Chaos Rings II

The third game in the Chaos Rings franchise.

Chaos Rings II abandons the Ark Arena storyline of the first two games, and instead focuses on a character named Darwin, who is chosen to be the Nominator, and given the task of sacrificing four Candidates in order to prevent the destruction of the world. This game adds new elements to the battle and exploration systems, and allows players to choose their own paths in the story, affecting the plot, with an awful Light Is Not Good twist that turns the story upside down.

Tropes used in Chaos Rings II include:

• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: No matter what, your party can never be more than two people. Especially obvious in the Playable Epilogue, where the 7 playable characters split up in order to escape the dungeon.
• Armor-Piercing Slap:
  • Marie to Darwin, when he offers to let her kill him in revenge.
  • Li Hua offers an Armor Piercing Punch to Orlando for not being around while Xiao was growing up.
  • Marie (again) to Orlando when he starts talking about a love letter she once wrote to Darwin.
• Battle Couple:
  • Darwin and Marie, although neither will admit their feelings.
  • Orlando and Li Hua, in the backstory. And in the Playable Epilogue content.
• Blade Lock: Araki to Darwin, when he first attacks him.
• Blood on These Hands/These Hands Have Killed: Li Hua, Araki, and Darwin, though mostly the former two. Bachs has a great time using this reason to justify their upcoming deaths.
• Body Horror: The True Final Boss of Chaos Rings II appears to have burst out of Ophan Lessica's body--the Ophan's face is dangling from its chest.
• Bragging Rights Reward:
  • In the initial release, the Super MV—the best accessory in the game, which gives great boosts to all stats. The catch? It's the reward for defeating the last (and toughest) boss in the game.
  • The April 2012 update averts this for the Super MV, as each of the new P.U.B. bosses are much stronger than Piu Piu, making it useful. These new marks each drop a party member's Infinity+1 Sword and Armor, which are then useful against the strongest (and new final) P.U.B. boss, as well as a strengthened form of the True Final Boss.
• Colony Drop: After defeating Amon, the orbiting cathedral starts to fall on the planet. Darwin is able to stop it using Neron's power, however.
• Color Coded for Your Convenience/Color-Coded Elements: The spells are color coded by their element (red, green, or blue), as a healing spell (yellow), or as non-elemental (white).
• Combat Tentacles:
  • Famine has two on his back.
  • The Azi Dahaka family have two claw-tipped tentacles that grow from the sides of their body.
  • The Destroyer sends tentacles to attack the location of the Rite. Although called tentacles, they seem to have mouths, vocal cords, and teeth. Lots of teeth. They also come into play during the boss fight against him, and they inflict some nasty status effects.
• Combination Attack:
  • Choosing Pair instead of Solo in battle allows both characters to perform the same action, usually for spectacular results. This means both characters will be hit by any attacks aimed their way, but it also means that they share any damage blocking or reflecting abilities.
  • Summon Magic is a combination of this and Limit Break. Darwin can only summon an Ophan if the Break Meter is built up to 1 unit and he selects Pair attacks.
• Continuity Nod:
  • In the library, there are records of past Rites of Resealing. The 8th Rite lists Escher as a Nominator and fellow Ark Arena contestant Eluca as a Candidate...
  • In one of the hidden libraries, the records indicate that Amon got the idea for the Rite from myths about a "tournament to the death" where the winner rebuilt humanity. Three guesses what tournament it was.
• Convection, Schmonvection: Zig Zagged. When Darwin first enters the planet's core, he's severely affected by the heat, and Lessica has to use her powers to protect him from it. However, when all the Pillars revive, right next to the core, they're all unaffected by it.
• Defeat Means Friendship: The only way to gain an Ophan is to defeat it.
• Duel Boss: Darwin gets one against Araki, then another one with him before Darwin sacrifices him. And a second one against Lessica, before descending into Abbadon. In fact, all of the Ophanim battles are this, except the final one.
• Earn Your Happy Ending
• Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: The same elements return. Blaze beats Gale, Aqua beats Blaze, and Gale beats Aqua.
• Elite Mook: Abaddon, which as you can guess, makes everything harder. If Abaddon wasn't enough for you, fear not, for Lessica introduces The All-Seeing Eye. Cue armored Cicada and Coal Billiken.
• Emotionless Girl: Lessica, mostly.
• Endgame Plus: You can save your game after defeating the final boss. Loading from that save results in starting, story-wise, from just before you enter the final dungeon.
• Eyes Do Not Belong There: The Azi Dahaka palette swaps have eyes all over their bodies.
• Face Death with Dignity: All the Pillars, eventually.
  • In the library one of the records where the pillars were all world leaders indicates they faced their fate willingly.
• Final Boss Preview: It opens with a variant of this, being a flash-forward of the actual final boss. Subverted in that this isn't the actual final boss.
• Flying Seafood Special: The jellyfish type enemies.
• Hammerspace: Where everyone but Darwin and Araki keep their weapons.
• Happily Ever After: After defeating Piu-Piu and letting him regain his memories, he rewards the characters by showing his true power and destroying the Hall and Amon in one blast. This leads to the eight of them (Lessica included) safely landing on the surface of the earth. Though, it might be Bittersweet Ending somewhat, just because Piu-Piu mourns Jodie, Meg, and Catherine's burning up in space, and it ends with Darwin and the boys failing to create new cut-outs and Marie and the girls substituting for Piu-Piu's harem.
• Gods Need Prayer Badly: The entire point of the Rite is to get Sopia power through prayer for the Creator, who uses that power to keep himself a alive. Apparently, he will cease to exist if no one believes in him.
• Heroic Resolve: Darwin is thoroughly battered by Neron, but manages to revive himself in order to take down the Destroyer. He pays the price for it, though.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • Each of the pillars thinks they're doing this. It's a lie by the Creator, but it turns out that if they hadn't bound themselves to Neron by becoming Sacrifices, then Darwin wouldn't have been able to defeat him, and the cycle would never have ended.
  • Lessica makes one, transforming into an Ophan and allowing herself to be defeated in order to bind Amon, the True Final Boss, to the physical plane (and thus making him vulnerable to the party's attacks) via her own body. She survives long enough to die in Darwin's arms after Amon's defeat.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: Happens no less than four times, whenever the heroes try to defy the Rite or the gods themselves.
• Hub Level: The cathedral-like building which is actually in orbit over Earth where the Nominator and Pillars are summoned.
• Instant Runes: Summoning an Ophan.
• In the End You Are on Your Own: Darwin has one final fight with Amon, away from all his allies. They do, however, support him, and provide some of the strength he needs to take down the Creator.
• Last Request:
  • All Araki wants is a fair duel to the death with Darwin. He gets his wish. Twice, if you count the battle with his Ophan.
  • Li Hua asks Bachs for time alone with Darwin. To Darwin, she asks him to take Xiao to the upcoming Festival in her stead, since she can no longer fulfill that promise to him.
  • Conor requests to see his parents one last time from Bachs, although Bachs only allows him to view them remotely. He asks Darwin to tell his parents how much he loves them and that he was proud to be their son, since he doesn't think he did it often enough.
  • Marie just asks Darwin to survive this.
• Limit Break: They are called "awakenings" and can be used when one has either taken or dealt enough damage.
• Love At First Sight/Love At First Punch: A very good case of both. Li Hua tells Darwin about how she and Orlando met for the first time on the battlefield and nearly killed each other, thinking they were from opposing sides of the war. Li Hua remarks that it was his eyes that got her.
• Load-Bearing Boss:
  • Neron. After defeating him, the planet's core begins to revert to the way it was before.
  • Amon. After defeating him, his floating cathedral starts to fall from orbit.
• Manipulative Bastard Bachs, AKA Amon. The Rite of Resealing only exists in order for him to receive prayers and therefore godliness.
• Multiple Endings: Chaos Rings II features four after defeating Ophan Marie, each extending the story.
  • Downer Ending: Darwin decides to go along with the Rite of Resealing, and ends up being mind-wiped by Bachs, and sent to destroy the world with the Four Horseman.
  • Normal Ending: Darwin decides to defy the Rite, and goes with Lessica to destroy Neron in Abaddon, the core of the planet. He successfully defeats Neron, and restores the five Pillars, but dies in the process.
  • True Ending: Darwin is revived after defeating Neron, and receives Neron's Sopia. Lessica then reveals the truth behind the plot, and the party goes to defeat Amon. Lessica dies, but she dies free and happy.
  • Golden Ending: see Happily Ever After above.
• New Game+
• Now or Never Kiss: Marie kisses Darwin just before he kills her in lieu of telling him how she feels.
• Palette Swap: Any family of monsters are the same model with altered colors. Conquest gets a slightly upgraded model the second time you fight him.
• Pietà Plagiarism:
  • Darwin holding the mortally wounded Marie, both times. Bonus points for her name being a variation of Mary.
  • Darwin holding the dying Lessica. We're seeing a pattern here.
• Pinata Enemy/Metal Slime: Billikins return as these. They give disproportionately high experience and monetary rewards, but tend to run from battle. Coal Billikins are especially nasty, and can even kill an underleveled party.
• Plot Coupon: Sopia cores and the Chalice.
• Powers as Programs: The Sopia Cores you collect from enemies and bosses, of which three can be equipped on any given character, and each one can hold up to 6 abilities. You also get a Sopia core from Orlando and every other Pillar, including Lessica that only Darwin can equip, that gives him all the abilities of that person.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: In the library one of the logs is from a rite where the pillars were a bunch of slave owners and the Nominator was one of their slaves. The log suggests he was quite eager.
• Sadistic Choice: A significant part of the plot of Chaos Rings II. Darwin must choose which of his teammates to sacrifice as Pillars, with the knowledge that whoever he chooses, he'll just have to sacrifice another one soon enough.
• Senseless Sacrifice: The deaths of every Pillar throughout history--hundreds upon hundreds of sacrificed lives--were used not to protect the world, but to strengthen and renew belief in the Creator's divinity.
• Sick Episode: Darwin winds up poisoned after saving Conor from Famine. Marie and another party member go to look for a Sopia Core to cure him, despite him needing a Sopia Core in order to kill one of them, not to mention being the man tasked to kill them all and the man who killed their brother/friend/lover/rival Orlando.
• Sidequest: Piu-Piu's cut-out girls give them out.
  • Bonus Boss: Several, with most added by an update to the game in April 2012. From weakest (relatively speaking) to strongest:
    • Rematches against the Ophanim.
    • Piu Piu.
    • One on one rematches with the Four Horsemen, the Destroyer, and the Herald.
    • Two on two fights with Shadow Counterparts of the party members.
    • Shadow versions of Garrick and Alto.
  • Fetch Quest: One quest has you go to one of the hidden libraries to retrieve a recipe.
• Signs of the End Times: The appearance of the Four Horseman, in true biblical fashion.
• Summon Magic: The Ophans.
• True Final Boss: Amon, the true identity of Bachs and the Creator of the world.
• Vendor Trash: Piu-Piu's Collection items, which is his long-lost Porn Stash. He'll pay good money to have them returned.
• Void Between the Worlds: Nearly every area has parts connected by this, which Bachs explains are put there by the Creator to help the party get where they need to go.
• Weapon Twirling: Orlando, Darwin, and Marie all do this at various times.
• You Killed My Father: Everyone but Conor bags on Darwin for killing Orlando. Orlando just happens to be Marie's step-brother, Araki's rival who he had an unsettled dispute with, and Li Hua's former comrade and the father of her child.
• Zero Effort Boss: The final fight with Amon. Darwin cannot die and the awakening he gains during the fight takes out Amon in one hit. Also counts as an All Your Powers Combined because Darwin can only defeat Amon after being enhanced by the power of his friends' Ophanim and the power of Neron's Sopia. The fight before it however, is not a zero effort fight.