Video Game / Code Vein

Come on and let me take you to the underworld

"In the face of certain death, we rise."

Code Vein is a Hack and Slash Dungeon Crawler Action RPG co-developed by Bandai Namco Studios and God Eater creator Shift and published by Bandai Namco's publishing arm. Announced by Bandai Namco on April 20th, 2017, Code Vein combines the action based gameplay of Shift's own God Eater games with the fiendishly difficult and trial-and-error gameplay of Bandai Namco and FromSoftware's Dark Souls franchise, while featuring cinematic visuals from animation studio ufotable.

Set in a post-apocalyptic, dystopian future where the world has been destroyed by a cataclysm of a very obscure nature, many of the surviving humans have transformed into vampires known as Revenants in order to stay alive. Among the Revenants lies a hidden society known as Vein, a group dedicated to saving what remains of society from the Lost, Revenants who have transformed into fiendish ghouls by fully giving into their bloodlust. The player takes on the role of a member of Vein exploring the ruined, Lost-populated world, with the aid of their companions.

The game utilizes the Unreal Engine 4 Game Engine and was originally set to be released on September 27th, 2018 for the Playstation 4 and Xbox One for Japan and September 28th, 2018 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC platforms worldwide, but was delayed a full year to September 27th, 2019 worldwide to ensure the final quality of the game.

Trailers: Teaser Trailer - Announcement Trailer - TGS 2017 Trailer - Golden Joystick Awards Trailer - Underworld Trailer - Release Date Announcement Trailer

It is not related to Code Geass.

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Code Vein provides examples of:

• 100% Completion: Both locally and game-wide. Each map has its own percentage counter, which is increased by purifying/activating every mistle in the area. The game itself has a few, namely for obtaining every Blood Code, using every weapon and Blood Veil type, visiting all Depths, activating every mistle, restoring every Vestige, viewing every ending, and getting all achievements. Due to some of the above conditions being mutually exclusive to one another, and the fact that the game has three endings, a minimum of three runs are required for a full clear, or Platinum if playing on PlayStation 4. Pre-order or DLC-exclusive gear and Blood Codes aren't counted towards this, though.
• Action Bomb: Several Lost have belts and bandoliers full of grenades strapped to them, and they attack by either spamming these, or bumrushing the player with a live explosive. If they get too close to you, or are knocked down with you around, they will try to take you with them.
• After the End: The game takes place some time after a calamity called "The Great Collapse" struck the world. The Thorns of Judgment which emerged during this devastated cities, and it is said that nearly half of mankind died. Giant spikes now litter the terrain as well as deadly miasma which turns the survivors into bloodthirsty Lost. This is revealed to be the same event as the one from God Eater.
• Aliens Never Invented the Wheel: Or rather, a certain region of the world never developed God Eaters. Despite the Red Mist only manifesting after Operation Queenslayer, information on Oracle Cells is curiously absent. It seems Vein was not part of the multinational research initiative to create weapons tailor-made to kill Aragami. Instead, all focus was invested into the BOR Parasite - the end product is still a Super-Soldier with enhanced strength, but they lack the speed and hardiness of their Aragami-slaying counterparts outside of cutscenes. Then there is the fact that Revenants are essentially on life support the moment they are created, requiring fresh blood lest they turn Lost and become a liability in the future. On the plus side, Revenants are capable of Resurrective Immortality, aren't in danger of mutating into a far more dangerous type of Aragami (although some Greater Lost can be pretty damn dangerous), don't require resources outside of regular blood donations, and can perform feats considered to be outright magic.
• Ambiguous Time Period: There is no specific time frame to identify how long after the Great Collapse the events of Code Vein take place, making it especially difficult to pinpoint exactly where the game falls in the God Eater timeline. That Aragami have never been formally classified as such (they are only ever referred to as horrors), that research on Oracle Cells wasn't a priority, that Revenants can take several years before they finally awaken after BOR Parasite inoculation, while never aging throughout (with a fourth generation of Revenants currently on the rise), and that only older Revenants such as Mido and Gregorio can still remember what the "horrors" lurking outside Vein even are, these facts all just muddy the issue further. You can even consider the equippable God Eater weapons exclusive to pre-ordering the Deluxe Edition to be canonical appearances, if you want the additional headaches.
• An Adventurer Is You:
  • Finding Remnants (the crystallized memories of other Revenants) or receiving the blood of one of your allies will unlock new "Blood Codes", granting access to skills and abilities similar to those of traditional RPG archetypes. Blood Codes can be changed at will, letting you go from a Squishy Wizard to a Mighty Glacier whenever you want.
  • There are five weapon types usable as well: One-Handed Swords which are fast and easy to use, Two-Handed Swords that deal more damage but are slower, Polearms that have long reach and good speed, Great Hammers that have very slow but devastating strikes, and Bayonets that can attack with slash attacks at short range and shooting attacks at long range.
  • In addition to these main weapons, there is a class of equipment known as "Blood Veils", armor that augments the user's various stats and have their own slow but powerful attacks which restore the player's Ichor Points. They come in multiple flavors, such as:
    • Ogre, which manifests as a large claw to slash opponents.
    • Stinger, which manifests as a long scorpion like tail to pierce enemies from afar.
    • Hounds, which creates two wolf-like heads to bite into the target.
    • Ivy, which creates spikes from the ground to skewer opponents.
• And the Adventure Continues: The Golden Ending has the protagonists and their companions managing to dispel the Gaol of the Mist, allowing them to venture into the outside world to help other humans who may have survived the apocalypse.
• Anti-Frustration Feature:
  • Being a Soulslike, dying means you drop all of the currency you have on hand, and dying again while trying to retrieve it means it's gone forever. Going to the Hotspring lets you recover half of that dropped amount. It's not quite what you've lost, but it's better than losing it all.
  • Defeating a Greater Lost immediately heals both you and your teammate to full and refills your ichor, without requiring a mistle. This lets a player thoroughly clear out a Depths zone in one run without needing to reset their Ichor pool at a mistle. It doesn't restock your healing items outside of your standard regeneration, however.
  • The UI's map function keeps track of your path in your current game session, as well as the most recent steps you have taken. This makes it easier to discern which spots on the level you have yet to explore. Additionally, the map can keep track of any items you may have accidentally stepped over while exploring.
  • The map board in the Base tells you where to go in order to advance the main plot, in case you can't find it on your own or you've forgotten what you were told to do. It doesn't hold your hand the entire way, but it plainly tells you which zone you should go to and what to look for when you get there.
  • The main quest will eventually require the player to go back into the Cathedral of the Sacred Blood two times, with the aforementioned map board just telling you to explore the place both times. The zone is large and confusing, so what are you looking for? The things you're looking for are two ornate doors emblazoned with wings... and both locked doors are shown in the pictures of the mistles in the Cathedral, within the fast travel menu. This spares the player from having to comb the labyrinth looking for something they've probably forgotten.
  • Side-quest givers are highlighted on the map and usually posted near a mistle, making it so that going back and forth to do their missions aren't as much of a chore. It ends at usually, though, as there are exceptions. When you accept a sidequest, the objective will also immediately show up on the mini map if it's in the same zone, or will appear on the map automatically when you arrive at the zone it's in. This prevents the traditional issue in Souls-like games where half the battle in sidequests is finding the quest giver, and the other half is finding just where the objective is in a sprawling zone.
  • Your AI companions do not suffer environmental tick damage, and cannot blunder off of ledges into Bottomless Pits even while attacking, the only notable exception being if the companion is on something that breaks when the player walks on it, at which point they will fall to their death. Some zones are stressful enough to explore as is, so at least you don't have to include your partner's health among your other concerns.
  • Your AI companions are also quite observant and will also call out the location of items or enemies and mark them on the mini map. If you're about to walk into a big group of enemies, your companion will always spot them and warn you about them.
  • You can find weapons and Blood Veils in each level that have already been upgraded. Not only does this mean you can pick them up and use them right away (further facilitated with how easily you can swap Blood Codes out to the appropriate class), but they serve as a barometer on what quality your equipment should be at that corresponding point in the game.
  • All maps keep their exploration progress in a New Game Plus, with the exception of Depths which have to be cleared again. This greatly helps with expediting gameplay in subsequent runs, and provides ample opportunities for Speed Running. Normal mistles still need to be reactivated to rest and enable fast travel, though, to prevent Sequence Breaking.
  • On the same note as above, the Successor Vestiges, if completed, will carry over to a New Game Plus, allowing the player the option to save or kill them without having to find the fragments again so they can explore the game's other routes. This is also the only way to earn the achievement for getting all Blood Codes. They will still spawn on the map, though, and the actual Vestiges themselves don't appear in your inventory. The game will just treat it as if you've restored all Vestiges of a given Successor and automatically transition to the memories after you've beaten them.
  • With the 1.04 update, you can lower your New Game Plus difficulty down by one level if you feel the current cycle is kicking your ass too much. In exchange though, you cannot earn a star that denotes the number of NG+ cycles you have completed until you go through another playthrough with your original difficulty.
  • For your allies, you can exchange valuables with them to acquire Chromes tied to their Blood Code that are used in equipment transformation, and that's frequently the only way you can obtain these Chromes. The Harmonia Chrome, tied to Eva, is the exception, as it can be farmed from the Crown of Sand. This doesn't lock you out of a source of the Chrome if you don't save her in your current playthrough.
  • The fights against the Successor of the Ribcage and The Skull King feature a second phase/transition wherein the boss will have their health bar refilled. If you die during the second phase, the game is kind enough to save your progress at that point, meaning you won't have to fight the first phase ever again.
• Anti-Grinding: Each area has a hidden level threshold. When your level exceeds that threshold, winning battles in that area will not advance your Gift mastery, so you're encouraged to keep moving forward, training in new areas instead of farming easy enemies. The alternative is to not increase your level until you've mastered the Gifts you wanted, or to expend "Awake MJ" items to instantly master the Gifts you want. The level threshold across the whole game increases each time you choose to engage New Game Plus on enhanced difficulty.
• Apocalypse How: Planetary. Human civilization was annihilated when giant black thorns erupted from the Earth, killing millions and leaving the survivors desperately trying to survive. Later revelations make it clear that the black thorns were not the cause. Instead, it was the Aragami that caused the end of the world.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: Your party size is limited to yourself and a partner, with at best a third unit in the form of another human player. This is despite the fact that your traveling party in several chapters consists of a few more people (e.g. Louis, Yakumo, and Mia in Ridge of Frozen Souls) who clearly appear in the relevant cutscenes, but are curiously absent once gameplay resumes.
• Ass Shove: Succeeding in a backstab on one of the larger enemies will cause the player character to effectively give them a colonoscopy, especially if they are using the Ogre blood veil.
• As You Know: Justified as amnesia is commonplace in the world of Vein, as people who have been turned into Revenants often have to remind each other of basic things that they might have forgotten. This also provides helpful info for the viewer as well.
• Attack Its Weak Point: While Revenants are functionally immortal, they have a weak point in their heart. This is where the BOR parasite resides in their bodies. If an attack is aimed at a Revenant's heart and manages to kill the parasite, then the host will turn to ash and never come back. Part of the goal of project Q.U.E.E.N. was to find a way to get rid of this weak point.
• Back from the Dead: Revenants are artificially created beings created when a BOR parasite is placed within a dead human to revive them. They keep coming back from the dead as long as the BOR parasite in their heart is not destroyed.
• Back Stab: Executing a light attack from behind an enemy counts as a Drain, which significantly damages, if not outright kills them. It takes a bit of finagling to learn the "sweet spot" for each enemy, however, as some times the sneak attack will register as a normal hit instead. To elaborate: a hit counts as this when struck against an enemy's relative "back", which could be anywhere between their actual back and rear thigh, if they're in the middle of performing an attack animation, or simply are just turning around in place.
• Badass Cape: The Ogre type blood veil places a small cape over the wearer's shoulder in addition to the armor it places on that arm.
• Badass Longcoat: The Stinger type blood veil takes the form of a long coat. This is also a case of the trope being taken more literally than usual in that the coat itself is a weapon.
• Bayonet Ya: One of the weapon types is the Bayonet, a gun with a blade attached to it. The weapon's light attacks are melee slashes, while the heavy attacks fire projectiles at the cost of Ichor.
• BFS: Two handed swords can be more than twice the size of the person carrying them.
• Bizarrchitecture:
  • The Cathedral of the Sacred Blood looks relatively straightforward to navigate (being one of the few levels not littered with rubble), but the layout is actually a series of dead ends and intersecting routes that blend together into a confusing mess. There are root-like structures serving as roadblocks, ladders skipping entire floors, solid walls where doorways should be, pitfalls gaping beneath precarious platforms, other pitfalls that are actually the way to proceed, uniform geometry that hinders pathfinding rather than aiding it, and above all, the layered architecture makes your minimap unreliable for determining a route. Forget a maze, traveling through the Cathedral's towers is like trying to solve a three dimensional puzzle box full of monsters trying to kill you. Take a look◊ at the view from the zone's entrance.
  • The Crypt Spire. According to background lore, the Crypt Spire was constructed from multiple small fortifications, resulting in a mess of floating platforms and rooms seemingly leading to nowhere and surrounded on all sides by Bottomless Pits. The only ways to cut through are government-built ladders and elevators that are easily withdrawn. To put simply, it's Cathedral Lite, and unlike the above example, it's far easier to navigate and was deliberately constructed as a collection of strategic positions for government soldiers to hold the line.
• Blade Spam: Queenslayer lets you do this using its Circulating Pulse Gift.
• Blatant Lies: "One of the Lost has invaded in search of blood." One?! Make that wave after wave of them!^note The line is referring to the particularly difficult enemy (the miniboss, you could say) who spawns in the final wave. Still an awkwardly worded line, of course.
• Bling-Bling-BANG!: All the weapons used by Cerberus members are made of white and crimson metals, with a gold plated finish.
• Bloodier and Gorier: Not that God Eater didn't have its share of violence, but it was also lacking in blood in comparison.
• Bloody Murder: Blood is one of the elemental types, alongside Fire, Ice, Lightning. Attacks include shooting a small ball of blood, shooting a large ball of blood, shooting a giant spike made out of blood, and creating a giant blood explosion under an enemy.
• Blood Magic: Revenants can use magic in the form of Gifts that have a variety of effects such as increasing your character's defensive capacity, creating projectiles to hit enemies from a distance, and increasing your character's movement speed from a roll to a dash. Gifts requires certain amount of Ichor Points to use and are most effectively gained by using your Blood Veil to perform a Drain attack on your enemies to drain their blood. A successful Drain attack will regain Ichor Points and a small increase to your maximum Ichor Stock while performing a successful Special Drain will regain and increase even more Ichor Points and Stock as well as dealing a massive amount of damage to the enemy. Certain powerful types of Lost can use Gifts as well.
• Bonus Feature Failure:
  • Completing each of the Towers of Trials yields an item that imparts a unique Gift. Charisma is a passive that boosts the stats of your AI partner. Vigorous Zeal temporarily boosts your defensive stats. Modest Offering is a low-cost low-output version of your default Guardian Aid skill. All three are not very spectacular, almost verging on Bragging Rights Reward. Players would rather use the Tower of Trials to grind Medals of Honor.
  • DLC contains bonus Blood Codes and three additional bosses. General consensus is that these bosses verge on being unfairly difficult and the DLC doesn't expand enough on the story to warrant the price.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • The "Queenslayer" line of weapons is available for much of the game, with the earliest of them being found in the very first area, and they're readily available in the shop after you've discovered each in a chest. Their even stat spreads and familiar move sets all fill in a comfortable middle ground between the various more highly-specialized weapons found later.
  • You'd be hard-pressed to go anywhere without a stock of Vivifiers. These serve as a Warp Whistle, bringing you to the previous mistle you rested at, so that you have a means of reprieve no matter where you are. The Vivification Gift from the Mercury Blood Code works similarly, but costs 10 Ichor per use instead. Once you reach the Crypt Spire, a certain corner of it contains the Mistle Root which is a free reusable Vivifier so you no longer have to worry about your item stock or skill slots.
  • A few passives are not exactly the best in combat, but definitely speed up your growth. Revenant's Greed and Revenant's Hunger boost your item drop rate and Haze increase rate respectively for quick supplies, while Pioneer's Guidance speeds up your Gift mastery speed to save on "Awake MJ" items.
  • Unless you're focusing on a specific build, sometimes the best transformation for your equipment is no transformation at all so that your gear maintains the same well-rounded efficiency across different builds.
  • The drain combo, made with square-R1+X / X-RB+B / click-Ctrl+Shift+click. It only increases your ichor capacity by 1 and doesn't trigger the badass cutscene of a parry or a backstab, but in return, it does almost the same amount of damage, it's much safer on account of having a much simpler execution, and chances are you'll get to do it often enough that your extra ichor stacks will add up very quickly.
• Boss in Mook Clothing:
  • The glowing, coral-infused Lost guarding the Eagle Key in the Howling Pit is not a boss and doesn't need to be taken out to grab the key, but it hits like a freight train and moves incredibly fast, in an area where the water slows your movement to a crawl. It can kill you faster than the actual boss of the level!
  • There is a burly Cthulhumanoid variation of Lost found only within the Ridge of Frozen Souls known as the Boreal Brute, of which there only three in the area. There's a reason for that; Brutes are relentlessly persistent once aggro'd, have a laundry list of heavy-hitting AOE attacks, have both a normal roll to close the distance and a rolling attack which will almost always one-shot the player, and all have an incredibly tanky health pool that even magic builds would have trouble shaving down. To make matters worse, it can buff its own defenses with ice crystals to decrease the amount of damage it takes even further. You get to fight two at the same time in the relevant Depths floor.
  • Large and powerful Lost dot the City of Falling Flame, easily distinguishable by the blue flames emanating from their bodies. They don't quite tower over the Protagonist, but are nevertheless a nightmare to deal with; they are fast, incredibly tanky, and boast a variety of relentless attacks that can catch players without frame-perfect dodges. To worsen the matter, they can create a large Ring of Fire (in a zone where open space is already prime real estate) that can kill players in mere seconds.
• Bottomless Magazines: Zigzagged with the Bayonets. They don't have to be reloaded, ever, but players are limited by their own Ichor cap. Taken to truly ridiculous levels during Yakumo's memory, where he fired one on full-auto if the audio report is to be believed, yet seeming no worse for wear once it's over.
• Brutal Bonus Level:
  • Completing the game and loading clear data gives you access to Depths maps that lead to the Tower of Trials. You descend a vertical tower where each floor pits you against tough enemies or Lost Invasions in a small confined space, capping with a souped-up boss rematch at every third floor. Each tower has 6 floors of challenges, with a reward that awaits players after their second boss. Your only means of leaving midway with your Haze intact is through Vivifiers (or items/skills with a similar effect). Mercifully, their completion doesn't contribute to the "Deep Trailblazer" achievement.
  • The DLC offers three bonus bosses to tackle, and is accessible after you beat the Crypt Spire. The enemies it offers are very tough, and you're expected to at least have completed the game before even attempting them.
• Cap: The game puts a cap on many things, most of which will be your combat supplies, making them scarce and enforcing careful rationing of your resources. The most prominent example are Regeneration charges, which initially cap at 3, and max out at 10 with all upgrades. Other items such as debuff cleansers or buff items are limited to 5, give or take a few units.
• Captain Obvious: AI partners are very guilty of this, frequently pointing out nearby enemies, items, points of interests, or commenting on situations such as locked doors or ledge drops. They often do this while you're looking directly at whatever they're talking about.
• Cartography Sidequest: If you want to achieve 100% Completion, you'd better find all of those mistles. On the bright side, at least your map will become more readable (and will be retained on a New Game Plus), though you cannot actually manipulate it and view separate floors.
• Cast from Hit Points:
  • The Restorative Offering gift lets you do this to heal an ally. Be warned, though, the HP loss can be quite massive from the get-go, and you could very easily kill yourself by using it, by being weakened by it so much that an enemy finishes you off. In addition, AI teammates who have this gift will also use it on you should you be knocked down to 0HP, usually at the expense of themselves. Sympathetic Boon of the Eos Blood Code is this bumped up to eleven, and Modest Offering (from clearing Tower of Trials III) is a watered-down version, including a smaller HP cost.
  • Blood Sacrifice lets you pay 20% HP to replenish 6 Ichor. Supernatural Blood lets you keep casting spells after your Ichor has run out, at the cost of your own health.
  • The Red Shoes gift, exclusive to the Fionn Blood Code, temporarily allows you to keep performing stamina-reducing actions even after you have depleted your bar in exchange for a sliver of health every time.
• Central Theme:
  • Surprisingly, for a game centered around vampires, the biggest themes storywise are actually Friendship, Compassion, Hope and willing Sacrifice for the sake of others. Almost every character encountered, even some of the major bosses, showcase aspects of these themes. One of the reasons the mad scientist Mido comes off as such a monster is he's one of the few characters that doesn't show any. This is especially surprising when you realize that the game is set in the same universe as God Eater — a game well-known for its cynical and nihilistic lore.
  • On a less optimistic note, the game also has a particular emphasis on the cruelty people are capable of when they become desperate to survive. One such example is the levy system imposed by the government of Vein, which has forced many revenants to go around attacking each other for blood beads and even enslaving other revenants for that purpose. The remaining humans in Vein are either kept in government bunkers and regularly donate blood to remain safe, and any human found outside the government's protection is regularly threatened for their blood. A great number of the memories viewed through Vestiges showcase this, and a major part of the main characters' initial motivation to research the Bloodsprings is to relieve the populace of Vein of this struggle to merely survive.
• Character Customization: The game has a pretty in-depth one for an anime-styled game, with lots of options for hair styles, faces, and accessories, most of which are unisex, though there is a discernible lack of sliders to fine tune specific aspects of one's characters, and outfits and body shapes are still quite rigidly-defined for each gender. Players have also expressed disappointment at the limited options for character outfits (i.e. the clothing your character wears underneath the Blood Veils), although there is the option to remove pieces such as stockings or belts.
• Checkpoint Starvation:
  • Played frustratingly straight within the Cathedral of the Sacred Blood, a positively huge map with tons of winding paths, dead ends, Bottomless Pits, annoyingly powerful enemies, and many more ways to die cheaply. While it does have more mistles than other maps, they are placed very inconsistently apart from each other, which makes the upper quadrants of the map completely unbearable to slog through, and that any death at all could potentially set the player back tens of minutes at a time. Averted for the rest of the game, however, as the mistles are usually very well spaced-out, so that the distances between checkpoints aren't too great.
  • The Crypt Spire and the levels that follow it tend to have two non-rotten mistles: one at the entrance, and one near the boss. Return trips are shortened by shortcuts you can unlock, but if you have to stop to rest (or get killed) at any point before opening those shortcuts, it's a lot of fighting to get back to where you were.
• Chekhov's Gun: Early in the game, you'll come across a Vestige — a crystal containing a memory that a Revenant has lost upon death/turning into a Lost. In terms of gameplay, they're how you can acquire new Blood Codes out in the field and complete your companion's side missions. And you're gonna need to collect a lot of them if you want to grab the "Dwellers in the dark" ending... and you can find your own resting in the Cathedral of Sacred Blood.
• Coat Cape: The Hounds blood veil is a coat worn over the shoulders. The sleeves are used to attack. Jack is also perpetually equipped with this while on the field, except for during the Whole Episode Flashback.
• Combo Platter Powers: Or perhaps more aptly, Power Pick-and-Mix. Once a gift is mastered, it can be equipped to other Blood Codes. This is unique to the protagonist, who has no Blood Code of their own, which allows them to switch and master several in the first place.
• Continuity Nod: In a strange way, to the God Eater anime; the Thorns of Judgement were an anime-original creation of minor Adaptation Expansion, devastating cities at the same time the Aragami showed up. These are the very same thorns conspicuously spread throughout vast swaths of Code Vein's world, as a severe foreshadowing to The Reveal that the two series are in the same universe.
• Cordon Bleugh Chef: Some enterprising manufacturer in the past decided it would be a good idea to market chocolate-covered garlic. Despite the off-putting premise and how strongly the stuff burns the nose, it's surprisingly popular among foodies due to just how strange it is.
• Counter-Attack: Parrying at the right moment allows the player to riposte and follow up with a Drain attack, dealing high damage on top of restoring a nice chunk of Ichor. Not all attacks can be countered, however, and those that can still require the player to time their parry, and they have to be frontal. Notably, parrying has both a maximum and a minimum range, so enemies hitting too close to the player cannot be countered. Some large enemies or bosses could also counter the player's attacks, but they cannot Drain.
• Cozy Catastrophe: Louis's base, which serves as the main hub, is in an abandoned church, and aside from some broken windows, a missing wall or two, and a crack going through part of it, it's in surprisingly good condition. It even has electricity, a fully-stocked bar, and a functioning hot spring.
• Creepy Cathedral: The Cathedral of the Sacred Blood, a huge complex with a Gothic cathedral in its center positioned inside a huge chasm.
• Crippling Overspecialization:
  • Bayonet builds are often guilty of this. Like caster setups, these demand a lot of Ichor to fuel their main method of attack, and hit hard when they actually land shots. To this end, they focus on getting the most Willpower and Mind possible, so as to attain a high Ichor count. Once this Ichor stock is depleted, though, they're essentially sitting ducks with very few means of getting it back, as Bayonets naturally suck at draining, so they don't even have that going for them unlike mage builds who at least could use light swords with Devour to recoup their spent Mana. Additionally, running a dedicated Bayonet build means both of your weapons should ideally be these, thus leaving no room for blades and such, and your Blood Veil should be light and therefore low on Defense and Endurance, so if a monster gets sufficiently close to you, or you are ambushed by the enemy, or both, you're pretty much SOL, since despite the name, Bayonets aren't very good up close.
  • Most DLC Blood Codes boast a base S-Rank in one to two stats, but C or D-rank in all others, leaving them very restricted in equipment options.
• Critical Existence Failure: Played with. While your character could still operate fine at moderately-low health, getting hit to within an inch of their lives (i.e. the screen turns monochromatic and heartbeats start playing) and they would start clutching themselves as they move about, though they don't suffer any combat penalties due to it, and the "danger" phase ends in a while anyway. Once your HP actually hits 0, your character won't die immediately, only entering a collapse animation and dying for good a few seconds later. In these few seconds, if your partner has Restorative Offering or any of its variants, they could sacrifice some of their HP and give it to you, bringing you back into the fight. You can also do the same for your partner if they went down, meaning you are not instantly at an disadvantage if your teammate is knocked out. Of course, should your partner be interrupted in some way like under enemy attacks or getting knocked down themselves, there is no escaping your death.
• Dark Fantasy: Implied, considering this universe takes place in a Post-Apocalyptic world, with most of the characters being some form of vampires. Thanks to being a Stealth Sequel, technically it's Magic from Technology Science Fiction.
• Deadly Gas: A poisonous gas called Miasma covers the world, and as a result, everyone has to wear gas masks when venturing outside a few select safe zones. This miasma also makes it harder to find the all-important Blood Tears since it kills the plants that they grow on.
• Death or Glory Attack: Queenslayer's Final Journey could be used as a quick panic button in the event that a boss fight is going very poorly. It fully heals the player, improves their mobility by 1 stage, and makes them a Lightning Bruiser (unless their gear is extremely heavy), on top of buffing many Gifts and granting a +50% damage buff to all attacks. The catch here is that it automatically kills the user one minute after activation while making it impossible for teammates to use their Energy Donation Gifts to revive them, so unless you manage to kill a boss or rest at a mistle before it expires, both of which remove all debuffs, you're boned. You could still also die the traditional way.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • You can lay down on the unoccupied bed in the Vein headquarters, which serves no real purpose other than a place to idle your character since the game doesn't have any real pause feature. If the Player Character remains there long enough, they'll eventually fall asleep on the bed and remain asleep until you prompt them to stand up, at which point they'll stretch and give a small yawn.
  • During your character's own Vestige, Jack gives you a vial of the Queen's blood to use to power any Mistle you find in the field, as the Vestige is set in the past before the Protagonist got the ability to revive Mistles on their own. When your character finds one and uses it, they have a different animation showing them using that vial, instead of the same one used on Mistles in the present.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Parrying. It is available from the get-go, deals heavy (if not fatal) damage to those it is used on, and also gives the player some Ichor, but requires some familiarity to pull off effectively, as different enemies have different attack telegraphs to let one know when to raise their defense. Even worse, the four different types of Blood Veil each have a different parry animation with different timing, meaning if you ever change up your build to incorporate a different class of armour you'll need to relearn the timing all over again. But with experience, the player could just parry their way through most fights, though it is much less effective on bosses than normal cannon fodder.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Early in the story you encounter a group of Revenants looking for a human who escape from them; after driving them off and finding the woman, she rants about how she's sick of being "drained by every passing Revenant" and treated like she isn't even a person. It really reads like a woman whose been forced into prostitution against her will and escaped from her pimp.
• Door to Before: You'll come to unlock numerous shortcuts across the game's dungeons to gain quick access to mistles you've unlocked and to facilitate return trips.
• Double-Edged Buff: "Final Journey" is a Gift that can only be used with the Queenslayer Blood Code, your original Blood Code, and unlike most Gifts can't be used without its original Code. It instantly restores you to full health, massively buffs your speed and damage, but will kill you in exactly one minute (certain buffs can extend this to 90 seconds).
• Downer Ending: The Heirs ending, good lord. You net this ending by failing to save all of the Successors. After the protagonist defeats Silva's Successor form and claims the latter's Relic, they go berserk and are on the verge of becoming the new Queen, forcing Amamiya to put them down. Io dies not long afterwards and crumbles to ashes. The remaining party members become the new Successors and hold themselves up in the Crypts relating to their loved ones. The reason this ending is so bleak and horrible beyond none of the characters being able to save the people most precious to them is that there's no indication of a new Successor of the Blood cropping up...meaning there's no one to save the new Successors when they go berserk and no one to revive the Mistles, meaning Vein is doomed to a slow death.
• Downloadable Content: Although none have been announced so far, Code Vein does have a Season Pass that promises additional content.
  • The ver. 1.04 update includes, among other things, Halloween-themed accessories and color palettes in time for the end of October 2019.
• Dude Looks Like a Lady: Played with. It's very easy to create an extremely◊ effeminate-looking◊ male protagonist due to many of the customization options being unisex, up to and including makeup and lipstick. With the right combination of hairstyles and accessories, the resulting player character could look very feminine and pretty, though they're still restricted to wearing male outfits and their body shapes are still decidedly masculine. The inverse effect, however, could not be believably achieved when customizing a female PC.
• Dynamic Entry: The lack of perception of the mobs opens the player to plenty of ways to initiate with a devastating, if not lethal, sneak attack. This includes leaping attacks from a higher balcony, Charged Drain attacks, or even charging through mobs with a Assassin's Sickle dash attack.
• Empty Levels: Pushing your level past 100 results in far smaller stat boosts than the preceding levels, encouraging the player to play more tactically rather than hoping to crush everything by virtue of level advantage. The sheer Haze cost increase for each level up past that point makes it more of a sink to sponge up your excess Haze.
• The Ending Changes Everything: The Reveal of the Aragami from God Eater are a part of the setting thanks to Big Bad Juzo Mido's explanation just before the end of the game recontextualizes everything about Code Vein's setting and what the Horrors they were made to fight really were.
• Everything Fades: BOR-infected creatures and people turn to ash when they "die", and is known in-universe as "dispersing". Dispersion occurs so quickly that a Revenant or Lost's body start to burn up before they even hit the ground, and within a couple of seconds there's no trace left behind.
• Expy: Adding to the laundry list of aspects that connect the two continuities, the Drain attacks usable in Code Vein is disturbingly similar to God Eater's Devour, in both form and function. The only major difference being that Drain is performed by the worn Blood Veil, and not a functionality of a weapon.
• Fan Disservice: Some of the Lost still wear the same revealing outfits they wore before they turned. Of note are the Stone-Crushers and their subtypes, who wear unbuttoned blouses that expose much of their cleavage, and their massive breasts are subject to Jiggle Physics, though at the same time they are bloated and festering behemoths with patches of diseased skin all over their bodies.
• Fanservice: There are plenty of female characters (and sometimes male) characters with light and revealing clothing and some pretty decent chests on display. Even some of the Lost get in on it. However, as mentioned above, it can easily have the opposite effect...
• Finishing Move: Successfully parry an enemy attack or perform a successful backstab and you can perform a Special Drain on them, in which you manifest your equipped Blood Veil before striking a devastating blow against your enemy, acquiring more Ichor Points than a standard Drain, increasing the maximum number of Ichor Stock, and simultaneously hitting the enemy with massive damage.
• Fire, Ice, Lightning:
  • Offensive Gifts can come in these elements, in addition to the Blood element. You can also enchant your weapon with one of these elements. Every combatant has different degrees of resistance to different elements.
  • Three DLC bosses are the Hellfire Knight, Frozen Empress, and Lord of Thunder, and as the names indicate, each has their own elemental specialty.
• Foreshadowing:
  • There are a few pieces in game before The Reveal that hint towards the game taking place in the God Eater setting.
    • If you go through the trouble of retrieving the Assassin Vestiges and go through Riki's memories, you'll find his plan to escape a mission gone horribly FUBAR was to find a rescue chopper. Said chopper is eaten in one bite by some monstrous creature, and Riki complains that they seem to be devouring everything they could find. These are two of the key traits of the Aragami from God Eater.
    • At one point early on, you can find a Bugurally doll. Seems like a Shout-Out at first, and if given to Rin, she talks about it being a action packed show just like the one from its source game. Given that its the same setting, she was watching the same show as others in the God Eater games.
  • Looking at the teleport screen for the Howling Pit, the Mistle where Mia and Nicola are first encountered is called 'Hill of Deception.' There is nothing special about the area that justifies the strange name, except as discovered later on Nicola is Actually A Doom Bot sent by the real Nicola, now a Successor, to watch over Mia.
• Forgot the Call: Revenants are now trapped in an endless fight against the Lost and their own bloodthirst, but it was never meant to be like this. Either too many years have passed during Vein's isolation, or too many people lost their ability to recall specific events during the Great Collapse due to repeated deaths, but the original purpose behind researching the BOR Parasite was to develop measures to combat the Aragami. This status is emphasized when Mido asks why they were originally turned into revenants in the first place, only for Mia to say it was to stop the frenzied Queen... who was a revenant herself, and thus would not have predated revenants to a degree that they would have been formed to stop her to begin with.
• Fun with Acronyms: The BOR parasite. BOR standing for Biological Organ Regenerative.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Within five minutes of starting the game, Oliver Collins gets his mask nicked by a weak swipe from a Lost, and succumbs to the ambient miasma before transforming into one himself. Nowhere else in the game does this happen, especially during gameplay, where not only your character is clearly shown without mask during a parry or a backstab, no amount of damage done to the player or other NPCs could crack their mask, whether the offending enemy be a lowly Lost, or the Final Boss itself. Masks can get torn off, sure, but never damaged.
  • Enemies capable of running the player through with their weapons cannot kill them in one hit despite them clearly piercing the chest. While this is pretty standard for Video Games, it is actually a plot point that destroying a Revenants' heart is the only way to permanently kill them.
  • It's stated multiple times that when a Revenant is killed on the battlefield and is revived, so long as their BOR Parasite remains intact, they will lose a portion of their memories. As a result, it's normal for people to inquire Revenants about the most basic of information about them such as their name and personal history to determine the severity of the damage. In terms of gameplay, though, no matter how many times the protagonist or their companions die out on the field, they don't appear to lose any of their past to their revival.
  • The protagonist is able to travel to and from their Memory via a mistle, and can retrieve and use items and equipment picked up from there. The chapter itself is chronologically set during Operation Queenslayer, which took place a good while before the events of the main plot, and the same location has been more or less destroyed when the protagonist returned there near the endgame.
    • In addition to that, while you can wear whatever Blood Veil you want during the Memory level, cutscenes during it will show your character as wearing the Queenslayer Claw Blood Veil you started the game with, even swapping it into your equipment slot when you first show up (helpfully providing a new one since you've probably sold the one you actually started with). In the same vein, you can equip whatever weapons and Gifts you've unlocked or acquired up to that point, despite chronologically taking place years before you actually got any of them.
• Gang Up on the Human: Well, revenant, at any rate. This is generally averted during play if one has an AI partner with them. Barring Eva and Mia, who fight at range, the rest of the companions will always charge in and draw enemy aggro if possible, leaving the player in relative safety. Should you get close enough, though, whatever beastie your AI teammate was fighting seconds ago will shift its attention to you more often than not. Bosses will focus on whoever's closest, but they will also obviously turn their attention on the player, even with their partner wailing on the boss. On subsequent New Game Plus runs, when enemies are much stronger and harder to manage, aggroing one crowd has a pretty high chance to also attract the one next door, leading to orgies of Losts dogpiling on the player and walloping them into the ground, often saving the AI partner for last. This is most observable in maps with tight halls and plenty of enemies that roam or play dead in one room, like the inner Provisional Government Center.
• Gas Mask, Longcoat: The Revenants' purifier masks and some Blood Veils invoke this.
• Gas Mask Mooks: Some of the Lost still wear their purifier masks, even though they no longer need them. In many cases their mask have fused with their face and become monstrous.
• The Government: After Operation Queenslayer a new provisional government was formed by Gregorio Silva. A lot of Revenants have strong opinions on his almost tyrannical rule... but the protagonists aren't fighting them, due to being a vital research team and receiving support from the government.
• Giant Mook: Some of the Lost are about twice as tall as your characters, and wield suitably scaled-up weaponry that shaves off most of the player's healthbar in a hit.
• Glass Cannon: The Swift Destruction Gift of Murasame's Hephaestus Blood Code gives you a hefty universal damage buff for speccing into a Quick-based kit. As a result, your character will move and attack very quickly owing to the reduced Weight, but Swift Destruction will slap another 20% damage buff on top of that, making late-game builds centered around the Eos Blood Code incredibly powerful and versatile, despite it being ostensibly a support class. The downside to this is that the player will have to trade overall durability to attain such speed and damage potential, therefore resulting in a staying power of a wet napkin once the going gets tough, so dodge often and don't get hit.
• Gotta Rescue Them All: Actively encouraged to get the best ending - in order to get the Golden Ending (and keep some of your favorite side characters alive), the player must save every Successor character. In order to do this, the player must engage in every sidequest given from every Partner and collect every piece of their missing memories known as Vestiges in order to save their lives and restore their memories. Collect some, and the neutral "To Eternity" ending will be played out. Fail to collect any Vestige, and the worst ending, the "Heirs" ending will guarantee that the current Successors and some of the side cast die, while the remainder take their place.
• Gone Horribly Right: The Revenants have the BOR parasite in their hearts as a weakness, which kills them if it's ever removed. The idea behind the Q.U.E.E.N. initiative was to find a way to eliminate this weakness while retaining all of the beneficial effects of revenancy. The result? An effectively immortal rogue Queen who wipes the floor with those sent to subdue her, and due to the lack of this weakness she cannot be truly killed, only separated into parts that are grafted into Successors. These parts also turn their holder into a new Queen if all of them are ever put back together again, which is essentially what happens during the "Heirs" ending.
• Good Scars, Evil Scars: Both Jack and Eva have prominent scars on their faces. Jack has what looks like extra skin grafted on one side of his face, while Eva has a huge cross shaped scar across her entire face. Both are implied to be somewhat morally dubious.
• Greater-Scope Villain: The horrors beyond the gaol. A.k.a. The Aragami. Though you never face them yourself, their attack on mankind is what drove the weaponization of the BOR Parasite to create the Revenants, project QUEEN, and Mido's attempt to forcefully evolve mankind.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy: The Lost seem to have a very low awareness range. A player can loudly blast a monster with fire and lightning, yet two other monsters sitting on the cliff a few meters away will hear absolutely nothing and continue to gaze out into the distance, only reacting when the player walks within two steps of them.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • Finding the Vestige fragments for the Successors becomes a major factor in which ending you get, and for three of them, their areas aren't too complex to miss them all so long as you check every nook and cranny as well as think vertically. The Cathedral of the Sacred Blood, however, is so complex thanks to being the largest and most convoluted area in the entire game that it may be the sole reason you need to look up a guide at all. This is also the first area where this factor comes into play, making it quite easy to fail this requirement before you even know why tracking these down is important.
  • You could just walk out of the boss chamber after beating each Successor without restoring their memory. In practice, this achieves the same thing as killing them without collecting every Vestige fragment, even if you've already found all of them, but it's an option the game never bothers telling you about.
  • Unlocking the Determiner of Fate achievement requires getting and viewing all three (technically four) endings as a single character. Obtaining them using separate characters will not count. Nowhere in or out of game does it tell you this.
  • Karen's Demeter Blood Code spawns in her chamber at the Cathedral of the Sacred Blood after all four Successors have been dealt with. Unless the player knows to backtrack to this area, they are very likely to miss it as there is no reason to head back to her room, let alone the actual Cathedral.
• Guns Are Worthless: Zig-zagged. On the one hand, there are Bayonets, which could be utilized to some effect by enemies, companions, and the player. On the other, Louis and Yakumo both possess handguns, but never use them against the Lost, implying they trope is Played Straight insofar as mundane firearms versus the Lost. However, judging by the reaction of an unnamed Revenant when Yakumo brandishes his gun at them, conventional firearms can still pack enough of a punch to be an effective tool of intimidation. It is also possible that that this is an Inverted Trope; firearms are still effective weapons, but the rarity of ammunition and of the guns themselves within the city means anyone who has a gun uses it sparingly.
  • The "Custom Gun Parts" valuable specifically refers to firearms being popular weapons for revenants, as they can accurately strike the heart. Yakumo pulling his Hand Cannon on another revenant implies he is willing to end him permanently.
• Guys Smash, Girls Shoot: Played mostly straight with the AI teammates. Of them, Louis, Yakumo and Jack are dedicated melee combatants, while Mia and Eva are equipped with Bayonets. The sole exception to this is Io, who wields Dammerung, which is a large spear.
• Healing Factor: Zig-zagged. In-game lore describes an ability called Regeneration, which is a revenant's self-healing ability in the event they are hurt. In actual gameplay, it functions more like a Healing Potion, and is an Expy of the Estus Flask.
• Healing Potion: Regeneration charges, as mentioned above. From start to end, the player could only carry a very limited amount^note Base of 3, 10 max, and they don't heal for much until you have sufficiently stacked enough upgrades.
  • There are also Regen Inducers, which heal for less a pop, but supplement the otherwise limited healing stock, and Pure Blood vials, which instantly heal the player to full on top of refilling their Ichor.
• Hellhound:
  • The Successor of the Ribcage certainly gives off the vibe, being some strange wolf-headed mage creature guarding the Cathedral of the Sacred Blood.
  • You also face what appear to be Lost dogs throughout the game. They're fragile, but they often come in packs, are quite fast and their bite often builds up nasty status effects.
• Hidden Elf Village: The actual reasons why Vein is so isolated from the rest of the world makes this a Zig-Zagging Trope, but the city is ultimately one in the grand scheme of things: Vein's inhabitants represent a methodology that runs parallel to the usage of Oracle Cells, and is now a relatively safe haven for humanity thanks to the Red Mist and the Weeping Tree; sure it's a zombie-infested garbage dump, but it's one of the few places free from Aragami.
• Horror Hunger: Being essentially vampires, though not that kind, the Revenants must periodically feed on human blood to stave off hunger and maintain their sanity, as failing to do so will cause their reasoning to gradually decay, until they finally succumb to their bloodlust and turn into a Lost. Actual blood could be substituted for with blood beads, which could support a revenant for some months, though their wellsprings are dying off in large numbers, putting an even further strain on resources as they are.
• Hotter and Sexier: Compared to other Soulslike games, this one definitely ups on the fanservice. For one, this game gives you the option to give a female player a large bust.
• An Ice Person: The Blade Bearer boss has ice abilities, to the point of leaving hoarfrost circles on the ground whenever she does an attack. She can also have giant ice spikes pop out of the ground in an instant, though they disappear just as soon.
• Identity Amnesia: Among Revenants, losing memories of their past is nothing unusual, and few know of their time prior to becoming Revenants. It is even standard practice to check someone's memories when they resurrect. While most take this in stride, some are dead-set on recovering their memories. The character Coco is unusual in that she has most of her memories intact with only a small handful missing, however that is enough to drive her to try and rediscover them.
• Improbable Age: Deconstructed with Murasame, who in the past was appointed captain of an elite military squad at age sixteen. When the unit got cornered and everyone seemed about to perish, she panicked due to her inexperience. An older soldier who viewed her more as a daughter figure than his CO subsequently knocked her out and hid her in a safe place, feeling she was too young to die alongside the rest of them.
• Inexplicably Preserved Dungeon Meat: Various valuables found in the open world are foodstuff that somehow survived the destruction around them. There are oden sandwiches that are somehow not spoiled, chocolate flakes that aren't disintegrated, jams that haven't gone bad, and cheese that's still noxiously pungent. They are still perfectly edible despite potentially decades of sitting around and being exposed to god knows what, be that deadly miasma, desert sand, hellfire, or dank, mossy caves.
• Invulnerable Attack: The player is completely impervious to any damage while Draining an enemy. More precisely, they cannot be hit while the animation is playing, and attacking enemies will just clip right through them. Bosses are a different story, however.
• Impossibly Cool Clothes: The Revenant outfits look like they were lifted straight out of an anime. The look is also affected by what Blood Veil the player has equipped; Type Ogre adds a cape and armor to the arm which turns into a massive claw, Stinger lengthens the coat and manifests as a bladed scorpion-like tail, Hounds adds long sleeves which turn into two wolf shaped heads, and Ivy a scarf that changes into spikes.
• Instant-Win Condition: Defeating a boss fully restores your health, healing, and ichor on the spot, and purges all buffs and debuffs on you. If your health was depleted, you're a few seconds from losing all your strength, and your partner manages to land the final hit on the boss, you'll be brought back to life rightaway. Defeating a boss also negates the "dies on expiry" effect of Final Journey.
• Insurmountable Waist-High Fence: The Gaol of the Red Mist. Per lore, it's explained that the mist barrier prevents any living thing from coming in or out of the Vein by subjecting them to unimaginable pain if they try, though it's never mentioned anywhere if they're also physically barred from going past it. As seen in the "Dwellers in the Dark" ending, the Gaol is very thin, or at the very least the point that the protagonist made their exit is the thinnest, which stands to be about three to four inches thick, give or take.
• Jack of All Stats:
  • Halberds strike a balance between speed and damage, with good range and drain rating as well.
  • The Protagonist's own Queenslayer Blood Code, is incredibly well rounded, can use most weapons and mastered gifts. With some fine tuning it can easily become a physical powerhouse, and the code's unique gift, Final Journey, can even turn the protagonist into a Lightning Brusier for a short time.
• Ken Doll Anatomy: The male revenant model, despite being very ripped, lacks nipples or even belly buttons. This is best seen when entering the hot spring.
• Last Chance Hit Point:
  • The Firm Stand passive of the Atlas code lets the player survive a huge fatal blow at the cost of being reduced to a One-Hit-Point Wonder, if they're struck while on moderately low health, but not currently in the "dying" phase.
  • The Feral Tenacity skill from the Warrior Code is a buff that enables this effect. Unlike Firm Stand, it has more leeway as a safety net and can be mastered for use with other Codes, but once it's saved you it goes on a lengthy cooldown and you have to wait before it can be re-applied.
• Last Lousy Point: Finding the final mistle in a particularly large or complex map can be this. Special points go to the Cathedral of the Sacred Blood, for it being massive, full of dead ends, and being riddled with ledge paths that you won't notice unless you look down often.
• Launcher Move: Pressing the button inputs for Dash + Heavy Attack will have the player perform an upward swing; normally this doesn't do much, but doing so while focused will send the unlucky recipient sky-high.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: The game seems to be riddled with this.
  • If you take an A.I. companion with you on the battlefied and don't move your character for a short period of time, your companion will turn around and will look straight into the player's camera. To the unsuspecting player, this will look like the companion is covering your character's back while you are away.
  • More evidence that shows that they are aware of the player's camera (kind of), some of the A.I. companions' chatter (specifically Yakumo's ) straight up calls it an "eagle eye".
• Lethal Lava Land: The City of Falling Flame, naturally. Hope you have some Fireproof Tonic ready!
• Life Drain: The Survivor Blood Code has a passive Gift called Life Steal that restores health when you kill an enemy. Allies landing the final blow won't count.
• Lighter and Softer: In a meta-sense, while set in a post-apocalyptic world, it is not as grim and eldritch as Dark Souls and Bloodborne. Even the thematic approach is noticeably more upbeat and optimistic - as opposed to the tendency for Souls-like games to be focused on futility and delaying the inevitable, Code Vein has people who still actively fight for a better tomorrow.
• Limit Break: Unlike other games in the Soulslike genre, Code Vein features a focus gauge that increases as you take damage, successfully dodge, and/or block attacks. Once filled, characters glow blue and temporarily gain a slight boost in damage, balance, and other assorted effects; in addition, players can opt to use the rest of their focus gauge to launch enemies upwards and deal a souped-up drain attack for massive damage and ichor regain. For those interested in a focus-based playstyle, there are several passives that either increase the amount of focus gained from certain actions, or significantly buff the player once they reach full focus.
• Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: Played straight DPS-wise; mage-type Blood Codes already have a high potential for destruction from the very start of the game, while a fully-kitted, endgame magic build can melt entire bosses within seconds. By comparison, melee-focused builds must continue to chip away bits of enemy health bars at a time, with most means of progression being steady and incremental. Funnily enough, this actually becomes a Downplayed Trope in prolonged situations; fighters do have a host of Gifts to choose from once mastered, have better access to weapons with naturally high drain ratings compared to mages, and can close the gap in ichor stock by performing parries and drain attacks (a much riskier prospect for magic builds for obvious reasons). The end result is that, while a wizard's damage potential is astronomical, fighters can more easily cast a steady stream of Gifts and quickly regain their ichor back to do it all over again.
• Magikarp Power:
  • Most Blood Codes impart the right Gifts that can specialize the player for a specific build, but will not realize their full potential until the player unlocks Gifts from several chapters later. For instance, the Venom-based Darkseeker Code becomes a lot more effective when you gain Debuff Build-Up from a Depths map that's obtained near the end of the game.
  • Some Blood Codes, due to the position of their Vestiges, don't get to unlock their best skills for a long time past their initial discovery. The biggest one is Io's Eos Code, where the final two Vestiges are picked up in the final dungeon.
  • The Intensification transformation sacrifices some of the weapon's base stats to increase the strength of its stat scaling. It may not look like much when you're under level 100, but as your level goes up past that, the bonuses begin to far outweigh the base stat penalty.
  • Inverted with the Gifts transformation, which boosts the weapon's base stats but erases its player stat scaling. It's fantastic for low-level runs, but in regular gameplay the stat scaling will outweigh the base stat bonus.
• Mana Burn: The Leak status effect, which causes an afflicted target to slowly "bleed" Ichor, rendering them unable to cast Gifts. Several enemy types and bosses can inflict Leak onto the player via their attacks. The very ground itself in Crown of Sand also gradually saps the player of Ichor with every step while wading through the dunes, though solid ground like concrete protects from this.
• Mana Meter: The resource used to cast Gifts (or use the Heavy attacks of certain weapons) is called "Ichor". The amount you can have depends on your Blood Code, but hitting an enemy with a Drain attack will increase the cap until you use a Mistle. Hitting with normal attacks gradually restores your Ichor.
• Mighty Glacier: Several Blood Veils offer great protection, at the cost of weighing down the player and reducing their mobility. Some Blood Codes have a great weight capacity and the stats to wield your heavy weapons and armor, but have a low base mobility. These are great for tank builds, who have to be as beefy as they could be to withstand enemy attacks, but are extremely bad for high-mobility playstyles such as Bayonet or mage.
• Mind Screw: The Whole Episode Flashback is initially presented as simply a memory, and the fact that you can bring your present-day equipment into it and also find new items inside seems at first like an Anti-Frustration Feature resulting in Gameplay and Story Segregation. However, a minor sidequest later on explicitly requires you to fetch an item from there for an NPC in the present.
• Modesty Shorts: The human girl that the Protagonist and their friends rescue wears some, as anyone who angles the camera to look under her skirt will discover.
• Modesty Towel: Exclusive to pre-orders of Japanese copies of the game is a set of "costumes" for both genders that are nothing but this, as if the protagonist is on the receiving end of Gone Swimming, Clothes Stolen. The male protagonist is shirtless all the time. And, due to the game's lack of Clothing Damage, these towels might as well be Made of Iron, since nothing under the sun could damage or cause them to fall off.
  • Outside of this, the only other place where this is seen is in the hot springs, where everybody will have one, including Io. They probably needed it, considering how the hot spring is a shared zone where male and female characters could enter the bath at the same time.
• Monster Knight: The Queen's Knight, a humanoid Lost wielding a giant, spear-like sword and shield.
• Multiple Endings: There are three endings, with the determining factor being how many Vestiges the protagonist has purified and if Eva was saved.
  • Heirs Ending: If none of the Successors' memories are restored, the Successors and some of the protagonist's companions end up being killed. Without their assistance, the protagonist succumbs to frenzy after defeating Silva, forcing Louis to Mercy Kill them before they become the next Queen. The protagonists then become the next generation of Successors to delay the Queen's resurrection.
  • To Eternity Ending: If at least one (but not all) of the Successors' memories are restored, then all of the protagonist's companions survive, but the protagonist is forced to take Silva's place, hibernating in his tomb for all eternity to keep the status quo of the city going.
  • Dweller In the Dark Ending: The Golden Ending. If the protagonist restores the memories of all the Successors, Io steps in to help contain Silva's Relic and is Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence, becoming a tree that protects the Vein and maintains the Red Mist while also ensuring that the protagonist is not driven mad by the power of the Relics. Jack and Eva elect to stay behind in the Vein and protect the city while also ensuring that none of the Lost leave, while the protagonist, Louis, Yakumo, Rin and Mia leave using the amber blood bead Io gave them to help humanity rebuild the world. The ending also implies that the Revenants are either the very first God Eaters or their successors.
    • There are actually two versions of this ending, dictated by whether or not the player had also restored Io's memories. If not every Eos Vestiges have been restored, then the normal version will play where the cutscene ends after the protagonist sets off with their friends. If the player had also restored Io's Vestiges, then the "True" ending will play, which is the same as the normal version, but the protagonist will turn to face the camera, utter Io's name, and then will the scene cut to black. These two versions are treated as separate endings, so both must be viewed to unlock the Determiner of Fate achievement.
• My Suit Is Also Super: All revenants are basically super-powered humans, who could shatter concrete pavements with a single smash of their weapon regardless of how strong they look. They also happen to be wearing Impossibly Cool Clothes that is immune to both their excess strength and Clothing Damage, no matter how strong they or the enemy happen to be. They are immune to being blemished or ruined by everything, be that hellfire or Queen miasma, which was said to be strong enough to warp even hard concrete and steel. And to make them even more super, these clothing items can also disintegrate and reintegrate at will when their wearers use mistles or perform Flash Steps, coming out looking as spotless as ever.
• Nekomata: The Successor of the Claw is a cat-headed humanoid that uses fire based attacks and possess distinctive two tails which are made up of flame.
• New Game Plus: The Day 1 patch formally introduces this mode, where players with a cleared game could start over from the beginning with all of their gear, exploration progress, stats, Vestiges, and Blood Codes retained. Partners that have been unlocked can be selected as soon as the game allows you to, even if they haven't appeared in the new run yet. That includes Eva, who remains selectable even if you do not save her in subsequent runs. Things not carried over into a NG+ includes Depth progression, as each level's keys must be found again before their boss can be re-fought, though their exploration progress is kept and only their central mistles need to be reactivated to rest. Coco's and Murasame's shop inventory also reset, so be sure to purchase your end-game items (and capitalize on the bottomless supplies of Queen metals) before embarking on a new run.
  
  Additionally, a player transitioning to New Game+ could elect to bump up the overall difficulty of their next run, and this is a stacking effect, as subsequent playthroughs will get gradually harder and harder, and a sharp increase in difficulty will be implemented from the fifth run onwards. Of course, the difficulty spikes are entirely optional and one could experience normal New Game+ by choosing not to increase it.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Revenants were originally created by the government to fight horrors attacking humanity. However, when the Queen frenzied and became lost, this caused many of the existing Revenants to become Lost as well. In order to defeat Queen, the government was forced to create more Revenants, leading to the current situation where the primary threat to the city is no longer the Horrors, but legions of Lost.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot:
  • The Successor of the Breath is a knight! With four eyes! And moose antlers! And a shield that's also a buzzsaw! And a jetpack!!! Needless to say, this is completely in line with what a little kid like Nicola would find cool and strong (though it's not quite the outright Super Robot he mentioned to Jack when taking up his post). Once he's restored to sanity, he doesn't even mind, thinking his new form is awesome and great for protecting Mia.
  • The Successor of the Claw is a giant special forces-looking katana-wielding ninja catgirl that is also on fire.
• Nintendo Hard: Being inspired by Dark Souls, Code Vein is naturally very challenging, with no way to adjust the difficulty. However, the developers have stated that they do not want the game to be so hard that the player gives up. This is accomplished by companions doing their best to aid the player in combat, as well as weapons and abilities being changeable on the fly, so that you can adapt and will never run into a challenge that cannot be overcome.
  • New Game Plus runs will get harder and harder the more runs you complete for a single character (see above). From the fifth run onwards, the combat difficulty will rise meteorically.
• No Cutscene Inventory Inertia: Normally averted. The protagonist is shown wearing and holding what you actually have equipped in cutscenes (leading to a possible amusing instance of Yakumo giving you a friendly pat on the shoulder while you are wearing the Suicide Spur, slamming his hand down on the many large spikes yet being completely unharmed). In the two cutscenes in the protagonist's own memory, the protagonist is wearing a Queenslayer Claw, which in addition to making sense story-wise since this is a memory from before the protagonist acquired anything else, but is also still an aversion since the game actually puts a Queenslayer Claw into your inventory and auto-equips it if you aren't wearing one already. The only true example of this trope in the game is in the memory's second cutscene where the protagonist kills the Queen. In the cutscene, they will always be wearing the default mask, which is strange considering in the first cutscene at the beginning of the memory they recieved a copy of your chosen mask from Karen.
• No Hugging, No Kissing: The closest the game gets to romance are some vague crushes that could just be close friendships (Jack and Eva, Louis and Cruz, and Karen and Aurora/Successor of the Ribcage, although that may be one sided on Aurora's part and might not even be romantic in the first place) and an Aborted Declaration of Love (Emily/Successor of the Claw to Yakumo).
• Notice This: Vestiges are glowing red rocks as opposed to the usual sparkle that most dropped items are so that the player can distinguish between them and know which is more important. If the Vestige is hidden somewhere, usually behind breakable objects, you're still hinted to its existence by the voices from the Vestige's memories echoing around it.
• One-Woman Wail: Much of the game's soundtrack is this, especially during tender moments.
• Optional Party Member: Eva Roux a.k.a. the Successor of the Throat. If the player gathers enough Vestiges to restore her memory, Eva would join the crew and become available as an AI partner. Otherwise she would die.
• Our Vampires Are Different: Vampires in this game are called Revenants and are not created by being bitten, but artificially created by placing a BOR parasite in the body of a dead human to revive them. They have Resurrective Immortality and will come back to life if killed, but at the cost of losing some of their memories each time. They are unaffected by most of the typical vampire weaknesses like sunlight, crosses, or garlic, but can be permanently killed by destroying the heart (since that's where the parasite is), wooden stake optional. If a Revenant's thirst for blood exceeds its threshold, then the parasite takes over completely and they will be reduced to a Lost, a mindless bloodthirsty monster with no shred of humanity left and can't be permanently killed no mater what. The Reveal that the setting takes place in the world of God Eater implies that the Revenants are a form of God Eaters, and either are based on similar ideas, or are the predecessor to them.
• The Outside World: Humanity outside of Vein still exists, but most Revenants are under the impression that their city is one of the few civilizations left. They are not aware that beyond the Red Mist is the world of God Eater.
• Palette Swap: Discovering a new Blood Veil will make them purchaseable from Murasame's shop, with the bonus of adding two extra color choices that don't affect stats to tailor to your fashion needs.
• Parasite Zombie: Sort of. The Revenants all carry a parasite called BOR inside their hearts that allows them to constantly regenerate despite the parasite technically making them walking dead. The parasite however needs to be constantly fed or else it will start to erode both their body and mind, causing them to become Lost which are a more straight example of the trope.
• Party in My Pocket: You can only have one partner with you at a time, but cutscenes will show everyone traveling together.
• Permanently Missable Content:
  • If you save a Successor by collecting all of their Vestiges before fighting them and restoring their memory, then you get the Successor's blood code. If you let the Successor die, then you get their relic's blood code instead. Naturally, you can't get both in a single playthrough.
  • The Pipe and Hammer of Thralldom are definitely this, as they are only given to new characters on their first playthrough, and cannot be acquired again on a New Game Plus run if you sell your last one, whereas boss or unique gear can be found again on a new playthrough.
• Phlebotinum Overload: Let's just say that carrying Queen relics inside one's body isn't a very good idea. It is an even worse idea to carry all of them at once inside a body clearly not meant for that purpose, as the protagonist found out first-hand in the Heirs ending.
• Pipe Pain: The starting weapon for every character is a Pipe of Thralldom, which the game treats as a One-Handed Sword. Despite its shoddy nature, the Pipe is one of a kind, and cannot be acquired again if sold to Murasame.
• Post Apocalyptic Gasmask: Gas masks form a core the game's aesthetic. Narratively, the reason for this is due to the miasma. Revenants who inhale the miasma are hit with a violent thirst for blood and are in danger of becoming Lost.
• Power Equals Rarity: A few Blood Veils are described as very effective, but are either in short supply or no longer being produced due to the rare materials needed to make them.
• Rare Candy: The "Awake MJ" items serve one and only one purpose, and that is to instantly master a given Gift and make it available to players using other Blood Codes. There are four flavours of these (018, 109, 212, and 310) in order of rarity, with Gifts coming from later Blood Codes requiring rarer ones to master. They mainly spawn in fixed areas of the map, but can drop from powerful enemies in limited quantities, and the best place to farm these are in the Depths, where they drop (in still very small numbers) from bosses.
• Real Is Brown: The overall color palette is fairly muted and blends into itself very easily with a mixture of browns, tans, greys, and similar.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Downplayed. Many of the Lost already have red eyes, which glow brightly when they feel it's time to get dangerous. The actual eyes one should take warning of is blue, which is the sign that a revenant is being taken over by the Queen.
• Relationship Values: One of the main differences between Code Vein and other Souls-style games is the inclusion of companion characters who join the player on their journey, with the relationship between them and the player character being given a lot of focus.
• Resurrective Immortality: Revenants will simply revive a while later if they are killed. The real danger however is becoming a Lost, from which there is no coming back.
• The Reveal: The Mist keeps out a threat bigger than anything the Revenants have faced: Aragami.
• Rivers of Blood: The Gaol of the Stagnant Blood. It's an underground lake of the stuff. God knows how many Blood Beads and donors it took to amass that much volume.
• Scarf Of Ass Kicking: The Ivy type blood veil appears as a long scarf hanging down around the back of the wearer's neck. When used the scarf extends to dig beneath the earth, bursting from beneath the ground to skewer enemies.
• Schmuck Bait: Vestige or Chest sitting out in the open completely unguarded? As is typical for Souls-likes you can guarantee something is waiting to ambush you. In the worst cases trying to grab these goodies will trigger a Lost Invasion event.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: The three DLC feature battles with bonus bosses that are powerful Horrors sealed away long before the events of the game. The Revenants of the time were no match for said Horrors and had to resort to using the power of a Relic to seal them away. If you unseal them, you'll find out firsthand why. Said Horrors are actually powerful Aragami. The Hellfire Knight is a Hannibal, the Frozen Empress is a Marduk, and the Lord of Thunder is a Vajra.
• Senseless Sacrifice: It's a very disturbingly common sight for players equipping the Guardian Aid gift to use it to revive an ally at the cost of their own health, only for that ally to die immediately afterwards, as the heals aren't very substantial without the correct Blood Codes, and the monsters themselves are very likely to hit the downed teammate as they're getting up, thus rendering the HP sacrifice moot. In worse situations, both players die after doing this, as the healer will have lost a big chunk of HP themselves, and achieving nothing.
• Sequence Breaking: A minor example, but speedrunners consider it mandatory to equip the Assassin's Sickle (earned from defeating the Invading Executioner) for this very reason - the weapon's charged special is a Dash Attack that covers a long distance, making it great for crossing certain gaps in the Cathedral of the Sacred Blood and skipping its puzzles.
• Shapeshifter Baggage: Many Losts and Successors could transform into positively massive beings that greatly dwarf their old selves without assimilating remotely enough mass to explain such drastic changes, giving a huge finger to Conservation of Mass and Energy. Of note are the Stone-Crusher types, who were formerly as lithe as the usual female revenant, but are now among some of the bigger mook types. Some bosses crank this up to eleven, with bonus points going to The Virgin Born, which is the size of a small building.
• Shield-Bearing Mook: Some Lost carry large swords and shields, though they are still quite slow and are easily flanked, especially when the player has a companion. The larger Lost use kite shields as mere bucklers, and can only block with them when they are not swinging their weapon themselves.
• Shout-Out: During the time you partner with Yakumo, He'll sometimes say "Let's Mosey"
• Slave Race: Normal humans are rare and are kept as slaves in protective bunkers due to their valuable blood.
• Squishy Wizard: Generally the case with players who gear heavily towards effective spellcasting builds, due to the prioritization of Mind and Willpower over Strength, and mage-suitable Blood Veils are often low on Defense and Endurance, making it so that their HP totals rarely exceeding the low 3000s. To make things worse, mage-types generally run Vow of Ichor to maximize their Ichor count, which puts a dent into their max HP. And god help you if you decide to incorporate Supernatural Blood and Blood Sacrifice in your build, and the enemy gets a solid hit in on you while you're weakened from using those.
  
  Their weapon choices are crimped even further, as the Blood Veils suitable for a mage build often are also very lacking in the way of Dexterity, thus severely limiting what blades they could be using to just a tiny handful of one-handed swords. While this might seem inconsequential to a caster, not all battles provide enough distance between you and the enemy for you to comfortably cast your Gifts considering what type of game this is, especially if they're ambushing you, or possess You Will Not Evade Me moves, or both. In such cases, a squishy character won't last very long.
• State Sec: Cerberus, "The Public Order Preservation Force", is a force formed by the new government and led by Silva. It is comprised mostly of Revenants that survived during Operation Queenslayer.
• Status Effects: Comes in five flavors. They don't take effect on the first hit — you will need repeated strikes to build up the ailment before it can fully affect the target. Higher ailment resistance will reduce the amount of ailment buildup, letting the combatant endure more hits before they succumb to it. You'll find skills and items that can raise your resistance to each and cure them.
  • Venom - Drains HP.
  • Stun - The afflicted becomes unable to act, although getting hit will knock them out of it.
  • Inhibit - Prevents the casting of Gifts, and cancels the effects of any active Gift buffs.
  • Slow - All movements including dodging and attacking become sluggish.
  • Leak - Drains ichor. It's also the only status effect which can't be inflicted on enemies.
• Story Breadcrumbs: While the game itself has a plot with fully fleshed-out cutscenes, trying to actually learn about the history of the setting and its characters will require reading item descriptions, loading screens, inferring from dialogue, and in some cases literally piecing together scattered memories to create the full picture.
• Stylish Protection Gear: There is actually a reason why most Blood Veils look less like combat gear and more something straight out of a runway show: The flavor texts for many armor pieces explain that designers and/or creative types who survived the Great Collapse contributed to the templates with their own flair, resulting in the many Blood Veils you can find in the game. Not that most Revenants cared about the looks, but it helps that the end products functioned properly.
• Super Boss: The three DLC feature powerful bonus bosses: the Hellfire Knight, the Frozen Empress, and the Lord of Thunder. God Eater veterans will find them to be very familiar.
• Suspicious Video-Game Generosity: Sometimes if you pick up a useful-looking skill, chances are the next level will encourage you strongly to use it. For instance, you pick up the Survivor and Dark Knight Codes that impart a Life Drain passive and a fire damage resistance buff respectively shortly before you gain access to the City of Falling Flame, a level that features fire-based environmental hazards everywhere.
• Sword Lines: These are present to make it easier to judge the attack range. Interestingly, the regular Lost's weapons leave dark and shadowy lines, whereas the Blade Bearer boss has much lighter bluish-grey ones, though it may just be related to her ice powers.
• Tactical Withdrawal: Enemies in Code Vein have a rather limited aggro radius, and short of boss battles the player is free to flee any fight they so choose, so long as they have enough stamina to outrun the enemy. This is encouraged, as not all fights will end up in one's favor, and will result in great loss of consumables, or even death. However this does not apply to Lost Invasion events; the enemies spawned will pursue you to the ends of the earth, even teleporting to your location if you climb a ladder to try and escape them.
• Tainted Veins: The veins of any Revenant that loses themselves to bloodlust will start to become discolored and clearly visible, starting near the heart and spreading across the rest of the body.
• Theme Naming:
  • The Attendants of the Relics are named after Greek mythological queens and goddesses.
  • Many Blood Codes in the game are likewise named after Greek gods and Titans if they're not a Class (e.g. Scout, Berserker, etc...). There are exceptions to this, though, such as Scáthach, Ishtar, Heimdall, and Fionn, though they are still named after deities regardless.
• Throwing Your Sword Always Works: The Legion Punisher Gift of Queen's Breath lets the player chuck two-handed swords and hammers at the enemy. These weapons spin once thrown, damaging anything within their strike zones.
• Took a Shortcut: In the prologue, Oliver Collins just sits down in one place and tells you to go on without him after his purifier mask is damaged in a surprise attack. Then, you team up with Louis and fight your way through the rest of the underground caves. Once you reach the exit, Oliver has somehow managed to reach the surface before you, where he succumbs to his bloodlust and becomes the first boss. This is especially notable since the only way up is a ladder gated behind a Door to Before that wasn't unlocked until the players themselves have reached it.
• Undead Child: All Revenants are undead and some of them, most notably Nicola, are children.
• Underground Monkey: Many of the boss fights in the main story have differently textured and named, but otherwise identical counterparts in the Depths.
• The Unseen: Whenever the history of the Great Collapse or early Revenant stories are touched on, the monsters that appeared with the Thorns of Judgement are only mentioned and referred to as "horrors." We don't see who or what exactly these horrors are until Mido temporarily brings down the Gaol of the Mist and reveals the existence of the horrors to the party. And to anyone who has knowledge of the God Eater series, horrors is an apt description.
• Variable Mix: The game's soundtrack plays around with subtle variations such as solely-instrumental, singing chorus, and etc. to suit the scenario. During gameplay, a series of tense strings will be played when you target an enemy while they are still idle and unaware (or vice-versa), graduating to the full battle theme once the fight properly starts and building into a more tense track if you become outnumbered.
• Victor Gains Loser's Powers: Certain bosses, after their defeat, will yield their Blood Code that lets you use some of their abilities for yourself. You may also obtain a boss's signature weapon after defeating them.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: Not collecting all of the Vestiges to save the Successors is bad enough, but even if you do collect all of the necessary Vestiges, the game still gives you the option to refuse to save them and leave them to die.
• The Virus: How the miasma functions in practice; the bodies of the Lost emit a gas into the atmosphere that drives Revenants into a bloodthirst if inhaled, transforming them into new Lost in the process. With all the corpses Silva had converted to Revenants during Operation Queenslayer, it's no wonder that miasma would become as widespread as it is right now.
• Vocal Dissonance: Despite many characters having to wear gas masks when venturing out into the world, none of them sound the least bit muffled like they should be, talking through a padded metallic facewear and everything. Becomes downright absurd in the case of Mido, whose entire head is practically encased in metal.
• Wake-Up Call Boss:
  • Butterfly of Delirium. Much like some other examples, the difficulty behind this boss is its use of poison and reinforces the fact that status ailments can and will kick your ass if you aren't careful. While the boss herself hits hard physically, the fact that most of her attacks deal Poison damage means the health loss will add up quickly. Unless you bring a sizable stockpile of Antivenom with you, or have Gifts that cure status effects, both of which you'll likely not have much by that point, you're very likely to land a controller at the TV screen fighting her.
  • The Invading Executioner will pose a challenge for players that haven't learned how to properly block, dodge, and pay attention to status effects yet. She hits hard and fast and will inflict the "slow" status effect which will leave you as a sitting duck for a very long time unless you cure it. Her worst attack is her charge attack due to how fast it comes out, and how she will, if she misses someone, do it again, meaning its very easy to die because of how quick and powerful it is. Your partner won't fair much better either as she tosses them around like a rag doll which means you'll need to pull your weight if you have been relying on them to carry you through the game so far.
  • If, by some chance, you're not adequately woken up after the preceding, the Argent Wolf Berserker will drag you out of bed and hurl you through your bedroom window. You fight him in an arena so small it's almost a cupboard, and his wild mace swings cover roughly half of it with every attack. Oh, and his attack power is so high, particularly once he Turns Red, that almost every attack he makes does almost as much damage as the Executioner's slide- you will be three-shotted by him, guaranteed. If your partner is Yakumo he'll be completely overwhelmed and beaten to death within a minute or so; if you went with Louis or, heavens forbid, Mia you'll be left staring at the small bloodstain on the ground where they were just standing, wondering why they just vanished. You can backstab him, but the hitbox for it is flakey and if you're slightly off you'll just attack him instead, which is problematic when he can rotate like he's on a turntable and many of his attacks are so wide they hit behind him. The Berserker is here to drive home the fact that you cannot stand toe-to-toe with the bosses in this game, you have to dodge and dodge and dodge again between every attack or kiss your ass goodbye.
• Was Once a Man: The numerous monsters throughout the world are all Revenants who have succumbed to their bloodlust.
• Welcome to Corneria: Your AI teammates have a very limited pool of quotes and responses to nearby enemies, items, or points of interests, which they spout incessantly. So much so that one of the changes included in Patch 1.04 is an option to disable their voices during gameplay.
• Wham Shot: Towards the end of the game, the Miasma surrounding the Gaol of the Mist briefly collapses. A few opportunistic revenants take the moment ad a chance to escape the Gaol, and run headlong into a a Dyaus Pita class Aragami, who begins hunting down the hapless revenants without breaking a sweat before the Miasma's restoration drives it off, showing that for all the horrors found within the city, they are nothing compared to the horrors outside the mist. Furthermore, it shows that this game takes place within the world of God Eater itself.
• Where It All Began: The final stages are in the Provisional Government Outskirts and its base since it was the same location the Protagonist fought in Operation Queenslayer years ago.
• Where the Hell Is Springfield?: The specific location of the world of Vein is never given. Information given through fluff pieces indicate that the world at large is geographically the same as ours, as Japan is a nation in-setting, though where on that Earth is Vein located is uncertain. The map on Louis' board shows that the city itself borders a large body of water, and the bleached coral in the Dried-Up Trenches further suggests that Vein is part of a coastal nation. It gets confusing, though, since the area also has a lake (or had), according to Jack, who claimed that the desert that is Crown of Sand was formed when part of the city ruins were eroded by the winds carrying crystalized salt inland from a nearby lake.
  • The license plate visible at the cars, in-universe English writing (especially near the map at the home base), the architecture of the home base (hot springs notwithstanding), and the presence of George Washington Bridge visible at the distance of Dried-Up Trenches all but confirm that the Vein is America, specifically New York.
  • However, the city map shows a road network that looks much more like Paris, with three concentric highways that would be Le Périphérique, Le Superperipherique and La Francilienne.
• Whole Episode Flashback: Finding the Protagonist's Vestige Core triggers one, and sends you to another area where you relive your character's lost memories of their part during Operation Queenslayer, as well as exploring their connection to Jack, and explaining how they ended up where they were at the start of the game. It is entirely optional, though, and will not be forced upon you should you refrain from picking the Vestige up.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity:
  • The Successors are forced to reside in their own Crypts in long slumbers, so that the frenzy brought about by the Queen relics inside their bodies don't drive them nuts and turn into more Queens.
  • Basically the "Heirs" ending where, after defeating the Skull King, the protagonist absorbs all four relics, becomes overwhelmed by their power, and turns into a new Queen, forcing Louis to interrupt them with a Back Stab.
• With This Herring: Your initial gear is pretty terrible — you're given a lead pipe and a large piece of rubble to serve as your weapons, and your companion Oliver will regularly outperform you. Things get a bit better once you find your first proper blade.
• Wolfpack Boss: Several of the boss rooms in the Depths levels pit you against multiple, slightly stronger versions of Lesser Lost that you've faced on your way here, or give a single Greater Lost flanked by several minions to complicate the fight. The challenge lies in their numbers, similar to a single wave of a Lost Invasion.
• World of Buxom: In this world, if a character is female, chances are they are quite bountiful up front. Not if their name is Rin Murasame or Mia Karnstein, though.
• You Will Not Evade Me: The Sword Saints and their derivatives possess an ability that lets them Flash Step towards a nearby player and perform a downward heavy attack from above. Running past these enemies in the Cathedral of the Sacred Blood often prompts them to use this attack, which is quite hard to telegraph owing to the fact that you usually can't see them pulling this move unless you're looking in their direction, and the camera suddenly shifts upwards as they're about to strike to mess up your sense of direction, so most of the time they'll be catching you by surprise.
• Zerg Rush: A Lost Invasion will spawn several Lost enemies that will chase you down in waves, each wave typically consisting of two Lesser and one Greater, before finally throwing in one elite variant as a finishing course. Make sure your resources are sufficient before triggering such events.

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