Floating Continent - Television Tropes & Idioms

Most of the .hack// series of animes and games have floating rocks, islands and the like. Makes sense, seeing most of the animes and all of the games are set in a fictional MMORPG called "The World".
In the manga version of Chrono Crusade, the Sinner's home is a small floating town called Eden. Somewhat justified, because (1) demons are actually aliens, who came to Earth on a fish-like spaceship—so the Sinners probably have access to technology that would allow for that sort of thing and (2) the Sinners are on the run and need to be in hiding, so a home base that's removed from people is probably a better idea than forming a colony somewhere on Earth.
The entire plot point of Edens Bowy is about two floating continents, Yulgaha (or Eurgoha}, and Yanuess. The people below regard them as gods, and some places actively do something for them, like providing water, or becoming an industrial place. Eurgoha is the larger, having high-tech cybernetic technology but is somewhat high-strung, while the smaller Yanuess is industrialized to the point of constant pollution (plus ruled by a cat-eared woman). Eurgoha and Yanuess eventually collide together, and a good chunk of Eurgoha falls. Yanuess is more or less intact, but Eurgoha is messed up, in a whole lot of ways.
Do the Neo Nation of G Gundam count?
A floating island of devious monkeys appears in Kyouran Kazoku Nikki. This one does have a reason for the hovering — Levistone, the same material that powers Hyouka, one of the main characters.
In Mahou Sensei Negima, Magicus Mundus had one of these... until Asuna's Anti Magic caused most of it to crash. All that left now are small clumps of floating debris.
The titular Laputa: Castle in the Sky. (Released as Castle In The Sky in some markets.)
In One Piece, an an entire saga revolves around how to get onto one of these, where different types of clouds serve as both land and sea (called both "Skypeia" and "Sky Island") and the Straw Hats' adventures on it.
- Later on, it's revealed that Upper Yard, the only part of Skypeia with actual soil, where the Big Bad and his Quirky Miniboss Squad reside and the two local races are fighting over, is actually a chunk of land from the island Jaya, blasted into the sky by a powerful geyser called the Knock-Up Stream (which is one of the ways to get onto Skypeia).
The enormous floating city of the Mu in Rah Xephon, large enough to obscure Tokyo.
Neo Verona in the anime version of Romeo x Juliet.
In the Sonic The Hedgehog OAV (not Sonic X), seemingly all of society lived on floating islands (as opposed to the games, where there's just one). Heavy cloud cover makes the otherwise perfectly habitable regular ground more or less abandoned.
In Uchuu Senkan Yamato, one of these exists in the atmosphere of Jupiter, until they (unintentionally) obliterate it the first time they use the Wave Motion Gun. They had no idea how powerful the thing would be, and were expecting to only hit the enemy base on the continent.
Floating castles and jewel-like planetoids feature in a fantasy sequence in Whisper of the Heart.
Yukina from Yu Yu Hakusho comes from a floating island of ice apparitions like herself, and so does Hiei.
Zero No Tsukaima: Albion. Called "the White Country" because of the clouds that gather around its underside.

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The sadly short-lived Cross Gen comic Meridian featured floating islands held aloft by a substance called "floatstone" woven into the rock (and floating ships to travel between them, made with special floating wood). There was even a completely artificial island.
Superbia, the home of the International Ultramarine Corps in the DC Universe, is a city that floats over the remains of Montevideo.

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Cloud City in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. (Justified in that the planet in which is located is a gas giant, and that at least we already knew that anti-gravity technology existed in this universe.)
- This is actually quite possible without anti-gravity (although the explanation in universe is all Applied Phlebotinum). There was a concept of Venus settlement which would "hover" using differences in density, the atmosphere in the colony (having the same pressure and content as Earth atmosphere) would make it fly like a zeppelin and make you able to use solar energy, have a lot of time to fix dents in the inflatable colony (the air of the outside wouldn't mix very quickly due to the fact that they'd both have the same density).
The beautiful Australian animated short film The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello (2005) is set in a gothic-steampunk world of floating islands and floating Victorian-style cities wreathed in smoke and criss-crossed by bridges. Airmen in steam-driven iron dirigibles trawl the aerial trading routes between city-states. Universities send explorers and cloud biologists on expeditions into "uncharted air". As with the previous entry there is downward gravity: people can fall off airships into unknown depths. No magic exists.

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In The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks, one character, whose job is to build Orbitals (artificial ring-shaped worlds), talks about making Floating Continents because she thinks that orbitals are too mundane.
- To clarify: these 'too mundane' orbitals are rings with the diameter of an average inner planet orbit, i.e. essentially stripes of a Dyson sphere.
Various flying castles in Steven Brust's Dragaera novels. All of them fell out of the sky during the Interregnum, since they depended on sorcery powered by the then-unavailable Imperial Orb, but Castle Black was later raised again.
In Steven Erikson's first book of Malazan Book of the Fallen, Gardens of the Moon, the armies of the Malazan empire besieging the city of Pale face a flying fortress called Moon's Spawn under the command of a powerful sorcerer, Anomander Rake.
John Hodgman's The Areas of My Expertise talks about a 51st U.S. state, Hohoq, a plateau surrounded by clouds that floats mysteriously around the United States.
The titular Kingdom beyond the Waves by Stephen Hunt is one of these, though the previous book established that great chunks of land do this often in floatquakes due to uncontrolled magic.
Larry Niven's Ringworld includes floating buildings, most of which fell when bacteria ate their wiring.
One of the Light Novels of Vampire Hunter D takes place in a floating town, and at one had to deal with a floating pirate fortress. The town ends up being overrun with vampires caused by a failed experiment, and the residents of the pirates were long dead run by an AI.
Paul Stewart's The Edge Chronicles has the floating city of Sanctaphrax, which is built on a floating rock. Unusually, the main problem isn't keeping it up, but rather keeping it down, with the help of one gigantic chain and a chest full of stormphrax.
Laputa is named after the original flying island in Jonathan Swift's Gullivers Travels.
The City in the Sky from the War of Powers fantasy novels by Robert E. Vardeman and Victor Milan.
Arianus, the World of Air from the Death Gate Cycle series of novels by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, consists entirely of Floating Continents.
Magnus has Dragylon the Imperial Fortress: a massive, invisible, sun-sphere and headquarters of [[Satan Lucifer]].
In Wen Spencer's Endless Blue, all sorts of islands float. When someone tells Mikhail that his warp drive won't work, this is what convinces him: a place with floating islands is not obeying normal physics.
In James Blish's Cities In Flight, the "spindizzy" — the Applied Phelbotinum that allows for Anti Gravity, Force Fields, Artificial Gravity, and Faster Than Light travel — works better with larger masses. As a result, eventually, entire Terran cities cut themselves free of the planet and soar out to the stars.
The original Laputa (Accept no substitute!) appears in Gullivers Travels, and is a magnetically floating island populated by Straw Man scientists and philosophers with no common sense.

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The floating city Stratos in Star Trek The Original Series "The Cloud Minders".
The seemingly primitive Nox from Stargate SG-1 are revealed to have built a floating city in Season 1 of the series
- And the Ancients also have a flying city... that travels through space.
The Animarium in Power Rangers Wild Force. This thing might as well have a yo-yo string on it during the course of the series, as it went up into the sky, crashed back down, and went back up again... of course, if Saban and Disney had managed to work things out, it would have managed to come back down for the next team-up episode...
The Sliders episode "Seasons Greetings" features a giant floating mall. People in there shopped, worked, lived there, shopped some more, and failed to work off their debt slavery (as opposed to Earth Prime, where the debt slaves are forced to find their own living quarters, too). But it leads this troper to the conclusion, if there's any structure which wastes this much energy just to make itself look spiffy, it just has to be a host body of a Starbucks.
The Firefly episode "Trash" featured the crew staging a robbery on Bellerophon where ultra-wealthy citizens reside on their own private estates that float over an idyllic sea.

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Roger Dean's album covers for the progressive rock band Yes are absolutely packed with these.
Music video example: "Feel Good Inc." and "El Mañana" by Gorillaz.

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Older Than Dirt: To get around a curse, Leto gave birth to twins Artemis and Apollo on a "floating island", Delos, which, as it's a real-life island, became anchored shortly after the birth.

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Multiple floating islands provide the name of the Tabletop Games Skyrealms Of Jorune.
Dungeons & Dragons settings frequently have more than a few floating continents or cities of various sizes.
- The ancient empire Netheril from the Forgotten Realms had a host of magical floating cities. Most were destroyed 4,000 years "ago" when a power-hungry mage accidentally caused magic to stop functioning. A few survivors landed safely but never flew again. One escaped into the Plane of Shadow, to return thousands of years later and start refounding the Netherese Empire.
  - In 4th Edition, the magical structure of Faerun went completely bitchcakes when the god of magic got killed. As a result, there are zones of wild magic where large chunks of the landscape sits above the landscape.
- In the Known World (or Mystara) setting, one of the sub-kingdoms of the magical Alphatian Empire consists entirely of floating islands. There's also a large number of floating landmasses in the worlds' hollow interior. Amusingly enough, during the metaplot the mainland of Alphatia is one of these, recreated after it sinks by the setting's gods as a literal Floating Continent.
  - Mystara also features the gnome-built (and mobile) Flying City of Serraine and its magic-powered biplanes.
- The Dragonlance setting had a floating fortress, a relic of more powerful magics in antique times.
  - There were actually several flying citadels in Dragonlance, one of which got Mist-napped and is now a pocket domain in the Ravenloft setting.

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Cloudcuckooland from Aristophanes' famous play The Birds, making this Older Than Feudalism.

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Ar tonelico. The floating continent is the only place where humans are located in the now-destroyed no-longer Earth.
In Breath of Fire II, the small town that you encourage to life is coincidentally constructed over a buried Lost Technology machine. An optional subplot allows you to activate the machine and the entire town goes airborne, becoming your new Global Airship. The "best" ending involves using it as for a miniature Colony Drop
- Said town also served as the The Very Definitely Final Dungeon of the first game.
- The first Breath of Fire game also gave us Agua, near the town of Romero.
The Kingdom of Zeal in Chrono Trigger, which readily become a falling continent after the player has finished his business there.
- Don't forget Terra Tower in Chrono Cross.
- And the Black Omen, but this is more a Ominous Floating Castle.
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind had a floating prison over the capital city of Vivec. It was actually a small moon that threatened to hit the city.
There was a Floating Continent in Final Fantasy III. The first quarter or so of the game is spent on the Floating Continent without you even knowing it.
- It's almost as big as the world map when you're on it, but very small when you're on the world map.
The Trope Namer is the Floating Continent area in Final Fantasy VI. (It averts the "unnoticed part", since the city below it gets shadowed and the people on the streets comment it.)
Final Fantasy VIII gave you a floating military academy. Two of them, actually, with the bad guys seizing one. A third was bombed to rubble before ever actually becoming mobile.
Final Fantasy IX had the Chocobo Sky Garden.
The Tu'Lia region in Final Fantasy XI.
- As well as the Riverne peninsula, which is now a flying archipelago. When a giant explosion blew the peninsula into tiny bits and threw it into the air, it just simply never came back down.
The floating city of Bhujerba in Final Fantasy XII.
- Its spinoff, Revenant Wings, takes place largely on a floating archipelago.
- Mt. Bur-Omisace, the Kiltias' sacred mountain, is surrounded by countless floating islands. Some are large enough to support man-made structures and shrines. They say that these islands are remnants of a Floating Continent which fell and broke apart long, long ago.
Cocoon in Final Fantasy XIII.
The Nazca Sky Gardens in Illusion of Gaia, which float above the huge drawings on the Nazca Plains.
With a small handful of exceptions, everywhere in Skies of Arcadia. Soltis, the lost Silver continent that rose from the planet's actual surface, is closer to the classic version of this trope, but it sinks again.
Likewise for the Baten Kaitos series.
- Baten Kaitos Origins, the prequel/sequel to the original Baten Kaitos has Tarazed, a flying fortress that completely pops out of one side of one of the floating continents and can blow up other floating continents.
Angel Island in the Sonic The Hedgehog series (AKA the Floating Island in Sonic The Comic).
- The Night Palace and Babylon Garden from the same series, as well.
  - Sky Canyon would be a technological variant.
- Sonic Unleashed may not have an explicitly floating continent, but look at the shattered world and tell me those landmasses don't look like they're flying.
Bowser's castle occasionally does this in various Mario games.
- Super Mario 64 had a lot of levels with bottomless pits, but the standout example is Whomp's Fortress. Super Mario Galaxy seems to take after it with levels like Beach Bowl Galaxy, although justifying it in that it's in, well, space.
- Glitzville in Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door seems to be kept aloft by rockets, and is pretty much a tourist trap with a fighting arena.
The Mana Fortress in Secret of Mana. Destroyed in the backstory. Floated again late in the game. And in the end, it was destroyed again.
The city state of Shevat in Xenogears.
- Also, Solaris.
  - Solaris was held up by a massive pillar, though. It was still high up, implausible, and exotic, but it technically wasn't 'floating'.
  - While Solaris is definitely indeed located high in the sky, according to Perfect Works, it is 'anchored' by a massive pillar going all the way down to an island in the middle of the ocean.
Lassic's Air Castle in Phantasy Star, which is shown to still be there in Phantasy Star IV, a thousand years after the planet it was on was reduced to an asteroid belt.
Outland in World of Warcraft consists of shards of a destroyed planet which now hang suspended in an interdimensional void.
- The zone Nagrand also has small islands floating high above the there seemingly solid ground.
- And as Outland was added in an expansion, the one following suit has a floating city populated entirely by Mages which was originally on land, destroyed, and rebuilt before taking off.
- The Undead scourge use a fleet of floating necropolis citadels as bases, which acted as their town halls in Warcraft 3, and act as Dungeons, instanced or otherwise and cities in World of Warcraft.
The Shadow Shard in City of Heroes has the same concept. CoH fans are quick to note that their game had it first by nearly two years.
- Final Fantasy XI beats them as far as MMORPGs are concerned with the floating shrine/temple/amphitheater of Tu'Lia, dating back to 2003.
  - Also Riverne in Chains of Promathia predates World Of Warcraft as well.
- Also, the Mu have their city floating high in the sky, an island raised from the sea by their goddess Hequat to save her followers from destruction by the Orenbegans (Circle of Thorns). It can be accessed in some late-game CoV content.
The entirety of Cave Story takes place on (or more accurately inside) a floating island. Depending on the ending you get, it either falls from the sky or starts falling but stops, but in either case everything and one on the island appears intact aside from some falling rocks.
The Tales Series seems to really like these.
- Exire in Tales of Symphonia, the last place of solace for the oppressed half-elves. Oddly enough, it has no direct impact on the plot, serving only as a place where Raine confronts her mother, who has unfortunately gone insane after abandoning her and Genis, as well as the location of the bonus Summon Spirit Maxwell.
- Preceded in Tales of Destiny — they actually had two of these. Radisrol, a floating city with a Magical Computer excavated by the good guys and used to reach Dycroft. The latter combines Floating Continent with Human Popsicles, Weapon Of Mass Destruction and The Very Definitely Final Dungeon
- Tales of the Abyss gives us Eldrant, which is also a The Very Definitely Final Dungeon.
Nearly all the battlegrounds in Super Smash Bros. are Floating Continents.
- The stage editor in Brawl doesn't even allow anything else.
- Also, there's an actual Floating Continent in The Subspace Emissary.
All the mages in Lunar: The Silver Star lived in a floating city/school of magic. They crashed, but ended up relatively intact. Made one heck of a crater, though.
Ogre Battle has the sky islands, which mostly function as bonus stages.
Netstorm is an RTS game that depicts there being no land but floating continents, which fly around and fire cannonballs at each other. Note that the islands themselves never move relative to each other during the actual game, they are just land on which you can build. They also can't be destroyed (but the things you build on them certainly can).
Stratosphere has flying fortresses that you control directly. The game is divided inbetween a building interface, where you get to build the fortress of your dreams, and the actual action, where you control the fortress as if it was a ship and blast enemy fortresses out of the sky while you try to minimize damage to yours. Everything is explained away with the presence of magical minerals of some sort.
The more recent (and rather weird; think WW 2 planes and cannons along with spells and magic elements) Project Nomads lets you control the single buildings on your floating fortress, and you can tell the fortress to move in between waypoints, but you cannot control it directly. You can also use your jetpack (or your legs, if you have time to waste) to get off your fortress and visit other large masses of floating land, some much bigger than yours.
The SNES game Bahamut Lagoon also takes place almost entirely on floating continents, called "lagoons".
In Heroes of Might and Magic V, the Academy faction's towns are all of this type.
- Not to mention Celeste, the City of Light from Might And Magic VII.
The PS 1 game Tail Concerto takes place on an archipelago of floating islands, surrounded by an impenetrable air reef (or "Airleaf", as the game misromanizes it, but then again, Atlus translations weren't always well-researched back then... if anything, they used to be Macekres).
Golden Sun had frequent mentions of a floating continent, and you could even visit the location it was in before it took to the sky, yet you never got to go there. Hopefully it will be touched upon when they finally get around to making Golden Sun 3.
- Of course, the fact that there's literally an "end of the world" that you could fall off of (if the game didn't prevent you from doing so, anyway), which will slowly eat away at the world if power isn't restored to the four magic lighthouses, suggests that the world itself may just be a floating continent.
Zepp in Guilty Gear, though it is a country, not a continent.
In Hoshigami Ruining Blue Earth, the entire known world is a floating continent. And every time someone uses magic, it saps a little of the energy of the elemental spirits holding the continent up.
The Emperor's Palace in Jade Empire is made of a special rock with magical properties that floats. The cutscene showing your approach is quite impressive.
The entire gameworld in Septerra Core is a concentric series of floating continents around the titular core.
Edmark's Sky Island Mysteries Edutainment Game. Enough said.
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess features The City in the Sky, a floating continent that doubled as the final regular dungeon in the game. The game tries to justify it floating by putting massive fans on the bottom.
While rolling up a new universe in ''We Love Katamari'', several floating islands appear somewhere above the ocean. Of course, they are just there to make it harder to run from the 1,000 Meter+ Octopus until you get big enough to roll the islands (Or the octopus) up.
Nearly every level in the first three Spyro The Dragon games was a floating continent.
The Lufia series has Doom Island, the floating island/castle where the Sinistrals resided.
In ToeJam & Earl, each level is a floating chunk of land. Falling off one lands you in the previous one, implying that they're arranged in a vertical stack.
The Good Future of Ecco: The Tides of Time.
The cities Yuno and Gonryun in Ragnarok Online, plus a couple related maps.
Unreal after getting up the Sunspire level. Inhabited by Nali.
Numerous floating islands are also found in Ellenier chapter in Serious Sam 2.
The entirety of the Jumping Flash series of games has all it's levels based around this trope. This was usually explained by the plot, where the Big Bad tries to dismantle the world. Strangely, while all the levels in the third game, Robbit Mon Dieu, are implied to take place on the planet itself, the levels are still of the floating continent type. Why this is is never adequately explained.
Metroid Prime 3 has Skytown, a hemisphere-spanning system of flying buildings in the skies over Elyssia.
- Elyssia is a gas giant, so it makes sense.
The Granstream Saga has not one, but four floating continents as the sum total of its world. The quest to save the rapidly failing technology that keeps them floating is what motivates the initial quest by the hero. And which gives us a pretty kick-ass opening cinematic...
Luna Online takes place in Blueland, a Floating Continent unto itself. There is a lower world, but it's inhabited by demons and sealed apart from Blueland to keep them from causing trouble — although the seal has cracked, causing some problems.
Setting of Mana Khemia Alchemists of Alrevis.
Certain Ages in the Myst series of games contain these, including Saavedro's home world in Exile and Sirrus's prison Age in Myst IV.
Crystalis for the NES has the floating fortress as the The Very Definitely Final Dungeon, where you receive the titular sword.
Sion's chapter in Treasure Of The Rudras visits a series of floating islands, home to the four races that came before humanity.
The Giant Palace, the final stage in Billy Hatcher And the Giant Egg, and home to the Giant Egg. At the end of the credits, it's revealed that The Giant Palace (when viewed from above) is in the shape of a Courage Emblem.
The Neverhood and other locations in the same universe float in a vast, mostly-empty blackness.
There are multiple floating continents in the Mega Man X series, including Sigma's fortress, Sky Lagoon, and Giga City (although technically a collection of islands). The first two inevitably fell, especially Sky Lagoon which was deliberately dropped onto a city.

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Narbonic's genius breeding colony flying island built by hamsters. No, really.

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A floating island full of Death Traps plays an important role in Transformers: Beast Wars.
This set-up (floating islands in a limitless sky after a great catastrophe shattered the planet, people travel around with airships) exists in the cute French cartoon Dragon Hunters (Chasseurs de dragons 2004, German Die Drachenjäger). Except in this series, there's a definite "downward" direction, meaning you can fall off or jump off an island and there are waterfalls. Populated fragments range in size from those sufficient for a house and small farm to those the size of a good-sized island, and even pebbles may float in the air over the surface of bigger landmasses. (It is never explained why some stones float and others don't, but hey it looks cool. Some populated fragments are tethered together with rope bridges. Uncommon in such settings, magic in Dragon Hunters is almost nonexistent, and where it exists it is part of the scenery, such as an enchanted fairy-tale spring or monsters breathing fire. The characters have clockwork technology but no steam tech or magic items.
Skyland takes place a couple centuries in the future when the world has been torn apart into floating "blocks" rotating around the Eath's previous core.
Code Lyoko: The four main sectors of Lyoko are composed of floating islands above the Digital Sea. The Mountain Sector, in particular, evokes this trope.
Skywhales!
Storm Hawks: While most of the terras are just mountains jutting above the clouds, no floating involved, Cyclonia is eventually augmented into one of these.
Beijing temporarily becomes one of these in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, after Triceratons install an engine that seals it off and sends it floating. The episode "Mission of Gravity" involves an attempt bring it back down to Earth.

Close Western Animation

Buckminster Fuller provides us with plans for elaborate floating cities. I refuse to elaborate, for fear they might make sense.
Additionally, this trope is suggested by the name of the B-17 "Flying Fortress".
Actually a viable means for colonizing Venus. Oxygen floats at, conveniently enough, the area in the atmosphere that is a balmy 70 or so.

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