Video Game / Another Eden

"Well, I guess...
It's time to set out on a journey
across time and space
to save our lost future.
Before the darkness of time falls upon us all..."

Another Eden: The Cat Beyond Time and Space is a free-to-play Eastern RPG for mobile.

Aldo lives a relatively peaceful life as a town guard in Baruoki, until his sister, Feinne, is captured by the king of the beastfolk, and his failed attempt to rescue her launches him several years into the future. Aldo finds himself on a time-traveling adventure to save the world before the fabric of space-time is completely torn asunder.

The game is an attempt to create a pure J/RPG experience on mobile platforms, with an emphasis on plot and a de-emphasis on Revenue-Enhancing Devices. It shares some creators and themes with Chrono Trigger, as well as its sequel Chrono Cross. The latter's influence is most visible in the game's non-linear plot. Character-focused Side Quests are only unlocked when you actually gain access to that character... and while some of them are handed to you by the main plot, others are only available via the "Gallery of Dreams" gacha. The gacha itself is fueled by "Chronos Stones," the game's premium currency, which can be earned by Level Grinding the rather comprehensive Achievement System.

Available for Android and iOS, with a Nintendo Switch port in the works. A PC port for the global version is available starting from March 31, 2021 through Steam.

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This game provides examples of:

# - E

• 2½D: The game's aesthetic. The team primarily moves left and right, but there are vertical walkways that allow you to transition between different rows of the map.
• Abandoned Laboratory: The Xeno-Domain, once dedicated to researching the Xeno Prisma, is a space station-sized one. No weird monsters or deranged experiments to face here, just the remaining security robots. It includes logs from the scientists who worked there.
• Absurdly High Level Cap: With the introduction of Stellar Awakening, select units can go up to level 100 (as opposed to level 80 for the rest of the 5-star units) but the journey from level 80 to 100 demands way more experience — about twenty times as much experience as it takes to go from 1 to 80! The levels between 80 to 100 don't provide any significant boost (since the Ability Board is already maxed out) and are viewed by most players as a luxury.
• Absurdly Powerful Student Council: IDEA, the IDA School student council, also acts as campus police and secretly investigate the various rumors on campus.
• Abusive Precursors: In the Western Mythos, the People of Paradise turns out to be this. They masked as "saviors" for the people of the barren Zerberiya Continent in order to kidnap the "wingless beings" as tools for their own war, and even before that, they callously used the planet as dumping ground for their spirits (real and artificial ones) those were deemed of no use for them - three of which (shade, crystal, and thunder spirits) more or less ended up contributing to Zerberiya's harsh environment. Also, the existence of the geometric-looking Optional Bosses such as Imbrium Basin could also be traced back to them (they were failed artificial spirits initially created to serve as energy source).
• Achievement System:
  • The "Records" menu tracks whatever feats (story-related or miscellaneous) you accomplish in the game and rewards you with Chronos Stones for completing them.
  • Google Play Achievements are also integrated within Another Eden, giving your Google Play account some EXP after completing a main story chapter.
• Action Initiative: Various skills "pre-emptively" activate, meaning they execute before anyone else regardless of Speed stat. Only faster combatants also using pre-emptive moves get to go before that. Various Grasta and equipment can also temporarily apply this property to any of your characters, although it typically works for the first move in battle. "Delayed" skills are an inversion, as they activate after everyone else. In addition, the environmental effect "Piercing Wind" and "Gale" encourage the use of these type of skills, since the damage bonus for said effects apply for preemptive and delayed skills.
• Actually a Doombot: The "Galliard" fought in Route 99 is actually just a mass-produced Synth mimicking his appearance. The real one is waiting in the Industrial Ruins.
• Ad Reward: In the mobile version, in addition to the 20 Chronos Stones you receive each day, you also get a daily prompt to watch an ad for 20 more Chronos Stones when it refreshes, a daily option in the store that lets you watch another ad for 10 more, and the ability to watch up to five ads at a chance of five to twenty Chronos Stones (or a Key Card) each. It's a step up from a flat daily 30 from before.
• Aerith and Bob: Justified for the Eastern characters, but other names are all over the place. One peculiar example is Amy, whose parents are named Zaol and Ishar.
• The Alcatraz: Two of them so far, although per the trope's description, only one of them that the main characters have to escape from.
  • The Prison Ship Gulfagin in the Future Garulea is an abandoned example. Although no longer used, menacing machineries to keep the prisoners in line still roam abroad the ship and the ship itself is protected by artificial thunderstorms, and the notes left by the prisoners and the wardens described the place as "inescapable".
  • Dungeon Ruins of the Land of Ro is technically no longer used - at least until the party gets thrown into it following the disappearance of Lord Genshin and Queen Garneli. Evil spirits and karakuri puppets are used as jailers in the area, and to top it off, the place is affected by special magic that takes away the prisoners' strength^note in gameplay, this translates to the party being unable to deal damage at all to these creatures until special seals in each floor is broken, and can only stun them from behind.
• The Alliance: At the beginning of Arc 2, the Lion Warriors and the Unigan Knights form one after the former get time-displaced in the latter's timeline in order to fight the Ogres.
• Alternate Timeline: Generally referred to in-game as "parallel time layers", since they're described as planes rather than lines:
  • The "First Knight and the Holy Sword" Episode takes place in a parallel world where humans and beastfolk are still at war with each other, except with the humans are having upper hand against the beastfolk due to the discovery of Tempered Tech.
  • The Chrono Cross crossover takes place in "Another World" where the beastfolk won against humans during the battle in Miglance Castle, with that world's Aldo and Feinne apparently had gone missing after a fatal attack from the Beast King blasted them away from the top of Miglance Castle's terrace.
  • The entirety of "The Apex of Logic and Cardinal Scales" Mythos deals with different time layers in the Future era and how too much divergence or interference between time layers can lead a time layer into its demise. It involves two alternate time layers and starts giving the layers official designations: the Twilight Time Layer is one where the Ancient Conspiracy Cardinal Vestige has eliminated Mega Corporation KMS, and the Midnight Time Layer is one where the reverse happens. The main timeline is designated the Dawn Time Layer.
  • The "Wanderer in the Vortex" Apocrypha and its conclusion, the "Wanderer in the Binding Night" Episode, involve the White Night Time Layer, where something is interfering in multiple points of history and causing the time layer to enter a "Groundhog Day" Loop trying to correct itself each time. To elaborate:
    • "The Road to Thunder" chapter is set during the Ogre Wars where the Ogres - who were not supposed to win in the proper history - ended up winning during the decisive battle in Thundering Fortress.
    • "Fatum Argentauri" is in the recent past of the Antiquity era where an alchemic experiment goes wrong.
    • "The King of Nevermore" is set during the final days of the future Kingdom of Kelkale.
    • "Seven-Color Coalition" is set in the recent Present era in an alternative Land of Ro, and their involvement in bloody conflict and Suzaku's following execution for allegedly betraying the Princess caused time to reset itself.
    • "The Undiscovered Babylon" sets in an unspecified Present era period in an isolated island known as Isle of Gospel, where the time loop hinges on the fate of a young woman named Marie and her ten foster children.
    • "The Breaking Dawn" takes place in the Future Era in a city known as "Dust City", which was built above a former KMS facility, and centers around Yakumo.
    • The root cause of all of this first appears to be an unknown explosion that killed everyone in an ancient kingdom of Cochlea save for its Queen, and her countless failed attempts of going back in time to save them, but it's ultimately revealed to be a far-future time war that destroyed the world and drove time itself to the breaking point, and the survivors engineering the destruction of Cochlea in a desperate attempt to Trick-Out Time and save themselves via Kill and Replace.
  • Yet another unnamed time layer has started showing up in a few character quests (Parallel Shannon's, and the unlock for Another Style Noahxis), where time travel has become so commonplace in the far future that it's been outlawed and Time Police are active, but the crackdown has led to an oppressive police state.
• Always Chaotic Evil:
  • The Phantoms a.k.a. Time Wraiths are described as such - they resent every living being and seek nothing but the destruction of not only all living beings but also the spacetime itself, and thus will manipulate everyone and everything to achieve that as seen in the main story and "Wanderer in the Vortex" Apocrypha. The only apparent exception to this so far is Ivan, the White Phantom responsible for the time loop in Chapter 5 of the Vortex Apocrypha, who is instead driven by his love for Marie and the children of the Clock Tower and his desperate attempt to save them from Fate Worse than Death.
  • The dark dragons featured in Tiramisu's character quests and Wryz Saga Episode similarly revel in destruction and despair, and the more intelligent ones take particularly sadistic glee on making humans suffer either by terrorizing them or through failed contract, as what had happened to Wryz in her backstory.
• Amateur Film-Making Plot: Update 1.7.2 adds the Theater minigame, allowing your characters to play various roles in theater plays, with different characters obtaining different results. You get rewards for doing good or great... Or screwing up.
• Ambidextrous Sprite: Sprites are simply rotated to make the character turn, which is very obvious with characters with asymmetrical sprites such as Bertrand, Cyrus or Jade.
• Amusement Park of Doom: Toto Dreamland, a former theme park in Elzion, is used as the Neohuman base. While you can only visit the Haunted Chateau at first, the rest of the park is like this complete with derelict crazed animatronics. According to Curio in chapter 5 of "The Apex of Logic and Cardinal Scales", this is due to the theme park was becoming something of a chaotic site where different time layers meet, and the strange happenings caused by it (e.g. rollercoaster that suddenly disappeared to people who had never been there suddenly appearing) became too much of a risk for the park to continue operating — at least in the Dawn Time Layer where time layer research has yet to reach as advanced state as others.
• Ancient Conspiracy: "The Closed-Off World and the Azure Rebel" introduces the existence of Cardinal Vestige, a.k.a. Old World government in the Future timeline. They control various government organizations (and terrorists) in the shadows, and has many of their agents such as Biaka and Cetie placed in government bodies to monitor their activities. While they claim that they operate for the sake of betterment of humanity, they also operate in Above Good and Evil morality, so even the most dubious methods are fair game for them.
• And I Must Scream:
  • In "The Time Mine and the Dreamers", the Visus Embryo, after being forcefully deactivated by Aldo and Riica in Antiquity, survived dormant through the ages and the collapse of the Tower of Time, but absorbing people's dreams instead of the stars. It absorbed so much nightmares and evil dreams it grew twisted into the Visus Echo and can't wake up even after millenia, until Aldo finds a way.
  • As "The Lost Tome and the Silver, Unfading Flower" revealed, this is what happened to Sophia and Cynthia before the events of the episode roll in. Each of them were trapped in the nothingness of a magic book until they managed to get out somehow, with Sophia had been trapped for at least 20,000 years.
• And the Adventure Continues:
  • Once the team have defeated Chronos Menas and freed Eden’s spirit, they all go their separate ways. They eventually band together again to find a way to save Eden’s lost future and to save Altena.
  • At the end of the Dragon Palace episode, Sheila initially parts ways with the party to continue her rule over the seafolk as Otohime. She then realizes that the unsealed Leviathan is still at large, and hastily rejoins the roster with a new objective to hunt it down.
  • Several of the side characters' final quests end in this way, with the immediate danger and/or conflict in said quest resolved, but not the long-term one that becomes their motivation in the first place. One such example is Tsubame's character quest, with her successfully halting the progression of Suzume's curse that transformed her into a monster, but she has yet to find a way to break the curse itself.
  • Despite all the efforts of the main cast, the Goddess of Time arc ends on this note, as Madoka is swallowed by chaos, destined to become the Goddess of Time and to re-nurture Eden from the ground up after his loss of identity. The party's new objective is to stabilize the future and await to be reunited with the Goddess of Time when she awakens.
• Animal Gender-Bender: Several of the collectible cats you can find are male calicos and tortoiseshells. While it's not impossible for them to be male, it is extremely rare.
• Another Dimension: Referred to as different "time layer" in this game, and overlaps with Alternate Timeline described above. The existence of different time layers is initially hinted in episodes such as Ciel's Other Tales, as well as "The Closed-Off World and the Azure Rebel", although the player didn't get to visit one until "First Knight and the Holy Sword". Instead of the usual blue-colored wormholes, these different time layers are accessed through green-colored wormholes.
• Anti-Debuff:
  • Possible rewards from completing the Ruins of Rucyana include badges that give additional resistance to a certain status ailment. Some pieces of equipment can give minor resistance to all ailments. If you know where to look across the overworld, you can eventually access badges that give complete immunity to one ailment.
  • The Antiquity Garulea chapters (56 to 66) introduce and promote a line of Support Grastas which, when fully upgraded, make a character less susceptible to stat and/or defense debuffs. While they're not immediately beneficial to damage setups, enhancing them at Itoise can make your party outright immune to debuffs, a strategy used to protect against certain superboss skills.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • To compensate on the lack of healing items in the game, Inns and Resting Spots are completely free, healing all HP and MP at once. On top of that, most Inns give out Food items, which act as 'portable inns' that restore the entire party's HP and MP at any moment so long as it's out of battle, but only one can be held at any moment. Said Food is extremely useful, as it allows you to be at full strength for an upcoming boss fight even after running through an entire dungeon.
  • If you receive Key Cards or Bold Pulses from one-time mails but are close to the cap for either color, the game will let you temporarily exceed your maximum until the excess is spent. You won't receive the usual 6-hourly key cards while you're still maxed out, though.
  • The Tsubura's Gems, introduced in v1.5.1, function as a Bad Luck Mitigation Mechanic for the rarest Another Dungeon rewards. The player earns them by completing Another Dungeon runs that require 1 red key or 2 green keys, and they come at a pace that lets a player trade for one Chant Script/Stellar tome or two Treatises/Codexes every month.
  • Each Side Episode usually features two major hurdles in each chapter where the player must enter its associated Another Dungeon to farm enough points to proceed. Helena's Side Episode removes both her and a plot-important character from the party at that point in Chapter 3, which prevents the player from accessing the Former KMS HQ Another Dungeon. Fortunately, the point hurdle here is much lower than expected and the player can quickly overcome this barrier with just a few more battles in the Former KMS HQ.
  • v2.3.2 snuck in a few significant upgrades to the Grasta system. First, you can now rescind individual Grastas and do so for free, allowing some capacity for experimentation with setups. At the same time, the fragment yield from Garulea's Another Dungeon chests was increased 5-fold to reduce the need to grind for fragments to upgrade Grastas.
  • Unlike other story characters' 5-star Psalms those aren't available outside Another Dungeons and the Nopaew Emporium, Feinne's upgrade Psalms are given for free as treasure chest items after certain point of the story to compensate her Late Character Syndrome, allowing her to quickly catch up with the rest of the party.
  • Characters with Stellar Awakening will be acquired already Awakened if the player gets their 5-star form from their corresponding banner. If a player already has the 5-star form of a character from before their Stellar Awakening was added to the game, that character can also be Awakened through two Stellar tomes (instead of three) that can be purchased from the Nopaew Emporium, allowing old players to enjoy the upgrade without needing to spend their Chronos Stones on banners for characters they already have.
• Anti Poop-Socking: Another Dungeon access is restricted by keycards, of which you get one of each color every six hours, though you can purchase extras with Chronos Stones. Most Another Dungeons only spawn five sets of random encounters per map before shutting them off, discouraging a player from loitering to grind.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: The player can only have six characters from a rather large list of playable characters, and only four of those people can be on the front line at any given time.
• Arbitrarily Serialized Simultaneous Adventures: The character quests for AS Hardy and AS Kikyo are two sides of the same story.
• Archaic Weapon for an Advanced Age: Most characters use one of eight different weapon types^note Staves, Swords, Katana, Axes, Spears, Bows, Gloves, and Hammers, which are appropriate to the medieval-styled Present Era, even the characters from the far future. Foran even notes in her recruitment dialogue that spears are archaic in an era with ray guns. Joker completely averts this with his personal weapon, which is his Tokachev pistol.
• Assist Character: Introduced in main story 3.0 are Sidekicks, who act as a fifth, less-controllable party member with their own set of equipment. They can support with various situational buffs and their own attacks.
• Asteroids Monster: The Menreiki, one of the Superbosses, has a deceptively small health bar and simple attack pattern. Deplete its health, and it splits into two, and these smaller ones can split even further, capping at 4 bodies all with the same strength as the base form. The fight quickly turns into figuring out how to avoid getting overwhelmed.
• Attack Its Weak Point:
  • Exploiting enemy weaknesses not only lets you get in extra damage, but it also increases the Another Force bar significantly (if no Zone is in place).
  • There are buffs that specifically increase the bonus damage you deal when striking enemy weaknesses, best for characters and strategies built around this trope.
  • The Octopath Traveller crossover Symphony introduces the "Break" system that only applies to encounters and battles related to it. Each enemy starts with multiple shields up, but weaknesses to one or more attacking types, and your Another Force bar is always empty at the start of each battle. Each move that strikes an enemy's weakness depletes their shields; when all shields are down the enemy is stunned and your Another Force bar is immediately filled up.
• Awful Truth: The whole point of Gewuerz Church's Tower Defender is to guard one regarding the church's history and teachings, something that not even the Supreme Cardinal knows. Among many things, the "god" they believe in doesn't actually exist, and the "blessings" actually came from copies of parts of the Four Great Elementals of Migleina created using the power of the crystal spirit. There were actually thirteen Winged Beings instead of twelve, and they actually came from "paradise" to deceive and kidnap humans to be used as war tools in their own battle. One of them, Judith, eventually betrayed the rest after she fell in love with human and sided with humanity. With her help, the church brainwashed and sealed the other twelve in the depths of Giant's Claw and rebranded them as "Those Bearing Wings", but it came at the cost of Judith and her human lover. With no one else left to sing the Stifling Song to calm the crystal spirit producing the blessings, the bishop at that time had to resort to forcibly using the crystal spirit power under their capture and became the first Tower Defender, while the priests under him continue the teachings of the church in order to keep up people's faith. By the time Clarte and co arrives, the crystal spirit is already on the verge of dying, hence the depleting blessings and Johann's plan to use Clarte as new vessel until his defeat.
• Bad Future: Given the time travel themes of the game, there are plenty of alternate timelines which various individuals try to prevent.
  • Aldo spends a lot of his time in the Antiquity to prevent one from happening, where Elzion was destroyed due to King Palsifal's messing with the timeline.
  • The family of Ciel and Shannon comes from one in another dimension, where Individuality Is Illegal is enforced to the extreme and anything artful or amusing is illegal.
  • The Lost Boy at the beginning of the Time-Space Cat sidequest chain is a shapeshifting Varuo who regrets his marriage with one of the cats in Baruoki and tries to avert it. He then gets pursued by people from his timeline who are trying to prevent a future that, in their words, has gone "completely kittens" from his rash decisions.
• Bag of Sharing: An NPC variant — Each shop you visit stocks the exact same weapons and has the same reserve of monster drops you've sold to them. Apparently their shared inventory can be accessed across multiple time periods...
• Balance Buff:
  • v1.9.2 adds a slew of balance changes to the game. The changes are as follows:
    • Various characters' skills got their numbers improved or gained additional effects, bringing them to par with new and upcoming characters.
    • The fishing cooler box's capacity and Kamasu point bonuses have been drastically increased. Fish caught at the Last Island now give an appropriate amount of fishing experience.
    • Various side episode characters have had their bonuses increased to speed up point collection. Each episode's Required Party Member now gives one of the biggest individual bonuses.
    • The Experience Booster threshold has been raised from half your highest level in the roster to three-quarters.
  • v2.3.3 gives a massive one to Guildna by improving almost all his skills to make him able to stand on even ground with other 5-star characters.
  • v2.5.1 upgrades Jade's skills by giving additional effects to his skills such as an attack buff for Lance-type characters.
  • The release of Part III: Conclusion of the Goddess of Time arc not only gives Feinne's 5-star upgrade but also reworks several skills of the the initial main cast to bring their power levels in line with the power standard of the newer 5-star units.
  • v2.9.6 (and the few updates following it) made several improvements to progression in the Fishing Minigame to facilitate the player obtaining Levia, who would finally get her Another Style upgrade in the subsequent update.
  • Starting from v3.3.1, older characters eligible for the Stellar Awakening upgrade receive massive readjustment on all of their skills to bring them up to par with newer characters and make them viable for increasingly tougher challenges. Aldo is the first to receive this readjustment, followed by Suzette and Tsukiha in v3.3.110.
• Barrier Change Boss:
  • The Primal Darkness alternates between absorbing all physical and absorbing all magic attacks. If ignored, it also bestows this attribute to the Final Boss.
  • Cradle Omega starts off immune to all physical attacks and weak to all magic attacks. At different HP thresholds, it switches its affinities, becoming weak to one physical attack type and immune to all other damage types.
  • The Sacred Beast starts with a Wind Zone and rotates between the elemental Zones, affecting the weakness of its Horn and altering the damage done by your units' elemental attacks.
  • In Levia's Another Style upgrade sidequest, the mindless clone of Rindo (Kikyo's father) will alternate between absorbing physical and magic attacks during its battle.
  • Returning to the depths of Journey's End starts a fight with the Inimical Travelers' Curse, an upgraded rematch of the final boss for the Octopath Traveller collab event. It now starts weak to either fire, water, OR thunder, and requires the player to break its shields by repeatedly striking its one weakness to even deal significant damage to it. Once it's on its last legs, though, it becomes weak to all three of those elements, giving multiple avenues to break its shields one last time before a final push.
• Beauty Equals Goodness: Done in a very apparent way with the non-humans recruitable roster; for example, the more ugly or non-human looking Beastmen are relegated to being mooks and enemies to kill in dungeons, while recruitable Beastmen such as Dunarith, Myrus and Zeviro are much more human-looking and attractive.
• Big Bad:
  • The Phantom is one for Arc 1 and Arc 2, a powerful inter-dimensional being that wants to destroy the universe. Arc 2 reveals that there's a whole race of them seeking the same thing, lead by a red Phantom.
  • Zennon Ogre takes this role in Arc 1.5, being the king of ogres that threatens to eliminate mankind and having direct stake against the party for kidnapping Altena and forcibly fusing her with the Elemental Arms.
  • Most side episodes have their own Big Bads, such as Reptires in the Shadow Witch episode.
• Big "WHAT?!": The party collectively drops one at the end of Chapter 74 when the Master and the Gallery Master reveal that they are the future selves of Aldo.
• Bonus Dungeon: Another Dungeons involve the player traversing difficult versions of levels they've already cleared, with souped-up enemies and bosses and unique rewards and drops that are collected on completion. Their Very Hard difficulty tier unlocks after completing the first arc (Chapter 25), presenting even stronger enemies and greater rewards.
• Bonus Stage: The Phantom Crystal Dimension serves as one to any Another Dungeon run, being an enemy-free zone with a chance to obtain great rewards. You can only access it with a White Key, and that has a 10% chance of appearing after completing any Another Dungeon run at any difficulty. White Keys cannot be stocked, so the player is encouraged to use them immediately when they obtain them.
• Boring, but Practical: Some early skills hit a single target multiple times and for cheap. They easily become useful in early- to mid-game boss fights as they build the Another Force gauge at an increased rate.
• Boss Bonanza:
  • Chronos Umbra, the final dungeon of the first act, has six miniboss fights against the primal elements. Defeating them weakens the main boss, since he'll use the gimmick of each primal element still standing during his own fight.
  • The Dark Lord's Tomb, the final dungeon of the second act, puts you through two sub-dungeons, each with their own boss fight at the end, before the final sub-dungeon unlocks and puts you in a fight with three bosses in succession (with no ability to heal in between): Phantom Eden, the Dark Lord, and Chaos itself.
• Boss Rush: Sebastia's Laboratory has a Battle Simulator, where you can fight against multiple souped-up bosses from story chapters without any recovery in-between.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: Downplayed — While you can purchase Chronos Stones to get more rolls on the banners to expand your roster and improve your odds at getting the best characters, just playing the game normally you get a lot of Chronos Stones to recruit plenty of additional party members to get through the main plot without spending a single cent.
  • "Fateful Encounter" banners can only be accessed with a 10-pull of paid Stones, and guarantee that you will get a 5-star character on the tenth pull (albeit still subject to the Random Number God).
  • Significant milestones like a Milestone Celebration or a major story content update are celebrated with the paid-only "Star Dream Encounter" banner, which gives the player an exclusive Star Piece that allows them to receive a 5-star character of their choice.
  • Starting from version 2.9.700 of the global build^note This was introduced in the Japanese build one year prior, the player can opt to purchase the "Guide of the Heavens" and "Guide of the Land" subscription services, which offer various perks such as Star Pieces for limited selection of characters and bonus light/shadow points for the player's character of choice. Players who have not subscribed to either can still earn a smaller portion of this reward system.
• Brick Joke: Very early in the beginning of the game, Aldo is given exposition on how prisma works by the Ashtear in Baruoki. The significance is never brought up again until an optional event unlocked after Chapter 6 of "Song of Sword and Wings of Lost Paradise", where Aldo tries to recall her teaching about prisma to use the energy of a blessing to fix the statue in Gewuerz Church that Clarte crashed into early in the Mythos.
• Brutal Bonus Level: These are available after completing Part 1 (Chapter 25).
  • First comes the Very Hard versions of the storyline Another Dungeons.^note Side Episode Very Hard Another Dungeons are instead unlocked with progress in the Episodes themselves. The level recommendation for the earliest Very Hard dungeon unlocked this way is 58, when the player is likely to just have finished the final battle with a level 55-56 team, and the level cap for 4-star characters is just 60.
  • The next step up is the Otherlands regions. They operate by the same Another Dungeon rules, but each level also features multiple boss fights that require you to bring your best if you want to clear them in one go. And you're definitely tempted to do so, because entering the Otherlands levels consumes two green keys.
  • Completion of the first arc of Part 2 (Chapter 55) grants access to the Present Garulea Another Dungeon. It costs two green keys to enter, has a recommended level of 80, and its rewards include powerful Grasta and the materials to upgrade them. Since you need to complete several other side episodes to get this far, on top of having to fight through fairly difficult story bosses, you are expected to have a well-optimized roster before you can even think about attempting this Another Dungeon. This expectation holds for the Antiquity and Future Garulea Another Dungeons as well.
  • Completing Chapter 84 gives the player access to the Underworld Another Dungeon, which has similar structure to Future Garulea Another Dungeon and takes it up to eleven with the increased encounter rate compared to previous Another Dungeons. Its regular enemies are also level 90 at minimum, so your team is expected to be maxed out to fare well.
  • The "Home's Lost Atelier" Another Dungeon is a special kind of AD introduced with the release of Ensemble side stories, where players are required to perform as well as possible against the bosses in order to achieve maximum reward. For each Ensemble so far, there are two modes: the "normal" mode accessible through blue painting in the dungeon (level 72), and the "high difficulty" mode accessible through the red painting (level 80). Furthermore, certain rewards are only obtainable by performing well in the high difficulty challenges, i.e. the Baruoki one requires the player to clear the Another Dungeon (including beating the boss) as fast as possible, whereas the Purgatory one requires the player to deal as much damage to the Four Great Elements as possible. The Purgatory one, in particular, also requires the player to deal at least 4.5 billion damage within three turns against each of them in order to unlock an additional Super Boss, so it's a challenge scaled for the highly optimized endgame party.
  • Completing Chapter 92 unlocks the Omegapolis Another Dungeon, which operate similarly to Garulea and Underworld Another Dungeons while retaining mechanics introduced in the new story chapter such as phase shift. The regular enemies' standard level is level 110 and it is even harder while entering phase-shifted areas of the dungeon, which means the Another Dungeon requires even more party optimizing than before. This sets the tone for the postgame grinding in the third story arc; Entrana Another Dungeon shares these mechanics.
• Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit": In the first chapter of "Song of Sword and Wings of Lost Paradise", Clarte refers to Noah as a rabbit when making remarks about its keen hearing, which baffles Melina. Much later in the penultimate chapter, when the party gets to visit where the People of Paradise lived on the moon surface, the place was full of Noah-like creatures, and all of the relevant archives refer to them as "rabbits" despite bearing no resemblance to actual rabbits for whatever reason.
• Can't Catch Up: Low-ranked characters, including story characters without promotions, not only have a lower level cap, but will have fewer Ability Board spots and weaker skills, making them unable to compete with 5-star units until they're promoted to that rank.
• Cast Herd: It is inevitable that several of the characters will be grouped based on their affiliation - sometimes to the point of having its own personality trait for Combination Attack. Some of the notable ones include the Miglance Palace knights and the IDEA.
• Chain of Deals: The Elpis Dagger, which is an incredibly strong katana, is obtained at the end of a series of trades initiated at Flotsam Isle. The mek who starts it has a different sense of "value" and is keen to teach it to Aldo, so it deems a shiny crown as Worthless Yellow Rocks, exchanging it for a can opener. You then have to journey about the time layer to find the right people who will accept the item you've got, eventually leading to a dusty straw hat. This turns out to be the prized possession of a human that was the mek's close companion, and in a show of its gratitude, it finally hands you the Elpis Dagger.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • There is a locked house in Baruoki that you can't access. The keys that open it are finally made available in the "Heroes of Bygone Days and the Engraved Rewards" episode, which was added over 3 years after the game's launch. According to May, it used to belong to her grandmother's acquaintance and she was trusted with the key - specifically, it was Victor's, as his Another Style quest reveals.
  • In the First Knight and the Holy Sword episode, you can find a Key Item named "Chemical Base" from a room in the Burning Beast King's Castle, which can then be transformed into the "Chemical Intellect" at a cauldron. It doesn't seem to do anything, and has sat in many a player's inventory without a purpose. Years later, in the "Fatum Argentauri" chapter of "Wanderer in the Vortex" Mythos, it would become crucial to creating the "Sage Essence" in an alchemical sidequest.
• The Chosen One:
  • The Ogre Wars arc starts with Aldo becoming one for the Dragon God by defeating his emissary.
  • A few optional characters also have this status. Melina, for example, is the chosen one of her religion, who is believed to be the one to greet their savior
• Collection Sidequest: Each part of IDA school introduces one where you collect items hidden on the overworld, which reward a level 1 Joke Weapon for completion. There are also Pixel Hunts for Snake Bone Island and Toto's Dreamland which reward useful upgradeable weapons.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience:
  • Horrors are marked one of three colors on the minimap; red means that it will be very hard to take down with your current party, yellow means that it will be a challenge, but possible, to defeat, and blue means that it poses minimal threat.
  • Chests holding monster drops have different colors to indicate their contents — Brown chests contain regular items, Red chests contain rarer items, while Blue chests contain quest-related items. The drop names are also color-coded — white for common, blue for rare, orange for extremely rare.
• Combination Attack:
  • If there are two or more characters that share a trait on the frontline when using a fully charged Another Force, they'll finish with a special combo attack. The first one you're most likely to see is the X-Strike, performed by Aldo and Cyrus.
  • If you have Lloyd and/or Colette in the party, you can fill up a Concerto Gauge to perform a Resonant Raid skill, which only triggers if you've used certain skills in the same turn. Lloyd and Colette can only trigger Resonant Raids with either Aldo or the other Tales Series collab characters.
• Com Mons: There are three sets of heroes (masked girls, armored knights, and robots) that pad out the 3-star encounter pool. They aren't voiced, can't be promoted, and have no unique sidequests, so unless you're hurting for a particular role, just about any other unique character is a better choice.
• Combat Exclusive Healing: You cannot use healing spells outside of battle. You can replenish your party's HP and MP with food, but you can only carry one food item around at a time.
• Continuing is Painful: Downplayed. Although Death Is a Slap on the Wrist, the game offers the player the ability to pay 50 Chronos Stones (or watch an ad) to resume the battle right there and then, with the party's HP and MP refilled. There usually is little reason to use this function, but it can secure the spoils of an Another Dungeon run.
• Convection, Schmonvection:
  • Traversing the Nadara Volcano doesn't affect the party unless they step on any active fire traps.
  • Averted in a few boss fights — The Primal Flame passively damages the party every turn. The Spirit of Salamander can set the field ablaze, damaging the party every turn unless they are protected by Undine's Tear.
• Cool, but Inefficient: Otherlands Hard difficulty monster drops are used to craft level 52 upgradeable armor. However, the upgrade effects are rather miniscule and only apply to wielders of certain weapons, making them no different from stock level 52 armor on anyone else. Higher upgrade tiers eventually require so many copies of boss drops that they quickly become not worth the effort. Not helping matters is that the Tower of Stars Hard difficulty yields drops that makes equally powerful level 52 armor (and superior level 60 armor) while requiring fewer key cards to enter.^Exception The Hertz Bangle and Gauntlets, on the other hand, offer a sizeable Spirit bonus that only Yipha (Another Style) and Tiramisu respectively can capitalize on for their skills, though being able to go the mile to max out its upgrades is practically a Bragging Rights Reward.
• Crapsaccharine World: The seemingly vibrant world of the game hides multiple dark aspects those the player will only learn as they go through the story and the character quests. To name a few:
  • Humanity in the Present and Future era are frequently in danger of losing a war - against beastfolk in the present and Synth Humans in the future. When the tables are turned in the parallel time layer of "First Knight and the Holy Sword", Commander Anabel mercilessly orders a massacre on an entire village of beastfolk.
  • Going through several character quests reveals that while the city of Future era (particularly Elzion) may seem nice and clean, social injustices are rather rampant. For example, Hardy's quest reveals the hardships of those who live in the slums, as the authority doesn't give a care for those without citizen ID and thus it makes no difference to them if anything bad happens to the residents of the slums.
• Creepy Changing Painting: The Haunted Chateau has some. One hall is filled with paintings of Faceless Eyes, which follow the player, and Amy runs into another painting that's facing backwards before flipping to normal.
• Crossover: The game traditionally releases a crossover episode every December featuring another big-name RPG. These are launched simultaneously in both the Japanese and Global versions, and are generally permanent additions with no time limits for completion.
  • One with Persona 5 was added in December 2019, with an expansion for the Royal version added in November 2020. The crossovers feature the Phantom Thieves as recruitable units and new dungeons in the style of that game's Palaces.
  • Another one with Tales Series was released on December 17, 2020, featuring Cress, Yuri, Milla, and Velvet as playable characters. Some of the unique mechanics from the original series are also included in the crossover such as (fully-voiced) skits, cooking, and Mystic Artes. A second Tales episode later released in December 2022, featuring Lloyd, Colette, Alphen, and Shionne.
  • The December 2021 update adds a crossover with Chrono Cross with Serge, Kid, and Harle as playable characters. The crossover also adds some mechanics from its original series such as Elements, Field Effect, and New Game Plus. The April 2022 update also adds Starky into the roster, alongside an extra quest that grant Serge's personal weapon. Unlike most Another Eden content, it will expire eventually, but that time limit is five years.
  • The 2023 crossover features Octopath Traveler, with Cyrus from I, Partitio from II, and Tithi from Champions of the Continent. It also features Octopath game mechanics like Shield Break, BP, and Path Actions. Like fellow Square Enix series Chrono Cross, it has a very generous time limit attached, as it's available for five years.
• Cruel to Be Kind: A sidequest in Ratle tasks you to find out why a kid keeps on visiting the Zol Plains and encourage him to go home. He was actually taking care of a tiny dragon in secret, but with Aldo's help, he realizes that it's better for the dragon to be reunited with its family. As a last resort, the kid had to discourage the dragon by renouncing their friendship.
• Curse: Multiple instances.
  • On individual level, several characters have various forms of curse inflicted upon them, with the trait "Cursed" is listed in their personality description. The most notable one is Cyrus, who had been turned into a frog.
  • There are also species-level example such as the curse inflicted upon Winged People that prevents them to leave Giant's Claw, and the curse on the Titans' bloodline that will degenerate them over time and turn them into ogres.
• Cursed Item: The Souleater Weapons, obtained throughout the "Crown of the Pale Dawn" collab events, are level 60 weapons with no offensive stats and impose a sharp penalty to max HP. You'll need to collect seven of them to unlock a quest and boss that yields the final one of the set and then unlocks their full potential. They'll still carry the HP penalty but will be as strong as your best non-personal weapons.
• Cute Kitten: Everywhere in the game, and the cats are generally treated as adorable beings in the game when not causing mischief. There's an entire catalogue (and the supporting achievements) dedicated for cats, a side mode where you play as Aldo's cat, accessories for your companion cat, and the Phantom Crystal Dimension is basically an entire world of cats.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Zigzagged.
  • Although many of the playable characters have Luring Shadow attribute, at worst it can be attributed to their Dark and Troubled Past and/or questionable line of work, and none of them are remotely evil enough to be considered Token Evil Teammate. This is even more jarring with some characters like Prai, a priest who is so honest and sincere that he has nothing to hide.
  • Story-wise, some people like Nopaew Clan members have with inherent darkness within them, but other than their unusual culture, none of them come across as actively malicious. However...
  • ...the darkness itself seem to revel in causing chaos and destruction, as shown in the case of Shadow Witch and the master of the shadows controlling Phantoms in Guildna's VC upgrade quest. Presumably, this is why the Nopaew Clan has taboo of naming their members, as the darkness can be so strong to corrupt the name giver if the taboo is broken.
• A Day in the Limelight: Most party members have a sidequest chain that features them, which might reveal a bit more about them and their backstory. Other Tales serve as extended character quests for their focal character, and Mythos puts the focus on an entire group of characters.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Dying and choosing not to purchase a continue (which uses valuable Chronos Stones) respawns the player in the nearest town. If the player dies in Another Dungeon, they'll also lose all the loot they picked up, but otherwise there is no other consequence.
• Deus ex Machina: After his encounter with Beast Vares in the Moonlight Forest, Aldo gets surrounded by two Chimera on both directions. Fortunately, a spacetime portal opens, and saves Aldo by dragging him in.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • Feinne comes to wake Aldo up in the beginning of the game, telling him to not fall asleep again. Interacting with the bed gives the option to go right back to sleep; if you choose that option, Feinne will come up to wake Aldo again. If the player keeps doing this, Feinne gets increasingly annoyed until she tells Aldo he won't be having breakfast.
  • Aldo ends up in Man-Eating Swamp with no way to escape, unless the player loses a fight, which respawns the player in the nearest town. Since Aldo has no narrative reason to want to return to the swamp, Riica will lose an important battery in the swamp to give Aldo a reason to return and meet Cyrus.
  • Unarmed characters, if engaged in combat, will brandish a "default" weapon fitting with their battle style.
  • The game has slight variations in quest dialogue to account for various conditions. For instance, if a quest introduces a character that is already in the player's roster, Aldo will recognize them rather than need to be introduced to them. Information obtained from plot progress also changes dialogue; for instance, one of Myrus's Character Quests has her muse about the beastmen's future, and Aldo can tell her about their presence in Future Garulea if he's been there.
  • There is a part in Tales from the East part 1 where Aldo’s face is stolen. If the party is defeated at any point before Aldo gets his face back, there is a short scene where Amy attempts to draw a face on Aldo before Riica suggests just digitally recreating it.
  • In the Complex Dream storyline, the dialogue changes when you have Guilard and Altena in your party when you meet Another World Altena, who then vouch that their Aldo and Feinne aren't the ones from the Another World.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Comes in several flavors.
  • Guildna's personal weapon and armor feature a damage bonus if any party members are defeated. It's very inconvenient to set up, but it can deliver damage capable of one-shotting superbosses if pulled off.
  • Some characters like AS Isuka cycle through forms that also alters the behavior of their skills, thus requiring precise timing in order to maximize the effects of said skills.
  • A few units like Milla and Kid have skills those provide powerful buffs or debuffs, but they also only last for one turn and thus also require careful timing.
  • Certain characters are at their best if their skills are used in a certain order, so using them in Another Force will need a bit more coordination as opposed to just mashing one skill.
  • Plenty of Zone-based characters will only activate the full potential of their skills when specific Zone is active, and in some cases like Dream Weaver Dunarith and Oboro, they also require awakened Zone. This means the player either needs to time the Zone awakening (since it normally will expire after 2 turns) and/or have multiple characters or Sidekick that can induce it.
• Difficulty Levels: These were first implemented with the Chrono Cross collab so that players at nearly any point of story completion can enjoy the event by adjusting the enemies' strength to their preferred level. This feature is also present in the "Wanderer in the Vortex" Apocrypha and the "Crown of the Pale Dawn" Symphony. Difficulty ranges from "Beginner", for players still in the middle of the first story arc, to a Harder Than Hard "Master" difficulty meant to challenge players with optimized teams.
  • The third story arc also features adjustable difficulty, but it starts at "Standard" which is scaled for players who have completed the main plot and most of the side content so far, to "Master" where even random encounters have loads of HP and Action Initiative. The Hard Mode Perks for taking on such a difficulty include increased drop rate for materials.
• Disc-One Nuke:
  • Your first free 4-star character is likely going to outshine your 3-star story-given characters. 4-star Miyu, for instance, will consistently outdamage Aldo (3-star by default) despite sharing the same gear. There will come a time, though, where you simply cannot last on mandatory party members and will have to either try your luck with the gacha or make up for an understaffed party.
  • Completion of Chapter 13 gives you access to the collab events including Persona 5, Tales Series and Chrono Cross, which adds their corresponding characters to your roster who start at 4 stars at minimum and can be upgraded to 5 stars shortly after completion of their events. The Chrono Cross event even has adjustable difficulty levels for players at different story progression points to keep it fully accessible.
  • The Ensemble Quest featuring May, available after completing the first main arc, provides the player enough materials to upgrade May to 5-star as well as a high level weapon, Hammer of Bond. Said weapon enhancements pair nicely with her already powerful Giganto Break ability, allowing massive damage numbers for that point in the game.
• Disappears into Light:
  • By the end of Chapter 4, Elzion and its inhabitants (including Amy) fade into light as a result of the future being changed.
  • This is the fate of the real Eden and Aldo after Aldo turns back into Kyros the cat and merges with him to save Eden. Presumably not happy with how it turns out, though, Aldo gets better and returns in the final scene through a wormhole.
• Draconic Abomination: The dark dragons certainly count. Their designs tend to look deformed or bizarre, such as mob that looks like a crab with dragon heads in place of its claws.
• Dream Land:
  • Dream Worlds form the basis of the IDA School Episodes. The first two parts involve the cast investigating one from Saki and Mayu respectively, after their consumption of a dark apple.
  • The Snake Dream is both this and Another Dimension, which can be visited starting from Chapter 32 of the main quest.
• Dressing as the Enemy: Aldo tries doing this in Elga's second quest, but it backfires spectacularly because the enemies' cowls were enchanted to brainwash whoever wears them.
• Dual Boss:
  • Chapter 32 sets up a fight between you, Berserk Neo Anguirius and Berserk Beast King. Both bosses have a different moveset, regularly use a Switch-Out Move, possess plenty of HP to One attacks, can summon mobs and can use Another Force.
  • Ogre Wars has the Hell Ogre and Death Ogre. They're less threatening than the two above, but can use Another Force as well.
  • Certain manifest fights will pit you against an additional, equally strong enemy to complicate the fight. You only need to defeat the main body to win, though.
  • If you've bested the eight superbosses of Present Garulea and Antiquity Garulea, you can access rematches with them in the Underworld. You'll be fighting one of the Present spirits with one of the Antiquity spirits, and although their behaviour hasn't changed much, they've received a mountain of stats, and having to deal with two boss attack patterns at once can prove very troublesome.
• Dual-World Gameplay: The Ocean Palace episode involves you traveling to and from the Dragon Palace in two time periods with the help of many warps. You will end up altering small things in the past to influence the future terrain — for instance, repairing a small crack in a walkway to prevent its future collapse.
• Dump Stat: Luck only slightly affects the character's critical hit rate. Only physical attacks can land critical hits, so the stat is useless for mages unless they have an ability to let their spells crit. This also means Luck-increasing badges are the least valuable. For a long while, AS Radica could fully utilize the Luck stat as and integral part of her kit, but recent updates feature more units those utilize Luck as part of their kits such as AS Soira^note increases the damage reduction of her Critical Guard passive and Colette^note increases the damage dealt by her Judgment and Holy Judgment skills.
• Early-Bird Cameo:
  • Many characters who would be available in Dream Encounters can also be found somewhere on the overworld for idle chat. If you have them in your roster, you can also find them as long as they're not in the active party.
  • Certain character quests feature cameos by other characters that eventually become recruitable. Some examples include Shigure in AS Shion’s quest, Cynthia in AS Claude’s, Hardy in AS Cetie’s, and Victor in the Baruoki Mayor’s tutorial quest.
• Easing into the Adventure: The game starts with Aldo running around town doing simple errands and fighting basic monsters, before the beast men attack and capture his sister.
• Easter Egg:
  • In Toto Dreamland and Garulea, there are spots where your current party can do things like pose behind cutouts (i.e. acting like tourists). If you have Foran at the end, she'll snap a photo.
  • When the cast first arrives in Garulea, they are given fluffy covers to use whenever they're indoors in the region. Any characters who are native to Garulea don't use these covers and just remove their footwear.
  • Starting from Tales from the East, there are various spots in the habitable areas of the world where the frontline party can sit on. These areas are not marked, but can be usually recognized from its size (i.e. enough for four characters to sit on).
• Effortless Achievement:
  • There are tons of things that will gain you Chronos Stones: for instance, you get 5 every time you fight an enemy for the first time.
  • The game hands you at least 50 Chronos Stones for progressing the story to the next chapter. Sometimes to proceed you only need to travel from point A to point B with a cutscene in between.
• Eldritch Location: The Underworld introduced in the final part of "Return of the Goddess of Time" is this, being a realm where the dark god is supposedly sealed. While the citizens of Nazrik may not seem malicious apart from their frequently creepy conversations, the location itself is not only full of bizarre and dangerous creatures those are apparently remnants of the chaos, but also rife with darkness strong enough to corrupt outside beings those who are unfortunate enough to be thrown there such as Queen Himika, Lord Genshin, and Queen Garneli.
• Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: Earth beats Water, Water beats Fire, Fire beats Wind, and Winds beats Earth. Shade and Thunder are weak to each other but resist Crystal, and Crystal is weak to itself but resists everything else. Hitting weaknesses will contribute a great boost to the Limit Break meter and significantly extend the Another Force duration. While this cycle can serve as a good pointer to determining team setup for certain environments, not all elementally-aligned enemies will follow it, and resistances or weaknesses can differ.
• Elite Mook: Horrors are powerful versions of regular enemies, can be seen on the map, and are usually ten levels higher than the surrounding mobs. Defeating them gets you materials that can be used to make powerful weapons and armor. Some of them even serve as a Beef Gate, guarding chests that hold appropriately strong equipment to reward players who can triumph despite the odds.
• Elite Tweak:
  • Guiding Light and Luring Shadow are accumulated either through getting duplicates of a character from Dream Encounters or increased from certain Another Dungeon runs for story characters. Through most of the game their influence is rather minimal, but they can have a significant influence when fully optimizing your party — especially at thresholds where they unlock an additional skill slot, badge slot, and Grasta slot, or when they help you access additional Stellar Awakening perks. Your point totals also affect the number of additional rewards you'd receive from an Another Dungeon run, giving incentive to accumulate them.
  • The Grastas, introduced in v2.0.1, permit you to further improve your characters by giving them passive effects like conditional damage bonuses or even additional skills. The Grasta can even be upgraded with ores to further customize your team. When you've maxed out your characters' levels, this is the expected way to improve them going forward.
• Equipment Upgrade:
  • The main draw of the Otherlands areas is that the materials obtained there are used to craft and upgrade special equipment. The requirements include multiple drops obtained from bosses and elusive shiny mobs.
  • Additional chapters to the story, starting from update 1.5.1, add more upgradeable equipment. Though they may not be as strong as those found from Otherlands runs, obtaining their required ingredients is a lot less tedious and involves fighting less difficult enemies.
  • Chapter 70 introduces the ability to further upgrade your Grasta. Expending Dormant Ores will unlock additional Grasta abilities based on what Grasta you're using. You can also find specialized Ores to give specific abilities to your Grastas.
  • There's a Wandering Blacksmith in the Hollow Time Layer who offers to reforge certain weapons, granting them additional buffs to bring them up to speed with newer equipment. These include the superboss weaponry from previous chapters, or fully upgraded Otherlands weapons. Certain Infinity Minus One Swords can also be reforged this way to make them nearly as potent as the best available weapons.
  • Blacktear weapons in Wryz Saga are required to clear out obstacles in Wyrmrest Isle, and occasionally, the obstacle will also require stronger version of the weapons, thus necessitating grind to upgrade them before the player can explore further.
• Evil Tower of Ominousness:
  • The Tower of Time, a biomechanical tower filled with bizarre machine enemies, acts as the first major dungeon in the game, and the dungeon that has to be completed prior to unlocking the Spacetime Rift.
  • Lampshaded during "The Celestial Tower and the Shadow Witch" when Ilulu insists that "you always find the final villain at the top of some ridiculously tall structure," and several characters are briefly bothered by this.
• Everyone Laughs Ending: Multiple sidequests end with Aldo and/or any surrounding characters laughing as the game cuts to the quest complete screen.
• Experience Booster:
  • Characters obtained from the Gallery of Dreams will always be level 1. You can use Scrolls to level them up, but if you put them in battle they will gain bonus experience until they are three-quarters the level of your strongest character, after which they will level normally.
  • Another Style versions of characters in your roster must be trained up from level 1. However, they enjoy an additional experience bonus that makes it easier to bring them up to speed with your current party.
  • You can obtain badges, Grasta, and equipment that increase the wearer's experience gain.

F - J

• Far East: The Garulea Continent, the main setting of Part 2, is also the home of several characters with the "Eastern" property. What separates them from being a classic Wutai is, in addition to Mikos and samurais, the presence of at least one Chinese-inspired character (Lingli).
• Fate Worse than Death: In Dunarith's third character quest, he reveals this is what happened to people unfortunate enough to have their soul sucked by a certain monster in Snake Dream, resulting the soul to turn into evil spirit starting with his own sister's soul.
  Dunarith: Their soul experiences a never-ending torture as it is nibbled away. Once it has enjoyed the taste long enough, it spits the soul up like gum! It's a huge disgrace to the victim's fate, to divine providence, and to all other beings!
• Fetch Quest: During the first Tales Series crossover event, Aldo and company are left unable to storm the Citadel of Time, as even Ogre Rancorem cannot break through the barrier that protects it. Thus begins a series of quests to obtain a pair of mythical swords in order to forge the Eternal Sword to allow them to infiltrate the lair.
• Fishing for Sole: In the first fishing minigame, some of your catches can be random junk like slippers and bottles. They still contribute to the fish compendium and you can even get achievements for catching enough of them or catching extremely large ones.
• Fishing Minigame: One is added to the game as part of the “1000 Ark of the Dragon Palace” update, and another variation is introduced as part of that episode's sequel.
• Fixed Damage Attack: A few bosses have an attack that inflicts a guaranteed 9999 (or more) damage to one or more party members. This attack is typically only used at low health, prompting you to burst them down before a Total Party Kill happens.
• Floating Continent: Due to the earth below becoming too toxic to live on, humanity lives on floating landmasses in the future.
• Fluffy the Terrible: Foran's grandmother has a pet cat named Mittens. Only the cat is actually a tiger, and the reason Foran is so afraid of cats, since she had to fight Mittens as part of her training, and never won.
• Flying Seafood Special: The future has flying fish that can be caught swimming through the clouds. The Ogres Spike has a white whale swimming in the sky in the distance.
• Forced Level-Grinding:
  • The additional episodes (starting with "Two Knights and the Holy Sword") introduce a new character to your roster. However, they're several levels behind the episode's recommended level and are ranked 2 stars — worse than the game's Com Mons. The only way to upgrade them is to progress their episodes, which in turn involves repeatedly fighting the associated monsters to gather points to unlock the next boss fight. The associated Another Dungeons give more points per fight, but also require that underpowered character to be in the party, meaning you'll have to bring them up to speed or they'll become The Load.
  • Upgrading your Manifest weapons takes a lot of fighting. They only gain experience from combat, and the process cannot be augmented by experience-increasing Badges or experience-giving Scrolls. You'll take a long while to reach their final level before you can initiate their second boss fight.
  • The 3000 Year Ark episode will halt your progress with undersea obstacles, and the only way to advance is to progress the episode's own harpoon Fishing Minigame and obtain the tool you need.
• Foreshadowing:
  • If new players go through the Persona 5 crossover content as soon as it becomes available, Morgana’s meeting with the Gallery Master provides a little bit of this, as the Gallery Master specifically mentions that the visitors to the Gallery of Dreams are all cats, hinting at Aldo’s true nature.
  • Shannon remarks in chapter 2 of Ciel's Other Tale that Aldo's meowing is incredibly convincing for what appears to be his first try and wonders if he's practiced it before.
  • The game’s title spells out the game’s major plot twist. “Another Eden: The cat beyond time and space” is literally what Aldo is.
• Frothy Mugs of Water: During a sidequest in the Ogre Wars arc, Aldo is introduced to a mixologist who works in a tavern trying to create the ultimate "smoothie" recipe.
• Full Health Bonus: Several skills do more damage when used at full (or very high) health. Various weaponry also give a stacking damage bonus if their user is at full health, and the same goes for the "Enhance at Max HP" grasta.
• Funny Background Event:
  • In Veina's character quests, Aldo can be seen practicing sword or playing with cat in the background when not sleeping while Veina is giving her lengthy expositions to the local NPCs.
  • In Chapter 6 of "Song of Sword and Wings of Lost Paradise", Prai continues his hot-blooded running to distract gathering crowds from focusing too much on Mistrare (It Makes Sense in Context) in the background while the ongoing dialogue focuses on Rosetta admonishing the crowd.
• Future Imperfect: A sidequest on Eeza involves three historians researching and recreating elements of Garulea's culture, only to be limited by great misconceptions. Time travel gets used to straighten things out.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Due to the gacha system, some characters described as weaker than the others can be maxed out before you pull the later one. Examples include Akane and Miyu respectively compared to Shion (Akane's older brother and a more skilled samurai) and Bertrand (Miyu's bodyguard and combat teacher).
  • Character quests always portray their villains as extremely dangerous and ambitious. This includes the first quests in which the enemy is level 10 and, by the time you can access the quests, can likely be killed your top characters in one hit.
  • Tiramisu's Encounter dialogue assumes the player has reached the story part where Aldo became the champion of the Dragon God, since she made note about her dragon being drawn to Aldo. Of course, it is possible for players who have not completed Part I to pull her anyway, but the dialogue line stays the same.
• Geo Effects and Weather of War: Starting from The Chronos Empire Strikes Back main story arc, weather and field conditions of the Hollow Time Layer affect field layouts and battles. For example, there are certain areas of the field those become invisible when the area is fogged, and enemies may have special buffs or debuffs depending on the weather condition. Different areas also have different severity of the condition, with phase-shifted versions of the area will always be affected by severe condition.
• Game Within a Game: IDA School Episode 3 is centered around the "Lord of Mana" VR RPG. Its rewards are earned by building up and maxing out your Relationship Values with anyone who can be recruited into the game.
• Ghost Town:
  • Horai used to be this before Marlowe begins revitaliizing it in "The Time Mine and the Dreamers".
  • The penultimate chapter of "Song of Sword and Wings of Lost Paradise" has the player visiting Lunar Ghost City, where the People of Paradise apparently used to live. Unlike the more worn-out Horai, all of the facilities in the city are perfectly up and running for some reason, and Noah-like creatures are spread across the city.
• Glass Cannon: Shade elemental characters can sacrifice their defense to increase their attack, leading to this effect.
• Global Airship:
  • In an exaggerated version of Defeat Means Friendship, defeating the Synth Hydra and completing the Riftbreaker chapter gets the automated dimensional airship to join your cause, and opens up a few new places to quick-travel to. Having the Riftbreaker in tow also lets you access any time period freely without needing to transit through the Spacetime Rift.
  • The whole Garden Island from Ciel's Other Tale turns out to be one, though it's a lot more static in its place than the Riftbreaker.
• Global Currency Exception:
  • The Nopaew Emporium only accepts Git for weapon upgrades; Memoirs must be bought using Tsubura's Gems, earned by completing Very Hard Another Dungeons and Otherlands runs.
  • Likewise, the Master Fisher only accepts Fish Stones and Kamasu Points in order to buy fishing rod upgrades and baits above basic tier.
  • Transactions in Iota District of Elzion only accepts special currency known as ROC, which is required to obtain equipment through the auction. The player can only obtain it by completing treasure hunting quests.
  • Special goods like Sidekick equipment, obtained from the Meks in Omegapolis and adjacent settlements use Bearings that are an additional currency you can acquire from the mechanical mobs in the region. The Miu world uses Scratch marks instead, obtained from defeating the mobs in their time plan.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: The real Eden was lost to the Dimensional Vortex when Professor Chronos tried to send them to the past. Trapped in the void, Eden's mind was consumed by despair and madness, and he mutated into a abomination of chaos.
• Golem: These are some of the recurring enemy variants that you can encounter in the game.
• Good Morning, Crono: Much like Chrono Trigger, the game begins with Aldo being roused from his sleep by Feinne. It becomes a Running Gag at the start and end of each arc as Aldo gets roused from his sleep by Feinne's voice, only to reveal a different character mimicking her each time.
• Gotta Catch Them All:
  • After gaining access to the Spacetime Rift, the player can interact with cats. There's an entire catalogue (and the supporting achievements) dedicated for them.
  • Once you unlock Monster Clash Arena in Chapter 97, you can travel the lands of the Miu world to scan different monsters to add to your MCA deck. Each monster you scan is assigned to one of three different decks and you need to complete a deck to use it to its fullest; missing spots will be substituted with placeholders from your weaker starting deck.
• "Groundhog Day" Loop:
  • The first chapter of "Song of Sword and Wings of Lost Paradise" forces the player (as Clarte) to go through this in order to prevent the deaths of Melina, Thillelille, Prai, and Rosetta at the hands of Johann by finding the proper order of events to prevent all involved parties from accompanying Clarte to the Crystalline Tower.
  • The premise of the Apocrypha "Wanderer in the Vortex" is this, with a gigantic vortex causing recurrent rifts of time that traps people and causes them to become unable to move forward. The prologue itself starts with one for Aldo and his friends in Baruoki, with Aldo being the only one who is fully aware of the loop. Him trying to find a way to break the loop is how he got involved in the story in the first place.
• Guide Dang It!: A few instances.
  • Early versions of the game go over the basics of the battle mechanics but generally leave it to the player to figure out the finer details of the system, like Valor Chants and backline regeneration. This has since been remedied by establishing combat tutorials with the Mayor, which become available as early as Chapter 2.
  • The game doesn't clearly explain the use of food and how to replenish it. It's not unusual for players to go about several chapters without ever consuming Feinne's sandwiches from the very start of the game.
  • Unlocking Mana's level 3 Valor Chant requires the player to complete the Lord of Mana main quest and then complete another quest afterwards, none of which are hinted at in Mana's profile.
• Haunted Castle: The Haunted Chateau in Elzion. It's a fake one part of Toto Dreamland, but years without maintenance have done a number to the special effects and animatronics. The former still works and are guaranteed to make the players do a Double Take or two, especially during cutscenes; the latter act as dungeon monsters.
• Healer Signs On Early: Aldo's first-ever companion is Feinne, who comes with a healing spell by default. After she gets kidnapped, the next story-based party member is Riica, who also can learn a mid-strength healing spell. Unlike Feinne, Riica never leaves the roster.
• Health/Damage Asymmetry: Your characters cap off at around 3000-4000 HP (but with the right buffs you can push to five-digit numbers) but can put out hundreds of thousands worth in damage. Bosses will have several million HP but will only hit for a few thousand. This does mean that Poison and Pain become rather ineffectual as Damage Over Time, and are rather used to enable Injured Vulnerability damage multipliers.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • The Elemental Spirits from Antiquity sacrifice themselves to minimize the damage from the timequake.
  • Near the end of Part I, Aldo willingly turns back into Kyros the cat to save Eden, culminating in them disappearing together into light. Presumably not happy with how it ends though, he gets better and eventually makes his way back to the Present era through a spacetime tear.
• Hero of Another Story: Version 2.14.200 update adds "Forward Unto Dawn" sidequest to "The Apex of Logic and Cardinal Scales" Mythos arc that follows several characters to showcase exactly how the Curio and Isuka from the Midnight Time Layer become the new Cardinal Vestige.
• He Was Right There All Along: The Horror monsters in the Macminal Museum are living dinosaur fossils that stand on a display stand and look like one of the museum's exhibits before someone gets too close and they attack.
• Hidden Agenda Villain: The android who hands out dark apples to people who've crossed the Despair Event Horizon, which "grants wishes" by trapping them in a Dream World. The truth is revealed in IDA Episode 3; it's an agent of the Mother AI that's searching for her adoptive daughter.
• Hidden Elf Village:
  • Konium, a beastfolk village hidden on the remote Snake Island, is home to beastfolk who are pacifistic towards humans as well as the reformed Guildna and Vares.
  • The end of the third chapter of "Song of Sword and Wings of Lost Paradise" mythos introduces Winged People's Village located at the base of Zerberiya Continent's Giant Claw. True to its name, its inhabitants are Winged Humanoids whose ancestors were apparently criminals exiled from the central continent and cursed by the wingless ones (i.e. humans), and they cannot leave the village as a result.
  • Hidden Village Itoise behind the Kunlun Mountains is a village where specters those are pacifistic towards humans live in.
  • Pador is a settlement beyond the depths of Hokishi Forest where the Titans live and isolate themselves after their participation in the battle against the Dark God ended long ago, in order to prevent the curse that will eventually degenerate themselves into ogres spread to others.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: A time-traveling, shapeshifting Varuo inadvertently changes his own history when he attempts to encourage his past self to touch a book that would grant him his powers. As a result, he ends up stranded in the Spacetime Rift.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: Aldo's "fight" with the Beast King at the end of Chapter 1 starts with him only getting in a few hits of token offense before the Beast King felling him with a 99999 HP strike. Even Aldo acquiring the power of his Ogre Rancorem sword isn't enough to stop the Beast King from smashing him a second time.
• Humongous Mecha:
  • "The Closed-Off Open World and the Azure Rebel" reveals that Leo has been developing the Deus Ex robots — which are based off of Sebastia's creation — and planning to transport them to other time layers before the plan is ultimately thwarted. Later in Chapter 6 of "Wanderer in the Vortex", it is revealed that the Branch Manager has been secretly developing Deus Cras in his desperate attempt to be able to return to his original time layer, which explains its ability to interfere with Another Force.
  • The Guilty Hades is introduced in chapter 97 after Kamlanage joins the party. You can even ride and pilot the mech to traverse the Miu world, and upgrade its weaponry and parts to take down giant monsters that you cannot fight normally.
• "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight:
  • The group has to face Feinne and Altena after they’ve fused into Beast Angel Geo Anguirus.
  • After the fight against Chronos Menas, the group finds Eden’s spirit and has to fight him to save him.
  • Near the end of the Ogre Wars arc Ogre Rancorem takes possession of Aldo.
• I'll Never Tell You What I'm Telling You!: The first battle against the Ogres has them brag about how they're invincible as long as their Ogre Dog is with them... Provided he doesn't fall asleep after eating too much treats... Treats one of the Ogres carries in a bag on his belt... Guess what you're supposed to hit first during the battle. No wonder Zennon Ogre kills them right after for their stupidity.
• Infinity -1 Sword:
  • After completing Chapter 21, the player receives the Geo Metal Lock Box. Through a secret side quest that involves properly forming some Geo Metal from that, the player can then use it to forge an Adamantine Weapon. The player can only forge one of it, but it's a level 50 weapon with stats that rival level 60 gear. The Adamantine Weapon can be upgraded later on, giving it higher stats or a passive ability that puts it on par with the strongest weapons in the game, and would only be surpassed by personal weapons.
  • Each major story update from the Garulea arc onward introduces a set of level 60 upgradeable equipment, and while they have lower stats and less attractive upgrade perks than weapons gained from defeating a superboss, they can be purchased en masse and the upgrade materials can be readily farmed from the overworld, as opposed to time-gated Another Dungeons.
  • The Rill Weapons are made from the drops of monsters fished up from the Fishing Minigame. Each weapon also requires a part obtained from one of several incredibly strong superbosses encountered by investing effort into said minigame. They don't have any passive effects, but their stats are on par with most other endgame weaponry, and duplicates can be made if you're lucky with your catches.
  • The Tales of and Chrono Cross crossovers introduce weapon and armor sets those can be completed by doing a series of sidequests (i.e. the Cooking set and the Prismatic/Rainbow set). Although their stats are not as high as the late-game weapons obtained from the Super Bosses, the effects make them just as valuable as the late-game weapons. The Prismatic weapons, in particular, grant 70% critical rate and SPD buff, and the Cooking weapon set grants Poison immunity and a Full Health Bonus.
  • All of the Ensemble side stories introduced so far introduce a pair of weapons for their completion rewards - for example, the Sword and Hammer of Bond set from the Baruoki Ensemble and the Sword and Staff of Purgatory set from the Purgatory Ensemble. Similarly, their stats are not as high as the weapons from the superbosses and the non-Sword weapons need to be upgraded, but they still provide nifty effects those can be very effective in the hands of the right units.
  • The equipment obtained from the Timetwisted Maze will never match up to superboss weaponry, even if they somehow end up with superior stats. Still, their passive effects can be decent for a lot of combat situations, and they can make for good stand-ins when you're missing some pieces of equipment for a team.
• Infinity +1 Sword:
  • Weapons obtained from the Otherlands regions are some of the strongest in the game, as fully upgrading them bestows unique bonuses that can dramatically improve the performance of their wielder. However, this involves repeatedly grinding Very Hard Otherlands regions for drops to both make and upgrade the weapon, a task best suited for a level 80 party.
  • In general, every story update after the first major arc includes a set of superbosses, and your reward for defeating them is a set of incredibly powerful weapons (usually one of each weapon type) that would only be outclassed by personal weapons.
  • Manifest Weapons, introduced in v2.0.7, are unique weapons for several 5-star characters. They are first acquired through a moderately difficult Mirror Boss fight, and then their stats are upgraded through a lot of manual Level Grinding. Once maxed out, you have one final and difficult boss fight to complete before it gains a surge in stats and large modifications to their characters' ultimate skills. Some characters also have True Manifests, which add another even harder boss fight (no extra grinding required) that gives another great buff to the character's skills on top of giving sizeable stat boosts.
  • The Icicle Bow starts as a Sword of Plot Advancement that breaks barriers to let you progress in Chapter 71, but if you take the time to search out more Aurentium to enhance it, it slowly upgrades. At maximum strength it transforms into the Elegant Icicle Bow which is on par with Manifest Bows stat-wise but also gives a massive +50% damage bonus at full health and +100 MP to its wielder. It's without a doubt one of the strongest bows you can get, though you only get one.
  • Aldo gains his own in the form of Ogre Rancorem: Light following chapter 5 of "The Apex of Logic and Cardinal Scales", which gives him 70% critical rate and allows him to use a Super Mode that boosts his attack, grants him MP regen, and inflicts Dark Seal on enemies. Winning an additional, tougher battle also strengthens the weapon further.
  • An update of the "Complex Dream" storyline in April 2022 adds an extra quest that opens once Starky is recruited, in which the party must battle a difficult boss to complete it. Winning the battle will unlock Serge's personal weapon Grand Dream, a.ka. Mastermune, which grants him guaranteed Critical Hit, Full Health Bonus, and HP regen.
  • First, the Tenkiri Maru is acquired as part of plot progression, becoming a Sword of Plot Advancement for Cyrus that remains as his strongest weapon for most of the game. After clearing Chapter 104 and hunting down the Lavog superbosses across Platonos, the Tenkiri Maru gets upgraded to the Hoshikiri Maru, granting him even stronger buffs.
• Interface Spoiler:
  • It's possible to check for the location of a crafting ingredient for a weapon or armor as soon as any ingredient for it is collected, which can reveal the name of future dungeons or the existence of a secret side area.
  • Averted for the pathway to the Charol Plains. The portal needed to access it is not marked as an interactive item.
  • Averted with the title of Sheila's four-star class, which is rendered as a ? before it's obtained to hide a reveal that happens a third of the way through her side story.
  • However, Played Straight for the title of Miyu's 5* class and her description, which spoil information that Aldo isn't told until Miyu's second character quest.
  • Played straight for sharp-eyed players with the Time Mine Episode, as Horai is sitting right where the Tower of Time is on the Antiquity map, making the time-related problems obvious to spot.
• Item Crafting:
  • There's only one weapon shop in each town (that's not called Uruala, which, for some strange reason, has three), to which you sell the Shop Fodder you've picked up over the course of your latest travels; you get money ("Git") in exchange. However, one man's trash is another man's treasure: the items you sold allow the shopkeeper to craft weapons, and you can't buy what you want unless you have enough Git and you've sold him the necessary quantity of Organ Drops.
  • The various facilities of the Mining Village from the Time Mine side episode offer a more standard variation of item crafting, where you gather resources to create materials and tools to aid your expeditions into the titular mine.
• Item Farming: Eventually mandated if you want to keep multiple teams' worth of equipment up to date. Several good weapons and armors require multiple stacks of Organ Drops to just produce one unit, and several more will take lots more drops to fully upgrade. The amount of Git (the in-universe currency) you get from winning each battle is also rather scant, and most of your income is derived from selling off monster drops.
  • Otherlands equipment require a lot of copies of monster drops, which also includes multiple boss drops and many rare drops from the local Metal Slimes. Not helping matters is how you need two green keys to commence an Otherlands run, effectively limiting you to two free runs a day. It's been estimated to take a few months of Otherlands runs to fully upgrade an Otherlands weapon.
  • Fully upgrading Grastas requires lots and lots of Fragments. The game does hand you plenty over the story's course to give your reserves a head start, but when you're working to optimize your roster, the fragment cost really adds up.
  • Equipment earned from the Timetwisted Maze is randomly generated, with tiers of strength based on the quality of OOPArts you get them from. The rarest equipment have stat numbers that outclass superboss reward items, but you'll be doing a lot of farming to earn them.
• It Only Works Once:
  • Some characters have the "Hold Ground" buff that enables them to survive an otherwise fatal attack, but the buff will disappear once used in the battle. The only exception to this so far is Sophia, whose active skill can grant this to the entire party any time once charged.
  • Later units with Shade, Crystal, and Thunder elements have "Lunatic" mode that replaces the normal attack button. This enables them to enter Super Mode that grants additional bonuses for three turns, but can only be used once in battle. Some later Lunatic units like Curio and AS Victor can get extra chance to activate it through their Valor Chant, or through special skill like Alma.
  • All of the Tales of crossover units start with one Over Limit at the start of the battle, which will be consumed once they unleash Mystic Artes.
  • A few units like AS Hozuki also has non-Lunatic Super Mode that greatly boosts their damage output, but it also has limited number of turns and can also end permanently when certain skill is used.
• I Was Named "My Name": Averted with Kyros the cat, who appears to have had a different name before traveling to the future, and gets a completely new name when he travels to the past.
• Joke Item: The Wooden Lance, Staff of Light, and Dry Bow are a potted tree, a lamppost, and a coat hanger respectively. They're also level 1 weapons.
• Jurisdiction Friction:
  • The EGPD (Elzion's police) and the COA (Elzion's feds) don't play nice with each other. According to Renri, it's because the COA takes precedence for any serious crimes.
  • The same goes for EGPD and IDEA (basically IDA School's campus police). According to Isuka in her first character quest, a big past case in IDA once got the EGPD involved in the investigation and it went downhill from there, hence why IDEA seeks to maintain IDA's independence at all costs and tries to get IDA students-related cases wrapped by them before EGPD gets their nose too deep.
• Justified Tutorial: Before Aldo sets off from Barouki in order to find Feinne, the Mayor, worried for his safety, teaches him how to fight through a tutorial that demonstrates the battle mechanics against a straw training dummy. When he returns from the Spacetime Rift, the Mayor justifies the next advanced training sessions by stating that Aldo still has a lot to learn about battle.

K - O

• Killer Rabbit:
  • A side path in Toto Dreamland leads to the Ferris Wheel, where one finds an animatronic for Mimi the Rabbit. If the flashing red Horror icon on the minimap doesn't communicate this trope enough, the fact that she's a level 100 Superboss will.
  • The "ephemeral fiends" in "The 3000 Realm Ark and the Sea Abyss" Episode may seem cute with their dumbo octopi-like appearance. However, as seen in the first chapter, they are able to nearly submerge the iceberg where the Siren's Village when attacking in large number.
• Lazy Backup: The player loses the fight if everyone on the frontline is defeated, even if the backup characters are at full health.
• Leaked Experience: Characters in your party (even those in the backline) get bonus experience if their level is within three-quarters of the level of the highest-leveled character in your party.
• Left the Background Music On:
  • In the Corridor of Time Layers, Last Island, and Toto Dreamland, the background music keeps playing even during fights. While the former is a rather epic and dramatic score fitting with the gravity of the situation the heroes face, the latter two engage in Soundtrack Dissonance with their quiet compositions.
  • The King's music box is needed to subdue the giant Earth Golem in the Derismo Highroad. But even as it resists, the music box will still keep on playing during the fight until you defeat the golem.
• Lethal Joke Item:
  • The Toto Weapons look like cheap plastic toys... And have stats and enchantments rivaling the Cruel Angel Set.
  • Tales from the East Part III introduces the Ocean set weapons those look more like fish-shaped decorative weapons rather than actual weapons. They also have stats on par with the Dark Spirit and Miaki's weapons sets.
• Let's Split Up, Gang!:
  • The final part of "Return of Goddess of Time" Part II requires the group to split into two teams to infiltrate KMS Eastern Division, with Aldo and Amy as Required Party Members for each group.
  • The final part of "Return of Goddess of Time" Part III also requires the party to split up again in the beginning of Mark of God section of Dark Lord's Tomb. Again, Aldo and Amy are required for each division.
• Let Them Die Happy: While the Oracle is dying, he asks Aldo about his daughter. Aldo leaves out the bit where she's kidnapped.
• Level-Locked Loot: Most weapons and armor have a level requirement, which caps at 60.
• Limit Break: You eventually unlock Another Force for use. When activated, Time Stands Still and your party is able to use any skills for free as long as you have meter, culminating in a special Finishing Move if two or more characters share a personality trait. For instance, Aldo and Dierdre both use Swords and therefore team up for an attack; likewise, both Aldo and Cyrus have the "Guiding Light" trait and have a team-up ability. If none of them are around, Aldo delivers a solo move, the only character to do so.
• Limited Move Arsenal: You can only assign up to three skills on a character at any one time, with one additional slot unlocked if the character reaches 80 light or shadow points. While it may be a no-brainer for damage-oriented characters who only need to know how to hit one or multiple enemies, characters with a wide variety of support skills will need frequent skill adjustments for the situation.
• Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: Inverted when late-game optimization is concerned. Your physical damage dealers are capable of performing Critical Hits, which lets them benefit off critical-enabling and critical-boosting buffs. Mages don't benefit the same way, requiring an entirely different type of buff before they can even crit. While they can put out more raw damage to compensate, the increasing availability of crit buffs means physical DPS will outstrip mages for most part.
• Loads and Loads of Sidequests: There are a ton of quests to do in this game after you've completed an early story chapter, but they are gradually revealed as you progress through the main story. Even then, a lot of the Character Quests only pop up once you gain access to the Spacetime Rift.
• Loony Fan: The In-Universe performance group Paradoxical Dreamers has a huge fanbase in Eeza, to the point that there's a portion of the fanbase that regards themselves as "true fans", treats their devotion as Serious Business, without any awareness about how much of a public nuisance they're being. It takes a literal Almighty Janitor — a janitor with a reputation of being one of the group's legendary first fans — to talk some sense into them.
• Loot Boxes: The main way to unlock new characters for the game. It is possible, but fairly hard, to go through the main story without spending any in-game currency. You can get about four to five batches of ten straight gachas worth of currency to test your luck throughout the main story.
• Lost in Translation:
  • In the Japanese version, some of the fish names are comprised of puns related to the fish type and the appearance^Example The original name of "Long Time No Yellowtail" fish found in Ancient Battlefield, for example, is ohisashiburi (オヒサシブリ). Read entirely, this is normally expression for "long time no see", but the name also contains the word "buri", which is the word of Japanese amberjack and a species for yellowtail. Naturally, due to the nature of the puns, the linguistic joke is lost in the English script and only the visual joke remains.
  • Chapter 4 of "The Apex of Logic and Cardinal Scales" has the group come upon an elevator that requires a password. Using various clues, they discover the passwords are made utilizing a word game. In the Japanese version, each new password uses the last syllable of the previous password. The English localization changes it so each password uses the second to last letter, allowing them to guess the password is Kirytte. The elevator then asks for a second password, which the Twilight Suzette provides with “Angel”. Aldo lampshades that the password doesn’t fit with the established rules, and no explanation is given for why it works. The Japanese word for angel, “Tenshi”, does fit with the word game though.
• Lotus-Eater Machine: The IDA episodes focuses on rescuing people who've eaten dark apples, which traps them in Dream Worlds that fulfills their desires. Their real selves are hidden away, while a Heart Guardian keeps them trapped in the dream.
• Lunarians: In the Western Mythos, the People of Paradise turned out to be this, as they were residing in the city on the moon surface.
• Magikarp Power:
  • The stronger versions of each character's main skill is unlocked by completing their personal sidequests, some of which require a degree of story completion before they can be accessed. Characters like Kikyo or Myrus's Another Style have their final quest unlocked after completing Chapter 60 — depending on how early you acquired them, it can be a long while before you can access their full potential.
  • Uquaji, fought in the Spactime Rift, starts off as a level 1 pushover, but with each victory it comes back five levels stronger, and it keeps scaling past the party's level cap. Eventually it caps off at level 195, and if you beat it then, it joins the party. As a playable party member, Uquaji has skills that grow stronger with each passing turn in battle, and at the 20th turn he enters a Super Mode that dramatically increases his HP, MP, and power.
  • The ULTIMANIA Hammer starts off as a mere level 1 hammer, but it has upgrade requirements that involve killing certain monsters while a party member (active or reserve) wields it. At its full strength, its stats are on par with the Rill Hammer while also giving a sizeable END and SPR boost. To get there, though, you'll have to hunt many monsters, some only exclusive to certain Another Dungeon environments, and eventually need to defeat some bosses in the Very Hard Otherlands regions.
  • Manifest Weapons, when initially obtained, have only middling stats and a slight bonus to one specific skill for a specific character. After a good amount of Level Grinding, the stats and skill augments improve, and it reaches its full potential after a very difficult boss fight at the end.
  • As of the release of "Return of Goddess of Time Part III: Conclusion", Aldo's 5-star skills become this, arguably even moreso than other characters in the game. In order to unlock his full potential, the player needs to play up until a plot-relevant event in the middle of Chapter 83 and take time to grind his Guiding Light stat, since the power of his 5-star skills becomes directly influenced by said stat after the aforementioned event. Serge from Chrono Cross crossover story is similarly dependent to his own Guiding Light accumulation, although unlike Aldo, his strongest skills are not locked behind story chapter.
• Mass Monster-Slaughter Sidequest: Through the Records menu, you are rewarded Chronos Stones for killing a lot of the same enemy type, capping at 100 of a single enemy slain.
• Matchmaker Quest:
  • One sidequest has Aldo deliver a love letter, and then having to convince the writer to be more true to herself instead of creating a persona her crush isn't even interested in.
  • Another quest involves Aldo trying to get an artist and the girl he drew pictures of together out of frustration from how willing they were to sit there pining after each other instead of just talking to each other.
• Meaningful Echo: In Acteul, a child named Rin wants to meet her father in the Palsifal Palace despite her mother's objections. Near the end of it, the mother apologized to Rin with the phrase "Sorry for causing you so much pain", which to Rin's surprise, is the exact same line that her father told her in the palace. She even lampshades how her parents are like two peas in a pod.
• Mechanically Unusual Class: Some characters break the mold, usually by using weapons not available in-game (Cerrine uses a whip, Felmina dual knives, Elga dual sickles and Saki her ice powers) or a peculiar skillset (AS Isuka switches between various stances with different effects). The former uses the same weapons than other characters to gain bonus stats but with altered properties (Cerrine uses fists, a blunt weapon, but her whip inflicts piercing damage), the latter requires practice to use them to full extent.
• MegaCorp: KMS in the Future era. They don't directly control Elzion, but they have a hand in every pie ranging from robot production (Riica), scientific research (Krervo and Nonold) and energy production (the Xeno Prisma). They also have a shadier side such as Project Eugenes (a Bio-Augmentation experiment that resulted in giving Suzette her powers), Project Deus Ex Machina (turning Riica into a combat model despite the protests of her head researcher) and favoring the Xeno Prisma over the less powerful but incredibly safer Geo Prisma.
• Me's a Crowd: Some Manifest fights will pit you against at least two copies of themselves to demonstrate how the weapon's full power skills can be used in combination with each other.
• Metal Slime: The Otherlands levels and Other Tales Another Dungeons feature glowing "Alarmed" mobs. These have a lower appearance rate, are a fair bit tougher than their non-shiny counterparts, are prone to running away at the start of battle, and drop rare items that are vital to weapon upgrades.
• Mistaken for Undead: Zig-zagged. A sidequest in Acteul involves Aldo investigating a mysterious voice that disturbs a household at night. Initially, the "culprit" was a female merchant who can't sleep and only bothers to conduct business regularly at that time. When the mysterious voice seemingly returned, it was an actual ghost that had to be appeased.
• Money Sink:
  • The most expensive items in the game aren't pieces of equipment but their upgrade prices. Fully upgrading a Cruel Angel's equipment, for instance, will consume at least 1,500,000 Git, and things like the Sword of Despair or the Elemental Arms will cost twice as much.
  • Grastas offer useful passives that greatly enhance a character's performance in battle, but fully unlocking each Grasta's capabilities can cost anywhere from 150,000 to 450,000 Git. Outfitting a single character with three fully upgraded Grastas will easily cost over 1 million Git in total; doing the same for an entire roster will drain your Git reserves very quickly. Prior to version 2.3.200 of the global build, the player is also required to pay 100,000 Git per Grasta if they want to remove the wrongly-equipped ones, although now removing Grastas no longer cost Git.
• Mordor: The Western Continent of Zerberiya has been hinted to be this throughout a few character quests such as Melina's, but the full extent of how harsh the environment is revealed in "Song of Sword and Wings of Lost Paradise". The Barbera Untrodden Region in the southern part, for example, not only has constant lightning bolts falling from the sky, but it also has no water, earth, air, and fire at all to make the area remotely habitable for normal lifeforms. Apparently, the sheer harshness of the continent is the reason why it used to be made as a place to exile criminals from the central continent.
• Most Definitely Not Accompanying Us: After rescuing Feinne from the Beast King's Castle, Aldo tries to leave Feinne with their honorary grandpa. Naturally, Feinne stows away on their airship.
• Moving the Goalposts: The Lost Tome episode revolves around finding a mystical tome that's gone on auction. It's priced so high that Aldo and company has to climb through the auction ranks to be able to bid on it. They get there by the end of the second chapter after a painstaking effort, only for the auction house to dramatically raise the requirements.
• The Most Wanted: The Chronos Empire Strikes Back main story introduces bounty hunting sidequests to track down various Mek criminals in the Hollow Time Layer, and the player must raise through the ranks and obtain clues in order to face off with four of the most dangerous criminals tagged as "Head". Defeating them all unlocks an additional one required to obtain the Elpis Sword.
• Motherly Scientist: Chapter 4 of 'The Apex of Logic and Cardinal Scales' deconstructs this. Professor Karin treats her subjects like people, which confuses her fellow KMS scientists. However, she also insists on referring to them by her new names for them, regardless if they want to keep their original names. She is also still putting them through horrific experiments, including transforming a child into a monstrous, berserk ogre. And she's only kindly so long as her subjects follow her expectations - the moment they don't, she'll order them to be disposed of, like her fellows would.
• Mundane Made Awesome: Auctions held at the Auction House during the Lost Tome episode are presented as Auction Battles, where the player wins the auctions by depleting the opponent's motivation.
• Mythology Gag: As the game was written by Masato Kato, who was also part of the team for Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross, there are several little nods to the series. However, later parts of the story also contain references to his other works.
  • The Good Morning, Crono trope is alive and well in this game, and plays out almost identically to its predecessor.
  • At the start of the game, Aldo gets a brief explanation into what Prisma are and how they work from Ashtear — a girl who looks like Lucca and shares her last name. The resemblance plays a role in Kid’s part of the story in the Chrono Cross symphony. When Ashtear is Promoted to Playable following the release of The Chronos Empire Strikes Back main story arc, she is also introduced with a Sidekick named Korobo — which brings Robo to mind.
  • One of the game's allies is a samurai-turned-frog named Cyrus. The same croaking sound effect for Frog is used when Cyrus speaks. Cyrus’s Nirvana Slash ability also shares its name with an attack Chrono Trigger Cyrus used in a flashback.
  • When Aldo and Cyrus perform an Another Force finisher together, they perform Crono and Frog’s X-Strike.
  • The Spacetime Rift the heroes eventually gain access to is an almost exact recreation of the End of Time. One of its recurring bosses is Uquaji, a blue evolving enemy that grows stronger after each victory, just like Spekkio. Then, the Chrono Cross crossover event includes Another Spacetime Rift that even more closely resembles the End of Time, and even includes an NPC that requires you to circle the room three times before interacting with it.
  • At Konium, the player finds a merchant who offers unique equipment in exchange for Stones, Feathers, and Flowers found across Snake Neck Igoma. This is highly similar to the Nu trader in Chrono Trigger.
  • Eating the Kasumi Lunch Box, a food item obtained from Purgatory, will fully restore the party's HP and MP like the other foods, but will also inform the player "However, you're still hungry" like the healing pods in the Bad Future of Chrono Trigger.
  • Several elements of The Chronos Empire Strikes Back Part I carry more reference from the Chrono series, such as the origin of the Meks' lightspark that comes from a "giant red stone from the sky", and there is a rebel organization named "Acacia Stargliders" led by an NPC named Darius. Furthermore, after clearing Part II (Chapter 104), a sidequest will open where the party will investigate red meteors those supposedly drove the Miu race to their extinction, and every single one of them leads to bosses named Lavog, which are clearly based off of Lavos from Chrono Trigger — down to their self-dividing ability in the second phase of the battles.
  • The Chronos Empire Strikes Back Part II introduces Nullgear Guilty Hades, which appearance is similar to the titular gear from Xenogears. Interestingly, though, its movement stances are more reminiscent to Weltall.
• Never the Selves Shall Meet: Played with, as it's more a case of the selves not meeting at a point where the original changed. King Miglance and Thunder King both carry Palsifal's sword and nothing happens even as they stand face to face, but time-related shenanigans happens when Aldo and Thunder King meet since Palsifal's sword was turned into Ogre Rancorem when Thunder King slew the Ogres.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: After the future is altered, wiping Elzion from existence, Aldo goes back in time to restore the world to the way it was originally. He only learns after shutting down the Tower of Time for good that the original timeline would eventually result in the destruction of all reality.
• Nominal Importance: Aldo doesn't bother to learn the name of every NPC, even the ones that give him quests. This often bites him back frequently, like when Aldo has to return a letter to the original quest giver and doesn't know her name, or when a kid refuses to believe that he was sent by the kid's father since Aldo doesn't know his name.
• Notice This:
  • Points of interest are surrounded by green sparkling particles. Tapping them rewards you with Shop Fodder materials used for Item Crafting.
  • The green quest marker to advance the main story is always visible on the overworld quick-travel map, and the minimap should you be close enough to your next destination. Setting a sidequest as "priority quest" will add the same behavior to its quest marker.
• Not Quite Saved Enough: In "Wanderer in the Vortex" Apocrypha, this is how all of the chapters end so far — the time layer might have been saved and able to move forward, but it is also at the cost of some characters central to the chapter. Completing an extra quest after clearing the chapter allows the party to properly save said characters, leading to the proper epilogue for each chapter.
• Obvious Rule Patch:
  • As stronger characters and mechanics are introduced, on top of ways to make existing characters even stronger, the potential damage one can do both inside and outside Another Force keeps increasing. To prevent players from essentially skipping bosses in one go, several bosses from later updates have stoppers, where they outright stop taking any damage past certain HP thresholds so that the player cannot skip their changes in phase.
  • Lokido's True Manifest fight has multiple life bars and stoppers on the final one to prevent him from being effortlessly burst down, and if you try to burst him in one turn from a full life bar, he will punish you with an unavoidable Total Party Kill. Very few boss fights have such heavy punishments like that.
• Older Than They Look:
  • Downplayed with Dewey, who looks like a pre-teen but is actually in his late teens. This is due to his stunted growth due to the illness that used to plague him before he was finally cured by Professor Zekir's nanomachines.
  • Victor is stated to have been around for a very long time. His quest reveals that he is of the same age as the Mayor of Baruoki and in fact used to go on adventures together with him, but he stopped aging after gaining power in Rucyana Sands during a past incident that nearly killed all of his and the Mayor's travelling companions.
  • The descendants of Those Bearing Wings in the Western Mythos stop aging physically once they reach adulthood. However, they have normal lifespan comparable to humans, and in their death, their body will age rapidly.
• One-Gender Race: The fishfolk in Zerberiya continent are all female, but they are able to reproduce asexually. Milsha elaborates that each of the Atlantica fishfolk produce a single offspring that's an exact copy of themselves and no more, but if they were to mate with another species they will always produce a male. This is how the 29th Otohime of the Dragon Palace episode came to be.
• One Stat to Rule Them All: In the late- to post-game, Speed is one of the most important stats. It determines the order in which each combatant acts, which is important for ordering your debuffs and Valor Chants. It also affects the cooldown between attacks during Another Force, which means a faster character gets more hits in and contributes more to damage and Another Force extension.
• One-Time Dungeon:
  • Multiple dungeons like the Corridor of Time Layers, Riftbreaker, and Dimensional Vortex all disappear after completion. They can be revisited from the Spacetime Rift, though.
  • The Dream Worlds of the IDA School episodes vanish once their associated episodes are completed, but IDEA keeps Virtual Reality backups you can access from their headquarters.
• Only the Chosen May Wield:
  • Only Aldo can wield Ogre Rancorem, for reasons yet unknown.
  • The Manifest Weapons, introduced in v2.0.7, have incredible stats when fully upgraded. They can be used by anyone like most other weapons, but the Manifest's true value lies in augmenting skills unique to a specific character.
  • Miscellaneous signature weapons like the Tocachev for Joker or the Amakiri for Cyrus can only be wielded by the character associated with them.
• Opening the Sandbox: Once you reach the Spacetime Rift, you can freely visit any location you've been to previously and grind and complete sidequests at your leisure. Completing the Riftbreaker further facilitates quick-travel, letting you access any era from anywhere without needing to transit through the Spacetime Rift.
• Optional Boss: Several of these are scattered across the game, and fortunately they are visible on the overworld (or prefaced with a boss warning prompt) so you can't accidentally walk into them prematurely. The game recognizes some of them as Horrors and your reward for beating them is free Chrono Stones through achievements. For most of them, you are not even permitted to use a Continue if you die. The first few you see can be matched easily once you have a party at or near the level cap, but more recent bosses get increasingly tougher, with some of them being a Super Boss that requires heavy party optimization to defeat.
  • Trekking back to the depths of the Moonlight Forest when you get your very first opportunity to revisit it (at around level 25) throws you into a boss fight with the level 65 Goblin King and several level 55 Goblin minions. The Red Dawn is visible in the distance in the Zol Plains, and it's level 70 while the surrounding mobs (and your party, on your first visit) are about level 12.
  • After finishing 1000 Another Dungeon runs, the Nameless Girl becomes available as a level 90 boss.
• Organ Drops: Drops obtained from monsters are usually organs or pieces of equipment they had on them. Functionally they're Shop Fodder, but selling enough drops to the shop allows them to produce new equipment.
• Organic Technology:
  • The Tower of Time and its inhabitants are made of this, bordering on Womb Level. Aldo and Cyrus even comment that the building looks like flesh and metal fused together, while Riica confirms that it's a living structure. The Visus Embryo within takes it to another level, being a supercomputer made of clairvoyant giant cyborg baby heads.
  • The Hollow Time Layer is basically an entire world made of these. The meks and various lifeforms forming the Hollow Time Layer are very much mechanical, but they also carry biological qualities to various degrees such as having digestive system.
• Our Demons Are Different: They're hybrids of humans and youkai, and tend to have gray skin and horns. Stronger than humans, they can make themselves look like regular humans, or transform into a more monstrous form. They're also apparently related to the Beastfolk in some way.

P - T

• Peninsula of Power Leveling:
  • The Transitory Time Space Another Dungeon have Pre-existing Encounters and have their entries limited by key cards, but they yield much bigger experience points for one battle than the usual for the expected levels (25 in Hard, and 60 in Very Hard).
  • The Battle Simulator has one, in Normal Difficulty Stage 4 of its first series. This pits the player against a total of 8 copies of Cyrus, the highest number offered by a single Battle Simulator stage that can be defeated without extensive optimization. Each repetition of the battle can be done in a very short time, and a use of a Bold Pulse gives you 6 hours of unlimited retries on a stage. This makes this stage one of the most efficient sources of experience that isn't gated by your red and green keys, which is great for grinding Manifest Weapons.
  • For veteran players who have reached Main Story Part III, phase-shifted areas yield stronger versions of the enemies and reward experience points at least within a hundred thousand range, with the Another Dungeon versions in Omegapolis and Entrana AD can even go so far to give almost 500,000 experience points. Phase shifts also pop up regularly in various areas of the map, making them handy to tackle while also grinding for materials and such.
• Penultimate Weapon:
  • For collecting 50 Black Pearls from the Dragon Palace Very Hard Another Dungeon, you are awarded Otohime's Trident. But for all its significance in its associated side story, the Trident is of equivalent strength to a level 52 spear which you can purchase from the shop. It wouldn't get an upgrade until the 3000 Year Ark episode, a few years after its introduction.
  • Completion of Chapter 44 (Ogre Wars arc) grants you the four Elemental Arms as usable weaponry. Their weapon stats are a little shy of the Infinity Plus One Swords and they can even be upgraded. However, they're not as powerful as the plot usually trumps them to be — their expensive upgrade perks only enchant the user's normal attack with their element and slightly raise resistance to the same element, which has been deemed to not be worth the cost.
• Percussive Maintenance: In a sidequest, a beastman asks Guildna to hit a broken Elzion drone as hard as he can.
  Beast Man: Because everyone knows that machines can be fixed by casual violence.
• Perspective Flip: Kikyo's and Hardy's Another Style quests go through the same events from their opposing perspectives.
• Pixel Hunt: Some sidequests have you gather items for an NPC, hidden in various maps. Some are easier to spot, others not so much.
• Play Every Day: You gain 20 Chronos Stones each day when you start up the game, which can be boosted up to 40 if you decide to watch an ad. The shop has a button that gives 10 free Chronos Stones (for watching an ad) which resets each day. On top of that, a system added later allows you to gain a random (5 to 20) Chronos Stones or even keys for Another Dungeon runs by watching ads, capped at five each day.
• Plot Device All Along: The Tsubura's Gems those the player can collect weekly by clearing Very Hard Another Dungeons? Return of the Goddess of Time Part III reveals that they are created by Queen Himika and Professor Madoka as means to collect information on Aldo and the party through the Nopaew Clan in order to devise Project: Another Eden.
• Portal Crossroad World: The Spacetime Rift is a Hub Level with portals to all the main time periods.
• Post-Final Boss: After defeating Chronos Menas, the party gets sucked into it and they have one final confrontation with Eden's soul in order to try bring him to his senses. His only attack does a miniscule amount of damage to the party, which is easily healed off.
• Power Creep: In early days of the game, your best attacks from a 5-star character would simply be a multi-hit XL-strength attack. As new mechanics and challenges get introduced, however, the new norm for 5-stars is to have attacks that not just deal multiple hits of damage, but also bestow stacking buffs to themselves or the party (or debuffs to hit targets) and/or build up a charge meter that does something different at full charge. Some of the latest 5-star characters have skill descriptions so long that they can nearly cover the whole screen when viewing them in-battle!
  
  To address this, Manifest weapons were introduced to bridge the gap between the older and newer units, and several story characters would receive buffs to bring them closer to the upward-moving par. In addition, starting from version 2.11.200, the game also introduces True Manifestation, which not only upgrades units with older Manifest weapons even further, but also makes the upgrades independent from the weapon while also giving stat boost to said weapon.
• Power Equals Rarity: Characters with a higher star ranking are straight-up better than those of lower ranks due to greater base stats, more Ability Board spaces, and a higher level cap.
• Pre-existing Encounters:
  • The monsters that can be seen on the map that are much more difficult than the Random Encounters in the same area, but drop rare crafting ingredients and sometimes guard chests with strong weapons or armor.
  • Some tiles inside the Nadara Volcano may periodically sprout flames. Walking through them forces an enemy encounter against Hell Hounds, but they won't reward EXP or Git.
  • Encounters pertaining to the Persona 5 collab are all visible on the minimap. This allows for the player to get a back attack on them for a free turn where the enemies are forcibly stunned.
  • The Transitory Time Space and Ephemeral Time Space Another Dungeons yield large amount of EXP and Git respectively, but the number of encounters are limited and all of the enemies are visible on the map.
  • The Dungeon Ruins of the Land of Ro don't have Random Encounters except in its 5th floor, as unlike other places, the party's fighting ability is sealed off^note all attacks' damage on the enemies will be nullified if they engage in combat and they are expected to stun enemies from behind - at least, until certain seals are broken on each floor.
  • Starting from The Chronos Empire Strikes Back story arc, regular encounters are no longer random and instead appears on the map as Symbol Encounters. These encounters are divided into two types: those marked with green symbols are non-aggressive and will not charge towards the player, while red ones are aggressive in similar manner as Horrors.
• Prestige Class:
  • Various characters can be promoted to a higher rank, gaining an additional Ability Board and several accompanying stat boosts. There are two ways to do this: either by grinding Another Dungeons to amass Tomes and Scripts, or by being lucky enough to pull the higher-ranked version of the character. Characters granted to you through special Episodes can only be upgraded by progressing their quest.
  • Several characters have an alternate 5-star form called Another Style, which either reinforce their current abilities or turn them into a whole other unit. A select few have an Extra Style which even changes their weapon preference and elemental alignment.
  • Starting from version 3.3.100 with the release of Wryz Saga, a select 5-star characters (starting with Aldo and Cerius) are eligible for Stellar Awakening, which gives them Stellar Skill and various other passives, raising their level cap up to level 100, and also unlock extra voice clips those will play when the player trigger different actions while exploring. Unlocking them either require class-specific Starcharts (obtained from challenges for story/free characters and from Gallery of Dreams and/or Nopaew exchange for gacha characters), or using Allcosmos Starchart rewarded to players every month. Unlocking all of their Stellar Board also require the player to have them at 80 light or shadow, with additional 20 Stellar Points available at 30, 50, and 80 light/shadow.
• Purgatory and Limbo: Where the dead end up. As time flies, they lose their identity more and more, turning into featureless ghosts until nothing remains.
• Quirky Household: Ciel and Shannon come from one. Everyone has an eccentric fashion sense, and many of the household members have strange hobbies, such as cosplaying historic outfits or taming monsters.
• Ragnarök Proofing: Several years after Clarte wiped out most life on the moon, the facilities in the Lunar Ghost City are still up and running.
• Railroading: A path on the Derismo Highroad is blocked by the massive Earth Golem, and the protagonists refuse to proceed knowing that they can't handle it yet. You need the king's music box to fight it.
• Random Encounters: For the most part, the battles in this game are this, without the ability to avoid them unlike in Chrono Trigger. Complete with Fight Woosh.
• Rare Candy:
  • Scrolls are used to instantly give EXP to characters.
  • The Guiding Light and Luring Shadow items are used for Elite Tweak of your characters by increasing their light and shadow stat. Unlike scrolls which are farmable, these come at extremely limited number, and the only way to gain them outside of getting maxed-out copies of characters in the gacha is by getting lucky in Phantom Crystal Dimension or through subscription service rewards.
• Rare Random Drop:
  • If you want to unlock the final Ability Board of characters who can be promoted (Aldo, for instance), you will need to acquire a specific tome and a large number of scripts, which are only obtained by doing Another Dungeons. The drop rates for these items are low (though you're guaranteed a Murmur Script at minimum each time), so expect to run through these dungeons a lot. Chant Scripts (used for 5-star upgrades) and Treatises (which unlock Another Styles) are especially rare, having a miniscule drop rate^note About 0.5% for Chants, 0.01% for Treatises and only being available in the Very Hard Another Dungeons or at the end of the Phantom Crystal Dimension.
  • Several 4-star characters who receive new 5-star upgrades (starting with Aldo and Miyu) do not require as many Chant Scripts. Instead the bottleneck is Psalms, which have a drop rate similar to 5-star class Tomes. Unlike Tomes, you'll require multiples of them, and it's not unusual to go through many Another Dungeon runs and not see a single Psalm drop. This seems to be rectified starting with Feinne and May's 5-star upgrades, however - Feinne's Psalms for her class change are readily available as treasure chest items after certain point in the story^note although the player still has to grind the rest in Underworld AD for her Valor Chant grasta, and May's are given for free after completing "Heroes of Bygone Days and the Engraved Oath".
  • Through the Dream Encounters, you have a paltry 0.15% (or lower) chance of encountering a particular 5-star character. Promotional banners bump up that rate to around 0.8%. Another/Extra/Parallel Style characters are even rarer, as they have an even smaller 0.02% drop rate outside their promotional banner. You don't even get a Bad Luck Mitigation Mechanic to help you out, and players have been known to spend tens of thousands of Chrono Stones on a rate-up banner without even getting the featured character.
  • While traversing Another Dungeons, you have a 10% chance of the second or third map being a "rare" version, with chests that hold more valuable loot (including an increased chance of containing Chant Scripts). If the second map is a rare variation, it may also contain a different Horror that yields a different drop, some of which are needed to craft strong pieces of equipment.
• Reassigned to Antarctica:
  • Discussed in Prai's flashback Chapter 5 of "Song of Sword and Wings of Lost Paradise" Mythos. When he had just come to Merlot Ward as a priest, a boy immediately asked whether Prai was there because "someone in the church doesn't like him", thus implying this trope is in effect for area where the blessings are barren such as Merlot Ward. Prai immediately denied it and reassured him that he was there because he wanted to help them.
  • In Chapter 6 of "Wanderer in the Vortex" Apocrypha, this is basically what happened to Yakumo and contributed to his misery — being transferred to perform PR in a near-lawless place like Dust City is such an unenviable position because whoever gets stuck there also has to deal with the gangs controlling the area. When he failed to meet quota in the second loop (and presumably the first loop as well when Aldo and Nona had just arrived), the Branch Manager decided to transfer him to the surface exploration division — which is all but stated to be death sentence due to the surface contamination. This final straw is what finally caused him to snap before proceeding to massacre the entire Branch Office.
• Regional Redecoration: The shape of continents and geographical features change between eras. What was once the lush fields of the Charol Plains in Antiquity has become the Rucyana Sands in the present era; the same landmass turns into the Last Island in the future when it gains a body of water.
• Religious and Mythological Theme Naming: Usually with the names of 5-star character classes. For example, Clarte's AS class is Gjallarhorn, a horn from Norse mythology that is said to herald the beginning of Ragnarök when it is sounded.
• Required Party Member: Several quests require you to have a specific member in your party (either frontline or reserve) to initiate and progress. Certain Another Dungeons also mandate you have a specific party member to even enter.
  • Downplayed with the Episodes. It's not mandatory to have the required character with you at all time, but having them (or others) in your party gives you a bonus to the special currency earned through the Episode dungeon.
• Retired Badass: In update 2.2.8 the game allows the Baruoki Mayor to give you tutorials on various combat mechanics. This is conveyed as him being able to floor Aldo in a Single-Stroke Battle, and after all the tutorials he becomes a fearsome Superboss.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: Several instances.
  • The cats are generally treated as adorable beings in the game when not (or even while) causing mischief.
  • Some of the playable characters' Loyal Animal Companions such as Noah (Melina's companion), Moke (Thillelille's), and Pip (the dumbo octopus-like creature that accompanies the party in "The 3000 Realm Ark and the Sea Abyss" Episode) are similarly treated and such, albeit to differing extents.
• Robot Girl:
  • Riica is a work android created by KMS, as she would tell you.
  • The Nameless Girl standing by the Another Dungeon elevator in the Spacetime Rift seemed to be this at first. She's actually an assassin sent by scientists from a future Aldo wiped away when he used the Tower of Time. Her mission is to destroy him, and after completing about 1000 Another Dungeon runs, she becomes a level 90 superboss. However, completing the EPS superweapons sidequest of "The Apex of Logic and Cardinal Scales" subverts this, as it is revealed that she is actually a Human All Along — just one with omniscient ability to observe spacetime.
  • Korobo (Ashtear's Sidekick) is basically one, being a regular mek child and all before he was rebuilt by Ashtear to save his life.
• Robot War: Humanity's problem in the future. The Synth Humans led by Galliard suddenly rebelled against their masters.
• Rousseau Was Right: Another recurring theme highlighted in the series.
  • In "Forward Unto Dawn" sidequest, despite acknowledging the crimes Cardinal Vestige has done and his own distaste towards their atrocities, Cetie refused to kill the Cardinal Vestige core members except as a last resort, since what he wanted them to do is for them to properly atone for their crimes had it not for Dawn Curio killing them just after they had Heel Realization. Midnight Curio theorizes this is why Cetie was chosen as one of the Cardinal Vestige agents, since it exemplifies human virtue they sought in their vision of ideal humans.
  • Some of the morally questionable characters like Minalca and Yakumo are by no means nice and heroic — and they have no intention to be such. That said, their character quests make it clear that it's the situation they found themselves in that ultimately shaped them into what they are now — and despite it all, they're still capable of differing degrees of compassion.
• Running Gag: Several of them. To name a few:
  • In an early game 3-part sidequest, Aldo and company are requested to discover the source of a mysterious nightly voice, and every time they think they solved the mystery, it turns out to be something else entirely: at first it's because of some stray monsters, then an elderly street vendor, then finally the ghost of a woman, and when they think they finally figured it out, the very last scene of the sidequest reveals it was actually an entity called Nightmare that feeds on dreams.
  • You seem to have a habit of finding out that popular idol girls are actually guys in the IDA episodes.
  • As noted in Good Morning, Crono entry above, the game will have Aldo being woken up by Feinne several times, only to turn out it's another party member mimicking her voice.
  • Aldo's outfit is frequently poked fun at in the Future era due to being Fish out of Temporal Water in various sidequests, with him being often mistaken as a cosplayer much to his exasperation.
  • Shion offering dried sardines to every cat he meets, only for them to turn away from him, much to his dismay.
  • In the Royal Theater, people keep misnaming Aldo as "Aldwin". Aldo repeatedly tries to correct them, to no avail.
  • Every main story update always has children NPCs who drag Aldo into playing hide-or-seek (or tag) for some reasons.
  • In all of her character quests, Rosetta always starts with playing with the local cats only to vehemently deny it when she is discovered by Aldo, with Aldo not buying her excuses at all.
• Sand Is Water: In Rucyana Sands, there is a pool of sand where you can catch fish.
• Savage Setpiece: On the Open Air Gallery in the Ogres Spike, the player may be able to see a whale, floating in the distance. It's not just part of the scenery — with the help of a key item located behind the next boss, you can call down this level 110 Horror and fight it.
• Scary Stinging Swarm: When Akane helped in getting honey for the candymaker, she remembers how she was chased by bees back when she was young. She employs the same tactic of charging at the hive again, but Aldo backs her in fighting the bees this time.
• Scenery Porn: The game's beautiful backgrounds are frequently appreciated by its fans.
• Schmuck Bait: In the Riftbreaker, some areas have alarm buttons on the wall. Press them and you will immediately be attacked by Synth Humans.
• Sequel Hook:
  • The Part I and Part II of main story both end with the party still unable to properly save Eden, and decides to continue their journey until the time comes for them to try again.
  • In Chrono Cross crossover story, even though the Another World version of Aldo and Feinne are finally saved at the end of Serge's route, Serge, Kid, and Harle are still unable to return to El Nido, unlike characters from past crossovers who are able to return once their purposes had been fulfilled. The closing narration then reveals the story is an unknown dream of the real Eden, which is "left for another time". Furthermore, the very last scene indicates that Lynx may still be around to some degree, and will likely have more plans under his sleeve for the future.
• Sequential Boss: Several important story bosses appear to be a pushover before unveiling a second form that will put the player on their toes.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: There's a sidequest that ends this way for almost everyone involved. Aldo is roped into getting back an idol fan's exclusive ticket to a concert. After having Riica use Xeno Domain's computers to figure out where exactly the ticket ended up, Aldo tracks the ticket to the Wasteland and beats up some imps to get it back. He returns to the fan... who got a reprint and doesn't need the original ticket. And then the concert got cancelled because one of the performers got sick. At least the imps got the ticket back.
• Shop Fodder: The Gold Lump material serves as this since it yields high price when sold, and can generally be found in Another Dungeons intended for Git grinding, such as Ephemeral Time Space and Ruins of Rucyana.
• Shout-Out:
  • The Melvillithan is likely a reference to Moby-Dick and named after its author Herman Melville.
  • The Geo Anguirus is named after the Godzilla kaiju, Anguirus.
  • Two monsters (Alighie and Milton) in Chronos' Umbra are allusions to the poets Dante Alighieri and John Milton as the area can be considered a hellish existence for Eden akin to their writings in The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost.
  • There is a jump rope minigame, and you have an achievement of getting a thousand consecutive jumps, much like a similar minigame present in Final Fantasy IX.
• Shrouded in Myth: After defeating the Beast King, Aldo is briefly known among the local kids as a hero who can deflect attacks with his iron skin and shoot laser beams from his eyes.
• Sidequest Sidestory: Side Episodes are multi-chapter story arcs that focus on character(s) that aren't necessarily tied to the main story quest. If you get those characters in your roster, they have their own character quests that typically serve as a personal epilogue once you've completed their associated Episode.
• Sidetrack Bonus: Treasure Chests are commonly found in the dead-ends or corners of the map. Some dead-ends also contain hidden paths not indicated by the mini-map.
• Simple, yet Awesome: Erina the Healer maxes out at 4 stars, but her "Energy Steal" is incredibly practical. The problem with Heal spells is that they reduce your Damage Per Turn, since one of your party members casts the heal spell instead of using an attack. "Energy Steal" is a non-elemental magic attack, letting you eke out a bit of damage while keeping the team fresh. This does start to become obsolete by the end of the first story arc, but by that point you'd have a big enough roster to not depend on it.
• Sins of Our Fathers: A recurring theme of "Song of Sword and Wings of Lost Paradise" Mythos is to defy this trope, making it a point that just because the ancestors of the focus characters may have been criminals or heretics, in the present the descendants themselves are no different than normal people who simply wish to go through their lives and do not deserve carrying the brunt of their ancestors' sins.
• Skill Scores and Perks: Called "Ability Boards" in this game. Leveling-up grants an Ability Point (AP) which is then used to unlock nodes in the characters' Ability Boards. Most of these nodes are stat bonuses, but you'll eventually reach nodes that unlock new skills for the character.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: The serene Last Island theme persists even while you're engaging a Horror you just fished up.
• Spanner in the Works: In "The Celestial Tower and the Shadow Witch" the Big Bad is ready to unleash the dark power of the Tree of Woe and destroy the world, and the heroes can't stop her... only for the tree to purge itself of its corruption and bloom instead of killing everything.
• Stable Time Loop: Happens aplenty due to time travel shenanigans.
  • Professor Chronos studied regular prisma to create the Xeno Prisma, an artificial enhanced prisma, after natural prisma became scarce. The Phantom tries to destroy the universe by taking advantage of the temporal distortions caused by Xeno Prisma, at one point dropping a floating island from the future into the past. The Elementals sacrifice themselves to stop this, shattering into the original Prisma shards. If the island hadn't been flung back in time, the Elementals wouldn't have to sacrifice themselves, and there wouldn't be any Prisma for Chronos to study.
  • In the side episode "Two Knights and the Holy Sword", Deirdre receives a demon sword from a hooded lady. While trying to reawaken its powers, she goes back in time and anonymously gives herself the same sword.
  • In its sequel, First Knight and the Holy Sword, The entire Stable Time Loop above is fixed, by sending the player to a parallel universe where Deirdre never received Verweil as a child and Anabel kicked it. However, this creates another Stable Time Loop in that the events leading to Deirdre receiving Verweil are perpetuated by another Deirdre, who only did so because Playable Deirdre stepped in. Playable Deirdre can only step in if she got Verweil as a child in the first place.
  • One was nearly averted in part 1.5. The Ogre Rancorem was created when Zennon was killed with the Thunder King's version of the Holy Blade. During the events of part 1.5, the Thunder King is brought into the present, causing two Holy Blades to exist at the same time. While Ogre Rancorem tries to exploit a time paradox to erase the Holy Blade that would be its good counterpart, a clever switcharoo ends with the Thunder King taking home the present version of the Holy Blade — the exact same one that would be handed down for generations before transforming into Ogre Rancorem — without endangering the existence of the other one that would become the Palsifal Sword.
  • In Lovely's third character quest, Lovely hears of the Samolyn Dwarven Restaurant that started from a traveling dwarf imparting their knowledge to the founders. Thinking it's her long-lost husband Samori who started it, Lovely travels to Unigan to find him, but instead runs into a troubled human chef. By intervening and helping him out, Lovely unwittingly becomes the traveling dwarf who inspired the restaurant and loses her lead on Samori.
  • In Bivette's character quest, she mentioned that she has been able to hear the voice of a spirit since she was a child. In the third character quest, it is revealed that the voice guiding her turns out to have belonged to the Minimander that she trapped as a child and eventually she sent back to the Antiquity era as penance over what she had done. If (in her own way) she hadn't saved that Minimander, that spirit probably wouldn't have been there to guide her.
  • Jade's upgrade subquest requires "The Lost Tome and the Silver, Unfading Flower" episode to be cleared first, since the events in the subquest take place after the episode. Then, in the epilogue of said subquest^note available after upgrading Jade to his 5-star class, Jade is sucked into a wormhole to an isolated room in an unspecified time period before the episode where the grimoire that sealed Sophia resided, after which he freed her with his newfound power. His involvement eventually leads to Sophia's story in the episode, and as well as the events of said subquest.
  • In Ewan's third character quest, the stumbling blocks behind his search for Phantom's Bane to break his curse from the contract with Phantom's Lance is due to the weapon being last seen in the Antiquity era. So he and Aldo go back to the Antiquity era to track down of the weapon and succeed. However, because the Phantom's Lance and the Phantom's Bane are basically two sides of the same coin, the latter promptly shatters after it is used to destroy the Phantom's Lance in Ewan's possession, thus rendering it the last time the weapon is ever seen.
  • In "Heroes of Bygone Days and the Engraved Oath", May reveals that she received her trusty hammer from her grandmother, who apparently forged it from the metal of a powerful enemy she defeated. When the party finally defeated the Spearbreaker with the help of the sword that is forged by the younger self of May's grandmother Maisie at that time, the metal chunks forming the Spearbreaker's defenses finally broke down and Maisie offered the party to forge a new weapon out of them as her thanks. May refused, however, and instead told Maisie to use them to repair her blacksmith hammer for herself, and told her that to make it strong enough so her descendants can also use it - which May uses in the present day. This is briefly discussed at the end, with May wondering what would have happened if the party hadn't intervened with the events at that time instead.
  • In "Wanderer in the Binding Night", the entirety of the White Night Time Layer turns out to be one that spans tens of thousands of years — more specifically, at the end of her journey, Nona was fated to become the new observer of White Night Time Layer and go back to the very beginning of time to mend all of the tears in the time layer, ultimately replacing the previous observer who turned out to be a previous version of her who went through similar journey. In the end, the final parts of the story focuses on breaking this in order to allow Nona her proper happy ending.
• Stat Sticks: Some characters are visually shown to use a weapon other than one of the eight basic weapon types, but they will still equip one of those weapon types to boost the damage of their attacks.
• Status Effect-Powered Ability:
  • Several skills do bonus damage on targets affected by poison or pain. If it's both, some skills stack their bonus multipliers too.
  • The Power of Pain and Power of Poison Grastas bestow a damage bonus to their user while attacking an enemy afflicted with pain or poison respectively. This stacks multiplicatively, especially when combined with skills that have their own bonuses against ailing enemies.
• Superboss: They serve as the bulk of end- and post-game content, and there's enough of them to fill out its own subpage.
• Surprisingly Easy Miniquest:
  • After being separated from his comrades in the Corridors of Time Layers, Aldo ends up in a new area alone. It's possible for Aldo to be underleveled for the area's random encounters, since you can drop the hero in this game. Not only is the nearest town really close, if an enemy would deal a lethal blow, they are instantly destroyed.
  • Likewise, after Amy gets separated from the group in the Haunted Cheateau after being scared by a "ghost", the random encounters are deactivated and you can only go in one direction until you find the rest of the team.
  • After the player upgrades Jade to his 5-star class, an epilogue of his upgrade subquest is unlocked where Jade gets sucked into a wormhole by himself and has to fight the Grimoire Guardian guarding the tome that Sophia is trapped in. The player only needs to use the skill from his upgraded class to instantly end the battle.
• Surprisingly Sudden Death: King Palsifal shows up and stabs the oracle in the middle of an exposition scene with little fanfare, besides the upcoming boss fight warning.
• Sword of Plot Advancement:
  • In Chapter 58, your progress is blocked by Minister Tsuchino-Homare who's a Hopeless Boss Fight. A brief sidetrack leads to Cyrus obtaining the Tenkiri Maru, his strongest personal weapon which can break open the Minister's defenses, giving your party a shot at beating him. Tenkiri Maru remains Cyrus's strongest weapon for most of the game, and can even be upgraded as a reward for besting a series of superbosses in Platonos.
  • The "Lamentations, Manifestations" sidequest is required to advance the Apex of Logic and Cardinal Scales story arc past Chapter 5. Completing this sidequest unlocks Ogre Rancorem itself as a proper equipment for Aldo, and it's easily his best weapon that grants a strong buff and a useful utility skill.
• Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: The Cat Battle in Varuo's quest is played using three standard moves: Pounce, Scratch, and Swipe. Swipe is strong against Scratch, Scratch is strong against Pounce, and Pounce is strong against Swipe.
• Tag Team: The four characters in your active party can switch into reserve at any time — even if there's no one in the reserve to switch with. This is actually an important Resources Management Gameplay tactic, as characters in the reserve slowly regain health and Magic Points. Each character also has a Switch-Out Move in the form of a temporary stat buff which they grant to the party upon arrival.
• Takes One to Kill One: Downplayed. Although the player can use other elements just fine, Crystal-aligned enemies in Zerberiya Continent are weak to their own element. Fortunately, this does not apply to the playable characters.
• Taking You with Me: The Superboss Kudang in Land of Ro's Dungeon Ruins will unleash an attack that practically guarantees Total Party Kill on the frontline party upon its defeat, thus necessitating at least one of the members to have Hold Ground buff to survive and for the game to count this victory.
• Team Pet:
  • By default, Varuo the black cat, though the player can switch with whichever favorite cat they ever encountered through their play. Nobody ever acknowledges the cat's presence, but the cat travels with you throughout your entire journey. The cat becomes more relevant gameplay-wise starting from Chapter 37 by helping the team to navigate the Haunted Chateau by reaching places inaccessible by sneaking through holes in the walls and ajar doors, and later parts of Tales from the East Volume 2 also require the player to send the cat back and forth for communicating and accessing places the playable characters can't.
  • Noah and Moke (Melina and Thillelille's respective animal companions) serve as this for the group in the "Song of Sword and Wings of Lost Paradise" Mythos. They do not play particularly important role throughout the story, although one sidequest released along the Mythos focuses on Moke.
• Temporal Paradox:
  • The side episode "Two Knights and the Holy Sword" establishes one with Deirdre's sword. It was given to her by herself from the future, who only had it because her past self had it. The time loop creates sword's existence from nothing. This is eventually addressed in "First Knight and the Holy Sword", where it is shown that the sword was created from the Deliverance Sword as the answer to the alternate Deirdre's true prayer - that is, to save Anabel - with some help from the playable Deirdre. However, this is also a Stable Time Loop in that Alternate Deirdre only did so because playable Deirdre stepped in. However, playable Deirdre can only step in should Verweil be given to her as a child, which her stepping in caused.
  • Ogre Rancorem planned to exploit one during Ogre Wars by using the existence of two Palsifal's swords. If the sword owned by Thunder King was used in the Present Era to kill Zennon Ogre and turn into Rancorem, the cursed sword would've existed in both the Antiquity and Present, erasing the pure version of Palsifal's sword owned by King Miglance in the process and thus getting Rancorem rid of its Good Counterpart. The Gallery Master correctly guessed it and swapped the two Palsifal's swords, suppressing the paradox in the process.
• Temporary Online Content: Unlike most gacha games that have limited-time content, Another Eden is known for averting this trope — All new content that gets introduced during each update becomes permanently available. The only temporary things are event promotions or rate-up banners, but the characters involved will stay available after the promotion expires. This gives players freedom to play the game at their own pace (albeit at the cost of the game itself becoming massive, taking upwards of 7 gigabytes on a phone).
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: The Unseen regularly telegraphs counterattacks to specific elements. If it's struck with that element, it will retaliate with 9,999,999 damage to the offending party member, when your own units rarely exceed 4000 HP on their own. Aptly enough, the counterattack is named "Merciless Sanction".
• Time Crash: In The Chronos Empire Strikes Back main story arc, a mechanical World Tree-like structure called "Tree of Time" stands in the land of Hollow Time Layer, and some NPCs assume that its power is responsible for frequent time distortions in the time layer to the point a nearby settlement had to be abandoned due to its severity. The distortions manifest in various manners; for example, a certain area will temporarily get replaced by its version in the past, and anyone who gets stuck there will be sent along to said past once the distortion stabilizes. As it turns out, this is because the Tree of Time harbors the key to rewrite time to the Age of Gods, which is what the Chronos Empire is after.
• Time-Limit Boss: You have the beat the boss of chapter 74 within 5 and a half minutes because the stadium the fight takes place in is set to crash down to the ground in that time.
• Time Travel for Fun and Profit: Several sidequests involve traveling back or forward in time to collect materials that are unavailable in other time periods.
  • Played for Drama in Beautiful Stranger Shannon's character quests. Hailing from a time period warped by repeated revisions to history, her role is to prevent or revert unwanted alterations to a time period. This causes Aldo to briefly reflect on whether his time travelling is justified. Things come to a boil when yet another alternate Shannon knocks out Aldo, briefly undoing all his effors to change history thus far.
• Title Drop:
  • At the end of Arc 2 Part 2, the Book of the Time Dream has to be unlocked by voice activation and a person's three names. Aldo's final password, in addition to his other name of Kyros is "Another Eden", and it restores the ruined Chapel of the Goddess of Time in the future.
  • A sidequest while playing as Varuo mandates going back and forth across the time periods, so you will become the titular Cat Beyond Time and Space.
  • In "Song of Sword and Wings of Lost Paradise" Mythos, the title itself is actually the password passed down to Milsha's family as part of the mechanism required in order to unlock the Spirit Sanctuary.
• Translation Train Wreck: As the Global version of the game has much more frequent updates to attempt to catch up with the Japanese version content-wise, the translation can look visibly rushed at some points. However, later updates have been known to correct earlier mistakes.
  • Several weapon effects used to read "Counter: (effect)". While this implies that it triggers a counterattack, the upgrade actually means "chance to apply (effect) with any attack". Unlike most translation mistakes, this unusual word choice went unchanged for months before it was finally corrected to "When Attack: (effect)" sometime before v2.5.1.
  • Much of the dialogue in chapter 2 of the Persona 5 crossover event is rather awkward and occasionally incomprehensible.
    Noir: "That's right! Because what didn't excite was the treasure of raising by force."
  • Morgana's skills are more of a transliteration from Japanese rather than proper terms from his home game's localization, so instead of Magarudyne we get Mahagarudain. At least it's less messy with the second pair of Phantom Thieves, with Ryuji's Maziodyne getting a proper translation.
  • There are three functions of a Cat Shrine — Bind, Separate, Destroy. Contrary to what the names indicate, "Separate" recycles a Grasta into fragments, while "Destroy" detaches all Grastas from a single character. The latter function was renamed to "Rescind" not long after.
• Trilogy: The IDA school storyline, which follows Aldo's teaming up with IDEA and journeying throughout Dream Worlds of people who have eaten "Dark Apples."
• Turn-Based Combat: The core gameplay is a basic turn-based system, although there are mechanics that manipulate this - "Another Force" which allows the player to use several skills in a quick succession within the same turn, and a unit's Speed (SPD) stat which affects turn order during battles.
• Turns Red:
  • Certain bosses begin to use their deadlier attacks or engage more dangerous attack patterns when they fall to low HP. Some even begin to count down to a Total Party Kill at said low threshold.
  • The Poison Lily and Aegis Defender (Felmina's and Bertrand's manifests respectively) fights are accompanied with the Little Glitter, represented by Miyu. If you defeat the Little Glitter first, they become enraged and deal a lot more damage to your party.
• A Twinkle in the Sky: Another Running Gag in the game.
  • In Ciel's Other Tales, Shannon launches the guard dog that attacked her cats into the sky, causing it to vanish in a twinkle. Later on in the final chapter of the side story, the mansion's resident beast tamer tries to tame the story's Final Boss, and gets launched into the sky with similar result by said creature for his efforts.
    Ciel: Wow, he flew a long way!
  • In Myunfa's final character quest, when Lord Genshin^note albeit hooded tries to force the kettle spirit that was previously contracted to Myunfa to make a contract with him, the kettle spirit would have none of his greed and proceeds to send him flying, also resulting in this.
    Genshin: Mommmmmmy—-!!

U - Z

• Useless Useful Spell:
  • Minecarts allow the player to fast-travel to certain sections of the mines at Horai, expediting the journey to deeper areas. However, due to the immense resource grinding needed throughout the episode, it's usually better to go on foot, mining all sorts of resources along the way. Fast Minecarts are worse in this regard, as they require 5 alloy ingots to make (which demands a lot of coal and ores) and the added perk of being able to swap your party within the mines is not worth the effort. The alloy ingots required for a Fast Minecart are better spent on a Hildamite, an explosive which clears obstacles that guard very valuable rewards.
  • The Slothfiend's Bile lowers the encounter rate in the Ruins of Rucyana. It seems useful if you want to blitz your way through the dungeon with minimal interruptions, but it needlessly drags out a Ruins run if you aim to milk all of the dungeon's random encounters for maximum Git yield.
  • Miyu's and Ciel's personal weapons get quickly outclassed by stock level 60 weaponry. Their upgrade bonuses aren't the best for the characters' combat roles, even. Not helping matters is that their upgrades require drops from shiny mobs in their exclusive Another Dungeons.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change:
  • The "Cat Beyond its Territory" content lets you explore the world as Varuo. Features include the ability to gather and trade for cat materials to make his cosmetic equipment, additional quests involving Varuo's mischief, expansions to maps that reveal new treasure and bosses, and a minigame where you rally your cat allies from across the overworld to fight through a crashed spaceship. The last of these is crucial to unlocking Bivette's 5-star form, by the way.
  • The release of Apocrypha "Wanderer in the Vortex" introduces Timetwisted Maze, which is a roguelike Dungeon Crawler. All of your units will start from level 1 without access to their usual equipment and skillset; instead, skills can be obtained from Runes within the dungeon, and the dungeon may offer some items to help along the way (or traps to hinder the player). The stat growth of your unit can greatly differ from their original performance, as each unit is assigned one of five "classes" (ATK/DEF/TEC/MAG/SUP) that restricts what kinds of Runes they can equip. The general goal of going through the Timetwisted Maze is to gather OOPArts that can potentially become extremely powerful (but random) equipment, and clearing the Maze past a certain level once allows the player to progress sidequests to recruit Noahxis.
  • The last third portion of Wanderer in the Vortex final chapter, Wanderer in the Binding Night, introduces a Turn-Based Strategy minigame where Aldo's group has to defeat a large number of monsters in a large, open space. Here, the movement of enemies and allies alike are restricted by a grid, each unit able to move three spaces per turn. Attacking other units will result in normal battle where the ambushed unit will get stunned on first turn, and each battle is restricted into two turns before a stalemate is declared. Furthermore, to assist with the situation of the battlefield, all units are equipped with a handful of command and boost skills to help them turn the tides, such as command skill to nullify stun when ambushed and to restrict enemy movement.
• Wake-Up Call Boss:
  • The Visus Embryo in chapter 10 requires more strategy than previous boss fights, as it'll start using devastatingly powerful attacks once it loses half its health. You've just been introduced to the Another Force function, so it's a reminder to make the most of it to burst past dangerous boss phases.
  • Ogre Rancorem, the boss of the immediate next chapter, disables the Another Force bar, forcing the player to compensate with buffs, debuffs, and Valor Chants.
  • Beast King Guildna, who's fought at the climax of chapter 13, is a common stumbling point for many beginners. He's a Sequential Boss with no weaknesses, and while you have all your combat options available to you, you are expected to make the most of them, including using buffs, debuffs, Valor Chants, backline regeneration, and proper timing of Another Force, to succeed. It's fitting as he's an early Climax Boss.
• The Web Always Existed: Averted during Foran's second quest. She tries to upload a photo she just took to her social media accounts, but since she's in Aldo's time period it doesn't work.
• Welcome to Corneria: Most of the habitable settlements have one NPC that serves to welcome the player and gives brief exposition about what the settlement is. In an unusually tragic example of this trope, however, if the player goes around to explore in the final chapter of "Song of Sword and Wings of Lost Paradise" Mythos, the player can interact with an apparitions of one the Lunar Ghost City citizens near the entrance while the "doomsday" record of the moon is playing, with said citizen was practicing to welcome travelers to the city and hoping that they will eventually get visitors from the "blue planet" one day in order to say what he had been practicing. Given that everyone including him is long dead by the time the party arrives, though, it is suffice to say that he never got around to say it while he was alive.
• Wham Episode: Chapter 5 of "The Apex of Logic and Cardinal Scales" Mythos is a huge one, especially if the player has also completed "Return of the Goddess of Time" arc beforehand. The chapter reveals that there are actually two species of titans - the Former Titans that bears the curse of mutation (and isolated themselves in Pador in Antiquity Garulea), and the curse-resistant New Titans that eventually bred with regular humans and merged into one species. Because of this, humanity in the Future era are no longer "pure" humans and all of them carry titan genes within them, and all of them can potentially turn into ogres.
• Wham Line:
  • The Nameless Girl drops one upon explaining her circumstances at the end of her boss battle.
    Nameless Girl: But... even if I do save the Fragile Plane, the world may still be destroyed in 2000 AD by a large-scale temporal disaster.
  • At the end of Chapter 74, two of them are dropped very casually by the Time's Forgotten Stop Master and the Gallery Master in successive manner.
    Master: What brings me here? Aldo... I came to help you, of course. You, my past self.
    (...)
    Gallery Master: We are... Master and I are you. Your future self, Aldo.
  • One particular line in Hardy's Another Style quest hammers down how a key element of "The Apex of Logic and Cardinal Scales" Mythos deeply affects the workings of Elzion.
    Auction Presenter: How many of you are familiar with the Lost Laboratory?
• Wham Shot:
  • Renri's Another Style quest ends with one. At first, it seems that the still-active (if haywire) machines in the Toto Dreamland was caused by the former owner of the park (illegally) attempting to resurrect the place. After the perpetrator is apprehended, however, the game fades to a shot of the Toto and Mimi mascots in the entrance of the park... and Mimi's costume suddenly talks to Toto saying "it's time to play", surrounded by numerous Parasitotos dancing around them.
  • Chapter 66 ends with the Church of Time in the future being restored, and the Daughter of Time appeared once again and unveiled herself in front of the party...to reveal that she has Professor Madoka's face, although she promptly introduced herself as the disappearing Queen of Gadaro before disappearing with the Church of Time once again.
  • In Chapter 2 of "The 3000 Realm Ark and the Sea Abyss", Milsha revealed that some of the Atlantican citizens had gone missing, which became the reason she went to investigate the undersea volcano, only for them to come back on their own with the help of some travelers. Cue some time later after the party decided to try performing the Ceremony of the Protector simultaneously to restore the crimson corals and left the area, the camera pans to one section of Uncharted Region Verdot... with the apparent corpses of the same fishfolk who had gone missing.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • Between chapters 25 and 67, the party gets caught up in story beats that are unrelated to the main objective saving Eden until the following story arc.
  • Early in Cetie's character quest, he stated that one of the main reasons he became part of the law enforcement is to clear his father's name, who was a politician who became a pawn in a large-scale embezzlement case and died in prison while the ones who were truly responsible got away, and to this day he still tries to. However, the rest of his character quests do not address this any further and instead focuses more on his role as an agent of Cardinal Vestige and how he tries to uphold the justice he believes in despite everything.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: The synth that was disguised as Galliard had been collecting Sound Orbs as mementos from humans (including those that Amy's mother had) in the hopes of studying human culture.
• Wholesome Crossdresser: Ciel. Even most other characters think he's a girl at first.
• Winged Humanoid: The people of Winged People's Village, a.k.a. "Those Bearing Wings", possess wings those become the source of their magic power. However, they are unable to fly due to the curse placed upon the village until Mistrare breaks the curse at the end of Chapter 4 of the Mythos.
• Wolfpack Boss:
  • A few Otherlands or Boss Rush fights consist of a group of similarly strong enemies. Some even have a Combination Attack of their own, while others Turns Red when a single member is left alive. Unlike Flunky Bosses you have to defeat the whole group rather than focus on its leader.
  • The Manifest fights for Isuka, Claude, and Hismena all have relatively straightforward attack patterns... but at some point they will bring the other Manifests into the fight, using their teamwork to complicate matters. You still only need to beat the main focus of the fight to win, but it definitely won't be easy.
  • Mariel's Another Style Manifest full power rematch, much unlike the first round, starts with Yipha instead of Mariel. She's immune to magic, and if knocked down to 50% HP, Bertrand comes in, who's immune to physical. Knock both of them out, and Mariel herself will finally show up, fully revive them, and reinforce them with a 2-turn full damage negation shield.
• Word Salad Title: The title of the game turns out to make sense in context. It's a major plot point that a time-displaced cat got transformed into a replica of another character, who is named Eden.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: At chapter 83, the party has defeated the embodiment of Chaos, thwarted the Phantom's plans, and even started to reunite Professor Madoka with Eden after separating her from her alternate identity as Himika. But at the last moment, the Phantom snatches Eden away to trap him in darkness again, and Madoka, who can't bear to be separated from Eden again, hurls herself into the darkness to be with him, just as the dark god is being sealed away again. Thus concludes the Goddess of Time major story arc.
• Year Inside, Hour Outside: In the Time Mine side episode, the task of rebuilding the broken bridge is scheduled to take a long time, and Aldo leaves the village in the meantime. When he returns, he is shocked to find the bridge already completed, and that several years have passed for the villagers. The cause of the phenomenon is the remains of the Visus Embryo, buried within the depths of the third mine.
• Zip Mode: You can travel to areas you've visited previously, including locations over different time periods once the Spacetime Rift is unlocked.

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