Video Game / Lineage 2

"Gran Kain shouted with great pride to all the world and instilled spirit into the creatures of his own image. However, the result was terrible. His creatures were weak, stupid, sly, and cowardly. All the other gods despised Gran Kain's creatures. Overcome by the shame of his failure, Gran Kain abandoned his creatures and went into hiding for a time. These creatures are called humans."

But later... "So. Is it not ironic that the lowest creatures of all, the humans, ultimately attained ownership of the land? But that is the result of human will. Even the gods did not imagine that humans would ever become rulers of the earth."

A MMORPG by NC Soft and sequel to Lineage . Not as well known as World of Warcraft but enough to get someone to list its tropes. This game is the template that started the infamous Korean MMO bandwagon rolling rather than WoW and the majority of MMOs from that country have mechanics similar to those still used by LII rather than picking up the changes Blizzard made to its own game.

The game was released in 2003-2004 as a P2P MMORPG, though it dropped its subscription fee in 2011.

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Lineage II provides examples of:

• Action Girl: Seriel, the blonde female elf with the sword in the many trailers for the game.
• A God Am I:
  • Beleth. Cue the ominous music.
  • Also, Bishops' get Turn Undead which reads "The undead cower and flee as you reveal your divine nature".
• Alien Sky: As of the latest installment, thanks to the Weird Moon with the symbol of Shilen burning upon it.
• Allegedly Free Game: Actually averted: the game boasts that it's Truly Free, and in fact, you really can play through the Path to Awakening without ever visiting the L2 Store. Most of the stuff you can buy amounts to cosmetic stuff and a few non-combat bonuses. But the basic grind is stiff enough that it sure does help to buy stuff like XP boosts and buff potions with actual money.
• Alt-itis: Encouraged by the addition of Vitality Points. Unless you've got cash for pots to top up your vitality a lot, you're either leveling your main with no XP bonuses or you're switching to an alt until your Vitality replenishes.
• Anti Poop-Socking: Vitality Points, introduced with the 8th expansion pack... about time!
• Armchair Military: Kekropus, despite ostensibly being a high-level Kamael military figure, doesn't do much more than send you letters directing you to various level-grinding zones.
• Bandit Mook: Maguen in the Seed of Annihilation Nursery, whose sole purpose in life is randomly showing up to steal your quest items.
• Beast Man: As if the seven playable races weren't diverse enough, there are several species of Lizardmen, Ratmen, Mahums (lion and tiger people), Silenos (goat people) and Crokians (alligator people), among others.
  • Apparently, the cute cats that the human Warlocks summon are also a race, and their capital city is called Arcan
• Blade Brake: Seen in one of the minimovies/trailers for the game. See here
• Braids of Barbarism: All the orcs wear cornrows.
• Bubblegloop Swamp: Most of the areas around Heine, especially the Field of Silence and Field of Whispers, right down to being full of alligators. Well, Mucrokians, anyway. More broadly, the Cruma Marshlands and the Swamp of Screams, home to various species of Stakato. The Blazing Swamp is both this and Lethal Lava Land.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Humans, at least historically. See Humans Are Bastards below. Dwarfs to a lesser degree.
• City of Canals: Heine, of course. Being a water-themed city, you can expect a lot of elves.
• Cool Horse: Awakened characters get class-specific ones.
• Copy-and-Paste Environments: All castles from Aden look the same, except one. The castles in Elmore, however...
• Creepy Cemetery: There's a big one just outside Aden. Oddly it used to be more full of mid-game orcs than of actual undead. These days it's chock full of endgame mobs.
• Critical Hit:
  • Dagger wielders are based on these, they have passive abilities to increase the chance and damage of critical hits which also affect their main damaging abilities (as they're criticals themselves).
  • Everyone relies on critical hits to be viable. Physical abilities have fixed x2 damage rate and chance defined only by STR stat, magical critical (including healing spells) have x3 or x3.6 damage rate and chance can easily be buffed to 20% (hard limit), general attack crit rate is limited by 50% and critical damage rate is usually x5-x15 in PvP, but can be as high as x100 in PvE.
• Cute Bruiser: Ertheia fighters and Female dwarves. And human-summoned cats.
• Cuteness Overload: Dwarf Females Girls. Especially when performing their emotes. This was deliberate, as NC Soft designed the dwarf girls to appeal to their Japanese fanbase.
• Dishing Out Dirt: Dwarf men have all the traits, right down to the available player classes being "professional resource gatherer" and "trader" and squat, stocky build. Fitting for the race created by the earth god. Except for the girls... no idea how that happened.
• Dual Wielding: Fist weapons and Dual swords are always this. Dual swords play this in an odd way; they're a pair of compatible swords that go through an irreversible magical joining process. Besides the fact that they used to be two different swords, for all purposes dual swords are a kind of their own. Anyone can dual wield if they want to, but...
  • It's required for the Gladiator / Duelist and Blade Dancer / Spectral Dancer classes for them to use their skills.
  • Also, Orc Tyrants, as all their skillsets require the use of fist weapons.
  • Dual daggers were later added to the game, and now the dwarven Scavenger/Bounty Hunter classes can use them.
• Dragon Rider: Players can pick up a wyvern. It's a flyable pet dragon.
• Engrish: Some of the voice acting. Particularly noticeable when you cross paths with Iason Heine. "What is it? Would you like my power?!"
• Evil Tower of Ominousness: Tower Of Insolence, expy of the Tower of Babel. Baium is locked at the top due to his attempted Rage Against the Heavens. At lower levels, Cruma Tower is also this.
• Floating Continent: Gracia, thanks to the descendants of the servants of Shilen succeeding in bringing some of her power into the world via the Seeds of Destruction and infinity.
• God Is Evil: Let's put it this way-the God of Darkness who created a race purely to mock the other gods? He's the nice one.
• God Save Us from the Queen!: Einhasad. Heck, she sent fire and lightning to the Titans when she discovered that they began creating new life forms, until she almost wiped them all.
  • Her husband is Gran Kain, the God of Darkness and Destruction, and she is supposed to be the Goddess of Creation. But Even Evil Has Standards and Gran Kain can often be found trying to defend people from her, or calling her out for her behavior.
• Heroic Willpower: Why humans have defied all expectations and come out on top-an inability to quit.
• Hidden Elf Village: All of the old-school starting towns are hidden villages. Especially Talking Island, where human characters used to start. There's also the Hunters' Village, a literal hidden village.
  • Averted as of Awakening; all the races except the Ertheia start at the revamped Talking Island, and the Elven, Dwarven, Dark Elven, Orc and Kamael villages are empty, blood-soaked areas gutted by the awakening power of Shilen and put under quarantine.
• Holy Hand Grenade: Most of the healer classes get holy-elemental attack spells. In the official version they used to hide under the Inquisitor transformation, but this has since been taken out, turning nukers at lower levels into halfway decent offensive casters: especially against the undead: who can also heal.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: After being taught magic by the elves to defeat the orcs, they betrayed them and made them retreat to their home forest where they still live nowadays. Oh, and dark elves are dark due to an incident with a human named Dasparion.... Its what they get for enslaving and using them as cannon fodder. Then they did it all over again with the Orc-Dwarf war, betraying the Dwarves to the Orcs, then betraying the Orcs by turning on them.
• Item Crafting: Artisans, Warsmith and Maestros can do this.
• Jerkass Gods: Gran Kain is the God of Darkness and Destruction who once upon a time had a relationship with Shilen, his own daughter; he is the reasonable one. From his point of view its just his job to be something of a dick, but he has to restrain his wife Einhasad- The Goddess of Creation- in particular from her jealous fits of rage that tend to result in an awful lot of smiting the innocent. Shilen, who bore the brunt of her mothers hate for the incest and was banished (over her dads protests, no less), is about as messed up as you'd expect and is probably more of an actual threat to the world than her dad (though maybe less than her mum).
• Kill It with Fire, Kill It with Water and Blow You Away: As part of a theme, Nukers and Buffers get fire, water and air themed abilities; that is, the human classes Sorcerer and Prophet get fire, the elven classes Spellsinger and Elder get water and the dark elven classes Spellhowler and Shilen Elder get air. Naturally, the Squishy Wizard's abilities are these. Exaggerated once the offensive casters Awaken into Feoh mages... and gain the ability to attach any of those elements to any of their spells, plus Dishing Out Dirt.
• Lethal Lava Land: The Blazing Swamp. Valakas' Lair may also qualify as this or Hailfire Peaks.
• Level Grinding: In stock form, the ur example of an Asian grinder. Dialed back a lot once the game went free to play.
• Lighter and Softer: For every race in the game, your first quest is a plunge into the undead-infested ruins of Ye Sagira before facing off against the evil Nemertess... unless you rolled an Ertheia. The Ertheia newbie quest involves bopping poplar fluff and honeybees and playing with a cute fox.
• Little Bit Beastly: The Ertheia, with their cute little ears, are stock kemonomimi.
• Mad Scientist: The Giant race were implied to be this, performing experiments on the lesser races like grafting a wing onto elves and eventually creating the Kamael and the use of Magic from Technology to turn most of them into cyborg-like creatures. There are quite a few of the Dwarves who are also this, notably the aptly named Dr. Chaos.
• Magic Knight: Blade Dancers, Dark Avengers, Paladins, Shillen Templars, Soul Breakers and Sword Singers. The Elvish Temple Knight was originally planned to be something like this, but it just didn't happen.
  • Also achievable by some of the Summoner classes, and weirdly, a few Elven Elders have been known to do this, wielding daggers or dual swords, meleeing outright, then stepping back to heal. A certain Elder once of Kain server was particularly known for this.^note Summoners usually don't use weapons to do damage, but rather they use them to increase activation chance of their "cubes", minor spirits they summon to assist them in combat.
  • The Prophet class tries to be the classic Magic Knight (Being the one class in the entire game with masteries for all kinds of armor, including heavy) with shades of Church Militant. Heavy armor is not much favored by players though being very expensive, decreasing max mana, mana regen and casting speed.^note  Augmentation system allows you to bound spell to a weapon, offensive spells being the more popular choice. Getting such weapon is the most optimal option to make character with no offensive abilities viable for duels. This system (along with the Inquisitor transformation) allowed healers and other not-offense oriented characters to be more successful in duels. Sadly, it made them less of a Magic Knight as well, seeing as they are just self healing Squishy Wizards now.
• Magitek: The lost technology and skills of the Giant race, its' remnants, and the Dwarvish attempts to rediscover Absolute Geometry.
• Making a Splash: Elves, having been created by the water goddess (before she became what she is), possess a strong water theme. As a result, their classes tend to emphasize alacrity, and elves possess the highest base Dexterity and Wit ratings of all the races.
• Marathon Boss: Some of the raid bosses, especially the two dragons, Antharas and Valakas. Bring several dozen people. And a lunch.
• Noob Cave: Ye Sagira. Subverted: you go back there to Awaken.
• Ominous Latin Chanting: Featured a number of times throughout the game, becoming more frequent with the game heading toward the the reawakening of Shilen. The trailers especially. Not surprising given the composers for the game: Bill Brown, Inon Zur, and Jaime Christopherson.
  • Some of the tracks of the game even have metadata, revealing titles such as Apocalyptic Divine Evil, Fury of the Victims and Divine Right of Demons.
• One-Winged Angel: Subverted at least in name: The Kamael race are one-winged all the time, until they obtain their Final Form and grow the other wing. All transformation abilities qualify as well. Too Awesome to Use: check, appearance change to a monster or into faceless armored giant form: check, serious power boost: check.
• Orchestral Bombing: Especially fighting Valakas, and even more literally since the Gracia installments.
• Our Dragons Are Different: Though they are generally Western in style, there is a large variety of them and they have some Eastern influences, with different dragons being tied to certain elements of nature. The most well-known ones are Antharas, the green earth dragon, and Valakas, the four-winged fire dragon.
• Our Orcs Are Different: Not only from convention, but within the game. The player Orcs are variously bishonen or Amazonian-looking pretty people, including magic-using shamans, all of them with cornrows, all created from fire to be a race of strength and stamina. Then there are the Orc mobs: about umpteen zillion different tribes of Warcraft-looking troglodytes who tend to wear assorted platemail and skull helmets while whacking you with strength moves.
• Patchwork Map: Seriously, just look at this◊.
• Palette Swap: Averted. Most mobs of a similar type will use the same couple of models, without so much as a colour change. Particularly noticeable with the zombies. You'll see a lot of mobs using the same shambling green zombie model.
• Peninsula of Power Leveling: Several. The free-to-play version even walks you through the best ones to try and get you to the endgame content faster.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Dwarves, especially the ladies. Ertheia too, though they're a little bigger.
• Player Versus Player: Works like this:
  • A player's name is white (default), purple or red.
  • Attacking a white or purple player makes you purple. Attacking (or even killing) a red charater does nothing, but there's a reason to attack one besides the thrill of battle, see below.
  • killing a purple player simply increases your PVP counter and not much else.
  • Killing a white character causes you to turn red (no, not that trope), increases your PK counter and increases your karma meter (normally it's 0, and increases even if you were already red), as long as you have karma you'll be red, you reduce your karma by gaining experience from monsters or you die, the amount of karma you get increases as your PK counter increases.
  • Most importantly, as long as you're red (and, as of Chronicle 3, have a PK counter of 5 or more) you have a chance to drop any of your items (equipable included) if you're killed by players (and increased chance if killed by monsters). This more or less makes you into a piñata for other players to bash. There's a quest to reduce your PK counter which provides an useful safeguard against this.
  • Augmented items cannot be dropped, ever. This can include weapons, non-epic jewelry and breastplate. If you REALLY need to PK a bunch of people(typically defending valuable spot, like epic boss dungeon entrance or Seed), it is possible to do with relative impunity, assuming you are using the armor you are willing to lose. This, however, gives your opponent a huge handicap^note Epic jewelry is really good, losing armor set better than A grade will really hurt you and its not a very good armor and you cannot use non-damaging debuffs and AoE spells on white opponents. and you will lose a lot of XP clearing your name (clearing PK meter is often considered far too bothersome at this point).
• Playing with Fire: The orcs! What else could the fire god create, aside from hulking warmongers who grow up learning to punch things to death? As fighter classes, orcs specialize in reducing the HP to shreds in record time. As a magic type, they tend to focus on Area of Effect spells and fire-themed status buffs for their allies.
• Power Fist: How the Orc fighters roll, with dual cestus weapons. Also the domain of Ertheia fighters, complete with Supernatural Martial Arts.
• Power Floats: Will be available to casters of all types after the Awakening. Video examples here, here and here
• Power Glows: Starting with Chronicle 3, all weapons enchanted (by using weapon enchant scrolls; effect is permanent damage increase) over the safe threshhold of +3, started glowing. +4 is faint white misty aura around, +16 is pronounced red. Heroic weapons that came with Olympiad mechanics — have the whole set of particle and glow effects on them.
• Prestige Class, called second class transfer, then there's third class transfer.
• Puny Earthlings: Elves were created by Shilen, from water; Orcs were created by Pa'agrio, from fire; Dwarves were created by Maphr, from earth... and so on. Humans, on the other side, were created by Gran Kain, God of Darkness and Destruction from the leftovers of other races: stagnated water, unfertile soil, ashes and violent winds. Really.
  • Of course in the end, the humans are on top.
• Purely Aesthetic Gender: Subverted by the Kamael race, whose females got different base stats and class options.
• Quad Damage: Soulshots and Spiritshots, the former for Physical attacks and the latter for magic, they're divided by grade and consumed depending on weapon, though people may b buying them in the thousands.
• Rain of Blood: As of the latest installment, every night. Followed by a Fog of Doom. Caused by The breath of Shilen as she begins to awaken.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: Any of the Baby Pets, Hatchlings, Cat Summons, and even the little dinosaur pet. The Dwarf females are this as well.
• Really 700 Years Old: Female dwarves. Some of the female dwarf NPCs, who look somewhat more mature, but still don't look much older than twenty-ish. Any of the other races are also implied to be this, but it's outright stated by the Elves and Dark Elves.
  • Jewel, a Dark Elf NPC, recalls once dancing with the Elves under the starlight before the war that resulted in the curse of her tribe, creating the Dark Elves: which can be anywhere from hundreds to thousands of years ago. And then there's the elf, Lilith, on Talking Island, waiting for her lover Teon. After a thousand years of waiting, she learns that he died only a few years ago, living in the human town just a short [[spoiler: and fast boat ride away, and either thought her dead or lost in the war against Beleth. Players frequently recount wanting to smack Lilith for never trying to search for her beloved.
• Real Money Trade: Practically endemic. Every town has at least one cash-for-adena bot at almost all times. The devs acknowledge the outright plague of gold-farming bots flooding a lot of early-game leveling grounds.
• Sand Worm: Trasken the Earth Wyrm.
• Scenery Porn: Ivory Tower, Rune Township, Aden Castle, Hellbound...Anywhere in Lineage II's world, really. Even late newcomers to the game are astounded at the sheer amount of detail that was put in, both in the costumes and the landscape.
• The Scourge of God: Einhasad, Goddess of Light, punished a human who befriended a dark elf by turning him a hideous demon. Take That!, power of friendship.
• The Scrooge: Dwarves
• Sealed Good in a Can: Hermuncus, the last surviving Giant, who was sealed away by the gods in Ye Sagira. Until you wake him up.
• Shoot the Medic First: The mobs have a aggro engine that determines if a player character is the active healing support of an party, and sometimes go for them, ignoring the damage dealers.
  • Overall heal has a quite high aggro effect. Mass heal ensures that monsters will go for healer. It can be used to your advantage.
  • Players usually kill the enemy healing members first in a PVP. Seeing that healers can resurrect anyone else with twenty seconds cooldown, it is indeed a very high priority target.
• Soul Jar: A literal item for use by the Kamaels (who use it to power their skills and magic), the subject of a few quests otherwise.
• Super-Empowering: In lore terms, Awakening consists of Hermuncus, the last giant, giving you the power of the ancient giant heroes. This is explicitly stated to be the power to oppose the gods.
• Super-Soldier: The Kamael race were created by the giants for this purpose. They were so powerful that just three of them completely annihilated Angel army sent to punish the giants.
• Status Buff: Many classes get this, but Prophets, Shilen Elders and Elders are classes specialized in this, in that order of specialization.
• Stripperific, Ms. Fanservice, Breast Plate: Female Dark Elves. And to a (much) lesser degree, female Elves, Orcs and Kamael. The higher the levels you go though, the more true this is for every female type. Especially noticable for the Human females and the Noble Vesper and Moirai heavy armor sets for the dwarf girls.
• Summon Magic: Elves summon Unicorns, Dark Elves summon Demons and human summoners can summon... cats. Human Necromancers summon undead.
• Time to Unlock More True Potential: You go through a lot of class changes, from your basic class through your first class change, second class change, third class change and finally Awakening. Saying nothing of doing it all again for dualclass and subclasses....
• Toxic, Inc.: Dr. Helvetica in the Fields of Silence is implied to be this, polluting the area in the hopes of developing it for business. One quest asks you to choose between him and a Nature Hero priestess. You'll have to kill the same crocodile men either way.
• Turns Red: Some warriors have a passive skill that increases their attack when at low health points.
  • And most epic bosses.
  • Also, various "critical" abilities from weapons net you bonuses at low health.
• 20 Bear Asses: Basically all the Path to Awakening quests. The early ones, anyway. The later ones are more like 900 Bear Asses. And not every mob will drop a gewgaw.]] Particularly egregious once you start running the Ketra Orc and Varka Silenos dailies.
• The Underworld: Prior to being created by Shilen, did not exist. She created it so that the souls of the dead would have a place to go to, instead of simply vanishing into oblivion, as an act of grief at the death of so many of her children during the war against the other Gods. The increase of the population of the dead during the Great Flood increased her dominion.
• The Un-Favourite: Shilen, goddess of water, was exiled when her mother Einhasad found out that she was pregnant due to a secret affair with her father.
• Updated Re Release: Goddess of Destruction was this, introducing the Awakening system, new areas, a new crafting system and a score of other updates. Oh yeah, and now it's free.
• Volcano Lair: The Forge of the Gods, where the Fire Dragon Valakas resides.
• Walk It Off: How much you regain depends on wether you're running, walking, standing still or sitting. Some abilities also change this.
• The Walls Have Eyes: The Wall of Argos. The backstory is that the Wall is the prison of Argos, born to Gran Kain and a giant with 100 eyes, and any eye that falls out of the Wall becomes one of the many, many, many floating-eyeball-themed mobs which wander the valley.
• Warp Whistle: Scrolls of Escape. Also the Return and Party Recall spells. Summon Friend and Gate Chant for the Summoners and the higher level Orc Doomcryers will teleport one character holding a Summoning Crystal, and a full party, respectively, to different places on the whole map.
• We Buy Anything: Anything which isn't a quest item or a newbie item.
• Weird Moon: The usual moon becomes red and has a burning eye open if the Servants of Dusk win the twice-weekly battle for the Seals of Shilen; when Dawn wins the moon turns green and the eye is visible but closed; joined permanently by the Moon of Shilen as of the latest installment, resulting in an Alien Sky.
• When Trees Attack: The recurring mook types in undead-heavy areas include various types of giant fangy trees festooned with hanging skeletons, with names like Hangman Tree or Dismal Pole.
• Wretched Hive: In-story, Floran Village is this (although it looks more like a ghost town). Red players go here when they respawn, there's no gatekeeper in town and none lend here.
• Your Soul Is Mine!: Kamael have the ability to take the souls of monsters they kill, using them to power their abilities.

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