YMMV / Love of Magic

• Angst? What Angst?: All told, Emily takes the death of her father extremely well.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Rage builds in general. They add additional damage to any subsequent hands, including combinations that would normally inflict no damage such as shield, lightning or more rage. While it does inflict recoil damage to Owyn, even that drawback comes with the benefit of recharging companions' abilities even faster and can be mitigated with Dylan's regeneration, Emily's shield and/or Bella's passive damage reduction. To top it off, Bella can give you an optional Rage 9 to add 200 base rage plus 1% per point of intelligence. All this makes rage builds by far the most consistently performing playstyle, with a few combinations in particular standing out:
    • The Rage/Cluster combination makes for a relatively early one - rage boosts each attack, and cluster is three attacks in one. Snowdrop's quest line can get you a Rage 7 gem early, slotting into the Four of a Kind slot, and having Molly in your party can get you regular Four of a Kind hands. Hellions later use this same combination against you.
    • The more conservative version, Rage/Shield, is arguably even more overpowered in the mid-late game. Shield absorbs rage's recoil and enemies' attacks, save for poison damage. Essentially, this variant mitigates its only drawback while still letting Owyn benefit from its damage boost. By the near end of Book I, even poison becomes less of an issue with the introduction of Excalibur's Barrier spell, which can block any damage for one turn, and also benefits from an accelerated recharge through rage's recoil.
    • At the end of Book I, Emily automatically gives you Shield 9, which grants a 2000 shield excluding the intelligence bonus. In Early Book II, this gem can be slotted in the Four of A Kind slot, a easily accessible hand through Molly, Chloe and/or Akane. At that point, both versions can safely be combined into Rage/Shield/Cluster to reliably keep Owyn alive while dishing out enraged clusters. If it weren't enough, Book II and Book III further make this build broken to a ludicrous degree with the introduction of three flawless gems: Clusterstrike inflicts five attacks of 100 damage that gets nasty with a lot of rage; Berserker adds base 100 rage then doubles its current level; Divine Guard grants a whooping 4000 base shield. By the time you obtain all three gems, you have likely improved Owyn's stats enough to turn him into a near-unstoppable killing machine and spam the companions' skills to remove the "near" part.
  • Later, once Emily learns Dragonslayer, she does a flat 1000 points of damage to anything, making Lightning/Emily or Ice/Emily a combination allowing Owyn to kill basically anything on the Paths without taking damage, and even moreso with a companion that can improve your plays like Molly, Chloe, or Akane. Decent lightning plays can easily freeze an enemy for three or four turns, or ice plays can nerf the opponent's attacks for similar time periods, letting Emily do 4000 or more points of damage. Book II lets Owyn and Bella have their own Dragonslayer-type attacks for over 3000 total damage per turn. Some opponents are immune to lightning or ice, but very few are immune to both.
  • Xochi (and, later, Dylan) have an ability to immediately refresh your other companions, while lets Emily, Bella, or Katie do double damage every turn.

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