For gacha games, anniversaries are a careful balancing act. They’re celebrations of the year the game has been around, surrounded by hype, and filled with rewards. They are also a goldmine of profits. How these games handle their anniversaries can greatly help or hinder their continued success. The most famous example would probably be Genshin Impact’s first anniversary, which led to players review bombing the app store. Hype for the game almost ground to a halt and there was big discussion in the community about Hoyoverse’s treatment of the fans. In subsequent years the relative lack of rewards hasn’t ruffled as many feathers, with most fans spreading jokes or memes, it did have an impact on the game. Fate/Grand Order, which is celebrating its 9th anniversary on the Japanese server, is experiencing a similar backlash.
During the anniversary livestream in the early morning of August 4th EST, the developers announced everything coming in the anniversary. First among these were the guaranteed SSR banners, small group banners where players can pull once with paid pulls to get any of the SSRs available in that banner. They seem to be broken by story chapters or events such as Lostbelt 6, or Summer 7. There is also a Destiny Order where people create their own small group banner of nine possible options but it costs twice as many paid pulls. All of this is standard par for course, but the two most important things are leaving the community divided.
The first is the anniversary servant Ereshkigal Beast-class. Instead of an entirely new servant, players are getting Space Ereshkigal, the counterpart to Space Ishtar, and Summer Ereshkigal in the same unit. A similar thing occurred with last year’s anniversary servant, connecting summer and anniversary. Her class is also very unique being the second Beast class playable servant, all others having been enemies. Summer Ereshkigal has been a meme among the community, with everyone hoping for her year after year since her initial debut, and her character in the story being one of the most beloved. Despite some grumblings about the combination of a summer servant with the anniversary, overall people seem excited that the summer version has finally arrived. Even the hype behind this new servant isn’t protecting Lasengle from backlash though.
The main reason for pushback is coming from a change to append skills. Append skills are non-active skills that players can unlock on each servant with currency provided from pulling extra copies of them. There were three on each servant, with the third being a class advantage that was unique per servant. However, during the livestream, they announced two new append skills, one of which is basically game breaking, as it lowers skill cooldowns. The response from the community has actually been anger as the new skills seem like a cash grab from Lasengle, with the hashtag “NeedsNP8” trending on X in Japan. Now in order to fully max out a servant, Level 120, All Skills 10, players will need NP5 and Bond 15 at least to unlock all skills. For free to play players this change might seem unimportant as most are not achieving that anyway, but some worry that new servants added to the game might require these append skills to be active to reach their full potential, or even be viable. How Lasengle responds to the outrage remains to be seen, but many do not believe that the new implementations will be fixed in a way that might reduce profits for the company.