Video Game / BLACKSOULS

Where Is Alice?

Alice! A childish story take,

And with a gentle hand

Lay it where Little Girl's dreams are twined.

In Memory's mystic band,

Like pilgrim's wither'd wreath of flowers

Pluck'd in a far-off land.

—BLACK SOULS II

Black Souls (stylized as BLACKSOULS) is an RPG Maker horror H-Game series made by Sushi Yuusha Toro. In addition to standard turn-based RPG gameplay, it mixes in Dark Souls-style gameplay with emphasis on Darker and Edgier fairy tales by The Brothers Grimm.

The game was released in 2017. Its sequel, Black Souls 2 (also stylized as BLACKSOULS II), was released in 2018.

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The series provides examples of:

• Absurdly High Level Cap: In both games, the level cap goes up to 999, making the first game easy if you spend enough time grinding. The second game however can be challenging even when maxed out while playing at the highest difficulty.
• Adaptation Decay: Secretly, pretty much the entire force that drives both the earlier work of Red Hood's Woods and BLACK SOULS I and II. The tales of these characters turn increasingly dark and their dim, miserable lives devoid of meaning or reason and their tragic deaths are revealed to all be the work of an evil Eldritch God who poses as your first and most loyal companion. In Ending C you confront the Outer One who reveals her true nature and your own as the tortured author of the original tales she spun who's been put in a world shaped out of your own creations, twisted. Needless to say, these are all a far cry from the real life counterparts of these tales.
  • II derives from I in the sense that the existing world is a sort of "play" rather than a fairy tale like the first, however, it maintains the fakeness of the world and it's inhabitants, and the same theme of fairy tale narratives with newly introduced characters and returning older ones, some of them like Red Hood and Elisabeth even having to come to terms with their malformed existence as mere fiction twisted into life, all observed from the eyes of it's original author, Grimm.
• Adjustable Censorship: Both games tell the player if they're interested in "carnal acts" (h-scenes), which they can answer yes or no to. There also exists an option to adjust whether the h-scenes can be viewed in the recollection rooms.
• Alice Allusion: The series features Alice as a central character and makes plenty of references to the original work she came from, let alone the similar themes of the protagonist being Trapped in Another World.
  • In the first BLACK SOULS, you meet a blonde girl wearing a blue dress and white apron named Alice, who you later find in Alice's Library though she is actually an android made in the first and original's likeness, the same one you saw die in the beginning. In front of the library is an empty tea table surrounded by little roaming white bunnies, and its entrance is guarded by the Bandersnatch.
  • BLACK SOULS II takes place in Wonderland, with you meeting an Alice that this time you can choose to be your daughter, a little sister, or your mother. Monsters like the Bandersnatch return, this time as girls; alongside the fact you can meet both a Queen of Hearts and a Red Queen. There's also an (all-girls of course!) tea party you can find is held the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, and a Dormouse.
• Body Horror: By the cosmos, this will be the most consistent thing you'll see in the franchise. Examples range from graphic descriptions of gore, equally grotesque-looking monsters and environments, werewolves carrying their ripped-off heads attacking you, a normal-looking rabbit suddenly growing into a big-eyed, long-limbed thing and its belly split open, whatever the hell those long-necked humans in a certain house in Winterbell are, cute human-looking girls that have another nastier form, and so on.
• Central Theme: Obsession, and how one's own can lead to ruin. At least every character has an obsession with something, and they downright suffer for it, with the only way to stop it is to get over their obsession, and by the time they do so, they have lost a lot of significant things in the process:
  • The player character more specifically, the Lewis Carroll part of Grimm, much like in real life, had an obsession with Alice Liddell. Seeing Alice as an older woman caused him to wish to be young again so that he could reignite his relationship with her. However, Mary Sue took notice of his stories and began twisting and turning them to create the Lost Empire and Elysium, a world designed for her amusement while Grimm suffers, which only worsens when Mary Sue lost control over him when the Crawling One took over and intended to use him to strengthen its creation power, resulting in Grimm's mind being further sunk down below to the point where some of his responses can be "I'm going to Alice". It's only that in Ends G and H in BLACK SOULS II that he's forced to face the reality that the Alice he knew of is gone for good, and even while he still has some lingering feelings with Alice in the latter end, he ultimately has to leave "Alice" (actually Prickett) behind if he wants to wake back up to reality.
  • Mary Sue or rather Leaf, was rather uninterested in humanity until she read one of Lewis Carroll's stories. Enamored by his tales, he would merge his soul alongside 7 other authors to make Grimm, and would cast him as the protagonist of his story and twisted many of his tales for her own amusement. Her obsession with these types of twisted fairy tales would lead to her own downfall when Grimm invites Baphomet, her mother, to the Holy Forest, resulting in its destruction, and while she does manage to kill her mother, The Crawling One soon takes both Grimm and most of her powers as an Outer One, imprisoning Mary Sue in the process. By the time Grimm meets her again, she's reduced to delusions of her being the "main heroine". While she is eventually freed following End H, it's unknown how she plans to recover from all this.
  • The Crawling One Initially took Grimm to strengthen its creator powers for an upcoming war between the Outer Ones, but as it grew immersed in its role as "Alice", it began to obsess more on Grimm, to the point that eventually, the Outer Ones who once participated had left. One of the Crawling One's parts, Prickett, is despairing over herself because of how she wants to be together with Grimm, but she still has enough sanity to realize how she, or rather, the rest of the insane parts of the Crawling One, are not actually helping out Grimm's insanity. Eventually, she decides to help Grimm escape from the Crawling One's grasp in End H of BLACK SOULS II, even knowing that she might never meet him again.
• Derailed Fairy Tale: Quite precisely what Mary Sue does with Grimm's fairy tales, who on surface level seem similar enough but quickly derail into complete utter malign lunacy with nothing but death gore and suffering. And she revels in it.
• Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?: Almost every single character you can interact with in II is a cosmic horror creature. Not to mention this trope is literally invoked with the tea party trio (Doormouse, The Mad Hatter and the March Hare).
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: This capacity is very much embodied by Grimm. Growing from an imprisoned undead soul rotting away in a cell to an undying being so unimaginably powerful he is able to contest and defeat Mary Sue, the God of the who created the world he is in and made him, Baphomet The Old Goat of the Woods who is Sue's mother and is comparable to her, and even when he has his progress reset and his memories wiped, goes on to do the same to Jabberwock, Mary Sue (again) and even the Crawling One, who rules the new Garden he finds himself in.
  • Done quite literally to Mary Sue in Ending G. And oh, brother, does it come in a glorious fashion.
• Did You Just Romance Cthulhu?: You can get it on with Baphomet and Leaf, given her true identity as the Outer One named Mary Sue in I. II expands the cast to feature more Lovecraftian heroines, including Kuti, Mabel, Prickett, and the Crawling One in some endings (nothing good will come out of it though).
• Big, Screwed-Up Family: Loads of examples. Everywhere from Red Hood and Elisabeth and her Grandmother who all have their hands stained with blood and a strained family relationship, and even Outer Ones such as Mary Sue and her mother Baphomet who are at each other's throats and fighting for their territory, and authority over the Gardens and are more than willing to just kill each other over it.
  • Greatly amplified in II, where it is revealed in one of the endings after Grimm gives up on his search for Alice that Grimm has seemingly unknowingly, been used as a breeding slave to father new Outer Ones, identical to the characters of the story, born as 1:1 copies as they were, all in reality horrendous comic horror entities who love him unconditionally.
• Earn Your Bad Ending: Both of the games have well over a dozen Endings, some of them even going unlabeled— but the inarguable reality is that the Endings you're presented with plainly (think "Ending A" for example, which is likely intended to be interpreted as the "main" or "first" one due to how the game lists them) are listed as such quite deliberately as they are meant to fool you into thinking you've achieved happiness, with A being a seemingly happy reunion of all party members and B an incredibly abrupt and short description with no visuals, essentially going "Hooray you saved the world and everything is great! The End!" but the game immediately puts that notion into question in A by making everyone disappear and in B by telling you to "fill the Library" to "find the truth", sending you back in time to do more. The more elaborate Endings are down the alphabetical list, were things are revealed for what they are and you get your questions answered, but they all involve confronting reality for the nightmare that it actually really is, leading directly or indirectly to the death of most if not all of your companions as you fight unholy Eldritch abominations of nearly insurmountable power, just for you to be sent back after it's all said and done anyways.
  • For the case of I, with Ending C that involves killing all of your companions at the Poseidon Hotel to fill out the Library for Alice 02 so Grimm can bust out of Mary Sue's grasp to finally confront her, and for D it involves making a long questline for a Pact with the Outer One Baphomet, who then, with your unknowing approval, you will into raiding and destroying the entire world and leads to the death of all of your friends. You gain nothing out of these besides learning the truth, and you lose everything.
  • For II we have Endings F and G which require a LARGE amount of criteria to be met (Speak with Red Hood 10 times, get Leaf's Ring, watch the 6 Memory Orbs, and then start New Game Plus and find a hidden interaction by cancelling a specific dialogue option), which then forces you to run through a gauntlet made out of the real monstrous forms of every companion/heroine and Covenant member in the game, then having to pick between siding with Mary Sue or with Red Hood before confronting The Crawling One. If you side with Leaf, Ending F has you forever trapped in the Crawling One's schemes despite all of this work, and if you side with Red Hood, G has a seemingly happy ending where you flee Wonderland and reunite with Red Hood, only for you to get sent back to the Library Dream immediately.
• Expy: There's a ton of references to FromSoftware games and fairy tales.
  • Dark Souls and Demon's Souls:
    • BLACK SOULS (the first game) is a near carbon copy of the two games, down to items like Herb Flasks being Expies of Estus Flasks, element-imbuing resins, Soul-based Sorceries, bonfires you rest at, teleport and cause enemies to respawn, a Moonlight Greatsword, and so on.
    • The Lost Empire is covered in a Fog of Doom that turns people into monsters, just like the fog seen in Demon's Souls.
    • The protagonist is an Undead, who gets rescued by Jeanne (an Expy of Oscar) in the beginning and implores him to help with a quest to rid the land of evil. He also can use souls, exchange them for level-ups or goods, and go Hollow when killed.
  • Bloodborne, prevalent in II:
    • The second game's gameplay has you use Blood Vials as a secondary healing item, and equipping an off-hand gun lets you 'stagger' enemies in battle when timed correctly.
    • Eldritch horrors are the main theme now.
  • The Brothers Grimm for both games:
    • The games have their themes and a number of characters taken from the Grimm fairy tales.
    • The protagonist's real name is Grimm.
• Fairy Tale Free-for-All: The series has all sorts of fairy tales from different real life origins and authors, from the famed ones such as Red Riding Hood, Snow White and Cinderella, to others like The Snow Queen, the common unifying trope is them generally being classics of old.
• Fourth-Wall Observer: Most of the Outer Ones are. Characters like:Mary Sue who maliciously set up the entirety of the first game, Jabberwock, the one who manipulated and spurred her to be so, others like Baphomet who plays an active role in the later half of I and The Crawling One and Mabel for II— are all painfully aware of the state of these worlds and their inhabitants through and through and do nothing about it but use them for their own amusement, letting their inhabitants live on obliviously.
  • The Crawling One can actually be seen a multitude of times during the events of I always just out of reach. In II he is quite plainly stated by Mary Sue to be so, stealing "her creations" and setting up The Wonderland for it to spectate for it's own satisfaction and curiosity.
    • And this is invoked in Ending F in a very literal sense. Grimm and Leaf turn on Red Hood and then "kill" The Crawling One, and the ending sequence has Grimm give into his perversions and rape Leaf seemingly for the remainder of time endlessly. However, unbeknownst to them both, the ending frames The Crawling One watching over them from behind a set of roofless walls with the space framed like a dollhouse or marionette show of sorts, quite literally watching over them from behind the walls that confine them, with the pair completely oblivious to still playing a part of his game.
• Grimmification: The main point of the series is the dark nature of the fairy tales and characters involved in the game, which go way beyond just returning to the dark medieval roots of most of these beloved stories and go well past beyond that.
  • Not only is this explained and justified by the protagonist's true nature as Grimm of the Grimm Brothers, but the dark and twisted nature of these fairy tales are a byproduct of Leaf, in reality the Greater Outer One Mary Sue, who created a fairy tale world but altered all the fairy tales she drew inspiration from, finding them unbelievably boring.
• Healing Checkpoint: The bonfires, which also serve as fast travel waypoints.
• Hello, [Insert Name Here]: You get to name your character at the start of each game. The true name of the protagonist is Grimm, and attempting to type this name in the first game will have an unknown figure interrupting Alice and boot you back to the title screen, while the second will have whoever is talking to you remark with surprise that your memories are still there and remove them, pushing you into a Non-Standard Game Over and back to the title screen.
• Hotter and Sexier: True to it's nature as an H-Game, the series has a high focus on converting the fairy tale characters, normally much more "conservative" in media, into most of what you'd see as per the genre— greatly accentuated figures, skimpy and revealing outfits, uncharacteristically provocative suggestiveness and interactions, and pretty much, genuinely everyone being willing to get down to business, if the need arises.
  • Hell, for crying out loud, Red Hood, the normally happy-go-lucky and innocent damsel wearing a long dress and cape you see in your fairy tales in this game wears nothing but a black thong bikini with leather linings inside under her cape, which is always in view in II.
  • This is later revealed to be invoked, being all by design of Mary Sue, who quite literally went and read the original fairy tales, and in pure distaste, thought this sort of inclusion of absolute lust and depravity would befit her own version of the tales and her own fantasy world and make them most exciting.
• Improbably Female Cast: There are very few male characters compared to the girls in both games, which is par for the course as adult games for males.
  • I has quite a few male characters in the cast, with the protagonist being one, but nearly every named female gets a portrait and more plot relevance in comparison. Given that the world and the cast are all Mary Sue's creations for Grimm, the many girls are possibly put there as an offering to Grimm's sexuality and 'spice up' the plot with depravity as she sees it, or to distract him from the truth of the world.
  • II has a far bigger cast than the first with the gender favoring girls, including (returning and not) fairy tale monsters like the Bandersnatch and the Jabberwocky that are now Cute Monster Girls, and a couple of heroines who are actually cosmic horrors straight out of Lovecraft's stories. Justified given that the Garden's creator wants to breed children with Grimm, so it throws tons of girls his way.
• Interchangeable Antimatter Keys: Master Keys are consumables that can open any door as long as it's got a lock, and you can buy a couple from certain shopkeepers. A scene with Mabel to see her panties through the rape option in BS2 has her boast that her chastity belt can only be unlocked by a key that can "open a range of space-time gates", fit into any lock and open anything—which you can proceed to unlock with a Master Key, much to her shock. She then realizes "that girl", heavily implied to be Mary Ann since Master Keys existed in the first game, had created copies of that key.
• Kill the God: Happens a multitude of times in the series, as it deals with the Outer Ones. Grimm has singlehandedly slain the likes of Mary Sue, Baphomet and Jabberwock, taken on The Crawling One and the Grand Guinol, all extraterrestrial Eldritch Gods with unimaginable amounts of power.
• Life Energy: In-universe, Souls are equivalent to a character's life and a measure of how powerful they are; being bereft of them leaves humans lifeless and prone to turning into monsters. In-game, Souls are used to level up or act as a currency, and coloured souls can increase your stats.
  • Green, Purple, Red, Blue, Yellow, Ashen and White Souls increase maximum health points, maximum magic points, attack, defense, speed, magical attack and magical defense respectively in both games.
  • Black Souls and Tainted Black Souls increase all stats in both games, but increase you sin by 1 in the first game, and reduce your SEN by 10 in II.
  • Unique to II are: Four-Leaf Souls, which increase your luck; Dream Souls, which increase your level by 5; and Souls of the Outer One, which raises all stats by ten times the amount Tainted Black Souls do, as well as increasing SEN by 100, and are earned by defeating Mabel at the end of the Ashes Reignited level in the Chaos Dungeon (available in the Crown of the Lion and Unicorn DLC).
• Little Red Fighting Hood: Red Riding Hood is one of the few recurring characters that appears in both games (and a previous work before BLACK SOULS titled Red Hood's Woods), and boy is she a fighter with the wolf himself as a partner. She can be summoned to fight with you in the first game, but in the second game, she's trying to rescue you from 'Alice'.
• Love Makes You Crazy: And evil in a number of cases.
  • In BLACK SOULS:
    • Mary Sue was enamored by the protagonist's fairy tales back in the real world, so she created a world where those fairy tales came to life as darker versions of themselves and put the former writer as the lead in her twisted idea of a fairy tale. By BSII, any relationship/romance you might have had with her in the first game seems to have carried over, albeit semi-deliriously still seeing herself as the heroine to her protagonist.
  • And in BLACK SOULS II:
    • The protagonist this time usually has an option to say "Going to Alice" or some variation of that, or gibbers about Alice in certain scenes where his thoughts are displayed. This is enough indication that his mind is at an all-time low by default, no matter his sanity level. At one point, he forces Red Hood to dress up as Alice and rapes her. Red Hood thankfully remained understanding and loyal afterwards.
    • The Crawling One, who disguised itself as Alice, had initially planned to strengthen its creation powers in a coming war between Outer Ones by using the imagination of a human writer, the protagonist Grimm, that Outer Ones lacked. Over the course of the repeating 'stageplay' however, the Crawling One came to 'love' playing its role as Alice and loving Grimm, obsessively keeping Wonderland in a loop, which Mabel lampshades and grows disgusted by while other Outer Ones who once participated left when they saw how insane the Garden's creator had become.
• Multiple Endings:
  • BLACK SOULS:
    • Companion endings: Defeat Cinderella, and when prompted, touch the fog with the companion of your choice. The ending has a scene depicting what happens between you and the companion you chose. Additionally, all of them except Leaf's ending will be have a cruel twist if the player has Leaf's Ring.
    • Leaf Companion end, post End C: Same as Leaf End, however, it's revealed that everything, including what happens to her in End C was planned by her all along, in an endless cycle.
    • End A: Defeat Cinderella, and when prompted, touch the fog by yourself without any Sin and have all companions. After successfully defeating Cinderella, the player returns back to a hero's comeback in the Holy Forest, with all of the companions celebrating their victory. However, everyone except the player vanishes afterwards...
    • End B: Same as above, except fail to meet one of the conditions. The ending is instead a text-only description of the player being hailed as the hero of humanity, and then encourages the player to fill up the library for the next ending.
    • End C: Fill up every book in the library. After doing this, murdering every one of their companions except Victoria, Miranda and Leaf in the process, and pulling the lever, the Holy Forest distorts, with Victoria turning hostile. After reaching the End of the Journey, Leaf suspects that the evil goddess Mary Sue is right here, and will only show herself when her true name is revealed. The player, with the hints he uncovered throughout his journey, outs Leaf as Mary Sue. Laughing insane upon the reveal, she admits that she masterminded the events, including the murder of Alice, and was mostly sick of humanity until she met Grimm, the player character's true name, who is an amalgamation of various authors such as Lewis Carroll and Hans Christian Andersen, resulting in her reshaping her world with twisted versions of their fairy-tales. She then attempts to restart the world, but removes Grimm's undeath so that she can kill him for good. However, Grimm manages to defeat Mary Sue and chokes her to death. Afterwards, all the companions that Grimm killed are mysteriously resurrected alongside Alice, who hail him as their Lord Creator.
    • End D: Complete all of Baphomet's requests. She will then proceed to invade the Holy Forest, killing its inhabitants over there, and both Leaf and Grimm defeat her. However, afterwards, Mary Sue kills Baphomet and Grimm's companions, but "Alice" (later revealed to be the Crawling One) approaches Grimm and Mary Sue...
  • BLACK SOULS II:
    • End A: Save Alice from the Cheshire Cat/Tearing Beast, Dinah. However, just as the player and Alice escape, the player once again repeats "Where is Alice?"
    • End B: Make a Covenant with everyone except the Calamities of Wonderland, level them all up to 3, make love with Node at least once, and chose to abandon your quest to save Alice when prompted. Node then guides the player to an area where various eggs are located. Said eggs hatch to reveal themselves to be identical to the various inhabitants of Wonderland that he made a Covenant with, with Node declaring that a new breeding season is underway.
    • End C: Fail to defeat the Cheshire Cat/Tearing Beast, Dinah. As Alice is killed by Dinah, the player's soul is overwhelmed by despair as it dissipates.
    • End D: Save Alice from the Cheshire Cat/Tearing Beast, Dinah, but kill Alice afterwards. As he does this, the player is left wondering whether this was a dream or not.
    • End E: Same conditions as End D, but have 0 SEN as you do this. "Alice" soon rants about the player, and after a boss fight against The Black One/Shadow Demoness/The Elk-Goddess, three duplicate Alices appear and kill the player.
    • End F: Meet and chat with Red Hood in 10 different locations, get Leaf's Ring, and collect 6 memories, then when starting a New Game Plus, when presented with the option to choose who Alice is, cancel and you'll instead get the Alice Liddell option, which causes the Crawling One to recognize that Grimm is beginning to remember. When presented to either side with Red Hood or Leaf, side with Leaf and defeat Red Hood. After listening to Leaf's description of the Crawling One and defeating "Alice", they then proceed to make love in their garden, unaware that the Crawling One is still alive and overseeing them.
    • End G: Same as above, but side with Red Hood. As Mary Sue is defeated again, she reveals that Red Hood will die at the age of 20, which is about a year from now, but Grimm punches Mary as she devolves into insane rants, knocking her out. However, just as the Crawling One attempts to rape Grimm, Red Hood knocks it away from him, and successfully kill the Crawling One, causing the entire garden to collapse. Eventually, both Grimm and Red Hood manage to wake up to reality, and they meet each other, relived that everything is over. However, Grimm suddenly appears once again at the Library Dream. Talking to the Cheshire Cat reveals that as thanks to Node saving her, she was to prevent Grimm from reuniting with the Crawling One through any means, but regardless of the outcome, is still part of the never-ending loop.
    • End H: Complete End G once, then talk to Mabel at least once, defeat the Old King to get access to the new area, then reach Winterbell and defeat the Grand Guignol. Node approaches Grimm, who reveals that as the entire garden is collapsing, the time loop is beginning to end, and realizes that she can never be with Grimm forever, cutting off her hair to symbolize her letting go of him. Node then holds off the Crawling One alongside Dinah. As Grimm escapes, both "Daughter Alice" and "Mother Alice" try to hold on to him, but "Sister Alice" swipes them away, telling him that there's a girl more important than her, with the subsequent scene revealing that "Daughter Alice", "Sister Alice" and "Mother Alice" are Bandersnatch, Jubjub and Jabberwock respectively. As Grimm escapes from the collapsing garden, Red Hood tries to help Grimm up an cliff, but upon seeing the Crawling One approaching them, Grimm spares Red Hood from the Crawling One by slicing his arm. However, "Alice", actually Prickett, saves Grimm from the Crawling One, apologizing for the fact that she will never meet Grimm ever again. Grimm later watches Red Hood as she approaches the final seconds of her life, and Leaf is still around. Notably, the only ending that boots you back to the title screen, to signify that this is the final ending of the game.
• New Game Plus: Featured in both games, it's accessible after you get most endings, via interacting with a crystal in each game's respective hub zone. Unlike it's inspiration, the difficulty modifier usually associated with NG+ can be changed, both during a regular play-through and afterwards.
• Recurring Character Though a lot of the characters die, a few of characters are actually recurring. The most notable being Red Hood who appears in all 3 games in the universe, being able to travel between worlds with her mirrors.
  • The boss in the Pond of Bloody Tears is revealed to actually be Elisabeth if you pair yourself with Red Hood, leading to you two fighting the girl's mother one final time, with the three finally getting closure on one another and the nature of the world around them.
  • Victoria and Miranda also return in II although for the case of Miranda she is long dead, being controlled by a being who has taken a hold of her memories and personality after finding her body on the beach, and is technically not really her.
  • And in DLC 3, we can reencounter Lindamea of the Black Trial, who puts Grimm to test once more hunting him down for his sins and engaing in a climactic showdown in the kingdom of Winterbell.
• Title Drop: Aside from the various Black Souls you can get throughout the game, the title is namedropped twice in both games:
  • The Five Demonic Princesses in I have their souls described as "black with taint".
  • II reveals that Grimm is an amalgamation of the various authors whose Black Souls were fused into him.
• The Wonderland: The games feature locations named exactly this, in keeping with its Alice in Wonderland references. Even without that, the setting is just plain weird to wrap your head around.
  • In I, Wonderland is a location you can visit, full of cute white bunnies you can harvest for souls. Ironically, it's the most peaceful-looking, what with the greenery everywhere.
  • The entirety of II takes place in Wonderland, which easily outmatches the world in I in strangeness, scope, and/or gore.
• World of Chaos: Both Elysium from I and Wonderland from II are perfect examples of this trope. Doors that lead to nowhere, impossible spaces and locations, ever-reappearing monsters that seem to inhabit nowhere, geological anomalies, completely incoherent geometry with floating objects and things that serve no purpose and paths that lead to nowhere, with areas that transition unnaturally, and entire aspects of reality that only exist depending on your mental state when you perceive them. The general fakeness of it all put up like cardboard cutouts, only there to ever represent and fool you for a moment into thinking these locations are real. That would be because none of them are and nothing is.
  • II takes it even further with the "SEN" system, functioning like a Sanity meter. The world becomes evil and distorted when you're at 0 or negative SEN, taking on a gory appearance and generating even more unimaginable monstrosities to come chase you, with things getting as bizarre as you getting sent straight up to the moon. This is not made better when you realize this is the true state of the world, and high "SEN" is in actuality you being deluded into thinking that following the fantasy seemingly set up for you in the Wonderland is the right path to walk.

Tropes found in the first BLACK SOULS:

I'll pray to you to avoid the worst end...^note From left to right: Leaf, the Player Character

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• Call-Back: When fighting against the Little Mermaid, if summoned, Red Hood will wonder if mermaids make a fish dish or a human dish, the same question she ponders in Red Hood's Woods after defeating the Envoy of the Depths.
• Continuity Nod: When meeting Red Hood for the first time, she will tell the player about having recently killed her grandmother completely in passing. That "grandmother" being the final boss battle of her own game of the same universe, Red Hood's Woods.
• Cuteness Proximity: When fighting an alpaca in the ranch, all your summoned companions will unanimously think this furry critter still trying to kill you is cute. Special mentions go to Jeanne, who feels her chest tighten and wonders why, Miranda, who maybe for once in her life doesn't really want to kill and says keeping it is fine too, and Red Hood, who says Poro is cooler and cuter, which implies she thinks it's cute enough to be worth a comparison.
• Dark Fantasy: True to its Dark Souls and Demon's Souls inspirations, BLACK SOULS is set in a Crapsack World where an empire along with its neighboring lands have all fallen to a mysterious fog that turns people into monsters. There are barely any survivors who remain sane or not some madman taking advantage of the chaos to further their own ends, with death, rape, and destruction being a common sight. Characters inspired by real life fairy tales you would expect to be heroes as they were in their original stories are most often enemies you must defeat. The protagonist themselves can choose to be one such villain by killing and raping with abandon. Such is the depravity of the world's creator, Leaf, who is the same Mary Sue you hear about, having twisted the original stories' characters to be darker than they originally were for no other reason than her own amusement.
• Darker and Edgier: Many of the fairy tale characters that appear have gone through a heavy case of this, with some of them being outright monsters. Although it turns out this is because the world's creator, Leaf, also know as Mary Sue, twisted them because she thought the originals were boring.
• "Everybody Dies" Ending: Played straight but also inverted. Multiple of the Endings have everyone die, such as the Companion Endings that seem happy but turn into horribly cruel twist endings, Ending C where you're forced into betraying and killing all of your party members to fill the Library or Ending D, where after defeating Baphomet, Leaf kills everyone. However the true nature of the world is for the tale to be never-ending, thus the deaths are always undone, keeping the cycle of misery going.
• Fog of Doom: The Lost Empire fell ever since its queen, Cinderella, went mad, while a mysterious fog sucked souls out of people and turned them into monsters called "demonbeasts", which is what Jeanne came to investigate in the first place. The only place it hasn't taken over is the Holy Forest, the only known sanctuary protected by a barrier.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: Downplayed. The Drake Helkaiser you fight at the end of the starting area is very much this, appearing and incinerating Jeanne, the powerful heroine who saved you in mere seconds, then engaging you. The creature is exponentially stronger than any of the enemies faced until now, acting as the first boss of the game and has tons of health and damage, being able to kill you in a couple if not one hit depending on your starter gear. If the player fails the Helkaiser will kill the player and send them to the Holy Forest and in that case he can only be fought again if the player returns to the starting area. However, if the player learned the ropes on Parrying and Evading, it is entirely possible for the Helkaiser to be slain, granting you the Drake Sword, one of the best weapons in the game as early as the second area.
• Karma Meter: The first game contains a sin system, starting at 0, and killing certain NPCs increases this value. Having this value above 0 can cause additional encounters. Certain items and NPCs can change the sin value.
• Recurring Boss: The Drake Helkaiser is very much this. It initially confronts the player at the start of the game, torching Jeanne and engaging him in a downplayed hopeless boss fight. Whether defeated or not, the Helkaiser can be revisited when the player returns to the starting area, and can be defeated, and then returns multiple times throughout the player's journey, intercepting him on a bridge, now revealed to be undead, partially rotting. and after being defeated, and having defeated Miranda, can be found one last time in the Tainted Bog, now fully undead, defeating him this one last time even has even the game reassure you he's done for good.

The corpse of your longtime foe Helkaiser turned into trash... He won't revive anymore.

• Sequel Hook: After completing Ending D and speaking to the corpse after having all of your Companions gain their ultimate skills, the corpse will mention how Alice Liddell created the world of Wonderland before mentioning how a Crawling came, and disappearing afterwards. Going up the top right corner afterwards has Alice (heavily implied to be the Crawling One) appear in an unreachable spot.
• Standard Japanese Fantasy Setting: The entire plot (if you ignore the girls) is this mixed with, or rather, is a near-total copy of Dark Souls: you are a random undead person rescued by a knightly figure, who explains that the land is now shrouded in a fog that turns people into monsters called "demonbeasts". You are then tasked with ridding the land of evil where the main villains you must slay are four evil princesses and a mad queen. Except the entire disaster is just a fabricated plot where seeing it to the end leads to Ending A. The truth is far darker.
• Summon Magic: You can find various heroines to summon and fight alongside you in battle, all of whom you can control like your own character, the first of whom is Leaf. The caveat of this is that you have to spend your character's turn (and a negligible 10 MP) summoning each one, up to a cap of three allies.
• The Rival: The Helkaiser and Lindamea of the Black Trail both fit this. Both are relentless in their pursuits of the player, with the Helkaiser returning from it's death multiple time and even becoming undead to face him. Lindamea goes as far as to pursue and show up to fight Grimm right before confronting Mary Sue as reality itself is falling apart, just to subjugate him for his sins.
• Vestigial Empire: The Lost Empire as described by Wandering Knight Izu used to be a nice place despite its lack of riches. But when its ruling queen Cinderella turned insane and the fog started turning people into demonbeasts, nearly every location within its territory has become disgusting cesspits of death, and whatever few human survivors there still are have barely anything on their minds other than survival.
• Was Once a Man: Most NPCs and companions can, under certain circumstances or reaching sufficient progression, transform into hostile demonbeasts.

Tropes unique to BLACK SOULS II:

I'm going to Alice.^note From left to right: Node, the Player Character, Alice, the Cheshire Cat. Not pictured: SEN

• Art Evolution: Though BLACK SOULS II continues to use the same rough, squiggled, hand-drawn-like style for its art, it has far more CGs, detailing and character sprites compared to the plainer ones of the first game.
• Becoming the Mask: The Crawling One originally pretended to be Alice to use Grimm to increase its power, but after enough loops fell in love with both its role and Grimm.
• Bittersweet Ending: End H is the only ending that requires a significant amount of effort that doesn't fuck over Grimm in any way possible, as with the help of Prickett, he finally reawakens to reality. However, in the process, he's forced to leave her behind, with his obsession with Alice still lingering on in some way, Mary Sue/Leaf is freed from the fairy prison, and Red Hood is approaching the final seconds of her lifespan, all while Grimm is comforting her in her final moments.
• Bloodier and Gorier: The second game manages to be this despite the plentiful excruciating deaths and Body Horror encountered in the first. For one, the starting area is a place where people fall, crash and die into bloody messes that created the red floor you're standing on, and one of the areas you could explore early on is a huge lake of blood.
• Boss Rush: Two notable examples.
  • The first comes when getting Endings F and G where you're put in a path to fight against every former companion and Covenant member. In this case the bosses are actually avoidable, though the narrow corridors may have you caught by one at some point, and some of them spell serious trouble.
  • The DLC 2 area of the Chaos Dungeon has a mode labelled Ashes Reignited, which is a floor-based boss rush mode where you take on 5 bosses per floor, a lot of them with multiple phases. The difficulty increases exponentially with each passing floor, and you even get some familiar faces from the first game such as the Forbidden Beast Behemoth, the Trashlord Kraken. Lust Demon Satyr and even your deceased longtime rival, the Helkaiser who even gets a fake-out death screen and returns with a new final form, the Ghost Drake Helkaiser.
• Cosmic Horror Story: II makes a huge leap from a Dark Fantasy in the first game and down a rabbit hole crawling with unfathomable horrors of the cosmos, which parallels the Dark Souls games coming first and Bloodborne being a later title of FromSoftware.
• Cutting Off the Branches: A bit ambiguous. II starts off from Ending D, where Grimm unwittingly invites Baphomet into the Holy Forest, which gets all its inhabitants killed, then leads to a boss battle where Leaf (Mary Sue) kills her in the end. But then The Crawling One (disguised as Alice) comes in afterwards, which is when they presumably kidnap Grimm and imprison Mary Sue. The odd part to all this is that the player can visit a ruin of Hotel Poseidon, where you would invite and kill all the heroines (assuming you didn't beforehand) for their fairy tales to get Ending C; despite Leaf summoning them at Ending D and killing them, that there are memories of Grimm killing them suggests that Ending C somehow happened as well, which may itself be a part of the Garden's time loop at work.
• Escape Sequence: A rather unexpected one in DLC 3 when going through the Crimean Nursing Graveyard. At a certain point you'll have to cross the "Night Lookout" as it is referred in the written messages, a bone-chilling ghastly entity that chases you down through the upper floors of the Nursing Graveyard and will rapidly kill you if you're caught. The lights flicker on and off in intervals and you're forced to dodge obstacles and make your moves in complete pitch darkness. It eventually even leads into Grimm being forced to hide it out in a cramped hospital room in which writings advise him to stand completely still before the entity giving chase bursts into the room. Sure enough, if you don't, it does NOT end well.
• Exotic Eye Designs: Mabel's eyes are blue and studded with stars, and has a four pointed golden star for a iris with white pupil, surrounded by smaller golden circles with white pupils within them.
• Horrifying the Horror: The Crawling One does this to Mary Sue. Yes, the completely irredeemable monstrous murderous psychopath God who put together the absolute torture fest that is the first game, that revels in seeing people under endless torture, be mutilated and sexually assaulted, when prompted to speak on the Crawling One as you both make your way towards the final confrontation with the aforementioned, has nothing but this to say:
  Mary Ann: I first came to know of it when mother introduced that thing as her new husband. I knew it at a glance, there was something off about it...the smell, it was the same as mine. But it was completely different! You'd know with just a word. it's the kind of guy who'd sit in the corner staring at ants! The Crawling One would never smash a Jenga tower!
• Lovecraft Lite: Believe it, your sanity hitting rock bottom is going to be the least of what you have to be scared of: bodies everywhere, literal rivers of blood, Humanoid Abominations, Eldritch Abominations, Everything Trying to Kill You, and your character constantly wanting to find Alice regardless of how high your Sanity Meter is doing are just a couple of such things. Add the Outer Ones into the mix who turn out to have been toying with you by repeating your adventure just like Mary Sue for who knows how long, and you've got yourself an adventure to make you drown in despair. That said, there's a lot of dateable characters (as a rule of thumb, anyone that is humanoid and is cute is a heroine), you can choose compassionate options and play The Hero straight even if it avails you nothing, you can fight said Eldritch Abominations and come out on top, and ultimately Earn Your Happy Ending... however costly it gets.
• Optional Boss: The Old King, the boss at the end of the Chaos Dungeon, is much considered to be this. Immune to status effects and status decreases, with immense amounts of health and can even remove your buffs from you, will instantly kill you if you give him a negative status effect, and applies a series of debuffs on you. His second phase is even stronger and summons clones and grants him HP regen. His only notable weakness is being susceptible to poison, which just makes this an uphill battle for most builds and players.
• Sanity Meter: The second game has a sanity system, called 'SEN', which starts at 100. Killing bosses, searching corpses and using certain items increase it, while killing/raping certain NPCs and other items causes decrease. Getting it below 31 changes certain events, and getting it below 0 causes full on Through the Eyes of Madness to occur. However, killing Jubjub gives you the Gear of Madness, a Sanity Ball in item form that lets you set SEN to 100 or 0 anytime you want.
• Star-Spangled Spandex: The inside of Mabel's dress is black studded with stars, looking more like the sky at night rather than clothing.
• Through the Eyes of Madness: Getting SEN below 0 causes all sorts of weirdness like eyeballs appearing in the walls, spawns new and dangerous enemy encounters and leaves you unable to understand the dialogue of most NPCs. However, it is needed to progress in certain areas.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: The house in Winterbell briefly turns the game into a Visual Novel based off of Lewis Carroll's relationship with the Liddell sisters.
• The Unintelligible:
  • Most people Grimm talks to in II when SEN is below 0 is this.
  • The Crawling One often talks like this, unless Grimm has Prickett's Ring equipped.
• Very Loosely Based on a True Story: The Visual Novel segment of Winterbell is based off of Lewis Carroll's time as a teacher for the Liddell family's children. Some of the optional scenes are based off of allegations that Lewis may have sexual conduct with them, with the game exaggerating those allegations. This is justified, however, as said memories were made to hide Grimm from The Crawling One.

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Where is Alice?