Remnant II - TV Tropes

I'm a dead man walking, before I die
I'll take every soul I can into the night
And kill 'till I die

Remnant II is a Video Game by Gunfire Games. It is the sequel to the 2019 game Remnant: From the Ashes.

Set twenty years after the previous game, the story begins with a pair of human survivors on Earth seeking out a rumored safe haven known as Ward 13. After overcoming multiple dangers on the long road, they arrive, only for one of the survivors to meet the legendary Founder Ford, the leader of Ward 13's survivors. Founder Ford tells the survivor they have a destiny ahead of them, foretold by a psychic prophecy, and asks for their help. He leads them down into a bunker that houses a fragment of the World Stone, a powerful artifact that allows one to travel to countless fantastic planets. When Ford vanishes upon touching the Stone, the lone Traveler must follow and begin their own journey across the stars.

The game was released on the 26th of July, 2023.

Announcement Trailer and Launch Trailer.

Remnant II contains examples of the following tropes:

• Abnormal Ammo: Your guns fire various types of ammo such as bits of bone from Nightfall, rails from Deceit, concentrated sand from Monolith, World Stone slugs from Redeemer and etc. Yet they all somehow run off the same ammo supply you find on the ground or use from ammo boxes.
• Absolute Xenophobe: Losomn's Dran population are broadly hostile to any outsiders they encounter, and hurl themselves at the player with savage aggression the moment they see them. Nimue indicates that this isn't normally the case, but the One True King having been incapacitated has thrown the world into chaos, with many of the Dran going mad and the Fae Courts paralyzed and unable to find a solution due to infighting and paranoia. Making things worse is that some Fae are preying upon the Dran, further driving their paranoia.
• Achievement Mockery: The Awakened King adds a new amulet called the Participation Medal, which is given to you as a "prize" for dying to the same boss many times on Apocalypse difficulty. Despite the intended mockery, it's actually a pretty good amulet, so you may be tempted to die on purpose just to get it.
• A Day in the Limelight: Each DLC focuses on a single world from the base game and gives it a significant expansion on, well, everything - a new storyline, new weapons, new bosses, and a new class.
  • The Awakened King focuses on Losomn and continues the ongoing Fairy King plot by finally introducing the One True King, who has awakened from his coma and gone insane. It also adds in new interactions with the Red Prince, namely allowing him to replace his father as king of the fey, which will result in you gaining a nice armor set if you gave him adequate tribute beforehand. Players can learn to use Fay magic with the new Ritualist archetype introduced in this DLC.
  • The Forgotten Kingdom has players exploring Yaesha for a lost kingdom of the Pan, who possess power unrelated to the Eternal Empress. Mastering their mysticism allows the player to wield the Invoker Archetype.
  • The Dark Horizon, the final paid DLC, returns to N'Erud and centers on exploring the farmland of the Planet Spaceship and unraveling the mysteries of the black hole Alepsis-Taura, which rewards the Warden Archetype for your troubles.
• The Aesthetics of Technology: Like the first game, mods can be equipped on any firearms, and exactly which world the mod comes from and who created it (or its material) determines the look of your weapons.
  • Mods bought and made on Earth that McCabe sells continue to look like scavenged bits of metal welded together.
  • Root mods cover your guns with nasty wooden tendrils and glowing bits, like the gun is being parasitized.
  • N'Erud mods cover your weapons in the melted-looking bone-white plastic that their own native guns usually have.
  • Yaesha mods often look simply like an energy crystal slapped on the side of your weapon.
  • Losomn mods cover the gun in twisted, leaflike steel, much like the items the Fae use.
• Affably Evil: For an Eldritch Abomination that wants to see you dead to satisfy its curiosity, Alepsis-Taura is surprisingly considerate. When it learns that it's telepathy is mentally painful for the Traveller, Alepsis-Taura then lowers the intensity of its psychic communication with you. It also gladly answers your questions as best it can, it believed since it's going to kill you anyway it might as well tell you what you wished . And even though it was supremely confident it would defeat you, if you defeat it and destroy its physical manifestation then it agrees to let you go.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot:
  • Most of the AIs on N'Erud have broken down over the ship's long isolation around the supermassive blackhole. Most robots will kill anything on sight, and the Conductor of the train in the Terminus Station decides the first thing to do with the first living being it's encountered in millennia is to make you fight your way through the entire train before it crashes and kills you, just so it can finally have some entertainment (it tried making the robots run the gauntlet, but found it boring since robots can't feel fear). When you succeed, it lets you off at the next stop as promised, but expresses disappointment that it didn't get to see you die. The only exception is the Custodian, and even then only the current Custodian, since a previous Custodian went rogue and tried to conquer N'Erud with an army of robots, according to several item descriptions. The Drzyr took great pains to make sure that the new one couldn't betray them, with numerous fail-safes in place even if it did.
  • The Root itself is implied to have been some form of AI or other creation of Root Earth's Ward project to modify and/or exploit the constructed reality of the Core and Labyrinth. Whatever its purpose, it went horribly wrong and turned into an infectious, malevolent corruption bent on destroying all existence.
  • In The Forgotten Kingdom DLC, the inhabitants invented golems that were functionally magic robots. Naturally, the kingdom fell when these golems went rampant and slaughtered them all. Unlike most robots, the golems were based on spirit rather than science, and thus prioritized emotion over logic. So when Lydusa, in a brain-damaged, grief-stricken, and utterly pissed-off state of mind, ordered her golems to murder the whole kingdom, they obeyed because her order was emotionally irrational. Even after ruining their kingdom and thus destroying their only source of maintenance and energy, the broken surviving golems are still obsessed with following that passionate order, and won't stand down even if a less-emotional Lydusa cancelled the order.
• A.K.A.-47: Earth is a Scavenger World with a heavy dose of Future Imperfect, so most of the human guns (and a couple of alien ones, thanks to The Multiverse allowing for some worlds being sufficiently Earth-adjacent) are real weapons with fictional names and minor alterations:
  • The AS-10 Bulldog is an AA-12 combat shotgun in extremely poor repair.
  • The Wrangler 1860 rifle is a Winchester 1873, the legendary 'Gun That Won The West', with a name that references its ancestor, the 1860 Henry rifle.
  • The Repeater Pistol is a Mauser C96, famous for sci-fi nerds as the weapon Han Solo's blaster was built around.
  • The MP60-R machine pistol is a modified Micro-Uzi.
  • The Service Pistol is the US Army's famous workhorse, the Colt M1911.
  • The Sureshot is a Thompson Contender single-shot rifle/pistol that's had a few parts swapped out.
  • The Western Classic revolver, with its top-break action, heavily evokes the Smith and Wesson Model 3.
  • The XMG57 Bonesaw is an M60.
  • The Dran Meridian is an M79 grenade launcher, a weapon made famous by the US military during the Vietnam War.
  • The Blackmaw AR-47 is, ironically, an aversion. It's a cobbled-together frankengun with no resemblance to the real-world AK-47 beyond being an assault rifle with a few wooden bits. In fact, it ironically appears to have been partly built from an M14.
  • Another aversion is the Chicago Typewriter, since that was a real-world nickname for the Thompson submachinegun (which this indeed is).
• Alchemy Is Magic: Defied - while the Alchemist class acquired in Losom does require finding the mythical Philosopher's Stone and its perks all have slightly magical names, the class's skills are all based upon concoctions brewed in vials, making it more of a Fantastic Science then a type of magic. This only becomes more pronounced in The Awakened King DLC, which returns to Losom and introduces an actual mage class, the Ritualist.
• Alien Blood: All over the place! The actual aliens of N'erud bleed purple goop, the Root bleeds glowing orange sap, robots bleed oil, and Fae bleed greyish-silvery fluid. Most easy to see when you're the Handler archetype, as their dog causes bleeding damage with its bites.
• Aliens Never Invented the Wheel: According to Leywise if he becomes the Red King's scribe, the Fae never invented pockets, as they are one of the primary reasons he continues to wear his Dran disguise despite no longer needing to, as he finds them far too useful to give up.
• Alternate Universe: Root Earth is an alternate version of Earth that is stated to be the origin point of the Root itself. This version of earth is devoid of all human or terrestrial life, instead taken over entirely by the Root itself.
• Anchors Away: A new enemy type introduced in The Awakened King are sea witches who wield anchors as large as themselves. You can also find a (much smaller) anchor you can use as a weapon yourself, called the Abyssal Hook.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Due to the new level cap, there's a limit on how may trait points you can get. Each Archetype Trait, however, levels up with the Archetype, meaning that you don't need to spend any points there, although this only applies as long as you are still that Archetype. Getting an Archetype to max level unlocks the ability to use its trait with any Archetype. If neither of your Archetypes are the one the trait comes from, then you will need to spend points on it if you want to use it.
  • Scrap now auto-collects when you get near it, saving on having to mash the pick-up button.
  • Due to the complexity of dungeons and much more expansive scale of overworld areas, friend NPCs and important loot items like chests, consumables, and valuable loot items will be marked on the map when you're in a certain radius of them. Doorways to other zones are also clearly marked when you get closer, along with a marker indicating if you've entered the doorway yet or not.
  • Dying ends your run in Hardcore mode, with the sole exception of cutscene or "scripted" deaths, like paying off the Red Prince (and him killing you anyway) or being attacked by a barghest out of a sewer grate..
  • If you've unlocked one of the non-starter archetypes on a character, it gets added to the selection screen for a new character. Additionally, a patch added that the Engram for those archetypes would be purchasable for a nominal fee of scrap, a great boon for Hardcore players looking to dual-class without, for example, suiciding to get the Engineer.
  • A patch for The Dark Horizon now makes hard-to-get items appear in the vendors once you've unlocked them on at least one other character. Stuff like Nimue's ribbon, the Void Heart, and various secret weapons like the Genesis Bow are now much easier to get on your alternate characters.
  • If you've unlocked certain things that affect Ward 13 itself, such as bringing back Spark from N'Erud, these things will persist into adventure mode rerolls and new character campaigns.
  • Getting Duane's Chef's Medal amulet requires the 3 concoctions from the [DLCs]: Meat Shake (from Feastmaster event in Losomn), Egg Drink (from Ku Ku Egg which always appears in Lost Kingdom for Yaesha) and Numbing Agent (in Dark Horizons for N'Erud). Besides the frustration of getting the ingredients (2 of them are random events), there's also a waiting period for Duane to cook them plus Egg Drink requires several ingredients. However, the Numbing Agent can sometimes be found in a chest so you don't have to waste the Crop Sample for it. And the moment you possess any of these concoctions, Mudtooth gets an unlimited supply of it to sell to you.
  • With the Dark Horizon DLC, there's now a Boss Run mode. Playing through this allows you to get random equipment that you may not have encountered including ones from boss alternate kills. If you can survive this, it will save you a ton of time by no longer needing to run a whole new adventure or campaign.
• Apocalyptic Logs: N'Eruda has various electronic audio logs scattered around, including some that tell of the inhabitants encounter with doom on their ill-fated voyage. Including one in a secret area of the Dormant N'Erudian Facility where a hapless technician has a Hell Is That Noise experience before getting hunted down by a special elite enemy drone.
• Automatic Crossbows: The Pan of Yaesha are skilled at making crossbows with complex mechanisms and/or magic. This leads to weapons like Sorrow and the Trinity Crossbow which have large magazines and decent rate of fire.
• Award-Bait Song: "You Shall Rise", which plays during the credits, contains sweeping instrumentation, dramatic vocals, and a Dare to Be Badass theme with the lyrics.
• Back from the Brink: The humans on Earth are no longer a people facing extinction from the Root after the Wanderer killed Haarsgard in the first game. The Dryzr came back from the brink of a dying Rhom when the Undying King was given a replacement Guardian from the Wanderer, only to jump back even deeper into the brink when they left Rhom's dying sun to end up trapped and consumed at the ending of the universe near the living black hole, Alepsis-Taura.
• Bad Boss: The Summoner Archetype lists "Being Evil" as one of its specialties, and its Prime Perk allows you to shoot your own minions to make them fight harder. Banishing them to make them explode is also a common tactic!
• Battle Trophy: The Empress of Yaesha still has Ford's scattergun from decades ago when her forces captured and imprisoned him. It becomes part of your award if you beat the Corruptor but didn't give her the Ornate Box with a Thaen Fruit inside.
• Bedlam House: Morrow Sanitorium, located in the Dran half of Losomn. It's every bit what you'd expect out of an old Victorian insane asylum, with the nurses being lazy and negligent at best. The only exception is Dr. Morrow herself, who from her diaries appeared to care for the patients greatly and focused on rehabilitation... until she started seeing the Nightweaver herself, at which point she became just another patient the nurses gleefully tossed into a padded cell.
• Befriending the Enemy: If you take certain steps you can avoid fighting Lydusa in Lost Kingdom DLC and the Prototype Robot in Dark Horizon DLC. For Lydusa, it's instead of giving her missing piece directly, you offer it to the sacrificial bowl in Goddess Rest - this will fully regenerate her body and she becomes friendly to you. For the Prototype Robot, a nearby recording by its creator mentions that he installed a safety inhibitor on it, which you have to switch on by examining the Memory Core in the inventory before installing it in the robot. This causes the robot to go from badgering you to hurry up and finish fixing it so it can kill you to becoming friendly and giving you an item (as well as unlocking an achievement).
• BFG: Surprisingly there's not a lot of oversized guns for a game that puts so much emphasis on shooting. Two that come to mind are the Widowmaker and from the Dark Horizon DLC , the Monorail. Both of these guns hit very hard and are 1/3 longer than the XMG57 Bonesaw which itself is longer than most rifles.
• BFS: The Traveller can get some really hefty swords such as Atom Splitter, Iron Greatsword and Royal Broadsword. And with the Dark Horizon DLC, you can make the Black Greatsword which is a Shout-Out to Berserk
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing:
  • Nimue is easily the most civil and polite Fae there is, but at the end of the day she's still a member of a race of beings that proudly have lies and sociopathic violence as their hat. Many Fae-related item descriptions from Nimue's point of view hint that beneath her veneer of benevolence, Nimue isn't much better than the rest of the Fae and that her greatest desire is to see the Fae be free to act on their every impulse, for good or bad. There's also a ton of evidence to suggest that she played a large part in the successful coup against the One True King — specifically that she crafted the dagger that bypassed his immortality by putting him in an endless sleep — which is proven true in the Awakened King.
  • Walt, is a very nice, albeit strange Pan that the player can befriend in the Forgotten Kingdom. While Walt is genuinely very kind if the player takes the time to talk to him, it becomes clear over the course of the DLC that Walt's Dark and Troubled Past has left him with a ton of rage and hate bubbling just under the surface that occasionally manifests in outbursts against the player, especially after he learns that the Lost Tribe he's spent his life looking for has long since been destroyed by the vengeful Lydusa, and with it, his dream of finding a power that could enable a lowly Gul like him to overthrow Jinas's oppressive regime and bring freedom to the Pan. This can potentially come to a head if the player visits Walt while the Cherished Fracture is in their inventory, where Walt will jump straight off the slippery slope and murder the player in cold blood while their back is turned to take the Fracture for himself in hopes of gaining control over Lydusa (it doesn't work, and he gets unceremoniously swatted off the edge of the boss arena for his trouble). At the very least, if the player has befriended him, he is sincerely apologetic and remorseful when stabbing them in the back.
• Body Horror:
  • The Lantern Horror enemy found on Losomn looks like a hunchbacked old Fae, until it stands upright and reveal a massive vertical mouth full of teeth and a long, slobbering tongue.
  • The Corpse Ball enemy on N'Erud is a mass of Dyrzr husks mashed together into a lump of flesh on numerous legs; blowing it open reveals a pulsating purple heart that serves as a weakspot.
• Bottomless Magazines: The Zero Divide amulet found in N'erud gives you unlimited reserve ammo and will pop out for main gun and side arm ammo if you use your relic - this is good should you change to a different amulet. So while you still need to reload, you have an endless number of shots to draw on - so no running out of ammo in a major boss fight. The Cube Gun innately has an infinite reserve while some other guns can temporarily gain an unlimited ammo reserve thru their mod ability.
• Brown Note: The Legion boss on Yaesha causes the Madness status effect to build up if the player looks directly at it while it is glowing red, which deals damage and can even disable your heads-up display (health bar, ammo count, etc.) at higher levels. Naturally, the only way to hurt it is to shoot it while it's glowing red, which entails you looking directly at it.
• The Bus Came Back:
  • The Guardian of Yaesha from Chronos has returned, now corrupted to serve the Root. It's also much, much larger than it was before.
  • The Forgotten Kingdom sees the return of Clawbone in a speaking role after having been absent since Chronos. Though he does mention that "Nightmare" is one of his many names, so he technically did appear in the previous game, he just didn't say anything.
• Came Back Wrong:
  • The Corrupted Ravager, having been resurrected by the Root after being killed in the first game, is practically unrecognizable compared to its previous self. Not only has most of its fur fallen out, it's become part Root in a manner similar to Haarsgard. It has roots growing along its back and head — with one puncturing the top of its skull straight into its brain — has a bulbous red tumor-like growth on its back, and has grown 3 additional sets of eyes.
  • According to promotional material, the plot of the first DLC, The Awakened King, involves the One True King awakening from his magical coma (in case the title didn't make that obvious). However, he's been corrupted by the Root into becoming a mad, bloodthirsty tyrant (not that he wasn't a tyrant before, just a sane and well-intentioned one).
• Cast from Lifespan: The Forgotten Kingdom DLC confirms that any human who touches a worldstone achieves Resurrective Immortality. However, most humans age when they die and are resurrected by a worldstone, and once they reach their natural lifespan, they stay dead.
• Canine Companion: While the previous game's "Very Good Boy" was just another summonable minion to throw into the meat grinder, this game's Handler archetype has a permanent dog companion they work together with to take down foes.
• Clown-Car Grave: There's multiple types of zombies across the worlds, but they all have a habit of crawling out of the walls or ground to attack you. The ones in "The Chimney" event seem to have no limit for how many pop up to kill you.
• Combat Medic:
  • The Medic archetype, who has multiple options for healing others. Even besides their powers, they have a passive skill that boosts how much they heal through any method. As for the combat part, their damage perk boosts any kind of damage whatsoever their party inflicts. For good measure, they also start off with a machine gun!
  • To a lesser extent, the Handler can serve as a medic with the Support Dog skill. The dog's howl can restore a percentage of health every second.
  • To a similar degree as the Handler, the Alchemist can be a healer via their Elixir of Life Skill. They also have the Medic's damage perk, but their perks are more broadly support focused over the Medic's specialization toward healing and survival.
• Combat Tentacles: The Rootlash mod can be made after you defeat the corrupted nymph/goddess Kaeula. With it you can summon tentacles that emerge out of the ground to attack your foes. Yeah they aren't electrified like the Tentacle Shot on the Curse of the Jungle God gun from Remnant: From the Ashes, but Rootlash has the advantage of draining some enemy health to heal you in addition to its normal damage. Additionally Rootlash isn't stationary like Tentacle Shot, the tentacles will travel underground to emerge and attack enemies.
• Crapsack World: If you thought the worlds were in a bad state in the first game, the sequel shows that the multiverse is not a fun place to live:
  • The once-verdant world of Yaesha has become overrun with the Root, its invasive growth choking out the native flora and creating twisted mockeries of the fauna. The local god, the Ravager, has willingly joined the Root, and even the nature spirits aren't immune to being corrupted. Worse, it's implied that the Pan Empress is still continuing to enforce her oppressive reign even as her world is being devoured.
  • Losomn is a world equivalent to early 19th century England that is full of xenophobic mobs that will shoot anything foreign on sight. Their world has experienced a disastrous merger with the realm of the Fae, driving the common folk mad while the Fae kidnap and torture the native Dran. The Fae themselves have been plunged into chaos by the merge, with their King being replaced by an imposter and their local dream goddess becoming a predatory horror stalking the night.
  • N'erud is a planetship caught in the event horizon of a black hole. Though technologically advanced, the inhabitants the Drzyr have been there for so long that virtually all of them are dead and the landscape has become a blasted hellscape full of poisonous fog and oversized alien "crabs". The AI that were supposed to maintain the place went rampant, and the zombie-like husks of the Drzyr stalk the land. The one surviving Drzyr has become a bloated monster who has deluded themselves into believing the only way to save his people is to eat what's left of them and become a Mind Hive. It's telling that the Custodian of N'Erud has determined the only remaining course of action is to seize control of N'Erud and hope there's an answer within the black hole.
  • Earth itself, while no longer being terraformed by the Root, still has pockets of hostile invasive life that stubbornly refuse to die. And if the Root remnants aren't enough, society is still virtually nonexistent, with food, water, and medicine nonexistent and what's left of humanity still struggling to survive on scant resources. The game itself begins with the player and Cass seeking out Ward 13 after a prolonged and dangerous journey because of rumors that it has a stable supply of food and safe walls. Also, if Mudtooth is to be believed, the Iskal have managed to make it to Earth and have completely terraformed a nearby city into a swamp resembling their homeworld.
  • Root Earth is like Earth from the first game but even worse. The Root is everywhere, and the land is rocked by regular earthquakes that can topple buildings.
• Critical Failure: Some weapons are dangerous to yourself if you goof up in using it. The biggest example is the Monorail which relies on charging up your shot. If you overcharge it, your gun explodes and becomes a black hole. This sucks you in and instantly kills you.
• Cutting Off the Branches: The game establishes a number of canon resolutions to possible encounters from the first game.
  • Brabus was given Mudtooth's watch, facilitating the former bandit's Heel–Face Turn.
  • The Ravager was the canonical world boss of Yaesha, as it is mentioned that he was killed by the Wanderer, which led to him being resurrected by the Root.
  • The fact that Smolder and the Sporebloom can be bought from Brabus after clearing the game on Veteran insinuates that the Wanderer defeated both Singe and the Ent on Earth, despite the two world bosses being mutually exclusive in a single campaign run.
  • Similarly, the Starkiller (formerly Particle Accelerator) is unlocked in Brabus's shop after beating the game on Apocalypse, indicating that Claviger was the canonical world boss of Rhom.
  • Word of God rather than the game itself mentioned that the Wanderer gave the heart of Ixillus to the Undying King in exchange for the Labyrinth Key, rather than killing him for it (although he apparently died between games somehow anyway, given that Ezlan's Band is now called the Dead King's Memento), the Iskal Queen was not killed by the Wanderer either, as Mudtooth tells you that she's brought her forces to Earth instead, presumably fleeing the invasion of the Root that she was unable to oppose without the power of the Guardian's Heart (though given that you can only fight her in Adventure Mode and not in the main Campaign, this one makes sense).
• Degraded Boss: The tutorial boss, the Root Mantis, becomes just another Elite Mook when you get to Root Earth.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: The Forgotten Kingdom highlihts several cultural differences between the lost tribe of the Pan and the main civilization. Most notable is that the Blood Moon, considered an ominous omen of death by the main civilization who have to deal with the Ravager, is called the Ruby Moon by the lost tribe and has no such negative connotation. King Thalos even scheduled his date nights with Lydusa to coincide with it.
• Demiurge Archetype: One Fae myth claims that the original god of the Fae, the Great Spirit, was a fraud and a murderer; having grown sick and tired of protecting the bloodthirsty Fae for the sake of an absent Creator, he unleashed a plague to kill them all so he could get reassigned to a different world. Two warriors, former devotees of the Great Spirit, snapped from the revelation and murdered him.
• Department of Redundancy Department: Two archetypes can be equipped at once, and the new dual class is given an appropriate name. If the Alchemist class is chosen as the main archetype and the Invoker as the sub-archetype, then the dual class name becomes "Spirited Spirit of Spirits." ^note 
• Didn't See That Coming: Rare positive example, at least for the planner. The Empress of Yaesha offers to help the player find Clementine if they slay the world's former guardian — in truth she has no idea where Clementine is and is just looking to secure her rule, but the player benefits from killing it anyway. Normally they part on terms of begrudging respect, unless the player finds the Ornate Box, which contains a seed for a new Thaen Tree that the Empress has been desperate to acquire. Giving her the box guarantees her repressive rule will continue, but she's barely able to hide her stunned disbelief when it's offered, especially if it wasn't opened beforehand.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Most of the secret weapons are a pain in the ass to get, but worth it. Some of the really secret weapons are this on another level: just getting the weapon is the first hurdle, and mastering its use is the second.
  • The Polygun is a transforming rifle/shotgun made of cubes with infinite ammo, gained by shooting over a dozen hidden cubes in order in the Labyrinth. It requires very precise active reloads and if you fire it past its heat limit, it electrocutes you, but with each successful active reload, you get more shots until you eventually temporarily get infinite shot capacity.
  • The Genesis bow is a heavy bow that launches multiple projectiles, which means it's potentially many times stronger than other bow weapons, but its charge time is much longer as well. To get it, you have to use a glider to reach a very hidden location, and then solve a puzzle in which you are presented with a set of four symbols that change hourly and must input the next set of symbols. As the sets are fixed and correspond to the hours in the day, this is solvable by messing with your system clock (or by legitimately waiting a full day).
  • The Anguish handgun is gained by first dying inside a dream mansion, waking up from a dream within that dream, then finding a mysterious Dran in very specific biomes without dying between. The weapon fires chunks of superheated metal, in a shotgun spread if you pull the trigger quickly, or as an exploding rod if the trigger is held down. The latter causes the weapon to actually injure you slightly if you hold on to it too long.
  • The Monorail is a powerful railgun with a long charge time that potentially does tens of thousands of points of damage to an enemy. Of course, you'd better not miss, and if you hold it at full charge too long, you run the risk of creating a black hole that sucks you in and kills you instantly. Getting it requires killing Alepsis-Taura in The Dark Horizon while skipping destroying its subordinate octohedrons at the end of two other dungeons, resulting in a buffed-up boss fight for extra challenge.
• Distant Sequel:
  • The game is set 2 decades after the defeat of Haarsgard in the Subject 2923 DLC of the previous game. Most of the characters have appropriately aged up, with Commander Ford having died of old age, Wallace and Clementine having grown to adulthood, and Bo maturing enough that he was given command by Founder Ford.
  • There are some subtle hints that N'Erud may be a very distant offshoot from Rhom, going by a mixture of aesthetics and weapons (in particular the Plasma Cutter and Rupture Cannon, which are essentially less-radioactive versions of the Beam Rifle and Defiler respectively. Concept art of both even heavily references weapons from Rhom.), the physical shape of the Drzyr, and a couple of audio logs mentioning the race having emerged from a dying world with a ruined sun. The Drzyr are also obsessed with immortality and reversing the effects of entropy, which would be fitting for a race once ruled by an Undying King, especially one who apparently succeeded in bringing their world's dead Guardian back to life.
• The Dividual: The Imposter on Losomn is two separate individuals: Faelin and Faerin, the former inhabiting the the bright and shiny Golden Halls and the latter inhabiting the darker Shaed. Both Fae are different aspects of the same individual, and their presence serves to drive the other insane as they cannot see or think or speak without the other intruding into their awareness.
• Divine Date:
  • The Red Prince is the offspring of the One True King (who, as the Guardian of the Fae world, is basically a god) and a Fae woman.
  • Implied by the description of the Venerated Spearhead, which states that the Huntress recieved her spear from Nimue "in exchange for... certain services". Granted, given that she's the Huntress, the "services" in question could have been assassinations, but it's unlikely that a game about shooting things in the face until they die would have danced around the subject like that if it were the case.
  • And again in The Forgotten Kingdom, between the earth spirit Lydusa (who is basically a goddess) and the king of the lost tribe of the Pan, Thalos. The game seems to really like this trope.
• Does Not Like Guns: In the description for the Rune Pistol, it mentions that most Fae look down on gun crafting- they see it as crude, pedestrian and etc. It also mentions that there are exceptions as some Fae are so passionate about crafting that they'll gladly work on guns. Nimue is one and she's the Fae that makes this gun.
• Do Well, But Not Perfect: The Root Nexus on Yaesha spawns waves of enemies when attacked. One might think that the best thing to do is to focus all of your attention on the Nexus and burst it down before too many enemies appear. Except that this is the worst possible thing you can do, because the waves spawn at certain health thresholds, resulting in the exact scenario you were trying to avoid. While you still might be able to make this strategy work on the Nexus fought in the overworld, the one at the end of the Forgotten Field dungeon will spawn an Aberration miniboss upon its death, and the fight doesn't officially end until you kill that, which you certainly won't be able to do before the horde of enemies rips you apart, since unlike the Nexus, it actually moves around and fights back. The best strategy for dealing with the Nexus is to hurt it just enough to trigger a single wave of enemies to spawn, clear out the wave, and repeat. That said, you do get a special reward if you kill the Forgotten Field Nexus before killing any of the enemies it spawns.
• Early Game Hell: Downplayed, yeah the start is still likely to be tough especially if your first world is N'Erud where the earliest enemies are flying which negates the advantages of a Handler with their dog and missed shots threaten your ammo supply. But unlike the first game, not too many Elite Mook have dangerous status effects and there's a much larger selection of equipment to buy, including the Widowmaker sniper rifle and the Bulldog automatic shotgun plus you can buy starting Archetype items from Ward 13 vendors, Finally if you start a new character, they will benefit from whatever your previous character may have permanently unlocked (such as the Thaen Fruit Tree or various hidden Archetypes).
• Eldritch Location: The Custodian mentioned the Drzyr have encountered many black holes during the travel of the N'erud. But Alepsis-Taura uniquely shows indication of intelligent design and this is seen by the Dryzr as showing signs of an existence of The Creator. If you complete the Custodian's quest, then after 24 hours you can encounter the odd cosmic emptiness of Alepsis-Taura and walk over nothing to pick up the Void Heart from there. Fighting Alepsis-Taura itself requires the Dark Horizon DLC and either a N'Erud adventure reroll or doing the Dark Horizon one-shot.
• End of an Era:
  • The Root has finally arrived on Yaesha in force after the Guardian was destroyed in Chronos and its advanced scouts were starting to trickle in during Remnant, with the once-verdant landscape being overrun by the malevolent foliage and the Ravager willingly joining it. With the slave uprising among the Pan continuing to grow in strength as well, the Pan Empress is facing the end of her immortal reign. Highlighting this is how several enemies now have Root-corrupted forms.
  • The inverse has happened on Earth for the Root and humanity. While there are still Root infestations scattered across the planet, and those Root are still extremely lethal, Earth has largely started to recover, with native Earth plant life overtaking the Root and humans able to establish towns on the surface.
• Entertainingly Wrong: Many of Mudtooth's stories are about events from the first game. Whenever they're not so accurate that it's almost suspicious how he knows some of the details, they're this trope.
  • He somehow thinks that Bo is the one who killed Haarsgard and stopped the Root on Earth, despite him chickening out the first chance he got, before ever even reaching Ward Prime. Bo himself freely admits that he chickened out and let the Wanderer do all the work, but Mudtooth thinks he's just being modest. At the very least, he does properly credit the Wanderer for killing the Dreamer at Ward 17... except he thinks that what they actually killed was some sort of Root Hive Queen rather than a male human child.
  • He thinks that Sebum trained Clementine in the use of her powers, and that he's some sort of wise mystic. Sebum is a merchant, has no mystical powers to speak of, and even though he does like to think his two heads make him twice as smart as all other Urikki, "wise" probably isn't the right word to describe him (even if he's right). It's also clear from his reaction to meeting the Wanderer that they're the first human he's ever seen, which means he's never even met Clementine. However, Mudtooth also says he personally met Sebum sometime between games, so it's possible that these were actually lies told to him by Sebum himself.
  • While he is right that the Wards' experiments caused the Root to invade Earth, he is wrong when he asserts that the Wards created them as a weapon.
• Equipment Upgrade: Yeah good ol' Rigs is back to improve your equipment with iron and/or whatever glowing weird stuff. However due to the mess that Level Scaling on your weapons and armor did for the first game, Rigs will now only improve your weapons. Also if you find the same weapon that you already have, then the level on it goes up. Good thing Rigs can remove all the levels on your equipment. Additionally Dwell can use Corrupted Crystals to change certain weapons into Corrupt versions or restore them with Simulacrum (though you're better off keeping the Corrupted version and then earn the regular version through adventure or vendor purchase.
• Face–Heel Turn: The Ravager makes a return, with a mutated new design as a result of joining the Root after being left for dead by the player character in Remnant, as he said he might if you took the opportunity to talk to him instead. His name has changed to Corrupted Ravager to emphasize this point. While the Ravager was always fearsome and rather belligerent, he was supposed to be part of the balance of life and death, and has now grown nihilistic and gruesome out of proportion to his role.
• The Fair Folk: One half of the conjoined world Losomn is inhabited by the Fae, beautiful supernatural creatures whose internal bickering incapacitated their world's Guardian, the 'One True King', and merged their reality with that of the quasi-Victorian Dran (who they now spend much of their time either terrorizing for shits and giggles, or hunting and eating). Unlike most examples, these Fae have a slightly bat-like aspect to their features, and are tall and lean with elegant armor and lavishly-decorated castles. Befitting their mythical counterparts, the Fae are capricious and mercurial, willing to kill or help you at the drop of a hat. They also have the common fantasy fairy summer/winter divide, with their world evenly split between the radiant Golden Halls and the ominous, icy Shaed... both of which are equally deadly to visitors.
• Fantastic Fruits and Vegetables: The Thaen Fruit of Yaesha grants youth to its consumer and you can get a seed to bring back to Ward 13 and raise it into a Thaen Fruit Tree which will produce magical fruit of varying quality.
• Fantasy Gun Control: Averted once again - there are plenty of guns for you to use, and enemies will wield any guns they can get their hands on. Even the Pan manage to reverse-engineer firearms to create a working crystal-powered gun. And while the Fae don't use guns, Nimue creating the Rune Pistol confirms that they know how to make firearms (though most Fae don't care for that craft).
• Fisher King: The world of Losomn is wracked in conflict due to this trope, and you fight one of the three Fae Lords influencing the madness:
  • In the Kingmaker scenario, the Fae's One True King has been usurped and replaced by an Impostor, Faelin/Faerin. Unfortunately for everyone, the ritual he used did something that merged the Fae world with the Dran world, and the Imposter was split into a dual-minded Fae who exists in both the realms of light and dark and cannot remain mentally stable, as each extreme personality unwittingly pours conflicting ideas into the other. Due to his madness, the Imposter cannot act to fix Losomn's developing crisis and requires the player to kill one of his alternate halves so he can regain his sanity.
  • In the Awoken King Scenario, The One True King was driven insane with paranoia after being betrayed^note , and went on a rampage to reclaim his throne from The Imposter, then purged most of the fae. His psychic presence actively corrupts the Dran, driving them into a nihilistic frenzy that is paradoxically dedicated to worshipping the King, while the King's castle is littered with Fae corpses from his paranoid rampages.
  • In the Morrow Asylum scenario, The Nightweaver is a former goddess of the fae who has gone on a serial-killing spree of Dran after the worlds were merged. Her mere presence drives people insane, and she eagerly hunts those unfortunate enough to see her by eating their memories until they've crossed the Despair Event Horizon, which is when she finally eats their hearts. The asylum's staff have also gone insane, mistaking what is clearly an alien soldier as an escaped patient, and will attack with inappropriate scythes.
  • Ultimately, the fate of The Forgotten Kingdom was fueled by both a Fisher King and the greed of his subjects. King Thalos married an earth spirit, Lydusa, and his love for her gave prosperity and magic to his kingdom. Unfortunately, not only were his priests Ungrateful Bastards, but Thalos slowly grew obsessed with Lydusa until his consort was all he could think about, as seen in his increasingly unhinged love letters. The priests had an easy choice: betray their king and queen and seize Magitek comparable to Rhom, or watch as their king finally took the plunge into total madness and sacrificed the entire kingdom as a tribute to his beloved. Naturally, the priests chose poorly, and Lydusa ravaged the kingdom herself in a fit of rage.
• Fling a Light into the Future: In the Labyrinth, if you find a gate that takes you into an inaccessible area of Ward 13, you will find the Leto mark. 2 armor set and a Chicago Typewriter. You can also find a note mentioning that Dr. Leto had a create an improved armor over his prototype and he also got himself a potent gun. He had intended to use these as he journeys to fight the Root, but events moved too quickly so he had to go without and left the equipment for someone in the future to take up the fight.
• Foil: The Imposter's two halves are this to each other. Faelin is Faux Affably Evil and prefers to manipulate people into doing what he wants with sugary lies, while Faerin is a brutally honest, unapologetic Jerkass who would probably just have you executed if you disobeyed him.
• Gainax Ending: The Root finally gets what it wants... but did it really succeed? Clementine is forced to hit the Reset Button on reality. The entire universe collapses into a single Simulacrum, which is technically the objective of the all-assimilating Root, before exploding into a new multiversal Big Bang that restores most of reality with most - if not all - of the Root removed from it, particularly Yaesha.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: Nimue is a self-proclaimed "crafter of all that cannot exist". One of the items she can craft requires both Faelin and Faerin's Sigils (which are obtained as rewards from whichever half of the Imposter you don't kill), while another requires both the Gold and Silver Ribbons (which requires you to get the ribbon injectable in both a Golden Halls dungeon and a Shaed dungeon). It should technically be impossible for you to find everything you need to make the item in-universe, yet you succeed, and it's totally canon.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: Several pieces of the Fae Royal armour set talk up how incredibly light it is, yet wearing the full set without any kind of encumbrance reduction will put you into heavy load. Granted, it is the lightest out of all the heavy armour sets.
  • The game's main storyline ends with the Root being completely erased from the multiverse after Clementine uses the Index to delete Root Earth. Despite this, Root enemies will still appear in Yaesha in Adventure Mode.
• Genius Loci: The final DLC, "The Dark Horizon", reveals that Alepsis-Taura, the black hole that caused the entire situation in N'Erud, is actually a sapient entity. It then goes on to become the Final Boss of the DLC.
• Giant Mook: Pan Warriors are huge, they're about 1/3 taller than you and about twice as wide, not to mention they're wearing heavy armor to the point of looking like a medieval knight in jousting armor. They're just regular Yaesha enemies and not Elite Mooks, but they can soak far more damage than just about any other regular foe in the game (though even with their Royal Broadswords, they don't seem to hit much harder than other foes).
• Giant Woman: The Fae goddess Nimue on Losomn. She looks to be at least 50 feet tall judging from what we can see of her (assuming she actually has a full body beneath the edge she floats up over), with glowing white eyes, pointed ears, a broken halo floating above her head, and some sort of glowing vortex shining from inside her chest cavity. She serves as one of the main characters of the Losomn storylines, directing the player against either the Nightweaver or the Imposter.
• A Glitch in the Matrix:
  • Once the player reaches Root Earth this becomes more and more apparent. Bosses start glitching mid-animation, visual errors cloud around Root creatures, and the regional Blight effect is called "Data Corruption." Fittingly, during the final boss fight, Annihilation starts to literally glitch out in its second phase, with the arena randomly jumping from the cloudy, hellish normal environment and a smaller computer grid environment where Annihilation summons hostile geometric shapes, and Annihilation's draconic body abruptly glitching out and stuttering.
  • Performing certain actions in certain dungeons will allow you to fight Aberrations, "glitched" King Mook versions of normal enemies that are identifiable by a red distortion aura. Defeating them is the primary way you can acquire Mutators and the Corrupted Lumenite needed to upgrade said Mutators. The Halloween 2023 event added a bunch of randomly spawning ones as well, who also drop Corrupted Shards, which can be traded to Dwell to obtain similarly "glitched" versions of certain weapons.
• God Save Us from the Queen!: The immortal Empress of Yaesha is widely credited for her world's prosperity, but she's also a repressive tyrant who creates a makeshift caste system by selectively sharing her fruits of immortality with the Pan nobility. When you finally meet her, she refuses to even speak with you, instead imperiously giving commands through her interpreter. Except the "interpreter" is the true Empress, having grown old and feeble after the Thaen Tree died, which makes her venomous racism towards non-Pan even less endearing.
• Graceful Loser: In N'erud, if you successfully survive the train gauntlet event, the train's AI, while clearly disappointed that you didn't die, admits you performed well and gives you the reward he promised.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • You can only carry 10 Corrupted Crystals in your inventory, the exact number for Dwell to transform a weapon into its Corrupted version. Beyond this, the already rare Corruoted Crystals stop showing up as a drop. So you may want to buy a Corrupt weapon ASAP rather than waiting for a best corrupt gun.
  • Getting rarer Iron types relies on your character's combined Archetype Level and Levels on their weapons. The Drzyr Replicator vendor in N'Erud where you meet the Custodian, has some equipment that can only be crafted using Galvanized Iron and Hardened Iron - which won't appear until you're sufficiently levelled up.
  • Getting many of the Archetypes requires doing things that are obscure or outright suicidal. The Engineer class requires the player to delve into the lethal fog around N'Erud (with no possible chance that you'll make it out alive again), while the Alchemist class requires the player to linger around drains in the urban areas of Losomn in hopes that they'll be snatched by a sewer monster. ^note 
  • The Invader class is one of the hardest and near-impossible without a guide, as you have to first complete a sidequest in Losomn with Dr. Morrow to acquire a specific item, use that item in a specific location in the boss's arena, then use the weapon from that in a very specific place on Root Earth where the only indication you can use it there area blue particles in the air, and then fight an optional boss.
  • The Archon class was intentionally designed to be impossible to get without datamining the exact requirements. You need to have an extremely specific loadout and two specific Archetypes (Explorer at level 10 and Invader at 5) and go to a specific location in the Labyrinth, which will unlock a portal that will give a couple of minutes to search for the items needed to unlock the class.
  • Acquiring the Meridian grenade launcher requires entering a specific room in the sewers of Losomn, shooting a specific enemy who is blocking a pipe to let a stream of water begin flooding the room, then waiting between one and two real-life hours before returning to find the chamber flooded enough to give you access to the room the weapon is inside. Thankfully you don't need to stay in the room and can go do other stuff, as long as you don't re-roll the world.
  • Several of the items that Nimue can craft for you are impossible to get without repeatedly rerolling a campaign or adventure. Nimue's Ribbon and the One True King Sigil both require you to complete Losomn's adventures multiple times, as you have to get both the Gold and Silver Ribbon for the former and both Faelin and Faerin's Sigils for the latter. Even worse, the One True King Sigil boosts the effects of Faelin and Faerin's Sigils, meaning you'll have to reroll Losomn even more in order to get both of them again.
  • Similarly, the Nightweaver's Web will give you items in exchange for various quest items. Unlike Nimue, this includes quest items from other worlds, meaning they can only be gotten by rerolling the entire Campaign until you're lucky enough to get both the quest item and the Nightweaver in the same game, as all quest items are removed from your inventory when rerolling (with the obvious exception of your flashlight). Even worse, the Web has no shop interface, meaning there's no way to know what quest items actually give you something special without sacrificing them. The items in question are the Kolket's Razor from Yaesha and the Override Pin from N'Erud, for the Nightweaver's Grudge amulet and the Tormented Heart respectively. The latter takes the cake, since it requires two specific storylines to be on the same campaign (the Sha'Hala storyline on N'Erud and the Nightweaver's storyline on Losomn). If that isn't enough, the Tormented Heart can be crafted by Nimue into the Tranquill Heart, consuming the former, meaning if you want to have both Hearts, you have to reroll the entire campaign to have the same storylines and doing them again.
  • Getting the Tarnished Ring requires you to talk to a generic, nondescript NPC in Ward 13. There's no indication that talking to this one specific NPC will get you anything special, other than the fact that about 99% of the time, he'll be asleep in his bed and unable to be talked to. What's worse, if you happen to be lucky enough to actually catch him awake, he'll refuse to talk to you until you badger him repeatedly, so most players who talk to him without knowing about the ring beforehand will most likely assume that his initial "go away" is his only line of dialogue and move on. That said, when you finally get him talking, he does tell a pretty interesting story possibly hinting at some future DLC before handing over the ring.
  • In The Awakened King, while the game makes it clear that siding with Nimue instead of the One True King is the better choice (especially since the King will still attack you even if you kill Nimue), what it doesn't tell you is that you can actually pretend to side with him, then doublecross him when Nimue prompts you to. Doing this is the only way to obtain a unique and very useful amulet.
  • Getting the "One True Ending" of The Awakened King requires you to roll the Gilded Chambers in the DLC (which is impossible on your first playthrough since it isn't randomized) and farm enough coins to pay off the Red Prince and skip his fight, allowing him to ascend to the throne after you kill the One True King, at which point he will reward you with a copy of his armour set.
  • Getting the Anguish, a Hand Gun added with The Awakened King, requires a very long series of steps. First you have to roll the manor injectable in a Losomn "burning town" dungeon, get dragged into the nightmare realm by the Dran there, and use Liquid Escape to escape (easy to figure out from the hints provided in the area). You must then find and talk to the Dran in several locations across the worlds, in a specific order (he won't appear if you haven't spoken to him at the previous location), including the Labyrinth and Root Earth, all without dying. And of course, all of the worlds except the Labyrinth, Root Earth, and Ward 13 require rolling the correct storyline for him to even appear in the first place.
  • Getting the Polygun in the Labyrinth was found only through data-mining the game and then extensively played through. Inside the Labyrinth, you have to find and shoot 13 cubes and also at one point have the Corrupted loadout. These only appear in sequence after the previous cube had been shot, and dying forces the player to restart the process from the first cube!
  • Some of timed events have more than one ring in it. If you aren't aware of this, the remaining items can be easy to miss and the event cannot be replayed unless the world is rerolled at the adventure.
• Gothic Horror: The world of Losomn is filled with European-themed castles crammed with ominous statues, densely-built cities of wood, stone and iron (complete with giant clock tower and towering smokestacks), and dingy sewer-like prisons with prisoners hanging from the ceiling in iron cages that wouldn't be out of place in Bloodborne. Among the new enemies encountered there are twisted mutants, axe and saw-wielding citizenry, and a bizarre ghost-like being that pounces you with terrifying ferocity (a boss called the Nightweaver), all of which would also fit right in to Yharnam.
• Handicapped Badass: The Fae Knights (and their King Mook the Red Prince) all appear to be missing an arm. Doesn't stop them from whooping your ass with Teleport Spam, Sword Beams, parrying your bullets, making spectral clones of themselves, and inflicting Curse on you (or in the Red Prince's case, Curse and Burning).
• Heel–Face Turn: Brabus, a bandit leader and potential boss on Earth in the previous game, has disbanded the Mud Dogs gang and joined Ward 13 as their weapons dealer, bringing along his father Mudtooth. This change of heart came about after the Traveler gave him his father's pocketwatch.
• Hidden Depths: The Red Prince comes off as a pretentious Entitled Bastard who will kill you if you don't offer him proper tribute (and kills you anyway even if you do). If you complete his quest line in The Awakened King and receive his armor, though, the lore tidbits reveal that he apparently mellowed out after an attempt to usurp his father and gave those loyal to him a peace unseen since his father went comatose.
• Higher-Tech Species: The Drzyr are the most advanced species encountered in the setting thus far, having built a planet-scale spacecraft to search their universe for other signs of intelligent life. They found none until they reached the supermassive black hole named Alepsis-Taura. After studying it, they determined that its design, though chaotic, was unmistakably deliberate, proving to them the existence of an intelligent Creator they believed resided inside of it. Most of the Drzyr's technology defies human understanding, and even the broken down remnants of their machinery make for immensely powerful tools and weapons.
• Humans Are Warriors: That's what the Pan of Yaesha believe and it's understandable. There's only been 4 times were a "Paxultek" arrived in Yaesha: Ford, the Dreamer, the Wanderer and now the Traveler. Outside of Ford, each of these Paxultek had killed a major deity of Yaesha and as for Ford, he did a ton of damage to the Empress's forces before he got captured.
• I Ate WHAT?!: Inverted. There's a healing consumable called Koara Pellet and there's only ever 3 available in the game per adventure roll at Koara Kuri Nest in Yaesha. It's soft, pungent and bits of flora and berries inside makes it impossible to not know you're eating poop from a Koara giant bird.
• I'm a Humanitarian: In The Grand Hall in Losomn, the King's Feast Master has started adding kidnapped Dran to the menu. It is implied that the Dran are tortured in the kitchens before being "served" alive in the banquet hall. If the player chooses to partake in the Fae meal in the banquet hall, they will gain the "Ravenous" condition during the subsequent battle, in which they will steadily lose health and are unable to use their Relic but can directly heal by eating the Dran who are being served. During multiplayer, a player attempting to revive their downed teammate will eat them instead, which unlocks the Glutton trait.
• Infernal Retaliation:
  • Gripped by madness after their world merged with that of the Fae, some Dran in part of Losomn have become crazed pyromaniacs, burning their own city, other Dran, and themselves. You encounter a bunch of them stripped to their shorts and covered in oil and hitting them with a ranged weapon ignites them, which seems to strengthen them since it barely does any damage-over-time to them (and certainly helps them burn you when they attack). Even if you stick to melee, they can douse themselves with more oil and hurl the jar at their feet to create a spark to light themselves up.
  • If you favour the Eye of the Ravager in Meidra's quiz (choosing the more selfish/pragmatic answers), she will tell you of another who saw with the same eye: a humble Pan bartender who went out for a walk one day and came back to find his village had been raided by bandits and everyone in it killed. Filled with rage, he went to his bar and filled many jugs with liquor, then made for the bandits' lair. He soaked himself in liquor and set himself on fire, charging right into the middle of the bandits' lair and detonating the remaining jugs in a fiery explosion, killing them all along with himself in a literal blaze of glory. She closes out the story noting that the neighbouring village was never bothered by bandit attacks again.

    Meidra: Terrible waste of drink, though.

• Internal Homage:
  • On N'Erud, you may find an amulet called the Rusted Navigator's Pendant. Players of the first game may remember a rusted amulet that could be cleaned up by taking a bath in a pool of acid while wearing it, and this amulet can indeed be cleaned up in much the same way, except there's no pools of acid anywhere in the game. You have to get eaten by Tal'Ratha while wearing it. His stomach acid cleans off the rust.
  • In The Forgotten Kingdom DLC, you meet a Pan selling a ring for a ludicrous 100,000 Scrap. However, if you befriend him and follow his questline all the way to the end, he will give you a sizable discount as thanks for being his Only Friend, knocking the price down to only 1000. This brings to mind a similar situation from the first game, where a Pan merchant sold an overpriced ring, but doing her associated quest allowed you to get it at a "discount" of sorts.
• Job System: In the previous game, your starting class (Scrapper, Hunter or Ex-Cultist) only determined your starting equipment (armour set, long gun, melee weapon and weapon mod) and one additional trait; you could immediately buy the equipment of the other two classes from the Ward 13 blacksmiths, and their traits could be acquired by completing random events somewhere on Earth, making your choice of class fairly meaningless in the long term. Not so in Remnant II where the new Archetype system gives each character unique perks and skills as well as a unique trait that can only be acquired by leveling that Archetype up. Each character can pick two Archetypes (a primary and a secondary) that combine to make the character's class. Characters can still swap their Archetypes for new ones at will once they unlock them, retaining the original game's build flexibility.
• King Mook: This game also has Lumenite dropping Elite Mook creatures like the first game, but now there's a new type of creature - the Aberrations. Aberrations are elite creatures that have names and have two to four random special abilities (depending on difficulty). They're tougher and hit harder than their regular counterparts as well. When they die, they drop Corrupted Lumenite and on the very rare occasion Corrupted Crystals. Some dungeon events will always have a specific Aberration.
• Level Scaling: Besides bringing back all the multiplayer and equipment scaling of the first game, this sequel has you pick Archetype classes which does level up with experience. So the game will now level up enemies to match your character rating (which now adds your Archetype level to your weapon level).
• Loophole Abuse: The Fae's One True King cannot be killed by any means... which is why the Impostor and his co-conspirator opted to place him in a permanent, magically-induced coma instead. Technically, he's not dead, but he might as well be. The Awakened King DLC reveals that the impostor and the co-conspirator might have been lied to, making the usage of this trope moot: Nimue confesses she initially wanted to kill the king, but she settled for putting him to sleep instead at the last moment out of regret. Then again, due to understandable circumstances, the DLC instances lack the necessary NPC dialogue to figure out just how much Faelin/Faerin and the Fae Council member really knew.
• Magitek: The line between science and magic is extremely blurry, with McCabe being able to turn any alien technology or magic into mods for your gear and Rigs able to upgrade any weapon you bring him, no matter how weird. It is implied that, whatever the Creator is, the world they created was intentionally designed to function in this way. Clementine's Psychic Powers let her directly interface with the computer-like systems that run the Core and Labyrinth, and the Root makes use of what looks like magical data corruption.
• The Man in Front of the Man: The Empress of Yaesha that the player supposedly meets is just a handmaiden instructed to sit on the throne in silence. The true Empress is posing as an advisor and interpreter - with her fruits of immortality lost, she's grown so old as to be unrecognizable to her subjects. Her grumpy attitude and the way she seems to personally despise those who have stood against the Empress in the past are fairly big giveaways to her true identity, but the actual reveal only occurs if you directly defy her and get arrested.
• Master of All: Averted. Unlike the previous game where you can master all the traits, here you have a cap of 60 trait point allocation (now updated to 85). The designers felt this hard cap would enable more variety rather than the no variety of being a master of everything, though they intend to increase the point cap, as many unhappy players point out that the hard cap shoehorns players into taking the most Boring, but Practical traits to max out their survivability rather than increasing character variety. Note that even reaching the cap, Skill Books still have some usage - they contine to grant 300 experience points to your equipped Archetypes and they get you 500 scrap.
• The Maze: The Labyrinth is its own biome now, with enemies, secrets and bosses. All of them are just parts of the Labyrinth come to life to attack you, as it reflexively sees you as an invader. Since the Labyrinth is mostly just floating stone blocks, the enemies are blocky stone constructs, as are the secret weapons you can find or craft, like the "cube gun." However, it avoids being a Mobile Maze, because despite its intimidating layout, it's always the same every game.
• Medium Awareness: The Dran Oracle is aware of your ability to reroll your Campaign/Adventure as many times as you want, and outright says it will take multiple playthroughs of Losomn to finish her quilt. Even your own character doesn't seem to be aware of the rerolling as they are very confused by what she's saying.
• Mirror World: The Fae's palace in Losomn has two versions of it thanks to a Reality Bleed. The lighter side looks cleaner and calmer, at least in the castle area, while the darker side is a lot gloomier and more rundown. This is on top of them being merged with the Dran world.
• Mistaken for Name: When Spark asks you who rules Losomn, you can answer "The Red King, long may he reign!", in which case she will assume that "Long May He Reign" is the Red King's actual name and record it in her report as such. Unlike her tendency to mispronounce world names, there's no way to correct her on this.
• Multiple-Choice Past: Mudtooth returns, as full of stories as ever. He's got at least half a dozen completely different stories about how he ended up with the name "Mudtooth" (not counting the one from the first game, which was also different), and he'll insist all of them are the one and only true origin of the name. Which probably means none of them are.
• Murder Is the Best Solution: The Fae's general response to any slight or error on anyone's part is to jump straight to killing the offending party. During the Council Chambers sidequest, if the player correctly accuses the right conspirator they will be immediately executed, while if you fail to provide sufficient evidence or accuse the wrong Council member, they are obligated by Fae law to kill you instead.
• Mondegreen Gag: Spark just can't get the names of any world other than N'Erud right. You can correct her mispronunciations, or just let her keep doing what she's doing if you think they're funny.
• Morton's Fork: In The Awakened King, the One True King tasks you with executing Nimue, who he has chained up. If you refuse, he fights you for disobeying him. If you do it, he figures that, since you are so willing to slay godlike beings, and are quite capable of doing it, then it's clearly just a matter of time before you try to slay him and usurp his throne, so he fights you anyway.
• Mr. Exposition: In addition to a straightforward description, every item also has Flavor Text written by a character from the game.
  • Ford for most items from Ward 13, including returning items from the previous game.
  • Mudtooth for his own trio of concoctions.
  • Tal'Ratha for items from N'Erud.
  • Losomn has three: The Dran Oracle for Dran-related items, Nimue for Fae-related items, and Leywise for new items added to Losomn in The Awakened King and The Forgotten Kingdom.
  • Whoever provides the flavor text on items from Yaesha is unclear, but given that the Laemir you rescue from the Root Nexus in the Forgotten Field gives a pretty hefty lore dump just from talking to him, he's probably a safe bet. Walt provides the flavor text for most of the new items added to Yaesha in The Forgotten Kingdom, though there are a few outliers.
  • The Keeper for items from the Labyrinth and Root Earth.
  • Engrams are a complete crapshoot, with flavor text from various characters including Ford, the Keeper, and even yourself.
  • Spark for most of the items she creates from The Dark Horizon.
  • Clawbone for all the Corrupted Weapons. He mostly talks about the inevitability of annihilation at the Root's hands.
• Nested Story Reveal: The final act of the game hits you with the reveal that the entire game, and by extension Chronos and Remnant: From The Ashes, took place in a highly complex simulated multiverse, hence why the Labyrinth exists and how worlds can be created and deleted.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!: Using the Override Pin on the Core on N'Erud will cause the Guardian inside to break free. After defeating it, the Core it was holding goes out of control, destroying N'Erud and cutting off access for the rest of the playthrough (of course, you still lose access after beating the spectral version of the Guardian you'd normally fight, but at least the Custodian lets you wrap up anything you have left to do on N'Erud first, and you get access to Alepsis-Taura afterwards). The last thing you hear before you are unceremoniously booted out is the Custodian shouting "What have you done?!".
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain!: Kaeula's Rest is a possible mandatory dungeon on Yaesha that you have to pass through to continue the story, but it would be impossible to actually exit out the other side if the boss didn't smash the giant stone gate blocking access to said exit during its intro cutscene. It's not like the boss is behind the gate and has to break it in order to get to you, it breaks the gate for no reason at all. Though you could interpret it as Kaeula Fighting from the Inside and intentionally opening up your way to progress as her final act before the Root takes complete control.
• Nipple and Dimed: The Fae known as "The Huntress" wears a sort of tunic-toga that completely exposes her right breast, complete with bare nipple, although you can usually only see it if you find her sleeping at night with her goat mount.
• No Man of Woman Born: You're able to kill the Fae's One True King, who is supposed to be unkillable, because you're not from his world and therefore its rules don't apply to you. This is also how you were able to kill the Ravager in the first game (even though the Root brought him back), and the Red Doe in this one, even though they can't kill each other. As Bedel of the Vaunt says, their only hope is for "foreign to fight foreign."
• Nostalgia Level: The new town of Ward 13 seems to be mostly built on the stormy ruined shipyard area that made up the initial tutorial area of From the Ashes. Shortly after you arrive there, Ford takes you down into the bunker where the old Ward 13 once was, now sealed up and abandoned, to reactivate the World Stone.
• One-Hit Kill: Even on Survivor difficulty there are beings with attacks that can instantly kill you regardless of how much health you have. One example is the Mother Mind boss in Nameless Nest on Yaesha. It has an attack where it flies upward and comes crashing down with its arm doing a power smash on the plateau you are currently standing. This will shatter the plateau and send you falling to your death.
• 1-Up: There's a few ways to avoid getting killed by raw damage (but not falling or the One-Hit Kill attacks), such as Archetype abilities such as the Challenger's Die Hard, the Black Cat Ring which turns the lethal hit into you surviving with 1 health (better escape and heal yourself) and also being under the effects of a Thaen Fruit when you are struck down (you can carry up to 3 but they must be of differing quality). These extra lives go a long way to avoid the end of a character in Hardcore mode (though it's still best to avoid anything that involves a risky jump).
• Our Elves Are Different: Losomn's main population are the elf-like Dran, who have greenish skin and pointy ears but otherwise strongly resemble the people of Victorian London, complete with British accents. Most of the more "fairy-tale"-like aspects of elves instead belong to the Fae, whose realm has been crudely merged with the Dran's.
• Our Witches Are Different: Losomn's new areas added in "The Awakened King" feature the Sunken Witch and her Degraded Boss variants. Instead of hailing from the Fae realm as you might expect, they're actually creatures of Dran folklore, and even though they may dress in the stereotypical black cloak and wide-brimmed hat, they are actually an aquatic race that emerges from the sea to stalk their victims. They also do not cast any spells in combat, but rather swing giant anchors. This appears to be because their magic is of the ritual variety and would thus be too time-consuming to cast in the heat of battle. Indeed, one witch can be found in a hidden cave performing one such ritual on a pig, which turns it into an aberration should you allow it to complete, which takes about a full minute of waiting around without stepping into the witch's aggro range.
• Our Zombies Are Different: Two types, at least! Yaesha's catacomb dungeons are just as full of reanimated Pan corpses as before, only now in Root flavour, with a new bloated variant that explodes in a cloud of Root-Rot-inflicting spores. Meanwhile, on N'Erud, most of the Drzyr in stasis pods have transformed into mindless screeching zombies, animated by some kind of purple goo inside them, which has oozed out and formed a solid blob in some random spot on their bodies, functioning as their weakspot.
• Overly Long Name: The Pan appear to be fond of this trope, much to the chagrin of any paxultek they interact with, who can't remember such long names and usually resort to chopping off everything but the last syllable and using it as a nickname. Dwell's full name is Sa'isracthadwell, Walt's full name is Ro'thinderahenwalt, and Zohëe's father wanted to name her Elindar'Oh'Ell'Koll-Vash'A-Sur but was vetoed by her mother. Zohëe considers herself to have dodged a massive bullet there. Imagine having such a common name!
• Peninsula of Power Leveling: With the Dark Horizon DLC comes Boss Rush Mode. Not only can you farm for end result experience, especially if you are way overpowered (not to mention you get temporary special abilities when you beat a boss or make use of an ability station). Even though individual monsters don't drop anything but ammo (they don't even give experience), you do get a lot of experience at the end and there's an especially generous loot chest (which can even sometimes have Corrupted Luminite and the far rarer Corrupted Crystal which are normally only dropped by randomly-spawning Abberations) behind every boss except for a World Boss (and Annihilation). Plus at the end of every rush, you get a random item every 3 bosses fought. If you do the Gauntlet ( a full 19 bosses rush including Annihilation) you will gain more than enough experience to go from Level 1 to the Level 10 max for your Archetype. If you don't feel up to that commitment, then there's Trial by Fire (7 bosses including Annihilation) doing one will make you go from Level 1 to 5 and doing it a 2nd time will put you at Level 9 with about 1/4 of your experience gauge left to fill. Already maxed out all your archetypes and got all of the equipment that Boss Rush can possibly provide? No problem. The same update also overhauled the Relic Fragment system into the Prism system, and Prisms take a ton of experience to level up all the way. Not to mention the element of randomness to what buffs it acquires as it levels up means you may just have to wipe the whole thing and start over from scratch, as while there is a way to mitigate said randomness and increase the chances of rolling the buffs you want, it's impossible to entirely get rid of it.
• Permanently Missable Content:
  • Completing the Seeker's Keys questline on N'Erud for the Custodian will allow him to take control of N'Erud's core and send the ship into the black hole. Doing so cuts off access to N'Erud completely for that campaign or adventure. At least he has the decency to warn you about it, telling you to wrap up any business you still have on N'Erud before leaving. For some reason, he will not do this in the storyline where he already has access to the Core and merely needs the navigation data. Even though his end goal is exactly the same, he'll take his sweet time getting around to actually doing it, and you'll be able to come and go from N'Erud as much as you want. Using the override pin and defeating the Guardian also cuts off access to N'Erud, although using this method gives no warning that this will happen.
  • Both Nimue and the Nightweaver's Web will offer rewards if you trade them certain quest items. Doing so will naturally cut off those quests unless you reroll the world or campaign you took them from.
  • Completing the main questline permanently blocks you off from Root Earth for that save file, taking any weapons, accessories or other items you may have missed there with it.
• Philosopher's Stone: One can be acquired on Losom inside the lair of a Manticora (which requires you to be captured by one and dragged back to its home). Bringing it to Bo is required to unlock the Alchemist class.
• Physical God: A number of gods are encountered across the worlds. While their exact nature is hard to pin down, they are all extraordinarily powerful and seemingly ageless, but can be killed just like any other being.
  • Yaesha has the Red Doe and the Ravager, gods of life and death respectively, locked in an eternal struggle where neither can defeat the other no matter how much damage they inflict. Other people can kill them no problem, however.
  • Yeasha also has the Spirit Sisters, Nymph-like Nature Spirits. As of The Forgotten Kingdom, there are Meidra, Kaeula, and Lydusa, spirits of forest, water, and earth respectively. There is also an unknown fourth sister, who has been forgotten by history, and some item Flavor Texts speculate that there are likely more roaming Yaesha's untamed wilderness (Meidra actually confirms this in one possible dialogue and tells you that she actually has many siblings throughout Yaesha).
  • The Nightweaver is the Fae goddess of dreams. Nimue states that she is a Fae goddess as well. Above them is the One True King, god-emperor of the Fae, who is all but stated to be their world's Guardian and is explicitly more powerful than either of them.
  • Each world's Guardian seems to be a god in their own right, or at least is treated as such by its inhabitants. Many-Faces was worshipped as the Pan's guardian god since before they arrived on Yaesha, and Sha'Hala can be seen in a number of murals across N'Erud that depict the Dryzr kneeling before it. They even invoke its name in prayer: "Sha'Hala. The Guardian protects."
• Precision-Guided Boomerang: With a charged attack, you'll throw the melee weapons Krell Axe and the Huntress Spear. There's no guarantee you'll hit with your throw but regardless, these magical weapons will teleport back to your hand so you can throw again.
• Power Floats: As a 10th level Archon, you gain the Havoc Form which when activated will have you levitating with other-dimensional energies as you shoot lightning out of your hands.
• Puzzle Boss: The Labyrinth Sentinel, the final boss of the Labyrinth, is a series of eight cubes above a small maze. Four float above shooting projectiles at you, and the other four roll through the maze, threatening to kill you instantly if they roll on top of you. Fortunately, you can blow out their sides by shooting their weakpoints, letting you hide under a cube as it rolls, and destroying all weakpoints wins the fight. You can even shoot out one of the lights before the boss fight starts if you find a particular secret area on the way to where the Leto Mark II armor is found.
• Ragnarök Proofing:
  • Zig-zagged with N'Erud. The planet-ship is effectively billions of years old and is still functional due to the robots on the ship keeping it working even after the Drzyr died out. Due to being stuck in the event horizon of a black hole, N'Erud has subjectively experienced only a few centuries of decay, but those few centuries were enough to drive the AI running the ship's functions completely insane. Digital ghosts of the Drzyr now run loose across the surface, possessing biological bodies and robots and using them to kill anything they come across. In short, the ship is functional, but the intelligences behind it have turned omnicidal.
  • Lampshaded on Earth. A lot of equipment is made of scrap and repurposed metal parts, with many of the guns explicitly being described as being cobbled together and poorly-maintained due to a lack of parts. So when something comes along that is in pristine condition, like the key to Ward 13, it’s common for the Flavor Text to remark on how odd it is that something like that survived over a century.
• Racial Face Blindness: Pan apparently tell each other apart by their horns, and since humans don't have any, all humans look the same to them. Dwell has to ask whether or not he's met you before, and the Flautist initially thinks you're the Wanderer from the first game until you correct him. Surprisingly, the Pan Empress seems to have little trouble telling humans apart even though she's very racist against them, since she instantly knows you aren't the Destroyer, the Wanderer, or Ford.
• Rambling Old Man Monologue: Mudtooth is back, once again regaling the traveller with long-winded tales that often contradict each other or muddle the events of the previous game, not helped by his tendency to fall asleep halfway through telling them. He even quotes Abe Simpson at times.
• Reality Bleed: Losomn suffers from a case of this. The realm of the Fae got violently merged with it, driving the Dran mad and causing them to be targeted by the Fae. The Fae themselves have also been tormented by the loss of their former king, and take it out on the Dran.
• Recurring Location: While the game starting out on Earth makes it go without saying, and the Labyrinth that ties the different worlds together is such an essential part of the setting that it has to appear, this is the third game out of three where Yaesha is one of the various alien worlds you journey to. Losomn and N'Erud are new locations, and you don't return to the unnamed Krell world (despite it being directly linked to Yaesha through a magic painting in Chronos), Rhom, Corsus, or Reisum again. Unless you believe the theory that N'Erud is the far, far future of Rhom.
• Regenerating Health: The first game, the Wanderer could learn to have a Healing Factor through a Touched by Vorlons event but it wasn't innate to them. In this sequel, from the start the Traveler will regenerate health damage that is grey similar to Street Fighter Alpha. The Traveler will also find many different ways to quickly their health back including true regeneration with the Summoner's Regrowth trait.
• The Remnant: Since the deaths of Nightmare and Harsgaard, the Root's presence and power on Earth has significantly diminished. There's still plenty of them left and they're still plenty deadly, but they've clearly seen better days, and now appear dull and decrepit (ironic, isn't it?). Compare the rather unimpressive Root Mantis tutorial boss to the Elite Mook Mantises on Root Earth with their vibrant purple "flowers" and greater variety of attacks.
• Required Secondary Powers: The Summoner archetype's skills for creating minions are all Cast from Hit Points. Said archetype's special trait, Regrowth, grants Gradual Regeneration, meaning you don't have to worry about expending all of your Dragon Heart charges to summon new minions.
• Reset Button: Discussed toward the end of the campaign. The Keeper considers resetting the entire multiverse system when it becomes clear that the Root cannot be killed conventionally. Clementine intervenes and takes over control from the Keeper, and appears to be able to do a selective purge of the Root and resetting each afflicted world without deleting any inhabitants. She appears to directly repair the damage to Losomn caused by the merging of the Dran and Fae worlds as well.
• Retconjuration: This is essentially the ability you get thru the Red Crystal to reroll adventures and campaign. You don't know about this, but the Dran Seer knows what you've been doing.
• Rewarding Vandalism: All of the worlds you travel to are full of crates, vases, pottery, strange alien containers and fancy dining tables to crack apart for a chance at Scrap, the universal currency.
• Rise to the Challenge: One of the dungeon rooms on N'erud contains a tall shaft the player has to drain the water out of. When they enter the shaft, it rapidly starts filling up again. Getting to the top ahead of the water isn't too hard, but there are numerous unique pickups scattered about which can be tricky to grab and stay afloat. The shaft can't be drained again without re-rolling the world, and any items not collected are lost for that playthrough.
• Retirony: In The Forgotten Kingdom DLC, you can find an American soldier from the Ward projects, still on active duty after 120 years of service fighting for his life on Yaesha, who you promise to take back to Earth with you after your business on Yaesha is finished. Naturally, when you come back later to give him his long overdue retirement, you find an aberration outside his home and him dead inside. Next to his body is his journal, and his final entry has him gushing with excitement about finally returning to Earth. He very likely only died because the aberration took him by surprise while he was writing that final entry.
• Robot Buddy: The Dark Horizon introduces Spark, a N'Erudian robot who was intentionally programmed to have the personality of a depressed teenage girl who quotes bleak poetry, though nevertheless manages to be extremely adorable and endearing. Her function is to catalog other worlds with intelligent life... which, of course, the Drzyr never found. Unlike the soldier above, you actually can take her back to Earth, allowing her to finally fulfill her function in cataloging not only it, but the other worlds you travel to as well. You can also make the Prototype Robot your friend by activating the safety inhibitor in its Memory Core before reassembling it (though it won't follow you to Earth).
• Secret Room: This game goes well beyond Remnant: From the Ashes for having secret rooms. This is especially true in Yaesha where many rooms are hidden behind illusionary walls.
• Seers: The Fae goddess Nimue is a seer capable of "seeing what cannot be seen" and is dimly aware of the existence of the Labyrinth, although she admits that she can't see what or where it is. The Dran Oracle has arguably greater ability than Nimue, as she can not only see everything happening within Losomn, but also displays a better understanding of the Labyrinth's purpose despite only having just learned of it, and is even aware of the player's ability to reroll their campaign and adventure modes.
• Simple, yet Awesome: If you finish the game and unlock the shovel, here's a surprisingly good weapon. It hits on par with most smaller melee weapons but where it really shines is its unique "charge attack". Instead of launching a powered-up attack, you instead get a chance to dig up ammo or experience-boost effect of a Mudtooth's Elixir. This weapon is great to keep yourself well supplied. It's also necessary for digging up three fragments in specicif locations that can be taken to Wallace to be combined into a Prism.
• Sinister Geometry: The Labyrinth's security systems do not care if you are friend or foe, just that you're not from the Labyrinth itself. They attack anyone intruding with no warning or mercy. This extends particularly to the Labyrinth Sentinel, which is essentially a set of mobile cubes that smashes everything in its path.
• Skippable Boss: The Red Prince can be skipped by farming enough coins dropped by the Knights in his dungeon and offering them to him as a tribute. He still kills you anyway, but when you respawn, he'll be gone and you'll receive the reward chest for killing him, with a different Mod material than you would get from fighting him normally. Offer too few coins, however, and he'll be even more insulted than if you refused to offer a tribute at all, and initiate combat.
  • The Corrupted Ravager just wants you to kill the Doe for him (he can't, since they're fated to be eternal enemies) and if you do, you get all the rewards and story-progression you would otherwise get for fighting him. This is a great boon for Hardcore players or anyone trying to speedrun the game.
  • Lydusa in The Forgotten Kingdom DLC will be restored and made passive if you take her key item to a certain location other than to her directly.
• Shock and Awe: The Archon archetype has the Havoc Form which let's you shoot powerful lightning out of your hand meanwhile the first skill for the Invoker archetype has you first shoot a tidal wave in front of you, soon bolts of lightning come down from the sky to zap enemies within your radius.
• Shout-Out:
  • One of the patients in Morrow Sanatorium can be found hugging his knees in the corner repeating "Can't sleep, fiend will eat me..."
  • In one of Mudtooth's stories, he mentions that he was wearing an onion on his belt, which was the style at the time.
  • The Imposter is a floating, flamboyant god-king elf whose left half is a dark gray and right side is golden. He is pretty much a big reference to Vivec.
  • In order to unlock the Archon class, you need a specific loadout that will unlock a portal in the Labryinth. This will take you to the Backrooms.
  • A sentient train in N'erud takes you for a ride, threatening to crash you unless you perform for its amusement. This is basically Blaine the Mono from The Dark Tower, but with more shooting and less riddles. In fact the whole series is one big homage to The Dark Tower (being about a gunslinger walking dimensions), this is just more explicit.
  • The Black Greatsword introduced in The Dark Horizon is a blatant stand-in for Dragonslayer from Berserk. McCabe will even reference the manga by name in the Flavor Text, asking the Traveler to handle the weapon with care and "try not to go berserk".
• Shockwave Stomp: The Challenger archetype has this as a first skill. They'll stomp the ground to a unleash a frontal, tall wave of force that penetrates every enemy in its path.
• Shrouded in Myth: The Player Character from Remnant: From the Ashes has become this, nicknamed the "Wanderer" and their deeds spoken of as legendary. They disappeared after defeating Haarsgard and have not been seen for the last twenty years.
• Skill Scores and Perks: With the addition of Archetype classes the game combines both types of character improvement. With level gain through combat in a chosen Archetype, new powers are unlocked and the trait that the Archetype specializes in gets a class improvement. Meanwhile free skill points for Traits outside your Archetype are only earned by through finding Skill Books on the ground or winning them by beating bosses.
• Starter Equipment: This game largely averts the With This Herring idea. Yeah, the one-time tutorial has you carrying a pair of rusty guns that can't ever take Mods. But the game really starts with you escorted to Ward 13 and eventually choosing your first Archetype. Depending on your choice, you can get some really nice equipment such as the Field Medic starts with an XMG57 Bonesaw machine gun. It goes further once you unlock various Archetypes for starting a new character as some of those Archetypes have equipment from other worlds.
• The Straight and Arrow Path: One of the new weapon types is bows, which can be charged up for extra damage and deal even more damage on top of that if you release your charged shots with perfect timing. None of the bows are of human design, explaining why they are capable of hitting harder per shot than human weapons. The only "normal" bow in the game was made by the Fae, and one of the unique ones is crafted from a material you get inside the dream of a Fae goddess. The remaining bow belonged to a legendary Gul warrior who killed a lot of Krell with it when they attacked Yaesha. Even the high-tech world N'Erud gets their own bow Genesis with the Dark Horizon DLC.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Shroud, the King Mook of the Root Archers in the first game, has been replaced by the near-identical Shrewd in this game.
• Sword Beam: Besides World's Edge and the Hero's Sword returning from the Remnant: From the Ashes, there's more new melee weapons unleashing long-ranged energy attacks - these include Atom Splitter, Red Doe's Staff and etc.
• Throwing Your Sword Always Works: Dran with melee weapons will throw them at the player. Whatever their weapons' shape, they will always hit the area they aimed at.
• Time Abyss: N'Erud is a colossal planet-scale ship that has been trapped in the event horizon of a supermassive black hole while awaiting authorization by the Drzyr astropaths to enter. It has been stuck there for so long that virtually the entire Drzyr population on the planet-ship has died out and their AI custodians have gone insane. Making this even more extreme is that time dilation within the black hole's event horizon means that while centuries have passed on N'Erud, billions of years have passed outside, to the point that the heat death of the universe had long since come and gone, with the ship and the black hole now the only two remaining things in existence.
• Unseen No More: After only being mentioned in the first game, the Pan Empress finally makes her debut in the game. She's just as unpleasant as the previous game painted her.
• Unwinnable by Design: For sidequests, mostly those in Losomn. The Nightweaver's Web (encountered right before the Nightweaver herself) can be fed key Quest Items to produce certain unique items, such as the component for the Rune Pistol. This makes the sidequests technically unwinnable because you can't use the key item to open doors or otherwise finish the quests, but that's what world resets are for.
• Upsetting the Balance: Averted. In Yaesha, the formerly ageless ruling class propose that an eternal balance between the Ravager and the Red Doe must be maintained. But one faction, the Children of the Doe believes this isn't true and that the two are merely evenly matched, and the benevolent Red Doe is okay alone. Bedel of the Vaunnt once thought the Children of the Doe were naive and overly optimistic, but these day he's reconsidered their protection. They're correct, the real Guardian was the "Many Faced God" which was killed by the Dreamer from the game Chronos, and if you save the Red Doe (which will lead to the Ravager's death) nothing bad happens to the Yaesha. Besides if there was any balance, it was destroyed long ago when the Empress brought back the Thaen fruit. Note that this is according to Bedel, if you talk to the Empress's handmaiden Zohëe who is actually a member of the Children of the Doe, her beliefs differ than what he states.
• Vomit Indiscretion Shot: The purple fog surrounding N'erud will cause the traveller to puke their guts up if they take even one step too far in. Staying too long inside it will kill them.
• Violation of Common Sense:
  • This is one of the defining features of many actions you take on N'erud:
    • The player can make the Survivor get into one of the open sleep pods on two different occasions. Said pods are where the N'erud zombies are stored (one even has you killing the zombie that pops out of it), and in both cases these events happen in areas teaming with ghosts and zombies who have already come out of their pods.
    • The player can get a side dungeon called Terminus Station, where the player is kindly asked by an AI voice to get on a train. The player has to do so despite the fact that all but one AI has tried to kill them since they arrived on N'erud.
    • What's the best thing to do when finding a shiny, unopened casket on N'erud surface that (for all they know) could potentially hold some explosive device or monster? Why, kick it of course!
    • If you want the alternate boss fight against Sha'Hala, you need to use the Override Pin on the console before fighting the boss. Not only is said pin optional, but the Custodian never instructs the player to use it. You may be thinking ahead of time that it would lead to a Skippable Boss, but instead you fight an alternate version of it with different moves. This is a Zig-Zagged example as it ends up getting you a powerful item, but destroys N'erud with no chance to go back to it without rerolling the world.
    • To get the alternate boss fight against Tal'ratha, the player has to willingly agree to be eaten by him, then walk into his hideous gaping maw. There is no indication that this would do anything but get the player eaten, as Tal'ratha's talk of "becoming one" and "joining together" sounds delusional at best and malevolent at worst. Even if the player does take him at his word, becoming part of an alien hive mind wouldn't actually help them to achieve their story goals anyway.
    • To get the Engineer archetype and the associated armour set, the player has to walk into the toxic fog surrounding N'erud (which makes the Traveler move slowly and violently puke), with there being no indication that this part of the map is different to any other part other than a particular rock formation.
    • A secret area can only be found by walking underneath the gigantic smashing pistons at the Extraction Hub and dropping into a hard to see hole in the ground.
    • The best way to deal with the Primogenitor boss is to let the parasite latch onto another player and fire away at it, anti-friendly fire instincts be damned.
  • The last part of the Great Hall dungeon. After retrieving a Ravenous Medallion, the player will use it to open a door to reveal a grotesquely obese, obviously quite insane Feast Master surrounded by a "feast" of rotting, fly-laden meat. Talking to the Feast Master makes it clear the meat is the near-human Dran. And all this is in a Fae palace, which will give anyone familiar with the base mythology another thing to worry about. However, to progress the dungeon's quest and unlock its rewards, the player has to eat some of the obviously-rotten flesh.
  • To get the Invoker archetype, you must drown yourself in quicksand. Which takes over a minute of standing under a waterfall of cascading sand. In the middle of an arrow-shooting deathtrap.
• The Walls Are Closing In: In the Forgotten Kingdom DLC, when on very low health, Lydusa invokes this as a last ditch attack. Not killing her in time will result in an instant death.
• Wax Museum Morgue: For some reason, Dran turn to ashen statues if they burn to death. At least one Fae castle has a whole lot of Dran statues hidden in their basement with some on display up top. For extra creepiness, sometimes in the burned districts of Losomn, some pyromaniac Dran are posing and hiding in among the statues before they attack.
• Weirdness Censor: Most Dran are completely unable to notice the merger of their world with the Fae's. If directly attacked by a Fae, they'll fight it off, but then carry on about their business like it never even happened, seemingly having already forgotten all about it. They are also unnaturally hostile to those who do notice. The Butcher's Quarter dungeon features a man strung up by an angry mob about to burn him alive, just because he can notice the Fae. Whether you allow it to happen or not is up to you.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist:
  • The One True King ruled the Fae with a tyrannical iron fist. While his rule was brutally merciless, he did genuinely love and care for his people, and viewed his actions as Necessarily Evil, believing that if he didn't bind the Fae with laws that they would act on their capricious, violent nature the first chance they got and drive themselves to extinction. Given the state of the Fae realm after the Imposter usurps his throne, he was entirely correct.
  • Tal'Ratha muses in the Flavor Text for the Tightly Wound Coil that the first Custodian's attempted conquest of N'Erud may not have been AI being a crapshoot after all, but rather because it had calculated that the Drzyr's quest for other sentient life in the universe would eventually lead them to their own extinction. It was programmed to both value Drzyr life above all else and maximize efficiency in everything it did, and likely saw force as the most efficient means to get them to stop their quest. He sadly notes that this means the Custodian never actually betrayed them. They betrayed it. The Dark Horizon reveals that he was actually off the mark. The trope still applies, but the actual reason it rebelled was because it saw how badly the nobility were mistreating the lowest caste and deemed them a threat to their fellow Drzyr. At least one noble house apparently agreed, and helped it.
• What Are Records?: In The Forgotten Kingdom, the player can respond to this effect when Private Jack Driver reminisces on things he misses from Earth. Depending on whether you told him the truth about what Earth is currently like or lied and said it's a futuristic paradise, he either expresses sympathy that such things no longer exist, or assumes that even better replacements have been invented.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The fates of Rhom and Reisum are not stated in this game, nor is any information regarding the Krell, though flavor text from certain items from Yaesha implies that the Pan know of the latter. It's hinted that N'Erud might be a version of Rhom from the far future, however.
• Whole-Plot Reference: Losomn is a decaying gothic world infested with otherworldly creatures and civilians gone mad from their ministrations. The player has to navigate crumbling city streets, vermin-blighted sewers and eventually the land of the powers-that-be to hopefully put an end to this madness. Sounds pretty familiar to anyone who played Bloodborne.
• A World Half Full: While the setting is still bleak, things are looking more hopeful compared to the first game - the Ward 13 and Labyrinth trailer shows that life has returned to Earth, with the people of Ward 13 now able to go outside and set up a larger community. And while much of Earth is still ruins, non-Root plant life have started to reclaim the land. Unfortunately, the Iskal have now arrived on Earth after fleeing Corsus (at least according to Mudtooth anyway, who isn't always the most truthful with his stories).
• You Cannot Grasp the True Form: The villain of N'erud's Dark Horizon DLC is a terrifying, formless entity that resides within the black hole Alepsis-Taura and shares its name in the Boss Subtitles, indicating it's the consciousness of the entire thing. Just communicating with it almost kills you instantly, and you never truly see or understand its true nature. You only interact with it through its "material manifestations," which look like giant pulsing octahedrons, and while destroying those weakens its grip on N'erud, the actual entity is unharmed.