Video Game / Labyrinth of Galleria: The Moon Society

The pursuit of mystery - A tale of love and courage

Labyrinth Of Galleria: The Moon Society , or Coven and Labyrinth of Galleria in Japan, is a first-person Dungeon Crawler RPG developed by Nippon Ichi. It was released in Japan on the PS4, Play Station Vita, and Nintendo Switch in November 2020, with the North American release arriving in February of 2023.

In the game, you play as the Lanterne de Fantasmagorie (Fantie for short) - or rather, you play as the disembodied spirit shoved into the aforementioned lantern by young medium Eureka de Soleil and her mentor Madam Marta. Charged by the Count Bismont of Galleria with retrieving mana-filled artifacts known as the Curios D'art, only you and your brigade of custom-made puppet soldiers can conquer the Labyrinth of Galleria and uncover the mystery of the Curios' creation.

Being a sequel to Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk, it quickly becomes apparent that not everything is as it seems. Due to the nature of Galleria and the ensuing discoveries, it's highly recommended to play the game first before proceeding to avoid spoilers.

This game contains examples of the following tropes:

• Alternate Self: All of the Facets have this going for them between the worlds of Alluna and Alstella. Some are similar - Shinomashira and Shinobushi only differ in their favored weapons and method of survival - while others are vastly different such as the Aster Crow being a Glass Cannon physical attacker and the Aster Ashe being a Magic Knight with emphasis on the Mage.
  • Eureka and Eureu are each other's counterparts from Alluna and Alstella. The key difference between them is that Eureka stayed with her father despite his abuses, leading to her eventual death in a revolution, while Eureu ran away from home, ending up in an orphanage where she met Kitcat and became the Moon Society's Oracle.
• All There in the Manual: The Japanese art book contains a considerable amount of details that never made it into the game itself including various characters' full names. Of note, Kitcat's real name is Ketty U. Netherland, indicating that she is a variant of, or related to a variant of, Nezaria, while Faus's full name is Lavilly Ral Faus Ghilruda, Transette Forge Ghilruda's perfected clone, which in turn reveals that Ghilruda had survived being turned into a rat and hurled out the window of a skyscraper and eventually returned to normal, much like Malia did, as well as implies that her recently deceased "predecessor" Lavilly Ral from the radio announcement at the start of the Alstella story was in fact just her previous identity.
• Ambiguous Ending: It's not outright stated if the scene in the ending where Nachiroux and Eureka sit in the field of daisies is a dream or not, and if it takes place before or after the post-credits scene, meaning it's left up in the air if Eureka ever finds Nachiroux or not.
• Ambiguously Related: Nachiroux's biological parents are implied to be Luca and Neldo, but never actually confirmed. She was a natural blonde before her hair color changed after contact with the mother that raised her, Donum spells related to her follow a similar naming theme as those from Mezzaluca's soul pact, her mother is said to be an unparalleled master at controlling puppets like Luca was, and at least one of her parents were from the World Tree Tribes, previously localized as Owls of Yggdrasil, when the known survivors of that race could be counted on one hand with Neldo among them and Cecilia and Geaux being ruled out.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • When disassembling items at the Alchemy Pot, if you happen to not have any Disassembly Fluid in your inventory already, the game will let you spend the same amount of silver it would cost at the general store to just immediately disassemble an item anyway. This also applies to repairing puppets at the Puppet Workbench, which is even more of an anti-frustration feature as the "parts" items are separated and limited to ranges of levels and progressively unlock through the story, and the game will kindly allow you to repair puppets' damaged parts anyway in the event that they are overleveled for your current progress in the story.
  • When feeding your manania to give them experience, you can opt to feed all of your meat to a single soldier at once - saving you dozens, if not hundreds of confirmation prompts if you're just trying to power a favorite character to level 99.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: As in the first game, you have 5 party slots, but each party is a "coven" created by a pact. Each pact has 1 to 3 "attacker" slots and 0 to 5 "support slots" that do nothing but enable magic, get experience, and activate the given support slot's abilities. Each slot can give buffs, debuffs, exp bonuses and penalties, et cetera. At the same time, covens share DP (the game's mana system) and spell availability is based on the pact, though some unlike the first game some facets can provide spells to their entire pact as well.
• Call a Hit Point a "Smeerp": Classes are called "facets"; your party is called a "brigade"; the magic used by your puppets is "donum", though the latter may be to distinguish it from the cutscene-only magic used by witches. Additionally, the Grand Cathedral's Floors are referred to as "years".
• Character Class System: Manania you create are assigned a class, here called "Facet," which dictates their weapon proficiencies, skills learned, and stat growth.
• Continuing is Painful: Zig-zagged. If the brigade wipes, they simply return to the summoner and the game continues with all progress retained, meaning you don't need to re-do anything you've already done. The catch? The puppets come back with most of their parts broken, necessitating paying hefty amounts of silver to get them back into fighting shape - silver which you may not have, and which will be difficult to grind for with weakened puppets. It's not impossible for the repair cost to be 10x what you've hoarded, and at that point you may as well reload an earlier save.
• Decoy Protagonist: Even more pronounced than in the first game. Initially, Madam Marta serves as the primary witch, while Eureka serves as The Watson to her efforts. Unlike the first game, where the witch's assistant turned out to be the protagonist, both fade drastically in importance after that, with Nachiroux, who was a supporting character for much of the first arc and doesn't even have an entry on the game's official cast page, serving as the main character for the rest of the game. Then it proceeds to get played with in all kinds of ways in that Madam Marta is revealed to be Nachiroux 100 years older while the supporting Nachiroux is just a copy she made along with everything and everyone else in the first arc. Then Marta!Nachiroux dies, and passes the protagonist role on to copy!Nachiroux for the remainder of the second arc, who passes the role on to Eureka for the final story arc.
• Disk One Nuke: The Sage Lamp, found midway through the first section of the game, has stats and abilities suitable to be used as a weapon against the final boss. It costs a huge amount of mana to unseal it properly (especially at the time when you get it), but if you scrounge up enough to do so it can carry you through large parts of the game.
• The Dreaded: Every time the name Geaux is brought up, it comes with a set of instructions: If you encounter him, run. Turns out he's an Ax-Crazy serial killer fully capable of using magic, comes from a world where his World Tree Tribe are incredibly powerful, and is hell-bent on getting revenge on the Moon Society for leaving him for dead in Alluna. After hours spent building up how powerful they are, he completely wipes the floor with the witches, leaving almost no survivors.
• Element No. 5: In this case, Element Number Seven. Certain weapons have a Special Attack attribute outside of the Flame, Fog, Mud and Slash, Blunt, Pierce types. What, precisely, this attribute does varies by description. A Bitterner Special Attack is always effective against Bitterns, Lightning Blade is always effective against aquatic enemies, Mysterious Erosion is always effective against the Discordance, and so on. The Transforming attribute of weapons like Scrolls can not mimic these effects, as it is limited only to the normal six attributes.
• Evolving Title Screen: After seeing the credits for the first time, sunlight breaks through the normally pitch-black title screen.
• Fission Mailed: As in the first game, there are several required "bad ends" that you must see (and save a continue save from) in order to proceed, such as the end of the first arc, where a revolution kills basically everyone and the world the first arc took place in proceeds to collapse.
• Forced Transformation: In order to deal with the traitor to the Moon Society, Eureu neutralizes the threat by transforming her into a rat - and throwing the defenseless rodent out the hotel window to its apparent death. Additionally, this is the nature of the "leash" that the Moon Society put on Geaux; if he tries to return to Astella before he kills Alluna's Oracle, he'll be transformed into a donkey. This is deliberately activated by Cecilia - via convincing him he's done so, then recommending he go home - in order to keep him quiet about her plans.
• Foreshadowing: As to be expected in an 80+ hour game, there's enough to deserve its own page.
  • The puppets given to you for the tutorial by Madame Marta are named Kit, Nelli, Marc, Clarris and Doris, named after Kitcat, Nelliru, Clarisstia and Doris, four of the Moon Society witches who Nachiroux grew close to, and Marc, Nachiroux's childhood friend.
  • Madam Marta knows the size of the Galleria Manor's labyrinth well enough to be able to estimate what percentage there's left to uncover, despite this being the first charted expedition to the labyrinth. Except she has explored all of it - the first time she was sent to Alluna, as Nachiroux.
  • Eureka has a surreal dream with a donkey demanding to know what she's looking at, then threatening her when it doesn't get a response before the dream just ends. Later, that same donkey is transformed into a man called Keu - heavily implied to be the Ax-Crazy murderer Geaux, just sans memory.
  • A short time after finding the last Curio D'art and filing your Witch Report, Eureka has a breakdown over her role in the start of the revolution - and the Discordance begins the instant she loses all hope for the future. It's an early hint that Eureka's more important than the story's let on.
  • When Nachiroux asks Kitcat if there ever was a Prince Hubert in the history books, the latter explains there was never a royal child by that name but there was a Hulian and a Bert. That's because Hubert is actually a closeted transgender boy.
  • Patch is introduced singing a creepy nursery rhyme about a bird person who comes out at night and Eats Babies. Turns out it's not just one bird person, but TWO: Cecilia and Geux.
  • Nachiroux warns of the consequences of lending Curios out to anyone, no matter how innocent the intent. This ends up biting Eureka in the butt BIG TIME and kickstarts the Alluna revolution when she lets Kay borrow the Screw of Ghalaya and her Intrepid Reporter fiance Thomas uses it to uncover Queen Luvalier's cannibalism.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: After Fantie is summoned to Astella by Nachiroux, all of the previous puppet soldiers become temporarily inaccessible - they're in another world, after all. Additionally, all of the Facets for new manania creation are replaced by slightly different alternate versions of themselves: The hammer-wielding Gothic Coppelia are swapped out for the cannon-firing Gothic Gratonia, for example. Once you have access to both Astella and Alluna's labyrinths, you gain the ability to create either variant.
• Hard Mode Perks: Traveling to a Nightmare World via the Witch Petition, essentially turning the difficulty to Hard, makes enemies stronger - but also increases how much mana you earn, and relaxes the penalty for bringing mana into the Labyrinth. Used well, the Nightmare World can earn Fantie enough mana to purchase as many treasure boxes as they like.
• Hate Sink: Over the course of the one scene in the present day where he appears as himself, Geaux kills multiple sympathetic witches, reveals through Decapitation Presentation that he'd killed the two entirely innocent young children, and attempts to rape the protagonist. Even his one notional ally makes it clear that she holds him in contempt.
• Heroic RRoD: There are numerous Donum that cost you HP every turn in exchange for dramatically increased power. Unlike normal buffs, these do not get lost upon death, rendering the unit almost completely impossible to revive in the middle of battle as the effect will just tear away that small amount of health from revival before they can act. The game helpfully reminds you that these effects are active by having the character portrait glow and crackle with electricity.
• I'm a Humanitarian: Queen Luvalier devoured the corpse of a young boy she stumbled across in hopes of maintaining her youth, and coerced her head maid Kay into participating as well. When they didn't actually get any younger, Luvalier decided the problem was she hadn't eaten enough boys. When the truth comes out, the bloodied ghost of their first victim briefly appears to point at them, implying they've been cursed for the act.
• Jack of All Trades: The Wonder Corsair facet gets skills that make them talented with any weapon and which allow them to fill almost any role.
• Kick the Dog: The first scene where the Count appears has him ordering a stray cat he noticed in his house to be killed, though it escapes. Also, Geaux, decapitating two innocent children just to torment Nelliru.
• Knight of Cerebus: Geaux is this for the second act. After a dozen or so hours of getting to know the Witches of the Moon Society individually, seeing Nachiroux come to care more for her mother, and discovering the last Curio, in comes Geaux. After being regarded as The Dreaded by the Witches, he proves it's not unwarranted; he kills Doris off-screen, murders Clarisstia, shows Nelliru the severed heads of her own children, and burns the Galleria general apartment to the ground. He doesn't live much longer, but his brief appearance marks the moment things go From Bad to Worse for Nachiroux.
• Lazy Backup: Played straight most of the time; characters assigned to "support" slots, while they provide some benefits and can even get followup attacks, will not normally join the fight if the people in their attacker slots are killed. Averted with the Wonder Corsair, who has a skill that allows them to swap in for any attacker who dies.
• Magic Knight: The Aster Ashe facet, who wield magic staves as weapons (and get double attack with them), making them both powerful attackers and spellcasters.
• Marathon Level: The Grand Cathedral is an utterly massive 3651 randomized Years long. For a little over an actual year from the game's Japanese release this meant the dungeon took on average 40 to 60 hours to complete while speedrunning. In April of 2022 it was patched to have elevators, which skip 30-300 floors at a time, spawn more frequently and added a Witch Petition to have Eureka notify you of when one has so you'd know to slow down and look for it. These changes brought the time down to just a few hours, and were carried over to the English release by default.
• The Multiverse: Turns out Galleria is a Non-Linear Sequel, and there are entire alternate and parallel worlds all running adjacent, both of similar stories and entirely different ones as well. After a Bad End at the end of the first arc, the basis of this concept becomes a major plot point as Eureka and Nachiroux gradually unveil the scope of the adventure before them in hopes of saving what's left of these other worlds.
• Once More, with Clarity: After the reveal that the version of Nachiroux we've been playing in the second half of the game actually goes on to become Madam Marta from the first half of the game, several key scenes with Madam Marta are shown with more detail to make it clear what was really going on.
• Our Clones Are Identical: Ghilruda dabbles in this, bringing up a number of cloning tropes. She keeps a small army of copies of herself to engage others in battle, where they usually end up dying, repeatedly revealing herself to have survived. Her main goal in life is to amass a harem of herself to indulge in a selfcestuous lesbian orgy until the world comes to its end. She sells out the Moon Society, and by extension all of Alstella, to Cecilia in order to learn how to create a perfect clone of herself which is much later implied, and confirmed in the art book, to be a more realistic take on cloning as Faus first shows up as a small child and is very much so her own person.
• Really Gets Around: When traveling about, one conversation leads into another and Eureka casually reveals that she's effectively had sex with many males of the local town, young and adult alike. Unlike most examples, however, Eureka is doing this out of an urge to want to make other people happy — and was all but exploited into sex by all of her partners without her own happiness in consideration since childhood. Nachiroux is initially baffled and thinks she's being taken for a ride, and then horrified by the implications of this. The situation becomes much worse once Eureka's father comes into the picture, as he pushes Eureka into doing anything for money for him including trying to get her to marry Count Bismont for money, heavily implying that he had a hand in this by whoring his own daughter out.
• Steampunk: Alstella is set in a world like this, with aesthetics loosely based on the 1920's coupled with steam and Magitek technology far beyond what that would usually imply.