Frightened (おびえ, Obie)? or Anxiety (不安, Fuan)? is an ailment in the series. Generally it is triggered randomly when a disadvantage of the Press Turn occurs.
Appearances[]
- Digital Devil Saga: Avatar Tuner, Digital Devil Saga: Avatar Tuner 2: as Frightened
- Metaphor: ReFantazio: as Anxiety
Effect[]
Digital Devil Saga duology[]
Frightened is an enemy-exclusive ailment which triggers randomly when the enemy's weakness is exploited or it receives a critical hit, as well as when the enemy's attack is either voided, repelled or drained. The Frightened status naturally expires when entering the next enemy phase. This ailment also has the lowest priority among all ailments, meaning it will be replaced by any other newly afflicted ailment, and Frightened will not occur if the enemy is already suffering another ailment. All bosses, their minions, and Karma Soldiers before transforming are immune to this status.
A frightened enemy is more susceptible to Hunt Skills, doubling the damage; luck-based fatal Hunt skills have a near-guaranteed success chance. The presence of any frightened enemy will also greatly increase the player's chance of escaping from battle.
Metaphor: ReFantazio[]
Party members have a chance to be afflicted with Anxiety either when the party is ambushed or when an ally receives a critical hit from an enemy. Allies afflicted with anxiety will be unable to control Archetype skills, and attacks against them won't consume enemy Turn Icons.
Anxiety also plays a major role in the story itself, as the substance known as magla is produced from the fears and anxieties of people. It is for this reason that places with huge amounts of magla make people uneasy just by going close to them and attract the monstrosities known as humans.
Humans are created from people who are exposed to excessive amounts of Melancholia, the toxic form of magla and succumb to the welling fears induced by the substance. Some of them such as Homo Jaluzo or Homo Margo can amplify and take advantage of others' fears to manipulate them to give them prey. Very few, however, can overcome the welling anxiety caused by excessive doses of melancholia and gain partial mutations. On the other hand, conquering one's own anxieties is instrumental for one to awaken their own Archetypes.
The discovery of magla in the World Before, the equivalent of the modern-day world, had resulted in a war that eradicated civilization and regressed it back to the medieval era, meaning that modern civilization has essentially undone itself with its people's own fears and anxieties.
Louis Charadrius' end goal is to turn all of humanity into humans to create a world devoid of anxiety; in some form or way, there will be no more anxiety if every other person has became a rampaging monster. Throughout the game, he would also take action to increase other's fears to prepare them for their transformation, such as by ordering armies of humans into attacking random human settlements or briefly transforming Will into a human and telling a half-truth that would turn the crowd on the boy.
The royal scepter is a device that absorbs magla from the general populace and converts it into royal magic, which allows the general populace to live their lives with minimal anxiety. However, there is a threshold, and if it would go past that point, it would no longer be able to absorb anxiety and all of the magla contained inside it will become stagnant melancholia, and the public will go berserk with fear and hatred. Louis knows about this due to his eldan studies with magic, and he was able to formulate a plan where he uses the tournament to take the royal scepter and use its stagnant magla to enact his insane plan. When Louis incited the public's anger against the protagonist outside the Regalith Grand Cathedral, the resulting anxieties of the public went completely out of control and overloaded the royal scepter, which would make them easier for Louis to turn into humans. Upon the destruction of Louis' unstable human form in the hands of the protagonist, the royal scepter is also destroyed, symbolizing that mankind can now live and make their own decisions without a device to suppress their fears.