YMMV / Lords of the Fallen (2023)

• Anti-Climax Boss: The Final Boss of the Radiant path, Adyr, the Bereft Exile. The fight is a Flunky Boss that revolves around you doing nothing more than killing specified minions that stand around the arena. Some have speculated this to be a deliberate reference to King Allant from Demon's Souls, with both fights containing monologues (In this case, Adyr desperately attempting to sway you to his side), and the fight leading up to it being a more traditional boss fight against another king.
  • Out of all the beacon-guarding bosses The Hollow Crow ends up being an annoying Flunky Boss - despite it's imposing design and good leadup through Stigmas the Crow itself barely attacks you outside of summoning some ice projectiles and the actual fight is focused on chasing down Lucys ghost and Soulflaying her in order to damage the boss, all while enemies keep getting summoned into the arena.
• Best Boss Ever: One notable point of improvement between games is the boss fights; this time around, they are MUCH better.
  • Pieta, She of Blessed Renewal acts as a Wake-Up Call Boss, coming after the first proper area past the tutorial and the first real major challenge between the player and the rest of the game. While challenging as an early-game boss, she is also a very fun fight, with a set of melee combos the player can parry for rapid stagger buildup, energy beams and explosions she can use from range to apply pressure against ranged builds, and in phase 2 she gains wings and the ability to summon clones of herself for long-distance melee strikes, and starts flying around the arena, forcing melee players to dig into their ranged weapons to keep up damage. She's overall a fantastic start to the real game and is a fantastically designed appetizer for the bosses to come.
  • Later in the game, exploring the Revelation Depths secret area brings you to the big-ticket Superboss of the game, Harrower Dervla the Pledged Knight. She's a knight in black armor, wielding a massive black sword and a crossbow, and she is one hell of a bout, being able to apply pressure at all ranges and even being able to heal by giving herself Wither buildup which the player can nullify with carefully timed attacks. However, the real fight happens in her second phase, where she falls over dead, and the young boy she was protecting breaks free from his shackles through sheer force of will, crawls to her corpse, and fuses with it into the Unbroken Promise, resulting in a much more savage moveset. All this set to a theme that combines tragic overtones with a determined, driving tempo, culminating in an utterly intense bout that serves as the player's first major obstacle to getting the Umbral ending.
  • The Lightreaper is a boss that gets built up throughout the game after beheading the original owner of your lamp in the opening, killing you in the tutorial, and appearing in several Stigmas just before killing lampbearers, and he does not disappoint. He has three phases, each one getting more and more dangerous with rampant usage of Ignite buildup, and if you don't find and destroy the parasite under the arena in the final encounter, he'll have a Healing Factor throughout, making passive play all but impossible. He combines a flurry of rapid attacks and devastating projectiles with a downright infuriating cocky attitude, which makes beating him all the more satisfying, especially since he was specifically created to hunt and kill lampbearers by Adyr, and defeating him proves you are far and away the deadliest lampbearer, bar none. He even can cap off Andreas of Ebb's questline by way of Antanas' descendant actually helping you fight him.
  • The Iron Wayfarer, who stands between you and The Very Definitely Final Dungeon of the Radiance ending path, Bramis Castle. He wields a massive hammer and hits like a damn freight train, and can inflict hefty wither buildup, resulting in him cutting through your health bar in two or three blows if you've slacked on leveling vitality. Add that to the explosions he can send out and the enclosed space you fight him in, and you've got one hell of a swan song for Harkyn.
• Fandom Rivalry: Due to both games releasing closely to one another, one sprung up between this game and Lies of P, since both are Soulslikes with a different approach to the formula. Not helping matters was the poor technical state Lords of the Fallen released in, with many performance problems, serious bugs, crashes etc, contrasting with Lies of P which was praised for releasing in a very polished and optimized state on all platforms.
• Game-Breaker: Combining the mana regen ring, mana regen rune, Aura of Tenacity, and Invigorating Aura will make you very hard to kill for a very long time, especially if you combine them with the best armor you've got. If you'd rather heal with other methods than Invigorating Aura, Aura of Tenacity on its own will never run out if you have the mana regen ring and mana regen rune equipped.
  • On the Inferno side of things, they have Seismic Slam, a spell that, with a little bit of spacing, does massive damage in an area, and doesn't cost very much mana.
• Goddamned Bats: The faceless Remnants permanating the Umbral realm will constantly flock to you in droves whenever you cross over there (whether through dying or to progress through the level) and as mentioned under Scrappy Mechanic: they spawn indefinitely. Even in large groups they aren't exactly a threat, drop negligible amounts of Vigor and can screw with your lock-on if you're fighting something else. The only real danger they pose is either hitting you and taking away your withered health (which is a common thing in Umbral) or simply body-blocking you against a wall when you're fighting a stronger adversary. Not even being in Axiom can save you from them as some areas have their "corporeal" reskinned enemies although these mercifully do not respawn all the time.
• Jerkass Woobie: The Iron Wayfarer, AKA Harkyn. His defeat of Antanas may have saved the world, but history chose to remember him as a common criminal that slew a man trying to change the world, not even bothering to remember his name. Add that to his mangled left arm and the fact that he's still alive 1000 years later and despite him being a convicted criminal, it's hard not to feel sorry for him that his one chance at redeeming himself was handwaved and ignored.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • For players that want to know more about the world of the game, they can do so through item descriptions (as per tradition in the genre). However, in order to read them, the player has to increase their radiant and inferno stats, which may seem frustrating if they're trying for a no-magic build, since they would be forced to spend vigor on stats that they had no intention of using in the first place.
  • New Game+ saw significant backlash for opting to disable all normal Vestiges save for the one at Skyrest. The only other checkpoints available are those created by Vestige Seedlings, which require a consumable. While Skyrest has a merchant that sells them and will never run out, only one Vestige Seedling can be active at a given time. However, it should be noted that the game's world was originally designed with this in mind, and relegating it to New Game+ was already a compromise.This was eventually acknowledged by the developers and they announced plans to patch the game with a customizable NG+, allowing people to tweak its difficulty to their liking.
  • A number of aspects of the Umbral realm have been criticized, namely its mechanic of spawning enemies if you stay in there for too long. While this is an intriguing concept on paper, realistically players have to spend a decent amount of time in Umbral to progress, and as such a game that already has fairly high enemy density often becomes very frustrating to play as you get swarmed with an absurd number of enemies. This was among the most recurring complaints about the game, to the point the developers announced plans to address the enemy density for NG in key areas, with only NG+ retaining the original design for the intended experience of a higher difficulty.
  • The Lightreaper is encountered at four different points in the game, serving as functionally a Hopeless Boss Fight for its first two encounters especially due to the lack of equipment you have to work with, and only fighting you one time in each area before moving to the next spot. Souls titles are no stranger to having an exceptionally difficult Early-Bird Boss encounter that carries steep challenges with no guarantee of rewards beyond bragging rights, but the Lightreaper is uniquely poised in that it actively punishes you before you kill it at its final arena, preventing you from completing a numbers of character quests.
• Spiritual Successor: The developers stated that they took aspects from multiple Souls titles when crafting the game.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: The original Lords of the Fallen sold decently, but was generally considered a mediocre and underwhelming game that has only aged worse as time has gone by with the Soulslike genre becoming more and more saturated. While this game has launched to a mixed reception, even most detractors will agree it is a more memorable and interesting game with new and potentially compelling ideas (such as the dual world mechanic).