Unison League is a free to play MMORPG game available on Google Play and the App Store.The plot goes as follows: You wake up an amnesiac in a field outside of Haumaforte, one of the biggest cities in the land. A girl named Filo appears, claiming she's your cousin, and, seeing how you've lost all your combat prowess, teaches you some basic fighting techniques. You then get called back to Haumaforte by Lord Falsa, leader of the Master Guild, to defend the city from recent monster attacks. This kickstarts an adventure spanning multiple continents to find out the Celestials' hidden agenda, uncover what's behind the mysterious dark Ether, save the Master Guild from being disbanded, and much, much more.
Gameplay is similar to a lot of RPG games on the market, however, battles take place in real time. You equip up to any four skills you've learned (the fifth is always taken by Attack) and go into battle with up to five other players (any empty slots are filled by CPU players.) Once your Unison gauge is filled, you can use one of up to five Monsters you have equipped to attack or provide a big buff to the party, and during a short intermission before the attack, other players can use their Monsters and make the attack more powerful. If the elements of at least two monsters match, a Unison Attack is performed, a powerful finishing move that calls one of the seven Great Spirits down for aid.
This game provides examples of:
- 20 Bear Asses: A common theme for event gear is for you to collect six versions of the same item to reforge it. Considering they’re all rare random drops… good luck with that!
- Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: Shown with the purple infusions, which cost significantly more gold and Ether Droplets than normal ones do.
- Addressing the Player: Happens in story quests. Your name is filled in on various pieces of dialogue. (Sadly, all the pronouns are male, as the game does not distinguish that.)
- A.I. Roulette: Happens often with CPU players, especially Clerics, who will many times use a useless basic attack when everyone needs healing.
- Ambidextrous Sprite: Applies in full force for any asymmetrical outfit, especially glaring for any eyepatches or hair clips.
- Allegedly Free Game: With weekly releases of better monsters and more powerful gear, it can take a bit of money to stay relevant if you're not into grinding for Gems and getting extremely lucky.
- The standard cost for a quality monster has nearly doubled since the game released!
- Although, formerly useless old monsters can now be elevated to OP status with the Enlightening feature.
- An Adventurer Is You: With a twist! The following classes all have skills learned with a currency called "Proficiency" earned from quests. However, you aren't stuck to one class, as you can mix and match all the abilities you've learned. Lancer using Ether Exchange? Sure! Mage using Imaginary Shot? Why not? Archer using Heaven's Breath? Go ahead! This can allow you to adapt to quests very well, such as using [1] Balancing on a boss that boosts its stats to insane levels, or Ether Exchange to give you that extra Cost to muscle through a boss.
- The Tank: The sword-wielding Soldier and secret Rook classes. The former has Life Up and Heaven's Breath abilities that increase health, and the latter has a Draw Aggro ability that makes the entire party unable to die for a few seconds, but both are rather lacking in offensive techniques, suffering from some serious Magikarp Power, as neither get high powered moves until the later growth rings.
- The Healer: The book-wielding Cleric line is an important addition to all parties; if they go down, especially fighting a boss, the whole party usually soon follows, due to lack of a steady stream of healing. They can also reduce damage to themselves and teammates and cure status effects.
- The DPS: The spear-wielding Lancer and axe/gun wielding Berserker classes are this. The former focuses on nuking with high power skills and spam attacks, and the latter sacrifices bits and pieces of their own health in exchange for super powerful buffs.
- The Status Effects Guy: The staff-wielding Mage class is this with hints of support and Squishy Wizard, specializing in chipping away with decently-powered skills, casting status effects on enemies, as well as buffing allies.
- The Jack Of All Stats: The bow/gun-wielding Archer is this, having Magic Knight qualities with a movepool utilizing both stats, as well as a plethora of utilities such as Balancing.
- The Resource Master: The Treasure Hunter is this, increasing the unit and Gold drop rate or applying particularly debilitating debuffs with its attacks, as well as being a veritable Swiss Army Knife on the non-combat side, being able to refresh debuffs and status effects, increase allies Unison power, and more.
- And Your Reward Is Interior Decorating: A useful example; equipping better furniture boosts your stats and resistance to status ailments.
- Armor and Magic Don't Mix: Sort of. Any class can wear armor, but mages and clerics get passive stat boosts from wearing clothing-type gear.
- Awesome, but Impractical: The monsters from the Super-Difficult quests have the highest F2P base stats, making them great for winning Unison Battles, but are also very high cost and don’t have the best effects.
- Background Music Override: This happens on the boss wave of many quests.
- Bag of Holding: Applies to your inventory and equippable items, you can use as many items as you possibly can, and you’ll only see one of each type of gear on your character.
- Black Mage: The Archer, Lancer, Mage, and Berserker classes.
- Black Magician Girl: Tistino, who's supposed to be the NPC representing the Mage class.
- Christmas Episode: There are special annual quests and gear for this purpose.
- Combatant Cooldown System: This is how abilities work. Different abilities vary in their execution speed and cooldown.
- Cosmetic Award: The cosmetic shop, cosmetic medals, low cost gear, etc. Some people do play just for the cosmetics, though.
- Critical Hit Class: Archers fill this role, as their signature skill, Fatal Testament, forces a critical hit, and some of their class passives increases the amount of damage their crits deal.
- Defend Command: Exists in the form of ‘Guard,’ a default ability which halves all damage for five seconds. Many players ditch it in normal quests, but it is invaluable in PVP combat.
- Disc-One Nuke: Many powerful weapons can be obtained via the beginner spawn. It’s incredibly easy to get an OP gear piece or monster as a newbie.
- Early Game Hell: Actually averts or even inverts this. The early game is extremely easy to advance through, with Gems in abundance, quests being generally very easy, high-level gear being easy to get through special spawns, and one early quest giving you one-time access to a quest that can boost you to around Level 120. As the game progresses, though, you will be hit by quests becoming harder, Gems getting more scarce, and early-obtained gear quickly losing their value in comparison.
- Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: Fire beats Wind, Wind beats Water, and Water beats Fire. Light and Dark beat each other, as well as Time. Time beats Star, Star beats Light and Dark.
- Endless Game: The Mobius path quests act like this. You fight a variety of never-ending and increasingly strong monsters.
- Equipment Upgrade: One of the main ways to improve your Gear Score. Options include infusion (increasing the max level of a certain piece with like gear), and plusing (Augmenting ‘+1’ gear into other gear).
- Fake Difficulty: For many bosses, their difficulty is merely their ability and the speed at which they buff and debuff, or their ability to apply special effects. The player’s job is to figure out how to get around this. This actually works out quite well since it forces players to be quick and smart about what moves to bring, when to heal, and when to Unison.
- Fake Ultimate Mook: The giant monster quests act like this. They have huge monsters, but are not much more special than their normal counterparts.
- Fantasy Character Classes: This is the official theme of the game, but futuristic gear exists that are more at home in a Sci-fi or Anime environment.
- Gendered Outfit: Nearly every gear set in the game has a male and female version of the same clothes. They do sometimes have different stats, though.
- Glass Cannon: Archers are usually very squishy, but have many high damage attacks. Lancers and Mages are other DPS classes that are typically squishy against magic and physical attacks, respectively. Berserkers are the most egregious since many of their attacks are powerful but have detrimental side effects.
- Good Morning, Crono: The game begins with Filo greeting you after having been knocked out by a goblin.
- Guns Are Worthless:
- Averted; swords are typically wielded by Soldiers, who are not primarily designed for damage. Archers and Berserkers, who use guns, are some of the best damage dealers.
- Played straight with Soldiers themselves, who have a designated anti-class advantage against gun-wielding Archers.
- Head Swap: For the Rank 70-ish story quests, the ‘masked man’ is obviously just a palette swap of Lord Falsa. It’s his clone, but it’s still pretty lazy.
- Health/Damage Asymmetry: Applies most of the time, unless it’s an event boss.
- Impossible Item Drop: Most every quest has mooks dropping a variety of low-level clothing and weapon gear, even things like jellyfish and birds.
- Infinity +1 Sword:
- The Azure Weapons and Armor set. Generally high stats, great procs, and looks awesome, though it can only be obtained by selling a ton of SSR gear to get recycle medals.
- It USED to be that you had to randomly sacrifice seven SSR gear pieces and hope the RNG gods give you one you can use. Now you can select which one you want, and they are renewable.
- Informed Equipment: For the players, cosmetics can change your look without affecting your gear.
- Keystone Army: Downplayed. While the Cleric usually ensures survivability, it needs to rely on the other classes due to their lack of offensive moves.
- King Mook: The Asahime is this to the normal Morning Glory, being much bigger and having more potent pollen due to absorbing way too much Ether.
- Level Grinding: An important pastime for growing stronger. It increases your hitpoints, gear slots, and occasionally awards you bonuses in the form of gems and cost points.
- Level-Up Fill-Up: A variation; leveling up refills your AP.
- Low-Level Advantage: Applies in some situations, such as the Battle Colosseum, where a higher level boosts you into the next tier, regardless of your stats. Low-level players also gain much more experience and sometimes good spawns.
- Mascot Mook: The Limimins are this for the game, appearing in lots of promotional artwork and Monster art. Strangely enough, they both function as The Goomba and Metal Slimes of this game, the weak mook form coming in six elements, and having Gold, EXP, and Skill variants which are used for selling, augmenting gear, and skilling up gear, respectively. There are also Roshimin and Angelmin variants, which, while they can't be captured, can be felled to earn a ton of Proficiency and User EXP respectively.
- Mass Monster-Slaughter Sidequest: “Destroy” Subquests have you do this. Also falls under 20 Bear Asses, as the monsters you have to find are completely random.
- Microtransactions: You can buy gems and special item packs this way.
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Model Dissonance: The elbow and knee joints look very strange in some clothes and poses. See Virtual Paper Doll. -
Nintendo Hard: The Super-Difficult Quests, intended for endgame players only. - No Experience Points for Medic: In the United Offense quests, Clerics tend to get less prestige because they don’t attack.
- No Exportfor You: Sadly, a large amount of content in the Japanese version never makes it to global, specifically collaborations. The devs sometimes try to remedy this with things like the Halloween Miku monster.
- Nominal Importance: In a way. There are only a few human characters, and they are the only NPCs with unique names.
- Olympus Mons: Most UR monsters, but especially the special ones that inflict high damage (Like Cleopatra or Tequila), buffs (The Planetary mons, specifically Mercury) or special effects (Mithra, which lets you revive with 60% HP instantly)
- One Size Fits All: One of the draws of the game, it restricts nothing about your identity.
- One Stat to Rule Them All:
- One stat for each class except Archers.
- Slightly also averted by the special classes Treasure Hunter, Rook, and Berserker. They use either a mix of stats or can be built to different playstyles.
- Palette Swap: Occurs for certain gear and furniture sets. Sometimes lazy, but sometimes an opportunity to get a cool or new cosmetic.
- Percent Damage Attack: A common and deadly tactic for boss monsters is to use this, then use a standard to finish the player off.
- Poor, Predictable Rock: Many noob strategies consist of spamming their best three attacks and Ether Exchange. This is less common in higher-level play. Averted with Boss fights, as their Percent Damage Attacks predictable, but are still unavoidable and very deadly to the unprepared.
- Purely Aesthetic Gender: All body gear and cosmetics are divided into either male or female, but you can be whatever you want.
- A Quest Giver Is You: You can send out the Expedition Limimin for free Gold, Augment Materials, or Reforge Materials.
- Rainbow Pimp Gear: The game wouldn’t be the same without it. Kinda averted in that you can change what clothes appear on you despite what is equipped.
- Rare Random Drop: You have a very small chance of getting items from certain monsters that would otherwise require a lot of grinding to obtain.
- Repeatable Quest: One of the main components of the game, grinding is required if you want to get all the goodies offered.
- Simple, yet Awesome: Many of the free-to-play exchangeable items are ordinary weapons with no special abilities, but are free, sometimes infinite, and amazing stat sticks.
- Skill Point Reset: The Drink of Enlightenment, which allows unlimited redistribution of cost points for one month.
- Status Effects: Paralysis, Poison, Blindness… take your pick.
- Poison and Bleed are classic damage over time effects, with bleed being more powerful. There's also Miasma which is not only stronger than bleed but it's incurable by Cleric spells.
- Paralysis has a chance to prevent you from using an ability, forcing it into cooldown with no effect. Stun guarantees that an ability will be wasted but only once.
- Blindness causes you to have a chance of missing an ability.
- Confuse can cause you to heal an enemy or damage an ally. This is serious trouble if the infected is a Mage or Cleric since a confused heal will bring back a considerable amount of HP.
- Psychological Contamination will disable up to 3 abilities until cured.
- Starter Equipment: You start with a set of low-level class gear and are given one SSR weapon for free. Don't rely on them for long though, especially when you can get better ones later.
- Stone Wall: The Rook class, which is unique in that it's kind of lacking in the skills department, but makes up for it by having a potent Life Drain attack to keep them running well, and a special skill that makes it that the entire party cannot die.
- Stripperific: A large portion of female outfits fall prey to this. It's especially noticeable when compared to their male counterparts.
- A Taste of Power: Happens in the tutorial, where you are rescued by the “Master Guild”, who show up and Unison Attack with fancy, exotic monsters, in stark contrast with your own basic gear.
- Tier System: Inverted, you can choose a difficulty level, with more options available the stronger you are.
- Turn Red:
- Bosses normally use weak attacks, until around half health or lower, when they start pulling out the big guns.
- It's a feature in the super United Offense quests, where the monster will go into a frenzy mode that restricts your Unison and buffs its stats.
- We Buy Anything: In a way. There is no vendor; you just sell the gear to the void and get gold from it.
- White Mage: The Cleric class, and, to a lesser extent, the Rook.
- Virtual Paper Doll: This game plays this very straight. It’s paper doll style for every character and mon.
- Wham Episode: Usually happens near the start of a new location.
- At the end of Regovas, King Val sacrifices himself to prevent the corruption of his ether. The Brutel do not take it kindly and the tribes fall into disorder.
- At the start of the Sacred Land, Princess Matriace is kidnapped by Celestials, and both you and Filo get trapped in said Sacred Lands.
- At the end of the Granvia arc, Filo sacrifices herself to save Lord Falsa.
