Video Game / HoloCure

HoloCure: Save the Fans! is a Vampire Survivors-inspired fan game based off the hololive franchise. It was created by Kay Yu (the lead animator of River City Girls), featuring art contributions by DuDul and Smpletan, and music by Eufrik.

The premise is simple: you play as various Hololive idols, fighting off overzealous fanbases who are no longer in control of their love for their oshis.

The game debuted on Windows PC on June 24, 2022 with a single stage and 11 hololive characters, and subsequent content updates have expanded the stage selection and character roster further, as well as added new features. The largest content addition yet arrived with version 0.6, which added a game mode called Holo House that contained various minigames: fishing, farming, raising mascots to generate coins, and decorating a customizable home. Future content plans include a casino area for Holo House, and a dungeon-crawling mode.

Hololive members added in each update include:

• Version 0.3 (June 24, 2022): hololive EN -Myth-, -Council-, and Project: HOPE
• Version 0.4 (September 9, 2022): hololive JP GAMERS and Gen 0
• Version 0.5 (February 10, 2023): hololive JP Gen 1 and Gen 2
• Version 0.6 (August 17, 2023): hololive ID Gen 1, Gen 2, and Gen 3

The game can be downloaded for free on Itch.io and Steam.

On April 28, 2023, the developers were forced to discontinue the game's proprietary launcher. However, on May 11, they announced they had received permission from Cover Corp. to distribute the game and its updates on Steam, which began with the release of version 0.6.

Kay Yu announced the development and completion of his other game, Holo X Break, featuring the fifth and sixth generations of hololive, and was released on March, 29th, 2024.

---

Tropes

• 100% Completion: Achievements were added to the game in update 0.5, with one last achievement for obtaining everything else. According to Kay Yu, this achievement was made specifically to cater to Kaela, who after maxing out every upgrade, beating Stage 1 Hard mode with most of the roster, and hitting the half hour mark in Endless with Halu level 5, complained that there was nothing else to do.◊
• 1-Up:
  • Kiara's Phoenix Fire gives her a 15-second window where if she runs out of HP, it will automatically revive her to full health on the spot.
  • Surviving 10 minutes as Kiara also unlocks the Chicken Feather item that acts as standard extra lives, with it being able to bank up to 3 revives at max level (5 if it's a Super Chicken Feather). Unlike Kiara's revive, this item only restores 50 percent HP while instantly killing all enemies on screen.
  • Ollie's undead skill sort of counts as one as upon getting to 0 HP she'll get an attack boost and be able to fight at zero HP for a time with temporarily reduced max HP and an attack boost based on how much Max HP was reduced. If you get her HP above zero by the time the buff end, you'll go on as if you didn't drop to 0 HP while if you don't you'll die.
• Achievement Mockery:
  • The "Get Some Help" achievement, as noted under Completion Mockery, suggests players to go touch some grass after earning it, plus one HoloCoin for their troubles. In 0.6, it adds "Completionist's grass" to the furniture shop for the price of 1 HoloCoin.
  • "Went Too Halu" is earned by dying during a run with any level of Halu equipped, which increases HoloCoin gain at the expense of making enemies tougher and more numerous. Newer players who just unlocked Halu might take it out of curiosity or confidence, only to end their run when their damage can't keep up with the enhanced enemy waves. The achievement also unlocks the GWS Pill as if to console the player or mock their overconfidence.
  • "True RNG" and "Just RNG" are two achievements that exist solely to lampshade a Born Unlucky player's woes when it comes to enchanting. The former is unlocked by failing an enhancement five times in one run, while the latter is unlocked by failing a +2 enhancement attempt, which has a 90% success rate.
  • "No Thoughts Head Empty" is unlocked by clearing any stage by only ever picking the first option offered on the level up screen without using rerolls or eliminations, poking some fun at the sort of player who'd rather skip their way through any sort of decision or reading.
• Achievement System: There is a list of achievements for players to complete. Most of them award HoloCoins but a few of them will unlock new weapons, items, stages, and more. On the Steam version many also give Steam Achievements. Kay Yu even had to address how newly published games have to earn the right to add on future achievements beyond the 100 maximum at the start, and so had to pick and choose which in-game ones would also be Steam achievements.
• Action Bomb:
  • The SSRB introduced in Update 0.4 will detonate a few seconds after getting close enough to your character. They will project a red circle to denote their blast footprint before exploding. The Oruyanke introduced in Update 0.5 function similarly.
  • Moona can make ones of her own with her "Lunar Construction"
• A-Cup Angst: The Cutting Board item is a nod to the idols who are known for their small busts and being particularly touchy about it (Ina, Gura, Suisei, Matsuri, Shion, Ollie, Kobo), and the related Collab Flattening Board even includes "feel the anger of cutting boards" in its description. These same idols in turn have a unique modifier that causes said weapon to be 30% larger and more powerful than if used by a character who isn't "flat", and the related Collab weapons are also buffed accordingly. Conversely, the Bounce Ball is at its smallest and least powerful if used by these characters.
• Ambidextrous Sprite: Some of the girls' sprites will occasionally mirror along with a weapon (if they're holding one) if they're facing left or right, which also includes their hairstyles. This is noticeable with Suisei's sprite where facing her right where her side tail and crown are flipped over, and her axe is on her left hand (her sidetail is always on the right and the crown is often on the left angle). Calli's scythe will also appear on both hands when facing either direction.
• An Interior Designer Is You: Update 0.6 adds the Holo House side mode, where you can purchase cosmetics to decorate the House with.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: Update 0.4 added new unlockable costumes for the Myth and Council+Hope generations as gacha pulls: the casual outfits for Myth, the New Year's Eve kimonos for Council, and a Santa hat and cloak for IRyS. Fubuki, on the other hand, gets a Palette Swap for Kurokami and is the only character from Gen 0 and Gamers to have an unlockable costume from the get-go. More unlockable costumes would be added with each new update.
• Anti-Frustration Feature:
  • All of the upgrades purchasable with Holocoins will apply to your entire roster instead of being separated per character, allowing you to be on equally strong footing regardless of who you're playing as.
  • If you have a valid combo in your item bar ready to Collab, a golden anvil will spawn almost right away or very soon afterwards to let you craft it. The Golden Anvil menu will also highlight weapons that can be combined.
  • The pause menu contains a list of every Collab you've previously assembled, including what weapons you need to form it. Update 0.6 adds a side menu in the level-up screen that also shows this same list, so the player doesn't have to rack their brain about the collab combinations while picking a new item/weapon.
  • Unlike Vampire Survivors, defeating a major 20 minute boss in Stage Mode ends the stage immediately with a "Stage Clear", whereas in Vampire Survivors you need to wait to get killed by Red Death to register a "Level Complete"
  • Receiving duplicates from the gacha grants a G-Rank upgrade, which improves a given character's base stats by up to 20%, so getting multiple copies of them won't be as much of a headache as the typical card collecting games. The problem arises after you've maxed out a character's G-Rank, however, as the gacha doesn't acknowledge this level cap and will keep churning out duplicates despite the excess ones no longer contributing to any meaningful stat-up.
  • Update 0.4 added a second currency to the game, called Gambler's Tears, that you earn with every duplicate gacha pull. If you get enough Gambler's Tears, you can outright buy the character you want instead of taking the random pull. The only drawback is your total number of Tears is split between the various character pools.
  • 0.5 shows recomended shop upgrade levels on each stage so you have an idea of what to expect in enemy strength.
  • Starting from 0.6 onwards, want some quick HoloCoins for Gacha purposes and not wanting to waste real life 20 minutes of your time per session in Stage Mode? Simply do some fishing and also farming which whatever you fished and planted can be sold off to Bloop and Nemu respectively for income. At the same time, achievements can also be unlocked along the way.
  • Provided the player has had any, save data from any of the previous builds of the game are fully compatible with later releases, including the Steam version. In the case of the latter, in-game achievements obtained in the 0.5 build will automatically unlock their Steam equivalent as soon as the game is launched.
  • If you create a Super Collab with a Super Item, you will retain its extra benefits (for example, using Super Idol Outfit to create Idol Live will still give you the 2nd Special charge.)
• Assist Character:
  • Amelia can summon Bubba to run around and collect XP gems, while also damaging and stunning enemies with his bark.
  • Mumei can summon Friend, who circles around her and fires off random weapons within her arsenal. Friend also picks up XP gems.
  • Sora can summon Ankimo, who will attack/push enemies closest to Sora with a chance to immobilize them.
  • Shion gets a floating garlic that increases her Special charge rate while it's nearby, and also gradually damages enemies in its vicinity.
  • In the 0.5 update Ina's "The Ancient Ones" skill was changed to have AO-chan appear on the field, allowing it to pick up XP gems on top of its original function of occasionally turning enemies into friendly Takodachis.
• Athletic Arena Level: The main stage of 0.6 (and Home Stage of hololive ID in general) is the Gelora Bung Yagoo Stadium, the setting of the hololive ID World Cup in Minecraft.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever:
  • Sana's special attack, "Become Beeg". It enlarges her character sprite to 3/4ths of the entire screen, turns her invincible during, and all enemies on the screen take damage and are knocked away when she runs into them.
  • Most of the stage bosses (as of version 0.5) qualify as this;
    • Stage 1 has Fubuzilla at the 10 minute mark, and a paradoxically large Smol Ame at the 20 minute mark, and Stage 1 Hard has Fubuzilla and Smol Ame return at the 10 minute mark (with Fubuzilla now being able to aim her beam), and a large Halloween Bae at the 20 minute mark.
    • Both Stage 2 and Stage 2 Hard have Mikodanye at the 10 minute mark.
    • Stage 3 has Shubangelion at the 10 minute mark, and a very large Spiderchama (i.e. the drawing Mumei did of Haachama as a spider) at the 20 minute mark. Stage 3 Hard features both Shubangelion and Spiderchama at the 10-minute mark, and Halloween Smol Ame and her equally-large genmates at the 20-minute mark.
    • Stage 4 has Udin at the 10-minute mark, and strange versions of all three members of Area 15 at the 20-minute mark.
  • While considerably less threatening, the stage's lesser bosses are very large versions of ordinary mooks.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Before the 0.6 update, Mumei's special True Horror would instantly killed all non-boss enemies on screen, but had a high chance of erasing EXP gems and other items as well.
  • Aki's Belly Charge can be charged up for 20+ minutes. The resulting damage will kill or decimate most 20-minute bosses, but this forces you to avoid using it and constantly move for said charge-up period.
• Bad Boss: One of the Usada Nousagis working on the Usada Casino begs you to save them, as their boss is working them to death.
• Bad Luck Mitigation Mechanic:
  • Each time you draw an idol you already have, you receive one Gambler's Tear for that banner. You can exchange the tears for banner characters or their alternate outfits.
  • The Credit Card increases the spawn rate of Anvils by up to 100%, but that's not all it does - it also spawns free anvils at certain intervals (every one to two minutes at maximum level), something that is strangely not mentioned in the description of the normal version of the item. This way, even the most unlucky players won't ever get zero benefit out of a Credit Card. The Super version is guaranteed to spawn an anvil every minute.
• Beam Spam:
  • Collabing the Glowstick with the Fan Beam yields powered-up glowsticks that constantly fire lasers everywhere.
  • The Stream of Tears (CEO Tears + Fan Beam) produces two endless beams that continuously rotate outward from the player.
• Big, Bulky Bomb:
  • The Atomic SSRB that spawns at the 18:00 mark on the Holo Office stage will need to be defeated before the timer above it runs out, otherwise it's most likely a One-Hit Kill^note Having a maxed-out Body Pillow may prevent a one-shot, with the player character being left with minimal health afterwards., as the blast radius is technically infinite and cannot be outran. The same applies for the Atomic Oruyanke that shows up at the 8:00 mark in the hard mode of that stage.
  • The "I'm Die, Thank You Forever" bomb will enlarge itself when it attaches itself on a Giant Mook. As it's a player collab bomb, it will give off a massive explosion, quickly cleaning the screen out of nearby fans.
• Bland-Name Product: According to the intro movie, the in-game idols conduct their streams on "Holotube". Additionally, in-game loot drops are found in "Holozon" boxes.
• "Blind Idiot" Translation: While the translation into Japanese isn't too bad, there are some questionable bits of localization.
  • Gura's Short Height giving her 0.5 seconds of "no partner".
  • The Headphones item having a 15% to 35% "establishment" to activate
  • Mumei's True Horror noting that "Items are unlikely to be destroyed" when the opposite is true (70% chance to be destroyed).
  • The unlock requirement for the "Pain Peko" achievement initially showing up as "Obtain a super item" when the opposite is true (Refuse, as in drop, a super item when it's offered). This now-fixed mistake threw Pekora herself for a loop while she was looking through the achievement list.
• Boob-Based Gag: Two of the weapons, the Cutting Board and the Bounce Ball, are based on recurring gags regarding the talents' bust sizes, "Cutting Board" being a nickname for the members with no bust, and "Boing Boing" referring to the more endowed members.
  • The Bounce Ball drops projectiles that bounce between enemies. It comes in five different size variations, and the bigger variants have increased knockback too. The balls are at their biggest when used by the most well-endowed members of the cast (Kronii, Sana, Choco, and Reine) and are at their smallest with the most petite characters.
  • The Cutting Board sends out a short-range projectile behind you (and to the sides, if awakened), and the projectile size is much larger if used by the least-endowed characters. The Flattening Board, which is a collab weapon that uses the Cutting Board, behaves similarly, dropping large boards that are even bigger if you're controlling flat-chested characters.
• Booze-Based Buff: Sake offers a crit rate that slowly builds up to a cap (10-20% depending on upgrade level), and getting hit by enemies halves your current buff strength. Eating food with this active gives an additional 5% crit rate for 10 seconds. If you happen to find the Super version in a box, the boosts are much higher, though the price is stability in your aim.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Nurse's Horns is nothing flashy, just a chance to trigger a minor heal whenever you defeat an enemy. However, the reliable passive healing is something that is useful in effectively any situation. Even characters like IRyS and Fauna that are already swimming in self-heals through their own abilities can still benefit, given that both have skills that trigger every time they receive a heal. Uber Sheep - which provides healing items more regularly - is similar.
  • Knight's Milk increases both your attack area and your pickup radius. Even if your weapons at the time are not synergistic with increased size, the larger pickup radius will influence the ease of gathering experience, accelerating the rate you level up.
    • Come the 0.4 update, the Limiter item provides an even more straightforward example of this benefit. While it doesn't increase the attack size like the Milk does, the pickup range bonus it applies is absolutely gigantic, capping at a whopping 300% at max level. This makes gathering coins and experience easier than ever despite the lack of other benefits.
  • Study Glasses give a boost to EXP gain and provide a miniscule bonus to damage per level-up. However, by getting and fully upgrading it early and then lasting into the late game, it allows you to level up far more times in a run than you would have without it, even discounting the up to five levels used in obtaining these upgrades. Doing this is practically necessary for the best potential performance in Endless mode.
  • Two of Amelia's skills, FPS Mastery and Detective Eye, provide a small boost to damage and critical rate. However, the boosts apply to all weapons and are non-conditional, so they're useful no matter what weapons you pick up.
  • Growth has a small sounding effect (+1% to main weapon and special attack per level per upgrade rank), but it adds up, as even a stage mode run will have you in the 40s, at least.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: The premise is that an evil force brainwashed the fans and it's up to the idols to save them.
• Breaking Old Trends:
  • The 0.6 Update is the first update that introduces songs outside of Bouquet album for the stages, those being id:entity for Stage 4, which is themed entirely around hololive Indonesia, and Myth or Treat for Stage 3 Hard, the second half of which is focused entirely on HoloMyth, with the 20-minute bosses being all five giant chibis from the music video.
  • Both stages featured in the 0.6 update (Stage 4 and Stage 3 Hard) do away with the Stone Wall enemies at the 19 minute mark and instead feature a massive wave of fans affiliated with that part of the level. Stage 3 Hard however still does the Bullet Hell segment at the 19:30 point though.
  • Stage 3 Hard is played a whole lot differently from the previous two Hard Mode stages. Instead of having tougher versions of fans usually faced in Stage 3 spread out throughout the entire 20 minutes, everything from the original Stage 3 is thrown at you in the first half, with Gen 2-themed ones starting to come in around the 5-minute mark (as opposed to when you're fighting Shubangelion), while the second half has beefed-up HoloMyth fans instead, starting at the 11-minute mark.
• Breath Weapon:
  • Collabing the Plug Type Asacoco with the Fan Beam results in Dragon Fire, a directional, highly damaging flamethrower that fires nonstop. It's so powerful that even most bosses will be melted in seconds.
  • Fubuzilla fires off one horizontally. In the hard mode version of stage 1, she no longer has such directional restriction, and can track your character before firing.
  • Mikodanye fires off a conical version of the Dragon Fire, and the attack follows after your character. The best way to avoid it is to actually get far enough away from the cone's area.
• Brutal Bonus Level: The appropriately labelled Hard Mode stages sic hordes of tougher enemies at earlier points in the level before you can build up enough upgrades to easily handle them, and also deploy level hazards frequently enough to create segments of Bullet Hell. They are balanced around a significantly higher baseline of shop upgrades than normal, with the easiest of them recommending 5x Attack and Speed upgrades.
• Bullet Hell: Taking inspiration from Vampire Survivors, which describes itself as a "reverse bullet hell," it naturally takes elements to resemble said game. But the Hard Mode stages crank this trope up to hell and back. On top of the aggressive hordes of enemies, the game will periodically fire projectiles at you from various angles to keep you moving, and also box you in with temporary invincible enemies while showering you in projectiles.
• The Cameo: A-Chan is attentively working at her computer in the Shop menu. She can also be spotted napping at her desk in the background of the Hololive offices stage. As of update 0.4, she's the final boss of the office stage.
• Cast from Money: The Membership power-up drains your Holocoins every second in exchange for stat buffs.
• Challenge Run:
  • You can enable hardcore mode in the shop, which turns you into a One-Hit-Point Wonder in exchange for a massive score boost in endless mode.
  • From update 0.4 onwards, there are options to make you run harder, like disabling G-rank benefits, collabs, and super items, and limiting the number of weapons and items you can hold in a run. They can be toggled in the same way one would with hardcore mode.
  • Can be enabled with the Halu item, which makes enemies stronger and spawn in bigger numbers but also adds bonus Coins at the end of your run. The Marketing upgrade also makes the game harder by increasing the number of enemies spawned, but you get increased drop opportunities.
  • One of the in-game challenges involves the achievement called "Couch Potato". Literally stand still and do not move for a whole 20 minutes, even if it means getting beamed by Fubuzilla or ground pounded by Smol Ame in Stage Mode 1.
  • 0.6 introduces modifiers to limit how many items you can get, banning collabs and some other things. It also introducing challenge achievements, some of which based on what some hololive girls imposed on themselves.
• Close-Range Combatant:
  • One of Ina's skills, "The Void", slows down enemies within her immediate area to a crawl (also dealing some mild damage to them at max level). A former Ina skill, "Cult", gives her a damage boost depending on the number of enemies surrounding her. The result is a character who is heavily incentivized to run close-range weapons such as Spider Cooking and BL Book, wade fearlessly into the biggest hordes, and start mowing them down.
  • Mio's entire moveset is built around getting up close and personal in the enemy's face. Her main weapon boomerangs back to her, so nearby enemies can be hit twice. Cheerful Laugh increases her damage output based on how close an enemy is to her, and Mama heals her based on the number of enemies around her. Her special provides her damage reduction, which can stack with other items like Body Pillow and Membership to render her very tanky - even moreso if she also takes Piki Piki Piman to spam it to kingdom come.
  • Korone has a rather short-ranged but extremely fast basic attack, and her moveset focuses on giving her damage resistance and boosting her healing so she can get right into the thick of things. She can gain a damage boost by taking damage.
  • Fubuki takes this into a different direction. Instead of a tank, she is an evasion-based hordebreaker, with her key skill Friendzone allowing her to gain a few seconds of guaranteed dodges upon being hit. Kon Kon creates noise explosions when she dodges an attack, and her Awakened weapon has a chance to spawn a flying katana upon hitting anything. This combines into a character who charges screaming straight into the biggest hordes, turning into a living storm of fur, steel and decibels, and leaves none standing while coming out completely unscathed.
  • Matsuri is another take on this, with the twist being that two of her skills revolve around delivering counter-attacks upon being hit. The first is Seiso Representation, which puts her in a "Seiso" state every 12 seconds; if she gets hit while in this state, she becomes "Unseiso", in which she will launch shockwaves that damage foes around her for 5 seconds. The other is GOD, which gives her a chance of responding to taking a hit by unleashing a beam of light from the sky that travels vertically across the screen and heavily damages any foes caught in it.
  • Ayame's "Nakirium" skill encourages this by boosting her Speed based on how many enemies are around her and increasing experience earned from any enemies killed within a certain distance. Her "Lady of Oni" boosts her haste based on enemies killed after attacking them with her main weapon (twin katana).
• Collision Damage:
  • All enemies in the game, including bosses who have extra attacks like Fubuzilla and Smol Ame, damage the player by touching them.
  • This gets turned on its head with Sana and Okayu. Their respective "Become BEEG" and "Mogu Mogu" skills let them run over nearby enemies instead.
  • If you pick up the Breastplate item, you can have a chance of causing collision damage to enemies yourself.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Enemy units can phase through solid walls and objects to attack your character, while you yourself can't do the same. This is especially evident in stage 2, where the fans will literally walk through all of the tables and chairs to home in on your position, and backing yourself up into a corner will just mean that they will be tunneling right through solid desks and cubicles to hit you in there.
• Combat Tentacles: Ina's weapon. She summons a giant tentacle to damage enemies in front of her. Her "Tako Spin" special goes even further by just creating a whirlwind of tentacles to tear up all enemies around her like a buzzsaw.
• Completion Mockery: The achievement for attaining 100% Completion is named "Get Some Help" worth all of one HoloCoin. Its icon is a tuft of grass, and in case the implication wasn't obvious to the player, the achievement's description is "Complete all achievements. Then go outside."
• Content Warnings: Whenever you launch HoloCure, there's a photosensitivity warning about the game having fast-moving images and bright, flashing lights.
• Continuity Cavalcade: The television in the Holo-Office stage features stills of various videos across hololive, particularly the talents' MVs and episodes of Holo No Graffiti.
• Contractual Boss Immunity: Played inconsistently. Minibosses are immune to anything that would kill them outright, such as Calliope's One-Hit KO effects, Mumei's True Horror and Okayu's Mogu Mogu, but otherwise can be stunned, frozen, flipped on their head and otherwise incapacitated like any other enemy. Major bosses, spawning at the 10- and 20-minute marks, have more immunities to avoid The Worf Effect, but some things can still bypass their defenses. For example, Kronii cannot stunlock them with her weapon or her special, but they can still be frozen in time if they walk into her Time Bubble. And bosses who incorporate Bullet Hell patterns will keep firing even while they're frozen in time! As of 0.6, the YAGOOs that spawn 30 minutes into Endless count as minibosses.
• Cooldown Manipulation:
  • Upgrading weapons or investing into the "Haste" skill allows weapons to fire faster.
  • The "Idol Outfit" item reduces the cooldown on special attacks.
  • Bae's "Absolute Chaos" skill works by applying a +1000% boost to Haste, which shortens the cooldown of most^note It has no effect on weapons with a fixed attack interval like Stream of Tears, Dragon Fire, or BL Fujoshi of her weapons to zero for a limited time, resulting in quite a show if you've been upgrading her arsenal.
  • Update 0.4 changed the Piki Piki Piman tea to giving this effect, where taking damage causes the ultimate meter to gain charge, with a very slight cooldown in between each trigger. This perk has since been moved to the Spicy Seafood Udon meal that you can cook at the Holo House.
• Cordon Bleugh Chef: The "Strange Seafood Soup" — made with Sea Turtle, Corn, Radish, Squid, and Garlic — not only looks one step removed from Haachama's Spider Cooking, but increases the rate at which you can encounter Halu during a level-up.
• Critical Hit Class:
  • Amelia Watson's character build takes advantage of critical hits. Her "FPS Master" skill adds a 30% critical hit chance at level 3, which can be boosted further with the Sake item.
  • Bae, being built around a luck theme, heavily focuses on them. One of her skills gives +30% critical hit chance, and another adds the possibility of another layer of critical hits with even greater damage.
  • IRyS becomes one indirectly through her skills. Specifically, she gains a stacking damage buff whenever she's healed, which requires her to heal at least once every five seconds to maintain, and one of her skills gives her a chance to heal when she deals a critical hit. Unfortunately, her base critical hit chance is pretty middling, and her skills don't give it any boosts, meaning you need to hope for some Sake or just some simple boosts to CRT to get the most out of her.
  • Calliope has a 10% base critical hit chance, the highest out of anyone in the roster other than Baelz, and adds 10% more within a specific radius around her when her "The Rapper" skill reaches full power. Also, one of the effects of her special is increasing the damage of all her crits by a whopping 300% for the duration.
  • Suisei also has a 10% base critical hit chance, and while her Axe Swing is not as large as Calliope's Scythe Swing, she makes up for it with guaranteed triple-damage crits once her weapon is fully upgraded. Her passives also synergize with crits — Suicopath raises her universal crit rate as she kills enemies, and Stellar and Block Master add extra effects to her critical hits.
  • Choco's Nurse skill allows any healing effect to become crit heals, triggering a burst that damages enemies around her. Her Demon Whisper skill also allows her to temporarily charm enemies when inflicting critical hits.
  • Reine's skills are built on crits. Attention Please increases her crit rate, Lady of the Peafowl boosts her crit damage as she collects coins, and Wind Magic increases her firing speed and occasionally generates bursts of wind when she crits.
• Critical Status Buff:
  • The Injection Type Asacoco slowly drains your HP until you have only 1 left, basically turning you into a One Hitpoint Wonder should you lack any means of passively healing yourself, but increases your damage by 40% (80% when fully upgraded). The "critical status" part can be subverted by equipping the Body Pillow, since the health drain will actually subtract from your shields first, by equipping and maxing out the Kusogaki Shackles which will outright negate the health drain, or by playing as characters who have strong heals built into their kit, such as Fauna or IRyS, who can basically shrug off the health drain entirely while still benefiting from the damage buff.
  • Ollie's "Undead" skill has something similar as one of its effects as during the main buff period, the more your max HP is reduced, the more of an Attack boost you get during it.
• Crosshair Aware:
  • A red field highlights where Fubuzilla's breath laser will hit before it fires, giving you time to evade it.
  • Mikodanye also projects a cone-shaped area in the player's direction to show where she will be attacking, though unlike Fubuzilla's, this cone will track your movement until just a moment before she starts belching fire.
  • Giant Smol Ame's Ground Pound landing spot is also highlighted by an ominous black shadow. Shubangelion marks the radius of its Ground Punch with a giant red circle as it winds up.
  • Red circles denote where enemies and bosses will drop into the field, and red lines indicate where the stage will fling projectiles across the screen. Both give the player ample warning to find safety. Hard Mode stages use these so frequently that they create Bullet Hell segments.
  • Certain skills that have effects on enemies within a certain distance from the idol, such as Calliope's "The Rapper" and Ina's "The Void", show a circle around them to mark where the skill's effects occur. You can turn them off in the options.
• Cursed with Awesome:
  • The "Halu" item adds a bonus Coin for every few enemies you kill, at the cost of making enemy waves tougher and more numerous. Leveling this item up increments the bonus more frequently but makes enemies even stronger and come in greater numbers. The fourth upgrade of this item questions the player's decision of continuing to invest in it, and the final upgrade description simply reads "Don't do it." This item can be an overall detriment if your DPS can't keep up, but if you can, you'll line your pockets very quickly.
  • The "Marketing" upgrade in the shop passively increases the number of enemies spawned, much like Halu but without toughening the enemies or adding bonus coins. It's normally a downside, but each enemy will still yield experience and offer an opportunity for dropped Coins or Anvils. If your build is adept at mowing down mobs you can easily profit off this.
• Damage-Increasing Debuff: Gura's Bite Marks increase damage dealt to any enemy inflicted with them. Other weapons or Stamps can inflict a general defense debuff to their targets.
• Dash Attack: A commonly-seen attack that was introduced with the normal version of Holo Offices, where certain enemies would make an immediate and rapid beeline towards the player once spawned. Hard mode stages tend to feature increasingly-elaborate patterns of this attack, usually in tandem with other area denial enemies and/or bosses.
• Death from Above:
  • The Psycho Axe and the Elite Lava Bucket combine into the MiComet, a monstrous weapon that rains giant meteors from above that deal damage and leave behind molten zones. The X-Potato and Elite Lava Bucket make MiKorone, which rains multiple, smaller asteroids on the enemy, igniting them and leaving behind smaller molten zones.
  • The Cutting Board and the HoloBomb yield the Flattening Board, which causes giant cutting boards to rain out of the sky, dealing massive amounts of damage to or even outright flattening everything caught under them.
  • IRyS' special, Hope Is Descending, rains down explosive death from above.
  • Suisei can drop giant Tetris blocks onto her enemies with either her special ability or the Blocks Master passive.
  • Shion's KusogaKick causes her to leap up into the air before dive-kicking the enemy.
  • On the enemy side, Smol Ame can do this to you with her Ground Pound attack.
  • Stage 2 features numerous enemies who will drop onto the map from above. They are telegraphed with large red circles to indicate the damage area.
  • As part of her boss encounter, A-chan also crashes into the stage like this, with her landing doing a lot of damage in a very wide area should you fail to evacuate it.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: A few weapons cause this, like Spider Cooking and Elite Lava Buckets.
  • For characters, it's Gura's specialty, with her Power of Atlantis skill causing this effect, and the Bite Mark mechanic from her Shark Bite skill encouraging it.
  • IRyS as well, as the Awakened version of her Nephilim Blast deals far smaller individual hits, in exchange for dealing far more of those hits to enemies it goes through.
  • Kronii's only innate attack buff increases her attack by a maximum of 50%, which is pathetic compared to most other characters, who (unless they're heavily healing-focused, like Fauna or IRyS, or crit-focused, like Baelz) tend to cap put at +80% or +100% (let alone Mumei's monstrous +350%). However, between "Perfection" and "Kroniicopter", she can reach up to +60% innate haste increase as well, while only Korone and AZKi get haste boosts at all without relying on the fairly rare chance of getting one from the upgrade menu. In addition, her primary weapon also gets speed increases twice instead of once. This means that all of her weapons are constantly firing at ludicrous speeds. The only girl who can truly surpass Kronii's attack speed is Baelz, and she needs her special to do so. (Korone's main weapon can be faster than Kronii's, but the rest of her arsenal overall cannot reach the same speed, as her native Haste increases cap out at only 30%.)
  • Korone operates on this. While her kit doesn't boost her attack high, her weapon is fast, and she can increase her haste with yubis. This allows her to have DPS on par with high Attack characters.
• Dem Bones: The Deadbeats are depicted as walking skeletons dressed in the garb of their fandom.
• Denial of Diagonal Attack:
  • The Fan Beam weapon can only fire on the horizontal plane.
  • Prior to the 0.5 update, this also applied to Amelia's pistol and IRyS's Nephilim Blast. As of said update, however, both characters can aim their weapons in any direction like everyone else.
• Department of Redundancy Department: Super Items, rare and powerful variants of normal items, affix "Super" onto the name of the original. So naturally, this results in "Super Chatto Time!" becoming... "Super Super Chatto Time!"
• Developer's Foresight:
  • The Stolen Piggy Bank is named as such based on the incident of Risu taking Moona's piggybank, so when you're playing as its rightful owner, the item will be renamed to "Retrieved Piggy Bank".
  • Talking to certain NPCs while playing as characters associated with them (Bloop with Gura, Nemu with Fauna) will result in unique dialogue directly addressing them.
  • There are three takodachis hiding behind the HoloHouse who are looking at presumably a naughty magazine. They ignore everyone who approaches them, unless you're Ina, which will cause them to hilariously scatter.
• Die, Chair, Die!: That poor vending machine in stage 2.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • Prior to the June 29 update, Calliope Mori could be a little difficult to get the hang of compared to other melee-oriented characters, because her attack had a sizable dead zone in close quarters that only got bigger when upgraded, though with plenty of close-range weapons to alleviate her issues at close range, she could still achieve a massive damage output over a wide range by combining "The Rapper" and "Workaholic" and shred bosses and hordes alike with "The Reaper". Following the June 29 update, her Scythe Swing was changed to have less of a dead zone while covering even more area, her "Death" skill was changed to have a more reliable effect that adds even more area of effect damage to her arsenal, and its One-Hit KO effect was made an inherent effect of Scythe Swing once it's Awakened, reducing the 'Difficult' part of her character considerably.
  • Baelz Hakos's attack deals unreliable damage, sometimes failing to kill even the lowliest of shrimps. One of her abilities has her sacrifice attack power in exchange for critical hit chance, and her special also scales in power with the number of different weapons she has, making it weak when she has only her unupgraded basic attack. In the later stages of the game, however, Bae dishes out super crits left and right and unleashes Bullet Hell levels of devastation with her special.
  • Combining a moderately-upgraded Halu power up with Membership can be a good way of capitalizing on the latter's ATK buff and damage reduction. The increased enemy spawns provide ample opportunities to proc Halu's on-kill coin generation, which goes into feeding the money drain of Membership and keeping the buffs active, with the only caveat being that the former ideally must not be upgraded past level 2 (3 provided that your weapons are powerful and/or upgraded), since from level 4 and beyond, the increased aggressiveness will offset whatever advantages offered by the latter. Acquiring the Super Chatto Time and Stolen Piggy Bank can potentially help with sustaining the coin economy without causing a potential drop-off.
• Disc-One Nuke:
  • Uber Sheep increases the drop rate of food and guarantees you food at a fixed interval, massively increasing any character's survivability in the early game, where it's a lot more consistent than its competitor healing item (Nurse's Horns) until you start encountering massive hordes and become powerful enough to easily mow them down. Uber Sheep will get you through Stage Mode well enough, but for Endless Mode you need the Horns. A food drop every 15 seconds is obsolete when you need healing every fraction of a second, and even if enough food drops to keep your health topped up... good luck actually finding it on the ground when the whole screen is enemies. The 0.4 Update somewhat eliminates this, as Uber Sheep has been buffed to provide food more quickly while Nurse's Horns has been nerfed to give a flat heal instead of percentage-based.
  • Calli's "Death" skill is absolutely devastating in the early game, allowing her to sweep away entire swathes of enemies with a single Scythe Swing, including ones well outside of its already considerable range. As a round continues, though, you'll accumulate more weapons that the skill doesn't activate with, especially collab weapons, and encounter enemies that you can't easily kill in one Swing, so it becomes comparatively ordinary in strength.
• Dual Boss: At several points, you'll be fighting two minibosses at once, with each boss dropping a Holozon box.
  • On Grassy Plains, large boss versions of the Membershrimp and Deadbeat gangs show up together at the 15:00 mark.
  • On the Holo Office stage, a Soratomo Megablob and a Pioneering Titan will appear together at the 14:00 mark.
  • On Halloween Castle, an Aqua Crew Captain and Shiokko Kilo show up together on the 14:00 mark.
  • All of the Hard stages have double bosses at the 10 minute mark; these bosses are the 10 minute and 20 minute bosses from the stages' regular version.
• Early-Bird Cameo: The Kaiju sized version of Fubuki, Fubuzilla, appeared as a boss before Fubuki herself was added as a playable character. Also the SSRBs, the representation of Botan's fans, appear in the Holo Office level while Botan is not yet in the game. Likewise, this trope also applies to many other members who are represented in the game as weapons and items associated with them prior to their official releases, such as Haachama (Spider Cooking), Kiryu Coco (all AsaCoco items), or Yukihana Lamy and Momosuzu Nene (Wamy Water), to name a few.
• Easter Egg:
  • Amelia can pet Bubba by holding down P when he's nearby. It unlocks an achievement, but otherwise serves no function other than being cute.
  • If you control Moona, the Stolen Piggy Bank is renamed the Retrieved Piggy Bank — it's originally Moona's, after all!
  • Behind the Holo House, you can find a group of takodachi enjoying something saucy. They won't react unless you're controlling Ina, where they will be spooked and flee.
• Eating the Enemy: Okayu's personal skills and special attack revolve around her eating the enemies, while gaining buffs and healing from it.
• Elite Mooks:
  • Around the 14:00 mark, the Membershrimps and the Deadbeats, having been phased out in favor of other mooks, come back as their delinquent counterparts from the "「Q」" music video (which also happens to be made by Kay Yu, the game's developer), and are significantly harder to bring down. They will also rush you nonstop until their respective leaders (who spawn at the 15:00 mark) fall.
  • Periodically, tougher mooks, such as (Delinquent) Deadbeats and Delinquent Shrimps holding shields and Takodachis with viking helmets will rush the area in set patterns- these guys are meant more as Bullet Hell type obstacles or improvised walls to box the player in. They can be defeated normally, but they're a lot tougher, and they will either vanish when they reach a set position or run clear out of the area. If your character can defeat them before they despawn, however (usually this requires using a special), you can gain a hefty bonus to experience, as they do drop gems that are lost if they simply despawn.
• Elite Tweak:
  • Pulling multiple copies of a character increases their G. Rank, which increases their stats.
  • Once you've unlocked the Fandom mechanic, getting your favourite character to a high G. Rank and/or playing her a lot unlocks additional stat boosts and lets her commence a round with some or all of her skills active.
  • As you run out of item upgrades and vacant item slots, the each level-up starts giving you the opportunity to upgrade your character's base stats for the rest of the run.
  • The 0.5 update lets you use an anvil to enchant your weapons (except your default weapon) and gain a random buff. If you fuse two enchanted weapons into a Collab, the Collab will retain the enchantments from both components.
• Empty Levels: Normally, gaining levels does nothing but give you a choice of 4 upgrades to pick from. The Growth upgrade, purchased from the shop after v0.4, averts this by giving your character a small boost in damage for every level they gain in a run. Roboco avoids this as her skills largely scale with her level.
• Endless Game: You can choose to play in an endless mode, which lets you continue playing after the usual stage boss against even tougher enemies. However, 30 minutes in, a swarm of YAGOOS that make previous enemies look harmless and infinitely keep scaling from there come in, mopping the floor with most players instantaneously. Even exceptional builds will fall before the power of YAGOO in a matter of minutes.
• Equipment Upgrade:
  • Collecting XP gems and Holozon Delivery boxes allows the player to upgrade their weapons, items, and skills. Blue Anvils can upgrade one currently held item, while Gold Anvils will appear to create Collab items when the requisite weapons have reached level 7.
  • You can use stamps to enhance your default weapon, buffing its stats or giving it effects like explosions on hit.
• Evolving Title Screen: The title screen in 0.5 onward showcases all of the hololive members featured in a group, with those that have yet to be unlocked depicted in a colored silhouette.
• Excuse Plot: The opening crawl mentions how fans were initially skeptical of the arrival of "vtubers", but grew to love them. Some mysterious evil force has made many fans go crazy, and it's up to the idols themselves to save them.
• Experience Booster: The Study Glasses increases experience gained. At max level, it's a 30% boost. The Super Limited slighly boosts both experience and money gained.
• Feather Flechettes: Mumei's starting weapon, Bird Feather. Reine has a similar weapon as well.
• Final Boss: There is one for each level, and unlike Vampire Survivors, defeating them will end the run on Stage Mode without you dying. In order of release, these bosses are:
  • Stage 1: Smol Ame (Normal) and Halloween Bae (Hard)
  • Stage 2: A-chan (Normal) and Nodoka (Hard)
  • Stage 3: Spiderchama (Normal) and Halloween Smol Ame and her genmates (Hard)
  • Stage 4: All of Area 15 (Normal)
• Fishing Minigame: Near the Holo House is a pond where idols can fish. If you're fishing, you get a rhythm minigame once you get a bite. NPC idols can also fish, though they can drop their haul for you to collect for an achievement. You can even pull up furniture to decorate the Holo House with.
• Forced Transformation: Ina can summon the Ancient Ones to turn enemies into harmless Takodachi. Even actual Takodachi mobs can be pacified by it.
• Fragile Speedster:
  • The Energy Drink item can turn any idol into one, increasing their movement speed while lowering their HP.
  • Kronii, in a sense. Her skills alone give her considerable movement speed and attack haste, but a good portion of that is from the Perfection skill, requiring her to stay at full health to maintain it. Kronii herself isn't necessarily any more fragile than any other character, but her status as a speedster is. Downplayed once she reaches Perfection level 3, which grants her health regeneration over time.
• Full Health Bonus:
  • Kronii's Perfection skill gives her absolutely massive stat bonuses for being at full health, and, at max level, works to keep her at full health.
  • The Researcher's Coat gives 1% EXP every 2 seconds, but if your HP is full it increases (capping at 4% when fully upgraded). If you lose even a sliver of HP, this bonus resets.
• Fusion Dance: You can collab certain max-level weapons, combining them into a single, substantially more powerful weapon.
• Game-Breaking Bug:
  • Prior to it being patched, there was a chance while playing Stage 2 where an anvil could spawn on a table or some sort of inaccessible scenery, making it impossible to retrieve. While this was an annoyance at worst for a regular anvil, a gold anvil spawning in an inaccessible location locks you out of a complete collab for the rest of that run as you cannot have two gold anvils at the same time. The only character who can bypass this on a technical level is Mumei, due to True Horror having a high chance of deleting the stuck anvil when activated and allowing it to respawn elsewhere.
  • In Version 0.5, it is possible as Hakos Baelz and with the right toolset to knock back the enemy so hard, they go flying offscreen. If this is done to a Boss? This will instantly delete them, which also prevents them from dropping any Boxes. This proves problematic in Stage Mode since this doesn't count as a proper KO, preventing you from completing the map properly.
• Gathering Steam:
  • Mumei's "Civilization" passive gives her an attack boost for each enemy on screen, and for every 100 enemies defeated that run. With this, a late game Mumei's attack is boosted considerably.
  • Super Super Chatto Time! boosts attack by 1% for every ten times a HoloCoin pickup is collected.
  • Both glasses
• Generic Doomsday Villain: The Evil Force behind the fans' brainwashing doesn't have any other motive other than just making the fans crazy for their oshis. They don't even have a name either.
• Giant Mook:
  • Most bosses^note Exceptions are Fubuzilla and Smol Ame are just larger versions of ordinary enemies. There are two distinct categories—"minibosses" that are only about twice the size of a normal mook, and proper bosses that are much bigger.
  • Beyond the 23-minute mark in Endless mode, the game will only spawn these giant enemies to attack you instead of their lesser brethren, and unlike their miniboss appearances, defeating these generic large mobs will not produce Holozon boxes.
• Giant Woman: Sana can enter Beeg mode with her special ability. In this state, she's immune to all attacks, while also being physically massive enough to trample over enemies and deal contact damage to them.
• Glass Cannon:
  • The Face Mask and Injection-Type Asacoco items can turn most characters into one, the first by increasing their damage dealt and damage taken, the second by increasing their damage at the cost of a constant health drain.
  • Calliope Mori is a melee-oriented character with average health and no defensive abilities of her own ^note The 'Death' skill originally provided occasional small heals, but that was changed in a later update. Her considerable damage buffs allow her to wreak havoc on the battlefield and casually obliterate enemies that most other characters can struggle with, but she has to be careful to keep enemies off of her while doing so.
• Gone Horribly Right:invoked The infamous "Inalock" (the combination of Ina's "The Ancient One" and the Plushie item to render Ina essentially invincible, see the Game-Breaker section in YMMV for a detailed description). There is currently no way in the game to stop your attacks or turn off your items, nor is there a suicide button, and exiting a stage through the menu aborts it, awarding you no high score nor Holocoins. If Ina has too much HP and lifesteal, the player may become unable to die, stuck in Yagoo purgatory until they quit the game, undoing all their progress. Leading to some surreal threads on the game's dedicated Reddit titled "how do I die" or "how do I end myself".
• Gradual Regeneration:
  • You can upgrade your characters' passive regeneration so that you can slowly recover lost health without needing food.
  • Fauna's Whispers heal 2% HP per stack every other second.
• Herd-Hitting Attack: With a game like this, these types of attacks are already prevalent, but some characters are even more specialized in this area than the rest, such as Calliope and Sana.
• Green Hill Zone: Stage 1 is a green garden. It's perfect level for beginners (and those getting introduced to the Vampire Survivor genre as a whole). Additionally, it's also a perfect way to practice with characters that you aren't familiar with AND the general grounds to clear a lot of necessary achievements. Additionally, it's a good place to practice Hardcore runs.
• Hitbox Dissonance:
  • Despite the implied perspective, the hitboxes of bigger enemies can extend further up than expected, so anyone trying to, for example, loop "behind" Fubuzilla's head will instead take damage by touching her ears. This eventually got patched.
  • Sana's Super Mode has shades of this, as any enemy that touches her sprite takes damage, but she can only collect items and XP at the tiny shadow at her feet.
• Homing Projectile: Mumei's Bird Feather and Fauna's Nature Shield become this once they're Awakened.
• "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight: The whole game is meant to be one big one of these, with the idols defeating the corrupted fans, staff and alternate selves to free them from Mind Control.
• Improbable Weapon User:
  • Weapons you can collect run the gamut from the relatively mundane, like axes or bombs, to the more off-the-wall, like buckets filled with lava, to the utterly insane, such as terrible food, glowsticks, microphones, yaoi books, and dragon tail buttplugs. It Makes Sense in Context of the hololive fandom, though.
  • When it comes to basic attacks, we have Bae throwing giant dice around, while Sana straight-up hurls planets that orbit her. Mumei and Fauna pelt enemies with feathers and leaves respectively. Ina is the standout in Myth by using a giant portal-summoned tentacle while everyone else starts with more conventional weapons.
  • The addition of Gen 0 and Gamers throws Sora (shooting stars), Miko (a gohei), AZKi (singing), Fubuki (her tail, at her request), Mio (tarot cards), and Okayu (onigiri) into the mix.

• Infinity -1 Sword: The "Awakened" variants of each idol's starting weapon are essentially the strongest non-collab weapon you're bound to get on a single run, with several gaining various perks that cannot be found on other weapons (such as Kronii's Clock Hands briefly stunning enemies they hit, and Okayu's onigiri slowing enemies on hit), or gaining brand new properties all together (IRyS's Nephilim Blast becomes a spiraling beam that hits several times, for example). Additionally, the introduction of the Stamp system in 0.5 gives the starting weapons a degree of customization not seen on any other weapon.
  • Collabs. They require max-level components to craft at the golden anvils that only show up when the requirements are met to create the collab. Most players will usually have at least one before the 10 minute mark, depending on the upgrades received from Holozon crates, anvils, and the level-up system. Collab weapons are really powerful and can often wipe out huge swaths of enemies in no time flat, and if sufficiently lucky with drops, one can have up to four of these going on at a time, essentially meaning a screen-wide "Instant Death" Radius for all but the strongest enemies in that mode. They've received a nerf as of 0.6 with Super Collabs being more powerful, therefore reducing collab weapons to this territory.
• Infinity +1 Sword:
  • Super Collabs, introduced in 0.6, are more obscenely powerful versions of the collab weapons. However, not only do they require a particular collab weapon, but they also require a maxed out item and a golden hammer that will only appear when your character is around Level 50 or have 3 collabs in hand. This essentially gives you room to upgrade one more item, as the Super Collab will integrate the item's effects. However, collabs have also faced a slight Nerf to make up for this. They can also be only used once per run.
    • Furthermore, if you make a super collab with a Super Item with a unique effect (which as of Update 0.6, includes the Super variants of Idol Outfit and Sake), despite not being mentioned, it actually retains the unique effect (for instance, the "Idol Live" gets to have Super Idol Outfit's unique "double special" effect).
  • 0.4 introduces special Holozon boxes that contain the very rare^note though at one point it was automatic, which was quickly patched but very powerful Super Items. What makes these items so Super is that they replicate the original max level effect and then add at least one powerful effect and removes any negative drawbacks. The caveat is that you can only obtain them if you haven't already picked the regular item while leveling up first.
    • The Super Idol Dress reduces cooldown by 45% and also allows two uses per a full special bar.
    • The Super Gorilla's Paw gives a bonus 50% attack bonus (as of 0.5).
    • The Super Body Pillow grants a shield that absorbs 40 damage, but also reduces damage by 30% and heals 10 HP every 3 seconds when the shield is full.
    • The Super Study Glasses grants 40% XP gain and doubles the chance for a Rainbow XP to drop and collect all the XP on the field.
    • The Super Energy Drink increases Haste by 30% and Speed by 60%.
    • The Super Super Chatto Time! makes targets drop 100% more coins, and picking up coins heals HP.
    • The Super Knightly Milk increases attack size of weapons by 30%, pickup range by 100%, and increases HP by 20.
    • Super Sake offers a constant 30% crit rate bonus, but in exchange your aim gets a little wobbly.
    • The Super Chicken's Feather gives 5 revives, and each time you revive you gain +20% ATK and +10% SPD for the rest of the run.
    • The Super Nurse's Horns have far stronger healing, healing 5% of your max HP plus 8 if you kill an enemy. You even get to recover 30% HP if struck while under 15%.
    • The Super Credit Card makes anvils appear twice as often, halves the cost of enhancing and enchanting, and guarantees an anvil appearance every minute.
    • The Super Hope soda has the 50% Crit Damage bonus without penality and makes every tenth hit an automatic critical hit.
    • The Super Breastplate has no speed penalty, reduces damage by 30% and has a 75% rate of inflict retailitory damage on the attacking enemy and those close by when attacked.
    • The Super Stolen/Retrived Piggy Bank adds 1 HoloCoin per 24px and boosts Speed by 50%
• "Instant Death" Radius:
  • The Spider Cooking weapon creates a miasma around your idol, damaging any enemies who come near. It can be upgraded to be strong enough to kill off certain enemies like KFP employees, Bae Rats, and early waves of Membershrimps.
  • Ina's skill "The Void" works similarly to Spider Cooking, in addition to slowing down enemies in its range. Considering that Spider Cooking is one of the best non-unique, non-collab weapons in the game, this makes Ina's early game extremely powerful, as she is guaranteed an area of effect weapon very quickly without even diluting her chance of obtaining run-optimizing items like Halu or Study Glasses early.
  • Calliope Mori's "The Rapper" ability gives her significant bonus damage and critical hit chance against enemies near her. While it doesn't do damage on its own, it ensures that whatever weapons you may have picked up that do will absolutely shred any enemy unfortunate enough to approach her.
  • Kaela's "No Pressure" skill is a stronger version of Spider Cooking, as it does heavy damage (if at a lower hit rate) to enemies within its radius.
• Japanese Delinquents:
  • The 0.4 update changed the Brats from Mr. Squeeks mice to bipedal delinquents with gold chains and comically oversized pompadours.
  • The Deadbeat and Membershrimp delinquents from the "Q" music video show up at 14:00 on Stage 1.
• Jack of All Trades: Ame has no conditional buffs or complex mechanics, allowing her to use (almost) any build reasonably effectively.
• Joke Item: Two particular stamps only provide a cosmetic effect for an idol's weapon with no gameplay difference: The RGB Stamp makes attacks look pretty, and Trumpet Stamp makes your weapon sound like a trumpet, the latter of which can be "upgraded" to be louder. The best thing you can do with them is sell them or use them to enhance another stamp.
• Jump Scare: Downplayed: Mumei's special attack "True Horror" uses a screen-filling Nightmare Face to clear the field of enemies (with a 70% chance to destroy on-screen items and Holozon boxes as well). It can be surprising the first time it's activated, as Matsuri, Pekora, and Subaru found out on their playthroughs; however, since it's a special attack, it has to be triggered by the player.
• Kaiju: Fubuzilla shows up at the 10:00 mark on both the regular and Hard versions of Stage 1. It fires out a giant Breath Weapon that deals significant damage.
• Kill Streak: Certain character skills require an enemy to be slain to earn an active buff, with the active timer constantly resetting for as long as enemies are slain before it resets.
• King Mook: Unlike proper bosses, which are unique and have their own special attacks, minibosses are usually just larger versions of existing enemies that hit harder, have more health, and leave Holozon boxes behind when killed. Played quite literally in the case of the King Clock, which is the larger variant of the Kronies. Smaller versions of this enemy will begin spawning after the player has defeated the boss one as well.
• Knockback:
  • Aloe's Headphones allows the chance to avoid damage from enemies while also pushing them away in this fashion. IRyS's Hope skill has a similar effect when fully upgraded.
  • Several weapons add this as an effect at later upgrade levels, such as Spider Cooking, Plug-in Asacoco, and Baelz's Dice.
  • Matsuri's Ebifrion, when Awakened, has a chance of landing a blow with massive knockback and doubled damage.
• Large and in Charge: Deadbeat and Membershrimp delinquents will eventually show up on stage 1, and the gang leaders will show up as a Dual Boss at the 15:00 minute mark.
• Lethal Chef:
  • "Spider Cooking" is a plate of something that radiates a damaging miasma around the player.
  • Mel's "Mel Mel Cooking" drops plates of food that emit damaging pulses.
  • The description of the "Elite Cooking" collab doesn't pull any punches.
    Elite Cooking description: A collaboration of Elite Lava Bucket and Spider Cooking. May have severe unknown side effects if consumed.
• Life Drain:
  • Gura's Shark Bite ability adds Bite Marks onto enemies when they take damage, which gives the chance to restore small increments of Gura's health. Combined with with Power of Atlantis, Gura ends up restoring health very fast.
  • The Nurse's Horns item has a chance to heal your character whenever an enemy is defeated.
  • If Calli gets "Death" to level 3, she regains health whenever an enemy is instakilled by the ability. At least, until the ability was changed in the June 29 update.
  • To offset her Glass Cannon properties, IRyS' Half Angel skill gives her a moderate chance to gain health upon landing Critical Hits, with only a small cooldown in between each heal.
  • Being a vampire, Mei's entire kit focuses on triggering life drain as much as possible: Her bite has it, she spawns bats when it triggers, and eating food gives her extra life drain triggers.
• Limit Break: Each character has a special ability that can be used when the meter is full, and can range from a giant attack to a Super Mode.
• Loot Boxes:
  • Holozon Delivery Boxes are dropped by defeated bosses and give 1-3 items or weapons, heavily favoring upgrading what you already have.
  • Gachas are your means of acquiring new characters. By spending HoloCoins that you earn from playing the game, you have a chance of getting a character or powering up one you already have.
  • 0.6 has crates in levels that may drop experience, money or special recharge items, but you have to explore the level to find them.
• Luck Manipulation Mechanic:
  • Rerolls let you swap out a selection of level-up bonuses for a new set. However there's a chance you'll get similar items. Said chance was reduced in 0.6
  • Eliminations remove one item from the pool for the rest of that run.
• Magikarp Power:
  • Most character-unique weapons start fairly bad but ultimately become quite strong once they become Awakened at max level. While Awakened weapons are more favorable than if the main weapons were neglected, some are clearly better than others.
  • Characters with skills that key off of hits (currently Gura and IRyS) don't work very well in the early game, needing to get a number of decently-leveled weapons before their kit functions the way it's supposed to.
  • As mentioned elsewhere, the effectiveness of Baelz's Special is based on the weapons that she's obtained, meaning that it's fairly weak until she's gathered and upgraded a variety of them for her Special to attack with. In addition, her RatNG ability initially requires her to take a hit to her damage in order to gain crit chance for her other main skill; however, upgrading the skill reduces, then eventually removes that penalty.
  • Mumei at the start isn't strong but in late game, with her main weapon and passives maxed out, she has monstrous attack power that she can easily hit enemies with.
  • Roboco's passives generally scale off of levels, so while she might be only alright in Stage Mode, Endless Mode and its high leveling potential allows her to have sizable attack and crit rate boosts.
  • Bae has one of the worst default weapons in the game, and even when Awakened, it's mediocre at best. This puts her at an immediate disadvantage, particularly on Hard levels, as she lacks a decent weapon to quickly take on enemies and has to start building her damage-dealing capabilities in other ways. However, her special is fantastic, and her skills, when leveled, are some of the most powerful in the game and can let her dish out unholy amounts of damage if supplemented with the right weapons and items.
• Making a Splash: Update 0.4 introduced the Wamy Water as a new weapon, which manifests as shotgun blast-like splashes of... "water".^note For those not in the know, it's basically Yukihana Lamy's bottled armpit sweat
• Mercy Invincibility:
  • Immediately after leveling up and picking your upgrade, the characters gain brief invulnerability for less than a second, potentially to save you from unfair deaths.
  • The "Plushie" used to grant a brief bonus of this, but at the cost of causing your attack damage to decrease for a while whenever it triggers. Thankfully, the debuff didn’t stack. This was changed in 0.5.
• Metal Slime: Every once in a while, a Golden YAGOO will appear on the map, darting around randomly faster than most enemies. Hitting him will cause him to drop large amounts of coins, and you also get an item if you defeat him. You can sometimes instead see a Silver YAGOO, who also drops Coins whenever he's hit, but yields a Stamp instead of items if you defeat him.
• Min-Maxing: This is part of what renders Roboco and Sora so powerful on Endless in 0.4. Most characters need a healthy mix of stats to survive the YAGOO swarm - speed to avoid them, health to survive their blows, attack and haste to destroy them. But having to balance all these stats, in addition to managing weapons, items, collabs, etc. means that most characters wind up as Masters Of None. Roboco and Sora are unique in that they can handle Yagoos while standing in place (the former by stunlocking them with batteries, the latter by outhealing their damage with Idol Wings). This allows them to safely turn speed into a Dump Stat and focus on other areas. Sora takes this to a whole other level since, unlike Roboco, she doesn't even need to kill the Yagoos. As a result of this, some Sora endless runs run few to no collabs at all in order to reduce the amount of levels wasted on weapon level ups while maximizing the amount of stat ups.
• Modular Difficulty: Under the 'Difficulty' tab in the shop, there's a variety of free purchases to modify the game and challenge the player. There's the option to limit the amount of weapons the character can carry, like with Vampire Survivors, but there's also the ability to do the same for the item slots. Other modifiers include the prevention of Collabs (combining maxed weapons to make stronger weapons) or Super items (randomly obtain incredibly rare variants of items that are much stronger), and Hardcore (setting the player character's health to one HP).
• Money Multiplier: Super Chatto Time! increases the number of HoloCoins gained from coin pickups, up to 100% when maxed. The super version increases HoloCoins gained by 150% instead.
• Money Sink:
  • The Gacha system is where you'd go to spend coins when not upgrading your characters in the Shop. It costs 1000 coins per try, and outside of Myth, whose members are unlocked by default, you will need to feed it a lot of money to get the rest, and then some to increase all of their G-ranks. Update 0.4 also added costumes for many idols, which have to be obtained through the same method, though the Gambler's Tears can reduce the overall amount of coins needed to summon a specific character or getting a certain outfit, with the caveat of each gacha banner having its own Tears pool.
  • Holohouse allows you to decorate your house however you want, but the furnishings are sold at relatively high prices to help encourage players to continue the grind. The lower left corner of the map will lead to the Usada Casino in a future update.
• Money Spider: The Golden and Silver YAGOO enemies drop coins when attacked. When defeated, the Golden YAGOO explodes into a shower of coins and a Holozon box; the Silver YAGOO instead just drops a Stamp.
• More Dakka: Amelia and Baelz can do this with their special abilities, with the former gaining a 50% fire rate buff to her pistol for 15 seconds, while the latter can unleash all of her current weapons with no cooldown in between each attack, potentially resulting in a Macross Missile Massacre. 0.6 adds Risu who can fill the screen with nut projectiles
• Mutually Exclusive Power-Ups: As you can only get each weapon once during a run, certain collabs will be mutually exclusive. For example, you can't have BL Fujoshi and Frozen Sea at the same time because they both require BL Book. You can also only take one super collab per run, even if you have the components for another one.
• Mythology Gag:
  • A great number of weapons and items are nods to Hololive events and characters. Here's a compilation video for the references for the weapons, items, and the collabs, if some of the references aren't inherently obvious.
  • Many of the full-body depictions of the holomembers are recreations of their official 3D renders. HoloCouncil being the exception, due to them not having 3D models at the time, so instead they're based on the art of them from their group song "Rise."
  • At the 14 minute mark for stage one, the character will be flanked by Dead Beats and Shrimps wearing trenchcoats while wielding bats and axes, based on the music video for Q that the developer Kay Yu had previously contributed to.
  • In the 0.4 update, one of the items added is Sana’s size limiter, a nod to her final stream where she gave up the limiter as a farewell gift to the Earth.
  • The Bone Bros. Collab weapon is combined from the Cutting Board (representing Gura) and EN's Curse (coined by Calli). The description references Kay Yu's previous contributions to Hololive, Calli & Gura's the "Q" music video.
    Bone Bros. Don't bite the hand that feeds you if it's holding a knife.
  • Hoshiyomi do not have physical form, so Kay Yu used Cometomos to represent them. Cometomos being the name of Suisei's fans prior to her joining Hololive.
  • The "Stolen Piggy Bank" item references an incident where Risu stole Moona's piggy bank and counted the contents on stream, only to panic when Moona (who was also streaming) found out and went to retrieve it. Because of this, if you are playing as Moona, the item is instead called the "Retrieved Piggy Bank".
• Necessary Drawback: Super Collabs are extremely powerful, but you can only have one per run, as the Golden Hammer only drops once.
• Never Smile at a Crocodile: Amelia's Teamates are represented in their investigator forms in the 0.4 update.
• Next Sunday A.D.: The game is set in the year "20XX".
• Nintendo Hard: The Halu power up makes enemy waves a lot more difficult in addition to granting bonus Coins at the end of the run for every enemy defeated so far. The item description warns the player more and more with each level.
  Halu level 4: Are you sure about this?
  Halu level 5: Don't do it.
• Non-Lethal K.O.:
  • Despite chucking bombs, shooting guns, and swinging weapons at the fans, the most you do is knock them back into their senses. The kill counter even shows swirling stars to reinforce it. Particularly egregious in Calliope's case, as one of her abilities is literally named "Death" and may deal a One-Hit KO, and yet it still doesn't kill anyone. Naturally spoofed in this fanart - probably shouldn't have expected the Grim Reaper who proudly sings about how much she loves killing people in her debut song to stick with nonlethal takedowns...
  • Taken to an especially absurd extreme with Okayu, who has a skill that allows her to eat enemies, but it's still counted as this.
• No Ontological Inertia: Defeating a primed Action Bomb-type enemy will defuse them instantly and harmlessly, regardless of how much time was left on the clock.
• Not Completely Useless: The Reverse stamp makes the character's main weapon fire in the direction opposite of where they're aiming. Certain characters have weapons that make them efficient at kiting enemies behind them, and using the mouse to aim allows players to use powerful aimable collabs like Bone Bros and Dragon Fire to devastating use. In these cases, any enemy in the character's main line of fire will melt like hot butter anyway, and reversing the direction of the starting weapon can provide some much-needed coverage against enemies coming from the opposite direction, which the collab doesn't cover.
• Notice This: Special enemy waves will often be heralded by flashing arrows indicating their direction of approach to allow the player to react to them. Likewise, if an anvil or Holozon box is nearby, a bright white arrow at the edge of the screen will point toward its location.
• No-Sell: The Robosas in Stage 2 Hard that box you in during the Bullet Hell pre-boss segment in the 19:30 minute mark are immune to any form of damage (bar certain specials), meaning that you're stuck there as they shoot at you. The same applies for the Giant Takodachis in Stage 3 Hard.
• One-Hit KO:
  • Calliope has an ability fittingly just called "Death", which has a chance to trigger an explosion of dark energy when an enemy is killed by her scythe or this ability itself, dealing some damage with a chance to One-Hit KO.^note Prior to the June 29 update, it used to simply give her scythe swings a chance to One-Hit KO enemies (and heal her one level 3 was reached).
  • Following the June 29 update, Calliope's Scythe Swing has an inherent chance to instakill once it's Awakened.
  • Amelia also has an ability that gives her weapons a smaller chance to instakill.
  • Ina has the ability to create zones where enemies may be instantly turned into harmless Takodachi (distinguished from the hostile Takodachi by being translucent). They will still pursue her, but harmlessly dissipate on contact, if the ability is maxed out, they will also heal her a little.
• One Hitpoint Wonder: Playing on Hardcore mode turns your characters into this due to them dying in one hit. Ironically enough, this means that items that provide high damage boosts at the cost of lowered survivability (e.g. Face Mask, Injection-Type Asacoco) basically become straight buffs in this mode, due to the necessity of avoiding all damage in the first place.
• Opaque Nerd Glasses: Korone's swirly Nerd Glasses can appear as drops after fulfilling their unlock requirements, providing a scaling increase to XP earned when equipped.
• Orbiting Particle Shield:
  • Sana's weapon is a planet that swirls around her. It gets larger when you upgrade it.
  • The BL Book circles around your character and damages enemies, but can only absorb so many hits before the attack needs to reset. The "BL Fujoshi" collab is a permanent orbiting shield of books and axes.
    BL Fujoshi description: A collaboration of BL Book and Psycho Axe. Endless BL, how shameless!
• Orwellian Retcon:
  • Nurse's Horns was initially called Succubus Horns in the first version, which was changed due to the misconception of Choco's species; she's a demon, but not THAT kind of demon.
  • 0.4 changes some of the fans sprites to the proper fanbase mascots instead of the vtuber's personal mascot, E.G Bubbas to Investigators (though Bubbas still appear with Smol Ame), Mr.Squeaks to Brats, Yatagratsus to Bread dogs and so forth(the older enemy types instead appear in the hard mode version of Stage 1).
• Our Founder: There is a bust of YAGOO on a pedestal that one can occasionally run into in Stage 1 and 2. As of the 0.4 update, multiple busts can spawn, and they can be destroyed for either food or coins. You even get an achievement named after this trope for breaking the bust!
• Piñata Enemy:
  • Regular enemies will continue to spawn after you reach the boss at the 20-minute mark. If you've made it this far, they're probably not much of a threat to you, and they drop golden XP gems. They continue spawning for a few minutes and are your last chance of finalizing your build (and allow characters with skills that rely on killstreaks to keep those going during the boss encounter) before things kick up a notch with the nonstop swarm of giant enemies.
  • Ver. 0.4 introduces the Golden YAGOO and Silver YAGOO enemies that drop coins when hit and leaves a holozon box(gold) and a stamp(silver) upon dying.
• Pinball Projectile:
  • X-Potato and its collab Rap Dog are potato-shaped projectiles (with Cool Shades in the latter case) that bounce wildly around the screen to hit enemies.
  • Ayunda Risu's Nuts also gain this status when fully upgraded, where thrown Nuts will bounce off of the edges of the screen to hit more enemies instead of disappearing.
  • The Curse Ball collab operates similarly to Risu's upgraded Nuts, but the player will need to actively kick it with their character sprite to keep the bounce going.
• Playing with Fire:
  • Kiara's attacks are all based around fire.
    • Her Phoenix Sword turns into a swath of fire once you awaken it.
    • The Trailblazer skill engulfs the ground on fire everywhere she steps. Enemies take damage while stepping over it.
    • Her Phoenix Fire special engulfs the area in fire, damaging and knocking enemies back in the immediate area and creating a circle of fire around Kiara.
  • The Dragon Fire collab shoots out a continuous stream of fire in the direction you're moving.
    Dragon Fire description: A collaboration of Fan Beam and Plug In Type Asacoco. The power of a once LEGENDARY dragon. The OG.
  • Some of Miko's unique skills and associated items are lava-themed, as a reference to her infamous Minecraft Lava Bucket accidents.
• Power at a Price:
  • The Face Mask increases your damage dealt, but also causes you to take more damage.
  • The Gorilla's Paw increases normal attack damage, but reduces critical chance by 20%.
  • The Energy Drink increases your speed while also reducing your max HP by 25%.
  • The Injection Type Asacoco increases your attack by up to 80%, but drains 5% of your HP every second.
  • In a more literal example, the 0.4 update adds the Membership item, which gives you a boost to ATK and damage reduction as long as you have at least 1 holocoin, but continuously drains the holocoins you've gathered during your run at a rate of 3 per second.
  • The 0.5 update introduces the Breastplate, which not only reduces damage you take, but also gives you a chance to hit enemies with a Counter-Attack upon taking a hit. However, it also lowers your speed.
  • As of the 0.5 update, a new item, the Kusogaki Shackle, was added that allows the player to avert the "at a price" part of this trope. At its base level, it reduces any negative effects, and when maxed out at level 3, it negates them entirely.
  • The 0.6 update introduces the Candy Kingdom Sweets, which reduces all of your damage by 25% in exchange for a large haste boost and a chance for every attack to inflict a second hit for 33% damage.
  • Creating Collab weapons frees up a slot in your item bar, but will remove the components from the loot pool for the rest of the run, which can mess with your strategies and render certain other combinations impossible to create (e.g. crafting MiComet will prevent Elite Cooking from being made due to the removal of the Lava Bucket, leaving Spider Cooking unable to be combined with anything else). Additionally, the opening of a free spot in your inventory means that new weapons will start being proposed to you in the level up menu to fill the gap. This sounds like a good thing, but on Endless mode characters will typically want various stat ups over a new weapon in the lategame, and an open inventory slot heavily dilutes the chances of receiving one.
• Power Equals Rarity: Introduced in Update 0.4 are Super versions of certain items, denoted by a gold outline and even more elaborate fanfare upon receiving one from a Holozon box, which provide insanely high buffs at little to no cost (e.g. a Super Gorilla's Paw gives a hefty boost to ATK and critical damage, without the regular version's -20% CRT), and also don't need to be upgraded. The only caveat being that these items are very hard to come across, made even worse by how they can't be found while leveling up.
• Power Glows: With the 0.4 update, activating Gura's special results in Gawr emitting a glowing red aura during the duration.
• Power-Up Food: Comes in several varieties as items, such as the KFP Full Meal, or Noel's Knightly Milk. With the introduction of Update 0.6 and the Holo House, players are also given the ability to craft certain kinds of buff food items via the Cooking system.
• Power Up Letdown:
  • Every Mumei player lives in dread of hearing the characteristic jingle of a Super item... only to see the Super Idol Dress show up.^Why?Super Idol Dress massively reduces the cooldown of specials and allows you to use one twice per cooldown. But Mumei's special is the only one in the game that comes with a downside, as it usually erases all drops on screen, including all XP gems, anvils and foodstuffs, which can really set back your game plan. It can save you from a real pickle once or twice per game, but it's definitely not something you would want to spam. This actually happened to Mumei while playing as herself. She spent several seconds in disgusted silence before dropping it like garbage without uttering a single word. As of 0.5 this also applies to Akai Haato, whose special is tied to her personality swap and as such has barely any cooldown to begin with. As of 0.6, however, the downsides of Mumei's Super have been removed, making it an unconditionally strong Smart Bomb.
  • If you're trying for a deep Endless run, finding a Super Supa Chatto Time can be a bit of a heartbreaker. While it's mildly more useful in combat than its normal counterpart, it isn't really worth running over anything else if Holocoins are not a priority. As of 0.5, instead of healing, it gives a permanent attack boost based on coins collected in an attempt to avert this.
  • An even bigger heartbreak is finding a super item you would have loved to find earlier, but you've already settled for something else and need other items to patch up the remaining holes in your build. For example: Super Energy Drink is normally a must-grab for pretty much any character due to it being universally amazing, but you only have one slot remaining and if you don't fill it with a healing item, you'll just die.
• Power-Up Magnet:
  • The Rainbow XP Gems will act as a vacuum for other XP gems when collected. As of Update 0.4, these special pickups will pull in coins as well, and Sana's Become BEEG skill also does after shrinking back down to normal size, albeit with a much smaller radius.
  • Super Chatto Time! automatically collects any dropped HoloCoins.
• Precision-Guided Boomerang: The Glowstick will circle back towards your character after being thrown if it doesn't reach its hit limit during the initial throw.
• Press X to Die: Petting Bubba as Amelia is extremely cute... it also just so happens to prevent you from doing anything else for a short period of time. A short period of time that is easily long enough for a horde previously kept at bay by your weapons to close in on you and tear you apart, as some unfortunate souls have found out. You're not guaranteed to die, at least not in the early game, but you have a pretty damn good chance.
• Purposely Overpowered:
  • Collab weapons are devastating and can be crucial to clearing late waves or reaching high scores, but you need to level two specific weapons to their maximum and merge them at a Golden Anvil. The combinations are also something you'll have to intuit with meta-knowledge or more likely discover by accident.
  • Super Collabs are the result of fusing a collab weapon with a passive item through the use of a Golden Hammer and a Golden Anvil. Not only will you need to form the collab, but you must also be at least level 50 or have 3 Collabs before the Golden Hammer even drops. Only then will you be able to form the Super Collab, but you can only do this once per run.
  • Super passive items are incredibly souped-up versions of their regular counterparts, and some of them lack the downsides that their original versions carry. The drawback is that they can only be rarely obtained from Holozon Boxes (obtained only by defeating midbosses), and you must not have their regular variant already in your possession.
• Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs:
  • In direct reference to JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Mio Ookami's special summons Hatotaurus to rapidly pummel her enemies, complete with "ゴゴゴゴ" engulfing her sprite.
  • Korone's main weapon, once fully upgraded, becomes a near-constant flurry of punches.
• Red Is Violent: Gura's special ability manifests Gawr for a short time. Gura turns red and gains a temporary increase in speed and strength.
• Reference Overdosed: As a fangame, this game is brimming with references to various events surrounding the talents, including those who are not playable yet. It's also loaded with references to other works.
• Regenerating Shield, Static Health: The Body Pillow item essentially works this way, though it refreshes every 15 seconds rather than gradually.
• Roboteching: Mumei's awakened Bird Feathers automatically home in on enemies, zig-zagging in every which direction regardless of if they hit an enemy or not in mid-flight.
• Shadow of Impending Doom: Smol Ame's Ground Pound casts a shadow that stops moving right before it hits.
• Shout-Out:
  • The Japanese-language version of the description for the BL Fujoshi collab replaces "Endless BL" with "Infinity BL Works" in Gratuitous English.
  • The icon for Miko's "Eroge Hero" skill is low-resolution, but still fairly recognizable as the cover of Sabbat of the Witch (the game she infamously accidentally booted up mid-stream).
  • Mio's Hatotaurus acts as a Stand from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, complete with "ゴゴゴゴ" Written Sound Effects.
  • Calli's, Kiara's and Gura's Special Attack animations reference iconic moments from Myth's Bad Ending.
  • IRyS's item unlock for clearing stage mode is Hope Soda, the same soda from fellow fan-made game Delivering Hope.
  • Shion's Assist Character is a floating garlic, in reference to her hairstyle and color. It also steadily damages enemies in a radius around it, much like the Garlic weapon in Vampire Survivors which this game is inspired by.
  • The achievement for dealing 10,000 damage in one attack is called "Over Nine Thousand?!"
  • The achievement for failing an enhancement roll from level 1 to 2 (10% failure rate) is "Just RNG," and the icon is a dice with Dream's smiley face on all sides.
• Single-Use Shield:
  • Fauna's Whisperer ability grants a Whisper stack every ten seconds. On the next hit, a stack is consumed to block the damage.
  • Kiara's Phoenix Shield skill halves damage and grants brief invulnerability if she hasn't taken damage for 10 seconds.
• Skill Gate Characters:
  • invoked Calliope Mori is perhaps the easiest Myth character to clear the early stages with: her scythe attack is extremely effective at clearing hordes right out of the gate, and she effortlessly handles enemies most characters struggle with. KFP employees, normally Goddamned Bats, fall in swaths to even a glancing blow of her scythe in a chain of Death explosions, and hordes of Armored Takos and Shielded Deadbeats are no match for her when she pops her special. This allows her to snowball into a killing machine quickly. However, she has zero survivability skills, and her damage potential, albeit high, is not quite enough to brute-force tougher hordes, and especially Yagoos. As a result, she doesn't perform very well on Hard stages and tends to die quickly in Endless.
  • Sana is almost brainless to complete easier stages with - just max out her weapon and her (non-Astrology) skills as quickly as you can and mash on X whenever things get slightly hairy. However, her damage potential falls off pretty badly in Endless mode.
• Skill Point Reset: You can refund HoloCoins spent on upgrades without penalty.
• Smart Bomb: Mumei's "True Horror" special is a screen-clearing attack that wipes out all non-boss enemies and gives a haste buff based on enemies killed. Matsuri herself was genuinely horrified upon seeing it for the first time when she played the game.
• Socketed Equipment: Update 0.5 introduces the Stamps system, which can be equipped onto starting weapons to provide certain buffs. Each weapon can accommodate three stamps, but these can be swapped out for new ones if needed.
• Spin Attack: Can be done on most weapons except for the Fan Beam simply by rotating your character sprite around. On a more technical level, certain attacks do this automatically without additional manipulation from the player, such as Anya Melfissa's Blade Form, which basically turns her into a blender on activation and deals constant damage to any enemy within her spin radius, and the Legendary Sausage Collab, which orbits around the player on its own, but does so faster if they're moving at the same time.
• Splash Damage: The Bomb Stamp does Exactly What It Says on the Tin by giving your projectiles a chance to explode on hit and hurting enemies close to the target for a portion of your main weapon's ATK. Its use stands out when you want more procs from your weapon attack (be it ailments or Greed).
• Squashed Flat: The 0.4 update allows elite and boss enemies to be squashed flat and immobilized by certain attacks such as the Flattening Boards or Suisei's Blocks special.
• Sticky Bomb: The "I'm Die, Thank You Forever" collab weapon drops a large pack of dynamites much like how you used to drop the Holo Bomb (one of its two components), but any enemy that runs over it will have the bomb attached to them, and once you defeat said enemy, a truly massive explosion will go off, damaging most enemies in the vicinity.
• Stone Wall: The Breastplate item confers a huge damage reduction that can be further upgraded, as well as a chance to inflict several times the damage of an attack back towards the enemy who hit you, but at a cost of a considerable 20% movement speed penalty.
• Stop Poking Me!: You can interact with fellow Holomems in the Holo House, and they'll initially greet you happily. Interact with them too many times however, and they'll get annoyed, earning you an achievement.
• Super Mode: Some Holomems' specials put them in a powered-up state which increases their abilities for a limited time:
  • Gura's special deals some damage to enemies in the area, but also gives her improved damage and speed for a while.
  • Calliope's special simply gives her a massive boost to attack power and critical hit chance, allowing her to tear even boss-level enemies apart in seconds.
  • Sana grows to an enormous size, becoming invincible and dealing Collision Damage to enemies rather than the other way around.
  • Baelz starts firing every weapon she has at an extremely rapid rate, which can overwhelm enemies quickly if she has enough different weapons.
  • Roboco has "high-spec mode" which for 8 seconds gives her a sharp spike in attack, speed, and pick up area, among others.
  • Okayu's "Mogu Mogu Time" enables her to eat any mook while being invincible. Before 0.6, YAGOOS could be eaten)
  • Haato plays with this somewhat. Normally, her special is more akin to a Stance System than this trope, letting her switch between herself and Haachama, who both have different normal attacks and different effects for their skills, complete with the shortest cooldown by a landslide. However, her Coexistence passive has the function of upgrading her special when it is fully built up (done simply by waiting, just like a special). This upgraded special gives you the benefits of playing as Haato and Haachama simultaneously.
  • Moona's "Moon Goddess" ups her Speed and Attack by 100% and changes her attack to massive slashes with double the normal weapon's damage.
• Suspicious Video-Game Generosity:
  • The hard mode levels give the player enough EXP for a free level up immediately upon spawning in. You're definitely going to need the headstart.
  • Stage 3 Hard takes this further and also gives you a Holozon Box at the very top part of the stage. The game's really telling you this one's definitely a ride compared to the two previous stages.
• Tail Slap: Fubuki's basic attack is smacking opponents with her tail◊. This was added at her request.
• Time-Limit Boss:
  • If your DPS is so low you fail to defeat Giant Smol Ame by the time her Bubbas stop spawning, you'll have to deal with her and an onslaught of giant enemies that gradually ramps up, at which point you'll probably get overwhelmed if you don't finish her off quickly. This applies to other 20-minute bosses as well.
  • The big SSRB in stage 2 is also a literal Time-Limit Boss, with a detonation timer of 30 seconds after spawning that can only be negated by defeating it before it blows up in a screen-wide blast that does serious (if not fatal) damage. It beeps loudly to announce its arrival.
  • The Atomic Oruyanke from Stage 2 Hard Mode is a more extreme version of the SSRB, appearing at the 8 minute mark and having a shorter detonation timer of only 15 seconds before it explodes. If you happen to survive the explosion, it starts counting down again.
• Time Master:
  • Amelia's special ability is "Slow Time", which slows all enemies to a crawl while speeding up her own shots.
  • Kronii's "Rule of Time" special causes damage over time with each second to every enemy on the screen, and increases damage with each second. Essentially forcing enemies to go through Rapid Aging. She can also freeze enemies in an area in time, as well as bend time around herself to make herself speedier.
• Time Stands Still: One of Kronii's specials creates a bubble of stopped time where enemies are incapacitated for a couple of seconds, unable to move or even inflict Collision Damage. The Awakened form of her basic attack also stuns enemies for a fraction of a second in the same way.
• Threatening Shark: Gura's special ability "Shark Call" summons a giant shark to take a bite out the enemies around her.
• Trap Master:
  • Gura's "Power of Atlantis" skill creates whirlpools that drag enemies inside it, leaving them trapped while taking damage for the duration. Combined with her Shark Bite skill and the range of her trident, she can easily pick off trapped enemies.
  • Kiara's "Trailblazer" skill leaves burning patches in her wake that damage and slow enemies that walk over them. Her special concludes by leaving a similar Ring of Fire around her.
  • Any idol can use the Elite Lava Bucket, which leave pools of lava to damage enemies, or either of the weapons that it can form via collab: Elite Cooking, which leaves clouds of miasma in the idol's wake, or MiComet, which randomly drop from the sky to form even larger pools of lava upon landing.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change:
  • Emphasis on Unexpected. A-Chan is the final boss of Stage 2, and she turns the arena into a Bullet Hell. Every 20-minute boss of subsequent stages do the same.
  • When you reach 19:30 of the Hard Mode levels, all enemies briefly stop spawning, and the game starts firing level hazards at you with enough frequency that the warning markers can cover the whole screen.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable: In the game's "Endless" mode, the difficulty starts rapidly ramping up after Smol Ame's appearance at 20 minutes, culminating in the game rapidly spawning a massive and endless horde of Yagoos should the player make it all the way to 30 minutes. The Yagoos move faster and hit harder than any other enemy in the game and they spawn in numbers so large that it is impossible to evade them; the result is that most players will die within a few seconds of them appearing, making them effectively an "end" to the Endless mode and a way to force-kill players with a build too powerful to be brought down by earlier waves. In earlier versions of the game, the right combination of abilities and item upgrades can effectively make your character immortal and outlast the Yagoo horde... but in exchange you have no way to end your run and reap the rewards. Some items and abilities were changed in subsequent updates to make this situation more difficult.
• Unique Enemy: While stage bosses and mid-bosses are unique, minibosses tend to be just oversized versions of regular fans... with a few exceptions.
  • Yatagarasu appears only once in the regular stages, as the boss of the wave of Sanallites on Stage 1 Hard, but can be spawned as a randomly generated mini boss during the Time Trial stage as well. It serves as a callback to the earliest version of the game, where Sanallites used to be represented by Yatagarasu, further updates turned them into bread dogs, with Yatagarasu getting promoted to miniboss status as befits its size.
  • Discounting its Giant Mook status, the Golden Apple Sapling that also serves as one of Stage 1 Hard's minibosses is identical to a normal Sapling in all aspects but one: its striking golden coloration. It is the only one of its kind in the game.
  • Stage 3 has an unusual amount of these. Obake-chan, the miniboss associated with Mel, differs from the regular Kapumins by her pristine white coloration. Chocolat is also visually distinct from regular Choco Mates. The Ascended Nakirigumi has a different color from its regular counterparts. Ayame's Poyoyo, the last miniboss of the stage, has no normal-sized fan counterpart at all.
• Variable Mix: Using Kobo's special attack to flood the screen with water also literally drowns out the stage music.
• Violation of Common Sense: The Super items are incredibly powerful, have few downsides, and really rare, but you do have the option of discarding them. There are a few corner cases where the Super item offers no benefit, and the game offers an achievement if you do discard it.
• Weird Currency: Any unneeded fish can be sold for sand, which can be used to buy better rods. Sand can also be exchanged for Holocoins.
• White Magician Girl:
  • Almost all of Fauna's toolkit is focused around healing and avoiding damage, including her special, which creates a giant tree that renders her invulnerable and heals her while she remains in its area of effect. Even her only unique offensive skill (other than her basic attack) triggers when she heals.
  • Two of IRyS's skills heal her, and the other gives her an attack bonus for being healed.
• Why Am I Ticking?: The "I'm Die, Thank You Forever" bomb will attach itself to an unlucky fan that happens to grab one. However, it will explode when a fan is defeated, which will cause a massive explosion.
• Wolfpack Boss: The 0.6 update features these for the 20 minute mark bosses for the added stages. Defeating each subsequent one will still yield Holozon boxes as if you've defeated a regular miniboss (until you defeat the last one on a regular stage run). Stage 4 features giant deformed versions of Moona, Risu, and Iofi, making you fight three bosses at once. Stage 3 Hard features giant versions of HoloEN Myth Chibis featured in Myth or Treat, making you fight FIVE bosses at once.
• Zerg Rush: Every now and then, during a level, the game will send a small horde of easily dispatched enemies rushing across the stage from one direction.

---