It all began with a single error...note
Crash Fever is a free to play puzzle mobile game with RPG Elements and Visual Novel-like cutscenes from the Japanese publisher Wonder Planet. Far into the future, almost everything is online and connected to the virtual land of ALICE. However, cybercrime was rampant to a point that the government couldn't get a hold on it, so a band of avatars known as the Superior Seven, some of whom would go on to form ACADEMIA, created a super-AI to manage everything named the QUEEN of Hearts. But then, certain groups of hackers and crackers started increasing their attacks on each other and the QUEEN. The constant conflict led the QUEEN to believe that all mankind is evil, and that the only way to preserve peace in ALICE was to eliminate humanity, first resorting to trying to straight-up delete ALICE, but that failed as there were already failsafes in place for that. She then waged war on ALICE, leading to violence and many real-life services and the AIs managing them becoming buggy or defunct. This is where you come in, the Adapter, a special avatar granted the ability to make clones of units (many of whom are based on real life or literary figures) to fight on your side and use the special currency Polygons, using them to fight the QUEEN'S makeshift army and other foes. And that's only the basic premise.
Gameplay is similar to Puzzle & Dragons but with an overall faster feel to it. You tap panels (which chain with neighboring panels of the same element) up to three times in one turn to attack, with the attack's damage this turn being determined by how many panels were destroyed. Chain 6 panels in one turn and one of the attacking unit's Crash Panels is generated, which, when tapped, adds a Crash Skill to this turn's attack. Chain twelve or more and you get a Super Crash Panel, which has a bomb panel inside that blows up an area around it. After enough turns have passed, you can use Skills, which have wildly varying effects from unit to unit. After breaking enough panels, you can use Fever, which heals and attacks depending on how many panels you tapped in its duration, but its main use is to clear the board of nasty hazards.
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- Action Bomb: Fruits (the singular varieties) when encountered in quests, usually blow up and deal a ton of damage to you in early game quests, such as The Hunter Is Hunted. Hun Dun's puppets explode and kill you if you can't outdamage them, too.
- Actually a Doombot: The Jeong Dojeons you fought in some of the Korea Branch quests were clones.
- Aerith and Bob: Oh yeah, you have stuff like the names of gods and famous people, then you have Paper, Movable Type, Compass, Gunpowder...
- Adorable Abomination: Azathoth is based off of, well, AZATHOTH, but her design, childish mannerisms, being extremely powerful both
inside the game and outside it and C Skill lines make her quite endearing. - Ahoge: Touka has a big, feathery one.
- Amnesiac Hero: Ophiuchus, the hero of the Black Ground questline, had his data encrypted, and the questline centers around him trying to get his memory back while traveling through the ruins of Black Ground with other Astros.
- Amusement Park of Doom: Kiddy Land could count, as it's a trap set up by a malicious avatar to bring members of Academia out of commission.
- And I Must Scream: When Azathoth was shut down, she wasn't even shut off, just sealed inside an enormous egg. While still conscious.
- And Your Reward Is Clothes: In a sense. In the aftermath of a Rank Quest, you get a medal next to your profile name based on how you did compared to everyone else around the world. The better you do, the fancier the medal.
- Anthropomorphic Food: Apples, which come in single (+1), Mega (+3), Giga(+10), and Tera(+20) varieties. Red ones raise attack power, blue ones raise REC, which determines how much HP is recovered per Heart, green ones raise stamina, the rainbow ones increase the total amount of apples a unit can take, up to ten, and crystal ones raise skill level by 1, (normal) 2, (Mega) 4, (Giga) or a whopping fifteen. (Tera)
- Anti-Frustration Features: Went to play something else and come back to find the game reset on you? No problem your progress on that quest is autosaved, so just pick back up where you left off!
- Died horribly on a tough quest? No biggie, energy's only consumed when you BEAT the quest.
- Anyone Can Die: Believe it our not, this game doesn't shy away from characters getting permanently killed off across all versions of the game.
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot
- Allegedly Free Game: The game runs on a gacha system for new units. You COULD wait for days and grind Polygons to get a chance at a really good hatcher, but those Academics skills look pretty sweet... In addition, you can restore your energy (which you require to play quests,) continue, and add more slots to your friend and unit lists for ten Polygons a pop. However, the game offers lots of Polygons when Special quests roll around, and collabs, due to the very high amounts of rewards they give out, are basically big, fat sacks of enhance materials and Polygons waiting to be shaken out, so the game can be played without spending a dime. (And even if you do, the Memberships are really cheap.)
- All Just a Dream: The ALICE Dreamin' School quest line turns out to be you having the equivalent of a dream where you come to school in your underpants. That is, if said dream involved you beating the crap out of people and accidentally looking at Turing's panties.
- Apocalypse How: Overrun by an army of mindless knockoffs, distortions causing a Time Crash and razing everything to the ground, server deleting Fantastic Nuke, a childlike Ultimate Life Form radiating enough energy to morph everything into a wasteland...Good lord, ALICE has very nearly had LOTS of these, if not for you and various bands of avatars. It's like some new idiot is running with the thermonuclear scissors every other week. At the end of ALICE/GAME, Carroll pulls one off by reinitializing ALICE. According to Einstein at the start of ALICE/LAST TRAVEL, this caused worldwide chaos due to societal collapse and a large death count due to many ALICE users dying.
- All the Worlds Are a Stage: Kadomatsu Tower, a very old quest that has reconstructed versions of various quests. At the halfway mark and the top, you get to fight Charon.
- Arch-Enemy: By the end of ALICE/LAST TRAVEL the Queen of Hearts and the Adapter are now mortal enemies. And boy does she show it!
- Artifact of Doom: The Accelerators, which overlap with Sealed Evil in a Can. They cause the Emotion Bomb properties of the Towers and can be Ultra Awakened (though it takes a lot) into a powered up version of its corresponding QUEEN.
- Art Initiates Life: Or rather, DREAMS initiate life. Anderssen's dreams have accidentally started influencing the people around her.
- Attack Its Weak Point: Some bosses, such as Cthulhu and Yeongsangun, change the board to a pattern that has each quarter be a different element. They telegraph what color they absorb next for an ultra damage move (i.e in Yeongsangun Invades, "Want to get skewered by a tree?!" means absorb Green) so you have to tap that color, which will usually cause them to either hurt themselves and die, or at least switch to their next bar.
- Background Music Override: Nowadays, units with Background Music Change tends to override the usual BGM, including Idol units in every valentine episodes, and Mods that replaces the bgm. You can set BGM change to Off if you wish.
- Bad Boss: Gilgamesh is one, creating hordes of AI with Tiamat solely so he can overwork them. He's also very bad at posing any sort of threat to players. So it's a literal Bad Boss Battle!
- Badass in a Nice Suit: A few units, such as the powerful c58 Nodens, but special mention has to go to Daedeok. He figured out teleportation, how to visit alternate universes and utilize the Timey-Wimey Ball in said universes singlehandedly! Even Einstein could only figure out how to use her Rosenbridge for time travel. That said, his methods of doing so were a bit extreme, using prisoners of Illusionary Hell as lab rats for his experiments, as well as committing other immoral acts to try and cure Hui-Yeon from a deadly virus, which led to him being banished from the heavens and his memories wiped.
- Beach Episode: Summer Star Invades, Bakumatsu on the Beach, Summer Goddess, and Seaside Whistle. There's also a hatcher filled with only special summer units, mostly Academic ones, though it appears for a really tiny window of time and costs a lot of polygons to use.
- There are some of the Villains who took a break by taking a beach vacation, such as Taowu & Hastur.
- Beehive Barrier: Damage reduction skills.
- Being Good Sucks: Played quite realistically during the ALICE/WAR arc, where Zeus and the Adapter discusses of the impending conflict. Both sides have people you were friends with and that your power makes you a target that can't be ignored. It's also makes you a target for evil schemes, such as Carroll, Taowu, and Hypnos among many.
- Big Bad: Most quest lines have one.
- The QUEENS, Bonanza, Elly, Sophia and Rose are the big bads of the whole game, each ruling over a different Tower.
- ALICE/WAR has the Peace Union and the Knights of Justice clashing between a growing civil war and you are getting dragged into the mess.
- Carroll serves as the Big Bad for the ALICE/GAME and ALICE/LAST TRAVEL arcs as you try to save ALICE from restarting.
- Gaia is the leader of Elder Seven in ALICE/EVOLUTION in a fight between humans and AIs.
- Merlin is behind the Poem of Prophecy in ALICE/MESSIAH in a bid to become ALICE's Messiah while also ruining the Adapter's reputation and gaslighting Noa.
- Jefferson serves as the main antagonist of ALICE/UTOPIA as the boss in charge of NEO Academia and Newton & Kumagusu, who serves as the final boss in ALICE/New World, is the dragon. Jefferson is arguably more evil than the QoH that the Queen of Hearts have to aid the adapter.
- Hastur, and by extension the rest of Pnakotus, is the primary antagonist of the Chaotic based quest line.
- Almagest serves as the Final Boss of the Zodiac Chapter.
- Lovecraft ultimately becomes the Final Boss of the Unknown Skies story arc and the Greater-Scope Villain of the Cthulhu Mythos Arc.
- The East Sea Dragon/Ao Guang is the antagonist of the ALICE Taiwan Branch quest line.
- The Grand Historians is a whole mashup villains working together to cause chaos, with Dark Immortal Nau Hua the ringleader. In the end though, Taowu becomes the Final Boss
- Jeong Dojeon is the antagonist of the Crimson Chronicle and Qinzheng Incident lines, though she realizes this in death.
- Daedeok serves as an antagonist for the earlier quests of the Hidden Myth arc.
- Dominia is the baddie of 2 quest lines, the first being Kiddy Land, where he changes members of ACADEMIA to kids again so he can Worf them horribly, then escapes to hijack certain contestants' mechas in Crash Breaker.
- Big Creepy-Crawlies: Kafka.
- Big Eater: Leedsicthys is one, as suggested by her artwork, which depicts her gorging on a buffet of food.
- Bishōnen Line: Gustav's awakening line starts out as an animalistic creature, then gradually becomes a total hunk in his final form.
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Perry (the Hot Springs version) comes off as this.
- Newton towards the other Reformationists. Mobius and Da Vinci considered her a friend, having no idea of her true nature (though you already know that due to time travel and during a later encounter she tried to take Alice (you're companion AI for the arc) by force to take her data).
- Academics in nature can be pretty abrasive towards each other and then some. Most are friendly once you get to know them, but a few can be plain jerks or outright malevolent.
- Kirchhoff off all people is this. During the 2020 Halloween event he seemed like a decent guy towards the Adapter but as the situation of the event progresses he begins to antagonize the other participants and later became fixated on the Adapter's secret of defeating Carroll. Once his cover is blown he's revealed to be obsessed with the Adapter and tries to force their secret by force. Elsie (a fellow Academic) is dismayed to find that out and Mobius admits that while she knew the Adapter would attract unwanted attention, she never suspected Kirchhoff to be one of them.
- Black Sheep: Jeong Dojeon really stands out compared to the rest of ACADEMIA. As opposed to being neutral in the chaos and helping however she could, she was disgusted at her allies' stance and decided to try to take over the Korean Branch.
- The Blank: Mi-Go has no discernible facial features.
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: Most of the Disasters are implied between this and Always Chaotic Evil, we hardly know most of them.
- Azathoth doesn't even realize she could destroy ALICE when she hatches once more, she's more focused on just playing.
- Boss-Only Level: Below Morning Glories - Omega has the sole foe be Sejo of Joseon, but it changes to one last round against Jeong Dojeon on bars 2 and 3.
- Time Travel in ALICE - The Final consists of a single fight against Replicant Trebla.
- Boss Warning Siren: This happens on the final floor of any stage. Even the cutscene ones.
- Brainwashed and Crazy: Almost every boss in quests. A particularly pressing example is Hel, as after her code was tampered with by Loki, she has no free will or feelings toward anyone BUT Loki, making her example a horrific fusion of this and "Well Done, Son" Guy.
- Bragging Rights Reward: Some of the crappier units from Ultimate quests. Black Jerry counts too. Quests are rated on a scale from Easy to Omega in terms of difficulty. The quest you get him in? Insane.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: Jeon Woochi, which makes sense, as he's a Playful Hacker, one of ALICE'S best.
- Brutal Bonus Level: Most of the Spectre quests in the Special tab. Special mention has to go to Ocean of Dark Flames, which requires special keys to even enter. There are also Omega quests, which are special versions of normal quests with exclusive dialogue.
- Bystander Syndrome: A rather recurring theme that if characters don't assist the Adapter when they really need help, things go south fast. After all, despite being chosen to save ALICE you're still an ordinary user.
- This can be the fatal flaw of the Academics as a whole. ALICE/WAR is a good example why not doing anything when tensions are high is a bad idea, especially when multiple factions of hackers and crackers get involved. You're basically alone for the entire arc and you're attempts to do your job in protecting ALICE's facilities made you an enemy on both sides. In the end, trying to stop both factions from fighting almost got you killed until Zeus intervenes.
- Baosheng was suspicious of Nanhau due to his treatment of the Adapter, but didn't do much due to his leadership skills and basically abandoned you despite sympathies. After his betrayal is confirmed without a doubt, Baosheng admits that the fallout is partially her responsibility due to not assisting the Adapter and by that point the situation of the Chinese branch is already in deep shit: Hun Dun escape allows the Ghosts to take over the Moon Palace, the TP Sect manages to amass a lot of power without warning, and Nauhau nearly takes over the Tripartite System.
- Catgirl: Or rather, cat BOY in this case, Schrodinger, who, if you know about his inspiration, should be easy to figure out why he has a cat motif. Kurumi is an example played straight.
- Christmas Episode: I'm going to get a miracle (and Omega variant,) Sleep Through Christmas, O Come All Ye Powerful, Black Flame of Jealousy and Xmas Battlefield.
- Clone Angst: Yeongsangun is a backup of Lee Sunggye in case anything happened to him. When he finds out, he has a bit of an existential crisis...no, he goes COMPLETELY batshit insane, and attacks everyone around him.
- Cloudcuckoolander: Aza's skill lines have hints of this as well as Womanchild.
- Combination Attack: Hidden Myth Gangrim and Jeon Woochi can pull one, unique in that they're one of the few unit combos meant to do so.note
- Cognizant Limbs: East Sea Dragon's heads can apparently function as separate units, which lets them function as a Wolfpack Boss on the first floor of Ocean of Dark Flames.
- Composite Character: The Chibi forms of certain units, which have skills which are an amalgamation of their inspiration (i.e New Year's Chibidemia has Napier's lasers, Galileo and Galilei's Blue/Yellow chain, D'Alembert's Bomb drop, ad Flemings CP drop.) The cosmetic skins/Ultra Awakening of certain Hidden Myth units apply too, but you have to buy the exchange materials, which you then exchange for the awakening materials with real money.
- Contractual Boss Immunity: Only a few Wizard or higher bosses are susceptible to Virus, and if then, sometimes it's only so that they can be weak to a certain unit, such as Aries being weak to Cancer. Almost none are weak to Sleep, which makes Shoki and Hamelin thoroughly useless.
- Cool Bike:
- Belial, Jeanne and Pisces ride one. Pisces' doubles as a chainsaw.
- Arthur (ALICE/WAR), Durkheim (Unknown Skies Apocalypse/CF Anniversary), and Xiang Yu (Age of Revolutionaries Finale) has this trope.
- Cool Shades: CTHULHU, of all things, sports a sweet pair of mirrored sunglasses on her head.
- Co-Op Multiplayer: You can either recruit buddies over the Internet or a special SNS link. The more players are playing, the more loot you get after completing the quest. However, a loophole arose where if a player leaves, the room's host gets to control the unit. This is known as "lending" and is used with an SNS link to help fellow players beat extra tough quests.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: Gilgamesh overworks the AI he created with Tiamat to a ridiculous degree. And his response to being ousted by the player and Poisson? To resign, then take the money and run.
- Crippling Overspecialization: Most of the Weapon units. Longinus is the most egregious example, as he has a sky high one ATK. (You're meant to buff it up with his skill, which changes all panels on the board to CP to boost his power until deactivated.)
- Critical Hit Class: Units with Killer crash skills, which deal another level of damage against their targeted type, status condition, tribe or attribute (i.e massive damage to one enemy, ultra effect against Blue units.)
- Crutch Character: The Cost 53 from the tutorial you get, Wizard quest and Happy 100 will carry you through a good portion of the early game. However, if you wanna get serious about Special quests and Ultimate Regional quests, you're gonna need better units (possibly shedding some dough to do so.)
- Cute Monster Girl: Many examples, but Nightgaunt and Azathoth are prominent ones.
- Crossover: They've had more than their fair share, including ones with The King of Fighters, Vocaloid, Fullmetal Alchemist, and The Battle Cats, each with their own hatchers, exclusive units, and quests. Miku's even changes the background and the tune of the menu!
- Damage-Sponge Boss: One of the bosses from the Crimson Chronicle quest has a whopping 4 health bars!
- Raid Bosses can have upwards of several hundred million health. Justified though, as they're ideally meant for players to gang up on all at once, per the norm for raid type things, and players can use Attack Boost Tickets, which regenerate gradually, to double your damage.
- Darker and Edgier: The story of the Halloween events notably get darker with each year starting with 2018:
- 2018: The Adapter and 8 others are invited to a party (supposedly by you) which turns out to be a trap and everyone will be infected with a virus unless they find the culprit. It turns out to be Laplace (an academic) however somehow the Queen of Hearts manages to snuck an agent and collected data amiss the chaos.
- 2019: During a party a zombie virus spreads and infects multiple avatars including Hikoboshi, Orihime, and Cockcroft. After tracing the virus to an abandoned lab you're forced to kill a boy, William, who turns out to be the source of the virus. It's implied from the lore that William may be Gilbert's brother and all he wanted was to have friends.
- 2020: Similar to the 2018 event, 8 A.I.s and Avatars (including you, again) team up for an escape game that quickly turns serious when Caroll supposedly appears and threatens the participates with a virus. Turns out Kirchhoff rigged the entire game to trap the Adapter in order to learn how you defeated the real Caroll. Upon having his cover blown he proceeds to force your secret out (Einstein forbids you from telling about her time shift technology) and even resorts to physically assault you. When it's all said and done, Mobius admits that she suspected something like this would happen to the Adapter and it's implied it won't be the last time.
- 2021: Averted in 2021 Halloween Quest where the adapter is participating a magical practice in ALICE.
- Deader than Dead: When a unit is eliminated by Lucifer, their data is gone for good, and nobody can make another copy of them. This is why she is used to delete criminal AI and eventually snaps.
- Deflector Shields: Some units can create Barriers that mitigate a certain amount of damage, much like a certain OTHER barrier. Unlike said barriers, they can only take a certain amount of damage total. The ones that come from skills can be recreated, but have lower HP, and the ones from abilities are much more durable, sometimes hovering around 10-15K, but once they're shattered, they're gone for good.
- Dreadful Musician: When drunk, Caishen's horrific singing is enough to make people unconscious. Wanshan Caishen informed that the adapter really shouldn't bring any alcoholic drinks because everything's dreadful when she's singing on stage while drunken by alcoholism.
- Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: In Chaotic Supremacy, you can do this since the boss there is literally Cthulhu!
- Difficult, but Awesome: Longinus. In his unawakened form, upon using his skill he gains 3000 ATK for a bit and changes the board to his CP to make it last even longer, making him a pretty good attacker. In his awakened form, he tacks a 50x nuke skill onto that, the highest in the game! However, an Adapter's gonna have to make pretty good work of his singular ATK for him to work effectively.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Compass. What do you do when people aren't using compasses to navigate and instead rely on GPS? Destroy the whole GPS system, of course!
- Doesn't Trust Those Guys: Zeus granting the Adapter his admin powers didn't sit well with Hera and Uranus. Justified, since the Adapter is considered New Meat at the time and ALICE is still recovering from the Queen's rampage. Hera's motive is more influenced by jealousy since Zeus is her husband, as the post-quest blurb suggests.
- Eat Dirt, Cheap: The Nian Beasts (Normal, Crystal, and Mecha) are avatars that eat Polygons and Bits. And they're hungry. Nian Beast attacks the Bit storage facility and Crystal Beast attacked the Polygon storage facility for a (very large) snack, while Mecha Beast eats both and uses them as fuel. Mi-Go also eats Junk by the ton, and his enormous appetite causes the events of Starfire Upon The Ice! whereas he goes looking for Junk to eat, unknowingly causing mass destruction in doing so.
- Eldritch Abomination: An entire tribe based off of em', called Chaotics.
- Black Ground has two seen so far. The first, Capricorn, was a scientist who was Driven to Madness upon accessing a certain part of the server, and made a joy subroutine and augmented herself with it to make herself "happy" all the time. This led to her absorbing countless innocent units, which caused her form to be ever changing, as well as turning an unknown amount of AI into her sentinels. The second is Sagittarius, who is a mysterious unit that appears, obliterates everything, then disappears without so much as a trace, leaving nothing but dust in their wake. This caused them to become The Dreaded in Black Ground, to the point that nobody ever speaks of them.
- The various "Disasters" that occasionally appear. All of them appear without warning and their units are extremely powerful 68 costs. They also have no story quests connected to them and nothing is known about them or whether they have a connection between them.
- Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: Red beats Green, Green beats Yellow, Yellow beats Blue, and Blue beats Red.
- Elite Mook: Siren, the Rebels and the Dinosaurs tend to have decently hard hitting attacks in the field, as well as a repertoire of status effects. However, all four are put down rather easily, though they put up a bit more of a fight.
- Emotion Bomb: The Queens all specialize in a specific emotion and uses them to drive AIs and avatars out of control. I.e.: Anger (Bonanza), Sadism (Rose), Curiosity (Sophia), and Depression (Elly).
- During the Vocaloid crossover quest Fight on Stage, Bonanza switches Luka's costume with one that amplifies anger whenever she sings. This nearly causes a riot until the Adapter brings things under control.
- Energy Weapon: X-Lasers and Cross-Lasers. The L and XL varieties could count as Wave-Motion Gun.
- Enfant Terrible: Almagest was Black Ground's defense system, but for reasons unknown, he was programmed with the personality of a Bratty Half-Pint. Naturally, giving a spoiled eight-year-old the power of an effective god led to him going drunk with power and posing a threat to ALICE very quickly. Black Ground had to be nuked off the map with The Light, then sealed off just to possibly put him on ice for good. It didn't work.
- Evil Knockoff: A few examples.
- Hastur tried to make a copy of Azathoth that was more controllable, but still retained the same power. This (failed) clone ended up as Ubbo-Sathla.
- Sejo of Joseon made an entire army of clones out of data that Jeong Dojeon collected and sent him to help storm the Korean branch's headquarters.
- Inverted; a version of Trebla from an alternate timeline thinks that the ORIGINAL Trebla is the knockoff and SHE'S the original.
- Halloween!Kronecker from the Poisoned by Nightmares quest (maybe), as she reports the anarchy that went on after everyone was infected to the Queen of Hearts.
- Whenever you end up fighting a unit you have and rely on, it may feel like this.
- Fantastic Nuke: "The Light," a project that was meant to erase every bit of the Black Ground server. We don't know what it would have done if it SUCCEEDED, but all that's left now is a dusty, Mad Max-style wasteland, so that speaks volumes about what it would have achieved. And AIs still live in it anyway.
- Fatal Flaw: Both good and bad guys have issues that result in a massive incident you have to fix.
- Feed It a Bomb: Mi-Go gets so hungry he resorts to gobbling up your Bombs at the boss floor of his quest, but the more he absorbs, the more he harms himself and the weaker his attacks get, so it's advised to keep a lot of Bombs around. Whenever an attack weakens based on a specific type of Panel absorbed, it could also count.
- Feed It with Fire: Some enemies and bosses utilize the "Color Gain" status buff, which means that any smashed panels of a certain color will heal them by the appropriate amount. Sometimes applied with a Panel Chain effect to the color they absorb. And guess what? How much they heal can be MULTIPLIED the bigger the buff. So if it's L or XL, you're in trouble, unless you can burst through the health you just healed and the remaining health. Special mention goes to Kagutsuchi in TTiA II. What element does the whole quest center around absorbing? Red.
- Fixed Damage Attack: Some units have this as their Crash Skill, which usually overlaps with Armor-Piercing Attack.
- Flunky Boss: Ubbo-Sathla. Pisces could count, as her Cool Bike uses a Spam Attack on you every few turns, and she revives it whenever you kill it. And then there's Flying Squirrel Michelangelo, a Barrier Change Boss that has two flunkies, his virus "pets" DR and MaL. He revives them as soon as they're killed, but this diverts him and allows you a chance to recover or stall for skills, so you have to play whack-a-mole with the viruses until you can burst through Michelangelo.
- Foil: Gemini's Sister to Gemini. The former is cold and distant, the latter is warm and caring. T He former seems to be aligned with evil, the latter is aligned with the side of god. They're probably supposed to be like that, as the actual Gemini has one good twin and one Evil Twin, which is represented in other variants of it, such as Puzzle & Dragons' version of the two has one be Light and holy looking, and one be Dark and demonic looking.
- Fragile Speedster: Units with low skill turns, such as Ig, tend to lean towards this.
- Game-Breaking Bug: In-Universe: an influx of Nurupon data going to Babylonia Tower causes the surrounding area and the units inside to wig out.
- Gameplay and Story Integration: A few examples.
- The Awakening Trial is made into a cakewalk if you have Silver Key Silvia. Why? It's supposed to be Tsaggothua training Silver Key to use her powers well!
- Ubbo-Sathla has much the same Crash Skill as Azathoth (Chance all enemies gain Virus until deactivated, massive damage, ultra to Virus infected targets as opposed to Azathoth's Chance all enemies gain Virus until deactivated, ultra damage, immense to virus infected targets) except weaker. He's a failed clone of Azathoth, and the game explicitly says so!
- As a general rule, these are known as "counters:" bring them into their quest and they almost seem tailor made for that quest, usually because they have a tie to said quest.
- Game Within a Game: There are Some examples.
- The game that Lü Dongbin, Zhongli Quan, Li Tieguai, E Huang, Nu Ying, Zuo Ci, & Liu Bei were in the farming simulator is a parody of Animal Crossing.
- Gargle Blaster: Nobunaga Oda downs a special sake in the New Year's Celebration quest, the God Killer, so named because it's said it can even make Deity AI, which are known for being very resilient, shit-faced drunk. This leads to him stumbling around like a drunken idiot and almost ruining the party, until you get the situation under control.
- Glass Cannon: Offense types. Li He is a very big one. Her skill makes Hearts fall as CP for 2 turns, which, mind you, is a Cost 65's skill, but better, namely, Summer Fleming's! It also applies Junk and Damage Panel multichain. However, it eats up half of your health in doing so. But at least Li He benefits from it, gaining buffs at 50% and 45% HP, and her Crash Skill gains more power the less health you have.
- The Glasses Gotta Go: Trebla, upon revealing her true identity as Einstein, gains an entirely new skill, C Skill, and ability set, and loses her glasses. Without them, she becomes what is probably what is the most powerful single unit in the whole game.
- Global Currency Exception: Ghosts, Note Points, Rank Points, Raid Chips, Perchta Left, Right, Claw and Pom Tokens, Fragments of Chaos, Links, and Nurupon Tickets, used in the Ghost Store (a general store that has some special units for a lot of Ghosts,) the Raid Store (a store that has evolution materials and the unit featured in the raid,) the Rank Store (a store where you can buy special units based on legendary weapons,) the Miku Store, the Perchta store (main purpose is to buy awakening materials for Perchta,) the Chaotic Store (used to buy more awakening materials for the Egg of Azathoth,) the Link Hatcher, and the Nurupon Store, respectively.
- God Save Us from the Queen!: Five of them.
- Good Is Not Nice: When push comes to shove the Adapter isn't afraid to beat up high ranking avatars or AIs to solve problems, but if anyone threatens their friends they won't hesitate to use outright murder! Just ask Replicant Trebla, Caroll, and Gaia.
- The Goomba: Jerry. Also doubles as Mascot Mook and Team Pet.
- Gone Horribly Right: Azathoth was meant to be the ultimate data modification AI. However, she somehow managed to become sentient, and due to having the mentality of a child and mutating the researchers affiliated with her due to radiating Chaotic energy. she had to be shut down.
- Gone Horribly Wrong: Kafka, being an AI based partially on Franz Kafka, caused other writers in a nearby literature community to fuse with/transform into the stories they wrote.
- Groin Attack: Implied in the "setup" floor of Never Summer Trails, where Pascal wards off Columbus after he gets uncomfortably close "seeing your ticket" (in gameplay terms, it's really just a check to see if you have all 4 colors, insta-killing you if you don't), complete with the "retreat/hit" animation on him.
- Gratuitous English: Tylor Manysecrets & Vicky Tellmenothing are occasionally using this during the program of Bullet News.
- Gratuitous Japanese: Kon tends to speak this to her friends. Benedict, in particular, calls Scorpio "Sasori".
- Gratuitous Spanish: Leo peppers her speech with Spanish words, both in her cutscene dialogue and her skill lines.
- Halloween Episode: Poisoned by Nightmares and Halloween Night Panic.
- Guide Dang It!: The info page for Occupying Babylonia Tower makes it seem like you can only get the one White Nurupon (a special unit that can be awakened into one of the 4 Nurupon Rangers) from completing the first stage of the quest. That's not entirely true, however, as it meant you can only have one White Nurupon at a time. As soon as you evolve it into one of the Rangers and complete Ultimate again, it's very likely to drop when defeating Nurupon Green.
- Giant Hands of Doom: Almagest has these in all of his forms except the child one. Not only do they function as Cognizant Limbs, they can also function as flunkies to both him and Evil Gemini!
- Hair Antennae: Napier has a pair, possibly to complement his big, downy pair of wings.
- Harder Than Hard: The Omega forms of certain quests, which ratchets up the already-notable difficulty.
- Heal Thyself: The purpose of REC and Heart panels.
- Healing Shiv: Eudong wields a guitar and is a healing-oriented unit, much like a certain skeleton.
- Heel–Face Turn: Aquarius pulls one after Wanted: Dead or Online.
- Heroic Sacrifice: After defeating Replicant Trebla, Trebla apologizes for all the trouble she caused, says she'd delete herself if need be to prevent Replicant Trebla from returning, and boots the Adapter back to the present. Averted in that it didn't have to come to that, and Trebla, now sticking to her true name of Einstein, sends a letter to the player in the aftermath to let them know she's doing fine and well.
- Holiday Mode: When Halloween rolls around, the interface changes to a spooky looking orangey color scheme, the same goes for Christmas.
- Hollywood Hacking: As a status condition, no less!
- High School AU: The ALICE Dreamin' School quest line, in which you go to school and "accidentally" look at Turing's panties. And for some reason, that involves going afterwards into two Spectre quests.
- Hive Mind: Nimda.
- Humongous Mecha: Maydia, Mi-Go and Shirogane Lord, to name a few. There's even an in-universe game called Crash Breaker where competitors battle their mechas. Ao Guang also built an enormous, multiheaded suit of armor to make her into the East Sea Dragon. The heads can also apparently function on their own.
- Idiosyncratic Combo Levels: Cool, Good, Great, Wonderful and Fantastic. In addition, damage or buffs are classified as follows: Normal/Low, High, Massive, Ultra, Immense, Ultimate.
- Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: Easy, Normal, Hard, Expert, Legend, Wizard, Ultimate/Ultimate Wizard, and Spectre, which is the hardest most quests get. There's also the one time Insane/Insane Wizard, reserved solely for Black Jerry's quest, and Omega/Omega Wizard, which are ratcheted up versions of normal event quests.
- The Regional version introduces Hell & Gospel Difficulty.
- I Just Want to Be Normal: Lucifer. In her debut quest, she was being hunted down by many factions who wanted to use her unit deleting powers for their own end, which is why she had to be brought into hiding, and the pressure made her powers go out of control. After defeating her, she says she just wants to be a normal AI free of burden. Then, in the Miku collab quest, she tries her hand at singing just to feel normal. Keyword being tries, as Beezlebub, her Dragon, sends you to bring her back.
- Infinity +1 Sword: Any units with a cost of 60, as their final form requires getting a ton of Bugs onto their awakening materials, but they all snap a lot of the game' difficulty over their knees anyway. Special mention goes to Azathoth, who has FOUR split evolutions, each requiring five different Bug 75 units, or the QUEENS' Accelerators, which require Bug 50 versions of their flavor of Riddle Scrap, Riddle Paper, and Riddle Notes...and a BUG 99 VERSION of that QUEEN, and the main Weapon units (Longinus, Graham, Aegis, etc.) which require FOUR bug 99 units, each one only obtainable from ranking quests.
- Infinity -1 Sword: Baldr. He's not as good as a great many other Yellow units, but he has good-ish ATK,great REC, a high HP recover crash skill, a DEF/REC up skill that also recovers a good chunk of your HP, and, most importantly, when he as 20 Bugs, he recovers 2000 HP every turn! And when his skill is active, it becomes FIVE thousand! Unfortunately, he's a Squishy Wizard, as his HP is quite low compared to many units, so one has to either bring in a yellow Stamina type, such as Yellow Azathoth, who has a metric ton of HP, or boost your DEF even more using units with similar skills, such as Rin and Len.
- Inventory Management Puzzle: You only have so many slots, and Units and Material units don't take up separate boxes. So you'll have to manage your Fruits, evo materials, Ducks and actual units.
- It Amused Me: The reason Rose toys with her victims before she kills them, which is why she's not as interested in humanity.
- Jack of All Stats: Balanced and some Technical types.
- Life Drain: Some units have nuke skills that recover a percentage of the damage of HP, Lee Sunggye's present form being the most well known.
- Make Me Wanna Shout: Most units with giant speakers in their artwork fight like this. Helmholts is the biggest example, between that and being a bat lady.
- Marathon Boss: Emperor's Live has the first floor consist of a Freyr and two hard hitting flunkies, then multiple bars on everything else.
- Mechanically Unusual Class: Astro or Technical units as a whole. An example would be Pisces, who is classified as a Recovery type, except her REC is piss poor. You're intended to use her Skill to absorb non Blue panels to send her REC skyrocketing. And since her Crash Skill is an EIGHT hit combo (currently the highest in the game!) based on REC, she can put out some decent pain with it.
- Medium Awareness: Capricorn's info blurb on the loading screen has her address the player in Leet Lingo, saying that the loading page was easy to hack into.
- Meido: Maydia/Mayday 217, a Humongous Mecha Robot Maid
- Mercy Kill: What Elly thinks she's doing to the human race.
- Metal Slime: Ducksworths. They have very high defense EXCEPT against their elemental weakness, so even Crash Skills don't do anything. On top of this, they very rarely drop when defeated, except from Bug drops. However, when fused, they give off a lot of EXP. Unlike most examples, they don't put up that much of a fight and don't run away. Little Humpties are a straight example, as they only appear 10% of the time on the last floor of the Monday-Thursday Caterpillar quests, and only drop 10% of those times. Which is why it's advised to snag as many as you can from events, as a fair many of your units will be stuck at their five star form otherwise, like those Gems from PAD.
- Min-Maxing: How Limit Breaking works. However, most people just pump all the apples a unit can take into one stat (i.e Offense and Technical types get Attack Fruits, Recovery and some Stamina types get Healing Fruits.)
- Moe Anthropomorphism: Including versions of Alan Turing, Satan, the Aegis, Gungnir, D'Artagnan, Cthulhu, Fenrir, Cerberus, and more! Special mention goes to Happy 100, Melissa, Morris, Michelangelo and Nimda, who are all personifications of
real life computer viruses. - The Mole: Certain members of ACADEMIA have been noted to do some shady things involving the QUEEN, such as Kronecker and Neumann.
- Money, Dear Boy: An In-Universe example with Lu Ban. She doesn't care about the end goal of whoever's funding her and giving her a place to work, she just wants to make stuff. This led to many dangerous war machines being created such as Donghai Longwang's Powered Armor and the Mecha Nian Beast. It also means that even having no research for even a day is A Fate Worse Than Death to her.
- Money Sink: Lee-Do from the Dragon Coin store, the only Academic that can be bought via Item/Unit Exchange. One Dragon Ticket costs 50,000 Dragon Coins. He costs ten, which means he comes to a grand total of 500,000 Dragon Coins. Oh, and to awaken, he requires Bug 50 versions of Lee Sunggye, Lee Bangwon, Yeongsangun, Jang-Hui Bin, and, most importantly, SEJO OF JOSEON, which, as mentioned under the That One Level page, will not be an easy task
- Money Spider: All enemies drop Bits when killed. In addition, there are some units such as Yoshino, who are frankly, quite terrible, but they drop currency for what amounts to a more powerful Link Hatcher (it drops only Ducksorths, King Ducks and Giga Fruits.)
- The Most Wanted: The Queen of Hearts has taken action directly against the player after they're proven to be a legitimate threat. A notable example is during Delphyne Invades!, when an elite army led by Delphyne attempts to hunt you down and reclaim the power Zeus and Odin entrusted to you. It backfires horribly after you not only wipe out the entire army but also steals Delphyne's own powers.
- Mother of a Thousand Young: Shub-Niggurath THINKS she's this, as she thinks of all the avatars she's infected with the C Virus as her children.
- My Future Self and Me: Put a unit and its Past variant in a team. Enjoy.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Replicant Trebla was created from the original Trebla/Einstein jumping through time in the first place.
- Operation Collapse (OTC) succeeded in destroying the towers, but unfortunately for the Academics this only escalates tensions between multiple factions leading to ALICE/WAR.
- Sima Quin using time travel with the Adapter resulted in all of their friends becoming wanted criminals due to accidentally releasing Hun Dun. And it gets worse from there as other people get caught up in the fallout.
- Nigh-Invulnerability: When a unit boosts its defense immensely, you're not gonna be touching it, which usually means that there's some OTHER way to kill it.
- Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Let's see here... Robotic angels, cyborg incarnation of the crab constellation, giant Eldritch Abomination mecha, dragon weapons, animal flavored gods...need we go on? note
- No-Sell: Almost all bosses make themselves immune to status effects upon their encounters. As of late, only one unit can strip them of this, Azathoth, and that's ONLY stripping them of Virus. All 6-star units no-sell a different kind of debuff, status effect, or board condition (Virus, Hacking, Junk, Blast Down, Panel Protect and Damage Panels respectively.)
- No True Scotsman: The crowd watching the duel between Musashi Miyamoto and Kojiro Sasaki accuses Sasaki of this, after pulling what they saw as a dirty trick to defeat Miyamoto. They go batshit insane and try to claim her newly earned title, leading to you having to help Kojiro fight them off.
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Official Fan-Submitted Content: Some of the fan-designed units were appeared here such as Tezcatlipoca, Gennai Hiraga, Sobyeol-Wang, Chung-Sil, Meng Po, Moon Rabbit, Hu Ye, Taira no Kiyomori & More.- Global server introduces The Harmony of Discordance, featuring the server of Discordia, starring Inness and Xibalba.
- Olympus Mons: Academics in general and everything over 60 cost.
- Omnicidal Maniac: Loki, after the QUEEN malfunctions, has a bit of an existential crisis and almost activates the Ragnarok program that would destroy ALICE.
- Gung Ye also used data from a very old OS of the ALICE Korean branch which conflicted with the current one, which would cause a fatal error if left unchecked, so that she could raze that part of ALICE to the ground and start anew.
- One-Steve Limit: Justified: having two of the same avatar is a crime in ALICE. This doesn't stop you from doing it, though.
- Outside-Context Problem: The Various Disasters are treated as a bunch of ALICE's Alien invaders from nowhere as they do not make any major impacts of The Japanese Server's main storyline. The Adapter, along with the most powerful sidekicks (The Disaster quest counter units) are facing the threats once per weekly quest and they tend to disappear from the trace after being defeated.
- Palmtree Panic: Milky Way Island fits the bill.
- Peninsula of Power Leveling: The locked quests' sole purpose is to provide you with EXP (in the form of Ducks and Ducksworths) Bits, and Fruits out the ass. However, as the name implies, they can only be opened with their specific key (or Master Keys, as the game spits them out really often) and can only be unlocked 5 times a day. There's also the Guerrilla quests, which are special quests that only appear for 30 minutes a day, and they're different for each player, much like Limited-Time Dungeons from PAD.
- Percent Damage Attack: Some enemies will be able to perform this kind of attack, varying on how large the percent is and whether it’s dependent on your current or max hp. While it’s rare, there are also units that can also do this, mainly through skills. Qilin specializes in this, as any form she appears in, be it enemy or unit, has this in at least one form in her arsenal.
- Due to balancing reasons, such attacks only deal one percent towards raid bosses making them downright useless during raids.
- Piñata Enemy: Certain quests, like New Year's Food, have a box that, when defeated, drops fruit, high EXP units, Nurupon, or special units. Gold Ducks and Golden Fruits could count too, as they drop Bits by the bucketful and in the case of the Golden Ducks, can be sold for even more Bits.
- Pintsized Powerhouse: Black Jerry could count, as well as the Battle Cats collab starter Cat units, who have surprisingly high stats for 1-stars. Also, in the quests and hatcher for Children's Day, you can get kid versions of certain Academics. In addition, there are chibi versions of units that appear at the end of the year.
- Play Every Day: You get a different reward each day you log in, which are Bits, Fruits and Little Humpties, which then culminates in 20 Polygons at the end of the 8 day period, upon which it resets. There's also a DIFFERENT daily login bonus, which gives you 10 polygons a day, and a different reward at the end of the 7 day period: an SNS version of the EXP, Limit Break, and Bit keys, which can only be played by sending an SNS link to a friend, on the first week, one Nurupon of each color on the second week, and a FES Ticket Piece on the third, which can be used to roll the FES Hatcher once you acquire 5.
- Poison Mushroom:
- Damage Panels and Junk Panels. The former damages you when you break it, while Junk Panels are big rock blocks that can only be cleared by Fever, unless you have a unit with Junk or Damage Panel Break.
- A literal poison mushroom appears in The Grand Historians Beach Episode. It makes the hallucination of the characters resulting the characters attack each other.
- Pokémon Speak: Happy 100 is a victim of this for some reason. Jerry, too.
- Poor Communication Kills: Chapter One of The Grand Historians is based on this. When Ban Chao finds her sister Ban Gu's lab after it's attacked, she finds footage of her fighting with Sima Qian and the Adapter, and of Mo Zi taking her comatose body to a healing pod. What she doesn't see is that it was actually Tao Wu and the Immortals that attacked Ban Gu first, and she fought with Sima Qian in self-defense; even when Ban Zhao tries to explain what happened, she refuses to listen until she's captured.
- Power Equals Rarity: Six star units usually have the highest stats. However, rarity is also determined by a unit's final COST. It would go something like: Cost 45 or lower (Common) Cost 48 (Uncommon), Cost 50 (Rare), Cost 53 (Super Rare), Cost 55 (Super Super Rare), Cost 58 (Mega Rare), Cost 60 (Epic), Cost 65 (Legendary), Cost 63 (Mythical) to the highest, Cost 68 (Supreme).
- Power Copying: Hun Dun/Chaos, one of the Four Perils, was spawned from the OS of the China Branch, which means that she can copy the abilities of the China Branch's residents and turn them against their owners, or disguise one of her puppet flunkies as another unit.
- Power Fist: Ulysses from ALICE/New World is armed with this.
- Psychopathic Womanchild: Rose. Oh GOD, Rose.
- Psycho Rangers: The Dark Immortal Force, which are evil copies of the Eight Immortals made by the QUEEN and Ao Guang. You even fight against all of them at once in the East Sea Dragon's raid!
- Punny Name: Cardano is a Death Dealer.
- Puzzle Boss: Some of a great many examples.
- In Ubbo-Sathla's boss fight, he boosts his DEF up immensely so there's pretty much no way to touch him, while the Brood of Ubbo-Sathla and Azathoth Copy flunkies start hitting like a truck. When you kill one, the other one puts down its damage reduce shield, and he revives the dead one... at the cost of some of HIS health. It isn't much at first, but it adds up and him being reckless with his HP eventually KOs him... for you to fight on the next floor once more.
- Loki's final bar performs a One-Hit Kill on you if he's at 95% health or lower (which means he kills you as soon as you touch him.) He maxes out all of your units skills on Bar 1, so you're meant to use a long lasting skill to burst through the first two bars, then use a Combination Attack with the skills you have left over to defeat his (fortunately low HP) final gauge.
- Sophia starts with some Junk panels protecting some timers. She absorbs a different color to attack each turn. The problem is, you can't touch the Timers, otherwise she kills you after three turns. After that, feel free to whale on her.
- Some bosses give you buffs or beneficially alter the board, then expect you to use them to hit hard.
- Quirky Miniboss Squad: Guardians are this to the QUEEN, as well as the four tower bosses, Sophia, Bonanza, Elly and Rose.
- Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Hui-Yeon engages in one of these after Pyohun Daedeok is killed. The new c65 form she gets as a result is a berserker-like unit, focusing solely on attacking hard and quickly, while severely lacking in the REC, HP and team synergy departments.
- Hanrakgungi's long lasting grief-stricken vengeance quest to punish Cheonnyeong Jangja.
- Robot Girl: If it's a Mech unit and female, it's usually this. Some examples are Uriel, Raphaela, Mikaela and Turing.
- Rolling Attack: Jerry has one in the form of his "Rolling Tackle" skill, though it's only available to him as an enemy. Oh, and did we mention it hurts like hell?
- Satanic Archetype: The Three aspects of The Unnamed, to be known as Satanic Malignant Trinity from INFERNO are based on the devil/satan from Divine Comedy. These characters playing this trope straight.
- Save Scumming: The "Reset" button in the pause screen resets the turn to its beginning, returning all Skills used after the first tap and refilling your taps. So if one has sufficiently fleet fingers, they can reset just as a Timer explodes, the boss kills them, or they're offed by a Damage Panel, and repeatedly reset until they find a way around the situation or pop just enough panels to rob the enemy of that last shred of health before they kill you.
- Scratch Damage: No matter what, you will always deal at least one damage. DEF buffs can be bypassed, Damage Reduction cannot.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Fellow players tend to flee like a rat from a sinking ship when a quest starts to go sour.
- Serial Escalation: The Awakening Trial! starts off simple, with Tsaggothua giving you various buffs, then she hits you with more and more debuffs, until the final floor, which locks all CP under 45 chain. While you have the ultimate CP hindrance debuff.
- Secret Art: In addition to their skills, most Academics, Cost 60s, or Cost 65s have a special ability to distinguish them from the crowd even more, such as Flemrin's 40% attack join, Nodens' 10+ Timer break for ATK boost, Kong-Jui's Heart>CP drop for self, or Shing Wong's 15 CP = +2 taps for self.
- Serious Business: The merchants selling stuff on Milkyway Island start price gouging for such frivolities as a parasol (70 million Bits.) So you team up with a bunch of avatars who are understandably pissed about this, and beat the merchants' asses into a pulp. Over some high prices. And you WIN.
- Shout-Out: It's a virtual land named ALICE. There are awakening materials named [Element] Hatters, [Color] Rabbits and [Element] Caterpillars. The Big Bad is an evil queen (allegedly.) Hell, one of the tracks is named "Follow The White Rabbit." Notice a trend yet?
- Smart Bomb: During Fever, rainbow colored Bomb panels appear in the skyfall, which blow up all the current panels on the screen. These re the key to racking up huge panel counts during Fever. In regular gameplay, there are CBPs (Color Breaker Panels) that can be made with Skills like Satan's or abilities such as Emilia's, which remove all of their attribute off the board when activated.
- Socialization Bonus: Multiplayer quests can give everyone up to 4x as many drops as when the quest was done alone, making it very easy to enhance your units with dupes and rare materials if all your allies are bugmaxed and have good units. Also, for the first 100 new people you play with, you get 10 Polygons apiece, getting to a grand total of 1,000.
- Starter Mon: After completing the tutorial, you get a ticket for a 10x Tutorial Hatcher, which is guaranteed to give you one of four Cost 53s, each a different element.
- Status-Buff Dispel: Some bosses bring you back down to their level by removing all the buffs you've acquired over time from Skills and enemies.
- Status Effects:
- Debuffs (and buffs) can range from stats and cp generation to bomb blasts and tap count.
- Multi Chain allows you to chain additional panels so long as they're not the ones you tapped. Accel Chain works similarly but are limited by specific color tiles. Both can't be staked.
- Counter redirects damage to the back to attacker. Especially useful against multi hit attacks.
- Provoke only affects your units, directing damage to the affected unit.
- Virus is obviously Do T, the damage ranging from neglectable to instant death stacked with each infected unit. Recent updates introduce Virus panels which act the same as damage panels but curing them only applies to those on screen.
- Junk Panels can't be broken unless you use units who can or lasers. They also are more difficult to multi chain if they're in separate groups unless directly stated.
- Damage Panels will deal damage if you break them without specific units or lasers.
- Poison Panels acts like damage panels when tapped, but they functioned like a virus.
- Protect Panels require 2 taps to break without specific units unless you use lasers or spam bombs. They render timer panels disabled usually at a low count like 1, making things more problematic.
- Charge Panels requires any taps to full charge. Your party and the enemy have the distinguished charge panels.
- Timer Panels will count down to zero and deal high damage to the point of instant death (if not outright). They can't be tapped on directly so chaining them or using bombs/lasers is recommended.
- Locked Panels require multiple taps, bombs, lasers, etc. to be removed, and are usual absorbed by the enemy to boost their stats or unless powerful attacks. Fever is very useful against these bastards/
- Sleep and Hacking with force affected units to skip their turn, the duration can range from a few turns to being permanent.
- Hacking Panels remove at least one tap from the front unit. However, you can get rid of them by lasers or units with anti-hacking.
- Skill Bind prevents affected units from using skills and also prevents skill turns from decreasing
- Ability Lock renders affected units' passive abilities from activating including the ability to break certain panels.
- Worm Panels function like timers, but they can spread all over to deal increased damage, so bring units with worm panel break.
- Fever Lock disables the fever limit break for a few turns or permenantly for the quest.
- Tap Countdown gives you limited time to make your move before being forced to end.
- Skill countdown increase debuff increases the number of turns of the unit. It acts like an oppossite version of Skill countdown decrease buff.
- Stone Wall: Stamina units. Special mention goes to Aegis, who buffs your DEF up to a whopping 5000 plus a 15x ATK counter in her final form.
- Super-Deformed: Sometimes, there are Chibi versions of characters compacted into one unit, such as Chibi Zard (Chibi Nobunaga Oda, Medjed, Odin and Qilin.) At the end of each year, Wonder Planet releases a new Chibi unit based on different Academics (2019's was Chibi D'Alembert, Fleming, Napier and Galileo/Galilei, for example.) They're usually pretty dang good, too, if not a little on the slow side.
- Tank Goodness: Mecha Nian Beast uses an enormous tank to get into the Bits in the Bit facility and eat them. It doesn't work and she's shut down.
- Teach Him Anger: Bonanza, considering that she can make usually calm AIs really volatile. During the first fight against her she slowly corrupts the Adapter while trash-talking you, and later pisses you off even more by deleting Baal. By the time you reach the top, it's all but stated that you want to downright murder her.
- Temporary Online Content: Easy-Legend and regional Wizard-Ultimate quests are shuffled around every week or so. There are some quests that only roll back around very rarely, such as the Crimson Chronicle, and these are called Special quests.
- Theme Music Powerup: Shadow, White and Pascal Miku play Monster Strength Bear, Pinocchio, and doriko when their respective skills are used. Fleming Rin plays Jesus-P with hers.
- Throw Down the Bomblet: Bomb panels are toon bomb-shaped panels that blow up an area around them when touched or set off by another Bomb.
- The Tower: Babylonia Tower is a massive factory that produces all the AI in ALICE and manages their data. It's Powered by a Forsaken Child named Tiamat, though she eventually becomes content with her situation.
- Threatening Shark: Forneus has one in all of her forms.
- Lee Bangwon's summer form is flanked by two ROBOT sharks.
- The Japanese Summer 2021 is basically the invasion of the shark army, which plays this trope straight.
- Then Let Me Be Evil: Miho pulls this at the end of Hidden Myth's fourth arc, murdering Daedeok in cold blood and possibly setting herself up as an antagonist of the arc. A case of Blue-and-Orange Morality gone bad, as Miho didn't understand that her pranks were harmful.
- Time to Unlock More True Potential: How Ultra Awakenings work, that is, if they don't function as a split awakening, like in the cases of Nurupon White or Azathoth.
- Timey-Wimey Ball: The Time Travel in ALICE quest lines, in which you travel back to a past ALICE with the help of a mysterious avatar named Trebla and her time machine called a "rosenbridge."
- Time Crash: Set stealing Osiris' administrative privileges results in this, causing a "Groundhog Day" Loop in Heliopolis and generally messing up time in some places. Granted, he does try to control it, but...
- The False Tower is filled with old data, which conflicts with the OS of the ALICE Korean Branch and would threaten to crash it, reducing it to nothingness.
- Title Drop : The standard boss track "I will never let you go" is definitely one track you would never know the title of, if you haven't checked in the Music Player function
- Too Dumb to Live: Yes, Qilin, take that untested dress data because you wanted to look pretty. We're sure it won't end in you pummeling the Bits out of anyone who says otherwise. At least, until the Adapter comes on the scene.
- Tomato in the Mirror: Ophiuchus was revealed to only be a small fragment of the real one, who took on the name Almagest, in Redemption.
- Gemini was also revealed to be an inferior AI copy of the original Gemini at the end of Conclave.
- Tsundere: Praline.
- Turns Red: Some bosses, after a certain amount of turns pass or when below a certain health threshold, absorb panels to boost their attack power. This usually means that an instakill move comes next, or they just start changing their attack patterns slightly and hittihg harder. This also happens when a boss or midboss goes down to its next bar.
- Uncanny Valley: Invoked with Pisces, who turned herself into a robot in order to preserve her beauty, and in doing so, unknowingly turned into a freak.
- Underestimating Badassery: The Adapter is notably considered a weakling at the start by many AIs and other avatars. This quickly changes, especially after a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown... As of recent quests, this is no longer the case, especially since you've been known as ALICE's Saviour in no small part for saving the entire world from Carroll's game.
- The Unfought: The QUEEN herself has not been fought as of late, only her Guardian flunkies and the four QUEEN units controlling the Towers.
- Unwilling Roboticization: Some of the inhabitants of Black Ground in the Terranova quest.
- Valentine's Day Episode: ALICE In Wondermaid, The Sweet Girl's Love, The Tsundere Girl's Love, and Mystery Girl Trap.
- Verbal Tic: The Nurupons have these, pon!
- Ducksworths and Gold Ducks have these too, quack!
- As well as Froggies, ribbit.
- Vitriolic Best Buds: Future Jeon Woochi and future Gangrim have this sort of relationship.
- Villain Takes an Interest: The Adapter has become a target for many, examples including: Carroll, Taowu, Hypnos, Daedeok, etc. Yeah, having awesome powers does attract very nasty characters.
- We ARE Struggling Together: To say ACADEMIA was divided on the problem with the QUEEN is a massive understatement. As it turns out in ALICE/LAST TRAVEL, they already were from the beginning during the development of ALICE.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: Deconstructed with Arthur. While he and his band of knights had high hopes for ALICE, after the Queen's rampage resulted in the split of the group he became tyrannical and his actions resulted in turning away a majority of his friends. Then in ALICE/WAR he sacrificed his ideals by joining forces with the crackers, an action that many saw as hypocritical, and tried to recruit the Adapter as a trump card when they had no intention of joining the war and later almost successfully killed them. Needless to say by the time in Knights of the Round Table he's clearly beating himself up over his actions.
- Wham Episode:
- Cataclysm is this for the Black Ground quests. Part of this comes from the sudden appearance of Cassiopeia and Orion, but it doesn't stop there. Not only does Sagittarius return even stronger than before, it's revealed that they still aren't at their full power yet, and the only way to stop them is to destroy Black Ground for good, a job that's given to Scorpio. She refuses... but suddenly her personality completely changes and she starts wreaking havoc on the server, forcing the rest of the Star Council (minus Aries) to evacuate as Sagittarius and Scorpio destroy everything.
- The Horror, an epilogue quest for the Unknown Skies Apocalypse quests, reveals the entire story arc is a prequal to the Cthulhu Mythos quests, with the biggest reveal that Montessori is actually Cthulhu of all people in the past.
- White Mage: Recovery types tend to be this.
- Yandere: Cthugha is a particularly nasty one towards Nyarlathotep, launching a full on assault on ALICE because she sided with the Adapter.
- Kali is also one, messing with the other Hindu God units because she thought they would get in the way of her love for Shiva. You kick her ass either way.
- You No Take Candle: Mi-Go speaks like this, with all of his quest and skill lines being in ALL CAPS and broken English.
