Although Limbus Company has its fair share of quality mechanics, there are some that don't sit as well with fans.
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General Mechanics
- Gacha, of course. Even the developers are lowkey implied to hate that they had to make their third game a gacha game, as to secure funds for the development of games that are not gacha. Players have called the game 'a gacha for people that hate gacha' due to the several Anti-Frustration Features surrounding its gacha system and Project Moon's generosity with giving out Lunacy and other freebies as compensation for issues with the game. The sheer length of the seasons in comparison to other games that have a battle pass (it's three months at the very least) also makes it so that one can easily build up enough shards to eventually buy their wanted E.G.O or 3-star Identity from the shop, further lessening reliance on the gacha.
- The fact that you can't choose targets and clashes in non-Focused Encounter fights really stung for some people, as it makes it near impossible to properly strategize and defend staggered Sinners from getting smashed into bits or prevent enemies from launching one-sided attacks, since the game will automatically select "better" targets if available. On the flip side, it also makes it nearly impossible to strategize a proper offense either, since you can't reliably line up favorable clashes, take advantage of damage type matchups, or exploit enemy gimmicks.
- In general, the fact that health and stagger are now intrinsically linked together rather than two separate bars like in Ruina has been disliked by veterans of past games, since taking any damage at all risks you getting staggered, which cascades down into your character being turned into mincemeat due to the massive damage boost staggering gives - especially since you can now stagger multiple times, which drives the damage multiplier up further. Essentially, this promotes a type of playstyle promoting trying as hard as possible to never get hit. This was slightly toned down as an update gave certain, more tankier characters more resistance to being staggered, but the fundamental problem remains.
- Compared to Library of Ruina, clashes are now an all-or-nothing system where the victor will use any coins they still have left over, while the loser has their skill completely cancelled. This is often a point of contention, especially since most player and enemy gimmicks are reliant on winning clashes, as not only does it make it very easy to cheese most fights or ignore mechanics by brute-forcing them with clash power, it also creates an overly centralizing meta where clash power is leagues more important than any other attribute of an Identity, pushing anything without high clash power to the wayside from the get-go. Furthermore, it can get downright enraging if the odds aren't in your favor, as a single bad coinflip can snowball into a loss since each coin that loses reduces the overall power of the skill for every coin flip after, making it very hard to turn a clash around once you start losing. And as mentioned, losing the clash will cause your skills to do nothing, unlike in Ruina where you could still land winning dice on a page even if the others lost; this especially hurts status units, as in non-Focused encounters where they can't aim one-sided attacks, a unit can have some of the most devastating debuffs or support in the game, but won't even be able to inflict them without clash power.
- SP mechanics in general are also sometimes controversial, as in theory SP buffing (or debuffing if the user uses minus coins) is supposed to increase the odds of rolling a favorable result. However, the change from dice to coins further exemplifies the all-or-nothing nature of attacks, and since even a single bad flip can lead to a totally lost clash or a substantial loss in damage, and it's still possible to roll tails at 45 SP (which gives an ~95% chance of rolling heads), this can get very annoying when you fail an attack that was overwhelmingly in your favor due to dumb luck, and in the case of endgame content or optimization can practically turn entire battles into a Luck-Based Mission. This also causes certain battles to be polarizing depending on how much SP you start off with, as any fight where Sinners retain their previous SP while enemies start with 0 can lead to a landslide victory if you started at 45, while that same fight with Sinners starting at 0 SP can wind up as a coinflip as to whether you can get lucky early and outroll the targets to let you snowball, or lose all your clashes and let the enemy snowball their SP instead. In theory, this is supposed to go both ways as the player is supposed to lower the odds of enemies rolling well by lowering their SP, but not only do a lot of the most threatening foes (like Abnormalities) not even have SP to begin with, enemies that do have SP will often have resistance to low morale/panicking and/or ways to quickly fill it to max without even needing to clash or kill like you do, most infamously Ahab and her crew who regenerate enough SP that they can hit 45 in 1-2 turns with no way to stop it.
- There has been some contention around most content so far being focused around speed-clearing, such as EX clears, the Refraction Railway, and grinding Mirror Dungeons, as it creates an overwhelming bias towards units with high clash power and damage output, while other powerful archetypes like tanks and supports get left by the wayside. This is compounded by the aforementioned lack of targeting in non-Focused encounters, as supports can't pick their targets nor can tanks peel for their allies, while a damage dealer or clasher will almost always be contributing to a speedy win. On top of that, multi-wave non-Focused encounters generally fix the number of enemy actions on the second turn, resulting in a dilemma where the game expects players to clear as fast as they can, but also makes it so that if they killed the first wave too fast, the second will almost always outnumber their actions and put players at a disadvantage for playing the way the game intended them to.
- There is some discontent with the way that when it comes to defensive skills for Sinners, Evades are overwhelmingly more powerful than the others. If one outrolls an attack with an evade, they can completely negate it and anything that it inflicts, and will be recycled for every attack that they take from that point on. With enough SP or buffs, one evade has the potential to completely negate attacks from an entire enemy wave, and are essential for turning around scuffles where direct clashing is not advised. In contrast, Block skills just generate more temporary HP, which can be easily cleared in a single attack by powerful foes and does nothing to protect against debuffs or secondary effects, and Counter skills necessitate taking an unmitigated hit in exchange for an unopposed attack that may not even do much, which may be deadly if it's an attack the user is weak to. This creates a hefty bias towards units that can Evade, with units that use Guard or Counter having to pull their weight just to make their defense skills worth using at all.
- On the other hand, Counter skills can be this for the opposite reason when used by enemies, as unlike Sinners, they usually have enough bulk to easily soak up hits without staggering and retaliate with their counterattack. Unlike Library of Ruina, counters cannot be clashed with, instead triggering an unopposed attack on the first person to attack the target (or that body part, for Focused encounters), and unlike Evades or Guards cannot be cancelled by offsetting them with another defense skill. More often than not, especially in non-Focused encounters where you have less control over who Sinners are targeting, this translates to taking unavoidable damage with no way to stop it, and can be especially nasty if the counter deals effective damage, sometimes leading to an unceremonious stagger or death; doubly so if the vulnerable target was the fastest one, all but forcing them to take the counter unless they waste their turn on a defense skill. It's particularly infamous during the fight with GasHarpoon Ahab, as the boss's last phase will often have them launching four highly damaging counters per turn, which can make the fight nearly unwinnable if your team is weak to them.
- The fact that most human bosses have SP is roundly criticized by some players, as most of them are difficult to clash with even at 0 SP, and several of them have a way to generate SP basically for free every turn, at a much faster rate than the Sinners usually can. What this often means is that a bad first turn can doom the attempt then-and-there, as the boss will have maxed out SP right away and will proceed to beat everything you throw at it. There's a reason Sinking became more popular when Canto VI released, as it was especially guilty of this.
- Similar to Lobotomy Corporation, most Abnormalities and other entities of their like will have their moves, passives, and weaknesses obscured until you've fought them for long enough or enough times. Also like Lobotomy Corporation, this can get incredibly annoying if you end up having to restart because you ended up bringing a team with the wrong damage types, or end up dying to a passive that you weren't informed of until it was too late.
Specific Mechanics
- A major reason for Charge and W Corp. Identities as a whole's status as the Low-Tier Letdown of the game during Season 1 is a major change to it since Library of Ruina, namely that Charge now decays between turns at a rate of one per turn. This is top of many Charge-generating skills having unreliable conditions (such as on hit, or worse, on heads hit), meaning that it's not only very hard to build up Charge, but also very hard to keep Charge. The end result of this is that, depending on clash results, it's entirely possible to only get 1 Charge in a turn and then immediately lose it. The only units that are effective Charge users are those that can generate a lot of it, either all at once (i.e Rosespanner Rodion and to a lesser extent W Don) or by Spam Attack (i.e R Corp Heathcliff). Uptie IV would, at least, try and address this problem for many Charge-based Identities by greatly increasing the amount of Charge their skills could build up and the second Mirror Dungeon adds various collectibles that also aid the generation and preservation of Charge.
- Sinking, a debuff that drains SP when the victim is hit, often has too inconsquenential of an effect to be considered useful, since not only can a Sinking target undo the relatively minor SP loss by winning a clash or two, it's usually faster to make human foes panic by just killing or staggering their allies. It's even worse in Focused Encounters, since most of the time, those fights don't have any SP to begin with; this leads to Sinking instead converting into Gloom damage, which usually just translates into a less consistent version of Rupture. It says something that Sinking didn't become remotely useful until the introduction of the second 3-star Yi Sang Identity and by extension the introduction of Sinking Deluge, which completely forgoes the SP drain gimmick and turns it into more burst damage. Furthermore, the introduction of the second Mirror Dungeon also added some much-needed Sinking support in the form of new E.G.O Gifts like the Midwinter Nightmare (which makes it much easier for Spicebush Yi Sang to build up Sinking reliably) and the Melted Spring.
- However, since Canto VI Sinking has slowly but steadily been making a comeback, since many enemies that roll high can at least be partially alleviated by putting their own SP down the drain, notably the first time Mirror Heathcliff is fought and there have been more Identities that work with Sinking.
- Tremor is a very clunky status effect to use. Its purpose is to raise the stagger threshold of enemies so you can stagger them faster, but it requires both stacking the status on an enemies and then using an ability with Tremor Burst, and at that point most enemies aren't sturdy enough that it's less efficient to just kill them the normal way. It isn't helped by the fact that until the start of Season 2, there weren't really any Tremor identities considered worth using, and the units that are are only so due to several beneficial combining factors, like applying Tremor and Bursting it with the same attack (like [Rosespanner Workshop] Rodion and [Molar Office Fixer] Outis), or inflicting secondary effects to soften up the enemy (like [Lobotomy E.G.O.::Regret] Faust inflicting additional damage based on the Stagger threshold raised, as well as Defense Level Down). In fact, some Tremor-based units don't even use it to amplify stagger thresholds, instead applying it to themselves as a Charge substitute, or their skills just activating conditional effects if the target has enough Tremor. There's also the issue of some Identities directly removing Tremor Count from the enemy more than necessary when they burst it, directly gutting a lot of chances to pile even more Tremor Bursts.
- Poise is generally considered a very poor buff, as the amount of potency most Identities generate isn't enough to reliably score a crit and it suffers from the same problem as Charge in that its count reduces each turn, meaning it's very possible to lose the buff before you can actually land a crit. Furthermore, even if you do land a crit, the damage increase is only 20%, often making it not worth the effort unless the identity has a way to boost the damage further with a crit multiplier. The only real exception to the rule is Shi Ishmael due to being the only Identity that can feasibly build up her Poise enough for it to matter, and she's still a Difficult, but Awesome unit who can only do this in certain content, like Refraction Railway or Mirror Dungeon. The second Mirror Dungeon, Mirror of Mirrors, does take steps to alleviate Poise's issues, as it has numerous new Gifts that grant good amounts of Poise or boost the damage of crits. Uptie IV would go on to further improve units that use Poise, generally granting them boosts to crit damage and more and better ways to stack and retain the buff.
- Gun-using Identities have an ammo counter that gradually gets consumed as they use attacks that fire the weapon - the problem is, there is no way to reload ammo in a fight and these Identities usually have attacks that heavily use ammo to inflict their best status effects. This means that those Identities become ill fits for longer fights, as they eventually run out of bullets and have their damage output gutted afterwards, although it fortunately doesn't affect their clashing power.
- The Shi Section Identities get stronger at low HP thresholds, as they did in the previous game. The problem? The stagger mechanic means they basically need be defenseless for an entire turn, which can easily be a death sentence in most situations. It's slightly more manageable after they retooled Shi identities to have only one (relatively early) threshold, but the amount of things that can burst a staggered sinner from that to zero is concerningly high.
- One of So That No One Will Cry's passives, Spreading Ember, makes this Abnormality a full-blown run ender for anyone running a Burn team. This is because with it, it reflects any Burn it receives back to any character with a Talisman debuff - which are applied on use rather than on hit, which means they can't be avoided. It isn't unheard of to accidentally stack 99 Burn on the boss...only for it to reflect to almost all of the Sinners next turn, utterly decimating your party. Fortunately, this passive is completely absent if you encounter it in the Mirror of the Lake, meaning you won't instantly lose if you run into it with a Burn team over there.
Content Additions
- Refraction Railway 2 was considerably less well-received than the first iteration of the mode. Almost every boss is a damage sponge with stall-based mechanics and a fight that often boils down to "wait out several turns of defense, fire your burst, repeat", and most of the fights also have Contractual Boss Immunity that hard-caps various statuses, making status teams significantly less viable and once again promoting brute force over other team compositions. The cycle gimmick, although interesting on paper with the escalation in both player and enemy strength, makes fights get repetitive very fast, since every boss other than Wayward Passenger and Sign of Roses needs to be fought anywhere between 2 to 4 times to get all the rewards, and they tend to get much tankier between cycles, turning many of the fights into painful slogs. Throwing extra salt in the wound is that Wayward Passenger and Sign of Roses are generally the only two bosses that players actually wanted to fight more, and the former in particular can't be refought at all without going through another four cycles of the Railway.
- The Dawn of Green, featured in the second Walpurgisnacht event, exacerbated the aforementioned speed-clearing issues by forcing players to kill a huge amount of enemies within a turn limit to get maximum rewards. The problem was that new enemies would only spawn once enough of the old ones were wiped out, and the event is designed in a way where you would have just enough turns to kill the required number of foes if you fully wiped one wave per turn. This essentially forced players to pray for perfect plays and/or coin flips, especially early on when everyone starts at 0 SP - if you left an enemy just barely alive because of one lost clash or min-rolled attack, you might as well Rage Quit right there, once again overwhelmingly favoring pure DPS units. On top of this, one of the missions for the Hard version of the event is to kill 7 enemies in a single attack, with the number of E.G.O. being able to hit 7 targets at once being countable on one hand (Ebony Stem, Sunshower, and Blind Obsession, the latter two of which require either a paid Battle Pass or purchase from the Dispenser). With that, the entire event basically depends on your arsenal of AoE E.G.O. and Identities with AoE baked into their kits, like Spicebush Yi Sang, Regret Faust, or Magic Bullet Outis, as it proved to be nearly impossible to fully clear it without at least one of the two.
