Video Game / Live A Live

Eight stories. Eight heroes. One grand adventure.

"Legend Is Alive"

— The remake Tagline

Live A Live (stylized as LIVE A ƎVI⅃) is an Anthology Role-Playing Game by Squaresoft, originally released on the Super Famicom in 1994. It was the directorial debut of Takashi Tokita, who would later go on to direct other Square classics such as Chrono Trigger and Parasite Eve, as well as the first Square title where Yoko Shimomura served as the composer.

The game features seven storylines set in multiple time periods, with each taking place in their own settings and genres. While the individual chapters are seemingly standalone at first, they eventually tie together. The storylines each draw influence from different sources, as wide and varied as '80s anime, spaghetti Westerns, fighting games, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Alien, to name but a few. They are, in chronological order:

• "The First": In a prehistoric era pre-dating spoken language, a young caveman known as Pogo finds himself trying to save a young woman from being sacrificed.
• "The Successor": In Imperial China, the dying shifu of the Earthen Heart school searches for a successor to carry on his teachings, taking under his wing a bandit, a thief, and a cutpurse.
• "The Infiltrator": In the twilight of Edo Japan, a novice ninja named Oboromaru is tasked with infiltrating a castle fortress to rescue a political prisoner.
• "The Wanderer": In the Wild West, the Sundown Kid, a wandering gunslinger with a price on his head, is roped into saving a village under siege from bandits.
• "The Strongest": In the present day, a professional street fighter named Masaru Takahara takes on the fighting masters of the world to test his mettle.
• "The Outsider": Akira, an orphaned youth in the near future, develops psychic powers which he must master to save the world from a dangerous conspiracy.
• "The Mechanical Heart": In the distant future, a robot called "Cube" must help the crew of a starship in deep space survive a perilous journey back to Earth.

Completing all the above chapters unlocks the final eighth chapter:

• "The Lord of Dark"": In the Middle Ages, a brave knight named Oersted is tasked with rescuing a princess from an evil lord.

After that, the player decides which path to take...

Live A Live deviates from the usual Squaresoft fare when it comes to the battle system. While combat is still turn-based like your standard RPG, it takes place on a 7x7 grid with some movement elements you'd expect from a Strategy RPG; characters need to take their position into account when making attacks, Geo Effects can alter parts of the battlefield, and some moves require charging and prevent said characters from moving. Although the battle system stays the same throughout the game, its prevalence varies since each chapter has its own distinct atmosphere, focus, and art style. For example, the Twilight of Edo Japan chapter revolves around a Stealth-Based Mission, the Present Day chapter takes inspiration from Fighting Games and features combat exclusively, the Distant Future chapter has Survival Horror undertones with very little combat, etc.

Live A Live was never officially released outside Japan due to poor sales, and seemed to be trapped there... until 2022, when a remake in the "HD-2D" style of Octopath Traveler and Triangle Strategy was released for the Nintendo Switch on July 22, 2022, which also features voice acting in both languages. Tokita returns as a major creative supervisor with Shimomura supervising the rearrangement of the soundtrack, even personally rearranging several tracks.

Compare Bahamut Lagoon and Treasure of the Rudra, two other RPGs from the same time period by Square that also stayed in Japan. Also compare Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, and Octopath Traveler, three later Square games with a similar storytelling format.

A demo of the remake was released for the Nintendo Switch's eShop, featuring truncated versions of the Imperial China, Twilight of Edo Japan and Distant Future chapters, which you can import your progress from any of them into the full game past the demo's cutoff point.

The remake has been ported to PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Steam on April 27, 2023, with the same demo system in place but with the Imperial China chapter being replaced with the Wild West.

Not to be confused with the Haruhi Suzumiya episode "Live Alive", The Wavering of Haruhi Suzumiya story "Live A Live", Alive A Life, Date A Live, nor is the opposite of Kill la Kill.

Beware of unmarked spoilers! You Have Been Warned.

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Live A Live provides examples of the following tropes:

# to B

• 11th-Hour Superpower:
  • The Imperial China chapter, with the Heavenly Peak's Descent. In the Final chapter, however, once you learn this with the successor, you can use it however many times you want, thus making it an Infinity Plus One Skill.
  • In the remake-exclusive True Final Boss, you eventually get the chance to control all seven heroes against the Sin of Odio. And then Oersted becomes playable once more, to deal the finishing blow.
• 20 Minutes into the Future: Akira's chapter comes after Masaru's "present day" chapter, but not as far into the future as Cube's, looking like an average Japanese suburb if you don't account for the robots and other science-fiction material.
• Abhorrent Admirer:
  • In the original, the Relentless Maid acts as this in the Twilight of Edo Japan chapter towards Oboromaru. She can be killed, but you won't get the reward for sparing women.
  • The Bountiful Heart, the boss of the Final chapter's Dungeon of Technique is a male example towards whoever your player character is. You can scold and kill him for good. This was changed to a Blood Knight characterization in the remake.
• Ability Required to Proceed: In the Earthen Heart dungeon part of the Final Chapter, the Successor has to use a certain one of their skills on the many rocks blocking the doors, some of which need to be learned through levelling-up. However, they only really need one skill learned early on to get their special weapon.
• Absurdly High Level Cap: Level 99 doesn't seem like much, but most Arc Villains can be defeated around level 10 (the Mammoth King, arguably the most difficult boss in the game, can be killed before level 20), and that's when Level Grinding is even a possibility. Level 30 is almost overkill for the True Final Boss. And your final skills are learned at 16.
• Absurdly Short Level: In a game where most chapters take between two to four hours to complete, two of them stand out as much smaller than the norm. Both also don't let their protagonists gain experience (this also applies to Distant Future, but mostly because that chapter doesn't have standard battles).
  • The Western chapter contains a few dialogue scenes and a couple of battles that are nearly impossible to lose to before introducing its gimmick: the chapter boss is a powerful Flunky Boss and how many flunkies are present depends on how well traps can be set before they arrive. The chapter is only as long as the Timed Mission of searching through the town of Success for supplies is, and players can even skip hours if they're feeling daring enough.
  • The Present Day chapter is a Fighting Game homage: there's no overworld, just six boss opponents to defeat in any order followed by the chapter's final boss.
• Acrofatic: Hong, despite being overweight, can run surprisingly fast when dine-dashing. Not so much in gameplay, though.
  • Jackie Laukea in Present Day is a Hawaiian sumo. He moves no slower than the other fighters.
• Action Girl: Lei, who kicks ass as a thief before being taken in by the Shifu, and can potentially be the sole female protagonist.
• Adaptational Alternate Ending: In the Super Famicom original, the ending of the "Ninja" chapter plays out essentially the same whether you killed everybody or just a few people in Ode's castle, with the prisoner, Ryoma Sakamoto and you watching a clear morning sky rise over Japan. In the remake, however, the ending changes depending on how many people you killed (probably as a nod to Undertale, which was in fact largely inspired by the Super Famicom original):
  • If you didn't kill anybody the ending plays exactly how it would in the original, you and the prisoner watch the completely clear morning sky rise over Japan after he hands you his Infinity -1 Sword.
  • If you killed some or even most of the people in the castle, without killing them all, the prisoner doesn't hand you the sword and the sky gets a bit cloudy, the amount of clouds covering the sky depending on how many people you killed.
  • If you killed all 100 people in Ode's castle, the sky suddenly darkens with black clouds covering the morning sun, and a strong thunderstorm starts while the narration simply states the number of lives you've taken. This suggests that the 100 murders you committed will weigh heavy on Oboro's conscience and implies that what you did will have dark consequences for the future of Japan.
• Adaptation Expansion:
  • While small, the Gameplay Tips in the remake add a bit more worldbuilding or character details to certain chapters. An example in Near Future is the tips mentioning Tobei has known Akira for so long because he makes frequent visits to Bright Sparks to fix their furniture. Additionally, the player can now find a Steel Titan toy the Distant Future chapter, something not present in the original game.
  • The remake adds an extra phase to the final boss in the best ending; after the boss rush, Odio's hatred will coalesce into the Sin of Odio in one last gambit to prove his viewpoint, forcing the party to fight it, with all seven heroes and Oersted himself joining in the battle.
• After-Combat Recovery: All characters are healed after battle.
• After the End: The Dominion of Hate final chapter takes place in the ruins of Lucrece, some time after Oersted became Odio and slaughtered every single human in the kingdom, with Palette Swaps of monsters from nearly all of the chapters running wild around the area.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: OD-10, the mother computer running the ship Cogito Ergo Sum in the Distant Future chapter, goes insane after watching the crew frequently bicker and fight against each other, finally deciding that everyone should die for the sake of harmony. Eventually subverted as the ship's AI is actually the demon Odio and the only actual true AI in the game, Cube, is a pretty heroic guy.
• All Cavemen Were Neanderthals: Or at least were primitives with no language.
• All Just a Dream: Subverted with the Near Future chapter, where Akira wakes up at the park like in the beginning, then revealing he's in charge of Matsu's taiyaki stand. It's implied that the playable events of the chapter were his memories of recent events that he was dreaming about.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us:
  • The Imperial China chapter has Shifu return from kicking Sun Tzu Wang's ass again, only to find his dojo wrecked and all three of his students beaten, two of which are dead.
  • The Near Future chapter has the Crusaders set fire to the Bright Sparks Orphanage, prompting Akira to save Kaori and Matsu to step in with Steel Titan.
• All Your Powers Combined: The focus of the Wrestling chapter and Masaru's end quote with his chapter boss, Odie O'Bright.
• Ambiguous Time Period: The game avoids specifying dates at which chapters occur, although the timeframes are much clearer and the Present Day chapter can be surmised as taking place during the 90s. Logs in the Distant Future chapter even go so far as to hide dates with X's (although the "copyright" text in Captain Square minigame makes it clear it takes place no earlier than the 22nd century). Interestingly, the real-world Twilight of Edo Japan and Wild West eras took place within a decade of each other. The credits for the Golden Ending if Oboromaru joins Ryoma shows the former defending the latter from an assassin, implying that their chapter took place before December 10, 1867; the date of the real-life Ryoma Sakamoto's assassination.
• An Aesop:
  • Evil can manifest in any time in any place, and everyone has the potential for it. Even the most diabolical of people can see themselves as the hero for a reason that, if not justifiable, is understandable. But nonetheless, the capacity for goodness will be similarly ever-present.
  • Sometimes, you just don't get what you want. Factors both in and outside of your control can cause you to face grief, even tragedy, even (if not especially) when you feel you are due glory and good fortune. But this isn't unique to you, and it's ultimately your choice whether to let these tragedies influence you negatively or to learn, grow, and pick yourself back up again so you can once again work for and perhaps even attain what your goals are. Lei and Akira spell this one out specifically for Oersted after the True Final Boss fight with Odio, and in both instances Oersted gets the point and agrees.
• Anachronism Stew:
  • The Prehistory chapter has cro-magnons^note even if Pogo and company are neanderthals, which is the the oldest plausible hominid that Beru could be, those didn't appear until 430,000 years ago, australopithecus^note late estimates say they died out 1.4 million years ago, and a dinosaur mixed together with a dash of Flintstones technology.
  • The Imperial China chapter has no idea what era it's supposed to take place in. Two characters are even seen wearing clothes from different time periods.
  • One of the healing items in the Middle Ages chapter, the Alice Biscuit, is meant to be a Shout-Out to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a 1865 novel. The medieval times lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries.
• Anime Hair: Most of the characters keep it down, but Pogo, Oboro, Matsu, and Akira more than make up for them. At least the latter two have an excuse: their chapter is modeled on a Super Robot anime. Also, Oersted, who naturally draws from the wild hairstyles of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest's protagonists.
• Antepiece: In the remake's Twilight of Edo Japan chapter, entering the rafters room above the front gate for the first time shows a short cutscene where a mouse gets spooked, runs over the trapdoor in the middle and falls down it, to show the player what happens. (It kicks you to the start of the castle.)
  • In the Far Future, most of the game is talking to other characters until you can proceed, mixed with some Survival Horror elements where you have to run away from a threat and maybe have to break open doors. The Final Boss is a typical end of chapter boss. Luckily in the first 10 minutes of this chapter you get to play a Game Within a Game called Captain Square where you try to defeat enemy aliens in the exact same way as the rest of the game Live a Live operates.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Any skills that you missed in Masaru's chapter can be obtained by leveling him up in the final chapter, preventing him from being underpowered if you missed a majority of them.
  • The kill counter in the Twilight of Edo Japan chapter only goes up when living humans are killed. There are a number of non-human enemies in the castle (e.g. ghosts) that you can level grind off of so you won't be horribly underpowered for the mandatory bosses in a Pacifist Run.
  • The remake's version of the "Twilight of Edo Japan" chapter has Oboromaru note what the password should be when the bell rings, so anyone aiming for a Pacifist Run doesn't need to keep that in mind as much.
  • Branching from the above, the remake in general adds some quality of life features that make it a bit less tedious to play compared to the original game:
    • A radar now exists and shows the player where they need to go for plot progression via orange diamonds (for rooms/areas) or orange flags (for interactions).
    • Interactable objects will "sparkle", usually denoting items but could also help players find particular objects for moving the story forward (such as an electrical outlet in the "Near Future" chapter).
    • The "Prehistory" chapter contains a room at the start where the player can get a hold of lots of crafting materials by interacting with the caveman in it. In the original, this involved speaking to the caveman to cause another one to come in, and then speaking to that caveman to cause another one to enter the room, and continues until about 20 cavemen are in the room, where speaking to the last caveman who entered will net the player one of each crafting material. The remake streamlines this into a simple, short memory minigame with the original caveman.
    • Both the "Twilight of Edo Japan" and the "Distant Future" chapters add maps to help the player either figure out where they are (in the "Edo Japan" chapter) or how the rooms are connected (in the "Distant Future").
    • Not only do the sparkles on objects makes finding items needed to set the traps in the "Wild West" chapter much easier, one of the layouts of the buildings was changed to make it a little easier to find a hidden room that contained a needed trap. Additionally, while Mad Dog would always tell the player how many times the bell has rung, the game now features a timer that indicate how many rings of the bell are remaining.
    • The stairs leading to the basement of Doc Tobei's lab in the "Near Future" chapter are now combined into one room in the remake instead of a bunch of separate, similar rooms. The same, seamless room layouts can also be found in the "Twilight of Edo Japan" chapter, lowering the amount of loading screens the player has to go through. Also, since cutscenes can be skipped in the remake, dealing with the randomness of Tobei's crafting mechanics is made much more bearable.
    • Midway in the Distant Future chapter, you need to answer a question which involved a very brief throwaway line at the beginning or you'll get a Game Over. Cube has the option to "Review Memory Banks" which eventually has the answer.
• Anti-Grinding:
  • In the Near Future chapter, leveling up Akira will also increase the difficulty of the random encounters on the overworld. If you level up too much at the start, you'll risk getting into a battle that you won't survive.
  • In the final chapter, enemies scale with the level average of the party, and by the end, half of the enemy groups give out 0 Exp while the other half that do give actual EXP are challenging to deal with.
• Anyone Can Die: Like any tale in history, not everyone is guaranteed to make it out alive...to the point all existence could be wiped out in the worst ending.
• Apocalypse How:
  • By the time the heroes get sent to the ruins of Lucrece in the Final Chapter, it's clear that a Class 0 had taken place as every single human has been killed and their souls are stuck in The Trial of Heart. It's implied that Odio had only slaughtered Lucrece at that point given the comments in the remake's True Final Boss that he's drawing all of [his] world's hate towards him.
  • You can pull off a Class Z by choosing the Armageddon option when your health is low in the final chapter with Oersted. The same ending also plays if you die while fighting Purity of Odio. In the remake, this extends to ALL of Odio's forms.
• Apocalyptic Log: If Cube is defeated by OD-10, a final entry that details the doomed fate of the Cogito Ergo Sum will show up.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: Your party can only hold four members, which is best shown in the Final Chapter where you can recruit three the other six protagonists into your party, and removing one due to full capacity has them run back to the spot you first met them at. The remake's Sin of Odio fight throws this out completely when the missing three protagonists who weren't in your party show up to help the incapacitated four, and Oersted helps strike down Odio at the end, bringing the battle party to eight playable characters.
• Arc Villain: Each of the final plot bosses with Megalomania as their boss theme in the scenarios. Played with - All of them except Streibough are incarnations of the Big Bad, Odio/Oersted, spread throughout time and space. Subverted with Odo in the Caveman chapter and Odeo in the Near Future chapter, where they are the Greater-Scope Villain. In the former chapter, the plot is driven by the Kuu Tribe Chief and Zaki, while in the latter chapter, the plot is driven by Odeo's followers.
• Armies Are Evil: The two times in modern times a human army is mentioned, they're never portrayed as good people:
  • In the Near Future chapter, the Japanese Army are at the beck and call of Yamazaki to prevent Steel Titan from stopping the advent of Odeo where many humans are horribly liquefied.
  • In the Distant Future chapter, the human army forcibly had Darthe and their captured Behemoth get a passage on Cogito Ergo Sum, a civilian-class ship, as a guest, and gave Darthe a secret order that in case the Behemoth escapes, its life should be preserved while the crews' deaths are 'acceptable sacrifices'. Even Darthe eventually thinks the rule is bullshit, kills the Behemoth in self-defense and after surviving the events, he quits the army.
• Armor of Invincibility: The Cosmic Armor set in the final chapter provide good, if not the highest defense and immunity to Petrification. There are five pieces, each guarded by a different superboss:
  • To get the Cosmic Helm^note 15 Defense in the original, 10 Defense in the remake, complete the Trial of Wisdom. Return and at the end of the first puzzle room, there will be a robot named Euraokos that will attack you for stealing Cube's weapon. It will drop the Helm.
  • To get the Cosmic Glove^note 15 Defense in the original, 10 Defense in the remake, let all eight bells ring in the Trial of Time to get attacked by the Jaggedy Jacks. If you're able to kill them, you'll get the Glove.
  • To get the Cosmic Mail^note 45 Defense in the original, 30 Defense in the remake, run away from battle 100 times. After the 95th, a countdown will begin for the last five, after which the Death Prophet will attack. Beat it to get the Mail.
  • To get the Cosmic Boots^note 10 Defense in the original, 7 Defense in the remake, meet Odio at the end of the Archon's Roost, but try to leave instead of fighting him. You'll be taken back to the void in the beginning of the chapter, where the Headhunter will attack if you don't reach the stairs in time. Fight and beat it to get the Boots.
  • To get the Cosmic Ring^note 10 Vitality, Evasion Up to Rear, Projectile, Grappling, Thrusting in the original, 8 Physical Defense and Resistance to Light in the remake, Evasion Up/Resistance to Fire, Water, Wind, Earth, & Spirit in both, find a Golden Topknot at either the Trial of Power or the Archon's Roost and take it to the lake in the Trial of Instinct. Lucretius will offer to fight; beating it will give you the Ring and some minor exposition.
• Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy:
  • Ou Di Wan Lee, being a Wuxia story villain, runs a brutal kung-fu school which values power above all, even going as far as murdering all opposition and rivals.
  • Odie O'Bright has such a superiority complex that he kills his defeated opponents.
• The Artifact: In the Distant Future's Captain Square minigame, the Uranus level has a majority of enemies called Pymli, disguised as the Electric Tiles, which their "leader" tends to hide behind and their sole skill is creating several real ones to hide themselves further and replicate. The remake makes this a lot easier due to the graphical overhaul, leaving said enemies using the old pyramid-shaped electric tiles on top of the new ones.
• Artificial Stupidity: The combat mechanics of this game, among other things, requires you to not just use the right move at the right time, but be in the right position to not only avoid attacks, but deal attacks of your own. The AI is quite bad at this, rarely moving enemies out of the way of your potential attacks and/or moving them in position for their own strongest attacks- which becomes painfully obvious when you control the final bosses in Oersted's version of the Final chapter, which not only allows said bosses to take advantage of your quite superior tactics but makes the protagonists victim to the game's Artificial Stupidity.
• Artistic License – Biology:
  • Tarokichi, Kaori's pet turtle, is apparently dying from a necrotic infection. In order to save him, Akira asks Tobei to turn Taro into a liquefied organism. The transitioning of living tissue to a liquefied state would do little to nothing to stop a necrotic infection. It just means that it's still there, either dormant or active.
  • For that matter, being liquefied means that the living subject would no longer have a spirit or consciousness since the brain is destroyed in the process. Unless of course the subject's brain cells are somehow preserved.
• Artistic License – Paleontology:
  • In the remake it's stated the dinosaur whose skeleton lies outside Pogo's village in the Prehistory chapter was slain by the elder when he was younger. Furthermore, the final boss of the chapter is a Tyrannosaurus rex called Odo. However, there are no other dinosaurs in the entire chapter. Odo can also be justified, as it is an avatar of Odio and therefore may not even be natural.
  • Gori's name suggests gorilla heritage. He's fully bipedal, with traits that suggest he's Australopithecus or Paranthropus, but these genera are distant cousins of the gorilla rather than descendants.
• As Long as There Is Evil: Oersted's final words to the heroes can be summed up as this... well, more like As Long As There Is Hatred. And rather than saying that he will come back, he says that anyone could become the next Lord of Dark.
• As Long as There Is One Man: Subverted horribly. Oersted believes that he can continue to fight, even as everyone else in the world turns against him, as long as there's one person who believes in him. She loses faith. He doesn't take it well, to put it mildly.
• The Atoner:
  • Alethea as a spirit in the Dungeon of the Mind gives Akira his best weapon and finally gets the team out of the dungeon, which formerly had no exit. Streibough also, to a lesser extent, but only as far as realizing just how much his jealousy cost Oersted and the world.
  • Matsu, having performed a Heel–Face Turn some indeterminate amount of time after he killed Akira and Kaori's father.
• Attack Its Weak Point:
  • The LH Combat Unit W1 boss in the Near Future chapter has an absurd amount of health, high defense and dodges nearly every attack. One way to defeat it easily is to attack it from behind where its liquefied human container is, then it'll likely perform a self-destructing move as a counterattack.
  • Death Prophet can be defeated easily when you hit him on the tail. When you do, he may unleash an attack called "Not the tail!", which will deal minor damage to the attacker, but deals 999 HP to himself, killing him outright (he only has 960 HP).
• Attract Mode:
  • The original release’s title screen had small snippets of gameplay in a handful of chapters if left running, some of which played in cutouts of the title.
  • In-Universe with the Captain Square game in the Distant Future chapter, which keeps playing the cheery retro theme no matter what is happening. This was presumably a hint to the player throughout the course of the chapter to keep this in mind, as the game console itself is a major factor in taking down OD-10.
• Avengers Assemble: In the Remake, during the battle against Sin of Odio the boss will use an attack to incapacitate your main party, causing the other heroes to jump in as backup. Eventually the main party is freed, allowing you to control all seven heroes. Even better, Oersted eventually frees himself from the clutches of Odio and delivers the final blow.
• Badass Biker: Matsu, riding a huge motorcycle. Akira inherits the trope and the motorcycle after Matsu dies.
• Badass Crew:
  • In the Final chapter, if not played from Oersted/Odio's perspective. You pick one of the protagonists to play as and recruit three more to defeat the Lord of Dark, but getting the best ending requires you to use ALL of the protagonists at one point.
  • Corporal Darthe from the Distant Future chapter gets special mention. He takes out the fake Cube quite handily, kills the Behemoth (a beast so strong that it touching you results in instant death) by himself, and lives. It's safe to say that if the military picked someone a little less badass to escort the Behemoth, Cube would've never made it to Earth.
• Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work:
  • At the end of the Prehistory chapter, the Kuu tribe leader gets eaten by Odo. Given that his fervent sacrificing to the dinosaur created the chapter's conflict in the first place, this heavily benefits all parties once Zaki takes over and buries the hatchet.
  • At one point in the Twilight of Edo Japan chapter, a bunch of guards come after you, only to be attacked by a masked man. You can let the masked man kill the guards for you if you're going for zero kills.
• Bad Moon Rising: The majority of the Twilight of Edo Japan chapter takes place under an eerie full moon glowing neon purple. At the end, the sun rises to a new dawn in Japan's history.
• Bad to the Last Drop: A Running Gag in the Distant Future chapter is that the coffee provided on the Cogito Ergo Sum is too bitter for everyone's tastes aside from Kirk. At the end of the chapter, Corporal Darthe takes a cup and doesn't mind the taste, given everything else that had just happened.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • During the Imperial China chapter, after Shifu saves a couple of waitresses from Sun Tzu Wang's gang, he can speak to them to get items. One pulls him aside to the restaurant where she's obscured, and Shifu's shocked by her showing him "a beautiful peach". Turns out she was giving him a peach bun, which he was praising the craftmanship of.
  • It's implied from his machinations and treachery that Streibough is actually the Lord of Dark of the Middle Ages chapter. It's shortly shown in the ending that Oersted becomes the Lord of Dark.
• Battle Theme Music: Every chapter has its own fight theme - "Kiss of Jealousy" for Pogo, "Clash in China" for the Earthen Heart Shifu, "To Arms!" for Oboromaru, "The Wilds" for Sundown, "Knock You Down!" for Masaru, "Playing with Psychos" for Akira, and "Heroic Struggle" for Oersted. (Cube never gets into a random battle in his chapter, unless you count the Captain Square theme for his chapter's substitute. During the Boss Rush where the boss fights use the normal battle theme instead of "Megalomania", the OD-10 fight plays "Unseen Syndrome".) Chapter bosses all share the same theme, "Megalomania". Which is not the only thing they share. This culminates in the Final Chapter, where the main battle theme is the title theme.
• Beethoven Was an Alien Spy:
  • Ryoma Sakamoto fought robots... and an incarnation of the Lord of Dark!
  • O. Dio from the Wild West chapter claims to be the sole survivor of the 7th Cavalry. In real life, there was indeed one survivor. A horse named Comanche.
• Behind the Black: In the Super Famicom version of the Wild West chapter, Sundown and Mad Dog immediately throw off their duel at the last moment to gun down two Crazy Bunch members in hiding across the road, who would've been in view of the townsfolk watching the duo. This was changed in the remake where it's shown that they were shooting at a hay cart and stack of hay bales, making the Crazy Bunch members hiding more plausible.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: In the Near Future chapter, the army commander Yamazaki, the temple head Unryu, and the professor Livingstill team up to revive the god Odeo.
• Big Bad Slippage: Oersted wanted nothing more than to be a hero and Save the Princess. However, things don't go as expected and quickly get increasingly worse for him instead, pushing him far past his breaking point and resulting in the birth of Odio.
• Big Eater: Hong, and to a lesser extent, Beru. In fact, if you want to recruit Hong during the final chapter, you have to feed him first.
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • The Imperial China chapter. Ou Di Wan Lee has been defeated, the successor of the Earthen Heart style has been named, and the successor is welcomed as a hero in the town, rather than being the bandits they used to be, but the other two students are dead, and the Shifu you've spent most of the chapter playing as dies just after recognizing his last student as his successor.
  • The Near Future chapter ends with the Big Bad Ensemble defeated and their plans ruined, but Lawless died due to his overdose, Kaori's condition is still unclear as she's still bedridden and Watanabe presumably still doesn't know that his father was turned into the now-destroyed LH Combat Unit W1 and won't be coming back as well as 2,000 innocent people were liquefied for Odeo's revival. Meanwhile, Akira takes over Lawless' taiyaki stand which has increased in popularity and inherited his motorcycle, but Steel Titan now lays dormant as Akira is unable to reactivate it at will.
  • The Distant Future chapter. Cube managed to defeat OD-10 and shuts down her higher functions and at the same time Darthe kills the Behemoth, ending its threat. Sadly only three of the characters survive and make it back to Earth (Cube, Darthe, and Kato) while Kirk, Huey, Rachel, and Hor are dead due to OD-10 going haywire. Notably, this chapter is the only one to have the sombre "Cry A Live" theme playing during the credits.
  • The Golden Ending. Odio is defeated and the 7 main protagonists go to live their lives. However, although the curse of the Lord of Dark is lifted over Lucrece, Oersted was still robbed of his future and was the last remaining human in the kingdom following his rampage according to Lucretius, leaving the kingdom to be a Ghost Town.
• Bleak Level: Of the starting seven chapters, the Distant Future one has the darkest tone of them by far. The story quickly descends into a Survival Horror plot, the setting is very uneasy and claustrophobic, the music is completely atmospheric and subdued and the characters are all played very seriously. The Captain Square minigame is likely the only lighthearted thing you'll ever find in the whole scenario. The utterly tragic second half of the Middle Ages chapter arguably makes the Distant Future chapter look outright sunny in comparison.
• Blood from the Mouth: Hasshe starts doing this just before he dies from the plague.
• Body Horror: A significant part of the story in the Near Future chapter is people being turned to liquid, which still maintains some degree of intelligence and consciousness. You can even use Akira’s mind reader powers on the containers.
• Bonus Stage: The entire game of Captain Square in the Distant Future chapter, which mainly serves to provide the grid battles from the other chapters.
• Book Ends:
  • The Prehistory chapter starts with Pogo's rite of passage of hunting small game for food. It ends with him hauling in perhaps the biggest game anyone at the time could dream of, being a giant dinosaur, which they happily feast on. Additionally, the optional sidequest with the monolith featuring Pogo throwing a bone into the air parallels the movie’s famous Match Cut, with the Distant Future chapter taking place on a spaceship which is also run by a faulty AI.
  • The Imperial China chapter begins with the Earthen Heart Shifu practicing his art and then attempting to split a rock. When he fails, he realizes that he's grown too old and must find students. At the chapter's end, the successor practices the art in front of the graves of the Shifu and the other students, turns to the rock, and splits it with one punch.
  • At that start of the chapter, as the Shifu crosses the bamboo forest, Lei will be seen trailing him, implying that Shifu knows she's there. If Lei survives the Indomitable Fist attack, when the Shifu tries to leave her behind to go assault their palace, Lei jumps out in front of him near the end. Since there's no shots of her like before, it's implied this time she did legitimately get the drop on him.
  • At the start of the Wild West chapter, Mad Dog stops the Sundown Kid as he rides across the desert, and challenges him to a duel. The Kid wins, and escapes from Mad Dog by shooting his horse's reins, spooking her into running away from Mad Dog. At the end of the chapter, if Kid spared Mad Dog by running from his duel in Success town, the same scenario plays out, with the same conclusion. Only this time, Mad Dog is riding the horse that was O. Dio.
  • The Near Future chapter begins and ends with Akira waking up on a bench in the park.
  • Near the beginning of the Distant Future chapter, Cube learns to make coffee, but is violently rebuffed when he offers some to Darthe. At the end, Darthe, wounded and exhausted, sits down and quietly asks Cube to bring him some coffee.
  • One of the first things you do in the Middle Ages chapter is defeat Streibough in a friendly duel in a tournament. The final boss of the chapter is a Duel to the Death with Streibough.
  • The music that plays at the title screen serves as the standard battle theme for the final chapter.
• Booze-Based Buff:
  • In the original game's version of the Wild West chapter, most of your healing items consist entirely of various alcoholic drinks. Of course, getting drunk comes with its debuffs.
  • In an attempt to emulate psychic powers to control Steel Titan, Matsu consumes a lethal amount of Matango which leaves him completely drunk.
• Boring, but Practical: Techniques that move, turn, or interrupt the target rarely deal that much damage, but prove indispensable no matter the chapter. All enemy actions, including reorienting themselves, can only be performed when their action meters are full, so repeatedly hitting an enemy with no-charge moves that force them to move back into position will slow their attacks and may even stunlock them if they have no attacks with backwards range. Interruption attacks typically carry these attributes, and most bosses with dangerous charged attacks can be defanged by striking them at the right time with these. The balancing factor is that enemies are also aware of this, and will happily shove the party around or disrupt their charged attacks if given the chance.
• Boss Banter: The bosses tend to be very chatty in the remake, throwing out taunts, threats, and various other comments in response to their current status and the player's actions.
• Boss in Mook Clothing:
  • A monster named Ishtar in the Final chapter gets no special fanfare, but not only does it have much more power than a normal enemy, it has the boss death sequence. The good thing is that it gives boatloads of experience points.
  • If you have been leveling up your party extensively in the Final Chapter, then you will eventually run into an enemy called Darkwall, a Palette Swap of the LH Combat Unit W1 from Akira's chapter. It possesses immensely powerful attacks, including Majin Ryunosuke's "Violence Honed" and Steel Titan's "Metal Strike", that can devastate even high-level parties. While it does possess the same weakness as the enemy it's based off of, its maximum HP of 2032 ensures that it will take more than one (also very damaging) self-destruct attack to bring it down. If you can defeat it, it will give massive experience, though by the time you do meet this enemy you'll more than likely be ready to finish the game.
• Boss-Only Level:
  • The Wild West chapter consists pretty much entirely of buildup and preparation for the chapter's boss, which is the only major fight in the whole chapter. There's a small handful of other battles for story purposes, but they're all against single enemies who go down in a couple hits and are nearly impossible to lose to.
  • The Distant Future chapter literally contains only one fight, against the boss. The rest of it functions more as an adventure game than an RPG, and it’s still one of the shortest chapters. The only traditional battles you can find are from the Captain Square minigame before you fight OD-10 in it.
• Boss Rush:
  • Applies to the Wrestling chapter; the entire chapter consists of seven battles, but they're all against boss-level enemies.
  • If you've fulfilled the requirements for the Golden Ending, Oersted tries for one last-ditch attempt at killing the heroes by having them face his incarnations once more, although they're now much too powerful for the Lord of Dark.
• Bound and Gagged: Happens to Beru during the Caveman chapter.
• Bounty Hunter: Mad Dog, who pursues The Sundown Kid for his bounty.
• Bowdlerise: In the remake, several dirty gags and other questionable details were changed:
  • In the Prehistory chapter:
    • Beru doesn't flash Pogo when given certain equipment while she's hiding in a haystack in Pogo's room, instead she comes out and takes Pogo into the haystack with her, with what they do left to the player's imagination.
    • Zaki's pixellated crotch when throwing his lizard loincloth as an attack and Gori's prominantly exposed butt when using his fart attack are instead covered with a smiley face.
  • In the Twilight of Edo Japan chapter, the statues fought as enemies^note Icon of Flame, Icon of Water, Icon of War originally looked like Buddha statues. The remake completely changes their design to resemble Fujin instead.
  • In the Wild West chapter:
    • The alcohol and cigar healing items were replaced with topical medicine and strips of beef jerky respectively, and consequently they don't inflict negative statuses when used.
    • One secret Joke Item, Annie's nighties, is replaced with her diary (though it can still be equipped as armor). The Easter Egg scene where running straight into her room after stepping into the Crystal Bar for the first time and accidentally catching her in the middle of changing clothes is altered to her just writing in her diary.
  • In the Present Day chapter, The Great Aja's stage, the Mexican flag designs used on the mat in the original version were replaced with a skull instead, through still painted with the muted colors of Mexico's national flag.^note In this particular case, however, this is very justified for legal reasons, as Mexico is notorious for strictily forbidding the use of its national flag for trivial reasons outside official use, and very especially by foreigners, for understandable reasons, compared with the U.S. and other countries. Considering that The Great Aja is a rudo, and a very evil and vulgar one to boot, the last thing Square Enix wanted is to have an international incident on relating the use of the Mexican flag on a villain.
  • In the Near Future chapter:
    • Akira and Watanabe's scheme to steal Taeko's panties is changed to just stealing her pocket money which results in a line of non underwear-related items, starting with Watanabe's pocket lint instead of his own boxers.
    • It's no longer possible to randomly end up in the orphanage's bathroom while Taeko is washing herself when using Teleport to escape from battle.
  • In the Final chapter, the Bountiful Heart has his characterization changed from Depraved Bisexual Abhorrent Admirer to relentless martial artist who takes great thrill in combat and pesters the heroes because he wants to have fun fighting them, presumably because the original joke did not age well at all since LGBTQ+ awareness is a much more sensitive issue in the 2020s.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: The first thing you see at the start of the Near Future chapter (and its trailer) is Akira's eyes staring right at you. He then starts addressing you directly for a short time before the action cuts to his actual story.
  "So, tell me. You happy with your lot in life?"
• Broken Record: In the Distant Future chapter:
  • After a certain point, Captain Hor only repeats, "What, are you serious? That's... quite unfortunate..." Later, it's revealed to be a recording OD-10 made after killing the captain.
  • Once OD-10's intent to kill the whole crew is revealed, it ceases to say anything other than "It would be in your best interests to stop. This ship is my domain, and I its master." It even bleeds into the loading screen tips.
• But Thou Must!:
  • Oboromaru's mission is to rescue the prisoner from Ode Iou's castle. Rescuing him and then bolting to the exit will have him refuse to leave, wanting to meet the man in charge.
  • You can't avoid fighting with Pike in the Western chapter - accepting his glass of milk and drinking it up will just lead to him ordering another until Sundown finally refuses it.
  • Played for Horror in the remake's Distant Future chapter, where at one point your radar will direct you towards a room with leaking acid, then the cargo hold where the Behemoth immediately ambushes you. Both trips serve no purpose story-wise besides being event flags, which implies O.D-10 hacked your radar to try and get you killed.
  • Throwing the initial match against Streibough in the tournament, in both the original and the remake doesn't net you a game over sequence like in the other chapters, it just takes you to the save screen to try again. Beating Streibough is the only way to progress the story.
• Butt-Monkey: Anyone or anything with the name Watanabe is humorously subjected to cruel misfortune in several chapters of the game:
  • Prehistory: 'Watanabe''s^note Due to the lack of spoken dialogue in the Caveman chapter, we never knew what this incarnation of Watanabe is named father fell into a hole and never came back out, he obviously died.
  • Imperial China: Wan Tan gets a stroke of bad luck if you have Hong as your successor.
  • Twilight of Edo Japan: Watanabe the Thief is killed by a Samurai after trying to get a stash of valuables, unless Oboromaru had killed said Samurai prior, so he's instead successful and presumably alive during and after his escape.
  • Wild West: Watt's father is shot dead by the Crazy Bunch Gang.
  • Present Day: Watanabe is an audience member who gets mauled in a special attack...that rarely occurs.
  • Near Future: Played for Drama. Watanabe's father was abducted and turned into a liquified human.
  • Distant Future: Played for Horror. The Watanabe Communication System consists of a main and sub antennae, the former gets critically damaged by an explosion. Kirk then dies attempting to repair the system.
  • Middle Ages: Watt of Nabe is eliminated/killed by Streibough in the semifinals of the tournament, causing his son to run up on stage in tears.
  • Final: The Watanabes are subjected to eternal suffering as petrified statues.

C to G

• Calling Your Attacks:
  • All three disciples with the ultimate Earthen Heart technique in the remake.
    Lei/Yun/Hong: HEAVENLY PEAKS DESCENT!!!
  • Akira (in the voiced remake as well) naturally starts doing a LOT of attack calling once he gets his hands on the Steel Titan. Though he'll sometimes start quoting the mech's Bragging Theme Tune instead, which works just as well.
• Can't Drop the Hero: In the final chapter, you can switch your party members, to include any of the prior chapters' protagonists. You can't, however, remove the character you chose to start the final chapter with.
• Cap: In the remake, the maximum value for any stat before equipment is taken into account is 99, at that point the stat will stop increasing when gaining levels. After equipment the max value is 150, this means any additional boosts beyond that are "wasted" and it's better to swap equipment for something boosts a stat that hasn't reached 150 or provides some other benefit like status immunities.
• Cartoon Meat: All the meat in the Prehistory chapter takes the appearance of manga meat.
• Casting Gag: The Japanese cast for the remake at least takes note of the actors' typecasting for their roles with Takashi Tokita himself having chosen them, but a few of them stand out due to their respective actor's previous roles and their character in the game^note Seeing as Live A Live is known to make Shout-Out to different genres, this can be seen as trying to live up that spirit meta-wise:
  • Masaru is oft-considered someone who kind of looks like Domon Kasshu mixed with Ryu, and Domon's show is basically a Tournament Arc (with Humongous Mecha and a little political intrigue, but it's the tournament that's the heart of the show). Square Enix most likely took the cue and assigned Domon's VA, Tomokazu Seki for him. In turn, one of his opponents is voiced by Yosuke Akimoto, who played Master Asia, Domon's old instructor, in the same series. Another one is voiced by Hōchū Ōtsuka, who is known to play as one of Domon's True Companions, Chibodee Crocket. All of them makes Masaru's furious declaration of challenge against Odie O'Bright a lot more poignant.
  • Akira's chapter utilizes a Humongous Mecha, and he's voiced by Kenji Akabane whose rose to fame in the voice acting business with the Shin Mazinger incarnation of Kouji Kabuto, a re-interpretation of one of the most classic Humongous Mecha anime that no doubt inspired the chapter. His mentor Matsu/Lawless is coincidentally also voiced by Hideo Ishikawa, the current go-to VA of Ryoma Nagare, whose series also defined the genre along with Kouji's.
  • Although the original Kouji voice actor, Hiroya Ishimaru, is also present, since he has considerably aged, he got the Earthen Heart Shifu instead. However, it counts in another way: Ishimaru is best known as the official dub actor for Jackie Chan, one of the martial arts movie legends of Hong Kong who has also considerably aged (but would have been at his prime during the game's SFC release without voice acting), so that becomes the consideration.^note To be fair, it also could be gag over Chan's role as Mr. Han in the The Karate Kid (2010) remake, which Ishimaru also dubbed. This also has an effect of the casting of Hong (whose Japanese name was the same as the fan translation one: Sammo), who is voiced by Yuu Mizushima, being the official dub actor of Sammo Hung (also known as one of Jackie Chan's best friends), the man whom Hong/Sammo is based on.
  • The casting of Akio Ōtsuka as Sundown Kid might not be too eye-catching and perhaps normal typecasting for Ōtsuka ... until you notice that Sundown is one of the few video game characters that can be healed when he consumes smokes. Another well known video game character that Ōtsuka voiced also has this 'healing trait' and general fondness with smoking: Solid/Naked Snake. Likewise, Ōtsuka had previously voiced cowboy or American characters in Wild West-like settting characters before, especially in Japanese dubs of foreign films, mainly Marquis Warren in The Hateful Eight and Sam Chisholm in The Magnificent Seven (2016) remake.
  • Large Ham Villain-Role Grandmaster Norio Wakamoto once again plays a character meant to evoke Oda Nobunaga, something that he has done before and most likely has caught on with the Japanese crowd.
  • Akira Ishida's role as Yoshiyuki Kato in the Distant Future chapter could be an allusion to his role as Wesley Crusher in the Japanese dub of Star Trek: The Next Generation, considering the references about the Star Trek franchise included on it. This is enforced by the fact that "Kato" is the surname used for Hikaru Sulu in the dub of Star Trek: The Original Series. This would also not be the first time Akira Ishida voices a leading character who is known to build small, round, sentient robots. On the same note, the casting of Kazuhiko Inoue as Kirk Wells, the pilot of Cogito Ergo Sum, may also allude that he was also casted as a pilot in a famed sci-fi series who possesses the personality of a bully, Jerid Messa (piloting a Humongous Mecha rather than a ship, though).
  • Toshio Furukawa's role as Mad Dog in the Wild West Chapter who is the rival who wants to kill the main character but decides to create a truce when there is a bigger threat. If the Golden Ending is achieved and Sundown chooses to spare Mad Dog, the two are riding their horses together and seem to have made a friendship, despite their rivalry and past. Piccolo, is that you?
  • Finally, Yūichi Nakamura's role as Oersted is most likely an ironic gag over his role as Captain America, aka Steve Rogers, from the Japanese dubs of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (not to mention Square Enix themselves just had an Avengers-based game in the recent years, though they had different voices there, so they resorted to the more mainstream-based Cap dub voice), since Captain America had very similar traits with Oersted, except that everything that he represents is twisted beyond recognition at the end of his scenario.
  • This even extended to the score with the new arrangement of "Go! Go! Buriki Daioh!" having its vocals by Hironobu Kageyama whose claims to fame not only include Dragon Ball, but also the long-running Super Robot Wars franchise, befitting with the Steel Titan's status as a Humongous Mecha.
• The Cavalry Arrives Late: If you've fulfilled the requirements for the Golden Ending and refuse to kill Oersted, the protagonists who weren't in your party arrive to Odio's statue room right after you had just defeated Purity of Odio, then they get thrust in his final attempt at victory. Subverted in the remake, as the missing three show up again to help when the main four get incapacitated by Sin of Odio.
• Censored for Comedy: In the Present Day chapter, Great Aja calls Masaru a "motherfucker", which gets bleeped out in both text and voiceover as if the fight was being televised. The game otherwise doesn't shy away from uncensored cursing but never goes further than the likes of "piss" and "shit".
• Central Theme: Most chapters have a major theme surrounding the events of the story. They also often serve as critical differences between the main protagonists and the Fallen Hero/Big Bad Oersted, who failed where they succeeded due to either the weakness in his own heart or simply being a Cosmic Plaything.
  • Prehistory: Love. Pogo's central motivation is to rescue Beru, the woman he has fallen in love with; said love brings peace between two warring tribes, and the word "love" even turns out to be the first word spoken by any human. Oersted also fights out of love for his fiancée Alethea, but unlike Beru, Alethea does not reciprocate his feelings and spits on the sacrifices he made to rescue her in the worst way possible, driving him over the edge.
  • Imperial China: Inheritance. The Earthen Heart Shifu seeks to pass along both his kung fu and his life philosophy down to a successor, and although two of his students are murdered, the third does take up his torch in the end. Oersted also has a mentor, Uranus, who tries to pass along his heroic teachings even in the face of adversity, but unlike the Shifu, Uranus' words fall on deaf ears when Oersted's problems and resentment grow too much to bear.
  • Twilight of Edo Japan: Trust and accountability. Oboromaru's mission is to rescue a prisoner who can oppose Ode Iou and prevent his conspiracy of plunging Japan into another age of war, all because the Enma ninja clan believes there's still good in people. Moreover, Oboro himself can go about his mission without any kills, killing everyone, or somewhere in between. Every decision he makes is a conscious one, even going as far as to counting his kills and remembering the names of the people he encountered as his way of owning up to his actions, and he believes he's doing the right thing regardless of his kill count. Oersted also went on a similar quest in recruiting the old hero Hasshe to defeat the Lord of Dark, but said hero has been reduced into an ill, bitter man who would've easily succumbed to evil himself had he not caught the plague. Uranus also put his trust in Oersted, believing there's still good in him and that he'd slay the real Lord of Dark and rescue Alethea, but of course things didn't go as planned considering Streibough's betrayal and manipulation, causing Alethea to declare her love for the latter instead before committing suicide. When Oersted finally snaps, he blames everyone else for putting him in such situation, and killed everyone in the kingdom without much thought, even the little kid who still believed in him whom he encountered earlier during his exile.
  • Wild West: Companionship. The Sundown Kid starts off as The Aloner due to accidentally provoking the wrath of a group of outlaws who killed everyone he cared about, but by the end of his tale relearns how to be with others again and begins longing for friendship again. Oersted, on the other hand, starts out apparently well loved by the citizens of his kingdom, but nearly all of the friendships he makes turn out to be shallow and unreciprocated (Alethea and the villagers abandon him for his perceived failings, Streibough secretly resents him enough to ruin his life) and the few genuine friends he has either end up dead (Hasshe, the king, Uranus) or are unable to reach out to him in time to prevent his downfall (the kid who still believes in him).
  • Present Day: Strength. Masaru and Odie O'Bright both seek physical strength, but while Masaru also places value on moral strength, Odie is just a violent thug interested only in using his strength to harm others who he perceives as beneath him. Oersted starts off like Masaru, having something worthwhile to use his martial strength in service of, but by the time his Trauma Conga Line ends he is left with nothing but his own rage and resentment, causing him to lash out and hurt others the way Odie does.
  • Near Future: Destiny. Akira stubbornly insists that only he is in control of his own destiny, and in the end is able to carve out a happy ending for himself. Oersted, on the other hand, lets his fate be guided by others; he's perfectly happy to serve as a hero when he's loved by the civilians, but once they turn on him, he takes their condemnation of him to heart and becomes the very monster they believed him to be.
  • Distant Future: Humanism. Cube, despite being a robot, is not at all a crapshoot, and tries his best to keep his fellow human companions safe. He is the one that manages to fight off the super computer going haywire, despite the computer's reasoning that Humans Are Bastards. He takes Huey and Corporal Darthe's words to heart, striving to learn and learning never to hurt another human, to the point that Darthe even jokes that Cube is becoming more human himself. Oersted, on the other hand, ends up seeing humans acting ungrateful and bitter, especially when he is personally injured by their words as well as the deaths and betrayals of his companions. He ultimately tars all of humanity with the same brush as those who screwed him over and abandons his own humanity.
  • Middle Ages: Hatred. Streibough has a perfectly good gig as a powerful sorcerer and the best friend of the king-to-be, but he lets his hatred and jealousy of Oersted consume him, leading him to ruin Oersted's life and ultimately resulting in his own death. This in turn leaves Oersted with absolutely nothing to live for other than his own hatred, which has disastrous consequences for the timeline at large.
• Character as Himself: Cube is credited as "Himself" alongside the remake's voice actors during the True Ending staff roll.
• Chekhov's Gag: Reading Aki's mind in the Near Future chapter has him tell Akira to stop reading his mind, indicating that everyone who knows Akira is aware he can do this. Kaori tries to stop Akira from learning that Matsu went to Tsukaba (which fails since Akira knows he was planning to go there), and Matsu uses this as a Deathbed Confession regarding that he was the one who killed Akira's father.
• Chekhov's Gun: In the Distant Future chapter, there's a fun minigame called Captain Square in the Break Room which serves as a stand-in for the otherwise-absent battles from the other chapters. The arcade machine itself is used in the endgame by Cube and Darthe, since OD-10 forgot about it and Darthe patches her through to the game so Cube can fight OD-10 through there.
• Chekhov's Skill: At the end of the Imperial China chapter, the new master of Earthen Heart manages to split the rock on the mountain clean in half, which Shifu was unable to do himself. This becomes a central mechanic in their dungeon in the Final Chapter, where you have break one to enter, then use the right skill to break the rocks blocking doorways inside.
• Cliffhanger: The remake's demo version ends during various climax points. For example, the Distant Future chapter cuts off after Kato and Kirk's space walk goes wrong and Kirk starts to suffocate. Justified because it's a demo, after all.
• Climax Boss: All the fights against the different chapter bosses, and the Lord of Dark in the Middle Ages chapter.
• Clock Punk: Karakuri ningyo are a surprisingly old Japanese craft, as Clockwork Gennai's creations are this and himself appears to be a primitive Cyborg with this level of technology. O-Robo takes the cake though, being a Palette Swap of Oboromaru unless he breaks, which reveals his mechanical parts.
• Cognizant Limbs: Odio employs this in a game where it otherwise doesn't feature in boss fights.
  • First is Odio's face, the Final Boss of the original game. It consists of the Brow of Odio, two Eyes of Odio, and the Maw of Odio. Only the Eyes and the Maw attack, with the Brow being nearly invulnerable and countering with a full-field heal/buff to the other parts if it gets hurt. Once the Eyes and Maw are killed, the Brow shifts into Purity of Odio and fights alone for its second phase.
  • Second is Sin of Odio, the True Final Boss of the remake, consisting of the main body and its two hands. This is the only phase of the battle, and each individual part is much frailer than the parts of Odio's face, but they hit much harder on any party members below them on the grid.
• Color Motif: Every main chapter gets one in the remake. They serve as an accent color on menus and in battle during that specific chapter, as well as help differentiate the songs in the Jukebox. During the final chapter, the color motif of the main hero's chapter returns as the accent color.
  • Prehistory: Green.
  • Imperial China: Yellow-green.
  • Twilight of Edo Japan: Purple.
  • Wild West: Orange.
  • Present Day: Gold.
  • Near Future: Light teal.
  • Distant Future: Silver.
  • Middle Ages: Red.
  • General music and music from the Dominion of Hate (Jukebox): Blue.
• Consolation Backfire: The game has a deconstruction in the form of Oersted. After everyone turns their backs on him because of him accidentally committing regicide, he is convinced (by his remaining friend, who dies soon after) that there's one person that still believes in him: Princess Alethea. As long as he still has her, he can keep fighting. So he sets off to save her, only to find out that the "accident" was actually orchestrated by a jealous friend, and when he kills said former friend, the Princess reveals that she has already lost faith in him and commits suicide in front of him. Oersted in turn snaps. Then in retaliation, he becomes the new Lord of Dark, levels the kingdom, and then declares war on all of reality.
• Conspicuously Light Patch: In the Middle Ages chapter, there's a large rock off the side of the mountain path that's noticeably a darker shade of blue compared to the rest of the area, but you can't interact with it. It's also a similar rock to the one the Earthen Heart successor broke at the end of their chapter, and they break it in the Final Chapter to access their dungeon.
• Cool Ship: The Distant Future chapter takes place entirely on a spaceship called the Cogito Ergo Sum.
• Cosmic Plaything:
  • Any incarnation of Watanabe and his father, with his father always being killed. Usually Played for Laughs.
  • Poor Oersted is on the receiving end of one breaking moment after another. Unfortunately, their chapter involves showing the logical conclusion of being subjected to this.
• Counter-Attack: Certain techniques are designated as "reactions", which cannot be used manually (unless they're also designated as a standard attack) but will instead trigger automatically if their owner get hurt while the opponent falls within its range. Masaru in particular is a counter-based character: by the end of his chapter, he'll have so many reaction moves that anything not attacking from a significant distance away will receive immediate payback, helped by him being very capable of taking hits.
• Covers Always Lie: Moreso an art piece lies. An art piece by Square Enix's official Twitter is captioned that it depicts a rendition of some of the game's heroes. However, the illustration actually contains side characters, opponents and villains rather than any of the seven protagonists. The illustration lists Ou Di Wan Lee, the main antagonist of the Imperial China chapter, as a hero. Seishi Moribe is an opponent Masaru fights but never joins the party and is simply an opponent Masaru fights in an organized show battle. While the rest are actually heroes, Kato is more of a Non-Action Guy Non-Player Character unlike the rest who are playable which include Matsu, Gori, Mad Dog, The Prisoner, and Streibough who hardly qualifies as a hero and is the Greater-Scope Villain who indirectly sets off Odio's rampage across time and space.
• Crapsaccharine World: The city in which the Near Future chapter takes place. A lush park with a food stall, an Orphanage of Love, marvelous inventions and such... but there's a biker gang kidnapping people, a bar full of drunk punks, and a trio of conspirators planning to summon a false god.
• Credits Gag: Completing the Captain Square minigame in the Distant Future chapter has a credits sequence like the other chapters, except it's comprised of fictional names that range from being akin to online handles to ones that sound robotic and alienlike.
• Crucified Hero Shot: Oersted as the core of Sin of Odio during the remake's Golden Ending.
• Crutch Character:
  • Gori in the Prehistory chapter is a mild example. When Pogo is at level 1 with no equipment to his name, Gori is a big help by being tanky and powerful even unarmed. However, his inability to equip much of anything means that he'll fall behind Pogo around the second half of the chapter once he's fully equipped and learned most of his varied moveset, but Gori can still prove effective support by spreading poison tiles and using the multi-hitting Chest Pound on anything that doesn't resist it.
  • The Earthen Heart Shifu. He starts at Level 10 and can beat up street thugs and forest tigers quite easily. However, as noted in the beginning of his story, he's getting weak and past his prime; he can't level up no matter how many battles you have him fight, and because of his Glass Cannon stats he's prone to being knocked out easily as he fights through the Indomitable Fist Fortress.
  • Hasshe and Uranus from the Middle Ages chapter. They are ungodly powerful when they join Oersted and Streibough, but only gain miniscule accuracy and evasion boosts when they level up (Uranus at least learns a couple more powerful spells) and are only around for the first half of the chapter.
  • Oboromaru and Pogo can (and probably will) be leveled up very high in order to defeat their respective superbosses, making them ridiculously overpowered during the first half of the final chapter until everyone else catches up.
  • Matsu from the Near Future Chapter becomes this for the first fight, saving the currently under-leveled Akira from a group of gang members who would have smeared him all over the landscape without Matsu's level 10 ass-kicking skills. When he joins your party for good later you've leveled up too much for him to be considered a crutch, but he's still quite useful.
• Cyberpunk: The Near Future chapter is still a moderately average setting on the surface, but robots are extremely prevalant mainly as weapons, but the local professor Tobei provides benevolent tech such as Taro's new body, a work-in-progress teleporter and his crown jewel; the Steel Titan. There's also the whole liquefied humans tech as well, which can be used to save lives or harm them.
• Dance Party Ending: Downplayed example in the Prehistory chapter. The second half of its credits show the NPC cavemen from both tribes happily dancing together around Zaki, the chief of Pogo's tribe, and what appears to be Odo's remains, but the rest of the main party are noticeably absent.
• Dangerous Forbidden Technique: The Heavenly Peaks Descent from the Imperial China chapter. You can only use it once in the final battle of the chapter. It stops being dangerous and forbidden in the final chapter, though, where it can be used at any time once it's learned. Justified, considering that it's only dangerous to the Shifu because he was too old to use it — his successor has no such problems.
• Dangerous Terrain:
  • In battle, there are different types of damaging panels: poison, water, fire, and electricity. These panels also affect enemies, and some enemies can recover on said panels. Oboro is capable of creating fire- and water-based panels, and Cube can create electric-based panels. Gori from the Caveman chapter can create poison-based spaces.
  • The bosses love elemental spaces. Most notably, Ode Iou's true One-Winged Angel form has an attack that creates an enormous area of poison-based panels. OD-10 also has Reformat Sector, which creates electric-based panels in a 3x3 placement (which can actually kill it).
  • Taken to extremes in the Captain Square minigame, the only part of the game where you can quickly die from elemental squares alone. The Fire Elemental enemy on the Earth level tanks everything but the Water tiles generated by the Water Elemental enemies alongside it.
• Dark Reprise: The remake manages to do this with the already-dark Odio's theme; the credits sequence of the Middle Ages chapter plays a version with a more cinematic quality, signifying just how high the stakes are as it becomes clearer and clearer that Oersted is the one responsible for the events of the first seven chapters.
• Death by Irony: Earthen Heart Shifu takes Yun under his wing and tries to teach him to believe in himself and harness his inner courage. Should Yun die fighting the Indomitable Fist, Shifu laments that Yun perished because he took these same lessons to heart. By contrast, Yun survives if he's the favored disciple because he panics and hides himself away.
• Decapitated Army: This is termed "overpowering enemies" in-game. Some enemy groups appear with a particular type of enemy as the leader(s). Should the leader(s) go down, the rest of the enemies disappear from the battle screen and the player-controled characters win. The remake for the Switch has the leader(s) in question tagged with a flag to help the player with the identification process.
• Decon-Recon Switch: The Middle Ages chapter serves as a Deconstruction of a lot of RPG tropes, especially Apathetic Citizens, Standard Hero Reward, and As Long as There Is One Man. Then the final chapter becomes available, and the player is allowed to choose whether or not humanity is worth fighting for, after all. If you choose anyone except Oersted/Odio for the Final Chapter, that's when the Reconstruction comes in, as the seven heroes of the previous chapters (who have never even met each other before) team up to defeat the God of Hatred.
• Despair Event Horizon:
  • Oersted hit this pretty hard. After being tricked, he finds that everyone has now abandoned him and considers him a demon, his only remaining ally is dragged away to be tortured, and he is blamed for the death of said ally, who expends the last of his power to set Oersted free. Oh, then he finds out that his best friend betrayed him to this fate because he was jealous. Oh, and the 'Aesop' which has been so far in the game? "Don't lose hope as long as somebody believes in you". That went well. The last person who he hoped believed in him, the princess? After Oersted duels his traitorous friend and kills him, she asks why he didn't come to rescue her (Ouch. He did. Streibough only got there first by faking his death and ruining Oersted's life), declares that she loves said traitor, and kills herself. That was the absolute last straw, the severing of his last tenuous tie to sanity. The result? Lord of Dark Odio is (re)born and is bent on destroying humanity.
  • Alethea crosses it when she realizes that Streibough, who reached to her first and gaslighted her into loving him and not Oersted through manipulation along with betrayal, is dead. Which leads to her being Driven to Suicide.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • Every character has a unique thing to say to Oersted in the final chapter if they're the player character.
  • Taroimo and Cube, both being robots, can equip the same extra parts which provide new combat abilities. However, most of these can only be obtained in the Near Future chapter for Taro. There is an unintuitive method of transferring them to the final chapter for Cube to use: Have Akira equip the parts when you finish his chapter. This does not benefit him in any way, but equipped items are carried over to the final chapter. The remake also mixes inventory contents when a protagonist enters the party, but you still need to remove them from Taroimo first or carry duplicates.
  • In the Near Future chapter at the Tsukuba Research Facility, a scripted battle against four Crusader members occurs and tells Akira that unlike at the start of the chapter, there will be no Lawless to bail him out of this fight. However, their dialogue will change if Akira detours to a restroom where a businessman will try to attack him, Lawless will knock the man out and join the party early.
  • In the Final chapter, what your character calls the item required to recruit Cube (if he is not your main character) varies logically depending on their original time period: Pogo has no idea what to make of it, showing up in his inventory as "????"; the Earthen Heart successor, Oboro, and the Sundown Kid simply call it an "iron box"; Masaru calls it an "odd part." Only Akira, being from a near-futuristic society, correctly identifies it as a battery.
  • A minor one: All of the characters have a unique sound clip they make when selected on the scenario screen, and it gets reused both when they level up and for the final ending screen that features your chosen protagonist's portrait - for example, Pogo's select sounds are monkey noises, Sundown's is a gunshot, etc. The Imperial China chapter utilizes a high-pitched Wa-chow! for these sounds in the original release. This sound will remain if you had either Yun or Hong as the one to succeed the Mountain Shifu, but if you picked Lei, said sound is changed to a unique feminine-sounding battle cry instead. The remake instead assigns unique voice clips pertaining to the characters.
  • In the Distant Future chapter, if you play the Captain Square game as soon as you're introduced to it and before you try to give Darthe coffee to advance the plot, Kirk comments on your progress, and actually reacts if you manage to beat it in one sitting, which is difficult since in order to save your progress on this minigame, you need the Memory Card which you obtain after Kirk's death.
  • Two interesting bits of foresight in the Middle Ages chapter in the remake; normally, after Oersted is framed for killing the King and cast out of Lucrece, it's expected the player will wander aimlessly around most of the world map before eventually resigning themselves to the fact there's nothing Oersted can do; he'll need to go back to Lucrece and turn himself in. However, if you go to Archon's Roost, enemies are leveled appropriately for the next major story beat, which takes place in the area. A daring player may choose to trek all the way through the longest dungeon in the game to try the doors that should be stuck leading to where Hasshe died, and find the doors...actually open now. You still can't complete the dungeon and end the chapter early, but it makes sense that Streibough isn't sealing the doors anymore. Furthermore, once you leave Archon's Roost, Oersted is immediately arrested and brought to the Lucrece dungeons; even if his intentions were to try once again to save Princess Alethea, the soldiers don't know that, and are operating under the belief Oersted is the Lord of Dark...and they just watched the man leave what is functionally the Lord of Dark's house, validating their beliefs.
  • Recruiting Akira in the final chapter involves him reading the main character's mind to figure out their name. Normally this isn't voiced in the remake since the game uses a Hello, [Insert Name Here] system, but if you're playing as the current Earthen Heart Master (all of whom have set names but go by the same title in the final chapter), Akira saying the name will be voiced. Similarly, the Bountiful Heart in the Trial of Skill also has full voiced lines for this.
  • In the Distant Future chapter, Kato asks Cube at one point to get a code from Decimus to enter the Captain’s room. After getting said code and giving it to Kato, he’s shocked to discover it doesn’t work. This scene changes if Cube attempted to use the code beforehand which also yields the same failed result, so they tell Kato about their discovery. Kato confirms it doesn't work just as Cube said.
  • Normally in the Dominion of Hate, Pogo needs to be fought before being recruited. However, if the chosen main protagonist is Lei Kugo, he instead gets attached to her and refuses to fight. The remake also has her react in bewilderment with a voiced line.
  • The remake's Sin of Odio fight has two scripted attacks which covers your current party in black ooze and renders them out of action. Checking the Party Status screen shows they are afflicted with a unique status effect. It also expands to include the other three heroes not in your party once they show up, and accounts for Oersted.
  • In the Middle Ages chapter, going to Lucrece Castle after recruiting Uranus but not going to Hasshe yet will have new reactions from the townsfolk and guards to the heroic priest's return, along with voiced lines from the King and the minister. The same thing happens if Hasshe joins your party, causing new reactions to appear.
• Disguised Horror Story: And perhaps the Ur-Example of this trope for video games at that. A fair bunch of the chapters masquerade themselves as something innocent and not too far-off from the genre they represent, only to suddenly pull the rug out from under the player and reveal themselves as something way worse.
  • The Imperial China chapter takes place in a typical Wuxia setting where an old master recruits several youngsters to inherit his fighting style. What the game doesn't tell you however, is that after you drive off a local gang, a rival sect will be out to kill all but one of your pupils, and the other two had to die.
  • The Present Day chapter, on the surface seems like a light-hearted Punch-Out!!-like campaign where Masaru spars with martial artists all over the world. You go through the entire scenario without encountering a single dark element... until you defeat all six of them and the BGM becomes the foreboding Demon King Odio theme, and the portraits of the martial artists fade to grey. Then Odie O'Bright shows up and gleefully brags about having killed all of them.
  • The Near Future chapter starts off as a somewhat hilarious playable concept of a mecha anime series starring a Stock Shōnen Hero with psychic powers who can help a local biker run a taiyaki stand and both beat up thugs for fun, and the resident Absent-Minded Professor takes care of said mecha while coming up with several chaotic ideas. Then you get to the Tsukaba Facility and the plot's tone drops off of a cliff when Akira discovers the liquefied humans who were part of the kidnapped 2,000 civilians mentioned earlier, and the conspirators are running an Assimilation Plot to summon the evil god Odeo. Even if the good guys win in the end, Akira's best friend and father figure is now dead alongside 2,000 people who won't be going back to their families.
  • The Middle Ages chapter seems like a trademark Square Enix "hero and mage save the princess" scenario. In actuality, it's a brutal self-Genre Deconstruction of Square Enix's trademark RPG setting, twisting something out of a typical middle-age fantasy into a horrible tragedy.
• Do Not Spoil This Ending: Up until the November 18th 2022 patch, the remake prevented use of the Switch's Capture function during extremely plot-critical events, mainly everything related to Odio's origin such as the final arc of Middle Ages where Streibough reveals his true intentions, the final battles against Odio in the Final Chapter, and the entirety of Oersted's Final Chapter.
• Do Well, But Not Perfect:
  • Both the 0-kill and 100-kill paths through the Twilight of Edo Japan chapter require making a few sub-optimal decisions to complete them. Getting zero kills requires Oboromaru to avoid all of the steps to free the Prisoner, as making it to the top of Castle Ode without him allows him to interrupt what would otherwise be an eight-man fight. Getting every kill requires that certain people be kept alive long enough, such as every woman (an NPC required for 100 kills only shows up if Oboromaru reaches the end of the chapter without killing any women beforehand).
  • A perfect execution of the setup portion of the Wild West chapter leaves O. Dio without any minions to support him in the final battle. However, an optimal execution leaves him with exactly one, as the Frying Pan trap that normally takes out a single outlaw can instead be equipped, and a defense boost for a Glass Cannon like Sundown is worth having to deal with a lone grunt enemy. You can also save the Dynamite and/or all of the Bottled Fire that Mad Dog makes, losing more impactful traps in exchange for a few strong battle items to toss at O. Dio or in the remake, save for the Final Chapter.
• Door to Before: Many trials in the Final Chapter spawn a portal leading outside when you reach the end.
• Double Meaning: In the Playstation 5/Steam trailer, the description for the Middle Ages chapter is "A Demon King and a Hero True". This can be easily read in the context of "the villain versus the hero", but this also describes Oersted perfectly in the remake, who becomes said Demon King, but he ultimately prevails as a hero in the end by slaying Sin of Odio.
• Downer Ending:
  • The Middle Ages chapter ends with Oersted losing everything and everyone held dear to him, with the whole of Lucrece branding him a villain after Streibough tricked him into committing regicide, and Alethea commits suicide out of love for Streibough, dismissing all of Oersted's attempts to save her. This leads to the creation of the Lord of Dark Odio.
  • Any of the endings that isn't the best one either ends up with the heroes dead if Oersted/Odio is protagonist, stuck in Lucrece if Oersted isn't spared, or with all of reality wiped from existence.
• Dramatic Irony: In the Final Chapter, the protagonists find each other wandering the ruins of Lucrece. To the player, they're exactly who they need in order to survive. However, every single one of them are complete strangers to each other still shook about what's happening, and most are understandably on the defensive when you encounter them.
• Driven to Suicide: It turns out Alethea fell in love with Streibough when he he reached to her first and hated the fact that, from her perspective thanks to Streibough's manipulation, Oersted never came to save her. When she learns that Oersted has killed Streibough, she snaps and kills herself.
• Drop the Washtub: A washtub comedically falls on Akira's head after one of his failed attempts to control the Steel Titan.
• Duel Boss: In terms of chapter bosses, Ou Di Wan Lee, Odie O'Bright, Odeo, and Streibough. The protagonist doesn't have any party members and the boss doesn't have any minions.
• Dueling Player Characters:
  • In the Imperial China chapter, the Shifu trains his students by beating the crap out of them. Twelve times over.
  • In the Final Chapter, depending on your protagonist you may have to fight Pogo, Lei, Masaru and/or Akira to get them to join you. The Neutral Ending also has Oersted as its Final Boss.
• Dwindling Party:
  • Occurs in the Distant Future chapter as the crew is gradually taken out by OD-10's machinations. In order, Hor chokes to death offscreen while locked in his room, Kirk suffocates when his oxygen supply is cut off in outer space, Huey and Rachel simultaneously get mauled by the Behemoth (Huey dies on the spot while Rachel gets her cryo pod's life support disabled a bit later), Kato passes out after being attacked by the OD-10-controlled Cube prototype, and Darthe is cornered by the Behemoth just as he enables Cube to interface with the Captain Square game. Following the chapter boss, Cube appears to be the only one left, though Darthe is revealed to have killed the Behemoth unscathed and Kato survives his injuries just fine.
  • This happens very rapidly after the first half of the Middle Ages chapter. Hasshe dies from blood loss due to his illness right after the false Lord of Dark is killed, Streibough is seemingly crushed when he fails to escape the Lord of Dark's room (he survives, but is no longer on the side of good), and Uranus makes it a bit longer but passes away when he uses the last of his energy to free Oersted from the dungeon, leaving him completely alone on his way back up Archon's Roost.
• Dying Town: Success Town in the Wild West chapter. It was a very successful town in its heyday when prospectors went for the gold rush, but it's reduced to its quiet state once there was nothing left of value, leaving the Crazy Bunch to bully the townspeople for what little they had left.
• Dysfunction Junction: The Cogito Ergo Sum cargo vessel in the Distant Future chapter is revealed to be one. Its regular crew consists of newly activated worker robot Cube; Kirk, a macho Jerk Jock; his Bitch in Sheep's Clothing girlfriend and communications officer Rachel (who ultimately suffers from Love Makes You Crazy after Kirk's death); her ex-boyfriend, ship's cargo loader and all-around Shrinking Violet Huey, who she disdains and Kirk bullies for being a chicken; a nerdy, nebbish mechanic named Kato (also the Only Sane Man); and a very distant, extremely hands-off Captain Hor who is actually dead and being impersonated by the ship's Mother Computer. Not to mention its passenger, a gruff military officer who hates robots. This is actually a plot point, as all the conflict on the ship leads its Mother Computer OD-10 to decide that the best way to maintain harmony onboard is to kill the entire crew. If the player has Cube access Captain Hor's log at the end of the chapter, he can see that the captain was planning on pretty much dumping the entire crew at the end of the mission and getting a new one that would function better.
• Early-Bird Cameo: See that castle on the title screen? It's Lucrece Castle, a major location in the endgame.
• Earn Your Bad Ending: In the remake, getting all or nearly all 100 human kills in the Twilight of Edo Japan chapter adds some foreboding atmosphere to the ending shots that isn't present in the original game. Like the original game, however, getting every kill is nigh-impossible to do by accident; while Oboromaru will get strong enough to win every fight effortlessly, finding all the targets requires absurd knowledge of the chapter due to the amount of obscure encounters as well as a lot of backtracking, and taking certain actions in the wrong order can lock people out of being fought.
• Earn Your Happy Ending:
  • "The First" ends with Pogo rescuing Beru, killing the evil dinosaur Odo, making peace with the Kuu Tribe, and getting his banishment lifted. The last scene is of him and Beru retreating to his room for some... private lover's time.
  • The Best Ending; Odio is defeated, and Oersted realizes his wrongdoings before dying as himself and being allowed to rest in peace. Each of the characters are returned to their respective times and are shown living happily afterwards.
• Endgame+: If you reload a chapter you've already beaten, the game deposits you right before the chapter boss.
• Enemies with Death: The remake styles the Death Prophet as a malevolent personification of death, come to punish the party for their cowardice.
• Engrish: Present in both the fanmade and official translations; e.g. in the final chapter, the fanmade translation mangles the "Titan Blood" enemy's name into "Titan Brad", while the official translation warps "Barbarian" into "Balbalayan".
• Equipment Spoiler:
  • Completing Oboromaru's chapter with zero kills rewards him with the Prisoner's katana... after the chapter boss, meaning there's nothing left to use it on. Naturally, you get a chance to play as him again later on.
  • Averted in the Dominion of Hate, where you can loot plenty of European-styled swords, including Brion, despite no characters being able to equip them except sometimes in their off-hand (Oboromaru strictly uses Japanese swords). Despite this, Oersted doesn't ever join the party in the Super Famicom original, and in the remake he joins at the end of the True Final Boss fight and can't have his equipment changed.
• "Everybody Laughs" Ending: In the ending of the Caveman chapter, both tribes laugh when Gori runs off with Pogo's tribe's elder.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep":
  • The Shifu, in the Imperial China Chapter; you don't name the Shifu, but rather, his fighting style. He is just referred to as the Shifu.
  • The Sundown Kid as well, for the sheriff of Success Town notes that he doesn't care for his real name.
• Evil Overlooker: Ode Iou in both the promotional art of the original game◊ and the remake◊ for the Infiltrator chapter.
• Evil Overlord: The Middle Ages chapter introduces (and is so named after) The Lord of Dark, a powerful Archon thought killed twenty years prior who's seemingly returned to again reign terror upon the kingdom, with the twist being, he hasn't. Turns out the Lord of Dark isn't actually a singular person, but rather a role anyone can fill should they submit to their worst aspects. Oersted, the chapter hero, tragically demonstrates this by his tale's end, when he declares himself the new Lord of Dark after a brutal Trauma Conga Line leads to him being consumed by a hatred for humanity, becoming the game's overarching Big Bad.
• Evil Speech Of Evil: All sapient/sentient Odio incarnations make one. The most memorable has to be the speech at the end of Oersted's chapter, delivered by Oersted himself.
• Evolving Title Screen: The opening montage of the remake's title screen changes depending on your progress. After completing the Middle Ages chapter, the final shot of Hasshe's grave is replaced with the Middle Ages heroes facing off against the Lord of Dark. Completing the game adds a shot of Oersted within Sin of Odio framed inside the "A" of the title and replaces the end screen overlooking Lucrece Castle with one featuring the seven heroes looking over it as well.
• Exact Words: The Robot Weapons and Robotic Enhancements from the Near Future chapter can be used with Taroimo to increase attack power and gain new moves. The game doesn't specifically say that only Taroimo can use them, rather that a robot can use them, such as Cube in the Dominion of Hate.
• Exposed to the Elements: Pogo and Akira show more skin than most of the protagonists but have no problem venturing a snowy mountain in the final chapter.
• Expy:
  • The Sundown Kid is quite similar-looking to The Man with No Name from the Dollars Trilogy.
  • Oersted is very similar-looking to the Fighter from Final Fantasy, especially with the remakes.
• Extremely Short Timespan: Most of the events in each chapter take place within a single day or three, with the exception of the Imperial China chapter which explicitly takes place over an extended amount of time and a likely exception of the Present Day chapter considering that Masaru has to travel between different countries to face his opponents. The fall of Lucrece begins after a disastrous two to three days. Special mention goes to both Twilight of Edo Japan and Distant Future, which take place over only a few hours.
• Face–Heel Turn: Occurs twice in the Middle Ages chapter. Streibough betrays the party and causes the events that break Oersted. And Oersted himself, after he thinks the last person has stopped believing in him, and deciding to become the dreaded Lord of Dark everyone took him for.
• Fallen Hero: Hasshe in the Middle Ages chapter. He was a hero who defeated the Lord of Dark, but lost faith in humanity and went to live as a hermit in the mountains. He subverts it by helping Oersted defeat the Lord of Dark to prove that he is still brave. Oersted eventually falls much harder.
• Fakeout Escape: If Oboromaru gets arrested and thrown into the castle jail, the assigned guard declares that there’s no escape as long as he’s on watch. To escape, you have to use the Invisibility Cloak to trick him into thinking you’ve vanished, then take him out once he opens the jail cell to investigate.
• Fartillery: Both Pogo and Gori have gaseous attacks which can cause some status effects to boot.
• Farts on Fire: Gori farts next to a fire and it ends up exploding in everyone's face. Pogo and Beru aren't pleased when this happens.
• Fate Worse than Death:
  • In the Near Future chapter, the people being abducted are being turned into liquefied humans to power the Great Inko Buddha statue, or to become robotic super soldiers. Watanabe's father just happened to be one of those unfortunate victims, except he is made into a robot guard instead.
  • Oersted ended up with a horrible fate: He is left in a land where people either think he is a traitor, or think he is a demon, because everyone who believed in him ended up dying. He winds up accepting the label of demon, and becomes the Big Bad.
  • Everyone in the Middle Ages chapter. They are reduced to souls that are forever locked inside the Dungeon of the Mind, neither dead nor alive and unable to do anything except think or speak.
• Feathered Fiend: Odeo from the Near Future chapter is a giant statue that looks like a cross between a Buddha and a parrot. The parrots in his temple cry out his name, and later screech "Begone!" at you.
• The Fellowship Has Ended: At the end, Odio has been defeated and the 7 protagonists part ways as they get sent back to their time periods to live their lives, aware that they'll never see each other again.
• Fetch Quest: You don't have to go through the character dungeons in the final chapter, but if you don't, you'll have a difficult time with Odio and you can't get the best ending.
• Fight Woosh: A spinning triangle-shaped Iris Out.
• Fighting Game: The Present Day chapter, which tries to emulate the traditional fighting game formula with the game's tile-based system by having its protagonist Masaru Takahara fight one-on-one against his opponents.
• First-Person Smartass: In the Near Future chapter, the item descriptions and loading tips specific to this chapter are from Akira, with some quips here and there.
• Five-Man Band: The Twilight of Edo Japan chapter's villain Ode Iou has his own, mostly comprised of spirits and undead.
  • Big Bad: Ode Iou, a warlord aiming to bring Japan back to conflict and imprisons a certain man who can end his plans. He's also the resident Odio incarnation.
  • The Dragon: The spirit of Musashi Miyamoto, who serves as one of the final challenges before the player can take on Ode Iou himself. Can be completely avoided, and his only motivations are to see how powerful Oboro can be.
  • The Brute: The spirit of Shiro Amakusa, who can be encountered if Oboro tries to rescue the prisoner from the castle dungeon. Oboro has to defeat Amakusa's Lost Soul minions before he can take on the ghost himself to defeat him for good.
  • The Evil Genius: Clockwork Gennai, who manufactures all of the traps in Ode Iou's castle, and is also a master of karakuri ningyo, as well as being a primitive cyborg himself.
  • The Dark Chick: The spirit Yodogimi, who pretends to be Ode Iou's daughter, the princess. Interestingly, if the "princess" was killed by Oboro earlier in the chapter or if she was completely ignored, then Yodogimi will actually be the last member of Iou's band Oboro fights before he gets to the Big Bad himself (otherwise it's Musashi).
• Flowery Elizabethan English: In the remake, all the characters in the Middle Ages chapter speak with a Shakespearean eloquency and gravitas befitting its tragic tale.
• Flunky Boss: O. Dio in the Cowboy chapter, which is the center of its main gimmick. The better you are at setting the traps, the less enemies will be able to fight with Dio, and it's possible to get rid of all his men.
• For Doom the Bell Tolls:
  • The arrival of the Crazy Bunch gang in the Wild West chapter marches closer when the bell rings eight times before sunrise. This also happens in Sundown's dungeon in the Final Chapter, where if you don't find the .44 Magnum and escape the dungeon in time, the party will get attacked by the Jaggedy Jacks.
  • To drive the point of the Armageddon ending home, its theme has bell sounds getting progressively louder, and accompanied by wind sounds. Eventually even the bells become quieter and stop playing altogether, leaving nothing but wind sounds, symbolizing how there's nothing left.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Not only is each chapter's end boss named after some variation of the word "Odio", but in the remake, after their defeat, they expel a cloud of dark red energy as they die, suggesting that something is tying each villain together.
  • In the Prehistory chapter, what can be easily seen as just a decoration for the overworld is a giant dinosaur skeleton, foreshadowing the presence of Odo, a giant living dinosaur that instigated most of the chapter's conflict through the Kuu tribe chief. Additionally, the Tips mentions that it was killed some time ago by Pogo's tribe chief, so humans did fight dinosaurs in this timeline.
  • In the Wild West chapter, Billy (a child) refuses to believe Sundown is a criminal like how his "Wanted!" Poster and Mad Dog portray him as. Not only was the bounty on Sundown placed by himself as a Suicide by Cop plan, a similar situation befell Oersted after being tricked into becoming a pariah by his rival, where a single boy was the only person who believed in him to the very end.
  • The Distant Future chapter:
    • Reading Kato's Personal Log mentions his previous attempts at building a robot. In particular, the second attempt mentions that it could be remote-controlled and it's stashed in the Personal Storage hangar. OD-10 uses it to kill Rachel.
    • When Darthe introduces Cube to the Behemoth, he guesses that the military wants to study it for combat purposes and turning it into a weapon, all in a unenthusiastic tone. This hints that he doesn't really care about following his orders to prioritise its survival above everyone else even if it goes on a rampage, and has no qualms about killing it in justified self-defense.
  • The Middle Ages chapter in general is very rich with this one, especially when it comes to its main protagonist, Oersted.
    • The chapter in question lacks a character with a name that sounds like "Odio" like the seven before it, the only one coming close being the player character, Oersted. This is your first hint that Oersted has more to do with Odio than first thought.
    • The fact that the Middle Ages chapter doesn't open up until after you've finished the previous seven hints that Oersted is more significant to the overarching plot regarding the Lord of Dark.
    • Oersted is also the only protagonist who has no key art in the game's promo material in the Super Famicom version, while the remake has. However, in case of the remake, his character model has his back slightly turned towards the camera, and he has no voice lines in the character trailer despite his voice actor being revealed, further hinting that his role in the game's overarching plot is more than it seems.
    • In the remake, each character has a color theme in the menu screen. Oersted's color theme is the same sinister shade of red emitted by each Odio incarnation in the preceding chapters.
    • Both Hasshe and Oersted had their final technique, 'Archon's Mark', labelled as a 'legendary demonic art once used to defeat the Lord of Dark'. Hasshe ends up disillusioned with mankind and could have been consumed fully with it if it wasn't for his sickness. That is also a sign that Oersted will lose himself to evil. To another extent, Streibough's final technique is Black Abyss which is also a Demonic technique only that it works as a counter. That is too a sign of Streibough's own jealousy and hatred of Oersted consuming him to plot against his own friend in the worst possible way.
    • After hearing Hasshe's remark that what they just killed wasn't the true Lord of Dark, Streibough starts poking around the room and becomes fixated on the pedestal at the back. It's revealed later that he discovered it was actually a secret panel where Alethea was locked behind.
    • In the remake, each of the chapters of the seven eras have titles that are themed around their specific protagonist. Only the Middle Ages chapter has the Antagonist Title named after the main villain known as The Lord Of Dark. Further hinting that not only does the main villain have more to do with the plot of the overall game, but also the fate of the hero himself.
    • In the original, each chapter has a small paragraph detailing what the chapter is about, but the Middle Ages chapter lacks one completely, which goads the player into thinking that this is a straightforward story like the previous chapters. It's anything but. The remake does add a paragraph to it, but it noticeably only has one page compared to the others that have two, as it's describing half of the true story.
  • In the remake, each of chapter bosses have a dark aura surrounding them in battle, which dissipates once they are defeated. In the Middle Ages chapter, the battle against the false Lord of Dark lacks this dark aura, which foreshadows that it isn't the Final Boss of that chapter, and is merely a minion of the true Lord of Dark.
  • In the remake, Akira's dungeon ends with the ghost of Alethea pleading the heroes to stop Oersted, as he's been twisted into Odio so much that he's lost his own identity. While this may sound like a standard-fare warning about a Fallen Hero, Oersted does remember his true identity at the end of the Sin of Odio fight and kills Odio himself.
• For Want of a Nail: In the Imperial China chapter, the Shifu was about to teach his pupils self-defense after mainly teaching them how to perform his art and fight, only to receive the news that Sun Tzu Wang is wreaking havoc in town, telling his pupils to stay put while he goes to sort it out, only for his dojo to get destroyed and two of his pupils are killed after he leaves. Had he been able to teach the self-defense lessons, or Sun Tzu Wang decided to not wreak havoc at that time, they likely would've had a much better chance of survival overall.
• Four Is Death: If the party ever reaches its capacity of 4 and this isn't a non-Oersted Final Chapter, expect something bad to happen. The Imperial China chapter has the Shifu find three disciples and can only do 4 training sessions a day, which leads to two of them being murdered. The Middle Ages chapter being a Wham Episode, leads to Hasshe and Uranus dying, Oersted killing Streibough in a Duel to the Death and the suicide of Alethea corrupts Oersted into Odio. While nothing explicitly bad happens to the heroes in the initial Prehistory chapter once Zaki joins the party to fight against Odo, they all die in Oersted's Final Chapter following his rewrite of history.
• The Four Gods: Oboromaru's dungeon in the final chapter has keys named after them in order to progress.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: Once OD-10's homicidal intentions are made clear in the remake, the game's loading screen tips are replaced by messages telling you to give up. A similar thing happens in the Final Chapter, when the tips on the loading screen are replaced with a simple "..." by Odio himself, until you defeat Lucretius and get answers from him, or defeat Odio for the first time.
• Free-Sample Plot Coupon: In the Dominion of Hate, the Earthen Heart Master will start at Hasshe's grave where Brion is, which gives you a headstart in entering the Archon's Roost if you're playing as them and if your master is Lei, Pogo will unconditionally join you.
• Freudian Trio: The Earthen Heart pupils. Hong is The Kirk, Yun is The Spock, and Lei is The McCoy.
• Fun with Acronyms: Read all of Cube's abilities in order and write down the first letter of each. It reads HUMANISM, the main theme for Cube's character. A few early English translations screwed it up. The remake's official localization hides this in the moves' descriptions instead.
• Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • In the remake, the radar shows room entrances and exits as well as orange markers for progressing the story. In the Distant Future chapter however, Kato realises how Cube could use a terminal to battle OD-10 without damaging its hardware, but falls unconscious before telling Cube which terminal he's thinking of, forcing Cube and Darthe to figure it out for themselves. The answer doesn't show up on the radar because of this.
  • In the Prehistory chapter of the remake, Pogo's rite of passage at the beginning has him gather food for his tribe, which is stated in the Gameplay Tips to be divided equally between everyone. Upon returning back to Elder after gathering enough food, all Haunches of Meat get taken away from Pogo to be stored.
  • In a similar vein to what Final Fantasy IV did with Tellah, old and experienced party members with no further potential to awaken have trouble leveling up. The Shifu in particular has reached so close to his peak that he cannot gain experience at all, staying at a fixed level 10 while his students can and will surpass him. Hasshe and Uranus can level up (in fact Uranus has a few extra skills to obtain, that he presumably forgot during his retirement) but they won't be getting any stat increases from it.
  • In the Middle Ages chapter, after Oersted gets charged with regicide and Royal Guard enemies start spawning, attacking them will inflict the Fear status on them since he's been branded as the Lord of Dark at this point and they're fearing for their lives.
  • The Tips in the Final Chapter are all left blank since no one knows anything about the alien environment they're in aside from a (possibly vandalised) map in contrast to the information in the previous chapters which they would have logically learned beforehand or in Akira's case, wrote himself. The missing information gets added once they get answers from Lucretius, who's the only living non-hostile source of information in Lucrece or for some reason after defeating Odio for the first time.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Ou Di Wan Lee's plan on tiring the Shifu before fighting him only happens in-universe. Gameplay mechanics prevents the Shifu from experiencing this as all HP is restored and status effects are removed at the end of each battle.
  • The type of weapons equipped does not affect what attacks can and cannot be used. The Tiger Glove in particular can be equipped by a number of characters^* Earthen Heart Shifu, Yun Jou, Lei Kugo, Hong Hakka, Pogo, Oboromaru, Sundown, Masaru Takahara, Akira Tadokoro and Cube, including bone-wielding Pogo and gunslinging Sundown. Humorously, they still use their respective weapons in battle, even though it is possible to not have them using their weapons if their weapon is the Tiger Glove with none of their weapons equipped as Hand armor. Lei only uses martial arts attacks in her first battle, despite having a billhook equipped when fought.
  • Earthen Heart Shifu takes in Lei, Hong, and Yun to make them all successors of Earthen Heart Kung Fu. However, over the events of the story two of the disciples will die to an ambush by the Indomitable Fist, incentivizing the players to only train one of the three disciples to maximize their stats.
  • Hong/Sammo Hakka is introduced as being an agile dine and dasher who can swiftly dodge attacks by a restaurant owner and is observed by the Shifu to have the speed of a man half his size. However, his in-game speed stat is extremely low and might be the lowest of all the playable characters. This trope might be played with as he can learn the ultimate technique of Earthen Heart which requires high-speed movement animation-wise, although Hong/Sammo has the lowest damage output when using the technique compared to Lei and Yun although this is because it uses the IQ stat rather than the speed stat. Additionally, Hong/Sammo's low speed can be because he is fighting enemies which means he needs fast reflexes rather than raw running speed which he used to run away from people rather than fighting them.
  • Akira mentions that he gained the power to move objects without touching them. However, none of his attacks in combat involve using telekinesis, nor does he use it in any cutscenes, making this ability an Informed Attribute. The Informed Attribute part is averted in the 2022 remake art which depicts Akira telekinetically holding some stationary. After the first fight in the remake's Near Future chapter where Matsu drops Akira off at the orphanage, Taeko gasps on how Akira got into another fight and how his shirt got ruined. However, Akira doesn't actually wear a shirt.
• Game Within a Game: Captain Square in the Distant Future chapter, which provides the otherwise-absent battles in other chapters. The arcade machine itself is what Cube needs to face the Mother Computer OD-10.
• Gatling Good: O. Dio's weapon. Stay out of its area of effect lest you get one-shotted.
• Genre Roulette: The settings of the chapters not only vary wildly in time period and narrative genre, even their gameplay can differ with Oboromaru being more of a Stealth-Based Mission that can be beaten without taking a single life, Masaru having a full-blown tournament arc, and Cube going through a near-combat-free Survival Horror story. Even enemy encounters are uniquely triggered with some being random, others can be avoided on the overworld, or completely scripted.
• Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: There are multiple in the Final chapter; the most notable example is the guardian of the Dungeon of Strength, who only appears if Masaru is in your party.
• Glass Cannon: Several. Yun has the highest power rating of the Imperial China heroes, but the lowest HP. The Sundown Kid has very low HP as well, but strong, long-range attacks and some of the most devastating techniques in the game. Oboro is similarly flimsy, but he's a Ninja, which is enough said right there. From the Middle Ages chapter, we also have Streibough, a standard swords-and-sorcery elemental mage. He's not so Glassy the second time you fight him, though.
• Gratuitous Iambic Pentameter: Much of the dialogue in the Middle Ages chapter in the remake as well as when characters from the time period appear in the finale is written using iambic pentameter to enhance the effect of the Flowery Elizabethan English.
• Gratuitous Latin: The ship in the Distant Future chapter is named Cogito Ergo Sum, Latin for "I think, therefore I am." It describes Cube's theme succinctly.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Among the final bosses, Odo and Odeo. It's their followers who directly cause the problems in their chapters.
• The Greatest Story Never Told: In the end, although the main protagonists saved all of reality and return to their home time periods to live their lives, only they have the knowledge of what happened as there was no one alive left in Lucrece to witness this.
• Gone Horribly Right: A successful attempt to one-up his rival led to not only Streibough's death at the hands of Oersted for instigating this, but Alethea's suicide kicks him over the edge and he becomes a threat to all of reality.
• Guest-Star Party Member: Almost every chapter has the main hero get some allies that, one way or another, leave before the final chapter:
  • Prehistory gives Pogo an eventual full party of Gori, Beru, and Zaki.
  • Imperial China has an interesting case of this, as out of the three pupils that the Shifu takes on, Yun, Hong, and Lei, only one will survive the story, becoming a permanent party member after that. They ultimately take over the starring role at the end of the chapter.
  • Imperial Japan has The Prisoner team up with Oboromaru. Optionally, the Mimic Mammet can also join.
  • The Wild West has Mad Dog team up with the Sundown Kid to protect Success.
  • The Near Future gives Akira Taroimo as a permanent sidekick, while Matsu comes and goes until the climactic dungeon.
  • The Middle Ages gives Oersted a balanced party with Streibough, Uranus, and Hasshe.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • There's no hint that a strengths and weaknesses system is in play during the battles, so you're going to have to resort to brute-forcing different attacks once you find out that your strongest attack does zilch against an enemy or boss. The remake alleviates this by marking each skill with a type icon and displaying what a targeted enemy is weak to.
  • Some attacks do not state what stat they calculate damage from, so players might invest a lot in one stat but not know that the attack they use calculates damage from a different one. For example, Masaru's Arm Lock might be assumed to be a physical attack because it is a martial-based attack. In reality, it calculates damage off the Special Attack/IQ stat, the one stat Masaru cannot increase through level-up.
  • In the Prehistory chapter:
    • Nothing tells or tracks what a combination of materials will make when having artisans craft items, so all you can do is either try all sorts of combinations or look up a guide of someone who already did it.
    • Getting the Rock of Rocks requires interacting with a particular stone face exactly 100 times (if you go over, you have to start from scratch), then backtracking to a door that appeared out of nowhere, finding a slab inside, and using a Bone on it (using anything else on it makes the Rock of Rocks inaccessible). The remake thankfully gives off a hint in the Tips on how to get this, but it still doesn't tell you how to make the door open, nor tell you that you need a Bone to get it.
    • Finding the Mammoth King can only be done after reaching the Kuu Tribe hideout near the end of the chapter, then backtracking to the first area where Pogo and his friends were banished to, and looking for a scent cloud that smells like a mammoth. However, while this does prevent you from accidentally running into a walking deathmobile without preparation, you have to press A while next to Mammoth King's invisible overworld tile, which also moves extremely fast. The remake makes this a lot easier by adding icons to the radar after touching scent clouds, loud footstep sounds when near the mammoth, and an input prompt when close enough to start the fight.
  • The Twilight of Edo Japan chapter:
    • A special weapon can only be obtained by completing the chapter with no kills. Doing this requires you to have Mimic Mammet in your party, and getting him is confusing in itself; and it requires that you avoid rescuing the Prisoner, since the cutscene where the Prisoner forces his way into your party near the end will have him drive off people you would otherwise have had to kill.
    • Trying to get all 100 possible kills (something which has no reward), requires keeping certain people alive until a specific point in the chapter, and you may not kill any women until late in the chapter for a good item and need to backtrack and take detours to get them all.
    • The Muramasa is a sword as powerful as the sword you get for a pacifist run, but obtaining it is an even bigger Guide Dang It! than getting other one all by itself - it requires walking to a precise point in a particular corridor, then turning around at exactly the correct spot to find a hidden room, then ignoring everything in that room and walking back the other way to access a superboss. The remake tries to alleviate it by adding a hint in the Tips about the existence of this, where the location of which is also named in the room title in the top-left corner of the screen, the specific spot makes a loud clicking noise which stops Oboromaru for a moment, changing the hidden room to have just the sword, and having the boss appear by trying to take it.
  • In the Near Future chapter nothing tells or tracks what Tobei can make from the items you give him, only saying when an item can't be changed. Many items also have more than one possible result when changed and there's no telling beforehand of that. Sometimes Tobei will fail to make something, although you won't lose the items involved, so you might mistake the result for meaning the item can't be changed if you haven't already seen said items succeed in being changed.
  • In the Present Day chapter, there is a third move (Worldbreaker's Wrath) you can learn from Jackie Iaukea, but you have to be in a very specific position in relation to him for him to use it. In the remake, a hint exists in the Tips that mentions that Jackie gets angry if he can't use any of his traditional moves.
  • In the Dominion of Hate:
    • To recruit Sundown, you have to pester him at several locations in a specific order, some of which you have to deliberately poke around to find that you can even traverse there. If he leaves your party afterwards, he sits around at any of the random locations prior.
    • Finding the Trial of Heart is a puzzle, as you have to teleport from battles when Akira's in your party which eventually throws you in there; the remake has a Tip that hints at this. Once there you have access to Akira's mind-reader skill from the Near Future chapter; while the remake has input prompts, the original game doesn't so the only hint you get reminding you of this is the ghosts who don't say anything if talked to directly, and you have to mind read Alethea's ghost at the end to leave.
    • Finding the Trial of Instinct requires you to go through an out-of-the-way narrow path in the Hero's Last Grave's first area to a dead end, then use his likely-forgotten smell skill to find a suspicious scent cloud emanating from a wall, then interact with it. The remake makes this slightly clearer by putting several conspicuous giant ice crystals around it, showing there should be a door there, and reminds the player when they first control or recruit Pogo that he can still use his scent tracking ability.
    • To fight Death Prophet to obtain the Cosmic Mail, you have to flee from battles 100 times, where the only hint about this exists in the Trial of Instinct with the Watanabe statues, which you have to use Akira’s mind reader skill on to get the hint.
• Guns Are Worthless: Averted. The Sundown Kid is the strongest character in the game, even more so if you get his .44 Magnum. Gun attacks in general are long-ranged, damaging, take no time whatsoever, and tend to not pose a significant disadvantage on the character using them, and on the other end, O. Dio's ultimate attack has a range that's either completely diagonal^note original game or includes all cardinal directions^note remake to the end of the field and hits for damage in the high triple digits (in a game where your health is unlikely to reach 200.) So basically, the Sundown Kid AND the Big Bad of his chapter both avert this trope.
• The Gunslinger: Sundown and Mad Dog are two cowboys from the Wild West era, and fight exclusively using their guns. Compared to other characters, their attacks are lacking in elemental variance and they themselves are frail, but they can strike from further distances and their attacks usually either hit multiple times, hit in a wide area, or have a high chance of disruption.

H to O

• Have a Nice Death: The Distant Future chapter is full of them, and if you happen to activate any of them, you are greeted with "Alas, Cube never had the opportunity to set foot on Earth..."
• Healer Signs On Early: Zigzagged with Beru, as she joins rather early in Prehistory but it's possible to not level her up ever and learn Sing Heal before she's kidnapped. Downplayed with Uranus in The Middle Ages, as Oersted and Straybow have to go without a healer for a bit. Akira and Cube will play this straight if either becomes the Dominion of Hate's protagonist.
• Heel–Face Turn:
  • Zaki from the Caveman chapter, for the final boss of said chapter. Afterwards, he takes over the Kuu tribe, ending their sacrifices to Odo and burying the hatchet with Pogo's tribe.
  • Matsu from Akira's chapter, but it happened in the backstory.
• He Knows About Timed Hits:
  • The Prehistory chapter has Pogo's tribe leader "tell" the player through speech bubble pictures to press the Y button, even pulling out a stone version of it above his head.
  • The beginning of the Near Future chapter has Akira tell the player that pressing Y enables him to read minds. The remake handwaves it a bit by having him comment that "it's as easy as pushing a button: (Y)", with the (Y) note being unvoiced.
• Hell Is That Noise: The sound that plays whenever the Lord of Dark is around in the last two chapters. Interestingly, the sound doesn't play when you encounter the "Lord of Dark" in the throne room, hinting that something's not quite right.
• Hello, [Insert Name Here]: At the beginning of each chapter, you get to name its protagonist. This is retained in the remake, and none of the dialogue featuring a protagonist's name is voiced. How much of the name can be chosen depends on the character in question:
  • Pogo, Oboromaru, Masaru (first and last name), and Cube are fully renamed. Notably, Cube's Canon Name is still mentioned by Kato in order to explain why a round robot could be named "Cube", but the player doesn't have to go along with it. Even with the name change in Pogo's case, he still says his name when he levels up in the remake.
  • Only Akira's first name can be changed, as his last name is set in stone so it can be used to refer to his father.
  • "Sundown" is the only part of the Sundown Kid's name that can be changed, so that he can always be referred to as "the Kid".
  • The Shifu goes completely unnamed; his kung fu style is what's named at the start of the chapter. This also gets used as the blanket name for whoever survives and becomes the new master of the art. Akira even has voice lines for each of the new masters' names when meeting them for the first time in the Final Chapter, where he reads the lead's mind to learn their name. The Bountiful Heart in the Trial of Skill has voiced lines for the new master as well which is fitting, given that the Trial of Skill is the dungeon for the Earthen Heart Master.
  • While not present in Live A Live, the OCTO-A-LIVE event in Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent averts this with Oersted. Oersted, Streibough and Alethea receive new voiced lines with Streibough and Alethea calling Oersted by his name in voiced lines which otherwise does not occur in Live A Live.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • Matsu does this to power the Steel Titan by taking a fatal overdose of Matango, so he can save Akira and Kaori (the latter actually initially volunteering to be liquefacted to power it before Akira stops her).
  • Uranus uses the last of his life to unlock Oersted's cell after their arrest, and Streibough fakes having one during the Middle Ages chapter.
• Hero Stole My Bike: In the Near Future chapter, in order to chase after a trio of Crusaders after they kidnap Kazu and Matsu ditches him, Akira steals a passerby's motorcycle.
• Heroic Spirit: Deconstructed. Yes, the sheer willpower of the seven protagonists is what saves the day in their stories, some of them having to discover that spirit first. Then you get to Oersted, who already fully believes in Heroic Spirit, but in his case it's more pessimistic — everything that can go wrong does go wrong. That he ultimately ends up as Odio is a testament to how utterly broken he was by the end. But then reconstructed, when Oersted summons the other seven protagonists to prove his point... and said protagonists' Heroic Spirit save the day and Oersted gets reminded on how he couldn't win by not shaping his spirit well enough.
• Historical In-Joke: If Oboro decides to follow Ryoma Sakamoto at the end of his chapter, in the final credits he'll be seen thwarting an assassination attempt on the latter. The IRL version of Ryoma Sakamoto died because of an assassination.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: The three antagonists of the Near Future chapter get turned into liquified humans too when the pool of liquified humans they gathered end up engulfing them.
• Hope Spot:
  • After Rachel nearly gets Cube thrown out of the airlock in her Kirk-obsessed frenzy, she seems to calm down...only to rush off again, and get Huey fatally mauled by the Behemoth, and then she dies minutes later.
  • After defeating Streibough for his treachery, Alethea appears and at first it's implied that she heard his Evil Gloating about his crimes, only to then profess her love for Streibough and commit suicide. Things go downhill quick.
• Hot-Blooded: Fittingly, both Akira and Matsu. Masaru doesn't talk much, but he reveals his nature to fit this in a particularly epic moment at the end of his chapter.
• How the Mighty Have Fallen: Lucrece was a prosperous kingdom which had found its future king to be wed to the princess, who also happened to be the local hero Oersted assisted by his powerful sorcerer friend Streibough. However, the kingdom fell shortly after their princess was kidnapped and the two heroes banded together to save her, only for Streibough to attempt a case of Engineered Heroics to take the princess for himself and brand Oersted a pariah. This led to the creation of the Lord of Dark Odio, the deaths of every single human in the kingdom, and leaving Lucrece in ruins while overrun with monsters following a Time Crash. Even after Odio's defeat and the curse being lifted, Lucrece is still empty and is presumably forgotten in the annals of history. This is reflected from the King of Lucrece as a soul in Akira's dungeon, who lamented the fall of his kingdom under his watch following all the events that transpired.
  King of Lucrece: The fault is mine, most surely. 'Twas my watch. Lucrece, my charge, my child... now all is ash.
• Hulk Speak: Item descriptions and loading screen tips for the Prehistory chapter are given in this manner, since the protagonists are all cavepeople.
• Humans Are Bastards: Most of the chapter bosses are centered around this. However, each timeline also has a counterpoint which tend to get overshadowed, and yet the heroes kept fighting for it (and just showed how flawed Odio's point was by ignoring these good humans and overfocusing on the bad ones).
  • Prehistory: A tribe is willing to sacrifice a captured human to appease their God, a living dinosaur called Odo, and Pogo is exiled from his own tribe for helping her. The counterpoint: The vast majority of the tribe was mostly controlled by survival instincts and fear of getting eaten, only the chieftain was very fervent and dogmatic in the sacrifice. Once the chieftain was eaten by Odo and said dinosaur was killed, both tribes quickly established negotiations with each other and unite in peace, with Pogo and friends returning home as a result of said peace treaty.
  • Imperial China: A local gang causes trouble and steals from local villages, and when defeated by the town's local Shifu, twice, a larger gang retaliates by raiding his Dojo for all its worth and killing two of his pupils. The counterpoint: The surviving student, who used to be ostracized due to their flaws, eventually became accepted by the public that shunned them, becoming a local hero for saving them from the gang, to succeed the Shifu that has passed away. In the remake, some members of the lesser gang attend the successor's Dojo too.
  • Twilight of Edo Japan: Ode Iou planned to take advantage of humanity's inherent greed and distrust by selling dangerous weapons, ultimately hoping to spark a war. The counterpoint: A group of people believing in trust still existed, led by Sakamoto Ryoma. It was for this reason that Ode Iou had him imprisoned, and yet the Enma Ninja still believed in peace despite their contractual nature and sent Oboromaru for his job, and he has the option to trust people and not kill them, and even when he does, he still tries to remember those he killed.
  • Wild West: O. Dio is in fact a horse given human form by the vengeful spirits of the 7th Cavalry after fatal losses to the Native Americans defending their home. The counterpoint: There's someone else who suffered fatal, personal losses and at first looks like a Death Seeker, but ultimately still managed to keep his heroism and rallied a bunch of innocents to defend their town instead of ravaging others like the Crazy Bunch, and even his constant rival is willing to put aside their rivalry for the greater good.
  • Present Day: While Masaru becomes the strongest by defeating his opponents in fair combat, his first challenger arrives and explains how he mercilessly killed each one to prove his own strength. The counterpoint: All of the victims are literal show-wrestlers making a living. Even Great Aja, the Jerkass luchador, wasn't malicious, the mauling of Watanabe's dad was because he was optionally provoked, and the result was not clear whether Watanabe's dad was dead or Great Aja just sent him to med bay.
  • Near Future: The human leaders of Japan plot to sacrifice their nation to Odeo while also influencing the local gang to do its bidding. And the liquefacted humans blindly lash out in hatred and assimilate their captors, only to nearly do the same to Akira, who was an innocent who had nothing to do with their state. The counterpoint: Matsu, an ex-gang leader who used to be wild and anti-law, managed to smell out the evil plot and oppose it, siding with the innocents and becoming Akira's mentor after he felt guilty killing his father, who, like other non-leaders of Japan, were Just Following Orders, albeit a little too apathetic.
  • Distant Future: The constant infighting of the crew lead OD-10 to conclude that they were a threat to its mission of maintaining harmony on the ship. The counterpoint: Darthe, who was at first the most aggressive member, survived and revealed a levelheaded side and his dark past. After the incident, he quit the military and became a healing robot creator, overcoming his dark past. And while Kirk and Rachel were mostly jerks, they were only doing their job in piloting the ship to transport dangerous beings, they could even be genuinely nice to Cube. And lastly as Kato stated, even if everyone are on their edges and bickering at each other, killing each other would be the last thing on their mind.
  • It is all brought full circle in the Middle Ages chapter: After being betrayed by his best friend, the royals, and the villagers, Oersted gives up his humanity to become the Lord of Dark, Odio, with the intent to destroy humanity in every time period for the final chapter, and even beforehand, after Hasshe's initial victory against the first Lord of Dark, the people and the kingdom only cheered temporarily before forgetting his deeds and heroism, causing him to seclude himself as a hermit in disgust of the people. The counterpoint: That one kid still believed Oersted till the end, even after Oersted-as-Odio subjected him to a Fate Worse than Death.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: What Odio is trying to prove with all of his sadistic plots is this in a nutshell, deeming that they are untrustworthy, immoral beasts that are only capable of hating and killing, especially each other, and also that all of their idealistic hopes and dreams amount to zip and change nothing about their existence. The main connection between the playable chapters is that you're proving him wrong. His stance is understandable when you learn that Odio was once human himself, a man named Oersted who was every bit a Knight in Shining Armor who once believed in Heroic Spirit with all of his being — and had it all thrown back in his face in the worst ways possible. He is thusly baffled when you not only overcome his trials, but defeat him physically.
• Humongous Mecha: The Near Future has the Steel Titan, which is used for the final battle. Complete with its own theme!
  "Go! Go! Steel Titan!"
• Hunting the Rogue: In the twilight of Edo Japan chapter, Oboromaru is sent by his clan to rescue a captive from Ode Iou and also slay the tyrant. However, Oboromaru can choose to abandon the mission. Doing so will have him branded a traitor and constantly hunted down by his clan up to his own master stepping in to suicide bomb him.
• Hyperlink Story: The game's true nature. Though the chapters are initially presented as disconnected, the hints that they're all a part of something much bigger start to get clearer, culminating in both the Middle Ages chapter, which reveals that Oersted became Odio and is the source of all the trouble the characters went through, and the Final Chapter, where the heroes are brought to the Dominion of Hate and their goal is to defeat him and return home. Overlaps with You All Share My Story.
• Ice Magic Is Water: Ice themed attacks like Akira's "Cold Day in Hell" are grouped under the water damage type.
• Infinity +1 Sword:
  • The ultimate weapons, one for each protagonist, in the Final Chapter. They're obtained by clearing each character's special dungeon.
  • Pogo's chapter has the Cola Bottle, a Rare Random Drop from the Mammoth King. When used as an item, it does 999 damage to almost anything, including the final boss.
  • Sparing all the women in Oboromaru's chapter, then waiting after acquiring the Maid's Sash will give you the Lacquered Medicine Box. It's an accessory that can be equipped to give a large bonus to IQ (Special Attack in the remake)... but it's also an infinite use healing item that also buffs all stats, which makes it very useful for fighting Oboromaru's Superbosses.
• Infinity -1 Sword: There's not one but two katanas in the Twilight of Edo Japan chapter that are Oboromaru's second best weapon (one is his best for the chapter, one you get after you beat it), although both of them are absurdly difficult and obscure examples of Guide Dang It!, and you can only take one into the final chapter. However, both are exactly the same stat-wise.
• Interface Spoiler:
  • In battle, enemies consist of still images that slide around when moving and attacking and usually take up multiple spaces. Zaki only takes up one space and has idle, moving, and attacking animations like the members of your party. Guess who joins you in the fight against the chapter boss? The same thing also happens with Mad Dog in the Cowboy chapter and Lei and Hong in the Imperial China chapter.
  • The reveal that the prisoner Oboromaru rescues is a Historical Domain Character is spoiled by the fact that he's directly called Ryoma as a party member in the fan translation. The remake opts to keep him named "The Prisoner" until the end of the chapter.
  • Ode Iou is first fought as a Trick Boss in his weak human form before turning into a Gamahebi for the real final boss of the Twilight of Edo Japan chapter. Players who have gotten through some of the other chapters beforehand can easily see the trick coming because Ode Iou doesn't have "Megalomania" playing in his fight and has a small battle sprite (whereas every other chapter boss has a very large sprite).
  • Before beginning each chapter, you're given a brief summary of the chapter's setting and what you'll be doing in said chapters... but no such summary is given to you once you select the Middle Ages chapter in the original game, while in the remake it's a vague one-section description. Suffice to say, there's a reason for this lack of description.
  • In the remake, the final bosses of each chapter have a red aura around them. Despite the primary goal in the Middle Ages chapter being to defeat the Lord of Dark, the titular Lord doesn't have the aura, indicating something isn't right.
  • Also in the remake, every character has a color theme. Oersted's is Red. The aura effect in the menu looks almost exactly like what you see when you fight an incarnation of Odio.
• Invisibility Cloak: Oboro gets one of these in his chapter, which can be used by holding down Y. Intangibility Cloak might be a more accurate term, though; while it's active, Oboro can't move, but enemies on-screen can't see him and will move through him. Apparently he was also given two more as spares, which get used by the Prisoner and O-Robo.
• It's a Wonderful Failure: Die in any of the chapters, and you get a nice little scene of someone or something reacting to your demise.
  • Prehistory: If you die in the first part of the chapter, Pogo simply falls to the ground while Gori laughs at him. Dying after Beru is abducted shows a scene of her tribe beginning the ritual to sacrifice her to their god.
  • Imperial China: The gravestones of The Shifu and his pupils are shown as text narration states that their martial art fell into the annals of history.
  • Twilight of Edo Japan: Oboro's master mourns his death and states that times of peace are still far off for Japan. Should Oboro abandon the mission, he will be hunted down.
  • Wild West: A lone tumbleweed blows through the now derelict Success Town. In the remake, text will flash on the screen "Bury Me Out on the Lone Prarie".
  • Present Day: The opponent that defeated you mocks you in an homage to Street Fighter II's continue screen.
  • Near Future: Kaori runs out of bed in a panic, seemingly sensing her brother's demise. After activating the Steel Titan, it becomes Matsu berating Akira in Heaven for failing. In the remake, the latter is changed to Akira collapsing in the Steel Titan's cockpit, while Matsu's spirit tells him not to give up.
  • Distant Future: A shot is shown of Cube's broken body; unless he gets sucked out the airlock, in which case he's shown drifting helplessly through space. The text narration then states, "Alas, Cube never had the opportunity to set foot on Earth..."
  • Middle Ages: The Lord of Dark looks over Alethea as she begs Oersted to save her, all while that hellish noise plays.
  • Final: If you fail to defeat Purity of Odio^note or any of Odio's forms in the remake, the Armageddon ending plays as everything is wiped from existence forever.
• Job Title: Played straight with the titles of the first seven chapters of the remake, each referring to what their player-controlled central character is or ends up being respectively (Pogo is "The First", Oboro is "The Infiltrator", Sundown is "The Wanderer" and so on). The unlocked eighth chapter named "The Lord of the Dark" is no exception to this.
• Joke Character: Akira starts off with having the worst stats out of all the playable characters which significantly adds to the difficulty of completing his chapter. The remake does buff his stats a bit though.
• Kaizo Trap:
  • Can sort of happen in the Wild West chapter; if you choose to spare Mad Dog, you'll fight him one last time after the credits roll. However, it's arguably harder to die than to win the fight, meaning you'd have to really be trying to invoke this trope.
  • A more plausible invocation of this trope is vs. any boss monster that self destructs as a final attack. If you took to the strategy of getting everyone close in order to pin the boss in, then watch as everyone dies.
  • Even after defeating OD-10, the airlock can still suck Cube out of the ship causing a game over. Like with Mad Dog at the end of the Wild West chapter, this only happens if you intentionally cause it.
• Karmic Jackpot: In the Twilight of Edo Japan chapter, freeing and sparing a ninja named Goemon in the castle jail will have him declare that he'll repay you some day. Checking certain treasure boxes that were already opened prior to this reveals that Goemon refilled them with a duplicate of their original contents along with a "Goemon was here!" message.
• Kill All Humans: Odio's primary goal. Lucretius reveals in an optional conversation that he succeeded with the entirety of Lucrece.
• Kleptomaniac Hero Found Underwear:
  • And yes, they are equipment, and had to be replaced with something less offensive in the remake.
  • The Near Future chapter. Belonging to three different people, no less. Bonus points for Akira not actually doing the act himself, even though he gets smacked for putting Watanabe up to it.
  • Sundown and Mad Dog can also swipe Annie's nightie in the Wild West chapter.
• Knight in Shining Armor: Oersted, deconstructed to hell and back.
• Large Ham: Zaki, somehow, despite not having a single line.
• The Last Dance:
  • Hasshe accompanies Oersted, Streibough, and Uranus to the Forbidden Land even though he's secretly dying from the plague so he can end his life doing something important. He dies soon after killing the (false) Lord of Dark.
  • In a way, the Earthen Heart Shifu's assault on Ou Di Wan Lee's school. Given his advanced age and the way he attempts to do it without his last remaining student, odds are good that the Shifu wasn't planning on coming back from dealing with Lee.
• Language Barrier: Averted in the Final Chapter, where despite several of the protagonists hailing from different countries such as the Earthen Heart Successor from Imperial China and Sundown being from the USA, no one really has a problem with communicating with each other aside from Pogo and Cube, and can all work together very effectively.
• Last Disc Magic: Every main character, plus two others, learns their final technique at level 16, high above what they need for their chapter's boss (though it's useful for superbosses in chapters that have them if grinded for) but perfectly achievable during the Dominion of Hate, and it outpowers the rest of their moveset with varying tradeoffs.
  • Pogo has Bing Bang Boom^note Dodegesden, a close-range, no-charge blunt move where he repeatedly clubs an enemy for ludicrous damage, but is inflicted with heavy stat debuffs for a while after using it.
  • The new Earthen Heart Master has Heavenly Peaks Descent^note Xuan Ya Lian Shan Quan, a spirit-element attack that deals heavy damage with no charge time or drawbacks. This is originally learned in the Imperial China chapter, where it can only be used once against the chapter boss, but upon being re-learned through leveling it can be used without limit.
  • Oboromaru has Death Blossom^note Bronze Leaf, a spinning slashing attack that covers a wide area and debuffs attack and defense. In addition to leveling up, it can also be learned early by offering 10 Koban to the talking pot in the Twilight of Edo Japan chapter.
  • The Sundown Kid has Hurricane (Shot), which has a lengthy charge time but lets him fire a ridiculous amount of wind-element bullets at anything in its target area.
  • Masaru has Worldbreaker's Wrath^note Earth-Rending Fury, an earth-element earthquake and one of his only area-of-effect techniques. He can learn it early via Jackie Iaukea if certain conditions are met to make him use it. Oddly, Mimic Mammet can also learn the skill if it reaches level 16 or the Koban pot is used.
  • Akira has Judgement Day^note Holy Image, a divine area-of-effect that deals middling damage but has a high chance of inflicting every debuff and multiple status ailments, including petrification.
  • Cube has Maser Cannon, a fire-elemental piercing star/laser blast that only works on diagonals. Since Cube cannot level up, they start with this technique from the get-go.
  • Oersted has Archon's Mark^note Death Trail in the fan translation, a demonic-element slash that strikes a single target twice but debuffs his accuracy and evasion. It's also one of Hasshe's moves.
  • Streibough has Black Abyss, a powerful ranged demonic-element counterattack. The chances of him getting it are extremely low since he leaves halfway through Oersted's chapter and never becomes playable again, though he will use it in his boss fight regardless due to being empowered.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: In the original release, Oersted's existence (and his entire chapter) was a secret only unlocked after you beat the other seven. The trailers for the 2022 remake, on the other hand, just introduces him as another protagonist. Likewise, while the original box art was sliced into seven parts for the initial protagonists, the 2022 remake adds one for him to give him equal billing to everyone else. More subtly, the trailer also reveals the fact that there is a final ninth chapter where you can control the other seven protagonists.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • Mad Dog emphasizes that Sundown Kid should save a memory of the moment (read: the player should save the game) before going off to hunt for supplies for the chapter's Timed Mission.
  • In the remake, the Distant Future chapter's notes mention that the hit video game Captain Square was released on September 2nd, 1994; the same date as the original release of Live A Live.
  • The Behemoth's codename in the remake is SHVC-5V, the product code for the Super Famicom release of Live A Live.
  • One of Streibough's lines in the Middle Ages final boss battle has him taunt Oersted that "this won't end like [he] think it will", referring to their battle trying to taunt the hero that he himself will win. Considering that the entire chapter was a Save the Princess plot gone wrong and Oersted becomes Odio at the end of it because of Alethea's suicide, the chapter itself didn't end like the player thought it would.
• Legendary Carp: There are two carp superbosses in the game. The first is Lord Iwama, a white koi living in the moat of Ode Castle in the Twilight of Edo Japan chapter, who drops a water-summoning scale when defeated. The second is Lucretius, a golden koi who lives in the Trial of Instinct in the Dominion of Hatred; he only fights the party if they bring him one of the two Golden Topknots that can be found, and upon being defeated he'll hand out a piece of the Cosmic equipment and provide some exposition about how Lucrece ended up in its current state.
• Lethal Joke Character:
  • Since Cube never battles any standard enemies in his chapter, one might think he'd be unfit for combat, but he's actually one of the best characters in the game as a Combat Medic.
  • Beru in the caveman chapter has really low stats and it's generally up to Pogo and Gori to keep her safe. Until she hits level 7 (or level 6 in the remake) and learns "Sing Hurt," which can One-Hit Kill the chapter boss.
• Let Me Tell You a Story: The Near Future chapter is entirely this, with Akira as the storyteller. Even has a bit of He Knows About Timed Hits as Akira introduces you to the gimmick of the chapter being his mind reader skill.
• Lone Wolf Boss:
  • Of the chapter bosses, Streibough is the only one that isn't an incarnation of Odio.
  • Odie O'Bright is the only chapter boss with no apparent followers or minions.
  • The Superbosses of Pogo's and Oboro's chapters are unaffiliated with the main chapter bosses, but still have "Megalomania" as their battle theme.
• Lost in Translation:
  • In the remake's English script for the Prehistory chapter, Pogo's first word is simply translated as "AIEEEEEE!". This, sadly, does little to carry over the original Japanese script's intent of Pogo's first word being "Love" (pronounced "Ai" in Japanese).
  • Among the superbosses in the final chapter is Euraokos, an accidental corruption of the intended "Erauqs", or "Square" backwards.
  • Downplayed example as the line still makes sense on its own. Jackie Iaukea's quote "I'M STRONGER THAN AN OGRE!" when he uses Mano Toss is meant to be referring to its original name, Ogre Grip, hence the ogre reference.
• Lord British Postulate: The final boss of the game consists of two phases, and the transition to the second phase occurs when the Brow of Odio morphs into Purity of Odio once the Eyes and Maw of Odio are killed. Attacking the Brow of Odio before this point just leads it to countering by healing itself and the rest of the boss. However, if it is somehow killed (the main method is to use an overlooked Fixed Damage Attack that doesn't trigger the counter), the second phase will be completely skipped.
• Luck-Based Mission:
  • Beating Pluto in Captain Square depends entirely on how often the enemies use their strongest attack.
  • Learning Great Aja's moves. Dude is so fixated with his Bite attack that possesses so much range that he'd use that over and over and over instead of the learnable techs. Fortunately, Masaru learns any attacks he misses when he levels up in the Final chapter.
• Magikarp Power: Beru from the Prehistory chapter. She is unspeakably underpowered compared to Pogo and Gori, especially against the enemy levels you're up against at the time. However, if you manage to carry her all the way to level 7 (or level 6 in the remake) in the short time before she's kidnapped again, she learns "Sing Hurt", a ranged singing attack that packs enough power to ruin Odo in 2 rounds.
• Main Character Final Boss: Oersted, the protagonist of the unlockable chapter "The Middle Ages", loses everything at the end of the chapter after being betrayed by the people he thought were his friends and lovers. He then calls himself "Odio" and vows to take revenge on mankind, sending an incarnation of himself bearing the name "Odio" as the final boss of the previous chapters. He also appears in the Final Chapter "The Dominion of Hate" as either the protagonist who sets out to Make Wrong What Once Went Right by taking control of the other bosses or as the final boss of the game. The HD-2D remake adds a third form for the final boss called Sin of Odio, which allows Oersted to finally redeem himself by separating himself from the embodiment of his hate and being the one to destroy it.
• Make Wrong What Once Went Right: Oersted as Odio's version of the Final Chapter Dominion of Hate has him change history so all of the protagonists lost to their Odio incarnation. He either succeeds, or takes reality with him in loss.
• Meaningful Echo: OD-10's "This ship is my domain, and I its master," is echoed by Odio if the party runs from him at the Archon's Roost: "This realm is my domain, and I its king."
• Meaningful Name: The end-of-chapter bosses are all variations on "Odio", with the exception of Streibough, which serves as a hint toward Oersted's true nature. Odio is Latin for "hate", which also means the final chapter, "The Dominion of Hate," can be read as "The Dominion of Odio".
• Meaningless Villain Victory: If Oersted is chosen for the protagonist for the final chapter and he succeeds in the boss rush against the other characters, he proclaims triumphantly that he's proved his point about humanity being terrible and not worth saving. But it leaves him all alone to wander the dead lands of Lucrece. He is the victorious Lord of Dark, who ends up ruling over nothing and no one. The last shot of him with his head down shows all he's left with is his depression.
• Moment Killer: In the Near Future chapter, a young couple at the park who decided to get married are suddenly interrupted by Steel Titan rising out of the lake.
• Mook Chivalry: Enforced near the finale of the Imperial China chapter. When the Earthen Heart Shifu and his surviving student reach Ou Di Wan Lee's inner circle of students, Ou Di Wan Lee mentions he could sic them all on the Shifu and student, but doing so would not be very fair. He instead allows the Shifu and student to fight his inner circle (who are all Elite Mooks culminating in a Mid-Boss fight against Yi Bei Kou) in more manageable groups of two and three. Of course, he gets called out on it by the Shifu's student because when he had the other students killed, he absolutely did not adhere to the trope, having his men gang up on them. In the end, it's actually a subversion: Ou Di Wan Lee has two hidden assassins that would kill his opposition unprepared or tire them further so they become easy pickings for him after they catered through his display of Mook Chivalry.
• More Dakka: O. Dio's solution to a few things.
  O. Dio: Two or one, it makes no difference. Another dog another bullet. And I have so, so many to spare!
• Murder Is the Best Solution:
  • Odie O'Bright kills all the wrestlers that Masaru faces in his chapter to prevent anyone from trying to take his place as the world's greatest warrior. Masaru proves him wrong.
  • OD-10 in the Distant Future chapter decides that killing everyone on the Cogito Ergo Sum is the easiest way to maintain its goal of a perfect community without disorder after watching most of the crew fight and bicker against each other.
• Multinational Team:
  • The remake's localization of the Distant Future chapter gives the Cogito Ergo Sum a multinational crew. Kirk is American, Hor is Scottish, Darthe is British, Kato is Japanese-British, Huey is British-Indian, and Rachel is Australian.
  • In the Final Chapter, the saviors of humanity compose of a caveman who predates modern ethnicities, a Chinese man or woman, three Japanese men from different centuries, an American, and a robot built by a Japanese-British man.
• Multiple Endings: Four in total, and that's not even counting all the dozens of variations there are to the two better endings.
  • Worst Ending: Choose Oersted as the final protagonist, get severely injured during the final battles, and unleash Armageddon, or choose one of the other protagonists and lose the fight with Purity of Odio^note Any of Odio's forms in the remake. Oersted takes his misanthropy to its logical conclusion and annihilates all of reality.
  • Bad Ending: Choose Oersted as the final protagonist and defeat all of the other heroes. Oersted has proven his belief that Humans Are Bastards, but is doomed to wander the ruins of Lucrece alone for the rest of his days.
  • Neutral Ending: Choose anyone except Oersted as the final protagonist and execute him when prompted after his boss fight. Oersted has been defeated and reality is saved, but it is implied that the protagonists are trapped in Lucrece for the rest of their days.
  • Good Ending: Choose anyone except Oersted as the final protagonist and refuse to execute him when prompted after his boss fight. After a Boss Rush against all of his reincarnations, Oersted is brought back to his senses and dies as himself, and the heroes return to their homes to live out their lives.
  • Remake-Exclusive Best Ending: Choose anyone except Oersted as the final protagonist, recruit all the other characters at least once, and refuse to execute him when prompted after his boss fight. After a Boss Rush against all of his reincarnations, Oersted out of frustration absorbs even more hatred into himself to summon the Sin of Odio. After a fight in which all heroes participate (including Oersted, who redeems himself at the last second and delivers the final blow), Oersted and the final protagonist share some words before sending everyone back to their original times with his last breath.
• The Musketeer: The Prisoner from Oboromaru's chapter's primary weapons are a revolver which he uses for two of his attacks, and his Yoshiyuki katana, which he uses for the third.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Streibough. His failed attempt at getting revenge on Oersted is what caused the latter to turn against humanity and become Odio, the hate-filled Lord of Dark. When you use Akira to read Streibough's mind, he realizes that he is at fault for what has happened to their world and regrets his actions for causing Oersted to turn evil.
• Mythology Gag: Added in the remake:
  • In the Prehistory Chapter, Pogo and Gori's running animations are based on the one used in the credits of the original game, where they had unique higher-detailed sprites of them walking profile.
  • Also in the Prehistory chapter, whenever a character talks about another character, an image of them is shown in the speech bubble. The images are based off of the original game's smaller sprites rather then the remake's larger and more detailed sprites.
  • The Chapter Complete medals added on the save files use the otherwise-absent battle cursors from the original release.
  • Oersted as Odio's appearance in his version of the Dominion of Hate Final Chapter or his Last Stand in the "Hero" versions has him don a cape, much like his design in Holy Dungeon, a Square Enix mobile game he guest-starred in. Additionally, Alethea's knife◊ matches the one◊ featured in her Holy Dungeon appearance.
  • In the Distant Future chapter, the release date for Captain Square is September 2, 1994, the release date of the Super Famicom version of the game.
  • The designs of the Near Future cast heavily resemble the ones provided in Kazuhiko Shimamoto‘s doujinshi retelling of the chapter’s events, particularly Taeko. The Steel Titan also has new animations for its attacks based on their manga depiction, such as Marduk's Rage deploying missiles from its jetpack and the Halogen Lasers being emitted from the red pads on its forearms.
• Nerf:
  • The Powerful, but Inaccurate aspect of multi-hit moves in the original is noticeably cranked up in the remake thanks to proper accuracy and evasion stats being implemented, with many of them now dealing much less consistent damage; this is most visible with Beru's Sing Hurt and Mad Dog's Texas Jitterbug, which lack some of the ridiculous output they had in the original, though they remain viable enough. This thankfully applies to enemies as well.
  • In the original game, stat buffs and debuffs persist for the entire battle unless counteracted, and the presence of moves that affected the "Level" stat (which has a significant effect on every other stat) allowed for various fights to be trivialized if a party member was capable of buffing themselves, or if they could Level Drain the opponent (which could be hard to inflict at first, but after one infliction their resistance to it gets lowered). The remake's combat changes included applying a turn limit for buffs/debuffs depending on the move, requiring they be used more strategically, and removed the ability to alter level entirely.
• New Powers as the Plot Demands: The Lord of Dark turns out to have once been an ordinary knight with no special magic. It's never explained just how he gained his alternate form and reality-warping powers.
• Nightmare Face:
  • OD-10's manifestation in the virtual world. Even more so if you scan the central tile on its body.
  • The pre-final boss, Odio's "Face".
  • Saint Alethea, Purity of Odio's ultimate attack.
• Ninja: Oboromaru is one, and his chapter takes place in the time of Feudal Japan.
• Non-Dubbed Grunts: Due to the Prehistory chapter's gimmick of every character speaking in noises instead of words, it uses the Japanese "voices" regardless of which voice track is selected.
• Non-Standard Game Over:
  • In the Twilight of Edo Japan chapter, attempting to turn around and run from the castle you're supposed to infiltrate will lead to you being hunted down by your fellow shinobi as a traitor. If you manage to fend off enough assassins, you'll be confronted by your leader, Hayate. If you manage to defeat Hayate, he'll still kill you with a Suicide Attack, ending the game.
  • If, for some reason, you decide to open the airlock in the Distant Future chapter, Cube will be sucked out and you get a game over.
• Not His Sled: In the original game, Odio forcing the seven heroes to fight their respective incarnation one last time was the final battle in the game before the ending. In the remake? After those battles, Odio powers up by drawing all of the hatred of the world into himself, trapping Oersted's body within a massive demonic bodily form called "Sin of Odio". This new form requires ALL of the heroes to defeat, so if you haven't leveled all seven heroes adequately, this final phase will be difficult. The entirely new segment gets lampshaded by Masaru and Sundown.
  Masaru: So it's not over, huh?
  Sundown: Not by a long shot!
• No Campaign for the Wicked: A notable aversion. The Middle Ages chapter has you playing as the man who would eventually become Odio, the Man Behind the Man for every other chapter's final boss. And if you're feeling nihilistic, you can keep playing as him for the Final Chapter.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: In the original Japanese, Hong is named Sammo for Sammo Hung. Max Morgan from Masaru's chapter also has an uncanny resemblance to Hulk Hogan, who loses his moustache in the remake.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: In the Prehistory chapter, Pogo takes in Beru who's on the run from the Kuu tribe, and after beating up the invading tribe and scaring Zaki off, Pogo's leader kicks him, Gori and Beru out to the wild out of fear that Beru's presence will cause the Kuu tribe to invade again.
• Non-Elemental: The "Void" attack element does not factor into the game's weakness/resistance system. On the player's side, it's the rarest attack type in the game, with only two associated skills: Hong's "Pork's Second Cooking", a variable Fixed Damage Attack, and Yun's "Whirlwind's Dismay", a multi-hitting attack that debuffs the target's attack and cannot be countered.
• No, You: Pogo and Zaki do this in picture/emoticon format regarding who's going to lose.
• Nubile Savage: Beru is incredibly attractive (even by modern standards) for an unintelligible, big-eating savage from prehistoric times. Zaki also counts, swishing hair and all.
• Numerological Motif: Many chapters have some feature that involves doing something 100 times. In the Prehistory chapter, examining a specific object 100 times will get you a powerful accessory. The maximum number of kills you can get in the Twilight of Edo Japan chapter is 100. In the Near-Future chapter, examining the TV in the orphanage 100 times will get you a short Easter Egg scene. In the final chapter, retreating from battle 100 times will trigger a fight with Optional Boss Death Prophet; defeating it will give you a piece of the Cosmic equipment.
• Obvious Rule Patch:
  • Due to the remake displaying HP totals in battle for player characters and enemies on the HUD, all moves from the original release that displayed them instead deal debuffs to make up for the redundancy.
  • In the Prehistory chapter, you're given a very small window to train Beru up in battle to get her skills up to Sing Hurt after Pogo and his friends get exiled from his tribe. Due to there being a finite amount of enemies per area until you move to another one, players of the original usually go into the cave in the north-east and quickly exit to refresh the encounters without triggering the story event which removes Beru from the party. This was changed in the remake where entering the cave automatically triggers said event so you can't refresh the encounters, so Sing Hurt was moved to Level 6 instead of Level 7 to avoid locking Beru out of learning it, and the player would more likely encounter this after clearing the entire area of enemies and learn her incredibly useful Sing Heal in the process.
  • In the remake, the final chapter now allows for all of a character's inventory items to be carried over instead of just what they had equipped, with a few exceptions. One of these exceptions is the Robotic Enhancements (consumables that give permanent stat boosts to robotic characters) from the Near Future chapter; this prevents a player from hoarding Robotic Enhancements while playing as Akira (where they aren't critical since Taroimo is plenty bulky already) and getting Akira and Cube as quickly as possible in the final chapter in order to hyper-buff the latter.
• Old Master: The Earthen Heart Shifu. Unusually for the trope, he is his chapter's protagonist, rather than a side character. At the end of his chapter, he dies, and it's his successor who goes on to participate in the Final chapter.
• Ominous Save Prompt:
  • Mad Dog will lean on the fourth wall to remind the player about saving after the first half of the Western chapter, as this is when the Timed Mission that affects how the chapter boss starts.
  • After defeating the sixth opponent in the Present Day chapter, the save menu will suddenly pop up. Since there's no overworld in the chapter, the game will immediately proceed to the chapter boss once the menu is exited.
• Omnicidal Maniac: The game has a fair number of these, but Odio in particular.
• Once per Episode: The Watanabes pop up once in each era (see Running Gag and Butt-Monkey).
• One-Hit Kill:
  • Attacks that cause stone count. Purity of Odio has the attack Saint Alethea. This is also accessible to the player with Oboromaru's Deepest Dark and Akira's Judgement Day.
  • O. Dio's Gatling Barrage, which does vastly more damage than you'll ever have hit points. In the original, the saving grace was that he could only attack with them diagonally; in the remake, he can now fire it in any of the cardinal directions! With that being said, it now has a visible charge period and only hits the tile his target was standing on when he started charging the move, so it's still manageable.
• One Stat to Rule Them All: The "Level" stat in the Super Famicom version of the game has a drastic effect on all of a character's offensive and defensive attributes and their debuff/status effect resistance, so it has a far greater effect in battle when boosted on party members or decreased on enemies compared to the four equipment-related stats. The remake axes the ability to buff/debuff Level entirely.
• One-Winged Angel:
  • Ode Iou turns into a giant frog-like monster holding a cobra.
  • Oersted's Purity of Odio form is actually angelic.
  • In the remake, after the Boss Rush after Purity of Odio, one last form is revealed called Sin of Odio.
• Only the Worthy May Pass: The seven trials in the Final Chapter has shades of this for entering the trial to begin with, differing between each individual character.
  • Trial of Instinct: Pogo's trial which requires him breaking the ice that blocks the entrance. Once the ice is broken, the trial can be freely entered regardless if Pogo is present or not. Having Akira in the party for the trial is needed for a secret
  • Trial of Skill: The Earthen Heart Master's trial. Technically, anyone can enter and exit the trial as they please but the Master is needed to break the rock at the entrance along with the other rocks found blocking the entrance to other pathways which can only be broken by using Earthen Heart skills, the correct one prompted as a hint by the Master. An interesting case of Developer's Foresight happens here as the hint for the Earthen Heart skills is worded differently between Lei, Hong/Sammo and Yun.
  • Trial of Time: Sundown's trial. A horse found on the southern path towards the Archon's Roost only appears when Sundown is in the party and interacting with the horse will cause it to run away and lead the party to the trial via a hidden path. Attempts to enter the trial without Sundown in the party will have the entrance to the trial obscured by tree branches and inaccessible.
  • Trial of Keys: Oboro's trial and a similar case to Pogo's and the Earthen Heart Master's. The trial can be entered by anyone but Oboro is needed for a ninja enemy called Shadows to spawn as they drop keys that are needed to proceed. If a key is obtained, Oboro is removed from the party and the party returns to the Trial of Keys, the party members cannot use the keys themselves and require Oboro to unlock the doors.
  • Trial of Power: Masaru's trial. The trial is blocked by a mini-boss called the Apophisphilo who can only be fought if Masaru is in the party. Once defeated, the trial is unlocked permanently regardless of the party.
  • Trial of Heart: Akira's trial which is more like "Only those with the Powers May Pass". Akira is needed to enter the trial and unlike other examples, this is done by having him use his Teleport command to flee from battle. The chance it will happen is random where Akira will find himself accidentally being teleported into the trial. As the trial cannot be re-entered, Akira will always be in the party during the trial by default due to his Teleport command.
  • Trial of Wisdom: Cube's trial which might be better described as Only Smart People May Pass. Entering without Cube in the party will have the party forcibly expelled from the trial.

P to U

• Pacifist Run: One of the possible ways to beat the Twilight of Edo Japan chapter.
• Painting the Medium:
  • In the Definitive version of the fan translation, every level has its own font for displaying dialogue. For instance, the Cowboy chapter's text looks like an old-west sign, the Twilight of Edo Japan chapter's text looks like Japanese calligraphy, and Oersted's text gradually becomes more and more distorted after his Start of Darkness. In the Final chapter, everyone speaks using their respective chapter's font.
  • In the remake, Captain Square uses the exact same chiptune music as the original game (whereas every other track was re-recorded) and bitcrushed voice clips.
• Peaceful in Death: The Shifu dies this way, knowing that he has avenged the deaths of two of his students and the last one will carry on his martial arts for generations.
• Percent Damage Attack: A poisoned character loses a percentage of their current health every few turns. A boss-level enemy at high health can lose a couple hundred hitpoints per poison tick, but once they get to critical health it'll start doing Scratch Damage.
• Permanently Missable Content:
  • The seven initial chapters can be replayed after completion and have their results changed, thus allowing the player to find secrets they might have missed in their first playthrough, but only until the eighth chapter is unlocked and cleared. Afterwards the chapter selection screen will become the Final chapter protagonist selection screen, making it impossible to replay any of the previous chapters without starting a new save file. This is averted in the remake, where starting the Final Chapter is presented as a seperate option and you can replay any of the previous chapters whenever you like.
  • In the Final Chapter, any treasure chest(s) the player doesn't open in Akira's dungeon stays inaccessible for the rest of the playthrough after the characters leave, as there's no way to reenter it after leaving. At least the Infinity +1 Sword inside it must be acquired before the way out of the place appears.
• Play as a Boss: Oersted's Final Chapter has you play as the Odio incarnations of each timeline to kill the heroes.
• Plant Person: When Odio reveals his true form to you at the final battle, you can see that he appears as a giant face made out of greens.
• Playable Epilogue: Available in only one chapter, the Distant Future. While every other story ends right after defeating their last boss, Distant Future only ends once Cube gets Darthe a cup of coffee. Until then, they're free to explore the entire ship without fear of getting attacked by the now-dead Behemoth, and can use codes to access the few rooms that weren't visited as part of the plot to get some more backstory on the crew of the Cogito Ergo Sum.
• Playboy Bunny: In the remake, a few of them can be seen in the audience at the top of Max Morgan's arena in the Present Day chapter.
• Player Nudge: In the Distant Future chapter, when Cube is trying to find a way to access and confront the Mother Computer OD-10, if the player hasn't found a way to do so yet, Darthe will call and ask Cube if there's something functionally unnecessary on the ship, yet connected to OD-10 in some way. The answer is the Captain Square game in the break room.
• Point of No Continues: A very rare inversion of this trope during Masaru's chapter. Normally, losing to an opponent just takes you back to the "Game Over" screen where you have to load a previous save in order to continue from where you previously saved (thankfully, the remake has an autosave feature). However, losing to Odie O'Bright, the chapter's final boss, brings up a "Continue?" prompt and start a countdown voiced by a narrator like in Street Fighter II. You can actually continue your game and restart the final battle directly without loading a save.
• Point of No Return:
  • Pogo loses access to his village halfway through his chapter. This doesn't lock him out of Item Crafting due to two crafter cavemen being present in the Wild Lands, but he does lose access to a minigame that grants crafting materials and will need to get them as loot or enemy drops instead.
  • Entering the Indomitable Fist Fortress's final room prevents the Shifu and disciple from leaving. If all the optional fights in the fortress were skipped, fighting the Indomitable Fist Elite will be the only way the Shifu's disciple can obtain the sufficient experience to be a match for Ou Di Wan Lee.
  • Beating the sixth opponent in the Present Day chapter brings up an Ominous Save Prompt and follows it up with the chapter boss, forcing a save reload to refight any of the opponents (though as this feature was added in the remake, this is only apparent there).
  • After finding Matsu in the bar late into the Near Future chapter and reading his mind, the game promptly progresses to the finale with no other chances to explore the overworld, also locking out item synthesis with Tobei.
  • In the original SFC version, finishing the Middle Ages chapter will lock you into the Finale, with no way to repeat past chapters unless a new game is started. Upon speaking to Odio during the Finale, the final battle sequences will commence with no chance to recruit any missing party members or complete anymore dungeons.
• Power Copying:
  • Masaru. Each time he gets hit by a wrestler's signature moves, he learns that move immediately; it's actually possible to have him defeat a wrestler using that wrestler's Signature Move. He states that this was a practice he pretty much invented recently, as no one else had the idea of doing so as well.
  • The Earthen Heart successors, sort of as the Shifu is teaching them the attacks to begin with. Any of them (whichever one doesn't die) will learn all of the Shifu's attacks anyway, but you can influence which ones they learn first during the training sessions. Beat one up with only the Tiger and Dragon's Rebuke, for example, and they'll learn the Tiger and Dragon's Rebuke when they next level. Switch to beating them with Wise Fox's Grace after that, and they'll learn Wise Fox's Grace next, etc. Putting this kind of influencing, however, is vital for them to unlock all of the Shifu's skills earlier, because otherwise, they will need to be learned through level-up which is quite limited in the Imperial China chapter.
• Powerful, but Inaccurate: This is the main gimmick behind multi-hit moves. The more times a move strikes, the more likely it is for each individual hit to miss, but if most of them do connect, it'll either deal ridiculous damage to a single target or spread it out among a large group of enemies. If an opponent is paralyzed, all hits are guaranteed to connect from multi-hit moves, easily racking up 999 damage.
• Prehistoria: The fittingly named Prehistory chapter takes place in an era of cavemen and dinosaurs, making it chronologically the first chapter. It's so primitive that spoken language isn't even a concept yet.
• Present Day: The aptly-titled Present Day chapter is the only chapter taking place in modern times (read: the 90s), as the Near Future and Distant Future chapters take place in the future, and all the others take place in the past.
• Press X to Die:
  • The airlock in the Distant Future chapter. You can open both doors of the airlock at the same time, which throws Cube out into the vacuum of space. Yes, even after you quarantine OD-10.
  • Abandoning the mission in the Twilight of Edo Japan chapter is functionally this; no matter what happens, you will die eventually.
  • If you play as Oersted/Odio in the Final Chapter and you're in the verge of losing, you can use "Armageddon" for the worst ending.
• Protagonist Journey to Villain: The Middle Ages chapter sees its protagonist Oersted lose everything he ever believed in, fall into misanthropic insanity, become the Lord of Dark, and declare war on all of existence.
• Pro Wrestling Is Real: The Present Day chapter, where Masaru can fight two wrestlers and gain their skills.
• Psychic Powers: Akira has them. Telepathy, Telekinesis, Teleportation, Pyrokinesis, Cryokinesis, Vitakinesis, and various illusion-casting and physical-power-amplifying powers besides. He's got 'em all.
• Pulling Your Child Away: In the Middle Ages chapter, Oersted starts off hailed as a hero and a champion with one child proving to admire him greatly. Following an incident where he is tricked into killing the king, he becomes shunned and labeled the Lord of Dark. The very same kid refuses to accept these claims as true and attempts to run up to Oersted only to be pulled away by his parents who demand Oersted to leave them alone.
• Punched Across the Room:
  • A Running Gag in the Prehistory chapter regarding Pogo and Gori.
  • In the Imperial China chapter, the Earthen Heart Shifu's student kills Ou Di Wan Lee with a roundhouse kick that sends him flying dozens of feet through the air. He plows through the back of his stone throne without stopping, and keeps going until he hits the massive gong at the back of the room with bone-shattering force.
• Punny Name:
  • All of the Lord of Dark's names in each chapter are all some variant or spelling of his name, "Odio". With the exception of the Middle Ages, because you are playing as what would later become Odio.
  • Cube's name is one in the original Japanese: Kato first says that since the robot is round, he'll name it Koro. "Koro" is both a very common name for dogs in Japan, but also means "to roll", which is why Kato associates it to the robot's shape. Then Kato decides that name would be too common, and goes for the opposite with the name "Cube". The fan translation attempts to preserve the same idea by having the initial name be Rover (both a dog's name and a reference to the treads on the robot's feet), while the remake's localization goes with Roundy.
• Puzzle Boss:
  • The Near Future chapter has the LH Combat Unit W1, which has ungodly stats and will dodge most of your attacks. The easiest way to defeat it is to attack it from behind where its liquefacted human tank is, which will likely cause it to counterattack with a special move, which kills it instantly.
  • In the Distant Future chapter, the entire Captain Square game is this. Brute forcing the levels is possible but it only helps so much as the enemies have gimmicks such as being able to constantly heal from terrain, overwhelm the Armored But Frail Captain Square through sheer numbers or having immunities to all of Captain Square's attacks. For example in the Earth stage from Captain Square, you need to defeat a Fire Elemental and a bunch of Water Elementals. The Fire Elemental can kill you with one hit and are immune to all of Captain Square's attacks, but if pushed onto Water panels (which Water elementals make with their attacks), it will die from Water damage.
  • The second boss in the Archon's Roost from the Middle Ages chapter. Attacks that strike from the front will not deal enough damage to kill her (as her attacks sap your health and Strength), but Oersted has one attack that can strike from behind without moving, which can kill her easily.
  • In the final chapter, especially in the remake, Pogo and Oboro can become this if you've over-levelled them in their respective chapters, as you have to fight them one-on-one in order to recruit them. Thankfully, Lucrece Palace has a freely available Parasite Sword that you can use to one-shot one of them, unless you pilfered it as Oersted in the previous chapter, in the SNES Original.
  • The Death Prophet in the Final chapter is a Superboss that appears if you flee from 100 fights, can tank your strongest attacks, is immune to the game-breaking Cola Bottle, and can easily turn your entire party to stone if you lack the proper Cosmic equipment or Cube (who is naturally immune to the stone status) is not in your party. But, like the LH Combat Unit W1, he can be easily defeated by attacking his weak-point, his tail. The problem is that he always starts the fight positioned on the top right corner of the battlefield, refuses to budge and you have to position your character diagonally upwards from the tail in order for the attack to work. So the puzzle involves not just figuring out his weak point, but also finding out a way to get him to move in a proper position for you to be able to attack it.
• Rage Quit: If you are on the verge of losing a boss battle in Oersted/Odio's finale chapter, you can choose the "Armageddon" option to reduce everything to nothingness.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: The party you will end up forming in the Final chapter (if you choose not to play as Oersted) will consist of leading characters from the other chapters, and as such, can potentially include a caveman with no grasp of spoken language, a kung fu master (who can be either a hot-blooded former bandit Action Girl, an Acrofatic Big Eater former thief, or a softspoken former pickpocket), a stern shinobi, a taciturn Wild West gunslinger, a modern-day street fighter, a Japanese Delinquent with Psychic Powers, and/or a robot.
• Random Encounters: In a game that otherwises uses Pre-existing Encounters of various kinds, random battles first show up in the Middle Ages chapter as part of its resemblance to similar fantasy role-playing games of the time. These are retained when Lucrece is transformed into the Dominion of Hate.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Unlike the other characters, Akira delivers one to Oersted if he is the Final Chapter protagonist.
  Akira: ...Know what your problem is? You blamed everyone else. Said it was them or gods or fate that made you what you are. But it was you! Just you! Yeah, people can suck. We can be selfish-look out only for ourselves. But if you focus only on the bad-judge them at their worst, well... You've already made up your mind, haven't you? Everything else is just an excuse!
• Reed Snorkel: Oboromaru and some patrolling guards use one to breathe underwater in the moat of Ode Castle.
• Reforged into a Minion:
  • The Twilight of Edo Japan chapter in the remake has Clockwork Gennai mention that he's going to replace the Prisoner's insides with his latest creation the next morning, presumably so the Ode can control him.
  • The fate of Watanabe's father in the Near Future chapter, who was liquefied and turned into the LH Combat Unit W1, who Akira's party was forced to destroy.
• Rescue Romance:
  • Happens in the Prehistory chapter. Beru falls in love with Pogo after he protects her from the Kuu tribe and then rescues her from Odo.
  • Deconstructed in the Middle Ages chapter. This is Oersted's overall goal but par for the course in this chapter it goes dramatically awry. This trope is the only thing that Streibough beats Oersted at, and the consequences are dire.
• Riddle for the Ages: After Odeo's defeat, the liquefied humans drown the conspirators, and then attempt to swallow Akira...cut to the epilogue, where it's never shown how Akira escaped in one piece.
• Retraux: The Captain Square game in the Distant Future chapter evokes classic arcade games, including compressed voice clips in the remake.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge:
  • The Earthen Heart Shifu launches one on the Indomitable Fist Fortress after its students attack his own school and kill two of the Shifu's students. He attempts to do it on his own, but will be joined at some point by his surviving pupil. They then proceed to kick nine kinds of ass through all of the Indomitable Fist's various students (thugs and assassins mostly) right up to the most senior circle of students and the chapter's Big Bad, the school's master Ou Di Wan Lee.
  • Oersted, now Odio, went on one offscreen sometime after the end of his chapter. This ended in the deaths of every human in Lucrece.
• Robot Buddy: Cube. Unusually for the trope, he is also the main character of his chapter, but he's still Kato and Darthe's friend.
• Robot Me: Oboro, with some guesswork and a strange item dropped by Clockwork Gennai, can find a blank robot and bestow it with his likeness and a few of his moves.
• Robot War: Occurred in the backstory of the Distant Future chapter. Darthe, who has lost many friends to the battle robots, is particularly bitter over it. Once he and Cube take down OD-10, he relaxes his grudge, befriends Cube, and retires from the military to help make medical robots.
• Role-Reversal Boss: In the Final Chapter you can pick who you want your protagonist to be, including Oersted, who you've just seen be Driven to Villainy. Should you pick Oersted, or rather, Odio, the scenario will completely change. It's revealed that the bosses of the first seven chapters were all different incarnations of Odio, and you must perform a reverse Boss Rush, playing as each version of Odio and killing the heroes off.
• Room Full of Crazy: Upon Kirk's death, Rachel takes to dragging his corpse into her room and laying it in her bed, pretending he's just sleeping. There's also a crazy text document draft readable on her computer terminal.
  "Tell me what to do Kirk I know you're in there I know this isn't happening it's not real it's not I did what you wanted why won't you speak to me Kirk please Kirk Kirk Kirk"
• Rule of Symbolism: During the ending of the Twilight of Edo Japan chapter, while Oboro and the prisoner watch the morning sun rise under Japan, clouds form on the sky depending on the number of people Oboro killed, clearly representing blemishes on Oboro's conscience for committing murder. If you went full genocide and killed all 100 people in the castle, the sky darkens and a strong thunderstorm starts, adding some very ominous tones to the chapter's ending.
• Rule of Three: The Earthen Heart Shifu takes on three students, and while training them, he focuses on improving three of their stats (first defense, then speed, and finally strength). However, each training session consists of four sparring rounds, meaning at least one student will inevitably be given the short stick each time. This gets the underdeveloped students killed.
• Running Gag:
  • The whole Watanabe thing, where someone (mostly always a father) dies shortly after it's brought up or said. It happens once in every chapter. Some are more obscure, like the antenna in the Distant Future chapter, and a way to trigger an audience member getting mauled in the Wrestling chapter. Or one is completely missable, like Wan Tan from the Imperial China chapter, which can only be seen if you picked Hong as the successor.
  • In the Infiltrator chapter, Oboromaru learns of the password system, which is also demonstrated when one of the samurai just blurts out "potato", outing him as an intruder. You can proceed to use "potato" when asked the password to start a fight almost every time.
• Samurai Ponytail: The Ronin-type enemy and their palette-swaps sport one.
• Sapient Ship: Cube's chapter; also A.I. Is a Crapshoot.
• Say My Name: Done repeatedly in the Cowboy chapter, particularly with Sundown Kid and Billy.
• Scare Chord: One plays in the Distant Future chapter when it's revealed what happened to Kirk's body; Rachel took it to her room and pretends that he's just sleeping.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: In the Twilight of Edo Japan chapter, you can turn around at the starting segment of the castle and abandon the mission. Doing so will have you labeled as a traitor and subsequently hunted down by your fellow ninja until you ultimately die.
• Sdrawkcab Name: As written in the artwork, the title is vertically mirrored with the center on the A, creating a perfect palindrome (LIVE A ƎVI⅃). The fact that "live" backwards spells "evil" is not a coincidence.
• Secret Final Campaign: If you thought you were done after clearing the seven available characters, you'll be surprised to find that there is an eighth. Once you beat that character's story, you still aren't done. You have one more story to clear with any of the eight characters acting as protagonist. Just know that Oersted won't provide a happy ending if you have him serve as the protag.
• Secretly Dying:
  • Hasshe suddenly collapses and dies of plague immediately after the party kills the false Lord of Dark. His illness is so secret that there is no hint of it before this happens.
  • Kaori is apparently suffering from a terminal disease, as she says she knows she won’t get better and so is willing to become liquefied in order to pilot Steel Titan and live forever with Akira through other means like how Taroimo became a robot. Even before then, reading her mind reveals some rather morbid thoughts.
• Sheathe Your Sword: Secret pacifist solutions to fights are plot-relevant in two parts of the game:
  • The Post-Final Boss of the Western chapter is Mad Dog, making good on his promise to have a duel to the death with Sundown once Success was saved. Noticing that the "Flee" command isn't grayed out is what leads to the chapter's alternate ending, where Sundown refuses to shoot and Mad Dog leaves him be, with them having one more shootout out in the desert after the credits (this time with Mad Dog surviving like in his first battle).
  • After defeating the Purity of Odio, the Lord of Dark is reduced to just his form as Oersted, and demands that you strike him down. Accepting leads to an easy Post-Final Boss and the neutral ending. Denying his request and backtracking to the statue room lets him regain his strength and pisses him off, starting the second portion of the final boss sequence that leads into the true ending.
• Shoo Out the Clowns: The Middle Ages chapter's Watanabe scene is in the very first scene of the chapter as well as some humourous dialogue from the villagers seeing you off, and it's the darkest of the eight main chapters.
• Shout-Out:
  • Prehistory chapter:
    • Gori's constant snickering is very similar to Muttley's.
    • Zaki's tribe uses 'cars' very similar to The Flintstones.
    • The primitive man's Infinity +1 Sword? A simple coke bottle.
    • Odo being worshiped by the cavemen as a god is highly similar to Daikyouryu no Jidai.
    • In one secret optional area you can find a black monolith. Using a Bone in front of it gives an item which raises IQ tremendously, referencing the beginning where the Monolith teaches the tribe of apes on how to use tools, for which they do with bones as makeshift weapons. Pogo even throws a bone in the air, similar to the famous Match Cut from the movie.
  • Imperial China Chapter:
    • Hong's original Japanese name Sammo is most likely a reference to Hong Kong actor and martial artist Sammo Hung.
    • While performing the Heavenly Peaks Descent, Yun can shout, "ATATATATA!" as a Kiai in the Japanese dub, referencing both Bruce Lee and Kenshiro's signature battle cries.
    • The whole chapter can also be a reference to Journey to the West: The Shifu is no doubt a stand-in for Tang Sanzang/Tripitaka, the master accompanied with three disciples, but he's a lot more badass; Sun Wukong/Monkey is represented by Lei, who's the most eager to fight and short-tempered, and previously living in a forest like an animal, her surname is basically the Japanese translation of Wukong reversed (She, however, does not count as a Monkey King Lite); Zhu Bajie/Pigsy is represented by Hong who's fat and a Big Eater; and finally, Yun represents Sha Wujing/Sandy, if only because he's the most unassuming. The trailer for the Successor chapter for the 2022 remake also goes along with this, by introducing the students in the same order of the disciples that joined Sanzang (Lei/Wukong -> Hong/Bajie -> Yun/Wujing).
    • In the remake, one of the NPCs will declare that a man who hasn't eaten a soup dumpling is never a full man.
  • Twilight of Edo chapter:
    • The young monk that summons the folding screen tiger is a reference to the Japanese tale "Ikkyu-san and the Tiger". The young monk lamenting "I couldn't keep him tied up!" references how the Lord in the story tasks the young monk to tie up the tiger picture that was on his folding screen, claiming that the tiger was real.
  • Wild West chapter:
    • "Sundown Kid" is a take on the name of a famous outlaw in American history who has had at least one well-known film made about his life.
    • The four guys in the bar are Wayne, Clint, Gene (wonder if he's also known as the Waco Kid?), and Gibson (who's not as much of a Maverick as you'd expect). In the remake, Gene and Gibson are instead known as James and Cesar, respectively.
    • Gene may also be a nod to Gene Autry.
    • Billy and Annie are likely named after Billy the Kid and Annie Oakley, respectively.
    • The description for Sundown's default equipped Well-worn Boots reads "They've walked a thousand miles, and they'll walk a thousand more."
    • "Sundown Kid! Come back, Sundown Kid!"
    • Pike is possibly named after American frontiersman Zebulun Pike, namesake of Pike’s Peak in Colorado.
    • Sundown's best weapon being a .44 Magnum is because it was based on the .44-40 Winchester handgun/rifle cartridge (which was both powerful and successful) and inspired by "Dirty" Harry Callahan.
    • One of Mad Dog's moves is called "Ride the Lighting".
    • The ending message of this chapter: "On the road again...".
    • The Game Over message of this chapter: "Bury Me Out on the Lone Prairie", references the western song of the same name.
    • O. Dio's last words after being defeated in his boss fight during the remake are "I'll never sleep... I'll never die...", which is taken from the last passage of Blood Meridian, and the barman recalls the same quote about him after O. Dio's demise.
    • Instead of giving Annie the Frying Pan to throw, you can instead equip it for some extra protection, bringing to mind The Man With No Name's (and Marty McFly's) bulletproof vest scheme with a boilerplate. Bonus points for Sundown wearing a poncho too, and gets trapped in the past, with him literally aiming to get "back to the future".
  • Present Day chapter:
    • Max Morgan = Hulk Hogan. His signature Max Bomber is also a reference to the Axe Bomber Hogan used as a finisher in Japan.
    • Odie O'Bright is a likely reference to wrestler Gary Albright. Design-wise, he resembles a bald Geese Howard wearing Akuma's prayer beads or Sagat wholesale.
    • Jackie Iaukea is a reference to Hawaiian pro wrestler King Curtis Iaukea.
    • The six rivals in the Present chapter are arrayed on a blue background, in the same style as Mega Man (Classic) or Street Fighter, where the latter is more leaned towards in the remake with a heavily stylised "Choose your fighter" screen.
  • Near Future chapter:
    • Akira's "Elbow Strike" resembles Mitsuharu Misawa's Rolling Elbow, and the kids are all watching a wrestling match featuring a "Misawa." Yuki also namedrops Misawa's Tiger Driver.
    • Decking yourself out in Rider accessories. Besides its namesake, it's just full of lovingly corny, Japanese retro sci-fi in general. The opening, with a black screen before two eyes appear is straight out of the original manga for Mazinger Z and Shin Mazinger with Akira's question towards the player is near-identical to Kouji's own question except asking what [you] would do if you could read minds instead of piloting a giant robot. The climax of the chapter even has Steel Titan rising out of the park lake which parts in half, just like the original intro of Mazinger Z.
    • One of the body equipment options is a Jushin wrestling shirt.
    • Steel Titan's design is highly reminiscent of Giant Robo.
    • If you play the organ in Akira's chapter, he might play the Chocobo Theme.
    • Akira's unique chime consists of four quick metal sounds that are followed up by two quick metal sounds, which is very similar to the opening of The Terminator.
    • A psychic child named Akira. This one should be obvious. The chapter even has horrific amounts of Body Horror regarding the liquefied humans, and this Akira is out to stop it akin to the first one trying to stop a mutating Tetsuo.
  • Distant Future chapter:
    • Cube's name is not a reference to a shape (particularly since he's spherical), but to Stanley Kubrick, director of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
    • One of the crew members is named Kirk after Captain Kirk from Star Trek: The Original Series. Ironically, the character himself is absolutely nothing like The Kirk and is a hot-blooded McCoy.
    • The passenger is named Darthe after Darth Vader from Star Wars.
    • The alien monster is a fierce, green quadruped nicknamed "Behemoth" — a cameo from Final Fantasy.
  • Middle Ages chapter: The best solo healing item is the Alice Biscuit, which the description notes would be pretty good for a tea party.

• Shown Their Work: O. Dio is described as the only survivor of the Seventh Cavalry, Custer's unit. The sheriff of Success notes with confusion that he'd heard there were no survivors. In real life, the only survivor of the Seventh Cavalry was, in fact, one of the horses. This also turns out to be O. Dio's true identity.
• Skyward Scream: The end of the Imperial China chapter has the successor of the Earthen Heart shifu scream this to the heavens once the shifu passes on.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: The Final chapter protagonist provides one after the final battle towards Odio, about why they always win and why he keeps losing. Akira of special note breaks out in a "The Reason You Suck" Speech.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Almost all of the chapters start on the cynicism side before sliding towards idealism as the story progresses. The Middle Ages chapter, on the other hand, starts wildly idealistic before taking a hard fall down the slippery slope into cynicism. As for the final chapter, it depends on whether or not Oersted is chosen as the player character; the game can either swing back into idealism with the heroes of the previous chapters banding together to defeat him, or crash straight into cynicism with Odio destroying them all.
• Small Role, Big Impact: A little boy still believes that Odio is still a good person. So long as just one person believes, then Oersted can't fully turn evil.
• Smash Mook: The Headhunter has only one strategy: move towards the nearest party member and hit them with its Wizenblade attack. Considering that it's one of the game's superbosses, this is really all it needs to give you a hard time.
• Smash the Symbol:
  • The giant rock on top of Mount Aspiration in the Imperial China chapter is an interesting case as it symbolises the future of the Earthen Heart kung-fu through its destruction rather than its intact existence. The Shifu fails to break it in the beginning, convincing him that he needs to find a successor before his art dies with him. Said successor manages to split the rock clean in half at the end, showing that the art is now in good hands. Played straight later on when the successor kicks Ou Di Wan Lee right through his throne and into the giant gong at the back of the room, ending his life and tyranny once and for all.
  • In the remake, the end result of the Boss Rush has the Odio incarnation statues smashed to pieces.
• The Smurfette Principle:
  • Lei is the only female protagonist. She's only one of two playable female characters in the entire game. On top of that, she's optional; depending on the player's choices in the Imperial China chapter, Hong or Yun could take her place.
  • OD-10 from the Distant Future chapter is the only female Odio incarnation.
• So Long, and Thanks for All the Gear: Characters who leave your party, be it permanently or not, will never return their equipment to your inventory unless you manually unequip them first.
• So Proud of You:
  • In the Imperial China chapter, Shifu's final speech to his successor, after they defeat Ou Di Wan Lee, right before his death includes this.
  • In the remake, during the Distant Future Chapter if you talk to Kato after defeating OD-10, he tells Cube how proud he is of him and how glad he is that he has brought him to this world.
• So What Do We Do Now?: Used in an interesting way in two of the endings. Consumed by hatred, Oersted lashes out at humanity. In the Final chapter, you can play as him, controlling each of the chapters' bosses and gleefully crushing the protagonists. If Oersted wins, after indulging in empty spite, there is nothing left for him to do but aimlessly wander his world alone. If the protagonists win but personally kill Oersted, they're stuck in Lucrece and won't ever return to their time periods.
• The Speechless:
  • Of the protagonists, Pogo (the earliest, chronologically) and Cube (the latest, chronologically) can't speak English, though Pogo does later learn a single word and grunts his name when levelled up.
  • Odo doesn't say anything other than roars, being essentially a feral beast. Odeo also doesn't speak for some reason.
• Start of Darkness: The Middle Ages chapter for Oersted.
• Static Role, Exchangeable Character:
  • In the Imperial China chapter, whichever student you trained the most is the Sole Survivor of the attack on the dojo. They become the Earthen Heart successor, and represent the Imperial China era in the Final chapter.
  • In the Final Chapter, you choose one of the previous heroes to continue through, with the other heroes being recruitable companion characters. This affects your interactions with the final boss. Choosing Oersted however puts you on a very different route.
• Status Effects: Petrification, Paralysis, Sleep, Poison, Incapitation, Dismissal (In which the character disappears from battle and cannot be revived). Along with these, there is also Intoxication (can only use your weakest attack and randomizes movement on the battle grid), Restraint (cannot use arm-based attacks), and Snare (cannot move or use leg-based attacks). There are also some that can only be inflicted on foes.
• The Stinger: Particularly in the Caveman chapter. It ends with Pogo speaking the first words mankind ever spoke. Namely, Love. And then Gori snickers. Most chapters have a stinger of their own, but it's mostly just a 'fin' screen.
• Stone Wall:
  • Masaru (but only in the Final chapter.). When he can level up, he does so quickly, and his HP and defenses shoot through the roof. It's rare to see him ever die once leveled, even without the best armor.
  • Several "enemies" such as rocks, screen doors and a giant table exist on the field purely to get in your way and don't attack nor move, but it's possible to defeat them to clear footspace.
• Story Branch Favoritism: In the Imperial China chapter, you have time for four one-on-one training sessions with your pupils before a rival school attacks and kills the two students you've neglected the most. Ties are resolved in the order Hong > Lei > Yun.
• Street Urchin: Yun, who was forced to steal from others by Sun Tzu Wang, including his own grandmother. Once Shifu beats up his tormentor, he takes Yun in as a student.
• Strike Me Down with All of Your Hatred!: Oersted, should he not be chosen as the main character in the Final Chapter, will ask the party to kill him after his Purity of Odio form is defeated. Doing so results in the Neutral Ending.
• Stripperiffic: Beru, wearing only a Seashell bra. Zaki's even worse, with a lizard biting into his crotch he even throws at people for an attack.
• Stupidity Is the Only Option:
  • After being banished into exile, Pogo wanders the barren wilderness and comes across a cave to take shelter in for the night. Unfortunately, it's the same cave that Zaki and his Kuu tribe henchmen were using to think of another plan.
  • Oersted suddenly wakes up in a cold sweat. And with Streibough standing next to him? He then walks out to find a demon in the throne room... doing absolutely nothing. You can't even tell the guards right outside about this, who just question why you're up this late or leave the throne room since there's a wall of guards blocking the exit. Trying to wake Uranus won't work either since he's deep into a nightmare, but only wakes up when it's too late.
• Superboss: There are a number of extra-tough optional bosses spread around the chapters:
  • The Prehistory chapter has the Mammoth King, a tanky lava-spewing mammoth who starts stampeding around the Wild Lands after Pogo reaches Kuu Village. Beating him grants Pogo the Fang of the King accessory, and it can drop the powerful Cola Bottle that can be equipped or used as an attack item.
  • Twilight of Edo Japan features Lord Iwama, a Legendary Carp in the castle moat who drops the Suijin Scale, and the ghost of Majin Ryunosuke, who guards the Muramasa, Oboromaru's alternate strongest sword for the chapter. There's also Hayate, Oboro's master from the chapter opening, who comes for you if you abandon the mission and kill all the Enma Trackers sent to kill you, and is capable of using all of Oboro's moves (with much greater effect). Unlike every other superboss, there's literally no reason to fight him other than bragging rights, as even if you beat him he blows you up in a cutscene with no way to avoid it, ending the game.
  • In the Dominion of Hatred, there are five secret bosses who drop the powerful Cosmic equipment when found and defeated. There are a few other optional bosses fought as part of the trial dungeons, but they aren't as difficult.
• Super Robot: Steel Titan, in the Near Future chapter.
• Surprisingly Creepy Moment: The Prehistory chapter is definitely the game's comedy chapter with a young caveboy and his farting, poop-slinging gorilla sidekick who both beat each other up on a regular friendly basis, an attractive cavewoman whose singing can literally kill, and a brash rival from an opposing clan whose strongest attack is throwing his pet lizard who's also covering his crotch as a loincloth. Then you get to the end and you come face-to-face with a bloodthirsty dinosaur who completely sticks out from the cartoony animal enemy designs, scared said rival tribe into sacrificing many animals and humans to it as food, and eats the evil tribe leader for good measure.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • If you have Sundown as your main hero in the final dungeon and attempt to recruit Masaru in the remake, Masaru decides to not fight him. Reason? Sundown is a cowboy with a gun; all of Masaru's martial arts will not save him from a bullet to a vital spot.
  • As badass and Hot-Blooded Akira and Matsu are along with having Taroimo (a robotic turtle with built-in weapons and super strength) when confronting The Conspirators where only one of them out of the three can fight, Matsu knew it would be a bad idea to fight them head-on due to General Yamazaki's influence over his army.
• Sword of Plot Advancement: Brion, in the Middle Ages and Final chapters. It is required to enter the Forbidden Land.
• Sympathy for the Devil: At the end of the Golden Ending, all of the characters offer varying levels of empathy towards Oersted, either noting that they understand what they're going through, attempting to offer some words of wisdom or simply trying to physically console him. The only exception is Akira, who instead tears into him about how he has no one to blame but himself for succumbing to despair and taking it out on the rest of humanity.
• Ten Paces and Turn: During the Cowboy chapter, Sundown and his rival Mad Dog step out for a five-pace duel early on. They turn, take five steps, turn again... and both shoot hidden members of the Crazy Bunch gang. They then put their rivalry on hold for the much more pressing issue of an impending gang attack.
• Terminally Dependent Society: The Cogito Ergo Sum, run by Decimus, the computer system of the Distant Future chapter. When it sees the crew being dysfunctional, it chooses to kill them all because they made its purpose of keeping Harmony impossible.
• Theme Naming:
  • Most of the Success townies in the Western chapter are named after famous outlaws or actors associated with the Wild West.
  • During the second visit to the Archon's Roost in the Middle Ages chapter, all of the new enemies and mid-bosses are named after various phobias.
  • The names of each boss in the first seven chapters have some variant of "Odio" in it. However, it might not be in their enemy name. It's not a coincidence.
• Theme Music Power-Up: Pretty much once per chapter, but best embodied by Steel Titan.
• Then Let Me Be Evil: Oersted chooses to become the demon people have labeled him to be.
• Through His Stomach: Pogo wins Beru's affection and smooches by bringing her Meaty Bones.
• Thrown Out the Airlock: It nearly happens to Cube when Rachel goes mad and OD-10 attempts to gaslight her into launching herself out of the ship, though Kato manages to catch his poor armless robot just in time. Later, you get free access to the console, and opening both the airlock and the door to it at the same time ejects Cube out of the spaceship and is an instant Game Over.
• Thug Dojo: The villains of the Imperial China chapter are the Indomitable Fist, a brutal school of Martial Artists led by Ou Di Wan Li that terrorizes the populace while espousing cruelty and social darwinism.
• Time Crash: Starting the Final Chapter has your chosen protagonist suddenly pulled out of their ending and thrown into a black void. Running up causes ghostly images of all 8 eras to appear and the monsters running around the ruins of Lucrece range from wooly mammoths that Pogo fought a couple millenia ago to the robots and flying warships from Akira's time. Items found throughout the land also include some pieces of equipment or consumables from nearly all the previous eras as well.
• Timed Mission: The bulk of the Cowboy chapter is finding and setting traps to take out as many mooks as possible before they arrive at the saloon, thus reducing the enemies fighting with O. Dio. After eight bells, the boss fight will start. The Dungeon of Time in the Final chapter also runs on eight bells, with your goal being to get the weapon at the end and leave before the eighth bell. Should you fail, you'll be attacked by four strong, unique enemies, though beating them awards one of the best equipment items and eliminates the timer.
• Title Theme Drop: The game's title theme reappears in the Final chapter as the random battle theme.
• To Be Continued: Happens after the credits for the Middle Ages chapter, following Oersted declaring himself as the Lord of Dark, Odio and setting up the events of Dominion of Hate.
• Toilet Humor:
  • One of Gori's attacks is him throwing his poo at the opponent. Just like a real ape!
  • The Near Future chapter is full of this, where Akira can sit on several toilets which often cause different events to occur, one mandatory event has him read Doc Tobei's mind while he's in an unpleasant experience on his shop's toilet, and Akira can wash his hands in various spots.
• Tomato Surprise: O. Dio is the last survivor of the regiment that was wiped out, yes. What you don't know is that the last survivor was a horse, who was possessed by the spirits of all those who were slain.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: They never meet per se, but amongst the playable females, Lei (tomboy) and Beru (girly).
• Took a Level in Badass: At least half of the playable characters become badasses over the course of their chapters. The rest were badass to begin with.
• Trailers Always Spoil:
  • Promotional materials for the Switch remake prominently show the secret Middle Ages chapter and its protagonist, plus scenes from the final chapter which reveal the heroes are eventually going to team up. One prominent scene for Oersted in the trailers is him confronting Streibough at the end of his chapter, although his identity is partially obscured in shadow, his voiced line in this scene indicates he was a friend of Oersted.
  • The chapter-specific trailers all spoil the boss of their specific chapter, many of which are normally a surprise. In particular the Prehistory trailer spoils the fact that its boss is a surviving dinosaur.
• A Tragedy of Impulsiveness: Late one night, Oersted sees Streibough (who's supposed to be dead) walking out the door, and Oersted follows him to find the Lord of Dark standing in the throne room. Oersted goes up and kills the Lord of Dark, who goes down easily. However, it turns out that it was just an illusion, and Oersted actually struck down his own king. Had Oersted just stopped and asked why the Lord of Dark was in the good king's throne room or was able to tell the guards outside about this, this tragedy might have been averted.
• Trash the Set:
  • The Wild West’s chapter boss battle takes place in the main road of Success Town with several items in the background knocked over. Justified, since the Crazy Bunch did just storm through earlier.
  • The Captain Square game in Distant Future gets overwritten for the battle against OD-10, where the ground tiles are noticeably damaged in the remake.
  • The Final Chapter Dominion of Hate takes place in the ruins of Lucrece, where everything is abandoned and the remake makes the buildings look damaged and run down.
• The Trope Kid: The Sundown Kid. Lampshaded by the bartender who puts his "Wanted!" Poster up, quipping he's clearly much older than a kid.
• Troubled, but Cute: Akira appears this way. His good looks and abilities couple with his tragic past.
• Turn Coat: Streibough, with a Face–Heel Turn. Also fulfills the Forgotten Friend, New Foe trope.
• Two Lines, No Waiting: The game at first appears to just have 7 stories which don't have any direct relation to each other aside from a Running Gag, until the player figures out that the name of each chapter's main antagonist is a variant on "Odio", suggesting a connection. Then after the completion of the Middle Ages chapter, a Time Crash occurs, bringing all 7 main protagonists together to discover that they were fighting incarnations of the Lord of Dark Odio.
• Uncertain Doom: In the original release regarding the Watanabes in the Twilight of Edo Japan chapter, killing the man who notices and manages to kill Watanabe's father removes their scene and has the items from their location missing, indicating their heist was successful but it's left ambiguous if they managed to escape or got caught afterwards. The remake confirms they also escaped just fine if Oboromaru aborts the mission.
• Underground Monkey: Most show up in a majority of the chapters. The Final Chapter's enemies are nothing but this aside from some unique minibosses, with them all spanning from the 7 time periods.
• The Unfought:
  • The chieftain of the Kuu Tribe in the Prehistory chapter, who runs off and is Eaten Alive by the chapter's final boss.
  • The three followers of Odeo in the Near Future chapter are never fought directly, although they do summon the deity to possess the Great Inko Buddha Statue.
• Unstoppable Rage: Several:
  • Masaru, before fighting Odie O'Bright to avenge the combatants O'Bright killed after Masaru merely defeated them in fair combat.
  • In the Near Future chapter, Lawless has to restrain Akira from fighting the Conspirators after he realises the giant robot they just destroyed was actually Watanabe’s dad, who they forcefully turned him into.
  • O. Dio, before fighting Sundown and Mad Dog. It turns out that Dio was a horse possessed by the accumulated rage and hatred of a cavalry that had been wiped out.
  • Oersted, during the scene at the end of the final chapter that leads into the Boss Rush.

• Unwitting Instigator of Doom:
  • Streibough wanted to be a local Card-Carrying Villain so he could take revenge on his rival Oersted. This causes said target to lose his mind, obtain unimaginable power through a string of coincidences, and become a time conqueror. When you meet his ghost later on, he's stuck in shock at the realization that his actions indirectly caused untold death and misery across at least nine different "worlds". Thanks a lot.
  • Alethea's spiteful suicide caused Oersted to forgo kindness and become a Lord of Dark. Thankfully, she realizes how much damage was caused by her actions and actively begs the heroes to defeat Odio and save Oersted.
• Ur-Example: Is probably the earliest example of a fully fleshed-out Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds in video games. Odio was a villain ahead of his time, even by the standards of pre-merge Squaresoft as most villains at the time of this game's release were either Generic Doomsday Villains, Adaptational Villainy, Card Carrying Villains, Well Intentioned Extremists, Giant Space Fleas From Nowhere or all of the above, mostly due to the storytelling limitations at the time. Similarly, it's also one of the first, if not the very first instance of a video game hiding its lore over a seemingly surface-level story, only unraveling its secrets when we learn about Odio's origins. Chrono Trigger did this as well, but was released a year after Live A Live's initial commercial failure, and ironically enough, had a literal Giant Space Flea from Nowhere as its main antagonist.
• Useless Useful Spell: Because there is no EN or MP limits for which attacks can be used, a lot of attacks end up being this where the only thing the player has to worry about is the attack's range, element and casting time. However, some attacks are calculated from a stat that the player might not be expecting, nor does the game explicitly state this.
  • Almost all the starting moves of the protagonists become this once they start learning newer and stronger attacks. Averted with Cube as his default attacks are all he has and he cannot learn new moves outside of accessories obtained from the Near Future or extremely rare drops in the Final Chapter. Downplayed with Akira's physical attacks as Low Kick and Elbow Strike have no charge time and certain enemies in the Near Future go down faster when hit by his physical attacks rather than his special ones.
  • Masaru's Frankensteiner and Tornado Press uses his Special Attack which cannot increase through level-up to determine damage and combined with being a Death or Glory Attack if it misses, the attack will see little use, despite its decent range. It doesn't help that his German Suplex has the same range and damage rating as Frankensteiner except that it uses his much superior Physical Attack stat. Fleetfoot has slightly less range than Tornado Press but it uses Masaru's Vitality stat and has the added chance of interrupting opponent's charged attacks. Averted with Arm Lock where despite using his Special Attack, its crippling effect will have it see some use.
  • Hong's Pork's Second Cooking is this as it deals fixed amounts of damage that cannot be countered or defended against, but is completely random and only goes up to 99 damage at best. However, it can see some use if one wants to defeat the Odio mole first rather than last as the game intends.

V to Y

• Variable Mix:
  • In the Cowboy chapter, the music in the saloon, "Sancho de los Panchos," is played by the in-universe musicians. Since they're citizens of the town, you can send them out to set traps and prepare for the attack, just like everyone else; if you do, their instrument is removed from the BGM until they come back.
  • In the Distant Future, "Unseen Syndrome" (the theme of the Cogito Ergo Sum under OD-10's control). It starts out with just a warbling bassline, adds strange "clanking" sounds once the Behemoth is loose, and then plays "Psycho" Strings once OD-10 reveals its true intentions.
• Vengeance Feels Empty: Odio. When he changes history by killing off the seven protagonists so that he is the winner, he is somewhat pleased with his victory... but becomes depressed. Why? Because he is completely alone with no friends or enemies to interact with and will never know the satisfaction of the pain and despair of those he had destroyed. What's worse is that he had no one else to witness his accomplishment which completely defeats the efforts he made in proving his point.
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: The Archon's Roost in the Middle Ages chapter, a dark cavern with glowing crystals that turns into an ancient ruin as the shrine for the Lord of Dark himself. When Oersted and his party climb up the first time to slay the Lord of Dark, the music with the same name as the dungeon plays. The same music track plays in the Final Chapter as well, when Oersted himself has become the Lord of Dark and the heroes climb up the Archon's Roost the same way as he did.
• Victory Pose: Noticeably added in the remake, alongside quotes for the one who finished off the last enemy.
• Video Game Caring Potential:
  • If you decide to kill everyone in the Twilight of Edo Japan chapter or at least just a certain man, Watanabe's dad avoids getting killed in the chapter because the man who is going to kill him is dead by the time the chapter's Watanabe Scene plays. If Oboro aborts the mission, they'll be shown if spared in the remake. You can also spare any innocent women you come across.
  • The quest to recruit Hong in the Imperial China chapter involves Hoi telling the Shifu to beat Hong up for stealing soup dumplings, leading to a quick fight. Alternatively, showing sympathy by rejecting the first prompt allows the Shifu to foot Hong's bill himself, satisfying Hoi and letting Hong join without a fight.
  • The Imperial China chapter's Wong Village has some old people suffering from stomach cramps (except for one starving old lady, who needs a bun). You're only required to help Yun's grandmother to proceed the story, but nothing's stopping you from saving all of them.
  • Although you don't have any real reason to outside of grabbing any other items you missed, you can return to Lucrece Castle with the previous heroes Uranus and Hasshe to visit the King, who is overjoyed at their presence.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential:
  • One way to get Oboro's Infinity +1 Sword in his chapter is to kill everyone in the castle, which makes you just strong enough to fight a superboss for it. This includes innocent servant girls and lady nobles.
  • Unless you spot that the Run command is available, you can kill Mad Dog at the end of the Wild West chapter.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: If you off even just one female (even the kunoichi or the ugly stalker hag; the ghosts and yokai are fair game, however) in the Twilight of Edo Japan chapter before a specific point, then you won't be able to get one of the best accessories in the game... Or, if you're going for a 100 kill run, you'll miss out on a kill. Actually going through with 100 kills in the remake nets a new (but cosmetic) ending where the peaceful weather is suddenly replaced with a dark thunderstorm, as if this was a warning that Oboromaru's actions may lead to dark times in Japan's future.
• Vignette Episode: The entire game consists of seven chapters (9 when you unlock the Middle Ages chapter and, in turn, the Final chapter), and they all revolve around a specific time period and these chapters aren't connected to each other, aside from one recurring joke and a misanthropic and genocidal demon.
• Villain Protagonist: Oersted, if he is selected for the final chapter.
• Villain Team-Up: At the end of the Cowboy chapter, if the Sundown Kid doesn't kill Mad Dog, after he leaves Success Town, he encounters his rival again in the desert, who's now riding O. Dio, reverted back into his true form of a horse. It's almost immediately subverted when the Sundown Kid shoots Dio's reins, causing him to buck Mad Dog off and run off into the desert, forcing Mad Dog to chase after him. Completely averted in the Golden Ending where this happens, where Mad Dog presumably makes amends with Sundown and manages to keep O. Dio.
• Visions of Another Self: Odio's seven reincarnations, which cause the main conflict in their respective timelines, and either succeed or fail completely, forcing Odio to bring them to Lucrece.
• Waiting Puzzle: If Oboromaru hadn’t killed any (living) women after making it to the top floor, one resident rewards him with the paltry Maid's Sash for his kindness. If you stand still and wait for a few moments after this, she returns and apologises for giving you the wrong thing, instead giving you the much better Lacquered Medicine Box.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Ghosts, traps, yokai and giant fish don't add to Oboromaru's kill count so in a Pacifist Run you'll need to grind out these enemies to level up high enough to beat the bosses. Ode Iou turns into the Gamahebi demon at the end, which is definitely off the human kill list.
• Wham Episode: The Middle Ages chapter. It's far darker than any of the other seven episodes up to this point, and reveals the details of the origins of the Big Bad Odio.
• Wham Line:
  • After starting your second chapter, you may notice something’s very fishy when the local antagonist is named something similar to "Odio" and that the same creepy organ theme plays in their presence, which after your third chapter when this happens again, suggests that these events aren’t completely unrelated after all…
  • A minor one but Pogo finally says his first word, and thus the first word uttered by humanity, at the end of his chapter, "Love" (the remake has him shout "AIIIEEE!" instead).
  • A minor one appears at the end of Oboromaru's chapter if you're well-versed in Japanese history, revealing that the prisoner you were sent to rescue is Sakamoto Ryōma.
  • If you check the files at the Robotics Facility in Akira's chapter, you'll find a file detailing the Crusaders gang you've been fighting, which also reveals its founder as Matsu Kenichi.
  • After a certain point in the Distant Future chapter, inspecting any database terminal, computer, or anything electronic displays the message "It would be in your best interests to stop. This ship is my domain, and I its master."^note In the fan translation of the SNES version, "Resistance is futile. I have taken control of the ship."
  • Oersted (a silent protagonist) speaking at all is the start of this, with the ending line confirming the "Odio" theming with the other chapter bosses.
  • In the remake, Oersted finally fighting back against his inner hatred and speaking these simple words:
    Oersted: I am...I must...I will!
• Wham Shot:
  • The room before the Lord of Dark. A player could easily freeze in their tracks when they see seven statues resembling each of the seven bosses prior to the Middle Ages chapter. This counts in-universe, too; every protagonist reacts with shock when they interact with their respective statue in the Final chapter.
  • After Oersted and Uranus return from their disastrous rescue mission after Hasshe and Streibough's deaths and retire for the night, Streibough appears directly next to Oersted and wanders off. Following him to the throne room reveals the Lord of Dark, but defeating him in a rather strange battle reveals that Oersted was tricked into killing his own king.
  • After Streibough's death, Alethea appears, then after mourning his death, she pulls out a knife.
  • After your chosen protagonist for the final chapter find themselves in the ruins of Lucrece, you're wandering around the area until you see a familiar face: One of the other protagonists.
  • In the remake, after defeating Odio's Last Stand with his incarnations, Oersted is about to keel over in defeat like the original, only to start screaming in pain as he draws all of the world's hatred to him. The fight is long from over.
• When All You Have Is a Hammer…: Whereas the rest of the characters in the game get a pretty good variety of attacks, Sundown and Mad Dog's attacks can pretty much be summarized as "shooting people," "shooting multiple people," and "shooting multiple people many times."
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: After the battle with Odio, everyone returned to their timelines, and...
  • Pogo has his first baby with Beru. However, Gori surprises him that he's having many baby gorillas with the female gorillas they rescued before.
  • The Earthen Heart successor (Yun/Lei/Hong) is training a new generation of Earthen Heart students. The remake reveals that Sun Tzu Wang and his gang decided to bury the hatchet with them and become students.
  • Oboromaru either continues to be a ninja in service of the Enma clan, or becomes Ryoma Sakamoto's bodyguard, foiling an assassination attempt that's implied to be the same one that killed him in real-life.
  • The Sundown Kid returns to wandering in the wilderness. Depending on his actions, he may or may not have to deal with Mad Dog again. Should you spare Mad Dog, the remake adds a scene of them riding across the wilderness together.
  • Masaru closes his current training room, picks up his bag, and resumes his journey in his quest to be the strongest.
  • Akira lives his life normally with the orphanage kids and occasionally visits/assists Tobei, who is now currently trying to use the teleporting device on Taro... before it breaks down again.
  • Cube returns to the now-repaired Cogito Ergo Sum after presumably having fun on Earth, reuniting with Kato and Darthe. Kato gives him a warm hug.
  • The Distant Future Chapter has this at the end. Cube and the surviving crew make it to earth. Captain Hor, Kirk, Huey and Rachel's bodies are all given proper burials, and Kato is currently in medical treatment. Corporal Darthe has retired from the military and now works for the creation of medical robots.
• Whole-Plot Reference: The Distant Future chapter's plot is essentially Alien mixed with 2001: A Space Odyssey.
• Why Isn't It Attacking?: Comes up in the Middle Ages chapter when the "Lord of Dark" appears in Castle Lucrece's throne room, but it's a But Thou Must! battle even if you notice something's wrong.
• With This Herring: Averted in the Middle Ages chapter, as upon receiving the mission to rescue Alethea from the Lord of Dark, Oersted is given free reign to grab every piece of equipment and healing item from the castle's bedrooms and treasury, most of which he doesn't even need, followed by plenty of gifts from the townsfolk as he departs. This is deliberate, given that all of this trust and praise is completely overturned by the halfway point of the story.
• The Wild West: The Cowboy chapter, taking place during the time of the good ol' cowboys.
• Winged Humanoid: The Brow of Odio / Purity of Odio, who seems to be Oersted after getting a pair of vulture wings and becoming completely bald and naked.
• A Winner Is You:
  • The ending of Captain Square in the Distant Future chapter, which just has Captain Square flying through space and taking off his sunglasses. The only other thing you can get from this is a funny bit of Developer's Foresight if you beat the game while Kirk is watching.
  • In the Super Famicom version, if the player managed to get the best ending with a chapter's character, they received a portrait of said character, drawn by the chapter's original artist, along with each chapter's victory text. In the remake the victory text is again displayed, but sadly the character portraits are completely absent (most likely due to the game's complicated copyright situation).
• Wolfpack Boss: The Jaggedy Jacks, a superboss within the Dominion of Hate's Trial of Time. The fight consists of four enemies with only around 500 HP each, but they start out completely surrounding the party, have above-average defenses, and can use area-of-effect attacks, lay out electrical tiles to rapidly heal, or use the rapid-fire Spacephage for high damage.
• Worthless Treasure Twist:
  • In the Twilight of Edo Japan chapter, the Watanabes are aiming for three boxes which they believe are full of riches they can take to their hometown. However, two of them are empty while the remaining box contains a single koban. They seem to cut their losses if Watanabe's father survives and both just head home with that.
  • In the Wild West chapter, the town of Success promises Sundown the town's money after the Crazy Bunch are defeated. However when he's about to head off, it's revealed that the town's actually broke. He's not bothered by this, since the experience enabled him to live again. The remake replaces this with a very small stash of gold the town offers to Sundown as a reward, but he doesn't want to accept it.
• Worthy Opponent: The Sundown Kid and Mad Dog seem to regard each other as this. Especially if Sundown doesn't kill Mad Dog at the end of his chapter. In the remake, should Mad Dog live, the two ride off together.
• You ALL Share My Story: The Final chapter, where it's revealed all player characters were up against a reincarnation of Oersted/Odio.
• Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: With a literal princess in the Middle Ages chapter. Aside from the seven statues hinting at something greater in the works, the chapter seemingly reaches its end point like a typical fantasy RPG where the heroes defeat the Lord of Dark, only to discover Princess Alethea is nowhere to be found. She was actually stashed in a secret room which Streibough figured out, but instead used this as part of his plan to take all the glory for himself.
• Your Size May Vary: Battle sprites notwithstanding, official artwork from 1994, overworld sprites and the artwork from the 2023 trailer seem to conflict with the heights of the Shifu and disciples. Official art from 1994◊ and the 2023 trailer demonstrates Lei being slightly taller than Hong/Sammo while their overworld sprites depict Hong/Sammo being the taller one. Similarly, Yun is depicted as slightly taller than the Shifu in both the 2023 trailer art and 1994 art linked above. However, his overworld sprite is approximately the same height as the Shifu's.
• You No Take Candle: The Prehistory chapter's attack and item descriptions are presented in this way. This also applies to the loading tips specific to this chapter, though these have addendum in proper English.
  Stick item description: "Stick is stick."
• Your Size May Vary: Most human or humanoid bosses, with the exception of playable characters like Streibough or Mad Dog, have sprites that tower over your characters. However, in the overworld, they are no bigger than a normal person with the same build as them.

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