YMMV / HoloCure

• Awesome Music: This is to be expected when you have Hololive music mixed with Eufrik's chiptune handling.
  • "Suspect" (Stage 1) is a catchy tune to match the start of your adventures.
  • "Candy-Go-Round" (Stage 2) is a tune that embodies both being used to what comes your way and the nostalgia from looking at the TV.
  • "Koyoi Wa Halloween Night!" (Stage 3) fits perfectly with the stage's spooky theme, and is enhanced even further thanks to the inclusion of a certain war criminal's iconic laugh.
  • "id:entity" (Stage 4) is a well-fitting tune that embodies the hololive Indonesia theme with their arena that fits with them perfectly.
  • "Shijoshugi Adtruck" (Stage 1 HARD) is significantly more frantic than the regular stage themes, conveying the Difficulty Spike coming your way.
  • "STARDUST SONG" (Stage 2 HARD) is incredibly hype for a chiptune arrange, and the chorus adds to the dramatic feeling of fighting for your life which is likely to happen if you tackle this stage unprepared.
  • "Myth or Treat" (Stage 3 HARD) conveys the tension that's present in the other two hard mode stages along with a spooky tone that sounds more sinister than Stage 3's. And to add to that, it's the first HoloEN song to get remixed.
  • "Asuiro ClearSky" (Time Attack) is an energetic number backed by the cheering of the crowd which makes you feel like you're in the spotlight for an idol performance.
  • Rather than one singular song, the "Holo House" theme is a medley of three different songs; Yume Miru Sora e, Connect the World, and id:entity voices. It's an extremely chill and easy-going theme, perfect for the relaxing nature of Holo House.
• Better Off Sold: Stamps can be obtained during a run, though some are less sought after than others. Plenty of stamps could see themselves being used as fodder for other stamps or sold for more coins.
  • Stamps that only serve as an aesthetic are often foddered off. The Reverse stamp, which makes the main weapon fire backwards, has seen some practical use in certain setups, however.
  • Solo (boosts main weapon attack power for each empty weapon slot) and Unit (debuffs main weapon in exchange for a buff in support weapons) stamps conflict with each other. So, if one is being used, the other will be shafted.
  • Projectile Up stamp is only effective on characters with a multishot main weapon, and is a Junk Rare on the others. Special mention goes to Roboco as her main weapon loses its multishot characteristic when it is awakened (i.e. reaches max level).
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Before the 0.4 update, Veteran players often stick to getting the Plushie, Headphones, Nurse's Horns and Full Meal items. Plushie effectively grants Mercy Invincibility in a game where every enemy can deal constant damage, slowing the rate of damage a character takes; Headphones has a chance to No-Sell enemy attacks while forcing them away in return; Nurse's Horns having a chance to heal for defeating enemies, which you'll do all the time throughout the run and constantly in the frantic Zerg Rush late game; and Full Meal doubles the total heals, boosting the effectiveness of Nurse's Horns and other characters with healing gimmicks. With these sets of items in tandem with a strong Collab weapon or two, plus plenty of HP up stat gains, and you can reliably take just about every character to the 30 minute mark bare-minimum, with certain characters (namely Ina) becoming practically unkillable.
  • The above was shaken up by the 0.4 update, which saw most of the items and skills nerfed, but also caused several other items that were not used as much before to become the new standard (e.g. the Piki Piki Piman tea used to be only really good for Critical Hit Class builds, but has become universally beneficial with its extremely fast ultimate meter generation, allowing for reckless spamming if done right; the Gorilla's Paw being buffed to the point that it can be beneficial to run on high-CRT characters due to the lowered penalty and the introduction of idols with natural crit buffs such as Okayu or Suisei, who can compensate for the stat loss).
  • 0.6's introduction of super collabs, nerfs to most regular ones, and reworks have shaken things up. One thing that has quickly emerged is Jingisukan being a favored super collab outside of expected synergies for the massive survivability boost it gives.
  • When it comes to farming Holocoins very quickly, most players tend to play as IRyS, and as of the 0.6 update, Reine, Risu, and AZKi.
    • IRyS's multi-hitting projectile at level 7 maximizes Greed Stamp's effect. Combine that with her hefty survivability, and with the right build, don't be surprised if you find your coin count rising like nobody's business while surviving hordes of enemies.
    • Reine's special, Tonjok, is unique in that you can use it 5 times per use and you can keep it indefinitely until you use all 5. Each punch knocks coins out of enemies, and combined with the Super Idol Outfit which gives 2 uses of each special, that means that you have 10 punches to knock out enemies and drop so many coins. It also helps that her skill, Lady of the Peafowl, gives her CRIT bonuses (30-70%) for 30 seconds for coins, so that's even more damage for more coins.
    • Risu's main gimmick is the fact that she'll drop a super ton of nuts to go around. Her main weapon fires off five nuts at max level and even bounce off walls and doubles the hit limit. Her skils, DLC and Non-stop Nuts, only increase the amount of nuts that you can fire. Just like IRyS, she can maximize Greed Stamp's effect and with the right build, even Halu Level 5 will have a hard time keeping up.
    • AZKi's damage on her main weapon received a significant buff, and her Awakened Diva Song has a high chance of splitting into two additional notes, which can proc stamps as well. Combined with the reworked Greed Stamp that boosts coin drops based off of damage now, AZKi is capable of farming millions of coins in a single Endless run.
• Continuity Lockout: Everything about this game revolves around hololive in-jokes, memes, and the supposed character settings of the playable characters, making the humor bewildering to people who happen upon this game solely in search of a freeware Vampire Survivors clone.
  • Case in point, the Cutting Board weapon and its associated collabs are bigger for flat-chested characters, but unless you have knowledge of the vtubers beforehand, you wouldn't know which characters this applies to because none of the sprites show enough for you to figure it out. Similarly, the Bounce Ball is bigger for the bustier characters, but the scaling has more variation. The in-game portraits added in 0.5 gives some clues on bust size, but it's not definitive.
  • Another case in point, the collaborations. While Vampire Survivors is no stranger to weapon evolution, those who don't know Hololive's collaboration pairings will not really know that "Elite Lava Bucket" can fuse with either "Psycho Axe" to get "MiComet" or "Spider Cooking" to get "Elite Cooking". Or "Plug Type Asacoco" fusing with either "HoloBomb" to get "Breath-In Type Asacoco" or "Fan Beam" to get "Dragon Fire" instead of just one fusion each as well as not knowing the significances.
  • That said, this also serves, ironically, as testament to the care and quality that Kay Yu has put into making this game, as there are a fair number of players who have fallen completely in love with the game despite knowing absolutely nothing about Hololive or any of the many references, some even becoming fans and falling into the fabled "rabbit hole" through the game itself.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • YAGOOs move at runaway train speeds and hit roughly as hard, and there are a ton of them, with each individual one boasting a staggering 9,000 health^note for reference, Fubuzilla has 8,000 HP, meaning each individual YAGOO is a Boss in Mook Clothing. Once you see them start appearing at the 30 minute mark, that's the game's way of telling you "well, you've had a good run but I'm gonna be wrapping up here, k thanks die". Even exceptional builds will die pretty quickly to their onslaught, and the number of builds and characters that can survive it for a long time can be counted on one hand.
  • Reddit-nikis can either be a minor annoyance or an outright run-ender depending on how ready you are to deal with them, especially in the hard version of Stage 2. Their basic variants can heal surrounding fans, but in the hard version of Stage 2, they're often paired with mini-bosses and will heal them for a lot of health (sometimes even negating any damage you gave to them), meaning it's almost impossible to kill them without a good collab or piercing weapon. Later variants will even debuff you, lowering your speed (blue) and attack (red), making you susceptible to already annoying mobs, especially Stellar Hoshiyamis and Robosas. They return with a vengeance in Stage 4 and Stage 3 Hard, with the debuffing variants appearing early on.
  • Any enemy that shoots is this. They hover outside of the range of conventional weaponry, making it annoying to hunt them down, and if you're not careful, they can end a great run out of nowhere since their projectiles cannot be stopped by weapons (except a starter weapon with the Pacifist stamp) and ignore most defensive strategies. Sana or Haato keeping enemies out of reach with an Orbiting Particle Shield with insane knockback? Shooting enemies don't care. Kronii camping inside a Time Bubble? Shooting enemies don't care. Ollie revived with low health, but is melting everything up close with her insane DPS? Shooting enemies laugh maniacally as they tear through her like a knife through butter. These bastards will warp your entire playstyle around them the exact second they appear. And one of the achievements requires getting through a Hard stage without taking damage from a single projectile.
  • The first stage has plenty:
    • The 8:30 mark engulfs the players with a wave of shield-carrying Deadbeats who encircle the player on all sides. There are certain builds that can overpower them, and they will eventually disappear like all waves, but it tests the player to find the gaps in their formation and run through them. Kiara herself ended up getting caught here more than any other point.
    • The 14:00 mark brings in the Q Delinquents from both sides. Not terribly hard to fight them off, but it rushes you with three continuous waves to test your dodging skills before throwing a Dual Boss your way at 15:00.
    • The 19:00 mark triggers a dense, enveloping swarm of large Kronies and Saplings, who collectively serve as a threshold guardian for the final boss. Surviving this wave requires either having sufficiently high DPS or breaking out of the enemy blockade in first few seconds and running in one direction non-stop until 20:00.
    • On Endless mode, the 25:00 mark is where the onslaught of Giant Mooks begins ramping up to the point where most characters will die unless they have both the Plushie and Nurse's Horns.
    • And then of course there is the Yagoo swarm at 30:00. Even builds that had been handling the previous horde just fine will suddenly die in seconds, and it takes a really powerful (or exploit-focused) build to make it any further into the game.
  • The office level is no slouch either, with a surprisingly high amount of durable enemies during the second half (especially compared to the first half) that will be the absolute bane of your run if you're not ready to deal with them. The hard version has all of them buffed, adds Reddit-nikis through some of those waves that buffs those enemies, the Pioneers will constantly shoot themselves towards you (also including a wave which has them hit you in a very annoying Bullet Hell pattern right before the boss), and some of the beefed up Robosas will shoot projectiles at you.
    • By the 3:00 mark you start seeing Koronesuki and Onigiryaa, right after you start getting enough damage to one-shot the Mio-fa. Those enemies have enough health to not get swiped off easily, and the cramped environment of the office can lead you to get boxed in and lose early.
    • The 10:00 mark brings in Mikodanye, who is That One Boss given her tracking cone of fire and Evil Lava Bucket pools that she spawns on your location, while you're still contending with waves of regular enemies.
    • 12 minutes in, a very easy wave of 35Ps and Soratomos is abruptly followed by an army of AZKi's Pioneers, who have twice as much health and hit twice as hard, including a stampede of fast ones moving in both directions. It is very easy to die here even if you were doing well earlier, especially if you got a little too cocky and gone overboard on the Halu. Following that, a beefed up wave of Kintokis (35P), Nun-nun (Soratomo), and Raving Pioneers, which are not only more durable but faster as well, will now come in mass droves and outright shred you alive if you had barely survived that wave (or if you're slow enough to not outspeed them).
    • The Giant SSRB in the 18:00 mark is a huge DPS check, and the threshold guardian for this stage's final boss. You have a limited time to burn off its health before it explodes and very likely ends the run, all while regular enemies can absorb attacks directed at it. That said, most characters can either melt it quickly with a well-timed special or have ways of negating the damage of its explosion.
  • Hard Mode of Stage 1 has, as expected, beefed-up enemy waves which will demand good effort to excel in. Taking down waves of enhanced enemies is one thing, but come the 19:30 mark, the enemies vanish and the game starts covering the screen with stage hazards, leaving the entire area red in overlapping warning symbols. It also introduces GuyRyS swarms around the 6 minute mark (fought alongside the miniboss Gloom and Doom) which are surprisingly fast and bulky and surround you in a circular motion from all directions. What makes them a real threat is how early they appear, meaning that if you don't have a fully developed kit, a good collab weapon, or a well-timed special, you'll most likely die against them. They also swarm shortly before Thicc Bubbas (which are just as fast and slightly stronger) before the 10 minute mark as well, making it more of an endurance fest until Amelia and Fubuzilla are defeated.
  • Stage 2 Hard:
    • Reddit-nikis are not too bad in stage 3, but here, they start spawning long before you have the weaponry needed to deal with them, so idols whose early game lacks DPS may find themselves struggling to deal with them as a horde snowballs around them. And at the 6 minute mark, you have to deal simultaneously with a Giant Listener and a Giant Onigiryaa, assisted by Reddit-niki healers that make it essentially impossible to deplete the minibosses' HP, all while significant hordes of Miteirus and Mio-fas are still spawning.
    • The 8:00 mark introduces the Atomic Oruyanke. Much like the Giant SSRB, it counts down to a screen-wide explosion that can do a lot of damage. Unlike the Giant SSRB, it's stationary, and if you're unlucky you've spawned it in a cramped part of the office and have to defeat it before the mobs corner you. Since it drops in far earlier, you're also lacking the weapon upgrades that would otherwise make short work of it.
    • If you've survived to 19:30, the enemies vanish again and the game now rains stage hazards on you. Of note is what amounts to a deadly carousel of bullets that force you to run a very tight circle to keep your health from being rapidly depleted.
  • The Zomrades from Stage 4, befitting their nature, are incredibly tanky, hit hard, and there are several massive swarms of them. Even a character that may have been doing fine before that may start struggling when these guys come into play. It doesn't help that they also accompany Udin, a That One Boss of its own right.
  • While Stage 4 introduces Udin and Moontato as bosses that ram into you with exclamation marks giving you a warning, Stage 3 Hard introduces mooks with that same strategy, specifically beefed up Rosetais (first half) and Bubbas (second half). Not helping that those particular mooks are significantly darker than the rest of what's coming at you in an already dark level, and you'll have no idea where they're coming from.
• Funny Moments: See the Funny page for examples.
• Game-Breaker: See here.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Stage 1:
    • Deadbeats show up very early in the game while you're busy trying to upgrade. Their shield variants are even worse as they will converge on you unless you're playing as someone like Mumei that could take out a bunch of enemies all at once.
    • Takodachis take an absurd amount of damage to defeat. They will take anything you throw at them, and their miniboss version is a Damage-Sponge Boss that will tank even a fully upgraded main weapon. You will learn to hate their Angry version in Hard mode since they appear very early (only a smidge later than red shielded Deadbeats) and deal far more Collision Damage to you than any other foe by that point.
    • KFP Employees tend to come in massive flocks that move at extreme speeds and cover a huge area. They're not too bad normally, but they have probably ended more Hardcore runs (where the player character has 1 HP) than any other enemy. To add insult to injury, if you fail to hit them at just the right angle with just the right timing, you are reduced to watching impotently as most of them flee offscreen and you lose out on the significant amounts of XP they're worth. It's really satisfying, therefore, to just barely graze them with Calliope's scythe and watch the whole flock get roasted in a chain of dark explosions.
    • Bae Rats are one of the smallest enemies and they can swarm at you right after you defeat Fubzilla. They head straight at you if you're not looking and can whittle away your health unless you use an Area of Effect collab weapon.
    • The Saplings and Hoomans combo can be a real run-ender for many players if they fail to anticipate them coming. Both of these types appear in comparatively massive quantities right out the door from every direction, which can quickly grind away a huge chunk of your shield and health in an instant if they caught you in a bad spot, if not killing your character altogether.
  • Stage 2:
    • SSRBs aren't too bad, but the camouflage versions are harder to defeat. Then a giant version will head toward you, and you are given 30 seconds to defeat it. Failure to do so results in death most cases.
    • Koronesuki and Onigiryaas can take a lot of punishment before they go down, and they come in swarms to Zerg Rush you relatively early in the Office Stage.
    • 35P are one of the weakest, but that does not mean harmless. They can chip your health fast and quickly, and can end your run if you're not careful. Just ask Miko.
    • COVER employees are another Zerg Rush swarm that immediately converge on you until you either die or manage to reach 20 minutes. They have very high health and can chip away yours in a matter of seconds if you're not strong enough.
  • Stage 3:
    • Reddit-niki's are somewhat beefy compared to the other fans you face, but their real annoyance factor comes in that they have a large radius in which they can heal any enemies inside it, and unlike most other fans they'll try to keep their distance from you meaning you'll have to chase them down in order to stop their healing. Thankfully they're a minor nuisance compared to how they are in Stage 4 and the hard versions of Stage 2 and 3.
    • Late in a run, the game starts spawning Shiokko which start firing projectiles at you. It's usually one projectile at a time, but the sheer number of them coming from all angles makes it difficult to avoid getting hit.
• Goddamned Boss: The Halloween Myth Wolfpack Boss at the end of Stage 3 Hard can be this for people who know what they're doing. You're still fighting five huge targets in a limited space, but only two of them are actually threats (those being Smol Kiara who employs Bullet Hell and can heal - and even then, Harusaki Nodoka from Stage 2 Hard is a whole lot worse - and Smol Gura, who has a similar annoying charging pattern to Udin and Moontato from Stage 4). Smol Ame uses her exact same pattern as Stage 1 (although with some rocks falling), Smol Calli only swings around a chainsaw from short range, and Smol Ina just throws some acid which can be a minor inconvenience at worse). Once you get rid of each one, they drop a Holozon Box and a lot of experience, letting you do any last minute upgrades to your kit, and as their numbers dwindle, they become far easier to deal with. It can still be easy to die at first though.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • Mumei has some oversights that allow her to break the game further than intended. To start, her skill History doesn't increase her damage for every 50 kills, but for every 25, with her cap limit at max level (200) actually being unlimited. Secondly, her special skill is normally supposed to have a 70% chance to delete all drops (including crates and anvils), but this doesn't apply to enemies and items offscreen, allowing you to easily kill hordes of enemies and harvest their EXP gems by simply out-running them. Finally, Friend's cooldown breaks upon reaching 100% Haste; firing their chosen weapon rapidly to overwhelm the foes. The 0.4 update fixed them all.
  • The 0.4 update brought the introduction of Super Items, more powerful variations of items that can only be found from Holozon crates. However, the rate of finding these Super Items was accidentally made far too Super after the first hotfix, allowing players to amass several of them before even the 10 minute mark. Another hotfix was quickly made to fix this, making their appearance rate less Super.
  • In 0.4 onward, the YAGOO bust can be damaged to drop either food or coins, but it can also be affected by Suisei's special attack, which squashes foes flat as part of its ability, resulting in YAGOO's poor head looking like you'd expect. Even better is, unlike the enemies which can recover from the effect, the bust remains that way the whole run.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • A few of the power-up items are actually tributes to former Hololive members who for one reason or another had to graduate early, but were never forgotten by their fanbases, such as the various kinds of AsaCoco, and the Headphones that are a nod to Mano Aloe. Even Uruha Rushia, despite the unfortunate circumstances surrounding her departure, is given a nod via the Cutting Board.
  • The Hololive offices has a TV that is flashing random screencaps from various holomems' musical performances or events. Screencaps such as Myth's Smol Halloween, Q, Coco's meme review, Laplus's introduction, etc. One screencap is of Coco and Rushia together.
  • Because of Sana eventually graduating on 31st July, aside from her Youtube channel, HoloCure is one way for Holofans (mainly her Sanallites) to remember her by. The 0.4 update added her limiter as an item, reflecting her leaving it as a moment in her graduation video.
  • In the 0.5 update, Stage 3 has Rushia's oshi mark at the top of the level to show she hasn't been forgotten even after her sudden termination, with other members hoping she'll be playable in a future update.
  • When a user on the HoloCure subreddit pointed out that there wasn't any onion references for Aqua despite there being a garlic one for Shion ^note Both characters are heavily associated with those particular vegetables in various memes due to the way their hair resembles them, Kay Yu personally responded by stating that, initially, he had planned on avoiding making those references altogether due to them being low-hanging fruit with little depth to the characters themselves. However, Shion ended up getting one anyway in the form of her Magic Garlic skill, and it was revealed in this same response that it was initially going to be a cat familiar instead of a floating piece of garlic. However, when Shion broke the news of her real-life cat tragically dying, Kay, not wanting to scrap the skill, decided to have it changed to garlic in order to avoid potentially upsetting Shion, showing that he puts a lot of care and consideration not just into the mechanics of the game itself, but also into the thoughts and feelings of the characters represented in it.
  • While playing as herself, Ollie was brought to actual tears after seeing her Special was the last un-changed Charge Rifle, her favorite Apex Legends weapon. This is because all the others were changed so that her favorite aspect of the rifle, the laser charging up then blasting, was no longer a thing, but the old version of the Rifle lives on in Ollie's character.
  • Kay Yu confirming that he's planning on putting "Friend R"^note Rushia and "Friend C"^note Coco in a future update featuring Gen 3 and 4, despite the former's termination and the latter's graduation.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: Although Vampire Survivors is just a game, HoloCure is more than just a fan game based on it. The VTubers in HoloCure are technically "real" and have indirectly and unintentionally "saved" their fans in many ways. They have helped people who were going through tough times, such as suicidal thoughts, homelessness, poverty, and loneliness, and who happened to come across them by chance or through HoloCure. After getting to know them and their references in HoloCure, these fans became subscribers and members of their respective idols, whom they can personally relate to in more ways than one.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • Items:
    • The Sake turned into one in v0.4, as the GWS Pill which was introduced in that update gave a better, non-variable crit boost under a simpler condition. It's since been fished out of this status by being a component for a Super Collab that gives an unconditional crit rate boost.
    • Stolen Piggy Bank only provides a small boost to your accrued coins, at 1800 coins in 30 minutes. It does scale with shop upgrades for a bigger payoff, but even at its highest potential, it still pales in comparison to Halu easily bringing you 15k to 20k coins. The tiny 15% speed increase it grants is almost inconsequential, while the significant 50% reduction to pick up range can be quite crippling in some situations. All this makes the Piggy Bank rarely worth considering even on coin farming runs. 0.5 requires you to move to get the coins and the pick-up penalty was reduced, which makes it a good farming item for fast characters like Fubuki or Kronii. In the v0.6 update it does have a super mode now which quadruples the pickup and it synergies nicely with Reine's Lady of the Peafowl skill.
    • The Plushie used to be a core component of any Endless survival build^ExplanationThe lack of a cooldown meant enemies could only hurt a Plushie bearer once every half a second instead of constantly, which stumped even swarms of otherwise game-ending enemies. With the right equipment in Nurse's Horns, Full Meal and Headphones along with enough offense and health up, just about every character could trivialize the game by out-healing what damage they take, with certain characters in particular, notably Ina and Kronii, could indefinitely survive even the YAGOO horde with a good enough build, but fell from grace hard in patch 0.4 when a minimum cooldown of a whopping 2 seconds was introduced on its 0.5 second effect. This completely killed any usability it may have had in the past and the former must-pick turned into a joke overnight. v0.5 changed the Pushie's mechanics, going from a mediocre Mercy Invincibility item to redistributing immediate damage to a Damage Over Time, giving it a different defensive role.
    • The Devil Hat gives you a damage bonus against enemies outside 150 pixels away from your character, but imposes a damage penalty on enemies close to you. A 150-pixel radius around your character covers a fair portion of the screen, and in later waves you'll be seeing more enemies that can force themselves into that space. While 0.6 sought to buff it by reducing the radius to 130 pixels, it's still highly outclassed as the newly introduced Focus Shades item occupies a similar niche among ranged weapons with none of the downside.
    • Hope Soda is another item with its benefits outweighed by its downsides. The item's purpose is to increase critical hit damage (reaches a respectable 50% increase at max level), but with a hefty 25% longer cooldown for Special abilities as compensation. Even if you dedicate another item slot to something like Idol Costume or Kusogaki Shackles to negate this downside, the benefit isn't really all that impressive seeing as how it only increases crit damage without increasing crit chance, which is a much more sought after benefit. Its only real niche is pairing with the GWS Pill to maximize its damage increase due to the longer Special cooldown, but even then there are other items that provide solid damage increases without sacrificing the powerful utility that most Specials bring to the table. All that being said, some Critical Hit Class characters who don't get significant boosts to their critical damage, like Amelia and Suisei, can still make use of it. 0.6 did introduce a Super variant of the item that removes the downside entirely while also guaranteeing every 10th hit to be a critical hit.
  • Characters:
    • AZKi was, in 0.4, likely the weakest character in the game. Her playstyle is similar to Kronii's Fragile Speedster build, except weaker on most fronts - and her only real defensive skill, Performance, was outright bugged and didn't do anything in that version. Fortunately, 0.5 fully implemented it, and AZKi is now somewhat more capable. 0.6 gave her a damage buff to push her further away from this trope, and is in fact, the strongest coin farming character in the game.
    • While she excels in the early game and can complete stage modes just fine, Mio is considered a bottom-tier character on Endless. The reason is that her main damage boost applies in a very small area around her, which means she doesn't have the wide area DPS needed to efficiently handle the massive Endless hordes. She also has no speed buffs to help her survive YAGOO, if she even gets there.
    • Amelia's status as the Jack of All Stats ends up leaving her with no real strong suits. The boost she gets to weapon damage, while unconditional, is somewhat mediocre. She gains a decent increase to crit rate, but no crit synergies unless she picks up Hope Soda. However, her main weapon is at least quite strong, especially against bosses. Her issues were far worse prior to 0.5, as her main weapon used to only fire in two directions and her greatest asset Bubba could turn into a liability as the XP gems he picked up ignored the player's shop bonuses to XP gain, slowing down Ame's leveling rate. The result was a character that felt like a strictly weaker Mumei. Later updates fixed both these issues and introduced more items to help Ame shine, leaving her a much more solid Jack of All Stats.
  • While Vestia Zeta has a powerful skill in "Secret Agent" and a strong special that can get her out of bad spots, her other two skills are underwhelming. "Cat(?) Reflexes" only increases her crit rate by a measly 15% and requires her to be constantly moving for that buff to apply, while "Data Collection" can net her bonus experience, but requires her to kill the target with a critical hit to even have a chance to trigger, and due to her fairly low crit rate (even with Cat(?) Reflexes), she needs crit-boosting items to really use it to its full potential. Her main weapon is also underwhelming unless she is invisible, something she cannot achieve all the time. As a result, while she's great at getting out of bad spots, she will end up in a lot of bad spots to begin with due to having difficulty clearing hordes when she's not invisible, and her emphasis on constant movement can easily get her killed on obstacle-filled stages like 2 or 3.
  • Weapons:
    • Among Super Collabs, Snow Queen doesn't really live up to the power of the others. Jingisukan is a Game-Breaker, Holy Fire is a very solid offensive collab, and Idol Live is niche, but can still see use in some Special-centric builds. Snow Queen, in comparison, offers rather little. In terms of damage, it underperforms, in terms of crowd control, Snow Flower Sake (and arguably even the unevolved Wamy Water) can do an equally good job, and in terms of stat bonuses, its paltry 20% boost to critical chance is rarely relevant. Even Critical Hit Classes will usually build Holy Fire instead for the damage boost it provides.
    • Many Collabs in general have become this after the brutal nerf to their damage power in 0.6, which turned them Awesome, but Impractical and often actively worse than their constituent items. Pretty much everything that uses EN's Curse that is not Eldritch Horror is worse than Eldritch Horror (one of the few collabs that got buffed rather than nerfed), and even it faces steep competition from Jingisukan (which competes for one of its components) and EN's Curse itself (which is a Game-Breaker in its own right and one of the best weapons for actually dealing damage to the YAGOO swarm on Endless). Anything that subsumes Idol Song or X-Potato, even the Super Collab Idol Live, will inevitably be weighed against the massive 20% damage boost Rap Dog provides. Collabs that use CEO's Tears, Psycho Axe or Wamy Water also tend to be subpar - the former two are very strong weapons that can outperform their collabs in damage, the latter's guaranteed stun is widely considered more useful for crowd control than its collabs' random chance to freeze.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Ludicrous gacha ranks. ^ExplanationWhile gacha ranks don't provide any benefits beyond 20, fans have decided to prove their dedication to their oshis by getting them to unnecesarily high ranks, these sometimes being funny numbers, and some even reaching 5 digits.
  • Bae the PC Destroyer ^ExplanationHakos Baelz has a special which fires out every weapon without any delay for five seconds. This has been attributed to lag on certain hardware, and she's been referred to as such.
  • Get Some Help/Touch Grass ^ExplanationThe "achievement" for completing every other achievement is an Achievement Mockery of grass titled "Get Some Help". Taken to an extreme when Kay Yu attempted to troll Kaela to buy "Completionists Grass" during Holo House.
  • No Pressure ^ExplanationOne of Kaela's more memorable replies to Kay Yu in regards to the pacing and scope of the game's update, which given her nature as a grinder and overachiever who clears new content in a heartbeat, came across as a playful but passive-aggressive reminder for the developer to push out more things for her to do in timely fashion. Eventually became the name of one of Kaelas' skills.
  • Holostars getting a Sausage weapon bonus ^ExplanationSince the girls in game already get Bounce Ball size bonuses based on their respective bust sizes, it has been joked that any eventually playable Holostars would be getting a similar increase to the Sausage weapon (or, alternatively, the Glowstick due to its shape).
  • PLEASE TAKE OUR DAMN MONEY, KAY YU!^ExplanationHolocure is regarded as a very high quality game by many fans, with plenty of content all for free. While Kay Yu has stated his reasons for releasing his games free of charge, many fans desperately wish they could pay him for the quality work he puts out.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The sharp, high-pitched "schwing!" sound effect of a golden anvil spawning, which heralds a can of whoopass being unleashed upon the enemy hordes by one of the many incredibly powerful Collab weapons. A similar noise is used to alert the player that their special ability is off cooldown, which can be an extremely fortunate sign when swarmed by a giant mob of enemies that your normal weapons are having a hard time clearing.
  • If you're lucky with a Holozon box, a suddenly more energetic and faster-paced version of Ochame Kinou will play to bring a smile to any player's face, as RNG has blessed them with three crates instead of one. Similarly, the melody of the chorus playing in tandem with bright spotlights will signal the appearance of an incredibly rare and powerful Super Item, which is certain to bless both the player and the run itself.
  • As far as examples from individual characters go, Moona's "Moon Song" skill is accompanied by a gentle and ethereal noise that's fittingly pleasant to listen to.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Using Mumei's Special for the first time can be quite startling if you aren't expecting it.
  • The boss of the second half of Stage 3 is Spiderchama, an unsettling abomination fused between Hachaama and a spider that belongs more to Yume Nikki than this game. Similarly to Mumei's special, they're both drawn by her.
  • The Halloween themed Stage 3 might feel rather tame, its Hard Mode variant definitely feels like a survival horror movie in comparison. The stage is significantly darker, it has a reddish tint, the music is far more tense (even compared to the original "Myth or Treat"), there's a reddish liquid (most likely blood) on the floor, and the Cursed Bubbas (originally Dummied Out from the original Stage 1) look very unsettling as they're rushing towards you at breakneck pace. In contrast, the Halloween Myth group are definitely Nightmare Retardant as they're drawn in a chibi and less serious manner compared to everything else the stage has thrown at you.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Kay Yu has been consistently taking swift action to correct weak characters and items to bring them to a decent power level.
  • Characters:
    • Calliope Mori was widely seen as underwhelming due to her scythe attacks missing enemies at point blank. Additionally, this dead zone would only grow as her attack area increased, so upgrading her weapon or grabbing Knightly Milk was partially a liability. She also suffered from "Death" being somewhat underwhelming and her Awakened weapon upgrade just increasing her damage a bit instead of doing anything cool. The June 29 update, however, fixed all of her issues while increasing her strong suits even further, arguably pushing her into Game-Breaker territory, though with a few nerfs as of 0.4 and the general Power Creep, she is now more of a Crutch Character than anything.
    • Kiara was widely considered to be somewhat underwhelming until 0.4. The main point of contention with her was that her "Dancer" boost required the player to constantly be moving, which got quite hard on the fingers and distracting. Her special didn't scale great into the late-game and in general, picking her over Calli felt like handicapping yourself. The 0.4 update gave her various buffs that significantly increased her power and ease of use, with her special now giving an Auto-Revive and Dancer stacks decaying gradually instead of disappearing all at once, which got her soundly out of the low tiers. She's currently a highly customizable character.
    • Upon release, Sora was widely considered low tier. With most of her skills being underwhelming or situational and her special being nothing to write home about, she was massively outshined at her healing-oriented niche by the likes of Fauna, her only real strong suit being the decent pushback power of her primary weapon. She did not remain in the low tier for long, with a subsequent patch giving her several buffs, the most significant of these being the addition of Life Drain on her Angel Wings, which turned her into a powerhouse on Endless Mode. While this build was subsequently patched out of existence, with the introduction of Jingisukan to abuse her Idol Healing, she currently sits in a pretty solid position.
    • AZKi, once considered a bottom-tier character, had this happen to her by pure accident when it was discovered that, as a result of the way her main weapon works and changes made to the Greed stamp, she is now by far the strongest coin-farming character in the entire game.
  • Items:
    • Piki Piki Piman used to give a bonus to crit upon the user getting hit. With most critical-centric characters wanting to keep enemies away from them, this item only ever saw use on IRyS, a tanky character who wants a high crit rate to fuel her healing. 0.4 changed it to generate Special meter instead, a rare and powerful effect that enabled unique strategies. 0.6 changes it to grant an Attack boost based on max HP, serving as a way for High max HP characters like Sana and Aki to get some much desired Attack boost.
    • The Credit Card was widely seen as worthless, a 5-stage item that mostly just reduced the (already pretty meager) cost of enhancing items and gave a 20% boost to anvil spawn rates at all levels. Again, 0.4 made it drastically better simply by scaling the anvil drop rate with the item's level, so that at max power you're getting twice the normal amount of anvils, in addition to spawning guaranteed anvils at certain intervals (an effect not mentioned in its description at all). It also has a super variant that on top of the normal one's max level effects, outright spawns an anvil every minute, more often than its non-super counterpart.
    • Body Pillow was never useless, but was considered a Disc-One Nuke, decent for stage mode but worthless on Endless due to enemy damage plowing through the Pillow's meager defenses like a knife through butter. 0.4 gave it a permanent damage reduction effect (25% at max level), making it significantly better for tank builds despite the shield proper being as flimsy as ever. It also has a super version that will gradually heal you while the shield is up. It actually became good enough to warrant a nerf, and now only offers a 10% damage reduction.
    • Uber Sheep, initially outclassed hard by Nurse's Horns, was buffed to generate food more frequently in addition to indirectly benefiting from the nerfing of the Horns. Additionally, the release of characters built around eating food (Okayu, and Mel in a later version) gave it a niche in which it could be consistently useful. 0.6 makes it part of a Super Collab which generate tons of healing and damage as well as raises max HP, giving healing and tanking-based characters a reason to pick up the item.
    • The Plushie went from Game-Breaker to Joke Item overnight in update 0.4, its immense cooldown making it worthless to roughly every single character. As of 0.5, it turns all damage received by the player into Damage Over Time. On builds that boast slow healing over time, such as Nurse's Horns, Plushie buys you the time to put these capabilities to use even when the amount of damage you took should by all means have been enough to kill you outright, making it useful again.
  • Specials:
    • Mumei's True Horror special would clear out all enemies that aren't considered bosses, with the caveat of removing everything onscreen, including not only XP gems, but even anvils and Holozon boxes, roughly 70% of the time. In addition to being actively worse than useless against bosses (doing nothing to them while erasing all the regular enemies, reducing Mumei's Civilization attack buff), using it, even as a last-ditch panic button, would typically incur such a catastrophic tempo loss that you might be left wishing you had just died instead. It was so bad that getting a Super Idol Dress while playing as Mumei became a popular "Shaggy Dog" Story among the community. 0.6 removed the downside while adding a temporary haste buff based on the number of enemies destroyed, removing the risks associated with the special on top of actually making it slightly useful against bosses as well.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Anya's Slumber skill slows down all enemies on screen, grants her regenerating health, and reduces the damage she takes and deals when she isn't moving. It's a strong skill on paper, but its biggest flaw is how it actively penalizes you for stopping to rest your fingers from moving a lot by gimping Anya's damage output. Aki and Kiara also actively encourage constantly moving around with her Belly Dance and Dancer skills respectively, but at least Aki can still deal great damage when standing still, and Kiara's buff decays slowly, giving you a more lenient window to regain the buff.
• Self-Imposed Challenge:
  • Beating a stage with a character's main weapon and only that; turning down all other weapons offered from item boxes and level ups aside from upgrading your main weapon to Awakened, while relying on the characters skills and the items/stat ups obtained. The v0.5 update added tools to encourage this challenge by adding the Solo Stamp and a free shop upgrade that lets you manipulate your weapon slots.
  • As what Reine herself did at some point, only choosing the 1st options after every level up and nothing else, this becomes an official achievement in the v0.6 update.
• Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: 0.6 introduces the Holo House, which is a very neat side mode which allows you to interact with other idols, decorate your own house with a variety of furniture, hire fans to work for you, cook food, and fish. It's very easy to get distracted and just spend your time fishing or building your house instead of taking on fans. However, some furniture do require an obscenely high amount of Holo Coins, so it's encouraged to coin farm.
• That One Achievement:
  • Couch Potato requires that you don't move away from your starting spot, pivoting your character notwithstanding. In a game that requires that you run around to level up and heal, the difficulty comes when you're facing a stage boss, and some such as Smol Ame, Halloween Bae, and even Spider Haachama will force you to move your ass especially when they deal high damage to use unless you spent leveling up your defenses and offensive stats. Most strategies revolve around maximizing your pickup radius so you can grab all the experience points you can, as well as making sure your character is resilient enough to weather any miniboss or boss that will eventually walk over you. Be ready to see lots of anvils and Holozon boxes lying around without being able to get them, with your only solace being that they might directly drop on you.
  • In terms of trying to get all of the items, getting Candy Kingdom Sweets is a doozy compared to other items^note this also includes not taking any damage at all and completing a run without using any character skills. To get it, you need to raise your Haste 10 times while leveling up, but it's easier said than done because even when running on a solo weapon run (which makes getting through the inventory quicker) with the right item set-up (Halu, Study Glasses, Researcher's Coat), it's still a Luck-Based Mission trying to get 10 instances of choosing Haste as an option when there's a 1/6 chance each time that'll pop up.
  • Similarly to the above, "Tank Class" is also a tough achievement to clear. Instead of trying to upgrade Haste 10 times, you need to upgrade your max health so it hits 500. You only get 3,000 coins for clearing it, but even with Jingisukan, Piki Piki Piman, Just Bandage, and the highest purchasable HP upgrade (which would get you to about 300 HP depending on the character you're playing), you'll still need a lot of luck to get those health upgrades.
  • Bullet Hell Pro requires beating a Hard Mode stage without taking any projectile damage. With all the chaos that can happen in these stages, it is surprisingly easy to either run into one on accident or to not even notice them heading towards you. Body Pillow is essentially required for this achievement since shield damage doesn't count, but even then you'll need to be careful with how easily the projectiles can just eat through the shield.
  • Rhythm Master requires getting a 50 chain combo in the fishing minigame, which is no mean feat when you're playing a Rhythm Game without any music to guide you, every chain of 10 fish caught speeds up the notes (making the process harder), and just one or two missed notes can end up with you having to start the whole chain all over again from zero. It's easier to do this with low-level rods than with high-level ones, but by no means outright easy unless you're already very good at these kinds of games. What makes this achievement particularly nasty is that the minigame it's tied to dramatically deviates from the core Holocure gameplay. You could be the literal god of Vampire Survivors-esque games and break every record on every stage with every character in Holocure... but you will never truly complete the game unless you also git gud at rhythm games.
• That One Boss:
  • Mikodanye will spawn within 10 minutes in the office level, but is no joke when you find yourself unprepared once you fight her. She is a Damage-Sponge Boss that occasionally shoots fire and chucks lava at you for disturbingly high damage, and she will take a few good minutes to defeat even if you managed to get your preferred collab weapon. Her constant lava and fire breath spamming also makes it very hard for melee-based characters to get good hits in without losing health in the process, and given the cramped quarters of Stage 2, it's actually rather easy for one to be pushed into an inescapable corner by her attacks where they may die. The Hard version has you fight her and A-Chan together.
  • A-Chan, the 20-minute boss of Stage 2, will bring forth Bullet Hell unlike the simplistic attack patterns of Fubuzilla, Smol Ame and Mikodanye and demand more dodging than anyone before her. She's also a much smaller target compared to those other bosses, making it more difficult to hit her accurately as well. She's also fought alongside Mikodanye in the 10-minute mark in Stage 2 Hard. If you thought she was bad enough, Harusaki Nodoka, the Final Boss of Stage 2 Hard, is a more beefed up version of her with a homing laser attack similar to Fubuzilla (and is very likely to hit you too if you're not fast enough), a ton of bullets that will fill the screen up quickly, and a second phase which will outright spell your death unless if you're really good at dodging.
  • The Shubangelion can spell trouble even for those who know what they're doing. Its main attack hits an extremely large radius around it, forcing you out of its range, and it also creates falling rubble to keep you moving. All the while, you are swarmed by Subatomo from all sides, making it difficult to get the breathing room to fight it safely, especially with a close-range weapon. In Hard Mode, you fight it and Spiderchama at the 10 minute mark, giving you even less room for error as they both have massive area of effect attacks. The only saving grace is that the Subatomos aren't there and you're only facing up against Spiderchama Hatchlings as the mooks, but you'll only have one minute to fight them clean before the HoloEN Myth wave starts to come in relentlessly.
  • Udin in stage 4 is a nightmare to fight. It has rather vicious Bullet Hell patterns, as well as a rush attack that hits like an assault vehicle if you're unlucky enough to be in its path and, due to its massive range, also makes Udin a surprisingly slippery customer that is hard to pin down with your weapons (while having absolutely no problem reaching you with its own bullets). It also comes accompanied by its tough and powerful Zomrades.
• That One Level:
  • The Holo Offices stage has several design quirks that make it potentially frustrating at times to play on. The most glaring difference between it and stage 1 is that the level map is now a continuous horizontal hallway, with clearly defined top and bottom boundaries, made worse by how utterly cluttered it is with various chairs, desks, cubicles, or other furniture. All of these combined makes it very cramped to navigate through, especially when one is having to dodge the mountain of enemies the level is throwing at them in the process. As the cherry on top, this level also introduces the more dangerous spawn patterns, with many waves of airdrops and area-of-effect-based enemies that further restrict the amount of free space you can maneuver in, with Mikodanye and the SSRBs being particularly annoying to fight in this regard. As a result, stage 2 is basically a zoning hell where one can very easily get stuck in a bad spot and be overwhelmed, and the enemy sprites can phase through solid walls to get at you also don't help. As if that weren't enough, a Game-Breaking Bug, which was addressed shortly after the update introducing this stage went live, may cause anvils to spawn inside the level's scenery, out of reach for the player. If this happens to a regular anvil, it's an annoyance at most, but if your golden anvil gets stuck, say goodbye to collabs for the rest of your run.
  • Stage 3 is not too difficult in terms of the enemies it contains, but its layout... oh dear. It is a dark, cramped place that, unlike previous stages, is fully walled off (so no running away if you're overwhelmed). It contains a bunch of annoying obstacles that can easily trip you up and most of the time, you can barely see them when the stage is so dark and you're spewing firepower every which way. Some of its nooks and crannies are so lethal that one of them even contains a skeleton as if to warn the player that going in there is a sure-fire way to get killed. It's also the first non-Hard stage to feature ranged non-boss enemies. The hard mode version is worse, as not only do you have the usual hazards and tougher enemies to worry about, but also the boss fights are a Dual Boss (10 minutes) and a Wolfpack Boss (20 minutes) - and all of these bosses are huge too, making it for less room to move around. Hard Mode also turns down the lighting, making it more likely to accidentally run into either an enemy, or an object to get stuck on.
  • Stage 4, Gelora Bung Yagoo, is similar to Stage 3 where you're in a walled off stadium facing off against Holo ID mobs. While the start isn't too bad, it contains loads of Demonic Spiders which will make your run a living hell if you're not careful. First of all, the debuffing Reddit Nikis that were previously featured in Stage 2 Hard return, appearing early on as well as the healing variants. The Zomrades here are tough, durable, come in massive swarms, and even accompany an already annoying mid-point boss, potentially giving you a game over early on. If you survive that, a couple of fans (specifically Kobo's and Zeta's) will fire projectiles at you, giving you a taste of Hard Mode. And if you think you'll just face a wave of slow bulky enemies in the final stretch like you've been doing for the past three levels, you're dead wrong. Instead, you'll face a huge wave of all the previous swarms of Gen 2 and Gen 3 ID fans coming in at a rather fast speed and in different directions. Additionally it contains random shooting waves of enemies that are in formations not unlike in Hard Mode exclusive stages.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: While 0.6's changes have been praised, there's been some types of players unhappy with how such changes adversely affected "endgame" endless mode (that is pushing into the YAGOO horde and doing 40 minute runs). Kay has said on twitter that stage mode is his main balancing focus. Some have also complained about the stage 4 difficulty spike.
• Woolseyism: The Japanese localization has a number of them making the flavor text more relevant to Japanese players.
  • The text of Broken Dreams, the original text talks about Yagoo's dream being dead while the Japanese text goes "no idols, only comedians"
  • The Super Chatto Time item is deliberately misspelled in Japanese as "Supachashito Taimu", referencing a misspelling that was in the original meme.