YMMV / Chippy

• Alternative Character Interpretation: The vagueness of the official campaigns' plots, along with Kraken, Hermit, and two Quartet bosses not typically feeling up to fighting the Player Character, has put the morality of the protagonist and any who command them into question, particularly in the Crusade campaign, where pixel creatures are to be killed even without a prominent threat for them to comprise.
  • Is the Execution cult a truly malevolent group? Or are the non-Nightmare versions' offscreen walks of life as harmless as any actual major religion?
  • What is Monarch typically like outside a fight? There's surprisingly little direction its characterization goes.
  • Is Xulgon outstandingly evil in his conquest ambitions, or is he a normal (albeit prideful) ruler looking out for the prosperity of his brethren?
  • If the blue-eyed Quartet boss is right about being Wrongfully Committed, the menu description text would be from a Unreliable Expositor as a result. Is it possible that not all of the bosses in that stage are "lunatics"?
• Anti-Climax Boss: As the Invasion campaign's Final Boss, Xulgon is somewhat underwhelming. Taking out his only form is a more streamlined process than many bosses before him, his minion waves aren't dangerous unless you confront them, each wave spawns a new Shield container if one isn't already present, the stage has no time bombs, and the Convert item his middle gun drops is an easy way to boost Damage.
  • Nightmare Xulgon has these same drawbacks as well. Furthermore, his green-eyed minions are the only ones to be a lot more dangerous in Nightmare mode, and his borrowed attack timers can easily be abused to keep him from firing his most worrisome Homing Projectiles.
• Awesome Ego: Above said, Xulgon is quite the juggernaut of an Evil Overlord who expels Bullet Hell like few others, making it fitting and endearing for him to go by a plethora of titles, e.g. "feared by the wise".
• Bragging Rights Option: The majority of the Ball Pit's Epic-rarity powerups aren't worth the price of twenty-five dollars^note At the end of each round, the winner earns $10 and the loser earns $5. Choosing a Common, Uncommon, and Rare item costs $2, $4, and $7, respectively., and they're only useful for a player to play in an unorthodox method and/or show off their upper hand.
• Breather Boss: The Nightmare versions of Overgrowth and Hermit are considerably easier than other bosses of their difficulty; players fighting the former can gain a damage boost with the Convert item and move around enough to evade spinning walls, and the latter boss's first form can give a decent abundance of Shields.
• Crazy Is Cool: The pink-eyed Quartet boss's self-absorbedness (unfounded as it may be) and the green-eyed boss and Storm's sprightly Blood Knight dispositions make the bosses all the more engaging to battle with.
• Demonic Spiders: In the Nightmare Invasion campaign, Xulgon's green-eyed minions fire immensely denser spread shots, making them stronger than even other Nightmare mode minions. Even just one greatly adds to the peril brought by the respective boss.
• Fridge Brilliance:
  • The player two Chippy is green, and it can only be played as with a controller... such as one for the Xbox series, which has green as its main color.
  • Cases of Adaptational Nice Guy and Adaptational Villainy applying to certain bosses in Easy and Nightmare Mode respectively adhere to generalizations of different styles of gameplay: games best played casually or while relaxed stereotypically have more lighthearted aesthetics, while one possible "hardcore view" of content is that Moral Guardians' hampering of presentation correlates with lessened gameplay quality.
  • The Size Up and Speed Up pickups in the Ball Pit affect balls allied with the bearer. Their presence is displayed at the bearer's ball-shaped eye: the eye is slightly larger if the bearer has any Size Up pickups, and a cross is displayed with the eye at the center if the bearer has any Speed Up pickups.
  • The "miscellaneous" powerups lumped into a shared magenta-violet color are united by their aid in players' offense:
    • Convert absorbs bullets to give Damage pickups.
    • Spawner makes you spawn bullets in the direction you're facing.
    • Fast Forward^note at least in Credits and future fanmade time-attack stages temporarily speeds up the arena's time flow, allowing the stage to be beaten in less raw time.
    • Factory spawns Cannon items and sometimes other offense powerups.
    • Laser Sight aids the player's aim and does a small amount of damage over time.
• Fridge Horror:
  • Overgrowth is a scientific experiment turned Alien Kudzu whose plant parts are conscious... and might be scientists absorbed into the mass and compelled to make more units into itself.
  • Storm, upon manifesting a new form after a previous one is destroyed, can exclaim surprise that it's not dead. How powerful is it, that it has fought and struck down many without having to use its later forms and such resultingly being unfamiliar to it?
• Game-Breaker:
  • Since the redux update, it is possible to use the Convert item to absorb an incoming line of bullets and gain an immense boost to damage.
  • The Slice item allows one to create a line of fuse-like pixels. This attack and what it creates penetrate otherwise invulnerable pixels, greatly easing up the need to figure out how to cut armor away. The pixels it transforms also deal massive damage to any parts they're right next to.
  • The Blink item teleports you a short distance, but it can greatly speed up assaults on bosses, because of both its mobility benefits (like Dash) and allowing you to directly bypass obstacles (like Fade).
• Goddamned Bats: Each one of Wireframe's drone minions packs only slightly more firepower than the average official game minion. If you leave too many alive, however, the arena will get cluttered with numerous bullet lines, as well as the drones' wing pixels; such makes the boss almost impossible to attack quickly.
• Goddamned Boss:
  • Each form of Skylier is a solid cloud of pixels that has no empty space within to ease up attack on it, and its curved walls of bullets and dense storms of lingering lightning bolts drag out the fight against it.
  • Volcanion has especially slow and obstructive attacks, its heat constantly makes you move slower than usual, and its forms have little substantial strategy needed for attacking them, being a round Rock Monster with no invulnerable pixels.
  • Singularity's first two forms aren't too bad to deal with, but its third and final one is a symmetrical, slowly-chasing behemoth that is tedious to maneuver around, attack, and avoid being cornered by.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The noises a boss makes to signal the impending defeat of its current form, and the added percussion while its central core is under attack.
• Scrappy Weapon: The Redux update added two new attack items, with the intent of diversifying special tools to fight bosses with. However, these properties come at the cost of raw functionality:
  • Barrage sends out a sequence of bullets that deal more damage near their maximum range. Aside from the difficulty of aligning all shots in the optimal direction, the slowed time brought during the attack means that using the item shaves much less time off a time-trial run.
  • Broadside is even more finicky and less rewarding: a spread of three bullets on alternating sides of your ship. Its cuts on pixels aren't well-concentrated, and the fairly low damage to parts is further offset by the fact that, to fire them at one side, you have to either waste time rotating your ship^note time you can spend rapid-firing your main gun directly at the boss, or clip inside the boss's core, with the latter under niche circumstances.
• That One Attack:
  • The bullets spawned all over the arena that fly in all directions in the beginning of Phobia's third form require more focus and reflexes to dodge than any of the boss's other attacks. This attack even counts in Nightmare Phobia's fight.
  • Monarch's second form's core can fire a tight, swift spiral of projectiles, and this trope comes into play when the last ones start off moving a great distance extremely fast.
  • The topmost gun in Storm's third form can repeatedly fire bullets that start off moving very fast, rendering it practically impossible to safely shoot the gun down.
  • Both Storm and Nightmare Guardian can fire an orb that shoots lightning at you while moving to you repeatedly, as well as a kite-shaped projectile that fires a stream of small yet numerous bullets at you.
  • Nightmare Neophyte forces its secret curse on you (with no powerup) after its third form spawns, causing bullets to appear and fly at you from all directions.
  • Nightmare Guardian's cursed Damage powerups each spawn a projectile that alternates between shooting a bullet... and moving towards you, and with other attacks for you to focus on, they are extremely prone to simply ramming you. Oh, and getting hit by one and defeating Guardian's first form won't remove it, and each will only vanish a fixed amount of time after they spawn.
  • Shortly after the Nightmare Execution boss starts attacking you on its own, small bullets flying from below in one direction combine with numerous volleys^note Specifically, an attack that's borrowed from Xulgon and originally intended to be from a core that is farther away from you from the boss to turn the fight from "very difficult" to "ridiculously brutal".
  • A curse from Nightmare Overgrowth and the spawning of Nightmare Storm's second form herald three Homing Projectiles that swiftly fly around, bounce off each other, and slightly track your movement direction.
  • The Unrealistic Black Hole fired by Nightmare Storm and Nightmare Xulgon has stronger suction than usual and moves towards the player.
  • Timebrain and the green-eyed Quartet boss can summon short-holed walls travelling one way around it and a laser beam chasing you in the opposite direction of rotation. With previously used attacks around you, this becomes very dangerous.
  • Forge can repeatedly fire long slow-moving lines (borrowed from Phobia) directly at you. They become very obstructive quickly and cannot be affected by Convert or any defensive items.
  • Volcanion's second form can restrict your movement into a small angle and fire three-parallel bullets into it. The latter isn't especially dangerous, but the former aspect of the attack may temporarily prevent you from attacking the boss.
• That One Boss:
  • Goliath uses a variety of dangerous moves at once, and the ones in its second form include spawning lingering trails of projectiles, shooting out orbs that persistently chase you and block your gunfire, making spinning bars appear all over the arena, and causing sawblades to fly at you from seemingly all directions. Furthermore, an attack where it spawns lines of bullets with toggling circles throughout the openings appears whenever enough of this thing's second form loses enough guns (whereas prior to the redux, it only appears if the second form is around for too long).
  • Nightmare Medusa is a particularly harsh introduction to the Invasion campaign's hardest difficulty. It sends giant versions of Neophyte's bullet walls through the arena, shoots Overgrowth's dense kite bullet spreads, pesters you with Xulgon's giant homing projectiles and Overgrowth's tether & bullet layer, and can hit you repeatedly with hails of petrifying and diamond bullets. To make matters much worse, its pink Gem Tissue is nigh-indestructible, making removing its latter two forms' guns a timelier and more complicated task.
  • Nightmare Goliath jacks its normal counterpart's difficulty up to eleven. Both its Recursive Ammo and its fragmentation projectiles home in on you, it shoots dense spirals of Overgrowth's fast-moving bullets, its second form's core's bullets move substantially faster, and said form is scripted to use its toggling circle and bullet line attack twice.
  • Nightmare Storm is also a step up even by its difficulty's standards. Aside from its new homing attacks and more dangerous bullet-spawning projectiles, its one-direction bullet rains move very fast, knockback bullets are more powerful and appear in bigger numbers, and its new attacks make quick strategies of defeating its earlier forms much more difficult.
  • Crossfire's fourth and last unique miniboss is quite the handful. Its rotatable main form's pixels, smaller units' shielding, and smaller units' pixels easily block your way to its core. It's all to easy for the 30th wave's time to expire and the standard wave bullets to resultingly appear alongside the boss's pixels, Launcher Moves, and target-leading projectiles.
  • Out of the bosses WestieNZ modded to have extra regenerative abilities, the last one, Xulgon, is made substantially more formidable. As long as any of his minions are active, his body will regenerate way too fast for you to defeat him. This renders destroying all appearing minions essential^note however, the minions cannot go below the screen, so unless you wipe out all minion waves perfectly in time, this mechanic will subject you to many, many more of Xulgon's complex barrages.
• Underused Game Mechanic: Out of the game's unique menagerie of powerups, a few could have been used better in the official game:
  • There's surprisingly little appearance of friendly-fire items (Drone and Airburst) in the normal-difficulty official campaigns. The former is only found in Anomaly's and Phobia's fights (and summons are hard to use against highly mobile bosses), and the latter is only dropped by the rare appearance of Xulgon's minions while fighting Medusa's third form.
  • Since the redux update, the Dash item isn't very useful for travelling great distances in less raw stage time, and it's only sometimes useful for dodging or outrunning (thanks to the Time Dissonance it provides) enemy attacks. Worse yet, outside official Easy difficulty, it can't be used while you're invulnerable.
  • The Laser Sight pickup is quite interesting for a powerup only fired by the boss of the Credits stage, being both a "fragile" pickup lost when the player is hit and the only powerup besides Slowmo whose main purpose is to mitigate the effects of human coordination's limits.
  • Carve, a version of Slice that creates fuse pixels in a ring instead of a line, also could have seen some more viable use.
  • A single Bumper can be used as cover from bullets flying from one direction, but its intended uses are to push the player forward and act as a repelling orb that moves away bullets that touch it. Besides, while it's a defensive powerup in the redux, it was classified as miscellaneous prior, because it wasn't intended to be viable for skilled players.

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