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One night in 2006, a call goes out to NHK and the Tokyo police, giving notice of a suicide jumper from the then-incomplete Tokyo Sky Tower. Ordinarily, this wouldn't be too unusual, except for one small detail: Akiko Yamaguchi, the suicide jumper, is a Magical Girl. She has fought a long, lonely war against Cults, a Circus of Fear, and the embodiments of fear itself for years and has reached her breaking point. She transforms on live television and takes the plunge. But before she becomes a wet crimson smear on the pavement, a black-clad angel swoops in to save her - Fate Testarossa, with Nanoha Takamachi flying in shortly after.
In response to the news that they aren't the only ones with magic in the world, Magical Girls and their support groups all around Earth come out of the woodwork and close ranks. In so doing, the magic which has kept The Masquerade in place since the fall of the Silver Millennium comes unravelled and The Magic Comes Back. The people of Earth must now come to terms with the extremely magical world they live in; the enemies of Earth must contend with public knowledge of their existence; and the defenders of Earth lock arms against the encroaching darkness.
Battle Fantasia Project (older links: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]) is a Super Robot Wars-style Magical Girl Mega Crossover. Hosted at the SpaceBattles Creative Writing Forum, it is a multi-author collaborative effort. At present the project is still mostly in the planning stages due to one author handling the entire first arc on his own, but numerous snippets of plot have been written by various authors and the thread broke the 100-page mark in just over a week. Feel free to drop by with your two cents.
Chapter One of the First Arc, Unity, was released on October 6th, 2011 on Fanfiction.net. Link.
The project has also created two Spinoffs:
- Lyrical Chronicles: Described by the Author as "The Super Robot Route" of Battle Fantasia. It appears to be working towards a Crisis Crossover with Lyrical Nanoha's Dimensional Sea as its enabler.
- Paved With The Best Intentions: An Alternate Universe sharing the same setting as the main story, but with greater focus on Lyrical Nanoha and Puella Magi Madoka Magica.
Has a wiki, for easy record keeping of ideas.
Not to be confused with either Battle Fantasia or the Magical Girl Real Trailer Fake Game movie clips from which the name is borrowed.
Tropes used in Battle Fantasia Project include:
- Alternate Universe: Strike Witches and Infinite Stratos are here in spirit if not in canon, with their characters and concepts uprooted from their original settings and replaced here in convenient places.
- To elaborate: Strike Witches is more or less directly imported from the alternate 1940s setting it takes place in, with the Neuroi being among the numerous extradimensional invaders harassing Earth and the Striker Units being the military's attempts to subvert Police Are Useless via Magitek. Infinite Stratos, likewise, covers life at a magic academy where Nanoha is one of the top combat instructors, with the IS units being Earth-produced devices reverse-engineered from Belkan and Mid-Childan tech.
- A Tragedy of Impulsiveness: Lindy told them not to charge into uncharted enemy territory. Didn't she Nanoha and Signum? Akiko faced these guys for four years and it results in her attempting to commit suicide? Did you really think you could wipe them out in one hit?
- Broad Strokes: The general concepts of various series such as Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya or Puella Magi Madoka Magica are used, but not the full continuity baggage.
- Car Fu: Akiko resorts to this in a prequel Snip, using a cement truck and a tank of gasoline to kill a monster which is resistant to her magic. Observe.
- Catch Phrase: For the Alliance, "You are not alone". The thread itself also has the unofficial motto "INCUBATOR MUST DIE!!!"
- Combat Pragmatist: Akiko, who missed a power-up due to her familiar's death and has to fight season 3 enemies with season 2 magic. She compensates by use of unorthodox tactics like Car Fu and using her magic rather... creatively.
- Dark Magical Girl: A bunch of them carved their own neutral territory out of the remains of a generic dark kingdom region.
- Deconstruction: Akiko's experience as a magical girl has more in common with Sailor Nothing and Puella Magi Madoka Magica than with Sailor Moon or Pretty Cure due to the fact that she's been fighting alone for seven years, with no support network and no Power of Friendship to back her up.
- Defeat Means Friendship: Deconstructed in the cruelest manner possible by the Nightmare Factory's Mind Rape of Nanoha, who twisted her canon motives around and accused her of simply beating Fate until she was more scared of Nanoha than of Precia.
- Despair Event Horizon: Crossing it was what led Akiko to jump.
- Dream Within a Dream: The method by which the Nightmare Factory trick Signum into basically revealing everything she knows about the Lyrical Nanoha crew.
- Driven to Suicide: Akiko right at the start. She gets better.
- Earth Is the Center of the Universe: Earth is drawing an unusually high amount of Dark Kingdom activity and an equally unusual number of magical girls.
- Enemy Without: The Nightmare Factory makes a point of manufacturing these things as part of their modus operandi, but only one has any real plot significance. Unfortunately, that enemy is Dark Nanoha. Both of them.
- Hannibal Lecture: One of the tools favoured by the Nightmare Factory.
- Heroic BSOD: The Nightmare Factory's primary weapon by way of weaponized High Octane Nightmare Fuel.
- The Factory's success rate with this tactic tends to vary depending on how at peace their target is with themselves. The Senshi and |Team Black Rock, having faced their fears many times before, can Won't Work On Me them and turn the tables on their attackers with no problem. Nanoha on the other hand...
- Immune to Bullets: Double subverted. Small arms can work against mooks, but Monsters Of The Week need tank-killing or anti-structural munitions - a bad idea in Urban Warfare - while top-tier enemies and Eldritch Abominations require magic to hurt them at all.
- Late to the Party: Honoka and Nagisa were busy with diplomacy business on behalf of the Dusk Zone in some of the local sub-dimensions when The Reveal happened. They came home to find the newspapers raving about Akiko and other magical girl sightings.
- Two of the Outer Senshi go to America to help a suspected Magical Girl... Well... Just look at what trope this is listed under.
- Magical Girl: OF COURSE!
- The Magic Comes Back: Not that it ever really left to begin with, it's just not hidden anymore.
- Manipulative Bastard: Kyuubee. Moreso than in the original series, because the existence of the Galaxy Cauldron means that the heat death of the universe is impossible and the Incubators have other purposes in mind for all that energy they're gathering.
- The Masquerade: Deconstructed. Yes, fighting in secret helps to protect your identity and your family from your enemies, but it also hides you from potential allies.
- Mega Crossover: Far too many series to list them all exhaustively, but for a quick sample of some of the core series:
- Multinational Team
- Noodle Incident: Akiko's tenure as a Magical Girl will largely be this. Not because the authors can't come up with anything horrifying enough, but because they can, and they can't dial it back.
- Won't Work On Me: High-level monsters and eldritch abominations can do this to all mundane weapons regardless of how much 'boom' they have due to the mazoku-like quality of having their true forms hidden away in the astral plane, where only magic can reach them and hurt them.
- OC Stand-In: The Black★Rock Shooter cast includes a few characters that weren't in the OVA, with associated real-selves.
- Original Generation: Since the vast majority of all magical girls reside in Japan, a host of original characters (of varying quality) has sprung up to fill out the international community. Few of these characters are involved with the core plot, save for Akiko and the Nightmare Factory.
- Police Are Useless: Played with. Because of the way the project uses the Immune to Bullets trope, police and military are only effective in direct combat against low-ranking mooks. However they can still support the Alliance with training, logistics, transportation, and various other forms of support that the magical girls can't manage on their own.
- Recursive Fanfiction: The Black★Rock Shooter team takes elements (including terminology) from a fanmade Tabletop Game based on the OVA.
- Reverse Cerebus Syndrome: Things start off very dark; suicide and weaponised mindfuck are not things that come up in the usual Magical Girl work. The work will eventually move to less grim pastures.
- In the meantime, several snippets set during the current arc help to balance this out a bit, especially the ones featuring the Kampfers and Pretty Sammy. Turns out that weaponized love and happiness is Super Effective against creatures made of nightmare fuel, and the Kampfers introduce a healthy dose of comedy, especially through Natsuru's "nightmare" of becoming a pregnant housewife at some point in his future.
- Shared Universe
- Stealth Hi Bye: Gamlain's take on Tuxedo Mask is fond of using this trick.
- Talk to the Fist: Deconstructed. Using violence to get Hannibal to Shut Up rather than beating him through reason won't help clear the seeds of doubt he planted. Furthermore, if the Lecturer's main thrust was that you're a trigger-happy belligerent, why, you're not doing yourself any favours, dear Nanoha.
- Also played straight in the case of Strength and the rest of the Black★Rock Shooter girls, though, who've already dealt with most of their issues in advance and can completely Won't Work On Me the Nightmare Factory's attempts to Hannibal Lecture them.
- Tokyo Is the Center of the Universe: Japan has an unusually high number of magical girls.
- Took a Level in Badass: The Senshi are pegged somewhere in between their anime incarnations and their "love and justice-powered eldritch abomination" manga versions, while Tuxedo Mask has been dubbed Batman!Mamoru for his awesome usage of the Stealth Hi Bye. Sammy is also slated to get a power-up from Tsunami to make her powers more suited for fighting evil, while Ayeka and Ryoko have inherited powers vaguely similar to those that their Tenchi Muyo! counterparts possess.
- The Unmasqued World: The premise.
- Weak but Skilled: The Nightmare Factory is no match for high-powered girls like Nanoha and Signum in terms of pure firepower, but they manage to make themselves a threat by using psychological warfare and weaponized High Octane Nightmare Fuel. Akiko herself, having missed quite a few powerups due to her familiar's early passing, has also had to fight in... unorthodox manners.
- World of Badass: It's been observed by some that this version of Earth is basically the TSAB's version of Cadia, having been under siege by demonic and extradimensional forces since at least the fall of the Silver Millennium 10,000+ years ago.
- Wounded Gazelle Gambit: |Strength uses this on one of the Nightmare Factory's minions, pretending to break down and have a Heroic BSOD in the face of a Hannibal Lecture, then turning around and suplexing the minion for a One-Hit Kill when it takes the bait.
- You Are Not Alone: The very core of the whole story.