Nasuverse

This article contains spoilers! You have been warned.

The heroines of the three main works in the Nasuverse. From left to right: Arcueid Brunestud from Tsukihime, Saber from Fate, and Ryougi Shiki from Kara no Kyoukai.

The Nasuverse is a fictional universe created by Japanese author Kinoko Nasu. His partner in crime is Takeuchi Takashi, the character designer and artist. Together the two of them form media company Type-Moon, license-holder for that which follows and ruler of all waifus.

The Nasuverse is basically an urban fantasy setting. Mages, vampires, zombies, and the Holy Grail are all real. Mages spend most of their time fighting each other over petty arguments, circlejerking in the magic academy inside of Big Ben, and committing crimes against humanity in the name of progressing their research. They only stop once in a while to fight over the Holy Grail so they can gain complete knowledge of the universe and access to the Akasha, or whatever.

Overall, the Nasuverse is pretty much the intersection of /a/, /v/, and /tg/, and it's been around for a long time. While there are earlier works, Tsukihime and Fate/Stay Night were the first major productions of Type-Moon. These two were eroge visual novels (the kind of VN that features sex scenes, distinct from the nukige that exist purely as pornography), and while an interesting story where you get to bang a cute girl sells pretty well in Japan, that second part doesn't fly so well in the West. As time went on, Nasu and Takeuchi tried to distance themselves from their sordid roots by remaking F/SN with alternate scenes in place of the sex, and by generally avoiding the matter in future material.

Nasu himself is a fan of Dungeons and Dragons and plays it a lot. Enough that he and a bunch of other weeaboo authors got together and recorded some of their play sessions in that weird Japanese tradition of replay books. It's called Red Dragon, and the anime about it sucks, so if you're that much of a weeaboo you should just read the source material.

Magic in the Nasuverse

Most of the works in the Nasuverse feature mages as pretty important people. These mages are an intersection of the study-hard-and-experiment wizard and the you-gotta-be-born-with-it sorcerer. Only people with Magic Circuits are capable of magecraft, and the number and quantity of your Magic Circuits stems from both eugenics the mages in your family tree and sheer luck of the draw. Mages from old, powerful families have more Magic Circuits of higher quality than those from less established families, leading Mage society towards snooty aristocracy and thumbing their noses at upstarts.

Mage families in the Nasuverse are distinguished by their Magic Crests, which are like a combination family crest, spellbook library, and tattoo. The family's Magic Crest designates the inheritor of their magic tradition, with each heir performing magical research in their lifetime to modify and extend the Crest before passing it on in turn.

As for the actual magic practiced, it's not called "magic." Most of the time. The majority of what you see in the Nasuverse is referred to as "magecraft." Magecraft is distinguished from magic by the notion of "how possible it is." If your wizardry is just a faster version of something technology or human effort can do, you are a mage and you are doing magecraft. To be a magician who does magic, also known as True Magic, you must do something by mechanics that no one understands, not even you. If humans eventually learn to replicate it through mundane means -- including magecraft, which is hermetic and can be replicated by anyone with the proper power/ingredients/magical affinities -- it stops being a True Magic.

This disqualification only applies if the formula for it can be properly understood, so blind replications of True Magic are not considered to limit their status as magic. For example, there are homunculi cloned to use Heaven's Feel, as well as a magical tool that uses Kaleidoscope in a limited capacity, but none of these understand how their magic works so they remain True Magic. Even something as simple as starting a fire used to be True Magic, but as a result of humanity's progress, very few things are still so impossible as to require True Magic. It is considered the realm of miracles, and even meeting a Magician is an event worthy of legend.

There are five more or less known True Magics in the Nasuverse:

• Denial of Nothingness, the First Magic. A Magic that is still active in the world, but its users are long gone. It is suggested to be related to creation of Ether Clumps, which is to say, making magic energy out of nothing. The user of First True Magic was born the night before the calendar started, so he is most definitely not Jesus because it's off by a day.
• Kaleidoscope, the Second Magic. Also known as Zelretch, the name of the only wizard crazy enough to ever achieve it. Kaleidoscope grants access to an infinite number of parallel universes, enabling tricks like casting a spell over and over without exhausting yourself by tapping into the ambient mana of the parallel versions of the room you're currently in. Zeltrech disappeared into interdimensional hyperspace after discovering Kaleidoscope, and he remains there as a convenient plot hook dispenser and plot hole repairman.
• Heaven's Feel, the Third Magic. Discovered by the Einzberns, one of the three great mage families, this is a magic that can materialize a human soul. The Holy Grail's ability to summon Servants for the ritual of the Grail War is an application of Third Magic. In the Fate/Extra continuity, humanity achieves the Third by learning how to digitize souls, so this is the only True Magic that ever lost its status in a Nasuverse work.
• Unknown Fourth Magic. All that's known is that it hid itself right after it appeared, but 'it definitely exists'. It might be related to the concealment itself, or not.
• Magic Blue, the Fifth Magic. Supposedly relevant to time travel, enabling the user to violate conservation of energy by borrowing energy from pasts with no future. This is the least-understood of the known Magics, but apparently it can be passed down the family line as the owner wishes, and its acquisition may involve reaching the Root and choosing to go back in time.

Whether or not there could be more Magics after the Fifth is pure speculation.

While not True Magic, the Reality Marble is a technique that comes close in power. This is a magecraft that replaces the caster's surroundings with some other space like a temporary demiplane. Reality Marbles demonstrated in the Nasuverse range from Emiya Kiritsugu's Time Alter, a bubble that surrounds him with a faster or slower flow of time, all the way up to the legendary Unlimited Blade Works.

Kara no Kyoukai

An actual book.

Kara no Kyoukai is the oldest official entry in what would become the Nasuverse. The first chapters were published way back in 1998, so they're probably older than the people reading this right now. It's so old that most people know about it from the series of seven movies by anime studio Ufotable.

The main character is Ryougi Shiki, and she has the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception. Yes, death, not depth. These are a form of magic vision that let her see the "implicit death" in all things. In less idiotically obtuse terms, she can see the lines of weakness in anything, and if she cuts them, that thing is destroyed beyond repair. Even people, ghosts, and magic phenomena have these lines, making her either an effective assassin, or a supernatural problem solver.
More interestingly, the story revolves around eastern mystic ideas of personal identity, which are difficult to translate into western words if you have not both read up on them and can read the kanji too. The movies do a decent job explaining everything through visual cues, but a lot is lost in the translation. If you want to have a Zen Buddhist themed villain Mage in WoD, though, KnK can be a great inspiration.

Anyone who calls it "The Garden of Sinners" is probably a fag. Anyone who calls it "Rakkyo" is probably an oldfag, a moon reader, or a hipster. The novels are officially localized, though again, they're a tough nut to properly translate, so a lot of fans aren't content with what's been put out. Official or not, you can read them, or watch the eight theatrical movies.

Tsukihime

The main cast of Tsukihime. From left to right: Yumidzuka Satsuki, Ciel, Tohno Akiha, Len, Arcueid Brunestud, Hisui, Kohaku. The redhead in the background is Aozaki Aoko, and the shadow at the top-right is Nrvnqsr Chaos (pronounced Nero).

As you shouldn't.

Tsukihime is a visual novel that's one part murder mystery, one part dating simulator, and one part gothic horror. Its main character, Tohno Shiki, survives a car crash as a child and is disowned by his wealthy parents for his frail constitution. In exchange for this near-death experience, he gains the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception introduced in Kara no Kyoukai, enabling him to cut through anything. The story begins when he's called back to his family manor upon the death of the family patriarch, where he gets embroiled in the 'vampire murders' occurring throughout town. The various routes of the story either track down the culprit or ignore them in favor of digging up the Tohno family's shadowy history.

The five choices of waifu, and therefore of routes in the story, are:

• Arcueid Brunestud, vampire-hunting vampire and the last one who was born this way, which makes her a kind of nature spirit. Technically the strongest thing on Earth bar maybe a certain temporally confused alien spider.
• Ciel, ninja-nun and vampire hunter working for the Church. Can't be killed because of a glitch in the world. Finds out that Shiki's eyes can fix glitches in one bad ending (or maybe she just stays a living head, who knows). She has a strange fascination with curry.
• Tohno Akiha, Shiki's younger sister and, after Shiki was disowned for being too sickly, heiress to the Tohno family fortune. She's used to acting the part of a financial conglomerate ojou.
• Hisui, Maid One of the pair remaining at the Tohno family mansion. She's quiet and keeps things formal. A poor cook, but excellent around the house.
• Kohaku, Maid Two at the Tohno mansion. She's the cheery big sister type to contrast Hisui's cool exterior. Her cleaning skills are horrendous, but she's the best in the kitchen and the garden.

Other waifus featured are Aozaki Aoko, a mentor figure Shiki met when he was still recovering from his accident, and Yumidzuka Satsuki, the designated classmate love interest. They don't get routes, so they don't count, and Satsuki not having a route is a common subject of memes among Nasuverse fans.

Picking a waifu from the five above sets you on one of the story's routes, which are organized into the Near Side (Arcueid, Ciel) or Far Side (Akiha, Hisui, Kohaku). The Near Side routes focus on investigating the vampire murders in town and explains a lot of the mechanics of vampires in the Nasuverse, while the Far Side investigates the mysteries of the Tohno family.

Overall, Tsukihime is a respectable visual novel and interesting if only so you can see how far Type-Moon has come from their beginnings hucking demos at Comiket. Its contained and minimalist nature helps it work out a lot, making it a lot more subtle than the loud idealist speeches and overexplaining everything you may be used to from Fate. On the other hand, there isn't exactly enough content to fill up five entire routes of story (80% of the Kohaku route is nigh-identical to the Hisui route), so going from one route on the same Side to the other(s) will involve judicious use of the fast-forward button.

If all you care about is shitposting, "Can Shiki kill Servants" is one of the fastest ways to start fights among Nasuverse geeks, and any relevant discussion quickly devolves into a total clownshow of powerlevel arguments.

Near Side

The Near Side routes focus on the vampiric threat in the city and the hunters dealing with it. The antagonist is Michael Roa Valdamjong, a vampire and one of the few in the Nasuverse to achieve immortality (kinda; a recurring theme in the Nasuverse is that immortality is not a thing, and even if your body doesn't decay, your soul still will, eventually). Roa's immortality allows him to continue his life by reincarnating into the body of a specially prepared host, usually a child so people ask fewer questions. He has a hateboner for Arcueid, who has sworn to hunt him down each time he reincarnates, and their conflict goes back generations. Meanwhile, Ciel is investigating the vampire murders on orders of the holy Church and trying to rope Shiki into being her partner.

Highlights of the Near Side include death by shark attack on the upper floors of a hotel with no aquarium, the use of anal sex to slow down a progressing vampiric possession, and a real eyesore of a chair.

Far Side

Roa does not make an appearance in these routes. Instead, it's revealed he attempted to reincarnate into the most magically gifted child of the Tohno family, a bloodline that's already exceptional due to mingling with oni. Unlike the Near Side, where he succeedeed in extinguishing the kid's soul, the Far Side allows the Tohno scion to leverage his demon blood to resist the vampire and expel him. Unfortunately, half-oni seriously struggle with controlling their violently psychotic impulses for the rest of their lives once they embrace their nature. The entire Tohno bloodline is half-oni. You do the math.

These routes explore the dark history of the household, shed light on Shiki's origins, let you sleep with the maids, and are generally a beautiful trip down "going batshit insane" lane.

Kagetsu Tohya

A proper sequel of sorts to Tsukihime, with quite a bit more art, music, and less dour atmosphere. It could be considered a fanservice disc, if not for the fact that it is quite a bit more intimately tied to Tsukihime's cast than Hollow Ataraxia is to Fate, going into their backgrounds more than Tsukihime could, and even tying up some legitimate loose ends, such as a short story set after Akiha's True Ending. Tsukihime was horror, and less is more in horror, so we instead get Kagetsu Tohya, which explores the world of Tsukihime in a way that the work itself couldn't afford to.
Kagetsu Tohya is generally split into two parts:
- Ten Nights of a Dream: Isolated stories to be read, some of them fanfiction made canon, but often pretty sizeable. They are unlocked as the player chews through the main story.
- Twilight Grass Moon, Fairy Tale Princess: The main story focuses on our protagonist, Tohno Shiki, who, half a year after the events of Tsukihime, finds himself endlessly reliving a single day of his daily life. Rather than a normal Groundhog Day scenario, though, he is caught in a dream, and the other characters with him. A dream somebody has trapped them in, for some reason. This is a problem, since Shiki's subconscious is a dark place, and he won't be allowed to leave until he confronts some of those repressed inner demons.

Tsukihime 2: The Dark Six

Things that may never happen, but have been teased before.

Kagetsu Tohya included a teaser for Tsukihime 2, which would never be made. Tsukihime Plus Period, the data-book akin to Character Material for other titles, included the prologue to Tsukihime 2, 'Talk'. Overall, not only is there a surprisingly high amount of information available, but it seems that the nonexistent story of Tsukihime 2 is referenced and even bleeds into the other works, which actually exist.
The story of Tsukihime 2 revolves around the Aylesbury Ritual, wherin several powerful Dead Apostles gather to summon The Dark Six, an entity that would bring salvation to the Dead Apostles. This ritual has incidentally been carried out and apparently botched in Fate/Extra, resulting in a polar shift and draining of all of the world's prana.
Tsukihime 2 has two protagonists, of which the first is Enhance, who is quite literally Vampire Dante From the Devil May Cry Series. He is a vampire that goes around with a sword and a shotgun killing other vampires. The other protagonist might be Shiki, or somebody else, since Shiki by the time of Tsukihime 2 is so overpowered his glass no longer work and he has to blind himself with magic bandages to suppress his eyes. Two heroines we know of are Bartholomeloi Lorelei, basically the purest blood magus in the world, and Altrogue Brunestud, Arcueid's sister, and the second in line to become Crimson Moon. From the Prologue it also seems that Ciel has a fairly large role in the story, possibly being the other protagonist herself.

Melty Blood

Neither of these will be mentioned again.

A sequel-spinoff series that continues where one of the routes left off. Which one? The Satsuki route, which doesn't exist. It started as a VN with a janky fighting game stapled to it, but later releases smoothed the gameplay until it was more like the Tsukihime Fighting Game than it was a VN you had to do fights to get through. Now there's a Melty Blood manga that goes over the original stuff, so you can just read that instead of playing badly made fighting games.

The main story is famous for a few things, among which is invoking several fresh new words and ideas which would never be brought up again, and many of which would be contradicted by Fate, as the Tsuki-side seems to have been abandoned by Type-Moon for FGO bucks. In Melty, the town of Misaki where both Tsukihime and Mahoyo are set is visited by an alchemist, Sion Eltnam Atlasia. It turns out that the town has been chosen as a spot for the next manifestation Night of Wallachia - a powerful vampire who takes the form of people's greatest fears. This is likely because certain people in Misaki have dangerous amounts of knowledge of the truly terrifying parts of the setting, and he hopes to use those fears to acquire some overpowered ability that would let him progress his research.
Wallachia, or Zepia Eltnam Oberon, you see, used to be a magus, an alchemist, and a scientist. With the infinite power of math, he has calculated the inevitability of the apocalypse, in Tsuki-side called The Sixth, and sought immortality by means of vampirism to help avert it. The Night of Wallachia is a roulette of sorts like that, meant to collect data, except that the guy running has long since gone batshit insane.
Resolving this situation, however, is just the Story Mode of the first title, and nowhere near where the entire storyline ends. What follows after this one is spread across the individual Arcade Modes and victory quotes (that's not a joke) of fifteen to thirty one characters across three different games, and no one can be expected to remember all of it, including the makers. As such, Melty lore contains some of the most obscure stuff in the setting. Not the deepest lore mind you, just the stuff no one could be bothered to remember.

Melty Blood is notable for its long, seemingly nonsensical titles, which are, in release order:

• Melty Blood
• Melty Blood Re:ACT
• Melty Blood Act Cadenza
• Melty Blood Actress Again
• Melty Blood Actress Again Current Code

Melty was meant to get a new title, not long after MBAACC. The first catch is that Type-Moon wanted the characters in the new Melty to have the Remake designs, which would be easy. The other catch is that they wanted it to adhere to the Remake lore, which is impossible, because there is no Remake. Therefore, there can not be a new Melty Blood game again. On the flip side, Melty Blood cannot be ruined anymore.
If you're poor and like fighting vidya, MBAACC is popular for having a pirate version with better netplay than the official release. At least enjoy the music.

The Tsukihime Remake

Click to die instantly.

A remake of Tsukihime was announced.

In 2008.

Updated character designs were revealed in 2013 and earned a lot of flak for changing things that didn't really need to be changed. It's also been revealed then that the novel would include entirely new characters, like a teacher in Shiki's school, and would discard a bunch of old Tsukihime lore, in particular replacing some of the lamer Dead Apostle Ancestors with cooler ones.

It still isn't out. Many suspect it never will be.

Fate

Fate is the biggest part of the Nasuverse and the one most people know. It started as a visual novel all the way back into 2004, and has since ballooned out into a money-printing machine with an uncountable number of spinoff series. Entries in the Fate series are distinguished from one another by the text after the slash (/). You have Fate/Stay Night, Fate/Zero, Fate/Extra, Fate/Hollow Ataraxia... and most infamously, Fate/Grand Order. So no, it's not Fate Stay/Night. The series is called Fate.

The big thrust of the Fate series is the Holy Grail War, in which seven mages get together in a not-that-big city in Japan and summon legendary heroes as their bodyguards and warriors. All of them duke it out for the right to touch the Holy Grail. Last man standing gets to wish for whatever they want. The whole thing was put together a couple hundred years ago by three of the great mage families in an effort to reach the deepest truth of the universe, known as the Root. The War part got involved when they got close to the finish line and started fighting to be the ones who actually got to cross it.

A total of seven mages are selected to fight in the Grail War. Each one summons one hero, known as a Servant, and acts as their Master. It's the Master's job to strategize during the war, and the Servant's job to actually engage in combat. All Masters are given a set of three Command Spells on their arm that mark them as Masters, allowing them to give three absolute orders to their Servant. Each of the Servants belongs to one of the seven classes:

The seven classes of Servant. From top-center going clockwise, they're Saber, Lancer, Rider, Assassin, Berserker, and Caster, with Archer in the center.

• Saber, for swordsmen. "Saber" is a class and not a weapon because Nasu probably did an Engrish and thought the -er ending meant it was a name for someone trained in swordplay the same way archer is a name for someone who does archery.
• Archer, the biggest meme of a class. The Archer from the first entry in the series spends most of his fights dual-wielding swords, and the Archer in the prequel doesn't even use a bow, preferring to fire swords as projectiles.
• Lancer, a class for fast guys with long poking sticks. Lancers are commonly drawn from Gaelic myth. Their being Irish is something fans take the piss out of really often, because most of them have absolutely horrible luck.
• Rider, for pretty much anyone who's associated with a vehicle. World-conquering leaders, famous pirates... Even being an infamous slut is enough to qualify a hero for this class.
• Caster, for anyone actually good at magic. Alchemists and writers get to come too.
• Assassin, for the most legendarily dick-assed of dick-ass thieves. Per the "rules" of the Grail War, an Assassin-class Servant is always one of the leaders of Hashshashins, all of whom took the name Hassan-i Sabbah. Because this is anime, rules don't count, and this one gets broken pretty much all the time.
• Berserker, a class for heroes with varying levels of RAGE. Berserkers range from incoherent roaring monster-men to "coherent every now and then," quantified by their Mad Enhancement rating. High Mad Enhancement strengthens them more, but makes them more difficult to control and harder to understand.

Every Servant gets a Noble Phantasm Revealing your Servant's Noble Phantasm is pretty much a dead giveaway as to their identity, because by definition an NP is something that most defined the Servant when they were alive. Most Masters keep this close to their chest for as long as they can, because all of a Servant's weaknesses from their old legend still apply.

This series is the most directly /tg/, since Servants are traditionally given character sheets with ability scores, skills, and even alignments. They don't play by the rules (one Berserker has the alignment Lawful Mad), but it's fun to speculate about what kind of abilities these actually correspond to.

Fate/Stay Night

Say what you will about Takeuchi's intense sameface, he's got good character design.

Fate/Stay Night was the original work in the Fate series, released as a visual novel in 2004. It's where you get ancient memes like "People die when they are killed," and "I am the bone of my sword." The Holy Grail War depicted in F/SN is the Fifth Grail War, and it features the following heroes:

• Saber - King Arthur, but a girl. Her Noble Phantasm is Excalibur, which manifests its power in a slash that "cuts through everything." The actual attack is a gigantic laser beam that vaporizes whatever she points it at.
• Archer - [REDACTED]. Archer actually isn't a legendary hero at all. At least, he's not a legend in the time Fate/Stay Night takes place.
• Lancer - Cu Chulainn. His Noble Phantasm is the spear Gay Bulge Gae Bolg. The one who began the trend of Lancer's having E-Rank Luck.
• Rider - Medusa. Why? Because Pegasus was born when she was decapitated, so she gets to use it as her Noble Phantasm even if she isn't Perseus.
• Caster - Medea. She's still bitter about Jason cucking her, so she maintains a sadistic streak. Her Noble Phantasm lets her sever magical contracts, which gets real fun when you remember that those are what bind Servants to Masters.
• Assassin - Sasaki Koijrou, autistic samurai. Trained so hard with his weeaboo stick that he developed the ability to make three sword slices simultaneously, but that's not an "implement" so he doesn't get a Noble Phantasm.
• Berserker - Herakles. He's too angry to use a weapon well enough to bring out its potential as a Noble Phantasm, so instead he gets extra lives.

Yes, that girl with the platemail-dress combo is King Arthur. This has and continues to introduce huge amounts of butthurt, and anyone not willing to tolerate waifu bullshit usually gets turned off the series at this point. The origin of this affront to historical veracity is in F/SN's origins as a visual novel, which in Japan are only purchased by geeks with PCs looking to whack off. Nasu's original plan was actually to have the main character be a girl and keep King Arthur as an actual king, but his artist and comrade Takeuchi convinced him they would do much better in the VN market if the protagonist was a male the audience could project on, and King Arthur was a girl. So history was made.

All that aside, the actual plot of Fate/Stay Night follows Emiya Shirou, a boy who was adopted by Emiya Kiritsugu when the fallout from the Fourth Grail War turned Shirou's neighborhood into a burning hellscape. Ten years later, he gets wrapped up in the aforementioned Fifth Grail War when he unwittingly summons Saber.

Fate/Hollow Ataraxia

A loose sequel to Fate/Stay Night, released not long after, and probably required reading if you liked the above. A fanservice disc in one part, and a backside of the original story in the other.
Long after the Holy Grail War, Emiya Shirou is caught in a looping world of four days, which appears to be a mesh of every route, including ones which don't exist, all due to what seems to be a catastrophic miscast on Rin's part, and everyone gets into wacky hijinks.
In truth, the situation is much more complicated. The real story follows Bazett Fraga McRemitz, Lancer's original master, who should have been dead. In Hollow Ataraxia, she is brought back to life by what seems to be a mysterious, irregular, weak, and very angry Servant calling themselves Avenger, and taken on a journey through the Holy Grail War's history, in an attempt to untangle the mess of the ritual properly.
Hollow Ataraxia is all translated, you can play it. Additionally, it originally did not have voice acting, but it has been made for the Vita version, and can now be patched in for PC. No adaptation of it exists, read the real thing.

Fate/Zero

Kiritsugu deals with mages Shadowrun style.

Fate/Zero is the prequel to Fate/Stay Night dedicated to exploring the backstory of Shirou's adoptive dad Kiritsugu. Originally released as a light novel in 2006, it got an anime in 2011. This was the first serious work at adapting Fate to anime since the disastrous 2004 adaptation of Fate/Stay Night. This has earned a position of major skubbery among Fate fans, since it brought in huge numbers of newfags. This entry in the Nasuverse tends to start arguments about what amount of edge is acceptable in the Nasuverse and whether or not Fate/Zero has too much of it. This owes to Zero's actual writing being done not by Nasu, but by Gen "The Urobutcher" Urobuchi. Yes, the Madoka guy. The one infamous for killing characters to generate easy drama because he can't figure out any other way to move the plot forward. Zero is still like that.

Anyway, Zero is about the Grail War that Kiritsugu participated in and that ended up with him adopting Shirou. Kiritsugu is a hardass who doesn't play by hoity-toity mage rules. Of the seven mages fighting in the Grail War, he's the only one using guns, and spends most of the time with his servant on the Sidelines while he handles things with firepower. He's pretty much playing Shadowrun while the rest of them are pretending to be Harry Potter villains.

Zero's cast of Servants is as follows:

• Saber - King Arthur. This is where we first hear of her as the "King of Knights." A lot of her relationship with Kiritsugu is post-facto foreshadowing and ironic reversals of her relationship with Shirou in Stay Night.
• Archer - Gilgamesh. As pretty much the first hero ever recorded, he's "King of Heroes." His Noble Phantasm is the Gate of Babylon, which lets him pull any kind of weapon he wants out of the ether. He's the original hero, so of course all other legends are derived from him, which means he has the original versions. Basically, he cheats. He's too arrogant to swordfight with these treasures, so he earns Archer status by launching them at his enemies.
• Lancer - Diarmuid ua Duibhne. If you thought Cu got it bad in Stay Night, very few suffer more than ol' Deermud.
• Rider - Alexander the Great. Summoned as he was at the height of his empire, he's known by the name the Persians gave him, Iskandar. He rounds out the three kings in Zero as "King of Conquerors."
• Caster - Gilles de Rais. The famous murder-rapist of children maintains his fetish for Joan of Arc. When he crosses paths with Saber, he mistakes her for his beloved Jeanne. He gets command of lots of tentacles via the actual Necronomicon and continues to spend most of his time murdering children.
• Assassin - Hassan of the Many Faces. Instead of one assassin, this Servant gives the Master access to a whole mess of Assassins that lack the superhuman abilities of a Servant. Their disposability makes them useful as scouts.
• Berserker - Lancelot. He spends most of the series incognito, only revealing his identity for a final duel against Saber. Notable for using his Noble Phantasm to hijack an F-15 fighter jet, dogfight with it against Gilgamesh, then turn it against Saber.

Fate/Extra

An alternate timeline spin-off for the PSP set in the Moon Cell, a supercomputer that is also the Moon. Rather than a free-for-all between seven Master/Servant pairs, this Holy Grail War is set up as a single-elimination tournament. Each week, one Master is paired up with one opponent, and so every week the number of Masters halves after the life-or-death duels.

The gameplay is sort of crap, involving a lot of grind in not-very-interesting geometric environments, but people like it because it's one of the very, very few games in the Nasuverse with an official English translation. Arcueid and Ryougi make cameo appearances, with Arcueid featured as a Berserker in one of the routes and Ryougi as a secret boss in the otherwise-unexplained Monster class. This was the first entry in the series to explore the backstory of Stay Night's Archer.

Fate/Extra has a sequel, Fate/Extra CCC, which was not and still isn't in English. The best you get is playthroughs on Youtube with subtitles superimposed on the game text. Most have added the CCC fan translation to the "never ever" pile alongside the Tsukihime Remake. This is kind of a shame, because the grognard opinion is, CCC is Nasu's latest work that was objectively good, and retroactively made Extra worth the time it had wasted.

Fate/Apocrypha

An alternate timeline spinoff where a mage worked with the Nazis to steal the Grail during WW2 and later held his own War elsewhere with two teams of seven Masters/Servants (one per class, as usual) and a neutral Ruler, a new class. Generally panned by the community for the mediocre writing. Only notable it for its introduction of more high-powerlevel Servants and weeaboo RAGE that erupted when Jeanne D'Arc, who has quickly grown to become one of Fate's poster girls, hooked up with a random Mary Sue homunculus that everyone hates.

Fate/Strange fake

Another spinoff, written by Narita of Durarara! fame, who's still doing his thing of having many narratives at once with no clear protagonist. Tries to turn many things on their heads and provides some creative, if not necessarily canon, ideas that DMs can explore. Noteworthy members of the cast are a Berserker Jack the Ripper representing the mystery of the original's true identity through shapeshifting powers (note that said original is also summonable as a Servant and is, perhaps somewhat predictably, a little girl with mommy issues), Herakles who rejects his divinity and rages at the gods who made his life a mess, and Enkidu, Gilgamesh's sidekick and the only person the King of Heroes will ever call a friend.

Fate/kaleid liner PRISMA☆ILLYA

A magical girl-oriented spinoff. Mostly lolibait with a side of yuri that cribs other Fate works for characters, villains, and storylines. The only thing more painful than writing or saying this name out loud is actually reading or watching it.

Fate/Grand Order

The biggest source of Skub in the entire Nasuverse, Fate/Grand Order is a freemium phone game launched in Japan in 2015 and unleashed upon the English-speaking world in 2017. As a freemium phone game, it falls into the popular category of "gacha games", where the player gets new characters of various rarities out of a glorified slot machine. Your tokens for this slot machine are a resource that, once exhausted, can only be regained by waiting some unrealistic amount of time or by shelling out real money. But it gets worse! Even among gacha games, F/GO is notorious for its horrendously stingy rates on the highest rarity of characters. It also loves limited-time events featuring extremely strong characters at this highest rarity. This is all par for the course for gacha, but the real stinger is that you get virtually no way to improve your odds. Sinking five hundred dollars of real money into the gacha is still no guarantee whatsoever that you actually get the character you want. With all of these combined, the game is clearly designed for the exact kind of whale player who thinks of nothing of sinking hundreds of dollars for the new Saber recolor. Everyone else can go hang.

Other than the blatantly predatory monetization mechanic, it's a skub titan because oldfags blame it for stagnating the Nasuverse, while newfags who have no clue about Tsukihime and Stay Night won't shut up about it giving them new piles of genderbent-historical-figure spank bait every month. This steaming hunk of smutty waifu PNGs makes millions of dollars a year. This fact, coupled with Nasu doing the writing for it, means that it is commonly blamed for stagnation in the Nasuverse and the Tsukihime Remake's VIP seat in development hell. It even has the nerve to pay lip service to other, much better properties by including Ryougi Shiki as a limited-time event character.

Defending Grand Order among fans of anything else in the Nasuverse is an instant way to become known as that guy.

Other Works

Mahoyo

An example of a still from Mahoyo. Pretty, right? Now think about how long it would take to make an entire visual novel where all the art is stills of this quality.

"Witch on the Holy Night," abbreviated Mahoyo from the Japanese title Mahoutsukai no Yoru, is unofficially the first Nasuverse work (unreleased due to various reasons) and one of the last visual novels written by Nasu with art by Takeuchi. It follows Aozaki Aoko's life as a magician before Shiki met her in Tsukihime.

It's notable for eschewing traditional VN practice of depicting characters with slightly-animated portraits, preferring to show everything with individually drawn stills. This makes it very pretty, but virtually nothing can be reused, so it's a big expense in both time and money. Mahoyo is infamous for the many delays in its production, enormous art costs, zero voiced dialogue (suicide for a VN released in 2012), and the decision to split it into three parts. The first of these three is all we have, without so much as a release date for number two. Its financial failure most likely convinced TYPE-MOON to focus on the safe bet of licensing Fate for the foreseeable future. This is probably why there have been no official efforts to bring Mahoyo to English -- the closest is a long string of abortive fan translations -- though for some reason the French fans managed to bring everything into their tongue in 2019. There is hope that going from the Japanese-English language gap to a mere French-English will be what saves the most recent translation attempt. Those who've been following the many English Mahoyo projects maintain a general attitude of despair about the whole thing, with some fans making gallows humor bets on whether we get English Mahoyo or the Tsukihime remake first.

Notes

Notes humanity is pretty out there.

Also known as Angel Notes, it is the second-oldest official Nasuverse work but is set in the far future. Earth/Gaia is suffering a spiritual death at the hands of human war and pollution. Humanity itself only survived by bioengineering to survive in the hostile environment. Enraged that the beings that killed her continue to live on her soon-to-be corpse, Gaia released into what was left of the atmosphere a lethal discharge of Mana, killing large swathes of humanity and mutating the flora and fauna into aberrations that would make a 40k Deathworld proud. The surviving humans responded by bioengineering themselves AGAIN into monsters beyond Gaia's monsters. In response, Gaia's dying breath was a call to the spirits of the other planets, the Ultimate Ones, known as the Types, to finish the job. The main story follows the last days of the last unmodified human (and thus the only one capable of wielding a God-Killing Gun), where he finds himself sharing an apartment with an incarnation of Type Venus that he 'killed' five years ago.

Many other Nasu works, particularly Prisma Illya, reference Notes as a possible bad end for their future.

Tsuki no Sango

Not even remotely Arcueid.

Or, Moon's Coral. A not so short story set in the world of Tsukihime, year 3000, released for a public reading. It can be understood as an eschatological counterpoint to Notes, presenting a different doomed future: Wheras in Notes, humanity became cosmic cancer, in Tsuki no Sango, it has become dull and boring, and lost its spark. As such, humans on the utopian Earth are slowly dying out due to fatal phlegmatism and apathy, because everybody who cared about future left for the space.
In this world is set a story akin to the one of Princess Kaguya, about a boy meeting a girl who is definitely not in any way related to Arcueid.

Lord El-Melloi II Case Files

A novel series featuring Waver Velvet from Fate/Zero after he became an old and badass Magus university professor. Despite him literally being a Fate character, and many other Fate characters having a cameo or ten, this is distinctly not a Fate title, being concerned with the nature of Magecraft rather than Servants and Masters and Holy Grail Wars. Additionally, it doesn't shy from using Tsukihime material, like Dead Apostles (though Dead Apostles are not strictly Tsukihime-only, they're just much more influential in that continuity while Servants can't be summoned).
The story is a series of 'cases' where Waver has to untangle a situation in the wizarding society of London's Clock Tower. Throughout them develops his relationship with his students, in particular his personal aide Gray, whose defining character trait is that she is NOT Saber in spite of having the exact same face. This has deep plot implications.
The novel series is widely considered to be one of the better written TM works not penned by Nasu himself. A 12-episode anime has recently been made. You can watch it to get a taste.

Carnival Phantasm

Carnival Phantasm is the obligatory comedy cross-over that all long-running Japanese series have to do at least once. It is very silly and is regarded with more or less universal praise.

That is to say, this is a 12 episodes anime worth of jokes. For the initial episodes it takes from the Take-Moon manga, but later episodes have the show's official content, with somewhat different tone and humour. Whether you like the simple gegs at the start or the complicated ones later, you'll probably enjoy Carnival Phantasm more the more of the other stuff you've read.

DDD

Decoration Disorder Disconection. Two novels in eight chapters all about demonic possession, which going by all the official statements are not in any way canon in the Nasuverse... except that the Nasuverse demons work the exact same way as described here, and one of the characters from DDD had appeared in Type-Moon's April's Fools website VN as one of TM's Twelve Golden Heroines. In fact, Fate/Extra CCC's finale makes an indirect callback to DDD, despite Nasu allegedly acting as if he never wrote those two novels. At least the first volume has a fan translation, you can find the 300 page pdf if you dig. The second does, as well, though there's no PDF and it's been retranslated from Russian so beware the occasional inaccuracy.

So, This is Basically World of Darkness, Right?

Maybe. Nasu has confessed to being inspired by tabletops, but never directly by WoD. However, consider the following line of thought:
- The number six has deep eschatological implications in the nasuverse. There's the Dark Six in Tsukihime 2, the totally entirely unrelated Six Sisters in Notes, the Beast VI being literal biblical Beast of Revelation in Fate/Prototype, The Sixth (which is most likely just the time of Crimson Moon's return) in Tsukihime, and finally the Six True Magics. But wait, you say, we have never heard of a Sixth True Magic, right?
- Mahoyo says that theoretically this is possible, if one more person would just reach the Root and manage to come back, it's just never happened. Furthermore, it says that magi in general like them up to the Third, the Fourth is weird, and the appearance of the Fifth is bad.
- In Notes, The Six Sisters are each a wielder of True Magic. Since there can only be a single owner of a True Magic at a time, it follows that in the world of Notes, there are six. Furthermore, the sisters are distinct from each other - the youngest has died fighting the Types.
- The youngest sister's name is stated to be Judgement.
- In Mage: the Ascension, Judgement is the name of the theoretical Tenth Sphere, which...
- Sound familiar?

Gallery

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  The cast of Heroic Spirits from Fate/Stay Night. From left to right: Archer, Berserker, Saber, True Assassin, Assassin, Rider, Lancer, and the Archer from the previous Grail War.

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  Zero's Heroic Spirits. From top to bottom, left to right: Assassin, Archer, Lancer, Caster, Rider, Saber, and Berserker.

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  The new design for Arcueid from a Tsukihime Remake promo. The least popular of the designs due to the changes to her hair and skirt.

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  New designs for Ciel and Akiha. Opinions are mixed about these.

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  New designs for the maids, Hisui and Kohaku. They got changed the least.