Granado Espada

Granado Espada, sometimes known as Sword of the New World, is a Korean MMO created in 2006 and released internationally in 2007. It is currently free to play.

Instead of a Standard Fantasy Setting, GE takes place during a Renaissance-era mass migration. Some brave new explorers (who happened to be named Granado and Espada) have just discovered an untapped, virgin landmass, and Pioneer Families (IE players) are flocking over en masse to help settle the new continent. At the very least, this means the game looks way different, being an interesting mishmash of Renaissance and baroque styles; it also allows an aversion of Fantasy Gun Control.

Granado Espada features the "MCC System": Multiple Character Control. Yes, instead of letting you run only one avatar at a time and teamwork in a clan, GE lets you form a "family" of characters and gives you control of up to three at a time. Five character classes are available, as well as a number of "Unique Playable Characters" who can be recruited from the game's flocks of NPCs. There's also a Stance System; each character class comes with at least three of them, which you can shift into and out of in combat if you have the right equipment on. For instance, if your Tank is throwing around a two-handed greatsword, s/he loses access to any stances that involve Dual Wielding, or swash and buckler, or Sword and Gun. Finally, there is also an option for the game to auto-play your characters while you are away from your console.

This game provides examples of:

 * Absolute Cleavage: Reckless Emilia and Princess Gabriella.
 * Agent Peacock: Montoro, of course.
 * Allegedly Free Game (while gameplay itself is totally accessible without your wallet, your starting Barracks has an Arbitrary Headcount Limit of four, meaning that's the most characters you can own at a time. There are five generic character classes, and at least thirty recruitable UP Cs. Extra beds in your Barracks cost $0.80. Line starts here.)
 * Anachronism Stew (At the very least, the Musketeer's muzzle-loading rifles and pistols reload with the speed of single-action firearms?not to mention the sound effects!)
 * An Adventurer Is You: while every class has multiple stances, all of them have an "Exclusive Skill" that stays available no matter what stance they're in. Factoring in those skills, the Splats go as follows:
 * Fighter: Tank (DPS stances included)
 * Scout: Healer (stances include DPS, Trapper and Buffer)
 * Wizard: Buffer (stances include Debuff and Mezzer)
 * Elementalist: Nuker
 * Musketeer: DPS (stances include Guns Akimbo, which isn't a splat but is still cool enough to be worth mentioning)
 * Oh, and, most of the UP Cs have unique stances. We're not even going to start on that.
 * An Ice Person: Karjalainen, Ion Felipe, Warlock and Hellena to an extent.
 * Anti Poop Socking: The entire point of the spacebar "AFK" mechanism. A simple press of a button will allow your team to auto-attack nearby enemies and healers heal wounded allies. You can't loot while you're AFK, though.
 * Also as part of the raiding system. Smaller, quick raids usually have a 1 day cooldown, while big, faction-sized raids have a one week cooldown.
 * Anti Magic: The Rapiere stance users. Especially Andre.
 * Arbitrary Headcount Limit
 * Awesome but Impractical: Some of the skills in-game. The most perfect example of this are the Warlock's Abyss Flare. Long cast time, needs a lot of mana, but damage is enough to shave an inch of a high-level raid boss's HP. Its major weakness? A single hit while you are casting it knocks you back, throwing all the required mana and items away with it.
 * Badass Grandpa: Fritz. Martial Artist master, looks like he's in his 80s but still kicks delinquent asses everyday. Another would be Grandice, Badass Grandma extraordinaire, who FUCKIN EATS DINOSAURS FOR BREAKFAST!
 * Battle Butler:  to Montoro. He apparently likes the job but hates the one he's working for.
 * BFS: The Great Swords, with Regulus' Passion taking the cake.
 * Boring but Practical: The builders (Jack, Diego, and Angie). Manually building their constructs is very monotonous, but you're building an entire fortress that kills mobs for you (the turrets), while protecting your still-squishy characters that you want to powerlevel (the fence), all the while buffing nearby allies, increasing their stats by a small amount (the wards). And finally, the rotating blades are some of the best tools in breaking colonies during the colony war.
 * Big Bad: Viscount Montoro, one of the Ten Nobles of Vespanola.
 * Bilingual Bonus: For those who are wondering, Babelfish claims that "Granado Espada" means "distinguished sword."
 * Which is probably exactly what the creators did to get that title. The grammar is wrong, and the meaning is archaic: although "granado" does mean distinguished and selected, no native speaker would translate that as something else than "loose" and "selected" in "loose selected grain."
 * Black and Gray Morality: Kurt and Edward, respectively. Although Edward's motif is White.
 * Blond Guys Are Evil: Played straight with Kurt Lyndon.
 * Bottomless Magazines
 * Bribing Your Way to Victory (a couple of UPC recruitment quests are way easier if you're willing to shell out for "Gold", the real-money currency. In fact, some are virtually impossible otherwise, because they require items that are almost impossible to acquire without Gold. Such characters are generally described as "Gold Shop Characters" on the online guides.)
 * Averted, but only recently. Almost all of the "Gold Shop Characters" have an alternate quest line where you can get them in otherwise "free" ways. Three of them can be recruited by collecting a semi-rare item that all monsters drop (although for two of them, you still have to use Gold Shop items, although minimal), one by killing a mid-level raid boss, one by hunting a rare spawn monster in a certain map, one by busting his hammer and anvil by upgrading a certain weapon to a certain level, and a last one simply by talking to him.
 * Camp Gay (Andre Janzur, a fashion maven who manufactures all the costumes in the game.)
 * Doesn't help that he's based on the late real life fashion designer Andre Kim. Down to his obsession with anything white.
 * Cloning Blues: Averted with Grandis, aka the "Red-Haired Girl", Grandice's clone.
 * Chinese Girl (Feng Ling/Soso)
 * Combined Energy Attack: Occult Magic's Abyss Flare. Somewhat subverted that it instead combines the energy from all elements. Still, it doesn't help conjuring images of Goku's Spirit Bomb.
 * Damn You Muscle Memory (A spell's hotkey depends on whether its character is Party Member #1, 2 or 3. Make sure you're reaching for the right button.)
 * Dark Is Evil: Kurt, again.
 * Death Is Cheap (so cheap it doesn't even seem to happen. A "killed" character gets knocked down and takes XX seconds to regain their feet, where XX is related to the character's level. If all three of your characters get knocked down this way, there is no penalty: you just wait until the first one gets back up again. So far as this troper can tell, there is no way to Game Over in Granado Espada.)
 * The only exception is when you're in an instanced quest area: a Total Party Kill results in you failing the instance. But Thou Must succeed, so the quest remains available for re-attempts until you pass it.
 * Game Breaker: basically any zone you're too low-leveled for is still a legitimate Peninsula of Power Leveling (aside from the logistics of actually killing anything before you wipe).
 * A hilarious subversion (well, hilarious for everyone else) occurs for anyone doing this immediately after hitting Level 51, when automatic revival shuts off, forcing players to return to the Barracks and manually reassign their "killed" characters to their active party.
 * Distressed Damsel - ( in her recruitment quest.)
 * Demonic Spiders (anything with a high movespeed, like Skullic Footmen and all forms of Phobitan imps. Even better, they are always...)
 * Elite Mooks (which are programmed as a separate species from their root Mook class, so they don't count when you're on a Twenty Bear Asses mission.)
 * Non Indicative Name (Elite Mooks are always more populous than their non-Elite counterparts. This is because, if there is an Elite version of a mook, it replaces the non-Elite versions on spawn tables; normal mooks can't enter play at all unless they are summoned by the Elite version.)
 * Boss in Mook Clothing (called "Zone Bosses" here. There is only one per zone, and it appears randomly. By which we mean, "whenever you don't want him to".)
 * Dual Wielding: The Fighter, the Musketeer, and, strangely, the Scout
 * Dynamic Entry: The Book of Wind's Dragon Kick. Arguably Master Martial Arts' Elemental Kick.
 * Everythings Worse With Bears: Ludin's Teddy Bear, which appears to have a life of it's own.
 * Evil Is Sexy: Oh boy, where do we start?
 * Expy: A little girl who likes playing with fire with an obviously evil Teddy Bear. Guess what other game has that.
 * Eyepatch of Power: Adelina and Grandice. Also, Bai Hu in his Narciso costume.
 * Fake Difficulty (whoever set the rates at which the game's Respawning Enemies come in was smoking something. We're talking a Zerg Rush every 10 seconds. While the Death Is Cheap situation removes any gameplay penalties, it can still take several minutes?and Total Party Kills?before you can regroup in safety.)
 * It's to account for the fact that you control three characters at once, and can split them up to have them take down different enemies. Throw in the ability to make parties with other players, and competing players (and their parties), and that's a lot of characters bearing down on the monster hordes and fighting for experience points.]
 * Faking the Dead:
 * Fantasy Counterpart Culture
 * Fantasy Gun Control (averted)
 * Fate Worse Than Death: What Montoro did to
 * Fire Ice Lightning: The three main elements Warlocks can use. There is a fourth element called Mental, which can be a completely different element (for Wizards) or a combination of fire, ice, and lightning (for Warlocks).
 * Gadgeteer Genius (Jack Shirley and his niece Angie, who can build turrets. Angie is also a Technical Pacifist in that she cannot equip actual weapons.)
 * Glass Cannon: Musketeer-class characters (like Bernelli), Elementalist-class characters (like Hellena), Idge (very unusual), Claire (literally if you let her use a Cannon).
 * Global Currency - "Vis" and "Feso"
 * Gotta Catch Em All (the UP Cs; it sounds like the developers are adding new ones on a regular basis. Exploited via the "buy more slots in your Barracks" Revenue Enhancing Devices.)
 * Gratuitous Spanish
 * Guns Akimbo: Starting off with Double Gun Shot. Then you upgrade to Outrage Shot complete with Gun Twirling. And then Unlimited Shot.
 * Lionel dual wields with a rifle on one hand and a pistol on another. A rifle on one hand.
 * Guns Are Worthless (averted; guns can One Hit Kill most mobs. While bullets do cost Vis, they're cheap enough that you still keep a profit margin.)
 * I Was Quite a Looker: Suggesting by his questline:
 * . More than confirmed.
 * Interface Screw (A character who is not selected cannot be issued orders. When a character "dies", they are automatically de-selected?and if they are the "lead" character dies, they automatically de-select the entire party. You can see where this is going.)
 * Gloomy Present from Wizard stance Darkness. Limits the player's view to only a small circle on the middle of your screen.
 * Istanbul Not Constantinople
 * Hand Blast: Employed by Warlocks on some of their spells.
 * Hot Mom (Adelina Esperanza)
 * Hot Blooded (The Coimbra Trooper and the martial artists to a degree)
 * Hot Witch: Sierra
 * Improbable Hairstyle: Gracielo and Dr. Torsche. You'd think they're the poster boys for a medieval hair gel.
 * Jiggle Physics (There's pretty much a reason why you see more female elementalists than males.)
 * No, it's because male elementalists are fugly.
 * Now they added female Wizards, Emilia, Lisa, Adelina, and Hellena to the list! Hell yeah!
 * Kid Hero - Ramiro and Tiburon. As if to play up the cuteness, they use one-hand swords for two-hand sword stances.
 * Lazy Backup
 * Leaked Experience (used with a twist: quests in this game award "Experience Cards" instead of straight EXP gains, and those Cards can be fed to your standby characters if you want.)
 * Loads and Loads of Characters: So far, there's around 100 named characters running around the continent of Granado Espada, half of that are recruitable. But not all of them have been introduced yet, such as the rest of the Ten Nobles of Vespanola.
 * Lightning Bruiser: The Martial Artists sans Jean-Pierre (half Mighty Glacier). Asoka/Mifuyu would count too.
 * Love Triangle -
 * Magikarp Power (some stances are like this. For instance, the Scout has a Trapper stance which allows him to set traps. ...After you spend a while grinding to Stance Level 8. Oh, and equipping a weapon takes him out of the stance, meaning he can only use his "Heal" or "Detect Invisible Objects" actions during this time. Other classes suffer similar problems by not getting new stances unlocked until they've ascended quite some rungs up the level tree.)
 * Macross Missile Massacre (the Photon Splash skill from the Levitation stance.)
 * Elementalist's Absolute Zero is this on a single target.
 * So is Hellena's Aqua Pierce.
 * Ion's Frost Dust takes this to overkill levels. The number of ice projectiles he shoots is at least three times Absolute Zero's.
 * Marionette Master :Catherine the Summoner.
 * Meganekko - Idge and Veronif. The stock characters as well when they equip glasses.
 * Mighty Glacier: Nar. Him and his unique stance Semilunar are verrrrry slooooow, but as for the damage...
 * Adding to the list are Claude, Grandice, Alejandro, and Cortasar.
 * More Dakka: Raid Bosses with insanely high HP? No worries, just bring a whole squad of Musketeers.
 * Mysterious Past: Nar.
 * Never Bring A Gun To A Knife Fight: Musketeer class characters are often weak to dagger attacks, which deals bonus damage to Soft Armors, the kind of armor Musketeer uses. Although it's given that one cannot evade bullets as most dagger stance use evade as a defense mechanism, Lisa's expert stance allows her to evade bullets, which only makes her more deadly against Musketeers.
 * One Winged Angel:  final form, as a raid boss.
 * Organ Drops (used only when you're on a Twenty Bear Asses hunt that's part of a Chain of Deals; during these, the organ does not actually drop, but is added to your account directly by the system.)
 * Peek a Bangs: Gavin.
 * Period Piece (more than most MM Os are; exactly what period we're talking about is up for debate)
 * Gorgeous Period Dress (for female Wizards and Elementalists particularly)
 * Perma Stubble: Raven's original appearance.
 * Pirate: Adelina Esperanza
 * Quest for Identity: Edward Jameson/Eduardo Hingis
 * Rainbow Pimp Gear (averted; fighting equipment does not have a modular impact on appearance that way, instead changing your avatar from head to toe. There are also four slots for items that do nothing but change appearance. However, the aversion comes at a cost: there is no avatar customization during character creation. The only way to personalize is to get items during gameplay.)
 * Randomly Drops (played straight with Item Crafting reagents and some items. However, averted with quest rewards. NPCs never give you an actual weapon, they instead give you "Polish," which can be traded for the "Ancestral" equipment of your choice. Ancestral EQ never has enchantments, but it's also generally 20% stronger than what you can get in stores.)
 * Worse is the dreaded Viscount Ring required for Grandice's recruitment. You can only get it in a "key" mission, where the key is a 1/100 drop from a boss monster in the dungeon, then when you get in the actual mission, there is a 1/5 chance of the monster which drops the ring to show up, which in turn has a 1/22 chance of dropping the ring. Which means you only have 1/11000 chance of getting the ring per boss mob kill.
 * Then if you decide to transform the key the boss dropped into a special key that allows you access to a special room where you can kill the monster without being interrupted by other players, that's another 1/2 chance. Which means your total chances go up to 1/22000.
 * Robot Girl: Catherine (Depending on which type you chose, either STR, DEX, INT or Summoner) is a marionette created by Dr. Torsche in an attempt to "revive" his dead daughter.
 * Scenery Porn
 * Standard Fantasy Setting (averted)
 * Stationary Boss: Quite a few of the in-game raid bosses are stationary, like Argus Brain (not the one shooting lightning at you, the creepy brain and spine thing you need to kill).
 * Also, Fritz, literally. He is the last you have to fight in a Boss Rush quest, but a Game Breaking Bug may cause him to stop attacking you and just stand there until you defeat him. Sorta makes him an Anticlimax Boss
 * Stripperiffic (female Scouts)
 * Sword and Gun: The appropriately named Heaven and Hell stance.
 * Rapier and Gun with Advance Garde.
 * Adriana's stance Cutlass.
 * Tarot Motifs (The Trump Weapon Series and the jGE exclusive Arcana Weapon Series)
 * The Beautiful Elite
 * The Von Trope Family: Lionel and Ludin von Hanen
 * Token Mini Moe: Claire, Viki, and Ludin. Ramiro and Tiburon doesn't count, as they're more qualified as Kid Hero.
 * Tsundere (Claire. Complete with "I-it's not that I like you or something..." when she 'accidentally' places her character card on a present.
 * Twenty Bear Asses (everywhere: in addition to NPCs sending you out on these, every monster in the game is the subject of a voluntary "hunt" which you can take on from a soldier or a terminal somewhere on the map.)
 * Walking Shirtless Scene (The Esinian Tattoo Armor for male Scouts.)
 * Soho as well.
 * The beach wear costumes as well. Also, Irawan.
 * Weapons Kitchen Sink: Weapons range from the usual sword and spear, to the surprisingly commonly-used Toy Hammer (hey, it has Stun effect, and anything with inbuilt stats is bound to be wanted by everyone in this game), and the Great Sword-dwarfing Crescent.
 * Western Zodiac: The zodiacs are tied to a certain stance and the corresponding weapon, which in turn is named after one of the stars in the constellation. The list is as follows:
 * Aries - Polearm - Tronada Cruz - The Leadership of Hamal
 * Taurus - Rapier - Rapiere - The Purity of Aldebaran
 * Gemini - Knuckles - Master's Martial Arts - The Wits of Gemini
 * Cancer - Sabre - Bloody Feast - The Will of Acubens
 * Leo - Great Sword - Hanging Guard - The Passion of Regulus
 * Virgo - Lute - Prelude - The Criticism of Spica
 * Libra - Gaiters - Master's Martial Arts - The Balance of Libra
 * Scorpio - Javelin - Peltast - The Insight of Antares
 * Sagittarius - Sword - Equites - The Cunning of Altair (the only exception)
 * Capricorn - Dagger - Arnis - The Impulse of Algedi
 * Aquarius - Rifle - Flintlock - The Tempest of Aquarius
 * Pisces - Pistol - Unlimited Shot - The Intuition of Al Rischa
 * White Haired Pretty Boy - Edward Jameson, Lionel, Ion Felipe.
 * White Haired Pretty Girl - Veronif.
 * Wooden Ships and Iron Men (trans-Atlantic crossings don't actually figure into gameplay, but if they did, this would be the trope involved. We're definitely not in a Standard Fantasy Setting anymore, Toto.)
 * Wrench Wench: Idge, Claire, and Angie.