History VideoGame / ValdisStoryAbyssalCity

* UselessUsefulSpell: Averted for the most part: status effects can be inflicted on basically any enemy, even bosses, but in order to be able to do so, you need a build that increases your chance to do so where it's plausible or use specific magic weapons that can do so, as described above.

** Darkness causes Corruptin, which prevents HP and MP recovery and reduces Armor and Resist by 30.

* ElementalPowers: Each character has access to 2 unique elements with their own set of spells, and by defeating bosses, gains [[PlayingWithFire Fire]], [[AnIcePerson Ice]], [[ShockAndAwe Lightning]] and [[PowerOfTheVoid Void]]-elemental spellsets, each of which has a secondary function that's required to access new locations: Fire's Dragon Fist breaks down stone walls, Ice's Ice Tower creates [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin ice pillars]] to stand on, Lightning's Bolt Jump functions as a DoubleJump and Void's Black Hole creates a slow-moving sphere of energy that allows you to warp to its location, bypassing traps and crossing large horizontal distances.

* EvolvingAttack: The assists, Focus Finishers and spells can all become more powerful in a variety of ways: assists eventually level up and do more damage and hits, heal more and have lower cooldown times when you keep using them, Focus Finishers either become more powerful with your character level (for your default one) or when you reach sufficiently high base stats and then talk to the crew member that teaches it to you and finally, spells become more powerful when you trade rare items for an upgrade to a specific element, but there's a limited number of said items and you can max out 2 elements out of the 6 possible at most.

* SuperMode: Focus Mode, which heals you when activated and gives you various benefits usually determined by skills at the end of the skill trees mentioned above. When in Focus, you have access to a [[LimitBreak Focus]] [[FinishingMove Finisher]], most of which do large amounts of damage to enemies but some of them can have more estoteric effects.

* PuzzleBoss: Most of them: a large number of them have a secondary blue bar under their lifebar, which can show anything from the status of their shield that you need to destroy to be able to damage them further to their current power reserves, which leaves them weakened once they deplete it via attacking you.

* StanceSystem: Wyatt's unarmed fighting style works somewhat like this. Depending on what heavy attack you use the last, his light attack chain changes: it can either be all punches, all kicks, a mixture of both or end in a flip kick followed by a dive kick. The reverse also applies to his heavy attacks, although to a lesser degree: if used alone or after just 1 light attack, it results in a single backflip kick, but after at least 2 light attacks, he performs the full heavy combo ending in RapidFireFisticuffs.

** You chose not to spare [[spoiler: Gernot's]] life after fighting him in the sewers? The DualBoss fight described above won't happen, meaning you can't get an unique item needed to craft a set of armor afterwards.

* GuideDangIt: Due to the multitude of complicated systems being at play at any given time, unique terminology used and an overall lack of indepth guides to refer to, figuring out the best stat distribution, skill tree paths and weapon upgrade paths tends to be complicated, to say at very least, especially since the only choices you can revert to any degree are your stat and skill point distributions.
** And good luck finding all of the crew the first time through.

** A less obvious example of this are the weapon upgrades: there's only so much Tamahagane available in the game, which is required for the best weapon upgrades, meaning at least one of them will be stuck at the second highest tier.

* OneStatToRuleThemAll: Due to the large number of potential builds and playstyles, any one main stat can function as this to a degree, although different characters can't make quite as much use out of some of them: while Wyatt performs well regardless of which main stat you focus on, Reina is better off with focusing towards Agi.

* ScoreScreen: Each boss battle gives you one, ranking you based on combo rank, damage/hits taken and time. The higher the rank, the larger the bonus you get for a stat and the more experience you gain. As stated above, [[RankInflation S-ranking]] {{Bonus Boss}}es is one of the few ways to get additional skill points.

* ColorCodedForYourConvenience: It's rather handy.

* GuideDangIt: Due to the multitude of complicated systems being at play at any given time, unique terminology used and an overall lack of indepth guides to refer to, figuring out the best stat distribution, skill tree paths and weapon upgrade paths tends to be complicated, to say at very least, especially since the only choices you can revert to any degree are your stat and skill point distributions.

* BonusBoss: There's a number of them, but they work somewhat differently than usual: 2 of them are always fought at some point of the game, but fighting them early prevents everyone in a late-game location from getting killed by the boss and saves you another boss fight later in the game, respectively: both of them also give you items that're required to craft 2 of the weapons. Another boss fight involves a DualBoss and depending on which of the 2 you take down first, the other one might power up and get a second form, but not fighting the upgraded boss deprives you of an unique item that's needed to craft a set of armor.

* GuideDangIt: Due to the multitude of complicated systems being at play at any given time and unique terminology used and an overall lack of indepth guides, figuring out the best stat distribution, skill tree paths and weapon upgrade paths tends to be complicated, to say at very least. There's also a severe lack of indepth guides for the various mechanics, so there isn't much to refer to to begin with.

* LostForever: Any items and crew members you don't pick up in the Mana Crystal Mine [[spoiler: before it collapses after you defeat the boss]]. Furthermore, if you don't defeat some bosses before you progress the story to a certain point, they might attack a friendly town and kill everyone in it, costing you all the items and services that would've been available in it. Before the game was updated, instead of the trigger for the above being story progress, [[NintendoHard it was a set number of hours as determined by the ingame timer.]] Finally, if you don't beat the {{BonusBoss}}es with an S rank, you're permanently out of a skill point.

* AbsurdlyLowLevelCap: The maximum level is 20, which doesn't take much effort to reach if you try to find all crew members, get enough materials to upgrade all weapons and armor and find all hidden items.

* EvolvingAttack: The assists, Focus Finishers and spells can all become more powerful in a variety of ways: assists eventually level up and do more damage and hits, heal more and have lower cooldown times when you keep using them, Focus Finishers either become more powerful with your character level (for your default one) or when you reach sufficiently high stats and then talk to the crew member that teaches it to you and finally, spells become more powerful when you trade rare items for an upgrade to a specific element, but there's a limited number of said items and you can max out 2 elements out of the 6 possible at most.
* GuideDangIt: Due to the multitude of complicated systems being at play at any given time and unique terminology used and an overall lack of indepth guides, figuring out the best stat distribution, skill tree paths and weapon upgrade paths tends to be complicated, to say at very least.

* HarderThanHard: In addition to the God Slayer difficulty, there's also an unlockable Goibniu Mode that forces you to play through the entire game on a single sitting with no saves available.
* LagCancel: One of the main mechanics: Secret Scrolls give you up to 3 natural Skill Cancels, and you can get 2 more with specific pieces of equipment. They allow you to cancel your attacks at any point, perform an invincible dash that goes through enemies and if used in midair, quickly stomp the ground to activate switches.

* KarmaMeter: There's a bar that shows whether your current alignment is demonic, neutral or angelic which is determined by your currently equiped weapons, spells and assists and skilltree choices: interestingly enough, this has no actual story function and only serves to give you different bonuses depending on which side you focus more on.
* OneStatToRuleThemAll: Due to the large number of potential builds and playstyles, any one main stat can function as this to a degree.

* SuperMode: Focus Mode, which heals you when activated and gives you various benefits usually determined by skills at the end of the skill trees mentioned above. When in Focus, you have access to a [[LimitBreak Focus]][[FinishingMove Finisher]], most of which do large amounts of damage to enemies but some of them can have more estoteric effects.