Video Game / Get in the Car, Loser!

Sam Anon, the titular loser.

She said "GET IN THE CAR, LOSER! I know you're not up to anything this summer, I've got the Sword of Fate, and there's an ancient evil that needs to be sealed away."

Get In The Car, Loser! is a Eastern RPG created by Christine Love's development team Love Conquers All Games using Unity. Originally planned for a 2020 release, it was delayed until September 21, 2021. The game started as free-to-play, but became paid on May 24, 2022. Additionally, the Beach Episode and soundtrack, released alongside the base game, are paid DLC. The next planned DLC, taking place in an Alternate Timeline the party ends up trapped in, is planned to release in the first quarter of 2023.

Cultist "edgelords" worshipping a Machine Devil are causing terror in order to awaken him, and the Divine Order currently ruling the world doesn't want to demean itself by fighting them. Not wanting to wait for an apocalypse, three students from the local Academy of Order ("lesbian disaster" Sam Anon, wielder of the (stolen) legendary sword Grace Morningstar, and former TA Valentin Vaillante) and one renegade literal angel from the Divine Order (Angela) decide to deal with it themselves...and hopefully hit every diner along the way.

Can be downloaded from Itch.io or Steam.

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THESE TROPES WON'T FALTER IN THE FACE OF EVIL

• Amazon Brigade: The party consists of three girls whose pronouns are she/her, and Valentin, whose pronouns are they/them.
• Ambiguous Situation: In both timelines, the lineup of Heroes of Fate are supposed to be the same. However, the latest fated hero, Emily Harmless, is killed by Dylan Southwind in the main timeline. The party thinks the Divine Order wouldn't bother finding a replacement hero and that the Machine Devil would have won if it weren't for Grace taking the sword, though it's not confirmed if this is true or not. Not helping matters is that the angels themselves aren't completely aware of what Fate has in store for the world.
• Balance Between Good and Evil: Deconstructed. The Divine Order claims that defeating the Machine Devil and its cult before date indicated by the prophecy is a disruption of balance and therefore nothing should be done until then. However, this just means the cult gets 10 years to freely murder innocents and spread their hateful ideology. Thus, the party is justified in taking the Sword of Fate early to fight back. When it looks like the balance is tipping in favor of the party, the Divine Order outright helps the Machine Devil Cult in the final battle.
• Beach Episode: The DLC chapter "Battle on the Big Boardwalk" takes place on the beach, and playing through it unlocks swimwear outfits for the main cast.
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • After the journey to defeat the Machine Devil, Sam gains more confidence in herself while Grace and Valentin's relationship becomes stronger than ever. However, Angela is going to be punished by the Divine Order for helping the party.
  • "The Fate of Another World" DLC ends far more bitterly. Although the party defeats the Machine Devil of the alternate timeline, Emily and Jo jump to their deaths, since doing so is the only way to prevent the Machine Devil from possessing Jo. Although Angela becomes the new Hero of Fate and reject the purpose given to her by her creator, she decides to stay in the alternate timeline to help Sam rebuild the charred ruins of civilization. However, the Jo of the main universe is still alive but imprisoned, and the remaining party members seek to find her to prevent her star from being misused.
• Break Meter: Ravage actions and the Sword of Fate can fill an enemy's Ravage gauge. Once the gauge is full, the enemy is temporarily staggered and more vulnerable to damage. However, the enemy can still act unless they're hit by the Slow ability while in stagger state, which upgrades to freezing them for several seconds.
• Break the Believer: By the end of the second DLC, Angela admits she no longer has faith in the divine, despite being an angel herself. Between her own brothers stupidly risking an apocalypse for the sake of maintaining the status quo, to the realization that divine scripture is a big fat lie after discovering alternate universes with equally self-justifying divine scripture, there's just too much evidence revealing that the 'perfect and almighty' God is either a poser or is ignoring Their very licentious mouthpieces. Rather than plunge her into despair, Angela gains such a rebellious will that she can use the Sword of Fate of an alternate universe.
• But Thou Must!: At certain points, you're allowed to choose the tone of how Sam answers a statement, such as "Heroic", "Sincere", or "Rowdy". It never affects the plot, but does affect some dialogue. However, during Act III, you can only select "Sam-like" prompts as Sam isolates herself and fixates on her own insecurities and doubts.
• Character Level: Every character has a personal rank based on the lowest ranked trinket they have equipped. Enemies also have ranks, which can be lowered or raised through ailments or Devil Clock effects. Every difference in rank between an attacker and defender makes a huge difference in the damage formula. A character one rank higher will deal twice as much damage and receive half as much when fighting a lower-ranked character.
• Combatant Cooldown System: Each character has three actions, each with their own real time cooldown. Pressing the "Next" button switches everyone to their next available action. When all actions are exhausted, Grace uses her Sword of Fate on the currently targeted enemy and the cycle begins anew with the first set of skills. The Options menu also allows the player to choose between Active or Wait Mode, where the latter pauses time when selecting Sam's healing target.
• Common Tongue: The Travel Story for the Holy Polearm explains that, in a reversal of the Tower of Babel story, an angel once fell from heaven and had to unite all of the world's civilizations by teaching them to speak the angelic language in order to build their way back up.
• Create Your Own Villain: The trinket, Platonic Ideal of Fire, has lore describing the Machine Devil's origins. The planet used to be overrun with plants, making it impossible for the animal kingdom to thrive. The heavens created an unstoppable flame to burn the overgrown plants, but the flame eventually gained sapience as the Machine Devil, Jonivanjo.
• Damager, Healer, Tank: The original three members of the party fill out these archetypes, with Grace as the damager, Sam as the healer, and Valentin as the tank. Angela, a later addition to the party, has both exploit and ravage abilities and in-game is said to be an average of the other party members abilities.
• Darker and Edgier: The second DLC, "Fate of Another World," is a story about loss and heartarche rather, in contrast to main story being a hot-blooded adventure to save the world. It takes place in a Bad Future where the Machine Devil was defeated on schedule, resulting in much of the Kingdom Under Heaven being turned into charred ruins. Worse yet, the Machine Devil managed to possess the corpse of Jo, the lover of the hero Emily, and relentlessly uses Jo's voice to torment Emily and Alt!Sam. Although the party defeats the Machine Devil again, Emily had to throw herself and Jo off a mountain so that Jo's lingering attachment to her no longer powers the Machine Devil.
• Demiurge Archetype: In the second DLC, Angela finds that she's powerless without her connection to her god, the Creator of All Things, due to being trapped in a different universe, whose god she is not connected to. She realizes the contradiction that there is more than one creator, and that something else must have created the multiverse.
• Difficult, but Awesome: In DLC 2, Smite is much more useful now that it has a Rank IX trinket that grants this action. However, it requires the player to refrain from using Smite until the enemy's stagger percentage is high, since it removes the stagger state afterwards. This action makes blind button mashing less viable compared to more mundane attack options, but can deal heavy damage with patience.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: A game developed in the late 2010s tackles minorities being attacked by a cult of edgelords while the dominant powers stand by and insist on letting people suffer until they defeat said cult by the book at the appropriate time for fear of being seen as "just as bad".
• Drought Level of Doom: For most of the beginning of Act II, you will not be able to visit a shine or rest stop to refuel your car and and stock up on trinkets and healing items.
• Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: Fire is good against plant, plant is good against water, and water is good against fire. Enemies of these attributes will also absorb attacks of the same attribute. A nuke elemental attack deals double damage to enemies of all elemental affinities. However, a nuke-aligned target is weak to all elements, including nuke itself. A player character's elemental alignment is dependent on their currently active skill, making it important to consider when selecting equipment.
• Enemy Without: The boss of Act III is Deadname, a representation of Sam's doubts about her transitioning. This boss has a physical presence, as shown by how it can hurt the party and be perceived by people other than Sam. In the second DLC, the Sam from the alternate universe looks just like Sam's doppelganger, and Alt!Sam had to fight his own doppelganger, who looked just like Prime!Sam.
• Equipment Upgrade: Non-plus gear can be upgraded into plus gear by sacrificing a certain number of items. The plus gear counts as one rank higher than the original.
• Evolving Weapon: As equipment is brought into battle, its "Road Story" becomes more developed. Additionally, the player can sacrifice other gear and consumable items to upgrade a piece of gear, which also has the bonus effect of unlocking more "Road Story" entries.
• Foreshadowing: You may want to pay attention to some of the road stories:
  • The Agi's Sword of Fate Replica details how the Final Boss will play out, including boss mechanics - and then Grace dies. She does, technically.
  • One story claims that the Machine Devil has a creative means of Anti-Hoarding which he used on Agi - he can make consumables explode. His first form has this ability, which thankfully has a long cooldown, but can one-hit kill any party member..
• Hard Mode Perks: The Devil Clock can be purchased after defeating the first boss. This item enables a new difficulty option that grants enemies random perks, but also causes them to drop devil points, which can be used to buy stickers, which can then be used to upgrade equipment more efficiently. However, the 1.0.1.34 update made it so that enemies drop more gas points in non-Devil Clock fights.
• Head-in-the-Sand Management: The Divine Order (with the exception of the rebelling Angela) refuses to deal with the Machine Devil Cultists because they don't want to be viewed as "just as bad as them" and because they want the next sealing of the devil to occur exactly 1000 years after the previous one. This culminates in two angels fighting the party to prevent them from fighting the Machine Devil off-schedule, and then releasing a murderous cultist prisoner, Dylan Southwind, who then sacrifices himself to power up the Machine Devil.
• Improbable Accessory Effect: Equipment consists solely of trinkets such as fancy pencils and water gourds, each of which bestows different skills depending on whether the wearer is focused on Ravaging (Sam/Angela), Destruction (Grace), Tanking (Valentin), Support (Sam), or Exploiting (everyone but Sam).
• Infinity +1 Sword: The strongest non-DLC trinkets, the eight Platonic Ideals, are all rank IX items that can only be obtained by completing requests in Act IV.
• Innocently Insensitive:
  • During Act III, Sam admits to herself that she felt insulted when Valentin asked for her pronouns, since she's trying her best to present herself as obviously feminine, but she doesn't want to say anything about it because she knows Valentin was just trying to be open to all possibilities.
  • When Grace uses the Sword of Fate against the Machine Devil, she temporarily dies and talks to the spirit of the previous wielder, Agi. Thanks to gender norms from his era, Agi initially assumes the hero is a male and that Grace is a party member or love interest, but Grace retorts that she's the current heroine. Despite that exchange, he's pleased that anyone in the modern age can become a hero, regardless of gender.
  • In the "Battle on the Big Boardwalk" DLC, although Sam is more respectful to Jill than the other characters, she still gets into trouble for assuming that Jill and Ann are just pals instead of girlfriends.
• Lawful Stupid: Heaven is not amused with Grace's plan to defeat the Machine Devil ten years early. They obstruct to an insane extreme by pardoning Dylan Southwind, a Machine Cultist and convicted murderer, giving him his cursed equipment back, and putting him right next to his god while telling him to fight the heroes. All because what Grace is doing is illegal while this flagrant risk of causing Armageddon is technically legal. This goes exactly as pear-shaped as you think.
• Level Drain: The Rust ailment causes the target to lose one rank. Since lower-ranked characters are penalized when attacking or defending against higher-ranked characters, this ailment can make a world of difference.
• Love Triangle: Sam only joined the trip because she'll do anything a pretty girl requests, but Grace, the girl in question, is already in a relationship with Valentin. Subverted in that Sam never competes with Valentin and instead supports the two's relationship, though some dialogue choices allow her to flirt with Grace.
• Meaningful Name: Angela, the Angel.
• Menu Time Lockout: The player can access healing items in battle by pressing the pause button, in case Sam's healing actions aren't enough.
• Money Grinding: Due to the equipment-based power progression, it's important to farm a lot of gas points and devil points to constantly upgrade equipment and increase the party's average rank. Additionally, higher-ranked gacha can only be unlocked after all party members reach a certain rank, and putting this off for too long will make later battles difficult.
• One-Hit KO:
  • The Zantetsuken, obtained from the "Battle on the Big Boardwalk" DLC, has this ability. However, it can't heal like the Sword of Fate can, only works on one enemy (or one boss phase), and the effect is then disabled for the rest of the battle.
  • Also, Dylan Southwind goes down in one hit, except on Devil Clock mode where he can only be killed by Smite damage, but even that only takes one hit.
• Our Angels Are Different: Angela looks humanoid, but has neon pink skin and the proportions of a giant. All other angels share the same physical traits of having pink skin and large proportions. They cannot use their full powers without disrupting the divine cosmology, so for the most part, they limit themselves to fighting at the same level as most human warriors.
• Permanently Missable Content:
  • All major bosses have their own achievements for winning on Devil Clock mode.
  • "Keep Honking — I'm building meter" requires the player to have Emily use 10 fully charged Sword of Fate attacks. Since she's only available in DLC 2, this achievement becomes unattainable after the DLC is completed.
• Power Limiter: The Adversarial Zodiac causes various combat penalties to be applied to Sam, Grace, and Valentin, since the stars reject their presence in the alternate timeline. The party has to accumulate Adversarial Zodiac Points and spend them in the planetarium in order to remove each penalty.
• Precursor Heroes: A thousand years ago, a hero known as Agi of Roses fought the Machine Devil and sealed him away with the Sword of Fate. The lore of some trinkets reveals he had his own combat party, such as a defensive fighter named Sir Robin. In modern times, Grace decides to use that same sword to prevent the Machine Devil's revival.
• Puzzle Boss: The first boss, "Fuck You," can turn invisible and become untargetable, but Angela, who is strapped to its chest, is still visible. The player has to target Angela and spill her blood to make the boss visible, but this will also allow it to counterattack with a powerful laser.
• Real-Time with Pause: Time is always flowing in combat and actions are performed by pressing each character's indicated button while shuffling through available actions with the Next button, but the player can pause the combat, giving them the option to either run from the current battle or use items. In Wait mode, time will also stop when selecting a target for Sam's healing action or when changing the party's current target.
• Retraux Flashback: During the final battle against the Machine Devil, when Grace falls in battle, she's given a vision of a thousand years ago so Agi of Roses can encourage her… and Agi's world looks like an old-fashioned, turn-based RPG.
• Road Trip Plot: On their way to deal with the cultists causing mayhem cross-country, the party decides to make a road trip out of it, stopping at various tourism spots and strengthening their bonds.
• Screw Destiny: Grace isn't chosen to wield the Sword of Fate, but steals it anyways because of the immediate threat of the Machine Devil Cult. Agi's spirit acknowledges her as a heroine, though he states that she shouldn't worry about his approval, implying he shares the same opinion that doing the right thing is more important than being The Chosen One.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: The party is at odds with the Divine Order, since the latter doesn't want them to use the Sword of Fate without being chosen. However, the party is more concerned about fighting the immediate threat of the evil machines and cultists than following arbitrary divine decrees. Fortunately, Angela is able to get her fellow angels off their backs by claiming to be holding the rest of the party prisoner, when she's really helping them reach the Machine Devil.
• Shout-Out:
  • Christine Love has shared in these Tweets that the game's systems were inspired by Final Fantasy and Valkyrie Profile, and as (coyly) verified by this specific Tweet, the boss "Fuck You" was a direct reference to the Adel fight from Final Fantasy VIII.
  • The lore for DLC trinkets are all created/inspired by guest writers, some of which reference other works, such as *Mute's Uniform Patch, Scout's Radio, Dinosaur Hat and Arbiter of Dialogues.
  • In the DLC episode, Valentin's shirt (a very stylized drawing of two cowboys naked from the waist down) is a reference to the Mclaren/Westwood Cowboys Shirt, the design specifically being taken from one Jim French's erotic cowboy drawings. The shirt was also worn by Mac in an episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, making this possibly a double Shout-Out.
  • A good few of the achievements' names are nods to various parts of modern internet culture, such as "AH AH AH! DROPPED THAT S***!", "3 2 1 Let's Jam!", and "From Downtown."
• Spirit Advisor: Anyone who wields the Sword of Fate temporarily dies in battle against the Machine Devil, only to meet the previous wielder of the sword, get a pep talk from them, and get revived. Agi states that in a thousand years, Grace will meet the next wielder of the sword and revive them too.
• Take Your Time: When the player travels a certain distance in an act, they gain access to the boss of the act. Surprisingly, despite the game keeping track of total distance traveled, there is no penalty for skipping the boss and waiting for it to respawn, giving the player the opportunity to perform any necessary grinding before starting the fight.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: In the "Battle on the Big Boardwalk" DLC, upon meeting Ann, trying to befriend her takes the form of a text adventure. The player can still only input the buttons for combat, though Ann barely grasps the concept of language and doesn't mind your own gibberish.
• Unwitting Pawn: According to the Road Story of the replica Sword of Fate, Fate itself already decided at some point that Grace would succeed in defeating the Machine Devil early. However, the angels don't know of this, and Fate intends for the angel duo in the final boss gauntlet to merely be a test of strength for the party.
• Video Game Stealing: One of the "Battle on the Big Boardwalk" trinkets grants Valentin the Mug action, allowing them to steal a random consumable item from the enemies once per battle. After that, the action defaults to Taunt Attack to ensure the player can still have a meaningful action.
• What's a Henway?: During a conversation in Act IV, Valentin tries to get Angela with an updog joke. She pretends to be offended and demands they recite a Latin prayer to repent, only to set them up for a deez nuts joke.
  Angela: "If thou art truly my friend, thou shalt show thy penance with a prayer of ILLA DIES ET IRAE DIES immediately!"
  Valentin: "Sorry, sorry! Uh, irae dee-us..."
  Angela: "It is more as though thou shouldst irae Deez Nuts."
• Whole-Plot Reference: The DLC Episode "Battle on the Big Boardwalk", which involves an interdimensional sword thief named Jill and her wild girlfriend Ann Kidu trying to steal the Sword of Fate, is one huge reference to the Battle on the Big Bridge, Gilgamesh, and Enkidu from Final Fantasy V. The sword Jill accidentally leaves in its place, the Zantetsuken, also has its One-Hit KO effect from the Final Fantasy series as a limit break. This Christine Love tweet indicates the DLC was inspired by Final Fantasy VIII, in which Gilgamesh obtains that sword.
• You Are Number 6: Angels are only referred to as the Nth Arm, where N is their number in the Divine Order. The NPC angels refer to Angela as the Thirty-Second Arm and no other name, implying her non-number name is something she gained upon joining the party.
• You Can't Thwart Stage One:
  • Subverted in the main story, where the party successfully seals away the Machine Devil before he can begin scorching the Earth again, despite the cultists and the Divine Order unsealing the Machine Devil early in response.
  • Played straight in the "Fate of Another World" DLC, which takes place in an alternate timeline where the Machine Devil was defeated after he already caused enough death and destruction to cause total societal collapse.

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