What are the cues you take to identify which writer is writing each event in FGO?
FGO writers tend to be very self-indulgent in what they do, so each of them has a very clear set of tells in their writing. Typography tells are the most reliable way to single a writer out, but character or theme/trope bias can also be a factor. Here’s a mostly comprehensive list of what I consider to be the biggest tells for each of them.
Yuuichirou Higashide
Higashide is the most vanilla out of FGO’s main writers, so for the longest time, my trick to identifying his parts is the process of elimination. If the text doesn’t seem to be anyone else’s, then it should be Higashide’s. That said, Higashide is still perfectly recognizable by his humor, which tends to be the most pun-heavy and rapid-firing with one-off gag exchanges. Some describe his style as MCU-like but I haven't watched a Marvel movie recently enough to confirm or deny it.
He's definitely the team member with the most American influences. He is a big movie guy and has admitted to making a few Servants based off of movies about their historical counterparts (Jing Ke, Yan Qing) or based Servants out of movie characters (Han Solo -> Bartholomew Roberts). Every chapter title in E Pluribus Unum is a movie name and Chaldea Thriller Night was littered with commentary on the horror genre. His love for Hollywood also shows constantly in his big action set pieces.
Maybe as a consequence of that, maybe as a consequence of him writing the first chapter of each part, his stories tend to be a lot more low-scale, humorous, and light-hearted than others. He knows how and when to be serious, but he’s humorous more often than not. Think of Old Moriarty’s character as a microcosm of his writing.
Due to his comfort zone being his comedy, Higashide's Fujimaru's personality is whatever suits the joke the best. From savvily calling out the nastiness of bad fetish characters like Bart and Kiyohime, to bantering on even levels with Jason and Xu Fu, to innocently delivering the idiot comment that will give Kadoc the highest amount of stress.
A famous Higashide trait among the Japanese fandom is his involvement in a lot of furry content before he became a Type-Moon writer. If you check the list of character creators in FGO Mats, you’ll see that every FGO-original furry or scalie character was created by Higashide, with the sole exceptions of Tiamat, and (to my complete surprise when fact-checking) Red Hare. NOTE: FGO Mats XI is the most recent volume as of this text’s writing.
I’m bringing this up because some fans correctly guessed Yuga Kshehtra wasn’t Higashide’s by the fact there was no furry character. In contrast, Orleans had Eliza and Atalanta, Okeanos had Asterios, Orion and Atalanta, E Pluribus Unum had Eliza again, Edison, and Cu Alter, Shinjuku had Lobo, Anastasia had, well, almost the entire cast and population, and Traum had Sancho. Atlantis is the exception, which is one of the contributing factors to the previous edition of this post being a major source of misinformation.
One noticeable pattern in his main story chapters is that all of his main villains have been duos, usually following a pattern of a sympathetic villain being manipulated by a viler villain. Orleans starts the trend with Gilles lying to Jalter about what she is, Okeanos follows up with Medea Lily lying to Jason about the consequences of sacrificing a god to the Ark, E Pluribus Unum subverts it with a last-minute reveal that Cu Alter wasn’t being manipulated by Medb at all, Shinjuku moves away from the manipulation trope by having Moriarty and Bael be allies on equal terms, and Anastasia returns to the formula by having Kadoc force Ivan to sleep and lie to him about the current state of Russia. Traum is a more complex case due to having too many antagonists, but the pattern is followed quite closely in Kriemhild and Zhang Jue pair. Atlantis once again breaks the pattern, but still don't forgive me for thinking that one was Meteo.
Speaking of pairs, part 2 longer story format has given him a lot of room to write more, and he loves filling this room with romance arcs unrelated to the protagonist. This is true even to the Apocrypha days with Amakusa and Semiramis but added to his collection with Kadoc and Anastasia, Orion and Artemis, Constantine and Joan, and Siegfried and Kriemhild.
Hazuki Minase
Putting in the simplest terms possible, Minase feels less like a real human being and more like a walking otaku stereotype, in all the good and bad that entails, mostly the bad. I won’t go into detail about the flaws of Agartha because everyone already talks about that a lot. I will say, however, that while Minase is as insensitive as he can get about sexual matters, like the otaku stereotype he is, he can write sensitively enough about problems otaku are known to suffer, like the ableism that is the central theme of Yuga Kshetra.
Overall, Minase’s best feature is that he responds amazingly well to criticism. Or at least that’s the only way I can justify the quality gap between Agartha and Oo’oku/Yuga Kshetra. Also explains why Minase’s supervised writing feels so similar to Kinoko’s own. Makoto Sanda once made a tweet explaining how Nasu’s supervision works, saying that for the 10 volumes of Case Files he wrote, Nasu hit him with hundreds of “Are you sure?”s, but never with a single no, so in that vein, I like to believe that Minase is the one guy who takes every single “are you sure?” as a “You must change this”. Nasu’s huge respect for his coworker’s creativity (or spinelessness, if you prefer to interpret it like that) might have put things he didn’t like into his universe, and Minase is definitely to blame for a big part of it, but I’d like to believe that at least he follows the supervision strictly.
In terms of character creation, I’d say Minase is the most simplistic of the five. All of his characters clearly begin with one core idea, and everything else revolves around that initial concept, while also staying true to its historical/mythological counterpart. Of course, this model can easily backfire and make his characters one-note, however. Minase is also decently knowledgeable about his character’s stories but takes an overly “show don’t tell” approach to that, causing problems like Nezha’s role in Yuga Kshetra. Nezha’s part is entirely defined by his relationship with Li Jing, but FGO never stopped to define who Li Jing was, so Nezha’s conflict might be hard to understand to people less familiar with the Investiture. He also never stops to explain the cultural background that explains why Altjuna is so ableist, but that ties into his other core character creation trait, that being that he’s the writer who is the least afraid of making his characters utterly unsympathetic, as better evidenced by Columbus and Wu Zetian.
In terms of style, Minase’s most noticeable trait is giving the reader constant access to the character’s inner thoughts. This has grown to become a common practice for the other writers too, but it’s a lot more omnipresent in Minase’s stories. Oo’oku’s Kiara and Yuga Kshetra’s Pepe felt like they have more inner monologue than spoken dialogue. Like Higashide, he’s also a strong believer that the tensest and most climactic moments are the best moments for jokes, though he cares less about thematically shooting himself in the foot doing so. Being the human otaku stereotype he is, he constantly makes and references internet jokes, even with characters that aren’t appropriate for that kind of humor, like Goredolf or Nero.
On the otaku humor repertoire, his favorite trope is the idea that headpats are the ultimate expression of love. No work of him can go without this trope. Agartha? We headpat Zetian into stopping being evil. Oo’oku? Tsubone’s right there constantly rewarding us with motherly headpats. Yuga Kshehtra? William Tell headpats Indian children to show his unshakable dadness. Akihabara Explosion? Hime demands headpats as a reward for winning her game, and Aphrodite tries to headpat Nero to get on good terms with her. The head petting is the most failproof mark of Minase’s writing.
Another, more unfortunate, side of his overuse of otaku tropes is the fact his authorial voice is very uncomfortably horny towards the gender non-conforming characters. You’ve seen Astolfo and D’Eon’s treatment in Agartha, and you’ve seen Fujimaru getting a first-person narration scene just to call Pepe hot in Yuga Kshetra.
One pattern I noticed in all his stories is that the villain’s ultimate goal is, direct or indirectly, suicide. Scheherazade and Phenex were plotting to erase arcana to give themselves one final death they would never return from. Kama wanted to oversaturate the world with love until love lost its meaning, causing herself to stop existing as a concept. Altjuna wanted to reset the world until it was rid of everyone flawed, while subconsciously seeing himself as another flaw that needed to be erased. The Sculptor King from Akihabara Explosion didn’t have suicide as a goal per se, but she was perfectly fine with including her own death as part of the plan to reunite Galatea and Pygmalion. And while not villains, it’s also easy to see those melancholic, almost suicidal undertones in other Minase-written characters, like Ashwattaman and Aphrodite.
As for typography fingerprints, Minase almost always starts the scenes outside of Fujimaru’s perspective with a textbox saying ～一方そのころ～ (meanwhile), which is super easily identifiable.
Hikaru Sakurai
Sakurai is by a huuuuuuuuuuuge margin the easiest FGO writer to identify typographically. She’s extremely addicted to using archaic language, and even her characters who speak in modern Japanese will still use outdated kanji for words that aren’t normally written in kanji. If you see an 嗚呼, 此処, or a 何故 instead of the usual ああs, ここs, and なぜs, you can be 99% confident Sakurai wrote this text. For all her writing is close to Minase’s in terms of long-windedness, repetition, and faux-poetic prose, the archaic kanji is unmistakable. That’s all honestly. I’ll still talk about her favorite tropes and themes, but you can skip that because you’ve already read everything you need to know to identify her text from a mile away.
Other things she shares with Minase aside from the pretentious style are a sense of scale seemingly designed to drive the vsbattles crowd insane (as every fantasy writer should, honestly), and more recently a lack of qualms to make some of her villains utterly irredeemable. That said her Douman and Dioscuri are much more cartoonishly villainous than Minase’s Mr. Slavery, Ms. Real Methods of Torture, and Mr. Kill Only the Disabled (at least Dioscuri when written by Sakurai. Higashide’s Dioscuri is very realistically uncomfortable.)
While all the other writers like to sell Fujimaru as a completely normal guy doing abnormal things, Sakurai takes the complete opposite direction, constantly reminding the reader that Fujimaru is a super special guy who can connect to worlds through dreams, whose blood is toxic to gods, and who has their edgy boyfriend The Count of Mount Cristo installed in his head. No Sakurai story is complete without a random and pointless Dantes cameo, which really sucks because I used to like Dantes a lot but now she’s conditioned me to stop expecting things from him. (Ordeal Call, please save this plotline)
Sakurai is the one writer who very much has one favorite theme, that being love, and she honestly can get quite a bit of variety out of it. I haven’t fully read ProtoFrags yet, but judging by what I know about Manaka, Brynhild, and Serenity, it seems to be mainly about excessive love being expressed in destructive manners. Then Gotterdamerung is about a pseudo-otome game starring a girl who can’t tell the difference between love and emotional abuse. Then Olympus is about a family where the father has lost the ability to love. Then Heian is about a man failing to become a Beast because he’s devoid of love for humanity. And Lost Einherjar is about Aslaug's reactions to being loved by everyone while feeling she did nothing to deserve any of this love. I also hear a lot of people saying she’s tangibly influenced by Utena, and haven’t watched that to know what they’re talking about, but I’ll assume it’s this part.
Like Nasu, she likes to make characters bond through the sharing of food, although she’s far less descriptive about her food than Nasu. Think of Shimousa’s dinner scenes at Muramasa’s house, Gerda’s offering of food in Gotterdamerung, the two dinner scenes with Adele and with Europa in Olympus, and even the lunch Manaka cooked for Arthur, which is her first real character moment.
Another interesting (more so in theory than in practice) trait of Sakurai is that she likes to be creative with the setting mechanics. While Higashide’s Singularities all had Goetia finding a person who can use the Grail and handing it to them, Septem had Lev failing to find anyone and having to use the Grail himself in hope that something good happens, London had Goetia giving the Grail to a very unwilling Zouken who sabotaged his plan, and Camelot (which she co-wrote mostly on the Egyptian side) had a whole Singularity that happened before the player arrived. Later her EoR is completely unrelated to the surviving Pillars, and her Lostbelt has its kingship shift twice. Weirdly enough, Olympus is her most mechanically standard chapter, although she compensates for it later in Heian, by making a Grail War with 7 historical hero Masters and 7 Caster Servants. Her most recent Grail War in Lost Einherjar also comes with a new and ridiculous rule set.
Last but not least, a favorite trait of her making her villains stupid, and that usually is the cause of our victory. And that’s not a case where the villains feel stupid because the writer is stupid. Sakurai always makes a point to show she’s actively making her villains dumb and incompetent. In Septem, we can fight all the enemy emperors one by one because the enemy side doesn’t have a plan, as Lev points this out as he complains he couldn’t find anyone to receive the Grail. London’s biggest reveal was about how Zouken duped the dumb Goetia by creating the slowest doomsday plan ever and stalling it further by forcing Tesla to power walk instead of flying. Shimousa has Douman brainwashed 4 Servants with oni blood with a spell incompatible with oni, allowing them to retain a bit of free will (or all of it for the full-blooded oni Shutendouji) and fixed Danzou, which gave Fujimaru a helpful ally and stabilized Kotarou’s presence. Shimousa even makes a point to include a scene of Musashi pointing out to Douman exactly how much all of his mistakes helped us. While not too tied to the cause of our victory, Gotterdamerung has moments of Surtr cursing his limited intellect, which is physically unable to think of anything other than his flames of destruction to offer to his dear Ophelia. And lastly, Olympus has us killing all mechgods one by one, as the gods can’t gang up on us because they can’t look seriously threatened to their population, and Beryl is there to point out how stupid and impractical their strategy is.
Meteor “Meteo” Hoshizora
This section will be significantly shorter than the rest because Meteo simply doesn't write enough. I have a lot less material to work with, and a lot of what was in the first edition of this post was later proven false.
Meteo’s most easily identifiable typographical quirk is that the man is absolutely addicted to the English language. Whenever you see unnecessary English on your FGO text, immediately suspect Meteo.
He's also perhaps the biggest tryhard when it comes to giving characters distinctive voices. See Voyager's English speaker struggling to learn Japanese tone, Nezha's poetic metric, the Fire Vampires messages in Chinese, Hokusai's fluent Edo-ben, Bakin's vocabulary being as obnoxious as the prose of a Bakin novel, and Taisui's vocabulary being a mess of habits he picks up on-screen during the event.
One thing about Meteo that so far still hasn’t come up much in FGO is that he’s very open about pink hair being his main fetish. For the original Apocrypha project, he shamelessly made two out of his three characters (Astolfo and Fran) pink-haired just because he could, and even now he makes no efforts to hide his Circe favoritism. We even get a whole colosseum audience screaming “Circe best girl” in Requiem. I take him as a suspect in writing Nightingale’s Christmas Carol just because both leads have pink hair (Higashide is still the prime suspect though).
Meteo seems pretty knowledgeable of his history and mythology, but he actively chooses to give no attention to what’s irrelevant to his story. The character profiles for his characters in FGO mats are as barebones as he can get away with, probably for that reason.
In terms of comedy, Meteo is very capable when it comes to writing down-to-earth character interaction-based humor. BUT he also can get more balls-to-the-wall than any other writer not named Nasu, resulting in stuff like Salem’s theater scenes, and whatever was going on with Jeanne in Las Vegas.
That said, Meteo’s parties are still very noticeably more cautious than FGO’s standards, especially Fujimaru. While Nasu’s Fujimaru is shadowboxing Hundred Personas Hassan behind her back and lariating Quetzalcoatl from the sky, Meteo’s Nasu makes sure to double-check with their Servants before doing literally anything. Looking at how Erice is, I guess Meteo just prefers writing hesitant protagonists. Overall, Fujimaru’s IQ just triples whenever Meteo touches FGO’s writing tool. Meteo’s Fujimaru is so cultured that Hopkins once dropped a random Bible quote to mock them, and they recognized it as the Bible.
Kinoko Nasu
Nasu is the easiest writer to reliably identify because we’re always officially told about his work. We either get told in advance a chapter will be his as a way to build up hype, or he goes on this blog saying “Hey, I wrote this!”. I honestly never bothered looking for marks in Nasu’s typography because he’s so open about what’s his. I don’t feel like I need to talk about his favorite themes because a lot of people on this website are already constantly doing it much better than I could, and I don’t want to talk about it either because I’d have to cover 8 whole games aside from his FGO chapters and FGO’s overarching narrative.
Thank you Nasu for making my job easier.
