Mall Fight

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
I run into a radio shack and grab all the N-Gages. Then I run into the bathroom.
—Aitruis, at the beginning of Mall Fight 1 on The Escapist.

Mall Fight is a Forum Game originally from GameFAQs, then The Escapist and now hosted primarily on its own forum.

The main location of the game is an endless mall which contains everything you could ever imagine. Yes, even that. That too. Yes, but you'd have to look for that one for a while. The goal is to kill everyone you see with improvised weapons, customized weapons and the such. Due to the many things one can do in the Mall, it is not a rarity that various matters of plot appear, and there has been way enough for Mall Fight to have its own continuity.

In fact, Mall Fight is currently more about the plot than the actual fighting, which converts the fighting into a break between story arcs.

It's filled up to its nose in plot holes, hanging plots/subplots, call backs, shout outs and gags. It is currently on its seventh iteration (There are at least nine iterations up to now if you count the two Mall Fights on the JR-Network and the thread(s?) on GameFAQs) and has a video game in the works.

Mall Fight threads

Tropes used in Mall Fight include:

"First question, what the hell?! Second question, what the fuck?! Third and final, what the helling fuck?"

  • Breaking the Fourth Wall: More like breaking every brick on the wall.
    • The Fourth Wall was even repaired when Tox ret-con'd Mall Fight 3... Only for it to be broken again.
      • There's even a Fifth Wall, which prevents a universe from collapsing unto itself. Already two of those have been broken.
  • Brick Joke: David the Mexican hooker from Connor's Wasteland video will pop up randomly.
  • Calling Your Attacks: Mango, Oh dear god, Mango.
  • Canada, Eh?: Tox is French Canadian, and the Mall is located in Canada.
  • Cloudcuckooland: The Mall itself.
  • Cool Gate: The gate to the Plot Mall at the beginning of Mall Fight 3.
  • Cool Starship: The Sky Fortress, a fortress that can literally fly and go to space.
  • Continuity Reboot: Often, and many times the result of a Time Paradox.
  • Crossover: There have been multiple cross-overs in Mall Fight, but most notable are the Daleks playing an important role in the story and The Auditor which comes from the Madness Combat series.
  • Curb Stomp Battle: See The Worf Effect below.
  • Dark Is Not Evil: Nega City is full of black buildings and has crashing lightning but is a entirely normal city otherwise (Aside from hanging above the Mall).
  • Deadpan Snarker: Ran is a master of this.
  • Department of Redundancy Department: "Balance between Chaos, Order... And Balance."
  • Determinator: The Mall Fighters will never give up. Ever.
  • Divergent Character Evolution: Sakura was just a holographic Expy of Madilyne, but she is slowly becoming brattier and more sarcastic, rather then a cliche loli ripped out a manga.
  • Dungeon Punk: The Mall is more or less this in a nutshell.
  • Enemy Mine: Nega Tox teams up with the Mall Fighters to stop Psycho Eric.
  • Evil Counterpart: Subverted. While Nega Tox is ruthless and is willing to cross the Moral Event Horizon, he is a Well-Intentioned Extremist.
  • Evil Knockoff: Psycho Eric.
  • Faux Affably Evil: Don't let Nega Tox's smile fool you. He will end you in a second if it is needed, and a lot of times even if it isn't.
  • Five-Bad Band: While there hasn't been a complete example of that Trope in Mall Fight yet, there are some villains that would fit in, should they ever all come together.
    • Big Bad: Nega Tox.
      • Bigger Bad: Nega Tox served as this during Act One of Mall Fight 4 while DAAAAAAAARRRRRRK ERIC served as the Big Bad. Subverted in the case of the Anti-Monitor, who was foreshadowed to be this, but he was ultimately just a Red Herring who never even met the Mall Fighters before he was killed by Nega Tox.
    • The Dragon: DAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRK ERIC.
    • Evil Genius: Xot in Mall Fight 2's finale.
      • Xot now is mostly the professional science expert for the Mall Fighters.
    • The Brute: The Auditor, to some extent.
      • Mango.
    • Dark Chick: Sister/Nega Saber.
  • Five-Man Band: Invoked by Eric during the raid on Nega Tox's airship, though he didn't get it quite right.
  • Fictional Document: The Mall Fight Magazine.
  • Filler: In-between story arcs, the thread shifts back to ordinary mall fighting.
  • Gambit Pileup: The latest arc, between Nega Tox and Toxter.
  • Gambit Roulette: Nega Tox planned everything, even him being possessed by Toxter.
  • Get Back to the Future: The Mall Fighters rarely, if ever, go back into time voluntarily, and so must make use of this trope.
  • Gone Horribly Wrong: Everything that the Mall Fighters and the NPCs create will go this way, including T.U.R.O.K and Mango.
  • Great Big Book of Everything: The files from the multiple security rooms have been known for making the plot advance more than once.
    • There's even an entire different Hammerspace dedicated to the files.
  • Guardian of the Multiverse: Taken to an extreme with nearly an entire mythology:
    • The Gods: Godhead Fridge, Adrien Brody and Professor Brian Cox.
    • The Higher Powers: Martin, Backroom Six and Alexander the Great/Ultimate.
    • The Higher Guardians: The old Mall Fighters (Claymorez, Aitruis, etc.)
    • The Lesser Guardians: Mall Fighters themselves. A large number of their enemies want to take over the Mall to help take over/destroy the Omniverse.
  • Hammerspace: There's a reason why a mall fighter can carry 2 shotguns, 6 chainsaws, 2 swiss army knifes, 1 minigun, 591 copies of the Mall Fight Magazine, 692571 scrolls...
    • Lampshaded after Tox and Waffles defeated an army of Dutch people and obtained an unquantifiable number of matresses.
  • Hearing Voices: Diablo hears Nega Ninja Medic in his head. How the Nega is doing this exactly, is unknown, but telepathy is unlikely, considering that the voice started showing up after Diablo was sent to the future.
    • For a while in Mall Fight 2, Tox had the spirits of Xot, Futox, Female Sam G, Code Monkey, Martin and Jim inside his body, and had to constantly hear their voices until he summoned them.
    • Waffles has stated there are at least five people in his head.
  • Heel Face Turn: Subverted with Nega Tox. Also, Sister is no longer entirely malicious, and is about as friendly as someone as Ax Crazy as her can be.
    • Diablo is now on the side of the angels after he and Eric destroyed the Mall.
  • Heel Realization: A meta example. Among other things, the aliens killed by Tox in MF 4 where revealed to be alive by Eric after he read The Ninjettes and remembered, to his absolute horror, how much he hated stories where irredeemably evil protagonists get away with evil things and never face punishment or justice.
  • Heroic Comedic Sociopath: Eric. See Anti-Hero above.
  • Heroic Spirit: All the Mall Fighters have this at some point.
  • Home Base: Mall Fight Offices. Connor and Diablo both had their own personal version they call a lair, but Connor's is just a IT department with a bed, while Diablo's was a more traditional Supervillain Lair (When they don't get destroyed).
  • Humongous Mecha: In Mall Fight 4, Diablo, Eric, and Ran all had a giant Humongous Mecha fight, mostly using Transformers. Eric also used a suped up Dragonzord to take out Nega Tox, and currantly rides around in the standard model to block Psycho Eric's Vampiric Draining.
  • Hypocritical Humor: "Gods, everyone wants to fuck kids around here. It's fucking weird, man. Fucking...Jesus."
    • "That sounds like something a 13-year old nerd would post on a forum game on a retarded gaming website!"
  • Iconic Item: Eric's Black Blade, and his motorbike now that he is officially a Kamen Rider.
  • Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: Subverted. Diablo's Mooks are deadly accurate.
  • Improvised Weapon: Improvised weaponry is the main point of Mall Fight.
  • Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain: DAAAAAAAAARRRRRRK ERIC for a little while. Eventually he got sick of it and tried to hijack the Missingno. Arc, going on a A God Am I and Who's Laughing Now? spiel. He was punked by the titular Big Bad of the story, but after that he became a better bad guy, and mainstay of the rest of Mall Fight 3. In the newest canon, he is even Nega Tox's Dragon.
    • The Dark Forceuser applies too, first for being an Anticlimax Boss in Mall Fight 2 and failing to kill the Mall Fighters in Mall Fight 3 with fucking aircraft carriers.
  • Insistent Terminology: His name is not Dark Eric. It's DAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRK ERIC.
    • It's been insisted multiple times that Mall Fight is a forum game and not a roleplay.
  • Ki Attacks: Most combat magic is pretty much this.
  • Klingon Scientists Get No Respect: Literally.
  • Loads and Loads of Characters: While there are not that many developped characters in Mall Fight, Martin implied that there is an infinity of counterparts of just about everyone.
    • Even said counterparts have counterparts who have counterparts who have counterparts who have counterparts who have counterparts who have counterparts who have counterparts who have counterparts who have counterparts who have counterparts who have counterparts, etc.
  • Lost Forever: House of (M)all. It was deleted due to severe Creator Backlash on Eric's part, leaving how the universe went back to normal and how Stephanie appeared unexplained in the next Mall Fight.
    • Also supposedly lost are the original Mall Fight threads on GameFAQs.
  • Lost Superweapon: The Mall has a billion or so in it's vaults.
  • Lovecraft Lite: Dark things lurk beneath the Mall...
  • Made of Evil: T.U.R.O.K.
  • Magic Knight: Tox.
  • Multinational Team: Americans Eric and African-American Waffles are joined by Australian Knife, French Canadian Tox, and (when he is on their side)Irishmen Diablo.
  • Moment Of Awesome: Yes.
  • My Name Is Not Durwood: Somewhat of a Running Gag with Vanessa.
  • Nerd Action Hero: Pretty much all the fighters.
  • Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: DAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRK ERIC would have killed the Mall Fighters if Missingno. didn't interrupt.
    • When Diablo tried to blow up the Moon to kill the other Mall Fighters, but hit Nega Tox instead.
  • Non-Lethal KO: Even thought characters die, they either respawn or reappear in Hell.
    • Yes, in Mall Fight, dying and going to Hell is considered Non Lethal.
  • Non-Malicious Monster: Nemesis.
  • Out-Gambitted: Nega Tox to everyone. Constantly.
    • Now Toxter has Out-Gambitted Nega Tox. Big time.
    • Nope. Nega Tox was planning on all of THAT too.
  • Overly Long Name: Jim, or Timothy Bartholomew Gonzales Lloyd Martin Olive Kenneth Blair Herman The Third.
  • Plot Hole: Mall Fight is filled with fucktons of them, but the biggest one is Martin and Backroom Six going back in time in Mall Fight 2 to "help" the Mall Fighters defeat Sister even thought Sister was still defeated in the future before they went back in time.
    • This results in fucking up the entire time-line.
      • An ironic follow-up of this plot hole is Futox asking Martin why he went back in time to defeat Sister even thought she was defeated anyways, even though he was never told that Sister would be defeated even without Martin and Backroom Six' intervention.
      • The most ironic thing is that Martin and Backroom Six did absolutely nothing when the Mall Fighters started fighting Sister.
    • Another notable plot hole is Xot going insane and killing Female Sam G, Code Monkey and Jim in Mall Fight 2 for no apparent reason.
  • Portal Network: The Hypercube System is basically that, in which you can go anywhere in the universe by using the Cubes as a tele-transportation system.
    • Also notable is the Cube System, a prototype which was abandoned after its reproduction system broke.
  • Plot Parallel: Often used by the Mall Fight Writers to give a meaning to things that happened long ago but don't make sense.
  • Pre-Mortem One-Liner: Inverted by Waffles.

Dalek: YOU REALIZE IF YOU FAIL, WE WILL EXTERMINATE YOU.
Waffles: That's an odd thing to say to someone about to kill himself.

    • Made on purpose by Xot before killing Toxter.

Xot: Keep your screams for down there, shitface.
Toxter: Oh my god that was an awesome li-Wait, you just want this to end up on TV Tr-*gunshot*

  • Rape as Drama: Subverted. Diablo's attempted rape of Sakura is hardly taken seriously.
  • Reactor Boss: Helped by Tox' Fetish for reactors.
  • Readings Are Off the Scale: By the time Martin was introduced, the notion of levels was completely distorted into oblivion up to the point where the Mall Fighters' levels were so high they stopped giving a shit about it.
    • It didn't help that Tox accidentally raised the level cap to 1,000,000.
      • Subverted when the New Mall caused level inflation to drastically decrease, causing everyone to go back to Level 4.
  • Red Oni, Blue Oni: Eric(Blue)/Waffles(Red), Eric(Blue)/Tox(Red).
  • Relationship Upgrade: Eric and Stephanie FINALLY become a couple in Mall Fight 7, and they couldn't have done it without the rower.
  • The Rival: Tox doesn't like Xandus.
    • Nemesis and Mango.
    • Sakura and Diamond.
    • Connor and Waffles in the beginning, but they soon became Vitriolic Best Buds.
  • RPG Elements: Sometimes, the Mall Fighters level up or gain some kind of skill, and at some other points, they completely forget about it.
    • Especially when the Fighters have skills that leave to think that they're level 1000, prompting the writers to often revert everyone back to Level 1.
    • Taken to an extreme when Waffles imagined everything was a Turn-based RPG.
  • Running Gag: Nuclear C4, Diablo's lair being destoryed for one reason or another, various kinds of play forts made of things like books and computers, and many, many more.
    • Every time someone (Tox, mostly) says the phrase "Cheese it!", Ren casts a spell causing molten cheese to rain all over the place, no matter if he's there or not.
  • Shout Out: Used to an epic level.
  • Signature Move: Eric's Galactic Hadoken.
  • Seinfeldian Conversation: Conversations about Eric's bad choice in music will span a couple of posts.
  • Spin-Off: Subverted, much to Tox's displeasure. He tried to start a prequel centering around the Sixth Wall and Sixth Remnants Army, but due to lack of interest, it went nowhere.
  • Sword Beam: One of the Black Blade's abilities.
  • Talking Animal: The Mall Fighters can talk to animals (Salamanders and Nakadiles, for example) and vice versa.
  • The Chessmaster: Nega Tox, Up to Eleven.
  • The Only One: The Mall Fighters are, in the end, the only people in the Mall to begin with.
  • The Worf Effect: Nega Tox destroys DC's very own Anti-Monitor just by snapping his fingers the moment he returns, and shortly thereafter murders Tox with barely a fight. Later in that same arc, Eric beats DAAAARRRRRK ERIC in seconds to show off his new Green Ranger powers that let him fight the same Nega Tox from the previous sentence to a stand still for ten days.
  • Technicolor Ninjas: Shows up as Mooks to Nega Tox in Mall Fight 3.
  • Took a Level In Badass: All of the Mall Fighters took one at least once. At least.
    • Diablo, ever since he was briefly the Big Bad, has generally became a better Fighter since.
  • Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Sakura being Eric's sex friend.
    • Maddie, too. For the record, Sakura is nine and so was Maddie for a quarter or so of Mall Fight 3 before she was aged to 13.
  • Two-Fisted Tales: All over the place.
  • Unreliable Narrator: Caused by the fact that there is no real GM to Mall Fight, more often than not, 2 Writers will argue about one thing happening or something else happening.
    • A notable example is Ran and Eric back in Mall Fight 3 arguing in-thread whether Madilyne died due to a Chestburster or not.
  • Vampiric Draining: Psycho Eric.
  • Waxing Lyrical: Just another form of the many, many Shout Outs
  • Weapon of Choice:
    • Tox' Legendary Katana/Epsilon, which was created by the 6 most powerful JRPG fans in existence, but then stolen after the Great Weeaboo Raid of 2XXX, and found by him in a parking garage.
      • The Katana's full capabilities hasn't been fully talked about yet, but knowing that it can cut through time, it's got some radical powers.
    • Connor's Widowmaker Sniper Rifle which uses .50 Caliber BMG bullets and his .223 Revolver (based off the gun from Fallout (Based off the gun from Blade Runner).
    • Eric and his Phantasm Spheres. He also carries the Masamune, a katana that can cut through anything in the omniverse when Eric wants it to, but when it is "idle" it is dull as a butter knife. DAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRK ERIC has it's opposite, the Muramasa. THAT sword is "active" at all times, and will cut through anything just by touching it, regurdless of it's master's wishes.
    • FPV is known for using both WEAPON ICE FUCK (a sniper rifle which uses ice cubes as ammo) and The Screwknife (a powerdrill with a knife attached to the end)
  • What Do You Mean It's Not Awesome?: The awesome moments quickly became ordinary to the Mall Fighters.
  • Wise Beyond Their Years: Both Sakura and Maddie.
  • Word Of God: The Mall Fighters started and have been adding to this page, so anything said by them here can be taken as canon. This includes the effects of the Masamune and Muramasa above.
  • X Meets Y: Dead Rising meets Bobobo-Bo Bo-bobo on crack.
  • Year Inside, Hour Outside: In the Mall's Hell, time passes much quicker than on the surface.
    • This trope also applies to Mall Fight's version of Oblivion.
  • Your Mom: Waffles' will make cracks at Tox's Mom for no reason.
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Mall_Fight?oldid=1948667"