YMMV / Monster Sanctuary

• Alternate Character Interpretation: The alchemists claim that they are Mirroring Factions with the Keepers, and that the Keepers are similarly selfish and only concerned with their own power. The heroes reject this, but there's a lot of support for the claim. Monster Keepers can only bond with monsters they raise from birth, which in practice means you spend your time taking eggs from their parents and raising them as Child Soldiers, in some cases literally conscripting them into the monster army. Chymes claims that the method he uses to steal the spectral familiars was created not by alchemists, but by the first Keepers, a claim your familiar rejects but cannot conclusively deny due to The Fog of Ages. It's very possible that the Monster Keepers' motives are not as altruistic as the characters would have us believe.
• Broken Aesop: The backstory and Monster Compendium entries show that the kings of the Old World were wrong for their prejudice in assuming monsters were Always Chaotic Evil, as the monsters were able to coexist with humans when the Keepers approached them peacefully. Your rivals also repeatedly state that acceptance and tolerance are fundamental values of the Monster Sanctuary. However, characters also use the Big Bad's association with occult monsters as proof he is evil, implying they really are Always Chaotic Evil. This assertion goes completely unchallenged by the characters extolling the virtues of tolerance.
• Demonic Spiders: Stolbys have been quite reviled by players for numerous reasons to the point of ending more than a few playthroughs. But what makes them this annoying, you ask? Well, they have naturally high evasion from both physical and magic attacks, meaning even monsters 20 levels above them can be completely incapable of landing a single blow on them. They also have great restorative abilities, so residual support damage won't help either. To make matters even worse, they have many vicious ways of stacking poison and other debuffs on your party too. The most unfortunate aspect, however, is that player owned Stolbys likely won't nearly be as impressive, as The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard when it comes to enemy chances.
• Difficulty Spike: Champion monsters aren't terribly difficult Boss Battles, as you outnumber them three-to-one and they're highly vulnerable to Status Effects. So it can come as a shock to players once Boss Battles shift to Keeper duels after the starting areas, as they're difficult six-on-six matches against monsters with much better stats, abilities, and AI than you're used to. While you can coast through the game up to that point, Keeper duels will require you to construct your team carefully to counter your opponents' strategy.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Manticorb is only found in one room of the Mountain Path and isn't used by any Keepers in the main story. Nevertheless, thanks to its adorable, catlike appearance and usefulness in battle, it's one of the most popular monsters in the game. It even proved popular enough to have a plush made of it.
• Fan Nickname: Godzerker for the dark-shifted Catzerker superboss in the Mountain Path added in the Forgotten World update.
• Game-Breaker: There are a few overwhelmingly powerful combinations in the game.
  • The most notable is probably the Brutus Stack Team, which centers on Brutus and Caraglow. Full details can be found easily, but the jist of it is that Brutus ends up with 50+ Charge stacks, multiple copies of Might, Glory, and enough power behind him that he can easily one-shot kill the final boss and all of the bonus bosses on the second round of the fight, or wipe an enemy keeper's entire front line of units at once, depending on which of his ultimates he uses for his finishing move.
  • Combining a debuff-focused monster who can inflict Chill with a monster that has Congeal (turns Chill into an extremely powerful Damage Over Time effect) can let you tear through just about anything that's not resistant to water. (To make this even better, Congeal damage applies before regeneration effects, unlike other Damage Over Time.) Mad Eye and Specter are a popular combination for this, as they can also inflict Burn for additional Damage Over Time and their dark-shift passives let them stack additional debuffs. Combining this with a monster that has the Blood Drive aura makes this even more powerful, though only three monsters in the entire game have access to it and one of them is in the second-to-last mandatory area, and another is the Final Boss.
  • For most of the game, your options for dealing with enemy buffs are limited to the unreliable Cleanse, which is a Luck-Based Mission due to its random trigger chance. Once you get a Sutsune, however, it gives you access to not only a number of reliable dispel abilities, but the ability to steal buffs instead of dispelling them. To make it even better, this ability applies to the entire party, and Sutsune has an additional ability that lets everyone dispel buffs. This allows you to make buff-centric enemy parties Hoist by Their Own Petard and clean house very easily. Unfortunately, you can only get Sutsune in the Final Dungeon, but they are incredibly useful against the final and optional bosses.
  • A team of two Fungi specced for stacking poison combined with a Troll with Poison Eater can be used to trivialize nearly every champion monster in the game. All three monsters have Multi Poison, enabling an additional 2 stacks of poison, and Poison Eater gains an additional hit for every stack of Poison on the target. With additional passives such as Dominance (3% damage boost for every debuff on the target) and Sensitivity (turns Weakness into a Damage-Increasing Debuff) you can observe some truly astounding damage values. Here's a video of the team in action.
• That One Achievement: A lot of players have expressed frustration with the Wanderlust achievement, because even if it looks like you've found every tile of the map, the game still says you've only explored 99.6%.
• That One Boss: Alchemist Zosimos, the boss of the Sun Palace, is widely cited as a Difficulty Spike for players. While you can generally coast through previous bosses, Zosimos requires players to analyze and counter his strategy, as he has an AoE debuff-spamming composition that will make most people rip their hair out. It doesn't help that his team heavily favors water and earth attacks, which most of the Sun Palace monsters you're likely to have been using throughout the area are weak to.