Get used to getting Jump Scared by abominations like these.
Well, what else to expect from a game with "Nightmares" in the title itself?All 3 games
- Nightmares. Picture the FOEs from Etrian Odyssey, but up to eleven:
- First, they aren't always in the dungeon. Instead, they'll randomly step in and make their presence known with a Jump Scare of the Nightmare's face.
- Most of them have some fittingly-creepy designs, like the Keeper from the Graveyard who has a big mouth with More Teeth than the Osmond Family on its chest.
- Despite much of the game being turn-based, Nightmares will chase you in real time. You have to put enough distance between yourself and the Nightmare to get it off your trail.
- While a Nightmare is present, you can't use Alice's Rabbit Hole to escape, trigger Scripted Events, or open up the menu. The map will disappear on Normal or higher, and the surrounding area darkens. Attempting to move to another floor without incapacitating the Nightmare first, or already being nearly far enough, will just cause a momentary display error on the distance before the Nightmare joins you somewhere on the new floor.
- If by chance you trigger a random battle while the Nightmare is chasing you, a Booked Battle begins. One, there are two powerful Grimbook enemies who will accompany the enemies you're already fighting. Second, the Nightmare will still continue to follow you, again in real time. If it catches up, it will attack you from off-screen.
- When fighting a Nightmare proper, it will advance up the turn queue in real time (yet again). Meaning that if you take your sweet time inputting battle commands, it can and will beat everyone dead every other turn.
- Because the Nightmares randomly appear, it is possible for the Nightmare to show up while you're in a dead-end passage. And depending on how underleveled your party is, it is possible to end up in an Unwinnable by Design situation, all because the Random Number God felt like being an asshole today.
- Nightmares are impossible to kill until you destroy their dungeon's core. Until then, the best you can do is temporarily incapacitate it and make a run for it.
- Marchens will gush blood all over the place when hit with a weakness, with a Bleed skill, or when they are overkilled. All over the surrounding dungeon region and onto the Blood Maidens too, and in both cases they're part of important game mechanics.
- If a Blood Maiden absorbs enough Marchen blood, she will go into Massacre mode, in which her abilities are heightened and she takes on a Slasher Smile with whitened hair and pink glowing eyes. And the Blood Maidens' voice clips indicate that this transformation is painful. And this is the less dangerous outcome of a full Blood Splatter gauge, because at least a Blood Maiden in Massacre status remains in control of herself. What can happen instead, particularly if the Blood Maiden has been corrupted by enemy attacks? She will instead go into Blood Skelter mode, going straight up Ax-Crazy and doing horrifying amounts of damage to random targets, including allies! Oh, and this was permanent until Jack came along.
- The traps in the series often run in real-time, and some traps appear to be harmless decoration until activated, so a player who is used to the idea of Dungeon Crawler games being turn-based may stroll through a seemingly quiet dungeon and not notice that a particular object is a trap until they idle next to or on top of it (for example, the headless skeletons that are triggered by passing by them) and fall back over on their chairs as the screen flashes red and the entire party takes damage with minimal warning.
Mary Skelter: Nightmares
- Alice passes her time in her cell at the start of the game by licking blood off the walls. And she has such a casual attitude about it, implying she's been doing this regularly for some time before the start of the game.
- How does Jack prevent Blood Skelter, or kick a Blood Maiden out of it? He shoots his own blood at them, using a gun that's hooked right into his bloodstream. And just to show that the bright pink Marchen blood isn't censorship: his own blood is natural human red color. And of course the predictable happens if he uses his own blood too much: unless he uses the Create Blood skill to refill his own blood, using the anti-Skelter skills has a chance to knock him out, with the probability increasing the less blood he has.
Mary Skelter 2
- Nightmare Jack's creation. Bleeding to death from the combined wounds of Alice's Blood Skelter attack and the fall into the Underground Caverns, all Jack can do is lament that he wasn't stronger and repeating a broken "Alice. Protect." before dying. Then the Jail decides to grant him that power and chance, reanimating him as a Nightmare by having blood red vines rupture out from his body, growing faster than Otsuu and Little Mermaid can remove, then what's still visible of his body begins violently bloating up and no longer resembles anything human. Once the process stops, the vines turn to a more natural green and clear away from his body slightly and Nightmare Jack appears to turn on the girls, stopped only by the psychic link that ends up forming between him and Otsuu.
Mary Skelter Finale
- The flying Jail, the Devouring Armada Tower. Easily four to five times, if not more, the height of the skyscrapers below this Jail easily makes the Jails of the previous games look small. While it has the eyes one would have come to expect, this Jail also has multiple mouths and what appear to be a pair of massive arms held crossed against itself and countless tentacles reaching down to the buildings below.
- The master of the Massacre Pink, Yuuto Gatou himself. 20 years ago, before the Jail fell into Earth, he was just a normal boy with a happy family with his mother expecting a baby sister. But that all changed when the Jail killed his father and turned his mother into a Marchen, before she died, giving birth to Guillotine while his brother ran away, leaving him alone. While this would normally be considered Tear Jerker territory due to his Dark and Troubled Past, his hatred for the Massacre Pink took over his mind to the point that he would do ''anything'' to eliminate all of them, especially kidnapping Rachel and experimenting on her, forcing her into a Massacre Pink herself under the name of Pyre, and even forcing the other Executioner Girls into Gore Suits that he made, powered by human blood. Yet, he saw them as nothing more than tools to kill, and did not care for them in the slightest, not even his own sister. When they fail to kill the Blood Team one too many times, he forces them into the walls of the Devouring Armada Tower in order to turn them into a Nightmare specifically to hunt Pyre down, and when even that fails because of Mary's match creating an illusion of Pyre dying, and Jack revealing him to be the monster he is thanks to the Witchcraft Core fragment protecting him, it reveals that every time he tried to kill Alice, Charlotte went berserk and used Mary's Blood Ability on a Witchcraft Core to reset the timeline, which truly drove him off the edge. Once the Blood Team reach the top, it's revealed that he made a stronger Gore Suit for himself, and his end goal is to drop the moon on Earth to destroy it, as the last pieces of the Massacre Pink Nightmare, specifically Guillotine, begs her brother to save her, he kills her for it, cursing her existence. This is a scary case of From Nobody to Nightmare, as he had no one to pull him out of darkness, he no longer cared for even his own family, or other humans regardless of their stance on the Marchens.
