Fate/Grand Order: Murder at the Kogetsukan Story Review

 

As I've mentioned before, Fate/Grand Order often excels when it comes to telling a good, engaging story that retains audience attention while also maintaining the fun gaming experience that comes with its turn-based fighting system. While that fighting system is utilized sparsely in this event, the story itself maintains a good pace, atmosphere, and general mystery about it so as to always keep the audience engaged. While the event is now over and the story isn't accessible to anyone who hasn't already played through it, I figured I'd highlight it only because "Murder at the Kogetsukan" is something Fate/Grand Order hasn't really done before with its events. And that's to tell a story not for the sake of a new welfare Servant, but rather in order to experiment with the ways in which storytelling can be employed through the medium of a gacha game.

The story starts out simple enough: Your character wakes up to find he's been transported into the body of someone else (who, coincidentally, I suppose, shares the same name as the player). While you end up encountering Servants that appear to be acting out some kind of realistic drama of sorts, you soon realize that these are not Servants at all. Instead, through whatever means of consciousness transportation concocted for the story, you are perceiving real people as Servants. These people make up two families who, after decades of struggling against one another for power, have decided to come together, utilizing a forced marriage between two younger family members in order to do so. However, things turn awry at the arrival of a detective who informs the families that he had been called by an unknown source in order to investigate a possible crime. But, soon after his arrival, the detective is murdered, beginning a slew of killings that threaten the arranged marriage. You are tasked with one goal: To find out who is behind these killings, and to keep them from ruining the joint marriage that will join these two factions together.

What I liked most about this story was how different it was from many others in the game. While other event stories have utilized servants in different roles than themselves before, they still acted as summoned beings or role-players who were aware of their true identities. Here, however, the "Servants" in the story are not Servants at all, but associative perceptions because of your inability to see the people involved for how they truly look. This was something I had to keep in mind as I read the story, given that an altered perception would make it more difficult to discern the killer. As, yes, once the story had reached a certain point, players were directed to vote online to see if they could guess as to who the murderer was. That interactivity coupled with the different way in which servants were utilized made it a very interesting time, forcing me to pay more attention to character interactions and perceptual cues as they were brought up in the story.

The story itself maintained interest not only through these new, nuanced ways of looking at everything transpiring, but also via the "switch-offs" that happened throughout. At the end of every chapter, you're consciousness is transported back to your original body, wherein you return to Chaldea to discuss what happened in the chapter with Mash, Sherlock Holmes, and Moriarty. While at first these sections seemed a bit useless aside from Mash's handy-dandy chart keeping track of all the family members, their purpose is expertly weaved into the narrative to the point where--despite being obvious in hindsight--I was surprised by how well everything flowed. The same goes for the story at large in general: It had good pacing, alright character development for the family members, and decent hints that were dropped throughout regarding who the killer might be (and how perception plays a role in uncovering who they are).

If I had to gripe about one thing regarding the story, it's that there is a bit of filler here and there. I get that you need to develop characters in order to make the audience care about them, and that it's best to do so early on in order to better deepen player connection. But, at the same time, a good chunk of characters, including important ones, didn't reach any developmental heights outside of general character traits. Juliet doesn't want to get married and has a crush on you. Eva is flirtatious with everyone around her. Chris is stoic and speaks with a plain voice. Mordred is Mordred. And while all of those are good, developmental character traits bolstering the story and its main players, there's not a lot to many of them outside of those superficial points. The only characters I would say had any sort of depth would be Hawthorne and Ann, the former of which doesn't even play all that much into the story as a whole. While I do get why they had to keep everyone in more superficial roles (after all, this is an event story for a gacha game with a very large cast of characters), part of me wishes there was a little more creative freedom so more of their characterizations could come out, giving me all the more reason to care.

But, at the same time, I can't knock them for creating a unique and interesting story that, barring some characterizations leaving me wanting more, was a satisfying chain of twists and turns. Fate/Grand Order has always had some of the best stories in gacha gaming, but the fact that they're still willing to experiment and keep players on their toes as to what's coming next never ceases to amaze me. The intrigue involved in these plotlines is one of the biggest reasons why I could never see myself quitting the game. Everything is done is such a way as to engage the reader with appeal and battles that do good for gacha games as a whole. I cannot wait to read future event stories and participate in more unique questlines.

...But maybe I should actually beat Act 1 of the story first.