Visual Novel / Angels with Scaly Wings

Mystery Slice of Life Romance Game meets dragons.

Angels with Scaly Wings is full of dragons. You are selected as a human ambassador to travel there and learn more about their strangely familiar world, spending time in a small town and hanging out with the natives, even possibly finding love. At least, until your human colleague warns you that not everything is as it seems, and that this new world may be in danger...

Angels with Scaly Wings is available for purchase on Steam.

There's also a prequel comic called Angels with Broken Hearts.

A sequel has been announced for release in 2023.

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Angels with Scaly Wings contains examples of:

• Accessory-Wearing Cartoon Animal: Barring few exceptions like Damion's lab coat, the dragons don't use any clothes and walk around completely naked. Instead, they wear various accessories, usually associated with their job, function or hobby - examples include Bryce's police badge, Remy's rimless glasses and white collar with burgundy tie or Adine's flight goggles.
• Achievement Mockery: Many achievements require the player to do ridiculous or pointless things.
  • "Daredevil" is awarded for drinking a random, unlabelled white liquid in the player's fridge.
  • "Prescription" is awarded for taking painkillers until it knocks the player out.
  • "Nuisance" is awarded for refusing to cooperate with Bryce 99 times.
• Aerith and Bob: Most of the dragons you meet in game have normal, real-world names like Remy, Anna or Sebastian. However, there are also dragons with less ordinary names like Maverick, Lorem or Vara.
• After the End: As it turns out, the human world is in the middle of an apocalypse caused by a massive solar flare, with the protagonist's hometown being possibly the last bastion of civilization.
• Aliens Speaking English: Yes, they're dragons, but they technically count as aliens since they inhabit a completely different world (or so it seems at first) on the other side of a mysterious portal. Justified, since their world is actually planet Earth circa 65 million years ago, the portal was in fact built by humans, the dragons themselves are a product of genetic experiments with dinosaur DNA and their civilization was founded with great help from a human of our world.
• Alternate Timeline: If the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs is stopped, the timeline branches off into an alternate timeline where the dragons and the dinosaurs survive.
• Ambiguous Situation: It's not clear whether it was the protagonist or their future self who remains in the past with Adine in her good ending, only that one of the two does.
• Anatomically Impossible Sex:
  • At one point on a certain route, the protagonist, a human, has (unseen) sex with a male earth dragon, a creature around the size of a Clydesdale.
  • While in game it's not clear, the prequel comic shows this is also the case with Anna, as it turns out she's the same size as Maverick and thus only slightly smaller than the above dragon.
• Anyone Can Die: Every main character in the game is destined to die if you do not prevent it or make it happen by picking wrong choices. During your first playthrough, most of the cast — if not the whole cast — will most likely be dead by the ending. Keeping them all alive is required to achieve the true ending.
  • Remy is suffering from severe depression. If you fail to reassure him, or are downright mean to him, at some point you may find out that he could not stand it anymore and hanged himself in his apartment.
  • Anna tends to stay late at work. Because of that, she is murdered by Reza when he breaks into her lab at one night. You can prevent this by convincing her to leave for home early - in that case, her assistant Damion is killed instead.
  • Adine is eager to partake in aerial stunt competition, but has an accident during her practice a few days earlier. Her wing ends up hurt and is not yet fully healed in the day of competition. If you accompany her on that day, you may convince her to avoid the risk, withdraw from the tournament and try another day. If you do not accompany her, it is implied she took part in competition anyway, lost control of her flight due to the wing injury and fell to her death.
  • Bryce accompanies you during police raid on Reza's hideout. If you choose to go in first, your protagonist opens the door slowly and carefully — and is able to notice an explosive booby trap set by it. If you allow Bryce to go in first, he just barges in, triggers the trap and is killed in ensuing explosion.
  • Lorem leaves the town to go on a treasure hunt one day and wanders into abandoned and partially flooded store in the middle of nowhere. During search for clues, a shelf falls on him, trapping him underwater. If you accompany him on the trip, you are able to save him. If you do not, he is there all alone and drowns.
• Apocalypse Anarchy: Angels With Broken Hearts reveals the human world has fallen into this, with bands of raiders roaming the wastelands and the main antagonists of Reza's story being a group called the Carrions.
• Apocalypse How: The human world already suffered Class 1, since a powerful solar flare and the resulting EMP has shut down nearly every piece of technology mankind had at its disposal. The resulting worldwide chaos led to collapse of every known organized government, and humanity regressed back to the Stone Age. The protagonist is a citizen of probably the last existing city which retains advanced technology, and their mission failure will result in moving on to Class 2 or even Class 3. Dragon civilization, on the other hand, is endangered with Class 4, as the Chicxulub asteroid is on its way.
• Attack the Injury: During Bryce's Good Ending, Maverick tackles Bryce's bullet wound to incapacitate him, in an attempt to kill Izumi.
• Babies Make Everything Better: Zigzagged in Remy's good ending. The key to unlocking this ending is suggesting that if he wanted to start a family so badly (but those plans were ruined by tragic death of his would-be-fiance Amelia), maybe he should consider adopting a child. This ultimately makes him regain the joy of life and reconcile with Adine. Then it ends up subverted when it leads to another tragedy when Vara, an orphaned dragoness whom Remy decided to adopt, is murdered by Reza, and right in front of Remy at that, but in the end is once more played straight when Remy gets over his loss and becomes interested in adopting another young dragoness named Amely. Who, ironically, actually is partially his and Amelia's biological daughter.
• Better as Friends: Unlike many dating sims, it's entirely possible for the player to just have the protagonist decide they and the dragon in question are Better as Friends and turn down romantic advances with no negative consequences.
• Big Bad: Reza is the main antagonist. While he's not responsible for either apocalyptic event, his actions directly threaten the survival of human and dragon alike and he's the final hurdle that must be overcome to save them both.
• Bioweapon Beast: The tech used to create the dragons was originally intended to create bioweapon soldiers. Izumi decided to create a sapient species instead, but their Breath Weapons are a leftover from that.
• Bittersweet Ending: Nearly every ending in the game is this, the only exception being the true ending and those finales which are downright depressing. The recurring general outcome is that you are able to save only one civilization — humanity or dragons — while the other one is doomed. On more personal level, there's always someone who has to die so that others may live.
  • An example of more "bitter" ending is Remy's "good" ending, where dragons are saved at the cost of humanity, but Vara — a young dragoness whom Remy adopted — is murdered by Reza in front of him. He survives, though, and later returns to normal life, planning on adopting another child.
  • An example of more "sweet" ending is Adine's "good" ending, where dragon race is the only one to survive as well, and the protagonist — having no place to return to now — decides to live on by Adine's side.
• Bottomless Magazines: Averted with Reza's revolver. He can fire up to six bullets before he has to reload.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: In one chapter, it's possible to screw up and let a character die. Should you reload your save, the game refuses to let you, forcing you to live with your error for the rest of the playthrough.
  • To get the secret true ending, you have to get 60 achievements and interact with the System itself through a shady menu and Developer Tools, some options of which will crash the game. You get a media browser where you can edit every variable and see every graphical asset.
• Break Out the Museum Piece: According to Angels with Broken Hearts, Reza's revolver belonged to an ancestor who used it in the Civil War. In fact, many humans began resorting to antique weapons, since the solar flares that ravaged the world destroyed most high-tech weapons.
• Breath Weapon: Many dragons can breathe fire. On Anna's route, she explains to the player how her species in particular can spit out liquid that bursts into flames. Lorem's species has a small flame, but it's hotter than other dragons.
• Broken-Window Warning: In Angels with Broken Hearts, Linnea's window is broken, with the message "GO HOME, CITY SLICKER". It's implied to be done by Iris, who disapproves of Linnea's teaching methods.
• Broken Tears: Lots of them.
  • When Remy is recalling the story of his life — particularly his late girlfriend's tragic death — to the protagonist, at one point it is shown that he can no longer contain tears.
  • He does this again in his "good" ending when Vara, young dragoness he decided to adopt, is killed by Reza, and he is crying over her dead body.
  • After Adine is shot (non-lethally) by Reza in her "bad" ending, at one point there is a closeup on her while lying on the floor and it is visible that she is crying — presumably from pain.
  • Anna, when meeting you for the last time before epilogue, is all teared up because the evidence of her illegal experiments — geared towards finding a cure for cancer she's suffering from herself — are discovered by the police, and now she is certain that she is going to rot in prison, slowly dying there from terminal disease.
• But Thou Must!: There is a scene where Bryce asks the player for assistance and the player can accept or refuse, but if the player refuses Bryce just asks the player to reconsider. (There is an achievement for refusing 99 times.)
• Chekhov's Gun: You end up picking up a few and can use them in certain playthroughs.
• Chekhov's News: It being mentioned throughout the story that the area surrounding the Portal is surrounded by water pockets.
• Costume-Test Montage: In the prequel comic, Sebastian is seen going through several uniform arrangements before settling on his iconic hat.
• Creative Sterility: Played with. Dragons possess roughly the same tech as we humans do in real world and even use identical designs when it comes to architecture of their houses, the look of various utility items like furniture, et cetera. That is because they directly adapted our technologies thanks to Izumi's involvement in founding of their civilization — and apparently did that without any changes or ideas of their own, not even those that would adjust said technologies to suit dragons rather than humans (the chairs, for example, are definitely more comfortable for the latter than the former). Still, they do not seem to be completely sterile, since they did come up with some original inventions, like Ixomen Sphere and most importantly, the generators.
• Creator Cameo: Not really a creator cameo, but many backers for the game got to have bit parts with characters based on them inside. One even gets a rather large part due to donating around 500 Euros.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Quite a few.
  • Early in Maverick's police career, the police were investigating a serial killer, whose actions were caused by a degenerative disease that made him go feral. One night, they found the killer, who turned out to be Maverick's brother, Miles. Miles attacked Bryce and Maverick was forced to kill his own brother from behind to save Bryce.
  • A few years before the events in the game, Remy was a member of a committee evaluating science projects competing for government funds. He fell in love with a scientist working on one of such projects, a dragoness named Amelia, but after her project was granted a fund, they decided not to meet each other for a few months in order to keep their relationship secret and avoid being accused of favouritism. In that time, Amelia fell ill, but refused to take a sick leave since her project was already behind schedule. One winter night, she left the lab in order to refill her medicine supply, but - overworked, ill, and exhausted from the effects of the drugs she was taking - she collapsed on the street. When she was found the next morning, she had already frozen to death. Unsurprisingly, Remy was left heartbroken and blamed himself for leaving her all alone.
    • To rub more salt into the wound, Adine reveals that Amelia was pregnant with her and Remy's child when she died.
  • Lorem is a dimunitive dragon, visibly smaller than other dragons and even human characters. Because of that, he was unable to defend himself as a child when other young dragons bullied him - which they apparently did a lot. He eventually grew out of it, but other dragons still tend to shun him due to being a hermaphrodite. According to Lorem, many dragons who they thought of as their friends turned on them immediately and wanted to have nothing to do with them once they had learned the truth.
  • Zhong was raised by a foster family since his biological parents gave him up for adoption before he hatched. After he grew up, Bryce, then a regular police officer, helped him find his biological parents' home. The meeting between them did not go well, to put it lightly; while his mother tried to be nice, his father was downright hostile towards him the moment he learned who he was and eventually yelled at Zhong to leave his house and never come back. He never did.
    Zhong: I cried so much that day.
• Death of a Child:Vara, who is murdered by Reza in Remy's "good" ending.
  • Also averted with dragon eggs which Reza had stolen from the hatchery, and which get caught in the explosion if Bryce triggers the booby trap at Reza's hideout.
• Dialogue Tree: A given for the genre. Depending on what you do, you might have some dialogue options available or not at certain points. And no, it doesn't always have to be actions from your current playthrough.
• Dinosaurs Are Dragons: Literally, dragons are just dinosaurs and prehistoric reptiles bioengineered to have desirable features in the image of humans' conception of dragons, including breath weapons and sapience. Though it should be noted even though that's what they originally were, Izumi implies they've long since evolved into something very different from what she created.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Emera's behaviour and the sounds she makes when you agree to give her a massage are... suggestive, to say the least.
  Emera: Yes! YES! YES!!!
• Downer Ending: Nearly every available ending in this game is heartbreaking to a degree, but some of them are just... downright depressing. Arguably the worst one is Remy's "bad" ending, which results in both humanity and dragonkind wiped out. Heck, even some endings labelled as "good" are surprisingly bleak — like Anna's "good" ending, where dragon civilization is saved, but humanity is doomed, and Anna herself dies from cancer anyway.
• Dragons Are Divine: Inverted; dragons have a "creation myth" about a human (namely, Otomo Izumi) who founded their society.
• Driven to Suicide: How Remy meets his end if you fail to reassure him or are downright cruel to him.
• Earn Your Bad Ending: You can get a special ending by going out of your way to be mean to the dragons and horrible at investigations. Reza implies it happened at some point but despite having regained all their memories by that point, the protagonist doesn't remember it. The Administrator implies that this might not have actually been the protagonist, but their replacement ambassador who 'wasn't a good person.'
• Earn Your Happy Ending: For the true ending, very much this, it requires you going back in time via the portal multiple times to get multiple endings worth of information (and heartbreak) needed to work out a plan to save humanity and dragonkind from each of their societies' respective perils.
• Earth All Along: As noted elsewhere on this page, the supposedly alien world populated by dragons is actually planet Earth, albeit in distant past. About 65 million years ago, to be exact.
• Ensemble Cast: Angels with Broken Hearts regularly changes perspectives between several characters. Sebastian, Linnea, Amelia, Remy, Adine, Maverick, Anna, Zhong and Reza have all had a spot in the limelight so far.
• Entendre Failure: Some of the player's possible responses to Remy.
  Remy: Anyways, is there anything in particular you would like to eat?
  Protagonist: I could go for some "meat" right now... if you know what I mean.
  Remy: Of course! I have a few steaks left.
• Fantastic Racism: Different species of dragons have different physical builds and usually go into jobs that they are specialized for. As an early political ploy to gain public favor by going against this, Emera hired Remy, a four-legged dragon, to be her assistant in the library, a position usually held by nimbler dragons. Unfortunately, Remy makes many clumsy mistakes in his job and is bullied by Emera over this. This drives Remy to suicide in some story lines, until the player succeeds in reassuring him. Justified because the dragons were originally bioengineered from dinosaurs to serve as specialized warriors.
• Featureless Protagonist: Has no defined gender or age, but shows hints of sarcasm now and again.
  • Also, given that they adopt the guise of the Administrator at some point, we can see they're at least of average build.
  • There are a few dialogue options where the player can imply some aspects about themselves, although they don't have long-lasting effects. In one of Sebastian's scenes they can say "Don't call me sir", in one of Adine's scenes they can say how prone they are to sunburn, and in one of Anna's scenes they can make comments establishing themselves as Christian.
• Foreshadowing: In Adine's first character scene, she asks the player what they would do if the world was about to end. Turns out that she's going to have a chance to answer that for herself and see how the protagonist reacts, as the Chicxulub asteroid is headed their way.
  • When playing trivia questions with Anna, one of the incorrect answers is "Otomo Izumi", later revealed to be the name of the Administrator. The fact that the protagonist knows this name at all also foreshadows the reveal that the game begins long after the first timeline.
• For Want Of A Nail: There's one between each of the Good and Bad Endings relating to what the protagonist must have to unlock the Good ending, as well as between the Neutral Ending and the others:
  • The nail between the Neutral Ending and all the others is the protagonist confronting Reza with back up rather than alone.
  • The nail between Anna's endings is the protagonist telling her humanity has a cure for cancer and ensuring they'll do whatever they can to help her get it. This, combined with the protagonist doing something so kind for her, results in her choosing to tackle the protagonist out of the way of Reza's bullets rather than sacrificing herself like in the bad ending, as she actually has something to possibly live for. An earlier nail not relating to an ending is the protagonist convincing her to go home early from work just this once to get some rest saves her from being murdered by Reza.
  • The nail between Lorem's endings is finding and fixing the Ixoman Orb, which allows Lorem to program it so it can be used as an emergence weapon against Reza. This allows Reza to be disarmed, so the generator isn't destroyed (which would've killed Lorem) and the protagonist sends themselves and Reza back in time.
  • The nail between Bryce's endings is reconciling with Maverick and earning his trust to a degree. As a result, he shows up in time for the final confrontation, and thus Reza has to divide his attention between him and Bryce, so neither are fatally injured.
  • The nail between Adine's endings is giving her the map to the facility. As a result, she and Maverick realize they can go around another way and ambush Reza from behind rather than coming at him from the front. This also results in Reza's most decisive defeat, as Maverick tears his throat out before he can injure or kill either. There is also another nail earlier were if the player goes with her to her performance, stopping her from performing with her injured wing. In the timeline where they didn't do this, she dies.
  • The nail between Remy's endings is convincing him to reconcile with Adine, resulting in him becoming a foster parent to Vara. As a result, Vara shows up and attacks Reza, and despite being killed in the process, she manages to hold him off long enough for the Administrator to show up and stop him.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: The 'System' that you use to save, load, and skip is an actual character, an artificial intelligence that you can find and talk to in the Secret ending.
• Gave Up Too Soon: In Adine's "bad" ending, the protagonist lets Reza go to save themselves and Adine. However, listening to how many shots Reza fired reveals Reza was out of loaded bullets, and thus the protagonist fell for a bluff.
• Getting Crap Past the Radar: This game managed to get a T-Rating despite using "fuck" multiple times uncensored. In any given playthrough, the word is used at least once and at most three times. However, since players have to replay the game multiple times to get the True Ending, they will see the word at least five or six more times, 13 at the most.
• Golden Ending: The true ending — which is available only after you unlock the "good" ending for every main character's story arc (Remy, Anna, Adine, Bryce and Lorem) — where you finally unite all those characters and enlist their help in stopping Reza, making sure that nobody dies this time (except Izumi) and both humanity and dragonkind are saved. Humanity and dragons proceed to unite together, rebuilding Earth as one united civilization..
• "Groundhog Day" Loop: After the first playthrough, the protagonist is constantly reliving the events of the game over and over until they manage to finally get a timeline where Everybody Lives. Unusually for this trope, their memory of the previous timelines is foggy so they don't initially realize this is happening, while the behavior of the other characters is effected by their fates in previous timelines.
• Hello, [Insert Name Here]: With the added addition of making your name in a variety of colors!
• Hot Skitty-on-Wailord Action: The player is capable of actually having sex with two of the dragons. Both of them are much larger than them with with Bryce being about the size of a Clydesdale and the prequel comic revealing that Anna is as big as Maverick and thus only very slightly smaller than Bryce.
• Humanity Is Advanced: Played with. The dragon civilization possesses roughly the same technology as we humans do in real world — which, given the fact that game takes place in future, makes them less advanced than in-universe humanity. However, their disadvantage is mitigated by the fact that most of the mankind actually regressed to the Stone Age after worldwide EMP caused by powerful solar flare rendered nearly every piece of advanced technology irrevocably lost. The protagonist and Reza are citizens of last surviving city which retained some of those technologies, and is on verge of running out of resources anyway. The dragons, on the other hand, managed to surpass humanity in one regard. Namely, they created an efficient, ecological and apparently renewable energy source — those vaguely described "generators" of theirs. Which is the main reason humanity is so willing to trade their advanced technological knowledge for them.
• Hurricane of Puns: The game has puns scattered throughout, but there is an especially high concentration when the player investigates the fruit in their pantry.
• Info Dump: Several times.
  • The beginning of the game, in order to set the stage.
  • A long one happens when the protagonist explains what happened to Earth.
  • And an even longer one happens when the Administrator gives The Reveal about the dragons.
• In Spite of a Nail: In most endings, the player confronts Reza, who acknowledges that he killed the dragons, and then meets the Administrator, who is unmasked and reveals herself to be Otomo Izumi, the biological engineer who created the dragons and their society. In one ending, however, the person behind the Administrator's mask turns out to be the player in the future, tasked by a dying Izumi to do the same things she did so that the player's experience will be consistent with past playthroughs and the player will be able to reapply what they learned. In a different ending, Reza never killed the dragons and simply went into hiding, so the Administrator took it upon herself to kill all the dragons he did in other timelines for the same reason.
• Interspecies Romance: The entire point of the dating sim part of this game is that you, a human, are trying to date the dragons. It is also worth noting that there are multiple species of dragons, and some interspecies couples exist and may adopt dragons from the hatchery to raise as their own.
• Jumped at the Call: The protagonist signed up to enter the portal, but never expected to actually be chosen.
• Just Before the End: The dragons' world turns out to be in the time of the dinosaurs, mere weeks before the asteroid impact that will kill them.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: In several routes, when time travel is brought up.
  Bryce: Isn't that something that just happens in bad science fiction novels?
  Player: Why only bad science fiction novels in particular? Don't you think there could be a good one?
  Bryce: Let's just say all science fiction novels, because they're all bad.
  Player: Huge generalization aside, what if we are in a science fiction story and time travellers are real?
• Luke, I Am Your Father: In the true ending it is revealed that Amely, whom Remy adopts in some endings, is actually his and Amelia's daughter (after DNA splicing by Anna.)
• MacGuffin: The generators.
• Maybe Ever After: Adine's Good Ending ends on this note. Nothing overtly romantic happens, but both the protagonist and their temporal duplicate comment they'd love nothing more than to stay with Adine and one version of them does. The ending scene is of the two seemingly living together and taking care of Amely, but it's never confirmed or denied they're together and could still be read as entirely platonic.
• Medium Awareness: Early in the game, the player must figure out the meaning of a secret message from Reza. They can try to guess the meaning from a list of options provided by the game.
  Player: (I don't feel like any of these options is actually right.)
  (When the player chooses the last option:)
  Player: (Okay, this was the last option and it was still wrong. If that's not enough to prompt me to finally start looking elsewhere, I don't know what will.)
• Misfit Mobilization Moment: The True Ending sees the protagonist regain all their memories of previous timelines and unite all five of their friends. After telling them about what's really happening, they finally come together to get an Everybody Lives ending and Save Both Worlds.
• More Insulting than Intended: Bryce and his friends tend to poke fun at each other when hanging out. Unfortunately, everybody has gotten so used to his alcoholism that they don't mind making fun of it. This makes Bryce feel like he can't be honest about any of his problems, because he thinks he'll just be mocked.
• Motive Rant: Reza delivers it to your hero during the climax in nearly every playthrough — it can get tedious after playing the game multiple times. That said, if you unlock enough of the endings, at some point the protagonist will essentially say "screw this, we're not going through that again" and tell Reza to get down to brass tacks already.
• Multiple Endings: As is usual for a visual novel like this. The total is 13 or 14. Good/Bad endings for each main dragon, a neutral ending, an evil ending, the true ending, and, if you count it as a different ending, the "secret" ending you get for doing something while replaying after the true ending, though it is a rather minute difference apart from a new scene and set of puzzles involved.
• Mundanger: In a world of dragons and time travel, while there is a more fantastical looming threat, the main antagonist is an unhinged murderer with a knife and a gun.
• Never the Selves Shall Meet:
  • Izumi brutally makes sure of it, each time you restart Izumi kills off the original ambassador that would normally come in that timeline (sometimes it was you sent as the ambassador, other times someone else depending on what happened before the selection of ambassador), all so that you can take the place of that timeline's ambassador and have another chance to set things right.
  • Subverted in Adine's Good Ending, in which its revealed Izumi died (presumably before she killed the present version of the protagonist) and the future version of the protagonist took her place. The future version meets directly with their past self and has an extended conversation with themself with no consequences.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Izumi, and an alternate version of the player, deletes the coordinates for humanity's portal to contain Reza is a few routes. This sometimes directly results in humanity dying and forcing the protagonist to go back again. Particularly true in Adine's Good Ending, as Reza was defeated without anyone except him (including Maverick) being killed in the final confrontation and had the coordinates not been erased, the protagonist would've got the outcome they wanted then and there.
• Our Dragons Are Different: There are 4-legged dragons with or without wings, wyverns, and ones that stand upright. Ones with wings are referred to as Fliers, and upright ones as Runners. Turns out that they are basically genetically-engineered dinosaur-human hybrids, so it's reasonable that they are modeled after what the human scientists imagined dragons would be like.
• Precision F-Strike: Probably the only instance of a T-Rated game that has MULTIPLE uncensored F-Bombs in it.
  • The first one happens during the confrontation with Reza after the Administrator appears:
    Reza: Who the fuck are you?! Freeze! I said freeze!
  • The second is in Lorem's Good Ending after the protagonist brings Reza with them through the portal, back to the first day of the game.
    Reza: What the fuck is going on here?
• Quirky Town: The setting takes place in a small rural town with governmental areas and shopping districts, and all five main dragons either know or know of one another.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: In the True Ending, the protagonist regains all their memories of the time loop and recruits their five friends to Save Both Worlds, meaning the fate of two worlds is up to an ambassador, a jerkish scientist with terminal cancer, a hermaphrodite game developer, a chief of police with a drinking problem, a dorky, depressed archivist, and a delivery girl with aspirations of being an athlete. Justified, as there's no time for reinforcements to be called in and the police are spread thin by the festival, so there's no other option.
• Reset Button: Justified by time travel, in the game's standard endings via the portal you go back in time to try and succeed where you failed the previous time.
• Reverse Whodunnit: The story is a murder mystery, but with a twist: it's fairly obvious from the start that Reza is the murderer, the actual mystery is how the protagonist will stop him and more importantly, why Reza is doing this.
• Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: Each time you time travel back again, you remember parts of what happened before. With enough endings/attempts under your belt, you can get the true ending. This starts to happen to the other characters as well. After convincing Anna to not work so late, she'll no longer be the late night murder victim in the lab, and if Bryce dies from the planted bomb enough times, Sebastian will tell Bryce to stop before he gets to it, saying he has 'a bad feeling' about the current situation. This backfires on the protagonist, however, in the True Ending final confrontation, as the plan is derailed when Reza reveals he has these as well and sees through the deception.
• Ruder and Cruder: Angels with Scaly Wings was given a T-Rating, and for the most part is relatively tame in terms of language, usually amounting to nothing more than a "damn" every once in a while. But Angels with Broken Hearts is MUCH more lenient in that department, among other things. Some examples include Sebastian describing the taste of a cocktail as fruits having an orgy in his mouth, and Anna calling someone a fucktard.
• Running Gag: The Sheridan series.
• Save Both Worlds: The human world was ravaged by a solar flare and is presently slowly decaying into lawless anarchy while the dragon world is about to experience the K-T Extinction event. It's the hero's goal to save both. Even in the best ending, the dragon world itself can't be saved, but all the dragons are brought over to the human world, allowing it to rebuilt while they survive.
• Scenery Censor: There is a scene in the player's fourth date with Bryce where they happen to be holding a wine bottle at a convenient location in front of the camera that conveniently conceals what's probably a dragon boner.
• Scenery Porn: Traveling to another world involves some very lovely sky views. (But after The Reveal it turns out that this "other world" is just our world 65 million years in the past.)
• San Dimas Time: The Administrator explains that so long as the two portals are linked, time continues to progress at its normal rate in the future as it does at the other end. She can bypass this, however, and reprogram the portal to act as a proper time machine.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: After your first ending, this is what you the player are trying to do: prevent the downfall of both humanity and dragonkind.
• Sequel Hook: The secret ending.
• Shout-Out: The game is full of these.
  • Just for starters, the title itself is a Shout-Out the classic gangster film Angels with Dirty Faces.
  • "Objection!"
  • "Be the very best, like no one ever was."
  • "Gotcha! You thought that was your answering machine, but it was me, Adine!"
  • "You got some seashells. Three of them."
  • "Excuuuse me, Princess"
  • "Do or do not. There is no try."
  • "Draw me, like one of your..."
  • "How pointlessly tragic."
• Show Within a Show: Humans, a sitcom in which every character is a human (represented by dragons wearing fake, bulky costumes). Adine and Remy are both huge fans of it.
• Snowy Screen of Death: In the game menu, you have access to a screen showing the status of the main dragon characters, along with portraits of them. If one of those portraits gets replaced by static, that means the character in question has died.
• The Speechless: Vara. Possibly due to a Trauma Conga Line.
• Someone Has to Die: In every ending, at least one major character dies. Even in the True Ending, which is considered the "save everyone" ending, you cannot save everyone, as Izumi eventually bleeds out after being shot by Reza.
  • The third victim of Reza's killing spree is one of two characters: Anna or Damion. You cannot save both of them, and you have to save Anna to unlock the True Ending.
• Stable Time Loop:
  • It's implied this is the reason the timeline won't diverge unless the asteroid is stopped: as Reza pointed out, the asteroid will wipe out any trace of the dragon's civilization and any remains of them will be mistaken for dinosaurs. As a result, none of the time travel actually changed the past and the original timeline is preserved. Diverting the asteroid prevents the dinosaurs from going extinct, and thus changes history entirely.
  • The final timeline is this as well: all the dragons are taken to the present, meaning no sign of their existence remains in the past after the asteroid hits.
• Story Branching: The game has around 12 to 13 endings based on the routes the player takes. However, there's also a sizable amount of different interactions, options, and special dialog that only unlocks if events, interactions, or dates are done in a specific order.
• Stupidity Is the Only Option: A minor example when the player is waiting in Remy's office. There are many actions available, but the only one that will trigger the next scene is playing with Remy's computer and causing it to crash. It stands out from many of the other choices in the game, where the player only has enough time to choose one or two actions from a list of possibilities.
• Suddenly Shouting: Bryce does this during your fourth meeting with him, expressing frustration with his inability to apprehend Reza and prevent his murders.
  Bryce: [deadpan] Let this be my official apology to you. I apologize for anything I might have done to wrong you. I'm sorry to putting you through all of this and having to involve you in our work while trying to fix this whole mess, because in the end, it is all my responsibility.
  Protagonist: You don't need to apologize for anything.
  Bryce: [throws an empty wine bottle at the wall] THEN WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO, HUH?!?
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Adine injures her wing, but is still determined to compete in her competition, including performing a very dangerous stunt. Instead of pushing through and competing anyway as is often the case in fiction...the protagonist points out this is a very bad idea and very likely to result in her suffering an even worse crash that might kill her. Which is implied to be exactly what happens if the player isn't there.
• Take a Third Option: Humanity needs generators to keep its society alive, but the dragons need all their generators to prevent the rapidly approaching asteroid from destroying them. Because there isn't enough time to make more generators, Reza is attempting to save humanity and Izumi is attempting to save dragonkind, each at the expense of the other. In the True Ending, the player manages to Save Both Worlds by getting all the dragons to cross through the portal to live with humanity.
• Tarot Motifs: Each major character and some minor ones have cards relating to them that appear in the chapter transitions that, while not actual tarot cards, are stylized like them.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Adine and Anna care about the protagonist enough to work together, but they do not like each other and Bryce pretty much has to keep them focused on stopping Reza.
• The Chessmaster: Izumi, oh gods Izumi. She may not have resources like your normal chessmaster, but she has lots and lots of time to try to make her goals happen (and in one timeline attempt, you take her place.)
• Time Machine: The portal was meant to travel through space, but something went wrong and sent the facility 65 million years into the past instead. By the time the portal was completed on their end the one in the far future had been destroyed by the solar flare, and due to San Dimas Time, the only way to fix it would be to remove its safety to avoid it. After its limiter was turned off, it could be used as a proper time machine and link to any past or future version of itself, which allows the protagonist to return to the past in a "Groundhog Day" Loop.
• Timey-Wimey Ball: The game's time travel seems to alternate between genuinely resetting time and creating splinter universes. In general, though, it seems endings that see the asteroid diverted do splinter the timeline on some level. Regardless, characters to have a degree of Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory. It's also shown two of the same person exist when someone travels back in time, as the Administrator had to murder the protagonist's past self each time.
• Trapped in Another World: After a certain point, the portal is damaged and unusuable, trapping the protagonist in the dragons' world. Several endings also end with the protagonist unable to return to their own world. It turns out that Maverick sabotaged the portal to trap Reza.
• Trauma Conga Line:
  • Poor, poor Vara. Life is really hard on her. First, her father is killed by Reza, being his second victim. Then, her mother slowly dies from a disease as Vara is fruitlessly trying to help her, but obviously has no idea what to do. With a little help from main protagonist, she is finally found by authorities - while trying to tend to her mother's dead body - and sent to the orphanage. And finally, after Remy decides to adopt her in "good" ending of his story arc, Vara is murdered herself by Reza when she gets in his way during final showdown. And all this is happening to a little child.
  • Life was also quite hard on Remy himself. For starters, his girlfriend dies in tragic circumstances, ruining his plans of starting a family with her. He either quits his job or is fired, and later Emera gets him a new one that he is ill-suited for. This causes him to make many clumsy mistakes, effectively turning him into a laughing stock of the town and Butt-Monkey of his new boss, who openly ridicules and bullies him. He suffers from depression, is estranged from his friend Adine and apparently has nobody else to turn to. If the protagonist is mean and uncaring towards him as well, that proves to be a final straw for Remy.
  • And there's Anna, as well. A few years before the events in the game, she is diagnosed with cancer. Using her scientific knowledge, she tries to find a cure for her own disease - however, due to the controversial nature of her experiments, she needs official government permission to continue them. She is ultimately denied, making her experiments illegal. She is ultimately sentenced to probation, under the condition that she will land in prison if she continues her experiments. Desperate to save her own life, she secretly continues them. Her assistant Damion finds out about this and blackmails her, threatening to expose her if she doesn't pay him for silence. Eventually, the evidence of her wrongdoings is discovered by the police during the investigation of Damion's murder case. By the end of her story arc, she is completely devastated and afraid that she will spend the rest of her days in prison, alone, slowly consumed by a terminal disease.
• Videogame Caring Potential: There's a number of times you can reassure a distressed or frightened dragon, or generally make them happy in order to get the best result for a scene. Doing so will make the character call you or wish to see you again. Especially true with the non-main character dragons you have the option of helping: it has no effect on the story to do so, you don't earn a better ending, all you get is an achievement at most...but you can still do it purely to be kind.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: Likewise, there are multiple opportunities to mock and insult the dragons, which will make them dislike you and not want to see you again. Doing it enough will result in the Evil Ending.
• Villain Episode: One of the settings in Angels with Broken Hearts explores Reza's origins.
• Wham Episode:
  • Chapter 3: If not prevented, Anna is murdered by Reza. The portal is broken, trapping the protagonist in the dragon world, and it's revealed the human world was ruined by a massive solar flare and slowly dying.
  • Chapter 4: Bryce, who's basically been the Big Good of the game up until this point, can potentially be killed off. Should the player have not befriended them, Lorem dies offscreen, and the Administrator finally meets the protagonist face to face and explains the portal is effectively a Time Machine and the dragon world was Earth All Along, just 65 million years in the past. The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs is on its way and if not avoided, the dragons will be extinct.
• Wham Shot:
  • Page 291 of Angels With Broken Hearts opens with the mutilated corpse of one of Miles' victims.
  • Page 310 of Angels With Broken Hearts has Reza and Kenneth finding the human world portal in a buried crate in the desert, revealing Reza was directly involved in kicking off the game's events.
• Year X: The game's human world is set in the year 20XX. Angels with Broken Hearts confirms that Reza graduated high school in 2052, narrowing the time frame down.
• You Are Fat:
  • If the player wants to be on bad terms with Bryce, the protagonist can make various insults at Bryce's weight.
  • When Adine mentions throwing out a weight-loss magazine, the player can remark that she clearly needed it. She's more saddened than angered by this.

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System: Bring me back.