Video Game / Quartet (RPG)

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The game starts with a group of four sages, one specializing in each element, confronting the mad conqueror, General Nathaniel Corsin, at the top of Mt. Nibaros. Although the sages prevail, they have to make a decision about what to do with the mountain's vast magical powers. About 150 years later, four protagonists in different nations must deal with the consequences of the sages' decisions.

• Alexandra Hin lives in the magicless city of Seren, where she tries to keep her family's grocery store afloat after her mother falls into a coma. She ends up having to flee her home with Juna, a euruphant, while learning to use her new earth magic abilities.
• Ben Balani is a cook in Akos, but loses his job once he accidentally uses wind magic and destroys his workplace. Now he has to look for work while being monitored by Agata, a member of the Order of the Phylax.
• Cordelia Helmont is a water mage who loses her job at Leornia's university due to being used as a political scapegoat. She moves to Feorlan, where she teams up with her old friend, Jerome Renault, to bust a gang of train robbers.
• Nikolai Proch is a sergeant in the Auslen Empire, but becomes disillusioned with his country's xenophobic and genocidal war. While deserting, he meets a magic robot, Zikaron, who guides him in opposing his homeland.

This game has a Steam page here and is available on PC and Nintendo Switch.

This game contains examples of:

• Accomplice by Inaction: During Nikolai's character quest, Mueller tries to insist that he's not like the other Auslen soldiers who oppress civilians and sexually assault women, but Maimun points out that his hands aren't clean, since he did nothing to stop the other soldiers.
• Affably Evil: Dewlin Coomes genuinely respects Cordelia's determination and compliments her for using glamour to sneak her friends into his hideout. However, he's still an outlaw seeking to avenge his brother, who Cordelia killed in her first chapter. Even when he's cornered, he continues treating Cordelia as a Worthy Opponent.
• Ambiguous Start of Darkness: The Big Bad Chancellor Uralt, is revealed to be Gustav Heizer, the fire sage who helped to end General Corsin's reign of terror. The game doesn't explain why or when he became a genocidal conqueror. At best, a flashback shows that even while relatively young, he was hungry for power, going as far as to brutalize an elemental, Gluhender, to serve his purposes. This implies he may have always been a Token Evil Teammate to the sages, but kept his ambitions to himself until their alliance was no longer needed.
• The Apocalypse Brings Out the Best in People: Gordon is first introduced using the Life Tap spell in an illegal way and uses his family's influence to escape the consequences. During Auslen's attack on Leornia, he helps the party fight off the enemy soldiers and displays none of the recklessness he had at the start of the game.
• Aristocrats Are Evil: Although Leornia promotes equal access to magic on paper, in practice, the country still has a lot of upper class corruption. A farming cartel deliberately ruined farmland in order to drive up crop prices, and when they were caught, they made Cordelia's father into a scapegoat despite the scandal happening long after his death. Worse yet, the parliament secretly colluded with Coomes's gang and the Auslen Empire in order to buy enough crops to make up for the famine and sweep the scandal under the rug. The Wigram family has an inheritance crisis due to Jesiah Wigram's imminent death, and one member, Lady Catherine, constantly schemes against her relative, Julia, in order to claim the inheritance.
• Armored, but Frail: Alexandra has good defensive stat growths and the ability to set up a HP barrier, but has low HP growth.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: After the battle against Corsin, the world split into four, with each based on one of the sages' vision of society. Le Dernier wished for a magicless society in the hopes that it would prevent magic wars, but this caused civilization to collapse. He ended up killing himself out of guilt.
• Becoming the Mask: Phillip Lanetes constructed a false soul to seduce Alexandra's mother, Marie, in order to trick her into a contract that turns her into a sacrifice if Lanetes is harmed. However, the false soul became independent from Lanetes and fell in love with Marie for real, causing him to betray his master by freeing Alexandra so that she can defeat Lanetes and free Marie.
• Big Bad: Chancellor Uralt is the military dictator of the Auslen Empire, who wants to wipe out all foreign mages so that only he and his chosen officers can wield magic. While there are other independent villains in the game, Uralt is by far the greatest threat, due to his army and his power as the fire sage, Gustav Heizer. He also knows about the worlds splitting into four and seeks to conquer all of them, meaning he is a problem even outside of his home world.
• Big Good: Keraunos the Wind Sage created the Order of the Phylax to both enforce laws on mages and help them seek magical education. He helps the eight party members travel between each other' worlds so that they can prevent Chancellor Uralt from conquering the world and monopolozing magic.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Phillip Lanetes presents himself as a benevolent mage that helps various groups, such as the Order of the Phylax, expedition groups, and barbarian tribes. He also acts like an understanding teacher to rookie mages who reject the Mage Guild's restrictions. He's really trying to steal bodies and souls from strong mages in order to advance his own magical knowledge, and he only acts nice to get into people's good graces before backstabbing them.
• Boss in Mook's Clothing: The Dragon Pond is a reference to the Dinosaur Forest of Final Fantasy VI, and the dinosaurs there are stronger than the bosses from the character quests. The strongest spawn in that map, the Sauropod, resembles the Brachiosaur.
• Damsel out of Distress: In Cordelia's character quest, Dewlin Coomes kidnaps Octavia and Conover. Octavia manages to escape by creating a magic doppelganger.
• Dangerous Forbidden Technique:
  • Cordelia knows a powerful spell called Death Surge, which instantly kills all within its range, but cannot be controlled. It doesn't distinguish between friend and foe, and is more likely to kill an ally when there are few remaining targets. The effects linger for so long that the party cannot reenter the bandit cave that Cordelia cast the spell in. She knows several more forbidden spells and casts them without restraint when an Auslen airship kills over thirty civilians in front of her.
  • Jerome has a spell, Life For Life, that can heal anyone from the brink of death, even if they were affected by the aforementioned Death Surge, but this deals permanent damage to his health.
• Death Seeker: Mateusz loses the will to live after the Ausleners sacrifice Pavel to a magic extraction machine, despairing over the world following a dog-eat-dog philosophy. He regains the will to live after seeing that the other survivors made it to Helva safely.
• De-power: The people of Seren were once capable of earth magic, but lost that ability 150 years ago. Despite that, non-human species of that region are still capable of magic. This is because when the world split into four, Le Dernier wished for a world with no magic for humans. This caused all of humanity's earth magic to be absorbed into the Earth Shrine.
• Driven to Suicide: Le Dernier is the only sage who the party never encounters, since he killed himself after realizing that he screwed over his nation by wishing for a world without magic.
• Dual Wielding: Agata wields both a dagger and a javelin. This means her normal attack deals a piercing hit and a slashing hit.
• Enemy Mine: In Nikolai's character quest, the party works with the Auslen soldiers at Therme to drive off the Luskiyan soldiers, since Therme is Nikolai's hometown. Cordelia leaves the party until the quest is finished, since she cannot accept a temporary alliance with the country that nearly destroyed her home.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Apingorix is a ruthless barbarian, but he cares about those in his clan, whether they were born into or or joined it, and Dreyfuss states that he's good with children.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Downplayed with Magico, the boss of Ben's chapter. He's a Mad Scientist mage who performs risky experiments and cares little for magical regulations, but if he KOs a character, there's a chance he'll revive that character immediately afterwards. According to the developer, he's arrogant and selfish, but doesn't like the idea of outright murder. However, his portal leads to Auslen, with the implication that he's sharing the fruits of his research with them in exchange for resources, though it's unknown if he approves of their genocidal wars. In Alexandra's character quest, he is disturbed by his teacher, Lenates, when the latter goes insane and starts possessing people for the sake of his magical experiments.
• Evil Versus Evil: Luskiya is a rival nation to Auslen, and it is only a marginally lighter shade of black at best, and is capable of similarly cruel war crimes at worst. The citizens of Stral faced oppression under their rule, albeit to a lesser extent than when Auslen took over. When they attack Therme, they kill all the people in the upper part of the town while kidnapping the women to sexually assaulted.
• Exact Words: After Nikolai pulls an Enemy Mine with the soldiers at Therme to defend the town, Captain Altmayer asks if he is going to continue defending Auslen. Nikolai states that he will defend his country from its biggest enemy. What he doesn't state is that he considers the country's leader, Chancellor Uralt, to be said enemy.
• Fair-Weather Friend: Dreyfuss's ancestors managed to climb to the top of the economic ladder in Seren despite being Yina, who normally face discrimination. However, the family's high-society "friends" refused to help them when the citizens launched a pogrom against the Yina.
• Fallen Hero: Chancellor Uralt was once Gustav Heizer, the fire sage who fought alongside Keraunos, Haelan Reed, and Pierre Le Dernier to defeat General Corsin. After the world split into four, he turned Auslen into a fascist empire that seeks to conquer the world and slaughter all non-Auslen mages so that his country and race can monopolize magic.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • The Ausleners are taught to believe they are the master race and that all mages from other countries are impure and deserving of death.
  • The Yina are on the receiving end of this trope from multiple nations, and not just Auslen, leading to them living in hiding in almost every region of the planet.
• Fate Worse than Death: In Alexandra's sidequest, Phillip Lanetes traps people's souls in glass containers the Astral Plane so that he can take over their bodies in the physical plane. When the party kills the strongest three souls in his collection, they thank the party for ending their torment.
• Faux Affably Evil:
  • General Nathaniel Corsin is respectful towards the sages when they defeat him and tells Gustav Heizer to take his sword, but in reality, he's mocking Gustav because he knows the latter will become a tyrant just like him.
  • Chancellor Ulralt is initially polite to Alexandra and compliments her people for their beautiful language, Rienese. He then uses levitation magic to force her to sit down so that he can explain his political philosophy, and then tries to kill her when she points out his ideology is built on endless human sacrifice.
  • Colonel Anseitz is a charismatic Auslen officer who is able to dress up Chancellor Uralt's genocidal goals as a necessary evil, and offers to take responsibility when Konitz feels guilty about the atrocities committed in Stral. When Konitz disobeys orders and refuses to return the detonators, Anseitz orders him killed without a shred of hesitation.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: According to Gustav, General Corsin was once a mere border lord before he gained powerful magic and nearly conquered the world.
• Genius Ditz: Ben is a scatterbrained cook who is nonetheless good at his job. He also turns out to have a lot of hidden potential in magic, and learns how to cast properly after a few misfires. He is also quick to figure out how to operate Magico's teleporation device, despite his lack of experience with magic technology.
• Glorious Leader: Most of Auslen's population believes Chancellor Uralt can do no wrong and buys into his extreme nationalism. Even when intelligence officers abuse their power against Auslen civilians, they believe these are just bad eggs rather than people acting on Uralt's orders.
• Graceful Loser: The prologue boss, General Nathaniel Corsin, takes his defeat and imminent death at the party's hands calmly, though this is partially out of smug satisfaction that Gustav Heizer will follow in his footsteps in conquering the world with magic.
• Heroic Sacrifice: At the end of Chapter 10, Haelan Reed uses Life For Life to revive Nikolai at the cost of his life, after he performed his own heroic sacrifice to revive all the people killed in Auslen's air raid of Leornia.
• Human Resources: The Auslen Empire built machines that can extract magic from people, and their victims vaporize once all their magic is drained.
• Hyperlink Story: After the prologue, the player is given the choice of four seemingly unrelated story routes in different locations. Notably, each setting is vastly different in terms of magic and technology levels. Once all of them are complete, control shifts back to Alexandra, who joins forces with the protagonists of the other routes and learns that their homes were all once part of a single world before the world was split into four, with each new world being based on the wishes of one of the prologue party members. The goal of the combined party is to defeat Chancellor Uralt, who was the Token Evil Teammate of the prologue party.
• I'm a Humanitarian: The barbarians in the ruins of Auslen's imperial palace in Alexandra's world immolate women both to appease their gods and to eat their remains.
• Intellectual Animal: Juna is a euruphant, an animal resembling a hippo. Her species is intelligent and capable of using magic, and she knows how to speak human languages.
• Interface Screw: One of the superbosses, Gluhender, starts the fight by using Phantasmagoria, which temporarily hides the turn indicator.
• Justified Criminal: Alexandra's brother, Alvin, turns to petty theft in order to support his family after their mother fell ill.
• Knight Templar:
  • Chancellor Uralt believes the only way to deal with the scarcity of magic is to kill non-Auslen mages so that only his "master race" of Auslens can use magic, reducing the amount of magic being consumed.
  • The Order of the Phylax evolves into a downplayed example of this trope due to their enforcement of magic-related laws. Although they start out lenient towards Ben and only assigned people to watch over him, they eventually order Dario to arrest him when he operates illegal magical machinery through intuition, despite how that very act saved Dario from certain death.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Sometime after Kassandra was taken away by the Order of the Phylax, she lost all memory of her life at the slave labor orphanage, as well as her knowledge of magic.
• A Lighter Shade of Black: The Kingdom of Leornia has its share of political problems and abuse of power from the parliament, but they has a less restrictive stance on magic compared to Auslen, since they allow people from all social classes to receive magic education while Auslen restricts magic to only military officers and seeks to kill any foreign mages.
• Mind Hive: Zikaron is a robot containing the memories of several persecuted Yina. However, only Maimun speaks on the behalf of the collective while most of the others get no dialogue, outside of Zikaron's sidequest where the party talks to Dreyfuss's ancestor.
• Mirroring Factions: Alexandra sees the Auslen Empire and a barbarian clan as this trope. In Alexandra's world, Auslen is a ruined nation that is primarily inhabited by barbarians, who practice human sacrifice to appease their gods and acquire meat. In Nikolai's world, the Auslen Empire builds machines to extract magic from people they deem unworthy, resulting in those victims being vaporized once they are completely drained. When Alexandra unwillingly hops between her world and Nikolai's, she notices that both the barbarians and the Auslen Empire are using the greater good as a justification to sacrifice people, meaning for all of Chanceller Uralt's claims of defending civilization, his ideal world is no more civilized than the barbarians.
• Misplaced Retribution: Ben's boss, Dimitri, has a debt to Codrescu's mafia. The mafia decides to beat up his employee, Ben, to intimidate him by proxy.
• My Country 'Tis of Thee That I Sting: Downplayed with Nikolai. He loves various cultural aspects of his home country, the Auslen Empire, but is also ashamed of the country's warmongering, atrocities, and indoctrination of its citizens. He laments that the rest of the world will justifiably only remember Auslen for its crimes rather than any of its good qualities.
• A Nazi by Any Other Name: The Auslen Empire preaches an ideology where all non-Auslen mages are considered impure and guilty of using magic that "rightfully" belongs to Auslen, seeks to kill all Auslen mages and conquer the world, performs deadly experiments on captured civilians and dissidents, believes one must be constantly fighting in order to justify one's existence, has a Cult of Personality built around Chancellor Uralt, and has its own civilians under constant surveillance from intelligence officers.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Nikolai and Konitz attempt to cover for a family in Stral by convincing a higher ranking officer that the house is empty. The officer orders the house immolated anyways. This causes Konitz to attempt to steal the Auslen force's detonators, only for Colonel Anseitz to destroy the building he's in as punishment.
• Orphanage of Fear: Ben grew up in an orphanage where he and his peers were enslaved and forced to produce alcohol, and the caretaker, Boris, got away with it due to bribing the authorities. After Kassandra reflected the damage from Boris's bullets and knocked him out, the government shut down the orphanage due to Boris being in no condition to continue his bribes. One of the orphans, Stani, eventually bought the land and turned it into a shop for tonic water and health foods.
• Piñata Enemy: The Island Shrine in the northeast corner of Cordelia's world has an encounter zone that only spawns a Kraptain enemy, which has high evasion, yields no EXP, and drops 35000 val. With Midas Glove, this doubles to 70000 val.
• Pragmatic Villainy:
  • Alvin and Robert are robbers, but they refuse to kill their marks or other criminals, since murder would result in more attention from the police than smaller crimes.
  • Apingorix and his clan decide to conduct legitimate merchantry when they realize that doing so is more profitable than working for Auslen or raiding settlements.
• Predecessor Villain: The boss of the prologue is General Nathaniel Corsin, who nearly conquered the world with the magic of Mt. Nibaros. He is defeated by the four elemental sages, and one of the sages, Gustav Heizer, goes on to become the Big Bad of the main story.
• Reformed, but Not Tamed: In the endgame, Apingorix's clan makes peace with the party and becomes allies, but that didn't make them nicer, and they still resent Nikolai for being an Auslener.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Cordelia normally only uses forbidden magic as a last resort, but when Auslen kills over thirty Leornian civilians in front of her, she spams forbidden spells against the Auslen soldiers without restraint.
• The Scapegoat: A farming cartel in Leornia deliberately despoiled farmland to drive up crop prices, nearly resulting in a famine. Since there are many powerful people involved in this scandal, they decide to pin all the blame on Cordelia's father, who was technically part of the group but died long before the scandal. This results in Cordelia being blacklisted from the magic academy.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Although Gordon caused in incident by using illegal magic on the Liganti, he isn't punished because his family is affluent.
• The Social Darwinist: Uralt believes that the only way for a nation to survive is to dominate all other nations, and that permanent struggle is the law of life. He states that those who don't actively fight and dominate others don't deserve to exist.
  Uralt: "The struggle for survival will forever be a conquest of the means of existence, and the elimination of others who would claim your share."
• The Svengali: Phillip Lenates taught many rogue mages, such as Vasilus/Magico, in order to gain their trust and steal their bodies and souls. Although Vasilus wised up to Lenates's true nature and cut all ties with him, the latter already placed a magic mark on the former in order to always know his location. This allows Lenates to collect Vasilus's corpse after his death in Ben's first chapter.
• Take a Third Option: In the ending, the party has to decide what to do about the currently split worlds. Uniting the worlds would allow all countries to mediate the war between Auslen and Luskiya to bring it to a peaceful resolution, along with allowing cultural exchange between nations again, but this could cause all kinds of environmental disasters similar to what happened when the original world split in the first place. However, leaving the worlds split would solve no problems whatsoever. The party decides to leave the worlds split, but use the magic of Mt. Nibaros to make world-hopping magic widespread so that the countries can interact with each other through ambassadors.
• A Taste of Power: The prologue party consists of Keraunos, Haelan, Gustav, and Le Dernier, the four elemental sages. They are all at level 50 with endgame equipment, unlike the main cast who starts with levels in the single digits.
• Tautological Templar: Despite his genocidal goals and bodycount, Chancellor Uralt believes himself to be a man of absolute virtue and that all of his atrocities are justified for the sake of sustaining Auslen's magic-based society.
• Translator Buddy: Zikaron is a robot who can translate languages, not by listening to the speaker and repeating their words in another language, but by casting a spell on others that automatically translates their words.
• Unskilled, but Strong: Downplayed. Ben has a hidden aptitude for wind magic and has one of the highest MAG growths of the party, but has no formal training and struggles at first to aim his spells. Even other inexperienced mages in the party are able to learn to control their magic faster than him. That said, he is quick to find non-combat applications for his magic, such as flying or creating illusions, showing that he's a natural at learning magic once he gets past his aiming issues.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Of the sages, Haelan Reed and Le Dernier get the least amount of screentime outside of flashbacks. The former appears in Chapter 10 and abruptly sacrifices herself to save Nikolai from the brink of death while the latter killed himself offscreen about 150 years ago.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • Bekker, a guest character in Nikolai's first chapter, calls out the latter for considering returning to Auslen's army after seeing what they did to the city of Stral, and points out that he's not inspiring confidence by admitting that he's only joining Stral's refugees because he has no other choice.
  • Similarly, Maimun states that Nikolai feels anger and pity regarding Auslen's atrocities, but doesn't feel them enough and therefore makes half-hearted attempts at helping Auslen's victims. At the same time, he criticizes Konitz for being too passionate and reckless in following his conscience, and he tells Nikolai that he has to find a middle ground.
• Willfully Weak: Private Kircher is actually Lieutenant Seisholtz, who is assigned to Nikolai's squad to ensure that they don't miuse the magic terminal. Since only Auslen officers are allowed to use magic, Seisholtz refrains from using magic in his disguise. When Seisholtz becomes the boss of Nikolai's first chapter, he uses powerful magic and has much higher stats than when he was a party member.