YMMV / Vampire Survivors

• Abridged Arena Array: If you're planning on coin farming, the Bone Zone outdoes any other level, as it can only drop coins and coin bags from light sources, which spawn faster than on any other map. While the level is extremely difficult because of this, once a character is sufficiently strong to get through the Bone Zone, it makes it easy to gather massive amounts of gold. Before then, the Inlaid Library is the easiest map to grind on due to its narrow layout, short length with easy access to the passive items, and coming with the Stone Mask and Empty Tome as its passive items, both ideal for farming.
• Awesome Animation: The Legacy of the Moonspell DLC launch trailer features an absolutely awesome animated segment featuring the four featured playable characters, courtesy of Studio Yotta and their collaborators.
• Breather Level: Inlaid Library is this compared to the Mad Forest. The stage layout is narrow and straightforward, the hordes are nowhere as tough as other stages, the stage has no real annoying gimmick, and there are spots where you can create a cheese strat for easy farming. It's also the only place so far where you can defeat Red Death through cheesing.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Prior to patch 0.5.0, most optimal builds either stacked Duration with the Song of Mana or Projectile Count with the Lightning Ring and Phieraggi. The King Bible and Santa Water, which benefit from both, were staples for most successful runs. 0.5.0's introduction of the Arcana system includes a deliberate effort to address this, as the most powerful Arcanas benefit what were formerly the weakest weapons and encourage building around their properties.
  • Among passive items, the Empty Tome and Attractorb are all but mandatory for their universal 40% cooldown reduction and an enormous increase in experience pickup radius, respectively; in the latter case, it also gets you La Borra, which is a nice evolution to an already staple weapon. The Spinach also sees widespread use for its 50% Might increase, especially on characters with no inherent Might bonus.
  • Since the Bone Zone lacks any items aside from gold coins, but spawns coins faster than any other map, the Disco of Gold Arcana is all but mandatory to provide a reliable source of healing through Gold Rushes. Going without it requires relying entirely on healing weapons like Soul Eater and Bloody Tear.
  • You want to defeat the Reaper without having to ran across the map for the rings and metaglios? Just pick the Mad Groove arcana for your first and/or second card, it'll immediately pull all pickups into your range every evenly counted minute into the game. This is the easiest option to get the metaglios and rings without having to pick up Wings for the extra movement speed. Just be careful of the protectors and careful not to accidentally grab the cheese in Dairy Plant or there will be consequences. On Boss Rush this goes from complacency to mandatory, as the only way to get any passive items is by using Mad Groove due to the impassable walls in the way.
  • Unless you want to challenge yourself, buying the Curse power-up is generally ill-advised, as even a single level of one can turn even the easiest level into Early Game Hell and it gives you no benefit other than to obtain Lama if not unlocked yet. Granted, you can draw benefit from it thanks to the increased horde amounts leading to more experience gems, but that's not much of an advantage if you die early before picking up steam. It'll get you killed in the last few minutes if your build does not have enough damage to make up for the boosted enemy stats, so it's a gamble at best. Curse power-ups are best for the Queen Sigma rounds if you want to unlock the Victory Sword.
• Demonic Spiders: Green Zombies and Werewolves in Mad Forest, Banshees in Inlaid Library, charging group of Minotaurs and many, many skeletons types in Dairy Plant, the Blood Skeleton mobs and the Skeletal Dragons in Gallo Tower. Oftentimes, these mobs serve as your Beef Gate to check your run strength, and if you're not there, you can say goodbye to your run.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Characters:
    • Pugnala is the only character with two starting weapons, Phiera Der Tuphello and Eight The Sparrow, both excellent weapons on their own and components of the extremely powerful Phieraggi. She has a passive 20% movement speed increase, just behind Krochi's, and an uncapped +1% Might bonus per level. This means that by level 100 she hits for twice the damage of any other character, and in a high-Curse run she can potentially even get up to triple damage, all without suffering from any Early Game Hell the way that most characters with strong lategame performance do. As of version 0.6.1, her high movement speed even makes it easier for her to reach the special bosses, and her high damage makes it easy to defeat them to gather the Golden Eggs they drop, which will further amplify her already impressive stats.
    • Avatar Infernas, who, while his Might bonus is lower than Pugnala's (0.5% as opposed to Pugnala's 1%) and he gains 0.5% Curse per level up, he also starts with an additional 50% Might, 10 additional Rerolls, 1 additional Revive, an additional 50% Luck, 100% Magnet, gains 2% Movespeed per level and most important of all, he gains 0.25% Cooldown reduction per level with no cap, a trait shared only by Smith. Additionally, Infernas actually has the fifth highest base health in the game, behind only Queen Sigma, Gyorunton, Mask of the Red Death and Megalo Syuuto, respectively, unlike Smith who has a base HP of 7, the second lowest in the game (above only Toastie, who is a One-Hit-Point Wonder), not counting missingN▯'s variable HP. He also starts with a decent weapon in the Flames of Misspell, which can be evolved into the powerful Ashes of Muspell with a max level Torrona's Box.
    • Zi'Assunta Belpaese has the level scaling passives of all four coffin characters, albeit at halved effectiveness compared to each of theirs. Her only downsides are that she starts with additional Curse and the difficulty of using her starting weapon, the Vento Sacro. However, if she is equipped with the Divine Bloodline Arcana (which deal +5 flat damage per point of Armor, give +0.5 Max HP for each enemy killed with Retaliatory Damage and also deal 10 Retaliatory Damage) turns her into a powerful character right from level 1.
    • Gains Boros has the passive ability to gain 2% Growth per level. With rapidly increasing XP gain, they can build a run well beyond what the game expects you to have at any given minute, making early game waves a joke. Their XP scaling also means that if you bring them into a stage with Limit Break enabled, they'll rapidly outpace to max build and start gaining the extra power from breaking weapon limits, turning them into a monstrous kill zone. And unlike other characters who balance their strength with drawbacks like abysmal movement or low HP, Gains' starting stats are completely average. While Heaven Sword is the most unimpressive evolved weapon, it's still an evolution from the start of the run.
    • Queen Sigma is the Bragging Rights Reward character for completing the Collection, and more than lives up to the effort to get her. She boasts the combined scaling passives of Pugnala and Gains, five Arcanas instead of three, functionally infinite Rerolls, Skips, and Banishes, and one of the game's most powerful weapons, the Victory Sword. She can't use Golden Eggs, but doesn't need them.
    • Megalo Menya Moonspell is a DLC character who can only be unlocked by killing 100,000 enemies in a single run as regular Menya. What makes her so powerful? She's Menya permanently locked into her Super Mode, meaning that she's invulnerable to enemy attacks. This trait disappears after the stage time limit runs out, but by that point you really shouldn't need it anymore.
    • Syuuto Moonspell starts the game as a Mighty Glacier, abysmally slow but with a ton of Might, native armor and an enormous health pool. To help compensate for his slowness, he also retaliates upon being hit. Once you evolve his main weapon (not a big investment as it merely requires a Duplicator, which almost every build wants anyway), he evolves into a powerful demon, turning into a monstrous Lightning Bruiser with even more health and infinitely scaling Might, at which point he is basically Pugnala 2.0. In case that wasn't enough, his evolved starting weapon basically covers the whole damn screen. In case you want to skip the Early Game Hell, his super form is also available as a standalone character once you kill 100 000 enemies in a single stage with him - not a tall order as he natively starts with 50% Curse.
    • Sammy the Caterpillar Cake from the Tides of the Foscari DLC is an utterly unparalleled Lethal Joke Character thanks to the simple fact it gets Exp from money, aided along by starting with Vicious Hunger. It does get a hefty Might penalty at the beginning, and Vicious Hunger is not an especially good weapon to begin with, so the very start of the game can be troublesome... right until you get a Gold Rush, at which point so much Exp rolls in that you can go from zero to built pretty much instantly. Whether you're good enough to get to level 30 (and set off the automatic Gold Rush), lucky enough for a Gilded Clover or pragmatic enough to use Disco of Gold and just get to steamrolling the game from the start, you can pretty much build at leisure and just watch the money roll in afterwards. With Endless mode and Limit Break, and/or the Wicked Season Arcana if you're very brave, you can get actual millions - if your computer can survive the sheer onslaught, because the damn caterpillar gets so many levels (especially with that last one) it's been known to crash the game in a deluge of constant level-ups and cataclysmic particle effects.
    • From the Emergency Meeting DLC, Megalo Impostor Rina, who, similarly to the other two "Megalo" characters, is a character permanently in their Super Mode, in this case being Impostor Rina. They may not have infinite scaling unlike Megalo Syuuto, nor invulnerability like Megalo Menya, but they're a Lightning Bruiser nonetheless: They start with +80% movement speed (second only to Megalo Menya and Mask of the Red Death), +90% Might (that's higher than everybody on the list except), and -10% Cooldown. And even then, it's possible to get infinite stats on all characters anyway through a weapon introduced in the same DLC, so the lack of infinite scaling isn't that huge an issue any more.
    • From the same expansion, on the opposite end of the spectrum, we have Scientist Mina, who suffers somewhat of a slow start with an underwhelming weapon, but gets to choose a stat to scale infinitely five times. You thought that characters like Pugnala were good? The Scientist gets to have five scaling stats... or one stat that scales by a whopping 5% per level, if that's more your speed. Or anything in-between. They do get a massive penalty to Luck, but that's only relevant for a select few builds.
  • Weapons/items:
    • Gatti Amari starts out weak and unreliable, but its cat fight clouds can dish out absolutely ludicrous damage. With a good enough build, you can cover the whole screen in them and achieve a damage output that puts even the most powerful evolved weapons to utter shame. You don't even need to waste a slot on anything to evolve it, since by itself it's way stronger than its evolved form (although you might want a healing item like Pumarola, because Gatti Amari is more likely to kill you than your enemies once you get it going). Things get really ridiculous if you have the Gemini arcana to double your amount of cats.
    • Gallo Tower isn't a particularly hard level to begin with. With the Song of Mana, it turns the level into a cakewalk - having a vertical Wave-Motion Gun in a stage where enemies can only generally come from above or below turns the hordes into chaff and, with enough strong weapons to handle the tougher foes, makes it difficult to lose except by intent.
    • The Torrona's Box is a passive item that at level 8 grants a whooping 25% might, projectile speed, duration, and area, making it a huge boon for just about any build. This is suppose to be balanced out by the fact that it slaps the player with +100% curse when maxed out. While this can be circumvented by using Banish on it after getting level 8, there's still benefit to leveling it all the way, as maxing Torrona's Box is mandatory if you want to evolve the Victory Sword into the Sole Solution. At this point, the +100% curse becomes an afterthought due to the raw power said evolution possesses. Patch 1.0 also added the Ashes of Muspell, which also requires a maxed out Torrona's Box.
    • The Emergency Meeting DLC adds the evolution of Report! (United with the Mini Crewmate), the aptly named Emergency Meeting. At a first glance, it merely seems like a version of Report! that can fire in every direction, but this belies its true strength, as every once in a while (and this can be made shorter by reducing your Cooldown stat), it will bring up a voting poll containing all current enemy types. It will then select one of those enemy types at random and instantly kill every enemy of the selected type. Of course, the instant kill doesn't work on bosses, but it's still a wonderful mass-clearing weapon. Even better is the fact that, unlike the similarly mass-destroying Pentagram, it doesn't run the risk of erasing the rewards for killing enemies.
    • Also from The Emergency Meeting DLC is potentially the most powerful evolved weapon of all: The Paranormal Scan, the evolved form of the Lifesign Scan, when united with the Mini Ghost. It retains the healing effect of its predecessor, but also adds another, extremely powerful effect: Every time the weapon activates, you gain a small, but permanent stat bonus to a random stat- and this can be most stats- the only ones it can't be being Reroll, Skip, Banish, Curse (It not being able to increase curse is a positive), Greed and Luck. This includes Growth, Magnet, Cooldown, Amount and even Revivals. This allows any character in the game to potentially scale infinitely. It's especially powerful on the Polus Replica, given how all of the mini-crewmate items and the Lifesign Scan itself are stage items). It also benefits from Cooldown Reduction and Amount, to accelerate the rate at which your stats increase- it can lead to you hitting ridiculous stats, INCLUDING -100% cooldown. The only issue is that it doesn't do damage itself, so you'll need one or two good weapons beforehand.
    • The Silver Tongue/Impostongue does damage that scales based on Recovery. This is normally not a big deal as it's hard to get very high Recovery, but on characters like Cosmo or Scientist Mina, who can get scaling Recovery, you can see Impostongue damage in the six or seven figures!
    • One of the main arguments against using the otherwise near-mandatory Empty Tome is that the weapon it normally evolves, the Magic Wand, falls off hard past fifteen minutes or so. The Phas3r from the Space 54 update also evolves with the Empty Tome, but has no such problems: In its base form, it's very good at thinning hordes thanks to the thin, but very wide area of its shots and the fact it auto-aims at enemies, making sure the weak early-game mobs get blasted apart with singular shots. As the Photonstorm, its area gets outright ridiculous, with each individual beam hitting both edges of the screen even without Candelabrador - and with a maxed Empty Tome, it will just keep firing constantly and all over the screen, quickly sweeping up all the trash onscreen and significantly softening what's left. And since the Empty Tome massively benefits just about every other weapon in the game, the Phas3r quickly turns into a must-have for any build you can think of.
  • Arcana:
    • Arcana VIII, the Mad Groove, is perfect for saving you endless amounts of running around the vast maps. Every 2 minutes (as well as immediately when you acquire it), it summons every item on the map into a neat circle around you- every single pickup (from basic EXP gems to chests and Nduja Fritta Tantos), every unbroken light source, and crucially, every stage item, including the Gold and Silver Rings and Metaglios. This makes getting all the upgrades on the map within 30 minutes a complete breeze and streamlining farming by constantly bringing all the gems that drop from enemies within easy reach. You probably wouldn't want to start with it (unless you want all four Atlanteans after you right from the start), but as a second or third pick, it's handy.
    • The Game Killer arcana stops any leveling and turns experience gems into explosive projectiles. A possible third pick once your build is done? Sure... or, if you're playing as Porta or Clerici, you can pick it right off the bat at level 1. Now why the hell would you do that? Because these characters get a massive bonus to a certain stat at level 1 that peters out at higher levels... but if you can't level up, you get to keep it the entire game. In Porta's case, she can spam her Lightning Ring with basically no cooldown (and in the maps that have a Duplicator lying around, you can still evolve it). Bonus points if you can then grab Silent Old Sanctuary. Clerici's area bonus sounds less useful, until you realize that it applies to the explosions created by Game Killer itself, allowing every single XP gem to hit half the damn screen. This trick is particularly useful in the Boss Rash, where you're starved for XP, and Mt. Moonspell, where exploration is the name of the game and the hordes are not particularly thick, making it hard to properly level up in the first place. (Sammy's gimmick means he also benefits from it, although he arguably benefits even more from Disco Of Gold to start with.)
    • Divine Bloodline is an Arcana that does a whole lot of things and gets real ridiculous, real fast. It grants some armor, gives the ability to inflict retaliatory damage (based on armor) when touching enemies, increases maximum health when killing enemies through retaliatory damage, and grants a Might bonus based on the difference between max health and actual health. Picking it as a first arcana and grabbing the Armor pickup and a bunch of retaliation weapons can allow characters to snowball into ridiculous power levels, with massive amounts of max health and consequently ridiculous amounts of Might while low on health. Some characters that go particularly well with it are Maruto Cuts (who starts with the only weapon in the game that, in its evolved form, can retaliate at range, he also gains more armor when getting hit, which he already wants to do anyway to trigger retaliatory damage), Divano Thelma (who gains up to 5 bonus armor as he levels up and starts with the Laurel, which can allow him to retaliate without losing health and evolves into the Infinity +1 Sword Crimson Shroud, which also deals retaliatory damage), and Cosmo Pavone (whose insane regeneration means he's not great at abusing the Critical Status Buff aspect of Divine Bloodline, but the health boost from it turns a normally fragile character into an indestructible Stone Wall).
  • Other:
    • The golden egg system lets you turn anybody into this with enough patience as they're lasting stat buffs for the character who gets them that need to be built up over time.
    • When it comes to farming golden eggs if you the Tides Of Foscari DLC and you've cleared the second stage of its darkness there's a hidden entrance on the left side of the map leading to a box passive. Go to where the box is and find the hidden path just below it, there are two paths to enter/leave the area where it is, and wait in the void area right below the secret entry. Mini Atlanteans will start spawning like regular enemies and drop golden eggs on death. Get a strong enough build to deal with them without moving too much/at all and any character can get buffed to high heaven.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • Antonio gets the short end of the stick as several other characters are just better at handling the whip than him; Arca's passive cooldown improvements ensure that the whip can swing harder with much smaller downtime. Gennaro gains a permanent extra projectile which also affects how much he can crack the whip per swing, Pugnala completely makes him obsolete as not only she has faster movement speed but also outshines his damage potential because her modifier can go up to 100% over Antonio's max of 50%. His only real advantage is that he's slightly tougher than most fighters barring juggernauts like Mask of Red Death and Leda, all of which are Purposely Overpowered characters. Funnily enough, his arcana, The Beginning, ends up being most beneficial on him because it turns the whip into the best early-to-mid game weapon in the game thanks to the amount of slashes you can deal in one strikes, better yet with Duplicator and the Amount bonus. No other character get the most benefit out of his Arcana apart for some outliers (like Dommario and Krochi).
  • Imelda gets overshadowed once other, better characters come into play. She does her job in early game, and once fully upgraded, Holy Wand can easily supplement other weapons, but her bonus loses its value as soon as she's maxed out everything.
  • The title of the worst character goes to Poe. While Garlic is a pretty solid weapon early on, Garlic onto itself is a weapon where players are meant to go up close and personal for the area-of-effect damage and EXP farming and trying to deal as much damage as you can up close while minimizing damage you forces yourself into. Poe has 30 less HP (tied with Exdash) armed with a weapon where you want to be as close as possible, which not only severely lowers his survivability, but it contradicts what people uses garlic for, and his bonus effect isn't even worth the tradeoff anyway. It says a lot when other characters can wield the garlic a lot better than Poe does. To add insult to injury, he cannot even get mileage out of the Beginning Arcana, as Garlic ignores Amount. The devs seem to be well aware of how pathetic he is, as the code for unlocking him in The Forbidden Scrolls of Morbane is "strongestcharacter".
  • Gyorunton fell at the short end of the stick when it comes to the (usually) Purposely Overpowered secret characters. While the ability to immediately upgrade your weapon without having to wait for 10 minutes is a pretty nice bonus, the Bracelet is not a very good weapon and usually not very good until you fully upgrade it to Tri-Bracelet. Most importantly, the 1% curse per level is also a double edged sword. While it can help the character level up faster, it's uncapped, and unlike other characters that have an infinitely scaling Curse, like Avatar Infernas or Je-Ne-Viv, Gyorunton has no other scaling stats. This means that enemies will keep scaling infinitely long past the point Gyorunton has capped out its build and may eventually become overwhelming.
  • Exdash and Peppino tied themselves as the worst secret characters in the game. For Peppino, the inability to move (without the movement speed powerup at least) really seals the deal for Peppino as they lack the ability to avoid enemies or collect experience gems and they aren't exactly shown to be tanky either, only having +20 HP and +2 armor. If you didn't get enough EXP for Peppino to get alternative weapons besides Soul Eater aforementioned before, then you'll shit out of luck. (That said, movement speed upgrades will at least allow it to slowly pick up chests, and with its 100% bonus Magnet area, it's one of the best users of Blood Astronomia in the game.) For Exdash... Well, you can say that he's just lucky.
• Older Than They Think:
  • While Vampire Survivors may be the Trope Codifier for horde-survival roguelikes, Crimsonland predates it by over a decade and a half (2003) via its Survival Mode, with its perks being the roguelike elements.
  • The Boxhead series of webgames from 2006 has a similar premise of surviving increasingly stronger hordes of undead on an open field using random pickups.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
  • The Knife requires you to be facing toward your target, which means moving towards them and risking damage. It also fires in a narrow column, giving it the smallest area of effect of any weapon. Earlier on, the knife is very ineffective at dealing with hordes and probably one of the more suboptimal weapons on horde heavy stages like the Dairy Plant. Its saving grace is that Knife knockback power becomes the best once fully upgraded and can easily mow down an entire horde line in one strike. The Slash Arcana rescues it by granting it the ability to land critical hits and doubling critical damage, so that it can tear through many late game enemies at once, while the Iron Blue Will Arcana grants it the ability to bounce off the sides of the screen and pass-through enemies, alleviating its issues with area.
  • The Fire Wand fires large, slow projectiles that do high damage to a small number of targets, in a game where most enemies rely on strength of numbers instead of individual HP. It was the only weapon to have an Arcana specifically for boosting it and it alone, Heart of Fire ^note This Arcana now affects Valkyrie Turner and Phiera Der Tuphello, by adding a splash damage explosion to each hit. It can also benefit from Waltz of Pearls to produce bouncing projectiles that fill the screen with chains of explosions everywhere they go.
  • The Axe fires projectiles in an upward erratic arc that then fall downward, making it difficult to aim, while its Death Spiral evolution only hits the eight cardinal directions. Like the Fire Wand, the projectiles are few in number but powerful, which makes them less useful against enemy groups. It benefits from the Slash and Iron Blue Will Arcanas to greatly magnify its damage and area.
  • The Cross suffers most of the same issues as the Magic Wand, as it has a similar type of projectile that boomerangs out towards the closest enemy and then flies back to strike behind the user. Its evolution increases the damage of the projectiles, but greatly reduces their count and increases their cooldown, making it less effective against groups. It benefits from the Slash and Waltz of Pearls Arcanas in much the same manner as the Axe.
  • The Whip strikes in an upward horizontal arc, leaving the wielder's lower half exposed. When evolved it gains a potent Life Drain ability, but this requires taking the Hollow Heart, one of the least useful passive items. In addition to the Slash Arcana, it benefits from the Sarabande of Healing Arcana, which doubles the potency of its healing and thus makes it a much more viable option for surviving large amounts of damage, and adds an Area of Effect damage to any healing the player receives (including the Life Drain) to help with crowd control. Plus, if you're willing to risk it, you can add the (damaging though somewhat difficult-to-handle) Vento Sacro to this combo and get Fuwalafuwaloo, one of the single most powerful weapons in the game.
  • The 0.6.66 update greatly salvages the otherwise overlooked Clock Lancet and Laurel by giving them evolutions that greatly improve their potency. That said, they'll take more effort to evolve than other weapons, but the end result is able to defeat Red Death at the end of a run. Even without evolving it, the Clock Lancet in particular also benefits massively from the Out of Bounds Arcana, which causes explosions when enemies are frozen and by proxy turns it from a support tool into a direct-damaging weapon in its own right.
  • Two of the earliest Arcanas, Chaos in the Dark Night and Boogaloo of Illusions, were themselves later buffed to grant an uncapped level-based bonus to the stats they affect, making them much more useful for builds intending to reach very high levels. While certainly not weak, they were unimpressive compared to other Arcanas due to simply providing a small net bonus to Projectile Speed or Area, as opposed to the game-changing mechanics that most other Arcanas offer.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • If you're doing gold farming runs, Orologion powerups will be your worst enemy, especially if you have a large Magnet stat. Gold Fevers rely on enemies constantly swarming you to keep running. Collecting an Orologion will briefly halt this oncoming stream, more often than not ending the current Fever in progress. This can be mitigated upon unlocking the Seal upgrade.
  • Orologions become even worse if you use Greatest Jubilee on a character with a large cooldown reduction. The sheer number of them that the latter generates is insane and will mostly result in a situation where all the enemies are almost permanently frozen, sometimes in their dying animation and preventing any more from spawning.
  • Each Golden Egg collected will vary slightly and permanently enhance a random stat of the current character. One of these stats includes the character's movement speed, which isn't capped. With enough Golden Eggs, the character will eventually become so fast to the point of borderline unplayability, zipping completely across the map and making it almost impossible to gather treasure chests or stage items. There's no way to tone down the speed unless one disables the Golden Egg enhancements altogether before starting a run, or visiting a special merchant in Moongolow; who removes 100 eggs at a time and only appears once the character has over 5000 eggs, but even then whichever stats are degraded are chosen at random.
  • The developers are very intent on ensuring players cannot accidentally lose their game progress. Perhaps too intent. There is no method aside from going into your file folders and manually deleting your save data folder after turning off Steam's automatic cloud backups to do something as mundane as replaying the game from the beginning. An in-game method was added in the August 2023 revamp involving going to Options, clicking the Account icon seven times in a row and then wading through pop-up warnings, but this procedure is not openly documented.
  • The Planar Bazaar is normally an Anti Frustration Feature that allows characters in Adventure Mode to purchase and unlock any items they want. Unfortunately, at release, this only extended to the weapons from the Among Us DLC, not the Crewmates necessary to evolve them, so it's impossible to evolve any of the unlocked weapons and impossible to refund them and remove them from the pool without resetting the adventure.
• Scrappy Weapon:
  • The Magic Wand, if it somehow manages to not have an Empty Tome, will quickly struggle against late-game enemies. The Waltz of Pearls Arcana rescues it by granting it the ability to bounce off walls, though it still has its problems with dealing enough damage without other heavy hitters aiding it.
  • Garlic and its Soul Eater Evolution are very middling knockback weapons, especially if not building around it. Even with the Sarabande of Healing, its DPS, sustain, and Bloody Tear greatly overshadows farming power. Unless you're playing Poe or trying to unlock the achievement, you're better off Rerolling, Skipping, or Banishing it as the effort you need to make it viable pales compared to other equally-powered-up weapons. The best use of the Garlic/Soul Eater is to be a support entity when fighting bosses. The Blood Astronomia Arcana makes it better by leaving damage zones in the user's wake, though the arcana also benefits Song of Mana in the same way as well.
  • The Clock Lancet and Laurel, for any other context that doesn't involve beating Red Death. The Clock Lancet fires in thin long needles and freezes the enemies it touches, giving you an escape route when you're cornered. The Laurel gives a regenerating shield that can negate up to three instances of damage. Their evolutions, when combined, can make short work of Red Death, but you really have to work for it by running to the edges of the map to collect their upgrade items and push each pair of passive items to their max level of 9. Put off the search for the Rings and Metaglios for too long, and you may not be able to gain enough levels or get midboss chests to complete their evolution before Death comes for you, but for the Clock Lancet in particular, you can get extra mileage out of it without evolving it if you take the above-mentioned Out of Bounds Arcana. Patch 0.11.3 also introduces the Blood Astronomia Arcana, giving them an extra layer of utility- especially in the Clock Lancet's case.
  • Gatti Amari's evolved form, Vicious Hunger, loses a huge chunk of what makes Gatti strong in favor of becoming a money-generating/farming tool, losing the massively damaging catfights in favor of turning things into coins. While it does do damage, it's not nearly as strong as Gatti, and it also turns XP gems into coins as well at a surprising rate. If you don't save picking up the stone mask or maxing out Gatti as the last possible thing in your build, you can potentially completely hamstring your run strength because you've drastically reduced your speed of level-ups. Especially with Limit Breaks encouraging leveling after reaching max build, unless you go into a run with the specific intent of money farming it's never worth evolving Gatti. To really rub salt in the wound, even gold-farming runs will often forgo it, because it's a graphically intensive weapon that can really tank the framerate. The only character who actually wants to use it is Sammy, who starts with the weapon, since his innate passive still lets him gain EXP from coins anyway.
• Signature Scene: The end of the Moongolow bonus stage, wherein you are suddenly deposited into a tight series of corridors without any of your items or stat upgrades as you're forced to flee from a tide of Angelic Abominations. It's become quite well known for being emblematic of the stranger nature of the latter half of the game, the fact it comes out of nowhere with a distinctly Creepypasta like atmosphere, and the fact that up to that point, the game has nothing resembling a story or any special twists, making it all the more shocking.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • "When the Clouds Drown," one of Moongolow's themes, is a clear homage to "Lost Painting" from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, particularly in the first thirty seconds of the song.
  • "Moms Are Tough", Zi'Assunta's theme, sounds almost like a complete copy of "Paradigm Shift" from Final Fantasy XIII-2.
• That One Boss: The Sketamari in the Bone Zone has proven to be a roadblock for people attempting to complete their Relic collection ^note which is ultimately required to unlock the Final Boss stage. Sketamari starts small but will absorb all enemies that come into contact with it, not only growing bigger and bigger each time (which also means absorbing enemies even faster), but also gaining large amounts of health in the process. Like any other enemy in the Bone Zone, it also benefits from growing stronger with every minute that passes. As a result, you're forced to be very precise in when to tackle it: Too early, and you'll be too weak to kill it. Too late, and it will swallow up enemies faster than you can kill it no matter what you have; both of these end in a giant ball of indestructible bones that doesn't even fit in your screen. If all that wasn't enough, it also zooms around faster than most characters can catch up. The only saving grace is that it won't grow offscreen until you first see it, so you can at least chose your time relatively safely. Thankfully, you don't need its Relic to get the Yellow Sign, so if all else fails, Infinite Corridor makes short work of its massive health pool.
• That One Level:
  • The first level, Mad Forest. Every five minutes or so, a circle of venus flytraps will entrap you in a small circle that's shrinking towards you, trapping you along with the current mobs (and a miniboss) you managed to pull into your screen. The tenth minute is even worse as the plants last for a full minute, and once they disappear at the 11th minute, the level smothers you with skeletons from all sides.
  • The Dairy Plant is by far the hardest level in the game period, to the point that the designer knew how bullshit the stage sometimes that they allow you to evolve your weapons before the 10-minute mark. Demonic Spiders everywhere, traps laid in and out across the stage, and also the introduction of the Stalker; a green pseudo Grim Reaper that's unkillable without using the cart or pentagram.
  • The Bone Zone is considered the toughest challenge as of v0.5. There are a lot of enemies that are tough to take down and can surround you, making it hard to escape. And the player doesn't level up as quickly. It's common to see people die at the 29-minute mark since the hordes of enemies are so bulky that they don't die quick enough for the player to stay in one place.
  • Cappella Magna is normally not an overly hard level, but it has a special variant that you must go through to get the Great Gospel, which sics each variant of the Grim Reaper at you long before you're in any way, shape or form prepared to deal with them. This includes the Drowner, who makes half the map inaccessible, massively restrains your freedom to maneuver around enemy waves, and camps at the corner of your screen where it's nearly impossible to hit him unless you shatter a window near him or use one of the Rosaries pre-placed on the map to get rid of him on the spot. If this Drowner is left alive for too long it will move towards the center of the screen, forcibly drowning your character in the damage zone unless you're constantly moving upwards. Thankfully once you defeat Ender, the other reapers except for Red Death won't show up ever again in this particular stage.
    • To make matters worse, this version of the stage makes a reappearance in Imelda's adventure, where it's exactly the same, but your character selection is much more limited and you will not have access to a lot of your strongest weapons and powerups unless you're prepared to spend a long, long time farming for gold. Thankfully, Pugnala is available and her twin guns are one of the few things that can actually hit the Drowner.
  • The first visit to the Astral Stair has a completely unique gimmick; some waves of enemies will blink between red and blue in color, and when they're like this they're only vulnerable to weapons that share the same color (like magic wand, holy water, fire rod, the red gun, ect. ect.) which can make them entirely too tanky for most characters to deal with as early as they show up and restricts your build to stuff that works with it. Thankfully, this is only forced until you clear the stage for the first time, revisits allow you to hit a button which disables the color-coded enemies.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: It's not readily apparent Leda's female. It's only from the flavor text for the Palette Swap Followa enemies from the Tides of the Foscari DLC that reveal she's female.

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