YMMV / Brutal Orchestra

• Anti-Climax Boss: This Pitiful Corpse is a deliberate example, as it isn't the true final boss, and merely acts as the gateway into Hard Mode. The boss does nothing but damage itself until Nowak either kills it, triggering the bad ending, or the fight is abruptly cut short by Bosch, triggering Hard Mode.
• Awesome Music: While the entire soundtrack is simply amazing, special mention goes to Feel the Rhythm (Music Man Theme). By itself, it's a fun jazz number. But if a Music Man successfully transforms into an instrument, that instrument is added to the song as well.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The entirety of the Bronzo the Boss sequence could be said to be this. Though its bizarreness lessens on subsequent playthroughs.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • Both of the game's final bosses are incredibly punishing and afflict deadly status effects that can eviscerate an unprepared party. Clive, however, can become your vanguard against either of the potential final bosses, and it's oh-so-satisfying to see the final boss's winning strategy suddenly crumple in the face of one party member.
    • Heaven forcing you to choose between heavily afflicting the party member on the center tile or dealing massive damage to all party members? Clive can tank the debuffs and remove them, effectively removing the penalty and keeping your party safe from damage.
    • Osman afflicts Curse upon your party members with each strike? Clive can remove it from himself and remain the party's reliable tank when other party members would be unable to sustain themselves.
  • Burnout's high initial damage output and simple ability costs mean that he tears apart the early game in a manner that other party members simply can't compare to.
  • As difficult as it may be to accomplish, managing to raise Arnold's damage to the point where he can one-shot one of the final bosses is incredibly cathartic to pull off.
• Character Tiers: Very rarely will you have collective agreement on which characters are the best or the worst, though in terms of pure effectiveness in combat, most would agree that the two resident joke characters, Arnold and Mung, are the worst.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • If an In His Image and In Her Image are present at the end of a turn, they merge into a Zeitgeist. They move twice per turn, applying Linked and Curse to all your party members so they all take damage at once without being able to heal it, and spawn tons of Next of Kin to deal even more damage and apply even more Linked to quickly overwhelm your party. While it is possible to prevent their encounter since they only spawn if they can merge, these enemies move positions and switch between these forms every time they're damaged, and can damage each other, making it very difficult to predict how all of them will end up, especially if there are three or four of them.
  • Giggling Ministers are some of the most dangerous enemies in an area already filled with dangerous enemies. They move around a lot due to the Slippery passive, and their attacks range from smacking a spot one to six times to inflicting Rupture on multiple party members to an attack that hits for high damage and destroys the target's item to an instant kill in Mind Games. Sure, Mind Games only has about a 1 in 8 chance to activate, but that still leaves your fate in the hands of RNG. The only saving grace is that they'll flee after four turns... until the Exquisite Corpse update, which added an ability that removes their fleeting passive for the battle, forcing you to deal with them if it's rolled.
  • Choir Boy is this mainly due to its passive ability, Masochism. Every time it receives damage, it gains another ability this turn. This can include applying Divine Protection to a party member to deal high damage to everyone else, or summoning one of Heaven's hands. And since they have Slippery and Skittish, and are capable of damaging themselves as one of their abilities, their movement is incredibly unpredictable. These issues were mitigated by a Nerf that reduced the weight of the Divine Protection ability and added scars to their self damage, but they remain very dangerous.
  • Of all the Music Man variants, the Psaltery has to be the worst of them. Their only ability is Minor Key, a completely unavoidable party-wide debuff move that reduces Max HP. Max HP cannot be gained back during the fight, and while you do get your Max HP set back to its default value if you win the fight, your remaining HP will stay at the value of whatever your reduced Max HP was. For example: If a party member's Max HP is reduced to 8, after the fight that party member will be hobbling into the next battle with 8 measly hit points despite getting their Max HP back. And again, you cannot avoid this. The only way to prevent the Max HP debuff is to kill the Psaltery, but you're very unlikely to do so in the first couple of turns, meaning you will be eating party-wide, unavoidable damage that you cannot heal. A bad encounter with this enemy can and will turn a promising run into a miserable failure.
• Difficulty Spike: While the Orpheum and its bosses are fairly difficult, they pale in comparison to the enemies found in the Garden. Enemies have much higher health and deadlier movesets, there are two mini-boss encounters on par with the Ungod from the prior area, and the two potential final bosses are practically designed to kill at least one of your party members over the course of the encounter.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Trigger Fingers, largely due to the lack of concrete lore around him. Some fans speculated that he was a defector who had a My God, What Have I Done? moment leading to his suicide, or even that he wasn't a Nazi at all (given the lack of a red armband or Swastika on his uniform). Talia has rebuked these claims and repeatedly clarified that he was a Nazi and a Dirty Coward who is only separated from the rest of the souls in Purgatory thanks to his gun, but these theories persist regardless.
• Evil Is Cool: Osman Sinnoks makes his presence immediately known by being the only main story boss with a pre-fight dialogue sequence, where he drops a memorable Pre Ass Kicking One Liner before making good on his threats by revealing that he'll use a One-Hit Kill move on his very first turn. He's imposing, the music is ominous, and he's got two phases. You won't forget, indeed.
• Fetish Retardant: If In His Image and In Her Image are allowed to remain alive, they fuse together into one dangerous enemy known as a Zeitgeist. This amalgamate is an abstract depiction of the two enemies having sex. Needless to say, it isn't pretty.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Clive is widely regarded as one of the most useful party members in the game, mostly due to his Resolve ability. Not only is it a solid healing ability, but at level 2 and above it removes all status effects from Clive. Normally dangerous debuffs like Curse and Scar can be tanked and shrugged off like they're nothing. This makes Clive extremely potent for boss fights that apply these status effects, and Heaven in particular becomes much easier as its two most common attacks are robbed of any danger. On top of this, he has Pressure Point, which is useful for managing excess pigment, Contusion, which is more niche but still has uses, and one of the highest health stats in the game. There's not much Clive can't do.
  • Stolen Gold and Soap are incredibly potent items, especially if obtained in Far Shore. Stolen Gold, while equipped, will double the coin rewards of any battle. The downside is that it applies constricted and scars to the party member using it, but if used well, the potential rewards massively outweigh the danger. Soap, on the other hand, grants 1 coin for every yellow pigment left in the pigment bar at the end of the battle. Unlike Stolen Gold, there's absolutely no downside, and if you play your cards right, you can potentially get 10 extra coins from every battle, more than double what a lot of early game enemies would give. In a game where money is scarce and valuable, having either of these items practically trivializes that resource and gives you more than you'll know what to do with.
  • Lump of Lamb is an item that spawns a level 1 copy of that party member for the current battle. It's an alright item for most characters, but the kicker is that the copied party member will always start battle at full health. This means that if given to a party member who utilizes self damage, such as Kleiver or Leviat, you can use their abilities with absolutely no risk every battle. The copied Kleiver can attack several times in a row, while the copied Leviat can do group damage or group healing, all with no risk since they'll be fully healed by the time you reach the next battle. Gospel gets even more use out of it, since he's always at level 1 anyway. Enjoy free party-wide damage protection and party-wide full heals every battle!
  • Another potent item combo involving Gospel combines him with Czech Hedgehog, forming a strategy dubbed by the community as Czechloop. Czech Hedgehog causes the party member to deal 5 damage to an enemy and 1 damage to nearby allies every time they're hurt. With Icon of Strength, though, that ally damage will be redirected back to him, triggering the item again ad infinitum. With Gospel's massive health bar, this can deal up to 500 damage, enough to trivialize just about any enemy in the game in one fell swoop.
• Genius Bonus: "Bosch's Butt Music", the victory theme, is an existing composition; it's from the sheet music a demon is reading off a sinner's ass in The Garden of Earthly Delights painting.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Wringle and Inner Child have Confusion as passives, obscuring what abilities the enemies will use this turn. They have low enough health that they're easy to kill in one turn, but you're likely to get hurt by other enemies in the process without being able to properly plan around attacks.
  • Spoggles can often be annoying to deal with, but Resonant Spoggle takes the cake due to its purple health. Attacks using purple pigment are very rare, so you'll probably only be able to whittle its high health down with Nowak unless you have another party member that can attack with yellow or purple pigment. And if you do generate some other pigment to attack with, it'll just absorb it.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Of the game's two resident joke characters, Mung suffers greatest by lacking the ability to level up entirely and having two near-useless abilities. With Arnold there were ways to work around his flaws, but Mung has no such work-arounds and he has his own unique unlocks that players are required to get if they want to 100% the game.
• Nausea Fuel:
  • The Music Men's heads are all malignant tumors that grow as a result of listening to too much of the Ungod's music. These tumorous growths make up nearly half of a Music Man's size. and look painfully swollen.
    • Kleiver's Cool Helmet? That's a metal prison designed to keep his tumor from growing any larger. Were it removed, the tumors would rapidly expand, transform, and kill him. It's no wonder he's so obsessed with silencing the Ungod's song.
  • The game has a fascination with parasites. Many of the game's enemies are parasitized corpses, whether its the hyperparasitic Inner Children or the Mung that pilot corpses, or even LongLiver, one of your own party members whose central mechanics are focused on parasitizing enemies and allies alike.
    • The parasites of the Far Shore are particularly vile. While other parasites are small enough that you may not notice them, the Mud Lungs show the heads of Mung protruding from the belly buttons of the corpses they control, with their tails sticking out of the bloody neck stumps.
    • Wringles are arguably worse. Their animations in combat show the parasitic worm travelling continuously through the corpse's belly button up through the neck stump and back to the belly button again.
    • Voboola take this a step further by travelling ass-first into two different corpses and out their neck stumps, forming an infinity symbol with their movements. While some players might not understand quite what they're looking at, an observant viewer will be very squicked out.
• Nightmare Fuel: Some bosses have special animations for a specific attack. While a lot of these are simply good art and animation, Smoothskin's has a younger image of itself being stretched and hurt by (presumably) its Abusive Parents while squealing in pain. "Trauma" is a fitting title.
• One-Scene Wonder: Zanguango only speaks in one scene of the game and makes quite the presence with that short period of time.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Decay is a mechanic in which an enemy, upon death, has a chance of decomposing into another enemy. For Mud Lungs and Mungling Mud Lungs, they have a chance of decaying into Mung, for Maniskins they have a chance of decaying into Inner Children, etc. The problem is that almost all of these enemies are either nigh powerless or are only situationally dangerous in group encounters. Once that's taken away, all that's left is wasting time whittling down the remaining, near harmless decayed enemies instead of progressing the run.
  • Panic Attack is Arnold's central mechanic, and makes an already mediocre character infinitely worse by taking his one major upside, that being his escalating damage and healing, and completely negates it whenever he takes any kind of damage. While it's still possible to work around this mechanic, it means that his capacity to work well in long-term encounters is only theoretical.
• Scrappy Weapon:
  • Used Needle is an item that is always free in shops and, befitting its cost, is almost always detrimental to runs. It deals one damage to the opposing enemy whenever the party member equipping the item uses an ability, which isn't very much. In any other game, it would be a mediocre slot-filler. However, because of Brutal Orchestra's pigment mechanics, using this item means you're getting twice as much pigment with every attack. Due to the sparse number of pigment reduction party members, this is often incredibly dangerous for players without a full party to deal with. Even with a full party, there are other items that have the same drawbacks but with much stronger positives (RAM! and Broken Hammer being the two most directly comparable). It has its niche uses if pigment is a must, but it's a shoddy pick in most cases.
  • Sculptor's Tools give the party member equipping it a 25% damage increase. The downside? It turns the target's health bar grey. This item has its uses, of course, but the pithy damage bonus doesn't make up for rendering an enemy dry of any potential pigment gain.
• Tear Jerker: The end of Ichor's quest. After finally reaching the Garden, Nowak is horrified to find that Ichor was attacked by a resident there, and begs him to join the party. Ichor turns him down, saying that even if he is being lied to by the "angel" that wounded him, he is happy. The next time Nowak comes across him, Ichor is missing half of his head, but is still barely clutching onto life, depressed that he never got to become the moon so he can be a comforting sight for anyone who looks upon him. He then says he is tired, but wants to come with Nowak. Nowak, Trying Not to Cry, says yes, and that Ichor should get some rest first. Ichor then dies. At the very least, it's implied that he became the moon.
• That One Achievement:
  • "God of Phalanges, Palms and Pain" requires the player to finish off every boss with a slap. Slaps only deal one damage, requiring getting their health down to exactly one (and without any shield) to cross them off the list. Smoothskin is particularly difficult for this achievement, since he frequently damages himself and creates shield, making it tricky to whittle his health down exactly right with a turn to spare for a slap. Items and abilities that inflict scars can make this easier, making him take more damage from all attacks, but you still have to ensure he doesn't kill himself in the process.
  • "Total and Absolute Mastery" requires the player to achieve a five run win streak. Considering the high difficulty of the game, especially once you reach the Garden and the final bosses, this achievement has quite low completion rates on Steam.
  • Though newer achievements, "Left Shoe" and "Wels Catfish" require that both final bosses be beaten with Mung. Both final bosses are quite difficult, and they're considerably moreso when you're forced to waste a party slot on a total deadweight and keep it alive for the entire fight. Better hope you get a team composition that's strong enough to pick up the slack.
• That One Attack: Any of the game's One-Hit Kill moves could apply here, but special mention goes to Osman Sinnoks' Mortal Horizon. While instant death moves are normally a rather sour experience, Mortal Horizon takes it a step further by having it trigger every turn. If that weren't bad enough, Osman's second phase splits him into two separate entities. Both use Mortal Horizon at the end of their turns.
• That One Boss:
  • Osman Sinnoks is ruthlessly efficient at killing party members, not only having the chance to afflict curse with each of his standard attacks, but also using a One-Hit Kill at the end of every turn. His movements are more predictable than other bosses, but even that can be thrown into disarray if he happens to use Concentration. God help you if he uses it twice. If you think that isn't bad enough, in the second phase, you get to fight two of him! Exact same health, attacks, etc. He just gets to do twice as many of them, including his One-Hit Kill. Have fun!
  • Charcarrion can be a considered a less lethal version of the above Final Boss, but in comparison to the other "regular" bosses, he is quite difficult. Charcarrion moves after most of his attacks and deals quite a bit of damage with them. If a party member is in the two spaces in front of him, they are given a scar, and are dealt an extra bit of damage for each scar. Building up too many scars will run the risk of his rarer, but party-wide damage attack. Oh, and he also comes back with less max HP when you kill him.
• That One Sidequest:
  • Bronzo's 2 Cents requires that, over the course of multiple runs, Bronzo be given a collective donation of four-hundred and seventy-seven coins. Considering how often you'll need coins in your own runs, this sidequest may take quite a long time to complete.
  • Mordrake's Untold Tale requires 100% Completion of the game, which is self-explanatory.
• Underused Game Mechanic: Oil Slicked is a status effect that, thus far, is used almost exclusively by enemies. The only party member capable of using Oil Slicked at all is Dimitri, and its primarily used to supplement his fire abilities. Considering how well Oil Slicked synergizes with status effects such as Ruptured, it can be frustrating to have so few party combinations that can take advantage of that synergy.

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