Video Game / Chaos Rings II

The third game in the Chaos Rings franchise.

Chaos Rings II abandons the Ark Arena storyline of the first two games, and instead focuses on a character named Darwin, who is chosen to be the Nominator, and given the task of sacrificing four Candidates in order to prevent the destruction of the world.

This game adds new elements to the battle and exploration systems, and allows players to choose their own paths in the story, affecting the plot.

---

This video game provides examples of:

• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: No matter what, your party can never be more than two people. Especially obvious in the Playable Epilogue, where the seven playable characters split up in order to escape the dungeon.
• Battle Couple:
  • Darwin and Marie, although both are reluctant to admit their feelings.
  • Orlando and Li Hua, in the backstory. And in the Playable Epilogue content.
• Blade Lock: Araki to Darwin, when the former first attacks the latter.
• Body Horror: The True Final Boss of Chaos Rings II appears to have burst out of Ophan Lessica's body—the Ophan's face is dangling from its chest.
• Bragging Rights Reward: The Super MV, the best accessory in the game and gives great boosts to all stats, is the reward for defeating Piu-Piu, who was the strongest Super Boss in the game when it first launched. However, subsequent updates added higher-level PUB bosses, against whom the Super MV is very valuable.
• Colony Drop: After defeating Amon, the orbiting cathedral starts to fall on the planet. Darwin is able to stop it using Neron's power, however.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience/Color-Coded Elements: The spells are color coded by their element (red, green, or blue), as a healing spell (yellow), or as non-elemental (white).
• Combat Tentacles:
  • Famine has two on his back.
  • The Azi Dahaka family have two claw-tipped tentacles that grow from the sides of their body.
  • The Destroyer sends tentacles to attack the location of the Rite. Although called tentacles, they seem to have mouths, vocal cords, and teeth. Lots of teeth. They also come into play during the boss fight against him, and they inflict some nasty status effects.
• Combination Attack: Choosing Pair instead of Solo in battle allows both characters to perform the same action, usually for spectacular results. This means both characters will be hit by any attacks aimed their way, but it also means that they share any damage blocking or reflecting abilities. Summoning an Ophan is also only possible when doing a Pair attack.
• Continuity Nod:
  • In one of the hidden libraries, the records indicate that Amon got the idea for the Rite from myths about a "tournament to the death" where the winner rebuilt humanity. Three guesses what tournament it was.
  • One of the Piu Collection items in Omega Extra Mode is a Papier-Mâché No. 3, whose description has Piu-Piu wondering whether it should be named Emma or Meg. Come the third game, Piu-Piu has had a third papier-mâché woman, named Meg, to join Catherine and Jodie, the two he already had in the first two games.
• Convection, Schmonvection: Zig-Zagged. When Darwin first enters the planet's core, he's severely affected by the heat, and Lessica has to use her powers to protect him from it. However, when all the Pillars revive, right next to the core, they're all unaffected by it.
• Death or Glory Attack: Sacrifice, provided by Gigas Sopia, uses up the entire remaining HP of the user(s) (minus 1 each) to deal massive damage to an enemy. Naturally, it's best used when either you're confident it will finish off the enemy, the player characters have Regenerate active (allowing them to come back to life if the enemy survives and retaliates) or the enemy is prevented from acting by Divine Punishment.
• Defeat Means Friendship: The only way to gain an Ophan is to defeat it.
• Distant Sequel: The All-Seeing Eye library heavily implies the Ark Arena tournaments did happen in the game's distant past (and served as Amon's inspiration for the Rite of Resealing), though seeing how 1685 Rites have been performed in total between intervals of centuries, the third game must take place hundreds of thousands of years after the first.
• Dual Boss: A series of P.U.B. quests pit you against two Shadow counterparts of the player characters each (Darwin and Marie, Orlando and Araki, Li Hua and Conor, and Darwin and Lessica), plus Garrick and Alto from the first game. Notably, these are the only enemies in the game capable of using Pair Attacks.
• Duel Boss: Bosses that are fought with Darwin alone include all of the Ophanim (except the final one), Araki (before he's sacrificed), Lessica (before she and Darwin enter Abaddon), the Final Boss and the Post-Final Boss. In the post-game content, for each party member, there is one P.U.B. quest during which they must fight a boss one-on-one: Darwin vs. Neron, Orlando vs. Li Hua, Marie vs. Death, Araki vs. War, Conor vs. Famine, Li Hua vs. Conquest and Lessica vs. Herald.
• Earn Your Happy Ending
• Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: The same elements return. Blaze beats Gale, Aqua beats Blaze, and Gale beats Aqua.
• Emotionless Girl: Lessica, mostly.
• Endgame+: You can save your game after defeating the final boss. Loading from that save results in starting, story-wise, from just before you enter the final dungeon.
• Eyes Do Not Belong There: The Azi Dahaka palette swaps have eyes all over their bodies.
• Face Death with Dignity: All the Pillars, eventually.
  • In the library one of the records where the pillars were all world leaders indicates they faced their fate willingly.
• Fetch Quest: One PUB quest has you go to one of the hidden libraries to retrieve a recipe.
• Final Boss Preview: The game opens with a flash-forward of the battle with the Final Boss (if we disregard the True Final Boss).
• Flying Seafood Special: The jellyfish-type enemies.
• Hammerspace: Where all but Darwin and Araki keep their weapons.
• Healing Boss:
  • Azi Dahaka Sopia bosses and Monk (a King Mook based on Flower Sopia) all passively regenerate HP every turn. The former can steal HP from the player characters, while the latter can heal itself and its teammates.
  • The Tough Shadow, a doppelganger of Marie, can use her Prayer of the Living Limit Break to heal itself and teammate Hurt Shadow.
  • Ophan Marie's P.U.B. rematch version only has 10000 HP (less than 30% of Ophan Orlando, which is 10 levels lower), but fully heals itself every turn, meaning that it must be brought down from full HP within the span of one single turn.
• Heroic Resolve: Darwin is thoroughly battered by Neron, but manages to revive himself in order to take down the Destroyer. He pays the price for it, though.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • Each of the pillars thinks he's doing this. It's a lie by the Creator, but it turns out that if the pillars hadn't bound themselves to Neron by becoming Sacrifices, then Darwin wouldn't have been able to defeat him, and the cycle would never have ended.
  • Lessica makes one, transforming into an Ophan and allowing herself to be defeated in order to bind Amon, the True Final Boss, to the physical plane (and thus making him vulnerable to the party's attacks) via her own body. She survives long enough to die in Darwin's arms after Amon's defeat.
  • Darwin attempts one after defeating Amon, staying behind on the cathedral to ensure its destruction. He survives, however, returning to Marie in the epilogue.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: Happens no fewer than four times, whenever the heroes try to defy the Rite or the gods themselves.
• Hub Level: The cathedral-like building which is actually in orbit over Earth where the Nominator and Pillars are summoned.
• Infinity +1 Sword: The best pieces of equipment in the game are dropped by a series of PUB bosses whose levels range from 105 to 150 (for the record, the True Final Boss' level is 50).
• Instant Runes: Summoning an Ophan.
• In the End, You Are on Your Own: Darwin has one final fight with Amon, away from all his allies. They do, however, support him, and provide some of the strength he needs to take down the Creator.
• Joke Ending: Defeating Piu-Piu as part of the Yours Truly Returns P.U.B. request leads to an ending which doesn't take itself seriously. After Piu-Piu is defeated and allowed to regain his memories, he rewards the characters by showing his true power and destroying the Hall and Amon in one blast. This leads to the eight of them (Lessica included) safely landing on the surface of the earth. However, as Piu-Piu mourns Jodie, Meg, and Catherine burning up in space, the boys fail to create new cut-outs, forcing the girls to substitute for Piu-Piu's harem.
• Last Request:
  • All Araki wants is a fair duel to the death with Darwin. Araki gets his wish. Twice, if you count the battle with his Ophan.
  • Li Hua asks Bachs for time alone with Darwin. To Darwin, she asks him to take Xiao to the upcoming Festival in her stead, since she can no longer fulfill that promise to him.
  • Conor requests to see his parents one last time from Bachs, although Bachs only allows him to view them remotely. He asks Darwin to tell his parents how much he loves them and that he was proud to be their son, since he doesn't think he did it often enough.
  • Marie just asks Darwin to survive this.
• Last-Second Ending Choice: Whether you get the bad or normal ending comes down to one dialogue choice made after the Pre-Final Boss is defeated.
• Legacy Boss Battle:
  • Like the Atman bosses from the first game, the Shadow bosses are fought in pairs, resemble red-eyed shadows of player characters, can use Pair Attacks, and have access to some otherwise player-exclusive skills (in this case, Limit Breaks). The only difference is the individual characters on whom they're based.
  • The final pair of 'Shadows' instead resemble NPCs Garrick and Alto; despite their appearance, their dialogue makes it clear that they're the same pair that fought four times against the player characters in Extra Mode of Omega.
  • Libido, the physical manifestation of Piu-Piu's perversion, is a Super Boss like it was in the first game. Notably, it is one of the only four enemies (alongside the Billikens) and the only boss in Chaos Rings II whose design has remained almost unchanged from the first two games.
• Limit Break: The Charge Gauge consists a total of three bars and slowly fill up with attacks from either side. Filling at least one bar up is required to perform an Awakening or an Advent. Awakenings, which can only be done in solo mode, are divided into three levels (with Darwin being the only character that has a level 3 Awakening), and consume one exact bar of the Charge Gauge per level. Advents, which must be done in pair mode, consume the whole Charge Gauge when used, and get stronger the more bars they consume (with the exception of Lessica's Advent, Divine Punishment, which requires all three bars of the Charge Gauge to be filled).
• Love at First Sight/Love at First Punch: A very good case of both. Li Hua tells Darwin about how she and Orlando met for the first time on the battlefield and nearly killed each other, thinking they were from opposing sides of the war. Li Hua remarks that it was his eyes that got her.
• Load-Bearing Boss:
  • Neron. After he is defeated, the planet's core begins to revert to the way it was before.
  • Amon. After he is defeated, his floating cathedral starts to fall from orbit.
• Manipulative Bastard Bachs, AKA Amon. The Rite of Resealing exists only so he can receive prayers and therefore godliness.
• Metal Slime: Billikens give disproportionately high experience, SP or money, if you manage to kill them before they run away from the battle. Coal Billikens are especially nasty, can even kill an underleveled party, and give disproportionately high experience, SP and money.
• Multiple Endings: Chaos Rings II features four after Ophan Marie is defeated, each extending the story.
  • Downer Ending: Darwin decides to go along with the Rite of Resealing, and ends up being mind-wiped by Bachs, and sent to destroy the world with the Four Horseman.
  • Normal Ending: Darwin decides to defy the Rite, and goes with Lessica to destroy Neron in Abaddon, the core of the planet. He successfully defeats Neron, and restores the five Pillars, but dies in the process.
  • True Ending: Darwin is revived after defeating Neron, and receives Neron's Sopia. Lessica then reveals the truth behind the plot, and the party goes to defeat Amon. Lessica dies, but she dies free and happy.
  • Golden Ending: see Happily Ever After above.
• Mythology Gag: In the library, there are records of past Rites of Resealing. The Nominator and one of the Candidates in the 8th Rite were named Escher and Eluca, though these are almost certainly different people who happened to share the same name with two of the protagonists of the first game.
• New Game Plus
• Non-Standard Game Over: Watching the game's Bad Ending (and only this ending) will cause you to look at the Game Over screen after the credits roll.
• Now or Never Kiss: Marie kisses Darwin just before he kills her in lieu of telling him how she feels.
• Palette Swap: Any family of monsters are the same model with altered colors. Conquest gets a slightly upgraded model the second time you fight him.
• Pietà Plagiarism:
  • Darwin holding the mortally wounded Marie, both times. Bonus points for her name being a variation of Mary.
  • Darwin holding the dying Lessica. We're seeing a pattern here.
• Plot Coupon: Sopia cores and the Chalice.
• Post-End Game Content: The credits roll and you're returned to the main menu after defeating Neron in Abaddon, but as soon as you reload the save file, you'll get to see a new cutscene, and after you return to the All-Seeing Eye, you'll gain access to The Very Definitely Final Dungeon, home to the True Final Boss. After this boss is defeated, you'll get to see the credits again and unlock further content in the form of PUB quests against very powerful optional bosses.
• Powers as Programs: The Sopia Cores you collect from enemies and bosses, of which three can be equipped on any given character, and each one can hold up to 6 abilities. You also get a Sopia core from Orlando and every other Pillar, including Lessica that only Darwin can equip, that gives him all the abilities of that person.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: In the library one of the logs is from a rite where the Pillars were a bunch of slave owners and the Nominator was one of their slaves. The log suggests he was quite eager.
• Sadistic Choice: A significant part of the plot of Chaos Rings II. Darwin must choose which of his teammates to sacrifice as Pillars, with the knowledge that whoever he chooses, he'll just have to sacrifice another one soon enough.
• Senseless Sacrifice: The deaths of every Pillar throughout history—hundreds upon hundreds of sacrificed lives—were used not to protect the world, but to strengthen and renew belief in the Creator's divinity.
• Sick Episode: Darwin winds up poisoned after saving Conor from Famine. Marie and another party member go to look for a Sopia Core to cure him, despite him needing a Sopia Core in order to kill one of them, not to mention being the man tasked to kill them all and the man who killed their brother/friend/lover/rival Orlando.
• Sidequest: P.U.B. requests are a series of objectives that grant various rewards but do not have to be completed to finish the story.
• Signs of the End Times: The appearance of the Four Horsemen, in true biblical fashion.
• Shop Fodder: Piu-Piu's Collection items, which is his long-lost Porn Stash, have no use other than being sold to Piu-Piu, who'll pay good money to have them returned.
• Summon Magic: The Ophans.
• Super Boss: The P.U.B. requests feature no less than 28 optional bosses with levels higher than even the True Final Boss, which you won't be be able to defeat without a fair bit of grinding.
• These Hands Have Killed: Li Hua, Araki, and Darwin, though mostly the former two. Bachs has a great time using this reason to justify their upcoming deaths.
• True Final Boss: Amon, the true identity of Bachs and the Creator of the world.
• Upgraded Boss: Many of Piu-Piu's post-game P.U.B. quests pit you against stronger versions of bosses that you already fought in the main story, including the Ophanim, the Four Horsemen, the Tentacle, Neron and the Herald.
• Void Between the Worlds: Nearly every area has parts connected by this, which Bachs explains are put there by the Creator to help the party get where they need to go.
• Weapon Twirling: Orlando, Darwin, and Marie all do this at various times.
• You Killed My Father: Everyone but Conor bags on Darwin for killing Orlando. Orlando just happens to be Marie's step-brother, Araki's rival with whom he had an unsettled dispute, and Li Hua's former comrade and the father of her child.
• Zero-Effort Boss: The final fight with Amon. Darwin cannot die and the awakening he gains during the fight takes out Amon in one hit. Also counts as an All Your Powers Combined because Darwin can only defeat Amon after being enhanced by the power of his friends' Ophanim and the power of Neron's Sopia. The fight before it however, is not a zero-effort fight.

---