Eden Eternal

Eden Eternal is a Free to Play MMORPG by Taiwanese developer X-Legend. It makes its mark by borrowing and uniting successful features from a variety of popular older Eastern and Western titles and wrapping them in a Animesque art style, with the addition of a unique mechanic that allows a single character to switch between and level all 15 of the game's classes at any time. Aeria Games provides the Western/Global service and has done a relatively excellent job, with enough pop culture Shout Outs to make a drinking game.

The game takes place in a Fantasy Kitchen Sink where infighting between various species of Petting Zoo People has been interrupted by the re-emergence of an ancient evil. The Player Characters are humans born from blue crystals, who have great powers that allow them to stand a chance against the enemy. However, the recent addition of the Zumi mouse-race has revealed that it is not merely humans but heroes of all races that are born into the land through the crystals. With most of the NPC races yet to be made playable, who knows how the rest of the legend will unfold?

This game provides examples of:
"He stares at it for a time, then says, "I'm sorry for any harm I'm about to do to the fourth wall, but you'll have to come back later at level 21.""
 * Action Bomb: The Engineer's Missile Destruction summons a small robot that follows the player around like a pet. When the player attacks it rushes the same target and explodes For Massive Damage (up to 14 times the caster's base attack unless the player is especially well geared).
 * Alice Allusion: Alice, the final boss of Mayor's Dream. Her subtitle is 'Dream Eater,' fitting as you're fighting her in the dreams of the Mayor she's trapped, and she appears as an adorable-looking child in lolita garb.
 * In the Trial version of the dungeon, Alice has a second form where she grows to a massive size.
 * An Adventurer Is You: The system is rather generous, with 5 different archetypes of 3 classes each. Every archetype has a set of skills shared by all of its classes and each class has its own unique skills to differentiate from the rest of the archetype.
 * Defense specializes in gaining and holding aggro. Warriors focus on keeping the attention of one enemy (such as a boss) while Knights have better area taunting ability (oddly enough they also have the best movement buff of all classes). The third Templar class is focused on the block stat and healing, with an instant self-heal that can outheal most Clerics.
 * Melee DMG specializes in doing damage up close. Thieves have stealth and attacks which are enhanced when used from stealth, Martial Artists specialize in hitting like freight trains and Blade Dancers have multiple melee Herd Hitting Attacks, some of which are enhanced by Bard skills.
 * Ranged DMG specializes in hitting hard from afar. Hunters can summon a powerful tiger companion to help them burn down their target. Engineers can switch between a high DPS single target human form and an Iron Man Expy with good AOE and damage mitigation abilities. The Ranger is a varied ranged class, with an eagle summon, two triple-hit skills and a fear debuff.
 * Magic DMG focuses on elemental attacks. Magicians are the AOE specialists, Illusionists do better single target damage and have a Robot Buddy to keep enemies at bay, and Warlocks are Gradual Grinders who can summon a floating ball of eyes to aid them.
 * Support specializes in healing and buffs. Clerics have the best tank healing abilities and powerful long lasting buffs. Bards have strong AOE healing but shorter lived buffs. Shamans are an oddity, being somewhat balanced for solo play and relying on fragile Totems for both healing and damage.
 * Badass Boast: Most members of enemy factions will tell you in gruesome detail what they plan to do with you.
 * BFG: Engineers carry a man-portable Artillery Gun that is almost as large as themselves. The gun model is not rescaled for Zumi characters.
 * BFS: Not normally available to players, with most two handed weapons being of a reasonable size, but there is one boss who uses a two handed broadsword on a child model, which is about a third the size of the average player.
 * Breaking the Fourth Wall: The game even lampshades it at one point when telling you to come back at a later level.


 * Bribing Your Way to Victory: The game has an item shop as is typical of most fee-less MMORPGs. Most cash items can in turn be sold for in-game gold. However, there are enough paying players trying to make quick gold from such transactions that prices have been brought down to a reasonable level for non-payers.
 * The Chosen One: The crystal-born. Formerly believed to only include humans, recent additions to the lore have indicated that heroes from all playable races are this as well.
 * Creepy Child: The final boss of the Mayor's Dream dungeon and the evil responsible for trapping the Mayor of Golden Plains City in his dream is an adorable little girl with Twin Tails and a black sword more than twice as tall as herself- who has a penchant for One Hit Kill-ing tanks who are undergeared or not familiar with her skillset.
 * Dark Is Not Evil: The Warlock class.
 * Dual Boss: Juan and Angela, a humanoid frog and a humanoid turtle respectively. They are written as lovers.
 * Later on in the Manor dungeon is the fight with the Johnson brothers, Bob and Banks. They are notable as they inflict debuffs on the party that are removed by the other one's attacks, forcing many weaker parties to fight both together.
 * Elemental Rock Paper Scissors: An interesting variant. Different elements and damage types are recognized in game but they do not affect raw damage done. Instead, an enemy's 'weakness' depletes a secondary value called 'Break Points', with 'Broken' enemies yielding superior loot- up to half of each boss's loot table is inaccessible unless it is 'Broken' before being killed.
 * Everyone Is Bi: An option. The customary romance feature has no gender (or race) limitations. This implementation was probably intended to avoid the trouble of defining which matches are acceptable.
 * Giant Space Flea From Nowhere: The premise of the Slain dungeon is that someone is pulling a whole lot of these in from somewhere. The interior of the dungeon itself actually takes players into SPAAAAAACE.
 * The final boss of Trial: Slain is quite literally a giant insect that appears from nowhere after you defeat the second boss, Anderli.
 * Green Aesop: Present in some segments of the main quest. Naturally, the enemy factions are the ones tearing things up and the player is recruited to fix them.
 * Everything Is Worse With Bears: There are both good and evil characters from the Ursun race but the enemy Ursun models are reserved for their Mighty Glacier roles.
 * Gadgeteer Genius: This is the Zumi hat and many of the game's technological facilities are run by them. You also aid a few Zumi Mad Scientists during the course of your main quest.
 * Giant Enemy Crab: Hermit crabs, to be more precise.
 * Guns Are Useless: Averted. Ranged weapon types have different power to speed ratios with guns being heavier on power. A lot of Hunters end up using guns despite the class bonus to bow damage due to their high natural Agility compensating for the lower weapon attack speed.
 * Hide Your Children: Sort of played straight. There are children in most cities but they are non-interactive parts of the backdrop, with one or two being NPCs. One boss does use a child model but she is implied to be an Eldritch Abomination.
 * Humans Are Special: Played straight in the original intro where humans are hailed as the saviors of the land. Subverted in the Zumi expansion and possibly all future race expansions.
 * Level Grinding: Definitely present but eased by the variety of legal ways it can be done, some of which would be borderline exploits in other games.
 * Loads and Loads of Races: Seven planned to be playable with two already released and one on the way, plus one NPC only. All of these races already appear as either NPCs or enemies.
 * Humans: Need no explanation. The only race released at launch.
 * Zumi: A diminutive genderless mouse race with strong technological aptitude. Second race to be released.
 * Anuran: A frog race with apparently strong magical aptitude. Third race to be released.
 * Ursun: A brawny bear race. Fourth race to be released.
 * Halfkin: A playful race of diminutive humanoids. Fifth race to be released.
 * Tuskar: A pudgy boar race. Release not yet scheduled.
 * Torturra: A hulking tortoise race. Release not yet scheduled.
 * Orcs: Orcs. Release not yet scheduled.
 * Drakai: A quadrupedal dragon race. NPC only.
 * Lost Technology: The theme of the Shale dungeon.
 * Katanas Are Just Better: Averted. Katanas are a separate weapon type but have the same traits as all other weapons- i.e. a unique stat ratio (sacrificing attack power for speed), several artifact/crafted versions and an attack boost when used by one particular class. The apparent katana 'specialist' has not been released at the moment and Word of God claims that they actually use Guns Akimbo, with their class preview holding a katana as a placeholder weapon.
 * Magic Music: The Bard class uses a combination guitar/lute to play songs for attacking enemies and giving teammates short buffs.
 * Mercy Invincibility: After some status effects (Stun, Fear, Sleep, Immobilize, Knockdown, and Charm) wear off or are removed, an invincibility status for that particular effect is given; this immunity applies to both allies and enemies.
 * Mordor: Blackflame Peak. Interestingly the ash and lava have nothing to do with the enemies' plans.
 * No Biological Sex: Zumi and Anuran by Word of God.
 * Petting Zoo People: All the races besides humans. Strangely enough there are no strong racial sentiments and both ally and enemy factions have members from multiple races.
 * Powered Armor: Engineers' Cyber mode.
 * Prestige Class: The Samurai, first class outside of the originally announced 15 to be released. Users of the katana weapon type who apparently specialize in linear AOE attacks.
 * Of the original 15, only 6 can be used without needing to have other classes at particular levels; all classes unlocked past character level 20 have prerequisite class level requirements.
 * Purely Aesthetic Gender: The only influence it has is for certain Item Shop fashions (Male humans, Zumi and Anuran can wear outfits female humans cannot and vice versa), and most of these have opposite-gender counterparts.
 * Rainbow Pimp Gear: If you get unlucky with your random dyes, you can end up falling into this.
 * Repeatable Quest: A very similar system to the World of Warcraft dailies, except with shorter cooldowns on the quests.
 * Rule of Cute: The basic mount in the game is a fluffy alpaca, which many players are attached to despite more advanced mounts having a larger speed bonus.
 * Smash Mook: Most dungeons will have a few of these patrolling the corridors. They hit MUCH harder and take MUCH more damage than the regular trash packs, to the point where pulling one by accident can kill the main tank in seconds.
 * Shout Out: Where to start? Notable exmples:
 * Journeyman Kino.
 * "It belongs in a museum!"
 * There's a flying wolf elite called B.B.. The achievement for killing this one is a reference to MMO culture as well as the story.
 * Engineers reaching level 25 can turn into a steroid-pumped Iron Man. The male model is a mishmash of various suit designs, including the metal 'spine' from the movie-era Suitcase Armor, while some players believe the female model looks like a Gundam. The single animation for all the armor's attack skills is clearly a Kamehame Hadoken.
 * In Malice Ruins, a wizard boss named Doubledoor, a pun off Dumbledore.
 * One summon boss is named Welles and the achievement for beating him is named "They're Better When You're Dead!".
 * The whole Crooked Vein dungeon is a TMNT reference. Two random turtle bosses out of four spawn (named Michelangelo, Donatello, Raphael and Leonardo) in the last room, and when those are defeated players are met by a mouse boss.
 * Scenery Porn: Many of the maps are packed with clever little design details that are off the beaten road (there are actual roads which are quite accurately outlined on each zone map) and the relatively long draw distance means that you'll often spot something interesting from far away. There are also plenty of elevation changes in even the most barren of landscapes.
 * Players are only allowed to access a blob-shaped portion of each map but the maps themselves are square with the unreachable areas having fully featured topography.
 * Schizo Tech: Most of the areas are at a standard High Fantasy Medieval Stasis level. Then night falls in Aven and you see electric spotlights...
 * Solo Class: Hunters can solo very efficiently due to having most of their DPS come from a powerful tiger companion that can be healed (they are sub-par against bosses that quickly kill or dispel their tiger). The class is exceptionally popular with botters for this reason.
 * Spoony Bard: The not-so-spoony variety. The class has strong raid healing ability (although it has trouble dealing with large damage spikes) and can kite via a powerful stacking AOE debuff and a hefty movespeed buff.
 * The Dev Team Thinks of Everything: There's a unique graphical touch with player models. If hats are made visible on characters with any form of hair tie, their hair will be automatically untied instead of having the pigtails or ponytails magically sheared off like in most MMORPGs. It's animated too.
 * Likewise, Zumi character hats allow their ears to clip through and their Engineer's armor has ear housings.
 * Title Drop: The 'Eden' in the game's title seems to refer to the player controlled Guild Towns, which are officially called 'Edens'.
 * Underground Monkey: While there are a relatively large number of basic models, most areas have local variations of the same enemy. Human and humanoid enemies seem to use the same character models as released or unreleased player races with various weapons, though it may be that the players themselves use modified enemy models.
 * A Worldwide Punomenon: The achievement for raising your Knight class to level 20 is "A Hard Day's Knight."
 * You Are Already Dead: Though the trope itself is not invoked, one of the achievements (gained through killing a specific boss) has this name.
 * You can however, invoke the trope by using skills that do constant damage over a set period of time on a weakened enough monster.