Phantasy Star Online 2 / Tropes N to Z

Main Page | Tropes A to M

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N-O

• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Gel Wulff, again. And quite literally you have to run away from them! (At least in the earlier areas.)
• Narrator All Along: The EPISODE 5 narrator is Shiva. This makes the fact that she sounds a lot like Hariette much, much more meaningful.
• Near Victory Fanfare: A lot of major raid bosses get a version of The whole new world replacing the boss theme when their health gets down to 25%.
  • Elder gets the standard version.
  • Luther gets a remix with Ominous Latin Chanting.
  • Magatsu actually gets the third opening theme as the fanfare. Magatsu Sai gets the theme song instead, with an oriental-themed version.
  • The Profound Darkness gets an Autobots, Rock Out! version.
  • All Mining Base Defense quests cue the EP2 opening mix of Resonant Defensive during the final wave. This also goes for Apprentice Zia, who cues the music when low on health.
  • ESC-A Falz Mother has a very slightly remixed version that adds a backbeat and uses instruments from her main boss theme, "The place of death".
  • Deus ESC-A likewise has a subtly altered version, primarily adding a chorus to the background as well as some extra drums and a synth beat.
  • Omega Luther's version is mostly identical to Luther's version, but with the Ominous Latin Chanting replaced with singing in Omegan and having some Omegan instruments added.
  • Omega Apprentice's version is very close to the original, but has bongos added and Omegan singing in the style of her main boss themes, "DINATIS VIRTULA" and "DYREINA".
  • Dark Falz Persona's version is mostly unchanged from the default version, but has a few triumphant-sounding instruments added to the background and the With Lyrics is changed to a mix of both Omegan and English.
  • The Primordial Darkness actually ends up using the normal version just like Elder. Quite fitting for the Final Boss of the game.
• Necessary Drawback:
  • For obvious reasons, charge time reduction effects and Charge Escape don't work on Namegid and Gigrants Type-0.
  • Vegas Illusia is the only Field boss that can drop 13★ weapons. So of course, it's the only Field boss that can't be fought on demand, only appearing as a random spawn in Vegas Exploration and Riding Quest. This makes it very hard to hunt for, unfortunately.
• Nerf: Many over the course of the game's history, albeit rarer than buffs. Some notable nerfs include:
  • Shunka-Shunran is possibly one of the hardest-hit PAs in the entire game in terms of nerfs; it went from the best Katana PA in the game in EPISODE 2 to being near-useless in EPISODE 4 to gaining a utility in EPISODE 6 but still having lackluster output compared to the rest of Katana's kit, which was progressively buffed compared to Shunka.
  • Zanverse originally scaled with any and all multipliers, which caused some really strange niche builds to pop up that maximized the damage of Zanverse, such as Break Stance TE/BO. As Zanverse's effectiveness scales with the MPA's effectiveness, boosting the raw scaling of Zanverse has a massive effect on overall DPS. This was severely scaled back come EPISODE 5, which removed the ability of Zanverse to scale, meaning it now always deals a flat 20%.
  • The effect of Weak Bullet was initially much stronger, as it multiplied all damage dealt to the target part by 2.55x (+155%). A side effect of the multiplier being so massive was that bosses were balanced around it, and by the time EPISODE 3 raid bosses occurred many bosses had reached Damage-Sponge Boss levels of HP, meaning that run speed largely hinged on the existence of a competent Ranger somewhere in the team. EPISODE 4 made an attempt to avert this by introducing "Weak Bullet Jamming", which reduced the multiplier of Weak Bullet to 1.2x (20%), and with bosses now balanced around that mechanic Rangers were no longer strictly required for better runs. EPISODE 5 solidified this change by removing Jamming and nerfing Weak Bullet to 1.2x, with bosses in previous content getting their HP pools nerfed accordingly.
  • Deus ESC-A Zephyros was nerfed within a week of being released, dropping his HP by 20,000,000 for the fight proper and dropping it by 10,000,000 for the DPS check while reducing his ATK in all forms. According to the developers, this was done with such haste because the failure rate pre-nerf was much higher than expected; the clear rate difference between regular Extra Hard Blocks and Expert Blocks^note Requires clearing Heaven and Hell Stages 1-5 and having a +35 Weapon/Lv. 120 Pet was a whopping 4x.
  • The Battle Arena Skill "Protection" had its usage limit cut to 1 (down from 2) in mid-May 2017. This is the result of most people taking Protection whenever it shows up and using it to hold down the Rainbow Emblem spawn zone during the last 1:20 to secure a victory.
• Neglectful Precursors: It's noted that the Photoners were as lazy as hell; this created the Profound Darkness because their laziness allowed their man-made Xion replica to become corrupted with negative Photons.
• Nested Story Reveal: The Wham Episode of EPISODE 5 manages to zigzag this to hell and back, almost to Mind Screw territory. After The Reveal that Shiva is the Narrator All Along, it is also revealed within the same scene that the story that the player and Xiera participated in is simply an alternate telling of the events in Omega that resulted due to the player's presence; the real story of Omega is much different, as in the original Omega, there was no player to act as the world's savior, and thus Harriet was lost to darkness. However, the "alternate" version of events is somehow just as real as the original, as not only was the black hole's closure the catalyst for Shiva's revival, but Harriet's soul from the alternate Omega carried over to the Oracle dimension as a Genesis Weapon.
• New Media Are Evil: A literal, and rather unique, twist to the concept. For some reason, the same Applied Phlebotinum that makes The Alternet of 2028 run also happens to power the Phantoms, hostile constructs that threaten Earthlings and ARKS alike.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: It happens a lot.
  • In Episode 2, stopping Luther saves the lives of everyone onboard Oracle, but creates a new Dark Falz.
  • In Episode 3, Persona's Heroic Sacrifice saves the life of Matoi, but inadvertently gives the power of Time Travel to The Profound Darkness, allowing it to infinitely revive from defeat. What's more, the creation of The Profound Darkness tears such a wound in space-time that it affects the parallel world of Earth, paving the way for the creation of Mother Cluster and the Phantoms.
  • In EPISODE 5, you get to imbue your Coat Doublis with the power of the Ame-no-Murakumo, which causes the entire rescue operation to go wrong.
  • While confronting the first of the Four Heavenly Apprentices, Margaretta accidentally reveals that she's the one who summoned the Four Heavenly Apprentices, in a harebrained scheme to become popular and respected by then getting the player's help and piggybacking on their victory. Xiera is clearly not happy with this development and only doesn't say Screw This, I'm Outta Here because Hariette convinces her that dealing with the Ephemera is bigger than Margaretta's mishap.
  • Margaretta uses her power to kill Elmir in the throne room. However, this just lets Elmir gain control of the power residing within the throne room, allowing him to force Margaretta to become Dark Falz Apprentice.
  • The climax of EPISODE 5 reveals a major plot twist. By defeating each of the Omega Falzes, the player is not actually obtaining the raw Falz essence itself, as such a power would inevitably destroy them; the consciousness they obtain is simply a fragment of the original Falz. The essences are actually returned to the earth, as Omega itself is the incarnation of the Profound Darkness, and by doing so the player had been playing into Elmir's hands the entire time.
  • It is revealed at the very end of EPISODE 5 that closing the black hole instigated Shiva's resurrection.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain:
  • In gameplay, Barbarillipans dig stuff out of their backpack to attack you with. However, they have a chance of throwing Recovery Pods at you, which restore your health.
  • Adam kills and absorbs Mother in EPISODE 4, Chapter 7, an action that ultimately proves to be his undoing.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Bryu Ringahda is a badass^note complete with Badass Arm-Fold avian centaur Falspawn. Even by this series' standards, this one is just plain weird...
  • The Phantasm-type enemies in Tokyo are stranger still: their ranks include zombies with blades and machine guns hidden in their torsos, tanks that can summon missile launchers of varying shapes and sizes, polar bears that can split their heads in half to project larger hidden mouths, Tyrannosauruses Rex that can stick their skulls out of their stomachs to use as a Wave-Motion Gun, and for the field's boss, bullet trains fusing together into a three-headed dragon ala King Ghidora.
• Nintendo Hard:
  • Plan on fighting Dark Falz Luther on Super Hard? Better bring all the healing items you can carry and some friends to revive you when (yes, when) you get KO'd. Extra Hard then goes and gives him even faster attacks, a shield that appears over his main weak point, and new moves (including a double time stop!) Have fun!
  • Mining Base Defense: Despair. Not only are bossess and Elite Mooks far more plentiful than in previous iterations, but the field is wider and there are far greater elements in place that single-handedly threaten entire runs with their presence, including Falspawn Particle Cannons, which One-Hit Kill Mining Bases if left unchecked, infected Campships, which kill players as fast as you can say "Oh, Crap!", and the addition of new Waves with Falz bosses and greater enemy numbers than ever before. You get the A.I.S. on your side for this mission, but if you're not careful with how you use them, you can still throw an entire run down the drain with one slip.
  • Upon release, it was basically impossible to get a net gain out of playing Mesetan Shooter without bringing friends. An update lowered its difficulty, but it's still difficult to acquire more Casino Coins than you paid for without at least one extra player. The March 2017 update further boosted potential payout by adding a Rainbow Coin that adds +20 CC, which is double up from the Gold Coin, which is only worth 10 CC.
  • Extreme Quests can get fairly nasty even for parties towards the end stages. The Solo Extreme Quest deserves special mention, which pits one player against nigh-insurmountable odds, AKA heaps upon heaps of ridiculous Level 80 boss fights.
• No "Arc" in "Archery": Averted. Your basic Bullet Bow shots will be subjected to arc gravity. Charging your shots, however, can mitigate this for more accuracy.
• No Hero Discount: The NPC shopkeepers will always charge full price for services even when a Dark Falz is punching ARKS Ships into oblivion. Granted, the stock generally sucks anyways aside from the consumable shop (which is inexpensive), but the Item Lab comes across as especially egregious in this regard, as it takes your money even in the case of a failed upgrade.
• No Ontological Inertia: Funny enough, after the player kills Shiva, the Luminmechs seen fighting Hitsugi and Kohri spontaneously keel over and die on the spot.
• No Power, No Color: An unmanned AIS is gray in color until someone boards it, upon which it takes on the color of whatever clothes they are wearing. Can be subverted if the pilot's clothes are grey.
• No-Sell:
  • The Weapon Potential "Wings of Fortune", found on the Rappy weapons, has a chance to negate damage when the player is attacked.
  • The 14★ Sword Akatsuki has a somewhat similar effect as part of its Potential when unsealed; it gives the player a 10% chance to reduce damage from any given hit by 99%.
  • Shiva manages to completely negate anything and everything that the player and their party throw at her. Matoi at first believes that she is simply immune to their attacks, but Maria points out that she is not only immune, she is actually absorbing their attacks.
• Non-Indicative Difficulty: Despite being called "Ultra Hard", the Ultra Hard versions of Erythron Dragon and Dragon Atrum are less powerful than their Extra Hard counterparts.
• Non-Indicative Name:
  • Despite what the big fat "2" in the title would have you believe, PSO2 is not a sequel to Phantasy Star Online in any capacity, being instead a Spiritual Successor like Phantasy Star Universe was.
  • Zig-zagged. At present, the Council of Six has a total of seven members, which includes a #0. However, one member's seat was empty for decades before Zeno became a member and #0 is a secret member meaning that as far as the public knew, there was a time where there was only five of them however the ARKS' secrets were leaked shortly after Zeno became a member so they now know there's a #0 too.
• Non-Uniform Uniform: Karin does not wear an ARKS Trainee Uniform. No one seems to know why.
• Nostalgia Level:
  • Gal Gryphon's arena was basically ripped straight out of Phantasy Star Online and given updated textures. Gal Gryphon even makes its appearance the same way!
  • The Episode 4, Chapter 7 Story Quest is essentially a reskinned Mothership level from Episode 2, Chapter 6, but with a blue Palette Swap. The final two rooms are even identical to the real thing.
• Not Completely Useless:
  • While the majority of Partners are only good for being meat shields and drawing Hate from enemies you aren't fighting, some are actually decent to have around. For example, Echo (EP3) knows War Cry in spite of being a Force, allowing her to distract enemies for you. Ranger Partners also know Weak Bullet most of the time, although they treat it the same as a normal attack and won't necessarily fire it where you want it. Friend Partners with optimized builds can also deal actually respectable damage if their normal damage output is high enough.
  • Nabarta Type-0, otherwise considered PP-inefficient, does have its uses; namely, tanking multi-hit attacks, which cannot otherwise be negated with Just Guard. Nabarta Type-0 has a niche of having always-active Just Guard, so it can break through multi-hit attacks with ease. Demon Phaleg after she Turns Red is especially notable in this case, as all of her attacks hit one to three times per hit, allowing Nabarta Type-0 to deal a ridiculous amount of damage with an Ice-specialized Force tree.
• Not the Intended Use:
  • Due to the fact that Lobby Actions override all actions the player is performing when you use one, there is a popular trick known as "Lobby Action cancelling", in which you use a Lobby Action to immediately cancel the animation of a Photon Art or Step, then immediately cancel the Lobby Action back into the same Photon Art or Step to negate endlag or other hindrances.
  • Prior to Episode 3's running speed buff, many players often used their dash action repeatedly to double-dash (or perhaps triple, with the aid of something like Assault Buster) to get from point A to B faster than just running on foot.
  • Many Forces and Techers who wield Ilzonde utilize it more as a sort of dash or faux-flying than as an actual attack.
  • Some players may keep a Rod, Talis, or Wand around on their Weapon Palette even if they have zero offensive use for it, because holding one gives the user Mirage Escape. Mirage Escape is the game's longest evasion maneuver, and thus gives the most invulnerability, which makes escaping sticky situations much easier than if one used Step/Dive Roll/Stylish Roll/Mirage Step.
  • In boss fights where One-Hit Kill attacks are involved, many players don't bother using their Photon Blasts for actually attacking; rather, they save them for when said One-Hit Kill attacks occur, so they can survive them by abusing the Photon Blast's ten-second invincibility window.
  • Techers were introduced as a class that specialized in support techniques, with Wand Gear providing some melee ability to distinguish them from the long-range Forces. Yet the sheer burst damage of a fully-charged Wand Gear combined with the enemy-gathering power of the Zondeel technic is so ridiculously effective at clearing large groups of mobs that "melee Techers" are by far the most popular build.
  • Jet Boots in a nutshell. They were designed to be melee weapons that used T-ATK to determine damage, which would let them be Magic Knights. The Switch Strike skill lets them change to S-ATK, presumably so that S-ATK Bouncers (specialising in Dual Blades) could also use Jet Boots. However, because there is no subclass that supports both melee combat and T-ATK, the most dominant Jet Boots builds are based around S-ATK.
  • Some Photon Arts are widely used as a method of getting around faster than on foot, such as Guren Tessen, Rodeo Drive Type-0, and Moment of Trick.
  • Some players may put items on their Player Shop for overtly exorbitant prices when the item in question isn't worth a fraction as much. Why? Because it frees up inventory space.
  • Étoile's "Étoile Will" Skill functions as a Last Chance Hit Point like most "Will" Skills. However, Étoile Will also instantly regenerates all Gear Gauges to maximum when the skill is activated. Because Étoile's Weapon Gears are tied to massive burst damage, savvy players will attempt to intentionally take lethal damage during certain fights to activate Étoile Will and get an on-demand Full Connect/Protect Release for free.
• Notice This:
  • Matter Board related items and events will have a gold sparkle when they appear.
  • Likewise, guaranteed drops that you earned from a Collect File will sparkle white on the field, and will have an accompanying pop-up at the bottom of the screen.
  • You're also bluntly notified when a Rare Random Drop has appeared. The screen will display RARE DROP! in big letters, and it becomes rainbow colored if it's a 10★+ item. If you can't find them, they teleport to you after 60 seconds or so.
  • When someone in the vicinity uses Weak Bullet on something else in the vicinity, a large, orange reticle makes sure everyone knows what just got shot. This also applies if a player/partner gets hit with an attack that inflicts Weak Bullet.
  • Sometimes in Single-Party Areas or after completing a mission on Very Hard or higher, you'll hear a short, cheery, ping-pongy tune unlike any other jingle in the game. This means that a rare Parallel World teleporter has appeared in the area. Beyond it are a gaggle of rare enemies: it will either a bunch of Rappies (either the best thing ever or a Zonk, depending on if you're looking for Rappies or not), a rare boss with a bunch of rare mooks, or Urth's Fount.
  • In Battle Arena, the top three players on each team are marked by an emblem above their heads. The problem being that this enables all players to roughly gauge their position at all times, so being within the top three essentially paints a target on your back; not only does it tell the opposition that you're worth more points for being killed, it also tells them if you're trying to attempt a sneak attack, so attempting to backstab your enemies while being within the top three is generally a no-no.
• Not So Above It All: Amusingly, for some reason, Dark Falz Elder shows up 30 mintues after Quna's live performances start without fail. It's now a fandom joke that he's (literally) her biggest fan. Subverted when the real reason for Quna's live performances (to get as many Arks in one place as possible to prepare for an oncoming threat) is revealed.
• Numerical Hard: Mostly played straight as per Phantasy Star Online tradition, with enemies getting more stats on higher difficulties. The game makes an attempt to subvert it starting from Super Hard, which features different Infection Cores and touts "AI changes" for enemies, but most enemy encounters still play out exactly the same save for a select few enemies and bosses. Ultra Hard generally subverts this, since it also introduces Photoner Infection Cores and Enemy Shields, and many minibosses and some basic mooks have actual meaningful changes like new attacks and altered behavior. Some minibosses also have "Ultra" counterparts that are similar to "Ultimate" enemies from PSO, having superficially similar movesets but also being much more aggressive and powerful.
• Obvious Rule Patch:
  • This trope is why the hard damage cap was implemented, to counteract players abusing specific Class combos and strategies in unintended ways (SU/GU being the main offender). This was eventually reversed in EPISODE 6 as at that point Power Creep had caught up and now virtually every class is capable of hitting the damage cap, so it was just removed going forward.
  • The "anti-air" shield for Omega Masquerade and Demon Phaleg was made specifically to prevent players from trivializing bosses by flying high into the sky then air camp with ranged attacks.
• Oddball in the Series:
  • It's easy to tell when Odin decides to say hello; instead of getting an Emergency Code, the "FATE Joined" message from Final Fantasy XIV appears.
  • Unlike previous collaboration bosses like Cougar NX, Knight Gear, and Odin, Monster Hunter Frontier's Elzelion only appears exclusively as a random spawn in Free Fields as opposed to having his own Limited Quest. Defeating him gives a chance to obtain his Quest Trigger, which will allow you to engage him in a four-player hunt at Frontier's resident Boss-Only Level, The Tower. Elzelion is also the first collaboration boss who does not possess a weakness to Lightning.
• Official Couple:
  • Zeno and Echo. A subplot in EPISODE 5 even involves Echo trying to tie the knot with Zeno.
  • As of EPISODE 5, Matoi is confirmed to have a romantic interest in the Player Character. Out of respect for open-ended character relationships in terms of the player, the player does not explicitly return her feelings, but certain actions imply that the player does reciprocate to a degree.
• Oh, Crap!: Just when you think you're through with Wave 6 on Mining Base Despair, the 7th wave reads "Wave 7 Start: EXTREME DANGER". You also hear Melitta freaking out over the Falz Arms showing up. On Wave 8 though... You hear the opening rift of Falz Hunar's theme, as well as a sudden visit from the Falz Hunar himself.
• Ominous Latin Chanting:
  • Dark Falz Elder's theme
  • Even more prevalent in the battle themes for Falz Angel and Dark Falz Luther.
• Old Save Bonus: In the Japanese version of the game, having your SEGA ID linked with both PSO2 and IDOLA: Phantasy Star Saga allows you to get Idola Points from playing the latter, up to 10,000 Idola Points a week. You can spend Idola Points at the Visiphone for some prizes, including Star Gems, the rare and powerful Idola-style Steak, and a variety of cosmetics based on the game, such as Lobby Actions, Room Items, and Music Discs. This was ultimately removed from the game when IDOLA shut down, rendering it Temporary Online Content.
• Older Than They Look: A lot of characters are much older than they appear to be. For example, Zeno is actually almost as old as Huey, Echo is a year younger than Zeno, Matoi and Io are both 18 (in Episode 5 and after timeskip respectively), Melrandia is around 20-21, Patty and Tea are 20, and most CASTs have crazy ages; Regius is 73 years old. It's justified in the latter case, since CASTs are also robots and look the same consistently. Though as Regius himself has proven, CASTs are not immune to looking rustier over the years.
• One-Hit Kill:
  • Guar Zigmorde's so-called "instant death" attack, where she attacks with an area-wide slash that causes a wisp to appear over the heads of those affected. If you wait too long, she will follow up with a second attack that will one-shot all affected players instantly.
  • Dark Falz Apprentice's Wave-Motion Gun has an extremely high chance to one-shot most players not protected by invulnerability or Iron Will/Automate/Dear Master. It also one-shots AIS and Mining Bases.
  • Odin's Shin-Zantetsuken, as is Final Fantasy tradition. Once he starts it up, the battle becomes a fight to the finish; failing to kill Odin before it goes off results in the death of the entire Multi-Party, no questions asked. This even goes straight through stuff that gives you invulnerability, such as Katana Combat Escape and the charging animation of your Photon Blast.
  • In Battle Arena's VR Volcano, falling into the lava results in instant death. The enemy team also gets 10% of your points, but as they're attributed to no one, you can't kill a specific target to get them back.
  • During the second encounter with Hagito Phemut in Magisterial Onslaught, Yamato will spawn a large, white ball of energy above the field. If it is not destroyed before it touches the ground, it inflicts a field-wide AOE that kills anyone not under invulnerability effects.
  • Yamato's Desperation Attack causes missiles to appear around the battlefield. If they aren't destroyed in time, they'll unleash a massive blast that destroys all A.I.S. on the field unless you time a dodge properly.
  • Let ESC-A Falz Mother absorb enough cubes during her deadly cubes attack, and the resulting field-wide AOE will hit anyone not under the effect of invulnerability for thousands of damage per hit.
  • Deus ESC-A has two.
    • After the first phase, he'll charge up a glowing white orb. If you don't avoid it by running away, it'll do enough damage to kill instantly.
    • If, somehow, you are unable to kill Deus ESC-A while he's stunned during the DPS check, he'll get up and sweep his sword, which does enough damage to one-shot anyone.
  • Apostolo Dragon has a unique interaction with Dark Blast that causes him to deal instantly fatal damage to anyone who dares use one in his presence with his absorption attack.
• One-Hit Polykill:
  • Gunblade's Aiming Shot is a Charged Attack that fires a moderately-powerful bullet at enemies. It's one of the few attacks in Gunblade's arsenal that has no Striking component to it, and it goes through enemies to hit groups.
  • Piercing Shell for Assault Rifles. It doesn't do a lot, but it goes straight through enemies, allowing you to hit multiple enemies in one attack.
  • End Attract seems like it would be this, but it stops at a single enemy. Instead, it penetrates through an enemy, dealing continuous damage throughout. Against boss monsters, especially enormous ones, one fully charged bullet can chew through HP extremely fast.
  • Last Nemesis for Bullet Bow takes the cake. Single piercing arrow that hits for astounding damage, and with enough R-ATK and damage multipliers, you can mow down a line of enemies in one blow.
• One-Winged Angel:
  • Most Dark Falzes have this, the specifics of which are difficult to describe.
  • Averted with Dark Falz Apprentice Zia; while it is a Falz form, it isn't complete, as it requires the essence (read:host body with Apprentice) of Dark Falz Apprentice to become complete. Guess where it decides to look?
  • The Chrome Dragon is a minor example. It's already an enormous monster, but as the fight goes on it starts eating the Falspawn it summons. This causes it to sprout wings, a bloated, glowing torso and an array of claws and spikes. These additions substantially boost its abilities (and grant new ones) until destroyed.
  • Deus Angeus transforms into his final form, Deus Esca Zefirot, once he is defeated.
• One-Steve Limit: Subverted; The game doesn't enforce this limit when naming characters, but is defined via Player ID and its assigned ID number. There may be multiple Alice's wandering around the lobby, but the ID number and Player ID assigned to each of them are unique.
• Only the Knowledgable May Pass: Meta example. To play the game, you are required to possess a Japanese SEGA ID. Since this is usually the only game of interest to foreign players that requires it, many potential players are subject to the account creation process. This comes with a standard-issue captcha, which wouldn't be so bad... if it wasn't Hiragana based. This requires a rudimentary knowledge of the Japanese kana alphabet; if one does not know anything about Japanese kana, they can expect to either have their recognition skills tested or ask a friend who does.
• Our Dragons Are Different:
  • The natives of Planet Amduscia are all dragonkin of one form or another. Full-sized dragons (typically based on the western variety) are a recurring theme in boss fights; Vol Dragon, Quartz Dragon, Chrome Dragon, GoronZran and Dragon X all present a new spin on the concept.
  • The boss of the Tokyo Free Field, Train Ghidoran, is a hydra-esque dragon formed out of multiple sentient trains.
• Our Giants Are Different: Male Harukotanese tower over the players and the females of their race, with Kuronians being slightly larger than Shironians. Gigur Gunnegam, the boss of the Shironia field (along with its rare counterpart) is even larger than standard Kuronians, and Magatsu, the boss introduced in an Emergency Quest in the December 2014 update, is even bigger still: it features prominently in the game's fourth opening as ARKS members fight it in a sequence that wouldn't be out of place in Attack on Titan.
• The Outsider Befriends the Best: One of the Player Character's first and closest friends as a new ARKS recruit is the mysterious Matoi, who is later revealed to be Klariskrays II, a former member of the Council of Six and thus one of ARKS greatest heroes. But her past as a Living Weapon and One-Man Army also makes her a as a viable vessel for the Profound Darkness.
• Overly Long Fighting Animation: The animation for Kazan-Nadeshiko involves the wielder performing a slow, circular motion with the Katana before creating a Laser Blade and bringing it down on their foes. The elapsed time for the windup is around three seconds, which is more than enough time for whatever you're fighting to either run away or body you. The Type-0 craft removes the animation and converts it into a Charged Attack.

P-R

• Painfully Slow Projectile:
  • Megid sure doesn't travel fast, but it does hit like a freaking truck.
  • Bar Lodos fires a big water bomb at the stage when low on health. It's slow enough for players to pummel it with turret fire, but if it hits the stage, it'll be very painful.
• Painting the Medium: When Hitsugi travels into PSO2 for the first time, the process of being transferred is depicted as her "loading" into the game, replete with interactable loading screen.
• Paint It Black: Becoming a Dark Falz comes with a nifty new dark-photon-composed outfit, which can be seen to instantly materialize during Gettemhult and Luther's transformations.
• Palette Swap:
  • The rare versions of certain enemies are of a different color. Rare Falspawn are a bright red, Burn Draal is gold, King Vardha is blue, just to name a few. Some of the monsters starting from Episode 2 also gain physical differences on top of the color change, such as Org Keratos' bigger, spikier horns when compared to Org Blan.
  • There's also the color variations for clothing that cannot be dyed with a Recolor Ticket, roughly four to six versions.
    • Mikoto Cluster, the outfit Matoi wears, however, has nine different colors, plus a special tenth. It's in Dark Falz colors.
  • Unusually, Cyleion, an NPC in Franka's Cafe, is a copy of Hyperion, but with orange tertiary colors instead of green.
  • The 3rd Anniversary event featured Weapon Camos based on existing weapons chosen out of a poll; all of the Weapon Camos are palette swaps of existing weapons.
  • Some weapon series are basically just reskins of other weapons but with differences in utility.
    • Justified for some upgrades that keep the original weapon's form but change the color, like Lumiere and Stil.
    • All es-original weapons are reskins except for Rig. Sigma (and the Gram camos) itself is a recolor of Rig, Arion and Raete are recolors of Nox, Dominacio is a recolor of Revolsio, Aculd is a recolor of Fornis, and Aletheia is a recolor of Jutus/Lumiere.
    • Dusk weapons are functionally identical to Orb weapons, but the non-Tech weapons have T-ATK on them and the Harmonizer is an All Class weapon. The Tech Dusk weapons are completely identical in every way. The only major difference between them is their usage in upgrade paths, as Orb is used as a material while Dusk isn't.
    • There is virtually no difference between Million and Krisa weapons besides the shiny coat of paint on the latter and Krisa having a vastly reduced requirement of 300 DEX to equip, low enough that some characters would be able to equip them at Level 1.
• Palmtree Panic: Wopal's Coastline field.
• Peninsula of Power Leveling:
  • You can powerlevel classes rather quickly if you link your character to es and play that instead, which overall earns EXP significantly faster outside of main-game Emergency Quests and Advance Quests.
  • The "Special Training" Quests released as part of the 5th Anniversary event were major cases. Especially the "Episode 2" and "Episode 1~4" Quests. This is due in part to a stacking bonus known as Extra Boost that bumped up the EXP that the Quests dispense, as well as the Boost Week right before the release of EPISODE 5 that boosted it even further. At full boost compounded with additional EXP boosters and Triboosts, players were earning full levels per run below Lv. 65, at least half their EXP gauge between 65 and 75 per run, and 1/6th of their EXP gauge between 76 and 80, which is a blistering fast grind rate. The Quests made level grinding so efficient that when Hero released in late July, people were capping out Hero at Lv. 80 on the first day.
  • Buster Quests dispense an immense amount of EXP at Grade 3 and Advanced, which makes level grinding significantly less time consuming.
  • There's a category of Featured Quest called "Level-Up Quests" that are intended to be this, consisting of once-Limited Quests packed with enemies with a constant EXP boost active. The one that takes the cake, however, is "A World Engulfed In Shadows", a quest consisting entirely of a gauntlet of Aberration bosses capped off with a Dual Boss fight against Dio Hunar and Anga Fundarge. The reason it's so effective is that unlike its original incarnation, it supports a Multi-Party of 12 players. Boss stats don't scale beyond a single party of four, so a full Multi-Party can shred through everything extremely quickly over and over to rack up an incredible amount of experience.
• Percent Damage Attack: The damage-over-time effect that Apprentice Zia spreads when she spawns in Ending deals a percentage of the player's maximum HP in damage every few seconds. This is done to dissuade AIS from wandering into it, since it will go through AIS health extremely quick if stood in too long.
• Plot Hole: The story doesn't directly address the issue of the existence of Dark Falz being interwoven with the Profound Darkness, which was the case in the original tetraology. For all intents and purposes, Elder, Luther, Apprentice, Gemini, and Persona are the "main" Falz, and nothing else counts. This gets a bit odd when you consider cases like Al, who is very explicitly a Dark Falz borne of the player's F-Factor but continues to exist after the death of the Profound Darkness, and Dark Falz Haddaj from es, whose existence supposedly predates that of the current Falz by a significant margin but is never addressed at any point prior to the Erzimaruts and Darker Busters blowing it to smitereens.
• Permanently Missable Content: Xion's mothership, the hub world for EPISODE 1 and most of EPISODE 2, is replaced with the hub world we know now. As North America started out with EPISODE 3 content, they never got to see the original hub world.
• Pile Bunker:
  • EPISODE 5's Buster Quests feature a weapon called the "Buster Ram", a giant, cannon-mounted lance that has the power to destroy large structures that otherwise wouldn't be able to be destroyed. In the Japanese version, it is called a "Buster Pile", which makes it closely resemble the Pile weapon class from Phantasy Star Nova.
  • The "Bunker" series of Launchers contain a large metal pile on the inside. The last of these, Exium Bunker, accentuates this by giving it a Potential that enhances the power of the Zero Distance PA, which, for all intents and purposes, involves getting in your enemy's face and firing an explosive shell at point-blank range.
• Piñata Enemy: The Mesetan, who not only spawns Meseta by simply existing, but drops a ton of it upon defeat. Carrying tickets that boost Meseta drops is a common practice in case a Mesetan shows up.
• Pixel Hunt: Somewhere in the casino, there's a Lilipan sticker that you can find. It does nothing significant, but it's a rather small object to find on a 3D environment, not to mention that the sticker's location is randomized. This is really just a fun little thing for most players, unless you're trying to get 100% Completion on the PS Vita, in which case it's a Trophy.
• Play Every Day: There are various systems that operate on a 22-24 hour clock in order to encourage daily play.
  • The first time you log in each day, you receive a Login Stamp. Each Login Stamp earns you an item, including valuables such as Este Passes and Star Gems. You also receive some FUN points, starting at 100 and increasing up to 500 on the fifth consecutive day. Both the number of stamps and FUN values are doubled with an active Premium Set.
  • Extreme Passes and Casino Coin Passes are also handed out on a daily basis.
  • Daily ARKS Missions provide useful items and experience as a reward for completing simple tasks such as using a drink or clearing any one quest at a specified difficulty level. There are also weekly missions, some of which pay out large sums of meseta. One of the weekly missions offers a gold Bonus Key for simply completing enough daily ones.
  • Each day has four Featured Quests. The first time you clear each of them with at least an A rank, you receive a gift that can contain, among other things, Bonus Keys or Crests.
  • Daily Orders refresh each day. Three of them — tied to the featured Free Field — provide a 5% Daily Triboost buff, which can stack up to 50%, and decays by 5% every 24 hours.
• Player Versus Player: There are two systems in place: ARKS League and Battle Arena.
  • In ARKS League, players are randomly grouped together and must compete with each other in completing a particular task. The highest scoring players can win lots of Star Gems.
  • Battle Arena plays like a real PVP mode, in which 12 players are split into groups of six and battle each other for the most points on a confined playing field. To do so, players must Mine weapons from points on the map and use the gear they dig up to stop the opposition cold while gathering emblems for themselves. By playing in Battle Arena, you can earn Battle Coins that can be used as a currency in the Battle Coin Shop to purchase exclusive prizes, such as special Boosters required to unlock Hidden Potentials on certain 13★ weapons. In addition, players who participate in the Arena can play the Battle Scratch at the end of a match, which allows players to earn special prizes such as exclusive Weapon Camos and the rare Grind Cap +1 item that can be used in New Type grinding to increase the target weapon's Overgrind Cap by 1 without the need to sacrifice another copy of that weapon.
• Playing Possum: (Nab) Rappies fake their death. After a few moments they'll get up and make a run for it, in which the players can hit them again to make them drop an item.
• Plot-Irrelevant Villain:
  • Apprentice is at best a B-plot villain. She has almost nothing to do with the main story outside of serving as motivation for Klariskrays II and all of her major appearances after EPISODE 2 are in subplots or (canon) side material. Its last appearance outside Omega is during the final Mining Base Defense mission.
  • The true form of Dark Falz Persona, who also qualifies as a Giant Space Flea from Nowhere. Shiva considers it a distraction at best.
• The Points Mean Nothing: Zigzagged with Mining Base, in which only some points mean nothing. The points you get from killing enemies are meaningless, while the points you get from Crystals actually unlock new abilities, but both contribute to (an also meaningless) Ranking at the end of each Wave.
• Pokémon Speak: Lillipans only ever say "Li!". Fourier tries to learn their language, and against all odds, successfully does so to a degree.
• Power Creep: Being an online game, expect best-in-slot rare weapons to get trumped by later weapon releases. The Ideal weapon series, for example, was once the only 13-star weapons in the game, which is later supplanted by better weapons such as the Revolsio and Nemesis series. In fact, it's this reason that several weapon series that were once useful got demoted to Weapon Camo status in the North America servers.
• Power Floats:
  • When Jet Boots are brandished, the wielder hovers in the air. The Étoile class similarly floats while using any of their weapons.
  • When using Sphere Eraser or Final Nemesis from the ground, the user floats into the air before executing the attack.
  • Charging Fusion Technics makes the caster glide as movement.
  • Prolonged usage of Nazonde in the air keeps you suspended mid-air until you drop the attack.
• The Power of Friendship: In the final battle against the Profound Darkness, the players who clear the boss fastest contribute towards a massive HP/PP buff for the players who are still fighting, making things easier for them. This buff is appropriately called, "ARKS".
• Power Gives You Wings: While using Zandion, wings made of wind energy appear behind the caster.
• Power Palms:
  • Played With. The Signobraver Gunblade is built from the arm of a robotic enemy, and fires/creates a Laser Blade from its palm.
  • And now there's the Elder Rifle which is Dark Falz Elder's arm which shoots bullets out of it.
  • Ilmegid takes this trope quite literally by launching a hand made of darkness that flies into enemies palm-first to deal damage.
• Power-Up Food:
  • The Naura sisters' cakes provide stat buffs.
  • Certain events feature special food items that you can consume for bonuses, such as the Valentine's and White Day events, which have Chocolates, and the recurring Donut item, both of which grant a +50% Triboost on consumption for 5 minutes.
  • The March 8, 2016 update adds a restaurant that can make stat-boosting food from fish and produce gathered in free fields and meat from defeated monsters.
• Power Up Letdown:
  • The 14★ evolved Pets (Jinga, Aero, Popple) are infamous for being very marginal upgrades from their 13★ versions, gaining very little by way of stats between Lv. 120 and Lv. 130. The base Pets (Wanda, Torim, Cery), by comparison, have explosive stat growth between Lv. 120 and Lv. 130, gaining several hundreds of HP and DEF in the process.
  • Dodge Auto Field is the worst Level 85 Skill in the game by a vast margin. It gives the player the ability to automatically activate the Bouncer's Field Skills (Critical Field and Elemental PP Restorate Field) without cooldown when you dodge an attack with Blinding Sidestep. This is on a class that disincentivizes using Blinding Sidestep due to the truckload of invulnerability frames it gets, and the trade-off for dropping DPS to use Dodge Auto Field isn't worth the effort^note There are attacks that do not leave the boss in question vulnerable in which using Blinding Sidestep is more viable, but only slightly.. The icing on the cake is that a balance patch in July 2019 made Field Remain last 30 seconds, meaning Fields now have no downtime whatsoever (provided you reactivate it right away) and making Dodge Auto Field even more meaningless. Those that can fully make use of it without dropping DPS are rare indeed.
• Powers via Possession: When Mother possesses Al in the final chapter of EPISODE 4, they gain the power to rip a hole in space-time, which they use break through the barrier between Oracle and Earth to assist the player's party in the final fight. Al also more or less gains Mother's abilities on top of his own.
• Precision F-Strike: In the English dub. During Episode 5 when Gettemhult and Luther are fighting in the Guardian's mind, the former refers to the the latter as a "fuck-up." It's definately in-character for the harsh and blunt Gettemhult, especially considering who he's talking to. It still manages to have an impact since the English dub script generally doesn't go for harsh language asides from a few "shits" here and there (fittingly, most of those come from Gettemhult as well).
• Precursors: EPISODE 2 introduces the Photoners, the predecessors of ARKS who were the first to harness the power of Photons and were responsible for the foundation of ARKS. A lot of the conflicts in the game's story can be indirectly (or directly, in some cases) traced back to the Photoners.
• Press X to Not Die: X on the default keyboard setting is your Dash key. Since most things can easily kill you if you are not a tank, the preferred way to stay alive is to dodge every attack.
• Prestige Class:
  • The EPISODE 1 Fighter, Gunner, and Techer classes were originally this, as they could only be unlocked by raising Hunter, Ranger, and Force respectively to a high enough level, then completing a Client Order from the respective Class Trainer to unlock them. The unlock requirement was later removed, turning them into basic Classes.
  • Successor Classes play it straight. Originally, the player was required to get one of each Striking-type, Ranged-type, and Technique-type basic Classes to Level 75 to unlock the Hero Class. This was later simplified to just getting any two basic Classes to Level 75 to unlock all three Successor Classes.
• Previously on…: After Episode 3 was introduced, players could access a lengthy video summarizing the plot (narrated by Xion) up to that point, even if the player hadn't completed up to that point or even started the story. Justified, as the update also allowed all players to begin Episode 3 without having finished Episodes 1 or 2, and they wouldn't be caught up on the plot otherwise.
• Product Placement: Every so often, a collaboration will also include a trailer promoting whatever it is the game is collaborating with, such as Shin Godzilla trailers being added to the TV rotation during the Godzilla collaboration. Other times, SEGA will add a trailer promoting one of their games, such as Tyson Hesse's animated Sonic Mania trailer and the "Custom Character" trailer from Sonic Forces being added to the rotation during the 2017 Sonic Lobby.
• Public Bathhouse Scene: EPISODE 4 features a few; one early on where the girls take Al to get a wash, while two after the Final Boss battle where the girls and boys (separately) discuss breast size. Notable for being the only cutscenes to be cut entirely from the Global version.
• Public Domain Artifact: The Ame-no-Murakumo and Gram, both weapons of legend that are wielded as Hitsugi and Kohri's Embodied Weapons, respectively. They are not actually the real weapons (for obvious reasons), but aether constructs formed in their image with the power of imagination.
• Pun-Based Title: The name of the November 2017/December 2017 AC Scratch can be either translated as "Soft Burst" or "Soft Bust". It is a Dead or Alive 5 collaboration, after all.
• Punny Name:
  • The name of the class "Luster" puns on the word "last", since it's the last Class in the game.
  • One of the last weapons to be added to the game prior to the release of New Genesis is the Heilo^note Likely a mistranslation of "Halo", as in Nova the weapon's fighting style is based around energy rings, a 15★ Talis based on the weapon type of the same name from Phantasy Star Nova. Its Potential is named "Supernova", playing off the title of the game it hails from.
• Punched Across the Room:
  • The Knuckles have a Photon Art called Backhand Smash that can cause this. While you have to be right in the enemy's face to hit with it (or at least moreso than all of the other Knuckles PAs), it hits hard; aside from doing a crap-ton of damage, anything that isn't a boss or otherwise defending itself will be sent flying straight backward. Bonus points if the enemy in question flies into a wall, in which case they bounce off of it and into the sky before crashing back down a few seconds later.
  • To a lesser extent, Rangers can get a Photon Art for their Launcher called "Crazy Smash" which is essentially using the Launcher as a golf club. Not as drastic as Backhand Smash, but still enough to knock some of the heavier enemies on their ass.
• Purple Is Powerful: With the Katana Gear, Bravers can envelope themselves in a fiery violet aura that boosts their critical rate.
• Purposely Overpowered:
  • The A.I.S. (ARKS Intercept Silhouette) (See Instant Awesome: Just Add Mecha!.) It comes equipped with a portable Photon Particle Cannon, and will make mincemeat of pretty much everything. However, it comes with a strict time limit; over-use makes it vulnerable to Falspawn infection and possession. Thus it is only used sparingly, such as Mining Base Defense: Despair/Ending, Gold Magatsu and Phantasm Battleship Yamato.
  • As noted under Infinity +1 Sword, the 14★ weapons have extremely powerful Game-Breaker Potentials that put 13★s to shame. However, they haven't had any noticeable effect on the metagame; this is because they're so exceedingly rare^note Word of God estimated the drop rate to be once per Ship per week; the actual rate is slightly higher than that, but it's still rare enough that less than 1000 14★s exist on a Ship at any given instance that 13★ weapons are still the go-to; having a 14★ makes you extremely overpowered, sure, but it's more of a sign of having god-like RNG than anything else.
  • The Hero class is a Game-Breaker by design; the developers explicitly intended the Class to be able to output incredibly high amounts of damage even in the hands of a novice player.
• Put on a Bus:
  • Everyone who wasn't popular to at least some degree got shafted in EPISODE 4. This includes effectively all of the minor side characters, including Aki, Light, Fourier, Rogio, Afin, and Eucreta, and even some of the more story-relevant ones including Echo and Zeno. Half the Council is also missing, including Regius and Maria, although it is commonly believed that it has to do with the voice actor's schedules.
  • Matoi also gets the bus in EPISODE 4 for the first few chapters as the result of purifying Aika of the Apprentice essence she absorbed in the last episode of the anime, which sent her into Cold Sleep. She comes back later on to reunite with the player.
    • She then promptly subverts it completely in Episode 5, where she takes part in the events from the start, and is the only character NOT Put on a Bus for Episode 5.
• A Quest Giver Is You: The main purpose of Support Partners/Auxiliaries is to automate Fetch Quests by assigning Client Orders to them and have them bring back the required items. As you send them out more, the more COs they can take on at once, and the more EXP and Relationship Values they gain, which in turn lets you give them a Personality.
• Rain of Arrows:
  • The Bullet Bow PA "Torrential Arrow" is a textbook example.
  • Archer-type Dragonkin Aberrations can use an attack that is very similar to Torrential Arrow. If you're caught in the target marker, it deals multiple hits of damage and has a high chance to inflict Poison.
• Rainbow Pimp Gear: Can be invoked by players who ignore everything about Unit Sets and slap on a trio of mismatching Units with tons of affixes, giving them awesome boosts but making them look a bit ridiculous. Can be averted by equipping a Unit Set or just hiding your Units.
• Random Drop: Decided on a character-by-character basis to avoid Loot Drama... though it may be inevitable if it was a Rare Random Drop, as the rares you get are displayed for every player in your party to see.
• Random Event:
  • Randomly-occurring "Emergency Trials" happen every so often in Quests, and can be anything from defeating a group of enemies or even a boss to collecting a bunch of items and returning them to a designated point. There's no penalty for ignoring them, with the exception of a rare few that block your progress until completed.
  • A good majority of Emergency Quests can recur at random times during any given day. You can be notified as to when these happen by up to an hour in advance if you have a Premium Set active and you own Phantasy Star Online 2es.
• Rank Inflation: At the end of a Quest, you're given a grade based on a variety of factors, and grades can range from C through S.
• Rank Scales with Asskicking: The Council of Six, who are the most senior members of ARKS.
• Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs: Dark Blast Elder has a Photon Art known as "Infinity Rush", where you start punching repeatedly at blinding speed until you let go of the PA button or you run out of PP.
• Rare Random Drop:
  • Notoriously, the Elder Pain. It was considered incredibly potent for its time due to its powerful Life Drain Potential, but was outclassed by EPISODE 3 due to the shift in meta towards stronger weapons. Up until the release of New Genesis it was one of the rarest weapons in existence by sheer virtue of being one of the only pieces of gear in the entire game that requires the player to break a specific part of the target. However, Elder Pains can now be bought on the cheap for Weapon Badges, rendering its formerly rare status moot.
  • Most infamous are rare weapon materials. These include the Time Reversal Stone Chronos, the Circular Amphitrite Stone, the Unlocking Liberate, and the Divine Eyestone Graeae. The weapon materials are bar none the rarest items in the entire game, and are used to make some particularly powerful endgame weapons that are made so powerful because the materials needed to create them are astronomically rare. Most players will get copies of the materials from handouts like Titles and campaigns, but dropping them is another story entirely. However, Hatred: Primordial Darkness drops all of these items at a very high rate, making them much easier to hoard.
• Razor Wind: Double Sabers' Gear ability allows them to summon a whirlwind that deals damage to enemies in close proximity for a brief period of time. There is also a Skill Ring called "L/DS Kamaitachi" that gives Double Saber a chance to automatically summon their whirlwind when using a Photon Art, up to 100% chance at +20.
• Rearrange the Song:
  • Ignoring "The whole new world" having a rearrangement of the original version of the song from Phantasy Star Online, the song is rearranged whenever it appears as the Theme Music Power-Up.
  • Some of the tracks in the game are rearrangements from other songs from across the franchise. "Comedy Again" from EPISODE 4 is a rearrangement of "Comedy" from Phantasy Star Universe, ESC-A Falz Mother has a rearrangement of "The Place of Death" from Phantasy Star II, "Unfathomable Darkness" combines a rearrangement of "Ooze" from Phantasy Star IV, "IDOLA the Strange Fruits" from Phantasy Star Online, and "The whole new world", and the fight against the Profound Darkness itself is capped off with a rearrangement of "Rose Confession" as the Quest Clear theme.
  • Xiao's theme is a rearrangement of Xion's theme, as he is Xion from a parallel universe. Mother as well, and there's a good reason for the latter.
  • Omega Hyunal, Omega Angel, Omega Falz Luther, and Omega Dranble all have rearrangements of their Oracle counterpart themes that prominently feature instruments associated with Omega, and Omega Falz Luther even gets added vocals. Omega Appregina and Omega Falz Apprentice get entirely original pieces instead due to their Oracle counterparts debuting in side material (the manga and the anime respectively), but their themes feature stylistic similarities to the Mining Base Defense music and have samples of Dark Falz Apprentice Zia's theme.
• Recurring Character: To date, the only characters besides the player to have had any form of story appearance in any capacity in every single Episode are Matoi and Lisa.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over:
  • The Falspawn's default color scheme. Rare variants go for lots of red instead. Dark Falzes like a more varied palette, though.
  • The rare version of Chrome Dragon, Haze Drahl, is black-and-red instead of white-and-red, which happens to make it look quite a lot like the Falspawn it summons and devours.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Knight Gear/Magiknight Gear flashes these during his pre-battle cutscene in Border-Piercing Blade.
  • The ARKS members also flash them after receiving the Absolute Order.
• Red Sky, Take Warning:
  • A weather effect in Mining Base Defense turns the sky a deep shade of red and boosts enemy stats. Bonus points for being accompanied by the word "WARNING" at the beginning of the wave.
  • Waves 7 and 8 in Despair get "EXTREME WARNING" with their darkened red sky. They're not lying.
  • Inverted on one occasion: The sky turning a light purple signifies the arrival of the swift, deadly Anga Fundarge.
  • The sky in Omega turns red during the Final Defense Phase in Buster Quest. It also turns red when an Accident occurs.
• Regenerating Health:
  • In Battle Arena, you will regenerate 10% of your maximum HP regularly as long as you're not being attacked.
  • Players with the Skill or Skill Ring "HP Restorate" (or its Étoile variation) automatically start restoring their own HP when it dips below a certain level.
  • A myriad of different Potentials and Super Special Abilities can give the player some form of HP regen.
• Regional Bonus:
  • The now-defunct SEA/Taiwanese version had a few things exclusive to their version, such as regional holidays to replace Japanese ones, such as Malaysia Independence Day and Chinese New Year, special holiday Rappies to go with them, such as the dragon-themed Drag Rappies, and some exclusive Costumes and Accessories. Most of these were eventually brought over to the Japanese version in some way, such as most of the cosmetics becoming shop or Mission Pass items, the regional lobbies being available through the Screenshot Studio feature, and Drag Rappies and Eleph Rappies being featured in a few Quests.
  • The Global version of the game abolishes the concept of Old Type weapons completely. Weapons with the "-NT" tag on their name have had them removed, and those that originally only had an Old Type in the Japanese version, such as the Elder Rifle, have had NT equivalents made exclusively for the NA version.
  • Due to the absence of Phantasy Star Online 2es in the West, Weaponoid Boosters are available for purchase with Unique Weapon Badges in the Shopping Plaza. Several NT weapons also associated with said game (like Lightning Espada-NT and Bluesy Requiem-NT) are also available for purchase in the same shop. Some es-exclusive weapon series such as Sigma have also been integrated into normal drop tables.
  • By extension, Receptor-type Augments are comparatively easier to acquire in the Western release. Soul Receptor, Reverie Receptor, Extreme Receptor, and Factor Receptor equipment can be purchased with Rising Weapon Badges at a fair slot count; compare this to the Japanese version, where they are exclusively available through PSO2es and you must buy them from other players if you don't play es.
  • Due to the heavily accelerated pace of content releases, Global throws in several bonuses to help players catch up fast. Among these are Collection Folders for Atlas/Atlas Ex and Trailblazer material weapons, Folders for Croesus and Millionare weapons (otherwise restricted to a Limited Quest), Folders for 14★ Eggs (which are Seasonal limited otherwise), and Badge exchanges for Urgent Quest Triggers (which would cost you Star Gems in the Japanese version).
  • Certain Titles have had their rewards revised accordingly due to the content pacing and Temporary Online Content that has long since been removed from the Japanese version. For example, the Whiteal Units are awarded at half the Titles required compared to the Japanese version, and Dark Falz Persona subjugation Titles award a Founder's Amphitrite at both 10 and 50 kills, whereas the Japanese version only gives one for 50 kills.
• Relationship Upgrade:
  • By the time Matoi returns in Episode 4, her and the player character are very much a known item on board the ARKS Ship, and their 'relationship' is however the player intends it to be, ranging from Heterosexual Life-Partners (for females) to Platonic Life-Partners (if males), and Matoi herself sits waiting for her partner to return when they are thrown into a space-time rift at the start of Episode 5.
  • A subplot in EPISODE 5 centers around Xiera convincing Echo that she and Zeno should get married.
• Relationship Values:
  • Every NPC has a friendship level that gauges how friendly they are to you. Their friendship level can be raised by doing their Client Orders, and/or going on Quests with their Partner Cards if applicable. The system is mostly negligible, though, as it only affects how they talk to you, though there are some Titles, and NPCs may give you presents, which range from meager, to cool, to actually useful.
  • Your Support Partner also uses this friendship system, though it's a lot more applied, since it also affects their Nature and how many Client Orders they can take at any one time.
• Remember the New Guy?: Subverted. The EPISODE 1 Chapter 9 update focuses on a new heroine that the player has supposedly met before, who is the center of a major subplot at the end of the Episode. When the Chapter was added, the update also retroactively added story events to every previous Chapter that shows the player and the heroine meeting several times over the course of the story before her subplot starts.
• Retcon:
  • Omnibus EPISODE 1 Chapter 2 has a scene after the fight with Hi Loga where the player jumps on his head after he's incapacitated and uses their power to purify him. This scene is not present in the original Matter Board version of the Story Quest.
  • Omnibus EPISODE 2 Chapter 2 has an additional action scene where you save Sara from an attack by deflecting Falz Hunar's Elder Pain with only your wrists.
  • Omnibus EPISODE 2 Chapter 5 makes Franka's EPISODE 4 outfit canon much earlier.
• Retconjuration: This is the Matter Board/Divergence Matrix's actual ability; by collecting "Matter" via nodes, the player is able to edit the past and create possibilities not foreseen by the Akashic Record. Although given the fact that a version of the player themselves is the Akashic Record and its creation is part of a massive Stable Time Loop, it's possible that "changing" the past and future is actually all part of the plan.
• Retro Upgrade: The Fighter, Gunner, and Techer classes were once used by ARKS in the distant past, but were eventually retired due to being rendered obsolete by the Hunter, Ranger, and Force classes. However, the Fighter, Gunner, and Techer classes were subsequently revived in A.P. 238 due to advancements in technology and outfitted with everything new to make them bright and shiny classes again.
• Revenue-Enhancing Devices: The revenue model for the game uses a currency called Arks Cash. Premium status and the various knick-knacks in the AC shop are certainly convenient, but in no way necessary to enjoy the game.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter:
  • Rappies! They even come in different flavors depending on the current promotion, season, or holiday PSO2 is running. Even the realistic-looking Nab Rappies are adorable.
  • The Lillipa species are a species of large, brown-furred critters sporting rabbit ears and are often taken as such.
  • Nyau is an adorable feline-like creature who carries a sword as big as his body, and seems to be a cocky kid out to fight ARKS. If you break said sword, he'll break down into tears. And possibly summon a boss in the process. Like Rappies, he also gets the seasonal change treatment, with him changing outfits and weapons by the occasion.
• Ridiculously Human Robots:
  • CASTs have the option of playing it straight, as certain cosmetic functions enable them to appear virtually identical to humans. Their distinguishing feature is their glowing eyes, which show regardless of whatever cosmetics they are wearing.
  • Xiera plays it straight compared to most of the other storyline CASTs, as she is a special model of CAST called a Hi-CAST specially designed by Xiao and patterned after Ulc. She notably lacks the robotic echo that most CASTs typically have.
• Robot Buddy:
  • Mags are back. They can be fed weapons and armor like Phantasy Star Zero, use Photon Blasts and can perform auxiliary functions like in Phantasy Star Online, and higher-level mags can also assist in combat like R-Mags and Tech Mags in Phantasy Star Universe.
  • Episode 2 added Support Partners, reminiscent of PSU's Partner Machines. They have just as much customization as the player characters, in Fun Size!
• Rock Beats Laser: In the 5th opening, the Battleship Yamato and a fleet of World War II-era biplanes are seen trouncing a Zerg Rush of A.I.S. The ARKS still manage to gain the upper hand through sheer numbers and a special weapon.
• Rocket Ride: The Rodeo Drive PA has you mount your own Launcher with the barrel pointing backwards. Amusingly, this is also a decently quick method of travel^note It's just barely faster than running, assuming you have ways to recover your PP fast enough to continuously use it.
• Rocket Punch: One of the Demon Castle's attacks during Final Attack in Buster Quest involves firing its fist at players.
• Rocket-Tag Gameplay: Battle Arena's gameplay primarily consists of 12 players being armed with weapons that can kill everyone else in one or two attacks and letting them loose on each other in a team deathmatch. The average life tends to last no more than 30 seconds.

S-T

• Sad Battle Music:
  • "Archer of Destiny", the theme that plays when fighting Theodore and later Double Saber Persona, is fast-paced yet distinctly melancholic.
  • A Lonely Piano Piece plays during the battle against Matoi Viel.
• Scenery Gorn:
  • The emergency city missions takes place in a city devastated by the Falspawn.
  • The battle against Falz Elder takes place among the wreckage of several Oracle Fleet ships.
  • The Pocket Dimension Gemini holds all it consumes in is a barren wasteland littered with fragments of various iconic scenery from previously-visited fields, such as remnants of pagodas from Shironia, and building rubble from the City. Naturally, practically every enemy type in the game appears here as well.
• Scenery Porn:
  • Vopal Coastline is a very scenic beach, complete with a sunrise and sunset sequence.
  • The rare, otherworldy Parallel Worlds look quite stunning. Better take some screenshots!
  • The Black Territory/Kuron may be one of the most aesthetically fantastic areas yet.
  • Thanks to the Stage 6 graphics setting, all of the areas fall into this. See for yourself with the Tokyo Game Show 2015 Trailer.
• Schizophrenic Difficulty: The North American version has this. To (partially) counteract the effect of having all the balance changes of the Japanese version but only with access to content that wasn't designed for that level of Power Creep, the Super Hard difficulty was made to always be Level 75 regardless of what Quest you're playing it on. The effects of this are interesting; due to the way HP scaling works on Super Hard, this more or less triples the HP of basically everything on the difficulty compared to their Japanese counterparts, resulting in increased difficulty. This trope comes into play with Extra Hard difficulty, which was bumped up to Level 80, but due to the lower effect of stat scaling on XH most enemies on the difficulty have less HP than their Super Hard counterparts, making most Quests much easier.
• Schrödinger's Gun: Overlaps with Schrödinger's Player Character, oddly enough. During the battle in 2-6, Persona's gender, appearance, and battle voice are based on you.
• Science Fantasy: Par for the course of the series. The Oracle Arc and EPISODE 6 have a greater emphasis on science fiction, while EPISODE 4 brings in Urban Fantasy elements, and EPISODE 5 mixes this with Medieval European Fantasy.
• Screen-to-Stage Adaptation: Phantasy Star Online 2 -ON STAGE-, which takes place in a separate continuity where Phantasy Star Online 2 is actually a video game, and the main characters are players. While it was rendered non-canon, various elements of the play were adapted for Phantasy Star Online 2: The Animation, such as the Game Within a Game concept and several of the anime's characters being expies of the play's cast.
• Sealed Good in a Can: The Luminmechs, surprisingly. They were man-made weapons originally created by the Photoners as part of their effort to seal away the Profound Darkness and wound up unintentionally being sealed away with it since their enemy is the size of a planet. Unfortunately, Shiva hacking and corrupting the Luminmechs caused them to become enemies and are now used gratuitously against the heroes.
• Secret Level:
  • The early Episodes had additional Matter Boards after you completed the chapter, allowing you to explore a side story of that arc and earn rare partner cards.
  • Parallel Worlds. Sometimes when you wander around a mission, you might find a rainbow-colored telepipe that leads to a very otherworldly land. What lies in it? Oodles of rare spawns, rare bosses included. The warp to the area disappears once you get in, so you only have one shot at clearing the area.
  • Extreme Quests sometimes have "hidden" stages that replace normal levels. Their details are typically obscured in the stage overview screen until you reach that stage. The contents of the stage can vary, between just being a normal stage, being a stage with lots of rare enemies, being a stage with lots of Rappies, or fighting Falz Arms or Dark Falz Elder.
  • In Endless Quest, there is a very rare chance that you will get an Extreme Quest stage instead of a regular stage. Said stage typically contains a very easy order and has tons of rare enemies, including Rappies, Empe Rappies, Tagamikazuchi, and Izanekazuchi.
• Self-Destruct Mechanism: The "Automata" Lobby Action imitates the infamous Self-Destruct action from NieR: Automata.
• Sentenced Without Trial: Due to Luthor’s manipulations, at the climax of Episode 2, the Council of Six calls for a Code: ABYSS on the protagonist. They do this without giving the protagonist any sort of trial, and on information that Luthor carefully manipulated to make it look like the protagonist was conspiring against the Oracle Fleet. Fortunately, the protagonist is able to clear their name when its discovered that Luthor had intended for them to fall as a distraction while he would try and fail to merge with Xion, to grant him the power of omniscience, with Luthor dying at the hands of Regius.
• Set Bonus: Highly prevalent in the early days of the game were Set Effects, where you can gain bonus stats by equipping multiple items from the same series (usually three units, but sometimes including a weapon, or some combination of weapons and units). This eventually fell out of favor as 12★ Units encouraged mix-and-matching for more flexibility, with only Austere keeping its bonus as a holdover from its 11★ counterpart. However, the game would later go on to introduce Divide Quest 13★ units; there are 54 Units, 18 each in Rears, Arms, and Legs, and combining any three Units produces a massive stat bonus.
• Sharing a Body:
  • By the end of EPISODE 5, Gettemhart, Luther, Margaretta, Flo, and Frau all end up taking up residence inside your head.
  • In EPISODE 6, Harriet uses Risa's body to talk to her companions, in addition to being an Equippable Ally.
• Shield Bash:
  • The below-mentioned Shield Bearing Mooks can, of course use this as an attack. Sil Dinians and Sil Sadinians specifically use them as their Counter-Attack if you strike their shield.
  • Dragon X and Drago Deadlion can attack with this method, using their left wing as the "shield". It does very little damage, but inflicts Stun, which can leave you vulnerable to a very powerful attack if you can't break out of it quickly enough.
• Shield-Bearing Mook: The Guwonda and Gawonda are twin enemies, sporting a large shield that deflects all attacks. Unlike the usual Shield-Bearing Mook strategy, the best way to take them down is to bumrush them the moment you see one, as they can turn around surprisingly quickly, but take some time to notice you.
  • Sil Dinians and Sil Sadinians wield shields that they sometimes raise. Hitting their shield makes your attack bounce right off and the enemy will perform a Counter-Attack.
  • Dragon X and Noire Drahl both sport large shields on the sides of their arms. Attempting to attack these severely nerfs the resulting damage. Poison helps with that, though.
• Shifting Sand Land: The Desert field of Lillipa. The Quarry, from the same planet, is a subdued version of this, having pieces of Lillipan technology around, along with the occasional oasis.
• Shock and Awe:
  • The Zonde series of Techniques, of course.
  • Some Mechs are capable of lightning-based attacks.
  • Tagamikazuchi and Izanekazuchi fight with storms of electric attacks.
  • Gal Gryphon uses lightning strikes and stomps alongside tornadoes. Ironically, it's also vulnerable to Shock...
  • Alongside its plethora of Light-based attacks, Deus ESC-A uses a lot of lightning that can inflict Shock if it hits you.
• Shockwave Stomp: The Quake Howling PA has the user hammer the ground with their fist to produce a shockwave that stuns all grounded enemies. Like most Knuckles PAs, it comes out disproportionately quick and hits hard. The added bonus of inflicting the Stun status means you can spam the attack for Cycle of Hurting shenanigans and get boosted by Chase Advance and Chase Advance Plus to boot.
• Shoot the Hostage: One cutscene involves Apprentice chokeholding Afin and putting a Twin Dagger to his throat while she tosses his Gunblade, preventing him from fighting back. You pick up the Gunblade and charge a Penetrating Bullet, and whether you want to or not, you shoot them both, knocking them out. They're both okay, since Photon wielders are Friendly Fireproof... including Apprentice. This ultimately helps Afin prove that she isn't a Dark Falz.
• Shooting Gallery: The Mesetan Shooter minigame.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: Not the player thankfully, but a couple of NPCs are hit rather hard by this. In one of the sub-plots, you converse with Theodore, an unmotivated Arks Force who hates fighting, and Ulku, his (girl?)friend who is trying to join the Arks but has no combat skills. It takes some doing, but she eventually gets a job as a staff member before the Chapter 7 story mission. She's then killed offscreen in said story mission, because even staff members had to fight in emergencies, and Ulku knew what she was getting into despite that. Worse yet, come Episode 2, Theodore has all but snapped as a result...
• Shop Fodder:
  • If you defeat an Izanekazuchi, it will often drop a rare type of Stone. This is the only Stone that has no value as a trade-in; however, you can dump it on the Item Shop for 50,000 Meseta apiece.
  • EPISODE 5 introduced an item called a Meseta Crystal, which has no use except for being sold for a small amount of Meseta.
• Short-Range Shotgun:
  • Diffuse Shell for Assault Rifles. It has pitiful range, and will probably hit about three meters in front of you. However, it packs a huge punch and knocks down instantly, and if you happen to peg a monster in the face, with the right skills you can be almost guaranteed to One-Hit Kill regular Mooks.
  • Nazan is the Technic version of this. The effective range is absolutely horrendous, but it deals gigantic damage to whatever's in front of you, and on smaller enemies, it also deals absurd Knockback. You can throw enemies quite a ways, and even make them bounce off walls.
• Shout-Out:
  • Early pre-release images named the demo characters after Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and Amy. This was changed later on to Phantasy Star Online references.
  • There's a Talis named Duel Gaze, which looks like a Duel Disk. Its description even claims that it's a remodeled card game device. For emphasis, it's latent ability is called "Trap Activation", which increases the damage of Traps.
  • The planet Lillipa is named after a continent of little people in Jonathan Swift's novel Gulliver's Travels, the novel which also made mention of a floating city named Laputa, of which there are robot enemies on Lillipa that have a certain Miyazaki feel to them.
  • Played with with the Egg Blasters. The weapon was originally from Phantasy Star Online, but was a Rifle. In Online 2, it's been reclassed as Twin Machineguns as a reference to Sonic Riders.
  • Most likely unintentional, but Chrome Dragon looks disturbingly similar to an Evangelion.
  • The entire Magatsu fight is a shameless love letter to Attack on Titan. You're fighting in a walled-off city that the boss bashes its way into, facing off against a massive, vaguely-humanoid monster that towers over everything and looks like it could crush you flat with a single step. Attacks to anything but a weak point are completely ineffective, and you have to climb its body to get to those weak points.
  • The Mesetan Crown Camo looks a lot like a Keyblade...
  • Certain concerts, such as We're ARKS! and Cosmic Twinkle Star, use a Rhythm Game mechanic where your character dances along when the player pushes buttons in time with the song, indicated by a target at the top right corner of the screen that rings approach. The target design uses an eighth note design identical to the one used in the Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA series for its Song Energy gauge.
  • Train Gidran is a bit of an on-the-nose Expy of King Ghidorah that uses train tracks similar to the ones used by the train-themed heroes, Kamen Rider Den-O and Ressha Sentai Tokkyuger, both shows also being of the Tokusatsu meta-genera, tough they are part of the live action version of the Henshin Hero sub-genera and not the Kaiju sub-genera.
  • The Valkyrie R25 definitely isn't a pair of Walther P99s. Their description even mentions them being used by a "Legendary Secret Agent".
  • Take one look at the Blanc Noir camo and try not to mention that it looks almost exactly like Elucidator and Lambent Light.
  • Bethor's death scene is one big reference to a certain time-stopping Psycho Knife Nut. Bonus points for also being an Actor Allusion.
  • The U.F.O. enemy can use an attack where it attempts to grab a player with claw machine arms, alluding to SEGA's own line of "UFO Catcher" claw machines.
  • The Battle Arena version of the Ride Slasher PA bears a striking resemblance to Temjin's Surfing Ram special from Virtual-ON Oratorio Tangram. The reference is deliberate, since the PA was introduced during the A Certain Magical Virtual-ON collaboration event, and the Slepnir camo that can appear randomly on Swords will transform into its surfboard form if used with Ride Slasher.
  • In the North American localization of the game, one of Risa's Ranger missions is entitled "Show Me Your Power, Ranger!"
  • The North America server has an exclusive Independence Day event, and one of Xie's Client Orders is to bring Red Meat for the BBQ. When she receives it, she comments how she went into the portal to the meat dimension.
• Shows Damage:
  • Inflicting enough damage to Elzelion's tail will cut it, causing it to separate from its main body. The tail can be carved for extra Hunting Stones.
  • Dark Falz Persona's chest will break twice as players attack it, gradually exposing raw muscle underneath his outer "skin".
• Show Within a Show: One of the fan videos Sega played on the lobby monitors in the spring of 2015 was a fan-made Super Sentai parody made within PSO2.
• Sigil Spam:
  • ARKS' star logo appears all over the place. Dual Blades even have a Photon Art where they generate the logo out of slashes then fire it forward to deal damage.
  • The Council of Six is represented by a six-pointed star emblem. Each member wears it somewhere on their clothes, and it briefly appears when they activate their Genesis Weapons.
  • The Dark Falzes have a vortex-like sigil that appears on all of their outfits. It is later used as the icon for Dark Blast.
  • The Esca logo appears over most Phantasms' weak points when they are exposed.
• Single-Biome Planet: Lillipa and Wopal are both a Shifting Sand Planet and ocean planet, respectively. Naverius and Amduskia subvert this trope: Naverius is covered all over in forest, but has frozen regions, while Amduskia has a whole two biomes: volcanic caves and floating islands.
• Sinister Geometry: Most of the architecture on Amduskia is composed of distinctly cubic and cuboid shapes. Some of these can glow, move to trap players, or even (at the Dragon Altar) unfold into turrets. In Destroyed World: Amduskia, the environment is explicitly out to kill you.
• Sinister Scythe:
  • Some Rods and Partizans come in the form of these.
  • Luda Sorcerers sport one of these. Their Omega counterparts, the Foie Sorcerer, Megid Sorcerer, and Gran Sorcerer, also have them to cast magic.
  • Phantom's Rod is thematically and functionally based on a scythe. Being a Rod, the actual weapon itself can either fit this bill or not , but is still used like a scythe.
• Sir Not-Appearing-in-This-Trailer:
  • The Summoner character is conspicuously absent from both the EPISODE 4 and EPISODE 5 openings despite being among the core class lineup and the poster character for EPISODE 4. The default Summoner finally makes her debut in the EPISODE 6 opening, accompanying the rest of the team on the Photoner battleship with her Jinga.
  • Ash (the default HUmar) is mysteriously missing from the EPISODE 5 opening despite being essentially the game's mascot.
• Situational Sword:
  • Salus Punisher's Hidden Potential. It provides a whopping +27% damage... but only during the hours of 9 to 3^note In Japan Standard Time, even. If you live in a different time zone where that means "midnight", tough luck.
  • Certain weapons have a second Potential that only takes effect during one specific raid boss quest, but has an extremely potent effect within those confines. For example, the Japanese-style weapons granted by trading in Weapons Badge 2017 have the "Perennial Conqueror" ability, which grants +20% damage dealt and -40% damage taken in "The Endless Darkness", the solo version of the Profound Darkness battle.
  • One of the most notable examples comes from the 12★ Dual Blade Niren Orochi. There's a reason why it's one of the only weapons that hasn't been obsoleted by the 13★ meta: at Hidden Potential Lv. 3, Niren Orochi grants an utterly explosive damage bonus of +60% against breakable parts during Break Stance. Given how Break Stance is only viable for select content, it's rare to pull out Niren on a conventional basis, but when you can, it can outshine even the best 13★ Dual Blades in raw DPS.
  • The Cleasis Series weapons have a Potential effect that gives a generous +12% damage during the Defense Phase of a Buster Quest.
• Skyscraper City: The City Area has lots of tall buildings to navigate around. Tokyo being, well, Tokyo, is also this.
• Sliding Scale of Plot Versus Characters: Leans more into the plot end. Most of the cast exists solely to drive the plot, with the bulk of them being defined by a handful of character traits and receiving almost no development whatsoever. There are optional cutscenes where non-critical characters get screentime, but most of these are just for the sake of having them do something on-screen and have little to no impact on their characterization or the story.
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World: Naberius' Tundra. There is no slipping, nor sliding, though.
  • Not for the players, at least. Breaking the "armor" on the legs of the Snow Banther/Banshee have them slip every time they perform their long-range lunge attack. Banther in particular loves to spam this in quick succession and thus gets winded after one too many failures to keep his balance.
  • Artistic License – Physics: This is also the case with their forest equivalents Fang Banther/Banshee, even though they're fought in a forest and have plenty of jagged terrain to grab onto with their fully-functional paws. Then again, you have just shot/slashed/burned their claws off, making them potentially painful and less functional to even stand on.
• Smashing Survival: Some grapple attacks, such as Rockbear/Wolgahda's grab or the UFO's tractor beam, can be escaped by Button Mashing. Others, like Gwanahda's pincer attack and Decol Malluard's electric field, cannot be escaped from; you can do nothing but eat the damage.
• Sneeze Cut: Used several times during the ending of EPISODE 5, when Klariskrays I is badmouthing her host, Alma, who reacts accordingly in the Oracle dimension.
• Song of Courage: The theme for the Final Boss of the game, "Dark to Light", is alternatively sung from the perspectives of the heroines (Matoi, Hitsugi, and Harriet) and the player reaffirming their faith in one another and their vow to fight to the end.
• Songs in the Key of Panic: During the Rideroid segment of Racing the Phantom Mother, falling behind to the point where the notification for using Over Boost appears will cause the music to transition to a very panicky version. If you fall too far behind, you'll continually take unavoidable damage until you die.
• Sound of No Damage: Four different ones; one when your attack bounces off the shield of the Shield-Bearing Mook, another when you successfully Just Guard, one when you attack Goron Zran's/Zoron Goraal's energy shield, and one when Luther's energy shield deflects your attacks.
• Space Elves: What modern Phantasy Star game would be complete without Newmans?
• Spam Attack:
  • The Twin Dagger Photon Art Facet Folia runs an enemy through repeatedly from every direction, the user being invulnerable throughout.
  • Partizans get in on the action with Tears Grid, an Art where they jab with the Partizan an innumerable amount of times before finishing off the target with a powerful thrust.
• Space Battle:
  • The EPISODE 6 Emergency Quest "Armada of Demise" pits a fleet of Oracle ships against a fleet of Shiva's Photoner battleships. Players must tear through Luminmech forces on foot to pave a route for ARKS to counterattack, then board the A.I.S. Vega to launch an all-out assault against the Photoners.
  • The EPISODE 6 Magatsu raid involves fighting a super-amped up Magatsu in the outer space above Harkotan.
• Space Pirates: Azanami (in appearance at least). The players can be one too, thanks to the Wild Ocean Pirates scratch including such costumes.
• Spanner in the Works: The Ame-no-Murakumo inadvertently gets the player into trouble in EPISODE 5. The Profound Darkness evidently does not react well to aether. This creates a time-space distortion that it pulls the player into, transporting them into Omega.
• Special Guest: The Phantasy Star Universe 10th Anniversary event included an EX story about Vivienne and Emilia crash landing on Naberius after yet another subspace experiment goes awry, following up on a plot thread introduced in Phantasy Star Portable 2 infinity about being able to transcend dimensions via subspace travel.
• Speed Run Reward:
  • Your performance in several Story Missions is calculated based on how fast you go. Clearing it in under a certain time will net you an S-Rank, which can earn you free Star Gems to buy boosters, cosmetics, triggers, and weapon badges.
  • Time Attack Quests encourage players to races through an obstacle course as quickly as possible. Top-ranking players can earn Star Gems and other rewards.
• Spell Levels: This is the first game in the series to avert this; while the prefixes in front of the Techniques are retained from previous games, this game bucks the trend of a certain prefix denoting a specific attack range or area of effect for that element Technique. While some of the effects of previous prefix/Tech combos are carried over from previous titles (Rafoie causes an explosion, Gizonde causes Chain Lightning, etc.), many of the newer Techniques in the Na- and Il- categories have no relation to each other in terms of attack type.
• Spell My Name With An S:
  • Some players could not decide whether "dewman" or "duman" was correct since the race has not appeared in any previously localized game. The in-game text and official English localization confirm that it is "deuman".
  • How Lillipa is officially spelled in Japan seems to run into a few inconsistencies. Is it "Lillipa", "Lilipur", or "Ririepa"?
  • Thanks to Japanese Ranguage, a lot of the official spellings for character names in the credits can vary wildly from their translations given by the fan translation. For example, Lisa is "Risa" in the credits, and "Melphonsina" is "Melfonseana".
  • The offical North American translation used a lot of direct romanization, much of which is confusing and sometimes straight up inconsistant such as Phongrulf and Phangrulfer^note Fangulf and Fangulfur, which by all accounts should be following the same naming conventions due to the later being a reskin and going with "Chroto" instead of Clotho while Lachiesis' name is the same as the fan translation.^note Klotho/Clotho and Lachiesis are named after two of the three Fates of Greek mythology It also uses the romanized names from the credits, including aboved mentioned "Risa" and "Melfonseana". Some names such as Afin, Aida and Alis, are exactly the same as the fan translation however.
  • The offical North American translation seems to be confused as to whether Quna's song added in in the Episode 3 concert is "Never-Ending Story" or "Endless Story". Other similar inconsistencies are peppered throughout the localization, such as Hilda saying "godspeed!" while her word balloon says "gods be!" and Melitta says "Something's coming... I think! ...Probably!"
• Spin to Deflect Stuff:
  • The Partisan's method of blocking. Persona in Episode 2 Chapter 6 can and will use this against you, with a nasty Counter-Attack waiting in store if your attack bounces off.
  • A well-timed spin with Twin Daggers will register as a Just Guard and nullify damage.
• Spot the Imposter: Mithra tries to pull this on Regius when she shapeshifts into Maria in a flash of light and locks Partizans with the real Maria. Unfortunately for her, Regius only needs a split second to figure out the ploy and gives Mithra a good whack.
• Springtime for Hitler: A technique known commonly as "downslotting" allows you to decrease the number of abilities on a piece of gear by purposefully failing an affix through attempting to add abilities with low success rates; by decreasing the number of slots, it makes it possible to use fodder of lower slot counts. However, if Dudu or Monica doesn't like you, they'll pass those abilities anyway in face of the odds, which is all the more frustrating for the poor player and forces you to find more affix fodder to retry the attempt.
• Stable Time Loop:
  • The event that turns Klariskrays II into Matoi happens because she mistakes Persona for you. This could only have happened if you had traveled back in time to meet her.
  • This is ultimately what Persona attempts to invoke by making you kill Matoi, which turns you into Persona, which causes the loop to start over. However, Xion's intervention allows you to break free from the loop and change the course of fate.
• Stance System: Each standard melee class has two stances that alter their attacks in certain ways. The first is active by default, while the second can be switched to manually. They are as follows:
  • Hunter: Fury Stance (increased attack, decreased defense) and Guard Stance (increased defense, decreased attack)
  • Fighter: Brave Stance (increased damage when attacking from the front) and Wise Stance (increased damage when attacking from behind)
  • Braver: Average Stance (non-conditional damage increase; weaker than other stances) and Weak Stance (increased damage when attacking weak points)
  • Bouncer: Elemental Stance (increased damage when exploiting elemental weaknesses) and Break Stance (increased damage when attacking breakable body parts)
  • Luster has a very unique system known as "Styles" that are based on the Element of the Gunblade being equipped.
    • Fomelgion Style is an offensive style that activates if the equipped Gunblade is Fire or Dark, and gives balanced usage of both Move PAs and Stand PAs.
    • Zandion Style is an evasive Style that activates if the equipped Gunblade is Wind or Lightning, and prioritizes the usage of Move PAs.
    • Barantsion Style is a defensive Style that activates if the equipped Gunblade is Ice or Light, and prioritizes the usage of Stand PAs.
• Stat Sticks:
  • Harmonizers are completely worthless as actual weapons, since it's the Pet rather than the Summoner that does the fighting, and exist solely to give the wielder ATK and abilities.
  • The Combat Cannon Launcher is designed to be this. It has several shortcoming as a actual weapon, including lacking any Super Special Ability slots and having a Potential that effectively handicaps you for having it out. However, it has the highest base raw of any Launcher in the game; this makes it a great candidate for Prominence Assail, as Complex Photon Arts ignore multiplers and scale exclusively off raw stats.
• Status Effects:
  • Burn: Gradually reduces HP. Capable of spreading to others in close proximity.
  • Freeze: Renders you completely immobile. Petrify is a cosmetic variation.
  • Shock: Causes you to twitch occasionally, interrupting attacks and leaving you vulnerable.
  • Mirage: Causes attacks to miss randomly.
  • Panic: Causes enemies to attack one another. Players, on the other hand, have their directional controls scrambled.
  • Poison: Gradually reduces HP. Unlike Burn, which deals flat damage per tick, Poison damage scales with your max HP.
  • Stun: Renders you completely immobile. Wears off faster by spinning the analog stick/mashing the movement keys in a circular motion.
  • Jellen: Decreases ATK stats.
  • Paralysis: Renders the player unable to move, but still capable of other actions.
  • Wound: Maximum HP Reduction.
  • Weak Bullet: Multiplies damage taken. On monsters, Rangers can target specific spots to afflict this condition on.
• Stealth Pun: The Easter Emergency Quest's background music is, of all things, Robotnik's theme from Sonic Adventure 2, thus making it Easter Eggman.
• Stepping Stones in the Sky: One battle scene in EP6 has Phaleg doing this, using the Yamato's biplanes as platforms to get close enough to a Dral Veluge to smash it and its fellow Luminmechs to oblivion.
• Stone Wall: A Hunter can become this, given full investment into the Guard Stance tree, including Guard Stance, Guard Stance Advance, and all three types of Flash Guards. This can be augmented further by subclassing Summoner, which gives Regenerating Health as a generic Skill. Unfortunately, while this does let you reduce the damage from practically any hit to double digits, it's not very useful, since your damage output tanks in the process.
• Story Difficulty Setting: A "Casual" difficulty was added to Story Quests in response to people wanting to simply enjoy the story. Casual caps the enemy levels to roughly the same as Normal difficulty enemies, making them extremely weak. However, playing on Casual stops you from earning certain Titles for that attempt.
• Stripperific:
  • Many an outfit, but special mention goes to the Smart Inner, a default Innerwear piece that covers little more than the essentials. While it's intended for clothes that show a lot of skin, it's enough to make even non-players tilt their heads.
  • Astonishingly, there's actually an in-universe justification for why this trope is so prevalent. Photons are absorbed through the skin, so greater skin exposure increases photonic intake and thus boosts the available resources for one to draw on. Mind, this has no bearing on actual gameplay, but this is used as an actual plot point to explain why the Stella Tears is as skimpy as it is.
• Strong as They Need to Be: Chances are, if you're fighting what's normally a raid boss in a normal Quest, it'll be far weaker than the actual fight. This generally happens to the ARKS Grand Prix version of Dark Falz Luther, the secret Dark Falz Elder fight that can happen in Extreme Stages, and the story fight against Dark Vibrace in Episode 2 Chapter 6.
• Stuff Blowing Up:
  • Cars in the City, bombs on Lillipa. The latter tends to be more dangerous, since they're generally clustered in groups, and blowing up one can cause a chain reaction of bombs that can cause instant death.
  • Melon and Maron, a pair of Pets for the Summoner, have this as their main gimmick. Once they've been hit enough, they'll inflate to large sizes and begin to blow off steam, at which point you can use a Photon Art to throw them at enemies like a grenade for massive damage. Maron Strike, Maron's throwing PA, has the highest power of any existing attack at 25,500, but using it knocks him out instantly. Conversely, Melon Strike, Melon's throwing PA, is substantially weaker, but to compensate, Melon can be chucked multiple times in a row before going out.
• Suddenly Speaking: Hadred, right on the verge of his death, after having been Quna's silent friend for who-knows-how-many years. Even Quna's annoyed at that, though it's mostly because his only words are asking her to sing again.
• Superboss: There are several bosses that are far more dangerous than any Urgent Quest or story mission and are meant to test the player's skill.
  • The final fight with Phaleg Ives is a high-speed battle that never lets up. You only have 7 minutes to whittle down all six million of her health, and she moves extremely fast and hits incredibly hard, one or two-shotting even the best equipped ARKS operatives. To add insult to injury, healing is dramatically reduced during this fight, making a Victory by Endurance impossible, and she gets even faster during the second phase of her fight, during which she gains a 50% damage resistance buff to the weapon that damaged her the most in the previous phase. Just to rub the salt into the wound, you only have 3 minutes to S Rank it and get the corresponding title for defeating her. It's widely agreed that she makes the final boss of Episode 4, Deus Esca, look like a complete joke by comparison.
  • The rematches with Omega Masquerade get increasingly more difficult the more times you do them. Should you manage to defeat him 999 times, you'll face his final version. This version of the boss deals 999,999 damage with every hit, forcing players to play perfectly to defeat him. He's also lightning fast, with attacks that cover a huge area, and has an enormous health bar. He also gradually gains immunity to a weapon you use consistently against him, forcing you to change it up lest he simply No-Sell everything you throw at him.
• Super-Deformed: Tama-hime, which looks like a miniature chibi version of Sukuna-hime.
• Super Mode: EPISODE 5 grants the player access to Dark Blast, which transforms them into a modified version of one of the Dark Falzes' combat forms (Hyunal, Angel, Appregina and Daril/Dranble), giving them extremely high stats and powerful attacks. Elder Form is a tanky close-combat powerhouse, Luther Form can fly and harass the enemy with constant ranged attacks, Apprentice Form is highly agile and can summon Falspawn drones to fight for it, and Gemini Form can hammer foes with a range of versatile moves, growing even stronger in the process. The transformation only lasts one minute, however, and can only be used once per quest.
• Super Prototype: The Cosmogenic Arms, the weapons used by the Council of Six and other major NPCs. Being the first weapons infused with Photons, they're also flawed prototypes because their immense power means only certain beings can use them, as well as being powered by Xion means they lost some of their power once she is killed.
• Superpower Lottery: 1st Generation ARKS worked like this. Due to unrefined Photon compatibility, whether an ARKS member was competent at wielding Photon energy varied wildly. Some were incredibly capable, others near-useless, and more still fell just about anywhere in between. Regius and Maria won the lottery, but were forced to sacrifice their original bodies for CAST bodies due to their original bodies being unable to withstand the sheer power.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: ARKS in general is filled with a number of issues the story deconstructs as it goes along:
  • There Are No Therapists despite grabbing people from any walks of life if they have any worthwhile Photon potential at all, so characters like Theodor are simply not prepared for the tragedy that can ensue in losing loved ones. Consequently, Theodor goes absolutely apeshit with insanity in the aftermath of Ulku's death, something caused by Luther to gain himself a worthwhile pawn. It's even worse in Phantasy Star Online 2: Episode Oracle because the sheer carnage and death of on-field warfare is brutally demonstrated, but no one seemingly gets any help over it all much less the series' version of the protagonist, Ash.
  • The entire organization was put together by Photoners and Xion, which means someone like Luther has full tyrannical control from behind the scenes and the Council of Six can't do a damn thing about it until it's too late. This nearly gets the Player Character killed because of exploited evidence and a brainwashing Code ABYSS order across the entire ARKS to suppress them, and severely harms the public trust in ARKS as well as makes everyone in the organization realize how screwed up everything is.
  • In between Luther's shenanigans, the Dark Falz forces, and more new occurring threats with time, the whole organization practically falls apart at the seams because said Council are too hands-off with much of the management while placing tight laws restricting the knowledge of very crucial events "for morale reasons", and most of the operatives on the ground simply don't communicate with eachother well at all if something rotten is afoot. As a result, problems that could've been prevented simply aren't because the heroes were not prepared for almost any of it. Between all of this, Xiao and Ulku end up having to severely work overtime to try to fix the organization, and do away with all the secrecy as they directly communicate and work with all operatives, especially the Player Character at the focal point of everything.
  • ARKS was so twisted under Luther's control that Risa silently bid her time for potentially a century or longer rather than dare speak up about anything involving what she knew of the bigger picture, never mind containing the Oracle version of Hariette's soul within her. Once this gets pointed out in the Episode 6 opener, the Council of Six can only solemnly agree on the sentiment due to their own failure to stop the obvious madman before.
  • On a different subject, the protagonist's Time Travel power gained in Episode 2 is liberally used at first to Set Right What Once Went Wrong, but gets shuffled quietly to the side mostly because of what it took to get to the episode's conclusion in the first place. Alma retroactively implies that Xion intentionally kept looping the events of the story over and over with nudges to a desired outcome - so if the protagonist did any more attempts to change history, such as preventing Xion's Heroic Sacrifice or interfering with Matoi nearly being corrupted into the Profound Darkness (though Xion herself manually blocked off that one), everything Xion and the heroes had worked towards could become undone with potentially disasterous results. Thus, time travel goes off-limits until Matoi herself breaks this silent rule at the very end of Episode 6 to save the protagonist.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: A lot of things from Universe/Portable 2 got reworked here and/or replaced:
  • The gunblade is the all-around weapon replacing the Saber
  • Photon Blast works the same way as the Mirage Blasts and SUVS that Human/Newman and Casts respectively had.
  • Dark Blast meanwhile works more like the transformation that Beasts carried.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: The description of the Rappy Fan Fan talis claims that "it definitely does not use real [Rappy] feathers... definitely not."
• Sword Beam:
  • One of the Photon Arts/Technics for sword-type weapons, named Sonic Arrow. They can hit multiple enemies at a range, with excellent damage. Also great for cutting the tall grass in forest levels. It should be noted that Sonic Arrow does not create a single flying wave like most Sword Beams. Instead, it produces two air-current-like lines which rotate, forming a spinning projectile.
  • There's more than that: the Partisan weapon has Speed Rain and Slide End, both of which produce... Spear Beams?
  • A sword Photon Art, Over End, involves producing a huge blade of light over your existing weapon to cleave enemies with. The last hit in particular hurts.
  • Dragon X, the armored dragon knight boss in Sanctum, has his own version of Over End.^note The name he calls for it translates to "world-destroying conflagration sword" If you're not a Hunter or Fighter with above-par HP, expect to eat dirt if you're hit by it.
  • The katana Photon Art, Hatou-Rindou, throws a vacuum wave in front of you. If you time the attack right, it can also produce a small blue flame.
  • Gigur Gunnegam combines this with Blade Spam by slashing several times in rapid succession, sending out a beam with every slash, before ending with a powerful thrust. It's one of his stronger attacks, has a moderate chance to inflict Freeze with every hit, and is almost inescapable if you get caught.
  • The avatar summoned by the Ilios Imera Photon Blast attacks using these.
  • The Form weapons have a Potential that enables them to fire projectile waves with normal attacks. Thing is, they only come in Tech weapon formats, there being a Rod, Wand, and Jet Boots. The higher the Potential level, the more waves fired at once.
  • Some of Deus's attacks involve shooting energy waves from his sword at you.
  • When charged up for its secondary attack, Brightness End fires a mid-range shockwave in the direction you're facing when released.
  • Lavis Cannon, true to its original game, throws a powerful shockwave during a Wand combo finisher. If you use the Wand PA "Heavy Hammer" in conjunction with Lavis Cannon, the shockwave grows even stronger based on the charge level of the attack.
  • The Sword Complex PA, Imperial Cleave, involves the user swinging their BFS Laser Blade to fire a shockwave that mows down everything in its path.
  • When wielded as a Gunblade, the Master Sword shoots circular wave beams as projectiles a la Breath of the Wild. Particularly funny if used with Luster, which can result in rapid fire sword beams.
• Swords/Guns Akimbo: Dual Blades, Wired Lances, Twin Daggers, and Twin Machineguns.
• Sword of Plot Advancement:
  • The Clarissa, a Genesis Weapon which can absorb, transfer and purify corrupted photons. This ability makes it invaluable to certain characters throughout the first three Episodes, and since it contains a copy of Xion's consciousness, it can act as the final key to her Core.
  • From -ON STAGE-, Star Quaser, the katana used by the legendary ARKS "R", is the only weapon that can defeat Dark Falz.
  • EPISODE 4 has the Ame-no-Murakumo, a Mid-Season Upgrade Hitsugi acquires that enables the wielder to temporarily dispel the effects of aether, Photons, or F-Factor from a desired target. It is used to free Kohri from her brainwashing and later split up Mother and Al after Mother absorbs Al. Its effect is copied by the player to attempt to separate Persona from the Profound Darkness, although being an Aether-based weapon it goes poorly. Finally, it is brought out one last time to separate the Primordial Darkness from the player's body with the help of Harriet and Matoi.
• Synchronization: The Summoner Skill "Alter Ego" has this effect: in exchange for boosting attack power, you'll take damage when your Pet gets hit.
• Symbol Swearing: When an expletive is typed in chat, it is replaced by a bunch of symbols. The filter is, as per MMO tradition, overzealous due to trying to cover all intended regions' expletives at once.
• Taken for Granite: There is a unique "petrified" status that can only be inflicted by two enemies in the game: Odin from Final Fantasy XIV and the Omega Cockatrice. The Petrify status is functionally identical to the Freeze status, with a very slightly different appearance.
• Talking Is a Free Action: In the cutscene mentioned above, there's an argument between your NPC friends on who should rescue the victim who was (consensually) used to summon said destroyer and who should stay behind to fend him off to buy time. After you and another NPC leave with the victim, the following conversation happens:
  Zeno: "You were waiting for us? You're surprisingly considerate of people's conversations, Dark Falz."
  Elder: "I have no interest in weaklings who aren't willing to fight."
  • During the final mission of Episode 2 the Player Character, Matoi, Oza, Risa, Marlu and Fourie are able to have a long conversation while Falspawn are continuously spawning around them but not attacking for some reason. Slightly humorous when you catch a glimpse of any Luda Sorcerers since they look like they are just twirling their scythe due to boredom.
• Tactical Suicide Boss:
  • Gigur Gunnegam infuses some of his stronger attacks with ice to boost their effective range and hit a lot harder. He also winds up freezing himself whenever he uses the more powerful of these attacks, creating ice structures that the player can scale to get to Gigur Gunnegam's head.
  • A common trait of Phantasms is that they typically expose their weak points by performing specific attacks.
• Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: In theory, weapons work this way in Battle Arena. Sword beats Rod, Rod beats Rifle, and Rifle beats Sword.
• Taking the Bullet:
  • 3-7 features one that is almost immediately subverted. When Gemini fires a huge packet of corrupted Photons in a last-ditch attempt to transform Matoi into the Profound Darkness, you push her out of the way and take the hit instead. However, Matoi, unwilling to allow you to become the Profound Darkness, transfers the Photons from you anyway and becomes the Profound Darkness instead, rendering the entire action pointless.
  • The Summoner Skill "Dear Master" is a pseudo-Iron Will clone that gives you up to a 100% chance to survive a fatal blow, and the damage is instead dealt to your Pet. This can KO the Pet as well.
• Tank Goodness: The Type-15 Tank. In addition to being able to fire heavy-duty shells your way and run you over, it also comes stocked with rocket payloads, a flamethrower, and a localized missile.
• Team Shot:
  • Similar to the final boss of the original Phantasy Star Online, defeating a raid boss rewards the players with a shot of all the players who took part in the battle. Unlike in the original PSO, this Team Shot includes not only the player and their party, but the other parties that fought the battle for up to twelve players in the shot◊.
  • The Vita version, conversely, only supports up to four players in the shot. If you aren't in a full party, any remaining slots are filled by other random participating players.
• Technologically Advanced Foe: Shiva and her crew are unlike any other enemy the ARKS have faced before, to the point where they manage to apply The Worf Effect to the four strongest characters in the story (including the player) with hardly any effort. It's suggested that as Photoners they have access to technology far beyond that of Oracle, including Photon-manipulation abilities that can negate anything the ARKS can throw at them, making it impossible to fight them on even ground. Only Harriet in her Rifle form is able to inflict any damage, and even then only a little.
• Teleport Gun: Inverted with Chase Arrow, which functions like Chekhov's Gun weaponized. The user fires up to three arrows (per cast) into the sky, which warp out to a pocket dimension. After that, the next time the user attacks with a Photon Art, said arrows warp back in and deal extra damage to the target.
• Temporary Online Content:
  • As one would expect, the Collaboration Scratches. Once their Scratch card expires, that's it. No more new stuff. The only remaining stuff is what currently exists when the Scratch expires, which means the price of said gear will proceed to skyrocket once it's no longer readily available. And God help you if you want any of the older Collaboration items, like Evo. Device/Kyubey or whatnot.
  • In a strange case where this applies to common equipment, many of the older, common-rarity gear is no longer obtainable by normal means. This is because the introduction of New Type grinding brought with it a change that removed a bunch of older gear from the drop tables that used the original Grinding system and replaced it with gear that uses the new New Type grind system; as such, much of that gear can no longer be found except by looking on the Player Shops. Some of the replaced gear does drop in Phantasy Star Online 2es, however, since that game didn't accommodate for the New Type update and thus some gear can still be found as regular drops or as Weaponoid Presents.
  • An update removed the Matter Board part of the game entirely, rendering all related Titles, rewards, and Client Orders lost to the void if they weren't obtained prior to the update.
  • Elzelion and Ramiel, both Crossover bosses that dropped Doom Break by the truckloads, were removed from the game a few months after their introduction.
  • Since the death of the Mission Pass system in June 2021, it is not possible to obtain any rewards exclusive to the Pass or anything from the Mission Badge Shop that isn't tradeable if you don't have any Mission Badges left over. If you play the Japanese version, it is still possible to obtain Astral Soul, Aether Factor, and Mana Reverie capsules via Phantasy Star Online 2es as a Rare Random Drop, but if you play Global you're out of luck.
• Terminal Transformation: Adam Sacrid attempts to force humanity to evolve into more powerful Phantasms out of disgust for mankind's waste, want, war, and desires. The first person he tries to provide this "gift" to is mutated so horribly that he dies on the spot and disperses into aether.
• Thanking the Viewer:
  • In the Endless Quest "Endless: Memories Beyond", the final room at the end of each Lap is a variant of the Menacing Castle Limited Quest map, with the enemy spawn patterns spelling out the phrase "THX 4 PLAYING".
  • In "Endless: Eternal Rondo", Stage 30 tasks you with defeating Omega Masquerade with a 3939 second time limit. 39 is a Goroawase Number for "thank you".
  • Pretty much the point of the EPISODE 6 credits song, appropriately titled "Thank You".
• The Battle Didn't Count: Unless it's come high time for someone to finally have their Killed Off for Real moment, the story treats pretty much every fight as either the opponent having something come up that requires their more immediate attention, or barely even winded at all and seemingly invulnerable against everything you toss at them, regardless of how reasonable it may be. And even if their defeat animation in their boss fight inclined otherwise.
  • The Falz Hyunal fight in Story mode. If you've done your Level Grinding, got your best equipment together, you could completely wipe the ass of a partly-awakened destroyer of the universe in under two minutes (possibly one), and it will still be standing (commenting on how the fight has warmed it up nicely) and you still have to leave two of your three NPC friends behind to do their Heroic Sacrifice. Even if you're thirty times stronger and one of them has a legendary status. Would've been a huge kick in the teeth by SEGA if his level were high enough for him to drop his rare equipment (you're booted back to the Campship and can't return, so no Boss Crystal), but thankfully he isn't 41+ here.
  • Now you can wipe what seems to be a fully awakened version of said destroyer in under three minutes (although there's twelve of you at him now, though it's disturbing how the player-base have practically turned utterly destroying Dark Falz Elder into an art form) and the previous guy who was possessed by said destroyer simply pops out and escapes. Oh, and Dark Falz is still in control of said body, so he's still alive.
  • The fight against Varuna in EPISODE 6 Chapter 2 features a Level 96 miniboss with decently powerful attacks and flashy gimmicks but is otherwise fairly straightforward and easy. One cutscene later he's giving the heroes what for and taunting them like they've done basically nothing.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: In-universe, Hitsugi learns this the hard way in the first episode of Chapter 4. In the anime, it's revealed what could have ended up happening to her. And it's revealed that almost all the computers in 2028 have Phantasy Star Online 2 installed...
  • During the very climax of EPISODE 4, Deus Hunas claims the protagonist does not belong in Earth's dimension and banishes them back to the Oracle... before shortly making the same claim and action towards the camera, as if to banish the player themselves as well. While it makes for a fun Oh, Crap! moment, it is fairly swiftly subverted however, as the cut-scene returns to Earth for quite a few minutes before the protagonist physically manages to return themselves. No other part of the story suggests that Deus Hunas really does have such insane fourth-wall breaking powers within the game's fiction, so it's possible that canonically, he was simply cutting off Xiera's ability to monitor Earth's dimension.
• Theme Music Power-Up:
  • Major raid bosses have the background music transition to "The whole new world" when the battle enters its final phase. Each one beyond Dark Falz Elder has its own remix of the song.
  • Certain content also prominently features the Episode's main theme as part of whatever climatic battle the opening movie is based on.
    • The "Mining Base Defense" Quests feature the EPISODE 2 main theme when Final Wave occurs.
    • "Annihilator's Apparition" features the EPISODE 3 main theme when Magatsu's health becomes low.
    • "Unleashed Prestige" features the EPISODE 4 main theme, "Borderless", when the fight transitions to the A.I.S. phase.
    • "Crimson Castle Crusher" features the EPISODE 5 main theme, "LEYGENDER", as the primary background music. The vocals are added in when the fight transitions to the final phase.
    • Divide Quest plays the EPISODE 6 main theme during each 5th Step boss battle against Grav Execour, Varuna, or Varuna and Mithra.
  • The climactic finishing blow against the Primordial Darkness has "The whole new world" playing in the background as the Falz hosts, Matoi, Hitsugi, and Harriet prepare the attack.
• Theme Naming:
  • Many Falspawn have -ahda attached to the ends of their names.
  • Twin Dagger Photon Arts are named after types of music and music terms, such as "Dark Scherzo" and "Raging Waltz".
  • Katana Photon Arts feature Floral Theme Naming as a Bilingual Bonus, such as Sakura-Endo^note Cherry blossoms and Kazan-Nadeshiko^note Wildflowers, as described by the Yamato Nadeshiko trope.
  • Dual Blades Photon Arts are named after birds and bird terminology; "Starling Fall" and "Justice Crow" for example.
  • Jet Boots Photon Arts, which are named for synonyms of "wind". Moment Gale, Strike Gust, and so on.
  • The NPCs at the Casino have... well... casino-themed names. The emcee is "Deal", the quest receptionist is "Any Pair", one of the prize counter NPCs is "Chip", another is "Ante" (as in the term "Ante Up"), etc.
• Third-Person Shooter: A button on the keyboard can switch the camera mode to over-the-shoulder, allowing ranged fighters to play like this. This gives the player pinpoint-precise aim, and it is often recommended to master it to attack targets that your lock-on can't latch onto.
• Throw It In!: In-universe example; when a Secret Stage starts in an Extreme Quest, Karin will briefly mention not having included it in the training program, then tells the player to roll with it.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: While Ulku did get killed offscreen, you eventually end up rewriting history so that she is simply believed to be dead. With her alive, she manages to pull Theodor back from the brink of despair.
• Throwing Your Sword Always Works:
  • Falz Hunar has an attack that involves him tossing his sword and having it constantly hover around him like a boomerang. Subverted however in that you can break his sword, nerfing its damage by a great deal.
  • Then there's the Double Saber Photon Art called "Deadly Archer" which, if properly distanced, can inflict a ton of damage. It also has a variation called "Deadly Circle" that orbits you.
  • And then there's Hien Tsubaki for Katana!
  • Falz Dranble can also toss the Elder Pain as an attack.
  • Hero has the Rising Slash PA, where they throw their Sword upwards in an arc while it spins around. If the PA button is held throughout the attack, instead of letting the arc finish, the player will instead jump up to catch the Sword and start slashing repeatedly in midair.
• Time Bomb:
  • The target of Emergency Code: Judgement, where you have to defuse time bombs. Each bomb has glowing lines running across its side connecting an unlit node to a lit node on the other end via tracks that direct the player to move up or down across the maze; defusing the bomb is a matter of deciphering which of the unlit nodes, Top, Middle, or Bottom, links directly to the lit node. However, messing it up only results in a painful shock, and you can retry a few seconds later.
  • Darchymes and Baize in Emergency Code: Destruction also do bad things if you let them explode, though, counter-intuitive to the trope and true to the Code's name, you have to destroy them to stop them.
• Time Skip: Two years pass between Episode 3 and Episode 4, during which you remain in Cold Sleep.
• Time Stands Still:
  • Dark Falz Luther stops time as part of his Desperation Attack. You can avoid being stopped by dodging the attack, or otherwise invoke Smashing Survival to break free. Dark Falz Persona can do the same.
  • Alma possesses the ability to stop time, although only in short bursts without the help of another person. Curiously, this ability is explicitly stated not to be Photon-induced, which lead to Regius and Maria referring to it as "magic".
• Timed Mission:
  • Let's face it, this is a staple for MMOs. A fair few of the client orders will have a time limit in which to fulfill them, started when you enter the required area/mission; fortunately failing doesn't mean you get kicked out of the area or anything, so it won't interrupt whatever else you're doing.
  • Literal Timed Missions - as in the ones that do kick you out for failing - exist as periodic events that are available anywhere between fifteen minutes to an hour, and their in-mission timers last anywhere between ten to twenty minutes. These mostly consist of invasions and Dark Falz Elder, though seasonal events do this too. The game server is at least kind enough to inform you well ahead of time if an event is going to start, so you have a chance to finish up whatever you're doing and prepare.
  • Many Emergency Codes are timed, and fail you for timing out, except in Emergency Code: Avoid.
  • Played with in the case of Racing the Phantom Mother; the first phase will eventually end if you fail to deal enough damage within a set amount of time. While you still go to the second phase anyway, failing the first phase will automatically drop your Rank to a B, locking you out of the best rewards.
  • The notorious DPS check in Phantom God of Creation is this. You and the other players get 5 minutes to inflict about 20 million damage worth of HP to kill Deus Esca Zefirot. Most multi-parties can make it up to this point, but once you get to the DPS check, if your team has undergeared players, you're effectively screwed.
• Timey-Wimey Ball: How the Time Travel aspect of the plot works. It's not technically time travel so much as observing different variations of the same timeline either to discover the full details of a complicated scenario, or to keep trying different things until you find a beneficial sequence of events.
  • The EPISODE 1&2 Materials Collection gives an explanation for this; the Matter Board has the ability to alter the past and create new possibilities with so-called "Matter", hence the node system.
• Tokyo Is the Center of the Universe: Initially played straight, then averted after the plot moved to America.
• Too Awesome to Use:
  • Many AC consumables, including Scape Dolls and Cosmos Atomizers. It costs real money to get them, so odds are, you either won't get them or you'll never use them because you're waiting for that exact moment when you absolutely have to use it. Downplayed with Half Dolls, which are distributed for free via the Stamp Card and various promotional events, but the player can only carry one at a time, so figuring out the best situation to expend your only one can be a task.
  • Grind Rate Up (+100%). It allows you to bypass the RNG and get any single grind guaranteed. However, they're one of the few items you can't get through either AC Scratch or the normal course of gameplay; they're only ever event-distributed and untradeable at that, so you'll only ever have a handful at once.
• Total Party Kill:
  • If Magatsu breaks the final gate, it will unleash a blast that wipes out everyone in the party.
  • In Demise, Apprentice has a charging Wave-Motion Gun she'll launch every so often. If the charge isn't stopped before the attack is launched, it's basically a Non-Standard Game Over; the beam is a One-Hit Kill against players, AIS, and Mining Bases.
  • Letting the Mothership Trial expire in Riding Quest will cause it to fire a Wave-Motion Gun that wipes the multi-party.
• Tower Defense:
  • The Mining Base emergency quest tasks players with defending three towers against waves of Falspawn enemies. Crystals scattered about the area provide points with which to repair the base, erect shields, and set up turrets.
  • Half of Buster Quest involves defending your Buster Towers from enemy assault, not unlike Mining Base. Unlike Mining Base, however, you have far more armaments at your disposal that can be used as defense, and the other half of the Quest involves fighting back.
• Transforming Mecha: The Tranmizer miniboss, as well as the core of the Big Vardha.
• Translator Microbes: ARKS is able to translate two-way communication in real-time after taking enough voice samples of the language they're translating. This is why you're able to communicate with the Daybreakers on subsequent visits to Harukotan as well as the people of Earth.
• Trap Master: In addition to the regular guns-and-bullets assortment, Rangers are also fluent in Trap Skills. They can passively search out set enemy traps before they activate, and they can lay down their own traps that can inflict various status conditions or launch enemies.
• Tricked-Out Shoes: The Bouncer's Jet Boots are weapons attached to one's feet that have blades for kicking attacks and allows the wielder to use magic.
• Triumphant Reprise: The music that plays over the climatic battle at the end of EPISODE 4, "Path to the Future", begins with an orchestral reprise of "The whole new world", segues into orchestral arrangements of "The Replica - Mother" and "HITSUGI", switches to a brief clip from "Advent of Deus Esca", then swaps back to an even more triumphant arrangement of "HITSUGI" as the party lays the final smackdown on the Big Bad.
• Tron Lines: The pre-release image gallery has a few characters sporting a lot of these.
• Tsundere: Friend Partners can get this as their Trait. A Tsundere Friend Partner will increase frequency of healing the player relative to how low the player's HP is.
• Turns Red: A common occurrence for most bosses when their HP drops below a certain value, usually denoted by a unique animation. There are some special cases, though.
  • Instead of having a generic enrage, Vol Dragon becomes progressively more aggressive and powerful each time it dives into the ground and gains a level of golden "magma armor". After it does this three times, it gains access to its strongest attack.
  • Train Gidran can enter enrage early if you break two of its train doors. The standard method of depleting its HP can still trigger it, however.
  • Some raid bosses have these as special "extra" phases when fought in certain content. Examples include Dark Falz Persona, which will become vastly more dangerous at low HP when fought in its "Rematch" Trigger Quest, and Ramiel, who enters a bonus "A.I.S." phase on Ultra Hard difficulty that ramps up its attack intensity and targets both EVA-01 and all of your missile bases at once.
  • A particular standard mook, the Orota Biketta, can do this. If you trigger both of its alarms, it becomes enraged and begins rampaging around the area while slamming everything around it with its gigantic lollipop.
• Twenty Rockbear Asses: A lot of the client orders take the form of either "Kill X (Monster Name Here)" or "Collect X Item Drops Off (Insert Monster Name(s) Here)". They're usually worth a significant amount of experience, so they're often necessary for grinding once you get into the higher levels. The monotony of it, however, is mitigated since all of these drops (excluding Team Order drops) can be and usually are sold in the Player Shop.
  • Most of these are courtesy of the NPC Franka, who is your best friend if you need EXP in a hurry.
  • Most of these can be used to level your support partner, who can also be used to take part of the work as long as it has the right level and equipment to actually beat the required enemies.
  • The Random Event version occurs in Emergency Code: Collect, which has players doing things like collecting keys to open blockades, picking up crystals for inspection, or drilling for minerals.

U-Z

• Uncanny Valley: In-universe, the "mysterious ARKS": a group of new ARKS members that look like regular ARKS members, but act rather strangely, behaving somewhat out-of-character and being capable of unusual actions such as "Logging Out", where they spontaneously disappear without warning or trace, seemingly invoking Medium Awareness. As it turns out, the "mysterious ARKS" are Digital Avatars of video game players on Earth.
• Uncanny Valley Girl: Fourier herself states that CASTs are usually seen as being cool and calculating. The only two CASTs ever being portrayed as such are Regius and Maria. Everyone else is eccentric in one way or another.
• Underground Level: The aptly named Subterranean Tunnels of Lillipa. Amduscia's Caves, too, to an extent.
• Underground Monkey:
  • Most Tundra enemies are reskins of Forest enemies with one or two extra snow-based attacks. The King Yede enemy is even a palette swap of Rockbear, but as a regular enemy, different attacks, and its weak spot is its rear instead of its head.
  • While not immediately apparent, both Wopal and Lillipa have variations of the Gulf enemy, and all of them share the same basic moves. They do have slightly different moves or otherwise new moves to mix it up between planets.
  • Several of the Dragonkin found in the Skyscape are the same as those native to the Volcano, but in pale blue and white colors instead of reddish orange (and weak to darkness rather than ice). Even the area mid-boss, Caterdra'nsa, is just a recolored Caterdra'n; in fact, they share the same rare variation.
  • The Tainted faced in Ultimate Quests are massively powered up versions of previous enemies with new attacks. While the Falspawn are simple Palette Swaps with a stronger black and red, many of the other Aberrations are visually completely different from their original counterpart. This is especially true with the bosses — Vol Dragon's Aberration is a giant bird found on Naberius, while Lillipa has mechanical versions of the Banshee and Banther.
  • Similarly to Tainted, Esca Falspawn use existing Falspawn as a base, but are colored varying shades of white and blue due to the use of Ether. However, Esca Falspawn have slight design variations and even get several new attacks or variations of existing attacks.
  • The fight against Aika as a denizen of Apprentice in EPISODE 5 involves her Dark Rappy transforming into a Dark Empe Rappy. Despite its black coloration, it shares most of the same moves with a normal Empe Rappy.
  • Omega Falz Luther is essentially one; it has an Aberration-themed Palette Swap and shares almost the entirety of its core moveset with the original Dark Falz Luther. However, it has a few new tricks up its sleeve, in addition to a different elemental weakness.
  • Ultra Enemies, which are new versions of old bosses encountered exclusively in Ultra Hard difficulty. They have new Light Is Not Good-themed color schemes and boast immensely upgraded attacks.
• Underwater Ruins: Vopal's Seabed.
• Undesirable Prize: The SG Scratch has EX Boosters. EX Boosters are Booster tickets that have the unique property of boosting other rates including the one listed on the ticket, as well as being stackable with normal Booster tickets. However, they are largely considered not worth the Star Gems paid to roll on the gacha, and are swiftly recycled into SG Recycle Badges when acquired.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: Emergency Code: Gesture. You must communicate a message from one Lillipan to another via Lobby Actions.
• Unexpected Shmup Level: The first phase of ESC-A Falz Mother is a Rideroid chase a la Star Fox. You must take her down with bullets, missiles, and barrel rolls in time to get to the second phase.
• Unidentified Items: The game gives rare weapons a chance to drop in an unidentified (and unequippable) state, though you can tell what type of weapon it is at a glance. This is a good thing for the most part, as when you do identify it, you're allowed to attach a special ability to it and to choose its elemental affinity.
• Unique Items: Some items are exclusively obtainable as rewards for completing Omnibus Quests. Most of these are rare weapons, like Ignis and Coat Doublis.
• Unlimited Wardrobe: Xie, the NPC who gives out Client Orders for seasonal events, always comes dressed for the occasion, wearing a different outfit in every appearance.
• Unrealistic Black Hole:
  • The black hole that shows up where Xion used to be is actually a portal to an Alternate Universe known as Omega, a Medieval European Fantasy land inhabited by, among others, AU counterparts of residents of Oracle.
  • It's later revealed by Enga that a mysterious black hole has also appeared in the Earth dimension, and despite the Earth Guides and Mother Cluster's efforts, the black hole is rapidly expanding. Mission Control projects that the two black holes are connected, leaving it to the player to save two universes from total annihilation.
• Unusable Enemy Equipment: Played with. While you can't literally pick up enemy weapons, some of the gear you can get is fashioned after enemy weapons, or the enemies themselves.
• Urban Fantasy: Everything happening on Earth is this.
• Useless Useful Spell: Several classes have largely useless Skills that no one bothers to put points into.
  • On both Force and Techer, players avoid the Status-based Skills. Status is useless for boss fights except for some instances, and it takes away points that can be invested in percent damage increases.
  • Fighter mains try to not put points into the situational stat boosts whenever possible. The keywords are "situational" and "stat boosts"; raw stats are less favorable for damage than percent damage increases, and having them active for only certain segments of gameplay makes them even less useful.
  • On a lesser note, Chase Advance and the relevant skills. Status damage has no use on bosses since most of them are immune to status, and for some reason, the "special status" effects that some bosses can be affected by don't count as being afflicted by status, rendering the point moot. However, it has a fair use for mobbing if you have either a weapon affixed with a proper status-inducing Ability or a caster on your team.
  • Automate Deadline is considered pointless because the activation threshold is 25% HP, which is way too low to reliably activate without taking a kill shot. Also, since Gunners have Perfect Keeper, there's no reason for a Gunner to be dropping below half health anyway unless they don't like damage bonuses for some reason.
  • Reverser Field. Revive your friends for free! Except it has a cooldown of 10 minutes, which means that unless it's called "Mining Base Defense", you're only going to be using it all of once most of the time. Also, it requires investment before it restores more than 50% HP so it can stop being a weaker Moon Atomizer with inferior range, at which point it also stops being worth it. There is a Skill Ring that halves the cooldown time, but it's still not efficient to put points into unless you play full support and have no points to put anywhere else.
  • Attack Advance increases normal attack damage by 50%. Normal attacks aren't really relevant for the majority of builds, so this Skill is skipped over for other, more relevant skills. Unless, of course, you play the Dragon Slayer HU/BR build, in which case Attack Advance is a major component for dealing obscene damage.
  • Summoner's Subclass Grow Up was originally considered a waste of a Skill Point because its only effect was to double the EXP gained by a Subclass. Thing is, 5% multiplied by 2 is still only 10%, and your Subclass stops getting EXP at Level 40 onward anyway, so it's basically a noob trap to put a point in. This was fixed in a Skill Tree revision that made Subclass Grow Up a default skill.
  • Massive Mate is unnecessary on Summoner Main because it gives you super armor when consuming Mates. Except Summoners have Technique access anyways, so there's no reason for them to be using Mates when they can just Resta to heal. This is only important for Subclassing Summoner for main classes that rely on Mates and don't have enough T-ATK for Resta to be efficient, and even then you have Megiverse to drain enemy health.
• Variable Mix: The music works this way. When you are attacked, the usually gentle music changes into a more intense mix, only to go back to calmness when the enemy is down. Boss battles also have variable mixes that become more intense the more you progress through the fight.
• Verbal Tic: Nyau ends many of his sentences with "nyau". He also says it when he gets hit.
• Video Game Caring Potential: While playing as Summoner, Pets will occasionally ask the player to cast either Resta or Shifta, marked by an icon appearing next to them. If you do so while the player owns the Pet Sympathy skill, Sympathy activates, which boosts various Pet parameters, including damage.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential:
  • If you've beaten your Clone in Falspawn Den, then congratulations, you've just turned it loose on the rest of the PSO2 community for three days; they copy all your stats and weapons and have a lot of HP, and you can potentially have given them a lot of good equipment. Expect anyone who dies to your Clone to curse your name if they see the real you. By that logic, there's nothing stopping you from setting loose a clone with terrible equipment, or having Crippling Overspecialization for other players to exploit against your Clone. The latter is more likely though. Clones of players in your friend list also yield more loot upon defeat, such as Photon Spheres.
  • If you dodge Empe Rappy's healing hug, Empe Rappy will become sad.
• Video-Game Lives: Divide Quest has a version of this in the form of Life Points. You get a set number of Life Points at the start of each Divide Quest segment, and you lose them when a party member is KO'd; lose all of your Life Points, and you fail the Quest. You can get extra lives by completing Life Route Stages, or obtain them very rarely from Photoner devices in Exploration Stages.
• Video Game Objectives:
  • Emergency Codes work like this. Sometimes you're issued one of these, and they vary depending on the area. Common ones include "Attack" (Defeat the marked enemies), "Collect" (Find a specific pickup and bring them to the collection point), and "Duel" (Defeat the boss). Turned on its head in spectacular fashion with Emergency Code: Abyss, where you're the target!
  • Odin is unique in the sense that instead of using a standard Emergency Trial display, a Full Active Time Event popup from Final Fantasy XIV appears instead.
• Video Game Perversity Potential: There's no apparent moderation with what you can whip up in the game's Symbol Art system. Although not rampant, don't be surprised when someone shows off a picture of boobs, panties, or other lewd whatnot through Symbol Art. This only applies to the Japanese version, as the North American GMs can and will ban you for inappropriate Symbol Art. Doesn't stop players from getting creative, though.
• Villain Song: The Divide Quest boss theme, "Vacuity" is a mix of Badass Boast and villainous gloating in song form, sung from Shiva's perspective. When the Rank Gauge is at 70% or higher, the song transitions into the Near Victory Fanfare "As One", which serves as a Song of Courage for the heroes.
• Visual Pun: One of the pre-release screenshots for Jet Boots◊ shows off literal Jet ^note As in, airplane jet Boots!
• Violation of Common Sense:
  • The infamous "Protection" Emergency Trial that requires protecting a Lillipan from harm while its friend tries to rescue it can be made very easy by running away from the Lillipan. This works because for whatever reason, enemies only aggro on the Lillipan if you're also standing near it, so running away from the target as soon is it spawns will cause the enemies to simply ignore it.
  • The Infection Cores seen in Ultimate Quests and Grade 3/Main Match Advanced Buster Quests gain power in stages, maxing out at Stage 4. As the core levels up, it grants the affected enemy more buffs. You can break the core to remove the infection and power down the target... or you can kill the target at max Infection and rake in a ton of EXP.
  • Summoners generally want to look out for attacks or field gimmicks with a high rate of Damage Over Time, as said damage can be heavily exploited by bringing out Marron and walking into the damage to charge it up quickly. This gets taken to ludicrous levels with the Primordial Darkness fight specifically, as the generally-accepted speed strategy for the fight is to run far more Marrons than reasonably accepted and stand inside the flaming death wall during Sodam's fire phase and just start milling through your stash of Marrons, dealing around 5 million to 7 million damage per weak point hit plus Zanverse damage if properly geared. For the truly insane, the optimal version of this strategy involves menuing to swap out your KO'd Marrons for live ones. In the middle of the fight. While standing in the death wall.
  • In a similar vein, skilled players with Counter-Attack Classes tend to run into attacks that can be easily avoided in order to attempt countering them, as counters produce huge burst damage and chaining multiple counters successfully can take a huge chunk out of bosses.
• Vocal Dissonance:
  • Seems to be a running theme for Dragonoids, though it's justified by them communicating through telepathy.
  • Dragon X suitably has the voice of a gruff, battle hardened warrior. Its rare counterpart, Noire Draal, has the voice of a confident teenage schoolgirl.
  • Boks Deubarz swings even harder in this department, as her voice sounds like an aggressive, young-to-middle-aged woman. Contrast against the other Tainted Dragonoid bosses, Gryzrorus Drago and Drago Deadlion, whose voices are more in line with Dragon X's style. Drago Deadlion's rare variant, Valeon Drahl, sounds like an old woman.
  • It can be fairly jarring to have a female character, then activate Dark Blast and your voice suddenly changes to a very loud, masculine Large Ham voice. It can be turned off in Options if you don't like it, though.
  • Erin, the Divide Quest operator, has the appearance of a child and refers to Karin as her older sister, but her voice is far more mature than Karin's and has a personality to match.
• Voice Clip Song: Many of these can be found on Nico Nico Douga, typically involving Dark Falz Luther and his plethora of lines that he likes to repeat very often.
• Volleying Insults: A side cutscene between Luther and Gettemhult in EPISODE 5 largely consists of both of them taking potshots at each other, with the player caught in the crossfire. They don't back off until the player threatens to either get rid of them or tell Xiao, and even then only the former decides to let the topic go.
• Warrior vs. Sorcerer:
  • The Guardian is canonically a Hunter before speccing in the Fighter, Hero, Phantom, and Etoile classes. Their Arch-Enemy in Episode 2 is Luther, a Photoner from an ancient civilization who specializes in the use of Techniques and has the ability to stop time, having stolen it from the body of Klariskrays I.
  • In Episode 4, Adam Sacrid, the leader of Earth Guide, has a certain rivalry against Phaleg Ives, Mother Corps' Disciple of Fire and an immensely powerful hand-to-hand combatant. When Adam takes the field himself, he uses magic-like attacks with his command of Aether. True to form for this trope, the bloodthirsty Phaleg turns out to be a Noble Demon who wishes the best for humanity as individuals, while Adam is a Well-Intentioned Extremist so obsessed with evolving humanity that he's willing to forcibly transform everyone on Earth into Phantasms.
• Wave-Motion Gun:
  • The Photon Blast Cetus Imera fires a large, frontal beam. You can't exactly aim this thing, but it is smart enough to keep itself locked on a moving target.
  • The Big Varder boss has five of them: four on the front, and one in its core. All five can be broken separately, but they are only exposed when they are about to fire.
  • Dark Falz Elder has one that fires out of his head.
  • Photon Particle Cannons will rip apart nearly anything they hit, but you have to charge the shot.
  • The A.I.S. comes equipped with a cannon known as the Photon Blaster. Unlike a Photon Particle Cannon, it doesn't need to be charged, ticks more, and is much more mobile, but in most Quests, it can only be used once per piloting session. The ones where you can fire it more than once are the ones where you can't eject.
  • Sphere Eraser turns your Launcher into a laser cannon, enemy-piercing included. Designed after the A.I.S.'s own Wave-Motion Gun, no less.
  • The Compound Technique Fomelgion is essentially a giant laser powered by fire and darkness.
  • Dark Falz Apprentice Zia has one that is fired via a very suspicious-looking chest-mounted appendage. It has to take some time to charge up, but it has more than enough firepower to destroy all of your towers in one blast, so it's a race against time to inflict enough damage to the appendage before she can fire. At the finale of the battle, you get to combat its Wave-Motion Gun with one of your very own and blow it to high hell.
  • Phantom Battleship Yamato's guns are turned into lots of laser cannons. During the latter half of the on-foot section, it will attempt to deal massive damage to players by firing them in bursts. The A.I.S. section instead trades them for Frickin' Laser Beams.
  • In the Godzilla Lobby, you can watch Godzilla fire his signature Atomic Breath at the TV in the distance. It's just a prop Godzilla, though.
  • In Mining Base Defense: VR, if you let a Zeta Granz stay alive for too long, it will initiate a unique move where it summons a ginormous laser that destroys a Base in two ticks before flying up, up, and away.
  • In the "Cosmic Twinkle Star" concert, Quna combines her power with the A.I.S.' Photon Blaster to make a superpowered laser to destroy the holographic Dark Vibras.
  • This is the default method of attack for the attack ships used in "Armada of Demise". If Demoire Dominus is challenged as the final boss, the Quest ends with a cutscene of your ship blasting a laser into Dominus to blow it and the Armada's flagship to smithereens.
• We Need a Distraction: Alis needs time to cast a powerful magic to disable the Erythron Dragon so Luther can absorb Lutz, and the Dragon with him, using Ephemera, so the player distracts the Dragon by going Guns Akimbo and shoots up a storm before jumping onto its head and showering its face in bullets.
• Weaksauce Weakness: The AIS Exoda take quadruple damage from anyone not in an A.I.S. This means they take five digit damage on average from even mediocre attacks and keel over very quickly as long as an A.I.S. hasn't showed up.
• Weather and Environment: Weather can change at random. Weather changes vary by region; some are pretty standard, like Thunderstorm, Thick Fog, and Heat Wave. Then there are the really weird ones, like Dragon Spirit, Black Dust, and Butterfly Dance.
• Weapon Specialization: Each class has its own set of weapons that are unique to it (barring the universally equippable Gunblades, though the Scion classes share them with another:
  • Hunter: Swords, Wired Lances, and Partizans.
  • Fighter: Double Saber, Twin Daggers, and Knuckles.
  • Ranger: Assault Rifles and Launchers.
  • Gunner: Assault Rifles (shared with Rangers) and Twin Machineguns.
  • Force: Rods and Talises.
  • Techer: Wands and Talises (shared with Forces and Heroes).
  • Braver: Katana and Bullet Bows.
  • Bouncer: Soaring Blades and Jet Boots.
  • Summoner: Harmonizer.
  • Hero: Sword, Twin Machineguns, and Talis.
  • Phantom: Like hero chooses from existing weapon types but uses them very differently from other classes. Assault Rifles, Rods and Katanas.
  • Étoile: Soaring Blades, Wands, and Double Sabers
  • Luster: Gunblades only.
• Weapon of X-Slaying:
  • Some weapons have a Potential that gives them an advantage against certain enemy types. For example, 12* and below weapons with the Potential "Ultimate Hunter" deal boosted damage to Falspawn. Dragon Slayer has a Potential that boosts damage to Dragonoids, and the Welk series weapons dropped by Esca Ragnus increases damage against and decreases damage taken from Phantasms.
  • Curiously inverted by Rig weapons, which deal bonus damage to everything except Dragonkin.
• Weapon Twirling: Partizans have this as their main schtick, and it's not just for Rule of Cool. Not only does it restore a big chunk of PP, if Partizan Gear is learned, letting the Player Character twirl the Partizan at the end of any combat action, be it standard attacks or Photon Arts, charges the Gear Gauge, which can then be consumed when attacking to boost the Partizan's effective range.
• Wham Episode:
  • After seven chapters of seemingly filler events and buildup chapters, Chapter 8 finally drops the first big bombshell of the game with Melphonshina's taking of a fatal attack from Gettemhart, Gettemhart reviving Dark Falz, Gettemhart's subsequent possession due to Dark Falz, and Zeno's Heroic Sacrifice. Episode 2 expands on this further by granting you the power of Time Travel and using it to pull a Big Damn Heroes moment to save Zeno.
  • Episode 2 Chapter 5 serves as another one, with the truth about Matoi and Xion finally being revealed, Zeno making his return (As one of the six heroes, no less), Theodore and Ulc being reunited, and Luther becoming Dark Falz Luther after his initial plan fails.
  • Chapter 6 keeps the whams coming, taking you back in time to the terrible Falspawn raid ten years before the game's events.
  • Episode 3 Chapter 4 is another one: First, turns out Apprentice isn't actually Apprentice (Gemini ambushed and ate Apprentice while she was starting to possess Eucreta). Then Elder of all people pulls a Big Damn Heroes and fights alongside the player (in human form) against clones of Apprentice and Luther. This culminates in Elder (again of all people) pulling a Heroic Sacrifice to save Melphonsina from Gemini. Elder's (or possibly Gettemhart's) parting words to Melphonsina give her the redemption she has been seeking and she begins using her real name again.
  • Episode 3 Chapter 6 continues the trend of significant plot developments. Gemini finally gets off their high horse to fight you and Matoi in combat, but no sooner than they are defeated that they attempt to infect Matoi with a large mass of corrupted photons to transform her into The Profound Darkness. Of course, being The Protagonist, you step in the way and take the brunt of it, and are very nearly transformed into The Profound Darkness before Matoi steps in and uses the Clarissa to transfer the mass to her, saving your life while becoming The Profound Darkness herself. After Sara carts the unconscious you back to the Medical Center, Persona appears and takes the Clarissa for his / herself.
  • Episode 4 Chapter 4 drops the first real bomb of the story by killing Hitsugi. Aru then proceeds to reveal that he possesses a Falz-like form that commands Photons, and revives Hitsugi. However, Mother Cluster abducts Hitsugi before Enga or the player can act, leaving them with Falz!Aru.
  • The entire post-credits scene of EPISODE 5 Chapter 6 turns the whole story inside out.
  • EPISODE 6 Chapter 3-2 finally sees the heroes scoring a victory through killing Mithra, and only Phaleg's timely intervention stops Shiva from getting her revenge.
• What the Hell, Player?: Breaking Nyau's sword causes him to break down in tears, looking practically heartbroken. If you feel bad about doing that, that's understandable. However, what cements this trope is the possibility of actually getting downed by Nyau's tantrum, and if that wasn't enough, the game may throw a boss at you for good measure.
• When All You Have Is a Hammer…: Thanks to Complacent Gaming Syndrome, the majority of solutions to all of a Ranger's problems can boil down to two words: "Weak Bullet". Elite Mook in your way? Weak Bullet its face. Demonic Spiders? Weak Bullet them. Fighting Your Friend? Weak Bullet. Staring down a universe-ending Eldritch Abomination? Weak Bullet that too.
• What the Hell Is That Accent?: Hilda's accent in the North American release.
  • The newmans are given British accents but Afin's sounds a bit closer to an Australian one, Kotori also has a disninctly fake British accent, while Light barely has a disninct accent at all.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: Of sorts. At the end of EPISODE 4, Hitsugi narrates an epilogue detailing what happened to everyone after the events of the main story. Hitsugi, Enga, and Kohri return to their normal lives, Och and Phul integrate into regular society and become teachers at Tensei so they can hit on Enga, Aratron formally disbands Mother Cluster and becomes the new head of ESC-A, Phaleg is taking "special care" of Ophiel for the time being, and Aru enrolls as a new student in Tensei Academy. Hagito doesn't appear in person, but is mentioned to have turned over a new leaf in a news article.
• Whip Sword: The Wired Lance weapons can be used for medium-range special attacks.
• Wingdinglish: The strange hexafont you see on the ship actually spell English words. There's sign boards that read "SHOP AREA" or security walls that read "KEEP CLOSE" to name some examples. Here's a guide if you wish to try to decode it.◊
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: In Omega, the Ephemera can be used as a catalyst to cast powerful magic, but slowly drives the user mad in the process.
• The Worf Effect:
  • When the party finally confronts Ardem/Deus Hunas during the climatic battle, Ardem demonstrates the extent of his god-like power by simply banishing the Player, established to be practically the strongest character in the entire story, back to the Oracle dimension with a simple flick of his hand. It's only Mother's intervention that not only allows the player to stage a comeback, but gives the party the advantage they need to defeat Ardem for good.
  • When Shiva and her party appear on the ARKS Ship, they almost effortlessly defeat the player, Matoi, Regius, and Maria simultaneously. They only don't wipe them out due to Risa's interference. It was later commented in Matoi's NPC flavour text that they did not lose due their difference in power, but possibly due to something that they, Shiva and her party, as Photoners, possess that they as ARKS, did not.
• Wutai: Episode 3's Harukotan has a planet-wide civilization that resembles feudal Japan.
• Year Inside, Hour Outside: Xiera points out that despite the player and the Profound Darkness entering Omega at nearly the exact same time, Ephemera (which is the embodiment of the Profound Darkness' corruption) was already running rampant throughout Omega. Alma explains that Omega and Oracle normally have a separate time flow, and that in the split second difference between the Profound Darkness entering Omega and the player doing the same, decades passed in Omega, during which Ephemera was established as a global source of power. It's only when Alma steps in that they are able to synchronize the flow of time between the two dimensions.
• You Can't Thwart Stage One:
  • Matoi becoming the Profound Darkness is all but predetermined; it's the only destiny you can't screw. What you can change is her ultimate fate.
  • The heroes are dealt a devastating loss at the start of EPISODE 6, as Shiva kills Xiao and successfully takes over the Mothership. Zeno also loses Nanaki to Mithra, and the heroes are only saved when Ulc and Theo pull a Big Damn Heroes and distract Shiva long enough with a self-destructing A.I.S. for Ulc to use Abyss to pull everyone to safety.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness:
  • Aki is the first to get this treatment come Episode 2; in fact, the ARKS seems perfectly fine with doing this to a lot of their staff, seeing as how it considers most of them pawns.
  • When the Black King Clone that Gemini manifested begins to gain a consciousness, Gemini swiftly takes action and invites Sukunahime to the Black Castle, then offs the Black King Clone and pincers Sukunahime in a trap. She barely makes it out thanks to a Heroic Sacrifice from you and Matoi.
• Zerg Rush: The 3rd opening treats us to the characters facing off against an entire legion of Falspawn at the Lilipa Mining Bases. Mining Base Defense throws you into that, and boy does it get chaotic.
• Zero-Effort Boss:
  • Stage 1 of "Heaven and Hell" is six Nyau. They're pitifully easy to defeat if you bait out their spin attacks^note Unlike regular Nyau, sheer brute force also works, since they have very low HP. Just beware the flailing of arms that follows shortly afterwards, which will make short work of you if you get too close.
  • The Story fight against the Profound Darkness during the prologue of EPISODE 5. It starts in Phase 3, has barely any HP, and can barely inflict any damage with any of its attacks. Even the worst class combos can kill it in just a few button presses.

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