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Fate/Grand Order's Merlin Overshadows Namie Amuro's Retirement on Twitter

Singer Namie Amuro announced on Wednesday that she will retire on September 16, 2018. The sudden news that such a prominent figure in the realm of otaku music is retiring should have created waves on Twitter. Yet, someone named "Merlin" mysteriously overshadowed her by a large margin to lead on Twitter's trending topics list on Wednesday. The phenomenon perplexed film and music journalist Koremasa Uno, who posted his reaction on Twitter.

In the Tweet, Uno said, "Who's this Merlin who's winning against Amuro by a mile with this timing?... (There are many things in the world I don't know)." According to Uno's post, two variations of "Merlin" had a total of 252,124 Tweets when he checked the trending list. In comparison, "Namie Amuro" only had 2,437 Tweets at the time.

The "Merlin" Uno was ignorant of was apparently the Fate/Grand Order game's character known as the strongest Servant. Just a few hours earlier, the official Twitter account of the smartphone game had revealed a campaign to celebrate surpassing 10 million downloads in Japan as of this week. As part of the campaign, players have chances to summon the five-star SSR character Merlin until October 4.

Due to the limited nature of the campaign, Merlin should still be a difficult character to obtain in the game. However, voice actor Yūichi Nakamura, who voices the Archer-class Servant David in the game, pulled off a rather impressive feat very quickly.

In Nakamura's first Tweet above he says the time for him to obtain Merlin has come. Less than 25 minutes later, he revealed that he had already managed to get five Merlins. It seems, some voice actors just have all the luck.

Aniplex released the Fate/Grand Order smartphone game in Japan in summer 2015. The game's English version reached 1 million downloads earlier this month. The game received an English release in the United States and Canada on June 25.

[Via Yaraon!, Nijimen]