Video Game / Shin Megami Tensei Liberation: Dx2

"I'm gonna break you down, I'm gonna steal your soul. I'm gonna burn you to flames, until you feel my pain!"

One day like any other, you find yourself walking down the streets of Akihabara, lonely, apathetic, and aimless. Your call for anything exciting to happen is swiftly answered by a mysterious app appearing on your phone, introducing you to an all-too-exciting hidden underworld of demon summoners called Devil Downloaders. Quickly, you are recruited into a group of Dx2, short-form for Devil Downloader, called the Liberators and brought into the midst of an on-going feud against the Acolytes, a conflict that holds the fate of the world in its balance.

Released in Japan on January 22, 2018 and worldwide on July 24, 2018, SHIN MEGAMI TENSEI Liberation: Dx2 is a free-to-play spin-off mobile game adaption of Atlus's notoriously hardcore, demon-summoning Shin Megami Tensei series. Taking place in an Urban Fantasy setting that hearkens back to the same series's Devil Survivor spin-off, this adaptation notably attempts to cram features from many different Shin Megami Tensei adaptations into one game, acting as sort of celebration of the series.

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SHIN MEGAMI TENSEI Liberation: Dx2 contains examples of:

• Absurdly Low Level Cap:
  • Your demons' level cap is 50. Not only reaching this cap can be quite easy since the game can sometimes be generous with Exp, you will start running into enemies who break that level cap long before you max out your demons with brands, spiritizations, mitamas and transcends.
  • Dx2 characters' initial level cap is 30, then you need to limit break them to reach their maximum potential of level 50. For all the Dx2s you obtain from season 1 story mode, this can be done within your first month of playing.
• Adam Smith Hates Your Guts:
  • You may find yourself lacking macca if you need to upgrade a lot of brands or buy some of the best, and thus most expensive, items in the black market.
  • Once you start fusing higher-grade demons, expect your painstakingly-hoarded millions of magnetite to go up in smoke.
• Adults Are Useless: Averted with Meat Balloon a.k.a. Gakuto Inoue who is willing to help anyone in need.
• After the End: Alter World follows up on Alternate Odaiba chapter, showing the protagonist trying to survive and find answers in a destroyed world.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Kurtz from the Ghost In The Shell crossover event is an impossibly genius machine with incredible hacking power it uses to try to cause a world war and fixation to assimilate Motoko Kusanagi, a fellow miracle machine.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us: In Chapter 6, the Acolytes, fed up with Liberator involvement, gather a massive force of Homunculi and march upon Akihabara, invading the hideout. A good part of the chapter involves kicking them out of several parts of the hideout.
• Alternate Self:
  • The MC who underwent the events of the alternate Chapter 7 and joined the Acolytes witnesses the Intermission's events, and asks to be sent from their apocalyptic world to the main timeline, with the caveat that the resident MC is a different gender.
  • This is also the basis for the Dimensional line of demons, which are presented as Summons influenced by an alternate dimension, identified by the extra A in their names, and others such as General Masakado and Hero Masakado and Fiend Alice and Undead Alice.
• Anti-Frustration Features: Several:
  • Fusion Errors are completely excluded, given how difficult amassing Magnetite can be.
  • Later items change demon archetypes, whether at random or allowing direct selection of a new archetype (except Common) in order to access different Awaken Skills, though you're stuck with the extra gacha skill.
  • Blank Genomes reduce the strain of transferring gacha skills by allowing to simply take the skill instead of sacrificing the demon.
  • The 3.0 Update changes how evolving demons works, allowing them to keep their current level when they evolve rather than going back down to one each time they evolve.
  • The introduction of 5★ Universal Spirits allows for the generation of blank Spirits that can be used to increase the level of 5★ demons without having to sacrifice another copy of the demon.
  • If you're not confident on taking on player-made PvP teams, especially since from Silver rank onwards you are penalized for losing, the game offers a few relatively easier AI opponents so that you can still farm for PvP-exclusive Battle Points currency.
  • The game acknowledges that Aura Gate bosses and PvP teams are much, much harder than random encounters and normal quest battles, and thus even if you set your battles to Auto, this autobattle is immediately turned off the moment you engage an Aura Gate boss or a PvP team. Even in Aura Gate SP, where the auto battle will apply on the (easier-than-usual) bosses, the game will not automatically barge into a boss room without your input.
• Apocalypse How:
  • The Acolytes attempt to cause a Regional scale disaster by dealing critical damage to the Dragon Stream, which would potentially destroy all of Japan if the Dragon Stream sustained too much damage. The Liberators decide to put an end to their plot by getting to the heart of the Acolyte threat, starting with Hayate.
  • It's revealed on the alternate route that Vanitas will exterminate humanity on a global scale due to determining humanity has no value. This and the "Extinction Event" Einherjar and Jabo know about are unavoidable in the future and will bring about the end of the world if left unchecked. Whatever it's all about, it's grave enough that the demon Astaroth and Maria decide to set aside their conflict in favor of dealing with Vanitas.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: The Pierce property causes attacks to ignore resistances, including Resist, Null, Absorb, and Repel. This allows you (and Demonic Spiders) to hit straight through with attacks that the opposing party would otherwise negate. There are rare few ways to counter pierce: The multi-fusion demon Alilat and the gacha demon Atavaka shut down pierce if their allies can naturally repel the attacking attribute^note Tetrakarn and Makarakarn do not work with those two, Rama can do similar thing if his teammates can naturally drain attacking attributes (extends to Rama himself since Elementalist Rama drains ice), and Demiurge combines both bonuses on top of either dealing almighty damage or healing his team depending on whether the attack is repelled or drained. However, these skills that bypass Pierce are deliberately disabled in Alter World Break system.
  • Several demons also feature skills allowing them to reduce certain types of damage, often as Spiritization bonus. For instance, Erlkonig and Nebiros reduce Dark damage by a percentage of 20% and 50%, respectively. This means that even though the attack will go through, it will most likely inflict only Scratch Damage at best, or will be completely ineffective at worst.
  • Unit 01, the Sixth Angel, the Tenth Angel and Camael all have Bulwark-ignoring attacks, so no matter how large their Demeter or Barong bulwarks are, the enemies are getting sliced through them.
• Artificial Human: Homunculi are a common sight, created by the Acolytes with alchemy. They're distinguished by their featureless faces, and attack the Liberators with demons.
• Artificial Stupidity:
  • The original auto-attack AI never heard of such silly things as "passing turns". When set to Auto-Battle, the computer would attempt to do something every single turn, even if the demon had absolutely zero options to use against the enemy or enemy party. This led to shenanigans like your demons using Attack on enemies that Null/Repel Physical and throwing away Press Turn Icons, and doing this repeatedly. However, a later update gave the AI the ability to pass.
  • The AI also doesn't understand things like MP conservation. As long as it can cast something effectively, it will attempt to cast that skill instead of saving up for a more expensive but powerful skill. Imagine the frustration of having your healer spamming cheap attacks instead of saving up MP for the expensive heal skills, though this can be lessened with a new item that allows you to shift the AI's priorities.
    • That said, the AI sometimes can be too smart for their own good. For example, when there is one last enemy with single-digit HP left, your spellcaster with full mana may forgo casting a killing spell and instead attempt Cherry Tapping with its basic attack, which may miss and allow the enemy to counterattack.
  • The automove AI in Aura Gate, especially Aura Gate 2, could be pretty dumb. If you hadn't cleared the floor boss, it would move erratically all over the place without doing anything useful such as opening chests. After you cleared the floor, it would then prioritize opening treasure chests, but its chosen paths often were not optimal. However, an update modified the Automove options, allowing you to customize the paths it takes (especially after exploring the entire map) and what battles to engage in.
• Ascended Demon: Ose Hallel and Flauros Hallel, "angelic" versions of the Fallen demons given a Gold and White Are Divine paintjob.
• Assist Character:
  • Each Dx2 has an assist skill that can randomly activate, doing things like buffing your demons or inflicting ailments on the enemy.
  • During battles, random players may assist with skills of their own.
• Attack Backfire: Absorb and Repel both help the demon you're attacking by either converting the damage into HP or reflecting the attack back at you, which in itself can be Absorbed. However, you can break through Absorb and Repel with Pierce.
• Auto-Revive:
  • Xi Wangmu's Peach of Immortality instantly revives one demon in her team when someone on her side dies, though it can only be activated twice.
  • Provided that one of his allies survive an enemy turn, Quetzalcoatl A can automatically revive himself once per battle and grant a bonus turn, allowing him to immediately wreak vengeance.
  • Several bosses in the lower levels of Hollow World are accompanied by mooks who can automatically revive themselves after being dead for a couple of turns.
  • Several demons can automatically revive dead teammates if they survive an enemy turn. Usually there is some condition or limit: Nebiros can revive every turn but need to have at least one enemy cursed, while Echidna and Maria can only revive a number of times per battle.
• Awesome, yet Impractical: Eileen's battle skills that rely/affect random attacks, while they are good, like gaining an extra press turn or casting Lydia or Barrier when killing an enemy with a random attack, there is the risk that the random attack can hit an enemy that's immune to that attack (unless you use it on a singular enemy) and/or the risk that it does its minimum attacks (which her "Fragrant Lily" skill can mitigate by increasing the minimum attacks by 1), not doing enough damage to the enemy to kill it.
• Badass in Distress:
  • Templar Dragon and Eileen are captured when they're goaded into surrendering by the villains. They only escape unscathed when Meat Balloon rams a truck doused in gasoline into the venue, distracting the man who was going to torture them to death.
  • In Chapter 5, Shionyan is kidnapped by the boss while the rest of the Liberators are occupied trying to fend off Fengshui mercenaries. She correctly guesses that the boss intends to use her due to her background, but the Liberators manage to track her down and rescue her.
• Bait-and-Switch: At the start of "Sun of Sepharvaim" event, which debuts Adramelech, a young man receives a vision that he will live his life to serve a great purpose. Players who are familiar with the villainous Adramelech, or those who remember "God's Tragic Hero" event, will immediately suspect foul play. Except that the entity who gives that vision is not Adramelech, but rather Uriel, who wants to use the young man as a vessel to take down Adramelech.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: You wanted excitement? Well here you go!
• Big Damn Heroes: When the Liberators are backed against a wall fighting Hayate and his army of Acolyte Dx2s, Einherjar suddenly makes an entrance and starts wiping the floor with the cannon fodder, allowing the Liberators to challenge Hayate directly to finish the fight.
• Bilingual Dialogue: For whatever reason, both the Bayonetta and Devil May Cry 5 events have both sides communicating with each other perfectly. In the case of Bayonetta, it's possibly justified with magic, but in the case of the DMC crew...not so much.
• Black-and-White Morality: In contrast to Shin Megami Tensei's usual Grey-and-Gray Morality or Evil Versus Evil, Liberation is a fairly simple "Liberators good, Acolytes bad" story. At the beginning, at least...
• Bland-Name Product: MegaTube is this to YouTube (with a little "MegaTen" thrown in for good measure.)
• The Blank: Nameless and very minor NPCs are drawn without any facial features.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality:
  • Many of the events involving demons have this as a recurring theme. For example, in one such event, a Silky, furious at the theft of several items of the mansion she dwells at, very nearly squeezes the thief to death with her telekinesis until the Liberators point out that the resulting blood splatters will be hard to scrub off.
  • Demons in negotiations also don't always see things the same way as humans do, for example, they actually think being called an idiot is actually a good thing...
• Book Ends:
  • At the end of the Alternate Chapter 7, you're just as aimless, lost and confused as you were at the beginning of the game... but now it's worse, as you've thrown your lot in with the Acolytes and alienated the Liberators.
  • The first floor of Hollow World has you travel straight northward through several rooms connected by small passageways. The last floor has you travel straight southward through passageways guarded by a Boss Rush.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Tier 1 skills such as Agi or Zio. Due to how MP works in this game, their cheaper MP cost means they're much more spammable than their stronger counterparts at the cost of only a small loss of power. In addition, their single-target nature means you can safely use them as opposed to multi-hit/multi-target spells which may be drained/nulled/repelled^note Losing a press turn from having your attack miss, drained, nulled or repelled overwrites the bonus turn you gain by hitting weaknesses. Lastly, they're much easier to find and require much less skill points to transfer. For example, Zan has 120 power, but can be obtained easily from a lowly Pixie and only requires 1 point to transfer. Meanwhile, Zandyne has 160 power, but requires a whopping 9 points. Plus, its earliest source is Loki, who is still an extremely expensive demon to create. Considering how difficult it is for high grade demons to obtain skill points, many players stick to transferring tier 1 skills for elemental coverage.
  • Pyro Jack and Jack Frost, both 1★ Demons, have access to the Skill "Tag" when made into the Protector archetype (which requires downgrading 3★ gacha demons). Tag allows you to Pass without consuming half a Press Turn Icon, essentially making Passing a free action. When combined with offensive Demons, you can rapidly and effectively hammer out repeated attacks from the same two Demons with zero cost in between.
• Boss Rush: The final boss of Hollow World is guarded by the four end-of-realm bosses you previously fight in their respective realms. You don't have to take them all down in one sitting, though.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: The angel Sandalphon uses a Light Is Not Good approach to this trope in the "One True Self" event, using a divine song of forgiveness to force a group of demons to "return to their true angelic form" - even when they aren't even related to angels in the first place. The song, however, is most effective on the Fallen demons Ose and Flauros, separating them from their Seraph Hallel forms.
• Break Meter: In Alter World's Break system quests, your team builds up Break gauge during combat by attacking enemies and resisting their attacks, and once the gauge is full, your team Overbreaks and starts dealing massive damage for the duration.
• Break Them by Talking: Vince successfully uses this technique to break the Hallel demons, pointing out that their desperation to absorb their Fallen selves stems from the fact they're terrified of being condemned again if they fail, making their promises of forgiveness hollow.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: There are plenty of opportunities to pay real money to quickly gain progress or items to become stronger. You can use free gems to get some of these benefits, however.
• Call-Back:
  • The ''Imperfect We May Be..." event has Demiurge observe various past events and decide he's done with demons attempting to instil knowledge upon Mankind, and decides to start the world once again in an effort to stamp out both knowledge and free will.
  • The final antagonist of His Purifying Blade event is Mara who is resuming his corruption of the land after he is previously foiled in Keeping Evils At Bay.
  • Blazing Yoyogi quests in Alter World implicitly refers back to the Light of Divine Judgment event, where you are attacked by an ex-Liberator who is aided by angels.
• Came Back Wrong: Revival skills are one of the only ways to guarantee full HP restoration, via Samarecarm, Recarmdra, or Xi Wangmu's Peach of Immortality passive. Persephone and Moloch's Fruit of the Dead and Blood Cradle passives, however, will make every revived demon come back with only 1 HP, and Moloch in particular will follow up with one high-tier Fire attack once per turn when this is triggered.
• Cap:
  • A demon's level cap depends on their star rating, ranging from 25 for one-star demons to 50 for six-star demons.
  • Dx2s initially cap at level 30, but by completing a special task and associated story fights, the cap can be raised to 50.
  • Fractional damage have a cap on how much damage they can deal to enemies with extremely high HP.
• Cast from Hit Points:
  • The skill Power Hit inflicts heavy physical damage to an enemy, at the cost of 10% of the caster's HP.
  • Tzizimitl is restricted to her Dark Premonition skill if she has more than 50% HP, and it will inflict 51% HP damage on her. When she's under 50%, Dark Premonition changes to Disastrous Eclipse.
  • When Talking to a demon, they might ask you to sacrifice some HP to gain their favor, and thus recruit them. The amount of HP given up can vary by circumstance; if the demon is sufficiently upset, they might force you to throw away upwards of 75% of your party's HP, which can put you in a dangerous position if you choose to accept.
  • Inverted with the Tenth Angel's Rejection and Mozgus' Bloody Scripture - their mechanics boost their abilities when they are at full health, and heavily decrease once they are wounded.
• Changing Gameplay Priorities: Of several kinds.
  • Elohim and Sabaoth's main attack spells make use of the Remnants mechanic, allowing them to generate Bonus Turns without the need for a Critical Hit or hitting a weakness.
  • Shaddai and Orcus change gameplay by denying the possiblity of Bonus Turns, Shaddai by negating those generated by Critical Hits, and Orcus those generated by hitting weaknesses.
  • Alice A, Panel 4 Mother Harlot and Sabaoth reduce enemy MP if the enemy goes first, the first two draining one MP from each enemy at the start of each enemy turn and the latter hitting them with a one-time one MP reduction if he goes second.
  • Masakado A, Cerberus A, Vishnu A, Sabaoth and Astaroth have the ability to generate extra Press Turns. Masakado A outright generates one more turn if his team goes first, Cerberus A will restore one Press Turn if the enemy reduces them, Vishnu A and Sabaoth's unique spells will generate one extra Press Turn per turn if they succeed, and Astaroth will generate a Press Turn the first time an enemy is downed.
  • Intimidating Stance demons reduce enemy Press Turns if the enemy goes first. Cthulhu, Masakado and Shaddai eat up two enemy Press Turns if they go second.
• Charged Attack: Of two kinds. The first makes use of Charge, Rebellion or Concentrate, inflicting positive status changes that increase the damage dealt or ensure a Critical Hit, and the second increases the effect of a move the more times it's used, such as Susano-o A's Violent Slash or Guts' Dragon Slayer.
• Chekhov's Gunman: At the start of Chapter 3, Megakin shows his viewers a segment of a video where a man named Gakuto gets into a fight with a fellow Shionyan fan, forcing the police to intervene. At the end of Chapter 4, Gakuto (who is revealed to be a Liberator codenamed "Meat Balloon") saves the protagonist, Megakin, and Chalk Eater from literally fighting to the death with a conveniently-timed improvised explosion.
• Chest Monster: Starting from 11F of Aura Gate 2, you can find yellow treasure chests containing Magnetite, Macca, or even a Mitama Extract. In rare cases, however, these yellow chests may instead release demons.
• The Chosen Many: In Chapter 13, Phanuel explains that there exist several humans, known as Key Factors, who have the power to decide the fate of the world.
• Clone by Conversion: Reiko Kashima's passive, You're Next, does this to any demon it kills with a single-target attack, transforming them into a Lv. 1 Reiko Kashima if they are revived in any way.
• Combat Exclusive Healing: Healing spells have their effectiveness heavily decreased in this game as part of the game's balance, and gain a use cap per battle. Aside from Lydia, healing skills that do not have usage limit are unique skills exclusive to rare demons, such as Barong's Barong Dance, Lakshmi A's Virtuous Prosperity, Ardha's Ruin and Grace and Mahamayuri's Blossoming Cyclone.
• Combo Platter Powers: Some rare skills are essentially a combination of several lesser skills crammed into a single slot. Some of them are transferable, such as Elemental Cycle (which is Fire Boost, Ice Boost, Elec Boost and Force Boost rolled into a single package), while the rest are unique to extremely high-level demons, and non-transferable, such as Ardha's Sahasrara (Infinite Chakra's extra MP regeneration, Great Aim's accuracy bonus, Assassin/Serial Killer's bonus to all damage, and a healing bonus almost as good as Recovery Amp, all in a single Skill).
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard:
  • In most of the game modes, you can encounter enemies whose levels are much higher than the level caps would usually allow. The final enemy of each Brands of Sin quest, for example, is at Level 73, when your own demons max out at Level 50 (and that's for 6★ demons). Hollow World enemies escalate this by slowly going all the way to level 99 the deeper you go, and Tokyo Abyss goes to town by introducing enemies with triple-digit levels by the time you reach around 30F.
  • Bosses have infinite MP, and they're all too happy to spam their strongest skills at you. This is especially bad when the skill they spam is either Almighty damage, which is unblockable unless you're lucky enough or have grinded long enough to have a Huang Long, or physical attacks with pierce, which can critical and there's little you can do about it other than pray it misses.
  • The last Hell's Park boss, King Frost, is a Level 100 abomination that Nulls everything, and Pierce does squat against him due to his Hell Shield passive. The only thing that can even touch him is Almighty, and only the extremely rare Almighty (Phys) property (found only in Shiva A's Third Eye, Asura Lord's Slaughter All, Griffith's Blade of the Absolute, and the Skull Knight's Sword of Actuation) can crit him. Later demons that decrease Elemental Affinity (Zeus, Tiamat A and Hagen) can circumvent this, by dropping his resistances to the point Hell Shield is no longer able to protect him.
• Contractual Boss Immunity: Boss demons, indicated by their dark Battle Aura, are immune to Mortal by default, and many of them are also immune to most ailments. The protagonist in Battle Tower also intrinsically has Mortal immunity by default, in part due to the Keystone Army nature of Battle Tower.
• Contrived Coincidence: The majority of the Liberators are, in fact, people whose interests and professions (usually associated with some branch of pop-culture) are the usual answer to the very boredom and lack of excitement you lamented about before becoming a Devil Downloader.
• Critical Existence Failure: Exploited to a lethal effect by Endure skills as well as Nebiros. A demon's remaining HP has no effect on how many press turn it provides or its power, so an army of demons left at only 1 HP will still hit as hard as a fresh team of demons.
• Crossover: Every now and then, special events crossing over with other franchises will pop up, introducing the Liberators to problem sets beyond those of their own world. So far, the list of worlds includes Bayonetta, Devil May Cry, Berserk, Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045, Sonic the Hedgehog, The Seven Deadly Sins, Rebuild of Evangelion, and Overlord (2012).
• Crossover Power Acquisition: How the Guest Fighters are interpreted, essentially blank demonic matter influenced by contact with other universes into generating demons partially mimicking the original people and entities from those universes yet can be summoned in the Dx2 reality.
• Cursed Item: The Rheingold, which the Nazis apparently dropped in Japan for safekeeping at some point in WWII. The demon Hagen came with the treasure, and peacefully kept it hidden for more than seven decades, slowly expending his energy, until Kriemhild's spirit managed to lure the granddaughter of the warden of the land where the gold had been hidden close enough to possess her and critically damage Hagen. In the end, the Liberatiors supervise the disposal of the Rheingold in Tokyo Bay.
• Cycle of Hurting:
  • Whenever an enemy attack misses Garuda Alt's team, his Brilliant Wings not only damages the enemy in retaliation but also reduces their accuracy, making it easier for them to miss Garuda A again, causing Brilliant Wings to further reduce their accuracy and so forth.
  • This trope is also part of what makes Anat so dangerous. Her main attack skill, Thunderstorm, is a very powerful AoE Elec move, and her passive Killer Impulse will activate whenever she successfully downs an enemy, firing off 4 light Elec attacks - enough to break Endures or kill survivors, firing off again. For this reason, Killer Impulse is limited to trigger consecutively only twice.
  • Hresvelgr and Sraosha don't quite have Anat's power level, due to lack of innate piercing attack for the first and unimpressive STR for the second, but in turn, they activate their AoE North Wind (Hresvelgr)/Soul Judgment (Sraosha) whenever an enemy dies from any cause/whenever one of your demons downs an enemy, and neither has any consecutive limit, meaning that a kill under the correct circumstances can easily doom entire enemy teams - even more so when paired together and/or with the aforementioned Anat who scores the killing blow.
  • Marici's Shimmer Arrow triggers whenever a demon in her team uses a Physical attack other than the basic Attack command, potentially adding to other combos.
  • Lilith A's Temptation, if successful, will follow up with a Charm effect. If at the end of her team's turn, there's at least one Charmed enemy, her Forbidden Fruit passive will add an extra Temptation free of charge.
  • An Ixtab paired with any resurrector demon, especially automatic resurrectors such as Xi Wangmu and Cernunos, can become this. You kill her, she kills one of your demons, and then she immediately gets back up ready to kill another of your demons when you are one man short.
  • Elohim's brutal single-target Solar Flare attack will proc a follow-up AoE blast, followed by a 1-turn offensive buff for his team and a defense debuff for the enemies, and will fire yet another AoE attack the first time an enemy is downed each turn. All of these attacks ignore Endures.
  • Panel 2 for Flauros Hallel and Susano-o A will restore 2 MP each time they down an enemy, allowing them to keep their MP topped up and spam their Signature Move. Similarly, Mother Harlot's Babylon Goblet drains 1 MP from every enemy, allowing her to keep herself filled. Her Panel 4 goes even further, allowing her to drain 1 MP at the start of the first enemy turn when she goes second, reducing the ability of the enemy to counter her and allowing her to fire Babylon Goblet straight from her first turn.
• Damage-Sponge Boss:
  • Gatekeepers in Aura Gate 1, preset enemies spawned in each sector of the Aura Gate, boast at least six-digit HP and can only be fought 5 turns at a time, requiring multiple players to attack them repeatedly to bring them down.
  • Democalypse enemies boast incredible HP, fitting for enemies which are to be taken out by an entire faction of up to 20 players. And every time a Democalypse boss is defeated, they come back with even more HP; it won't be long before they start having millions of HP..
• Deader than Dead: There are some attacks (Skull Knight's Sword of Actuation, Lilith A's Temptation, Tzitzimitl's Disastrous Eclipse, Flauros Hallel's Baptisma, Elizabeth's Ark, Echidna's Freezing Gale, Astaroth's Lord Astaroth and Nyarlathotep's Otherworldly Force) that disable resurrection for any enemy killed by those attacks. Berserker Guts' Berserker Armor passive used to inflict this on himself, since it inflicted a massive 40% HP penalty at the end of the enemy's turn - which ignored Endure skills, but he's later buffed to take only 30% damage and without revival block. However, all these anti-revival attacks lose out to Maria, whose unique skill specifically removes revival block, and Quetzalcoatl's Panel 4 upgrade, which disables this status and clears him to use his Ce Acatl's Return to revive everyone.
• Deadly Upgrade: At the end of Chapter 6, Hayate goes One-Winged Angel in a last ditch attempt to kill the Liberators by fusing with a large mass of Homunculi, causing him to transform into a half-human, half-demon monster. However, as Shionyan points out, the effect this has on his human body would cause his internal organs to disintegrate rapidly, giving him about an hour of life at best and then collapsing on himself afterwards. The Liberators can either attempt to make a break for it to stall out Hayate until he dies (in which case he catches them and forces them into one last fight) or just stand their ground and fight until he drops of his own accord.
• Death-Activated Superpower:
  • Alternate Surt will unleash Twilight Inferno, a tremendous Fire-type attack, upon being destroyed the first time.
  • Tlaltecuhtli will cast Earth Sacrifice (1-turn Luster Candy and Tetrakarn) when destroyed. Baldur's Panel 1 is a partial counterpart, casting a 1-turn Debilitate when he's killed.
  • Nadja casts New Hope which heals her team when she dies.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Losing a battle just kicks you back to the previous menu, with only your stamina and time lost.
• Death or Glory Attack: Physical attacks (not to be confused with physical attribute) can critical or miss, unlike magical attacks which never miss but can't critical. Scoring any critical will give you bonus turns even if the enemy has no weakness, but if your multi-hit attack misses just once, no amount of criticals can recover that lost turn. All Phys attribute skills are physical attacks, but some physical attacks may have other attributes, such as Cu Chulainn A's Barbed Spear, which is Force.
• Death Seeker: The nameless man and woman in 11F~20F of the Aura Gate. They're mostly under the influence of the angel of death Azrael. When Azrael is defeated, they promptly snap out of it and return to the normal world. However, the desire to die was something they already desired; Azrael simply amplified this desire.
• Demonic Possession: During Chapter 2, the Liberators are deployed to investigate an issue involving a digital drug that uses VR to induce a high through heavy audio and visual Sensory Overload. Unfortunately, it also causes demons to possess those who take the "drug", which results in some people to becoming enslaved and others Driven to Suicide.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Multi-Fusion can be a tricky task, as Multi-Fusion only accepts Common Archetype demons^note with the single exception of Beelzebub (97), which requires the gacha-exclusive Beelzebub (Human), meaning gacha demons aren't usable and you'll probably have to execute long chains of various Fusions to gather your components... before even starting with the Multi-Fusion's cost, which can reach into the millions of Magnetite for higher-level demons. However, Multi-Fusion demons typically have useful, unique attributes that can't be found on other demons, like Hare of Inaba, who has a Passive that nulls Dark Zone effects and greatly reduces Poison Trap damage while in the Aura Gate.
• Disc-One Nuke:
  • "Teal Ose," an Ose of the Elementalist archetype will gain the passive ability "Null Phys" upon awakening, making him impervious to all physical damage, while already having no weaknesses by default. As a result, he's gained a reputation as this, especially for carrying players through the early game. Compounding this is that he's very easy to obtain, as he's only a 3★ demon, and the player starts with an Elementalist Setanta, requiring only a little creative fusion to pass on to Ose.
  • A free giveaway gave early adopters an Aragami Thor, a 5★ demon with respectable stats and access to a plethora of potent Skills, such as Charge, Megaton Raid, and the unique multi-hit Lightning Skill Mjolnir, with access to Gigantomachia upon Awakening. This gives him strong Physical/Lightning presence on early-game teams and allows you to punch your way through early content given proper training.
  • Similarly, the Devil May Cry 5 event had a easy giveaway for the normal, four star version of Dante. Even in this state, he's a powerful force that can easily solo his way through early content like the above if leveled properly.
  • Players who log in during the first Berserk crossover event are rewarded with a Common archetype Guts, a Phys powerhouse if trained well. The second Berserk crossover gives a Common Zodd, whose playstyle is quite similar to Guts, only exchanging Guts' aggression for sustain. The third rewards players with an Aragami Griffith.
• Double Unlock: Five Multi-Fusion demons can only be produced after finding and destroying them in the Aura Gate 2 dungeon: Kartikeya, Cybele, Parvati, Neko Shogun, and Lucifuge. Furthermore, Lucifuge only spawns after defeating the last Aura Gate 2 boss.
• Downer Ending: All three of the Take Back the City events so far.
  • In the first, Shionyan discovers Susano'o, who'd been oppressing the few remaining humans and keeping Amaterasu sealed, was actually keeping them alive and giving them whatever meager help he could to cover up the truth that Amaterasu was dead, with his defeat killing what little hope remained in that world.
  • In the second, Vince destroys Elohim's copies to force them all to merge so he can destroy the last remaining one. To his horror, the last remaining copy isn't interested in interacting with the few surviving humans other than killing them, since they have not repented from the attitudes that brought forth Vanitas. He survives when Kokoro briefly sends him home as Elohim triggers its attack, but when he returns he finds all life in that world had been incinerated.
  • In the third, Templar Dragon is led by Amon to Siegfried, the demon who used to be his master. It turns that while said master was a naive Well-Intentioned Extremist who thought he really had enough power to beat back Vanitas, Amon was a Treacherous Quest Giver who only forged a contract with him to begin with because he believed in him to save the world from Vanitas - and leave it ripe for conquest for his own true Master. Siegfried dies knowing he was always a pawn to Amon's game.
• Driven to Suicide: Megakin notes that suicide rates have spiked since the digital drug started being distributed on the streets. As it turns out, those with high EQ who take the drug fall under Demonic Possession and subsequently attempt to kill themselves to clear a path for the Acolytes. The Liberators manage to save a hospitalized girl from slashing her wrists by kicking the crap out of the demon possessing her.
• Dump Stat:
  • Downplayed. Strength and Magic are mainly offensive stats, but they respectively also contributes to Physical Defense and Magic Defense (although less than Vitality, which contributes to both). Still, it's not really preferable to have a magic attacker with high Strength or a physical attacker with high Magic.
  • While acting first is absolutely advantageous in most PvE content, some PvP team strategy prefer having low Agility to act second. This is because going first in PvP only let you start with 2 MP, while going second make you start with 5 MP so you can fire the more expensive skills right off the bat. Furthermore, some skills are more beneficial for teams that go second, such as Intimidating Stance and Auto-Tetraka/Makarakarn that only triggers for a team going second, and Auto-Taru/Raku/Sukukaja/nda skills which can stack only if cast by a second-going team. Finally, the loss of accuracy/evasion has mostly no effect on magic users because magic never miss, while physical attackers in these teams have high Luck to compensate. That said, it's important to keep more than one team in PvP, since going first or last can easily manipulate the flow of battle to either combatant's favor. Intimidating Stance teams, for instance, have to deal with Parvati's Joy Song and Ganesha's Faith in Wealth, that restore 1 MP for each cancelled turn - enough to allow the enemy to use their strongest attacks from the beginning; Hero Masakado's Guardian of the East, which grants one extra turn if he goes first; and Angra Mainyu's Everything Evil, which grant the entire team an additional 2 MP each turn for two turns, allowing the attackers to open with their own overwhelming barrage.
  • As you progress down Tokyo Abyss, your MC will eventually hit a level cap of 50, and your demons cap at 99, after which only your MC can gain stats and even then in small amounts at a time. Because enemies keep gaining levels well beyond triple digits, AGI eventually becomes a dump stat as the enemies keep gaining more and more AGI until eventually it is impossible for you to act first no matter how much you try.
• Dungeon Crawler: While most of the game runs on the standard "battles per stage" formula typical of mobile games, the Aura Gate utilizes first-person dungeon crawling reminiscent of classic MegaTen games, complete with Random Encounters.
• Earn Your Bad Ending: The Odaiba Alternate level is the result of the MC deciding to see if taking Jabo's path is better, attempting to make peaceful contact with Joshua Hawke, to the detriment of the Liberators. In fact, it can only progress beyond a certain point by outright joining the Acolytes. However, we're shown a glimpse of the unavoidable Bad Future in which Tokyo has been leveled by nuclear missiles, with only the God Aion being mentioned before it ends.
• Easy Levels, Hard Bosses: The Aura Gates. As your demons grow stronger, it gradually becomes easier to build farming teams that can effortlessly steamroll random encounters on auto even in the last few floors. The bosses, on the other hand, require a lot of preparations to take down.
• Eldritch Abomination: Vanitas is revealed to be this by Jabo on the alternate route, its origin being alien even to demonkind. They only know it is able to judge humanity and bring about disasters that cause growth amongst humanity. However, technology has advanced enough that if it fully activates again, human extinction will be the result.
• Enemy Mine:
  • Despite their inherent animosity, Brotherhood of Harmony and The Elements are willing to work together with the Neo-Liberators to stop the remnants of The Acolytes, who has grown so desperate from their constant losses that they resort to more and more violent methods to summon Vanitas then and there.
  • In a similar vein, Maria and Astaroth belong to opposing factions, but they both are aware that Vanitas must be dealt with and thus are willing to set aside their differences for the time being.
• Evil Former Friend: In Gakuto's Dx2 Quest, you face his friend during his days as a mercenary, who has become a demon smuggler working with the Acolytes. Subverted, as the friend is revealed to not be a bad guy in the end. He wanted to quit the Acolytes, and was asking Gakuto for help.
• Evil Is Not a Toy: In "The God of Chaos Cometh" event, a few cultists decide to summon Nyarlathotep to bring chaos to the world. Nyarlathotep grants them their wish by messing up their perception, making them unable to tell demon from human and vice versa, promptly resulting in a bloodbath.
• Experience Booster:
  • The protagonist passively boosts EXP earned when he/she is the lead Dx2. You can upgrade the boost by investing Skill Points.
  • You can use items that increase the amount of EXP earned by demons for a limited time.
  • Kanbari, a 2★ demon obtained from Multi-Fusion, has a Passive called "Luck" that increases both EXP and Macca earned from fights by 20%.
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: When investigating the Ikebukuro bombers, Shionyan figures that the Acolytes are using Homunculi capable of transforming into bombs. Megakin asks her what's stopping them from using the bombs against the Liberators. Shionyan scoffs, saying those bombs are more of an emergency measure, to which Megakin asks her what's stopping the Acolytes from considering an intrusion into Ikebukuro an emergency. Cue a homunculus approaching and Shionyan realizing what it means.
• Fanservice
  • Rika's skirt happens to be a wraparound. It certainly comes in handy when she needs to reach for the gun strapped to her thigh.
  • Shiori's battle portraits depict her wearing her idol costume. This is particularly jarring as story scenes have her wearing a more casual outfit when she's not performing idol duties.
• Female Gaze: The opening alone has a few separate clips of two guys working out, including a Shirtless Scene.
• Fight Clubbing: Chapter 4 has the Liberators investigate an underground arena. As it turns out, it's not just an arena, but also a place where people are auctioned off to others to do to as they please, a la Hostel.
• Fighting Your Friend:
  • The franchise's classic Charm ailment.
  • In the Alternate Chapter 7, the MC makes the conscious decision to betray the Liberators and is forced to confront them, leading to the Alter-World timeline.
  • The MC's Loyalty Mission has them confront each of their friends in a sequential tournament inspired by the Holy Grail War. It's a play melee between friends as a joke.
  • A more serious form appears in the The God of Chaos Cometh, in which Nyarlathotep, in a bid to reduce all society to chaos, blocks both humanity and demonkind's ability to recognize their own in the middle of a demon invasion, turning both attackers and defenders into an incoherent mess.
• Forced Level-Grinding: As with other MegaTen games, your Player Level needs to be a certain level before you're allowed to fuse demons of specific tiers and rarity. The way this works is different from previous games, however; instead of being unable to fuse demons of a higher level than you, it simply comes down to reaching specific level tiers to unlock new demons to fuse.
• Fragile Speedster:
  • Yatagarasu is considered one of the strongest 4★ demons within the rarity thanks to access to Phys Boost as a Common Archetype demon and the terrifying Speedster passive, which boosts his Ag by 50%. Just having him on your team gives you decent odds for getting initiative, which can be enhanced by pairing him with other fast demons. The problem is that his Vitality stat is abysmal, giving him just a few hundred hit points to work with and being difficult to break into four digit HP.
  • Among all demons, Feng Huang has the highest Agility and Luck combined, making it capable of evading most physical attacks. It's also the demon with the lowest Vitality in the entire game. Worse, it's also weak to physical attacks (unless its archetype is Elementalist), so if an attack connects it will likely take a massive chunk of its health, if not killing it outright.
  • Hresvelgr is the fastest demon in the game to start with, can further be enhanced with Speedster, and its final Panel increases its base speed by 20%. However, it's weak to both Fire and Phys, making it a massive liability if the enemy team survives the initial attack.
  • Kartikeya and Sraosha are among the top ten fastest demons^note Kartikeya's Skanda skill gives additional 20 AGI when maxed, allowing him to outspeed even Hresvelgr, further augmented by innate Speedster for both, and their second Panels increase their base speed by 30%, which can be further increased with Agility Amp III or Epitome of Swiftness. However, they're on the low, low end of HP, making it easy to destroy them if the enemy team survives.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Kurtz, from the Ghost in the Shell crossover, started out as a half-baked experiment in using demons to influence a translation program, though the result was so useless its original creator had no trouble dumping its server in the Aura Gate. However, after being exposed to a mysterious light, its original intellect skyrocketed, allowing it to begin manipulating the Gate and connecting it to the Ghost in the Shell world, giving it the technological edge it needed to begin spreading into the Liberators' world.
• Fusion Dance:
  • Demon Fusion is back in full force, but has a few extra rules thrown in for good measure. For example, you must use at least one Common Archetype Demon in the Fusion process; using just rare Archetypes (like anything pulled from the gacha) will not work.
  • Alter-World uses a different variant in Armaments by fusing demons with blank shelds or swords. Any Armament created with 5★ demons has the additional possibility of taking advantage of Spiritization by increasing its stats with Spirits of the base demon, requiring up to five copies of the demon to fully activate all Panels. However, Gacha-exclusive demons will require only three copies.
  • In Tokyo Abyss, not only you have a regular fusion, but there is also conjunction where your fusion has a chance to produce a demon different from what you'd normally get, including demons you normally cannot obtain from regular fusion.
  • Human-demon fusion occasionally shows up in the story, such as Liberator member Vagit being a half-demon, and Alter World story mentioning about human-demon fusion project conducted by the Acolytes.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: Everyone makes sure to tell you that the demon battles are dangerous and can kill you. Should you lose a battle, Death visits you, and you get the option to revive for a price or accept death. However, the worst that happens is that you make no progress, and you only lose the stamina and time you spent on the battle.
• Gemini Destruction Law: Unlike all other bosses in Hollow World, 49F has Dual Boss of Shiva and Vishnu whom you must both dispatch before their turn, otherwise the fallen will revive himself on top of buffing both of them.
• Gender-Equal Ensemble: Almost as of chapter 10. Ignoring the protagonist, there are five male playable characters (Megakin, Chalk Eater, Kangaroo Boxer, Meat Balloon and Vince) and six female (Templar Dragon, Eileen, Shionyan, Seiran, Xana, and Honey Sweet). The equality remains true if you add the four non-playable Liberators, with two male (Vagit and Kazufumi) and two female (Arisa and Himika).
• Ghostly Goals: The "Salvation for a Soul" event has Jeng Yun make contact with a Phantom intent on identifying the person who killed him in a car crash and fled the scene. Between Jeng Yun and Templar Dragon, the Liberators find the culprit and hand him over to the authorities, exorcising the Phantom.
• Glass Cannon: Several demons have egregiously high offensive stats at the cost of defense. The prime example is Titania. She has the third highest Magic stat in the game, Elec Boost to boost her damage, and when Psychic Archetype, she also gets Back Attack to increase her damage even more if she hits a weakness. On the other hand, she also has the second lowest Vitality and HP in the game.
  • Berserker Guts has obscene STR and AGI stats; his main offensive move is Berserk, which is, bar none, the strongest single-target skill in the entire game, which has a real possibility of killing two enemies (it hits in two parts; if the first kills an enemy, the second will hit another one, especially since both attacks ignore Endures), plus Great Aim, which increases his accuracy by 20%; his Psychic Archetype has Death Blow, which increases the damage his Critical hits deal by 20%; and the Berserker Armor passive, which raises his Crit rate by an absurd 100% and his Phys damage by 50%, and reduces damage taken by 40%... but will also slap him with a 30% HP penalty at the end of the enemy turn, which will ignore his own Endure skills.
  • Elohim's stats allow him to easily deal huge amounts of Fire damage and greatly help his team go first, and his Panels and Godly Power passive increase his damage output and speed to monstrous levels, but only increase minute amounts of HP. If outsped, it's very difficult for him to survive to actually fire.
  • Unit 01 has amazing attack stats that allow it to deal immense amounts of Bulwark-ignoring Dark damage and buff control, but its only defense is the frail Bulwark it casts if it goes first. If it does not go first, it's not going to survive.
• God Was My Copilot: In the Arrival of an Ancient Antarctic Ruler, Kogoe is revealed to be a Shoggoth pretending to be human in order to get close enough to the Old Ones to kill them for good rather than allow them another shot at regaining control of Earth with their psychic abilities.
• The Good, the Bad, and the Evil: In season 2, the Neo-Liberators are the good protagonists who want to stop Vanitas via the most amicable methods, the Brotherhood of Harmony and the Elements are the bad who want to stop Vanitas via unscrupulous means, and the remnants of Acolytes are the evil who tries to end the world by summoning Vanitas then and there.
• Greater-Scope Villain: A so-called Incubator residing in the Aura Gate is ultimately responsible for several conflicts involving the Aura Gates. It is something of a Jackass Genie who grant wishes of those within in ways that is detrimental to the wishers or innocent people, turning the Aura Gate investigators into demons corresponding to their desires, creating the Hollow World so that Ixaya can commit genocide to become human, and a few other temporary events, such as granting Undead Alice Domain Holder powers to amass friends (read:kill people) and giving Kurtz incredible intelligence allowing it to wreak havoc to global military.
• Guest Fighter:
  • From Bayonetta, the title character, Jeanne, and a Beloved were recruitable demons during the "The Umbra Witches" event.
  • As part of a crossover with Devil May Cry, Dante, Nero, and V were summonable during the "Souls of the Devil Hunters" event.
  • The first Berserk event adds Guts, Schierke, Skull Knight, and Mozgus in. The second event adds Berserker Guts, Griffith, and Zodd.
  • The Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 event adds Motoko Kusanagi and a Tachikoma. The rerun adds Batou.
  • The Sonic the Hedgehog 30th Anniversary event adds Sonic.
  • The The Seven Deadly Sins event adds Ban, Meliodas, and Elizabeth.
  • The Rebuild of Evangelion event adds Unit 01, the Sixth Angel, and the Tenth Angel. Notably, the game uses a unique Unit 01 model with tentacles and a palm spike rather than any existing model.
  • The Overlord (2012) event adds Ainz, Albedo and Shalltear.
• Halloween Episode: The Halloween event. The Liberators have a party in which they dress up as some of the game's demons...which gets crashed by a clueless Pyro Jack, who thought it was an actual demon gathering.
• Hard Levels, Easy Bosses: Tokyo Abyss, in contrast to Aura Gates. The bosses strictly stick to Clear archetypes and do not have any Pierce skills (unless they innately have Pierce or Almighty), plus the game announces beforehand what boss you'll fight every five floors, so they're usually fairly easy to take down with demons sporting a healthy mix of nulls, absorbs and repels. The regular demon battles, on the other hand, are a bit more mixed, requiring a larger pool of skills to effectively survive.
• Harmful Healing:
  • In the Wrathful Goddess and the Fruit of Immortality event, a doctor arranges for the Asuras to attack Xi Wangmu's orchard to steal the Peaches of Immortality as a substitute for the Elixir of Immortality they crave, securing a supply so he can distribute them among his patients. Unfortunately, humans can't handle the magic of the peaches and literally explode when consuming one.
  • Black Rider and Ladon both punish healing by dealing fractional damage to enemies who heal using their skills, including passive skills. Ladon deals less raw damage than Black Rider, but in exchange, whereas Black Rider doesn't respond to Lydia, Ladon also punishes Lydia users by immediately removing said Lydia, on top of inflicting debuffs.
• Healing Loop: This can easily happen if you fight a boss who is programmed to spam a certain element, the boss drains that element, and you bring a demon that repels that element. The boss will attack, your demon repels it, which then heals the boss as it drains the attack. If your demon is the last party member left, it's unlikely it alone can outdamage the boss' absorb-heal, and the boss also has no way to kill it, making the battle an endless loop. Many made the mistake of bringing Rangda (repels physical) against the Siegfried boss in Aura Gate (the boss does physical attacks and absorbs physical damage).
• Here We Go Again!: The Books of Evil event. After confiscating the demon-spewing books, everyone leaves to destroy them. Cue Arisa pulling a last book from under the couch and curling down for a read.
• Heroic Sacrifice: When the MC decides to go along with Period's plan in an alternate Chapter 14, Shiang Sun is forced to use reckless techniques in a desperate gambit to stop them, sacrificing his soul to summon something strong enough to stop Period. He summons Malice Metatron, but even the angel's monstrous power isn't enough.
• Hostage for MacGuffin: In the Wrathful Goddess and the Fruit of Immortality event, Xi Wangmu, the guardian of the Peaches of Immortality, is assaulted by Asuras and has the orchard she protects raided. She descends to the mortal realm and encounters the Liberators, who convince her to place her trust in them by ceasing her unthinking attack and letting them just gather the stolen peaches for her. However, the goddess is less than willing to blindly trust a bunch of humans and demands hostages. Stretched very thin, the Liberators balk at this - until Vagit and Kazufumi volunteer to serve as her hostages until the peaches have been reclaimed.
• Hypocritical Heartwarming: In the MC's character story after you "kill" Gakuto, Shionyan calls him an annoying sweaty fat-ass, but swears to avenge him because "he was my fatass." Considering the whole scenario was an act, and Gakuto could hear her, this makes it sweeter, if anything.
• Invisible to Normals: Decoherence Fields prevent non-Dx2s from seeing the superpowered demon battles happening right on the streets. In Chapter 4, Hayate owns a technology that allows normal people to see demon battles in a Decoherence Field, though the muggles assume those are merely super-advanced CGI.
• Jumped at the Call: You join the Liberators without a second thought.
• Karma Meter: Based on your dialogue choices in the story cutscenes, the icon on your profile will show either Law, Chaos, or Neutral. This has no effect until the second story.
• Keeping the Handicap: Part of the Battle Tower mechanic. Players can elect from a list of positive (e.g., increased HP, ailment immunity) and negative (e.g., lowered damage dealt, increased damage received) handicaps, which negatively and positively affect the final score, respectively.
• Kill Streak:
  • In PvP matches, keeping an unbroken kill streak will increase your team's HP, attack and points earned.
  • Some demons will cast additional skills upon successfully killing an enemy. This can be a damage buff such as General Masakado spiritization power, or extra attacks such as Anat and Hresvelger.
• Knight Templar Parent: A Hollow father is encountered in the later parts of Hollow World with his two daughters, trying to escape past the demons that pose a threat to his girls and study up on demons and fusion. He reveals as he's dying he fuses his daughters with demons so that they can survive and not be killed, with his youngest being implied to have given him his injuries. His oldest daughter(Cerberus) understands their father was trying to protect them, but they were losing their minds to their demonic halves, asking to be Mercy Kill before it happens.
• Last Chance Hit Point: Death prevention skills such as Endure stops a fatal hit from killing a demon once per battle and leaves the demon with its last HP. There are also stronger versions of Endure which heals the demon some HP instead of leaving them with only 1 HP - Enduring Soul will heal the demon for 200 HP and Enduring Soul+ will heal it for 500 HP, and some rare demons such as Vishnu, Guts and Azazel, all have their own unique variants healing various amount of HP.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: The narratives of temporary events in the game are based on the latest available story chapter, meaning that when new players play these events, they may see characters who will not make appearance until much later in the game proper.
• Later-Installment Weirdness: Owing to it being a mobile game, Dx2 takes several liberties in adapting the standard MegaTen formula.
  • Instead of having an MP stat for each demon that grows with them, every demon has a standardized, non-increasing pool of 10 MP that regenerates by 3 MP at the start of each turn.
  • Hama and Mudo Skills have been downgraded to standard elemental magic and no longer inflict a One-Hit Kill.
  • Physical Skills cost MP instead of being Cast from Hit Points.
  • This is one of the few mainline MegaTen games where Fusion Accidents are out, at least via normal fusion process. This is more of an Anti-Frustration Feature than anything else, as Magnetite is a resource that's difficult to come by in large quantities and fusing high rarity demons requires a lot of the stuff.
  • In addition to Talking and Fusing to acquire new demons, there is now a gacha for demons, which is standard mobile game trappings. However, Fusion hasn't been obsoleted, as many of the best demons can be obtained through Fusion, and many of the rarer gacha demons cannot be used as Fusion materials without a Common Archetype demon as the second material.
• Let's You and Him Fight:
  • Both crossover events have the heroes end up in fights with the Guest Fighters, with the exception of the real Nero (although you do fight a bunch of Nero doppelgangers summoned by Alice).
  • This is Mother Harlot's true plan during the Devil May Cry crossover: she didn't care whose souls she got to eat: the heroes', or the demons'. She powered herself on either just as well.
• Lighter and Softer: The initial entry point story is noticeably toned down in content compared to mainline MegaTen games, as it takes place in a contemporary, non-post-apocalyptic setting and follows a more typical Monster of the Week approach. The story afterwards is due to be significantly closer to mainline MegaTen in tone, however - especially after the Light of Divine Judgment event, in which the Archangels Gabriel, Uriel and Raphael sucker the Liberators into giving their tacit agreement to join God's army...
• Lightning Bruiser: Sonic the Hedgehog, of course. Not only does he sport a very high Agility stat for his rarity, he gets +50% Battle Speed as a base passive and can unlock an additional +10% Battle Speed with dupes, making him incredibly fast. He also has the ability to hit as hard as he goes fast, with his Supersonic Hedgehog passive giving him Endure and Rebellion at the start of every turn and having the strong Spin Dash ability to deal Physical Force damage with added Force Pierce while his Might effect is up.
• Limited Move Arsenal: Demons are limited to six skills and passives in total. While four of them are fixed, they can inherit skills into the other two slots; also, the most overpowered moves are often limited to a small amount of uses. It is possible to unlock a seventh skill slot with a lot of investment, but the cost associated with it is so onerous one has to be extremely careful when selecting which demon should receive the treatment, especially if it's a 5-Star.
• Love Makes You Crazy: During "My Fair Angel" event, a woman falls madly in love with a Dominion who accidentally saves her life by killing a demon he is tasked to kill. She then goes to great lengths to summon a Dominion to make into her guardian angel, which nearly kills her when a man manipulates her to become an unwilling sacrifice to summon his demon.
• Loyalty Mission: Each Dx2 has a special set of missions that unlocks under certain conditions. They give that Dx2 A Day in the Limelight, where the player character accompanies them on a personal task, and reveals a bit about their backstory. Completing the missions increases their level cap and unlocks more skills for them to learn.
• Luck-Based Mission:
  • The gacha, obviously, but even worse than that is gacha-exclusive demons if you're hunting for specific Archetypes of them. Fortunately, most of them are viable regardless of Archetypes, although some are obviously better than others (e.g. Elementalist White Rider gets Null Force that covers his only weakness, while Psychic White Rider gets the extremely situational Null Bind).
  • Finding that perfect Brand for your demons is a pure slog since each Brand has so many properties that can be mixed-and-matched^note A Brand consists of its Brand type which determines the Set Bonus it confers, its position that determines what primary bonus it can bestow, a primary bonus that always increases when you level them up, a secondary bonus that only levels up from Brand level 10 onwards, and three static bonuses which are often initially hidden until you level up the Brand, one of which will receive additional boost on Brand level 15.. Getting a War brand^note increases Phys Atk that increases Magic Atk stat or a Spell brand^note increases Mag Atk that increases Phys Atk is just the tip of the iceberg^note Pretty much all demons require a focused min-maxing to maximize their potential, and thus spreading their stat between Phys Atk and Magic Atk, for example, is not a good idea. Somewhat alleviated by the Unleashing mechanic, which allows you to unlock an additional random bonus, which can change over and over by sacrificing brands of the same type and rarity (one brand to increase the chance of success by 3%) or Potential Shards, special Battle Tower rewards (each to increase the chance by 10%) for a combined maximum of 10, until you find exactly what you need.
  • Demonites you obtain from Alter World quests or D Fusion are similar. While the primary effect of a demonite is guaranteed depending on what demonite it is (for example, Valor Demonites always increase Phys damage), its two secondary effects are completely random. Unlike brands, demonites has no unleash mechanic to fix their problem.
  • Conjunction in Tokyo Abyss is this game's take on fusion accident; you can either get a demon you would expect from the fusion, or a different demon of at least 3-star rarity, possibly even a demon you normally cannot obtain via fusion.
• Luck Stat: Luck is one of the five basic stats of a demon. It's surprisingly useful, as it governs accuracy along with Agility, as well as critical and ailment infliction rates. A demon with low Luck can expect to receive a lot of critical hits and get bogged down by ailments a lot.
• Magikarp Power:
  • Some demons you get can become fairly powerful with enough investment into them. The best example is the 2-star demon Shadow. It has one of the highest base magic stats, 195 at 6-stars, higher than 84% of all demons. As a Psychic Archetype (meaning you have to fuse it using a 3-star Psychic Archetype demon), it only gains an extra 5 agility, but it also has a great agility stat innately, and speed is king and most strats are built on going first and hitting hard. Finally, it can get skill points easily thanks to being a 2-star demon, unlike rarer and "stronger" demons.
  • In the sixth area of Hell's Park, demons of lower grades will deal higher amounts of damage.
  • Even some high-grade demons can become magikarps due to Spiritization: These demons start off unimpressive for their rarity, but once their panels are unlocked one by one, they become significantly more powerful.
• Man of Kryptonite: Some demons are tailor-made to wreck certain demons.
  • Maya is a charm-user who hard counters Daisoujou, whose attempt to punish charmers by slapping mass mute will result in Maya removing said mass mute on top of nuking Daisoujou's team.
  • Mahamayuri in particular is made to neutralize Angra Mainyu by removing all ailments Angra inflicts on the previous turn, and using a unique piercing Force magic attack, which Angra can thus neither resist nor dodge, that also heals his team to counter Angra's unblockable damage.
  • Flauros Hallel is especially lethal against Nebiros and Undead Alice. His Halo of Hallel grants him Null Curse on his first turn, denying Alice an easy way to kill him, and Baptisma, as a Light magic attack, cannot miss, ignoring Nebiros' high dodge rate on top being being Nebiros and Alice's natural weakness. To make it worse, any demons killed by Baptisma are Deader than Dead, ruining Nebiros' main schtick and making him extremely useful against team resurrectors such as Recarmdra users and Xi Wangmu.
  • Ladon counters endurance teams, negating and punishing Lydia use and countering healing abilities, especially those automatically triggered, with his passive Dragon of Hesperia.
  • Adramelech is a kryptonite to demons who can gain MP, but two targets stand out:
    • Ailment demons who can gain MP, such as Angra Mainyu, Mother Harlot and Undead Alice, have to deal with Adramelech's MP drain and unblockable damage, but most importantly, his party-wide barrier, stopping those ailment demons dead on their tracks.
    • Lakshmi A in particular is dead to rights against Adramelech, because her Diwali giving her team 1 MP after she uses Virtuous Prosperity to heal them will set off Adramelech's MP drain and unblockable damage, undoing all her hard work.
  • Amon is a hard counter against Elohim, with sky-high Magic Defense and the ability to put up a Bulwark each time he's hit by a Magical attack, up to four times, and retaliate with a Concentrate at the end of the enemy turn and respond with a devastating Magic Defense-boosted Abyss Flare.
• Manipulative Bastard: Lucifuge tricks Tokisada into amassing enormous amounts of power by presenting himself as a "voice from the heavens", and cheats him out of it all at the end of the God's Tragic Hero event.
• Mêlée à Trois: Essentially the situation in season 2: We have the Liberators, the Brotherhood of Harmony, the Elements, and the remnants of the Acolytes, each with their own agenda.
• Microtransactions: As expected of a mobile game, there are plenty of purchases you can make with real money to get an edge in battle. Sometimes, you'll use gems that can be acquired through in-game means as well, but others require a cash transaction.
• Mind Rape: A mysterious letter draws Megakin, Vagit, Kazufumi and the MC into Cthulhu's dream in the Sleeper of the Deep event, keeping them in a state of sleep with constant nightmares. While in the real world they stay asleep for about two days, the group is forced to descend into the dream until they realize they're actually in a vision of R'lyeh. While everyone makes it out after the final door opens, the MC was the closest and the one who got the most exposure to whatever was on the other side. They awaken to convulsions and incomprehensible groaning, and are taken to a hospital. In the end, they escape to the beach, and while they get picked up, their last line is Cthulhu's Signature Line, as they give the ocean a last longing look.
• Monster of the Week: The plot format, at least in Season 1. Every Chapter can largely be summed up as "A suspicious thing is happening, and it's the Acolytes' fault! Go stop the bad guys before they cause more damage!".
• Mundane Solution: Hayate's Dangerous Forbidden Technique will kill him within the hour. The MC can make the suggestion to run until he's dead, But Thou Must! fight him anyways.
• Mutually Exclusive Power-Ups: Some primary brand bonuses cannot be bestowed on a single demon at once because they occupy the same brand slot. For example, Phys accuracy, Phys evasion and critical rate primary bonuses are all available only to right arm slot, so choosing any of them denies you the rest. You can still make up for it with tertiary bonuses, but they are very unreliable on top of providing significantly lower bonus per brand.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Seiran is a Chinese woman with a passion for Feng Shui who talks about underground dragon lines that carry people's good and evil will and are connected to the collective unconsciousness. Where have we heard all that before...?
  • Once again, a Nadja sacrifices herself for a blonde hero in a fusion-like manner.
  • The fusion theme at the Church of False Gods is a remix of Chiaki's theme from Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne.
  • A Hollow in the 49th level of the Hollow World laments that they couldn't be human, comparing themselves to clay that could never become gold. In Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne, the Manikins are similar pseudo-humans made out of clay.
  • A lot of demons have skills relating to their mythology. The Skull Knight and Griffith's main attack moves, Sword of Actuation and Sword of the Absolute, refer to their battle in the manga - Sword of Actuation is a very rare Almighty (Phys) move that's nearly impossible to resist and forbids resurrection for anything it kills. Sword of the Absolute, on the other hand, casts the even rarer Almighty (Phys) shield necessary to reflect Sword of Actuation when it downs an enemy, relating how Griffith did exactly that with the Skull Knight's attack and caused the Great Roar of the Astral World.
  • Tezcatlipoca's unique skills are Ome Acatl and Yohuallipoca. Both are correct Nahuatl, the first meaning "two reeds" (one of Tezcatlipoca's titles) and the second "night smoke" (referring to his title as Lord of the Night and his name meaning "smoking mirror".
• Nerf:
  • Healing spells aren't as useful here compared to the rest of the franchise, restoring comparatively pitiful amount of HP per cast, with even Diarahan spells no longer giving full heal, and most healing spells also have a use limit.
  • Almighty attacks are also not as strong as they usually are, even if some of them are still useful. The main reason is that elemental attacks with pierce are abundant in this game, and they have better amount of supports via other skills^note For comparison, other attributes have all manners of Boost, Amp, Survivor, Prana, Enchancement, Accel etc skills to support them (most of which increase by 15% in addition to some other bonuses if any, while Amp gives 25% bonus) and can be obtained from various sources including fuseable demons, whereas Almighty only has Boost, Survivor and Debuff, which can only be obtained from Demiurge, Beelzebub (Human), Elizabeth and Cthulhu, all of them being limited-time gacha demons and, other than Cthulhu's Almighty Survivor, only in their Aragami Archetype or Aura Gate 2's Berserk mechanic, which can boost all attributes except Almighty.
• Never Shall The Selves Meet: Several demons that have two different incarnations are limited when selecting a party, unless they come as Support Demons. Examples include General Masakado and Hero Masakado, Fiend Alice and Undead Alice, Night Lilith and Witch Lilith, any of the three different Beelzebubs (Beelzebub (68), Beelzebub (Human) and Beelzebub (97)) and Hero Guts and Fiend Berserker Guts.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: In "Wind-Scarred Wastes" event, Shionyan agrees to help humans in an alternate timeline that has been destroyed by Vanitas depose the tyrannical Susanoo and free Amaterasu. Except that, one, Amaterasu has already been long-dead, and two, Susanoo established the "oppressive tyranny" to protect humans he deems worthy so that humans don't go extinct. With Susanoo dead and no Amaterasu to save them, the humans are promptly overrun by demons with Shionyan being warped out of the doomed timeline by Kokoro at the last second. Shionyan understandably kicks herself for the blunder.
• Night of the Living Mooks: Nebiros' passive, Call of the Dead, will automatically resurrect all of his dead teammates at the end of the enemy's turn with 10% HP if even one enemy is Cursed.
• No Saving Throw: As useful as Endure skills can be, a good number of skills are designed to slice past them, such as Alice's Die for Me!, Guts' Boost 2 Dragon Slayer, or Susano-o A's Violent Slash. To add insult to injury, no matter how many Endure skills you pile on a demon, those attacks will bypass them all and prevents them from triggering anymore during the battle, even from other attacks, if the demon is later revived.
• Non-Standard Character Design: Most of the demons have 2D art, but the Devil May Cry 5 characters use their 3D renders, and are more realistically designed, making them stick out like a sore thumb.
• Non-Standard Game Over: In the alternate Chapter 7, if you refuse to commit fully to your Face–Heel Turn by betraying the Liberators for the Acolytes, the story ends on the spot.
• One-Hit Kill: Unlike most Megami Tensei titles, Hama and Mudo skills here only inflict elemental damage. Instead, now we have a few rare demons such as General Masakado and both Alices who have skills that inflict Mortal, instantly killing a target if they do not null/repel/absorb the attack's element. In response, there are demons who either innately have or can temporarily bestow immunity to Mortal attacks.
• One Stat to Rule Them All: Ag, or Agility, is the most important stat in the game due to how much difference getting first initiative can mean in mid-game to endgame fights and Player Versus Player. Because the collective Ag stats of each demon in your party are added up into a general "Battle Speed" statistic that determines who gets to go first, having slow demons in your party can weigh heavily against you when attempting to get initiative.
• One-Steve Limit:
  • Although you may own duplicates of any demon in your inventory, you cannot put multiple copies of a given demon into a single team. There are also some demons listed under Never Shall The Selves Meet above with whom you can only field one version and not the other. Dimensional demons and support demons are exempt from this rule; it is possible to have two demons of the same name if one of them is normal and the other is Dimensional alternate, and you are allowed to pick any available demon as your support.
  • This also forms the basis for the Overlord (2012) event. Ainz, Albedo and Shalltear are dragged to the Aura Gate due to the machinations of the SMT demon Demiurge, whom Ainz mistakes for his own subordinate of the same name, and at the start, tries to have his subordinates catch a demon without killing it to properly interrogate it rather than just using their overwhelming power to slaughter them, believing it a test of skill. When he realizes what happened, he facepalms, lampshades the stupid error, and commands Albedo and Shalltear to start the bloodbath.
• Out-of-Character Moment: At the end of Chapter 5, Shionyan thanks the Liberators for saving her, stating that it's out of character for her to thank someone. Everyone else just lets the moment seep in... except Meat Balloon, who gets overexcited and starts shedding Tears of Joy.
• Parental Abandonment:
  • Part of the backstory of Shiang Sun. The emotional scars inflicted from said experience briefly causes him to fall under a Demonic Possession.
  • Rika's mother is never mentioned, while her late father was a Liberator who fell on duty. Like Shiang Sun above, her grief over her father's death, especially because said death was caused by a Liberator member selling them out, makes her susceptible to a demon's corruption.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: A Moh Shuvuu the MC fed during "Kindness Pays" event decides to help them by killing a pedophile who has been eluding the Liberators.
• Peninsula of Power Leveling:
  • Each chapter has a specific leveling quest which contains weaker demons you can fight to powerlevel yours. The quests even let you take a second party so you can level up a lot of demons at once! In general, the latter the leveling quest is found, the better the payout per stamina is.
  • Events that come with Event Area spot in the map come with a few special battles with weak-but-generous Piñata Enemy, allowing you to quickly power-level your team much faster than even Leveling Quests.
• Percent Damage Attack: Some demons such as the Horsemen of the Apocalypse (except White Rider) have skills that deal damage based on the enemy's HP, either their current HP or max HP, up to a cap.
• Photo Mode: Every demon and Guest Fighter has a "AR" button in the Compendium, which overlays the demon with the camera feed. There's another AR mode called "Demon Scanner" used for Relationship Values features, but the one in the Compendium is specifically for taking pictures of demons.
• Piñata Enemy: Mitamas in the Aura Gate. Their drops can be used in Infusion to increase a demon's stat points; using the Mitamas themselves gives more points. Rare demons will also drop larger amounts of Magnetite when compared to normal battles there.
• Plaguemaster: Nergal's Plague of Babylon removes all enemy Barriers and inflicts Weak on them, all but guaranteeing any ailment that comes next will stick. Angra Mainyu's 16 Scourges slams the enemy with every single ailment in the game plus an unstoppable 25% HP hit. Samael's Panel 3 allows it to remove both magical shields and Barriers, clearing the way for its God's Malice, and its Panel 4 hits every enemy at the end of his turn with a slightly less potent version. Motoko Kusanagi's Ghost Hack removes enemy Barriers and inflicts Mute and Bind. Similarly, David's Bemusing Rhapsody removes Barriers and inflicts Charm and Curse. Fafnir's retooled Golden Greed removes Barriers and inflicts Poison. Others such as Kabuso and Lilith have skills that instead chain when an enemy is inflicted a certain ailment (Poison or Charm, respectively) and follow up with another ailment casting (Charm and Bind, again, respecively).
• Play Every Day: As expected of a mobile game, there are plenty of incentives to play every day, like login bonuses and daily missions.
• Pocket Dimension: Demon battles on Earth typically take place inside a sealed space called a Decoherence Field that protects the outside world from harm and hides the demons from plain sight. Cracking open Decoherence Fields tends to leave residual energy, which the Liberators can use to track enemy Acolyte activity.
• Police Are Useless: Justified during Chapter 5. The police gave up the bomb search because there was no evidence to be found, but as Shionyan points out, any possible evidence wouldn't be detectable by the police anyways since the Acolytes are involved.
• Posthumous Character: After defeating the Chairwoman in Chapter 3, her body disintegrates. The Liberators discover that the Chairwoman has already been dead for a while, and that the Chairwoman controlling the film club was an animated corpse.
• Power Creep: Zigzagged. The game defies this by first introducing the Spiritization mechanic to make older 5★ demons competitive: by sacrificing copies of the demon, a certain amount of Spirits can be obtained (Common demons can be sacrificed for 60 Spirits; any other color will render 100). These can be used to activate a series of panels, both to increase base stats and introduce a series of extra effects to increase the demon's viability. In addition, sometimes the game buffs older demons who have been lagging behind. But also played straight as power creep is still quite evident with a few demons becoming meta-defining soon after their release (the Moirae Sisters, Angra Mainyu, Beelzebub (97), Maria to name a few), as well as new transferable skills which are definitely better than the previous one (Enduring Soul+ being a better Enduring Soul, for example).
• Power Equals Rarity:
  • Slowly but surely played straight with demons. Higher grade demons have unique skills that are often better versions of skills owned by lesser demons, and 5★ demons have better spiritization bonuses than 4★ demons. Still, some lower grade demons may have more useful stats, skills, resistances or stat infusion limit and thus may still see play.
  • Played straight with Brands and Demonites. Rarer Brands and Demonites, up to 6★, always confer better primary (and secondary, for Brands) bonuses than lower-rarity brands, and while tertiary (secondary for Demonites) bonuses may make up for it, it's unreliable.
• Precision F-Strike: During the Bayonetta crossover, Rodin has the honor of dropping the game's first F-bomb. Despite this, the game is still rated 12+ in the App Store.
  Rodin: For fucks sake. Well, at least we found you.
• Purely Aesthetic Gender: You can choose to play as a male or female. Aside from some slight dialogue changes, there is no difference playing as one or the other; an update even added the ability to switch avatars. The alternate MC from the events of Chapter 7B will always be the opposite of the chosen gender.
• Pyrrhic Victory: An unfortunate amount of events end up with a fair amount of people dead, and this is when the Liberators actually manage to defeat the demons responsible for the deaths. Megakin is the one who usually takes it the hardest, even if he tries to use this as motivation to get stronger.
• A Quest Giver Is You: Demon Dispatch lets you send out up to six demons to complete a task. All dispatched demons passively gain experience when dispatched, and you can speed up the dispatch by sending demons of the requested race.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: The Tokyo branch of the Liberators is composed of an average everyday person, an internet celebrity, a gun nut, a Cosplay Otaku Girl, a Playful Hacker, a Taiwanese martial artist, a sharp-tonged Idol Singer, and an ex-mercenary Otaku. Together, they defend the world from the Acolytes.
• Randomly Generated Levels: Aura Gate 1 floors are randomly generated every hour. Subverted with Aura Gate SP, which instead picks one layout out of several possible map combinations every time you go in, and the combinations are the same from one Aura Gate SP event to another.
• Rare Random Drop: The game often features events and time-limited summon campaigns, offering the chance to acquire otherwise non-fusable demons.
• "Ray of Hope" Ending: The Shinagawa Alter-World level. The prior two levels, Akihabara and Yotsuya, end in outright Downer Endings (an awful lot of people die defying Grendel in Yotsuya, while the MC is badly battered by the illusory Liberators in Akihabara); in contrast, Shinagawa succeeds in repelling the Illuyanka infestation, the MC gives the lead scientist the final piece he needs to make the city's defenses viable long-term, and they finish the story between said scientist and his best friend/rival.
• Red Is Heroic: Taro, the leader of the Liberators, wears a red blazer, while another member of Liberators Jeng Yun Tsai wears a zip-up maroon vest.
• Required Party Member:
  • The plot prohibits certain Dx2s from participating in a Story Quest at certain points. For example, when the Liberators need to talk to people in Templar Dragon's school in Chapter 3, the protagonist and Chalk Eater are forced to stay outside (the latter because it's an all-girls school), so only Templar Dragon and Eileen can play the Story Quest.
  • During the Devil May Cry 5 collaboration event, Nero is required to fill the Support Demon slot for three battles while Dante and V are required for four each.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Arioch in the "A Blessing for Revenge" encourages people to exact vengeance to those who have wronged them with their own hands, turning several such people into hateful demons in the process.
• Rocket-Tag Gameplay: Quite prevalent in PvP: If the team who attacks first fails to take out their opponent, they can expect getting wiped out in retaliation. Can also happen in Aura Gate 2: The berserk mechanic steadily escalates the damage you do to the increasingly-higher-leveled enemies, but does nothing to your defense and healing, so your attacks will eventually be strong enough to mop the floor with the demons, but failing to wipe them on first turn may result in your team getting trashed soon after.
• Roguelike: Tokyo Abyss in Alter World is a seasonal dungeon where your MC dives deep without your usual collection of demons. Instead, every time you start a new abyss run, you only bring your swords and one shield and must recruit demons and level up along the way.
• Schmuck Bait:
  • Some players deliberately put an underleveled demon in their otherwise maxed-out PvP team. These demons generally serve to slow down their team to benefit from going second, or are expected to die first to activate certain skills, either theirs (such as Ixtab and Nadja) or others (Nebiros and Alraune).
  • You may occasionally see Abraxas and Slime in PvP, demons who are as pitiful as their grades suggest due to having a lot of weaknesses. If you see those demons accompanied by Orcus and/or Murmur, however, beware: Orcus turns weaknesses into defense by reducing AoE damage done to its team proportional to how many weaknesses its team has, in addition to negating bonus turns normally gained by hitting weaknesses (a penalty that also overwrites bonus turns from criticals). Murmur, meanwhile, converts his team's weaknesses into both power boost and damage reduction for himself, making him deadlier and tankier.
  • Gogmagog has the most weaknesses among 5★ demons, but actually hitting its weaknesses will trigger its Final Opposition, healing him a percentage of its HP on top of putting it into Might state. Notably, a Gogmagog who serves as Hollow World 37F boss abuses this by not only having inflated health, but also weakness to everything.
• Secret A.I. Moves: Most of the harder enemies have skills that your demons can never have.
• Secret Art: All 5★ demons, some 4★ demons and a rare few lower grade ones have one or two skills that are unique to them and cannot be transferred. More unusually, all members of the Wood race possess the Power of Life Skill. The sole exception was Ananta, until an update shifted its Auto-Rakuka passive to Endless One.
• Set Bonus:
  • How the Brands work: the different Sets require either two or three Brands of the same Set to activate a bonus for the demon, from increasing its various stats, providing temporary protection from ailments, enhancing healing capabilities, or even add extra MP to their natural regeneration.
  • There are some demons who reward you for fielding multiple demons of the same race in a team. Examples are the Heralds Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel, who each use an offensive ability with an added debuff when used in a team with two other Heralds, and Tyrant Lucifuge, whose Hell's Ministry passive and panel each allow for all Tyrants' Almighty skills to be used for 3 MP less, intended to work with Lucifer to allow him to spam his Morning Star or with Beelzebub (97) to spam Death Flyers.
  • This is the Moirae Sisters' entire schtick. Each has a unique ability that will trigger if they're in a team with two other Lady or Femme demons: Atropos' Passionate Rage fires off an AOE Electric attack at the start of the enemy's turn and follows with an AOE Fire attack if the first is successful, Clotho's Passionate Allure will remove all enemy Barriers and inflict Charm and Poison at the end of the enemy's turn, and Lachesis' Passionate Embrace will debuff enemies' Attack and Defense while buffing her own team's at the start of the enemy's turn.
  • Pales' Vile Glare will debuff enemies and reduce their Press Turns depending on how many Jaki/Vile/Drake allies he has, and its Cry of the Poor will inflict fractional damage at the end of its turn. Both skills require at least two allies to work, and a third to activate an extra effect.
  • Cthulhu and Nyarlathotep work best together, since the latter's Crawling Chaos increases Magic damage dealt and decreases ailment resistance to Gloomy enemies, driving up the damage inflicted by Cthulhu's Lost Sanity; besides, Cthulhu's continuous spamming of Gloom via Call of R'lyeh helps keep their joint Panel 2 effects, reducing enemy Attack and Defense for Cthulhu and increasing ally Attack and Defense for Nyarlathotep.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: The Intermission has an interesting variant: the divergent Alternate Universe of Chapter 7 ends with that timeline's version of the MC, who is the opposite gender, alone as the last human alive. However, after conferring with Jabo and witnessing the Intermission's events, the alternate MC asks to be sent back to the main timeline's place and time.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story:
  • The "Happy Hellmark" event sees Shiang Sun collecting Hellmarks that can be exchanged for various prizes. He eventually finds the one he's supposed to exchange the Hellmarks to, only to learn that they were only supposed to be given to demons, and the only way to exchange them is to become a demon. Shiang Sun leaves with only his humanity.
  • In "Star Festival", a stack of wishes the Liberators gathered suddenly goes flying everywhere from a gust of wind, and Gakuto enthusiastically gathers them up, in hopes that he'll get a peek at what Shiori wrote. When Gakuto gathers them all up, he pulls out the one he thinks belongs to Shiori, which reads "I'd like to get to know Meat Balloon better." It isn't until Gakuto faints that it's revealed that Jeng Yun wrote that wish. Shiori wouldn't do something as unscientific as write a wish.
  • "Operation: Money Maker" has Ririn hatch a scheme to take pictures of demons and sell them online to make big money. As it turns out, no one buys them because they think they're edited ghost photos.
  • In "Demon Cosplayer: Ririn", the Liberators spend a while making some costumes for Ririn to cosplay in. When she sees the results, she's greeted with heavy and unwieldy costumes like Kinmamon or Arahabaki, and opts for the horribly stinky costume of a Pellaidh. As she leaves, Megakin stares at her, revealing those costumes were jokes and he intended to give her a Lilim costume.
• Shoot the Mage First: Some PvP teams are built around one or two extremely dangerous nukers, so taking out these hazards first can help you steamroll the rest of the enemies.
• Shoot the Medic First: One actual in-game hint specifically suggests you to take out healers first to increase your chances of winning. And healers in this case include resurrectors.
• Skill Slot System: Each demon has seven slots for skills and passives. Three of them are fixed skills that the demon always knows. One of them is an Awakening skill, which changes depending on the demon's Archetype. This leaves two slots, upgradeable to three via transcendence, that can be filled with any skill, each slot capable of housing two skills that can be switched any time the player wants once the demon is transcended enough. 3-Star demons and above, when pulled from the gacha, will receive an additional move in one of the free slots, and in very rare cases the other free slot also gets another skill.
• Smug Snake: All of the bosses, who are pretty fond of taunting the Liberators while shoving lackeys down their throats until the boss is caught. Even after being backed into the corner, the boss will go on a rant telling the Liberators about how they could never hope to understand the purpose of their actions. Of course, this is usually followed by a This Cannot Be! after they're (predictably) defeated.
• Socialization Bonus: There are some features where you can help or be helped by other players, and the game further encourages you by giving out Fame currency whenever you help other players.
  • You can bring one of your friends' shared demons into battle, giving you a fifth party member to fight against the enemy.
  • You can choose to assist other random players with attacks, and they can similarly assist you with theirs.
• Snuff Film: One of the Acolytes' plans is to produce these, to recruit more "like-minded" members. Even worse, they're holding a high school film club hostage to produce them.
• Spell Levels: As usual, with a few extra added to fill out extra space between tiers, such as the "-ra" tier between Dia and Diarama. The amount of tier prefix/suffix combining starts to get ridiculous the farther up the ladder you go even by MegaTen standards; ever wanted to use such fantastic Skills like Mahashibabooon, Mahamarin Karinon, and Mahapoismaon?
• Squee: During Chapter 1, Templar Dragon halts the investigation abruptly to fangirl over an airsoft shop, breaking her serious image in the process.
• Status Buff:
  • The series standard Tarukaja, Rakukaja, and Sukukaja, increasing the party's offense, defense, and accuracy/evasion respectively. Here they act as buffs to the whole party instead to individual demons. They also cancel each other with the respective -nda debuffs.
  • Tetrakarn and Makarakarn erect a one-time shield that reflects physical and magical attacks, respectively. They don't stack and a later -karn spell will override the earlier one. The 5-star demon Huang Long has the unique skill Five Elements, which reflects magic attacks, including Almighty attacks (Almighty bypasses regular Makarakarn).
  • Charge and Concentrate greatly increase the damage of the next physical and magical attack, respectively. They don't stack with each other. There is also the Might buff, which ensures the next physical attack is a critical hit, which stacks with Charge. Girimekhala even has a skill that casts both Charge and Might together, and Ose Hallel's Heavenly Sword autocasts both Charge and Might when it connects.
  • Lydia heals the target by a small amount everytime they take a turn.
  • Barrier prevents the target from getting inflicted by status ailments.
  • Nyarlathotep's Skill Crawling Chaos, Trumpeter's Panel 4 and Cthulhu's Call of R'lyeh inflict the status change Gloom on all enemies at the start of the first turn for the first two and at the start of each enemy turn, for the third (it's not coded as an ailment, so it cannot be resisted or dispelled). By itself, it decreases hit rate, evasion rate, crit rate, and chance to inflict ailments by 20%. Crawling Chaos will additionally increase all Magic attack received and decrease all Magic attack inflicted by 25%, and Call of R'lyeh will increase the damage dealt by Cthulhu to Gloomy enemies by 30%.
  • Lanling Wang's Flying High and Amaterasu's bonus Tenson Korin Panel 4 effect inflict the Zenith effect on all of his teammates, increasing their Phys hit rate, evasion rate, crit rate, and chance to inflict status ailments by 20% while decreasing the damage dealt by critical hits and ailment chance by 20%, and the first's Mask of Veiled Beauty increases Phys attack by 25% and 30% to crit rate as long as he's alive for any teammates with Zenith. Fariedone's Hero of Prophecy will inflict Zenith on all teammates at the start of his own turn, and all demons on his side will receive an additional 25% boost to their Phys attack and 30% to their hit rate. If any effect inflicting Gloom triggers against any demons with Zenith or viceversa, both ailments will cancel themselves out instead.
  • Decay for Mephisto and Barbatos and Fortify for Idunn. For Decay, every level will decrease a demon's maximum HP by 20%; if a demon manages to get hit with all 5 maximum levels of Decay, they will be left a maximum of 1 HP, and the only way to reverse it is to either die or add Fortify levels, which instead increase 20% HP for each of the possible 5 levels.
• Status-Buff Dispel:
  • The series standard Dekaja and Dekunda. The former dispels all -kaja buffs on the enemies and the latter dispels all -nda buffs on the allies.
  • Discord removes all Charge, Concentrate, and Might buffs from the enemies.
  • Tetra Break, Makara Break, Lydia Break, and Barrier Break. Exactly What It Says on the Tin, they dispel Tetrakarn, Makarakarn, Lydia, and Barrier.
  • Silent Prayer is the ultimate dispel skill, as it removes any and all kinds of Status Buffs and Status Effects from allies and enemies alike. Only things it doesn't dispel are -kaja buffs and -nda debuffs.
• Status Effects: The game has the standard status effects you expect from an RPG:
  • Series standard Tarunda, Rakunda, and Sukunda, decreasing the party's offense, defense, and accuracy/evasion. They act as debuffs to the whole party rather than to individual demons. They and the respective -kaja buffs cancel each other out.
  • Poison deals damage to the inflicted every time they gets their turn.
  • Bind prevents the target from dodging, acting, or even utilizing their passive skills, instantly skipping their turn.
  • Charm causes the target to do actions beneficial to the enemy, like attacking their allies or healing the enemies. Passive skills, however, will still benefit the owner of the charmed demon, for example, if a charmed Futsunushi attacks his teammate with a phys skill, his counterattack will still hit the enemy team.
  • Mute prevents the target from using any active skills, limiting them to only basic attacks or pass. Despite being less potent than Bind and Charm, Mute usually lasts longer. Like charm, mute has no effect to passive skills.
  • Curse reduces the potency of healing magic to only 1/5 the usual amount. The effect is weaker than other ailments, but it lasts longer and has higher chances to stick.
  • Weak does nothing on its own, but other status spells cast on a Weakened target have a 100% infliction rate. Like Curse, spells inflicting Weak has higher accuracy.
  • There are several demons with a passive skill that nulls all ailments (Kinmamon, Daisojou, Mahamayuri and Maria), and additional skills that confer immunity to one ailment, or two at most ^note Null Bind/Weak, Null Mute/Curse and Null Charm/Poison are the only skills that can stop two ailments; the first is found only on Arioch and Fariedone, the second on Nyarlathotep, and the third on Cthulhu.. Some demons also gain ailment immunity from panels, such as Griffith and Beelzebub (97) who get Null Charm, Null Mute and Null Bind from their Panel 2, or the Moirae sisters whose panels confer various ailment immunities to Lady/Femme demons, including themselves.
• Status Effect-Powered Ability:
  • Pale Rider's Pestilence will inflict 50% HP fractional damage to all Poisoned enemies at the end of his turn.
  • The "Deadly" line of passives will increase damage inflicted against enemies suffering from their respective ailment by 30%.
  • Undead Alice's Do Me a Favor? will change to Be My Friend if there's a Cursed enemy, and instantly kill them.
  • Nebiros' Call of the Dead will revive all fallen enemies on his side with 10% HP if there's a single Cursed enemy.
• Stealing the Credit: A variant. Longinus gets mightily pissed when every single demon he runs across only acknowledges the power of the Holy Lance he carries, never thinking of actually recognizing his own battle prowess. Until Jeng Yun actually notices he fights blind and praises his own might rather than the Lance's, he nearly goes berserk with rage at the idea that his own accomplishments are regarded as worthless next to that single aspect of his identity.
• Stellar Name: While Aura Gate's Gatekeepers are modeled after existing demons in the game, they are instead usually given distinct names taken from Real Life stars.
• Straight for the Commander: Zigzagged. In modes such as story battles, Aura Gates and Battle Tower, killing the boss/leader right away immediately wins you the battle even if you ignore their flunkies; for instance, the human enemies in the Battle Tower gain 20%, 50% or up to 80% damage cut depending on how many allies they have, plus innate Null Mortal. However, these bosses are often given inflated durability and/or some Contractual Boss Immunity, meaning that trying to kill them first can be difficult. In some other modes such as Hell's Park, you still have to kill everything to clear a battle.
• Superboss:
  • The Kiwami battles are all insanely powerful Lv. 73 demons with huge HP reserves, modified variants of their regular moves, and a team of helpers tailored to maximize the boss' advantages and reduce the player's.
  • Aura Gate 2 contains several demons who are much, much more powerful than the enemies and boss you find in the same floor. Examples are the demons you have to beat before you can create them via Multi-Fusion (the first of which, Parvati, is found on 7th floor), as well as the level 90+ Celestials you can first find on 8th floor of each of the five ten-story blocks.
  • Events that use event area have one or two challenge battles that are significantly more difficult than the other battles in the same event.
• Support Party Member: Aside from the demon you can assign for others to use as Support, Seraph serves this role in a party with its Garden of Eden passive, Merciless Blow and his panels, which are intended to work in Democalypse battles to boost damage to weak spots.
• Tag Team: While traversing Aura Gates, you can have a second Dx2 accompany you and switch between them when needed.
• Taking You with Me: Ixtab's unique passive, Yaxche, inflicts Mortal to an enemy who kills her. Surtr A, meanwhile, explodes into Twilight Inferno when he dies the first time, potentially taking out all enemies.
• Tempting Fate: You just HAD to ask for something exciting to happen!
• There Can Be Only One: The main character's Interlude is a Shout-Out to the Holy Grail War, pitting you against the other Liberators for "Gehenna's Holy Grail". It's basically an impromptu melee between friends meant to amuse the local shrine maiden.
• Timed Mission:
  • Player Versus Player fights have an element added to them called a Defense Field. If you fail to defeat the enemy party within 3 turns, the Defense Field will activate and deal heavy, increasing damage to your party at the end of each turn until either party is wiped out. Unfortunately, this had the inadvertent side effect of making stall teams top tier in Dx2 Duels defensively, since why fight the enemy party when you can just get the game to kill them for you? However, this has decreased after the Defense Field damage and the rate at which it increases were considerably toned down.
  • In Battle Tower, you, as an attacking party, must win within 10 turns, otherwise you lose via time-out.
• Time Master: Mot regains his infamous Harmonious Death passive, granting his team an extra Press Turn every second turn. Completing his panels will allow him to gain an extra Press Turn every third turn.
• To Be Continued:
  • Chapter 6 ends with the Liberators raring to assault the Acolyte HQ. As it was the last chapter available at the game's worldwide launch, it ends with "To be continued...".
  • When Chapter 7 was released, the normal version also ended with a "To be continued...". The alternate version ends with a bad ending.
  • All chapters in Season 2 end with "To be continued", at least until the next chapter after the previous one is released.
  • A similar result happens at the end of the Aura Gate dungeon, as the hole in reality at the bottom of the Gate is closed following Metatron's defeat, again with the defeat of White Rider in the second Aura Gate's tenth level, Beelzebub's in the twentieth, Mara's in the thirtieth, and Orcus' in the fortieth.
  • The Talons in the Night event. Turns out the demon Camazotz was run out of its usual lair by something, which was why it started making a new home in Tokyo and hunting humans, succeeding in killing several. However, after the Liberators apparently finish clearing the demon's hideout, a final victim desperately attempts to run out... only to be caught by something, brutally killed, and dragged back into the dark. It would later turn out the attacker who displaced Camazotz and killed the last victim was Undead Alice.
  • At the end of the Ghost in the Shell event, Section 9 leaves Kurtz with the Liberators to be studied.
  • Keeping Evils at Bay event ends with Mara successfully poisoning Take-Minakata, turning him into a strange demon (Koga Saburo) who desperately warns the Liberators and Mahamayuri not to follow him before vanishing.
• Took a Level in Badass: At the game's launch, Tyrant Beelzebub was a fairly underwhelming demon at level 69, and his Secret Art Gluttony quickly became obsolete due to his lackluster Magic stat, inability to Pierce until you unlock his third panel, and no defensive ability even though he has no innate weaknesses. Cue the The Fly King Reborn event, in which he suckers another fragment of his power, the benevolent storm god Baal, into allowing him to fuse with his human form (Beelzebub (Human)), creating a much higher-leveled and far stronger Tyrant Beelzebub.
• Unblockable Attack: Fractional damage is the only damage type in the game that just cannot be stopped or weakened due to not having an attribute. In contrast, Almighty, normally unblockable in the rest of the franchise, can be blocked with some demons like Huang Long, while Pierce needs to worry about Alilat, Rama, Atavaka, Demiurge, and spiritization bonuses that reduce damage. The only exception to this is the MC in Battle Tower, whose defense reduction also applies to fractional damage.
• Uncanny Valley: In-Universe, the Hollows featured in Aura Gate 2. They're incomplete humans, and through their experiences begin to grow closer to a real person. However, they have little to no society, due to a variety of factors on each floor:
  • The Hollows in 1-10F, the Luminous Realm, are far too innocent and trusting, taking no action even as they are killed one by one.
  • The 11-20F Hollows, the Harmonious Realm, begin developing religion with the associated intolerance and persecution.
  • The 21-30F Hollows, the Free Realm, are obsessed with freedom, even at the cost of others and their own well-being.
  • The 31-40F Hollows, the Subjugated Realm, develop an imaginary corporate culture and a parody of the trappings of capitalism.
  • The 41-50F Hollows, the End Realm, never succeed in making anything of themselves given the Aura Gate 2 begins preparing to complete its main purpose.
• Useless Useful Spell:
  • Poison can deal lethal Damage Over Time, but the damage is too tiny in a game rife with Rocket-Tag Gameplay. Poison players usually use Pale Rider who can mass poison and also deal massive unblockable damage to poisoned enemies, or Shionyan and/or Fafnir whose skills crank up poison tick damage.
  • Curse rarely sees use since you usually run into enemies whose healing skills are lacking or absent, or have Contractual Boss Immunity, not to mention that curse does nothing to revival. Undead Alice and Nebiros can use curse to a lethal effect, however.
  • Barrier, and by extension Ward Brand, theoretically are useful for temporarily blocking ailments, but some commonly-used ailment demons such as Nergal and Motoko Kusanangi can remove barriers immediately before unleashing their ailment attacks, making barriers useless.
  • Skills and items that grant temporary repel (such as Tetraka-shift or Makarakarn mirror) are practically worthless due to the abundance of piercing attacks, especially since demons like Alilat require their allies to have innate repels, not temporary ones.
  • In a similar vein, Null attribute such as Null Phys rarely has use because, even though they can be transferred unlike Drain and Repel, they are just going to be ignored by Pierce all the same.
  • Healing items other than Bead^note Full HP heal to one demon, Balm of Rising^note Fully revives a dead demon and Amrita Shower^note Removes all ailments from all friendly demons will likely pile up in your inventory forever. Healing items cannot be used outside battles even in Aura Gates, but using items uses up press turns, so you will only want to use the best possible items for the occasion if at all. Plus, the AI will never use items during auto battles no matter what, thus you are forced to tailor-made your farming teams such that using items is unnecessary. Lastly, most of the hardest battles in the game^note e.g.: all PvP combat, Kiwami battles, the last ten floors of Hell's Park, Hollow World celestials disallow item use, further reducing their utility.
  • In an aversion, Black Rider's passive Soul Divide saw extremely limited use given how heavily healing was restricted in the game. However, with the advent of Maria and how she heals her team with Miracle of Fatima every time one of her teammates foes down, Black Rider became a staple against Maria teams.
• Villains Want Mercy: In the DMC event, the ruler of the realm, Mother Harlot, frantically asks to be spared once it's clear she's no match for the Devil Hunters. Of course, considering that she has just threatened to kill the heroes seconds earlier, her pleas fall on deaf ears.
• Viral Transformation: Rumor Reiko Kashima's passive You're Next will transform any demon who she kills by a single-target skill into a Lv. 1 Reiko Kashima if revived
• We Cannot Go On Without You: Averted in normal gameplay, but played straight in Alter World, where your protagonist is part of your combat team, and it's instant game over if they die.
• Wham Episode: Chapter 8, the first of the game's second arc. A new player, the Brotherhood of Harmony, massacres the Acolytes, destroys all Liberator cells save for Akihabara's and frames the Liberators as terrorists. Chapter 9 keeps the tempo, introducing the Elements, the Chaos counterparts to the Brotherhood, and begins introducing uncomfortable questions about the continuing involvement of the Liberators.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • In Chapter 1, an Akiba girl gets kidnapped by the Acolytes to be used as a sacrifice. While you do arrive to save her, her final fate is left unknown.
  • In Chapter 4, a girl is severely injured by a man before the Liberators step in to stop him. The area they're in begins collapsing after that, and what happens to the girl afterwards is unknown.
  • The Books of Evil event ends with the books seized and destroyed, but Arisa still has one and the Liberators haven't even found the source of the books.
• What Is Evil?: Azazel from "Those Who Are Worthy" event argues that power and knowledge that he distributes to the masses are not inherently evil, so what's wrong with doing it? Black Maria counters that although power and knowledge are by themselves not bad, the fact that Azazel distributes them in such a way to ensure mayhem and deaths makes him evil, to which he can only reply with one last challenge to fight.
• White Sheep: Black Maria, the Only Sane Woman in "Those Who Are Worthy" event. Unlike her heavenly brethren who wantonly play Judge, Jury, and Executioner on all demon-summoning humans, she wants to minimize human casualty while searching for the true culprit behind the demon-summoning outbreak, and thus the angels hate her.
• Why Won't You Die?:
  • It's possible to stack multiple death prevention skills on a single demon, then pair it with demons with revival skills, resulting in demons who just keep surviving fatal hits and then refuse to stay dead. In response, there are demons who have unique skills that disable death prevention and/or ressurection.
  • Nidhogg's unique passive, Nastrond, heals him by 80% and grants him one-turn Null Mortal every time his teammate dies. This means leaving him for last results in him repeatedly healing himself back to pristine health.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: During the Take Back Tokyo event, Shionyan tries to liberate the people of an alternate Tokyo from the tyranny of the Kunitsukami, who sealed away Amaterasu. Except the Kunitsukami have very good reasons. The wall of wind surrounding the city, for example, isn't to keep people in, it's to keep the demons out. Amaterasu was Dead All Along, and not by her brother's hand. Killing the Kunitsukami robbed Tokyo's citizens of all protection.
• Zerg Rush: The Acolytes' plan to defeat the Liberators in Chapter 6 involves throwing seemingly endless waves of Dx2s at them until they're too worn down to continue.
• Zombie Apocalypse: The Anniversary of the Dead event. An Acolyte, nostalgic about the materialistic era and economic bubble of The '80s, summons a horde of Bodyconians and Man Eaters in an attempt to bring it back.