Xenoblade Chronicles X / Tropes K - Z

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K-R

• Katanas Are Just Better:
  • The longswords are basically this in all but name and are widely regarded as the strongest weapon type in the game, due to having an extremely powerful damage-boosting aura in Offensive Stance, a multitude of special and powerful weapons dropped exclusively by specific tyrants and an absurdly strong tension art in Blossom Dance, which on top of possessing one of the highest damage multipliers in the game ignores the enemy's damage resistances, meaning everything is going to be feeling equal amounts of pain from it, even the superbosses. However, while acting like Katanas, they rarely ever look like them, and typically resemble broadswords. So they are definitely Playing With This Trope.
  • Nagi's second Affinity Quest shows how much of a badass he really is with his signature katana in an awesome display of Cutscene Power to the Max.
  • Various post-endgame tyrants drop Signature Weapons— legendary longswords that almost always look like a katana. There are no signature weapons for any other weapon type in the game.
  • Ralzes (Grenada GG-made dual swords) resemble dual katanas.
• Kicking Ass in All Her Finery: The game's "fashion armor" sets allow you to dress up party members without altering combat stats. You can wear full combat armor but appear wearing anything else. They'll be armed and ready for a night on the town, spent mowing down enemies with melee weapons and heavy artillery!
• Kill All Humans: The aliens (well, some of them, anyway) that destroyed Earth have this as their motivation. They repeatedly state that "all Earth-aliens must die!" and any attempts at diplomacy are shut down instantly. The only reason they give is that humanity is a "blight" that must be "cleansed". We don't learn their real reasons until the very end of the game: the species that leads the Ganglion can be killed by human DNA. Human bodies are completely, lethally toxic to them. The Ganglion were engineered as a Servant Race to the Samaarians, who built in a weakness to their DNA in case the Ganglion ever rebelled... and humanity are the descendants of the original Samaar species.
• Killer Gorilla: A common enemy in Primordia. Simius are very aggressive and will attack the main characters upon sight. Their King Mook is a high-level Tyrant known as 'Hayreddin, the Territorial'.
• Killer Rabbit:
  • Terebras are adorable giant otter-like creatures with huge ears. They will still rip you a new one if your gear isn't up to par. Mephites are about the same, though not nearly as cute, and always aggressive.
  • Sirene, the Lost looks like a cross between a giraffe and a sea slug and is just level 13. It has the highest kill count of any Tyrant, likely because players didn't expect it to be so tough for its level.
• Kill Sat: The superboss Leva'el, the Terminus has the ultra-powerful Apocalyse Wand art. You are given a five-minute warning before it uses this attack, just to show how powerful it is. When the attack comes, a burst of purple energy rains from the sky upon you. It is a guaranteed One-Hit Kill on your Skell and then you.
• Lame Pun Reaction: Everyone has a suitably awesome response to the Joker Female's lame after-combat joke.
  Joker Female: Whew! I'm bushed. Did I do all the work or what?
  Elma: You did enough, but next time you can do more.
  Hope: If you're bushed, then I'm shrubbed. So, there.
  H.B: Show some humility! That was all me.
  Murderess: Oh, please... I stretched a little.
• Laser Blade:
  • The photon sabers utilized by the Blast Fencer and Galactic Knight classes. They generally deal beam damage, but variants capable of inflicting heat, electric, or even gravity damage exist.
  • Skells can have energy swords, katars, rings, and claws.
• Last Lousy Point: It's inevitable in a game this massive: whether it's collectibles, items, indigens, or stuffed lobsters, there'll always be that one thing that just won't be found. The nasty part about the Enemy List is that it doesn't log how many total of each species there are, and there are several species that only show up in certain weather conditions (like Frenzied Coronids during a Red Aurora).
• Last Note Nightmare: A weird, fairly downplayed example is z30huri2ba0tt12le1110, the boss theme for Rexoskell as well as Interfearance. It's an utterly terrifying, loud, unpleasant song that violently abuses Scare Chords throughout, but by far the part of it that's strangest is the ending, where it very abruptly goes from creepy orchestra to near-silence and some strange clicking noise.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: Can be Exploited by players accidently or not. In this game, you can set up Holograms that you gain multiple times through the game. Players who join other people's squad missions will visit the host's barracks, and they can go to the hologram room and view the host's holograms they put up. Some of the holograms feature WalkingSpoilers, and while you can't view the hologram's name, you can still get spoiled by certain things, like the Prone Tree Clan and chimeras, even if the player won't understand the contexts they are from.
• Leaning Tower of Mooks: Among the various indigenous species are a series of turkey bird-like Saltats, who often go about their nature dancing and and making strange musical noises. Some of them can be seen stacking on top of each other as part of their natural behaviors.
• Learnt English from Watching Television: One alien the player meets on Mira, L, is remarkably fluent in English from the first time you meet him. It's quickly explained that he happened upon an archive of the Library on Congress that happened to crash near his home, and has been studying it, learning English through that. Though he does not have a particularly good grasp of idioms, frequently getting sayings wrong.
• Lemony Narrator: The narrator for the English-language "Survival Guide" videos, who becomes more dickish with each new video. "If Map View is too difficult for you, consider staying on Earth to witness its destruction."
• Lethal Joke Character: Drifter!Rook is a Jack of All Stats at best, Master of None at worst, and only really has the extra passive slots to go for them. Master the class lines for whatever weapon combo you want and a variety of skills, however, and you can turn it into The Ace when it comes to Rook's classes.
• Lethal Joke Item: The Ramjet Rifle. You get to keep it after field-testing it for a weapons researcher, who decides against developing it further as most of its stats are absolute garbage (for instance, it has an attack of one at a point in the game where other weapons of the same type will be closer to ten). The key word being most: While its attack is awful and it has an absurdly long cooldown, it also gives 300 TP per attack, meaning with the right build you can practically spam powerful attacks that would otherwise take a while to build up TP for.
• Lethal Lava Land: Cauldros. The continent serves as the largest host for the Ganglion headquarters, thus overlapping with Remilitarized Zone; even without the dangerous monsters lurking within, the place is harmful due to the frequent rain of volcanic debris. Because of the high amount of lava, using a Skell to explore it is recommended.
• Lettered Sequel: It's the only Xenoblade game to use a letter in its name instead of a number (which means the next game, Xenoblade Chronicles 2, is the third installment). The X stands for Cross.
• Let X Be the Unknown: The developers stated that the "X" in the title of the game represents alien life or the unknown.
• Limit Break:
  • Overdrive functions this way: you can activate it after you beat chapter 5 in the main story and have 3000 or more TP. It greatly lowers Art cooldowns and enables tetriary cooldowns, which allow Arts to have even greater effects if you wait long enough after it becomes available. You also gain a number of different bonus effects if you use Arts in a specific color order, such as extending Overdrive duration, doubling the hit count (which increases the effectiveness of every bonus effect) for the next Art you use and increasing experience and Tech Points gained. You can also fully max out Overdrive duration if you gain another 3000 TP during it, which can be done with the right skill setup and gear augments: you can do this as many times as you like during a single Overdrive, which makes it a key to a number of highly effective setups. You also get various bonuses if multiple characters have Overdrive active at the same time, but since your AI-controller partners won't save enough TP to have it available unless you specifically tell them to do so, don't expect to see it often.
  • Skells also have their own form of Overdrive that generally seems use much more often, since their TP equivalent, GP, isn't needed to use their Arts: its exact effects change depending on the base Skell model, but generally speaking it increases stats, negates fuel consumption, speeds up Art cooldowns and increases the change of triggering Cockpit Time with Art use, which makes the Skell invincible for its duration and resets all its cooldowns. Like the human version, it can also be extended beyond its default 10 second duration: the first extension is guaranteed, but anything past that is randomized and depends on whether you manage to trigger Cockpit Time.
• Living Gasbag: Most of the flying critters in the game clearly have gas sacs keeping them aloft, ranging from the man-sized floating jellyfish to Giant Fliers like Colubrims. Even the land-bound Millesaurs (utterly enormous dinosaur things) are noted to have huge gas bags in their bodies, lightening them to the point they don't collapse under their own body weight.
• Loads and Loads of Loading: A concession to fitting such an expansive game onto a single blu-ray is that all the game assets are stored heavily compressed; combined with the Wii U's modest hard drive space precluding any large, uninvited install procedures, load times of 20-30 seconds are the norm when playing from a disc, and crop up any time you trigger a cutscene or fast-travel. As a counter to this, uncompressed asset packs can be downloaded for free from the e-shop, dramatically reducing loading times for those with the space to store them.
• Loads and Loads of Sidequests: There are three kinds: basic missions that give out small rewards for killing enemies or finding objects, normal missions that deepen the setting, and affinity missions which are voiced and develop your party members or major NPCs.
• Logical Weakness:
  • Large enemies and machines are especially vulnerable to gravity-based attacks. The bigger they are, the harder they fall, after all. In addition, wearing bulky armor reduces your defenses against gravity attacks — it's heavy, after all.
  • Insectoids and Theroids are often vulnerable to thermal attacks. Living beings are vulnerable to Kill It with Fire, which makes sense.
• Long Song, Short Scene:
  • "Black Tar" is over three minutes long (and has two versions). You'll finish most battles before the lyrics start.
  • Likewise, "Uncontrollable" plays when you fight Tyrants, though you'll probably only hear the lyrics in full if the battle starts to draw out.
  • "Wir Fliegen", the song that plays when you activate Overdrive has a 2nd verse after the chorus before looping, and on the same track there's a version that uses more rock instruments for the second half. However, both of these are missing from the game, especially considering that Black Tar has the second half in place while fighting in Skells.
• Lost Colony: The game takes place on a Lost Colony called Mira, which was established when a colony ship from Earth crash-landed on the planet. The reason the colony ship launched at all is because Earth itself was destroyed in a clash between two warring alien civilizations. It's speculated that other colony ships may have survived and founded their own colonies, but there's no way to confirm this.
• Love Dodecahedron: It goes like this: Gwin has a crush on Irina, who doesn't like men but just might have a soft spot for Elma or Rook. Murderess makes several flirtatious comments towards Rook, with some hints that it's more than just idle talk. Lyvia is Definian who is the romantic rival of Eri, who has a crush on Rook. Mia flirts with Doug in an after combat dialogue, who is in love with Hope (who has numerous NLA citizens in love with her), who is vaguely hinted to be in love with...you guessed it...Rook. Rook is a Love Vortex, and all of these examples are just if Rook is male, the female Rook includes all of these and MORE.
• Loyalty Mission: Every party member (save Rook of course) has Affinity Missions to advance their story, build their relationship to Rook (and other characters) and allow a Rook which uses their weapon to learn their unique Art. Some of these are even required to progress the story.
• Lost in Translation:
  • Black Tar's lyrics include, "Standing as long as we can until we get all Dolls up", which would make more sense if you understand that Skells are called Dolls in the Japanese game. At least it's not in the Skell combat part.
  • The names of Tatsu's younger siblings are all puns on the Japanese numbers 2-6, a joke that non-Japanese speakers wouldn't get.
  • In-Universe, Professor B's native language contains words that don't translate into English, so he does the best he can to describe it when asked. The words just appear as jumbled garbage text.
• Lucky Charms Title: As with most games composed by Sawano, the songs' names have abstract names which combine words with numbers in a scrambled fashion.
• Lyrical Dissonance: "Uncontrollable", the song that plays against Tyrants, sounds like a kickass battle theme, but it's very easy to miss the lyrics that tell the story of a broken relationship and the uncertainty of mending it.
• MacGuffin: The Lifehold Core. Finding it is the primary goal of BLADE, and it isn't located until the end of the game.
• Machine Blood: As part of the Robotic Reveal, the Player Character bleeds blue circulatory plasma when they get their arm blasted off.
• Mage Marksman: The Psycorruptor and Mastermind classes specialize in buffs, debuffs, and minor healing Arts, and have very powerful raygun weapons.
• Magic Knight: By contrast, the Fullmetal Jaguar and Partisan Eagle specialize in close combat and have many melee attacks that have elemental properties, and attacks that also inflict debuffs.
• Magikarp Power: A minor example: the starting class, Drifter, has barely any Arts of its own and can't use any notable weapons but it's the only class that has 5 passive skill slots. Since you can use a class' weapons in any other class once you master its most advanced form and what Arts you can use is determined by the type of weapon you're equipped with, you'll ultimately switch to Drifter permanently to make use of its 5 skill slots once you master every other class since at that point you have no limitations on what types of weapons you can use.
• Magma Man: Gularths are walking titans made of lava and rock, and breathe fire and launch lava bombs as their attacks. Millesaurs could be seen as volcano-like as well, as their materials include obsidian, they have a large conical port on their back, and some of their attacks, like Dino Mortar, fire blobs of lava.
• Male Gaze: The Ganglion women get noticeable camera attention on their bodies, especially the rear end.
• Marathon Boss:
  • The two Global Nemeses, Yggralith Zero and Telethia Plume, offer an interesting spin on the concept. Fought in online events in the style of an MMO raid, these bosses have utterly obscene amounts of HP spread across hundreds of thousands of individual "lives". Each instance against them is timed, and a sufficiently prepared party can be reasonably expected to only shave off a few hundred lives in one sitting. The idea is that the entire community is supposed to work together to take these bosses down over the span of a few days.
  • There is far tamer example outside of online: a Milesaur Tyrant named Gradivus, the Headless Emperor. It has one hundred million HP, the highest of any non-Global Nemesis enemy in the game despite being just level 74, but unlike the Global Nemeses, you have to kill this one in a single sitting. There's ways to reduce that HP relatively fast with absurd builds, but it's a testament to its resilience that even the strongest builds in the game can't one shot it and take a while to bring it down.
• Master of All: It's possible for the player to fully master all 16 of the game's Classes and acquire the skills each one has. However, the problem that prevents this from being practical is the Level 60 Cap: At best, you'll only be able to master 9 Classes (Drifter, two Tier-2 Classes, three Tier-3 Classes, and three Tier-4 Classes) before your Class Point gain peters out to just one per battle.
• Match Maker Quest: There are a few twists to the formula. One of the first is a compulsory quest to help the subordinate of a team member, that involves getting a favor from an alien craftsman that comes with a steep price; 10 pizzas. Doesn't seem like much until the shop owner charges you 10,000 credits for them. Another has gotten the girl with little issue already, but needs your help convincing her Proud Warrior Race father. But the third is the doozy; The questgiver is actually asking for help on behalf of a friend of hers. Like in its predecessor, it ends in failure. But mostly because the client decides she'd rather get with the player instead... then the questgiver gets jealous and decides she likes you too!
• Mecha-Mooks: There's a big family of hostile mechanoids, all created by the Ganglion race. Examples include the Fal-swos (flying drones shaped like manta rays), Oc-servs (hovering machines shaped like squids), Xe-doms (large sentries with a Skell-like metallic carapace), and Xerns (gigantic, hovering aircraft carriers shaped like cranes; they're large enough to be Boss in Mook Clothing enemies, and one of them is indeed entrusted the role of Superboss in the postgame).
• Mechanical Monster: There are various large, mechanoid Tyrants across the continent of Cauldros. Among them is Leva'el the Terminus, a Superboss that only appears in the Playable Epilogue.
• A Mech by Any Other Name: Referred to as "Skells", which is short for "exoskeletons". The original Japanese calls them "Dolls".
• Mechanical Lifeforms: According to Luxaar, The Vita, the Ganglion's ultimate weapon, was once the physical body of their god "The Great One". The post-credits scene reveals humanity itself has become this, as despite the Lifehold's inner core being destroyed, the mimiosomes are all still functional.
• Megaton Punch: An attack used by Simiuses and Cantors. It's a thermal-based attack with extremely high damage, and will send whoever it hits flying if it doesn't outright kill them.
• Mercy Mode: If you die on a story or affinity mission boss for a certain number of times, you are given the option to lower the boss's level by 5.
• Metaphorically True:
  • At face-value, Weapons that fire multiple projectiles per attack are weaker than weapons that have higher damage but fire fewer or even only one projectile. So this means you should only stick to using high damage weapons, right? Wrong. You need to take into account the number of projectiles that a weapon fires and then use the most basic equation (Damage output x number of projectiles per attack) to get the actual base damage output of the multi-shot weapon.
  • For reasons unknown, the percentage sign in the Stability stat (which is clearly visible as day in the original Japanese version◊) was omitted in the localized versions◊. This made the Stability stat ambiguous and hard to understand in its function and importance.
• Mid-Season Twist: Chapter 5 ends with your player character's arm being blown off by an enemy mech, leaving behind a metal stump filled with wires and leaking a blue liquid. This is because you, along with every other human in New L.A., are being held in stasis within the missing Lifehold Core, and have been remotely controlling robotic bodies from there. This is also where we learn what the countdown on the BLADE Tower is for — it shows the Lifehold Core's remaining power, and if it hits zero before it can be recovered, everyone dies.
• Mile-Long Ship:
  • The settlers leave Earth on enormous motherships, which seems to double as a colony on their adopted home planet.
  • The Ma-non ship shown casually hovering above New Los Angeles is not too shabby either, being nearly as large as the city itself.
• Mini-Mecha: Mechs known as "Skells" form one of the game's key gameplay mechanics. They're just over twice the size of a human pilot and can transform from a humanoid combat form into land vehicles for faster travel. Eventually, you can unlock an upgrade that enables flight.
• Missing Secret: After beating the game, a BLADE member at two camps in Primordia tells of a powerful Marnuck Tyrant hiding at Talon Rock. He does not exist.
• Moby Schtick: Most of the main plot concerns with the Ganglion's attempt to pursue and destroy the crew of the White Whale Colony Ship out of dogmatism, even as the humans start killing high-ranking members one by one.
• A Molten Date with Death: Exposure to the lava in Cauldros will eventually kill you or your party members, but the white phosphor lake on the western part of Cauldros makes the lava relatively safe to stand in by comparison.
• Monster Compendium: The Enemy Index keeps track of all the indigens, Ganglion, and otherwise that you've encountered over the game. It also includes a bit of information on their biology and culture (for nonhumans).
• Mood Whiplash: Practically any scene that involves Tatsu. In fact, most conversations are completely serious and formal...then Tatsu makes a joke or does something silly (which may or may not be followed by a rebuttal)...after which the scene plays goes back to playing out as normal. Whenever you hear that oh-so-familiar bass guitar start playing, you know the scene has turned comedic.
• Morality Kitchen Sink: Initially the game starts out Black and White, as the humans of NLA are the one thing standing in the way of the Ganglion, a ruthless, tyrannical syndicate. Gets less so as time goes on as side missions reveal there are quite a few scumbags among the human NLA population, such as racist BLADEs ready to commit genocide against all alien races, criminals and murderers raising hell in the city, and that's not even getting into the late-game reveals that the selection process for the White Whale was corrupt to the bone. In addition, there are some notable defections from the Ganglion, such as the Cavern Clan of the Prone and the entire Wrothian race. But it becomes this again when said defectors join the ranks of NLA, and the criminal humans start conspiring with the Ganglion. To say nothing of discontent within certain BLADE members and their willingness to commit treason as revenge.
• Moral Pragmatist: Most alien races fall into this trope. Since virtually all of them have been press-ganged into joining the Ganglion, they leap at the chance to rebel once they realize that A) they're stranded on Mira and the Ganglion are without most of their reinforcements and B) humanity actually has a good chance of defeating the Ganglion and thus freeing them. The Orphe and the Wrothians, in particular, make it clear that their alliance with humans are strictly a tool for survival (the Wrothian prince even flat out tells you that if there ever comes a time that Wrothian interests oppose human ones, he will void the truce immediately), but both species come to respect humanity in the meantime.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous:
  • Simius and Cantors have four arms.
  • The Telethia has six limbs; the upper two always serve as wings/arms while the lower two always serve as legs, but the middle two switch between functioning as arms or legs depending on its stance.
• Mundane Luxury: One of Mia's Heart-to-hearts reveals that pets in NLA are this. Mimeosome dogs and cats are available to citizens, but are outside of most peoples' reach because they're very expensive and require special permission to buy. The party can only get a pet by tracking down ones that have been lost.
• Musical Spoiler: Right before you first encounter the Prone, it's painfully obvious someone's sneaking up on you because the music is suspensefully building up to a climax.
• The Musketeer: All classes use two weapon types, a melee weapon for close range combat, and a gun for long range combat.
• Mutually Exclusive Party Members: Phog and Frye Christoph are brothers who are opposites in every way and had a major falling-out over a past tragedy. You recruit Phog first, but Frye's recruitment mission requires Phog to be recruited but not in your active party. Afterwards, both of them will refuse to join your party if the other is present. Until they resolve their differences in the "Blitzkreig" mission (unlocked after raising your Relationship Values with both of them to a certain level), you can't have both in your party at the same time. Different examples can be found regarding Celica and Mia; these two characters become recruitable only after the point where Lao becomes permanently unavailable as a party member.
• Mythology Gag: As per use in Monolith Soft.
  • There are a few inside the character creator alone:
    • Several default faces are reproductions of popular characters from previous games of the metaseries, specially Xenogears.
    • One of the face paint options is the red X from the Xenogears logo.
    • In the English dub, there's a "Classic" voice option for the main character in each gender. The voice actors are Adam Howden and Carina Reeves respectively, who voiced Shulk and Fiora, the male and female leads in Xenoblade Chronicles 1.
  • Lin's Monado hairclips.
  • In the affinity mission "The Ties That Bind", when Tatsu returns home, his brothers and sisters mistake him for their father. Lin calls out Tatsu as a "middle-aged deadbeat", something that could describe Riki. Lin also wonders if the Nopon live in trees, a call back to Frontier Village from the original Xenoblade Chronicles 1.
  • At one point, Lin and Elma call Commander Vandham "Colonel Square-tache", something Reyn called Vangarre in the original game. In the Japanese version, the two share the same name.
  • In Chapter 10, Tatsu claims the Zu Pharg is even bigger than the "legendary" Frontier Village.
  • Choosing the right dialogue in Chapter 12 may lead to Tatsu calling his friends "hom homs", what the Nopon called the Homs in the original game. Gwin asks him what those are, and Tatsu doesn't have a clue. He then looks at the camera and smiles.
  • In both Xenoblade games, there is a boss battle near the end of the game against a close ally who was Evil All Along who is the last major boss before the finale. However, unlike the guy in Xenoblade, Lao makes a Heel–Face Turn.
  • The quote "Not Like This" at the end of Chapter 11 is a reference back to the original Xenoblade. Both involve traitorous events and giant mechs. Mumkhar says it after being stabbed by a giant stalagmite. Lin, defending Lao, shouts it to avoid Elma from shooting him.
  • Said event in X is a lot like the end of the second fight with Jade Face/Gadolt, where a talented sniper is forcefully ejected from his mech.
  • There is the mention of Ether, this time as a damage element independent of weapon class, determined instead by a certain weapon manufacturer.
  • The Blast Fencer and Galactic Knight classes contain a few to the original Xenoblade, such as an attack that resembles the Monado Buster, as well as a skill that deals extra damage to mechanoid enemies.
  • One of the Full Metal Jaguar's arts shares its name with Shulk's "Stream Edge"^note though the attack itself bears no resemblance to it.
  • Two of Doug's arts also taken from Shulk: "Phenomenon" looks similar to Shulk's version of Stream Edge and Galactic Cataclysm is the same as Monado Buster.
  • Shield Gunners act as tanks and use taunts to aggro the enemy. They also learn Reyn's "Wild Down".
  • Melia's Starlight Kick also returns as a Galactic Knight skill.
  • Funnily enough, though, despite the Melia-and-Shulk reference attacks, the weapon choice for Blast Fencer/Galactic Knight? Attack drones and a beam saber - exactly the weapon loadout for Fiora.
  • By the same token, one of Nagi's unique arts is "Blossom Dance", which was Dunban's signature move in Xenoblade.
  • One of the arts for the Commando is Shulk's Back Slash and one of the arts for the Drifter is Shulk's Slit Edge.
  • The quantum computer running the Lifehold greatly resembles Zohar from Xenogears and Xenosaga both in shape and overall appearance, and the capsule where Elma's real body is stored in is also greatly remiscient of the one KOS-MOS is kept in when she's offline or undergoing maintenance, which is fitting considering she's essentially a biological alien Expy of her.
  • In the English dub, Celica has an British accent and pronounces Nopon the same way it was pronounced in the original Xenoblade Chronicles (everyone else, including the Nopon, pronounced it differently), both of which call back to how Xenoblade was dubbed.
  • One of the collectibles is a pair of statues depicting the Bionis and Mechonis.
  • One of the collectibles is the Gem crafting furnace from the first game. Its description makes a joke about how there aren't any ether crystals or cylinders in this game.
  • The Sword of Legendaryness sought after by a pair of Nopon is (a Nopon-made replica of) the Monado.
  • Mia nicknaming Rook as "Chief" is similar to Allen who also always refer to Shion Uzuki as "Chief".
  • In the Predator and Prey quest two BLADE members gets ripped apart by the Prone and their body parts are used◊ as weapons◊ which is similar to the Soylent System.
  • Irina and Gwin always referring to Elma as "Colonel" is similar to how Captain Jin Uzuki always calls Commander Margulis "Colonel".
  • The song NO.EX01's German lyrics is a nod to the Xenosaga titles.
  • The Telethia return from Xenoblade, though play a completely different role in this game.
  • Galactic Cataclysm's attack animation is nearly identical to Monado Buster. Side Slash's animation is quite similar to Double Wind.
  • Numerous items from Xenoblade drop off enemies, such as the Cloudy Eyeball from certain Diluses or the Bloodied Face from Qmoevas.
• My Rules Are Not Your Rules: Some of the Tyrants are dangerous for this reason. They have abilities or powers that bend or break the normal rules of combat and force the players to find ways to counteract them in order to win.
• Naïve Animal Lover: An early quest has an Interceptor named Carl task you with clearing a cave of indigens, but balk at the prospect when it turns out the beasts in question are all young. You're given the option to spare them, in which case they come back later in the game, now grown up and very hungry, and kill several BLADEs in their rampage — including Carl himself.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Applies to the Tyrants as a whole. Experienced BLADE members know they aren't to be taken lightly and are usually best avoided, unless you're outfitted with a Skell... and can still prove dangerous even then.
• Nature Is Not Nice: The game utilizes this trope much like the previous game, except that it's much more obvious this time around. Mira is full of hostile beasts, and it's usually not a good idea to take mercy on the wildlife. Just ask Carl, who, if you decide to spare a group of infant Suids (swine creatures), they'll eventually grow up and attack some people, including Carl himself.
• The Needs of the Many: Every citizen of NLA is expected to contribute something to the city's greater good, whether BLADE, alien, citizen or government official. In fact, during Celica's first Affinity Mission, Director General Chausson specifically says that the city cannot spare any resources whatsoever for idle citizens (especially one who eats as much as Rock). Even after Celica risks her life to become a BLADE for the sole purpose of helping Rock, Chausson still gives Rock the choice of either working in heavy industry or leaving the city outright. Every single character present (Rock, Celica, Vandham, Elma, Lin and you) applaud Chausson for how generous this decision is.
• Negative Space Wedgie: There is something weird going on around the planet Mira. People keep crashing on the planet for no adequately explained reason, those that repair their tech enough to try to go off-planet always have something mysteriously go wrong, everyone can understand each other's speech despite speaking different languages, and the planet itself is not on any known star charts... even those made by civilizations that have mapped out entire galaxies. One highly advanced scientist confirms the existence of some kind of space-time anomaly around the planet but is unable to explain anything about it.
• Never Smile at a Crocodile: Diluses are Mira's answer to the crocodilians. Your first encounter with them will likely be the Merciful Diluses in southern Noctilum, which have levels in the late 30s when the other indigens in the area are early teens. And despite the name they're aggressive, too.
• New Neo City: The Hub City is named New Los Angeles.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • Many quests can result in innocent NPCs getting killed or their lives ruined by a lack of preparation or missing a crucial clue or item needed to save their life.
  • By killing and looting a simple Nopopotamus hanging out at Lake Ciel, you end up causing quite a bit of strife for a Nopon at the local Caravan who was planning on buying a wedding dress and proposing to his fiance. He was waiting for his friend and that Nopopotamus to arrive at the caravan so he would finally have the money needed to buy the dress, and give her a nice ring as a proposal as well. Instead, he's forced to take a loan from a local Loan Shark and deal with the consequences of not paying up in time. Fortunately, you help him get around the issue.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: The Ares Skell series are named after a Greek god of war, skate around on their oversized wheels when moving normally, sprout energy wings when flying and have Hinduism-themed weapons.
• No Biochemical Barriers: Discussed. When the party first encounters Tatsu, one of the first things Lin does is scan him for pathogens before letting him into New LA. The same is also applied to every other species that is allowed to immigrate. An initially-xenophobic store owner tries to use this as an excuse for keeping Ma-non out, but it's pointed out to her that every species is scanned for pathogens. The Zaruboggan race averts this by not being oxygen-breathers and feeding on pollutants.
• No Bisexuals: Played With. Heterosexuality is assumed to be the default in nearly all cases that the subject of love or sex comes up—especially in regards to alien species. For example, when a Definian tries to seduce Female Rook, she disguises herself as male. There are many cases of Ambiguously Bi all over the place, but they're just that—ambiguous. Lara Nara is the only character who openly states an attraction for the same sex/gender, and while he also flirts somewhat with women, it's hard to know if he's just teasing. A possible exception is the suitor Rook finds for Male!Lyvia, who is female, but professes to like Lyvia regardless of what form she takes.
• Nobody Here but Us Statues: Aeviters and Cantors do this often. There are a few problems with their disguises, though: Disguised Cantors keep moving their heads with a loud clacking sound. And the Aeviters' disguises would have been perfect... if not for the fact that there are no non-Aeviter statues in the game.
• No Cutscene Inventory Inertia: Annoyingly, the game is extremely bad at recognizing whether or not you are driving a Skell for cutscenes. A few late-game missions mandate Skell use and show everyone in their cockpits, but most missions just assume you're walking up on foot even if your entire team is in Skells. This means you walk up to the cutscene point in your Skell, somehow hop out of your Skell for the cutscene, draw your ground weapon for a fight, and then get inexplicably teleported back into your Skell the instant the cutscene is done with the game not missing a beat. A few standout examples:
  • This gets especially weird in Chapter 8. You're defending New LA from Ganglion attack, okay, sure... and the cutscenes imply you're helping to hold the gate and later clear the city on foot. Not only is this a full chapter after you get the ability to unlock at least a starter Skell (and has a level limit that puts you exactly at level to get a "proper" Skell and get Elma and Lin into Skells too, if they match yours) but literally everyone else defending New LA is using a Skell. The only other non-Skell folks are Lao's team, and that's because they're defending the relic mech inside a hangar. And yet, if you bring the Skells you almost certainly have, and which the scale of the crisis rather suggests you bring, it doesn't get acknowledged at all and you're apparently ground-pounding for some reason while everyone else is in robots, including Team Irina, who otherwise need to bum your Skells when they're on your team.
  • Chapter 9 also gets fairly strange about this: once again you have Skells and are heading into hostile territory, which rather passively suggests you should bring the robots for this run. You have to dismount to talk to Lao, which is a fair enough do, but you're then shown walking into Sylvalum on foot regardless of your robot status. You then reach the ambush point, and this time you're once again just shown as being on foot, regardless of Skell status, and are detained. You then have the duel with Jiarg, the first part of which is absolutely mandated as a foot battle - and when the second part begins and he summons his Skell... he tells you to "arm yourselves as you wish", and doesn't aggro immediately when you gain control. And your Skells are once again available to board. It's a very odd way of acknowledging that you probably want to use Skells for this fight without actually showing the Skells in the cutscene, and has left a few people wondering just what's going on with Skells and cutscenes.
  • Chapter 10 damn near goes off the rails with it - it seriously seems to be implying that you took on the Zu Pharg, AKA the robotic siege weapon the size of a large building, on foot. And won. In reality, you not only probably had everyone in Skells for that, but you very likely had flight modules!
  • It should be noted that the game regularly averts this outside of Skell-related issues.
• No Longer with Us: When the player first meets Tatsu's family, his father is absent, and several comments are made as to him not having been around for a while. Lin assumes Tatsu's father is dead, but it's later revealed he's actually just on a long journey to repay debts he owes and hasn't been home in a while.
• Non-Combat EXP: The game expands on its predecessor by also awarding EXP for launching data probes to mine resources in each area of Planet Mira.
• Non-Mammal Mammaries:
  • Many alien women are not based on any sort of primate (or even mammalian) species and yet have human-shape breasts. Milsaadi women in particular have breast-like structures despite being mechanical.
  • Averted with the Nopon, who are all spherical in appearance; Ma-non, who all possess slim figures; and the Orphe, who are simply red.
• Non-Human Sidekick: Tatsu, a merchant of the native Nopon race accompanies you in the story. He serves as comedy relief for the most part.
• No Name Given: The name of the alien faction that fought the Ganglion over Earth and shot down the White Whale is never revealed in the game as well as a mysterious Black Testament-like character who approached Lao in the epilogue.
• Non-Combat EXP: As in the previous game, you mainly earn EXP by exploring the world map and discovering landmarks, hidden areas, and completing sidequests and story missions.
• Non-Indicative Difficulty: The amount of stars for each basic mission on the board usually represents the BLADE Level required to unlock it, not the overall difficulty of the mission. For example, there's a two-star mission that requires hunting high level 30 Purgovents, which can take a beating even from a Skell. Meanwhile, there are missions above five stars that involve killing level 15 Tyrants or enemies, and so forth.
• No OSHA Compliance: Subverted. New Los Angeles has a few unfinished bridges between some of the districts without roadblock signs to stop people from driving off. Even the bridges that do have roadblock signs don't stop some exceptionally clumsy or drunk residents from stumbling off of them. The subversion kicks in when it's explained that the liquid at the bottom of NLA is shock-absorbing gel, which keeps uncoordinated residents from killing themselves this way. However, it's still a long climb to get back up.
• Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond: The Ganglion. They were one of the two factions that destroyed Earth and continue to aggressively hound human refugees on Mira. Fighting them off is a struggle and they're easily winning a war of attrition for most of the game. It's later revealed that the Ganglion are actually a criminal syndicate — and not even a major one, they're the space equivalent of thugs the real players use as hired muscle. That's just what happens when a Higher-Tech Species decide to pick on a race still figuring out spaceflight.
• No Such Thing as Alien Pop Culture: Almost every alien species that joins NLA gains some sort of fascination for human pop culture. The Ma Non become obsessed with pizza and fashion, L is captivated by human sayings and idioms, and at least one Prone is interested in human military strategy. However, for the most part, nothing of the aliens' culture aside from technology and weapons seems to catch on with humanity. In fact, there's barely any sign of alien pop culture at all. There's one Prone woman who seems to be a dancer, but that's about it.
• Not Always Evil: The Cavern Clan Prone and the Definians seem like the Ganglion's signature evil Mooks, but a few can make a Heel–Face Turn and live in NLA. Both of the defectors wish to exact revenge on the Ganglion for leaving them for dead or treating them like expendable slaves.
• Not Quite the Right Thing:
  • In one side mission, a man hires your team to clear all of the dangerous indigens out of a cave. Upon exploring the cave, it's discovered that the creatures inhabiting the cave are all juveniles, prompting the man who hired you to decide that you shouldn't kill them all. If you decide to listen to him and leave the creatures alone, they eventually grow up into extremely dangerous monsters that end up killing a number of people, including the guy who originally hired you to clear out the cave.
  • In another side mission, you're introduced to a guy who often harms other soldiers and takes the credit for their missions. When you're later assigned to find a rock, you see him in trouble running from an indigen. Should you give him the benefit of the doubt, he'll reveal that it was (partly) a ruse, and takes the rock and takes the credit for that mission. Should you refuse to help him, he gets eaten, you complete the mission, and it's stated that what he got was karma (plus there's one less traitor within the army).
• "Not So Different" Remark: When the player saves a bunch of Ma-non from a racist human who wanted to kill them, they say they hold no grudge against you because every race, Ma-non included, have their fair share of bastards.
• Not Worth Killing:
  • Some of the Indigens ignore you depending on whether you're in a Skell or not. The medium sized enemies think of humans as lunch, but a giant armored robot would be too difficult to fight to bother with; the large enemies barely notice humans at all, but see the Skells as a threat.
  • Murderess learns that the serial killer who killed her parents on Earth somehow managed to get onto the White Whale, and has killed some of her friends in NLA since then. Knowing full well that she'd be throwing away everything she's worked so hard to obtain up to this point if she took her revenge and killed the guy, she decides to just walk away and lets him get eaten by a Caro instead.
  • Can be invoked with The Blood Lobster, resulting in a Villainous Breakdown instead.
• Oddball in the Series: X is the only game in the series to be explicitly set in our reality rather than in a Constructed World, and eschews most of the Magitek and mythological elements of the other games in favor of being a mostly straight sci-fi story about humanity trying to rebuild itself on a new planet after Earth is destroyed. Aside from the Nopon, none of the other races from the other games appear, and instead the game introduces several new alien species that don't appear in any of the other games. It's also the only game to have no direct^note the protagonist, Elma, does appear as a DLC character in Xenoblade Chronicles 2, but the two games are otherwise unrelated plot ties to the other games in the series, being a thematic sequel instead.
• Offscreen Teleportation: Your party members are always right beside you outside of combat. If you're running across a field, they'll just be running behind. If you jump off a cliff, you sometimes see them land with you. If you climb up a steep cliff face in such a way that they can't path their way to you, they will instantly appear as soon as you get up top.
• Off with His Head!: While most monsters only lose tails, horns, or maybe a limb on occasion in battle, Millesaurs and Coronids aren't so fortunate and can have their heads removed if their necks take enough damage. Doing this simply causes them to reveal their real head (or a large "eye" in the case of Coronids) that's normally concealed within their chest, though. Gradivus, the Headless Emperor, like the name suggests, doesn't have one to begin with.
• Older Than They Look: A father-son duo of Prospectors, Keifer and Leland, has everyone appropriately confused over their age and appearances. Leland is well into his senior years and insisted on having a mimeosome that looks younger than his son. His speech mannerisms support his age, but you certainly wouldn't know by looking.
• Ominous Latin Chanting: The game has a lot of English lyrics in its songs, but it's not really chanting. The chanting comes in the form of wordless chants for the game's main theme, and some German chanting for the primary boss theme.
• One-Hit Kill: Two of the post-ending Superbosses have attacks that can destroy instantly all Skells piloted by the party members, namely Dadaan The Strongest Prone (through a destruction command that is activated during the first ten seconds of the battle) and Leva'el the Terminus (with the Apocalypse Wand). While you can still continue fighting the former on foot, the latter will ruin your day if it triggers its deadly move, because it's far too high in the sky to be fought from the ground.
• One-Man Army: Once you reach the endgame status with any combination of powerful setups, you'll essentially be this compared to the rest of the party, simply because the AI-controlled party members can't make proper use of infinite Overdrive to reach the same kind of damage values you can and they will mostly serve as a distraction to the enemy, assuming you can be bothered to bring them along to begin with. That being said, they still contribute a decent amount in endgame Skell combat, mostly because it focuses more on overpowered gear setups over abusing a single battle mechanic.
• One Stat to Rule Them All: Among the available field skills, Mechanical is this, as it serves not only to open up White Whale and vehicle wreckage, but it's also required to establish FrontierNav probes. And said wreckage often contains probes, which are miles more valuable than the augments and cosmetics Archaeological and Biological treasure spots occasionally yield.
• One-Time Dungeon: The Lifehold Core is the only place in the game that can only be played once; afterwards you can only hang around the outside parts.
• Only One Save File: There's only one save file per Wii U account. This is due to the online features (and the achievements unlocked with them) tied to the player's profile.
• On-Ride/On-Foot Combat: Players first start off the game on foot, but later can obtain humongous mecha called "Skells" to fight and explore in. There's no restriction in what enemies you fight in and out of Skell, so it's entirely possible to take on gigantic megafauna on foot or step all over enemy grunts in your mech, though a Skell-loving NPC finds the latter behaviour to be dishonourable.
• Optional Stealth: A limited but still useful version: the dual swords Art Shadowrunner makes the character untargettable by enemies, which not only means that they can't be targetted in battle, but also makes the character untargettable out of battle as well, preventing the enemy from attacking you even if they'd normally see or hear you. This allows you to target an enemy without engaging it, use the Art, cancel the targetting and run past any Beef Gate that might otherwise One-Hit Kill you on your way to your destination or quickly grab whatever treasure they might be guarding. While this is normally limited by the fact that Shadowrunner is a TP art, you can just use another dual swords Art Blood Sacrifice to gain an instant 1000 TP on command at the cost of half of your current HP, which you can just quickly recover back by the virtue of not being currently in battle. There are also augments that reduce the likelihood of detection.
• Optional Party Member: Just under half of your possible party members in the game are completely optional. This makes sense, as they're simply fellow BLADEs, and "recruiting" them just involves doing an assignment together, after which they're impressed enough to offer you backup in the future. One of them, Mia, requires doing some out-of-the-way sidequests and is potentially the very last recruitable character in the game (at earliest, you must not only complete her standard sidequests but also one that is in turn locked behind a complex branch of other sidequests, and ultimately this can only be achieved once you've completed the penultimate chapter in the game).
• Otherworldly Technicolour Hair: Despite literally taking place on another planet, and the character creator allowing for the usual outlandish anime hair colors, the citizens of New Los Angeles are all humans who came from Earth, and as such exhibit usually normal physical qualities. This trope applies to Elma, who is actually an alien who came to Earth to give them the technology to escape from the planet before it was destroyed in the crossfire of two warring factions. Her human form has dark skin and white hair, but her true form has pale skin and blue hair that may very well be made of crystals.
• Our Monsters Are Weird:
  • Saltats are supposed to be birds, but they look more like huge primates with hand-shaped wings, a masked face, a huge trumpet horn on the back of their head, and colorful eye markings on their wings. They also constantly make horn noises, make spinning dances when not in battle, make Bring It gestures, and generally clown around. Liceors are similar, but have a more ethereal and bright design.
  • Gerrids look like an oversized flea with a nautilus's shell, except the shell is bright red or green, and the tentacles are more insectoid, and they have long, spindly legs. They also generate electricity and have a habit of jumping around and happily flailing about on the ground. And according to the Enemy Index, the males incubate eggs inside themselves.
  • Millesaurs are massive sauropods with a praying mantis-like head and a volcano built into their backs. The mantis head isn't even their real head either; the real head is actually in their chest cavity behind their false neck. The same principle applies to their Sylvalum counterparts, the Coronids, which have a large eyeball inside their neck.
• Out of Focus: Any character who is not required for the current story/affinity mission is visible in cutscenes, but will not interject or have their presence acknowledged. A jarring example of this becomes rather humorous if you take Irina as your 4th party member when you complete chapter 11, since she'll be just be standing there beside you and Elma while Elma talks extremely personal details about her to Vandham.
• The Overworld: The world map is said to be approximately 400 sq. miles - spread across five continents, floating land masses, and the islands out in the ocean. And the only way you'll be able to fully explore it is by unlocking your Skell's flight capability.
• Pale Females, Dark Males: Female aliens tend to have lighter coloration than their male counterparts. Notably, Buidhe is much paler than her master Jiarg.
• Palette Swap: Nearly all the different indigen species have a counterpart that looks and acts very similar to them. For example, Liceors are swaps of Saltats, Caros are swaps of Grexes, Viragoes are swaps of Vigents, and Jaculs are swaps of Auravis. Usually, the two species live on different continents (Liceors are only found in Sylvalum, for example, while Saltats are everywhere else), but there is some occasional cross-over.
• Palmtree Panic: The game features plenty of coastline but most of it is seen in Primordia.
• People Puppets: This entry in the series carries the status effect of Control, which can make enemies your allies instead. However, this can also be used on party members, forcing them to lose control of themselves and attack at random.
• Permanently Missable Content: This game tries very hard to ensure that it never hits this trope at all. Even if there were one-time only things, there are alternatives that give you another chance at them. None of the quests have a time limit on them, and certain Affinity Quests that would logically become permanently missable later in the plot are mandatory toward progression anyway. However, there are a few things that slip through the cracks:
  • The only thing the player can truly miss out on are Lao's Heart-to-Hearts, but because of their temporary nature the game does not count them toward completion; all they provide is some dialogue and extra affinity points. And, of course, there's Lao himself.
  • A more minor aversion of this is BP, which only comes from examining various alien objects, finding new locations and completing missions, all of which are only available in limited amounts and might potentially make it so that you can run out of BP to max out the Arts and skills needed for your preferred type of build if you spend it on every new Art and skill you learn: this is averted with the addition of Support Missions that're unlocked when you finish the main story and allow you to gain up to 60 BP per mission as many times as you want.
  • In Murderess's recruitment mission, if you give in to her demands, you won't fight a unique Skell that has an entry in the Enemy Index.
  • For the absolute completionist that wants to collect every piece of equipment that exists in the game, there are two particularly startling details that make it very hard: 1. Unlocking Meredith AM after completing chapter 4 will make Broken Skell Sidearms, Broken Skell Arm Weapons, and Broken Skell Spare Weapons disappear. 2. Wrothian Skells can drop their own unique brand of weapons which you can use on your own skell. However, there are only a finite number of times where you can encounter and fight them. After that, they're gone for good.
  • Selling very rare items such as Level 20 Skell you first get means you won't ever get it back.
• Perpetual Motion Machine: The Ma-non's starship is stated to have a couple of perpetual motion machines aboard, generating power in each of its two wings. They regard these as mundane technology, one character compares how they view it to how humans view campfires. It is stated that the machine doesn't really output very much power at once though, so the Ma-non do require alternative fuels for more energy-intensive tasks.
• Piñata Enemy:
  • Aquatic Visgels are a common source of farming Ultra Diamond/Nebulan weapons due to them being level 66-67, the minimum level to drop items of that quality consistently, as well as being weak enemies. Just be careful about the sleeping level 97 Yggralith right next to them.
  • Joker, the Unknowable is level 90, but is a very common enemy to defeat for levelling up BLADE Scouts and obtaining Ultra Diamond/Nebulan weapons because, being a Blatta, it has relatively low health and attack power. It can be tough for lesser-prepared players because of its ridiculously high Evasion, though. The nearby Squall Blattas, which appear in huge numbers, also contribute to the grinding effort.
• Pink Girl, Blue Boy: For suids outside of Noctilum, boars are blue and sows are reddish-pink.
• Pink Is Feminine: The female Orphe are red, while the males are blue or green.
• Pistol-Whipping: The Assault Hammer/Breaker arts for the assault rifle both have you bludgeon your target with it, potentially knocking them down or stunning them, respectively.
• Playable Epilogue: The game continues after Chapter 12 with the quote "this story never truly ends". Completing the game unlocks new missions, new skells, new equipment, and new enemies (including the optional superbosses) you were unable to fight before. By the time you complete the main game itself, you most likely completed less than 50% of it. Have fun spending the rest of your hours getting a 100% completion. On the good side, you can play online multiplayer with less worries. However, likely as a reminder of the aforementioned quote, some things are left unfinished: You cannot get Lao back, but at least you know he's still alive. You cannot locate the unknown knight. You cannot find Ghosts in this game. You cannot eradicate the entire Ganglion race in Mira. And certain matters pertaining the supporting characters, such as those between Gwin and Irina, are left unresolved.
• Playboy Bunny: Female players can craft up two different bunny suits. One is the traditional one shown on the trope page, and the second is a bikini variant.
• Player Headquarters: The BLADE Barracks inhabited by the player character, Elma, and Lin, where you can customize the decorations, fine-tune your Skells, go on quests with other players, and start the main story quests. New Los Angeles as a whole also counts to a lesser extent, as you receive almost all other quests and interact with most NPCs there including all the recruitable party members; excluding a handful of BLADE stations and Nopon caravans, the rest of the game world is hostile territory.
• Point of No Return: There's no turning back once you enter the site of the final battle, the Lifehold Core. You can't save while inside, to prevent you from being locked in the place while underprepared.
• Post-End Game Content: Completing the final chapter rewards you with blueprints for the level 60 Skell Superweapons, allows you to craft the level 60 Skells and some unique armor, unlocks several missions, including the Support Missions to grind affinity, money and Miranium, or Battle Points, and adds five Superbosses to the world.
• Powerful, but Inaccurate: The Six Stars arms manufacturer produces weapons with high offensive stats but poor accuracy, operating under the principle that the user should be able to compensate with their own skill.
• Power Glows: Overdrive has a visual tell. It shows up in the rare cutscene as well, meaning that it's probably not just a gameplay thing.
• The Power of Friendship:
  • The core lesson behind almost every side mission. People are fragile, flawed, weak, or straight-up bastards on their own, but learning to rely upon and help each other makes everyone stronger and capable of doing anything. Elma flat out states this as her Kirk Summation several times.
  • Mon'Barac worries that he isn't strong enough to survive on Mira, so he tries his hand at beast taming like the Prone are capable of. After you save him from being swallowed whole by a Lophid, you suggest he go ask the Prone for advice on his methods. He overcomes his fears of talking to other races and quickly makes friends with a Prone, Ma-non, and Nopon. After you save him again from being swallowed whole by a Lophid, his friends come up to him and tell him that he can survive by working together with his newfound friends, and you teach him what the bonds of friendship mean.
• Precursors: The resident Precursor race was known as Samaar, who are said to have come into this universe from someplace else soon after its creation. The civilization they founded, the Samaar Federation, still exists in the present day, and is stated to control a radius of over 6 million light-years (which means it spans many galaxies, including the Milky Way and Andromeda). The game is rather ambiguous on whether the original Samaarians are still around, they're never directly said to have died out or disappeared, but everyone speaks of them in the past tense, and humanity is revealed to be their direct biological descendants.
• Predator Pastiche: The Prone are a large, imposing Proud Warrior Race that judge everything (including allies) by martial superiority. There are two warring clans (the Tree Clan and Cavern Clan), which have been at odds for centuries; the Tree Clan is willing to work alongside humanity against their greater foe, while the Cavern Clan are almost all hostile upon sight. Even their faces have some resemblance to Predators, with wide, mandible-like mouths.
• Pre-existing Encounters: Carried over from its predecessor; enemies will litter the landscape, and the player can seamlessly transition into fighting them at will.
• Puny Earthlings: It appears that humanity is very far south of the average tech level of the universe. All life on Earth is wiped out as a side effect of a battle in orbit between two warring alien powers (though we later learn that at least a portion of one side of the conflict was deliberately targeting Earth). Humanity only survived by a rushed evacuation of the homeworld into unknown space, and even the technology to do that was gifted by a friendly alien... on their own, humans would have been screwed. The leaders of humanity are later dismayed to find out that the multi-species alien army that very nearly caused humanity's extinction is considered nothing more than a minor crime syndicate by the ruling governments of local space (which, incidentally, encompasses multiple galaxies).
• Race Against the Clock: The big number at the top of BLADE Tower isn't arbitrary: it's a countdown indicating how much energy the Lifehold Core has. If the heroes don't reach the Core and activate its secondary energy generator before it reaches zero, the mimeosomes (Robotic bodies housing the humans' souls) will shut down, and bye-bye humanity. While the residents of New LA do know they have a time limit, only a select few know the meaning behind the number, to prevent widespread panic.
• Ragnarök Proofing: Mira, the main setting of the game, has numerous ancient ruins of unspecified age, most notably the O'rrh Sim Castle that takes up a large portion of Cauldros.
• Randomly Generated Loot: Discussed in-game. An NPC in NLA comments that weapons found inside the stomachs of various indigens tend to take on special properties. He wants to research why a gun found inside a Grex's stomach may end up being more powerful than store-bought equipment.
• Randomly Generated Quests: There's a mission board where BLADES gather to look up jobs. It's a large pool of mostly pre-determined quests that tasks you with gathering certain materials or killing certain enemies, but you almost never know which ones will be available from day to day, or which ones will show up next after you complete some of them.
• Random Number God:
  • Weapon Stability is definitely something that is not self-explanatory at first glance. What it actually is is a range modifier that adds or subtracts from the base attack value of the weapon. Weapons with high stability (lower numbers) are desirable because their damage output is very consistent. However, Weapons with low stability (higher numbers) can inflict more damage but at the risk of inflicting very weak hits if you're unlucky. Stabilizer traits and augments allow a player to remain on the safe side of damage output whereas Destabilizer traits and augments offer a "high-risk, high-reward" fighting style to those that want to take their chances.
  • "Jarosch, the Sensational" is possibly the worst example of a Tyrant that you'll never find in your game unless you look up a guide. It becomes even more annoying if you're trying to collect it's Holofigure. Jarosch's spawn point is on a cluster of giant, red flowers growing on an arching tree in Rustpool Banks which will not activate unless you step directly inside it since it has a very short trigger distance. The huge catch here is that Jarosch shares that spawn point with a Jade Saltat which has a higher chance of appearing. So expect to do lots of reloading to get that very elusive tyrant to appear.
• Rare Random Drop: Enemies can rarely drop a weapon or piece of armor in a higher tier than what is normally found. This is the only way to obtain certain Ultra Regal and Ultra Infinite armor sets, as their droppers might be only level 56-60 or 61-65, below the levels they normally drop (UR drops for 61-65, while UI drops for 66 and above).
• Real-Time Weapon Change: The game gives the player a melee and ranged weapon and they can switch between the two at the push of a button or when they use an Art with the weapon they aren't currently holding.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over:
  • One chraracter effectively refers to Cauldros as "hell". It looks the part, too, what with all the black rock and lava everywhere. The place also happens to be the main base of the Ganglion.
  • Luciel, the Eternal, is a Millesaur with a distinctive red and black color scheme. It's also aggressive, a Tyrant, and one of the highest-leveled indigens in the game.
  • Tainted indigens are black-colored, have red electricity coming out of their eyes, and are aggressive and have an insatiable hunger for flesh.
• Red Baron: Tyrants have unique names that illustrate how dangerous they are, such as "Pharsis, the Everqueen" and "Telethia, the Endbringer".
• Red Mage: When it comes to stats, Blast Fencers and Galactic Knights have a global boost to them, meaning that there won't be any one of them that will go to what the Drifter has or worse. If the Drifter can be made The Ace due to its fifth skill slot, the Galactic Knight can be considered a close second as all of it's stats are boosted evenly. Obviously, the class is the second option for fully ranked-up Enforcers, which is the game's mage class.
• Redshirt Army: The Ganglion treat the Zaruboggons as nothing more than expendable scouts. As an entire race, they have no aptitude for combat. Their ability to adapt to any environment is the only reason they're useful at all, and the Ganglion expect them to put up a fight and die.
• Reduced-Downtime Features: There are very few healing arts in the game (with the most powerful one, Smooth Recovery, only available in the US edition or Japanese DLC). To heal consistently, players have to perform Quick-Time Events that allow them to combo abilities with their teammates. This allows the player to focus entirely on the battle and not need to stop and heal. Also, abilities work via a Cooldown feature, and health automatically regenerates outside of combat.
• Refuse to Rescue the Disliked: There's an NPC named Gus who attacks you during a mission. Later in the mission, he's seen being chased by a Petramand (a giant crab spider hybrid creature) and is asking for help. You can refuse to help him. This is ultimately the better choice, as it was all a ploy by Gus (again) and he screws you over if you rescue him.
• Regional Bonus: The Western releases have the DLC characters (Alexa, Bozé, H.B., and Yelv) released for free on the disc.
• Relationship Chart: The Affinity Chart shows how all the characters on Mira are interconnected with each other. The relationships will change over the course of the game as the story plays out, but more importantly from the dialogue choices the player makes which affects the outcomes of side quests. If a player isn't careful, they can get an NPC killed, with the chart placing an X over their picture. It also shows the Relationship Values the the player has with the other party members, which is necessary for unlocking more of their story missions when the game advances to the proper chapter in the story.
• Relationship-Salvaging Disaster: The lyrics for "Uncontrollable" are about a man and woman who put aside their differences and failed relationship in order to board Project Exodus to escape Earth and start anew.
• Relationship Values: Every party member has these, and raising them is necessary to take certain quests. They're also needed if you're interested in striking a conversation with them while they're on a break (not in your party).
• Remilitarized Zone: There is a much larger number in this game than in the first game, in the form of Ganglion bases scattered through the five continents of planet Mira (among which Cauldros is by far the most occupied).
• Reptiles Are Abhorrent: Invoked and defied. A human clothing store owner refuses to let the reptilian Ma-non enter her shop due to a preexisting phobia of Earth reptiles. This is despite the Ma-non looking like miniature Gungans with floppy dog-like "ears" with thoroughly non-malicious Manchild personalities. The player character has to bring word back about their helpfulness around New Los Angeles from people who have worked with them on a regular basis to convince the store owner that it's worth suppressing her phobia to let them shop there.
• Required Party Member: All missions that continue the main story require Elma and Lin on the party. Most missions unlocked through affinity with other party members must include them from the start, though some instead limit the party's usual size and disallow a character so that they can join midway through.
• The Reveal:
  • At the end of Chapter 5: All of the humans wandering around Mira are actually androids called Mimeosomes. Their real bodies are stored on the Lifehold and remote-control the Mimeosomes from there. That big, mysterious countdown on BLADE Tower? That's the reserve power level for the Lifehold, and it's a countdown to death for every remaining human.
  • Towards the end, there's a nasty reveal that the Lifehold was destroyed when the White Whale crashed. Humanity, at least in this sector of the universe, is dead. And somehow the humans' consciousness has integrated with the mimeosomes.
• Rewarding Inactivity: Depending on how you set up your probes on Mira, you can get high amounts of money and Miranium after a certain amount of time has passed in game. As such, it's a valid tactic to leave the game playing in the background with the Game Pad plugged in to have resources build up while you're busy doing something else. However, the game apparently has algorithms to determine if a player is idle; after a while, resources WILL stop accumulating until you start playing again.
• Rewatch Bonus: There are so many plot twists (especially at the Eleventh Hour of the game) that if replay the game (or watch a Let's Play of someone else playing it), you can catch tons of stuff that you missed now that you have knowledge of said twists.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: The Nopon from Xenoblade return, and they're even more adorable than before due to updated graphics.
• Ridiculously Human Robots: As per Xeno tradition, you'd probably expect at least one to show up and be a major plot element, and you might even suspect that various major characters might be one. The twist is that the player character is one - along with all the other humans. The residents of NLA for the duration of the game are all near-perfect human androids, piloted by the consciousnesses of the sleeping humans in the Lifehold.
• Robotic Reveal: In Chapter 5, when the player character throws themselves in front of Tatsu to protect them from an enemy Skell attack, their arm is blasted off, revealing metal, sparks, and blue bio-electric fluid where their arm used to be. As it turns out, they are actually a highly advanced android controlled via a human consciousness from within the core of the Lifehold, as is every person in New LA. You were never told because it was such a basic fact that Elma never realized you didn't know it.
• Rocket-Tag Gameplay: Post-game bonus bosses can certainly feel like this. Even with Skells, the strategy for a few of them can boil down to "use high powered attacks and an Overdrive extension abuse set to flatten them as soon as possible" or "die horribly in the first five seconds".
• Running Gag: Most story missions begin the same way: Lin asks the player for ideas on what to cook. The dish she ultimately prepares is based on the player's choice (which includes fried chicken, pot pie, and foie gras). During the preparation of the dish, Lin will try and trick Tatsu into becoming part of the dish, to the Nopon's unending chagrin. Once the meal is prepared, other BLADE members may drop by for a meal before laying out the mission.

S-Z

• Sad Battle Music: "aBOreSSs", the first half of which plays during the second phase of the Prog Ares fight (hence the title's uppercase and lowercase letters splitting into 'ares' and 'BOSS'). The other half of it (which is echoed in the last note of the first part) is instead a lot more menacing, and plays for the Zu Pharg fight.
• Sand Worm: Sabulas, which can be found in certain sandy terrains (though, oddly enough, not the actual desert region). They're about thirty to fifty feet long, but are mostly docile, only attacking if attacked first. However, there are certain individual Sabulas that are gigantic (on the order of a mile or more in length) that serve as optional post-game bosses... two of which are named "Atreides" and "Gesserit".
• Sarashi: The Six Stars ceremonial uniform you can develop fits around a male's stomach or female's breasts.
• Savage Setpiece:
  • Tons of them. Indigens like Progens, Millesaurs, and Coronids are never going to attack unless you do so first, with rare exceptions, but given how strong and highly leveled they are, you really don't want to unless you can handle them.
  • Telethia, the Endbringer itself is one of these. At level 99 it's the most powerful enemy in the entire game, but it's also totally non-hostile.
• Saved From Their Own Honor:
  • At one point, the Wrothian (the game's Japanese Fantasy Counterpart Culture) Anti-Villain Ga Buidhe decides to disobey her master Ga Jiarg and kill the protagonists, intending to protect him and her people against them despite his willingness to negotiate. When she fails, she tells the protagonists that she's willing to pay with her life, until Ga Jiarg arrives and says that, despite her disobedience, her death isn't necessary.
  • During Celica's Affinity Mission, we learn that her friend Rock is in danger of being kicked out of New LA because the city can't afford "idle citizens", and despite having Super-Strength, Rock doesn't want to fight. Being told that Rock will be forced out unless some sort of compensation is made, Celica asks how she can join BLADE (a paramilitary operation) and is jokingly told by the Commander that she could do a mission by herself. Celica does so without question and almost dies before Rock and the protagonists show up to save her. Later, Chief Executive Chausson still says that this isn't enough and Rock sadly announces that he's willing to fight if it means he and Celica can stay. However, Chausson says that isn't necessary because Rock can instead use his strength for heavy industry. Everyone then applauds Chausson for his generosity, and later Rock says he's hoping to one day pay Chausson back for the favor.
  • One side mission has another Wrothian who wants to go on a Suicide Mission to fight against Ganglion forces. The only way to talk her down from this is to remind her that dying isn't what her friend would want.
• Save Scumming: The player is only given one save file per account. Like the first game, a good number of the side quests have multiple outcomes depending on your choices (and some of them affect connected future side quests). The rewards stay the same regardless of outcome this time, but unless you know ahead of time, you're not going to get the favorable outcome on the first attempt every time. If the "bad choice" doesn't lead to damaged NPC relationships, it usually leads to one or more friendly NPCs getting killed.
• Scary Dogmatic Aliens: The Ganglion coalition, while called a crime syndicate with an exorbitant amount of political influence, are a mix of Nazis and religious fundamentalists. They have a hierarchy where the Ganglion species is the dominant race, and other species are to either serve them or be destroyed, and they seek to destroy humanity under the claim of them being a plague, which is actually a cover for the fact that humans are the legitimate descendants of their creators, the Samaarians, and Saamarian/human DNA is a failsafe against the Ganglion species. As religious fundamentalists, they not only paint the extermination of humanity as a holy mission, they worship the Samaarians like gods and have reverence for an as-yet-unseen entity known as the Great One, but given the revelations about humanity's ancestry and the Ganglion's status as an artificial servant race, it's not quite clear how much of it is genuine dogma or cultural propaganda to cover up a power grab.
• Scenery Gorn: Much of Cauldros, notably The Capital Wreckage, The Ruined City of O'rrh Sim, and The Kw'arah Cloister.
• Scenery Porn:
  • As with the original, its spiritual sequel offers a wide variety of terrain and breathtaking vistas. The amount of detail in New Los Angeles alone is a vast improvement over either of the Colonies. Made moreso, once you get your first Skell and gain the ability to fly — you may even get to see an electromagnetic storm!
  • A prime example of this is right after the first boss fight, when you reach the Western Gate. Walk up the stairs and take a good look at the scenery from the extended balcony. If you waited until nightfall, auroras fill the sky, accompanied by a full moon. For that matter, cutscenes are rendered according to time. Whether you first enter, and then tour, NLA at morning, daytime, dusk, or at night is entirely up to you.
• Schizophrenic Difficulty: The game is absolutely lousy with enemy placement. Nowhere than the very start of the game is this made clear; Elma herself informs you that you really should take the upper route to New Los Angeles, as while the fall to the lower level won't kill you, the high-level indigens certainly will. Even then, you will spend much of the early game stealthing your way around high-level threats by exploiting the terrain, because trying to brute-force your way past them will only end in you getting wasted in record time.
• Schmuck Bait:
  • Every continent has enemies who just so happen to look like rocks or the local foliage, who just "happen" to be hiding out near tempting resource nodes or shortcuts.
  • A cove in Noctilum has a mysterious wrecked robot half-submerged in the water. Go ahead. Investigate it. See what happens. Thought you could get revenge on it once you had the Ares 90? Hope you have reflection negation gear, or else this trope will happen to you again.
  • In Sylvalum's North Silent Sandsea, you can find a large ring of tooth-like protrusions sticking out of the sand. Get closer and you can see that the innermost ring is opening and closing slightly. Go ahead, walk on the mysteriously mouth-like structure.
  • The first Filiavent the player is likely to encounter at first looks like a very large, ornate flower, but the top parts are swaying around and the game plays ominous music if you get close. It's not quite as dangerous as the previous two examples, but it's still likely to be a Total Party Kill until you get a more powerful Skell.
  • There's a probe spot in Oblivia set on a floating island in the middle of a bottomless chasm. One wouldn't be blamed for thinking it could be reachable by driving a Skell off a ramp. It can only be accessed with a flight module, and even then, said probe spot needs one's mechanical skill to be level 5.
• Schrödinger's Question: The player can decide to make an effort to negotiate with Alex on behalf of Eliza, the former having possibly murdered a few innocent people and plans on doing nothing short of genocide in NLA. This decision affects the ending of the related mission chain; if the player does go the full mile with negotiation, Alex dies whimpering that he and Eliza used to see eye to eye, indicating that he wasn't always that evil before. If the player shows absolutely no mercy to Alex during negotiations, Alex spews out one more Hannibal Lecture before getting shot in the back (long story), implying that he's always been a xenophobic monster.
• Screw Destiny: The implication of the acronym B.L.A.D.E. in Japan - Beyond the Logos Artificial Destiny Emancipator.
• Sea of Sand:
  • Averted with the game's designated desert region of Oblivia, which despite being referred to in-game as "Sandy Butt Canyon" by Tatsu, actually has very little sand and is mostly rocky badlands. There is one area that actually is sandy, but it stands out from the rest of the continent and is a dead givaway of a trap— in this case a giant Tyrant Sand Worm.
  • The trope is played more straight by the continent of Sylvalum. It is covered in a layer of fine, ghostly-white sand, and even has a number of regions explicitly named "sandseas" because of how sprawling and sandy they are. However, Sylvalum is actually a continental sized forest and the sand is implied at times to actually be pollen. Thus, though it fits the bill of being a sand sea, it is much more alien and surreal than other examples of this trope.
• Secondary Sexual Characteristics: Most alien females possess human-like sexual characteristics, such a human-like bust. See also Non-Mammal Mammaries and Tertiary Sexual Characteristics.
• Secret A.I. Moves: Subverted. You'll quickly notice most of your allies are listed as being "[class]+" with impossible weapon combinations, and even those that aren't have arts which you can't learn. However, mastering a class path allows you to use its weapons to mix and match, and unique arts can be learned from your allies through Affinity Missions.
• Sensible Heroes, Skimpy Villains: While players can dress their characters and teammates in anything from bulky armor to bikinis, the female characters start out wearing reasonable clothing and armor. For the two main female antagonists, Goetia wears a thong leotard with a Cleavage Window, and Ryyz goes for a Navel-Deep Neckline. The female Cavern Clan prone tend to wear more revealing outfits than the female Tree Clan prone, and the Definians aren't too different either.
• Sequel Escalation: Well, more of a thematic sequel escalation, but still...
  • The last game's world was already about the size of Japan, but since the Skells are five times bigger than the characters, this game's world is five times bigger than the previous game's.
  • Just how expansive is this game? At one point, Monolith was worried one disc wouldn't be enough. While they did fit the final release on one disc, the thing is so jam-packed that optional data packs were released on the eShop to help decrease loading times.
  • To put that in perspective, a YouTuber named Griffon Li Britannia posted a video showing the elapsed time it took to sprint from the outermost edge of Oblivia, to Noctilum's outermost edge was 31 minutes. And that was travelling in a straight line, while ignoring both the northern continents and the islands, out in the ocean!
• Sequel Hook: "This story never truly ends" indeed, once you beat the main game's story, that is. There are many, many mysteries and questions left unanswered.
• Sequence Breaking: It's possible through careful mountain climbing to find and enter Bedrock Hold in Primordia and meet Ganglion forces before the story introduces them. Later cutscenes will still have characters surprised to meet them anyway. This is a bit strange since they put invisible walls to prevent you from entering other regions from over the mountains until the story allows it yet missed this one area.
• Sequential Boss: The final boss is four different fights in a row. First you fight the Vita, piloted by Luxaar. Then Luxaar transforms the Vita into a more powerful form. Then a lengthy cutscene ensues, after which you fight a swarm of grotesque chimeras. After another cutscene, the chimeras merge with Luxaar and Lao to form the actual final boss.
• Serial Killer: There are a couple in NLA, who you have to investigate and take down during missions.
• Settling the Frontier: After Earth's destruction by a pair of warring alien fleets, one of the few surviving colony ships crash-lands on a new world they name "Mira", and the game is mostly about the colonists' attempts to establish a permanent colony there. Things get complicated when they learn that (some of) the aliens that destroyed Earth have also crash-landed on Mira.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story:
  • Naza Tenpanzi, a Prone who carried a seed from her home planet is trying to grow it in New LA, and gets help from an Orphean botanist, who sends the player on a Fetch Quest for something to help the tree grow. When the seed sprouts, the Orphean mistakes it for lunch and eats it, not realizing Naza's desire to grow the tree to preserve it, so she beats him up. The Orphean sends you on another fetch quest so that he can clone the sapling to appease Naza, only to have another Orphean walk by and eat the plant. Can actually be averted, in a Guide Dang It!. Talk to Yun'tonam, who is nearby the two xenos and tell him what happened last time the tree got eaten at night.
  • The entire Sword of Legendaryness plot ends up like this. After a lot of searching and misadventures, Muimui and Moimoi finally get their hands on the namesake sword and make a profit, only to spend all the money on a feast.
  • A less comical version is the Celeste Three plot. After being betrayed by Fodsyke and Moorehouse when confronting Briggs, the safe remains closed until much later, where Adolphus and Ga Bewehe asks the player to find the remaining key needed to open it. Turns out the whole request was a wild goose chase, Adolphus had the key all along, and Ga Bewehe attacks the player. After all that, it's revealed that Ga Bewehe was playing both the player and Adolphus and took everything from the vault for her own purposes. The quest even ends with describing the whole story as "a waste of time". Though you can resolve the mission on a happier note if you visit a certain cliff in Oblivia in the rain...
• Shield Bash: The Shield weapon used by the Shield Trooper and Bastion Warrior classes do this for all of their physical arts, they ever have an art where they hit the air so hard they can hit multiple enemies and slow them.
• Shifting Sand Land: The continent of Oblivia. It is not a totally straight desert because it does have an oasis in the middle. Instead of extreme heat or quicksands, the primary environmental hazard is an electrified sandstorm that gradually depletes the party members' HP, as well as that of the Skells if they're being piloted.
• Shop Fodder: The golden blatta Tyrants all drop a special item that has no purpose except to be sold for at least 10,000, most 50,000 credits apiece. These items are some of the only in the game that can't be purchased with Reward Tickets.
• Shout-Out: X makes nods to previous Xeno- games, going all the way back to Xenogears. Other science fiction tropes and works get the nod as well. Briefly:
  • The start of the game mimics the backstory of Xenogears as humanity flees planet Earth. One of these ships crashes on to an alien planet under less than ideal circumstances.
  • In the prologue:
    Elma: Watch yourself--that first step's a doozy.
  • Wels is the name of Elma's favorite Skell, but don't worry, the Skell isn't a mutated human.
  • The questline for an NPC named "Professor B" not only has you build a time machine out of a luxury car, but the arms manufacturer you unlock for completing it is called "Factory 1.21", both of which are references to Back to the Future.
  • So "Galactic Knights" use Photon Sabers, do they?
  • Two of the Sabula Tyrants are called Atreides, the Distinguished and Gesserith, the Wileworm.
  • According to a collectible, the White Whale had an on-board A.I. called A-HAB.
  • The Ma-non are short, have extremely high-pitched voices, and the first three you meet respectively wear red, green, and blue.
  • An NPC you can eavesdrop on in the hangar lounge after meeting the Ma-non speaks about trying to befriend the xenos by sticking out their index finger and telling them to phone home. "...It didn't work out like it did in the movie."
  • Another NPC takes note of the Ma-non's technology and expresses worry that humanity will be "Killed five times before they hit the ground" if they ever get on their bad side.
  • The upgraded version of the Formula skell model is called the Formula Zero.
  • One of the collectible holofigures you can decorate your barracks with, simply called "Assassin", depicts a Milsaadi doing Ezio's famous pose.
  • Another holofigure shows a Prone chucking barrels in a familiar way. Two others depict a red Nopon jumping over a barrel and a green Nopon getting smacked in the face by one.
  • A trio of Tyrants in Noctilum have their names and descriptions based on the main characters from Heidi, Girl of the Alps, specifically Pyotr, the Shepherd (Peter, also a shepherd), Heidi, the Lively (the titular character herself, who is very lively) and Claire, the Sheltered (Clara, who lived a sheltered life until meeting Heidi).
  • Plenty of nods to Mecha Shows.
    • In an Affinty mission Tatsu puts on a pair of Kamina/Gurren glasses
    • The Goliath Piledriver superweapon is a reference to the Giga Drill Break
    • Sakuraba Skellwear looks a lot like Eva unit pilot suits.
• Silicon-Based Life: There are numerous indigens and races who aren't carbon-based all throughout Mira. The game's bestiary states that the Milsaadi are metallic lifeforms similar to robots. The giant Gularths found in Cauldros are basically rock creatures. They absorb lava into their bodies in order to bolster their own defenses. Numerous petramands, lophids, scintimures, tersquals, and other indigens live in the lava. One of the collectibles you can find in Cauldros is a fox who eats lava, and will die if exposed to the rain.
• Skill Gate Characters:
  • The class selection menu describes the Striker as being "beginner friendly," since it grants you a balanced mix of attack/defense/and HP bonuses as you increase your skill level. However, it doesn't gain as many specialized Arts and skills as the Commando and Enforcer classes do.
  • Skells become this late game. Most players, after gaining the best Arts, Skills, weapons and equipment, choose to battle everything on foot. The reason being that the cooldown for Skell-based moves becomes a liability while ground-based ones recover much quicker and thus deal more damage-per-second. As such, Skells become only useful for taking out weak enemies easily (for farming or grinding levels) or fighting enemies that fly or are far too deep in the water.
  • Rook, Elma, and Lin, being required for all the story missions in addition to many affinity missions, become this as well. Without paying attention, the levels of these characters (especially Rook) will tower over that of anyone else. Elma having the Secret Art Ghost Factory (which grants Decoy to the entire party) makes this more apparent.
• Silence Is Golden: The opening cutscene doesn't have dialogue until over two minutes in.
• Sinister Scythe: A skell weapon, they hit twice and do extra damage from behind, making them a good way to kill enemies that should be too strong for you until you get the best weapons.
• Sleeper Starship: The White Whale was designed this way, with a portion of the crew running the ship using robot bodies remote-controlled by their still-sleeping selves in stasis. When the ship is destroyed, the bodies still in stasis are preserved in the ship's core. But in truth, rather than storing bodies in stasis, their consciousness' were uploaded into the core's computer.
• Sliding Scale of Gender Inequality: The game rests at the "Near-perfect equality" range, albeit a number of problematic issues. For example, the people of NLA and the BLADEs are pretty evenly male and female, and humanity is in such dire straits that Old-School Chivalry and Stay in the Kitchen mentalities are pointless. As such, in terms of being actors and agents of the story, men and women have an equal time of it.
  
  However, most of the top brass of BLADE and NLA are male. The three superiors your team reports to are all male, and another character states that women are rare within BLADE proper.^note Curiously, though, this doesn't bear out in the game itself - out of the eighteen(!) recruitable non-Rook party members, eight are women, which is pretty close to an equal spread. And it's only the DLC characters shifting it male - in the original Japanese print copy, without H.B., Bozé, Yelv and Alexa, the gender ratio was dead-on even at 7:7. There's also tons and tons of NPC BLADE women in the sidequests. Furthermore, a number of design choices are still very gender-unequal. Case-in-point, female characters tend to be given very Stripperiffic outfits and the Male Gaze is everywhere. There's actually only one outfit in the entire game that is exclusive to the male gender, and it looks like L's outfit, six-pack abs and all. Even well-armored women wear conspicuous amounts of Breast Plate and Sensual Spandex armor. Alien women wear thigh-high boots, Combat Stilettos, Thong of Shielding, and low necklines.
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World: Subverted. At first glance, Sylvalum looks like it's covered in a thick layer of snow and ice, and has music evocative of an ice world, but the material is actually pollen and white sand. However, during Moimoi's quest to find the Sword of Legendaryness, he mentions that Sylvalum is pretty cold.
• Small Role, Big Impact: The Ghosts only appear in the opening cutscene as one side in the war that destroys Earth and later as the side that attacks the White Whale, causing it to crash on Mira. None of the plot would happen without them, but they aren't even named in the game with the name "Ghost" comming from the game's Japanese artbook.
• Small, Secluded World: It's implied to be the case with planet Mira. The Ganglion mention that they are unable to leave the immediate space around the planet and previous attempts to leave resulted in them just ending up back at the planet and a random Manon NPC will mention that their sensors indicate that the space around the planet is very small, implying the planet is in some kind of sub-dimension.
• Snake Oil Salesman: Fraisie at the cathedral tries to exploit the Ma-non into following her religion by selling "Miracle Water" that will cure them of their ailments. The water really is a miracle cure, as it contains the antidote to the poison she's been slipping into the local drinking supply that are making the Ma-non sick in the first place.
• Sniper Rifle:
  • Used by the Partisan Eagle and Astral Crusader classes. While it hits about as hard as one might expect, its range isn't much better then the other ranged weapons, and needs to be boosted with arts, augments, or skills before it can hit enemies at somewhat appropriate distances.
  • Skells have their own version of sniper rifles as sidearms. They have higher range than other sidearms.
• Socialization Bonus:
  • When you start or reload your game, you're asked to choose a type of Squad to join, one focused on story progression, another focused on multiplayer and one focused on people you are friends with: these consist of up to 32 random players that you can hire to use as party members over the normal NPCs, offer up enemy drops you don't need yourself and do specific types of missions with together. The most visible component of this system are randomized Squad Tasks that require you to collect specific types of items or kill specific types of enemies: doing so awards some Reward Tickets every time someone contributes towards a task to that person and a larger amount of them to every Squad member when one of them is completed. Completing said Tasks also contributes towards unlocking more online Squad missions.
  • Squad Missions are mini-excursions that can be undertaken with your party, or you can recruit other players to play alongside you(the game will usually tell you(the gold-bordered announcements) if a recruitment call goes out while you're playing, but not if you're in a menu). Completing these grants you a large amount of materials (sometimes from enemies that are otherwise only fought as Superbosses), more Reward Tickets and Battle Points. In additon, completing some missions in a certain way(examining suspicious objects, fighting extra enemiess the mission points out, or destroying the right part(s) of the mission's final enemy) can unlock another squad mission with even bigger rewards. All squad members also get reward tickets when somebody completes these, with final bonuses gained if all Squad Tasks and Squad Missions are completed.
  • Finally, Superbosses might appear at specific times for a limited amount of time: you have a preset amount of time to deplete as many of their lifebars as possible and if you reach specific milestones, you can get a number of rare items when either all of their lifebars are depleted or they escape at the end of their availability period. However, the real purpose of fighting them is destroying their appendages: each one drops 1-2 items when destroyed and you can get 7-14 of them per fight, which you can redeem for large amounts of Reward Tickets and is by far the quickest way to get a large number of them assuming you're strong enough to fight them long enough to dismember them without getting killed yourself, which isn't particularily hard to accomplish, then abandoning the mission. You don't get the normal rewards, but you do get to keep the parts you broke off.
  • Like stated above, you can hire other peoples' avatars to use as party members for a limited amount of time: killing enough enemies with them in your party increases their scout rank, which gives you some free items(you also get a free item when your avatar gets hired) and if it's maxed out, a BLADE Medal when you release them: this is one of the few ways to get them and you need them to fight the Superbosses mentioned above. Even if you don't want to hire another player's avatar, you can still ask them to provide Division Support, which nets you various buffs and bonuses in gameplay.
• Soft Water: Explicitly so. But the "water" at the bottom of New LA is actually impact gel, not water. That said, you can already survive a fall of nearly any height, even onto solid ground.
• So Long, and Thanks for All the Gear: Lao leaves forever during and after Chapter 9, and it doesn't get any better from there. However, this is subverted when Doug gives back all of Lao's gear during his final Heart-to-Heart once Chapter 12 is complete.
• Sorting Algorithm of Threatening Geography: The game gives you free reign to travel where you want to from the get-go, but the game's story campaign explores each of the planet Mira's regions in order, starting with the idyllic plains and lakes of Primordia, followed by the thick and toxic rainforests of Noctulum. Next is the desertous Oblivia, then the mysterious and alien Sylvalum, and finally, the volcanic mountains of Cauldros.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: Incredibly dangerous (natural) locations use a slow, ominous song when you approach it, and they're usually home to particularly dangerous enemies, hazardous terrain, or Jump Scare enemies. More often than not there's a nasty Tyrant in the mix. It also plays in the Cleansing Spring, where the Dopang Caravan is located. This place is the safest place in Sylvalum, since none of the indigens there are aggressive, and the local Tyrant is a level 15 Murra.
• Space Opera: Though the gameplay is confined to land and sky, the plot begins with an interstellar war between multiple alien species.
• Space Orcs: Two of the Ganglion's primary Mook races fit into this archetype:
  • The Prone's skin colors include pink and purple rather than green, and they have tentacles hanging off their faces, but aside from appearance they are essentially Blizzard orcs. They tend to have aspects of both Tolkien and Blizzard orcs, usually depending on how likely they are to shoot you.
  • The Marnucks are essentially Tolkien orcs, aside from their blue skin, being reptilian, preference for guns, and having invented their own military technology. What little we know about them is that they don't just love war; their chief deity is their god of death, and they think killing people in battle is an honorable act. Their homeworld was destroyed by a global civil war, and the only ones left are the ones that sided with the Ganglion.
• Spoiler Title: One of the soundtrack's name is, decoded, Lao Chimera Telethia. Strangely, the actual track has nothing to do with those details, even though it all happens later.
• Spy Catsuit: The Skell gear and Orphean Technologies light gear are the closest things to this.
• Square-Cube Law: The game has a lot of very large animals wandering the surface of Mira. Most of the enormous creatures are shown to have very large organic gasbags keeping them aloft, like living blimps, but the Millesaurs and Coronids are just plain gigantic four-legged dinosaurs. The in-game fluff explains the Millesaurs as having a surprising amount of their bulk consisting of an internal buoyant gas sac, which means they are a lot lighter than they look.
• Stab the Salad: There's a Normal Mission where Rook has to search for a Wrothian. Said Wrothian has a woman cornered in an alley and asks for a sword. Turns out he wants to be a chef and his sword will be his cooking knife. Played with in that this Wrothian was introduced in an Affinity Mission earlier and is clearly trustworthy.
• Stalking is Love: One Normal Mission has you working for a Ma Non who wants to analyze human emotions and satisfy them. His third and final subject is Dana, a female BLADE officer who has an unrequited crush on another BLADE named Christopher. At this point, she says that she's asked Christopher to go out with her several times and he's rejected her each time. His rejection, however, is framed as a misunderstanding or misevaluation on his part, thus she continues to follow him around and enlists your help to try and win him over. To this end, she asks you to help her assemble one of two gifts. One of the gifts will finally win over Christopher's heart and the other will have him reject her for a final time. There is no option, however, to tell her to back off of the guy. For his part, though, Christopher invites these assumptions.
• Starfish Aliens:
  • The Orpheans (or the Orphe as they call themselves) are an insectoid race that are not only very logistical by human standards, they are connected to what appears to be a divine Hive Mind which is actually a symbiotic virus called the Ovah. In addition to initially having no concept of gender, they reproduce by using Senirapa water to split themselves into two Orpheans (or create two new Orpheans if the Orphean receiving the water is on the brink of death), with the new one already at adulthood and inheriting their parent's memories. It gets to the point that after replicating the water, the race goes from a mere five members on Mira (there were two others, but one's a traitor that stuck with the Ganglion coalition and the other got eaten by Visigels, thus spreading the Ovah to non-Orpheans) to making up a noticeable chunk of New LA's xeno population. Eventually, enough contact with humanity results in one Orphean spontaneously fissioning into a "female" gendered Orphean.
  • The Zaruboggans can only survive in environments that other species would consider toxic and polluted, and in addition to wearing hazmat suits all the time, they carry around gorkwa staffs to filter out voltant material from polluted areas. Also similar to the Orpheans, they have No Biological Sex (or concept of gender) despite being referred to with masculine pronouns and reproduce by regurgitating their offspring, which are born from the voltant they were consuming.
  • The Milsaadi, a race of assassins allied with the Ganglion, are silicon-based, to the point of looking almost like robots in robes. They also have the ability to shut off their ability to feel pain rather than Feel No Pain altogether.
• Starter Equipment:
  • Any time the Player Character switches classes, they're given a free set of the most basic weapons that class can equip^note Yes, you could farm money like this... but these items go for less than 20 credits, when the stuff you want to save up for tops 200,000 by midgame.
  • An odd example of this trope kicking in well into the game: your first Skell. It's given to you for free, and it's the only level 20 frame in the game. Meaning you're not getting a party full of them, its stats are nothing gamechanging, and it can only equip a fairly basic suite of weapons. It's still thrilling to explore with while you level everyone and save up for better gear, though.
• Stats Dissonance: While most Tyrants are simply enemies with much higher levels and stats than other enemies in the same area (for example, a Level 80 wandering around areas where the mobs are usually Level 10 or below), Elma warns the player early on that a Tyrant's level and stats mean nothing. Some Tyrants have special properties, immunities or abilities that can make them harder to defeat than enemies much stronger than them statistically. For example, Agnes, the Divine Scaled can reflect all Thermal-type damage, and Blaudolch, the Chalcedony can make the player's party freeze in place for a while, rendering them helpless to its attacks.
• Stock Audio Clip: NPCs may often share voice clips when interacted with, such as with Powell & Giotto and Corwin & Trevor.
• Strictly Professional Relationship: Gwin joined BLADE because he nursed a crush on Irina, but his feelings are unrequited due to her bad history with men. So she only regards him and Marcus as valued subordinates at best. Which is good enough for Gwin.
• Stripperiffic: Risque indeed in many occasions, especially the alien gear. Then again, aliens do not follow human decency standards, so it doesn't matter. And for the playable characters (mainly females), the equipment shop follows under this once you unlock them late in the game, including Elma's alien suit she wears in the "ending". Yes, you can battle with a playboy bunny suit, the bunny bikini, or even ones that don't show much on the lower regions. How everyone manages to take a ton of damage without losing clothes remains a mystery.
• Stone Wall: The Shield Trooper and Bastion Warrior class has bonuses to health and damage resistance, as well as skills that grant damage and debuff resistance while wielding their signature Shields, but the Shield weapon has few good damage-dealing Arts despite its high base power.
• Subsystem Damage:
  • Enemy limbs and external features can be specifically targeted. These parts have their own Hit Points, indicated by a circle over the targeted part. Destroying parts can affect enemy status, remove their ability to use certain attacks, and earn you extra loot.
  • The same is true of Skells, lose an arm and you lose the arts attached to it. They regenerate after battle though.
• Subverted Suspicion Aesop:
  • A recurring question in the story is where the line between survival, justice, and genocide begins and ends. While this lesson is best shown in the main story, there are a number of subplots that tackle it as well. For example, there's a side mission where you can choose whether or not to kill baby suids in their nest. The orders were to slaughter them all, but Rook hesitates to do so. If you let them live, the Quest Giver, Carl, tells you he respects your choice and says he'll handle the report. Everything seems fine until later where you find out those suids you spared are now slaughtering many of your fellow Blades.
  • Another more short-term example is during The Celestial Three quest. When you finally confront Briggs, you either have the option of sparing him and listen to his side of the story or finishing him off anyway when he's defeated. Sparing him means that you have to fight Moorhouse, Fodsyke, and Briggs rather than fighting just Moorhouse and Fodsyke.
  • The vast majority of the time, sparing anyone that attacks you in cold blood during missions is a bad idea. The one exception is Roselle, who offers a bribe and never causes trouble again.
• Suddenly-Harmful Harmless Object: There are lots of monsters like this in the game:
  • They tend to be completely indistinguishable from the bits of scenery they're disguising themselves as, and can't be targeted directly until they've revealed themselves, nor do they show on your radar. This can occasionally lead to you getting into a bigger fight then intended if an area effect attack happens to hit some hidden monsters accidentally.
  • While they don't disguise themselves, some of the robots and mechs utilized by Ganglion can be encountered in an inactive, untargetable state, only for them to suddenly spring to life and attack when approached. One will quickly learn that just because it looks broken doesn't mean that it necessarily is...
• Suddenly Voiced: Rook doesn't have any voiced dialogue until they get into battle, where they talk all the time.
• Superboss: Much like its predecessor, the game has numerous tyrants that breach the level cap of 60.
  • The most powerful Tyrant is the level 99 monster Telethia, the Endbringer. It's first shown in a cutscene near the end of Chapter 6, and is later challenged in a Zero-Effort Boss fight in an Affinity mission ("The Nopon Heir"). The real battle comes during the normal mission "A Fateful Choice".
  • There's also Neilnail Albus and Neilnail Furvus, a pair of Skells fought in the 'Twin Dolls of Mystery' Time Attack mission. They were originally supposed to be a story boss, but that plot thread was scrapped.
  • The Global Nemeses, Telethia Plume and Yggralith Zero, put an interesting spin on this. They appear on the online mission list when a certain amount of multiplayer tasks have been completed, but instead of beating them, you're supposed to just deal as much damage as possible to them within 8 minutes (or until you die three times). This takes away from an absolutely massive healthpool shared across every player meaning thousands of players need to work together over the course of about a real time week to actually kill either of them.
  • Completing the game adds five powerful Tyrants to the world: Dadaan, the Strongest Prone, who summons his squad and will scrap your Skell with his bazooka if you try to use one against him; Lugalbanda, the Wanderer-King, which can debilitate you with Eye Beams and summon ovis to eat for healing; Gradivus, the Headless Emperor, a Barrier Change Boss millesaur with a permanently destroyed neck and 100 million HP; Leva'el, the Terminus, a Xern that summons squads of enemy Skells and Satellis units and has a One-Hit Kill Kill Sat attack; and Nardacyon, the Shadowless, a souped-up version of the Chapter 7 boss and a Lightning Bruiser extraordinaire that is summoned if you try to fight its pilot Nahum, the Red Hare while you're in a Skell. Some of these Tyrants drop unique weapons or special augments that add reflect effects to certain auras and Overdrives, and most of them drop unique holofigures.
  • Also found in the postgame are several non-Tyrant mission bosses at or over level 60, such as Blood Despair, the Gleaming Sphinxes, Ozuchi Caladar, and Nopopon Incarnate.
• Super Mode: Overdrive is both this for the characters and the Skells. By sacking 3,000 TP, the characters temporarially gain a boost in attack power and the ability to spam their arts with little cooldown. When you first get it, it's a tad bit Awesome, but Impractical since the TP cost is rather steep and it doesn't last very long, but once you reach end game, through proper use of TP Gain augments and certain art sets, it's very possible to permanently stay in Overdrive mode for the rest of the fight after you activate it.
• Super-Persistent Predator: Enemies will chase you far longer than in the original Xenoblade; it takes considerable effort to run away from a hostile indigen.
• Take Your Time:
  • The degradation of the Lifehold's core only increases when you decide to continue with the main story.
  • Nagi has a busy schedule as a Secretary, but you would forget about that if you have him in the party for 24+ in-game hours straight. This also applies to the other BLADEs who have do other missions on their own time, yet you can have them in party for a very long time.
  • Even though the Ganglion are mercilessly attacking the shields of the Lifehold Core, they'll never break through until you go in.
• Technology Uplift: Very downplayed at first. A quick, glossed-over line in the opening cutscene mentions that humanity, despite being technologically outclassed by the aliens that attacked their planet, had "known the war was coming" and had prepared themselves for it. Despite Earth being their only home, humans were well-prepared for FTL velocity, space travel, as well as alien world colonization. The Skells they use are also fairly new to them, as they're the only species that hasn't figured out how to make theirs fly (at first). A Ma-non engineer comments mid-way through the game that there's a significant disparity between different areas of human technology: some of it is primitive, and some of it is surprisingly advanced. He assumes that humanity must have had a random super-genius come along and invent the advanced stuff. The intrigue involved with this, as well as how humans caught up in technology so fast, is brought up by Big Bad Luxaar in the final mission. It turns out that this was all thanks to Elma, the alien who warned humanity of the war, and helped them jumpstart their technology to survive it.
• Tech Points: Two varieties, CP and BP: the former are accumulated from killing enemies along with EXP and are used to level up your classes in order to learn more Arts and passive skills, while the latter are received from missions, finding new base camps, and performing Field Actions on the various alien artifacts and flora you can find and are used to level up said Arts and passive skills.
• Teleporting Keycard Squad: Very often, seemingly unguarded Miranium deposits or treasure boxes have enemies set to ambush you just as you're setting the probe. At least one Tyrant will only appear if you approach a certain treasure box.
• Temporary Online Content: Once the servers go down, a lot of content will go with it:
  • Division Rewards such as Salvage Tickets cannot be obtained.
  • The Global Nemeses, as well as Phanatos, the Netherlord, are gone for good, and their drops can only be obtained from the Reward Tickets obtained by completing the survey of Mira.
  • Reward Tickets cannot be obtained very easily. Good luck finding those Crude Neilnail Masks!
  • BLADE Scouts and Division Support are gone.
  • Any and all achievements relating to online mode, such as doing Squad Missions or Tasks, fighting the Global Nemesis, scouting BLADEs, getting Division Support, and obtaining every Holofigure, are unobtainable.
  • Due to the shutdown of Miiverse in November 2017, BLADE Reports can no longer be sent, and the achievements relating to them can no longer be obtained.
• Tertiary Sexual Characteristics: The alien races that are not very humanoid (such as the Nopon and the Ma-non) possess characteristics that make it easy to tell them apart. For example, they may be lighter in color, have Tareme eyes drawn to look like they have eyeliner, or have slightly wider hips. Some of them (such a female Nopon) are even pink.
• Time Travel: Professor B is from the future. His sidequests are about him trying to return via a Back to the Future car. What ends up as a funny set of references also ends as a disturbing important episode for the plot as a whole, because it reveals that the planet Mira won't even allow someone to bend time to escape it.
• The End... Or Is It?: The epilogue reveals a revived Lao who is approached by a mysterious character who is only identified as "Black Knight" showing that there is more unidentified forces to deal with on Mira.
• Theme Naming:
  • The two main Wrothians are Ga Jiarg and Ga Buidhe, which are similar to the names of two mythical spears owned by Diarmuid Ua Duibhne: Gáe Dearg and Gáe Buidhe, literally "red spear" and "yellow spear". To carry the connection further, Ga Jiarg ^note "Jiarg" is Manx Gaelic for "red" while "Dearg" is Irish Gaelic has red/orange fur, and Ga Buidhe wields a polearm.
  • Given that the Colony Ship that brought everyone to Mira is named the White Whale, it's natural that there are plenty of Moby-Dick and Herman Melville references in several collectibles and areas of New Los Angeles.
  • Tatsu's siblings are named for puns on the numbers 2-6 in Japanese, a theme that was Lost in Translation.
• There Are No Therapists:
  • Someone suffering PTSD like Lao or Irina (who lost family on Earth) and Reggie (who survived a monster attack by abandoning his unit as they were eaten) has no known outlet to cope and get a grip on their emotions. The closest NLA has are Hope and Joy, who are not certified therapists in any sense—just very good at listening and giving advice, and recommending how playing sports (tennis in particular) is good for lowering stress, respectively. From a Watsonian (in-universe) perspective, this can be Hand Waved by saying no therapists were on the White Whale or survived the crash. From a Doylist perspective, it could be because the game was made in Japan, where therapy is a very taboo and shameful thing to be made known.
  • Another major issue with this point is that Elma flat out tells Vandham that PTSD cases like Lao and Irina are expected, considering what everyone went through on Earth, then in space, then on Mira. And there are the bombs dropped during The Reveal at the very end of the game. Considering all of this, mental health should have been a major priority on the White Whale and in New LA. Again, this can partially be Hand Waved by assuming that most of the designated therapists died (or were lost) during the crash on Mira, but that still seems odd considering that most other essential crew at least survived well enough to function.
• There Is Another:
  • Concept art of Mira◊ reveals another city on Mira exists, possibly New Tokyo◊ confirming that the White Whale is not the only survivor of the invasion on Earth as well as unexplored continents a few NPCs mentioned in-game.
  • There is a quest from Lara Nara to locate a piece of the Lifehold in Sylvalum, only to discover—aside from some Milsaadi setting up an ambush—that it's from another ship.
• This Is a Drill: The massive Goliath Piledriver Skell superweapon is a cross between a drill and a pile bunker, as per the name. It also does more damage when hitting things from behind leading to the obvious joke.
• Thong of Shielding: The Six-Stars heavy legwear on women show this. Goetia wears one by default.
• Three-Point Landing: You do this upon landing from a very long fall, and everyone does it in cutscenes.
• To Be Continued: The epilogue of the main story ends with an equivalent: "this story never truly ends" or "this story is never ending" in the Japanese version rather than displaying The End on-screen.
• Tough Love: A common theme over and over again throughout the story is that people who lose their nerve or are unfit for combat/duty/responsibility need some tough love to keep them in line. In particular are Bozé and Corwin, who both resort to physical violence against one of their soldiers suffering from PTSD in two separate missions. No other alternatives are suggested, and as stated below, There Are No Therapists in this game. The theme exists in civilian facets too, such as the newlywed husband of a Prone woman whose father-in-law says he will use tough love to toughen his son-in-law until he's fit to protect his daughter.
• Trademark Favorite Food: The Ma-non love pizza. LOVE it. They consider frozen pizza a good trade for the technological secrets the Ganglion were trying to kill them for.
• Transforming Mecha: All of the Skells have a vehicle mode they can switch into whenever they please. Depending on the model, you might end up with a three-wheeler, four-wheeler, or even a tank.
• Translation Convention: Lampshaded in an early chapter, when Elma finally questions exactly how humanity is able to understand all these aliens without any lingual difficulties. L at least has the excuse that he was obsessively studying human records and learned English that way, but the Nopon and Ma-non have no trouble communicating either, despite having had zero contact with humans beforehand. They ask Tatsu about it, and Tatsu replies that from his perspective, they've all been speaking the Nopon language like natives from the moment they met. Everyone's confused but don't have the time to question it any further at the moment.
• Traveling at the Speed of Plot:
  • The game has a "traveling companions" mechanic that shows characters who are supposed to be "traveling with you" to and from certain locations. However, only one of these characters (Tatsu) is visibly shown to be travelling with you (and only if Lin is in the party). Other than that, the character will usually already be waiting for you when you arrive at the destination (some will even chide you for being "late"). For that matter, characters who are NOT Blades or combatants in any way can somehow make it all the way to places like Oblivia (with heat waves, level 30+ monsters and electromagnetic storms) or even Cauldros without any assistance or protection while full-fledged BLADE members can barely travel five feet without needing backup.
  • And then there are the "retrieve my pet" missions. The first few aren't so bad — a cat you retrieve from a waterfall in Primordia, a dog that's at the bottom of a cave a few minutes' walk from N.L.A. — but in the late game, you're left wondering how in the hell a Dalmatian made it to an enemy base, on a Floating Continent two continents and an ocean away.
• Treacherous Quest Giver:
  • There are a lot of examples of quest-givers that wind up turning on Rook, but the main story example is Lao, who starts two Story Missions (Chapter 6 and Chapter 9, specifically) and is revealed to be The Mole.
  • On the sub-quest side, there are Fosdyke and Moorhouse, who feign being the victims of a cover-up, but turn out to have been in on the plan the entire time. That same quest is later followed up with Ga Bewhe, who feigns helping the player in giving out vital information, but then betrays them and Adolphus and takes all the cash reward for herself. Her intentions were pure though, as a follow up on the quest reveals that she spent all the money on medicine for her people and quickly became known as the "Wrothian Robin Hood". In addition, if you visit the mountain northeast of FN 312 in Oblivia while it rains, you can find Ga Bewhe and she'll explain herself and give you a cut of the money.
  • Then there's the hindsighted example of Alex, who is a xenophobic and genocidal terrorist.
  • Depending on the player's actions, there's also the more domestic examples of either Leroy or Loda and De Ezich, where the player doesn't follow through with the quest giver's demands and the quest giver attacks you out of anger. Nobody gets seriously hurt though.
• Tree Trunk Tour: A large hollow tree can be found and entered in Noctilum, and it's connected to a network of trunk bridges that lead to other areas of the continent. Notably, a sidequest involving Mia starts here.
• Trial-and-Error Gameplay: There are several missions in which picking the wrong dialogue choice results in an innocent NPC's death. At least three of these missions require you to overhear information from somebody in the massive New Los Angeles or the many BLADE camps scattered across Mira in order to even be able to make a life-saving choice; one of them requires you to have obtained a certain rare collectible on top of that. Two other missions require you to be able to know the geography of a region and the attacks of a specific enemy type, respectively, from memory.
• Trial by Combat: The Wrothians love to implement these. Any uncertainties or disagreements are typically settled with a fight of some sort (sometimes on foot, sometimes in Skells). Most Wrothians will gladly step down and let the winner dictate things after the trial by combat is over, but a few require either additional convincing or will demand that their life be ended because they can't bring themselves to agree with the outcome. Even the latter, however, will be more amenable to some sort of compromise.
• Turns Red: A vast majority of enemies get the "Enraged" status when their health gets low or an appendage is broken, increasing their offensive power. Many of the special Tyrants with descriptive text also change the flow of battle after taking certain amounts of damage or certain requirements being met. For example, Pyotr the Shepherd in Noctilum will turn enraged if you kill the two Ovis that he's watching over.
• Tutorial Failure: The few tutorials you get at the beginning of the game are accurate, but incomplete; they cover maybe 10% of the game's actual mechanics. While some of the stuff they skip over isn't needed to beat the main game (changing Soul Voices, how to control characters other than Rook, etc.), it also skims over things like how to increase survey percentages (each hex has a specific objective that increases the survey percentage; doing other stuff in that hex won't get you any points) and how to switch out your party members (you have to go to their locations in NLA and talk to them to add them to your party). The game also clearly indicates the elemental properties of attacks and armour, but doesn't clearly indicate which elements enemies are weak/resistant to. Unless you read the manual which should make the gameplay easier to understand.
• 20 Minutes into the Future: The game takes place in 2056 A.D. Earth was destroyed in 2054.
• Uncommon Time: While partly in 4/4, z30huri2ba0tt12le1110 also has fairly long 6/4 parts.
• Underground Monkey: There are lots and lots and lots of variants of certain enemy types, which are only differentiated by their level, location, size, and/or color scheme. There are a few similarities between certain species, though there's still a very distinguished design between them.
  • Liceors are similar in design to Saltats, but are found exclusively in Sylvalum. They have round feathers compared to the pointed feathers that Saltats have.
  • Vigents are large ape-like quadrupedal creatures who inhabit Noctilum, Sylvalum, and Cauldros. Viragoes have more defined muscles, more eyes, and pointed horns on their heads. Buchwald, the Guardian, and Behemoth, the Netherdweller are tyrant Viragoes who happen to literally live underground. The former lives in Rockburrow Cave in Noctilum, and the latter at the bottom of the Abyss Reservoir in Sylvalum.
  • Auravises and Jaculs both have long spear-like horns on their heads, but that is about where their similarities end. Jaculs have larger bodies, are more skeletal in design and have large fan-like tails, while Auravises have the gas sac between their wings, and have more bird-like features.
• Unique Enemy:
  • There's only one Millepod out of three that isn't a Tyrant in the game: the Brute Millepod you fight during the mission The Unbreakable Sword.
  • The Qlurian Skells only appear in a certain Timed Mission and a certain Squad Mission. They otherwise might as well not exist. No wonder they call it "The Unknown Threat".
  • A few non-Tyrant, non-mission enemy species have only one (respawning) member. Such species include Mountain Sylooth, Goliath Sylooth, Lord Xe-dom, Macho Armored Suid, Jade Saltat, and Spore Filiavent.
  • The Squad Mission "Hunting the Headless" has a unique millesaur variant, the Greedy Millesaur, which has the color scheme of Luciel, the Eternal but is missing its neck. It's also far lower level than other millesaurs.
• Uniqueness Decay:
  • At the beginning of the story, you're told that people who gain the privilege of driving a Skell are rare. The license to pilot one is only given to BLADE members, and then only the elite who prove that they're one of their most productive members. And then, only if they pass a difficult test. And then only if they have the money to buy it themselves. However, by the time you are able to buy/pilot one yourself, suddenly everybody has one. Characters whom you have to buy one for in gameplay (such as Irina) have their own, and evil BLADEs (such as Alex, Gadd, and Fosdyke have one. Hell, even Powell from Army Pizza has one, and he isn't even a BLADE! The last one gets lampshaded by the Ma-non BLADE, Ackwar after the related sidequest (provided you did everything to ensure he survived it), pointing out that Powell shouldn't have access to a Skell even if he's ex-military, leading him to suspect that he had outside help in claiming it.
  • Inverted with the Telethia in terms of the game universes. In the original Xenoblade Chronicles 1, Telethia were an entire family of monsters that are the devolved and mutated form of the High Entia race and Zanza's antibodies. In X, there are only two Telethia in the game, both considered the planetary guardians of Mira.
  • Also inverted with playable characters who use sniper rifles. Lao and Bozé are the only two who use it, and Lao becomes unplayable after Chapter 9.
• Unobtainium: Miranium. It's a mineral vital to creating various things on Mira, and it's always in short supply. One Ma-non states that it's extremely malleable and can be both extremely hard or very soft depending on how it's manufactured, and can be used as a fission-based power source.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight:
  • No one comments on your appearance (save gender), no matter how crazy your Player Character gets. After all, it's not your REAL body.
  • At the same time, no one bats an eye when you park your skell on main street while you chat up the locals. This one is sadly an engine limitation, vehicles and shrubbery lack collision detection to prevent Grand Theft Auto-style antics. On the other hand, this also means that everything that DOES have collision detection is unbreakable, meaning that you can leave your Skell kneeling down on some random park bench or chain-link fence without damaging it in the slightest.
  • After you've found half of the lobsters for the Blood Lobster quest, the villain himself detonates a lobster in the commercial district after tricking some random citizens to gather at the spot. Nobody even mentions the explosion or the loss of life.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: You introduce the Ma-non to pizza. Which, to some of them, becomes very...very addictive. So much so that Army Pizza sees an explosion in sales. Which overworks Camilla, the wife and co-owner of the establishment, until she commits suicide from the stress of dealing with it and pizza-crazed Ma-non. Her death prompts her husband, Powell, to become a Serial Killer that targets Ma-non, which leads to a lot of innocent Ma-non and Powell himself being killed in the end.
• Useless Useful Spell: The Chimeroid Slayer and Chimeroid Criticals Up augments for Skells are only really useful during Chapter 12, as afterwards the only remaining enemy that they work against is found in an area that Skells can't enter (unless you glitch your way in).
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: The final story mission in the game takes place inside the Lifehold Core, located very far from any of the five continents explored up to that point.
• Video Game Caring Potential:
  • Once it becomes apparent that some Non Player Characters can die during side quests as a result of your decisions (usually by accident), you may start being more evaluative about the decisions you make to reduce the number of preventable deaths that can occur (or prepared to Save Scum or do some research).
  • Like the previous game, there's also an incentive to preserve positive relations between characters, and the wrong choice in missions (and in Affinity Shifts too) can send those relations downhill.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential:
  • On the flipside, not only can you make your character out to be a Jerkass through some dialog decisions that go far beyond Pragmatic Hero, some of the preventable NPC deaths you can cause can be a result of you executing them or choosing to do nothing about their trouble. In some cases this is the right thing to do.
  • It's possible to kill certain enemies through stomping on them with your Skell over and over. Watching them get launched so high into the air can be sadistically funny.
  • It's also possible to kill weaker enemies with overpowered weapons in a single hit. Sometimes this is the best way of racking up kill counts for Squad Tasks.
  • You can repeatedly bump into citizens walking along NLA for no real reason other than to be a dick.
• Video Game Flight: Flight modules for skells can be unlocked late in the game. Flying allows players to access areas of the planet Mira that would otherwise be inaccessable and challenge flying monsters, including a few superbosses, at the expense of continuously using fuel (and doubling fuel consumption during battle).
• Video Game Perversity Potential: The Character Creation allowed the ability to adjust a female PC's height and breast size. Fearing this trope would ensue, the breast slider was removed for the international release. However, while some of the armor pieces where changed to be more modest (most notably the swimsuits) many people still outfitted the female party members with the skimpiest or skin-tight armor the game had, most notably the 13-year old Lin.
• Violation of Common Sense:
  • During L's Conundrum, it's better off that Rook not recommend the kind of products that the two customers are looking for during their request. Thomas won't be satisfied with the honey smoke bomb and Nelly won't be too happy with the cooking pot, but they won't mind getting the other two items.
  • For Child of Mira, sending Orleron to see humans instead of his own kind, the Zaruboggan, for help, makes the mission slightly easier in the end (sending him to the humans only requires escorting him somewhere while sending him to the Zaruboggan requires a material from a particularly nasty enemy).
• Virtual Paper Doll: The gear you equip can be seen on your character. If you happen to find your stat-giving gear unfashionable or ridiculous, each character also has "fashion armor" slots, which provide the visuals without compromising stats.
• The Virus: Some indigens in Noctilum are affected by a virus that turns them into black-colored flesh-hungry creatures with bolts of electricity coming out of their eyes, known as "the tainted." Fortunately, this virus can't survive outside of Noctilum, and the tainted indigens won't eat anything inorganic or other tainted. That includes Mimeosomes and Skells, but definitely not Tatsu and L.
• Wake-Up Call Boss:
  • Many a new player who chooses to plow through the story missions right away has stumbled on the encounter with Goetia in Chapter 4, since it's the first fight in the story where brutal elemental attacks, the necessity of singling out certain enemy targets, and the value of soul voices really come into play. Getting through it requires fully wrapping one's head around how the combat system functions, as well as equipment upgrades and the various defense stats that need to be kept track of. This is made worse by the fact that not all of the game's complicated mechanics can be spoonfed to players, so you either need to look over the manual thoroughly or just really be paying attention.
  • Chapter 5's battle against 3 Qmoeva Skells, nearly equal leveled and difficulty, can easily wreck your if you come in this battle not properly equipped with higher gear and not plan a good strategy. Hopefully, you did not just run away from most of the battles throughout this very long road before approaching this, right?
  • Chapter 6 pits the player against tainted enemies, and culminates with a fight against a giant one. This stresses the absolute influence of Overdrive, and there's plenty of tainted enemies on the way to the objective (that won't attack the player despite the icons above them) to build up TP to prepare for this fight. Funny that this Chapter is required to finally get your skell.
  • Chapter 9's battle against the Wrothians will let you know that you can't just cheese your way through every human-sized opponent with Skells since the game won't let you use them in the first half and remind you to continue keeping your ground builds up to date. The fact that you're dealing with six powerful enemies at once means that you have to be able to handle their weaknesses, use Overdrive effectively, ensure that your teammates are of a sufficient level and not just yourself, and equip your team with the best items and weapons you can just to survive. The second half, which throws a huge amount of Skells at you, may tell you that the dinky level 20 Skell you started with won't cut it when you have to go through six powered-up Skells, as its low defenses and HP simply can't handle the punishment your enemies throw at it.
• Walking Techbane: Jo, a barrista for a coffeeshop in the commercial district, just has absolute horrible luck with machines. Everything she touches breaks. This includes numerous coffee makers, an espresso machine, a freezer, and even her own comm device. She sends you on a quest to gather some repair parts while she has a freak out over how useless she is. Fortunately, her boss easily forgives her and wants her to keep working. She's used to it by now.
• War from Another World: The premise of the game starts with Earth getting blown up in the crossfire of two alien forces. While one of the two factions actually was trying to kill off humanity, the planet was blown up by accident before they had a chance to actually destroy it. Humanity just barely managed to escape, and most of the fleeing ships didn't even make it out of orbit.
• The War Has Just Begun: The endings invokes this, as the Ganglion are defeated, the Lifehold Core is secure, and survey of Mira to make it safe for human habitation is underway. However, there are many questions left unanswered, many dangers still looming, and the Ganglion were ultimately only a tiny part of the larger Samaar Federation, whose interests and role is still unknown. That's not even counting the Ghosts. In short, the entire game was basically you playing Paul Revere, and the real war hasn't even started yet.
• The War Sequence: Chapter 8, which, rather than being a mission where you explore someplace new and kill some enemies at your leisure, is an enormous assault by the Ganglion on your home base of New LA. Most of the Chapter consists of fighting wave after wave of enemy war machines as they bear down on the city while sirens roar, bullets fly, and explosions happen all around.
• Warm-Up Boss: Lambert, The Divine Wind, is a level 15 Insidia Tyrant on the natural bridge leading to Chapter 4's end. There's no way to avoid it. Fortunately, it's not too difficult to defeat compared to most Tyrants of its size, but it's almost certainly there to test the player's capabilities for Goetia mentioned above.
• The War Sequence: Chapter 8 subverts this trope. The Ganglion send an army to attack NLA, but Team Elma is tasked with protecting the East Gate and only that, even though you can prompt that you feel like taking on the whole army by yourself. Even though you fight off a fair share of enemies, Team Irina is shown fighting off far more enemies in the cutscenes.
• Warp Whistle: Using the Wii U's Game Pad, players can warp to areas they have already visited.
• Wave-Motion Gun: The Hexad-Partican and Agashura-Cannon fire combined laser beams that can obliterate all but the must durable of enemies in a single hit.
• Weapon-Based Characterization: Each class has their own weapon loadout, although certain ally characters have variant classes with alternate loadouts.
  • Drifters use knives and assault rifles.
  • Strikers, Samurai Gunners, and Duelists use longswords and assault rifles.
  • Shield Troopers and Bastion Warriors use shields and gatling guns.
  • Commandos, Winged Vipers, and Full Metal Jaguars use twin swords and twin guns.
  • Partisan Eagles and Astral Crusaders use javelins and sniper rifles.
  • Enforcers, Psycorrupters, and Masterminds use knives and rayguns.
  • Blast Fencers and Galactic Knights use photon sabers and psycholaunchers.
• We Cannot Go On Without You: When the playable character gets KO'd a thirty-second timer starts counting down. Your allies can finish off the enemy themselves during that time, and if they do the battle is won; they'll also revive you if possible (though this isn't terribly likely since it requires 3000 TP, which the AI rarely conserves). If the timer runs out, everyone else falls, or you simply choose to skip it, you are, again, sent back to a nearby landmark.
• We Help the Helpless: BLADE's primary mission is to recover the Lifehold core, but they're generally designed to be able to respond to anything and everything that the citizens of New Los Angeles need. From fighting off dangerous Indigens and hostile Xenoforms, Scouting the planet and installing Data Probes, solving domestic disputes, finding lost pets, and anything else under Mira's five moons. Granted, BLADE IS divided into divisions that supposedly specialize in more specific fields but any BLADE, regardless of division, can accept any job if they feel they can handle it. So it's not uncommon for, say, a Harrier to provide marriage counseling, or an Outfitter to gun down a rampaging Millisaur if they need to. This is justified in universe, as humanity has only been living on the planet for a couple of months prior to the game's start, and they know next to nothing about it. Such flexibility is ideal in a situation where anything can happen.
• Weird Moon: Mira has 5 moons, all but one of which are absolutely massive with the largest dominating the eastern night sky. They're each different colours, don't have phases, don't move in the sky and stars can be seen through them.
• Weird Weather: Planet Mira has weather patterns similar to Earth's, including rain and sandstorms. But its harsher environments have unusual weather phenomena that are unique to their respective continents. Such as: Oblivia's electromagnetic storms, Sylvalum's spore clouds, and Calduros' brimstone rain.
• Welcome to Corneria: NPCs come in two varieties: generics you overhear and named ones you speak to. The dialogue changes as you explore and complete missions.
• We Used to Be Friends: In the "End of an Idealist" quest chain, Alex says that the woman who's been foiling his plans, Eliza, used to be a friend and someone whom he saw eye-to-eye with (if Rook did make further attempts to negotiate with Alex during Shotgun Diplomacy).
• We Win, Because You Didn't: Elma takes this approach after the Ganglion's assault on NLA, which also results in them stealing the mysterious super-mech the player recovered a few chapters earlier. Ryyz tries to claim that this was a Ganglion victory because they stole the mech, but Elma, intent on wounding Ryyz's pride, declares that so long as the human city of NLA is standing, regardless of how much damage it took, then it's the Ganglion's loss. Since they couldn't destroy the city completely, humanity wins. Ryyz is reduced to barely coherent rage at this.
• Wham Episode:
  • Chapter 5, in which Cross gets their arm blown off, revealing blue blood and metal servos.
  • Chapter 8, in which the Ganglion attack NLA and successfully steal The Vita.
  • Chapter 11, in which Lao is revealed to be a traitor and steals an experimental Skell, The Prog Ares, and the revelation that the selection process for who made it aboard the White Whale wasn't as fair as previously thought.
  • Chapter 12. Nearly everything, but especially the realization that the internal structure of the Lifehold Core was destroyed upon crash-landing, and yet the mimeosomes that sustain the physical life of humans still work just fine.
• Wham Line: The game manages to fit one into The Stinger.
  Elma: The system, everyone's consciousnesses and memories, the entire database... has been destroyed for some time!
• Wham Shot: In Chapter 5, Rook pushes Tatsu out of the way of a massive energy blast and is sent flying. After they land, they try to clutch their left arm in pain but realise that it's been blown clean off. Instead of what they expected to see, they find a sparking, mechanical stump.
• What Could Possibly Go Wrong?: The game itself asks you this when, for an affinity mission, you make the somewhat dubious choice of teaming up with a person named Murderess.
• What Is This Thing You Call "Love"?: Half of the xenos who come to New LA don't understand the concept of love. So it's especially hilarious when they start dealing with romantic feelings for the first time in their sidequests.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: A reoccurring theme throughout the game. As more Xeno lifeforms migrate to NLA, many sidequests will become available specifically dealing with human's anxieties to sharing their homes with these new races. This get pushed even further in the last chapter when it's revealed that the true human bodies were left on Earth, with the plan to have new cloned bodies serve as the substitutes. This causes a minor identity crisis with Doug, who questions if they can even be considered humans anymore if they will no longer be returning to their old bodies.
• Wide-Open Sandbox:
  • In contrast to its predecessor Xenoblade Chronicles 1, which was more of a stage 5 on the Sliding Scale of Linearity vs. Openness. Players are not restricted to exploring the map as defined by the story, either. If you want to run to Sylvalum or Noctilum at a low level, you're free to do so, provided you can get around the numerous hazards in your way if you don't just want to swim there. There are even low level monsters scattered around the other continents, just as there are high level monsters interspersed in Primordia.
  • According to Nintendo Force editor Lucas Thomas, the game world is bigger than the worlds of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and Fallout 4 combined. It is so big that Thomas spent four hours simply running around the world map, seeing how far he could get, and cleared little more than three percent of the map.^note This is a severe misnomer, as the game grades map completion by completing key objectives in each cell, not by simply traveling there.
• Winged Unicorn: Progens and Monoceroses are giant alien unicorns with wing-shaped projections, though they cannot fly.
• Witch with a Capital "B": According to the game's subtitles, Elma calls Goetia a "Samaarian witch" in Chapter 6. Most players are in agreement that this is definitely not what Caitlin Glass actually said.
• With Catlike Tread: No matter how much you run, stomp, jump, or fly around, as long as you don't step into an enemy's aggro range, they'll never notice you, so sneaking around them can turn into this at times. Augments exist to crank this trope up to eleven as well, reducing aggro range of enemies.
• The World Is Just Awesome: After getting introduced to NLA Rook and Elma walk out into Primordia, and the camera cuts back and forth to different parts and Indigens to show off how amazing and beautiful and exciting Mira is.
• World's Smallest Violin: The game occasionally has fun with its Dialogue Trees and players have the option to make their Player Character act snarky. One such instance is responding to another character complaining that you are crushing his business reputation by how well you are doing by, "Rubbing your fingers together like you're playing the world's smallest violin"
• World's Strongest Man: Dadaan, the Strongest Prone is this for the Prone (obviously). It's not a lie, either.
• You Are a Credit to Your Race: Inverted by the Ma-non. Even after a xenophobe attempted to round up and exterminate a large crowd of them under the guise of a inter-species relations seminar, the would-be victims quite amicably tell Rook that they know every race has its bad examples and they aren't going to tar all humanity with the same brush due to one extremist.
• You Bastard!: Surprisingly, the game goes out of its way as much as it can to make you feel horrible for pursuing the ultimate Superboss of the game. The Telethia shows up during the main story to save the party from a hopeless situation, though they do theorize it may have been taunting them over its power, and when you have to face it in an affinity quest to get an item from it, its stats are lower as if holding back, and it cuts the battle after dealing one-fourth of its health, giving the item you were after while possibly deeming you worthy to live on the planet. Its enemy description even describes it as 'guardian of life'. And when you do encounter it outside of the affinity mission, it's non-aggressive. It'll only attack in self-defense once you attack it first, and it's death animation is rather disturbing to watch. Despite all this, you can still gun it down for the thrill of the challenge, and to complete a Tyrant tile to achieve 100% Completion.
• Zip Mode: The game features landmarks across the world to Fast Travel to, to the point where nearly half the hex grids on any continent's given map have warp spots in them. The game counters this by making the process of exploration both the entire point of the game and a game-long reward in itself, so that players will sometimes still want to take the long way around even though they don't have to.

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