Video Game / Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom

Foreground, center: Chado
Background, clockwise from top: Terra, Poky, Rosalya, Kayenne and Askel

Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom is a 2017 action RPG/fighting game hybrid developed by the French studio Enigami and published by Focus Entertainment for PC (through Steam and Humble Bundle), PlayStation 4 and Xbox One (and later ported to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S).

The game is a loose adaptation of The Shiness, a 2005 web manga by Samir "Samjin" Rebib, who founded Enigami with the game's composer Hazem Hawash. Set on the shattered planet Mahera, it revolves around a young waki named Chado, who discovers he's the only one who can see Terra, one of the four elemental spirits known as the Shiness, and goes on a journey with her and his friend Poky to find the legendary Lands of Life. But when their airship crashes, they end up in the middle of a war...

As you can probably guess from the synopsis, the game is a deliberate love letter to classic Eastern RPGs, though it features a real-time combat system similar to a fighting game. Intended to be the first part of an Episodic Game, The Lightning Kingdom unfortunately received mixed reviews and failed to make a profit, killing both Enigami and any chance of a sequel.

Shiness: Crossroad^note Shiness: Chemins Croisés in French., a 6-chapter tie-in manga, was released as a prequel for the game a few months before its release. Since the game's website no longer exists, the manga may instead be read with the Wayback Machine or in its artist's Instagram stories. Unfortunately, only the French version is currently completely findable.

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Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom provides examples of:

• Aborted Arc:
  • When he learns that Chado is Terra's summoned one, Kayenne warns him that mysterious dark forces are trying to hunt down the Shiness's summoned ones for unknown reasons. After meeting Ayron, he theorizes that he's a member of these forces, but they're never brought up again and his theory is never confirmed.
  • If the party finds the Secret Rift and meets the Sister of Secrets, she reveals that she met King Ranahel and Ayron and that they both gave her secrets they wanted to forget. She doesn't reveal them to the party, we never find out what they are and they're never mentioned again.
• Accidental Murder: Depending on the player's choices, either Irys or Kaorys accidentally kills her sister while trying to convince her to join Ayron's side.
• Ace Pilot: Xaham. Chado also claims to be Kimpao's greatest pilot, but it doesn't convince Xaham from allowing him to fly his airship.
• Acrofatic: Despite being chubbier than Chado, Poky is a pretty agile fighter who can dodge attacks quite fast.
• Action Command: The hyper requires one.
• Action Girl: Basically any human woman involved in the plot, like Rosalya, Irys, Kaorys, Altania or Vrynn. Mingane, a shelk, is also implied to be one, but she's never seen using her combat skills.
• Action Initiative: You can attack an enemy before they notice you and start the battle with an advantage, however, enemies attack first if they notice you before you can attack.
• Actor Allusion: Possibly, as Poky's Maherian voice is Brigitte Lecordier, the French voice of Son Goku: both the first spell and the first technique Poky learns, Kiidju and Bomee, strongly resemble a Kamehameha.
• Adaptation Dye-Job:
  • Kayenne had red eyes in The Shiness, as he was a fire shi user, they were changed to green for the game, as he was changed to an air shi user. Similarly, the red details on his original outfit were changed to green.
  • Askel's eyes are green in the game, but his manga counterpart Youko's were yellow.
  • Rosalya's hair is pink in the game, while her manga counterpart Rosa's was more purplish. Rosa also had green eyes, while Rosalya's are grey, blue or pink Depending on the Artist.
  • Ayron's eyes were blue in the manga and his hair was white, but in the game, they're yellow and silver respectively.
• Adaptation Inspiration: The game differs considerably from The Shiness, but keeps the basic premise and universe, the art style and the main characters.
• Adaptation Name Change:
  • Askel, Rosalya, Ranahel and Mingane were known as Youko^note Samir Rebib renamed him because Youko was too close to Yōko Kurama., Rosa, Yanos and Silty^note She was possibly renamed because she was originally a fan-made character Samir Rebib canonized. in The Shiness.
  • Chado and Poky's spaceship was named the Kinli-Waki^note From a waki expression meaning "joy and success". in the original manga instead of the Asanao-3.
  • Every single placename was also changed, for instance the planet Mahera was originally known as Orion. Interestingly, there's one sentence in the game's French version where the writers goofed and used Kimpao's old name Hika.
  • The main characters had surnames in The Shiness, whereas they all have Only One Name in the game.
  • The shelks were known as sheiks^note Sheik means "elder" in Arabic, this was probably deliberate, as the shelks are by Samir Rebib's own admission a Fantasy Counterpart Culture of the Arabs. in The Shiness and kept that name for some time during the game's development.
• Adaptation Personality Change: Ayron seemed to actually have a crush on Rosa in the original manga, whereas his game counterpart wants to kill Rosalya and doesn't even try to pretend he has any affection for her.
• Adaptation Title Change: The original manga was titled The Shiness.
• Adaptational Backstory Change: Basically everything:
  • In the game, Chado and Poky leave Kimpao without their parents' permission on a ship Poky invented. In The Shiness, they instead volunteer for testing a new ship invented by Chado's grandfather Yandor. Furthermore, Chado wasn't looking for the Lands of Life in the original manga since his mother was alive in it, he and Poky just wanted to go home after they mistakenly landed on the wrong meteora and were effectively Pinball Protagonists who had no significant involvement in anything that happened after their arrival since they were arrested almost immediately afterwards and accused of abducting Rosa, then spent the rest of the story in jail or as Condemned Contestants.
  • Askel's counterpart in The Shiness, Youko, was arguably the manga's true main character. He used the shi to Mind Control his way into King Ranahel's counterpart Yanos's service because he wanted to assassinate him and avenge his parents, but he became hesitant when he met his daughter Rosa, Rosalya's counterpart. All of this seems to have been dropped in the game.
  • Rosalya's counterpart, Rosa, wasn't a summoned one, she tried to flee merely because she wanted freedom rather than being a princess and because her father was planning to marry her to Ayron. She also failed to flee her meteora, since Youko defeated Chado when the latter tried to help her.
  • Kayenne had no involvement in Rosa's escape, the party meets him in jail after he unsuccessfully tried to steal the Shiness of Earth from King Yanos because he believed it would bring balance to the shi.
  • Ayron wasn't a former summoned one who became evil and wasn't Barred from the Afterlife for using forbidden forms of shi, he just wanted to find the Shiness to Take Over the World with their power rather than have Revenge by killing the summoned ones. His name was also actually Ayron rather than Adjin.
  • There was no war in The Shiness, Adorya's counterpart Pandora was at peace and Gendys didn't have a counterpart at all.
• Adaptational Badass:
  • Rosalya/Rosa was neither a fire shi user nor a summoned one in the manga, whereas the game turns her into a Pretty Princess Powerhouse.
  • Poky wasn't a fighter in the manga and was just Chado's Cowardly Sidekick. In the game, he's also cowardly at first, but this doesn't prevent him from fighting alongside the rest of the team during the entire game.
  • Ayron relied on this servants to do the fighting for him in The Shiness and was a Non-Action Big Bad, whereas in the game, he's a powerful Magic Knight the party fights directly.
• Adaptational Intelligence: The game's continuity turns Poky into a Child Prodigy who invented the spaceship Chado and him reach Gendys with, whereas in the original continuity, he wasn't its creator.
• Adaptational Superpower Change:
  • Anyone could see and hear the Shiness in the original manga, there was no such thing as a summoned one, Chado was therefore The Unchosen One.
  • In the original manga, Chado was an air shi user and Kayenne was a fire shi user, whereas in the game, Kayenne becomes the party's air shi user and Chado becomes an earth shi user, this might have been done to make Chado less similar to Naruto, of whom his game version is basically an Expy. Chado could also use air shi to give himself Super-Speed, a power he lacks in the game.
  • In addition to his plant shi powers, Askel/Youko had Mind Control and dark shi powers as well as the ability to use plant shi to grow vegetal blades in the manga, he lacks them in the game, though he does have them in Crossroad's Alternate Continuity.
  • Overall, the equivalent of magic on Mahera, the shi, has fewer forms in the game: it can't be used for Mind Control or to turn people into stone, there's no gravity shi^note At least none that any character in the game or in Crossroad is known to be able to use, but this form probably does exist to some extent to explain how the Maherian vehicles and Mantara fly, it's just not mentioned., no light shi and no steam shi. These limitations are often cases of Pragmatic Adaptation, since some of the shi techniques shown in the manga would be extremely unbalanced, for instance some powerful earth shi users could use their powers to walk through walls.
• Adaptational Wimp:
  • Askel is much weaker than his counterpart Youko from the original manga, as he lacks Youko's Mind Control power and doesn't use his paralyzing bloodor in combat. Chado defeats Askel in the game, whereas in the manga, Youko defeats Chado by paralyzing him and knocking him out.
  • Kayenne is also a lot weaker in the game, as he's no longer a fire shi user: in the manga, he was powerful enough to shield himself from arrows by summoning a fire shield hot enough to melt the arrows in midair.
• Adapted Out:
  • Almost every character of The Shiness save for the five playable characters Chado, Poky, Kayenne, Askel and Rosalya, Chado's mother (though she was alive in the manga), the main antagonists Ayron and Ranahel, and of course the Shiness Terra, though she became a Composite Character of two different Shiness.
  • Chado's love interest Liana is absent from the game, but she makes a Continuity Cameo in Crossroad.
  • An entire race from the manga, the elves, was dropped.
  • The Shiness had a Tournament Arc during which the protagonists were Condemned Contestants forced into Gladiator Games. It was dropped from the game.
• Advertised Extra: The former shelk warlord Nashoba was hyped as an important character in official artwork, but the most he does in the game is to capture Chado when the latter finds the Mantarian camp while looking for Poky at the beginning, he then becomes a completely unimportant extra, with his pupil Mingane basically filling in for him.
• Aerith and Bob: Most Maherians have made-up names, or at least unusually spelt names like Irys, but some NPCs have more mundane names such as Rose or Bert.
• Air Whale: Mantara combines this with Floating Continent, the shelks created her by enlarging an egg laid by a mantis (a whale-like flying animal) so that the Gendyan refugees could build a city on her back. Kaorys also uses Manrena, Mantara's normal-sized mother, as a mount.
• Airborne Mook: Shivos can fly, often making shi projectiles the only way to hurt them.
• Aliens Never Invented Democracy: Inverted with most of the game's races, as all four human nations appearing or mentioned in it (the fallen Meonis, Mantara, Adorya and Irallium) are monarchies while the shelks, the wakis and the isolitos are implied to lack monarchs. However, the gromiz do have a dictator, Zagrom. The party meets Ragan, the former chief of the gromiz, but whether he was elected is unknown.
• Alien Sky: Floating asteroids, shi streams and the neighboring meteora of Adorya can be seen in Gendys's sky. Mantara is even visible from the Gendys Plain once in a while.
• All of the Other Reindeer: When Chado told the other wakis he can see Terra, they all believed him crazy and he became an outcast, Poky even confesses he chose to go on a journey with him without being sure he wasn't insane. He learns from this mistake and keeps his being a summoned one a secret when he first meets the Mantarians, until Poky spills the beans to Kayenne.
• All There in the Manual:
  • Anything regarding the Maherian language was revealed either on social media or in a guide that was given to some backers. The guide is even the only place where the proper pronunciations of some Maherian words can be found, as the game romanizes them incorrectly (for instance, the name of one technique contains voselib, which is a bad romanization of the Maherian word /voʃelib/, meaning "terrible", which is pronounced with an English sh-sound and not an s-sound). However, not even the guide reveals how the name of the town of Shjue is supposed to be pronounced.
  • The main characters are given little backstory in the game, more is found in Crossroad. It's also the only place where Altania's name is revealed.
  • Minor details such as Mingane and Nashoba's backstories and why Mahera shattered were only revealed on the game's defunct website.
• All There in the Script: The name of the waki girl who appears in this artwork and briefly in Crossroad, Liana, is only known from concept art. Interestingly, she was already in The Shiness, the concept art therefore confirms that she makes a Continuity Cameo.
• Almost Out of Oxygen: In Crossroad, Chado and Poky weren't originally planning to land on Gendys but were forced to head to it because their ship was running out of oxygen. This results in the ship being struck by lightning as soon as it enters the meteora's atmosphere and crashing, like in the game's opening.
• Alphabetical Theme Naming:
  • The isolitos all have a name beginning with "Iso" followed by another capital letter (except when the writers forget, like in Isolando's name) and the rest of the name, like IsoKaralo.
  • Meos's undead knights Arkaros, Feros, Bados, Goros, Joanos and Pheciros all have a name ending in "os" like his.
• Alternate Continuity: Confusingly, Crossroad serves as a prequel to the game and was advertised as such, but is also set in a different continuity which often contradicts the game's story (for instance, Poky intentionally jumps from the Asanao when it's about to crash in the game, but he falls accidentally in the manga). It's also slightly Truer to the Text, as it features a few elements from The Shiness that the game didn't keep, like Askel's Mind Control powers or the Adoryans' anti-shi handcuffs.
• Alternative Number System: Maherian uses base-twelve numbers and its alphabet has therefore twelve digits. Obviously, they're always converted into base-ten numbers in translated texts for the players' convenience.
• Amazing Technicolor Population: The gromiz come in all sorts of colors (berserkers are red, commandos are yellow, ice munchers are blue, marsh gromiz are green, Zagrom is purple...), not to mention that the color of a hostile gromiz often indicates how strong he is.
• Ambiguous Start of Darkness: The unfinished story doesn't fully explain Ayron's motivations. We know he hates the Shiness because he was condemned to never return to the shi by Terra for his use of forbidden shi techniques, but we aren't exactly told as to how he became evil in the first place, Terra merely implies that power corrupted him.
• Ambiguously Absent Parent: While Rosalya's father King Ranahel appears in the game, her mother never appears and no queen of Adorya is ever mentioned.
• Ambushing Enemy: A few, especially in hidden zones that can only be accessed late in the game with Rosalya's powers.
• An Economy Is You: The merchants only sell items and equipment relevant to gameplay.
• And I'm the Queen of Sheba: Askel's answer when Klaig claims he's the son of Lord Altonataros is "and I'm the king of the squirropigs".
• Animal Facial Hair: Several wakis in Crossroad, such as Chado's father, have moustaches or beards.
• Animal Wrongs Group: The Optional Boss Gittibris is a crazed animal rights defender who protects gambaris, which are common enemies and considered pests by everyone but her. She got a bounty put on her head after killing several gambari hunters and has to be attracted by having the party fight gambaris repeatedly.
• Animesque: Both the mangas' and the game's art styles were heavily inspired by the likes of Dragon Ball and YuYu Hakusho. Crossroad's panels are even read from right to left.
• Anti-Grinding: Enemies stop giving experience if your level is too high compared to theirs.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: Though five characters are playable, only three can be active at once.
• Area of Effect: Many offensive and healing spells are only effective within a circle, which you can move around while casting them.
• Armor Is Useless: Even though all Adoryan soldiers wear full armor and helmets, they can be defeated with mere punches and kicks. Averted with Ayron, however, as his armor is indeed very effective against physical attacks, though it's still vulnerable to shi attacks.
• The Artifact: The game's logo◊ is missing Rosalya's head, hinting that she wasn't originally meant to be playable^note Another clue is that she didn't appear in the game's first trailer..
• Artifact Title:
  • The track "Defeat the Fleet" was probably intended to play when Ayron's fleet attacks Mantara, hence its title, but in the final game, "We Are Under Attack!" plays instead during this battle and "Defeat the Fleet" is only heard in some earlier fights not involving a fleet.
  • The track "Adorya Station" actually plays at the Gendys Station, the Adorya Station was probably meant to appear when the track was composed, but it's not in the final game. The description of the achievement "Serkan Gear Solid" contains the same mistake.
  • The track "Chaolito", which plays in the Isolitos' village, refers to the name they had at some point during the game's development, not to the one they have in the final game.
• Artificial Limbs: Feyn, a Mantarian, lost a leg to the gromiz berserker Grorim and has to wear a peg leg.
• Artificial Script: The Maherian language has its own alphabet, which you can read if you're one of the backers who were given a copy of the language's dictionary.
• Artistic License – Linguistics:
  • Chado can perfectly understand Terra even though she's thousands of cycles old and speaks an older form of Maherian, whose modern forms are also almost unchanged and all mutually intelligible despite the considerable time gap. This was done deliberately by Maherian's creators Déborah Lebon and Clément Michard, otherwise the plot couldn't start.
  • The Maherian guide implies that the game is an adaptation of a Maherian book that somehow ended up on Earth and was translated by Lebon and Michard. As Maherian is an alien language unrelated to anything spoken on Earth, it should have been impossible for them to translate it without some sort of Rosetta Stone.
• As Long as It Sounds Foreign:
  • Though a Maherian language was created for the game, the spoken lines don't always match the translations due to rewrites. The Maherian voice clips that randomly play during dialogues also tend to be irrelevant to what the characters are actually saying.
  • Worse, many instances of written Maherian are actually random, irrelevant Maherian words, or misspelt, or just French written with the Maherian font, or even complete gibberish. They even forgot to use the alphabet on the map in the library of Meos's palace and just wrote the names on it with the Latin alphabet, King Ranahel's seal in Crossroad is also the Latin letter R. For Vrynn's Interface Screw spell, they used Germanic runes, of all things, rather than Maherian letters.
  • Even the name of the Final Boss, Wio Irys/Kaorys is wrong: wio means "dark" in Maherian, but adjectives are supposed to follow names and nouns in this language, not to precede them, an error the names of the tier 2 and 3 techniques also contain.
  • The words invented by the game's writers are quite inconsistent and don't look like they're from the same language at all even though they're supposed to be. In particular, the word Shiness is the only one whose I is pronounced the English way rather than the French way, because Samir Rebib made it up by blending the English words "shine" and "darkness".
• As You Know: When the party first reaches the Giant's Hall, Kayenne reminds everyone how to call Xaham even though this was already explained by Xaham himself when he flew the party to the Gendys Plain for the first time. This was added in an update because some players forgot they could call him.
• Ascended Extra: The Shiness herself, surprisingly: even though the original manga was already named after her, she had no involvement in its plot beyond serving as a power source, whereas the game makes her a much more important character.
• Ass Kicks You: One of Poky's basic physical attacks consists of jumping butt-first at an enemy.
• The Atoner: Ajoss made the mistake of throwing Lord Altonataros's book of spells into the Gromiz Lair, where Zagrom found it and used its powers to destroy Meos's kingdom. Cycles later, the now-undead Ajoss is trying to atone for his mistake, and the player can choose to side with him when his wife Vrynn, who believes him to be a traitor, confronts him.
• Attack Reflector: A well-timed parry can deflect most projectiles. It's also possible to deflect a projectile with another projectile.
• Autobots, Rock Out!: Frequently used in battle themes and boss themes, especially Askel's battle theme "Askel the Mercenary".
• Baby Be Mine: The Gendyans believe that the Korguen, a monster living on the Shiyawo mountain, snatches children. It's actually Sabba who started abducting children to raise them as her own after she lost her son and became corrupted by the dark shi, the Korguen is just a "Scooby-Doo" Hoax to keep people away from the mountain.
• Background Boss: Both Meos's and Sabba's final forms are too large and far from the party to be reached with normal attacks, Meos can only be hurt by reflecting his projectiles, while Sabba has to be weakened by ringing bells around the area until she collapses and the party can attack her head.
• Background Magic Field: Actually a gameplay mechanic: during battles, the force field delimiting the battle area randomly changes color, makes the element of the corresponding color stronger and allows both playable characters and enemies to refill their shi meter for this element considerably faster.
• Backtracking: An often-critized aspect of the game, many sidequests require players to go back to already-explored areas, and sometimes already-beaten dungeons. While calling Xaham can shorten the trips, it can't be done in dungeons, so you can't exit them quickly after finding what you were looking for.
• Bad Boss:
  • Ayron stabs one of his minions though his head in Crossroad just because he looked at Rosalya in her bath.
  • Zagrom had his minion Unoom's tongue cut out for calling him an "ahik".
• Badasses Wear Bandanas: Chado, Vrynn and Reize wear one on their heads and Askel wears one around his neck. Subverted with Bagogue, who wears one on his head but turns out to be a Dirty Coward. Nashoba also wears one on his head and is said to be a powerful warrior, but since the game never shows him fighting, his badassery is just an Informed Attribute.
• Barred from the Afterlife: Adjin/Ayron was condemned to never return to the shi by Terra for his forbidden alchemy. This becomes his motivation for hunting the Shiness down.
• Battle in the Center of the Mind: The Optional Boss IsoKaralo fights his victims in their nightmares, in an Amazing Technicolor Battlefield.
• Battle Theme Music: Several depending on the place, though some like the Gendys Plain have no battle theme and just use the same theme in and out of fights. Normal battle themes tend to be used for minor bosses, but major ones usually have their own themes, all the Optional Bosses with a bounty on their heads share the special theme "Hunter Punker", and the Superboss Reize has the unique theme "Promised Heart -Summer".
• "Be Quiet!" Nudge: Early in the game, Chado punches Poky to stop him from revealing Terra's existence to the Mantarians to avoid being Mistaken for Insane again.
• Bear Trap: A common obstacle in dungeons and Gendys's wilderness, many of them are implied to have been set by Bagogue.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Even though Rosalya has suffered fits of Power Incontinence causing powerful shi explosions ever since she was a child, her body is completely unscathed, the game justifies this, as characters with a very high affinity to an element become immune to it. What isn't justified, however, is how her clothes aren't damaged by the explosions, though it's possible that King Ranahel simply had fireproof clothes made for her lest she keep destroying her outfits.
• Berserk Button:
  • Zagrom hates being called an "ahik", as his minion Unoom learned the hard way. It's a very effective insult against him during the insult duel between him and Chado.
  • If you don't want a menhir in your face, do not call Chado's bandana old-fashioned, as Poky finds out, and as Crossroad shows, do not talk about his mother.
• Big Bad: Though he has no involvement in most of the game's plot, Prince Ayron becomes this when he attacks Mantara. Aside from nearly killing Askel, he reveals his intention to hunt the Shiness and their summoned ones down supposedly as Revenge for being Barred from the Afterlife by Terra, becoming a threat to both Chado and Rosalya as well as their loved ones.
• Big Eater: Poky. An achievement is awarded for feeding him every consumable item at least once.
• The Big Guy: Kayenne is the party's tallest (6'7", roughly 2m) and bulkiest member, as well as The Leader and The Mentor.
• Bilingual Bonus: Backers who received a Maherian guide can translate written Maherian words (unfortunately, they're rarely correct) and the names of some spells and techniques.
• Bittersweet Ending: The unfinished story results in one: Ayron is defeated, but Irys and Kaorys are dead, most of the Gendyan resistance is gone, Mantara is destroyed... and the war against Adorya isn't over.
• "Blind Idiot" Translation: Often happens in the English, Spanish and German versions. For instance, the English translator was apparently unaware that doyen means "elder" in French, assumed it was a made-up word and left it untranslated.
• Blow You Away: Kayenne starts the game with a high air affinity. Air is implied to be all shelks' element of choice, as they use the symbol of air as their home meteora Nalluka's sigil, it's also the isolitos' element of choice.
• Body Horror: The dark shi turns the people it corrupts into hideous monsters, King Meos became a half-human, half-giant arachna creature and Sabba has serkans growing out of her body.
• Bodyguard Crush: Heavily implied between Askel and Rosalya. Ayron seems to have noticed it and taunts Askel over it just before trying to kill him during the battle of Mantara.
• Bonus Dungeon: Two of them:
  • The Room of Nine Pillars, where you can find the Superboss Reize and powerful equipment, spells and techniques. You actually need to visit it six times to fully beat it, as it has six different doors hidden here and there on Gendys that require a high affinity for a different element each to open: each door leads to a switch that makes more of the room reachable, and Reize can be fought after they're all activated.
  • The Secret Rift, where you can find the Sister of Secrets and fight the Superboss Rennerd. It also has the game's strongest enemies and therefore doubles as a Peninsula of Power Leveling.
• Book Dumb: Chado's grades are terrible, and what Terra teaches him about Mahera's true history in Crossroad doesn't help, as even his teacher dismisses it as nonsense.
• Bookcase Passage: The princesses' bedroom in Meos's palace has one activated by pressing books in a certain order to enter a password, Princess Altania's name (which you can't learn in the game, you have to read Crossroad).
• Bookends: The game starts with Terra asking Chado if he can see her. The last cutscene starts with Chado asking her if she can see him.
• Boss Remix:
  • Ayron's Leitmotif "Are You Afraid?" is remixed as "Your Highness" for the first fight against him and as "Beauty and the Evil" for the final battle.
  • Inverted with "Mummy", which is a remix of Sabba's battle theme "Come, My Little Child!" and plays during the cutscene following the battle.
• Boss Subtitles: A brief establishing cutscene plays whenever the party encounters an Optional Boss it has been tasked with eliminating. However, while they contain text, it's just random Maherian rather than the bosses' actual names.
• Boulder Bludgeon: Aside from using them to solve puzzles, Chado can throw his menhirs as his Kiimeni technique. He finishes Ayron off this way with a huge menhir, throwing him over Mantara's edge.
• Bounty Hunter: Some sidequests involve becoming one, in each, the party is tasked with eliminating an Optional Boss. One of them can be a subversion depending on your choices: Eymdal, an Adoryan officer, will task the party will eliminating Laukhy, another Adoryan soldier he accuses of war crimes. When the party finds Laukhy, he explains that Eymdal is lying, that he's actually a defector and Eymdal, his former commanding officer, wants him dead lest he be the one the Adoryan army punishes for his failure to stop a traitor. The party can then choose between believing him or not, if they choose to believe him, they have to kill Eymdal instead to complete the quest, and therefore refuse the bounty.
• Broken Bridge: Obstacles that only disappear when some conditions are met appear frequently, especially during the game's first fragment. The presence of some of them, like thorny plants that make entering the Forest of Meonis impossible before Zagrom is defeated, is never explained.
• The Bully: One of Chado's unnamed classmates brutally bullies him in Crossroad, only for Chado to counter-attack with his Shi-Menhiro technique.
• Butt-Monkey: Poky is this early in the game. Chado does an Angry Collar Grab on him when he laments that the Asanao-3 is going to crash, he later punches him and chases him with a menhir because he called his bandana old-fashioned, and punches him again to shut him up when he's about to reveal Terra's existence to the Mantarians.
• By the Eyes of the Blind: Only a Shiness's summoned one can see and hear her.
• Cain and Abel: Either Irys or Kaorys betrays her sister and accidentally kills her.
• Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit":
  • Aside from the fact they're blue, the Maherian "blue apples" look nothing like apples and are kinda spiral-shaped.
  • Chests are a non-living example, the item "chests" found here and there are made of stone and look like snail shells floating above small pillars. How exactly you open them isn't shown, the items just seem to be inside the shells, which disappear when you "open" the chests.
• Calling Your Attacks: The characters often shout their spells and techniques' Maherian names when they use them, with the exception of the spells that can be spammed, to avoid making the characters shout the same names several times per second. Bagogue lampshades this by mentioning that he should give names to his techniques.
• Cannot Keep a Secret: While Chado tries to hide his being a summoned one to the Mantarians by pretending that he's the one who has Terra's power to Detect Evil, Poky spills the beans to Kayenne when the latter becomes suspicious.
• Can't Believe I Said That: Kayenne has this reaction when he finally agrees with something Askel said, when the latter tells Chado not to jump to hasty conclusions regarding the Lands of Life.
• Can't Drop the Hero: Averted, any teammate can be removed from the active party, even Chado.
• Cap: The maximum level teammmates can reach is 50, enemies also have levels with the same constraint. Interestingly, the final boss's level is only 48, only some enemies fought in the Secret Rift and the superbosses Reize and Rennerd reach 50.
• Cat Folk: The shelks are humanoid lions.
• Cataclysm Backstory: Two of these: the first is the shattering of Mahera, which was caused by the overexploitation of the shi, which resulted in the elements' balance being broken... but none of this is mentioned in the game. The second, the corruption of Gendys by the dark shi, is more relevant to the game's plot, as it triggered the fall of the kingdom of Meonis and the war between Gendys and Adorya.
• Catapult to Glory: You can launch one of the undead guards of Laotan-Piki-Lanku into a nearby lake with a catapult. The guard seems to willingly wait inside the catapult to be launched, possibly because he died while he was drunk and never sobered up.
• Catching Some Z's: An NPC in Laotan-Piki-Lanku does this. Amusingly, instead of Zs, the corresponding letters of the Maherian alphabet appear.
• Cave Behind the Falls: The secret entrance to Meos's palace is behind a waterfall in the Forest of Meonis.
• Cerebus Syndrome: The game starts as a lighthearted adventure, becomes darker once the party reaches the Forest of Meonis, where either Vrynn or Ajoss can die depending on the player's choices, Meos's tragic story is revealed and his own daughter Irys puts him out of his misery, and goes full War Is Hell when Ayron attacks Mantara.
• Challenge Run: An achievement is awarded by finishing the game without getting your whole party knocked out. Save Scumming won't work, as the game will remember any Game Over during a playthrough.
• Character Development: After the battle of Mantara, realizing that Ayron could attack Kimpao to draw Chado out of hiding, Poky stops being a Cowardly Sidekick. When Kayenne asks him and Chado if they wish to go home rather than go after Ayron before he can strike again, he refuses before Chado does.
• Character in the Logo: The game's logo◊ features silhouettes of the heads of Chado, Poky, Kayenne and Askel.
• Charged Attack: Spells can be charged by holding buttons down to make them more powerful.
• Child Prodigy:
  • Poky built a spaceship at the age of ten. He also somehow invented a shi generator, which is thought by Xaham to be impossible when he mentions it, since the shi is Mahera's Life Energy and should therefore be impossible to synthesize.
  • While he's not as smart as Poky, Chado also qualifies, as he knows how to fly the spaceship Poky invented at the age of eleven. With no prior experience.
• Child Soldiers: Chado and Poky essentially become these when they have to help defend Mantara against Ayron's fleet. This probably contributes to the Heroic BSoD Chado suffers after the battle.
  • Askel was possibly also one, as he's already one of King Ranahel's most trusted retainers even though he's only 20 when the game starts.
• The Chosen One: Every Shiness has a summoned one, Chado is Terra's, and Ayron believes that Rosalya is the Shiness of fire's, which is confirmed by the Sister of Secrets. Adjin/Ayron was also Terra's summoned one before turning evil. It's unclear as to whether the Shiness actually choose their summoned ones, as Terra seems surprised when Chado says he can see her, and Rosalya never met the Shiness of fire.
• Les Collaborateurs: Some Gendyans willingly joined the Adoryan army, one of them, Helran, even got rid of all the evidence of his Gendyan origins. The poacher Bagogue, who seems to support the Mantarians at first, also decides that there's more money to be made on Adorya after most of the Mantarian freedom fighters perish in Ayron's assault and prepares to leave Gendys.
• Collapsing Lair: After the battle against Meos, his throne room's ceiling starts collapsing and players have to watch out for falling debris. However, it doesn't fully collapse and there's no time limit to exit it.
• Color-Coded Elements: Air shi is light green, fire shi is red, water shi is blue, both sides of Yellow Earth, Green Earth are played since earth shi is yellow while plant shi is dark green, and lightning shi is purple, averting Yellow Lightning, Blue Lightning.
• Combat Parkour: Dodging often results in this.
• Coming in Hot: The game begins when Chado and Poky's airship crashes on the meteora of Gendys.
• Composite Character:
  • The Shiness Chado meets was known as Vanny in The Shiness and was the Shiness of air, whereas the Shiness of earth was Terry. In the game, both characters were combined into Terra, who is the Shiness Chado can see as well as the Shiness of earth.
  • As Chado's grandfather Yandor, who invented Chado's ship in the original continuity, was Adapted Out, Poky's game counterpart inherits his intelligence and is the one who invents the ship instead.
• Conlang: A fully functional Maherian language and its alphabet were created by Déborah Lebon and Clément Michard for the game. Unfortunately, the Maherian cutscenes are only available on PC.
• Constructed World: Mahera. Unfortunately, we only get to see the meteora of Gendys.
• Continuity Reboot: The game wasn't intended to simply adapt the original manga, it was supposed to start a new continuity that would replace the manga's. Confusingly, Crossroad was also intended to replace the manga's continuity, but is an Alternate Continuity separate from the game's despite serving as its prequel. In other words, the original continuity was rebooted into two mutually exclusive continuities which were intended to run parallelly.
• Contractual Boss Immunity: You can't use your hyper on some bosses, no justification is given. Bosses are also often immune to some Status Effects.
• Contrived Coincidence:
  • Chado and Rosalya, two summoned ones seeking the Lands of Life, happen to leave their home meteoras on the exact same day and to end up in the same forest on the same meteora at the exact same time.
  • Later, Chado meets by happenstance the only person in the world aside from him who can see Terra, Ayron, because he's one of her former summoned ones and the only one still alive. This conveniently allows Chado to discover the truth about his not being Terra's first summoned one and Terra to explain Ayron's true identity, Adjin, to him.
• Cool Airship: Many, such as Chado and Poky's Asanao-3, Xaham's Gendoka or Ayron's Elite Squadron of Rellium. Some like the Asanao-3 double as Cool Starships.
• Cool Train: Maherian trains are flying trains and can even fly through space.
• The Corrupter: Lord Altonataros turned evil after a serkan corrupted him. He in turn tried to corrupt Irys by sending her a Spell Book for her birthday. The book might have in turn corrupted Zagrom, though whether he was already evil before finding it is unclear, as the book's influence seems to be too weak to corrupt good people like Zlog.
• Court Jester: The undead jester Skulfon served many kings, both before and after he died.
• Cowardly Mooks: Shivos can flee battles if you take too long to defeat them.
• Critical Existence Failure: Low health doesn't weaken you, it can even strengthen you if you program supports to do so, your active fighter only collapses when their hit points reach 0.
• Cryptic Background Reference: Often found in item descriptions, for instance some of them mention particularly powerful shi masters.
• The Cuckoolander Was Right: When the party first visits the town of Shjue, a man named Klaig approaches them and frantically tries to convince them that he's Lord Altonataros's son, which isn't believed by anyone but turns out to be true, the party therefore has to ask for his help to enter the palace of Laotan-Piki-Lanku, as he owns one of the medallions needed to open its gates. He also correctly claims that Mahera was once a single planet, which the villagers also dismiss as nonsense.
• Culture Chop Suey: What we see of Mahera blends several Western and Eastern (such as a torii-like gate on the Shiyawo mountain or the gromiz's Oni-like and Tengu-like masks) influences. Maherian was designed to sound like a mix of French (especially the human dialect), Arabic (especially the shelk dialect) and Japanese (especially the waki dialect).
• Cut Short: The game was meant to be much longer and the first part of an Episodic Game, but due to budget constraints, it ends with a Sequel Hook and unresolved plot points. Any hope for a sequel was killed after Enigami went into liquidation due to poor sales. Worse, this was the second time the story was unfinished, as Samir Rebib had dropped The Shiness after two tomes without a conclusion.
• Cutscene Power to the Max:
  • Askel uses his bloodor to paralyze Rosalya in a cutscene and several Mantarian soldiers offscreen. He can't do this after joining the party.
  • After the final battle, Terra boosts Chado's powers, allowing him to create a giant menhir and throw it at Ayron, knocking him over Mantara's edge. This is the only time they do this, and why they suddenly can is never explained.
• Cycle of Hurting: Can happen when fighting enemies with very fast attacks, especially the hammer-wielding undead soldiers in Meos's palace and the ruins on the Shiyawo mountain because they have an unblockable Spin Attack that strikes repeatedly.
• Cynic–Idealist Duo: Irys is The Cynic and Kaorys is The Idealist.
• The Dark Side: The dark shi, created by negative emotions, can corrupt living beings into evil and even turn them into monsters.
• Deadpan Snarker: Askel. For instance, when the party realizes that Ayron is about to attack Mantara:
  Poky: There's usually a happy ending. Something like "and they lived happily ever after..."
  Askel: Ha ha! Yeah, right... this one is sure to end up happily ever after!
• Death by Adaptation: Chado's mother was alive in The Shiness.
• Death Mountain: The Shiyawo combines this with Slippy-Slidey Ice World.
• Death of a Child: As revealed in the aftermath of the battle of Mantara, some Mantarians lost children offscreen during it.
  • Averted with Sabba's abducted children, who can be fought but not killed, they just flee when defeated.
• Debug Room: Some like this one on the Gendys Plain or than one in the Mantarian camp were found beyond the maps' bounds and can be accessed through glitches.
• Defeat Means Playable: Askel joins the party shortly after he fails to capture Rosalya and is beaten by Chado, because Rosalya became comatose after she suffered a fit and only he knows how to cure her.
• Defend Command: There's a guard button, but it's almost useless, first because parrying is more effective (guarding only reduces damage whereas parrying can negate it when done properly), second because you can't move while guarding, if you try, this will trigger a dodge instead.
• Dem Bones: The party encounters both friendly and hostile skeletons called "wandering memories", who became undead because they died somewhere a bloodor (a rose-like flower that grows where someone died) can't take root. It's implied that one also needs to have an Unfinished Business to become a wandering memory, which would explain why they don't outnumber the living.
• Depending on the Artist:
  • The characters' outfits are often less detailed in 2D cutscenes.
  • Kayenne is modeled with a white spot on his forehead and brown eyebrows, but in cutscenes and on his in-game portraits, he's drawn without the white spot and with orange eyebrows. On official artworks, he's usually drawn with brown eyebrows but without the white spot.
  • Similarly, the shades of brown used for Chado and Poky's furs in the 2D cutscenes and official artworks tend not to match the ones their models use.
  • Bagogue's model has brown hair, but his portraits are drawn with red hair.
  • Rosalya's model has grey eyes, but the 2D cutscenes and official artworks sometimes use pink or blue instead.
  • The shirus are blue, but on the map screen, they're green.
  • Xaham is modeled with his eyepatch on his left eye, but on his in-game portrait, it's drawn on his right eye. He's also drawn with more facial hair.
  • Similarly to Xaham, Nashoba's right ear is drawn with an Ear Notch in cutscenes, but his model has the notch on his left ear instead, and Mingane is drawn with a braid on the right side of her head, but her model has it on the left side. The official artworks conflict with each other.
  • Nashoba's outfit is also inconsistent: he wears Handwraps of Awesome in some cutscenes and not in others, he's modeled with a sleeve on his left arm, which he doesn't wear in cutscenes, and his model lacks the Badass Cape he wears in cutscenes.
  • Ayron looks more androgynous in Crossroad, whereas he looks more masculine in the game.
• Derelict Graveyard: The summit of the Shiyawo mountain is full of crashed ships.
• Developer's Room: Ruins containing the names and statues of some backers can be found near the Giant's Hall. Interestingly, an NPC here, Rimite, is the only waki besides Chado and Poky you will see in the entire game (unless you count Chado's vision of his mother).
• Devil's Pitchfork: The fearsome gromiz berserker Grorim carries a four-pronged pitchfork on his back, though he doesn't use it in battle. If you spare him after defeating him, the ending shows that he just uses it to cook.
• Diegetic Soundtrack Usage: Rosalya's song "Maherian Dreams", which she sings to Chado, is just her Leitmotif with lyrics.
• Direct Line to the Author: The Maherian dictionary's foreword explains that the conlangers Déborah Lebon and Clément Michard discovered the Maherian language by studying a book from Mahera written in it and implies that the whole game's story is actually the book's translation.
• Dirty Coward: One way to get past Bagogue at the Giant's Hall is to wake the two giants, causing him to flee in terror.
• Dishing Out Dirt: Chado starts the game with a high earth affinity, which is justified in that he's the Shiness of earth's summoned one. He can also summon menhirs and use them as projectiles, but this doesn't consume shi and counts as a physical attack, oddly enough. Earth is also the gromiz's element of choice, and they used their mastery of earth shi to dig their underground lair.
• Disney Villain Death: Ayron falls from Mantara after the final battle.
• Ditto Aliens: With the exception of the Optional Boss IsoKaralo, who is a Palette Swap, the isolitos all use the same model and textures.
• Ditzy Genius: Poky is the ten-cycle-old Child Prodigy who built the Asanao-3... and apparently forgot the parachutes. And when the Asanao-3 is about to crash, he jumps anyway^note In the game, at least. In Crossroad, he falls accidentally.. Furthermore, in Crossroad, he miscalculates the amount of oxygen he and Chado would need for their journey, and when the ship starts running out of oxygen, he erroneously believes he and Chado will suffer Explosive Decompression, though the latter part is probably an error from the writers themselves.
• The Dreaded:
  • It's implied that Adoryan soldiers fear Ayron a lot more than they fear the Mantarians.
  • All Gendyans living near the Shiyawo mountain fear the Korguen, which is the whole point of the "Scooby-Doo" Hoax the Korguen turns out to be. Even Kayenne and Askel, who are not even Gendyans, know its fearsome reputation.
• Dreadlock Rasta: The mischievous isolitos all sport dreadlocks.
• Dreadlock Warrior: Kayenne and Nashoba's manes give them this appearance.
• Duel Boss:
  • Poky fights Skulfon alone if you choose to fight him when Poky first meets him.
  • Chado fights Askel alone after the latter captures Rosalya.
  • Rosalya fights Ayron alone after he knocks out the rest of the party.
• Dungeon Punk: Various magical creatures are found on Mahera, and Maherians use a combination of elaborate elemental magic and advanced technology, which results in various shi-powered machines.
• Duty That Transcends Death: The undead guards of Meos's palace and Laotan-Piki-Lanku keep serving even after they died. Most of the ones who talk without attacking the party on sight don't seem to even know they died, they also seem to have forgotten part of their past lives, as they mistake the party for people they knew. Meos's guards even believe it's still Irys's birthday, the day the gromiz attacked the palace and killed them 15 cycles before.
• Elemental Baggage: Shi users can create elemental projectiles or hazards (tornadoes, explosions...) in battle even when the corresponding element isn't around, it's implied that they do so by converting shi into temporary matter which dissipates after a few seconds.
• Elemental Embodiment: The four Shiness are the embodiments of air, fire, water and earth. The one Chado can see, Terra, is earth's.
• Elemental Eye Colors: Generally averted (for instance, Chado's eyes are blue like water shi, but he's an earth shi user), the few cases where this happens are probably coincidental, with the possible exception of Kayenne: he was a fire shi user in the original manga and had red eyes, but in the game, he's an air shi user and has green eyes, hinting that shelks' eye colors are linked to their elemental affinities. However, since we don't get to see Mingane and Nashoba use shi, this theory isn't confirmed.
• Elemental Powers: The party's spells use the four basic elements, air, fire, water and earth, as well as two compound elements, lightning (air+fire) and plant (water+earth). The snow bloodor also produces ice shi, Ayron can use metal shi, time shi and space shi are mentioned as extremely advanced forms of shi manipulation, and the combination of all four forms of shi is the power of life itself.
• Elemental Punch: Chado's hyper is a punch empowered by earth shi.
• Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: Fighters are more vulnerable to elements they have a low affinity for. If their affinity for an element is high enough, they even become immune to it.
• Elemental Weapon: Adoryan soldiers can use lightning shi to electrify their swords and spears.
• The Empire: Adorya. The Adoryans' main goal is to invade Gendys, they already control part of it when the game starts and they're shown to intimidate Gendyan peasants into paying them tribute.
• Energy Weapon: The Adoryans use laser-like beams against the party on the Three Arrows, but strangely not during their assault on Mantara. The third train even has Laser Hallways.
• Epiphany Therapy: Chado recovers from his Heroic BSoD after Ayron's assault on Mantara when Rosalya cheers him up by singing.
• Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting: Chado and Poky already know basic martial arts when the game begins, and item descriptions reveal that everyone on their home meteora Kimpao has to learn some, for unexplained reasons.
• Everything Fades: All common enemies disappear in a puff of smoke after you defeat them (except Sabba's abducted children, who just run away). Whether they actually die is unclear, as the game establishes that a bloodor (a Maherian flower) will grow where someone died, but this doesn't happen when you defeat a common enemy, even a sapient one. Critters will also vanish in a puff of smoke if you take too long to catch them.
• Evil Poacher: Bagogue. The player can either fight him and his goons or choose to help him capture pouis for some easy money.
• Exploding Barrels: The party has to use one (which has no reason to be there) to blow up a wall in Laotan-Piki-Lanku.
• Exposed to the Elements: The party climbs the Shiyawo mountain without changing into something warmer, though this is justified for Chado, Poky and Kayenne since they have fur. Xaham even lands his ship near the summit and gets off it while shirtless.
• Expy:
  • Chado resembles Naruto to some extent: he's a Hot-Blooded Kid Hero and a Pint-Sized Powerhouse, wears a bandana and has been ostracized by the villagers of Kimpao, he was even an air shi user in The Shiness. He also resembles Anakin Skywalker somewhat, as they're both Chosen Ones, they both already know how to fly spaceships at their age, and they both lost their mothers and became more aggressive and interested in finding ways to cheat death as a result.
  • Poky is similar to Tails: he's Chado's Cowardly Sidekick, a Child Prodigy and a Gadgeteer Genius.
  • Ayron is blatantly based on Sephiroth: he has long, silver hair, wears a black cape and Shoulders of Doom, and is a Magic Knight who fights with a sword and his mastery of metal shi and dark shi. He's also similar to Darth Vader: he's a Tin Tyrant (and possibly a Cyborg, as part of his face appears to be artificial), a Bad Boss, a master of The Dark Side of the shi, and The Poorly Chosen One, he also changed his name when he turned evil, and had the same mentor as Chado.
  • Rosalya is similar to Garnet: they're both Rebellious Princesses whose parents are among the games' antagonists, they both manage to escape their kingdoms, and they're both hunted by the antagonists for their unusual powers. She also resembles Blaze somewhat in that they're both princesses with power over fire who regard it as a curse and had to grow up friendless because of it.
  • Overall, the main characters are quite similar to the original Star Wars trilogy's: Chado is Luke Skywalker, Poky is both C-3PO and R2-D2, Kayenne is both Chewbacca and Obi-Wan Kenobi, Askel is Han Solo, Rosalya is Leia, Terra is Yoda and Ayron is Darth Vader.
• Extra Eyes: Serkans have dozens of eyes all over their bodies. They even have independent eyes that aren't connected to their bodies and can freely move around by floating.
• Extra-ore-dinary: Ayron's element of choice is metal, and he's the only character who can control this advanced form of shi.
• Extremely Short Timespan: The game apparently takes place over only a few days. There's no In-Universe Game Clock, it's always night in some places such as Meos's palace but anywhere else, the sun never sets, and the characters are never seen sleeping except when injured for plot reasons.
• Eye Motifs: Many Adoryan soldiers' helmets have visors shaped like a large, single eye.
• Eye Scream: Anoom, one of Zagrom's minions, is missing an eye, and another, Akuum, is missing both. It's implied that Zagrom is responsible.
• Eyepatch of Power: Xaham, Zagrom and Altania all wear one.
• Face–Heel Turn: Depending of your choices, either Irys or Kaorys betrays the Mantarians by sabotaging Mantara's Invisibility generators so that Ayron can attack it and capture Rosalya, and spare the sisters in return.
• The Faceless: The Adoryan King Ranahel only appears in one cutscene and a few panels of Crossroad, and we never get a clear view of his face.
• Faceless Goons: Aside from one bareheaded soldier in a cutscene, all Adoryan troopers wear face-concealing helmets. Of course, this is completely averted with the Mantarian freedom fighters, whose helmets leave their faces visible.
• Fairy Companion: Terra to Chado.
• Fake Longevity: In addition to the frequent Backtracking and Forced Level-Grinding, the game has 2 endings but no New Game Plus mode to speed the second playthrough up, so if you want to see both endings, you have to beat the game twice with the exact same progression both times... and the 2 endings are basically the same anyway (the last cutscene is exactly the same in both cases) aside from having different final bosses, so this ends up feeling more like Padding and less like replayability.
• Falling Damage: The party can take some if they fall from too high out of battle, and both players and enemies will take massive damage if they fall into a Bottomless Pit during a battle, which can happen if it started near one. As the game's Jump Physics aren't great, this mechanic arguably qualifies as Fake Difficulty at times.
• Family-Unfriendly Death:
  • Early in the game, Chado and Poky can do a sidequest consisting of looking for a missing Mantarian patrol. They eventually discover that the soldiers were killed by gromiz when they find their bloodied, mangled corpses.
  • Ayron kills one of his minions for looking at Rosalya in her bath by stabbing him through his head in Crossroad.
• Fantastic Fauna Counterpart: Basically every Maherian animal. Squirropigs replace squirrels, bovamoths replace oxen, amoses replace horses, etc...
• Fantastic Flora:
  • Most of the game's edible items are imaginary Maherian fruits.
  • Bloodors are rose-like flowers that grow where someone died.
  • The snow bloodor is a type of bloodor that produces ice shi.
  • The koclis and the gaiaks are Plant People with earth and plant shi affinities.
• Fantastic Racism: Both the game and Crossroad feature shelk-hating Adoryan soldiers, Ayron also had this trait in the original manga, but his counterpart in the game and Crossroad seems to lack it. Irys also hates the gromiz, though this is justified in that they slaughtered her father's people and are responsible for his curse.
• Fantasy Gun Control: Though firearms, such as Mantara's cannons, exist to a limited extent on Mahera, no personal firearms ever appear in either the game or Crossroad, not even soldiers use any, they rely on spells and melee weapons.
• Fantasy Metals: Some late-game pieces of equipment are made of gendill, the most resistant metal on Gendys according to their descriptions.
• Faux Fluency: Every actor in the Maherian version, obviously.
• Fictional Currency: Gendys's currency is called the uzu. We never see what it looks like or what it's made of, a secret room of Meos's abandoned palace contains several open chests full of what appears to be gold but the party can't take any, so whether they contain uzus or some older currency which is no longer valuable is unclear.
• Filching Food for Fun: This artwork (which is a remake of that one◊ from the original manga's era) shows Chado and his friends stealing blue apples from a farmer, the isolitos also steal Rewald's blue apples in the game.
• Find the Cure!: After Rosalya suffers a "fit", the team needs to head to the Shiyawo Mountain to find the snow bloodor in order to get her back on her feet.
• Floating Platforms: Found here and there, some of them are made of stone and seem to naturally float, presumably because of the same phenomenon that causes the meteoras to float. Others float for no apparent reason, like some of the books in the library of Meos's palace.
• Flower from the Mountaintop: The snow bloodor is only found on the Shiyawo mountain.
• Flunky Boss:
  • Before fighting Meos, the party has to defeat his knights and a puppet of his human form, and he sends more puppets when the party finally fights him.
  • If you choose to fight Bagogue, his goons help him fight the party. He regenerates while they fight for him, so you need to defeat them quickly to have a chance to beat him.
• For Doom the Bell Tolls: Used in Meos's battle theme "Web of Regrets" and the theme "Prelude to War", which plays just before the battle of Mantara.
• For the Evulz: Apparently Zagrom's only motivation for destroying Meos's kingdom, as he didn't conquer it afterwards and just left it abandoned. He even gave Meos a Sadistic Choice between having his family killed and putting a curse on himself just because he could.
• Forced Level-Grinding: Zig-Zagged, on the one hand, the game has Anti-Grinding measures, on the other hand, bosses become extremely difficult (or even unbeatable at times if they can heal, because they might do so faster than you can hurt them) if your level is below theirs, and you need lots of grinding to master techniques and spells. The game therefore ensures you have to grind, but can never become overpowered (well, until you find the Secret Rift, at least).
• Foreign Language Title: The game is titled Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom in every language even though it's a French game. Averted in the case of the tie-in manga, which is titled Shiness: Chemins Croisés in French and Shiness: Crossroad in English.
• Free-Range Children: Chado is eleven and Poky ten, yet they both left their home meteora, wander around Gendys and fight in a war with little concern from adults, Poky even mentions that he chose to leave his family behind to follow Chado. This is lampshaded by the wakis attending their airship's takeoff in Crossroad.
• From Cataclysm to Myth: Many Maherians believe the world was always that way and that there never was a single planet Mahera that shattered. In Crossroad, Chado is mocked by his classmates and even his teacher for this idea.
• From the Mouths of Babes: Chado is only 11, yet he often uses the Maherian swear word "wagdass" and is shown to know many more Maherian profanities during his insult duel with Zagrom.
• Fully-Dressed Cartoon Animal: Almost all shelks and wakis, with the exception of Nashoba, who is often shirtless and doesn't wear shoes.
• Functional Magic: Though some powers like Kayenne's telekinesis are gifts, basic forms of shi can apparently be mastered by anyone with enough training.
• Funetik Aksent: Used to convey the Gendyan peasants' stereotypical country bumpkin accents.
• Furries Are Easier to Draw: Chado, Poky and Kayenne have models noticeably more expressive than any human character's.
• Furry Female Mane: All female wakis are seen to sport one, including Chado's mother in the vision he has of her after defeating Sabba. However, many male wakis also have human-like hair.
• Furry Reminder:
  • Maherian has some expressions only used by wakis and shelks about their fur and their ability to move their ears.
  • Kayenne roars when he uses the Muun technique.
  • Chado runs on all fours, but oddly not Poky.
• Fusion Dance: Ayron uses a dark shi technique to merge with either Irys or Kaorys for the final battle.
• Game-Breaking Bug: Several, unfortunately, due to the game's unfinished state:
  • There are ways to make the game Unintentionally Unwinnable with Script Breaking: for instance, the Three Arrows contain a room full of soldiers you can fight, but you're actually supposed to solve a puzzle to get rid of them. If you kill them (which is possible and not even that hard at that point) instead of solving the puzzle, a dialogue will later fail to trigger, crashing the game. If you saved in the meantime, you're screwed.
  • The force field delimiting the battle area sometimes fails to despawn after a battle, trapping the player and forcing them to reload their save.
  • Before a patch fixed this, it was possible to keep levelling past the Cap, which would eventually result in the characters reverting to level 1.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Low-level enemies don't attack you if your level is too high, even when the plot says they should. For instance, if you've been Level Grinding in the Secret Rift before going to the Three Arrows, the latter's guards won't try to stop you from hijacking the trains.
  • The enemies found on the Gendys Plain also completely ignore you if you're riding an amos, regardless of your level.
  • All techniques are considered non-elemental and deal damage not based on their users and targets' elemental affinities, even when they blatantly do involve elements, like Chado's menhir throws.
  • Xaham can't fly you to places you haven't reached on foot first, so he can't directly fly the party to the Shiyawo mountain or anywhere nearby during the quest for the snow bloodor even though you're supposed to find it as soon as possible, but he can once the party reaches it. This is only justified once, when the party reaches the Gendys Station: he can't land there until the party turns the station's defence system off from the inside.
  • He also normally can't pick you up if the party is inside a dungeon but breaks this rule after the battle against Sabba by directly picking up the party from the Shiyawo's summit. He can't do it again if you revisit this dungeon, unless you go all the way to the summit again^note This was added in an update to prevent players from accidentally softlocking themselves, he originally couldn't do it again at all..
  • The gromiz will still attack you if you choose to let the friendly Zlog become their new leader.
  • Similarly, Adoryan soldiers will still attack the party on sight after Rosalya joins it, they'll even try to kill Rosalya herself, even though they're supposed to bring her back to Adorya alive and to know her face.
  • The access to the Gendys Plain is protected by puzzles, which are actually a tutorial to learn how to use Askel's attracthorn and are justified as security systems the gromiz are too dumb to get past. And yet, gromiz can be fought all over the plain.
  • Terra briefly appears as an NPC after the battle against Sabba, interacting with her just replays a dialogue. The problem is that it's the only time any party member and not just Chado can interact with her, and that characters automatically look at nearby NPCs: the developers forgot to add an exception for Terra, so Poky, Kayenne and Askel will look at her even though they aren't summoned ones and therefore can't see her.
  • Askel is seen riding an amos while looking for Rosalya in the Forest of Meonis in a cutscene. And yet, the only place where you can ride an amos in the game is the Gendys Plain, it despawns if you try to enter the forest with it.
  • Kayenne is supposed to be a very knowledgeable shelk who has been around for more than a hundred cycles, but when he joins the party, his level is very low and he only knows a very small number of spells and techniques. Conversely, when Rosalya joins the party much later in the game, her level is very high and she knows a considerable number of spells and techniques even though she's not supposed to be able to control her powers and spent her childhood in a Gilded Cage where she presumably never learned how to fight, Kayenne and the Mantarians are never shown teaching her. A possible explanation is that Ranahel had her learn spells in an unsuccessful attempt to help her control her powers, but it doesn't explain why she doesn't defend herself when Askel tries to capture her (however, in the unpublished seventh chapter of Crossroad, she does use a fire spell against him, albeit unsuccessfully).
  • Chado is shown to be strong enough to lift menhirs larger than himself, but he never uses his strength to lift or move any other heavy object, puzzles involving these require using Kayenne's telekinesis instead.
  • Relatedly, Kayenne's telekinesis is a lot less useful in practice than in theory because it only works on Chado's menhirs and on objects bearing a telekinesis symbol, no in-universe justification is ever given. He also can't use it on some objects that must be moved with Askel's attracthorn instead even though it should logically also do the trick. Furthermore, he never uses this power for anything in the story or in battle, only during out-of-battle gameplay.
• Gameplay Grading: You receive a grade at the end of each fight, better grades mean better rewards. One achievement requires you to achieve an S rank against a major boss.
• Generic Doomsday Villain: Ayron, due to the unfinished story that leaves his exact motivations unexplained. While it is known that he wants revenge against the Shiness, this doesn't explain why he wants to hunt their summoned ones down.
• Genius Bruiser: Poky is a surprisingly good fighter in addition to being a Gadgeteer Genius.
• Genre Mashup: The game is a Role-Playing Game with a combat system more akin to a Fighting Game.
• The Ghost:
  • Nalluka's elders (mistranslated as "doyens") are mentioned several times by Kayenne, who has been tasked with bringing Rosalya to them, but they never appear in the game since it ends before the party reaches Nalluka.
  • An isolito mentions a different tribe called the sanolitos, which never appear either.
  • Unlike Chado's father, who appears in Crossroad, Poky's family appears neither in the game nor in Crossroad even though he mentions it in the game.
• Giant Enemy Crab: The craclis are huge crabs wielding Savage Spiked Weapons.
• Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: Generally averted, an odd exception is Plantadent, a unique and unusually powerful Menhiros the party has to fight as a Mini-Boss before reaching the Scarlet Promenade: what exactly it is is never explained, it just attacks the party on sight and is never mentioned anywhere, not a single line of dialogue about it precedes or follows the fight.
• Goggles Do Nothing: Averted in Crossroad, where Poky wears his while working on the Asanao-3. Played straight in the game.
• Going Through the Motions: Used in most dialogues, during which the same Stock Poses are reused over and over.
• Going to See the Elephant: Poky chose to leave Kimpao with Chado even though he wasn't sure he could actually see Terra because he wanted to see the world... and discover new recipes.
• Golden Ending: No matter what you do, you can't prevent Irys and Kaorys's deaths and the Mantarians' defeat, but the happiest ending you can achieve is the one where Ajoss and Vrynn reconcile, Zlog becomes the gromiz's friendly ruler and Iselys is prevented from murdering the Mantarian counselors.
• Goldfish Poop Gang: Bagogue and his goons are encountered twice during the game, first when the party has to reach the Great Poui, second just before the party reaches the Shiyawo. The first time, they're just here to poach pouis and fight the party when they interfere, the second, Bagogue tries to force the party to pay him or work for him to access the mountain, in both cases, they're just crooks unaffiliated with the antagonists.
• Golem: Not seen but mentioned as formerly used at the Giant's Hall to carry goods. Surprisingly, even though there are none in the game, the Maherian dictionary has a word for "golem", /hodet/.
• Gotta Get Your Head Together: Rosalya often does this when she has her "fits" or when she uses her power to reveal invisible objects.
• Gratuitous English:
  • Even though Samir Rebib is French, the original manga was known as The Shiness, he removed the article afterwards but "Shiness" is still pronounced like an English word, and is actually a Portmanteau of "shine" and "darkness".
  • The game's subtitle is The Lightning Kingdom in every language, even in French.
  • The tracks of the game's soundtrack all have English titles only even though Hazem Hawash is French and Hiroki Kikuta is Japanese.
  • Chado's name was Shadow in Samir Rebib's very early drawings◊, he then Frenchified it but it's still pronounced like "shadow".
  • Some other Maherian words like "bloodor" are obviously derived from English words and keep their pronunciations.
• Gratuitous Foreign Language: Aside from insults, some untranslated Maherian words such as sodeba (goodbye) appear in dialogues once in a while.
• Great Offscreen War: The shelks and the humans were at war at some point in the past, which side won isn't revealed. Pagash, an Adoryan soldier, brags of the many battles he fought against the shelks in the French version.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Altonataros indirectly caused Zagrom's ascension to power by trying to corrupt Irys when Ajoss threw the dark shi-infused grimoire he sent her into the Gromiz Lair, which in turn caused the downfall of Meos's kingdom and the refugee crisis that started the war between Gendys and Adorya. Altonataros himself turned evil when a serkan corrupted him, though whether it's actually sentient is unclear.
• Green Thumb: Askel starts the game with a high plant affinity and has the unique ability to summon a vine and use it as a whip called an attracthorn. This is also Kaorys's element of choice, she can decipher plant spells so that the party can learn them and uses plant attacks if she ends up being the final boss.
• Guest Fighter: The recurring guest character Reize Seatlan, whose creator was a backer for the game, appears as an Optional Boss.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • There's a hidden way to make Ajoss and Vrynn reconcile, but it's not easy to figure out because it involves talking to invisible NPCs who have a model in dialogues but not outside.
  • Meos's palace contains a secret room that can only be accessed with a password. This password is "Altania", which is the name of a character who doesn't appear in the game and is never mentioned, you're supposed to know her name from the tie-in manga Crossroad, even though nothing in it connects her to Meos (though the game at least gives you some clues). If you've never read the manga, which is likely as it can only be read in French through the Wayback Machine, you either have to look at a guide or waste time brute-forcing the code. At least the piece of equipment found in this room is arguably a Disc-One Nuke.
  • Rosalya can reveal invisible doors leading to powerful items, but you can only find them by listening to a sound that plays when they're close. Unless you waste a lot of time revisiting every place, including already-cleared dungeons, you will need a guide to find them all, the one on the Three Arrows is even permanently missable.
  • Worse, she can also reveal hidden chests, but unlike the doors, they don't make any sound.
  • After reaching Mantara, the party is tasked with going to the Shiyawo mountain to find a cure to Rosalya's illness. A sidequest requires you to fly back to Mantara before you find the cure (though there are good reasons to do so, as along the way, the party can find disciplines that have to be deciphered by Irys or Kaorys to be used) and becomes unavailable afterwards, and is initiated by finding a small piece of paper on the ground away from any NPC worth talking to.
• Gusty Glade: A recurring obstacle on the Shiyawo mountain, they can only be passed by summoning a menhir to make Chado heavier. Oddly enough, the Three Arrows lack any, even though several parts of that dungeon involve walking on the trains' roofs while they're in flight.
• Handwraps of Awesome: Samir Rebib is fond of this trope, Poky, Askel, Altania, Meos and Zagrom all wear some, as well as Nashoba in some cutscenes Depending on the Artist.
• Harmless Electrocution: When the Asanao-3 is struck by lightning in Crossroad, Chado and Poky are just slightly dishevelled and charred. Earlier, when Altania paralyzes Kayenne with lightning shi, it incapacitates him without injuring him.
• Haunted Castle: The palaces of Meos and Laotan-Piki-Lanku have both become this after the dark shi caused their downfall, most of their occupants are monsters and undead guards.
• He Knows About Timed Hits: Zig-Zagged, the characters don't mention buttons and tutorials telling which to use are addressed to the player only, however, the characters do mention interface elements like the health bar and the shi gauges.
• Healing Hands: Apparently, any element of shi can be used to heal wounds, so any character can learn an efficient healing spell no matter their element of choice.
• Heel–Face Turn: Askel, an Adoryan mercenary hired to capture the runaway princess Rosalya, ends up being more interested in protecting her from harm and temporarily joins the party to find a cure for her after she suffers a "fit", then permanently as her bodyguard when it becomes clear that Ayron will stop at nothing to hunt her down.
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: The party (though they have Informed Equipment), Mingane and Ayron are the only characters not wearing a helmet during the battle of Mantara, the Mantarian and Adoryan soldiers all wear one.
• The Hero: Chado. He might only be eleven, but he's a Determinator willing to go on an adventure around the whole planet, fight all kinds of monsters and join La Résistance to find the Lands of Life.
• Heroes Fight Barehanded: All five playable characters, though some techniques involve Poky's wrench and Askel's attracthorn.
• Heroic BSoD: Chado suffers one after witnessing Mantara's devastation by Ayron's squadron and learning that he isn't Terra's first summoned one and that his predecessors either died in their quest for the Lands of Life or, in Ayron's case, turned evil. He gets over it when his friends cheer him up.
• High-Speed Hijack: The party has to hijack three moving trains in a row to reach the Gendys Station.
• Hitman with a Heart: Askel is a menacing mercenary sent to bring Rosalya back to Adorya by any means necessary, including paralyzing her when she tries to escape. However, it quickly becomes clear that he genuinely cares for her, and he eventually decides to escort her on her quest for the Lands of Life.
• Hobbits: By Samir Rebib's own admission, the wakis are the Maherian equivalents of hobbits, they're smaller than the shelks and the humans and live simple and peaceful lives on their meteora with no interest in traveling.
• Hold Your Hippogriffs: Expressions like "squirropigswash" pop up once in a while.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: Chado, Poky and Kayenne can't win the first fight against Ayron so that Rosalya can save the day.
• Hopeless Suitor: Arkaros unsuccessfully tried to woo Vrynn when he was alive even though she and Ajoss were married, and keeps trying after his death. He even tries and fails to steal Meos's crown just so that she would notice him.
• Horse of a Different Color: The Maherian mount of choice is the amos, which looks like a cross between a camel and a velociraptor.
• Hot Blooded Sideburns: Chado's fur gives him this appearance, which definitely fits his personality.
• How the Mighty Have Fallen: Meos went from the The Good King of Meonis to a monster living alone in his ruined palace after Zagrom destroyed his kingdom and gave him a choice between having his family slaughtered and putting a curse on himself.
• Hulk Speak: Rachigrin, Zagrom's dumbest minion, speaks that way.
• Humans Are Cthulhu: Poky, who has never seen humans, imagines them as waki-eating monsters in Crossroad.
• Humans Are Special: The game's old website describes the humans as a race of ambitious conquerors who have built empires, while the other races are described as more modest.
• Humiliation Conga: The player can choose to put Zagrom through one after defeating him.
• Hurricane Kick: Chado's Hiiraa-Kimpao technique is an upside-down variant similar to Chun-Li's Spinning Bird Kick. Fittingly, this technique's name means "Kimpao tornado" in Maherian.
• I Ate WHAT?!: After he jumps from the Asanao-3 and is knocked out, Poky dreams of a tasty meal. When he wakes up, he realizes that he's been chewing on one of the skeletal jester Skulfon's arms and does a Spit Take.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: The game's chapters and Crossroad's are called "fragments", referring to the Shattered World they're set in.
• Idiot Hair: Chado has a large cowlick on his forehead. According to Samir Rebib, it was inspired by Tails's.
• Improbable Age:
  • Chado is 11 and Poky is 10, yet the former already knows how to fly a spaceship (to be fair, he's The Chosen One) and the latter how to build one, and during the battle of Mantara, they're both tasked with fighting to defend the city even though every other child is evacuated.
  • Askel is 20 and already a notorious mercenary employed by King Ranahel himself. This was justified in The Shiness, where he used the shi to Mind Control his way into the king's service because he wanted to assassinate him, this plot point seems to have been dropped in the game, as Askel isn't shown to have any mind control powers or intention to kill the king in it.
  • Meos's three daughters are all in their early 20s (only Irys's exact age is known, she's 23), yet Altania is one of Ranahel's top retainers, Irys is a Warrior Princess leading the Mantarian army and Kaorys is the queen of Mantara. The latter two are justified in that their kingdom was destroyed when they were still children, so they had to learn how to rule earlier than expected.
• In My Language, That Sounds Like...:
  • Waki means "armpit" in Japanese.
  • "Poky" can translate as "annoyingly slow" or "stupid" in English, and "Shiness" is obviously a homophone of "shyness".
  • The word "shi" was probably intended to resemble the Chinese word for "vital force", qi, but it ends up sounding exactly like the Japanese word for "death".
• Indo-European Alien Language: The conlangers Déborah Lebon and Clément Michard went to great lengths to avert this, Maherian has various grammatical features not found in Indo-European languages such as base-twelve numbers, a verb-object-subject word order similar to the one found in many Austronesian and Mayan languages, and a nonconcatenative morphology akin to the one found in Semitic languages.
• Inescapable Ambush: Basically every battle, since a force field appears whenever a battle starts and makes it impossible to escape until every enemy is defeated. It's also impossible to avoid a battle against an Ambushing Enemy.
• Inexplicable Treasure Chests: Everywhere, though a few of them are justified, like the ones that are part of the Three Arrows' cargo.
• Info Dump: Many, especially during the game first third, when everything important that happened on Gendys during the last 15 cycles is just told to the player without using Flashbacks, you have to read lengthy dialogues and documents scattered here and there.
• The Informant: Askel knows one named Dogri, who gives the party some useful information to enter Laotan-Piki-Lanku.
• Informed Attribute: Dogri calls Askel a "heartbreaker", even though Askel is never seen flirting with anyone in the game or in Crossroad.
• Informed Equipment: The playable characters' models stay the same for the whole game no matter their equipment, even though every piece has a different illustration in the menu. For instance, Chado may wear a blue bandana in the menu but his model will always wear a red one. This results in Armored Villains, Unarmored Heroes, as Ayron and many other foes visibly wear armor.
• Instant Expert:
  • Chado knows how to fly the Asanao-3 and manages to fly it all the way to Gendys even though there are no other spaceships on Kimpao and therefore nobody to teach him, and his only experience is the Asanao-1, which burned down before it even took off, and the Asanao-2, which crashed immediately after taking off.
  • Somewhat averted with the spells and techniques, as characters have to learn the ones they don't already know when they join the party by equipping scrolls, which they have to keep equipped to use the corresponding spell or technique until it is mastered and usable without the scroll. However, the characters perfectly use the spells and techniques from the get-go, their efficiency doesn't change depending on whether they're mastered or not.
• Interface Screw: Vrynn can cover the whole screen with Instant Runes (strangely enough, they're not Maherian letters, they're actual Earth runes) for a few seconds if the player chooses to fight her.
• Invisibility: The Mantarians (or possibly the shelks) have developed invisibility generators to conceal Mantara, and shivos can turn invisible in battle.
• Invisible Wall: The Gendys Plain's west edge has a gigantic, very noticeable one due to the area's unfinished state.
• Jacob Marley Apparel: The undead Ajoss still has the arrow that killed him stuck in his head.
• Justified Save Point: Players can save by talking to shirus, which are creatures who feed on memories and can preserve them.
• Kamehame Hadoken: Chado and Poky's Bomee technique. Kiidju also resembles one, though it's a water spell.
• Kid Hero: Chado is eleven and Poky is ten.
• Kids Driving Cars: Chado somehow knows how to fly a spaceship at the age of eleven, and none of the adult wakis who attend the launch in Crossroad seem to find it strange.
• Kinder and Cleaner: The characters used actual profanity in the original manga, but the game uses Maherian insults instead. However, there's one instance in Crossroad where the writers forgot and Askel uses an actual swear word.
• King Incognito: Rosalya is actually the runaway princess of Adorya in disguise.
• Knight of Cerebus: Ayron. While the previous foes faced in the game committed their evil acts offscreen, the party first meets him when he attacks Mantara and the game goes full War Is Hell.
• Kung-Fu Kid: Chado and Poky both already know martial arts and can defeat adults without even using the shi.
• Kung-Fu Wizard: Basically every playable character, since they all fight barehanded and all possess Elemental Powers.
• Lazy Backup: Only three characters can be active at once, and if all active characters are defeated, the battle is lost, even if the rest of the party is available. Inactive characters aren't even shown leaving the party, they just vanish with no explanation.
• The Leader: Kayenne usually serves this role.
• Lecture as Exposition: A chapter of Crossroad is partly set at Chado and Poky's school, where their teacher explains to his class and the readers what meteoras are.
• Legacy of the Chosen: If a Shiness's summoned one dies, she will always find another (or maybe it's a case of Someone Has to Do It, as whether the Shiness choose their summoned ones is unclear). Chado is actually Terra's eighty-third summoned one, and Adjin/Ayron was one of them before turning evil.
• Leitmotif:
  • Several, the most common is basically the game's main theme and elements of it are heard in the title screen theme, in Kaorys's theme, in the Gendys Plain's theme, in the ending theme and many others.
  • With the exception of Kayenne, every playable character has a theme.
  • The Shiness also had one which could be listened to on its website, but it wasn't reused for the game.
• Letter Motif: Most gromiz have names containing G, R or Z, which are also in the word "gromiz": Zagrom, Gabzur, Zlog, Ragan, Grorim, Rachigrin, Karok... the only exceptions are the "brothers of pain" Akuum, Anoom and Unoom, who instead share a five-letter name ending with a doubled vowel and an M.
• Life Drain: Askel's Wernusu technique heals him by draining the target's hit points.
• The Lifestream: The shi is both Mahera's equivalent of magic and what the dead's souls return to.
• Limit Break: The hyper is a very powerful attack that requires an Action Command and a large amount of tension points. Since tension is also needed to parry attacks, using a character's hyper makes them more vulnerable afterwards.
• Limited Wardrobe: All characters always wear the same outfit (except Nashoba in some cutscenes Depending on the Artist), even in chapters of Crossroad set a while before the game.
• Locomotive Level: The Three Arrows combine this with Levels Take Flight since the three trains are flying trains.
• Long-Lived: Shelks can live into their 250s, Kayenne is 112 and Nashoba is 196.
• A Long Time Ago, in a Galaxy Far, Far Away...: The game is set on the planet Mahera, which has human inhabitants, and the similarities with Earth end there, though some elements of the Maherian cultures are seemingly inspired by real-life civilizations. However, Earth seems to exist, as the Developer's Room near the Giant's Hall contains a meteorite which might come from another world according to Rimite and is covered with names of backers written in the Latin alphabet. The Maherian guide also implies that the game's story is actually the translation of a Maherian book that somehow ended up on Earth.
• Look on My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair: Many places on Gendys such as the palaces of Meos and Laotan-Piki-Lanku are ruined, for the dark shi caused their downfall.
• The Lost Woods: The Forest of Meonis became this after Meos's kingdom collapsed.
• MacGuffin Location: The Lands of Life. The game ends before the heroes find them.
• Mad Scientist: Gabzur, one of Zagrom's minions.
• Made of Evil: Serkans are creatures made out of dark shi.
• Magic by Any Other Name: Maherian magic is called the shi, and is technically Mahera's Life Energy. Though the shi is thought to be impossible to replicate, Poky mentions that he somehow managed to invent a generator of artificial shi to power the Asanao-3, a feat akin to building a Perpetual Motion Machine.
• Magic Missile Storm: Some spells can be spammed to fire a whole bunch of projectiles, and enemies can do so as well, so battles will often involve both sides using this trope on each other at the same time.
• Magitek: The shi can be used to power machines, Poky's puzzles consist of rerouting shi fluxes to complete circuits.
• Making a Splash: Poky starts the game with an above-average water affinity, though his affinities are more balanced than the other characters'. Kayenne feels it and teaches him the game's first spell, Kiidju, a water-based attack.
• Malevolent Architecture: The Three Arrows. For some reason, they have Acid Pools, Laser Hallways and Smashing Hallway Traps of Doom even though they're just trains.
• Mana Meter: Each fighter has a different shi meter for each of the four basic elements, for instance air spells only consume shi from the air meter.
• Manipulative Bastard: It's heavily implied that Ayron manipulated either Irys or Kaorys into betraying the Mantarians.
• Manual Leader, A.I. Party: You may have up to 3 active members in your party but you only control one (which you can change whenever you want) during battles, while the others help with support spells when needed.
• Martial Pacifist: Nashoba is implied to be one, his backstory on the game's defunct website mentions that while he's a former warlord, he prefers peace and silence to war and often meditates.
• Meaningful Name: Terra means "earth" in Latin and many Romance languages, and Terra is the Shiness of earth.
• Mentor Archetype:
  • A rare example of a playable mentor, Kayenne teaches Chado and Poky how to use spells and techniques, as well as various things he knows about Mahera and the Shiness. He also teaches Rosalya some lessons about the shi in Crossroad.
  • Terra is also Chado's mentor to some extent, especially in Crossroad^note Unpublished pages from the unreleased 7th issue even show her teach Chado how to summon a menhir.
• Mercury's Wings: The shelks have wing-shaped ears and Kayenne wears ornamental wings on his shoes, this fits the fact that air is the shelks' element of choice.
• Microts: Maherian years are called "elemental cycles".
• Miles Gloriosus: Debatably Chado, he repeatedly claims to be an Ace Pilot even though he only flew a ship twice and crashed both times, the second time was because he carelessly flew through a storm. Then again, he did manage to fly through space from Kimpao to Gendys on his second attempt, whether he achieved this through luck alone or at least some skill is left ambiguous.
• Mind over Matter: Kayenne's power, which he oddly doesn't use in combat, its only purpose is to solve puzzles... and to briefly paralyze enemies out of battle, but it's effectively useless since you can't move while using this power, its range is too limited, it wears off almost instantly and results in enemies noticing and attacking you.
• Missing Mom:
  • Chado's mother died sometime before he met Terra. When he asked Terra if the shi can resurrect his mother, she let him believe he might see her again if he finds the Lands of Life, this became his motivation for leaving Kimpao. The game ends before he finds them, though he has a vision of his mother after defeating Sabba.
  • Queen Arisme, the mother of Irys, Kaorys and Altania, died at some point during the 15 cycles between the fall of the kingdom of Meonis and the beginning of the game, and is buried in a cemetery in the Forest of Meonis.
• Mistaken for Insane:
  • Chado, when he told the other wakis that he can see Terra. Mingane and Nashoba also believe this when they see him seemingly talking to himself from a distance, assuming this to be a consequence of the Asanao-3's crash.
  • Klaig, when he unsuccessfully tried to convince the villagers of Shjue that he's Lord Altonataros's son.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: Some Maherian animals look like crosses between real-world animals, and some of their names, like the squirropigs', are even Portmanteaus.
• The Mole: Either Irys or Kaorys turns out to work for Ayron, fights the party alone as the Pre-Final Boss and merges with Ayron to become the Final Boss.
  • Counselor Iselys also works for the Adoryans, the party can see through her and deal with her in a sidequest, otherwise she's fought near the end. In the latter case, she kills the other Mantarian counselors before the party can reach her.
• Money for Nothing: Money is so easy to gain, what with all the chests you'll find, rewards you'll get for completing quests and things you can sell, that you'll probably finish the game loaded with nothing to buy with all your uzus since merchants only sell gameplay-related items.
• Money Spider: Averted, enemies don't drop money when you defeat them, even the ones whose species are sapient, like the Adoryan soldiers.
• Monogender Monsters:
  • Female gromiz are mentioned but never seen in the game.
  • All named isolitos are male. The isolitos are Ditto Aliens, so we don't know if some of them are female too.
• Mook Chivalry: Both played straight and inverted, presumably to avoid making the very fast-paced combat system too complex or unbalanced: enemies are always fought one at a time and party members are always controlled one at a time.
• Motion Comic: Most of the game's cutscenes.
• Mr. Exposition:
  • Kayenne is the team's most knowledgeable member and often fills the others in on how the shi works aside from what only Terra knows.
  • Parodied with Xaham, who annoys Mingane by blathering useless trivia about the trains during the infiltration of the Three Arrows.
• Mr. Fanservice: Kayenne's vest leaves his abs and muscular arms exposed, and Nashoba spends most of the game shirtless. Xaham is also shirtless aside from his scarf.
• Mukokuseki: Fittingly for the game's Animesque art style, most humans look ethnically ambiguous with both Western and Eastern features (some like Irys are Ambiguously Brown) and some improbable hair colors.
• Multicultural Alien Planet: Though they all speak the same language, the wakis, the shelks, the humans, the gromiz and the isolitos all have very different cultures, and it's implied that there are different cultures within the races too.
• Multiple Endings: Two endings are possible and determined by your choices: one where Irys turns out to be the one who betrayed the Mantarians, accidentally kills Kaorys and is fought as the Pre-Final Boss before merging with Ayron to become the Final Boss, and one where Kaorys is the traitor and the roles are reversed, you're more likely to get the second ending by making the cruelest choices. Since no sequel was made, we don't know which ending is canon, though the final cutscene is the exact same no matter the ending since both sisters die in any case and the party leaves Gendys anyway, so it's likely that neither ending would have had long-term consequences.
• Mysterious Past:
  • All we know about Kayenne is that he's 112, that Mingane is his sister and that Nashoba is his "hunting brother". His goal at the beginning of the game is to escort Rosalya to his people to investigate her curse, but neither the game nor Crossroad explain how he met her in the first place.
  • We're never told what happened to Adjin after Terra condemned him to never return to the shi and why he now goes by Ayron. Whether he was always a powerful prince is unknown, and so is how he became one if he wasn't.
• Nasty Party: The dark shi corrupted the lord of Laotan-Piki-Lanku, Altonataros, into inviting his own subjects, including his wife, to a poisoned feast. His own sons would have also died if an alchemist hadn't rescued them.
• Never Bareheaded: Neither the game nor Crossroad nor any official artwork for the game ever depict Chado without his bandana or Poky without his goggles, even in class. However, in the original manga, they were bareheaded in class.
• Never My Fault: Irys/Kaorys doesn't accept that she accidentally killed her sister and blames her for everything, then blames the party for Mantara's suffering before fighting them.
• Never Trust a Title: No place in the game is called the "Lightning Kingdom". The closest thing it has is the Sparkling Kingdom, which was the name of the former alliance between Gendys and Adorya in the game^note In Crossroad, it's Adorya's nickname instead.
  • Despite its title, Crossroad does not show Chado and Rosalya's stories intersect, this only happens in the game^note This would have happened if the unreleased 7th chapter had been published, however..
• Never Trust a Trailer: The game's trailers, even the ones shown only a few months before the game's release, often show elements that were obviously animated just for them, such as the whole party fighting whereas only one character can fight at a time in the game, or were removed from the final game, like cutscenes that were later deleted due to rewrites.
  • The worst offender is easily the Gamescom 2016 trailer: it contains an animated cutscene of Chado and Terra's first meeting whereas it happens offscreen in the game, the scene showing the Adoryans about to execute Askel at the Gendys Station never happens in the game and seems to be a misleadingly modified version of a similar scene happening on Mantara instead, none of the shots where all five playable characters travel together can happen in the game, Ayron's model is outdated and he speaks with Askel's voice, the monster he summons is the unrelated boss Sabba and neither is fought at the Giant's Hall... the trailer barely features any frames from the actual game.
• Nipple and Dimed: When the party first meets the Sister of Secrets, she's too upset to help them because she found out that Rennerd drew her while she was taking a bath. The party has to fight him to take the drawing back, and if you look at it in the inventory after obtaining it, the Sister's nipples are covered by crosses.
• Non-Indicative Name: The Giant's Hall's English name is a mistranslation, there are actually two giants there and the original French name translates as "Giants' Hall".
• Notice This:
  • With the exception of Chado's menhirs, all objects Kayenne can move with telekinesis (and only these objects) bear an unexplained spiral-like symbol whose only purpose seems to basically solve the puzzle for you.
  • Similarly, floating leaves circle all objects Askel can move with his attracthorn, and only these objects.
• Now, Where Was I Going Again?: Averted, first because the map will clearly indicate where to go (sometimes bordering on Interface Spoiler), second because the menu contains a quest log listing the current and completed objectives.
• Obviously Evil: Ayron wears a black cape and has long fingernails and Yellow Eyes of Sneakiness. Unsurprisingly, he's one of the game's least trustworthy and most dangerous characters.
• Oculothorax: The eyes of serkans are floating eyes with tentacles.
• Offscreen Teleportation: The Korguen does this to scare the party whenever he's off-camera.
• Offstage Villainy: Every antagonist who isn't Ayron or one of his minions did whatever makes them an antagonist offscreen years before the game starts. Their actions are just told through Info Dumps or Story Breadcrumbs.
• Oh, My Gods!: Maherians, especially Kayenne, sometimes exclaim "by the shi!" or "the shi help us!".
• One-Gender Race: Though we only see Terra in the game, the four Shiness are implied to all be female.
• One-Hit Kill: Touching one of Sabba's ghosts during the phase preceding the actual battle against her instantly defeats the active party member unless he's protected by the light of her husband's ghost. This can make the following battle significantly harder if you didn't give one of your other characters an item to revive the defeated member beforehand.
• One-Time Dungeon: The Three Arrows are the only dungeon that can only be visited once. While this makes sense for the first two trains, as the party only needs them to reach the third before letting them go, they can't revisit the third for some reason even though it stays in the Gendys Station after the party disembarks.
• One-Word Title: The game's three "fragments" all have one: Meonis, Bloodor and Mantara.
• One-Winged Angel:
  • Sabba turns into a gigantic version of herself after her normal-sized first form is defeated.
  • Ayron and either Irys or Kaorys merge into one for both for the final battle.
• Only Friend: While he isn't sure Terra is real, Poky is the only waki child who doesn't mock Chado when the latter explains that Mahera was once a single planet, as Terra taught him, and is the only one willing to talk to him when the others believe him insane.
• Only One Name: All of the game's main characters seem to only have one name, only a few unimportant NPCs such as the biologist Feindar Fourbépines have surnames. Averted in The Shiness, however, where the protagonists had surnames.
• Opening the Sandbox: The game lets you explore the Gendys Plain freely and return to previously visited areas once Xaham first flies the party to the plain and gives them the item to call him.
• Optional Boss: Several sidequests consist of defeating some, speaking to the Sister of Secrets requires defeating Rennerd, and obtaining a powerful item in the Room of Nine Pillars requires defeating the Guest Fighter Reize.
• Optional Stealth: Players can obtain extra equipment and an achievement by hijacking the Three Arrows without being spotted by the searchlights, but this isn't a requirement.
• Oral Fixation: Askel almost always has a bloodor in his mouth, even when he's tied to a pole after being captured by the Mantarians, somehow.
• Organic Technology: Cohayas are scallop-like, slightly telepathic Maherian shellfish which repeat what other nearby cohayas hear and can serve as primitive walkie-talkies. The one the team uses to call Xaham's ship seems to have been modified with cybernetic implants to boost its reach.
• Our Goblins Are Different: The gromiz are essentially the Maherian equivalents of goblins, they're small with big Pointy Ears, they form a Barbarian Tribe and most of them live Beneath the Earth.
• Our Spirits Are Different: The hostile shivos are floating, transparent spirits who can teleport at will and turn invisible.
• Overly Long Fighting Animation: Every hyper you can use has one, but thankfully, they're skippable. Zagrom's and Ayron's also have one.
• Overly Narrow Superlative: Chado repeatedly claims to be Kimpao's best pilot, but he's also the only pilot on Kimpao since the wakis have no interest in ships.
• Paper-Thin Disguise:
  • Chado, Poky and Kayenne convince Rachigrin they're gromiz simply by wearing gromiz masks. Justified in that Rachigrin is one of the stupidest gromiz.
  • Rosalya ran away from her kingdom in a disguise merely consisting of a turban to hide her hair. She's immediately recognized when she arrives at the Gendys Station in Crossroad.
• Pardon My Klingon: The characters, especially Chado and Askel, frequently use the Maherian swear word "wagdass". Chado even engages in a Maherian insult duel against Zagrom before fighting him.
• Party in My Pocket: Averted out of battle with the active party members, the ones you're not controlling follow the one you play as. Played straight with the inactive ones, who just disappear. Also played straight whenever a battle starts: you only see the character you're controlling, the other active characters help you with supports but don't physically appear. This trope is also inverted in that the same thing happens to enemies, you only see the one currently attacking you even if others are helping it with supports.
• Party Scattering:
  • Poky jumps ship when the Asanao-3 is about to crash, Chado's first mission after the crash is therefore to find him.
  • After the battle of Mantara, Poky has to gather Kayenne, Askel and Rosalya from all over the city to cheer Chado up.
• Permanently Missable Content:
  • Some sidequests become unavailable after certain portions of the game.
  • Some supports can only be obtained during the battle of Mantara, a short event during which it's impossible to grind, or on the Three Arrows, a One-Time Dungeon, and some pieces of equipment can only be obtained by beating the Three Arrows without triggering the alarm.
  • Aserys, a Mantarian barkeep, sells special items that make catching critters easier, but she stops selling them after the battle of Mantara.
• Phony Psychic: When Terra detects the dark shi stream that prevents Irys's call from reaching Mantara, Chado pretends to be the one able to detect dark shi to convey her message to the Mantarians without revealing her existence.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Chado is only 4'5" (roughly 1.35 m), but he can lift boulders larger than himself. Whether he can do that because he's a summoned one or any physically fit waki with a good mastery of earth shi can do the same is unknown, although when he uses his Shi-Menhiro technique against a bully at school in Crossroad, nobody seems to find this power strange.
• The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything:
  • Even though Poky is said to be a Gadgeteer Genius who invented the airship he and Chado left Kimpao with, the game never shows him building anything. When Xaham needs to improve his own airship to hijack the Three Arrows, he just tasks the party with finding parts and Poky doesn't help him add them to the ship.
  • Nashoba is introduced as a former warlord and a powerful ally of the Mantarians and Mingane is introduced as his pupil, but they're never seen fighting, not even during Ayron's assault on Mantara.
  • The only time in the game you will see Chado, "Kimpao's greatest pilot", piloting a ship is in the opening, when the Asanao-3 crashes. Any other ship the party boards during the whole game is piloted by Xaham.
• Place of Power: The legendary Lands of Life, where the four elements meet. Chado seeks them to see his mother again, Rosalya to lift her curse, and Terra for unknown reasons.
• Playing with Fire: Rosalya starts the game with a high fire affinity, which is justified in that she's the Shiness of fire's summoned one. Fire is also Lord Altonataros's element of choice.
• Please Wake Up: Irys/Kaorys has this reaction after she accidentally kills her sister, unleashing dark shi all over Gendys and corrupting Mantara.
• Plot Hole: Several in both the game and Crossroad, often owing to the incomplete story and multiple rewrites during the development. As the game's and Crossroad's plots differ considerably from the original manga's, most also count as Adaptation-Induced Plot Holes.
  • As Irys and Nashoba explain to Chado and Poky, the war between Gendys and Adorya began when Gendys became corrupted with dark shi and the Adoryans refused to grant asylum to the Gendyans who tried to flee it because they believed that they would spread the dark shi. What doesn't make sense is that the Adoryans are trying to invade Gendys even though they regard the dark shi as a threat.
  • How Terra ended up on Kimpao in the first place even though the Shiness supposedly can't travel between meteoras on their own (otherwise Terra wouldn't need Chado to bring her to the Lands of Life) is never explained. She hasn't always been on this meteora, since she mentions having visited the Forest of Meonis before, gives Chado some exposition regarding Adorya in Crossroad (she even mentions that Adorya is trying to invade Gendys, which is a rather recent event, the war only started 15 cycles at most before the game begins) and had other summoned ones on other meteoras before Chado.
  • The cause of Rosalya's fits of Power Incontinence is never made clear. Though this is probably related to her being a summoned one, it doesn't explain why the same doesn't happen to Chado. This could be linked to the fact that she has never met the Shiness who summoned her, unlike Chado, but the exact rules are unknown.
  • Furthermore, Crossroad implies that the Adoryans' anti-shi handcuffs (which don't appear in the game's continuity) can prevent Rosalya's fits, but never explains why she doesn't simply wear them constantly and still had to grow up confined in an explosion-proof room.
  • When the party first meets him, Ajoss has just abducted Skulfon to obtain the password to Queen Arisme's crypt from him as the first part of a plan to atone for his mistake that caused the downfall of the kingdom of Meonis. However, this happened fifteen cycles ago, and he has apparently never done anything to repent or to convince his wife Vrynn he wasn't a traitor in the meantime. If you take the hidden Third Option when you have to choose which of the two to side with, she forgives him within minutes. Worse, you have no involvement, they just run into each other and decide to discuss, which seemingly never happened before in 15 cycles.
  • If you choose to partake in Askel's humiliation on Mantara, he leaves after the party finds the snow bloodor and doesn't fly back to Mantara with Xaham and the rest of the team. Immediately afterwards, he's on Mantara when Ayron attacks whether he stayed with the party or not, even though Mantara's location is only known to a few trusted pilots like Xaham and the Mantarians turn the city invisible when the party warns them that Ayron's squadron is approaching. The squadron itself can't have picked him up since it flies past the mountain before he leaves the party.
  • Even though the Adoryans are shown to have airships on Gendys, they never have them fly over the Forest of Meonis to search for Rosalya and just send soldiers to search it on foot instead, no justification is ever given. The fact that it therefore takes them hours, if not days, to find the Mantarians' camp even though they didn't even try to camouflage it makes this even stupider.
  • Chado and Poky somehow managed to build three spaceships even though there are no spaceships on Kimpao, so they had no way to get the parts. Even if they had somehow built every single part on their own or cannibalized other machines, how they managed to build the three Asanaos so quickly (how long it took them isn't mentioned, but since they don't seem to age between the chapter in Crossroad where Poky becomes interested in traveling with Chado and the one where the Asanao-3 takes off, it was supposedly less than a cycle) is never explained, neither is how they could afford building the 3 ships even though they're still children. This is definitely an Adaptation-Induced Plot Hole, since in The Shiness, the ship was built by Chado's grandfather instead and he mentions it took him his entire life.
  • Even though Ayron wants to kill the summoned ones, he spares Chado after defeating him on Mantara in spite of the fact that he has plenty of time to finish him off before Rosalya can reach him. He doesn't even do anything after he beats Chado, he just waits for Rosalya.
• Plot-Irrelevant Villain:
  • Ayron has no involvement in the plot for most of the game and doesn't interact with the heroes until his squadron attacks Mantara, moments before the final dungeon.
  • Sabba only exists to provide a threat to the party when they climb the Shiyawo and a touching moment for Chado when he has a vision of his mother after her defeat. Unlike Ayron, she's completely irrelevant to either Chado's or Rosalya's quests, and unlike Zagrom and Altonataros, she wasn't involved in the events that started the war between Gendys and Adorya.
• Plucky Comic Relief: Poky is both a Big Eater and a Cowardly Sidekick, though he's also The Smart Guy to some extent.
• Point of No Return: A non-final example: the Three Arrows can't be exited until they reach the Gendys Station, so you can't leave this dungeon without beating it.
• The Poorly Chosen One: Chado is actually Terra's eighty-third summoned one, the others died in their quest for the Lands of Life or turned evil. Ayron is actually Adjin, one of the latter.
• Portmantitle: "Shiness" is a portmanteau of "shine" and "darkness".
• Power Crystal: Shi crystals can generate or absorb shi fluxes and are used to power machines.
• Power Floats: Irys/Kaorys's wrath after her accidentally killing her sister unleashes so much dark shi that she starts floating, which the party finds disturbing. However, she doesn't use this ability when the party fights her afterwards.
• Power Glows: Anything shi-powered. Some powerful shi users such as Rosalya when she has her fits have Glowing Eyes of Doom, and after Irys/Kaorys accidentally kills her sister, her fury unleashes so much dark shi that she even develops Volcanic Veins.
• Power Incontinence: What Rosalya calls her curse causes her to have "fits" of powerful shi explosions. Crossroad shows that the Adoryans devised "shi handcuffs" that can prevent her fits, but she refuses to ever wear them again after she flees Adorya because they remind her of the Gilded Cage she spent her whole childhood in.
• Pre-existing Encounters: Most enemies are visible and avoidable, only a few are hidden.
• Pretty Princess Powerhouse: Rosalya turns out to be this once she becomes playable, she even defeats Ayron on her own after he easily overpowers the rest of the party.
• Primal Chest-Pound: The gromiz often do this in battle.
• Prince Charmless: Ayron is the prince of Irallium, as well as the game's main antagonist, a war criminal devoid of empathy willing to hunt down the summoned ones no matter who he has to kill to reach them. Rosalya isn't fooled for a second and chooses to flee Adorya when she suspects that her father is going to marry her to him.
• Programming Game: Though only one character can be controlled at a time in battle, the others can be programmed to support them, similarly to the gambit system from Final Fantasy XII.
• Protagonist-Centered Morality:
  • The Mantarians order Chado and Poky to fight as Child Soldiers for them without any repercussions just because the Adoryans are the ones who are invading.
  • While hijacking the Three Arrows, the party has to get rid of some Adoryan soldiers by clogging chimneys to suffocate them, apparently to death. There's no way to get past them more peacefully and they're not given a chance to surrender. The party faces no consequences.
• Punctuation Shaker: Generally averted, an odd exception is the password to Queen Arisme's crypt, Ellan'irys, which is supposed to be a transcription of the Maherian equivalent of "princess Irys", even though Maherian doesn't use apostrophes.
• Punny Name:
  • Ayron's name is obviously a pun on "iron", fitting his metal motif.
  • Rennerd's name is a Portmanteau of renard (meaning "fox" in French) and "nerd", as he's a fox-like spirit with Nerd Glasses who Cannot Talk to Women.
  • Skulfon's name is a Portmanteau of "skull" (Skulfon is undead, only his skeleton remains) and bouffon (meaning "jester" in French).
  • Cohayas are shellfish whose name is a pun on Coraya, a French brand of surimi.
• A Pupil of Mine Until He Turned to Evil: Adjin/Ayron was Terra's summoned one before he began using forbidden forms of shi and eventually became a dictator and a war criminal.
• Purple Is Powerful: Meos's daughters Irys, Kaorys and Altania all sport purple hair and are among the cast's most powerful fighters, Zagrom, the king of the gromiz, is purple too. Purple is also the color of lightning shi in the game.
• Puzzle Boss: Sabba's final form is one to some extent, since players have to use the light of her husband's ghost to ring several bells to make her vulnerable.
• Racing Minigame: A sidequest consists of beating the runner Mitrabeoj. It's possible to cheat by using a shortcut, and surprisingly, No Fair Cheating is averted and you won't be disqualified.
• Recurring Traveller: The same merchant, Silas, is seen in many locations, including near the Shiyawo Mountain's summit, somehow.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni:
  • Chado is a Hot-Blooded Determinator whereas Poky is a Cowardly Sidekick. Their outfits even include red and blue respectively.
  • Irys is a cynical Warrior Princess who leads the Mantarian army while her sister Kaorys is an idealistic Wise Princess who rules the city of Mantara.
• La Résistance: The Mantarians, a remnant of the fallen kingdom of Meonis hiding in the flying city of Mantara and led by the daughters of King Meos Irys and Kaorys, are the only Gendyans who resist the Adoryans.
• Respawning Enemies: Enemies respawn after a while, allowing you to farm some materials.
• Rhymes on a Dime: The undead jester Skulfon often speaks this way.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: Chado and Poky, though Poky may sometimes be a Gonk instead Depending on the Artist. Baby mantises also count, especially in Crossroad as they're more expressive in it than in the game.
• Rock Monster:
  • Menhiros are walking piles of rocks. They're the game's slowest enemies but have a massive defense, hit very hard and can fire Eye Beams.
  • The two giants near the Giant's Hall, the Lightning Giant and the Plant Giant, are made of stone.
• Rose-Haired Sweetie: Rosalya (it's even in her name!) has pink hair and is a sweet girl who immediately befriends Chado and Poky and completely avoids behaving like a Royal Brat despite being a princess.
• Route Boss:
  • Depending on your choices in the Forest of Meonis, the boss you'll have to fight to enter Meos's palace will be either Ajoss, Arkaros or Vrynn.
  • Depending on your choices in the Pouis Forest, the boss you'll have to fight to reach the Great Poui will be either Bagogue or Ervea. However, when Bagogue is later encountered again in the Giant's Hall, he's a Skippable Boss instead, you can simply refuse to fight him.
  • Depending on your choices throughout the whole game, the final battle will be against Ayron and either Irys or Kaorys.
• Royal "We": The Shiness use it since they speak for the whole planet... except when the writers and/or the translators forget: for instance, she uses it in her final line in the French version but says "me" in the English version, and in both versions of the final cutscene, she uses "my" instead of "our".
• The Runaway:
  • Princess Rosalya ran away from Adorya with Kayenne's help to seek the Lands of Life, where she hopes to be freed from her curse, and because she suspects her father of planning to marry her to Ayron.
  • It's also implied that Chado and Poky left Kimpao without telling their parents.
• Sand Worm: Serkans move around by burrowing underground.
• Scarf of Asskicking: Poky wears a blue one.
• Scenery Porn: The game's environments are absolutely gorgeous, what with Mahera's Alien Sky, the Gendys Plain's beautiful landscape, the flying city of Mantara... telescopes are even scattered around Gendys just so that players can enjoy the scenery even more.
• Schizo Tech: Frequent but somewhat justified, first in that the shi's discovery probably resulted in technology evolving differently on Mahera, second in that Mahera's explosion presumably caused significant technological regression.
  • Even though Gendyans have the technology to build airships, they don't seem to use other vehicles and the most common way to travel on Gendys appears to be on amosback.
  • Artillery exists on Mahera, for instance the party has to fire cannons during the battle of Mantara, but personal firearms don't appear and soldiers just use melee weapons and short-range spells.
• Science Fantasy: Casual magic and advanced technology such as space trains are both found on Mahera.
• "Scooby-Doo" Hoax: The Korguen, a dreaded monster living on the Shiyawo mountain, is actually a well-meaning human in disguise who just wants to keep people away from the mountain to protect their children from Sabba.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • Poky jumps from the Asanao-3 before it crashes (Chado later points out how foolish it was), separating him from Chado for a short while at the beginning of the game.
  • Bagogue decides to move to Adorya when it becomes clear that the Mantarians lost the war.
• Sean Connery Is About to Shoot You: The official artwork used as the page image depicts Chado charging his hyper at the viewer.
• Secret-Keeper: The Sister of Secrets is a witch who can keep one's secret so well everyone but her forgets it.
• See the Invisible: Rosalya has the power to reveal invisible chests and doors. However, she can't use this power in battle, so it's unhelpful against shivos, who can turn invisible.
• Sensor Character: Terra, as well as Kayenne to a lesser extent, can detect dark shi, this proves useful when the party has to locate a dark shi stream that prevents Irys from calling Mantara. Chado first pretends that he's the one who has this power in order to not reveal he's Terra's summoned one.
• Sequel Hook: The game ends with Chado still seeking the Lands of Life in a new ship. When he tells Terra he's afraid of what awaits him, she cryptically answers "one day, we have to face up to who we are... and when that day comes, I hope you will forgive me". Unfortunately, no sequel was made.
• Sequential Boss: Meos, Sabba and Wio Irys/Kaorys have two phases each.
• Shamed by a Mob: Askel is shamed by the Mantarians after being captured and narrowly avoids getting pelted with tomatoes. The player can choose to partake.
• Shattered World: Long ago, Mahera shattered into fragments called meteoras when the balance of elements was broken.
• Shock and Awe: Lightning is Irys's element of choice, she can decipher lightning spells so that the party can learn them and uses lightning attacks if she ends up being the final boss. It's also the element of choice of her father Meos, her sister Altania and most Adoryan soldiers, who even wield electrified weapons. In Crossroad, Adorya uses lightning as its main energy source.
• Shop Fodder: Enemies don't drop money, but players can find various raw materials by catching small animals and winning fights, some of them can be traded for useful equipment, spells and techniques, but most are useless and only good for selling.
• Shout-Out:
  • The way Chado carries his menhirs on his back and throws them is a homage to Obélix.
  • Askel shares his plant shi powers, rose motif and vine whip with Kurama. This is one of the reasons why he was renamed, as his original name Youko was too close to Yōko^note The other reason was that Samir Rebib realized that in addition to meaning "demon fox" in Japanese, Yōko is also a feminine name..
  • The giant egg Mantara hatched from can be seen resting atop a mountain.
  • A doodle resembling Naruto can be seen on Chado's school desk in Crossroad.
  • In Crossroad, Poky has never seen humans before leaving Kimpao and pictures them as monstrous skinless giants.
  • Crossroad shows Ayron turning his finger into a metal spike to stab one of his minions through his head, exactly like the T-1000.
  • A resident of Shjue is named Kaan and a sidequest involving him is titled "The Anger of Kaan".
  • An archaeologist the party can meet at the Giant's Hall is named Nalluka Jones.
  • An NPC who can challenge the party to a race through the Forest of Meonis is named Mitrabeoj, a slight deformation of Joe Bar Team written backwards.
  • An achievement awarded for hijacking the Three Arrows without being spotted is called "Serkan Gear Solid". This one makes more sense in French, the original name is Le Serkan Solide, meaning "The Solid Serkan", which sounds nearly identical to Le Serpent Solide, a literal translation of "The Solid Snake".
  • Another achievement awarded for discovering ten interest points is called "Elementary, my dear Poky".
  • Another awarded for catching every type of critter is called "Catch 'em all!", this is also the name of a sidequest consisting of catching some specific critters.
  • The one awarded for defeating Ayron is called "Iron Man".
  • In the French version, when told that the Opalin Bayou he lives in is a "slimy mudhole", Ragan angrily answers "My home this is!".
  • Cohayas are telepathic molluscs than can transmit messages, exactly like the Den-Den Mushi from One Piece.
• Shovel Strike: Vrynn, being a gravedigger, uses her shovel as a weapon if the player chooses to fight her.
• Shown Their Work: The creators of Maherian didn't just create one language, they designed different dialects for the humans, the shelks and the wakis. They even had Terra speak an older form of the language due to her being as old as Mahera itself.
• Sigil Spam:
  • Expect to see the Adoryan sigil on anything the Adoryans build or wear. This sigil already existed in The Shiness, in which Adorya was known as Pandora, and was even more common, since it was both Pandora's sigil and the symbol of earth shi, whose Shiness Pandora controlled.
  • The Gendyan sigil and the arachna-shaped sigil of the fallen kingdom of Meonis are also found everywhere inside Meos's palace.
  • The four interlaced circles symbolizing the shi appear in many places relevant to the plot, like in the game's opening or Kayenne's Info Dumps in Crossroad, or the gameplay, like the diagram showing a character's elemental affinities in the menu, they're also frequently used as a background decoration in menus and promotional artwork and serve as the game's spinning loading icon.
• Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!: The reason why either Irys or Kaorys betrays the Mantarians.
• Single Language Planet: Maherian is the only language of Mahera, it's spoken by every species on every meteora and uses the same alphabet everywhere. The Shiness, who are as old as Mahera itself, also speak an older form of Maherian, which implies that it has always been the planet's only language. However, it has several mutually intelligible dialects instead of being the exact same language everywhere, each of them is spoken by a different species^note Only three of them were created for the game, the humans', the shelks' and the wakis'. Characters from other species have no voice lines, but they presumably speak their own dialects..
• Skill Point Reset: Two statues at the Giant's Hall can change any teammate's elemental affinity, which is particularly useful to open the six doors to the Room of Nine Pillars, as they only open if the party's combined affinity for the corresponding element is high enough.
• Slasher Smile: Ayron often sports one late in the game after his villainous nature has been made clear, especially immediately before each part of the final battle.
• Sleeves Are for Wimps: The five party members all fight barehanded and none of them wear sleeves, even when climbing the Shiyawo mountain.
• The Smurfette Principle: Rosalya is the party's only female member.
• Smurfing: Ervea, the keeper of the Pouis Forest, is so obsessed with pouis that she replaces some syllables of her speech with "poui" in the French version.
• Solve the Soup Cans: Most of the puzzles have no reason to be here, for instance Meos's palace contains an elaborate mechanical one which takes a whole room, requires both Chado's and Poky's powers to be solved and turns out to just be an elevator to another floor.
• Some Dexterity Required: The PC version has terrible mouse and keyboard controls that can only be remapped by editing the game's files.
• Something about a Rose: Askel is rarely seen without a bloodor in his mouth. Justified in that he can use it as a paralyzing weapon, though he only does so in cutscenes.
• The Song Remains the Same: Rosalya's song "Maherian Dreams" remains in Maherian in the English version.
• Sorcerous Overlord: Zagrom became the king of the gromiz by finding Lord Altonataros's book of spells and learning how to master the dark shi.
• Space Elves: The shelks somewhat fit this trope, they have Pointy Ears, live much longer than the other intelligent races and are more knowledgeable about the shi, some like Kayenne even have Psychic Powers.
• Space Master: The shelks are able to use space shi and created Mantara by enlarging a normal mantis egg. They consider this unnatural, however, and only agreed to do so to provide the Gendyan refugees with a home.
• Sparse List of Rules: Adoryan soldiers mention a couple laws with convoluted identifiers consisting of numbers, letters and foodstuffs, such as "Chocolate 34-XZ", implying that Adorya's laws are ridiculously complex.
• Spider People: The dark shi turned Meos into a combination of a human and a giant arachna. His undead knights, and later Altonataros, are also partly transformed.
• The Spiny: Craclis reflect all direct physical attacks and can only be defeated with spells or ranged techniques.
• Squashed Flat: The fate of Pagash, an Adoryan soldier, who is trampled to death by Meos.
• Staking the Loved One: Irys gives a Mercy Kill to the monstrously corrupted Meos when she realizes he's actually her father.
• Status Effects: Many, several work like in most RPGs, such as poison (which causes the target to gradually lose health) or silence (which prevents the target from using spells). However, some others are instead linked to elements and change the target's elemental affinities, and others, such as lightness (which makes the target easier to knock down) or fear (which causes the fighting character to briefly become uncontrollable and move away from the enemy) are specific to the real-time combat system.
• Steampunk: Some places fit this aesthetic, especially Kimpao as seen in Crossroad, where the houses have large pipes, chimneys and cogs on their roofs.
• The Stinger: The game's final cutscene follows the end credits.
• Stock Shōnen Hero: Chado fits this trope to a T: a Hot-Blooded, Book Dumb Kid Hero, The Chosen One, a Determinator with red details on his outfit and an Instant Expert.
• Storming the Castle: Three instances: the party has to fight its way through Zagrom's lair, then through Meos's palace, then through Altonataros's fortified city.
• Story Branching: The player is often asked to choose between two options (with an occasional third, though it's usually much harder to figure out), and one is generally crueler than the other (for instance, you have to choose between sparing Grorim's life and finishing him off after defeating him). These choices change how both minor and major events play out and determine the game's ending.
• Story Breadcrumbs:
  • How Meos's kingdom fell is told that way, through notes left here and there in his palace.
  • The backstories of the Scarlet Promenade and the Giant's Hall are told through plaques.
  • Sabba's backstory is told similarly, but without text, the clues are murals found in the ruins near the Shiyawo's summit.
• Subtitles Are Superfluous: Averted in the 3d cutscenes, which are subtitled, and in the 2d ones, which have Speech Bubbles, but played straight everywhere else, even though outside of cutscenes, the characters only speak Maherian.
• Sucking-In Lines: Whenever a character is charging a spell or building up shi.
• Summon Bigger Fish: When the party first reaches the Giant's Hall, Bagogue tries to scam them into paying him or working for him to access the Shiyawo mountain. One way to get past him is to wake the two giants (this isn't an example of Awakening the Sleeping Giant, however) to scare him away.
• Superboss: The Optional Bosses Reize and Rennerd are the game's only bosses whose level reach 50, even the story's final boss's is only 48. They're nearly impossible to beat if your teammates' level isn't also 50.
• Take My Hand!: Askel does this to save Rosalya when Mantara ends Ayron's assault by diving into a lake. The track that plays during this cutscene is even titled "Take My Hand".
• Take Your Time: Rosalya needs a cure? Irys and Kaorys have been captured? The dark shi is corrupting Mantara? It can wait until you're done doing every sidequest.
• Talk to Everyone: Most of the sidequests not involving fighting an Optional Boss just consist of talking to NPCs in a certain order, with occasional Fetch Quest elements.
• Teamwork Puzzle Game: Puzzles often require using up to three party members' skills to be solved: Chado can summon menhirs, Poky can manipulate shi streams, Kayenne can levitate objects, Askel can pull levers with his whip and Rosalya can power machines.
• Technologically Advanced Foe: Ayron's flagship is implied to be significantly more advanced than the Adoryan fleet, which is itself much more powerful than anything the Mantarians have as they're a faction of refugees who own no warships. Mantarian soldiers also seem to lack the Adoryans' electrified and energy weapons, and wear less elaborate armor. However, it's implied that the technology that can turn Mantara invisible belongs to the Mantarians alone (as Ayron's squadron is fully visible when it travels from Adorya to Mantara, allowing the party to spot it and warn the Mantarians) and was the only thing that gave them a chance to resist Adorya for cycles.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Kayenne can't stand Askel, doesn't trust him because he's an Adoryan mercenary, and can't believe he agrees with him when Askel tells Chado not to jump to hasty conclusions regarding the Lands of Life, one of the game's loading screens depicts them arm wrestling. Furthermore, Crossroad shows that Askel despises Ayron and implies that he isn't thrilled when he has to work with him to find Rosalya.
• Teleportation with Drawbacks: Some spells, which are therefore inherently limited, can teleport fighters around the arena or switch their positions, and shivos can teleport at will.
• Tennis Boss: The only way to defeat Meos and Wio Irys/Kaorys is to reflect their energy balls back at them.
• Terrible Trio: The "brothers of pain" Akuum, Anoom and Unoom are three gromiz the party fights in the Gromiz Lair before reaching Zagrom, their shared quirk is that they were all mutilated, Zagrom is implied to be responsible, though this is only confirmed for Unoom, who lost his tongue for insulting him.
• This Cannot Be!: Ayron has this reaction when Rosalya single-handedly defeats him on Mantara.
• Three-Act Structure: The game is divided into 3 "fragments" of rather uneven length. The first ends after Chado is knocked out by the fit Rosalya suffers when Askel tries to capture her, and the second ends when Mantara dives into a lake to escape Ayron's attack.
• Thriving Ghost Town: There are only 2 towns in the game (though we only see part of Gendys), Mantara, which has fewer than a hundred NPCs and roughly a dozen houses, and Shjue, which is even less populated (it appears to have more houses, but you can't enter them). Justified, first because many Gendyans died in the war against the Gromiz, the poisoning of the inhabitants of Laotan-Piki-Lanku then the war against Adorya, second because many survivors fled to safer regions when Gendys became tainted by the dark shi.
• Throne Room Throwdown: The party fights Meos in his throne room.
• Til Murder Do Us Part:
  • Lord Altonataros's wife Ferynni was among the victims of the poisoned feast he organized under the dark shi's influence.
  • The dark shi also corrupted Sabba into poisoning her husband.
• Tin Tyrant: Ayron always wears an armor that only leaves his face and hands uncovered, in Crossroad, his armor is also his weapon, since he can manipulate it to turn his arms and fingers into blades. However, he doesn't do this in the game and just uses a sword.
• Title Confusion: "Shiness" isn't the name of a country also known as the Lightning Kingdom (and there's no such kingdom in the game), a Shiness is an elemental spirit.
• Title In: Whenever you move from a location to another, the latter's name appears on the screen with a (very poor) translation of it in Maherian.
• Toilet Humor: The squirropigs' favorite food is dried droppings.
• Token Heroic Orc: Ragan and Zlog are the only friendly gromiz in the game. The former was the king of the gromiz before Zagrom overthrew him and gives the heroes some useful information to enter the Gromiz Lair, the latter becomes Zagrom's benevolent successor if the player chooses to give him Zagrom's book of spells after defeating him.
• Too Long; Didn't Dub: Only the animated cutscenes were dubbed in English, every other voice clip, like Rosalya's song, is still in Maherian.
• Tornado Move: Several spells, especially air-based ones, as well as Kayenne's hyper.
• Tragic Monster:
  • Meos was cursed after being given a Sadistic Choice by Zagrom and eating a sacred arachna to save his family. The resulting dark shi gradually turned him into a half-man, half-arachna monster and caused him to lose most of his humanity. After the heroes defeat him without killing him, he's given a Mercy Kill by his own daughter Irys.
  • After losing her son, Sabba became corrupted by the dark shi, poisoned her husband and started abducting children to raise them as her own. After the party defeats her, she sees Chado and hallucinates that she's finally seeing her son again. This causes Chado to also hallucinate that he's seeing his mother again, so he hugs her and she peacefully returns to the shi.
• The Tragic Rose: Bloodors, the Maherian equivalent of roses, grow where someone died. A large field of these flowers is found at the Scarlet Promenade due to a massacre that occurred there cycles before.
• Traintop Battle: Frequently happens on the Three Arrows.
• Trapped in Another World: Well, on another world, Chado and Poky are stranded on Gendys after their ship crashes.
• 24-Hour Armor: Ayron is never seen without his armor. While this makes sense when he fights, he also wears it when he visits Rosalya in Crossroad and the Sister of Secrets mentions that he wore it when he met her.
• Two Lines, No Waiting: Crossroad follows two stories, Chado and Poky's departure from Kimpao and Kayenne and Rosalya's escape from Adorya. They first intersect shortly after the game starts when Poky meets Kayenne and Rosalya while looking for Chado, and they merge when Chado learns that Rosalya also wants to find the Lands of Life and decides to continue his journey with her.
• Underground City: The Gromiz Lair.
• Underground Monkey: There are only about a dozen different types of enemies in the game, most of them have at least one stronger, recolored version. Catchable critters also have variants depending on the zone.
• Unexpected Shmup Level: The battle against the Optional Boss Rennerd is a top-down Bullet Hell phase.
• The Unfought: The serkan that corrupted Altonataros is dormant when the party reaches Laotan-Piki-Lanku, so while they fight and defeat Altonataros, they don't wake the serkan and leave the city without fighting it, even though destroying it would presumably rid a large part of Gendys from the dark shi. As Terra can feel the massive amounts of dark shi the serkan produces and warns Chado not to stay near it, the party presumably deems it too dangerous to fight on their own.
• Unnamed Parent: Chado's father appears in Crossroad and Chado seeks the Lands of Life because he hopes to see his deceased mother again, but both parents are unnamed. This was averted with his mother in the original manga, however, where her name was Cassy.
• Unnaturally Looping Location: Laotan-Piki-Lanku is protected by a time shi trap causing this trope when the party first tries entering the city. It can only be deactivated with the three medallions owned by Lord Altonataros's three sons Klaig, Rewald and Helran. The party therefore needs to track them down to enter the palace.
• The Unpronounceable: Some Maherian words qualify as the language is quite permissive of unusual consonant clusters, it even allows word-initial geminated consonants, which are very rare in real-world languages.
• Unstable Powered Woman: Rosalya is the only character who can't control her powers (except when she's playable).
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Even though wakis and shelks are very rarely seen outside their home meteoras due to the Great Offscreen War between the shelks and the humans and the wakis' lack of interest in space travel, very few Gendyans seem surprised to see Chado, Poky and Kayenne on Gendys.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Assuming that Lord Altonataros was trying to seduce Irys (he was actually trying to corrupt her) and believing that he wouldn't make a good king, Ajoss threw the Spell Book he had sent to her for her birthday into the Gromiz Lair. Zagrom found it and destroyed Meos's kingdom with its powers.
• Ursine Aliens: The wakis are small humanoid bears.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: According to Terra, her ex-summoned one Adjin was a kind boy before he turned evil and became Ayron.
• Useless Useful Spell: Many supports heal Status Effects that are inflicted so rarely that having characters equip them is nothing but a waste of space for more useful supports.
• Variable Mix: Encountering enemies in the Gromiz Lair causes its theme "Gromiz Lair" to switch to the more aggressive version "Laboratory", the same happens in Meos's palace, where "The Old King Palace" switches to "Dance of the Soldiers".
• Verbal Tic: Bagogue says "I'm the kinda guy who..." whenever he talks about himself.
• Version-Exclusive Content: Maherian voices for the cutscenes are only available on PC as a free DLC. Console versions only have English cutscenes.
• Video Game Stealing: Askel can steal items from enemies without fighting them with his attracthorn.
• Villainous Breakdown: Ayron briefly suffers one when he first meets Chado and sees and recognizes Terra.
• Vine Tentacles: Askel's attracthorn is a vine he can use as a whip with his plant shi powers. However, its main purpose is to solve puzzles or steal items, he only uses it in battle for some techniques.
• Volleying Insults: Before the party fights Zagrom, Chado engages in a Maherian insult duel against him. You can choose your insults, some are more effective, but the duel has no effect on the following battle.
• Wacky Wayside Tribe: Pretty much everything happening on the Shiyawo mountain is irrelevant to the rest of the game's plot and never mentioned again.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: Zagrom is arguably the game's first hard boss due to his unique dark shi abilities, such as spamming homing projectiles. He's also the only boss who can use the hyper (with the exception of Ayron during the first fight against him, but this is a Hopeless Boss Fight, he doesn't use it during the actual, winnable fight against him), which is unblockable and undodgeable, deals massive damage and can be triggered simply by using too many physical attacks on him, so you can't rely on them alone.
• War Is Hell: Ayron's attack on Mantara leaves most of the city in ruins and kills many civilians, including children. Chado suffers an Heroic BSoD after the battle.
• Warp Whistle: Xaham's airship can be called to fly the party to several fixed destinations.
• Was Once a Man: Meos and his soldiers, Altonataros and Sabba, before the dark shi corrupted them and turned them into monsters.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • The party defeats and overthrows Zagrom without killing him, his fate after they leave the Gromiz Lair isn't revealed, he never reappears and is never mentioned again.
  • We're never told where the civilians who fled Mantara during Ayron's assault went, and they're never encountered again.
  • After Rosalya suffers a fit at the Gendys Station and incapacitates Altania in Crossroad, Altania doesn't reappear in the manga, never appears in the game at all and her status is never mentioned afterwards, so we don't know what happens to her after Kayenne and Rosalya escape her.
• Whole-Plot Reference: The Lord of the Rings, as Samir Rebib fully admitted. The wakis are heavily inspired by the hobbits, and the plot revolves around two of them breaking traditions by leaving their hometown to travel through a warring world in order to bring an element important enough to be in the title to a faraway land.
• Wilhelm Scream: One of the guards of Laotan-Piki-Lanku will do one if you launch him with the catapult he's sitting in.
• Wingdinglish:
  • The designers rarely bothered to actually write Maherian on signs and sometimes just wrote French words with the Maherian font.
  • Rennerd's official artwork shows him reading a book titled "How to talk to a lady" written in a pseudo-Greek font which never appears anywhere else in the franchise.
• Wolverine Claws: The gromiz often wield these in battle.
• Word Salad Lyrics: The lyrics of "Maherian Dreams" don't make much sense in the English version:
  A fallen tear
  It beckons our fear
  The deepest of souls
  Let the story unfold
  Flames untold
  We jump, we fly on a wing and a prayer
  Come pick the bloodor, your dream so fair
  We run, we flourish, we love, we care
  Come pick the bloodor, your dream so fair
  • They don't make much sense in the original French^note The song was first written in French, then translated into Maherian. either:
    Un courant frais (a cool draft)
    L'autre nous effraie (the other scares us)
    Au plus profond de l'âme (deep within the soul)
    Le vent puis le calme (the wind then the stillness)
    La mer, le sable, les flammes (the sea, the sand, the flames)
    On saute, on s'envole, par folie on perd ses ailes (one jumps, one takes flight, by madness one loses one's wings)
    Viens cueillir la bloodor, sous tes plus beaux rêves (come pick the bloodor, under your sweetest dreams)
    On court, on s'écroule, par amour on se relève (one runs, one collapses, by love one gets up again)
    Viens cueillir la bloodor, sous tes plus beaux rêves (come pick the bloodor, under your sweetest dreams)
• The Worf Effect: Kayenne is the party's big guy and a martial arts expert with an extensive knowledge of the shi. Altania easily defeats him during her first appearance in Crossroad.
• World of Technicolor Hair: Many humans, most of them female, have unnatural hair colors: Rosalya has pink hair, Vrynn has blue hair, Gittibris has green hair, Meos's daughters Irys, Kaorys and Altania have purple hair...
• Would Hit a Girl: Basically everyone, any party member can fight female foes like Vrynn or Ervea and all enemies can attack Rosalya. It's also heavily implied that Ayron intends to kill her because he sees her being a summoned one as a threat.
• Would Hurt a Child: No foe has qualms about attacking Chado and Poky either, and Ayron also seems to intend to kill Chado, as he's Terra's summoned one. Adult party members can also fight Sabba's abducted children, though they just flee when defeated and can't be killed, unlike the game's other enemies.
• Wreathed in Flames: Lord Altonataros during the battle against him, since fire is his element of choice.
• Wrench Whack: Though Poky mainly uses his wrench to fix circuits, he also uses it as a weapon for some techniques.
• Written Sound Effect: Maherian sound effects often appear in cutscenes and battles (though some of them are just random scribbles rather than actual Maherian). However Crossroad uses French sound effects instead.
• Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe: The Great Poui speaks that way in the French version due to his great age, his speech is basically mangled, very inaccurate archaic French. Oddly enough, Terra speaks normal French, even though she's supposed to be as old as Mahera itself.
  • However, this trope is notably averted in the Maherian version, where Terra does speak an older form of the language.
• You All Look Familiar: Human and gromiz models are often recycled, all isolitos use the same model, and all isolitos besides IsoKaralo use the same textures. Averted with the wakis in Crossroad, who are all distinct. Also averted with the shelks, though we only see three of them.
• You Don't Look Like You: Some characters who were introduced in The Shiness look very different in the game, most notably Chado's mother.
• You Have Failed Me: During his assault on Mantara, Ayron tries to kill Askel for failing to bring Rosalya back to Adorya. He also mentions that he doesn't need him anymore anyway.
• You Owe Me: The Mantarians reluctantly agree to help the shelks smuggle Rosalya to Nalluka because they owe them a favor for creating Mantara with their mastery of space shi.
• You Shall Not Pass!: Kayenne tries this when the party first encounters Askel because the latter is only looking for him and Rosalya. Defied when Chado and Poky refuse to flee.

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