Manga / EDENS ZERO

Now, your adventure has begun. Let your own feet carry you forward.

"The boy has begun his journey. What will he bring upon our universe? Will he become a hero of legend? Or will he wreak insurmountable havoc as a demon king?"

— Mother

Shiki Granbell has spent his days Raised by Robots in an abandoned theme park on a forgotten island, dreaming of new places to explore and friends to make. His life takes a sharp turn when the park receives its first visitors in 100 years: the wannabe web celebrity Rebecca Bluegarden and her talking blue cat-bot, Happy. When an unspeakable tragedy leads the other robots to chase Shiki out of their home, the two travelers decide to take Shiki to see the outside world on their boat—which suddenly rises from the water and blasts off into space!

So begins the tale of a boy whose name will one day echo across the universe. But the surprises don't stop there, as Shiki is quickly thrust into command of the Edens Zero, an interstellar warship left behind as inheritance by his adoptive grandfather, the mechanical Demon King Ziggy, who once used it in his search for Mother, the fabled Goddess of the Cosmos. What follows is a galactic adventure filled with cybernetic dragons, space pirates, existentialist androids, temporal anomalies, magical cyborg ninjas, and much more as Shiki vows to fulfill his late grandpa's dream—and to make as many new friends as he can along the way, whether they like it or not!

EDENS ZERO is the third major manga series by Hiro Mashima, coming on the heels of the long-running Fairy Tail's conclusion in July 2017. Described by Mashima as "Space Fantasy" rather than straight-up Science Fiction, the series is a classic High Fantasy story with a more cosmic edge that continues Mashima's tradition of reimagining select characters and elements from his previous works, namely Fairy Tail and Rave Master. But while it continues Mashima's traditional themes of True Companions and The Power of Friendship, it's a markedly Darker and Edgier tale than its immediate predecessor, featuring viler antagonists and a greater emphasis on loss, prejudice, and human cruelty.

The manga was launched in Japan's Weekly Shonen Magazine on June 27, 2018. Owing to Mashima's shift from analog to digital drawing, the manga is notable for being the first to ever be translated and published worldwide at the same time as its Japanese release, done in a grand total of six other languages.^note English, French, Portuguese, Chinese, Korean, and Thai Mashima has also featured the manga in a short-term Crossover series with Rave Master and Fairy Tail titled Mashima HERO'S, which ran simultaneously with EDENS ZERO and Fairy Tail: 100 Years Quest from October 16 to December 25, 2019.

An Animated Adaptation of the manga by J.C. Staff began in April 2021, with Netflix acquiring rights to stream the series internationally in August the same year. A second season began airing in April 2023, despite the death of Season 1 director Yūshi Suzuki; unlike the first season, global rights to Season 2 are handled by the French distribution company Mediatoon, which handed it off to Crunchyroll and other companies around the world to allow for weekly simulcasting.

Lastly it also has not one, but two Action RPG video game adaptations by Konami in development: a 3D game for consoles, and a top-down game for mobile devices titled EDENS ZERO Pocket Galaxy.

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This series provides examples of:

• Accidental Time Travel:
  • Subverted in the Norma arc. When Shiki, Rebecca, and Happy travel to Norma, they find themselves fifty years in the past, and have no idea how they got there or how to return. When they manage to leave the planet, they learn that 50 years of the planet's time was eaten by a Chronophage, meaning that the Norma of 50 years ago is the new present Norma, so no time travel actually took place.
  • Played straight in the Lendard arc, which reveals this is how Shiki became Ziggy. His decision to try and stop the 20,000 Anti Matter bombs exploding on Nero 66 by compressing them with his gravity ended up causing an accidental reaction with the bombs and Rebecca's own time-leaping Ether Gear, triggering a spacetime distortion that sent them both 20,000 years into the future. Rebecca didn't survive, while Shiki barely survived at all and had his mind transferred to a robot body to become Ziggy. On the other hand, years of the future scientists studying Rebecca's preserved corpse and Ether eventually allowed them to discover the secrets of actual Time Travel.
• Adventure Guild: The Shooting Starlight guild is as an "adventurer's guild", but is more mundanely portrayed as a passport agency and center of information that grants commercial access to other planets and cosmoses. Also, despite kicking off the central plot by introducing Shiki to Mother (or in the anime's case, refamiliarizing him with her), the guild falls to the wayside once the Edens Zero is introduced, since exploring the cosmos the old-fashioned way in a big, fancy spaceship gives the heroes a more romanticized sense of adventure that they wouldn't get from simply booking a flight.
• All Deaths Final: Discussed with regards to Universe Zero, a Merged Reality of all other universes, which Rachel says makes it impossible to perform any time leaps like she could in other worlds, meaning anyone who dies here is truly and unambiguously Killed Off for Real. However, this gets subverted when Rebecca discovers a Magic Prerequisite for using her Time Rewind Mechanic (that being taking off her clothes), though with the Necessary Drawback of breaking her body apart even faster with just one use than before.
• All for Nothing: Universe Zero's Müller aims to harness the power of Time Travel with Xenolith's gravity powers, Rebecca's time powers, and the Empire's Antimatter bombs, coincidentally just like the freak accident that led to Ziggy's creation. As Rebecca notes to herself, however, time is supposed to remain constant in Universe Zero, meaning Müller would achieve nothing but blow himself up.
• The Alliance: During the final arcs, the Interstellar Union Army forms one with the Edens Zero crew against the Edens One, as they know that even with their own military might, they stand little chance against Void and his forces.
• Alone Among the Couples: Noah becomes visibly uncomfortable when he's surrounded by several happy couples in Chapter 247. While he claims he's not bothered by it, though Eraser and Holy can see right through him and happily tease him about it.
• Alternate Universe:
  • Noah reveals in the Belial Gore arc that Rebecca's Cat Leaper doesn't just let her jump back in time, but also jump into different timelines. These timelines are categorized as "worlds" and "universes"; the former is used to refer to the timelines visited by Rebbeca each time she uses Cat Leaper, consciously or otherwise, and typically have small differences. Universes, meanwhile, refer to timelines with drastically different events in the timeline, such as whether or not Shiki is killed by Drakken Joe. "Universe 1", i.e. the first few arcs and the first half of Belial Gore, is the universe where Shiki is killed, whereas "Universe 2" has Shiki defeat Drakken Joe. The Lendard arc reveals the existence of "Universe Zero", where time converges and all other universes stem from.
  • On the subject of Universe Zero, Chapter 222 shows that unlike Universes 1 and 2 where the robots of Planet Granbell suffered from a lack of Ether energy to sustain themselves, Ziggy created a device that supplied them with Ether, meaning there's no reason for them to ever resort to playing the role of villains to force Shiki to leave. Furthermore, Ziggy left the Edens Zero in the Castellan's care and asked his fellow robots to give it to Shiki should he ever decide to leave the planet.
• Always with You: Ziggy assures Shiki of this after being killed by him in the Lendard arc, since he is Shiki's Alternate Self and will continue to live on in a form different than what he became in the Stable Time Loop of other Universes.
• Ambiguous Situation: The circumstances behind Labilia's confinement in the Belial Gore arc. When Rebecca first encounters her in the arc, she's bruised and beaten all to hell. Then, after going back in time and finds that Labilia has actually been rescued and replaced by Amira, Rebecca notices that Labilia/Amira doesn't have a hair on her head harmed. With the later reveal that Rebecca actually traveled to an Alternate Universe's past instead of her own universe's, it raises the possibility that Labilia was genuinely tortured in one universe and rescued in the other, but doesn't clarify it.
• Ambiguous Start of Darkness:
  • The only details of Drakken Joe's past known are that he Used to Be a Sweet Kid who wanted to extend his own short life to make more friends, but has since come to value money and immortality far more than friendship. What exactly triggered this transformation is never clarified.
  • It's not made clear what drove Joker Helix to become one of the Big Bad's minions to begin with. Since she was revealed as a Benevolent A.I. made by the good Professor Weisz, the Professor speculates that either she grew to empathize with Void's vision of a world without humans, or that she was found by Void first and had her behavior altered in some way.
• Androids Are People, Too: One of the central themes of the series is that every being has a heart, whether they're human, machine, or some other artificial entity, showing that they are capable of feeling the same emotions and forging friendships as anyone else. Unfortunately, this is not a universally held sentiment, with Shiki and his crew being among the few people to wholeheartedly think otherwise.
• Anti-Magic: The Sun Jewel arc introduces the concept of Ether coating, which is used on certain machines to give them resistance to all Ether-based attacks, including Ether Gear.
• Antimatter: The Nero Empire makes use of 20,000 anti-matter bombs, any one of which could reduce a single planet to ash. Prince Shura tries using all of them just to kill and usurp his father. The anti-matter also reacts adversely to Shiki's gravity Ether and Rebecca's time Ether, distorting spacetime to such an extreme that the explosion blasts them both 20,000 years into the future.
• Anywhere but Their Lips: Rebecca kisses Shiki on the cheek in Chapter 176 as a "reward" for always helping her out.
• Apocalypse How:
  • Planet Granbell, which is inhabited mostly by robots, suffers from a Class 3B apocalypse when the core functions of every bot on the planet completely shut down after an entire century of endless activity. If the bots didn't evacuate Shiki before this happened, he'd be the only living person left on the planet. It escalates to Class X when Ziggy destroys the whole planet with a gravity attack. However, the apocalypse is later averted in Universe 0 since Ziggy built a machine to produce ether for another 1000 years.
  • A 20,000-year Flash Forward shows the aftermath of a Class X apocalypse, with almost half of an unnamed planet ripped off and barely held together from the rest by sinewy strands of Ether. The android scientists searching the planet are only able to find two bodies, a man and a woman, with only the former barely alive. It's actually all that's left of Nero 66 in a Bad Future where Shiki attempted to stop the 20,000 Antimatter bombs from exploding, with Shiki/Ziggy himself—alive but suffering from radiation burns—as the Sole Survivor.
  • Any planet whose time is devoured by the Chronophage suffers a low-key, planetary-scale variation of Class Z, getting its present permanently overwritten with its past. While the planet may continue to thrive depending on how many years were stolen (ranging from decades to millennia), the original planet is considered to be "dead" for all intents and purposes, along with anyone unlucky or foolish enough to remain on-planet. Such is the case with Norma, which is already "dead" by the time Shiki and co. arrive; Guilst, which the crew get to bear witness to, and Lendard, which kills Elsie and Justice along with it.
  • Planet Hook, a place where old and unwanted robots are discarded, teeters on the edge between Classes 2 and 3 due to a shortage of Ether, with Hermit helping a team of scientists build a ray gun to provide emergency energy and avert the crisis. It escalates to Class X when the scientists repurpose the ray gun into a Doomsday Device to obliterate the planet. The apocalypse never happens in Universe 0 due to the absence of Muller and the rest of the human scientists and Hermit is able to finish work on helping the planet recover.
  • The Nero 66 arc ends with Nero 66 itself suffering a Class X explosion when Ziggy detonates 20,000 Antimatter bombs sent there by Poseidon Nero, which also takes innumerable planets in the sector with it.
• Arc Number: The number 20,000. It's first seen in Chapter 4 during a Flash Forward to 20,000 years in the future where two robots find the remains of a human man and woman. It's then seen again during the Nero 66 arc when it's revealed there are 20,000 Anti Matter bombs on Nero 66. Chapter 204 reveals that the two are directly related: in Universe 2, where Shiki and Rebecca stayed on Nero 66 in an attempt to stop the bombs, the energy from the blast resonated with their powers and sent them forward in time one year for each bomb. And comes up again in Chapter 256 with the start of a flashback set 20,000 years in the past where the Four Shining Stars appear to be living as humans on Earth.
• Armed Females, Unarmed Males: The main leads Shiki and Rebecca qualify. Shiki fights using his control over gravity while Rebecca uses her Happy Blasters in battle, although she eventually gains the power to fight with enhanced kicks when she gains the power of Super-Speed.
• Artificial Gravity: Every ship has some form of artificial gravity, as the characters have no problem walking around as if they were on the surface of a planet. In keeping with the story being a space fantasy rather true sci-fi, this is often taken for granted.
• Attack Its Weak Point:
  • Shiki, Homura, and Rebecca destroy one of the biggest Stones in Sun Jewel by attacking the weak spot Pino's analysis finds on its back.
  • The crew's fight against Deadend Crow involves finding and exposing his vulnerable core hidden inside his body. Blasting it with the ship's Wave-Motion Gun causes him to explode without a trace.
• Author Appeal: A work by Hiro Mashima means fanservice, but besides the obvious curvy women in tight/skimpy outfits and shirtless men, the recurring focus on bondage and feet make it apparent that Mashima has certain kinks.
• Awful Truth:
  • The details behind Valkyrie's disappearance and ultimate fate are recorded on a B-Cube she left for her friend Paul on Sun Jewel, but he hesitates to give it to Homura because he fears she won't be able to handle it. Homura goes into a Heroic BSoD when she watches it and learns Valkyrie left to find Homura's birth mother, Madame Kurenai, who betrayed Valkyrie to her death three years ago.
  • The truth behind the Four Shining Stars' birth and why their memories of traveling with Ziggy were erased. Pino is the only one Ziggy ever told about it, but she found it so distressing that she removed her own memories of it, and later goes into an Angst Coma when she gets these memories back. The reality is that the Four Shining Stars are all Replacement Goldfish for the dead humans Ziggy found with Shiki; their memories of their voyage never existed because they were built on the return trip, and everything they remember before the voyage is just Fake Memories he gave them because they wouldn't function otherwise.
• Back for the Finale: The Edens Zero crew's trip to Universe Zero for the final arcs allows many long-absent characters to return, including those who died.
• Back from the Dead:
  • Ziggy comes back ten years after breaking down from old age. Unfortunately for Shiki, it's no heartwarming reunion with his grandfather, as he immediately becomes the Big Bad. Once Pino's Overdrive EMP restores his original personality, he reveals the true Big Bad possessed his body to revive him.
  • Following Chapter 220, the Cosmic Retcon brings back not just every character who died over the course of the story, but also rewrites history to allow every Posthumous Character to survive as well, including Weisz's mother and Valkyrie.
• Bad Future:
  • In Chapter 69, Rebecca has a nightmare of what looks to be a possible future where she and Shiki are engaged in a Robot War. A followup in Chapter 149 shows Rebecca finds herself back there, this time with Master Noah and an adult Shiki confirming it is very real. From what's been shown, Happy and the rest of the Edens Zero crew are dead, and Rebecca lost her legs and can no longer use Cat Leaper to escape from it.
  • The Lendard arc reveals that the universe in the 20,000-year Flash Forward is one of these. At some point in the present era, Mother disappeared and all of humankind has gone extinct, leaving nothing but robots and androids. While this would mean a universe where robots no longer suffer any oppression, it also caused a shortage of Ether that guarantees the eventual extinction of all artificial life.
• Badass Crew:
  • The main characters establish themselves as this before their adventure officially begins. Shiki is a Gravity Master with superpowers from a bygone age; Rebecca is The Gunslinger with twin blasters and uncanny marksmanship, and later gains the powers of superhuman speed and time reversal; Happy, who is really an alien cat android, transforms into Rebecca's twin blasters; Weisz is a Technopath and Ace Pilot; and Homura is a Master Swordswoman.
  • Averted with the Adventure Guild Shooting Starlight. Apart from a few cliques here and there, it's really just a place of business where everyone is more or less indifferent to each other, with one random guy selling Shiki out when a crew of infamous Space Pirates comes looking for him.
• Badass in Distress:
  • Rebecca gets put in this position for the Guilst arc. Ambushed and kidnapped along with dozens of other B-Cubers to be sold to Illega, she quickly takes the lead in working out an escape plan. While she does briefly need Shiki to save her when she ends up running into Illega, she gets payback the next time they cross paths.
  • Homura very briefly gets caught and tied up by Garrot in the Sun Jewel arc after she and Shiki get hit by his paralyzing whip. It doesn't last long enough for Garrot to have his way torturing her before Shiki saves her.
  • In the Belial Gore arc, the entire crew falls under Drakken Joe's mercy when their infiltration goes horribly wrong, getting caught one by one and dragged into a dark underpass while their android friends are decommissioned. The end result: Weisz losing an arm as a "warning", Shiki getting shot dead when he continues to resist, and Rebecca and Homura being too broken to do anything about it. It isn't until one week later that Rebecca awakens her Cat Leaper and undoes their disastrous defeat.
• Bait-and-Switch: The second chapter/episode features Shiki about to join Rebecca's Adventure Guild, making the plot of the series appear to be a retread of Fairy Tail, with Shiki going on missions with all the new friends he makes there. Immediately upon entering the building, he finds that apart from the friendly receptionist and an Alpha Bitch bully, hardly anyone could care less about him and Rebecca, disillusioning Shiki from the guild altogether and reinforcing the different turn the series takes from its predecessor.
• Bathtub Bonding:
  • The story features multiple scenes of the crew and guests bathing together and getting a bit of Character Development at the Spa of Eden, the Edens Zero's bathhouse.
  • In Chapter 248, the crew gets in on this with Rachel (Rebecca's mother) and Feather on planet Miltz, with the bath coincidentally being the same Ziggy used to make the Spa of Eden.
• Beach Episode: Chapter 107 is a Breather Episode with the Edens Zero crew going to have fun at the beach of the planet Red Cave, allowing them to relax after all the crazy stuff they went through. They return there in Chapter 246, this time to meet with Holy, Eraser, and the Interstellar Union Army's directors to get debriefed on the final battle.
• Beat Them at Their Own Game: Jamilov, the Arc Villain of the Digitalis arc, is able to make his player avatar invincible by hacking the game. The heroes decide to use this very tactic against him.
• Beyond the Impossible: Nero's Empire Dice are shown to be unaffected by gravity due to being a Relic. Ziggy manages to crush them in his hand anyway by using "true" gravity. The reason: Relic or not, it's still matter, something that cannot resist true gravity.
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • When the crew is on Sun Jewel in the Reunion arc, where Homura (in the middle of a Heroic BSoD) finds herself surrounded by Stones, a resurrected Valkyrie leaps down from the heavens to destroy them all, marking their Big Damn Reunion.
  • During the fight with the final Arc Villain of the Reunion arc, the Oración Seis Interstellar come to the Edens Zero and Empire's aid in their fight against Müller, with Amira jumping to Rebecca's rescue and sending a distress signal to Shiki and Shura, and the rest wiping out the imperial fleet under Müller's control.
• Big Damn Reunion:
  • The Reunion arc is full of this, as it involves the crew getting back together after their Party Scattering in the previous arc. It's made more poignant by the fact that the crew went through a Cosmic Retcon and relived their entire lives without knowing each other until they went through a Memory Trigger that reminded them of the old world.
    • The biggest reunion of all in the arc is the one with Valkyrie, who was brought Back from the Dead by the Cosmic Retcon. The reunion hits twice as hard for Homura, who searched for her for three years before finding her to be Dead All Along in the previous world, and suffered for five years thinking she carelessly caused her death in Universe Zero. For Shiki, it marks the first time Valkyrie has seen him since he was a baby, so she's shocked to find him all grown up, while Shiki is just glad to greet her properly. As for the rest of the Shining Stars, it has Witch (who doesn't remember her death) being pleasantly surprised, Hermit bawling her eyes out, and Sister scolding her for dying.
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • The Foresta arc: The Edens Zero crew manage to stop the virus that's driving the planet's robots to enslave and kill humans, but by then there's been casualties on both the robot and human population, and it's left in the air if the humans will be able to trust the robots again.
  • The Nero 66 arc: The crew manage to defeat the Nero Empire and save all the robots in the cosmos from being destroyed, with some help from Oasis and the Interstellar Union Army. But there are many casualties from the fight, including Ijuna, whom Laguna was trying to save; Creed from the Interstellar Union Army, who was shot by his own teammate Jesse; and, most devastatingly, Witch, who sacrifices herself to prevent the Edens Zero from being destroyed. Rebecca also finds her power won't let her go back to undo any of it, forcing everyone to accept that their loved ones are gone. Also, Ziggy is still left on the loose and has become an even bigger threat after absorbing Nero's "Wormhole" Ether Gear.
• Blood from the Mouth: Müller does this after getting his body sliced in half by Shura in Universe Zero.
• Bond Villain Stupidity: Ziggy's decision to let Connor handle killing Shiki and the rest of the Edens Zero crew raises a few questions as to why he didn't simply do it himself when they first met him after he came Back from the Dead, especially with Wizard's assertion that they'll become an obstacle if allowed to live long enough. Doubly so when Ziggy reveals Shiki's very existence to be a threat to the universe, which makes his lack of urgency all the more confusing. It becomes muddied by the reveal that Shiki would eventually become Ziggy in the future, and killing him then and there would prevent Ziggy's birth, though due to the ripple effect across the Multiverse caused by his return to the past, Ziggy would still be able to exist.
• Boom, Headshot!:
  • Mostly Played for Laughs with Rebecca. She appropriately applies her gamer skills to almost exclusively land non-lethal headshots with her Ether-powered Happy Blasters.
  • Played straight by one of Drakken Joe's henchmen when he takes out the disgraced hacker Spider.
  • At the turn of the Belial Gore arc, this is how Shiki dies in World No.29 at Drakken Joe's hands.
  • In the Miltz arc, one of Joker Helix's copies gets shot straight through the front of her visor to the back of her head by Professor Weisz.
• Bowdlerise:
  • When Captain Connor is teaching Pino how to swear, he outright teaches her to say "Fuck you" in Japanese (Fakku yū). Kodansha's translation of the manga softens the version to have them just say "Screw you," while the anime adaptation keeps the word, but censors it with a comical buzzer sound.
  • During the scene where Rebecca gets her panties swiped by Paul in the Sun Jewel arc, Kodansha USA edited out the shot of Paul holding them in front of her.
• Break His Heart to Save Him: The Granbell robots, knowing that their days are numbered as their batteries are about to expire, stage an uprising and pretend to have never been friends with Shiki to convince him to leave their planet with Rebecca. They did it to spare him the fate of remaining alone on their dead planet, as they knew he would have stayed in Granbell to try to fix them otherwise.
• Bridal Carry:
  • Shiki sometimes carries Rebecca bridal style. One of the most notable instances is in Chapter 107, where he carries her flying so she can film the scenery of the planet Red Cave decorated with Ether lights.
  • In Chapter 102, Weisz carries Homura like a princess after the Big Bad starts destroying the ground they were standing on. From Homura's face, she finds it embarrassing.
• The Cameo: A few Fairy Tail characters show up in a bunch of shots on Blue Garden, including Natsu, Lucy, Shadow Gear, Max, and Warren. Mirajane and Lisanna later show up among the B-Cubers kidnapped by Rogue Out.
• Casting Gag: Miyuki Sawashiro once again provides voice to a mentor character that dies tragically for the sake of her pupil (with whom she maintains an almost mother-child relationship) in a work of Hiro Mashima.
• Casual Interplanetary Travel: And how. Rebecca casually travels from planet Blue Garden to Planet Granbell in a civilian spacecraft that she owns as an online streamer to film a "cool video."
• Chekhov's Gag: Mosco Versa-0 has a button on his navel labeled "DON'T PUSH", which he tries pushing on numerous occasions. Sister Ivry doesn't say what it would do if pressed, except that she gets incredibly pissed whenever he or anyone else makes the attempt. During the final arc when Sister and Mosco are incapacitated by Clown and an organic Happy is being chased by him while contemplating how useless he is, Mosco convinces him to finally push the button on his stomach and reveals it's a Split-Personality Switch Trigger that changes Mosco into Cosmo, a Super-Powered, Sexier Alter Ego who turns Sister into his submissive bondage slave that easily defeats Clown.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • Rebecca's B-Cube, specifically the one engraved with the name "Edens Zero" shown in the 20,000-year Flash Forward in Chapter 4. Not only did the engraving partially inspire the ship's name when it was built in the future, but the B-Cube itself is revealed to be the vessel for Etherion.
  • The "dragon/meteor" that Shiki, Ziggy, and Michael see while stargazing in the very first shot of the series. In Chapter 220, it's revealed to actually be the Edens Zero itself, hurtling back in time to Universe Zero.
• City of Adventure: Blue Garden is described as entire planet of adventure, due to housing the adventurers' guild Shooting Starlight.
• Cool Starship:
  • The Edens Zero itself is an extravagant black-and-gold dreadnought with a demonic-looking dragon's head at its prow. It also includes various luxuries such as a massive bathhouse with a cosmic skylight and superpower-inducing water, an Unlimited Wardrobe factory, a kitchen that automatically provides whatever food the crew wants, and a built-in fireworks launcher. Its Skull Fairy form is also impressive with a similar-looking dragon head.
  • Rebecca's ship, the Aqua Wing, is a multi-purpose craft that effectively functions as a seaboat, a plane, and a spaceship.
• Contrived Coincidence: Right after Shiki and Rebecca are told to seek out "Sister", an entity with the same name coincidentally starts kidnapping B-Cubers (one of whom is Rebecca), and Shiki discovers this plot when he gets lost in an enormous city and just so happens to stumble upon Labilia right in time to foil her own kidnapping.
• Cosmic Retcon: This is the result of the heroes using Etherion to travel back in time to Universe Zero at the start of the final arcs, creating a Merged Reality of all other universes in The Multiverse. This hit the Reset Button on nearly all events beforehand, with only those aboard the Edens Zero and Rachel retaining their memory of the old world, and creates several drastic changes in history such as Posthumous Characters like Valkyrie avoiding their original deaths, people who've never met before becoming close acquaintances, and irredeemable villains turning out for the better.
• Cracks in the Icy Façade: Hermit is introduced as an emotionally broken and cold Robot Girl who detests humans because of how horribly her kindness was taken advantage of by humans who pretended to view androids as people. She initially treats Shiki with the same contempt, but willingly helps him and his friends against the Arc Villain when they need it, which allows her to witness just how much they genuinely care about her and others who wouldn't be considered "alive", leading to her defrosting by the end of the arc.
• Crapsaccharine World:
  • Planet Newton is a world marked by succulent apples that float through the atmosphere where scientists tirelessly work to improve human-robot relations in the cosmos. Said scientists also turn out to be of the evil variety, and actually use the robots as Unwitting Pawns in a bid to destroy a neighboring planet filled with them.
  • Sun Jewel is a glitzy and glamorous metropolis planet and popular tourist spot where travelers go when they want to have a fun time...at least in the rich sector. The poor sector is where its citizens are forced to mine all of the metal used to keep the rich sector thriving, and that metal comes from ferocious mineral monsters that can kill the most skilled of warriors if unprepared. On top of that, the rich citizens don't bat an eye at the fact that their ruler publicly executes criminals on the spot with a Kill Sat that can keep track of each and every citizen, where they go, and what they say on the planet, and exerting the slightest degree of violence—including self-defense—would earn them a one-way ticket to the labor district, where they'd essentially be imprisoned for life.
• Cross Player: During the Digitalis arc, Weisz and Homura both take the opportunity to select avatars of the opposite gender, Weisz doing so for less honorable reasons. It later turns out Homura is a government spy disguised as her, passing the switched gender off as another one of her quirks.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Universe Zero's Müller falls on the receiving end in his battle with Shiki and Shura, who wipe the floor with him moments after it becomes clear that, even with Xenolith's planet-crushing gravity powers at his full disposal, he has no actual combat techniques to fight back with.
• Curb Stomp Cushion: For the first half of Ziggy and Nero's battle, Ziggy is put on the ropes thanks to Nero's Empire Dice making him an Invincible Villain with an incredibly powerful Ether Gear hidden up his sleeve. Nevertheless, Ziggy manages to score a couple of hits on Nero, ripping off one of his mustache tentacles and head fins, before finally getting his own head ripped off and going down. Then the second phase of the fight begins, catching Nero off guard and crushing his dice, at which point everything starts going Ziggy's way.
• Cyberspace: Digitalis is a virtual planet that acts as a server to the MMORPG Rogue Fantasia, where players upload their consciousness to interact with their surroundings. It's also inhabited by fully sentient NPCs who Grew Beyond Their Programming.
• Darker and Edgier: In terms of a Spiritual Successor to Fairy Tail, this series has more of a cynical and gritty tone with more grotesque violence, blatant prejudice against marginalized groups such as robots and androids, and utterly despicable Hate Sink villains who've caused widespread death and misery across numerous planets.
• Death Is Cheap: Zig-Zagged. Despite the abundance of robots and Ether, the series makes it clear that death is unavoidable. When Valkyrie breaks down beyond repair, Sister argues they could just use a previous backup of her mind to bring her back, but Witch argues back that they'd just be making a Replacement Goldfish designed to copy their dead friend. However, Rebecca's ability to time leap allows her to undo Shiki's death when he's killed by Drakken Joe, but she doesn't know exactly how to make it work, and it's stated to be a Dangerous Forbidden Technique.
• Debut Queue: Shiki, Rebecca, and Happy are all introduced in the first chapter. Then Weisz appears in Chapter 4, followed shortly behind by E.M. Pino in Chapter 6, both of whom stick around long enough to join them as the first crew members of the Edens Zero in Chapter 14 (though the former doesn't officially agree to stay until Chapter 28). From there, it becomes a Gotta Catch Them All scenario with the Four Shining Stars, with the first three found between Chapters 14 and 24, and one extra crew member, Homura, tagging along in Chapter 18.
• Defiant to the End: Lightning Law, one of the Big Bad's final minions, refuses to accept defeat against a human even after Laguna runs him through with a sword. He spends his final moments getting in a solid retaliating hit, mocking the Edens Zero crew's belief in equality between humans and machines, before Laguna finally cuts him to pieces.
• Destroy the Evidence: During the Nero 66 arc, Jesse deletes the Edens Zero crew's account of Creed's death to keep Justice, Creed's superior officer, from finding out that he was the one who killed him.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: During the Reunion arc, Müller, a lowly human scientist, catches the legendary and powerful hero Xenolith off guard and steals his power, building a perfect replica out of it that gets accepted into the Oración Seis Galáctica and tarnishes the real Xenolith's reputation.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • Rebecca wishes to be a famed B-Cuber on the net, but her style is very amateurish and she doesn't really bother with her presentation when making her videos, instead just filming what she feels is interesting and uploading it, something any regular schmo can do. While her rival, Labilia, is a complete Jerkass about her popularity, she at least bothers to put more effort and work into her videos, which catches more views.
    • After the Time Skip, though, this gets turned around. Thanks to coaching from Couchpo, who's still aboard, Rebecca has become a well-respected B-cuber while Labilia is eventually revealed to have gone over the hill and become a has-been.
  • After several successful battles against powerful and influential people, Shiki decides to take the fight to Drakken Joe—leader of the most powerful crime circle in the cosmos—when he's hot on their tail, expecting that they'll be able to pull through whatever obstacles come their way with determination. The whole crew gets beaten and captured. Our heroes get dragged into a dark tunnel surrounded by armed men who use non-lethal force when they talk out of line; the Elite Mooks who got curb-stomped at the start use their loss to go undercover and successfully capture the ship; Happy and Pino get sold to a random junk shop; Weisz gets picked to have an arm hacked off as a way to show that they mean business; and when Shiki declares they'll just get stronger and come back, he's just desperately trying to take advantage of Drakken's Thou Shall Not Kill policy, which Drakken reneges on by shooting him in the head at point blank. All of this completely saps the bravado out of our plucky heroes, reminding us that they're just inexperienced kids in way over their heads.
• Died Happily Ever After: Ziggy's voice reaches out to Shiki following his destruction in the Lendard arc, expressing contentment that he will live on through his grandson (i.e., his Alternate Self), and entrusting the fate of the universe to him.
• Doomed Hometown: By the end of the first chapter, Shiki's home planet of Granbell is already on the verge of having every robot on his island (i.e., the entire planet's population except for himself) cease to function after over a century since their activation, which happens at the end of the chapter. Tragically, Shiki himself doesn't realize this as the other robots had to keep it a secret, or else he'd spend his life in vain trying to fix them all. By the time Shiki comes to learn what actually happened, the entire planet gets obliterated by the now-evil Ziggy.
• Doppelgänger Gets Same Sentiment: Due to the nature of The Multiverse, characters with Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory like Rebecca tend to treat different versions of their friends in one Universe as the same as the ones they knew in another.
• Dramatic Drop: Müller's discovery in the Reunion arc that Rebecca has the same Time Ether as Saintfire Nox causes him to drop his coffee in shock, since she's one of the pieces he's looking for in his plan to achieve multiversal travel.
• Dramatic Irony: The first chapter ends with Shiki, Rebecca, and Happy convinced that the Granbell robots have been infected with a virus that turned them hostile against humans, not realizing the robots were just acting the part to save Shiki before they ran out of power. Tragically, Shiki gives them a blissfully ignorant farewell mere moments right after they shut down. This lasts all the way until Chapter 101 when the crew finally revisits Granbell to say goodbye before they ship off through Dragonfall.
• Dramatic Unmask:
  • During their showdown on Lendard, Shiki lands a powerful upper cut that cracks Ziggy's skull face, revealing that not only does he have a human face underneath, but he is actually Shiki's future self.
  • Joker undergoes one as part of her Heel–Face Turn, with her One-Way Visor becoming transparent to reveal her humanoid face underneath. While her face itself is nothing out of the ordinary, it marks Joker's change from a creepy, faceless menace to a friend.
  • Early in the final battle, Void gets his own helmet broken by Ziggy, showing his almost identical appearance to Shiki, who at this point is revealed to be Void's biological father.
• Dying as Yourself: After regaining his true personality thanks to Pino's Overdrive EMP, Ziggy urges Shiki to kill him before the Edens One reasserts control, successfully coaxing him after pretending to get taken over again.
• Dynamic Entry: In the Reunion arc, this is done to mark the grand return of Valkyrie in Universe Zero, where she descends upon the Stone horde threatening her student with a flurry of missiles and blade swipes.
• Ear Ache: Müller gets his ears punched by Shiki and Shura during their fight in the Reunion arc, which causes both of his ears to start smoking.
• The Earth-Prime Theory: Universe Zero is the convergence point of The Multiverse from which all others stem, so changes in this reality have consequences on a multiversal scale. It's the belief of the scientists from Universe 3173 that Universe Zero is the only one in which it is possible to prevent Mother's death/disappearance that is seemingly inevitable in other timelines, while it's the goal of the Big Bad to kill Mother here and assure this comes to pass.
• Energy Ring Attack: Illega's Ray Gun fires a concentric circle beam which turns people into stone.
• Engineered Heroics: Cure built up the reputation of the Oración Seis Interstellar and the Interstellar Union Army by ensuring the rise of villains who would threaten the cosmos that they would later defeat. He admits to Holy that he helped Drakken Joe and Nero's rise to power in addition to being the true power source and main body of her nemesis Deadend Crow. He also demonized Elsie and Nox to make them scarier to the public. Though he admits that he's not responsible for all of the villains — Ziggy and Acnoella are independent villains.
• Everybody's Dead, Dave: Ziggy finds himself the only remaining member of the Edens Zero crew of his Universe, with the rest either killed in the explosion of Nero 66 or dead due to the 20,000 year Time Skip caused by the detonation of the Antimatter bombs combined with his and Rebecca's Ether Gear.
• Evil Versus Oblivion: According to Ziggy, Shiki is an Apocalypse Maiden who poses a threat for the universe as a whole, and therefore must be destroyed. Ziggy himself, however, is a Galactic Conqueror with designs to dominate all organic life through a Robot War, which removes all nobility from his fight to save the universe.
• The Evils of Free Will: As the Big Bad, Ziggy plans to brainwash machines into asserting dominance over humankind, regardless of how they ordinarily feel towards humans. He nearly does this to Pino, too, telling her she has no will of her own and ordering her to erase her memories of Shiki to follow her programming. This flies straight in the face of his earlier creed that robots have the freedom to choose who they are.
• Existential Horror: Before the final battle, this is discussed between Homura and Valkyrie, who confesses that she's been suffering some serious angst after learning about her death in the previous world. Knowing that events in Universe Zero are bound to align themselves with the last world as much as possible, Valkyrie fears she's not "supposed" to be alive in the new history, and that her survival is nothing more than a cosmic whim that's bound to be undone sooner or later. Homura gives her an earful for this, demanding Valkyrie make something of her second chance at life.
• Face Death with Dignity:
  • During Shiki's childhood, Ziggy accepted that his days were numbered and went out with a smile.
  • There are multiple accounts of this in the Lendard arc, where characters calmly accept death when they're convinced it's inescapable:
    • Pino accepts being killed by Ziggy with a Tearful Smile, telling Shiki that she hopes to be reborn as a human one day. Fortunately for her, her death was faked by Ziggy.
    • Ziggy happily welcomes death moments before Shiki destroys him with Black Sky to save him from the Edens One's control.
    • Both Elsie and Justice allow the Chronophage to erase them from existence to "purify" all the time they wasted senselessly fighting and hating each other, both spending their final moments at peace with each other.
• Facepalm of Doom: Ziggy uses this to finish his fight with Poseidon Nero, grabbing his foe by the face so he can't escape before triggering Gravity Drain.
• Facial Horror:
  • In the Sun Jewel arc, Valkyrie's remains are found with parts of her facial skin chipped away and her right eye socket exposed, resembling a decomposing corpse.
  • In the Nero 66 arc, the very first glimpse beneath Ziggy's skull face faintly shows a human-like skull with an exposed eyeball. It's implied that this is an injury from when he fought Nero, since his face looks more ordinary when it's fully revealed.
• Fake Crossover: Happy from Fairy Tail appears as a major character, albeit with a totally different history and a slight design change (the tip of his tail is black rather than white). Plue, who similarly made the jump from Rave Master to Fairy Tail, also pops up as a race of identical restaurant employees.
• Family of Choice: All the human members of the crew are orphaned. As explicitly stated after the three-year Time Skip, this makes them united by this common trait and committed to seeing each other as a family that they're committed to protecting.
• Fan Disservice: The Guilst arc features Rebecca and a bunch of other young women getting covered in suds that dissolve their clothing. This would normally be milked for all the Fanservice it's worth in any other such scene drawn by Mashima, but it's 100% Played for Drama here: all the victims are scared out of their minds to be put through such humiliation before getting turned to stone at the risk of death, and Rebecca, while having enough pluck to put it behind her, has a brief meltdown over what she's gone through after she's rescued.
• Fanservice: Shown more than a few times, mainly via Rebecca and anytime the girls of EDENS ZERO take a dip in the bath, which is often since the ship comes with its own spa and bathhouse, meaning there can be Hot Springs Episode whenever the author wants it to happen.
• Fantastic Rank System: Shooting Starlight has one, with Rank E (Shiki, Rebecca, and Happy's rank) being the lowest. Nothing else is ever brought up about it again or what these ranks entail, though.
• Fictional Counterpart: B-Cube is this series' answer to YouTube.
• Fictional Currency: "Glee" is the most widely mentioned form of currency in this universe.
• Fighting from the Inside: Ziggy's apparet stunt of returning to his "old" self in the Lendard arc turns out to be this: Ziggy was struggling against the Edens One's attempts at hijacking him since before he came Back from the Dead, which led him to create Pino with the ability to Overdrive so her EMP could break the ship's control over him. He also manages to secretly unlock Pino's memory while his evil self is spying on her, allowing her to temporarily bring the real Ziggy back.
• First-Episode Twist: The first chapter makes it seem like a more modernized fantasy adventure series where Rebecca travels to different lands such as islands and kingdoms in a seaboat. Then, when she and Shiki make their getaway, her boat lifts off into space, and it becomes apparent that those "lands" are actually stars and planets.
• Forgiven, but Not Forgotten: Shiki's resentment and trust issues towards Noah are this. While he has every right to be upset over Rebecca and Sister being put in danger, Noah claims he was just trying to stop Drakken Joe. When the crew succeed in stopping him, Noah apologizes to them for all the troubles he caused, but Shiki remains distrustful of him and refuses to consider him a friend. Even with an apology, you just don't stop resenting someone in the blink of an eye.
• Fun with Acronyms:
  • The "Edens" in Edens Zero is short for "Ether Drive Eternal Navigation Ship".
  • The first three names of the true Big Bad, Over Nu Etherion Void, come together to form "O.N.E.", reflecting his identity as the Edens One's Artificial Intelligence. Taken with his fourth name, it becomes "one void", which is what he plans to reduce the entire universe to.
• Future Self Reveal: In the Lendard arc, Ziggy is unmasked as an older version of Shiki, who was thrown 20,000 years into the future of Universe 3173 by a spacetime distortion that the "main" Shiki avoided during the Aoi War, and traveled back 100 years before he adopted his younger self.
• Gambit Roulette: His plan to evacuate Shiki from Granbell before all the robots shut down banked entirely on the off-chance of a space traveler coming to an old, abandoned theme park that hadn't seen a single visitor in over a century; either that, or Shiki would be trapped on the planet both physically and emotionally. Justified by the fact that the robots didn't have any of the resources needed to contact other planets or get him off-world by themselves.
• The Ghost: Aside from a few mentions, the Cosmic Government has yet to appear so far in the series.
• Girls Stare at Scenery, Boys Stare at Girls: In Chapter 107, the Edens Zero crew watches the Ether lights on the planet Red Cave. While everyone admires the beautiful scenery, Weisz is much more interested in staring at Homura's butt, making Homura kick him.
• Go Out with a Smile:
  • Ziggy's death during Shiki's childhood saw him breaking down from old age while wearing the same Grin of Audacity he always had.
  • In the Nero 66 arc, Witch faces her crew a final time with a Tearful Smile while performing her Heroic Sacrifice.
  • In the Lendard arc, Ziggy, Elsie, and Justice all face their respective deaths with a calm and welcoming smile.
• Gondor Calls for Aid: In the final arc, Labilia and Couchpo rally a legion of B-Cubers and their millions of followers across the cosmos to help transmit the heroes' time-displaced Ether through B-Cube as bait to lure the Chronophage to save the dying Mother.
• A Good Way to Die: Discussed between Rebecca and Witch when Witch's Universe Zero self learns about her Universe 3 self's Heroic Sacrifice, expressing pride to have gone out in such a noble way.
• The Government: The Cosmic Government rules the Grand Shiki Cosmos with the Interstellar Union Army and its Oración Seis Interstellar serving as enforcers of the law and protectors against evil.
• Gory Discretion Shot:
  • Happy immediately after his run-in with a drunk driver. It's obstructed by certain angles and the edge of the panels, but just enough of his lower body is shown to indicate it isn't there anymore.
  • A silhouetted version occurs in Chapter 65 when Garrot gets Impaled with Extreme Prejudice by Valkyrie's sword, showing the blade plunging through his abdomen with a splash of blood.
  • In Chapter 83, Weisz's missing arm is covered by a speech bubble.
• Gotta Catch Them All:
  • Once Shiki gets the Edens Zero, the focus of the plot shifts to assembling the Demon King's Four Shining Stars, a group of androids that bring the ship's functions to full capacity, or else they'll find it difficult to make past the Sakura Cosmos's border, where ship-devouring space dragons gather. This ends with the discovery that one of the four, Valkyrie, was Dead All Along, with her pupil Homura taking her place long after already joining the crew.
  • Downplayed with the crew's search for the Relics, artifacts born from Mother herself that emanate with her Ether, each one serving as a radar to the next Relic and, eventually, Mother herself. Instead of needing to gather all the Relics, however, the crew is informed right off the bat that they just have to keep collecting Ether from different Relics until the reading becomes strong enough to detect Mother.
• Grew Beyond Their Programming: Digitalis is the server of an MMORPG whose NPCs somehow gained sentience and now act like normal people. This is part of the reason why the game was shut down, causing the NPCs to form their own thriving society.
• Half the Man He Used to Be:
  • In the Nero 66 arc, Jaguar pulls this off on Killer, demolishing the upper half of his body, which forces him to be rebuilt for the next arc.
  • Müller gets cut in half at the waist while battling Weisz in the Foresta arc, but since he's a Cyborg, he's able to keep fighting. History Repeats in the Reunion arc, where he's torn in half by Shura before Shiki obliterates the rest of him (besides his head) with Black Sky.
  • Lightning Law, one of the villains in the final arc, is finished off this way by Laguna.
• Have We Met Yet?: This takes place often throughout the final arcs in Universe Zero, where the Edens Zero crew recognize people they'd meet in the future once their memories before the Cosmic Retcon return, but none of those people can possibly return the sentiment. This is especially a Running Gag with Witch, who died before she could travel with the crew to this world, so her past self has to endure being glomped and cried over by people she's only just met.
• His Name Really Is "Barkeep": If a robot is given a descriptive title indicating their general role or purpose, odds are that actually is their name. Case in point, the Four Shining Stars are named Witch, Sister, Hermit, and Valkyrie. While they all have second names, those are treated more like their surnames.
• History Repeats: Just like in Universe 2, where he had his O-Tech body totalled by Weisz and left as a helpless head, Müller gets his fake Xenolith body obliterated by Shiki in Universe Zero.
• Hollywood Hacking: Discussed. Because there's no trace of Joker's history on the internet, Hermit thinks of her as an exceptional programmer who erased all related search results of herself. When she's revealed to have started out as a game engine built by Professor Weisz, however, it becomes unclear whether or not there was ever anything related to her online to erase.
• Human Aliens: Every human character is technically an alien by virtue of coming from a planet that isn't Earth. Rebecca takes it further by saying the human Shiki is technically an alien from her perspective because he lived on a planet different from hers.
• Human Pet: The robots on the planet Foresta do this under the Big Bad's influence to all the humans that they didn't kill in their revolution.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: Zig-Zagged. While humans are negatively highlighted for their maltreatment of robots, the series goes out of its way to show that there are humans who treat robots like people, as exemplified by Shiki and his friends, while also having its share of bots and aliens who mistreat innocent humans, up to the robotic Demon King Ziggy coming Back from the Dead and not only abandoning his ideals of harmony with mankind to become the Big Bad, but being revealed as being an amnesiac villain to begin with.
• Humongous Mecha: Characters such as Sibir and Madame Kurenai pilot gigantic mechs called Knight Gears, which are designed to combat giant warships easily. Shiki's Ether Gear is able to dismantle Sibir's easily, but Kurenai's proves to be much more resilient and powerful.
• Hyde Plays Jekyll:
  • During the Lendard arc, the "Mechanical King" Ziggy seemingly changes back into "Grandpa" Ziggy to pull off a Wounded Gazelle Gambit on Elsie when she nearly kills him in the Lendard arc, briefly pleading for her to take Shiki and flee moments before stabbing her with her own sword. It's later subverted with The Reveal that "Grandpa" Ziggy was actually Fighting from the Inside against the Edens One's control.
  • In the Lendard arc's climax, Ziggy's good, real self pretends to fall back under the Big Bad's control to motivate Shiki into killing him once and for all, faking Pino's death to trigger Shiki's Traumatic Superpower Awakening.
• I Am Not Left-Handed:
  • In the Nero 66 arc, Ziggy's gravity hardly has any effect on Nero's Empire Dice, which are a piece of Mother and thus above the power of ordinary gravity. As Ziggy demonstrates after successfully grabbing the dice, he can crush them by using "true" gravity, which is simply him exerting more power than necessary.
  • In the Lendard arc, he and Shiki appear evenly matched when the latter is using his Overdrive. Then Ziggy reveals he can Overdrive as well, and their fight becomes a Curb-Stomp Battle in Ziggy's favor. Ziggy points out that since he's the future Shiki with a century's worth of more power and experience, it's only natural that there'd be such an enormous gap.
• I Am the Noun: When Shiki demands to know what Void really is, and especially what makes him think he can sentence the whole human race to extinction, Void answers that he is "the will of the universe".
• I Let You Win: When Ziggy attacks Shiki after apparently falling back under the Edens One's control, Shiki notices he's fighting the exact same way he used to when training him as an inexperienced boy, which clues him in that Ziggy is just faking his possession this time. Once Shiki musters the will to use Black Sky on him regardless, Ziggy drops the act and allows the attack to destroy him.
• I Have You Now, My Pretty: Müller captures Rebecca during the Reunion arc once he learns about her Time Ether, which he tries to extract and combine with Xenolith's Gravity Ether by strapping her to an operating table and sawing off her legs. She's freed thanks to Amira, Shiki, and Shura before he has the chance to do anything.
• Idea Bulb: Müller gets one in Universe Zero when he imagines Rebecca's legs as "parts" so he'd feel more comfortable with chopping them off due to being Terrified of Germs.
• Inconsistent Spelling: The Japanese name of Universe Zero is spelled with a numeral as "Universe 0", which pops up one time in the official translation.
• Inside a Computer System: Digitalis is a virtual planet that players "dive" into by uploading their consciousness into it. This also means that death in the virtual realm equals death in real life.
• Irony: Planets are typically considered to be "dead" once they are eaten by a Chronophage, which overwrites the existence of everything within its atmosphere with an earlier version of itself. The irony comes when a Chronophage does this to Guilst, a world formerly abundant with nature before it devolved into a Wretched Hive, as the apocalyptic event actually returns the planet to a thriving state.
• Just a Machine: A commonly held belief across the universe is that robots, androids, and other artificial beings like digital lifeforms are just mindless automatons designed to imitate emotion without actually feeling them, which gives rise to some truly horrific acts no different from racism and genocide against ordinary humans.
• Ki Manipulation: Ether Gear is a cross between this and Magic by Any Other Name, since its users have to reconfigure the flow of Ether in their bodies like a machine, which results in a seemingly endless variety of powers depending on its type.
• Kidnapped by the Call: Downplayed. Shiki initially refuses the call to stay on Granbell to ensure Rebecca's escape from his rogue robot friends, but Rebecca refuses to hear it and immediately drags him onto her ship. However, she only does this because she knows he always wanted to leave and now has the excuse. Surely enough, Shiki quickly settles into it.
• Kill It with Ice: Lightning Law is defeated this way in the final arc courtesy of Laguna's Overdrive, which turns Laguna's water into ice. This way, Laguna is able to flash-freeze Law after dousing him with water, which weakens Law's armored body enough to impale him and cut him to pieces.
• Killed Off for Real: Subverted with regards to the Cosmic Retcon in Chapter 220, which undoes every death that takes place over the course of the series, up to bringing Posthumous Characters like Valkyrie Back from the Dead.
• Knockout Gas: Rebecca and Happy suffer this during the Reunion arc, leading to them getting taken to a Torture Cellar by Müller.
• Last Request:
  • His last words to the robots were to send Shiki away from Granbell and into outer space by whatever means presented themselves, both knowing that Shiki would be left all alone once the robots died, and believing he had the potential to change the universe.
  • In the Lendard arc, Ziggy begs Shiki to kill him before he gets taken over again by the Edens One, which has been controlling him from the beginning, arguing that he's supposed to be dead and would rather be put out of his misery that continue being used as a pawn.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler:
  • The fact that EDENS ZERO is a space adventure story in the first place. The setting is so integral to the story, right down to Mashima describing the genre as a "Space Fantasy", that it may come as a surprise that the reveal of outer space was a big First-Episode Twist.
  • Any and all crew members that join following the reveal of the Edens Zero ship itself, including the Heel-Face Turns of the villains Mosco, Jinn, Kleene, and Laguna. The opposite also applies to Valkyrie, who's built up as the last mandatory crew member for the voyage until she is shown to have been Dead All Along, with Homura taking her place.
  • Anyone introduced to the series through scenes after Chapter 84 would know that Shiki's death in the Belial Gore arc doesn't stick thanks to Rebecca performing a time leap.
  • Nothing past Chapter 101 makes any attempt to hide that Demon King Ziggy—Shiki's dead grandfather figure and the series' paramount example of Dark Is Not Evil—comes Back from the Dead as the Big Bad, or that his new ship is the Edens One, the Superior Successor to the Zero first name-dropped in Chapter 49.
  • After chapter 203, it's a double whammy concerning Ziggy. Not only is there the previous reveal that he came back to life and is a villain now, but the fact that Ziggy is actually Shiki from 20,000 years in the future of Universe 2.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: While discussing how Shiki imagined the Shooting Starlight guild to be more much more like a big, welcoming family than it turned out to be, Rebecca and Happy mention there used to be of a manga/anime like that.
• Let No Crisis Go to Waste: Ziggy takes advantage of Shura and Nero's power struggle over the 20,000 anti-matter bombs by stealing Nero's Ether Gear, creating a portal back to Nero 66 to reach in and trigger their activation himself, and then restraining the Edens Zero within the blast radius of the bombs to be rid of them once and for all. As it's revealed later, this is because the war itself was the catalyst for Shiki's "death" and "rebirth" as Ziggy, and his actions are to create a Stable Time Loop.
• The Load: When the heroes enter Digitalis to save Hermit, they are told they still have access to the abilities they have in the physical world. However, like in regular RPGs, they cannot do anything to modify or alter the game as that would result in them getting banned. This means that Weisz and Pino cannot use their respective technopathic and EMP powers. As Weisz states, this effectively makes them deadweight. Even when Weisz decides to ignore the rules and counter Jamilov's hacking, he needs Hermit's help.
• A Long Time Ago, in a Galaxy Far, Far Away...: The series focuses on Human Aliens living in a region of space called the Grand Shiki Cosmos, which is filled with strange cosmic phenomenon such as flurries of cherry blossom petals, oceans of water filled with cosmic fish, and a magic energy called Ether that causes Weird Weather and grants people superpowers. Subverted with the final arc twist that the Grand Shiki Cosmos neighbors our Solar System, if it's not its own pocket universe, and that it takes place a good 20,000 years in the future.
• Losing Your Head:
  • Müller is able to survive as just a head after getting his body destroyed in the Foresta arc and in Universe Zero.
  • During their battle in the Nero 66 arc, Ziggy (an android) successfully plays dead after Nero tears off his head, with Ziggy mocking Nero for thinking simple decapitation was enough to kill an android.
  • In the Reunion arc, it's revealed that Universe Zero's Valkyrie was sentenced to death via beheading on Oedo to spare Homura the same fate. Homura and the rest of Oedo believed her to be dead, but being that Valkyrie is an android, she simply had her head reattached courtesy of Seiji.
• Magic by Any Other Name: Ether is a type of energy present in the universe that can be found in people's bodies, machines, and planets. It can also be compressed into physical objects such as bullets and crystals. However, only people with Ether Gear like Shiki can tap into it via Ki Manipulation.
• Magitek: All technology in the series runs on Ether, a mixture of Mana and Life Energy. It can also compress Ether into solid or semi-ethereal forms, ranging from bullets and shockwaves to more mundane objects like ID cards.
• Male Gaze: In the first chapter alone, readers are greeted by shots of Rebecca's curvy frame, further emphasized by scenes where she is tied up or falling. Then there are the times Weisz admires Homura's butt and when Shiki stared at Rebecca while she was in a compromised position (sprawled on the floor, temporarily paralyzed, and wearing nothing but a towel).
• Maou the Demon King: The title of "Demon King / Maou" belongs to both Ziggy and Shiki as captain of the titular ship, with the former also performing the role at the Granbell Kingdom. Rather than an inherently villainous title, which it's widely believed to be In-Universe, it actually stands for the King of Magimech—the gravity-based fighting style Ziggy and Shiki use—who shares his Ether with machines. Then the role gets played straight when Ziggy comes back wrong becomes the Big Bad, brainwashing other robots into revolting against humans and any other robots who side with them.
• Meaningful Name:
  • The Sakura Cosmos is filled with Cherry Blossom petals as far as the eye can see. The anime version is especially stunning.
  • Code 3173, the designation given to Edens Zero's Etherion, is so-named because it's the Ether extracted from the body of Rebecca from Universe 3173.
• Meanwhile, in the Future…: In Chapter 4, the series has a brief Flash Forward 20,000 years into the future, where two Ambiguously Human astronauts discover the remains of a man and a woman on a desolate world neighboring an eviscerated planet, also stumbling upon what appears to be Rebecca's B-Cube necklace with the words "EDENS ZERO" carved on it; the shift is so sudden and jarring that Xiaomei opens the next chapter to reassure the reader that this isn't how the story continues. The Lendard arc revisits this plot thread, revealing that the barren world is Nero 66, the man to somehow still be alive, and Planet Granbell is fully intact with the name "Eden". It then drops the biggest bombshell in that not only is the barely-alive man Shiki, he would go on to become Ziggy.
• Mechanical Lifeforms: The dragons that fly through the cosmos look more like dragon-shaped dreadnoughts than anything else, yet they're treated like living beings that are commonly mistaken as comets from a distance.
• Mega City: Eternal, the home of the Shooting Starlight guild on planet Blue Garden, is a futuristic metropolis filled with spires and a river of water floating across the sky.
• Merged Reality: By traveling into Universe Zero, all other timelines in The Multiverse are merged into one, overwriting the events and memories of everything and everyone within them, with the Edens Zero's passengers and Rachel regaining their memory of the old world. This also makes it impossible for people like Rebecca and Rachel to travel to any other worlds, while making it more costly to attempt to reverse time.
• Meta Twist: The identity of the Big Bad, as well as The Reveal leading to it, both put a darker spin on recurring conventions in Mashima's works: the first is that it's a mentor and father figure (or grandfather, in this case) to The Hero, who are invariably good guys in older Mashima works, if not the Big Good or Greater-Scope Paragon, as Ziggy is built up to be; the second is that it's someone who's Not Quite Dead. Ziggy Came Back Wrong and has undergone a jarring personality change.
• My Significance Sense Is Tingling: When he found Shiki, Ziggy felt a certain connection to the boy that compelled him abandon his search for Mother, feeling that Shiki had the potential to change the universe for the better. The reason for this is because he sensed that he and Shiki are in fact the same person.
• Name Amnesia: Downplayed with Ziggy. His Trauma-Induced Amnesia leaves Shiki unable to recall his name, resulting in the mangling of it to "Ziggy", but at least for a while he knew that wasn't actually his name. Several decades on, he settled into accepting Ziggy as his name, and once he discovers his past, he considers the name "Shiki" to belong to his past self.
• No Body Left Behind: Several characters meet this fate in the Lendard arc: Deadend Crow and Cure by the Edens Zero's Star Bringer, God Acnoella by Elsie's Grand Chariot, Ziggy by Shiki's Black Sky, and Elsie and Justice undergoing Death by De-aging from the Chronophage.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Universe 2's version of Shiki chooses to stay and try to stop the bombs detonated on Nero 66. This decision led him to become the Sole Survivor of his crew, transform into Ziggy, and be taken over by the Edens One's AI.
• Non-Indicative Name: Subverted with the "Fire Planet" Red Cave, which is actually covered in water. It turns out the planet got its name from its volcanic caves of seemingly sentient fire and magma that stand between travelers and the Mother Relic enshrined on the planet, which only became covered in water after the Relic's disappearance. Once the Relic is restored, the planet goes back to its original state.
• Non-Lethal K.O.: Ether-based attacks are this because ether is based on life energy. Rebecca's Happy Blasters fire bullets made of ether, so even when she scores a ton of headshots, her victims are just knocked out. Later, Hermit defeats one of Drakken Joe's Four Elements, Fie, and makes a point of adding ether coating to her final attack to ensure a non-lethal victory.
• No One Could Survive That!:
  • In the Lendard arc, Clown prematurely writes off Hermit and Homura as dead after Hermit is infected by Killer's virus and Homura has been smashed against a metal pillar by Brigandine.
  • In the Reunion arc, it's shown that Homura and the rest of Oedo assumed getting beheaded is as lethal for Valkyrie as it is for a human. When Valkyrie shows up perfectly fine years later, she explains decapitation is merely a painful inconvenience for an android like her.
• Not an Act: When Ziggy makes his Face–Heel Turn, Shiki and Rebecca hold out hope that it's all just an act, since they just learned that the other Granbell bots were pretending to be infected by a virus to save Shiki's life. Ziggy's immediate response is to demolish the theme park—and soon the entire planet itself—with all the dead robots still there, firmly establishing him as the villain.
• Not Quite Dead:
  • Ziggy uses his ability to survive decapitation to his advantage in the Nero 66 arc when Nero appears to kill him on the Temple, sneaking up on him and swiping his dice once Nero thinks he's been killed.
  • This happens a number of times during the final arcs:
    • Valkyrie is presumed dead since she had her head cut off, but Seiji/Creed was quickly able to reattach it, since she's an android.
    • Ziggy turns out to still be alive thanks to the same device he used to save the other Granbell bots.
• Noodle Incident: When Ziggy reveals his true identity and purpose for coming to the present, he refuses to explain what it was that changed him from a would-be savior of humankind to its attempted conqueror. As it's shortly revealed, this is a subversion; nothing of the sort happened, and he's being controlled by someone else who's forcing Ziggy to act like he's inexplicably gone rogue.
• Not Quite the Right Thing: In the Nero 66 arc, when given the choice to either prevent Nero 66's destruction or escape from it, Universe 2's Shiki chooses to try the former by compressing the 20,000 antimatter bombs set to blow it to oblivion, while the "main" Shiki chooses the latter, dooming the planet while ensuring his crew's safety. The first choice turns out to be the more disastrous one, as Shiki not only fails and loses his crew, but the resonance between the bombs, Shiki's gravity, and the nearby Rebecca's time powers created a spacetime distortion that blasted them several millennia into the future, one year per explosion.
• Offscreen Villain Dark Matter: Void, the ultimate Big Bad of the series, is stated by Müller to have infinite wealth, resources and power, so he has no issue acquiring exactly what he needs to carry out his evil plans. Müller also lampshades this, saying that this much infinity violates the epsilon-delta definition of limit.
• Only Six Faces: Shiki and Rebecca have the same general attributes as the male and female leads of Mashima's previous works, particularly Natsu and Lucy (Shiki has slanted eyes and spiky hair, Rebecca has wide eyes and blonde hair^note Ash blonde like Elie but longer like Lucy).
• Our Dragons Are Different: The cosmos is populated by absolutely massive mechanized dragons, thrown in just to show how incredible the universe is.
• Our Hero Is Dead: This happens in the Belial Gore arc when Drakken Joe actually kills Shiki via a bullet between the eyes. The next chapter is spent on Rebecca unable to cope with his death before her Ether Gear's time travel powers kick in, sending her back to stop Shiki just moments before they can set off on their doomed mission.
• Outdoor Bath Peeping: Shiki takes Homura to bath at a spring after her fight with Mora. As Homura speaks to him about her concerns of what might happen if Mother can only grant one wish, Shiki turns around to look at her and Homura politely asks him to turn away because she's still bathing.
• Painting the Medium:
  • Whenever Homura talks about Ether Gear, it's written in hiragana (used for native Japanese words) instead of katakana (usually for words borrowed from non-Eastern languages), suggesting that it's a foreign term from her perspective.
  • In the Nero 66 arc, Homura gets trapped inside a mirror with Mirrani where everything is reversed, including the Written Sound Effects.
• Pet the Dog: Despite his nihilistic view of machines after becoming the Big Bad, Ziggy expresses enough compassion for the Granbell robots to pay his respects before crushing the planet. This is an early hint that he's actually Shiki, whom the robots raised as his family.
• Please Put Some Clothes On: Noah requests this of Rebecca when they meet in Chapter 247, where she is wearing nothing but a provocative swimsuit due to being on a beach planet, which briefly distracts him from giving the Edens Zero crew any vital expositon.
• Plot Coupon: The Four Shining Stars are the Demon King's top androids who serve aboard his ship, the Edens Zero, and bring it to full travel and battle capacity. Since most of them have gone their separate ways after the Demon King's retirement, Shiki and the gang learn that they have to gather all four to breach Dragonfall, a sector between the Sakura Cosmos and outer space that swarms with ship-devouring space dragons.
• Plot Twist:
  • The first chapter contains a First-Episode Twist revealing that the series is actually a Space Western, and not an Urban Fantasy set 20 Minutes into the Future as first suggested. It also reveals that all the robots on Granbell, who appeared to be plotting against Shiki all along, were actually trying to save him from getting trapped on the planet before they all shut down.
  • The true nature of Rebecca's Ether Gear, Leaper. It's not just a speed based power, it actually allows her to leap through time and she's done so subconsciously multiple times in her life and throughout the story without the reader being aware. It's true name is Cat Leaper.
  • Chapter 49 reveals that There Is Another ship with the title of "Edens" called Edens One, captained by a man named Connor. It's elaborated in Chapter 102 that the Zero was a prototype for the One.
• Point of No Return: As Rachel warns the Edens Zero crew, traveling to Universe Zero causes all other Universes to merge into one, making it impossible to return to the ones they've been to.
• The Power of Friendship: Played with. Shiki wants to make as many friends as possible, though Rebecca warns him that's easier said then done. That said, Ziggy has taught him at an early age how important friendship is and has since gone out of his way to help Rebecca and other people he befriended when they need help the most.
• Reclaimed by Nature: By the time he reactivates, Ziggy's mechanical body is overgrown with moss, with parts of his body cracked/broken and his cape in tatters from exposure to the elements. Shortly after he sets foot on the Edens One, he gets an instant repair job.
• Robots Enslaving Robots: Ziggy's idea of "liberating" machines from humanity is brainwashing them into being his psychotic slaves.
• The Quest: By Chapter 3, Shiki, Rebecca, and Happy decide to take up a quest to find the seemingly mythical Goddess of the Cosmos Mother, which becomes their most prioritized goal in the series. At first they do it simply as a way to turn heads and get new friends (or subscribers in Rebecca's case), while Shiki personally wants to know why he seems to remember meeting Mother before. Shiki becomes all the more motivated when he learns it was his late grandfather's Tragic Dream to find her, giving Shiki the chance to finally surpass his grandpa and pay tribute to him by doing something he could never accomplish. When his grandfather comes Back from the Dead as the Big Bad, the quest turns into a race to see who can get to Mother first.
• Raised by Robots:
  • Shiki grew up living as the only human on the Granbell Kingdom, a fully automated amusement part run by robots. They were friendly with him and gave him a good home, but this meant he never really interacted with real humans until Rebecca came along. Once off planet, he has trouble adjusting to talking and meeting with new people.
  • Homura was raised by the android Valkyrie following her Parental Abandonment. This wound up making her a target of unsavory gossip and rumors on her planet, which frowns upon any kind of relationship between humans and machines.
• Recurring Element:
  • There are several prominent Expies of older Mashima characters from both Rave Master and Fairy Tail, such as Happy, Plue/Nikora, Elsie Crimson (Erza Scarlet), and Justice (Sieg and Jellal).
  • The manga features not one, but two groups referencing the Oración Seis, a group of six powerful villains from Rave Master and Fairy Tail, both being subject to Dub Name Change: the first is the Oración Seis Galáctica^note Spanish for "Galactic Prayer Six", who are a collection of planet-crushing outlaws known in Japanese as the Ginga Rokumashō^note "Galaxy's Six Demon Generals", alluding to the name's furigana spelling in Fairy Tail as Rokuma Shōgun^note "Six Demon Generals"; the second is a government-sanctioned military squad that opposes the former, and is simply known in Japanese as the Oración Seis, which gets its name switched to Oración Seis Interstellar^note "Interestelar" in the simulpub version, making it Spanish for "Interstellar Prayer Six" out of respect of its own furigana spelling as Seikei Rokukishō^note "Star System's Six Prayer Generals".
  • Mildian, a city from Rave Master and Fairy Tail that is closely associated with time, is reinvisioned as a planet that's cut off from the rest of time, and is home to a fortune teller that can see everything past, present, and future.
  • The secret behind Code 3173 (itself a reference to Rave Master) is called Etherion, a powerful force of destruction that's present in both Rave Master and Fairy Tail.
  • One of the series' Quirky Miniboss Squads is called the Element 4, just like Phantom Lord's Classical Elements Ensemble in Fairy Tail, this time working for Drakken Joe as his special forces unit. The group's water representative, Laguna, also makes a Heel–Face Turn just like his Fairy Tail equivalent, Juvia, and both face off against the series Lancer (Weisz and Gray, respectively).
• Reset Button: One major discovery that begins to dawn on Rebecca during the Sun Jewel arc is that she has the power to jump backwards in time and undo events that lead to her or her friends getting in danger, something she's unconsciously done 30 times throughout her life; case in point, after the initial outing on Belial Gore goes horrendously and results in the ship's capture and Shiki's death, Rebecca jumps back a week right before their infiltration happens.
• Reused Character Design: The series features Expies of Happy, Plue, Erza, and Jellal, all characters that have shown up in Fairy Tail (and Rave Master, in Plue's case).
• Ret-Gone: Discussed between the Edens Zero crew during the Reunion arc when they don't find characters like the fake Sister and Müller where they were supposed to be before the Cosmic Retcon, questioning if this means they either don't exist or simply wound up someplace else due to the changes in history. In Müller's case, it's a subversion as he returns as a minion of the Big Bad, Void.
• Ridiculously Human Robot: While most of the old robots on Granbell are instantly recognizable as such, there are others who could instantly pass off as regular people to the untrained eye. Even Happy himself is mostly machine, counting more as a "ridiculously feline robot".
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: During the Reunion arc, Müller correctly concludes that the Edens Zero crew has travelled through time, but only because he thinks they triggered some sort of temporal paradox that caused him to misplace his coffee, which he'd been holding the whole time.
• Robotic Reveal: Happy is revealed in the second chapter to be a mostly mechanical cyborg with the appearance of a regular cat whose old body was mangled in a roadside accident.
• Sadistic Choice: In chapter 271, Shiki receives one from Mother, who tells her that if he saves her, then Universe Zero will be finalized, including who lives and dies. This means that everyone who died in the various alternate worlds—including Witch, Valkyrie, Ziggy, Elsie, Weisz's mom, and even Shiki himself—will be Killed Off for Real. However, not saving Mother will guarantee the Bad Future where her death leads to humanity's extinction and eventually the death of the surviving robots once the Ether runs out. After learning about Mother's past, Shiki ends up choosing to let Mother disappear in Chapter 276 in order to save his friends. In the very next chapter however, he revealsthat he still plans on saving Mother by luring the Chronophage towards her in order to reverse her disappearance and destroy the Chronophage once and for all in the process.
• Scenery Censor: While Rebecca is taking a bath her nether regions are obscured by a leaf, then after nearly being sucked into space and slamming against the ceiling the bars serve the same purpose.
• Scenery Gorn: The planet in the Flash Forward is shown to have gotten entire chunks of it ripped off with sinewy strands of ether still clinging to them, giving it the appearance of an eviscerated life form with its entrails graphically exposed.
• The Scottish Trope: In Chapter 210, when the original personality of Ziggy attempts to tell Shiki and Pino the true identity of the "evil Ziggy" possessing his body, who is the true Big Bad and is already on Lendard, the name comes out in text as squiggling lines, with everyone present unable to make out what he's saying as he realizes to his growing shock what's happening. Pino questions if it's some sort of language control program, while the speaker simply decides their time is growing short and Shiki needs to hurry up and kill him before evil Ziggy resurfaces.
• Science Fantasy: EDENS ZERO is set in a world that incorporates space travel, robots, and a generally futuristic aesthetic, but the main characters also have special abilities that allow him to fight with the strength of a machine.
• Secretly Dying: The power supplies of all of the robots on Granbell are nearly depleted and there is no way to restore them, so they pretend to turn against Shiki and Rebecca to send Shiki off-world since they don't want him to waste his life futilely trying to repair them. They last just long enough to see Shiki fly off into space with his new friends before they all shut down.
• Sensual Spandex: Deconstructed. The crew have to wear skintight suits while "diving" into the virtual reality of Digitalis. Once they make it back to the real world after about two whole days, they're completely drenched in sweat due to their poorly ventilated-outfits.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong:
  • After finding out they've been sent 50 years back into Planet Norma's past, Rebecca initially has to caution Shiki time and again against doing anything that could alter the timeline. But when they find out a criminal from the past has already started using technology from the future before their arrival, they're forced to take action to stop him. It's subverted when it's revealed they didn't travel through time, but that a Chronophage overwrote Norma's present with its past, resetting the planet's timeline in a paradox-free manner.
  • Played straight with Rebecca, who discovers she has the power to travel back in time with her Ether Gear, Cat Leaper. This allows her to undo the events of the Belial Gore arc that end with Drakken taking the ship, capturing her, and killing Shiki.
  • Ziggy reveals his mission as given by the androids of the future was to return to the past and prevent the event that causes humanity's extinction, which in turn leads to Mother going missing and all Ether in the universe slowly fading away. However, Ziggy has since turned against that mission for his own reasons to the point he wants to destroy humanity and kill Mother himself.
• Sexiness Score: Parodied. All of the official character profiles have one joke stat for each character, with Rebecca's being "Leg Sexiness", in which she scores a perfect 5-star.
• Shout-Out:
  • Coming off the heels of Fairy Tail, which itself followed Rave Master, this series has tons of allusions to both preceding series:
    • Happy's home planet, Excede, is a corrupted version of Happy's species name in Fairy Tail.
    • The skull-and-crossbones flag of Elsie Crimson—an Expy of Fairy Tail character Erza Scarlet—is actually the Fairy Tail guild emblem turned 90 degrees counterclockwise. She also owns a battleship called the Skull Fairy to boot.
    • The top-secret door aboard the Edens Zero labeled "Code 3173" is a reference to the Arc Number in Rave Master, which similarly tied into several of that series' most closely guarded secrets. That secret turns out to be called Etherion, a term used in both Rave Master and Fairy Tail that's closely associated with 3173 in the former.
    • Weisz's modified assault rifle flamethrower is called Atlas Flame, the same as a fire dragon in Fairy Tail. His other weapons in his Arsenal form also take cues from Fairy Tail dragons, such as the Drum Buster (Skiadrum/Skiadram) and the Grandy Ray (Grandeeney).
    • On Digitalis, Homura rides the same kind of "horse" the main characters of Rave Master used for some of their travels.
    • The Berial Goer/Belial Gore, the space fortress used by one of the Oración Seis Galáctica, is named after one of the members of Rave Master's Seis, Berial/Belial.
  • Elsie Crimson looks like a cross between Erza Scarlet and Emeraldas.
  • An Omake included with the first volume's limited edition focuses on Shiki, Rebecca, and Happy playing an online Survival Horror game against a player-controlled slasher just like Dead by Daylight.
  • In Kodansha's translation, Happy describes the planet Guilst as a wretched hive of scum and villainy.
  • Negan from The Walking Dead makes a cameo in a crowd shot aboard the Belial Gore during a scene that's reminiscent of his debut episodes, where Drakken Joe has the crew "punished" and kills Shiki similarly to how Negan punishes Rick's group by killing Abraham and Glenn.
• Single-Biome Planet: The Edens Zero crew visits many throughout their adventure. Almost every planet they come across has one defining characteristic, usually explained by having Ether of a particular element be abundant in the atmosphere.
• Sinister Surveillance: Universe Zero's Müller taps into the Edens Zero's communication lines with none of the crew the wiser. He also communicates directly to Rebecca, disguising himself as Shiki with a voice changer to lure her into a trap.
• Slippery Swimsuit: In the Pool Episode in Chapter 176, Homura asks Weisz to make the water at the water park go faster so she can run against the current for her training. Unsurprisingly, Homura ends up losing her bikini because of the water pressure.
• Space Is an Ocean:
  • Space Pirates are a major threat in the universe, and Rebecca explicitly mentions how Elsie Crimson, the most dreaded of them all, conquered the "Seven Cosmic Seas".
  • The Aoi Cosmos takes this to a whole new extreme, as it's filled with an actual ocean in the middle of space that exists above and below planets.
• Space Western: The series follows Shiki and the crew of the eponymous Edens Zero hopping from planet to planet in search of Mother, while making friends along the way.
• The Stations of the Canon:
  • In-Universe, Ziggy explains that Shiki getting involved in the Aoi Cosmos war is a "fixed point" in almost all universes, especially the detonation of the Anti Matter bombs on Nero 66. This is because that in turn results in his existence and eventual jump back in time, which then sends waves through all universes.
  • In Chapter 222, this gets discussed by Shiki, Rebecca, and Happy as they comment on their shared memories from their own experiences with that of their counterparts from Universe 0, noting that despite certain things being different (Planet Granbell having an abundance of Ether due to Ziggy, Happy not being a Cyborg) other things have remained the same (Ziggy left behind the Edens Zero, Rebecca meeting Professor Weisz). This leads Rebecca to assume that perhaps this is simply history's way of attempting to "repair" itself.
• Sudden Soundtrack Stop: The second season and fifth episode of the anime has its soundtrack of sad music stop the moment Shiki is shot in the head by Drakken Joe. As Shiki is shot, Drakken Joe, Fie, and Daichi cheer in his demise while Rebecca and Homura can do nothing to save him.
• Suicide by Cop: Ziggy coaxes Shiki into putting him through this, knowing that the Edens One will take control over him again. Despite his hesitation, Shiki obliges.
• Super Mode: Jinn and Drakken Joe state that all Ether Gear users can enter a state called Overdrive which happens when the Ether surpasses a certain point and causes a change in the ether itself. Shiki is the first seen to achieve this, and he transforms into a devil-like figure. After training in the Aoi Cosmos, Weisz and Homura can also achieve Overdrive; Weisz's Overdrive form is streamlined, like a humanoid android, while Homura's Overdrive form looks like a kitsune. After the three-year Time Skip, Rebecca achieves Overdrive as well, taking on a Cat Girl form.
• Take Me Instead: During Homura's childhood in Universe Zero, where Homura was sentenced to death by beheading for accidentally hurting Creed/Seiji (the shogun's son) in a children's duel, Valkyrie offered herself in Homura's place, stating that her student's mistake was her own responsibility as a teacher.
• Taking You with Me: As a last resort after his lair is found and his drones are destroyed in the Reunion arc, Müller orders his remaining drones to fall down into the surface of Nero 1 to significantly damage the planet, potentially killing himself and many other people.
• Talking the Monster to Death: Rebecca does this in her battle with Joker Helix, successfully reaching out to Joker's long-forgotten desire of entertaining people with her games, capped off with a Big Damn Hug.
• Temporal Theme Naming:
  • Shiki's name is Japanese for "four seasons". This is in keeping with Mashima's personal tradition of naming main characters after seasons, following Haru (spring) from Rave Master, Natsu (summer) from Fairy Tail, Aki (autumn) from Monster Soul, and Mafuyu (winter) from the one-shot Fighting Force Mixture. Incidentally, Monster Hunter Orage (Mashima's manga based on Monster Hunter), also stars a protagonist named Shiki.
  • The four cosmoses are all named for Japanese seasonal festivals: Sakura (cherry blossom, spring), Aoi (hollyhock, summer), Kaede (maple, autumn), and Yukino (snow, winter). That said, each cosmos seems to play with their name somewhat; Sakura, for example, has cherry blossoms all over the place, while Aoi (which under a different Kanji means blue) has streams of water instead.
• There Are No Therapists:
  • In Hermit's backstory, after being used by Dr. Muller—first as an Unwitting Pawn and then as a target for his sadistic impulses—she is eventually rescued when the authorities come to arrest Muller and his cronies. Rather than offer her any form of support when they find her emotionally broken from what was done to her, the officers on the scene simply consider her a lost cause and let her wander off on her own so she can find a place to die.
  • Rebecca suffers from traumatic flashbacks and emotional breakdowns periodically throughout the story, and is only able to keep it together thanks to Shiki. One of these flashbacks involves witnessing Shiki's death and being held Drakken Joe's prisoner for a week in the timeline before she makes her first fully conscious time leap.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Ziggy tries killing the Edens Zero crew on Nero 66 by triggering Shura's 20,000 anti-matter bombs, only one of which would be enough to destroy the planet. As it's later revealed, doing so is necessary to send Shiki into the future so he loses his memories and becomes Ziggy, creating a Stable Time Loop and thereby "killing Shiki" in a sense.
• Thicker Than Water: Discussed; Homura's home planet places great value in blood relations between family members no matter how bad they may be, which fuels the low public opinion of the mechanical Valkyrie raising the human Homura. This ends up getting to Valkyrie, who sets out to find Homura's Missing Mom. When it turns out Homura's mother would rather become an Evil Overlord than return to her daughter, Valkyrie—and later Shiki—try to drag her back to Homura by force, determining that as a blood relative, Homura is the only one suitable to judge what to do with her. In the end, the trope becomes defied when Homura chooses the now-deceased Valkyrie as her true mother and disowns her biological mom outright.
• This Cannot Be!: Müller has this reaction in the Reunion arc when Shiki and Shura easily resist his gravity field and overpower him despite having Xenolith's power on his side. The two simply tell him that his stolen powers mean nothing if he doesn't know how to use them.
• This Is Reality: Rebecca periodically gives Shiki reality checks about how friendship works when he goes gung-ho about making them, pointing out that most people he meets generally won't care about what he has to say. He experiences this firsthand on his first day at the guild, where everyone laughs him off and goes about their business after he makes a scene and, failing to read the atmosphere, gets rebuffed again when he asks to be friends with them all.
• The Time of Myths: There is an occasionally mentioned period known as the "Dark Ages" where Ether Gear originated from. There's also the case of "Mother", a Mysterious Watcher and Physical God who was supposedly seen by an explorer ages ago, but anyone who claims to have seen her now is laughed off as a lunatic.
• Time Skip:
  • A relatively minor one in Chapter 133 since only seven days of in-universe time pass during the skip, but it's notable in that the Edens Zero crew spends the whole week training in a VR space that compresses the week to feel like a month. The end result is that every character has taken several more levels in badass than they otherwise would have, with many characters learning how to Overdrive like Shiki.
  • The Aoi War arc ends with a three-year skip.
• Time Travel:
  • Played with in regards to the Chronophage. When the crew visit the planet Norma, they find themselves in the Norma of 50 years in the past. After they leave, they find that they didn't go back in time; rather, the Chronophage devoured the last 50 years of the planet's time, effectively erasing the present Norma and leaving a past version in its place. The older Weisz that Rebecca and Happy knew (as well as anyone else from Norma) evacuated before the Chronophage arrived. The ones they met, including the younger Weisz who joins them, now exist in the same present without any risk of a paradox.
  • Played straight with Rebecca's Ether Gear, Cat Leaper, which lets her use Mental Time Travel to jump back to an earlier point in time—which she's unconsciously done 29 times throughout her life, unable to remember until Shiki's gravity allows her to have a Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory.
• Tomato in the Mirror: When Shiki's future self is sent 20,000 years into the future, the doctors treating him ask for his name. Shiki's labored attempts at a reply instead come out as slurred sounds. Judging by the crazed glare in his eyes, he realizes the sounds are similar to another name he knows:
  "...ki... Ji...gi... Shi...... Zhi...ki...ggy...gy...gy... Zi...ggy..."
• Tongue-Tied: In the Lendard arc, when Ziggy attempts to tell Shiki and Pino the name of the true enemy who's been controlling him, it comes out as an indecipherable sound.
• Torso with a View: Law suffers this courtesy of getting stabbed by Laguna's Ice Brand sword. Being an android, though, he's able to keep fighting.
• Torture Cellar: Jinn and Kleene were taken to one when they were Kidnapped for Experimentation by Müller, who tied Kleene up to a post and forced her to watch as he cut Jinn to pieces with a chainsaw.
• A Tragedy of Impulsiveness: Shiki's impatience to face Shura alone and refusal to listen to his crewmates that it would be risky ends with Shura attacking the ship, critically injuring Sister and Hermit, and kidnapping Witch. He almost makes the same mistake again when he wants to go rescue Witch by himself, but Jinn and Couchpo manage to reign the furious Shiki in and convince him to rendezvous with the infiltration team first.
• Tragic Dream: Ziggy's goal to find Mother was simply so he could regain his lost memories, but it took him so long that by the time he found Shiki, he found himself too old to carry on and retired, dying without ever achieving his dream. He eventually learns his true identity from the Big Bad who resurrected him, but his memories are still lost.
• Trailers Always Spoil: For the second season of the Edens Zero anime, it spoils a major plot point of the Belial Gore arc; Shiki's death from Drakken Joe. Less impactful spoilers introduces Kleene battling Homura, including all of Drakken Joe's Elemental Four.
• Trapped in the Past: While trying to get to Universe Zero from the future with Etherion, Ziggy's course was altered by a Chronophage and sent him some 20,100 years in the past with his memories almost completely wiped, including how to travel through time, which leaves him stuck there in Universe 1 (and all other timelines because of the ripple effect across the Multiverse).
• Tron Lines: When a person uses Ether Gear, parts of their body—most commonly their arms—become covered in glowing lines of Ether, indicating their similarity to a machine.
• True Art Is Angsty: The points in the story that get the most widespread attention and acclaim tend to be when the story is at its absolute bleakest, namely the three-chapter period in the Belial Gore arc where Drakken Joe and his crew defeat the heroes, drag them to a dark tunnel, hack off Weisz's arm, shoot Shiki dead, and leave Rebecca in a Heroic BSoD for a week. While many readers correctly predicted that it would lead to Rebecca's Traumatic Superpower Awakening of her time leaping power and undoing all of it, some have been split between those who enjoyed Mashima's the oppressively dark storytelling while it lasted, and those who wished the rest of the story was like that.
• Underestimating Badassery:
  • The Rogue Out soldiers think Homura is just a "girl in a bootleg kimono" when she offers to stay behind and fight them while Shiki goes after Sister (keep in mind that earlier they had seen her slice a missile in half). When we next see them, the Rogue Out soldiers are on the ground while Homura doesn't so much as have a hair out of place.
  • Ziggy doesn't really take Jaguar seriously as a threat in the Nero 66 arc, despite Nero's warnings that he's on par with them. This winds up costing him Killer and Brigandine, though he's able to rebuild them later.
• Underground City: Due to the planet Norma's climate causing giant earth ether pillars to fall from the sky, its people built the city underground.
• Unreliable Expositor: After Ziggy drops the multiple bombshell reveals of his true identity and the factoring of Time Travel into the story, Shiki and the overhearing Hermit and Sister immediately note that, even if they take it all as the truth, several things either don't add up or clearly aren't being elaborated on. Ziggy himself admits this, but also adds they don't need to know more than what he's already told them. When "Grandpa" Ziggy regains control of the body, he states even he hasn't remembered his life before reaching Universe 1, so he can't confirm or deny whether his possessed self was telling the truth about his true identity.
• Upgrade vs. Prototype Fight: This winds up happening to the Edens Zero itself, which turns out to be a prototype for the Edens One, helmed by Captain Connor and commanded by the Not Quite Dead—and evil—Demon King Ziggy. This ship also includes its own counterparts to the Four Shining Stars called the Four Dark Stars, who are said to be superior to their predecessors. When the two ships duke it out, the Zero suffers an interstellar Curb-Stomp Battle from the One, and only gets out in one piece thanks to Elsie Crimson.
• Vehicle Title: "Edens Zero" is the name of the Demon King's battleship, which is inherited and used by Shiki and his friends.
• Victory by Endurance: Law attempts this in the final arc when he and Laguna are deadlocked by each other's powers (Laguna getting fried by Law's electricity, and Law shorting out over Laguna's water), with Law confident that Laguna will be electrocuted to death first. Laguna defies this entirely by Overdriving into an ice-based form that better adapts to the electricity.
• Villainous Breakdown: The final Arc Villain of the Reunion arc goes through this. At first, Müller feels prepared in facing off against Shura and Shiki, but quickly panics when it turns into a Curb-Stomp Battle in their favor. As a last resort, Müller deploys his drones to destroy the surface of Nero 1. Once that plan fails, Müller loses his mind in a desperate attempt to seize Rebecca's Time Ether before getting his entire body destroyed and is given a "The Reason You Suck" Speech over how he can't control Xenolith's powers.
• Virtue Is Weakness: As he kills Shiki after triggering him over his own mistreatment of the Skeleton Army, Law taunts him for letting something like get to him.
• We Hardly Knew Ye:
  • Subverted in the Nero 66 arc with Killer and Brigandine, who seem like a throwaway villains when they get demolished in the Nero 66 arc with little fanfare, but they're repaired and upgraded after the Time Skip, getting more characterization and a bigger showcase of his abilities in the Lendard arc.]]
  • In the final arc, Lightning Law receives very little characterization outside of being one of Void's followers, and he's destroyed a small handful of chapters after he's introduced.
• Weaksauce Weakness: Shiki and Homura discover that they can't use Ether Gear when their hands and arms are restrained by something as simple as rope. Strangely enough, they were never taught this by Ziggy and Valkyrie. Losing the associated limb seems to permanently cripple Ether Gear use. The older Weisz, for example, can't use Machina Maker due to having a prosthetic right hand, while in a Bad Future, Rebecca loses the ability to use Cat Leaper due to the loss of her legs (unlike the others, her ether gathers in her feet—this implies that she would lose her ether powers if bound by the ankles instead).
• Wham Episode:
  • Chapter 101: Ziggy is revealed to be alive... and out to conquer the universe. Declaring to Shiki and his previous Four Shining Stars his intention of destroying them.
  • Chapter 166: Witch sacrifices herself to save the Edens Zero crew.
  • Chapter 169: The chapter ends three years later.
  • Chapter 172: Rebecca's actions not only involve leaping through time (by which point Noah says she's done it over 400 times), but also branching into Alternate Futures where significant elements differ (this explians the two—soon to be three—Captain Connors she's seen to date). She's so far done it twice: when she hit the Reset Button on their raid on Belial Gore, and when she convinced Shiki to evacuate Nero 66.
  • Chapter 183: Elsie Crimson's real name is Elsie Le Lendard, as in the same planet that Ziggy has taken over and is using to manufacture armies of robots, and which the Shiki/Elsie/Holy alliance is currently attacking.
  • Chapter 203: A two-fer. The barely-alive Shiki in the 20,000 year Flash Forward struggling to say his name to the aliens who saved him, only to ultimately end up calling himself Ziggy, followed up by the now-unmasked Ziggy in the present revealing that he's actually that same Shiki, from 20,000 years in the future.
  • Chapter 215: The Hidden Villain and true Big Bad controlling Ziggy is revealed to be the Edens One itself.
• Wham Shot:
  • Chapter 167: Rebecca, while consoling Shiki in his room after Witch's death, begins to take her top off. Cue a full page of half of Rebecca's body cracking as a result of a futile attempt to time leap multiple times to save Witch but failing.
  • Chapter 169: The chapter ends three years later.
  • Chapter 203: Ziggy's mechanical skull face being shattered by Shiki's attack...only to reveal a human face beneath it. An older Shiki's face.
  • Chapter 206: Holy squeezes her way into what she and Jinn believe to be the core of Deadend Crow's gigantic android body... only to her confusion seeing her fellow Oración Seis Interstellar Cure casually sitting in the room like he was waiting for her the whole time.
  • Chapter 224: The end of the chapter has the Universe 0 Draken Joe and his cronies intimidating a debtor. The debtor in question is Homura, showing that not everyone has better lives in Universe 0.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Humans generally tend not to view robots and digital beings as actual people, at best being indifferent to their troubles, and at worst damaging, abandoning, and scrapping them without a care (shown poignantly with Hermit's backstory). Ziggy raised Shiki to actively look past such labels, Rebecca learned to do the same from a young age when Happy was rebuilt as a machine, and Homura was raised by Valkyrie, who ended up treating her much better than her real mother, who abandoned her.
• The Worf Effect: Universe Zero's Müller is built up as being stronger than ever before since he stole the gravity power of Xenolith, the King of Gravity and mentor of Ziggy, one of the universe's ultimate warriors. When pit against Shiki and Shura, however, he proves to have less than basic skill in actually using that power in battle, and is thrashed without so much as throwing a punch.
• World of Buxom: Like Fairy Tail before it, all women who come of age are endowed with massive boobs. Sylph who was modest, develops over the Time Skip.
• World Tree: Guilst is home to a gargantuan tree called Mechdrasil that is visible from space, and whose roots cover the entire planet's surface. Due to this, its entire civilization is built on its branches.
• Wretched Hive: The planet Guilst is an Outlaw Town where all manners of illegal activity are committed freely.
• Wutai: Homura's home planet Oedo looks like feudal Japan.
• You Are Too Late: This occurs in the Sun Jewel arc when the crew discovers Valkyrie has been Dead All Along for the past three years, meaning Homura's search for her was All for Nothing.
• Your Days Are Numbered: By the time he first found Shiki, Ziggy already realized he only had a few years of functionality left in him, which is part of the reason why he called off the search for Mother.

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