YMMV / Darkstone

• Anti-Climax Boss: Draak is statistically fearsome, being far stronger and durable than anything else you'll fight, and he'll summon a pair of Mystical Wyverns with a ridiculous speed boost, while constantly respawning them when they're killed. Get them out of the way though through other means, and all Draak does is just spit fire at you over and over, which the Reflections spell will reflect like any other ranged attack. So if you just sit there and keep casting Reflections Draak cannot hurt you whatsoever unless you go right up to his face, as Draak will just sit there spitting fire at you instead of being smart enough to just run up and bite you. With enough mana potions stocked up to keep Reflections up and an appropriate ranged weapon or attacking spell to safely damage Draak from a distance, you can beat Draak pretty quickly without taking any damage once you get rid of the Wyverns, just remember to use the Time Orb before he reaches half health or he'll fully regenerate. The Time Orb's duration to kill Draak in is also quite generous, so the effective time limit against him isn't an issue either.
• Cheese Strategy:
  • Magic bomb and poison cloud originally could be cast anywhere you could see. Even if it was completely unreachable. People quickly turned dungeons into jokes by trapping enemies behind doors and then blasting/fumigating them into oblivion. It is telling that the first patch for the game fixed this exploit by making it so that you need to have a path to the target to cast spells at that location and allowing enemies to open doors.
  • Due to a quirk in his AI, Drakk could be cheesed by hiding in a specific location inside an alcove inside his dungeon. This causes him to try and constantly attack you in melee combat instead of using his Breath Weapon...and he cannot fit inside that alcove nor reach you in melee combat. As long as you stay in that specific location, he cannot harm you and you are free to pound away at him with whatever weapon you choose.
• Complete Monster: The evil dragon Draak once tried to Take Over the World before being driven away. Returning, Draak incinerates the order of monks of the goddess, brutally sweeping across the land to kill multitudes of people with his forces and monsters, utilizing the evil Darkstone to rise even further. With the Darkstone, Draak plots to drain the lives of everyone in the kingdoms to empower himself and rise to godhood.
• Demonic Spiders: There are plenty of nasty enemies you'll encounter:
  • The Queen Spiders, which are giant fireball-spitting spiders. They have a ton of HP, hit hard, attack surprisingly fast, have very strong armor that can make them especially hard to consistently damage with ranged-weapons without you having a very high hit rate, your weapon's durability will deplete at an accelerated rate when hitting them, and they can poison you with their melee attack for good measure. Plus if you get an enemy on your side, from either using Invocation to summon a Fire Golem or Confusion to turn enemies against each other, no monster will retaliate against a Queen Spider and will just stand there being attacked until it dies. The only reprieve about them is that they move rather slowly and in dungeons their massive size keeps them restricted to the rooms they spawn in, but their size also means it can be difficult or impossible to maneuver around them in confined spaces, especially with a pack of them.
  • Mages, which attack in swarms, hurl fireballs, Teleport Spam, summon golems (fire and ice), leave magic bombs behind when damaged and are completely immune to any form of magical assault. Luckily they are fairly easily to kill with normal weapons despite having surprisingly high health... if the golems and fireballs don't kill you first or if you can catch them.
  • The Mystical Wyverns, specifically two variants. The normal Wyverns are pretty bad as is, being rather durable enemies with a massively-ranged lunge attack that poisons you and reaches farther than it appears, but one variant of Mystical Wyverns will spam fireballs at you with the fastest attack speed of any ranged enemy in the game. Another variant spawned by Draak when you fight him thankfully can't shoot fireballs, but instead move ridiculously fast and will outrun you unless you got your running speed boosted, and Draak will keep infinitely respawning them when you kill them. The only way to get them out of the Draak fight so you can focus on him is to lure them far away from him, and cast the Slowness spell on them to bring their movement to a crawl, so you can then run away from them back to Draak where they'll then no longer pursue you as long as you don't go back near them.
  • The red and blue Skeleton Captains. The yellow Skeleton Captains aren't bad, being essentially a beefed up version of the basic skeleton. but the red and blues ones are not only stronger but also shoot fireballs and Magic Missiles respectively, while they have very strong armor like any skeleton has that makes them difficult to damage without a very high hit rate, especially with ranged weapons.
  • While Amazons are mostly God Damned Bats, the highest tier of Amazons are particularly nasty. They are recognizable by their full plate armor and armament of a one-handed mace paired with a shield. They are faster in attacking than other Amazons, their attacks do a lot of damage, they can take quite a beating and like other Amazons, they are immune to all spells except poison-based ones. It should be noted there are two poison-based spells and they are both level 4 spells, the highest tier available.
  • Goblin Bat Riders and Giant Bats. Both are immune to all spells except fire based ones (and there are only 3 fire based spells), they're fast, have a lot of health, they do a lot of damage and they infinitely spawn bats (including upon death). Luckily, they are rather rare.
  • For enemies you can encounter earlier on, there's the Chief Rat Man, who will be among the first ranged-attackers you can encounter, but compared to other earlier ranged attackers they're more durable, attack faster, and seem to have a higher hit rate that will have their throwing axes penetrate your armor more frequently. Then there's one late game quest where you'll encounter fake crystals and if you try to pick them up you'll have two special Chief Rat Men spawned near you; they can't throw their axes, but they are the fastest enemies in the game, being impossible to outrun and having a ridiculously fast attack rate.
• Disappointing Last Level: Draak's Lair is completely unlike any of the other dungeons visually and is unique in being the only dungeon level in the game with no random elements at all, allowing it to feature a layout unlike the other dungeon levels and a bit of teleport maze to go to different rooms. However it's very short, with each room being rather small, and you'll always reach Draak's room after you step onto your third teleport pad, while there's only a couple more optional rooms to explore. And the enemies you'll encounter are also much weaker and less threatening than the monsters you've been fighting for about the past ten dungeon levels, being yellow Skeleton Captains that have no magic, Scorpions, and Eyes of Cain, making Draak's Lair really easy by the point you reach it, especially compared to the Serkesh dungeons full of Demonic Spiders you just had to go through. Then Draak himself is a big pushover that can be easily rendered a harmless HP blob as covered prior.
• Game-Breaker:
  • In the Playstation port, there's really no reason to play any of the classes besides the Assassin/Thief class unless you're explicitly looking for a harder and more limited experience. First ranged combat is vastly superior to close combat, even if the weapons are weaker you'll be getting hit a lot less often, especially against the bosses and stronger enemies you're not strong enough to flinch, making them much more capable of fighting enemies above their punching weight without having to rely heavily on magic, and close-ranged combat can be cumbersome in general with the wonky hitboxes that enemies often outrange. Then the real gamebreaker is their Thief skill that allows them to get far more items and equipment from enemies, while stolen equipment is much more likely to be enchanted, which significantly increases the likelihood of them getting better equipment, and when combined with the Good Bad Bug mentioned below of being able to get duplicate plot items, also means they'll be getting drastically more money. With all that extra money, they'll not only be able to afford substantially better equipment and keep themselves stocked up on items, they'll also be able to buy far more of the stat-boosting potions that will become your main source of stat-increasing after you get to the point where levelups are painfully slow and no longer rewarding, which will make them stronger than the other classes in durability, damage output, and magic ability. They even get the Identify and Trade skills for good measure too, which means they won't have to spend any money on identifying unidentified enchanted equipment and will be able to know which equipment is most worthwhile to take back to sell, while Trade lets them buy stuff/get services the slightly bit cheaper and sell stuff for a slightly bit more profit with each upgrade in the skill, which really adds up over time and they can exploit the cheaper repairs to get even more profit by repairing their loot before selling it. Assassins/Thieves are really playing an entirely different game from the other classes with the massive monetary and combat advantage they get.
  • The best spell in the game that you will probably use way more than any combat spell? Berserker, that level 1 spell you'll probably get very early on, possibly as even your first spell. When Berserker is active, your armor and hit rate are drastically increased, your movement speed is about doubled, and your health regenerates at a significantly fast rate, while the spell has a rather low mana cost and even at its first level will have a long duration of over 30 seconds, that significantly increases each time you upgrade the spell. With Berserker active you could be nigh-unkillable while you'll be hitting enemies a lot more often than they're hitting you, especially with the pesky ranged-attackers as the armor increase can make you near-immune to projectiles, not to mention how immensely useful the movement speed increase is in general. You'll be using this spell all the time from the beginning of the game to the absolute end, and no other spell in the game will come close to matching it utilities and sheer usefulness. This spell even makes close-ranged combat bearable and can allow allow close-ranged fighters to beat bosses without using any potions nor anything else.
  • The other broken spell is Absorption. When it is active and you deal damage in close combat, you'll recover 20% of the damage dealt to your health, and if your health is full you'll recover it as mana instead. Then while it does have a very high mana cost to cast (75 at its first level), it also has a very long duration of a minute at its first level, and upon each upgrade it'll last another minute while also costing a bit less mana (5 less for each upgrade). Combined with Berserker you'll be nigh-immortal even on the harder difficulties, while its mana regeneration can cover its own mana cost and allow you to spam other powerful spells without needing to consume mana potions, especially when you have it upgraded. Its one downside is that it'll have no effect when you're attacking a "lifeless" enemy, such as all the skeletons and golems, but you should almost always have at least one enemy around that you can "absorb" from. The other downside is it's a level 3 spell so it can be a bit hard to find its spellbook and will have a high Magic requirement to learn and even higher for each upgrade, so in your first playthrough you might not get to use to it until near the end if at all and certainly won't get it upgraded, but for subsequent playthroughs on harder difficulties it'll become an amazing staple spell you can keep active at all times.
  • In the PC version, there is absolutely no reason not to play with two characters. By equipping both with scrolls or spells which allow for resurrecting dead characters, you effectively make your heroes immortal.
• God Damned Bats: The Amazons. They'll never be an especially threatening enemy (with the exception of the one variant listed under Demonic Spiders), as they all move rather slowly, aren't particularly fast nor strong with their attacks, and the one ranged variant in the Archer Amazons are probably the least threatening ranged-attacker in the game, being slow, weak, and having a low hit rate that will make most of their arrows bounce off you if you got decent armor. The Archer Amazons being ranged-attackers still makes them annoying, but the one aspect that makes all Amazons so annoying is that for some reason they all have a complete resistance to any attacking magic spell in the game besides poison spells and so will take only 1 damage from any spell that isn't a poison one. Once you reach dungeon level 7 or Marghor you'll encounter Amazons nearly everywhere afterward, with some dungeon levels or lands even having multiple Amazon varieties within them, so you'll rarely just be able to blow away all enemies with spells in a dungeon level. They are especially annoying for Wizards/Sorceresses, ensuring they will have to keep using the Lycanthropy skill long after their magic prowess surpassed it or use ranged-weapons they attack slowly with.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • Ranged weapons and spells can be used on enemies on the other side of certain types of walls and doors (such as prison-style bars), but they can't attack you in return. This is eliminated if you install any of the patches for the PC version.
  • The unpatched PC version also has a truly remarkable way to use the very limited inventory space to generate unlimited gold for your character. Explicit directions can be found on a number of fan sites.
  • A similar bug can be found in the PlayStation version; the normal mace's selling price, for some reason, is higher than its buying price, which you can abuse for extra gold.
  • In the Playstation version, enemies and bosses that drop a plot-important item can have it stolen by the Thief skill, while they will still drop it again upon death, meaning you can get duplicates of such plot items if you can successfully use the Thief skill, which you can then sell as artifacts later for substantial money, even the ones you would normally have to use up elsewhere to advance the plot. You can even get duplicates of the crystals when a boss drops one, which might seem useless at first since you can never sell the crystals, however the crystal collection for the Time Orb doesn't check if you actually got the seven individual crystals, just that you have seven of any crystals, meaning you can have a duplicate crystal take the spot of another crystal. So through this exploit you can get the Time Orb and thus beat the game faster without having to resolve the plot of all seven lands (you can beat it after clearing just four of the lands if you're lucky enough to get four quests that end in fighting a boss that drops the crystal), and it can safeguard against a glitch that can make overworld items disappear permanently, preventing you from having to restart the game if it affects a crystal you left lying around.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Be prepared for a cutscene following the fourth dungeon in which the landscape drastically changes.
  • There's also the Village of the Damned, where you can be mauled to death by an entire screen full of poisonous spiders. It takes only seconds.

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