Fate/strange Fake New Character Visual: Lord El Melloi II (cv. Daisuke Namikawa)

It's more like 'he was an asshole, but he was completely right about everything, I was an idiot and got him killed, who even though I hate I recognize as a great mage and a teacher'

He straight up said that 'Kayneth is my idea of the ideal mage' in the novel. Or something along those lines.

Yeah, like, Shirou and Rin exist in every timeline, doing Shirou and Rin things. But the specific events of their lives are at least slightly different in every version, because things don't exactly line up the same.

Actually, nothing like Zero could have happened in Apocrypha, Prilya, or FGO.

Going back the furthest, FGO's timeline only had a single Fuyuki Grail War. Instead of constantly fucking up the formula before getting a functional ritual nailed down, they only had the one actually functional Grail War and ironically lost it to Marisbury anyway.

Apocrypha's story divergence happens in the 3rd Fuyuki Grail War, where a significant chunk of the Grail gets stolen unlike Strange Fake where they only stole an insignifciant chunk and the blueprints. What they stole in Apocrypha was enough to permanently shut down the system in Fuyuki, so no 4th Grail War can happen. Zouken actually goes catatonic or something in Apocrypha timelines with the Fuyuki Grail being doomed, and Sakura never goes to the Matou family but somehow gets adopted into the Edelfelt family.

I'm not too sure about Prilya, but at the very least, no 4th Grail War ever happened. I'm not sure if they ever got a Fuyuki Grail War going, but Kiritsugu shuts it down along with eliminating the Einzbern. Illya is also notably born much later in Prilya, and doesn't suffer from stunted growth like the original, either she's modified much less, or her modifications went much better. Either way, Illya's actually 10 years old in Prilya instead of being 18 like in regular Fate.

deku becoming a professor vibes

Strange Fake just borrows plot points from other Fate entries, I wouldn't look at it like a sequel or anything. 

Case Files actually takes place a little bit before Fate/stay night (it ends right about the time Fate/stay night starts).

Fate/strange Fake takes place about a year after The Adventures of Lord El-Melloi II (strange Fake is 2009, Adventures is 2008).

It's kind of a wonky canon where it treats everything as happening in some manner, even including Tsukihime.

Nah, cuz then the sequel, Hollow Ataraxia, does some weird bullshit that says "All of them are canon and none fo them are canon." Don't ask me how that works, I've never played it.

> I always assumed that Heaven's Feel was the canon ending, since I thought it was the last one you play in the game

That's not an unreasonable assumption, since a bunch of other VNs and multiple ending games do have the last route unlocked as the "True Ending", and some even take the approach of "you can do the other endings in any order, but you have to have done them all on your save file before you're allowed to make the choices for the True Ending".

Fate/Stay Night isn't like that.

You have to play the Fate, Unlimited Blade Works, and then Heaven's Feel routes *in that specific unlock sequence*, because they're used to give the player information in a certain order, not because HF is the True Ending. This is both for dramatic reasons (some twists in the later routes hit significantly harder because you're used to seeing certain characters act in certain ways in prior routes, so revealing other sides to them is a lot more of a shock than it would be with only the route where they're revealed), and the merciful practical reason that it means the game doesn't have to re-explain some things because it knows the player already got that information from a prior route. I say merciful because the game already has a massive amount of text, so not repeating itself more than necessary is a blessing. It also creates some interesting narrative depth in some cases: for instance, Saber's identity is only revealed in Fate route, IIRC, but knowing that identity explains why Saber takes some of the actions she does in later routes which might seem ...a bit odd without knowing what her deal is.

The game is also cheeky enough to first imply that the three routes presented aren't even the only three ways the Fifth Holy Grail War could have gone [Unlimited Blade Works major spoiler]>!because one character is actually from the future, and their experience of the Holy Grail War in their timeline doesn't exactly match up with any of the three ingame routes!< and then outright state that there are infinite universes/timelines [Heaven's Feel minor spoiler]>!by having a character create a weapon that explicitly operates by drawing in not only the local mana where they are in their own universe, but the local mana from *that same location and point in time from a ton of alternate universes* - not much power from any one universe, but added up together... it's possibly one of the most powerful weapons in the story, which is saying a lot, considering how nuts Fate/Stay Night's powerlevels are!<.

True but it could be helpful for understanding Gilgamesh a bit more if you're unfamiliar with the Epic since strange Fake uses some of his Babylonian history which isn't really touched on in the main series. Plus iirc a certain other Babylonian individual from FGO Babylonia shows up later as well

Yeah, the movies had to cut out so much for time that they feel like almost completely different stories despite covering most of the main points.

>Characters waiting until someone’s an adult to lust over them?? In MY Fate universe????

I mean, he was already an adult in Fate/Zero (he was 19).

>(grad students in the US are 22 at minimum btw)

Yeah, but he wasn't a grad student, he was essentially in undergrad in Fate/Zero.

Here, he's in his 30's and is a professor.