YMMV / Limbus Company

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Just how accurate is Gregor considering his memories about the former G Corp.? While most of them are likely true, according to Faust, it might not be exactly accurate given his memories were resonating with the Golden Bough and he's a Shell-Shocked Veteran of the Smoke War. Some of his testimonies also rings major alarms, such as an insect monster towering over a skyscraper, which will run into issues with the Head's weapon regulations. They undeniably did deploy these giant insectoid monsters, but they're likely not on the level Gregor described.
  • Kromer's slaughter of Sinclair's family. Considering that Sinclair was instantly turned off when his family replaced their flesh with prosthetics, did she genuinely consider the massacre in Sinclair's house as repaying his favor? Note that she did spare Sinclair from the massacre and didn't try to kill him until the final confrontation when she's about to run with the Golden Bough in Nest K (at which the Sinners are essentially obstructing a Wing from doing its job so she had to fight back).
  • How much of Hong Lu's Innocently Insensitive Sheltered Aristocrat nature is genuine, and how much of it is Obfuscating Stupidity? Chapter 3 has him lie unprompted to Saude about Effie's condition while everyone else was at a loss for words, and his comment to Heathcliff about the origin of potatoes in Chapter 3.5 could be read as him intentionally trying to annoy him.
  • This fan comic proposes that the Faust of the N-Corp Mirror World is the "true" One Who Grips, and Kromer had been imitating her this whole time after mistaking her for her own future self. There's certainly merit to this, since imitation is a major theme of Canto III, Kromer's word shouldn't exactly be taken at face value, and she also staggers from the get-go if The One Who Shall Grip Sinclair is in battle, given how that Sinclair is taken from the same Mirror World the Faust equivalent of The One Who Grips comes from. However, the game itself doesn't mention whether Kromer saw into the Mirror Worlds before or after she became the One Who Grips, leaving it ambiguous as to whether she was already like that from the start or became her current self after looking into the Mirror.
• Americans Hate Tingle: Or, rather, English Speakers Don't Care For Yi Sang. The main reason he isn't quite as popular with the Western fanbase is that his main quirk of makings loads of puns using his own name does not translate into English whatsoever. The Japanese translation, by comparison, fares somewhat better in this regard since it can at least somewhat replicate the gimmick. This seems to have improved with Hell's Chicken and especially Canto IV, not only giving him some well-needed character development, but also showing off more of his obsessive compulsive tendencies such as his strange endearment to a burnt yam or helping Don Quixote beat Sinclair at chess solely because he doesn't like where she puts the pieces.
• Anvilicious:
  • Project Moon's works have always had anti-capitalism undertones, but K-Corp literally profiting off of the suffering of others and creating their product out of the tears of their Singularity is about as subtle as a jackhammer.
  • Meanwhile, T Corp. literally drains the color from the general populace in some twisted relation to it's time-based Singularity, and forces its feathers to use time as a currency. You can get your colors back... for a ludicrously high price.
• Awesome Bosses: The Dual Boss against Erlking Heathcliff and Every Catherine sets a new standard for Canto final bosses going forward. On top of the sheer visual spectacle of the battle compared to prior ones, neither Heathcliff nor Catherine possess any difficult-to-understand mechanics, "instant loss" skills, or guaranteed damage to the extent perfect play is demanded to survive, making for a challenging, but still incredibly fair battle. "Through Patches of Violet" is also one of Mili's best tracks for the game yet, cementing this fight as one of Limbus Company's most memorable.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Vergilius has slowly worked his way into this position, starting out as the very competent looking individual he was in Selva Oscura, his lack of action since then has many fans turn on him, not helped by the lack of good will on his part. In Canto V, the response to the Sinner's very reasonable concern and need of help is brushed aside, and the rescue from the Middle by the Indigo Elder is not acknowledged by Vergilius. The implication that Vergilius needs the Sinners for something but doing nothing to actually help outside of the occasionally off-screen physical reprimands makes him look less as an All-Powerful Bystander and more as someone who is only around to be a bully towards Dante and the others. As a result, he's occasionally referred to as "The Red Fraud". It's practically acknowledged by the devs themselves, as the intro of Canto VI had him clarifying that his contract with Limbus Company outright forbids him from getting involved and helping the Sinners, followed by him actually intervening later in the chapter.
    • It also does not help that the bulk of his lore, which is in Leviathan, is more difficult to access for westerners, needing an account on Postype since it is locked behind an 18+ warning, causing many newcomers who have gone to Limbus without reading Leviathan first possibly getting a very biased view of Vergilius.
• Breather Boss:
  • Among the two bosses exclusive to the Mirror of the Beginning and Thread Luxcavation, while Headless Ichthys is commonly considered That One Boss, the Alleyway Watchdog has the complete opposite reputation. Sure, its attacks are strong and will only build in strength if it's left unchecked, but it also has multiple glaring damage vulnerabilities, and its stagger thresholds are so high that it's fairly easy to stagger it in one turn - since most of its attacks are tied to its body, staggering it will often render it completely out of commission for the next turn. It's not uncommon for fights with the Watchdog to end in as soon as one or two turns. However, this is completely reversed in the Refraction Railway or Hard Mode Mirror of Mirrors, where not only does it lose the early stagger thresholds that made it so easy to knock down normally, it also has a lot more health while retaining the same offensive power.
  • In Refraction Railway Line 1, the final boss My Form Empties is comparatively a relaxing break after the grueling slugfests that were the fights preceding it. Due to it being a Puzzle Boss, once you figure out the gimmick of the cyclical Karma it becomes very easy to beat as long as you can keep winning clashes - the fight is pretty much over once its three minions are down.
  • Its successor in Refraction Railway Line 2, Sign of Roses, follows a similar pattern. While it's certainly intimidating with its Total Party Kill, E.G.O. resource drain gimmick, and having eight targets to focus on, once you figure out its mechanics, it basically boils down to demolishing the summoned roses as fast as possible, and said roses don't have extremely strong moves nor threatening passives outside of possibly the Wrath and Gloom roses. Compared to the DPS races of the previous fights, wiping the roses isn't too hard due to their fatal weaknesses to their respective Sin type and susceptibility to multi-target attacks, and once you take out the Roses, the actual boss can do little to prevent you from whaling on it. Furthermore, its scripted events (which provide a stacking global damage dealt/taken increase from a Sin of your choice) will often only lead to your attacks killing it faster if you choose the type contributing most of your damage. It can re-summon the Roses if you can't kill it in one cycle, but it isn't a problem since the Roses will also heal you if you can kill them in time, negating most of the accumulated damage. Also, with every Cycle you progress, whilst it gains more health, it deals less damage - thus, when you reach the 5th Cycle if you're aiming for the highest-tier banners, the direct damage of the attacks that inflicts alone aren't going to be very threatening themselves, allowing you to better focus on taking it down as intended.
  • Despite generally being the opposite when fought in the story, Kromer tends to be easier than the other Final Bosses of Mirror of Mirrors' Hard Mode. In her first phase, although her rolls are as horrifically high as expected, she has a lot less health than the other bosses (at only 883), doesn't resist as many damage types (albeit not being weak to any either), has a higher stagger threshold, and tends to use less moves in one turn. With a full team and an arsenal of items to buff them, it's a lot easier to burst her down and stagger her before she causes too much damage, and her low health ensures she'll almost certainly be finished off afterwards. Once you get her to her second phase, while it has a bit more HP and equally high rolls, it also has extremely glaring weaknesses to multiple damage types, very high stagger thresholds on all its parts, and takes a bit of time to start using her more dangerous attacks, meaning that it's fairly likely to stagger or outright break multiple of Kromer's parts on the first turn after the transformation. After this, the fight is basically over if you unload your burst when she's down, and Kromer will also become Fatal to all damage types below half health, almost begging you to finish her off. Kromer also has a scripted event that can guarantee yet another stagger if you do enough damage, which can further disable her without even letting her fight back properly.
  • In the Hard Mode of the Mirror of the Lake, three of the five possible final bosses are buffed versions of the Canto V Abnormalities (with Dream-Devouring Siltcurrent in particular being a tremendous pain), and the fourth is My Form Empties. The last one is Faelantern from Refraction Railway 2, which is more of a Goddamned Boss than a significant threat, with relatively passive behavior, less powerful clashes, and a DPS check gimmick which is much more readily met in a Mirror Dungeon where you have an entire arsenal of E.G.O. Gifts and starter buffs under your belt. Even with the stat inflation from Hard Mode, unless you took an excessive amount of enemy HP buffs, it's relatively easy to stagger and then burst it down without much of a fuss, especially since a team that was strong enough to make it through floor 5 in the first place will almost certainly have enough damage to snap Faelantern in half. Furthermore, because the game considers the "cycle count" to be 1 since there are no cycles at all, Faelantern starts the battle by charming only 1 Sinner instead of 2-4, making it nearly impossible for it to screw you over early like it could in the Railway.
  • The Final Boss of Yield My Flesh to Claim Their Bones, Distorted Bamboo-hatted Kim, is fairly easy compared to some of the other end bosses of chapters. Although he has some nasty attacks, the boss has relatively low HP for a boss with no minions, a fairly high stagger threshold, and severe weaknesses to Pride and Slash, which is notable as many powerful Slash identities liberally use Pride anyways, in particular the Blade Lineage that was at the forefront of the same update. Even if some attacks land, your Sinners will often be able to deal as much damage to him as he did to them, and if you came packing Slash Identities (which you should have given the entire event is weak to it), it's not hard to stagger him before he has a chance to use his stronger moves. He does use minus coins which help him roll high with his constant SP loss whenever a turn starts or he wins a clash, but he also gains SP when he loses a clash, which makes it easier to stop him from snowballing; by the time you face him, you'll likely have an entire team of 45 SP Sinners too, further widening this gap. Furthermore, he only enters his second phase and starts using his most dangerous Counter Attacks when he's at a mere 20% of his HP (with To Claim Their Bones also taking 2 turns to set up), which is so low that he's fairly easy to finish off before he can do anything, with more powerful teams being able to capitalize on his first stagger and just erase his entire health bar before he can act again. In the event-modified Mirror of the Lake, he can also be chosen to face as the final boss instead of one of the normal options, and is usually the easier choice; although it means that he can benefit from the massive stat inflation in Hard Mode, he lacks the more complex mechanics the others use to pose more of a threat, meaning that the stat buff is usually not enough to outpace the equally ridiculous items and buffs the player has access to, with well-equipped teams often being able to kill him in as little as 1-2 turns, most infamously [Blade Lineage Mentor] Meursault who can kill him in a single use of To Claim Their Bones with some buffs. For comparison, Jun is generally considered a far more dangerous threat and an outright run-ender in the dungeon, and even the Warmup Boss version fought right before the actual dungeon is sometimes considered harder solely because you start with 0 SP.
  • In Canto VI, the latter parts of the chapter are slogging boss fight after boss fight. Nelly is the exception - with no complex mechanics that can't be solved by just punching them really hard, a (relatively) normal SP Gauge, and unimpressive resistances, they are a much-needed break between the Puzzle Boss immediately prior and the Climax Boss that follows. One can still get caught off guard, but with a little bit of Sinking - the strategy that is already predominant in both the Canto's seasonal units and makes earlier fights considerably easier - there is literally nothing they can do to stop you from bulldozing right over them.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Despite their ridiculous getups, their self-buffing and sanity-boosting make the Los Mariachis into some massive speedbumps on release. The game even recognizes this, with the enemies after your fights with them being of lower recommended level than they were (and are, in fact, a LOT easier with the tools you likely have starting off).
  • Everything There of an Inquisitor aren't that menacing when encountered later in Mirrors, due to you having buffed yourself with several collectibles, but in the main story, they're easily this. They're hard-hitting menaces with a powerful self-heal, and if you allow the battle to drag on, they grant themselves several huge buffs that are nearly impossible to overcome. The kicker is their counter skill, Imperfect Imitation, which as its name says will try to imitate any attack that it counters, meaning you cannot just kill them with one big attack since, if it doesn't stagger them, you'll likely get hit by it right back ^note  The counter doesn't imitate side effects and will always be Slash damage, meaning you can take the hit by someone who's not susceptible to Slash damage . They also commonly come in groups for what they're worth, too.
  • Not to be outdone by their brethren, the Crawling Inquisitors are also the bane of many players due to their combination of ridiculously damaging attacks, their tendency to gang up on one Sinner at a time, and them coming in large packs during later Mirror Dungeon fights. Their most favored gimmick is Blind Charge, which always hits twice for four stacks of Bleed per target, assuming they haven't already Staggered your units via their high base damage alone, as well as Attack Down debuffs to reduce your clash efficiency against them which will result them being able to get more hits in and cause your Sinners to often drop dead on the spot due to extreme blood loss. And that's not getting to their even stronger counterpart, which can combo for triple-digit damage with Tear Apart...
  • Honestly, all of the Inquisitors count as this, even the normal ones. Their attacks are very difficult to clash with because of their high coin power, deal very high damage if they do win the clash, and can inflict debilitating debuffs like Paralyze, Attack Down, and Nails on hit. Defensively, they also have a lot of health, resist Slash (a damage type used by a lot of powerful identities), and tend to have comparatively low stagger thresholds. On top of this, they'll also all gain attack power if you kill one of them or a damage boost if a Sinner dies, letting them overturn player advantages and snowball from disadvantages. They'll start showing up in droves near the middle and end of Canto 3, the EXP Luxcavations, and the Mirror Dungeon, so you best hope you've raised identities that can deal heavy Blunt damage and resist Blunt/Pierce, otherwise you'll be in for a bad time.
  • Solid Combined Bots, and to a lesser extent their smaller cousins. The latter are already irritating due to their high HP and defense, resistance to Bleed, immunity to sanity loss, surprisingly high clashing power, and effectively only staggering if you've already depleted 80% of their HP, meaning even Blunt damage might not be able to disable them in time, and they can all but shrug off Slash damage. The Elite Mook version excaberates everything bad about them - they're even bulkier, immune to Bleed instead of resistant, and have attacks with very high coin power that inflict dangerous amounts of debuffs and have an annoying tendency to win clashes, along with one that will instantly stagger the target on hit. They still have specific vulnerabilities to both Tremor and Rupture, but both statuses are too clunky to stack to the point where the Bot actually takes significant harm from them - in fact, Paralyze has an arguably bigger effect since all of their skills only have one coin.
  • The Enhanced K Corp Class 3 Staff that can be encountered randomly in the 2nd Mirror Dungeon are the hardest enemy available, combining high base HP, passive health regeneration, high coin power and complete stagger immunity to result in very annoying enemies to deal with. Even worse if encountered in floor 4 or 5 due to the stacking floor buffs enemies recieve, especially since they have No Trespassing, a four-coin skill which gets huge benefits from buffs to Coin Power and can outclash even E.G.O. at higher floors.
  • Pequod Town Villagers from Canto V thankfully don't show up often in the actual dungeon, but can become a terror when encountered in Mirror of The Lake. They're decently tanky and pack both abnormally high power and many coins on their skills, and can innately stack Offense Level with the inflated stats given to enemies in the Mirror Dungeon, which on Hard Mode translates to their skills capable of easily outrolling any E.G.O. below HE tier. Hits from them will often deal enough damage to stagger a resistant ally in a single use while either inflicting debuffs or buffing themsleves with Poise, and they can naturally regenerate SP to make sure they're rolling heads as often as possible, while also often coming with Pallid Mermaids that can lower your SP at the same time. On the other hand, lowering their SP isn't an option either, as they also have equally powerful minus coin skills and are specifically programmed to start using them as often as possible if their SP is dropped low enough.
  • Canto VI introduces the Edgar Family Butlers, which have unusually high bulk for swarm-type enemies, powerful attacks with multiple coins, heavy debuff infliction that can shred stats or inflict huge Damage Over Time, and passives that grant free power and damage buffs either against enemies below half health, or enemies that are slower than themselves. Many of their pages also have conditional buffs that are activated when they're faster than their opponent, which lets them take advantage of the fight being a non-focused encounter by dogpiling on your slowest member with unopposed attacks, ensuring their speed-based passives will trigger. Also because they're fought in non-focused encounters, they'll generally outnumber your actions by the second wave, which combined with their speed and numbers will usually cause an unavoidable cascade of one-sided attacks that can kill a Sinner in seconds. The worst of them are the Veteran Butlers, who on top of having the strongest stats and skills, each have a skill (Housekeeping for the female ones, Interloper Banishment for the males) that can be reused once as a one-sided attack if they outspeed their target by 3+, letting them cause free damage with no real way to stop it, especially the latter as while Housekeeping needs to actually hit to trigger the recycle, Interloper Banishment will do the speed check and recycle on use.
• Diagnosed by the Audience:
  • It's becoming more and more common to find posts both joking and serious saying that Meursault is somewhere on the autism spectrum. Interestingly enough, analyses of The Stranger have posited that the man Camus modeled M. Meursault after may have been autistic himself.
  • Don Quixote has also been fan-diagnosed as on the autism spectrum, but for entirely different reasons: mainly her odd way of speaking, Black-and-White Morality and hyperfixation on certain hobbies. Bonus points for her W Corp Identity to have a very intense interest in trains, which are a common autistic hyperfixation.
• Difficulty Spike: The game's prologue and 1st chapter are pretty easy, with only the Abnormality bosses offering a significant enough challenge. Enemies are weak enough that you don't really have to think about team composition or the deeper mechanics that early on - that entirely changes by Chapter 2, where the difficulty ramps up VERY fast, enemies start getting much more health and damaging skills and become more difficult to beat in Clashes. It doesn't get much easier from there on.
• Draco in Leather Pants:
  • Kromer is a Hate Sink who sadistically burns entire cities and (presumably) goes beyond orders to spite Sinclair on a personal level. In fan works however, she often has her more unpleasant traits removed and becomes either a Memetic Molester, a legitimate lover of Sinclair or a fanservice girl.
  • Dongrang is often treated as Yi Sang's lover in fanworks despite the canon version having no such affection for Yi Sang, and their interactions in-game sum up as the latter disposing of a former friend that has been gone too far to be reasoned with.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • For someone who effectively amounts to a Tragic One-Shot Character for Chapter 1, Yuri is very popular in the fanbase, receiving probably the most fanart of any non-Sinner characters. Her chemistry with the Sinners, particularly Gregor and Charon, interesting backstory, and tragic death all combine to make her very memorable. The fact she's effectively a canon example of the fandom's beloved Nuggets from Lobotomy Corporation also helps. To the point where a large chunk of the fanbase genuinely wishes she survived to continue working with the Sinners.
  • The crying toad (Literally named, the Blubbering Toad) one can encounter in Mirrors is also rather popular due to its cute design. When it turned out to be way bigger than expected in the Refraction Railroad and it actually being able to attack with its tongue and dislocated eyeballs, many art and memes were made of it being disproportionally big and being Grotesque Cute.
  • Even before his return in Canto IV, Samjo made a very good first impression for the fanbase in Intervallo I with his Consummate Professional attitude and good looks, but his return and subsequent dynamic with Dongrang coupled with his sudden (if absurd) death solidified his status as this.
  • Wayward Passenger is another Abnormality that hit it off with fans, particularly those returning from Library of Ruina who know exactly the nature of its existence; having both some of the most violent Body Horror in the game by itself, the Dimension Shredder E.G.O, and a noticeable Animation Bump in its combat animations left a striking impression. While Refraction Railway 2 as a whole has garnered rather split views, namely regarding how most of the fights were varying levels of patience-testing Goddamned Boss, Wayward Passenger tends to be one of the few agreed-upon highlights due to the aforementioned animation bump and his unique fight that had much less stalling than the others, with some even wishing he was actually harder or tankier just so the fight could last longer. For bonus points, he's always a welcomed encounter in Mirror Dungeon due to handing out the Blue Zippo Lighter.
  • The blonde woman with glasses in the background of Rodion's Dieci Assoc. South Section 4 Identity artwork already had some fans simply due to her design, but her popularity exploded after she popped up in Yi Sang's Dieci Identity artwork as well and people realized she was likely her own character instead of the Dieci identity of another Sinner like Ishmael. Speculation abounds as to her actual identity, with the most popular theories being that she's the Dieci Section 4 Director, the equivalent of Razumikhin or Dunya due to showing up with Rodion in both her appearances, or the equivalent of Dante's lover Beatrice from The Divine Comedy due to her seeming position of authority and the Dieci^note Ten in Italian Association matching with Dante's Sinner number.
• Epileptic Trees: Due to the Shout-Out heavy nature of the Sinners, not only taking names but also characteristics and backstory details from various works of literature, a significant chunk of fans have come to predict that each of the characters will follow a City-based version of their referenced stories, and given how every one of the chosen stories ended poorly, fans that know them and have seen how things went in previous Project Moon games are fully expecting tragedy to strike for everybody.
• Estrogen Brigade: While most gacha games are aimed at men - especially those as violent as this one - the game has a significant female fanbase inherited from previous games or freshly introduced to the setting. It's easy to see why it would appeal just from a surface look at the game: a Gender-Equal Ensemble with no overt sexualization, female characters that aren't just stereotypes meant to appeal to men, and a diverse cast of attractive male characters.
• Fandom-Specific Plot: There's an entire type of 'sinner swap' alternate universes in fanart and fanfics in which the Sinners and villains switch places - such as Kromer being a Sinner and Sinclair taking the role of The One Who Grips instead.
• Fanfic Fuel: All of the various Identities come from distinct alternate universes and have no effect on the broader plot, which makes them prime fuel for fanworks that explore the Sinners and their interactions within those specific Identities.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Players often call individual identities with a shorthand of letter+Sinner's name, so The One Who Grips Faust is called NFaust (due to N Corp), R Corp Rabbit Heathcliff is called RHeath, and so on. It's also not uncommon to see players coming up with clever ways to incorporate a sinner's name and their identity into a play on words; for example, The One Who Grips Faust occasionally being referred to as "Kraust" (Kromer-Faust) or Cinq Association South Section 4 Sinclair being named "Cinqlair".
  • Don Quixote is often abbreviated as 'Don' or more jokingly as 'DonDon'. In-universe, Dante refers to her as Donqui in their notes, which has been picked up by some fans.
  • It's not a Difficulty Spike, it's a "filter". Often used jokingly in discussions about the game's difficulty and newcomers to Project Moon and their usual Nintendo Hard difficulty averages.
  • There's a sect of players deadset on referring to the Liu identities as a group as the "Blowjob Brothers", even when Ishmael is involved.
  • Fans often call Gregor's cockroach that occasionally shows up in the artwork of his various Identities as "Pablo".
  • For some reason, it's not uncommon to see players call Blubbering Toad "Glupo".
  • Season 3 has been called the "Season of Poise" or "Season of Bloise" thanks to its disproportionate number of new Poise and Bleed Identities added - in fact, every Season 3 Story or Event-specific Identity had been based on Bleed or Poise, with the only Identities to not involve those being General Pass or Walpurgisnacht Identities.
  • [Lobotomy E.G.O.: Sunshower] Heathcliff is occasionally nicknamed "Potential Man", as he's considered to be in dire need of an upgrade that can make him actually useful. However, the nickname really caught on with the release of Canto VI, which just so happens to perpetually drain Heathcliff's SP...
• Foe Yay Shipping: One of the most popular pairings in the fanbase is Heathcliff x Ishmael - not in spite of them canonically detesting each other, but because of it. It helps that they have been put back to back in pretty much every piece of promotional content (and are back-to-back in the bus, number- and chapter-wise to boot), serve as good foils as both their (originally English) stories work around themes of revenge, and Heathcliff directly drawing a parallel between himself and Ishmael. Their dynamic in Canto V, Heathcliff gaining Queequeg's identity (whose own relationship with Ishmael has a lot of romantic subtext), and Heathcliff's Lost Lenore Cathy bearing an unusual resemblance to Ishmael only added fuel to it.
  • Somewhere down the line, Distorted Kim x Jun also gained a following. Somehow.
• Friendly Fandoms: It shares a significant playerbase with Arknights due to both being story-focused, dark gacha games with complex gameplay. It's not uncommon to see crossover fanart between the two. This became an Ascended Meme with the April Fools 2023 special cutscene which, among other gacha games, parodied Arknights' opening sequence but with a bunny-eared Vergilius in place of Amiya and Dante in place of the Doctor.
• Game-Breaker: Has its own page.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • The K Corp. Checkpoint Guards fought in early Chapter 3 are extremely irritating to get past due to their focus on defense and Healing Factor. With high defensive rolling, constant health regeneration, and the ability to pull off early staggers with Tremor, they can easily end up as a roadblock for players who haven't fully upgraded their characters yet. The stronger Class 3 members found in the Refraction Railway have even more HP and stronger attacks, can still heal themselves, and no longer have a Blunt weakness to throw you off.
  • Not to be outdone, the Empowered Class 3 Staff have boatloads of health and attacks that can destroy a target in a single go, but what makes them really annoying is that they'll heal a whopping 25% of their maximum HP at the start of each turn, up to three times. Even with the 3 turn limit and their other passive giving them permanent Fragile, their healing makes it nearly impossible to chew through their massive HP in a single turn before they just heal off the damage dealt, and if they heal over their stagger threshold after you stagger them, they'll shrug off the stagger while still losing the threshold. Woe betide you if you're going for the 120-turn banner in the Refraction Railway, because you aren't killing them before they exhaust their healing and add three extra turns to your clear.
  • Despite their absurdity, the Headchickens/Bongys can quickly prove to be a terrific nuisance if underestimated. Each of them passively drains 3 SP from a random Sinner each turn with no way to avoid it, gradually sapping at your ability to roll heads unless you brought SP battery identities or can wipe them out before the damage builds up. Depending on their variant, they can also inflict more debuffs and SP loss, heal themselves, or buff their allies to let them snowball even harder. Most painful of all are the variants that gain +3 coin power if not damaged the previous turn, which they can abuse on the first turn of combat to handily win clashes and inflict heavy damage. On the bright side, they're fairly squishy and stagger easily, making it possible to knock them out before they can get up to too much trouble.
  • As if making an attempt to match K Corp, T Corp's Class 3 Collectors found at the end of the fourth dungeon and Refraction Railway Line 2 have lots of health, fairly powerful moves, can buff themselves while debuffing targets, and have an extremely painful ability that will effectively fully heal them once if their HP is between 6% and 24% at the end of a turn. This is almost impossible to properly manage outside of just bursting them completely in a single turn, and similar to the Empowered Class 3 Staff, this will also remove all of their stagger thresholds to make them even harder to kill after, although they'll also get 3 Fragile to counteract this. If this passive procs too many times in the Refraction Railway, your turn count is going to take a hit, especially since later cycles will have you fighting 2 waves of Collectors instead of 1. To add insult to injury, for a good chunk of Refraction Railway 2, the Collectors were bugged to not be affected by SP, meaning that you could reduce them to a state of panic and still have them rolling heads all the time.
  • Both Pallidified Things and Pallid Mermaids. Like The One Who Shall Grip Sinclair, they prefer rolling tails on their coin flips. Also like The One Who Shall Grip Sinclair, when they do land tails their coin power is ridiculous, often landing in the double-digits off of a single coin. This makes them frustrating to clash with since their clashing power starts with numbers so high that almost nothing but E.G.Os can consistently beat them. The Pallidified Things also have sanity, so clashing with them never gets easier since bringing their sanity down through winning clashes will just make them more likely to land tails, which only makes them harder to clash against. The only thing keeping them in check is their lack of damage to capitalize on their absurd clashing.
• Goddamned Boss: See here.
• Good Bad Bugs: A lot of E.G.O Gifts and boss passives didn't work (at all, or intended) once added - here's just a few of them.
  • The final boss of Chapter 3 has a passive where if they start the turn with Burn or Bleed - any at all - they heal 15% of their boss-sized health pool and gained attack power. On release, this passive just straight up didn't work, resulting in the boss being way easier than intended. Once it was fixed, however, the boss ended up way HARDER than intended, due to a large portion of the available Identity roster being based entirely around Bleed, which then resulted in the passive getting a nerf tied to a unique E.G.O Gift to the dungeon.
  • The Green Spirit E.G.O is supposed to only trigger when damaging someone with a Gluttony (green) skill. Instead, it triggers whenever any damage is done at all, resulting in the entire enemy field being filled with stacks upon stacks of Tremor, just waiting to be burst.
  • Meursault's Capote E.G.O. doesn't inflict Tremor by Burn's count like it says in its description, it inflicts Tremor by its potency. Since the E.G.O. is well-optimised to snowball up the Burn potency, this quickly leads to an easy source of 99 Tremor Burst, easing up quickly staggering the enemy a lot.
  • So called 'defensive cycling' allows players to go more quickly through their ability pool by selecting a sinner's defense move, but using their other move anyway, which removed both the move used and the one overwritten from the pool. As of April 2023, Project Moon has attempted to patch it out thrice, but a sizable chunk of the playerbase has called for some form of the tech to remain in the game.
  • When part 3 of Canto IV came out, there was a bug where Sloth and Wrath Power Up, instead of increasing the respective sin's power by 1 per stack, would increase their damage by 100% per stack instead. This, particularly combined with Yi Sang's already powerful Sunshower EGO and synergystic Spicebush ID, resulted in Yi Sang being able to completely decimate waves by himself and casually deal 4-digit damage to Abnormalities with multiple parts.
  • The release of Refraction Railway Line 2 came with a bug similar to that of the Sunshower bug mentioned, causing statuses modifying physical damage to be applied tenfold. This translated to anyone that could apply Slash/Pierce/Blunt Damage Up buffs would start dealing ridiculous amounts of damage, potentially ripping through even the exorbitantly bulky bosses of the Railway and making it far easier to hit the 200-turn limit. This was hotfixed not even a day after release, and Project Moon subsequently added a second award for those who could do five cycles in under 150 turns, now that the bug was no longer there to be exploited.
  • Another bug popped up that once again caused ludicrously low turn counts in Refraction Railway Line 2, allowing players to essentially stack as many attacks as they wish onto a single skill, which both translates into ridiculously high coin power (unless the skill loses coin power on Heads or is affected by coin power-lowering skills) and enabled players to essentially clear the fights in as little as 1 turn at times. With the bug, players have managed to get the highest-ranked Railway banner in as little as 34 turns.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Somehow, Canto III manages to become this following the events of Canto IV Part 2. Not only did K Corp. know exactly what Nagel und Hammer was up to in Sinclair's hometown, they were using the gratuitous and heartless torture taking place to film snuff films and fuel their own Singularity.
• High-Tier Scrappy: Charge-based teams (which mostly encompass the R Corp and W Corp IDs) initially garnered the opposite sentiment in Season 1 simply because Charge decays between turns unlike in Library of Ruina, which would restrict you from getting the full potential of their skills, and only W Corp Don Quixote could get around this issue. This has rapidly swung into the opposite sentiment in Season 2 with so many buffs given to the status effect (such as Uptie IV-exclusive On Use-based gain and E.G.O. Gifts) that the decay between turns becomes completely neglegible, in addition to the introduction of multiple new Charge-based IDs (especially with 3 powerful new W Corp IDs in particular). This has led to the side effect of other status effects like Bleed, and especially Burn getting very badly neglected, which is something that doesn't sit well with some players that seek to use status effects other than Charge.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • A gag video released in mid-April 2023 involves Yi Sang slowly turning into a flower. Jump forward to Canto IV Part 2, and not only does the finale involve Dongbaek, someone with close relations to Yi Sang, growing flowers out of her body upon awakening her E.G.O. and then transforming into flowers when she was slain, said flowering was then teased to be Yi Sang's next identity.
  • From the same animator, comes another gag video which features Meursault vigorously dancing with Sinclair near the end of it, somehow predicting that Meursault himself canonically used to go to dance clubs as he reveals in Canto V.
  • For the second Railway, Project Moon made a major adjustment that basically made solo runs unfeasible by not giving you more skill slots as the fight progressed to compensate for deploying fewer sinners. However, as time went on, people found a glitch that allowed players to basically stack as many attacks as they wanted onto a single skill slot, meaning that not only could you now solo the entire Railway anyway, you could do so with ludicrously low turn counts - the best rewards were given out for finishing 5 or more loops in 150 turns or less, and now people could squeeze it down to as little as 34.
  • Another gag vid on the introduction of Walpurgis Night predicted that out of all of the new Identities, Philip would get Identities based on them. A couple Walpurgis Nights later, A Philip Identity would be announced, this time belonging to Sinclair.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: Project Moon has always had issues with this, but by the time Canto V was fully released, the complaints reached new heights. The chapter is loaded with fights that are brutal even with the best IDs in the game, and God help you if you haven't been so lucky with the gacha pulls. For many fans, this led to the game being genuinely frustrating rather than entertainingly challenging. It got so bad that Project Moon hotfixed nerfed the Final Boss within hours of its release, and began making plans to allow players to change IDs while in the middle of the dungeon to prevent them from having to start all the way from the beginning if they encounter a fight that's borderline impossible with their current comp, which is a testament to how brutal the Difficulty Spike got in that chapter.
• Jerks Are Worse Than Villains:
  • On one hand you have Kromer, a zealous cult leader purging and torturing a whole city's worth of people for the crime of replacing their body parts with prosphetics based on what could charitably be called Insane Troll Logic. On the other hand you have Hopkins from Chapter 1, a lowly Fixer who gets upset with Yuri for not providing information she couldn't really offer at that point and scampering off halfway through the dungeon and leaving the Sinners and Yuri to die because he got frustrated with how little preparation they have done. Take a guess which one the fanbase dislikes more.
  • This trope strikes again in Canto VI. Linton has not performed nearly as many horrific actions as Kromer, let alone the most evil characters in the series. However, his absolutely horrid treatment of Heathcliff, as well as his lack of an excuse to be so mean (unlike the drunken Hindley, who's at the very least suffering from an addiction that clouds his judgement) quickly led to him being one of the most hated characters in the series.
• Junk Rare: [Blade Lineage Salsu] Yi Sang gained this reputation in some parts of the playerbase due to being distributed for free in the game's launch; getting lucky enough to roll a 000 Identity, only to receive a dupe of the Yi Sang they already got for free, did not amuse many players. The Identity itself is not bad for beginners, but it is considered middling in power in comparison to others that came with and after it due to Poise being a Scrappy Mechanic. However, Uptie IV has given him and Poise substantial buffs that make him more viable.
• Launcher of a Thousand Ships: For whatever reason, the fanbase likes to ship Ishmael with just about anyone - the most popular ones being with Queequeg and Heathcliff, but it's possible to find fanart of her shipped with almost every Sinner.
• Love to Hate:
  • Kromer might be one of the most downright bat-shit insane characters in a setting full of bat-shit insane people, but her hammy dialogue, her very cool design and just how unabashedly evil she is (attitude-wise) made her one of the most popular non-Sinner characters right after the game released. Add to that the fact that she marked the first battle with unique battle music and a second form, and you have a popular villain in the making.
  • Captain Ahab is utterly evil and her Gaslighting of her crew cements her as one of the most despicable villains of the game. However, the fans love her anyway for her badass design, brutal difficulty, and sheer charisma that demonstrates in just two cutscenes how she managed to wrap the people of Pequod Town so completely around her finger. These same fans were elated when she survived her defeat and was recruited into Hermann's organization, because it means that they haven't seen the last of her yet.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • Among the base Identities, Ishmael is generally considered to be the weakest due to all of her attacks being all-or-nothing singular coin attacks in a combat system that rewards high amounts of coins, which makes her significantly vulnerable to getting her attacks broken and stunlocked to death. Base Meursault is also fairly disappointing due to being tanky, but extremely slow and deals pretty low damage overall despite having multiple multi-coin attacks.
  • Right behind her is Don Quixote's base identity, which has many of the same problems as well as not even being tanky, having bad passives, and a third skill that works best with fast speed but with only a frustrating single coin flip way of actually acquiring the haste to make use of it. Even her Shi Association version is considered better, wholly by the fact it's passives are serviceable.
  • Gregor's Suddenly, One Day is pretty much the worst E.G.O. of all the default Sinner E.G.O.'s by the simple, yet debilitating fact that its status infliction is entirely random, rendering it completely unreliable if you do want to inflict a certain status effect. Anyone who gets their hands on Legerdemain would quickly replace Gregor's ZAYIN E.G.O. slot with it if only because it's much more consistent on what status effects it can inflict.
  • Los Mariachis Jefe Sinclair is a very silly identity in terms of looks, but unfortunately his actual kit doesn't do much of anything. Sinking, Poise, and stagger control all don't synergize well with each other, and his offense level is so low that he won't deal much damage at all. His high defensive stats aren't helping either because he has no Aggro mechanic to take advantage of his defense level. In general this identity does very little to actually contribute to any fight, with him often being used more for his support passive that gives free damage.
  • Blade Lineage Outis is a frankly terrible Identity who can't do her job of being a Poise-based damage dealer as a result of her exceedingly poor Poise generation and horrible clashing. Her first skill has rotten numbers, with a base power of 4 and only a single coin with 6 power, meaning she's very likely to lose clashes with or without the 1-Coin Power bonus from having 5+ Poise, and worse still is that this is the only way she can rack up Poise potency by herself. Her second skill, while marginally better with a nice 2 Slash DMG Up, still has a pitiful maximum value of 13 power so it's also very liable to lose clashes, and this is similarly the only way she can get Poise count. And keeping with this trend, her third skill, while capable of some good damage due to acting as a Finishing Move, also clashes very poorly with a maximum of 14 power, or 16 if she's targeting an enemy below 50% HP. While her very poor numbers can be somewhat patched up with E.G.O gifts in the Mirror Dungeon, and the utter monster that is Blade Lineage Mentor Meursault makes it legitimately viable to field her to have a full team of Blade Lineage units, it's still a very common sentiment that she isn't worth the trouble of using or the resources required to build her, and the most people will generally bother with her is to unlock her admittedly useful support passive.
  • Lobotomy E.G.O: Sloshing Ishmael is a Tremor and Rupture focused Identity, just like LCCB Assistant Manager... but does it so much worse. Her Tremor Burst knocks off 4 counts of Tremor, meaning she might mess with other Tremor Identities, her infliction amount is pitiful compared to Quake Rounds, and her Rupture is dependent on the Burst while LCCB's isn't and is much better. And while Sloshing can only do Tremor, LCCB's skills offer more, such as Suppress inflicting fragile to let any allies slower than her that turn deal more damage, inflict paralyze to shut down powerful coins, and attack down. It's even worse when you figure out that Sloshing's coins are 1-2-1, LCCB's is 1-3-4, meaning that Sloshing is more inconsistent than LCCB with skill power. LCCB does most of what Sloshing sets out to do much better, and is a 00, the same as Sloshing, so there's little reason to use the latter.
  • Lobotomy E.G.O.: Sunshower Heathcliff already had to fight an uphill battle the moment he got announced, being a 000 identity for Heathcliff with negative coins so people had expectations along the lines of his Rabbit Corp. ID and Sinclair's The One Who Shall Grip, both widely considered two of the strongest units in the game. Then he actually came out... and things went downhill from there. For starters, his base values are laughably bad, with his S1 hitting a laughable 6 at maximum Uptie and his other skills only faring slightly better, yet always below all of The One Who Shall Grip Sinclair's skill powers by comparison. What really hurts his viability however, is that it's very difficult for him to actually get into negative sanity to get any use out of his kit since his main tool to lower it involves inflicting himself with Sinking and either using his passive to trigger it or actively take hits, and unlike Sinclair's aforementioned ID, where it's almost too easy to trigger E.G.O Corrosion, Sunshower Heathcliff will easily hit the Sanity cap if he's not actively babysat. This might be part of the reason why the game hasn't seen another identity with negative coins since.
    • However, funnily enough, he's considered by some to be Heathcliff's best-in-slot for Canto VI, since his character-specific buff Bereavement actually helps him keep his sanity low without having to pay it too much attention and raise his clash and damage values on top of Sinking being considered very good for some of its harder encounters.
  • Sinclair's Lifetime Stew is considered the worst E.G.O. the game has as of Season 1, and it's honestly easier to list things which it actually does well. For one, even when fully uptied, it's coin value only reaches as high as 18 at base, but thanks to having a coin that actually reduces its power on hitting heads, you'll most likely only see it hitting 8 (for comparison, Don Quixote's La Sangre de Sancho, considered one of the worst base E.G.O. in the game, low rolls to 12, but gets additional power on heads). Its main gimmick is targeting low health allies instead of enemies and healing them, but not only might you already have access to Faust's Fluid Sac which heals your allies and boosts SP and damages enemies, Sinclair already has Impending Day which, while only healing on kill, heals substantially more, and incidentally takes up the same slot. That doesn't even begin to touch upon buggy interactions with certain E.G.O. gifts and other allies' defensive skills - for the former, an ally getting hit would also incur negative status effects like Burn, and regarding the latter, they would actually trigger upon getting targeted, meaning your allies could either dodge your meager healing or deck you in the face with a counter since it's still technically an attack. About the only reason that doesn't make it a full on Junk Rare is it mitigated the amount of grinding you'd have to do for the Hell's Chicken event... which would have required bringing Sinclair along for the event dungeon with Lifetime Stew equipped, and the Identities at his disposal (barring his base identity) for much of the event's run were generally considered rather weak, at least until the arrival of his N Corp. Idenitity following an extension in the event's duration.
  • Both of the Intervallo 4.5 E.G.O.'s prove to be the worst E.G.O. of Season 2, dropping the ball even harder than the previous season's Intervallo-event E.G.O.:
    • Soda Hong Lu's decent roll for a TETH-class E.G.O. is offset immediately by it's abysmal Offense Level (-3 on Corrosion, and -5 on Awakening), guaranteeing that he'll actually roll 1-2 coin powers less than what his base power info would actually state. The one supposed advantage it has over Land of Illusion, which is healing allies HP, is also immediately offset due to healing at a fixed amount instead of by percentage like most healing E.G.O.'s do, and a low amount at that too. It's crit-condition effect is guaranteed to never happen due to none of Hong Lu's Identities being Poise-centered, as if the insultingly low heal count hasn't already nailed the coffin on how awful this E.G.O. is.
    • Soda Ryoshu is horrible in supposedly focusing on Sinking and resource generation, as it only inflicts an insignificant 6 Sinking with no Count, and the kill-triggered E.G.O. resource generation at Awakening and the E.G.O. resource amplifier status at Corrosion isn't enough to justify it's disgustingly lofty 6 affinity price that requires 3 different Sins. It's also awful at replacing the base E.G.O. Forest For The Flames, given that the latter is cheaper in both resource and sanity cost, has a higher maximum roll at Threadspin 4, and can inflict the much more universally useful Fragile.
  • Among Mirror Dungeon E.G.O Gifts, White Gossypium quickly became loathed thanks to its rather unusual effect - removing the ability to stagger enemies in exchange for inflicting massive amounts of bleed on them. As useful as bleed is, staggering an opponent is the most devastating condition in the game, leaving enemies unable to use skills and suffering from doubled damage from all sources. The Gift's infamy was only made worse when it was uncovered that its special event in Mirror Dungeons will always result in it being added to your list of E.G.O Gifts, not helped by how it was straight up impossible to refuse gifts even if you got it randomly, leaving you unable to avoid taking it until an update changed the event to make it possible to refuse it (and gain a much more useful powerup instead). When Refraction Railway 3 was announced with the Gossypium Flower being promoted to a boss, many players relished the opportunity to give it a hell of a beating for all the Mirror Dungeon runs it ruined.
  • Out of all the statuses that one can build a team around, Burn teams are among one of the weakest ones, alongside Tremor (listed below under Scrappy Mechanic). Although Burn is functional as a status and isn't as clunky to use, there are concerningly few units who can even inflict the status, and a good chunk of them (most notoriously the 00 Liu identities) have low clashing power for the current state of the game and, in endgame content, will have significant difficulty even winning any clashes; many will gain Coin Power against Burning targets, but good luck hitting the target to apply the Burn in the first place, especially in a non-Focused encounter. Sources of Burn Count are also surprisingly rare for how essential it is for Burn in general, as without it, any Burn you set up on an enemy will instantly vanish the next turn. In addition, Burn being capped at 99 Potency may not sound significant at first since every other status also has this limit, but its damage only being a single instance on turn end, as opposed to triggering on hit/coinflip, means that without certain multipliers like Glimpse of Flames or Magic Bullet Outis' Dark Flame, it's pretty easy to hit the Burn cap early on in a turn and then not be able to do anything for the remainder. This often leaves you stuck doing 99 damage per turn where any boss worth its salt will have 2000 HP at the least (although it can be increased against multi-part Abnormalities) - this also ends up hurting the Burn gifts you can get in Mirror Dungeons (which tend to be genuinely powerful), as they still won't be able to do anything once they get capped.
• Memetic Badass:
  • People like to joke that Meursault is so Literal-Minded that all you need to do to win is to order him to do so - and he will. This is made even funnier with the release of Chapter 5.5, where when Aeng-du is having a mental breakdown and is about to Distort, Dante orders Meursault to stop her from Distorting, and he actually does by simply knocking out Aeng-du before the Distortion could complete.
  • The rise of the "Nah, I'd Win" meme led to Head Hooligan of all characters being portrayed as an absolute badass by the fandom, despite all that is otherwise in-game.
  • Ricardo, due to his Hopeless Boss Fight and status as a formidable member of the Middle (not to mention his similar name to the real life Ricardo Milos, a Memetic Badass in his own right) has found himself the center of memes that portray him as one of the strongest characters in the game, which to be fair, is not too much of a stretch given how the game itself treats him as a menace in both story and gameplay.
• Memetic Loser:
  • Of all characters, Carmen/The Voice, someone who was revealed to be an absolute menace for her monstrous ascension in the previous game was hit with this after the events of Canto IV and V because she utterly fails in breaking Dongbaek and Ahab, causing them to relatively easily awakening their EGO, and even when she managed to have Dongrang Distort, Dongrang managed to not only reverse the Distortion but awaken an EGO anyway. "Yield My Flesh To Claim Their Bones" made it even funnier by having her almost get to Aeng-du, only to get thwarted by Meursault simply punching her lights out before the Distortion could fully kick in. Jokes abounded in the fanbase about how the usually infallible Carmen was thwarted by characters going 'no thanks'. Canto VI would result in this walked back quite a bit, as she first succeeds at turning Hindley into a Distortion (complete with an explanation on why Meursault can't just knock him out like he did to Aeng-du) and then manages to do the same to Heathcliff, giving a horrifying and heartbreaking look into his thoughts as he's goaded into Distorting in the process.
  • As the story goes on, Vergilius' status as an All-Powerful Bystander who barely lifts a finger to help the Sinners except when strictly necessary as well as his unimpressive combat record (he lost against Iori in Leviathan and only wins on-screen against opponents way below his level (the three Fixers at the start of the game, as well as a dozen low-ranked Zwei Association Fixers)) became more and more glaring and less reasonable. This has led many to joke that Vergilius is actually just a Fake Ultimate Hero unworthy of actual respect, that the eye augments that gave him the Red Gaze title are actually just contact lenses, that he would lose in a fight against Ruina's very easy first guest Finn and so on. This came to a head in Canto 5, where after the Sinners encounter the Mermaids for the first time and one of them seeks Vergilius' help due to the threat they posed, he reveals just how little he wants to care about the state of the Sinners at all even though they might risk getting Killed Off for Real this time. The Indigo Elder performing a Big Damn Heroes and saving the Sinners from Ricardo while Vergilius was conspiciously absent only serves to put even more fuel to the fire to the allegations. As a consequence, Vergilius has been deliberately misnamed by some fans with the word "Fraud" somewhere within his name or title, like "Fraudgilius", "The Red Fraud", and "The Fraud Gaze". Even the developers seem aware of his poor reputation, as the intro of Canto VI has Vergilius clarifying that his contract with Limbus Company outright forbids him from getting involved and helping the Sinners, followed by him breaking said contract to intervene in the Peccatulum experiments under Wuthering Heights, becoming a Guest-Star Party Member that effortlessly wipes out a losing battle. This almost completely wiped Vergilius's fraud status, with several fans hailing him as a "GOAT" and filling out apology documents promising they'll never doubt Vergilius again, and even the most skeptical viewers see his return with optimism for future involvement in the story.
  • Aeng-du quickly became the butt of a number of jokes following the release of the Yield My Flesh To Claim Their Bones event as a result of everything that happens to her over the course of the story. She's found on the ground in a near-death state by the Sinners at the start of the event, which wouldn't be so funny if she wasn't in a pose near-identical to that of Yamcha's death pose, she knocks herself unconscious shortly after being treated for her wounds due to overexerting herself, Jun defeats her in a Single-Stroke Battle, she nearly gets herself killed by the Distortion the Sinners were tasked with subduing, and to cap it all off, she nearly transforms into a Distortion herself but gets interrupted by Meursault simply punching her lights out on Dante's orders. The fandom in turn opted to poke fun at her in a variety of ways, such as calling her a Jobber, redrawing her in the aforementioned Yamcha Pose proper, or redrawing her as the "Nah, I'd Win" meme, just to name a few.
  • The Kurokumo Clan and related IDs have slowly accumulated a negative response for a few reasons. Firstly as the main antagonists of "To Yield My Flesh to Claim Their Bones" they are cut down viciously by both the Blade Lineage and the Sinners, with the former only stopping as a result of being so outnumbered and being dazed due to being ejected from the Library. Secondly, during the event, they only received one ID (Kurokumo Clan Captain Gregor) as a 00, versus Blade Lineage's 3. Lastly, as people have discovered, the Kurokumo IDs have actually significantly less synergy than the Blade Lineage or other similar themes. ^note  Compared to Blade Lineage and its application of Poise, Kurokumo Ryoshu deals Bleed and very little else, Kurokumo Hong Lu's best skill requires the target to have little to no Bleed, and Kurokumo Gregor requires a large amount of Bleed to get the most out of his damage and apply his debuffs. Meanwhile, Kurokumo Rodion, while good, has a weird mix of Poise and Bleed that makes her better suited with a Blade Lineage team than her own allies.
• Memetic Mutation: Has its own page.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The Stagger sound effect has a satisfying crunch to it that indicates you're about to beat an enemy into a literal bloody mess - not as wonderful when the one Staggered is one of your characters, however.
  • The 'ding!' sound when passives activate or coins flip heads.
• Narm: Similarly to the previous game, the ridiculous lengths to which some of the Wings will go to oppress their citizens, usually for profit but sometimes just for shits and giggles, can make the game's anti-capitalist themes feel more like a parody than an earnest critique.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: Once another promising entry to Project Moon's franchise, its reputation was tarnished during the release of Intervallo II, where some players complained that the Molar Boatworks Identity of Ishmael wasn't sexualized enough and that the Molar Boatworks Identity of Sinclair was comparatively more sexualized (particularly pointing out a choker he was wearing as being symbolic of a collar) and claimed that the game was tainted by feminist extremists. They framed the CG artist, Vellmori as one of them over alleged dogwhistling in cutscene artwork by pointing out poses which somewhat resembled a feminist hand signal (which has been an ongoing argument in Korea as a whole), causing them to supposedly lay her off and starting a series of uproars within not just the fandom, but also by the Korean game community as well. While it was later revealed that Vellmori voluntarily resigned due to the harassment, the incident remains as a major problem of South Korea's infamous gender war issues, and any discussions about the company or its games are inevitably going to involve the Vellmori incident at some point.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: The benefits from Uptie 4 vary wildly among the playable cast, but arguably none got a bigger improvement than [R Corp 4th Pack Reindeer] Ishmael, who was formerly plagued with several clunky drawbacks in her kit that limited her usefulness. Almost all of these were addressed or even reversed with her Uptie 4 - her attacks generate more Charge and generate on use instead of on hit to let her build Charge faster, her combat passive (which formerly discouraged activating it due to Ishmael taking unavoidable sanity loss in exchange for a small Attack Power buff next turn) now gives her the buff immediately and only drains her sanity if she fails to deal damage that turn, and her infamous Mind Whip not only takes 8 Charge instead of 10, but only drains the required 8 instead of wasting all of it. On top of that, she got even more power on her already decently strong skills, turning her into a veritable powerhouse now that she can make full use of her kit.
• Self-Fanservice:
  • Out of all the female sinners, only Rodion and to a lesser extent Faust have a noticeable bust - doesn't stop fanartists from drawing all of them way bustier than they are in canon.
  • Kromer is not the most attractive-looking female character from the Project Moon universe. However, it is not uncommon for artists to make her look way prettier than she is in-game.
• Solo-Character Run: A common Self-Imposed Challenge players partake in is to take just one Sinner to battle and have them clear the stage all on their own, with any Identity of the players' choice, ranging from Game Breakers to Low Tier Letdowns just to see how well they could fare when put to the test. Mirror Dungeons are the most popular game mode for the solo Identity challenge, both because of the added challenge from health and SP being retained throughout each encounter, and because the E.G.O. gifts could be major game-changers depending on what you get, especially if they heal your Sinner or give E.G.O. resources the Sinner couldn't provide otherwise.
• Squick: If you hate the sight of trash polluting the enviroment, Intervallo 4.5 will make you vomit - the U Corp. Backstreets are outright drenched in trash to the point that the water and the sky itself look all sickly green. The enemies you face in the chapter aren't any better - the local Trash Crabs that have fitted themselves with the trash to make their shells look very gnarly too.
• Testosterone Brigade: They have rather... strong feelings about Ishmael. Fans of both genders already found her to be an Unkempt Beauty when the game first released, but the release of her Molar Boatworks ID and then the reveal of her Ax-Crazy side in Canto V kicked the lust for her into overdrive.
• That One Attack:
  • Nail-stacking skills. All N Corp. Inquisitors love to spam these abilities on your Sinners if given the chance, which don't do a lot of raw damage on their own, but often translate into insanely high bleed stacks once your turn is up, causing your units to lose considerable amounts of health with every tick. Given the huge Beef Gate of chapter 3, the Inquisitors are also highly likely to win clashes as well, often resulting in unavoidable nail stacks and enemy buffs in an already pitched battle. Unless the fight ends quickly in your favor or if your Sinners have a means of recovering lost health, they are liable to be staggered and/or killed very easily when battling these enemies, often dropping dead once it's their turn to move due to the huge bleed ticks.
  • Headless Ichthys' Blood Cannon. All of its attacks are damaging enough to stagger in one use if the target is weak to them, but Blood Cannon takes the cake as it inflicts a ridiculous amount of Bleed, and is practically unable to be clashed against without a strong E.G.O. Before the boss was nerfed, it could even do this twice in one turn!
  • Headless Ichthys' Clap and Powerful Clap are also very infamous to due being relatively difficult to win clashes against and having the ability to lower your character's attack power so that it's even MORE difficult for them to win clashes in the next turn - and unlike Blood Cannon, Clap and Powerful Clap are its regular attacks.
  • For one that has such a silly name, Clippity-cloppity? Tap Away!'s Twinkle☆Sprinkle Spinny is an absolute menace, with it doing ridiculous levels of damage and being a multi-hit ability, which can easily knock a Sinner down several Stagger levels in a single combo, especially if they're weak to Blunt, and possibly even killing them outright should they not have enough health to withstand it. Safe to say, it hits a lot harder than its normal counterpart. As the cherry on top, the cyborg leader can decide to do this up to three times per turn and disable most of your team in one go, which can be especially painful if it's the final boss of a Mirror Dungeon. Getting to remove one of its attacks is already a whole feat.
  • In Refraction Railway Line 2, So That No One Will Cry's namesake Skill is bound to be the worst attack you have to go up against, compared to its mostly annoying nature in any other gamemode. Most of the strongest skills of each encounter have a very low coin count, meaning that outclashing against them with a powerful enough Skill is mostly as simple as 1-to-2 clashes to circumvent it. So That No One Will Cry's namesake Skill has 5 coins, and to boot, unlike in any other gamemode, it has an ungodly base power of 17, and its +2 rolls means it could get so strong that it can even outclash HE E.G.O.. You better hope you have reattached enough Talismans back on it to dampen it, and stagger/break its body parts if you feel too scared to even clash against it, because otherwise any Sinner that gets struck by it will have to confront deadly amounts of Rupture, and the 5 Paralyze and Bind is guaranteed to leave them a sitting duck if they don't immediately die to that Skill.
  • Insidious Pallidification, a Counter skill used by GasHarpoon Ahab in the last phase with Queequeg's ego, is single-handedly responsible for the difficulty of that phase. The boss will use it once every turn, which will grant her a 10% max. HP shield that can go up to 25% depending on how much of Queequeg's Ego she has, which she starts combat with 30 of. In addition, for every 10 Queequeg's Ego, she can reuse the Counter once, meaning that at the start of the phase, she will be launching four counters per round of combat, which combined with it having two coins and fairly high damage along with the boss' innate scaling damage means that most of your team will be taking heavy hits with no way to avoid them, with Pierce-vulnerable or squishier Sinners being liable to instantly stagger right after attacking. To make matters worse, it also comes with an effect that saps 5 SP every time you attack her with the shield up, punishing multi-coin nuke skills and making it easier for the boss to win clashes of their own. The player is required to break at least one shield every turn to drain 10 of Queequeg's Ego, which will reduce the shield strength and number of counters before ultimately staggering the boss, but if you fail to break it, she'll recover 5 instead. Even once you've bled her dry and staggered her, if you can't kill her in one turn, she'll still put up the 10% shield and use one counter per turn, which combined with the constant SP drain from attacking her shield can easily lead to you bricking during the final stretch.
• That One Boss: See here.
• That One Level: See here.
• That One Sidequest: You know things will be dicey if you're going for an EX clear (ie. 10 turns or shorter) and a combat encounter has at 3 waves. Even with a well-oiled team, it can be tough to tear through 15 or so foes in that time in some of the later stages, particularly since it takes a bit of time to build up action slots, and the lack of agency in non-Focused Encounters means that you can't even line up favorable clashes or damage matchups half the time, not even counting if you don't have heavy firepower of the right damage types to begin with. Worse still, if you rush the early waves too fast (which is encouraged by the time limit), the second or third waves will tend to outnumber your actions and start launching unchallenged attacks for cheap damage. Naturally, it's worst with enemies that have a lot of health, low stagger thresholds, methods of self healing, or heaven forbid all of the above - even if you can regularly beat them in clashes and weather their attacks, they can just stall you out until 10 turns pass. To make things worse, Canto V introduces the first encounter with 4 waves while keeping the same 10-turn limit, practically demanding you to kill all of the enemies in only 2 turns per wave on average, which can be especially tough in the earlier waves where you're lacking SP, Sin resources, and action slots.
• Trans Audience Interpretation: Sinclair has a lot of qualities and motifs that are seen as transmasculine. His duality motif (and the fact his logo is an egg, which is a term in the transgender community for a closeted trans person) are aesthetic reasons, while his short height and shifting mood both add to the theory. His story starts with him dreading an irreversible scenario once he reaches adulthood that his parents try to assure is normal, and he makes a deal with Kromer who states she can prevent it from happening. On the other hand, him being seen as transfeminine is also not uncommon, as his book version painted an 'ideal form' of himself that was a bigender deity, and he concludes his thoughts about Beatrice with what's essentially gender envy. These factors have led to a portion of the audience viewing him as a transgender youth.
• Ugly Cute:
  • The Peccatulum Irae, while as visceral looking as other Peccatulums, is often depicted as at least a little bit cute in fanart due to its almost cartoonishly simple face and big goofy eyes.
  • The Blubbering Toad, despite being a dangerous foe and a grotesque frog leaking depression-inducing slime, is not only relatively peaceful for an Abnormality, but also has a dopey, pitiful demeanor, along with a round and cute design comparable to a stress toy or plushie.
• The Woobie:
  • Yuri. To say that she's been through a lot is an understatement. It's implied that the fall of Lobotomy Corporation has reduced her to scraping by, and even during her working days in Lobotomy Corporation, she was treated in the same manner as any other employee (i.e. like cannon fodder). Her treatment during Chapter 1 isn't pleasant either; She's betrayed by another Grade 8 Fixer, a coworker from her Office, and is left to die. And by the end of the Chapter, she finally meets her end courtesy of an Abnormality.
  • Sinclair too, really; First his family starts fully converting themselves into inhuman cyborgs, and then they pressure him into doing it once he's graduated high school without bothering to see if he'd want it. He does manage to make a friend, but.. she turns out to be a fanatical, possible Yandere, Chosen One of an insane cult operated by N Corp. that aims to kill everyone who uses prosthetics, who then slaughters his entire family. And then he joins Limbus Company...
  • While a lot of Identities in Season 1 are in bad situations, N Corp. Heathcliff is considered the most unfortunate. He is painfully aware that he is trapped in a cult, but he is too exhausted and overworked to do anything about it. His death line also has him weakly call out for Catherine.
  • In Season 2, Lobotomy E.G.O. Heathcliff is in much the same situation (only the Technology Liberation terrorist group instead of a cult), made infinitely worse by the emotional bleedthrough of the E.G.O. he's using - Sunshower, from the Drifting Fox, which appears to make the user isolationist and aggressive towards the help or affection of others.
• Woolseyism: Yi Sang is a Pungeon Master towards his own name in the game's native Korean language. That's lost in translation in other languages, so much of his dialogue has to be rewritten. The Hell's Chicken event demonstrates this when Meursault roasts his cooking skills by finding other words in each language that Yi Sang's name rhymes with.
  (In English) "Yi Sang. I must ask if you aim to throng my teeth and prong my tongue by cooking wrong — seeing as this plate's a headstrong lens to ding-dong notions of what food is to you all along."
  (In Japanese) "Yi Sang, true to your namesake you've cooked an utter tragedy. My stomach acid is roiling and I wonder if you're trying to make me contract stomach cancer. I rest my case."