Shout Out / Guardian Tales

Guardian Tales is a game that loves its shout-outs.

Very much a work in progress. Expect spoilers.

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World 1

• World 1-2
  • Loraine outright says the famous "It's dangerous to go alone" line before giving you a phone, and then immediately says she'll be your annoying fairy.
• World 1-3
  • If only Mad Panda didn't take an arrow to the knee, he could've fought off the Knight and Loraine...
• World 1-4
  • The key acquisition here are the Pegasus Sneakers which allow you to run, referencing the Pegasus Boots featured in many Zelda games.
• World 1-5
  • Because it couldn't get any more blatant, you wind up pulling the "Master Blade" out of a pedestal at one point, and then a female Link Expy shows up and asks for it... after the Blacksmith has already tried to "improve" it, so she gets a laser cannon instead.
• World 1-6
  • The solution to the Lost Girl quest is very similar to how you complete Thieves Town: Bring the NPC follower to a room with light shining in it and then have her walk into that light.
• World 1-7
  • The Konami Code shows up as the solution for a puzzle in the Lost Woods maze area.

World 2

• The Iron Teatan's design very much looks like a mix of The Iron Giant and the Steel Titan from Live A Live. Its theme Iron Teatan even sounds somewhat similar to Go! Go! Steel Titan!!.
• World 2-3
  • When you ask Marianne if you could pilot the Iron Teatan, she quips back with "In your wildest dreams! I'm Amuro!" In the Japanese script, it's more of a parody of one of Amuro's lines: "No, because I can use the Iron Teatan best!"
• World 2-5
  • When Marianne calls in her Mini-Mecha army, the Invader's reaction is "It's a bird! It's a plane!"
• The entire "Rising Force" side quest is one massive Dragon Ball reference. This gets amplified further in World 2 Nightmare where the Invader fought in that quest, now named Furiza demands you bring Dragon the next time you come by for a rematch.

World 3

• Being a magic school under siege from ghosts, World 3 in general takes a lot of cues from Harry Potter and Ghostbusters.
• World 3-3 (Chapter ending):
  • A pair of twin kids do a Heroic Sacrifice that results in them turning to stone. No, not those twins.

World 4

• The entire world's setting draws heavily from Mad Max, with biker enemies and the final boss of the world being a High-Speed Battle just to drive the point home.
• The Nightmare story of the Desert of Madness is a reference to a Spongebob Squarepants episode; more specifically, it's a Whole-Plot Reference to "Sandy, Spongebob and the Worm", where your team has to take down a Desert Bull Worm that's terrorizing the desert villages, complete with the "push it somewhere else" line.
  • The Nightmare story ends with what basically amounts to a Pokémon battle between the Bull Worm and a Sandmonster you tamed earlier, complete with Marvin as the trainer issuing commands to Sandy.

World 5

• World 5 itself appears to be one massive shout-out to Live A Live's Imperial China chapter: an old master wants to pass down his great martial art to his three disciples, later dying after overexerting himself, this time around though none of the disciples die from an ambush, one of the disciples (you) choose who'll become the Master and 5th Champion by training with them the most, and all disciples participate in inflicting the final blow onto the chapter antagonist.
• The Ultimate Fire Ice Bomb is very reminiscent of Popp's great but dangerous Medoroa spell, formed with a fire spell on one hand and an ice spell on another.
• World 5's Nightmare plot is basically Shaolin Soccer but dodgeball instead.
  • The character of Danpei, the dodgeball coach, is blatantly a grownup version of the titular character from the manga Honoo no Doukyuuji: Dodge Danpei.

World 6

World 7

• A bunch of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers knock-offs show up in the race as very minor side characters. The Sixth Ranger shows up in the Nightmare story, complete with the Dragon Flute. No robots, however: the flute winds up summoning Vishuvac instead.
• Hyper appears in one stage, sleeping and dreaming about being stranded on an island and needing to acquire instruments to wake up a fish.
• One side quest features expies of Marcille and Chilchuck as they task you with gathering monster ingredients for anti-petrification food.

World 8

• When you're presenting evidence during the trial, you'll yell out OBJECTION!
• At one point, you find a literal Killer Rabbit that you get past via Holy Hand Grenade, just like they did in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
• Another one from Monty Python and the Holy Grail is the Bridge of Death sidequest.

World 9

• In a secret passage in the cave on the first level, you run into a woman who's trying to get back to Columbia via a reality tear.
• There are a couple of points in the world where you sneak around in cardboard boxes.
• There are two brothers that are part of a sidequest in the Rah Empire. One is a Living Armor and the other is a human, and they send you to fetch something called the Alchemist's Stone to change one of them back...more specifically, to change the human back into a Living Armor, as it turns out they were both originally Living Armors. To drive the point home, they then introduce themselves as the Rusty Metal Alchemists.
• At one point, an NPC gives you a request to get some soup. The guy you have to get it from is basically the Soup Nazi, complete with the famous line.
• At the end of the world, the Big Bad throws you into the future similar to what happens in Samurai Jack.
• At one point, you run into a tuxedo-clad figure known as Jay Katsby.
• On the fifth level, you pass by a seemingly innocuous blue telephone booth. When you replay the level, you find out this "telephone booth" is Bigger on the Inside...
• In World 9-3 Nightmare, you meet esteemed private investigator Jercule Pierrot as he leaves aboard the Orient Express bound for Dungeon Kingdom.

World 10

• World 10-2
  • You can find a secret area where Hyper has been sleeping during the entire Time Skip, although grabbing the star piece here wakes her up early.
• World 10-3
  • Future Princess does a "Mission: Impossible" Cable Drop at one point, complete with the not-quite theme itself.

World 11

• World 11-1
  • Sohee tells the Invaders to "Say hello to my little friend!" as she blasts them with her energy cannon. Then she comes up with this when faced with a Super Invader shrugging off everyone's attacks:
    Sohee: <Playername>! Say hello to your little friend! *throws the Cosmic Destroyer to the knight*
• World 11-5
  • You can find Ranpang's hideout, which contains volleyballs dressed up as Dragon Talon clan members, with the Knight's basically being Wilson wearing a Guardian helmet.
  • The Boss Rush is done Mega Man style: Walk up to tube and pick which boss you want to fight. In this case, it's two rooms with 7 bosses total. Bosses do not provide refills on their own but there are recovery shrines before the rooms.
  • In between the two Boss Rush rooms is a reference to Omega: A quadrupedal patrolling mecha that will absolutely obliterate you (in this case by turning the room into a Bullet Hell) should you get caught by it and do not have a seriously powerful party or cheese strat.
• World 11-6
  • When the Final Boss has nearly been finished off for good, it'll start spamming a greatly weakened version of its meteor attack, similar to the weak Meteo spell that Zeromus uses. In an ironic twist, the boss invokes this attack by praying, not unlike another character in the other famous instance of Meteor in that series.
• There's a puzzle sidequest involving special items that create blue and orange linked portals to develop unconventional solutions to normally impossible problems. Yes, the cake is still a lie.

World 12

• The entirety of World 12-1 plays out like a level from Super Robot Wars.
• World 12-2 essentially plays out like a Grand Theft Auto game, more specifically the first three games, up to and including a Wanted rank depending on how much you've gone killing everything and everyone in your path.
• There's one moment in 12-2 where you encounter a blonde belittling a man named Louis for not knowing where he'd parked which results in him gunning her down in the parking lot.
• In 12-9, when you blow up the helicopter, you can say either "You're terminated!", or "Yippee-ki-yay, you damn tin can!".

World 13

• Four siblings that you find earlier in World 12 as a sidequest were also in Lilith Tower when it got taken over by terrorists. Two of the three sisters manage to get away, but one sister and their only younger brother get trapped. In an effort to shield him from the terrors currently surrounding them, the remaining sister tells her younger brother that they're now taking part in a hide and seek contest, and if he manages to hide for a long period of time and gain 1000 points, he can have a tank as a prize. He hides, while the sister acts as a scapegoat for the terrorists as she gets caught by them. If you manage to find and get the kid to the safehouse, his sister's fate is left unknown until the ending of World 13 where it's shown that she came out of the building safe and sound, unlike the film it's referencing.
• At one point in 13-5, an Invader's corpse drops down on their fellow Invaders with a note on them reading "Now I have a machine gun, Ho-Ho-Ho." Soon after a guy bursts in, takes out the others, and shouts "Yippee ka yay, you mothers!"
• Before climbing the window in World 13-7, one of the decisions is "Tell me I'm cool as Tim Cruise."

World 14

• In the plaza, there's a gacha going on that seems to involve expies of various in-game characters for the game You-Gee-King. Someone even laments that they got Cursed Guardian Alef instead of Future Empress Lilith.
• The quest involving a former dishwasher who suddenly became a competent cook and saved a failing restaurant overnight, with you spying on the dishwasher on behalf of the jealous head chef. You can even opt to report and successfully have the dishwasher fired for letting a rat into the kitchen.
• You can go spelunking with an Indiana Jones Expy.
• The Unexpected Gameplay Change level, with you playing an endless runner-styled section while driving a certain car to the beat of... well, discount Eurobeat, is a big reference to a certain anime.
• Some of the vampire NPCs bear a resemblance to Lady Dimitrescu.

World 15

• The Secret Lab stage is basically Among Us in all but name.
• In various stages there are sections where you have to run away from killer defense robots called AMMI until you can activate an EMP device to destroy them. There's even a QTE you can do to prevent it from killing you, but only rarely.

World 16

• In the Temple of Lightning stage, you can come across a tracksuit-wearing android who's very bad at communicating with others, playing a guitar and singing. Chasing after her afterwards even lets you see the parodical version of the iconic "glitch" with the appropriate scream.
• The Best Clone Contest sidequest. It's basically a standard Fall Guys round, complete with jank collision physics. The Knight is even wearing a costume that resembles the game's sentient jellybeans.

World 17

• The "Even Faster than Lightning" sidequest has you, Lana, and her mother Lala teaming up to save any stranded civilians within the Demon World capital. At one point, the three of you come across a part of the map that has an ammo transport vehicle that's about to blow, with a bunch of civilians that wouldn't be able to escape in time before the blasts reach them. You and Lana run into the scene recklessly but you both end up almost getting blown to bits... if not for Lala activating a special bloodline ability that allows her to, as you can guess by the sidequest name, "be even faster than lightning" for a short period of time. Cue her saving the both of you, along with all the civilians, to another remixed tune of the Demon World theme with an accompanying track that is oddly reminiscent of "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" by Eurythmics.

Side and Short Stories

• 21 Kanterbury Street
  • The name and general plot are references to 21 Jump Street, albeit Marina and her Absurdly Powerful Student Council are a clear reference to Kill la Kill.
  • The stage select screen and intro are taken straight from Mega Man X.
  • Kendo Club Kai:
    • You find a girl in a yellow jumpsuit at one point and go on to parody a scene from the film. She laments not being able to find a sword and decides to get a five-dollar milkshake.
    • Kai introduces himself as KAI ZONVOLT, THE SWORD THAT GUARDS MARINA.
• Once Upon a Time in Burywood
  • The films starring Eugene are obvious references to The Dark Knight, Kingsman, and Star Wars. Invader Quest is a send-up of Dragon Quest with the art basically being "imagine Erdrick but an Invader".
• Welcome to the Succubus Cafe
  • Upon defeating Carmen's henchmen, the game declares them RETIRED.
    • On that note, during the final stage of the side story, Alef deals what can only be called "7 Page Adi" against Carmen, ending with an "Adios Muchacha" to top it all off.
  • At one point, you are asked by two girls that totally aren't Tifa and Aerith about why they are having so much trouble in combat. The game even shows them using the ATB system, which you then promptly tell them to ignore.
  • Another subplot has expies of Geralt and Yennefer appearing.
• Rue the Red Christmas Day
  • A skier shows up scared that a yeti is going to eat him right before a yeti zooms by and kidnaps him, a reference to SkiFree.

Kama-ZONE

• A lot of Kama-ZONE's artifacts are either shout-outs or references to various memes and tropes:
  • The "Orichalcum Spike" is a LEGO, referencing how those things hurt like a motherfucker if you're unfortunate enough to step on one because of their sharp edges.
  • The "Disputable Dress" is a reference to "The Dress". In-game, it's shown as half white-gold and half black-blue and has a Set Bonus with two different monocles that go with the dress.
  • The "Stealth Suit MG-2" is a cardboard box.
  • "Unfinished Bread" is basically Toast of Tardiness according to the description.
  • The Sponge with Pants is Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
  • You can get a crowbar called the "Free Man's Steel Talon".
  • The Rapture Breaker is a wrench that is said to have sunken a glorious ancient city.
  • The Power Rangers's helmets are available, and you can get them signed for extra power.
  • One of the artifacts is basically an Apple Airpod, and you get a power boost if you complete the set.
  • The Hunter's Trophy and Hunter of Hunters artifacts are keychains depicting a crew member and an imposter, respectively. The latter will even eliminate the former if both are in your inventory if you complete a combat encounter.
• There is a random event where you visit a business called Amy's Cake Company. You can spend 50 coins to purchase a cursed cake artifact from them.

Motion Comics

• Poker Face: When Miya almost burns the poor 1-star character playing poker with her for winning against her, they sprawl on the floor in a Yamcha pose, complete with a crater for some reason.

Characters and Costumes

• A few of the earlier Normal (base 1*) Heroes, generally being one-off side characters, are suspiciously similar to other famous characters:
  • Hyper is basically female Link, right down to her backstory. Hyper's design has been altered for the later Japanese release though, presumably to avoid copyright issues from Nintendo.
  • Maria and Lisa aren't quite as blatant shoutouts to the Mario Brothers but their backstories make it obvious.
  • Dragon is one to Goku, with an ability that parodies the new form Goku gets in Super. Dragon also gets toned down for the Japanese release, switching out his long, blonde spiky hair during his power-up for a shorter, orange spiky one.
• Marianne's mech comes very close in appearance to the Lagann as you gain evolution levels (JP removes this reference). She also declares that "Teatan science is the world's finest!" Her JP illustration also imitates a certain high school vigilante's pose.
• Rachel was inspired by some comic about so-called "pirates" that sail around & fight evil in search of adventure. When you return after the Time Skip, she even asks if you were off learning to use Emperor's Haki.
• Sohee:
  • Sohee has a Ghostbusters motif between her early evolution/weapon designs and her role in World 3's plot. She even outright gets a Ghostbuster skin.
  • She's eaten 4797 breads. This comes up in a quiz in 21 Kanterbury Street as well.
  • One of her touch quotes has her ask "What do you want?" in Klingon.
• If you tap on her sprite while in Heavenhold, Idol Captain Eva would sometimes mention certain idol singers from a faraway land that sing to protect their school, and that she admires them for doing so.
• If you tap on his sprite while in Heavenhold, you apparently ask Girgas if:
  • You can get a wish after collecting seven balls. (JP dialogue)
  • You can get a wish after collecting seven... things, all the while asking you what the hell you're talking about. (EN dialogue)

Other

• When your teammates die, you lug their coffins around instead of their dead bodies.
• Cloud Two-handed Sword. Enough said.
• The game features a couple of prominent Bland Name Products: The setting's chat app is called Facebreak, while the various branches of the shop are part of a company called Kamazon^note Kamazon at least makes sense in context as one of the setting's gods is named Kamael, who founded the company in the first place..
• The Training Room that is located at the bottom of Heavenhold contains four turtles and a rat, with each turtle having a unique stripe^*Fitting that Ninjas get one of the sneakier references, isn't it?.

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