You're in a school. Here, go fight this person with a sword you just pulled out of your friend's chest.
Utopia Academy (later renamed to a City of Rakuen) was
a Journal Roleplay based on Shitsurakuen, only this time, characters are pulled into the school from many other worlds and are forced to fight if they want any hope of regaining the ten memories that were arbitrarily removed from them, or of returning home. It ran for a couple of years, before concluding in 2013.
Has no relation to the 2017 video game Rakuen, even if it uses the exact same name for its Dreamwidth domain.
Utopia Academy provides examples of:
- Bifauxnen: One of Tougyu's ten lost memories is that Sora is a girl. He rediscovers this at least once a week.
- Cast Herd:
- There is a truly unreasonable number of characters from Shitsurakuen for only one week of play.
- The Code Geass cast is getting there. Weeks later and they're still in second place, which is truly impressive considering the drastic gap in playable characters.
- Defeat Means Friendship: Apparently the most popular way of making alliances or acquiring new Weapons. Also played entirely straight in that Weapons have to transfer to their victorious opponent.
- Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: There are eight elements, each with their respective weaknesses and resistances.
- Empathic Weapon: Like in Shitsurakuen, the students are the Weapons and feel any damage done to their weapon forms. And of course, like the original game, breaking the weapon causes traumatic comas.
- Hopeless Boss Fight:
- Challenging one of the teachers to a match will generally trigger one of these.
- Round Zero featured a thirty-foot-long tiger with laser vision, which only two weapons were able to harm. Neither of them had much of a chance anyway.
- Incredibly Lame Pun: The crack comm was named "Crackuen".
- In Name Only: There are a number of differences between how Exaclan works in the game and in canon. This has not escaped the notice of the Shitsurakuen characters in the game.
- Joke Item: Kotarou's weapon form is a pendant. Russel's is a shield.
- Justified Tutorial: Before arriving in the game, everyone has a "dream" of a creepy shadow version of themselves teaching them how to fight and use tokens.
- Laser-Guided Amnesia:
- Characters lose ten memories upon entering the game. What quantifies "one memory" isn't really explained. One year of your life or the names of all of your loved ones are somehow just as meaningful as the exact number of pancakes you had for breakfast one morning.
- Conveniently, everyone from Shitsurakuen has forgotten how to win Exaclan once and for all.
- Nerf: Everyone's superpowers are now gone. On the plus side, they get weapon upgrades that are reminiscent of what they could once do.
- Real Life Writes the Plot: As Shitsurakuen is still ongoing, its characters forgetting how to win Exaclan is a handy way for players from that series to avoid elements that may be contradicted by later canon, and then incorporate those elements once they are revealed.
- Revive Kills Zombie: If a character is taken from a post-death canonpoint, healing abilities harm them instead.
- Shout-Out: The introductory video explaining Battle Roya-- ...er, Exaclan.
- Warrior Heaven: Characters are split on whether being trapped in a school that forces its students to fight each other is a fun break or a special level of hell.
