Build. Buy. Battle. Bears!
You are a summoner from another world who obtained a sacred treasure of a divine sword cut off from the tail of a dragon. They carry all elemental attributes, and the power of disconnection that lies in their sword has the power to divide control and power. As compensation for being a "wanderer," they have been "exiled from their birthplace." One day, a magical power sends you to a different version of Tokyo. There, you will gather companions and develop your story in this card-based RPG.In this Tokyo, 23 mysterious pillars of light appeared suddenly one day. These pillars are known as Gates, connecting Tokyo to 23 different worlds, each one based on a different mythology or story. The beings that inhabit these worlds are known as Transients, and after crossing into this world, together with humans and like minded Transients who share the same philosophy, form guilds and compete in The Game.
The Worlds known currently are as follows:
List of Worlds
- Tokyo; The main setting of the game, and the main stage for The Game. Based on the real Tokyo, it's split into 23 different wards for each of the Gates of the other worlds, and humans and Transients live together in relative harmony. Humans are native here.
- Takamagahara; Based on Shinto mythology.
- Land of Wa; Based on Japanese legends, folktales, history and literatures.
- Kamuy Kotan; Based on Ainu mythology.
- Hourai/Penglai; Based on Chinese legends, folktales and literatures.
- Garothman; Based on pre-Islamic figures in Arabian legends, as well as Zoroastrian figures.
- Deva Loka; Based on Hinduism mythology.
- Nirai Kanai; Based on Ryukyuan mythology.
- Bora Bora; Based on Polynesian mythology.
- Xanadu; Based on Mongolian history and mythology.
- Shangri La; Based on Tibetan mythology.
- Yggdrasil; Based on Norse mythology.
- Kitezh; Based on Slavic mythology.
- Tír na nÓg; Based on Celtic mythology and European folktales.
- Eden; Based on holy or formerly holy figures in the Abrahamic religions.
- Gehenna; Based on demonic figures in the Abrahamic scriptures, as well as demons in related occult texts.
- Olympus; Based on Greek mythology.
- Babel; Based on Babylonian and Mesopotamian mythology.
- Great Spirit; Based on mythologies of the Indigenous North American peoples and North American legends.
- El Dorado; Based on Mesoamerican mythologies.
- Aaru; Based on Egyptian mythology.
- Old Ones; Based on H.P Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos.
- Utopia; Based on science fiction literature.
- Unknown 23rd World
Tokyo Afterschool Summoners (Tokyo Houkago Summoners), also known as Housamo, is a mobile game developed by Life Wonders. Defined as a "Card Battle RPG", the game is targeted towards LGBT individuals, with 95% of the game's cast being gay. The player can choose from up to 5 appearances for his, her, or their main character, collect cards and companions, choose selections in a story, and battle foes in a grid-based RPG system.
The game launched in December 2016. Though still technically a Japan-only game, most iOS users can download the game from the App store. Since August 2018, the game is also available on Android's Play Store.
Beginning late 2017, after thousands of requests from international players, Housamo has begun to include translations of the main quest in fragments — in English, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. Additionally, fan translations of most special and character quests are available on the Housamo wiki, with an active fan community updating the pages regularly.
Game has a character sheet- feel free to contribute.
See also Live A Hero, another LifeWonders game.
This gacha provides examples of:
- Absurdly High Level Cap:
- Maxing out a unit's level, up to 90 for 5-star ones, can take a while or a lot of EXP boosters. To give you an idea, a single EXP booster gives 1536 EXP to a unit of appropriate element (or any unit for All-Round boosters) and you can only keep a little over 100 boosters in your inventory at any given time, and the highest EXP you can obtain from a battle is a little over 60K from a once-per-day mission if you use the AR that focuses all EXP gain to a single unit and supporting ARs that further boost Exp gain. You'll start needing 6-digit EXP once you try to level up from 80 onward, and the last few levels need literally over a million each.
- Sacred Artifact level, which governs a unit's charge skill's power, can only be increased by pulling duplicates of that unit, so making it out to 100 will take a while. AR level also can only be increased by getting AR duplicates.
- The mother of ridiculous level cap goes to the Rank Exp, which determines your AP capacity and team size, among other benefits. Without spending items or real money to constantly replenish your AP, you will need years to reach the maximum rank of 130.
- Adam Smith Hates Your Guts:
- To increase a unit's Skill level, you cannot grind in battle, instead, you must use Soul items, plus up to a million coins per unit, which is not a small amount of money.
- Level Seed and Skill Seed, which further increase your units' level cap and skill activation rate after you completely max them out, will quickly cost you millions of coins per seed. To give you an idea, the most coins a non-limited mission can give is a little below 200K (before any coin bonuses), and you can only play this mission four times a day on weekends naturally, whereas giving the maximum 10 skill seeds to a unit will cost you 27.5 million coins, and 20 level seeds require no less than 105 million coins.
- Adaptational Attractiveness: Likely due to the Dating Sim element present in the game, not only all characters are humanoid, those who are normally described as ugly or monstrous in their original mythology are significantly prettied up. However, as Nyarlathotep and Azazel hint, some of them may have adopted A Form You Are Comfortable With.
- Anti-Frustration Feature:
- Getting duplicates of higher rarity units & AR increases their Sacred Artifact level by a higher number than usual (+5 for 4-star, +20 for 5-star), which is nice since pulling them at all is already a difficult task.
- Starting from a 2019 update, you cannot spend more Exp Boost items than what is needed to reach the unit's maximum level (at least, maximum level before you limit break them). What it means is that if the Exp given by one boost item is enough to hit the max level, the game doesn't allow you to select more boosts. Ditto with skill-boosting Souls.
- To compensate for how rare and especially expensive level, skill, atk and HP seeds and blooms are, the effects those seeds provide are shared among units who are the same character. So for example, giving your original 3* Shiro a level seed will increase the level cap of that Shiro and all other Shiros you have or will have.
- Starting from the release of Chapter 13, losing and quitting a battle refunds your stamina, allowing you to redo the battle or pick a different one should your first attempt go awry.
- A heavily downplayed case: Once you have achieved maximum Sacred Artifact level of 100 of a given unit, which is only doable by getting enough duplicates of that unit from gacha, that unit will be permanently removed from your gacha pulls and thus you will never obtain useless duplicates. The heavily downplayed part comes from the fact that it's practically impossible to do without spending ludicrous amount of real money, so this benefit rarely happens to people who play with minimal or no spending.
- Arbitrary Headcount Limit: You can have up to ten teams, each containing up to five units. However, during a battle, the first three plus one Support can be on your side of the field at any point of time; The other two will only enter the scene should any of the initial four fall.
- Arc Number: 23 and/or 24. There are 23 wards in Tokyo, each with a gate connected to one of 23 other worlds. Those worlds, plus Tokyo itself, make 24 colliding worlds total, which is also the number of souls that inhabit the protagonist (one from each of the 23 worlds, plus their own).
- Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: A recurring element throughout multiple chapters: the Exception bosses summoned when two conceptually opposite powers clash in a way that the app can't process. Additionally, Gyumao and Typhon have the ability to grow to colossal sizes.
- Author Tract: Chapter 4 in particular calls out certain angles and interpretations of Biblical scripture.
- Bara Genre: A rare non-doujin and (relatively) safe-for-work example, seeing how a lot of the characters are depicted as Big Beautiful Men and gay.
- In particular, this game seems to actively work to reverse and subvert the roles of the sexes often seen in other forms of Japanese media. As this game mainly caters to a gay male audience, the male characters in the game are typically drawn and written in suggestive and provocative ways, which parallels how mainstream games treat their female characters.
- Beach Episode: Every summer, there is at least one event that takes place on the beach or ocean that comes with gacha companions wearing swimsuits and summer outfits.
- Beast Man: A large majority of the game's cast resemble this. The protagonist gets the option of petting several characters who fit this trope, and few of them seem to find it patronizing.
- Big Bad: Michael, the Archangel and Right Hand of God, alongside 20 other World Representatives hailing from different worlds. They had since the beginning of this game, split into 3 separate guilds due to an internal feud over how they wish to use the Player for their own, personal goals. The Representatives take center stage in the second arc, where the proceed to enter all out war just to claim the Player.
- Big Beautiful Man: A number of the male summonable characters are considerably chubby and are actually reasonably attractive. Examples include Moritaka, Zao, and Typhon.
- Brutal Bonus Level: Occasionally there are 0 AP battles which reward first-time clears with rare items like Solomon ticket, though nothing else so they can't be used to grind Exp and resourcesnote . The generosity of this 0 AP cost is massively offset by the battles being loaded with Fake Difficulty.
- But Thou Must!: Dialogue options never actually impact the story, and oftentimes the follow-up dialogue will be as if the player character spoke all three options in order regardless of what was tapped on. When the option has impact, it will only be 2-3 lines before the story goes on as normal.
- Cast Full of Pretty Boys: Zig-Zagged. While most of the summonable characters are attractive men, most of them are too burly to be considered "pretty". There are Bishonens thrown into the mix though.
- Color-Coded Elements: Each of the eleven elements in the game are given its distinct color: Fire Is Red, Water Is Blue, wood is green, aether is yellow, nether is purple, infernal is black, valiant is white, world is brown, all-round is grey, infinity is orange and null is neon pink.
- The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Perhaps to offset that your team always takes the first turn, enemies tend to have far more HP than legally possible and tend to outnumber your 4-man party. And that's before getting into the harder battles where enemies start having AI-only abilities and a buttload of nasty buffs and debuffs.
- Contractual Boss Immunity: Quite a number of the game's hardest enemies, such as Exceptions and superbosses, are immune to debuffs, or at least,immune to the strongest of debuffs such as skill bind and charm.
- Crossover Cosmology: We have Transients hailing from Shinto, Norse Mythology, Greek Mythology, Judaism, Ars Goetia, Cthulhu Mythos and more.
- Death Is Cheap: Whenever an app battle is successfully closed, any damage that happens around the area and players is immediately undone, including death. Naturally, some participants would have mixed feelings about dying and suddenly coming back from the dead, with a few fencers even quitting at the start.
- Did You Just Romance Cthulhu?: Given that some of the playable characters are based on beings who are utterly monstrous in their original mythologies (the ones from Cthulhu Mythos being merely one obvious example), you can invoke this by matchmaking anyone with these eldritch characters, although any squick factor is eliminated by Adaptational Attractiveness. And given that one of the MC's souls is Cthulhu, this trope becomes invoked literally whenever they romance anyone.
- Divide by Zero: A core element of the "app battles" in the game are Roles and Rules, which are possessed by people with Sacred Artifacts. Any time two people with Rules that diametrically oppose one another are exposed to one another's power, it causes what's known as an Exception: reality warps and the original owners of the Sacred Artifacts held by the perpetrators are summoned, potentially destroying the world itself. The only way to undo an Exception is for the people that caused it to declare their rules' positions in a hierarchy.
- If either or both of the people that caused the error are the original owners of their Artifacts, they become an Exception instead and the hierarchy has to be declared by proxy.
- Its also possible to cause an Exception if an interaction between 2 powers would cause a time paradox.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: During the game's time when it was first released, every quest involved would have the player fight a battle, with the only exceptions being special quests where they would hang out with a character such as "Valentine Panic". This included missions where there was no need for conflict or even hints at an upcoming battle, such as the endings of "Gift for an Apprentice Santa" and "Black Snow on the Hot Spring Mountains". It wouldn't be until Chapter 4's "Escape from the Underground Cavern" where there would be quests that would have no battles whatsoever.
- Eldritch Abomination: Other than the Cthulhu Mythos-inspired characters, the aforementioned Exceptions, who are berserk versions of mythological figures. So far we've seen six, with different powers defined by the intersection between the two Rules that caused it: Yog-Sothoth, Thor, the Fisher King, Yukimura, Orlean, and Mahakala.
- Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: A unit belongs to one of eleven available elements. The relationships among the elements can be seen in a chart in this Wiki page
, but to put it in text:- Group 1: Fire, Water, Wood. Fire is disadvantaged against water, which is disadvantaged against wood, which is disadvantaged against fire.
- Group 2: Aether (Light) and Nether (Dark). They take double damage from each other.
- Group 3: Infernal (Demon), Valiant (Heroic) and World. Infernal is disadvantaged against valiant, which is disadvantaged against world, which is disadvantaged against infernal. In addition, each member of this group takes bonus damage from its own type.
- Group 4: All-Round, Infinite and Null. All-Round dominates infinite, which dominates null, which dominates all-round.
- Infernal deals and takes bonus damage to and from Group 1 and Group 2.
- Valiant takes half damage from Group 2, but deals half damage to Group 1. In contrast, World takes half damage from Group 1 but deals half damage to Group 2.
- All members of Group 4 deals and takes regular damage to and from the other three groups.
- Endless Winter: The world of Kamuy Kotan is pretty much frozen over.
- Enemy Civil War: The top executives of Roppongi Tycoons do no get along with each other, with behaviors ranging from lack of respect to declaring open war with each other. As it turns out, the same thing is happening on a larger scale with the 3 World Representatives Guild warring over the complete control of Tokyo and more importantly, the freedom to do whatever they want with the Player.
- Everyone Is Bi: Most characters are able to go on a Love Quest with the protagonist regardless of their gender or the protagonist's own, which is mutable.
- Fanservice: A lot of the male characters wear Stripperific outfits and have detailed muscles. Higher rarities are more likely to show more skin with exceptions. The few girls that appear are no slouches in this department either.
- Fantasy Kitchen Sink: Along with the Crossover Cosmology noted above, there are also a futuristic world as well.
- Female Gaze: Overlapping with Homosexual Male Gaze, of course. The game is more or less on permanent Female Gaze what with the swathes of Bishōnen, Hunks, and Big Beautiful Men making up most of the cast. There are still a decent amount of attractive female characters to supply Male Gaze as well, but the lion's share of the cast is clearly meant to appeal to players who're attracted to men.
- Freemium Timer: The game has a stamina meter that decreases every time a battle occurs. The maximum amount of stamina you can have increases as your rank increases. Stamina drinks can increase the available stamina beyond the maximum, allowing for more quests to be done, but once it goes lower than the maximum, a timer will begin showcasing when the stamina meter will fill up again.
- Getting Crap Past the Radar: Despite having a 12+ age rating note , this game gets away with a lot of sexual content that would otherwise not be allowed, such as visible crotch bulges and straight up nudity, courtesy of Bathym's ass.
- Gilded Cage: Chapter 9 revealed that is what the Walled Tokyo really is for the Player. A place where those who love and hate them exist in equal measure. Where the Player can achieve whatever they desire, so long as it benefits the masterminds. The catch however, is that it's only this way due to Michael and his cohort's machinations, and even that's beginning to fail due to in-fighting over what they to do with or to the Player.
- Hero Unit: The protagonist is their own unit that uses a sword with five different appearances to pick from, an assignable gender regardless of what appearance you picked, and five different voices to choose from. They also summon the other units you get from the gacha. The protagonist also costs much lower than units of similar rarity rating (3-star protagonist costs 0, while 4-star costs a measly 2), and their Sacred Artifact level cannot be raised via gacha since you cannot pull them that way (3-cost protagonist has their SA level increased via My Guild function, while 4-star protagonist can only increase their SA level by completing the absolutely brutal Refrain quests).
- Highly-Visible Ninja: The ninjas of this game are depicted as big, burly men with brightly colored headgears and a Full-Frontal Assault. Can be lampshaded by the protagonist in the main story chapters.
- Inconsistent Dub: May occasionally appear.
- Originally, Hati was known as Managarmr. However in-dialogue text referred to him as Hati. Eventually they updated his name to Hati overseas.
- Ganglie was called Gyoryu in Japanese. In the English localization they used Gangie instead, based on the original Chinese version of his namesake.
- Hourai, the world based on Chinese mythologies, is also often named as Penglai, a Chinese reading of the world.
- Limit Break: Forged Reification or Charge Skill, a super move that can only be used if a unit's Charge Points hit 100% during a battle. These attacks do more damage and have powerful effects, and sometimes even better attack range to compensate how rarely you can use them in battle. (Note that the game uses the actual phrase Limit Break for another purpose, namely, to increase a unit's level cap.)
- Makara: Makara hails from Deva Loka and is implied to have served as a vahana to Varuna. He looks like a blue humanoid crocodile and although he's fine on land he really livens up in the water. He is a member of Toyosu Marine Academy's water polo team and works as a lifeguard at the beach in Edogawa Ward. Makara has no alliances, only shows up during events, and is aggressively concerned with other people's safety and wellbeing, which is reflected in his restorative and movement-based skill list.
- My Rules Are Not Your Rules: Transients and objects hailing from Cthulhu Mythos are able to generate permanent change to the real world, bypassing the app rule where changes made during the app's battle zone execution will be removed when the app is closed.
- Narnia Time: Happens quite frequently, usually when battle zones and collided areas are involved. For instance, in Chapter 3, staying inside the underground Ikebukuro Labyrinth — a massive battle zone in itself — feels like hours or days, even though it had only been minutes since the protagonist had entered the Colosseum.
- No Woman's Land: As Babalon attests, women are treated like dirt in Eden.
- Obvious Rule Patch: Christine in Chapter 9 reveals that after a loop where the Game broke and the 3 factions immediately went for the Protagonist in a first-come-first-serve free for all, the Game Masters made them sign a peace treaty that prevents them from going after the Protagonist until a certain amount of time has passed in subsequent loops.
- One-Steve Limit: You can only obtain one copy of each unit; any duplicate you obtain will instead increase their Sacred Artifact level. Taken to the next level for character units: Each of them have multiple versions spread across different rarities, but you are not allowed to field more than one units of a particular name (so, no two Shiros, no two Kengos, etc. in a single team). Support units are exempt from this limitation, so it's possible for you to choose a Support who is exactly the same as someone in your team.
- Pillar of Light: How the gates are represented. No one knows how or why they came to be, but once they appeared, Tokyo would be inhabited by residents from worlds connected by the gates.
- Power Equals Rarity: Higher-rarity units have better starting HP and Atk on average, a higher level cap which allows them to possess even higher HP and Atk, and in case of character units, occasionally better abilities. This bonus is offset by their higher cost during team building; as of this writing, the only way for you to field five 4* units in a single team is to either reach player rank 120 (not an easy task) or field the 4* protagonist (who costs much lower than usual 4* units), while fielding more than three 5* units is completely impossible.
- Rare Candy: Aside from the many items needed or usable to increase Exp of units, there are also Seeds, which permanently increase the stats of a unit up to a certain limit. HP and Atk Seeds (and later blooms) increase their respective stats, Level Seeds increase level cap after you fully Limit Break a unit, and Skill Seeds increase the percentage of skill activation rate after you max out a unit's Skill Level. However, these items are incredibly rare, with HP and Atk seeds only becoming farmable once you clear story chapter 8, and Level and Skill seeds only being available in limited quantities from limited-time events.
- Rocket-Tag Gameplay:
- Because there are several pairs of elements that are mutually effective against each other (such as Aether vs Nether), fielding an entire team of one of such element against an enemy team of the opposing element tends to end the battle quickly.
- There are several different buffs that increase attack, and debuffs that decrease defense. Different buffs and debuffs that have similar effect are treated as separate and thus can stack, so with enough of them piled up, any heavily buffed unit can deal insane damage to any heavily debuffed unit.
- High level battles are generally this. Either you maim the enemy team on your very first turn, or they will destroy you in retaliation.
- Shirtless Scene: Many male characters have alternate portraits where their shirts are removed, sometimes stripped down all the way to underwear. Some of them also feature Clothing Damage, usually at higher rarities to show them Hulking Out and such.
- Shown Their Work:
- While some liberty is taken when designing characters based on mythological beings, those characters still possess some traits their mythological counterparts have.
- Hombretigre is one of the better researched characters in the game. As a character based on Lucha Libre (Mexican wrestling), nearly everything about the style was preserved with Hombretigre’s design, mannerisms and even wardrobe. His physique mirrors that of other, famous Lucha Libre figures (having plenty of muscle without sacrificing mobility) like Rey Mysterio and Carlos Colón (in his prime). He has an overall amicable personality that makes him appealing to people. And best of all, he has the talent to back it all up.
- Sickeningly Sweet: Gabriel can come off this way, as she deliberately crafts her image to be as sweet as possible.
- Status Effects: A great number of buffs and debuffs present in the game are essentially status effects, such as Damage Over Time debuffs (poison, burn etc), immobility (paralysis, fear etc), charm effect (possession) and more.
- Stout Strength: Some of the Blow units (who have great attack but have limited range in attacks) are both muscular yet chubby. Examples include Chernobog and Macan.
- Teenage Wasteland: The main populace of Kamuy Kotan are children.
- Too Awesome to Use: The AP-replenishing items, especially Stamina Major and Stamina Max. The reason is twofold: These items are only available as login rewards or occasionally via event shops and thus extremely rare, and those two particular items restore your AP as a percentage of your AP (half your max AP for Stamina Major, 100% of your AP for Stamina Max) and thus are more useful when you are at higher rank, which is when you have higher Max AP to benefit from these percent-based recovery.
- Turn-Based Strategy: The way battles are played out. You can only move around one unit at a time, but they can change the positions of other units. Half the difficulty is finding the best way to position your units in the time you have to make your turn.
- Useless Useful Spell: Buffs generally avert this: Having buffs such as protection, attack up, evasion, guts etc can save your team in dire situations, and having a correct strategy against enemies with said buffs can save you a lot of trouble. Debuffs, on the other hand, are a mixed bag: Things like charm, possession and skill bind can make the enemy team more manageable, but other debuffs that don't impede the enemy's offensive are often useless for some reasons: Enemy team tends to have too much HP for DoT effects to matter, debuffs on enemy teams tend to expire sooner that those on yours, and some of the most dangerous enemies are flat out immune to debuffs anyway.
- Wham Episode:
- Episode 8 has the reveals that the world has been looping countless times, organized by the Game Masters so that the Representatives can claim the Player, who is an amalgamation of 24 Exiles' souls, for their own personal goals. Then, Duo betrays the Summoners and sides with the Rule Makers.
- Episode 11 ends with the reveal that Kyoma is in fact the Transient King Solomon, working to save the Player from the greater forces after them. It ends with him sacrificing himself to give the Player a fighting chance to end the cycles of Game.
- Younger Than They Look: All over the place — it's very easy to forget that this game primarily focuses on students getting involved in all manner of supernatural action. Consequently, remembering that someone like Claude, a tall and beefy man who runs an entire Colosseum, is still young enough to be the president of his school student council can be quite the shocker. Though a decent portion of the cast averts this trope by at the very least being faculty of the schools they're associated with, rather than students.
