YMMV / Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass

• Awesome Music: Kasey really outdid himself on the soundtrack in this game. Every track is wonderful, but here are some notable ones.
  • A Cocoon Throbbing In A Dead Man's Mouth, the boss theme for "scary" fights, is scarily oppressive, and gets the blood pumping for the game's tougher battles. The 8 bit version is pretty good as well.
  • Righteous Scrabble is the boss theme for more "standard" fights, and while not nearly as common as A Cocoon, it's cheerful and serious nonetheless. The 8 bit version deserves mention too.
  • Gut Punch plays for fights against Buck, and is by far the most intense track in the game, with a kickass guitar line, and even bits from other songs in the game like Let's Color Today and Adventuring For Beginners.
  • The Noble Sea evokes the feeling of drifting into a dream as Jimmy imagines his new transformation. It also plays when you've completed a Nightmare Zone, giving a cathartic feeling of relief after you've bested its horrors.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • The third version of Hug Monkey in Jonathon Bear's Playtime Forest can not only grasp a party member to prevent them from moving, but does ridiculous damage with every squeeze. And it's always accompanied by at least two other enemies.
  • Fifth Street Creepers in the World's Library have the ability to instantly kill a party member, something very few enemies share. While they're not especially impressive statwise, this alone makes them a brutal opponent. Unlucky Nekos exaggerate this behavior — their only action in battle is either to "watch you" or insta-kill a party member, and they take a lot of damage before they go down.
• Disappointing Last Level: The Pulsating Mass itself — while it has some interesting new enemies and a Nightmare Fuel atmosphere, the dungeon itself is just a retread of an area you've already been through only a few hours ago, which is a bit of a letdown when you consider every other area up to this point has been unique.
• Disc-One Nuke: The Bee Stinger weapon can be found as early as your second visit to the Buddy Bee Hive, and it makes the early game much easier if Buck's agility is raised high enough. The stats are reasonable on its own, but the weapon really stands out due to its 25% chance to startle an enemy on a normal attack. Since Buck has a passive 25% chance to attack twice, 50% with his Mixtape trinket which can be obtained shortly after Legato, it becomes trivially easy to crank out stuns as soon as the enemy is no longer alert, giving you much needed breathing room to heal.
• Friendly Fandoms: Fans of this game tend to also be fans of the more popular OMORI, due to both being EarthBound-inspired indie RPGs with a cutesy exterior hiding nightmarish imagery and concepts.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Several flying enemies, especially those in Grimclaw's dungeon, can take to the skies and evade all physical attacks, forcing you to pull out a source of magic damage to kill them.
  • Lucky Nekos either counter physical attacks or reflect magic attacks, so it's hard to damage them without taking some damage in return. Take too long and they flee the battle.
• Memetic Badass: Punch Tanaka seems to be one, given his article on the fan wiki for this game.
• Moment of Awesome: Any time you clear a Nightmare Zone. Not only do you overcome the specific fear the dungeon represents, but you’re given a few chests and the game plays the calming theme that plays whenever Jimmy gains a new form. A nice temporary relief.
• Nightmare Retardant:
  • The track that plays in the Asymmetrical Cavern, Counting Backwards from Infinity, is a disorienting track, with numerous voices shouting numbers at you without much of a sense of rhythm at all. It loses some of its scare factor when you can pick out the voice shouting "pickle!"
  • Normally, the Severed hand enemies in the Pulsating Mass are just as nightmarish as anything else in the dungeon, but their sprites can easily be misinterpreted as wearing a miniature Santa hat on their wrists.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: Organic Nightmare, the Final Boss theme, sounds similar to Some Rudiments Of Propriety from OFF, not due to their melody, but due to the sound effects and instruments used, with both songs combining distorted synths with sounds of squishy liquid flowing and a person breathing through a gas mask.
• That One Attack:
  • Imaginary Numbers's Program Omega is pretty much guaranteed to one-shot anyone but Lars at the level you can first fight it, and has no attack windup or cooldown, so nothing prevents it from using it multiple times unless it decides to glitch out.
  • Grimclaw's Death Breath, while having an attack windup, is still ridiculously damaging if you let it land, and pretty much requires you to bring a fast party member with access to a stun move. Thankfully, Grimclaw's not too tough otherwise.
  • Mr. Grouse choosing to "invest in the future" gives a significant increase to his Interest counter, which governs his strength. Also, his computer gives a percentile increase to the Interest every turn, while each attack you make on it deducts a static value from it. This means that if he invests in the future enough times in quick succession, his Interest will grow faster than you can keep it in check and he'll snowball out of control.
  • GAMM-E's Rockets deal huge damage, to the point of likely being an instant kill, and have no windup, instead requiring the boss to reload their rockets.
  • The Golden King's 'absorb darkness' move, particularly in the rematch where it can heal about 9000 HP, and next turn attack your whole party with the strongest attack it has. Better hope the boss doesn't use this twice in a row. Making this more notable is that his other attacks are not too bad — but this one attack is likely to drag out the fight.
• That One Boss: This game is considerably hard for an RPG and could make the bosses over at Atlus blush. While most of the bosses are pretty tough, there are a few that stand out.
  • The boss at the end of the third continent, Jonathon Bear, can be quite the almighty roadblock. He's not too bad at first — he doesn't hit too hard and gives attack warnings for his more threatening attacks like his rampage. The most annoying thing is that he can grab a party member in his mouth and chew on them, but it can be removed via Startled. However, when he gets low on health, he starts to use his rampage and mass-disease claws without any attack warnings, and causes a hugely damaging tremor with his attack warning as well. While this is signaled by him staggering backwards and screeching, it doesn't take up his action for the turn, giving your party little time to prepare. It's not uncommon to be doing very well up until the final phase, where the boss proceeds to wreck the party. It doesn't help that with Jonathon gone, you only have three party members, limiting your options. Thankfully, there are some tricks you can use, like buying Super Balls from Rubik and stealing Jonathon's stitching to cause a pretty big chunk of damage, but they only make the fight marginally easier. It doesn't help that the level leading up to him is crawling with Demonic Spiders that makes it difficult to get to him with a fully fresh party unless you grind enough (or use Clean Getaway) to skip all the encounters.
  • In terms of optional bosses, if you challenge him as soon as he's available, Turnbuckle is a force to be reckoned with. His gimmick is that he summons presents every turn, which have very damaging effects when they open up — specifically, bombs that cause damage to everyone (though thankfully, they hit the opposing side too), a retractable boxing glove that deals huge damage to a single foe, spirits that make everyone afraid, or noxious gas that causes Sick and Immunodeficiency to the entire party. Turnbuckle replaces presents almost as soon as they're gone, which doesn't help. If you picked up Jonathon's Immunize manual from Ebeezil, this can help neuter the presents, but not always. Turnbuckle himself is no slouch either, having the ability to mass-stun your party, as well as use counters and magic barriers.
  • Imaginary Numbers is essentially a Luck-Based Mission. The boss comes with a static 30% chance to reflect any magic attack and evade or counter physical attacks — and yes, those last two can trigger at the same time. However, that's not what makes it especially tough. Its has 6 different sets of attacks, each one more punishing from the last. As turns go by, it cycles through them — unless it uses the "Glitch Out" skill, which hurts itself and resets the attack pattern to the first, easiest one. The problem is, its 6th skillset has Program Omega, which is pretty much guaranteed to massacre your entire party. And nothing prevents it from using it twice in a row, either, or if you're especially unlucky, three times. You have to pretty much hope it glitches out and resets itself, because there's very little you can do to stop it otherwise. You know it's bad when the game developer himself outright suggests that you go back and one-shot it when you're at higher levels.
  • While he is essentially the Final Boss, Buck's second boss fight is a huge Difficulty Spike compared to any of the bosses listed here, especially since his first battle was relatively tame. This is a Final-Exam Boss that combines all of the gimmicks from the previous Pulsating Mass bosses — he has the Mutt's miasma to drain your health, Chancellor Pulsating Mass's ability to use specific attacks based on what form you have equipped, and four of Principal Pulsating Mass's Brain Bats — which have their AI reconfigured to be as infuriating as possible; the bats that prevent physical damage and reflect magic now use their skills exclusively on the weakpoint-granting bat, while the other Brain Bat keeps the boss from being Startled.

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