YMMV / Equin: The Lantern

• Breather Level:
  • Some of the maps are very small and they might have no enemies. Amusingly enough, early on you can get the message warning of a snake-populated level and find it empty. Don't get too happy with this, though, as a lack of fights means you're not getting any stronger either.
  • With some luck you can get a level with a campfire on it for repeated full recovery or at least a level with lots of flower patches to eat.
  • Levels with anti-magic fields can be a good sight when you're not a Wizard. You can beat the magic-using enemies easily and then look for the anti-magic switch to get even more experience points.
  • If you get the Nightvision perk then the dark floors turn into this. Not only you'll have a full field of vision, but enemies won't ever ambush you and they'll will also be 15% easier to hit.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Killer Plants are mid-level enemies that can appear from the very beginning. Avoid them until much later.
  • Deadly Asps can also often be seen in the first few levels, but they're actually beatable even at that point with certain moves (e.g. the Wizard can kill them with two Flame spells) and will be worth a couple quick level ups if you do manage to kill them.
  • Skeleton Warriors and Master Thieves are examples of strong champion monsters that can unexpectedly appear on the first 20 floors or so. There is a clear gap of power between those two and the enemies presented by that point, including the Deadly Asps and Bloody Slimes.
  • Enemies who can use spells, specially when playing as the Warrior because he has next to no magic defense growth. Not to mention how some of the equipment with good defense that you'll want to wear have magic defense penalties. If the A.I. Roulette decides to go for an elemental spell and you're no wizard yourself, you're dead.
  • The Cyclops is the strongest normal enemy during the endgame. Challenge its champion counterpart at your own peril.
• Goddamned Bats: Everyone gets harder to hit during a green Lantern phase. Expect to see both your character and the enemy missing each other for several turns, draining away a lot of stamina for nothing. And that's if the RNG isn't feeling too spiteful.
• Goddamned Boss: The Ninja, the Ghost and the Reaper have an evasion bonus of just over 10%. If they cast Dodge on top of that...
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • The game doesn't register some interactions between your character and certain objects when you walk into an enemy or for half a second after a battle is finished. This can cause you to run over traps unharmed and go right through closed doors. And if you fight two enemies in a row, you can keep certain stat buffs that were supposed to last for a single battle.
  • The Ghost and the Reaper could take over the place of any boss, including the Lich, if their events happened in boss levels. This was later fixed.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Originally, instead of manually choosing your three starting items, you had to tap the cursor back and forth on the character select screen until a combination you like came up. An update later patched a proper starting item selection screen in.
• Sequel Displacement: The original Equin games were Equin Adventures and Equin Village. They aren't listed on the developer's website anymore, and as a result the full version of Village can be considered lost media. It's possible to scavenge for info on The Daily Click and archived versions of the original DXF Games page on Sitesled.
• That One Achievement:
  • "Ghost of a Chance" requires you to defeat the Ghost boss, a difficult enemy that only has a chance of appearing on a rare level event.
  • "Cursed Cannibal!?" and "Hidden Heroes" require you to wear a full set of certain equipment that are all very, very rare.
• That One Attack: Some enemies can put you to sleep for a few turns, while others can cast the fire spell and break your wooden gear. The Zap spell is the most powerful of them all and something you definitely don't want to see used against you.
• That One Level:
  • Poison weeds and flames on the field are unavoidable unless you have items to counter them and are often set on mandatory paths. Weeds can set the Toxin status for even more damage and flames don't go away when stepped on. And don't forget to remove your wooden gear before walking through a fire tile. The spikes that go on and off are mostly harmless... except for when you don't have the time to stand still.
  • Dark levels don't just reduce your field of sight. They make it more likely for enemies to ambush you and makes them 10% more likely to avoid your attacks.
  • Levels with anti-magic fields when you're a wizard. You should keep a backup physical weapon for those, but really, the Wizard sucks at physical damage to begin with and you should just avoid all combat or look for a dispelling switch.
  • Time Bomb levels will instantly kill you if you fail to find the goal under a certain amount of steps. That also forces you to fight even on lantern phases that are inconvenient to your character.
  • Monster Infestation floors are self-explanatory. The enemies in those floors give more exp, though. Likewise, Arenas of Death only have Champion enemies in them. High risks, high rewards.
  • Icebox Floors prevent stamina recovery from walking around.
  • Level gimmicks can stack, so you can have the anti-magic field combined with darkness or a step limit. You DO NOT want to play through a dark time-bomb level...

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