Richard I

Appearances

Parameters

Skills

• Magic Resistance (B): Saber-class resistance to magecraft, enough to cut through ordinary spells while charging.
• Riding (A): A king who lived in the saddle from Aquitaine to Outremer. Horses, and in Snowfield even a guitar as a wandering prop, sit easily in his legend.
• Lionheart (A): Courage as a name. The epithet that made a crusader king into a European brand of fearless charge.
• Master of All Trades (A): A dabbler-king: languages, song, siege, and sword. He treats any tool as worthy if it can be named a path to victory.
• Superhuman Speed (A): Battlefield tempo as a personal skill. Combined with Agility EX (ranging B through A++), he crosses a stage before the opera house has finished gasping.

Noble Phantasms

• Excalibur (Ever-Distant Sword of Victory) · Anti-Army (D~A+): Not Artoria's consecrated sword. Richard names whatever he holds Excalibur—the ever-distant ideal of victory. Rank swells with how completely he believes the Arthurian dream in that instant.
• Rounds of Lionheart · Anti-Army (A): His own Round Table: comrades of the crusade and the road summoned as a lionhearted host, a wandering king's knights rather than Camelot's official roster.

Personality

An Arthurian fanatic in a Saber container, Lawful Neutral, delighted to be alive in a Grail War. He is chivalrous, loud, and willing to treat a guitar in Snowfield as seriously as a sword in Acre. He names any weapon Excalibur because victory is a title he confers, not a relic he inherited.

Story in Fate

True Saber of Snowfield is summoned at an opera house in place of Artoria Pendragon, contracting to Ayaka Sajyou. Richard I is a Lionheart who never stopped wanting to be a knight of the Round Table: he allies with Enkidu, wanders the American city with a guitar, and turns whatever blade he grabs into 'Excalibur.' The ever-distant sword of victory is faith as a beam, not the holy sword of Britain. Rounds of Lionheart calls his comrades. He is a crusader king rewritten as the fan in the front row of Arthur's legend.

Relationships

• Ayaka Sajyou — Master; summoned with him at the opera instead of Artoria.
• Enkidu — Ally in Snowfield, a friendship across False and True sides of the war.
• Artoria Pendragon — The king he idolizes; he occupies the Saber seat she did not take this time.
• Saladin — Historical adversary of the Third Crusade, the worthy rival his legend cannot drop.

Trivia

• He will call a stick Excalibur if the scene demands a sword of victory.
• The Snowfield guitar is a wandering-king gag with a published stage presence.
• Agility is listed EX, with a working range from B to A++.
• Yūki Ono voices him in Japanese; Ben Balmaceda in English contexts.