Rakuen Revolution
You're in a school. Here, go fight this person with a sword you just pulled out of your friend's chest.
If that sounds familiar, it's because Rakuen Revolution is a Continuity Reboot of Utopia Academy. It's a game based on the manga series Shitsurakuen, only this time, characters are pulled into the city Rakuen from their own worlds, and forced to attend school and fight one another if they want any hope of regaining the ten memories that were arbitrarily removed from them, or of returning home.
Tropes used in Rakuen Revolution include:
- Agony Beam: The warning penalty used to dissuade characters from breaking assorted rules. It takes the form of a strong headache, similar to its appearance in Shitsurakuen.
- Used viciously by the Conquest staff every week on those who lose battles or break the rules, in a Kneel Before Zod sort of manner.
- An Economy Is You: The town makes a vague pretense at normality but no one even tries to hide the fact that most of it is just there to take the characters' money.
- Calling Your Attacks: May not be strictly necessary, but it makes battles much more awesome.
- Death Is Not Permanent: If someone dies, they'll wake up pretty much instantly back in their bedroom. They also get an optional Revive Kills Zombie upgrade they can equip.
- Empathic Weapon / Equippable Ally: Like in Shitsurakuen, the characters are the Weapons and feel any damage done to their weapon forms. And of course, like the original series, breaking the weapon causes traumatic comas.
- Fairy Tale Motifs: The Legend. And really, what do you expect from a game based on Shitsurakuen?
- Hopeless Boss Fight: The prefects, headmistresses, and mayor. For now, anyway.
- Incredibly Lame Pun: The name of the crack comm.
- In Name Only: There are a number of differences between how Exaclan works in the game and in canon.
- I Will Punish Your Friend for Your Failure: If a character somehow winds up with fewer than zero raks, they aren't the one who's punished -- instead, a random person is targeted with the warning penalty once every hour. It's particularly useful against those stubborn, selfless types who don't care what happens to them so long as everyone else is spared.
- One of the prerequisites for becoming a prefect is having a person who you believe in with all of your heart. Guess who gets punished if a prefect breaks the rules?
- Justified Tutorial: Before arriving in the game, everyone has a "dream" where they are taught how Exaclan works.
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: Characters lose ten memories upon entering the game. What quantifies "one memory" isn't really explained. One year of your life or the names of all of your loved ones are somehow just as meaningful as the exact number of pancakes you had for breakfast one morning.
- Conveniently, everyone from Shitsurakuen has forgotten how to win Exaclan once and for all.
- Loophole Abuse: Notice a loophole in the Exaclan rules? Try it. See what happens.
- Money Spider: Although there aren't actual monsters anywhere in Rakuen, fighting the other player characters results in money appearing out of nowhere. How does this economy work, anyway?
- Nerf: Everyone's superpowers are now gone. On the plus side, they get weapon upgrades that are reminiscent of what they could once do.
- Odd Name Out: The school dormitories are named after colors: Red, White, Black, and... Pale, which is actually a sickly green color.
- Revive Kills Zombie: If a character is taken from a post-death canonpoint, healing abilities harm them instead.
- School of Hard Knocks: Conquest and Fortitude are both "battle schools". Battling on campus is encouraged.
- Widget Game: Rakuen is simultaneously a high school RP, a memory-loss RP, and a fighting game. Appropriate, considering the series it was based on.
- The Wiki Rule: Rakuen had a game wiki before it even opened. However, this was mainly because it was based on an older game that had already put most of its information on a wiki.
Characters in this game provide examples of:
- Apathetic Teacher: The setting actively tries to avert this by punishing the adult teachers if they refuse to do their assigned jobs. That said, some of them are still only giving as much of a crap as they have to.
- Figure It Out Yourself: Mayor Dunleavy is glad to give out snippets of a cryptic fairytale to people who ask her for assistance, but refuses to explain what it means.
- Mode Lock: A non-shapeshifter variant -- Most characters alternate roles week by week, but the mod characters are permanently stuck as either Players (Santana, Recette, and Dolorosa) or Weapons (Nanami, Day, and Dunleavy).
- Never Live It Down: Golbez. You trigger a citywide random Agony Beam one time...
- Please Kill Me If It Satisfies You: Stated by Nanami to Lelouch at one point.
- Too Dumb to Live: Justified and Enforced by the memory loss system; a number of people are missing memories such as "How stairs work", "That humans can't breathe underwater", and "That decorative fruit centerpieces are not to be eaten".
Weapons and their upgrades provide examples of:
- Battle Theme Music: The Invigorating Melody ability provides a boost to offense as long as the Weapon is singing.
- Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: There are eight elements, each with their respective weaknesses and resistances.
- Joke Item: Kotaro's weapon form is a teddy bear. The Midwife's is a chair. Joke weapons are more than allowed; they're encouraged.
- Standard Status Effects: The Condition upgrades consist of Poison, Sleep, Paralysis, Confusion, Blind, Slow, and Weakness. Additional abilities include Stop, Instant Death, Berserk, and Mute, along with a couple of less-commonly-used statuses such as Deafness.