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"The Valkyon Federation was created to defeat the argons, because if we can’t win the war, our world is doomed. What we need to remember, though, is that if we win the war but can’t win the peace that follows, the federation itself is doomed."
Fraya, Allemantheia Commander

The Exiled Realm of Arborea, or TERA, is a Korean action MMORPG by Bluehole Studios. Built on the scrapped source code for what would have been Lineage III, TERA uses a real-time battle system instead of the standard MMO fare of a plethora of action keys. Players can Hack and Slash, Cast Magics, Dodge, and Block, all in real-time and with no breaks.

A millennia ago, the two gods Arun and Shara met in the void and fell asleep. As they slept, they dreamed, and as they dreamed, the world of Tera was formed. First came twelve gods, who all battled fiercely for control of Tera. Born into the conflict were the mortal races, dragged into the divine wars and ever at the heels of the gods. The divine wars lasted for centuries, and took its toll on mortal and god alike.

The divine wars ended with most of the gods dead, imprisoned, or diminished. The remaining mortal races took over control of Tera, and with the recently formed Valkyon Federation, old wounds are finally starting to heal. But in this peace, trouble has arisen: to the north, the metallic race of argons have surfaced and threatens to terraform the world to their liking, and the mysterious Island of Dawn has suddenly risen at the center of the world.

The Player Character enters this world to fight these mysterious menaces. Players can choose from one of seven races, eleven classes, and explore the world either alone or in groups. The game was released on January 25, 2011 in Korea, August 18, 2011 in Japan, and May 1 and May 3, 2012 for North America and Europe respectively. Other markets planned for release are China and Thailand.

The US and European versions of the game have been free-to-play since early February 2013, now with the new title TERA: Rising.

TERA officially shut down on June 30th, 2022. However, several private servers are available for people who still want to play.


This series contains examples of:

  • Age-Inappropriate Dress: The Korean version of this game is the king of this featuring a race of girls with animal ears, who never seem to grow past 10 years. Yet they wear little more than lingerie. This was toned down for the American version.
  • Anti Poop-Socking:
    • Hourly notifications of your playing time, and the Rested EXP system to encourage logging out, this game takes this seriously.
    • Averted with the Production Points (PP) system, which limits the amount of resource gathering and crafting you can do. You can wait or use or special pay items) to regenerate them.
  • Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: BAMs. It stands for "Big-Ass Monster". Yes, that's the official name.
  • Badass Adorable: Popori and Elins are anthropomorphic animals and Little Bit Beastly girls respctively, but are just as tough as a fighter as the other races are.
  • Bag of Sharing: You have one bank for all your characters on a server.
  • BFG: The Gunners wield huge ass magical guns known as arcannons.
  • BFS: Not just the swords. All weapons seem to be appropriately scaled for the towering Amani and Baraka, so they are over-sized for smaller races including humans. The tiny Elins' and Poporis' animations show them having trouble with their weapons' momentum!
  • Bottomless Magazines: Archers. Justified in that the arrows are magical.
  • Bowdlerise:
    • The US and EU versions of the game censor the Elin models. Compare the differences here. Considering that the other races (well, except Castanic females that is) kept their stripperiffic outfits, this might be due to lolicon fears. Of course, uncensor patches cropped up the moment the game came out.
    • Incidentally, the censored armors are also very cosmetically glitchy. None of them react properly to dyes (the new elements aren't included in the diffuse layer), some have clipping issues, and most of them have some manner of issue with the tail holes in the Elin armor — depending, they forgot to add one to the new design, they forgot to leave a gap in the midriff cover so the tail isn't magically sprouting out of cloth, or the shorts ride too high in comparison to the tail hole in the outer armor, so the tail is improbably close to or even sprouting partially or entirely out of the shorts.
    • For added fun, only Player Character Elin armors were edited. Not only are there Elin NPCs that have outfits that would be censored if they were on Elin PCs, but there are actual children of other races who have outfits that would be censored if they were on Elin PCs.
    • Perhaps the most damning about this whole thing is the fact that the Elin costumes, which you pay real money for (or buy them off people who bought them for real money), are left completely and totally uncensored. The hypocrisy of this gets turned up to eleven when you look at the Elin Devilicious Costume, which is far, far, far more "offensive" than any of the censored armors ever were.
  • Brawn Hilda: The female Amani. The race's men are much more monstrous-looking compared to the women, but the female Amani still stand out compared to the women of the other playable races in the game. And while it's possible to give a female Aman a more comely face, she would still retain her race's height, three-clawed hands, elephant feet, statue-like physique, and overall intimidating presence.
  • Break the Cutie: The Reaper class is an Elin who saw her home being burned to the ground and basically losing everything that makes an Elin (innocent, happy, merciful) all gone with the Reaper.
  • Chainmail Bikini: A lot of the female (and some male) armors are very revealing.
    • In fact, there have been comparisons of high-level armor sets vs. more revealing clothing, and the high-level armors were more revealing than the basic underwear.
    • This gets especially ridiculous on human women, as even in the "heavy armor" weight class, every single armor set in the game shows off significant skin and usually cleavage. Even worse, nearly all the female models are literally rigged, animation-wise, to walk in heels. At all times. Even in heavy armor.
  • Charged Attack: Several classes have these, most notably Berserkers and Archers. Charging determines the power or the number of hits.
    • One of the game's loading messages explicitly tells you that, should you die in an instance dungeon, you should NOT choose the default resurrection, as it will resurrect you outside the dungeon and to the nearest town... which is usually a good ten minutes away, leaving your party members having to wait for your sorry ass. For this reason, it's good to have a healer or some Scrolls of Resurrection around.
  • Cute Bruiser: Choosing Popori or Elin and any melee class results in this.
  • Darker and Edgier: The Reaper comic and later update has Pora Elinu being burned to the ground by a group of mercenaries, and the Reaper class wants to kill them all. The worst part: only the Elin race can be a Reaper.
  • Dual Wielding: The forte of Warriors.
  • Dude Looks Like a Lady: High Elf males.
  • Elfeminate: High Elf males are Bishounen to the point of looking girly, just without breasts.
  • Energy Ball: The majority of the sorcerer's attacks, several priest and mystic skills, several quest items, boss monster attacks, and in some cases, scenery.
  • Exponential Potential: Sorcerers pretty much use nearly every spell they get.
  • Fantasy Character Classes: The available PC classes are:
  • Fashionable Asymmetry: And lots of it.
  • Fetch Quest: Quite a few of them.
  • Four-Fingered Hands: Both the Amani and the Popori are missing a digit-this gives the former a more monstrous aspect, and the latter a more cartoonish one.
  • Ghost Town: Several have been overrun by monsters but there are hamlets scattered here and there that are completely empty of people.
  • Glacier Waif: See Cute Bruiser above.
  • Glass Cannon: The Sorcerer is arguably the most powerful class in the game, what with mid-high attack power and the best DPS. Doesn't help them when being flattened by a big-ass monster, however.
    • Beehive Barrier: Mana Barrier provides them with a extra emergency durability and newly added Warp Barrier gives them 2 second immunity to all damage... with 8 seconds cooldown.
  • Green Rocks: Noctenium, a substance that enhances skills, drives the plot of the expansion, is used to create new equipment, and can be used to summon monsters or turn players invisible.
  • Hack and Slash: This game is the poster child for the new action-based trend in Korean MMO design.
  • Half-Dressed Cartoon Animal: When worn by the Popori, some armors (particularly low-level ones) conspicuously lack pants. There's nothing to see, thankfully.
  • Hartman Hips: If the Elin had realistic proportions, they would not sport these.
  • Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: There isn't even a slot for a helmet, though there are hats you can wear.
  • High Fantasy: At first sight, delve into Dark Fantasy with surprising ease.
  • Impossibly Cool Clothes: Yes.
  • Impossible Item Drop: Ever see a piglet drop a huge two handed axe?
  • Improbable Power Discrepancy: There level 1 piglets and level 60 piglets.
  • Jack of All Stats: Warriors. They're not as good as DPS compared to Slayers and Berserkers with their offensive stance, nor can they tank as easily as Lancers with their defensive stance, but they're still capable fighters in a variety of situations.
  • Jiggle Physics
  • Jousting Lance: The Lancer's weapom, taking after the Monster Hunter treatment with an accompanying tower shield.
  • Lightning Bruiser: Brawler characters, especially at their debut and considering they're classified as Tanks. They have very high DPS, are durable thanks to their ability to block and counter enemy attacks, and have skills that let them move quickly across the battlefield.
  • Lightning Can Do Anything: Electrical charges deal damage (Shocking Implosion; Priest Skill), give damage resistance (Balder's Temple Golem Generator), stun players and monsters (Visionmaker Gear), yank players toward enemies (Auricadis in Balder's Temple), serve as visual indicators for boss monsters enraging (Kumas), instant-kill players (Also Auricadis if you let it charge), and can be harvested to craft weapons and items (Lightning Essence), among other things.
  • Magic Skirt: Human Females. Despite wearing on average, the shortest skirts in the game, they never flip up.
  • Mass Monster-Slaughter Sidequest: All of the suppression quests that give vendor token rewards.
  • MMORPG: The genre of the game.
  • Navel-Deep Neckline: More outfits than you'd think.
  • One-Gender Race: Elins are all-female, while Popori and Baraka are always male. Popori and Elin were originally the incredibly bizarrely dimorphic males and females of the same species.
  • Our Elves Are Different: They are long lived and physically and magically competent but they are also warlike while being nowhere near invincible. After being smashed by an alliance of other races they seemed to have reformed and are now the main driving force of The Federation, though Thulsa still calls them out on their arrogance.
  • Our Giants Are Bigger: Or arguably smaller in this case. The Baraka are claimed by lore to be one of the giant races that abandoned their peoples' battle lust (and escaped divine judgment for that) but they are scarcely a few heads taller than Humans. They also have body proportions that make them resemble overgrown Dwarves. The only slightly smaller Amani are not called giants for some reason.
  • Physical God: Most of the gods and goddesses in the game became corporeal and killable after Lok's device stripped away their powers but as one outing with Kaia shows they are still unmatched by any of the mortal races.
  • Pun: Some of the names of quests. Examples are "Ore, Really?," "A Venom-enal Effort," and "Dying of Boar-Dom." "Lair And Back Again" doubles as a Shout-Out.
  • PVP Balanced: TERA's player-versus-player combat factors in the type of equipment you're using in addition to player skill and class play style differences. Archers and berserkers have a reputation for smashing other players in a single hit; warriors, lancers, and slayers have reputations for stunning, knocking down, or otherwise incapacitating other players to death; mystics and priests are generally accepted as being near-impossible to kill in an evenly-geared, one-on-one engagement (and are prioritized in group pvp), and sorcerers' different builds tend to focus into combos and celerity or simply Fireblasting the target to death after stunning them.
  • Randomly Drops
  • Random Number God: Pray when enchanting a piece of equipment. At least in the western version you can never have a Critical Failure.
  • Revenue-Enhancing Devices: The Tera store is a fairly inoffensive (if you don't count Fanservice) form of this, mostly selling cosmetic outfits, mounts, weapon skins, and dyes. You can also buy boosts for XP and Reputation, as well as strongbox keys, supply packs (low-level equipment and some potions, typically), and a few crafting materials-nothing gamebreaking, but convenient for those with money to spare.
  • Rule of Sexy: The only explanation for the existance of many, many, many outfits in this game.
  • Same Content, Different Rating: EU version got slapped with PG12, while even middle-game content clearly does not match.
  • Scenery Porn: Most of the landscapes in the game are brightly colored, absurdly detailed and screenshot-worthy, and you'll have no choice but to take them in when you get on a flying mount (which have fixed routes as the game's fast travel system).
  • Sexy Backless Outfit: Nearly all High Elf outfits are these, but particularly the robes, which are essentially cocktail dresses and evening gowns.
  • Sequence Breaking: Several story quests are unlocked at a specific level. Therefore, by overleveling, one can theoretically reach a point where Samael will become increasingly impatient with your character for letting certain key characters labeled traitors "escape"... while Elleon, one of Samael's targets, will be waiting right outside the next room himself, informing you of your next deployment, the cause of which is Samael's apparent death!
  • Shout-Out: You wouldn't believe how many there are.
  • Small Girl, Big Gun: The Gunner, who totes around a Magitek Arcannon that's twice her size.
  • Spin Attack: Many classes have gratuitous spinning in their attack animations, while most 360 degree AoE attacks have at least one full spin. The Berserker's is particularly noticeable as the class can choose the number of spins by charging the attack.
  • Standard Fantasy Races: Of the playable races:
    • Humans were originally nomadic before creating the Valkyon Federation. They strive for peace and civilization in Arborea
    • High Elves are ancient, yet noble and cunning. They used to be part of a great civilization that was destroyed during the Divine War. They are the remnants of that civilization.
    • Castanics are a demonlike race who defected from the service of Lok.
    • Amani are tall and strong and used to be a Slave Race to the Giants. However they have since gained their freedom. They're basically a heroic version of Orcs.
    • Elins are Little Bit Beastly girls who are forever young. They were created by the goddess Elinu and hold a deep connection and alliance with the Popori.
    • Popori are short, plump, anthropomorphic animals who manifested from the animal spirits after the Elins were created.
    • Baraka are the descendants of Giants and are known for their heavy strength, but are actually gentle and cherish knowledge and wisdom.
  • Status Buff: Most classes have their own self-buffs, though Mystics are valued for their crit-enhancing aura buffs, which last as long as the Mystic is alive, in the area, and not completely spent on mana. Priests are also capable of casting buffs, but not to a passive extent like Mystics.
  • Stone Wall:
    • The Lancer class. Warriors using the defensive stance can attempt this as well.
    • To a lesser degree, the intended purpose of the Mystic's Thrall of Protection. It has a lot of health, but isn't too good with aggro'ing and tanking compared to Lancers.
  • Stripperiffic: The majority of female armors in the game (along with Combat Stilettos), as well as a few male armors. Castanics tend to get the most revealing outfits, but even Amani and Elins get a few as well.
  • Sword Beam: The Slayer can fire them off during some attacks.
  • Tactical Suicide Boss: All BAM types and the bosses based on them have long recovery times after certain attacks during which they're vulnerable. These are usually the attacks that are least survivable without good use of a block or dodge move but to experienced players they're simply a signal to prepare to blow all their damage cooldowns.
  • Taken for Granite: A rare beneficial version: the Sorcerer class learns a stoneskin spell that makes them immune to all attacks. They can't do anything while petrified, but they can cancel the spell early.
  • Take That!: On their New launch Features page, they promise you won't have to kill a thousand Furbolgs just to go through a tunnel.
    • These patch notes state that they're changing the LFG channel limit to one message per minute. Their reasoning for doing this is because "It's not Barrens chat." EME seems to like poking fun at Blizzard.
  • Teleporters and Transporters: The flying mounts enter some sort of wormhole for longer travel distances.
  • The Mole: Samael threw his lot in with the Scions of Lok quite a while ago.
  • Thriving Ghost Town: All of the smaller towns.
  • Thong of Shielding: Castanic females
  • 20 Bear Asses: Many of the quests are like this.
  • Underground Monkey: Again, level 1 piglets and level 60 piglets.
  • Walking Shirtless Scene: Certain armors for High Elf males and Castanic males.
  • Welcome to Corneria: NPCs have a very limited number of spoken lines, limited to what race/gender they are.

Alternative Title(s): TERA Online

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