Elsa is a girl who recently moved to the island of Espheria, where she befriends an engineer and is gifted a combat robot. Using this robot, she ventures into the forest to slay some bats, but learns that she is able to open the portals of the Game, allowing her to use the game boards to gain power and wealth. As she travels the island looking for additional boards, she discovers some uncomfortable truths about the Game and the island.
The original can be downloaded from rpgmaker.net
and the remake is on Steam.
Note that the majority of the tropes below pertain to the Plus version.
This game contains examples of:
- Ambiguously Gay: When Linve bathes in the hot spring, Elsa inspects the former's underwear and briefly considers taking it.
- Auto-Revive: The Phoenix Chick is a key item that allows Elsa to revive from KO once, resulting in the item being consumed.
- Boss Rush: On Grandora Island, there are three events featuring sequential boss battles. The Chamber of Tales has the hard mode versions of the board bosses and the Chamber of Secrets has the four mechs that guarded Eloire's equipment in the Hexagon Tower. The Chamber of Visions has Origin, the priest, and Anima.
- Bragging Rights Reward: Subverted with the hidden pieces of gear in the Hexagon Tower. They can only be obtained after beating Eloire, the Final Boss. However, if the player unlocks Grandora Island, these pieces of gear can be equipped to the Fighter and the guest version of Eloire.
- Character Class System: At the start of the game, the player can choose Elsa's class. This affects both her combat abilities and non-combat events.
- Elsa's Fighter class allows her to equip swords, pikes, shields, and corslets. She learns offensive skills and self-buffs, but otherwise has no support skills.
- Elsa's Tinker class allows her to equip hammers and waistcoats. She can read books to increase her MP, use her hammer to lower enemy defenses, use items to permanently increase her robots' stats, and learn support skills that specifically target her robot allies.
- Elsa's Joker class allows her to equip staves, chakrams, scythes, mojos, and robes. She can learn enemy skills, but her early game equipment options are limited.
- Collection Sidequest: The Blue Crystals can be delivered to the jeweler for rewards. These crystals are disguised as ordinary objects that are usually indicated by having a blue color scheme. The jeweler is part of a conspiracy to delete and replace the world of Espheria, and the crystals give him the power to do so. This results in Elsa fighting him as a boss and learning about the truth behind the digital world, leading to the true ending of the game.
- Crippling Overspecialization: The Tinker class has support skills that apply to robots, but not humans. This limits its usefulness in Grandora Island, where Elsa only has human party members.
- Dual Wielding: Elsa's Fighter class and Eloire's Champion class can dual-wield one-handed weapons.
- Evil Former Friend: Eloire was once a friend to Vaille, but eventually went mad with the wizard's power and tried to take over Vaille's body. In the present, Vaille is trying to groom Elsa into becoming a heroine to finish off Eloire's vengeful spirit.
- Excuse Plot: Subverted. At first, the game gives little reason or plot for Elsa to clear the game boards, other than her curiosity. After clearing the boards, Elsa learns that the Game is both part of Vaille's gambit to save the island from Eloire and part of Anima's gambit to force the population to go to the real world.
- Fallen Heroine: Eloire was once the heroine who cleared the Game in an attempt to wish for her sister's revival. However, the wizard Shin refused, so she killed him, took his power, and went insane. She tried to take over her friend Vaile's body, but failed and got sealed into the Hexagon Tower.
- Final Boss: Eloire is considered the last boss of the main story. Going to bed after saying goodbye to Vaille but before turning in all the Blue Crystals ends the game, making Eloire the last mandatory boss that the player can fight before the normal ending.
- Guest-Star Party Member:
- Varia and Origin are summonable AI-controlled party members. They can only be summoned once per battle through their runes and their runes have to be recharged by resting before they can be summoned again.
- All the human party members in Grandora Island are illusionary versions created from Elsa's imagination rather than proper AIs from Espheria. These include Eloire before her Sanity Slippage, Hemrock's original human self, and Vaille. Since they're imaginary, they are temporary comrades that can only exist in Grandora. Unlike Varia and Origin, they can be controlled in battle and their equipment can be changed.
- Inside a Computer System: Espheria is actually a simulated world full of artificial intelligences, including the protagonist Elsa. This is part of a project to develop AIs who can repopulate the real world.
- Lightning Bruiser: The guest character, Hemrock, has the highest attack, defense, and speed of all playable characters and starts every battle with a buff to all three main stats. His only weakness is that he has no skills, but due to his weapon's stun chance and ability to land at least two hits per normal attack, he doesn't need them.
- Magikarp Power: The Joker class starts as the weakest of Elsa's classes, due to its lack of early equipment options, lack of MP, and dependency on enemy cards to learn skills. However, Elsa will eventually gain enough MP to use these skills and can gain access to better support abilities than the Tinker. Eventually, the game replaces the robots with human party members who specialize in offense, making the Joker's repertoire of support skills invaluable.
- Moveset Clone: The guest character, Eloire, has the same skills and equipment options as Elsa's Fighter class, only all of her skills are at level four. This works in favor of non-Fighter routes, since the player can just give all the Fighter gear they accumulated to Eloire.
- Multiple Endings
- If Elsa goes to bed after saying farewell to Vaille, the game jumps to credits without any fanfare.
- If Elsa completes the Blue Crystal quest, she learns that Anima and the Elder want to delete and replace Espheria with a new digital world. The Elder tests her resolve to remain in a false world by having her fight through the boss rushes of Grandora Island. While she isn't able to stop the conspiracy, she is given a century to live in peace before Espheria is deleted and she and her fellow AIs are transferred to the next world.
- Nerf: Before patch 2.2.3, enemy cards restore MP when used, allowing the Joker class to quickly recover their MP out of battle. However, cards for skills already learned don't get consumed, meaning the Joker has an infinite source of MP outside of battle. After the patch, cards no longer restore MP, making it harder for the Joker to manage their resources.
- Pet the Dog: After losing his boss battle, Anima isn't actually damaged at all and still intends on erasing Espheria to replace it with a new digital world, but plans to postpone it so that Elsa can at least live out the rest of her life in peace.
- Point of No Return: Right before the player delivers the final batch of Blue Crystals, the game warns them that doing so will lock them into the endgame.
- Power Copying: The Joker class can consume enemy cards to learn enemy skills. However, they can only know five enemy skills at a time and must use Dissolve to clear their skill list if they want to revise their setup. The Umbrella Broach allows them to delete all of their normal enemy skills and learn boss skills.
- Purposely Overpowered: The Meteo Crusher skill has a base damage of 999 in a game where the tankiest boss has 6000 HP, allowing the player to kill most bosses before they can cycle through their pattern again. The description for the skill admits that it's vastly overpowered. Unfortunately, the final dungeon of the game, Grandora Island, removes all robot party members, which means the player no longer has access to this skill.
- Secret Character: The Joker class is not immediately available in the class selection screen, but repeatedly refusing all the normal options will cause Elsa to be assigned this class.
- True Final Boss: If the player collects all the Blue Crystals, they get an extended endgame with the Traveller being the last boss before the credits roll.
- Video Game Remake: The Plus version is a remake of the original in a newer RPG Maker engine featuring a class system, an extended endgame, and rebalanced combat.
- Warrior Prince: On the Fighter route, Elsa can recruit Lasse, a prince of Gardeth, as a party member who can wield axes and has a combination of offense and support skills.
- Weak, but Skilled: The Joker class can only equip weapons and body armor with mediocre stats, but they also have a large variety of enemy skills to choose from. By the end of the game, they'll have much better support skills than the Fighter and Tinker classes.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: The Elder and Anima are part of a project to restart human civilization. This involves creating digital worlds like Espheria, figuring out how they can improve upon these worlds, and deleting these worlds in order to make room for better ones. It's implied that all the AI characters will have their souls transferred to new worlds until they can eventually be brought to the real world.
