Due to the nature of this game, all spoilers will be unmarked!
- Awesome Music: The entire soundtrack is a rollercoaster of emotions, with every song being a perfect piece to set the mood for your dive into the Void. Some highlights include:
- Void Symphony
, a mysterious track that evolves into a sense of wonder to welcome you into your adventure. - Tantrum, an intense fight theme for what amounts to a play fight between Gray and Princess Lily as she acts like a spoiled brat.
- Buzzing Boogie, the bombastic theme of Lord Bee's domain to let you know the game's taken off its kid gloves and isn't pulling its punches anymore. The puzzles will be tough and it will only escalate from here.
- Runaway Groove, a fast-paced, frantic piece that plays when the Void Staff is stolen from Gray. The track perfectly fits the desperate atmosphere of trying to catch up with the thief as you have to solve puzzles without your most important tool.
- Muted Motive, an ominous theme for Lev's domain, it hammers in a sense of sinister air as well as a hint of loneliness. If you thought the final zones were exciting or intense, Muted Motive will let you know just how unwelcome you are in her realm and if the music didn't send the message, her judgement statues certainly will.
- Affront to God, a Dark Reprise of Tantrum for boss fights that, unlike the 'duel' with Lily, these are deadly serious and you're fighting inhuman monsters.
- Voided, a heartbreaking song for the Bad Ending of the game, beautifully singing about how no matter how much you forget, how much you lose or how much you hurt, the best you can do is hold on and keep going forward, even if you have to shut out everything else.
- Final Verse, a breathtaking theme for the final zone as Lillie, as she is inches away from rediscovering the truth of her birth. Unlike when Gray went through this zone, there are still quite a few challenges left to keep you on your toes.
- ILTATÄHTI, the penultimate boss fight against Cif. The music is just as much of a splendor as the presentation of the boss fight itself, the Void Lord providing one final test to see who's light burns out first. After the first half the theme takes on a sadder tone as Cif really doesn't want to do this, questioning Add's motives.
- S** *** ***, a reprise of ZeroRanger's "Sky XXXX Days" which plays during both the score-attack mode "Cif's Challenge" and the TLB of 0stRanger.
- Void Symphony
- Best Boss Ever: Despite also being That One Boss, the fight with Cif at the end of DIS is awesome, as the fight is unlike any other in the game, with as much of an Amazing Technicolor Battlefield as you can do with four colors, some of the best music in the game, and manages to be a Puzzle Boss that still has a direct and satisfying way of fighting it.
- Nintendo Hard:
- Many of the puzzles will seem impossible at first and will require you to think very deeply about your surroundings. It's rather telling that the game's store blurbs offer only these pieces of advice:The game autosaves between each room, so take it easy
If a puzzle seems impossible, get some rest
If that doesn't help, try asking someone for help
Good luck! - Besides the puzzles themselves, another thing that makes the game very hard is that it can be extremely punishing due to the way some of its mechanics interact. And as there is no undo function in the game, one wrong move can result in the player having to restart a whole run, which is itself a rather complex an unintuitive process.
- There's also a finite lives mechanic in play here. Dying by falling into a hole or getting hit by an enemy takes away a life, and you have to earn lives in the form of Locust Idols from treasure chests. Given that this game is focused around puzzles that can be made Unwinnable by Design if you don't think your moves well in advance, this makes the game much more punishing than it seems on the surface. If you run out of lives, you are given the option to come back with what seems to be infinite lives via the Void state...but doing so locks you into a bad ending!
- And just when you think Gray's runthrough is hard enough, Lillie has to traverse the same dungeon, but this time littered with even harder puzzles!
- Many of the puzzles will seem impossible at first and will require you to think very deeply about your surroundings. It's rather telling that the game's store blurbs offer only these pieces of advice:
- Scrappy Mechanic:
- Despite being a dungeon crawler with a save feature and the existence of hundreds of floors, there's a notable lack of backtracking that can frustrate players who are targeting specific endings or unlockables. You can't go back up floors short of starting all over or utilizing certain obscure secret techniques, and you have Only One Save File. While there is a save backup system that was added in a post-launch update, it's only intended for if your save gets corrupted, not to go back and rewind to intermediate points in the dungeon.
- You have finite lives in this game in the form of Locust Idols you collect from treasure chests, which can be rather aggravating when the game not only features enemies but also Block Puzzles that can be easily made unsolvable and force a restart due to the lack of any undo function. You can alternatively reload your save, but doing it too much will result in a punishment sequence. Some players find it strange that this game punishes mistakes so harshly considering that System Erasure's previous game, ZeroRanger, expects players to die again and again and does not punish the player short of one very specific circumstance at the end of the game. While you can come back as Void status, doing that is also punished with a false ending that forces a restart from B001. If you go Void early on, it becomes very frustrating to then continue on for another couple hundred floors only to realize then that the game expects you to complete the game with a limit on how many mistakes you can make. You can unlock a cheat brand that gives you infinite lives without giving Void status...but if you haven't gotten Gor to move out of the way on B143, you are forced to use a smirking idol warp which takes away your Locust Idols, even if you have infinite of them, rendering the cheat useless for the long run.
- Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: Manages to do this after the game proper is over with 0stRanger, a score-attack version of the shmup section at the very end of the game complete with a detailed scoring system, secrets, and even an unlockable Brutal Bonus Level. Some shmup fans wish that this game had a standalone release rather than having to push through a lengthy game in a different genre just to get to it.
- That One Boss: The fight with Cif in DIS can be by far the hardest part of the main game, being an Unexpected Gameplay Change to dodging real-time bullet patterns while still being locked onto a grid. It also manages to be a Puzzle Boss... but the easy way out can be quite hard to figure out on your own, meaning if you don't find the solution (or simply want to take the hard way) you'll be stuck fighting a Marathon Boss while you're still a One-Hit-Point Wonder, and you have to dodge one last attack while the entire screen's dark.
- That One Level: If you haven't been collecting burdens, B096 when you get the Void Rod stolen from you is a nightmare to traverse, actively taking advantage of your muscle memory by making room puzzles a lot more complicated than necessary.
- DIS in its entirety is That One Level. The floor structures are actually built around your burdens and will test your mastery of them in unorthodox ways, pushing the player to their limits.
You are foolish indeed. But at least you're an honest fool. Continue your journey, stranger. Your day of absolution will come in time. Until then... Pray we'll never meet again.
