Joseph Mother

Absolutely not

For 4* to remain good past getting 5* servants they have to offer something unique and all Mecha Eli offers is a spunky robot that does damage. A need that is fulfilled once you get a bigger Alter Ego like Bazett or Tiamat let alone an actual Berserker who covers everything unlike AE or Pretender.

She would inevitably be seen as rather mediocre even after Buster's resurgence. Her buffs to Final Eli-chan were strong, but the other buffs plus never receiving an NP damage buff really pushed her down. It is the fate of lower rarities to become more irrelevant once you have 5* contemporaries...

She was still an okay choice past that for a little, but once Skadi hit that was it for anyone who already had Melt. Alter Ego's had an interesting history as by and large the class is still not impressive, but it has had its glory days and one could say it started with the little mecha dragon girl.

Combined with this she had decent access to crit stars through Innocent Kaiju and Merlin, an NP charge (Albeit a pretty weak one), and could increase her own NP damage. She had a decent supply of buffs and the Merlin support made it so she could dish out a lot very quickly.

This is where Mecha Eli was really valuable as she was the sole Alter Ego already seeing use because of the rarity of actual good ST assassins and casters and now she just shits on the main boss of Salem. By getting her you also got NP5 if you kept up on the event so damage wise she was strong.

The class was bad and there was never a meaningful reason to justify using anyone in it over a servant in the main classes who could do the job as easily, at least not until Salem where Foreigner got introduced and the second Extra triangle began to form.

And Okita Alter who by all accounts was fine, but suffered from being an AOE servant so justifying using her typing was difficult at times if there was a knight mixed in to the enemy group. Melt didn't have proper support so she got written off quickly and Kiara did negative damage.

This was the year of the Alter Ego class' debut and we got hella Alter Egos between the Sakurafaces, Kiara, Okita Alter, and Mecha Eli. This did end up being a class that sucked for a bit though. By the end of the year our best Alter Ego characters were the 4* servants.

My last character of 2017 I wanted to talk about, Mecha Eli. I think I made an implication with talking about Liz where none of the early Liz halloween variants were good and if so, I was wrong because Mecha Eli was insanely valuable for quite a while.

Got buffed to allow her to turn all of her cards into buster cards. You just take her now and whack em with the stick. Koyanskaya's made it so easy to be belligerent with her.

I do feel like Saber's someone I've come to like having around. I initially got her in FGO trying to get Merlin on one of his rerun banners and got so fucking frustrated. Now though? I can say I've used her more than a bit and she's really fuckin good especially after her stupid ass buster skill...

Saber's probably the earliest brush I had with the concept of dysphoria and I had absolutely no understanding of this shit in my teens so it flew over my fucking head. So I completely missed out on that whereas now I have a better appreciation for this concept as a whole.

So the line about her body being muscular is meant to be absurd to a degree because no one thinks she looks like a warrior when outside of her armor. She's a grown woman in an unaging body who eternally looks like young teenager, she's not going to look that way to anyone and that's the point.

Where she acknowledges perfectly fine that she's a woman, but does not acknowledge the parts of her that are womanly. Rin mentions how she thinks she's gorgeous, but Saber thinks Rin is commenting on her perceiving that because of her class' radiance, not because she herself could ever be pretty.

Finally the thing with the muscular body was me also not remembering some of the times Saber brought up her gender and how people perceived her as beautiful. Tbf to this one on me, this is a long fucking story and it's easy to forget some details. Saber is meant to have dysphoria of a sort...

So Fate as a route will always have that sting on it, but it's something I can accept. I will also say, Saber with ponytail? If this was her look in FSN instead of the braid/bun thing she has I would've jumped to liking her a lot sooner. I get wanting the more distinct look though.

Something I empathize way more with now than I did at the time. I think as time went on too I really did learn to like her and Shiro as a sort of master/student relationship where both supported and uplifted the other, though because of that I think I also can never see them romantically together.

A lot of Saber's story in Fate and UBW is opening up to Shiro and Rin and through them she gets to actually experience her humanity instead of the cold facade she was forced to adopt as a king. Her story becoming one of truly understanding who she is and accepting what happened as king is...

It sets her apart super well and paints her as a bit more of a warrior. I think the King stuff can be silly but with the justification of magic and other helping her hide it it makes a bit more sense. Second, I have come to understand the core of characters arcs a lot more than I used to.

One, I took it for granted for a long time but Kawasumi's voice for her is very deep. It's something about Saber I didn't appreciate for a while, but it becomes so much more obvious when I think about and compare her huskier tone with the girls or more traditionally feminine servants.

At the time seemed insane to me how much they'd try to sell her as a king. Finally, I fuckin really thought her problem made no sense to me and was just a bunch of bitching and moaning about not being able to change the past. Now my perspective on a lot of these things has changed a lot.

Alright let's talk about this lady. I mentioned before how I played FSN and ended up disliking a lot of characters when I was younger. You better believe Saber was one of them. So the game makes her out to be this hardened warrior, but she's a waifish girl. She looks insanely girly too which...

The fucking CE from Battle in New York 2018?
The recent CE from Chaldea-U Summer?
I had to put her away eventually cause she just never got to the point I wanted her to be at to handle the game's harder shit, but I always want to see more of her. I still do tbh.

It sucks because I think she's one of the more interesting Greek figures you could do a lot with in the game, but she's sort of left to the side to just be a foe to Achilles and a recurring joke about Amazon. She hasn't even gotten a summer outfit yet which is crazy cause she's fine as hell.

For anyone who's known me long enough, they'd also know this was my My Room servant for a long time. I genuinely loved this character's design so much and thought she was awesome and kept getting disappointed that it felt like they not only wanted to do nothing with her, but never buffed her.

Her NP also wasn't that great, single target damage is good but you generally want something to supplement the damage beyond just the damage modifier and she reduces the opponent's attack and not by much at 100%. She could've had an interesting niche if she did more attack reduction, but alas.

Golden Rule that only gives NP on turn end? You'd rather this be an immediate NP charge. Charisma? Bad. Bellow of Ares actually isn't too bad, but the pool of servants that fit the mold even today is quite small. At the time it would've been exactly 6 servants plus Megalos as a boss fight.