Video Game / Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus

Warning: This page contains unmarked Late-Arrival Spoilers for Wolfenstein: The New Order.

Danke schoen, darling, danke schoen...

"You take freedom away from the American people, you're playing with fire. And I intend to pour some gasoline!"

— B.J. Blazkowicz

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus is the tenth game in the Wolfenstein series, and Sequel to the 2014 First-Person Shooter game Wolfenstein: The New Order. It was developed by MachineGames and published by Bethesda for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC, and was released worldwide on 27th October 2017, with a Nintendo Switch release on 29th June 2018.

Like The New Order, The New Colossus is set in an Alternate History where Nazi Germany won World War II. The game once again follows B.J. Blazkowicz, picking up after his assassination of General Wilhelm "Deathshead" Strasse as he recovers from his injuries sustained at the end of the last game. With the Nazis' power base in Europe now in ruins, B.J. and his allies set their sights on The United States, in hopes of sparking a second American Revolution and destroying the Nazi grip on the world once and for all. The game focuses heavily on character building, analyzing Blazkowicz's emotional state and background while also giving more attention to the supporting cast from The New Order.

A series of three Downloadable Content campaigns, collectively called The Freedom Chronicles, were also released. Each campaign focuses on a different playable character with their own playstyle and takes place in a different part of the United States. The Chronicles are framed as in-universe comic books written by Curtis Everton, a character present on Eva's Hammer in the main game.

In 2017, Titan Comics published a prequel comic book series called Wolfenstein written by Dan Watters and art by Piotr Kowalski and Ronilson Freire.

The game's immediate sequel, Wolfenstein: Youngblood, is a Gaiden Game that takes place in the 1980s and focuses on BJ's twin daughters Jessica and Sophia. However, MachineGames have stated that a third full game in the series is in the works, which will likely complete the New Order trilogy.

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This game features examples of:

• A Boy and His X: The reveal trailer featured a fake commercial, in the style of old series like Lassie, about a young girl... and her car-sized, fire-breathing Nazi robot dog called "Liesel".
• Abusive Parents:
  • Rip Blazkowicz beat his wife, constantly belittled BJ for not being "manly" enough, and once forced BJ to shoot the family dog as punishment for being friends with (or judging from his words, showing common decency toward) a black girl. When BJ learns that Rip sold BJ's Jewish mother Zofia out to the Nazis, BJ kills his father without remorse.
    BJ: I'll be in the grave, rotting away... and still a better daddy than you.
  • Frau Engel constantly makes fun of her daughter Sigrun's weight, discusses the sexual fantasy Sigrun wrote down in her diary to her subordinates, tries to force Sigrun to murder a prisoner, torments Sigrun with that prisoner's severed head, and leaves Sigrun to the Kreisau Circle's mercy when she defies her.
• Action Dad: Even though BJ is not a father yet, since his children are on the way, he is determined to not let them grow up in a Crapsack World run by Nazis.
• Action Girl: Anya now gets to show off the skills she had in her backstory, occasionally showing up on the front lines of battle. Including one scene right at the end where she dual-wields assault rifles, bare-chested and heavily pregnant with twin girls.
• Adolf Hitlarious: The man himself shows up on Venus, a pathetic senile old man with bladder issues and an cartoonishly violent temper. Mel Brooks would be proud.
• American Eagle: The Show Within a Show Blitzmensch features an eagle-themed American villain called "Illegal Eagle" as one of the members of Blitzmensch's Rogues Gallery.
• America Saves the Day: Inverted; it's actually up to the European resistance cell to take America back from the Nazi regime.
• An Arm and a Leg: In the Fergus timeline, his arm is lopped off by Frau Engel at the end of the prologue level. If Wyatt was chosen, he receives a huge facial scar instead.
  • Before BJ kills Rip, he chops his hand off.
  • In the ending, Blazkowicz chops off Engel's arm before killing her.
  • Since B.J. uses hatchets instead of knives for melee combat in this game, stealth kills and combat takedowns feature no small amount of limbs being chopped off.
• And This Is for...: Just before he executes Frau Engel in the ending of the game, B.J. remarks, "This is for Caroline".
• Anguished Declaration of Love: Sigrun hits Grace and tells her to stop antagonizing her, then turns to Bombate and cries while telling him she loves him and doesn't understand why he won't return her affection. She concludes with declaring that even if he doesn't love her, she'll be thinking of him when alone in her bedroom later, and there's nothing he can do about it.
• Anti-Frustration Feature:
  • Areas crucial to the plot that cannot be revisited at will (e.g. Section 7, the Ausmerzer, the Oberkommando, etc...) only have readables for the player to collect. Any missed collectibles are deposited into the Vault area of the Eva's Hammer after their respective missions are completed, ensuring that nothing is lost despite the game's lack of a chapter selector.
  • Collectibles themselves are much easier to find now that instead of killing the commander without being detected, you just have to kill them, thereby making the stealth segments largely optional.
  • Enigma Codes (aka the only collectibles that actually do something) are now found by killing Commanders instead of being hidden, making it near-impossible to miss them.
• Arc Words: "The old and the weak are doomed". This is a phrase used by Rip to justify his Social Darwinist ways that BJ repeats for various situations. He initially uses it to describe his broken body, eventually using it to describe how he's coming after Frau Engel.
• Artificial Limbs: Fergus now has a robotic right arm, which is fairly wonky to use, seeing how he struggles with trying to eat a cookie without hitting himself in the face repeatedly.
• Artifact Title: The titular Castle Wolfenstein was last visited in Wolfenstein: The Old Blood.
• Artificial Brilliance: The enemy AI in this game has been updated to be able to form and field quite sophisticated tactics against the player. Hiding behind a tall cover will have them split up to flank the player while the other half of the squad stays behind to lay down suppression fire. Blazkowicz strutting around on his Battle Walker and gaining the advantage of height? They will throw grenades or unleash Kampfhunds to knock him down on his ass.
• Artificial Stupidity: Conversely, the enemy AI in this game can really struggle against a player sitting behind a low cover like, say, a wrecked car in the middle of the street. If a cover lets the enemy see and shoot at the player, but not reliably hitting them, their AI will freak out and either attempt to throw grenades, which can be tossed back for some easy kills, or just run around like a flock of headless chickens for a good while until Blazkowicz shows his face once more, where they will likely repeat the whole charade from scratch. It is not for nothing that the Manhattan Ruins district is the perfect spot for farming enemy grenade kills.
• As the Good Book Says...: At the end of the game, if Wyatt survives, he will deliver a Rousing Speech while quoting Hosea 8:7a to show the Nazis who sow the wind that the American people "will be the whirlwind."
• Authority Equals Asskicking: The Ubercommander assassination targets have 5 times the health of the basic Mooks, able to shrug off multiple headshots before dropping, and are equipped with rocket launcher pistols that can kill you in 2 hits with full health and armor. Averted with General Engel, who turns out to be a Zero-Effort Boss in the end. And technically averted even further with Adolf Hitler. The grand leader of the entire Nazi empire is a frail, senile old man you can kill one with single stomp. Granted, doing so gets you instantly shot by his guards, but most players will agree it's well worth the price.
• Babies Ever After: Invoked; B.J. gives making the world a better place as his new motivation for taking down the Nazis, as Anya is pregnant with B.J.'s twins.
• Badass Boast:
  • From Blazkowicz himself on why the Nazis shouldn't have conquered America:
    B.J. Blazkowicz: You take freedom away from the American people, you're playing with fire. And I intend to pour some gasoline!
  • B.J. also delivers one in the final scene of the game, after he's lopped off Frau Engel's arm and buried an axe into her face live on television. It's also partly Waxing Lyrical, as after the final scene plays out, a cover of "We're Not Gonna Take It" by Twisted Sister plays over the credits.
    Blazkowicz: Lady, is that the best you got? Then your best won't do. You're among wolves now. And these are our woods.
  • Just before that, during the final battle against the Destroyer robots on the deck of the Ausmerzer:
    B.J Blazkowicz: Can you feel it, General? You are the old and weak. And this is your day of doom.
• Badass in Distress: Although still a total badass, B.J. needs to be rescued by Anya and the crew multiple times (including once posthumously after having his head cut off) throughout the course of the game.
• Bad "Bad Acting": At the movie audition, B.J. not only reads his lines off of his hand, but he delivers them in a very wooden way as well.
• Bag of Spilling: The upgrades to the Laserkraftwerk earned over the course of The New Order have mysteriously vanished when Set gives the weapon back to BJ at the start of The New Colossus.
  • Might overlap with Nice Job Breaking It, Hero, since the change is handwaved with Set explaining he made some "improvements," that have turned a long range weapon capable of frying multiple enemies per second into a glorified battle rifle.
  • Averted halfway through the game, when BJ gets captured and subsequently beheaded on Live TV. After his head is attached to an artificial body, Set mentions that Anya went out to the ruins of BJ's childhood home to retrieve all the weapons he'd dropped.
    Set: She is relentless, this girl. She's a keeper.
• Battle Couple: Now that Anya has Taken a Level in Badass, she and BJ often fight side by side. In the final mission, the boarding party the resistance sends to capture the massive Nazi airship Ausmerzer consists solely of BJ and Anya. The two of them face overwhelming odds, but complete their mission unscathed.
  • Not only that, but Anya saves BJ from an ambush, losing her top to a fire-breathing Panzerhund which leaves her topless but screaming in fury while she dual-wields assault rifles as blood rains down on her. BJ is suitably impressed by the sight.
• Better Than New: By the time New Colossus begins, B.J. is a battered man who is still suffering from the injuries he incurred at the end of New Order, confined to a wheelchair and unable to do much of anything unless he has the Da'at Yichud Powered Armor. This is also reflected in gameplay, as his overall maximum health is capped at 50 instead of the first game's 100 when he's not in the suit. Once Frau Engel decapitates him, his head is saved by the Resistance and grafted onto a new cyborg body, with his maximum health returning to the default 100.
• Big Applesauce: Or The Big Rotten Apple variety, as a result of being obliterated by the Nazis' nuclear weapons as mentioned in The New Order. The survivors are holed up in the top of the Empire State Building to avoid being poisoned by the fallout below.
• Blatant Lies: As a propaganda paper, the Star-Spangled Daily is bloated with them. Apparently, 99.8% of America strongly approves of Reich leadership, while the remaining 0.2% is simply undecided. Not to mention the Reich has also managed to reduce the amount of lying propaganda in American newspapers down to 0%.
• Bloodier and Gorier: The axe executions in this game are much more graphic and bloodier than the knife executions in The New Order, since they involve hacking limbs off as opposed to just stabbing or shanking. Enemies also bleed a lot more and their blood can even splatter over the player's weapons!
• Bondage Is Bad: One note you can find is a Nazi officer requesting his friend's wife "wear the pigskin costume, and remember, no safewords this time."
• Bookends:
  • Within the game itself, the opening and closing levels are this. In the opening level, Fergus loses his arm or Wyatt gets a facial scar when Frau Engel tries to goad Sigrun into executing them. In the final level, B.J. returns the favor by lopping her arm off with a hatchet before burying it in her face.
  • BJ hangs a lampshade on this during the penultimate mission, which has him fall onto a conveyor-belt and just ride along shooting Nazis, just like the opening level of the game.
• Boring, but Practical: The Sturmgewehr with the Marksman Scope and Armor Piercing attachment. While lacking in the sheer volume of bullets like the Maschinenpistole or the Nazi pulping fun of the Shockhammer, it's ability to do high semi-auto damage and pierce armor makes it perfect for shredding everything from the lowly mooks all the way up to a Panzerhund with a magazine or less.
• Boss Warning Siren: The final boss's soundtrack cue starts with one.
• The Butcher: Ubercommander Eckstein is called "the Butcher of Boston." What atrocity he committed to earn that moniker is never specified, but it was bad enough that even other Nazis consider him to be a depraved monster.
• Brain in a Jar: Well, Head in a Jar. After B.J.'s decapitation, his head is covertly saved by The Kreisau Circle, and kept alive by one of Set's contraptions. As a result B.J. regains consciousness as an disembodied head in a jar, and stays that way for a little while, while Set prepares a new body for him. Amusingly, it actually means that he resembles his depiction on the HUD from the old Wolfenstein 3D.
• Brain Transplant: Or head transplant, to be more precise. Set created technology to save Shoshana, the Siamese cat he found and adopted on the U-Boat, which was suffering from bowel cancer when he found it in the sub's reactor room, by perfectly transplanting its head onto the body of a brain dead squirrel monkey. It's later used to transfer B.J.'s head to a new body. The whole time, it is played completely straight, and near-medically correct, as Set and the Kreisau Circle make sure to get oxygen into B.J.'s brain to keep it functioning and add additional systems into their temporary home for the head to keep B.J. alive while they prepare for the actual surgery.
• Call-Back:
  • The New Colossus being the almost limitlessly-applicable poem B.J. recites at the end of The New Order.
  • Like New Order, the first level begins with a situation where B.J. and several Resistance members are caught and held down by the Big Bad (Deathshead in the previous game, Frau Engel) and a select few commandos. Unlike New Order, though, there is no Sadistic Choice — Engel plans to execute everyone, and kills Caroline before Sigrun defects and begins to help the heroes.
  • In the same scene, in the Fergus timeline, when Engel is toying with the captive Caroline, Fergus shouts "Don't you fucking touch her!" much like how he stood up for Wyatt in New Order.
• Came Back Strong: At one point, BJ is captured and decapitated on live television in Washington DC. But, the body his head was attached to was dying anyway, and as luck seemed to have it, Set had a headless supersoldaten holed away in his lab...
• Casual Interplanetary Travel: The Nazi regime has built a base on Venus. All it takes to get there and back is a one-pilot UFO about the size of a trailer home. How long the trip lasts never gets mentioned, but it's certainly far less than the 3 months such a journey would take at its absolute minimum distance with modern propulsion.
• Chainsaw-Grip BFG: The various Supersoldaten drop four of them: the Lasergewehr, the Dieselgewehr, the Hammergewehr and the Ubergewehr. All deliver immense firepower in a jiffy but are too big to fit in B.J.'s arsenal.
• Cool Versus Awesome: From the final mission - a topless pregnant lady dual-wielding a pair of machine guns versus a giant Nazi robot dog with a flamer in its mouth, all while getting showered in the Ludicrous Gibs of the Nazis she'd just blown up with a pair of grenades, anyone?
• Common Tongue: A recurring motif is the Nazis' effort to make German all of their conquered territories' lingua franca, "encouraging" America to learn before "Changeover Day" on July 4, 1961, when English will become a banned language and speaking it is made punishable by execution.
• Continuity Nod: Panzerhounds can't be misled by grenades, likely due to Wyatt tricking one into swallowing a stielhandgrenate by telling it to "fetch!" in the prologue of ''The New Order."
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: In the previous game, Frau Engel was The Dragon for the Nazi hierarchy represented by General Deathshead, an Orcus on His Throne Mad Scientist who relied mostly on his horrific creations to combat the heroes. In The New Colossus, Engel has become a Dragon Ascendant and acts as a Frontline General who actively hounds BJ and his friends throughout the game. In spite of her efforts, however, Engel tends to fall short of Deathshead in numerous ways:
  • At the start of the game, Engel manages to capture BJ, Fergus/Wyatt, and Caroline, and manages to swiftly execute the latter. However, Caroline is "merely" killed while Deathshead in his counterpart scene takes it a step further and turns Wyatt/Fergus into a slave to fight BJ at the end. Deathshead also has his surviving prisoners trapped at the mercy of one of his giant mooks while Engel is actively thwarted by her own daughter before she manages to kill Fergus/Wyatt and BJ.
  • At the end of New Order, Deathshead's grenade trick manages to critically injure BJ and is the reason why he's so weak at the start of New Colossus, slowly dying and unable to fight without Powered Armor. Meanwhile, Engel's public execution of BJ actually manages to not only revitalize him thanks to the efforts of the Kreisau Circle and the grafting of a new artificial body, but greatly lower the guard of the Nazi regime, who believe BJ to be dead.
  • Deathshead is Properly Paranoid with an arsenal of weapons and gadgets at his disposal, resulting in a climactic boss fight at the end of New Order. Engel, on the other hand, believing BJ to have stayed dead, is taken by surprise and swiftly killed in live television on a talk show.
• Crapsaccharine World: Roswell, New Mexico. It's bright, colorful, looks similar to archetypal 1960's America and its citizens are polite and friendly. But there are Nazi soldiers everywhere, Swastika banners and flags all over the place, Klansmen in full costume walking down the street and people speaking positively about the purging of undesirables from society, espousing racist ideologies and looking forward to the next slave auction.
• Crapsack World: And of course, the setting is still in a Nazi-dominated planet. For some America specific examples:
  • New York is a bombed out nuclear wasteland, with millions of corpses still choking the streets and the underground tunnels. The few survivors are forced to live on the top of the Empire State Building to avoid the lethal radiation.
  • New Orleans is a walled ghetto where the Nazis send undesirables to fend for themselves. Not only are the inhabitants effectively trapped in the city, but they must deal with regular incursions from Nazi death squads sent in to wipe them out.
• Create Your Own Hero: Teaching kids that violence solves everything, making them learn to use a gun and instill belief that nothing is worse than being weak - that's not unlike the Reich's concept of raising future soldiers. While the previous games already had the delicious irony of William being essentially an Aryan-looking super soldier Made of Iron mowing down actual Nazis, here we see the roots of this, Rip's twisted and cruel treatment may have had an impact on his son becoming a strong and remorseless fighter... for the cause that is the opposite of Rip's own. Many kids with backgrounds like BJ's have grown into killers, but BJ has grown into a killer of Nazis, hating everything that's wrong with them long before Adolf Hitler even came to power.
• Cutting Off the Branches: Averted. The player can re-choose whether Wyatt or Fergus survived 1946 to assist in The New Order at the start of this game. Also, regardless of which choice is made, both characters survive the events of this game, as the chosen character shows up for the final Dare to Be Badass speech.
• Dare to Be Badass: The ending speech. It's delivered either by Wyatt or by Grace and Horton, depending on who you chose to save at the beginning of the game. Either way, the speech made on TV is meant to inspire the American people to rise up in revolt against the Nazis, and to not settle for their oppression for one moment longer.
• Darkest Hour: All the events leading up to Blazkowicz's execution, and the execution itself.
• Darker and Edgier: As if Wolfenstein: The New Order wasn't dark and edgy enough in its depiction of a Crapsack World run by Nazis, The New Colossus seems to be pulling no punches in showing what the Nazis have done to America, from nuking New York to ethnic cleansing in New Orleans. The backstories and tensions between some of the characters are also more jarring to watch.
  • If Wyatt is the one who survived the war, then the game takes on a slightly more serious and dramatic tone. Wyatt has to overcome his drug addiction and his personal demons from the war, and there's an intense scene where B.J has to prevent his suicide. In the ending, Wyatt is the one who gives the final speech to the American people urging them to rise up against the Nazis. He nails it.
• Dark Lord on Life Support: By this point in the timeline, Adolf Hitler is 71 years old and a paranoid wreck of an old man prone to bouts of senility and losing control of his bladder and gag reflex. When he shows up to the casting for his latest propaganda flick, he coughs, pukes, pisses blood, mistakes the director for his mother and puts his head in her boobs for comfort, and shoots all of the actors bar B.J. for reasons ranging from that they angered him by not showing the respect he demanded (Ronald calling him "Mr. Hitler"), failed catastrophically at the audition (Llewellyn during the mock fight, B.J. if you make him say the wrong lines during the reading), or even just because they'd already picked another actor and didn't need him anymore (Johnny).
• Daydream Surprise: When B.J. gets captured by Irene Engel, and then put on trial for his crimes, he is suddenly able to burst from his shackles, despite his body being stated many times to be breaking down, and massacre everyone in the courtroom. He then finds his mother, Zofia, and has a touching scene with her, afterwards he wakes up and the trial proceeds as normal.
• Deadline News: Happens to Frau Engel at the end; as she is happily chatting away on the Jimmy Carver Show Blazkowicz strolls onto stage and introduces her face to his hatchet.
• Death by Cameo: Ronald Reagan shows up at the casting call on Venus just long enough to introduce himself to the producer and then get shot in the head for calling Hitler "Mr. Hitler" instead of "Mein Fuhrer." And then shot eight more times.
• Death by Irony:
  • Super Spesh, a paranoid conspiracy theorist, dies because he was insufficiently paranoid, and forgot the oppressive government had him profiled. Turned out they saw his whole plan from the moment he walked in, and conspired to let him get to BJ for their own amusement.
  • Frau Engel herself in spades, at the end. She cuts off Fergus' arm and makes sure that BJ's execution is as public as possible. BJ returns the favor by walking in on her during the Jimmy Carver Show and hacks off her arm before burying his hatchet in her face, in front of millions of viewers.
• Death World: Venus is as much of this in the game as it is in real life^note Venus has a concentration of atmospheric greenhouse effect gases several orders of magnitude greater than Earth. As a result, the average temperature on Venus is 464 ºC/867 ºF. When walking outside, you need to keep a constant eye on the coolant level in your atmospheric suit—the second it runs out, you'll burn to death.
• Defector from Decadence: A member of the Nazis Frau Engel's daughter Sigrun joins the rebels and plays a role analogous to Klaus from the first game, providing info on strategic military locations and other classified intel.
• Degraded Boss:
  • One of the new enemy types seems to be a more streamlined "mass produced" version of the Ubersoldiers. It's not nearly as durable as Deathshead's original models, going down after about 40 assault rifle bullets instead of a few hundred, but is encountered significantly more often as well as being equipped with dual laser guns and a jetpack that lets them perform rapid forward charges.
  • The Panzerhunds also count despite, or perhaps because they've been upgraded with flamethrowers; where before they where fast-moving and aggressive and had to be avoided almost as often as killed, here they're content to slowly walk towards you while spouting flame; still dangerous but surprisingly easy to outrun and not as viciously damaging. Plus, those tanks of gas on its back allowing it to spout flame make for handy targets.
  • Inverted with the Zitadelles, which are significantly larger, tougher, and more heavily armed than the Guard Robots from The New Order, essentially serving as boss encounters, with there only being about 6 of them in the entire main campaign.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: Aside from the obvious racism of the Nazis, there are references to America's own pre-war racism:
  • Among Rip Blazkowicz's many sins was punishing his son for playing with a black girl, on top of his frequent complaints about "coloreds" and "queers".
  • One of the freedom fighters mentioned being barred from a movie theater for being black.
  • And there's the good ol'Klan making some appearances.
• Dented Iron: Because of all of the damage BJ sustained at the end of the last game, his maximum health is severely reduced, from 100 to 50. At least until he gets a new super soldier body a little more than halfway through the game.
• Despair Event Horizon: BJ gets closer and closer to it as the game progresses. His fight with Deathshead wounded him to the point that he feels like if he takes off the armor he's wearing, he'll just fall apart. The armor itself is a constant reminder of its previous user, Caroline. He's only got a few months to live, max. It's likely he'll never see his kids at all, leaving Anya to raise them alone in a world ruled by Nazis. It gets to the point that he hallucinates a quiet moment with his mother (who was sent to a concentration camp long ago) to get a little bit of security. The only thing that keeps him from giving up completely is the continued existence of Nazis to kill. However, once he gets a head transplant onto a strong, healthy supersoldier body, his vigor and optimism return with a vengeance.
• Developer's Foresight: In Roswell, BJ faces a giant robot, with a vulnerable back...and a nice, big gap between its legs that's perfect for sliding under. Try it. He'll sit on you.
• Different States of America: Once the Reich took over America, they renamed it the "American Territories" and dissolved the 48 states, splitting the country into four occupation zones: West, Central, Midwest, and East.
• Disc-One Nuke: The charged shot upgrade to the Laserkraftwerk rifle deals massive damage, with a headshot from it taking away something like 80% to 90% of the health of a Zitadelle robot, Panzerhund, or even the Final Boss. It's only available in the Fergus timeline, though. The Wyatt timeline equivalent, the Dieselkraftwerk, is stronger against groups of Mooks or even the Giant Mook enemies but significantly less effective against the game's Boss in Mook's Clothing enemies.
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  • BJ's flashback with his Jerkass of a father involves shooting his dog for simply being friends with (or judging from his words, showing common decency toward) an African-American girl.
  • Caught speaking English after "Changeover Day"? Execution!
  • In one mission, you disguise yourself as an actor auditioning for a role in a Nazi propaganda film. Adolf Hitler himself is present during the audition, and he will personally murder any actor whose performance he deems unsatisfactory, or even just for calling him "Mr. Hitler" instead of Mein Führer.
• Dirty Coward: The Nazis in the intro are noticeably only mocking of B.J. after they realize he's disabled.
  • The diary of a soldat hiding in Section F of the U-Boat has him angrily ranting about how he'll avenge the death of his friend Johann at the hands of B.J, and how the Germans are the strongest and bravest warriors on earth... and then ends with him lamenting how he has to piss in a bucket as he won't dare to use the level's flush toilet out of fear he'll attract too much attention and B.J will come back.
  • Rip Blazkowicz sold out his Jewish wife, friends and neighbors to the Nazis. He claims he did it to earn status and wealth, but saving his own skin was likely another factor.
• The Dog Bites Back: After Sigrun defects to the resistance she gets nothing but flak from everyone except for B.J. and Wyatt about her heritage and former allegiance. After Grace calls her a Nazi one too many times Sigrun gives an epic "The Reason You Suck" Speech (and bitch slap) that doubles as an affirmation of her allegiances and a moment of pointing out the hypocrisy of the resistance treating her like dirt because of her heritage, much like the Nazis did to every one of them. Everyone takes the hint and starts treating her much better.
• Do Not Adjust Your Set: A heroic version. At the end of the game, the resistance infiltrates the set of the Jimmy Carver Show, where Frau Engel is doing a live interview, kill Engel, and use the show to broadcast a call to revolution across America.
• Downer Beginning: The opening levels are just one gut-punch after the other. For starters, while it's revealed that BJ survived the ending of The New Order, he's in bad shape because of it and can't even walk. We get flashbacks to his horrific childhood, and his terrifying, loathsome father (if you are a dog lover, play at your own risk). And then Frau Engel shows up, with her daughter Sigrun in tow. Not only is she every bit as horrifically abusive as BJ's father, but she kills Caroline. By chopping her head off with an ax. And then she plays around with the severed head, miming the head "kissing" BJ, and even imitating oral sex with Sigrun (who had refused to kill Caroline). Luckily the tone becomes more lighthearted and adventurous shortly after this whole opening sequence, and aside from a heavy portion around the halfway point, it never gets quite so emotionally grueling again.
• Dragon Ascendant: Frau Engel seems to have taken the role of the main antagonist, since everyone else in B.J.'s Rogues Gallery is dead, with the exception of Adolf Hitler, who seems to have degenerated into a frail, senile old man in the 15 years between the original series and the new games.
• Dual Boss: The game's Final Boss is a fight against a pair of Zerstörer (Destroyer) robots, which are basically robotic King Mook versions of the Ubersoldats, dual-wielding the game's equivalent of the BFG 9000.
• Early Game Hell: When the game starts B.J is wheelchair bound and slowly dying due to injuries sustained at the end of the last game, only able to walk after the first mission because of Caroline's Power Armor. The state of his body means he's down to 50 health maximum in a game where that number can drop fast. After Chapter 5 however, about a third into the game, B.J gets captured and executed by the Nazis giving the resistance an opportunity to retrieve his head and reattach it to a Super-Soldier body, restoring his maximum health to 100.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: The Nazis are still ruling the world and New York is still a bombed-out radioactive wasteland, but Blazkowicz finally gets revenge on Frau Engel, his body is no longer crippled and dying, and he has twins on the way, and he proposes to Anya in The Stinger! Plus, the revolution is back on.
• Elite Mooks/Heavily Armored Mook: The Elite Mooks, particularly the shotgun soldiers, are noticeably more heavily armored than the regular troops, and as a result can take quite a bit more damage (about 3 to 4 times more bullets) if you're not using armor-piercing rounds. However, they are not anywhere nearly as durable as their old counterparts the Fire Troopers and Heavy Troopers from The New Order or The Old Blood, but to compensate are much quicker and appear in much larger numbers.
• Embedded Precursor: Done with a twist as the original Wolfenstein 3-D is presented in its entirety as Wolfstone 3D, with the same gameplay and levels but the setting changed from Nazi bases to Resistance/Terrorist hideouts, with Nazi symbolism, enemy sprites, digitized voices and even some of the music changed appropriately.
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: During the mission in Roswell, B.J. can overhear a conversation between a Nazi officer and an American woman who is way too happy to kiss the Reich's ass. She keeps going on and on about how wonderful Germany is and how they brought real culture and music back to America. When she admits she stopped listening to Mozart because she found out he's an "impure Austrian," the officer points out that not only is Hitler Austrian by birth, but so is his grandmother. He promises to report her name to his superiors and suggests she not step out of line again.
• Evil Is Petty: Frau Engel positively delights in inflicting pain on the members of the Kreisau Circle. Her hatred is arguably justified, since the Circle is directly responsible for her facial disfigurement, but the sadistic extremes she goes to are not, nor is how her sadistic treatment extends to her own daughter.
• Exact Words: During Frau Engel's attack on Eva's Hammer, she proclaims that if B.J. comes to her alone, she will set his captive allies free. What she means is she will set their heads free from their bodies as he is Forced to Watch, which she does to Caroline.
• Expy: A lot of the new weapons in the game share a lot of similarities to weapons from other FPS games, including some of the older Wolfenstein games
  • The Dieselkraftwerk gun is based on the Scar Gun from The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena (made by the same developers as this game), which also fires sticky grenades you can detonate. It also has some similarities to the Napalm Cannon from Blood.
  • The Laserkraftwerk MK II gun behaves similar to both the Rail Gun from the Quake series, and the Gauss cannon from Doom (2016).
  • The Ubergewehr gun is identical the BFG from Quake II and the Doom series.
  • And finally, the Lasergewehr gun is very reminiscent to the Particle Cannon from Wolfenstein (2009).
• Faction Calculus: Just like in the previous game, the differences between the Fergus and Wyatt timelines plays much like a regular example of this trope. The Laserkraftwerk focuses on precise, heavy damage while the Dieselkraftwerk favors guerilla tactics and/or spam attacks.
• Failed a Spot Check:
  • In a diner, an SS officer asks to see B.J.'s identification papers while a wanted poster obstructed by a door is on the wall behind him and a TV shows BJ's face. When he eventually has to leave, he sees the poster and the realization hits him.
  • Subverted with the random guards on the street: if B.J. stands close to one, the guard will comment on how he looks familiar. Unless the player moves away, the guard will soon recognize "Terror-Billy" and open fire.
• Fan Disservice: At one point late in the game, Anya's jacket catches fire and she throws it away while saving B.J. from a group of commandoes as he powers up ODIN. She then pulls out Guns Akimbo and destroys a Panzerhund while topless, covered in blood and screaming. For his part, B.J. is not nearly as freaked out by this and simply says, "Wow..."
• Faux Affably Evil: The Nazi that BJ meets in the soda shop acts very congenial, even handing an obviously anxious mother practically dragging her son out of the establishment her dropped bag. However, as soon as he gets close to BJ, he starts talking about his "Aryan features" and asks him for his identification papers.
• Final Death Mode: Upon beating the game at any difficulty, you'll unlock the Mein Leben difficulty. Starting a game on Mein Leben disables saving and any changes in difficulty. If you die (or quit) at any time, you are immediately taken back to the title screen, and you will have to start the entire game over again.
• Fire-Breathing Weapon: The new model of Panzerhund is equipped with a flamethrower in its mouth.
• First-Person Dying Perspective: During B.J.'s public execution at the hands of Frau Engel we see the whole process from B.J.'s point of view, including the head chopping, and it being separated from his Dented Iron body. The next scene has Frau Engel holding B.J.'s severed head.
• Five-Token Band: The members of the Kreisau Circle each represent a different demographic that the real life Nazis thought worthy of extermination.
  • Set is a Jew.
  • B.J. isn't a practicing Jew, but had a Jewish mother.
    • Both his parents are Polish American, as well.
  • Bombate and Grace are black.
  • Wyatt has become a habitual drug user.
  • Anya is a Slav.
  • Caroline is physically disabled, and also implied to be a lesbian.
  • Max is mentally disabled.
  • Super Spesh is a white male who had a child with a black female.
  • Sigrun is the Token Enemy Minority of the group since she's a former Nazi.
  • Horton and his crew are Communists.
  • Fergus is Scottish.
• Flying Saucer: The Nazis seem to be building them in Area 52, strengthening Spez's theory about space aliens. It's later revealed to be the result of Da'at Yichud research reverse-engineered by the Nazis after they took over America.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Shoshana, the cat-monkey hybrid pet Set keeps, demonstrates that the Da'at Yichud have the technology and know-how to transplant heads onto other bodies. This technology is used to save B.J. after he is executed.
  • There's an early scene where a woman attempts to shamelessly flirt with a Nazi officer, showing how some Americans are all too willing to jump into bed with the winners if they can see an opportunity for themselves in it. This foreshadows how Rip Blazkowicz sold out his business associates, his wife and (posthumously) his son to the Nazis.
  • A number of the notes B.J. finds aboard the Eva's Hammer reference certain plot points such as Section F and a (failed) head transplant experiment.
• Friendly Fire Proof: If the player attempts to shoot an allied NPC, BJ will put down his gun instead.
• Game Within a Game: Eva's Hammer has an arcade machine with Wolfenstein 3-D (renamed here as WolfStone 3D) on it, where instead of B.J. fighting the Nazis, it's Elite Hans fighting the Kreisau Circle.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: To represent B.J.'s battered and broken body, your maximum health has gone down from the traditional 100 to 50, and you are either crippled or forced to use the Da'at Yichud power armor to get around. Once his head is transplanted onto the body of a Nazi super soldier about two-thirds through the game, you have a full 100 health again.
• Gargle Blaster: Whatever Horton Boone brews, B.J. is the first person to ever remain coherent after a glass of the stuff. Also one of his allies reminds Horton to not spill it on the table... because it will eat through said table. And that's before getting into the contents of his hangover remedy...
• Gatling Good: The Schockhammer automatic shotgun sports three rotary barrels.
  • Exaggerated with its big brother the Hammergewehr, which has four barrels.
• Good Scars, Evil Scars: BJ and Frau Engel both sport facial scars resulting from the events of The New Order. BJ's is a neat line over his right eye. As for Frau Engel...well, at least the reconstruction of her jaw doesn't interfere with her speech.
  • Averted by Wyatt and Fergus, heroic characters with prominent facial burn scars.
• Gosh Dang It to Heck!:
  • Wyatt can scream like nobody's business, but he'll never actually swear. At one point, he even quotes the trope verbatim after his ear hurts.
  • The residents of Roswell are shown to speak this way, presumably as part of the Nazis' vision for a clean and moral society. One man almost says "shit" at one point, but catches himself and says "shoot" instead.
• Grammar Nazi: A literal example when a Nazi soldier quizzes and criticizes a pair of Klansmen about their German language lessons. He becomes pissed when one of the Klansmen can't say "Danke Schön (thank you)" correctly.

  Nazi Soldier: That was terrible. You're butchering my beautiful language!

• Guns Akimbo: B.J. can still dual-wield guns, but this time he can mix and match his guns, for example wielding an assault rifle in one hand and a shotgun in the other.
• Handicapped Badass: The game starts with B.J. paralyzed from the waist down confined to a wheelchair, and there appears to be at least one whole level where B.J. kills his way through several dozen Nazis while stuck in it. He later gets a Da'at Yichud Powered Armor to turn him into a proper Super-Soldier.
• Happy Ending Override: Both inverted and played straight. B.J. survived the events of The New Order, as impossible as it seems. However, the Nazi rule is far from over despite the Kreisau Circle's globetrotting, Nazi-fighting, giant robot-destroying, moon-visiting escapades; anything that happened in the previous game barely dented the Nazis influence, particularly in the United States.
• Hate Sink: Frau Engel is back, and has somehow become even more despicable than she was in The New Order, taking the reins as Big Bad while reaching new lows each time she appears, whether it be through treating her daughter like dirt or gleefully killing Caroline, Super Spesh, and even BJ himself (even if that last one doesn't stick). And if Engel wasn't enough, the game also introduces Rip Blazkowicz, BJ's horrifying monster of a father who beat his wife and son, beat BJ's dog and forced him to kill her as a twisted punishment for being friends with a black girl, and is not shy about expressing his extremely racist views. Both of these characters fill the player with hatred and revulsion every time they appear, which makes eventually killing them extremely satisfying.
• Harder Than Hard: Two words. Mein. Leben.
• Heel Realization: In the New York bunker, you can find a letter from a soldat's brother who has come to realize that the nazi "manifest destiny" involves murdering people just like him, save the color of their skin.
  "Did God not give them souls, hearts, and minds, just like us? ...We stole their destiny to realize ours."
• Hero with Bad Publicity: Understandably, the Nazis have given B.J. a very bad dose of publicity after his gutting of their science division.
• Higher Understanding Through Drugs: This is why Wyatt continues to take LSD after that accidental first dose. Set is convinced that what he saw relates to Da'at Yichud writings, and after Wyatt's bad trip that members of Da'at Yichud had used it for the same purpose, but none of them had the kind of "clarity" that Wyatt seemed to.
• His Name Is...: Subverted. During a transmission, Wyatt says that the signal is weak. He says "Watch out for..." and appears to cut out, but he just felt light-headed for a moment. He then finishes the transmission by telling you to watch out for Nazi patrols.
• Historical In-Joke: The Roswell Incident is revealed to have been part of the U.S. government's attempts to reverse engineer Da'at Yichud technology in a last-ditch attempt to stop the Reich. Unfortunately, not only did this come too late to save America, but the Nazis proceeded to seize that research for their own ends.
• Hollywood Hate Groups: The Klansmen are depicted in their full robes and wearing their cloth face covers. This makes zero sense, because the robes and masks were adopted by the Klan to keep their members' identities secret to the public to prevent reprisals against their activities. In a modern world with the Nazis in charge and their ideology of aryan supremacy being made law, there would be no need for Klansman to wear their robes and face covers in public, because they'd be in charge and proud of it.
• Humans Are Bastards: Unsurprisingly with regards to the Nazis' atrocities, people are beginning to express this sentiment.
  B.J. Blazkowicz: Monsters did this.
  Grace Walker: Not monsters. Men.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: Has been a standard across the Wolfenstein series, but here it is especially apparent. All of the classic 3D difficulty names return, and while Uber from The New Order is gone, more have taken its place. As you select your difficulty, BJ's face changes accordingly:
  • Can I play, Daddy?: Shows BJ with a baby bonnet and pacifier. Easy difficulty setting for the novice gamer.
  • Don't hurt me.: Shows BJ with a shocked expression. Normal difficulty setting for the casual gamer.
  • Bring 'em on!: Shows BJ with a neutral expression. Normal difficulty setting for the experienced gamer.
  • Do or die!: Shows BJ with a cocky smirk. Hard difficulty setting for the expert gamer.
  • They call me Terror-Billy!: Shows BJ with a Psychotic Smirk, his face sprinkled with blood. Very hard difficulty setting for the heroic gamer.
  • I am death incarnate!: Shows BJ with a Kubrick Stare and a Slasher Smile, more blood splatter on his face. Ultra hard difficulty setting for the fearless gamer.
  • Mein leben: Shows BJ as a lifeless skeleton, still wearing his shirt and with blood spattered across its skull. Same as I am death incarnate!, but it is now a Final Death Mode a la Ultra-Nightmare. One life only - game over if you die.
• Ikea Erotica: A novel The Professor reads aboard the sub has a handful of butchered gardening metaphors that she loudly complains about.
• Immoral Reality Show: "German or Else!", a game show where contestants must demonstrate their knowledge of German or else be sent to a re-education camp.
• Impressive Pyrotechnics: New Order used mostly subdued, realistic explosions and had mechanical enemies just shut down when killed. Not here; explosions are big and fiery, while large robot foes like Panzerhunds dramatically fall down and explode Toku-style.
• Ink-Suit Actor: The majority of the new characters are modeled after their voice actors, i.e. Sigrun Engel is modeled after her own voice actress, Alyssa Preston, while Grace looks like a somewhat rougher Debra Wilson with an afro.
• Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: A downplayed example, but even though some of the heavy weapons (such as the lasergewehr and laserkraftwerk) can vaporize people in one shot and can even melt some metal barriers, you'll find plenty of plain old wooden doors they are unable to even singe.
• Ironic Echo: In the flashback at the start of the game, BJ's father says that "the old and the weak are doomed", which parallels BJ's thinking about his life now that he is disabled. Right before BJ captures the Ausmerzer at the end of the game, he muses that it is Frau Engel who is the old and the weak and that today is her day of doom.
• Irony:
  • Gruber, much like Frau Engel before him, compliments B.J. on his "Aryan" features, not quite realizing that he is half-Jewish until Super Spesh puts a slug in his head.
  • As a meta example, Wolfstone 3D has had some map changes from the original Wolfenstein 3D due to the presence of Nazi Swastika symbols in the map design despite the fact that the game is an in-universe Nazi propaganda game.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Resistance fighters still calling Sigrun a Nazi and not liking her may be caused by more than just her origin. Sigrun loves music and doesn't have a bad singing voice... thing is, she doesn't know any music but Nazi music. When she loudly sings "Mond, Mond, Jah, Jah" by Die Käfer (unlike other Nazi songs in the Wolfenstein universe that are sometimes politically neutral and humorous, this one, while being light-hearted and catchy, outright praises the regime and the conquest of the Solar System), even the otherwise polite and compassionate Set Roth outright tells her to shut up.
• Keystone Army: Averted Trope. Killing Deathshead may have been a hell of a loss, but that doesn't mean the Nazi war machine is going to stop unless La Résistance can force them out.
• Kick the Dog: The reprehensible nature of B.J.'s father is quickly demonstrated in the opening of the game by showing flashbacks of him beating B.J. and his jewish mother, and later tying B.J. to a chair and ordering him to shoot his dog with a shotgun in retaliation for B.J. hanging out with an African-American girl.
• The Klan:
  • They're here and unsurprisingly, they've become quite chummy with the Nazi regime. A grunt even asks a couple Klansmen openly walking about in full garb at one point whether they've taken any German lessons. Historically, while both were racist, white supremacist scumbags, the Klan hated the Nazis after Pearl Harbor, when Hitler sided with the Japanese and the Klan with the US; in the New Order continuity, however, Germany turned on Imperial Japan and converted it to a puppet regime once the Allies were defeated, which may have helped smooth things over a bit. There's also a note in one of the levels in which one chapter of the Klan urges another to accept the alliance with the Nazis, since, you know, death squads and atom bombs...
  • Amazing Grace mentions that the Klan were put in charge of the South, which might have helped their relation with the Nazi.
  • In the New Orleans level demo, there is a message from a local commander named Pohl addressed to his superior. He mentions that the Klan is being used as muscle for the "messiest operations" and complains that they are "dull beyond belief" and that he always has to clean up after their mistakes. It ends with "How do you suggest I improve my control over these morons?"
  • Oddly, even though Klan mooks are in the game, they're never fought in the main campaign, only a couple of the side missions.
• Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: A couple in the Venus chapter. There's Ronald, the actor with a chair with a name ending in -GAN (the rest obscured by a towel), and Hitler's film producer Lady Helene. The later is a bit less obvious, referring to Leni Riefenstahl's first name.
  • Not to mention Jimmy, with a name starting in CA- and ending in -ER who became a talk show host. Bonus points for this version giving this character the namesake of another person famous for peanuts.
• Left the Background Music On: A section of the Venus chapter has a theremin on the soundtrack. Successfully sneaking up on a Nazi officer will reveal him playing the theremin and killing him as he plays will cut the instrument from the background music. ^note Interacting with the instrument afterwards will also reveal that BJ plays a mean theremin.
• Les Collaborateurs: As demonstrated by Adler in Roswell and later by Rip Blazkowicz, some Americans are quite shameless in jumping into bed with the victorious Nazis for their personal gain.
• Life Saving Misfortune: The Kreisau Circle use an actor's audition taking place on Venus to infiltrate one of the Nazi bases there. Blazkowicz and Anya end up kidnapping actor Jules Redfield and the former goes in his place as the role would be none other for Blazkowicz himself as the Nazis haven't figured out that he cheated his own public execution. Given how the other actors in the audition end up getting shot to death by Adolf Hitler in his various crazed outbursts this ends up saving Redfield's life.
• Lighter and Softer: Strangely enough. Despite the horrific events that ensue over the course of the game that are easily the darkest yet in the series, and BJ in a sort of understated Heroic BSoD for most of the story, the second half of the game takes a considerably sillier turn, complete with a hilarious "movie audition" at Hitler's personal movie studio on a space station orbiting Venus. The prelude to the final mission involves a crazy birthday party for ol' Blaz, followed shortly thereafter by him and Anya taking over Frau Engel's personal ship and killing her on live television with no real setbacks. Compared to the Bittersweet Ending of the previous game, The New Colossus leaves off on a Sequel Hook and a whole new American Revolution as well as a Wacky Marriage Proposal!
  • If Fergus survived the events of the last game, the game takes on a slightly more humorous tone, as Fergus adapts to his new bionic arm and in the ending he doesn't participate in the speech to urge the American people to rise up, but he does give his own ranting contribution in The Stinger.
• Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition: In addition to standard copies, there's also going to be a special edition release of the game across all platforms. This will include the game in steelbook packaging with Frau Engel on the cover, a B.J. action figure labelled "Terror-Billy" with changeable clothes and guns and a mini poster featuring one of the game's In-Universe superheroes, Blitzmensch.
• Literary Allusion Title: Titled after Emma Lazarus' poem "The New Colossus", which was quoted during the ending of the previous game.
• Marathon Level: The whole game is this while playing on the Mein Leben difficulty.
• Major Injury Underreaction: If Fergus' timeline is chosen, he has this response when his arm is lopped off by Frau Engel. He immediately grabs a gun and shoots several soldiers in the room, then is still conscious enough to use his belt to stop the blood loss and hold a gun on Sigrun when interrogating her. B.J. even lampshades afterwards that Fergus is something else for being able to keep going even after getting his arm chopped off.
• Mecha-Mooks: The Nazis have these now, in addition to the robotic dogs and cybernetic/armored human troops. They can take more bullets than flesh-and-blood Nazis, dual wield laser blasters, and can perform super-jumps and rapid sideways or forward dashes.
• Mile-Long Ship: Eva's Hammer, a gigantic U-boat the heroes take over and use as their base. Even the Ausmerzer (which itself is about as big as an aircraft carrier) is dwarfed by it.
• Minor Injury Overreaction: An actor involved with the propaganda film about "Terror-Billy" attempts to do a fight scene with a Nazi soldier despite being more of a posh kind of guy. One gun butt to the face later and he immediately wants to go treat a bloody nose rather than continue casting. Hitler shoots him in the ass over this and lets him bleed out on the ground to death.
• Mirthless Laughter: Grace laughs upon hearing the last words of Super Spesh, since she wasn't there to see it happen. Although given the context of the scene, she hardly finds it funny.
  Grace: I need to know what his last words were.
  B.J.: He said "It was space aliens, man."
  Grace: (chuckles) Motherfucker.
• Moral Myopia: America under Nazi rule has Klansman walking around openly during parades and officers drinking milkshakes while people are scared shitless around them. It is expressed repeatedly and vocally through the game that it all hinges on their racism: they care if you are Aryan, everyone else (including otherwise "pure" Aryans who are "deviant" in refusing to embrace Nazi ideology) is literally subhuman in their eyes.
• Monowheel Mayhem: They seem to have replaced traditional bikes entirely in the Kraftfahrkorps cycle companies; a couple of soldiers can be seen fueling up their gigantic Army models at a Roswell gas station, and B.J. hijacks another to drive out of Roswell before the nuke goes off.
• Monument of Humiliation and Defeat: What Washington D.C. has become under Nazi rule. The National Mall is now a huge amphitheater for executions, the Washington Monument has been reinforced and made taller, and the Lincoln Memorial is a now a swastika-draped shrine to Hitler. In something of a variation, the Nazis are planning on outlawing English in America on the next July 4th, a.k.a. Independance Day in the US.
• Mood Whiplash:
  • During the middle of a serious argument between BJ and Anya over his belief that he's Secretly Dying and her denial that he can't know that, Super Spesh walks out of the toilet behind them, proclaiming that it does indeed work.
  • The game as a whole has this. The first half is extremely dark and somber, even compared to its predecessor. Caroline is killed, BJ learns he's got weeks to live, and contemplates how he'll never see his children. Reflects on his abusive childhood and wonders if he'd have been a better father. Is captured after a final confrontation with his abusive father where he learns the man gave his wife to the Nazis, one ally dies trying to save him, and then BJ is beheaded on national television. Only for his head to be recovered, his life saved, and a new superhuman body to be given to him. After that point almost all the game's dark elements are just gone and the game turns on the zanyness and surrealness up to eleven. All of BJ's worries are gone, you go on Venus, meet a senile Hitler that pisses himself. The final boss fight ends with a topless and heavily pregnant Anya doing a powerslide with two machine guns as nazi blood splashes over her.
• Mooks, but no Bosses: Unlike previous Wolfenstein games (or even previous Starbreeze games), The New Colossus doesn't really have unique boss fights. There are several Boss in Mook's Clothing encounters against Zitadelle or Panzerhund robots, but these aren't really full-on bosses and can even often be avoided by stealthing around them or just running past them. Even the "final boss fight" against the pair of Zerstörer robots at the end of the game isn't really a unique boss enemy; one also appears during the final Ubercommander mission.
• Mook Horror Show: Exaggerated from the previous game, when B.J.'s ability to come back from any injury earns him the moniker "Terror Billy". The first mission alone has Nazis tripping themselves over in fear as they walk straight into microwave traps and getting turned into mush while "Terror Billy" wades right through them in a wheelchair.
• Multinational Team: Over the course of the game, B.J will gather up a remarkably diverse number of allies: an old Violent Glaswegian or an all American boy, a badass Namibian, a Nazi leader's daughter gone rogue, Grace and her Sisters, Horton Boone's anti-capitalist group, resistance fighters from France, Spain, Scandinavia... Despite their different races, nationalities and backgrounds, they all live together in the community on Eva's Hammer and get along very well. It's a really nice "fuck you" to the Nazis' ideology of racial hierarchy and supremacy.
• Mundane Utility: In the Wyatt Timeline, at one point B.J uses the Dieselkraftwerk, a Diesel based incendiary grenade launcher, as a fuel pump for a Helicopter.
• Mushroom Samba: Due to the pain from his ear, Wyatt's been experimenting with drugs. One scene shows him popping Acid in the middle of an operation and while Anya is brutally maiming a Nazi in the background, Wyatt is more concentrated on protecting a cutesy little cartoon creature that isn't even there.
• Mythology Gag:
  • The classic Wolfenstein 3D appears in a playable format again, this time as a role-flipped "Wolfstone 3D" that involves a Nazi POW trying to escape American forces.
  • Super Spesh's plan to help a restrained BJ escape execution is the classic strategy of luring a guard in and taking them out with a knife, something BJ's done numerous times in the series as practically a signature trait. A Surprisingly Realistic Outcome occurs due to Spesh heavily overestimating his odds of rescuing the most wanted man in the planet from his ultra-high security cell and Frau Engel being onto his ruse the entire time.
  • One of the resistance members on the ship asks BJ to deal with a rat "the size of a dog" that got into the ammo room. In the Super Nintendo Entertainment System port of the original Wolfenstein 3D, the attack dogs in the game were replaced with giant rats.
  • On the movie poster for Hitler's film, Hitler can be seen wearing his power armor suit from Wolfenstein 3D. This is most obvious in the DLC which has a colorized version of the movie poster.
    • This one gets driven home further as a postcard you can find in the final level from Hitler to Engel has him detail his vivid memory of crushing BJ with the hands of his mech-suit.
  • B.J., while being temporarily reduced to a Head in a Jar, is asked what upgrade he wants for his new super soldier body, and is presented with three options, and since he has no functioning vocal chords for the time being, he is asked to simply look at the upgrade he wants. The result is that B.J. actually briefly resembles his depiction on the HUD for Wolfenstein 3D, i.e. a disembodied head capable of looking in three directions.
  • The hardest difficulty mode (and Final Death Mode) is still called "Mein leben", which was a quote that SS soldiers said upon dying in Wolfenstein 3D. It also sums up what it was like to be a regular AI enemy in 3D.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Ausmerzer (Frau Engel's flying fortress) means "eradicator" or "obliterator" in German.
• Nazi Protagonist: Not the game itself, but the game within a game Wolfstone 3-D is a Palette Swap of Wolfenstein 3-D featuring Elite Hans as its playable protagonist, replacing the Nazis with Allied soldiers and swapping Hitler out for BJ.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Before Rip Blazkowicz revealed his son's location to the Nazis at the cost of his own life, B.J was a dying man on his last legs who had made his peace with his inevitable end. After B.J's execution, he was brought back with his head pretty much stapled onto the body of a Super-Soldier and in much better health than he'd been in years and more stronger then before. In other words, great job giving the greatest threat to the Nazi regime a second wind that he needed, Rip and Engel, you both are paid for your help.
• Nintendo Hard: The previous game wasn't a cakewalk by any means, but this time, on Bring It On! and above, you can expect a direct and prolonged firefight to end badly. Enemies can turn you into swiss cheese within seconds, and by late game when you have a full 100 health and new abilities at your disposal the nastiest foes can still kill you in only a handful of shots. Mein Leben forces you to do it all with no checkpoints or saves in a single run, where a single mook can kill you without much effort.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Jimmy Carver, a talk show host in the mold of Johnny Carson.
  • There's also an actor named Ronald auditioning for the role of Terror-Billy whose obscured last name is shown to end in -gan. Obviously a reference to Ronald Reagan, except he looks considerably younger than 50 and claims to be from Arizona rather than Illinois.
• No Swastikas: Unsurprisingly, every single swastika is excised in the German version. However, this game goes wayyyy above and beyond the standard for German localizations; to such an extent that it almost qualifies as satire.
  • Every reference to the Nazis is changed to "The Regime".
  • Hitler is named "Heiler", and instead of "Führer" he's always adressed as "Kanzler" (technically Hitler's position in the Third Reich). He's also missing his iconic toothbrush mustache.
  • Any references to Jews are also removed.
• Numbered Sequels: Weirdly, for a franchise that has existed since the early 80s, this is the first numbered sequel in the series since, technically, 1992's Wolfenstein 3D (Castle Wolfenstein's sequel is called "Beyond Castle Wolfenstein", Wolfenstein 3D's sort-of sequel is named "Spear of Destiny", then the series experienced a reboot with Return to Castle Wolfenstein, whose sequel would be titled simply Wolfenstein).
• Off with His Head!:
  • At the end of the tutorial level, Frau Engel decapitates Caroline in front of Blazkowicz, Fergus/Wyatt and Sigrun, the latter of whom decides to aid the heroes after seeing what her mother is capable of.
  • B.J. is executed by Frau Engel on live television, with the player having a first-person view of the action. A few seconds later, he is revealed to be Not Quite Dead when the Resistance saves his head and conducts a radical transplant to graft it onto an Super Soldier's body.
• Oh, Crap!: Everyone in the television studio, including Frau Engel herself, gets this reaction once they see B.J. descending on the elevator next to the stage.
  Jimmy Carver: Holy fucking Christ, it's Terror-Billy!
• Oppressive States of America/Invaded States of America: What the U.S. has become under the Nazi regime. It's up to B.J. and the Europeans to free them.
• Organ Autonomy: In the Ferguson timeline, his arm is replaced by that of an übersoldat killer robot, and it has a mind of it's own, punching him in the eye when he tries to sleep, squishing his cookies when he tries to have a cup of tea, flipping off Amazing Grace when they're introduced, and ruining his shot with Maria by honking her boob when he tries to confess his live for her at Blazco's birthday party. The last instance is the Last Straw, and he rips it off and repeatedly bashes it against a door frame, then chucks it down the stairs.
• The Password Is Always "Swordfish": The password for the automatic defense system called "ODIN"? Turns out it's "Valhalla". During World War II, the Nazis were prone to using super-obvious code names and generally bad security.
• Patricide: BJ kills his father, Rip, after discovering that he sold his mother out to the Nazis. Then again, Rip was close to Offing the Offspring by putting a gun to B.J's head, so the murderous intent was mutual.
• Permanently Missable Content: There are 6 Achievements that can't be fixed later. The first 5 focus on picking up every one of a certain collectible in the game, many of which are available only in a specific level or district. The 6th, Crippled but Able, requires the player to make a melee takedown on an enemy while in the wheelchair. The wheelchair is only found in the very first level of the game.
• Playable Epilogue: After beating the game, you return to Eva's Hammer, where you can continue trying your skills at the gun range, play Wolfstone 3D, and hunt the Ubercommanders.
• Plug 'n' Play Prosthetics: Averted in the Fergus timeline. He has the arm of a Killer Robot implanted, which randomly punches him in the nose, gives Grace the bird when he meets her, and, at B.J.'s birthday party, ruins his cances with the girl he likes by honking her tiddy. At this last indignity, he rips it off, beats it on the wall, and throws it away.
• Powered Armor: The Da'at Yichud armor returns, but with B.J. wearing it, instead of Caroline, thus allowing for its abilities be incorporated into gameplay. Like her, he seems to need it.
• Pregnant Badass: Despite visibly carrying a couple of buns in the oven, Anya appears to have Taken A Level In Badass to becoming a full-fledged resistance fighter, including sneaking up on a Nazi soldier and stabbing the crap out of him.
  • Exaggerated in the final level, where she saves BJ from an ambush, tackling him to the side as she dumps grenades at the feet of the platoon of Nazis that just entered. She has to shed her top when it catches fire, leading to her dual-wielding rifles to take down the Panzerhund as blood showers over her. BJ's only able to mutter a soft "Wow..." as he looks up at her.
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner: Discussed. In a side mission, you can overhear two Nazi soldiers comparing the "death speeches" they give before executing victims. One admits his needs work.
• Press X to Die: When you are given the chance to walk around during the audition at Venus, you can stomp Hitler to death. Doing this immediately gets the unarmed BJ shot to death at the hands of Hitler's numerous bodyguards, but you do get an achievement out of it. That and a metric fuckton of personal gratification.
• Previously on…: The first cutscene is a brief flashback to The New Order in this style. It also allows you to choose whether Wyatt or Fergus survived that game.
• Propaganda Machine: What Hollywood has become under Nazi control. After destroying most of the previous studios, Los Angeles' skyline has become dominated by the Media Tower, the distribution point for bastardized versions of 1950's American dramas, comedies, game shows, and talk shows, all designed to brainwash the public and normalize the Nazi ideology.
• Propaganda Piece: B.J. is the subject of one In-Universe, called Das Ende Alles Bösen ("The End of All Evil"), written by Adolf Hitler himself no less. One mission is actually build around B.J. infiltrating the audition for the role of himself so he can get closer to the Nazi leadership.
• Protagonist-Centered Morality: Downplayed. Sigrun’s breaking point from Frau Engel’s abuse is finding out that her mother had had the Gestapo search her room so she could read her diary - which leads to Sigrun interrupting the Resistance being executed and escaping with them. Once she and Blazkowicz and the others are back aboard the submarine, you’re encouraged to get to know her in the conventional video game fashion… by reading her diary. While tensions between Sigrun and the rest of the Resistance becomes a recurring plot point, the game never brings up this particular mistreatment and it’s unclear if Sigrun ever even finds out.
• Public Execution: Frau Engel makes an announcement she will execute her captive B.J. Blazkowicz at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., with everything happening that's being broadcast for the whole world to see. What's even heartbreaking is that the player has to see it happening from the dying Blazkowicz's perspective while he is suffering from a Heroic BSoD after being sentenced to death. As heartbreaking as it is to see him get decapitated, though, it pays off in the end when he is revived via head transplant into a stronger, healthier body.
• The Purge: The Nazis are doing this to New Orleans by the time B.J. arrives. The whole city has been walled off, Panzerhounds are burning down the buildings, and soldiers are killing civilians by firing squad. Notes B.J. can find indicate the plan is to completely level the city and rebuild it as some kind of Nazi resort town.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: B.J.'s goal is to organize a revolutionary army, consisting of groups with a broad range of ideologies, including a communist offshoot in New Orleans. Justified since in a Nazi-ruled world each and every one of these groups is being hunted and/or slowly driven into extinction.
• Rebuilt Pedestal: The United States itself is given this treatment. Despite a good portion of the storyline deconstructing the American Dream, in the end this only serves to motivate B.J. and the Resistance to live up to those values. This becomes even more pronounced in the Wyatt timeline, as not only does his patriotism not waver even in the face of the murkier aspects of his country, his Dare to Be Badass speech at the end even invokes the Founding Fathers and allusions to American democracy.
• Red Baron: B.J. has earned a nickname since the events of The New Order — "Terror-Billy", based off the action figure that appropriated his likeness for a new villain.
• Red Herring: The God Key, a suggestively-named Da'at Yichud device recovered from a crashed UFO by Super Spesh years ago that Set Roth very prominently doesn't understand and can't figure out despite obsessing over it for several missions, plays no part at all in the main story. All we get are two hints - first, Set figures out that it (probably) isn't a literal key, and second, Wyatt makes an offhand comment in his timeline about it resembling a doorknob that seems to prompt "Eureka!" Moment from Set. What it actually does is finally explained in Wolfenstein: Youngblood.
• Refuge in Audacity: Blazcowicz really can't resist, as part of his faux audition, to beat a soldier and kill him for real, brutally mauling his corpse and then asking the producer if that is what he wanted. Since he's auditioning undercover for a role of himself, his antics are met with praise for his incredible in-character acting and fighting skills.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Vilified: La Résistance are pretty clearly depicted as the morally upstanding good guys, even if some of them are somewhat Anti Heroic and, in the case of Blazcowicz, unstoppable killing machines, they are most definitely presented in a much better light than the Nazis. Some of the scenes during the credits imply that their surprise appearance and Dare to Be Badass speech on the Jimmy Carver Show almost immediately sparked a nationwide revolution.
• Rock Beats Laser: The Da'at Yichud power armor is literally centuries ahead of anything the Nazis have, but after single-handedly killing her way through scores of stormtroopers, Caroline ultimately gets taken out by one of Deathshead's Ubersoldiers, who are incredibly crude compared to the power armor she's wearing, but apparently still hit hard enough to take it out.
• Sassy Black Woman: Grace, one of the American resistance leaders is this, with a dash of being Ax-Crazy to boot (she threatens B.J. with a grenade in their first meeting, only to laugh it off when it's revealed to be a dud). Of course, the fact that she only starts smiling after B.J. hurls himself on top of her companion to shield him from the possible blast with his own body, hints that maybe she was testing him.
• Saved by a Terrible Performance: B.J. Blazkowicz's Bad "Bad Acting" is what saves him from being shot by a lunatic Adolf Hitler, a fate that befell the other three candidates for his propaganda film.
• Scenery Gorn: Post-nuclear bombing Manhattan is as much of a dead, twisted, bombed-out hellscape as you could imagine, and it's one of the most visually impressive levels of the entire game.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: After all of the carnage and destruction B.J. has caused both on Earth and on the Moon, the Nazis decide to move all of their leadership to the farthest possible place they can think of, Venus. Too bad that STILL doesn't work.
• Secret Test of Character: Once Sigrun fimally snaps and wallops Amazing Grace, Grace reveals that her antagonism towards Sigrun was this. After picking herself up and unkinking her trachea, Grace asks Sigrun to be on her team.
• Sequel Escalation: The New Order had BJ infiltrate the Nazi moon base to recover the codes to use Eva's Hammer's nuclear cannon. The New Colossus has BJ infiltrate the Nazi Venus base (coming face to face with Hitler in the process) to recover the codes to take over the Ausmerzer.
• Sequel Hook: The "God Key" that Set seems to spend much of the game's final act staring at seems to be one of these. Also, after the credits roll, Grace points out to Blazcowicz that even though Engel is dead, there are still a number of other Nazi leaders who need dealing with, providing fuel for DLCs and for sequels. Plus, Hitler is still alive...barely, and given his ailing health, it'd be a miracle if he lives to see the 1970s.
• Shirtless Scene: An exceptionally rare female variant comes courtesy of Anya. After blowing up a shitload of Nazis with grenades aboard the Auswherer her jacket gets set on fire by a Panzerhund. She then throws it off to avoid getting burned and lays waste to the Panzerhund with two rifles as the blood of all the Nazis she killed rains down upon her.
• Shout-Out:
  • Fergus' new limb malfunctioning seems to be a reference to this video.
  • To suggestions that the Nazis have somehow utilized alien technology, Super Spesh yells out "I'm not saying it was space aliens, but it goes without sayin' it was fuckin' space aliens!"
  • One of the collectible files, a postcard from Providence sent by a German traveler to a relative, is a fairly blatant allusion to the work of H. P. Lovecraft, particularly "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" and "Dagon".
  • One of the soldiers stationed there comments how he thought Venus would have more trees, having read a book about it called "Pirates something" by "that guy who wrote the jungle boy stories" which depicted Venus as a world of lush jungles and rivers. Whilst he's actually referring to "Pirates of Venus", the first of the Amtor series written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, his description of the author will probably make most players think he's referring to Rudyard Kipling, of The Jungle Book fame.
  • For some reason the Roswell level contains or refers to characters named "Peter, Aunt May, and Mary Jane".
  • Many of the TV shows are these, having been created explicitly as Nazi versions of would-be American cultural touchstones.
    • Blitzmensch is one huge and obvious homage to the Adam West Batman series — animated opening, super-catchy theme song, on-screen sound effects, and even a huge rogues' gallery played by "special guest" character actors.
    • Title aside, Trust in Brother is a blatant parody of Leave It to Beaver, right down to the almost-identical layout of the boys' shared bedroom.
  • One of the upgrades for the Maschinenpistole turns it into a Nailgun. It also slightly pushes the aim up, like the Machinegun from Quake II.
  • When Wyatt talks about how his hallucinated lizard died, he says 'So it goes', the Arc Words from Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Slaughterhouse-Five.
  • This isn't the first time the Nazis have colonized Venus.
  • On dining tables and counters in the Venus base there are colored food cubes identical to the ones eaten by the crew in the original Star Trek series.
  • In the DLC The Adventures of Gunslinger Joe, the majority of the game takes place in Illinois - cue the internal monologuing by the titular character, complaining about Illinois Nazis.
  • BJ's hometown of Mesquite, Texas was the real-life headquarters of id Software for many years.
  • One of the NPCs on board the Eva's Hammer is named after Felix Baumgartner, better known as the guy who jumped from space.
  • In Roswell, BJ will be forced into a conversation with a Faux Affably Evil Nazi Officer who won't leave you alone and praises strawberry milkshakes at length, until he recognizes you and forces a confrontation. This is a reference to the strudel and "Who Am I?" scenes from Inglorious Basterds
  • The way BJ puts on the Venus atmospheric suit looks a lot like the way Isaac Clarke puts on a RIG in Dead Space.
• Show Within a Show: "Blitzmensch", a fictional Nazi propaganda children's show where a Nazi superhero fights caricatures of American ideals, such as "The Illegal Eagle".
• Sins of Our Fathers: Happens with Sigrun so much. At one point Anya lists a bunch of atrocities her mother commited and blames Sigrun, even though, (as she herself said) she didn't take place in any of them and, (being just a kid at the time) couldn't have done anything to stop them anyway.
• Skippable Boss: Many of the Boss in Mook's Clothing encounters against Zitadelle or Panzerhund robots, and even the Final Boss fight against the pair of Zerstörer robots, can be skipped by stealthing or even simply running past them into the next area.
• Slavery Is a Special Kind of Evil: Black slavery is, unsurprisingly, making a resurgence in America; some are more excited than others, even gossiping about who they'll buy at auction.
• The Sociopath: BJ's father, Rip, is a textbook example. Lack of empathy? Check; he's very racist and bigoted, and he shows no love even for his own family nor any remorse for crossing the Moral Event Horizon by selling out his own Jewish wife, Zofia, to the Nazis. Lying manipulator? Check; he's a con artist who scammed people out of their money by selling phony ailments, he tricked Zofia into falling in love with him by making her laugh with a monkey joke, and the only time he wasn't a complete asshole to his son (which showed him giving a BB rifle to confront his nightmares) was only to get him to stop waking him up at night with noise after a good ol' beating didn't work. Constant need for stimulation? Check; he's easily angered and incredibly violent, and his Domestic Abuse towards his wife and child, as well as his brutal murder of the family dog, borders on sadism. Abhorrent selfishness? Check; he only married Zofia for her father's money, and when scolding his son for terrorism he manages to make it about his own reputation. Inflated opinion of his own abilities? Check; he didn't shut down his business when Zofia's father told him to, he blames literally everyone but himself for his own problems, and he insults and tries to kill his own son despite knowing that he is, in his own words, a super-killer terror bomber. It ends the only way anyone could possibly expect; his own death, although that may have been his intention as he was stalling him long enough for Frau Engel to arrive.
• Sparing Them the Dirty Work: When the Kreisau Circle arrives at the TV studio to kill Frau Engel, they tell Sigrun to stay in the submarine, since although she understands what needs to be done, she cannot directly take part in the mission to kill her mother.
• Spoiler Cover: The cover actually depicts B.J. with the new body he gets after he is executed by decapitation by the Nazis. The collar he wears is actually the contraption used to attach his head to said body, and an observant player might recognize it from the scene with Shoshana, where Set explains how he saved the cat's life by attaching its head to the body of a squirrel monkey. Furthermore, the artwork on both the disc and the sleeve's alternate cover depicts BJ as a prisoner in Nazified Washington, DC, noticeably lacking that collar, and with Frau Engel looming over him with a sword. Even if you have no idea what happens in the game, just by looking at the two pieces of art, you might be able to figure it out yourself.
• Start of Darkness: An Anti-Hero example. The cause of B.J.'s near psychotic hyper-violent hatred of Nazis (not that you need a reason to hate Nazis, but most wouldn't saw a Nazi in half with a chainsaw with little prompting), which was unexplained in the first game, is shown through a series of flashbacks in this game to have been caused by years of physical and emotional abuse by his bigoted father who only married his wife (who happened to be Jewish) for her money, eventually siding against her with the Nazis once they conquered America.
• The Stoner: Wyatt starts using J's leftover LSD due to the pain from taking an ax to his ear, which causes him to have hallucinations at times.
• Story to Gameplay Ratio: The game was criticized for having a reduced focus on gameplay and a much greater emphasis on cutscenes compared to The New Order, with shorter gameplay segments interrupted much more frequently by cutscenes; said cutscenes were also generally much longer than those in The New Order.
• Stylistic Suck: The "Combat Simulation" mode in which you can replay the main mission levels as an "arcade mode" have a glaring CRT effect, to emphasize that it's a virtual reality simulation using 1960's Stupid Jetpack Hitler technology. Playing the Wolfstone 3D machine likewise has sound effects that sound somewhat muted and distant, emulating how it would sound to play the game on an arcade machine.
• Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome: Caroline Becker, the leader of the Kreisau Circle and a major character in both New Order and the 2009 game, gets her head chopped off at the end of the first level of New Colossus.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Super Spesh's plan to break B.J. out of his capture is to pose as B.J's lawyer, call in a guard after making it look like B.J. attacked him, then kill the guard and help break B.J. out. Unfortunately for Super Spesh, this relies on assuming that the Nazis would actually honor any sort of attorney-client privilege and forgetting that he's a known political agitator. Spesh gets executed by Frau Engel, who reveals she knew who Spesh was and what he was planning the entire time. B.J. is promptly convicted by a Kangaroo Court, and he's executed.
• Take That!:
  • A Nazi scientist's memo mentions their previous disastrous attempt at gene splicing — the "crocoduck" hybrid experiments — suggesting that they have, at the very least, a somewhat poor understanding of biology.
  • The Star-Spangled Daily, the Nazis' official propaganda newspaper in Roswell, contains a review of a new alternate-history science-fiction novel — "The Trumbauer Journals" — where Manhattan was never bombed and America instead fell to "degeneracy and corruption". The review goes on to reveal that the author, who has done mostly boring-sounding paeans to the Reich, has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and even ends with a soft-pedalling "while this may be incredibly offensive to many people, there is a message of hope in this book".
  • Frau Engel's appearance on The Jimmy Carver Show satirizes the controversial tendency of late-night hosts to give humanizing softball interviews to ghoulish or divisive politicians, and their willingness to joke around with them; long after the applause goes quiet, Jimmy is still smiling and laughing. If you even look carefully, you can see that the audience is just rows and rows of cardboard cut-outs.
  • Ronald Reagan shows up on the Venus "casting session" just long enough to call the Fuhrer "Mr. Hitler" and get shot in the face for his trouble. And then shot eight more times.
  • As mentioned above, the game portrays The Klan as a group of dimwitted idiots that the Nazis hold in barely restrained contempt and can't stand to work with.
• This Cannot Be!: Frau Engel's Last Words. Arguably pretty justified as she did decapitate Blazko. He just got better.
• There Are No Therapists: A few of the characters are in some pretty serious need of therapy, including but not limited to Blazkowicz himself, Grace, and Wyatt. Justified in the the Nazis in Real Life considered mental illness and disability to be an executable offense, and there's no reason to assume these fictionalised Nazis would be any different; plus all the characters are effectively fugitives and don't have time to be seeing therapists.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Anya, a legendary Serial Killer of Nazis, takes out a Nazi guard by stabbing him, and then stabs him another dozen or so times for good measure.
• Token Enemy Minority: Sigrun is a notable German member of the Kreisau Circle who left the Nazis after being tired of them mistreating her. She still has trouble being accepted by the other members, however.
• Took a Level in Badass:
  • Anya appears to graduated to becoming a full-fledged member of the resistance and fights alongside B.J. and his companions, in comparison to her role in The New Order where she was more of an Action Survivor. She's also visibly pregnant with twins.
  • Max Hass has since the ending of The New Order, seeing how he's shown fighting alongside with other resistance fighters in one scene. In the same scene, Bombate encourages him to enjoy the combat.
  • A darker version is Frau Engel. In 'The New Order, she spends the game getting her jaw crushed, losing control of her concentration camp due to a prisoner riot, and watches helplessly as B.J. kills her lover. Come The New Colossus, she's become the Big Bad, promoted to lead the Nazi army in America, manages to kill Caroline and Super Spesh, maims Fergus/Wyatt and captures and successfully executes B.J. himself, until he managed to survive and get a new body.
• Tragic Bigot: Grace Walker, an African-American woman, holds disdain for white people (and the Germans in particular) but this is due to a lifetime of racist discrimination from a Nazi-occupied American government (not to mention the segregation that was already here prior). Adownplayed example as her bigotry is limited to trash-talking and a patronizing attitude but otherwise she's willing to cooperate. She even get kinder by the end.
• Travel Cool:
  • Cool Airship: Introduced in this game is the Ausmerzer, General Engel's flying warship. Originally used to put down resistance strongholds throughout the United States, it now serves as her mobile base of operations.
  • Cool Boat: Returning from the first game is the Eva's Hammer, the colossal Nazi submarine hijacked by the Kreisau Circle which now serves as their own mobile base.
• Trauma Conga Line: Geez, where to begin. Blazkowicz is already dying at the start of the game, and it gets worse from there. He kills his own father before being captured by Engel and having his mother's ring stolen from him, witnesses Super Spesh die in front of him, gets put on trial, has an daydream where he escapes the courtroom and kills all the enemy soldiers before meeting an apparition of his dead mother, wakes up, is sentenced to death, and executed. Ouch. Talk about a Trauma Conga Line! (He gets better.)
• Uncanny Valley:
  • In-universe, Set's beloved pet Shoshanna, with the head of a Siamese cat and the body of a squirrel monkey, is shown to frighten and unnerve just about everyone who meets it. Some of Grace's girls even mention that they stay away from Set's lab because it creeps them out so much.
  • Invoked with B.J.'s new bioengineered prototype body, which the designers note was made to look like it came from a lab; there are various stitches and serial numbers all over the surface, it lacks nipples or a navel, and the skin looks more like a plastic Terror-Billy action figure than a human being with pores and body hair. Neither B.J. nor Anya seem to mind, though.
• Unlockable Difficulty Levels: The "Mein Leben!" difficulty disables saves and forces you to start from the beginning if you die. It must be unlocked by completing the game on the next highest difficulty, "I am death incarnate!"
• Unspoken Plan Guarantee:
  • Averted with Grace's plan to set off a nuke in the heart of the Nazi operations in New Mexico. Despite the player learning everything about the plan, it largely goes off without a hitch.
  • Played straight with Super Spesh's plan. His attempt to break B.J. out of jail ends with him getting killed, and the execution goes as planned.
• Vasquez Always Dies: Ambiguously lesbian, definitively butch Caroline Becker gets her head chopped off at the end of the first level, feminine Pregnant Badass Anya survives the entire game and gets to have B.J.'s twins. Matronly Baroness Frau Engel arguably splits the difference. Averted with Grace, who survives the game alongside Sigrun Engel.
• Vestigial Empire: B.J. can overhear a conversation between two Nazi soldiers salvaging a destroyed battle robot, where one soldier points out the inconsistency of their leaders going through the trouble of salvaging the robot when they should be able to easily build a replacement with their boasted infinite resources. That same soldier then darkly concludes that all is not well within the Nazi regime and troubled times lie ahead.
• Villain Ball: After Frau Engel manages to publicly execute Blazkowicz, she and the rest of the Nazi regime presume that all resistance is morally and objectively crushed. Or at least relatively hopeless given the presumed death of the ultimate nazi-killing One-Man Army on the face of the planet. It gets to the point that when there's terrorist activity on their Venus base while Hitler is there, a log from her lying around shrugs off the threat as something to be rounded in inevitably. This leaves her flabbergasted when good ol' BJ rolls down the elevator on the TV station set before her...
  • She also holds onto it firmly at the beginning as well. Despite having every reason, hostile intent and otherwise to murder BJ the moment she gets her hands on him, Frau Engel takes her sweet time flaunting horrible acts in his face in an attempt to break him instead. This backfires spectacularly when her Jerkass nature causes her own daughter to betray her.
• Villain of Another Story: Our protagonist B.J. has become the basis of a villain called "Terror-Billy" in the Elite Hans line of action figures.
• Villain Takes an Interest: Whereas Frau Engel was once less concerned with deliberately seeking out B.J., his murder of Bubi in The New Order seems to have brought her to the point of outright trying to hunt him down.
  Set Roth: Frau Engel... she's been hunting for you. She's been moving Heaven and Earth, and today she found you...
• Villain World: In addition to those from the first game, we get more glimpses of the Nazis remaking the world in their image.
  • America is a land of swastika banners fluttering in the breeze and brainwashing propaganda is distributed to all people, even children. Chattel slavery has been reintroduced, death squads regularly purge the ghettos of undesirables, speaking English is on its way to becoming a capital offense, and re-education camps have been set up for people, even those who fail at German trivia games.
  • A collectible postcard has a cheerful description of how the people of Korea have abandoned Buddhism, their own language, and even chopsticks in favor of the Reich's ideology and policies. They've begun rebuilding Seoul in their image as well.
• Villainous Breakdown: Engel suffers a major one when BJ walks onto stage during her time on the Jimmy Carver Show. Having spent the entire game as a Smug Snake ceaselessly parading her victories over Blazkowicz whenever she finds the chance, upon seeing BJ's face she immediately draws her pistol and begins firing wildly, gibbering about how he was supposed to be dead.
  Frau Engel: You're dead! I severed your head from your shoulders! I KILLED YOU!
• Voice of the Resistance: After finishing Engel during her live broadcast, the rest of the crew broadcast their voices.
• Wacky Marriage Proposal: Halfway through the credits, BJ recovers his mother's ring from Engel's corpse and promptly proposes to Anya on national television. She says yes.
• "Wanted!" Poster: B.J.'s got em in America and probably around the world after the events of The New Order.
• Waxing Lyrical: In the ending path where Wyatt is alive, both he and Grace's final speeches contain lines from "We're Not Gonna Take It" by Twisted Sister, a cover of which is the end credits song. And regardless of which path you take, BJ's Pre Mortem Line to Engel will have him paraphrase "Is that your best? Then your best won't do."
• Wham Shot: The trailer shows what appears to be an old 50's-era American TV show about a girl and her pet dog... until that pet dog, Liesel, turns out to be a fifteen-foot death robot with a flamethrower in its mouth. As the channel hops, there are also several shows, including a cartoon that show the Statue of Liberty as evil and Nazi characters as G.I. Joe-esque action heroes with action figures. Later, it also shows Klansmen and SS officers walking freely in 60's America.
  • For quite some time, the fans wondered whether Adolf Hitler still lived within this continuity, given that so far, he is only mentioned through newspapers and intel items. There's no implication that Hitler is even involved with the movie, let alone its screenwriter and producer, until Frau Helene yells heil and he staggers into the actors' audition, wheezing and coughing.
• Wham Line: The bar sequence not only include SS Officer freely going about in business but also revealed that German has become the nation's Poirot Speak.
• What Measure Is a Mook?: After B.J. is captured by the Nazis at his childhood home, a mother smacks him in the face and shouts that he murdered her son.
• Wretched Hive: References to slaves committing theft being sent to New Orleans and Nazi soldiers desiring to serve on death squads in that city seem to indicate that it has become a large-scale ghetto/camp for undesirables.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: At one point the gang catches Sigrun and Bombate going at it in the submarine, suggesting that she may have found someone who really loves her. Unfortunately, it turns out later he has lost interest in her, something she eventually calls him out on.
• Your Costume Needs Work: Zig-zagged when BJ infiltrates a casting call to play "Terror Billy", i.e. himself. After Hitler declares "none of [the actors] even look like the man", BJ does badly at the initial line-reading, causing Hitler to talk him down and saying he could learn much from another actor who puts much more emotion into the lines. When they perform mock battles against a guard, though, BJ straight-up murders the guard in an excessive fashion (including emptying his own gun into him, bashing his corpse with it several times, then throwing it at the glass) and then threatens to do the same to every other Nazi in the world rather than reading the line he's given... and steals the show with that performance, with Hitler praising him for being so attuned to the psychotic urges of "Terror Billy" and proclaiming him the actor who will play the role in the film (while executing the last actor).
• Zero-Effort Boss: Since Frau Engel was not expecting the resistance to raid her late night talk show appearance, she has no guards and is armed only with a pistol. All BJ needs to do is get close enough and use a melee attack to trigger the ending cutscene. The actual final boss was the brutal fight against waves of Ubersoldats and the two Zerstörer droids (basically a King Mook version of the Ubersoldats) on the Ausmerzer's roof.

The Freedom Chronicles

• Action Girl: Jessica Valiant. Especially noteworthy because she's the first playable one in the franchise.
• Another Side, Another Story: The Freedom Chronicles DLC Pack features three different protagonists fighting in different places around the US:
  • Episode Zero: A prologue that introduces the protagonists.
  • The Adventures of Gunslinger Joe: Focuses on former quarterback Joseph Stallion as he deals with Nazis in Chicago and all the way to space.
  • The Diaries of Agent Silent Death: Focuses on ex-OSS assassin Jessica Valiant as she infiltrates Nazi bunkers in California.
  • The Amazing Deeds of Captain Wilkins: Focuses on Captain Gerald Wilkins as he dismantles a Nazi operation in Alaska.
    • Though it's Subverted because the characters are fictional in-universe... Maybe.
• Authority Equals Asskicking: General Dunkel in "The Diaries of Agent Silent Death" isn't boss-level tough, but he is noticeably tougher than normal. He's got Ubercommander-level health and takes almost a full mag of assault rifle fire to kill, and is also protected by 2 Super Soldats. He can still quickly be killed with headshots or stealth kills. Averted with General Schwarz in "The Amazing Deeds of Captain Wilkins", who's a Non-Action Big Bad who actually drops to his knees and begs for mercy once he finds himself trapped in the same room as you.
• Cutscene Boss: The main villains in Joe and Wilkins' stories are killed with a single button press. Averted for Jessica Valiant, whose final target acts like a typical (though heavily defended) Commander and is killed during normal gameplay.
• Eloquent in My Native Tongue: An interesting variant. In the main game, Curtis is inarticulate, mumbling, and emotionally reserved — though friendly — when speaking; during the cinematic portions, however, he quickly turns into a Large-Ham Announcer.
• Homage: To the Blaxpliotation genre, classic spy fiction, and American action films, respectively. Valiant's narration manages to sound like she's a Film Noir detective with a drinking problem, while a scene in Wilkins' campaign references the famous Predator handshake.
• I Know Madden Kombat: Gunslinger Joe's football training justifies his ability to keep his footing when a grenade goes off next to him, to throw objects at great velocities and distances with lethal force, and to ram throw solid brickwork! Because the Ramshackles is for chumps!
• Story to Gameplay Ratio: Unlike the main game, which frequently interrupts the gameplay with lengthy cutscenes, the only cutscenes in the Freedom Chronicles come at the beginning or end of a level, allowing the new missions to focus on the game's solid gameplay.
• Story Within a Story: The entire thing is a work of fiction written by former popular author Curtis Everton (who affectionately calls it "lighthearted trash") to raise the spirits of the other Kreisau members on board Evas Hammer.
• Tuckerization: In-Universe. Captain Wilkins was the name of one of the soldiers BJ fought alongside when he stormed Deathshead's lab.

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We're not gonna take it anymore!

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