Fate/ Franchise order

[Mafty]

So the Fate/ series (Fate/stay night) is a huge franchise with a lot of spin offs and alternative universes (like Eva or Euerka Seven). It's kind of confusing, so what is the watch order?

[Seto Kaiba]

1. "Don't".

If you're really determined, it hardly matters because many of them are either stand-alone or alternate versions of the exact same story.

For example, Fate/stay night, Unlimited Blade Works, and Heaven's Feel are all adaptations of different routes in the first game. Each is a stand-alone story with the same characters and setting, but reflecting the different choices made by the incredibly obnoxious protagonist based on who the "main girl" of the story ends up being.

Fate/zero is a prequel to Fate/stay night set several years earlier, but only really makes tolerable sense if you've seen Fate/stay night first. It's basically the only one for which viewing order actually matters.

Fate/Grand Order is an AU story based on a mobile game with no real connection to the other stories, just watch those in production order.

The magical girl show is... best forgotten.

[Kuruni]

Just make sure to watch Lwarning with Manga FGO. It's short anyway.

[Mafty]

Thanks. It helps a lot to see that they are independent timelines , with largely the same casts. This is probably the best way to do a Visual Novel adaptation, as they have multiple routes and endings. Most of the series (Save for the movie trilogy's) are legally streaming on a number of sites, so that makes things more economical, Though I agree with skipping the Magical Girl stuff(for the same reason I avoid several scenes with Ple and her "Sisters" in ZZ, and Mint in Mospeada).

[Quiddity]

I've been working my way through the Fate franchise for a number of months now.

For the main series, you've got three adaptions of the visual novel which from what I've heard address three different routes from the VN. The order I watched them in was Fate Stay Night: Ultimate Blade Works, Fate Stay Night, and Fate Stay Night Heaven's Feel, although I think one could switch the first and second with little to no trouble. The third strayed the most from the others and at least for me I was happy I watched it third.

Then comes Fate Zero which is a prequel to these and is an adaption of a light novel. By far the best Fate anime I've seen. Probably the best new anime I've watched this year.

Fate Grand Order is an adaption of a video game, but from I've heard (again, as with original Fate my only experience is the anime), it skipped a lot of stuff and doesn't fully adapt the game. The order I was instructed to watch it in was First Order, the 2 Camelot movies, Absolute Demonic Front Babylonia, the Solomon movie and finally Moonlight/Lost Realm. There's also Fate Grand Carnival which is akin to SD Gundam, it's basically just a parody of Fate Grand Order. Although many characters in this I didn't even recognize so it may be enveloping more of the Fate franchise.

Fate Apocrypha is what I watched next, which pretty much stands on its own and is also an adaption of a light novel.

And right now I'm on Fate Extra: Last Encore which again seems to stand on its own, separate from the other anime, and is again based on a video game.

That's where I am for now. I think there's still 4 - 5 more shows for me to watch after this including the mentioned magical girl show, and apparently there's a cooking show too.

[Seto Kaiba]

For the main series, you've got three adaptions of the visual novel which from what I've heard address three different routes from the VN. The order I watched them in was Fate Stay Night: Ultimate Blade Works, Fate Stay Night, and Fate Stay Night Heaven's Feel, although I think one could switch the first and second with little to no trouble. The third strayed the most from the others and at least for me I was happy I watched it third.

Because each anime adaptation is essentially stand-alone, there's no real incentive to watch them in any particular order.

The original visual novel's order was:
1. Stay Night
2. Unlimited Blade Works
3. Heaven's Feel
... but in their original form, the visual novel expected you to carry over knowledge from one route to the others so it could skip some of the character development, so they had a certain justification for unlocking them in that order.

That's where I am for now. I think there's still 4 - 5 more shows for me to watch after this including the mentioned magical girl show, and apparently there's a cooking show too.

The cooking show - Tonight's Menu for the Emiya Family - has no connection to any of the others in terms of the storyline. It's basically just an ordinary cooking anime that happens to reuse characters from Fate/stay night.

[Mafty]

Yes there are several spinoffs that change the genre, yet keep the characters. It seems like when a franchise gets popular enough, they'll make any kind of spin off. The same thing actually happened with Evangelion.

[Seto Kaiba]

Yes there are several spinoffs that change the genre, yet keep the characters. It seems like when a franchise gets popular enough, they'll make any kind of spin off. The same thing actually happened with Evangelion.

To an extent, it's got the Dragon Ball problem where there are only a double handful of character designs that get reused over and over for totally unrelated characters.

There are what, four or five identical Sabers who are supposedly different people (as in, different historical figures) between titles?

[Mafty]

Something like that. Saber is clearly one of the most popular characters in the franchise, so it makes sense they'd use her as often as possible. The alternative timeline thing makes that relatively easy. Then other franchise's have the whole expy thing, with similar characters(in both design and personality) across several unrelated series(eg, the Char Clone). That being said you can really see the Dragonball like character reuse in Hiroshi Hirai's post Cosmic Era work (look at any mech series he did in the mid 2000s and you'll see similar characters everywhere).