YMMV / Phoenotopia: Awakening

• Awesome Art: This game really pushes its pixel artstyle to its limit with gorgeous backgrounds and lively, adorable character animation. And then there's certain cutscenes...
• Awesome Music: Same as the original, pretty much the entire soundtrack qualifies. Can be found here.
• Difficulty Spike: Happens in Atai, where there are more dangerous enemies and certain scenarios where you have to pay money to progress (bribing the prison guard and buying wine for the prisoner, which requires you to dye your hair), not helped by the fact that it's hard to earn at this point, and some enemies can steal it from you. The three trials you have to do in the Ouroboros hideout are also very difficult, and the place only has one save point that you'll have to keep backtracking to between them. Things get a bit better once you get the Lifesaver, allowing you to cross water safely, and you can easily get more food and money if you save up for a fishing rod.
• Genius Bonus: The Anuri Temple is home to the Century Toad boss. "Anura" is the taxonomic order comprising frogs and toads.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
  • It's a fairly niche game in any country, but seems to have gotten a small but devoted Japanese following, likely thanks to the high quality translation by the publisher Flyhigh Works. The Japanese twitter tag seems to be more active than the English, and the game even featured on the Japan specific speedrunning event RTA in Japan on Summer 2021.
  • On Steam, it seems the most common language for reviews is Chinese.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: A common complaint about this game, especially pre-patches. The combination of a stamina meter (that is pitifully short at the start of the game), brief-to-no invincibility window, slow consumption of food, and low money drop rates have soured the game to many players, usually at around the Atai area. This seems to have been largely rectified via patches to the game, however, seeing as the Steam release got a much warmer reception than the Switch one.
• Player Punch: Your reward for befriending Birdy after she's sent to jail? She gets sent to the guillotines. Granted, it turns out she was literally allowed to go look at Atai's old guillotines, but until you find that out, it's heartbreaking to think that, right after you came to understand her, she had to die.
• Surprise Difficulty: The artstyle is cute. The world is vibrant and colorful. The characters are quirky and most NPCs are nice to Gail. Both the main plot and the subplots are largely idealistic and full of humor. The gameplay, meanwhile, has a Dark Souls inspired stamina mechanic, and several other difficult aspects (see the It's Hard, So It Sucks! entry above). This has taken many reviewers and players off guard, particularly when the game was first released.
• That One Boss: Katash stays well out of bat range for most of his fight, is capable of stealing and eating your food to regain health (and rob you of essential healing items), and midway through the fight, he summons a spaceship with a laser attack that is very difficult to dodge.
• That One Puzzle: There are many difficult puzzles, but one of the most frustrating ones is in one of the GEO dungeons, where you have to rely on Scabers pressing all the buttons in the room at the same time. You can stall them with the slingshot or crossbow, but that might also cause them to change directions, and you can't use more than one remote bomb at a time to keep one of the buttons pressed.

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