Elona



"Shena's ass is the best. -Random NPCs"

"Your pet is running toward you gleefully! It's a...dog! Cat! Bear! Little Girl!"

Some roguelikes want you to die. Other roguelikes want you to die as painfully as possible. Elona wants you to die smiling.

More a life sim and normal RPG than a straight up roguelike, Elona was designed to allow players to play with no specific goals in mind, doing whatever they want in the open sandbox world of North Tyris. The world of Elona is plagued by an airborn blight known as Etherwind. You are an adventurer, fresh from the boat, ready to explore and make your mark on the land. Start a farm, run a museum, be a shopkeeper, go adventuring, or raise pets to duel in the monster arena. If you really feel like it, you can do all of those and more.

Twisted, funny, and strangely compelling. Like Dwarf Fortress' Adventure Mode on crack.

A spin-off game, simply named Elona Shooter, was released recently. It actually has very little to do with Elona, except for sprites and a few references. You play a wanderer who visits a town under siege by hordes of monsters. After being put in charge of the defense of the town, you are then left to do what you will.

The homepage.

Elona Shooter.

Elona wiki.

This game provides examples of:

 * Action Bomb: Some characters explode themselves as a tactic. This can be aggravating as other characters with that ability will also explode in a chain reaction. And of course, there's the possiblity of your escort being a Action Bomb itself.
 * Actually Four Mooks: If you choose to try and rob a wandering vendor, about 20 blokes appear to kill you.
 * Same problem happens when a Rogue Boss stops you. Challenge him, and about ten of his buddies show up to kick your ass.
 * It's possible to make custom npcs do this as well, but lord help ye in deciphering the code. HSP is a harsh mistress. If you summon Ehekatl, then kill her, an enemy called God Inside Ehekatl spawns in her place. This also happens at the end of the game, killing the final boss spawns a neutral bonus boss. Based on this code a few Japanese have created critters that will spill out multiple other critters, or will spawn new critters upon death. They tend to be Yukkuri related, so beware custom moongate maps with yukkuri.
 * All in A Row: Averted, annoyingly. Party members will wander off to attack enemies or just run around in your general vicinity. This often causes angry monsters attacked by your allies to attack you when the ally runs back, so most people buy a leash to chain the ally to you. And if you have a little girl as an ally...
 * Just wait until you get the diaries.
 * Almighty Janitor -
 * Balzak the janitor is also quite tough for starting characters, for those looking to fill their museums.
 * Arbitrary Gun Power - Machine guns are [usually] weak, but fast. Shotguns are stronger than crap, granted you're within four feet of the enemy. Pistols are usually... terrible.
 * Ascended to Carnivorism - Everyone can and will eat meat, including rabbits and sheep.
 * Berserk Button - Loyter hates bad piano playing. See Disproportionate Retribution.
 * Body Horror: What most of the mutations, Etherwind or not, tend to do to you. Even if the sprites don't show it, a high level character usually runs around with the eyes of a hawk, a hard shell on the skin, and generally more limbs than a person should have. Although it can be healed using a rather rare potion. (rare can be subjective)
 * Betting Minigame: Casinos allow you to play blackjack for rare items.
 * Big Bad:
 * Catgirl: Ehekatl, the Goddess of Luck, is one. She mewls a lot.
 * Not to mention is as crazy and flighty as one...
 * Bizarrely enough, she doesn't have the ears.
 * Also the younger catsister spawned from reading her diary. Also, you if you pick the catsister (or catgod)race.
 * There's a Catgirl in Palmia (Mia) who asks you to capture and bring a silver cat to her in exchange for gold and an artifact that makes dominating monsters to be pets slightly easier. Deconstruction: Everyone thinks she smells and believes she's either a psycho or retarded.
 * Cool Gate: Moongates. However, they only lead to user created rooms which are otherwise inaccessible in standard play. Whether they lead to a room full of locked doors or a world where the gods are put in zoos is entirely random.
 * Creepy Child:
 * Critical Encumbrance Failure: Averted. As you carry more stuff, a penalty on speed becomes greater and greater. When you're REALLY burdened, you start getting crushed by your stuff, and you also have a chance to fall down stairs and potentially break your neck.
 * Traveling while "Overweight" will usually get you one-shot smashed.
 * Note that while you get gradual penalties on carrying things, you can still pick up something very heavy like the above gates with no warning of it crushing you instantly.
 * Critical Existence Failure: Played straight. The only indicator that you're low on health, apart from your health bar, is a pounding heartbeat sound that sounds once and is easily lost amongst the sword clashes, machine gun fire, and grenade explosions...
 * Cute Bruiser - The little girl you can start with can become one.
 * Death Is a Slap On The Wrist: Notably played straight, at least for a roguelike.
 * It is however, possible to lose months of time due to the fact some equipment drops when you die. If you die in the wilderness to a rogue ambush on your way to the fire tower...
 * You also get some random penalties for dying, past level six, but nowhere as harsh as regular roguelikes.
 * Death of a Thousand Cuts: Some enemies will take a lot of scratches before going down, if they can't regenerate their health enough anyway. Can be done quite literally as cut damage is rarely resisted.
 * Deadly Nosebleed - Overlapping with Magical Nosebleed below, its quite possible to die from overcasting.
 * Disproportionate Retribution - If Loyter doesn't like someone's pianist skills, he lets them know by throwing rocks at them. Ludicrously overpowered rocks that kill in one hit. A lot of random NPCs die by his hand.
 * A lot of NPCs will dislike your performances, and gladly express their discontentment by way of rocks, until you trained it enough. And since they're generally higher leveled than you at first, it'll usually result in you being gibbed.
 * While he is not quite as strong, Gilbert is also a renowned music critic, if you see someone that looks like a knight in your partytime quest, zap him away before you begin playing.
 * Dual Wielding - A skill. You can't go Guns Akimbo with guns, however. You also get a penalty if the weapons you're using are too heavy for normal dual wielding, like, say, using a claymore and an axe. (Even if your strength normally would negate this.)
 * Mutants, the only class which can gain limbs without heavy cheat engine editing, can, with some amazing save-scumming skills, take this Up to Eleven quite literally, though there's a steep accuracy decline starting from the fifth arm.
 * Empty Levels: Your skills and stats level up independently from your actual character level, and it's possible to increase either without increasing the other. Increasing the character level and nothing else has few benefits and is usually a bad idea. (Thankfully, it's hard to do accidentally and can be undone.)
 * Escort Mission: One of the various quests availiable. This can be as simple as just going to the destination, or having to deal with assassins as well.
 * Everythings Better With Dinosaurs - Tyrannosaurs are one of the most deadly enemies in the game... and, if you've got the right items, you can tame one as a pet - or, if you're using debug races, play as one.
 * Everything Trying to Kill You: Averted, neutral NPCs will often spawn in dungeons and wilderness areas and attack hostile monsters.
 * Also, any monster spawned by a book reading or a spell cast in confusion has a chance of coming out neutral. For small creatures, this is a boon, as they will respawn in the town they are summoned in until you catch them or otherwise force them to stop appearing (though it's slightly buggy, sometimes they don't respawn for ages, or not at all, since they aren't originally a part of the town.) For large creatures, it sure is nice having a sky golem spawn on your side after you inadvertently summon a master lich. They will engage any hostile monsters just as a normal neutral character such as a rogue archer or mercenary would do.
 * Evolving Weapon: This, along with Living Weapon, are what some artifacts can be. Using them too much eventually becomes fatal.
 * Five Races: A bit different than usual, as there are 11 official races, but they're similar to or hybrids of the five races listed.
 * Snails (yes, salt kills them instantly) would count as a cute race, except they are better at nothing that the other races can't do better. They're explicitly described as a race for people seeking a really big challenge.
 * Extreme Omnisexual: Your character can marry and create a "gene" with your party members. They can be anything from yith, animals, to little girls.
 * Game Mod: While the game's coding prevents any large modifications to actual gameplay, a lot of small things, ranging from portraits, sprites, music, or game text, can be easily changed by altering the config files.
 * Hello Nurse: Everyone loves Shena's ass.
 * Hide Your Children: Averted. Children are treated the same way adults are in-game, getting drunk just as often, things that are illegal in nearly every country, or attacking enemies. Not to mention a little girl can be your starter pet.
 * She's also your best pet, since she can use weapons and skills.
 * Hyperspace Arsenal - The 4D pocket spell. You, if your strength is high enough.
 * I'm a Humanitarian: Eating human flesh makes you go insane... at least until you mutate and develop a liking for it.
 * Improbable Weapon User: Panties can be used to deal psychological damage to enemies. Enemies who are killed this way go insane and kill themselves.
 * You can also use an artifact piano as a thrown weapon.
 * The RNG also generates weapons such as a Candy Staff of Lightning, a Cloth Scythe, and a Raw Sword. The staff and the sword can be eaten. Foods made of 'raw' are basically thought of as being jerky-like, aside from those specifically stating they are candy.
 * In Game Novel: While they aren't very long, there are several books that can be found and read.
 * Insubstantial Ingredients: One can make scrolls with harvested materials like screaming madman or memory fragments.
 * Interchangeable Antimatter Keys: Averted. There actually aren't any keys, only lockpicks which may break depending on how skilled you are at lockpicking.
 * Izchaks Wrath: Applies not only to shopkeepers, but to anyone who sees you trying to pick up something that isn't yours. Like a piece of garbage. The most you can do is secretly eat displayed foods, which never gets you caught.
 * Joke Character: You can play as a snail as a Self Imposed Challenge. They're as weak as you expect. Activating extra races allows you to play as certain enemies, like a dog, cat, yith, et cetera, without their special abilities.
 * Lethal Joke Character: ...Or a dinosaur, or a dragon, or a God...
 * Karma Houdini: But only if you're careful. For instance, you can't kill the guy who wants you to kill cats for him, or a person who just cut down a prostitute in cold blood, without taking a karma hit. That said, you can break the minds of children (which leads them to kill themselves), send beggars to Hell, and summon a bunch of monsters to wipe out some weaker NPCs, and simply teleport away while laughing. With the proper feat, you can even nuke a city and still not be considered a criminal.
 * Though, learning that feat requires that you nuke a city without it, first.
 * Kleptomaniac Hero: Averted. You can't pick up anything that isn't yours without using the pickpocket skill.
 * You can, however, eat food straight off the ground. Won't be as healthy as cooking it, of course, but it works great in Vernis and Yowyn while doing hunting/gardening quests.
 * Lethal Chef: It is possible to mess up cooking so badly that raw meat would have been better than your attempts at cooking it.
 * Giving poorly cooked food to an NPC for quest related purposes will make the NPC vomit and die of food poisoning.
 * Actually, NPCs only die of food poisoning if they are given spoiled food. And it's cursed food items that cause vomiting. Food prepared with an abysmal cooking skill simply reduces the stat boosts (and probably nutrition) that you get from eating the food.
 * The food was cursed. The same thing happens with cursed drinks and potions. Interestingly, giving someone cursed food only makes them hate you, and doesn't give you a karma hit, but giving them plain ROTTEN food does.
 * Lord British Postulate: Most major NPC's. In fact, the tougher ones can survive a nuclear blast. There's actually a reason to try and kill them though, because unique NPC's might drop a unique statue or card upon death.
 * Watch out for infestations in towns with NPCs like this. Alien kids take their parents' stats. Which means the little bastard will ALSO survive the nuclear blast, and begin impregnating everybody again.
 * Ludicrous Gibs: Everything dies in an explosion of chunky salsa (and that's mainly if you didn't use magic - then it's a magical black vortex, or if you got turned into an ice sculpture) and the only remains are some bloody bits and whatever items it was holding. If you're lucky, there's a leftover corpse that you can pick up and cook to eat.
 * Madness Mantra: "Round Eyes! Round Eyes! Round Eyes!" "You snail!" and various other cries when the player's insane.
 * Magic Nosebleed - The result of over-casting results in the tile surrounding you spattered with blood.
 * Magic Versus Science: Mentioned in random conversations, where magic and science were thought to be opposed. Obviously, it's not the case in the game.
 * Magikarp Power: Pianists, when in the right hands, can ruin bosses that other classes couldn't handle because their high charisma allows them to hire many allies. It would probably be a Game Breaker if the the AI controlling the allies weren't so bad.
 * It still is, with either breath pets (especially dragons) or quicklings/bells with guns or bows. A shub niggurath would be a good pet as well if only you could tell the damn thing to stop casting summon monster. There's a high probability that anything it summons is strong enough to kill BOTH of you. It is the fastest of the 'eye' class (not that that says much), the strongest, and has the highest health. Even has its own unique graphic! Turning another npc insane gives it the full rush of non-poisonous status effects in the game, and the shubby's insanity strike lasts longer than the insanity from cannibalism.
 * The Tourist Class is specifically this.
 * Mini Game: Blackjack, as mentioned above. A card game is also in the works.
 * Mismatched Eyes: The brooding man (Whom Dwell in the Vanity) at the Vernis graveyard has this -- red and blue, too!
 * Monster Arena: For your pets, which may be monsters. You can also fight there, but the ranks for you and your pets are seperate.
 * Multi Armed and Dangerous: High level mutants might have this. Also the Asura (debug) race, which starts the game with 30 levels and 250% potential in Dual Wield.
 * Named Weapons: All artifacts are this, thanks to the random name generator the game uses.
 * Also can result in some Crowning Moments Of Funny due to name/ability/skillboost combination as well...
 * Newspeak: Renton the suffering wizard sometimes says, "Will the kiss of Death bring an end to the double-plus-ungood that is my life?"
 * Obviously Evil - The mad bomber in Derphy would give the Demoman chills, and she constantly cackles about blowing random people up. And just wait until you complete her quest! The response is...way out there.
 * One Stat to Rule Them All: Speed is just about the most valuable stat in game allowing you to complete actions faster and time is everything.
 * Physical God: It's possible to summon one of the various Gods you worship, and even be one as a debug race. The later can be Awesome Yet Impractical since they have only four slots in exchange for godly stats.
 * The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: The jeweler skill is used to write scrolls due to real jewelry creation not being implemented yet.
 * Oddly, it makes a strange amount of sense, since in most fantasy works magical scrolls are ENGRAVED, at least the really super cool awesome high-leveled big bang ones.
 * Purely Aesthetic Gender: To the point where you can have a character on paper be its own Distaff Counterpart on-screen. Age, height, and weight also have no in-game effect....yet.
 * Schizo Tech: Hot tubs, machine guns, electric lamps, nuclear bombs, laser guns, and more all exist within Elona's vaguely medieval setting. Cyber Dome is a settlement whose entire existence could be Schizo Tech, given the setting.
 * Sidequest
 * Slime Snails and Mutant Tails: The Snail and Mutant races.
 * Shout Out: Having to kill big daddies and rescue little sisters is a quest you can take to unlock genetic manipulation. The scientist who gives you it sounds suspiciously like Tanenbaum, without the accent. (It's a voiceless game, after all.)
 * You can capture monsters with monster balls.
 * One of the starting class is the Claymore.
 * There are also certain lifeforms that can impregnate you and then burst out of your chest.
 * There's a currently unimplemented card game called Wizards and Magic.
 * There's also Shub Niggurath appearing as a rare encounter. Strangely, it's not too hostile, and will instead render you insane, then summon loads and LOADS of much more dangerous creatures like adamantium golems before teleporting away. And yes, a properly built martial artist CAN punch it to death before it does either of these. (Think Final Fantasy Black Belt). Beware of being trapped in a corner by it, however. If there's little room to maneuver it, er...kinda...tentacle rapes you, I guess.
 * The Kaneda Bike.
 * As of Version 1.16, there's a high level dungeon called The Void which requires you to defeat several void masters in order to proceed further into the void. The last void master turns out to be
 * And then there's the puppy cave, which is quite similar to the Puppy Cave of ADOM in terms of the description given (often dying trying to take the puppy out? Mhmm.)
 * Thank whichever god(ess) you pick that it doesn't scale, at least!
 * Odd example: On the voting board, people often submit alias when they get an appropriate title (for example: The Drunk Suika Ibuki, and so on.
 * Noel's passive dialogue is a word for word reference to The Evil Midnight Bomber What Bombs At Midnight. Ahahahahaha!
 * Sorting Algorithm of Evil: Pretty much averted for the most part. Random encounters on the world map will scale according to your distance from the nearest town and fame, which is a sort of measure of your heroic deeds (or lack thereof). Dungeons such as the pre-generated level 666 castle can be found on the road between two cities. Randomly generated dungeons of varying difficulty can also spawn next to your starting location.
 * Sorting Algorithm of Weapon Effectiveness: Played more or less straight. However, it is possible (albeit very unlikely) to find an Infinity Plus One Sword early on thanks to the RNG that drives the game.
 * Sword and Gun: Thanks to the way Elona handles equipment, this is usually taken to the next step, namely Sword and Shield and Gun. If you're a mutant, you'll probably find yourself equipped with a Sword and Shield and Axe and Spear and Sword and Gun and...
 * This Looks Like a Job For Aquaman: The Performance Quests will be largely this for the otherwise mostly incapable Pianist class, which is the only class that can perform those quests reasonably well without tons of grinding.
 * Tsundere: The Healing goddess, Jure of the healing, doesn't want to help you. Really, she doesn't! Stupid!
 * Vancian Magic - Elona has this and combines it with a Mana Meter.
 * Wake Up Call Boss: Many many pianists have had their careers ended early by performing in front of Loyter.
 * On a more general note, Goda the Orc Captain is more than capable of slaughtering players lower then level 5 unless they're extremely well-geared. It doesn't help that he spawns at random. Thankfully, he'll stop spawning once you managed to beat him once...if you can.
 * Welcome to Corneria: Averted somewhat. Every random NPC picks a line from one of several pools of possible text each time you talk to them. While the combined pool is rather large, it never changes throughout the course of the game. Major NPC's play this trope straight, though.
 * Also note you can edit them and add to them. So have a ball, and share your rapier witticisms with all your friends! The Elona community backs and supports drop.io, for those who need a place to put their creations. The Japanese tend to use Japan's DA, Pixiv, however.
 * Where It All Began:
 * Wretched Hive: Derphy. The beginner's guide describes it as such, verbatim.
 * Even the inhabitants describe it as such.
 * You Gotta Have Blue Hair

The spin-off Elona Shooter provides examples of:

 * Boom Headshot: A key mechanic in the game. Scoring a headshot deals critical hit. Scoring 7 headshots will make your character go into a frenzy.
 * Death Is Cheap: You can kill all the civilians that are in the map for that day, but expect them to respawn afterwards.
 * Random Number God: Get just the right sequence of cool weapon with multiple mod slots, awesome mods and wicked drops, you're basically invincible for many, many levels. Get unlucky with weapons and mods, you're So L and will be lucky to get past level 10.

Scut!