Raven is a casually dressed swordsman who makes ends meet by fighting in the Champion's Crown arena. One day, he discovers a Harbinger of Calamity hibernating underneath the arena grounds, forcing him to confront his dark past concerning these deadly war golems.
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This game contains examples of:
- Accidental Hero: Deconstructed because Raven's accidental feat was achieved through an act of cowardice. Raven abandoned the White Talons and the city they were guarding to the Harbingers of Calamity. He tried to hide in a cave in the Southern Plains, but accidentally came across the mastermind Jade's hideout. Raven then lies in wait to ambush and kill Jade when the latter returns with his guard down, leaving the Calamities without a controller.
- Big Bad: Emilia is the main antagonist behind the returning Harbingers of Calamity and the strange aura activities in Celis. She's trying to absorb aura throughout Celis in preparation for challenging Raven to a deathmatch, all so she can avenge her lover Jade.
- Difficulty Levels: This game has Easy, Normal, and Nightmare. Higher difficulties increase enemy stats and increases the effect of the Stale mechanic, making it even more critical that players don't overuse techs. The difficulty can be changed whenever the player isn't in battle.
- Doppelgänger Attack: The Final Boss can summon clones to help with covering the screen with projectile attacks. However, the clones drop HP orbs, which can help Raven win the battle of attrition.
- The Dragon: The Black Blade, Victor is the only subordinate of the Big Bad, Emilia. However, his role is to distract Raven rather than kill him, since the Big Bad wants to be the one to defeat Raven in a deathmatch.
- Early Game Hell: The first few stages of the game are harder than the later ones due to the player's lack of useful mechanics, such as Auradrive regen and good crowd control techs.
- Elemental Powers: The elements in this game include electric, fire, ice, wind, shadow, light, and spirit. Raven has access to all of these elements except for ice.
- Fire techs tend to have higher damage multipliers.
- Electric techs have higher hitstun.
- Wind techs tend to be ranged and have higher crit chance when it hits a target's back.
- Ice techs have a chance of inflicting the frozen status.
- Light techs have a chance to remove the target's buffs.
- Shadow techs have a chance to inflict the haunted ailment, which weakens the target's damage.
- Spirit techs don't have a consistent property.
- Escort Mission: While fighting alongside Valerie in the Mystic Forest and Northern Plains, the player has to keep her from dying or they'll have to restart the round. Fortunately, she's capable of fighting, so she not too hard to protect on Normal or lower.
- Fake Ultimate Hero: Defied. Raven is the one who killed Jade, the controller of the Harbingers of Calamity. However, he only found Jade's hideout in the process of deserting a battle with the Calamities, meaning even his "victory" is dishonorable to the comrades he abandoned. Raven also feared that one of Jade's loved ones would target him if they knew, so he tried to hide this incident and live on as a nobody.
- Fragile Speedster: Valerie as a boss is faster than the Black Blade and has powerful multihit techs, along with a tech that allows her to teleport to a target's location, but her HP is much lower and her lack of ranged attacks means she has to risk close combat. As a guest character, she retains her speed, but can fall quickly on Nightmare mode due to her lack of regen effects.
- Genocide Backfire: 60 years ago, the Praelians coveted the aura magic of the Farulians and slaughtered most of them when they wouldn't share their forbidden techniques. The surviving Farulians, led by Jade, used those forbidden techniques to create Harbingers of Calamity in order to attack the Praelians.
- The Gift:
- In the Mystic Forest, Raven notes that Valerie picked up on the basics of aura very quickly. Later, she's able to use techniques and understand concepts that took Raven years to learn.
- Valerie and Victor note that it's impressive that Raven can learn so many techniques just by roughly imitating his teacher with minimal instruction. Victor suppresses part of Raven's memory in order to intentionally keep the latter from surpassing him.
- Golem: The Harbingers of Calamity are golems that can absorb and use aura. Their creator, Jade, used them to attack Praelia.
- Guest-Star Party Member: In the Mystic Forest, Valerie is an AI-controlled ally capable of using the same techs from her boss battle, only she's also using her recently learned aura skills. She later joins again in the Northern Plains and leaves after the battle with the Black Blade.
- Jerkass to One: Emilia's initial interactions with Raven are genuinely cordial, but once she confirms that he's the one who killed her lover Jade, she treats him with contempt for the rest of the game. This implies that she's normally benevolent towards strangers as long as they aren't her revenge target.
- "Just Frame" Bonus: Guarding at the correct moment results in a Flash Guard that negates damage while restoring AP and drive gauge. This also temporarily increase hit chance and gives the user i-frames for a short time if they immediately attack after guarding. However, unlike Ys, Flash Guard is harder to abuse because attack animations cannot be canceled into guard.
- King Mook: Lore-wise, Berserkers are common brutes that somehow evolved or transformed to the point where they can rival Brutalisks. When revisiting old areas, it's possible to find optional Berserker bosses. These include Dread Hunter, Rarefin, Ancient Rider, and Lost Skelreaper.
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: Victor has the unique aura ability to alter memories, which he used to help Emilia store a Calamity golem underneath the arena. He also used this ability to erase some of Raven's memories to impede the latter's progression as a warrior.
- Life Drain:
- The optional boss, Ancient Rider, has an upswing that deals a decent amount of damage while healing HP. Whatever percentage of the player's HP it deals, it heals back, which is worse than it sounds because of Health/Damage Asymmetry.
- The Final Boss has a projectile that can drain HP too, but at the level the player fights that boss, it doesn't do enough damage to heal much.
- Raven himself has the tech, Soul Devour, which drains HP from the enemy in proportion to how stunned they are being being hit.
- Limit Break: When using Auradrive, the player can hold B during a tech to end Auradrive early and activate their most powerful tech, an Ace. However, some bosses have their own Aces.
- Raven's first Ace is Silver Stream, which can be activated from a rank 3 tech. Later, he learns Lightning Moment, which replaces Silver Stream when chaining to Rank 3 techs. Silver Stream is changed to activate from Rank 2 or lower techs.
- Valerie learns the Ace, Violet Autumn, after sufficiently mastering aura usage.
- The Final Boss, Emilia, gets the Ace, Celestial Requiem.
- The Black Blade, Victor, has Rending Void.
- Love Makes You Evil: Emilia wants to avenge her lover, Jade, who Raven killed. To this end, she researches the Harbingers of Calamity and enacts a ritual to absorb aura from all over the island of Celis, which she hopes will give her the power to kill Raven.
- Mighty Glacier: Downplayed with the Victor the Black Blade. Compared to Valerie, who is a Fragile Speedster boss that executes her techs quickly, he tends to use techs with high damage and range, but long wind up. However, he still has one quick comboing tech and has decent running speed. In his final encounter, he has the highest HP of any boss in the game at 2.3 million, making the fight long no matter how aggressively the player can attack.
- Mirror Boss: The Black Blade has many of the same techs as Raven, along with similar looking techs with different names. This is because he's actually Victor, who taught Raven swordplay.
- Misplaced Retribution: Subverted. While Emilia doesn't directly target civilians, her preparations to take revenge on Raven end up aggravating brutes all over Celis, putting Southlight Village in peril. However, as part of her deal with Victor, she's not allowed to directly attack anyone outside of her revenge target, meaning the increased brute attacks weren't her intention.
- My Greatest Failure:
- Raven abandoned the White Talons in their battle with the Calamities, allowing the golems to ravage the city the Talons were protecting. He regrets this so much that he refuses to take credit for killing Jade, the controller of the Calamities.
- Likewise, the Black Blade, Victor, failed to save the Outer Ring of Arcana from a brute invasion and later cowered and did nothing in the face of the Harbingers of Calamity. This caused him to lose confidence in his abilities, though Raven convinces him that they can both continue improving themselves.
- "Not So Different" Remark: After the final Optional Boss fight, Victor reveals that like Raven, he cowered from the battlefield at a crucial moment and has doubts about his own self-improvement. Just like Raven feels guilty for abandoning the White Talons, Victor feels guilt for not helping Valerie's father.
- The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: Despite being stronger than his employer, the Black Blade spares and holds back against Raven whenever they fight. This is because the Big Bad, Emilia, wants to kill Raven with her own hands in order to avenge her lover, Jade.
- Open-Ended Boss Battle: The first battle with the Black Blade allows the player to continue whether they lose or drop the boss's HP to 50%. In the latter case, the boss will still win in the cutscene.
- Optional Boss: Returning to older areas like the Mystic Forest, Arctic Lake, Tempest's Heart, and Mt. Arzen allows Raven to fight optional berserker bosses.
- Permanently Missable Content:
- All stages can only be cleared once, which means any chests the player misses are lost forever.
- Southlight Village become unavailable after beating the Ashen Calamity, along with any quests that can be taken there.
- Self-Made Man: The knight captain, Levin, was once a street urchin from the Outer Ring of Arcana. He eventually works his way up the knight order, but he doesn't forget his humble roots, which is why he rushes to protect Southlight Village from brutes despite how slow the knights are to approve sending out help.
- Spanner in the Works: Emilia didn't account for Valerie befriending Raven. As such, she didn't expect Raven to give one of the Whispering Shards to Valerie, who uses it to find the location of the pocket dimension that Raven and Emilia are trapped in, foiling Emilia's plan to take Raven down with herself.
- Super Mode: Those trained in using aura can activate Auradrive, a state that temporarily boosts their strength, defense, and speed while quickly regenerating their AP. Auradrive can be ended early to activate an ultimate tech known as an Ace.
- Superboss: In the postgame dungeon, Wistful Pass, Raven fights his mentor Victor, who is no longer holding back.
- Surpassed the Teacher: Raven and the final Optional Boss discuss and deconstruct this trope. Victor feared that Raven's growth would surpass his own, so he sealed away Raven's memory to make the latter forget his more advanced training, which is something he admits is petty. Similarly, Raven fears that Valerie might one day use aura powers for evil and become too strong for him to stop.
- Taking You with Me: At least two of Raven's enemies attempted to kill him along with themselves when victory looked uncertain.
- After Raven defeated Jade, the latter collapsed the cave they were in rather than be apprehended. Raven survives, but Jade doesn't.
- Emilia teleports Raven to another dimension for the Final Boss battle. After her defeat, she reveals that with her power drained, there is no way to escape the dimension, which will result in the two eventually starving to death. Fortunately, Valerie breaks them out of that dimension.
- Technician Versus Performer: Valerie went through more formal sword training with her father while Raven learned his skills by observing and roughly imitating his teacher, Victor. Despite their different training, they are considered evenly matched in Valerie's first boss fight, where Raven refrained from using aura and only relied on his swordplay.
- Worf Had the Flu: The Crystal and Ashen Calamities are in the process of recharging their aura, meaning Raven can kill them before they reach their peak performance. At their full power, they're supposed to be nigh-unstoppable beings that Raven and Victor fled from in the past.
- Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: Emilia reveals that Jade was one of the survivors of Praelia's massacre of the city of Farul. He and his fellow Farulians built the Harbingers of Calamity in order to retaliate against Praelia, but the Praelians being ravaged by the Calamities see them as terrorists.
