Main Tropes Index

Troperville

Editing Help

Tools

Toys

Narrative

• Universal
• Applied Phlebotinum
• Characterization
• Characters
• Characters As Device
• Dialogue
• Motifs
• Narrative Devices
• Paratext
• Plots
• Settings
• Spectacle

Genre

• Action Adventure
• Comedy
• Commercials
• Crime And Punishment
• Drama
• Horror
• Love
• News
• Professional Wrestling
• Speculative Fiction
• Sports Story
• War

Media

• Animation (Western)
• Anime
• Comic Book
• Fan Fics
• Film
• Game
• Literature
• Music And Sound Effects
• New Media
• Print Media
• Radio
• Sequential Art
• Tabletop Games
• Television
• Theater
• Videogame
• Webcomics

Topical Tropes

• Betrayal
• Censorship
• Combat
• Death
• Family
• Fate And Prophecy
• Food
• Holiday
• Memory
• Money
• Morality
• Politics
• Religion
• School

Other Categories

• British Telly
• The Contributors
• Creator Speak
• Creators
• Derivative Works
• Did Not Do The Research
• Language
• Laws And Formulas
• Show Business
• Split Personality
• Stock Room
• Trope
• Truth And Lies
• Truth In Television
• Weirdness Isolation

A shipping container on the roof. Sounds crazy, no?

Chaos;Head is a Visual Novel starring Nishijou Takumi, a high school student and raging otaku.

Takumi lives in a steel shipping container on the roof of a building, converted into a small apartment. He spends most of his time at home, either playing the fictional MMORPG Empire Sweeper Online (in which he is Knight-Hart, the most famous and powerful player to exist) or watching anime. He has over one hundred "waifus" (figures), his favorite being the character Seira from the fictional anime Blood Tune; he frequently affirms his love of 2-D women and his hatred of 3-D women. He is a borderline hikikomori, having crafted a "minimum attendance shift chart" to ensure that he can attend school as little as possible while still graduating.

When the story begins, he is only know to have even semi-regular interactions with a few people: his bratty younger sister Nanami, his ESO guild partner Grim (whom he speaks to online), and Misumi, another classmate who his high school's resident playboy. Beyond these, he seems to be quite afraid of interacting with people, exhibiting classic signs of social phobia (such as extreme discomfort with making eye contact).

This routine life is shattered when, upon coming home one day, he hears the sound of something being pounded into concrete. Looking over, he sees a pink-haired girl pinning a body to an alley wall with cross-shaped stakes. The girl turns, smiles, and inexplicably calls him by name, at which point he runs. This scene is the third in a series of bizarre, gruesome murders called the "New Generation" murders.

The game has a unique "delusion trigger" system where the player can, at certain points, opt to view one of Takumi's daydreams/delusions. The player is given a choice between a good delusion (happy, humorous, or H in nature) or a bad delusion (paranoid, violent or tragic in nature). For example, when Nanami visits and berates Takumi for not ever calling home, she takes a swig of soda without asking; the good delusion brings up the concept of an Indirect Kiss, prompting Takumi to compare it to a hentai game scene (at which point it almost does turn into one), and the bad delusion involves Nanami taking a swig of coke, then gagging and coughing up blood and dying. Takumi wonders why that happened, then remembers that he poisoned the coke beforehand. Typically these delusions have no direct influence on the story itself (Takumi simply snaps out of it and the scene continues from where it left off), but seeing certain ones triggers flags that can influence which ending you see. Many of these delusions involve blatant reference to anime (or eroge) tropes.

The game was made into an anime for the fall 2008 season, with an Xbox 360 updated rerelease titled Chaos;Head Noah released in February 2009.

A fan translation patch for the game was released in July, but was taken down from the main site due to an agreement with Nitroplus.

---

Provides examples of:

• A God Am I?
• Arc Words — "Whose eyes are those eyes?" ("Sono me, dare no me?")
• BFS — The Di-Swords.
• Bittersweet Ending
• Bland Name Product: Deluoode for Google, and We-Key Pedophiria - seriously - for The Other Wiki.
  • The list goes on, believe me - Taboo! (Yahoo!), Slavecard (Mastercard), Grouchosoft Mindorz X Perfect (Microsoft Windows XP Premium... seriously), TWO different McDonald's spoofs (McDeinald's and WacTiKald's)... there are easily a half dozen of these in each chapter of the game, and the anime adds in even more.
• Bloody Murder
• Calling Your Attacks — Subverted; in the only instance, the character can't think of a name to use
• Cannot Stand Them Cannot Live Without Them — Takumi's attitude towards "3-D" girls.
• Character Blog — Part of the website for Chaos;Head Noah features blogs by each of the six main girls and one for Takumi.
• The Chessmaster — Norose.
• Cooldown Hug
• Complete Monster — Norose.
• Creepy Monotone
• Crowning Moment Of Awesome — At the end of the AA/A routes, Takumi gets killed by the Big Bad and after a series of questions concerning his identity and status as a delusionary being, starts regenerating no matter how many times he's killed until he finally destroys Noah II
• Cute Mute — Kozue, at first.
• Department Of Redundancy Department — Serious-mode Yua has a habit of emphasizing sentences by repeating them several times in a row with slightly different phrasings.
• Diabolus Ex Machina — Route B is one huge ever-expanding example of this, featuring among other things, a Despair Event Horizon (Sena) and Body Horror And I Must Scream (Kozue), all of which culminates in a Let Them Die Happy Mercy Kill Just Before The End for a Shoot The Shaggy Dog ending. And the reason why it all happened? Kozue got knocked unconscious during the earthquake.
• Diagonal Cut
• Dojikko — Kozue. Also Yua, in the anime.
• Downer Ending
• Emotion Eater — This is how the Di-Swords function.
• Fanservice — Some of the delusions Takumi is having qualify for this.
  • The rest tend to be Fan Disservice.
• Fake Band — Phantasm. Their lead singer is FES, also known as Ayase Kishimoto.
• First Name Basis
• Flash Forward — The show starts with one
• Formulaic Magic — fun¹⁰ × int⁴⁰ = Ir2, the equation Takumi discovered in elementary school and the basis of the Noah Project. What the equation actually signifies is never explained in depth.
• Geek — Takumi
• Girl With Psycho Weapon — The entire core female cast.
• Go Mad From The Revelation
• Government Conspiracy
• Hair Colors — Fifty-fifty split - Rimi, Kozue and Ayase have them, while Yua, Sena, and Nanami have more normal blonde and black shades.
• Handsome Lech — Takumi's best(/only) friend Misumi.
• Harmful To Minors — Sena and her mother, sister and father. Wow.
• Healing Factor
• Hey Its That Voice — Kenta Miyake as Norose is basically reprising his role as Rosenberg in El Cazador, except with scary teeth and a BFS.
• Hey You
• Hikikomori
• Hot Chick With A Sword — They all might use Di-Swords, but it's Sena who belongs to this trope.
• Imaginary Friend — Seira, from Blood Tune
• Through The Eyes Of Madness
• Interrupted Suicide — Ayase. Takumi's first conscious use of his delusionary abilities in the game is to create a flowerbed which breaks her fall after she attempts suicide by jumping off the roof of the school. And later on, Takumi himself.
• Laser Guided Amnesia
• Mind Screw — With Takumi leading the narrative, not only does he not have any idea what's going on, the audience doesn't know much more than he does.
• The Mole — Suwa.
• Moral Event Horizon — Norose's treatment of Nana when Rimi comes to rescue her. You can only really go downhill from there.
• Mr Imagination — Takumi
• Multiple Endings
• My Name Is Inigo Montoya
• New Transfer Student — Kozue.
• Nietzsche Wannabe — Norose.
• Nightmare Fuel — Plenty of it - this is a Nitroplus game, after all.
  • A sample: all the New Gen murders in the game have mysterious elements, particularly the second, in which the dead man has an eight-month old fetus sewn into his stomach; given the age of the fetus, it had to have been removed from the mother's body before birth. It is eventually shown, in flashback, exactly who the mother is and how this happened. This troper REALLY wishes it hadn't been.
• Ninety Percent Of Your Brain — Norose's reasoning for how the abilities of Gigalomaniacs work. Also that 80% of the brain is used for processing visual data.
• Otaku — Takumi
• Psychic Link — Kozue uses this to communicate telepathically. Kind of. It's stated that somehow it is entirely different because it runs off the power of delusions.
• Scary Shiny Glasses — Yua
• Slasher Smile
• Show Within A Show — Blood Tune. All the audience really knows about it is lead character Seira, who Takumi is deluded enough to see talking to him.
• Spoiler Opening — The gradual reveal of the different Gigalomaniacs throughout the story isn't quite as exciting after you see all but two of them with their Di-Swords in the opening.
  • The reveal of Norose as the Big Bad is also somewhat spoiled in the anime OP by the shot of him grinning maniacally.
  • There's also the shot of Hazuki and Suwa together... why would those two characters be even be associated? ...Oh...
• Suspiciously Apropos Music — In all three versions of Chaos;Head, the music by Phantasm is not only apropos, it's plot important, since it seems to be predicting the New-Gen events.
• Tall Dark And Bishoujo — Sena.
• Techno Babble
• Theme Music Power Up
• Tomato In The Mirror — Takumi is actually a delusion of...himself. The other him being what the protagonist him knows as "Shogun".
• Took A Level In Badass — Takumi does by the end.
• Trademark Favorite Food — Sena loves popsicles.
  • There's also Momose and her pronounced fondness for Japanese sweets.
• Twelve Episode Anime
• Uh Oh Eyes
• Ultra Super Death Gorefest Chainsawer 3000 — Show Within A Show titled Blood Tune, and MMORPG titled Empire Sweeper.
• Updated Rerelease — Chaos;Head Noah, for the XBox 360. Changes to the game include adding routes for each of the girls and changing it to widescreen.
• Unwanted Harem — While except for Rimi none of them are after Takumi romantically, elements of the genre are invoked in a fashion. Official art usually depicts Takumi with the six leading girls of the show in a way reminiscent of it as well.
  • When Takumi is being tortured in the final episode of the series, he slips into a delusion of having a romantic comedy-like relationship with the girls.
• Well Intentioned Extremist — Norose. The fact that he's also a Nietzsche Wannabe pursuing his goals to extremes that make him a Complete Monster tend to make him less than sympathetic, though.
• The Worf Barrage
• Yandere
• Yangire — Two. Nice with some disturbing and murderous traits: Kozue. Jerkass psychopath with a veneer of civility: Suwa.
• You Gotta Have Blue Hair — Ayase.
• Your Mind Makes It Real
• Zettai Ryouiki — Rimi and Kozue.

---