Video Game / Blade Chimera

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One day, demons suddenly appeared on Earth, and no corner of the planet was left unscathed by the ensuing war between them and humanity. Thirty years later, Shin is a soldier of the Holy Union, a religious organization that doubles as an anti-demon task force. However, circumstances lead to Shin having to ally himself with Lux, a Demon Blade that can not only augment Shin's abilities, but also reconstruct items from the past and help Shin discover who he really is and what Holy Union's intentions actually are.

Tropes:

• Achievement Mockery: A few achievements are earned by dying in various ways, with the most blatant example being firing a laser gun underwater (which the game explicitly warns you not to do).
• After the End: The story is set in Osaka, Japan, thirty years after the "Demon War" that completely devastated the world. Buildings have cobwebs or overgrown plants in the corners, and there's demons running rampant in the streets.
• Alcohol-Induced Stupidity: Had Fumiaki not been Drowning His Sorrows over accidentally unleashing the D-Virus, Shin probably would have been able to convince him to accept responsibility and help him develop a vaccine. Unfortunately, in his drunken state, he was irrational enough to believe he could escape the consequences by tricking Shin into getting cryogenically frozen, a deed he immediately regretted afterwards, with things spiraling even further from there.
• Amnesiac Hero: Shin begins the story with no memory of who he is, other than a Holy Union soldier. He eventually leans that he was a scientist that used to work alongside Archpriest Baal, the latter of whom is actually a clinical psychologist named Fumiaki that caused the demonification of sick people and end of the world by accident during a drug trial. When Shin argued that it would be better to develop a vaccine and accept blame than to let the world end, Fumiaki tricked him into a cryogenics freezer, which he'd presumed had killed Shin until the freezer was restored decades later.
• Archaic Weapon for an Advanced Age: While Holy Union uses advanced technology in their crusade against demons, such as laser guns and hovering blades, the Peacemakers prefer using gunpowder and ballistic weaponry because they've discovered that silver-coated ammo is very effective against rampaging demons - even more so than the Holy Union's weapons.
• Attack Drone: One type of enemy is a floating drone that scans for Shin and shoots familiar-looking homing bolts at him. Ronaldo uses two of them to fight Shin as an Optional Boss, since he's a wheelchair-bound old man.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: The "titanic demons" that serve as a majority of the game's bosses are giant animalistic monsters, at least in their first phases. From the second titanic demon onwards, they have a smaller and more humanoid second phase, with the exception of the final titanic demon who starts in their humanoid form before becoming a giant. All of them used to be the five test subjects that Fumiaki tried to use his regenerative treatment on and harbor a grudge against him that persisted even through their demonification.
• Badass Bookworm: Shin is an expert marksman and swordsman. He also has a rather extensive amount of knowledge in multiple scientific fields including biology and quantum physics. Makes sense, considering he was scientist prior to his amnesia.
• Big Damn Heroes: Hanzo wakes up from his coma just in time to deal the killing shot to Victor before Victor can send Satomi plummeting to her death.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Victor is introduced as seemingly being one of the more level-headed and friendly members of the Peacemakers, but it's revealed that he's actually a cold-blooded hitman working directly for Archpriest Baal who's been digging up dirt about his employer so that he can take over the Holy Union.
• Bland-Name Product: The "24H Mart" convenience stores that can be spotted in the background have a similar logo and color scheme to the ones of Japanese chain of convenience stores FamilyMart.
• Company Cross-References:
  • One of the characters Shin meets is a scientist and former pilot named Irina, who looks like an elderly version of the protagonist of DRAINUS, Team Ladybug's previous game. She also has a robot on her desk that resembles Gehnie, and mentions that "Gehnie" used to be the name of one of her dogs.
  • The music that plays during the "After Beam" mini-game reuses motifs from DRAINUS as well.
• Connected All Along: After helping the Peacemakers obtain a sample of the D-Virus to engineer a vaccine and then agreeing to destroy the rest before it can hurt anyone, a member named Morlock reveals to Shin that their leader, Rebecca, is actually Hanzo's sister.
• Cyberpunk: Has a few shades of this, being a future dystopia taking place in a city overrun with monsters created by medical technology gone wrong and controlled by a regime whose agents are Judge, Jury, and Executioner.
• Damsel in Distress: After Shin learns the truth about his past, Victor offers Shin a chance to work together to take out Baal, but Shin refuses due to Victor's duplicity. Victor then reveals that he's kidnapped Satomi, the Holy Union clerk that Shin's on good terms with, and states that Shin will have to come to him and fight to save her if he's not willing to cooperate.
• Death of Personality: When a person fully transforms into a demon, they go berserk and lose all memory of who they used to be. However, we see a few demons who managed to retain their humanity in Peacemaker territory, and the time-travelling version of Lux managed to remember her life as Hotaru due to her sheer determination to save Shin.
• Defector from Decadence: Shin isn't fully loyal to Holy Union at the start of the game, willing to question their doctrine though hesitant to disobey it, but it's only after Archpriest Baal orders him to kill the Peacemakers, including the fully human ones for showing sympathy to the corrupted, that Shin begins to outright rebel against the organization and fight for a more just cause.
• Disc-One Nuke: The Violet Blade is this if you go get it early on via clever use of Lux as a platform, dash if needed and exploiting how teleporting puts you in the middle of the room. Getting it this early will see it be useful against most enemies save robotic ones who No-Sell it.
• Double-Meaning Title: The "Chimera" in Blade Chimera refers to Lux's ability to transform into a sword and manifest objects out of time, but "Chimera" is also an in-universe term for demons rumored to have retained their sanity.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • After defeating the Final Boss, Shin uses Lux to reveal a past memory of Baal, as Fumiaki, about to jump off a building as penance for causing the Demon War, and was only stopped by a coincidentally-timed phone call from his mother asking if he's okay and letting him know how his coworkers always valued his ability to motivate their patients and encourage them to keep fighting to survive.
  • After defeating the Optional Boss, Kagero calls Shin naive for trusting demons and other rule violations under the belief that it's alright to break rules to protect people, and impales himself with his own hover sword instead of listening to Shin any longer.
• Drowning My Sorrows: Restored surveillance footage in the medical labs shows Archpriest Baal, in the past as Fumiaki the clinical psychologist, telling Shin that he's had somewhere between one and three glasses of red wine to try and cope with accidentally causing an apocalyptic scenario. Unfortunately this is enough to tank his senses silly, enough for him to commit his greatest regret.
  • This also explains one of the earlier sidequests at the beginning of the game, specifically the one about bootlegged booze, and why the crackdown on any drink above 2% alcoholic content is harsh. After murdering his best friend (or so he believed, at the time) while under the influence, Fumiaki/Baal would of course be extremely sore about allowing anyone under his regimen to inebriate themselves into yet another episode of Alcohol-Induced Idiocy.
• Dying as Yourself: All of the "titanic demons", once defeated, manifest a ghost of their human form for a few final words before fading away. Defeating the Final Boss has him do the same, first appearing as Baal before shifting to look like Fumiaki, as does the True Final Boss turning back to Hotaru.
• Evil Former Friend: Archpriest Baal is actually Dr. Fumiaki Baba, one of Shin's former hospital colleagues who went insane with grief when his regenerative treatment turned into a world-spanning plague and branded himself as a holy man to run away from the guilt.
• Fast Travel: One of the skills that can be unlocked allows Shin to instantly warp to any square of the map he's discovered before. This is required to obtain some otherwise inaccessible items, such as a puzzle piece midway through an uninterruptable elevator ride.
• Fluffy the Terrible: The last leg of the game features squat cylindrical robots named "KIT-T" with cat ears and stylized cat features on their visors... that possess a rocket launcher dealing a lot of damage.
• Forced Transformation: The Final Boss Archpriest Baal attempts to transform Shin into a mindless demon at the start of the fight by dousing the whole room with the D-Virus, unaware that Shin had already been transformed into a demon earlier and was now immune. Then Shin breaks open the cockpit of his Humongous Mecha during the fight, leading to a Karmic Transformation.
• The Four Gods: Some of the titanic demon bosses are based on these mythology beings. The Cobalt Dragon is, well, the Azure Dragon. The Phoenix is the Vermillion Bird. The Bai Hu is the White Tiger. And the Leviathan is the Black Tortoise, even if in-game it is an enormous crocodile.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: Dr. Fumiaki's regenerative treatment was the cause of the whole Demon War. Initially a perfect success in dogs, he rushed human experimentation out of concern for Hotaru and discovered all too late that the treatment turns into a mutagenic plague in human subjects, spreading out of Osaka and to the world at large.
• The Goomba: Noppera-bo, faceless humanoid demons, are the first enemies Shin will find and they do nothing beside slowly shuffling towards him. Humorously, they are also the only enemy with a variant: the ones in the cinema area sport 3-D glasses... despite not needing them.
• Green-Eyed Monster: A flashback reveals that Kagero was passed over for the position of vicar in favor of Shin, despite the latter's tendency to play loose with the rules, explaining Kagero's particular enmity towards him.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • There initially doesn't seem to be much point to the Violet Blade, as by the time you can easily find it, it's probably outclassed by easier-to-acquire weapons like the various whips. However, it's the single most powerful weapon against the hidden boss at the end of the game, and the rest of your arsenal does half damage or less. Nothing tells you this, except Lux herself when you first encounter an ultraviolet light, where she informs that ultraviolet light is lethal for her.
  • The game seems to avert Ability Required to Proceed, unlike most Metroidvanias. Despite a double jump, a roll, and a double jump with a higher reach all being powers Shin can unlock, they're seemingly optional, as the game is built so that you can play it, start to finish, without needing to use a single unlockable skill. However, not only do you need to collect all puzzle pieces and beat every sidequest to face the True Final Boss, you can only accomplish this first goal by making outside-the-box tactical decisions with the abilities you can unlock. There are some endgame puzzle pieces located well outside of your normal jumping range that do not provide a jetpack for you to reach, which require you to abuse the warp skill in tandem with the double jump and higher double jump to gradually make your way up shafts that do not otherwise provide you with soft ground for Lux to make platforms with, teleporting again as you fill out each square on the map on the way up. Nowhere is it ever implied the warp skill can be chained with the double jumps to reach higher locations. At most, the game will hint that you can use the warp skill to get to puzzle pieces trapped in elevator shafts that otherwise lock you in the elevators, but this process is so obtuse it might even look like an exploit to first-time players.
• Hailfire Peaks: The Incinerator area can be considered an example of this. The interior is full of molten metal and enemies with fire powers, while the surrounding area is a snowy plain full of youkai linked to snow and ice, such as the Yuki-onna.
• Happy Flashback: The main story ends with Shin having a flashback of himself, Hotaru, and Fumiaki enjoying a sunset on the roof of a building together.
• He Knows Too Much: Hanzo is Shin's subordinate in Holy Union, and the only member of it curious as to why demons first appeared thirty years ago and whether their organization's mission is truly just. Partway through the game, he asks Shin for permission to look for answers, only to end up nearly assassinated with Archpriest Baal, their boss, having ordered the hit.
• Hot Witch: An Optional Boss Shin can face in one of the side missions.
• Humongous Mecha: The first stage of the Final Boss fight has Archpriest Baal controlling a power loader that tries to cut up Shin with its hand saws.
• Hypocrite: After defeating Victor, who turned out to be at least partly demon, Shin reveals Lux's existence to Hanzo and Satomi, and Archpriest Baal (who had created the D-Virus and also hired Victor to kill Hanzo) interrupts via telecommunication to deride Shin for allying with demons.
• Immune to Bullets: Traditional firearms don't work against demons due to lacking vital organs, which is why the Holy Union uses Energy Weapons and blades. The Peacemakers discovered that silver powder makes bullets very effective.
• Jack the Ripoff: The "Chasing a Phantom" quest has you fighting a demon who's called Jack the Ripper and is an Optional Boss. Fighting him is only necessary if you plan on getting 100% Completion.
• Jerkass: For as fanatically by-the-book as the Holy Union's troops can be, Kagero is downright smug and belligerent about his adherence to the law 24/7 and gets unnecessarily hostile towards Shin for his laxer approach.
• Justified Save Point: The save points are mailbox-shaped communication terminals that record Shin's current status and allow him to call in to the Holy Union's offices. They also seem to have some medical apparatus since they fully heal him as well.
• Karmic Transformation: The second stage of the Final Boss fight has Archpriest Baal become infected by the D-Virus he created thirty years ago, and had just flooded the room with in an attempt to debilitate Shin, transforming into a demonic version of himself. Shin recalls that victims transform into their worst fear and states that Baal must truly be self-loathing.
• La Résistance: The Peacemakers are a group holed up in the Living City that are against the Holy Union and their Knight Templar doctrine of causing innocent casualties if they show the slightest taint of demonic corruption. Some of the Peacemakers are even demons that managed to retain their sentience.
• Life Drain / Mana Drain: Attacking enemies or absorbing projectiles with Lux will restore some of Shin's HP. Conversely, attacking with Shin's mundane weapons restores MP.
• Light Is Good: Lux tends to be associated with a soft green light and her abilities have "Lumina" in their names, and she's firmly on Shin's side. The version of Lux that serves as the True Final Boss, not so much.
• The Lost Lenore: Lux turns out to have once been Hotaru, Shin's terminally-ill wife and a coworker of his and Fumiaki's thirty years ago, who tried to intervene and save the first victims of demonification but immediately caught their disease as well and mutated past a salvageable state, devastating the others.
• Mad Scientist: Archpriest Baal is eventually revealed to have been a clinical psychologist named Fumiaki that tried to rush ahead the testing phase of a cell regenerating procedure, only for cell mutations to lead to people transforming into what would be later known as the demons. When Shin finds him afterwards, Fumiaki calls himself this while drowning his sorrows.
• Metroidvania: The game is structured similar to the "IGAvania" entries of the Castlevania series, with the ability to find and pick up weapons and skill enhancements in a large open world.
• Mini-Game:
  • In a difficult-to-reach rec room in the Holy Union headquarters, Shin and Lux can play Go against each other.
  • "After Beam" is a minigame unlocked by defeating the human trafficker thug, where the player controls a ship that leaves a laser beam behind it with the goal being to make enemy ships crash into the beam.
• Mirror Match: Completing all of the sidequests leads to an Optional Boss fight against Kagero, a member of Holy Union that believes people should follow all laws instead of Shin's belief that laws should change to protect people, and also uses guns and a hover sword just like Shin as his weapons.
• Mundanger: One of the missions asks Shin to destroy a human trafficking ring, and the Optional Boss he has to fight is by all accounts a normal human criminal who attacks by shooting, hiding behind arcade cabinets and throwing grenades.
• Never My Fault: Double subverted with Archpriest Baal, or rather Dr. Fumiaki Baba. When he accidentally unleashed the D-Virus, he was driven to alcoholism to cope with his guilt, only to cryogenically freeze his friend to avoid being potentially tried for causing the outbreak. However, his judgment had been impaired by the heavy drinking, and he felt so terrible over the act that he nearly committed suicide, only for a call from his mother to inspire him to instead use his psychological skills to help people overcome the ordeal he created. However, even then, he failed to ever come clean about causing the outbreak, going to increasingly further extremes to cover it up until it warped into the Holy Union. It would be accurate to say Baal feels guilty about what he's done but is too much of a coward to accept the responsibility.
• The Nose Knows: Professor Irina uses a lavender-scented pendant as part of a passcode system. Talking to her after Shin rescues her has her state that lavender was her dog's favorite scent, though said dog has been kidnapped due to pets being a luxury. Later, when Shin is being held captive by the Peacemakers, it turns out they're using illegally-obtained dogs as test subjects to try and cure demonification, and that dog is among them, coming to Shin's aid the moment it smells the lavender on him despite never directly crossing paths and being two hallways apart from each other.
• Older Than They Look: After being initially captured by the Peacemakers, Shin's body is analyzed and they're shocked to learn that he's actually 61 years old despite having the body of a regular adult. It turns out his body had been cryogenically preserved, explaining the discrepancy.
• Ominous Obsidian Ooze: In the few instances where a character visibly transforms into a demon, their skin turns into a black substance, which then subsumes their clothing.
• One-Hit Kill: There's a few distinct scenarios where Shin can die in a single blow. Most of these will also deny a chance for Lux to revive him
  • Firing a plasma gun in water will instantly toast Shin. This is the only instance where Lux could revive him.
  • Being too close to the Leviathan boss when it bites the train will lead to Shin being Swallowed Whole.
  • The mini-boss version of the Shinigami enemy fought in the amusement park area creates a bottomless pit beneath the ferris wheel. Fall down, and Shin won't be touching the bottom.
  • If the hand-spam attack of the King Enma Elite Mooks connects, they'll drag Shin into their book and declare him guilty.
• Optional Boss: The side missions feature mini-boss encounters, usually against more humanoid (or even outright human) opponents. Defeating most of them is required to reach the True Final Boss, as they hold some of the puzzle pieces necessary to access the fight.
• Our Demons Are Different: The demons Shin fights are actually not evil spirits, but victims of a medical treatment that turned into a plague that causes humans to mutate and destroys their minds in most cases.
• Peninsula of Power Leveling: In the first area there's a rather easily accessible stretch with a high level security door and two drone enemies with easily dodged scanners. If reached as soon as possible, (affer getting Lux and dash) you can farm exp from them and get considerable exp, speeding up ability unlocks.
• Protagonist Title: In a optional memory conversation, Hanzo refers to the sane demons in the Living City as "Chimeras". Lux, one of the aforementioned sane demons, takes the form of a sword. Thus, she's the titular Blade Chimera.
• Puzzle Boss: The only way to defeat the Specter haunting the cinema in one of the optional missions is to plant Lux in front of the seat Shin is going to sit on, wait until the ghost appears and let it destroy itself against the barrier. Otherwise it can't be harmed and deals a One-Hit Kill.
• Shinigami: A demon referred to as a Shinigami can be challenged in one of the side quests as a late-game Optional Boss, who manifests a deadly bottomless pit in its arena. Shinigami also appear as a rare enemy in the final area of the game, albeit without the bottomless pit.
• Shout-Out:
  • The achievement text for the "Bonus Stage" achievement, which involves destroying a car, says "Oh, my car!"
  • The acheivement text for the "Rail Enthusiast" achievement, which involves riding trains repeatedly, says "I like trains."
  • The poster in front of the Peacemakers' base is pretty clearly a low-res version of the poster for Get Out (2017). The movie theater also features legally-distinct versions of the posters for Hidden Figures, The Help, and American History X.
  • There's an arcade in the Living City that's still operational. You can spot the attract screens for games such as Street Fighter Alpha 3 and Metal Slug 3, although they're too low-resolution to matter.
  • The Sumo Tengu enemies are basically E. Honda with red skin and long noses.
  • The Dogu clay dolls reimagined as transforming robots evoke Huitzil from Darkstalkers. A second enemy, the rare King Emma, can land a one-hit kill on you with a move that deliberately mimics Jedah's Prova di Servo from the same series.
  • Most of the demons in the game are youkai, but a few of them are based on Western demonology, coming from the Ars Goetia (Malphas) or the Dictionnaire Infernal (Lucifer, Ukobach).
  • The "After Beam" mini-game plays similar to the Light Cycles game mode from the TRON arcade game, with the goal being to make enemy ships crash into your ship's exhaust beam.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: A few weapons categorized as shotguns appear, offering their own advantages at the cost of a small magazine.
  • The Amphibious Gun is, for a large part of the game, one of the only ranged weapons that won't flash-fry Shin to a crisp underwater.
  • The Shotgun is, of course, a shotgun, boasting stronger single target damage than the Peacemakers' other guns.
  • The Dragon's Breath Shotgun has bar none one of the highest attack ratings in the game and a reasonably quick firing rate.
• Single-Use Shield: Downplayed example with the Bulletproof Vest, which can negate three hits before breaking and is restored at save points. The big advantage is that it always absorbs three hits, no matter how powerful they are, which makes it especially useful for the True Final Boss which deals 150+ damage during its first phase.
• Skill Scores and Perks: After picking up Lux, Shin gains access to a skill tree which grants him additional traversal abilities, quality-of-life buffs, and offensive magic skills using the points he gains from levelling up. Level ups also increase his attack, defense, and HP/MP recovery slightly. A few more abilities are unlocked after defeating Majin.
• Spiteful Suicide: After being defeated, Kagero opts to kill himself with his own hover sword than entertain the possibility of his ideals being wrong.
• Stable Time Loop:
  • During the Unexpected Gameplay Change, Shin, as Majin, is brought 24 hours into the past in order to purge his demonification by fighting himself. Along the way, he also activates a tram car, allowing someone Shin had saved earlier to flee to the Peacemaker's base and advocate for him after the Peacemakers catch Shin.
  • After the Unexpected Gameplay Change, Lux talks to her past self and reveals that she first developed her time manipulation and restoration powers after originally failing to save Shin. She then switches places with her past self and ensures that this Shin gets the help he needs to succeed, explaining how she knew things like how to save Hanzo's life after an assassination attempt.
• Stealth-Based Mission: After Shin first encounters the Peacemakers and is captured by them, control briefly shifts to Irina's kidnapped dog as he crawls through ventilation, distracts guards with barks, hides behind tables, and delivers some cell door keys to Shin. If the dog's caught by the guards, it's returned to an easily-escaped kennel at the start of the section.
• Take That!: The "Mr. President" demons found in the Funfair area, who look like a certain head of state and attack by summoning a certain star-spangled flag (only the stars are replaced by circles). Not to mention that, before the final boss fight, Shin says that people turned into demons become what they are most afraid of.
• Tragic Villain: Dr. Fumiaki Baba, now known as Archpriest Baal. The D-Virus was initially an attempt to cure sick people, with testing rushed due to the terminal illness of one of his friends. He locked his other friend in a cryogenic freezer to avoid facing responsibility, but this was caused by drunken cowardice instead of a clear mind. He initially wanted to die for his actions, but a call from his concerned mother and recalling Hotaru saying he was charismatic and caring enough to lead a religion instead motivated him to use his psychology skills to help people overcome the ordeal he caused, though his refusal to admit responsibility led to his corruption. And the final words of his spirit before passing on are how he wishes he could just turn back time and undo it all.
• True Final Boss: Beating the story and collecting every puzzle piece in the game, including beating every Optional Boss, unlocks a door that leads to a fight against Lux, or rather the version of her that had to go back in time to reinforce the Stable Time Loop, as a Background Boss trying to kill Shin and her present self so that she can possess Shin's corpse and be with him forever. Defeating her allows "Hotaru" to pass on, while Shin and Lux decide to start focusing on their future instead of the past, followed by a second credits roll.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: After defeating the boss of the Recycling Centre, Shin accidentally exposes himself to the D-Virus and turns into the Majin, prompting Lux to send the two of them back in time so the past Shin can "defeat" Majin and cure his future self. The playable Majin has access to his spear attack, which can be charged and destroys spikes and wood doors, and then has to "fight" Shin by surviving for sixty seconds without killing his past self so a rift can appear.
• Was Once a Man: According to Holy Union, demons were once humans that gave in to their sins and were transformed into their own worst fears. In truth, the demons turn out to be people that were infected by the D-Virus, a man-made pathogen that was originally supposed to be a medical treatment, with the Peacemakers trying to develop a vaccine, and the game's demon bosses being the original test subjects whose ghosts thank Shin for slaying them.
• Weakened by the Light: Demons can be turned to ash by UV radiation, which is why the Holy Union uses plasma-based weapons and UV traps. If Lux lingers too much within a UV light (which is about one second without the Sunscreen equipment equipped), she will be destroyed, resulting in an immediate Game Over. The Lux variant fought as the True Final Boss is particularly weak to the Violet Blade, which emits UV light.
• We Can Rule Together: After Shin learns the truth about his past, Victor, the Peacemakers agent that Baal hired as a hitman, congratulates him for finding the blackmail he had over Baal and offers to work together to take Baal down and reorganize Holy Union. Shin refuses, as Victor had nearly killed Hanzo and clearly isn't trustworthy, so Victor reveals he's also kidnapped Satomi and challenges Shin to come get her.
• Yōkai: The various demons Shin fights in Osaka are fittingly based on and named after Japanese spirits, such as Hitodama Lights and Oni.