Video Game / Octopath Traveler II

Walk astride to the dawn.^note From left to right: Agnea, Temenos, Throné, Hikari, Osvald, Ochette, Castti, and Partitio.

Octopath Traveler II is a sequel to the original 2018 HD-2D JRPG Octopath Traveler, developed by Square Enix and Acquire. It was released on February 24, 2023 for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Steam, with a port to Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S in 2024.

The core gameplay and features of Octopath Traveler II remain the same as its predecessor. Players form a party of eight new characters, each with a personal, non-intersecting story. The playable cast sports the same classes as the first game, but their stories and characterizations contrast greatly, and the game takes place in a new environment called Solistia, a land of two continents bisected by sea.

Gameplay and story progression have been greatly expanded on. Characters now have unique Latent Powers and unlockable EX Skills to give them the edge in combat, as well as two Path Actions for use across a new day-and-night cycle (which you can switch between with a button press). Character stories can now diverge into branching paths as well as cross paths with other characters, and characters acknowledge each other with in-battle banter. Finally, the Job System has been re-worked: all twelve classes have been modified, and it is now possible for a subjob to be attached to multiple characters.

The eight travelers this time are:

• Ochette the Hunter: A beastling hunter who has spent her days keeping her people fed, but is now tasked with gathering three legendary beasts to ward off a coming calamity. In addition to her ability to Capture monsters, she can also "Prepare" them into consumable food items. This connects to her Path Actions: in addition to the "Provoke" ability shared with H'aanit, by night she has a variant on the "turn NPCs into a Guest-Star Party Member" skill called "Befriend" that works Through Their Stomach.
• Castti the Apothecary: An apothecary who awakens at sea with Identity Amnesia — which is unfortunate, because apparently, pre-amnesia, she was up to some pretty bad stuff. By day she retains the "Inquire" ability, but at night she can "Soothe" people by spending consumable items to apply Instant Sedation, making it easy to go through choke points they were blocking.
• Throné the Thief: A thief enslaved to a criminal organization who seeks to win her freedom. Besides the Video Game Stealing ability, at night she can "Ambush" someone to knock them out, with results similar to "Soothe." Her passive makes her automatically cast buffs on the party at the start of the battle if fighting at night.
• Osvald the Scholar: A scholar imprisoned for the murder of his wife and daughter, who must escape prison and seek revenge against the man who framed him. Besides "Scrutinize," the chance-based version of Castti's level-based "Inquire," he can also "Mug" people at night, dueling them to get their possessions.
• Partitio the Merchant: A fast-talking merchant traveling the world to fight poverty. Besides being able to "Purchase" people's possessions, he can "Hire" them at night by spending money, at which point they are available to "Summon" in battle. (Hired NPCs may also provide passive bonuses.)
• Agnea the Dancer: The daughter of a dancer on a "journey for stardom," who seeks to uphold her mother's legacy and spread joy. She combines "Allure" in the daytime (including the Summon aspect) with "Entreat" at night, allowing her to beg for people's possessions via Puppy-Dog Eyes.
• Temenos the Cleric: A flippant church inquisitor hunting down a murderer who seems to be guided by prophecy. In addition to "Guide," he can "Coerce" people at night, entering a Battle in the Center of the Mind to get information from them. He can Summon people in battle, and also auto-applies debuffs to enemies in battle at night.
• Hikari the Warrior: A noble prince seeking to free his kingdom from his tyrannical brother, his own family's legacy of warmongering, and some problems of his own. At night he can Bribe NPCs to get information from them... assuming he has enough leaves. By day he retains the "Challenge" ability, but with a twist: winning duels allows Power Copying of the NPC's ability; Hikari can equip up to five such abilities at a time.

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Tropes:

• 100% Completion: On most platforms come trophies that require you to scour every last inch of the land to earn that Platinum. In short, you have to:
  • Complete all eight character's stories, their crossed-path quests, the final chapter, and then witness the epilogue.
  • Obtain all the EX skills found in shrines scattered across the map.
  • Find every record after completing Partitio's side-quest, which unlocks the gramophone in taverns.
  • Buy, mug, steal, or entreat a copy of each of the Battle-Tested equipment from important NPCs.
  • Acquire at least one license for every secondary job.
  • Visit every location in Solistia at least once.
  • Complete every secondary quest in the journal. Which also means crafting every tool needed for the Inventor job, finding every rusty weapon needed for the Armsmaster job, and defeating the Super Boss.
• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: Throné's story begins with her escaping from one of these, beneath the city of New Delsta.
• Alas, Poor Villain:
  • Both Mother's and Father's deaths are treated with a surprising amount of emotional gravitas, despite how much the game turns the former into a Hate Sink. Most of it is because of Throné's own conflictions as she kills them and Mira's pleading not to kill Mother, but Father in particular dies smiling, happy to have had a daughter.
  • This is also the case with Trousseau, who was utterly broken by the Book of Night and became an omnicidal nihilist as a result when he was once one of the most compassionate members of Eir's Apothecaries. Even though he's past the point of no return and dies clinging to his nihilism, it's hard not to pity him.
• The Alcatraz: Osvald begins the story as an inmate of Frigit Isle, a prison on a frozen island four days' sailing away from the mainland.
• Amnesiac Dissonance: Castti expresses being frightened of her lost memory in banter with Temenos, believing it possible that she developed amnesia to forget some sort of horror or trauma and hypothesizing that she may be happier never getting her memory back. Temenos refutes this, telling her she is a good person and a fine apothecary, as proven by her actions.
• And Then What?:
  • Lady Clarissa asks this of Osvald during his chapter 3, asking what he'll do once he gets his revenge on Harvey and warning him that Vengeance Feels Empty. He refuses to answer her.
  • On the Glacis route of Ochette's chapter 2, Ochette asks fellow hunter Heig what he would do after killing Glacis, adding that doing so wouldn't bring back his comrades who perished trying to hunt her in the past.
• And the Adventure Continues: Ochette’s story ends this way. Traveling alongside her companion and some jerky, she gained new bonds and strength. With that, she understood what it meant to be guardian of her land and no longer doubts any responsibility that comes with it. Thus, she looks forward to her next adventure.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different:
  • Temenos' first chapter begins with the player controlling not him, but Aelfric the Flamebringer, the god of light.
  • If Agnea is chosen as the main character, then the player controls Pala, her younger sister, during the epilogue. This is because Agnea is busy at the theatre.
• Antepiece: For optional content, of all things. As part of the sidequest chain to make the fight with Galdera possible, the player has to fight a massive creature called the Gigantes, which has an interesting gimmick - it recovers break points every turn, making it tremendously difficult to break. It's entirely possible, even likely, that Gigantes will die before being broken once. This gimmick makes the Gigantes fight play like a more traditional turn-based JRPG. While Gigantes can hit relatively hard, it's no threat to a properly leveled party and doesn't have many tricks beyond its main gimmick, which means that it introduces the concept of an enemy you're unlikely to break to the player safely. Come the fight with Galdera at the end of the quest chain, and suddenly the final phase of the boss has that exact same gimmick, only it hits like a runaway freight train and has several nasty debuffs and ailments it likes to add to the mix, serving as a proper exam on the concept of difficult-to-break bosses.
• Anti-Frustration Features: Several gameplay mechanics have been ironed out since the first game:
  • There are no more locked chests that only a Thief can unlock, like there were for Therion.
  • Gameplay and Story Segregation are in full effect for the sake of allowing the player to do different path actions with the time of day. Even if Castti has to Inquire someone for the sake of the story and it would make no sense for that person to wait there all night, the player is free to toggle day or night as appropriate.
  • Ochette has 25% chances of Capturing a monster if she deals the killing blow instead of wasting a turn using the Capture command, perhaps to ease the fact monsters can be cooked into items as the new Discard feature. You can also turn this function on or off if you don't want her constantly capturing things and the game asking you which monster to discard.
  • All of the achievements can be earned in one playthrough without excessive grinding. You don't have to beat the game using one character, or under a time-limit, or open every treasure-chest, or catalog every missable monster weakness. Simply completing the campaign and every side-quest will do.
  • Ochette can use Captured monsters in battle an unlimited number of times, though there is still a limit on the number of monsters she can bring with her at any one time.
  • During Hikari's intro chapter, if he happens to be out of money before he can Bribe the merchant, there just so happens to be a chest right next to the merchant with enough funds to allow him to progress the plot.
  • Passive skills that do not stack if more than one character has them equipped at the same time are now more clearly labeled.
  • If you're required to Guide/Allure/Hire/Befriend a certain NPC by the story, any NPC already following you at that time will be put in an Offstage Waiting Room and returned to you after you part ways with your new companion.
  • In the first game, you could only read the party banter once, and if you didn't have a character in your party, you were never going to see it short of loading a save and replaying it. In this game, if you go to the Journal and select a chapter, you can press a button to see all of the party banter for that chapter, even the ones you missed.
  • While there are three distinct landmasses, you only need to pay for ship crossing twice. After you've visited the places once, you can fast-travel to them from any continent.
  • There are some sidequests that are locked behind a time of day. If this is the case, the map will still show you the icon that denotes the location of a questgiver even if it's the wrong time of day and the questgiver won't be at the location so you don't accidentally check a section of the map and decide a quest isn't in the area. The icon is a different shade of orange, as well, to make it clear the questgiver's presence is tied to the time of day.
    • Adding on to this, all questgivers are found in towns for the sake of convenience, so you don't have to scour the map and run into random encounters just to find questgivers in out-of-the-way locations you are unlikely to visit more than once. The only exceptions are Al, who is always found close to the town the chosen protagonist starts in so you can't miss him, and a few questgivers tied to specific dungeons, who are found either within the dungeon itself or in an area just outside it so you can turn in the quest quickly and easily once it's complete.
  • The game keeps track of how many sidequests you've completed in an area and overall the same way it tracks story and Crossed Path progress; as you complete sidequests, the stained glass window you can view sidequests from in the menu continually fills up. This is a massive improvement over the previous game, where it was all too easy to lose track of how many sidequests were left in an area, requiring players to trek through practically every section of the map in the game to track down where sidequests were. The stained glass approach gives you a bunch of information you can use to figure out how far you are; if the sidequest menu for an area is full of completed quests but the stained glass isn't lit up yet, that's a sign there's a quest out there in the current section of the map to look for. Furthermore, the sidequest menu generally condenses down the information relating to the sidequest to what the travelers can do to solve the problem.
  • The map is incredibly detailed, and the paths laid out on the map are very distinct from each other and heavily detailed to where it's easy to trace one's path while exploring. More saliently, however, these excessive amounts of detail on a given map space makes it very clear where optional dungeons are, meaning the player can glance at the map and immediately pinpoint any dungeons they've yet to visit, just in case a player saw a dungeon's level warning, decided the area was too much for their party, and decided to travel elsewhere before forgetting the location.
  • The very existence of Castti's Latent Power is a marked upgrade over Alfyn's own abilities in the first game, and for a simple reason; you don't use up components. Alfyn's concoctions were Awesome, but Impractical until late into the first game when you could finally afford reagents (and/or you reached a town where they are sold). Every Drop Counts makes Concoct much more reasonable to use from the get-go, meaning players starting with Castti can easily use her core gimmick for the entirety of the game. Drop rates for ingredients are also plentiful enough that you can occasionally splurge on a non-Every Drop Counts Concoct.
  • Agnea starts with Ruinous Kick, a skill that lets her break shields no matter the enemy's weakness. This goes a long way towards making her valuable during the early game, compared to Primrose who was limited to daggers and dark damage until she could unlock a secondary class and who otherwise had only support skills.
  • The cost of fixing your reputation is much cheaper than it was in the original game. This makes failing certain Path Actions a lot less punishing.
  • You need to complete a specific one of Partitio's Scent of Commerce subquests, consisting of a purchase of 100,000 leaves, to complete his Story Arc. To compensate, other characters' final chapters really start shelling out money; you'll find chests full of the stuff everywhere you go.
    • Partitio can't progress far into his third chapter unless he's completed one of his Scent of Commerce sections, but it doesn't matter which he completes, only that's he's completed one. The one in Sai is very obviously meant to be one of the first he interacts with, and has the cheapest, easiest path to conclusion, meaning it's unlikely the pace of Partitio's story will be broken up by the player not having done a Scent of Commerce mission before reaching Wellgrove (or not having those L100K).
  • The Final chapter allows you to change your party formation at any time once you start it, removing the need to go back to the tavern. This becomes a permanent feature, so if you continue exploring between the final chapter and epilogue, you can still change your party whenever you want.
  • Unlocking the final chapter and the True Final Boss is much simpler than in the first game. Instead of being hidden behind a string of Guide Dang It! Side Quests, it's unlocked simply by completing all story content; the game is guiding you there much more deliberately. Additionally, while the first game's dungeon was a grueling Boss Rush with no save points, you're required to revisit several locations you've already encountered; none of them are particularly grueling, you've still got the same save and fast-travel network as before, and two of the dungeons don't even have bosses.
  • By virtue of the True Final Boss and the Superboss no longer being the same entity, the latter's Spurning Ribbon can be acquired before starting the final chapter ^note you could potentially get it before doing most of the stories, in fact!, making it actually useful for speeding through the game's remaining content rather than a Bragging Rights Reward.
  • There is now an option to double the battle speed, making traversing dungeons, grinding and fleeing less of a hassle.
  • The entire difficulty curve in combat has been adjusted. Bosses have fewer HP, their Charged Attacks hit hard but are no longer practically guaranteed Total Party Kills, and it's a lot easier to get to the point of hitting and/or breaking the damage cap. (The fact that their purple attacks are weaker also allows the game to let bosses fire them more frequently, causing boss battles to be more entertaining.)
  • Since each traveler will be alone in their starting chapters (whether they are the starting character or not), the three squishiest characters (Temenos, Osvald, and Agnea) will be accompanied by a sturdier temporary character until their first boss is defeated, and they join your party (or start their journey, if they are the first traveler). This is unlike the first game, where starting with fragile characters (especially Primrose) could mean a difficult chapter 1, as dying was very easy. Hikari and Throné also get helpers during the first half of their first chapters (and Throné is also on the fragile side), making starting out much easier in general.
• Apocalyptic Log: The Worn Journal chronicles the last few days of the young daughter of the Wellows family, who was assassinated years earlier along with all of her household. It tells the story of her happy life in their mansion, her accidentally stumbling on a servant getting bribed for information, and the final day where her parents tell her to play a "game" of hide-and-seek as the murderers break in. Stuck in her hiding place and not knowing what's going on, she decides to start playing with her new birthday gift: a music box. The diary brutally cuts off a few lines later.
• Arc Number: Much like the first game, eight is a significant number.
  • There are eight major playable Travelers.
  • There are eight base classes again, each with eight basic skills to learn.
  • There are once again eight geographical regions.
  • In Temenos' history of the Sacred Flame, he recounts the actions of eight primary gods in a great battle against a ninth, evil god. A notable change as the first game had twelve good gods, not eight.
  • With the five who are already dead by the time the story starts, and including himself, Hikari's companions originally numbered eight.
  • Partitio's chapter 1 starts when he's eight, it then jumps forward eight years, to him being 16, and then jumps forward another eight years to the present and Partitio being 24. ^AddendumThis also applies to Partitio's father, Papp, whose current age is also a multiple of eight and his path action information details significant life events that happened to him every eight years. He ran away from his Abusive Parents at eight years old, started his first shop at 16 years old, lost it at 24, had Partitio when he was 32, and founded Oresrush when he was 40.
• Arc Words:
  • In the second half of Throné's story, "Did you know there is something that cannot be stolen? Something even the greatest thief could never take." starts coming up quite a bit. Every character it's asked to has a different answer to the riddle, one that says a lot about them.
  • "Surrender yourself not unto silent dusk, for the light shall fade. And soon, night shall fall." These words pop up often in Temenos' story and later, in the final chapter as the motto of the Moonshade Order.
  • During several final chapters multiple references happen about the Dawn. Some are incidental, such as Dolcinea claiming to surpass Sealticge, a dawn of a new goddess, some are direct, like Partitio bringing about a dawn of a new era of capitalism and Harvey's claim to sacrifice the dawn in his pursuits. The Dawn is what the Moonshade Order seeks to end forever.
• Art Evolution: Compared to the original and Champions of the Continent, Octopath Traveler II has far more animations, that all use many more frames. To wit;
  • Player characters have more intricate basic attacks, with each weapon type having its own animation set. Most skills also have unique animations attached to them rather than relying on stock poses, with Agnea in particular having impressive dancing animations.
  • Every enemy has at least one detailed attack animation. Bosses often have multiple phases that are accompanied by new sprites.
  • NPCs that you fight or recruit all have idle poses and attack animations for whatever weapon they use, up from the single static fighting pose they used prior.
  • Even the hand-drawn portraits for the characters are more lavish, having detailed backgrounds, more dynamic poses and more elements to them compared to the first game where the portraits are all the upper bodies of the character on flat backgrounds inset in a shield.
  • The game's cinematography is upped significantly from the first. The screen effect for getting into a random battle involves panning the camera around the party leader, so we now have camera angles from more than just the straight-on isometric position. This camera rotation is also used in some cut scenes to up the drama. Finally, there are additional cinematic techniques on display; Partitio's first chapter, which starts with a flashback to when the lad was but 8 years old, features an undercranked Time-Passes Montage depicting his and his father's mansion being constructed — from which Partitio, now 16, emerges to begin the next phase of gameplay.
• The Artifact : The four secret jobs aren't represented by a patron god, unlike the ones from the first game. However, each of their ultimate ability is still a "Divine Skill".
• Artifact of Doom: Throughout the game, mention of four "Darkblood" artifacts are brought up, and they're all some flavor of horrible and play key roles in the Moonshade Order's plans.
  • The Darkblood Blade was once wielded by D'arqest, the infamous archmage who founded the Moonshade Order and led a bloody campaign against the world long ago. Its corruptive power is capable of turning people into horrific monstrosities.
  • Ori gives Arcanette the Darkblood Staff that Claude gives to her.
  • While not much is known about the Darkblood Bow, its power was enough to drive Roi half-mad with paranoia, and its power is heavily implied to have played a role in the creation of the Darkling fought at the end of Ochette's story.
  • Finally, there's the Darkblood Grimoire, which is actually a combination of two equally terrible books: The Book of Night, which contains detailed accounts of humanity's worst crimes and atrocities, and is capable of driving all but the most stalwarted to nihilistic madness; and the Book of Demons, a spellbook created from D'arqest's own flesh after his death that, when "fed" with the blood of the Lumina bloodline, grants its owner the ability to use Shadow magic.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: For the Blacksnakes, Mother and Father believe this when it comes to their successor. Of their four top thieves, Throné, Pirro, Scaracci, and Donnie, they set them up on a heist to see who is the best. After Donnie dies in the mission, Mother and Father tell each of the survivors one of the others is a traitor for the purpose of making them kill each other. The last standing will be their heir to the organization.
• Awesome, but Impractical: There are definitely a few abilities that, while looking cool, are either outclassed by other abilities, produce underwhelming effects, or just cost too much SP to use frequently.
  • Conquerer's Roar, the sword ability of the Armsmaster class, has your character charge up a heavy slash that is unleashed at the end of the turn. Unfortunately, various other abilities such as Limb From Limb can outperform it in damage since Conquerer's Roar only hits once, and it requires that your character equip the associated Divine Weapon, which itself is outclassed by the Battle-Tested Sword. Within the scope of the class itself, Conquerer's Roar has to compete with the Lionheart Axe's On the Hunt, which is considered to be the single most powerful ability in the game, doesn't require any charge time and thus luck with the turn order, hits twice, and gains a power boost on the much more reliable condition of how many weaknesses have been revealed on the enemy.
  • Throné's Disguise EX skill allows her to copy the moveset of an ally (except for Latent Powers, EX Skills, Learned Skills, Provoke, Concoct, and similar character-specific abilities), but this prevents Throné from using whatever moveset she's been configured with. It has its uses, but Throné is usually better off using her own skillset instead of copying another's.
  • The Rite of the Sun ability from the Conjurer class revives and fully heals the entire party while granting them bonuses to their defense stats, but it prevents the one who used the ability from moving for 6/5/4/3 turns (depending on how much it was Boosted). While this can let you come back from the brink of defeat, locking up the caster for at least 3 turns makes it hard to justify outside of situations where things have already gone horribly wrong.
  • Many of Ochette's level 10 captures fall into this, because you need to be fully boosted to use them, they're only available once per fight, and they can never break the 9999 damage cap. The Latent Power/Provoke Beast Ex Skill glitch gotten after clearing her story, however, throws this out the window: with no limit on how many times she can use them and the ability to use six at once, Ochette can load up with an array of boss monsters that still can't do high single-target damage output, but can do everything else. For those who don't though, the level 10 captures are only really helpful in niche situations due to that, especially when using Provoke Beast can provide more utility.
  • The Arcanist's Divine Skill, Seal of Eternity, allows a random buff that's affecting one of your characters to become permanent, even buffs provided by other Divine Skills such as Sealticge's Seduction. However, given you are likely to have multiple buffs on a character before you can use Seal of Eternity, you likely will end up giving permanent duration to a buff you didn't want. Additionally, Seal of Eternity does not prevent the buff from being Anti-Magic'd by an enemy, which could make your efforts to get the permanent buff All for Nothing. While Seal of Eternity can be very potent if it grants permanent duration to a Divine Skill's buff, Agnea's Song of Hope tends to be the better choice for extending most buffs since it extends all buffs affecting your team (though Song of Hope does not affect Divine Skills). Using Seal of Eternity properly requires you to forgo buffing your party until it has been used on the buff you want, otherwise it is very likely to extend the wrong buff.
  • Temenos' Heavenly Shine EX skill is potentially the most powerful attack in the game, but it consumes all of his SP when casting it, and then calculates the damage based on how much SP was lost. Without a lot of setup to capitalize on the power of it, Heavenly Shine cripples Temenos too much to make using it normally worth it, but not only is it really strong, but it is commonly used as one of the main strategies for beating Galdera.
  • Osvald's second EX skill, One True Magic, deals AoE elemental damage to all foes and lowers their shields while ignoring weaknesses. Even better, it can be empowered by Advanced Magic and Alephan's Wisdom to attack up to three times in one action. However, it costs 75 SP to cast, which will quickly force the player to spend actions giving him SP-restoring items. There's also the fact that Osvald already has natural access to much cheaper AoE Fire, Ice and Lightning magic (which can also be empowered by the aforementioned two skills), so if a foe(s) is weak to any of those three elements, there's little to no point in using the EX skill anyway. That said, it becomes really strong when combined with the Conjurer's SP Saver to reduce the SP cost, making it easier to cast and use, so it becomes more viable at the end game, if still a bit impractical.
• Awesome Moment of Crowning: Hikari becomes the new king of Ku at the end of his story, after killing Mugen and ending the war he began.
• Background Music Override: Happens a few times in this game:
  • During Ochette's Chapter 1 when shadow creatures begin to infest the way back to the village. The music will not be replaced by the battle theme when encountering enemies.
  • During Ochette's Chapter 3, the dungeon area will keep having "Tempest on the Battlefield" playing until the end of the chapter and will override the usual battle theme when encountering shadow enemies there, which the players cannot run away from.
  • During the Extra Stories where The Night That Never Ends falls upon Solistia, there is either no music at all, or an eerie music playing throughout the overworld. This can also sometimes happen temporarily before the Extra Story.
• Bad Moon Rising: The Night of Scarlet Moon. It's a calamity that happens to Toto'haha every 400 years, and Ochette's primary goal is to prevent it by bringing the three legendary creatures to the island.
• Bait-and-Switch Boss: Throné's first chapter seems to lead up to a fight with Scaracci and Diamante. By the time you reach them, Pirro has killed them both, and he challenges Throné to a battle to take her place as Father's successor.
• The Battle Didn't Count: In Hikari's chapter 2, no matter how the challenge fight against Bandelam goes, he'll be nonplussed, compliment Hikari on being his toughest foe yet and proceed to unleash a proper boss battle.
• Beast Man: The beastlings of Toto'haha have doglike ears and tails, and stronger senses of smell than humans.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: There's a NPC in Clockbank who constantly brags about being descended from royalty, but has no concrete evidence of his lineage. You can bring him said evidence, upon which he finds out that he indeed descends from a long-lost prince... who was long-lost because he backstabbed his brothers in a quest for power, eventually brought his own kingdom to ruin in the process, and disappeared into the night. He doesn't take it well.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family: The Blacksnakes: unbeknownst to them, they are all Claude's children, and due to the Klingon Promotion nature of the guild, they often stab each other in the back (sometimes literally) to get ahead, to say nothing of Mother's whipping as punishment and Father's mind games pitting them against each other.
• Bittersweet Ending: Some characters, despite all their hard work, get this in the end.
  • Osvald's story. Harvey has been defeated and Elena rescued from him before she could bleed out — however, because of Harvey tampering with her memory, Osvald is denied a proper reunion with his daughter. Instead, Lady Clarissa takes her in until she fully recovers, while Osvald heads back out to track down Harvey's associates. Elena’s dialogue during the epilogue indicates that she has since recovered some memories of her real father.
  • For Castti’s story: She regains her memories and saves a city from the same disease that killed a tragic village. But it came at a great cost: Many lives were taken from the disease and her colleagues all gave up their lives to save Castti and the lives of many others. What's more, Trousseau fell from grace and had to be put down. Nonetheless, Castti soldiers on and continues to save lives from whatever evil may come and in memory of Eir's Apothecaries.
  • Throné's story ends on the bitter part of the spectrum. She finally is freed from the shackles of her collar and being in the Blacksnakes... and yet, she felt she burned too many bridges and made enemies along the way. Even killing Father left her with little satisfaction after coming to an (if twisted) understanding for what made him who he was. Worse yet, Throné still isn't over the fact that her hands will forever be stained in blood, something that continues to plague her even after her story is over. At least now she has a chance at a new lease on life. There is a silver lining, however small it may be: Some sidequests and her journey with the party alleviates some of the pain.
  • Temenos' journey was not one without bloodshed. Crick, the Pontiff, and several others are dead, all because of the heretics operating from within the church. On the bright side, thanks to Temenos' perseverance, he was able to put a stop to the corruption that used the name of the Sacred Flame in vain. With that, the hound continues his journey to sniff out the darkness in the world.
• Bizarro Elements: Discussed between Osvald and Ochette. While talking about the nature of the One True Magic, Ochette posits the element is meat since she feels stronger when she eats it. Osvald feels that it doesn't sound right.
• Black Market: Outside of the Abandoned Village in the Brightlands at night are merchants that will sell various dubious goods, up to and including all 3 variants of each kind of Soulstone.
• Bleak Level: The town of Lostseed seems dedicated to trying to recreate the Dark Souls ambiance in HD-2D. The entire town is a mess of dilapidated ruins, the inhabitants are all mad or hit the Despair Event Horizon a long time ago, and even the music is eerily quiet. It's all the more startling when you remember the town is hidden right next to the biggest city in the world. It's Claude's base of operations, and even other Moonshade Order members are creeped out by what his town is like.
• Bookends:
  • Partitio's story begins and ends with Papp and Roque discussing how to best move forward with a building plan. At the start, its about how to best build what will eventually become Oresrush, and at the end, its about the railway Partitio and Roque are working on.
  • Agnea's story starts with a glimpse of her on stage in New Delsta, and the game's epilogue ends with her on the same stage
  • If the player picks Temenos as their starting character the game both begins and ends with a boss fight against Vide the Wicked (albeit the first one is only a part of a play.)
    • Additionally, if the player picked Temenos and saved the Flamechurch Cathedral for last during the final mission, his story begins and ends with a journey up Flamechurch Pilgrims' Way. Whether or not it serves as the first and last 'dungeon' of the game is contingent on whether or not the player completed the 'Pilgrim Protection' mission.
  • Ochette, Throné, and Hikari's stories begin and end in Beasting Village, New Delsta, and Ku, respectively. Throné has a unique final town, but she has to go to New Delsta first in order to access it.
  • Ochette's story begins with her giving some 'Friendship Jerky' to her chosen companion. In her final chapter, she gives a piece of it to the unchosen one (though the second instance is much more tragic than the first).
  • Castti's story begins and ends with her waking up from a dream. Both of these dreams involve Malaya.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Multi-hit moves are consistently useful from the start of the game to the end of the game. Early on, certain monsters, the cleric's Mystical Staff, the thief's HP Thief, and so on provide a method of quickly and conveniently breaking enemies while still preserving Boost Points for the moment the enemy breaks and the character can unleash their full power. Late game, attacks like On the Hunt, One True Magic III, and Limb from Limb rule the roost in terms of pure destructive power when the player can reliably reach the second damage cap of 99,999, since they offer a means of working around the restriction to damage foisted on the player.
  • Thanks to Every Drop Counts, Castti's concoctions are far more reliable than Alfyn's were in the first game, and stand out as an easy way to saddle a foe with multiple debilitating ailments or give the party a power boost that more convoluted methods like chaining Dohter's Charity into the various jams can't match.
  • Ochette's animal companion always hits either a physical or magical weak point. This not only helps when in a new area when you're figuring out enemy weaknesses, since there very few enemies in the game that only break from weapons or magic, it's also a guaranteed hit on a boss's shields in fights where you really can't waste a turn on a guess or don't want to play with a strategy guide across your lap. It also helps that Mahina/Akalā grow with Ochette and get an upgrade at the end of her storyline.
  • The Conjurer's support skill SP Saver halves the SP cost of all skills. This helps greatly mitigate the high cost of Osvald's One True Magic and of Hikari's stronger Learned Skills, like Sentencing Gavel and Right Hook, since he has a smaller SP pool. Thanks to a glitch, when paired with the Price Of Power skill, you get both the halved SP cost and the double spell power at the same time.
• Boss Rush: Hikari's final chapter has four boss fights in rapid succession, with the only time to save being in between the first two. They are Ritsu, Mugen, a Duel Boss versus Hikari's shadow self, and Mugen as the Enshrouded King.
• Brutish Character, Brutish Weapon: If a character carries a BFS, you can be certain they're ruthless at best and insanely cruel at worst. Mugen is the most obvious case, but other examples include Bandelam the Reaper and Kaldena, the leader of the Sacred Guard.
• Call-Back: Once again, a boss in the Hunter's storyline is way more important than they first appear. Like how Graham Crossford was transformed into the Redeye in the first game, it's heavily implied that Roi, Temenos' predecessor as inquisitor, was transformed into the Dark Entity, Ochette's first boss fight.
• Canon Character All Along: Al, the first questgiver of the game, reveals himself to be a young Alfred Hornburg, who would later be killed in the intro to Olberic's story in the first game. Whether or not this game is a Stealth Prequel or Alternate Universe is left vague.
• Card-Carrying Villain: While some members of the Moonshade Order have a Freudian Excuse or want to Put Them All Out of My Misery, there are some members who are unapologetically evil and have no stated reason for them to want Vide to destroy the world. Harvey, Claude and Petrichor all offer no reason for why they want the world destroyed. Claude and Harvey's involvement in the scheme at all seems to be only so far as they can advance their own aims, although their own goals are monstrous in their own right.
• Central Theme: While the game's central theme is about hope in the face of nihilism and despair, the game also has a strong theme of rich vs poor, and in particular the rich exploiting the poor for profit. Almost every character story encounters elements of this. In particular characters who put their own greed ahead of the wellbeing of others is a recurring plot element.
  • Montwise has a gladiator arena where the poor fight for the entertainment of the Rich, sometimes to the death. With the local arena boss having no regards for how wounded his fighters are.
  • Partitio's entire plot circles around that. Oresrush becomes a miserable town when the landowner takes over the town and begins taxing everyone. The same thing happens in Clockbank where everyone, even children, as being taxed by the local rich company.
  • The rich theater owner of New Delsta goes to beat the crap out of a tavern owner where Agnea is dancing because he can't stomach poor people having access to dance show. He also expresses his hatred for the poor and kicks a beggar on his way back.
  • Hikari likes to hang out with the common folks and proves very popular with them. So his brother kills them all and burns down the town when he takes over the kingdom, seeing them as too weak to contribute to his wars and not wanting to risk them supporting Hikari.
  • The town of Sai is in the throes of a war between poor refugees who came in looking for a living and the richer local royalty. Edmund used to fight for the former until he grew disgusted with how they treated their opponents who just wanted a better life and he switched side.
  • The warden of the prison where Osvald's story begins lines his pockets by making the prisoners perform hard labor mining minerals in conditions that make many die of exhaustion and exposure to the cold weather.
  • Accompanying the above, many of the villains are rich and often make blatant displays of their wealth. Giff and Captain Stenvar are both fought surrounded by the piles of ill-gotten gold they've amassed.
• Chance Meeting Between Antagonists: In the final chapter, Ori's journal reveals that Castti was with Trousseau the day he met Claude. Claude was able to influence Trousseau, but not Castti, and (correctly) predicted that Castti would be a potential Spanner in the Works.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • The locked door at the very beginning of Throné's story. It turns out the keys that Mother and Father carry actually unlock that door instead of Throné's collar — it leads to the town of Lostseed and the real holder of Throné's key, Claude.
  • The course of Agnea's story. The campsite where the final chapter begins is just outside of her hometown of Cropdale. Retracing her mother's steps takes her to the locations of two of the Sacred Flames: Ku (the Tranquil Grotto is even involved in her and Hikari's Crossed Paths story) and Toto'haha. It's no coincidence that Agnea meets Giselle's troupe, including Tanzy, in Toto'haha. In the final chapter, Tanzy's diary reveals that she joined Giselle's troupe in order to travel Solistia and find the Sacred Flames for Arcanette.
  • Some attention is given to the names of each herb that Castti uses to concoct important medicines throughout the story. All of them, when combined with the snowdrop flower that she's had in her satchel since the very beginning, are the ingredients for the cure to Trousseau's poison.
• Color Motif: Like in the first game, each character is associated with a specific color, which appears in their costumes, the stained-glass window representing the progression of their respective stories, and their Limit Break meters.
  • Ochette: Pink.
  • Castti: Blue.
  • Throné: Purple.
  • Osvald: Grey.
  • Partitio: Yellow.
  • Agnea: Orange.
  • Temenos: Green.
  • Hikari: Red.
• Colourful Theme Naming: There's a set of sidequests in Timberain in which you must find evidence to determine the innocence or guilt of the suspects in some crimes. The guys who's obviously guilty in called Nero (Italian for 'Black'), while the guy who's innocent is Bianco (Italian for 'White').
• The Computer Is a Lying Bastard:
  • The game's description for the Warrior's Enervating Slash is flat out wrong. While it says it removes all of the enemy's status buffs and gains more power the more are removed, the reality is it removes your status buffs and gains more power the more you have.
  • Throné's second EX Skill, Disguise, also has an incorrect description. It says it "disguises a single ally" without elaborating on what that means, when it actually disguises Throné as another ally, temporarily replacing her own appearance and skills with the targeted ally's (except for Divine and EX skills).
• Continuity Nod:
  • One of the tomes the library in Montwise is looking to acquire is From the Far Reaches of Hell, the book that Cyrus' story in the first game centered around. Finding the books eventually leads to a pair of follow-up quests that culminate in a full blown Legacy Boss Battle against Galdera.
  • The game's mythology involves eight good gods taking on a ninth evil god, where the first game featured eight player characters against a force known as "the dark god."
  • The statues of the god Aeber, Prince of Thieves, have him standing by a treasure chest that looks like the ones only Therion could open in the first game.
• Contrasting Sequel Main Character: The entire cast greatly differs from their counterpart in the first game.
  • Where H'aanit was an experienced hunter and The Stoic on a quest to save her master, Ochette is a young girl who's more excitable and out to find three legends on a mission by her master Juvah.
  • Where Alfyn was driven by his memories of the man who saved him, Castti is driven by her complete lack of memories.
  • Therion loved being a thief and acted independently. Throné was raised (and enslaved) by the Blacksnakes and wishes to leave the thief's life entirely.
  • Cyrus in the previous game had the scholarly and relatively mundane goal of finding a lost tome and his strongest flaw was his obliviousness to infatuated women. In contrast, Osvald's journey is not about his profession, but rather seeking revenge on Harvey for stealing his research and framing him for the death of his family.
  • Tressa was just starting out as a merchant and got her first taste of the harsh realities of the world. Partitio is an experienced merchant who is aware of the world's problems and seeks to fix them.
  • Where Primrose had a harsh childhood following her father's death and only became a professional dancer as a means to an end, Agnea had a generally pleasant childhood that led her to want to follow her mother's example.
  • One of Temenos's main motivations is his doubts surrounding his faith, unlike Ophilia's rock-solid, unwavering faith in the church and her family.
  • Olberic was a tall, beefy man and a medieval knight of commoner origins who fought with massive greatswords, Hikari is a lithe young man who fights like a Samurai and is the heir to the throne of a kingdom.
• Corrupt Church: Unlike the completely benevolent church of the first game, the church here is more ambiguous as to its nature, with Temenos trusting no one else in the church except the Pontiff. The Order of the Sacred Flame, which includes all of the actual clergy, turns out to be almost as benevolent as it was in the first game, but the Sacred Guard turns out to be so corrupt that it's stripped of all its authority at the end of Temenos's story. Then it also turns out one of the clerics is the head of The Moonshade Order.
• Cover Drop: The campfire scene on the game's boxart happens at the beginning of the final chapter. Soon after the eternal night begins, as the Sacred Flames are doused by the Moonshade Order.
• Crapsaccharine World: On the surface, the setting of the game seems to be far better then the previous one. Technology is progressing smoothly, medicine is far more well known and spreading, and save for the last war in Ku the continents have been at peace for a long time. However, it becomes apparent very fast that nearly every town has a seedy underbelly of crime and/or corruption that either controls or takes advantage of all the progress that has been made. Even just reading up on NPC often reveals secrets they hide, from merely hating their job to being former criminals trying to turn a new leaf.
• Culture Chop Suey: Hikari's home region is a mix of feudal Japan and ancient China both in weapons, costume design, names, and architecture, except it's all set in a desert.
• Darker and Edgier: In general, the protagonists' stories are darker and have higher stakes than in the first game. Throné's story in particular includes slavery and abuse on top of murder. Justified by the game's Central Theme — finding hope when confronted with despair.
• The Day the Music Lied: Played straight and for laughs on 2 separate occasions.
  • In Ochette's final chapter, "Unshakable Resolve" starts to play when Ochette recognizes the Darkling and tries to confront it, only to come to a halt when the Darkling knocks Ochette and her companion off the cliff.
  • In Agnea's final chapter, the usual prelude to her boss fights starts playing to make it seem you are going to fight La'mani again, only to have the music stop as Veronica comes in and gut-punches La'mani and knocks him unconscious for you.
• Degraded Boss: Some locations and optional dungeons have boss monsters that cannot be stolen from, collected from, or captured by Ochette the first time you fight them. However, after they're defeated, they have a chance of appearing again as normal (but still as powerful as before) enemies, except they can now be captured like other monsters. These particular monsters are so powerful that they can only be summoned once per battle, and only with a maxed out boost, by Ochette.
• Demoted to Extra: The four additional gods of the first game, Steorra, Dreisang, Balogar and Winnehild are not part of the Solistian pantheon unlike the Osterran one and their corresponding jobs aren't in the game. They are however mentioned in Agnea's dance sessions, although with altered names ("Sterra's Fantasia", "Nocturne of Sang" and "Hild’s Hymn", with "Sonata of Balogar" being the only unchanged name). The reason for their absence and their name's alteration is unknown, though it is implied they didn't participate in their sibling's battle against Vide like they did against Galdera, and therefore, aren't very well known in Solistia.
• Developer's Foresight: All over the place.
  • Each traveler has extra lines and takes the lead in group shots if chosen as the starting protagonist during the Journey For The Dawn, which is only at the end of a game that can easily clock in at over eighty hours.
    • In the same endgame scenario, having Temenos in the party for the fight with Arcanette will give him special dialogue like many of the heroes have with the end bosses for their stories. It would be odd for him to not take Mindt's betrayal personally, after all.
  • The four characters who can convince townsfolk to join them all have unique greeting dialogue for characters that are close to them when they summon those characters in battle, such as Partitio and Papp or Agnea and Pala. This even includes former villains, as characters like Dolcinaea and Roque have specific things to say if summoned by the hero that opposed them.
  • If you know where to go and when to go there, the game actually accounts for the areas the Moonshade Order douse the Sacred Flames at, and will have the local flame doused if it's at a point in the story when it would be doused, even before The Journey For The Dawn. The Tombs of the Wardenbeast's flame is put out following the end of Ochette's tale, for instance, and Ori has the flame in the Fellsun Ruins doused following the completion of several travelers' journeys. Even better, the journal entries Ori leaves scattered in the area will also be there, meaning the player can collect the entries ahead of time.
  • The player, if in a hurry, has the ability to just skip everyone's Chapter 1 if they are not the main character, at which point the new party member starts at Lv.1. If you instead choose to play the Ch.1 as a flashback, any levels and items are retconned in when you're done. Lastly, the fact that they're all flashback, played solely by the character in question, means that each intro chapter is better tuned to the character... but means that your main source of Ch.1 level-grinding — the other Ch.1 adventures — is eliminated. For this reason, all remaining level requirements are scaled quite differently than they were in the first game, allowing you to segue smoothly despite the fact that most of your characters are maybe Lv.10.
  • Performing a Path Action like Throné's Ambush on NPC's who block specific pathways or buildings will sometimes adjust their dialogue if the area they were guarding had items inside. For instance: knocking out the NPC blocking a house in Oresrush, looting the chest inside, and then talking to them when they are awake, will have them comment on someone stealing what they were guarding.
• Disc-One Nuke: If playing as one of the travelers who starts on the eastern continent, especially Throné or Temenos, it is possible to easily get the Inventor class, one of the four special classes. While it needs specific items to make it powerful, the starting catapult ability is significantly more powerful than most early game skills, provides an AoE physical attack that can target any weakness, and is learned without any further upgrading. Due to this, Inventor can provide an early means of getting quicker kills in battle, letting you grind slightly quicker, and progress through locations easier combat wise.
• Did Not Get the Girl: In Castti's Chapter 3, using Inquire on Andy reveals that he's secretly in love with Castti. He dies without telling Castti how he felt.
• Died in Your Arms Tonight: Happens twice in Hikari's first chapter. Tsuki and King Jigo both die in Hikari's arms.
• Disappointed by the Motive
  • Less disappointment, more anger, disgust, and horror. When Hikari confronts General Mugen at the end of his first chapter, he asks why Mugen slaughtered the people of Ku. Mugen coldly replies that he knew that they loved Hikari and might rebel against him in the future, so he launched a preemptive strike to solve the problem. Hikari is furious and aghast that not only did Mugen butcher an entire town of innocent people, he did it because they may possibly oppose him, calling him a monster.
  • The Glacis part of Ochette's story sees her confront the idea of hunters hunting a beast not to feed themselves, acquire rare materials or defend themselves, but just for the glory of Defeating the Undefeatable. She is, to put it bluntly, really confused by the idea, and thinks of it as a very flimsy reason to kill something.
  • Even Ori of the Moonshade Order thinks Harvey pathetic, since all he has done, including helping them exterminate all life in Solistia, is driven by the fact his ego can't handle being second-best to Osvald.
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  • If the player doesn't choose Hikari as their protagonist, they will find him protecting a low-class citizen of Ryu from some of Mugen's soldiers, who want to kill the citizen because he gave them rotten food.
  • A flashback in Hikari's story shows that Ritsu's father was killed because he dared to ask some upper-class soldiers to purchase some of his oil, and one of them found him annoying.
• Distant Finale: The Epilogue takes place an unspecified amount of time after Vide's defeat. Speaking to the various characters reveals pieces of what has happened since then; Partitio and Roque's railway has been a resounding success, Timberain and Sai are finally beginning to make peace, Agnea has become a dancing star just as famous, if not even more so than Dolcinaea, Ku is prospering under Hikari's rule, and Elena has recovered enough that she can now be with Osvald once more.
• Downer Beginning: A few of the travelers' stories have quite bitter starting chapters.
  • Throné: All of her friends are dead thanks to the Blacksnakes' ploy to make them kill one another, with her having to strike down Pirro — setting the tone for the rest of her story.
  • Hikari: His close friend betrays him, his home is razed to the ground with his father and everyone he cared about slaughtered, and he's forced to flee the country for his life, falsely branded as a traitor prince.
• Duel Boss: Several.
  • Like in the first game, any NPC that is fought via a Path Action is done so with only the character that initiated it, including Hikari's enemies in Montwise's arena.
  • General Rou in Hikari's third chapter is also fought via Challenge, so Hikari is on his own for it.
  • Karma, due to the Decaying Temple only allowing entry to a single person.
  • Shadowy Boy, the holder of the legendary staff, can only be coerced by Temenos.
• Due to the Dead:
  • In Canalbrine, there is a man who is trying to bring the ashes of his best friend home to Ku, the friend's homeland. Unfortunately, the friend lost the ashes on the ferry ride from Toto'haha's port. The traveler must retrieve the urn from the worker there.
  • In the Abandoned Village in the Brightlands, an old man reveals after Inquiry/Scrutinizing that he came to the village and found it full of dead bodies. All he could do for the lost was to bury them. It took him ten days to complete the task.
  • In New Delsta's slums, there's a small graveyard. Among its members are Blacksnakes who died. In her chapter 5, Throné finds Pirro's grave is now there after she killed him in Chapter 1.
  • In Ochette Chapter 2: Glacis Route. Ochette encounters Heig. One of his motives to being in a forbidden area is to gather the bodies of fellow hunters, one including his own nephew, after their failed attempt to kill Glacis and then smashed her eggs years ago.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Characters who faced many hardships eventually receive this.
  • Hikari. After losing his father and friends to Mugen and being forced out of his homeland, all the while suffering from the Curse of Ku, he is finally able to defeat the curse, put his brother down, and become the new king. His first act: Renounce Ku's claims over its conquered territories, ending the cycle of bloodshed once and for all.
  • Partitio. With hard work and elbow grease, he was not only able to end his own poverty, but gave a brighter chance at a better life as well. Not only that, he was able to make new friends and reforge and made a genuine friendship with Roque as well!
  • Agnea. From a little troupe to the big theater, she was able make many new friends, create her own song, and gained many admirers. Not only that, but she gained a new outlook on the world and what it means to use dance to change lives, one step at a time. And by succeeding in that, she is able to carry on her mother’s legacy. Plus, she gained the respect from her supposed enemies!
• Egopolis:
  • Go ahead, take a wild guess at who the founder of Roque Island is.
  • In Chapter 4 of Agnea's route, Dolcinaea plans to level the slums of Sai and rebuild the town as Dolcinaealand.
• Element No. 5: A subplot in Osvald's story is his and the villain's search for the seventh source of magic outside the regular six elements, the One True Magic. Harvey believes it to be the Shadow, the power of the evil god Vide. Meanwhile, Osvald finds out it's related to the Power of Love, as it's his resolve to protect his daughter that lets him use it.
• Elite Tweak: Much more supported than in the first game. Hikari, Agnea, and Ochette all have abilities with a wide array of potential effects by interacting with specific townsfolk, or in Ochette's case by capturing the right set of monsters.
• Exact Words: In Temenos' Chapter 1, Vados' Coerce info refers to him as a "religious zealot", suggesting that he is devoted to the Order of the Sacred Flame. In Temenos' Chapter 2, it is revealed that Vados is responsible for the murder of Pontiff Jörg, and that his devotion lies with Vide.
• Exactly Exty Years Ago: The flashback explaining Kaldena's backstory states that it happened exactly thirty years ago. This places it right about the time Temenos was born...
• Everybody's Dead, Dave: By the end of the game, Temenos has lost his entire supporting cast (barring Ort). The pontiff's murder kickstarts the investigation. Vados is killed for compromising the conspiracy. Crick is murdered for knowing too much. Kaldena and Cubaryi are lawfully felled by Temenos. Roi is all but stated to have transformed into the Dark Entity that attacks Ochette's village. Finally, Mindt is revealed in the last chapter as having been the true mastermind behind most of the game's events and she is taken down by the party.
• Everyone Is Related:
  • The Archmage D'arqest was responsible for fathering Claude and the Ku Clan. This means that Throné and the rest of the Blacksnakes are distant cousins to Hikari and Mugen (and the rest of the Ku bloodline).
  • Aelfric's descendents are known as the Lumina family, and they show up in several different places. Hikari (again), his mother Kura, Alpates, and Rita and Elena Vanstein are all said to be a part of bloodline.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: In Ochette and Castti's Crossed Paths story, the Shadow is shocked to discover that there is no darkness in Ochette's heart.
• Evil Counterpart: Most of the final story bosses are direct counterparts to their respective hero, having the same job, similar backstories, and even personal relations to them, but radically different ideals that form the core of their conflict. While Ochette's animal companion faces the corrupted version of the one Ochette doesn't select, Ochette, herself, and Temenos have their counterparts in the form of Moonshade Order members Petrichor and Arcanette respectively.
• Evil Old Folks: Just about every resident of Crackridge is a member of the Moonshade Order, and were the people involved in the massacre of the Kal Clan, but most notably, the three older people Temenos encounters do everything they can to hinder his quest to find the Fellsun Ruins and are ultimately working to bring about The Night That Never Ends at the very least, or maybe even The End of the World as We Know It as other members of the Order are.
• Evil Power Vacuum: Mother and Father of the Blacksnakes seek to avoid this if something were to happen to them, so they're looking to crown a successor by the time of Throné's first chapter. Sure enough, when she returns to New Delsta after killing both of them, she finds its members killing each other in broad daylight in the hopes of establishing some form of hierarchy. Talking to some people in town after reveals that the Blacksnakes have almost cannibalized itself due to this, more or less spelling the end for them as an organization.
• Family Honor: Mugen has a particular chip on his shoulder about Hikari being the son of a commoner and refers to him as "the shame of Clan Ku." It later turns out that it goes a little deeper than that. Hikari's mother was from the Lumina bloodline, who are descended from the god Aelfric. Clan Ku is descended from the dark mage D'Arquest, who previously tried to summon Vide the Wicked. Mugen arranged for Hikari and his mother's assassination because that bloodline made them a threat.
• Fantasy Metals: Clockite, a metal which is brittle at room temperature but becomes more rigid when exposed to heat. Its most common use is in manufacturing clocks and clockwork mechanisms (hence the name), and Partitio figures out that it's also ideal for manufacturing the components of a steam engine.
• The Fellowship Has Ended: At the end of the game, the eight travelers finally part ways with each other after defeating Vide the Wicked. They later reunite, along with many supporting characters from their stories, to witness Agnea's show where she debuts a work inspired by their adventures together.
• Foregone Conclusion:
  • It's made very clear near the start of Castti Chapter 2 in Winterbloom that Rosa cannot be saved from her disease. All Castti can do is make her comfortable and extend her life long enough for Melia to inherit stewardship of the town instead of her cousin, Greg.
  • Inquiring Andy during Castti's flashback in Chapter 3 reveals that he has feelings for her. Because Eir's Apothecaries are all killed off, minus Castti and Trousseau, he obviously never gets the chance to hook up with her.
  • As Hikari is a main character and Kura isn't seen beforehand, when Rai Mei has a flashback to her youth when Hikari and his mother are attacked by bandits, her death and his survival is obvious to the player. What isn't known is that it was actually an assassination attempt arranged by Rai Mei's brother, Jin Mei, but only because Mugen threatend to exterminate Clan Mei if he refused.
• Foreshadowing:
  • While exploring the Brightlands, the player might come across an Abandoned Village, where unsettling music plays in the background and very few NPCs reside. Inquiring/Scrutinizing the old man reveals he came across many dead bodies and it took him ten days to bury them all. Castti's Chapter 3 reveals what happened there.
  • If Partitio is not chosen as the protagonist, after recruiting him, he says, "I look forward to sharing a campfire with you." The Journey for the Dawn begins with the eight travelers gathering around a campfire that Partitio and Agnea light.
  • In Throné's Chapter 1 when she is infiltrating Diamante's estate to kill Diamante and the traitor to the Blacksnakes, all the guards are killed with pierced wounds or sliced throats. Scaracci, the supposed traitor, uses axes as his weapon and so would have left different injuries on the guards. This foreshadows someone else is ahead of Throné who uses a dagger instead. At the end of the chapter, Throné faces Pirro, who already killed Diamante and Scaracci, and waits now to kill Throné.
  • In Partitio's Chapter 1, Papp berates himself for not noticing the clause in the contract he signed when buying the land that would become Oresrush, that gives the former owner the right to buy the land back at any time. Near the end of the chapter, Giff reveals that the landowner added that clause to the contract after Papp had signed it, and tricked him into believing it was there all along.
  • In Throné's Chapter 2 - Mother's Route, she meets a young boy who looks like Pirro, and in her Chapter 4, she meets a gondola guide who reminds her of a guard at Mother's Garden she met in Chapter 3 - Mother's Route. Near the end of Chapter 4, Claude reveals that every member of the Blacksnakes are his children, including Throné herself.
  • During his boss battle, Father reveals he raised Throné so she'd kill him. It's exactly the same purpose her biological father has for her.
  • Osvald and Partitio's Crossed Paths story introduces Regulus, an astronomer. He tells Osvald and Partitio about his research, including his observation that the nights are growing longer while the days are growing shorter. This foreshadows the Final Chapter, where it is always night and the day/night feature is disabled.
  • There are several hints observant and inquisitive players can notice that point to the fact Castti is hallucinating Malaya.
    • Despite there being a serious sickness wracking Canalbrine in Castti's chapter 1, no one seems to acknowledge Malaya's presence, even when she offers to help out. This especially stands out because Malaya isn't wearing her Eir's Apothecaries uniform at that point, so the townsfolk would likely listen to her over Castti, who they find to be disreputable due to her connection to the organization.
    • In one Travel Banter, Osvald comments that Castti occasionally talks to herself at certain points. At first, one may think that he's referring to Castti's tendency to do so whenever she's assessing a situation that requires medical knowledge, but this actually foreshadows that the Malaya she encounters and converses with isn't actually there and that Castti really has been talking to herself all this time whenever "Malaya" shows up in her chapters.
    • Outside of Castti's first chapter, Malaya refuses to show up anywhere where people would be present to question Castti's sanity.
    • During Castii's chapter 3, Castti is required to use her path action on Malaya, revealing her to be twenty-seven years old. Castti then recalls an incident two years before, and during this playable cutscene, the player can once again use Inquire on Malaya... which shows she's still twenty-seven, which creates a paradox. Furthermore, despite the fact this scene is presented as Castti remembering the past, Malaya is narrating, which only further sets up the fact she's in Castti's head.
  • In Castti's Chapter 2 - Winterbloom Route, she recalls a lost memory where Trousseau is having great difficulty coping with his little sister's death, and berates himself as worthless in front of Melia because he doesn't know how to help Rosa with her disease. This sets up Trousseau breaking completely when he was taught the bloody history of humanity and becoming a genocidal nihilist, as revealed in Castti's Chapter 3.
  • In Ochette's Chapter 1, and every now and then while traveling around, the player may enter a new screen to find that the environment is tinted purple, the music is eerie, and the monsters are also colored purple. Ochette and Castti encounter something similar in a forest during their Crossed Paths story. This is a preview of the eternal night that sets in at the start of the the final chapter.
  • In Osvald's Chapter 2, after his escape from Frigit Isle, he has a vision of Rita, his deceased wife. His wife affirms her love for him and states her desire to tend to his broken body, but asserts he cannot be with her now. He has unfished work and must carry on. She isn't speaking of his plans to murder Harvey in vengeance, but saving their still-living daughter from Harvey's clutches.
  • In Osvald's Chapter 5 when Osvald confronts Harvey, Harvey screams he would sacrifice everything to defeat Osvald with his list ending with the Dawn. The Dawn is the very thing the Moonshade Order, which Harvey is part of, plans to take away from the world.
  • At the end of Osvald's Chapter 3, Clarissa warns Osvald against succumbing to vengeance. After this scene, Hikari's Travel Banter with Osvald has him note that Hikari's mother had a similar view, "the road of resentment is one shrouded in darkness." Osvald mentions his wife had a similar saying. The Final chapter reveals Rita and Kura, Hikari's mother, are distant blood relatives from the Lumina bloodline.
  • A massive clue as to the identity of the Moonshade Order's leader can be found following the end of Temenos' story. At the very end of his story, Temenos notices Mindt's hair ornament is missing. Nothing suspicious on its own, but a sidequest with Ort unlocks following the end of Temenos's story where Ort tries to redeem himself by rooting out allies of Vados the architect he still believes to be in Flamechurch. He manages to find allies of Vados searching the Flamechurch Cathedral Catacombs bearing the same necklace that Moonshade Order adherents typically wear, especially in Crackridge, and one of them mumbles about finding a hair ornament... Adding on to this, it's then immediately brought up how strange it is that Vados, despite seemingly being Kaldena's ally, was a member of the Moonshade Order, which begins to beg the question if there aren't more Order members in and around Flamechurch...
    • If the player is really on the ball, they might notice that Mindt's hair ornament is missing as early as the end of Temenos's first chapter. It seems harmless at the time, but one of the kids at the school directly calls attention to it while she's still wearing it, making its absence all the stranger once Temenos notices it later...
  • Similarly, there are other hints to the identities of various Moonshade Order members.
    • Although the character in question isn't truly a part of them, strictly speaking, one might suspect that something is up with Tanzy, who constantly references a "goddess". This is pointed out as unusual, should you Inquire/Scrutinize her, as no one else does even among the religious, who almost always say the name of who they worship.
    • More than once, Hikari innocuously comments on how while he trusts Kazan, he sometimes feels like he's one of Kazan's pawns and/or he wouldn't want to be on opposing sides with the man... and he's more right than he could've realized, given Kazan's role as one of the final antagonists of the game.
    • In Hikari's final chapter, after Hikari defeats Mugen, Kazan tells him to go on ahead and let everyone know that the fighting is over. Conveniently, this leaves Kazan alone with Mugen's body and the Darkblood Blade...
    • In Partitio's Chapter 4, Ori tells Partitio that she's met many people in her life, but no-one like him. Turns out she grew up as an orphan in a land decimated by war until she was adopted by Oboro/Kazan, and believed that everyone is Secretly Selfish until Partitio caused her to doubt her beliefs.
    • Near the end of Partitio's Chapter 4, Ori recalls the time she first met Partitio, and admits that she had difficulty believing him when he spoke of a bright future, foreshadowing her involvement with the nihilistic Moonshade Order.
  • Also, relating to Tanzy's example, if the player heads to the New Delsta Anchorage after finishing Agnea's story, they can find Giselle's troupe at the docks... However, Tanzy is suddenly missing, and it's just Giselle, Rico, and Coda.
  • As soon as the Night of Scarlet Moon begins, Ochette comments on how she can smell a familiar scent. This scent is from the Darkling, the animal companion she didn't choose ten years ago. The final chapter also reveals that during the events of Chapter 3, it is already on the island with Petrichor, and the latter makes it kill her to put out one of the Sacred Flames.
  • Ori's name falls more in line with the style of a name from Hinoeuma, according to NPC chatter that explains that shorter names like 'Rai Mei,' 'Ku,' and 'U' are what's typically in style, than a name from any other region of Solistia. This is because Ori is from Hinoeuma, and she happens to be Kazan's adopted sister.
  • In Throné's Chapter 4:
    • Throné's banter with Castti has Castti remembering visiting Lostseed but nothing else. As the route is secured behind a double-locked door with few people having keys to it, this isn't a normal place one should go. This hints at where and when Claude shows to her and Trousseau the book which broke Trousseau's mind.
    • Her answer to the question, "Did you know there is something that cannot be stolen? Something even the greatest thief could never take." When she is asked by the dying Claude, her birth father, Throné's answer is "the dawn. It can be taken away, but not stolen." The Dawn is what the Moonshade Order seeks to steal from the world, and Throne will be one of the people fighting to reclaim the dawn.
• Four Is Death:
  • In Throné's Chapter 4, it is revealed that she is the fourth of Claude's children to make it far enough to meet him. She is the one to finally kill him.
  • In the final chapter, the eternal night begins with a dream of four Sacred Flames going out.
• Fun with Acronyms: As is the case with the heroes of the original game and the Ringbearers of the mobile game, the first initials of Osvald, Castti, Temenos, Ochette, Partitio, Agnea, Throné, and Hikari, the protagonists introduced in the announcement trailer, spell out OCTOPATH. This also applies to the Moonshade Order, who have one member or associate as part of each protagonist's story and also spell OCTOPATH: Oboro, Claude, Tanzy, Ori, Petrichor, Arcanette, Trousseau, and Harvey; as an added bonus, their corresponding protagonists spell out OCTOPATH backwards.
• The Gadfly:
  • Temenos enjoys messing with Crick every time they work together. Crick barely tolerates it, but he eventually comes to harbor a deep respect for Temenos, and the two work quite well together after their first meeting. When Crick is murdered by Kaldena, Temenos becomes uncharacteristically serious for the rest of his storyline.
  • Castti has an extremely impish sense of humor whenever Partitio is involved. Partitio mentions getting blackout drunk in one travel banter, only for Castti to tease him about having a wild night with her as well as being a total stallion, and when Partitio panics, Castti teases him even further about now knowing what it's like to have memory loss. Later on, after Partitio meets Alrond for the first time, Castti pretends to have recovered her memories and claims to have come from a noble family. Partitio almost falls for it.
• Gambit Pileup: Played for Laughs in Clockbank, where virtually every single NPC's Inquire/Scrutinize entry has them keeping some sort of secret identity or malicious scheme, with the end of each entry claiming their secret is safe for now.
• Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • While he's in prison, Osvald is muzzled so he can't use any of his spells. During his first fight, when he mugs his cellmate, Osvald is inflicted with the Silence condition and can't use the Scholar class skills. (Well, almost: only the regular Fire, Ice, Lightning spells have been locked. If you come back to do his first chapter after recruiting him and leveling him up a bit, you'll find the other skills are perfectly usable... including Elemental Barrage.)
  • Everyone only uses either a sword, polearm, dagger, axe, bow, or staff as their weapon of choice. As revealed by Masoud's Mercantile Manuscript, this is because the blacksmith's guild has artificially constricted the types of weapons that are made because it's easier to secure a monopoly that way.
  • There's an old man in Flamechurch who wants sacred candles to light the path between Flamechurch and the Cathedral and make it safer. If you complete his quest and give him the candles, he actually lights them along the path, and you won't get random encounters there anymore. Doubles as Anti-Frustration Features since the path is full of trash mobs that only exist to be Temenos' combat tutorial.
  • As revealed during Agnea's introductory chapter, Gus is the barkeep for Cropdale's bar. Appropriately, he is one of two barkeeps throughout the entire game (the other being the 'barkeep' in the Abandoned Village of Healeaks) to have a unique sprite.
  • One of the scientific advancements that Harvey didn't crib from Osvald's research was the discovery of where the elemental Soulstone items come from: they crystallize in a monster's bloodstream, which is what allows non-sentient creatures to use magic-based attacks. This is a theory that's also mentioned in the Mercantile Manuscript.
  • In Hikari's final chapter, he conquers his Superpowered Evil Side once and for all. This is reflected in his Latent Power when you use it, as it permanently changes from Shadow's Hold to Light's Radiance, with accompanying alterations to the voicelines and graphics.
  • In the first part of Partitio and Osvald's Crossed Path, Regulus laments that his gambling has left him with insufficient funds for his telescope. The remaining money he gives to Partitio is, in fact, slightly less than the price of all the items you need to buy.
  • Castti's final boss is the Plague Doctor responsible for the poison rain falling on Timberain. This affects the battle as your party members experience a Maximum HP Reduction with every passing turn. In the second phase of the fight the boss loses his mask, exposing his face to the poison rain and making vulnerable as well.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • If Partitio has a Hired companion with an ability to give a discount on purchases, this discount will not apply to him purchasing the rights to the steam engine for 80 billion leaves, as even the smallest discount would allow the player to walk away with millions.
  • A late-game travel banter reveals Castti has Acquired Poison Immunity for everything but the strongest of poisons from creating various medicines and testing them on herself. This does not give her immunity to the Standard Status Effect, unfortunately.
  • At one point, Throné enters a home stealthily, only to find all the guards slaughtered anyway. This doesn't stop guards and guard dogs from spawning as random encounters.
  • Partitio's entire Story Arc centers around a priceless new invention (the steam engine). His Chapter 3 boss can summon infinite copies of said invention, which makes them seem like much less of a big deal.
  • There's a tavern in the Abandoned Village, because there's a story chapter (Castti's third chapter, to be exact) that takes place there. Said tavern consists entirely of an old man sitting in the empty street with no one to ever buy anything from him, but the game needs him to be there, so he is.
  • It's stated during Osvald's opening chapter that Frigit Isle is 4 days sailing through treacherous waters from the nearest mainland. Once the player acquires a boat, they can easily sail between the Isle and anywhere else in the world in less than an in-game day, and the only thing impeding the party's travel is the fact that they're forbidden from docking at Frigit Isle if Osvald's story hasn't been finished yet.
• Ghost Town: The Abandoned Village in the Brightlands has only the operator of a makeshift tavern, an old man, and a thief in it. In Castti's story, you learn that every resident of the village, formerly known as Healeaks, was killed by Trousseau's Mystical Plague.
• Gladiator Subquest: Like Olberic before him, Hikari's 2nd chapter is this, with Hikari taking part in gladiator combat via his "Challenge" path ability.
• Gold Digger: In Crackridge Harbor, the Travelers meet a rich noble woman running away with her commoner beau. While she is in love with him, Coercing/Bribing information from him reveals he plans to steal her money once they make it to port in another land.
• Golden Ending: Doing all the stories and the required party side quests leads you to fight the true final boss and earn this at the end. The true source of all the pain and suffering has been stopped, and one member of the cult has regained her faith in humanity, thus proving the cult and those associated with it dead wrong about the cruelties of humanity. The entire party got something out of it in the end, while forging an unbreakable bond. The final scene of the game ends with the majority of the cast—both party and NPCs—appearing in the grand theater to watch a reenactment of the events of the game. And with that the game ends with the words “OCTOPATH TRAVELER.”
• Grim Up North: The northeast corner of the map consists of a snowy tundra known as the Winterlands, with settlements such as Frigit Isle, Cape Cold, Winterbloom and Stormhail.
• Guest-Star Party Member: With the exceptions of Ochette, Castti and Partitio, all of the travelers get one or more temporary party members before they meet up with the rest of the party.
  • Emerald joins Osvald's party during the escape from Frigit Isle in his first two chapters.
  • Pirro and Scaracci start in Throné's party, but leave after they escape from the Underground Waterway.
  • Agnea's friend Gus the Bartender tags along when Agnea needs to go find Pala, her little sister, who seems lost in the woods near her home town.
  • Crick accompanies Temenos for his first chapter, first as a Guided ally and then a full-fledged party member after the first encounter on the way to the cathedral.
  • During The War Sequence that is part of Hikari's Cold Open, he is accompanied by Ritsu, a sword fighter, and Rai Mei, a lancer. Narratively, the three are assigned to different duties after the battle depicted here. Ritsu falls in with Hikari's brother Mugen, and a heated, hateful duel between Ritsu and Hikari serves as his intro chapter's boss fight and kicks off that chapter's climax.
• Haunted House: The Wellows Mansion has been left in ruins and abandoned ever since the entire family and their staff were murdered years ago. Going there at night will get you all kinds of ghostly experiences at least until you find and return the daughter's music box, which lets them all finally pass on.
• Hellhole Prison: Frigit Isle is located so high up north that it's locked in an endless blizzard, which would already be bad enough on its own. But then it turns out that the guards also use the prisoners as forced labor in a mine under the prison, not caring if they die in the process. (As it turns out, that last bit is in fact highly illegal and the place is eventually shut down after an inspection.)
• Heroic Sacrifice: All members of Eir's Apothecaries die in the process of either saving the Brightlands from Trousseau's poison rain or saving someone else's life. Elma gives up protection from the rain to save their horse, Jeyah, which proves crucial in getting Malaya and Castti to the New Delsta docks; Andy and Randy die within seconds of breathing the poison in directly from its source at the bonfire but manage to put the fire out, potentially saving New Delsta and other nearby settlements in the process (considering how far the rain had gotten already); and Malaya, through a sheer, stubborn unwillingness to die until their best apothecary is safe from the poison, manages to ride Jeyah all the way out to the docks and get Castti on a small boat that leads Castti to safety, before finally succumbing with Jeyah as she sees Castti off. Furthermore, it's only through giving up the snowdrop flowers Malaya had that Castti managed to survive the incident with no more than black swelling on her arm.
• Hit Them in the Pocketbook:
  • Stenvar is a Corrupt Guard Captain who helped frame Osvald the Scholar for murder in exchange for coin. After Osvald escapes from prison and beats Stenvar in a fight, he decides that his life isn't worth taking and contents himself with using his fire magic to burn all Stenvar's ill-gotten money to ash.
  • Giff is an enforcer for a corrupt land owner who gets rich out of bleeding the economy of Oresrush dry, turning it from a thriving prospector town into a Ghost Town. Partitio leads the citizens of Oresrush in a mob attack on Giff's manor, learns that the land owner's contract was tampered with illegally, seizes Giff's wealth and reinvests it back into the town. Giff ends up a common laborer forced to work for Oresrush's newly revitalized businesses.
• Hope Spot: In Osvald's chapter 4, he gets one after having to Mercy Kill the Grieving Golem. Even if his wife is now well and truly dead, his daughter seems perfectly fine and is calling out for her papa... only for it to quickly be revealed that she considers Harvey her father after he erased all of her memories of Osvald.
• Human Sacrifice: The Moonshade Order use human sacrifices utilizing the Darkblood items, or similarly tainted things, in order to douse the Sacred Flames and bring about Vide's return. Ori attempts to sacrifice herself (she lives, but it's enough to douse the flame), Petrichor sacrifices herself by way of the Darkling, Arcanette sacrifices Tanzy, and Oboro sacrifices General Ageha. Oboro eventually offers himself to Vide's flame as well.
• Identical Stranger: A number of them pop up in Throné's story and associated side quests. This is no coincidence—they are all fathered by Claude. Specifically, Pirro, Claude, and an unnamed young boy in Oresrush all look alike, as do the elderly guard at Mother's Garden and the gondola guide at the Deserted Highroad. The guard and guide even meet face-to-face in the elderly guard and Mira's side quest.
• If I Can't Have You…: In Throné's Chapter 3, Father reveals that he killed Marietta, Throné's birth mother, because she left him for another man and killed her and Father's child.
• I Never Said It Was Poison: In a Timberain sidequest, a judge discusses an old case of his involving the theft of a "black treasure". A guard at the court overhears this and realises that since the treasure was the property of Timberain's royal family, only they would know what color it is... he does some snooping around the judge's property and quickly realises the judge was involved in the theft.
• In Medias Res:
  • Like the first game, when Travelers encounter each other for the first time it will be during that person's first chapter or just after its conclusion, and be at a junction where the new Traveler could use some help from others.
  • Throné starts her story in the middle of a botched heist with one of her comrades bleeding out in her arms as she carries him.
  • Hikari's story begins in the middle of the final battle of a war between two kingdoms.
• Infinity -1 Sword:
  • The Legendary Arms are a set of items, one of each weapon type alongside one armor and one accessory associated with each base class guild. They are hidden in the world, each with powerful stats and effects such as attacking one more time, having a chance to instantly kill a target, or buffing magic effects. Some are hidden behind bosses, on NPCs or in special encounters. Some are merely in out of the way chests and items. The associated guild will offer a vague hint as to its location. While they're not the strongest equipments, most of them are obtainable as soon as you start tackling the final chapters, and their good stats and effects ensure they'll be useful for a while.
  • The Divine Weapons are "rusted" weapons found around the world in side quests or bonus dungeons. There's one for each weapon type. Each can be reforged into a powerful weapon in Gravell. There are stronger weapons in the game, but the catch is that the Armsmaster secret job require equipping these weapons to use its skills. So it's a toss-up whether to use the skills but potentially lose out on stats and better effects, or sacrifice the skill for higher stats.
• Infinity +1 Sword: Returning from the first game, the Battle-Tested Equipment are a weapon of each type (and a shield) that has extremely high stats and a beneficial effect. They're held by various NPCs all over the world that only appear after completing character stories, and require either stealing or challenging them to take the equipment.
• In-Series Nickname: Throné is known among the Blacksnakes as "The Best In the Nest."
• Interface Screw:
  • In all of Castti's story segments, the screen glitches out and all text vanishes except for the words associated with her memories, which appear in yellow.
  • Partitio's final boss fight has an attack that obscures the turn order at the top of the battle screen and prevents the player from knowing who's coming next (assuming they're not performing any turn manipulation).
• Interface Spoiler:
  • Near the end of Throné's Chapter 2 - Mother's Route, she has to pick between two drinks, one of which contains a lethal poison. The option to consume the poisonous drink has splatters of blood on it. No points for guessing what happens if you select that option.
  • The sigil on the loading screen contains four elongated pointed shapes at the northeast, southeast, southwest, and northwest positions. They resemble the four Sacred Flames throughout Solistia and point to the approximate locations of the flames. They become grayed out after completing Ochette's Chapter 3, and a few other points depending on the completion of other stories. Once the eternal night begins in the final chapter, all four are grayed out and two dots resembling eyes appear in the center of the sigil.
  • During the final chapter, the game warns that there will be no map indicators to tell the player where to go. The purple smoke on the map is thicker around the locations where the party has to go, and the areas themselves have risen to Danger Level 51. After the party reignites the Sacred Flames, the four symbols on the loading screen gain a glowing effect, and the center of the sigil corresponds to Vidania's location in the middle of the Sundering Sea.
• In-Universe Game Clock: As mentioned in the official announcement trailer, every protagonist has two different Path Actions depending on the in-universe clock; the example shown is Hikari, who can Challenge characters to a fight during daylight and Bribe them for information at night. Music is also different at night — all zones have two versions of the same track — and monster encounters are stronger. While there is a proper day-night cycle as you travel the lands, you can also "quick switch" between day and night at the press of a button, with NPCs fading in and out of existence appropriately; that said, some secrets are only revealed by actually waiting through the cycle.
• Incorruptible Pure Pureness: The original Beastlings were humans exposed to Shadow that, in the process of transforming, had all of their malicious desires removed and became incapable of even considering doing any evil. This trait endured among their descendants, who are nothing but kind and polite to everyone they meet. They also aren't very ambitious, which some humans use to their advantage.
• It's Personal with the Dragon: While each traveler has some sort of connection to the Moonshade Order, a few have more personal ties to the remaining villains who serve the Final Boss. i.e. Temenos, who has a scene essentially dedicated to him due to Mindt/Arcanette being the Order's leader, and Hikari, who won't receive focus in the conflict against Kazan/Oboro if he wasn't the player's starting traveler; however, if he was, then his dialogue makes it clear that heading to Vidania is as much about confronting his old friend as it is about anything else.
• Joke Item: Among the skills Hikari can learn from dueling NPCs are ones like "Back Pain", which just gives him a speed and evasion debuff. At least it doesn't cost SP.
• Kamehame Hadouken: Harvey's shadow spell "Ultimate Magic" has him charge and fire off one of these in the Darkness element. Osvald's ability "One True Magic" has him fire a non-elemental version that lowers enemy shields regardless of weaknesses, for the hefty price of 75 SP.
• Karma Houdini:
  • Harvey survives his battle with Osvald, not having left behind a body, and the group never sees him again. He's mentioned in Ori's journal fragments at the Fellsun Ruins as having crawled out and vanished in the English version. In the Japanese version, it is confirmed he's dead
  • The older members of the Moonshade Order inhabiting Crackridge that Temenos meets are never brought to justice. On the contrary, the lone survivor of their massacre is Temenos' primary antagonist. However, the party are fully able to mug, challenge, provoke, ambush, etc. them to their hearts' desires.
  • Similar to the above example, Borneau, the proprietor of Montwise's gladiator arena, runs for the hills before he can be brought to justice — however, once you finish Hikari's story, he's open season for path actions.
• Kill the Parent, Raise the Child: Throné is introduced to the player as a member of the Blacksnakes Thieves' Guild, answerable to the guild's two leaders, Father and Mother, who aren't her biological parents but act as abusive parent substitutes to her. It's eventually revealed that her birth mother, Marietta, was once a Blacksnake leader herself, and was murdered by the pair so they could sieze control of the guild for themselves.
• Lampshade Hanging: The game rather cheekily has Gus call out the fact Agnea doesn't have much of a Southern Belle accent despite most of the rest of Cropdale having one by having Gus make mention, almost out of nowhere, that Agnea's been doing her best to smother the accent so she'll be more readily accepted in big cities. For her part, Xanthe Huynh actually has a decent southern accent that she'll dip into whenever Agnea is nervous, but it helps explain away the fact Agnea often doesn't sound like she even comes from Cropdale.
• Lighter and Softer: Agnea's route, contrasting with her companions whose stories are generally the opposite compared to their counterparts from the first game.
• Limit Break: New to this game, each Traveler has a Latent Power gauge introduced during the boss fight at the end of their first chapter, granting them a unique and powerful ability. Note that the gauge has been adjusted to this game's unique structure: while taking damage results in filling it, dealing damage will not; you have to Break an enemy to make it go up.
  • Ochette's Latent Power is Animal Instincts, which allows her to channel her inner beast to perform one of three skills: Beastly Claws, an all-targeting typeless physical attack, Beastly Howl, an all-targetting debuff that reduces all foes' defenses and reduces their Shield Points, and Beastly Fangs, a single-target typeless physical attack.
  • Castti's Latent Power is Every Drop Counts, which allows her to Concoct without consuming any ingredients. As a result, you only need 1 instance of any given component to use it infinitely, even within the same Concoction.
  • Throné's Latent Power is Leave No Trace, which allows her to immediately take another turn. She does not gain BP on this second turn.
  • Osvald's Latent Power is Concentrate Spells, which allows him to focus his Herd-Hitting Attack spells on a single target at increased damage.
  • Partitio's Latent Power is Hoot and Holler, which immediately maxes out his BP.
  • Agnea's Latent Power is All Together Now, which changes her next single-target skill into an all-target skill.
  • Temenos' Latent Power is Judgment, which lets his next attack(s) reduce the target's Shield Points, even if he does not strike a weakness.
  • Hikari's Latent Power is Shadow's Hold renamed to Light's Radiance after beating his chapter, which lets him channel the power of his clan's curse to use one of three skills: Tenretsuzan, a powerful strike on a single target with a sword, Hienka, a two hit sword skill that lets him act again at the end of the turn, and Sougetsusen, a two-hit all target attack, with the first hit using a spear and the second using a sword.
• Little Bit Beastly: Ochette is a beastling, a demi-human race with furred ears and a tail. Any other player character with Hunter as their secondary job will miraculously gain ears and tails as well.
• Living a Double Life: Taken to almost parody levels in Clockbank. About 90% of the NPCs have some hidden life, typically being thieves or related to thieves or assassins. Scrutinizing/Inquiring/Bribing/Coercing information from them will reveal their secrets. Each time it ends with the phrase "their secret is safe for now."
• Longer-Than-Life Sentence: Scanning prisoners in Frigit Isle reveals some wild jailtime numbers. Even relatively minor infractions apparently net you dozens of years of prison.
• Lost in Translation: Early in Agnea's story, her sister refers to Agnea's breasts as "peaches" when suggesting she try to get the town ready for the festival, which turns into a Brick Joke in Partitio's story. A conversation between the two has Partitio gushing about his love of peaches (the fruit), causing Agnea to get flustered until she realizes what he meant. The joke doesn't work as well in the localization due to Agnea's sister suggesting she use her "talents" instead, making the joke seem random in comparison.
• Love Martyr: Poor Tanzy loses her husband, is distraught with despair, meets Mindt, and is emotionally manipulated into doing anything for Mindt so that Mindt will return her love. She is then callously murdered so that her death will smother the Sacred Flame at the Flamechurch Cathedral.
• Love Triangle: In New Delsta, between three NPCs. One is an playwright that loves the actress. The actress is has high hopes for the impressario and is not interested in the playwright. The playwright thinks the actress won't amount to much, but sees great potential in the playwright.
• Low Fantasy: Like the first game, the heroes' tales are very mundane and personal in the face of a greater world that's home to monsters and magic, as opposed to being more grand in scope and having to do with gods. At first, that is. The lands are still human-dominated, and while magic is still somewhat prominent, the world is gearing up for an industrial revolution (that's explicitly being brought about by the time Partitio's story ends).
• Luke, I Am Your Father: All of the Blacksnakes are Claude's children, making all of them Throné's half-siblings. This includes, of course, Father and Mother.
• Meaningful Background Event: During Osvald's prologue, when he is on trial, the courtroom is littered with different characters. Among them is Ori, who primarily features in Partitio's story and has a cameo in Castti's final chapter. While she is there to cover Osvald's trial for the murder of his family, her journal reveals her true intentions later on.
• Mechanically Unusual Class:
  • The Inventor Job. It's the only class that doesn't use SP. Rather, you use a skill once and then have to use it again as a countdown appears for how many turns are needed to use the skill again.
  • The Armsmaster job. It has two skills that anyone can use, but six more that can only be used if a specific weapon is equipped. These weapons are very strong, but there are some that are stronger, forcing the player to make choices about how they want the Armsmaster to function.
  • The Inventor and Armsmaster jobs. Instead of unlocking their abilities using Tech Points, you Gotta Catch 'Em All: bring certain specific items to Arkar, and rusty weapons to the Gravell blacksmith, to unlock new abilities. All Support passives are made automatically available to all characters at all times.
• Memento MacGuffin: In the Sidestory "Lingering Love," a young woman in Stormhail is forelorn about a man named Eugis who left her after proclaiming his love for her. All she has to remember him is the Treasured Necklace he gave her. Stealing/Entreating/Mugging the necklace will make the woman realize what "a rotten, callous, bastard" Eugis is. She will scream at the heavens and feel much better afterwards.
• Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot: The pontiff of a local church has been murdered → these murders were performed by a man operating on behalf of the Moonshade Order → the Moonshade Order massacred the Kal clan in the recent past → the last survivor of the Kal Clan has taken control of the Sanctum Knights and is using them to try and eradicate the Order of the Sacred Flame because she blames them for her clan's destruction. This investigation ends, but sparks another. The Church was in possession of an evil artifact called the Darkblood Bow → the Moonshade Order has absconded with the bow and other Darkblood artifacts, and has smothered the Sacred Flames around the world, shrouding it in eternal darkness so that they may bring about the return of the dark god Vide the Wicked. In a strange irony, Temenos also discovers that the leader of the Sanctum Knights had nothing to do with the pontiff's murder. The pontiff was murdered by the leader of the Moonshade Order because the pontiff had learned just what the leader was up to and was trying to warn Temenos about them. So Temenos went on an entirely different investigation, the loose ends of which somehow led him right back around to the true culprits of the first one.
• A Minor Kidroduction: Two of the eight party members are introduced this way. Partitio's story begins with him as a child, arriving at what would be the future site of a bustling silver mining town, as he is just beginning to learn how to be a merchant. Ochette's story starts with her as a child picking her partner that will follow her for the rest of the game, before skipping ahead 10 years.
• Miscarriage of Justice: Osvald’s story begins with him preparing to escape from Frigit Isle 5 years after being sent there when framed by Harvey for the latter’s murder of Osvald’s wife and daughter.
• Misplaced Retribution: When Hikari and Agnea meet Yomi in Tranquil Grotto, she reveals that she's the twin sister of Tsuki, and she plans to kill Hikari to avenge her fallen sister. While that was done by Clan Ku, it was all done under Mugen; in fact, Hikari was horrified by what Mugen did and was partially driven to take him down so those lost in the massacre of Ku, like Tsuki, could rest in peace and he put a stop to his elder brother's tyrany once and for all. The tragedy is, Yomi knows her feelings and actions make no logical sense, and it's not fair to lay any of this at Hikari's feet, but all she believes she has left is her rage and grief, with Hikari being the only target left to point her dagger at.
• The Mole: In Throné's first chapter, she is assigned to deal with one in the Blacksnakes. Subverted. There is no mole — Throné, Pirro, and Scaracci were each told that one of the other two was a traitor as part of their secret test to be chosen as Mother and Father's successor.
• Money for Nothing: In this case, Job Points. While abilities cost the same to purchase as they did in the last game, JP itself comes thick and fast thanks to the support skills that increase its gain in combat. Two of the advanced jobs don't even require any JP to purchase skills, instead needing key items that must be found or traded in. An endgame party will likely be sitting on a pile of useless JP with nothing to spend it on.
• Motifs:
  • The moon is a major motif throughout the game.
    • A full moon is visible in the background of a number of important scenes, including, but not limited to, Throné's Chapter 3 during her confrontation and battle with Mother and Chapter 4 during the gondola ride to Lostseed and her confrontation and battle with Claude, even if it's daytime, Ochette's Chapter 3 on the Night of the Scarlet Moon, which is a lunar eclipse, Hikari and Agnea's Crossed Paths Chapter 1.
    • Ochette's companions' names mean "sun" (Akala) and "moon" (Mahina) in Hawaiian, and the final boss of her story is called the Lajackal/Malamaowl of the Sorrowful Moon.
    • The true antagonists of the story are the Moonshade Order and their symbol is a crescent moon. A crescent moon sigil is visible in Temenos' Chapter 4 at the altar where Captain Kaldena tries to invoke the power of the Shadow.
  • In the advertising, each character's story was described as "A journey for ___." The pre-boss fight music for each character is also named "For ___" accordingly (e.g. "A journey for home" and "For Home" for Hikari.) The final chapter is referred to in-game as "the journey for the dawn."
• Mutual Envy: Scrutinizing/Inquiring/Coercing/Bribing some pairs of characters will reveal they secretly want what the other has.
  • In Merry Hills, there are two women. One is a woman who stayed in Merry Hills' small rural community and is envious of her visiting friend who lives in New Delsta. Her city-living friend is tired of the city life and wants to return to a country life.
  • In Winterbloom there are two soldiers meeting. One is a guard on Frigit Isle and has come to hate the isolation, harsh weather, hard journey, and conditions there and would like to take up a steadier job in Stormhail working for Clan Mei. His counterpart works for Clan Mei in Stormhail and wants to leave to work at the prison isle.
• Mutually Exclusive Party Members: Ochette can only choose either Akalā the jackal or Mahina the owl to be her Loyal Animal Companion. The other flees into the wild after she makes her choice and returns as the Final Boss of her route.
• Mystical Plague: In the final chapter, Ori's journal reveals that Trousseau's poison was not of this world; it was the Shadow.
• Nerf: Several Game-Breaker skills from the first game have been nerfed here.
  • The skill "Steal SP" from the first game has been replaced with "Mystical Staff". It's now Staff-based and is learned by the Cleric instead of the Thief. This reduces the amount of physical damage done by the skill, and thus less SP recovered. In exchange, the amount of SP recovered has been buffed from 5% to 10%.
  • The Cleric Divine Skill "Aelfric's Auspices" has been replaced with the weaker "Aelfric's Blessing". Instead of granting a completely free additional action, now it simply gives the target an additional turn at the end of the round. It's still powerful, but nowhere near as gamebreaking as it was in the first game.
  • There are less Support Skills that can recover SP mid-battle, requiring you to either conserve your skills or find other ways to restore SP, especially in boss battles.
  • While not outright nerfed, several powerful skills and support skills like Reflective Veil and SP Saver are given to hidden jobs instead of basic jobs, restricting your access to them until lategame.
    • Percipience and Insult to Injury have been replaced by the Champion's Belt and Enfeebling Amulet respectively, accessories that can't be accessed until mid-game. ^Where?The Champion's Belt is dropped by Yurinas during Hikari's Chapter 2. The Enfeebling Amulet is located in a chest in the Unfinished Tunnel, a Danger Level 34 area.
  • Zigzagged with the Armsmaster's Sixfold Strike, which deals damage with all six weapons, very similar to the first game's Winnehild's Battle Cry. Now instead of hitting all enemies, each hit will target a random enemy. On the other hand, it's no longer a Divine Skill, thus can be spammed more often and works with Sealticge's Seduction.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain:
  • Osvald's route wouldn't have happened at all if Harvey had paid the court to get Osvald sentenced to death (as was apparently intended) instead of life imprisonment. However, because Harvey wanted Osvald to see for himself how Harvey took everything from him, he ends up spurring on Osvald's character development and, ultimately, causing him to figure out the secret of the One True Magic.
  • In Partitio's route, he and his hometown eventually fall into poverty after the ruthless landowner buys the land out and creates laws that financially oppress the residents, which spurs Partitio to go on a journey to help end poverty.
• The Night That Never Ends: The Final Chapter always has the time set to night, and disables the day/night cycle until you clear the chapter.
• No Historical Figures Were Harmed: King Jigo's retainer Benkei is named after the original Benkei, but also has major elements of Yasuke, both in his somewhat darker skin tone and fighting amidst a burning residence where his master was treacherously murdered, saving said master's son in the process. This would make Jigo, the weary conqueror, into a composite of Minamoto no Yoshitsune and Oda Nobunaga.
• Non-Elemental: Introduced in this game are several attacks that reduce shield points regardless of an enemy's weaknesses, making them functionally this.
  • For skills and attacks there are the Dancer's Ruinous Kick skill, Ochette's Beastly Howl, and Osvald's One True Magic.
  • The Almighty Soulstones are an item version of this, dealing typeless magic damage to all enemies, as opposed to the usual elemental Soulstones.
• Non-Standard Game Over: With Throné, if you pick the wrong cup during her and the Slaver's poisonous drinking contest. She succumbs to the poison while the Slaver gloats, and unlike losing a battle you can immediately try again without reloading a saved game.
• Noodle Incident: One group travel banter between the lady travelers has them discussing what they want in a lover. While Ochette doesn't understand their emotions, when Throné talks about a tail wagging and her heart fluttering, Ochette finally understands because she felt that way about a person. The banter ends with Ochette not revealing anything else.
• Obvious Rule Patch:
  • Agnea's Latent Power "All Together Now" description mentions it does not affect divine skills or skills that only affects the caster. In practice there's some other skills that fit neither descriptions which can't be used with "All Together Now" active, most notably the Merchant class' "Donate BP". The reason is clear as with the proper combination of passives (One Step Ahead and Boost-Start), Agnea would be able to make the entire party start with maxed out boost on turn one.
  • Partitio can hire NPCs who either net you a partial refund on items you buy, or increase the sale-price of items you sell. Needless to say, you can't skim a percentage off the 80 billion leaves needed to buy the steam-engine from Roque, as that is a signed contract and not something Partitio can haggle over after signing.
  • Several job skills like "Extra Experience" now clearly have in their skill description having several travelers utilizing this won't affect the total amount gained. In the previous game, the wording was more ambiguous.
  • Ochette's Provoke having infinite uses makes it better than same system from the first game, but to compensate for how the rare monsters are purposely really strong, rarer monsters gained via Provoke can only be used once per battle, and require fully boosting to use them.
• Odd Couple: Religious inquisitor and Friend to All Children Temenos and thief who laughs when she steals candy from a baby Throné just bounce right off each other in their Crossed Paths and get along swimmingly as they solve the mystery of the treasure (and later, murder) of Alpates.
• Older Than They Look:
  • Beastlings in general seem to age much slower than humans. Ochette is 20 years old despite still looking and acting like a child, and the leader of the Hunters' Guild is 120 years old despite looking much younger than that.
  • Temenos is 30, yet doesn't look much older than 21-year-old Hikari, and looks younger than 24-year-old Partitio. It's not revealed if he's always had white hair, or if he's just gone grey young.
• Olympus Mons: Tera and Glacis, two of the Creatures of Legend that Ochette is searching for, as well as some end-game dungeon monsters like the Tempest Revenants in Throné's chapter 4, can be provoked into battle like any other monster. They have very powerful, multi-element attacks, but they require maximum Boost to be summoned and can only be brought out once per battle.
• Ominous Save Prompt: The game advises you to save before starting on the final chapter, even suggesting that you use an alternate save slot if necessary. This is largely because The Night That Never Ends kicks in, locking you out of all daytime path actions (Temenos can't Guide NPCs, Throné can no longer steal, etc.) and interactions with characters who only show up during the day (of which there are a handful). As consistent with the game's rules up until this point, all monster encounters are also stronger at night.
• Ominous Visual Glitch: Whenever Castti Inquires about something that turns out to be related to her forgotten past, the screen briefly glitches out, the relevant phrase is highlighted in yellow, and all other text in the inquiry fades out.
• One Dialogue, Two Conversations:
  • The travel banter between Castti and Throné in Castti's Chapter Two: Sai Route. They talk about cleaning up the hospital, Castti literally and Throné metaphorically.
  • The travel banter between Castti and Throné in Castti's Chapter Four has them repeat the same mistake in Timberain. Castti is interested in seeing the royal jewels to admire them. Throné wants to case the place and steal them, and will split the reward with Castti 50-50. Castti is shocked and admonishes her friend.
    Castti: B-Bad Throné! No larceny!
• One-Time Dungeon:
  • The Sacred Guard Ship cannot be revisited after Temenos explores it during his second chapter.
  • Vidania becomes inaccessible after clearing the final chapter.
• Only the Worthy May Pass: The eight Job Guild Halls which give licenses for others to have that profession each have their own tests and trials. Some are Fetch Quests in which one must obtain Macguffins, such as Soulstone drops from some enemies for Scholar or rare one-of-a-kind items for Thief and Hunter, or meeting some threshold of mastering the job, such as mastering the Divine Skill of the job for Warrior and Dancer, or like Merchants just pay for it as proof as one's skill as a merchant.
• Orphanage of Fear: Mother's Garden. On the surface, a legitimate orphanage with the backing of the church — in reality, it's run by the Blacksnakes and serves as the place where its members are trained from birth in the ways of killing and stealing, with harsh punishments for any who dare defy Mother. After finishing Throné's story, however, it becomes an Orphanage of Love, with the same children there but now they are able to lead normal lives with the help of the elderly caretaker.
• People of Hair Color: Flashbacks show that the Kal people all had white hair, the only humans other than Temenos to have that hair color at all ages...
• Plague Doctor: Trousseau wears the heavy robes and mask of one to protect himself from his own poison rain. Once the mask breaks after the first phase of his fight, he'll actually start taking damage from said rain.
• Plot Tunnel: Osvald's Great Escape takes up his first two chapters. That means that chapter 1 leads directly into chapter 2, and you do not get access to the overworld until you're done with both. If he's not your main character, the game directly warns you that playing his chapters might take a while upon encountering him.
• Posthumous Character:
  • Ochette's story has Cateracta of the Three Creatures of Legend, who was killed by hunters some years prior to Ochette beginning her mission.
  • Castti's story has Eir's Apothecaries, including Malaya, all of whom succumbed to Trousseau's poison. Andy and Randy sacrificed themselves to put out Trousseau's fire, and Malaya used the last of her strength to get Castti aboard the small lifeboat and cast her out to sea. The Malaya we've been seeing has been a figment of Castti's imagination, her own mind trying to help her recover her memories.
• The Power of Hate: Harvey believes the One True Magic is this. Driven by his desire to best Osvald, he taps into the Shadow's magic and unleashes all of his hate into a Kamehame Hadouken to try and kill Osvald.
• The Power of Love: What the One True Magic actually is, as Osvald discovers when he taps into untold new power while protecting Elena from Harvey's magic.
• Put Them All Out of My Misery: Several members of the Moonshade Order want to unleash Vide on the world to annihilate it, believing that humans are irredeemable. Claude managed to shatter Trousseau's worldview to the point that Trousseau sought to simply exterminate the people more directly, rather than the world itself.
• Prestige Class: Like the first game, there are four hidden jobs on top of the regular eight. They are however hidden in more varied places, and also more gimmicky.
  • The Inventor has powerful skills that cost nothing to cast, but take up turns to build/repair and can only be used once. Unlocking it simply requires finding Arkar the inventor's house next to New Delsta, and unlocking skills beyond the first two involves bringing him specific materials to create each invention.
  • The Armsmaster is the successor to the Warmaster, granting the character the ability to wield every weapon type and strong offensive skills. The job is easily obtained by talking to the blacksmith in Gravell, but its skills are directly tied to the Divine Weapons, a set of unique weapons found around the world in a heavily rusted state.
  • The Conjurer is a support job specialized in elemental weapon enchantments, effectively the new Runelord. Obtaining it requires completing the Five-Tiered Tower, a late-game Boss Rush.
  • The Arcanist is a bizarre spellcasting job carrying a variety of unique but niche spells, as well as both Light and Dark damage. Getting it requires solving the mystery of the Lost Isle labyrinth ruins.
• Rain of Arrows: Multiple skills in the game feature the character firing a volley of arrows on all enemies. The secret job skill "Hunter's Bow: Flurry of Arrows" from the Armsmaster job, if set up properly, can chain multiple waves of arrows as the skill refreshes if even one enemy shield is broken by the attack.
• Rearrange the Song:
  • "Unshakable Resolve" is a new arrangement of "Determination" from the first game. The instrumentation in "Determination" feels simpler and features a solo English horn before giving the melody to the strings. "Unshakable Resolve" gives the main melody to the piano, introduces a new and stronger countermelody from the strings, and peaks in a different place in the music.
  • "Empty Memories", which plays during flashbacks in Castti's story, is a slower and simpler arrangement of Castti's theme.
  • The song that Agnea writes throughout her story, Song of Hope, is built on top of Agnea's theme song. Song of Hope adds new vocal melody and brass counterpoint lines, as well as electric guitars and a drum set.
  • Each character's musical motif is incorporated in the lead-up to the boss fights in their stories ("In Pursuit of ____"), as well as the music that plays during each of their final boss fights ("The Journey for ____ Ends"). All of them are faster and more intense, and there are some notable differences in how they are presented, such as:
    • Castti's motif is now played by French horns, which gives it a more sweeping and noble quality.
    • Throne's motif is also played by French horns, while the violins take the countermelody. This also gives Throne's theme a more sweeping quality, but with the countermelody, it's more complex.
    • In "In Pursuit of Revenge," Osvald's motif is played by low brass and then a cello, but in "The Journey for Revenge Ends," it's played by an electric guitar. It has a lighter sound than the low brass and cello that came before, but there's still an edge to the sound.
    • In "In Pursuit of Hope," Agnea's motif remains the same, but the surrounding instrumentation is different, and it introduces a French horn countermelody. That countermelody ends up becoming the vocal melody in "Song of Hope," while Agnea's violin melody becomes the countermelody.
• Red Herring:
  • Cohazeh is played up as if she is Ochette's antagonist almost right from the get-go, showing up and demanding more land from Juvah, among other unsavory actions. She is not one of Ochette's main antagonists despite this, merely serving to be a cynicism catalyst for Juvah regarding humans.
  • Temenos initially suspects that Lucian has something to do with the Pontiff's murder. However, Lucian ends up getting killed by the real murderer instead, which allows Temenos to figure out who the killer actually is.
  • The entire maze on the Lost Isle is actually this. While there's a bunch of good items hidden in the maze itself, on the other end is just a sign telling you that overthinking won't get you anywhere. The path to the real treasure of the maze is actually an invisible walkway to the left of the starting platform and doesn't require going into the labyrinth at all.
• Restored My Faith in Humanity: In the final chapter, despite having spent her entire life as an agent of the Moonshade Order and working towards Vide's resurrection, Ori is ultimately unable to put her heart into her mission due to how Partitio's sheer selflessness in his story completely shook her nihilistic beliefs and made her believe that maybe the world does deserve to see a new dawn. This revelation ends up saving her, as her doubt caused her to end up surviving her sacrifice to douse her Sacred Flame, allowing a healer from Crackridge to save her life.
• Revenge: Over the course of the Timberain Courthouse Sidequests, it is revealed that the friendly guard Meylan has been seeking revenge against Judge Astell for over a decade. The Judge wrongly sentenced Meylan's parents to death for a theft they didn't commit. After completing the Proof of Innocence sidequest, Meylan realizes the Judge is the true thief and using a weapon Meylan secured from the criminal in Proof of Guilt sidequest he kills the Judge and tries to cover up his crime. Because of the exposure of the Judge's criminal behavior with items found in his home, Meylan is given a sentence of life imprisonment while apologizes to his parents for failing to live an honest life.
• Rule of Symbolism: The final chapter of Partitio's tale takes place on Roque Island, a monument to just how rich Roque is. Given the man's focus on himself and his own achievements and his lack of trust in others, the chapter is symbolic of the term 'No man is an island.'
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: An actual gameplay mechanic for Partitio once he unlocks his EX skill. With Negotiate Schedule, he can effectively bribe a given enemy to have that enemy give up their turn, at which point Partitio takes their turn for them. It does have the limit that Partitio can't bribe a broken enemy, though, for the sole purpose of maintaining the concession that broken enemies need to get their turns first in a round when they recover lest moves like Negotiate Schedule remove all challenge from the game.
• Seven Deadly Sins: Each Final Boss of the travelers represents one or more of the classical sins (plus the eighth sin of Despair) in some way:
  • Harvey is Envy, wanting to surpass his rival Osvald to the point of framing him for the deaths of the latter's wife and daughter, all the while faking their deaths to use them in his experiments and cause Osvald more pain.
  • Mugen is Gluttony as well as Wrath, wanting to Take Over the World and expand his rule beyond the kingdom of Ku, and embraces the philosophy of Might Makes Right as a Blood Knight who desires conquest.
  • Roque is Greed, who not only bleeds Oresrush dry of its citizens' money, but also wants to monopolize the rights to the steam engine and keep all profits for himself.
  • Claude is Lust as well as Sloth, having sired countless children (with the implication that some of them were made non-consensually), and is the shadow ruler of the Blacksnakes through his Co-Dragons Mother and Father.
  • Dolcinaea downplays Pride. She vainly believes herself to be the greatest dancer and star in all of Solistia, and even claims to have surpassed the goddess Sealticge at the Grand Gala. However, Dolcinaea turns out to be a Graceful Loser and accepts Agnea as the better dancer once the latter outperforms her.
  • Kaldena is Wrath, seeking Revenge against the Moonshade Order as the Sole Survivor of her people who were slaughtered along with her father, with said hatred eventually extending to the entire world as well as the gods, making her an Unwitting Pawn manipulated by her own enemies.
  • Trousseau is Despair, as he gave up on life and decides to Put Them All Out of My Misery rather than drudge through an unforgiving world, using his poison rain to commit mass murder.
  • The Darkling is Despair as well as Wrath, due to its continuous torture for ten years turning it into a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds, with even its epithet being "of the Sorrowful Moon".
• Shared Dream: At the beginning of the final chapter, all eight characters go to sleep at a campsite and have a shared dream about four flames going out, a dark flame arising, and an unfamiliar place. They wake up in a seemingly endless night as the events of the final chapter kick off.
• Ship Tease:
  • Hikari and Agnea get a lot. After Agnea's Chapter 2, Hikari mentions that he has a very warm feeling watching Agnea dance and repeats Gil's catchphrase about her dancing being hot; she replies that her cheeks are starting to feel hot at his praise. Their first "Crossed Paths" quest has them enjoy an evening under the moonlight while listening to Yomi play her lute. Hikari also offers to let Agnea hold his hand if she stumbles again in the second part of their side story.
  • Throné and Temenos just bounce off each other and tease each other mercilessly in their Crossed Paths quests, and while they don't have any overt romantic moments, the way they bicker is Like an Old Married Couple.
  • Temenos and Crick's interactions wouldn't look out of place in a romantic comedy. Each time Crick (re)appears in story it was with a meet-cute scenario.
  • Castti enjoys driving Partitio up the wall, but special mention goes to one of her Travel Banters with him, in which he bemoans getting blackout drunk, and she claims that they had themselves a wild night, which flusters him for a few moments before she admits she was just teasing him.
• Shout-Out: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• Simple Solution Won't Work: In her final chapter, Castti manages to reach Timberain before the poison rain starts, and with the help of Edmund, Griff, and the local soldiers, manages to get everybody inside and to close their windows before it even starts to drizzle. However, the poison turns airborne once it hits the ground and will eventually get into the buildings if it goes on for too long, so the evacuation is simply about buying Castti enough time to go cut off the rain at its source rather than being a solution on its own.
• Simple, yet Awesome: The Merchant class has always been a utility class, with abilities like "Rest" that restore SP at the cost of consuming a turn. Now it also starts with "Arrow of Fortune," which gives you a bonus for damage dealt in the form of 50 damage equalling... 1 Job Point. Aside from Breaking your foes and the fact that the ability takes a fairly hefty 12 SP to cast, there is literally no reason not to replace all your basic attacks with this ability; and since the Merchant's other starting ability is "Rest," so it's not like you can't get that SP back without consuming items.
• So Unfunny, It's Funny: Joe, one of Partitio's friends, is trying to woo a girl by making her laugh, and asks you to bring him a variety of jokes to help with that. When you complete the quest, he thanks you, goes off to see her... and combines his friends' jokes into one awkwardly-mangled story. She ends up laughing at the sheer absurdity.
• Spell Blade: A Conjurer can grant the whole party bonus elemental damage on their weapons.
• Status Buff: In addition to the numerous ones that carried over from the first game, the multi-hit spells formerly available to Scholar and Sorcerer are now gated behind Osvald's "Advanced Magic" spell and "Alephan's Wisdom" Divine Skill. The game does not explain this.
• Story Branching: Unlike the first game, most stories have branches at some points, where characters can choose which objective to tackle next. The order in which they are done can affect how the other chapters play out.
• Story to Gameplay Ratio: Significantly more even than the first game. Each character's arc now has at least five chapters instead of four^note Throné, for instance, has two Chapter 2s and Chapter 3s, while Partitio has three mini-chapters in his "Scent of Commerce". Fewer bosses qualify as damage sponges. In each Traveler's path, there are chapters that are pure dialogue with no boss fight and sometimes even no dungeon^note Like the "Mother's Route" version of Throné's Chapter 2 First Half, Osvald's Chapter 2, and each one of Partitio's "Scent of Commerce" mini-chapters.
• Straw Nihilist: The Arc Villain of Castti's storyline, Trousseau. His encounter with Claude left him so broken that he came to see life as little more than decay and suffering, and is now so broken and insane that he genuinely believes that mass genocide is a mercy compared to a lifetime of suffering and regret. This also applies to the overarching villains of the story since their goal is to bring the advent of Vide the Wicked and destroy the world as they feel the world full of corruption and bloodshed does not deserve to exist.
• Superboss: Galdera returns as a Legacy Boss Battle and can be challenged by returning the books to the Montwise library, helping Al decipher From the Far Reaches of Hell, and finding the Gate of Finis on an island in the Sundered Sea. He is once again the toughest opponent in the game by far, and much like the first game, beating him awards an accessory that turns off random encounters.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Alrond tells Partitio how his father, who witnessed the decline of Wellgrove's economy, tried throwing his vast wealth at the merchants and workers in a desperate attempt to reignite the town. However, once he did, the merchants and workers either used the wealth to leave Wellgrove or simply retired from working, making the problem even worse.
• Sympathetic Villain, Despicable Villain: The game is fairly evenly split between villains you want to give a hug and villains you want to punch in the face. On one hand, you have characters like Father, Trousseau, Kaldena, the Darkling, and Oboro, whose actions were the result of circumstances beyond their control. On the other, you have characters like Mother, Harvey, Mugen, Claude, and Arcanette, who are utterly monstrous individuals with no redeeming qualities to speak of. Dolcinaea is the odd member out, as she's just a major snob and doesn't even qualify as a villain.^note The worst she did was trying to forcibly evict the people of East Sai from their homes and renovate the place into a resort in her liking. And that was more out of inconsideration towards their feelings rather than any genuine malice. And even then, she grows out of it by the end of Agnea's route.
• Tangled Family Tree: There is one ancient bloodline which has blood connections to at least two Travelers and several villains. D'arqest started the nation of Ku, and his grandson Claude started the Blacksnakes by fathering countless children. What this means is that most (if not all) of the Blacksnakes are distant cousins to Clan Ku.
• Team Kids: Though not the youngest of the group (that would be Agnea), Ochette is the most childlike, as well as being inexperienced in the ways of the world, such as money, due to having grown up on a secluded island. She's also particularly close to Team Mom Castti, whom she (usually affectionately, but sometimes derisively, such as when the latter tells her she can't only eat meat) calls Mama.
• Temporary Party Member to Villain:
  • Hikari's first chapter opens with him fighting in a battle alongside his war buddies Ritsu and Rai Mei. Later in the chapter, Hikari's brother Mugen assassinates their father, King Jigo, and launches a coup to seize the kingdom for himself - Ritsu pledges his support to Mugen and is tasked with killing Hikari.
  • Subverted by Rai Mei - she reluctantly backs Mugen out of fear he'll slaughter her clan, and serves as a Boss Fight in Hikari's story, but ultimately decides to back Hikari's claim to the throne and fights alongside him once again in his final chapter.
• Threatening Shark: The Battle-Worn Shark, an enormous shark with a massive mouth, appears as an optional boss off the Western Continent's coastline.
• Title Drop: At the very end of the game, as the title of Agnea's show about the group's travels, no less!
• Tome of Eldritch Lore: The Book of Night, which contains detailed accounts of the world's bloody history and the dark depths humanity is capable of sinking to. Reading the book drove the previously kind-hearted Trousseau to genocidal madness. Oboro, however, is unfazed by its contents due to having his heart already blackened with nihilism due to his own dark past.
• Too Awesome to Use:
  • Downplayed with the Refreshing Jam, Reinforcing Jam, and Revitalizing Jam, which are rare but not so rare that you can't use one every once in a while (and Refreshing Jams can actually be stolen from certain enemies on the water). The same is true for the large variants of the Energizing Pomegranate, Empowering Lychee, Olive of Life, and soulstones. The Almighty Soulstone, Primeval Horn Elixir, and Perfect Jerky are also quite rare but can at least be farmed.
  • Played straight with the Rejuvenating Jam, Ruinous Relic, Ancient Cursed Talisman, Decaying Dragon's Essence, Wriggling Root, and, oddly enough, Red Apple. You can only find each of them (other than the Red Apple) in one place, and only 2-4 of them.
  • The Almighty Olive, Grail of Life, and Exotic Remedy, on the other hand, are the biggest example of this. There is only one of each of those items in the game.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: After clearing Hikari's story, he can repeatedly challenge a novice warrior in Southern Ku Sands, causing the latter to improve each time. Eventually, the apprentice will reach rank 10 in terms of NPC difficulty, but will also become arrogant to the point where most path actions have ridiculously high requirements when used on him. Once the apprentice is defeated one last time, he'll become more humble and lower his path action requirements.
• Tropical Island Adventure: Toto'haha is a pair of tropical islands (much like New Zealand) with a Polynesian theme, including ancient ruined temples in a kinda-Southeast Asian, kinda-Mesoamerican style. Recently discovered and colonized by people from the mainland continents, it's home to the Little Bit Beastly Beastling tribes. It's also an Isle of Giant Horrors, but that's not usually much of a problem; Ochette casually kills a bus-sized King Iguana as a pre-breakfast chore. It's the appearance of new giant horrors that kicks off Ochette's adventure.
• True Companions: Owing to the increased interactivity between the protagonists, the party come off as much closer to each other. At the end of the game, when they all decide to go their separate ways, they make it clear that they've all forged an unbreakable bond and they'll all see each other once again, which they do in the Epilogue.
• The Unfought: There are a few antagonistic characters that don't get taken on by the characters whose story they appear in. Almost all are involved in the game's larger plot.
  • In Ochette's story, The Dark Hunter Petrichor isn't ever met, much less fought. However, Petrichor is responsible for almost all of the trouble Ochette has to go through to assemble the guardians, from killing Cateracta to smashing Glacis' egg, to even taking the spurned companion and raising/torturing it until it was so full of hatred that the Shadow found it an easy mark to corrupt. She dies by sacrificing herself to the spurned companion so that her sacrifice would smother the Sacred Flame on Toto'haha.
  • In Temenos' story, the residents of Crackridge are never brought to justice for massacring the Kal. However, nothing's stopping the party from beating them up through Path Actions like Provoke, Challenge, and Mug.
  • In Hikari's story, Mugen's Evil Vizier Ageha disappears during Chapter 5 and doesn't reappear until the flashback as the party reignite the Tranquil Grotto's Sacred Flame, where it's revealed that Kazan murdered him as the necessary sacrifice to smother that one.
• Unreliable Narrator: Father may be one when it comes to Marietta, Throné's mother and the former leader of the Blacksnakes. Everything that is revealed to player about Father and Marietta's relationship comes from Father, who, by his own admission, murdered Marietta out of spite. The flashback scenes are all from Father's perspective, and they never show Marietta expressing the same kind of sentiments that Father does, which leaves some ambiguity about the true nature of their relationship and how much Father's retelling may be influenced by his bitterness.
• Unwitting Pawn: Tanzy is manipulated by Mindt to go on a journey to locate the four Sacred Flames scattered throughout Solistia. She remains none the wiser that the Moonshade Order are going to smother them. Once she returns with the knowledge of where all four of them are, Mindt murders her to douse the Sacred Flame at the Flamechurch Cathedral, the final flame needed for Vidania to rise from the seas and for Vide to bring about The Night That Never Ends.
• Variable Mix: There are different versions of most locations' background music for day and night; because the player can toggle between day and night with a button push, the versions will segue into each other as the change is made.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential:
  • As with the previous game, using Path Actions, you can beat up/mug/steal from countless innocents. In the case of theft, this includes mementos, from children, etc.
  • Whenever you use Hikari's Latent Power (and given how powerful it makes him, especially in early game, this will likely be often), you are essentially forcing his Superpowered Evil Side to influence him. Compared to the triumphant or determined nature of the other travelers' Latent Power voicelines, Hikari is audibly struggling in his, indicating that it's not exactly willing on his part.
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: Castle Vidania.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: The game actually starts out significantly easier than the first, so these are the bosses that start ratcheting up to the difficulty level we all remember.
  • Castti's Chapter 2 boss(es), Plukk, Mikk and Makk. While many bosses in the franchise can summon and re-summon mooks, this is the first Wolfpack Boss in the franchise: all three are individual characters, they all have similar HP totals, none of them re-spawn... and all three have the Glows Purple special attack, which they naturally fire off in sequence to all but guarantee a Total Party Kill. In the meanwhile, they also do the thing where the flunkies lock the boss's weaknesses, so you can't actually Break the boss's (7) shield points unless you've already chewed through at least one flunky's (4) points. And, in absolute worst-case scenario where all of them Glow Purple, that's a maximum of 15 shields you have to get through in one turn.
  • Ochette's Chapter 2 boss, Tera. This boss carries on the time-honored tradition of discarding its own weak points, limiting the things that will Break it. (Tera starts out vulnerable to Daggers, Axes, Staves, Ice and Darkness, but by the end it will only be weak to the elements.) The boss is not particularly difficult if you're prepared, but there's no way to find out what to prepare for besides 1. Checking the internet (and/or the above spoilers), 2. being Born Lucky, or 3. Trial-and-Error Gameplay.
  • Thurston, Partitio's Chapter 3 boss. This character is a Flunky Boss who is rendered Immune to Breaks, and untargetable, by their flunky. You have to destroy — not Break it, destroy it — it before you can break the boss itself. Meanwhile, the boss can spend a turn to add 7 Shields to their flunky, instantly setting up the possibility that you Break the flunky literally right before the boss gets a turn and just restores it to working order with a snap of his fingers... and implying that, uh, maybe you should time your Breaks differently so that this doesn't happen. He can also just re-summon the darn thing at a whim. And no, you can't just Leghold Trap the boss, because he's untargetable; you just have to make the turn order work in your favor.
• Weapon Tombstone: Southern Ku Sands contains a graveyard on a hill, decorated with the swords and spears of the Ku soldiers buried there. It appears in several cutscenes from Hikari's story.
• We Hardly Knew Ye:
  • Donnie is already bleeding out when he's introduced in Throné's first chapter, and he dies of his wounds after her first battle. He gets six whole words of dialogue.
  • Similarly, Osvald's cellmate dies from a combination of exhaustion and the warden's beating several minutes after being introduced.
• Wham Episode: Several.
  • Castti has a particularly big one in her Chapter 3, in which she recovers her memories: How her kind colleague Trousseau went rogue, how he became an Omnicidal Maniac after encountering a man who taught him the world's bloodsoaked history, how he mass-murdered with poison the villagers he swore to protect and heal, how all her co-workers pulled a Heroic Sacrifice because of it, along the biggest reveal: Malaya was Dead All Along, as she sacrificed her life so Castti could survive. The one Castti sees is a mere imagination.
  • Temenos, in his Chapter 2: The person who murdered the Pontiff turns out to be Vados the Architect.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • Harvey is said to have survived his duel with Osvald, according to Ori's journal fragments. Despite this, we never see him again.^note This may have been a mistranslation, as the Japanese version of the game never says anything about his survival.
  • The boy in Oresrush who resembles Pirro is never seen again after finishing Throné's second chapter, despite almost every other important NPC getting a lategame sidequest, reappearing during the epilogue, or both.
  • Reiza, the Moonshade Order woman who wanted to atone and leave the group after failing to seduce and kill Temenos, disappears after his time in Crackridge is complete. Like the Pirro-lookalike, she mostly serves to just introduce the player to a group of people—in Reiza's case, the Moonshade Order.
  • The woman who was going to be sold by the Snowhares disappears without a trace once Bergomi is dealt with. Her absence is noted, but there's no means of ever saving her, and this case is especially egregious because Throné already killed Bergomi, which leaves the identity of whoever sold her ambiguous.
  • The Emaciated Woman who asks Throné to kill her baby in Lostseed also disappears by the end of her respective chapter.
• What Measure Is a Mook?: Zig-zagged. Some characters actually do seem to care about mooks: Hikari refuses to finish off helpless opponents, Throné wants to stop being an assassin and so makes her ambushes non-lethal. That's in the cutscenes; nobody has a problem with annihilating Random Encounters of nameless human enemies in gameplay — even if you're fighting your way through the backstage of a theatre and they're all actors, dancers and musicians. (In Acquire's defense, they added a large number of non-human but sentient animal races in both Solistia and Orsterra to lower the Fridge Horror.)
• Won the War, Lost the Peace: Ku negotiated a ceasefire with its enemies, and remained at peace for three years. Shortly before the events of the game proper, though, a power-hungry Mugen and his followers overthrow King Jigo with the intent of returning Ku to war and expanding its territory.
• Wolfpack Boss: The Winterbloom branch of Castti's chapter 2 has her fighting against the bandits Plukk, Mikk, and Makk. While Plukk is the main boss, all three of them have distinct weaknesses and their attacks hurt when they coordinate them.
• Wouldn't Hurt a Child: Just like in the first game, you can't perform Path Actions that involve battling child NPCs, nor can you perform "guide" type Path Actions (since you can summon guided NPC to aid you in battle).
• Wutai: The kingdom of Ku is a desert-based version of this.
• You Can't Fight Fate: Throné spends her entire quest killing other Blacksnakes to escape the gang. Then she finds out that was exactly what her true father, Claude, wanted all along. The Blacksnakes being a criminal organization was just the icing on the cake. It was a disguised battle royale to decide which one of them was the worthy child to slay Claude and give him the successor he wanted. She's the fourth of Claude's children to make it to him, and she succeeds where they failed; but in the end, Throné followed the script to the letter (like any character in a video game).
• You Can't Go Home Again: After Hikari's first chapter, you cannot return to Ku until his story is complete.
• You No Take Candle: Most Beastlings talk in short, gramatically-awkward sentences, implied to be due to their species' origins. Temenos calls attention to this in a travel banter with Ochette, and Ochette herself notes that she's been taught grammar by Juvah.
• Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: Throné's story has her hunting down Mother and Father for their keys to her Slave Collar so she can remove it and finally be free of the Blacksnakes. But once she defeats both and claims the keys, it turns out they're not the keys to her collar. They're actually keys to a secret path in New Delsta that leads to Claude, the true leader of the Blacksnakes and the one who holds the real collar keys.

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