[Coolshaymin]

Credit to Kash for making up this white list post.

Elsword is an Action MMORPG, set in a world that's a mix of Sci-Fi and classic Fantasy, featuring several playable characters each with 4 unique advancement lines, and an incredibly dense amount of lore to sink your teeth into. This is a world that survives thanks to a mystical entity called the El, and in Elsword you play as one of the many eclectic members of the El Search Party. The El has been going missing, and havoc has been being strewn across the land, be it natural disasters due to the El, the forces of robotic creatures called Nasod wreaking havoc in search of the El, or the demon realm waging war on the land for the El. Everything revolves around this El, and as a member of the El Search Party, it's your job to help people out and save the world. And, on top of this, while each character has a canonical class progression, they have 3 more that explore "what if" scenarios for them, and flesh out the world further.

But why am I even mentioning this game? Well, despite being a PC exclusive game, it has a link to a series that recently became ligal, Dungeon Fighter Online, or through the game that made it ligal, DNF Duel. With DNF Duel being on Switch, the two series have a strong connection through the female Gunner Class in Dungeon Fighter Online, which has two of her own class advancements playable in DNF Duel, the Female Mechanic, and the Launcher. This is important, because she also exists in Elsword! She is the playable character Rose, and is present in that world under the orders of the Empress of Empyrean.


The problems of Elsword's world threatens to spill over into the world of DNF, and thus she becomes an important member of the El Search Party, with nearly all of her characteristics from DNF intact to boot. The two series have strong ties as a result, putting it under the limelight for potential whitelisting.

[Glimmericious]

I've had wanting Elsword to be ligal on here for a while (see my signature for the past like two years), so I'm here to show support and give a brief blurb on some Elsword lore.

So, the El in question is essentially a rock from the gods (hence 'god rock' often being thrown around when I discuss the series) and more than just being a macguffin, it's the very substance that gives the world life at all. It will actively shape and warp the world around it -for instance, the land around the Fire El is a volcanic wasteland. Associated with each major shard of the El (the Fire El, Water El, etc) is a priestess capable of interacting with the El.

Before The El Priestesses, though, there were the El Masters, charged with protecting the El in a much more physical sense - they were warriors, and becoming a El Master essentially awarded your family with a huge amounts of prestige. There were tons of families vying for the El Master position and they all do some pretty shady shit. Rosso, for instance, was someone who had the eye of a powerful demon implanted into him to give him the means to control the Fire El - Fire El Masters tended to live very short lives because their own power would burn them alive, and by using demonic strength, Rosso was able to essentially smother the Fire El's power.

The El might sound pretty potent, but it's by no means limitless - in fact, in the time of the story, it is actually already drastically weakening. The continent was originally sustained by one Great El, but the problem with the Great El is that it's a little... unstable. Every few centuries, the gods would mark some young lady as the next 'El Lady' - essentially an incarnation of a goddess whose ultimate purpose was to be devoured by the El to stabilize it, lest it turn into a nuke that would annihilate the supercontinent of Elrios. Much of the later parts of the story are actually the main characters trying to find a break this cycle of ritualistic sacrifice.

Nasods, as mentioned in the main post, are machines powered by the El. Many of them are essentially become able to think. Nasods have their own troubled history of trying to pull a Detroit: Become Human, and it ultimately failed (largely because the person who made Nasods was a huge piece of shit), but Nasods still somewhat linger in the present world in spite of what would basically have been genocide on all Nasods. The techniques used to defeat them still linger as well, though - people who know what Nasod Ruler used to fight. And their name is Add, if I'm being honest.

Now, to name a few of the characters in question:

Elsword

The titular character, he starts as a go-getter runt with a bit of potential and an abnormal aptitude for the El. His story through his canon path is largely one of maturing into a capable knight and leader of the El Search Party, but he has plenty of other paths about him becoming more competent with magic or using the Dark El to get a multiplying sword. He's also allegedly proof the gods' order has failed, which is a statement that hasn't been elaborated on, but it sure is a piece of lore just abruptly dropped on us!

Aisha

Obligatory mage is obligatory, but she has quite a few different ways of handling her magic. She can contract a familiar, she can throw around different elemental magic, she can be an alchemist who has discovered immortality, or maybe, fuck it, she'll just become a warper of time and space! She starts her journey trying to recover some ring that gave her a ton of magical power, and discovers some pretty unfortunate stuff about her family and how they came into possession of said ring on the way.

Eve

The Queen of Nasods, and Adrian Nasod's best creation (and yes, the entire Nasod 'species' was named after Adrian. He's still a mother). She seeks to essentially rebuild the Nasod kingdom from near extinction, and while lines like Code Empress will have her begin creating her own subjects to assist her in battle, sometimes her classes get a little bit screwy. Code Ultimate says 'fuck it we ball' and creates Odin's spear, Code Sariel overloads and eventually breaks her emotional core, and Code Antithese is what happens if you were to do:

try:
  *Eve's Entire fucking OS*
except:
  pass
...And it goes exactly as well as you'd think!

Naturally, there are a lot more characters and a lot more lore I could delve into (the Add light novels are very enlightening) but for the sake of brevity, I'll spare you all a lot of the gorey details - this should just serve as an example of the characters present and that the lore runs much, much deeper than you would initially be lead to believe. If anyone wants to app a character and needs a loredump, I am more than capable of providing.

[KashKey]

I'm gonna go full mask off now that I'm done writing what was essentially a wiki blurb for Elsword. I both love and hate this game. I hate its business practices. I love its story, lore, characters, and combat loop. Glim gave a good example of why the lore is kinda sick, and I won't really go into too much detail myself because of it. I will however point out that its sense of style, story telling, and humor, are all great. When it's telling a serious story it can get really dark, and then it can go full clown shoes in the next minute and have an event that sends everyone to highschool. Or puts all the guys in maid outfits and all the girls in butler outfits. Or other such goofy, non-canon events. It takes itself seriously, but when those clown shoes go on, they go on HARD. And in ways that I feel fit well with this forum. I'm in full support of whitelisting it.

Another thing I love is that its crossover with DNF isn't a crossover just for the sake of it. Rose may not to get to play many pivitol roles in the story, that tends to go towards the absolute nonsense that is Elsword himself and his initial crew, but when the other characters pop off, they pop off hard. As an example with Rose, Elsword re-contextualizes many things simply taken for granted in DNF, and takes them farther. Her backstory in military school and how the loss of her father, who was a general, show a darker side of how Empyrean functions that's never fully explored in DNF. It even re-contextualizes her different classes. Add on top of all this that, frankly, Elsword just has a lot of really fun threads to pluck at and play with, I think it would be an excellent edition that we would be remise to skip out on.

Now with that all said, LET ME PLAY MY EDGEY BOI HERE

[Coolshaymin]

We have reached our consensus that Elsword will join it's DFO brother in Ligality. Approved.