Alternate Character Interpretation: Ezlan, the Undying King. Is he a brutal tyrant oppressing Rhom's people for his own benefit, or is he a well-intentioned but ruthlessly pragmatic king doing the ugly things needed to save his planet? The Akari are hostile toward him, seeing him as a heretic whose curiosity and greed brought the Root to their world. None of the Buri who bother to talk to the player like him much, but Ford's diaries suggest their people in general take perverse pride in being his slaves. Worse still, the Akari suspect that Ezlan was responsible for the Root's appearance on Rhom in the first place, and if the player asks Ezlan how they invaded, he is noticeably evasive on the subject despite claiming virtual omniscience. The two interpretations aren't even mutually exclusive; in the same cutscene where he takes the Heart of Corsus's guardian into the pool to help regenerate Rhom's own, he boasts of how this will help cement his control over Rhom forever.
Anticlimax Boss: A lot of players think of Dreamer/Nightmare as a painfully underwhelming end boss for the base campaign. While the presentation and physical design is good, its Puzzle Boss gameplay design makes it practically impossible to beat if you don't know how its special mechanic works, and pretty much a walkover if you do. The True Final Boss of the Subject 2923 DLC, Harsgaard, Root Harbinger, is considered vastly superior as a final opponent.
Awesome Music: Remnant: From The Ashes has some epic music:
"Dreamer" and "Nightmare", the two-stage boss theme of the campaign's final battle, is pure pulse-pounding intensity.
Best Boss Ever: Brudvaak, the Rider from the Subject 2929 DLC brings something to the table that other bosses lack: sheer badassery. Let us count the ways: 1) He fights in an area strewn with the charred corspes of his victims. 2) He rides a giant naked mole rat and can tag-team in and out with it. 3) Said naked mole rat can exhale a storm of ice breath. 4) He wields a wrist-launcher that can shoot fire and ice, despite the technology of Reisum being equivalent to 9th century Scandinavia. 5) He can blow a war horn to call his followers to fire-bomb the arena. 6) He smack-talks you the entire fight & 7) When either one dies, the other becomes enraged and grows more powerful. The resulting fight is epic beyond anything else seen in the game.
Breather Boss: After the utter hell that is the first part of Corsus, the Unclean One is refreshingly easy. He has a few melee swipes with his hammer, a pounce and a move where he throws his hammer at you, none of which are terribly hard to avoid and his only adds are a pair of the normal infected enemies you've been fighting so far. Enemies that the boss is very good at killing for you. The boss also has a huge weakspot making it easy to tear him down quickly. The only scary attack is a spin that goes on for way too long. And as your reward you get to make the Devastator, a really cool crossbow that shoots five bolts at once. Just don't fight him in the basement unless you want to be on the receiving end of his hammer smash (detailed under That One Attack below.)
Canker is this after the DLC patch. Canker himself is a pathetic boss. He literally cannot hurt you if you do not step into his swamp (though he can obliterate you if you do). The issue used to be that, at half health, the game would spawn an Iskal Knight, which are annoying to deal with at the best of times and essentially unkillable with a boss breathing down your neck, so you had an enemy that could herd you into the boss' line of fire. This elite spawn has since been removed, so the only way of smoking you out of the safe places are a few undead swamp elves that are easily dispatched.
Breather Level: Cutthroat Channel on Earth. The only enemies here are human bandits and attack dogs. While they can still overwhelm you if you're careless, they are a walk in the park compared to other dungeons filled with Goddamned Bats and Demonic Spiders.
Can also be That One Level if you hate hiding from riflemen or wanted to farm Lumenite Crystals, because there are no Elites in Cutthroat Channel, only gunmen, axe wielders, and dogs.
The gear level system and accompanying enemy Level Scaling. The player's "gear level" is calculated by averaging their highest-level gear for each slot, and when a new world is "rolled" all enemies are assigned a level of that plus one.
Proponents argue that it ensures that enemies never become trivial as the game progresses, discourages trying to just brute-force enemies with better stats and bigger numbers since doing so will make later stages even harder, and that, since leveling gear to 20 unlocks special traits and later worlds do have minimum level floors baked in, the player is still incentivized to upgrade.
Detractors argue that the system is never properly explained to the player and is extremely counter intuitive (since the player upgrading armor or weapons improves enemy damage and health, most of the time upgrading gear past the "floor" actively makes them weaker than enemies which scale harder than they do, and since the game never comes out and explains how it all works players might not understand that upgrading aggressively is just making things harder for themselves down the pipeline), that this sort of dynamic scaling only results in Empty Levels that makes upgrading unfun and unrewarding as the game goes on, that since only the highest-level gear is calculated the player is being punished rather than rewarded for experimenting with new weapons instead of sticking to tried-and-true ones that are the least crippled by this system (boss weapons especially count for double their level for calculating gear level, meaning a player trying out with one but finding it not to their taste can easily permanently hobble their character), and that the "minimum gear level for a world" is not only something the game never tells the player about but the very definition of a problem found because there was a solution searching for one.
The randomized generation systems generally. Fans argue that it produces almost infinite replay value and ensures no two runs will be exactly the same. Critics argue that it not only jumbles up questlines and makes acquiring specific items or weapons a frustrating crapshoot the player has little control over, but that the randomly generated levels are such repetitive copy-paste jobs anyway that the result is ultimately hardly "infinite variety." Such players often prefer handmade levels like the Leto lab, or Ward Prime from the DLC, that integrate environmental storytelling and adventure elements in with the action. It doesn't help that so much of the late game involves scrounging around for Simulacra, which only have a chance of appearing once in a given Adventure mode playthrough.
Common Knowledge: Many players take uncritically the Houndmaster's rumor that Ezlan the Undying King fuels his immortality by reducing the Buri intosome kind of powder he consumes, and admittedly it's in-character for the pragmatic tyrant. But the developers have confirmed that this is false, and that his actual longevity comes from his connection to Rhom's guardian and his relentless self-experimentation; he culls the Buri for some other purpose.
Of the game's three starting classes, the Ex-Cultist is generally seen as the easiest, especially in solo play. Its Coach Gun longarm has many of the advantages of the Scrapper's Shotgun, but with slightly longer reach and better burst-fire, and emptying both barrels before rolling away as it reloads is better than standing one's ground and blasting most of the time anyway, meaning its tiny two-round magazine isn't a huge issue in practice. Its Mender's Aura mod creates a huge zone of health regeneration, which pairs very well with both its starting gear's set bonus that extends the duration of said mod's effects and its individual effect which causes all mods to automatically charge at a good clip, and its starting trait Spirit, which further boosts mod power generation. This also takes a huge burden off the player's Dragon's Heart resource management, allowing the player to top off between battles. While the game does have a lot of better weapons, mods, and armor available eventually, these can carry a player for a pretty long time, and the Ex-Cultist's armor in particular is a pretty useful spot-filler for other sets since slow, steady mod power generation is really good.
The advantages of the Beam Rifle's continuous stream of radiation more than make up for its mediocre damage-per-tic, since the beam has good range, can still stagger enemies while melting their health, can be easily "walked" from foe to foe by holding down the fire button, eliminating some of the frustrations of having to aim at fast-moving enemies, and offers fantastic mod power generation while coming with an open slot for whatever mod the player wants to fit it with. Its huge magazine size helps ensure its relatively slow reload speed isn't much of an issue. And it's available on Rhom after beating a gauntlet of normal foes rather than a boss fight, albeit only if the random number generator sees fit to deposit the correct dungeon into the world. Some of the other weapons might be stronger in their particular specialized niches, but the Beam Rifle's excellent all around performance and ease of use makes it hard to pass up, even compared to several boss weapons.
It helps that Radiation is a pretty good element; it gets a damage bonus that ranges from significant to okay on most organic foes and just about the only enemies that resist it are constructs actually on Rhom. It's not necessarily the best tool in many situations, but it's rarely a bad one.
Root Hunters are practically mini-bosses in their own right in singleplayer, especially in the early parts of the game. They are almost always holding their blades defensively, automatically blocking any and all attacks, only dropping their guard when attacking. The problem is that their attacks are quick, heavily damaging, have deceptively massive reach, can cause bleed, and have higher than average tracking, meaning that the only way to reliably damage them (letting them get close and baiting out their attacks with high-damage weapons at point black range and praying they stagger before their combo starts) is essentially a gamble. Even worse, unlike most of the Elite Mooks in the game, they always spawn behind you several feet away and slowly creep up on you, so unless you're paying attention for their whispers (or the unique Scare Chord whenever a special enemy spawns), you won't know one's there until it's carving you up. Finally, they primarily show up in dungeons, meaning that the fighting has a good chance of attracting or accompanying a Hollow swarm. In multiplayer they're much easier since other players can just shoot them in the undefended back while they're pursuing a player, and once you have the Ravager you can use its mod to emulate the effect even in solo.
The Skull Mites on Corsus. They only do two things: One, shoot a corrosive projectile at you that knocks you over and two, summon two Undead Swamp Elves. And if they're not doing one, they're doing the other. If you fail to notice them (which you will, since they love spawning in the swamp while you're in buildings above them) you will have to fight a veritable army to even get to them. And if you kill them, you still have to kill the actual Mite or it finds itself another body. Oh, and they love to spawn in pairs.
Knights on Corsus. They come in two variants. One without a head and one in armor. The one without head you need to shoot until it keels over and exposes the mass of gas that gives it life. Then you need to shoot that and quick, before it gets sucked back in and the Knight heals to almost full health. The armored versions don't have that gas trick since their gas bubble is on full display. Instead they have a ton of health and can toss a hammer at you. Both of them pretty much never stagger and can toss you around like a ragdoll.
Buri Shamans on Rhom. They either shoot radiation projectiles at you or spawn a Radiation sphere on top of you. Doesn't sound so bad; after all the Root Witches do the same thing but with Root Rot, right? Wrong! Their projectiles are faster, their spheres take effect immediately so it's almost impossible to not take at least a little damage, and the downtime between their attacks is far shorter. If they spawn in pairs, or, god forbid, alongside a Strider, it's practically Game Over then and there.
There is a version of the Buri Shamans that only appears in the Shackled Canyon dungeon. While the Shackled Canyon is already That One Level, being basically an endless slog along chest-high walls while fighting snipers, rocketeers, and dogs, the Shamans are the crown jewel. These shamans do not produce radiation spheres or projectiles, they produce a continuous radiation beam. This beam outlasts your i-frames when dodging, clips through some cover that's supposed to stop it, and does not stop for about ten seconds. If you are caught by this without cover nearby, you are just dead. In a Hardcore Mode run, it's entirely understandable if you reroll your entire campaign the moment you notice that Shackled Canyon is mandatory in your current campaign. Oh, and did you know that the game sometimes spawns two at once so one can smoke you out of cover into line of fire of the other?
Plenty of the heavily-armored elites in the fishing-ice portions of Reisum are really hard to stagger and really good at punishing a player for trying to line up shots on their exposed weakpoints instead of pumping fire into their heavily-armored bodies. And unlike their Corsus equivalents, who can usually do one or the other, they often tend to be huge damage sponges with ranged attacks that're both able to take a beating and able to return fire.
Difficulty Spike: Corsus, the third world you encounter, is far harder than any before or after. The enemies have high health, difficult to dodge lunges, and often come with strange new mechanics - stunning screams on enemies that like to stand still, two different types of enemies who have to be finished off or they respawn with full health, big brutes which relentlessly and rapidly rush you down, burrowing attack beasts which cannot be hurt if they see you first, and so on. It doesn't help that it's the only area whose level range does not coincide with you getting a new tier of gear.
Disappointing Last Level: Ward 17 is completely devoid of enemies, obstacles and puzzles. All it consists of is a very long walk to the final battle, which can come off as a major letdown for players expecting an action-packed finale.
Funny Moments: On Earth, if the player climbs through a broken window (i.e. one with no glass in it) they will do so normally. If the window does have glass in it however, they will yeet themselves through it like a lunatic, even if it is a 10th-storey window.
The Breath of the Desert mod obtained from beating The Scourge. It shoots seven radioactive bees at people each of which does respectable damage. If they all hit (which they will, since they home very aggressively) they deal enormous damage. And you can have three charges for it stored up at once. There is not a boss in the game whose health bar doesn't get a significant dent when you unload all three. Even the Final Boss will lose two thirds of his health to that triple barrage of pain when he is in his vulnerable state. Was "nerfed" in the Swamps of Corsus update to deal less damage, but that update also added multiple ways to buff mod damage, which means that the update that was supposed to nerf the mod, instead ended up buffing it, because the mod is now even stronger on a proper build that buffs mod damage.
The Defiler, obtained by killing The Harrow normally. It's essentially a shotgun pistol with about as much kick as the Magnum and the same number of rounds but with a much faster reload and the Radioactive Volley mod added on, which fires a tight burst of high-damage radiation pellets that bounce off walls. And you can have five of these mod shots stored up at once (nerfed to three since the most recent update, still enough to rip most elites in half).
The Labyrinth set. A set of medium armor that strengthens your mods by 50%. This turns most damaging mods into nukes and even affects buff mods like Song of Swords. This is somewhat balanced by the Labyrinth set being a major Guide Dang It! to find and even if you know where to look, it's still a major pain to actually get.
Adventure Mode allows you to roll up any one of the worlds without having to reroll your entire campaign. This is useful if you want a specific dungeon to spawn but it becomes completely bonkers when you consider that a world rolled in Adventure Mode is always scaled to your gear level. Normally, Rhom starts at Gear Level 6 and Yaesha at Gear Level 9, but Adventure Mode can be entered at Gear Level 1 without you getting obliterated. So, before even starting your campaign, you can enter Yaesha, Corsus or Rhom and scour them for some of the absurdly powerful gear mentioned above. Sure the bosses there are meant for characters with a higher Trait Level and more healing items, but you can simply upgrade your gear to outgun them, netting you powerful mods and accessories way too early.
Since the update, the Ricochet Rifle and the Bandit set. The Bandit set has a chance to recycle ammo when you hit something, the Ricochet Rifle bounces between targets to hit multiple enemies. Combining the two and fighting a large enough group will keep the gun perpetually loaded and ready to fire. Even better? The devs have stated that this is not a bug or an exploit, this is working as intended.
The new Warlord set combined with the Band of Discord, the Triage trait and any one item that gives you regeneration or extra healing efficiency (Golden Plum, Blood Font, Ezlan's Band, Mender's Charm). The Warlord set makes it so that using a Dragon Heart doesn't heal you but instead buffs your damage by 40% and gives you lifesteal on any damage you do, be it melee, ranged or even status effects but will also drain 200% of your health over the next thirty seconds. The Band of Discord converts your Dragon Heart into a heal over time, which still works despite the Warlord set and, along with the Triage trait to double its effectiveness, significantly mitigates this health loss. Add to that any other source of regeneration and you heal more damage than you take before even taking your massive new life drain into account. All of this combined makes you nigh unkillablenote in theory; there are still a lot of bosses who will one-shot you on higher difficulties, rendering all this healing meaningless.
The new Burdens. A set of five rings that give huge buffs but come with certain downsides. Except for most of them the downsides are either irrelevant or easy to circumvent.
The Burden of the Gambler gives you a massive crit chance and crit damage bonus. The downside is that weakspot hits don't deal increased damage, but a lot of bosses don't have weakspots and against the ones that do, you can switch the ring out for something else.
The Burden of the Reckless heals 25% of your health (50 with the Triage trait) on a perfect dodge but your Dragon Hearts no longer heal you. This allows you to focus on dodging and shooting without needing to waste time healing in boss fights..
The Burden of the Devoted transfers half of all your healing to your allies but lowers your damage output by 15%. Used correctly, this ring allows you to keep your friends from dying indefinitely.
The Burden of the Follower is the crown jewel. It increases your mod power generation by 100% but lowers your fire rate by a huge 35%. Except that single shot weapons like the Ricochet Rifle don't care about fire rate and doubled mod power generation makes your mods extremely spammable. Also you can swap between weapons to get around the fire rate penalty.
The Burden of the Warlord gives a multiplicative 15% bonus damage to everything but halves the effective range of your guns. This means your mods get stronger, your melee gets stronger and your guns get stronger but shorter-ranged. Combine with decently-ranged guns and it's a sizable damage boost with no downside.
The Frozen Mist mod obtained from That One BossObryk, The Shield Warden. Like Wildfire Shot it shoots a grenade that applies damage over time to an area, except instead of setting enemies on fire it gradually applies Frostbite while ticking huge damage onto anything stuck in the cloud. Frostbite slows enemies down, which makes them stay inside that cloud for longer, which also applies more Frostbite until the enemy is Frozen and thus takes higher Crit damage. What's more, since the damage from Frozen Mist is part of the mod and not part of the status effect, shooting multiple Frozen Mists at the same area makes the damage from all of them tick individually. This would be insane enough on its own, but also on Reisum you can find an item called Vulcan's Detonator, which powers up explosions and makes explosions inflict Burn. Frozen Mist's initial impact counts as an explosion, thus giving you yet more damage over time.
Corrosion. The player can stack up to five applications of Corrosion onto enemies, which lowers their defenses by a massive 25%. And thanks to the way the damage calculations work, this increases damage dealt by far more than 25%, to the point where even the hardiest bosses won't last much longer after they are properly corroded.
The aforementioned Triage trait, even without the rest of the Warlord set package. Easy to overlook compared to traits that directly increase your damage or tankiness, its raw power makes it arguably the strongest trait in the game- most traits only give 0.5%-1.5% bonuses to a stat, which stacks up to about 10%-30% at rank 20, significant but not game-breaking. The Triage trait increases your healing received from all sources (not just Dragon Hearts, but Bloodwort, passive regeneration from equipment, lifesteal etc) by 5% per stack, meaning that at rank 20 it literally doubles your healing!
Summoned allies are already spectacularly effective, with the Radioactive Skulls being powerful ranged harassers that are just as difficult for enemies to actually destroy as they are when you have to deal with them, Iron Sentinels chewing through bosses with automatic fire since the limited rooms where they're encountered remove the disadvantages of their being stationary, and the Very Good Boy tearing through bad guys even without his damage buff. Pulling out three or four of them can steamroll through exploration areas, slaughtering enemies long before the player actually arrives. And this is before they're used in conjunction with powerful relevant equipment like the Soul Link, which causes all of their attacks to heal the player, the Soul Anchor, which doubles the length of time that a summon sticks around while also boosting the player's damage for every summon they have out, and gear that charges mods automatically over time, like the Ex-Cultist armor set a player can start the game with or easily buy from the blacksmith (which also further boosts duration).
The Radioactive Skulls on Rhom go down in two shots at most, but they are flying enemies which rules out melee and they are everywhere in certain kinds of dungeons, always showing up to pelt you with their attacks while your trying to fend off an elite enemy. Making it worse is that if they don't go down in one shot they reel wildly, making it likely that your next shot will miss.
The grey, spindly Vyr in the Vyr Temple dungeons on Rhom have a tendency to rush you in huge groups, often while other enemies are attacking. Though one good melee whack is enough to kill them, they have an awkwardly timed leap attack which often lands just before your swing, guaranteeing you'll take damage if you try to take them head on. Worse, they'll often be joined by a radioactive version that explodes when killed, making melee even more risky.
Root Hollows in the Earth dungeons can be taken down with one or two good shots, but they spawn in massive groups and have a bad habit of suddenly rushing you while you're in the middle of fighting other enemies.
The basic Urikki enemies on Reisum overworld tiles. They sprint from cover to cover like the Root gunners but much faster, dodge shots more than Iskal elves and are as accurate as Pan crossbowmen while having noticeably higher HP to the point that most guns need more shots to kill them than any other normal enemy. And the version on Reisum 2 tiles inflicts frostbite with their crossbow bolts.
Shroud, the King Mook version of the Root Archers, isn't so bad on paper, but he loves to constantly teleport around the room very quickly, barely giving you time to line up your shots or close in. You're actually more likely to die from his Devil reinforcements ganging up on you than to Shroud himself.
Onslaught, a literal Lightning Bruiser that can teleport very quickly, giving you very little time to actually hurt him. He also has a very annoying area of effect attack he can do straight out of a teleport and summons the little lightning gargoyle enemies that do a surprisingly high amount of damage themselves.
Scald and Sear used to be That One Boss, one a small flying harasser and one a crossbow-wielder who could shave off most of your health with a volley and set you on fire even if you dodged his shots. Now, after Scald took an 80% cut to his damage and a massive reduction to the burn area, instead of being ridiculously hard, they are only absurdly irritating, with a harasser, several too-tanky adds, and a sniper who runs around a twisty arena looking for the best direction to ambush you from.
Dream Eater, for the simple reason that he has a charged attack where he sticks himself to the ceiling and you have to find the real one among a bunch of clones and pump damage into him to make him drop. This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that his arena is dotted with instant death pits that are very easy to blunder into while you're running around with your eyes on the ceiling. And the worst part? That slam attack looks as if it'll kill you if you fail to stop it, but it really doesn't do that much damage for all the build-up it gets.
Tian the Assassin. Aside from his charged knife throws he's not actually that dangerous, but he is immensely annoying. He jumps all around his huge arena, his fur and armor are pretty much the same color as the rocks around him, he provides a very small target and his slams and swipes can even stagger you if you're wearing the Leto set.
Erfor the Jackal. His arena is an ice floe with metal plates covering holes. The adds he summons are exploding rats that can break those metal plates, exposing holes for you to fall into. Every once in a while he will jump away out of reach and throw ice projectiles at you that will very quickly freeze you, at which point they come faster than you can dodge them, while the previously mentioned rats cheerfully demolish the arena around you. However, once you realize that his weakspots are his tiny baby legs, you can melt him fairly quickly.
Riphide, especially if you're unlucky enough to find it before you have any area-of-effect weapons or mods. Its gimmick is that it splits in half at each health threshold, and each one has the same moveset, which includes deadly-accurate projectiles and a wide area blast that requires precise timing to dodge. Also, one or more of the clones will begin glowing and healing the others. The only mercy is that all of the clones share the same health bar, meaning that you can trivialize the fight with damage over time effects spread across the entire group, or an area-of-effect attack like the Explosive Shot mod that hits all of the clones.
Nightmare Fuel: The basic Root enemies make...sounds. Intensely creepy sounds that are a combination of gurgling and the sound of crying children. And they're everywhere in maps like Earth.
There is something deeply, inherently wrong about Leto's Lab, a relatively rare optional dungeon on Earth. From the first part where you have to dig your way through a cubicle farm that has been overgrown by the Root, to how the Splitter elites that are standing around everywhere are completely motionless until you attack them, to the design of the Splitters, to the creeping dread as you make your way deeper. Then, in the second part, you find the teleporter as well as a log that starts off goofy like an SCP test log but turns horrifying as you find out that's how the Splitters were created in the first place and one of the places the teleporter can take you is a disposal facility that has a burning pile of distinctly human corpses, with no explanation given for where they're coming from, though the fact that there are still new ones dropping down in this long abandoned lab suggests that the teleportation device (which you've used several times) isn't actually teleporting... and then the final part is called the "Cursed Station", just for added creepiness.
There is now a questline about willingly subjugating yourself to the Iskal and helping the Queen to finish taking over her entire world. And if you do so, you can actually find that last uncontrolled elf turned into a zombie.
Ward Prime of the Subject 2923 DLC. The worst part isn't the immensely creepy atmosphere, or the haunting audio logs you find: it's the Genre Shift from a fast-paced Soulslike shooter to Survival Horror. To progress through the area, you must find gates that shift between two planes of existence and then run for your life to get to a barred gate and shoot it open, dodging hard-hitting flying Root that spawn ad infinitum and completely invincible Root monsters that will stalk you until you return to the real world. To make matter worse, while in the real world, you see said invincible Root wandering around, transparent and enveloped in a dreamlike fog, just waiting for you to shift so they can chase you again. And walking through them causes an ever-so-slight controller rumble akin to shivers down your spine.
The intro cutscene for Brudvaak, the new World Boss added in the Subject 2923 DLC, shows an arena strewn with hundreds of charred corpses. Brudvaak's pet warg is chowing down on a pile of them while Brudvaak nonchalantly sits atop a mountain of corpses. One poor sap tries to crawl away, only for Brudvaak to impale him in the back with a harpoon and toss his body away to join the rest.
Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: The Ricochet Rifle, a crossbow that shoots out TRON discs that bounce around. Originally it used realistic physics to bounce around, which made it completely unreliable. The update that accompanied the DLC changed the bounce to home in on nearby enemies though, so it will now smartly bounce between targets until it peters out, turning it from a weapon that was barely decent for inhumanly precise trickshots into an amazing weapon for crowd control.
Minibosses spawn with certain aspects, which isn't usually a problem as it adds variety, because bosses can be very different experiences with different aspects, but some combinations can be extremely irritating, like Skullcrusher Brabus, whose shotgun inflicts massive stunlock, or Hearty Riphide, where the extra health of the Hearty aspect gives the boss much more time to pull off his self-healing, or Vicious Scourge, whose Bullet Hell can be overwhelming even without the damage boost from Vicious. And then there's the Enchanter aspect, which can only happen to Mangler and Shroud and causes them to cast the same explosions as the Root Witches throughout the entire fight.
An example outside of actual gameplay is the lack of a pause function, even when playing offline. For whatever reason, you're unable to actually stop the game if you need to do something outside of it, like needing a restroom break or an emergency that really needs your attention. The only way to guarantee safety is to make your way to a checkpoint... which could be very far away depending on where you are. You can't even clear out an area and be safe, as enemies periodically respawn and can do so behind you in areas you've already cleared. Given that the entire game can be played offline and by yourself, there is no reason why you can't pause it.
The random generation logic can often spawn half of a randomized quest or event without the other half, and there's no partial credit for partial completion here. If you get, just as an example, the Control Rod from the Houndmaster's alternate kill condition, but Wud and the Ancient Automaton outside of his shop haven't spawned, tough luck and hope the already unnecessarily stingy dice see fit to spit out both at once next time because it can't be carried over. The Labyrinth Set in particular is an absolutely infuriating test of patience for this reason, since it requires these random factors to align no less than three different times before unlocking.
Sequel Displacement: Barely anyone had even heard of Chronos (in no small part because it was a VR exclusive game), to the point where the overwhelming majority of gamers assumed Remnant was an entirely new IP. Its success prompted Chronos to be remade as Chronos: Before the Ashes, and even then it's still practically unknown compared to its sequel. The third game in the series is simply called Remnant IInote although admittedly it's a direct sequel to Remnant, which was something of a Genre Shift from Chronos.
Slow-Paced Beginning: A common criticism of the game is that it has a rather painful few opening hours; you have a very limited selection of weapons, armour and abilities to choose from, which may or may not improve depending on how the procedural generation lays out your gameworld, and the environments (the ruined cities of post-apocalyptic Earth) and enemies (endless hordes of the Root) are very drab and repetitive. It's generally considered that the game doesn't really begin to come into its own until you make it to Rhom, which may take several hours of play, depending on how stuck you get on the Earth bosses.
Surprisingly Improved Sequel: Remnant is one for Chronos. Outside of being a VR game, Chronos was an outdated Soulslike game where you had no armour and a limited moveset that made the original Demon's Souls look new. Remnant, at the very least, adds more variety in equipment (even if they dropped the shield) and made a faster paced game. These improvements made Chronos: Before the Ashes a headscratcher for those who didn't know it's a re-release of the original Chronos and were wondering why the "prequel" seemed inferior and simplistic to Remnant.
"Unleash Your Potential", the trophy/achievement for gaining 30 different Traits. On launch the game had 32 Traits, but 5 of them could only be obtained through co-op, leaving solo players unable to complete the trophy, and leaving a very narrow margin for collecting enough (given how obscure to unlock some of them were). Rectified by the DLC as it added eight new Traits only one of which is co-op-exclusive.
"Dominator", the achievement for defeating ten bosses in a single run in Survival Mode. Survival Mode isn't just a Boss Rush, you have to go through 2 normal stages before facing a boss every third one (except for every third boss, where you only have to beat a single stage before facing a world boss), and a timer is constantly counting down as you do, making all enemies stronger every time it hits 0 before resetting. So to unlock this achievement you need to go through not only ten bosses but seventeen exploration stages in a row, without dying once, with the timer constantly urging you on. And with how much harder some bosses are than others, it's all up to your luck of which ones you get (common advice is to disable the Subject 2923 DLC before attempting it because of how much harder Reisum's stages are than Earth, Rhom, Corsus or Yaesha). Unsurprisingly it has the lowest global achievement completion percentage in the game.
The lightning-throwing shamans on Yaesha are probably the least threatening Elites in the game. However, they have one absolutely irritating trick up their sleeves where they electrify the weapons of all the nearby Pan enemies. Those electrified weapons are so strong they can shear off half of your health per hit even on the lowest difficulty setting - and most Pan enemies attack in quick succession.
The Unclean One's hammer smash attack that he uses if you trigger his alternate fight in the basement. There are a number of issues with this attack: 1) It covers the whole arena - no matter where you are standing, if you don't dodge at the right time you will get hit. 2) It is lightning fast. Although the wind-up is slow, the actual smash comes down so quickly that if you are half a second too early or too late you'll end up losing half your health bar. 3) The wind-ups have variable timings. This is the worst bit - each swing has a different wind-up before releasing. Sometimes he holds for 5 seconds, sometimes only half a second, making it impossible to get into a rhythm for dodging. You have to be prepared to react instantly as soon as you see him start to bring the hammer down. Oh, and just in case all that wasn't enough 4) he can and will do it several times in a row, and 5) occasionally after the last slam he'll follow up by instantaneously hurling the hammer at you with literally no wind-up (the hammer will be flying through the air before the dust from the slam has even dispersed) and perfect accuracy, even if you were standing behind him, which will usually be enough to one-shot you as well. This last trick is so blatantly and undisguisedly unfair that there's a good chance it's actually a bug.
Singe's horizontal fire breath sweep can be one depending on difficulty and how much cover is left in his arena. The burst of flame lasts longer than the i-frames from dodging, meaning that if you're in range of the fire breath you will take damage and be afflicted with a stack of Burn. The only ways to mitigate the attack are to either get completely out of range of the wide area of effect or to put some of the ruined structures between you and Singe. The latter will only work for so long because virtually every other attack Singe has will knock said structures down.
While there's plenty of cheap bosses, Gorefist, the King Mook version of Root Hulks, takes the cake for being one of the first ones that you're likely to encounter, being one of the four possible boss dungeons on Earth. He's extremely fast when charging, has ridiculous tracking, his sword causes bleeding and can even stun-lock you into a near-instant-death combo, and he can also ignore the laws of physics, as his sword doesn't bounce or deflect off walls and pillars if he's already in his attack animation. Oh, and he's accompanied by infinitely-spawning Rot-Warts. What really amplifies this is that the dungeon leading up to Gorefist is filled with trivial enemies that feel appropriate for a tutorial level encounter, but Gorefist's attacks will deal 85%-90% of a PC's starting health with no armour upgrades or damage reduction modifiers. If you're relying on the Hunting Rifle, then in this case it's better to use the Shotgun with the Hot Shot mod added to it when fighting Gorefist.
Mangler, one of the bosses on Earth. Not only is he accompanied by a lot of Hollows that he constantly spawns more of, he is also plain and simply too fast for this game. He rolls toward and around you at speeds you can barely follow and that your character is too unwieldy to avoid. Which wouldn't normally be an issue but Mangler also happens to hit like a truck. And once you get him down to half health, he grows to twice his previous height, hides underground even more and when he pops up it's to attack you with hits that have graduated from 'truck' to 'freight train'. The entire battle consists of rolling away, dealing with ads and, very occasionally, taking potshots at the boss. The only mercy is that you can bait him to smack into walls, at which point he will do something that looks suspiciously like crying in a corner, letting you go to town on his health bar. And if you're very unlucky, your Earth map might be laid out in such a way that Mangler becomes a mandatory encounter.
Ixillis XV, the Guardian of Corsus, is also extremely frustrating if not in a group. It starts out fine, but then Ixillis XVI shows up to help once XV takes enough damage. Even that wouldn't be so bad, but the fight takes place on a bridge, with one boss on each side of it, so you can't pay attention to both at once. Even that wouldn't be so bad, but you can fall off the bridge, and several of their attacks have knockback, especially the giant laser which is almost guaranteed to send you plummeting to your death, and again, if you're shooting at one, you can't see the other one at all, and have no idea what its about to do.Tip In fact, only one of them will be in "attack" mode at once, using the full range of their attacks; the other one will retreat to the back of the arena and only use the giant laser blast, which they'll start from one end of the bridge and slowly move down to the other, periodically firing it, so as long as you see which end it's starting at and cross over its firing zone between shots, you should be fine and able to focus on the primary attacker. But working this pattern out is difficult in the heat of the moment. The only respite is when they charge their ultimate, which you can disrupt with weakpoint attacks - but if you fail to stagger both of them in time, they fire off a super-charged 100% accuracy stun chain-attack on all characters immediately.
Claviger, but only if you'renotplaying solo. With two and especially three players this boss becomes unbelievably difficult. Not only does it spawn more Mooks but its energy orb attack, usually slow and easy to dodge, will come out at a rate so fast that reviving a fallen player is next to impossible. Additionally, the orbs target all players at once wherever they are in the arena, meaning any given player can't draw all the aggro away from the others. And one of his two drops requires you to make sure he never absorbs any of the Vyr constructs he summons, which forces you to focus more on his helpers than him if you want the very powerful Particle Accelerator.
Riphide, the newly added boss with the addition of Leto's Lab in the Earth area. At first they resemble the standard Root Devil but as the fight goes on they'll reveal three abilities that set them apart. A massive near-whole arena range ground wave that must be dodged with pretty good timing, the ability to heal themselves if left alone and the final ability: to clone themselves as their health gets lower. Two becomes four, four then become eight. The good news is that they share a health bar. The bad news is they WILL chain cast that aforementioned ground wave attack and can rapidly heal themselves if one starts the animation and isn't canceled out by damage. Unless you're kitted out for overwhelming DPS, they can even outheal your attacks on another Riphides that isn't using the healing move. Suffice to say, they can surround you and whittle you down with ranged attacks and ground waves cast in rapid succession. The one good thing about there being so many of them is that multi-target attacks can affect all of them at once. Particularly the Spitfire's Flamethrower mod chews through their health at an insane rate. Shame that your Earth can spawn in such a way that Riphide is a mandatory encounter before you even meet the boss that drops you the Spitfire.
Barbed Terror, also one of the new DLC bosses, especially on Survival Modenote Oh, and you don't need the DLC to encounter him Yay. Don't have Veil of the Black Tear when you encounter him? Have fun in Bullet Hell! Even with the bullet shield up, his horizontal melee attacks can span half the room and his vertical melee attacks are fast chops. Brought some friends to help? In co-op the gaps between his attacks are almost zero, the wind-up for the big scythe-claw is much shorter, and only when stunned is there an opening long enough to raise downed allies without putting skill points into the revitalize trait. This boss fight is the only one to lack any kind of mooks, and but compensates with a near unrelenting torrent of attacks.
Obryk, the Shield Warden, if he spawns with the Skullcracker aspect. Obryk is normally just really irritating, being a boss that has different layers of armor over his body so you always do reduced damage but some spots are slightly less heavily armored, so he never staggers and has lots of health. If he spawns with the Skullcracker aspect, however, his combos stun you so hard that you are stopped from rolling away longer than the downtime between his attacks so you either have to beat the boss without getting hit or you need the Leto set.
The Undying King, should you choose to fight him, is one of the biggest challenges in the base game, because there is so much stuff going on- constantly spawning energy-shooting orbs, Anointed and Lurkers assaulting you from every direction at once while the King himself maintains an Ominous Walk towards the player, slicing them to ribbons with his blades if they can't get away. And the first time you down him, he comes back to life with half his health restored- what, did you think his title was just an affectation? Plus if you challenge him when you first encounter him on your initial playthrough you're probably in for a beating, as he has a minimum gear score of 13.
Singe can be one, but not in the way you think. Yes, he's a tough boss with powerful attacks that inflict Burn, but otherwise he can be managed. What makes Singe problematic is getting the unique drop from cutting off his tail, especially on higher difficulties. Since he is almost always facing the player, hitting his tail is difficult due to his body blocking most angles and the best way to flank him is to get very close and open yourself up to his nasty melee attacks. You also have to do roughly half Singe's health in damage to the tail to sever it, meaning you need to be constantly flanking, exposing yourself to risky attacks, and shooting a small, moving part of his body for a significant part of the fight to bring him down.
Corsus is viewed by many to be this due to having the most annoying enemies, many of whom have long windows where they either can't be hurt, have heavy armor all over their bodies with small weakspots that wiggle around when they get hit, can't be stunlocked, or just stunlock the player into a Cycle of Hurting. Oh, and it's the best location in the game to farm Simulacra since one random event drops them, so have fun with that.
One specific part of the game that can be a particular pain is having to defend Root Mother in the church for 2 minutes as waves of the Root attack, particularly if you have to do it solo. No matter how tough you are, the Root will inevitably start to ignore you to go straight for Root Mother instead, and when a pair of Elite ranged Slayers and a brutal, tanky Hulk spawn in at the same time, merely surviving will be hard enough, considering that even one of them has enough damage to effectively solo Root Mother if you don't deal with them quickly enough- not to mention what they can do to you. The one saving grace is that as long as you do at least some damage to an enemy, they will focus on you rather than the Root Mother, meaning it is possible to draw enemy attention and kite them until time runs out.
That One Puzzle: The Bell Puzzles of Yaesha are brutal to do especially if going solo or with a inept team. The Bell Puzzles means the next bell must be rung before the previous bell stops clanging. It's especially bad when trying to get the alternate "kill" on the Ravager bell puzzle with the Song of Lullaby as some of the bells are distant and partially concealed, requiring very precise positioning to shoot as a solo player. And that's setting aside that the Luck-Based Mission of getting the right bell keys in the first place, or the Required Secondary Powers of having the right ear to find the notes to play.
A Tale of Two Liz's. You have to fend off an assault of Root while trying to keep two NPCs alive. The problem here is that, unlike the Root Mother defense mission, you do not get a Game Over if either of them dies, making this the only quest in the entire game that has a failure state. If you kill all the Root and keep them both alive, they will reward you with the Chicago Typewriter, but good luck managing that. If you fail you can try again by rerolling your campaign/adventure, but then you have to get the event to spawn again first...
A side quest from the DLC requires you to, in order, get infected by something you can only catch by failing to stop a very specific grab attack, talking to the Iskal Queen while infected to get a quest item, then taking that quest item to a certain NPC, sneaking past that NPC to drop the quest item into the nearby cauldron and then reloading the area to find the NPC turned into a swamp zombie. And all of that for a ring that most players will never use, as it doubles your melee damage but only if you're using fists. Though granted, you also get a new trait, which is fractionally less situational as it makes consumables last longer. The thing which takes it from merely "troublesome" to "impossibly infuriating" is the need to roll up an Adventure containing the Iskal Sanctum, the Graveyard, AND an area containing an Iskal Infector all in the same world instance, something that might take dozens of attempts.
In one of the random areas on Earth, you come across a dungeon quest called "The Supply Run". You come across a skeleton with a key with a monkey key chain attached to it. At the end of the dungeon is a safehouse it unlocks with the Assault Rifle. Along with two skeletons(one significantly smaller than the other) with the following note: Day 79. Food and water is going to run dry soon. I hate going out there for any reason, but if I don't try, we won't make it. I'll leave tonight while you're both sleeping. With any luck I'll be back by morning. If I'm not, and you're reading this, know that I loved you both with everything inside of me. -Dad
The conversation with the hunter in Bonus Dungeon Hunter's Hideout is pretty depressing as well.
The whole story of Ford's family. Ford himself is sitting in a cell for helping some rebels and is so defeated that even after you bust him out he just stays there and his wife has become a gnarled tree creature so bizarre that even their granddaughter doesn't recognize her. They've all been too broken to make a family reunion happen.
NPC dialogue stops updating after the Keeper's Tower appears on Earth once you beat the World Boss. You'd think everyone would be very interested in hearing about Ford's exploits on other worlds, but even after you rescue him from a prison cell on Yaesha and obtain the key to Ward 17 to stop the Root's invasion once and for all, you don't even get the option to tell anyone. The trend continues into the DLC, where once the player returns and talks to Ford for the first time, there still isn’t any new dialogue even when Ford is directly asking the player for updates. The other NPCs don’t even update their dialogue to account for him being there.
The lone Akari NPC who greets you upon arrival on Rhom also never updates her dialogue imploring you to visit the Ezlan the Undying King even if you've already met and/or killed or cut a deal with him, which is doubly a shame since the voice actress's subtle performance of her flowery flattery, the limited information available about Akari from Ford's journals and the one dungeon that contains their records, and the text of the Kingslayer trait you get for killing Ezlan all suggest that she's trying to engineer a situation where Ezlan will offend someone powerful enough to actually do him in.
The Iskal Queen is mentioned in both Ford's journals and an Apocalyptic Log you can find on Corsus itself, setting her up as a potential antagonist responsible for the Zombie Apocalypse you end up finding there. While you do get to meet her, she's a non-hostile NPC and you can't learn anything more from her. It's never even made clear why she would want you to kill her world's Guardian for its heart and risk invasion from the Root. She can eventually be encountered as a boss in some random Adventure mode dungeons, but considering it's Corsus, a lot of players understandably don't want to come back, even if the randomized nature of Adventure mode didn't make that encounter a crapshoot.
The situation on Yaesha, where a rebel uprising battles an Empress who holds sway over the nobility with the promise of Immortality is simply a framing device for why you find the human Ford in a prison cell. You meet only one group of Rebel NPCs who vanish once their leader is done talking, and you never get the chance to fight the Empress. Even when you free the prisoner, he doesn't seem to have any intention of continuing the fight and does nothing until Subject 2923, where he greets the player exactly once and then does nothing.
, the two-stage boss theme of the campaign's final battle, is pure pulse-pounding intensity.