Video Game / Epic Battle Fantasy

"Fight through waves of enemies."

Epic Battle Fantasy is a series of flash games developed by Matt Roszak (AKA "Kupo707", which was changed to "Kupo Games" sometime around the release of EBF4). It consists of three individual series: the main Epic Battle Fantasy series of Eastern RPGs (consisting of five games), as well as two spin-offs.

The main Epic Battle Fantasy series is your standard turn-based RPG, with not too much deviation from the standard system, at least initially. What makes the game stand out more is its style: the world of the series is an Anachronism Stew with the Fantasy Kitchen Sink in effect, and so throughout all the games, you'll be fighting off enemies like cats, slimes, catslimes, giant insects, turtles, robots, monoliths, dragons, and many others, using weapons ranging from traditional magic to airstrikes and boomboxes. Also present in the series are dozens of Shout Outs, numerous lampshades, and gameplay that requires taking use of what would be Useless Useful Spells in other games.

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Entries to the Epic Battle Fantasy series:

Main Series

• Epic Battle Fantasy 1
• Epic Battle Fantasy 2
• Epic Battle Fantasy 3
• Epic Battle Fantasy 4
• Epic Battle Fantasy 5

Spin-Offs

• Brawl Royale (technically predates the series, but some characters are borrowed from it and there's a Continuity Nod in 1)
• Bullet Heaven
• Adventure Story
• Bullet Heaven 2
• Bullet Heaven 3

Related Games

• Mecha Dress Up Game
• The Kitten Game
• Cat Cafe
• Epic Battle Fantasy Collection^note A re-release/updating of several games pre-EBF3 for Steam; includes 1, 2, Brawl Royale, Bullet Heaven, Adventure Story, and the other Related Games in this folder.
• Hidden Cats

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Multiple entries in the series use these tropes:

Tropes A-E

• Ability Required to Proceed: Used in EBF4 and EBF5. The axe, torch, hammer, ladder, and three kinds of boots will be obtained throughout the games. Deliberately patterned after Pokémon.:
  • EBF4: You even get achievements called "Used Cut", "Used Flash", "Used Rock Smash", and "Used ...Ladder?". Non-player characters at Goldenbrick Resort in EBF4 call the stepladder "legendary" since there is only one in the entire world.
  • EBF5: which adds an additional number of items such as the shovel and a second type of hammer, but also the items that are necessary only for extra loot, like the Cloud Boots.
• Achievement System: The games started to include a "Medals" system in the second game. Throughout most of the games, these are nothing but Cosmetic Awards. In the third game, bonus areas containing loot are unlocked as the player unlocks tens of medals. In the fifth, a fanart gallery and its numerous rooms (including fights and loot) are locked until the players earns enough medals to get through them.
• Actually Four Mooks: From the third game onwards, a single sprite on the map represents a group of monsters, so that harmless-looking bush could actually contain a four-wave long marathon battle. Fortunately, the encounter usually shows the strongest monster on the map, so there aren't too many bad surprises.
• Adorable Evil Minions: Kittens, slimes, and bushes show up throughout the series as mooks.
  • The first two dog enemies in EBF4 have an animation where they wiggle their front paws. Both girls Squee over it.
• Affectionate Parody: Of Final Fantasy and JRPGs in general.
• Airborne Mook:
  • Most flying enemies in general have high evade rates, making them a pain to hit if you don't debuff their evasion beforehand. They also tend to be resistant to Earth damage.
  • The main exception is in the first game, where there is no accuracy or evasion stat, and all attacks always hit.
• Always Check Behind the Chair: Some treasure chests from the third game onwards are hidden behind the Obstructive Foreground, requiring the player to check behind places like bushes, a gravestone, and a snow sculpture (and in one case, the menu button).
• And I Must Scream:
  • During the fourth game, at the second village near the optional graveyard area, one of the NPCs will bring up a rumour about how her friend was supposedly turned into a tree. Going into the graveyard area you'll see a lot of living trees, which the main characters show pity towards if you try to interact with. It's stated during the mentioned discussion that this is fairly common.
  • The equipment upgrade system in EBF5 involves using captured foes to upgrade equipment. Presumably while still alive!
• Animesque: The art style makes this obvious.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • In the fourth game, the Instant Death status ailment instantly charges your limit break. Not only can this turn the tide, it can make it easier to recharge it before a boss battle.
  • Battles can be fled at any time, so you can scan enemies without losing a turn. You can also select the difficulty at any time (since you only get achievements for beating bosses on epic).
  • In the first and second game, if Natz is hit with the Seal status effect, she can still use Purify to un-Seal herself.
  • Bullet Heaven 2 includes several ways to lessen the increased difficulty, including bullet clearing after every wave, the ability to bomb and avoid taking damage (effectively giving you extra hits and letting you lessen the blow of losing a perfect wave streak), and not requiring a restart if the bonus waves are failed. Interestingly, there are handicaps that allow you to remove the former two features, in exchange for a better score multiplier.
  • In 5, medals given for beating bosses stay even when reloading the game to a previous state. So it's possible to save, kill a boss on Epic to get the medal, load the save, and fight the boss on Zero difficulty in order to have a much easier time capturing it for use as a summon.
  • The Hungry status prevents a player from doing anything but waste turns eating food, sometimes the very expensive kind. Fortunately, this food doesn't come from your inventory.
  • Normally, loading the game after saving it will drop the player off in the exact spot the game was saved. The one exception to this is the Minecraft Maze in 5, where saving and quitting will drop the player to the starting room, which is something mentioned in both the sign and by the party. This is to prevent the player from getting lost and/or allow a quick way to warp out after finding everything of note, given that the area is a giant maze. The only exceptions are if the player saved in any of the three side rooms, to avoid losing the progress of finding them.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: With more player joying from the fourth game onwards, the party can only have three members at once. Fortunately, the unused party member can be swapped in at any time during battle without wasting a turn.
• Artifact Title: The series is called Epic Battle Fantasy because its games consist entirely of one battle after another... until the third game, where it becomes more of a normal RPG and adds features like walking around and talking to people, so battles are no longer the entire game.
• Artistic License – Economics: In EBF4 onwards, one of Lance's idle animations is him reading a newspaper. Quoth one of the randomly-picked headlines that may appear:
  ENTIRE WORLD IN DEBT
  BANKS SAY "oops" / BANKS GET RICH
• Artificial Insolence:
  • The Berserk buff causes the target to attack without being ordered, also preventing the use of spells or abilities, and can be inflicted by allies or enemies.
  • The Hungry status (given by seeing a big tasty animal explode into meat) causes the character to skip their turn by eating a random healing item. Fortunately, the item doesn't come from the player's inventory.
• Art Shift: The cutscenes in the fourth game onwards are rendered in a construction-paper like artstyle.
• Author Appeal:
  • Roszak has stated that he made the series so he can see a game with everything he liked. Suffice to say, he likes a lot of things.
  • He loves cats. Especially armless and legless cats, like the series' mascot NoLegs.
• Author Avatar:
  • Matt, named after Matt Roszak. Roszak's Newgrounds account is even called matt_likes_swords.
  • Phyrnna, the series' music composer, has her mascot (also called Phyrnna) appear in Bullet Heaven 2. She's one of the playable characters available in the Steam version or via the expansion pack.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Matt's Soul Eater sword, which greatly boosts his physical attack at the cost of large cuts to everything else. It's just not worth it on most difficulties, at least not without extensive upgrading (in the third and fourth games).
  • The Catastrophe summon in the first game, which most people recommend using once in the entire game, to deal the last blow to the final boss, because it nearly kills Natalie when used. Ion in the second game does damage to both party members, though the damage isn't quite as bad. The two self-damaging limit breaks in 3 are pretty tame by comparison, especially since you're already spending your whole limit bar and want to get as much bang out of that turn as possible.
  • The Annihilate Limit Break supposedly has a "high chance" of inflicting Death to every enemy onscreen. Naturally, all bosses are immune, most stronger enemies are also immune, and against standard mooks, it's just a waste.
  • The Black Hole Limit Break is about as dangerous to your party as it is to the enemies. The Nuke too, especially in EBF5, where it swaps the current weather for Radiation, which has a chance to lower the maximum HP of any player character on the battlefield.
  • Bombs in the Bullet Heaven series are powerful, but using one will lower your score, which is important for several achievements. It's especially harmful in the sequel, where getting a perfect wave requires not using bombs; since perfect waves give out hearts and diamonds, abusing bombs will make it harder to beat later waves.
  • EBF5 has a weapon for NoLegs, Masamune. Said weapon multiplies NoLegs' attack and magic by 3 as well as adding 30% to evasion and accuracy. The catch? It reduces his HP by 70%. Considering his HP is already pretty low to begin with, it really turns him into a Glass Cannon unless you boost his evasion further.
• Badass Adorable:
  • NoLegs the cat goes One-Man Army on whole zerg rushes of enemies during the bonus stages of EBF2, and is top tier in Bullet Heaven. He is also a usable summon in EBF4 that strikes all enemies and is fantastically useful in the early game, though tougher enemies later on make him somewhat obsolete. Though there's the Kitten Fort summon, where he returns leading a wagon-fortress, and is much more useful, by way of giving you a buff that staves off One-Hit Kill effects, on top of running the enemy over. Even better, NoLegs can auto-summon himself in between turns, and does this regularly, without any equipment restrictions or requirements, making him a constant source of damage. He becomes a full-blown party member in EBF5.
  • Meow Meow, a recurring character who wields a sword bigger than any other in the game, and does massive amounts of damage. He slightly resembles Cloud Strife of Final Fantasy VII, but that's just his cape and sword. His sword can also break in his attack, doing more damage but also hurting you.
• Badass Longcoat: The Swordslinger/Gunslinger enemies are robot heads, a nice hat, and a duster containing a ridiculous amount of swords/guns.
• Badass Normal:
  • For a given definition of "normal", Lance. Natalie is a Magical Girl and Matt is a Magic Knight, while Lance does not appear to know magic per se at all. Despite this, he is no weaker than the rest of the party, relying primarily on very powerful guns, but also tanks, nukes, ion cannons...
  • Anna is even better at this, being just as good at killing stuff as her companions, except she mostly only uses bows.
• Bag of Sharing: Items are put in a single section of the inventory, and anyone can access it. When equipment is introduced from the third game onwards, there's only a single copy of each piece, which keeps the system simple.
• Bag of Spilling: Each entry resets the party's gear, for different reasons each time.
  • Justified in the third game, where doing something stupid makes the heroes lose all their equipment and get depowered.
  • Used again in the fourth game, but this time no justification is given. Matt is even shown carrying a huge sack of loot when he's introduced, yet in the following scene, he has nothing but his clothes and the sword on his back. (Maybe Anna confiscated it or something, who knows.)
  • Justified in the fifth game, since the series is soft-reset.
• Barbarian Hero: Matt has many elements of one, naturally Played for Laughs. He tends to focus more on brute force than anything, carries an assortment of huge swords and maces, is not very smart, tends to focus more on loot and battle than actually saving people (having no qualms breaking into houses to steal valuables), and he will eat anything.
• Beehive Barrier: The Barrier spell screens in front of the party with hexagonal cells.
• BFG: Lance likes them. Some enemies also use them. The Gunslingers in particular have a massive cannon that attempts to instantly kill a party member. This is also lampshaded in-game: when the attack is first used, the characters mention that if it hits, your chances of survival are low, but with a gun that huge, their accuracy can't be good...
• BFS:
  • Some of Lance's weapons are partly this as gunblades.
  • A lot of Matt's swords. Meow Meow the kitty wields a huge meat cleaver to chop your enemies into pieces.
  • Some enemies too. Akron's lower body is able to belch a massive Laser Blade for massive damage to the whole party. His Evil Worm can also regurgitate a huge sword to hit a party member. Swordslinger robots possess enormous swords as well.
  • Parodied by a line from Matt in EBF5. He explains his Ragnarok Limit Break is a bunch of "swords" falling from the sky because they're too big for him to hope to attack with conventionally.
• Blob Monster: Slimes are an enemy fought in every game.
• Block Puzzle: Matt hates these. Naturally, the fourth and fifth games have quite a few, with Matt getting increasingly enraged at each one you come across.
• Bloody Murder: The Sandworm enemy, when at low health, pukes toxic blood every turn until killed.
• Blue Means Cold: Ice monsters, weapons, and skills always have something blue related to them.
• Booze-Based Buff: Ever since EBF3, where food can be consumed in battle for various effects, beer increases a player's physical attack stat.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • The Protect and Barrier abilities. You will be casting these constantly in tougher battles, because many strong enemies and virtually all bosses can kill party members in one turn on Epic if you don't.
  • In EBF5, the Putrid Worm summon has a pitiful attack and only affects a single target. However, that effect is to reduce the target's evasion to the minimum, which greatly boosts the chance of capturing an enemy, including bosses.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Many instances in the third and fourth games.
  • In the first secret area of the third game, Lance speculates that the author was too lazy to add a background.
  • In the second game, when Natz does her Limit Break and thus gets a jiggly close-up, she then has a chance to comment "That's enough Fanservice for now."
  • Upon encountering jellyfish enemies for the first time:
  Natz: "Why are the jellyfish flying? Would it be harder just to draw some water underneath?"
  • In the fourth game, while Natalie objects to killing a woolly mammoth in Winterfall, she's okay with it in Battle Mountain, since that's a bonus area and it doesn't matter what the party does there.
  • All over the place in the fifth game, with Matt the primary offender. It's actually played for Nightmare Fuel at certain points; in particular, the party beg you not to make them fight the boss of the final glitch area, and the Final Boss is aware of your existence and talks to you, and when he is defeated, he says that he will find a way to materialize in the real world.
• Breather Level: Variant with waves. In certain mandatory multi-wave encounters containing mini-bosses, some waves will consist of a small number of weak enemies, placed specifically to give the player an opportunity to revive and heal. The Final Boss of 4 has three out of seven waves like this, and you're going to need them.
• Breath Weapon: Many enemies. Akron has no arms to use for his casting poses, therefore alternative ways to cast his spells are necessary. His first form has an electric breath and a dark breath, his second form has a humongous mouth and as such has an energy sword "breath", a dark beam breath, a huge death ball breath... His Evil Worm has a bubble breath, a dark breath, and a poison breath. Same goes for the Sandworm. The Hydra / Dragon heads also like their breath weapons...
• Breast Expansion: The Cow Costume female armor in 4 causes Natalie's breasts to become larger.
  • In 5, it causes it for both Anna and Natalie, which is followed by appropriate responses from both.
• Brutal Bonus Level:
  • Battle Mountain in the Steam version of the fourth game, featuring beefed-up versions of the main bosses, new bosses more powerful than those in the main game, and regular enemy encounters with at least 6 waves of enemies each, with each wave getting progressively harder. Not to mention all enemy encounters there scale to your level.
  • EBF5 has five bonus dungeons with beefed-up versions of regular bosses, one special boss, and the level scaling as well.
• Bullet Hell:
  • The aptly named Bullet Heaven spinoff, where even the bullets shoot bullets. Bullet Heaven 2 naturally ups the ante.
  • Lance also has a fire-elemental attack from EBF3 onward named Bullet Hell, and the animation really fits. The first time you use it, he mentions he'd like to see the enemy survive it with no bombs or continues.
• The Cameo: Lots and lots, including several bosses in the first game, many of the summons, and a lot of the NPCs in the third game. Cameos are generally from anime, particularly Pokémon.
  • Meow Meow is the mascot of Singaporean web animator NCHProductions.
  • A more traditional example in EBF5: Chibi Knight appears as a reoccurring miniboss throughout the game. You can also unlock Sushi Cat as a skill for NoLegs.
• Canon Discontinuity: The second game makes no mention of the first game's final boss outside of his suicide explosion, and the heroes' deaths at the hands of the explosion was erased entirely. His grave appears in the fourth, though.
• Captain Obvious:
  • In the third game.
    Protip-Hit the enemies 'til they die!
  • In the fourth game's Battle Mountain, Matt will comment on unhealthiness of drinking the purple water. Natalie's unspoken reaction gives off this vibe.
  • In Bullet Heaven 2, the description for the "Imperishable" badge:
    Beat any boss without getting hit at all. The best way to do this is to not get hit.
• Call-Back:
  • The Defender, the second boss in Epic Battle Fantasy 1, is a recurring miniboss in Epic Battle Fantasy 4. Elemental variants of it also turn up as minibosses in EBF5.
  • In the fourth game, Sarah reappears in Greenwood Village, north of Anna's house, and references her appearance in the third game, where her boyfriend was too low level to hit archery targets:
    I finally dumped my loser boyfriend btw! After training for two years, he still couldn't defeat a slime!
  • In the fourth game, there's a girl in Greenwood Village with a slime on her head who enthusiastically tells Anna how good slimes feel when they move around on her. In the fifth game, Anna tells Matt about a girl from Greenwood Village with a weird slime fetish.
  • In the fifth game, when you see a Cosmic Monolith in Lance's fortress, the nearby boombox plays the music from the hidden boss battle with it in the fourth game.
• Censor Box:
  • Used during the beholder's "secret move". If the player characters are to be believed, it's exactly what you'd expect.
  Natz: Eww. I hope I don't get pregnant from this.
  • Also on naked NPCs.
• Changing Clothes Is a Free Action: Averted - Matt can instantaneously switch swords, but doing so eats up a turn. The third game onwards follows suit for all characters, though multiple pieces of equipment can be changed at once.
• Chew Toy: NoLegs was originally a doodle by Roszak that he would torture over and over again. He even made an entire game about it, The Kitten Game. It can be played here.
• Climax Boss:
  • Both the Valkyrie Tank (particularly on Epic mode), and Akron. On any difficulty. If only for the energetic music and/or his speeches, constantly ascending in awesomeness. The fourth game gives us Godcat.
  • Up to eleven in EBF5. The final boss of that game, the Devourer, serves as the final boss of not just the game, but of the entire series.
• Commonplace Rare: The rarest type of healing item, which fully restores your party? Pizza. Other kinds of healing and stat foods are equally expensive.
• Compilation Re-release: The "Epic Battle Fantasy Collection", released on Steam in 2022, bundles together all of the games and spin-offs not already remastered for the platform: the first two Epic Battle Fantasy games, the first Bullet Heaven, Adventure Story, Brawl Royale, The Kitten Game, Mecha Dress Up, and Cat Cafe.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: The enemy versions of some skills, especially The Dark Players' LimitBreaks.
  • Dark Matt's Annihilate does a massive amount of damage, when the exact same Limit Break does next to no damage when used by Matt.
    • Possibly justified due to Matt's Annihilate having a higher chance to instantly kill compared to Dark Matt's.
  • Dark Natalie's Black Hole does not do damage to her, while when Natalie uses it, the party takes a very small amount of damage with a chance of instantly dying. Note that Dark Natalie, like all bosses, is completely immune to instant death. Fortunately, Dark Natalie not taking damage from it means it doesn't heal her at all, since she absorbs darkness.
  • Dark Lance's Nuke does not burn him, while Lance's Nuke burns the whole party.
  • Dark Lance's Unload and Dark Matt's Legend don't apply ATK down or Tired on them respectively, allowing them to spam these moves without consequence.
  • The enemy version of Supernova used by Dark Natalie and the Destroyer don't damage or burn their side, unlike your party's version.
• Continuity Nod:
  • In the first game, one of the bosses has a Charged Attack, which, when charging, triggers a warning saying "Brace for beam cannon". The final boss does this as well, his saying: "Brace for spirit bomb". The main concept is "Brace for X." The Cosmic Monolith's strongest attack involves it using a very low-damage ray to tear a rift in the ground, which then explodes. This prompts Lance to say "Oh, Crap!, brace for... that."
  • Zombie Goku carries a scar from his previous battle with Matt in Brawl Royale (although the scar is much smaller than you would expect for a guy who got perfectly bisected).
  • The final outfit that can be found for Lance is his German officer uniform from his appearance in EBF2, minus the swastikas.
  • Numerous references are made to earlier games in Bullet Heaven 2, ranging from clear ones like Akron (which turn out to be relevant at the very end of the game) to more obscure ones like EBF3's beach scene.
  • In 5, Matt once again calls Lance's tank a "car," as he did before the final battle of 2.
• Cooldown Manipulation: in 5, some enemy attacks increase the cooldown of some abilities, preventing you from using them for the next turn. This is perhaps an alternate version of the syphon status effect.
• Cool Sword: Loads of them appear in the series that define this. Naturally, it's Matt's preferred weapon.
• Covert Pervert: Lance. Well, he's trying to, anyway.
  Matt: ...And I think Natalie would hate you less if you stopped staring at her non-stop.
  Lance: That's not a fair criticism! I'm very subtle about it. I've got hidden cameras on my clothes, so that I don't even have to look in her direction.
  Matt: That's what I mean…
• Cross-Popping Veins: What the icon for the Berserk status effect looks like.
• Curse Cut Short: Lance seems to like these.
• Cute 'em Up: The Bullet Heaven spinoff is definitely this in the first few worlds, containing cats, bushes, and other cute EBF foes. However, this is averted in the later stages, where you find machines, scary creatures, and even gods to shoot.
• Cute Kitten: Everywhere!
  • NoLegs.
  • The (also legless) cats you fight.
  • Meow Meow is the only cat with legs (but apparently only in battle).
  • They even find their way onto all four of the Bullet Heaven bosses, as well as a few in the sequel.
    • Godcat (the 4th of the Bullet Heaven bosses) came back for EBF4. And is once again the Final Boss, being revealed to have literally created the world.
• Cute Little Fangs: Natalie has these when she uses her Kyun Limit Break. This no longer applies in 5, where it is renamed 7th Heaven.
• Cycle of Hurting: A natural consequence of a party member dying, since unless they have Auto-Revive, they lose all their buffs. This often results in turns spent reviving them and reactivating those buffs. Against bosses, this gives them plenty of time to kill another party member and start the whole process all over again. Two Superboss fights in 5 emphasize learning how to deal with this, since Dark Priestess Natalia disables all healing spells, ensuring a lot of deaths, and God gives a large stacking buff to all living party members every round, which becomes necessary to survive later-phase attacks.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: The characters lampshade this frequently in the third game, often showing no concern when they or their teammates die. However, players who are down when a battle ends do not gain experience.
  Natalie: Meatshield down!
• Defeat Equals Explosion:
  • The first 3 games' final bosses explode when killed (well, only the top half of the third one explodes, the rest seems to fade away, see for yourself). Justified in the second game's final boss, as it is the tank (no, not the pilot). Averted with Godcat, the fourth game's final boss, who simply flies away. Her Creator and Destroyer aspects that you do destroy still explode, however.
  • It is also not uncommon for mechanical enemies to explode on defeat, either.
• Degraded Boss:
  • The first boss of EBF1 is NoLegs riding a Giant Slime; Giant Slimes would later appear in EBF3 beyond as stronger counterparts to existing slimes. Similarly, the first mini-boss of EBF2, the Kitten Fort, got degraded to a tough enemy with several variants in later games.
  • The Beholder, Zombie Hydra, and Sandworm are back in the third game as enemies. Fortunately, they have far less hit points, the Hydra can no longer revive each head, and the Sandworm isn't assisted by its tail. They all get re-upgraded to serve as optional bosses in the fourth game, though the Zombie Hydra got downgraded once again (complete with variants) as a Wyrm in the fifth game.
  • In a rare case of this happening to parts of a boss, there's the three Turrets in EBF4. Each is based on a secondary weapon of the Valkyrie Tank from EBF2.
  • The Defender from the first game returns as a mini-boss in EBF4 and EBF5 (gaining variants in the latter), and it's still pretty darned powerful. The Pyrohydra and Giant Squid bosses from EBF3 also get downgraded into the Dragon and Squid species, respectively.
  • After being a boss in two games, the Mammoth becomes a standard enemy in EBF5, alongside new variants.
  • The Cosmic Monolith goes from being a Boss in Mook Clothing in 3 and an Optional Boss in 4 to a relatively ordinary late-game enemy in 5.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Our heroes have done this all the time.
  • In the third, they destroy an ancient Eldritch Abomination.
  • Up to eleven in the fourth, wherein they beat up the Creator and Destroyer aspects of Godcat. At once. Justified because she is not using her full strength, is still implied by the ending cutscene to be in better shape than our heroes rather than outright beaten, and ends up leaving once they prove their worth to her.
  • Kicked into Serial Escalation in the fifth, where they destroy an eldritch horror from beyond the veil that tampers with reality itself. Note that both halves of Godcat are reduced to Limit Breaks explicitly because of it.
• Dual Boss: The games where this happens:
  • EBF1: Regice and Regirock (renamed in 2021 to Metaice and Metarock), though they are first fought individually and later together. The former has low defense and high magic defense, the latter is the opposite.
  • EBF2: The Zombie Hydra. Both heads have a One-Hit Kill attack (most annoying and lethally accurate on Epic), and can revive each other if not both defeated on the same turn.
  • EBF4:
    • Godcat plays it straight first, with Creator Godcat and Destroyer Godcat, then both of their One-Winged Angel forms separate. After beating both individually, they attack you together, but they aren't weakened at all and still manage to remain a Flunky Boss on top of that!
    • Near the end of the bonus content, you fight "Dark" versions of each party member. After fighting each of them individually, there's a rematch where you fight both of the physically-oriented ones at once and both of the magic-oriented ones at once. They can also summon their normal helpers when their partners go down.
  • EBF5: Once in the main story, and once in the bonus content:
    • The main story has Lance and Neon Valkyrie.
    • The bonus content has Sol and Skadi, with the twist that which one you choose to start the fight with affects the weather you have to deal with.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: In multiple ways:
  • Instead of being a traditional RPG adventure, the first two games were "arena"-style, where you fight continuous waves of enemies and bosses. There's no leveling (characters start with max stats), no equipment other than Matt's swords, and a lot fewer spells (due to the different formula, there was no need for multi-tiered spells). The first game was even simpler, lacking Limit Breaks, an Enemy Scan, and a save feature.
  • While the series is known for being Reference Overdosed, EBF1 took it to another level by directly using characters and music from other works. Starting from the sequel, which was significantly more professional, these characters either disappeared entirely or had their roles replaced (for example, NoLegs replaced Mog as the random healing item spell). Possibly as a result of this, the first game doesn't have much connection to the rest plot-wise, with the only relevant event from it being Zombie Goku's death explosion, which kicks off EBF2's plot (Zombie Goku himself goes unmentioned).
  • Summon Magic was in a weird situation for the earlier games. In the first two games, it was basically another form of regular magic for Natz. In the third, it's scrapped entirely and the summons are turned into other types of skills. EBF4 reintroduced the system so that everyone could use it, as well as changing its cost to Summon Points.
  • Going further back, Natalie's first appearance had her using shuriken as a weapon instead of magic, and Matt's appearance in Brawl Royale had him use a gun at one point, something he never does afterwards.
• Easier Than Easy: Zero difficulty mode, first added in v2 update of fourth game and then retroactively added to the Steam release of first two games.
• Easy Levels, Hard Bosses: Especially in the fourth and fifth, where there are achievements for beating bosses in Epic but no repercussions for fighting all other battles on Easy, which makes the (very much necessary) grinding much easier.
• Elemental Powers: Ten in the main series. Nine of them are standard — Fire, Thunder, Ice, Earth, Poison (renamed "bio" in the fifth game), Dark, Holy, Water, and Wind. The tenth is Bomb, which specifically refers to explosive force, and works best on enemies made of solid stone or metal.
• Eldritch Abomination: Entities such as Akron and the Devourer qualify, but there's also the Cosmic Monolith; a gigantic, pitch black rectangle from space that fires lasers capable of ripping holes in space-time and whose signature attack is named Doomsday. Worse yet, upon death, the inside of the monolith resembles Dark Matter. In the fourth game, summoning it even causes thousands of the things to appear all over the globe in a way that implies an invasion of the things. Good thing one of them's on your side. In 5, as if all its nasty power isn't bad enough, it has a single physical attack if Syphoned, and it hurts like hell!
• Elemental Weapon: Most weapons are elemental-based and can sometimes deal Status Infliction Attacks of freezing, burns, or paralysis.
• Embarrassing Superpower: Natalie considers her "Kyun!" Limit Break embarrassing but useful (as it clears away all status problems, buffs the party, and debuffs the enemy).
• Empty Levels: Due to the way stat growth formulas work, higher levels can actually hurt the player if they're in a Level Scaling area, since enemies benefit more from level gains than player characters.
• Endless Game: The aptly-named Endless Battle in EBF4. The waves are randomly generated, every 5th wave is tougher, then the enemies level up. By wave 30 or so, all enemies are 6 levels higher than you, no matter your team's level! Also, Hard difficulty is forced for this mode!
  • This carries over to the EBF5 combat demo, only you have an options menu for levels, equipment, difficulty, etc.
    • In fact, this goes as far back as the battle demo for EBF3, only way simplified, with 3 repeating waves of slimes that level up with each repeat.
  • Bullet Heaven has a single survival level available from the beginning, which gives you maxed health and bombs, and collecting money gradually powers you up. Enemies are somewhat random, but later waves have tougher foes, until you come across foes from the final zone.
  • Bullet Heaven 2 has 11 survival levels, also with randomly generated waves. Here, enemies get slightly faster and tankier each round, and their bullets are similarly increased in speed. While 5% or so each round may not seem like much, it still adds up quickly, and if you want 3 stars in these levels, you need to collect 15 diamonds! Oh, you also have one each of health and bombs, and cheats (and handicaps) are disabled like Bullet Heaven above!
• Enemy Scan: In the second and fourth games, you can summon a Scanbot, and in the third, Lance has a Scan skill. Each game has medals for scanning enough enemies and stores enemy info in a bestiary you can refer back to. In the fifth game everyone has the Scan ability.
• Everything Fades: All dead enemies do, at least. The last Wooly Mammoth, on account of how the party don't actually kill it after defeating it, doesn't.
• Evolving Attack: In EBF3 and 4, leveling up an attack merely boosted its strength or status effect, but in 5, some attacks change completely. For example, Natalie starts out with 'Ice' as a single ice attack, but on level 3, it becomes Iceshard and at level 5, Icestorm (which were separate skills in previous games).
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Epic Battle Fantasy. Some of the moves, as well: Heal, Revive, Screamer, etc.
• Exploited Immunity: Some enemy spells do damage to everyone on both sides of the field. In all cases, the caster absorbs the spell's element, often alongside its allies. These include:
  • A rain of hot ash that hits 3 times for fire damage in EBF3 and has a chance of inflicting Burn status in 4 and 5.
  • A hail spell that hits 3 times for ice damage. This skill is learnable in EBF4 as "Hailstorm".
  • Cloudburst hits everything once for water damage in 3, gives everyone "Wet" status in 4 and 5, and is learnable in 4.
  • In EBF3, Doomsday hits the entire field for massive dark damage, and can be used by Cosmic Monoliths. This means that not only can this really hurt, but these monoliths absorb darkness, making high dark resistance, Syphon, and/or fast damage a must, since Cosmic Monoliths cast this every 3 turns like the other two do with their beam attacks. Doomsday no longer hits the enemy side in 4 onward (meaning the Cosmic Monolith can't heal itself this way), but it is still pretty nasty, to say the least.
  • A snow-themed ice spell replaces Hailstorm for the enemies in 4, doing ice damage to everyone with a chance of inflicting Freeze.
  • One interesting outcome of any of these spells being cast is when other enemies aren't immune or even resistant to such elements, resulting in them taking damage from their own allies. This is particularly noticeable in a certain "Monolith Trio" battle in 3, in which the Cosmic's Doomsday will do severe damage to its two allies. Even more so in 4 on Hard or Epic on a New Game Plus, in which certain snow/ice enemies can cast the snow-themed ice spell mentioned above, and One-Hit Kill non-resistant allies, even if you hardly feel it!
• Extreme Omnisexual: The Beholder. From the protagonists to every enemy in the second game: cats, bees, a mecha, a mecha's sword and shield, jellyfish, turtles, a giant worm (labeled giant mutant penis, of all things!), said worm's tail, ghosts, the skeleton of two hydra heads, "fly bots", the top of a tank, the tank's cannons, the tank's electrical equipment, a nuke, the tank itself, and the tank's pilot. The fourth and fifth games allows it to molest the god of the planet and the eldritch horror controlling it (although doing it to the latter is a bad idea since the summon is poison-based and said eldritch horror will benefit from it), among other things. It's in all five games, by the way.
• Extreme Omnivore: A Running Gag is Matt eating or wanting to eat monsters, no matter how impossible it seems.
  • Guess what Matt and Natalie do to the Giant Sand Worm after defeating it in the second game. You know, the one with poisonous blood.
  • Taken up to eleven in the third game. First, after defeating Jack, you get to play the first minigame, which plays this trope on NoLegs, but this is optional. In the following cutscene, the whole group throws up while eating slimes (except for Natalie; she threw up before she could eat one). Then it is implied that they ate the Giant Squid boss. Finally, Matt and Lance try to eat the last Woolly Mammoth after defeating it. Only Natz's pity for the creature saves it from becoming dinner. This whole routine is repeated in EBF4, with Anna in place of Natalie, and if you find the mammoth in the Bonus Dungeon, even she'll consent to eating it on the grounds that it won't be canon.
  • After the party defeats a turtle enemy:
  Matt: Let's make a turtle soup out of this guy!
  • In the volcano area, Matt comments that it's a shame they didn't get to kill whatever left those giant skeletons around, because the lava would've made it easy to cook. A few screens later, they fight a dragon, though they sadly aren't shown eating it.
  • In the fourth game, after Anna takes Matt hostage because she suspects he stole the crystal, she joins him in battle. The first few comments he makes are about cooking the wildlife they fought.
  • Apparently, even Matt draws the line at eating the Evil Worm.
  • In the fifth game, Matt will occasionally state after winning the battle that they're not going hungry today. Even if their opponents were a group of Cosmic Monoliths, stated to be composed of anti-matter.

Tropes F-J

• Factor Breakdown: Starting from the third game, the stats screen shows the stats that come from base*equips (starting from the fourth game, it's turned into base*equips*buffs during battle).
• Fake Difficulty:
  • The first two games become really hard if one party member dies, since you only have one left. Even worse, some enemies stun or freeze you… with a high chance of doing so. Meaning, you could have to sit out a turn with nobody else to help you getting attacked until you can fight again. And if there are multiple stun/freeze enemies, Godcat help you.
• Fantastic Firearms: Shoulder-mounted magical BFGs are Lance's weapon after his playable debut in Epic Battle Fantasy 3. By default, his guns are capable of firing Thunder, Fire, and Dark-elemental projectiles.
• Feed It with Fire: If resistance to an element is above 100%, attacks of that element heal instead of doing damage, so poisoning some foes will merely cause them to regenerate health (some foes such as slimes start with this buff on epic difficulty). Also, some fire-absorbing foes in 4 start with Burn status, to the same effect.
  • Starting from EBF4, if you have the right equipment, you can experience the same thing. There's even an achievement medal for doing it!
• Flying Seafood Special: The jellyfish of the third game are explicitly said to be flying. The fourth game adds robots that look like flying fish in the factory area.
• For Want Of A Nail:
  • Matt and Natz's seemingly aimless Epic Battle Fantasy quest from EBF1 sparks off events leading to them fighting and earning the respect of a god in EBF4.
  • In EBF5, a power outage in Matt's house leads to him fighting a fascist, tree, god, and later, the final boss of the entire series.
• Frictionless Ice: Ice blocks in EBF4 and 5 never stop sliding until they hit an object. 5 has puzzles involving floors of ice that do this as well. There is a pair of spiked boots late into Frozen Valley that allows the party to walk normally on ice.
• Friend to All Living Things:
  • Anna. She is seen caring for a baby Bush monster in her idle animations. She will not hesitate to defend herself against the more aggressive living things, though.
  • While Natz is shown to defend some forms of wildlife (if they're cute enough) like the mammoth, one of her responses against the Rafflesia boss is "Screw the rainforest!".
• Game-Breaking Bug: As of December 2015, Chrome updates have introduced a number of bugs to the older Flash EBF games that can make them almost unplayable.
• Game Over: The series plays around with this. Be prepared to see some form of it on Epic (Heavenly in ''Bullet Heaven 2'') a lot in any of the games.
• Gender-Restricted Gear: The third game onward has hats and armor that only the male characters (Matt and Lance of course, but later NoLegs as well) can wear, and likewise with Natalie and (fourth game onwards) Anna.
• Giving Up the Ghost: Happens whenever a party member dies. Strangely, Anna is an exception.
• Glass Cannon: Most of the games give several of the characters one weapon which has the highest offensive stats in the game, but also an incredible defensive penalty like -70% HP or -50% def+mdef.
• Gratuitous Greek: In Matt's Ragnarok limit break, the biggest sword has some Greek letters on it. However it is just the word "heaven" displayed in the Symbol font which has Greek letters for the code points of the Latin letters.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: If this is anything to go by.
• The Grim Reaper: The most recurring One-Hit Kill attack in the series summons one to attack the target, with its lethality being counterbalanced by its relatively low accuracy... except on Epic. Until EBF4, it was exclusive to enemies, and even when it did become available to players, it's only as a rare summon from one specific weapon.
• Guide Dang It!: Getting the medal for finding all treasures in each area in EBF3 can be very tedious, as some are ridiculously well hidden. This is averted from EBF4 onwards, where the achievement is reduced to finding a vast majority of the chests, but not every last one.
• Hailfire Peaks: Enemies in levels in the third game onward tend to be themed around a single type of elemental damage, weak to it early on, but enemies further in are resistant to it. The final level of EBF4 has holy and evil enemies fighting on the same side!
• Hammerspace: Every character can just sort of raise themselves up in the air and flash, and suddenly they've got a different hat, shirt, and weapon on them. Lance seems to have a tank and helicopter slightly offscreen at all times.
• Hard Mode Perks: Higher difficulties fill all players' Limit Break bars faster, because of the increased damage. Be grateful for this! Even with the limit-bar damage multipliers decreasing with difficulty, the net result is still greater.
• Harder Than Hard: Epic, and in ''BH2'', Heavenly mode. Oh so very much.
• Healing Boss: Bosses who heal are a semi-frequent appearance in the series:
  • The Zombie Hydra, a reocurring boss first introduced in the second game, will revive its heads when they're killed (with full HP, to boot). Killing all of its heads in a single turn is mandatory to prevent this.
  • Epic Battle Fantasy 1: The first boss, King Slime, has a dedicated self-heal ability.
  • Epic Battle Fantasy 2: The second boss, named the Guardian, has the ability to repair its arms if either are broken, restoring them to full HP. Preventing this via inflicting Stun or Seal is vital, as it will pummel you otherwise.
  • Epic Battle Fantasy 3: While none of the bosses have direct self-healing techniques (except for Akron when using the Holy element), Pyrohydra gets a mention because all three of its heads absorb Fire, and the Blaze head has a move that hits everyone for Fire damage; the results should be obvious. On higher difficulties, the Abyss head starts with some poison stacks, and it absorbs Poison damage, effectively giving it a Healing Factor. Some of the bosses (particularly Protector and Akron) have minions who can heal them as well.
  • Epic Battle Fantasy 4: Below 65% HP, Rafflesia gains access to Photosynthesis, which heals it and removes all debuffs and negative status effects on both itself and its allies. On Hard or Epic difficulty, its allies also gain two stacks of Regen.
  • Epic Battle Fantasy 5: Neon Valhalla, a stronger version of Neon Valkyrie, will heal 2% of its maximum health every turn (increased to 3.5% on Hard or Epic difficulty). Combined with its sky-high health pool and immunity to Poison, Burn, Virus and Scorch, this makes it capable of tanking frankly absurd amounts of damage.
• Healing Spring: The places where Slime Bunnies are in EBF4 onwards, since they live in water, and are used to automatically restore everyone's HP and MP.
• Health/Damage Asymmetry: As both player and enemy levels increase, the latter group tends to grow faster in HP, but not as fast in overall damage. To balance things out, the players tend to have way higher defensive stats than the enemies could even hope for by the endgame.
• Heel–Face Turn: This apparently happens each game.
  • First, NoLegs joins your party in the second game, when in the first game he rides the first mini boss, and then the Beholder joins too (and then it's an enemy in ''3'' and ''4'' again).
  • Then, of course, Lance does this after you beat him in the second game.
  • The woolly mammoth from 3 is a summon (and sometimes randomly triggered effect), dropping from the sky to flatten your enemies. Natalie is quite happy to see it's alive and well.
  • In 4, the Mammoth and Beholder are enemies once again, but join you post-defeat. Godcat herself does a version of this after destroying both of her vehicles, though it's more of a Heel Realization.
  • In 5, both forms of Godcat return as NoLegs' Limit Breaks, and Godcat herself is referred to as NoLegs' friend. Lance, who became a villain again due to 5's status as a reboot, does this similarly to how he did in 3. You can even invoke this trope by capturing certain bosses, such as Snowflake!
• He Knows About Timed Hits:
  • Typically from NPCs in town.
  • Matt, Natalie, and Lance all seem to be aware that they are in a game, often making note of the game's mechanics mid-battle.
• Hit Points: Appears in all the main series games.
  • General: They're shown as a fraction above the Life Meters of the players, and also used to note how much damage was dealt to enemies.
  • Starting from the second game: It's possible to get a precise measurement of how many hit points an enemy has, by scanning them with a Scanbot or something.
• Hopeless Boss Fight:
  • EBF4 has a couple of downplayed examples with the Creator and Destroyer forms of Godcat, who each ambush you at specific points in the story. Your attacks will almost always miss them, and their attacks are guaranteed One Hit Kills, but unlike most examples, they'll leave after a few turns and summon some weaker enemies that you can defeat.
  • EBF5 has a more traditional example when Lance ambushes you in the Valkyrie, wipes out the entire party before you can do anything, and kidnaps Natalie.
• Hot Drink Cure: From the third game onwards, coffee is used to revive characters.
• Hydro-Electro Combo: If a character is under the "wet" status effect, they will receive bonus damage from electric attacks.
• Hyperactive Metabolism: EBF3 starts replacing potions with various food items. This has the side effect of making pizza incredibly rare.
• Hyperspace Arsenal:
  • This is a given thanks to the equipment system, as shown in the Hammerspace entry.
  • The Valkyrie Tank boss can endlessly summon turrets from within itself, even though the total volume of the turrets should exceed the tank itself.
• Ice Breaker: The other way to get rid of the freezing effect besides healing is to get attacked while frozen, for bonus damage. Lampshaded by an NPC in the third game as you go into Glacier Valley that it's probably a bad idea to do that to allies, and it's better to heal them. Also lampshaded by Natz when she first uses Regen, remarking that it'll probably be a good way to get rid of freeze.
• Ice Crystals: A common representation for ice in the series:
  • The Ice element (naturally) is displayed this way, though it can have a rougher appearance instead of being entirely polished. However, in the Ice Cave environment, perfectly-cubical ice blocks do appear for some floor puzzles.
  • Natalie's recurring spell Iceshard portrays crystalline ice chips.
  • The "Solid Water" item has an appearance much closer to ice, with sharper edges in 4, but it's softened and made to look more like actual water in 5.
• Idiot Hero: Everyone, but Matt in particular. For example, this exchange from Bullet Heaven 2:

  Natalie: Hold on, there's a demonic portal opening up ahead. Maybe—
  Matt: Finally! An exit! I'll take it!

  • One scene in EBF3 showing off the group:
    Natz: Oh no, a puzzle, we're too stupid to figure this out.
    Lance: I concur. Do you concur?
    Matt: I concur.
• Immune to Fire: The fire resistance stat is a percentage that is the amount of reduction on fire element damage. It's possible for it to become high enough to entirely negate fire-based damage.
• Instant Awesome: Just Add Mecha!: Robots and machines of various types are common enemies across all four games.
• Instant Runes: They frequently pop up whenever a spell is cast. Matt, Natalie, and Lance also have unique ones representing them and cast them when defending.
• Interactive Start Up: From the third game on, you can "pop" low-level Mascot Mooks and make a new Palette Swap appear on a Loading Screen for a reward in each game's Achievement System after a certain number of mooks have been "popped". From the fourth game onward, the commercial Steam versions replace the loading progress bar with a language selection menu.
  • Epic Battle Fantasy 3: The mooks are slimes of various elements and environments, some more typical than others: snow, sand, sludge, and lava, but also the green plant-type veggie slimes — which have vegetables, flowers, and fruits growing out of them — and Furry Slimes, with tails and fox, cat, and bunny ears.
  • Epic Battle Fantasy 4: The mooks are the game's various idol enemies: wooden, obsidian, ice, clay, and gem.
  • Epic Battle Fantasy 5: The various Underground Monkey types of Slimes are the mooks, such as chocolate, ice cream, and mud flavors, as well as the slime mouse, which parodies various Pokémon (specifically Pikachu, Pichu, and Dedenne).
• Item Amplifier: Several armors in the third and fourth game can double the effects of HP and MP healing items, while others double the damage of thrown items.
• Just Friends: Natz and Matt. Natz is very surprised when Matt says they're "more than friends", only for her to be dejected when he says he means "we're a team." Matt views being part of a team as closer than friends, while Natz views the opposite, since NoLegs and Lance are also part of the team. Well, maybe until after the fifth game, at least.

Tropes K-O

• King Mook: Giant slimes and the Beholder to the slimes and eyeballs.
• Kill Sat: The Ion Cannon is a Limit Break that sets a satellite in space to shoot a thunderous beam at enemies.
  Lance: "Don't worry, it's solar powered. Minimal damage to the environment and radiation, but still lethal. I'm quite proud of it."
  • When the Praetorian uses the Ion Cannon as its charged attack in the fourth game, Lance complains that the boss in question hacked it. Then he hacks the Praetorian after the party defeats it.
• Kleptomaniac Hero Found Underwear: It is possible to find panties if you loot enough places. EBF4 and EBF5 both have quests that require you to give them to NPCs.
• Lampshade Hanging: Roszak really likes this trope.
  Matt: I'm starting to wonder if dragons have bodies, I mean all we've seen are their heads!
• Last Chance Hit Point: The Morale status in EBF4 onwards leaves the character at 1 hit point if they were hit by an otherwise-lethal attack when above half their maximum health. This even works against the Glitch's otherwise One-Hit Kill attack.
• Lazy Backup: Thankfully averted — if your frontline party is completely incapacitated and your backup is still alive, they'll jump to the front.
• Legacy Boss Battle: Bosses from older games sometimes reappear in newer ones, usually as mini- or optional bosses.
• Leitmotif: Prominent throughout the series. An example being Rage of the Abandoned (played during a difficult encounter) and Derelict Factory of Twisted Metal. Both are essentially the same thing, but the latter sounds more rearranged.
• Life Meter: In all of the main games, and Adventure Story, there is a bar in general that shows the players' HP.
• Lightmare Fuel: Matt's "Screamer" spell flashes a Jump Scare on the screen. However, the spook factor is severely reduced to the point of comedy since 1) the screamer only happens when you cast the spell, so you know when it's coming, and 2) instead of a Nightmare Face, you just get a picture of a dog with the colors inverted (or alternatively, a screenshot from the infamous "GIRUGAMESH!" Sakuracon commercial, or a photo of the game's developer, Matt Roszak).
• Lightning Bruiser:
  • GODCAT in her main light and dark forms. RIDICULOUS HP, attack power that can kill you several times over until you're close in level, and evasion so DAMN high that you have no chance in hell of reliably hitting her! In fact, the game crashes if you kill Godcat by hacking!
  • To a lesser extent, some bosses and minibosses have very high evasion without losing out in other stats, such as Praetorian MK2 and the Cosmic Monoliths.
• Limit Break: EBF2 gives Matt and Natalie one specific limit break each; both of them reappear later as "Cleaver" and "Kyun" respectively. In EBF3, each character has up to three to choose from. In EBF4, characters can have up to eight limit breaks!
• Limited Animation: The idols introduced in 4 really stand out in the way that they have only one cohesive sprite. Most characters from the game have a number of segments to them that move and stretch for their actions, but the Idols are completely unmoving. The Pixel enemies from the bonus areas of 5 act the same way.
• Living Gasbag: The Jelly enemies, large floating jellyfishes color-coded with elemental powers.
• Magikarp Power:
  • The weapons and armors themselves can be more or less this, depending on your playstyle, in every game since 3. An example is the Sky Feather in 4. When it starts out, it's rather difficult to use and isn't as powerful as other options, but upgraded, it can, if used right, allow Anna to spam spells and restore her magic constantly.
  • In each game, your skills and characters start out weak, but grow much more powerful with the ability to do so many more things. For example, NoLegs starts out with 3 weak sword attacks, but later on, he can blast his foes with a warp star!
• Mini-Mecha: They typically appear as bosses throughout the series.
• Modular Difficulty: Epic Battle Fantasy 4 and 5 have a "Cheats & Challenges" option that involves "Cheats" that make the game easier, like increasing SP gain and letting all characters be able to learn any skill, and "Challenges" that make the game harder in different ways than just affecting stats as the usual selectable difficulties do, like giving foes extra counter-attack moves and putting your turns on a timer, so you would have to select actions for all your active party members in 30 seconds before your turn ends by force.
• Monster Compendium: The Bestiary from the second game onwards.
• More Dakka: Lance's arsenal includes his Gunblade revolver, a bazooka, and a tank. With the right equipment, he can get to use all of them in a single turn.
• Mook Promotion: The Cosmic Monolith goes from a Boss in Mook Clothing to a legitimate boss in the fourth game's Battle Mountain. It goes back to being a standard enemy in the fifth game.
• Moth Menace: Despite their name, the Wasp line of enemies has only the first one looking like a wasp. The others look more and more like severely mutated butterflies as the game goes on.
• Mr. Fanservice: To different degrees, Matt and Lance.
• Ms. Fanservice: Natz. It gets taken to a whole new level in the second game's Game Over screen, where her dress is nearly ripped apart. You can even click her breasts to induce jiggling. Taken up to eleven in the third game with her Cat Girl and Cow Girl outfits. In each game, she invokes the trope in her healing "Limit Break", and lampshades it at least once per game. Anna from the fourth is clearly not impressed, or possibly jealous, but it's hard to tell by Natz' stature, and during the remarks where she openly says something, it's clear that Natz is annoyed by it.
• Multi-Melee Master: Matt, in all five games. Excluding a few pieces of concept art, it's never shown where he stashes all of his swords; in battle, he just glows and voila, the sword changes.
• Mythology Gag: Every "mecha" enemy in the series (the Mecha from EBF1, the Guardian from EBF2, and the Praetorian from EBF4) was designed with one of Roszak's earliest games/projects, "Mecha Dress Up".
• Nausea Fuel: An In-Universe version: when some enemies like Squid die, it grosses the players out so much they can't use food items for a while.
• Nerf:
  • The skill Guardian (renamed Guardian Shield in EBF5) has zigzagged this several times. In EBF3, it buffs the target ally's defense and magic defense by up to 60% and evasion by up to 30%, and heals them slightly. In 4, it loses the healing, but gains 70% (magic) defense buffs and a 35% evasion buff. In 5, it also loses the evasion buff, in exchange for raising the defense and magic defense buffs to at least 80 percent at maximum level!
  • EBF3's examples of Infinity +1 Element also had this in 4. Poison stacks drop by 1 each turn and scale less to enemy HP, while more enemies resist bomb attacks, although it's only a mild nerf; nevertheless, they can still be good elements to have on hand.
  • Natalie's "Kyun" Limit Break was hit hard with the nerf gun in EBF4. Specifically, in the second and third games, it heals all players, buffs their attack, magic attack, defense, and magic defense by up to 50% while debuffing the same stats of the enemies. In 4, it loses the ability to debuff! However, EBF5, as well as renaming it to "7th Heaven" and changing the animation, buffs it again by making it affect all living allies in backup, which doesn't happen in 4. And it makes Natalie lovable, thus unable to be targeted by single-target attacks.
  • Quite a few skills zigzag this trope, as on one hand, they are nerfed by the skill cooldown system in EBF5, as now you can't spam Healmore every turn, for example (at least without giving the user apple slices to reduce their cooldowns). On the other hand, some of these attacks have something to compensate for the cooldowns:
    • Judgement has a 2-turn cooldown and loses its ability to inflict Weaken, but finally regains its Life Drain ability from the first two games.
    • Legend also has a 2-turn cooldown but no longer makes Matt tired when used.
    • Unload has a whopping 5-turn cooldown but no longer debuffs Lance's attack.
    • Lance's fire skills each have a 1-turn cooldown, but they debuff the targets' defense. His dark skills now lower enemy magic defense. His plasma skills, however, are closer to an actual nerf, continuing to debuff enemy evasion but having the cooldown like his fire and dark skills.
    • Reflex has a 5-turn cooldown like Protect and Barrier, cures Shroud status (see Status Effects below) as well as buffing everyone's evade.
    • Pulsar has a 2-turn cooldown, but possesses the exact same power (skill-based factor for damage per target hit) as Dark Pulse.
  • Monoliths were made more vulnerable to Syphon (which completely shuts them down) in the fourth game. In addition, their strongest attacks now require a turn to charge, making them less able to vaporize your party out of the blue. The laser for the Cosmic Monolith's Doomsday attack also no longer deals damage or debuffs accuracy, and it no longer hits the Monolith's side (which would heal the Monolith, since it absorbs Dark).
  • The Updated Re Release of EBF3 applied several nerfs, mostly to enemies:
    • The Pyrohydra had its health reduced, and their Fire absorption and Abyss's poison absorption were lessened; this drastically cuts down on Blaze's healing output and Abyss's Healing Factor.
    • The Viking Monolith's Wave-Motion Gun attack has a much lower freeze chance outside of Epic difficulty.
    • The Cosmic Monolith's Doomsday had its damage reduced.
    • Poison now deals less damage to enemies.
    • The Soul Eater sword had its defense reductions increased.
• New Skill as Reward: In all games after the third, the ability to buy certain skills are unlocked after you earn them in quests.
• New World Tease: In 4 and 5, disconnected parts of other areas can be entered far before they can be explored properly. It is possible to step in to Lankyroot Jungle in 4 even before entering Ashwood Forest, the first proper area. In 5, there is a preview of No Man's Land before defeating Jotun, the Rainbow River can be seen constantly at the south end of No Man's Land itself, and while going through the Rainbow River, the volcanic territory of the Rapture is visible at the southeast section of it before crossing through Frozen Valley.
• Ninja: In EBF3 onwards, there's Ninja equipment for both guys and girls.
• Ninja Pirate Robot Zombie: The equipment system means your characters will swap around a fair bit from being dressed as knights, ninjas, pirates, vikings, etc. as you go through the game. Or just some simple combination of these things if you don't bother completely coordinating a single character's outfit or lack the corresponding hat/armor.
• No-Damage Run: Playing any level without getting hit is possible in the spinoff games.
• No Fourth Wall: The characters have no compulsions against Breaking the Fourth Wall, and the fifth game contains an in-game fanart gallery which the characters will comment on the pieces while viewing… and the characters will be explicitly barred from the gallery or various rooms within it from a lack of medals.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: The Beholder, which mostly existed throughout the series as a Naughty Tentacles joke. The fifth game has its derivative, the Devourer, be behind all the other games and even literally deletes the world.
• Non-Elemental: The Lucky Star and Star Shower spells do non-elemental damage, while some high-end weapons have no element (and no resistance) in exchange for doing high damage. These are necessary to defeat the Glitch in the fourth game.
• Normally, I Would Be Dead Now: With Morale status in EBF4 and 5, any character or foe can survive any single-hit attack that would otherwise One-Hit Kill them, with exactly 1 HP. This works not only with overkill levels of damage, but also instant death (which otherwise bypasses the Hit Points system)! The one condition is you have to be above 50% HP for it to work.
  • Also, careful emphasis on the "single-hit" part, because it does not work if a multi-hit attack reduces the target to said 1 HP before the final hit. Neither that or knocking the target below 50% HP with multiple smaller hits, then dealing a powerful blow (such as with (Dark) Matt's Legend).
• Numerical Hard: Averted in main games, enemies get better AI and skills in addition to stat increases on higher difficulties. Sometimes they also start with statuses that are beneficial to them, for example poison-absorbing foes start with poison.
• Obstructive Foreground: The third game uses this extensively to hide treasure chests. The fourth game just hides treasure within objects, but still uses this trope from time to time.
• Ominous Latin Chanting: Some of the songs:
  • Twins of Duality.
  • Nox Tenebris Daemoniacae.
• Ominous Pipe Organ: Each game has one, at least after the Early-Installment Weirdness of EBF1.
  • EBF2 has Organ Jaws, a classically sinister usage of Ominous Pipe Organ.
  • EBF3 has DiVINe MaDNEss, featuring a more frantic and chaotic take on the trope.
  • EBF4 has Fallen Blood, leading off with the organ before taking a turn for the heavier.
  • EBF5 has Blaze of Iris, combining the organ with a more synthetic instrumental arrangement to represent the terrors from the beyond.
• One-Hit Kill:
  • The first two games have a pattern where the second-to-last boss and the last boss have one. One of the zombie hydra's attacks, and one of the tank's cannons in the second game, and the spirit bomb and mega lazer in the first. Thankfully, all of these (except for the Zombie Hydra's instant-death spell) are Charged Attacks, and they aren't true One-Hit Kills — they just do such ridiculously high damage that they might as well be. As long as your HP is high enough, you can use the Defend Command to avoid utter annihilation.
  • One of the platforms that the Valkyrie tank can bring up to assist itself is a nuke-launching station. Its only attack is to advance a countdown. And the nuke will be launched at you when it ends. The only way to save yourself from that one is to demolish the nuke station before this can happen. And it's entirely possible for it to have two nukes being prepared for launch simultaneously. For more Final Boss cheapness, Goku from the first game still gets to take his turn after his Spirit Bomb lands. Thankfully (or not), he never spends that turn charging up another Spirit Bomb. Instead, he uses one of his other super-painful moves. Though he can^note and probably will when at low health launch another Spirit Bomb on the turn after that.
• One-Steve Limit: We have main character Lance and minor character Lancelot.
• Only One Name: None of the characters have a known surname.
• Our Banshees Are Louder: A skill Fright conjures up a ghost that shrieks directly in an enemy's face, doing Dark damage.
• Our Dragons Are Different: Dragons start appearing in the second game onwards, but are only rendered as heads and a long neck (which gets lampshaded in the fourth game). EBF5 changes the Zombie Hydra and variants to "Wyrms" to justify their appearance, but the standard dragons keep their species.
• Our Hydras Are Different: 3, 4, and 5 feature multiheaded dragons (but only their heads fit on the battle screen, and only in 3 does the dragon have a body on the overworld). They're particularly dangerous because, in addition to strong attacks, high HP and defenses, at least one head will have healing magic, and in 5 you actually need to kill all three heads within a turn of each other or they'll revive one another indefinitely.

Tropes P-T

• Palette Swap: In the first game, there are different colored versions of enemies:
  • Crabs: purple and red
  • What would be called "Eyeballs": Brown◊, Green◊, Purply-Red◊.
• Panty Thief: One of the tasks in the fourth and fifth games involves collecting panties for an NPC. There's even a medal called Panty Thief.
• Pictorial Speech-Bubble: One of Natalie's victory animations in EBF3 has her with a speech bubble of a Heart Symbol.
• Pinball Points: The first two games do this with damage, with regular attacks doing four figures' worth from the very beginning. The third one does away with this with the introduction of a more traditional Experience Points system.
• Power at a Price: Some weapons will provide rather insane buffs, but with considerable drawbacks, such as penalty to some other stats or inflicting harmful effect when held.
• Powerful, but Inaccurate: Quite a few weapons from 3 onward will offset their ludicrous damage bonus by accuracy penalty. For example, Lance's Green Goliath in 5 doubles physical and magical attack when maxed, but decreases accuracy (along with evasion) and auto-inflicts Tired status, which gradually decreases accuracy even further.
• Powers Do the Fighting: Equipping lots of autocast clothes can result in this, as they can activate at the very beginning of a battle.
• The Power of Rock: The Power Metal attack, which plays a small bit of "Through the Fire and Flames" in the first three games, and a piece of "Winter Night's Journey (Through the Storm)" in the fourth and fifth games.
• Percent-Based Values:
  • Epic Battle Fantasy 4: For equipment's effect on stats, and after the Battle Mountain update, some healing items' effects. For example, this piece of equipment: Flower Pot: At level 1, it boosts physical and magic defenses by 5%, and stops 10% of Thunder and Earth, damage.
    • Healing items:
    • Crisps: Heals all living party members for 25% of their max HP.
    • Chips: Heals all living party members for 50% of their max HP.
  • Epic Battle Fantasy 5: All healing items, and the buff and debuff statuses. The listed values are the base, which can be boosted with certain equipment, which also increase their wearer's abilities by percentages:
    • Healing Items: Such as Pumpkin: "Heals an ally for 300 HP, or 20% of their max HP. Whichever is higher."
    • Status Buff items: Such as Beer: Buffs an ally's attack by 60%.
    • Equipment: Such as Fusion Blade: At level 1, it boosts Physical and Magic attack by 15%, and blocks 10% of Bomb, Fire, and Bio damage.
• Pre-existing Encounters: From third game onward, most foes appear on the map, and you initiate battles by interacting with them. The enemy encounters that don't appear on the map trigger when you step on specific tiles. The good news is that they don't actively chase you and the ones that block important paths don't respawn.
• Putting on the Reich: Lance's outfit in the second game is quite... Nazi-like. In subsequent installments, you can re-attain the outfit and equip it on Lance or Matt. It provides a notable amount of Dark resistance, and when maxed out, will provide extra tank attacks randomly. It's worth noting that it lacks any Swastikas and becomes the "Officer's Coat" and "Officer's Hat", though it keeps its appearance. Also, Lance's tank keeps its Balkenkreuz insignia in all appearances.
• Puzzle Boss: While not necessary to defeat her, the final version of the Chibi Knight can be made much easier by casting Berserk on her so she'll only use her basic Holy-element attacks and equipping the active party with Holy-resistant gear, leaving only the mammoth accompanying her able to deal damage.
• Rainbow Pimp Gear:
  • There are only three equipment slots, and mixing and matching doesn't make the characters look TOO bad, though.
  • The fourth game introduces three additional equip slots for Flair that can look rather out of place while being surprisingly effective.
  • Even more downplayed in the fifth game. Some gear changes color depending on the other gear or even the character wearing it.
• Random Effect Spell: Mog in the first game, NoLegs in the second and third games, and Friend Dog in the fourth game, supply a random consumable item to be immediately eaten. It may not be useful if it, say, buffs your mage's attack, but in a pinch it becomes the best way to replenish your MP without using expensive or limited magic-replenishing items.
• Randomized Damage Attack: Lucky Star and Star Shower (the latter, introduced in 3, being a more powerful version of the former that hits all enemies) are cheap on MP but deal wildly random damage, ranging from a mere tickle to devastating output for such a skill.
• Recurring Riff: Estavius, from EBF3 on.
• Reference Overdosed: Just look at the Shout Outs page.
• Respawning Enemies: Enemy encounters in 3 onwards may respawn once you leave the area, if said enemies weren't blocking a path and/or key item.
• Revolvers Are Just Better: Especially if they're also Gunblades.
• Rule of Fun: The whole point of the series.
• Runic Magic:
  • Viking Monolith enemies have runes engraved on them that glow when they cast magic.
  • The Rune Blade weapon greatly boosts the power of magical attacks. Presumably because runes.
  • The elementally magical Rune enemy class don't actually appear to involve carved runes and instead resemble small clusters of floating stone objects.
  • The Dark Rune item is a chunk of black stone carved with complex red lines that is used to craft Dark-aligned items.
• Say It with Hearts: The Pictorial Speech-Bubble version.
  • In the third game, it happens if a character eats something they like.
  • In the fourth game:
    • Some characters say it on the victory screen, randomly.
    • Natalie says it when hit by the Beholder's Censored attack.
• Sequel Escalation/Sorting Algorithm of Evil: The first game's final boss was Zombie Goku, again. Not so awful for Matt and Natz to deal with, you say, aside from him destroying a good portion of the world upon his defeat. The second game has them fight the guy trying to take over the world in the aftermath of the first game. Again, not so horrible to deal with, especially compared to the final boss of the original... then we get to EBF3, where the main villain is a demonic being of god-like power who represents a huge threat to the world relative to previous final bosses, and to existence in general. And the final boss of EBF4 is Godcat herself, which pales in comparison when the final boss of EBF5 goes meta.
• Schmuck Bait: In all games, Matt has a move called "Screamer", as in the "Scary Maze" kind of screamer. Thankfully, the accompanying scream is kept to a reasonable decibel level. ^note According to Roszak, it's a picture of his dog with the colors inverted.
• Screamer Prank: Matt's "Screamer" special conjures up a color-inverted picture of a dog and lets loose a bloodcurdling shriek. It hits all enemies for Dark damage and reduces Magic Defense. However, since it runs off of Magic Attack, he's unlikely to do much damage with it, so in the fourth game giving it to Anna might be a better choice.
• Self-Imposed Challenge:
  • Play as one player. Or two in the third game, seeing how some battles have up to five enemies in one wave, in contrast to the first two games' three. This makes a one-player run nearly impossible and stunning/freezing enemies (2 onward) will make these challenges harder.
  • EBF4 onwards allows you to set the difficulty whenever you want. Also, you can try beating the fourth game on Epic without changing the difficulty while keeping Lance in your backup slot the entire time (this means no Total Party Kills on the front line).
• Sexy Whatever Outfit: Basically everything the female PCs wear. There are a few armors which might not look too provocative on Anna, but you can probably be sure that won't hold on Natz. Pretty much the only armors that doesn't look of this trope at all on either of the ladies is the Shrine Maiden Dress and White Mage Dress.
  • Played for Laughs in 5, because Natalie's inexplicably stuck with these (when NSFW content is allowed) while Anna's are generally more respectable.
  • Up to eleven when using 7th Heaven: There is a different fanservice design for every female armor in the game.
• Sexy Santa Dress: As Female Armor:
  • Playing the fourth game very completely might result in you missing this one from your inventory. You have to set your computer's clock to December unless your playthrough lasts through that month.
  • 5 puts it up to eleven by it making the torso coverage nothing but two red straps tied around her breasts to cover her nipples.
    • In the final game, this designed was changed to something logical... until you use 7th heaven with it.
• Shoot the Medic First: You'll be doing this often enough that even Matt recognizes it as a good idea.
  Matt: A healing plant! Must kill!
• Shout-Out: Now with its own page.
• Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: Lance's virulent dislike of NoLegs is this, as Lance refuses to allow him to have opinions or participate in his conversations because he's a filthy animal.
• Spectral Weapon Copy: Matt's skill Seiken / Holy Sword / Light Sword skills attacks with a sword made of light to deal holy damage.
• Stock RPG Spells: Being a parody of RPGs in general, many examples of this trope and included sub-tropes are present.
  • Herd-Hitting Attack: Both Natz and Lance have access to a great deal of Area of Effect attacks. Lance also has Chaining attacks.
  • Non-Elemental: Attacks which deal non-elemental damage are surprisingly scarce. Even melee attacks are almost always elemental, unless the weapons themselves have no element.
  • Summon Magic: Added in the fourth game. Summons can be called by any player character. They are further made distinct from Skills and Specials in that they consume a party-shared SP (Summon Points) meter which is only replenished by killing monsters.
    • Furthermore, their damage is dependent on the level of the user, as opposed to (Magic) Attack; however, their power is boosted by matching elemental weapons just like regular skills!
    • Natalie had her own Summon Magic in the first two games, but they use MP like any other special technique.
• Status Effect-Powered Ability:
  • The Giga Drill skill does more damage the higher the enemy's defensive buffs are (and is most visible on bosses).
  • In EBF5, every element can be boosted by a neutral or negative status effect. However, the neutral status effects like Dry or Light will also protect from damage of other elements, such as Light decreasing Earth damage.
• Stock Monsters: Most often played straight, or zig-zagged. The series includes the usual Slimes, poisonous Insects, Mecha-Mooks, The Undead, Golems, Dragons, Things with tentacles and lots of Elementals.
• Storm of Blades: The Ragnarok spell, where blades from Matt's collection rain down from space / the sky.
• Straight Man: Natz to Matt throughout most of their existence, and Anna to her teammates in the fourth game.
• Stuff Blowing Up:
  • Bomb is considered an element in the series, used primarily by Lance. It's effective against machinery and rock/metal enemies.
  • Many enemies, including bosses, explode when killed.
• Solid Clouds: Clouds are solid, BUT unless you have the Cloudwalking Boots, they won't support the weight of four people.
• Super-Deformed: The party members, NPCs, and enemies are drawn in chibi style on the overworld map.
• Status Effects: Just over 30 in total as of EBF5, most of which can be cured via using an Antidote(EBF1 and EBF2)/Garlic (EBF3 onwards), or by casting Medikit/Health Strike, Cleanse, Purify or Kyun/7th Heaven:
  • Introduced in EBF1:
    • Dispel: Removes all stat buffs and positive status effects upon infliction. Was named Debuff before EBF3.
    • Poison: Inflicts Bio-elemental damage each turn, multiplied by number of stacks and affected by Bio resistance. Will heal if the afflicted absorbs Bio.
    • Syphon: Prevents players from using skills/spells (barring their normal attack and their limit breaks). Swaps foes to an alternate attack pattern. Was named Seal before EBF3.
  • Introduced in EBF2:
    • Blind (exclusive to EBF2): Cuts Accuracy in half. Was replaced by Accuracy debuffs in all later games.
    • Freeze: Freezes the afflicted, preventing them from taking actions, evading attacks or being switched out until it expires or they take damage. The next hit taken inflicts extra damage (50% extra in EBF2, double damage in later games)
    • Stun: Prevents the afflicted from taking actions or evading attacks, though they can still be switched out.
  • Introduced in EBF3:
    • Berserk: Causes afflicted players to automatically attack random foes (exclusively using their normal attack in EBF3, and randomly using a subset of learned skills in later games), dealing increased damage in the process (2.4x in EBF3, 2.5x in later games). Swaps foes to an alternate attack pattern, with a similar boost (double damage inflicted and halved physical damage taken in EBF3, 50% extra damage inflicted in later games).
    • Doom: Inflicts Instant Death, alongside dealing moderate Non-Elemental damage (in case the afflicted has Bless or is otherwise immune) once the timer expires.
    • Instant Death: Kills instantly upon infliction.
  • Introduced in EBF4:
    • Burn: Inflicts Fire-elemental damage each turn, affected by Fire resistance. Like Poison, will heal if the afflicted absorbs Fire. Unaffected by number of stacks in EBF4, affected by number of stacks in EBF5.
    • Curse: Debuffs Defence and Magic Defence (by 10% in EBF4, by 15% in EBF5) each turn, and increases Holy-elemental damage taken by 50%.
    • Random: Inflicts a random status effect upon infliction.
    • Slimed (exclusive to EBF4): Turns the afflicted player into a Slime, doubling damage taken and preventing them from taking actions or being switched out, though they can still evade attacks. Cannot be cured, but can only be inflicted on a single player at a time.
    • Stagger: Guarantees a critical hit on the afflicted. Gained the ability to stack in EBF5.
    • Tired: Debuffs Accuracy and Evade (by 10% in EBF4, by 15% in EBF5) each turn, and increases Dark-elemental damage taken by 50%.
    • Weaken: Debuffs Attack and Magic Attack (by 10% in EBF4, by 15% in EBF5) each turn, and increases Earth-elemental (in EBF4) or Bio-elemental (in EBF5) damage taken by 50%.
    • Wet: Halves Fire-elemental damage taken, in exchange for increasing Thunder- and Ice-elemental damage taken by 50% and doubling Freeze chance. Incoming Chill is converted to Freeze. Treated as a neutral status effect in EBF5.
  • Introduced in EBF5, negative:
    • Bad Luck: Decreases the afflicted's attacks' accuracy, critical hit chance and status effect/debuff infliction chance by 20%. Increases incoming attacks' accuracy by 10%, crit chance by 30% and status effect chance by 25%, changes incoming Doom to Instant Death and causes pre-existing Doom to have its timer reduced to 1 turn.
    • Confuse: Causes the afflicted to randomly use the weakest version of their learned skills.
    • Disable: Puts random skills on cooldown upon infliction.
    • Hungry: Causes afflicted players to automatically eat random food each turn. Does not affect the inventory.
    • Scorch: Inflicts twice as much damage as Burn, and debuffs max HP by 10% each turn.
    • Shroud: Hides the afflicted's HP bar, stats and status effects.
    • Stuffed: Prevents the afflicted from eating food. Also negates max HP debuffs caused by direct attacks since the v2 update.
    • Surrender: The afflicted flees from battle on their next turn. Exclusive to foes.
    • Target: Redirects single-target attacks towards the afflicted, including attacks that target randomly. Limited to a single player at a time.
    • Virus: Inflicts twice as much damage as Poison, lasts indefinitely until cured, and can spread to other foes/players.
  • Introduced in EBF5, neutral:
    • Chill: Halves Fire-elemental damage taken, in exchange for increasing Thunder- and Ice-elemental damage taken by 50% and doubling Freeze chance. Incoming Wet is converted to Freeze.
    • Dry: Halves Thunder- and Ice-elemental damage taken, in exchange for increasing Fire- and Bomb-elemental damage taken by 50% and doubling Burn/Scorch chance.
    • Enchanted/Invisible: Negates one type of damage (magical for Enchanted, physical for Invisible), in exchange for doubling damage from the other type.
    • Heavy/Light: Halves Wind-elemental (for Heavy) or Earth-elemental (for Light) taken, in exchange for increasing damage from the other element by 50%.
• Status Buff: Ten in total, all but two of which can be Dispelled:
  • Introduced in EBF2:
    • Auto-Revive: Automatically revives its target upon death, with all stat (de)buffs and other status effects retained. Was named Autolife before EBF4.
    • Regen: The target regenerates a portion of their health at the start of each turn.
  • Introduced in EBF4:
    • Bless: Grants immunity to all negative status effects, Dispel and Instant Death included.
    • Brave: Increases crit rate (calculated by: 2×base%+20), and grants immunity to critical hits (though Stagger takes priority over Brave in EBF4). Also negates Attack/Magic Attack debuffs inflicted via direct attacks in EBF5, after the v2 update.
    • Charge: Enables use of certain powerful attacks (e.g. Lance's Hyper Beam), expending the status. The status cannot be Dispelled and is retained upon death. (Similar effects appeared since EBF1.)
    • Defend: Halves damage taken (excluding status effect damage) for one turn, but prevents counterattacking. (Similar effects were available via the "Defend" Tactic since EBF1.)
    • Morale: Causes otherwise-lethal attacks to leave the afflicted with 1 HP, unless their health is under 49%. Also negates Defence/Magic Defence debuffs inflicted via direct attacks in EBF5, after the v2 update.
  • Introduced in EBF5:
    • Good Luck: Increases the afflicted's attacks' accuracy, critical hit chance and status effect/debuff infliction chance by 25%. Reduces incoming attacks' accuracy by 10%, crit chance by 30% and status effect chance by 25%, and changes incoming Instant Death to Stagger.
    • Haste: Grants an extra action per stack (foes automatically lose all their stacks upon taking their turn, limiting them to one extra action). Cooldowns are unaffected.
    • Lovable: Renders the afflicted untargetable by single-target attacks (with some exceptions).
• Sword and Sorcerer: Matt and Natz in the first two games.
• Tank Goodness: Lance's Valkyrie Supertank. In the third and fourth games, Lance has an ability where he orders his boss tank from the second game to fire its machine guns at the enemy. If you find and completely upgrade his old Nazi hat and outfit from the second game, the tank will randomly fire either its machine guns or its main cannon (and sometimes both) at the enemy for free. To top it off, one of Lance's limit breaks involves pounding the tank into the bad guys and then blowing it up.
  Lance: WRYYYYYYYYYY!!
• Theme Naming: Either a normal colour or some different shade of a colour.
  • Epic Battle Fantasy 4:
    • Greenwood Village
    • Whitefall Town
    • Graybone Cemetery
    • Goldenbrick Resort
  • Bullet Heaven 2:
    • Greenwood Forest
    • Bubbleblue Beach
    • Goldenbrick Desert
    • Whitefall Glacier
    • Jaderoot Jungle
    • Redroast Volcano
    • Irongray Armony
    • Browngrave Cemetery
  • Subdued, but still present in Epic Battle Fantasy 5:
    • Greenwood Village (again)
    • Redpine Town
    • Rainbow Islands
• This Is a Drill: Tera Drill in EBF3 and Giga Drill in EBF4 onwards, an extra skill that drills into an enemy from below to deal physical earth damage, doing more damage the higher the target's defense is overall.
• Too Awesome to Use:
  • The Ion attack in the second game. While you can use it whenever you want, doing so causes extreme damage to the entire party. Averted when the Final Boss uses it due to their high HP, though it can cut the lifespan of their summoned turrets.
  • In the third game, Natz' Black Hole Limit Break and Lance's Nuke Limit Break will both hurt the party as well as the enemies. (The Ion attack, now also a Limit Break, no longer has this problem.)
    • Actually, Limit Breaks in general are this, as you'll keep saving them for later and typically only end up using them on bosses. The same goes for more costly summons in the fourth game, like the Praetorian, the Protector, and the Cosmic Monolith. Learning to (partially) cast away this mentality and keeping track of both charging bars is one of the most useful advanced techniques you can learn for the nastier bosses and for Battle Mountain's rush waves.
  • In addition, Meow Meow and Catastrophe in the first. Summoning Meow Meow featured a 30% chance of his sword breaking and damaging the party as well (supposedly compensated by hitting the enemy twice when this happens), and Catastrophe's third sword always hit P2 (Natz) for high damage, about 8000 of her 9999 health.
  • Some food items in the fourth game, as they are either only available in chests, very rarely dropped by enemies, or bought in the rare shop (though the price doubles with each purchase). This is subverted due to how enemies gain more per level than the players, making these items essential to surviving Battle Mountain. That said, the player still needs to be smart about how they distribute the stat items.
  • Very rare items in EBF5, such as Espresso, which also buffs your maximum HP and is one of few ways to do so. They cannot be bought at all, so you'll probably save them up for Optional Boss battles. Stat raising items can be gotten from some nasty enemies (think Cosmic Monolith), but their drop rate is very low.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • Matt (especially Matt), Natz, and Lance are not bright. They die in the second game when they eat a sandworm, despite knowing that it had attacks that implied it was obviously poisonous. Then, they poke a chained, obviously evil demon that steals their power. Lampshaded in the third game, when they admit that solving a puzzle hurt their heads. Natalie gets smarter in the fourth game, though. When a puzzle needs explaining and there isn't an NPC around to help, the others call her over to take a look.
  • Lance believes radiation and smoking have no negative impact on the human body.
  Natz: That's dangerous levels of stupidity right there!

Tropes U-Z

• Underground Monkey: Just about every enemy in the third game onwards has around three/four species variations with different attacks, weaknesses and resistances, and drops. In an interesting use of this trope, none of the enemy variants can really be considered "stronger"; since enemies use a leveling system like the heroes, an early game-enemy can appear among its later-game variants and still be just as strong, meaning that no single enemy becomes obsolete.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable:
  • In EBF3, it's entirely possible to walk into a bonus area, save, exit, visit the medals page, and delete all your medals! This causes the NPCs that guard the bonus levels (until you have sufficient medals) to reappear, blocking your exit instead of your entry! That's right. You can trap yourself in a bonus area unless you have a spare save from the same playthrough.
  • 4 has the Battle Mountain ice puzzle, which is difficult enough by itself, even with the NPC Walter's hint ("The secret is...to...line up...the ice blocks...in a row..."). It's actually possible to block yourself in the puzzle! Hopefully, unlike what's in the link, you'd be observant enough not to save in the middle if you've blocked your exit on all sides!
• Unusual Euphemism: "Fffffffffiretruck!" and "Shiiiiiiiiipyards!"^note For the F word and S word, respectively
• Unsound Effect:
  • Any Status Effect (such as "DEATH"), or Status Buff when applied in EBF4 and 5 (and the Steam update of 3).
  • This is how NoLegs "communicates" in Bullet Heaven 2 and EBF5 when not meowing.
    NoLegs: *feels right at home*
    NoLegs: *commits violent thoughtcrime*
• Useless Useful Spell: Averted. You need to use buffs and status effects in order to survive.
• Vague Hit Points:
  • Epic Battle Fantasy 1: How much health an enemy can take can only be determined through manually recording damage numbers and comparing that to the ungradated, temporarily on-screen Life Meter for the enemy.
  • Epic Battle Fantasy 5: The uses of Interface Screw in the game:
    • The Shroud status effect hides literally all information on-screen on the character it's been applied to. Health, buffs, status, everything.
    • The glitched field effect in certain areas does an Interface Screw to everyone on the field. Only HP is visible, and even that is an uncertainty. One area is so bad that it corrupts even the graphics for equipment and skills.
  • Adventure Story: A platformer, which as typical for the genre, has enemies that usually die in few enough hits that listing Hit Points isn't useful.
  • The Bullet Heaven series as typical for a Shoot 'Em Up series, has enemies that die quick enough to not need Life Meters or Hit Points info displayed.
• Video Game Perversity Potential: Starting from the very first game, you can click on Natalie's chest to make it bounce. When achievements were introduced, every successive game had one specifically for bouncing them multiple times.
• Wave-Motion Gun: A lot of the enemies have this. Godcat's creation form's in particular is pure pain in beam form. There's also, Lance's bomb in the Bullet Heaven games, and his Hyper Beam attack in EBF4 and 5, complete with charge-up turn.
• When Trees Attack: "Stop pretending to be a foe, tree, you're just a tree." Also, the Laurelin and Telperion boss battles in the fifth game, now including more cats.
  • All of the games have different types of bushes as basic foes (or advanced foes in the case of giant bushes), and "haunted tree" enemies that use dark and poison attacks. The fourth features Mighty Oak (a treant of sorts) as its first boss, and many flower enemies in the Jungle (including the massive Rafflesia boss).
• What Happened to the Mouse?: EBF2 & 3 have a summon called Meow Meow where a giant sword-wielding cat is summoned to attack the enemy. Meow Meow vanishes the next game. What makes this notable is that Meow Meow violates the Worldbuilding of EBF4, which stresses the fact that cats don't have arms or legs in this world. It's rather jarring that all the players make a big deal out of seeing cats with arms, legs, and tails despite the fact that they had a summon that was just that.
  • Justified in that the Meow Meow character doesn't belong to Matt Roszak, but to fellow Newgroundser NCH. Meow Meow was specifically removed from future installments as too many people believed that the cat was originally Matt's.
• Wingding Eyes: In the fourth game, Cactussa has pink Heart Symbols for eyes. Fifth game has them sometimes for player character's pictures when they are talking.
• Wolfpack Boss: The Pyrohydra consists of three equally powerful dragon heads that count as separate targets.
• Women Are Wiser: This was averted in EBF3, as Natalie and Lance alternated between being in the right while Matt was consistently an Idiot Hero. The trope was played straight in EBF4, as Natalie and Anna were much more down to earth and wise compared to their male counterparts.
• World of Snark: Downplayed. Most NPCs are limited to Lampshade Hanging at best, but the playable cast all tend to snark. Especially noticeable in EBF4, where certain pieces of scenery provoke a different snarky line from every character. Take the wall of "warning" signs in the factory, for example:
  Lance: "Danger again, huh? I guess they're serious this time."
  Anna: "Judging by these inviting labels, this appears to be some sort of safe room."
  Matt: "I may not be too bright, but even I can tell there's something dangerous in there."
  Natalie: "Something tells me these warning signs aren't going to keep us out of there."
• Writing Around Trademarks: In general, for all appearance of copyrighted characters, their names will each have one letter covered in asterisk.
• Yellow Lightning, Blue Lightning: Most lightning in the games is yellow, except for Lance's Plasma spells, which are purple.
• Yin-Yang Bomb:
  • Natalie uses both holy and dark spells.
  • Godcat also uses holy and dark, but this trope is best shown in Bullet Heaven, where she uses both at once. In EBF4, she's split between her dark and her light side, who only use spells from their element.
  • NoLegs has also Dark and Holy moves in his default skillset. And GodCat as his exclusive limit breaks.
• You Cannot Grasp the True Form: Of the Glitch's attacks, or even its name.

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