Satsuki is an amnesiac girl who wakes up in a Driftworld and teams up with a spirit cat, Tarte, to claim a Heart Fragment containing her memories. The fragment reveals that she was once a trumpeter, Karen, who had the grand ambition of performing at the Super Live with her friends. Although she manages to return to the real world, Satsuki/Karen discovers that she's a ghost, and the only way to regain the rest of her memories and her humanity is to find all seven of her Heart Fragments, all of which are guarded by powerful Gangers.
The gameplay is a hybrid of Action RPG and tile turn-based mechanics. While the player starts each map in ARPG Mode with only a subset of their skills available. Upon landing or receiving a preemptive strike, the game will shift to SRPG Mode, where all skills are available, but all combat is turn-based. The dungeon crawling is roguelite in that Karen loses her equipment if she's defeated, but if she finds that equipment later, they'll gain a few levels to compensate.
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This game contains examples of:
- And the Adventure Continues: Karen defeats the Ganger who took her first fragment, but she still has three more fragments to obtain before she can complete herself and there's still the question of who turned Karen into a ghost and rewrote the past. The anchor in Mika's house tells the player to hold on to their save file in preparation for the sequel, Absented Age: Ghostbound.
- Awesome, but Impractical:
- Rush type skills allow characters to move several tiles, but if they're attacked immediately afterwards, they get toppled, preventing them from moving to another tile and using rush attacks for a few turns. However, there's an amulet that can prevent this drawback, making Rush skills safer to use for cameo characters only.
- The Nikkari Aoe has an excellent ATK cap at 23, but Karen cannot easily use it because as a ghost, she'll continuously take psychic damage from it. Fortunately, it's possible to give this weapon to Iris in her skill tree, and she won't take damage from it due to being a robot.
- Being Evil Sucks: The Karen Ganger reveals that deep down, she's ashamed of having to harm humans by eating their Heart Fragments to sate her Horror Hunger, but as a Ganger, she can't fight her nature. She allows the real Karen to Mercy Kill her, but not before requesting that Karen finds a way to save the other Gangers.
- Big Bad: There isn't a clear main antagonist at first, but after Karen completes the Park Driftworld, her most important Heart Fragment is stolen by a more intelligent than average Ganger. Said Ganger is the leader of a pack of weaker Gangers, and intends to steal Karen's identity and use her powers to merge reality and the Driftworlds, all to make it easier for Gangers to consume people's Heart Fragments. However, the Gangers aren't responsible for Karen becoming a ghost in the first place, which is a mystery left for the sequel.
- Break Meter: Ganger bosses and the Secret Boss have a Shield meter that prevents them from entering turn-based combat. The player has to deplete the boss's in action-based combat to force them into turn-based combat, where it'll be easier for the player to continuously attack them. However, once their Shield gauge refills during turn-based combat, the boss will force the battle into action mode again.
- Brutal Honesty: Hayato doesn't mince words if he finds a flaw in a music score. He's also not afraid to call out the Brass Band Club leader, Rumi, for turning the club into her own personal posse rather than a place to pursue musical passions. This leads to him and Karen becoming friends, since this shows that he takes music as seriously as Karen does.
- Cats Hate Water: Cat spirits cannot swim and are weak to water damage. However, Light Enchant grants spirits the ability to float, allowing them to at least cross pools of water safely.
- Charged Attack: Some actions, such as Astrake's Vastel Rush and Karen's extra Summonstone action, require the player to hold down B to charge the skill to one or two levels. However, this will still activate the default skill first unless the player also holds down L before holding down B, which skips the default action.
- Church Militant: Spirits like Tarte and Hoop hunt down Gangers on behalf of the Elicio Church, since the Gangers are threatening the safety of the Driftworld. Unfortunately, the church also wants to suppress non-Ganger abnormalities, such as Karen, who is a pseudo-ghost.
- Clothing Damage: As Karen/Satsuki uses up turns and takes damage, her armor loses durability until she's forced to unequip it. This is shown not only through percentage values, but also her body portrait having torn clothes.
- Club Stub: The Sado Club (tea ceremony) is in danger of being disbanded because the vice-principal framed them for smoking, causing all the members to leave. The club advisor, Mr. Minami, recruits Karen, Hayato, and Suzu in exchange for letting them refashion the Sado Club into the Sado Band Club and allowing them to practice their music.
- Combos:
- Astrake can perform follow up skills if he uses a specific sequence of skills first. Unlike in his home game of RealityMinds, he has to perform the combinations by himself rather than rely on a party member.
- Iris can perform a three-stage physical combo in both ARPG and SRPG modes. The third and final action depends on her current elemental mode.
- Crippling Overspecialization: Despite being a Squishy Wizard, Astrake's default skills have surprisingly poor elemental coverage, forcing him to rely on equipment in order to access more elements. Unfortunately, unlike in Story Mode, Arcade Mode doesn't allow the player to bring their equipment into the dungeon, meaning Astrake is always going to be set up with a limited selection of elements.
- Dean Bitterman: The vice-principal is a strict disciplinarian who yells at the Sado Club for focusing on band activities than their actual modus operandi of doing tea ceremonies. It turns out he framed the club for using cigarettes on campus in order to get the club shut down, all so he can convert their building into a museum.
- Dual Boss:
- Yayoi and Hoop fight the party at the midpoint of the Green Corridor.
- The boss of the Steel Corridor is a pair of Oil Pit Squids.
- Enemy Scan: Enemies information can be obtained by using the Scan Baton on them. This allows the player to view a basic description and weakness, though they'll have to return to Mika's house and read the Monstropedia to learn more about specific enemy skills and traits.
- Evolving Weapon: Every time the player picks up a piece of equipment that they already have, the equipment's mastery increases and boosts its stats according to its growth rate. If the player dies, they lose anything they have equipped, but that same gear will gain a few mastery levels upon being picked up again.
- Final Boss: Karen Alias, the Ganger who took Karen's first Heart Fragment, is the last Ganger boss fought before the player can reach the ending scenes and credits.
- Final-Exam Boss: The Final Boss, Karen Alias, is immune to Foxtrot during ARPG Mode. However, various obstacles like iron balls, water pumps, auto-cannons, and logs will spawn, and the player has to remember how these obstacles work so they can use them against the boss, which will make the boss vulnerable to Foxtrot.
- Flash Step: Satsuki has the skill, Foxtrot, which does damage based on her agility and moves her forward by a certain distance or until she hits an enemy. This is also her default action in ARPG Mode, allowing her to quickly close the distance on enemies.
- Flunky Boss: All Arc Monsters can summon minions to assist them, though only some mandatory bosses, such as Canavarı Alias and Plumocrat, can do the same.
- Forceful Kiss: Karen Alias hits and forcefully kisses Tarte when he protests the real Karen losing the rest of her Heart Fragments and disappearing.
- "Freaky Friday" Flip: Astrake from RealityMinds is a cameo in Arcade Mode, but he's in Silvana's body, causing him to be affected by both kinds of gender-targeting effects.
- Guest Fighter:
- Astrake (in Silvana's body) from RealityMinds and Iris from Soaring Machinariae can be used in Arcade mode.
- In the postgame infinite dungeon, Parking Lot Depths, the player can summon an ally, Scale, who comes from Craft the Mapcrafter: Gathering Magic Words.
- Guest-Star Party Member:
- In the Warehouse Driftworld, Yayoi and Hoop will temporarily join as ally units during the final third of the dungeon. However, they end up getting separated near the end and won't show up again in reruns of the dungeon. They will also help in the Final Boss fight by summoning obstacles for Karen to use against the boss.
- The Parking Lot Depths and the Arcade Mode exclusive Nameless Tower allow Karen to use Summonstones to either summon an ally as a separate unit or have the ally temporarily replace Karen as the controllable character. The Parking Lot only has Scale as an ally while the Nameless Tower has Iris and Astrake.
- Heroic Mime: After becoming a amnesiac pseudo-ghost, Satsuki/Karen doesn't talk directly in the dialogue box, though she still gets dialogue choices. Subverted in the ending, where she has proper dialogue when participating in the Super Live, indicating that she's regaining her identity as Karen.
- Home Base: Mika's house is the base of operations in this game, where the player can upgrade their skill trees and manage the storage system. This is also the only place where Karen can materialize in the real world, at least until she learns how to materialize anywhere in the ending.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: Karen Alias merges the Driftworlds and the real world, but this allows the real Karen to use her full psychic powers, due to the presence of the real world.
- Horror Hunger: Gangers aren't inherently evil, but their hunger and the fact that they can only eat human Heart Fragments means they'll eventually degrade into ravenous predators.
- I Owe You My Life: Double subverted. Despite orders from the church to seal Karen into a dagger, Yayoi chooses to spare Karen after she exhausts herself saving him and Hoop from a Ganger. However, he later states that this is out of pragmatism, since Karen is stronger in the real world and could kill him in retaliation even when she's unconscious. Despite his pragmatic reasoning, he and Hoop still help Karen materialize in time for the Super Live after they work together to defeat Karen Alias, with no strings attached, which shows that his gratitude is genuine.
- Ignored Epiphany: Rumi is initially shocked that her mistreatment and jealousy of Karen caused the latter to leave the Brass Band Club, but after Karen starts a new band with her friends, Rumi goes back to despising Karen and becomes worse than before. After Karen is pronounced dead due to a time paradox, Rumi reveals that she's actually glad that Karen is gone and spray paints over Karen's missing person poster out of spite.
- In the Hood: At the start of the game, a mysterious hooded figure is seen leaving Karen's unconscious body. In the postgame, they resurface as a Superboss in the Warehouse Driftworld, and nothing significant is revealed about them even after using a Scan Baton on them. When they drop a gun, Tarte speculates that they're with the Elicio Church.
- Interface Screw:
- The confuse ailment scrambles controls and makes it possible to hit allies with attacks that normally ignore them.
- The blind ailment shrinks the viewing distance to a 3x3 square and also makes it possible to unleash friendly fire on allies.
- When Karen lured into a trap by a group of Gangers, she finds herself in a dungeon full of unbeatable enemies. Every time she dies, she loses something that makes her "Karen," which places a penalty on her. One of them makes the log only output garbled text and the item names. In the Final Boss fight, Karen Alias can glitch Karen's skills, causing them to be unusable while having garbled text.
- The Superboss's initial move is to lock out the player's menu for several turns, meaning the player will have to survive without items for a long period of time.
- Inventory Management Puzzle: The initial inventory and storage limits are 30 items each, though the former can be expanded with a Score of Collection while the latter can be expanded in Satsuki's skill tree. However, neither limit can be increased forever, with the inventory capping out at 60 and the storage capping out at 120.
- Jack of All Trades: Karen has the most balanced stats of the playable characters and has decent close and long-range skills. However, she isn't as specialized as Iris and Astrake in close and long-range combat respectively. She doesn't have a default close-range combo like Iris and has no default long-range option in ARPG Mode like Astrake. However, this works out for her because as the main story protagonist, she's going to be in a larger variety of situations than the Arcade characters.
- Jerkass Has a Point: Rumi points out that Karen's inability to be a team player hurts her music career because a trumpeter needs other players to complement them. While Karen acknowledges that this is a valid argument, Rumi is motivated by jealousy and refuses to accept the Sado Band Club, despite the latter being proof that Karen can thrive with the right team.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Although Yayoi and Hoop are condescending towards Tarte, they're surprisingly flexible about following the Elicio Church's orders. After Karen saves them, they decide to help her out of gratitude despite her being a target of the church. They even uphold their end of the deal and help Karen materialize in time for the Super Live despite all the flags indicating that they might backstab Karen.
- Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: The vice-principal is harsh on the Sado Band Club for causing noise with their activity even though they're supposed to be doing tea ceremony instead of music. While he initially seems like a strict school official who is just doing his job, he turns out to have an ulterior motive. He wants to tear down the Sado building in order to make room for a campus museum, and went as far as to frame the club for smoking. Even when Mr. Minami counters all of the vice-principal's arguments about the Sado Band Club's activities, the latter still tries to threaten to suspend the club members and ruin their permanent records.
- Laser-Guided Karma: The vice-principal is antagonistic towards Mr. Minami, the Sado Club advisor, to the point of assaulting the latter on campus. It turns out the vice-principal framed the Sado Club for smoking in order to get all the members to distrust each other and leave. After Karen, Hayato, and Suzu join the club and convert it into the Sado Band Club, Mr. Minami effortlessly shoots down all of the vice-principal's arguments about the club's noise level, making the latter look like a fool in front of the student body.
- Level-Up Fill-Up: Leveling up will instantly fill the characters' HP and MP, unless that level is gained from a Level Tonic in Arcade Mode.
- Little Bit Beastly: The Loup-garou enemy can inflict Beastized on Karen, which causes her to grow wolf ears. The ailment boosts her speed, but lowers her DEX and prevents her from using items.
- Loss of Identity: Without her Heart Fragments, Karen is in danger of losing her identity. What this means is that if the Gangers take her Heart Fragments, they can become "Karen" while the real one is doomed to wander the Driftworlds as a ghost. When a Ganger steals her first and most important fragment, it's considered closer to being Karen than Karen herself, making it so that the rest of the Heart Fragments gravitate towards the Ganger while rejecting the ghost Karen.
- Kick the Dog:
- Rumi spray paints over Karen's missing person poster to demoralize the Sado Band Club.
- When Mr. Minami protests the disbandment of the Sado Club that he's advising, the vice-principal hits him out of annoyance.
- Karen Alias hits and spitefully kisses Tarte, out of annoyance for the latter mourning the real Karen's apparent death.
- Knight Templar:
- The Elicio Church hunts down any Driftworld-related abnormalities regardless of their intent to harm. Unfortunately, they deem Karen an abnormality who must be captured because her psychic powers have the potential to devastate the city.
- Subverted with Yayoi and Hoop. While they initially try to capture Karen on behalf of the church, they're later willing to turn a blind eye to her abnormal existence after she saves them. They also realize that it would be more constructive to team up with her to defeat Gangers than to risk their lives trying to capture her and turn her into a living weapon.
- Magically Inept Fighter: Iris has the best close-range capabilities of the playable characters due to her "lead" combos, but she has poor MP growth and low MAG.
- Mental World: Near the end of the final dungeon, the talking flower reveals that the Sunken City map that Karen often arrives at is actually her Heart's Core, and her existence will be maintained as long as this place is safe from the Gangers. The flower claims that the image of a sunken city is deeply ingrained into Karen's memory and caused the map to look like this, but how she acquired this memory is unknown.
- Mighty Glacier: Some powerful enemies and bosses have the Slow trait, which forces them to act every 2 turns. However, later dungeons tend to have fewer Slow enemies while having enemies who hit just as hard at normal speed, implying that this trait was implemented for the sake of easing new players into the game.
- Mirror Boss: Karen Alias has many of Karen's basic skills, such as No Foot Rise, Power Move, Foxtrot, Backflip, and Blaze Blast. Unfortunately for the player, she also has exclusive skills, such as the ability to disable random skills.
- Mysterious Past: Mika had most of her memories stolen by the Gangers and somehow knew that Karen was trapped in the Driftworlds, but not much else about her is revealed in this game.
- The Needs of the Many: The Elicio Church is ruthlessly dedicated to stamping out spiritual abnormalities out of fear for the potential destruction they could cause. They want to seal Karen into a dagger in case she loses control of her vast psychic powers and destroy Amefuribashi.
- New Game Plus: In the postgame, the anchor in Mika's house allows the player to start a new game with carried over equipment mastery, skill trees, encyclopedias, inventory, storage, Driftworld Points, and high scores. The player can also choose to reset specific parts of their progress in exchange for Round Score.
- Nightmare Sequence: In the Warehouse Driftworld, Karen is captured by the Gangers and has a nightmare where they slowly take away her identity while her friends reject her existence. Eventually, she wakes up in her Heart's Core, where she meets the talking flower. The flower tells her that she only experienced a nightmare, but if she gets too absorbed into it and succumbs to her fear of rejection, it'll have become real due to her own belief.
- No-Sell:
- Although Iris identifies as female, she's a robot and is immune to the effects of gender targeting items
- Ruin Warden and Karen Alias are normally immune to taking shield gauge damage from Foxtrot, but they can become vulnerable if the player figures out the gimmick to weaken them.
- Not Me This Time: The Gangers are responsible for consuming the Heart Fragments of humans, but they didn't turn Karen into a ghost or rewrite reality so that people believe she died in a time paradox, and the true culprit is still unknown.
- Old Save Bonus: After the ending, the player will be sent back to Mika's house, where an anchor appears in the bathroom. The anchor is supposed to help the player transfer bonuses from their clear save to the sequel, Absented Age: Ghostbound.
- Opportunistic Bastard: Karen Alias states that the Gangers didn't turn Karen into a ghost and send her into the Driftworlds. Throughout the game, they try to take advantage of this situation by hunting down the Heart Fragments. Karen Alias plans on becoming the real Karen so she can merge the real world and Driftworld.
- Optional Boss: All Core dungeons have an Arc Monster near the end of the stage. These bosses are optional, but are also powerful enough to rival the actual Ganger boss of the dungeon. They are also the only enemies with 100% gem drop rates.
- Parrying Bullets: Iris can learn a skill that allows her to deflect certain projectiles with well-timed slashes in ARPG mode. Since this is a party skill, this allows other playable characters to perform the same action.
- Permanently Missable Content: Unlike other scannable bosses, the Final Boss cannot be rechallenged, meaning the player has only one chance to scan them.
- Puzzle Boss:
- The Dual Boss fight against the Oil Pit Squids is difficult to win through brute force, since the party is surrounded and each squid is powerful at close and mid range. However, there's a fire hydrant in the middle of the arena that can be used to knock them back, allowing the player to control the distance between the bosses.
- The boss of Park Driftworld Core, Ruin Warden, can only have its guard broken when it gets wet, causing it to short circuit. At first, there are water pumps to get the boss wet, but after it takes enough damage, the pumps disappear, forcing the player to find other means to drench it, such as spamming Foxtrot to push it into the water. It's also capable of using the surrounding water against the player in conjucntion with its electric skills.
- The Final Boss, Karen Alias, is also immune to all normal attempts to break her shield. However, her shield will either take massive damage or become vulnerable if the randomly spawned field obstacles are used against her.
- Randomly Generated Levels: Numbered floors all have random layouts and loot, though important maps such as boss arenas and checkpoints are predetermined.
- Revive Kills Zombie: Undead enemies take damage from healing, which means skills and items that can heal the enemy can be situationally useful.
- The Rival:
- Karen was initially part of the Brass Band Club, but quit because she was mistreated by the leader, Rumi. Karen then forms the Sado Band Club with Hayato and Suzu, which Rumi doesn't take kindly to because this means Karen can overshadow her again.
- Hoop, another cat spirit, mocks Tarte for being an underachieving spirit who can't find a human partner.
- Scoring Points: Whether the player completes a dungeon, leaves it before completion, or dies, they get a score that gets converted to DP. Each Arcade Mode dungeon records the highest score the player achieved, though Story Mode dungeons don't keep track of the highest score.
- Sequel Hook: Karen Alias reveals that the Gangers weren't the ones who turned Karen into a ghost, which means there's still an enemy out there. Additionally, the game ends with four out of seven Heart Fragments, indicating that the journey is only a little over half complete. Finally, the secret postgame boss states that they are investigating the "Lost World" and that their meeting with Karen isn't supposed to happen yet, implying that they will be an important character in the sequel.
- Socketed Equipment: Upper body and lower body armor can hold up to five Ectoplasms, which increase the stats separately from leveling the equipment up. The only way to remove Ectoplasm is to use Ecto-Cleaner.
- Squishy Wizard: Astrake has several offensive spells that don't require him to equip rings and has high MP and MAG growth, but his defenses and HP are low. Astrake also has reduced HP regen, meaning he has to rely more on his skills to maintain his HP.
- Sunken City: Every time Karen defeats a Ganger boss, she enters a map featuring several buildings partially submerged in water. The talking flower here allows her to pick one new Enchant skill every time she comes here. After she recovers from her nightmare segment, the flower reveals that this place is Karen's Heart's Core, which can maintain her existence even after the Gangers take her Heart Fragments. The sunken city tileset is also used for the entrance map of the Arcade Driftworlds.
- Superboss: Once the player acquires all the Arc Monster gems, they can return to the site of the final battle to challenge the hooded figure who appeared at the start of the Awakening Driftworld. This boss is deliberately designed to dwarf the Arc Monsters and the Final Boss in difficulty, since they have a barrier and healing skill that forces the player to optimize their DPS while surviving the boss's brutal attacks.
- Suspend Save: The game has an autosave feature for when players enter a map. However, if the map is in a Driftworld combat zone, loading the autosave will only work once. Any subsequent attempts to load it cause the player character to instantly die.
- Tall Poppy Syndrome: Karen was treated poorly by the rest of the Brass Band Club because the others didn't take club activities seriously, yet were jealous of Karen outperforming them.
- Time-Limit Boss: Beating the boss of an Arcade dungeon isn't mandatory to clear the level, but if the player wants to do so, they have to win within the time limit like all the other floors, or the game will automatically teleport them to the exit floor.
- Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay: While many games allow the player to use any combination of equipment, this game considers the consequences of upper and lower body armor combinations. Karen can equip boots with one-piece body armor, but not body armor that only covers her upper body, since this would leave certain areas exposed.
- Wistful Amnesia: Tarte notes that Karen used to be more talkative and passionate about music before becoming a pseudo-ghost. Karen spends much of the game second-guessing if she's the same person compared to her pre-amnesia state and if she truly has a good reason to want to reclaim her memories. This makes it difficult for Karen to use the church's necromancy technique to materialize herself, since she doesn't fully comprehend what her original self was like, at least until she remembers when she and her friends successfully pulled off a practice performance in the Sado Band clubroom.
- Worthy Opponent: Double subverted. Hoop acknowledges that Satsuki/Karen is a superb spirit master, but only so she can accuse Tarte of depending too much on the latter. In this case, it's less respect towards Karen and more an excuse to deny Tarte's victory in the Dual Boss fight. That said, she and Yayoi are at least pragmatic enough to form an Enemy Mine with Karen to defeat the Gangers and even uphold their end of the bargain with her, showing that the two do genuinely respect Karen.
- You Are Better Than You Think You Are:
- Hayato wonders if his attempt to stand up for Karen only made things worse for her, since she ended up leaving the Brass Band Club and now has no official music club to join. However, Karen reassures him that it's for the best, since she would be unhappy if she continued staying in the club and stifled her passion for music.
- In the Warehouse Driftworld, Karen wakes up from a nightmare where the Gangers stole every bit of her identity and her friends rejected her as a "fake." When she talks to the flower of her Heart's Core, the flower points out that even without her Heart Fragments, Karen is worthy of her identity and that she shouldn't fear rejection.
- Zerg Rush: Lategame dungeons and the hard versions of the Arcade dungeons have the Monster House mechanic, where a black portal can spawn a massive amount of enemies, who are automatically aggroed onto the party. Together, all these enemies are even more likely than most bosses to defeat careless players.
- Zero-Effort Boss:
- In the real world, Karen can unleash the full extent of her psychic powers, giving her massive stats and an overpowered moveset. This allows her to quickly defeat a Ganger boss, despite conventional wisdom stating that Gangers can only be defeated in the Driftworlds.
- After the Final Boss fight, Karen Alias takes Karen's three Heart Fragments and uses them to merge the real world and Driftworlds. However, this allows the real Karen to use her full psychic powers again, allowing her to easily defeat Karen Alias and the latter's gang of Gangers.
