YMMV / ENDER LILIES: Quietus of the Knights

• Anti-Climax Boss: The Final Boss is very underwhelming compared to the other bosses that came before it. The boss has a massive amount of HP and can kill Lily in just a few hits, and also gains a second form if you're going for the Golden Ending. Even so, the boss can't move, isn't that aggressive, has attacks that are blatantly telegraphed and slow to execute, and makes long-range attacks frighteningly effective because of the boss's short reach; on the other hand, short-ranged attacks are also effective due to the boss lacking many means of attacking Lily if she's right in front of it. If anything, the constant stream of minions the boss summons are often more dangerous than the boss itself, as they have a lot of health and powerful homing attacks, and you'll likely run out of ammo for your best Spirit attacks during the last stretch of the fight due to the amount of health it has.
• Awesome Art: The lighting, scenery and environmental design in the game is gorgeous.
• Awesome Music: The game's soundtrack is composed by Mili, who does a great job at conveying the tones of mysticism and despair that permeate the game. Some notable examples include the themes for the White Parish and Cliffside Hamlet.
• Breather Boss:
  • Hoenir, Keeper of the Abyss, is frankly a pushover compared to the other bosses fought around the same time. Sure, he's fast and constantly tries to keep his distance, but the damage he does per hit is pitiful up until he Turns Red (and even then it's on the low side), making taking hits far less punishing. While the Dark Axemen he summons hit hard, they're also less sturdy than the Axemen regularly encountered in the game, and can't use their teleportation ability to its full potential, allowing you to dispatch them easily with spirit attacks. Most of the difficulty of the fight boils down to beating through his wall of respawning minions and chasing him down, turning him into a Goddamned Boss.
  • Although Miriel has extremely punishing attacks that can get overwhelming if you don't know what you're doing, she's a completely stationary, massive target with generous telegraphs for most of her more dangerous attacks. You wouldn't expect a boss like her to lie at the end of the very difficult penultimate dungeon.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Many players include Eilene in their spirit loadouts due to the fact she fires homing projectiles and has plenty of uses so you can pick off enemies at a distance and shoot down flying enemies. Her Last Rites is also capable of dealing tremendous damage to anything Eilene is planted directly on top of (enough to usually refund its SP cost), making it useful against large enemies like Miriel or the final boss.
• Complete Monster: The last King of Land's End was a selfish man who considered everyone but himself disposable. Obsessed with gaining immortality, the King ordered his mages to conduct mass human experimentation with the Blight, turning many of them into horrific monstrosities in unending torment. When the White Priestess Fretia was becoming too corrupted by the Blight, the King also had little clone girls of her created to take her Blight and die in her place. Despite being dead before the game begins, the King was instrumental in causing the destruction of Land's End.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • The twisted humanoid mutants in the Verboten Domain have an enormous amount of health for how often they appear while doing just as much damage, enough to kill Lily in as few as two direct hits depending on her stats. They also have more attack variety than most of the enemies in the game and are more difficult to predict, having a rapid slash, an uppercut that reaches extremely far, a ground slam that produces a wave of highly damaging spikes, and a Flechette Storm of spikes if you try to take them from behind. Sometimes, the best course of action is to simply skip over them instead of picking a fight.
  • The huge piles of fused bodies and limbs frequently found in the Verboten Domain. Although they can't move (except for a few found deep in the Domain), their fast tentacle swipes cover an extremely wide area, deal massive damage, and can be used multiple times in succession with virtually no downtime. They also possess a radial tentacle spike attack that can catch players off guard if they weather the swing attack. On top of that, they have a lot of health, meaning that no matter how you approach them, they aren't going down easily. Dashing through them to skip them is not ideal either, as their hitbox is so massive that you'll take Collision Damage if you try it.
  • The flying creatures found in the Abyss. They're like the smaller ones from the Verboten Domain, except they have much more health, increased damage, and much faster projectiles with strong homing to ensure that you usually need to dash to avoid them, on top of being airborne to make them hard to hit. Worse still, they don't come alone, so they can pin you from multiple directions easily. Fittingly, the Final Boss loves summoning them in their fight, and it's telling that they're arguably more dangerous than the boss itself.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Flying enemies, as expected for a platformer. You first have to face crows that hover just outside your airborne melee range and pepper you with bullets, and this escalates to mushroom mages, flying gargoyles, and dragons. The more damaging ones that show up late-game border on Demonic Spiders, like the eyeball monsters mentioned above.
  • Knights are a little tricky to fight since they have shields that block frontal attacks. Attacking them from afar is a waste of ammo as projectiles just bounce off the shields. The game teaches you to dash behind them to strike them from behind, although it won't take long before they turn around. You do get Spirits that can slip behind them to damage them, but the later levels, like the Twin Spires and Ruined Castle, will throw in heavier knights that react more quickly and take more punishment (and more Spirit charges) before they go down.
• Moe: Lily is small, adorable, somewhat helpless on her own, and often acts in an endearing way befitting of an innocent child. She also stays selfless, kind, and determined despite the dreary setting and incredible suffering she goes through over the game, making it hard not to feel protective of her.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Pretty much everything that has to do with the Blighted is some shades of this due to the sheer Body Horror involved, but especially the Verboten Domain, an Abandoned Laboratory filled with heavily mutated Blighted from the inhumane experimentation, toxic miasma, and mycelium growths that gradually become replaced with disgusting Meat Moss the further down you go (including moving mouths and countless eyeballs that stare at you), combined with highly unsettling music that features organic-sounding clicking noises which give the impression that the entire domain is alive and hostile.
  • The Abyss is even worse than the Verboten Domain. The background becomes completely covered by gnarled black roots, bright red vines and flowers which look like viscera, the terrain is solely made of dead-looking moss, and the "music" consists of a Drone of Dread punctuated by strange creaking and what sound like choking gasps. At the bottom of the Abyss, there's a constant dripping of water from said vines, which combined with the lighting and scenery gives the impression that the entire place is literally bleeding.
• Tear Jerker: The majority of the character backstories are this:
  • Silva purposely became a guardian of the White Parish to spare her sister Siegrid from the duty, even if she knew it'd drive a wedge between their relationship. It turned out to be All for Nothing, as Silva and Siegrid both fell victim to the Blight, with Silva's last wishes being to see her sister again.
  • Gerrod refused to be purified after his many battles, knowing that it put the White Priestess through immense pain. To that end, he bore his pain in silence and died a lonely death protecting the doomed citizens.
  • Ulv was shunned due to his Blood Knight tendencies and difficulty expressing himself, before Fretia became his Only Friend and taught him that there was more in life than battle. Even after he eventually became Blighted, he continued defending the flowers Fretia had admired with him.
  • Julius spent his entire life trying to prove himself worthy to his father who abandoned him, only to find out too late that he was an Immortality Seeker who had sacrificed his entire kingdom for his own greed.
  • Faden ventured into the Verboten Domain with his lover Miriel to find a cure for the Blight, only to be driven insane when she was transformed into an abomination. By the time he realized all of the horrific experiments he had done to try and bring her back had only caused suffering to others, it was already too late.
  • Fretia had it the worst, since she almost destroyed her body to contain the Blight, was forced to watch her cloned daughters get repeatedly sacrificed in a vain attempt to replicate her role and keep her alive, and still failed to prevent calamity from erupting in the end. When you find her in the Abyss at the end of the game, she succumbs to the Blight and transforms into the final boss, and if you're going for Ending C, this boss gets up for a second round... but as it falls to low health it stops attacking you and silently weeps while an emotional reprise of the main theme is playing, showing that Fretia's still fighting the Blight from the inside and doesn't want to hurt Lily any further.
  • In a case of Nothing Is Sadder, the secondary spirits usually just get a few-sentences long description on how they became blighted, leaving the player's imagination to fill in what exactly happened. It doesn't make their emotional wallop any less powerful.
• That One Boss:
  • Ulv, the Mad Knight. He's very aggressive, does high damage with many of his moves hitting twice or thrice in succession, has three phases and can take a long time to kill if you haven't upgraded your spirits yet, making him quite a battle of endurance. Some of his attacks (such his the cross slash or the pillar summoning) come out very quickly and also require very good timing and/or positioning to avoid, more so than the other bosses the player will have faced up until that point and even some of the ones after.
  • If Ulv wasn't enough to stall your progress, Knight Captain Julius will gladly do it in his stead. He's just as tanky and hard-hitting as the likes of Ulv, and while he's also quite a bit slower, he compensates by inheriting the mechanic of the Knight enemies where he blocks frontal damage when not attacking, which greatly exacerbates his massive health; it can also cancel his telegraphs if he blocks during the windup of his attacks, catching you off guard. His lance also gives him a surprising amount of reach on his attacks, especially as he loses health and starts adding in extended lunges and thrusts, as well as a backwards swipe that is designed to nail you if you were trying to stay behind him. His last phase is also his most dangerous, as while the massive boost of aggression he gets reduces his ability to block your moves, he now attacks so frequently that he can overwhelm Lily incredibly quickly, which points to the solution being to keep your distance...which is where Julius also brings a Wave-Motion Gun that is a nearly guaranteed one-shot if you can't get behind him during the windup (albeit being a massive window for damage if you did).
• That One Level:
  • The Ruined Castle is a big step up from every previous area, as it's stuffed to the brim with Elite Mooks that have a lot of health and heavy-hitting area attacks, with several encounters trapping you in enclosed areas with multiple of them. Many of the enemies also use shields that deflect frontal damage, forcing you to bait out attacks before whittling them down.
  • The Verboten Domain is frequently considered the hardest and most annoying area to go through. It's staffed with tons of obnoxious enemies that have very high stats and hard to avoid attacks, and is full of toxic gas and water that drains your HP at an alarming rate. Even the gas mask you can obtain only lowers the damage they cause; without it, you're likely to die to the environment before even fighting the enemies. And even then, the gas makes all the enemies that much harder to even spot in the first place meaning that you will be taking a lot of cheap hits from near impossible to see enemies until one learns where they are and can dodge them from memory.
  • There's a particular section of the Abyss that forces you into a platforming segment requiring judicious use of all of your movement techniques, all while concentrated Deadly Gas rapidly drains your health even with the gas mask (and will instantly kill you without it). This turns it into a Timed Mission with a painfully short timer even with your Prayers - and doing it without good prayer Relics (or worse, prayer restrictions) is nearly impossible. Worse still, because there's a Stone Tablet Fragment and an Ancient Soul held at the bottom, doing this section is mandatory for both the Golden Ending and fully upgrading the Umbral Knight.
• The Woobie:
  • The vast majority of the characters in the game could qualify this, what with most of them being innocents forcefully turned into suffering abominations, or Fallen Heroes and heroines who gave their lives to protect their people and still failed in the end. Memoirs and lore show that their final moments were all filled with despair or regret, with them only finding peace after you purify them.
  • Lily herself, a little amnesiac girl who awakens to find a world completely consumed by ruin, with all but one being she meets instantly trying to kill her, only to get instantly saddled with an insane responsibility for something she had no part in. Despite her being unable to speak, the player can see her putting on a brave front despite being evidently anxious and afraid, and the pain throughout her entire journey is clearly visible, both from lamenting the stories of those before her and the physical strain of purifying the Blight.

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