence disappears, but apparently Mash forgot that she's an Assassin and all she has to do is hide if she doesn't want to be found. She returns later to use her Noble Phantasm to torture Phenex until it leaves since it cannot be killed.
- Heroic Sacrifice: After already being badly or perhaps even mortally wounded much earlier, she goes all out with her Noble Phantasm to torture a demon pillar so badly that it's crippled and unable to do anything but blindly flail around. In this constant state of death and rebirth it can't interfere while Fergus brings down Laputa, ending the singularity.
- Hidden Depths: Though extremely ambitious and ruthless, she is to some extent forcing herself. She wants to go out and play like a child or to laugh, have fun and eat candy, but knows that acting like a child would get in the way of her goals. So when she's disappearing after her Heroic Sacrifice, she puts aside her ambition and just asks for her head to be petted.
- Master Poisoner: Her skillset revolves around this, with her Noble Phantasm dunking the enemy in a vase full of poisonous sludge.
- Mega Twintails: She wears her hair in pigtails that are about as big as her head.
- Noblewoman's Laugh: She does one for her Extra Attack as spears impale the enemy. During the story she also corrects herself at one point when she starts laughing like a little girl and not a famous empress.
- Obliviously Evil: She sees nothing wrong with the brutal police state she's set up and honestly believes that it's completely honest, fair and sure to lead to the eradication of evil.
- Off with His Head!: One of her attack animation involves her minions beheading a target with a giant saw.
- Offing the Offspring: It's suggested that she not only took advantage of the death of her first child, but that she may have killed it herself to frame her rivals.
- Royal "We": She refers to herself in plural form as an empress.
- Stripperiffic: Looks like she took a page from Shuten's book. Her ascension outfits basically has her only wearing a string panties and a "tube top bra" what looks more like a string under her robes and loincloth.
- Torture Technician: She's a torturer famous for her gruesome punishment of enemies, which is also one of her skills. Her NP is the Kù Lì (torturer) manual book, which is said to have been written during her reign. It has guides on torture and interrogation for the purpose of "persuading criminals" into confessing. While this Noble Phantasm is deployed, she becomes the torturer and all who try to challenge her become the tortured.
- Tsundere:
- In Agartha, she actually seems to like the protagonist and wants their approval, even if she won't admit it. This is probably for the simple reason that they were nice to her and patted her head, which she 'graciously forgives.' She can't admit normally that she wants to laugh and play like children her apparent age would, but when she's disappearing she allows them the honor of petting her again.
- At Bond 5 her playable version goes one step further and starts talking about how she never ruled with a partner, and starts hinting that she wants the player to fill that role, only for her to get mad and call them an idiot over how dense they are.
- Weak, but Skilled: Almost literally - her HP is incredibly tiny, even compared to other Assassins at her rarity, and her attack is nothing to write home about, but her skills all last three turns and have 7-5 turn cooldowns, two of them help the entire group, and her Noble Phantasm does a huge amount of damage and further increases her crit strength if overcharged, making her great at killing bosses alongside other Quick-focused Servants.
- Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: She's really afraid of cats and cat-like Servants like Tamamo Cat and Jaguar Man. This is because she believes in a curse from a consort whom she had executed that Zetian would get reborn as a mouse and get eaten by the reborn consort as a cat. She therefore prohibited cats in her imperial court. She tries to deny this when commenting on those two Servants, but it's pretty obvious how scared she is. She's also afraid of the ghosts of people she had killed and so moved her capital from Chang'an to Luoyang to get away from them.
- You Gotta Have Blue Hair: She has purple hair.
Yan Qing
ID: No. 159
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Attribute: Man
Origin: China (Water Margin)
First appearance: Fate/Grand Order
Illustrated by: Sima Udon
Voiced by: Nobuhiko Okamoto
Yan Qing is one of the ruffians introduced in the Water Margin, one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature. Despite his small build, he's handsome, has outstanding martial skills and excels in performance with musical instruments. He joined the band of Mt Liang together with his lord, Lu Junyi. Though he is fictional, his name is well known as the founder of the Yanqingquan - a school of Chinese kenpo.
He debuted as an antagonist in Shinjuku and later appears during the second part of the Summer 2017 event. He also has a role in Halloween 2017.
- Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy: He boasts of his skill and speed while using his martial arts to beat down or outmaneuver enemies. And he brags while unleashing his Noble Phantasm.
- Balance Buff: His Interlude upgrades his Espionage skill to Doppelgänger, which adds a critical damage buff and a Quick buff on top of the original skill's critical star generation, making it far more versatile.
- Bare-Fisted Monk: Similar to Li Shuwen, him being an Assassin seems to stern from just how efficient he is as a martial artist. Li Shuwen's Interlude pits them in a scenario similar to a wuxia flick.
- Becoming the Mask: The one drawback to using the Doppelgänger's powers is that he experiences the memories and feelings of the person he impersonates, meaning that he is in danger of forgetting who he is when taking a disguise. He decides to limit these later on, keeping the transformation partial so he won't be fully affected by them.
- Bishōnen: He's a very pretty young man covered in rose tattoos. For once, it's a case of Truth in Television, as Yan Qing is described in the Water Margin as being rather tall, of fair complexion with a narrow waist and red lips.
- Body Double: During the end of the Dead Heat Summer Race, he ends up taking the place of Quetzalcoatl as she prepares to take on Ishtar, with you fighting him in that disguise during the battle against Medb.
- Composite Character: He's combined with the Phantom Doppelgänger as a result of the events of Shinjuku. This is why a chivalrous hero in his own legend is a nearly-psychotic killer in Shinjuku.
- Crippling Overspecialization: His kit and Quick-centric deck, especially post-Rank Up Quest, ensure phenomenal critical star generation, allowing for much more frequent crits and faster NP gain overall. And that's about it. Outside of this niche, he has average HP, sub-par attack power even for an Assassin, and no defensive buffs, making him very reliant on support in order to stay alive and deal damage.
- Doppelgänger: His Saint Graph has been merged with the Phantom Spirit of the original, a murderer that transforms into others, then murders them. While he would normally be a chivalrous thief, in the vein of his original legend, and while his strong personality prevents the Phantom from taking control, it does stain his mind, turning him into a psychotic murderer instead.
- Doppelgänger Attack: His Noble Phantasm spawns multiple copies of himself to mob the enemy with martial arts.
- Face Palm Of Doom: The finishing strike of his Noble Phantasm, Ambushed from Ten Sides - As If There Was No Shadow, has him grabbing the opponent's face while having his arm coated in energy, and then unleashing the energy.
- In-Series Nickname: The protagonist calls him "Shinsin-san", as in "Shinjuku Assassin-san".
- Master of Disguise: He transforms completely into another person due to the Doppelgänger's power.
- Rapunzel Hair: His hair is so long, he asks if his hair grew even longer when you level him up.
- Reincarnation: He and the other 107 Ruffians of Mt Liang are 36 holy and 72 demonic spirits who took human form to spark a change in Song Dynasty China, with Yan Qing being the lowest-ranked among the holy spirits.
- Spot the Imposter: Constantly throughout Shinjuku.
- While he is disguised as the Hassan of the Cursed Arm, Moriarty carefully offers him normal beer, low-malt beer, or whiskey, and pointedly takes the low-malt beer for himself when "Cursed Arm" selects whiskey, then makes a big show of being drunk. This is a two-fold trap: normal alcohol is haram, and a Muslim like Cursed Arm wouldn't've picked it, while low-malt beer is not, and isn't strong enough to get drunk on.
- To figure out who is Yan Qing at the party when he disguises himself as one of his Mooks, the protagonist dresses as the opposite sex to make him react with surprise when they take off their costume.
- Ultimately, it leads to his death. After blowing up the club, he tries to pretend to be a wounded bystander in order to get away. Holmes and Moriarty, both of whom are experts of disguise and acting, see through his act and cut him down, with Holmes stating he could count quite a few faults in his wounded guise.
- Tattooed Crook: A hooligan who's body is almost completely covered in elaborate tattoos.
- Walking Shirtless Scene: Wears nothing on his upper body after his first ascension, and it was barely covered beforehand.
Mochizuki Chiyome
ID: No. 185
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Attribute: Earth
Origin: Japan (16th century)
First appearance: Fate/Grand Order
Background development:
Illustrated by: Hiroshi Hiroyama
Voiced by: Ayane Sakura
A feudal noblewoman, founder of an all-female ninja order at the service of the Takeda clan. Chiyome has grotesque powers, having inherited a curse cast by Yamata no Orochi from her ancestor Kouga Saburou. She works as a kunoichi for the sake of her lord and dedicates prayers as a miko of serpents to appease the spirit of Orochi.
She appears in Shimosa as one of the Seven Swordsmen summoned by Amakusa Shirou Tokisada.
- BFS: For her third Ascension, she wields a sword almost as big as herself.
- Does Not Like Shoes: Goes barefoot for her first and final forms.
- Eyepatch of Power: Wears one leather strap over her right eye for her first two stages, taking it off at her third Ascension to reveal it's slitted like a snake's.
- Miko: She trades out her ninja garb for this by her third Ascension, which fits with the fact historically her subordinates preferred dressing as shrine maidens for their disguises in infiltration.
- Ninja: She is considered to be the founder of kunoichi, and is one of the most famous ones.
- Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: She's pretty much a young demonic-blooded Crusading Widow kunoichi shrine maiden. It is noted that being someone who is also so many things makes her have a little complex.
- Rapunzel Hair: It goes down to her ankles. Even after she ties it up it still reaches past her waist.
- Reused Character Design: Looks a lot like an older Miyu from Fate/kaleid liner PRISMA☆ILLYA.
- Snakes Are Sinister: She has tattoos on her skin patterned like snake scales, her right eye is slitted and gold like a snake's, and her Noble Phantasm summons an Orochi to attack her foes.
- Stripperiffic: Her clothing consists solely of fishnets and multiple leather straps. Though it gets better with her first and third ascensions, it goes right back to the red leather straps in her final ascension art.
- Twintails: Ties her hair into two, long thin ones from second Ascension onwards.
ID: No. 46
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Attribute: Earth
Origin: Hungary (17th century)
First appearance: Fate/Grand Order
Background development: Yuuichiro Higashide
Illustrated by: okojo
Voiced by: Atsuko Tanaka
The Countess of Blood and the most infamous female serial killer in European history. In life, Elisabeth Báthory was a noblewoman who tortured and murdered hundreds of young women and bathed in their blood under the belief it would grant her eternal youth. This version of Elisabeth has fully accepted her evil nature and assumed the identity of "Carmilla": a fictional vampire from one of the earliest examples of the vampire fiction genre. She is an unrepentant murderer whose noble upbringing makes her incapable of regarding others as human; a true monster of history who spent her life pursuing nothing but her own selfish desires with cruelty and sadism.
She is completely incompatible with her younger self, the Servant known as "Elisabeth Báthory". Elisabeth refuses to become like Carmilla, and Carmilla regards Elisabeth as an intolerable symbol of her youthful ignorance.
She appears in the Orleans chapter summoned by Jeanne Alter as an abnormal Assassin with the "Mad Enhancement" skill usually exclusive to Berserkers. She also has a minor role during the first Halloween event, "The Adventure of Singing Pumpkin Castle," and the second half of the Summer 2017 event. She also appears in the Moonlight/Lostroom OVA.
- Animation Bump: The Halloween 2017 event gave her a significant update to her animations, making her attacks much Bloodier and Gorier.
- Balance Buff: Her first Rank Up Quest gave her the "Blood Bath" skill, which reduces enemy critical hit chance and gives her critical stars for three turns. Her second Rank Up Quest increased both the damage and Overcharge effect of her NP, meaning she can hit even harder on female Servants than before.
- Bloody Murder: One of her attacks in her updated animations involves her sending a wave of spiked blood at her target.
- Chained by Fashion: She just keeps adding chains with each Ascension, whether it be to her outfit or her staff.
- Combat Stilettos: Can perform an impressive kick post-animation update, and she's sporting some very notable stilettos.
- Contralto of Danger: Carmilla has one of the deepest voices among the female characters.
- Cool Mask: She wears a half-mask, but stops wearing it after her third Ascension.
- Dominatrix: Clad in leather and chains, in fact her outfit could be described as "European noble clothes mixed with bondage gear". Her stage four card even has her stepping on someone.
- Evil Is Not a Toy: Every so often, she'll threaten to kill her Master.
- Evil Laugh: With her animation update from Halloween 2017, she received an alternate line for using her Noble Phantasm, which ends with a particularly long one.
- Femme Fatale: Gorgeous and seductive, but also a serial killer.
- Femme Fatalons: Has very long, sharp blue-colored nails. She puts them to significant use in her updated animations.
- Hates Being Alone: She acts cold and distant, but she actually can't stand to be by herself or imprisoned.
- Hates Being Touched: She threatens to kill the protagonist in her early bond lines for touching her, but by bond five she sounds a little lonely because they've apparently stopped.
- Hidden Heart of Gold: She wouldn't admit it, but deep down she is a devoted Servant and when a past victim comes at her for revenge, the only reason she gets angry is because the victim put the player in danger as well. She feels anyone trying to get back at her is justified but the protagonist has nothing to do with any of that.
- High Collar of Doom: A staple for classic vampires and evil noblewomen; Carmilla happens to be both (sort of— see Our Vampires Are Different below).
- Human Pincushion: Her Noble Phantasm, Phantom Maiden, guarantees to do this to any unlucky target.
- Ice Queen: She's very cold and sadistic, going so far as to threaten to kill the protagonist in early bond lines. Later bond lines make it clear that she's come to trust them and is a lonely person, but she never really gets as far as actually defrosting.
- I Hate Past Me: When asked about what she dislikes, she says herself, though she means her younger form. Her actual feelings are implied to be more complicated as it seems more like she envies that Liz hasn't fully committed to evil yet. Strangely, this dislike does not extend to either version of Mecha Eli Chan, who instead evokes a reaction of confusion from Carmilla simply because Mecha Eli Chan is a robot. Brave Liz, meanwhile, seems to invoke both confusion and frustration.
- Immortality Seeker: Her wish for the grail is eternal youth. It's noted that if she actually got it she would stop wasting her time with murdering people and just go become a rather effective governor.
- It Runs on Nonsensoleum: She can ride on 'pain bullets' to fly, apparently.
- Iron Maiden: Phantom Maiden: Phantasmal Iron Maiden is the iron maiden what people believed she used in life, though further research reveals that it never existed in the first place.
- Kick Chick: For one of her attack animations, she does an impressive kick that shows off her combat stilettos.
- Lethal Chef: The chocolate she creates is something the main character mistakes for octuplet crystals.
- Magic Staff: Despite being an Assassin, her main method of attack is firing bolts of magic energy from her ornate staff, which even contains a magic crystal. When her animation was updated this was changed to attacks like slashing with her nails, using a mini iron maiden or blasting enemies around her with blood.
- The Maze:
- Her castle is this, as a part of her game for her victims. Of five girls she captures, three she killed for her blood bath, one she kept as a pet maybe until her next batch of victims, while the last one she let go free. That is, if they can escape her castle. The chance of the fifth victim escaping is about 1/1000. Her interlude has her Master as the fifth victim.
- This is, funnily enough, why she appears in Summer 2017; as a master of mazes and foiling escapes, she's more than happy to help Medb run a prison and watch over the inmates. Alas, she's not much of a match for the combined fury of all the Chaldea race teams combined once they find the greatest prisoner's cell.
- Mythology Gag: An older version of a character with white hair who's bitter at her past innocent self with the two eventually duking it out with the younger version beating the older version? That sounds familiar...
- Never My Fault: Played for Laughs during the Valentine's event - she screws up making chocolate so bad that the main character mistakes it for Octuplet Crystals, and if you read the description, she blames the ingredients, the cooking utensils, and the weather.
- Not So Stoic: During at least part of her Interlude, she's trapped with the player in the castle where she eventually died and seems composed, if a little tense. However, after one point where she compliments the protagonist on not letting the situation unnerve them, she suddenly throws a screaming fit because she cannot stand being locked up and would honestly rather die than be trapped like that. Clearly some things don't change.
- Only Known by Their Nickname: Her name isn't really Carmilla, but that's how everyone usually refers to her, including herself. She prefers it this way since it provides her with another excuse to distance herself from her younger self.
- Our Vampires Are Different: Much like Vlad III (both versions), she's not a vampire (in the Nasuverse sense), but is viewed as one by the populace, hence her gaining the traits of one as a Servant. This is reflected in how her Phantom Maiden Noble Phantasm restores HP to her after use—likely referring to the idea that she supposedly "took baths in the blood of her victims" to rejuvenate herself.
- Red and Black and Evil All Over: Her outfit is mostly red and black with purple and gold accents.
- Retired Monster: Discussed. Her profile notes that if she actually achieved her wish she'd stop killing people, but she wouldn't be in the least bit repentant.
- Showgirl Skirt: It's not just her skirt; her entire dress is open in the front to show off her body.
- She's Got Legs: Her sprite revamp emphasizes her legs and her final artwork shows them off as she steps on someone.
- Simple, yet Awesome: Carmilla's gameplay basically has her take advantage of her very high NP gain and her Vampirism skill to charge her NP and unleash a powerful single target attack that buffs her ATK and heals her. Even when she's not facing a female enemy, it still deals very respectable damage. It also helps that she had the highest ATK among all the 4* Assassins, before Swimsuit Ushiwakamaru was released, who only beats her by less than 50 points, anyway.Also
- Situational Damage Attack: Her Noble Phantasm deals additional damage towards female enemies.
- Starter Mon: In addition to Mash, Carmilla is one of the ten available 4* Servants that can be summoned from the Starter Summon. Among the ten, Carmilla and Stheno are the two 4* Assassins.
- Stripperiffic: She's basically wearing what could be described as a noble lady's dress mixed with BDSM gear.
- Torture Technician: Like her younger self, she has Torture Technique skill. And while it has the same rank and effect as her younger self, she has a lot more experience on torturing people, especially women.
- Truer to the Text: This version of Elisabeth Báthory is much closer to the tone of the historical figure's myth, in contrast to the Lancer version's role as a wannabe idol singer. The younger Elisabeth is basically plucked from a time before she had committed the majority of her crimes and thus has a chance to turn back before it's too late while Carmilla is her as an adult, who accepts the responsibility for her actions but does not think she can go back anymore.
- Upgrade vs. Prototype Fight: A very, very weird, non-robot case of this. In Orleans, Carmilla faces off against Elisabeth Báthory, whose legend Carmilla was based on.
- Used to Be a Sweet Kid: While Elisabeth has that Ambiguous Innocence situation where she was not entirely there when she did her crimes and her upbringing enabled her behaviors, Carmilla is the Elisabeth who has embraced her evil image because she is evil. There are times where it seems she's regretting it, but she can't stop because she thinks she has jumped the slippery slope and it's already too late for her to go back. In a way, she is to Elisabeth what EMIYA is to Shirou. Both older versions get white hair, and Elisabeth and Carmilla despise each other.
- Vampires Are Sex Gods: Her art portrays her as a sexy dominatrix type. However, this doesn't actually come up in the story.
- Vocal Evolution: Carmilla's voice sounds notably higher and "younger" in her voiced valentine scene.
- White Hair, Black Heart: Her younger, redeemable form had pink hair, but Carmilla's hair has turned pure white for unknown reasons. She hates her younger form for denying her and, it's implied, still having a chance to make something better for herself, even if she'll probably fail.
- Wolverine Claws: While from an aesthetic point of view, originally her nails were just Femme Fatalons, when her animation was updated it turned out that she's also quite comfortable slashing enemies with them.
ID: No. 43
Alignment: Lawful Evil
Attribute: Man
Origin: France (18th century)
First appearance: Fate/Grand Order
Background development: Yuuichiro Higashide
Illustrated by: Shimadoriru
Voiced by: Mamoru Miyano
The fourth head of the Sanson family, which had performed executions for generations in Paris. His lifestyle was extremely wealthy, but he was often scorned because of his occupation - something that became a source of anguish in his youth. His house loved and respected the King and Queen and showed great pity for the citizens governed by them. It has been said they even provided cutting-edge medical technology, cultivated from executions, free-of-charge to the needy.
Times were not always peaceful for Charles. During the French Revolution, he executed all sorts of men. He conducted further executions with the guillotine, eventually witnessing the execution of his beloved royalty, King Louis XIV and his wife, Marie Antoinette.
He's an antagonist in France and an ally in the Salem chapter of Epic of Remnant.
- Anti-Hero: Can be seen as one. In fact, one of his skills, aptly named Executioner, gives him a damage boost against units with Evil alignment.
- The Atoner: Desperately appeals for the rule of Law and Due Process in Salem, as he sees in their trials himself as he was during the French Revolution. So much that he willingly undergoes Death of Personality.
- Back from the Dead: He should not have been able to survive death in Salem. All of his memory of Chaldea should have been erased, but Abigail found him...somewhere and gave him the choice of going back. He remembers everything up to right before they left for Salem. Da Vinci does a bunch of tests just to make sure this is actually Sanson and not a fake.
- Badass Longcoat: For extra badass points, it gets more elaborate as he ascends.
- Bilingual Bonus: His sword has the words L'Epee de Justice inscribed on it, meaning "Sword of Justice".
- Combat Tentacles: Manifests these when using his Noble Phantasm, in the form of shadowy hands that grab onto and hold his enemies in place beneath the guillotine's looming blade.
- Composite Character / Artistic License History: In the records, it was not Sanson himself who personally executed Queen Marie Antoinette, but his son Henri. He did oversee the execution and was there as his son's assistant, but Nasu presumably changed it to make an interesting connection with Marie Antoinette in-story.
- Deadly Doctor: The Sanson family studied anatomy and pharmacy to find out how to best decapitate people in one strike, and also served as doctors who worked free-of-charge. This is reflected in Charles' A-rank in the Medicine skill and B-rank of Human Study skill.
- Death Equals Redemption: A less villainous version happens in the Salem chapter where he lets himself be hanged so that no one else in the group has to die, with his reasoning being that it is his chance at redemption for all the people he killed in life.
- Dying Declaration of Love: Essentially does this towards Marie, whose forgiveness was all he wanted. Marie tells him that there was nothing to forgive and that he did nothing wrong, and he then passes on in peace.
- Evil Wears Black: He is more morally ambiguous than evil, but being an executioner the trope still applies.
- Face Death with Dignity: Jokingly says that he resigns as he fades away.
- Hearing Voices: His interlude is essentially this. Despite holding up a perfect facade during his life, he admits that he is haunted by all the killing he's had to do, even in the name of justice at no fault of his own. The protagonist snaps him out of it by reassuring him that he simply did what he had to do, and if he ever brings his blade to bear against someone he should not, they will be there to punish him.
- Heroic Willpower: The in-story main weakness of his Noble Phantasm. As a metaphysical blade, it can be thwarted should its target have enough conviction to overturn the apparent definitiveness of a guillotine execution.
- Icy Blue Eyes: Rather fitting for a executioner. Though it should be noted that despite his job, he is by no means a cruel person.
- In-Series Nickname: In the medieval France segment of the game, Mozart refers to him as "Chopper".
- Interplay of Sex and Violence: He dedicates himself to executing others with such a skillful slice that it brings ecstasy instead of pain in their last moment. He considers his beheading of Marie to be his "kiss" to her and asks her if she was able to climax from it.
- Irony: He's an executioner who thinks the most valuable thing there is is life.
- Master Swordsman: His family trained since they were old enough to lift a sword, all for the purpose of killing the guilty in a single stroke.
- Oddly Shaped Sword: Wields a very large sword with a T-shaped blade. It is based on the kind the Sansons really did usenote before Charles-Henri invested his family fortune into the creation of the guillotine. The three holes in the the T-shape made a screeching noise if the swing wasn't completely straight, as a reminder for the executioner to strike true on the first blow and make it painless.
- Off with His Head!: As Royal Executioner and then High Executioner of France during the French Revolution, part of his fame comes from his use of the guillotine. He also summons one for his Noble Phantasm, La Mort Espoir: Death is Hope For Tomorrow.
- The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: During the Orleans chapter, he believes that he alone has the right to execute Marie Antoinette.
- Professional Killer: Professional Executioner. The Professional part of that vocation is especially important because his callous murder of innocent French citizens, since it went against his very nature, actually weakened him significantly to the point that Marie Antoinette (who had several disadvantages when it came to confronting Charles) was able to defeat him in a duel.
- Psychotic Smirk: On his attack cards, and constantly on his battle sprite.
- Real Men Cook: He makes a simple preparation of food in Salem involving zucchini that he comments reminds him fondly of his home of outer Paris.
- Red Baron: Aside from being known as "the High Executioner of France," Charles-Henri was also known as "The Great Sanson" and "Monsieur de Paris", or "The Gentleman of Paris."
- Religious Bruiser: He prays to God for forgiveness once more in one of his end-of-battle lines.
- Shoulders of Doom: Gets these with his stage three outfit, in the form of a pair of pauldrons shaped like horse heads with bladed manes.
- Situational Sword: When Executioner and Human Study skills are used together, he gains a power bonus against enemies with both Evil and Human attributes. This sounds useful, but unfortunately Servants are listed as humanoid and not human, meaning his third skill only works against mooks. If there were a mook Rider or Berserker enemy with both traits he could deal up to 120% bonus damage from power bonuses alone, but unfortunately, the only two targets in the game that match these requirements are Ivan and Xiang Yu.
- Slasher Smile: Has one on his stage four card, standing invitingly in front of a guillotine.
- The Stoic: His voice is very toneless, and his facial expressions are generally quite stiff.
- White Hair, Black Heart: Averted, as while he is summoned on the wrong side in Orleans, he is still good at heart, and simply tried to gain Marie's forgiveness for having executed her in life the only way he knew how: trying to do it again.
- Yandere: Towards Marie Antoinette, and to a lesser extent life in general, as, as an executioner, he knows exactly how precious it is. He believes he and Marie to be destined for each other because she's the only person he has the chance of executing twice.
ID: No. 139
Alignment: Lawful Neutral
Attribute: Man
Origin: Egypt (1st century BC)
First appearance: Fate/Grand Order
Illustrated by: Rui Komatsuzaki
Voiced by: Rie Kugimiya
Cleopatra VII was a tragic queen known for her beauty. She was the last queen of the Ptolemaic Dynasty of Egypt, and the de facto last pharaoh of ancient Egypt. Many literary works have depicted her as a ravishing beauty who drowned in love and turned her kingdom into her personal property, but the truth was the opposite. Cleopatra has a profound intellect, particularly in the domain of economics, and her leadership raised the militarily weak Ptolemaic Egypt into one of the worlds foremost economic powers.
Strictly speaking, the last pharaoh was her son Caesarion, who ruled mutually with his mother in her final years. Caesarion lived for several more days after Cleopatras death, however, Caesarion was merely nine years old when he died. Cleopatra was the final pharaoh who ruled the kingdom and struggled against destiny.
She debuted for the second Halloween event, "Super☆Ghouls 'n Pumpkins," as the main villain and its limited Servant.
- Arc Villain: Of the second Halloween event as she kicked the two Lizzes out of their castle because their concerts are noisy as hell.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: She shows up in Musashi's Trial Quest and addresses Musashi as the "girl with three Buster Cards".
- Cast from Hit Points: Her Noble Phantasm damages her for 1000 damage after use, but the recoil is fairly negligible thanks to her great HP recovery options.
- Combat Stilettos: She wears a nice pair of high heels, and she uses them to powerful effect in her attacks.
- Dance Battler: Flips, jumps, moonwalks...
- Ethical Slut: She loves Caesar the most, but she's not above flirting with or falling for other attractive men, such as Iskandar or the protagonist. However, she's noted to be difficult to woo for real, meaning she does have her standards, unlike Medb. Caesar is the same and openly encourages her relationship with the protagonist, though she does seem a little annoyed at how open he is about it.
- The Fashionista: Proud of it, the main reason for her very much non-Ancient Egyptian outfit. Gotta follow the trends of today, not of several millennia ago.
- Happily Married: She's still very devoted to Caesar, though she's shocked to see how overweight he is. "Super☆Ghouls 'n Pumpkins" was her attempting to live up to the legacy of the pharaohs in large part so that she could see him again. A chance to make things better with her and their son Caesarion is his greatest wish as well. That said, both seem to have active sex lives apart from each other: Cleopatra has the hots for Iskandar and the protagonist while Caesar is noted to have even slept with fairies.
- Hidden Depths: Beneath her haughty facade lies a crippling guilt complex for letting the proud line of Egyptian pharaohs die out, even though she did everything she could, as shown by her My Room lines with Nitocris or Ozymandias in your party.Cleopatra: Even I have some shame. In front of true pharaohs I slink down... How am I supposed to save face when I'm the one who put an end to Pharaohs...
- The High Queen: In-universe and out, Cleopatra transformed the diminishing Ptolemaic Empire into a proud economic powerhouse and a hub for art and culture before her defeat and demise. She's devoted to her country and her only wish for the Holy Grail is to allow it to flourish again.
- Historical In-Joke: If she's summoned, she'll ask if you thought she would appear from within a rolled-up carpet, and admits that she considered it but decided not to. This is an allusion to how she arranged to meet Caesar on her own terms to discuss a political alliance, which involved her being smuggled into Alexandria while hiding in a rolled-up carpet that was delivered to him.
- Informed Attractiveness:
- She's considered one of the three great historical beauties and the protagonist feels somewhat unsuited to be seen with her, but literally every female in the game is really cute at worst, making it unclear as to why she's special.
- Justified, as Cleopatra VII, from what her depictions show, wasn't actually that physically attractive, particularly her large nose. Her appeal actually came from her intelligence, knowledge, sociopolitical savvy, and conversational skills, which were what actually attracted Caesar and Antony. Her reputation as a seductress mostly came from Octavian creating the image of such to justify his declaration of war against Antony without making it look like yet another civil warnote . Further slander came from Dante Alighieri putting her and Antony in the second circle of Hell, where the lustful are sent.
- Jack-of-All-Trades: Cleopatra is surprisingly quite well rounded for an Assassin. She has good damage with her Buster-based Noble Phantasm, good survivability with all three of her skills, and even has good critical compatibility with her third skill, with the only thing she lacks being utility for her team.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: She's very sharp-tongued, and a bit of a sadist, but also very kind; apparently it was one of the reasons she was one of the most desirable women of the time (looks like All Women Are Doms, All Men Are Subs even in ancient times). She's not very subtle about it, though. For your birthday, she says she has no interest in such a useless matter, right before gleefully asking if you want anything in particular.
- Kick Chick: When she's not attacking with her light magic, she's getting up close to the enemy and pummeling them with nasty kicks.
- Lightning Bruiser: Her first skill recovers a good portion of her HP as well as a chance to greatly increase her defense, her second skill is a 3 turn HP regeneration (as well as NP gain up and NP gauge charge), and her third skill removes her debuffs and grants her invincibility, making her surprisingly quite tanky for an Assassin. She can also put out some impressive damage with her Buster based Noble Phantasm, which boosts Buster performance before she attacks.
- Light 'em Up: Her Buster attack is her using sparkling light magic on the enemy.
- My Greatest Failure: Letting the legendary Ancient Egypt end. It is the one thing she'll never forgive herself for, even if the other pharaohs don't hold it against her.
- Not in This for Your Revolution: She's working with Mecha Eli-chan in the third Halloween event not because she was forced into service or because she agrees with her ideals, but because Mecha Eli-chan has some good resources for getting Caesar back into shape.
- Not So Above It All: She's usually a pretty chill woman, but her lines about Caesar and Iskandar have her fangirling over them, with her enchanted by Iskandar's charisma. Makes sense, since the Real Life Cleopatra was married to Caesar, while Iskandar was the man who conquered Egypt before her family's reign.
- Panty Shot: You can see her black panties in the third ascension.
- The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: She gets a bit depressed in the third Halloween event because in truth she barely assassinated anyone and doesn't even know much about torture, leaving her the odd man out when in a group with the likes of Carmilla or Wu Zetian.
- Polyglot: Cleopatra was educated in the Royal Library of Alexandria and could speak Egyptian, Greek, Parthian, Median, Syriac, Ethiopian, Hebrew, Arabic, and the language of the Troglodytae.
- Power Floats: Her sprite is floating, though for her second stage onwards she has a golden snake to sit on.
- Playing with Fire: Her NP, Uraeus Astrape, surrounds her enemies with a huge fire pillar.
- Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs: Not fist, but her close-range Quick attack has her start with a rapid fire kicks, akin to a certain famous 'Thunder Thighs'' personal move Hyakuretsu Kyaku.
- Rapunzel Hair: Her first stage alone has hair ridiculously long, ending near her legs.
- Red Baron: "The Last Pharaoh".
- Single Woman Seeks Good Man: Well, single is pushing it, but Servants seem to have loose ideas regarding how binding their past relationships are. Her profile notes that while she's definitely a seductress, if you really want to get close to her you need to be a man of excellent character and nobility and even suggests trying to win her love.
- She-Fu: She performs several jumps and even have a backflip kick as parts of her moves. She'll do that even while in her regal dress at the 3rd Ascension.
- Spam Attack: Downplayed, but her NP generation is already fairly good at base, and her Golden Rule skill not only boosts her NP generation rate even further, but also gives her bonus NP gauge every turn, making it plausible for her to have her NP up again by the next turn should she score a critical hit with her Arts or Quick cards after using her NP.
- Sweet on Polly Oliver: In a manner of speaking. She finds "Medjed" (read: Nitocris with a sheet over her head) to be the most wonderful and awe inspiring god she's ever seen and tries to become their devotee.
- Tights Under Shorts: She wears shorts and black tights in her first two stages.
- Tsundere: Her room dialogue has her denying that the protagonist made her heart flutter and such. She's also really good-natured in general but ineffectually tries to hide it behind an arrogant facade. Further fueling this is how she's voiced by the Queen of Tsundere herself, Rie Kugimiya, despite not being short like most of the other kind of characters she voiced (And Oda Nobunaga)
- Woman in White: She dons a white dress by her third ascension.
ID: No. 109
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Attribute: Man
Origin: Japan (original creation)
First appearance: Fate/stay night (as Kiritsugu Emiya)
Background development: Kinoko Nasu & Hikaru Sakurai
Illustrated by: AKIRA
Voiced by: Rikiya Koyama
An Assassin incarnated as an agent of the Counter Force, an imitation Heroic Spirit referred to as a Guardian who didn't have the deeds to become a Heroic Spirit and never would have existed in proper human history as a Servant. Despite the same name, he is not the same EMIYA as detailed on the Archer page.
As a result of the Einzbern House not adopting the strategy of hiring an outside Master, Kiritsugu Emiya did not meet with the wife he was supposed to meet, and thus did not get separated from said wife nor suffer from the frustration from such separation. Consequentially, his heart of steel remained steel, his emotions eventually withered away completely, and his soul was called out to the circle of deterrence.
He debuted in Fate/Accel Zero Order as an ally. This EMIYA exists as a hypothetical possibility that can only be summoned in the Grand Order timeline.
- Armor-Piercing Attack: His noble phantasm ignores defensive buffs after an interlude upgrade. It only makes sense as it's the Origin Bullet, a round designed specifically to rip the target's magic circuits apart if they defend with mana, as most servants do.
- Balance Buff: His first interlude gives him a damage increase and defense ignoring effect to his NP.
- Beyond the Impossible: At maximum power, his Affection of the Grail skill allows him to escape and survive inescapable situations and enemy abilities. Unfortunately, this has the side effect of dooming everyone else around him.
- Call-Forward:
- As a Servant, his skin is dark brown and his hair is white just like his son.
- Just like how Shirou not making a real connection with Saber, Rin or Sakura results in him turning into EMIYA, Kiritsugu fails to make a connection with Iri (due to not being hired as their respective master) and turns into a Counter Guardian.
- Combat Pragmatist: His preference for underhanded tactics is represented with the "Scapegoat" skill, which forces enemies to target any ally he chooses.
- Critical Hit Class: His Affection of the Holy Grail skill gives a powerful 50% critical damage buff for 3 turns on a 5-turn cooldown at max level, while Scapegoat instantly generates 15 Critical Stars as a secondary effect, also with a 5-turn cooldown. For passives, not only does he have A+ in Presence Concealment to generate more Stars, but he also has Independent Action to increase critical damage. Both his basic cards and his Noble Phantasm have incredible hit counts to generate Stars with (his NP has 15; his Extra Attack has 8, his Buster card has 6, and his Quick and Arts cards have modest counts of 4 and 2 respectively). To top it all off, his NP debuffs an enemy's own critical hit chance.
- Defrosting Ice King: A Downplayed example but it's still there. At first he treats his Master with absolute apathy, as they are just a means to an end, but as his bond with them grows he starts seeing them in a light not much different to how he saw Shirou at the end of his life.
- Doom Magnet: His Affection of the Grail skill literally sucks out the fortune and happiness of those around him. The Grail gives him successes out of her love but since Equivalent Exchange is at work when it comes to cause and effect, he becomes lucky at expense of other people's luck.
- The Eeyore: Human Kiritsugu was already not a very cheery guy. The Servant version is an absolute downer, appalled at the idea that all he got in the end was to be brought back as the most sneaky and underhanded Servant class to see his dreams of justice trampled on some more.
- For Want of a Nail: The "Fate/Accel Zero Order" event where he debuts is an Alternate Universe of Fate/Zero. In this singularity, he wasn't hired by the Einzberns and didn't start a family with Irisviel so he formed no attachments and was in the right mindset to make a contract to become a Counter Guardian. This is Played for Drama in his own Interlude: while nearly every Servant in-game who had a role in Fate/Zero remembers him/wants to reconnect with him (among them, of course, Irisviel), his own internal monologues show he doesn't know any of them, he doesn't recognize the Kiritsugu they know as himself, and he doesn't want to bother doing anything about it.
- The Gunslinger: Even as a Servant, he still uses guns along with his knives. In particular, he uses his Calico M950 sub-machine gun as part of the Buster attack, while his custom .30-06 Thompson Contender is used as the final shot of his Noble Phantasm, Chronos Rose.
- Hades Shaded: Is now sporting (rather familiar) dark skin and white hair.
- Heroic Self-Deprecation: He laments how all he was good for in the end is acting as an Assassin-class killer. Presumably, this trope is the reason for his in-universe Chaotic Evil alignment.
- I Work Alone: At the end of the Fate/Zero event, he hides the fact that the Greater Grail's core and Angra Mainyu are still around, simply because he'd rather not get the heroes involved in the problems of a world that isn't theirs.
- In the Hood: For his first two stages, he takes the hood down after his third Ascension because it was too warm for him.
- Irony: He's known as the Magus Killer, but as an Assassin, Casters have the advantage against him. Then again, considering he has a preference for the class due to his own fighting tactics (as he mentioned during the Fourth Grail War), he's probably not beating himself up for it. Of course, Assassins generally target the Masters instead of the Servants, and the Masters all tend to be Mages. His title still applies, but gameplay limitations don't let him live up to it fully.
- Knife Nut: Uses a knife as his primary weapon and even has a holder filled with them. His knife is actually his second Noble Phantasm called Phantasm Punishment: Mystery Bisection, which is manifestation of his Origin of "Severing and Binding", thus making it deal severe damage against those who possess either magic circuits or magic crests when evoked.
- Meaningful Name: Chronos Rose's phonetic name and kanji name note , are both a reference to To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time by English poet Robert Herrick, specifically paraphrasing the verse "gather ye rosebuds while ye may"note . The official description for Chronos Rose even begins with a paraphrase of another verse: "And this same flower that smiles today / To-morrow will be dying." The meaningfulness comes when you consider that just as flowers wither with the passage of time, so did the soul of the Kiritsugu Emiya who never met Irisviel von Einzbern and thus continued down his self-destructive path, eventually becoming a husk of his former self.
- Mythology Gag
- His line before invoking his Noble Phantasm's name is, "Can you keep up with me?", Archer's iconic Dare to Be Badass line to Shirou in the Heaven's Feel route of Fate/stay night.
- His final Ascension art is a reference to Fate/Zero's second opening.
- Obvious Rule Patch: Due to the 15-hits of his Arts-based Noble Phantasm, EMIYA has his NP gain halved while using it so he doesn't become a Limit Break spamming monster. But his already abysmal NP gain for an Assassin makes him far more niche when compared to the similarly Arts-based Ryougi Shiki.
- Perpetual Frowner: Has the same vacant-eyed frowning expression in all of his ascensions.
- Speed Blitz: As a Servant, his Innate Time Control has been overclocked and boosted by his already-superhuman speed and durability to the point that he can now relentlessly attack an opponent within an instant. His profile isn't shying away from the Fridge Logic of this trope, describing him as "invincible in anti-personnel combat", but within gameplay his ability to do this is limited to his Limit Break.
- Sweet Tooth: He states that he sometimes likes to eat sweet things in one of his My Room dialogues.
- Time Master: His Innate Time Control power manifests as his Noble Phantasm, Chronos Rose. Chronos is the personification of time in pre-Socratic literature and his NP manipulates time.
- What Is This Feeling?: Like his alternate timeline son, he passed the Despair Event Horizon a long time ago and has resigned himself to being a weapon of the Counter Force that can do nothing but kill people for the greater good. So when El-Melloi II offers him a way to solve the threat of the singularity in "Fate/Accel Zero Order" without having to kill Irisviel, he admits that being offered the choice to find a different solution brings out emotions that he doesn't fully understand.
ID: No. 117
Alignment: Neutral Evil
Attribute: Man
Origin: Japan (16th century)
First appearance: Fate/Grand Order
Illustrated by: Sasaki Shonen
Voiced by: Natsuki Hanae
Kotarou Fuuma is the fifth chief of the Fuuma clan, a village of the Kazama valley shrouded in mystery and feared for their deadly tactics. He has oni blood, a result of his clan engaging in eugenics to create a shinobi masterpiece.
He debuted as an ally in the Onigashima event. He is also an ally in Shimosa.
- Adorkable: He becomes super flustered when meeting Kintoki and begs for his autograph.
- Animal Motif: During Onigashima, he plays the role of the pheasant companion within the Momotarou group, due to his hair. He doesn't mind playing the role of a bird that can fly, and it happens that the famous swallow-killer Sasaki Kojirou is pitted against Kotarou, who has several of his Berserk Buttons pushed by the samurai.
- Badass Longcoat: He wears an oversized jinbaori (i.e. a formal surcoat, normally worn by Samurai) from Stage 3 onwards. Interestingly, real-life ninjas did wear traditional samurai outfits (or civilian ones) instead of black garbs shown in popular media, making this Truth in Television.
- Berserk Button: Implying that the Fuuma clan is in any way inferior to the Iga or Kouga clans is a surefire way to piss him off, which Sasaki learns the hard way at Onigashima.
- Blinding Bangs: Has a full mop of red hair and even when his eyes are shown, it's only his left eye shown to the player.
- Broken Pedestal: Downplayed. Like Atalante with Artemis, he's a bit let down with how his hero Kintoki turned out to be. He still admires him though and fanboys when Rider Kintoki shows off his NP.
- Department of Redundancy Department:
- His full Noble Phantasm name is Immortal Chaos Brigade: Immortal Chaos Brigade.
- His name is officially rendered as Fuuma "Evil-wind" Kotarou when written in English. The thing is that "Fuuma" roughly means "demonic wind", so his official English name repeats his clan name twice.
- Dual Wielding: He dual wields kunais for fighting.
- Good Eyes, Evil Eyes: He's rather sweet and not particularly aggressive, but he has some very dangerous eyes when his bangs stop covering them.
- Gratuitous English: He's fond of this to the point that his Noble Phantasm has an English name, which he states is his way of honoring his foreign ancestry. Jeanne Alter Santa Lily even gives him an English dictionary so that he can change it to something more grammatically correct.
- Half-Human Hybrid: He has some oni blood in him.
- Kill the Ones You Love: He may have been the one who killed the original Kato Danzo after she had been broken for years and had completely forgotten everyone she already knew. He doesn't remember for sure, however.
- Killed Offscreen: He was one of the seven Servants Gilgamesh summoned in Babylonia, but he disappeared before Chaldea's arrival after he and Amakusa went to scout out the jungle around Ur and Eridu. It's never fully explained what happened to him, but it's implied he was killed by either Jaguar Warrior or Quetzalcoatl. (Gilgamesh's (Caster) Interlude confirmed Amakusa's death by the hands of Jaguar Warrior.)
- Magic Feather: His second NP is a mask that family legend said would turn the wearer into a 'demon'. However, it's stated the mask was in fact entirely ordinary... but when he eventually felt he needed its power, he did become a demon of sorts. He grew stronger and more ruthless until finally he was a true monster. Essentially, he indulges fully in his own blood in a bid for power and grows much stronger, but also much more evil than his normally dorky self.
- Mixed Ancestry: As well as oni blood he also has foreign blood, which explains his propensity for Gratuitous English.
- Ninja: One of the historically-famous ones.
- Playing with Fire: He attacks with fire blasts and his NP surrounds enemies with a flame tornado.
- Plot Parallel: Curiously, Kotarou's backstory is almost word-for-word the Nasuverse's background of both the original Assassin (the Hassans, as seen above), as well as Robin Hood—in that they a) take on a Legacy Character name, as well as b) carry a reputation for being outlaws.
- Red Is Heroic: Probably one of the few known positive (or at least, not overtly-villainous) portrayals of Kotarou. He hasn't exactly dropped the Red and Black and Evil All Over aesthetic though.
- Scarf Of Asskicking: Takes to wearing a flowing red one by Stage 2.
- Simple, yet Awesome: Besides a couple of event-limited "welfare" Servants, Kotarou is the best free option for AoE Assassin damage despite a lower rarity and an indirect supporting skillset. The number of hits on his cards, his Quick-focused, deck, and high Presence Concealment rank lets him compete with even Jack the Ripper for sheer Star generation, especially if he uses the targetable Evasion plus 50% Critical Star generation skill Ninjitsu on himself. Decreasing debuff resistance lets certain other Servants shine where they wouldn't normally (especially those with inaccurate Stun or Charm effects), he can leverage this decreased debuff resistance himself with a debuff to enemies' attack and critical hit chance, and his upgraded Noble Phantasm has a debuff to defense and a unique chance to Skill Seal every turn for 5 turns on top of the AoE damage.
- Sleeves Are for Wimps: As a ninja, his outfit doesn't have them. It conveniently allows him to show off the large tattoo on his left arm.
- Stock Ninja Weaponry: His armament consist of kunai as main melee weapon, shuriken and kusarigama.
- Took a Level in Badass: Throughout the Shimosa chapter he gets several boosts like Chiyome's dagger and the techniques of the first head of the Fuuma clan. He ends up as more or less the ultimate ninja.
ID: No. 243
Alignment: Lawful Good
Attribute: Man
Origin: Original creation
First appearance: Lord El-Melloi II Case Files
Illustrated by: Mineji Sakamoto
Voiced by: Reina Ueda (Gray), Daisuke Ono (Add)
Lord El-Melloi II's apprentice, she is the welfare Servant for "Lady Reines' Case Files". She is accompanied by Add, her chatty and annoying Mystic Code who transforms into her weapon.
- Ascended Fanboy: She absolutely loses it when she sees you have Iskandar, and is overcome with joy that she wishes to rush off to let El-Melloi II know, and entrusts herself to the care of the younger Alexander when she discovers they're the same person. It's Averted with Altria; She is notably less impressed with her, Lampshading the many different variations of her, and seems rather melancholy if you have Saber Altria as she shows what her home was working towards.
- Because You Were Nice to Me: A weird variation. She holds high respect for Lord El-Melloi II because he was one of the few people who didn't like her face, something that makes her happy because it means he doesn't care about her lineage like so many others did. This also transfers to the Protagonist as well, as she is happy they look at her like any other person and are not seeing her as a Saberface like so many others did.
- Future Me Scares Me: Averted. Although hesitant and unhappy at first, she understands and acknowledges the existence of Lancer Altria, who continued to hold Rhongomyniad, and that she might take her form one day.
- Glass Cannon: She's tied with Assassin Ushiwakamaru for having the highest attack of all 4* Assassins, and the second lowest HP stat of the same rarity. The result is that she hits very hard and her Buster NP combined with its Overcharge lowering Buster and Quick Resistance makes her a strong AOE Servant, but her only survivability option only protects her from one attack and lasts for one turn, on top of forcing her to waste the Buster and Quick buff that she gets from it.
- Identical Grandson: She's a descendant of the Pendragons and looks just like Altria. She didn't always look like that, though. In "Lady Reines' Case Files", her mere appearance immediately gives the amnesiac protagonist memories of the Lion King.
- Idiot Hair: Due to having identical appearance of Altria, Gray also has her ancestor's iconic ahoge, though it is hidden under her hood most of the time.
- In the Hood: She prefers to keep the hood on so she doesn't have to acknowledge her face, which is also the justification for her not changing between Ascensions. She does take it off for her final artwork.
- Late-Arrival Spoiler: Her possession of Rhongomyniad is one of the bigger spoilers in the first volume of Case Files as it plays into the mystery of her relation to King Arthur, but it's immediately revealed for the player in Grand Order.
- Limit Break: Her skills and passives encourage her to spam her Noble Phantasm, as she has a flat 10% buff to her NP generation, and although she has one Arts card, she has three Quick cards so she can generate a fair amount thanks to that, on top of having a flat 20% NP charge skill.
- Meaningful Name: Her name is Gray, and she's a grey-haired Saberface.
- Morph Weapon. Add can transform from his default box-in-a-cage form into a scythe, a tower shield, a lance/halberd, a bow (with arrows), a jet-powered hammer, and a giant bladed boomerang.
- Reused Character Design: Her resemblance has been frequently noted to look like Altria in-universe and as the latest "Saber-face". This is actually a plot point in her home series as Gray originally didn't resemble her and it was the byproduct of a plan to prepare her as host for Altria's soul. This didn't happen however because Altria would end up summoned into the Fifth Fuyuki Holy Grail War instead.
- Sinister Scythe: Add's default form in combat is a large ornate scythe.
- Situational Sword: Her Anti-Spirit Combat skill gives her a bonus damage buff to Undead enemies.
- Talking Weapon: Add is the Mystic Code that transforms into her weapon and loves to yak on and on to annoy people.
ID: No. 154
Alignment: Lawful Evil
Attribute: Man
Origin: Persia (11th century)
First appearance: Fate/Grand Order
Illustrated by: Ryota-H
Voiced by: Joji Nakata
The first Hassan-i Sabbāh to bear the title 'Old Man of the Mountain' after the Hashashin sect was established. However neither the other eighteen Hassans nor the devotees of the sect knew this figures identity and there seems to be no evidence of his existence. He is a legendary assassin said to appear to take the head of a generations Hassan-i Sabbāh when they stray from the path, the Hassan who kills Hassans.
The Hashashin left no witnesses, so it comes as little surprise that all who have seen him are dead. The first Old Man of the Mountain also chose to live the life of a guardian who passed judgement on the decay within the sect. The organization rightfully followed Gods teachings, but its actions were evil to humans. All the more reason that he could not allow the organization itself to rot; such offense would be the greatest sacrilege to God.
He is a very mysterious and powerful figure who first appears in the Camelot chapter as an ally before returning again later in Babylonia. He was released as a limited Servant early into the third year of the game, at the tail end of the New Year's festivities.
- The Ace: Even Ozymandias is a bit freaked out by just how ridiculously good he is at murdering things. To clarify, Ozymandias made the Hassans, the mountain folk, his enemies during the Camelot chapter. Just prior to Chaldea's arrival, when he was in Ramesseum Tentryis, King Hassan literally appeared behind him and promptly severed his neck and even though Ozymandias responded by attacking him with all his might, he just disappeared back into the shadows (note that, being in his seat of power, Ozy survives a beheading, but to him it's the principle of the thing.)
- All-Encompassing Mantle: Has a shroud like his successors that he later wears as a Badass Cape from the second ascension. The cape itself is pretty badass, as Hassan was able to completely nullify Gawain's Excalibur Galatine during the Camelot Singularity. Note that said sword is said to be on par with Arthur's Excalibur, and this Gawain is extra powerful due to the nature of his summoning, the blessings of the Lion King, and the fact that his Numeral of the Saint was active.
- All-Powerful Bystander: His "Evening Bell" skill description says that he cannot decide who lives and dies by his own will, but rather by the will of God. As a result, he simply watches conflicts from the shadows, refusing to impose the concept of death on his enemies until "the Evening Bell has called thy name". He can be convinced to assassinate a target that one of his Hassan successors cannot, but requires that Hassan's life as payment afterward. As a playable Assassin, his ability to impose death on enemies is left to chance, showing that if he takes a more proactive role he only has a fraction of his power. Indeed, during his Noble Phantasm animation, he wonders out loud if the Evening Bell will take the enemy's life or not.
- Antiquated Linguistics: He has a very archaic manner of speaking compared to some of the other Servants, including the really old ones like Ozymandias and Gilgamesh.
- Ascended Glitch: Upon his playable debut, his Noble Phantasm was bugged so that any enemy who would die from it would just vanish, without any death lines, leaving nothing but their item drops behind. This was patched out a day after, replaced with a standard death animation, but when players said that they liked the vanishing effect it was eventually un-patched and restored.
- Badass Baritone: He's the most gruff and threatening Joji Nakata has ever been, just like his role as Roshuo.
- Badass Boast: He gets a suitably epic one that also doubles as a Pre-Asskicking One-Liner right before he puts the concept of Death to Tiamat."Thou may be a god that has fallen to a beast, but thou art still the primordial mother, so I must reveal my name. From the abyss of the ethereal valley, I came to deliver the dark death. I am the Old Man of the Mountain, Hassan-i-Sabbah. The Evening Bell has called thy name. Let those wings be deprived from you under the mandate of Heaven!"
- Beyond the Impossible: His assassination prowess is such that he can kill anyone, anywhere, represented in-game by all of his attacks having a chance of inflicting instant death. He can even kill abstract concepts like long-distance communication and the magical contract/agreement between goddesses. In Babylonia, he applies the concept of death to Tiamat by sacrificing his power as a Grand Servant: in other words, killing her is impossible and he makes it happen anyway.
- Big Damn Heroes: Appears atop a cliff during the Darkest Hour in Babylonia to inflict the concept of death upon Tiamat, allowing her to actually be harmed while until this point all the protagonists - including multiple gods! - couldn't even touch her. He also does it by severing her wings, thus preventing her from flying out of the Underworld.
- Black Knight: His armor, weaponry and demeanor all give off this vibe.
- Brilliant, but Lazy: He admits that despite his skill he tends to slack when it comes to finishing the job. That's why he only stops at "beheading" Ozymandias in a place where that alone won't quite suffice and doesn't finish Gawain during their clash.
- Brought Down to Badass: He gives up his status as a Grand Servant in Babylonia. That being said, his Saint Graph (the Graph that crafts his spiritual body) is still that of a Grand Servant, allowing him to apply the concept of death to Tiamat and take away her immortality by sacrificing the power of that Grand-class Saint Graph. It's only then he finally becomes a normal Assassin, but even then he remains powerful."I need not the rank of Grand, but in my blade now dwells the proof of the strongest."
- Composite Character: Sort of. This iteration claims to be the very first Hassan-i Sabbah, but his Red Baron title (The Old Man of the Mountain / شيخ الجبل / Shaykh al-Jabal) was technically more the epithet of one of his successors, Rashīd ad-Dīn Sinān (رشيد الدين سنان). He's also the closest thing the franchise has had to Death as a Servant, but stays true to the Hashashin by being a Religious Bruiser who reaps souls in the name of God. Babylon also has him claiming the name of Ziusudra; the hero of the Sumerian Flood Myth; similar to Noah or Ut-napitim.
- Dark Is Not Evil: He has one of the most menacing designs out of any Servant thus far, yet he's more than willing to help out the heroes twice, going as far as to skirt around his own personal code to do so.
- Death Glare: A fierce glance from him can summon a humongous pillar of fire to engulf his target.
- Death Seeker: His highest bond My Room dialogue has him revealing that his wish is for oblivion; and he feels helping you in this fight will achieve this.
- Demonic Possession: Pulls this on Serenity when the party arrives at his mausoleum to test their abilities, boosting her powers to a much higher level.
- Don't Fear the Reaper: His existence toes closer to a Grim Reaper than that of a Heroic Spirit, but he is wise and helpful towards Chaldea."The relationship between Master and Servant is an exchange of missions. Thou savest lives, and I return them. Everything is as light and shadow, my contractor."
- Dub Name Change: He's formally known as "First Hassan" in the English version of the game, in contrast to the Japanese version's "Old Man of the Mountain". This is because the latter is too much of a mouthful in languages without kanji, so "First Hassan" is used instead to prevent his name from overflowing the text box. He's still called "Old Man of the Mountain" in-story, though, and keeps his nickname of "King Hassan". When he's used in battle in the English version, his name is properly "Old Man of the Mountain" because it doesn't overflow the name space there like it would in text scenes. The Japanese server later acknowledged "First Hassan" when an enemy version of him appears in "SE.RA.PH. -Second Ballet-" under the initials of "F.H.".
- Evil Weapon: His greatsword, Azrael, was originally a commonplace weapon, but after King Hassan spent a lifetime wielding it while walking the boundary of death, it became a cursed sword and a Noble Phantasm in its own right. Every attack performed with Azrael has a small chance of imposing instant death on the enemy, no matter how powerful they are.
- Exact Words: He's fond of using these. He claims that he will only assist the protagonists if he gets to kill Cursed-Arm Hassan afterward. When Cursed-Arm unsealed the demon within his arm to destroy Tristan's Saint Graph, only to then be at the demon's mercy, King Hassan appears before him, claiming to have come to claim his payment... only to kill the demon instead. When Cursed-Arm questions this, King Hassan responds that he did kill Cursed-Arm Hassan - he destroyed the Noble Phantasm that defined Cursed-Arm as a Hassan, but left Hanam the man untouched and free to go his own way.
- Expressive Mask: The eye sockets of his skull mask enlarge and squint as if they were his actual eyes depending on his mood.
- For Doom the Bell Tolls: His Noble Phantasm has him walking at the enemy while asking them if they can hear the bells ring. When he then strikes them, he sets his sword into the ground in sync with the enemy taking damage as bells begin to toll and feathers cover the screen.
- Glowing Eyes of Doom: Usually blue, though they turn red when he's pissed or using a Skill in combat. Not only that, but he possesses the same "At The Boundary" skill that Ryougi Shiki is sometimes portrayed as having. However, Nasu revealed in a magazine article that he doesn't have mystic eyes, even though it sure seems like he should.
- The Grim Reaper: The closest any being can be to this; if not this entirely. "Azrael" is a name of the Grim Reaper, after all.
- Grumpy Old Man: His first two Bond Lines consist of exhausted groans.
- Hidden in Plain Sight: He spends all of the Babylonia chapter disguised as the old man Ziusudra. The only thing that could possibly give him away is that he holds his cane in the same stance as with his sword.
- Highly Visible Ninja: As the executioner of Hassans who stray from the proper teachings or otherwise fail in their duties, he apparently dresses to contrast with them as much as possible. While they favor poison, knives and odd body modifications he's a guy in gaudy armor that looks straight out of a Heavy Metal album or a Dark Souls game. However, despite this, he still possesses a high ranked Presence Concealment skill, meaning his glowing blue flames and skull armor still go unnoticed. That being said, one of his other skills means that even if you can't see him, you'll still know he's coming for you.
- I Am Not Left-Handed: He brings down a sandstorm to block Gawain's Numeral of the Saint ability and then keeps him busy while the main party goes after the Lion King. After enough time has passed, he drops the storm and Gawain instantly goes for a full power strike only to be casually parried. The storm was for the party's sake, not his.
- I Know Your True Name: During Babylonia, when the possibility that "Ziusudra" is just a pseudonym is brought up, both King Gilgamesh and Doctor Romani agree that it's technically possible, while affirming that it is not a name one takes lightly.
- Implacable Man: His animations and skillset convey him as one. He doesn't flinch whenever receiving an attack, instead blocking it without giving any ground, and his Noble Phantasm has him perform an Ominous Walk towards the enemy. He has a passive that renders him immune to instant death and charm, while his Protection of the Faith will give him a guaranteed 100% debuff resistance for three turns when maxed out. And he has the highest known Battle Continuation so far, at EX. In other words, when the Evening Bell tolls for a poor soul and they see him walking towards them, nothing they throw at him will stop him from claiming their head.
- In-Series Nickname: The protagonist refers to him as King Hassan, though Mash tells them not to because he's a flaming skeleton man. King Hassan is pretty mellow though and doesn't mind, he even seems to like it.
- Inadequate Inheritor: If his My Room lines are to be believed, he sees all the other Hassans who followed him as this, and is a little too keen on relieving them of their heads given the chance (to Sitcom Archnemesis levels).
- Legacy Immortality: The man who started the Hashashin legacy and states that he will be the final Hassan alive after his legacy ends.
- Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: When in his third stage, he has a kite shield to block any attack.
- Master Swordsman: Is stated to be able to easily match any of the Knights of the Round in a contest of swordsmanship, but his incredible killing ability usually makes this irrelevant. Supplementary materials show that he has the same Uncrowned Arms Mastery skill as Karna, reserved for weaponmasters whose skill was never remembered by history for one reason or another.
- Meaningful Name: His elderly disguise Ziusudra is the last Sumerian King to rule before the great flood and predates Gilgamesh. Whether it's simply part of the disguise or part of his actual identity is left unknown.
- Mechanically Unusual Fighter: He's the only Assassin with three Buster cards in his spread and a Buster NP - this is a setup more common to Berserkers. It actually does mean he's not the best at an Assassin's "typical" job (generating tons of crit stars), but in trade he has interesting interactions with several other characters who can increase Buster power, most notably fellow Grand candidate Merlin, who can buff his damage to truly ridiculous levels. And, like fellow triple-Buster-user Gawain, as he isn't a Berserker he's quite a bit more durable than an actual Berserker.
- Mysterious Veil: The jawless skull is only half of his mask; the other being a dark veil covering his mouth which, eerily, doesn't move when he speaks.
- Nerf: In the same vein as Merlin, it's probably appropriate to point out that the playable version of him is unlikely to whip out his signature features (i.e. frequent auto-kills against Mooks or bosses) the way his NPC Support in Babylonia did — if only because the internal mechanism of the game gives enemy units a higher death resistance rating compared to player units. At best, ensuring frequent triggering of his auto-kills (and only at non-Servant enemies at that) will require you to maximize King Hassan's skills — which entails the cost and grinding for skill reinforcement a 5* Servant does.
- No-Sell:
- During your assault on Camelot, he blocks Gawain's Excalibur Galatine by throwing his cape at it, while his Numeral of the Saint was activated. Gawain gets genuinely terrified by the fact that someone could toy with him while he had his full power and almost freaks out.
- In gameplay, he's got one of the strongest Battle Continuation effects in the game, which gives him an additional 5000 HP when he would otherwise go down when maxed (and "merely" 3000+, otherwise). In lore, his Battle Continuation is ranked as unquantifiable at EX — higher than Cu Chulainn's famous version (which allows him to temporarily survive the destruction of his heart) and at the same rank as Jeanne d'Arc's Magic Resistance, which in lore makes her immune to virtually any magic.
- He is passively immune to any Instant Death and has 100% Charm resistance, his second skill gives him 100% debuff resistance for three turns, and his Bond CE also gives him 100% resistance to any debuff, all on top of his Magic Resistance. While debuff success rates can exceed 100%, technically meaning he only has outright immunity to instant death, in practice it is rare to find something that can break through the above without ignoring debuff resistance entirely.
- Noble Bigot: He outright calls the Protagonist a "pagan" for not practicing his very specific religion, but says that you are worthy of his trust nonetheless. While something of a Knight Templar, he also has no problems interacting with or working alongside those who hold different faiths or even the deities they worship. A self-described fanatic, this tolerance might be due to believing in the supremacy of God to the point that he feels totally unthreatened by other theologies.
- Off with His Head!: His basic M.O., as noted in this profile. Presumably, this is also how his Noble Phantasm, Azra'il, works in-game. Humorously, he also tends to threaten all of the other Hassans in your party with this when placed in My Room (as to why, see Sink-or-Swim Mentor below). His favorite thing? Heads."Fool. Bring me thy head."
- Older Is Better: While he's not the oldest Assassin on record historically, he might as well be the first true Assassin since the order he founded effectively invented the word and the world's modern-day perception of it. As you've probably guessed by now, he's also ludicrously powerful, as a Grand Servant or not.
- Older Than They Look: Possibly. There's a decent bit of insinuation in the seventh chapter that he really is Ziusudra of Babylonian myth, rather than Ziusudra just being a disguise of his. Ziusudra is, to Abrahamic religions, better known as Noah. This would not only make him older than most of the religious traditions which acknowledge him (and call into question just how old he really was or is), but it would also make some of his My Room comments viewable in a new light if true.
- Ominous Walk: When he activates his Noble Phantasm he simply starts walking towards his enemy, disappearing into a dark-blue fog, while asking if his enemies can hear the bells ring.
- One-Hit Kill: His At the Boundary passive skill gives him, among many other things, a 5% chance of insta-killing with any of his attacks and renders him immune instant death effects. His Noble Phantasm, Azrael, has a much much higher chance of this proccing. One of his skills, Death Toll, also decrease the enemies' resistance to Instant Kill effects.
- Only Known by Their Nickname: He doesn't call himself King Hassan. The protagonist simply started referring to him as such and he accepted the moniker. At this point, despite there being a few hints dropped in Babylonia as to a potential identity and even then it's not clear if they're just part of his disguise, we don't actually know if he's some historical or mythical figure or if he's just an original creation with no identity beyond being the first and greatest Hassan.
- Power Echoes: His voice has a slight echo to it whenever he speaks, and he's undeniably powerful both in terms of gameplay and in lore.
- Pre-Asskicking One-Liner: His Noble Phantasm has one of the best in the entire game."Hear me. The evening bell ringeth thy name. Wings which announce death shalt thou take now this head? Azrael!"
- Purposely Overpowered: First Hassan's hidden stats (NP gain and crit star drop rate), are incredibly high, to the point where at a glance, he seems overpowered. However, First Hassan's deck is filled with one Quick card, and one Arts card. Without high NP gain or crit star drop rate, he'd be Awesome, but Impractical since he would have almost no way to get his NP out without outside help, and he'd be unable to generate any stars.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Delivers scathing ones to all of the other playable Hassans, all of whom are Inadequate Inheritors in his eyes.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: Despite vowing to strike down Hassans that lose their way or fall into evil, he is a surprisingly reasonable figure respecting deals even when people don't do exactly as he asks. He chooses to help the protagonist despite them not killing Serenity and later states he has killed Hassan of the Cursed Arm by killing the demon the arm originally belonged to (and that Cursed Arm was forced to unleash to defeat Tristan) so that Hassan of the Cursed Arm can live the life he dreamed of.
- Red Baron: He is referred to as Azrael/Azazel, the Islamic angel of death, because of his feats in life. The Mausoleum he resides in is even named after this title, and his own One-Hit Kill Noble Phantasm is even crowned with the name Azra'il: The Angel Who Announces Death, in contrast to all his successors whose Noble Phantasms are all named Zabaniya.
- Religious Bruiser: The founder of a religious order that's the origin of the word Assassin. Also, he has A+++-ranked Protection of Faith, which is the same as EXTRA's Vlad III. However, he's not anywhere near as Ax-Crazy as Vlad is. Also, since the Holy Grail legend came from Christianity, he thinks that it is only a delusion."There is no such thing as a Holy Grail. Do not thou confuse delusion with fanaticism."
- Secret Test of Character: When he first appears in his Ziustrada guise, the Protagonist sees them, and after overhearing that they've been there for days and perhaps he hasn't eaten, buys him some bread. He commends them for doing exactly the right thing since while just helping him proves that they are kind, the fact they gave him bread instead of money shows that their kindness isn't hollow since they tried to give him exactly what he needs. This moral ends up being doubly important since 1)treating the Goddesses like regular humans offends their inhuman mindsets and 2)the Big Bad ends up being Condescending Compassion taken to the extreme.
- Single-Stroke Battle: His Noble Phantasm is a Diagonal Cut to Sword Plant with a high chance of a One-Hit Kill, even on a Servant. It's also how he decapitated Ozymandias during the Camelot chapter.
- Sink-or-Swim Mentor: An extreme case. All of his successors know where he is and can freely ask him for help, but if they do he'll kill them afterwards, because if they needed him they proved unworthy of bearing his name. Though he does engage in a bit of Loophole Abuse for Hassan of the Cursed Arm during the Camelot chapter, probably because the impending end of the world is a very good reason to ask for his help.
- Skeletons in the Coat Closet: Most Hassans simply wear a skull mask. He has a skull helmet, a skull armor, skull pauldrons, a skull on his breastplate...
- Spell My Name with an "S": One of his skills can be translated as Death Bell, Death Knell, Vesper Bell, or Bell of Demise (or, if you want to get a bit punny, Death Toll). His Noble Phantasm can also be spelled as either Azrael, Azazel, or Azra'Il, depending on which source language one believes is appropriate.
- Square Race, Round Class: He's an Assassin with Presence Concealment, but he has a QABBB Command Card spread (three Buster cards) - a spread usually reserved for Berserkers. He also has the Archer class's Magic Resistance and Independent Action as personal skills, while his personal fighting style and in-universe stats are more in line with a Saber than any other class. The only reason he's a Assassin is because the word itself came from the order he founded.
- Stone Wall: While he has better offenses than most Assassins, he's still hampered by the .9 multiplier. However, he has amazing durability on top of a self-heal and an incredibly potent Guts skill. With the right support and CE, King Hassan becomes one of the premier solo units to throw down against a myriad of bosses, such as Summer 2017's Gugalanna, Ivan The Terribles mammoth, and even other fights he has a class disadvantage against such as the fight with Skadi in Lostbelt 2.
- Sword Plant: His sprite has him doing this. It's also how he holds his cane when disguised.
- Technicolor Fire: Most of his attacks include enormous bursts of blueish-black flame.
- Teleport Spam: When he's not walking menacingly, he always flash steps to attack the enemy.
- Trickster Mentor: He first appears in Babylonia as an old man who's missing a leg. The Protagonist goes to buy him bread, and in repayment, he gives some valuable, if cryptic, advice about how to deal with the goddesses before disappearing.
- Tron Lines: A downplayed, supernatural version. By Stage 3, certain segments of his armor, its spikes and his shield begin emitting blue flames as well.
- You Have Failed Me: He's implied to have been the one to behead Serenity when she was alive, having fallen from the path of Hassan after falling for the general she was with at the time.
ID: No. 40
Alignment: Lawful Evil
Attribute: Man
Background development: Kinoko Nasu
Origin: Persia (11th century)
First appearance: Fate/stay night, Heaven's Feel route
Illustrated by: Task Ohna
Voiced by: Tetsu Inada
One of the nineteen Hassan-i-Sabbah, the Persian "Old Man of the Mountain" who led an assassination organization originating in the Middle East. While he was a legendary leader who became the origin of the word Assassin, there were nineteen different people who took up the position of Hassan-i-Sabah over many years. Supposedly there are 18 successive generations of the Old Man of the Mountain, and each one is said to be an expert that cultivated a special technique.
An ominous outward appearance produced by a skull mask, a dark robe and a pole-like right arm. The face underneath the skull mask has been scrapped off, so he is faceless. From the moment he succeeded the professional name of "Hassan-i-Sabbah", everything he had until then as an individual was thrown away.
He appears as a major ally in the Camelot Chapter, and a corrupted version makes a cameo in the First Order anime.
- Adaptation Expansion: Holy moly. One of the central foci of the Camelot chapter is to basically be "Hassan of the Cursed Arm: The Backstory Chapter" and it expands on his character enormously. In Fate/stay night, he wasn't really much of a character, appearing in all of one route, and there were questions about how human he even was, due to the odd summoning he received from Zouken, and most other works regarding the original F/SN usually omit to include him. The Camelot chapter, meanwhile, explains his history, his motivations for becoming a Hassan, and what makes him tick as an individual, all in great detail. By the end of it all, he's arguably more three-dimensional as a character than some of his fellow F/SN stars. It even establishes when he was active as a Hassan - during the Ninth Crusade in 1273, the very time period which the Lion King has inserted herself into.
- Adaptational Heroism: One of the prime examples within FGO. He was a ruthless Punch-Clock Villain in Heaven's Feel, but Grand Order managed to turn him into one of the more heroic Servants.
- Affably Evil: While he looks Obviously Evil, he's nowhere near as evil as his appearance would suggest. See "Informed Attribute", below.
- All-Encompassing Mantle: He has one in Stage 1, making the comparison with Batman below quite unsubtle.
- Animation Bump: The early October 2017 update to promote the F/SN Heaven's Feel: Presage Flower movie included an animation rework for Cursed Arm, and it was one of the most dramatic the game's ever seen. Even as a 2*, he gained a number of incredibly fluid animations inspired by his appearance and fights in the original F/SN visual novel.
- Badass Longrobe: He wears a tattered black one for his Stage 1 artwork.
- Balance Buff: His Throw (Dagger) B was given a Rank-Up Quest that buffed it to Throw / Retrieval A, which now starts off giving two extra stars at level 1 (meaning 5, and this increases with each rank), but also gives him a star regeneration effect as well. This basically means he is capable of getting back, at max rank, 15 stars back for the next turn, effectively giving him his own version of Fragments of 2030 for one turn, making him even better at generating crit stars since he can now essentially refund some for the next turn.
- Bald of Evil: In his original appearance in F/SN, the trope seemed to apply, but by the end of the F/GO Camelot chapter it's been massively subverted.
- Beat Still, My Heart: His Noble Phantasm works by cursing the enemy's heart, allowing him to make a perfect replica in his right hand. He then crushes the fake heart, destroying the enemy's real heart. He can also replace the real heart with the fake, allowing him to devour the enemy's heart to boost his intelligence, although he never uses the ability in this manner in F/GO.
- Berserk Button: He detests disloyalty and those that go rogue to fulfill personal vendettas.
- Better to Die than Be Killed: In a flashback regarding Shinjuku in Assassin of Shinjuku's interlude, instead of allowing Yan Qing to kill him and thus imitate him perfectly, he decided to kill himself so that the Chaldea crew would have even the slightest advantage against Yan Qing.
- Boring, but Practical: Cursed Arm (and Jing Ke) tend to be the default options for single target Assassins for those without better options. Cursed Arm's distinguished from competitors as being a simple but reliable Critical Hit Class Servant, even at a low rarity. He generates plenty of Critical Stars, fills up his NP decently quick, is surprisingly tanky thanks to Protection from the Wind, and his Noble Phantasm has a relatively high Instant Death chance if the damage itself doesn't finish off a mob. All of his abilities have a short cooldown and high uptime (his buffs max out with a 3-turn duration on a 5-turn cooldown) so he does well in long or short-term fights. All he needs is Craft Essences that buff his damage, crit star generation, or Quick card effectiveness to succeed.
- The Cameo: He makes a brief appearance in First Order as Caster Cu Chulainn tells the protagonists what happened during his Holy Grail War, but he's already been dealt with by Caster Cu by the time they arrive.
- Consummate Professional: As both a Servant and as an Assassin, he's a loyal and polite ally.
- Cool Mask: A (somewhat emotive) skull mask, like many of his fellow Hassans.
- Covert Pervert: In the limited-time Summer event Craft Essence "Chaldea Lifesavers", he can be seen using Presence Concealment to hide in the water so he can happily leer at Nightingale's underboob.
- The Cowl: His interlude has him basically going around Rome fighting crimes, especially ones that involve children, Batman style. He might be a professional killer, but Rape, Pillage, and Burn is below him.
- Critical Hit Class: Cursed Arm spits out an excess of Critical Stars and uses them well enough. His A+ Presence concealment and triple Quick deck (and Quick Noble Phantasm) forms the basis of a stable Star generator despite mediocre, launch-era hit counts. His Protection of the Wind skill, which is a 3-hit-based Evasion, also increases his Critical Star generation by up to 30%, while he's encouraged to spam Throw (Dagger) to summon a burst of Stars every four turns (and with his Rank-Up, it's actually two bursts of Stars). Giving him a bit more damage despite his low rarity is a powerful 50% critical damage buff from Self-Modification. Craft Essences like Be Elegant help him generate even more crit stars on top of it.
- Dark Is Not Evil: He's one of the main characters of Camelot and is a good guy through and through for the entire chapter. It gets to the point that the player base has begun to seriously question the alignment he's given in his profile.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: Camelot sees him go through so many trials only to get his happy ending. He's discovered that the Lion King has mounted her attack within the time period which he lived, leading to the death of his past self's wife, and he has to protect and take in the newly-orphaned Rushd. He offers his life to King Hassan in order to gain his aid, per the contract he has with his successors. At the end, however, King Hassan only kills the demon composing Cursed Arm's arm; this "killed" the existence known as Hassan-i Sabbah, but allowed the man underneath to go his own way and live his own life. Cursed Arm assumes his former name - "Hanam" - and happily lives out a new life with Rushd within the singularity.
- Everyone Has Standards: If you have Gilgamesh, he's practically horrified, saying that you should end your contract with him right away, since Gilgamesh reeks of betrayalnote .
- Friend to All Children: A definite contrast to his appearance, but he has a soft spot for children and is really quite good with them. His interlude in Rome has him protecting children, Batman-style, in the Christmas 2016 event he gets along quite well with Nursery and Jack, and in the Camelot chapter he's an excellent father-figure to Rushd, the refugee boy. The last one is in no small part because Rushd is the son of Salia, the woman he loved before he left to become the Old Man of the Mountain.
- I Just Want to Be Normal: King Hassan gives him the chance to live the normal life he wishes for in his home village. This makes him the first person to ever live after giving up the title of Hassan.
- I Just Want to Be Special: Grand Order expands on his past and reveals he used to be this. A non-exceptional man with little talent who was afraid of dying and being forgotten, he decided to do everything he could to become the next Hassan and leave his mark in history. Harsh training not being enough, he underwent heavy body modifications, culminating in his accepting to carry the arm of the demon Shaytan. Having thrown away the chance to be with the woman he loved, his body, and everything that made him human, he eventually succeeded in becoming Hassan. And then...
- Infinite Supplies: In lore, averted. Assassin has to manually create new dirks and only carries around forty at a time. While this doesn't carry over in his combat animations, his upgraded skill, Throwing/Retrieval, represents him gathering up his fallen daggers after using them (and so generating critical stars both on the the skill is used, and on the turn afterward).
- Informed Attribute: His Evil alignment. He's had it since Fate/stay night, and while it seemed to apply there, in Grand Order it's almost farcical. In every single appearance he has made in Grand Order, Cursed Arm has been unflinchingly heroic and virtuous; his interlude is basically him being Batman and protecting kids, and all throughout the Camelot chapter he is a steady ally and a good friend once you earn his trust. It's very likely that he just inherited the Lawful Evil alignment from King Hassan, who despite his own nobility can be considered "evil" because his entire existence is devoted to killing; by assuming the Old Man's identity and casting aside his original self, he assumed the Old Man's alignment as well. It's gotten to the point where it's a Meta Twist in Shinjuku that the one who approaches the protagonists is actually antagonistic, and even then that was just Yan Qing trying to infiltrate the group and the real Hassan deliberately uses Zabaniya on himself to sabotage Yan Qing's attempt to copy his personality.
- Invisibility Cloak: His Presence Concealment skill does exactly what it says, allowing him to go fairly undetected by others, and his is particularly high-ranked. That includes, for example, passing through the boundary field around Shirou's house.
- Killed Offscreen: He was summoned to Shinjuku, but was killed by Yan Qing before he could meet the heroes. Yan Qing later uses his form to get close to the protagonist in order to abduct them.
- Knife Nut: He uses a type of throwing knife called a dirk that he can throw with the speed and power of a low-caliber bullet. This isn't an ability intrinsic to the knives themselves, but rather Hassan is just that skilled with throwing weapons.
- Kryptonite-Proof Suit: This Hassan has a high rank in "Protection from Wind", an enchantment he got in life to counteract sandstorms and djinns.
- Lean and Mean: Although initially obscured by his cloak, after he takes it off, you can see just how thin he is. Subverted once he's shown as a heroic ally in the Camelot Chapter.
- Legacy Immortality: According to his backstory from F/SN, anyone who becomes leader of the Hashashin takes on the name and persona of Hassan-i-Sabbah. Thus, the True Assassin Heroic Spirit is a compound being made up from the deeds of all the Hassan-i-Sabbahs. Grand Order's Camelot chapter shows that it's a little more complicated than this.
- Neat Freak: He finds being in clean rooms calming, and happily offers to help keep your room clean.
- Noble Demon: He's a very kind man, and he demonstrates clear-cut heroics as a Servant of Chaldea, but he's still a killer for hire. His original appearance in F/SN has him follow Zouken as his Servant, and once he reconstructs his incomplete personality by cannibalizing other Servants (long story) he's a lot more professional and less sadistic than his Master. He fights the heroes with the dirtiest tricks in the book, but he refuses to torment the heroes needlessly.
- Non Fatal Explosion: He reveals in the 2018 Servant Summer Festival that "Protection from Wind" also protects against explosions (as the pressure wave of an explosion is basically just a very sharp gust of wind), after he carried to safety XX's self-destructing suit and returned no worse for wear before explaining said info.
- One-Hit Kill: His Noble Phantasm destroys the opponent's heart, killing them instantly. Doesn't work well against targets with high magic resistance in-lore, though. (In gameplay, instant death counts as a debuff, so MR is added to the target's innate debuff resistance, and while Zabaniya can still do good damage, targets with high MR ranks can be annoying difficult to insta-kill.)
- Red Baron: Old Man of the Mountain.
- Red Right Hand: Subverted. In order to become an Old Man of the Mountain, he replaced his right arm with that of a type of demon called a Shaytan, which is so unnaturally long that he normally keeps it closed at the elbow and wrapped up in cloth. He's still a really nice guy.
- Sole Survivor: Of the Hassan trio in the Camelot chapter.
- Taking You with Me: After the initial plan to poison Tristan fails during the attack on Camelot, he releases the curse he uses to control Shaytan's arm in a last ditch effort to allow the demon to devour both himself and Tristan. The arm does manage to kill Tristan, but First Hassan steps in before it can kill him too.
- That Man Is Dead: He states that all who take up the mantle of "Old Man of the Mountain" must cast aside their old identity. At the end of Camelot, released from his duty, he takes up his old name once more: Hanam.
- Vocal Dissonance: He has a very deep and commanding voice for someone so skinny and faceless.
- Was It Really Worth It?: After he became Hassan he came to realize he was now the nameless nobody he was so afraid of becoming. He even went down in the Hassans' history as the most unremarkable of them all.
ID: No. 110
Alignment: Lawful Evil
Attribute: Man
Origin: Persia (11th century)
First appearance: Fate/Zero
Background development: Kinoko Nasu & Gen Urobuchi
Illustrated by: Task Ohna
Voiced by: Akina Abe
Hundred-Faced Hassan is one of the nineteen people to hold the legendary Persian title of "Old Man of the Mountain", Hassan-i-Sabbah, the leader of Hashashins. He was a candidate along with "the Beautiful Assassin", but he was chosen due to their fear of her. Their official reasoning was that even though she copied the eighteen previous "Zabaniya" abilities, she had not produced a miracle of her own.
Their own ability, Delusional Illusion, was unique in that it was the first to be an inborn ability rather than achieved through modifying their body. Instead, they took advantage of their affliction of Multiple Personality Disorder and acted as an assassin without a true identity. They became the nineteenth in succession and currently the last to have become a candidate for summoning. Their wish to the Grail was ultimately "to be reconstituted as a complete personality."
They debuted with Fate/Accel Zero Order and became an ally for Camelot.
- Assassin Outclassin': They attempt to ambush the heroes on three different occasions in "Fate/Accel Zero Order" and fail every time before they can even attack. El-Melloi II catches them in his Stone Sentinel Maze the first two times and Assassin EMIYA manages to sense them coming the third time by virtue of simply being the better assassin.
- The Big Guy: Gozuru has the largest and most muscular frame, and relies on his fists over weapons.
- Blade on a Stick: Zayd carries a spear.
- Butt-Monkey: Of all the Hassans, Hundred-Faced often ends up the butt of jokes. In "Fate/Accel Zero Order" they're basically suffering through a drawn-out version of their outing from Fate/Zero and are barely a threat to the heroes. In Camelot they find themselves on the wrong end of Cursed Arm's teasing more often than not. They tend to lose bodies pretty quickly if they get a showing, to the point the individual facets take the role of farmable mooks in events, particularly in "Accel Order".
- Contralto of Danger: Asako sports one of the deepest voices among the female characters.
- Cool Mask: Wears the typical Hassan bone mask. Though unlike the others, Asako has a face beneath it. Child Assassin's mask is merely her hair decoration.
- Didn't See That Coming: Before the assault on the Holy City, they research Tristan's background and put together a plan to use Serenity's Zabaniya to take advantage of the knight's weakness to poison. They learn too late that Tristan's Gift from the Lion King renders him immune to poison, at which point he easily kills both them and Serenity.
- Flight, Strength, Heart: If going by the description for "Library for Hundred Men" Bond Craft Essence, the specialties each personality has tend to vary from useful to situational to really weird.
- Foreshadowing: Calls out to the Great Founder of the Hashashins after her final self is defeated during the Fate/Accel Zero Order event.
- Gameplay and Story Integration:
- Their base stats are middling, they have a difficult time building up their Noble Phantasm gauge despite being an Arts Assassin, but they have a 4000 HP heal and an Evasion on a very short 5-turn cooldown. They won't accomplish much as frontline attackers without support, but they're surprisingly hard to kill — just like their outing in the Fourth War.
- Their version of Zabaniya is not a killing technique, but instead the ability to turn their multiple personalities into a mob of attackers. As such, they're the only Hassan whose Noble Phantasm doesn't have a chance to inflict instant death.
- Wide Specialization reflects how varied the Hundred Personas are — with only a 30% boost to each card buff (and since their deck has a singular Buster card anyway), there's a high chance of a noncombatant specialty appearing. At least there's a guaranteed Evasion to reflect their difficulty to kill.
- Gameplay and Story Segregation: Their being comprised of multiple units supposedly makes them weaker, according to their source material. In-game, however, this makes their version of Zabaniya potentially lethal, as it would hit their single opponent multiple times. See also Irony below.
- Idiot Hair: One of their personalities, the Child Assassin, has one.
- In the Hood: Their stage 1 art.
- Inadequate Inheritor: They're weaker in every way than Zealot from Fate/strange fake, their contemporary. However, Hundred-Faced was picked as the next head of the order because Zealot A. failed to produce her own new technique, the primary qualification, B. thinks more like a warrior than an assassin, C. is, well, a zealot, and D. the other assassins may have feared her. As a result, the new leader ended up being a man with a weaponized mental illness and a diverse but mundane set of skills rather than the strongest member they had had since King Hassan himself. Hassan of the Cursed Arm even spells it out, saying that he can't comprehend how Hundred-Faced could be chosen as the Grandmaster if there's a better candidate in every category.
- Irony: The Hundred-Faced Hassan had the dubious honor of going down like punks against Iskandar through his Ionioi Hetairoi in Fate/Zero. In this game however, their class provides them advantages against Iskandar—and could be expected to kill him when prepared properly.
- Jerkass: Nobody likes the Zayd personality because he's such a dick. The group as a whole mentions him by name with surprise when noting that you've secured the loyalty of every splinter of Hundred Faced's fractured mind.
- Knife Nut: Asako's main method of attack, shared with the cloaked personality, Makuru.
- Legacy Immortality: The name of Hassan-i-Sabbah was inherited as a way to keep the Hashashin the first Hassan created eternal. But as he was the nineteenth and thus the last Hassan ever, the immortality of Hassan-i-Sabbah ended in his lifetime.
- Literal Split Personality: Their Zabaniya allows each personality to have a body for their own.
- Me's a Crowd: Their NP Zabaniya: Delusional Illusion manifests the original Hassan's multiple personalities into a total of 100 distinct figures. Several of these appear in his attacks and the NP animation has numerous Assassins mobbing a single target.
- Pronoun Trouble: While the original Hassan-i-Sabbah was male in life, as a Heroic Spirit this Assassin manifests as numerous figures of both genders without a central personality. The unofficial front-man of the group and the one who appears in the card art is "Asako", a female personality; however the name that's used for their profile is Zayd (for those wondering Zayd is the one adjusting his mask◊).
- Random Effect Spell: Their Wide Specialization skill has the in-game description "Apply random effects to yourself" with an "all card-types buff" icon. The skill's actual effect is that each card-type buff has 30% chance of activating for three turns while also giving 1-turn Evasion.
- Red Baron: Old Man of the Mountain, or the Hundred-Faces.
- Sir Not-Appearing-in-This-Trailer: They didn't appear in any promotional material prior to announcement of Fate/Accel Zero Order and were confirmed to be in the event when they were included with the other Fate/Zero' Servants in an advertisement.
- Sole Survivor: In Billy's interlude, they appear as an ally for a The Magnificent Seven parody ( which itself is a Wild West version of Seven Samurai ). Along with Billy and Hektor, they're the only survivors with Hundred Faced in particular being down to her last body.
- Stripperiffic: The male Hassan sprites don't exactly differ from Hassan of the Cursed Arm's sprite designs. Asako (who serves as the frontman), however, has an outfit that could charitably be characterized as something no self-respecting Middle-Eastern woman would wear.
- Token Mini-Moe: The Child Assassin among the Hundred Personas.
- Transgender: A product of their multiple personality disorder. The original Hassan they originated from is stated to be male with MPD, which became the basis of their Zabaniya that grants him multiple bodies in both genders with each one of his personalities. In gameplay, they are classified as "female" since their main representative is "Asako", and in Valentine's day events, they give chocolates to the protagonist just like female Servants do.
- Tsundere: Asako, oh so much in Camelot, to the point where Cursed Arm Hassan repeatedly calls her out to just say what she's thinking instead of having to attack the party.
- Worf Had the Flu: El-Melloi II theorizes that Tokiomi Tohsaka may have taken control of them from Kirei in a fit of desperation after losing Gilgamesh in "Fate/Accel Zero Order" and didn't know how to properly direct them, which affected their performance enough for Kiritsugu to sense their presence.
ID: No. 124
Alignment: Lawful Evil
Attribute: Man
Origin: Persia (11th century)
First appearance: Fate/Prototype: Fragments of Blue and Silver
Illustrated by: Nakahara
Voiced by: Sayaka Senbongi
One of the successive Hassan-i-Sabbah who played the role of "Old Man of the Mountain" for the assassination cult and an expert in poisoning, leading to her alias, Hassan of the Serenity. Based on the Indian myth of the Visha Kanya, everything in her body is poisonous, from hair to skin to mucous membranes. She can also resist most poisons because of this.
She kept creating artificial relationships with her targets that could not be fulfilled as they would eventually die at her hands. Gradually her mind fell apart. She eventually was killed while trying to kill an enemy general, though the exact circumstances of her death are shrouded in mystery. Perhaps he killed her out of suspicion, perhaps she begged him to do it after revealing herself, or perhaps she was killed by someone else while the general wasn't paying attention...
She appears as an ally in the Camelot chapter and minor antagonist in the second Halloween event, "Super☆Ghouls 'n Pumpkins".
- Absolute Cleavage: Her costume. It is deliberate, as her preferred method of killing is by seducing her targets first.
- Accidental Kiss: She ends up in one of these with the protagonist due to having unsteady footing after being unchained from a wall. Her initial reaction is different from the usual instances of this trope since she thinks she killed them due to her Poisonous Person properties, until she realizes that they're immune, leading to the below Luminescent Blush.
- Action Girl: Despite being built to be a walking honey trap, she can hold her own in a fight and can use her poisonous body to full effect via her NP.
- Alternate Self: According to her profile in the Fate/Grand Order Material IV, the Hassan of the Serenity that is in Grand Order is that of "different person of sorts" than the Serenity that appear in the Prototype world, and thus, has absolutely no information of the events that occurred in that story, so she is apparently confused about why Arash act familiar with her.
- Balance Buff: Her Rank Up Quest in addition to boosting her NP's damage also doubles the poison effect from 1000 damage over 5 turns to 2000 damage over said turns, and her Interlude improves her second skill by allowing it to generate more stars, apply a poison effect without using her NP of 500 damage for five turns and finally to double the damage dealt to the target by poison. Combined together, she can deal 5000 damage a turn for five turns through poison damage alone, which is 2.5 times what she could do before. This makes it very useful for a limited few encounters built around enemies with high special defense since poison is not subject to mitigation. It's also an extra 25,000 damage, which isn't too shabby either. This makes her fit her niche better as a cost efficient Arts Assassin, and makes her similar in gameplay to Robin Hood, just as an Assassin.
- Becoming the Mask: This happened in her life, no pun intended, with disastrous results. She would fall in love with or be betrothed to someone only for her acts of assassination, and the stress of constantly repeating the process eventually broke her mind due to the conflict of wanting to become the mask and knowing it was impossible.
- Blessed with Suck: Her body is a powerful weapon given that it naturally produces incredibly potent toxins. Unfortunately, this makes her unable to even touch anyone lest she kill them accidentally. When she does find those she can touch she seems to grow abnormally attached.
- Call-Back: Her clinging to the protagonist who's immune to her poison mirrors her affections for certain people in Fate/Prototype Fragments who had immunities. Though unlike the Serenity summoned in Fragments, she has trouble coping with the fact that multiple people could withstand her touch.
- Can't Hold Her Liquor: In Camelot, she gets so drunk the night before the assault on the Holy City that she hallucinates that she's having some kind of romantic encounter with the protagonist. According to Touta, it didn't take much to get her to that point.
- Cool Mask: She wears the typical Hassan bone mask. Though unlike Cursed Arm, she has a face beneath it.
- Does Not Like Shoes: She's barefoot, wearing leggings that expose most of her feet.
- Gradual Grinder: With her unique Toxic debuff increasing the effectiveness of Poison, she can be played as an enabler for Poison spamming. Both her Poisoned Blade skill (which applies Toxic) and her Zabaniya Noble Phantasm inflict Poison, and when paired with more Poison-debuffing Servants such as Robin Hood she can wear down certain challenge quests.
- Grand Theft Me: This happens to her courtesy of King Hassan in order to test the protagonists, which boosts her powers considerably. She spends much of the time back to the village apologizing for it.
- I Just Want to Have Friends: Her poisonous abilities have left her incredibly lonely, leading her to latch onto the Protagonist (who is immune to her poison).
- Kiss of Death: Her preferred method of using her poison is to kiss the target while draining mana from them. The kiss melts the target's brain while filling them with so much bliss they are unable to feel the pain. Her version of Zabaniya has her doing this to the target.
- Knife Nut: Like Hassan of the Cursed Arm, dirks are her main form or ranged combat.
- Love Confession: She's devoted to the protagonist, but when she bumps into Arash it sets off a brief chain of events that ends with Paracelsus tells her a story about a key event about Fragments and questions about whether what she feels for the protagonist is really love or simply an unhealthy attachment to a person she can touch without killing them. If the latter, then anyone would do, even a walking corpse. This resolves her to confront the protagonist directly and confess that while she's not entirely sure if what she feels is love, she's resolved to find out and do her best for them. This marks one of the few direct confessions that take place outside My Room. Kiyohime ruins the moment, though.
- Negative Continuity: Even more than usual Servants. According to Paraclesus, anytime she is summoned and becomes happy; she will not allow that memory to be summoned from the Throne; instead letting that version of her "sleep" as a means of showing loyalty.
- Luminescent Blush: She gets one in Camelot after learning the protagonist is immune to her poison.
- Poisonous Person: Her Noble Phantasm, Zabaniya: Delusional Poison Body, and main schtick, as her entire body is so toxic that touching it is an almost instant death to humans, based on the Visha Kanya ("Poison Girl") from Indian myths. She can even destroy armies just by standing in a cliff, letting her poison spread through the wind. Her Interlude buffs her second skill to amplify her poison damage, making it do as much as 5,000 damage per turn if she combines it with her upgraded NP from her Rank Up Quest.
- Power Incontinence: Her body produces poison on its own. Just touching people will generally kill them, regardless of whether she wants to or not.
- Shapeshifting: One of her abilities. She uses this to transform her face and body as needed for her assassination missions.
- Stripperiffic: She's wearing a backless leotard with cleavage window and skintight leggings because she has to expose as much of her skin as possible to make her poison spread.
- Suicide Attack: Her Material profile mentions that she has a last resort skill where she bursts and scatters her body everywhere at point-blank range in an attempt to spread her poisonous blood at the target.
- This Was Her True Form: Her profile makes explicit mention that the face under her mask as shown in her third Ascension is in fact her real one, not a shapeshifted disguise.
- Yandere: Played for laughs in "Super☆Ghouls 'n Pumpkins", where she, Kiyohime, and Raikou form the Yandere trio that Elisabeth and friends have to face.
ID: No. 81
Alignment: Lawful Good (Jekyll) & Chaotic Evil (Hyde)
Attribute: Earth
Origin: Literature (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)
First appearance: Fate/Prototype: Fragments of Blue and Silver (as Berserker)
Background development: Hikaru Sakurai
Illustrated by: Nakahara
Voiced by: Mamoru Miyano
Dr. Henry Jekyll (and his alternative personality, Mr. Edward Hyde) is a fictional character in Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 mystery novella, "The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde". Henry Jekyll was a well-respected doctor who spent a great part of his life trying to repress sinful urges that did not befit a man of his stature and social class. This version of Jekyll became convinced of the inherent evil within all humankind and invented an alchemical potion intended to remove or detach the "evil" from a person, using himself as the first test subject.
However, this potion actually transformed him into Edward Hyde, a decadent man without compassion or remorse who could freely indulge in Jekyll's repressed vices. A second dose of the potion reversed the transformation, but as time went by, Hyde grew in power and eventually managed to force transformations without the potion. Their life ended after Jekyll ran out of a key ingredient and committed suicide rather than allow Hyde to live.
As a fictional character, Jekyll and Hyde should not exist within the Throne of Heroes. Perhaps it is due to the unique circumstances of the Grand Order that he can be summoned, or perhaps the Heroic Spirit known as "Jekyll" was based off a real person.
Jekyll and Hyde are mechanically unique in that Jekyll is an Assassin-class Servant, but drinking his potion transforms him into the Berserker-class Hyde. He appears in London as an ally, and later in the Moonlight/Lostroom OVA.
- Adaptational Attractiveness: Compared to the original novel, where Jekyll was a middle-aged man and not the Bishōnen we know here. The official material book also mentions that summoned as an Assassin Hyde only has minor changes when transformed, becoming more beastlike when summoned as Berserker.
- Alchemy Is Magic: Though no Magus, he claims to have used a hint of alchemy in making his elixir.
- And I Must Scream: The activation of his Noble Phantasm seems to invoke this. It shows Hyde on the other side of a mirrored surface, after which Jekyll switches places with him, only to immediately regret it and start uselessly beating his hand against the surface while Hyde starts cackling to himself.
- Anime Hair: When he turns into Hyde, his hair becomes noticeably spikier.
- Clipped-Wing Angel:
- In their interlude, you have to choose Hyde as your Guest Servant, but he has neither his trademark Buster Effectiveness buff nor access to his Noble Phantasm, making him far more weaker than normally he should be. This is invoked by Past Jekyll who isn't limited by the same handicap, as he wants to lecture Jekyll that becoming Hyde alone doesn't help him accomplish anything and that Jekyll has a duty to fulfill as a Servant. The fight would teach Hyde that he has to cooperate with and rely on his Master and allies to be effective.
- Hyde can easily lose his buffs via Buff Removals. If that happens to him, there's no way for him to buff his Buster cards with his Noble Phantasm again, making him significantly less effective.
- Coat Cape: After his first Ascension and onwards.
- Declaration of Protection: Some of his My Room lines have him declare that he will protect his Master this time since he failed last time.
- Driven to Suicide: He commited suicide when he was alive in order to stop Hyde.
- Evil Makeover: In Hyde form. In addition to the hairstyle change, his eyes turn red.
- Historical Hero Upgrade: A more sympathetic take on Henry Jekyll: in the original novella his motivations were selfish, as the potion was designed to change his appearance so he could indulge his vices incognito. He even derived pleasure from Hyde's activities until Hyde began to take over.
- Hyde Plays Jekyll: During his interlude, it turns out that the playable Jekyll in your party was Hyde pretending to be suppressed by Jekyll so he could kill off his real life counterpart.
- Knife Nut: Reluctantly uses them as Jekyll and enthusiastically and violently slashes at enemies as Hyde.
- Mechanically Unusual Fighter: He's the first and only servant that has two classes (his default Assassin, and the Berserker class when his Hyde persona takes over). The only way to shift classes is his Noble Phantasm, and It Only Works Once. His active skills are also enhanced under his Hyde Persona, making his skills even more dangerous when his Hyde persona comes out.
- Megane: He immediately drops the glasses when he becomes Hyde.
- Odd Friendship: Was friends with Sherlock Holmes and Watson when he was alive. His suicide in the short story narrated by Watson is even about how Holmes took it as a personal case. He also becomes friends with Mordred during London despite their clashing personalities.
- Older Than They Look: He looks like a young man, but is said to be much older. The real Dr. Henry Jekyll was said to be in his 50's, and yet this one looks in his 20's tops. That said, the real Mr. Edward Hyde was said to look in his 20's as well, so perhaps it's justified and the serum simply made him look younger when Hyde was created.
- Pretty Boy: Indeed!
- Properly Paranoid: He's wary of Shinjuku's Archer who casually seeks to be on friendly terms with him in My Room dialogue. Since Moriarty's manipulations lead Jekyll to create Hyde and commit suicide, he has every reason to not like the guy.
- Sharp-Dressed Man: As Jekyll, which he loses as his ascensions go up, and whenever he becomes Hyde.
- Split-Personality Takeover: His Noble Phantasm is the elixir that allows him to pull this. And as his third ascension and his interlude shows, Hyde slowly affects Jekyll's persona too.
- Stance System: His gimmick. Using his Noble Phantasm, the Dangerous Game elixir, he switches back and forth between Jekyll's Assassin and Hyde's Berserker, though in-game It Only Works Once and leaves Jekyll as Hyde for the rest of the fight. Prototype's Jekyll was not an Assassin, but was noted to be so weak as a Servant without Hyde that he naturally acquired the Presence Concealment skill, hence his classing as Assassin in Grand Order.
- Superpowered Evil Side: How Hyde works in-game upon using their Noble Phantasm: he completely recovers all of Jekyll's health while increasing his max health by up to 6000 at max level post-Interlude, gives a permanent Buster upgrade depending on Overcharge between 40%-80% post-Interlude, adds a bonus effect to each of Jekyll's skills, and finally changes Jekyll's class from Assassin to Berserker in order to achieve maximum damage output.
- Waistcoat of Style: It becomes more loose as Jekyll ascends, symbolizing Hyde's growing influence on him.
ID: No. 75
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Attribute: Earth
Origin: England (19th century)
First appearance: Fate/Apocrypha (as Assassin of Black)
Background development: Yuuichiro Higashide
Illustrated by: Ototsugu Konoe
Voiced by: Sakura Tange
A serial killer whose name is known all over the world. In spite of the frantic investigations of the Scotland Yard, they butchered five women and then disappeared without ever getting caught. Because the true identity of Jack the Ripper has never been made clear, their shape changes in accordance with which Class it is summoned into. In this case, having manifested as an Assassin, they are an aggregation of children who were not allowed to be born.
She, who was summoned as Assassin, calls herself "Jack the Ripper"; but even she doesn't know if she is really the "true culprit". Although she has memories of killing several women, it is also unknown if they were Jack's victims.
She debuted in the first Christmas event "Almost Weekly Santa Alter," and appears in the London chapter as an antagonist. Later, she goes on to play significant roles in many side events, the first Valentine's event (Chocolate Lady's Commotion") and the second Christmas event ("The Little Santa Alter") most notably, being a major playable ally in the latter.
- Advertised Extra: Was advertised as a major character of the London singularity and even gets the singularity's introduction scene but is killed halfway through the story and is ultimately unrelated to plot.
- Age-Inappropriate Dress: Even if she's intended to be a bit older than her appearance suggests, her outfit is unusually skimpy.
- Alas, Poor Villain: After being defeated by the party in London, her last words are crying out to her Mother before fading away, with Mash watching sadly. Paracelsus himself even offers a word or two afterwards, though he was the one who put her up to dying in the first place.
- Alternate Self: Jack the Ripper has two versions in the Fate franchise, this one who appears in Fate/Apocrypha as the "Assassin of Black" and the "Fake Berserker" of Fate/strange fake. It's a bit unclear, even to them, whether they're the same Heroic Spirit, though.
- Ambiguous Innocence: She is genuinely rather innocent of mind in most respects and doesn't really comprehend the impact of her actions, however, she's also a serial killer. Despite this, she's said to get along best with Good aligned Masters and it's noted that she can be guided in a better direction if she attaches to someone with a proper moral compass. But she'll still probably want to cut you open and crawl inside... in her desperate quest to find a mother's warmth.
- Anthropomorphic Personification: This form of Jack the Ripper is an incarnation of the hatred of the abandoned children of Victorian England, who was killed by a group of magi after her legendary murders.
- Awesome, but Impractical: Her Maria the Ripper Noble Phantasm, which can, in theory, instantly kill the target if the target is female, it is night time, and the weather is misty. If any of these conditions is not met, they only function as a set of D-Rank knives. In practice, even under ideal circumstances it's still basically impossible to pull off against even moderately high tier Servants. However, in terms of gameplay, the instant kill gimmick is fortunately discarded in favor of simply dealing bonus damage against female enemies.
- Ax-Crazy: During life, she would approach prostitutes and attempt to make them be her mother figure. The exhausted women would generally reject her, in most cases more harshly than necessary. If Jack stumbled across them again, she would cut them apart and then press her face into a piece of their flesh while saying "I'm sorry" over and over again. Apart from the murdering, she also has numerous disassociative traits, an urge to climb back inside her 'mother' with knives if necessary and a lot of other mental baggage.
- Broken Bird: Was abandoned at an extremely young age in late 19th century London, and lived as a Street Urchin in absolutely horrifying conditions until dying in her mid-to-late teens. It's no wonder she's so screwed up.
- Cheerful Child: If the person she's latching onto as her mother doesn't reject her, she can be a surprisingly good kid, though prone to violence and sadism. During Inheritance of Glory, Sieg pointed out how much she is different when having the protagonist as her "mommy" compared to the time when she was with Reika.
- Cloud Cuckoolander:
- Combined with Cheerful Child above, like a few of the other previously-"sinister" Servants, her time with the Chaldea crew (particularly her friends Nursery Rhyme and Jeanne-ASL) has pushed her more in this direction in F/GO post-London. While she still occasionally does things like innocently ask someone if they would mind being dismembered, she at least listens to the inevitable "no" with perfect acceptance and in general gets to be a lot more of a kid, albeit a rather odd one.
- An excellent example is her Valentine's 2016 chocolate: while some of the other chocolates can be elaborate, hers is a perfectly-sculpted replica of a human heart as chocolate. With the note "Dear Mom" attached. This is meant, purely and without irony, as an affectionate gift.
- Critical Hit Class: Even amongst Assassins, Jack is a monster at getting critical stars with high innate star generation, three Quick cards, and 5 hits on each Quick card. It's easy for her to gain fifty stars with a single Quick chain, all but ensuring that all of your cards will crit the following turn. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that putting Jack on just about any team will guarantee stars all day long and she's the cornerstone of almost any crit team in the game. Even in a post-Merlin meta where Buster cards ruled above all else and Quick cards had faded into obscurity until the arrival of Skadi, Jack was still considered by the player base to be one of the, if not the, best Assassin in the game because the star generation on her Quick cards is just that fucking good.
- Cute and Psycho: She's a legendary Serial Killer so the "psycho" is a given, but this does little to stop her from being absolutely◊ adorable◊.
- Dark and Troubled Past: In her original life of the dominant personality among the amalgam, she suffered Parental Abandonment at an indeterminably very early age, spent her entire life as a Street Urchin, and judging by her young appearance when summoned (Servants are typically summoned at the "prime" of their lives), she died well before reaching adulthood too.
- Darkness = Death: Her Murderer of the Misty Night skill allows her to achieve an unconditional ambush against any opponent during the night, and nighttime is also one of the requirements for her Maria the Ripper Noble Phantasm to cause a One-Hit Kill.
- Fog of Doom: Jack's Mist Noble Phantasm is enough to kill normal humans, cripple mages and hamper Servants. It's also one of the necessary conditions for her 'Maria the Ripper', letting her inflict a One-Hit Kill with her knives on any female target. She used it during Inheritance of Glory event to hide the Servants from Karna, however he easily erased it so much to Jack's annoyance.
- Freudian Excuse: All Jack wants is to return to the womb. By cutting open random prostitutes until she finds the right one.
- Friendly Tickle Torture: The first three of her bond lines in My Room build up to this where she's hesitant and not quite understanding what it is the protagonist would like to do, but ultimately trusting her master. In her fourth bond line, when they finally do tickle her, she's absolutely delighted.
- Gameplay and Story Integration:
- In gameplay, she and Nursery Rhyme actually do make a really good pair - she can generate lots of crit stars, and Nursery Rhyme has a skill that increases her crit star absorption and critical damage, so Jack is very good at helping make the magic happen. Conversely, Nursery provides a defense down debuff for Maria the Ripper, allowing Jack to spike down people even harder. Jeanne-ASL helps complete the set, too, as her NP gives an attack buff to help Jack's NP even further and also has relatively good stargen for Nursery.
- Also, her not having the Mental Pollution skill from Apocrypha would initially seem to be an opposite example, but it makes sense: one, her Master this time isn't of a capital-E Evil alignment (unlike Reika and Hyouma) and encourages a healthy relationship, and two, the other Servants she's closest to are also of non-Evil alignments and would encourage her sanity. Her Mental Pollution is described in Apocrypha as getting stronger when made to commit Evil acts or influenced by an Evil-aligned Master, so it stands to reason that under opposite conditions, with a non-Evil Master and friends, her Mental Pollution would eventually fade into total dormancy.
- Gender-Blender Name: Jack the Ripper, usually referred to as plain ol' "Jack". Of course, the name is merely one that was assigned by the public rather than given to her at birth, but she still considers it to be hers even if she isn't sure that she's the real serial killer. Though saying anything about her 'birth' would be misleading anyway considering what she is.
- Gender Flip: She is one possible candidate for Jack the Ripper. While she's not confirmed to be the real thing, if she is, then Jack at least looked like a little girl.
- Girl with Psycho Weapon: Uses four strangely-shaped knives and two butcher's knives as her main weapons, with a bloodstained scalpel for added measure.
- Good Scars, Evil Scars: Her face has some scars you would normally expect to find in a grizzled war veteran, in case her dark background isn't obvious just yet. It's likely she sutured that one scar on her right cheek herself.
- Humanoid Abomination: She looks and mostly acts like a little girl, if perhaps a deranged one, but she is in fact a Mind Hive of thousands of abandoned children that came to 'life' in Victorian England. Traces of what she really is can be seen at times, especially if given bad influences.
- Knife Nut: She's an Ax-Crazy knife-wielder. Duh.
- Late-Arrival Spoiler: Much like her friend Nursery Rhyme, her appearance here is... a rather big spoiler for Apocrypha. Her true nature is a major mid-story reveal there (early on, while Reika thinks her pronoun usage is strange, it's thought she's just a single person), but since she has a profile and is summonable, her true nature is evident as soon as the player can see her profile, thus ruining the surprise if you watch/read Apocrypha afterward.
- Meat Grinder Surgery:
- She actually is capable of this, true to the police reports, and it's even a skill she possesses. She can enhance any surgery or suturing she does with prana, meaning that despite looking like a rough sewing job, it'll still close a wound and heal just fine. She also does possess a surprising degree of anatomical knowledge (see again: that perfect human heart in chocolate), and three guesses where she got that knowledge.
- In Grand Order, the... inelegance of her methods would be why her healing skill has such a low base amount, though it scales normally (and cools down rapidly).
- Odd Friendship: The first real friend she makes is with fellow child/conceptual being Nursery Rhyme. That would be an amalgamate of 80,000 dead children, driven by despair and vengeance, making friends with the anthropomorphic personification of children's stories. They get along surprisingly well, all things considered, even if Jack tends to duck out of Nursery's tea parties more often than not. Later, during "The Little Santa Alter," Jeanne d'Arc Alter Santa Lily joins the circle of friends, and she has her own circumstances that make the friendship simultaneously both bizarre and incredibly touching. Paul Bunyan joins this group dynamic later on.
- One-Hit Kill: In lore, Jack's Noble Phantasm Maria the Ripper: The Holy Mother of Dismemberment does this if three conditions are met: the victim is female, it is night time, and it is misty (which she can create using her second Noble Phantasm). It activates as a curse that summons the knives within the target's body and rips them open from the inside out, and can only be blocked if the Servant in question has a high enough Magic Resistance to negate the curse. While it doesn't have an instant-kill effect in GO, it still deals a ton of damage and, especially with the bonus effect, it's very likely to kill its target.
- Palette Swap: Before their sprites were made more distinct with updates, her silhouette and posture were distractingly similar to that of Cursed Arm Hassan's, especially when she had her cloak on.
- Powered by a Forsaken Child: The special ability of her Noble Phantasm Maria the Ripper channels the hatred of the children of 80,000 prostitutes in Victorian London's ghettos who were abandoned back then by their mothers, because they would've cut down on their profit margin.
- Pronoun Trouble: Tying into her overall confusion as one individual or multiple voices and her Cloud Cuckoolander personality, Jack alternates between referring to herself as "I" or "We", sometimes in the same breath. In her Interlude, when the protagonist's group runs into another Jack the Ripper:Jack (Playable Servant): I don't care. I believe that we are the real one. That one believes that he is us. So, we have no choice but to take him out.
- Red Baron: The Legendary Serial Killer.
- Serial Killer: While she was definitely a serial killer in London at the right time even she doesn't know if she's the Jack the Ripper. While she did kill numerous prostitutes, she's not sure if they were the 'right' ones. Therefore, she is only one of numerous possible candidates, though one of the more likely ones.
- Situational Sword: Maria the Ripper can instantly slice up women from the inside on foggy nights. In this game, this gives her a high power buff against female targets that activates upon using the NP and lasts for the rest of the turn. In lore, it's actually quite difficult to pull off even under perfect conditions, which is why she's still pretty weak.
- Stealth Insult: She has a tendency to latch onto the women around her as potential mothers with the very notable exception of Mash who Jack blithely acknowledges by name whenever they cross paths.
- Street Urchin: Her "home" was the filth-ridden, crime-infested slums of Victorian London.
- Stripperiffic: Her Servant outfit, once she casts off her tattered cloak, consists of a sleeveless, off-shoulder, and backless skintight top with a Cleavage Window (though she has none), bikini underwear, bandages covering her hands and forearms, and a lot of belts on her arms and torso. Those who don't care for said appearance frequently choose to keep her in her non-ascended appearance since the cloak looks pretty cool by itself.
- Tomboy and Girly Girl: The tomboy to Nursery Rhyme's girly girl, she often makes herself scarce when her friend tries to get her involved in overtly feminine activities.
- Which Me?: In Jack's Interlude, the protagonist's group runs into, seemingly, another Jack the Ripper (but male, and with a generic Shadow Servant image).Mash: That's... Jack the Ripper?!Jack (Playable female Servant): But Jack is us.
- You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: She discusses this idea with the protagonist at the end of her Interlude. Of course, she's reassured that she won't be simply replaced by someone stronger than her; the protagonist can even reassure her that strength doesn't matter.
ID: No. 42
Alignment: Chaotic Good
Attribute: Man
Origin: China (3rd century BC)
First appearance: Fate/Grand Order
Background development: Yuuichiro Higashide
Illustrated by: Keitarou Takahashi
Voiced by: Atsuko Tanaka
Jing Ke was an assassin that plotted the assassination of the First Emperor of China, and fell one step short of accomplishing it. An individual who could have repainted the history of China, if it weren't for external hindrance. Jing Ke not only made a living out of assassinations, but also was a hedonist individual who loved reading, swordsmanship, chats with her wise friend and - more than anything - alcohol.
Having a present to offer the First Emperor, obtaining a knife dipped in poison meant for assassinations, but just before the time for implementing the plan came, the man who was supposed to support her became unable to move out of fear and Jing Ke had to pursuit the assassination all alone; but maybe due to the Emperor's good luck, she failed to catch him by a narrow margin.
In the story, she appears as an ally in Rome. She is the focus of a short story for the Chaldea Ace magazine, which details her historical confrontation with Qin Shi Huangdi. She later appears in Lostbelt #3: SIN as an ally again.
- Alternate Character Reading: Her Chinese character name (荊軻) is read in Japanese as "Keika." Some prefer using this name when referring to her as it sounds somewhat comparatively feminine. Altria Alter parodies this trope when she butchers her name as "Jing Kay" during the first Christmas event.
- Animation Bump: On the release of the third Lostbelt chapter, she received an update to her sprite and animations. Her updated Noble Phantasm is quite beautifully animated for a 3-star servant, too.
- Balance Buff: She was granted a third skill via Rank-Up Quest, Insolent, which raises the power of her Quick cards and critical hits for a turn. For a raw, one-or-two-turn burst of damage, Jing Ke is a remarkably-serviceable Assassin for anyone without higher rarity ones.
- Boring, but Practical: For players without higher rarity Assassins, Jing Ke is the default choice for single target damage besides Cursed Arm — the tradeoff is sheer damage versus sturdy reliability. Her Noble Phantasm's 1000 self damage debuff means she either needs long-term support or will only survive for short-term fights, but day-to-day questing is focused on the short-term anyway. She'll generate slightly fewer Critical Stars than competitors, but she can consistently absorb them for herself to easily build her Noble Phantasm gauge and unleash a one-turn burst of damage via her Insolent skill — perfect for wiping out a final (Rider) boss at the end of a Rider-filled mission.
- Characterization Marches On: With her very aloof, distant yet eventually-caring relationship with her Master plus her Knife Nut tendencies, she was originally essentially Ryougi Shiki as a Servant. After Shiki herself was featured as a Servant (as seen below), Jing Ke was characterized more as a fatalistic Lady Drunk.
- Contralto of Danger: She's got one of the downright deepest voices amongst female Servants in the game.
- Covert Pervert: Offers to recharge your prana through intimate means even though she knows that you know that she knows there are other ways to do so in Chaldea.
- Critical Hit Class: Jing Ke produces and uses a Critical Stars well despite low hitcounts on her cards, letting her function as a self-sufficient Assassin damage dealer. Her Restrain and Planning skills last for 3 turns each, and respectively increase Critical Star absorption and generation. Restrain also produces a one-turn burst of Stars, just like her Noble Phantasm. Her final skill, Insolent, sharply increases her Quick card effectiveness and critical damage for one turn.
- Did They or Didn't They?: Thanks to her Valentine's day chocolate description, its implied she and the protagonist recharged their prana through alternate means.
- Flat "What": Her response to Jeanne Alter Santa Lily revealing that her present in the second Christmas event is a detoxifier to sober her up.
- For Want of a Nail: She's an assassin infamous enough to become a Heroic Spirit not because she killed her target, but because she didn't. If she had killed the First Emperor of China like she wanted, she would have changed history in very unpredictable ways, especially with China's prominence as a global superpower in the modern day. However, her notability in history extends from the fact that she was inches away from doing so but failed; in a hypothetical Alternate Timeline where she succeeded, she likely wouldn't be anywhere as famous, since her killing of the emperor would have been taken for granted at best.
- Gender Flip: For this series, is it any surprise?
- Glass Cannon: Unlike other lower-rarity Assassins, she possesses no defensive measures at all, not even so much as defensive debuff. In fact, her Noble Phantasm even damages her on use! As a trade-off, she's one of the few Assassins with a means to absorb (and therefore actually use) the Critical Stars they generate, and thus leverages her (buffed) critical hits much more easily.
- Go Out with a Smile: When she fails to kill the Emperor again in the SIN chapter. Notably, he does give her some major respect for not only almost succeeding in killing him a second time, but also having the peace of mind needed to take her own death with a laugh.
- Hard-Drinking Party Girl: Loves alcohol, and when she drinks, she drinks. When she shows up in the first Christmas event completely plastered, her friends imply she's been drinking almost non-stop for ten days. During the second Christmas event, she panics and questions whether life is still worth living after accidentally drinking a detoxifier that not only instantly sobers her up, but makes it so that drinking any more alcohol will actually hurt her.
- The Hedonist: Described as such in her character profile.
- Knife Nut: Comes with the territory of being an assassin really.
- One-Hit Kill: Her Noble Phantasm, All I Do Is Kill: Nonreturnable Dagger, has a chance of doing this, besides doing massive damage in addition to the effect.
- Psycho for Hire: She admits that the only reason she joined Nero in Septem is so she can have a shot at killing the various emperors of the United Roman Empire. That said, unlike most examples she's pretty upfront about it and remains on the protagonist's side even once all the emperors are dead. She even joins up to help fight Altera at the end of the singularity.
- She's Got Legs: Her Stage 4 artwork is keen to remind you of that.
- Similar Squad: As noted above, she acts and works quite similar to Shiki. What separates them and makes them both serviceable, however, is that Shiki is best used for Arts teams, while Jing Ke fits well with most Quick/critical-hit teams.
- Spell My Name with an "S": Her name is read as 'Keika' in Japanese.
- Stranger in a Familiar Land: She's heavily perturbed by the vast changes Qin Shi Huang implemented in the third Lostbelt during the 1900 years in-between his original reign and the present. It does bolster her resolve that she was right to attempt the emperor's assassination. She also ends up teaching some of her favorite poems to the village which slightly reduces her melancholia with this foreign China.
- Taking You with Me: Her Noble Phantasm also has the nasty side effect of reducing her HP, which may somewhat jive with the fact that (in her story) her failure in assassinating Qin Shi Huang also led to her execution. Use her NP at the least optimum moment and she can go as bad as Arash on this end.
- Woman in White: And given how color motifs work in Oriental culture, it fits her class.
ID: No. 239
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Attribute: Sky
Orgin: India (Hindu Mythology)
First Appearance: Fate/stay night (as Matou Sakura)
Illustrated by: ReDrop
Voiced by: Noriko Shitaya
Also called Kamadeva, Kama is the God of love in Hindu Mythology. Even though Kama in the original mythology is male, he has manifested as a woman by possessing a certain girl as a result of her special characteristics, and due to a certain other Pseudo-Servant related to her. Furthermore, Kama should be an Archer because of his sugarcane bow and flower-adorned arrows being able to arouse love and lust in whomever they are shot at and is famous for shooting at Shiva while he was meditating to make him notice Parvati. Instead, Kama has manifested as an Assassin-class Servant.
She debuts as the limited servant in the Tokugawa Labyrinth event.
- Bored with Insanity: She views love as a curse and type of insanity, and she'll invoke Glowing Eyes of Doom when talking about the ultimate fate of those who succumb to her arrows. However by her own admission she has no motivation to followup.
- Breakout Villain: Like Altria Alter, Dark Sakura was popular enough to appear as a vessel of Kama.
- Cast from Hit Points: Kama's first skill inflicts a permanent (but not unremovable) Max HP debuff on its target, while overcharging their Noble Phantasm and restoring some of her health in exchange.
- Celestial Body: By the 3rd Ascension, both Kama's limbs and hair have started reflecting the cosmos, representing Kama becoming Ananga, the formless love that spreads through the cosmos.
- Chekhov's Gunman: She was first mentioned in Parvati's skill "Ashes of Kama" and its description, and also mentioned in both Parvati and BB's F/GO Material entries.
- Cupid's Arrow: Kama's bow and arrows evoke love and lust in whomever the arrows are shot at.
- Foil: To Parvati. Parvati took Sakura's Lighter and Softer side while Kama takes her Darker and Edgier side. Both are Hindu deities of love, but of different aspects of it. Upon Ascension, Parvati gains more clothing while Kama becomes more Stripperific. Their alignments are polar opposites as well.
- Gender Bender: Is stated to still be a man in the original mythology, yet seemed to choose to manifest in the body of Sakura due to her previous connections with Parvati. It's also worth noting that Kama was eventually turned into a bodiless spirit after his death at the hands of Shiva, so gender probably wasn't an issue anymore. In-game, Kama is considered female.
- Interface Spoiler: While nothing in her profile or her dialogue necessarily spoils the fact that she is Kama/Mara aka Beast III/L until you clear Ooku, her skills raise huge red flags on who she is as not only does she have Independent Manifestation, but her third skill is called Mara-Papiyas.
- Last Chance Hit Point: Her second skill grants her a one-time Guts and boosts her attack, and her Guts is not only rare in that it lasts indefinitely until it is triggered, but it's unique in that it's the first that actually scales with level (Blackbeard, who has a similar infinite Guts, only revives with 1 HP).
- Literal Split Personality: Kama apparently took on the negative aspects of Sakura that Parvati rejected.
- Love Hurts: How she views her portfolio.
- Luminescent Blush: Her blushing sprites, seen in her second and third Bond 5 lines, have her face become fairly pink.
- The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body: In her young first ascension state, she claims that treating her like one of the other child Servants is not appropriate, while simultaneously pouting over the prospect of her cake being taken away.
- Mystical White Hair: Has white hair evocative of Dark Sakura, and being a God in Human Form, makes said hair color quite meaningful.
- No-Sell: Kama's unique variant of the "Core of the Goddess" skill, "Core of the Love Goddess", sacrifices the usual debuff resistance for immunity to charm effects. Not that she needs it though, she has Magic Resistance A to give her 20% debuff resistance already.
- Playing with Fire: Kama's attacks involving her giant vajra has her igniting it with blue flames. Her limbs are also burning blue in her 3rd Ascension.
- Red Eyes, Take Warning: Her eyes evoke Dark Sakura, and she also has the Chaotic Evil alignment.
- Sadist: People being happy and falling in love disgust her, but she does get a kick out of them falling into ruin afterwards.
- Scissors Cuts Rock: Her Mara-Papiyas skill grants her full advantage against Alter Ego class for three turns.
- Sensible Heroes, Skimpy Villains: She's Chaotic Evil and she shows more skin as she ascends. It's especially obvious in comparison to fellow Sakura pseudo-Servant Parvati, who's Lawful Good and much more conservative with her clothing.
- Sex God: Was the god of love in Hindu and Buddhist mythology.
- She's All Grown Up: Invoked with her Ascensions. Her First Ascension has her appear like a little girl, her Second Ascension turns her into a teenager, and her Third and Final Ascension has her become a fully-grown woman. And what a woman!
- The Slacker: She claims to be a Love God that hates her job, and thus barely puts in any effort into it; same goes for being a Servant — at least until her final ascension, where she tells her Master that they've finally made her get serious. It's a reference to the myth, where "he" was pressured by the other gods (she mentions "power harrassment among gods" in one of her lines) to shoot Shiva, who was busy meditating, with his arrow to notice Parvati and make an offspring that could defeat a powerful demon. Shiva got angry at him for breaking his meditation and burned him to ashes, then turned him into Ananga. He/she's been bitter about it ever since, showing her open hatred towards him and Parvati.
- Slasher Smile: She sports a downright wicked one in her Third Ascension's sprite, and whenever she's feeling particularly malicious.
- The Snark Knight: She'll gleefully snark about everything and everyone. But herself worst of all. There's a strong implication that she's actually entirely incapable of loving herself.
- Square Race, Round Class: Despite being in the Assassin class, Kama is firmly still an Archer, using a bow and arrows in all her attacks. As a result, Kama lacks the Assassins' Presence Concealment, and replaces it with the Independent Action almost all Archers tend to have. She also has Riding as a skill, which very few Assassins possess.
- Stealth Pun: Why is Kama an Assassin exactly? Because Mara's name has roots in Sanskrit word for "killing" or "causing death", and is also used as a name for the Hindu goddess of death.
- Stripperiffic: Kama's outfit is fairly modest in her first ascension, but as she ascends and grows older in appearance, she loses more clothing. By her third and final ascension, she's just barely covered up.
- Tactical RockPaperScissors: Kama's third skill uniquely grants her class advantage against Alter-Egos. Quite fitting as the other half of Beast III, Kiara, is also an Alter Ego, and she has something of a rivalry with her.
- Theme Music Power-Up: Unique in that it only applies to her third stage and onwards. This is mainly because her third stage is closest to her Beast version and the music is a snippet of Kama/Mara's Battle Theme Music.
- What Is This Thing You Call "Love"?: Having grown disillusioned with the concept of love, Kama mostly feels despair when she thinks about it nowadays. At Bond 5, her three different forms have unique reactions to how alien it feels to her.
- Her child form rationalizes her Master's insistence on trying to befriend her as them being a person who is fascinated by disgusting things.
- Her teenage form feels hot and bothered when she realizes she's receiving love instead of giving it like usual. Naturally, she decides she needs to stab her Master with one of her love arrows in response. She's not concerned with whether or not they'll survive it.
- Her adult form gets asked what love is, and responds by challenging her Master to answer that question for her, and make her remember why it once felt wonderful to her.
ID: No. 188
Alignment: True Neutral
Attribute: Earth
Origin: Japan (16th century)
First appearance: Fate/Grand Order
Background development:
Illustrated by: Makoto Soga
Voiced by: Satomi Akesaka
A ninja descended from the Fuuma clan, who was active during the late Sengoku period. Her true identity is a karakuri doll manufactured by the sorcerer Kashin Koji, molded with the help of the first Fuuma Kotarou. In life, she slowly began to break down and lose her memories. Because she is summoned in this state, she doesn't remember much about the people in her life anymore.
She appears in Shimosa as an ally.
- Become a Real Boy: Her profile states that she did not possess free will in her lifetime, and she was just a mechanical doll that just abided by the orders inputted into her or so she defined herself. But, upon being carved in human history as a Heroic Spirit and manifesting as a Servant, she began to consider that maybe, she might be allowed to think - and have feelings - just like humans. She wants to do so, if she is allowed.
- Blade Below the Shoulder: They pop out of her arms and look a lot like Kars'.
- Blow You Away: Her Noble Phantasm, Karakuri Genpou Dongyu.
- Dangerous Forbidden Technique: Her second Noble Phantasm, the cheerfully named Decapitation Black Arts - Moonflower. Not much is known about it outside of the name and that she hates using it because it's apparently just that gruesome.
- Double Unlock: She can only be summoned after completing Shimosa.
- Early-Bird Cameo: Was mentioned back in FGO Material Book 3, as Charles Babbage qualified a then-unnamed Servantnote as the most beautifully crafted automaton he's ever seen.
- Even the Girls Want Her: Musashi, at least, clearly has a thing with her.
- Exotic Eye Designs: Her eyes are gold, have a faint glow to them, and her pupils are polygonal.
- Gender Flip: Again, this is Fate after all. Though this time, it's not the biggest twist on the legend...
- Has Two Daddies: She considers her "parents" to be Koji Kashin, the mage from the feudal era who built her body, and the first Kotarou Fuuma, who powered her and taught her everything she knows.
- Idiot Hair: Has one in her Final Ascension art.
- Lethal Chef: She can make rations that are excellent in terms of nutrition, stamina recovery and pure calories. However, because she has no sense of taste she can't check that herself and the entire Fuuma clan didn't have the heart to tell her how awful her concoctions tasted or how to improve them. She knows too but the protagonist had already eaten one before she could warn them that they taste like death.
- Letting Her Hair Down: From her 3rd Ascension onwards, which reaches down to her waist.
- Master of Illusion: Her profile mentions that she has illusionary abilities,and she can give either evasion or invincibility to an ally. In fact, her Noble Phantasm is just an application of the illusion of her swallowing an entire bull.
- Mercy Kill: After training Kotarou, she asked him to kill her because her memory was in complete shambles and her duty had been fulfilled. He doesn't remember whether he granted her request or not.
- Robot Girl: Actually a particularly advanced karakuri automaton, virtually human on the outside except for a few obvious joints, hidden weapons, and some less than anatomically correct details like the ability to spin her wrists 360° at super speed until they create cyclones.
- Rocket Punch: One attack lets her shoot off her arms to punch the enemy, though they're attached by chains so she can pull them back on.
- Shared Family Quirks: Like the playable Fuuma, she has a propensity for speaking Gratuitous English when using her Noble Phantasm.
- Supernatural Gold Eyes: They showcase her robotic origins quite well.
- Telescoping Robot: Most of her weapons are built directly into her rather slim frame. Worst offender is probably the large rockets that come out of her back, that even get lampshaded in-story as annoyingly cumbersome to use.
- Third-Person Person: She refers to herself using only her name.
- Throw the Dog a Bone: As a result of her interlude, she regains some of her memories of Kotarou, going from calling him quite formally at the beginning to simply calling him by name at the end like she did when he was a child. At the same time, a My Room line was added for him where she's really happy to see how much he's grown.
- Villain Override: Ends up having to face the party after spending most of the chapter as an ally, due to an override Caster Limbo put in her head.
- Wistful Amnesia: She's attached to Kotarou because she helped to raise train him. He considers her to be his mother. She doesn't consciously remember him, however.
- You Are Not Alone: She remarks that she'd like to talk with Babbage or Nursery Rhyme if you have them as she feels a kinship with the former being a robot and the latter having doll parts.
ID: No. 235
Costume Dress ID: No. 18note & 19note
Alignment: Neutral Evil
Attribute: Man
Origin: China (19th century)
First appearance: Fate/EXTRA (young), Koha-Ace (as Lancer)
Illustrated by: Arco Wada
Voiced by: Kunihiko Yasui
The older version of Li Shuwen. He first appears during Lostbelt 3, serving as the Imperial Head Guard for Qin Shi Huangdi. He also makes a memorable appearance in New Year Event 2019 as a playable support Servant in certain quests, later becoming available to summon during the same event.
- Armor-Piercing Attack: As a boss, he's capable of applying a buff to himself that ignores the damage penalty he should be getting against Casters. In addition, his version of the Chinese Martial Arts skill allows him to ignore Invincibility for a turn. Combined with being able to single out enemies with a targetable taunt, you better hope your Merlin/Skadi/Tamamo/Waver has a guts buff active to revive them from the death blow.
- Badass Grandpa: He's an old man compared to his vigorous Lancer counterpart or his Fate/EXTRA version, but he's only suffered a one-rank decrease in his Strength and Endurance. In exchange he gets one-rank increase in Agility, and can kill Servants even as a human, which is more than the vast majority of people in the Nasuverse can say.
- Badass Normal: His story version is not actually a Servant, but the real Li Shuwen, having been kept alive by Qin for all these years. 150 years of martial arts experience means he's still more than capable of fighting Servants with his bare hands.
- Bare-Fisted Monk: Has dropped his spear in favor of just beating the hell out of people with martial arts. He is no less deadly for it, if not stronger without a weapon.
- Blood Knight: Even in his old age he's just as eager to test himself against anyone, including his younger self if the player has him. In fact, a chance to take a crack at himself in his youth is his personal wish for the Grail.
- Coat Cape: He wears a long coat on his shoulders like his Lancer version with his third ascension.
- Cool Shades: He sports Lennon Specs for his First Ascension before switching to a more typical pair for his Second Ascension. He takes them off for his Third Ascension.
- Cool Sword: His Valentine's return gift is a wooden sword he personally made. This is not meant for battle however, yet is handy on warding off ghosts. It also turns out to be popular among boys, particularly Kintoki and Koutarou.
- Double Unlock: He requires clearing Lostbelt #3 to be summonable, though like Sitonai, he was only released several weeks after his Lostbelt as part of an event.
- The Dragon: To Qin Shi Huang. He's the one put in charge of coordinating the defense against Chaldea and picking the warriors to fight them.
- Finger Poke of Doom: One of his Extra Attack animations has him performing a really gentle one-inch punch which still has enough power to pull off a Delayed Explosion.
- Fragile Speedster: A+ ranked Agility but D ranked Endurance, yet he doesn't pull his punches.
- The Glasses Come Off: He removes his sunglasses after achieving his third Ascension. After clearing his Interlude, two Costume Dresses are unlocked at the Da Vinci Shop, with each Costume Dress having his sunglasses removed for each of the other two Ascension sprites. Each Costume Dress has to be bought separately and costs 500 Mana Prisms like any other normal Costume Dress.
- Limit Break: Like his Lancer counterpart, Old Li is entirely focused around cold-hard burst with the defense reduction from his Noble Phantasm. He has two Arts cards, good NP gain, and a passive that boosts his Arts effectiveness. He's particularly focused on the "finish in one turn" aspect, as all of his damage-boosting skills last only one turn, forcing him to make the best of it or lose out on potential damage.
- Martial Arts and Crafts: He somehow used his martial arts skills for massage purposes in the New Year 2019 event, as he stepped up as a security guard and massage expert for Benienma's inn.
- Mythology Gag:
- His version of No Second Strike looks nearly identical to how it was depicted in Koha-Ace. In a broader sense, ever since Fate/EXTRA, Assassin has been touted as being the best class for when he's summoned as a old man, and this version has been sitting in the game files ever since release before finally being released years into its lifespan.
- His coat in his later Ascension is similar to the one his Koha-Ace Lancer self wears.
- Old Master: Aside from a slight drop in some of his Parameters, Li is more than capable of kicking ass despite his seeming advanced age. He even has a passive skill called Veteran which increases his Arts cards performance and crit star generation.
- Self-Deprecation: He refers multiple times to his old age, either as an insult to himself about how much he can do or to his enemies about their loss against an old geezer like him. It also slips into Heroic Self-Deprecation, as he doesn't believe he is worthy of being among other Servants despite being able to fight them. But he still is thankful for being able to meet people like his younger Lancer self or fellow martial artist Yan Qing, the former being his wish to fight and the latter he considers a great honour to meet, as well as being amused by the novelty of such meetings.
- Silver Fox: Despite being visibly older than his Lancer version, no one will say he isn't easy on the eyes, if not just as much as his younger version.
- You Are Already Dead: He possesses the same Noble Phantasm as his Lancer counterpart, giving him a chance to instantly kill his target. It functions the same way too: engulfing his foe's internal systems with chi so they stop working properly.
ID: No. 45
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral
Attribute: Man
Origin: Netherlands (20th century)
First appearance: Fate/Grand Order
Background development: Yuuichiro Higashide
Illustrated by: Hirokazu Koyama
Voiced by: Risa Taneda
Mata Hari was a woman spy active in the underworld, and was one of the more odder people in her line of work. A strip dancer, her legs continued to bewitch military officers until the day she was executed as a spy. Thinking back, the starting point of Mata Hari's life stumbled on a hole that she was helpless to do anything about. Her father lead the company he managed into bankruptcy and repeatedly had extramarital affairs. Her mother fell ill from worries and finally died when Mata Hari was around fourteen. Even her married life ended in failure due to her husband's habits of violence, alcoholism and infidelity.
So for her, who wasted most of her youth to the selfish desires of men, to become a spy who made sport out of men was something that suited her nature to a frightening degree—even if what awaited in the end was an execution.
She tends to cameo in events and plays a reasonably notable role during the second Halloween event, "Super☆Ghouls 'n Pumpkins". She made her first appearance in the main story as an ally in Salem.
- Badass Normal: In comparison to other Servants, as she doesn't even possess Class Skills. Then again, her Personal Skill, Information Gathering, obscures which side she is on, making her seem like an ally even to enemies.
- The Bartender: She shows up in "Super☆Ghouls 'n Pumpkins" as a barmaid, giving Brave Liz shelter after she was kicked out by Cleopatra.
- Belly Dancer: Her general aesthetic.
- Bi the Way: One of her lines in My Room confirms this."I love all kinds of humans, both men and women."
- Death Faked for You: In Salem, she is accused of being a succubus and executed by Sanson against his will. However Circe foresees this so she stages a fake murder by poisoning Mata Hari so she can get away safely.
- Even the Girls Want Her: Unlike most Noble Phantasm's like it, Mata Hari's Noble Phantasm charms both men and women, though it doesn't discriminate against monsters either.
- Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": Although Mata Hari is considered her True Name as a Servant, her actual name was Margaretha Geertruida MacLeod, with Mata Hari being her far more well-known stage name as she got around the conservative outlook of the times by claiming that her dances were derived from ancient Middle Eastern rituals.
- Favors for the Sexy: How she did her work in life. Her entire fighting style as a Servant revolves around this, charming men and women alike to do her bidding as she herself is a terrible fighter.
- Femme Fatale Spy: As in her original legend.
- Gainaxing: She is incredibly bouncy.
- Genki Girl: In many events where she tends to feature, she tends to provide some levity and light-heartedness around her. It even translates to her role in the "Super☆Ghouls 'n Pumpkins," where she serves as the friendly barmaid your party meets during their adventure.
- Hello, Nurse!: Was considered the most desirable woman in Paris, if not the world, when she was alive. So much so that the firing squad who executed her had to be blindfolded, as her executioners would otherwise be too entranced by her beauty to pull the trigger.
- Highly Visible Ninja: She has no innate Presence Concealment, but she does have a very high Espionage skill that prevents her foes from recognizing her as an enemy so long as her master doesn't rat her out.
- Honey Trap: One of the most famous.
- I Just Want to Be Loved: Her wish to the Grail would be for someone to love her and a happy family.
- It's All Junk: Her personal 10 star Craft Essence is the jewelries she gained through her seduction of WWI military officers. The Craft Essence is called "Worthless Treasure", as riches and luxury is not what she's after.Although it's necessary in order to live, I still have this slightest feeling. What I don't need, it keeps on increasing forever. What I need the most, it abandons me.
- Joke Character: Her stats are abysmal as a Common Servant, she comes with no passive skills, and her active ones pre-Rank-Up quest aren't really good (especially Espionage). She's also painfully aware of it and has practically given up on ever seeing her wish granted (which is extra depressing when said wish is just to be happy for once in her life).
- Laser-Guided Karma: Her career as a Femme Fatale Spy is said as karma's punishment because men had done so much wrong on her. Men had brought her many sufferings, so she brought them ruin. Even though she's not exactly malicious toward men herself, her very presence is anathema for them because karma is backing her up.
- Lethal Joke Character:
- Her iteration as an enemy Servant in the GUDAGUDA Honnoji Event, is no pushover, being high-leveled plus her Noble Phantasm almost always paralyzing all enemy Servants—especially if they are male.
- Also, hilariously, she can be good against the final boss of the first storyline. Her third skill is an opposing skill seal, which prevents the boss from using its wombo-combo skill buffs that give it tons of damage and evasion/invuln pierce, and she's one of the only characters who gets such a skill. Bring along some protection as well, and she's a key to beating the boss, and in many ways is the easiest to obtain (being basically free). And then, on top of that, since she's an Assassin she does get the bonus damage against him...
- Despite her relatively poor individual gameplay, she does have a niche as a surprisingly nasty debuffer with some of the strongest debuffs to enemy Defense in the game (up to a whooping 80% at maximum) with her second and third skills and her Noble Phantasm. She's sometimes compared to the higher-rarity support Assassin Stheno favorably, since they both effectively offer a 3-turn, +40% skill-based damage buff for the team (since defense debuffs are just inverted attack buffs), but Mata Hari's debuffs are non-conditional.
- Let's You and Him Fight: Seems to reference this trope upon entering combat, given how her role as a Femme Fatale made men turn on each other instead of her.Mata Hari: Oh dear, it's a fight... I don't really want to... how about you all kill each other instead?
- Magikarp Power: Her Rank-Up Quest adding a second debuff greatly increased her viability. Before, she was just a Joke Character since a +20% damage buff from skills was common. A +40% total damage buff is uncommon, she has another debuff in her Noble Phantasm, and she was much easier to obtain than other "damage support" Servants, especially those who didn't need to waste a card in one turn boss kill scenarios such as the Demon Pillar raid event.
- Mass Hypnosis: The effect of her Noble Phantasm, Mata Hari: The Girl Who Has Sunny Eyes, turning anyone that witnesses her dance into her puppet.
- The Matchmaker: She attempts to act as a wingman for Summer Mordred and Qin Liangyu in their Valentine's Day scenes, but only succeeds in embarrassing them both.
- Ms. Fanservice: Perhaps the biggest example, just look at the picture. It's used against her in Salem as she attracts an unwanted admirer and rejects him which gives Hopkins the leverage to accuse her of being a succubus come to bring the men of Salem into sin. Also, in her Arcade appearance, the cameras started giving shots to her curvy ass and boobs to show that she's charming her enemies that way.
- Plucky Girl: Noted as being aware of her weakness as a Heroic Spirit, but making up for it in sheer determination. She also doesn't let any of her rather awful backstory show in her bright smile.
- Shipper on Deck: During the Valentine's event, she tricks Swimsuit Mordred into initiating a pocky game with you, and even shows up to cheer Mordred on.
- Smells Sexy: Essentially the function of her Pheromone skill.
- Stripperiffic: Again, look at the picture. It helps that she basically was one in Real Life.
- Support Party Member: She specializes in plastering enemies with defense debuffs and charms (including a rare one that affects any gender in her Noble Phantasm), with additional options for Skill Seal, an attack debuff on her NP, and some Critical Star generation.
- The Tease: Towards her enemies and allies alike, though for the latter she won't use the supernatural part of her charms.
- Weak, but Skilled: Every stat besides Luck and her Noble Phantasm is E-ranked.
- Who Wants to Live Forever?: Her wish was going to be for immortality, but she started to have second thoughts.
ID: No. 86
Alignment: Chaotic Good
Attribute: Star
Origin: Planet Servant (or so she claims)
First appearance: Back Alley Satsuki - Chapter Heroine Sanctuary (Type-Moon April Fools 2013)
Background development: Kinoko Nasu
Illustrated by: BUNBUN
Voiced by: Ayako Kawasumi
A Long Time In The Future, In A Galaxy Far, Far, Away, the universe has become overpopulated by Saber Expies. The evil Saber Empire has driven Lancers to extinction, and Archers are locked up as criminals. Thus, a mysterious young heroine takes up a laser sword and travels through time to exterminate the Saber population and prevent this Bad Future from coming to pass. She is not Altria in a hat.
She claims to be the Ultimate Anti-Saber Decisive Weapon, and the definitive version of the Saber class (though she is an Assassin). Although she originally intended to violently murder anyone who looks like Saber, she is touched by the innocence of Saber Lily and instead decides to violently murder anyone who looks like Saber except for Saber Lily. Her arch-enemy is the Golden Great Emperor, Cosmo Gilgames.
She debuted as an ally and limited-time Servant during "Saber Wars". She pops up here and there during other events, and is Nobunaga's teammate for the Dead Heat Summer Race.
- Ace Pilot: Her EX-rank Riding combines with her specialty in piloting spaceships means she can somehow made a spaceship without warp function able to go into warp.
- Balance Buff: Besides her fairly early Interlude upgrade to her Noble Phantasm, she also gets a Rank-Up Quest to upgrade her terrible Intuition skill to Star of Saber, increasing the amount of Critical Stars she gets and also giving her a turn of Invulnerability.
- Batter Up!: Apart from her Flynning her 2018 animation updates incorporates baseball moves on her attacks—particularly her Extra Attack. Considering her baseball player-inspired outfit, it kinda works—even if she's really using mechanized versions of her swords.MHX: SABER HOME RUN!!
- Berserk Button: Put her in radius of a Saber (or in Jeanne's case, even vaguely looking like a Saber-face), and she instantly transforms into a raving, screaming ball of pure, unrestrained fury.
- Big Eater: As per usual for Altria. Her revamped skill animations have her chowing down on a cup of noodles.
- Blatant Lies: In Saber Wars, she lets it be known that she is 100% a Saber, even though it clearly lists her as an Assassin in the party menu.
- Coat Cape: Eventually stops wearing her jacket correctly.
- Crippling Overspecialization: Mysterious Heroine X is basically only good against Saberface Sabers, Swimsuit Mordred, her Alter, Berserker Jeanne Alter, and both Santa and Swimsuit Alter. Otherwise, she's easily the worst SSR Assassin and is outperformed by some SRs. Also, generally you'd want to bring an Archer against the former since she only does about 10% more damage before factoring in the Archer's skills and lacks the defensive advantage. Even for Santa Alter she'll still perform worse than Jack, who isn't even limited. Her only saving grace is her EX-ranked Riding skill that boost her innate Quick performance which most Quick-oriented Assassins lacked.
- Declaration of Protection: As she Ascends and reaches higher Bond levels, she starts to abandon her self-imposed mission of eliminating Sabers and decides to serve the protagonist loyally as their sword.
- Dual Wield: She dual wields Excalibur and Excalibur Morgan for her Noble Phantasm Secret Calibur: Unsigned Sword of Victory. Amusingly, during Musashi's trial quest she claims a Saber who dual wields is no true Saber (despite she herself being a Saber in all but Class).
- Eating the Eye Candy: Just like with Mysterious Heroine X Alter, the protagonist has the opportunity to muse on MHX's bloomers and zoom in on them in the ending of X Alter's Trial quest.
- Enemies List: Her personal Bond CE is a picture of files on several Sabers she plans to eliminate. She's extended her hatred to other Sabers who don't have Altria's face, now trying to kill Ryougi Shiki and Siegfried.
- Flash Step: Her animation update for the "Saber Wars" rerun integrates this, which now causes after-images of her to appear while conducting her multiple attacks.
- Flynning: Her swordplay is a lot more gratuitously flashy than most swordsmen in the game and feels more like Star Wars lightsaber battles, probably as a reference to the Grand Order event she appeared in being a big reference to the franchise. This was further made elaborate in her animation update that was coupled with the rerun of "Saber Wars".
- Glowing Eyes: Subtle example: by Stage 3, her irises/irides glow like her Tron Lines.
- Heroic Comedic Sociopath: She's Chaotic Good In-Universe, but it really doesn't show; most of her appearances are gags that emphasize her ruthless willingness to hunt anyone who is a Saberface or a Saber with few exceptions. Still, she does show up in the Solomon Singularity to help the protagonist in the main story with (less of) a gag attached.
- Hunter of His Own Kind: She's a Saber-face dedicated to eliminating Saber-faces.
- Idiot Hair: While it's a mainstay of that person she definitely isn't and her clones, hers deserves a special mention for somehow poking through her hat.
- In-Series Nickname: Her name's shortened to just X.
- Irony
- Although her gimmick is hunting Sabers, her Noble Phantasm only gains bonus damage against enemies with the Saberface trait as opposed to Saber class enemies - the majority of whichnote are not Sabersnote .
- In Miyamoto Musashi's Trial Quest, she claims Sabers should wield sword with only one hand and declares Musashi's Dual Wield style as a sin, ironically coming from someone who dual-wields swords herself.
- Joke Character: Played With. On one level, she's a literal joke character, created for TYPE-MOON's 2013 April Fool event, but she's an SSR Servant nonetheless with the stats to back it up. On the other hand, as noted in Crippling Overspecialization, she plays this trope straight in some ways with one of the narrowest skillsets in the entire game. It's quite fair to say she's the Joke Character of SSRs, but her limited availability ensures that those who do seek her out make conscious excuses to use her.
- Let X Be the Unknown: Her "name". X's also show up a lot in her design.
- Muscles Are Meaningless: Still has the slender body type of most expies of Altria, but is effortlessly Dual Wielding greatswords.
- Mythology Gag:
- In her last Interlude. She fights the "original Saber-face", Altria. She claims that by killing Altria, the dystopian future where she came will not happen. Maybe she got this idea from a certain red Archer.
- Her archenemy is the Golden Great Emperor Cosmo Gilgames.
- Oh, Crap!:
- She's in the last room of the Garden Of Order event, fighting the new Saber; Shiki. As in, the Void who can kill anything, even a Joke Character. She realizes this after challenging her.
- Happens again to a lesser extent during Musashi's trial quest where she gets the same feeling of extreme danger from Musashi that she got from Void Shiki. Once Musashi uses her Heavenly Eye to destroy the braclet MHX is using to project her illusion of the battlefield MHX realizes she has absolutely zero defense against it and runs scared.
- One-Handed Zweihänder: Do remember that she can carry two versions of Excalibur in each hand like they're baseball bats.
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: After the aforementioned "oh crap" above she starts backtracking on all of her tough talk and even tries to use an emergency warp to turn tail and run like hell.
- Paper-Thin Disguise:
- She can't be Type-Moon's most recognizable character. Saber doesn't wear a hat, and her sword is Excalibur, not "Himitsucalibur" (literally "Secret Calibur")! Her final profile portion outright admits that she's Altria but asks you not to tell her otherwise you'd spoil her perfect disguise.
- In My Room and her Interludes, she keeps referring to herself as a Saber, not Assassin. You, Mash and Dr. Roman have to remind her that she's in the Assassin class.
- Ramen Slurp: For some reason, her animation update tied with the rerun of "Saber Wars" has her doing this while using any of her skills.
- Scarf Of Asskicking: Eventually become her gauntlets in final ascension.
- Square Race, Round Class: She might have become an Assassin thanks to her murderous plotting, but she's still very blatantly a Saber. Her class skills are still Riding and Magic Resistance with no Presence Concealment in sightnote , making for a rather confusing character. And of course there's the brightly glowing magic greatsword that's absolutely not Assassin material. Lampshaded during her brief appearance in Guda Meijin, where she goes on a rant about how a cheap Saberface got to be a 5* Saber (Okita) while she herself was made an Assassin (complete with copying Okita's Incurable Cough of Death).
- Stripperific: Starting at Stage 3, beyond the Coat Cape and her tight-fitting arm-length gloves, she's showing off as much skin as Mordred in Fate/Apocrypha.
- Suspiciously Specific Denial: She's never met Mordred before ever and has no family issues related to her whatsoever!
- Sword Beam: Her revamped animations have her shooting an X-shaped beam with her Arts cards.
- There Can Be Only One: She wants to kill all of Altria's expies, referenced by her Assassin class, and her Noble Phantasm that deals extra damage to Saber-faces.
- Tron Lines: Her final Ascension.
- Vibroweapon: Based on their effects and the sounds they make, her cybernetic versions of Excalibur and Excalibur Morgan likely fall under here.
- Zettai Ryouiki: After Stage 1.