MMM - Alabaster Adolescent Accompanies Akihabara Appointment, Annihilates Adversaries (Akihabara Explosion)

First off in Galatea’s skill set is Pygmalion’s Love EX. Got to love it when your affection for a figurine of your waifu is rated EX...Humanity never changes, huh?

This skill is your usual dual-card, 3-turn buff, boosting both Galatea’s Arts and Buster cards by 30% for 3 turns. However, this thing comes with bonus goodies, giving Galatea a 100% Buff Removal Resist buff for 1 time, 3 turns, and also a flat 20% gauge charge. All these numbers assuming skill level 10 by the way.

Time-based long duration Buff Removal Resist is something we lack on an individual level, as I find it can be situationally really strong in keeping buff setups like Casturia Invulns stacked up on your party. While this only applies to Galatea herself, keeping the buffs active on your damage dealer is nice insurance, especially when it’s tied to her primary damage steroid.

And as always, gauge charge is always good. Even if it’s 20% on a relatively long 8-turn base cooldown, it allows more flexible turn-1 setups for challenge quests, which is always useful.

Damage steroid+NP gauge charger is, as always, a tried and true superb combo, and this skill follows that trend.

Next on the lineup is Sculpted Maiden A. This is a purely defensive Guts skill, granting Galatea a 1-time, 3-turn Guts that stacks with other Guts effects, and a strong 2-time, 3-turn defensive buff on top.

Stackable Guts is actually not too bad a defensive option to have, as it opens up solo possibilities running a Guts CE, on top of not wasting other Servants’ kits if you choose to run her alongside Paracelsus or...uh, Scheherazade I guess. But the reality is we want Galatea to deal damage, and Berserkers are so squishy that defense buffs, even strong ones that go to 50% aren’t that…

Wait.

100% Defense Up?! Well pickle my onions, that changes things. As a reminder to you all, in case you don’t have a completely firm grasp on FGO’s mechanics. Defense Up buffs aren’t modifications to invisible “defense” stats that Servants and enemies have, but purely a direct multiplicative modifier to the base damage of the attack. A 1000 damage hit on a 50% Defense Up Servant deals half, 500 damage. And 100% Defense Up means all damage you take is reduced to 0...unless the attacker has an Attack Up buff, Defense Pierce, or said Servant also has Defense down applied on them.

The reason why this is somewhat significant is that until Casturia, the only means of surviving an Invincible Pierce NP was Guts buffs, 100% (or near to that) Defense Up, or stopping it from ever arriving to begin with. While obviously we live in a post-Casturia world where she’s just by far the best option to deal with such issues, it doesn’t make 100% Defense Up bad.

In fact, in the present game state, Sure Hit / Invincible Pierce feels more common on enemies passively than Attack Up. In that sense, Galatea’s Guts skill is essentially a 2-hit Invincible buff with less common outs and a Guts buff in the backline in case it does get hit past.

Only real bummer is that the Guts is 3 turns instead of 5, but this remains an extremely good defensive option, and one that sits on a respectable 8 turn base cooldown (probably due to said 3-turn Guts).

Last in Galatea’s skill lineup is Aphrodite’s Boon EX. Hey, we’ve actually seen this lady for once out of the Goddess namedrops. But then again, Greek Myth tells us that Aphrodite taking interest in you is a really shitty hand, so we’ll see how this skill plays out.

This skill is actually pretty straightforward, applying two buffs to Galatea. One is a HP regen buff, but for the entire team, restoring 2k HP each turn at max skill level for 3 turns. It’s like a free compressed Garden of Avalon healing, assuming you’re not a filthy whale with a NP2+ Merlin. With Galatea’s natural affinity toward stall playstyle with her Arts focus, strong defensive tool and her NP (which we’ll get onto soon), this frankly isn’t too bad a perk. One of the notable drawbacks of Casturia is lack of sustain, and this skill does a good job of covering her weakness, while also being tied to a Servant you want to use with Casturia in CQ scenarios anyway.

Wait...is this good game design? From DW? Colour me shocked. I wonder where this was when they decided on making Miyu or Consort Yu’s kit.

The second effect on this skill, however, is arguably more interesting. Galatea applies a new buff, at least in player hands, Debuff Removal per turn. As it sounds, for 3 turns she removes all debuffs on both herself and her allies at the end of the player turn for 3 turns. In especially debuff-heavy fights this can be pretty crazy, and trivialize some CQ gimmicks outright (I’m reminded of Touta’s card-lock debuffs CQ, though we’ll likely never see that again), but outside of that it’s like a more thorough team debuff removal.

That said, it does have two downsides - it can be blocked by Buff Denial, which just runs contrary to the value of Debuff Removal itself, and you can’t get the benefits until the end of the player turn. So if, say, Galatea gets NP Sealed, you can’t pop it then NP on the same turn. But equally, it has benefits regular Debuff Removal can’t do, like popping Terror or Confusion debuffs immediately after they apply (assuming the proc for them goes first...it’d be pretty sad if they didn’t).

Unfortunately with all these unique benefits, this skill has a hefty 9 turn base cooldown, but it’s somewhat fair considering the unique power of it.