YMMV / One Way Heroics

• Accidental Innuendo: If you get killed, the game over text might state that your killer looks down on you hungrily, even if the killer is a human.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: On higher difficulties, the Zenura Weave + Pro Wrestler strategy can cause this trope for some players.
• Contested Sequel: Mystery Chronicle is this, especially in comparison to Plus. The major gripes with the former for most players are the unreasonable 30 FPS cap (even on the Steam version), performance issues despite the FPS cap and Loads and Loads of Loading on every platform, hidden traps that are hard to play around and seemingly only there to bring Mystery Chronicle closer to other Spike Chunsoft roguelikes (with only the Steam version having the option to toggle them off), and having none of Plus's balance changes due to being a fork of the original One Way Heroics. For some, all of these issues compounded together make Mystery Chronicle a harder sell over Plus (or even the original), while others ultimately don't mind these issues as much and think the criticism is overblown. Some supporters of Mystery Chronicle find the FPS cap complaints in particular to be nitpicking, claiming that framerate shouldn't matter for a turn-based game.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Yay, you can unlock Dosey as an alternate skin for a class in Mystery Chronicle! Which class, you ask? Half-Beast.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Fire-Breathing enemies are a genuine threat. They can destroy your flammables (woe unto you if you happen to be carrying certain bombs or vials of fire), and set you alight for several turns, doing damage constantly. Even if you won't be permanently damaged by them, fire pierces all sources of physical armor and reduction like the few sources of enemy Force powers do, so in most cases fire damage does twice the damage other enemies would inflict, while your only defense is a small chance to nullify fire damage found on uncommon armor items and enchantments.
  • So, logically, Dragons are the king of Demonic Spiders. Every attack is a fire attack. Black Dragons are even worse, since they can cause food to decay.
  • Undead enemies have the ability to rot the hero's equipment, unconditionally stripping away 10 durability from their weapon and armor (with higher-level ones stripping away 20 durability). They're also relatively tankier than other similarly-leveled enemies, meaning players will take a durability hit unless they're geared enough to one-shot them. Not helping matters is that certain biomes and random events will increase the rate at which undead enemies spawn.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Dosey. Her inevitable Face–Monster Turn was tragic enough that plus added a hidden epilogue where you could save her, and she's one of the few returning party members in Mystery Chronicle.
• Franchise Original Sin: Mystery Chronicle was criticized for its invisible traps that can screw over your run. Chunsoft's previous Mystery Dungeon games (which the series was retroactively added to) also had these, and they also could screw you over if you were unlucky, but the addition of the Light Raid makes it even harder to recover from traps.
• Game-Breaker: With patience and some lucky enchantment scrolls you can make ridiculously powerful equipment in this category.
  • Stacking Durable and Quality on gear is simple, yet makes items stupidly tough and useful.
  • Dimensional Vault abuse can result in hilariously broken plays. For example, keeping and maintaining that powerful Quality (weapon) +9 you forged over the course of countless adventures allows you to build something that will be strong enough to shred the Demon Lord.
  • Lockpicking can be very powerful. Cracking those chests that contain valuables without burning precious Energy on Force moves, Stamina, weapon durability, and Life on Bash, or otherwise lugging around a heavy Battle-axe, can result in you swimming in powerful gear and silver coinage.
  • Stacking 5 Pro-Wrestler perks (which increase unarmed extra hit chance by 30% and critical hit chance by 5% each) on either Swordmaster or Hero can be exceptionally useful thanks to their increased chance to hit multiple times per attack: much like in Final Fantasy, this turns them into Bare Fisted Monks with the ability to hit 2-4 times by default and only going up from there as they gain more Agility levels, and since they're not using any weapons, they can just sell off any that they find and not be restricted by their durability. Furthermore, since Pro-Wrestler also gives an increased critical hit chance, it's easy for them to hit 100% critical hit rate permanently, which increases their overall attack power by a good amount as well as bypassing the Demon Lord's barriers completely, allowing them to easily defeat'em in the first encounter with some liberal Awakening abuse. This is somewhat balanced by the fact that some enemies, like the Phantom Knight, are resistant to non-axe damage. Also, trying to punch the Dark Dragon — a.k.a. the Darkness itself — will end just as poorly as you'd expect.
  • Combining Zenura Weave with the Pro-Wrestler strategy allows your Hero to kill most enemies before they can even react. Even with the Nerf in Plus, it's still possible to activate it after gaining all the necessary allies and utility spells so that the Charisma and Intelligence penalties affect the player less. And the EXP penalty is outweighed by the fact that with all this power (and Queen Frieda's Letter), the player won't need to run from most enemies and can easily make up for the lost EXP this way.
  • Starting the Force Knight quest will cause a building to regularly appear with an Non-Player Character that heals the player and restores their energy. As long as the quest is never advanced, this results in a guaranteed healing point, making it easier to get endings that don't conflict with the quest.
  • Almost all items obtained from beating various endings are gamebreakers when taken on a future run. Most of them have higher attack and durability than the best items you can normally find with the same weight. This gives you a huge power boost from the first day which is still relevant at the end of the game, and relieves the need to hunt for good equipment.
  • Boomerangs, a weapon class added in Mystery Chronicle, are a form of ranged weapon that have a highly unusual but extremely useful attack range. Boomerangs travel counterclockwise along the outline of a 4x4 square and it isn't stopped by walls, nor do they damage them, making them a very effective tool to pick off enemies stuck behind such obstacles wthout fear of them retaliating. The boomerang's only real weaknesses are their rarity and their low durability, with the latter being easily fixed with enchantments and/or repair scrolls.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The flavour-filled way the forced autoscroll is implemented makes it nightmarish. Imagine it, running endlessly from an all-consuming wave of darkness, with the knowledge that if you get trapped in a dead end, you're doomed.
  • Overlapping with Fridge Logic when you start encountering villages wiped out by monsters and beasts, though all the doors are closed until you come and later you witness the Corruption and villagers who are half-turned into monsters, Demon Lord also mentions this. When running for 10,000 km, the terrain becomes increasingly scarcer, because you might be looping on to the lands already devoured by Darkness. And a long (25x times longer than usual) run through the wastelands puts a strain on the player's mind.
  • The protagonist is reincarnating in different dimensional versions of the world, partially remembering previous lives and what killed them. In some epilogues, the main character is implied to start losing memories about their self, their name, and so on. Probably because of exploiting timelines.
  • Die from damage over time by being lit on fire and you'll get a disturbingly graphic description of your character agonizingly asphyxiating from the smoke.
  • In Plus, Death Masks can take the appearance of their victims. Not only do you have to be paranoid of friendly Non Player Characters, there's also some Fridge Horror that if you lose to the Death Mask, it can pretend to be the hero and continue giving the world a false Hope Spot.
  • Also in Plus, your food can rot. You can try to eat it, but it will give you the "Food Poisoning" status.
  • The Jump Scare caused by coming within a one-square radius of a treasure chest room, only to be suddenly teleported elsewhere.
  • Another Jump Scare can occur when you try to approach a Goddess Statue in a dungeon, only for the dungeon to seal its doors on you. Becomes Nightmare Retardant if you already busted a hole in the wall, which won't get sealed up.
  • Forest terrain is usually good, as it confers a 10% Evasion boost. Big forests, however, are also home to Shadow enemies.
• Paranoia Fuel: On Grueling Campaign difficulty and above: Fake doors. Be prepared to attack every door instead of just opening it as it might be a monster in disguise. Not even town doors are safe!
• Player Punch:
  • In order to recruit Mila, you have to pass her father by and let him get killed by a Death Mask. All so you can get 100% Completion.
  • The alternative is even worse. After delivering Mila to her father, you think you gave them a heartwarming reunion, but if you find Mila's father again, he'll be Laughing Mad, implying Mila ended up getting killed by monsters while they fled the darkness. Poor girl can't catch a break.
  • After learning the truth about the Demon Lord, killing her on later runs can leave a sour taste in one's mouth.
• Porting Disaster: The Nintendo Switch version of One Way Heroics Plus uses small font sizes that made sense for its era, but not so much for the Switch's resolution. The result is that most in-game text ranges from barely legible to completely illegible in portable mode, depending on how good one's eyesight is, hurting its viability as an on-the-go game.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • One Way Heroics Plus is available as a standalone game on Playism, but on Steam (which is more popular in the West), you have to buy vanilla OWH first since Plus is marked as DLC. Most people who play Plus don't touch the vanilla edition which makes that particular edition a waste of money for them. To add a little insult to injury, both editions are more expensive on Steam than on Playism.
  • Mystery Chronicle adds invisible traps that can screw over players in a tight spot. A later update to the Steam version added the option to make all traps visible.
  • The sky "biome" in Mystery Chronicle takes the rarely-occurring bottomless pits of the desert biome and makes them a feature of roughly half the tiles, especially at the north and south edges of the map. Without a means of escape such as teleport potions, a Force Bridge, or a way to fly above terrain, one can find themselves stuck between the Shine Raid and a dead end.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: The Plus version has more gimmicks and nerfs to balance out various abusable features from the original and make it much easier to get cornered, making it closer to the difficulty of other Roguelike games. Some gimmicks include toll booths, which will put a bounty on you and send a Lightning Bruiser Toll Collector after you if you try to sneak past, expiring food and food poisoning (worse yet, Animal Meat always has a random chance of being rotten when you eat it), Int, Charisma, and EXP penalties for Zenura Weave (which is still considered overpowered by some), randomly appearing enemy mobs that are both powerful and cluster together, random periods of higher enemy frequency, all of the hero's main stats except Strength have their positive effects reduced, and the goddess altar having its cost increased and limits your choices of benefit, Fortress and Cave terrains, which both feature lots of walls you can be trapped by (and tough enemies in the former case), the Coast terrain being full of sand and rivers, basically combining the worst aspects of Cave and Desert terrains, the dimensional corridor, with tougher enemies and a tougher boss to replace the Demon Lord (once you enter, you're there for the whole rest of the game), and the End of the World being pushed back to 3000 km, and a Tourist class, who is intentionally underpowered and needs to waste turns in dangerous encounters to fulfill his eventual win condition.
• That One Sidequest:
  • The Tourist special ending is this, even on Afternoon Stroll and with preparations. Not only do they have low starting stats, they have a chance to fill out pages upon leveling, which means enemies will end up surpassing the player, especially in agility. At best, the Tourist might gain enough Mountain Climbing and Swimming skill to outmaneuver enemies, find some strong allies (both Non Player Characters and unique allies), or find plenty of towns to safely fill out more pages.
  • In order to get the Dosey+ ending, the player needs to find a Parchment of Darkness, which is one of the rarest items in the game.