YMMV / 20XX

• Alternative Character Interpretation: It is obvious that Sharp is the one running the Very Safe Labs, which offer some extremely powerful but very dangerous augments for free. Is he running the lab to test the prototypes on Nina and Ace even though they could destroy them? Or is he genuinely trying to help the duo succeed in their mission, as it was hinted he isn't as cruel as his partner, Flat? Perhaps it is a mix of both.
• Anticlimax Boss: The game's Final Boss is a bit of a letdown compared to what comes before. Compared to Sharp's Mirror Boss tactics and challenging yet fun fight, Flat in the Omega Model is more or less a few mini-stages with some special enemies sprinkled about, and doesn't even start attacking on its own until its health is down to 60%.
• Awesome Music: Oh yes. Hear it in its full synthetic glory here!
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Most Gamma level enemies can be mildly frustrating to fight, but some stand out in particular:
    • Gamma Creeps. They'll always leap at you from offscreen, detonating in an enormous explosion of bullets that's incredibly difficult to react to and dodge.
    • Gamma Lurkers are somehow even worse than Gamma Creeps. They're capable of taking far more damage and their needle attack creates a needle explosion that you have to retreat to avoid.
    • Gamma Blasters fire an enormous volume of bullets at your character. If you don't have Oxjack's Guile or a Force Nova when you approach one, especially when in close quarters, it's near impossible to avoid the flurry of bullets.
    • Gamma Maintcores project shields upon all enemies in a big radius. Getting through the army of almost-invincible enemies without taking a hit is difficult, to say the least, especially if you don't have the Mortar or a Quantum Spook on you.
    • Gamma Flapps will initiate a dodge immediately after detecting weapon fire, and then charge straight at the player. They struggle to dodge melee attacks, but if you're trying to attack them at range... And if you're playing with Wrath (doubles enemy damage), Furor (increases enemy attack speed), or anything like that they become a very credible threat for a semi-common enemy.
  • While Soul enemies are notably dangerous, Soul Maintcores the most painful, due to the combination of how often they put up their shields and how much their health has been bolstered. Lord help you if you have to fight a Gamma Soul Maintcore, which will also shield all nearby enemies and is nigh-impossible to kill off unscathed without the Quantum Spook or the Mortar.
  • Soul versions of Beta Arkors are also particularly dangerous, due to their vastly increased rate of fire. Good luck approaching one with all that mortar spam. Interestingly, Gamma Arkors don't gain an increased fire rate as a Soul version.
  • Beta Gromes. No, not the Gamma Gromes - the Beta versions. They're remarkably tanky (but still less than a Gamma), but what makes them worse than their Gamma counterpart is that the Betas shoot homing missiles, while the Gammas won't attempt to home in. The frustration is further compounded by how the Betas are far more common than Gammas.
• Funny Moments:
  • Text pops up when you pick things up, often including some sort of joke, but the prize has to go to the interaction of the Kingseeker prototype aug ("Bathe in glory") and the System Restore, which purges its downsides ("Bathe however you like!")
  • There's a prototype aug that gives you one of each repro, and a regular aug that doubles every repro you pick up from that point onward. They stack.◊
  • Some of the game over quotes can be pretty amusing as well.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Brutish Augmentation from the Very Safe Labs gives your buster/blade damage an inherent x1.5 boost in exchange for setting your energy reserves to zero and disables boss powers. This is supposed to be a detrimental trade-off... However, considering just how versatile the buster/blade is and how the player can outright ignore boss powers in exchange for stat boosts, this is nowhere near as detrimental as one may think. Also note how this boost is a multiplier, not a stat boost. This means that when stacked even with a small amount of buster/blade damage boost can allow the player to absolutely shred through most enemies and bosses with little effort. The player trades an array of situationally useful abilities to amp up their versatile, infinite-use main weapon. This is probably the only prototype aug which can be taken without regretting it later.
  • Hysteria Augmentation from the VSL, doubles the strength of any subsequent augment you get. If you get it early enough this is a Disc-One Nuke and makes getting very far in Endless trivial... so long as you can deal with tripled damage intake.
  • Core Augment sets in general are absurdly powerful, but special mention to the Armatoise set. Collecting all four pieces (or three, if using Patchwork Connector) makes you flat immune to most environmental hazards. Paired with Gapminder and/or boosts to Jump Height, platforming becomes a breeze. This is in top of immunity to knockback, the ability to erase projectiles with a charged shot, the ability to hover and bonus armor on health pick-up. While it's a bit of Luck-Based Mission to acquire, Patchwork Connector, Thrillseeker and Choice Booster all make it much easier to put together Armatoise or any other set.
  • Within a few days of his release, Draco's name was dominating the leaderboards. His design sacrifices some versatility in special powers, which are flashy but not very important, for the ability to have multiple primary weapons. The primary weapons in this game are often very specialized, so the ability to have multiples is game-changing. For stages Draco can use his insanely powerful bow, Gemini. For bosses Draco can use Ace's Plasma Blender to eviscerate his foes in record time (literally). You can use his third weapon slot for the double jump attack he starts with. Armatort's set pushes this further - the Blender will automatically block projectiles so that you can just stand in front of a boss blending it without taking any damage in return. This set also negates all damage from stage hazards, meaning you won't need those utility powers that Draco loses out on.
  • The double jump core for the legs, when combined with even a small amount of jump boost completely neuters any platforming challenge the game throws at you. It is possible to completely jump over large sections of the levels with enough jump boost added to the character.
• Goddamned Bats: Flapp enemies. They all usually die in one hit but they become so numerous and common that they will get a few hits on any player trying to go too fast. ^note Apparently Flapp's infamy did not go unnoticed as version 1.3 added the "Unflappable" augment which renders them harmless.
• Goddamned Boss: Eternal Star and Death Lotus can easily become this for Ace. Eternal Star will slowly follow the player, but he summons tons of smaller enemies and has bottomless pits in his arena, making it difficult to find opportunities to land in attacks. Lotus can pop in parts of his arena that range from awkward to downright impossible for Ace to hit him consistently, especially since most of the platforms are the disappearing/reappearing blocks.
• Good Bad Bugs: When it was first introduced, the Meganut would immediately offer 25 Nuts to anyone who picked it up. Not bad in of itself, until you realize it was also initially sold in shops. The current item description notes that selling money was not a wise business decision.
• Nightmare Fuel: The Prototype Augs. From the oh so reassuring pickup text ("You feel your sanity slip", anyone?) to its Datalore entries. Theres also the bones you can encounter in the levels- while interacting with them makes it turn into an aug, the text that appears while doing so can be dark ("Nobody is born on purpose").
• Obvious Judas: You mean those two Jerkasses who constantly insult and belittle you no matter how well you do, condescendingly refer to you as "it", try to screw you out of your payment twice, and are clearly expecting you to die horribly, are the bad guys? Who would've thought?
• Scrappy Weapon: All characters have at least one:
  • The Rippling Axe for Ace. A hefty damage multiplier and the fact that attacks done in midair are always charged makes it seem very appealing, but the main downside is that aerial attacks will cancel any horizontal mobility. Considering the amount of verticality the game has mid stage, this seriously cripples Ace to being very difficult to control during the stages themselves, but able to shred through any of the stationary bosses.
  • The Wave Beam for Nina. It does have a natural wall piercing ability, but its wavy pattern makes this weapon unreliable to take out small critters like Flapps or Bzzombs, not to mention that its wall piercing can be rendered redundant by the Quantum Spook augment.
  • The Protorifle for Hawk. While you do start out with it, it has a poor damage output, made even worse by Hawk's starting sub weapon power of -5. The game is well aware of this and encourages you to replace it as soon as possible.
  • The Seeking Striker for Hawk. On paper it is supposed to be a good weapon: locks-on and rockets itself to hit the closest enemy. However this weapon has a terrible tendency to target enemies behind walls (which it cannot go through without a specific augment) and miss small ones like Flapps and Bzzombs even at medium to close ranges. If used too far from an enemy it will even fail to trigger and will simply flop and explode on the ground.
  • The Volt Edge for Draco. While it's not a bad weapon per se and is Draco's only ranged option at the start, it feels very underwhelming, stops at walls and is easily outclassed by other ranged weapons like Gemini (better range and faster), Forkalator (covers a much better area) or Scattershot (raw damage).
  • As for Powers, the Shadespur is often skipped for the Nutstack/Aug bonus. This is mostly due to the weapon's main gimmick - it fires in the direction that the Contractor moves in. This makes it very awkward to use, especially when jumping or landing, and not to mention its range is limited by your speed, a stat which players tend to invest little in unless they're speedrunners. It does have a little use in locking the "yoku block" platforms, but it's situational as yoku blocks are generous enough as-is.
  • While none of the Core Augment sets are actively bad, the Oxjack set can be a very underwhelming. It does provide some protection against projectiles and excellent mobility in the form of a four way airdash. However, its mobility is of limited use in boss fights, isn't that much better than other methods of boosting mobility, can be hard to control and pales in comparison to the other sets. Who needs a couple extra air-dashes when you could have immunity to most hazards, spammed charge-shots and super-boosted powers?
  • Oxjack's helmet is likely the worst core augment in the game: it fires a single projectile forwards when you dash. A bolt that doesn't even benefit from your Attack and Power damage bonuses, but is instead buffed by your movement speed. It can be somewhat handy as Ace early on, but on Nina, who already has a free long-ranged weapon, it's utterly useless outside of *very* specific builds.
• That One Achievement:
  • The "Bold" achievement. Clear Level 1 with pretty much every challenge skull enabled. Not enough? How about getting to Level 3 with the same stipulation! The latter achievement is named "Probably Cheating" for a reason.^note One of the skulls required for it, Lightning, which forced the game to run faster than usual was removed from this making this achievement slightly more manageable. The key word here is "slightly".
  • "Ancestor Worship" requires you to finish the game with two challenge skulls: Rock and Purist. Rock makes lava (of any color), spikes (of any type, including the blowtorch-like fire on Agnisort), bottomless pits, and Boltpairs (laser traps on Skytemple) to instantly kill you and Purist makes any Core Augs (armor pieces) to vanish from the current game which means no double jump, hover, fly or air dash to avoid stage hazards and they're everywhere from the start to the very end of the game. While you can mitigate the difficulty of this achievement by knowing the hidden properties of special weapons, all it takes is a brief moment of carelessness to see that game over screen.
• That One Boss:
  • While most Level 8 bosses are difficult, but manageable, Level 8 Rollster Beta is quite possibly the most frustrating boss in the whole game, mostly due to the splitting ability: you must concentrate attacks on one Rollster during the fight, or you're going to end up with four Rollsters onscreen, all doing that damned bouncing move they use at half health. Even if you manage to kill them one by one, it's difficult to avoid all the Rollsters, with smaller ones becoming faster. While you'll probably have the Flameshield by the time you get to a Level 8 Rollster, you probably won't have enough energy to last the whole fight, and even if you do, the Flameshield is rather annoying to use and comparatively weak against Rollster.
  • Level 4+ Twin Astrals come in at a close second, mostly because of their ability to turn red. Upon doing so, the fireball spread shot now covers all directions instead of just in front of the Astral, the homing fireballs attack fires two at a time, and both attacks shoot faster. The only saving grace here is that they'll only turn red if you destroy one first without the other immediately after, so defeating them simultaneously avoids the difficult part of the fight.
• That One Level:
  • Agnisort, Perforator Alpha and Rollster Beta's stages on Levels 7 and 8 tend to be quite problematic if you don't have good augments. The level is generated in such a way that you will always have to battle large groups of enemies in cramped spaces or at unfavorable ground with stage hazards getting your way. Without Quantum Spook to hit through walls, or some way to quickly destroy enemies you might get hit a lot while fighting the enemies. While Nina can have a break with her long range, Ace will almost always struggle with this level since only one of his weapons has decent range. Additionally, there are some gaps that require either a leg augment or some other jump enhancement to cross; if you don't have those, then you are in for a bad day.
  • Frostor, Shatterbeak and Vile Visage's stages on Levels 7 and 8 are nothing short of frustrating to play at times mostly because this level loves to generate Maintcores, even Gamma Soul ones, which will give shields to every enemy close by which will make dealing with them much harder. Additionally, the icicle shooter hazards can be somewhat unpredictable as they shoot based on player proximity, and they appear a LOT in this level.
  • Level 9 is a very long gauntlet loaded with all the obstacles and hazards of all the previous stages. It also has some very long periods without solid ground, even more than Skytemple, and as a result you can get sent quite a ways back if you fall into a pit. To make matters worse, crates, item chests, vending machines, and shop teleporters are all very sparse or nonexistant until you reach the boss door. You'll have to make do with what drops from enemies here. Notably, the stage after this one is a bit easier due to fewer pits and the presence of crates and vending machines within the stage, though it does feature a much nastier boss.