The Spirit Engine 2 - Television Tropes & Idioms

The Spirit Engine 2 is an In Name Only sequel to The Spirit Engine. The story begins when the three heroes (chosen from a possible cast of nine) rescue a young girl named Isabelle and her brother Elai from assasins of a cult which seemingly seeks to kill her and her brother. Before killing Elai, one claims that some great mission is almost over. Although they rescue Isabelle, nobody has any clue why they had any interest in the children. Knowing her village is too vulnerable to leave her there, they escort her to a nearby military base in hopes of leaving her under their protection. However, they are soon plunged into the heart of an even deeper, more sinister plot, with many apparent enemies and few friends. The plot inevitably links back to the children they saved, but not before growing in scale beyond their wildest dreams.

Although the plot retains no similarities or links to the first Spirit Engine, the game features a greatly-enhanced version of the first game's active-time battle system which leads to difficult, strategic battles. Like in the previous game, the player can choose one of three characters to fill each slot, with similar roles in the party, but the choice of characters in this game has a much greater effect on the plot, each having their own arc through the story and many scenes either unique to one or different for each party (including elements which depend on more than one person). Their outlooks are also far less similar than one would expect, despite leading them to the same decisions at most points.

~~The game is shareware; a demo containing the first two chapters is available on the author's website and the full nine chapters can be purchased for ten dollars.~~ AND NOW IT'S FREE!

This game provides examples of:

Action Girl: Ionae, Charlotte, and Grace.
After Combat Recovery
Almost Dead Guy: Clay 13, who uses this to deliver one of the game's biggest Tear Jerkers.
Anti-Hero / Knight In Sour Armour: Kaltos.
Apocalyptic Log: You find one right near the end. So did the villains, but they're too impatient to translate it all. It's anybody's guess whether reading its warning would have changed their course though.
Arranged Marriage: For Ferwin.
Artifact Title: This game does not contain the spirit from the first game, rather less the Spirit Engine, but retains the name anyways.
- Spiritual Successor: Though it has a completely different setting, it retains the battle system of the original Spirit Engine.
As the Good Book Says: Mericious quotes a passage from the Bible at one point.
The Atoner: Enshadu most obviously, but also possibly Kaltos and Grace.
Aura Vision: Pyan Pau claims to have this, though we must take his word for it. Mostly it tells him there's something wrong with Ionae, in case it wasn't already obvious.
Battle in the Center of the Mind: Sort of. After Ick Thelloth's brutal Hannibal Lectures in chapter 8, your characters proceed to fight the imaginary visions that Ick Thelloth used to Mind Rape them in the first place.
Battle Theme Music: Regular encounters have their own theme that usually changes once per chapter, and every boss has a unique theme.
Berserk Button: Don't criticize (or patronize) Grace for her part in the Amaran war. You will regret it.
BGM Override: During chapter 5, the area music plays during all battles except the boss.
Big Damn Heroes: Clay 13, twice (though it's not until after the second time that you actually find out who he is).
Bishonen Line: The Final Boss goes from an enlarged version of himself, to a bizzare humanoid creature in heavy armour, then ends with a transformation back into his regular human form (albeit with an Absurdly Sharp Laser Blade).
- Possibly justified; Baliste is slowly losing power throughout the fight due to being disconnected from the World Eye. By the time he gets down to his final form, he probably only has enough energy left for the Laser Blade.
Blood from the Mouth: Lieutenant Grossman.
Bonus Boss: Urtat Underval, twice. Once as a human, and once as a hulking zombie.
Boss Remix: "The Fiercest", chapter 3's miniboss battle music, is a remix of that chapter's normal battle music.
- "Demonic Timbre", chapter 8's boss music, is also a remix of that area's background music.
Broken Angel: Ionae is a demon who has been stripped of her powers.
- Subverted. According to Word Of God, Ionae is actually an alien from another dimension, not a demon.
Byronic Hero: Ionae. However, she becomes a more typical Anti-Hero towards the end thanks to Character Development.
Cavalry Betrayal: Though they don't want to kill you, just slow you down.
Character Development: And how!
Character Portrait: Lots. Even minor characters usually have quite a few.
Chekhov's Gunman: Isabelle.
Circling Birdies: Stunned creatures will have the star variant.
Combat Medic: Priests are your main healers, but can dish out formidable concussive and magical damage too.
Cool Old Guy: Denever.
Cool Sword: Knights.
Cursed with Awesome: Ionae eventually comes to view herself as having this. When she's given the chance to go back she kills the messenger to make sure that nobody else can try to bring her back again. However, even (or perhaps especially) after that she is acutely aware of the downsides of being a relatively-powerless human.
Cuteness Proximity: The tiquits in chapter 7.
Ferwin/Charlotte/Pyan Pau: Oooos so cute? You are!
Dark and Troubled Past: Kaltos got involved in some very illegal stuff and didn't realize what he was doing until his wife left him. Charlotte ran away from home after "winning" a suspicious amount of money off her boss in a card game, and even one of the fellow party members casually implies that he suspects her of being a thief. Enshadu can't even guess at what he must've done in the past, but it was clearly pretty gruesome.
The Dead Have Eyes: Dead Ionae.
Deadpan Snarker: Kaltos, Ionae, and Mericious.
Defrosting Ice King: Kaltos if you also have Charlotte in your party.
Detached Sleeves: Ionae.
Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Ick Thelloth. Huge, hideous demon who can manipulate and break minds and who has been mutating and evolving the wildlife nearby towards things which could dig him out of his prison, likely for hundreds of years. Goes down hard.
Difficulty Levels
- Harder Than Hard: Absurd mode.
Doesn't Like Guns: Kaltos.
Don't You Dare Pity Me!: This, along with "...I just want to be alone...", are the last words of the Big Bad.
Dracula: Count Cristoff.
Dressing as the Enemy: The one secretive thing Zerau does all game.
Dumb Blonde: Charlotte, kind of.
Easily Forgiven: Jaques.
The End of the Beginning
Eldritch Abomination: Ick Thelloth.
Everything Fades: Averted with monster corpses at least; they stay on-screen even after the battle is over.
Expressive Mask: Enshadu.
Expy: The hippy, peace-and-love cult making a pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Edges look identical to the evil cult from The Spirit Engine 1. Naturally, everybody and his brother assumes they're evil. If only they could be so lucky.
False Flag Operation: And boy does it work.
Fantastic Nuke: You'll know it when you see it. Dear lord, you'll know it when you see it.
Fantastic Racism: Two-sided example. Yaegera and Lereftain both think the other country is full of wretched barbarians.
Fantasy Gun Control: Actually averted. The technology level seems to be around the 13th to 14th century — guns are still fairly recent inventions, and swordsmen are still around. This is actually rather problematic for knights, as the skills that they spent their lives training for are quickly becoming useless due to the advent of gunpowder.
The Fatalist: Mama Saga.
Foreshadowing: So much of it. Shala's insistence to take Isabelle into her custody, Sam's and Arie's ramblings in chapter 2, chapter 5's ending cutscene...
Fridge Logic / Gameplay and Story Segregation: In chapter 9, if you have Ionae in your party, she threatens to collapse the hall using an explosive shell...except that she can't use that skill.
Fridge Brilliance: It initially seems very confusing why the scientific research station in Chapter 6 is in such an obscure location and why no major breakthroughs have been made by all the (admittedly kooky) scientists there. Then you realise this is how the Rakari isolate and supervise scientific minds so they can mindwipe and suppress any discoveries to preserve their Medieval Stasis.
Glass Cannon: Musketeers, though their passive dodge skill helps a little.
- Also Baliste's final form. Terrible armour, but can dish out upwards of 2000 damage per attack.
Guest Star Party Member: At several points (including the final boss) someone with a gun hangs around behind you to provide extra firepower. They're never as strong as the actual party members, but the extra firepower is free, so who's complaining?
Hair of Gold: Charlotte is a subversion.
Hannibal Lecture: Ick Thelloth delivers one each to your characters in chapter eight via Mind Rape. Some of them are more like verbal No Holds Barred Beatdowns.
Human Popsicle: In an interesting variation, most of the population of the world underwent this to wait out a disaster, except a few who stayed awake for maintenance. Sadly, the weapons used to fight the Rakari killed an awful lot of them when the controller was driven insane... twice.
I Choose To Stay: Ionae.
Idle Animation
Inexplicable Treasure Chests
Infinity+1 Element: Absolute damage, which cannot be dodged or resisted. Enemies are the only ones who can use it, too.
- Actually one accessory will infrequently cause a small amount of this damage to an enemy, but the point still stands in general.
It Got Worse: Often. Very often.
Jerkass: Jonah, the bookseller at Longreach.
Karl Marx Hates Your Guts
Lady of War: Grace.
Lightning Bruiser: Shana.
Load-Bearing Boss: The final boss. Though to be fair he was wrecking the place up pretty bad before you even arrived, and just got worse once he started fighting you. It's a wonder the ceiling held long enough to finish your fight.
Lost Technology: All of the Aulder ruins, but especially the World Eye.
Made of Iron: Jaques.
Magic from Technology and/or Magitech: The game turns more sci-fi the closer you get to the end. However, not all the setting's magic has any relation to technology (such as the skills of the party members themselves).
Make My Monster Grow: Baliste's first form is simply an increase in size.
Malevolent Masked Men: The Keepers.
Marathon Boss: The Bonus Boss, Urtat Underval. He's a Stone Wall, and heals himself when low on health. Defeating him is extremely difficult and often takes quite a while.
- Also Count Cristoff. His health actually decreases throughout the fight, but every attack he makes drains a sizable portion of his target's health, so if you damage him, he can just drain it back. It gets even worse once he gets low on health and uses an attack that makes him disappear for a long time and regenerate about 2000 Hit Points. Needless to say, the battle can drag on for quite a while.
  - Although effective use of the brace skill allows you to reduce the damage of his attacks, and coincidentally the strength of his healing, to such pathetic levels that his fight becomes an extremely short cakewalk.
- The king, though, is Ick Thelloth. He doesn't have any way of healing himself except for some token extremely slow regeneration, but he reflects a percentage of all damage he receives back onto one of your party members, in a form that ignores armor and cannot be dodged or resisted. So if you try to kill him too fast you die, and just hitting him at all usually requires waiting for him to randomly select the party member you can most easily heal for his ability, launching one or two solid attacks, and healing up, by which time your window of opportunity to attack has likely closed. And he has a lot of health, and some devastating active attacks.
Master of Illusion: Ick Thelloth, although it's more of the characters' own imaginations by way of Mind Rape.
Mauve Shirt: Almost every Red Shirt becomes this due to the aversion of Nominal Importance, though in particular, Captain Hardcastle.
Medieval Stasis: The Rakari tried to enforce this, but found that there were just too many people to control.
Melodrama: Ionae is fond of this, especially in her journal entries.
Mercy Kill: Your third party member delivers one to Count Cristoff.
Mind Rape: The Rakari used this as a weapon during their war against humanity, and may or may not still do so when necessary for security (though the end of Enshadu's story implies that their mind control is refined enough that they probably don't have to). This is also Ick Thelloth's modus operandi.
Mirror Match: The Imagination battle if you have a party of Ionae, Pyan Pau, and Denever. (Doubly so for Ionae and Enshadu, who actually fight themselves)
Money Spider: Averted — there's actually a finite amount of credits in the game, in addition to a limited number of slots for selling things, forcing you to be very careful with your purchases.
Mood Whiplash: Chapter 4. You've gone to bright, happy, Porto Vale, with cheery music, a festival, and an uplifting mood! Things might be making a turn for the better for once! ...And then we get mood whiplash of the other kind once chapter 5 rolls around and we get a Fantastic Nuke combined with Zombie Apocalypse.
Morality Kitchen Sink: Although the good guys are obviously good guys and some of the bad guys are obviously bad guys, by the time you reach the end and have the full story it's entirely unclear whether the Rakari or the the Keepers of Order are good, evil, or neutral, and the answer to both questions may not be the same. And if you do think they're evil, that gives the "real" villains of the story quite a bit of sympathy points.
Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: You're actually helping the Big Bad for almost the entire game.
Nintendo Hard: The second half of the game.
No Hero Discount: Averted with Surplus Sam in the final chapter, who agrees to give you a discount, but also played straight and Lampshaded with the shopkeeper right next to him.
Nominal Importance: Usually averted; even minor characters and shopkeepers have unique names and sprites.
- Also Played for Drama in that many of the Red Shirts and Cannon Fodder are given unique names and portraits, purposefully sidestepping the usual purpose of the trope.
- And Played for Drama yet again in a specific instance: During Grace's Hannibal Lecture in chapter 8, her imagination is simply called "Unknown Soldier" to emphasize how she tried not to think about how the soldiers she mowed down were actual people. The purposeful contrast with other Red Shirts having names is rather chilling.
Now What?: The ending leaves it intentionally unclear whether any of the Rakari even survived, rather less if they are still going to be in charge of the government. The status quo is definitely broken, but it'll be a while before any of the characters present for the finale or the final scene know just how broken, and nobody has a clue yet what it'll be replaced with.
Occupiers Out of Our Country: Big part of Batiste's motivation.
Officer and a Gentleman: Captain Hardcastle.
- Also, Grace.
Oh My Gods!: Since Pyan Pau is from a different country, he uses "Karvey" in place of "God".
Only One Name: Averted; almost everyone has a last name, and we never even learn Baliste's first name.
Overt Operative: He may be good at not dying and several steps ahead in information gathering, but it's hard to justify calling Jaques Zerau a good spy.
Plot Armour: When the airship crashes at the beginning of chapter 3, the main characters' compartment is magically the only one left intact, allowing them alone to survive.
Projected Man: Darak.
Properly Paranoid: Once you finally reach the Institute, one of the professors is extremely paranoid and distrusting of you. The one that greets you tells him to stop worrying. Later, a group of Keepers arrive, and the same scenario plays out...except that it ends with the keepers killing both professors and gassing the facility.
Psychic Powers: The Rakari can read and rewrite humans' minds, though the mind-reading power doesn't seem to be always on. Ick Thelloth's got mind-attacking powers too, but seemingly much less refined.
Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: It depends on what characters you select, but you'll often end up with this.
Religion of Evil: Subverted with the Keepers. They have all the trappings of one (and they certainly don't do themselves any favors), but it turns out that, until the very end, they're literally the only ones actually opposing the Big Bad, whereas everyone else is playing right into his hands.
Retired Badass: Grace. Averted with Denever.
Reverse Mole: Jaques.
Rhymes on a Dime: The Crone.
Ridiculously Human Robot: Clay 13. He even delivers one of the game's biggest Tear Jerkers right at the end.
- Also, Darak.
Runaway Fiancee: Ferwin.
Schrödinger's Player Character
Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Jaques Zerau is rather...eloquent.
- This is also deconstructed, amazingly. In the final chapter, while he raises his gun to shoot Isabelle, he begins a long-winded speech about how what he's about to do is for the greater good and is a necessary evil. Before he finishes, he is stabbed In the Back by one of Baliste's bodyguards.
- Ionae does this too, of the melodramatic variety.
Sequential Boss: The final one.
Shape Shifter Guilt Trip: Ick Thelloth absolutely loves this trick.
Show Some Leg: Ionae.
Shut Up, Hannibal!: A few characters attempt this to Ick Thelloth...who simply redoubles his efforts and causes them to finally crack.
Simple Staff: Priests.
Slept Through the Apocalypse: A minor example, somewhat. The playable characters and Jaques survive the Fantastic Nuke midway through the game due to the latter locking them in a bunker. They don't realize what's going on until they wake up.
Sliding Scale Of Linearity Versus Openness: Usually a level 1. Areas are extremely linear; you can only follow one path. Chapter 7 is slightly closer to a level 2, however.
The Smart Guy / Only Sane Man: Denever, Enshadu, and Grace, usually.
Spirit Advisor: Pyan Pau's grandfather. He seems to be real, as at least once he tells the party something he shouldn't have known, but nobody else (including the audience) can see him.
Stab the Sky: The Swordfaith ability.
Starfish Aliens: The Rakari, Ick Thelloth, the cloud children... how about "everything that's not a human".
Stepford Snarker: Ionae
Stone Wall: Priests, if you use the right tactics — chi protects them from physical damage and constantly regenerates, aurora protects them from magical damage, and the Chosen skill greatly increases resistance to ethereal. If you combine these attributes, they become nigh untouchable.
- Also Urtat Underval. His defenses are massive, and he can also heal himself while at low health, which can make the fight drag out for quite a while.
  - Notable in that he apparently has an in-universe reputation for this; his title is "Urtat the Unmovable".
- The Final Boss slowly progresses from Stone Wall to Glass Cannon every time it changes forms.
Stripperific: Ionae to an extent. Averted with every other female character.
Sufficiently Advanced Aliens: The Rakari, probably. Though as it turns out, the humans were the ones who created most of the technology.
Sword Plant: The Thunderstrike ability, which creates an earthquake (or something).
Talking Is a Free Action: Averted hard with Jaques during chapter 9.
Theme Naming: Shana, Shara, and Shala, Baliste's three bodyguards.
Timed Mission: Two of them. Unsurprisingly these compose two of the three places people will argue are the hardest in the game.
Token Good Teammate: Shala, of Baliste's group.
Tomboy: Marie.
Took a Level in Kindness: Ionae by the end of their Character Development.
Tsundere / Belligerent Sexual Tension: Kaltos and Charlotte to each other.
Universal Poison
Unwitting Pawn: The three main characters; see Nice Job Breaking It, Hero, above.
Victory Pose
Villainous Breakdown: The Crone before she is fought a second time, evidenced by her dropping her Rhymes on a Dime.
- Baliste also goes completely insane once they go into the World Eye.
Visionary Villain: Baliste.
Well-Intentioned Extremist: Batiste. Whether the Rakari and/or the Keepers of Order are this is intentionally left for the player to decide for themselves, but it's clear that even if they are, he went a bit overboard against them.
- Jaques is a heroic variant.
Wham Episode: Chapter 5.
Wham Line: Minor example; "You've got plenty of time. Or rather, it has already run out."
Where It All Began: Almost. The game ends in Longreach, which is also the location of chapter 2.
Why Don't Ya Just Shoot Him?: Averted with Baliste, who does not hesitate to slaughter anyone who gets in his way.
Wide-Eyed Idealist: Pyan Pau, Ferwin, and Charlotte are mild examples. Charlotte is also a subversion.
Winged Humanoid: Ionae. While the attention they draw is inconvenient (and they're no good for flight), that's only tangential to her real problem.
- Wings Do Nothing: They're not for show, though, and she actively tries to hide them.
With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Anyone who tries to use the World Eye, Baliste in particular.