YMMV / Stranger of Sword City

• Difficulty Spike: After the event in the Mausoleum of Forests' sacred grounds three new dungeons open up... all three of them will wreck your shit unless you've done a lot of over-leveling.
• Game-Breaker: The Clocker class from the Remake. As a Jack of All Trades it works well to supplement any other class, but it's abilities also make every other class significantly better. A properly leveled Wizard / Clocker, for example, can nuke the entire enemy party twice per turn with Omega Impact for upwards of ten thousand damage. And you can do this with multiple characters at the same time.
  • A Ninja, while hidden, cannot be targeted by enemies in any way. While in a party this means the other party members are targeted instead, if the main character is a solo Ninja, it means the enemy party merely stands around as the Ninja ambushes them with assassinate. As a bonus to this, a solo character gains 6 times the normal XP as it is not divvied up amongst the rest of the party and the player can ignore the Permadeath system the other characters have to work around. The catch being about halfway through the final dungeon the Curse mechanic begins to appear, which the Ninja cannot deal with without becoming visible again. Instant death spells being the one spell that does not need to target the Ninja to land...
• Scrappy Mechanic: "Curse," a status effect that late game enemies (and ALL late game / postgame bosses) use. On paper it merely disables your weapons / armor until cured, which would be bad enough, but it also removes all resistances from the character, including those that are not based on weapons/armor/accessories, such as the Paladin class's immunity to stunning. This includes instant death resistance, meaning that it's entirely possible to be cursed and then instantly killed in a single turn without any ability to react to it.
  • Having to roll for the initial amount of attribute points for new characters is a lesser case of this, due to how it is all but magnetized to give you the least amount of points possible. It practically tries to force you to make elderly (and as such, more easily perma-killed) characters just so you can actually receive 10 or more attribute points.