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Over the past year or so I've seen a number of people complain about how bad and outdated the Type Moon pages are, with many both on and off-site wanting to recreate the verse from the ground up. Organizing this for a verse as big as Type-Moon is incredibly daunting, so I wrote this thread to explain why I think the verse should be deleted or locked down for the time being.
I'll preface this with saying that as of right now I've only read Fate/stay night, Mahoyo, the original Tsukihime, and Kagetsu Tohya, so I'll probably miss a lot of issues and have to rely on second-hand info from other people.
1: The pages are pretty bad
Starting with the profiles, a majority of them barely link scans to or cite any of the feats they bring up. Some that do (see Kama or Space Ishtar) have them in Japanese, completely untranslated.The Root's page not only doesn't link scans in its AP section, but its citations are completely nonsensical, citing just "Fate/Zero" "Fate/Grand Order" "Kara no Kyoukai" etc. without specifying which chapter, event, etc. they're citing.
Characters that resist magecraft/magical energy have a long list of resistances which are never explained on the pages themselves.
Sakura's page has an entire key which is absent from the rest of the profile.
The verse pages are all scattered despite a main page existing, with most of them (including the main page) still listing the old 6-C Servant scaling instead of the newer High 6-C scaling which was implemented nearly 2 years ago.
Ciel was upgraded to High 6-C over 2 years ago, but characters that scale to her like Arcueid or Roa are still 9-A.
Both Ciel and Akiha are described as scaling to Red Arcueid in their AP justifications, yet are only High 6-C despite Red Arc being 1-C.
Illya's Degen is noted as scaling to Rin's jewels, with the justification going on to list the High 6-C characters the jewels scale to, yet Illya doesn't have a High 6-C rating and only has "far higher with Degen".
2: The scaling is pretty bad
Moving on from the general issues in the pages, there's also massive problems with the scaling. To start with, the calc which something like 80-90% of the pages scale to was deemed to be fake over a year ago.Sakura's profile alludes to this scan to justify her 9-A rating, but the immediate context is about the Jeweled Sword, which is rated as Low 6-B, allowing Rin to repeatedly use her full output of 1000 units with the mana in the cave and thus cancel out Sakura's Shadow Giants, which are also listed separately from her 9-A rating.
On the topic of the "master-tier" characters in FSN, their travel speed is rated as Subsonic despite no Subsonic travel feat existing and all of their best travel feats being in the Superhuman range. Shirou's travel speed also shoots up to Relativistic+ with Projections for seemingly no reason.
There's also hilarious cases of circular scaling. Take this line from Ibaraki-Douji's profile for example:
Then if we go to EMIYA's profile for TLCW:
So not only do we have C rank NPs = A rank NPs (a misreading of this statement, no doubt), but a chain that goes "B-rank NP > C-rank NP = A-rank NP > B-rank NP (by the same logic)".
This brings us to one of the bigger issues in the scaling, the rating for the Servants.
2.I: Servant Parameter scaling is fake
As noted above, the "Servant-tier" characters comprise a vast majority of the existing profiles, so it should go without saying that a big part of Servant scaling being wrong would pose a huge problem for the profiles.To start off, I assume most readers are aware of instances where the ranks are inconsistent with what we're shown and told within fights, but I'll list a few that I got in my Fate/stay night reread off for those uninitiated.
- Saber's ranks under Shirou and Medea are the same, despite EMIYA saying otherwise.
- Saber also for whatever reason has higher Endurance and Agility under Kiritsugu, whose magical energy is still insufficient, than under Rin, where she's supposed to be at her peak.
- EMIYA's strength parameter is D, yet he's shown to be equal to B-rank Cu, and stronger than both B-rank Cursed Arm and B-rank Medusa, the latter while being weakened by Blood Fort Andromeda.
- Cursed Arm has it bad because he gets completely ragdolled by Medusa and gets his bones shattered while still she's still inferior to Saber. Despite this, the three of them have comparable ranks, with Cursed Arm the best STR/CON/AGI spread of the three.
| Fate/Apocrypha - Volume 1 [source] |
| Of course, Saber feels as shocked as Lancer. He possesses the Armor of Fafnir - a cheat of an ability that re-enacts the legend of the the hero who washed in dragon-blood, nullifying all attacks of rank B and below. In other words, it should have been impossible for Saber to be hurt in this state... not by that spear, which had only been used as a regular piece of armament and not fully activated as a Noble Phantasm. Yet every single one of the seventy-eight strikes by Lancer have caused damage to him. The wounds were light enough to be instantly healed by his Master's thaumaturgy... but they are more than enough to terrify Siegfried. It means that Lancer's spear possesses power proportionate to an A-rank attack. But while the spear itself is certainly a rare gem, it never could have penetrated this dragon's body and landed a blow by itself. Lancer's destructive force comes from his immense physical strength and his transcendent technique. |
There's also cases where stats are decided for arbitrary reasons, like in the case of Luminary Arcueid where her STR goes from B-rank all the way down to E-rank because she uses magical energy to attack instead:
| TM Manuscript【型月稿本】KATATSUKI KOUHON [source] |
|
And the most damning piece of evidence by far is in this interview Nasu had with 4Gamer.
| Raws (source) | Fan Translation (source) | Machine Translation (Google) | |
| 4Gamer: | ちょっと脱線しますが，サーヴァントの能力値などは奈須さんが決められるのですか？ | If I may change the subject for a bit, how do you decide on the parameters for Servants? | I'm going off topic for a second, but does Nasu decide the ability scores of servants? |
| Nasu: | 能力値については，実は明確なルールがあるんです。A～Eの5種類を，筋力/耐久/敏捷/魔力/幸運の5つのパラメータに，同じアルファベットが被らないように割り振るっていう。これは，昔自分が遊んでいた，自作のTRPGシステムの名残りなんですが。 | About that, there are actually clear rules for deciding on their parameters. The statuses range from A to E, and they’re distributed such that there are no duplicate letters. That’s a remnant of an old TRPG system I made. | There are actually clear rules for ability scores. Five types, A to E, are assigned to the five parameters of strength, endurance, agility, magic, and luck, with no overlapping letters. This is a remnant of a homemade TRPG system I used to play. |
| 4Gamer: | あれ，でもパラメータが被っているサーヴァントもいますよね？ | But there are Servants who get duplicate letters on their parameters. | But there are servants with overlapping parameters, right? |
| Nasu: | それは特例として，Aがない代わりにBが2つとか，Aが2つあるけどCも3つとかも，バランスが崩れない限りはアリってことにしています。あと宝具は別で，自由に設定していいことになっているので。 | Those are exceptions, such as “this Servant doesn’t have an A, so they get two B’s,” or “this Servant has 2 A’s, but also has 3 C’s.” I make them so they don’t break the balance. Noble Phantasms are different since there are no hard rules on setting their parameters. | As an exception, it's okay if there's no A but two Bs, or two A's but three Cs, as long as the balance isn't broken. Also, Noble Phantasms are separate and can be set freely. |
| 4Gamer: | なるほど。そういう仕組みだったんですね。 | I see, so that’s how it works. | I see. So that's how it works. |
| Nasu: | ただ，Fateシリーズの場合は，こうした能力値とは別のところで，Fateの世界観における総合的なサーヴァントの強さを，僕の方でランク付けすることになっています。だから，能力値だけで強さが決まるわけではないんですけどね。 | But in the case of Fate/, there’s a separate parameter for me to decide on the overall power level of the series’ Servants. So it’s not like their individual statuses alone decide how strong they are. | However, in the case of the Fate series, I rank the servants' overall strength in the world of Fate separately from these ability scores. So strength isn't determined by ability scores alone. |
Here we have clear confirmation that the ranks don't correlate to scaling and are often chosen arbitrarily.
2.II: Why Parameter scaling being fake is important
Now, I went through all this for a reason: Parameter scaling is used in a large chunk of the justifications for the Servants' ratings, often exclusively. Beyond this, threads like these are almost entirely premised off of parameter scaling:So it's not like the current ratings don't rely on the ranks and could just have their justifications changed with everything else remaining the same, they are fundamental to the Servants' ratings.
3: No Cosmology page
This is pretty straightforward. A verse with a cosmology as extensive and convoluted as TYPE-MOON, after many years, still has no cosmology page to speak of. There have been some attempts in the past, but those were dropped.
That concludes most of the more blatant issues with the current profiles. There's certainly far more wrong with them, but those issues are far more loaded and would most likely derail the thread.
4: Not enough people seem to care enough to fix it
Getting to the crux of this thread: No one seems particularly bothered enough to fix these issues. If you look through the revision history, an overwhelming majority of them have been purely dedicated to changing Attack Potency/Speed tiers or adding abilities to the P&A section. Large chunks of the profiles are unaltered from how they were over half a decade ago. Even now, most of the active threads in recent times are exclusively about upgrading/downgrading the cosmology or certain characters, and a lot of those died out.Regardless of that, the current profiles are far beyond repair and would have to be rewritten from the ground up, which disjointed revision threads cannot possibly do.
5: The solution
The only way forward, in my opinion, would be to either temporarily delete or lock down the verse and have a large number of the supporters gather in one place and draft the new pages over a number of months. This is to prevent stuff from becoming too messy for the time being, since any effort put into threads outside of the revamp would more than likely end up wasted at best or cause even bigger problems at worst.Now, I and some others have already began work on revamping, but what we've gotten done is still a drop in the bucket compared to how much we have left. If anyone after this thread is interested in contributing they're free to message me on the forum and ask for the Discord link.
IMPORTANT ADDENDUM: If deletion does get passed, the new profiles will obviously have accompanying revision threads when the time comes. I thought this much was obvious, but apparently not.
Agree with Deletion: @Mageman460, @Expectro2000xxx, @KingNanaya, @PsychoWarper, @Junkoposter, @Violatas, @Phoenks, @Migue79, @BreezeHM, @Sir_Ovens, @DaReaperMan, @MasqueTLDF, @Qliphoth_Bacikal, @Tllmbrg, @Franstel (fine with both), @LamentSatanael, @Deagonx, @DarkDragonMedeus, @TheSilverKing14, @BadSystems, @HammerStrikes219 (fine with either), @Rutæhh, @Eseseso, @Da3ggman, @Planck69
Agree with Lockdown: @Wankbreaker, @BoastJr, @Ionliosite, @Vietthai96, @CloverDragon03, @Deidalius, @Ebihara, @Franstel (fine with both), @GarrixianXD, @Boy.Line, @HammerStrikes219 (fine with either)
Disagree: @Hasty12345
Unspecified:
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