YMMV / Dungeon Encounters

• Audience-Alienating Premise: The idea of a JRPG with basically nothing in common with a conventional JRPG (lack of story, graphics, or music) except seemingly-simplistic JRPG gameplay from a company that is basically characterized by its success in the JRPG industry did not really resonate with people very well, and the Invisible Advertising didn't help boost its popularity. The result is a game that aims for a very particular niche, and for fans of that niche is a very successful game and potentially a modern Cult Classic, but outside of that niche receives very polarizing opinions.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • The Treasure Hunter encounter is usually the first test of how much the player is willing to tolerate the game's ability to screw you over. It can be fought as early as Floor 9 and the game warns you that this is a bad idea by telling you its stats in advance, but players who do decide to fight it anyway usually not only discover that you can have negative money, but find themselves tens to hundreds of thousands of Gold in debt with very little way to make that money back given how early you can fight Treasure Hunters. They become trivially easy to beat once you become capable of fighting enemies in 60F and lower, but for new players this experience is typically the first indication that the game will not hold your hand.
  • Mummies. While they only have 1 HP, they have huge Physical and Magic Defense values that make slogging through their health a chore if you don't have a Shuriken or Enchanted Shuriken. They also have the deadly Dissolve attack, an Armor-Piercing Attack that does disproportionate amounts of damage for an attack that bypasses your Defense. Characters will usually only survive taking a Dissolve to the face twice or thrice before keeling over, and Mummies are a distressingly common encounter in the floors that have them.
• Critical Dissonance: Many reviews of the game have been fairly glowing, with positive 8/10 scores from many sites, but ask anyone else whose played it and the responses you'll get back will be... mixed.
• Fanfic Fuel: The game gives just enough worldbuilding through the character biographies that filling in the missing story blanks with imagination is a fun way to play the game for some players.
• Game-Breaker: The Javelin. No, not the basic starting Javelin, but the ultra-powerful 350,000 damage one that hits all enemies. It's so powerful that just having one character with one alongside the Dominant Strength ability and decent SPD gear alongside decently-geared allies gives you enough raw strength to plow through post-game battles, including foes whose Defense stats rate in the millions.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: A common complaint about the game by its detractors is the employment of Fake Difficulty in ways that were common in games 20 to 30 years ago but today would be considered "unfair". A player's enjoyment of the game is typically related to how used they are to the game shoving you into dangerous and harmful situations and expecting you to learn what to do to avoid it after the game tears you a new one.
• Scrappy Mechanic: If you want to use Lesser Ascension or Lesser Descension, the game will not help you navigate to a square where it is possible to use it; the game will only tell you if the exact tile you're standing on can be used as a target. If you don't have the map memorized (which, let's face it, why would you), you'll have to check every tile you can until you stumble into a valid target.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: A problem that even some fans have with the game is that combat and exploration don't really get interesting until you're already a few hours in, at around the Floor 30 to Floor 40 mark. This is around the point where you have sufficient traversal abilities to go full Metroidvania on the dungeon and enemies become strong and varied enough that encounters flesh out from "push the attack button to win" into something more along the lines of miniature puzzles where the goal is to get to the end of combat as efficiently as possible before the enemy party overwhelms you.
• Tainted by the Preview: Initial reception to this game's reveal was very cold; many Square fans were upset about the game's minimalist graphics making it look like a cheap indie game, and trailers failed to properly demonstrate the game's gameplay, which is the entire selling point of the game. Two big Final Fantasy names attached to the project didn't really help fan perception, as fans saw it as Square Enix wasting their talent on a budget side project.
• That One Level:
  • The first roadblock many players run into when going for 100% map completion on every floor is Floor 25. Even when every tile is filled out, there's typically one missing tile and no indication of where it is or how you could possibly be missing anything. It's a single hidden tile at the very top right corner of the map, which is particularly weird when there are no hidden tiles anywhere else on the floor. The intent is for you to get Enhanced Awareness and come back so you can find it, but this is still relatively devious for this point in the game.
  • Charting Forgotten Glory tends to give players a headache as the unique gimmick of the area is "toll tiles" where walking on it forces you to lose Gold. Attempting to chart every tile on your first pass without waiting for the Toll Evasion Skill has a bad habit of putting the player in severe debt that is hard to climb out of for the level they're at. In addition, large portions of the map are covered in hidden tiles that can be frustrating to find out until you get Illusion Clairvoyance (saying nothing of Enshrouding Mists, which is 98% hidden tiles).
  • Floor 92 is an absolute nightmare to fully chart as it consists solely of tiny islands scattered across the map that aren't connected to each other in any way. Some of the islands are connected to Floor 93, but most aren't, and there's nothing else to guide you besides estimating the distances between visible islands with your eyesight and warping to them with Teleport or Gambler's Shift. The developers seemed aware of how much of a pain in the ass this floor was as well, as charting it to 100% awards a unique bonus of a whopping 50 Ability Points.
• That One Puzzle: Most of the Math Riddles are notorious for requiring outside knowledge of concepts and mathematic constants that most people would not remember off the top of their head, and some of them have absolutely nothing to do with math whatsoever, such as Riddle 10 (atomic numbers, which are a scientific concept, Riddle 15 (Super Bowl scores, as though the overlap of sports fans and fantasy JRPG fans isn't practically nonexistent) and Riddle 16 (which expects the player to have watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind).