YMMV / Minoria

• Breather Level:
  • Snakeroot Garden. After a very 'school-of-hard-knocks' opening to the game in the form of St. Hildreth's Cathedral, where (especially new) players will likely struggle a bit with the parry mechanic, have some growing pains accepting how frail the protagonist is, and hit a brick wall in their adventure in the form of Sister Devoir, Snakeroot Garden actually ends up being a fair bit gentler. Every enemy in the area is meant to punish the player if they haven't figured out the benefits of parrying yet, but they also have much more predictable tells and far longer wind-ups than the enemies in the first area, if they don't instead attack immediately after they signify they're going to, which just makes it easier for a player wanting to block as soon as they see the universal attack indicator around an enemy. Sister Semilla also begins accumulating numerous healing items and can quickly obtain items that somewhat lessen her frailty issues, and the boss of the area is almost a complete joke; most players going at the game casually will beat Saora on their first try, and even players going for flawless victories will probably only reset ten times, max, and only because of the short windup on her massive laser attack.
  • Similarly, Mercy Cellar, which follows Snakeroot Garden, isn't that bad; besides the swinging flail traps, an ounce of caution and patience goes a long way towards making it one of the easier points in the game, and while parrying is still necessary against some enemies, the thieves are very easy to read. While the boss of the area, Frikka, takes more effort to no-hit than Saora, she's one of very few bosses whose attacks have enough windup to properly block, and she doesn't attack fast enough to really contest going to town on her. This is also at the point where you simply have enough incense to stay back and pelt her with magic with near impunity, if you so choose.
• Game-Breaker: Not initially, but incenses quickly become this by the time you exit St. Hildreth's Cathedral. In a game where most of the challenge comes from performing flawless victories against bosses to get special items, the incenses you can burn more than make up for a lack of a bow in this game. Both in transit and against bosses, it soon becomes difficult to come close to running out of spells in any situation. Not only are they numerous, they steadily just keep getting more powerful, and even though they often 'suffer' from a low ammo count individually, nothing stops the player from swapping them out on the fly to abuse a given situation or to spam-cast every spell they have against a boss, who generally have very few options in terms of reprisal against the majority of spells, which are fired off at range. Not only that, spells are amazing at interrupting bosses given how they accumulate stun damage. Storm, in particular, basically shreds a boss' stun gauge with each use, and does incredible damage with no chance to miss once deployed.
• Obvious Judas: Princess Amelia Soliette and the Church in general. Though seemingly the Big Goods of the setting, it is made abundantly clear since the beginning that they are a Corrupt Church — one of the first things we learn about them is that they killed heroine Semillia's mother for being a witch, and a little later it is casually mentioned that they burn down entire villages to kill suspected witches. We learn in about the halfway point that they would torture witches in a cellar below the cathedral. Amelia seems nice at first but starts badmouthing witches and spewing hateful rhetoric about them, and is fully supportive of the Church's atrocities. It is thus little surprise when they turn out to be the real villains.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Flawless victories against named bosses return, and unlike Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight, the main entry in Momodora most players jumping into Minoria are familiar with, you don't have a bow to cheese bosses with. While magic will quickly pick up the slack to some degree following exodus from St. Hilderth's Cathedral, the first few bosses can be a nightmare to deal with up close and personal, especially Sister Devoir, who, as mentioned in That One Boss down below, needed no help being a pain to beat.
• That One Boss: A lot of players have admitted to taking issue with Sister Devoir, the second boss, especially with the 'no damage' challenge to get her sword. Frequently compared in difficulty to the final boss, Devoir gets a lot of her infamy from her Confusion Fu approach to combat; while her tells are consistent, she's very adept at changing up how she fights the player with the moves she has. Her main combo is especially infamous due to the method of dodging it being the exact opposite of how you counter her standard spell attack - rolling away as opposed to rolling past her. In the chaos of battle, watching for Devoir to swing her hand to telegraph her magic attack can be a challenge, and dodging the wrong way will get the player hit - either rolling past her anticipating her magic attack means she'll catch the player with her second swing, or rolling away from her anticipating her combo means her magic attack will get a clean hit on the player. Her main combo can also be extended at her leisure to contain a thrust and then a final swing, and while the thrust is telegraphed, the swing isn't, meaning anyone trying to catch her while she's overextending risk getting cold-cocked by her possible final attack. Add in a massive lunar-shaped swipe and the fact the magic attack hits you mid-jump to punish panic jumping, and Devoir is massively challenging for the second boss in the game. While possible to brute force on a normal run, if you want her sword, you have to learn patience and study her every tell to know when to punish her attacks.
• That One Attack: The Super Boss, Harina, has several deadly attacks, but the worst of them is the one where she conjures up three columns of giant balls in the left, right, and middle ends of the arena. These balls will hit for a lot of damage and take a while to disappear, during which she can conjure up another attack, leaving you very little room to dodge — and using the dodge button is tricky because you can accidentally go too far and get hit by the balls on the other end. And once she Turns Red, the giant balls will last even longer — better hope she does not do this attack twice in succession, or the fight is basically over for you unless you still have some attack Incenses left over. This is especially so if you are going for a no-hit battle so you can get her secret item.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: While siding with Princess Amelia is treated as the non-canon, bad ending (lacking the song that plays in the true ending and having Sister Anna Fran ask if the player did the right thing), it's hard to argue that Princess Amelia does not have justified cause for most if not all of her actions. While the nuns, through their adventure, come face-to-face with the reality of the situation, Princess Amelia doesn't, nor can she be held accountable for not knowing the depths of evil the Corrupt Church represents. Having grown up in the Holy Kingdom of Ramezia, where the Church's teachings are such an ubiquitous aspect of daily life that even the previous Queen, who herself was a Witch, readily treated with the Sacred Office to maintain order in her realm, it's understandable that Amelia has been taught from the start to see the Sacred Office as a force for good. By comparison with Sisters Anna Fran and Semilla, Amelia spends the adventure getting cursed by her sister, who taunts her over the affair and mocks Amelia's faith in her; witnessing her sister stage a coup that kills knights loyal to House Soliette by the truckload, including fleeing combatants; being held captive by two witches who mistreat and are implied to actively torture her; being kidnapped again and forced to witness a blood ritual that tears the capital city apart with plants using the skull of her dear mother; and has to deal with many of her nation's civilians being misplaced, barricaded in their homes, and burned at the stake. Ignoring the Sacred Office's own misdeeds, the Witches aren't exactly saints, either, and even their stated goal to 'free the world' from humanity's hold over it is shown to include mass amounts of death - those skeletons and skulls used in their necromancy had to come from somewhere, and the ritual to summon the Ceremonial Forest to attain Minoria's power is a blood ritual using such copious amounts of the liquid that when Sister Semilla does battle in the massive ritual chamber with the Witch of Lust, she's forced to wade knee-deep in the liquid. It's hard not to root for Princess Amelia taking charge of her life, freeing herself from her abductor, and earnestly thanking Sisters Anna Fran and Semilla for all they've done to save her nation. It's also important to note that until Poeme explains that she's always harbored pro-Witch sentiments and brings up their mother, Amelia only ever laments the monster Poeme has become and even begs her to stop her plans.

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