Video Game / Tower of Fantasy

Tower of Fantasy is a free-to-play open-world action RPG developed by Hotta Studio, part of Perfect World Games, released in China in October 2021 and worldwide (published by Level Infinite, part of Tencent Games) in August 2022.

In 2316 humanity discovered the habitable extraterrestrial planet Aida and, faced with dwindling resources and a collapsing environment on Earth, sent a colony spacecraft on a more than a 200-year interstellar journey to establish a human colony on the planet. In 2653 the comet Mara is discovered and within it, a vast reserve of potent energy called Omnium. To capture the comet and harness this energy the Tower of Fantasy is built, but just 5 years after its completion an explosion of Omnium energy irradiates Aida and devastates human civilization on the planet. Some of humanity survives thanks to 'suppressors' developed to counteract the radiation, and the scientific organization Hykros is formed to enable humanity to adapt and further utilize Omnium. Opposed to Hykros is a shadowy organization that goes by the name of the Heirs of Aida, which views Omnium as a source of misery and evil and fights against Hykros to end Omnium research. Meanwhile, life on the planet gradually mutates into increasingly aggressive and powerful lifeforms that pose a dangerous threat to the survivors.

About 50 years after the cataclysm the player and an unnamed companion are exploring a ruined facility on an unspecified mission when they are attacked by houndlike monsters. The player and the companion separate and the player survives the monsters, only for their suppressor to run out of energy and the player to fall unconscious. The player then wakes up in the Astra Shelter outpost in the presence of its leader Zeke and his sister Shirli, with no recollection of their past.

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The game contains examples of:

A-M

• Ability Required to Proceed:
  • Some early-game ruins grant you Relics that are necessary to complete them when you start your first foray.
  • Two areas of Innars cannot be safely explored unless you take a couple of sidequests to upgrade your environmental suit. The Dragon Breath Volcano may be completely frozen over at first, but once you advance the story to the point where it erupts, the active lava flows make the zone too hot to explore. Meanwhile, the Dark Source cave has high water pressures that threatens players with a Damage Over Time effect.
  • The frigid temperatures of Marshville's Forbidden Country are too cold to explore normally, and the area is only accessible once a plot event has initiated the Skyburn Pillars to make it habitable. While you do gain a thermal element to help survive the cold, it has a limited duration which can be extended by upgrading certain Alabaster Towers.
• The Ace:
  • Tian Lang is actually the strongest executor in District 7 and is described as Vera's "hidden ace in the hole" just in case Mirroria City faces a crisis. He's also good in business management as he's able to continue funding Mirroria's Nursery despite its research funds cut off.
  • Lyra's character page shows that she has perfect stats on her joke stat chart.
• All Deserts Have Cacti: The Vera desert is peppered with various types of cacti, and a few can be interacted with to gain a black nucleus.
• All There in the Manual: The character and game trailers from Lyra onwards usually detail a Simulacrum's backstory alluded to within the game.
• Amazing Technicolor Population: Umi stands out from all the other characters as she has gray skin whereas everyone else is usually fair-skinned.
• Amnesiac Hero:
  • The Wanderer is found by the Heirs of Aida at the end of the tutorial and has their memories wiped. Though they quickly learn their origins as an Executor after visiting Hykros after a few chapters.
  • After the battle in Aesperia, Zeke lost his memory as a side effect of being flung into time-space. He took up the identity of Ming Jing after losing his memories and finding himself in Domain 9.
  • Alyss lost her memory while defending Mirroria against the Grayspace Entities when they breached the city. She never recovers her memories when the Abyssants holding a stalemate inside her mind was defeated.
• Amusement Park: Cetus Island is an Amusement Park on a Floating Continent and the home of Dr. Claire. It features a rollercoaster, a Ferris wheel, a carousel, and even a fireworks show during certain times of the day. A claw machine minigame is also available and up to 3 gifts can be acquired here every day.
• Animal Motif:
  • Shiro's appearance and attitude strongly resemble a cat, even pretends that she is a cat when interacting with people.
  • Fenrir has a canine motif, with her name referencing the monstrous wolf of Norse mythology. Her hair has flaps that look like dog ears, her weapon animations have her pouncing and clawing at enemies, has two dogs she keeps as pets, is deathly allergic to chocolate, and likes to make cute dog noises.
  • Umi has a rabbit motif with her stage magician gimmick, complete with rabbit ears and tail.
  • Alyss' design is inspired by dragonflies with her alternate sprint transforming her into a translucent dragonfly. Her awakening design changes this into a blue butterfly motif which symbolizes change and rebirth, which is appropriate to her story.
  • Gnonno's clothes and weapon design incorporates octopus tentacles and she also has her pet octopus, Pip, joining in whenever she attacks.
  • Nan Ying is associated with black butterflies, befitting its symbolism with death and terror that she creates after she defects to the Darkness.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • New players can partake in a time-limited event that grants a free SSR weapon of their choice; the only limitation is that they cannot obtain Limited Banner weapons this way. The Gold Nucleus Special Order also has a one-time-only guaranteed SSR weapon on the 30th pull, so that new players can at least get started with a full set of three SSR weapons barring duplicates.
  • Gold and Red Nucleus and Matrix banners have a "pity" mechanic that guarantees an SSR every 80 pulls (40 for matrices). If a player is lucky enough to get an SSR before this point, progress towards pity doesn't reset. With Limited banners, pity progress transfers from one Limited banner to the next (but Flame Gold converts to regular Black Gold) so that you're not encouraged to exhaust pity progress if you want to stop pulling.
  • If a player gets stuck or glitches out for some reason, there's an unstuck button in the settings menu that will let a player teleport to the nearest spawn point.
  • At least 75% of a daily activity reward can still be claimed in the Reward Recovery tab the next day, ensuring minimal losses just in case a player is too busy or missed doing it.
  • The 2.0 update adds the ability to use multiple Void Rift/Frontier Clash attempts in one sitting, reaping proportionate rewards for a fraction of the time. The same can be done with blue keys to reduce the need to hunt password chests. The 2.2 update extends this convenience to purple password keys and Interdimensional Trials, and this was also extended to Domain 9 keys in 3.1.
  • Should the player's Combat Score be high enough, the game permits them to skip multiple floors of Bygone Phantasm (up to 11 at one go), reducing the amount of time and effort needed to reach higher floors and to reap the rewards at various thresholds.
  • The 2.2 update adds height indicators to let you know if you're above or below an object of interest, which is a big game-changer in exploring Vera and Domain 9.
  • The 2.5 update adds the Dimension Level, which dictates the strength of overworld enemies, to address the disproportionate Level Scaling mechanic. Now, the player can manually adjust the strength of overworld enemies, and the game gives CS recommendations so that they don't bite off more than they can chew. It's cathartic to curb-stomp level 10 enemies with your level 90 character, but increasing the overworld difficulty is incentivized with better chest drops and one-time bonuses for cranking up to certain thresholds.
• Anti Poop-Socking:
  • The Global version of the game starts the players at an abysmal level cap of 18 for the first day of launch, but then slowly raises it with each passing day. While the level cap lifts at a quick rate, going to 24 on day 2 and then rising 3 levels each subsequent day, the increments slow down after the first week — going at 2 levels every couple of days and then slowing down to 1 level every 3 days, until things taper off at its highest cap of 80 (initially; subsequent updates have added gradual increases to the level cap to the new maximum of 100). Since equipment upgrades and various gameplay features are also level-gated, this practice discourages players from rushing through content as they risk losing excess experience from story quests (which yield enormous bursts of experience) once they're at the level cap.
  • If a player rushes the story too quickly, they'll also find that the game outright time-gates its Aesperia story chapters, which will only become available when your account is certain hours old. This last bit also means that players who joined later are still forced to wait through the time-gate instead of being allowed to rush through the story to catch up with the playerbase. These time gates are not present for the Vera chapters and later.
  • There are a lot of points of interest to find across the overworld maps, each of them yielding Black or Gold Nuclei used for the gacha system, and contributing to exploration progress achievements that give extra rewards. There are very few physical barriers that prevent you from straying off the beaten path so you can theoretically navigate to a quick-travel point on the other side of the map if you know where to go. That said, several chests and interest points meant to be discovered far later in the plot will be inaccessible for a set period of time (some as long as a few weeks!) and this time-gate is player-dependent. It forces players to pace themselves with exploration as opposed to scrounging everything from the map in one go. Fortunately, these time-gates are only present within the Aesperia region.
  • Events with minigames impose a cap on the number of points a player can earn, though this cap grows each day. This is to keep players from grinding out the event on day one while averting Play Every Day pressure; if a player has missed a few days, they can compensate later without worry of missing out.
  • At the start of each season, each level of Origin of War past the first few presents a scales quickly in difficulty, to the point where enemies take a lot of firepower to defeat and can one-shot the party. However, with each passing day, the difficulty of those levels slowly decrease until they're on par with the first few levels. This keeps players from rushing through the game mode at each season, encouraging them to pace themselves and wait. This also ensures that there will regularly be players to match into the game mode to help out those without a party.
• Anti-Rage Quitting: Frontier Clash features a penalty where quitting before the mode ends would still use up their attempts for the week and lose whatever equipment they gained during the round. Additionally, the first player to exit while it's ongoing will be barred from queueing for 10 minutes.
• Apocalypse How: Aida experienced a Class 3A after one reactor in one of the six Towers of Fantasy exploded after a failed time travel experiment, polluting the planet with loads of Omnuim Radiation before its continents got separated and spread over different dimensions and times. Now each continent has its own very special kind of dystopia/apocalypse to contend with after the explosion that made it impossible for humanity to thrive in each region.
• Armor Meter: Every boss and mini-boss will generate damage-reducing shields that need to be shattered. While mini-bosses won't do much if not shattered, bosses will gradually charge up a powerful attack while their shields are up, forcing players to bring out shatter-specialized weaponry to avoid a Total Party Kill.
• Art Attacker: Liu Huo wields a giant paintbrush as her weapon that leaves trails of fire to attack enemies. She even paints calligraphy in the air as a way to attack her enemies.
• Artificial Human: Ruby is discovered to be part-human and part Grayspace Entity and the only successful result of Project Listener, an experiment trying to fuse Grayspace Entities with human genetics.
• Artificial Gill: Access to the city of Innars is only available once Icarus provides the player character with one of these, and this allows one to freely explore the entirety of the Grand Sea.
• Artificial Intelligence: All the Simulacrum are AI copies of actual humans (some of which may be dead) who volunteered for the project as revealed in their character files. All of them are somewhat aware of what they are and their original owners and talk about it in their Simulacrum messages.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • A few SSR relics like the Type V armor and Colossus arms look cool to use and are helpful in the early game, but they all have long cooldowns compared to a few SR relics. Over time, these will be outshined once players get decent armor and build up their weapons.
  • The Thunder Roar is a car that you can purchase from a limited-time event and you can even sample it through Mirroria Racing or from an associated overworld race event. It can reach speeds that outclass most other mounts, but as you'd find in the dune-racing event, its handling is atrocious, it's got a large hitbox that gets stuck on a lot of scenery and overworld mobs, and it can spin out of control as you course the uneven dunes of the Vera Desert. Its speed will get you good times in the dune races, but you'll hardly need that speed almost anywhere else.
• Back Stab:
  • Certain weapons like Crow's daggers can deliver a devastating attack that can only be initiated while crouching behind the target.
  • Breaking certain bosses' shields can allow a player to cling to their back and stab them for a few seconds, dealing massive damage while the boss tries to shake the attacker off. This is helpful in team battles as it gives the rest of the party a few seconds of free damage.
• Bad Luck Mitigation Mechanic:
  • Every 80th Weapon Special Order is guaranteed to yield an SSR weapon, and every 40th Matrix Order is guaranteed to yield an SSR Matrix.
  • Duplicate SR or SSR weapons convert into fusion cores that upgrade that weapon. If your weapon is at max stars, further duplicates are converted into Black/Flame Gold (1 for SR, 10 for SSR) and 120 Black Gold can be redeemed for a dupe of an SSR weapon you already own. 120 Flame Gold can be used to redeem for the limited-time weapon, even if you're unlucky enough to not have that weapon after getting that far.
  • You accumulate Base chips as you perform Matrix Orders, duplicate or not. 80 Base chips can be exchanged for a SSR Matrix of your choice. 40 Overclocking chips (for limited Matrix banners) are exchanged for a limited Matrix of your choice.
  • Special Orders using Black Nuclei are exempt from this trope, so it's all entirely up to the Random Number God to determine if you get anything good from that.
  • In Joint Operations, every time a box is opened, the percentage of getting the best equipment featured goes higher. And if a player is still unlucky after opening a certain amount of boxes, a hidden pity mechanic called Special Fall activates and will ensure the player gets one gold equipment for their troubles. This doesn't apply to matrices though.
  • Stat-lockers allow you to block off one of four stats in a piece of equipment when upgrading (the blocked stat will not receive the upgrade), reducing the odds of a bad roll.
  • From v2.4 onwards, when rolling for Limited Matrices you can choose which of the four possible Matrices you won't receive, reducing the odds of duplicates to help players complete a Set Bonus.
• Balance Buff:
  • The 2.4 update (which introduces Lan) would be accompanied by a large slew of changes to ease gameplay for solo players and close the power disparity between new and old players:
    • New players can now access Vera and combat gear at earlier levels to help them catch up to other players.
    • All weapons from the base Special Order banner, including the Starter Equipment, gain significant buffs. Support-type SSR weapons also gain a new "Elemental Benediction" passive that buffs the whole team's elemental attack (corresponding to the weapon type) while their user is in Benediction Resonance.
    • The Vitality cap is increased to 360 to reduce the Play Every Day pressure.
    • The menu interface now gauges which of the player's upgrades are up to standard to guide players along the intended growth curve.
    • Resources are easier to obtain — overworld chests get a higher rate of yielding high-quality equipment, and the same applies for high-level Joint Operations. Raids offer greater Spacetime Dust rewards, and Void Abyss and Origin of War offer additional Vera equipment shards. Spacegates and Dimensional Trials can be instantly completed with a Quick Battle function if you tackle them alone and are at least 5 levels higher than recommended.
    • If you've joined a Joint Operation solo or with CS below the recommended level, the game grants you a buff to make it easier to clear the activity.
  • Claudia's weapon and matrices in the Global version were given a significant attack boost in their values instead of being nerfed like the other limited weapons released. Thanks to this, her weapon and matrices are still viable even after the other weapons and matrices released in her generation are rendered obsolete by the Power Creep.
  • Ming Jing's weapon and Trait were reworked during the anniversary of the Global Version, giving Onyx Tortoise flame resonance to work with flame weapons. This allows it to boost two resonances (physical and flame) at the same time and opens for more rainbow team compositions.
  • With the release of the first anniversary, Annabella and Lin's weapon stats were given a significant buff that it can compete with the newest released flame character, Liu Huo, at similar advancements.
  • Version 3.4 introduced the Balanced Difficulty for Joint Operations that standardizes weapon damage across all available weapons, giving an environment where old weapons that were overshadowed by Power Creep a chance to see play again.^{For reference} Matrices and Simulacrum traits do not apply here. While old SSR weapons like Shiro's and Nemesis' are largely unchanged, newer weapons like Liu Huo's, Nan Yin's and Ling Han's all do a tiny fraction of their usual DPS.
• Barely-Changed Dub Name:
  • Lin Ye's name is shortened to Lin in the English version.
  • Freya is renamed to Frigg in the English version.
  • Seele's name is changed to Shelly since there's a boss named Seele in the English version.
• Battle Royale Game:
  • Called the Break From Destiny mode. Players can select to join solo or in a group of 3, starting in certain areas to gather weapons, gear, and relics scattered all over or in chests guarded by enemies before fighting other players while the gameplay area slowly becomes smaller the more time passes.
  • The Wormhole mechanics are similarly reworked to a solo battle royale. In this mode, Players must find weapons, relics, and equipment scattered all over or by killing elite enemies before the time runs out.
• BFS:
  • Meryl's Rosy Edge is almost as big as her body, and she's one of the taller characters in the game.
  • Zeke wields a greatsword that he can easily swing around, showing off his strength. This helps hint who he really is when he is later introduced as Ming Jing, but this time he wields another greatsword reminiscent of Cloud's Buster Sword.
• Big Damn Heroes: After arriving in Vera and trying to run away from monsters, the player and Shirli are saved by the executors in Vera, namely Lin, Ruby, Samir, Huma, Meryl, and Zero.
• Bizarrchitecture: The Confounding Abyss below Mirroria consists of unnaturally blocky floating platforms within a cavern with similarly blocky walls, a few floating islands that only appear if you see through a diamond doorway or get close enough, a Giant Faceless Eye structure overlooking the whole area and is populated by numerous Abyssants.
• Boobs-and-Butt Pose:
  • The first opening screen, where the player picks a server to log in to, shows Nemesis with her back to the player but also turning over her shoulder to glance at the camera. She does a similar pose after the end of the Aesperia storyline.
  • Yulan's awakened portrait has her striking a pose with her back to the viewer and looking back over her shoulder that gives emphasis to her hips and butt at the same time.
• Body Horror: A person who has their suppressors broken and exposed to Omnium will immediately turn into a ghoulish creature called Aberrants, and we see the nasty transformation process after Shirli's suppressor broke
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Some of the SR relics are more favorable to use than some SSR relics due to various factors:
    • The Couant relic is the most recommended combat relic for many players as it creates a shield for 5 seconds that can absorb decent damage. Once it breaks, it provides many buffs (speed increase, final damage increase, damage reflection, decreasing enemy speed) at maximum advancements while only having a half-minute cooldown. Fully upgrading the Couant is also much easier than most SSR relics.
    • The Strange Cube can deal decent damage while sending enemies up in the air before increasing damage dealt by 10% for ten seconds up to three charges. As it also has a half-minute cooldown period per charge, it's possible to keep a 100% uptime if timed correctly.
    • The Jetpack and Cybernetic Arm are among the first relics you unlock, but go unchallenged as the best mobility tools in the game even though they don't contribute to combat much. None of the SSR relics give that much mobility!
  • Zero's Negating Cube is one of the earliest standard weapons but it's discharge effect (remove debuffs and party damage immunity for 3 seconds) and skill effect at full advancement (creates orbs that heal and boost team damage for 30 seconds) is valuable for hard content that it's still used in benediction teams. His 4-piece matrix set is also one of the best matrices to equip even on other benediction weapons as it boosts the party's damage up to 28% when shielded at full advancements.
• Bottomless Magazines: Samir's Dual EM Stars never runs out of bullets if auto-attacking, though doing a lengthy jump attack or using her aimed mode will consume stamina.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall:
  • One sidequest in "Apartment Anecdotes" has an in-game Hotta employee suddenly ranting about the complexities of using Unreal Engine 4 and that many of them have never been home for many days. This suddenly cuts to a 2 second note from the devs thanking the players for sticking to the end and apologizing for all the issues.
  • Yan Miao's trailer has a part where the trailer itself rewinds on a recording software and the shoplady asks to add subtitles to Yan Miao's dialogue. Later on, the game interface is shown while Yan Miao is mining ores.
  • Brevey's trailer has Archon Elric lambasting her for causing the bug that made various Wanderers to grow abnormally large while videos of said bug play in the background.
• Bubblegloop Swamp: Miasmic Swamp is a location in Vera where only genetically enhanced animals can thrive. Some parts are covered with an airborne toxin that makes it hard to explore the poisonous areas unless you do some footwork to disable the toxic konjac emanating the poison. It's also the only part of Vera that rains and when it does, it fills up the lowest parts of the swamp, rendering some exploration points inaccessible until the rain stops and the water slowly drains.
• Bullet Time: The game has a mechanic similar to Bayonetta's Witch time called Phantasia, this can be activated by doing a perfect dodge, meaning dashing out of the enemy's attack at the right moment. The enemies will significantly slow down and all weapons will be immediately charged, allowing everyone to use all their discharge attacks for massive damage. If in a group, only the aggro holder can activate Phantasia.
• Butt-Monkey: Shelly usually gets the short end of the stick whenever she appears, like how her favorite stall ran out of food after sneaking out of work and burning her tongue, and being forced to work one month free in Lin's trailer.
• Came Back Wrong: The Darkness in Domain 9 are the fallen soldiers or animals forcibly revived by the invading Grayspace Entities to fight their former comrades.
• Cast from Hit Points: Equipping Tian Lang's Thunderbreaker will activate Volt Sense, a passive where using a volt weapon's (including itself) discharge and skill will consume a percentage of HP points every time it's used before regenerating a small amount of health after a few seconds.
• Casting Gag: Huma in the Japanese Dub is voiced by Rie Takahashi, who is famous for voicing Mash Kyrielight, another cute girl wielding a shield as a weapon who was also experimented when she was younger.
• Cataclysm Backstory: The Omnium Explosion 50 years ago, triggered by the Tower of Fantasy malfunctioning during an attempt to rewind time, turned the planet Aida into a radiation-filled wasteland and mutated every living creature on it, forcing the surviving people to use suppressors or they will mutate into Aberrants.
• Chainsaw-Grip BFG: Hilda's Terminator cannon, which has two modes; in the first, it's wielded this way and fires automatically, and in the second, it turns into a mounted sentry turret that fires slow, single blasts.
• Character Customization: You can design a male or female avatar, and the game has a selection of outfits and accessories to unlock. On top of that, you can also use an unlocked Simulacrum as a character skin.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Tsubasa's simulacrum log labels the real one as a friendly person who can get along with anyone, but she has a tendency to switch sides as quickly as she joins a group. It's noted she first joined the Hyenas, then ran away to apply for Hykros then backstabbed them after her training to join the Heirs of Aida. Her AI counterpart even questions why her real self can't get attached to anyone and doesn't want to stay in one place.
• Color-Coded Elements: Different weapons and their attack animations are associated with certain colors to determine what elements they are. Fire weapons are Red-orange, Volt weapons are violet, Frost weapons are light blue, and Physical weapons are light yellow. The Aberrant element, currently held by Lin, is special as it follows what weapon resonance a player has and if it doesn't have a weapon resonance, attacks will show up as Green.
• Color-Coded Item Tiers: The background of any item indicates its rarity or quality. It goes from grey -> green -> blue -> purple -> gold in ascending order.
• Combat Hand Fan:
  • Lin's Shadoweave is a huge hand fan capable of generating wind currents in the shape of flowers to attack enemies at long range, can pull enemies together with her discharge, and creates a huge field where she can float out of enemy attacks with her skill.
  • Huang's Azure Dragon is a set of small fans capable of summoning her beloved dragon to attack enemies and can generate electrical discharges that she can shoot at enemies.
• Combat Medic:
  • Cocoritter's files state she's been an expert healer ever since she was young and takes her job as a nurse seriously, but she is also capable of defending herself in a fight, unlike the other medical staff who aren't trained in combat.
  • Pepper used to work as a medical student for Hykros and, like Cocoriter, she can also defend herself enough to be picked up by the Simulacrum project.
• Company Cameo: Hotta Studio's logo is usually splashed on screens around Aesperia. They also have an in-universe version of their studio located in Mirroria City beside the Oasis Club, and the player character can join them as a temporary worker helping the overworked employees design boss monsters before the deadline.
• Convection, Schmonvection: Once the Dragon Breath Volcano far beneath Innars erupts, the area lights up in active lava flows. Trying to revisit the place subjects you to a deadly Damage Over Time effect due to the heat, and you need to finish a newly-unlocked sidequest to be able to survive the depths. However, you don't have this problem with the lava flow in the Great Trench in Innars.
• Cooking Mechanics: Players can collect ingredients or kill wildlife and cook at various cooking stations around the map, usually in shelters, near ruins, or boss arenas. Recipes are discovered by combining ingredients and while only one ingredient is needed to unlock them, chances rise the more ingredients are added, even if it's not part of the recipe. Failing will usually result in creating an awful stew and losing all ingredients used.
• Coolest Club Ever: Located in Mirroria is the Oasis Club, a cyber club full of virtual lights and a bar for humans and robots to hang out after work. It's only open from 9:00 pm until midnight server time and is where Fenrir, a famous DJ in the city, performs her shows.
• Cool Big Sis: Lin fulfills this role towards Ruby, who also holds her in high regard. The two even share a simulacrum story where Lin asks the Player to help organize a concert for the latter's birthday, just because Ruby admits to Sparky that she wishes to go to a concert with Lin.
• Cool Bike:
  • Players will receive one called Falcon the first time they reach Hykros in the storyline.
  • Artificial Island has the Crimson Meteor bike, and players must earn around 140 Tech Store tokens to unlock it.
  • The Dust Wheeler is a dead ringer to Jack Atlas's D-wheel, and it's unlocked by reaching Grand Marshall in PVP.
• Corralling Vacuum: The Spacetime Rift relic creates a time-space collapse that sucks targets in for 10 seconds and deals a percentage of damage while active. This is useful in pulling groups of mobs before activating skills in places like Bygone Phantasm.
• Crapsaccharine World: Make no mistake, despite the Animesque aesthetic, the world is basically Pandora:
  • The Aesperia continent, where the reactor in the Tower of Fantasy exploded, has it and the surrounding city completely destroyed and everything is filled with broken-down technology and mutated monsters. The surviving 20% of the population has stripped the planet bare of resources to construct shelters to survive and must heavily rely on their suppressors or cybernetic enhancements to withstand radiation or they will mutate into aberrants. The surviving Hykros scientists are more resistant to the radiation, but they never aged a day afterward in exchange.
  • Due to the omnium radiation that swept the planet from the explosion, the once lush continent of Vera has been reduced to an arid desert constantly attacked by weird alien beings from "Grayspace", a weird warped version of Vera where tears to it appear all over the continent. The other cities on Vera (the Third City in the depths of the earth and Innars in the depths of the ocean) have been under heavy attack by the alien beings that the Third City is forcefully abandoned and Innars cannot fully establish a habitable environment for civilians, so civilization is now concentrated in the Mirroria capital, with the population shrinking due to the lack of space and resources.
  • Domain 9 is constantly attacked and overrun with beings called the Darkness, which are dead people or animals forcefully reanimated by Nan Ying, a former Domain 9 researcher who defected to the Grayspace Entities to serve as an undead army. While the remaining safe havens are currently holding their own, Ji Yu outright says that they're on borrowed time and their energy supply wouldn't last for a long time unless the invading enemies are dealt with.
• Critical Hit Class:
  • Shiro at max advancement has a 100% crit for 8 seconds after casting her skill. Combining it with her skill reset in her A3 when breaking shields gives her the best burst and shield shatter for standard weapons.
  • Crow's Matrix and playstyle depend on him proccing crits while in the enemies' backside. His A5 advancement even grants a 100% crit chance for the next 4 seconds and increases crit damage by 50% for 10 seconds.
  • Fenrir's max advancement gives her an 18% Critical Chance buff, allowing her to deal with more crits in her attack.
  • Huang/Mimi's trait extends crit rate boosts by 25 seconds when using 3 volt weapons, turning Crow and Fenrir into heavy hitters.
• Crossover:
  • Bai Yuekui and Marc from Ling Long Incarnation appear as recruitable characters in the Chinese version of the game. Sadly, they're not available to the global version for licensing reasons.
  • An update on 12 March 2024 sees a crossover with Neon Genesis Evangelion for all versions of the game. Asuka and Rei are featured as playable Simulacra.
• Damage-Sponge Boss:
  • Abyssal:Harrah and Crystal Hoof:Culton, when they were first added to the global release, had the same amount of health as they did in the CN version, without accounting for the fact that the global version tones down the damage numbers. This led to a full server of players spending over twenty minutes just trying to chip down the boss. Their health was readjusted in a later patch, and upgades from later points in the game allow for smaller parties to have an easier time fighting these bosses.
  • The limited-time raids Zhuyan and Gluttonous Feast raid also have an absurd amount of HP that requires the players to use the fights' gimmicks to make any meaningful progress. This also means that the DPS Resonance is largely useless in those raids, and a player not pulling their weight can spell the difference between victory or defeat.
• Dance Battler:
  • Tian Lang's hold skill makes him breakdance with his spear.
  • Alyss incorporates ballet dancing moves while she's fighting enemies.
  • Fei Se is a famous dancer, and she proves her art by dancing gracefully even when attacking enemies.
• A Day in the Limelight: The Simulacrum stories cover a Simulacrum AI's history, and will even show the original person the Simulacrum is based on.
• Dark Action Girl:
  • The Angels of Clemency from the Heirs of Aida are mostly women who survived a dangerous experiment, transforming into soldiers loyal to the organization and can easily kick the Player Character's ass in the story.
  • Shirli becomes one after her transformation as the cyborg Nemesis.
  • Dr. Rubilia is discovered to have turned into a hybrid of a human and Grayspace Entity after delving deep into the Confounding Abyss and being possessed by the Hive Mother.
• Deliberately Monochrome: Activating Zeke's Selfless Realm will turn everything screen into monochrome for a few seconds until it expires or the executes are used up.
• Derivative Differentiation: Tower of Fantasy is set in an Post Cyber Punk Scavenger World closer in feel to Borderlands, compared to its inspirations Genshin Impact and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild which is set in a High Fantasy world.
• Desert Punk: A large portion of Vera is a harsh desert wasteland due to the Omnium explosion, with Mirroria City being a Cyberpunk-inspired Neon City.
• Diegetic Interface: The screens of Bygone and Sequential Phantasm show the HUD as this with the player character facing the screen, which becomes a problem as this sometimes causes the explanation for the dungeon's mechanics to become unreadable.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Tian Lang's Thunderbreaker sacrifices HP to deal damage whenever a volt skill and discharge activates, and gets an attack bonus the lower the HP is, requiring players to either perfect dodging enemies to stay alive and/or pair him up with a healer to offset his health drain. But in the hands of a skilled player, one can put out insane damage numbers and still be nearly unkillable even with minimal investments and no healing weapons.
• Dramatic Shattering:
  • Successfully shattering enemy shields is punctuated with a slow-mo effect as a signal for the player to go for the kill.
  • Entering and exiting the Grayspace Area in Vera will cause a crash effect to happen on screen before moving in or out of the map.
• Dual Boss:
  • The Frigg + Valkyrie Raid pits the party against Frigg and Valkyrie in separate arenas. If one goes down, the group has 1 minute to defeat the other before the defeated enemy revives with half HP. However, if a boss is unattended for too long, it will reset its behavior and refill its HP fully. Higher difficulties shorten the window between the death of both bosses, and the bosses can enter a berserk state if the party takes too long to defeat them.
  • The Nemesis Raid pits the party against two copies of Nemesis in the same arena. They must first be separated because if both bosses are too close to each other they will heal rapidly. Defeating one will cause the other to become more aggressive but at least the defeated boss stays down.
  • The Carnival Party Joint Operation pits the players against two separate bosses in sequence, then, after a rhythm game segment, has the players fight both of them at once.
  • A few limited-time events will have players facing two bosses at the same time.
• Dual-World Gameplay: Vera has two zones where players can explore:
  • Grayspace Portals dot the desert of Vera, and once you reach level 74 you can use them to enter Grayspace itself, a parallel version of the Vera desert with its exploration points, overworld mobs, and field bosses.
  • Another zone called Twilight Zone was later added and, like Grayspace, is a Dark World version of Vera that is in eternal night and has different mechanics for exploration.
• Dungeon Bypass:
  • Using Lin's skill, Lan's skill, and Alyss' Latent State can let players float above the maze walls or platform minigames, making it a breeze to collect the dream machine rewards.
  • For Sadness Valley, it's possible to dash-glide from the starting platform all the way to the boss, bypassing all trash mobs. This is made easier with Alyss' Latent State ability.
• Early-Bird Cameo:
  • Some SSR characters from the Standard Banner can be acquired early on even before they appear in the story proper or simulacrum stories like Crow, Shiro, and Tsubasa, or only debuted during the Vera Storyline like Zero.
  • For the SR characters, only Bai Ling and Hilda made an early story appearance while Ene took her until the Innars storyline to finally make her debut.
  • Claudia is one of the earliest Limited SSR characters and only made her debut in patch 2.5.
  • Lan and Kanro, characters from Domain 9, also made a cameo and Lan was given a banner during the later parts of the Vera storyline.
• Easy Level Trick:
  • It's easy to cheese the rhythm minigames by standing on the side and shooting Samir's EM Guns at the end bar to hit all the passing notes.
  • For Deepsea Stronghold, equipping Meryl's maxed Simulacrum trait or using certain frost weapon skills can create ice platforms players can stand on, negating the difficulty posed by the water. Using any weapon that can pull enemies, like King's dodge attack, will prevent Thunder Wings from flying everywhere and make it stay close to the ground.
  • For the maze minigame in Claire's dream machine where relics aren't allowed, using King or Samir's aerial attack, and weapons that can make the character travel above the walls like Lin's moonlight realm will let players go up the maze walls to easily collect the trophies.
• Electronic Speech Impediment:
  • Due to a malfunctioning language circuit, Mi-a sometimes stutters whenever she's speaking, but has no problem speaking out what she needs to say. Shelly tries to fix her stuttering after arriving in Vera, but can't fully fix her since the language chip needed for her model was discontinued.
  • Melo, on the other hand, also has a malfunctioning language chip but unlike Mi-a, this made him a Terse Talker with a kindergartener's vocabulary.
• Empty Levels: Your character's levels contribute little to your combat strength and are instead a limiter for the content you can experience and the extent to which you can upgrade your weapons and gear. However, this means that when the game gives new players a large experience boost to get them to catch up with the level cap without accounting for their equipment strength, the player will feel weaker for leveling up if enemy strength begins to outpace their own.
• Equipment-Based Progression: Strengthening your weapons, equipment, and suppressor are major contributors to your Combat Score and overall battle performance.
• Expy: Many of the movesets are taken from or inspired by Devil May Cry, especially Frigg's Balmung blade, which has a moveset that resembles Vergil's in the fifth game.
• Evil Former Friend: Nan Yin used to be Ling Han's closest friend until the Hendeca County Calamity happened and she disappeared for two years before returning as Domain 9's public enemy.
• Extremity Extremist: Alyss's weapons are a pair of footwear attachments, so all her attacks involve kicks and ice-skating maneuvers.
• Fake Longevity: The limited-time event design is not one of the game's strengths. Side events are often criticized for being a slog to play through or requiring several plays just to accumulate enough event points to buy the limited-supply resources you're going for. Often, the points exchange stores are also structured such that you cannot simply just focus on the rare items and be done with it, while the event also has a points cap (that slowly rises daily) to keep you from mashing the event repeatedly from day 1 and buying out the store immediately. Impatient or tired players are known to try to AFK-farm such events.
• Falling Damage: Players can receive falling damage after falling from high areas, but doing a fall attack, dashing before hitting the ground, or falling into the water would prevent damage.
• Fast-Killing Radiation:
  • Trying to explore a region of Aesperia when your level or suppressor rank isn't high enough, or trying to go out of bounds via the sea, will expose the player character to harmful Omnium radiation, slowly reducing your health until you die or get out of the place fast enough. Vera doesn't have this problem as the researchers found a way to strengthen the populace's resistance to the radiation and the radiation gradually subsided in that region.
  • If you run down the timer in a Wormhole stage, the game will indicate your Suppressor is "overloading" and inflict damage over time on your character, forcing you to finish the stage before your character dies.
• Field Power Effect: One of Domain 9's Timestamp technology applications amplifies one of the player character's elemental stat as long as the player is inside an Astral Monument or Statue's radius to make it easier to fight off enemies.
• Fishing Minigame: Introduced in the 2.2 update, you can catch fish from various bodies of water in both regions and trade them for fishing tokens to redeem the side mode's rewards or to keep them as pets in your personal aquarium.
• Floating Continent: Domain 9 is a large floating landmass composed of floating islands connected by bridges that don't seem to connect to anything below the clouds.
• Follow the Money: Vera has a chockful of coin trails usually located on top of buildings, rock formations, and even underground, and following it will usually lead to an exploration point. There is even an arrow of Vera coins pointing down to a quicksand vortex, hinting at an underground cavern if the player sinks into that point.
• The Four Gods: The characters released in 3.0, aside from Lan who released a patch earlier, are based on the Four Gods in Chinese Mythology, with their weapons named after the god they are based on. The regions of Domain 9 also correspond to them.
  • Lan is themed after the Vermilion Bird, as she has a phoenix motif in her clothes and attacks. Her Japanese name is Suzaku, which is the name of Zhūquè in Japan. The same phoenix also adorns Ignisville's Vermilion statues.
  • Yulan is themed after the White Tiger, with her black and blue motif and she even summons a tiger in one of her attacks. Ling Han's skills also evoke the White Tiger itself, and the White Tiger stands atop the Alabaster Statues in Marshville.
  • Ming Jing takes many themes from the Black Tortoise, with his weapon named the Onyx Tortoise. His title is Lord Xuanwu, which is derived from the name of the deity itself. The Onyx Statues in Aquaville bear the Tortoise's likeness.
  • Huang/Mimi takes after the Azure Dragon with her color scheme and dragon motif. Her attacks even involve summoning dragons to attack enemies with her. The Azure Dragon is also perched atop the Azure Statues in Joltville.
• Friendly, Playful Dolphin: Phantom Dolphins won't attack as long as they're not attacked, and will even turn friendly and follow you if you approach them. If your Aquatic Taming level is high enough, you can tame and raise them, and if you're lucky they can become an aquatic mount.
• Game-Breaking Bug:
  • An exploit was discovered where it's possible to transfer items from one character to another if the hacker found a player's UID, usually by teaming up in cross-server, causing affected players to lose weeks or months' worth of items. This affected only a few servers but other players began to avoid cross-matching and even other players in the same server in fear of losing their hard-worked items. Hotta quickly issued an emergency maintenance a few hours after its discovery to remove the exploit, banned the offending player/s, and offered rollbacks to affected players.
  • After the 2.0 patch was launched, some servers were affected by a bug that put them on a non-existent queue that made it impossible to transfer to a solo or party instance, making daily activities virtually undoable. This was patched after a few days.
  • It's discovered that if a player is in a solo instance (like Ruins or Training Centers) and upgrades or makes any Special Orders, the upgrades or new items are not saved once they leave the instance, leading to a potential waste of resources.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • The player's suppressors can't ever be broken. It's one of the leveling methods that grant increased stats by collecting upgrade items.
  • The Simulacrum AI disguise is turned off during story dialogue, so the NPCs don't react to copies of themselve or the sight of people who shouldn't be around.
  • Like Genshin, it's possible to acquire a specific character even if you have not properly met them yet. For example, it's possible to get King's Simulacrum data in the first rolls and use the skin even before you meet him later in the Arena.
• Gameplay Randomization: Trying to min-max your gear involves a lot of randomness when you examine the minutiae. Equipment pieces randomly drop from Joint Operation chests, and you'll need to hope you get the one for the slot you want. Then, each piece of equipment comes with four stats, randomly determined. When you upgrade their star rating, the game randomly picks between which stat gets a bonus, and even there, the increment has some variation, so even when everything goes your way and a single stat receives all the upgrades, you have a chance of low-rolling the boost. Most players would just opt to make the best of what they have rather than go the extra mile to get the biggest numbers.
• Gatling Good: Hilda wields a pink gatling gun called Terminator, and it also can turn into a mini turret via the skill button.
• "Get Back Here!" Boss: Certain bosses like Vulcan, Pallas, and Valkyrie are highly mobile, making them infuriating when they get out of your reach and you have to chase them down.
• Ghost City: The Third City in the Confounding Abyss was planned to be an expansion for the increasing population in Mirroria, but the sudden Grayspace Alien attacks and the missing surveillance teams forced the higher-ups to seal the entrance to prevent more casualties. Once the player explores the area, only the ruins, the local Vera fauna, and a few malfunctioning droids are left.
• Global Currency Exception: As you progress out of Aesperia, you'll find your gold reserves to be almost worthless as the other cities use a different currency. Mirroria's services use Mira and Veron, Domain 9 uses Field Energy that differs in locations, and Joltville trades using Dominium.
• Gondor Calls for Aid: After discovering the real size of the breach where the Grayspace Entities are sneaking in their attack on Innars, Fiona calls for every single executor available in the other district to help defend the city. Nearly every Simulacra released and the Angel Of Clemency shows up to help drive away the enemies, except for Tsubasa.
• Grappling-Hook Pistol: A variant with the Cybernetic Arm; this can be used to pull enemies close, pull closer to the target, deal damage, or access hard-to-reach areas.
• "Groundhog Day" Loop: One Ravager Minion accidentally traps himself and the player character in a time loop of his death after stealing a time capsule from Dr. Claire's lab, forcing the latter to think of ways to save him before he dies.
• Guide Dang It!: A common criticism from players is the game's flawed user interface. Some menus are nested within menus and the game often does a poor job of explaining specific mechanics (such as how to distribute buffs in Void Rifts or to adjust your role queue before entering any co-op content) which can hinder the experience of an unwitting player.
• Guns Akimbo: Samir's weapon, the Dual EM Stars, is a pair of guns that rapid-fire electric shots.
• Harder Than Hard:
  • Frontier Clash has an Evolution difficulty, which is tougher than its Hard difficulty and generally requires a strong and coordinated party to take down. Defeating them yields valuable rewards like red nuclei and red matrix tickets.
  • The later levels of Origin of War start at a dramatically increased difficulty at the start of each season that slowly decreases with each passing day. Clearing those stages above 300% or 600% difficulty yields additional rewards, but requires a strong team.
• Harmless Freezing: Frost-type weapons have a small chance of freezing enemies and opponent players for a few seconds, and one can only break out of it by button mashing. Some chests in Marshville will freeze players trying to open them, and upgrading the required Alabaster Statue is needed to safely open it.
• Heroic Sacrifice: To stop the time machine from creating another explosion and to atone for his Face–Heel Turn, Zeke risked his life to shut down the time machine engine but was lost in the time-space as a result. There are hints that he was flung to Vera, and thus the player is led there in the 2.0 arc. But as it turns out, he landed on Domain 9 and became one of Ignisville's enforcers.
• Hive Mind: The Grayspace Entities are discovered to share thoughts within its colony, which is how Rubilia tries to communicate to Lin via the Puppet Singer and Ruby. Unfortunately, this also means that the Hive Mother is also aware of what she is trying to accomplish.
• Holographic Disguise: The Simulacrum AI are based on the original wielders of the SR and SSR equipment and can be equipped once their weapons are acquired on the special loot. This changes the player character to the chosen Simulacrum and the AI will even contact the player if they have enough awakening points.
• Hover Board:
  • There is a Hoverboard relic that lets players move faster and even traverse quicksand for a limited time. This is only available on the Battle Pass so players will have to shell out some money to acquire this relic.
  • The Jetboard relic's main purpose is to glide on water and it can also be used to glide on land for a limited time, but there is no way to boost its speed on land unlike in water.
• Impossibly-Low Neckline: Many of the female outfits tend to show off the neckline and even a lot of cleavage, though most of these outfits are also locked in a paid gacha event.
• Improbably Female Cast: Among playable Simulacrum characters, the male characters number in the single digits, while there are many more playable female ones.
• Inconsistent Dub: The game has shoddy localization and subtitles in-game aren't consistent with the voice dubs everywhere, sometimes even disappearing while a character is speaking. One example is some characters saying "Vela" while the subtitles and the official localization call the planet "Vera". Even characters aren't exempt as Tian Lang is called Sirius in the English Dub yet the subtitles show the former.
• Inexplicable Treasure Chests: Many exploration points like supply pods, various chests, and nuclei are scattered all over the map just waiting for players to pick up, though most chests in Aesperia are time-gated to prevent players from picking all up in one go.
• Insufferable Genius: Zero is a Child Prodigy talented enough to hack Hykros' security system at a young age so easily that the organization sends a team of Executors to catch him. He certainly likes to brag about his superior mind, even programming his creations to shill himself and tends to look down on whoever is asking for his help. That said, he is amenable to requests as long as one gives him ice cream.
• Interface Spoiler: It's easy to guess what happens to Shirli early on considering her transformation to Nemesis is shown on many loading screens.
• Invisibility Cloak: The Quantum Cloak relic allows players to enter a quantum state for 10 seconds (6 seconds in Break From Destiny mode). Enemies cannot detect the wearer while under the quantum state and attacking will immediately end the effect.
• Jack of All Trades:
  • The "Balance" resonance, enabled by wielding one weapon of each type in your loadout, gives a small bonus to damage, defense, shield-breaking, and healing, but not as strong as any of the specialist resonances. While this is self-sufficient for solo content, specialist resonances are more valued in group content.
  • Lyra's Vesper is a support weapon but her weapon passives change depending if she is in the Benediction Resonance or not, allowing her to work with all resonance types while still supporting the team with her shields.
  • Fenrir's weapon is tailored to be a DPS weapon yet she has a decent shatter rate, which lets her shatter shields close to what tank weapons can do, and great self-healing, having the ability to heal herself so fast that she is less reliant on healing weapons.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Frigg's Simulacrum has the most antagonistic interactions with the player character — naturally, since they are on opposing factions — but occasional messages received at higher Affinity show that Frigg occasionally still cares for the well-being of the player character and her fellow Angel Nemesis.
• Killer Yoyo: Icarus's weapon is a huge pair of bladed yoyo called Precious One.
• Kirin: Joltville has a Nightmare Scourge mini-boss named after the mythical creature itself. Fittingly, it's the only mini-boss with multiple health bars, which makes it a Boss in Mook's Clothing.
• Last Chance Hit Point:
  • Lyra's fifth advancement has the Forgiveness Guard and Enlightenment Guard buffs, giving 1 and 2 chances to negate fatal damage for herself and her teammates before recovering 5% of max health respectively.
  • Fenrir's third advancement will gain 1 escape death buff if 99% of health is lost, blocking lethal damage and giving a few seconds of invulnerability every 45 seconds, allowing players a few seconds of reprieve to recover their health.
• Level Scaling: Happens in all areas including previously revisited ones, encouraging players to use elements that are strong against the enemy's element, weapon upgrading, and rolling for SR and SSR equipment. The only exception is the main storyline encounters, Ruins, and Bygone Phantasm stages.
• Lightning Gun:
  • Samir's Dual EM Stars shoot out electrical energy instead of bullets and she can shock enemies by firing an electrical field.
  • Nemesis' Venus is a set of Blaster Guns that also shoot out electrical energy and can set up electrodes to help support the team.
• Limit Break: After dealing enough damage with any of your weapons, you will gain access to a "Discharge" attack that will be unleashed when you switch weapons.
• Loot Box: Called "Special Orders" and it's the main method to gain equipment.
  • Weapon Orders are made with Nuclei of three varieties: Black, Gold, and Red. Black and Gold Nuclei are commonly acquired through daily activities or from overworld exploration, and draw only from the evergreen pool of weapons; Black Nuclei pulls do not use the Bad Luck Mitigation Mechanic that the other types do. Red Nuclei are more scarce, only obtained from limited-time events or purchased using Dark Crystals, and are used to pull for limited-time characters.
  • Matrix Orders are made with Proofs of Purchase (standard banner) or Special Vouchers (limited banner). They have similar behavior to the nuclei but exchange for matrices instead of weapons.
• Lost in Translation: Abnormally more so than other Chinese games, one of the most infamous being the digit 9 on keypads being replaced by "10% off" for quite a while on the Global version.
• Love at First Sight: Crow's messages show that he immediately developed a crush on Shiro. In the next message, it's revealed he made a fool of himself by approaching and making cat noises to her, which Shiro doesn't appreciate.
• Lovecraft Lite: In Gnonno's story quest, she snuck away to explore the site where a meteorite was supposed to strike as noted in her grandfather's notes. It slowly goes through mindscrew territory after the Player Character gets dragged to a cave before switching to Gnonno accompanied by what looks like a ghost child only she can see. The Player Character also receives visions of Gnonno's grandfather slowly going insane while surrounded by octopuses after reading his Apocalyptic Log, and later, the entire cave gradually fills up with octopuses. It's hinted that the Gnonno the player character is with may not be Gnonno herself.
• Low-Level Advantage: Keeping one's dimensional level low can let one solo bosses that would otherwise need a whole team to defeat, the only caveat is that they wouldn't be able to open chests only available for higher levels. As the scaling doesn't only apply to the player, other players can team up with the low dimensional level player to instantly kill bosses, unlocking achievements or rewards with ease.
• Magical Girl Warrior: Brevey invokes this as she is a big fan of the Magical Girl genre. Her outfit is a cyberpunk seifuku, has a non-human robot sidekick that she uses to attack enemies, and even has a Transformation Sequence in her trailer. Her bosses, on the other hand, are not amused as she mixes her fantasies with her research.
• Magic Music: As shown in the 3.0 trailer, Nan Ying plays her xiao to revive fallen animals and soldiers and make them fight for the Grayspace Entities. Her playable version also plays music at the end of her attack string to deal damage to enemies.
• Mechanical Horse: The Monocross mount is a unicorn version, and its parts can be found in the Crown and Warren region via quests and drops.
• Mercy Kill: Implied that this was the "rule" Zeke imposed on the inhabitants of Astra Shelter, should anyone become infected or irradiated (it's not that clear how Aberration works). After Shirli's suppressor breaks when an Aberrant attacks her when the Shelter was invaded, Zeke considers killing her himself. He can't go through with it and instead turns to the Sage to help save her life.
• Morph Weapon: Huma's Molten Shield V2 is a shield that's used to clobber enemies, and using the weapon skill converts it into an axe form with a separate moveset. Using the weapon skill again (or changing weapons) will revert to shield form.
• Moveset Clone: A few SSR weapons share their moveset and skill animations with some basic weapons while adding a little flair to their animations. To wit, Crow's Thunderblades shares his moveset with the Combat Blades, Claudia's Guren Blade with the common EM Blade, Tsubasa's Icewind Arrow and Bai Ling's Nightingale's Feather to the Composite Bow, and Coco's Absolute Zero with Peppper's Staff of Scars.
• My God, What Have I Done?: A sidequest in Domain 9 involves investigating the cause of vandalism to the Astral Monuments. You eventually trace it to a geomancer who lied through his teeth about the Monuments disrupting the local feng shui, but has unwittingly seeded a conspiracy theory. He's been trying and failing to talk the townsfolk out of this mindset.
• My Rules Are Not Your Rules: Several bosses, especially Void Abyss bosses, do not obey the Phantasm rules and can move unhindered in the time-slowing bubble. Other enemies have attacks that will not trigger Phantasm even if you dodge them.

N-Z

• Necromancer: Nan Ying is this all but name with her ability to revive dead soldiers thanks to her connection with the Grayspace Entities.
• Neon City: Mirroria City is a thriving cyberpunk city full of bright neon signs floating on top of an apocalyptic desert populated with dangerous monsters. It used to be on the ground, but the harsh environment and invading Grayspace Entities wrecked their plans to repair the environment around the city and forced the people to make the city float in the sky.
• New Work, Recycled Graphics: Many aspects of the Vera region, particularly the Grayspace entities and the Confounding Abyss map, have their models reused from another unreleased PWG game called Project Prism.
• Nice Mice: The Friendly Sand Rats aren't afraid of or hostile to humans and will give one Black Nucleus if they're given attention (via emotes) or the food they request.
• Nigh-Invulnerability: Opposite of Tian Lang, it's not an uncommon sight to see Lyra players take 0 damage in a team run. Her Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs regenerates health so fast that one can go from low to full health in mere seconds. Her extra healing turns into shields for herself or the team, and it's easy to maintain it as long as she keeps healing in Benediction stance. Her fifth advancement also negates any fatal damage to her teammates as long as one has Forgiveness or Enlightenment guard buffs.
• No Cutscene Inventory Inertia: The protagonist, in cutscenes, often uses their bare hands/feet, or a pink EM Blade regardless of the player's current equipment in-game.
• Non-Action Guy: Franz acts as the Mission Control and is usually the one finding clues on the Heirs of Aida. That said, he usually leaves the fighting to the player character since he can't fight, and he is captured later in the story and has to be saved.
• Non-Indicative Difficulty:
  • You may notice that the CS recommendation for the Hard difficulty Ruins goes through the roof, scaling faster than most players can achieve in a short time frame. However, those Hard Ruins can still be cleared with a CS of about half the recommended (or lower) if you fight smart and use all the tools you have available.
  • It's also possible to clear a Joint Operation dungeon with party members below the recommended CS score, though not recommended unless the players know what they are doing.
• Not Quite Flight:
  • Lin can jump thrice as much as a regular jump, hover with her Shadoweave, and dash-glide as long as the field effect of her skill is activated.
  • Lan can teleport up in the air up to a certain distance and slowly glides down with her parasol.
  • Rubilia has the most mobile weapon as she can launch herself up at high speeds, the highest out of all the released characters, and can also dive down at an angle just as quickly, allowing her to traverse terrain with ease.
  • Alyss can stay in the air during her latent state if she transforms in the air, allowing her to float even after going over a cliff and continue flying until her stamina runs out.
  • Fei Se and Ling Han can store charges of Light Steps that regenerate over time. With them, attempting a third jump after the double-jump will instead launch them into the air, and holding forward afterward lets them glide forward until you release the movement key or hit a solid surface.
• Ominous Latin Chanting:
  • The boss theme shared by the Interdimensional Frostfire Dragon and Valkyrie features plenty of foreboding chanting, fitting for some of the hardest bosses in the Aesperia region.
  • Abyssal Harrah's theme starts with a choir chanting at the start before transitioning into a mix of Rock and EDM.
• One-Hit Kill:
  • Fiona's Moonstar Bracelet 3-star advancement has a chance to instantly kill an enemy with HP below her max crystal count times 2 plus 2%, equivalent to 12% maximum health.
  • Entering Zeke's Selfless Realm gives the player the ability to instantly execute a non-boss enemy 3 times in succession, with a 200-second cooldown in exchange. This helps deal with minibosses and other elite enemies.
• Only in It for the Money: KING clarifies that his primary motivation is money and will work for someone as long as the payment is good. His Simulacrum file reveals that the real one rejected the benefits given by Hykros to be part of the Simulacra project and prefers to be paid in cash, which is noted as an astronomical amount that stood out on Hykros' financial expenses.
• Our Zombies Are Different: The Aberrants scattered all over the map are people who succumbed to the harmful Omnium radiation and became mindless beasts. The process of becoming an Aberrant is shown early on when Shirli's suppressor broke after saving Zeke.
• Outliving One's Offspring: Banges Tech's president Kolador wanted to cure his son Theo from a disease so he colluded with the Heirs of Aida to subject his son to their experiments just for a chance for survival. Unfortunately, Theo didn't survive and Kolador became remorseful for even agreeing to subject him to the experiment and giving him a painful death.
• Parasol of Pain: Lan's weapon is an umbrella that can generate more umbrellas that serve as foci of explosions.
• Pass Through the Rings: One Training Facitily mode in Aesperia and one minigame in Mirroria uses a ring sequence as flight training.
• Patchwork Map: The Aesperia map has a mountain range where one side is the lush Navia and Crown Mines and the other side is the snowy Warrens. The environment changes from lush green fields and sandy beaches to snowy within walking distance. It's much more visible when gazing down at the continent from atop the titular Tower of Fantasy.
• Phonýmon: The Beast Capture system introduced in patch 3.1 allows Wanderers to capture and tame specific enemies, and said enemies can be raised in beast pens in Artificial Island. Fully tamed creatures can be sold for Dominium points. A later update adds the Beast Brawl Arena mode where players can raise mutated pets and battle them against other players.
• Post Cyber Punk: The story is set in a world after a huge radiation explosion that nearly wrecked the ecosystem and caused the environment to be inhospitable to humans. While there are still darker elements like the radiation threat, the occasional enemy attacks in their shelters/cities, and hostile alien lifeforms, people still live normal lives and the world looks cheery and vibrant, especially in Mirroria City.
• Power Creep: While an inevitable element of the genre, it's much more blatant in the original Chinese version, where the latest Limited banner weapon will be far stronger than everything else, even other Limited weapons. The Global release has tried to downplay this by reducing the numbers advantage of the latest hot weapon, but the effects are still visible — for instance, Fiona is a fair bit stronger than Lin even though both share the same role of flexible buff support, and the latest elemental DPS weapon, even at minimal advancements, can outclass other high-advancement weapons of the same element.
• Power Fist:
  • Lyra's Vesper weapon is a huge pair of robotic arms floating beside her, and she can dish out respectable damage even if she's a support-type character.
  • The Colossus Arms relic is also a huge pair of robotic arms similar to Lyra's Vesper.
• Prayer Pose: Lyra's discharge animation shows her praying before spreading her arms while Vesper lets out an AOE attack.
• Premium Currency: Two types in the game: Dark Crystals and Tanium. Dark Crystals are your main item shop currency used to purchase nuclei for your gacha pulls among other things, and can be acquired by playing the game, exploring the maps, and participating in limited-time events. Tanium can only be purchased through microtransactions and is used to purchase premium outfits or special red nucleus packs in the in-game store.
• Puppeteer Parasite: It turns out that a few types of Abyssants like Abyssant:Jormungandr can control humans, as she was able to take over Umi's body and sabotage outpost 10. Unfortunately, it did such a poor job hiding its actions that Lin and Tian Lang were able to figure out that "Umi" was the one who caused the attack.
• Puzzle Boss: The limited-time Zhuyan and Gluttonous Feast Raids take Scratch Damage from all attacks until both bosses generate their shield and "challenges" the player that has aggro on it to a duel. The dueling player gains a massive attack bonus, and everyone else can contribute by shattering Zhuyan's shield, which also deals a large amount of damage to it. The strategy thus becomes loading up on Tank and Healer players and waiting to break its shield, rather than just stacking DPS and beating it with brute force.
• PVP Balanced: Apex League, the game's PVP side mode, equalizes both players by forcing all their equipped weapons and Relics to 6 stars, disabling the effects of equipped matrices or Simulacrum traits, and equalizing their character and weapon levels. The only thing that makes a difference is what you bring to the fight (provided you have them in the first place) and your skill.
• Quicksand Sucks: The southern region of the Vera desert, aptly named Quicksand Belt, has huge quicksand pools scattered throughout the area. Getting trapped in one will slowly sink players while making it difficult to trudge to safety, and failing to escape is instant death. However, sinking in slowly swirling vortexes in certain quicksand pits will instead deposit you in underground caves to explore.
• Racing Minigame: Mirroria has a large racing scene that incorporates at least half of the map. Players can join solo or group races to earn mira and unlock better and faster cars.
• Razor Wings: Rubilia's weapon, Lost Art, is a set of mechanical wings that discharges electrical energy, allowing her to quickly fly to and attack enemies in a wide range in the ground or air.
• Regenerating Health: Your health replenishes outside of combat, with the speed of recovery governed by a Satiety meter that depletes as your health regenerates this way. Eating most foods refills Satiety.
• Relationship Values: Giving gifts to the Simulacra you've unlocked will increase their Affinity, which at first unlocks their chat avatar and then enables automated side conversations that expand on their character. At 1200 Affinity you unlock a Simulacrum trait, which is an additional passive that you can toggle (without needing to use that Simulacrum skin), and 4000 Affinity upgrades their associated trait.
• Revenue-Enhancing Devices: Several outfits are locked behind real-money purchases. Some are even obtained only through limited-time gachapon events that may demand a lot of tanium to eventually acquire.
• Rings of Death: Shiro uses one, called Chakram of the Seas, as her main weapon that can shoot out rings like boomerangs to attack enemies. She can even summon a holographic arena that can allow the rings to bounce around for a few seconds to shred an enemy's health and shield.
• Robot Buddy:
  • Mi-a is Shirli's robot assistant who explains that it was found in one of the ruins. Mi-a later becomes the player's travel companion after her owners leave the shelter.
  • A sidequest in Domain 9 unlocks the Smart Servant system, where you can now pick between one of eight robot buddies (Mi-a included) who will participate in battles.
• Scenery Censor: In Yulan's Prototype portrait, a trail of ice blocks the view between her legs while she's doing a front kick, even when it's still covered by her dress flap.
• Sea Monster: The Grand Sea introduces powerful Abyssant sea monsters scattered throughout its waters that players can fight like Abyssant: Nakya, a giant underwater spider, Abyssant: Haboela, a four-legged creature similar to Sobek, and Abyssant: Scylla, a giant squid-like creature with drum-like appendage. For the native sealife, the Umbra Whale is a large whale swimming in set locations easily capable of killing unprepared Wanderers that disturb it.
• Self-Deprecation: Mirroria has its own version of Hotta Studio, which designs in-universe entertainment citizens for its residents. The player can take on a few sidequests where they do part-time work with the staff and discover that they are understaffed and overworked. To top it off, it values "translation skills" over everything else in its potential recruits, and the whole experience feels like a large self-deprecating joke.
• Self-Induced Allergic Reaction: A serious example. It's revealed in Fenrir's story, messages, and the lyrics of Chocolate that she is allergic to chocolates but keeps eating them since she sees hallucinations of her loved ones whenever she's having an allergic reaction, and admits it's the only time that she feels truly loved.
• Set a Mook to Kill a Mook: Due to her connection with the Hive Queen, Rubilia can convert an enemy Grayspace entity into an ally for a limited amount of time and make them fight other enemies.
• Set Bonus:
  • Equipping different combinations of weapons can enable a Resonance that dictates the player's team role. For example, setting two DPS weapons will activate Attack Resonance which increases damage, while setting two defense weapons will activate Fortitude Resonance which increases the player's defenses, Draw Aggro rate, and shield-breaking efficiency.
  • Certain weapons have an elemental resonance passive that grants a bonus to its element (and enables other skill effects) if you also have a weapon of the same element in your loadout.
  • Attaching matching Matrices to a weapon can enable a bonus effect that's far more valuable than the raw stats they bestow. SR-tier and lower Matrices require three Matrices of a kind, while SSR-tier Matrices have a bonus if you equip a pair, and a bigger bonus (that is oriented to benefit the matching character's weapon) if you use four of a kind.
• Ship Tease: The player character's interactions with the other simulacra are mostly professional, friendly, or rarely, quite antagonistic. Meanwhile, Tian Lang seems to be shipped with the player character as most interactions, mail, and messages of the real one and the simulacrum give the impression that he is awkwardly flirting with the player character.
• Shout-Out:
  • Sometimes, you can find the Hyenas dancing Gangnam Style as an Idle Animation.
  • If you look at the side of some of the beached ships in Aesperia, you'll find the Unlimited Blade Works chant spray-painted on them.
  • One of the NPCs in Mirroria will tell the player to "Better call Swall" and replicate some lines about bringing (shady) justice as a lawyer from the show.
  • Saki Fuwa's CN trailers have her mimicking the famous Chika dance while fawning over her favorite figurine.
  • Joltvile in Domain 9 has two locations named Crouching Tiger and Hidden Dragon.
  • Yan Miao's trailer has the old shoplady mimicking Gintoki's shocked face and later on, Yan Miao similarly wails like Bocchi in her office.
• Shrinking Violet: It's not very obvious, but under her cool and calm exterior, Meryl is so shy that she has a hard time communicating with other people. Unfortunately, her frosty attitude and way of fighting also made it hard for others to relax around her and many prefer to distance from her instead.
• Sinister Scythe: KING's weapon of choice, called the Scythe of the Crow, adds to his already intimidating figure and can temporarily extend its reach by acting like a chain whip, allowing one to pull enemies closer so it's easier to break the enemy's shields.
• Skewed Priorities: In co-op content like Void Rifts or Joint Operations, the game HUD defaults to showing the main objective and a DPS comparison meter, instead of showing the participants' health and roles to help facilitate effective coordination. You can change the HUD to show the right information with a couple of clicks in the right place, but critical information not being displayed by default gets egregious to some.
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World:
  • The Warrens in the northeastern section of Aesperia is completely frozen over and experiences constant snowfall.
  • The southern section of Marshville of Domain 9 is snowy, but the Forbidden Country region is so frigid that it takes a giant furnace to warm things up to survivable temperatures. Even still, several exploration points are frozen over and must be thawed out with a fire weapon.
• Socialization Bonus:
  • Befriending a player before taking their Omnium beacon will allow both players to receive the full rewards of the beacon, incentivizing players to befriend random strangers for a win-win situation.
  • Joining a Crew gives extra perks like access to a Crew Store that yields Relic shards, and a weekly source of Dark Crystals. Bigger crews with more active players can advance to a higher Crew level to unlock better perks like a more diverse Crew Store inventory. Frontier Clash grants you a stacking damage buff for each crewmate in your party.
  • Helping out low-level players or those who have not logged in after a long while grants you Support Points and Return Support Points respectively that can be exchanged for items that are not easily stockpiled. Participating in Vitality-consuming group activities while you don't have enough Vitality yourself also grants you Support Points in lieu of their usual rewards.
  • The Mentorship System released in 3.0 lets higher-level players be mentors to lower-level "apprentices" by accompanying them in group content until they move up the chain and graduate. The more players helped out, the higher the rewards.
• Socketed Equipment: Matrices can be attached to weapons to enhance their stats and provide additional passive effects.
• Springy Spores:
  • Mushroom enemies can be jumped upon harmlessly, with Shirli even showing the player character how to do this early in the story. Mogden even has a minigame where players must bounce on a mushroom and hit a target high up in the air.
  • An exploration puzzle involves bouncing on large blue mushrooms in a specific order. Completing this yields a Nucleus item.
  • Vera has a similar mushroom puzzle, but this one requires players to match up the colors instead, and doing so will yield one nucleus.
  • Joltville's caverns have large floating mushrooms that usually have one energy orb on top.
• Starfish Aliens: The Grayspace Entities in Vera are robotic creatures that resemble aquatic animals and came out of nowhere after the Cataclysm, with no hints where they come from. Later variants found in the Compounding Abyss and beyond begin to resemble Humanoid Aliens and even have human-like qualities like the Abyssal Puppet, Harrah, and Jormungandr.
• Star Scraper: The titular Tower of Fantasy in each region is the tallest architecture in every region that can be seen anywhere on the map. It is possible to scale the Asperia Tower of Fantasy; what's waiting for the player at the top is a very breathtaking view of the whole region and a supply pod containing a title and an avatar frame.
• Starter Equipment: You start with the EM Blade in the prologue, pick up the Combat Blades as the Discharge skill combat tutorial, and then the Composite Bow to fill out your three loadout slots. They (and the Frost Spear) serve as Com Mons in the Special Orders.
• Status Buff: The timestamp technology in Domain 9 gives a huge boost to the player character's attack, elemental attack, and defense power the more the Statues are upgraded just as long as the player stays within the range of an Astral Monument. Without the Field Power Effect, killing a simple mob would take a longer time to do as the enemies in Domain 9 are more powerful than the ones in other locations.
• Super Armor: Various effects and traits can give the player Hyperbody, denoted by their character model glowing gold. It keeps the character's attacks and movements from being interrupted by enemy attacks or status effects.
• Super Move Portrait Attack: If you use a weapon's discharge skill while wearing the matching Simulacrum skin or discharging with Coco and Zeke's weapon, the camera will shift and zoom for cinematic angles of the attack.
• Support Party Member: A few weapons, usually indicated by a support icon, have skills that will heal teammates or sometimes buff their damage. Equipping two support weapons will give a player a benediction resonance, increasing their healing abilities by 100% and a further 100% when in teams.
• Taking the Bullet: Shirli does this twice:
  • Shielding her brother from incoming fire during the Astra Shelter invasion, saving his life but breaking her suppressor in the process. She nearly turned into an Aberrant before Zeke sought the help of the Heirs of Aida.
  • Shielding Ruby from the invading Grayspace Entities just after arriving in Vera, this time they were saved in time by Lin.
• Taking You with Me: The Agent Jason sidequest ends with the titular character luring the guards close to the explosives the player placed before setting it off to destroy the Heirs of Aida facility and to allow the player to escape.
• Talk to Everyone: Many exploration points in the Mirroria expansion require talking to nearly all NPC's to acquire their rewards. Some hidden quests will require going back to the same character everyday.
• Technicolor Blade: Fitting for a cyberpunk-inspired story, blade-type weapons come in different shades of colors from pink to whatever element the blades are.
• Theme Naming: A few overworld minibosses in Asperia are named after a few figures in Greek Mythology. Stheno, Euryale, and Medusa in Vera are named after the Gorgon sisters and the minibosses in the Warren are named after the 12 original Titans.
• Thinking Up Portals: Equipping Nan Ying's Purple Bamboo can allow one to conjure up to two Void Abyss Currents (three at the fifth advancement) that serve as a teleport point at any chosen location. This is helpful for places that have a dearth of teleport points.
• Third-Person Shooter: Gun-type weapons like Samir and Hilda can manually aim their weapons while holding the attack button.
• Time Abyss: Due to the Omnium outbreak, everyone in Aesperia who was affected never aged a day afterward. Franz, Dr. Clair, and the rest of Hykros are at least 50 years older than their actual ages.
• Time Crash: Hykros initially assumes Vera to be on a different planet, but it's another continent that's part of Aida. Later in the story, it's revealed the Omnium accident caused the planet Aida to fall into this, and its continents are scattered into different time planes as a result.
• Timed Mission:
  • Frontier Clash, Bygone Phantasm, Origin of War, Void Rift/Abyss, and Sequential Phantasm require players to kill the enemies or bosses within a tight time limit to receive rewards.
  • Wormhole stages have a time limit, but when you run that timer down, you get a Damage Over Time that constantly threatens your character as opposed to the stage ending immediately.
  • When you enter Grayspace, you have 8 minutes to do as much as you can before you are kicked back into normal Vera. Twilight Zone has a similar timer, but the time limit is 8 hours, which is more than enough time to clear up the zone.
• Toxic Phlebotinum: Omnium is an energy source from the Comet Mara that humans harnessed and researched to help benefit humanity. Unfortunately, scientists realized too late that it is also a radioactive substance that slowly contaminated all the Omnium Towers and gradually spread to the environment, causing a disease where humans and creatures exposed to it will turn violent aberrants.
• Trauma-Induced Amnesia:
  • Alyss was Saki's former captain called M-Sec 002, but she was gravely injured protecting Mirroria from a Grayspace invasion and lost all her memories as a result. Everyone who knew her before was given a gag order not to reveal her true identity and to call her M-Sec 2000 to protect her mental state. It's revealed that this amnesia is caused by abyssants trying to invade her mind, but she has them locked in a stalemate. However, the stalemate has led 002 to become bound to the Abyssant holding her captive, and defeating this Abyssant also causes 002 to disappear, so Alyss never recovers her memories.
  • The severity of the battle during Tower Of Fantasy raid and the bumpy journey in the temporal wormhole caused Zeke to lose his memory upon landing in Domain 9. He took the moniker Ming Jing after being Master Yue found and took care of him.
• The Trickster: Samir loves to play pranks on other people and she has a reputation for being a troublemaker in Hykros. In her story, she subjects the messenger Hykros sent, namely the player, to life-threatening pranks after stealing the T-04 chip and pretending to be Huma. She later apologizes to the player after meeting each other again in Vera, albeit with some prodding from the real Huma.
• Underground Monkey: Since all the locations used to be part of Aida, expect a few monsters to be similar to each other
  • The lizard-type enemies (including Sobek and Magma) in Aesperia and Vera are copy-cats of each other, with only a few differences in attack animations. The in-verse reason for the similarity is that Aesperia lizard-type enemies are robotic versions of the wildlife in Vera.
  • The Grayspace Entities found in Confounding Abyss and some of the Darkness Entities in Domain 9 are nearly the exact copies of each other, with only a few minor differences. In lore, they are the exact entities that invaded and adapted to the Domain 9 environment.
  • The Hornfeather, Archeagle, and Nightmare Scourge enemies are the exact model of wildlife creatures that are colored depending on their element and location, which are yellow, blue, and purple respectively.
  • Terribears and Horror Beasts are the same creature with only a few minor differences in color like how the former has darker fur.
• Under the Sea: The Grand Sea is a vast underwater landscape inhabited by luminescent flora and many kinds of sea creatures that players can collect for resources or research materials. Players are given a Mini Pelican relic and an underwater vehicle to help explore the vast underwater level.
• Underwater City: Innars is located deep in the Grand Sea ocean floor and only accessible by swimming towards it with the help of a breathing apparatus. Currently headed by Archon Fiona, it is the only successful project in trying to expand human civilization in Vera.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change:
  • Claire's dream machine, training machines, the Mirroria Funzone machines, and events usually feature a random mishmash of minigames that players can earn rewards every day, like a Railway Shooter, a Rhythm Game, a climbing minigame, a racing game, and a Platform Game.
  • Two of the Joint Operations take the party on a brief deviation from the usual dungeon combat to put them in a racing minigame or a rhythm minigame before the instance's third boss.
• Utility Weapon:
  • Your weapon shatter rate remains the same regardless of its level, so some players bring in an un-upgraded high shatter weapon solely to help break boss shields. Hilda's Terminator, for instance, is a high-shatter ranged weapon that everyone is practically guaranteed to have (as an SR), and gets brought out to break the shields of the airborne Interdimensional Frostfire Dragon.
  • Zero's Negating Cube creates 5 orbs that damage enemies close to the user, which players use to AFK farm honeycombs and even mount parts.
  • Elemental weapons can destroy crystal formations of their matching elements, yielding elemental ores for weapon upgrades. Fire weapons can burn Kerosenia, Tar Pits, and Thornvines that block chests and orbs containing nuclei, and can even thaw out frozen-over devices in Marshville. Ice weapons are useful to cool off lava pools to retrieve the nuclei within.
  • Long-ranged weapons can shoot down dandelions and drones containing nuclei with ease, and snipe the floating elemental orbs to unlock certain supply pods in Vera.
  • While wielding Alyss's weapon, holding down the dash button transforms the player into a dragonfly and lets them fly over gaps as long as their stamina permits it.
  • Lan's weapon, when out of combat, can generate a floating parasol within a certain range of your character. Using her out-of-combat skill (which has a very short cooldown) lets you teleport to that parasol, increasing your movement options in addition to the Relics you can use. Double-jumping with this as the active weapon deploys the parasol, letting your character glide through the air and altering their descent trajectory.
  • While wielding Rubilia's weapon, holding the dash button causes the player to briefly take flight at the end of the dash.
  • Nan Yin's flute can create teleportation portals anywhere on the map, handy for places that have a dearth of teleportation points.
  • A prolonged dash while wielding Yanuo's weapon gives you temporary stealth and a speed buff. Attacking unleashes a stronger attack with a buff attached, in exchange for dropping the stealth. Holding the attack button lets you freely aim and toss the weapon like a javelin, and temporarily allow you to do a short-range teleport to where the weapon landed.
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: The Omnium Towers you deactivate to illustrate each section of Aesperia's map are all pointed to the titular Tower of Fantasy. As you progress to the end of Aesperia's story arc you are eventually led to the central section of the continent and scale the Tower to fight the Angels of Clemency.
• Video Game Dashing: Players have 3 dashes that charge up after each use which allows players to sprint and dodge enemy attacks. Dodging an attack with proper timing triggers Phantasia to slow enemies and supercharge your weapons' charge meters.
• Virtual Training Simulation: Weapon trials and some of the game's tutorials are conducted in a virtual training facility.
• Visual Innuendo: The interactable cacti that serve as exploration points in Vera are usually a tall cactus with a pink flower bud on top, flanked by two ball cacti.
• Warm-Up Boss: The first Boss Enemy encountered in the Main Story quest during the attack on the Astra Shelter is Commander Habaka, and this is the point where Wanderers are taught the Phantasia mechanic. It's easy to practice said mechanic on him as all his attacks are telegraphed and he hits like a wet paper.
• Walk on Water: Applying a maxed-out Meryl Simulacrum trait freezes the air around your character. If you're on or near water it will freeze your immediate surroundings, creating a carpet of ice to walk on.
• Wall Run: The Speedwalkers relic can let players run on walls anywhere in Domain 9 for a set duration, making it easy to traverse its mountainous terrain with ease.
• We Can Rebuild Him: To prevent Shirli from turning into an aberrant, Zeke seeks out the Sage who can conver her into the cyborg "Angel of Clemency," named Nemesis.
• Welcome to Corneria: The dominium NPC shops in Tianhe Bazaar all speak the same handful of phrases as each other whenever one interacts with them.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist:
  • The Heirs of Aida aim to cause a massive planet-wide time retracement to prevent the Cataclysm by halting Omnium research from the get-go. However, they do this without considering the humans who have adjusted to the post-Cataclysm environment, and they also have not considered the consequences of a second failed time retracement. In the Affinity conversations with Frigg's Simulacrum, the player character goes into a long tirade against the Heirs about their misguided goals.
  • One driving question in the Domain 9 chapter is how and why Nan Yin turned traitor and sided with the Darkness. Then it's revealed that Nan Yin has gained the ability to control the Darkness by merging with the ancient technology in the Black Jade Ruins during the Hendeca County Calamity and spent all this time amassing Darkness Entities to create an Enemy Civilwar to kill the Hive Queen by herself. Ji Yu and Ling Han acknowledge that her sacrifice brought Domain 9 time to recover, but that doesn't excuse all the death and destruction she directly caused.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: During the prologue, the player can pick between two Wanderers to decide the gender of their character. The one who was not chosen is never seen or heard from again, though there are hints that they hadn't survived the ambush.
• Wide-Open Sandbox: Clearly taking from its inspiration.
• Wutai: Domain 9 has a traditional Chinese aesthetic in contrast to the Sci-Fi setting of the first two locations. While Mirroria has such elements as well, it's more of a Friendly Local Chinatown within a Neon City.
• Wuxia: Domain 9 is also a love letter to many Wuxia themes and tropes while at the same time combining it with a Cyberpunk aesthetic. Characters released during this phase are either themed from The Four Gods or lifted straight from Wuxia novels like Ling Han, Fei Se, and Nan Ying.
• X-Ray Sparks: If your character or an enemy takes Volt damage, this will happen to them.
• You All Look Familiar: Many generic NPCs share the same model which is noticeable in Vera, where you can see the same models in every building.