YMMV / Gain Ground

• Difficulty Spike: The first couple of Epoches are tough, but manageable. The third one, however, introduces regular mooks with fast-firing, straight-shooting projectiles, and the game becomes utterly brutal.
• Game-Breaker: A few characters fall into this category:
  • Verbal, who has a fast walking speed, great range on his weapons, and can fire over walls/onto the high ground. In fact, given the combination of his range and ability to high ground at any angle, certain enemies can ONLY be killed by Verbal. Well, Verbal OR Robby- but Robby is VERY slow, and weak against low-ground threats whilst doing so.
    • All speedrun categories in the game heavily utilize Verbal- so much so, that some categories simply off all their other characters and abuse Verbal's speed to rush for the exit of every level to save massive amounts of time, and use his highly flexible weapon set to deal with any levels or bosses where isn't (immediately) viable to do so.
  • Mars is just Verbal with longer range on both of his attacks and the ability to strafe with his arc shot. If you don't need to aim arc shots horizontally or diagonally in a given stage, Mars is a straight upgrade.
  • Mud Puppy has the ability to deal three damage per shot of his special weapon, and can strafe. If he can get right up in a boss' face, he can knock out all of that boss' HP in under a second via spamming the fire button(s).
  • Fire Knight is a suitable side-grade to Mud Puppy. Magic deals two damage per shot, and with Fire Knight's ability to strafe and fire multiple times with both of his weapons, he pretty heavily contests Mud Puppy's role as the best boss-buster. In fact, Fire Knight used to be the preferred character for the Cheat%Hard category^note Using level select to go straight to the final level and beating the final boss thanks to his better mobility and generally higher damage output at non-point-blank range, and was only outclassed when a more direct and speed-reliant strategy was developed that made Athra the best choice^note Given that he was the first character on the roster and had the fastest movement speed.
  • Zaemon can one-frame kill the World 4 boss with a single tornado- which has more HP and trickier movement patterns than any other boss in the game. Killing the other bosses in this way, who don't have the same hitbox bug the World 4 Tank has, isn't all that much harder, either.
  • Glow Knight has this in the most literal sense, given that he can grind out infinite amounts of score via a lingering hitbox glitch on the World 4 boss- or, at least, he does it faster than any other character, even without hacks.
    • Without hacks, a human player using Glow Knight can out-score the game's intended maximum value before the 4-10 level timer runs out with ease.
    • With an auto-clicker, they can outscore over twice that of the game's intended maximum score value before the timer runs out.
    • With a simple Game Genie code to freeze the in-game timer, just a simple five-minute score grind can be enough to overflow the game's score counter past six digits, causing the game to start loading letters into the score display. Grind score for even longer, and other unintended sprites can start bugging their way in as well.

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