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  • Alternative Character Interpretation: Was the Batter a sociopath whose "holy mission" was really one of vengeance against his wife? Was he a Well-Intentioned Extremist who thought he was doing the right thing by erasing everything "impure" from existence? Or was he truly performing a Mercy Kill on an ever-worsening, twisted world of suffering and neurosis?
  • Aluminum Christmas Trees: Metal really does accumulate inside cows, although not in such large quantities as found in the game, and certainly not without making the cows sick. Then again, if all the 'dirt' in the world is actually made of metal…
  • Anticlimax Boss: Both Final Bosses have pitifully low HP. The Judge only has as much health as the first boss, and you outnumber him four to one. The Batter has even less HP, and you're given an incredibly powerful competence for the battle that can kill him in three hits or less. Or you can use Palsy on him to flat-out turn him into a Zero-Effort Boss. To be more exact, The Batter can be killed so fast he lands exactly one hit on you in the entire battle. And even that hit can miss.
  • Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
    • The giant flying whales that appear out of nowhere in Zone 2. The description says nothing at all about them being related to the specters at all — they are apparently actual living whales that for some reason fly and attack the Batter. This BLAM has been the subject of several pieces of fanart.
    • Most baffling of all is the fish that appears when you step on a certain circular pad in Zone 1. It briefly jumps up, and that's it. The event also only plays once, so you're likely to forget that it even happened. The event itself is even very easily missable, so you're likely to never encounter it. Not to mention that the fish is the only living thing in the area that's actually in color.
    • In the Room, you encounter what appears to be either a giant Elsen stuck in the wall or a large, talking mural of one.
  • Broken Base: The 3.0 translation. While it was far more literal than the original translation, it also removed all of the swearing from the game, even Dedan's. Many fans also find it drier than the 2.0 release, but also more polished.
  • Common Knowledge: It's widely believed that the person that gave Hugo his pills and who he refers to as "Papa" is either his biological father (he has none) or the Batter. Word of God states that he is the Elsen.
  • Creepy Cute:
    • The Judge is this to many fans.
    • To a lesser extent, some people consider Zacharie to be this.
  • Crossover Ship:
    • The Batter with the Scout. Presumably, it has to do with the fact that they use baseball bats as weapons.
    • On a non-baseball related note, Batter/Wii Fit Trainer are starting to become a thing thanks to the latter's similar pale and featureless appearance, as well as the fact that one of her moves in the new Super Smash Bros. game utilizes several hula-hoops — which fans have joked about resembling the Add-Ons.
    • There's also a bit of Dirk Strider/Zacharie.
  • Demonic Spiders:
    • The Secretaries, extremely strong and hard to beat enemies that appear in the purified zones, though luckily only in said zones, which are optional and not required to beat the game. Although Secretaries give monstrous amounts of experience when defeated, they tend to show up in groups of 2 or 3 at a time, and do things like hit harder than anything else in the game in terms of damage, or inflict you with the nastier status effects, all of which are very annoying. The most advice one can give you with them is to not directly go to the purified zone immediately after it opens.
    • Earlier than that are the Fat Spectres, which only appear in Zone 1. While they aren't so bad themselves, they can spawn "Ah, ah" speech bubbles (covered under Goddamned Bats), and due to the fact that both they and "Ah, ah"s can spawn "Ah, ah"s at an alarmingly fast rate means that you're going to pray your attacks are always accurate when dealing with them since you don't have Omega or Epsilon to cover for you if the Batter or Alpha miss. Oh, and you have to take out five of them in a row during an early part of Zone 1.
  • Designated Villain: While the Guardians are all guilty of something, the Queen doesn't seem to do anything especially evil. Maybe because she's not actually a villain?
  • Draco in Leather Pants: All of the villains get this treatment in some part or other of the fandom. Especially the Batter.
  • Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: The gameplay is average up through Zone 3 where it starts becoming a lot more frustrating, and almost every boss is a Damage-Sponge Boss with little challenge. However, this is compensated for by the auto option being pretty useful. The real focus of the game is on the story, and to some extent the puzzles.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse
    • You'd be forgiven if you thought Zacharie was the protagonist, based on all the fanart he has.
    • The Whale is easily one of the more recognizable enemies.
    • Sugar is also very popular among fans, despite being a very easily missed enemy.
  • Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: To be expected when there are Biblical Motifs all over the place. One of the most out-there ones has to be when a reader/friend of the Something Awful LP claimed that it was a deconstruction of sexist power fantasies. (However, this was largely a joke.)
  • Fan Nickname:
    • It's one of those common word titles where everyone types it as "OFF (game)" just to make it clear that's what they're talking about.
    • "badbatteur" is the file name of the picture of whatever the Batter turns into in the Special Ending, and "le batteur" is his name in the original French, so the fans naturally decided to call this "Bad Batter".
    • Elsen, in reference to the people populating the game world. It's actually just the name of the first area of Zone 1, with no specific name given to the people. Mortis Ghost says they're human.
  • Fanon:
    • A lot of fanart out there tends to give the Batter Extra Eyes due to a misunderstanding of his character portrait where the way his eye is squinting looks vaguely like he has multiple eyes.
    • A lot of fanart also tends to draw Zacharie wearing a sweater. This probably stems from a misinterpretation of his sprite, which has misled a lot of people into thinking Zacharie's neck is his sweater collar.
  • Faux Symbolism: The Biblical Motifs spread around the game. Besides the names of the guardians (Dedan, Japhet, and Enoch), most fans (and even the creator himself) tend to ignore the motifs spread throughout the game when people try to discuss the game. Beyond the Batter being "Savior" class.
  • Friendly Fandoms:
  • Germans Love David Hasselhoff: There's a fairly large English following for OFF. To contrast, there aren't too many French fans of the game, even though it was originally created in said language.
    • OFF also has proven to be very popular in both Japan and Korea, with dozens of Japanese and Korean fangames and fanart.
  • Goddamned Bats: "Ah, ah"s, or the word bubbles that the Fat Spectres and Dedan spawn. Dedan doesn't spawn them as fast and they never attack, making them less annoying than the normal "Ah, ah"s, but the "Ah, ah"s Fat Spectres spawn can not only spawn more "Ah, ah"s but they are also able to inflict Blinded. While they have low health, if you aren't careful to take out the "Ah, ah"s quickly, they can overwhelm you, especially since you have to clear out every enemy before the battle can end (not just the ones at the start).
  • Good Bad Bugs: Poisoning Sugar. She is one of the few enemies that can easily get poisoned, has lots of turns without doing anything (but where each counts as a turn to get poison damage) and Poison itself is based on a percentage of maximum health points instead of based on the level of the Batter. It is possible to easily and quickly kill her as soon as after beating Zone 1, as can be seen here.
  • Good Bad Translation: The English version lists your special attacks as "Competences", which probably refers to "skills". This actually works in the game's favor, as it goes with the cerebral nature of the game and the awkward and abstract naming schemes of the competences themselves.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: A character with a baseball bat fighting the paranormal, huh?
  • It Was His Sled:
    • The Batter is the Villain Protagonist and an Omnicidal Maniac whose quest to "purify" the world, as literal or metaphorical as it can be, still involves murdering everyone and annihilating what's left of creation.
    • Hugo dies.
    • With all of the fanart, it's hard to hide the fact that the Batter is a potential final boss.
    • While not as talked about, the fact that Sugar (not the Superboss, but the material) is made from Elsen corpses is fairly common knowledge.
    • Pretty much everything about The Queen. Shes a wildly popular character who you can see left and right in fanart and discussion. She's also an One-Scene Wonder character in game whose said scene is the most critical spoiler-heavy moment in the whole game due to the scale of the revelations and significance in it. Her relationships to other characters, role, purpose, and even her apperance are all spoilers.
  • Memetic Mutation:
    • A nice game for cute children.
    • The Batter's mission to "purify the world" as well as Zacharie's love of money/credits are played up to nearly-obsession levels in Fanon.
    • Hula Hoops Explanation 
    • HEY BATTER BATTER HEY BATTER BATTER SWING! Explanation 
    • Beating OFF Explanation 
  • Moral Event Horizon: The fight against Hugo, who's only an infant. Arguably also the one against the Critic Burnt crying for help in the Zone 3 subway (though that one could be seen as a Mercy Kill).
  • Nausea Fuel: The makers picked a damn realistic sound when they were making the pedalo ride on the meat fountains. Too bad the sound of paddling through a river of meat isn't exactly something that'd stir your appetite.
  • Older Than They Think:
    • A video game where you're actually playing as the villain? There are many games just as old as OFF that do the same thing, some even older.
    • OFF itself is an example. A lot of Americans would tell you that the game came out around 2013 (around the peak of its popularity), but it was actually released in 2008.
  • Once Original, Now Common: It's easy to forget, but OFF came out way before the slew of Earthbound-inspired RPGs that the mid-to-late 2010s would produce, making much of its content feel tepid in comparison to games that came out after it. Not to mention that "morally dubious protagonist in a quirky Crapsack World" became a genre staple of RPG Maker games very quickly after OFF's release (LISA: The Painful, Suits: A Business RPG, etc), making its original premise quickly feel derivative. The combat got hit especially hard by this, since combat in OFF is basically an afterthought to the story which encourages the player to put it on Auto mode, when later games would find unique ways to keep the turn-based combat engaging and intertwine it with an enthralling narrative, with Undertale probably being the crown example.
  • One-Scene Wonder: Unlike other major characters, Vader Eloha is never seen before the final showdown with her, even if she's heavily referenced by other characters over the course of the game. However, her conversation with The Batter completely recontextualizes the entire game, heavily expands on the character of The Batter himself, and establishes her as a very unique individual. This is followed by an extremely memorable Mirror Boss battle.
  • Portmanteau Couple Name:
    • Batter/Zacharie: Batterie
    • Sugar/Zacharie: Sugarie
    • Dedan/Enoch: Denoch
  • Player Punch: The fight against Hugo consists of the player being prompted to order The Batter to murder a helpless toddler who doesn't try to fight back in any capacity and cries out in fear of what's happening.
  • Quirky Work: The inhabitants of this game breathe smoke, swim in liquid meat/plastic, and are horribly addicted to sugar, among other things. It should be noted that the game credits none other than Suda51 as one of its inspirations.
  • Ron the Death Eater: The Batter is an interesting and very, very subjective case. Many interpret him as an out-and-out Villain Protagonist and being neglectful at best in his relationship with Hugo and the Queen. Most fanon likes to portray it as flat-out abusive (albeit Hilariously Abusive). However, part of the evidence fueling these is due to nuance being lost or small translation mistakes due to unfamiliarity — further translations came out to fix some of these mistakes.
  • So Bad, It Was Better: Some people feel that way about the 3.0 translation. Yes, it removed a lot of translation mistakes, but the old version had more distinct speech patterns for the characters as well as gems such as Batter calling Enoch a "big bacon". That is not at all helped by 3.0 also removing swearing from the game.
  • That One Attack:
    • Japhet's "Head Voices" is one of the game's hardest hitters this side of the Secretaries and Sugar.
    • Also from Japhet, an unnamed attack he will use after failing to summon spectres in his first meeting hits like a freaking brick wall, and will target both the Batter and Alpha with unerring accuracy.
  • Theme Pairing: The Batter and the Scout (from Team Fortress 2) because they both use baseball bats as weapons. Later, it became an One True Threesome with the addition of Leon Kuwata from Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, who is also a baseball player.
  • Unintentional Uncanny Valley:
    • The Secretaries look much more detailed than other enemies, which, combined with their already rather unsettling appearance and the places you find them, makes them (especially Zone 2's) quite creepy.
    • There's also one section in The Room where the scenery has much greater detail and colour, calling into question what the real setting of the game is.
  • Underused Game Mechanic: In one section in The Room, there is toxic liquid on the floor which hurts the Batter when walking over it. This is the only time this mechanic appears.
  • Woolseyism: The original translation tended to bound between this and "Blind Idiot" Translation, and while the 2.0 translation fixed some of these issues, it didn't remove all of it. The 3.0 translation tried to be a more literal translation, for better or for worse.
  • The Woobie:
    • While cases could be made for several characters, poor Hugo is easily the biggest one by far.
    • The Judge. His beloved brother is killed and he's forced to fight the person he trusted to do good by the world. And if you choose the special ending, he's left with an empty, blank world with only a couple of people left.
  • Woobie Species: The Elsen. They live in a perfect world without danger, but they're hopelessly neurotic anyway. And if they ever get too stressed, their heads explode and they attack everyone around them. Special mention, however, goes to the Critic Burnt in the Zone 3 subway, who doesn't fight back and only uses his turns to scream out for help.


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