Ginormo Sword is a Flash-made action RPG, from Japanese developer Babarageo. You play as a purple-clad adventurer armed with nothing but a sword, fighting monsters to accumulate gold and buy upgrades to make yourself stronger. The title comes from players' ability to upgrade the size of their sword, and there are plenty of levels for that.
Play it here
.
A remake of the game is currently in progress. Occasional blog updates of this remake can be read here. (All text is in Japanese.)
Ginormo Sword provides examples of these tropes:
- A.I. Roulette: Oftentimes, victory can hang on how frequently a boss monster attacks.
- All Swords Are the Same: It doesn't matter what kind of sword you're using, the attack animation is always the same for each one. Granted, the hitboxes do differ, until you get them so big that they take up the entire area in front of you, after which they all play the same except for enchantments.
- Amazing Technicolor Battlefield:
- The battle against the False God.
- A much earlier field, the theater, also counts.
- Artificial Stupidity: The monsters really only mill about the map at random or actively pursue you, no matter how long you whale on the blind spots in their bullet patterns. Unfortunately, the henchmen you can hire also have the same problem, and they don't take Collision Damage well.
- Asteroids Monster: The "multiple slimes" in the Shrine of Knowledge's secret test. You need to kill 10 of them, but there's not enough at first. Stepping on them makes them split into two so you can beat the required number.
- Beef Gate: If you can't see the enemy's life bar going down as you're hitting it, it's time to either level up some more, try a sword with a different enchantment, or buy magic spells. Most likely the former.
- BFS: This game redefines BFS! By the end of the game, you'll have a sword that takes up over half the screen... Or just a giant coloured block that covers the entire screen in front of you.
- Bragging Rights Reward: Once you beat the Avatar, you obtain a relic that you can equip to put the game into a higher difficulty level.
- Bullet Hell: It looks like a Hack and Slash at first glance, but by the time you learn magic and your opponents start using projectiles, it is a full-fledged Shoot 'Em Up.
- Character Level: Averted. You don't gain experience by killing monsters, just gold that you can use to buy increases to your stats, and increases to your sword level.
- Chest Monster: The Mimics, which look like gold bags, but periodically open their mouths to affirm that they're not. Touch 'em and get hurt.
- Color-Coded Stones: The game has gems as enemy drops which are used to apply elemental power to your weapons and armor:
- Red = ruby = fire
- Blue = aquamarine = water
- Green = emerald = wind
- Yellow = topaz = earth
- White = diamond = light (the diamonds themselves are light blue)
- Black = onix [sic] = dark
- The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: The certain bosses have no problem sending three screen-spanning attacks in addition to their regular Bullet Hell attacks and/or traps.
- Deathbringer the Adorable: It seems to be the case with the Hellhounds, that look like cute little puppies... Until you actually fight them and get destroyed by their fiery breath.
- Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: If you die, you'll just end up back on the map screen, which makes escaping battles by walking to edge of the battlefield pointless and even detrimental. There is even an accessory that prevents you from escaping a fight. Of course, if you are strong enough to receive very little damage from the boss, but too weak to deal any significant damage to them, the only way to get out is to close your browser.
- Death of a Thousand Cuts: Even if it takes twenty hits or more for your enemy's life bar to go down one pixel, it is still possible to beat it.
- Degraded Boss: Subverted, in a sense. Many bosses, such as the Maze Minotaur, Mutant Cyclops and Guardian Dragon, are recolors of much stronger regular enemies that you may encounter later in the game.
- Doppelgänger Spin: The Lizard Assassin's specialty. It is also one of the few enemies that
deliberately causes Collision Damage. - Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: Some enemies drop gems. Those gems are used by the enchanter of the fifth zone to give elemental properties to your sword and armor, with the usual powers and weaknesses (Fire/Water, Earth/Wind, Dark/Light). This becomes important later on in the game, when you will face bosses that can be damaged only by a specific kind of power (for example the fire demon Efreet can only be hurt by a Water-powered weapon). However, opposing powers cancel out each other even on the equipment: if you, for example, use on your sword both Dark and Light gems, they would be wasted because one element automatically depowers the opposing one.
- Enemy Summoner: The Necromancer boss won't hurt you on its own, he only shoots black and blue magic balls that push you past the boundary of the screen, forcing you to restart the fight if you don't have a particular item. However, he will summon many undead enemies such as Skeletons, Zombies and Ghosts.
- Feed It with Fire: Certain monsters will actually be healed by certain types of elemental damage, make sure your sword doesn't have too much of that elemental enchantment when facing them.
- Final Boss, New Dimension: You have to go to outer space to fight the Avatar.
- Forced Level-Grinding: See Beef Gate.
- The Goomba: Neko Slimes. They're weak, do very little damage, and die fast. Of course, they also have Underground Monkey versions.
- Hitbox Dissonance: The player character's hitbox is approximately 2 pixels by 2 pixels.
- Invisible Monsters: The Invisibles in the Uninhabited Castle in zone 15.
- Killer Rabbit: The Hellhound appears to be a rather cute looking mono-coloured dog. Then it attacks you with a massive-size beam that will probably destroy you instantly.
- Kill It with Water: This is the only way to beat the Efreet, as it is completely invulnerable to all damage that isn't Water-elemental.
- Kung Fu-Proof Mook: Some foes are completely invulnerable to your sword regardless of element or how big and powerful it is. Use spells to take care of these.
- Level Grinding: Where you don't have levels to speak of, you have to grind a lot if you want to have a chance of damaging higher level monsters.
- Luck Stat: This increases the amount of cash a foe drops, increases the chances of gem (or fruit) drops, and also increases the chances of stronger monsters appearing in an area.
- Magic Missile Storm: The Chaser Spell makes you fire this out.
- Mercy Invincibility: Averted. Touch a monster or one of their projectiles for too long, and your HP will drop like an anvil. Unless you buy the Shield.
- Metal Slime: The literal example is apparently a blatant ripoff called Metal Neko which is just a Underground Monkey of the weakest enemy in the game.
- Then there are the Palette Swap enemies, who fit the trope. They're basically upgraded versions with a ton of hp added, but give ludicrous amounts of loot (compared to the weaker versions). They're also incredibly rare to find, and there's a high chance of you finding one and not having the damage (read: patience) to kill it. An interesting example is the Golden Knight, the strongest member of the Living Armor family. It appears very rarely, has insane defense, but if you somehow manage to find and defeat it, it will drop a level 9 (maxed out) armor with +9999 Fire, Wind and Light protection that can't be found anywhere in the game.
- Mirror Boss: The Doppelganger, who copies not only your look but also your sword's size.
- The hellhound line of enemies might also count, because the widgth of their breath on the screen is related to the size of your sword (it always extends from the hellhound to the edge of the screen, of course) - Both are dealt with in the same way - reduce your sword to its minimum size and kill with magic.
- Money Spider: Enemies will most likely drop a bag of money whenever you defeat them.
- Monster Compendium: The Library in zone 11 shows you every kind of monster you have defeated.
- Nintendo Hard: Where to begin?
- No-Sell:
- Some enemies like Gas Clouds and Whirlpools enemies are immune to your sword and must be damaged by magical attacks.
- Efreet is invulnerable to non-Water elemmental damage.
- One-Hit-Point Wonder: Subverted, in a sense: you start out as one, and you'll likely stay one the rest of the game, but it's possible to upgrade your endurance (hit points) to survive longer. Largely considered the least useful stat because by the end-game, you'll be hunting monsters that can kill you in one hit or so anyway and you'll be good enough at dodging/exploiting elemental resistances.
- Palette Swap: Numerous monsters appear in progressively stronger variants. Some (but not all) of them are color-swapped.
- Random Encounters: Averted. There are set areas you can click on the map to enter battles, and most of them show a name when you're on top of them. Beating all the monsters in a single encounter "completes" the area you entered, and when all of the normal areas in one section of the map have been beaten once, the boss area appears.
- Rare Candy: The apples that are dropped by certain foes boost one of your stats by a single point.
- Real Men Wear Pink: Assuming the pink protagonist is even male to begin with.
- Retraux: The game looks like it has either really bad NES graphics, or halfway-decent Atari 2600 graphics.
- Sand Worm: Two bosses, one is the optional fight with the Abyss Worm.
- Sheathe Your Sword: During the fight against the Doppelganger. It will always have a sword as big as yours, but powered with the opposing element. It, however, has no magic: you can resize the sword to a minimum, put a lot of points in your INT status and fight him from a distance with the magic attacks.
- Shout-Out: One of the bosses is a "Mutant Cyclops" with blue skin and gold clothes, and a red eye that fires laser beams. Those colors certainly seem familiar....
- Then there's the Golem family. The strongest examples are the Iron Golem and the Colossus... which are made to look like War Machine and Iron Man respectively.
- The color palette of the Succubus Queen is a bit reminiscent of Morrigan Aensland.
- The Cameo: The game is rife with cameos from previous games developed by Babarageo. Your first helper, Indigo=Roger, is the protagonist of the minigame that shares his name, the fairy that appears in the inn at the beginning comes from Xenoraider, and the giant head that appears in the shrines was a boss from the shooter Uchuforce 2.
- The Grim Reaper: Death, the boss of zone 15.
- The Unpronounceable: The names of the locations and of some characters are composed by randomly arranged letters and change at every new game.
- Tron Lines: On the Apocalypse, the strongest variant of the Giant family of enemies.
- True Final Boss: The Avatar. After completing the right requirements, you have to travel out of the world map into outer space to fight him. What's more, he constantly fires an all-but-unavoidable barrage of nearly every single type of projectile in the entire game. That means you'll have almost all of the following coming at you at any given time: eight-way bullets, outward spirals of bullets, homing circles of bullets, laser beams, streams of fire breath, exploding spirals of bullets, aimed whirlpools, five-way whirlpools, spirals of whirlpools, icicles spreading out in all directions, lightning beams, three-way lightning bolts, curving lightning bolts, homing bullets, energy sickles, and...the occasional homing heart which stuns you for a few seconds if it hits you. Fortunately, the Hyper Armor makes all this do Scratch Damage to you.
- Underground Monkey: Palette Swapped enemies have more health compared to their normal variants and drop more money. They're found in the same area as the normal variants, but much rarer- you'll need high Luck to make them appear more often.
- Warm-Up Boss: The Orc Chieftain just has a lot of health (for starting level) and has absolutely no special attacks.
- When Trees Attack: The Trent family of enemies and the boss Yggdrasil. Being trees, they have a higher chance of dropping apples, especially the Hamadryad.
