Video Game / Epic Battle Fantasy 5

The fifth game in the Epic Battle Fantasy series released for Steam on November 30, 2018. It resets Matt in his room, playing video games. When a meteor hits nearby, it results in a power outage, so he leaves on a journey to fix it. He has a re-encounter with NoLegs who was scavenging his trash, and after battling it, NoLegs joins his party, this time proper, and from there, they travel the world, to investigate the meteor.

The free version is online, and the expanded version can be purchased on Steam and mobile.

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Tropes specific to Epic Battle Fantasy 5:

• 11th-Hour Superpower: For the last bonus boss in the Temple of Trials. After four bosses in a row with unremovable crippling status effects, the last one is the reverse: All your stats are buffed by 20% each turn, to a max of 95%. Of course, the boss's stats are so high that you need those buffs just to survive his attacks.
• Absurdly High Level Cap: There's no hard level cap, but the main campaign's strongest enemies reach level 36 and grinding a lot is unlikely to help much as enemies in optional content scale to the players' level, though most of their stats are given a fractional multiplier that grows exponentially with each level above 36. Averted if Scaling Foes is enabled, which makes the level cap 50, though players are expected to reach 46 by the end.
• Action Bomb: On their turn, the Ore enemies self-destruct to perform various effects.
• Adjustable Censorship: This is the first game in the series that features a set of "NSFW" toggles^note 2 had a similar option, but it only controlled whether or not blood would appear during some attacks, which will remove elements like Lance's Nazi/SS logos, Natz' stripperiffic outfits and infamous breast bounce, and the bears' new Dung Fu attacks, among other things. Enemies' death animations are also more cartoonish, disappearing in a puff of smoke rather than the blood effect of the previous games. This is to widen the game's appeal without censoring it completely, something Matt is quite averse to doing.
• After-Combat Recovery: The party automatically heals quickly over time outside of battle, not more than about ten seconds to fully heal. If there's a water bucket with a slime bunny not a screen away from you, you can just use that to fully heal the party immediately after interacting with it.
• Algorithmic Story Branching: As explained in-depth here, the Modular Epilogue's scenes are initially determined by which of and whether the Relationship Values between each possible pair of human Player Characters has reached certain numbers, with target values determined by number of completed achievements in its Achievement System, among other factors, but it will be the Golden Ending if the achievement for beating the Final Boss is beaten on the Harder Than Hard "Epic" difficulty has been acquired, in any game, or if the party is a invoked Solo-Character Run or two-person party Challenge Run.
• A Molten Date with Death: A surfer NPC in the lava half of the Premium-version Freezeflame Dungeon will ask the party about Lava Surfing, which Matt encourages as long as he films it so that his life doesn't go to waste. If you exit and re-enter the screen, the surfer will be gone, with his surfboard and skull floating in the lava.
• And I Must Scream: The equipment upgrade system involves using captured foes to upgrade equipment. Presumably while still alive, given that its achievement is called "Unusual Torture", and its text is: "Melt down a captured foe and use it as a crafting material. The foe's consent is not required."
• Anti Poop-Socking: One of the books in the library says you should take a break every hour, or else you may get hemorrhoids and die prematurely.
• Artistic License – Economics: One of Lance's idle animations is him reading a newspaper. Quoth one of the randomly-picked headlines that may appear:
  ENTIRE WORLD IN DEBT
  BANKS GET RICH
• Ascended Extra: NoLegs was a boss in the first game, a summon from the second game onward, and was promoted to a full-on party member in EBF5.
• Astral Finale: There is a space-themed area called The Beyond, accessed by placing orbs representing the 4 classical elements (fire, earth, air, and water) into their respective pedestals in the middle of The Rapture to activate a portal.
• Attack Reflector: There are several types of mirrors, which reflect either physical or magical (or both!) damage types to any active party member, depending on the mirror. Hitting them with a powerful attack can smash them, preventing this effect while giving 3 turns of Bad Luck to the attacker. Also Voodoo dolls, which return the damage to whoever they represent even if they are in backup, but it also applies to healing. Unlike the Mirrors, you can also counter the Voodoo doll's reflection alltogether by simply Syphoning them.
• Avenging the Villain: Some of the optional bosses (Sol, Skadi, and Vulcan) will attack the party in order to avenge their story boss counterparts.
• Backbench-Hitting Attack: A variety of enemies and bosses have attacks that can damage backup party members. On the other hand, you can freely switch characters in and out of backup, and some support spells also affect backup party members.
• Backtracking: Like in the fourth game, chests and secret levels are often blocked by obstacles that the player can't currently bypass. The characters at one point comment on the amount of backtracking in the game.
• Bag of Kidnapping: There's the capture mechanic. Well, more like box/crate/container of kidnapping, but close enough.
• Barrier Change Boss: The Cosmic Gigalith, which is immune to every element save for one, from which it takes quadruple damage; it changes its weakness every round.
• Batman Can Breathe in Space: Our heroes have no problem walking around and fighting in space without oxygen sources. Not even the extra damage they take after their home planet's deleted explains it — that's just them trying to resist being deleted, too.
• Boss-Altering Consequence: v2 increases HP, Attack, Magic Attack and Accuracy of Final Boss with completion of optional content, namely defeating optional bosses, collecting medals and monster cards. Considering the boss has already ton of HP to begin with it can be rather aggravating.
• Boss Banter: Every boss, even in cases where the boss can't speak and the banter consists of weird sounds instead.
• Boss in Mook Clothing:
  • The game has an upgrade to Defenders as well as the Dragons. There is also the Chibi Knight fights, which give zero indication on the overworld map that they are any different.
  • The Cosmic Monolith's status as a Boss in Mook Clothing is lampshaded in EBF5: the first time you defeat one, Anna will remark that such a powerful enemy must have been a boss and it's a good thing the party won't have to fight any more of them... right?
• Boss Rush: The Steam version features 33 waves of every enemy in the game, including some Bonus Dungeon only enemies, the miniboss rush featuring Chibi Knight and the Hydras, Boss Rush, and Bonus Boss Rush. No Dark Players rush this time.
• Bragging Rights Reward: There's a last room in Grand Gallery that needs all medals to be accessed. The reward? A few items that boost your stats, which is completely useless at that point of the game, considering you have to beat the Boss Rush of Superbosses on Epic difficulty, and some exclusive cheats that completely break the game (though medals are disabled if you have cheats on anyway). To be fair, the guards blocking the path will warn you about this should you talk to them beforehand.
• Brutal Bonus Level: There are five bonus dungeons with beefed-up versions of regular bosses, one special boss, and the level scaling as well.
• The Cameo: After being absent in EBF4, NCHProductions' mascot, Meow Meow, cameos as a Flair called the Meow Meow Badge. Its description flatly calls him "NCH's pet cat", to prevent any potential confusion.
• Carnivorous Healing Factor: The Chomper enemies all have an attack where they try to chomp one of the heroes. The Chomper, regardless of variant, will heal from this if it lands.
• Chain of Deals: There is in Redpine Town, near the entrance to the last location of the game, a ex-member of Lance's army. Should you finish the quest, he'll blow up a house there, and a saddened owner will start another quest that requires 7 Star Balls that grant any wish so he can get his house back. Each of them is given separately from another quest. And then the NPC wishes for a ton of treasure instead. The party is not amused, to put it mildly.
• Charged Attack:
  • One of Lance's skills, Hyper Beam, gives Lance the Charge status. If used again while the status is active, he fires a massive beam which hits all enemies.
  • God, NoLegs' doppelgänger, has a two-round limit-break where the first round, he only charges a massive energy ball (despite having two turns normally) that flies to the sky. 1 round later, it lands on top of your party, dealing massive damage.
  • Devourer has a charged attack that splits the planet in half before they reconnect, and it is used at you on point-blank range. You'd better defend before then, otherwise it is a front-party-wide One-Hit Kill. And on Epic, not even defending will save you; Auto-Revive is a must.
• Cherry Tapping: Anna can hit enemies with her bow. This is apparently so humiliating that the struck enemy may end up surrendering on their next turn (and makes them easier to capture). No longer applicable in v2.0, as the attack does good damage but it can never kill anything.
• Chest Monster:
  • Be very wary of obvious, unguarded chests left out in the open, as they may lead you into surprise battles instead of giving treasure! If you stand close enough to such a trap for long enough, you can see the chest jump every so often.
  • The v2.0 update adds the Treagure enemy, an animated chest with cat-like features that attacks with bites and exploding gems.
• Common HTTP Status Code: Using a Limit Break that shows Earth in its animation after the Devourer's deleted the world will instead show the animation with Earth replaced with a black circle with a red outline and "ERROR 404: NOT FOUND" in red.
• Continuity Reboot: Matt mentions here that Epic Battle Fantasy 5 is going to be this, where the characters meet up for the first time and have homes. There's some sense to it; how can the heroes gaining the respect of their very god be topped? Simple: Obliterate a horror from beyond the veil that is tampering with their reality from behind the scenes! Ultimately though, this is subverted, as the events of previous games actually still happened. The Devourer just wiped everyone's memories of them.
• Convection, Schmonvection: Walking on metal walkways over lava is still okay, but actually fighting there is usually accompanied by some unpleasant weather condition related to lava, such as hot ash that may cause burning. Walking on lava is not possible anymore at all; instead, there are paths of basalt that you can walk on with the right boots, but you'll still take damage. Standing next to lava still does nothing, though.
• Cooldown: There are no more Mana Points. Instead, stronger abilities are restricted by giving them a cooldown, in number of turns, until it can be used again. Some food can be used to have players' cooldowns be reduced, and making use of the Haste effect (allowing those with it to take an immediate additional action) does not count toward cooldowns — they only pass by after an entire side's turn. Some enemies can inflict a status called Disable, which immediately places character's cooldown skills (and sometimes skills without cooldowns) into, well, cooldown.
• Cosmetic Award: Each boss medal can have an additional star if you beat the boss on Epic mode with all challenges on and no cheats that don't have an asterisk. The stars don't count towards achievements or anything, but they're there if you want an absurd challenge and something for it.
• Creator Cameo: The angelic Support Party Member in the video game Matt is playing at the start is a depiction of Phyrrna, the composer who wrote the game's music. She also explicitly appears similarly as a named NPC in Battle Arena, giving you a skill named Phyrrna's Blessing of which the animation is her logo appearing.
• Creepy Doll: Voodoo Dolls. Damaging it damages the counterpart in your party, even if they are in backup. Sometimes it's helpful to capture one, instead of killing it, just to avoid further damage.
• Cuteness Proximity: Can be invoked during the battle with Natalie. When the Lovable status is applied to both Matt and NoLegs, she will get swooned and surrender, ending the fight.
• Cyber Cyclops: The Flybot enemies.
• Debug Room: You can access a debug menu in the mobile version by clicking the sawblade icon in the options. It lets you turn on a bunch of cheat options (some are struck out and unusable) and get things like summons and level ups instantly.
• Defeat Equals Explosion:
  • Downplayed in general that enemies make a small burst of explosion upon death.
  • Lancelot self-destructs to deal huge damage when his HP reaches zero.
  • Cosmic Gigalith makes a big explosion upon its defeat. If the difficulty is set to Hard or above, said explosion deals damage that carries over to the next wave.
• Defeat Means Friendship:
  • All the party members (minus Matt) are recruited into the party after a boss fight in 5.
  • You can also do this with nearly every single enemy you fight, including most bosses, with the new capture mechanic. The tougher the enemy is, the harder it is to capture them, however — and their summoned forms are typically much weaker than the original.
• Destructive Teleportation: Discussed by Lance and Natalie, after they go through a series of teleport pads.
  Lance: The question is... are we being killed and cloned every time we're disassembled and reassembled?
  Natalie: What would that mean?
  Lance: Probably nothing.
• Developer's Foresight: Using a Limit Break in EBF5 that shows Earth in its animation after the Devourer's deleted the world will reflect that and instead show the animation with Earth replaced with a black circle with a red outline and the numbers 404 in red.
• Double-Edged Buff: The Invisible status effect makes you immune to physical attacks, in return for taking double damage from magical attacks. Enchanted works in the opposite way.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • When you get Laurelin down to very low health, you can apparently hear the sounds of the cats inside committing seppuku en masse.
  • Quest NPC Albrecht, due to the fall of Lance's empire and the destruction caused by the meteor strike. His quest has you gather explosive materials, and when you walk off the screen after handing them over, he blows himself up with them. Clearing the quest earns you a Bomb skill.
• Dual Boss: The main story has Lance and Neon Valkyrie. The bonus content has Sol and Skadi, with the twist that which one you choose to start the fight with affects the weather you have to deal with.
• Dung Fu: Bears can crap on a player as an attack, ending with a fart. The players are suitably grossed out to being subject to this — even Anna is not pleased to be on the bad end of this attack.
• Easier Than Easy: The new "Zero" difficulty in EBF5, intended for super casual players.
• Easter Egg: When using 7th Heaven after Laurelin, there is a small chance^note unless the "Cleavage" option is disabled for the illusion of Natalie to forego the usual revealing version of her armor in favor of Censor Box-covered total nudity.
• Eldritch Abomination: The Devourer. Who is full of tentacles, and from another world, with powers including soft-rebooting the entire series and leave it at that.
• Epic Rocking: The soundtrack version of "M3CHANICAL CON-D4MNATION", Lance's boss theme, clocks in at 6:37.
• Export Save: This game has at least 1KB files in the odd .meow extension. They're downloaded from the game and loaded from the file explorer. A program like Notepad++ can easily open them, though, since the.meow file extension is really a renamed .txt file. You will need a base64 decryptor first if you want to edit your file before re-encrpyting it via the same format.
• Expy:
  • Invoked during EBF5's development. Fans claimed that the Flame Sprite enemies in EBF4 looked like Flame Princess, so for EBF5, Matt turned the resemblance from coincidental to blatantly deliberate.
  • The Mouse Slimes are totally just Pichu, Pikachu or Dedenne as slimes.
• Eye Lights Out: The Ore enemies, if you kill them before they explode.
• Fanservice: The "7th Heaven" Limit Break has Natalie posing for the player — and how much she's wearing depends on whether they've enabled the "No Cleavage" option in their settings. She insists she's only doing it for the buffs!
• Fire-Forged Friends: As our protagonists are in a Continuity Reboot and none of them have any prior history at all anymore, they must learn to trust each other through battles and hardships again. (Although they do have a strange sense of having been through this before. Odd, huh? Probably nothing.)
• Flipping the Bird:
  • Some attacks cause a stone fist to rise from the ground. This is one of the configurations it can take.
  • Matt, Natz and Lance do this when they're particularly angry in some dialogue boxes. NoLegs of course is incapable of doing so due to being limbless, and Anna instead does an Eyelid Pull Taunt.
• Flunky Boss: So ubiquitous is this trope in EBF that when the party fight the Cosmic Gigalith at the end of the game, Anna specifically notes that it's fighting alone, without any backup, and how unusual that is. Sure enough, it's not the Final Boss. The real Final Boss, the Devourer, has respawning eyeballs and tentacles that fight alongside it.
• Fragile Speedster: No-Legs has much lower health than the other party members, but a very high evade stat. If you lean into this with his equipment he'll often dodge several turns worth of boss attacks in a row only to be one-shot when his luck runs out.
• Frictionless Ice: Ice blocks never stop sliding until they hit an object. There are puzzles involving floors of ice that do this as well. There is a pair of spiked boots late into Frozen Valley that allows the party to walk normally on ice.
• Game Over: Similar to the fourth, this game has the same Game Over theme, but the background is completely dark.
• Giant Mook: The giant enemies return in 5 for some waves. Foe Rush now has two giant enemies: a Dark Bush and a Slime Bunny. Both are also 15 levels higher than the party.
• Girls with Moustaches: Doable, if you equip Natz or Anna with Fake Mustache.
• Glad He's On Our Side: Matt remarks this of Anna after seeing her Limit Break for the first time, and of Lance the first time he uses Neon Valkyrie's Machine Guns after his Heel–Face Turn.
• Glitch Entity: Grey Pixels, Red Pixels, Green Pixels, and Dead Pixels, as well as their Elite Mook cousins that have a jumble of garbage and hex characters for a name, are all glitch enemies with weird properties.
• Grand Finale: With the most epic scope as of all the games (especially thanks to v.2.0), an ending that wraps everything up neatly, and a grave that states EBF6 is dead along with all who ask for it, this is truly the final installment. Well, for the main series at least.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Exaggerated when the Devourer reveals that not only are Akron and Godcat his creations, but all five games were just simulations run by him. You can't get much greater scope than that.
• Hailfire Peaks: The first bonus dungeon is also a straight example: it's located inside the Ice Cave, but has pools of lava all over the place alongside the frozen sections. Matt naturally lampshades it the instant the party first steps inside.
• Hard Mode Perks: Higher difficulties means more HP for enemies, which means it'll be easier to get enemies to a lower HP percentage, making them easier to catch.
• Heal It with Nature: "The embodiment of nature's spirit", Earth's Whisper, when upgraded, "Randomly casts Refresh between turns.", where Refresh is "Advanced healing magic".
• Holiday Mode: Special quests can be undertaken and equipment can be earned. For example, around Christmas time, enemies will occasionally drop Candy Canes. They can't be used for anything, but you can trade a bunch of them to an NPC in exchange for Santa outfits for your party members.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: Lance crashes Neon Valkyrie into your party and kidnaps Natalie. You can't do a thing about it, as it deals thousands of damage to everyone. It's more like a cutscene than a real fight. Strangely enough, when he uses the same attack during the actual boss battle, it deals much less damage, albeit it still hurts quite a lot.
• Hotter and Sexier: The second through fourth games had a Limit Break for Natalie, called Kyun, where she did a pose winking towards the screen. 5 renamed this 7th Heaven and changed it to an illusion of a full-body shot where she dresses down into a more revealing version of the costume she was wearing at the time, with a rare Easter Egg alternate version where she's completely naked aside from a pair of small censor bars.
• HP to One: Second version of the game changes Anna's bow whack to a variation of this: If the attack would kill an enemy, it leaves them with one HP instead. You'll appreciate it when capturing weak foes, such as small slimes.
• Infinity +1 Element: Like Poison (the element) before EBF4, Bio becomes this. This is mainly due to the introduction of The Virus status, which does the same thing as Poison (the status), except it spreads and renews by itself, meaning you have to infect someone once and you don't have to bother with it again. To top it off, it stacks with Poison, so you can put maximum stacks of both on something and it drops quickly even with some resistance. The only disadvantage is that Virus can spread on you from the enemies, but usually the weapons inflicting the Virus also provide some resistance to Bio-aligned damage. Specifically, Lance's maxed-out Biohazard Blaster comes with the Virus as a status and whopping 150% resistance to Poison (while inflicting Poison on Lance, basically giving a weaker Healing Factor).
• Infinity +1 Sword: Star Hammer for NoLegs in EBF5. It boosts his non-elemental skills, can randomly cast Falling Star between turns, halves damage from three main elements, his attacks have 100% chance of dispelling buffs (critical for later bosses), and can follow up with Star Punch. The main reason, though, is that the weapon multiplies both his attack and magic by 2.3 and also raises both defenses by 20%. The only weapon with stronger attack bonuses reduces his HP so much it is barely usable.
• Interface Screw:
  • The Shroud status effect hides literally all information on screen on the character it's been applied to. Health, buffs, status, everything.
  • The glitched field effect in certain areas does this to everyone on the field. Only HP is visible, and even that is an uncertainty. One area is so bad that it corrupts even the graphics for equipment and skills.
• Interface Spoiler: The Skills and Equips interfaces gives plenty of space for other people aside from Matt to fit into them, making it obvious other people will soon fill up that space, let alone being able to get other equipment for Lance, Natalie and Anna before you meet them.
• Joke Item:
  • Found after beating God in V1, one of NoLegs' weapons is the Buster Sword, "the strongest sword of them all!". Well, according to the description. It's actually a much smaller replica made entirely out of "100% recycled cardboard" and duct tape. It's as useless as it sounds. V2 buffed it to increase stats and made it more easily accessible, pulling it out of this trope.
  • The Electric Bat summon is literally worse than useless: It will confuse the entire party, causing them to act randomly without your input... and that's it. There is no purpose to it aside from maybe you thought it'd be funny to watch the party automatically fight the battle. At least the Water Slime summon can be used for Cherry Tapping enemies down to a capturable state when you don't have Anna!
• Karma Houdini: Lance again. Not only does he plan to take advantage of a global catastrophe to unite the world under a fascist regime, as he does in EBF2, he also kidnaps several women (including Natalie) to act as "breeding stock" for said regime. Once again, his only punishment upon defeat is to join the party. This time it's justified, as they're only recruiting him for his knowledge of the monoliths and they don't particularly like or trust him (especially Natalie). It's also downplayed: aside from the party's own distrust, several NPCs are astonished or appalled to see Lance just casually walking around with you. Even Lance himself is surprised that he got off so lightly.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: The ending reveals the game's technically not so much a Continuity Reboot as it our heroes having their minds wiped and shoved into an alternate scenario by the Devourer. Its demise gives them their memories back.
• Lava Surfing: Darkly but hilariously subverted. One guy in the Freezeflame Dungeon tries to surf on lava. Matt snarkily remarks that he hopes someone records it, otherwise it would be a waste of life. Come back later and you can find his apparently lavaproof surfboard stuck in lava next to what is likely his skull.
• Level Scaling:
  • Before the 1.5 patch, in all optional areas. When you level up, so do enemies, but they get more stats per level. It makes it harder, the higher level you are, to account for the Rare Candy items that are acquired throughout the game. Stat growth is exponential, so you're punished the more you level up. However, you can do some Money Grinding instead and buy stat raising items that modify the stat growth ratio, so with enough patience and level exploring, you can have them enough to overcome the enemy stat growth. But, such items' price doubles with each buy... After the 1.5 patches, it changes things so after level 36, it does get easier, even without stat boosting Rare Candy.
  • The version 2.0 takes this trope to its logical conclusion, where everything scales with your level and enemies in bonus dungeons reward AP, EXP and money. On one hand, it allows you to max your skills further, but until level 36 the enemies get stronger faster than you do and you're getting levels faster as well, meaning you have to pretty much dump all your money on stat boosting Rare Candy. The game gets considerably easier once you're past level 36, though, especially if you did spend all money on Rare Candy.
• LOL, 69: Summoning the Beholder, which uses a censored attack involving Naughty Tentacles, costs 69 SP. It also has 2169 base HP, though you won't know that unless you look it up on a wiki or in the game's files.
• Luck-Based Mission: Downplayed with Air Strikes weather which can drop bombs or medkits randomly on literally any single individual in the battle. It can turn the fight into a cakewalk unlike if the weather had not existed, or it could heavily contribute to killing your party in a turn or two.
• Magikarp Power: Red Ribbon in EBF5. Natalie starts with it, which suggests it will fall by the wayside by the end of the game, but once leveled to maximum, it randomly grants Auto-Revive, a rare and powerful effect.
• Marathon Boss:
  • The Superboss Neon Valhalla, because 1) It has high HP and defense, 2) it has permanent, unremovable Regen, and most importantly, 3) it periodically summons three parts, the Bombs, that if not handled in a few (read: 3) turns, can wipe out your party with ridiculous damage, so for most of the fight, you'll end up destroying those while the main boss is healing itself. Curse is basically mandatory.
  • The Cosmic Gigalith and The Devourer have, on Normal Difficulty, a total HP of over 6 million. The Devourer also has four auxiliary parts that can potentially heal it, and absorbs Virus and Poison that some of its parts (the tentacles) can spread when wounded. Needless to say, you'll be there for a while.
• Maximum HP Reduction: Besides the attacks that may cause this, 5 also introduces Scorch that works like Burn with added effect of reducing your maximum HP each turn when in effect.
• Mirror Boss: After beating all the optional bosses, you can enter the Temple of Trials to battle the Evil Players (Matteus, Lancelot, Natalia and Annabelle, counterparts of Matt, Lance, Natz and Anna respectively). Defeat/Capture all of them, and you can then take on NoLegs' counterpart, God, as well.
• Minus World: Some of the secret areas in 5 are represented as a glitchy pixel that acts as a portal to whisk you into a secret level where the music is a chiptune derivative and most of the enemies are glitched-out Grey Pixels and Dead Pixels.
• Monster Arena: The Battle Arena next to the Data Bunker. In it, a single character without the ability to summon monsters must defeat 10 sets of foes with one wave each, plus some exclusive enemies for one of them. All of them have to be beaten without leaving, but dying doesn't reset anything.
• Multiple Endings: Of the Modular Epilogue variety. While the overall ending is the same, the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue varies depending on each party member's hidden Relationship Values with each other.
  • Bad ending: Max out three or less of the party's relationships. The group goes their separate ways after the final battle, still holding on to personal grudges. While they do meet occasionally to grab a beer and reminisce, they never replicate their first success.
  • Normal ending: Max out four or five of the party's relationships. The group saves the world and gains some fans, but others condemn them for their recklessness and kleptomania. They come to be seen as dependable when times are tough, but a nuisance in times of peace.
  • Golden Ending: Max out all six of the party's relationships. The group saves the world and is able to make up for the damage they caused along the way, causing them to be generally hailed as saviors. They remain good friends for years to come.
• Mundane Made Awesome: Matt's first sword is a hockey stick he grabbed on a whim. It's called the Ultra Pro 9000X.
• Musical Spoiler: Every time you fight a Cosmic Monolith, a specific music plays. In at least one instance, the battle has multiple waves and said enemy isn't present in the first wave. No points for guessing what awaits you on the subsequent waves.
• Mythology Gag: With EBF5 acting as a soft reboot, there's naturally quite a lot of these in the game, like Matt commenting on feeling like he remembers using his signature Heaven's Gate sword (which is no longer default) when he obtains it in the game.
• Nausea Fuel: Played With In-Universe with the reactions coming from party members.
  • Some enemies such as squids will inflict the Stuffed status on dying (the afflicted character is unable to use a food item) because they're just that gross to watch.
  • Inverted with some enemies such as mammoths, who instead inflict Hungry (the character loses a turn and eats a random food item) when killed.
• Ninja Cat: One of the types of cat that can be fought, are "Cat Ninja", who are "very evasive cats".
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Quoted by Lance when using Poseidon as a summon on Vulcan. When proven that the party has captured Poseidon and not killed him, Vulcan assumes it was a ghost and will still insist on avenging him.
• No Ontological Inertia: Defeating the Devourer at the end is apparently enough to undelete the planet after its deletion a few moments before. It also undoes, among other things, the Laser-Guided Amnesia the Devourer had hit the party with, which caused them to believe they'd never met before.
• Not Me This Time: Anna's boss fight starts off due to mistaking Matt for a facist since he has blonde hair. Matt is offended due to it being accused of something he hasn't done unlike when he met Natalie.
• Nostalgia Level: The Data Bunker has eight series of battles based on previous games, two per game. They borrow elements from the originals while keeping some mechanics of 5, for example 1's simulations make Accuracy and Evasion completely pointless.
• Outside-the-Box Tactic: The battles against the recruitable party members can all be ended through alternative means, instead of just beating the crap out of whoever's about to join your party. You also get medals for doing it.
• Pink Means Feminine: Natalie's Steroids are all pink colored: Poptart, Donut, Cake, Lollipop.
• Point of No Return: On the Steam store page for the game, the "Epic Battle Fantasy 5 does NOT feature..." section mentions: "Points of no return."
• Power at a Price: Multiple:
  • Base game has few weapons that are like this. For example Honjo Masamune for NoLegs provides insane buffs to attack and defense, but decreases his already low HP by 70%.
  • Equip Remix however ups the ante. There is a weapon for Anna (Juggernaut) that randomly casts Machine Guns, Sea Mine and M.O.A.B (the last one being Lance's skill with 10 rounds cooldown) between turns for free, at a cost of her being confused half the time.
• Puzzle Boss: Multiple:
  • The Evil Players fight much like the Dark Players in 4, only they force a permanent status effect on the party as long as they're alive. All but the last Evil Player will limit the tactics the player can use, forcing them to make better use of tricks that aren't affected by the status effects. The last Evil Player gives the party a beneficial "Epic" status effect, but is balanced to easily kill party members if they aren't fully buffed from Epic, forcing rotations of party members if they die and revive.
  • Each future party member has to be fought (barring Matt) and almost all of them have alternative means of defeat (which are quite logical if you are aware of the game's lore). There are even achievements for defeating them all this way.
• Rare Candy: Some food items are classified as Steroids which boost the stats of the characters.
• Razor Wind: Gale, which becomes Tempest at level 3, a physical skill that does wind damage to one enemy.
• Red Filter of Doom: Losing the last living party member(s) results in the background turning red for a moment before the Game Over screen... Even Auto Revive doesn't prevent the red "flash", though it does otherwise work as normal.
• Relationship Upgrade: Matt and Natalie can become a couple in their Golden Ending.
• Relationship Values: All four of the human party members have a hidden statistic determining how close they are that can be increased by using them in battle together. (NoLegs doesn't have relationships, but boosts the rate at which the other two frontline fighters grow closer.) This value determines how good of an ending you get.
• Recurring Boss: Chibi Knight, fought 3 times, getting more powerful each time. Levelling up, but also getting new abilities.
• Ret-Gone: The Devourer tries to do this to Godcat between 4 and 5. It isn't quite perfect, since NoLegs can still summon her as his Limit Breaks. Also, her religion remains intact, causing everyone to see the new God as a cat. Natalie also recognizes Godcat if NoLegs summons her while Natalie is in the front line.
• Reviving Enemy: The Mammoths have a high chance to revive when killed, unless afflicted with certain status effects. The game also sees the return of the Hydra boss in 3 elemental variants, all of which have the ability to revive the other heads unless you kill them all on more or less the same turn.
• Ship Tease: To go along with the Relationship Upgrade when they've fought together enough before the end of the game, Matt and Natalie are a tad more embarrassed when talking to each other while they've just met. And NoLegs doesn't stop teasing it either.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: The last boss fight in the Temple of Trials, the most powerful boss in the game. The fight occurs in bright sunlight and features a calm, wistful song with lyrics about returning home. This comes immediately after four very dark bosses in a dark-themed area with heavy metal music.
• Status Effect-Powered Ability: Every element can be boosted by a neutral or negative status effect. However, the neutral status effects like Dry or Light will also protect you from damage of other elements, such as Light decreasing Earth damage.
• Stone Wall: Matt's Love Blade lets him become one, as it cuts Attack in half and increases his defenses by 30%. It's description is:
  "A sword made for healing, not fighting."
• Superstition Episode: This is the only game in the series that makes luck into a mechanic, even as just names for specific statuses. Good Luck is a Status Buff, while Bad Luck is a negative Status Effect.
• Surprisingly Creepy Moment: You'll find dark underground chambers guarded by masked NPCs who speak in creepy growls, animals that sometimes turn red and make an equally creepy growl when touched, glitched areas that temporarily mess up part of the game, culminating in a horrifying area where the party scream at you to stop moving them while messages like "DIE" and "ROT" flash up on the screen, a boss who uses your party members as a mouthpiece to directly tell the player to stop playing the game (while likely confusing them so they act without your input), and an Eldritch Abomination final boss that knows you exist, threatens to invade your reality, and deletes the protagonists' planet on a whim.
• Taking You with Me: Multiple:
  • On Hard or Epic difficulty, the Cosmic Gigalith's dying explosion will hit the whole party for a significant amount of damage. And then the Devourer appears and attacks you before you get a chance to heal...
  • Lancelot also does this, although there's no new enemies after he dies. Lance has a different dialog if you manage to avoid this by capturing the boss.
• Tele-Frag: The Monoliths resort to this when they're syphoned in this game.
• Time-Limit Boss: Twice:
  • Matteus, the evil golem twin of Matt, gives you 15 turns to defeat him before an automatic Game Over kicks in. Virus and Poison are mandatory on Epic difficulty.
  • The Devourer will delete the planet when his HP goes down to 25%. This inflicts a damage-over-time effect on everyone that raises the longer the battle takes. Take too long, and it will outdamage any healing you have and kill you.
• Throwing Your Sword Always Works: Matt has an attack where he throws his currently equipped sword at the enemy wave, where it spins around several times and damages all foes with each spin. Appropriately enough, it's called "Slicing Cyclone".
• Too Dumb to Live: A surfer NPC in the lava half of the Premium-version Freezeflame Dungeon will ask the party about Lava Surfing, which Matt encourages as long as he films it so that his life doesn't go to waste. If you exit and re-enter the screen, the surfer will be gone, with his surfboard and skull floating in the lava.
• Unnaturally Looping Location: The glitch worlds loop with left leading to the right, and up leading to the bottom of the screen, and vice versa. Except for the final Redpine one, where going up leads to a Superboss, but all the other sides work the same.
• Useless Item: Lampshaded by the flavor text of The Rubber Boots, which states that they 'allow you to walk on acidic tiles, but there aren't any in the game at the moment'. There still aren't after the V2 update.
• Vague Hit Points: The uses of Interface Screw in the game:
  • The Shroud status effect hides literally all information on-screen on the character it's been applied to. Health, buffs, status, everything.
  • The glitched field effect in certain areas does an Interface Screw to everyone on the field. Only HP is visible, and even that is an uncertainty. One area is so bad that it corrupts even the graphics for equipment and skills.
• Video Game Stealing: This game has a skill, albeit inaccurate, that can steal items from foes. Makes sense, considering our heroes' history.
• Visual Pun: In this game, the icon for the tired status effect is literally a tire.
• Voodoo Doll: This game has one type each for Matt, Natalie, Anna, Lance, and NoLegs^note the last of which has legs, with skills taken from the players. The most important feature to keep in mind is that attacking a doll damages its counterpart! In other words, try not to use powerful attacks against them.
• Wasteful Wishing: An NPC uses the Star Balls to wish for... a mountain of treasure instead of a house. The Players are not amused in the slightest.
• Weather of War: A new feature. Each area of the game world will have several possible weather conditions that randomly cycle over time, with each one affecting battle conditions in a different way. These conditions range from obvious ones like rain, to weirder ones like "Cherry Blossom" and "Cursed Ground".
• Weird Weather: There's weather like 'Energy', 'Radiation', and 'Lava Flow' that are not weather at all. There's even weather like '??—[[/@#,,' in glitch areas.
• A Winner Is You: If you collect all medals and access the last room in the Grand Gallery, you can find a hidden note saying: 'Congratumulations! You win the game! This is the end! Plz buy second copy!'. Lampshaded by one of the NPCs guarding the room, who admits its contents aren't that exciting.
• You Bastard!:
  • Played for Horror. The party are horrified by the nightmarish final glitch area and plead with you, the player, to leave immediately and not fight the boss. After you invariably fight and defeat it, Matt calls you out on it, and the entire party relate how scarred they feel as though trying to guilt you.
    Matt: You sent us in there even though we begged you not to. You're a monster.
  • Also to variable degree after you defeat the enemies from the arcade games. For example after you defeat TREAGURE enemies, you get the message that you plundered the treasure and learned nothing.

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