YMMV / Enchanted Portals

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Haarmit's second phase isn't against him, but an octopus. Once the octopus is beaten, it disappears from the fight completely and the third phase pits you against Haarmit once again, with the octopus never appearing again until the Final Boss.
• Breather Boss: The second phase of the final boss is considerably easier than the phases surrounding it. It's a tree, which is a massive, immobile target with no hitbox, and the projectiles of which can be avoided reliably, as they only come from above as well. You just have to aim up and shoot until the boss goes down.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: The Conductor is widely regarded as one of the coolest bosses in the game for having a unique concept where his attacks are in tune to the music, with sound effects to match. Many players wish his fight could have been realized as a full-length boss battle complete with multiple phases.
• Fan-Preferred Cut Content: The boss fight with Rocky Rooster had a different premise earlier in development, taking place at the Fountain of Youth, and each phase would have Rocky gradually get younger. Some players wish this version of the fight had made it into the final game, finding it more interesting and cohesive than the Fountain of Time concept that the fight ended up going with. Also in the Rocky fight, he uses an attack in his first phase where he bounces light off of his hand mirror. In the trailer, when he does so, it has a visible beam of light coming off of it; this is missing in the finished version, which many find baffling as it makes it look like his mirror is just randomly firing off waves.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: The game can easily be beaten in under an hour, and there are no bonuses to go back and find or ranking systems to encourage replaying the levels or bosses for a higher score. By comparison, Cuphead offers much more content for the same price.
• Obvious Beta: Upon the game's release, one of the biggest things people noticed was just how unfinished the game looked and felt — a lot of areas lacked polish, the sound design was very poor (there were literally no sound effects during boss fights except your character's magic) and some of the levels felt like they were never play tested.
• Nightmare Fuel: In the second phase of Haarmit's battle, with the octopus, look in the background. You can see the ruins of Haarmit's pirate ship, along with the skeletons of the three shark pirates. It's not a pretty sight, especially when the ghosts of Haarmit and the pirates come back for revenge.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The game lacks a save feature of any kind. There is no way of knowing this at first until one turns the game off a few worlds in, only to find all their progress undone. The game is short enough that it can be beaten in one sitting, however.
  • The levels and enemy placement are both randomly generated, not only making it difficult for the player to create a consistent strategy, but also possibly resulting in sections where it is impossible to avoid taking damage.
  • Enemies don’t despawn when going offscreen, meaning that rushing through the levels will quickly result in an enormous amount of enemies ganging up on you.
  • You switch spells with the D-Pad, but you must be completely stationary in order to switch, making it difficult and clunky to do on the fly. A later patch fixed this, mapping spell switching to a single button and allowing you to do it in midair and while moving.
  • The difficulty levels change nothing except how much health your character has - six HP on the easy setting, three on the normal, one on the hardest. Combined with the RNG-dependent level structure and enemy placement, this can make it literally impossible to clear areas on the hard difficulty.
  • The jump height is always fixed; there's no way to perform a short hop by simply tapping the jump button. This can lead to many situations where an attack that could easily be dodged with a shorter jump becomes much more difficult and clunky to avoid. A great example of this is Meowitch's second phase.
  • The dash preserves your momentum, meaning that it's almost impossible to predict how far it will move you and it's very likely you'll end up slamming into things while using it. Compare to Cuphead, where the dash cancels your movement and takes you a predetermined distance.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • The phase transitions in the final boss fight^note The screen cracking like glass to reveal the next phase often get compared to transitions you would see in Youtube videos.
  • The game’s sound design is very obviously unfinished.
    • The game just flat out lacks sound effects for several enemies, bosses, or actions as basic as walking.
    • The music doesn’t seemlessly loop and tracks noticeably just stop and restart whenever they end.
    • The game’s introductory cinematic was still synced to the music from the announcement trailer, resulting in the song cutting off abruptly and awkwardly when the cinematic ends.
    • The dance moves of the disco cows dancing to the music in the alien cow's boss fight don't sync up with said music, which looks jarring.
    • Similarly, the composer's piano attacks don't sync up with the music, which causes it to sound like the piano is just making random noise, alongside making the attacks hard to telegraph.
  • The game’s Art Shift sequences look fine in stills but have significantly more stiff and limited animation than the rest of the game in motion. Moreover, the background doesn't change at all.
  • The death animation has the player fall to the ground with a flower in their hands. Perfectly fine if they're standing on the ground, but if you die in the air, the animation still plays without the player falling to the ground, leaving them floating mid-air.
  • Enemies sometimes have very inconsistent animation quality. For example, in the first level of World 3 alone, the alligators move almost as smoothly as the protagonists, while the gorillas firing monkeys from bazookas are extremely choppy and sometimes change size mid-animation. The worst part are the rolling monkeys, which are literally still images being rotated in-engine.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: When the first trailers dropped, many were quick to write the game off due to being very heavily inspired by Cuphead and not being all that subtle about it. That's also why the production was troubled.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The idea of traversing different fantasy worlds is fairly interesting but the game barely puts this to good use, with each world amounting to a different background/enemies with no real unique mechanics added. As well, there's a few points in the game where the art style of the characters temporarily changes which only ends up looking jarring in the final product. Quite a few people lament the potential for each new world bringing in a new art style, which would have worked thematically, allow for some interesting variety and to let the game stand out compared to Cuphead instead of being unfavorably juxtaposed to it.
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • The first level gives tutorials for enemies with magic barriers that require using different attacks to kill them and large walls that can only be taken down by the melee attack, yet these two mechanics are used quite sparsely through the rest of the game. The magic barriers don't show up anywhere after World 1 until World 3's boss, and only get used a few more times afterwards, even in spots where it seems like it should (such as the colored viruses in World 2-2 or the fairies during the Final Boss), and the only other breakable wall in the whole game is at the beginning of World 2-1.
  • The first boss introduces the concept of a temporary Art Shift that happens halfway through the fight, but the first and final boss fights are the only times in the game where this happens.

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