Character · Fate/stay night
Rider
The class is named for what the servant arrives on, and the franchise cannot agree whether that is a horse, a chariot or a bull.
In Otakana the clue reads: Servant class that arrives mounted
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Fate/stay night
- Letters
- 5 · Normal
Rider is summoned for a mount, and the mount is usually the point. In Fate/stay night the slot belongs to a tall purple-haired woman in glasses whose noble phantasm is Bellerophon, a winged horse, and whose fallback is a stare that turns people to stone. Fate/Zero fills the same slot with Iskandar, who drives a chariot pulled by divine bulls and treats conquest as a hobby.
Class abilities follow from the theme. Riders get magic resistance on the low side and riding on the high side, which in practice means they can pilot almost anything, up to and including vehicles nobody in the original legend had access to. It is the class most likely to produce a scene that is funny and enormous at the same time.
The pattern holds across the franchise. Whoever fills Rider tends to have the largest personality and the shortest patience for the war's rules, and routes that give the class room usually spend it on a set piece rather than a duel. Nasu keeps the seven slots stable from work to work and swaps the legends inside them.
Spelling RIDER
RIDER is five letters, an English word, and the shortest of the Fate class names in the game. Japanese writes it ライダー, Raidaa, and here the R really is an R, unlike LANCER. The one distraction is Kamen Rider, an entirely unrelated franchise built on the identical five letters. One D, and the E sits before the R.