Video Game / Limbus Company

Face the sin, save the E.G.O.

"Eternally in hell
We live
By default."

— In Hell We Live, Lament, Limbus Company's Expository Theme Tune

Limbus Company is a Turn-Based Strategy RPG Gacha Game developed and published by South Korean independent video game studio Project Moon. It was originally slated for release on December 23, 2022, but was delayed and released for mobile and PC platforms on February 26, 2023.

Set in Project Moon's dystopic shared universe some time after the events of Library of Ruina, the game follows the story of the aforementioned Limbus Company, an organization composed of thirteen individuals known as "Sinners" who are tasked with exploring ruined branches of the now-destroyed Lobotomy Corporation to recover the Golden Boughs - the essence of the corporation’s energy production technology - as well as any Enkephalin, E.G.O. and other valuables still on the site, coming into conflict with City denizens and escaped Abnormalities in the process. In order to do so, the Sinners have the ability to take different "Identities", where they assume the form of other versions of themselves from alternate realities. The tenth of these Sinners and Limbus Company's manager, an amnesiac with a prosthetic clock for a head named Dante, has the ability to resurrect any of the Sinners after they've been killed.

The game has a tie-in Webcomic/Webnovel known as Leviathan, which stars their guide Vergilius and serves as a sort of prequel that shows his story prior to the events of the game.

• Previews: Official Promotion Video, Combat Systems Introduction, Combat Demonstration, Abnormality Combat Systems Introduction, Story Gameplay Demonstration.
• Character Promos: Yi Sang, Don Quixote, Emil Sinclair, Faust, Meursault, Ryōshū, Heathcliff, Ishmael, Hong Lu, Rodion, Gregor, Outis

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"Yahoo! Rocinante, ride on! We shall list tropes at our enemies!":

• Absurdly Sharp Blade: In Canto IV Shrenne is killed mid-sentence by a blade cutting her, and the concrete wall she had her back against, leaving a thin surgical line going from head to groin that instantly kills her. The feat is so quick and so unexpected that the Sinners can't do anything but speculate that the assassin behind the wall had to be a high-ranking Shi Association member.
• Accent Adaptation: The English translation gives a few of the Sinners accents or speaking quirks that, for rather obvious reasons, can't work in the original Korean:
  • Heathcliff is the most notable, with all of his dialogues being filled to the brim with British slang.
  • Gregor, Rodya and Don Quixote occasionally add in words from their nationality: German for Gregor, Russian for Rodya and Spanish for Don Quixote.
  • While heavily downplayed due to his dialogue most of the time being very proper and stiff, Meursault will occasionally drop in French words like "non" instead of no.
• A Day in the Limelight: So far, each of the Inferno story's Cantos focus on one of the Sinners in particular, showing off their backstory and motivations. This is eventually revealed to be intentional In-Universe; for whatever reason, each Golden Bough resonates with a particular Sinner and said Sinner effectively acts as a "compass" of sorts to locate it. In that process, the Golden Bough will create an illusionary, but still very physical, environment around it based on said Sinner's past.
  • Canto I, The Outcast, focuses on Gregor.
  • Canto II, The Unloving, focuses on Rodion.
  • Canto III, The Unconfronting, focuses on Sinclair.
  • Canto IV, The Unchanging, focuses on Yi Sang.
  • Canto V, The Evil Defining, focuses on Ishmael.
  • Canto VI, The Heartbreaking, focuses on Heathcliff.
  • Canto VII, The Dream Ending, focuses on Don Quixote.
• After-Action Report: After defeating Abnormalities for the first time, you unlock the ability to view a report on them the next time you face them in battle, written by one of the twelve Sinners, and occasionally commented on by others. As you interact with that Abnormality more in battle, you can unlock further logs written by the same Sinner.
• All There in the Manual: Dante's Notes serves as a manual about many basic concepts in the City that one might have picked up from prior games like Lobotomy Corporation and Library of Ruina, told through the eyes of the amnesiac Dante who is more or less learning all these things for the first time (like some of the players). This includes information about Fixer Associations, Syndicates, the City's technology, and Limbus debut concepts like Uptying.
• Alternate Self: The Sinners' Identity system functions as such, with the player being able to summon alternate versions of them during fights. For example, Meursault as a member of R Corp's Rhino Team rather than a common Sinner, or Don Quixote as a member of W Corp's Cleanup Crew. With certain identities, the Sinners outright replace already established characters in their role - For example, in the N Corp. timeline, Faust is The One Who Grips instead of Kromer.
  • In Canto VI, the Sinners discover a character from a Mirror World running around in the main timeline: An alternate version of Heathcliff, who has made it his mission to kill every Heathcliff after going mad from grief.
• Always a Bigger Fish: When Pilot's old LCCB squad were cornered and about to be pummeled to paste by Big Brother of the Middle, Ricardo, their assailants stop cold in their tracks and decide to book it when confronted by the approach of The Pallid Whale, one of the Five Calamities of the Great Lake. Given how terrifying Ricardo alone is, it speaks volumes of just how much of a monster The Pallid Whale must be.
• Anti-Frustration Features: It has quite a few.
  • Failing or quitting a stage or dungeon gives you back the lunacy or modules spent.
  • The Lunacy Monthly Card does not require you to login, which lightens the pressure to login even on days when you can't.
  • As for the gacha:
    • The standard rate for both E.G.O and 3* Identities is 4%, rather high for a gacha game. The game also at times rewards players with tickets that guarantee a 000 Character to be pulled.
    • Many gacha games only allow you to get a character's full potential by pulling multiple duplicates of them in order to promote minmaxers to spend even more money - not the case in Limbus, in which duplicates have no utility beyond giving you some (already plentifully grindable) character shards as a consolation price. While this does mean that pulling duplicates is considered a 'bad' result, it also means that when you obtain a character you get them at full potential. In addition Season 2 introduced an additional Uptying level for Identities that costs character shards on top of thread, making duplicates more worthwhile.
    • When an E.G.O is gotten from the gacha, it is removed from the pool permanently. This heightens the chance of getting other E.G.O or 000 Identities.
    • The battle pass seasons last fairly long, around a few months. This allows for people who started in the middle of a season to still get all the rewards and for anyone to build up enough shards to eventually buy an Identity or E.G.O.
    • One can buy exactly the E.G.O or Identity they want from the Dispensary once they build up enough egoshards (00 Identities cost 150, 000 and EGO cost 400), and that's on top of a spark feature added with Season 2. There are a few limitations, such as a seasonal identity not being able to purchase from the Dispensary the season after their debut, but in the long run, everything is available. E.G.O from the previous season's battlepass are also added to the Dispensary the following one were a player to miss a season, or not buy the Limbus Pass.
    • The battle pass also gives Nominal Egoshard crates for every level attained after 60, 1 if you're free2play, 3 if you've bought the Limbus Pass. Each crate gives 1-3 egoshards of a character of your choice, so sufficient grinding (average of 200 boxes for a 000 Identity) can allow you buy something of your choice rather than pull on them.
  • Certain boss fights have a 'soft cap' on how long they can take to prevent stalemate situations, a notable one is the final boss of Canto III, who will take more damage when under 50% health while also boosting her own damage output - which means you either manage to beat the fight faster, or you're the one beaten to a pulp.
  • Completing Mirror Dungeons, which are effectively brief Rogue Like experiences where your chosen Sinners have preset levels, rewards you with plentiful amounts of Pass XP to level up quickly and gain the rewards - a single run of the Hard Mode of Mirrors of Mirrors gives 75 XP with the weekly bonus, enough for 7 levels and a half of the battlepass in one go.
  • Character Select Forcing starts to occur from Canto IV's Story Dungeon onward. To accomodate this, the Sinner that gets this also gets an E.G.O. gift that raises their level and Uptie to the maximum for the Story Dungeon, making them a viable party member even if you didn't spent much to maximise their levels.
• Anti-Hero Team: The Sinners are an entire group of dysfunctional and morally messy characters (with some like Heathcliff and Ryōshū on the border of Villain Protagonist only held in check by Vergilius) working for a very dubious company with an unknown goal. Even Dante, who due to their amnesia is the least used to the City, is not exactly a paragon of heroism. That being said, some of them like Gregor, Rodion and Don Quixote are (relatively) more morally stable and affable, although Don's heroics tend to put the rest of the group in bad situations and at best ends up putting the gang at odds with people just doing their jobs.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: Even though the plot usually has the whole crew traveling together, most missions only allow up to 5 playable characters on your team. Justified however, in that Dante is their lifeline and leaving them undefended is not a good idea.
• Arc Symbol:
  • Canto I has apples, as a reference to the scene in The Metamorphosis where Gregor Samsa's father throws apples at him. Two of the abnormalities are apple-themed, and Gregor's backstory reveals Hermann trained Gregor by having him slice apples with his cockroach arm.
  • Canto IV has mirrors and wings.
    • In Yi Sang's past, his invention that impressed the League of Nine was a mirror he dubbed "Yeonsim", that showed multiple possibilities and was one of the few sources of color in T Corp's Nest. The gifts in that Canto's mirror dungeons are four mirror shards representing the four phases of Yi Sang's life as a member of the League of Nine.
    • The wings not only reference how Yi Sang is named after the author of The Wings, it refers to how Yi Sang wants to fly away and be free, but he was broken down so badly he doesn't think he can anymore. Sang Yi, the idealized version of himself has wings to fly with, and reminds him that he's a reflection of Yi Sang. The ending of his chapter has him deal the final blow to Dongrang, gaining the wings Sang Yi has.
  • Canto V has ropes, sunsets and a compass.
    • Ropes are a general symbol of the bond between Ishmael and Queequeg, as well as a symbol of Ishmael's sanity. Upon entering the Dungeon for Canto V, the player is given a noose (a general symbol of self-destruction and suicide) as an E.G.O. Gift, which causes Ishmael's gameplay-related Sanity Slippage effect. However, the player gains more and more ropes (ones that seem to have been fashioned by Queequeg) throughout the dungeon, ending with the player obtaining an Unbreakable Knot, one that gives a buff to Ishmael if a party member dies.
    • The sunset also represents the bond between Ishmael and Queequeg. When the chapter ends, the Sinners go outside and find that the sun is setting in the sky.
    • The compass represents Ishmael having lost her direction and path to Ahab's influence, Ishmael's overwhelming desire for revenge consuming herself. Her Image Song, "Compass", refers to how her time with Ahab robbed her of her life before, and how this time she's moving on and charting her own path without Ahab, choosing to follow Dante instead of the old sea captain.
• Arc Villain:
  • Canto III has Kromer, the fanatically deranged leader of Nagel und Hammer and Sinclair's former tormentor.
  • Canto IV has Dongbaek, the leader of a terrorist organization who is really manipulating its members for her own selfish goals, and Dongrang, a jealous scientist who is characterized entirely by his Faux Affably Evil facade and his gluttony for recognition, fame, and respect.
  • Canto V has the charismatic and cruel Captain Ahab, the captain of the Pequod before it was eaten.
  • Canto VI has a Big Bad Duumvirate between Nelly, Linton Edgar, and "Matthew"/Erlking Heathcliff, each of the three being equally responsible for the major events in the Canto, with Erlking Heathcliff being the most direct and persistent threat by the final part of the story.
• Armor-Piercing Attack:
  • Sinner abilities that deal Blunt damage type work extremely well against high-Defense enemies like Abnormalities or N Corp Inquisitors. Weirdly enough, Pierce damage is not as effective against the same enemies despite what its name implies, with associated attacks not having any type bonuses.
  • The Rupture status effect deals a flat amount of extra damage whenever the one suffering from the effect is hit, bypassing any resistance or damage reduction.
• Art Evolution:
  • Just like how Library of Ruina was a big visual step-up from Lobotomy Corporation, so too did Limbus improve on pretty much everything on the visual end of things - the sprites used in cutscenes are more colored and detailed and the art of the various Identities is downright beautiful, the battle-sprites, while still Super-Deformed to a certain extent, is more proportional and colored, and the combat animations are far more detailed and have more frames of animation than in Ruina.
  • This game shows how E.G.O can look like if it's completely individualized. Back in Lobotomy Corporation, E.G.O looked similar due to its business purposes, and it became more elaborate in Library of Ruina. This time, E.G.O is extracted for the Sinners personally, causing it to be expressed differently ^note  Rodion's Fourth Match Flame looks like the dress a poor girl would want, except all burnt, whereas Yi Sang's looks like a Mad Scientist for each Sinner. This also causes their Corrosion forms to take on different forms.
• April Fools' Day: On April 1st 2023, Project Moon released an April Fools cutscene that played upon opening the game titled "A Midspring Nights' Dream". Wherein Dante, after suddenly collapsing on the bus, starts to experience several alternate realities where they interact with different versions of Vergilius that reference various other gacha titles like Blue Archive and Arknights, before Vergilius manages to fix their apparently malfunctioning prosthetic and everything goes back to normal.
• Badass in a Nice Suit: As per Project Moon tradition, the Sinners all sport snazzy suits to provide a professional badass image. You can see these outfits on the game's site and on their official Twitter.
• Bad Powers, Good People: Well 'good' may be stretching it, but the Sinners can take on the Identity of some outright villainous factions while keeping their current personality intact, such as Rodion and Mersault's Nagel und Hammer Identities.
• Barefisted Monk: This is the hat of the Liu Section Identities, who utilize martial arts in conjunction with Power Fists in combat to do damage and inflict Burn on their enemies.
• Beach Episode: Canto 4.5 is more or less one. With the Sinners trying to have typical beach fun like playing volleyball in-between working on making Mephistopheles seaworthy and fighting Trash Crabs.
• Between My Legs: In Canto III during the flashback to the deaths of Sinclair's family, at one point Kromer walks closer to him, until the horror of the scene before him is framed between her legs. Unlike most examples of the trope, this is framed as neither visually appealing nor dramatically tense. It's an absolutely terrifying view through Sinclair's eyes, where he can see both his dead or dying family members, and know that the person who's responsible is right in front of him.
• Bigger on the Inside: One of the cutscenes in the Dante's Notes mini-story reveals that the backdoor of Mephistopheles leads to an infinite corridor filled with doors, which lead to the Sinners' lodgings whenever the bus is stopped.
• Bilingual Bonus:
  • Each promo video also has subtitles for the language of the original work. For example, Faust is named after a character from a German work, and her promo video also has an option for German subtitles. Bonus points for Heathcliff's English subtitles being noted as United Kingdom English, and Hong Lu has options for simplified and traditional Chinese.
  • Yi Sang and Ryoshu make language puns on their own names when introducing themselves.
• Bittersweet Ending: Canto VI leans heavily towards the bitter. Catherine gets retroactively erased from existence across all worlds to allow the Heathcliffs of the mirror words to lead happier lives without feeling bound to Wuthering Heights just because of her, with only the main world's Heathcliff and Dante remembering she ever existed, and in spite of Vergilius going so far as to breach his contract to help the sinners, the Golden Bough that hasn't been drained of its energy ends up getting stolen by Nelly. Though while he is distraught that she is gone, he at least learned that Catherine did truly care for him all along and finally managed to confess his feelings for her, and his new voiceline for Bodysack pretty much states that he hasn't given up hope on eventually bringing her back.
• Bizarro Elements: On top of the recurring Slash - Pierce - Blunt attack elements in the franchise, this game adds Sin Affinities which by all intents and purposes act as elements, except they're named and styled after the seven deadly sins instead of things like fire, water, etc. Some of Sins, however, seem to be very heavily themed around particular standard elements; Envy (purple) being nearly universally associated with electricity in E.G.Os and E.G.O gifts, for example.
• Blessed with Suck: Mirror Dungeon events that increase your characters' levels seem like one of the few unambiguously good results from an event. Unfortunately, if you're of a higher level than an enemy, you don't get a teamwide SP boost when killing them, which means that encounters that you could plow through over and over with a bit of proper EGO resource management become slogs because your team is SP starved.
• Blood Is the New Black: Every member of Nagel und Hammer wears white armor that is covered in blood, highlighting their fanaticism. Any Sinner with a Nagel und Hammer Identity is also covered in blood.
• Bloodier and Gorier: In contrast to its prequels deaths are very bloody and accompanied with visceral sounds, Instead of simply mostly Bloodless Carnage like in Lobotomy Corporation and Everything Fades in Library of Ruina, both killed enemies and sinners are depicted as bloodied heaps of flesh and (in the case of humans) clothes and weapons on the floor, and the story is much more liberal with visceral violence.
• Body Horror:
  • The former G Corp soldiers encountered in Canto I have insectoid parts growing out of their bodies or replacing entire limbs. The story shows that this was common procedure through the old G Corp's troops during the Smoke War. Gregor was the model test subject, his only obvious transformation being his right arm is now insectile, though the employee manual implies he can transmogrify his entire body further under stress.
  • In Canto III, various N Corp Inquisitors in the Canto's dungeon undergo severe E.G.O. corrosion that turns them into Abnormality-like creatures. Kromer in particular undergoes a transformation which turns her into a hideous Peccatulum-like monstrosity from the waist down during the second phase of her boss fight.
• Boring, but Practical: The base identities of the Sinners don't really have any special gimmicks and mainly focus on the major status effects of the game like Bleed, Tremor, Rupture, Sinking, and Poise. None of them even have access to Burn or Charge, let alone unique status interactions like Sinking Deluge or boosted Poise crits. However, they are unique in that they upgrade based on game progression, and by the end of Chapter 2 they will be upgraded to Uptie Tier III for free, upgrading their attacks, obtaining a third skill and a support passive when not in the group. It's totally possible for the base identities to be stronger and more useful than non-Uptied gacha Identities, and even when it comes to Uptie IV, LCB Identities cost less to upgrade than the gacha Identities, making them enticing first choices for newer players to upgrade despite their lack of flair.
• Boss Bonanza: As Canto VI doesn't take place near a Lobotomy Corp. branch, the climax of the chapter is instead made up of a long series of human bosses; The third part starts with Distorted Heathcliff's boss fight right after the previous part's Climax Boss, and later throws in Erlking Heathcliff and Nelly as midbosses for good measure.
• Boss Rush: Refraction Railways pit the player against some of the Abnormalities and plot-relevant King Mooks of each season in a series of focused encounters, all while the player must stick with the set of Identities they've chosen and must carry any remaining SP and HP they have on their Sinners for each next battle. Each Railway will also slot in a stage featuring a set of regular enemies, like the K Corp staff in Line 1 and the T Corp Collectors in Line 2.
• Boss Warning Siren: Certain tough bosses, such as the Final Bosses of story dungeons, certain Abnormalities, and high-level human enemies will have a special intro before their fight, namely the appearance of a red runic circle and 7-pointed star inlaid with the most well-known phrase from the Divine Comedy.
  PROELIUM FATALE: LASCIATE OGNI SPERANZA, VOI CH'ENTRATE^TranslationFatal Battle: Abandon all hope, ye who enter here
• Bragging Rights Reward: The reward for finishing a Refraction Railway under a specific total turn count is a fancy banner you can display on your profile and...nothing else. The actual practical rewards are given out by simply beating the fights regardless of how long they take. The closest to an exception to that is Line 2's Terminus, and even then the rewards are only dependent on how many Cycles you've gone through, regardless of turn count.
• Break Meter: The health bar itself serves this function for both Sinners and enemy units. On a given character's health bar are several colored thresholds that, should their hitpoints dip below these defined tiers, will cause them to become Staggered where they will be unable to act or defend themselves for one turn. Staggered units and Sinners also take additional damage while in this state, and it's possible for hard-hitting attacks to knock them down multiple thresholds, which if done in the same turn will dial up the damage multiplier even further. Each Stagger threshold only applies once per battle regardless of healing, and regular staggers can only last for one turn, even if the target was knocked below another threshold during the vulnerable turn.
• Breather Episode:
  • Chapter 2 is much more relaxed and has significantly more comedic moments than the previous chapter. While dark themes are discussed and shown, no major named character die and it ends with the Sinners obtaining their first Golden Bough successfully. Chapter 3, however, is an entirely different beast.
  • Intervallo 3.5 is also much more lighthearted and low-stakes than the two Cantos between it, as the Distortion the Sinners face is resolved through much less effort, and the Sinners get in some comedic antics (here being a cooking competition).
  • Intervallo 5.5 is also more lighthearted and comedic, having the sinners fight Christmas gnomes in theme with the holiday.
• Brutal Bonus Level:
  • Refraction Railways are currently the hardest content in the game: a series of very hard, max-level balanced fights against both old and new bosses, that all must be done with a single team that carry over any HP and sanity between fights. They're significantly harder than anything the main story has to offer, with bosses regularly having 4-digit HP and rather unforgiving mechanics, and abandoning it to change your team forces you back to the start. That being said, the rewards are well worth it: such as large amounts of Thread, free Decaextraction Tickets and even tickets that guarantee a 000 character if used.
  • The Hard Mode of the Mirror Dungeon has you fighting top-of-the-line enemies with ridiculously inflated stats and clashes that scale further as you go on, with enemies often being over a dozen levels above the level cap for Sinners along with benefiting from other passive buffs, while sometimes also being more restrictive on the units you can start off with at the beginning. Of course, if you can actually beat it, you'll be rewarded with a lot more XP and Starlight, as well as being able to claim the reward equivalent of 3 runs of a normal Mirror Dungeon in one go.
• Call-Back:
  • Many to Lobotomy Corporation, with the gameplay revolving around exploring L Corp's ruined branches after its fall at the end of that game.
  • Some of the Abnormality byproducts fought in the dungeons between floor bosses resemble the mutated test subjects shown in Chapter 15 of Leviathan.
• Canis Major: The Alleyway Watchdog resembles a huge wolf with multiple heads growing out of a single neck, with telephone poles placed across its back.
• Capitalism Is Bad: While Project Moon games were always critical of capitalism, Limbus is the most blatant about it, as a game revolving around investigating the inside workings of Wings rather than Syndicates and the Fixer community, and thus displays the corrupt system and insane corporations in all their ugliness: Of particular note is Canto IV which shows how inventors and their creations are corrupted by capitalism to further its own ends, such as geolocating tags meant to be used to find missing children being turned into mandatory monitoring devices for T Corp factory workers.
• Casino Episode: The majority of Canto II involves the Sinners infiltrating a casino in J Corp's Backstreets to enter a gambling match where victory will grant them access to a Golden Bough. Wherein, through a variety of shenanigans, the cast proceed to battle, gamble, dance, and insult their way through the casino's floors in order to reach their prize.
• Casting Gag: In Chapter 3.5, Hong Lu refers to Gregor as a boss with big, meaty claws. This stems from Gregor sharing voice actors with Mr. Krabs in the latter show's Korean dub.
• Cerebus Rollercoaster: Cantos, and especially the Event 'Intervallos' between major story chapters, are all over the place in terms of tone - from crushingly depressive, bleak but ultimately hopeful, to relatively lighthearted and comedic. Sometimes the tone even shifts mid-chapter.
• Cerebus Syndrome: What would otherwise set Intervallo 4.5 as a Breather Episode just like the previous one quickly loses its lighthearted tone once Ishmael starts undergoing Sanity Slippage over the news that the Sinners are going to the Great Lake to fetch their next Golden Bough, with her trying incredibly hard to convince the Sinners in any manner to delay the trip to that place, even resorting to violence, making the others pretty weary of her.
• Characters Dropping Like Flies: Generally speaking: If a colorful cast of characters is introduced in a Canto, there's a good chance they'll be dead at the end of it. Canto IV is notable for literally every newly introduced character aside from Alfonso dying at the end of it.
• Cherubic Choir: Kromer's fight features an angelic-sounding choir singing in English. The lyrics that appear on screen during the first phase evoke the feeling of a Christmas Carol. The second phase sounds more akin to high-pitched Ominous Latin Chanting.
• Chunky Salsa Rule: Practically every killing blow results in a bloody mess and a corpse, but certain powerful single strikes with a lot of impact (such as Kurokumo Rodion's Sky-Clearing Slash) will send chunks flying across the entire arena.
• Christmas Episode: "Miracle in District 20" was released a few days after Christmas and involves the Sinners getting tangled up in various shenanigans involving evil gnomes from the Outskirts who use Human Resources to make presents for others.
• Christmas in July: In Canto III, despite taking place during February, part of Kromer's plan to torment Sinclair includes the massacre of the Calw townspeople and turning their viscera into gory Christmas decor, complete with decorated pine trees, music, and lights. The Sinners note that the events most definitely do not take place during the appropriate season for it all.
  • In addition, "Miracle in District 20" takes place In-Universe not close to Christmas. The Sinners lampshade how the gnomes celebrate a Christmas-like holiday when it is at least three months before Christmas, and that this is similar to Canto III.
• City of Adventure: Even more so than Library of Ruina, since you’re now the ones doing the adventuring. For every deadly danger the City has to offer, there’s a proportionally great opportunity for talented and well-armed denizens to achieve fame and riches by eliminating these dangers... or becoming one themselves.
• Combination Attack: If you're able to have your Sinners perform consecutive attacks of the same sin, all of those attacks get more powerful, with the first level of combo being triggered by two in a row and the second by three or more in a row.
• Continuity Cameo: Ezra makes a voice-only cameo in the "Yield My Flesh To Claim Their Bones" event as a member of Limbus Company's Distortion Task Force. Additional dialogue also makes it clear that Moses is the leader of said task force.
• Contractual Boss Immunity: Refraction Railways bosses starting from Line 2 will often have passives that cap the amount of certain debuff stacks that can be applied to them, preventing players from stacking up enough debuffs to instantly vaporize them. On the other hand, some of them may also gain new weaknesses to specific debuffs.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: While Library of Ruina did have some antagonistic Wings (namely W Corp, R Corp and the Head itself) the game was mostly focused on the Fixer and Syndicates sides of the City - meanwhile, Wings have been a major focus in Limbus Company in both story, background lore and antagonists, with several antagonistic Wing employees and executives featured. Furthermore, while the Fixer and Syndicate community in Library of Ruina are at the worst Faux Affably Evil, the personnel of Wings are really as batshit insane and monstrous as their reputation suggests. This game is also the first time we see a Wing CEO in the flesh (other than the Player Character of Lobotomy Corporation) in the form of K Corp's Alfonso.
• Cool Car: Limbus Company B moves around the City in a vehicle that looks like a cross between a train and a bus called 'Mephistopheles'. A cutscene reveals that it's powered by a hybrid of extracted Enkephalin and ground up organic matter used as biofuel. Both of which are extracted by the Sinners inserting subjects into the vehicle's fuel intake. Faust reveals that more can be extracted from living subjects than dead ones.
• The Corruption: The monolith that the Sinners encounter in the third Intervallo acts as this. It's a giant black stele with tendrils coming off of it, proximity to which and being in contact with the tentacles appears to encourage those affected to Distort.
• Cover Innocent Eyes and Ears: When Ryōshū is out-swearing a crime syndicate, Rodion covers Sinclair's ears with her hands.
• Crapsack World: This installment of the Project Moon franchise gives an even closer and grittier view of the City, as unlike Lobotomy Corporation and Library of Ruina, the main characters in this game and currently living in the City rather than just commenting on it, forcing them to face the worst parts of the City head-on. There are also some truly venal personalities around as opposed to the ones invited to the Library that are at least Faux Affably Evil.
• Creepy Basement: Though the basement of Sinclair's house itself isn't seen, it apparently has an access point to a ventilation shaft that led right into an underground branch of the Lobotomy Corporation. Specifically, to a vent that looks right into the cell of an Abnormality.
• Critical Status Buff: The common gimmick of Shi Section 5 Identities is a huge buff to their core abilities when an associated Sinner is at low health, with Ishmael gaining Poise stacks at 50% HP or lower, and Heathcliff doing more skill damage at quarter health and below, respectively.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • The battle in the prologue is this against the Sinners, who are rapidly dispatched one by one by the people who were trying to attack Dante.
  • Canto III has two of these. The first wherein the Sinners are up against Siegfried, who violently disables them all in less than a minute. The second when Demian appears just when Kromer is about to wipe out the Sinners, and cuts her distorted from in half with just a motion of his arm.
• Cutting Off the Branches: The game, as well as the prequel Webcomic, confirm that the Golden Ending of Library of Ruina to be the canonical one, and in Canto 4.5 we even encounter the Molar Boatworks, the same Molar fixer team fought in the previous game, who were freed along with the other prisoners of the Library in the true ending.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: Inverted in Canto III, where Nagel und Hammer are so averse to prosthetics that they have a fanatical obsession with flesh purity. This culminates in some of them getting corroded by organic Abnormalities.
• Damage-Increasing Debuff: The Rupture status effect causes each subsequent hit landed on the target to deal additional damage until its stack count on them is depleted.
• Darker and Edgier: This is the first game in the series that warrants an explicit 18+ warning, which is prominently placed in the game's twitter bio. Without the isolating factors of the Library or the inside of Lobotomy Corp and its convenient censoring programming, all of the nastiness of the city is on display. It's also here where you'll see all the truly nasty people with no morals whatsoever running around, unlike in Library of Ruina where the entities you meet are Faux Affably Evil at worst.
• Death Is Cheap: After realizing that Dante can bring all of them back to life no matter what state they're put into, the Sinners become less worried about their own safety and start to treat the idea of death or severe injury as a minor inconvenience at most. This idea discourages Dante, as they're the one suffering the most every time they need to rewind the Sinners' deaths.
• Death or Glory Attack: Most single coin skills have extremely high bonuses if the coin flips heads, but because it relies on one coin, there's more of a risk to their clashing potential should it land tails. Hong Lu's Tingtang identity has this real bad, with a skill with 5 base power, but a +25 if its single coin lands heads. Landing heads will result in a dead enemy, but a tails will end in a dead Hong Lu.
• Denser and Wackier:
  • Yes, really, and not just Black Humor. In stark contrast to the humor from the previous two games, which was both sparing and usually very dry, things quickly turn for the silly as your band of twelve horribly dysfunctional Fixers bumble their way through their missions, as if each one were a D&D player trying to come up with a cool or silly idea to get themselves out of whatever situation they'd blundered their way into (sometimes to shocking success).
  • Chapter 2 is definitely one compared to the mostly dark and depressing events in the previous chapter. A Heist Episode that goes horribly, comedically wrong as the Sinners continuously disregard plans, a Syndicate filled with Mexican Mariachis that force people to dance, Dante showing they're Not So Above It All, and it's all written with a generally lighter tone.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • Identities that get stronger with less health, like the [Shi Section 5] Identities or [The Pequod Harpooner] Heathcliff, can be borderline unstoppable once their HP gets low enough. But with how the damage and stagger system works, it can be tricky getting them to meet these conditions without getting killed. Moreover it makes Damage Over Time effects like Bleed and Burn substantially more risky, and gates most healing skills in the game as a majority of them either target the whole party or the allies with the lowest HP.
  • Tails coin Identities, that is, Identities that lose power if they land heads on their coins rather than gain power. These identities deal more damage at lower sanity, rather than higher, which clashes with the design philosophy of any other identity, and means they are always teetering on the verge of Corrosion, which can absolutely destroy your team. However, these Identities roll higher numbers than any other if working at maximum potential, and do have means of reducing their sanity to get there. Played right, these identities can burst through damage races and prevent enemy offense with sheer high numbers. Played wrong, they literally kill your own party faster than anybody else.
• Distracted by the Shiny: Once they enter the casino's first floor, Don Quixote is enraptured by the variety of slot machines and other flashing devices throughout the gambling floor which she apparently hasn't seen before. Dante is intrigued by them to a lesser extent themself.
• Double Entendre: Aside from the implication of the title of Nagel Und Hammer's leader being "The One Who Grips", there are several other innuendos sprinkled throughout their ranks' attack names. Most notably "Hard Nailing" and "Deep Thrust".
• Downer Beginning: For those who played Library of Ruina but skipped Leviathan, the prologue is a reminder that the City is still a place where a bus that consumes still-living people for fuel is not only considered normal but downright economic, as the increasingly-rare Enkephalin it draws from people is done at a lesser and sustainable rate because the protein from the body acts as a secondary power generator. It was easy to forget all of that when the main characters were effectively outsiders looking in, but now the viciously inhumane sides of the City are front and center.
• Downer Ending: If the Sinners failed to get a Golden Bough, you'd bet things have ended grimly for them.
  • Canto I: Just as the Sinners finally retrieve the Golden Bough, Hermann's team swoop in at the last minute to take it from them while they're too injured to resist, meaning Yuri died an utterly meaningless death.
  • Canto VI: All the Sinners got this time was a fizzled-out Golden Bough that practically does nothing, as in the chase to get it, Heathcliff goes through immense emotional turmoil throughout Wuthering Heights, ending with every single version of Catherine in every Mirror World erased, including his own world's own. The only silver lining lies in how this world's Heathcliff and Catherine finally admitted their love for each other, where every other version of them failed to. Meanwhile, Vergilius willingly violated his contract to help the Sinners, only for them to fail to get either Golden Bough, as Nelly cuts in after Erlking Heathcliff's defeat and takes the still-functional one that was used to power Catherine's coffin.
• Easily Forgiven: Even after Don violates a taboo and triggers a Code Purple that brings the finest forces of K Corp down on their heads, once Siegfried kills the group no one gives them any more trouble even after they're revived despite the grievousness of the infraction. Apparently considering the Sinners being killed as having served their time despite being resurrected.
• Eating the Enemy: While they don't do so directly on the battlefield, it's implied that all the Trash Crabs felled by the Sinners and Molar Boatworks personnel end up on their dinnerplates in one form or another, since they serve as one of this District's Backstreet's primary source of food. Olga even mentions making wine out of their brains.
• Eldritch Location: Canto V takes place in the Great Lake, an ocean-sized body of water that not only brings an uncountable number of Weird Weathers, but is also inhabited by gigantic whales with the ability to merge with the bodies of dead sailors.
• Empowered Badass Normal: By the game's setting standards, all of the Sinners besides Gregor could be considered fairly mundane Badass Normal fighters, with the major thing changing between Identities being their training and available equipment, along with the occasional Power Armor or prosthetic enhancement - however, permanent E.G.O Identities (such as Spicebush Yi Sang) allow the Sinner in question to perform the closest equivalent to magic in the setting, like Spicebush Yi Sang using his fan to send out golden, flowery waves to strike his enemies.
• Ensemble Cast: The game focuses on the 12 Sinners, Dante, and Vergilius. While each Canto focuses on one character, that doesn't mean the others are left out.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • In Canto I, despite what anyone thought of Yuri, her rather tragic end is played as a very somber moment and all the Sinners are quiet as the Bus makes its way to a new destination.
  • The Sinners tend to be incredibly violent and wild normally, but in Chapter 3, they are generally very disturbed by the sight of Nagel und Hammer making a bloody spectacle of the people of Sinclair's hometown. Even more so when they find out the reason for this massacre is because, by the order's (and N Corp's own) standards, they believe people who wear or make prosthetic body parts are heretics.
  • In Intervallo I, Outis insults the name of the Eunbong's restaurant, calling it tacky. The owner reveals he named the restaurant after his mother. The music immediately cuts and everyone stands awkwardly after realizing how badly she'd insulted him. Even Ryoshu thinks she went a step too far, and Outis is quick to backpedal.
• Evolving Title Screen: The game's title screen frequently changes to coincide with the game's current plotline.
  • When Canto V released, the title screen changed to Ishmael wearing her Blind Obession E.G.O.
  • When the "Miracle in District 20" event released, the title screen changed to show Don Quixote and Heathcliff looking at the Gnomes while Santata looms ominously behind them.
  • When the "Yield My Flesh to Claim Their Bones" event happened, the title screen changed to Distorted Bamboo-Hatted Kim surrounded by corpses.
• Expy: The Bongy headchickens encountered during the Hell's Chicken event are basically Half-Life headcrabs, but in poultry form, complete with a M.O. where they would latch themselves onto the heads of potential victims and drive their bodies around like a puppet.
• The Faceless: In flashbacks, the faces of Sinclair's family are half cloaked in shadow, so they're never fully seen. Though in reality they became this completely after they all underwent procedures for full body prosthetic replacements, replacing their normal human heads with Non-Human Heads.
• Failed a Spot Check:
  • Somehow, no one notices that Ryoshu apparently never changed her clothes into a Tingtang outfit until after they'd all entered the casino during Canto II, where her Limbus Company uniform gave her away immediately.
  • According to side dialogue, the Sinners N Corp Identities were told that Dante's clock head is not, in fact, a prosthetic but just a mask. Somehow all of them believe this without question.
• Falling Chandelier of Doom: In Chapter 2, while being cased by Casino security guards, Ryōshū tries to invoke this trope by taking Yi Sang's knife and flinging it into one of the Casino's chandeliers, making it fall down...Which then does absolutely nothing.
  Dante: <So, uh, what was that for? Ryōshū?>
  Ryōshū: ...A performance.
• Family Extermination: Because of their family's involvement in the creation of prosthetics, Sinclair's mother, father, and older sister were all slaughtered by fanatics from Nagel Und Hammer. Save for Sole Survivor Sinclair, who was only spared because of Kromer's interest in him.
• Fanatical Fire: As a part of Nagel Und Hammer's "purge" of Calw, the entirety of the town is set ablaze as a backdrop to the horrific "Christmas decorations" that Kromer had set up, and to emphasize the multiple impaled bodies of the citizenry throughout the town.
• "Fantastic Voyage" Plot: The plot of Canto V is more or less one. While the Pallid Whale is so massive that shrinking isn't required to enter its body, the Sinners more or less follow the same type of pattern. Where they begin in the stomach and eventually migrate to the heart by traveling through the blood vessels.
• Females Are More Innocent: Inverted with the Nagel und Hammer Sinner Identities: the female Sinners in that alternate universe are all bat-shit insane fundamentalists and one of them, Faust, is The Corruptor that takes the place of Kromer; meanwhile the male Sinners are shown to be more tragic, with Sinclair having been successfully corrupted and indoctrinated into killing his own family, Heathcliff being in a constant drug-induced haze, and Meursault starting to doubt his faith.
• Full-Conversion Cyborg: Not a terribly uncommon procedure in The City, though not always viewed as a very desirable one outside certain circumstances. In which the subject's brain (and possibly other organs depending on the individual procedure) is removed from their body and placed into a "full body robotic prosthetic" in lieu of their original flesh. Sinclair's whole family (father, mother, sister, and possibly even pet dog) underwent this procedure, believing it to be superior to existing in a human body of flesh and blood that can get tired, hungry, or injured. With the expectation that once Sinclair graduated from school, he'd also undergo the procedure like the rest of them. Even though, in reality, the prospect horrifies him and is utterly loathe to think of it actually happening.
• Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • It's established pretty early that being able to randomly pull Identities, to change the look and combat style of the Sinner, is completely integrated in-universe as the main feature of Mephitopheles' Engine.
  • On top of the above, according to Dante's Notes, every single gameplay feature has an in-universe explaination: the ability to 'talk' to the Sinners' other Identities on the home screen? A feature on Dante's PDA. The Thread currency and the ability to upgrade Identities with them? Not a gameplay abstraction, they're used to better 'sync' the Sinner with that Identity. The level-up tickets? Actually enhance the body of the Identity they're used on in-universe.
  • Taking Sinclair's The One Who Shall Grip identity into the final fight of Chapter 3 will cause Kromer to get stunned for the first turn.
  • In a cutscene in the Hell's Chicken event, Ryōshū and Gregor feed Eunbong's proprieter such abhorrent food it makes him physically ill and furious. The ensuing battle stage shows the Papa Bongy being faced having a chunk taken out of his health and the special status "Poultry Apocalypse" applied.
  • Dialog from the Sinners in early Canto IV reveals that they canonically go through both Mirror Dungeons and the Refraction Railway.
  • Because of how connected Canto IV's story is to Yi Sang, it's required by the game to take and use him in the dungeon.
  • In Canto V, Ishmael undergoes massive Sanity Slippage over being back in the Great Lake for the first time in a while, which is extremely traumatizing for her to the point of making her more aggressive and less reasonable. If you select her for a battle in that Canto, she's inflicted with a special status effect that raises her attack but locks her starting sanity to be way lower than normal.
  • In Canto VI, Heathcliff's Hair-Trigger Temper goes off when he learns about Catherine's death. This translates to him recieving a status effect that increases the damage he both deals and recieves, while also trickling down his sanity every turn if it's above a certain threshold.
  • After Canto VI is completed every single instance of Catherine being mentioned in Heathcliff's Identity voicelines will be censored, because she has been completely erased from all Mirror Worlds.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • At times, post-fight cutscenes will describe and/or depict some of the Sinners being severely wounded or even dead regardless if you finished the fight with no deaths or even no damage. Especially notable in the final boss of Canto III in which despite beating Kromer in gameplay - twice - all of the Sinners except Sinclair and Dante die.
  • Despite Ishmael revealing that the way Whales turn people into Mermaids means Dante can't just rely on turning back the clock if things go south and a Sinner gets slaughtered by a Mermaid, there's no corresponding defeat penalty in-game when you lose a battle against the Mermaids.
• Gathering Steam: The Charge mechanic of various Identities work like this, which generates stacks via the use of certain abilities and/or passives. Charge is then spent when using designated skills to confer additional effects to them, or in the cases of W Corp. Don Quixote and R Corp. Ishmael, act as safeguards against those abilities' nasty side-effects.
• Gender-Blender Name:
  • Every female Sinner carries the name of a male character. A slight variation of this is Ryōshū, who uses an Alternate Character Reading of a masculine name.
  • Inverted with Sonya, Rodion's childhood friend, who is a man with a traditionally female name taken from a female book character.
  • In the same vein, Gregor's mother Hermann, who takes her name from Franz Kafka's father.
• Giant Enemy Crab: The Trash Crabs in Canto 4.5 are a species of massive crabs which take discarded human technological waste from the beaches and ocean and use them as shells.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: Canto VI reveals that as N Corp begins to perfect Yi Sang's Mirror technology, more people are being exposed to the existence of Mirror Worlds isn't exactly a good thing. Erlking Heathcliff, Catherine, and even Nelly essentially go insane or hit the Despair Event Horizon due to their exposure to Mirror Worlds.
• Grass is Greener: Crayon and Domino, two Outskirts dwellers who know firsthand how bad it is where they live, dream of one day entering the walls of the City. Wherein they believe the place is free of monsters and random, horrible deaths. None of the Sinners or Dante want to break the news to them that it's not that much better inside the City's walls like they imagine.
• Gratuitous Mariachi Band: The entirety of the Mariachi Syndicate have garb and weaponry commonly associated with a mariachi ensemble; complete with ponchos, maracas, and even some sombreros. They're portrayed as a little silly on account of the whiplash of first encountering them in a casino, and their proclivity to force people to dance if they run out of money to gamble with, but they're no less dangerous than any other Syndicate. This also extends to Sinclair's "Jefe De Los Mariachis" Identity.
• Gratuitous German: During Canto II, when failing to sneak into the facility below the casino, Gregor utters the word "Scheibenkleister", which functions somewhat like "fudge" in that it's a swear word taking a G-rated turn after the first syllable.
• Gratuitous Spanish: The Mariachi Syndicate grunts have a tendency to pepper their speech with various Spanish words and phrases, seemingly only on a whim.
• Hellgate: Dante revives the Sinners by going into what looks like an astral plane with nothing but a gigantic, ornate door - which is noted to have the sounds of terrifying wails and laments coming from the other side. When the gates open, hundreds of grasping red hands reach out from within it, and Dante grabs the ones that apparently belong to the fallen Sinners. How literal this is meant to be taken is...unclear.
• Hollywood Acid: The acid secreted within the Pallid Whale's stomach is apparently so potent that even a single drop can melt clean through clothing and flesh alike in a matter of seconds.
• Hopeless Boss Fight:
  • The tutorial fight turns out this way. None of your attacks ever do any damage to Lion, and she and her companions immediately one-shot your entire party once they start fighting back.
  • Even after Kromer is pushed to and defeated in her final form, the game will still end the fight by having her throw out her arms and knock all of the Sinners out of the arena, causing them all (save Sinclair) to die and begin melting into the hill of bodies.
  • The battle against Big Brother Ricardo in Canto V is a subverted case, as while Ricardo himself is incredibly powerful in his attacks, and his HP does not display any numbers, it's still necessary to deplete 50% of his health to actually clear the level, where at that point a scripted defeat will occur.
• I'm Melting!: At the end of Canto III, the Sinners are nearly melted completely into goo after the fight with Kromer has concluded, with only Sinclair left alive as his flesh melts off his bones while he continues to struggle on. While this normally wouldn't be an issue thanks to Dante's abilities, Dante themself is also affected by this, and nearly kicks the bucket alongside them. Thankfully they're saved by Demian and Dante is able to revive the sinners afterwards.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: The unfortunate fates of the citizens of Sinclair's hometown at the hands of Nagel Und Hammer in Chapter 3. As part of their "purification", they impaled and hung everyone with robotic prosthetics on giant nails. Also the unfortunate fate of Effie, who was found by the impaled on a nail alongside the citizens still alive. Faust notes that if they left him, it would still have taken him at least two more days to die completely, and it would be excruciatingly painful the whole time.
• Interface Screw: In Canto VI, Catherine hijacks Dante's computer and forces the game to reset to the title screen. However, the main difference is that the "Clear Cache" button has been replaced with a "Clear All Cathy" button, which the player must press in order to initiate Catherine's plot to remove herself and her Mirror World counterparts from existence.
• Interface Spoiler: In Canto IV, a few stages before you actually encounter it in-story, you can see K Corp's Singularity at the top of the chapter map.
• Irony: After the Sinners tussle with the Mermaids for the first time, Ishmael reveals that the Whales capability of parasitizing humans and turning them into Mermaids is grounds for her concern over how Dante can't just turn back the clock willy-nilly to bring the Sinners back, because the human victims become Mermaids while they're still alive. The actual situation where turning back the clock proves to be a futile effort occurs when Big Brother Ricardo effortlessly beats the Sinners to a pulp over and over again, which means the situation Ishmael was concerned about came into reality at the hands of actual humans instead.
• Kick Them While They Are Down: The battle system has it so that when an enemy and a Sinner target eachother back, they'll fight over which side gets to attack. A higher number beats a smaller number and when one side is out of coins and thus cannot attack, the other side will attack.
• Lampshade Hanging:
  • By the beginning of Canto III, Dante expresses to Faust that they've noticed the trend where each District they visit in pursuit of a Golden Bough, one Sinner will have a strong reaction to the place, and then turn out to indeed be connected to the location in question.
  • In Canto V after meeting the surviving LCCB member, Pilot and getting information for their journey from him, he offers to accompany them to offer his guidance and support. However, after acknowledging their not-so-great track record of keeping people outside the Sinners who accompany them alive, Dante and the Sinners summarily decide that it'll be better for his life expectancy if he doesn't do that.
  • Also in Canto V, Dante ponders the extreme coincidence of the Sinners showing up looking for the Golden Bough just in time to meet the Pequod crew ready to mount an expedition into the Pallid Whale's heart after years of preparation. Others brush this off as simply a happy chance of fate.
• Limit Break: By accumulating elemental resources, characters can use E.G.O. Skills in order to perform powerful attacks capable of large amounts of damage. Multiple can be equipped per character regardless of their Identity, up to five as long as they fit in that slot.
• Lottery of Doom: During Canto I, it's revealed that some Lobotomy Corporation employees that got trapped in the ruins of the facility resorted to using this to choose who to sacrifice to an Abnormality that demands it. It didn't last very long as the fear, paranoia and stress from being trapped with something that could kill all of them without a second thought led to everyone fighting each other to not be sacrificed.
• Lost in Translation: Yi Sang's dialogue in Korean, both when he himself talks and when others refer to him, often is riddled with puns on his own name. This is something that obviously cannot be translated to English most of the time, so the translation largely doesn't bother doing so. The notable exception being in Hell's Chicken, where his strange choices of food are bad enough that Meursault's dialogue in English ends up being delivered in rap form.
• Ludicrous Gibs: Both the Sinners and their enemies explode into viscera when their HP is reduced to zero. This will occur even if they got stabbed or they were hit by maracas.
• Mega City: The City holds the grand majority of the population of the planet - the opening shows the population to be over 6 billion people - and each District is more akin to a country in size and scope, with its own government (headed by a megacorporation) and customs.
• Masochist's Meal: While the enemy Trash Crabs of Intervallo II are technically edible, their taste is completely revolting no matter what way one might try to cook them. Ishmael mentions eating a chowder made with their meat in the past and how she had to fight against vomiting the whole time she ate it.
• Mêlée à Trois: Canto VI involves a three-way brawl between the Sinners, the Dead Rabbits, and Edgar's Butlers. Heathcliff and Edgar are trying to gain access to the basement of Wuthering Heights while Hindley just wants to kill everyone and take back ownership of the manor by force.
• Mercy Kill: Outis asks Dante's permission to perform once on Effie after the group finds him impaled alive, along with several other horrific wounds. With no way to help and with the knowledge that the suffering would continue an unreasonably long time until death came naturally, they reluctantly give the order.
• Minimalist Cast: Specifically when it comes to the playable characters. While most other gacha games have usable characters ranging in the dozens if not triple digits, this game only has 12 useable characters in total and each gacha is simply an alternate identity of that particular character, changing their looks and moveset.
• Myth Arc: As the sinners collect more Golden Boughs, several mysteries keep reappearing in the plot: N corp. and the Mirror Worlds, Demian and the Mark of Cain, the Distortion Phenomenon, and the reason why Limbus Company was first formed.
• Mythology Gag: For the third time in a row, you can play using the power of 'enemies' - while Lobotomy Corporation solely allowed you to draw power from Abnormalities with E.G.O suits, Library of Ruina had you directly take on the clothing and kit of the enemy after you beat them. Now, you can still play using the enemy's power via Identities that has your Sinners fill in the enemy role in the story.
• Necessary Drawback: Several Identities have very powerful abilities and attacks, but have a drawback that prevents them from being truly broken:
  • All Charge Identities, like the W Corp Cleanup crew or R. Corp Reindeer Ishmael, must gather Charge before using them - you can still use those attacks, but with a severe disadvantage like damaging the character or making the target random, which includes your characters.
  • Gun-using Identities tend to have high potential for damage and attacks with lots of coins, but are balanced out by having a limited amount of bullets for each fight.
  • The One Who Shall Grip Sinclair is very powerful, with high base power attacks and the ability to gain Fanatic much more easily than any other N Corp Identity - this is balanced out by every single attack losing power on Heads and thus benefitting more while having negative Sanity, which carries the risk of Corrosion.
  • Tremor Count is used by some Identities in place of where Charge would normally be - applied on the Identity itself to add additional bonus effects for some of their skills, with the added drawback of increased Stagger risk around enemies who can burst Tremor. Given that these Identities also tend to be way more self-sufficient than Charge-using identities are without their respective status effect, this is a necessary compromise to get some of their most powerful bonuses in combat.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: When Dante attempts to stop Don Quixote from messing with a slot machine, their hand slips and hits a button. The machine, just so happening to have had a coin in the slot already, proceeds to spill out a full jackpot, thus using up all of the wishpower in the sticker they'd been given for the purposes of winning the gamble to gain access to the Golden Bough, and attracting the unwanted attention of the casino's security. Subverted in that it turns out to have been the right thing to do, as one of the Syndicate leaders at the high-stakes table naturally suspected the leader of the TingTang gang of cheating by using their accumulated wishpower to improve their odds, which meant that the original plan was destined to fail.
• Nondescript, Nasty, Nutritious: According to Heathcliff's N Corp Identity Story, the primary food that the lower tier Nagel Und Hammer soldiers of their timeline consume is a colorless goop from a can. Whatever it is, it's apparently enough to sustain them even if it's described as being pretty nasty. Though it is implied it has the side effect of aiding the indoctrination process. Don Quixote's N Corp Identity reveals that the canned food is N Corp's Singularity, which is quite literally "canned experience".
• Non-Human Head:
  • Main character Dante is the most prominent example of this in the whole game, having replaced their human head with a prosthetic that looks like a burning clock.
  • Sinclair's family also completely lack human appearances, on account of they got full-body robotic prosthetic replacements. This, of course, extends to their heads, which appear mainly to be metal shapes with some small holes in them to presumably allow them to see.
• Non-Indicative Name:
  • The world the story takes place is called The City, but its sheer size and its several districts with each its unique culture (plus entire border security and immigration processes) makes it less of a city and more like a whole continent.
  • The game being described as turn-based. Sure, you do progress in turns, but a typical turn-based game has a seperate turn for you to act and for the enemy to respond. In this game, similar to its predecessor, you and the enemy act at the very same time.
  • The first of the interlude chapters between Canto V and VI is titled 'Miracle in District 20'. The title implies that it's taking place in said District 20, but not only does it start where the ending of the last chapter left off - namely, in the middle of the ocean - when Contrived Coincidence does actually take them off their ship, it's beyond the other end of the City. The closest relevance the title has to the story is that it's all but stated to be where Canto VI is taking place.
• Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond: The Sinners are not incompetent fighters, and indeed can easily wipe the floor of the average street thug or wipe out a small-time Syndicate or even the average Wing-employed mook squad. However, they are also hideously underpowered compared to the more powerful people of the City like the higher-ranked members of the Five Fingers.
• Obsessive Love Letter: While it takes the form of her diary, Catherine's written words in the pages and the inkstains that reveal more information to Heathcliff and only Heathcliff all imply that the diary and its contents are meant as a message to him. And quite a lot of it involves vague hints about Catherine's intentions to draw Heathcliff back to the manor. And, most importantly, back to her.
• Obvious Rule Patch:
  • K-Corp security enemies have a passive that restores a flat percentage of their maximum health every turn, which in normal gameplay makes them Stone Walls but still manageable if you focus on staggering them. However, in the Refraction Railway most enemies are turned into Damage Sponge Bosses, so most K-Corp enemies are given substantially less health buffs than the other encounters, and the final wave against new K-Corp Elite Mooks gives them a limit to how many times their passive can heal them in order to stop the fight from becoming Unintentionally Unwinnable by virtue of them being able to outheal the player's DPS.
  • Similiarly to the above, all other versions of Kromer outside of her Story Mode battle don't have her passive that allows her to regenerate from any bleed or burn debuffs - since it would be particularly dickish to make the fight potentially unbeatable because of your team composition.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child: Canto IV reveals that K Corp's Singularity is a sentient, disembodied eye that is made to watch people suffer so it would shed tears, which are in turn refined to become regeneration ampules.
• Power Equals Rarity: The game has three rarity tiers for Identities: 0, 00, and 000. 0 are the base Identities of all characters and nothing else, while 00 and 000 are obtained from the gacha. 000 Identities tend to be better and with stronger abilities - though exceptions definitely apply - at the cost of both being rare to obtain in the gacha and being more expensive to Uptie. E.G.O are rarer than even 000 Identities and can be used across all of that character's Identities; they don't have a rarity system, instead their label showing which slot it can be put in.
• Power Incontinence: Using an E.G.O. Skill while a Sinner has low Sanity causes them to undergo "E.G.O. Corrosion". They'll deal more damage in this state, but in return, the player can no longer control them.
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner: Anyone who uses an E.G.O. says a line before attacking. If they suffer from E.G.O. corrosion, their line changes and they sound more distorted.
• Purple Is Powerful: When a Sinner suffers from E.G.O. Corrosion, the cracks that appear in the screen when they use an E.G.O. Skill become purple rather than the usual orange, and the attack itself deals more damage... in exchange for them effectively turning into a new instance of the Abnormality it comes from.
• Pyrrhic Victory: Dante themselves considers the end of Chapter 3 this, considering it proof of their lack of managerial skills. While they succeeded in their mission, it wasn't without losses and ultimately they needed to be rescued by an outside party.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Deconstructed. Instead of being competent in spite of their various character flaws or ultimately getting along despite initial impressions, the Sinners kill each other without a second thought and the idea of a well-thought-out plan is non-existent when they begin a mission. Case in point, the mission to infiltrate a casino in Canto II goes off the rails almost immediately.
• Rare Candy: Threads. These are required in large amounts to Uptie the Mirror Identities for your Sinners and their additional E.G.O.s, which unlock additional abilities and passives in so doing. As a limiting measure, Threads can only be gained in small amounts by doing Thread Luxcavations or via specific challenge rewards, or by converting unspent E.G.O. shards that are collected when rolling the gacha.
• Reconstruction: Of the amnesiac gacha game protagonist. While Dante does suffer from amnesia, this is used less as a way for the player to impose their own personality onto them and more as a way of heightening their interactions with the Sinners as a bumbling executive manager who has no real way of keeping them in control. There is also no player input when it comes to Dante's reactions and choices during the story, whereas most other gachas use multiple-choice dialogue segments to make the player feel as if they "are" the character; Dante has an entirely independent personality separate from the player and is as much of a character as everyone else is, they're just also the narrator.
• Recurring Element:
  • Like the games before it, the game also has features that allow your characters to borrow the power of enemies: the Identities allow the characters to take in the appearance and fighting style of humanoid enemies, much like the Pages from Library of Ruina, and E.G.O Gifts allow them to tap into the power of Abnormalities like the same-named equipment from Lobotomy Corporation.
  • The Sanity Meter system is once again a gameplay feature where the emotional state of a character changes their combat abilities, and it combines elements from both previous games: Negative Sanity will cause characters to get negative various panic debuffs like in Lobotomy Corporation, while positive Sanity will buff the character significantly, like the Emotion level Library of Ruina.
• Readings Are Off the Scale: In Canto VI when Heathcliff starts smashing Mirror World Heathcliff into the ground with Bodysack, he'll go at it with such ferocity that the damage counter in the corner and the damage numbers popping out with each hit will go from normal to complete gibberish. Instead of an indication of power, however, this more is to show that Heathcliff is completely losing it and about to Distort.
• Red Shirt Army: Most of the non-Sinner LCCB staff typically end up being this, especially the operatives in the Before Teams, whose job is to scout old L Corp facilities and act as guides for the Sinners. However, since the L Corp facilities are typically located in highly dangerous areas (or were containing the danger), the casualty rate among them is extremely high. By Canto 5, the Sinners start feeling guilty about all of the Before Teams that end up getting sacrificed to ensure their mission success.
• Ret-Gone: Chapter 3.5, "Hell's Chicken", has the Sinners deal with a restaurant owner that went mad and turned into a Distortion after a rival stole his famous fried chicken recipe and burnt it in a "concept incinerator", a device that so thoroughly destroys technology that even the chicken's taste was erased from their own memories.
• Rewards Pass: The game has a seasonal 'Limbus Pass' that gives out rewards in exchange for doing daily/weekly tasks or clearing Mirror Dungeons, with two tracks: a free one, and a paid one. Unlike many other games with a similar feature, the free track actually has pretty decent rewards all throughout, including very valuable and rare E.G.O abilities.
• Sanity Meter: Sinners and enemies, excluding Abnormalities, have a sanity meter that goes up and down depending on certain skills and actions in battle. Low morale for enemies may cause them to suffer from a variety of negative effects, while Sinners using E.G.O while having low sanity may cause an E.G.O Meltdown. Both sides are less likely to roll a heads on coin flips if their morale is low. Since some moves and E.G.O. benefit from a tails flip rather than a heads, it may sometimes be beneficial to have low morale.
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: According to promotional material, the City holds over 6 billion people in a surface area roughly the size of Belgium. Dante's Notes Hand Wave this by quoting Yi Sang as essentially saying "the City is denser than it looks on the map".
• Schizophrenic Difficulty: Due to the unpredictable and randomized nature of Mirror Dungeons, their difficulty from run to run or even between floors can vary greatly. This holds double for boss rooms: it's entirely possible to get a pathetically easy glorified mook battle at the end on one floor, and a horrendously difficult monster of a boss in another.
• Sea Monster: One of the new Abnormalities, called the Headless Ichthys, resembles some sort of giant, headless fish that also has a fluid sac containing a nervous system, as well as hand-like limbs in place of fins.
• Secret Diary: The existence of Catherine's diary is well known to the servants of Wuthering Heights, along with Linton and Heathcliff. However, besides her only Heathcliff had any inkling of where she kept it (extremely well) hidden.
• Set Bonus: The 000-grade N Corp. Identities for given Sinners have a specific passive that buffs their allies with Fanatic, provided said allies are also N Corp., which increases their damage dealt to enemies with Nail stacks on them.
• Seven Deadly Sins: An overarching motif. All skills are linked to one of these, and they will generate it as a resource after they are used. These resources are instrumental in the (de)activation of passive abilities. The logo also has the Latin words for the sins on it. Something to note is that the sin of Greed has been replaced by the sin of Gloom (despite the word Avaritia appearing in the logo).
• Ship Tease: Rodya and Gregor have a bit of a ship tease, such as her constantly referring to him with affectionate nicknames like "babe" or "darling". It's even pointed out during the Hell's Kitchen Event when she joins Ryoshu's team instead of Gregor's:
  Rodion: Greg, darling, we've been stuck too close for too long. Why don't we try a little distance just for today?
• Shout-Out:
  • Every Sinner references a certain piece of literature, with quotes in promotional material being derived from the respective sources:
    • Dante and their boss, Vergilius, are both named after Dante Alighieri and Virgil, more specifically their depictions in Dante's The Divine Comedy.
    • Yi Sang is named after Kim Hae-Gyeong, an acclaimed Korean author whose pen name was Yi Sang.
    • Faust is named after the mythical character also called Faust.
    • Their vehicle, one of Faust's inventions, is also named "Mephistopheles", after the demon from the same book.
    • Don Quixote is named after the namesake character from Don Quixote.
    • Ryōshū is named after Yoshihide^note which can be read alternatively as Ryōshū as pointed out by CasualWatson of the Cool Kids Club translation team, the main character from Hell Screen, a short story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa.
    • Meursault is named after the main character from The Stranger.
    • Hong Lu is named after the novel Dream of the Red Chamber.^note  Notably, his name doesn't directly match the novel name.
    • Heathcliff is named after the main character from Wuthering Heights.
    • Ishmael is named after the narrator and character from Moby-Dick.
    • Rodion is named after Rodion Raskolnikov, the main character from Crime and Punishment.
    • Emil Sinclair is named after the main character from Demian by Hermann Hesse.
    • Outis is named after a pseudonym used by Odysseus in The Odyssey.
    • Gregor is named after Gregor Samsa, the main character from The Metamorphosis.
  • The Intervallos typically mimic the title of a popular show or movie:
    • Intervallo 3.5 is called Hell's Chicken.
    • Intervallo 4.5 is called The Magic Hell Bus.
    • Intervallo 5.5 is called Miracle in District 20.
  • In Canto IV, Dongrang references a red 'truth tablet' that forces the one who takes it to only tell the truth, a reference to the red pill/blue pill metaphor in The Matrix. Later in the same chapter, it's revealed that Yi Sang's mirrored self once offered him the equivalent of the blue pill.
  • In The Stinger of Canto V, Wilson the volleyball from Cast Away can be seen floating on the waves in the background.
• Shown Their Work:
  • The appearance of the Hellgate Dante sees whenever they revive the Sinners is based on the real sculpture of the Gates of Hell, where the Thinker is part of.
  • The E.G.O. of My Form Empties, Ya Śūnyatā Tad Rūpam, has its name word-for-word taken out of the Heart Sutra, meaning 'emptiness is form and form is emptiness'.
  • Sinclair is from the town of Calw. The writer of Sinclair's source book, Hermann Hesse, hailed from the real Calw, a German town surrounded by the Black Forest, and the Sinners are very clearly shown passing through a forest before arriving in the town accordingly. What's left of the architecture also resembles the (still intact) Calw in real life.
• Simple, yet Awesome: During Focused Battles, one can create one sided attacks that don't clash, but just whack the enemy freely. This won't gain Sanity, and using a lot at once can open the team up for a pounding... but due to how Stagger works in this game, can shut down attacks that cannot be clashed with your current skills. Ricardo in 5-30 will really make you need to learn this technique if you want to beat his fight.
• The Stinger: The end of Canto IV has a face-first shot of Dante, with the minute hand of their clock-head slightly moving forward.
• Stronger Than They Look: Goes for pretty much everyone, except for those with Small Girl, Big Gun. This is likely caused by the City having many ways to enhance one's body without it having any kind of physically visible effects.
• Subsystem Damage: Certain Abnormalities, like the Ebony Queen's Apple, can have individual body parts targeted by attacks. These body parts can be staggered and even destroyed (temporarily or permanently depending on the enemy).
• Surprisingly Happy Ending:
  • The Hell's Chicken event ends with the Sinners, against all odds and their own innate incompetencies, actually managing to save the owner of Eunbong's Bar & Fryers from being a Distortion, and while the future of his restaurant may be uncertain, he remains hopeful for it.
  • Appropriately for a Christmas Episode, "Miracle In District 20" also has a surprisingly upbeat ending. The rest of the Sinners successfully rescue not just Don and Heathcliff from the Gnomes, but also Crayon, an innocent Outskirts child who was also captured by them, and reunite her with another survivor from her village. Afterwards, Vergilius doesn't punish Don or Heathcliff for the whole affair because Dante signed off on it, Heathcliff gets help from the other Sinners in looking proper for his return home, and Don even manages to steal some Christmas decorations and presents from the Gnomes to cheer everyone up during their long voyage back from the Great Lake following Canto V.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • At one point during Chapter 2, as the Sinners are busy fighting off the security forces of the casino in a massive brawl, Ryōshū decides to cut down the big chandelier hanging over the center of the room with one well-aimed thrown dagger. The chandelier dramatically falls... and proceeds to not actually hit anyone because no one was standing direct under it. There's even a brief Beat in the fighting as combatants on both sides question what exactly she was trying to accomplish.
  • Normally, in a story with a Battle At The Center Of The Mind of a mentally troubled character, in which a character has to face their own direct trauma, would result in massive character development. However, human beings don't change that easily, and trauma is not so easily resolved - which is perfectly encapsulated as Gregor and Rodya's chapters notably don't resolve their inner struggle and they don't experience a lot of character development for it, especially because the fundamental causes of their trauma are not yet resolved. Even for Sinclair and Yi Sang, who have shown a greater degree of change after their respective Chapter, are simply starting to show signs of improving on their character flaws rather than becoming fully realized.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: The event shop for the Hell's Kitchen event has this line on top: "*Please rest assured that all meat used at Eunbong's is not derived from K Corp's singularity."
• Swallowed Whole: How the Sinners in Canto V begin their ultimate mission to enter and then fight The Pallid Whale. Taking advantage of a distraction by the Indigo Elder so that they can row their skiff into the monster whale's maw without getting noticed and crushed during the ingress.
• Tattooed Crook: Several Syndicate members are seen to have tattoos of some variety, and Sinners with Kurokumo Identities typically have the Syndicate's distinctive shoulder and chest tattoos. This is justified in-universe as tattoos are a common body modification in The City in order to increase one's fighting strength.
• Temporary Online Content:
  • Surprisingly averted when it comes to E.G.O and IDs. Event IDs are available 2 seasons after their original event, as with IDs from Gacha (though they are still in the gacha pool). Season Pass items are added directly to the dispenser upon the end of the season. In fact it's more accurate to say it's Temporary Offline Content.
  • So far, Refraction Railways are Season-exclusive events that cannot be played after that specific Line ends - which also means that, unless they're reintroduced in some other type of content (Like the MDH 2 for Line 1's Abnormalities), Refraction Railway-exclusive bosses cannot be fought again.
  • Banners gotten from various events are unobtainable after the event ends. This also goes for new announcers and customizations options for a Player's ID page.
  • Walpurgis Night is a quarterly event banner that features Identities/EGO based on Lobotomy Corp, Limbus Company and Distortion Detective characters. Unlike other banners, the featured items can only be extracted from this specific banner during the time period, and cannot be dispensed. Previous Walpurgis Night items can be dispensed during the next Walpurgis Night and any after that, but still only during that specific timeframe, so while still not this trope, these Identities/EGO are the closest to them.
• These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: A reccurring element in Canto VI is that anyone who studies the Mirror Worlds will be invariably driven across the Despair Event Horizon with the realization that certain things will always happen no matter what other divergences may occur. Realizing that the love story between Heathcliff and Catherine will always turn out the same way utterly breaks Erlking Heathcliff, our Heathcliff, Catherine, and Nelly.
• This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: Depending on the usual team composition this can be the case when tackling extra content such as the Refraction Railway and Mirror Dungeon.
  • Shi Association Ishmael is usually regarded as poor in normal gameplay as her abilities are only empowered when at low health and the likelihood of having low health instead of being outright defeated is very low. In the Refraction Railway she can become extremely powerful as every attack there is targeted rather than random and health is maintained between runs, allowing her to safely veer dangerously close to 0 HP and then stay that way, provided that she doesn't take more damage and that she keeps being deployed.
• This Was His True Form: When Sinners are killed, the pile of gore notably has their original clothing and weapon on it no matter which Identity they wore before dying.
• Twisted Christmas:
  • As part of Kromer's ploy to torment Sinclair, the entire town of Kalf is set up to resemble a gory Christmas display. Complete with ominous Christmas music being played over radio and loudspeakers.
  • "Miracle in District 20", despite not being set on Christmas in the game's universe, has a bunch of gnomes kidnap Don Quixote and Heathcliff, intending to use them as Human Resources for presents they can distribute to the monsters of the Outskirts.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: Most of the game's main story gameplay is mission-based fighting waves of enemies like many other mobile games - until you reach the end of the chapter in question, in which you have to go through an extended dungeon with multiple rooms, shared health and sanity between fights, checkpoints, multiple-choice scenarios in the style of a non-roguelike Slay the Spire, temporary buffs, cutscenes a-plenty and several strong bosses with unique mechanics. Dungeons are also where you'll fight Abnormalities, themselves significantly different from regular enemies due to their Subsystem Damage and a higher focus on intercepting attacks with clashes like in Library of Ruina.
• Ungrateful Townsfolk: Mere moments after the pawn shop owner being shaken down by a Yurodivy goon was fawning over Don in thanks, the goon's backup arrives. And the pawnbroker turns right around and blames the Sinners for the injuries to avoid getting in trouble.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Few people ever seem to take notice of very blatantly unusual traits like Gregor's insect arm or Dante having a burning clock of a prosthetic head. Given that this is The City, however, such features are likely just overlooked.
• Variable Mix: The final boss of Canto VI involves Wuthering Heights becoming unstable due to interference with the Golden Bough, causing the Sinners to juggle between fighting Erlking Heathcliff and Every Catherine. When the battle switches, the vocals of "Through Patches of Violet" switch as well, with low vocals when fighting the Erlking and high vocals when fighting Every Catherine.
• We Cannot Go On Without You: In the fights against Erlking Heathcliff in Canto VI, Heathcliff dying causes an automatic loss.
• Wham Episode: Canto VI, which marks the halfway point of Inferno. A Sinner distorts for the first time, the Ring and N Corp's Mirror experiments are elaborated upon, Vergilius breaks his contract so he can save the Sinners, and the entire thing ends with the Sinners' second failure since Canto I.
• Wham Line: Most of the "To Claim Their Bones" event focuses on what happened to Bamboo-Hatted Kim and the Blade Lineage after their return from the Library. However, in the latter half, Dante starts getting messages from an energetic member of Limbus Company's Distortion Response Team concerning the strange object that caused Kim to Distort. It's only in the last scene of the event that she says something that indicates we've met her group before, which is then confirmed when she properly introduces herself as Ezra.
  LCD Member: Good work! Detective, the levels are stabilizing!
  Ezra: Ah, I can't seem to stop calling you Detective huh. Sorry, old habits die hard, y'know...
• What Measure Is a Mook?: Right from the start of the game in Canto I, the Sinners will be massacring petty Backstreet thugs for the express purpose of feeding their still-living bodies to Mephistopheles; none of the sinners bat an eye at the former, and only some show distress at the latter. Justified Trope: the Backstreets are not exactly places where empathy gets you anywhere.
• What the Hell, Player?: Each Sinner has two possible responses when asked to perform a check that they have a low chance of passing. Some express fear or pessimism, others will try to put up a brave front in the face of impossible odds, while most will politely suggest that you pick someone else. Here's a few of the angrier reactions:
  Faust: This would make our decision to name you our manager a regrettable one.
  Meursault: You must be mad.
  Heathcliff: Are you taking the piss? You want ME to do this?
  Ishmael: Are you serious? Several screws loose? I'm disappointed. Don't talk to me.
  Gregor: ...So you were the kind of boss to get fragged by their own men.
• The Wild Hunt: In Canto VI, Erlking Heathcliff summons several hundred imperfect Mirror World versions of the Wuthering Heights manor members as well as several Peccatula to kill the Sinners. Their sheer numbers are overwhelming, and it is only when Vergilius shows up to Hold the Line that the Sinners can escape.
• Winds of Destiny, Change!: Chapter 2 introduces the history behind J Corp and how its Singularity came to be: the District had a Semi-Singularity of "wishpower" that allows you to extract a person's luck and turn it into a sticker you can slap onto yourself. The value of wishpower resulted in the advancement of security technology, with it eventually developing into a Singularity of its own - the technology to lock anything.