Library of Ruina's bosses rarely pull any punches, especially as you progress through to the later stages of the game. Be noted that most of these bosses are significantly easier upon subsequent rematches where you have better equipment against them; most of the time, the issues come from being stuck on the first try.
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Main Story
- Tomerry, with their high health and escort of tough Love Town residents, is extremely tough even by the standards of chapter 4. You'll have to be primed to pay attention to certain cards that have a gimmick snuck in that lets said escort gain +10 Power if you forget to clash against them. The greatest danger comes from the fact that Tomerry will eventually drop their defenses and charge up for a turn; fail to stagger them there, and they will unleash an absolutely devastating attack that is likely to kill, or at the very least stagger, the librarian that it hits. To make things even worse, they do this attack twice in one turn, which means that half your party could be rendered down for the count. Even if it 'just' staggers the target, they'll be fresh meat for their aforementioned escort, whom you now can't clash against. Once Tomerry gets below half HP, they'll lose this ability but go berserk and gain some incredibly nasty attacks, the likes of which are nearly impossible to outroll at that stage of the game.
- E.G.O. Philip isn't the most difficult fight by himself, but you have to fight him directly after you battle the Wedge Office, making him likely to catch any new player off guard. What makes it worse is that you're only allowed to use one floor against this two Act battle, and Wedge Office themselves are rather tough opponents with solid pierce based decks. This means that your party will be softened by the time you reached E.G.O. Philip, who will usually be just strong enough to wipe out a team weakened by the Wedge Office. This is especially true if you recklessly attack him when he's defending, which will further wear your team down through his block dice and Attack Reflector applying Burn, leaving you vulnerable when he goes on the offensive; and if you fail to stagger him at that point, he'll use his Blazing Strike, a 30-40 roll that is nearly guaranteed to one-shot anything it hits. note
- Speaking of which, the third battle against Philip after his transformation into The Crying Children is seven phases long, rivalling the floor realisations in terms of being a long and exhausting fight to the finish. While each individual phase isn't too hard, the sheer number of enemies and the player being limited to one floor makes for a fight that will wear out any team at that stage of the game, especially if it's a floor that hasn't completed their Floor Realization and unlocked their full potential yet.
- Chapter 6/Star Of The City is hard in general, but towards the end, the game throws a huge roadblock in the form of E.G.O. Xiao. The main difficulty of the fight comes from the massive amount of Burn that the boss constantly stacks on your Librarians which, combined with her passives that synergize with Burn and multiple mass attacks give her the ability to wipe out your Librarians in an instant if you're not careful. Meanwhile, on the defensive side of things Xiao packs a deck full of strong, well-rounded attacks that make it a pain to get hits in, worsened by the fact she turns off power buffs every other turn, effectively stopping you from increasing your damage against an opponent who has to be taken down as fast as possible. And if you mess up and target her "Reverse Scale" page on a scene where power is off, next scene she'll flatten you directly with her incredibly strong buffs. As just a cherry on top, before you even get to her, you have to fight through a brief first phase against Xiao and Miris. While not hard on its own, this phase is usually just hard enough to soften you up for the sheer slog that is the boss fight proper.
- While every phase of The Reverb Ensemble reception possesses unique challenges that can arrange from moderately difficult fights to extreme hurdles, two of the fights are notoriously difficult: Pluto and Bremen.
- Bremen's first phase is relatively simple, revolving mostly around staggering Bremen while they focus on buffing their allies and debuffing your librarians. The difficult part of their fight comes in their second phase which happens after staggering them thrice. Bremen will start using a mass attack every three scenes that inflicts heavy amounts of paralysis. Dodging this mass attack is also fairly difficult as they can still use multiple buff/debuff pages in that same scene. On top of all of that, Bremen becomes unstaggerable while also having ineffective resistances to all damage types, meaning even your strongest attacks will deal Scratch Damage at best to Bremen. While all of their resistances do change to fatal the scene after they use their mass attack, they can still act during that turn, meaning that it remains difficult to gets hits on them as they will continue to spam strength buffs and feeble debuff pages to make it difficult for your librarians to win clashes. It is telling that most strategies for beating Bremen involve either trying to deal enough damage to them in their first phase so their second phase ends quickly or exploiting the Spring's Genesis Abnormality page to have a solo librarian slowly whittle down their health while neither Bremen nor their allies can act.
- Pluto starts his fight by slapping your Librarians with complex and multi-faceted debuffs, before summoning duplicates to fight them. The duplicates copying elite Key Pages could be hard enough, but you can't cheese them by equipping your Patrons with weaker pages reliably because they have their own attacks, which can potentially be lethal. In fact, you can't even get around this by attempting a solo run, or he will cage your sole combatant in phase 2 and potentially get them killed. The fight forces you to juggle a huge number of headache-inducing gimmicks at the same time, all the while Pluto has his own set of attacks that he spams and are abnormally heavy-hitting. Despite Pluto seemingly has a low amount of HP, he is also invulnerable to direct damage and one is required to remove his extraordinarily bulky stagger resist or stack Burn or Bleed on him to actually deal damage to him.
- Depending on how strong your librarians are in the endgame, the shades he summons are Demonic Spiders in their own right, as they not only inherit your librarians' HP, they also inherit your passives.
Realizations
Depending on the floor, some the Floor Realizations qualify for this title, while others don't. They are mixed bags of varying difficulties, but in general, the enemies there have significantly higher stats than their usual Abnormality counterparts, which is compounded by the fact that each of them are a whopping five phases long and there is a new Abnormality which might take some time for players to figure out.
- Most players found Binah's Realization the hardest, with three Puzzle Bosses at the start and a very powerful foe, both canonically and gameplay-wise at the end. To put in detail, Lamp's Salvation can instantly put a single Librarian out of action and Justitia can induce a cheap Total Party Wipe via Ceaseless Judgement - given what the encounter after Justitia is (mentioned later), losing anyone to Salvation or nearly being wiped by Ceaseless Judgement mandates an instant restart. The final encounter, Twilight is the single worst of the bunch; it consists of a single entity with a whopping 1400 HP and the only way to kill it is to deplete its stagger gauge four times, with a total of 1000 Stagger Resist required to be removed and a different type weakness in each phase. Offensively, Twilight has powerful pages, seven speed dice and is one of the few enemies in the game that can fire multiple mass attacks in a turn, sometimes even using two or three at once. Its first phase, Big Eyes is notably MUCH harder than the Small Beak, Long Arms and Apocalypse Bird phase, since it spends its first two rounds demonstrating its most dangerous mass attacks (including Peace For All) and if not taken care of quick its light-stealing pages will ensure your Librarians brick and get killed. Last but not least, Big Eyes has a Power Null effect that makes sure its incredibly devastating moves WILL destroy your team.
- Some of the encounters in the Realization of the Floor of General Works are among one of the hardest enemies in the game — so bad that unlike most fights, they had been considered outright unfair. This is further exacerbrated by that, if Angela were to be taken down, it will result in an automatic game over. It's telling that unlike every other Floor Realization, every phase of the fight counts as a seperate encounter, allowing you to restart from the last defeated phase instead of from the very start.
- The first encounter of this slew, Wrist Cutter, is extremely unfair to a fault. The first thing is that on turn three, Wrist Cutter will almost always stagger Angela with Pale Hands and the other Librarians will come in, albeit with a staggered Angela that is easy to kill. Her pages also have extremely high rolls and it's extremely difficult to defend from her waves of assault, and she will clog your hand with "Depression" cards that are almost impossible to clear. The solution to beat the self-loathing counter dice cards, although they also have extremely high rolls and it's only a matter of time before someone gets staggered, either because of the depression cards or because of Pale Hands.
- The second encounter, Aspiration, is greatly considered the hardest part of this whole slew (and before a Nerf that allows it to lose Hankering, it's almost impossible without cheesing or luck). The encounter's main gimmick is there are four lungs of Craving that each grant Aspiration a certain amount of Hankering under certain conditions, with one giving her four every time a lung dies, and another giving her three each turn. The problem is that Hankering is equal to power, indicating that Aspiration will quickly have 30+ stacks of power and potentially induce a hard Total Party Wipe with a Mass Attack that she uses every four turns.
- The fourth encounter Frost Splinter is worse this time around compared to the original Snow Queen fight, because you cannot rely on your likely stronger assistant Librarians and Angela herself is still rather fragile. Even though she has many E.G.O. pages at this point, the fight resets your Emotion level and makes regaining it slower since only Angela can gain Emotion points, meaning that she won't have much light or Abnormality pages to break the blocks of ice trapping your assistants. The blocks also heavily resist pretty much every damage type except for their weakness to Blunt, which is problematic when Angela's deck has next to no Blunt damage outside of her E.G.O. pages, which cost a lot of Light and must recharge over time. While your first task is to free your assistants, Frost Splinter herself will target Angela nonstop, eating up room for any freeing attempts lest you get killed before even freeing anybody. She also needs to have all librarians freed to even harm her, so good luck trying to juggle these two tasks with limited light and dice.
- The fifth and final encounter, Remorse is of no slouch compared to Aspiration and Wrist Cutter, featuring several extremely complex gimmicks and high rolling attacks that will decimate you the moment you get caught off guard. While the first phase is not that hard considering that the Hammers and Nails that accompany Remorse can be easily destroyed via pure brute force, the second phase is the troublesome part. First of all, Silent Girl will hand each player a 9 cost Guilt page that will not only cause your whole party to die in 9 turns, it will allow the Instincts surrounding her to basically win almost every single clash due to their pages gaining power from the cost of Guilt. The cost of Guilt will be decreased upon killing any enemy or upon winning/losing clashes upon certain pages, but good luck trying to win clashes without being hit by one of Remorse's attacks that inflict Power Null to your dice types, or getting overpowered by the Instincts/Desires power stacking; the former gain power from the cost of Guilt as mentioned, while the latter will instead gain +10 power after being damaged and decimate you if you don't blow them up in a single turn. Even then, the minion attacks will have decent rolls on their own, indicating that outrolling them is definitely not easy. Oh, and there's also two extra E.G.O. pages based on Apocalypse and Penitence, which must be used during the fight or Remorse will induce a Total Party Wipe after she's defeated.
