S4 League

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The 'Circle' Arena

"S4 League in the building!" "Start! Show me your S4!"

S4 League is a free-to-play, online, third-person shooter for the PC by Korean developer Pentavision, published in Europe (and catering to International players as well) by Alaplaya.

Similar in genre to Gunz:The Duel, but approaching from a very different angle, the game places a heavy emphasis on team-based gameplay, with all the game modes' winners being decided by the teams' overall scores and presenting itself in a sporting, rather than violent light wherever possible. There are currently six main game modes, Arcade, Battle Royal, Captain, Deathmatch, Touchdown, and Chaser. Touchdown, wherein two teams compete to get the Fumbi (a kind of little, humanoid, cyclopean... ball thing) from the center of the arena to their opponents' goal, the highest number of goals at the end winning the match. Arcade mode, where a team of up to four players go through a story with 8 stages against a computer opponent to fulfill various objectives. Battle Royal, a basic free for all mode. Chaser is a one vs all where the one has dramatically increased health, speed, and damage. The rest compete only to survive and deal the most damage to the Chaser. A seventh gameplay mode, Practice, allows players to earn small amounts of money firing at sentry turrets on their own and generally just getting the hang of things.

The 'Fumbi' Mascot

The S4 in the name stands for "Stylish eSper Shooting Sports"; Stylish from the surprisingly deep and vibrant character customization the game offers for its genre (after character creation); eSper from the abilities players can choose from, such as energy shields, flight, or invisibility to name a few; Shooting due to the game's emphasis on gunplay; and Sports, because the game claims to be an 'Online Sport', even going so far as to divide matches into two rounds, complete with a half-time dance from the mascots and a halfway decent automated commentator. Herein lies another oddity of S4 League: it presents itself as 'real', and in a way, it is. Thematically it's a virtual reality gun-play competition participated in over the internet by players using a PC-based client - as played with a bit by the game's trailer, and further emphasized by the computerized aspects of the graphics, which are at times reminiscent of Tron and .hack.

While comparable to other online 3PS games such as Gunz, S4 League has been praised for being much smoother, easier on the hands, and significantly less open to exploitation (though not completely immune) than most, with a nice degree of simplicity that avoids monotony by having arenas that are all visually unique and require wildly varying tactics and styles of play. It has also received significant praise for the level of polish it displays, both in graphics and gameplay, not to mention its unusual visual style and emphasis on teamwork.

Also, S4 League shares a number of visual and musical elements with the DJMAX series, also by Pentavision. A PlayStation Portable version of the game has been created, which, while different in some ways, still routes through the same servers as the PC version of the game for online play, meaning PSP players can compete alongside PC based players. There appear, however, to currently be no plans to release S4 Portable outside Korea.

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Tropes used in S4 League include:

• Allegedly Free Game - Averted, to an extent. Those who purchase and use any real-money costing items will have access to a different set of servers altogether from those who do not. The benefits alone don't really add up to too much unless you really start forking over for it.
• An Adventurer Is You - Not much, but S4 does touch on this, occasionally. With its heavy emphasis on teamwork, certain character set ups - while far from compulsory - will perform better in certain roles than others. For instance, a character with a Sentry Gun, Heavy Machine Gun, Railgun and Wall or Shield skill will generally make a better goal keeper than a character with a Revolver, Plasma Sword, and the grappling Chain skill, who themselves would probably be better as a ball runner. You might also see The Healer, and by and large most characters sit between The DPSer and The Jack. Alaplaya's website makes a few suggestions to this end.
  • The in-game shop has also begun selling item packages built around these specific roles.
• Announcer Chatter - From the same announcer of the DJMAX series (JC of vocalist/rapper fame). In fact, some of the comments are reused for DJMAX Trilogy. He tends to speak quite a bit in Touchdown matches:

"Run run run!" "Whoops! Go get the ball man!" "Warning! Go to your goal post!" "It's lookin' bad, man!" "TOUCHDOWN! WHOSE THAT MAN? WHOSE THAT MAN?"

• • This troper always thought he was saying "TOUCHDOWN! WHO'S DA MAN? WHO'S DA MAN?"
• Anti-Poopsocking - The game reports your play-time once every hour.
  • In addition, after so many hours it starts to cut down your Experience and currency gains.
    • The reduced experience with time has been taken out, so much for moderation
• Arm Cannon - The Cannonade, a conical energy cannon that partially covers the user's forearm. Not to mention the 'Smash Rifle', a strange, rapid fire, seemingly energy based weapon, also usable in melee, shaped like a shield and strapped to the user's forearm.
• Awesome but Impractical - The Turret weapon. At the first glance, it's awesome - dual chainguns which you can deploy into a stationary gun emplacement which hits harder than HMG and has almost perfect accuracy. Sounds great? In practice, mobile mode can't hit broad side of a barn and makes you move MUCH slower, while the stationary mode makes you a sitting duck for snipers who can, and WILL kill you in one hit, since you are perfectly immobile, it takes ages to un-deploy the turret and it provides no protection whatsoever. You can't even use a shield skill while in stationary mode. Not to mention it has limited ammo, but it's not really an issue, since with this weapon you're unlikely to survive long enough to spend even one clip. Not to mention, you can only turn the gun in approximately a 75 degree cone in front of you, meaning you're helpless if attacked from the sides.
  • Also the Rescue gun, which lobs healing grenades. Too bad you can't heal yourself and you CAN heal the enemies with it. It also has limited ammo, and the Mind energy is still more efficient, despite healing only one person at a time.
• Badass in a Nice Suit
• Batter Up - The Storm Bat.
• Big Freaking Gun - Possibly covers the Heavy Machine Gun and Cannonade weapons
• Big Freaking Sword - The Plasma Sword.
• Blind Idiot Translation - Most English text in the game is at least intelligible, but is riddled with questionable grammar, spelling errors, and poor word choice, giving it a slightly "broken" feel overall. Memorable examples include "You Are Won the Match!" (thankfully the announcer gets it right), and the "Senty Nell" turret weapon, which was clearly intended to be "Sentinel", but didn't quite make it (one wonders if the translation team uses the Telephone Game for inter-office memos).
  • I have to disagree on Senty Nell. Nell is too obviously fitting to the stun effect the weapon causes. In my opinion, it's an obvious pun, not an error. Besides, it's not that bad. Errors are occasional, and 90% of in-game text that isn't a spoken announcement or image-text is spot on.
  • There is one particularly egregious example with all player characters in Arcade cutscenes called "she" and referred to as female, even with a male character.
  • Oh, yes, and the broken grammar of some of the mission descriptions make them hard to figure out. It can take a while for players to figure out that "throw down the opponent X times using Y weapon" actually means "get X kills with Y weapon."
• Boom! Headshot! - Attacks impacting with a character's head are reported as 'Critical', and deal twice the damage of a normal hit. Somewhat justified in that S4 League has little problem making clear it's taking place inside a computer game.
• Bottomless Magazines - Most - but not quite all - of the weapons have unlimited ammunition, but quite limited capacity between reloads. Of course, again, S4 will proudly justify this by just barefacedly being a game.
• Broken Record - The Mr. Funky remix of Super Sonic. SUPERSONIC! SUPERSONIC! SUPERSONIC! SUPERSONIC!
  • Nailing a string of Critical Hits. "CRITICAL! CRITICAL! CRITICAL! CRITICAL! CRITICAL!"
• Bribing Your Way to Victory - AP items provide more stats than their PEN counterparts. Then there's AP++, known sometimes as "Premium Items" which provide even more stats. And if that isn't enough there's Forcepack Capsules which have a chance of providing weapons which are arguably the best items around.
  • It may seem AP items are not so overpowered in swords-only mode, like some people like to say. Wrong.
• Capture the Flag: Touchdown mode, though it plays a bit more like soccer meets CTF, there's only one Fumbi, and it has to be taken to the enemy‍'‍s goal, not yours. If you will compare to another video game series, it's best likened to Unreal Tournament 2004‍'‍s Bombing Run mode... even though that game has regular CTF as well.
• Cel Shading - A major element of the game's graphics style. However, it's a bit of a hybrid - cel-shaded, yes, but with a secondary gradient between dark, light, and lightest as well.
• Chained by Fashion: Ophelia. Made more so after being defeated by Lilith.
• Character Level - Ranks. An odd version, in that it's more of a Bragging Rights Reward than anything else. It has a few discrete effects, but no system-based influence on gameplay. It doesn't even unlock new weapons, as all weapons are available to even the newest character, if they can afford them (and all come with a five hour free version after a brief tutorial). However, due to balancing you can often tell the strength of a team by the ranks of its players. Ranks run: Newbie, Rookie, Super Rookie, Semi-Pro, Pro, S1, S2, S3, S4, with numeric sub-ranks denoted by the number of lines beside a player's rank symbol.
  • It's also worth mentioning that the levels are also absurdly hard to get - S4 rank has been calculated to take over 10 years of in-game playing time, most players hover around Semi-Pro to Pro.
  • There are also specific channels for most of the ranks, though most still gravitate toward the non-rank restricted 'free' channels.
    • A recent adjustment, likely to discourage people from remaking their accounts over and over to stay in the Rookie channels and harass newbies, gives a gradual increase in PEN income as rank increases.
• Charged Attack - The Railgun and Cannonade will both do much, much more damage if charged first by holding down the fire button.
  • Also the Airgun and special attack of the recently introduced Twin Blades and Breaker can be charged.
• Color Coded for Your Convenience - Player apparel is Palette Swapped to show team affiliation. Each player sees their own team as green, and the opposing team as red. Since this means (atypically for a team-based shooter) that teams are not objectively distinguished by their color, S4 refers to the two teams in a match as "Alpha" and "Beta".
  • Not quite true. Rather, players will see their own team in the colors the players chose to wear, be they green, blue, yellow, purple, whatever. The opposing team, however, are seen as wearing red. No Palette Swapping is seen by a player for their own team, however this does mean that there is never a red variation available for any outfit.
  • Chaser mode takes an interesting turn on this, as the character designated Chaser is somewhat implied to be infected with a computer virus and driven temporarily insane. As such, while playing as the chaser, all a player will see of the other characters, are their red-veined silhouettes.
• Combos - All of the melee weapons have combos of varying length and effect. The game also lists the numbed of 'Combo' hits ( attacks that have hit in close succession ) on the right. Needless to say, these numbers can get rather high when using automatic weapons.
• Critical Hit - Aim for the head for shooting weapons, be as close as possible to your target with a melee weapon, and with weapons such as the Mind Energy or Mind Shock, aim the crosshairs on a target and be on the same elevation.
• Cycle of Hurting - This can be easy to pull off with melee weapons, and will often happen to Chasers if people decide to fight back. How? Step one: Take at least three people with melee weapons that can cause Knockback. Step two: Let them go to town on the chaser. Step three: Repeat until the Chaser dies. Have allies shooting at the Chaser is optional.
• Darker and Edgier - Two Words: Iron Eyes. The updates the game received during that season turned the menus dark colors, and added weapons, one or two of which don't feel so right in S4's world of ludicrousness because of their design being so serious looking.
• Death From Above - Possible by shooting people with the fly skill.
• Deflector Shields - The 'Shield' skill, which will protect against incoming fire that isn't either Melee or a Cannonade, and takes a small chunk from the user's SP with each hit as well as slowly draining it while active.
• Drop the Hammer - The Breaker.
• Dual-Wielding - The Twin Blades, considered the most troublesome of all Melee weapons. Two blades attached to chains both capable of generating magnetic fields for attacks.
• Emote Animation - A number of emotes are available, linked to voiced phrases one can transmit to their own team. Unfortunately, many players seem to have the highly annoying habit of, on the victory screen, endlessly spamming emotes without even letting the voice or animation finish.
• Energy Weapon - Most of the game's weapons use solid ammunition, but a few (Cannonade, Smash Rifle, are clearly energy based.
  • Also, all weapons are instant-fire: there is no leading required for any of the weapons at all.
    • Other than the sniping weapons (Cannonade & Rail Gun), which require leading under certain conditions.
• Escort Mission - A few in Arcade Mode.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin - S4 League is an online gunplay competition played over the internet, and makes no attempt to claim otherwise. It does, however, have stories inside its 'part of the real world' setting, such as .hack-esque viral infections for players to defend against in the new Arcade mode. The game at times seems to share similar perspectives on the 'computer world' with the aforementioned series, too, though its deliberate acceptance of the real world as, well, the real world, mostly averts Cyberspace while in a curious way offering players a little more immersion.
• Expansion Pack - Season 1: Dark Lightning. Features three new maps, three new weapons, and three new Chaser Viruses.
• The Faceless - GMs. On the rare occasions they appear in a match, GM characters (not to be confused with Moderators, who just get big yellow text in the chat windows) appear as black-jumpsuited players wearing Fumbi-esque helmets with opaque white face plates.
  • A silent NPC character appears during the tutorial with a similar form.
• Game Breaking Bug - Not out of bad game design, but rather out of a major bug that has yet to be fixed. In Chaser mode, occasionally, one's camera will not return to the character correctly. One form of this bug lets you still play, but renders the player without a HUD, while the other form of the bug will lock the camera in place with the character free to move around without it, rendering the round completely unplayable.
• Gangsta Style - For some reason, your character insists on holding the Sub Machineguns, and the semi-rifle sideways whilst shooting.
• Gatling Good - The Heavy Machine Gun, which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin
• Hand Cannon - The Revolver's proportions are a little silly.
• Handguns - Of course, it's a revolver bigger than your head, and seems to think it's a shotgun, but... and then of course there's the more modern style 'Handgun'
  • There are actually some real-life revolvers which shoot shotgun rounds.
• Have a Nice Death - "You were dominated by _____! What a shame!"
• Healing Hands/Healing Shiv - Mind Energy, a 'weapon' shaped like a large metal glove, that functions in a similar way to Mind Shock, but rather than draining a target's health with a short range energy beam, it restores it.
• Hyperspace Arsenal - Only the currently selected weapon, of a maximum of three, is shown anywhere on a character.
• Invisibility Cloak - The Invisibility skill, which operates like classic active camouflage, including visibility ranging from invisible while still, hinted while moving slow, blurred but noticeable while running, and all but ineffective while dashing.
• Justified Trope - The backstory means that the artificiality typical of games is justified as being a side-effect of S4 League being a computer game in its own fictional universe. (Compare with the Animus in the Assassin's Creed series.) Ignoring the obviously fictional content of Arcade Mode for a moment, one can actually go a step further, and make the argument that S4 League is, in fact, completely real, in that it is both in reality, and thematically, an online sport played through a client designed for use on a normal, personal computer.
• Katanas Are Just Better - Season Three introduces these as a melee weapon.
• Kobayashi Mario - 'Extreme' level Practice Mode approaches this, with the impossibly accurate Sentry Guns spawning all over the place in large numbers, often very sneakily, and capable of downing a character in only a couple of hits. Meanwhile, the player is expected to achieve an inordinately high score against an unforgiving clock.
• The Medic - Anyone who decides to pack a Mind Energy or Rescue Gun.
• Nintendo Hard - Dear God, the Shield License Test.
• Power Fist - The 'Counter Sword', a weapon comprised of a small sword, for the weapon's weaker attacks, and a large fist used for powerful area attacks.
• Pre-Ass-Kicking One-Liner - When you become the Chaser, a near unstoppable force with tons of defense, a big damage boost, and the miscellaneous buff here and there, the announcer is more than happy to say one for you: "You are the Chaser. Bring it!"
• Revolvers Are Just Better
• Ring Out - Being cast off the side of the arena will usually cause a character to 'die' when they strike an invisible wall some twenty feet below the floating arena's lowest point. It is, of course, possible to recover from this using the Flight skill, or Anchor if you're still close enough to grapple onto something and rescue yourself. A favorite tactic of that-one-guy-with-the-Plasma-Sword-waiting-behind-the-train-in-Station-2.
  • Don't forget Chaser Games in Circle.
• Sarashi - Lilith. May or may not be for Suppressed Mammaries.
• Short-Range Shotgun - The Revolver. Also averted with the actual Burst Shotgun.
• Spin Attack - Storm Bat secondary attack. This (apart from CS spamming) is the best method for quickly damaging multiple enemies at once in melee combat. Critical hits will occur if bat user taps the secondary attack button in a synchronized succession.
  • The infamous Twin-blades also do some sort of spinning jump attack when they use their charge attack, though most of it goes to the front.
• Stationary Wings - The wings given to users of the Flight skill while it's in use tend only to move while the character is pushing upwards, though they change position depending on whatever else their user is doing.
• Stone Wall - Metallic, kind of in the same light as Halo Reach's Armor Lock, except... different... instead of being invincible, you just take much less damage, some of which is reflected back at the person who dealt it. It also slowly restores your health, making it the only way for someone to heal by themselves, it's a bit more practical overall.
  • Recently revealed to be not-so-breakproof by the troper. Oh no, the guy I've been chasing just threw down a turret and went metallic! Sword the turret, empty your magazine on point-blank headshots.
• Stripperiffic - Some of the outfits; a particular culprit being the 'Silklace' line. Others, like Indian Mode, are modest to the point of aversion. All the same though, few of the outfits look like they'd be in any way useful in real world combat. But justified, like a lot of the tropes on this page, in that the game openly admits to being an online game as part of its concept.
  • It's nice to know the guys aren't treated much different in this regard.
• Stuff Blowing Up - Some would have you think that this is the only use for the Cannonade.
  • Don't forget the grenade launcher.
    • Earth Bombers too. They have such a large explosion, it hurts allies as well.
• Sword Fight - Particularly the 'Swords Only' rule set.
• Theme Music Power-Up - In Chaser Mode, if you start the next round as the Chaser, the music changes.
• Virtual Paper Doll - A remarkably hard element to make use of, due to the game's somewhat unforgiving economy. Still, since the 'missions bug', which undermined half a player's estimated income, was fixed, buying and selecting outfits for the character will no longer break your bank and leave you incapable of playing, if you don't spend your money foolishly. In a way, this adds a somewhat nice layer of validity to the game, really.
• Weak Turret Gun - Well, there's the Sentry Gun, but it's a bit of an aversion. You plonk it down, and it sits there shooting stuff until someone blows it up. However, it does run out of ammo, and it can't be knocked over. It's also pretty tough, too. Even more averted by the Senty Nell, which, while more akin to a land mine in effects, looks and operates very similarly to a normal turret and makes ruddy certain it won't fall over by drilling a metal 'root' two feet into the arena floor.
  • Not to mention that a +0 Sentry Gun can take up to 44HP with a full 4-hit combo. That's 44% of a normal player's life. Add pushback effect on each shot, have the opposing player flinch when they get hit, AND they see through Invisibility, and you have one of the most annoying weapons in the game. The fact that a player can carry only 3 on himself for each respawn would balance it out, but given how often they die during a match it's hard to place all of them during a single life.
    • Add the fact that Sentries auto aim and the average character has 100 hp, and you realize why tournament play restricts setups to only one sentry per team.