Nasuverse
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The Nasuverse is a fictional universe created by Japanese author Kinoko Nasu. His partner in crime is Takeuchi Takashi, the character designer and artist. Together the two of them form media company Type-Moon, license-holder for that which follows and ruler of all waifus.
The Nasuverse is basically an urban fantasy setting. Mages, vampires, zombies, and the Holy Grail are all real. Mages spend most of their time fighting each other over petty arguments, circlejerking in the magic academy inside of Big Ben, and committing crimes against humanity in the name of progressing their research. They only stop once in a while to fight over the Holy Grail so they can gain complete knowledge of the universe and access to the Akasha, or whatever.
Overall, the Nasuverse is pretty much the intersection of /a/, /v/, and /tg/, and it's been around long enough that there's something for everyone. Nasu himself is a fan of Dungeons and Dragons and plays it a lot. Enough that he and a bunch of other weeaboo authors got together and recorded some of their play sessions in that weird Japanese tradition of replay books. It's called Red Dragon, and the anime about it sucks, so if you're that much of a weeaboo you should just read the source material.
Magic in the Nasuverse
Most of the works in the Nasuverse feature mages as pretty important people. These mages are an intersection of the study-hard-and-experiment wizard and the you-gotta-be-born-with-it sorcerer. Only people with Magic Circuits are capable of magecraft, and the number and quantity of your Magic Circuits stems from both eugenics the mages in your family tree and sheer luck of the draw. Mages from old, powerful families have more Magic Circuits of higher quality than those from less established families, leading Mage society towards snooty aristocracy and nose-thumbing towards upstarts.
Mage families in the Nasuverse pass down Magic Crests, which are like a combination family crest, spellbook library, and tattoo. The family's Magic Crest designates the inheritor of their magic tradition, with each heir performing magical research in their lifetime to modify and extend the Crest before passing it on in turn.
As for the actual magic practiced, it's not called "magic." Most of the time. Most of what you see in the Nasuverse is "magecraft." Magecraft is distinguished from magic by the notion of "how possible it is." If your wizardry is just a faster version of something technology or human effort can do, you are a mage and you are doing magecraft. To be a magician who does magic, also known as True Magic, you must do something that nobody understands the mechanics of, not even you yourself. Conversely, when humans do learn to replicate it through mundane means (including magecraft, which is essentially hermetic magic and can be replicated given you have the power, ingredients, and necessary affinities), it stops being a True Magic. Blind replication doesn't count; there is a line of cloned homunculi users of the Third and a magical tool that uses the Second in a limited capacity, but people still don't understand how either works. Most magecraft used to be True Magic, but, as a result of humanity's progress, very few things are currently impossible for it. They are considered the realm of miracles, and even meeting a Magician is an event worthy of legend.
There are three known True Magics in the Nasuverse:
- Kaleidoscope, the Second Magic. Also known as Zelretch, the only wizard crazy enough to ever achieve this magic. The Kaleidoscope grants access to an infinite number of parallel universes, enabling tricks like casting a spell over and over without exhausting yourself by tapping into the ambient mana of the parallel versions of the room you're currently in.
- Heaven's Feel, the Third Magic. This is a magic that can materialize a human soul. In the Fate/Extra continuity, humanity achieves the Third by learning how to digitize souls, and it stops being a True Magic.
- Magic Blue, the Fifth Magic. Supposedly relevant to time travel, enabling the user to violate conservation of energy by borrowing energy from pasts with no future. This is the least-understood of the known Magics, but apparently it can be passed down the family line as the owner wishes, and its acquisition may have involved reaching the Root and choosing to go back.
The First and Fourth Magics are known to exist, but Nasu's never really said anything about them.
Kara no Kyoukai
Kara no Kyoukai is the oldest official entry in what would become the Nasuverse. The first chapters were published way back in 1998, so they're probably older than the people reading this right now. It's so old that most people know about it from the series of seven movies by anime studio Ufotable.
The main character is Ryougi Shiki, and she has the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception. Yes, death, not depth. These are a form of magic vision that let her see the "implicit death" in all things. In less idiotically obtuse terms, she can see the lines of weakness in anything, and if she cuts them, that thing is destroyed beyond repair. Even people and ghosts have these lines, making her an effective assassin
Anyone who calls it "The Garden of Sinners" is probably a fag.
Tsukihime
Tsukihime is a visual novel that's one part murder mystery, one part dating simulator, and one part gothic horror. Its main character, Tohno Shiki, survives a car crash as a child and is disowned by his wealthy parents for his frail constitution. What he gains are the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception introduced in Kara no Kyoukai, enabling him to cut through anything. The story begins when he's called back to his family manor upon the death of the family patriarch. This gets him embroiled in the grisly 'vampire murders' occurring throughout town, which the various routes of the story either explore or ignore.
The five choices of waifu, and therefore of routes in the story, are:
- Arcueid Brunestud, vampire-hunting vampire and True Ancestor. Technically the strongest thing on Earth.
- Ciel, ninja-nun and vampire hunter working for the Church. She has a strange fascination with curry.
- Tohno Akiha, Shiki's younger sister and, after Shiki was disowned for being too sickly, heiress to the Tohno family fortune. She's used to acting the part of a financial conglomerate ojou.
- Hisui, Maid One of the pair remaining at the Tohno family mansion. She's quiet and keeps things formal.
- Kohaku, Maid Two at the Tohno mansion. She's the cheery big sister type to contrast Hisui's cool exterior.
Other waifus featured are Aozaki Aoko, a mentor figure Shiki met when he was still recovering from his accident, and Yumidzuka Satsuki, the designated classmate love interest. They don't get routes, so they don't count, and Satsuki not having a route is a common subject of memes among Nasuverse fans.
At any rate, picking from the five waifu-based routes above gets you into either the Near Side of the Room (Arcueid, Ciel) or Far Side of the Moon (Akiha, Hisui, Kohaku). The Near Side routes focus on investigating vampire murders in town and explore the mechanics of vampires in the Nasuverse, while the Far Side explores the mysteries of the Tohno family.
Overall, Tsukihime is a respectable visual novel and interesting if only so you can see how far Type-Moon has come from their beginnings hucking demos at Comiket. There isn't exactly enough content to fill up five entire routes of story (80% of the Kohaku route is nigh-identical to the Hisui route), so going from one route on the same Side to the other(s) will involve judicious use of the fast-forward button.
If you're poor and like fighting games, the sequel-spinoff Melty Blood is pretty popular for having a pirate version with better netplay than the official release. At least enjoy the music.
If all you care about is shitposting, "Can Shiki kill Servants" is one of the fastest ways to start fights among Nasuverse geeks, and any relevant discussion quickly devolves into a total clownshow of powerlevel arguments.
Finally, a remake of Tsukihime was announced. In 2008. Updated character designs were revealed in 2013 and earned a lot of flak for being generic. It still isn't out.
Near Side
The near side routes focus on the vampiric threat and the characters that deal with it. The antagonist is a vampire who can reincarnate by taking specially prepared children over and has a hateboner for the resident vampire princess, though you meet a few others, as well. Highlights of the Near Side include death by shark on the upper floors of a hotel (that doesn't have an aquarium) and anal sex being used to slow down a progressing vampiric possession.
Far Side
It turns out that the antagonist tried to reincarnate into a member of the protagonist's family who had considerable magical strength due to his oni blood. In the Near Side, he succeeds, but in the Far Side routes, this trait also gave the child enough strength to resist the vampire and expel him. Unfortunately, half-oni seriously struggle with controlling their violently psychotic impulses for the rest of their lives once they embrace their nature. The entire Tohno bloodline is half-oni. Yeah. You get to explore the dark history of the household, learn the truth about Shiki's origins, and get violently angry at chairs.
Fate
Fate is the biggest part of the Nasuverse and the one most people know. It started as a visual novel all the way back into 2004, and has since ballooned out into a money-printing machine with an uncountable number of spinoff series. Entries in the Fate series are distinguished from one another by the text after the slash (/). You have Fate/Stay Night, Fate/Zero, Fate/Extra, Fate/Hollow Ataraxia... and most infamously, Fate/Grand Order. So no, it's not Fate Stay/Night. The series is called Fate.
The big thrust of the Fate series is the Holy Grail War, in which seven mages get together in a not-that-big city in Japan and summon legendary heroes as their bodyguards and warriors. All of them duke it out for the right to touch the Holy Grail. Last man standing gets to wish for whatever they want. The whole thing was put together a couple hundred years ago by three of the great mage families in an effort to reach the deepest truth of the universe, known as the Root. The War part got involved when they got close to the finish line and started fighting to be the ones who actually got to cross it.
A total of seven mages are selected to fight in the Grail War. Each one summons one hero, known as a Servant, and acts as their Master. It's the Master's job to strategize during the war, and the Servant's job to actually engage in combat. All Masters are given a set of three Command Spells on their arm that mark them as Masters, allowing them to give three absolute orders to their Servant. Each of the Servants belongs to one of the seven classes:
- Saber, for swordsmen. "Saber" is a class and not a weapon because Nasu probably did an Engrish and thought the -er ending meant it was a name for someone trained in swordplay the same way archer is a name for someone who does archery.
- Archer, the biggest meme of a class. The Archer from the first entry in the series spends most of his fights dual-wielding swords, and the Archer in the prequel doesn't even use a bow, preferring to fire swords as projectiles.
- Lancer, a class for fast guys with long poking sticks. Lancers are commonly drawn from Gaelic myth. Their being Irish is something fans take the piss out of really often, because most of them have absolutely horrible luck.
- Rider, for pretty much anyone who's associated with a vehicle. World-conquering leaders, famous pirates... Even being an infamous slut is enough to qualify a hero for this class.
- Caster, for anyone actually good at magic. Alchemists and writers get to come too.
- Assassin, for the most legendarily dick-assed of dick-ass thieves. Per the "rules" of the Grail War, an Assassin-class Servant is always one of the leaders of Hashshashins, all of whom took the name Hassan-i Sabbah. Because this is anime, rules don't count, and this one gets broken pretty much all the time.
- Berserker, a class for heroes with varying levels of RAGE. Berserkers range from incoherent roaring monster-men to "coherent every now and then," quantified by their Mad Enhancement rating. High Mad Enhancement strengthens them more, but makes them more difficult to control and harder to understand.
Every Servant gets a Noble Phantasm Revealing your Servant's Noble Phantasm is pretty much a dead giveaway as to their identity, because by definition an NP is something that most defined the Servant when they were alive. Most Masters keep this close to their chest for as long as they can, because all of a Servant's weaknesses from their old legend still apply.
This series is the most directly /tg/, since Servants are traditionally given character sheets with ability scores, skills, and even alignments. They don't play by the rules (one Berserker has the alignment Lawful Mad), but it's fun to speculate about what kind of abilities these actually correspond to.
Fate/Stay Night
Fate/Stay Night was the original work in the Fate series, released as a visual novel in 2004. It's where you get ancient memes like "People die when they are killed," and "I am the bone of my sword." The Holy Grail War depicted in F/SN is the Fifth Grail War, and it features the following heroes:
- Saber - King Arthur, but a girl. Her Noble Phantasm is Excalibur, which manifests its power as a slash that "cuts through everything" in a suspiciously giant laser beam-looking area, which amounts to vaporization.
- Archer - [REDACTED]. Archer actually isn't a legendary hero at all. At least, he's not a legend in the time Fate/Stay Night takes place.
- Lancer - Cu Chulainn. His Noble Phantasm is the spear
Gay BulgeGae Bolg. The one who began the trend of Lancer's having E-Rank Luck. - Rider - Medusa. Why? Because Pegasus was born when she was decapitated, so she gets to use it as her Noble Phantasm even if she isn't Perseus.
- Caster - Medea. She's still bitter about Jason cucking her, so she maintains a sadistic streak. Her Noble Phantasm lets her sever magical contracts, which gets real fun when you remember that those are what bind Servants to Masters.
- Assassin - Sasaki Koijrou, autistic samurai. Trained so hard with his weeaboo stick that he developed the ability to make three sword slices simultaneously, but that's not an "implement" so he doesn't get a Noble Phantasm.
- Berserker - Herakles. He's too angry to use a weapon well enough to bring out its potential as a Noble Phantasm, so instead he gets extra lives.
Yes, that girl with the platemail-dress combo is King Arthur. This has and continues to introduce huge amounts of butthurt, and anyone not willing to tolerate waifu bullshit usually gets turned off the series at this point. The origin of this affront to historical veracity is in F/SN's origins as a visual novel, which in Japan are only purchased by geeks with PCs looking to whack off. Nasu's original plan was actually to have the main character be a girl and keep King Arthur as an actual king, but his artist and comrade Takeuchi convinced him they would do much better in the VN market if the protagonist was a male the audience could project on, and King Arthur was a girl. So history was made.
All that aside, the actual plot of Fate/Stay Night follows Emiya Shirou, a boy who was adopted by Emiya Kiritsugu when the fallout from the Fourth Grail War turned Shirou's neighborhood into a burning hellscape. Ten years later, he gets wrapped up in the aforementioned Fifth Grail War when he unwittingly summons Saber.
Fate/Zero
Fate/Zero is the prequel to Fate/Stay Night dedicated to exploring the backstory of Shirou's adoptive dad Kiritsugu. Originally released as a light novel in 2006, it got an anime in 2011. This was the first serious work at adapting Fate to anime since the disastrous 2004 adaptation of Fate/Stay Night. This has earned a position of major skubbery among Fate fans, since it brought in huge numbers of newfags. This entry in the Nasuverse tends to start arguments about what amount of edge is acceptable in the Nasuverse and whether or not Fate/Zero has too much of it. This owes to Zero's actual writing being done not by Nasu, but by Gen "The Urobutcher" Urobuchi. Yes, the Madoka guy. The one infamous for killing characters to generate easy drama because he can't figure out any other way to move the plot forward. Zero is still like that.
Anyway, Zero is about the Grail War that Kiritsugu participated in and that ended up with him adopting Shirou. Kiritsugu is a hardass who doesn't play by hoity-toity mage rules. Of the seven mages fighting in the Grail War, he's the only one using guns, and spends most of the time with his servant on the Sidelines while he handles things with firepower. He's pretty much playing Shadowrun while the rest of them are pretending to be Harry Potter villains.
Zero's cast of Servants is as follows:
- Saber - King Arthur. This is where we first hear of her as the "King of Knights." A lot of her relationship with Kiritsugu is post-facto foreshadowing and ironic reversals of her relationship with Shirou in Stay Night.
- Archer - Gilgamesh. As pretty much the first hero ever recorded, he's "King of Heroes." His Noble Phantasm is the Gate of Babylon, which lets him pull any kind of weapon he wants out of the ether. He's the original hero, so of course all other legends are derived from him, which means he has the original versions. Basically, he cheats. He's too arrogant to swordfight with these treasures, so he earns Archer status by launching them at his enemies.
- Lancer - Diarmuid ua Duibhne. If you thought Cu got it bad in Stay Night, very few suffer more than ol' Deermud.
- Rider - Alexander the Great. Summoned as he was at the height of his empire, he's known by the name the Persians gave him, Iskandar. He rounds out the three kings in Zero as "King of Conquerors."
- Caster - Gilles de Rais. The famous murder-rapist of children maintains his fetish for Joan of Arc. When he crosses paths with Saber, he mistakes her for his beloved Jeanne. He gets command of lots of tentacles via the actual Necronomicon and continues to spend most of his time murdering children.
- Assassin - Hassan of the Many Faces. Instead of one assassin, this Servant gives the Master access to a whole mess of Assassins that lack the superhuman abilities of a Servant. Their disposability makes them useful as scouts.
- Berserker - Lancelot. He spends most of the series incognito, only revealing his identity for a final duel against Saber. Notable for using his Noble Phantasm to hijack an F-15 fighter jet, dogfight with it against Gilgamesh, then turn it against Saber.
Fate/Extra
An unconnected spin-off for the PSP set in the Moon Cell, a supercomputer that is also the Moon. Rather than a free-for-all between seven Master/Servant pairs, this Holy Grail War is set up as a single-elimination tournament. Each week, one Master is paired up with one opponent, and so every week the number of Masters halves after the life-or-death duels.
The gameplay is sort of crap, involving a lot of grind in not-very-interesting geometric environments, but people like it because it's one of the very, very few games in the Nasuverse with an official English translation. Arcueid and Ryougi make cameo appearances, with Arcueid featured as a Berserker in one of the routes and Ryougi as a secret boss in the otherwise-unexplained Monster class. This was the first entry in the series to explore the backstory of Stay Night's Archer.
Fate/Extra has a sequel, Fate/Extra CCC, which was not and still isn't in English. The best you get is playthroughs on Youtube with subtitles superimposed on the game text.
Fate/Apocrypha
An alternate timeline spinoff where a mage worked with the Nazis to steal the Grail during WW2 and later held his own War elsewhere with two teams of seven Masters/Servants (one per class, as usual) and a neutral Ruler, a new class. Generally panned by the community for the mediocre writing. Only notable it for its introduction of more high-powerlevel Servants and weeaboo RAGE that erupted when Jeanne D'Arc, who has quickly grown to become one of Fate's poster girls, hooked up with a random Mary Sue homunculus that everyone hates.
Fate/Strange fake
Another spinoff, written by Narita of Durarara! fame, who's still doing his thing of having many narratives at once with no clear protagonist. Tries to turn many things on their heads and provides some creative, if not necessarily canon, ideas that DMs can explore. Noteworthy members of the cast are a Berserker Jack the Ripper representing the mystery of the original's true identity through shapeshifting powers (note that said original is also summonable as a Servant and is, perhaps somewhat predictably, a little girl with mommy issues), Herakles who rejects his divinity and rages at the gods who made his life a mess, and Enkidu, Gilgamesh's sidekick and the only person the King of Heroes will ever call a friend.
Fate/kaleid liner PRISMA☆ILLYA
A magical girl-oriented spinoff. Mostly lolibait with a side of yuri that cribs other Fate works for characters, villains, and storylines. The only thing more painful than writing or saying this name out loud is actually reading or watching it.
Fate/Grand Order
The biggest source of Skub in the entire Nasuverse, Fate/Grand Order is a freemium phone game launched in Japan in 2015 and unleashed upon the English-speaking world in 2017. As a freemium phone game, it falls into the popular category of "gacha games", where the player gets new characters of various rarities out of a glorified slot machine. Your tokens for this slot machine are a resource that, once exhausted, can only be regained by waiting some unrealistic amount of time or by shelling out real money. But it gets worse! Even among gacha games, F/GO is notorious for its horrendously stingy rates on the highest rarity of characters. It also loves limited-time events featuring extremely strong characters at this highest rarity. This is all par for the course for gacha, but the real stinger is that you get virtually no way to improve your odds. Sinking five hundred dollars of real money into the gacha is still no guarantee whatsoever that you actually get the character you want. With all of these combined, the game is clearly designed for the exact kind of whale player who thinks of nothing of sinking hundreds of dollars for the new Saber recolor. Everyone else can go hang.
Other than the blatantly predatory monetization mechnic, it's a skub titan because oldfags blame it for stagnating the Nasuverse, while newfags who have no clue about Tsukihime and Stay Night won't shut up about it giving them new piles of genderbent-historical-figure spank bait every month. This steaming hunk of smutty waifu PNGs makes millions of dollars a year. This fact, coupled with Nasu doing the writing for it, means that it is commonly blamed for stagnation in the Nasuverse and the Tsukihime Remake's VIP seat in development hell. It even has the nerve to pay lip service to other, much better properties by including Ryougi Shiki as a limited-time event character.
Defending Grand Order among fans of anything else in the Nasuverse is an instant way to become known as that guy.
Other Works
Notes
Also known as Angel Notes, it is the second-oldest official Nasuverse work but is set in the far future. Earth/Gaia is suffering a spiritual death at the hands of human war and pollution. Humanity itself only survived by bioengineering to survive in the hostile environment. Enraged that the beings that killed her continue to live on her soon-to-be corpse, Gaia released into what was left of the atmosphere a lethal discharge of Mana, killing large swathes of humanity and mutating the flora and fauna into aberrations that would make a 40k Deathworld proud. The surviving humans responded by bioengineering themselves AGAIN into monsters beyond Gaia's monsters. In response, Gaia's dying breath was a call to the spirits of the other planets, the Ultimate Ones, known as the Types, to finish the job. The main story follows the last days of the last unmodified human (and thus the only one capable of wielding a God-Killing Gun), where he finds himself sharing an apartment with an incarnation of Type Venus that he 'killed' five years ago.
Many other Nasu works, Prisma Illya in particular, reference Notes as a possible bad end for their future.
Mahoyo
"Witch on the Holy Night," abbreviated Mahoyo from the Japanese title Mahoutsukai no Yoru, is unofficially the first Nasuverse work (unreleased due to various reason) AND one of the last visual novels written by Nasu and drawn by Takeuchi. It follows Aozaki Aoko in her time as a magician before the run-in with Shiki we saw in Tsukihime.
It's notable for eschewing traditional VN practice of depicting characters with slightly-animated portraits, preferring to show everything with individually drawn stills. This makes it very pretty, but virtually nothing can be reused, so it's a big expense in both time and money. Mahoyo is infamous for the many delays in its production, enormous art costs, zero voiced dialogue (suicide for a VN released in 2012), and the decision to split it into three parts. The first of these three is all we have, without so much as a release date for number two. Its financial failure most likely convinced TYPE-MOON to focus on the safe bet of licensing Fate for the foreseeable future. This is probably why there have been no official efforts to bring Mahoyo to English -- the closest is a long string of abortive fan translations -- though for some reason the French fans managed to bring everything into their tongue in 2019. There is hope that going from the Japanese-English language gap to a mere French-English will be what saves the most recent translation attempt. Those who've been following the many English Mahoyo projects maintain a general attitude of despair about the whole thing, with some fans making gallows humor bets on whether we get English Mahoyo or the Tsukihime remake first.
Carnival Phantasm
Carnival Phantasm is the obligatory comedy cross-over that all long-running Japanese series have to do at least once. It is very silly and is regarded with more or less universal praise.