Video Game / Guardian Tales

A Link to Classic Adventure.^note From left to right: Marianne, ???, Sohee, Fei/Mei, Marvin, Aisha, The Knight, The Little Princess, Lilith, Craig, Coco, Kaden, ???. Above: Floating Castle Heavenhold.

"This is your story."

— The Knight's Book entry.

Guardian Tales is an action role-playing gacha mobile game developed by American-Korean studio Kong Studios and published by Kakao Games (Global and Korea), bilibili (China), and Kong Studios themselves with assistance from Yostar^*Partnership ended on September 18, 2023, giving sole publishing rights to Kong Studios. (Japan). It serves as both the canonical sequel and spiritual successor to their previous game Dungeon Link, a puzzle-style mobile game launched in 2015 and shut down in 2019 that was published by GAMEVIL^note Now COM2US Holdings. It was initially soft-launched in Southeast Asia on February 24, 2020, before its official global and Korean release on July 28 of the same year. The Chinese version followed on April 27, 2021, and the Japanese version was released on October 6 of the same year, with redone art from multiple illustrators and new/re-recorded Japanese voice acting. A standalone port on the Nintendo Switch, with Kong Studios self-publishing again, would later release on October 3, 2022, 2 years after global launch and a year after CN and JP.

The game follows you, a quiet, young, and passionate knight, as a new recruit to the Kanterbury Kingdom's Guardians. As you were about to be formally inducted into the Guardians, a sudden invasion occurs, and you team up with the captain of the Guardians, Eva, in protecting the kingdom's Queen and Princess. During the escape, a dark-robed figure incapacitates Eva and the Queen, and in the process, you and the Princess are blown away together, finding yourselves in front of the Kanterbury Inn, home to a mysterious innkeeper. Venturing into the nearby forest, you and the Princess find the emerald-colored Champion's Sword, and as you pull it out of its pedestal, you're taken to the heavens where you meet Queen Lili, Queen of Kanterbury from 500 years ago. It is then that she calls upon you, who she declares a Champion, to travel across the world to seek the other 12 Champions and restore the Champion's Sword with their blessing to finally fend off the invasion. As your quest goes on though, it seems as though you have bigger enemies to worry about than just the Invaders...

Gameplay is similar to a certain famous action-adventure game, but with the same "twin-stick" controls on other widescreen mobile games. You have a button to attack, a button to run, and a button to utilize the Weapon Skill of the character you're playing as. If the required conditions are fulfilled, you can perform a Chain Skill with other Heroes, which can have different effects depending on who you chain it with.

In short, imagine MapleStory meets The Legend of Zelda games of old.. .with a hint of EarthBound, a smidgen of Animaniacs, and a crap-ton of references tossed in.

Check the official sites for the game in English, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, as well as the official website for the Nintendo Switch version here. Also, you can check the developers' own website here.

The game has also spawned a 4-koma webcomic spinoff titled "Kanterbury Days", drawn by Junsuina Fujunbutsu. Initially a Japanese-only work, more recent entries have now been given official translations in both English and Korean.

Tropes featured in Guardian Tales include:

A-B

• A Taste of Power: The last stage of a side-story switches your character to that particular plot's Unique character wielding their exclusive weapon, letting you "test drive" them for a bit. Later on, an update gives players the ability to "try out" the featured unit in their banner before deciding to pull.
• Absurdly High Level Cap: Due to the live-service nature of the game, the level cap grows with each story update, in addition to 5 bonus levels when limit-breaking units. Currently, it's capped to Level 95 once the player reaches World 18, which can be increased to 100 at max limit break.
• Achievement System: The game rewards you whenever you clear the achievements, which are easily tracked below the main screens.
• Action Bomb: Bomb Bugs appear in World 6 and 18 and are giant beetles that self-destruct upon getting close enough to the lead character, dealing massive damage in their damage radius.
• Action Girl: The vast majority of recruitable characters are women.
• A Day in the Limelight: The purpose of both side and short stories is to give the spotlight to certain characters as they become either the Knight's confidant at the time or the leading character for a while.
• Advanced Ancient Humans: Around Tetis are ruins and artifacts of an ancient civilization with highly advanced technology. Much of the ruins resemble modern, real-world human buildings and machinery, but some hold much more futuristic technology. The nations of Tetis have varying degrees of access to these relics based on location, partially explaining why modern Tetis technology seems so wildly inconsistent.
• Advancing Wall of Doom: Every co-op stage has zone slowly flood with a black mass of SOMETHING that rapidly drains health should it catch the party.
• After the End: Recordings and other Easter eggs reveal that the story is on a planet settled by the descendants of humanity that had fled Earth after it was infested with the deadly Labose bacteria thousands of years before.
• Affectionate Parody: Of classic RPGs in general. The tagline says it all. This also applies to whatever pop culture reference it has in its storylines.
• A.I. Breaker: It's possible to break the AI of world 7's Chest Monster by picking up a fire pit from earlier in the level and throwing it at the idle mini-boss. The Optional Boss of world 11 has it even worse: You can build a small fort from the pushable blocks in the same room, and since the enemy only uses projectiles that bounce off objects and you have an invincible Guest-Star Party Member ...
• All in a Row: Reminiscent of classic RPGs, the units you don't control will always follow your lead unit around in a row until you encounter an enemy.
• All the Worlds Are a Stage: In World 10 Nightmare, all of the nations you travelled to throughout Season 1 you will return to, as the Little Princess, in your search for the mysteriously absent Knight.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us: As of the end of Chapter 15, Heavenhold, and at least four of the Champions, have been commandeered by the Invader's First Corps Commander, former-Queen of Kanterbury, Camilla.
• Alternate Universe: What the world you currently are in might be one, as the existence of Earth is shown in the video logs at the inn.
• Alternative Calendar: The game renders its dates with the year A.H. (After Hero), counting the years passed after Kaden's adventures over the course of Dungeon Link.
• Amazing Technicolor Battlefield: Credit goes to Beth's final boss fight in Season 1 being set in another plane, even if it lacks the whole "technicolor" shebang.
• Amazon Brigade: With how infrequent playable male characters are released, the game's roster can practically be considered this as an enforcement of Improbably Female Cast.
• Ambiguously Evil: Aside from the shady innkeeper Loraine who's canonically part of the main cast, some of the recruitable units, particularly of the Dark element, are rather dubious in how evil they can be. Special mentions to Arabelle and Lupina, to name a few.
• Ambiguously Gay: Female characters are treated the same by the Succubi as the male characters. In the Succubus Town level, some Succubi will put you through Dream Therapy, and in your dream, they go on a date with you. Therefore, every female character theoretically goes on a dream date with the all female Succubi. Justified in a meta sense as the story mode's script believes that you are the male Knight, and the game does not acknowledge which character you are actually playing as.
  • In Worlds 12-13, the Knight can suggestively imply that they are the ex-lover of Beth, and in World 14, can repeatedly declare their intent to make Priscilla their wife and thus become Claude's in-law. This dialogue is completely unchanged even if you're playing as the Female Knight.
  • Ambiguously Bi: Because of the above case, every female character canonically shown with a romantic interest in men is this trope.
• American Kirby Is Hardcore: Downplayed and inverted, while the original art is not really that "hardcore", the Japanese release, and the optional per-character artwork switching introduced around the same time for the global versions, has almost all the characters drawn as bonafide moe-blobs, even making the male knight even prettier than he was. This stopped in 2023 where new characters didn't have alternate artworks.
• An Adventurer Is You: Despite the main character's title being The Knight, it's the only class that allows the use of different weapons depending on your choice.
• Ancient Conspiracy: Information regarding the truth of the Knight's heroic prophecy and the reason for the world itself being stuck in a wide-scale time loop are being withheld by an unknown group much more powerful than the Invaders and a Knight in full power, according to statements from both the Savior and the Other Knight.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: The rewards for clearing each world and some stages reward the user with a costume that can be equipped to a specific 2-star or 3-star character.
  • Furthermore, each World has a stage where you must collect three 'Mysterious Slates', and after placing them in an altar, you get a costume for one of your heroes.
• Another Dimension: The Demon World exists in a separate plane far from the human world, with their own set of progress and turmoils.
• Anti-Frustration Features: You only need to spend stamina on any given story or challenge stage once to unlock it. This way, you can keep coming back to challenge a roadblock whenever you get a power bump without having to constantly spend coffee, or if you go in with a unit composition that cannot clear a challenge stage.
  • A lot of stages have barriers you can lower as you progress, making navigation back through the stage much quicker if you wipe to a battle late in the stage or are just trying to collect any remaining pickups.
  • Once you gain a new rank in the Arena, you cannot demote below it even if you run into a bunch of overwhelming opponents after since Arena's matchmaking is entirely random.
  • After reaching a high enough guardian level and clear a rift stage with three stars on full auto, you gain the option of autoclearing the stage. This lets you quickly do your daily awakening dungeons and get your coffee spent farming whatever resources needed so you can move on to other content.
  • Once you've reached the final boss of a chapter, whenever you get a game over fighting it, you start at the beginning of the boss fight instead of the stage should you chose not to use a revive. When fighting Beth at the end of Season 1, you instead start at the furthest phase of the boss fight that you reached. This also applies to Demon God Belial in Season 2.
  • Repeatedly failed at getting the character and weapon you wanted? With each pull, you are given a mileage ticket, which is spark currency. Gather 300 of them, and you can redeem any character or weapon you want at any time, except collaboration characters, as they need 200 of the more limited Collaboration mileage tickets that expire when the collab event ends.
• Anti Poop-Socking: As with other gacha games, the game has a stamina system (called Coffee) in which 1 Coffee is restored every 10 minutes, with a hard cap of 76 Coffee as of the latest updates. Initially, this was fully enforced and was a major gripe for many players, particularly because the lowest amount of coffee needed for a mission was 10. It would later be alleviated by the fact that the game would now give free 50 coffee at 12nn and 7pm per day.
• Arbitrary Equipment Restriction: Heroes are usually restricted to only one weapon type upon release: One-handed Swords (usually paired with a Shield), Two-handed Swords, Staffs, Rifles, Bows, Baskets, Claws, and Gauntlets. There are exceptions like the Knight themselves, and as of late, this has begun to be averted with the introduction of alternative Exclusive Weapons, letting certain heroes gain access to weapon types they were initially locked out of.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: Normally, the maximum amount of characters you can have in any given party is 2/3/4 characters in the Story game-mode, based on your progression through the first few worlds, and three in Arena.
• Art-Style Dissonance: The game's reliance on pantomimed expressions during cutscenes makes it jarring when the story is faced with dark scenarios involving death and cruelty.
• Artificial Stupidity: The auto AI does a decent enough job of avoiding some boss attacks, but they'll sit there and take other attacks, especially since computer-controlled characters can't run. Cursed Towers in particular are NOTORIOUS for allies standing on the attack indicator right until the laser fires and kills them. Some characters' AI also fishes way too hard for optimal damage or healing at times and will happily throw themselves in the line of fire to do so.
• Ascended Meme: The Knight with a gatling gun, an enemy type notorious for ruining player's lives in Kama-ZONE and the Orbital Lift, becomes its own Unique character in the form of the Future Knight with her exclusive weapon. Another would be the addition of an idol-themed costume for Marvin during April Fool's 2022, acknowledging the various fan creations of Marvin wearing Idol Eva's costume throughout all parts of the Guardian Tales fanbase.
• Attack Animal: The game features many humanoid animals, but special mention to the White Beast and Kang, who look like a normal wolf and tiger cub, respectively.
• Badass Adorable: Applies to the younger-looking heroes of the roster, like Noxia, AA72, and White Beast (in his present puppy form at least).
• Badass Boast: Each obtainable hero has their own, which you can hear during battle or through their profile.
• Beach Episode: The short story When You Wish Upon a Star is a long-awaited summer story with the summer units, two of them being released a year before said story, taking leading roles, set on a peaceful beach spot called Starlight Beach.
• Beef Gate: World 10 lets you progress all three screens before forcing you to fight a boss three levels above your standard level cap with only your lead unit. The good news is that you've just unlocked the last piece of content geared toward character improvement, so if you can't clear the fight you can at least get your characters prepared.
• Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: Yetis appear as minor enemies in Mount Shivering.
• Bittersweet Ending: In the ending of Season 1, you either travel back to your past leaving the future which can't be altered, or stay in the future and leave your Little Princess behind. Both can be thankfully chosen again if you decide to re-enter the level to try and get the other ending, but later chapters reveal the first option to be the canonical end.
  • World 13's can potentially be this if you weren't able to save some of the survivors by the time you fight and win against the Other Knight.
• Blank White Eyes: Used in-game to express terror in story characters. Also exists as an emote in the Guild and as an emote to monsters inside the Monster Ranch.
• Block Puzzle: Geometrically perfect grey blocks of either small or large size are a recurring design element which usually must be pushed out of the way to proceed, or pushed onto buttons to activate some mechanism, or more specific puzzles, like the symmetry puzzle in World 13 Nightmare.
• Body Armor As Hitpoints: Some characters or cards have one of their buffs/party buffs (or their sole buff in the case of cards) manifest as "Shield on Battle Start" or "Shield on Enemy Kill", which functions as a second life meter that effectively bolsters the health of the character, up to a certain percentage of their HP, taking precedence over base health in absorbing damage while active.
• Body Horror: Two cases: Beth grotesquely transforming into her One-Winged Angel form in the transition to her final boss battle's second phase in World 11, and Priscilla's body being forcefully transformed by Demon God Belial in order to fight against the Knight and Claude in World 14's climax boss fight.
• Bomb Whistle: When falling from great heights (or simply falling into a Bottomless Pit), your descent will be accompanied by a loud whistling sound. Usually, though in more dramatic moments like your mercurous entry into the second phase of the 1st Corps Commander's boss fight, this is instead subverted.
• Bookcase Passage: Starting with World 3, various secret passageways can be found behind moveable bookcases and fake bookcases. Where these all are is up to you, the player, to find out.
• Bookends: In 4th District, 29th Street, the short-story begins with an epigraph involving Parvati's thoughts regarding her father's wish for her to live a 'normal life', before moving into a small apartment at Standfield Apartment complex on the eponymous 4th District, 29th Street. At the end of the short-story, after assassinating threats to Kamazon's monopoly in 29th Street, she recalls her father's words, again, and moves to 30th Street, where the Vicious Cycle continues.
• Bond One-Liner: After a battle is over, one of the characters in your party will be randomly selected to make a statement about the fight or your triumph over the enemies.
• Boss-Arena Idiocy: Winning the fight against old Erina fairly requires the player to train to level 70, in order to survive her one-hit kill attacks...Unless the player takes advantage of the four torches in the arena, which blocks her melee attacks, but not yours. This allows lower-leveled players to hide behind a torch and spam her to death.
  • A similar thing happens in World 11, during the first phase of Beth's bossfight, in which you can hide behind the regularly interspaced torches to avoid her dash attack. Downplayed, as she has plenty of other tricks up her sleeve to get around this minor handicap.
• Boss Subtitles: Sometimes the description of the character you're fighting, sometimes the funny phrase you need in the middle of a not-funny situation.
• Boss Rush: What World 11's 5th stage is.
• Break Meter: Each Weapon has it's own dedicated 'Weapon Skill' which, upon activation, adds a certain amount of progress, determined by the Hero wielding the weapon, towards so-called 'Ailments'. Once that progress (recorded by a meter beneath the health bar of the effected enemy unit) reaches 100%, they will be stunned, upon which you can combo the Chain Skills of each character in your party, provided that you have unlocked each of their first Awakening Nodes.
  • In later worlds, some bosses, like the Plague Doctor, are capable of pulling off the same tactics against the player.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: If your rich (and bad at managing resources) enough, you can get through Story Mode with an otherwise unviable team lineup by buying revives using Gems. Of course, this isn't recommended, as Gems are better used for actually improving your team and it's survivability.

C-F

• Canon Immigrant: A few characters are ported over from Dungeon Link.
• Can't Drop the Hero: Zigzagged. This is a gacha game first and foremost, so you can practically bench the main character forever even if Gameplay and Story Segregation ensues. Nevertheless, there are times when players are forced to use the Knight for the entirety of a story chapter^*which isn't necessarily the Knight the player uses, but a set one that the game provides, in particular: World 11-1, World 13, and World 14.
• Cartoon Bomb: Flower Bombs and their magnetized variants resemble iron spheres with the obligatory match cord to boot.
• Casting Gag: Not the first time Rie Kugimiya (The Little Princess) voiced a child character beloved by both fans and in-universe characters alike that are actually very powerful and very important to the overall storyline.
• Cerebus Syndrome: The game storyline swings this around whenever it wants to. One minute you're laughing at a few pop culture references here and there, the next minute you find yourself in a Bad Future where the Token Mini-Moe becomes a disgruntled badass leader and most of your friends are either dead or worse off than the last time you saw them.
• Character Name Limits: Your player name is restricted to ten characters.
• Character Portrait: Two-star Heroes that are unlockable through the main story will have their character art displayed next to their text-bubbles, in portrait form.
• Character Select Forcing: Some Tower levels require you to have a "Cannon Dealer" hero or someone that can hit differing heights and/or through walls. You'll have to test out your ranged attackers to figure out who can do so. The Towers of Horizon take this a step further and outright lock out anyone that isn't the correct element.
  • For some reason, the melee character Lilith can clear these stages, and yet the game doesn't mark her as such. If you're wondering how, Lilith can use a skill that damages enemies (and increases her damage to them by marking them), and this damage from this skill is what enables her to hit enemies the game says she shouldn't be able to.
• Chekhov's Gun: As of early 2024, there have been two prominent examples where some seemingly useless element is needed to achieve 100% Completion in their useful stages:
  • In the stage 'Invader Lab', you can get an Orbital Lift Key Card which has no function until you reach World 13, in which you can use the key card to retrieve the tenth and final Mysterious Tape.
  • Loraine will give you a 'Mysterious Card Key' at the end of World 17, which you can only use to access 18-15.
• The Chosen Many: The initial goal of the Knights journey was to unite the all Thirteen Champions, of which they are just one.
• Cliffhanger:
  • The World 9 ending. Just when the problems in Rah had been resolved, the Knight is found by the Dark Magician as they end up getting thrown into a dark portal by their hands. The last scene shows the Knight in front of a destroyed Heavenhold Inn, not yet knowing they were thrown ten years into the future.
  • The World 16 ending. As Queen Lili, inside Queen Camilla's body, was about to drive flying blades into the Knight and the Princess, Camilla regains control of her body one last time to aim the blades at herself, killing her and taking Lili with her. The Princess, in pure shock of seeing her big sister die right before her eyes, starts to "glitch out", and the abrupt ending implies that the world had glitched out as well, seemingly reversing the status of the twelve Champions and the Knight. Time will tell what this actually means.
  • The ending of World 17 is little better because, while it does tell us what became of the Little Princess and Heavenhold following her sister's untimely death, not only does it leave the meaning of the esoteric "champion sword inversion" of the last world unresolved, but it leaves the fate of Morrian's fate uncertain, and closes with Lilith's turmoil, the civil war yet still raging on, the activation of Heavenhold and Erina's rampage to exact vengeance upon the fallen hero Kaden and the birth of his vile Labose monster.
• Closed Circle: A very minor example, but for the most part, once you step into an arena, you cannot retreat, and are forced to defeat the enemies to leave because of a barrier suddenly appearing behind you.
  • In 1-7, after defeating the Mad Panda Trio, you can no longer backtrack because of a barrier blocking the path back. You can only go forward.
• Com Mons: The various One-Star heroes. They're the weakest class of adventures, usually not worthy of any investment over even the weakest hero of a higher class. They have no voiced lines, unique equipment or attacks, or even individual artwork (instead having cloaked, androgynous figures in the character screen). They're, at best, secondary characters for a world's plot and are by far the most common draw in the game's gacha. Despite this, each one still has a unique bio and sprite design and have been required for certain quests.
• Costume Evolution: Heroes that aren't Com Mons/collaboration characters have different sprites per evolution level, gradually becoming more grandiose with each rank up.
• Crack in the Sky: During World 18, thousands of jagged dimensional rifts began to rend asunder spacetime, acting as portals between The Otherworld and Demon World.
• Crapsaccharine World: The game's setting appears brighter and much more optimistic than some of its gacha contemporaries, but it's not all sunshine and rainbows. Even ignoring the invasion having depictions of cruelty and murder, the world itself has other problems shown like Fantastic Racism and Fantastic Terrorists.
• Crash in Through the Ceiling: How the player ultimately enters the arena where they will fight Hero Camilla.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: The priest of Chapter 4's Religion of Evil is a Fat Bastard that gets ferried everywhere by a team of his Desert Elf followers. You'd expect him to be a pathetic boss...that is, until his throne activates its rocket thrusters and attaches itself to a tank...
• Cute Ghost Girl: Slightly averted in Magic School, where the female ghosts that block the way are drawn in chibi style but still look creepy.
• Cutscene Power to the Max:
  • Craig's stand against the Archdemon in World 8, where he eats multiple 9999-damage hits at once and got burnt to a crisp, and yet he still stands like it didn't even leave dents on him.
  • The duel between the Knight and his Other version in World 13. Despite it being a disappointingly easy climax boss, this boss fight is chock full of quick-time events, cinematic shots, moves from the Knight that the player normally does not have access to, and just overall hype throughout the whole fight sequence that you can just tell this was more of a climactic showdown than the usual stat check.
• Cyberpunk for Flavor: The Demon World's capital city is a highly technologically advanced city in a dimension separated from the human realm. Within an unspecified amount of time in between the 500-year gap from the end of Dungeon Link to the beginning of Guardian Tales, the current queen Lilith, with the help of her "human" companion Erina, managed to turn what was once a chaotic realm into a Post-Cyberpunk-styled futuristic world full of high-rise buildings, neon lights, android assistants, and a generally peaceful populace. That doesn't immediately mean she managed to stomp out all crimes though. The other parts of the Demon World outside the capital aren't lacking in this department either, though they generally don't have the same level of cyberpunk flavor compared to the capital.
• Cynicism Catalyst: The Future Princess became the way she is because of: the Knight's disappearance at the end of World 9, the constant bullying she received as a result of said disappearance, her seeing the deaths of Big Jack and Sandy, among future deaths she would later see as a warrior and Resistance leader, and the difficult decisions she's had to choose over the course of ten years.
• Damage-Increasing Debuff: Two of the three Ailments will increase the damage dealt to the afflicted character when they are attacked, depending on the source of that damage and the type of damage they deal:
  • The Airborne status ailment increases dealt range damage;
  • And the Downed status ailment increases melee damage.
• Damage Over Time: By contrast, the third Ailment, Injured, steadily drains the life of the affected enemy.
  • Towers of Toxicity also inflict Injury damage over time, which can be negated using "Injury Negation" cards.
• Death from Above: Immediately after entering the stage 2-5, you will be targeted by Invader Orbital Bombardment, constantly, until you get out of the antechamber of the stage.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: You can spend Gems to revive if you perish during a fight. That being said, the cost to revive gradually climbs to cost-prohibitive prices that can quickly drain your stockpiled Gems should you put to much faith in reviving, and some stages restrict the maximum number of revives to 3 or even 1.
  • More pertinently, when the player makes a stupid mistake that should cost them their life, like falling into a Bottomless Pit, they'll simply start over at an unofficial sort of checkpoint, rather than have to redo the stage all over again.
• Defeat Equals Explosion: Most bosses don't actually have a death/defeat animation, and will erupt into rays of light and golden fire when defeated.
• Depopulation Bomb: Months prior to World 12, over 93% of the population of Demon World's District 51 had been wiped out by L-bacteria in the span of hours, leaving the infrastructure untouched but what few survivors remained mortified and desperately clinging onto life, waiting for a rescue that may never come.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Learning how to use Chain Skills can be an arduous journey, not just because of the resource investment required to unlock them, but also because you must study the Ailments inflicted by your units' Weapon Skill and then their own Chain Skills in turn so that you can properly "chain together" the Chain Skills of all your party members, and then couple that with proper planning so that you can disable the enemy for the maximum amount of time, without waiting too long and losing your ability to finish the chain before the enemy gets back up- and that's before you realize that Chain Skills have cooldowns significant enough that you might not be able to use them again when you stun the same enemy again. Of course, once you get the hang of the mechanics of Chain Skills, you can design specific teams that, when combined with judicious timing and the right leader, you can fire off the Chain Skills of all four party members in quick succession while maximizing the down time of the afflicted enemy and the damage inflicted onto that enemy, and not lose damage to wasted stuns, allowing you to swiftly dispatch even the toughest of bosses in record time.
• Disney Death: Mk. 2 and the Other Knight. Mk. 2 somehow survived a helicopter crash and reformed her Turing gang, and the Other Knight somehow survived a drop from the tallest building in the Demon World just to end up getting locked up in prison for their crimes.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Park illegally in the Guardian Tales universe and you will be subject to having your vehicle smashed to pieces and blown up.
• Distant Sequel: Guardian Tales is set around 500 years after the events of Kong Studios' defunct puzzle game Dungeon Link.
  • Dungeon Link's lead character Kaden vanished off the face of the earth while leading the construction of Heavenhold and has not been seen or heard from for 500 years.
  • Clara the Cleric, one of Kaden's companions, managed to live for 500 years despite being human, but for some reason, she became an Empty Shell who now acts as a Saintess for Veronica's cult.
  • Kaden's demon mentor-of-sorts Lilith and his heroic predecessor Erina stopped adventuring and eventually went back to Demon World to rule over it.
  • The human gods mostly lost their powers following the burning of the World Tree some time after said game. The gods and angels all took to their own paths after that. Kameal founded KAMAZON as part of a plot to slowly recover enough money and power to restore the World Tree, Eleanor entered human society for her own amusement, and Plitvice somehow ended up sealed in crystal on Heavenhold for centuries.
  • Akayuki, one of Dungeon Link's starter units and viewpoint characters, was turned into stone for 500 years.
  • Belial, one of the Demon Gods that Kaden and his party subjugated in Dungeon Link, started using demons that inherited his blood as vessels to try and resurrect himself, and was almost successful when he possessed Priscilla had not the Knight, Sohee, and Count Claude intervened.
  • The other three Demon Gods were tricked into severely weakening themselves when they attempted to possess demon women as vessels. Now they're magically forced to serve their former enemy Queen Lilith and kept on a very short leash.
• Doomed Hometown: More like "Doomed Kingdom" since the kingdom of Kanterbury is this for the Knight, Eva, and the royal siblings Queen Camilla and the Little Princess.
• Door to Before: Many Stages contain passageways that lead to easily accessible areas, from sections that would be a pain to return to because of extreme battle difficulty or strenuous and lengthy puzzles. These corridors allow the player to bypass these challenges, should they return to the level on a later date, or simply wish to reduce travel time between two areas of the stage. Of course, not all of these doors make sense geometrically, like the ones in 3-4.
• Double-Meaning Title: World 18 - Two Heroes. It could very well refer to one or all of the following pairs: The Knight and Kaden, and the duel that would decide the fate of the world; Erina and Kaden, two friends turned enemy; Heavenhold and Kaden, two Champions logged into the Champion's Sword; The Knight and the Little Princess, the two owners of the Champion's Sword; or the fact that two heroes remain to be collected.
• Dual Boss: At the end of the Laura Side Quest, after her vengeful soul possesses the Occult Girl's body, she sics both of her Shadow Beasts at you, and you must defeat them both to continue.
• Dual-World Gameplay: The Otherworld in World 18 has interactable switches that act as anchors between two distinct but deeply intertwined modes of the universe. Interacting with these switches is necessary to solve puzzles within the Otherworld and progress forth.
• Elemental Powers: Each Hero is attuned to one of six: Basic, Fire, Water, Earth, Light or Dark.
• Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: There are two wheels: Water beats Fire beats Earth beats Water, while Basic beats Light beats Dark beats Basic. An elemental advantage or disadvantage gives attacks a 30% bonus or penalty, respectively.
• Empathic Weapon: The Champion's Sword. It will determine the Guardian to be it's rightful owner and reveal it's true power to them once they unite the thirteen Champions. In spite of this, according to Camilla's admission in World 16, the Guardian was seen as far too weak and the Champion's Sword refused to accept them as it's owner.
• The Empire: The Rah Empire, rivals to the Kanterbury Kingdom. Not counting Duncan's... hostile acts towards the Kanterburian refugees in World 9 to put it lightly, the Empire leans more on the Anti-Villain spectrum with one of its princesses Aisha being part of the 13 Champions.
• Enemy Mine: The terrorists hired by the Other Knight in World 13 forces former Invader commander Beth, the Disc-One Final Boss now just a janitor in Lilith Tower, and the Knight to cooperate with each other to protect the survivors, Beth prioritizing the safety of the two other janitors that picked her up from the dumps of the Demon World capital and gave her a job. Beth still has contempt towards the Knight, but on a smaller magnitude than when she was still with the Invaders.
• Equipment Upgrade: Available once you meet the Blacksmith in 1-5, whose in-story attempts to enhance equipment almost always fail. Thankfully a case of Gameplay and Story Segregation: While she can trash a whole lot of gear in the process of using them as upgrade materials, there's no way to break whatever item you're currently working on.
  • Essentially, using so-called 'Strengthening Hammer's', and paying a small fee, you can upgrade any equipment to a maximum level equal to the maximum level of your Heroes, which is determined by your completion of the Main Story- so as of World 18, the maximum level for equipment is Level 95. This cap can be limit-broken to Level 100 in a manner similar to with Heroes, except using Legend/Epic Limit-Breaking Hammers instead of Hero Crystals, depending on the rarity of the equipment.
  • You can also raise the Grade (measured in stars) of an equipment via the Blacksmith for a larger fee of Gold, which will further increase it's combat effectiveness, though only up to a Grade determined by the equipment's Rarity, or up to a hard cap of five stars. And finally, you can 'mystery evolve' (typically lower grade, though not strictly so) equipments into other equipments, which is useful later in the game for transmuting useless equipment into potentially useful equipment, or even EX weapons, if one's lucky enough.
• Everyone Join the Party: Just before going to World 16's final two stages, provided you've completed every available sidequest before moving on with the story, almost every playable unit that you've rescued within the depths of Heavenhold, even the Com Mons, will gather right around the Justice Lift and interact with each other. You can talk to them to have one final conversation with them and to give you some support before you and your party go up to challenge Camilla.
• Evolutionary Levels: Heroes can be evolved using enough of their specific Evolution Stones, which increases their stats, allows more Awakening Nodes to be unlocked, and changes the appearance of 2-star and 3-star heroes.
• Experience Points: Not as a statistic, but as a raw material. EXP can be gained through adventuring and defeating monsters, and can be given to your Heroes at will to level them up.
• Exploding Barrels: Powder Kegs are explosive barrels that detonate when attacked. Or if they're thrown to the ground to hard.
• Eyedscreen: Used to portray units activating their Chain Skills, being displayed as cut-ins with associated voice lines from said units. Downplayed as these cut-ins actually show the face than just the eyes.
• Falling Chandelier of Doom: Can be invoked in 13-5 to kill nine terrorist occupiers.
• Fantastic Fighting Style: The Shen Mountain Fist, practiced by resident martial artists Fei and Mei, as well as the Knight for a while.
• Fantastic Racism: Everywhere! There's a lot of discrimination going around between the various races, from a significant chunk of Rah looking down on Kanterburian refugees (something you take a lot of steps to address in World 9), Snowmen marginalizing and oppressing Innuits, Teatans being often made fun of for their appearance, Demons and Vampires being at odds due to centuries of strife, Werebeasts are stereotyped as vicious animals, and naturally, Invaders absolutely despising every single inhabitant of Tetis. Even androids face discrimination in Demon World!
• Fantasy Gun Control: Averted; Guns turn out to be far more common than what one would initially expect for a game that begins in a seemingly standard Medieval European Fantasy counterpart culture...
• Filler Arc: World 6 is much shorter than the other worlds and has no champion to find for the Guardian Sword, basically only existing for you to finally recruit Dolf and Amy and for the increased level cap upon finishing the world. The Nightmare plot isn't much better, although there is a side area that shows how Oghma came to be.
• Fire-Breathing Weapon: Dozens of flamethrower traps appear throughout the Invader Lab substage of World 11, the ninth stage of World 15, and beyond.
• Fishing Minigame: The November 1, 2022 update introduced a fishing minigame to Heavenhold Farm, complete with a fish archive, fishing coins by selling caught fish, and an aquarium to place your favorite fishes in. Said minigame involves tapping on a button in time with a visual indicator aligning with an outline in the middle while making sure your HP is enough to beat a fish's within a certain number of taps.
• Fission Mailed: In World 11, during Heavenhold's last stand, the player will end up fighting against a Super Invader and die. The game presents you with the game over screen... but the buttons that would let you restart the level or go back to the main menu are nowhere to be found. A few seconds later, it's revealed that it was just the Future Princess Dreaming of Things to Come, which leads to her attempting to fix relations with the Rah Empire to combat this inevitable battle.
• Flashy Protagonists, Bland Extras: While most NPCs borrow from a restricted set of sprites that are, usually, by no means decorated or garish, the sprites of Heroes easily stand out because of their relative flashiness. In fact, some people inferred that Vinette from World 17 would be a hero because her sprite is far to detailed to be a mere side-character.
  • Though sometimes this rule is subverted, particularly in World 7, in which some of the NPCs use the sprites of as-of-yet Dummied Out Heroes or costumes or are references to other media, and thus stand out amongst the crowd of bland NPCs without being playable characters. Furthermore, some quest-giving NPCs definitely do not have standard, bland sprites.
• Floating Continent: Your main base of operations, Heavenhold, is this. You can build several facilities there to generate Gold over time and garner Soul Points from all your owned Heroes. These Soul Points can then be used to upgrade facilities or get special rewards. It is later revealed that Heavenhold was actually supposed to be a powerful weapon that the Hero Kaden spearheaded the building of 500 years ago as a preemptive plan for any future invasions, but he suddenly vanished afterwards, leaving Heavenhold in an incomplete state. "Completing" Heavenhold then becomes the end goal of Season 2 as a whole. Later chapters in said season would hint at Heavenhold's true nature being a Humongous Mecha, an idea further fueled by World 16's Final Boss stage being set in front of a mysterious mecha's face◊ located within the deepest floors of Heavenhold, and finally realized at the end of World 17 as it transforms into its mecha form with the influence of the Little Princess.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Shortly after Kanterbury is attacked by the Invaders in the prologue, you are saved by a mysterious character whose identity is unknown. It is not until World 10 that you learn that she is the Future Princess, and that she was sent to the past to save you by the Savior in W11 Nightmare.
  • When you first meet the Queen and Princess of Kanterbury, the Little Princess will briefly look at you and seems to recognize you, however faintly. It is not until World 11 that this is revisited, where it is revealed in 11-6 that LP and the Knight have been together some time in the past.
  • When escaping Kanterbury Kingdom, a long number, 834527817, appears beneath your name in the credits. It's not until World 13 that we learn that that number is the number of elapsed iterations of the timeline.
  • When the Invader warlock attacks your entourage, while you and the Princess, and Eva are jettisoned to disparate regions of the world, Camilla doesn't actually fall with any of you. This is because she was taken by the Dark Magician to the Savior, who then turned her into a replacement for the 1st Corps Commander, which we only learn in World 16. This was also foreshadowed by the background featured in Beth's illustration.
  • At the end of World 1, after dislodging the Champion's Sword from the pedestal in the ruins of an old city, and after concluding your meeting with Queen Lili, she says to herself that 'the Little Princess' presence was unexpected.' (well she actually says 'she was unexpected', but this remains unchanged regardless of the players' gender.) This is because the Princess is a Paradox Person and isn't supposed to existence, accordinh the prophecy.
  • In Season 1, after completing World 1 and retrieving Heavenhold, you might notice some design features such as a giant fist being embedded into it's main body. This is because the Floating Continent is actually a Humongous Mecha.
  • Really, the entirety of the Champion's Sword screen can be considered Foreshadowing, as it allows one to preview heroes that will be collected in the future, such as Kaden and Heavenhold. Well, almost, but in World 18 the Champion's Sword is no longer as good for prediction as once thought...
  • In World 12, as Heavenhold is about to be shot out of the sky by a massive Invader Mothership, the ship's commander says a rather cryptic line: "Found you, my cutie."' This is because she is actually the 1st Corps Commander Camilla, a fact that is not revealled until World 16.
• Frothy Mugs of Water: Just assume any instance of "tea" is some sort of beer. No, it doesn't matter that Loraine's portrait features a pair of rather foamy drinks, or that one sidequest involves going through a series of bars drinking their signature barley tea, where you wind up getting so hammered you black out at one point.

G-J

• Gameplay Ally Immortality: Guest Star Party Members cannot perish in battle- even if their health is depleted to a mere sliver, they will no longer be able to loose anymore hitpoints until they are healed. This fact is at times exploited by players, for example it is possible to defeat the Dark Magician in World 10 using Bob by letting AI Future Princess do all the heavy-lifting while you dodge the Dark Magician's attacks.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Unless the game forces you to use a specific party for a stage, it will always assume that the Knight is the lead unit in your party as far as the story is concerned. It doesn't matter if your actual lead is the same character that is the focus of the current plot, an Alternate Timeline Knight, or even the Big Bad, when it comes time for a cutscene, everyone talks to them like they're the Knight.
  • The story also assumes the Knight fights alone when they don't have any guest-star party members joining them. Any party members that the player has in their own party is completely ignored.
• Gateless Ghetto: As all stages are finite, they have to be physically bounded somehow to prevent the player from leaving the stage, and seamlessly so. So stages are bounded by insurmounted fences, perpetually locked doors, walls, elevations, and so on. Can be justified in the case of indoor Worlds like World 3 or World 7.
  • Of course, this is sometimes subverted, for example in the case of World 5 or World 6, whose levels are bounded by gravity barriers, though even then those cases are limited.
• Gathering Steam: Some Cards or Heroes possess the property of 'Atk Increase On Enemy Kill', which is extremely useful in game-modes where the player can expect to be swarmed by swathes of enemies, like Story or Expedition. After a few waves of enemies have been dealt with, characters with these buffs can become a force to be reckoned with.
• "Get Back Here!" Boss: Harvesters love to hop around all over the place (making them difficult to land a good weapon skill on) and occasionally fly offscreen for a few seconds. This isn't too much of a problem in the story, but it makes Harvesters in Guild Raid^note A server-wide guild competition where you try to do as much damage to a boss as possible within 60 seconds particularly infuriating to fight, to the point where attempts generally go better once the boss begins using its Desperation Attack. Mitigated later down the line, though they still are pretty annoying to fight against.
• Giant Mook: In both the main story and Kamazone, sometimes enemy units will be slightly larger and, consequently, tougher and harder to kill. They can be easily differentiated from their conspecifics due to a spiked red-orange circle marking the ground around their feet.
• Grappling-Hook Pistol: The Hookshot, obtainable in World 3, allows the player to jump from one distant ledge to another using pillar-like stakes.
• Greater-Scope Paragon: Kaden of Dungeon Link, who's been MIA for 500 years now. Alongside his acts in his original game, he prepared Heavenhold in anticipation of the Invaders. Plus points for being hinted as one of the Champions that the Knight will eventually find and recruit.
• "Groundhog Day" Loop:
  • In the Halloween short story, it is implied that the Halloween monster, posing as the Princess, is causing a time loop to force everyone to indefinitely enjoy Halloween (reminiscent of the Endless Eight.) Only when the knight starts messing with the time loop and refuses to trick or treat does the monster freak out and disappear, ending the loop.
  • Gets used as a plotline again in World 14. The citizens of Demonshire are stuck in a 1-day time loop that resets every time Count Claude makes the artificial sun explode. Only outsiders like the Knight and Sohee keep their memories from the previous loops. There are notable variations with every loop, noted by Count Claude as being caused by the two outsiders.
  • It is slowly revealed that the entire story is stuck in a time loop. This is first hinted at during World 11 Nightmare through the Savior's dialogue. Then at the beginning of World 13, you're temporarily given control of the Other Knight, whose world had seemingly ended after killing the Savior, when a fairy-like being appears and suggests they be taken to the next loop for a "second chance". In addition, the fairy-like being refers to the Other Knight as "winter farmer #834527816". For reference, the "credits roll" that appears near the end of Prologue and the start of World 12 contains the numbers "834527817" which could refer to the current Knight. By World 16, it is explicitly spelled out that the world is trapped in an endless cycle of death and rebirth that is actively maintained by hidden manipulators like Queen Lili from Dungeon Link for an unknown purpose. The only reason the current iteration of cycle is notable is that the unforeseen presence of the Little Princess has caused events to deviate significantly from the usual "script", granting a glimmer of hope that the cycle could finally be broken for good.
• Guest-Star Party Member: Different characters from different worlds join and fight alongside your character/team in some stages, such as Marianne in World 2, Sohee in World 3, etc. Some of them, especially the destined Champions (except Lilith as of World 14), even join you on your quest to restore the Champion's Sword at the end of the chapter.
• Hard Truth Aesop: Folktale ultimately teaches that all the world suffers from the excessive greed of the corrupt and powerful, and appeasing them is an ultimately fruitless, if not harmful, gesture. Garam gave a village a well of magic healing water to cure a plague; the village blocked out everyone else who suffered and hoarded the cure. He gifted a magic sack of food to save a pack of tigers from famine; another village's gluttony leads them to attack the tigers in pursuit of the sack, which causes rampant attacks on both sides. He left a water stone behind to replenish a lake for a third village and left faeries to guard it; the village eventually goes faerie hunting in an attempt to seize control of the stone. When Garam was targeted by a fourth village for his magic bead, which brought about these miracles in the first place, and lost his close companion to that village's chief as a result of his self-defense, he snapped hard. Nari has to play the dark shepherd that takes away the villages' blessings (blowing up the well to cure the tired and sick outside the first village, siccing a transformed knight to ravage the second village and transforming its chief into a dog, and taking away the water stone from the third village after the faeries are killed), but their people are ultimately better off for her involvement.
• Harsh Talent Show Judge: The player can be asked to judge a talent contest. They are requested to act rude to boost the ratings. Their remarks can be so mean, such as calling one girl a gorilla, that the contestants retaliate as the screen Fades to Black. Thankfully, this is not a Non-Standard Game Over.
• Healing Checkpoint: You can find towers throughout the game that allow you to heal your Heroes back to full health.Beware, though, for the presence of a healing tower suggests a boss or other challenge lies ahead.
• Heartbeat Soundtrack: Whenever the Knight is under extreme duress, the background music grinds to a halt and is replaced by their heavy heartbeat. Notably, in World 16, whenever directly confronting Camilla, this trope is played straight when they realize that they can't produce a counter-argument to her statements. This is taken to it's conclusion with her boss battle theme, which does have the faint echo of a heartbeat.
• Hello, [Insert Name Here]: You can name the Knight whatever you want. You can even change it later in exchange for gems.
• Heroes Prefer Swords: The Knight has the Champion's Sword that they have to power up to fully use, as well as their personal weapon Libera, which is primarily a one-handed sword. The Knight themselves are not bound to swords though, since they can also equip bows and guns alongside one- and two-handed swords, and the Libera itself is capable of transforming into a two-handed sword and a bow.
• Heroic Mime: The protagonist is only seen communicating through pantomime whenever there are no dialogue choices presented. This stays true even when they're not controlled by the player and become an NPC.
• High-Altitude Battle: Season 2 opens up with one, with the Invaders launching an assault on Heavenhold, with the heroes gradually losing the battle due to the sheer amount of enemies piling on them in addition to a mothership blasting Heavenhold down so badly that it had to be transported to the Demon World to be saved.
• Hotter and Sexier: The Japanese redesigned artwork is known for placing the female characters in more revealing variations of their outfits and suggestive poses. Many of said characters received significant "enhancements" to their figures in the transition, as well.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: Two cases: the muscular merc Marvin with the young cactus juice seller Laila, and D-list warrior Craig with dungeon scavenger Ailie.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: From the hidden tapes and backstory, it seems that the Invaders are in fact humans. Confirmed by Season 1's final boss fight, in which Beth outright says they're humans.
• Humongous Mecha: The Iron Teatan in Chapter 2 and in the Science Club in 21 Kanterbury Street. Weapons for days, but easily dismantled. There's also the mecha Champion hinted in both the silhouettes in each chapter's ending card and the Season 2 teaser trailer, which is revealed in World 17 to be Heavenhold's complete form.
• 100% Completion: Each normal stage has a 50 gem reward for collecting all the Star Pieces and collecting all the Purple Coins. Completely clearing a world unlocks a new costume for a character, as well as the ability to replay stages in that world.
  • You have an item encyclopedia that tracks what pieces of gear you've obtained, and also contains "Collections" for obtaining and levelling certain gear sets. Filling out the book becomes an important part of your progression in the late game, as each item tab and collection gives you a permanent stat bonus as you fill them out.
• Idiosyncratic Wipes: Unlike stage transitions in the map screen of World 16, the transition from World 18 to The Otherworld is quite conspicuous, as is the transition between different time loops in World 14.
• Improbable Weapon User: One of the main weapon types is baskets, generally used by healers and caster-types. While quite a few weapons of this type are actual baskets, a lot of the exclusive baskets are simply magic catalysts such as a magical bead or fan. In general, anything that wouldn't readily fit into one of the other weapon types is usually categorized as a basket for convenience, which leads to "baskets" encompassing a very diverse collection of weapons and tools.
• Improbably Female Cast: Male heroes are very few and far between, especially within the Unique Heroes space^*Only six male heroes have been released post-launch: Alef, Garam, Kamael, Claude, KAI and Chun Ryeo, which has become one of the more vocal criticisms with the game as a whole^*The longest gap between a male hero's release to the next is 9 months (Garam to Kamael). The developers attribute this mentality of theirs to the main demographic of the game being males.
• Informed Equipment: Equipped accessories, relics and merch do not affect the appearance of Heroes equipping them.
• In Spite of a Nail: Despite the fact that the current timeline has irreparably diverged what is to be expected from the prophecy, some events that happened in our timeline still happened in other timelines, as shown by 18-9: namely, the Demon World Civil War, though instead of Morrian leading the charge, it was instead a war between Saul hardliners and Neo=Federation.
• Interface Spoiler: The bios of two characters^note Future Princess and Beth and the existence of a few skins spoils a major plot event in world 9. Averted in later updates where these bios got updated to become locked behind story progression goals.
  • Going into the Purple Coin shop tends to spoil which characters have plot implications in each world based on what evolution stones you can purchase.
• In the Back: There are a few areas of the game where enemies in a combat area are on patrol instead of waiting to engage you. Sneaking behind them gives you the option to club them in the back of the head with a nail bat, doing heavy damage to the target. However, performing this attack may instantly alert everyone and is not guaranteed to kill. It may be better to just sneak up to a group and blast them with your weapon skill at that point.
• Invulnerable Civilians: While of course averted when demanded by the plot, NPCs are completely unfazed by your attacks- and in the Guild HQ, a place where NPCs do respond to attacks, still show no signs of actually being hurt.
  • Can be taken to extremes, and then promptly exploited; in 2-4 there is a field of land mines that blocks the way to a star piece. You could do it the normal way, or you could pick up the old man from earlier in the stage and throw him into the land mines, blowing each and every one of them up. Fret not, for he is perfectly unscathed!
  • Subverted in World 12, where it is a game mechanic in which you can mug and kill civilians for their money if you cannot get 50,000 Demon World dollars through ethical means, which should really make you question the Knight's rectitude and sense of morality...
• Iris Out: Most Stages are concluded in this style. Subverted with the final stages of worlds, which abruptly cut to a black screen reading 'WORLD CLEARED'.
• Juxtaposed Halves Shot: Right at the end of World 18, as the Knight and the Little Princess combined their collective synchronization with the Champion's Sword to purge Labose from Demon World, right as they plunge the two projections of the sword into the ground below, their portraits merge half-way, so that both of their faces are shown as two sides of the same coin.

K-O

• Karma Meter: One exists but it currently has no impact on gameplay.
• Keep Away: There are multiple cases in which an antagonistic entity tries to keep some important object out of your hands. In any case, the solution is to use your wits to trap the perpetrator and deal with them when they are knocked out, because they are faster than you and always have multiple escape routes.
  • In 1-3, a goblin steals a Rah Empire girl's purse, and when you inevitably opt to retrieve said purse the goblin attempts to keep it out of your hands, taunting you all the way.
  • This is revisited throughout World 15, where a small, robotic Invader attempts to keep a Plasma Bomb out of your grasp.
• Kiai: Most heroes have multiple voicelines for when they attack, which range from grunts of exertion to short, spoken sentences.
• Kick Them While They Are Down: A major gameplay mechanic. Using weapon skills on enemies builds up a stun on them, and upon fully stunning them you can unleash Chain Skills to inflict extra damage and another stun. With a good team composition and timing, it's possible to stun a boss for over 10 seconds while you pound away. One of the potential stuns is even called Downed.
• Kids Are Cruel:
  • Some students of the Magic School decide to relentlessly bully a freshman For the Lulz. They go so far that they completely Break the Cutie and she goes completely flying off the slippery slope into dark magic. The shadow beasts she summons as a result are still around in the present day and serve as the world's midboss.
  • You see a bunch of Innuit children tormenting one of their own in the Nightmare story. The girl they are tormenting is Mako, who was just framed for murder in the Normal plot.
  • Not even the Princess is safe from this as she starts being bullied about the disappearance of her Knight during the Time Skip.
• Kung Fu-Proof Mook: Various enemies throughout the game may exhibit immunities against Ranged attacks or Melee attacks, but thankfully never both.
• Laser Hallway: Laser detection systems intermittently appear in Worlds 10-11, and throughout Season 2, where stepping in their path of detection will result in an immediate failure, though interestingly, they seem to ignore non-player entities and objects like bombs...
• Last Episode Theme Reprise: The final level for World 11, and Season 1 as a whole, has Cecil hum the title theme of the game to calm the survivors down and to give them hope that the Knight and the Future Princess will return victorious.
• Last-Second Ending Choice: Season 1 can end in one of two ways; Either return to the past to continue the fight against the Invaders and gather the remaining heroes, or stay in the future and fix the damage, which means that the Guardian can never return, leaving only their helmet to the present Princess.
• Lethal Lava Land: The aptly named 'Lava Zone' of World 7 is a section of Dungeon Kingdom that is filled with lava pools and flame traps galore.
• Level Cap: Starting at an initial level cap of 30, it can be increased by increments of 5, per completed world, up until World 7, after which the cap increases by increments of 3 instead (with the exception of World 17, in which completion boosts the level cap by 5 to level 95). You can increase this cap further, by an extra 5 levels in a process called 'limit breaking' (but only for specific character caps), using a currency known as Hero Crystals. A similar level cap exists for weapons and accessories, except limit breaking is only possible through specialized limit breaking hammers.
• Limit Break: Not to be confused with the identically-named leveling mechanic, but, using specific teams of five-star heroes, you can use so-called 'Team Combination Skills'. Unlike other mechanics (except for maybe Chain Skills), these skills cannot be used in rapid succession, and must be charged to use. Progress towards these attacks is measured by a gauge on the right side of the screen and is filled by killing enemies. Once full, it can be used to pretty much wipe out an area, so-long as none of the enemies are bosses.
• Locked Out of the Fight: In the passage 18-4, the arena for the Worker287634 mini-boss functions in a way such that the gates that enclose the arena prevent your team-members from following you inside, forcing you to fight alone.
• Loot Boxes: Of two kinds! You can summon up to ten 1-3 star Heroes or ten pieces of gear using gems. You get Mileage Tickets for each summon you make (up to 10 at a time for the batch summons), and can use those to buy heroes in case the RNG hates you. Copy summons of heroes give stones you can use to raise a hero's maximum level.
• The Lost Woods: Kanterbury Forest is a grassy forest filled with ruins.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Shields are items that can be equipped in conjunction with One-handed Swords that bolster defensive capabilities, as well as provide incoming damage reduction and, for higher rarity equipments, a slew of benefits for the wielder. Of course, as said, only heroes actively wielding One-handed Swords can wield shields too- but this does not mean that all heroes that use One-handed Swords can use shields; for example, Marina is a One-handed Sword user who cannot equip a shield.
• Macro Zone: The Inn...? world has you getting shrunken down to the size of a bug and exploring the kitchen in the Inn.
• Manual Leader, A.I. Party: In most PvE game-modes, your Player Party will generally be lead by a hero that you pilot, and 0-3 AI heroes All in a Row.
  • Averted in Co-op game-modes, where your allies will be human controlled.
  • Also averted in the Arena game-mode, where your (now three-man) party functions as a line-up of heroes ready to replace whatever hero is currently being fielded should they perish. All party-members are piloted by the player in this way.
• The Maze:
  • In stage 1-7, the only way forward is to pass through a geographic anomaly known aptly as the 'Maze Forest'. Of a hybrid breed of the Asymmetric and Tricky varieties of video games Mazes, there are two possible outcomes resulting from two possible paths through the maze; the obvious path, hinted at by the Princess' used handkerchiefs, and a more subtle, referential path.
  • In World 13, there are multiple sequences in which you have to crawl through circuitous ventilation systems within the tower, which are infested with robotic spiders that will immediately reset all progression through the maze upon contact.
• Mecha-Mooks: For much of World 13, the primary enemies consist of minor variants of robotic spiders.
• Military Mage: When the antagonistic force of a particular world is more sophisticated and organized, like the Invaders, they will often deploy en masse significant quantities of wizards, healers/priests, and, from World 13 and onwards, wall wizards.
• Mini-Mecha: After the Iron Teatan is destroyed, Marianne goes to work making these for the TDF, and even uses one during the chapter's boss battle and as a playable character. Higher evolutions cause it to resemble Lagann.
• Mirror Boss: The aptly-named Mirror Rift has the party battle clones of your allies.
• Missing Secret:
  • The "Veteran Resistance" card has been in the Book's card tab since the release of World 10. It could be obtained as of the release of World 11 Nightmare.
  • There are 40 purple coins missing from world 6, meaning you can't get everything from Kamazon for that world. A later update would let you get them as a reward for completing world 6.
• "Mission: Impossible" Cable Drop: In 10-3, there is a puzzle where you must cable-drop the Future Princess into an underground chamber filled with mines and monitored by a laser security system to disable the Invaders' security network in that section of Heavenhold.
• Mobile Maze: The Maze Forest in 1-7 is technically this, as it consists of only a single chamber with four corridors radiating without, with their destinations shifting with each iteration.
• Mood Whiplash: Beneath the cutesy and nostalgic art style belies a rather dark tone that you can clearly see for the first time as early as the opening stage of World 2, with you getting to see a Teatan mother get stabbed in front of you. And to twist the knife further in, you're treated to the sight of her child looking for her right on the next screen, and you can even follow him back to the previous screen to see him trying to "wake up" his mother. The game keeps this tonal whiplash in later chapters.
• More Dakka: Gun-wielding units are generally this, but no one encapsulates this trope more than Future Knight and her giant Magitek-powered gatling gun Cosmic Destroyer, which can unload more than 40 bullets in one magazine + being able to shoot more with her weapon skill while she reloads, practically having an infinite magazine.
• Must Have Caffeine: The game's main stamina equivalent is Coffee, and you can upgrade your stamina limit with coffee grinders.
• Mysterious Stranger: During the prologue of the game, the knight is saved by a woman that appears out of the sky. In Chapter 10, this is revealed to be the Future Princess. As to how and why she appeared to save you, this is not shown until Nightmare 11
• Named Weapon: While regular weapons typically have very generic and/or descriptive names (like 'Holy Sword' or 'Scale Sword'), EX Weapons typically have actual, personal names, like Beth's 'Predator' or Veronica's 'Messiah'.
• Near-Villain Victory: The Unrecorded World. The situation is horrible when you get there as humanity as we know it is on its last legs. Even worse is that without your timely reappearance, the Invaders would have killed everyone a day or two later.
• Nitro Boost: Of the first variety: boost pads are recurring structural elements that immediately accelerates the player to maximum speeds significantly higher than their max running speed for a second or two- and you lose control of movement for this duration. Of course, because of this, they can just as easily be insurmountable obstacles.
• Non-Indicative Name: The game features increased difficulty levels for each world, but these higher difficulty levels actually feature new maps and plotlines instead of simply being "this world but everything is higher level".
• Non-Standard Game Over: World 11 has two;
  • World 11-2 has a scene where you rescue an android who will make food. However, after she makes the food, she then puts on a creepy face. Choosing to eat the food will give you a game over.
  • World 11-6 Nightmare has the Savior destroying everything after rejecting the decision to travel back in the past. This decision is mandatory given that the prologue has Future Princess save you.
• Not the Intended Use: "Exclusive Weapons" are only exclusive in that they give the intended wielder a passive effect and higher-levelled weapon skill and can otherwise be equipped on any hero that can use its weapon type, either to change the character's attacking element or utilize a weapon skill that easily stuns a raid boss.
• NPC Roadblock: Appears alot in World 12 and elsewhere.
• One-Winged Angel: Beth, Priscilla, and the Plague Doctor gain their own forms during their respective boss battles, complete with Body Horror transformations.
• Only One Name: Most characters do not have known last names and are only known on a first name basis. The only exceptions are Eva 'Dealsalot' (shown in the credits of the prologue) and possibly Jerry Little Volt.
• Optional Stealth: For many stealth missions, you can just as easily stab all of the patrols In the Back.
• Our Demons Are Different: Devils and demons are common species in the planet. Beyond a greatly extended lifespan and some minor physical/magical changes, they are effectively the same a humans with no innate inclination towards evil.

P-S

• Party Scattering: The Champions and other story-relevant allies gathered over the course of Season 1 end up getting split apart right at the start of Season 2 after the fall of Heavenhold and subsequent crash onto Demon World soil. The Knight now has to look for them again alongside gaining the batteries needed for Heavenhold's full activation. As of the end of Chapter 15, more than four in-story months after the initial attack, the Knight has recovered two of the lost Champions and located another who had yet to be found before.
• Pastiche: This is a game that's not afraid to wear its influences on its sleeve. The gameplay, graphics, and overall feel of the game are highly reminiscent of The Legend of Zelda games of yore. The game's tagline is "A Link To Classic Adventure." Hell, there are even characters that are an expy of Link and the Mario Bros. themselves! General Nintendo game Shout-Outs are also the most common by far. In addition, the humor generally feels somewhat flat, so to speak.
• Permanently Missable Content: The various cross-over content, alongside their associated Short-Stories, cannot be accessed once the collab is over. The only exception is the cross-over with Slayers NEXT, which was temporarily re-run due to Lina Inverse being unfairly overpowered in PvP. Of course, after that, the collab was never re-ran again.
  • Expired seasons of Co-op Expedition and the lore and gameplay they provide may be unplayable forever once the season is done. However, it has only been two months since the release of Co-op Expedition as of March 2024, so it's far too early to judge if the content really is gone forever or if replay options will be added in the future.
• Phantom Thief: The game has the infamous criminal Lucy as its resident recruitable phantom thief. Nari can also be one with her own phantom thief costume, which definitely isn't referencing another famous phantom thief, that can be bought from the Arena shop for Battle Medals.
• Pineapple Ruins Pizza: One of the Cursed Artifacts found in the KAMA-Zone is the Pie from Hell, which is just a slice of pizza with pineapple on it. The name is literal: one of the punishments for evil souls in the Afterworld is to bake these pizzas.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: The Teatans, who are smaller than average humans. They're normally not this; that is, until Marianne builds them all Mini Mechas to fight against the Invaders.
  • Two costumes for Marianne have her not use the mecha, but still pack just as much of a punch.
• Pivotal Boss: Elphaba stays in a painting, but transfers her spirit to one of three paintings around the room.
• Place of Power: You eventually unlock a Training Room that empowers anything put in it, instantly boosting heroes to max level, evolution, awakening, and eventually limit break, while exclusive equipment are boosted to max level, limit break, and eventually options. However, these boosts only last as long as you keep them in the training room, you can't power them up normally while they're in there, and there's a 24-hour/10-day cooldown on switching characters/equipment respectively.
• Player Death Is Dramatic: When you fail, a faint Dramatic Spotlight befalls and highlights your fallen form as mysterious beings descend all around you, while dreary, downtrodden music plays.
• Play Every Day: As expected for a mobile game, Guardian Tales motivates it's players to return daily to retrieve 28-day Attendance Rewards, sometimes alongside other daily rewards during events. During the player's downtime, stamina will regenerate, typically twice-per-day, so that they can farm for items, EXP, and other stuff. Guild Raid Entry Tickets are regenerated every midnight and useable during daylight hours, and the potential gem rewards from participating in raids is quite enticing. Entry Tickets for Colosseum and other PvP modes are regenerated in a similar manner. And finally, daily packages are purchaseable once (or multiple times) per day.
• Power Equals Rarity: Rarer weapons are more powerful, rarer accessories and relics have better stat-scaling and provide better boosts to defense, attack, and so on, and both generally have superior options to lower-rarity items. Furthermore, they can be upgraded to higher grades then lower-rarity weapons.
• Pre Ass Kicking One Liner: A random party member will usually deliver one upon starting combat. If the enemies are stronger than you or a boss, some characters will have an Oh, Crap! or Bring It line instead, while weaker enemies will produce taunting or exclamations of boredom.
• Precursor Heroes: The game has two:
  • The Legendary Hero Erina, a human hero from Dungeon Link's backstory who, together with Demon Princess Lilith, defeated the four Demon Gods 1500 years ago and sealed them within herself, giving her near-immortality. In the present day of the story, she has long since retired from active adventuring due to her age. She now serves as Queen Lilith's chief of national security and closest confidant.
  • The Hero Kaden, protagonist of Dungeon Link: a young hero from 500 years ago who would later end up stopping the great evil looming over the world with a Pyrrhic Victory by burning the World Tree and making humans and gods lose access to holy magic. Some time afterwards, he learned of the coming danger of the Invaders far in his future. Together with Queen Lili and Demon Queen Lilith, Kaden sought out the Champion's Sword and built Heavenhold as a weapon to be used centuries later by his successor, the Knight. For unknown reasons, he disappeared without a trace before he could finish his preparations, leaving Heavenhold virtually powerless by the time the Knight and Little Princess find it.
• Premium Currency: Gems, which are split between Free Gems (obtained through participating in multiplayer modes) and Paid Gems (obtained by paying real-world money). In-universe, Gems are noted to be capable of healing and even reviving downed characters, as seen with the Little Princess being capable of healing characters by throwing gems at them whenever she's in the party. Also, the Little Princess may also find such gems and give them to you whenever you log back in to the game, also seen in-universe in the Rue the Red side story, the 300-gem chest the Future Princess had inside her tent while waiting for you to come back in World 10, a gem being used as one of the ingredients of the cure-all potion found in World 11, and the Little Princess's use of gems as a healing item in your fight against the Other Knight in World 13.
• Promoted to Playable: Case in point: magical-alpaca-with-a-human-form Mayreel, who was only Bari's Exclusive Weapon for almost a year since the latter's release in May 2020. And she even power creeps her hard.
• The Prophecy: The whole deal with the 13 Champions and the Champion's Sword, with a lingering hint of Prophecy Twist as the narrative goes on. It's better explained in the Video Record obtained in World 13: according to cave murals found by Astronaut No.7, when darkness comes and threatens humanity, 13 heroes will step up to fight against this evil. One will end up dying while protecting their comrades, while the leading hero will wield the sword of light to finally banish the darkness. If ever the darkness returns again, a new set of 13 and the sword of light will rise again to protect humanity, repeating the prophetic cycle. Astronaut No.7 lampshades this trope by mentioning it almost sounds like them given their current situation.
  No.7: "An unknown monster, 13 explorers, and 12 remaining Tetitians... No.13's sacrifice..."
• Putting the Band Back Together: Season 2 starts with the Heavenhold being shot down by the Invaders and falling into a portal into Demon World. In the attack, most of the characters, including the Champions and other story-relevant characters found by that point, were scattered randomly about both worlds, forcing the Knight to slowly recover their teammates all over again.
• Puzzle Reset: Generally manifesting as small green buttons, they exist in pretty much every complex puzzle in which the player can accidentally screw up their chances at progressing pass because of a misplaced block.
• Quicksand Sucks: Quicksand represents a major obstacle in World 4.
• Randomly Generated Levels: The mechanic behind Kama-Zone.
• Rare Candy: Coffee Grinders are items that can only be bought in the Shop using Purple Coins, and, once you've bought five of them, you can increase your maximum Stamina by one, permanently.
• Red Filter of Doom: At the end of World 16, we are treated to the sight of a completely ruinous Demon World, with the ominous sight of Heavenhold standing amidst the .
• Retraux: The character graphics and models for the environment and world are intentionally designed to resemble games on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, such as The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.
• Required Party Member: In stage 15-6, Gremory is required to be the lead character to hack into the two computer terminals located within the stage, to access the Mini-Boss and achieve 100% completion. Of course, once you disable the security systems, you can easily back out of the stage and replace her with a more viable hero if necessary.
• Revisiting the Roots: The September 2022 "World 15" update has the aforementioned story chapter return to the standard world map formula found in Season 1^*Worlds 1-11, around a year after World 12's initial release in May 2021. As Season 2 has mostly consisted of only main story stages and stat check passages, World 15 brings back sub-stages that are utilized for certain side quests.
• Rewarding Vandalism: Destroying stage objects and tearing up the scenery may drop hearts which heal your heroes by a certain percentage of their maximum health. Not to mention all of those Purple Coins and Star Pieces often hidden under those objects...
• Ridiculously Human Robots: Heavenhold's androids are all fully sentient and have individual personalities with the full range of human emotions. They eat specially-made food, rest by sleeping, and, apparently, have confirmed souls that go to the same afterlife as any other mortal. If it wasn't for their slightly distorted speech patterns and drill "ears", they would be indistinguishable from humans. For inexplicable reasons, regardless of their other personality traits, nearly all of them share a distinct lazy streak that leads them to slack off on their duties whenever possible. The only two that aren't lazy are unique androids made explicitly separate from the main production lines.
• Right Justified Fantasy Map: The World Exploration mode shows a somewhat full view of the known world the player has stepped foot in throughout the game, and only the known nations, as anything beyond them, which lies beyond the right side of the map, is not shown, cut off even.
• Robot Girl: A whole fleet of identical robot girls operate Heavenhold, programmed to obey the holder of the Champion's Sword. They're also used to upgrade facilities, and you can buy or find more scattered around the world to upgrade more buildings at once, much like the smithwyrms. They are advanced enough to not only have individual personalities but are so human-like as to actually have souls that go to the After World like any other mortal (a fact that causes significant confusion to the staff of the underworld when attempting to judge one). Two of them, the only surviving combat models from their initial production, become playable characters with unique third one from an in-universe new production joining later.
• Status Buff: Support Party Members that are not primarily healers provide various active or passive stat buffs to other heroes in the party, which may be permanent for passive buffs.
  • For example, Idol Captain Eva's Chain Skill augments allies' attack power by 30%, while Eleanor also boosts Light attack power depending on the number of Light characters in the party.
• Status Effect-Powered Ability: Your heroes can only use their Chain Skills against enemies that are stunned by some Ailment.
• Secret Art: All 2-star and 3-star heroes unlock a special passive ability upon reaching their 5-star evolution.
• Secret Path: There are many of these in many stages of the game. Usually, finding them is not required to progress, but they often have Purple Coins behind them and various lore pieces.
• Series Mascot: The Little Princess, due to her Everyone's Baby Sister status as well as her overall role in the story, not to mention the fact that she's voiced by Rie Kugimiya in Japanese. She even made her way to become the game's newest app icon, succeeding Lilith and the Female Knight.
• Shout-Out: Now has its own page.
• Sizable Snowflakes: While not true snowflakes, the Purple Coins collectibles found exclusively around Mount Shivering are massive purple snowflakes the size of the players sprite.
• Skill Scores and Perks: You can use Awakening Stones to Awaken characters and increase their HP, Attack and Toughness (defense). Each section of their Awakening chart you fill out unlocks the sections attached to it, and you can give them special passive or active abilities using Dream or Legendary Awakening Stones when all the nodes around one particular node are unlocked.
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World: World 8 is definitely this, with fields of slippery ice, windswept, snow-covered peaks, snowmen, and yetis.
• Spell My Name With An S:
  • Heavenhold is sometimes romanized as "Hevenhold", and, in one instance, as "Heavehold".
  • Favi is spelled as "Pavi" in one of the quest descriptions.
  • Loraine is sometimes spelled as "Lorraine" by both the game and the fanbase.
  • Lala is spelled as "Lara" in one of the quest descriptions.
• Sprite/Polygon Mix: Characters are displayed as sprites, while the environment is rendered as intentionally primitive models.
• Starter Mon: The Knight (of a functionally-identical male or female variety) is the first character you get. You also get the White Beast and Lorraine by completing the first chapter.
• Stop Poking Me!: Almost every character you can tap on in Heavenhold has at least one positive and one negative reaction to being tapped on.
• Story Breadcrumbs: Often, the lore of the game is delivered in loosely connected and typically very vague indices and databases, most notably in the "Orbital Lift" on Heavenhold.
• Super Move Portrait Attack: When using a Chain Skill, the corresponding character's portrait will be displayed as an EyedScreen.
• Super-Deformed: The in-game character sprites and background characters in character card art are all in this style.
• Super-Powered Robot Meter Maids: World 12-1 shows that even the civilian model Heavenhold androids are equipped for aerial combat. They're nowhere near as powerful or durable as true combat androids like Mk. 99, but they can hold their own surprisingly well for handful of maids and construction workers. They still passive-aggressive complaints about this not being their jobs throughout the stage while they fight.
• Suspicious Videogame Generosity: A lot of the stages feature stations you can activate to get a full team revive and heal. There is almost always a major battle or boss after.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: In Chapter 4, you can find an android in a chest. After making an attempt to bribe you to go away with a bit of EXP and Gold, which is chump change at the part of the game you're in, she fakes a system reboot and tells you that all data from the past conversation was deleted, then tells you that she was definitely NOT slacking off, because resting is unnecessary for androids, then returns to the Heavenhold.

T-W

• Take That!: A Cursed Artifact you can find in Kama-ZONE is called the "Pie from Hell" which mentions that you'd lose your appetite forever after seeing it. You'd think it's some sort of some sort of crime against the concept of food, right? Nope, it's just a pizza with pineapple on it. The story Afterworld Inc. takes it even further by showing that the name is literal: one of the punishments for evil souls after death is to make pineapple pizza until they work off their karmic debt.
• Taking You with Me: World 11 has one android that if you turn it on, it then decides to explode on you.
• Temporal Paradox: This is basically what happens at the end of world 11.
  • As Sohee explains, the fact that their future did not change means that they created a separate timeline, proving what she calls the Future Underwear Theory.
  • This becomes a big thing at the end of Nightmare 11. The Future Princess is forced to go to the past by the Savior, the leader of the Invader Forces, promising a 3-year ceasefire if she does or personally destroying Heavenhold if she does not. Regardless, she is thrown into the very beginning of the game, having to protect the Knight as they go through the prologue of the game. This itself means that the Knight had to be sent to the future to create the new timeline so that the Future Princess could go back and save them at the start of the game.
• Thread of Prophecy, Severed: World 16 confirms this after months of foreshadowing. The prophecy was supposed to go like this: the Guardian finds the Champion's Sword, which accepts them, then they unite the other twelve Champions and slay the Savior. This plot was followed by the universe, unerringly, for the past eight hundred million iterations, yet, with this one iteration, something changed. The point of divergence, if you will, for this iteration started a decade ago, before the game begins, with the anomalous birth of LP, who absorbed much of the now-weakened Guardian's power. As such, the latter was too weak to kill Beth where she stood at the throne of Kanterbury, meaning she could lock them away ten years in the Unrecorded World, while Lili's hand was forced to find a replacement for the weak Knight. And the prophecy kept unravelling from there.
• Time Abyss: It is implied that the world has been trapped in a "Groundhog Day" Loop for up to 834,527,816 iterations, which each iteration presumably spanning hundreds, if not thousands of years.
• Timed Mission: Many missions of this type exist throughout the game, from 3-3 to 12-5 Nightmare.
  • Really, any puzzle that requires lighting up a number of temporarily lit torches is one of these.
• Toggling Setpiece Puzzle: First debuting in World 7, color switches can either be toggled to blue or red. If blue, then associated pillars of the same color will be raised while red pillars will be lowered, and vice versa.
• The Tower: World 13, Lilith Tower, takes place in the tallest skyscraper in Demon World, soaring far beyond all nearby high-rises to an extent that it sticks out like a sore-thumb. It functions as the palace of the Demon Queen, Lilith.
• Trick Boss: The top floor of the Magic School pits you against Flamel, who turns herself into a banshee and is a complete pushover. Then you go back to the main hall to report your success to Elphaba, thinking your job is done, and PSYCHE! It turns out Elphaba was the mastermind behind the ghost infestation the whole time! Naturally, you then have to fight them.
• Underground City: What remains of the ancient city of Demonshire is the underground city of vampires. Demons from the surface section of the city fled beneath the earth in hopes of co-existing with the vampires after the Demon World Reunification War completely annihilated the surface city, where they together created the Artificial Sun to support the life of the refuges without harming the natives.
• The Underworld: Guardian Tales's concept of the afterlife, After World, is based on the Ancient Greek version, but it has two faces: one is a vacation spot where the honorable dead can spend Soul Energy generated by good deeds in life on some rest and relaxation before re-entering the cycle of Reincarnation. The other is a labor camp for sinners to pay off their Soul Energy debt before reincarnating, or, for souls whose sins were so numerous and/or damning that they can't be kept with others, a maximum security prison where they "work off" their massive debt by suffering solitary confinement for as long as it takes to cleanse their souls of negative karma. It's run as a semi-modern large company split into 108 divisions that manage souls from regions of the living world and trade Soul Energy as currency. They employ spirits who can't or won't reincarnate due to excessive regrets in life as Grim Reapers that manage the various operations of the After World until they either overcome their regrets and rejoin the reincarnation cycle or abandon it permanently to seek higher positions in the company. As the normal flow of time doesn't apply here, spirits in After World can remain for as long as needed before reincarnating without interrupting the cycle of life in the living world.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: Has happened on multiple occasions:
  • End of Prologue: Unexpected Shmup Level, avoiding dark balls from a cloaked magician
  • World 2: Shooting rockets from a giant steampunk mecha
  • World 4: Motorcycle-powered sand surfing using a beaten-up mercenary as a surfboard
  • World 11: Shooting down an Invader aircraft with a gatling gun while riding a trike
  • World 12: Super Robot Wars-style strategy game for the first stage, later shifts to a stage-based pseudo-open world level design ala early Grand Theft Auto for the rest of the chapter
  • World 13: Scaling a skyscraper up to the top floor while avoiding falling debris and slowly-approaching robotic spiders
  • World 14: An endless runner-style driving minigame chock full of Initial D references
  • Rue the Red: A Star Fox-style Shoot 'Em Up, complete with barrel rolls for days
  • World 15: Riding a Demonic Dragon to fly toward an Invader battleship above the skies of the Demon World capital. Similar to Rue the Red's but focused only on dodging incoming fire.
• The Unreveal: The Inn...? world's Nightmare story has the Little Princess introduce herself to a new companion she meets while shrunken down...except the screen goes black when she does so. The same thing happens when her future self tells you who she is in Unrecorded World.
• Versus Character Splash: When entering the Arena game-mode, entry into a spar with another player will show your heroes on one side of the screen and their heroes on the other, with a 'vs' in between the two halves.
• Vicious Cycle: The entire setting is stuck in a perpetual time loop. Events follow the same path until the Knight slays the Savior and destroys the current universe. After that, everything resets and repeats. The reason for this cycle is unknown, but the unexpected presence of the Little Princess has allowed this iteration to deviate from the usual script enough that it might be possible to avert the fated catastrophe.
• Victory by Endurance: Due to how the Arena game mode works, it's possible to win using a Tanker or a healing Support unit to survive the thirty seconds with more health than the enemy player- and because the player with the lowest health loses, they win without much actual effort or skill. And That's Terrible!
• Video Game Cruelty Potential:
  • Occasionally, a blimp will fly in from the left side of Heavenhold towards the landing zone on the northeastern area carrying some of your Facebreak followers on a rope, who you can tap for Soul Points. You don't have to wait until it reaches that landing zone, however: If you notice the blimp in time, you can tap the passengers before they get over Heavenhold, causing them to plummet offscreen.
  • You can attack and kill civilians to get money in Demon World.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: Attacking and killing civilians in Demon World will increase your wanted rating, which hampers you with debuffs, increasingly difficult law enforcement sent out to stop you (that when overcome, also increase your wanted level), a drone equipped with a machine gun that forces you to constantly move or be shot, and finally Erina herself shows up to put an end to your rampage.
• Video Game Dashing: Players have access to a dash button right from the start, but it's comparable to a brisk walk at best. Around halfway through World 1, players will then obtain the Pegasus Sneakers, unlocking the full dash functionality with no restrictions whatsoever.
• The Virus: Technically a bacteria, but the Invaders are fleeing from a man-made bacteria called Labose, that has destroyed their planet, somehow developed sentience, and now chasing them across the stars. It becomes more detailed in tapes found in the story and logs found in the Orbital Lift. In chapter 11, it turns out the innkeeper, Loraine, is Labose itself.
• Weakened by the Light: Rather intuitively, heroes attuned to the Dark element experience major resistance debuffs against heroes of the Light element.
• We Cannot Go On Without You: No matter how many allies remain alive, you get a Game Over if the unit you control is defeated.
• Wham Episode: The end of World 9: You've defeated the Big Bad of the world 9 plot, hurray! As you're celebrating that fact, you see Penny, who was supposedly killed off earlier in the plot. You follow her, at which point she then reveals her real form as the Dark Magician, before chucking the Knight into a rift in space and time. This leads directly to...
  • Chapter 10: Unrecorded World. You're sent 10 years into the future, where the Invaders are on the cusp of victory and a partially crumbled Heavenhold is the last line of defense against them. Most of your friends are dead, and the ones that are still alive are stretched thin. And the Princess has taken a couple levels in cynicism.
  • Stage 10-2 goes into much more detail on what has happened, and then has the Dreaming of Things to Come scene: Soon after you go to sleep, you're awoken by Invaders launching an all-out attack to finish off Heavenhold, and you go to Hold the Line with the Princess, Craig, Lavi, Marshmallow, the Mad Panda Gang, and Sohee manning a laser cannon. The situation gets progressively worse until you are thrust into a Hopeless Boss Fight that lasts all of about three seconds, Fission Mailed, thankfully it was All Just a Dream. When will it be coming? Oh, tomorrow.
  • Worlds 12 and 13 waste no time in setting the plot back on track after the Unrecorded World, and boy they're not pulling any punches. World 12 opens you up with Heavenhold being sieged by Invader fighters, shot down by the mothership, and then transported to the Demon World, where everyone ends up scattered and someone has managed to steal your identity, rendering you persona non grata and even have you branded as a criminal! Then when this plot is continued in World 13, what should have been a meeting involving politics and ethics is disastrously derailed by an utterly horrifying and brutal terrorist attack on Lilith Tower and the surrounding city, turning the chapter's story into a survival thriller where you have to sneak around terrorist patrols and rescue survivors of the initial attack. And for World 13 in particular, making the wrong choices (or failing to take decisive action at key moments) can and will get people killed, impacting the outcome of the ending.
    • 13-9 goes the extra mile to cap off this intense arc by killing off everyone involved in the arc. The survivors, the terrorists, the other Guardian, even you. It is only the Little Princess unleashing her mysterious powers in the peak of distress that manages to revert this horrible tragedy.
  • The end of World 15. The Knight, the Little Princess, and the Demon Gods manage to successfully infiltrate and destroy the Invader Queenship sieging the Demon World capital and recover one of the missing Champions. Although the Invaders' 1st Corps Commander was nowhere to be found, Queen Lilith, Erina, and the various law enforcement groups for the capital manage to push the Invaders back so victory seems assured... Then one of the soldiers alert you all of an massive unidentified flying object floating towards the capital in place of the Queenship: it Heavenhold, hijacked by the 1st Corps Commander, who escaped before you even got to the ship's bridge. The with accompanying cutscene showed she has corrupted the Champion's Sword by brainwashing four of the eight found Champions (Marianne, Marvin, Craig, and Coco), moving the ownership of said sword to her. What's more is that she had already obtained the two remaining Mana Singularity Drives needed to power Heavenhold and access its true power, destroying two of the major nations of Demon World in the process. Then the cutscene finally reveals who the 1st Corps Commander actually is: it's Queen Camilla, returning after going AWOL since the start of the story, with the implication that she had been allied with the Invaders the entire time.
  • World 16 drops follows up its predecessor with some bangs. Camilla is revealed to have been working with the Invaders in exchange for protection from her evil ancestor Queen Lili who has worked behind the scenes for untold eons to enforce the prophecy that dooms the world. She confirms that the Knight will destroy the world should they meet and kill the Savior, so she took over Heavenhold to kill them so she could take their role as "Hero" for herself to avert it. After the Knight defeats her, she is possessed by Lili and is forced to sacrifice herself, directing upon herself a lethal magical attack, to protect the Little Princess and deny Lili a new host. When Camilla dies, the Little Princess' grief causes her to release so much of her hidden power that reality itself warps. The full effects were unknown, but the scene ends with a scene of the robot form of Heavenhold standing in a ruined city and the Knight left as the only Champion found once more. It is also hinted that the mysterious Plague Doctor is really the Hero Kaden who became disillusioned after learning that Lili was manipulating him into helping perpetuate the cycle.
  • World 17 continues this cycle: Right off the bat, the Princess is shown to have fallen into a state of extreme despair and denial, enough so to disappear herself and the entirety of Heavenhold, seemingly excluding it's personnel, into an alternate reality (perhaps of her own design) where the Invader attack never happened and Camilla still lived, temporarily living in that reality with only scattered and disturbing memories of real life and the Guardian. Meanwhile, and Demon World falls into civil war with the specter of the Invaders still lingering over the world and a new, baleful Labose flower blossoms over Saul. Then, after Lorraine makes her return after nearly six worlds, it is confirmed that Kaden is, in fact, the Plague Doctor, researcher and master of Labose, and creator of the aforementioned innkeeper. And while the ongoing war may not be of his design, it will come to consume and depopulate much of Demon World. Finally, at the end of the world, after the Princess came to her senses, and returned at the behest of one of the Knight's broadcasts, she brought back Heavenhold, and activated it, causing it to transform into it's Humongous Mecha form, to combat the newly birthed Labose monster.
• Wham Line:
  • There's mention of deadly bacteria called "Labose" that ancient humans created that eventually overran their home planet and then drove them off. Then Lorraine finally mentions what she is: that same corruption.
  • Once Beth goes One-Winged Angel in 11-6, she drops this line:
    Beth: For the survival of humanity!!
• World-Healing Wave: At the end of World 18, the Knight and the Little Princess ultimately expunge all (or at least most) of the lingering Labose from an addled Demon World using their combined powers, amplified by the Champion's Sword.
• World of Jerkass: Mount Shivering. The Snowman tribe is practically defined by its Fantastic Racism of the Innuits. The Innuits are better, but are still quick to turn against anyone different and not above using the prejudice against werebeasts as a cover for crimes. There's an Ice Witch also over there that likes to go on random hunts just to sate her ego, but the one time she does it on-screen will probably not be met with sympathy for the victim. The mountain is so bad that the major characters of the story washed their hands of the whole place and left in disgust.
• World-Wrecking Wave: On a far smaller scale, every time Claude decides to press the reset button and destroy the Artificial Sun for more borrowed time, the cutscene depicts Demonshire being shredded into dust by a Sphere of Destruction in this manner.
• You Bastard!: When commiting a immoral or atrocious act, a character in your party will vocally excoriate your act, unless if they themselves are particularly jaded or evil.
  Future Princess: "This is not the you that I remember.

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Work Page Complete.

The Troper's Sword partially recovered its power.

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