Video Game / Flight Rising

Everything's better with dragons.

Flight Rising is a free Virtual Pet / Breeding Sim focusing on dragons. It launched on June 9th, 2013, following a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign. It was mainly created by Jessica P. "Undel" (the artist and author behind the Dragon Art: How to Draw Dragons series of drawing books) and Dana P. "Xhaztol". It features nineteen species of dragons, breeding, familiars, apparel, a Coliseum for both monster and Player Versus Player battles, holidays, and buying and selling dragons.

When you join the game you choose your 'Flight'^note the eleven Flights are based off of elements, led by a deity who your clan will serve, and receive two dragons. One is player-customized and the other is randomly generated. Your clan's eye color and lair aesthetic are determined by your Flight’s element; you can swap to a different Flight (under a different deity) once every six months.

Players can alter the look of their dragons by adding inheritable genes, non-inheritable player-created skins or accents, and a variety of apparel items. Eleven months of the year include one Flight's holiday week, in which a special festival currency may be collected and exchanged for Flight-themed apparel and familiars.

Previously only open during specific periods, Flight Rising registration is now open at all times. It can be found here.

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Flight Rising contains examples of:

#-L

• 20 Bear Asses: Acquiring the resources required for some of the Swipp swaps can feel like this, especially if they double as Coliseum drops. Can result in farming monsters at length to collect cloven hooves, bird skulls, pink catfish, etc.
• Abandoned Laboratory: The Golem Workshop Coliseum venue, an abandoned factory featuring loads and loads of robots that attack you.
• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: The Waterway Coliseum venue is a very large sewer crawling with slime creatures and mutant fish and rats.
• Achievement System: Avery's shop is where you redeem currency for the updated achievements system, added to commemorate the site's 10th anniversary.
• Added Alliterative Appeal:
  • The eight sites of the trading post are Crim's Collection Cart, Pinkerton's Plundered Pile, Swipp's Swap Stand, Tomo's Trivia Tablet, Baldwin's Bubbling Brew, Roundsey's Raffle Roulette, Galore's Glorious Gifts, Fiona's Fantastic Familiars, and Arlo's Ancient Artifacts. During holidays, they're joined by Festive Favors.
  • The Volcanic Vents Coliseum venue.
  • Four of the Fairgrounds games have alliterative names: Shock Switch, Tidal Trouble, Glimmer & Gloom, and Mistral Mahjong.
• Aerith and Bob: The random name generator can have this tendency: Darius, Myloph and Intermezzo are all equally likely to show up.
• A.I. Roulette: Enemies in the Coliseum run like this. Enemies with full health bars will heal themselves, enemies with full breath bars will continue to meditate, and enemies will use elemental attacks against the dragon on your party with the strongest resistance to that element. Unless, of course, the enemy uses their attacks properly and wrecks your team in 3 turns. That is also possible.
• Allegedly Free Game: Deliberately averted by the game's creators, to prevent "pay to win" gameplay. While purchasing premium currency (gems) can result in a higher cash flow, there is a large market for converting between premium and non-premium (treasure) currencies and items can be bought and sold with both. The conversion rate is player-determined.
• All There in the Manual: Nearly all of the game's lore is found in the Encyclopedia. It also contains info on the game's mechanics and content (Swipp trades, Coliseum loot, retired/cycling items).
• Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: Applies to dragons^note 177 colors, three per dragon, familiars and food critters/plants. The world is very bright.
• And Man Grew Proud: In the game's lore, this was what caused the eradication of humanity and the end of the Second Age. Scientists and wizards got together to create a massive machine in order to "fortify life, challenge death, and know the true potential of magic." Instead, it exploded, taking nearly all the life on the planet with it. (Said explosion also inadvertently created the Arcanist.)
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: Your dragons can all deck themselves out in various outfits and skins to change their appearance, and many outfits can be found as a reward for defeating enemies in the Coli.
• Animal Motif:
  • Due to the Mix-and-Match Critters nature of the various breed designs. Nocturnes are essentially bat dragons, Skydancers are birdlike, and Coatl look like a cross between snakes and ferrets with some feathers slapped on. While it isn't so obvious in their appearance, Mirrors are also comparable to wolves or hounds, and a group of them is called a pack rather than a clan.
  • Each element has its own "spirit animal," too, as symbolized by the "Spirit of [Element]" familiars. Earth is a ram, Fire is a phoenix, Ice is an owl, Light is a rabbit, Lightning is a mantis, Nature is a stag, Plague is a rat, Shadow is a bat, Arcane is a squid, Water is a sea turtle, and Wind is a snake.
• Animal Facial Hair: The Wise Whiskers apparel item, a bushy gray mustache and eyebrows. Guardian males and Tundras of both sexes also naturally grow beards, and both the Earthshaker and the Gladekeeper have beards (albeit made of plant material since they're dragon gods).
• Animals Not to Scale: In the Coliseum, all dragons and mobs appear roughly the same size, with the exception of boss monsters.
• Animate Inanimate Object: Many familiars, including virtually all Night of the Nocturne exclusives.
• Animated Armor: Two of the Night of the Nocturne familiars, with one of them sharing a name with this trope.
• Apocalypse How: Class 5, twice, the first creating and the second caused by one of the deities before the game's present setting and the reason for many of its 'lost culture' items.
• April Fools' Day: Most years, each player gets a "chest" that, when opened on April 1, turns into another chest on an endless loop. After April 1, opening the chest gives you an item and turns into a "depleted" chest, which, like on April Fool's, can be opened and turned into the other chests over and over. Something silly also happens to the site's layout, though never drastically interfering with regular gameplay.
  • April Fool's Day of 2014 didn't have any changes to the site's layout, but top hats that gave out rabbit familiars were provided.
  • April 1, 2015 had the site turn into a Stylistic Suck version of itself, with all of the text (including the game's logo) being in Comic Sans, the dragons in the top banner gaining googly eyes, both the top banner and background images having awful JPG artifacting, and the header text reading "Fligthtr Risng". Players received spools of thread that gave out ugly sweaters.
  • On April 1st of 2016, the banner dragons were fine. It was every single player-owned dragon that got googly eyes instead, complete with dragons of different elements getting different types of eyes. The items that year were mirrors (not the breed) that yielded apparel versions of the silly eyes.
  • April Fool's 2017 introduced "Flight Rising HD," which replaced all of the dragon images with new and improved versions...drawn in MS Paint by the game's lead programmer. The artwork was removed on April 2nd with the simple note "Mistakes were made." Rather than having a "chest" item like previous years, players instead received two special apparel items: "The Emperor's New Clothes" (which does nothing except take up an apparel slot) and Marva's Invisibility Cloak (which turns the dragon wearing it and any apparel equipped underneath the cloak invisible; apparel equipped above the cloak appears to be floating in thin air).
  • April Fool's 2018 replaced all of the banner ads with fake Flight Rising-related ads, including clickbait parodies. Players received eggs that could hatch into a phoenix or buttersnake familiar.
    Stormcatcher doesn't want you to know these 5 simple power-saving tricks!
  • April Fool's 2019 had dragons switch places with their familiars. The gift items this year were crafting kits that became paper masks of the various dragon breeds.
  • April Fool's 2020 saw the Which Waystone become sentient and start providing unsolicitated commntary and advice. Players could pick up chunks of rock that became mini-Waystone familiars.
  • The dragon images were rotated in various directions for April Fool's 2021. Players received swag bags with items themed after Luminax, Sornieth's resident Dracolich.
  • April 1, 2022 had all dragon profiles gain scrolls containing a variety of predictions, advice, and silly messages. Players received vials with fish in them.
• The Archmage: The Arcanist, deity of all things mystical and magical, and the cause (directly and indirectly) of two apocalypses. (And counting.)
• Art Evolution: The site's art style has changed slightly since its inception, going from black outlines to colored outlines and generally being more detailed. (This is most obvious with the first two Rockbreaker's Ceremony special apparel items, because they're obviously intended to be worn on the same dragon, but the outline changes mean that it doesn't work as well as it should.) Some older items have had their art changed to fit in better with newer items.
• Ascended Meme: When the World Map received an overhaul in March 2021, the userbase immediately found Luminax, the multiheaded Dracolich wandering around Light Flight, to be endearing. The site's staff responded by theming that year's April Fools' Day items after a Luminax-themed convention.
  Aequorin: (...)the LuminaxCon apparel set is our meta-joke and love letter to our community.
• Barrier Maiden: An unusual use is seen in the site's lore—8 of the 11 deities once combined to form a pillar that held up a magical barrier to protect the world from the Shade.
• Big Boo's Haunt: The Ghostlight Ruins Coliseum venue; most of the enemies you face there are ghosts or undead enemies.
• Biological Weapons Solve Everything: Both Gladekeeper and Plaguebringer think so. Both deities have made powerful virus- or flora-creating weapons that can destroy the entire world if either one is set off, though Plaguebringer is notably the one who frequently dabbles in biological experiments by stirring up new viruses in the Wyrmwound like it's a cauldron. However, it should be noted that the viruses are less like weapons and more of a test of strength against her flight. The Final Infection is just the only one that's deliberately meant to be completely inescapable and cover the planet in the Plague element.
• Blow You Away: The Windsinger, ruler of the Windswept Plateau and the Wind Flight, utilizes wind magic.
• Borrowed Without Permission: Ridgeback dragons have an entire culture around stealing resources by using tunnels and traps to secure whatever they need, which they consider "borrowing" much to the annoyance of other dragons. If caught, they usually just shrug it off and insist that they would've returned it upon being asked. This mindset was developed thanks to living in a desert.
• Breath Weapon: A magical variant; several coliseum attacks reference this trope, and the Tundra breed style of fighting revolves around it. In battle, "breath" is used as the equivalent of MP.
• Bubblegloop Swamp: The Mire Coliseum venue is basically a swamp. Watch out for the giant toads.
• Casting a Shadow: The Shadowbinder, ruler of the Tangled Wood and the Shadow Flight.
• Catlike Dragons: The Obelisk breed, which is based off of Chinese Guardian Lions and Pixiu.
• Chained by Fashion: The Icewarden's 2014 festival item is this, leading to some speculation about what, exactly, his Flight gets up to in its long dark winter nights.
• Character Blog: Sort of; all eleven gods have their own dens/clans (accounts), just like the normal players, and they exist in said dens as actual dragons. You can also see them make forum posts from time to time - indeed, they sometimes respond to users.
• Character Level: Applies to your dragons in the Coliseum, and to your entire lair for item gathering. Higher levels unlock the option for finding different, higher-value items.
• Cheap Gold Coins: The standard currency is treasure, represented by gold coins. You get 250 treasure per day just for logging in and keeping your dragons fed, while higher-end lair expansions will set you back over a million treasure. Each.
• Cherry Blossoms: An apparel item gives this effect, but with rose, daisy, violet, and black tulip petals in addition to sakura blossoms. Matching flower crown, lei, and corsage items exist to match.
• Chest Monster: The mimic enemies (Snarling Mimic, Ectoplasmime, and Jawlocker) that can only be fought during the Night of the Nocturne event in December. They're also available as familiars, so you can have your very own living treasure chest as a pet.
• Clickbait Gag: As seen in the fake banner ads displayed on the site during April Fools' Day 2018.
  Do This Every Day! This simple weird trick will keep your noggle shiny and vibrant.
  11 reasons why dragons mean the end of Sornieth! Number 7 will shock you!
• Clingy MacGuffin: Collectable holiday currency cannot be sold or discarded, only stored away. Similarly, certain "specialty" items used for customizing dragons cannot be sold either.
• Color-Coded Elements: Visible in the deity and lair art, dragon eye color, and elemental attacks. Also crops up in the color wheel: Sand, Leaf, Fire, Storm, Ice, etc. are all possible dragon colors, and they look as one would expect.
• Common Tongue: All dragons can speak traditional draconic, though Coatls have their own language and have some difficulty speaking draconic and Faes supplement it with a complex body language that other breeds cannot understand. Beastclans also use a beastclan-wide variant in addition to their own languages.
• Concealed Customization:
  • Skins (which can be added to or removed from a dragon like apparel) cover all or nearly all of a dragon, completely hiding their natural colors and genes. It's also possible to layer a dragon with so much apparel that it's hard, if not impossible, to tell what the dragon underneath looks like. Depending on the dragon, this can be a good thing...
  • It's impossible to see most of the eye types (except Multi-Gaze, Primal, and Glowing) on many adult dragons due to how small their eyes are compared to the rest of the body.
• Cooldown: After a dragon breeds, they can't breed again for at least two weeks. The exact length depends on the breed's rarity, ranging from 15 days for the "plentiful" breeds^note Guardian, Tundra, Fae, Mirror to 35 days for the "rare" breeds^note Wildclaw, Coatl. Using a Swiftbrood Boon will let a dragon breed immediately...by adding time to their next cooldown, so you'll have to wait even longer until they can breed again (and no, you can't use it on a dragon that has an extended cooldown).
• Crapsaccharine World:
  • A cute, harmless game in which you breed colorful dragons... who are constantly at war with each other over limited land and resources, and the more adorable something is, the more likely it is to be a food item. A lot of the darker elements of the game aren't immediately apparent.
  • This is taken up to eleven with the Arcane Flight, whose element colour is pink and whose themes include crystals, dreams and stars, and who also happen to be accidentally warping the world around them. Arcane-themed things tend to be both pretty and/or cute and rather foreboding, if not downright creepy, such as the many-eyed bird familiars or Irradiated Astronomers, or the world map flavor text for the Starfall Isles, all of which have a distinctly Lovecraftian writing style. If you gather items from Arcane you have an equal chance of turning up tooth-rottingly sweet foods (like Sugary Prickleleaves and Nebula Floaters) and unsettling or grotesque things that you could also find in Plague or Shadow (like the see-through Glass Minnows or weird-sound-making Dark Creepers).
  • The planet itself is also undergoing some changes that put all of dragonkind at jeopardy in one way or another. Earthquakes are shaking up the Starfall Isles, a mysterious Ancient Evil forcing one deity to go underground, peaceful research sanctums being converted into unstable energy reactors, a Draco Lich hunting dragons in Sunbeam Ruins, ANOTHER Ancient Evil that's on the verge of being released from ice thanks to earthquakes, portals connecting two enemy flights suddenly being activated, a civil war over resources, a gigantic vortex suddenly changing direction, an entire dragon god going missing without explanation, and the armistice between two Arch-Enemy flights was not only violently broken but at least one world-ending Bio Weapon is missing. Needless to say, dragons in every flight are beyond stressed.
• Crazy Cat Lady: Fiona, a Trading Post NPC, has the stereotypical haggard appearance of one, and you bond with eight random familiars per day from her massive hoard of pets.
• Creature-Breeding Mechanic: The primary focus of the game. Dragons can come in several breeds and colors, and genes can be added to a dragon in order to give it special markings and features. All of these traits can potentially be passed down, with inheritance calculated differently for each.
• Crystal Landscape: The Crystal Pools Coliseum venue; besides the setting, most of the enemies there are also crystal-themed.
• Dark Is Not Evil:
  • A good deal of world-building and lore is dedicated to balancing Deity characteristics; while the Shadowbinder, Stormcatcher and Plaguebringer all use a darker aesthetic, their natures are not truly 'evil.'
  • Averted with The Shade, which is an enormously powerful and evil embodiment of the void that manifests as a gigantic Living Shadow.
• Death Mountain: The Harpy's Roost Coliseum venue, featuring harpies and dodos.
• Defeat Means Friendship: The Beastclans can be used as Familiars if they are defeated in the Colosseum.
• Dishing Out Dirt: The Earthshaker, ruler of Dragonhome and the Earth Flight.
• Dragon Hoard: A literal example. All your clan loot, food, apparel and familiars are stored in it.
• Dragon Variety Pack: The game features a number of dragon breeds based on a variety of mythical and animal sources, including and not limited to Guardians, which look like traditional Western dragons, the more Eastern-styled Imperials, serpentine Spirals, raptor-based Wildclaws, and Obelisks who are basically just Asian Lion Dogs.
• Either/Or Offspring: It's impossible to have hybrid dragons because a hatchling can only be born as the species of either parent, which is determined by chance and breed rarity. This doesn't stop players from making their own dragons into hybrids in their written bio or even drawing fan art of what a true hybrid could look like.
• Eldritch Abomination: The Shade, referenced in the lore, has ...shades of this.
• Eldritch Location: The Forbidden Portal coliseum venue added in June 2020.
• Elemental Eye Colors: A dragon's eye color is determined by the element of the nest it hatched in. Some people choose their flights solely based on eye color; others who are already attached to their flight but hate the eye color associated with it will rent nests from other players in order to get dragons with an eye color they want. Coliseum enemies do not necessarily have the eye color that they're 'supposed' to, to the annoyance of some players; the lore handwave is that elemental eye colors only apply strictly to dragons because of their innately magical natures.
• Elemental Nation: Each flight essentially functions as an individual country ruled over by an elemental dragon deity. A dragon's element is influenced by what elemental energies their egg absorbed from the environment, so outside of finding eggs from Coliseum enemies and Scavenging, most arcane dragons come from Starfall Isles, ice dragons come from the Southern Icefield, and so on. The only exception to this are the dragons hatched from the Unhatched Nocturne, Bogsneak, and Banescale Eggs, which function differently from the eggs in the Nesting Grounds since all three types can hatch a dragon of any color and element. Though rather than being called countries, they're simply referred to by what deity they associate with, so the groups named after elements like the Arcane flight, Ice flight, Fire flight, etc.
• Elemental Powers: Eleven total: Ice, Shadow, Wind, Water, Nature, Light, Lightning, Fire, Arcane, Plague and Earth. Each has a dragon god ruling it.
• Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: Each element is stronger/neutral/weaker in relation to other elements, making for some interesting Coliseum combinations.
• Enemy Mine: The deities aren't too fond of each other, with several of them openly waging war (possibly for centuries), but when the Shade shows up they're more than happy to band together. Of course, there's also nothing stopping player clans from allying within their lore regardless of flight.
• Extra Eyes: Both Plague breeds, Mirrors and Aberrations, have some extra eyes in one way or another. Mirrors have an even number of four eyes, two of which have normal vision but the smaller ones grant them thermal vision, which can cause them to get blinded on occasion by seeing too much heat. The two-headed Aberration dragons have a surprising total of five eyes, with one head having two eyes while the other has three.
• Eyes Do Not Belong There: Any dragon with the Multi-Gaze eye type has a long set of eyes lining the sides of their body from head to tail.
• Facial Façade: The Wicked Smile and Vile Grin familiars — first released during the 2023 Night of the Nocturne event — resemble large moths with eye spots on their wings, in reference to some real life variations of the trope. This is lampshaded in the tooltip for the Vile Grin:
  Whoa! Best to give the flying face a wide berth - you have moths to hunt!
• Familiar: A wide range of critters can be attached to your dragons as either pets or allies (depends, of course, on if they're sapient or not). Bonding with them through daily clicking results in treasure and, with time, item-containing chests.
• Family Business: In October 2015, Swipp's daughters Pipp and Tripp joined the Swap Stand. Now, in addition to Swipp's deals, each of his daughters will offer an extra item, for a small additional fee. Pipp shares her father's entrepreneurial exuberance, while Tripp is a bit more dour and unenthusiastic.
• Family Theme Naming: Swipp and his daughters, Pipp and Tripp.
• Fantastic Fallout: Energy from the Arcane Flight is specifically compared to radiation, being capable of making dragons sick, mutating the local wildlife, and distorting the land around the Starfall Isles.
• Fantastic Racism: There are occasional instances of prejudice between dragons of different species and elements in the lore of the game. The latter is easily explained because of the long history of conflict between the Elemental Nation flights, though occasionally more physical-based examples appear, such as the case in the Temper, Temper short story where one Coatl is called a "snakehead" by a Bogsneak.
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink: The world of Flight Rising is this: There is elemental magic, actual magic, electricity and technology side-by-side in a world ruled by dragon deities and populated by dragons, llama people, centaurs, hippogriffs, clockwork frogs, faeries, sprites and unicorns. Judging by the apparel, pirates, ninjas, Egyptians and cowboys are also in residence.
• Fictional Holiday:
  • Each flight has their own week-long festival held at or near the end of their respective month, featuring opportunities to get flight-themed items, skins, and accents.
    • January: Crystalline Gala (Ice)
    • February: Trickmurk Circus (Shadow)
    • March: Mistral Jamboree (Wind)
    • April: Wavecrest Saturnalia (Water)
    • May: Greenskeeper Gathering (Nature)
    • June: Brightshine Jubilee (Light)
    • July: Thundercrack Carnivale (Lightning)
    • August: Flameforger's Festival (Fire)
    • September: Starfall Celebration (Arcane)
    • October: Riot of Rot (Plague)
    • November: Rockbreaker's Ceremony (Earth)
  • In December, rather than an elemental holiday, the game has a two-week-long festival called the Night of the Nocturne, which is the only way to get Nocturne eggs and breed change scrolls, as well as many other exclusive items.
  • Finally, there are five-day "micro-holidays" each season which feature increased Coliseum drops for one of the four types of food items, increased Coliseum experience, and added familiars (which are also obtainable after the event through gathering). Fall has Drakeharvest in September (more plant drops), winter has Frigidfin Expedition in December (more seafood drops), spring has Springswarm (more insect drops), and summer has Sunparched Prowl (more meat drops).
• Fireball Eyeballs: Fire dragons with the Primal eye type have flame coming out of their eyes.
• Fluffy Fashion Feathers: Aside from dragon breeds with their own natural feathers, there is a very fluffy range of apparel items that operate on this trope.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: The site does have official lore but the admins have no interest in enforcing it on players, who have developed a culture of using or ignoring site lore as it suits them. This mostly comes up when players decide to write their own biographies and other lore about their own clans, but does intersect with gameplay - nothing is preventing players who aren't in the Fire flight from breeding their Coatls, nor from having Imperial/Pearlcatcher pairs despite the in-lore animosity between the two breeds, and so on. On the other side of things, the dragon-trading section of the Auction House is strictly a game mechanic and doesn't seem to exist in lore, though this doesn't stop some players with coming up with (often dark or at least alien) explanations for it.
• Gassy Gastronomy: Mentioned in the description of the White Cabbage Butterfly food item:
  Caution: Excessive consumption of this butterfly may cause cabbage farts. Think of your den mates.
• Gem-Encrusted: The entire purpose of the Gembond tertiary gene is to cover your dragon in sparkly gems.
• Giant Flyer: The larger dragon breeds, of course, but some boss familiars also count, such as the Roc and its Palette Swap the Crowned Roc, the bosses of the Harpy's Roost coliseum venue.
• Global Currency Exception: The special items available during the holiday festivals can only be bought with special currency (different for each festival) which is useless at any other time.
• Glowing Eyes:
  • You can give these to a dragon with a Vial of Glowing Sight.
  • Light dragons with the Primal eye type also have glowing eyes, although it might be more accurate to say that their eyes are light.
• Goggles Do Nothing: After they're steamed up, that is. Several colors of goggles exist in-game, though it's plausible that flying dragons would find a very good use for them.
• Gold Makes Everything Shiny: Gold is a gatherable material. It is used to make several gold apparel pieces and can be traded for the lauded Gilded Decorative Chest, an extremely shiny item. One of the Kickstarter rewards was a Golden Idol familiar.
• Gotta Catch Them All: The Bestiary keeps track of all the familiars owned by your lair; filling it is one possible player goal, made difficult by rare familiars exclusive to specific events.
• Gratuitous Japanese: The Bishoujo Observation apparel item, giant animesque eyes for your dragon.
• Gravity Master: According to Word of God, Arcane dragons are able to manipulate gravity around them.
• Green Hill Zone: The Training Fields Coliseum venue, which as the name suggests, is the lowest-level venue. It's a bright green field and you'll never encounter more than two enemies in a battle (later venues usually have three and can have up to four).
• Green Thumb: The Gladekeeper, ruler of the Viridian Labyrinth and the Nature Flight, who controls magic related to growing and plants.
• Harping on About Harpies: One race of Beastclans.
• Have You Seen My God?: The Tidelord went missing during the Bounty of the Elements, causing Water dragons to no longer be able to receive prophecies from him. It's unknown where he went, though subsequent lore installments have clarified that he's still alive.
• Holiday Mode: The monthly festivals are this, with special currency and the Elemental Festival Shop available for one week only. However, unlike many other games, none of these holidays are analogous to real-life secular or religious holidays. A few real-world holidays have been acknowledged over the site's history outside of the monthly elemental festivals:
  • April Fool's Day sees the site have various Stylistic Suck gags applied to it with a few new items from the mysterious Marva. Initially, she left her items in players' hoards directly, but these days Galore hands them out.
  • International Talk Like a Pirate Day has sales of exclusive pirate-themed apparel and familiars.
  • Valentines Day also has exclusive familiars and apparel.
  • American Thanksgiving used to be acknowledged with the Woodland Turkey familiar only being available for the last few days of November, but this was later retconned and the familiar is now available year-round.
• Homemade Sweater from Hell: The 2015 April Fool's items are tacky sweaters that your dragons can wear, which look exactly as ridiculous as you would imagine dragons wearing ugly turtleneck sweaters to be. Going even further, the purple-and-neon-green Glorious Sweater has this description:
  "Knitted by a grandma tundra from her own fur; you really can't refuse this glorious generosity."
• Hot Skitty-on-Wailord Action: Any dragon can breed with any dragon of the opposite gender, regardless of breed or size. Occasionally invokes this trope for players who pay attention to their dragons' listed size and weight. (Every dragon's portrait is the same size, but if you actually read their vital stats, the smallest Fae look to be about the size of the largest Imperials' individual whiskers.)
  • Averted for the ancient breeds, who can only breed with other ancients of the same species.
• Ice Palace: The Fortress of Ends, where the Icewarden resides, is said to be one of these.
• An Ice Person: The Icewarden, ruler of the Southern Icefield and the Ice Flight, controls and icy domain and controls the element of ice.
• Insistent Terminology: Staff maintains that the Night of the Nocturne is a "celebration of the Nocturne flight and of the mimic creatures" and NOT a second Shadow flight fest despite the focus on a Shadow breed of dragon and the holidays' shared themes of trickery and illusion.
• Insult Backfire: The description for the Yellow-Frilled Eel, "These eels swim in erratic circles and often tie themselves into knots. Some dragons sneer and claim that they are the ancestors of Spiral dragons; Spiral dragons grin because they think that is a super cool idea."
• Item Crafting: Baldwin's Bubbling Brew. Rather than using items to make other items directly, you transmute items into Baldwin-exclusive materials that can then be used to craft unique items. (However, some recipes do require additional items alongside the normal Baldwin materials, and all of them require you to pay treasure to make.)
• Item Farming: The Coliseum is built for this; made more interesting by the huge variety of items dropped, including food, apparel, familiars, unhatched eggs, skins, accents, vistas, genes and raw materials, many of them exclusive to the location or monster battled.
• In Place of an Eye: The Primal eye type gives dragons something unusual regarding their eyes, depending on which Flight the dragon is a part of. It's downplayed in many cases, in that some Primal eyes mostly only affect the area around the eye instead of the eye itself.
  • Earth Primal gives dragons dirt/pebble-like structures around their eyes.
  • Fire Primal gives dragons fire coming from their eyes.
  • Wind Primal gives dragons clouds of wind/air coming from their eyes.
  • Water Primal gives dragons waves of water circling in/around their eyes.
  • Shadow Primal gives dragons black/purple goop dripping from their eyes.
  • Ice Primal gives dragons snowflakes coming from their eyes.
  • Lightning Primal gives dragons bolts of electricity coming from their eyes.
  • Light Primal gives dragons bright lights coming from their eyes.
  • Nature Primal gives dragons flowers/vines growing around their eyes.
  • Plague Primal gives dragons red veins and green pustules in place of their eyes.
  • Arcane Primal gives dragons a galaxy-like pattern in their eyes, along with a glowing pink rune shape around their eyes and forehead.
  • If you'd like to see what the eyes look like, this guide has pictures.
• Irony: The Ridgeback dragon breed eats a diet of solely seafood, despite the fact that they originate from a desert region, and they tend to have a natural fear of water.
• Jungle Japes: The Rainsong Jungle Coliseum venue; it's very colorful.
• Katanas Are Just Better: There's a katana available as an apparel item; it was added in the same update as several sets of samurai-inspired armor. (Don't think too much about how dragons would wield swords...)
• Lamarck Was Right: Dragons hatched from eggs as a result of breeding will inherit one of its parents' species, their genes, and feature a color that is in the same color family of the parents. Averted for the dragon's flight (and thus, their element and eye color) which will always be the same flight/color from all eggs produced in that respective player's breeding grounds regardless of what flights the breeding pair descends from.
• Lazy Dragon: Alluded to with the player's Hibernal Den, which simulates the dragons hibernating for any length of time at the player's discretion. Dragons sent to the Den have limited interactivity options, but they do not require any food to maintain their energy levels.
• Lethal Lava Land: The Volcanic Vents Coliseum venue, featuring lots and lots of magma just steps away from your dragons.
• Life/Death Juxtaposition: Subverted. The Nature and Plague flights largely fit this trope since the former is associated with life and growth, while the other represents rot, decay, and illness thanks to their Plague Master abilities. However, the Plague flight doesn't embrace death at all due to its "survival of the fittest" attitudes and the Plaguebringer's intolerance of the undead, though that doesn't stop players from playing this trope straight with their own interpretations of Plague and Plague dragons.
• Light 'em Up: The Lightweaver, ruler of the Sunbeam Ruins and the Light Flight.

M-Z

• Magma Man: The theme of the Flamecaller, more so this than true fire since she can summon volcanoes.
• Making a Splash: The Tidelord, ruler of the Sea of a Thousand Currents and the Water Flight.
• Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds: The Arcanist. He was born out of one apocalypse and caused another one because he thought it was a good idea to attempt communication with an extraterrestrial entity lurking just outside a planetary shield. That curiosity not only destroyed said shield, but nearly caused the entire planet to be wiped out. While not malicious, he is treated as such in-universe by dragons of other flights, as the Magister of Shadow in the Ten Eyes short story doesn't trust the entirety of the Arcane flight due to his actions.
• Mix-and-Match Critters:
  • Wildclaws are raptors with wings, Coatl are feathery snake ferrets, Nocturnes have traits of bats, and Skydancers resemble birds.
  • Many of the familiars are combinations of two or more real life animals (or plants). In particular, most of the Blooming Grove enemies/familiars fall under this.
• Money Sink: Several of them.
  • The Marketplace, obviously.
  • Buying nests. You start out with one and can have up to five, with the price increasing with each nest.
  • The Auction House, in a minor sense; there's a listing fee for every treasure listing you put up, and the fee is higher the longer you put the listing up for.
  • Roundsey's Raffle Roulette; each ticket costs 500 treasure.
  • And finally, the biggest money sink in the game: lair expansions. They start off fairly cheap, but increase in price exponentially. Later expansions cost millions of treasure even with the dominance discount.
• Monster Arena: The Arena Coliseum venue, although it's not fundamentally different from the other venues.
• Monster in the Ice: This is part of the Ice Flight's motif. They use icebergs as frozen prisons for creatures influenced by the Shade.
• Multiple Head Case: Played with with Aberrations, who each have two heads. In some cases, an Aberration's minds are similar to each other. In others, the two heads will often quarrel with each other. There is even debate between Aberrations which variant fares better
• Mutagenic Goo: This is what sits inside the Wyrmwound. It's so potent that even the mightiest of plague dragons will avoid the substance, fearing they could either die or become mutated if they fell in. Meanwhile, Aberration dragons casually swim in it just to make their bodies stronger, though even they take caution and try to keep their swims minimal and only when necessary.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: The logical conclusion of mix'n'match apparel themes and user-generated skins.
• Non-Indicative Name: The Auction House isn't actually for auctions; you put an item or dragon up for a set price and the buyer buys it directly.
• Oh Wait, This Is My Grocery List: Instead of being predictions or advice, a few of the 2022 April Fools' Day scroll messages are documents that were mixed up with the former items. These include the instruction manual for a wind-up mouse and a recipe.
• One Size Fits All: Any dragon breed, aside from the ancients, can wear any kind of apparel, regardless of their size or body type. Exaggerated here, as the smallest dragon breed, the Fae, is roughly a meter long on average, while the largest dragon breed, the Imperial, is roughly a whopping 22 and a half meters long on average.
• Orphaned Etymology: Companion animal apparel in this fantasy setting includes a French bulldog, Pomeranian, Yorkshire terrier, Maine Coon, and Scottish Fold, all of which are named after real-world places.
• Our Dragons Are Different: A lot of the game's dragons have a mix of the characteristics of Eastern and Western dragons (Imperials and Pearlcatchers look Eastern—but have wings).
  • The game's different dragon breeds have different physical attributes, many of which are reptilian, while others aren't. Tundras and Gaolers, for example, are covered in hair, making them appear more mammalian, and Veilspun have insectoid wings.
• Our Kelpies Are Different: Kelpies appear as familiars here. They appear similar to the classical depictions as water-themed equines, though it is unknown if they are able to shapeshift. According to their item descriptions, though, they do drown their prey, but the game's dragons are considered too large to ride kelpies and are considered to be allies instead. Kelpie manes are also in-game apparel items.
• Our Hippocamps Are Different: There are the hippocampus, a green and blue creature, and the clown hippocampus, an orange creature designed after the clownfish. They're familiars. The flavor text of the hippocampus — that it never forgets — is a reference to the hippocampus portion of the brain, which is important to the formation of memories.
• Our Perytons Are Different: There are three different-colored peryton familiars that look like deer with wings that also have feathers elsewhere and which can bond with a user's dragons. Out of the three, only the flavor text for the Rosy Peryton acknowledges the dangerous part of their mythology, but states that "this species has learned to live harmoniously with dragonkind".
• Our Wyverns Are Different: The ancient dragon breed, Banescale, is notable for being the only breed in the game to lack forelegs.
• Palette Swap: Most items and familiars in Flight Rising have two or more different variants with alternate colors and/or mirrored artwork.
• The Phoenix:
  • One of these is available as a familiar; unlike most familiars, the Phoenix's image actually changes each time you open the page it's on, cycling between four stages of life (egg, chick, adult, ash).
  • Appropriately, the Spirit of Fire familiar also takes the form of a phoenix.
• Planimal: The Gladekeeper deity's art suggests she branched this way. Several familiars found in the Woodland Path, such as the Stranglers and Dryads, also appear to be these; Rainsong Jungle has boars made of branches and foliage; and high-level foraging can rarely get you one of two sentient pansy familiars.
• Player-Generated Economy: Primarily via the Auction House, where users can buy and sell items and dragons for both treasure and gems. There's also the Crossroads, which allow two players to directly exchange dragons/items/currency.
• Play Every Day: To get the most out of Flight Rising, you have to log in daily, feed your dragons, and send the dragons off to gather items. Each of the Dragons' Familiars can be checked on daily to boost their bond with their respective dragon.
• Playing with Fire: The Flamecaller, ruler of the Ashfall Waste and the Fire Flight.
• Poisonous Person: The Plaguebringer, ruler of the Scarred Wasteland and the Plague Flight.
• Power of the Void: Not represented by one of the dragon deities, the Void is represented by the setting's Big Bad, The Shade.
• Pure Energy: The Arcanist, ruler of the Starfall Isles and the Arcane Flight, whose element is simply "arcane." Funnily enough, not considered Non-Elemental (there are abilities and creatures not considered part of an element, however).
• Purple Is the New Black: Shadow-elemental abilities are more purple than they are black, and Shadow eyes and banners are all purple. The Shadow color available is also more purple than black, but still very dark.
• Rare Random Drop:
  • Nocturnes, the second Limited breed (i.e. the chance to get eggs and scrolls without buying only comes around occasionally), notoriously difficult to obtain without buying. In order to get the breed change scrolls and randomly generated eggs, you need to grind for event-specific Strange Chests, only obtained either through digging in the gathering part of the site, or by participating in the wholesale slaughter of the various varieties of the special Mimics in the Coliseum. The chests also have a chance to drop event-specific familiars, apparel, and forum vistas.
  • The familiar versions of "boss" monsters like Frost Delvers and Wartoads. These bosses can only be fought as rare random encounters; upon defeat they then have a very small chance of dropping a familiar version of themselves. As this is the only way to obtain these familiars, they are some of the rarest non-retired familiars on the site.
  • Hippojays, Dappled Dunhoofs, Manticores, and Darktouched Chimeras are only available as extremely rare gathering drops. A player has a limited number of gathering turns per day, so finding one of these familiars can easily take weeks or even months of patience.
• Reference Overdosed: A large number of the item descriptions feature references to various tv shows, films, books, and video games. See the Shout Out page for a list.
• Reward for Removal: Exalting dragons removes them from being customized, breeding, or otherwise taking part in game mechanics in exchange for treasure and helping your flight's standing in the weekly Dominance battles. It's explained in the game's lore as the dragon being sent to serve their deity and as the highest honor a dragon can receive.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter:
  • The baby art for any breed, so much so that a game item allows a player to 'freeze' a dragon in its baby stage just to enjoy the art.
  • Lampshaded with the Wildwood Owlet food item's description.
    This owlet evolved large, adorable eyes to deter hungry predators with its cuteness. Are you going to fall for that?
  • Several food items, most notably the Wildwood/Sakura Owlets, Sandstrike/Everglade Hedgehogs, and Micro Goats have a reputation for being too cute to feed to dragons. Players will often hoard them in their vaults instead.
  • Lampshaded again in the description for the Grasslands Trunker, a tapir-like familiar:
    This small, squat herbivore is almost too docile and cute to eat. You decide to take it back to the lair and bestow "all the cuddles".
• Schmuck Bait: Whenever Pipp or Tripp offer to trade nine Broken Bottles for a single Broken Penny Jar (a "chest" that contains 200 treasure and another Broken Bottle). When Swipp offers this trade, it's an opportunity to trade an otherwise-junk item you'll probably have a lot of for a little bit of free money. When Pipp or Tripp offer it, you'll have a net loss of either 800 or 1800 treasure per trade.
• Sdrawkcab Name:
  • The Nooccar, whose description lampshades the unoriginality of the name:
    Really, field researcher? That's the name you went with?
  • The Agol, a recolored version of the retired Loga familiar, which can only be obtained during Night of the Nocturne.
• Separated by a Common Language: Fae dragons speak traditional draconic but also have a complex system of body language using their frills to communicate emotion and intent. The lack of these frills on other dragon breeds means that Faes have difficulty understanding and being understood by other dragons.
• Sewer Gator: The Waterway Coliseum venue is based on a sewer and features Toridae, alligator-like enemies.
• Shaped Like Itself: One of Tripp's random phrases includes, "This [name of item for trade] is certainly a [name of item for trade]".
• Shifting Sand Land: The desert-themed Sandswept Delta Coliseum venue.
• Shock and Awe: The Stormcatcher, ruler of the Shifting Expanse and the Lightning Flight.
• Shop Fodder: The vast majority of items in the Materials and Other inventory sections that your dragons can gather are only good for selling to Crim, selling directly from your hoard, or transmuting into Baldwin ingredients.
• Short-Lived Organism: Zig-zagged with Imperial dragons. According to their lore, some Imperials have a lifespan of as short as ten years — however, some of them can live as long as several centuries.
• Shoulder-Sized Dragon:
  • Fae dragons usually fall within 0.5-2.0 metres long.
  • A bug that occurs when using breed change scrolls means Nocturnes and Bogsneaks can become this as well.
• Sibling Yin-Yang: Pipp and Tripp. Pipp is enthusiastic about participating in the family business, while Tripp is grumpy and wants to be literally anywhere else. Tripp even wears a birdskull necklace to emphasize it.
• Slept Through the Apocalypse: The first eight deities^note all of them except the Gladekeeper, Plaguebringer, and Arcanist, who were all created after the end of the Second Age went to sleep in the Pillar of the World at the end of the First Age, not waking up until after the Pillar was physically destroyed by the Shade at the end of the Third Age, completely missing out on the giant explosion that eradicated nearly all life during the Second Age.
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World: The snowy Boreal Wood Coliseum venue.
• Snake People: The Serthis race of Beastclans are humanoids with the lower body of a snake from the waist down.
• Socialization Bonus: Subverted. The research notes in Arlo's Ancient Artifacts can unearth one randomized space on a dig site for anyone who receives them, though they can never be directly used - only shared with other players or turn eight notes into the guild for one extra pickaxe/magnifying glass. Therefore, while players get no guaranteed reward for sharing, it's more ideal to find other players willing to share notes in order to clear their plots faster, thus encouraging players to socialize on the forums and add each other to their friends list in order to send notes back and forth through Arlo.
• Spiders Are Scary: Referenced by the descriptions of some of the spider food items.
  Diving Aranea: To some, true terror is a spider that can swim.
  Harvestman: You are more afraid of it than it is of you.
  Black Iron Spider: The only thing more terrifying than a spider is a squish-proof armored spider.
  Grey River Jumper: Nope.
  Acid Widow: Didn't think it was possible to make a spider even worse? Nature has been severely underestimated.
• Status Effects: Each element's special magical attack has a chance to inflict one of these alongside doing regular elemental damage. Some of these effects are more useful than others.
  • Envenom (Nature) applies Poison, which does exactly what you think it does.
  • Sear (Fire) applies Burn, which increases the physical damage done to the target.
  • Congeal (Ice) applies Freeze, which prevents the target from attacking.
  • Fossilize (Earth) applies Petrify, which prevents the target from acting but also greatly increases their defense.
  • Shock (Lightning) applies Paralysis, which has a chance to prevent the target from using abilities.
  • Enamor (Light) applies Silence, which prevents the target from using abilities.
  • Shroud (Shadow) applies Blind, which decreases the target's accuracy.
  • Disorient (Wind) applies Berserk, which causes the target to attack friend or foe.
  • Drown (Water) applies Slow, which decreases the target's speed.
  • Contaminate (Plague) applies Virus, which causes the target to take damage from restorative abilities.
  • Enfeeble (Arcane) applies Amplify, which increases the magical damage done to the target.
• Steampunk: An entire line of apparel uses Steampunk aesthetic and the Stormcatcher's clan borders on this trope.
• Super Not-Drowning Skills: The Water flight keep their lairs actually underwater. Per the lore, water and wind dragons have such control over their elements that they're still able to breathe air while underwater, and can extend this ability to fellow clanmates who need it.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: The descriptions of the food that can be crafted through Baldwin's Brew.
  Soylent Green: Totally not made out of anything weird. Especially not that thing you may be thinking about. Life is perfect.
  Soylent Red: This reddish wedge of matter is super tasty! No, really! It does not taste weird at all! EAT IT. IT IS SHAPED LIKE A DRUMSTICK.
• Take That, Audience!: The description for the Overcharged Silverbeast familiar, a Rare Coliseum drop, is this toward players who sell items (familiars and otherwise) at inflated prices: "If you purchased this silverbeast from the auction house, you were likely overcharged."
• Taken for Granite:
  • The Pillar of Deities, though they got better.
  • The Basilisk, true to its mythological inspiration, is said to do this.
• Temporary Online Content:
  • At the end of each month, the Festive Favor shop offers several limited-time items that are only available during the week it remains open, including an emblem rune depicting the Flight the event is themed after, two pieces of appeal, and a special familiar exclusive to the month. The familiar and apparel change to different items each year its corresponding holiday is held, while the emblem rune remains the same for each time the holiday is held each year. Roundsey's Raffle Roulette sometimes raffles off retired items, but at such small quantities that they don't make much of an impact on the game's economy.
  • Users who backed the game's Kickstarter campaign received exclusive items; unlike other retired items, Kickstarter items which are raffled off at Roundsey's Raffle Roulette are donated by backers rather than generated by the admins for the raffle.
  • There is a small number of retired items which are neither Kickstarter rewards or festival items; several were given to players as compensation for downtime early in the game's lifetime, while others were given to players for April Fool's Day or the game's anniversary.
• Tertiary Sexual Characteristics:
  • Averted for players' dragons; there are no gender-specific apparel items, which results in plenty of bow-and-flower bedecked male dragons.
  • Played straight by Tomo at the Trading Post, a female Snapper dragon with a pink flower tacked to the side of her head.
• Theme Naming: Nearly all of the characters in the "Bounty of the Elements" short stories have names related to their flight. This is most obvious in the Arcane story, "Ten Eyes", which lists all eleven magisters from the Oculus of the Eleven, all of whom have flight-related names. Beatrix Thundrael is the Lightning magister, Arwin Petalhide is the Nature magister, Rish Sunspark is the Light magister, and so on.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: The Eliminate stone in the Coliseum becomes this when used by high-level dragons in lower-level zones. Because it replenishes breath when its use results in an enemy death, it can be used to perpetually one-shot enemies, often with several hundred points of extra damage.
• Under the Sea: The Kelp Beds Coliseum venue; you're apparently fighting in a giant, indestructible air bubble.
• Unusual Halo: 2018's small festival apparel items consisted of 11 of these as wearables for player-owned dragons, all circular but with colors and flourishes matching the 11 elemental flights. For example, Plague's halo features teeth, eyes, and rotting flesh.
• Video Game Caring Potential: Keeping your lair well-fed and happy results in bonus gathering turns. Letting them starve leads to...
• Video Game Cruelty Potential:
  • A very visible reduction in the bright yellow health bar at the top of your lair's page, echoed in the health bars of every single dragon in your lair. But dragons don't die, so aside from the lost gather bonus and inability to breed or battle there is no penalty for playing this way.
  • Subverted with Baldwin's Bubbling Brew. While it looks like you're shoving familiars into a cauldron for alchemical ingredients, staff confirmed you actually pluck some fur or feathers for the cauldron and send the familiar back into the wild.
• Virtual Paper Doll: The apparel system functions this way, which can result in unintended hilarity when overlapping clothing items are placed out-of-order.
• Wind Is Green: Light green is the color associated with the Wind Flight, and their eyes, banners, and deity are all this color.
• Wings Do Nothing: The Snapper dragon breed has wings, but is land-bound according to their lore. However, Word of God states that Snappers aligned with Wind can fly by controlling gusts of wind and Arcane Snappers can manipulate gravity. Bogsneaks have it slightly better, but still suffer from an unfortunate body-to-wing ratio. Meanwhile, Gaolers cannot fly due to their small wings, which they use to climb and dig instead, though it's unclear if elemental magic can help them fly or not.

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