Alternate Character Interpretation: The Scavengers initially appear to be selfish people who are spreading The Corruption by cracking open Lost Technology for their own gain. However, the revelation that that technology is Powered by a Forsaken Child raises the possibility that they could be trying to save the deformed foxes trapped inside the obelisks, or at least release them from their suffering.
Demonic Spiders: Many enemies in the Quarry could qualify, but special mention goes to the purple insectoid energy monsters. Not only do they split in half several times before dying, they also hit hard and like many things in the Quarry these attacks drain your maximum health. They also tend to show up in tight areas, limiting your ability to dodge.
Ending Fatigue: Neither ending is gonna let you reach it without putting in a lot of effort.
To get Ending A, you must face a two-phase boss battle against The Heir, a significant difficulty jump from the rest of the game that easily puts it as That One Boss.
To get Ending B, you have to find at least ten of twenty hidden fairies throughout the game world by solving Holy Cross puzzles throughout the world in order to get the back cover of the manual. Getting a secret ending requires you finding all twenty. In addition, after having every other page of the manual, you have to go to the top of the mountain and do the Golden Path puzzle; see That One Puzzle below.
Friendly Fandoms: Inevitable given that The Legend of Zelda inspired Tunic. While it is a bit one-sided given that this game is a bit on the obscure side, you'd be hard pressed to find a Tunic fan that isn't also a Zelda fan.
Game-Breaker: The Wand+Magic Dagger combo attack from using them both at the same time, which freezes enemies in place, fires instantly, and costs as much MP as a typical Wand shot. Very effective at stun-locking almost any enemy in the game, including bosses. Eventually this got nerfed, increasing MP cost to that of four Wand blasts – less than 6 of the Dagger, but enough to make it non-spammable. A secret Holy Cross code can revert this nerf, however.
Goddamned Bats: Faeries have homing elemental attacks that either freeze you or burn you, making you stop in your tracks in order for other enemies to close in and attack. They also have an annoying penchant for moving just out range of your attack and tend to spawn in groups, making blocking their attacks not very reliable either. As soon as player gets their hands on the Wand, Faeries could as well turn into free mana refills... but only assuming Wand is actually equipped at the time of encounter.
Good Bad Bugs: Go to the top of the great library after killing the librarian and throw a bomb at his lifeless corpse. Watch in awe as it slowly floats away. His now invisible hitbox will remain rooted to the spot, however.
A GUN?!spoiler One of the obtainable weapons is a shotgun. A lot of players found this juxtaposition hilarious given the otherwise fantasy-heavy nature of the game, and it's even helped by the fact that the game ITSELF reacts with surprise at the gun being obtainable.
Gun%spoiler Some speedrunners who find the above interpretation of the Ruin Seeker funny made a joke category of getting said gun as fast as possible. Again helped by the fact that there's even an achievement for getting it before the sword.
Popular with Furries: The fact that the player character is an anthropomorphic fox immediately caught the attention of the furry community, especially the Zelda fans within it.
Getting the best ending requires the player to find all of the manual pages. Finding the last two (the front and back covers) requires solving some very hard path-tracing puzzles, which can be challenging to perform even if you look up the answers.
That One Boss: The Heir is a rare example of the Final Boss being this trope. It's the most difficult boss in the game by a wide margin, even with the Easy Levels, Hard Bosses nature of the rest of the game. Apart from wide swings from a massive BFS, it has plenty of ranged magic attacks and a penchant for turning things into a Bullet Hell in the latter half of its HP bar if you're any distance at all outside of the sword. It also tends to get faster the more the HP bar gets drained. And then it gets a second bar, something no other boss in the game has, with zero chances for refilling your items between the phases. And on top of all this, it gets the life-draining ability from the corruption plus the ability to leave trails of the corruption around the battlefield while remaining as aggressive as before. Even if you get all of the possible upgrades, 100% completion and use everything you have, it's still incredible just how difficult this whole ordeal is.
That One Level: The Swamp & The Cathedral are back-to-back levels filled with difficult enemies that you must face immediately after the Heir took away all of your upgrades. It's a very longPlot Tunnel that has several Demonic Spiders and confusing map layouts which make traversal a chore, and it all ends with a gauntlet of mobs of enemies from previous biomes, including a pair of Garden Knights (thankfully you can kill first one before second one spawns).
The "Golden Path". To open the door at the top of the mountain and get the cover, you have to use the D-Pad to put in 100 inputs correctly without screwing up to cast the spell which opens it, or else you're starting over. Thankfully an update added Sequence Assistance, which lets you see your inputs and edit them before actually committing, making the spell much easier, but still pretty time consuming to cast.
Secret Treasure #4 is generally considered to be significantly harder than all of the other Secret Treasures, being an absolute gauntlet of a puzzle. Firstly, you need to utilise clues in the manual to figure out that you need to stay in a pool of water for a minute to reveal a secret riddle on the manual. However, said riddle turns out to be in the same Cypher Language that most of the game's written in, requiring you to learn said language to be able to read the riddle, a task that can easily take several hours of playtime. This would already be enough to warrant this trope, but then the actual riddle itself once you're able to translate it is no easier. You have to transcribe synonyms of words used in the riddle into directions, then combine those directions with numbers mentioned in the riddle to create a Holy Cross code to finally obtain the Secret Treasure. The sheer length and amount of difficult steps necessary, compared to every other Secret Treasure, have made Secret Treasure #4 infamous.
Useless Useful Spell: Holy Cross healing spell. It consumes huge amount of MP to work and it isn't even that powerful. It is only normally becomes available at the end of the game, at which point 1) player already has multiple MP-consuming items that allow more efficient MP application, 2) the only remaining challenges are The Heir and, potentially, enemies that guard remaining Hero Shrines. This means very few opportunities to try out this power, and low utility found in it.
and "Relics of Comradery"