Video Game / Tactics Ogre

Fear is only the beginning. Fight it out!^{Clockwise from top}Catiua, Vyce, Warren, Lanselot, Ravness, Canopus, Myrdin, Deneb, Gildas, Cistina, Cerya, Sherri, Olyvia, Denam

Originally released for the Super Famicom in 1995, Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together (Episode VII) is a game in the popular Ogre Battle Saga, acting as a direct sequel to Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen. It was originally developed by Quest before it was bought out by Square-Enix, and was later re-imagined by most of the original development team after Square's acquisition of Quest. Tactics Ogre is different from the first game in a lot of ways. Unlike the first game, this is a Turn-Based Strategy game, and has the player controlling and witnessing the lives of a smaller group of people. While it does not take place in Xenobia, some of the Xenobians from the first game do make appearances here, and play a large part in the game's story.

Written by Yasumi Matsuno, Tactics Ogre's story follows three young people of the Walstanian ethnic minority: Denam, his sister Catiua, and his friend Vyce as they join a rebellion against a campaign of genocide run by Hierophant Balbatos of Galgastan. They quickly get caught up in a web of political intrigue, and are forced to make unimaginable sacrifices for the freedom of their kinsmen. The storyline has multiple branches, and the choices Denam makes affect the state of the world around him and the fates of him and his friends. It touches on the themes of class warfare, democratic reform, imperialism, et cetera, and continues in this direction throughout, unlike its most well-known counterpart which swerved into the direction of Magic Stones.

A remake for the PSP was announced in July 2010, re-subtitled Wheel of Fate in Japan but keeping 'Let Us Cling Together' in English when it was released in North America in February 2011. The original release achieved cult status at best in America, but the re-release got great reviews, with some even preferring it to Final Fantasy Tactics.

A remaster titled Tactics Ogre: Reborn with rebalanced gameplay, re-orchestrated music, and full English and Japanese voiceovers was released on November 11, 2022 for the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam. The announcement trailer can be seen here.

A prequel to this game was released on the Game Boy Advance in 2001 (Japan) and 2002 (North America) called Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis.

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Tactics Ogre contains examples of:

A - D

• Absurdly High Level Cap: Sort of in versions prior to Reborn. During a normal playthrough, you should end the game around level 20ish. Your classes should all still have skills to learn even at this point, but if you grind enough to be able to learn all your skills, you will be overleveled for the final dungeon. However, that is just for the base New Game. New Game Plus makes enemies keep leveling with you. AND you are going to need those levels if you want to even consider taking on the bonus dungeons and content. Level 20 will not get you very far in the Palace of the Dead. Definitely won't get you far in the Coda content. Reborn revamps the level curve entirely, pacing you throughout the game and capping off at 40 before the credits roll, which you're extremely likely to be at due to the new Unity Level system.
• Acceptable Breaks from Reality: If you recruit a character but go to a route using the Chariot system where they are canonically dead or not recruited yet, you will still have them.
• A Child Shall Lead Them: Downplayed. The High Priest Sardian who rules Lodis is a young man in his early 20s. Denam himself is described as being barely old enough to shave at the start of Chapter 4.
• Alas, Poor Villain: There is a bio for every single enemy leader you fight. Some of them were architects, philosophers, mothers-to-be, and so on. Sometimes they will even tell Denam who they were when they die.
• Ambidextrous Sprite: The female Rogue's eyepatch switches side depending on which side she is facing.
• Ambiguous Situation: Is the Dynast-King Dorgalua who rose from the Chaos Gate the real deal, despite being heavily corrupted by years of being accidentally locked in the demonic realm, or merely a demon assuming its guise? Denam seems intent in believing it to be the latter, although if Catiua is present during the battle the king will promptly recognize her for her true lineage, claiming that "blood will always call to blood", and urging her to come to his side so that they can reign over the isles together. Additionally, upon his defeat, the alleged Dorgalua will appear to show a brief flash of sanity and recognition for how far gone he is, before being overwhelmed by the influence of the Chaos Gate.
• Anyone Can Die: Several plot-central characters die, and not even children are spared. Since your choices affect the story and the characters in a big way, when certain people die, it's your fault.
  • In the original version of the game, your own army is always at risk of permanent death. They can still die in the remakes, and on your original run they'll largely stay that way, but they can each be replaced through the World Tarot in the post-game.
• Anti-Frustration Features: A fair number courtesy of Reborn:
  • Crafting has been completely overhauled, removing the crafting animation, failure chance, and even letting you upgrade items already equipped by your party.
  • Random drops from the Pharompa Wildwood no longer include crafting recipes that drop from hyper specific enemies - these are instead spread across a much wider variety of enemies throughout the Palace of the Dead.
  • Deneb's recruitment process has been dramatically simplified and only requires you unlock one of each orb type and upgrade relics thrice in her secret shop if you'd also like to get her special Wicce Job.
  • While still something of a grind at higher levels, weapon skills are the only ones that need to be manually improved by using them, and now improve dramatically faster than they did in the PSP version. Offensive magic also improves all equipped weapon skills simultaneously.
  • It completely revamps and streamlines class levels by making character levels class levels. A character can switch from a Fighter to a Terror Knight at level twenty and have the same skills as someone who had it since level one, the only difference being their weapon level. The whole revamp avoids gobs of grinding to get a character up to speed.
  • Once you finish the game, Chaos Frame menu in the Warren Report is displayed. Even if they still won't tell you how to actually raise it, it still gives a hint on two things: when you can do the Cressida recruitment quest in the Chaos route without having her leave in the end and forcing you to redo it all over again, or your progress in trying to avoid the ultimate Downer Ending by having high Chaos Frame on Walister, Galgastani, and Bakram.
  • You're finally able to scout out battles to see what you're up against, instead of having to try anticipating and preparing for absolutely everything.
• Arbitrary Weapon Range: In the PSP version, you can't fire bows and crossbows from up close unless your target happens to be in the arrow's trajectory to another target. No one said you couldn't be creative.
• Artificial Atmospheric Actions: In the PSP version, when you fight the Dark Knights later on in the game, it's possible to have recruited Ozma if you went the Law Route. It becomes rather interesting when you consider that they programmed conversations to happen if she's present, but it becomes rather silly when they recognize Denam leading the forces and talk about avenging Oz and Ozma...when the latter is right there in front of them.
• Artificial Brilliance: The SNES and PSX versions were rather minimalistic in what they could do. They would have some moments of this, such as choosing not to attack a squishy when there's another unit who can die in one hit instead of three. However, in the PSP version, the AI is more advanced. Tricks that they've added include:
  • The knowledge to Shoot the Medic First. If you leave your medics unguarded, they WILL be shot at.
  • Prioritizing squishies and ganging up on weakened targets. Similarly, mages will often harass people with lower magic resistance.
  • Using finishers at the worst possible moment.
  • Intentionally targeting their own allies with AoE spells because they're surrounded by more enemy units.
  • When it has a unit with Rampart Aura (which prevents you from getting past them on foot), you will hate them. The AI will often place them at a bottleneck. Even if it can only occupy one tile and in theory, you can just slink past them, their rampart aura will keep you from getting too far. To make matters worse, they'll often put Phalanx on, which reduces damage taken by 90%, so you can't just beat them down so you can get past them.
  • Impressively, some will target missile spells at distant targets, including friendly targets, to cause it to hit the enemy directly in front of them, which would normally be too close to target.
• Artificial Stupidity: While the AI in the PSP version has its shades of brilliance, it can also be amazingly thick. To wit:
  • Healers will stay way, way away from the rest of your party, hiding usually on the other side of the map, unable to cast heals on anyone due to range. (However, when they do remain in range they do a very good job, making this particular quirk very, very noticeable.)
  • Characters with magical attacks (hybrid classes mostly) will often use those instead of melee attacks.
  • Characters with debuffs will spam those instead of doing anything actually useful, such as doing damage or healing. This often occurs even when they have literally 0% chance of hitting. Worse still, they accept the chance of your own party members being hit an acceptable risk for said 0% chance, meaning that casters with debuffs often run around debuffing your team instead of the enemy team. As a damning "bonus", you can't unlearn or disable casting debuffs outside of disabling all magic from that school.
    • Reborn fixed this to a degree by making spellcasters only able to equip up to 4 spells at a time. However, the AI now never uses debuff spells or even debuffing items, despite sometimes having them equipped. All that said, it seems to be absolutely intentional: the AI no longer spamming debuffs makes battle flow more smoothly, a number of debuff TP skills for demi-human and beast classes were made into auto skills, it's easier to predict what you'd be up against (especially since you can now scout fights out beforehand). Enemy units with buff and debuff spells equipped end up obvious recruitment opportunities for both instant access in battle and obtaining new stuff that possibly isn't in the shops yet.
  • Characters with access to healing items will spam them — the basic healing and mana recovery items being the main culprits here. It's very rare to see these actually remain available when you go to use them.
  • One notable problem with the AI is it feels an overwhelming need to move a character, even if they're just moving it one square to the side — this causes the character to take twice as long to get another turn. In addition, the movement AI does not sync up with the Action AI — a character may run up into melee range, only to use a single healing item and stand there, now free to be attacked by the entire enemy force.
  • The AI will specifically not target the target! Specifically, if a map objective is "defeat the leader," you're far better off switching to manual, as the target will be the last thing to die, due to it having higher stats and the AI prioritizing squishier targets. It also works in the opposite way: AI characters aren't really good at defending their leader, and the leader itself is always acting like any other character. Even when outnumbered, you can easily lure the target out of the enemy squad and finish it off with ranged attacks.
  • Guest characters are very stupid, following some combination of any and all of the above. Even worse, they refuse to come into the training sessions with you, meaning that they remain low-leveled while the enemy becomes just as strong as you... not that this will stop them from charging right into them while you are trying to maneuver your army in a different direction entirely. This can be averted if the guest characters are a standard class — the PSP remake equalizes all levels across a certain class, see One-Man Party below.
  • Some abilities, spells and items simply cannot be used by the AI, at all, making equipping a character with them a waste of time. This tends to be status inducing attacks, spells and abilities, making some classes completely useless under AI control. The AI, for instance, will never cast "Boon of Swiftness", and Dragoons may use their Beastslayer or Dragonslayer ability at the end of their turn, but not at the beginning, despite being in range of monsters. As for items, the AI will only ever use HP or MP restoring ones, items that cure status and Holy Water, but will never use status boosting or status debuffing ones.
• Ascended Extra: Some generic enemy leaders are given Warren Report entries in the PSP remake, most prominently Mordova (previously a witch, now a Necromancer), and Hektorr (originally named Didario, this was his first name, and he's now linked further with Nybeth's story).
  • Hamilton's caretaker gets additional scenes in Coda.
• Balkanize Me: This is what happened to Valeria after the death of King Dorgalua.
• Battle in the Rain: One of the most notable examples is the battle to rescue Donnalto. The Balmamusa Massacre also goes like that.
• Big Fancy Castle: The Hanging Gardens (Eden), whose formal name is Heilingham Palace.
  • There's also Almorica, Coritanae, Phidoch, Brigantys, Barnicia, and Heim. You get to have fights on the inside and outside of each one. Heim in particular is a sight to behold.
• Birds of a Feather: Some of the recruitable characters tend to join because they felt like similar with Denam:
  • In Chaos route, since Denam is more of an idealist that dislikes unnecessary bloodshed, Cistina agreed to join his cause and left Cerya's Liberation Front.
  • In the Law route, since Denam has stained his hand and currently worked to atone for his sins, this struck a similar kinship to Jeunan, who then offered to join his cause so they can atone for their sins together. This is also why Jeunan didn't appear in the Chaos route; in that route, Denam didn't have something to atone for, so it didn't click.
• Bittersweet Ending: In the original, even the "Best" ending later had Valeria be invaded by the Hittites a thousand years down the road. It was especially bittersweet if Denam let his sister die and he became ruler of Valeria, where he is either executed by an assassin or the entire nation is invaded by Lodis.
  • However, the PSP version changes it to Valeria persisting for a thousand years before uniting with Heth, likely the Hittites. This implies that it was more consensual, so that makes it the best ending. Additionally, even if Kachua dies; if you do the DLC to save Lanselot Hamilton, he'll tell Denam how to avoid getting invaded. By inviting Lodis to the official coronation, they won't invade because they can save face this way.
• Black Knight:
  • The Dark Knights of Lodis, also known as the Loslorien Order. No knights in shining armor, these. In word and deed, they are as dark as their name.
  • The Terror Knight class as well; they wield dark magic (as opposed to the regular Knight class) and their offensive skills are based on causing fear.
• "Blind Idiot" Translation: The PSX (and SNES patch) translation for Let Us Cling Together. The script is decent enough despite being ridden with typos and grammatical errors, but the names are simply a travesty. "Goshe?" "Bincent?"
  • It also includes such gems as "There is also such a thing as the immune system. It can purify the evil within the soul."
  • Averted in the PSP remake; the translation has been completely redone with all the name changes that come with it.
• Body Surf:
  • In grand Ogre Battle tradition, several villains do this. Deneb as always, although we don't ever meet her original body (she denies it to Canopus, but her "death" quote still says otherwise). Serene seems to be the only one to get permanently destroyed and her host was sad about that. There's also Georges Sekendorff and Beelzemuth in the Palace of the Dead, killing the latter's body doesn't bother her and she's sure some other group of heroes will come down soon enough. Supplemental material reveals that Rudlum, found in the Palace of the Dead, is the villain Albeleo from the original Ogre Battle game, also body surfing.
  • Non-unique Player Mooks can do this with the Ogre Sword dropped by some of the Optional Bosses.
• Bonus Level of Heaven: The San Bronsa Ruins, filled with angels none too pleased at mortals emulating their powers.
• Bonus Level of Hell: It will test your patience more than your skill, but the Palace of the Dead has 115 floors, and there's a fight on all of them (except the 3 shops). The EXP and SP rewards are also pitifully low on each floor. In the original, it was appropriately translated as Hell Gate and serves as something of an evil counterpart to the San Bronsa Ruins. And in Reborn, you will be stuck at Level 40 for non-story battles over there, thus in the last half of the dungeon, you will face tough enemies all the time.
• Bonus Dungeon: The Palace of the Dead (Hell Gate), the Phorampa Wildwood, the Pirate's Graveyard, and six different elemental dungeons with 7 floors each. As well as the Tower of Eternal Law, and the Floating Island of San Bronsa.
• Book Ends: The last Coda is traveling back in time to an Alternate Universe version of Lanselot Tartaros's assault on Denam's, Catiua's, and Vyce's hometown; the scene the game opens with.
• Boomerang Bigot: One of the Galgastani bosses wishes for the complete eradication of the Walisters, even though there are Walisters currently fighting under her. Denem points out to her that her men likely don't share her bigotry.
• Boss Banter: Nearly every single boss in the remake has something to say during their battle, whether it be a "reason you suck" speech, a Hannibal Lecture, or just a Badass Boast.
• Bottomless Pit: A common hazard in many different dungeons and battlegrounds. In the original and Reborn, letting a unit fall to their death meant they were instantly dead. The PSP version simply has a character lose a life, instead.
• Bragging Rights Reward: Finishing the final Coda with only Denam, Catiua, and Vyce and then killing Lanselot Tarteros last, without letting him run away, gives you a chance to get his sword, Ambicion. This was the weapon he got from the Fallen Angel in Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis. You REALLY don't need it if you can accomplish this.
• Breather Episode: Deneb's side quests are relatively more lighthearted than the whole game.
• Brutal Bonus Level: The Palace of the Dead (Hell Gate), which is a whole 100 floors long. In the SNES version, all 100 floors had to be done in one sitting with no chance to save the game in between. In both the SNES and PSX version, there was no retreating from it.
  • The PSP version turns it into a labyrinth, while at least not demanding you to finish all floors, and even putting two shops around for you to recharge. In exchange, there are fifteen new floors you get to access during the second Coda episode.
• But Thou Must!: In the Law route, once Leonar pulls you aside on your way to parley with the Dark Knights, there's no talking your way out of participating in killing Ronwey.
• Catchphrase: For the series overall. "FIGHT IT OUT!" Not present in the PSP remake or in Reborn, where you get a Fight Woosh instead in the former, and "TO BATTLE!" in the latter.
• Character Alignment: In-universe. Lawful / Neutral / Chaotic. Important note: This says nothing about morality, merely your character's viewpoints on obeying laws.
• Childhood Friends: Denam spent his childhood with all four Phoraena sisters, but afterwards moved to Walister and spent his teenage age with Vyce. Regardless of the route taken, Denam will lose one or more of his childhood friends: Either Cerya and Cistina (in the Law route), or Vyce (in the Chaos/Neutral route).
• Clone Jesus: You can make "Divine Knights" similar to Angels in previous games using blood from a martyr's rood, Lost Technology and Necromancy. The actual angels are not happy about this.
• Cluster F-Bomb: You'll see the word 'shit' uttered a lot in the Atlus translation of the game. The PSP remake completely retranslated the script, cutting down on the swearing significantly.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: Xaebos does this to Vyce, and Lanselot Tartaros does this to Lanselot Hamilton.
• Color-Coded Elements: Each element is given a color and a symbol.
  • Fire has two red triangles resembling a flame;
  • Water and Ice has a blue teardrop;
  • Earth has two green triangles resembling mountains;
  • Air and Lightning has a yellow chevron resembling wings;
  • Light/Virtue has six bluish-white triangles forming a star;
  • Darkness/Bane has three dark purple triangles forming a bigger triangle.
  • In the PSP remake, Ice and Lightning are given their own elements, with Ice having a light blue icicle and Lightning a light purple bolt.
• Commander Contrarian: Vyce serves this role, as he turns against you no matter what choice you make at the end of Chapter 1. If you take the Law route, Denam slaughters the village on the Duke's orders and Vyce turns on you, calling you a murderer. If you take the Chaos route, Denam deserts rather than slaughter the village and Vyce turns on you, saying you're a coward who doesn't have the guts to do what it takes to win. If you take the Chaos route at the end of Chapter 1, then choose the Neutral route at the end of Chapter 2, Denam returns to the Duke's service only to have Vyce turn on you AGAIN and run away, saying he could never serve in the same army as somebody like you. Ends up being justified, as when you finally defeat him in chapter 3, he admits he was really only acting out of his jealousy of Denam, not because of anything he really does or doesn't believe.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard:
  • The Templars of the Black Knights can use every single weapon and skill, but most possessors of the class are built as other classes; Knights, Warriors, Archers, Terror Knights, Rune Fencers, Clerics, and Wizards, to be precise. The Templar job forces players to observe what foes have carefully, on top of allowing all Lodissian enemies to be unrecruitable (though recruitment is a Player-Exclusive Mechanic).
    • On the bright side, the Templars in Reborn are Color-Coded for Your Convenience, though it is rather subtle; red-shirts are Wizards, purple-grays are Terror Knights, purple-shirts with red capes are Clerics, and purple-shirts with yellow capes could be anything else.
  • Reborn implements Anti-Grinding measures (specifically a floating Level Cap) that enemy commanders frequently flout, and typically outnumbers your roster in fights to boot. It also has several bosses start out with full stacks of buffing cards on top of that, with each one giving a 50% boost to a certain stat.
    • On the other hand, Foes after Chapter 1 will also always have maxed-out weapon skills, so a certain amount of grinding may be required to keep up with them...
• Continuity Nod: In Coda, Denam turned down a high position in the newly reformed kingdom. Lanselot Hamilton tells Denam he is reminded of the hero of Xenobia who did the same thing. This is a reference to Destin in March of the Black Queen.
• Converted into a Weapon: The Snapshot/Snapdragon spell permanently transforms the caster into a sword, with its stats based on the caster's.
• Crystal Dragon Jesus:
  • Filaha/Philaha is a God expy. Often referred to as "the Great Father." He is considered part of the pantheon in Valeria (and Xenobia), but as a monotheistic entity in Lodis. His angel servants were seen in both Ogre Battle and Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis, but said servants aren't interested in the slightest in the distinctions mortals make.
  • Interestingly, the only thing the gods say directly in the PSP game is during the Tower of Law Bonus Dungeon; they denounce the practice of making angels (Divine Knights) using Precursor magic; said beings are not true divine servants.
• Cutscene Incompetence: Some of the endings lead to your death. This does not take your strength into account.
  • Ravness is, apparently, the only reason you weren't slaughtered horribly during the tutorial level. She may or may not get killed by a single crossbow bolt, depending on your choices. To her credit, she dies very slowly.
• Death Amnesia: Orias only remembers being Nybeth's daughter; despite having her mother's soul. In this case of Our Souls Are Different; the soul acts as an animus; not consciousness.
• Death of a Child: A child is murdered while Denam and another character talk about the war's effect on children. And when you kill a pirate's wife, she will reveal that she's pregnant. Cutscenes involving the sacking of towns will show children in the area, some dead.
• Decapitated Army:
  • Most missions have taking out the leader of the opposing force as the sole goal—and in certain dangerous ambush situations or escort missions, doing so is much easier than hunting down every enemy. This is probably what the game wants the player to do, since every enemy death lowers the player's Chaos Frame. Going straight for the leaders directly results in higher Chaos Frame due to fewer battle-murders.
  • In-Universe, this is the response when Balbatos/Barbatos is executed/killed; having lost the support of his own people, most of them flock to the Walister resistance, with High Commander Xaebos leading the only significant army that is still "loyal" to Galgastan.
• Deconstructed Character Archetype: Denam in the Chaos route is one to the idealistic hero. Having a set of morals and sticking to them is indeed admirable - but it doesn't make your life easier or even get the most ideal results. Especially since he is in a war situation where it's Kill-or-be-killed. He's considered to be morally unsullied, but he's also not really done anything. While he does end up becoming the military leader of Valeria, it's only because he finally started doing something.
• Despair Event Horizon: Lanselot Hamilton spends a few months being tortured in jail, and the only autonomous action he ever takes again after being freed is to scream in agony when he hears his dead wife's music box. You end up leaving him like that, since you can't do anything for him anyway. This can be avoided via Time Travel in the PSP version.
• The Dog Bites Back: In the law route, Leonar has had enough of Duke Ronwey's terrible strategies, betraying and slaughtering his own people, and general egocentricity. So he takes you aside and straight-facedly tells you that loyalty to the duke is no longer a viable option, and we'll have to go straight-up murder him now.
• Dogged Nice Guy: In Tactics Ogre, judging from final chapter death quote; Folcust to Cistina. Arycelle might be a 'Dogged Nice Girl' for Leonar. Also, Vyce to Catiua, but only in Lawful route, since in Chaotic route, you don't associate Vyce with 'nice'.
• Downer Ending: Neither ending where Catiua kills herself and Denam becomes King ends well. Depending on your chaos frame, Denam will either be assassinated by a Walister radical at his coronation, or Lodis will return with a proper army to conquer Valeria, which King Tristan in Xenobia notes will almost certainly end in defeat for Denam and Valeria. The only happy ending comes if you talk Catiua out of suicide which leads to her becoming queen at the end.
• Downloadable Content: The PSP remake had four additional postgame mini campaigns, named CODAs, as DLC for the Japanese version of the game. By the time it released in the West, they were included from the start.
• Dressed to Plunder: Azelstan. He doesn't overdo it, but he's got a nice hat and a matching coat.
• Dub Name Change: The PSP remake changes some characters names. Denim Powell is now Denam Pavel, Kachua has become Catiua (still pronounced the same way though) and Vice has been renamed Vyce, and so forth.
• Dual Wielding: You can naturally wield two one-handed weapons, but unless you have the double attack skill, you won't actually use them at the same time.
• Dual Boss:
  • Chapter three Chaotic, where you fight both Oz and Ozma. Changed up in the PSP version in the lawful route, where the boss is Oz and Balxephon (tt was just Oz in the original). The Penultimate boss is also just Barbas and Martym.
  • An optional boss features Ozma and Volaq as the bosses. This is one of those fights where totally depleting boss hit points to zero deprives you of an incredibly valuable recruitable character, in this case Ozma. Get her down below 10% HP after removing Volaq from the board, and she'll surrender. Not that the game tells you this.
• Duel Boss:
  • There are a couple... and they're usually allowed a cheap shot at you at the beginning, which is bad news for people who made their hero a Squishy Wizard.
  • Oz starts off this way in the lawful route. And then you both get reinforcements... seems like a precursor to what became That One Boss in its Creator-Driven Successor, Final Fantasy Tactics.
• Dump Stat: Reborn renders Agility and Avoidance - stats that help you hit more accurately and dodge attacks respectively - these. The base hit chance of all spells and attacks are so high that these stats serve very little purpose in this iteration of the game. It also makes the many "Use an attack with 100% hit chance%" missions trivial.

E - L

• Early Game Hell: Battles in Chapter 1 and early Chapter 2 can drag on a bit. Your equipment and spell options are very limited, you can't use weapon arts until you reach at least level 10 in a weapon skill, your troops are incredibly slow, and, besides Donnalto, you do not have access to unique characters with better stats than the norm. You are bound to sweat bullets when encountering your first monster-type enemies such as the griffins and octopus, which have incredibly high stats, hit like a truck and can even deal high damage through counterattacks. Once you get access to crafting and a few key spells, such as Boon of Swiftness, and powerful characters, such as Arycelle, the game becomes increasingly easier. Reborn also amps the trope further: Random encounters are removed while the Training option is limited, where you can't train on non-town/castle areas. Therefore, you will be starved of money (the massive goths given by Duke Ronwey in Chapter 1 will end up being very vital) until you unlock the Phorampa Wildwood (though in exchange, leveling troops and maintaining loyalty is easier).
• Easter Egg: Reborn gives you a chance to fight off the notoriously powerful versions of Arycelle and Hobyrim back in the SFC/PSX versions (Aloser and Haborym) as Allocer and Aym, both can be encountered randomly in Palace of the Dead. They're notoriously hard for a reason.
• Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: An odd, mostly-subdued version. Light and Dark are weak to each other and strong against themselves, while the other four (six in the remakes) act in a wheel. All characters have an element; they are treated as having better stats when attacking characters of an element they're strong against, and worse stats when attacking characters of an element they're weak against. This gets more dramatic at higher levels.
  • Most of the "elemental" spells do 10 points more healing/damage if used by someone of a matching element and have a chance to make the target weaker to attacks of their element, but (at least in Reborn) the damage they deal actually has the element of their user. If your team is all of one element, then you have basically no reason to put mismatched "elemental" spells on your casters.
  • Finishing Moves take their own element into account, instead of the character's; Ozma's Flood Lash does massive damage to Fire characters, for example, even though she's an Ice character (so the rest of her attacks are weak on them). The rebalancing in Reborn made most Finishers Non-Elemental, however.
  • Elemental Armor can only dull the effect of damage from elements the character is weak to, and never more than the damage would be without an elemental edge.
    • On that note, the non-elemental damage-reduction of armor depends on the damage type of the wearer's weapon, not the damage type of the attacker's weapon. Whether this is a bug, or an intentional feature is unconfirmed.
• Emergency Weapon: Soldiers without weapon type can either punch or throw a stone. The thrown stone only does Scratch Damage, which generally makes it less effective than waiting to gain a faster activation, unless you need someone awake or (in Reborn) you need their MP to regenerate just a bit faster. The punch does slightly more damage equivalent to a double scratch but allows the opponent to counterattack.
• Escort Mission: Constantly. In a lot of battles, you will get the help from Guest characters, or will have to rescue them. While they can act fine on their own, there are quite a couple of instances where Artificial Stupidity will make your life a living hell, especially since keeping them alive is necessary if you want to recruit them in your army proper eventually. Sadly, in some cases, no amount of turn-rewinding can help you if guest units keep on rushing to their death, and you are completely at the mercy of the Random Number God:
  • During Chapter 2, Chaos Route, you will get ambushed by Vyce. Arycelle starts the fight in the middle of the fray, which is extremely bad for an archer. If she decides to run away from you and into enemy ranks, you will be hard-pressed to save her in time, especially as the boss enemy can make mincemeat out of her with ease.
  • The first battle of Azelstan's storyline begins with him completely surrounded, while your troops are far away. While he is powerful, he doesn't have any way to heal himself, and a nearby beast tamer enemy is likely to attack him and prevent him from running in your direction, meaning that Azelstan will run away from you, where more enemy troops will gang on him and kill him way before you can reach him.
• Everyone Has Standards: Part of the reason why Barbatos has a 0% Approval Rating even among the Galgastani was because a fraction of Galgastani thought he went too far with the ethnic cleansing of the Walister, this is despite their tense relations..
• Expy:
  • In the PSP remake, Chaotic-route Vyce becomes one for Algus/Argath, starting from his rampant Jerkassery, killing Ravness (like Algus did to Teta), and the eventual fate of being revived as a zombie knight (by Nybass).
  • Dame Ravness Loxaerion, a new character added in the PSP version, is extremely similar to Final Fantasy Tactics' Holy Knight Agrias Oaks. Both in position, attitude and looks, they are almost the same character. Ravness' battle sprite is pretty much Agrias with a lighter colored hair and her unique class is the White Knight! An early concept art of her with one of the options having Agrias's color palette and a comment by artist Tsubasa Masao acknowledging how similar they look.
  • The artwork and sprites for the Swordmaster class in the SNES/PSX version of Let Us Cling Together had an uncanny resemblance to Alec Guinness. The artwork for Hobyrim looked a lot like Ewan McGregor with a goatee. This might cross over with Author Appeal considering the Star Wars references in Final Fantasy XII.
• Eye of Newt: The reagents for necromancy magic.
• Face–Heel Turn:
  • Vyce in Tactics Ogre undergoes a highly drastic change if one decides to not slaughter an entire village...he practically suddenly morphs into a sadistic bastard right in front of you. You can tell something wasn't right because he looks evil! This is averted if you turn evil — he becomes the leader of La Résistance!
  • It's amazing how many of your allies will at some point try to kill you, though given the political situation it's not surprising in the least.
• Fake Ultimate Mook: The Golem units in most of the games. They have inherently high strength (and, in the front row, deliver three crushing punches) and can easily withstand most physical damage. However, they have pitiful HP, and are easily slain by one or two Fire-elemental spells. They're ultimately only useful as platforms to reach otherwise difficult to access areas.
• False Flag Operation: In Tactics Ogre, whether or not Denim takes part in this determines most of his path through the rest of the game, with choosing to obey orders rather than follow his conscience representing the more lawful choice.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Some elements are intentionally taken from Eastern Europe, especially former Yugoslavia and the old Byzantine Empire. There's also the Hagia Banhamuba, which presumably has at least some resemblance to the Hagia Sophia on the outside.
• Faux Action Girl:
  • For some reason, Cerya can be seen as this. She's said to be an Action Girl leader of the Valeria Liberation Front and kills lots of Lodissions... off screen. Then, you need to bail her out from the Dark Knights, or she gets killed without you seeing (only in Lawful route). And when you do get her? For some reason, she can't really hit a thing with hit rate over 50%.
  • Possibly inverted gender-wise by Lanselot Hamilton as well. Anyone who plays March of the Black Queen knows that Lanselot is one of the playable characters and can grow powerful. In Let Us Cling Together? He got cheap-shotted by Barbas/Martym (OFF SCREEN), gets himself imprisoned by Lanselot Tartaros, mentally tortured to the point that by the ending, he's turned into some sort of vegetable.
• Floating Island: The second half of the San Bronsa Ruins, a bonus dungeon added in the PSP remake. And the in-game explanation as to why they exist is King Roderick used the Apocrypha to magically nuke San Bronsa off the map during Dorgalua's Great War. With the only remains being the Tower of Law Eternal, which was already there before San Bronsa existed, and the Floating Ruins, parts of what was maybe the royal palace just locked in the sky.
• Foreshadowing: As he lays dying, Denam's father Prancet states that Denam must make sure that Kachua becomes queen, and that Denam must deny his claim to the throne as a Bakram descendant. The only happy ending you can get is if Kachua survives and becomes queen of Valeria. If she kills herself and Denam ascends to the throne, he will either be assassinated on his coronation day or quickly be faced with the full military might of the Lodis Empire, a war that King Tristan of Xenobia notes Denam has little chance of winning.
• For Want Of A Nail: Explored via the chapter system. Characters who are vital in one timeline can be near afterthoughts in the other. Characters who would be villains in one can be some of your most powerful allies in another. The text entry describing the World system in the post-game lampshades this slightly, explaining that duplicates, dead people, etc have all been seen in your party recently.
  • Vyce takes the cake, however — he turns on the party no matter what decision you make, but in the Chaos route he swan dives off the slippery slope, in the Law route he actually becomes heroic — fitting, since it's later revealed he doesn't really care about either path as much as he cares about going up against '''you.'''
  • To wit, your decisions decide who dies and who lives. Pick Law, and you pretty much doom Cerya, Cistina, Folcurt, Bayin), Cressida, Oelias and Dievold. Pick Chaos and you pretty much doom Vyce, Ravness, Xapan and Ozma (Jeunan and Occione don't die, but they didn't stand up to join you). Further, your choice between Chaos and Neutral will decide who gets to be part of Nybbeth's family and live (Cressida for Chaos, Oelias-Dievold for Neutral), while those who don't became unrelated and die and picking Neutral dooms Gildas.
• Freudian Excuse: Lanselot Tartaros had such a big one it took an entire Gaiden Game to establish it.
• Fighting a Shadow: Late game you can fight avatars of servants of the gods in the shrines; or using a special "tuning fork" through Item Crafting in a bonus dungeon, avatars of the 12 Heavenly Generals; based on Indian mythology. Killing them can give you special drops, but if you go through the shrine again, they'll still be there; or if you have another tuning fork. The divine servants are actually pleased you're doing this.
• Game-Breaking Bug: In the PS1 version, there was a bug that would prevent loading a saved game. This occurred occasionally, but it was frustrating considering how long the game is.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: Characters gained from other timelines using the World System are playable, but do not affect the plot unless you specifically save/have them join your party in that time thread. This includes oddities like having a character fight themselves.
• Gender-Restricted Ability: Less so in the PSP, which re-balanced some classes (Witches were turned into the female version of Wizards, both can now cast damage and support magic) and added opposite gender variants of the existing ones that did not have a close counterpart. There are, however, gender restricted pieces of equipment, such as fans and whips.
• God Save Us from the Queen!: Queen Vernotta, Dorgalua's wife.
• Gray-and-Gray Morality: Tactics Ogre is very gray and gray, especially if you choose the Law route.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Vyce's reason for his Face–Heel Turn. When you duel him at the end of Chapter 2 Chaos, he'll mention that everyone liked Denam, but not him, as his father was an abusive drunk. He never mentions it in the Law route, though.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • Recruiting Sherri. You have to fight her in Chapter Four and are told not to kill her when you do, because Olivya and her dad (Or her other two sisters if you have them) believe she can be saved. Killing the squishy wizard is easy to do by mistake, but you can retry that. However, for some reason, when you do reduce her HP to about 20, she vanishes and...guess what? She didn't join. For no discernible reason, you have to go to Balmamusa, enter training, make it rain somehow, and then leave to trigger the event where she joins. And no one told you that in order to trigger that, you need to keep Olivya's loyalty high, which might not be a problem since she joined with high loyalty in the first place, but for some people who accidentally got her loyalty lowered...
  • The new characters in the PSP, Ravness and Cressida, requires a great Guide Dang It! understanding to get. ESPECIALLY Cressida, as it requires you to understand the Chaos Frame system which is NOT visible at all anywhere...^note  Well you can, but it requires going into a 100-level dungeon twice.
  • Trying to get Ravness makes one battle near the end of chapter one a That One Level.^Why?You essentially cross her Moral Event Horizon and she decides to kill you, thus joining the battle, which happens to be a "Kill all" stage. If you want to recruit Ravness, you have to finish the fight without killing her. This is easier said than done as she starts the battle right next to you with all the other enemies up a hill. You need to have methods of crowd control to keep her out of your way, except chapter 1 doesn't give you the widest selection of debuff skills. To get Ravness after this, you have to read the news and do an optional fight to save her. Then the next chapter, recruit Jenaun, a character with no visible ties to her, bring him to the next Boss Battle, and then wait until you get enough dialogue between him and the boss. After that, you will get an optional battle where Ravness finally joins.
  • You can actually recruit Ozma on the law route in the PSP version...however good luck figuring out how to do that without a guide.^Confused?In chapter three, during the chapter where Ozma is attempting to arrest Hobyrim and you interrupt, leading to a battle, you have to not kill her. Easy enough - she retreats at critical health anyways. Then the game drops a hint that Ozma actually knows Hobyrim...and is wondering exactly what is going on. It gives a pretty big hint that she's playable. However, you must then play the game normally, which involves killing Oz at the end of Chapter 3...which you can imagine is probably not going to make his twin happy. But then, you must check the news that suggests of dissent growing amongst the Dark Knights, and optionally see a scene where Ozma runs off and Volaq comes to retrieve her. This then unlocks an optional battle against Ozma and Volaq...where the two and their templar knights are likely to be much higher level than your characters In this battle, you must bring Hobyrim, pick the right choice, then reduce Ozma to critical and not kill her, and then reduce Volaq to critical, causing him to retreat and Ozma to surrender. In the ensuing scene, you must pick the right option or else Ozma will think you're too wishy-washy and refuse to join you. How did anyone figure this out?
  • There's also recruiting Deneb AND unlocking her special class, which can also be tedious. It also doesn't help that they changed the requirements between each release, although the easiest method is in Reborn.
  • Getting any special recipes and items. They're only dropped by certain enemies on specific stages, which you'll have a hard time figuring out without Guide Dang It!. And these same enemies don't necessarily even spawn in the battles at all. And in case if that wasn't enough, the enemies won't necessarily drop all or any of their belongings. Even if you use CHARIOT, you might still have to spend a good amount of time until you'll get what you wanted. Oh, and did I mention that there's also a party level requirement for even having a chance of getting that awesome gear? Good luck hunting.
  • A rare, justified example - The Fireseal. Evidently, Quest held a contest to see who could get the fire seal first, awarding an ogre-battle style battle helmet to the winner.
    • To get it, you have to find the 4 Wind God Weapons....which was also the requirement in the original and Ogre Battle but see the above about how hard it is to get specific drops. Three of those drops are in the Palace of the Dead. The 4th was in the Ruins of San Bronsa in the DLC Coda. Then you had to go to the bottom of the PotD a second time.
• Guns Are Worthless: Averted in the original version - gunners can shoot from anywhere on the map, but they realistically cannot fire over obstacles (like arrows). In the remake, however, guns have been Nerfed with range but are still useful. If anything, they often wind up Overshadowed by Awesome since you can't get them before chapter four when your endgame team is almost ready and bows still outdo them. Reborn buffed them by letting them pierce through armor.
• Handicapped Badass: Hobyrim, the first Swordmaster you're likely to get. Is a "retired" Knight of Lodis. They cut his eyes out for his trouble.
• Hard Truth Aesop: A lot, given the fact that the entire point of the game is War Is Hell:
  • Generically, the amount of mutually exclusive characters illustrates that you can't save everyone. While it may be undermined slightly by the fact the player can recruit everybody through the use of the Chariot system, it's more of an Acceptable Break from Reality.
  • Lawful: Principles are often sacrificed if one feels you "have" to do it.
  • Neutral: Hypocrisy has side effects. People like Arycelle see you as very wishy-washy because Denam doesn't seem to truly believe in the morals that she joined him for.
  • Chaotic: Having principles is a very nice thing. However, it sure as heck does not make life easier for you. Denam spends the entirety of the Chaos Route on the run. Additionally, enemies call Denam out to be a cowardly version of a Principles Zealot, being someone who refuses to stain his hands to achieve a realistic goal and prefers to live in a heroic fantasy with clear cut morality like a child who never grow up.
• Heroic Bastard: Vyce in Tactics Ogre's Law route. Other routes turn him into a literal bastard.
  • Technically, Catiua is one, since she is the result of an affair.
• Heel–Face Turn: Depending on your routes, you can recruit Dark Knight Ozma in the remake.
  • Given the route system, just about every character is on at least one "villain" side depending on your point of view. This includes Denam.
• Hello, [Insert Name Here]: In games without voice acting (SFC, PSX, PSP), or the one with minimum voice acting (Sega Saturn), you can rename Denam with whatever you like. In Reborn, where voice-acting is heavily involved, Denam cannot be re-named. This is because the game won't skip out parts where it has to mention the protagonist's name. That said, one of the unlocks for beating the game in Reborn is being able to rename Denam.
• Hidden Backup Prince: Catiua is secretly the illegitimate daughter of King Dorgalua; her mother was driven out of the palace by the queen when Catiua's conception was discovered, and said mother died in childbirth. Unlike many a Hidden Backup Royal, Catiua's life wasn't preserved as a fail-safe, but rather because the two men who ended up deciding what to do with her couldn't bring themselves to throw the baby to the wolves (for varying reasons). One of these two men became her adopted father, who named her for (and acted like she was) the infant daughter he recently lost. Catiua does not take it well, and all the circumstances surrounding her discovery of her true parentage (and what it means about the people she thought were her family) can throw her across the Despair Event Horizon and drive her to suicide.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Denam himself can make such a choice by taking the Law route. He is surprisingly less angsty about it than one would think.
• I Hate You, Vampire Dad: Nybeth the Necromancer tried to bring his son back to life using Forbidden Magic. However, his son comes back as an undead knight, with no memory or personality (in the PSX/SNES; he keeps them in the PSP and Reborn). It's primarily for this reason his daughter Oelias hates him.
• Inconsistent Dub: This was a problem with Atlus's PS1 translation. One notable example was that for the first two chapters, the text referred to "Cardinal Barbatos" and "Bishop Branta." However, come chapter 3, Branta started being referred to as cardinal. More than one player got confused at this.
• Infinity -1 Sword: The holy sword Brynhildr. Not only is it a Sword of Plot Advancement, but it is also the strongest sword you will get from doing the game's normal content. There are stronger weapons in the optional dungeons, and of course the Snapdragon weapons can theoretically be even stronger still, but Brynhildr is nothing to sneeze at.
• In-Universe Game Clock: A day passes for every location you pass through or fight in (perhaps even while training); there seems to be some minor weather-related effects tied to the date (it'll rain/snow more or less often depending on the month), but the main thing players are interested in is matching up the dates in order to access Deneb's secret shop.
• Ironic Echo: After Sherri finds out that you've killed her minion prior to approach Balhamusa Shrine, she claims that he was "all breeding and no substance." Shortly thereafter, when you've sent Sherri herself fleeing (or have killed her), Abuna Brantyn claims the exact same thing...About her.
• Item Crafting: Added in the PSP remake, and kept in the Reborn version:
  • Unfortunately, it's very tedious, with a long animation for every sub-combine, and no ability to make multiples at a time, and it can fail; thus, some of these sub-materials can involve over thirty previous item crafting processes to produce. Items can only be improved to +1 but are almost always better than the next "tier" of gear, often adding special effects as well.
  • The Reborn version of the game keeps the crafting system but fixes all of its issues by removing everything that made it tedious. The crafting animation is gone, you do not have to manually craft every sub-material anymore, and all of your recipes have a 100% success rate.
• Jigsaw Plot: Very mild. But you might be surprised with how some characters wind up if you go to a different route. For example, Zapan/Xapan becomes an ally in the Law route. However, in the Chaos route, he becomes a Disc One Dragon.
• Joke Item: Ranged attacks when you don't have a ranged weapon equipped. Mostly this involves throwing a stone at the enemy which will do one point of damage. There are exceptions, though.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: Balxephon was a Karma Houdini in the original game - but the remake adds a plot thread in which the other Lodissians learn about what he did, thanks to some Adaptation Expansion in Ozma having been his girlfriend. This is reinforced by Volaq in his optional boss fight when he informs Ozma that Balxephon will be tried after they get back to Lodis.
• Katanas Are Just Better: The artwork for the Jedi Swordmaster class and young Obi-Wan Kenobi Hobyrim in the PSP version of Let Us Cling Together shows them using katanas. Which makes sense, given that the Swordmaster (of which Hobyrim is the first and only NPC variant) are 2 handed Katana specialists.
• Knight in Shining Armor: Lanselot Hamilton
• The Lance of Longinus: Longicolnis, a take on Longinus.
• Lawful Stupid: Many new players are confused at the start of Chapter 2. Refusing to slaughter a town of innocents under a False Flag Operation? Clearly the good choice, so why did you become Chaotic? Because obeying orders, no matter what you personally think of them, is the lawful choice — and the Law / Neutral / Chaos choices do not take into consideration morality. This was shored up a bit in the PSP remake — in the original, the Terror Knight class was Chaos only, making it hard to justify playing as a noble knight when the only knight-like class available was the fear-inducing, lord of darkness Terror Knight class.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Played with in the PSP remake and Reborn, Presance attempted to use Exorcism on living Undead... only to fail because the new system requires that undead be knocked out first before being exorcised. He remarks that it's been 15 years since he fought an undead as an excuse, which is the real time difference between the remake and the original's release. Reborn even changed it to "(a) quarter century". However, in Orias' case in the Chaos route, this got her fatally wounded by the undead as she failed to exorcise, and it wounded her to the point she succumbed to the wounds and die.
• Lethal Joke Item: Usually chucking rocks only deals 1 HP of damage. However, if you raise your stats high enough, you can cause a significant amount of damage to the enemy, especially to more squishy classes. Plus, critical hits almost always knock back units, so a critical hit with a rock can potentially cause an enemy unit to fall off a ledge and die instantly.
  • It's also particularly good for Cherry Tapping; one boss requires that you don't kill them so that you can recruit them later.
  • The Caldia (a heart-shaped fan) is utterly useless for attacking, and doesn't contribute much to your stats, but it does give you a free rank of Augment Darkness and lets you cast Charm for free once per battle.
• Light Is Not Good: Lanselot Tartaros is Light elemental, and the leader of the Knights Loslorien, living up to the position admirably. You're also pitted against angels in a post-game dungeon who are exclusively Light elemental, and also vengeful and hostile to mortals intruding on the ruins.
• Limit Break: Finishing Moves, which were added in the PSP remake. Each weapon type has four Finishing Moves for units to learn, although Ozma has her own unique whip Finishing Move, the Demon Rose.
• Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: Zig-zagged across the various editions.
  • Magic is very powerful, especially the hidden Dragon Magic. However, Warriors tend to be able to keep up, especially Ninjas and Archers. Amusingly, the strongest Melee and Ranged combat skill layouts involve giving those characters elemental weapons and the elemental support skills (at face value meant for magic using characters) — making them into an odd melee version of a spellcaster in the PSP version!
  • Magic received a significant nerf in the PSP version, needing multiple skills to augment certain element(s) and to stack "Averse" debuffs and/or attuned buffs before it kept up with the damage done by melees and archers. It received a buff in Reborn, but crafted weapons and finishers can still out damage them easily. One thing that helps is that weapon strength does help increase the damage of spells now.
• Literary Allusion Title: Almost every installment's title has something to do with Queen, as does the overall series title.
• Lizard Folk: Reptile males as known as Lizardmen, an One-Gender Race of humanoid lizards. They have high strength and vitality, but low agility and avoidance, thus they tend to focus on physical classes (Warrior, Berserker, Juggernaut, and Hoptile, with the magical Patriarch thrown in to mix things up). What little info on them seems to show they're barbaric warriors. They're mainly found as enemies, but they can be recruited with the Coax skill.
• Loads and Loads of Sidequests: Well, sort of; the number of sidequests is manageable, but the length of some of the sidequests is ridiculous. The 100- (or sometimes 115-)floor Palace of the Dead is a sidequest you'll have to do at least three times to get all the special loot, the Shrines quest involves six dungeons with six fights each (and you have to go through all of them again to collect more Shaman's marks)...
• Love Redeems: Hobyrim to Ozma in the Law route.

M - S

• Mad Scientist's Beautiful Daughter: Mad Necromancer Nybeth has three beautiful daughters, two of which rebel from their father and are recruitable, though in different paths. Cressida is maddeningly more difficult to recruit than Oelias.
• Magic Knight: Magic Knights up the wazoo! Valkyries (and the male counterpart Rune Fencers), Terror Knights, regular Knights, Vartans, Knight Commanders, Catiua's Princess class, Denam's Lord class...
  • Warlocks also fall into this, more so in Knight of Lodis, where their preferred weapons are swords.
• Magikarp Power: You wouldn't believe it based on the first hour or three of gameplay, but archery becomes very powerful in the mid and late game. Part of the problem is the first bow is absurdly weak.
  • Averted in the Gaiden Game where Archery is downgraded to Annoying Arrows.
• Manual Leader, A.I. Party: You have this option, however the AI tends to show suicidal behavior.
• Marathon Level: Hell's Gate is this in the first version of the game because there is no retreating from it. The Hanging Gardens (Eden) is this in both versions of the game.
• Master of All: Before the remake said class was the AI-only Templar Knight.
  • Denam's unique Lord class can do nearly everything; equip almost anything, cast almost any spell, use several skills that are available to painfully few classes (Tremendous Shot or Double Attack)... and he's noticeably better than average at all of it. The only downside is that the class doesn't actually learn much, you have to learn skills with other classes to make the most of Lord.
• Master of None: Generic classes that "specialize" in more than one thing generally aren't too great. Valkyries/Rune Fencers can't dish out the magical damage that focused spellcasters can, or the physical damage that other classes can. Terror Knights can dish out decent physical damage but are frailer than most front-liners and are the slowest unit; they can't manage the versatility or precision in debuffs that casters can, either. Et cetera.
  • Averted by the Dark Knights' Commanders; sure, they'll occasionally cast Spiritsurge on you for 1 damage, but they're still formidable opponents.
  • Reborn fixed this by buffing magic and letting spell usage contribute to weapon mastery, allowing a Valkyrie/Rune Fencer to be a useful Jack of All Trades while Terror Knights can be debuff monsters.
• Maximum HP Reduction: The pretty much almost never used (a mercy by the programmers and the AI) skill called Oracle reduces the max HP of the target. The only one who actually uses it Lans Tartare, the leader of the Templar Knights in the game.
• Mind Rape: The Knights of Lodis' preferred tactic for dealing with captives, combined with Cold-Blooded Torture. Lanselot, one of the major characters in the series, is reduced to a vegetable after they are done with him — for no other purpose than they thought it would be fun to torture a holy knight. Other victims include Catiua (manipulated until she turns on the party) and Hobyrim (eyes cut out).
• Mistaken Identity: The start just mentions that Lanselot is approaching. Only after your ally attempts his attack does the conversation about the mistaken identity starts, noting that the dark knight has a missing eye.
• Morton's Fork: Denam really can't win if he becomes ruler of Valeria. Chaos frame too low? Someone assassinates him. Chaos frame high? Then Lodis invades and takes over Valeria.
• Mythology Gag: One of the items is a Rood, except it's upright rather than inverse.
  • Similarly, many of the Finishing Moves take their names and even elements from Vagrant Story's Break Arts.
  • The description of the Palace of the Dead if you put your cursor over the levels is usually "All who enter this dungeon, abandon what little hope yet may yet have." This was inscribed on the Gate of Hell in Dante's Inferno. "Hellgate" was what the original Playstation version called the dungeon.
• Necromantic: Nybeth Obdilord from Tactics Ogre, complete with a priestly daughter who wants him dead.
  • Made even more so in the PSP remake. It turns out that his "daughter" is actually his wife, revived in his daughter's body with his daughter's memories.
• Never Trust a Trailer: The animated trailer of the PSP remake focuses more on Lanselot Hamilton and his knights than anyone else. Denam doesn't physically appear until almost a minute in, and he's the only the focus of the video for roughly fifteen seconds. It also showcases a big battle on an expansive field between the good guys (featuring Lans Hamilton) and some mounted force led by Lanselot Tartaros; this is a battle that has no analogue (or anything particularly close!) in the game.
• New Game Plus: In the PSP remake. Finishing the game changes the event map (the Wheel of Fortune) into The World; using it lets you move to important points in the story to see how different choices play out. You bring your entire end-game party with you, but don't expect to steamroll the opposition, enemies level with you.
  • Events change based on who is alive or dead according to the Warren Report. Even if a character is in your party, if she or he dies in the storyline that character is dead for all future story events until you go back and avert that death.
• Neutral No Longer: There are a few maps with powerful, over leveled neutral dragons just hanging about. Ordinarily they do nothing, simply maneuvering the battlefield. The moment one side is careless with their spells or abilities and strikes them however, they'll turn on them and assist the other.
• No "Arc" in "Archery": You'll love that they averted this whenever you start on the top of a map and hate them for it whenever you're at the bottom. Crossbows even get their own, mostly accurate arcs — straight forward.
• Nominal Importance: Played with; antagonists who appear for only one battle often have detailed Warren Report entries (even if they don't have unique character portraits). Also, several characters of central importance in one path might go unmentioned in other routes.
• Nostalgic Musicbox: Lanselot Hamilton has one.
• Not Blood Siblings: Turns out that Denam and Catiua are not related at all.
• "Not So Different" Remark: Brantyn Morne tries to give this speech to Denam during a battle; after all, they're both leaders who are willing to get their hands dirty to achieve their goals. Denam is having none of it.
• Obvious Rule Patch: Reborn removes TP and instead has Finishing Moves cast from the Mana pool like every other skill. To counterbalance this and keep the player from stocking up on Magic Leaves to nuke everything they encounter, they, and any other MP restoring items aside from a single item that only recovers 10% of your HP and MP, cannot be purchased from shops.
• One-Man Party: Averted in the PSP remake — classes, not characters, get experience levels. So using Warriors in battle will cause all your warriors to gain levels equally. The EXP rewarded for each class will be weighted hugely towards your lower-level ones, until they've pretty much caught up.
• One-Gender Race: The Reptiles are divided between two one-gender variants: The males are all Lizardmen while the females are all Lamias.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted. There's Paladin Lanselot Hamilton, the head of New Xenobia's Holy Knights, and then there's Death Templar Lanselot Tartaros, the high champion of Lodis's Dark Knights Loslorien. Denam and friends even attack Lanselot Hamilton in the first battle of the game because they heard a "knight named Lanselot" was coming.
  • The game will check your current battle party and make sure not to duplicate the names of anyone you brought but does not check the party members who are not on the map. Thus, you will occasionally fight an enemy with the same name as someone in your army.
• Orphean Rescue: In one of the Coda post-game, your party goes to look for the Chaos Gate in the Palace of the Dead to rescue Warren.
• Outside Man, Inside Man: With Denam and Vyce. Your choice at the end of Chapter 1 determines who is the inside and who is the outside man.
• Our Angels Are Different: In the original game, Angel Knights were created by random chance if a female party member died. In the remake, "Divine Knights" are created using an Ensanguined Rood on The Undead on stage 3 of the Bonus Dungeon, the Tower of Eternal Law. Enemies in that dungeon, called "Ethereal Visions" are true angels, and are not happy about this.
• Perfectly Arranged Marriage: Hobyrim and Ozma were initially engaged for political reasons but grew to love each other. Despite the former being branded as a wanted criminal, the latter never stopped loving him.
• Pirate: Diego/Azelstan. Formerly a type 1, he freely admits to having done worse than murdering children out of spite, until his daughter was killed, and he put it all behind him to take up drinking and cynicism. His buccaneer class can equip a sword and fusil simultaneously, if you want.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child: The Cursed Weapons, which start out unexceptional but can go on to become some of the strongest in the game... provided you sacrifice a unit, body and soul, to the weapon. They take on some of their stats, elemental attributes and even their name after the fact.
• Protagonist-Centered Morality: Subverted, especially in chapters 2+. Especially on the Law side, where the protagonist decides Utopia Justifies the Means and is complicit in the slaughter of thousands of his own countrymen under a False Flag Operation.
• Pun: The Warren Report, which coincides with an infamous US Report on President Kennedy's Assassination.
• Randomly Drops: So very much. The end-game item crafting is essentially one big Guide Dang It!. There are recipes that can only be obtained from a specific enemy who might spawn on the fifth floor of a 6-floor dungeon, and might drop a loot bag upon death, which might contain your recipe. Several crafting ingredients are similarly annoying to find, and Dark Priestess Classmarks can only be obtained from specific Templars, on certain floors of a dungeon containing only Templars. Then you combine this trope with the 115-floor Palace of the Dead and scream.
• Rape Discretion Shot: One of Cerya's possible fates. In the Neutral route, you save her from this... maybe. She starts the battle surrounded by enemies, atop a fort, without equipment, and with the Leadened status. In the law route, well, you aren't there at the time. Oz tells his templars to have their way with her and leaves; Cerya is not heard from again. The PSP version turns this into more likely Gory Discretion Shot, since Cerya didn't look like fearing her virginity being destroyed, but instead telling the templars to just go ahead and try.
• Ripped from the Headlines: Matsuno allegedly based some events of this game off of real life events - namely the Ethnic Cleansing around the Yugoslavian regions. The game's original release year was 1995, right when The Yugoslav Wars were in full swing, so this one may be on the money.
• Rival Turned Evil:
  • Vyce, if you pick the chaos route; but he still turns against you no matter which choice you make.
  • Rictor becomes this in the Gaiden Game. However, he gets better - he becomes Brainwashed and Crazy on the A route, and is saved on the B route]].
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Arycelle in Tactics Ogre. Toned down in Chaos route, taken to quite the extreme to death in Law route in the original version (she can be stopped a little and join in the PSP version of Law route).
• Rogue Protagonist: The Gaiden Game Tactics Ogre: Knight of Lodis stars a soldier from Lodis named Alphonse. In the "A" ending, he is given the name "Lans"...Lans Tartare. If you get the "A+" ending, you see a "One-eyed knight" preparing to attack a village...and in Tactics Ogre, he's revealed as Lans Tartare. He even wields the sword obtained from Shaher.
• Schrödinger's Gun: Vyce will make the opposite decision as you at the end of the first chapter; and this will become his entire personality.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: If you pursue Lord route, you can get a divergence by gaining the support of the three clans through Chaos Frame. Denam gets assassinated if he doesn't and if he does win their support, Lodis will launch an invasion against Valeria, likely rendering his efforts pointless.
• Sheathe Your Sword: Going alone and unarmed to Brigantes lets you skip the battle. If you don't, you kill some of the people you're trying to negotiate with and get told that he could have avoided that. (It's true!)
• Shout-Out: The (most likely) first Exorcist (first version) / male priest (PSP version) you get is Donald Pleasance, probably referencing the Halloween series.
  • As noted under Expy, Swordmasters have a few things in common with Jedi, complete with force-throwing rocks, the standard male Swordmasters looking like Alec Guinness, and Hobyrim looking like Ewan MacGregor. Toned down in the PSP version where only the outfit and hairstyle are similar.
  • Some of the music takes a few cues from the Star Wars soundtracks.
  • Also in the original version, when Catiua left Denam while revealing that Prancet isn't their real father, Denam quoted Luke Skywalker, "That's not true. That's impossible!", followed by Catiua quoting Darth Vader, "Search your feelings, you know it to be true." This is fixed in the PSP version.
  • Some of the Dark-tainted enemies that can't be recruited include Death Eater: A dark mage, said to practice cannibalism. They serve one who must not be named; Cenobites and Uruk-hai.
  • Go through the Bonus Dungeon twice and with the 4 Wind God Weapons. What the does the bottom boss drop? The Crest of Fire and The Gran Grimoire.
  • The remake's localization is one big one to A Song of Ice and Fire. The script uses similar unconventional spellings of common names, terms such as hedge knights and some of the randomly generated names are Arya and Eddard.
  • It's hard not to look at Azelstan and not immediately think of Juan Sánchez Villa-Lobos Ramírez.
• Shown Their Work: The PSX translation of the game used Roman Catholic terms when translating religious titles, namely "Cardinal" and "Bishop." However, the PSP translation used titles from Orthodox Christianity. This is extremely relevant, as Valeria is a Fantasy Counterpart Culture of Yugoslavia and Eastern Orthodoxy is the dominant form of Christianity in that area.
• Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!:
  • The background of the inner conflict between the Valeria Liberation Front at first. Cerya is quite the realist and will dirty her hand to achieve her goal, while Cistina (and Folcust and Bayin) is more of the idealist and refuses to create a nation out of bloodshed.
  • Some enemies will call Chaos path Denam on this. As far as they're concerned, sure, he's morally unsullied, but he won't do anything, and lets everyone else get their hands dirty; Denam's ideal, but irrelevant. This doesn't stop him from becoming the military leader of Valeria once he finally starts DOING something, but those enemies don't dwell on the fact.
• Smug Snake: Brantyn. Take a look at how he got into the Cardinal position (from Prancet's death scene), and combine with the fact that while he 'usurps' the rule on Valeria, he pretty much lets the Dark Knights do most of the work for him and gets visibly shaken when the Dark Knights plan to stop supporting him...
  • In the PSP Remake, he spends most of the fight running away while his soldiers (almost all tanky types designed to make it hard for you to get to him) do all the work. His dialogue is all about trying to convince you that You can Rule Together. While he did take a level in badass and can actually hurt you, he's still a Squishy Wizard.
  • Just look at Martym and try to claim he’s not intended as such; adding to this is his weapon which poisons his opponent, without which he’s not as impressive as most other Dark Knight Commanders. He’s also a massive coward, as during the sacking of Rhime Gildas sent him fleeing despite taking a painful blow early on (it’s implied that his death in Neutral was more because he’d not reunited with Mirdyn and Warren and succumbing to the poison than because Martym overpowered him), so despite his arrogance he can’t really back up his alleged superiority when facing a tougher opponent.
• Snake People: Reptile females as known as Lamia, an One-Gender Race of humanoid snakes, with their upper torso resembling a human woman, but they have snake hair, and their lower body is a snake tail. They tend to specialize in magic more than their male counterpart, having the same classes as them plus Enchantress and Witch. They're even rarer than lizardman, only found as enemies in a few maps and they can be recruited with the Coax skill.
• Snakes Are Sexy: Lamia Matriarchs are considered to be an Inhumanly Beautiful Race with their upper torso being that of an attractive woman with snake hair. They're also always topless, though their sprite is Nipple and Dimed while their portrait only shows them from the shoulders up. They even have a skill that illustrates their status as a Head-Turning Beauty: The 'Irresistible Beauty' skill which forces all enemies on the map to look in the direction of the unit if they fail to save against it, possibly leaving them open to being flanked. The Gorgon variant can combine this with their Deadly Gaze skill 'Evil Eye' which petrifies anyone facing them.
• Space Cold War: This is happening between Lodis and Xenobia, complete with using Valeria (itself resembling Yugoslavia after the death of Josip Broz Tito) as a proxy battleground.
• Spared by the Adaptation: In the PSP version, you can Time Travel to save Good Lans and enter a Chaos Gate to save Warren. Also, in Law Route, Ozma, who can pull a High-Heel–Face Turn.
  • A lesser example is the pregnant pirate captain Veldrei in the Chaos Route; it is possible to slowly chip off her HP and spare her life. Possibly Ascended Fanon, as rumors of sparing her abounded in the original version.
• Squishy Wizard: Magic-focused units deal excessive amounts of damage but tend to die easily.
• Status Effects: And the enemy AI seems to favor trying to inflict these ailments more than casting damage spells.
  • Which can still be problematic, as this is one of those few games where status effects are not entirely useless. Thankfully, the same applies to your own support-style mages. If you level them up right, a Witch or Warlock can reliably shut down enemies with little trouble.
• Story Branch Favoritism: Depending on the version, there's a more beneficial path when it comes to unique recruits.
  • The Chaos Route in the SFC/PSX/Saturn version, if only for being the only way to recruit and keep Arycelle, plus recruit all four of the Phoraena sisters, in the same playthrough. Furthermore, the Neutral and Chaos Routes are the only ones you could get access to the Shaman class, since the associated sidequest required all four sisters, one for each shrine. This meant that it was impossible to fully complete the quest on the Law route as Cerya and Cistina are only recruitable on Chaos/Neutral. Also, Sherri can be missed due to being a minor Guide Dang It! to recruit. With the PSP release, this was changed so as long as you have a single sister in your army, alive or dead in the Warren Report, you can open every single shrine.
  • The Lawful Route has the most benefits for following than either of the other paths in the PSP and Reborn version. You get more route-exclusive unique characters than the other paths, three of whom (Vyce, Ravness, and Ozma) are the only ones who get special additional scenes when doing any Coda scenarios. And it is the path with Denam at his most Antihero-ness (considering he takes part in the massacre of his fellow countrymen who didn't want to fight in a false flag operation to goad others to war). The biggest downside is the exclusive characters you can’t get — most of which are shared between Chaotic and Neutral — and that aside from Cerya’s confirmed fate none of them are touched upon (in contrast, the only Lawful exclusive never seen outside their route in the remake is Jeunan). There are a some other semi-uniques (characters with unique portraits but otherwise recolored generic unit sprites) that are unavailable in Law, but what you do get generally outshines everything you don't get.
  • Inverted in the sense that it brings unfavorable issues if not dealt with first. The Neutral route in the PSP and Reborn versions is the least desirable route because Gildas dies, barring you from doing the Coda scenarios at all since completing the first one (and starting the second) requires Gildas in your party and alive in the Warren Report. Even more so in Reborn because said Coda also raises the maximum level cap to 50, which means Neutral players are stuck at Level 45 unless they use the time travel to try another route and pick up Gildas. Taking this route first is advised because Arycelle's drop in loyalty becomes harder to fix if another route is taken first.^note The easiest way to raise loyalty is to raise skill/weapon levels, or in case of Reborn, merely leveling up. If everything has been maximized before tackling the Neutral route, there are fewer ways to raise Arycelle's loyalty.
• Straight for the Commander: Makes this trope the only way you or the enemy operates (especially in the Chaos Route Rime Battle where the Commander and a guest are in the middle of the heat and the army has to play Catch up, a really bad moment if the player has made said unit a Squishy Wizard).
• Surprisingly Sudden Death: The bolt that killed Azelstan's more-or-less adopted daughter just came out of nowhere, and after you'd won the "defeat all enemies" fight, too!
• Superboss: During a trek to the Palace of the Dead in Reborn, if you enter a random battle where you deploy 12 characters, then there is a chance that you will encounter one of these two bosses as an Easter Egg: Allocer or Aym (Haborim in Japanese). Yes, they're basically the absurdly powerful incarnations of Arycelle and Hobyrim in the SFC/PSX versions... now as your enemy. Not only they are surrounded with Level 55 enemies while they're at Level 60 themselves, but they also have 1000+ points for their primary stats, which means they can easily one shot your squishy units to death. They also break the normal rules of a normal Archer and Swordmaster respectively. It's more advised to retreat from the battle if you're not specifically preparing to hunt them down.
  • Allocer has a tendency to locate herself on the higher ground and has Speedstar which procures everytime in the beginning, therefore she can act quick and fast, and despite using a mere Short Bow, she can shoot across the screen to easily reach your squad's initial position, meaning that she can immediately take out one member of your team or just take half of their HP.
  • Emulating Haborym in the past, Aym has both Spellstrike and Petrifog, so he can petrify your whole team with ease. In addition, he dual-wields like the old version of the Swordmaster. While he wields dagger, his sheer physical attack stat is enough to make him kill you in one shot.
• Sword and Gun: A possible way to equip your characters. Can be Awesome, yet Impractical due to weight issues with the combination.
• Sword of Plot Advancement: Brynhildr. It's quite a powerful holy elemental sword in its own right.

T - Z

• Take Your Time: You can spend many game years without advancing the story.
• Talking Is a Free Action: Subverted. Oelias in the sidequest fight in Balmamusa ( "The Balmamusa Dead," the first sidequest for recruiting Cressida.) — you and her have a nice discussion, she prepares to teleport out, only to be stabbed to death by an undead soldier before she can finish using the gem.
  • Many character recruitment paths require that conversations play out in certain battles; these conversations (in the PSP version) happen one person at a time as the talkers' turns come up, their present contribution to the conversation happening right before they take their turn. This means that one sometimes has to drag out a fight long enough for the people talking to finish shouting at one another (not that the end of the conversation is always obvious), which can be really inconvenient in the cases of some guest party members.
• Tarot Motifs: All of the major arcana are items that enemies sometimes drop. Ending someone's turn on one nets you a status effect inflicting item and a tiny but permanent stat boost.
  • Characters also invoke the Chariot and the Wheel frequently in dialogue; not so coincidentally, both of these are part of the game's mechanics. The former lets you turn back turns in battle to correct your mistakes, that latter serves as a visual representation of major storyline event and a film viewer.
  • Achieving any of the multiple endings open to you turns the Wheel into the World, which serves as the game's New Game Plus.
• Thanatos Gambit: In Law, Leonar would have preferred Denam to take the blame for the Balmamusa massacre and murder of the Duke but when he loses to a duel; tells Denam to blame it all on him.
• This Cannot Be!: Brantyn says as much when you kill him, placing either Catiua or Denam on Valeria's throne.
• Time Travel: The World system. Also, in the Bonus Dungeon there's a way to go back in time and save Warren and Lanselot Hamilton.
  • The final Coda has you going back in time to stop the Golyat massacre; and fight all of the Roslolian Dark Knights. This seems to be more of What If? that didn't actually happen as you go back to the regular timeline after. But you do get to keep any drops...
• Trailers Always Spoil: In the animated trailer for the PSP remake, a few important (and unexpected) scenes are shown, such as Leonar and Denam arguing right before the Balmamusa massacre or the Loslorien attack on Rhime.
• Trauma Conga Line: The beginning of Chapter 4.
• Two Guys and a Girl: Denam, Vyce, and Catiua in Tactics Ogre.
• The Unfought
  • Balzepho/Balxephon and Volaq in the original versions were never fought. In fact, battle data of Volaq did not even exist! This was averted in the PSP remake, where Balxephon fights you in a Dual Boss story battle, and Volaq is an Optional Boss.
  • Barbatos / Balbatos are either captured and then executed offscreen (although you can view his execution) or he commits suicide in the law route.
• Underground Monkey: In the aftergame and Bonus Dungeon, blue enemies are Infernal (Umbral) and Golden enemies are Divine.
• The Unseen: Barbatos and Mourne are regents to their unnamed puppet leaders (the Queen's relative in the latter's case). They were never mentioned or given a portrait despite less important characters getting one.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Nobody seems to be bothered by the skeleton merchants selling items in the Palace of the Dead.
• Useless Useful Spell: Averted, for the most part. With just a little tweaking, your casters can invoke status conditions like Asleep, Petrify, or Charm with surprising regularity.
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: The Hanging Gardens (Eden).
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: Not only can you sell off your (sentient) Beasts to be chopped up for parts; you can also use a Snapshot/Snapdragon spell or a Cursed Weapon to Permadeath a character and turn their soul into an Infinity +1 Sword.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: While you can game the system via a rudimentary "reincarnation" process that turns drops any character (except the main protagonist) back to level 1 and still keep whatever stats they'd gained up to that point, this causes them to lose massive loyalty points, and they will abandon the party if loyalty drops too low.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: The first few stages of the remake hold the player's hand quite tightly. Then the fourth stage is against necromancer Nybeth who starts the level with an exceptional high ground, which is compounded by the fact that he has several archers and mages to dish out damage from afar. Then there's the fact his minions are all undead, meaning they will revive if not exorcised in three turns. Considering this is only the second stage to not have a Guest Character who will essentially wipe out the board on their own, it's quite the shock.
• War Is Hell: Yup. No matter which route Denam walks down, it's impossible to keep his hands clean. War affects everybody- these aren't just bad people who raised their swords against you for no apparent reason - they're people with families and often quite understandable and sympathetic reasons to fight. The remake goes out of its way and gives you profiles on the Warren Report detailing the lives of some of these guys you kill.
• We Can Rule Together: Brantyn Morne, current regent of Valeria and Prancet's brother, making him Denam's uncle, offers Denam the chance to rule Valeria alongside him. Naturally, he refuses. If Catiua is alive, she becomes Queen. If not, Denam gains the Lord class, arguably his most powerful, and becomes ruler of Valeria.
• Wham Line: At the end of Chapter One, the trajectory of the entire story changes with one line:
  Leonar: You must... You must kill them. All of them. Spare no one.
• What If?: The World System works like this, letting you change your choices throughout the story. Coda / Postgame Chapters 3 and 4 explicitly uses this, though noncanonically. Namely what if you could have saved Lancelot Hamilton from being captured and tortured into insanity, what if you could find and save Warren on the other side of the chaos gate after his Heroic Sacrifice, and finally, what if you could have stopped Lodis from razing Denam's hometown, bonus points (and an Infinity Plus One weapon) if you win with just Denam, Kachua, and Vyce.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Happens frequently. Do you kill every enemy you encounter? Your (hidden) standing with the various factions dips with each kill. More obviously, NPCs will frequently call your actions out no matter what you do, though particularly on the Law path.
• What the Hell, Player?: If you raise an L-size beastie to a high enough level, you can auction them off in exchange for unique weapons and items. Sounds good, right? Except that when you do designate them to be up for auction, they sob.
  • And then you can buy whatever items they were butchered to make.
• White Mage: Clerics, Priests, and High Priests. Brantyn has a special class called Dark Bishop that focuses also on Divine Magic (since he is basically the head of the church) but sounds as if it would focus on dark magic like Catiua's Dark Priest class.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Lanselot Tartaros, who required an entire game to establish his tragic past. He's manipulative, ruthless (even torturing Lanselot Hamilton into catatonia), and is searching for the secrets of the royal family to help his homeland's goals of spreading further. However, The Knight of Lodis (when he was known as Alphonse) reveals he was a genuinely heroic young man who fought for what he believed in and wanted to help people. But then the girl he loved, a sweet, gentle soul who had nothing but pity for the fallen angel Shaher who was a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds as well, gave her life for Alphonse and their companions. He has never forgiven God and it's clearly left him with deep emotional scars.
• Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe: Sometimes. It stands out when it does.
• You Bastard!: All paths see Denam do morally questionable things in order to accomplish his goals, and every ally and (named) opponent who dies has last words that are designed to make the player seem awful (and reading their Warren Reports will really pound in the guilt).
• Zombie Apocalypse: Nybeth's experiments start invoking one during the Neutral route.
• Zombie Gait: Sure enough, the standing still animations for zombies suggest this.

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