Evoland 2

Evoland 2: A Slight Case of Spacetime Continuum Disorder is a Time Travel computer game that starts off like a traditional RPG, much like early Zelda games. And then you touch a strange ancient stone, and you've shifted in time from 16-bit graphics back to 8-bit!

This is a game obviously written by fans with a deep love of all sorts of video games from the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s, as it includes a little bit of play from all sorts of styles. Some people find this somewhat jarring, as you'll be playing a platformer, and then one scene later you'll be flying through a Bullet Hell. But the whole concept is to honor a whole era of games, with switching between games as a form of "temporal discontinuity".

Includes games from quite a few genres, including: And less commonly:
 * Japanese Role Playing Game
 * Platform Game
 * Puzzle Game
 * Action Game
 * Fighting Game
 * Bullet Hell
 * Collectible Card Game
 * Arcade Game
 * Active Battle-Mode RPG
 * Rhythm Game
 * First-Person Shooter -- is not a mode included in the game, but Fina suggests that touching a Magilith might throw you into that mode as a throwaway joke.

Fina: No you're not. My worst nightmare is where I'm wearing a pink dress and all of the mushrooms think I'm their princess. Fina: Brr... Why does it always have to be MUSHROOMS?"
 * 100% Completion: The final screen of the game will tell you how much stuff you collected as a percentage of the total, with a lot of it being "collectable stars" with no in-game effect or cards for a children's card game. This changes the ending screen a little, with more characters appearing at 100%.  If you want to keep track of and track down missing items, the Everything Under The Sun-dar will tell you your completion percentage too.
 * Animesque: In the character portraits, and especially in the future.
 * An Ice Person: Velvet got most of her cold based powers from reading the Book of Boreas.
 * Badass Bookworm: The Meganekko Velvet. She basically fangirls her way around the Magi Library when you visit it.
 * Babies Ever After: Implied by the ending scene on the island, but see Half-Human Hybrid and Gainax Ending.
 * Bridge Logic: Sometimes you gotta chop down a tree to get across the water, but this only works in the 8-bit era.
 * Colonel Badass: Dalkin. The Lieutenants are somewhat... less badass.
 * Cool Plane/Time Machine: By the end of the game, your flying machine travels through time!
 * Dismantled MacGuffin: The five fragments of the Key of Time.
 * Doomed Hometown: But this is a time travel game, so it gets better!
 * Gainax Ending: This is a time travel game, so there was already a high chance of crazy, but there's a Steam thread where people are still trying to figure out what happened at the end.
 * Good Morning, Crono: How the game begins, natch, given the similarities to Chrono Trigger.
 * Half-Human Hybrid: Ceres is half-demon . And then there's  who is the granddaughter of a Sylph.
 * Horned Humanoid: Menos is a purple-skinned demon with horns.
 * Humongous Mecha: One of Ceres's final forms.
 * Konami Code: Used to get one of the Collectable Stars. The sign hints: ⬆︎B ⬇︎A.
 * Lampshade Hanging: On a many RPG and video gaming tropes pretty much constantly. See the image to the right.Evoland2-lampshade.png
 * Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: Clara Loft
 * Lost Technology: The Magiliths
 * Lost Superweapon: The Weapon that Magus wants to use.
 * The Lost Woods: Both the Haunted Forest and the Sylph Forest, though the latter is more of an Arcadia.
 * Mute Protagonist: Kuro, though occasionally the party will make fun of him for it.
 * My Name Is ???: Here's a little dialog (right before they figure out they do know the character from the past):
 * "???: Who am I? I am your worst nightmare!


 * Negative Space Wedgie: The Anomaly, which exists in every time -- except your own at the start of the game.
 * Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Just like the Prophet says, Kuro becomes the Great Destroyer.
 * Orange and Blue Morality: The Hero and The Villain, oddly enough. Ceres is trying to bring about the End of Time, but is that really a bad thing?
 * Pac-Man Fever: In Giro's lab, the super-advanced computers have a Turing Test to keep worker robots from taking over: levels of classic arcade games on monochrome screens. Pac-Man, Pong, and others are featured.
 * Precursors: The Magi.
 * The Prophecy: Given by the Prophet, natch, who foretells that Kuro is the Great Destroyer, he will collect the five keys, and the heroes cause the Great Disaster and flood the world.
 * Prophecy Twist: You meet the Prophet when he is a child, get the keys to his hideout from his friends, and then destroy his plans and flood his group's hideout, causing a "Great Disaster".
 * Retired Badass: Dalkin in the present.
 * The Scream: Some of the art in the future is a version of Munch's classic depicting a Mu in anguish.
 * Stable Time Loop: And how!
 * Stage Name → One Mario Limit → Known Only by Their Nickname: When thrust into the Colosseum, you get a list of classic video game characters, all one letter off, to choose for your fake identity. As this is where you meet Menos, he will call you this name for the rest of the game, so you could be known as "Super Morio" for a longer time than you thought.
 * Stylistic Suck: Each era has a different graphics level. The future (year 1059) looks like PS2-level graphics, the present (year 999) looks like 16-bit graphics, the past (year 950) looks like 8-bit graphics, and the era of the Magi looks like Game Boy graphics with gray on green old LCD-style graphics.  This means that many of the assets have four different versions, which has to have been a hell of a lot of work for the artists.
 * Time Travel: Gameplay is obviously inspired by Chrono Trigger.
 * Time Travel Tense Trouble: Mainly among the fandom, because
 * Unexpected Gameplay Change: So, so much. See the list of gameplay styles in the description.  Just one example: You platform your way up to the top of a mountain, find an old flying machine, and then suddenly you're flying through a Bullet Hell!  The final boss has four different modes in three different eras.
 * Wise Tree: The Yoda Tree helps your quest, he does.
 * Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Fina has a thing against mushrooms (and lampshades the trope). There are a decent amount of mushrooms in this game.
 * You Gotta Have Blue Hair: Most of the characters have some odd color.