Video Game / Unicorn Overlord

Liberate your Kingdom, Reclaim your Destiny

Unicorn Overlord is a tactical role-playing game developed by Vanillaware and published by Atlus.

The continent of Fevrith is thrown into turmoil when Cornia's General Valmore turns on his Queen, Ilenia, gathering most of her subjects and leading a rebellion to conquer the kingdom and reestablish the ancient Zenoiran Empire. Soon Valmore turns his attention to Fevrith's four remaining nations and conquers them with surprising ease, taking the name Galerius and installing himself as emperor.

Ten years later, Prince Alain of Cornia, who was smuggled away as a child when Valmore killed his mother, must lead a rebellion against the Empire and find out how Valmore turned so many seemingly loyal knights to his side. With the Ring of the Unicorn, a keepsake of the Cornian royal family, in hand, he will gather allies from the various former kingdoms and races to bolster the Liberation Army.

Unicorn Overlord combines a real time world map with tactical combat reminiscent of Ogre Battle with the player building squads of characters who operate automatically in combat. Adding some complexity is the player's ability to tailor how these characters behave and what abilities they use. The game touts over 60 recruitable characters. Like Fire Emblem units that fight together build increasing rapport which can unlock specific conversations and skits.

Unicorn Overlord was released on March 8, 2024 on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4 and Xbox Series X|S. A demo was made available on February 23, 2024 (a day earlier for Switch). The trailer can be seen here.

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Unicorn Overlord contains examples of:

• Action Girl: Too many to count. Virginia, Chloe, Berengaria, Miriam, Hilda, Kitra, Fran, Celeste, Eltolinde, Leah, Berenice, Amalia, Nina, Melissandre, Ochlys, Liza, Monica, Yahna, Yunifi, Rosalinde, Galadmir, Raenys, Ridiel, Dinah, Umerus… JUST to name a few warrior ladies. Even Scarlett becomes one after being rescued. Then, of course, there’s the extra female mercenaries you can hire.
• Actually Four Mooks: "Roaming" enemies on the world map only show the lead unit. When battling them, you'll see the other units in their party.
• All Just a Dream:
  • In a rapport, Lex wakes up from a nightmare of having to taste Scarlett's terrible cooking, only for her to appear behind him to ask him a favor. Lex runs away from her.
  • If Alain performs the Rite of Covenant with a romantic partner, the more romantic third-level Rapport conversations with his other Love Interests that the player haven't yet seen will be turned into this. Alain comments after them that it was "just a dream" and he won't violate the covenant.^note The girls that have this happen to their third-level rapport are Scarlett, Chloe, Yahna, Miriam, Fran, Nina, Melisandre, Leah, Berengaria, Primm, Liza, Rosalinde, Eltolinde, Ridiel, Celeste, Yunifi, and Dinah.
• All There in the Manual: It's an in-game manual at least, but the Fevrith Archive often explains plot beats more concisely than the dialogue and sometimes includes information the characters don't have access to. For instance, it explains the circumstances behind Nina washing out of her knighthood (her father refused to bribe the instructor, who used Nina's merely passable horsemanship to flunk her in retaliation) even though her recruitment leaves this point unresolved.
• All Swords Are the Same:
  • Sword types include everything from longswords to broadswords to shortswords to greatswords and everything in between. Almost every sword-wielding class can equip any of these types of swords with few restrictions and they'll fight just as effectively with any of them.
  • Two exceptions are rapiers, which are typically only equippable on Swordfighters/Swordmasters, and the Holy Unicorn Blade, which is exclusive to Alain.
• Alphabetical Theme Naming: The nations of Fevrith are Albion, Bastorias, Cornia, Drakenhold, and Elheim, while the empire you must defeat is called Zenoira.
• Always Accurate Attack: Truestrikes, attacks that will always hit the target, even Thieves and flying units who rely on their high evasion for survivability, since "always hits" takes priority over "always evades". It's the signature power of the Hunter and Swordfighter classes, though other classes can gain truestrike skills by equipping gear that bestow said skills.
• Ambidextrous Sprite: In grand Vanillaware tradition, character sprites are mirrored perfectly depending on which way they're facing. One-eyed characters even switch which eye they have whenever they face the other direction.
• Ammunition Conservation: Catapults and Ballistas have limited ammo, with only 5 and 30 shots, respectively. Catapults in particular have a long reload time, which forces the player to use careful aim and timing to achieve the biggest impact.
• Annoying Arrows: Averted, as archer units can dish out a ton of damage. In battle, they're one of the few reliable counters for flying enemies (to whom they deal extra damage by default), their "Truestrike" ability allows them to hit evasive foes like the scout classes, and they can attack the back row directly to take out squishy casters/enemy archers. Outside of battle, their Ranged Support leader skill can cripple enemy parties as soon as a battle begins against an allied unit and their Arrow Rain valor skill can do the same over an Area of Effect, weakening (if not outright killing more vulnerable units) enemy parties.
• Anti-Armor:
  • Warriors wield (massive) stone mauls, which do immense damage to armored units like Hoplites and Werebears. They often possess abilities which specifically increase their damage to armored targets on top of this.
  • Wizards and other offensive spellcasters attack with magic that ignores physical armor.
  • Witches, besides their own offensive spells, imbue allies' weapons to turn part of their physical damage into magical damage, which ignores armor.
• Anti-Frustration Features
  • You can use the World Map to not only Fast Travel to any town or fort you've liberated, but to also check the inventory of their shops and status of your deliveries, saving you from a lot of needless travel.
  • Upon retaking a fort, NPCs of the mercenary classes that can be recruited in them will be found stationed nearby, meaning you don't need to enter each fort to check out who's available.
  • The Fevrith Archive's entries have hyperlinks to other entries mentioned in them, allowing the player to seamlessly go from topic to topic.
  • There is no penalty for quitting back to the world map in the middle of a battle, so the player is free to throw themselves at a mission to see if they're ready for it.
  • Most enemy units always use default actions with default targeting priority. While this does lead to some rather suspect behavior, it also means the player can use Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors to the fullest extent without having to look at every enemy soldier individually.
  • Wandering enemies are a great source of Honors, a currency needed for recruiting mercenaries, expanding the size of your squads, and promoting units to their Prestige Class, provided you can manage to wipe a wanderer in a single bout of combat. They're all instantly defeated upon liberated a town, fort, or city in the general area and any Honors you didn't get from defeating them directly is credited to you as if you'd done so.
  • Characters that are taken away from the player for story reasons can still be accessed in the menu. It means that So Long, and Thanks for All the Gear is not a major concern, as Berengaria, who joins in a main quest after entering Drakenhold for the first time, is taken away from you after completing "Another Prince" until you clear the final battle for the capital, but can still be selected in the menu so you can take out any good equipment out of her for the meanwhile.
  • Alain and Scarlett automatically unlock their first rapport level after rescuing her to compensate for the fact that she has been unavailable for the majority of the Cornian quests.
  • Upon completing the main story, the player can restart the final two missions to play them again. Also the player can return to the altar of the unicorn to pick a different person to give the ring of the maiden to and thus end the game again, allowing one to see the different epilogues without having to replay the entire game. You can also choose to replay the final mission from the point you can already enter Gran Corrine, making it considerably shorter.
  • The achievement/trophy Compiler of Classes doesn't actually require you to complete all of the classes, just encountering all of the characters that can be reasonably obtained in normal gameplay. This is because the one class that cannot be completed in normal gameplay, High Priestess, requires completing the game without clearing the "The Priestess, Abducted" main quest, which is itself a challenge on its own.
  • Resource nodes continue to produce their contents well past the three item default (after the first time you harvest them) if you don't have a guard posted in the area to do the harvesting, so there's no rush to hire mercenaries to cover the cities and towns you don't have enough bespoke characters to guard. If and when the time comes to do a resource trip for settlements you haven't developed or for Honors grinding, you'll pick up half a dozen or more at each node if you've been away from the region doing other things for a while.
  • If you run out of time during the mining mini-game while actively digging up an item, you'll be allowed to finish, so you won't miss out on the best items (which are typically buried much deeper than the local basic minerals) if you find them while low on time.
• Anti-Grinding:
  • Once characters have more than three levels than the enemy they're fighting, they gain so little experience that it might as well be nothing^note for instance, Josef starting on Level 20 gets a handful of experience at best when defeating a unit during the start of the game when a level up for him requires multiple thousands. This gets indicated with said character's level number turning red. The game does at least offer various means of leveling up characters as long as they don't hit that experience threshold.
  • Phantom battles also allow money and honors to be grinded for easily (and, indirectly, delivery items via stationed guards). But given everything you can buy with these currencies is strictly limited, this feels more like letting you correct purchasing mistakes than giving access to an exceptional amount of resources.
  • "Dew" items increase an character's stats, and there are ways to farm them from fairly early in the game. To limit this, any given stat can only be increased this way five times per character.
  • "Reinforcement" units that show up at enemy bases during battles pay out only about half the experience and gold as other enemy units, so there's not much gained by waiting for them to arrive to get a few extra kills in.
• Anti-Magic: Radiant Knights have a passive skill that blocks all incoming magic damage on an ally or themselves. It does not work against debuffs, however.
• Antiquated Linguistics: The game (and characters' speech) uses the antiquated spelling of Physickal rather than Physical for all stats. To contrast with Magick which also has a superfluous K.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: The player has a limit on how many squads in total and how many combatants in each squad they have, starting at only three and two, respectively. One can raise each of them at a fort by spending Honors, but the size of the later is capped by the Renown rank of your army. This caps out at 10 squads of 5 members each. Which is well below the number of recruitable characters the game has, even without counting generic soldiers.
• Arc Villain: Each country has at least one antagonist in a larger narrative role, as well as some notable missions.
  • Cornia has Renault, who abducts Scarlet and mustering the forces to defeat him is required before one can enter other countries.
  • Drakenhold has Berengaria leading the forces occupying Castle Soldraga after Baltro abducts her midway through. The desert also has Magellan and Gloucester (representing the people struggling under Zenoira), and “Blooming Rose on Bare Rock” features the first of the traitors from the prologue, Giethe.
  • Elheim has Alcina (first seen possessing Eltolinde, later the Climax Boss of the region), with Lord Gailey supporting her before breaking off at the arc’s midway point.
  • Bastorias has Reimann, the traitorous nobleman from the prologue who seeks the Bastorias Blue to subjugate the Bestrals. He is aided by Elgor, who betrays and kills him for his own goals, becoming the Climax Boss.
  • Albion has Sanatio, who is aiding Zenoira for their own reasons and holds the capital for them, but is an Anti-Villain in the end; the final two traitors from the prologue, Bradley and Hodel, also have a mission featuring each of them as the main threat.
• Area of Effect: A number of Valor Skills, usable outside of battle by spending valor points earned via defeating enemies and capturing outposts, affect an area either damaging/debuffing enemies or healing/buffing allies within. Arrow Rain, Hastened Call, Merciful Rain, etc. are all examples. Some classes, such as the Rogue, gain an AoE ability upon promoting. (The Thief's single-target Plunder becoming the AoE Plunder II at the same valor cost).
• Armor-Piercing Attack:
  • Warriors can No-Sell the defense advantage armored units like Hoplites and Werebears have.
  • A variation of this trope is present with the spear-wielding Soldier class, who instead of only being able to hit an enemy in the front row like most melee classes, can attack enemies in the backrow if they are aligned in the same column.
• Artificial Stupidity:
  • It is possible to use the tactics menu to set target preferences for units to, for example, tell Archers to favor high evasion units and spellcasters rather than waste their time shooting at the frontline tank in armor. The AI never uses this, with all their units having default target priority which means they favor whoever is most directly in front of them. This means that while your archers can snipe mages in the back row, enemy archers will never do the same to you and instead waste their time shooting at whatever tank is covering these mages. The game occasionally uses this to its advantage. The first appearance of Glaerius at the end of the first arc has some extremely suspect attack setup, tuned to make the fight feel like an appropriately tough and almost multi-phase boss while only being a single unit on the map.
  • Your own units can also have this issue, as they may decide to use certain skills first despite logic suggesting otherwise. For instance, Josef may use his healing ability multiple times in battle when nobody really needs the healing because of how his tactics are setup, when attacking would be more helpful at the moment. This happens because his default healing tactic triggers as soon as someone is missing any hp and has higher priority than his attack. This can be resolved by changing the triggering condition of his heal from "< 100% HP" to "< 50% HP" so Josef won't bother to heal unless someone has a big chunk of hp missing.^note The tutorial for setting up skill conditions kind of admits Josef was set up this way on purpose to incentivize players to actually learn unit matchups while they were still simple and/or reward them for figuring this stuff out early for themselves.
  • Clerics have a similar issue. Their tactics only tell them they should heal when someone is below 100% HP, but the tactic has no target priority. Meaning they are equally likely to heal the person with 1 hp missing as they are to heal the one with 1 hp left. It's recommended to add "Lowest % HP" as the tactic's second condition to avoid this.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • The Onyx Pendant, the reward for beating the second run in the Coliseum that opens up after recruiting Amalia. It bestows 2 Active Points and 2 Passive Points to its wielder, but it also brings down all of his stats by -15, making use of it very tricky if not downright not worth it, as even classes like Shamans or Gilbert's unique Prince class that don't usually use their other stats benefit from high Initiative.
  • Many of the multi-AP, multi-turn "charging" abilities are not worth using when that same unit can easily dish out more damage with multiple single-AP attacks for the same cost. Some can be devastating, like the Millennium Scepter's Trinity Rain Herd-Hitting Attack, but require such specific set-ups that you essentially need a guide.
• The Bad Guy Wins: In one of the possible endings, if you opt to Speedrun the campaign and directly attack Galerius while ignoring the majority of the main quests, if you somehow manage to prevail, Galerius' spirit will simply possess Alain's body since he's done none of the tasks needed for him to resist it. This results in Galerius establishing a permanent Zenoiran Empire to last for all eternity.
• Bag of Sharing: All of your deployed units can access the inventory, no matter the distance.
• Bandit Mook: Enemy Thief-led squads will use Plunder to steal your money and then try to run away. You can recover it if you destroy their squad.
• Battle Amongst the Flames:
  • The side quest "Ervélda, Guardian of the Fae" involves Gailey setting the Forest of the Fae on fire in order to destroy the divine tree Ervélda and disrupt Elheim's protection. The Liberation Army must put down the flames, using either the effigy that summons rain or the Elven Archer's valor skill, and cut down Gailey's troops, who are ordered to continue setting fire to the trees until their outposts are captured, then take him out to save the forest and Ervélda.
  • The final main quest has a part of Gran Corrine and the field surrounding it on fire, as part of the culling within the city to make it ready for the rite of channeling that would restore the Zenoiran Empire of yore. Like the side quest, there are several effigies that summon rain to put down the fire, which gives your units a shortcut to move through the battlefield easier.
• Battle in the Rain:
  • The prologue takes place in a dark and stormy night, where Valmore and his followers surround Gran Corrine and Queen Ilenia makes her last stand while Alain and Josef escapes the castle.
  • The final main quest in Albion, "The Holy March", has the battlefield dowsed in rain as the Liberation Army and Nigel lead a siege against Bisfaine Basilica, garrisoned under Sanatio's command. This is a climactic battle, as not only will the Liberation Army wrest control of Albion away from Zenoira if they are victorious, but also, (usually) free all of the nations of Fevrith from the Empire's rule, with Cornia remaining to be liberated at the Final Battle.
  • Using the divine effigy that summons rain or the Elven Archer's valor skill Merciful Rain, then entering battle within their radius invokes this trope.
• Beast Man: The Bestrals of Bastorias, a country that stretches out in the frozen north of Fevrith. They look like anthropomorphic animals, and include the classic werewolves as well as bears, lions, foxes, and even owls.
• Beef Gate:
  • The main thing limiting the player's exploration of Fevrith are high-level enemy encounters. If found trying to venture into such areas, Josef will explicitly warn Alain from going further. The first area for example pushes the player to explore the areas around higher level zones to avoid this.
  • It's possible to gain access to Valmore's stronghold, the capitol of Cornia, within the first few hours of the game. However, the enemy level there is 40, while at this point, the average level of a Liberation Army member (sans Josef) is less than 5.
  • Mordon acts as one. The city he occupies (which is a plot relevant mission) basically blocks the path to further progress (unless you go face the aforementioned even tougher Beef Gates). His map is small but has a very small time limit and features hoplites in barricades defending each entrance, meaning for the player to proceed they basically need to have found and recruited some units to deal with heavy armor like Auch.
  • In theory, the player can go to Bastorias (the region intended to be visited fourth) as soon as they reach the northern part of Cornia. However, the entrance is guarded by a level 25 liberation mission, when the encounters surrounding it on the way in are level 13 at worst; most players won't reach that level until they've completed Drakenhold and Elheim. A liberation mission with a similar but less steep leap in levels guards a harbor from with you can sail from Drakenhold to Bastorias.
  • Similarly to the above, the player can sail from an harbor on Elheim's western coast to Albion (which is normally intended to be done last), if they can complete a liberation mission with a much higher level requirement than anything Elheim threw at them at this point.
• Black Market: A shady merchant will sell some of the best gear and items in the game during nighttime in remote locations in each country.
• Blue Is Heroic: Alain and his mother have blue hair, and dress in blue, the colors of Cornia. Several members of the Liberation army also wear blue, like Clive and Adel's Azure Knights.
• Bookends: The final mission takes place on the same map as the prologue, with the Liberation army starting where Valmore was, moving towards the Palace, in a reverse of the course Ilenia followed.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • The humble Soldier (and their promoted Sergeant class) is far from flashy, but tends to be a mainstay in most parties throughout the game thanks to being something of a Jack of All Stats who can counter multiple threats. They deal extra damage to cavalry, can attack columns of enemies to deal with the squishier casters/archers that typically hide out in the back row, learn the Javelin skill at level 10 which deals extra damage to flying units, and have a role as a secondary healer with the First Aid passive skill at the end of battles to keep your party's health up.
  • The Carnelian and Lapis Pendants are accessories that add +1 AP and +1 PP, respectively. Compared to the many flashier accessories that add extra abilities or stat boosts, they seem pretty "boring", but you'll likely hoard every single one you come across in the first half or so of the game. Getting to use your abilities twice in a single battle (or unlocking 2 AP/PP abilities early) is a tremenous early game advantage. They start to get outclassed in the second half of the game once you start to promote your units (giving them a natural +1 increase to both AP and PP), weapons and shields become available that add AP and PP freeing up accessory slots, and you start to get Ruby/Sapphire/Amethst Pendants that give larger increases, but they will still likely be in use by your secondary units.
• Boss Remix: Every nation's final story mission (except Cornia's, though "the Priestess Abducted', the final mission for your first proper run through Cornia, provides an example instead) uses a remix of the battle stage theme for that nation that persists in and out of battle, only stopping when you face that mission's boss, you complete it, or you fail. The game's final mission instead features a Reprise Medley of all 5 nations' stage themes, and a unique battle variant when entering standard fights within it.
• Boss Rush: The post-game side quest "Dying Breath of an Empire Fallen" is essentially one giant boss rush against nearly every single unique combatant in the game, heroic or otherwise. This includes Alain and his closest companions as the final challenge, despite what the game claims otherwise.
• Bragging Rights Reward: The post-game mission rewards you with Queen Ilenia, Millé, Beaumont, Gailey, Alcina, and Elgor. However, since it's the only post-game mission there's nothing else to use them for other than just replaying the final and post-game missions again or tackling the second run of the Coliseum and the Superbosses.
• Broken Bridge: Both a literal one and a Beef Gate prevents the player from marching to the Cornian capital. The only way to repair the bridge is to recruit Mordon or Kitra and gather the necessary materials to repair it.
• But Not Too Gay: Alain can give the Ring of the Maiden to male characters, but the romance with them (where it exists at all) is muted in comparison to the more explicit female cutscenes and dialogue, and he doesn't actually marry any of them, despite the fact that they are his "partner." Travis, however, is the exception, as he openly is romantic with Alain in the final portion of the game if he is chosen.
• But Thou Must!: Although there are considerable Sequence Breaking options, there are notable exceptions:
  • You can’t enter the other nations’ borders (save Palevia which is part of Albion) until you have completed “The Priestess, Abducted”; if you try to leave, Alain will note that Scarlett still needs rescuing and turn back. This is also justified for plot-based reasons, as Scarlet features in key story scenes in the other nations (especially Albion) and would require adjustments to make work; you can also do literally all of Cornia before rescuing her.
  • The upper half of Drakenhold will be blocked from you by Gilbert's forces, since he needs to discuss with Alain how to topple the enemy forces amassing just beyond Baumratte's gates.
  • Drakenhold and Elheim must be entered from Cornia, as the areas they have with ships for (respectively) Bastorias and Albion cannot be reached from said country until they’re liberated first; in Elheim’s case, this also requires finishing Yahna’s recruitment mission as, besides the eastern quarter of the country where Ridiel is, you need Yahna to pass through the Winding Wood… In addition, Albion is the only country that cannot be properly entered via Cornia; you must clear either Elheim or Bastorias first, and the latter is required for the north-eastern third to be reached (after doing its Liberation missions, you can freely move within the country as you please).
  • You can't go deeper into Elheim until you save Eltolinde. As with Scarlett, it’s justified for plot reasons, as she's a major player in this arc.
  • The player's progress in Bastorias will take them from east to west, where further progress and exploration will be stemmed by missions that center around the Bastorias Blue.
• Can't Drop the Hero: Averted. Generally, Alain never needs to be captain of his unit, or even assigned to one at all. Defeating Baltro at the very end of the game is impossible without him, however, so unless you've got a killer squad to support him hopefully you didn't leave him in the dust for most of your playthrough.
• Central Theme: Forgiveness and second chances. Several optional party members Alain can recruit over the course of the game are criminals or were controlled by Galerius' dark magic (and understandably horrified when the magic is undone and they learn everything they did while under the spell's effects). They join the Liberation army to either make amends or out of gratitude for Alain's kindness. Time and again you're given the option to punish or flat out execute criminals or vanquished commanders of the Zenoiran Empire. Opting for harsh treatment is always the lesser of the two options, usually with some useful short term reward like money or items in exchange for recruiting a potentially perpetually useful new party member. This partially extends to the Secret Characters unlocked in the post-game, albeit to varying degrees. This becomes most obvious when defeating Galerius. Executing him can lead to a Non-Standard Game Over, trying to appease his soul unlocks the good ending.
• Character Level: In typical RPG fashion, units level up via gaining Experience Points earned through defeating enemies. With each level up, their stats increase, and at certain milestone levels, they can learn new abilities.
• Charged Attack: Some skills, like Dragoon Dive and Arrow Rain, requires the unit to charge their attack until their next turn. While charging, they cannot evade attacks or use their passive skills, and stunning or freezing them will cancel their charge. Once the charge is complete, they deal a devastating attack that usually hits the entire enemy unit. Many are Awesome, but Impractical for this reason, though there are some ways to skip charging to devastating effect.
• Childhood Friends: Lex is Alain's. He's the son of a fisherman who trained with Alain under Josef. Scarlett also has grown up with Alain and Lex.
• Character Class System: Each unit is assigned a class that dictates their abilities, both passive and active. See the relevant subpage for a list of all the classes and their role.
• Character Customization: When hiring a Mercenary unit, or by using an Idealist's Handmirror item on any pre-existing unit including main characters, the player can alter both their stat growth by choosing different archetypes and their base, hair, and accent coloration. New mercenaries can also have their name chosen from a list, as well as their voice type.
• Color-Coded Armies: Player units are blue, allied units are green, hostile units are red, and neutral and non-combatant units are grey.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Baltro, as the True Final Boss, and possessed Amalia, in the postgame as a Superboss, will have a six person unit, more than the maximum of five the player is restricted to. Baltro is also impossible to defeat without Alain in your party.
• Combination Attack: There are several attacks which increase in damage or trigger additional effects if used on an enemy that is Afflicted or Debuffed. For example, the Dark Marquess' Sanguine Pursuit grants +1 PP if used on an Afflicted target. Burn is stackable, so if you use an ability that inflicts a burn on an already burned foe, they'll take even more damage from the burn.
• Covers Always Lie: Berengaria and Nigel are part of the Evil Overlookers, even though they directly oppose the Zenoirans, instead of being aligned with them. At the start of the Drakenhold storyline, Berengaria joins the Liberation Army after escaping imprisonment by the Zenoirans and only becomes the storyline's Arc Villain after Baltro abducted and brainwashed her into serving Zenoira again, which only occured because she saved her brother from his attack. As for Nigel, he is loyal to the pontifex and rejects Zenoira's meddling with Albion's affairs, only opposing the Liberation Army because he was ordered to fight them, believing them as enemies of the Orthodoxy. However, when he discovers that the Pontifex's daughter, Scarlett, is among the Liberation and Alain tells him that the Pontifex is already dead, he decides to seek the truth himself. Upon discovering that Sanatio conspired with Baltro to keep his death a secret and being branded a heretic for learning the truth, he comes to the Liberation Army's aid to help them liberate Albion.
• Critical Hit: Possible to pull off, with each unit having a "Critical Hit %" as a stat that determines how likely it is. It deals more damage than a standard hit when it triggers.
• Critical Hit Class: The Swordsman/Swordsmaster is a prime example, coming with a naturally high critical hit rate, ablities that make it even more likely to happen, and multi-hit attacks that can cause it to trigger each hit. With the right equipment, many other classes can have their critical hit rate increased to the point where they have a better than 50% chance of causing one with each attack.
• Crutch Character: Josef is one of the first available characters, joins at level 20 while the others available early join in the low single digits, and is in an advanced class (Paladin) meaning he'll have 2 AP and PP right away. In line with other classic examples of the trope, he serves as a guardian/mentor to Alain, is one of the oldest characters you can recruit, and comes with some healing and support abilities. He will steamroll all but the most unfavorable matchups for the first third or so of the game, however, he levels up very slowly due to his high level, meaning that if you lean on him too much, other characters will miss out on that experience due to the limited party sizes. As other characters catch up, Josef's lack of offensive output will cause him to fall behind while other, more dedicated healers and supporters will surpass him in those areas as well, leaving him as a Master of None late in the game. But even with all of that said, the fact that characters are only one part of a unit for the vast majority of the game does mean that Josef's ability to "steal" XP is limited and his ability to "babysit" underleveled characters, funneling experience to them by helping them win fights they shouldn't, is boosted compared to, say, a Jagen archetype from Fire Emblem.
• Cutscene Incompetence: The number of enemies throughout the game that escape during cutscenes after being defeated in battles can't even be counted on your fingers. It's a good bet that, if the game shifts to a cutscence after a battle, the bad guy is going to get away.
• Cutscene Power to the Max: During the mission "A Half-Elf's Resolve", Zenoiran forces take a group of Clerics hostage. Even if you defeat them with your Liberation forces, multiple groups of reinforcements will spawn who can only be defeated when Ridiel steps in. Despite being a lone Elven Archer unit, she'll use an Arrow Rain-style attack (an ability she doesn't even have) to drop up to four of the reinforcement groups in one strike, something she cannot even come close to accomplishing in normal gameplay.
• Damage-Increasing Debuff: The Shaman's Defense Curse lowers the defenses of an entire row of enemies, causing them to take more damage from the Shaman's allies.
• Damage Over Time:
  • In battle, Poison and Burn are afflictions that deal damage each time the afflicted unit acts. Poison deals damage based off a percentage of the unit's max HP while Burn deal a flat amount of damage that can be stacked.
  • Out of battle, some Valor Skills deal damage to units in their Area of Effect over time. The Wizard's "Blaze" skill is one such example.
• Damsel in Distress:
  • The first act involves Scarlett being kidnapped by The Empire and Alain's efforts to rescue her.
  • The early stages of the Elheim arc see the elven leader, Eltolinde, possessed by Zenoira's dark magic. The Liberation must rescue her and free her mind to progress.
• Defeat Equals Friendship: Many of the enemies Alain fights can be forgiven and recruited if the player wants to. Reasons vary from being mind controlled against their will and joining after being freed, to wanting to make amends for their past actions, to being a Punch-Clock Villain who is willing to defect.
• Defend Command:
  • Every unit is capable of guarding against physickal attacks to reduce damage received, but units that are equipped with shields and greatshields are more efficient at guarding attacks than those that do not. However, units inflicted with Guard Seal cannot guard at all and will receive a full amount of damage.
  • There are two stats involving guarding: Guard Rate and Guard Efficiency. Guard Rate is the actual stat that determines whether the unit will guard the attack or not and is increased when equipped with shields, greatshields, or certain accessories, like gauntlets. Guard Efficiency is the percentage that the damage is reduced. By default, guarding reduces physickal damage received by 25%, but shields increases it up to 50%, while greatshields increases it up to 75%.
  • Some classes, like Fighters and Knights, have guard skills that allows them to guard an attack automatically without the need of their guard rate at a cost of a passive point. It practically serves as a crutch for holding the frontline in the early game until their guard rate is high enough to reliably guard attacks.
  • Cover skills, like Hoplite's Heavy Cover, are a type of passive skills that allow the unit to guard the attack for their ally. While units with cover skill will still cover their ally even when afflicted with Guard Seal, they will instead take the full damage.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • Depending on who've you recruited, certain dialogue and even some cutscenes will change. For example, in Drakenhold, the player can traverse the desert if they so choose. There, the player can encounter Liza and potentially recruit her. When reaching Baumratte, a cutscene plays in which Scarlett goes to the market and encounters Liza in disguise. If you already recruited her, the two will talk, already being familiar with each other. If not, they'll act as strangers. Similarly, if you recruit Berenice before you do the Elheim arc, she will be present for Gailey's death and demand to know what could have changed him into such a callous man.
  • Upon receiving the Ring of the Maiden, you are given the main quest "Unicorn and Maiden" that allows you to choose Alain's significant other. In a cutscene, Rosalinde exposits how the rite works and warns Alain to think carefully about his choice. However, if Alain's rapport with Rosalinde is maxed out before seeing the cutscene, she seductively approaches Alain as she finishes explaining the rite, as if nudging him (and the player) to choose her since you already have the prerequisite to complete the main quest.
  • After giving the Ring of the Maiden to his chosen partner, any third-level rapport that ends romantically will be dismissed by Alain as a dream upon returning to the world map, to avoid an awkward situation of a girl expressing romantic interest to a guy who is practically betrothed.
  • You can actually go straight after the Final Boss once you repair either the NW or SW bridge leading to the castle, which unlocks the final story mission. If you attempt this without doing any of other major story objectives, such as rescuing Scarlett, freeing the neighboring countries, and unlocking the full power of the Ring of the Unicorn, you will not only be faced with a monstrously brutal and difficult challenge, but are also guaranteed to get the worst ending. If you do this before you rescue Scarlett, she will also appear as a possessed enemy unit.
• Discard and Draw: Dragonbone, Thorn, Icefall, and Wingcrest equipments grant the character one extra PP at a cost of a stat specific to the equipment. Dragonbone equipments reduce the character's initiative, Thorn equipments reduce the character's HP, Icefall equipments reduce the character's guard rate, and Wingcrest equipment reduce the character's critical rate. Each of these equipments are sold in shops in Drakenhold, Elheim, Bastorias, and Albion, respectively.
• Disc-One Final Boss: At the climax of the first arc, Alain and company chase down Galerius and even manage to kill him, but too late to stop Baltro breaking the final seal and reviving Galerius with greater power still.
• Disc-One Final Dungeon: The main story quest "Princess, Abducted" takes place around Euicuit City and involves defeating Renault while rescuing Scarlett at the end of the game's first story arc. If following the game's encouraged order of events, it's the toughest map to that point in the game, features a relatively large area including a village and the city itself, and is the first map to strongly encourage the use of unit setups and tactics (including the tutorial on those just before it). After, the story takes a much darker turn as well.
• Disc-One Nuke:
  • Once you've repaired Ouvrir Harbor, you can take a ship back to Palevia where you can purchace the Sanguine Blade, a 16 Physical Attack sword with a Life Drain ability. A sword-user can easily nuke their way through the early Cornia chapters while it remains useful, if no longer nuke-like, for a while after.
  • Kingsblade Cornix, the reward for the "Carved of Cornia Stone" sidequest where you have to find stoned carvings scattered across Cornia, is a 15 Physical Attack (originally 25 before a Nerf patch, but still more than enough to qualify) sword and raises all your stats by 5. It's unlikely that you'll have anything better until at least past the halfway point of the game, and even then, the stat bonuses make it a worthwhile Stat Stick on a sword-wielding character not focused on pure damage output (like a Radiant Knight) or whose damage is determined by another factor (such as making it the second sword of a Swordmaster) deeper into the game.
  • Giving Travis the first Lapis Pendant you come across allows him to use his Evade passive skill twice each battle (and possible more if he is successful using Passive Steal). Early on, with him in the front row and enemy parties limited to 2-3 basic class units, he can effectively serve as a "dodge tank" who evades all of their attacks while you put squishier Glass Cannons safely in the back row to dish out damage. It eventually tails off as other units level up and other strategies become available, but remains viable against the right enemy party makeups.
  • You can recruit Ochlys after completing "The Winged Knight" sidequest and presenting her with 30 Divine Shards, and she can basically be recruited for free if you choose to have Mandril executed. If you're good at defeating/evading higher-level enemy units in enemy controlled areas, you can easily find the 30 required much earlier than otherwise intended. As Ochlys is an advanced class (meaning she starts with 2 AP and PP) and good evasion (further boosted by her default equipment), she can easily nuke her way through the early Cornia stages. Additionally, as a Flyer, few early game enemies possess counters to her and most early maps don't take into account flying unit leaders in their design as you're not expected to have them yet. She'll remain a mainstay in your parties for quite a while after, though as you promote other characters to advanced classes, she'll no longer be as much of a "nuke" while anti-flying enemies become more prevelant to counter her.
  • Even accounting for the stretch of Drakenhold where she's unavailable, Berengaria is a terror, and shows why almost all the other Dark Marquesses are post-game content. A prepromote with sky-high stats and a do-anything skillset that synergizes with basically any party, Berengaria can make short work of virtually any enemy that isn't flying or armored, and honestly between her high native accuracy and attack can generally tear through them too with enough effort. She's recruited partway through the very first mission in Drakenhold, which the player is nudged towards after completing Cornia.
  • The Colosseum in Drakenhold is accessible about a third of the way into the game (as long as you head to Drakenhold before Elhiem as the game recommends) and provides tons of great rewards for fighting your way through, as well as Colosseum Coins you can use to purchase others. The opposing teams you face increase in level as you go, all the way up to champion Amalia at 40, but it's extremely easy to use exploits and "cheese" your way to victory against much higher leveled teams. For example, most teams are poorly equipped to deal with evasive opponents, while few have resistances to Afflictions and Debuffs. A team consisting of, for example, Travis and Melisandre in the front row to dodge (either with their naturally high Evasion or skills like Evade/Parry) with some mages/witches/archers in the back to dole out damage and Afflictions will allow you to defeat teams many levels above your own. Blindness is a particularly crippling effect there and even works on possessed Amalia in the final Colosseum battle, making her devastating multi-hit ultimate attack (Heavens Asunder) miss. If you manage to defeat her, Amalia joins the Liberation at level 40 with a kit of end-game quality equipment, making her a nuke as well.
  • If you previously showed mercy to Gammel and Mandrin, you can recruit them and Celeste immediately after opening up access to Elheim. This requires the player to reach their mission marker by avoiding higher-leveled enemy units and other missions on the overworld. Once done, the trio are capable of flying over to and defeating the boss of their recruitment map without much trouble, rewarding the player with a trio of level 17, promoted units armed with exclusive gear.
• Discount Card: The player can find coupons as rewards for quests. These will allow them a one-time free use of taverns or mines.
• Downer Beginning: The prologue starts with Zenoira defeating Cornia and subsequently conquering the other nations in the decade that follows. It's up to Alain, Josef, and a few of Alain's childhood friends to build an army strong enough to retake Cornia and liberate the other nations from the Empire's iron-fisted rule.
• Dual Wield: Swordmasters, the improved Swordfighter class, are seen using, and can be equipped, with two swords. They use the strongest attack value of the two swords, but benefit from the other passive bonuses and abilities granted by both weapons, and (after a patch) add half of the attack value of the weaker weapon
• Early-Bird Cameo: In the prologue, both Ilenia's party and the named enemies on the map are full of named characters you'll meet much later in the game.
• Earn Your Bad Ending: Achieving the absolute worst ending is a monumental accomplishment, much more difficult then getting the best ending. The player needs to complete the level 40 "Unicorn Overlord" quest before they've fully unlocked the Ring of the Unicorn's power, and the worst variant of that ending requires doing so before saving Scarlett. This not only means that the player's level is going to plateau around 14, but that they'll have to somehow overcome the most difficult version of that quest, which increases in difficulty for each region not yet liberated before the final battle.
• Easing into the Adventure: The first battles in Palevia followed by the first couple of missions in Cornia require effort to actually lose. Your party members will recommend exactly the course of action you need to take to win and, if you follow it, you'll win with ease. Once you reach "The Priestess, Abducted" and get the tactics tutorial, this will fade off and you'll need to be more careful with your matchups and setups to succeed. New enemy unit types will typically still be called out, along with what units are effective against them, but there is still a significant jump in challenge after.
• Easy Amnesia: Anyone that has Galerius's Mind Control dispelled from them forget anything they did while under its thrall. This turns out is because Galerius' spell replaces the soul in their body.
• Easily Forgiven: Alain can choose to forgive several enemies he encounters, even recruiting them if the player wishes. For specific examples:
  • Despite leading them into an ambush and delaying the heroes from rescuing Scarlett, Alain choses to forgive Aubin and even recruit him to the cause after realizing he's just a hired mercenary.
  • Alain has the option to forgive Gammel and Mandrin, allowing both Black Talon leaders to go free, despite being murderous thieves, one of whom took a church hostage to plunder it, because of a sob story they give about Gammel's sister being sick and the only doctor charging a lifetime's worth of money to save her. Several characters, including Rolf, Clive, and Ochlys all argue the bandits shouldn't be let loose. However, Gammel swears never to forget what Alain has done for him if Alain lets him go, implying something will happen later in the game for doing so. The Liberation Army can end up crossing paths with both criminals again in Elheim, and if mercy was shown to them earlier, they'll join Alain there.
  • By the time Tatiana is given the offer to join the Liberation despite working under a Mad Scientist trying to cure a local plague, his close allies Lex and Josef are lampshading it.
• Easy Level Trick:
  • Mordon is usually a pretty steep Beef Gate, what with being the boss of a cramped city battle with no room to maneuver, the gates heavily fortified so you have to figure out how to have magic-users deal damage without getting killed in return, and a brutal 45-second time limit that gives little room to think. That said, his own squad isn't that tough and Gryphon Knights are unlocked the same time as one of your magic options (and the flying Ochlys around that same time as well, if not even sooner), so it's surprisingly easy to simply fly around the walls and take out his party before his guards can react.
  • The fight against Baltro in Elheim can be won by just sending a flying unit with anti-armor specialists over the field of thorns from your HQ to Baltro's. Bypassing all the enemy bases and squads. He lacks any flying units of his own to intercept yours, and his own units won't run into the thorns to block you. As completion speed yields more bonuses than freeing all bases or destroying all enemies does, it'll not only finish the level faster and more easily, but yield a better score, thus more Gold and Honors than doing it the long way around.
  • Amalia's second phase has her fighting alone. Bring a Shaman and a class who can remove positive buffs on enemies (like Priestess). Because they don't have to spread these between enemies and can just focus on debuffing her and removing her buffs, Amalia becomes very easy to defeat.
  • Several of the optional liberation maps are small maps where you start a stone's throw away from the enemy command center. A Werefox can immediately use Jump II to jump her squad to the enemy commander. Usually you'll face assist attacks for not clearing the surrounding troops but this can be negated by having a leader with resist ranged assist / resist magickal assist, or using an item to make yourself immune to assists. This lets you beat several maps with a completion time of 0 seconds and earn the requisite bonuses to boot.
• 11th-Hour Superpower: Upon visiting all of the Sanctuaries, the true power of the Ring of the Unicorn and Maiden is unleashed, granting Alain and his Maiden the skills Astral Blade and Celestial Light, respectively. They don't do anything at all, until you reached the True Final Boss. Celestial Light completely No Sells Baltro's Unicorn's Wrath skill, which practically kills your entire unit in one hit, while Astral Blade is a powerful row-hitting attack that can make quick work of Baltro's goons. Astral Blade is required to kill Baltro, who will survive any other attacks.
• The Empire: The Zenoiran Empire, led by Galerius, is a revival of an ancient, technologically and magically advanced Precursor empire that mysteriously vanished in the continent's past.
• Enemy Mine: The battle against Magellan also pits the Liberation Army against three distinct bandit factions, all of which join your side to help fight Magellan.
• Equipment Spoiler: The first couple of towns liberated sell "Recruit" equipment of each weapon type, even if you haven't yet recruited characters who can use them.
• Experience Booster:
  • Chloe's Charm, which Chloe comes with equipped by default, is an accessory that increases the experience gained by whoever has it equipped. As do Rookie Egg and Silver Goblets.
  • The "Recruits's" equipment is a set of weapons and shields worse than everything but the default "Bronze" Starting Equipment, but increases experience gained by its wielder.
  • Alain's "Royal Order" valor skill doubles the experience gained by the target unit for one battle. The "Liquid Fortune" consumable item doubles it (as well as money gained) for 20 seconds.
• Experience Penalty: If a unit is more than three levels above the enemy units they've defeated, they'll get significantly fewer experice points as a form of Anti-Grinding.
• Experience Points: In standard RPG fashion, winning battles rewards the units involved with experience points. Gain enough and those units will increase a Character Level.
• Exponential Potential: Units each learn at least 2-3 "Active" abilities and 2-3 "Passive" abilities from their class simply by leveling up. Add in additional abilities of both types potentially added by weapons, shields, and accessories, and you can easily have a unit with more abilities than you have tactic slots for. These also allow for exponential combinations.
• Exposed to the Elements: Played straight as you enter Bastorias, a snow-covered region in northern Fevrith. Most of your units don't adjust for the arctic north, especially the more Stripperific classes, like Witches and female Elven Fencers, while the native Bastorian civilians have appropriate clothing for the cold. The Bestral classes, like Werewolves and Werefoxes, don't wear much either but are likely tolerant of the cold due to their layers of fur. Humorously, Deborah, the boss of the main quest "Legacy of the Lion Kings" and a Sorceress, complains about the tundra cold.
• Fantastic Racism: None of the four major races get along. Even being heavily integrated into the same religious order doesn't stop many Winged taking a dim view of humans, and the other Bestral bloodlines are noted to look down on and mistreat the rats. In a nice break from troping tradition, though, some of the best racial relations are between the Light and Dark Elves. The story occasionally notes that Galerius' rapid conquest was almost certainly aided by his enemies coming pre-divided.
• Fetch Quest: What deliveries for liberated settlements basically amount to. You have to travel the map, find items, and turn them in to get rewards and upgrade the town to access additional features.
• Flunky Boss: All the bosses stationed in garrisons are this, as they will send out reinforcement after reinforcement to impede on your progress towards them.
• Food Porn: A long-running Vanillaware trademark, cuisine in taverns is exquisitely designed and look delicious.
• Gameplay Automation: The battles between units themselves are automated and are wholly dependent on the formations, stats, skills, and conditions applied, which you can set before battle.
• Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • The Ring of the Unicorn starts of as a neat, but not exceptional piece of equipment. Its partner signet, the Ring of Maiden, does nothing but take up an equipment slot. The main goal of the Elheim arc is to figure out how to unlock the hidden power that lies within them. Once done via the Rite of Covenant, they both become some of the best gear in the game.^note Ring of the Unicorn: +1 Active Point and +5 to all stats; Ring of the Maiden: +1 Passive Point and +5 to all stats
  • The size and variety of a given shop's stock is directly proportional to the size of the settlement it's found in. A tiny hovel in the middle of nowhere will have a handful of weapons and sundries, while the sprawling city central to commerce in the region will have a wide array of items, a tavern, and a fort all in one convenient place.
  • When recruiting mercenaries in forts, you can choose their names only from a predetermined list. However, that list will change depending in which country the player is doing the recruiting. For example, mercs in Cornia will have French names while those same classes available in Drakenhold will sound more German.
  • Some areas have mercenaries with minor cosmetic changes relevant to where you recruited them. Some of Elheim's forts hire out dark elves while others their lighter counterparts, and one fort near a town where a plague epidemic is occurring offers Clerics with plague doctor masks like those fought in the quest to liberate the area.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Warriors and Werebears use giant hammers. This is on their model, and comes up in rapport conversations for a few of them. But gameplay wise they are axe users. Some weapons in the axe category are actual hammers (and said weapons are exclusive to Warriors and Werebears as a result), such as the Warhammer Mordon starts with, but most are not. As a result, Warriors will frequently use axes. To a lesser extent this happens with Thieves (depicted using twin daggers, equipped with a single sword, unlike swordmasters who do dual wield), Great Knights (depicted with lances, use spears instead) and Arbalists (depicted using crossbows, (mostly) use regular bows instead).
  • You can assign guards from your army to any of the towns all over Fevrith, but crossing over with Easy Logistics, they'll still find a way to zip over to whatever battlefield you find yourself on when the time comes, even if it's on the other side of the world.
  • The end and post-game exclusive characters are effectively non-canon bonuses you can repeat the end of the game with or use to challenge the harder coliseum battles, but don't interact with the game's story elements at all, completely lacking rapport events or the option for Alain to give them the Ring of the Maiden. Even the quest most of them are recruited from is a non-canonical what-if scenario with an excuse plot to justify it.
• Geo Effects: Ground units move quicker on roads, and cavalry are slowed severely by woods. Flying units can move freely but slow down over the otherwise untraversable mountains. Structures on the map also grant boons to those garrisoning them, allowing units to fight without stamina loss and not be displaced along with other bonuses depending on type. Forts and other strongholds allow new squads to deploy and those on the field to steadily recover, bridges form difficult chokepoints, and watchtowers increase the range and power of support attacks. Sand slows all non flyers down, fire and thorns damage them, and geysers cause damage and stun squads who touch them as they blow.
• Get on the Boat: Happens relatively early, as Alain and co. will travel by boat from the island of Palevia (where Alain was raised in exile) to Cornia to begin their quest to liberate the land from the Zenoiran Empire. Once you've repaired Ouvrir Harbor, you can return to Palevia if you choose.
• Gladiator Subquest: Baumratte city in Drakenhold has the Coliseum, where you can optionally battle through the ranks to face the champion, Amalia. It offers great rewards, is required if you want to recruit Amalia, and has a second set of higher-level battles to optionally complete after.
• Global Currency: Simple gold coins are used throughout all five continents of Fevrith. The sole Global Currency Exception is in Baumratte's Coliseum, where the store operates on "Coliseum Coins" instead.
• Gondor Calls for Aid: For the final mission, and the assault on Gran Corrine, the armies of Drakenhold will assemble, and join the battle midway through, with Hermann finally joining the Liberation Army.
• Gone Horribly Right: In an attempt to achieve immortality, the ancient Zenoirans killed the Unicorn in an attempt to steal its power. However, the Unicorn's death triggered a curse that not only instantly killed the entire population of Zenoira, but barred their souls from ascending to the afterlife, forcing them to wander the physical plane as disembodied spirits. The Zenoirans got the immortality they wanted, but at a terrible cost.
• Gratuitous French: Many places and things in Cornia have French names. Examples include: Port Ouvrir (Ouvrir translates to "To Open"), the dish "Cheese Filled Steak Haché" (Steak Haché is a French term for Ground Beef usually used in Quebec). Even the protagonist, Alain, whose name is the French form for "Alan".
• Great Offscreen War: We only get to see the very start of Zenoira's rise to power in the prologue - by the time the 10 years long Time Skip ends and the game proper starts, it managed to conquer all of Fevrith. The speed at which it happened is commented on by characters as well, which makes the reveal Galerius mind controlled people to do so justify him doing so.
• Green Hill Zone: The former Kingdom of Cornia, where the game proper starts. It's a lush, green land with plenty of forests and fields.
• Guest-Star Party Member: A frequent sight. New characters will often join as a temporary unit at first, often to put new classes in their element to give A Taste of Power. They often come with a couple of other one-and-done members filling out their unit too, to give some example synergies.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • For some recruitable characters, the steps needed to recruit them are far from obvious. In some cases, you even need other recruitable characters to recruit another character:
    • Recruiting Amalia is pretty straightforward: Defeat all thirty enemy units in the coliseum, then beat Amalia herself (who is the reigning champion). Actually getting to her, however, is problematic. You can do this "sidequest" at any point in the story after reaching the coliseum, but it's designed as an end-game level challenge with Amalia and the top ten enemies all being high-level while their unit set-up is specifically designed to punish anyone trying to steamroll through the coliseum using brute force. The coliseum basically tests your ability to remember the advantages and disadvantages of classes, how organized your set-up is, and the conditions in which your party members activate their skills and attacks, all the nuances of which can require a guide to keep track of. Conversely, major exploits can be taken advantage of to defeat it with a team around level 20... but doing everything you need to accomplish this also requires looking it up in a guide. Adjusting your team for each enemy group, the time/order to activate skills, certain weapons/shields/accessories to give them the abilities/immunities they'll need, etc.
    • The most obtuse example is recruiting Gilbert. In order to recruit him, you need to recruit Aramis, who can be recruited if you have Primm talk to him in the same battle they're introduced (which is easier said than done since Primm is surrounded by enemies on all sides). Then you need to talk to Gilbert before doing the "Heir to the Drakelands" story mission and reveal that Aramis is his missing brother Ludwig. While this is semi-intuitive (the first choice is almost always the correct one when it comes to recruiting characters), Aramis also threatens to walk out of the revolution altogether if anyone spills the beans, so it's not impossible for a player to second-guess themself into having to refight the gigantic final battle for Drakenhold.
  • The tutorial slide explaining Gathering Points tells you they respawn after you fight enough battles. A completely separate slide on a different topic at least ten minutes later tells you that stationing a guard at a restored city will result in that guard occasionally foraging materials for you. What the game obscures by omission is that these systems are connected; a stationed guard will automatically forage points as they respawn, giving you the item while saving you the trouble of checking manually. Particularly early on when delivery materials are in short supply, you can be running around the map wondering how long foraging takes to refresh without realizing that's where your "passive" foraging comes from.
  • In the mining spots around Fevrith, the player can find up to five treasure maps. The game doesn't outright tell when you found all the maps, outside of the treasure icon disappearing from the top right corner of the minigame's screen. But more importantly, it doesn't tell you that after finding the initial 25 treasures, five new maps will now be available to be found via mining. Unless the player goes out to farm resources at the mine after meeting the criteria, they can be missed entirely.
  • Some passive abilities "Activate at the Start of Battle". The game does not tell you that each side may only use one such ability each, and if you have multiple units who have these abilities, the unit with the highest Initiative will be the one triggered, leading to plenty of confused players.
• Healer Signs On Early: Scarlett, a Priestess whose default accessory allows her to heal, is the first character technically "recruited" at the very start of the game. She gets kidnapped soon after, but by then Josef and Chloe have joined, each possessing healing abilities as well.
• Healing Factor: Gladiators' "Buff Up" reaction restores a ton of their hitpoints the first time they get hit each turn, potentially making them a tough nut to crack without multiple attacks or thieves' ability to nullify PP. This is moderately balanced out by them being Glass Cannon units, so they have a lot of HP and can heal quickly, but have almost no defenses.
• Heavy Equipment Class: "Armored" units, like Hoplites and Werebears, are heavily armored Stone Walls and carry Greatshields for maximum protection. You'll usually need an Armor-Piercing Attack or magic to bring them down.
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: Many of the named characters are bareheaded, while generic units of the same classes typically wear a type of headgear that conceals their face.
• Herd-Hitting Attack:
  • Support Attacks from bows and magic users hit the entire enemy formation. Certain other units can prevent it and it's subject to accuracy checks but it's one of the few things that damages an entire squad and the damage can quickly add up.
  • A few abilities can hit an entire formation as well, though usually come with a downside (such as being a Charged Attack) to balance them out. Arrow Rain, Trinity Rain, Sandstorm, and possessed Amalia's Heavens Asunder are several such examples.
• Heroes Act, Villains Hinder: In an unusual example for an heroic fantasy story, the enemy empire will never try to reconquer or reclaim the player's territory, no matter how much of it they chip away. This is justified though, as it's mentioned several times in the story that invading the entire continent has stretched Zenoira's forces so thin that they'll grab anyone they can to fill their ranks. Making matters worse, their forces across Fevrith are still busy dealing with both scattered and organized revolutionary groups, meaning they simply haven't got the manpower necessary to react when Alain's resistance starts peeling away at their conquests. And since their leaders' endgame is cracking open the Beyond so their undead spirits can steal the bodies of the living en-masse, they have a vested interest in as many people being alive as practical before they do.
• Heroes Prefer Swords: Alain's default weapon is a sword and he's the only character capable of equipping of the Infinity +1 Sword.
• Hero Must Survive: Averted, unless there's a specific mission objective relating to a unit, a character or even their entire squad getting KO'ed won't fail the mission.
• Hit Points: In standard RPG fashion, units have HP that, when depleted, knocks them out of the fight.
• Human Sacrifice: During "Unicorn Overlord" Zenoiran soilders start slaughtering inhabitants of Gran Corrine en-masse to power the ritual of opening the gate to the Beyond and release the souls of their compatriots to posess the survivors.
• Human Subspecies: Angels are descended from humans who were experimented on by ancient Zenoiran sorcerers, turning them into a new race.
• Identical Grandson:
  • Subverted by Yahna, who is at first thought to be the child or grandchild of Queen Ilenia's court wizard and looks identical to her ancestor. She turns out to be the same person, having used magic to restore her youth to hide from Zenoira, at the cost of much of her former mystical power.
  • As Alcina comments upon meeting him, Alain's the spitting image of his grandfather Gerard. When he shows up as a Bonus Boss, he's essentially Alain's twin with green-tinged hair and copper-colored armor.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: In the form of Story (decreased challenge), Normal, Tactical (generally requires more thought and specific squad-building) and Expert (hardest). Finishing the game at least once also unlocks one more difficulty above Expert: True Zenoiran.
• "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight: It's a cutscene rather than a fight, but in the normal ending, Alain strikes down Galerius and is then possessed by him. Whoever he gave the Ring of the Maiden to will implore him to break free of the Zenoiran Emperor's control, which lets Alain free himself.
• Immortal Procreation Clause: It's explicitly stated that the elves of Elheim have much longer lifespans than humans but also produce fewer children. Alain can even bring this up in a max Rapport conversation with Eltolinde, who says she doesn't care if it means being with him.
• Inevitable Tournament: An optional one at Baumratte's Coliseum. Fight through the ranks of the other competitors to reach the champion, Amalia, at the top. Completing it and defeating her is the only way to recruit her.
• Infinite Stock For Sale: Averted. The Armorers and Provisioners across Fevrith have limited supplies which remain unstocked for the duration of the game. However, played straight with the Prize Exchange shop in the Baumratte Coliseum, but only in regards for Dews and Fevrite.
• Infinity -1 Sword:
  • The weapons granted by completing the "Carved in Stone" quests on each continent that involve visiting a series of stone carvings in a certain order are incredibly good. There is one of each weapon type and they each add +5 to all stats. The Kingsblade Cornix, acquired in Cornia, is a Disc-One Nuke if acquired as early as possible but tends to fall off by the midway point due to its middling 15 physickal attack (It started at 25, but was nerfed in an early patch), while the others are all at least at 20, and the Kingslance Elhal has 18 and 8, split between physickal and magic damage, respectively. Any below a base attack of 25 can be upgraded to that at the Blacksmith using Fevrite^note The Kingslance Elhal instead goes to 20 and 10, making them all mainstay weapons at the end of the game.
  • The items granted by defeating the guardians of the Anemoi monuments are some of the best of their type in the game. The weapons come dealing 25 physickal damage (trailing on the Holy Unicorn Blade's 28, while also adding +1 PP and stat boosts. The shields offer some of the best defenses in the game plus abilities and stat boosts, while Lips's Ring grants "Hastened Action", great for getting typically slower characters (like spellcasters) to act sooner in battle.
  • Thanks to the Blacksmith in Albion, you can upgrade any weapon to a base 25 physickal/magickal attack or any shield to its defense maximums (8/30% for standard shields, 16/50% for greatshields) using Fevrite at the cost of 50 Honors. If there is a particular weapon or shield that grants a good ability or stat increases but has fallen behind in terms of raw power, you can upgrade it and turn it into an end game quality item this way.
  • Meteorite weapons can be acquired by offering Star Iron at a group of statues in Bastorias. They come at 24 base damage while boosting max HP and guard rate.
• Infinity +1 Sword: The Holy Unicorn Blade, King Gerard's sword. Obtaining it requires maxing out one's reknown and then defeating Gerard in combat. Like the Anemoi monuments (and unlike the Colosseum or regular combat), you don't just need to win, you need to actually destroy them in a single combat. This is challenging on multiple levels, as Gerard is a High Lord (the same class as Alain) with all the survivability that entails, at level 40 with the Holy Unicorn Blade equipped, and backed up by four other strong units with good synergy. The blade itself has 28 physickal attack (the highest in the game) and grants extra PP and AP to its wielder.
• Info Dump: After performing the Rite of Covenant and completing the Albion storyline, you'll be tasked with visiting various sanctuaries around Fevrith to unlock the true power of the Ring of the Unicorn and Maiden, while getting huge dumps of backstory from the sages there on the history of Zenoria, backgrounds on the non-human races of Fevrith, details on Baltro and Galerius, and more. Since this will be accomplished very late in the game, all six of them can be done one after the other, resulting in a massive info dump. Even if you access them as early as possible^note Going against the game's recommendation and going into Albion through Elheim, you'll have at least three shrines' worth of information left to learn about, half the total and still a large amount of info.
• Informed Equipment: The equipment on a character's sprite stays the same no matter what they're equipped with. Warriors are a particularly blatant case, as their sprite shows them wielding a Humongous-Headed Hammer, but the vast majority of weapons they can equip are axes.
• Instant-Win Condition: Most skirmishes in the game have the main objective of taking over the main command point, marked with three stars and stationed by the leader of enemy forces. Take them out, and no matter if it was your last unit while several enemies are swarming at you - you win. The caveat - the same applies for the enemies. Some maps even have units hidden in forests near your base who will immediately move toward it if you leave it ungarrisoned.
• Interface Spoiler: During the "Vile Desecration" mission in Elheim, Baltro is the boss of the map and starts off surrounded by four dead party members, which is visible if you hover over him at any point in the battle. No other enemy parties in the game start off with dead members, which should tip you off that something is amiss. Sure enough, as a Necromancer, he brings them back to life to fight when battled.
• In-Universe Game Clock: Of the internal variety. Time moves at around 1 real-time second for in-game 5 minutes, with an actual clock being visible in the upper right corner of the pause screen. The game changes from night to day which has various affects ranging from cosmetic (different overworld music) to practical, such as the black market merchant only selling his wears at night. It starts to come much more into play once bestrals and angels start to appear on the battlefield. The player can change time of the day by using a Dream Blossom during battles.
• Invisible to Normals: According to one villager, the light shining from gathering spots for items is an actual thing in-universe, but most people can't see it. Alain sees it just fine.
• Javelin Thrower: Javelin, a level 10 skill for the Soldier, lets them throw their spear like a javelin to deal 50% more damage to flying units.
• Joined Your Party: Happens with every newly recruited party member. Most are (at least initially) unique, though you can later hire generic mercenaries of their same classes and will start to see doubles of certain classes even among unique party members (like Thieves Travis/Gammel, Clerics Sharon/Primm/Tatiana, Radiant Knights Miriam/Monica, etc.)
• Kill the God: The ancient Zenoiran Empire was able to slay the mythical Unicorn itself in an attempt to steal its power. This was not without consequences, however, as it killed them all and rendered their souls unable to enter the afterline.
• Kissing Cousins: Alain can present the Ring of the Maiden to Virginia, his first cousin. The dialogue involved is explicitly romantic and it's implied they get together in the ending.
• Knight Errant:
  • Quite a few Cornian knights and knightly orders were left without land or lords when Zenoira took over. Clive/Adel of the Ashen Blue and Miriam/Fran/Kitra of the Knights of the Rose (which formerly served Queen Ilenia directly and safeguarded Princess Virginia out of Cornia) were quick to join up with the Liberation. Some of the minor nobles like Monica and Melisandre, whose families were punished for either initially resisting Zenoira or backstabbed by other Cornian turncoats, also qualify, now serving as low-level Zenoiran enforcers while remaining "noble" in name only. (After witnessing his prowess in battle against him, they are eager to join Alain.)
  • After completing "The Priestess, Abducted", a face-concealing helmed Great Knight calling himself "Laurent" will join the player for their next four Liberation battles. He explicitly calls himself a "Knight Errant" and is later revealed to be Renault, looking to atone for his crimes (despite being mind-controlled). He eventually gives up the act and joins the party as himself.
• Law of Cartographical Elegance: The five landmasses of Fevrith all fit neatly within the rectangular map.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: If you manage to reach the end game and fight Norbelle, the Zenoiran priestess inhabiting Scarlett's body if you opt not to rescue her, she commends Alain on reaching that point, claiming it would be difficult to do without Scarlett. Giving the significant amounts of sequence breaking required to get there without rescuing Scarlett first, she's not kidding.
• Leg Focus: Several of the female sprites have this, almost to the point where one has to wonder if it's a designer's fetish. Some are straight up in Zettai Ryouiki territory while others have basically painted on leggings. Sexy Slit Dress with bared legs are common as are Combat Stilettos which sometimes show up to accentuate things. Examples include all the female swordfighters/swordmasters, including Melisandre and Leah, all the witches and sorceresses, including Yahna, all female Sellswords including Berenice, Amalia, Virginia, and Ilenia, Berengaria has a painted on catsuit with pieces of plate stuck to it and armored black heels. Oh, and all the female elves. Even the male Elven Archers wear identical thigh highs to their female counterparts.
• Level-Up at Intimacy 5: Increasing Rapport between two characters gives them stat bonuses when they are in the same party, and these bonuses stack if the character has rapport with multiple others.
• Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: In the early stages of the game, physickal attacking "warrior" types will carry the day while the various magick-using "wizard" types will need to be well-protected and babied along. While the "warriors" never fully fall off, the "wizards" get much more powerful, being key to some of the game's most devastating strategies (like quick casting Trinity Rain).
• Lore Codex: The Fevrith Archive, which contains information on the lore, locations, and characters. It expands as you play through the game and even fills in details not given in dialogue.
• Mercy Rewarded: Fitting the game's themes of Forgiveness and giving up on ancient, pointless grudges, Alain will often choose mercy when dealing with enemies even setting aside the many times the player has the choice to, and it almost always works out for him, leading them to join his Liberation Army out of gratitude. This extends even to the good ending, where the Zenoirans side with him against Baltro and accept the freedom from their undead condition he offers.
• Mind Control: The first proper level reveals that Valmore was able to become so powerful without warning by using some kind of magical mind control to force people to his side, with the Ring of the Unicorn being the only displayed method of undoing it. While there were people who willingly joined his side, characters mention that many people likely are unwillingly serving Valmore. Later reveals (which can happen as early as right after fixing the first Broken Bridge, but more "properly" towards the end of the Elheim storyline) show that it is more like Grand Theft Me.
• Marathon Level:
  • "Province of Famine" is an early Cornia mission featuring the longest map with easily the most enemy units to that point in the game, while your parties are likely to be still limited to 2-3 non-advanced class characters, making a long slog to complete.
  • "The Holy March" is the final map in Albion, covering a massive area including mountains that cannot be flown over. After a certain point, a large number of enemy reinforcements will also appear along the path you've been traveling, leaving your command post and any captured towns/forts along the way vulnerable.
• The Minion Master: Sellswords and their promoted class, Landsknecht, have "Summon Warriors" and "Summon Archers" as Valor skills, respectively. For just one Valor point, they can summon a squad of Level-Scaled units to take some of the fighting and soften up enemy units.
• Money Multiplier:
  • The Gold Goblet and Miser's Bracelet items, as well as the the "Bandit's" weaponry, are items that increase the gold earned by a unit after battle.
  • Liquid Fortune consumable doubles the amount of money earned by a unit (as well as experience gained) for 20 seconds.
• Multiple Endings:
  • The Good Ending, which is achieved by trying to convince Galerius to stand down, prompting Baltro to expose his treachery and reveal his plans to use the Zenoiran souls as fuel for his magic. Alain and his party unleash the true power of the Rings of the Unicorn and Maiden, defeating the necromancer, finally breaking the curse upon the souls of the ancient Zenoirans, and ushering in an era of peace.
  • The Bad Ending is achieved by defeating Galerius too early and thus not unlocking the option to try to save him in the first place, resulting in Galerius' spirit possessing Alain and establishing Zenoira's eternal rule over Fevrith in the process.
  • The Normal Ending, which is a variant of the above, is achieved by executing Galerius after fully restoring the Ring of the Unicorn. Though Galerius possesses Alain's body, the prince manages to resist the despot from the inside, wresting back control and banishing Galerius for good. Peace is restored throughout Fevrith, but the Zenoirans continue their cursed existence.
• Neglected Sidequest Consequence:
  • With some extreme Level Grinding and/or making liberal use of exploits, it's possible to engage the final battle without having even rescued Scarlett, meaning you won't have explored outside of Cornia. Even if you win, the end result is a serious case of Earn Your Bad Ending.
  • Failure to engage in sidequests and liberation quests prevents you from recruiting quite a few characters, including some very good and interesting ones, making both the game harder and depriving you of extra content.
  • Viewing them as a type of sidequest within battles, recruiting some characters requires having Alain or another specific unit "Talk" to them during the battle. Failure to do so means not only are they not recruited, but possibly killed.
• Old Retainer: Josef, the former captain of the Knights of Cornia who escaped with Alain, acts as his mentor and protector. Once the Liberation Army forms, he acts as something of an advisor to Alain. In their Rapport conversations, Alain makes it clear he views Josef as an outright Parental Substitute.
• Once per Episode: There are recurring quests that appear in each region.
  • There is at least one Liberation quest that involves liberating a city occupied by a potential recruitable character that joins the Liberation Army upon defeat. Cornia has the Walled City of Barbatimo (Mordon), Drakenhold has the Walled City of Adopti (Jeremy), Elheim has the Voryatan Citadel (Railanor), Bastorias has the Fortified City of Solvaquad (Bryce), and Albion has two cities: Largion Citadel (Jerome) and the Walled City of Peyston (Fodoquia). Railanor is an interesting case, as she joins the Liberation Army without any choice to reject her, while the other can be rejected. Another interesting case is the liberation quest involving Fodoquia, as it is completely mandatory to clear as the city blocks you from reaching the main quest "Bound by Sacred Oath".
  • Each regions in Fevrith has four cemeteries, where Sharon is tasked by Mother Laelia to offer prayer to the restless souls of the cemeteries. Completing these quests reward a bouquet, a gravekeeper accessory, clerical staves and accessories, and rapport points between Alain and Sharon.
  • Each region has four carved stones spread throughout the region. In order to initiate these quests, you must first find faded journal associated with the region and also recruit Yahna to decipher them. Once the journal is deciphered, you will have to interact with each of the carved stones like a puzzle. Once the quest is complete, you are rewarded with powerful weapons that grant +5 to every stat and rapport points between Alain and Yahna.
• Optional Party Member: Most of the recruitable characters are this. Only a small portion of your potential army get automatically added into your ranks.
• Our Angels Are Different: The Winged are one of the four races inhabiting Fevrith that the Liberation Army can recruit. While many of them are with the church and said church regards them highly, they aren't divine beings. Rather, only high-ranking Winged that serve the Palevian Orthodoxy get to be referred to as "Angels" as a sign of respect. As revealed in Primm's "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue slide, humans who do great things for the church can earn the title of "Honorary Angel" in that same vein of respect.
• Our Elves Are Different: They come in both light and dark varieties, though due to a quirk of elf genetics mixed race children between a light elf and a dark elf don't inherit mixed traits from their parents, they're just a light elf or a dark elf which can even occur in twins. They also don't engage in the typical elvish rivalries as seen in most fiction, actually having been on friendly terms for some time.
• Peninsula of Power Leveling: The Sigil Trials are auxillery battles that can essentially be repeated as many times as you like. In addition to any experience gained during the trial itself, they reward Military Treatises, which grant further experience, and can be used to rapidly grind Honors (used to promote units to advanced classes and increase unit size) and collect resources (needed for rebuilding towns) from stationed guards. Beginner 1, which can be found in Corina, is particularly easy to beat given its low-level requirements and can be accomplished in a matter of seconds if you have cavalry since your starting position isn't far away from the boss.
• Player Mooks: The Liberation Army can bolster their ranks by hiring mercenaries at any of their forts. The player can decide their color scheme, voice types and character growth, though they have a preselected name from a list. So, unfortunately, no John Cena the Gladiator. This has the benefit of allowing the player to use classes they don't have a unique character for, such as getting access to a Gryphon Knight some time before you get a unique character as one, and you can decide the stat growths of generic recruits. By contrast changing those of a named character uses up a very rare and expensive item.
• Player Nudge:
  • Someone, usually Josef, will pipe up if the player approaches an area way above their level to suggest leaving it be for now. He'll also inform Alain (and the player) when the Liberation Army has grown strong enough to tackle a previous barricade or story objective.
  • The game does a lot to hint at various unit synergies, from tutorial popups with basic examples to Guest-Star Party Member squads to practice battles with mercenaries on the world map, the latter of which also giving the player a safe environment to figure out counterplay for these synergies.
• Plot Coupon That Does Something: The Ring of the Unicorn - In-Universe powers to dispel Zenoiran magick of control and, gameplay-wise, a starter piece of equipment for Alain with decent stats that can later get a significant upgrade.
• Plunder:
  • While the Liberation Army gains money from every enemy they fell, the player does not have the option to loot liberated towns. In fact, what shocks most liberated settlements is how, rather than take, the Liberation Army gives resources via deliveries in order to rebuild them.
  • The Thief class possesses the Valor Skill Plunder, which allows them to steal money from enemy units outside of battle.
• Port Town: Several of them mark the coastlines. Liberating and rebuilding them will allow the player to sail to locations often inaccessible by foot, though the ship from a port town will always go to the same specific location.
• Prejudice Aesop: A logical companion to the game's Central Theme of the importance of Forgiveness and the pointlessness of holding onto old grudges is its slightly more subtle condemnation of the evils of bigotry in all its forms, from racism to classism to chauvinist nationalism. Zenoira was only able to conquer the rest of Fevrith after the fall of Cornia because the continent's other leaders looked down on one another and passed up every opportunity unite to stop them until it was too late, on top of being riven by exploitable internal divisions caused by mistreatment of their own people. As a deliberate constrast, the Liberation Army is surprisingly egalitarian from the off, with Lex, one of Alain's closest companions and confidants, being a lowly fisherman's son, and grows to its strongest extent when it freely accepts recruits from all nationalities, walks of life, and species without prejudice. Every region has its own spin on this moral, from Drakenhold, where the new King pledges to eliminate discrimination against the desert population and the royal families of Drakenhold and Cornia agree to bury the hatchet of their ancient grudge and even join together in marriage in the end, Elheim, where locals repeatedly admit they have to question ancient anti-human prejudices after an army full of humans saves their country, Bastorias, where the mistreatment of the rat bloodline creates the threat of Elgor and the future king admits that his cause was just even if his methods were not, and Albion, where angel prejudice divides their society and misplaced national pride causes a massive "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot. Through it all, open-mindedness and a nonjudgmental attitude is shown to be a virtue that strengthens the heroes, while bigotry and racism proves a bane that weakens the villains.
• Prestige Class: At Renown rank B, forts unlock the ability to promote characters to advanced versions of their classes. Tier two classes start with two PP and AP, as well as gaining a new equipment slot with the type is determined by the class. On top of the generic classes, Alain, Scarlett, and Virginia all have advanced versions of their unique classes. Other characters with unique classes (and non-humans) start with the equivalent of tier two classes. For specifics:
  • Arbalist → Shieldshooter
  • Cleric → Bishop
  • Crusader → Valkyria (Virginia only)
  • Dark Knight → Doom Knight
  • Fighter → Vanguard
  • Gladiator→ Berserker
  • Gryphon Knight → Gryphon Master
  • Housecarl → Viking
  • Hunter → Sniper
  • Knight→ Great Knight
  • Lord → High Lord (Alain only)
  • Hoplite → Legionnaire
  • Priestess → High Priestess (Scarlett only)
  • Radiant Knight → Sainted Knight
  • Shaman → Druid
  • Sellsword → Landsknecht
  • Soldier→ Sergeant
  • Swordfighter → Swordmaster
  • Thief → Rogue
  • Warrior → Breaker
  • Witch → Sorceress
  • Wizard → Warlock
  • Wyvern Knight → Wyvern Master
• Programming Game: Characters behave according to a simple script the player makes called "Tactics", setting the conditions by which each ability (active or passive) the character has will be used. Moves higher in the list have priority, so if two moves have identical conditions, the top one always triggers. This means that moves that should be the default use and thus lack specific conditions should be at the bottom of the list less they supersede specific use-cases moves. "Conditions" in turn are parameters that can be either target priorities (ie: whoever has the least HP, the most AP, Prioritize cavalry as targets, etc...), or actual conditions for the move to trigger at all (If attacked by a flying unit, If you have 2 or more PP left, if armored units are present, etc.). The latter are labelled to mention that if the condition isn't met, the move will not trigger, while the former merely affects who the unit prioritizes when using said move. Moves can be entered in the list multiple times, each with various sets of conditions dictating when and how they should be used, allowing for some fairly granular control on the tactics each units employ. Lastly, Tactic template can be saved and imported to other characters of the same class.
• Rain of Arrows:
  • Archer classes, like Hunters and Elven Archers, have the leader effect Ranged Assist, which allows them to aid allies in range by shooting a volley of arrows to damage the enemy unit at the start of battle. It gains more potency if the unit has more units with Ranged Assist, allowing it to deal more damage. However, classes with Resist Ranged Assist, like Fighters and Hoplites, reduces the damage down to a minuscule proportion, making them effective counters against a horde of archers.
  • The Hunter's valor skill Arrow Rain is an area-of-effect damaging skill that hurts everything that is under its radius. It also deals 1.5x damage against flying units.
  • The Trapper's Warbow grants the active skill Arrow Rain, which is a Charged Attack that rains down a volley of arrows 3 times.
  • Upon reaching Level 30, Yunifi learns the active skill Glacial Rain, which functions similarly to Arrow Rain, but has an added effect of freezing the enemy.
• Rare Candy: Comes in three flavors:
  • Dews increase one stat of a character up to five times.
  • Military Treatises give a set amount of EXP, but triple that if the character is under a certain level.
  • Miracle Apples just straight up give an automatic level up.
• Real-Time with Pause: During combat, units move in real time, but the player can pause at any moment to change orders or survey the battlefield. There is also an option for the game to pause after any new order.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: Units belonging to The Empire favor this color scheme, mixing reds and blacks.
• Redemption Demotion: Characters you face in battle as bosses and that can be later recruited tend to be weaker when they change over to your side, having lower stats and sometimes less action points than they did as bosses.
  • Hilda is a challenging boss during "The Champion of Order" who can devastate your party with Thunder Shaker courtesy of the Silver Trident she wields. If you choose to recruit her, you'll discover that, as an unpromoted unit, she lacks the two AP needed to use Thunder Shaker even if you give her back the Silver Trident. You'll need to promote her or give her one of the precious few AP increasing items before she returns to her former strength.
  • Nigel is armed to the teeth with enemy-only "of the Abyss" equipment, and a useful Amethyst Pendant to boost his AP and PP, the former of which dramatically enhances his already respectable surviability. When he joins up later, both temporarily and for real, his equipment loadout is disappointly basic, and depending on your difficulty, his squad may need babysitting to meaningfully contribute in the former case.
  • Amalia is a downplayed case. When battling her in the Colosseum the second time, she turns out to be possessed and empowered by the spirit of her ancestor and has a unique moveset exclusive to this battle. When she joins your party, she's still an incredibly strong fighter, but only ever has access to her kit seen in previous battles with her.
• Relationship Values: Known as Rapport in the game; the greater it is, the bigger stat bonuses units will receive while paired up. It can be increased by fighting in the same unit, dining together at taverns, and, for Alain, giving them gifts while set as guards.
• Religion is Magic: All Clerics and Bishops in the game serve the same religion - the Palevian Orthodoxy. Each has healing magic and a few have some Holy Hand Grenade-style offensive abilities as well.
• Required Party Member: At the very end of the game, Alain, equipped with the Ring of the Unicorn, is the only one who can defeat Baltro and end the war. You technically don't need to have the character who he choose to give the Ring of the Maiden to as well, but it makes the fight signifciantly more difficult if they're not there to shield the party from Baltro's Unicorn's Wrath.
• La Résistance: The Liberation Army led by Alain. It starts small, just Alain, his Old Retainer, and a few childhood friends. By the end, it can be a massive army with soldiers from all five continents.
• Ring of Power:
  • The Ring of the Unicorn, a sacred heirloom of the Cornian royal family. It allows Alain to dispel foul magicks used to Mind Control enemies of Zenoira into obedience. It can later be upgraded, imparting the wearer with +1 AP and +5 all stats.
  • The Ring of the Maiden, a sacred ring in the protection of Elheim, is a companion artifact to the Ring of the Unicorn capable of unlocking it's true power. Once aquired, Alain can present it to eligible characters he's reached maxed Rapport with, similar to a marriage proposal. This will upgraded it to impart the wearer with +1 PP and +5 all stats, and also upgrade the Ring of the Unicorn.
  • Numerous other rings that impart abilities, resistances, or stat boosts can be found throughout the game. Lips's Ring is one of the Anemoi quest rewards, each of which tends to be Infinity -1 Swords of their type.
• The Quisling: Valmore/Galerius was able to establish his dominion over the entire continent through swaying local leaders to serve as his eager collaborators. This turns out to be because he has access to a spell that can shackle the hearts of men; seemingly only the Unicorn ring can break the magic and put the victims back in their right minds.
• Sequel Hook: There are implied to be other continents away from Fevrith that could be home to future adventures. A couple of Amalia's Rapport conversations reveal that her father wasn't from Fevrith and the sword she carries is of a make never seen before in Fevrith. Aubin's "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue slide implies that he sailed his ship to other lands as well. The Zenoirans themselves were once inhabitants of another continent in the distant past before fleeing en-masse to Fevrith.
• Shoulders of Doom: Many characters and classes gain pauldrons when promoted, giving them more armored, powerful, and imposing appearances. Examples include, but are not limited to Alain (who starts the game bare shouldered under his cape), Knights (who gain larger pauldrons as Great Knights), and male Breakers and Gladiators.
• Sequence Breaking:
  • The recommended route for the player is Cornia → Drakenhold → Elheim → Bastorias → Albion, due to the level and typing of enemies. However, once done with "The Priestess, Abducted" in Cornia, the Liberation Army can march to either Drakenhold or Elheim (or even Bastorias, although this is much harder). In both cases, one of the last settlements to liberate there are harbors that can let the player "skip" nations - to Albion from Elheim, and to Bastorias from Drakenhold, to be precise. Though the enemies in those Liberation missions will have higher levels than the rest of their ilk in those countries.
  • It's possible to skip through most of the game and go straight to the Final Boss by repairing the bridge east of Fort Thessalon, though you'll need thirty Cornite Stone to do so. Anyone who tries this in the early game will find themselves wiped as the recommended level for the final mission is 40. By this point, you'll only be under level 20 or so. It's also not recommended, as starting the final mission without freeing the other continents from Zenoiran control not only makes the fight that much harder, but almost guarantees you get the bad ending, especially if you try to do this without completing "The Priestess, Abducted".
• Sexy Slit Dress: Common with the Witch (miniskirt edition), Sorceress, Shaman, Featherbow, Crusader/Valkyria, and female swordfighters.
• Sibling Team: You can put siblings into the same unit and they tend to synergize well with each other. Some examples include Rosalinde and Eltolinde, Travis and Berengaria, Primm and Hilda, and Gilbert and Aramis, previously known as "Ludwig".
• Stationary Enemy: Enemy units stationed at watchtowers, war machines, and outposts will not move from their designated spots to try stopping your advance. The player can, however, lure them out either with the Fighter/Vanguard Valor Skill Provoke or by using certain items, though that will not work on enemies that are garrisoned at towns, forts and so forth.
• Status Effect:
  • Units with skills that can alter their allies or the opponents' stats and fighting ability are called buffs and debuffs, respectively. Buffs affect your units positively, while debuffs affect your units negatively. Both buffs and debuffs last until either the end of combat, or are removed through skills with Status-Buff Dispel or Anti-Debuff effects.
  • A subgroup of debuff is called "afflictions," and they have detrimental effects that makes the unit's ability to fight much more difficult.
    • Poison: The unit receives damage based on the percentage of their HP before they can act.
    • Burn: The unit receives a flat amount of damage before they can act, but it is also stackable.
    • Freeze: The unit cannot act until they are attacked. It also disables their passive skills, blocking, and dodging.
    • Stun: The unit cannot act until it is their turn. It also disables their passive skills, blocking, and dodging.
    • Blind: The unit will miss their attack. It also overrides any truestrike effects.
    • Passive Seal: The unit cannot use their passive skills.
    • Guard Seal: The unit cannot guard attacks. Cover skills will still be active, but they cannot guard the attack.
    • Deathblow: The unit is instantly killed.
  • It is important to make the distinction between debuffs and afflictions. For example, Viking's Wide Breaker gains extra potency against debuffed units, but Dark Marquess (Axe)'s Sanguine Pursuit only regains 1 PP if the target is afflicted. Another distinction to tell the difference between debuffs and afflictions is if the unit is afflicted, they will use their "at low HP" animation instead of their idle animation.
• Stripperiffic: Female Elven Fencers wear basically a leotard made of black straps that hides very little, combining Leg Focus, Impossibly-Low Neckline, and exposed belly.
• Switch-Out Move: The player can swap what unit will engage in battle if there's another unit close by to the one that met the enemy combatants. Note this can also put the switching unit into or out of a garrisoned position, which can impact their defenses or stamina.
• Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: By design, almost every unit type has a near-hard counter that can mess them up from here to Fire Emblem:
  • Gladiators struggle against thieves, who can steal away the PP necessary for them to use their powerful healing reaction while proving nigh-impossible for them to hit with their axes.
  • Thieves, flying units, and anyone else who relies on evasion are really in trouble against hunters' Always Accurate Attack, ranged supporting attacks, or weapons with Truestrike. Conversely, fighters' ability to block arrows aimed at an ally make them invaluable support for evasion-reliant or flying teams.
  • Spearmen pierce both combat rows, meaning anyone who wants to huddle up in the back rows really doesn't want to be standing behind an ally when ten feet of steel and wood comes flying back into their faces. They also do extra damage to Cavalry.
  • Spellcasters ignore armor doing devastating damage to such units, but are vulnerable to archers who are faster and can directly target the back row killing them before they can act. Each casting class also has different skills, such as the Witch being able to provide a buff that allows a unit to treat their attack as magic damage to bypass physical defenses.
  • Gryphon Knights deal bonus damage against Cavalry units while Cavalry units deal bonus damage to Infantry units.
  • As unit sizes get bigger, the rock-paper-scissors starts tying itself into tactical knots, too. For instance, the flying Gryphon Knights become excellent for evading the frontline and assassinating entrenched Hunter formations if they can bring along some Fighters to no-sell the otherwise lethal arrows.
  • The list of counters also gets more complex as units increase in levels and gain new moves. For example, level 10 Soldiers learn Javelin, a move that does 50% bonus damage to flying unit, suddenly turning them into a potent threat against flyers. Witches at the same level gain a spell to make an ally's attack become a True strike, meaning any squad with a witch in it becomes problematic for Scouts and Flyers. And of course, a squad with both a witch and a soldier now become top tier anti-air where as before they were harmless.
• Taking a Third Option: In the "To Resist or To Yield" mission, Alain can choose to side with either Govil or Bertrand. However, the more ideal decision is to not side with either and start the battle at the midpoint between their two forts, effectively forcing the Liberation to fight both their armies on two fronts. Winning will allow Alain to recruit both Govil and Bertrand.
• Takes One to Kill One: The way various mechanics interact to create counterplays means that some classes a either soft countered or hard-countered by other characters of the same class. For example:
  • Hunters thrive on the backline, able to target enemies who are prone to dodging, or who are vulnerable to physical damage in the enemy backline, like casters. They are themselves vulnerable to physical damage, meaning they are a prime target for other hunters who can directly target them in the backline with proper tactics.
  • Thieves have attacks composed of multiple hits. Because of how dodging works (each successfully dodged attack increases the odds the next attack will hit cumulatively), Thieves are great at depleting other thieves' evasiveness, either by consuming all their PP used for Evade, or increasing their hit chance allowing for other party members to make the kill.
• A Taste of Power:
  • The battle in the prologue, where the player controls Queen Ilenia in her Last Stand, features a team of five endgame level characters with a plethora of abilities that the player won't likely see for a good while.
  • The first proper level lets the player use Scarlett in battle, who not only is a healer, but can use magic due to being in a unique class. The level pushes you to use her so you can beat the armored Hodrick, who is difficult for the other characters to damage. Once you win the level, Scarlett is kidnapped, so you end up going through several levels without magic or a dedicated healer, adding to the challenge.
  • You get to use Amalia in the mission "Another Prince". As an ultra-powerful level 40 tank with the unique Dreadnought class, she then leaves to fight her way to the top of the Coliseum brackets and is the Optional Boss at the end of the Colosseum. Amalia only joins permanently when you beat her there, which is likely to be at least several hours after this mission.
• Tastes Like Friendship: Ordering food at a tavern for your units is one of the quickest ways to increase Rapport between them.
• Thirsty Desert: The southern region of Drakenhold is a blistering hot desert that serves as a land of exile for Drakenhold's criminals in the past. The desert is still dangerous for travelers, due to its unpredictable sandstorms and lurking bandits. It is also where Aubin, Magellan, and Liza were born and raised.
• Thunderbolt Iron: "Star Iron" can be collected from stone circles, dug up in the mining areas, and received as a reward. Offering it at the foot of a row of statues in Bastorias will reward you with a "Meteorite" version of that statue's weapon type, high-level weapons with 24 Physickal Damage, +20 HP, and +10% Guard Rate.
• Timed Mission: All missions have a time limit, though the time limit is generally different depending on the level. Not finishing the mission before the end of the timer is an instant game over. Certain items will allow you to refill the time gauge if that happens, though you get no bonus score for time at the end. Time only flows when units are moving freely on the map so while some can have time limits as short as 45 seconds, between watching battles play out, issuing orders, and tweaking your squads on the fly, they can still take a while to play out.
• Tin Tyrant: Valmore is clad head to toes in black and red armor and employs a lot of armored units in battle.
• Title Drop: The final mission is titled "Unicorn Overlord".
• Treasure Map: These can be unearthed during the mining minigame. They start a side quest where you have to find the buried treasure by referencing the World Map and a photo of the exact location the booty is hidden.
• Unicorn: The titular Unicorn is a holy symbol to the people of Fevrith, and as per the trope represents purity and goodness, exemplified by the Ring of the Unicorn's ability to undo Valmore's brainwashing. They're believed to be extinct, with Zenoiran forces killing the last one in an attempt to seize its power centuries in the past. The tomb of the last unicorn is on the small island where Alain grew up in exile.
• Unusable Enemy Equipment: While often averted as many enemy commanders drop a unique piece of gear they were equipped with during the battle, several bosses have a set of equipment suffixed with "of the Abyss" that is designed to make them bulkier and more difficult to defeat than would normally be possible. The player is never allowed to find and utilize any of these items at any point. The Sanguis Mea staff and Bloodstained Ribbon accessory used by Norbelle are also unobtainable.
• Vengeance Feels Empty: Virginia seeks to kill General Giethe rather than wait for him to be summoned back to Gran Corrine given that he murdered the Knights of the Rose, except for herself, Miriam, Fran, and Kitra, with the four of them leading a suicidal charge on his fortress. However, it becomes apparent that he doesn't even remember doing this, and after Virginia kills him, she realizes it didn't make her feel better at all (especially given that she endangered her companions to do it) and chooses to leave the Liberation Army (but Alain and company convince her to stay).
• Victory Pose: Each character in a unit strikes a pose after winning a battle.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential:
  • You can kill off an alarming amount of recruitable characters simply by refusing to let them on your team — or, in some cases, forgetting the option to press-gang them when you have them down. Most can be substituted for with mercenaries if you still want that class.
  • When initiating the Rite of Covenant, you have a choice to reject the character that Alain has chosen, in case you need to rethink your choice. Some characters do not take the rejection well, like Scarlett, Melisandre, and Virginia. And yes, you can do this repeatedly with the same character over and over again to make Alain look like a heartbreaker.
• Video Game Stealing: In battle, Thieves and Rogues have abilities which can steal AP and PP from units they hit.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: Appropriately enough, the first encounter with Galerius himself. On Expert, the boss demands the player understand the game's core mechanics and discourages relying on a single well-leveled party by hitting your entire squad with an attack that reduces their HP to the minimum and poisoning those that attack them, so that they'll drop dead if and when they act again. This has the knock on effect of making winning the encounters with the boss borderline impossible after their minions are defeated, locking your losing unit down temporarily and forcing you to rely on back ups to chip away at the boss's health before it regenerates.
• The Wandering You: The Overworld Exploration phase of gameplay sees Alain traverse Fevrith, recruiting allies, uncovering items and resources, and undertaking quests.
• Wiki Walk: The Fevrith Archive allows you to select red words, which serves as hyperlink to another entry, to read another entry relevant to the previous entry. This can result in you reading about an entry of a story event and then suddenly reading an entry about sigils.
• Wham Episode:
  • The ending of "The Priestess, Abducted". Alain strikes down Galerius, but Baltro undoes the seal at the Cornian Sanctuary thanks to Scarlett being the daughter of the Pontifex, reviving Galerius and empowering him enough that he almost kills Alain in one hit. Alain and Scarlett only survive because one of the ancient sages heals them, charging them to stop Galerius before he unleashes some form of greater evil.
  • Fittingly, the final story mission "Unicorn Overlord". "Galerius" is revealed not to be Valmore, but Queen Ilenia; Valmore was Galerius' vessel after inheriting his family's ancestral armor, and Galerius later possessed Ilenia when she killed Valmore during their fateful battle ten years ago. The Zenoiran Empire is also revealed to be little more than an army of ghosts who were Barred from the Afterlife when they tried to gain immortality by killing the mythical Unicorn, only for it to curse them and wipe it out in an instant. Baltro is also revealed to be using Galerius for his own purposes, intending to open the door to the Beyond and use the souls of the fallen empire to fuel his vile necromancy.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: The epilogue gives each character a description of what they will accomplish after the end of the war. The character that received the Ring of the Maiden will have their ending moved to the end of the epilogue, where it describes what they did in the future with Alain. Some characters' endings change depending on who received the Ring. For example, Railanor and Ithilion's ending changes if Alain chose Rosalinde.
• You All Look Familiar: Units of the same class and gender will look exactly the same, no matter under what banner they will fight. Those of the player's side can have different colors of the player's choosing. Even named recruitable characters will usually differ only with their heads from their "common" counterparts; Yahna for instance looks almost the exact same as the generic Witch class, with the only major difference being her hairstyle.
• You Shouldn't Know This Already: Generally averted, the player has access to some exotic weapons and the full depth of the skill priority systems long before the game deliberately teaches you about them.

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