Titan Quest



Titan Quest is a Diablo clone for Windows set in the ancient Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, and China and loosely based on Greek mythology. It is notable for its pseudo-historical setting, and generally is fairly faithful to the eras it attempts to portray, though there are some anomalies. Mysterious monsters known as "Telkines" have appeared along with hordes of monsters, undead and demons. Playing as a young traveler you have to choose your path and stop the Telkine's plans of destruction and death.


 * Exclusively Evil: All the monsters and enemies in the game, with the only exception of a single centaur hero and a satyr merchant found in Greece, who are friendly. It's explained during the story that the creatures used to be mostly timid or neutral, although it's hard to imagine how this could work for a few (such as the crocodile men).
 * An Adventurer Is You
 * Artificial Stupidity: Justified. Most enemies are dumb and susceptible to arrow volleys while a summoned scarecrow distracts them, but some intelligent species exist (mostly humanoids) that will actually kite you, flee when attacked or summon distractions.
 * Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Cyclops and most of the larger, more powerful enemies. That include a gargantuan Yeti on your way to China.
 * Authority Equals Asskicking: Justified.
 * Awesome Yet Practical: The Seer's Trance of Wrath: a passive, aura skill which deals a lot of damage to all enemies around you, be them mooks or bosses. The only downside is that is a top level skill, and you'll have to get at least fifteen levels to get it and max it, but is still worth.
 * Badass Normal: The guy in the opening movie who manage to kill a gorgon by having a statue fall on her. Later, when Megalesios himself appears to taunt him, he just charge at him screaming.
 * Battle Aura: The player can learn to grow them and can level them up.
 * Big Bad:
 * Big Boo's Haunt: Several of them. The undead can be killed in any way, but they're extremely resistant to some forms of damage (such as pierce and poison) and completely immune to others (life leech). Since some types of characters rely on these damage types, killing undead enemies may be extremely tricky.
 * Big Creepy-Crawlies: Several giant insects, usually in Egypt. Including spiders, scarabs, antlions and mantises.
 * Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: Yetis and Yerens.
 * Blade on a Stick: Spears, the favorite weapon for the Hunter Class. Despite being slow they're quite powerful and can pierce armor.
 * Bloodless Carnage
 * Bonus Dungeon: The infamous Secret Passage. You'll need a special key to unlock the door.
 * Boring but Practical
 * Boss in Mook Clothing: Dactyls. Huge melee damage, huge attack speed, fairly high health. Their most lethal attack is a ground wave that they spam continuously that will surely stunlock you, while dealing insane amounts of damage. And in Legendary mode, they have 99% chance to avoid projectiles. Fun!
 * Cyclops near the end of the game.
 * Breath Weapon: Some enemies have these, but the most notable case is the Hydra. Fire breath, poison breath and ice breath. All three deal massive damage over a very short time (generally more than potions can heal) and the ice breath also you down.
 * Broken Bridge: You can hear from a nearby NPC that it was a cyclops who smashed the bridge to pieces. Soon enough, you have to kill that cyclops.
 * A bit less noticeable than some examples because you are already on the opposite side of the bridge before you are told you to go to the city that would have required crossing it in the first place.
 * Calling Your Attacks: Charon yells "RIVER! RISE!" every time he's about smack you with columns of water. After he gets into his One-Winged Angel form, he stops yelling it.
 * Came Back Wrong:
 * Cap: Of the statistics kind.
 * Character Level
 * Check Point
 * City Guards: They only block your path three times in the entire game, and are generally helpful.
 * Cobweb Jungle: Justified, as there are abnormally oversized spiders found throughout the game. And some are half human.
 * Combat Tentacles: Some of the creatures and also
 * Cooldown: Using certain skills, drinking potions, using scrolls and using some of your artifacts special abilities have cooldowns.
 * Copy and Paste Environments: Played straight in Egypt, where pretty much all you'll see is sand and tombs. Averted hard in Act 3, where you'll run all over Asia and visit lush meadows, bamboo forests, snowy mountain peaks, icy caves and even a volcano.
 * Critical Existence Failure
 * Dark Is Not Evil: The necromancer-like Theurgist can kill monsters by sucking their souls, summon a Lich King to aid him and even control the minds of weaker enemies, all while protecting himself with blood pacts and other abilities with frightening names. However, he's identical to any other hero story-wise. The Rogue class, dealing with poison and sneaky attacks, also applies.
 * Dem Bones: The game loves this trope. Hordes of skeletons of all colors lurk in the shadows (sometimes sunlight), including the normal looking ones in Greece, the black ones in Egypt and the Golden ones in China - all with prefixes that explain their coloration.
 * Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Either twice or five times per difficulty. Depends on whether Telkines would count.
 * Disc One Nuke: Certain low-level skills can become this if you decides to spend a lot of points in them.
 * Door to Before: Or at least to areas which the player could have reached easily, like the Hathor Basin.
 * Dual-Wielding: Warrior classes can do this with swords, maces and axes. The Warfare mastery has a skill tree that boosts your offensive power when dual-wielding.
 * Elaborate Equals Effective: Most of the weapons and armors follow this suit, although (owing to the game's top-down perspective) "elaborate" here doesn't mean that much.
 * Eldritch Abomination:
 * The Theurgist can summon one to help him in battle.
 * Elemental Powers: The main elements are Fire (Pyromancer), Ice/Lightning (Stormcaller) and Poison (Rogue). Also Dark (Theurgist) and Nature (Wanderer).
 * Escape Rope: Town portals.
 * Escort Mission: Two of them in the expansion.
 * Everybody Hates Hades: Guess who's the Bigger Bad in the Expansion?
 * Everything Is Better With Spinning: The Warfare mastery has no less than two skills with this effect.
 * Fire, Ice, Lightning: Done with the various magical staves, which can be fire-enchanted, frost-enchanted or thunder-enchanted. Fire, ice and lightning are also present as elements along with other lesser ones like poison and vitality.
 * Full Boar Action: Feral boars are among the early enemies. Later you can see the Dusk Boars, some of which are the size of a bull. There are also some powerful boar men in Greece.
 * Giant Enemy Crab: Near the beginning of the fourth act.
 * Giant Space Flea From Nowhere: The Chimera.... in Babylon. Hands up if you didn't saw that coming.
 * Giant Spider: Many of them are usually found underground or in forests. Unlike other examples, there are several species of them. You can also meet some spider-human hybrids called Arachnos in both Greece and China.
 * Glass Cannon: Some mastery combinations make excellent glass cannons (pure mages being particularly good examples). Some enemies, mostly found in the late game, also qualify. Sometimes with devastating effects.
 * Golem: The bronze and iron Automata in Crete, the granite, clumsy living statues in Egyptian's tombs and the Terracotta Army in China.
 * Gotterdammerung:
 * Heroic Fantasy
 * Humans Are Special: Naturally only a human can save the day. However, following gameplay conventions the other humans you meet are almost as helpless as the gods are implied to be. One human is special.
 * Hybrid Monster: Hooo boy, where should we start? Plenty of them, including: satyrs,centaurs, spider-men, fishfolk, minotaurs, rat-men, boar-men, gorgons, jackal-men, crocodile-men, scorpion-men, tiger-men and even dragon-men. The Hunter class has a bonus against this kind of monsters, which are fittingly labelled "Beastmen".
 * Impossible Item Drop: Averted: every piece of equipment dropped by monsters is something that the monster was using, sometimes including unique and powerful weapons and armor. Gold, quest items and healing items are the few exceptions.
 * Improbable Use of a Weapon: Some spear-like weapons have a curved cutting edge like a glaive. You still use them to stab your enemies.
 * Improbable Weapon User: Including a hoe of power.
 * Informed Equipment: Averted hard, you'll even see the equipment of the Mooks. If you notice an enemy carrying exotic-looking equipment, there's a good chance they're unique items, with powerful stats that the enemy will also get.
 * Katanas Are Just Better: Played straight in the first game (no expansion), where the "Sabertooth" sword really looks like a katana and is easily the best sword in the game.
 * Kleptomaniac Hero: How the enemy army sees you. Considering what they're doing this can be Hypocritical Humor.
 * Large and In Charge: Usually the "champions" and commander monsters will be far bigger than their underlings.
 * Lethal Lava Land: The Obsidian Chambers in Wusao Mountain.
 * Light Is Not Good: Not when Aktaios is trying to use it to fry you...
 * Living Statue: In Egypt. Megalesios also summon some to delay you.
 * A Load of Bull: Minotaurs. Also, a demonic bull boss in Act 3.
 * Made of Explodium: The various crows you fight near the beginning of the game, which pop into a pile of feathers when they die.
 * Magic Knight: Made possible by mixing melee and magic masteries. Combinations include the Thane (Warrior + Stormcaller), Juggernaut (Defender + Pyromancer) and the Avenger (Pyromancer + Hunter). On the downside, they tend to be left out of high level equipment for pure warriors or mages.
 * Magic Wand: Staves. They come in three flavors: Fire type (always deals the same amount of damage), Ice type (weakest but slow down people) and Thunder (damage swinging from very high to very low). They're the most suitable ranged weapon for magic users.
 * Man-Eating Plant: They show up in Act 3 and 4 in a few different variations.
 * Mighty Glacier: The Defense mastery and most (if not all) mastery combinations involving it. Also applies for some kinds of monsters.
 * Mooks: Of several ranks and species.
 * What Measure Is a Mook?: One useless unique drop is the Letter from Beastman Archer #783, in which the hapless beastman points out that someone's been killing everyone and taking all their stuff and money, which is why they have so much crappy equipment.
 * Multi-Armed and Dangerous:
 * Nipple-and-Dimed: Bronze statues of naked people are found everywhere in the game. The female statues have no nipples on their breasts. In fact, no reproductive organs are present either, women or men. While missing nipples are an explained occurrence in real life, it doesn't make sense in the game's universe.
 * One-Gender Race: Actually pointed out by the Beastman Archer 783, who complains about the lack of female satyrs or male maenads and fear that they'll may be called "sexists". Comedy aside, the various monster race tend to be this.
 * One-Man Army: Eventually your hero: in more than one chance you'll have to make your way through armies of monsters of all kinds in order to reach (or escape) a besieged city/village/temple. Up to Eleven in Act 3 where you have to walk the whole way from Babilon to China.
 * One-Winged Angel: Charon has two forms, while Hades has three.
 * Orcus on His Throne: Unlike the Telkines, who actively run around to complete their goal, Hades will be satisfied with staying inside his humongous palace waiting for you to come.
 * Our Demons Are Different:: Of various degrees, including corpse eaters, life suckers, sand beings and elemental creatures. Certain weapons (and some of the Seer's skills) deals more damage to demons.
 * Our Dragons Are Different:: Other than the Dragon Men in China, you can also find undead wyrms under Mount Wusao.
 * Our Genies Are Different:: Seen in Orient as grotesquely fat female spirits Dual-Wielding swords.
 * Our Liches Are Different: As regular enemies, including a female Lich Queen as a boss and a Liche King as a summonable unit.
 * Plaguemaster: Unlike the usual conceits, it's not the necromantic Theurgist who does this, but the Wanderer--the user of the Nature Mastery. The plague in question quickly conducts between enemies close to each other. In its base form, it just depletes a percentage range of health, but upgrades let it cut enemy movement, attack speed, and defenses.
 * Playing with Fire: The Pyromancer combines this with Dishing Out Dirt, making it a Magma Man.
 * Poisoned Weapons: The Rogue mastery can do this at will, and it's really useful if paired with a bow weapon or throwing knives... both of which go nicely with this mastery.
 * Power Glows
 * Punch Out a God:
 * Purely Aesthetic Gender
 * Puzzle Boss::
 * Ragdoll Physics: Most enemies. With enough physical damage you can punt corpses all over the ancient world.
 * Real Is Brown: Averted. You're going to travel through vivid green jungles, shiny ice caverns, vibrant surreal landscapes in the Underworld and other exotic locales. Even in the second Act, which is set in Egypt and its sand desrts, you'll find plenty of colorful areas, mostly around the shores of the Nile.
 * Redshirt Army: Just to show off how powerful the enemies are, the Redshirt Army consists of Spartans.
 * Reptiles Are Abhorrent: Crocodile men in Egypt.
 * Scenery Porn: The graphics are astounding for their time (2006), especially for a game that is best played with the camera as far overhead a possible. The lighting and texture work, coupled with some impressive views scattered around the game, create some extremely nice pictures that are very rare in the genre.
 * Shaggy Dog Story:
 * Shock and Awe: The bulk of the Stormcaller's powers, mixed with Kill It with Ice.
 * Shown Their Work: Most of the time, concerning locations and weapons, with some exceptions. (i.e. the Shamshir being a cleaver-like falchion while in Real Life is a long, curved scimitar). Some artistic liberties were also taken, especially regarding monsters.
 * Smash Mook: Cyclops essentially fill this role.
 * Summon Magic: Almost all the magic-related class can summon creatures to help them, ranging from melee creatures (Wolves and Depth Dwellers) to range creatures with magical skills (Nymphs and Liche Kings). Some enemies will summon other creatures to help them out. Last but least scrolls in the Expansion will allow you to summon useful aids.
 * Swamps Are Evil: Usually infested by Ichtians and other unpleasant monsters. This is taken Up to Eleven in the Stygian Marshes in Hell.
 * Take That Us: The various monsters you meet in the Secret Passage are all named after the creators and developers of the game.
 * Take Your Time: There are no timed missions of any kind in the game. Even the sidequests that revolve around saving a NPC in danger aren't timed. At only one point in the game you're required to do something quickly, but if you fail to do so, you simply have to deal with a few additional enemies during a boss fight.
 * The Time of Myths
 * Took a Level In Badass: Look at your hero at the beginning of act I, then look again at him at the end of said act. The same goes with certain types of mooks. For examples you first meet ratmen as a race of pathetically weak scumbags in Greece, but later you'll fight with their stronger coursings in Babylon.
 * The Unchosen One: The player character is a random fellow (not even a Helot as he shows up in Helos apparently looking for something that is never mentioned again) who just happens to be amazingly skilled in combat and capable of casting powerful magic.
 * Underground Monkey: Happens with certain types of mooks. You start with Satyrs, the Dark Satyrs, then Mountain Satyrs. And so on.
 * Unnecessarily Large Interior: Justified by the setting.
 * Viewers are Morons: One quest would have the PC climb on top of a snowy mountain in Act 1. This got axed because THQ argued that players would be confused as to why there was snow in Greece. THQ wanted all ruins to be removed from Greece because someone was afraid that players might not understand why, if the game took place in ancient times, that there would still be ruins.
 * The Voice: Zeus.
 * We ARE Struggling Together!: As a scholar in Athens muses, the Telkeins' armies have caused a strong camaraderie between the Greek cities that would normally be at each other's throats.
 * Whatevermancy: Necromancy, geomancy and venomancy just to name a few.
 * Wolfpack Boss: The gorgon queens in mid-late Act I. Also the Grays during act IV.
 * You Can't Thwart Stage One: No matter what,.
 * Zerg Rush: The main strategy of large enemy groups. And they can be deadly later on.
 * Zerg Rush: The main strategy of large enemy groups. And they can be deadly later on.