YMMV / Metal Walker

• Accidental Innuendo: One of the capsules you can buy is called "Get Blown".
• Breather Boss: B. Eel, the third boss. As opposed to the B. Panther, which came at you hard and fast, and Badoh's flying ace at the end of his rival fight which essentially necessitates playing dirty with debuff capsules to overcome due to its inherent advantage over you ^note  At this point, you only have two Land Cores, meaning you either fight Badoh's team at a statistical disadvantage with Meta Ball or a type disadvantage with your two available land evolutions., the B. Eel is slow and has a type disadvantage to your Metal Walker, given you only have Land Cores available to you and it is a Marine robot. It still hits relatively hard, and its Flood 2 packs a sizeable punch, but its slow rate of movement means it will never get capsules unless one spawns next to it, and even then its AI prioritizes rushing down your Metal Walker. Furthermore, the fact it has two B. Maimais backing it hurts it, since B. Maimais bring defense-boosting capsules into the fight that you can take. Even one of them will render the B. Eel utterly incapable of threatening you.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • B. Lance has an erratic bouncing pattern, a capsule that lets them go twice, a fairly high encounter rate, and they're powerful even if you're at a good level for other enemies in the area.
  • In later dungeons, B. Dragons and B. Zeppelins pick up the slack.
• Difficulty Spike: The last two dungeons' enemies are stronger than anywhere else. This is lampshaded by NPCs, who outright warn you about the spike.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Once you have the rhythm down for it, Aquazone against boss fights. This capsule turns Marine units into unstoppable icons of death, largely because bosses have no real counter to using Aquazone. Though nothing special for regular encounters, given how much room Aquazone capsules would take up in your inventory if you tried to use them anywhere, setting the environment to favor Marine units stonewalls a majority of the bosses given their preference for Land and Sky Metal Walkers. If they use Land Metal Walkers, the type advantage the walker has against your Marine model is meaningless because you can easily shove the enemy away such that their reduced movement underwater prevents them from ever hitting you. Against Sky models, your improved mobility and their type weakness leaves them more or less helpless against you.
  • When traveling through the world and dungeons, Sky Core evolutions never suffer mobility debuffs in any terrain and in fact have the highest mobility in the game. Since Sky models normally can't be brought into aquatic maps on the player's end, they never have to deal with Marine units, their proclaimed weakness, ever posing a threat to them, since Sky units can just knock Marine units away whenever they get close on land. Since Sky evolutions have an advantage over Land units, this means that Sky units hard counter two-thirds of the encounters you can run into. Even against other Sky units, a healthy supply of Flood capsules more or less eliminates any threat of counterplay. The only limiting factor is that Sky Cores are the last cores you get, but M. Kite will carry you through the first half of the midgame, and once you get your final Sky Core, all bets are off for endgame - especially if you go out of your way to then get M. Galax, the ultimate Sky evolution.
• I Am Not Shazam: The robot that follows you and NPCs around is a Metal Walker. Enemy robots and those controlled by Metal Masters are Metal Busters. There's a difference.
• Nintendo Hard: This game has a very high random encounter rate, powerful enemies, even more powerful bosses, and a large overworld.
• Paranoia Fuel: The towns aren't safe from random encounters, and neither are the buildings.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Outside the final dungeon and in boss battles in that dungeon, the walls electrocute your Walker and cause damage. Fortunately, this also applies to enemies.
  • Before you unlock the Battle Arena, Capsules are automatically placed on the battlefield. They disappear after 2 turns. This includes your only source of healing items.
  • Not being able to save in buildings.
  • The lack of dedicated fast travel options really gets annoying near the endgame, where the player may be tempted to strike out and find the special Cores. Though there are various points on the map that help you get to other places in the Rusted Land quickly, and you can teleport to the eastern side of the island from the bases in every town, trying to reach the western half of the Rusted Land is a nightmare, as is navigating the central sections of the island. This comes down to the fact that even as you get stronger and battles in old areas become trivial, the sheer number of them, even with Metamorit capsules, grinds gameplay down to a halt when you aren't following the main plot beats. That's not even accounting for how difficult it can sometimes be to reach the exit from a fight. If you do every fight, you'll be deluged by text box after text box telling you what you get from winning each fight, and you have to sit through the explosions of the various Metal Walkers, and woe betide you if you run into a capsule that slowly damages other Metal Walkers... Though understandable from an early game perspective to use the environment and the enemies to illustrate how inhospitable the Rusted Land is, it just becomes a slog later on.
• Self-Imposed Challenge:
  • Going through the game as Meta Ball wherever possible.
  • Going through the game without scanning any enemies. Not recommended for the sane, as HP recovery items are only found in enemy capsules.
• Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: Getting all the Scan Data can result in wandering around for longer than necessary. You can even scan the final boss.
• That One Boss:
  • Oddly enough, Badoh. While he gets stomped by enemy Metal Masters, when you face him you'll die if you're not prepared.
  • B. Dragon. He does a fair amount of damage even if you grinded... and his amount of HP is massive. Even if you do 77 damage with each hit, he will likely kill you before you kill him, especially if he or his minions get good capsules.
• That One Level:
  • Bronze Rocks, as it's a Marathon Level with powerful enemies and an even more powerful boss at the end that can only be accessed through one, long route.
  • Neo City, the final level, is much the same—and its enemies are even harder, with a very long path to get back to the final boss. Even worse is that some areas are dead ends.
• The Woobie:
  • Emil; while she's rich, to say she and her parents don't get along is putting it lightly. When she was kidnapped they refused to pay her ransom.
  • Your character is too, with his father missing. Emil even says he's lonely like she is.
  • Marina and Dolfi. Their grandfather, the one who planted trees in Ever Green, is dead. And they fight for his memory.

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