Realm of the Mad God

The Mad God Oryx has transported you to his realm as food for his vile minions. Will you proceed quietly to your fate or fight back?

Realm of the Mad God is a free-to-play MMORPG which can be found here, and on Steam^[1]. Gameplay takes cues from both the Roguelike and danmaku genres, with permadeath in effect for everyone. The game is small and embedded on that page so unless you don't have Flash installed you can play right away.

Tropes used in Realm of the Mad God include:

• Absurdly Low Level Cap: The maximum attainable level, 20, can be achieved within as little as thirty minutes, although maxing out all of your stats will take much longer (but still relatively little time compared to other MMORPGS). Justified by the permanent death system.
• Action Bomb: The grey blob, which is a grey blob. They like to get right up next to you before exploding in a circle of fire. A whole swarm of them is a common way to end a game in a hurry.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: Enough players in a group can do this to virtually anything in the game without taking any casualties.
• Awesome but Impractical:
  • The Spider Eye ring is assumed by some players to be the best ring in the game due to its rarity, but it no better than a standard Ring of Health Regeneration if you are not a magic user. And health regeneration is also a pretty useless stat to begin with.
  • All classes now use MP, the Spider Eye ring is now bit more practical, but only at lower levels.
• Big Bad: Oryx the Mad God, who only appears when the event bosses have been defeated on a single server. Actually considered by some to be less powerful than many other gods (highest-level random mobs).
• Bonus Dungeon: The Wine Cellar, the ultimate challenge for end-game characters and containing a more powerful version of the Big Bad.
• Boring but Practical: The Knight's default Wooden Shield. Although there are many higher-tier shields that do more damage and have more range, the fact that the basic Wooden Shield has the same stun duration for a significantly lower costs often results in some Knights preferring to keep their starter shield, even when they have high-tier alternatives.
• Bullet Hell: Every attack in the game is a projectile; hordes of enemies or high-level monsters can quickly flood the screen with multicolored bullets. Special mention goes to the Skull Shrine and Cube God bosses. Fortunately, unless you're a low-level character in the midst of the godlands, practically none of the enemy's shots are one-hit kills.
• Continuing Is Painful: If you die, you get to start all the way back as a fresh level 1, and any items in your inventory at the time of death are lost forever.
• Dark Is Not Evil: All Necromancers are good. Those that fall to The Dark Side are called Deathmages.
  • The Paladin's (currently) best Seal, the Seal of Blasphemous Prayer^[2] is pitch black and is described as being considered dangerous, but it still heals you and your friends.
• Death Is a Slap on The Wrist: Despite the use of Final Death, you're actually encouraged to die, as doing so is the only way to obtain the game's currency, Fame.
• Degraded Boss: A number of cases, most notably the Horned Drake, which tends to show up in groups of three or more in higher level areas.
• Disc One Nuke: Items which are fairly unremarkable finds for a level-capped character, like the Staff of Destruction, can still be used to breeze through the trek to level 20 without much effort. However, they won't help you much in the quest for the game's ultimate weapons.
• Drunken Master: According to the "official" fan lore, much of Oryx's power comes from copious consumption of wine.
• Dungeon Crawling: The game currently has 11 dungeons, with more on the way.
• Even Evil Has Standards: According to the lore, Oryx does take pity on baby drakes whose parents have been killed by the heroes. Of course, he shows it by turning them into trees. He is a Mad God, after all.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: If it moves and isn't a player, it's an enemy.
• Evil God: Oryx.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Many dungeons. No prizes for guessing what enemies are in the Spider Den.
• Experience Leak: Everyone who is in the vicinity of an enemy gets a set number of experience points (regardless of how many players there are) when it's slain, with the participants getting the full amount and non-participants receive less.
• Excuse Plot: You're stuck in the Realm of the Mad God. Here's how you move, shoot and loot corpses. Now go kill things.
• Eyes Do Not Belong There: The Pentaract Towers have eyes. And are surrounded by a swarm of eyes. Which will shoot you.
• Final Death: If your character dies, he is gone for good. The game even places a gravestone where he died. That said, if you save up the massive amount of fame required to purchase an Amulet of Resurrection, you at least get one more chance.
• Foe-Tossing Charge: The common practice of player 'trains', so called because it consists of a horde of players 30+ strong charging along the main roads and shooting everything that moves. Anything found near these roads will be consumed as if by a swarm of army ants.
• Fragile Speedster: Rogues, Archers, Assassins, and Huntresses.
• Heal Thyself: The Priest's healing ability can heal himself, as well as the other people in the spell's range.
• Infinity+1 Sword/Dagger/Staff/Bow/Wand: As of now, the Dagger of Foul Malevolence, the Bow of Covert Havens, the Staff of the Cosmic Whole, the Wand of Recompense, and the Sword of Acclaim. Also of note are "untiered" items, which drop from dungeon and event bosses. These are exceptionally rare and generally have effects different from normal weapons: the Crystal Sword, for example, has a longer range than other swords.
• Interface Screw: Being inflicted with confusion will rotate your controls 90 degrees. Usually, the effect doesn't last very long, but the bats in the Manor of the Immortals confuse you for several seconds.
  • Enemies in the Forbidden Jungle also have an attack that causes "Hallucinating", which switches every sprite on the screen with another one at random. This includes the trees and vines the area is covered with, making the overall effect quite distracting.
• Inventory Management Puzzle: Your character has eight inventory slots, and the Vault contains an additional eight by default. Seeing as anything in your character's inventory is lost on death, and nearly all equipment is restricted to certain classes, it often becomes a challenge to decide what loot to store in the Vault to use when your current character inevitably kicks the bucket and you start anew. The Vault can be significantly expanded, but doing so requires gold, which can only be obtained with real-world money.
• Jerkass Gods
• Lethal Lava Land: The Abyss of Demons and portions of the world-map.
• Mad God: Natch.
• Mighty Glacier: Knights and Paladins. Knights have monumental HP and DEF, and Paladins are able to heal and buff themselves and their allies.
• Mook Maker: Most bosses summon minions of some sort, although the most notable example is the Cube God, a massive blue cube that summons smaller orange Overseer cubes that summon even smaller yellow cubes and smaller-than-even-smaller blue cubes.
• Nintendo Hard: The game can easily slip into this when your level goes into the double digits (assuming you keep following the quests alone). Especially that, unlike other MMORPG's, death is permanent.
• Odd Job Gods: A lot are reasonable, such as the Ghost God, Mermaid Goddess and Ent God, but then you have the Cube God, the Hermit God, the Evil Chicken God...
• Prestige Class: You start-out with the Wizard. Everything else must be unlocked by reaching X level with the preceding character(s).
• Puzzle Boss: Many of the higher tier enemies and bosses have a specific gimmick. Examples include the Ghost Kings, which can only be damaged once their minions have been killed, and the Construct Trio, who continuously heal each other unless one of them is frozen by a Mystic.
• Randomly Drops: All items, aside from the ones you start with, are dropped by enemies. That includes all equipment, save the Ring of Minor Defense.
• Roguelike: Deaths are permanent, items can only be found from enemy drops, various classes are available, individual stats can be raised by grinding for stat potions, and the world map changes whenever the Big Bad is defeated.
• Save Scumming: Not literally, but binding the Nexus hotkey close to WASD to allow quick escape into the safe haven of the game is a common practice.
• Schmuck Bait:
  • "Pirate Rum - It seems like it would be a bad idea to drink this. Shift-click to use." For the curious, it makes the screen blurry for a minute or so.
  • Also, the occasionally-appearing Mysterious Crystal. This immobile crystal constantly self-regenerates and begs everybody in the world to attack and break it (players who find it often add their own pleas for help). The sheer effort required to break it usually means that if it breaks, most of the available players will be right there, including a lot of low-level ones who don't really know what's going on. And it's not the crystal that's begging you to break it...
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: The Bandit Leader will yell "Forget this... run for it!" and run away after taking a beating from you. You can still kill him, however.
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World: Can be found in portions of the world-map. Of note is that little sliding is performed, which is for the best in a game like this.
• Stat Grinding: Done in the form of the various stat potions, which when drunk increase a certain stat by 1. Obtaining them involves slaughtering the gods of the realm, and you'll need every last drop if you want to survive the Big Bad and Bonus Dungeon.
• Sword Beam: Keeping in with the Bullet Hell-style of the game, everything shoots beams, even the melee weapons. It's just that swords and daggers have a small range, while staves and bows and the like have a much longer range.
• This Cannot Be!: Yelled word for word by Oryx when you defeat him in his first incarnation.
• Throwing Your Shield Always Works: The Knight's special power is to do this, which normally stuns enemies.
• True Final Boss: Going through the steps necessary to unlock the door that appears after you kill Oryx will open up a Bonus Dungeon which eats maxed out characters like they're going out of style, ending in a rematch against the souped-up Big Bad himself. Bring health potions and lots of them.
• Turns Red: Several enemies and most bosses "power up" after taking a lot of damage, the Super Sumo and Ent Ancient being the most notable. The Ghost Kings are inversions. Once their health is low enough, they actually shrink and can't do anything except run around.
  • A minor version with the Enraged Bunny. It's a cute little pixellated bunny...THAT SETS ITSELF ON FIRE AND ATTACKS IF YOU SHOOT IT.
• Very Definitely Final Dungeon: After defeating enough of his guardians, Oryx will prevent everyone from teleporting out of the realm. Defeating ALL of the guardians results in him teleporting everyone in the realm at the time to his castle. Defeat Oryx there, and he may drop the entrance to his Wine Cellar, which requires a rare, single-use item to unlock and is by far the hardest area in the game.
• Video Game Caring Potential: Players have no way to sell excess items, which often results in higher-levelled players saving and dropping medium-levelled items in the Nexus for low-level characters to use.
• X Meets Y: Bullet Hell + Roguelike + MMORPG + Retraux.
• Zerg Rush: "Trains" or "Locust Swarms"^[3] consist of a large mass of players running along the brick path leading around the realm shooting at absolutely anything that looks at them funny.
  • It also tends to happen once everyone is teleported to Oryx's castle. Seeing as half the players present will likely die from a good hit, bunching up and attacking as one is probably their best bet.
  • On occassion, the enemies get in on this as well in "XP Storms". It's not so bad when the weaker group with a seemingly strong tendency to do so, the Sandsmans, is doing it; the problem comes when the enemies in the Godlands figure out this tactic.

1. ↑ In fact, it's possible for the Steam account to be compatible with an account on the game's main site
2. ↑ aka the Oreo Cookie
3. ↑ formerly "Rape Trains" but was changed for obvious reasons