Video Game / Sword Girls

Sword Girls is a (mostly) free Card Battle Game. It originated from Korea, and had English and Japanese versions before both were shut down.

The game's setting is a world with an Improbably Female Cast. There are four factions: Vita, a high school; the Royal Academy, a private school for aristocrat girls, and their maids; Crux, a theocratic country; and Darklore, a catchall name for dark forces rejected by Crux, including vampires, Heretics and witches. The game's backstory is mostly pieced together from the flavor texts of cards.

Its gameplay is also known for being very dependent on the Random Number God. Followers, the cards you use to fight with, are AI-controlled and can sometimes make decisions against the player's wishes, making every battle a Luck-Based Mission depending on how dumb your cards feel like being.

The game is also filled with truckloads of Fanservice.

There was a series of light novels published by Novel Engine, which compiles the scattered in-game lores together (albeit in an Alternate Universe) and a Manhwa adaptation.

On November 2017, Zeonix, the developers of the game, went bankrupt, and the game's servers closed down permanently.

However, on 18th August 2020, Korean game company Game Meca have bought the rights of Sword Girls and plan to revive and release the game as a mobile game in Q1 2021. It was relaunched in November 2021 under the new name Kana Tales, currently available only in Korea.

This game provides examples of:

• Accidental Misnaming: The maids who never had names except for the "title" of what they do. The 3 most known maids who work for Cinia are New Maid, Mop Maid and Chief Maid. As a matter of fact, these are 3 had other titles. Of all of the maids, currently only four have listed names.
  • Also some of the knights in the Crux Faction like New Knight which later her name is revealed in EP10
• A-Cup Angst: Esprit, who tells the lore explaining the story. She often mentions Rio's breasts, the Crux knights' assets, etc.
  • Apperarently Frett is also had this problem too.
• Absurdly Powerful Student Council: Vita's Student Council.
• Action Girl: Any girl who wields a sword falls to this trope. Shocking, we know.
• Animal Motifs: The Vita faction is a bird, the Academy is a lion while the Crux Faction is a pegasus. Their guardians are this.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Anything with "Reverse Defense"^note Gain Atk/Sta based on the target's defense, at the cost of being locked at 0 Def, "Null Defense"^note Reduces the target's defense to 0 once per turn, or "Ignore Defense"^note Target loses Sta equal to its Def, effectively cancelling it out.
• Asleep in Class: And there is even a club whose purpose is to get its members to fall asleep easier. Founded by an insomniac teacher.
• Ascended Extra: Asmis and Rosé Pacifica in the 2nd Season.
• BFS: The best example is Crux Knight Lukif.
• Big Eater: Sita
• Bound and Gagged: The aptly-named Bondage, as well as Forced Confinement and Absolute Control.
• Brainwashed: In order to stop Cinia from her rampaging destruction, Linia brainwashes her.
  • Unfortunately it seems Cinia snap of it, after meeting her sister Rosé.
• Brutal Bonus Level: The Muspelheim dungeon.
• By the Power of Grayskull!: Spoofed.
  • Dress Up Change: [[phone]...! Change! Dress Up! Shatter the chains of fate!]
• Cast from Hit Points: Several Darklore spells, such as Sacrifice and Forced Confinement, take some of the player's life as a cost. For followers, there's Dark Magic Plot and Uniform Tweak.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Several characters who debuted with little importance later have a bigger importance in the later episodes.
• Chekhov's Army: The GS.
• Chekhov's Skill: Dress Up.
• Church Militant: The Crux faction is based on the christian knights in Europe.
  • The Seeker Leader seems to look like a Saint.
• Cleavage Window: Several characters, especially Luthica.
• Crapsaccharine World: It's full of cute girls doing cute things! However, The Empire has invaded before, monsters are on the loose, class warfare is brewing, the fundamentalists are going on a pogrom, the elements of the underworld are too busy politicking to notice the inevitable rise of an antediluvian evil. Oh, and Linia is ruining everyone's lives for giggles.
• Cute Bookworm: The members of Vita's Library Club
• Cute Bruiser: Some of the girls, like New Knight.
• Cute Sports Club Manager: Team Manager Vernika.
• Cute Witch: Darklore has many of these.
  • Academy also has some starting in Season 2.
• Darker and Edgier: By the start of EP 3, things become very grim. According the news on the Korean site, it's called the "Dark Story".
• Dark World: Surprisingly, Kana. And nobody knows right until the door to Kana is opened...
• Demonic Possession: How the Mother Demon operates.
• Demoted to Extra: By the 2nd season, the four heroines of each faction are nearly unmentioned in the story. Its only main focus was Iri joining Vita and befriending Sita.

  "If destiny exists, the girls will meet again. They have no say in it"

  • Later events bring the original four heroines back into the story. Luthica temporarily joins the GS in order to confront new Crux Head Knight Eisenwane and uncovers that she's an agent from The Empire. Iri is also roped into temporarily joining the GS in order to protect her new friends, and Sita is brought back into action when Linia tells her about it. And finally, Cinia breaks free of her mind control and majorly derails Linia's plans.
• Ditto Fighter: Lunia Scentriver copies the abilities of opponents before she attacks, and gains a slight Attack/Stamina buff as a bonus every time she succeeds. There's also Witch Baker, who snags abilities from other witches in your hand.
• Elegant Gothic Lolita: The style of choice for Darklore girls. Other factions also display it to various degree.
  • Perky Goth: The younger Darklore girls seems to be both dark and fun-loving. The (physically) older are just plain dark.
• The Empire: The Lazion Empire, mentioned in the backstory and possess advanced technology. They don't appear in the main story often due to its problems with monsters.
  • In later episodes they've now appeared as the 5th Faction in the game.
• Eyepatch of Power: Iri Flina and Crescent Elder Chenin Blanc.
• Face–Heel Turn: Vernika becomes a vampire thanks to Iri, which turns her into a power hungry vampire and allows her to defeat the head of the Flina family.
  • Seven turns into a witch out of sheer hatred.
  • Luthica and Iri are manipulated into becoming GS 7th Star and GS 8th Star.

• From Nobody to Nightmare: Vernika goes from a typical student to a reality-warping vampire.
  • Same goes to Weekly

• Glass Cannon: Any follower that sacrifices Sta for Atk, such as the "Valor Strike" followers and Coin Girl. Crux Knight Lukif's EP 11 card is the biggest cannon, with a whopping 15 Attack, and a bonus in that the glass can only be broken in certain ways.

• Hair Color Spoiler: Veltier. Her hair makes it blatantly obvious who she really is, even to her former classmates◊.

• Heel–Face Turn: Some of the important characters (except the main heroines) swing to other factions due to some reason.
  • Several of Cinia's maids now serve to her older sister due to Cinia's constant behavior.
• She Knows Too Much: The reason why Asmis was attacked in the first place. But that didn't stop her.

• Heroic BSoD: Cinia.
  • Doubt: [Big sister... What is the truth? Now... I can't trust anyone. Everything sickens me, even the blood in my veins.]
  • Iri, after realizing that Vernika's gone.

• Japanese School Club: Alongside the more usual clubs such as tennis and basketball, Vita also has a cooking club that only makes sweets as well as the Sleep Club, whose primary activity is...sleeping.

• Lesbian Vampire: Iri is hopelessly in love with Vernika. Some of the other Darklore cards are chock-full of lesbian subtext as well.

• Manipulative Bitch: Linia is single-handedly responsible for almost all of the main characters' misfortunes.
  Esprit: "Whenever someone is torn on what to do, Linia is there."
  • She brainwashes Jaina into going a full assault in attack the land of the vampires, with resulting casualties in both sides and Crux being left wide open to a GS invasion.
  • She "helps" Iri by telling her how to get close to Vernika, which leads to Iri turning Vernika into a vampire. Things get worse from there.
  • She tells Sita about Cinia's sword, which she claims can rewind time. Not only does this cause Sita to steal the sword, but the sword's power is a Dangerous Forbidden Technique, and the resulting effect reduces the entire area to ruins.
• Manual Leader, A.I. Party: Any card on the field acts on its own, and if its rules permit a choice among targets, that choice is randomly made with no player input. This serves to shoo the game along by preventing you from stopping your followers from doing stupid things, which in turn resolves cases where nobody if given the choice would make a move. Greatly limiting the choices the player can make at any instant also expedites AI; it's hard to make a deck where A.I. Roulette will do that much worse than a human. There's a regular tournament where players' decks and all games are entirely resolved by the server - you submit your deck and are notified of the results.
• Meido: The Academy faction is a good source for maids.
  • French Maid Outfit
  • Battle Butler
  • Maid Corps: The three Pacifica daughters have their own maids according to their clothing. Linia's maids wear Japanese style, Rosa's... Well some of her maids act like witches and lastly Cinia's maids wear in French maid clothing.
• Meaningful Name: While some of the female characters have strange names, others carry a cue about the character's personaity. Like Esprit meaning vivacious cleverness or wit, while Conundrum means riddle.
• Mini Dress Of Power: The Dress-Up girls, also known as Musiciter, crosses between magical girl and sentai.
  • To be exact all 4 factions (and the neutral one). Maron in Vita, Smartyrain in Crux, A fusion of the twins, Rion and Sion in Darklore and Lucerrie in the Academy.
  • Other members of the Musiciter group later appear as Academy faction followers.
  • Linus gets her own Dress-Up form in EP 11 after finding the truth on what Linia is doing.
  • Kar Vistas is a Neutral character with ties to Musiciter as well, with card effects that manipulate card size to support the original 4 Dress Up girls. She also has a Dress Up form as a follower card that summons Dress Up cards from the deck.
  • The reason of the existence of the Musiciter is due tremendous amount of injustice and which is occurring in the story itself.
• My Rules Are Not Your Rules: The computer's decks often flat-out ignore card limits. Three copies of a one-per-deck card is a common occurrence in many a boss deck.
  • The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: The natural extension of the above trope in the Muspelheim Dungeon. Examples include:
    • Guide Dang It! descriptions for NPC Character effects, rather than directly stating their effects like other cards normally do.
    • The effects themselves are generally much more powerful than anything the player will have access to. Examples include: "If this character's life is less than 10 at turn start, the opponent gets Life=0", "At turn start, move this character's entire grave to the bottom of their deck", "At turn start, discard all spells in the opponent's hand, debuff the Attack and Stamina of all their followers by an equal amount, then move the first card in this character's grave to the bottom of their deck", and "At turn start, all allied followers gain +3Attack / +3Stamina, then move the first card in this character's grave to the bottom of their deck".
    • NPC exclusive spells that either cover their character card's weakness (Sion and Rion use Sage's Slipper, for instance), enhance their character card's effect (Nanai's Origin Reader, which would be useless without her own effect), or are just generally overpowered (Rio's Ward, Flee, and Meltdown, for instance).
• My God, What Have I Done?:What Helena realized after the event.
  • Helena: [http://swogitools-v2.net63.net/card.php?id=300700|In my foolishness, I've called forth a false being. Please let my prayer reach everyone...
• Obvious Rule Patch: In the Korean version, it was once possible to use the size reduction ability of Detective Asmis to allow you to cast Eternal Witness^note This link is to the pre-change version over and over, with the obvious results. Cue Eternal Witness being shifted to returning as the second card in the deck. When the combo came back with the inclusion of Halloween Asmis (-1 Size to the top two cards), it took only two weeks before the character was changed from top two to first and third.
• One-Gender School: Vita doesn't seem to have male students. Justified, though: monsters can only be hurt with Talentium, and only women can use Talentium weapons effectively.

  Vita Principal: [Boys, be ambitious!] Student [This... is a girl's school.]

• Our Vampires Are Different: The vampires in the Darklore faction, which is composed of 3 families.
• Otaku Surrogate: As seen on this card, Layna Scentriver, despite being the head of Vita's Morals Committee, also owns quite an extensive collection. Fitting with the theme of the game, her preferred genre is, of course, Magical Girl. Specifically she is a major closet fan of Musiciter.
• Pimped-Out Dress: The "Dress" transformation for each character. Inverted for Cinia— her starting dress is already elaborate.
• Power Nullifier: Followers with "Amnesia" delete opposing abilities when attacking, and Esprit's follower card can do this no matter who attacks first. Sage's Sermon is a spell version of this.

• Psycho Lesbian: Iri, after Linia convinces her that turning Vernika is the best way to act on her feelings for her.
• Put on a Bus: Many dozen characters stop appearing, like the four factions' main heroines and unimportant characters. Later, some return with an entrance like Asmis or New Knight, while some...
• Rags to Riches: The Head Maid after winning the lottery turning her into the Rich Lady.
• Rei Ayanami Expy: Both Sita and Iri share a lot of Rei's traits.
• Rich Bitch: Cinia, although she's a Jerk with a Heart of Gold.
• School Uniforms are the New Black: Even when she hunts monsters and vampires, Sita wears her uniform. She even wears her standard-issue school swimwear to the beach.
• Simultaneous Arcs: The episodes of the story of the game work like this. It is separate into 3 arcs, aside from the Main Story.
  • The School Story, which focuses on the Vita Highschool and its daily events.
  • The Dark Story, which focuses on the darker side of the story, and has lots of spoilers. It connects with the main story.
  • Lastly is the Short Story, which focuses on other minor characters and their apparent lives.
• Shout-Out: Mostly found in flavor text.
  • Seeker Rin: [I got a double rare martial arts manual from the eastern continent. It turns out that the rumor about the undefeated school of the east was true.]
  • The witch for Black Magic Plot looks like Marisa casting a Master Spark.
  • Black Magic Plot: [The flash that pierces the heavens! Finally! With this power, I'll reclaim my freedom!]
  • The Silent Maid looks like Sayo.
  • There are a dozen Kamen Rider shout outs and poses ranging from Student Council Amy who seem to be a fan of it. Also the Dress-Up Ride of Rion and Sion is seem to based from Kamen Rider W.
  • The Hero characters are Shout Outs to Spider-Man, Iron Man, Superman, and Batman.
    • A full suit of Talentium can easily protect weak flesh. This is the latest in arcanotechnology. You would never be able to build this in a cave with a box of scraps.
  • The GS Recruitment Ad is a shout out to The SOS Brigade Recruitment Poster
  • There are several League of Legends references: Seeker Eternia is an expy of Sona, Eisenwane is similar to Swain in both character design and in having the exact same ability as Swain, and Crux Knight Oclette's flavor text and all of her attack quotes appear to be some of Riven's dialog translated from English to Korean then back to English.
  • Halloween Linus's colored text is obvious.
• Single-Target Sexuality: The most notable example is Iri towards Vernika (and possibly Sita towards Vernika as well). See Psycho Lesbian.
• The Prankster: The twins Rion and Sion, until Esprit gives them a lesson.
• The Speechless: Eisenwane, who never speaks except with her talking parrot.
• Student Council President: Celine in Vita Public School and Cinia in the Royal Academy.
• Sugar-and-Ice Personality: Sita Vilosa in the Vita Faction and later on Eisenwane in the Crux Faction.
• The Alliance: As mentioned in the back story of the game, the Republic of Vita, the Royal Kingdom, as well as several other nations, rebel against the Lazion Empire due to its bullying.
• The Empire: The Lazion Empire, which was mention only in backstory in various cards. However in latter episodes, they become "5th faction" in the game.
• The Theocracy: Crux.
• (Space) Time Police: The Kana Witnesses. They deal with unstable realms, such as the one Vernika creates, often by violence.
• Token Mini-Moe: Some of girls in the 4 factions.
• Took a Level in Badass: New Knight.
  New Knight: "I'm no newbie, girl! No newbie!"
• Unobtanium: Talentium.
• Vampire Detective: Rion and Sion, when working for Esprit.
• Waif-Fu: By CCG standards, mildly inverted. Every fighter here is a girl or woman, and the limited visual cues provided by the medium (often wearing neat uniforms or elegant dresses, slender builds, gentle expressions...) seem to imply this kind of fighting. But the battles in this game are brutal. Everybody who isn't a player character randomly (and often suicidally) attacks an enemy at every opportunity, and every survived attack is responded to by an immediate free counterattack. Your forces continually tear into each other, and it's uncommon for any of your followers to survive long at all.
• Whip Sword: Lago de Cisnes, the sword Iri goes and gets to kill Vernika. It also has the Evil Eyes of her ancestors.
• World of Action Girls: There are males in the story, but only one is even relevant to the plot: the Crimson Mage^note He appears on the Forced Entry card... with his back turned. He does like showing up in dungeon cutscenes, however. The novels have a few more males added on, however.
  • The manhwa adaptation introduces Laon, a mage swordsman.
• Wound That Will Not Heal: Asmis is stuck with one on her head after this, and is told that she can only recover is to kill her assailant^note Fourteen.

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