YMMV / IDOLA: Phantasy Star Saga

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: A Soul Symbol released in November 2019 called "Popona's Thanksgiving" features some Thanksgiving-themed artwork like traditional Fall season colors and a turkey, bewildering some international players who are accustomed to Thanksgiving being an American holiday. This is a reference to an actual Japanese holiday called "Labor Thanksgiving Day" that is celebrated on November 23rd and is basically the Japanese equivalent to American Thanksgiving despite having a different connotation and history.
• Ass Pull: Rockingham survives an otherwise lethal blow in the final chapter by blocking it with his arm, whereupon it's suddenly revealed that he has a mechanical skeleton. The only allusion made to this in the plot is Rockingham explaining that Machina colonized the region that eventually became Canceed, which still doesn't explain how or why this plot point occurs other than to ensure he lives.
• Breather Boss:
  • Leo is generally picked on more than other Idola. Despite his destructive capabilities and relatively high Speed, he is the only Zodiac Idola who lacks an Area of Effect Elemental Blast, significantly neutering his ability to wipe your party. He is also predominantly weak to Water, which also makes him worse than other Zodiac Idola solely due to the fact that there is an abundance of strong Water units available compared to other Elements. Then "Royal Leo", a stronger variant of Leo who has party wiping power, happened and put Leo back on the map... then Matoi and Astraea EX happened, and Leo went right back to getting bullied as two of the best characters in the game easily trample over both Leo and Royal Leo.
  • Sagittarius follows along the same lines, being the second accessible Zodiac Idola whose Elemental Blast is also a single-target attack. It does not possess offense-raising abilities like Leo does either (instead, it can buff itself to Counterattack you for one turn), meaning that it's arguably less intimidating offensively than Leo to boot. That said, Sagittarius can inflict Numbness with some of its attacks, which can be potentially much more detrimental than the Burning status Leo can inflict^ExplanationBurning is Damage Over Time, that is, per turn to your characters but it can't KO them, while Numbness prevents the afflicted characters from using their Elemental Blasts, which can outright ruin a team or strategy that relies on a specific Elemental Blast being used at the right time., and there is a comparative lack of strong Fire characters easily accessible to most players to counter its Wind typing, so it roughly evens out.
  • Scorpio is generally considered the "Earth Leo" as Sagitarius is the "Wind Leo", as it shares many of the same traits and issues that Leo and Sagitarius have with a Poison skew instead of Burn/Numbness.
  • Polaris and its more offensive-minded cousin, Polaris Nova, are similarly regarded as easily-gimped bosses. They rely on building up a Brave Gear buff to enhance their attacks and they possess a very powerful EB that will always hit a weakness on its intended target regadless of element. However, their attacks outside of this EB aren't particularly threatening, and in fact letting Polaris enhance its normal attacks so they deal more hits can make it easier to snowball EB loops against it. The player can similiarly wipe this buff using popular PvP souls like Lynx Assassin or Sleepy Giselle, or characters with buff-wiping moves, to gimp Polaris' power. The result is that Gameplay and Story Segregation occurs, with a supposedly incredibly powerful weapon that can go toe-to-toe with Dark Falz itself being easily demolished by a small group of fighters on foot.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: Phuramy being Seraphy with Laser-Guided Amnesia was not terribly surprising to most players, considering the game blatantly plastered hints throughout the story that the two were connected.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • If your Team Score is above 230k, take a shot every time you play an Arena match and encounter any frontline team that involves some combination of New Resolve Stella, Anniversary Popona, Mirabel, Christmas Matoi, Lulutemia, and Idol Stella. Better hope you're drinking soda, because otherwise your liver will hate you after the first four matches.
  • Also expect to see Idomags with lots of Status Resist effects such as Yuru Gerda or Arbear due to their Stat Stick properties.
  • For Brigade Battle, its extremely common to see defense teams with Barnabas, Sasha, Coco Rock, Kyra or Popo Pudding. In fact, its extremely common to see at least two or three of these on the starting side on the vast majority of non-newbie teams.
  • Although Theater's place in standard Arena has been shuffled out in favor of Idol Stella, he is still a powerful mainstay in Arena SP. Due to having Barrier Change Boss as an ability unique to him, Theater is the only character in the game who can fill two element gauge for one character slot for a sackful of extra points. This invariably leads to almost every top ranking team running seven characters of the featured Element and one Theater for maximum score efficiency.
  • Players gaming the birthday system to get a Uly of a specific Element will almost always pick Fire. This is because Fire needs all the help it can get and all other Elements have strong, competitive units that would make Uly redundant. Uly himself is comparatively better than what his rarity tier implies, making Fire the best choice. This is no longer an issue with the advent of numerous powerful Fire units as well as the ability to freely switch the protagonists' element from the main menu.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • The Rabi Idomag if you fight one in Arena. The Rabi Idomag has the ability to inflict Numbness on Reverse Rush, up to a maximum of 30% chance when the Reverse Rush Gauge is maxed. Numbness is one of the scariest status effects in the game due to its ability to completely shut down a character; if your opponent gets good RNG and you don't, fights can go downhill in under five seconds. Oh, and Rabi can only be bought with real money.
  • Similarly, the Ori Idomag will place a debuff upon the stricken team that will prevent them from receiving any buffs at all for the duration of that turn. Unlike the Rabi Idomag, this effect will trigger without fail unless the targets are protected against debuffs, which is a very uncommon ability that is mostly present on rare limited characters and requires to be set up an entire turn in advance, further reducing the probability the victim can protect against it. Additionally, unlike Rabi, Ori is an event reward so anyone can get it, though players who did not obtain it during its event are out of luck until the event is rerun. On the other hand, using Ori intelligently is the best way to counter the extremely common and easily-set-up stall team of Barnabas/Coco Rock/Sasha/Popo Pudding in Brigade Battle, making Ori a godsend for this mode.
  • The now-notorious Lynx Assassin Soul Symbol, considered the meta-defining Soul Symbol when it was released. It gives its user a one-turn buff that allows the user to delete buffs from anyone they hit with their normal attack. Considering how overpowered buffs are, either side losing their buffs early can handily turn matches. The most frequent abusers of this Symbol used to be Phuramy [Summer] and Messala, both of whom were fast enough to grab initiative against most other characters and have a normal attack that hits all targets, at least until Erwin was introduced, who outspeeds both of them while also having a hit-all normal attack (in his FDs).
  • Lynx Assassin's cousin, Fluffy Lillimo, can also really suck to fight against. Fluffy Lillimo gives the user a turn of buff removal on Skill hit if the enemy has a buff at the start of the turn. The biggest offenders of this Symbol are Chaos Luther and Chaos Kibaki EX, who have priority Skill 2s (meaning getting outsped is practically impossible) that hit all targets. Thankfully, Fluffy Lillimo generally tends to be much easier to outplay due to Artificial Stupidity. And then Episode 2 introduced a new highest tier of priority dubbed "Super Fastest", and then introduced Farley, whose S1 outspeeds previous priority wipers Luther and Kibaki EX, putting the need for [Buff Protection] in ever greater prominence (see further below).
  • The Sleepy Giselle Soul Symbol introduced with Brigade Battle is rapidly becoming even more common a sight than either Lynx Assassin or Fluffy Lilimo for two very good reasons: the Symbol can be obtained completely gacha-free by trading its fragments from the Brigade Battle Coin Shop, and unlike Lynx or Fluffy Lilimo, Sleepy Giselle gives unrestricted buff-wiping power, so Artificial Stupidity hardly ever gets in the way of it potentially ruining your day. Enemy teams with Sleepy Giselle are so widespread nowadays that it's quite difficult to perform well even in mid-tier Arena matches without one or both of the following entry.
  • Stella [New Resolve] (hence "Stella NR") and Stella [Aries Knight's Diva] (hence "Idol Stella") are as powerful on your side as they are annoyances to work around when faced as enemies. They feature the extremely useful [Buff Protection] party buff as their main selling point, very high stats (Stella NR has some of the highest HP and Defense in the game, while Idol Stella trades some HP for more attack) and very potent E Bs. Teams featuring one or both of them are common, to the point their mere existence prompts most people to use at least two buff wipers in their team "just in case" they run into these two.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: The gameplay is considered nothing to write home about and the entirety of the game can largely be played on Auto Battle, but the game itself is praised for its attractive artwork and music, alongside an interesting premise (in terms of Phantasy Star).
• Epileptic Trees: A fairly popular fan theory is that the Warrior in EP2 is possibly a Meteorn or that the time frame of the game is synchronized with New Genesis, as the way the Warrior is introduced is similar to how the Meteorns arrive on Halpha and the game strongly hints that ARKS was present on Vandor a long time ago, suggesting an indeterminate Time Skip.
• Fandom-Enraging Misconception: Calling the game a Fate/Grand Order clone by simply looking at snippets of gameplay will likely elicit exasperated sighs from fans.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Some have taken to calling Sagittarius "Wind Leo" for the reasons described in the Breather Boss entry.
  • The popular and powerful Maihime Kaougi Weapon Symbol is commonly called the "fan", and effects that emulate its ability are also referred to as such.
  • Getting free Symbol Fragments from 10x pulls or Titles related to pulling a certain number of times is commonly referred to as "pity fragments". Similarly, the guaranteed pull Step on a Step-Up Gacha is referred to as a "pity X", where "X" is the name of the character.
• Game-Breaker:
  • All four Elementor units are considered extremely good regardless of their rarity, as the Class has an inherent gimmick that accelerates the charge speed of Element Value for their respective element, making them invaluable for accessing your team's strongest moves faster. In particular:
    • Popo Pudding has one of the game's best buffs: Element Convert. Every time your team gets hit by an enemy attack, they gain Element, up to 0.5 Element per attack per Unit damaged. Setting this up Turn 1 allows the team to siphon Element from foes for almost no additonal effort, then turn it back around and retaliate with EB spam. While strong on its own, Law FD makes this terrifyingly powerful by adding +40% DEF on top, turning the team into Stone Walls that eat damage for lunch. Even better, Emil, the resident Earth Elementor, is essentially a budget Popo, getting a weaker carbon copy of this buff that stacks with it.
    • Kampfer, the resident Water Elementor, has a fun buff by way of giving a single allied unit +40% Weak Hit Damage. Possibly the most potent 3★ in the game (not counting Uly) just because he synergizes with the overpowered Matoi + Astraea EX combo by feeding Matoi extra Water Element and pumping even more damage into her with said buff.
  • Levi was incredibly strong for his time; going Neutral Fate gives him access to an extremely abusable Collusion buff almost strictly better than any other Pursuit buff in the game, and his EB is comparatively cheap, hits like a truck, and has a base 20% chance to Fatal Wound, scaling up to 50% based on Attack Flare stacks. Power Creep eventually caught up to him, but he remains competitive in his Element and very viable.
  • Nearly anything that extends buff duration, starting with the infamous Maihime Kaougi Weapon Symbol and branching out into stuff like the superior Zeineis Fidell Symbol, Stella [Summer] EB, and the Affectionate Maiden Soul Symbol. Buffs are insanely potent due to being percent modifiers to your characters' base stats; stack enough of them and you'll be able to steamroll the crap out of nearly anything and/or tank the hell out of practically anything even without dedicated tanks. Buff extensions let you do all this longer, giving you more time to go ham on whatever poor soul is in your path. The aforementioned Affectionate Maiden is this in particular; the Symbol extends all buffs for the party by one turn if the user has a buff. Not only does the Symbol activate twice if it's Lv. 10, you can stack multiple copies!
  • Star Fes banners starting from Siegmund began a trend of newer Star Fes characters being so insanely overtuned that they Power Creep basically every other DPS character in their Element. Not only do Siegmund, Luther, and Matoi have vastly superior stats (in excess of 600 when fully maxed) than any other character, they combine this with powerful Skills like Siegmund's crazy powerful Counter-Attack that can potentially One-Hit Kill, Luther's Mana Drain Skill that steals 2 Element (unconditionally!) from a target and adds it to his own, and Matoi's extremely heavy-hitting EB that wrecks Fire characters and Leos.
  • Astraea EX possesses one of the best buffs in the game: Regen, 30% ATK Up, and Element Gain Boost. The lattermost effectively multiplies Element gain on any attack hit, allowing characters to get triple or quadruple the amount of gauge with their normal attack. This leads to ridiculous EB loop strategies that can snowball depending on the team. The best part is that because this buff is on her Neutral FD, she's splashable and works on basically any team composition whatsoever.
  • Erwin became a meta-defining unit on release thanks to his synergy with Lynx Assasin as the speediest unit in the game with a hit-all normal attack, outspeeding previous favorite users Messala and Phuramy Summer. Entire PvP matches were decided solely over whose Erwin was speedy enough to erase the other side's buffs first. Even after months into Episode 2, Erwin remains the most common user of Lynx Assassin solely because of how fast he is as well as well the utility of his Law EB, which grants a powerful heal to his team as well as an absolutely staggering **90%** damage reduction buff for one turn, turning the entire team into immortal Stone Walls unless this buff is wiped.
  • Stella NR possesses the near-unique ability (only shared with Idol Stella) to grant [Buff Protection] to your party. Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Buff wiping through Lynx Assassin and/or Fluffy Lilimo became so meta-defining that Sega had to instate an entire buff dedicated solely to counteracting it, and here's the premier carrier of it. Short of specific strategies that can take advantage of repeated attacks for multiple wipes in one turn, her mere existence forces you to dedicate a slot for a second wiper, and if you lack the necessary tools or characters for the job, blocking one of your wipes is all that's needed to turn what should have been a landslide win into a struggle. It doesn't help this buff also comes packaged with a hefty Defense buff as well (and attack on Law/status resist on base), and Stella NR is notoriously tanky, boasting some of the highest HP and Defense stats in the entire game as well as a horrendously powerful all-target EB. It's not uncommon for an enemy Stella NR to unexpectedly tank everything you throw at her with a sliver of health left and then retaliate with her EB, likely taking out some of your units and ruining your score.
  • Meanwhile, Idol Stella incorporates her [Buff Protection] into her [Live] Buff, which is in some ways even more exploitable. [Live] is effectively a better [Dance], conferring 1-turn buffs to the team every turn for its duration but not restricting the user's actions to this skill for its duration. So not only does Idol Stella raise all of her team's elemental values, increase their speed and grant them one stack of [Buff Protection] every turn, Stella herself is free to resume fighting the following turns, which she does with a powerful hit-all S2 that buffs her team's attack and extends their buffs and a ridiculous single-target EB that not only can very easily nuke an unfortunate soul into oblivion, if it succeeds in doing so, Stella buffs herself so she performs another one free of charge after everyone else goes, almost certainly dooming another target as well (this EB alone would make her broken due to letting Idol Stella max out the Earth score all by herself). If she's Chaos, it becomes even more absurd because Chaos removes all support utility on her EB to instead make the follow-up EB deal double damage.' Did we mention her [Live] buff can be extended indefinitely? So if you do not pack at least two buff wipers or one with a Super Fastest priority move, you can potentially find yourself dealing with this status for even longer than when facing Stella NR herself!
  • Gerda [Witch of Leoria], possibly the single most overtuned PvE unit in the game. She packs basically everything you'd want in a single character: an immensely powerful buff skill that grants Element Convert and her unique offensive Witch's Blessing buff to all allies to increase their Weak Hit damage and give them Mana Burn properties, a Skill 2 that Mana Burns all foes for 2 Element, and some of the best burst damage in the game in the form of her Elemental Blast, which is a Cost 8 Single Target that doublecasts if the target has 5 Element or less and Mana Drains 2 Element otherwise. Her Chaos counterpart gets even more insane, as her Elemental Blast gets a supercharge with a small damage boost and the ability to siphon 4 Element instead. To top it all off, she also owns what is considered to be the best Unique Weapon in the game, which gives a no-strings-attached +1 (+2 when maxed) to Wind Element at the start of the fight. For perspective on how crazy her kit is, a later Summer seasonal variant of Gerda was released in 2021, and she is virtually a 1-to-1 Moveset Clone of [Witch of Leoria] but for Fire Element; she's just that good that they decided to duplicate her kit on another unit.
  • Keeping in tune with Phantasy Star Online 2es making anniversary units obscenely broken, say hello to Anniversary Popona, a Water Star Fes character and massively enhanced version of Popona. This Popona boasts some of the most outrageously overtuned Skills in the game, including a Cost 5 Super Fastest Skill that smacks the entire enemy party with a Herd-Hitting Attack, cleanses and grants immunity to debuffs, and gives her one of the most powerful pursuit effects in the game, a Co-Star buff that has a stupidly high base power and triggers on any ally hit. She also has the unique ability to temporarily increase the activation limit of Symbols, granting extremely potent Symbols like Sleepy Giselle an additional push to break the enemy party in half. To top it all off, she packs a Cost 6 All Targrt EB that, while possessing surprisingly mediocre damage, grants all allies an ATK/DEF/SPD buff and reduces all allied Skill Cooldowns by 5! Her sheer presence is so overwhelming that she effectively smashed apart Brigade Battle meta by merely existing, not helped by how she can be splashed into essentially any team comp with no downsides.
  • Io isn't quite as busted as Gerda [Witch of Leoria], but she does pack one of the best single PvE skills in the game: Banish Arrow. This Super Fastest attack sticks a debuff on the target that tracks the damage dealt over the course of the turn, up to 300,000 damage, then reapplies it at the end of the turn. Unlike its original PSO2 counterpart, Banish is 1:1 scaling and unaffected by any form of mitigation, and considering 300,000 damage is at worst a quarter of the health of the tankiest Idola in the game, the added damage output can easily cinch a fight much faster than usual.
  • Stella [New Years], one of the first seasonal variant units in the game, quickly escalated into an Arena mainstay in August 2021. This is due to a Balance Buff that made her into the game's best source of Team Score and turned her into one of the game's best single-target Water damage dealers with an EB that grants both doublecast on kill and Max HP Up; this was in tandem with an adjustment to Arena Element Gauges that doubled their max limit, making single-target EBs substantially more valuable. All of these factors together allowed her to completely displace [New Resolve] as the keystone Water unit of Arena, as she pulls double duty on gauge fill due to her massive overkill power and Max HP Up buff filling the Water gauge even further.
  • There are very few weapons that can be considered meta-defining, but one notable exception is the Star Support Virginias (also known as "the guitar" or "PVP guitar"). This weapon has the notable effect of granting a two-turn 20% ATK buff whenever its user applies a DEF buff to a target. This weapon singlehandedly turns defensive buffers into offensive buffers in a 2-for-1 deal and compounds the capabilities of support units who could already apply DEF and ATK/damage at once, making it basically invaluable for high-level content and PvP. It was also formerly limited to Arena top-rankers, but a later update made its slightly-weaker counterpart available as a shop item for 500 Arena Medals.
• Genius Bonus:
  • The way Uly's Element is determined by your birthday is not at all random; it is actually consistent with the 12 symbols of the Zodiac and their associated dates on the calendar, which further strengthens the Zodiac theme.
  • The minor Idola (the ones marked by a Dark Falz insignia) are also tied to the Zodiac theme, as they are all based on minor constellations. This includes some fairly obscure ones like Chamaeleon, which is not a misspelling of "chameleon".
  • Dark Falz Theatri is named after the term idola theatri, a Latin phrase coined by Sir Francis Bacon that describes the human tendency to rely on logical fallacy.
• Goddamned Bats: If you play in any decently-ranked Brigade, you will learn to hate Sasha. A Lethal Joke Character to the highest order who seems eternally immune to Power Creep, her combination of inflicting Provoke and gaining Self-Sacrifice from her Elemental Blast allows her to eat through your turns while you struggle to make a dent through DEF stats high enough to give EP2 characters a run for their money. Symbols and support effects that give her more DEF and damage resistance will turn her into Made of Iron, and if you have no way to get past those buffs she'll stall you out until the end of the round. That said, she has counter-play, but doing so typically requires rare and powerful units or Symbols.
• Goddamned Boss:
  • The Chameleon Idola due to being able to buff its Evasion, allowing it to dodge attacks in a game where attacks normally never miss, and for possessing the unique ability to change its Core element with a specific attack to match the element of its victim, which can potentially throw your whole strategy out the window if you're unlucky. On top of also having the common ability to greatly decrease all damage in one turn, this makes a smart Chamaileon very tanky.
  • Zodiac Virgo, whose gimmick is that using specific attacks grants it a unique barrier buff that considerably decreases all damage incurred by Virgo, and unlike the active guard action used by other Idola, this buff is enduring and must be dispelled by inflicting weak-hit damage. The clincher is that this buff can stack with itself, especially if Virgo uses its Elemental Blast, leading to Virgo layering barriers to slow down aggression against it, stalling while launching its own attacks. A full-Earth elemental Virgo is the biggest offender due to only Earth being effective against Earth and having no resistances, meaning your Earth units are at high risk of being swiftly KO'd by Virgo and thus potentially rendering you unable to break Virgo's barriers at all.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • Levi's second skill is an Action Initiative attack where he slices through the enemy team while hidden in shadow, dealing one hit to two random targets. A rare but harmless glitch may cause Levi to end up not returning to the player's side or forcing the black screen to persist even after the attack, which can result in some pretty "interesting" side effects.
  • The early September 2021 event "Midsummer Underworld of Regulus Pt. 1" was normally supposed to sell 1500 Star Diamonds in the event shop like all other Star Diamond events; however, the exchange limit for the 100 Star Diamond prize was accidentally set to 50 instead of the usual 5. In a surprising turn of events, instead of fixing it, the bug was left in to be fair to people who didn't farm early, allowing everyone to get 6000 Star Diamonds instead of 1500.
• High-Tier Scrappy: Despite the rapidly-shifting metagame of the Arena, the one unit who has been consistently good in the mode ever since it released is Popo Pudding, due to her Game-Breaker-tier buff that results in nearly every top tier meta team running her in Law.
• Ho Yay: Messala's death scene has some very intimate undertones between Messala and Siegmund.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Some players are only interested in the Idola Points feature for PSO2, which lets you purchase items via a special shop that you earn currency for by playing IDOLA. This includes an extra supply of weekly Star Gems, 1 Million EXP Tickets, and the valuable Idola-style Steak item, a rare and powerful commodity for level grinding.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • Earth was formerly disliked on release due to a lack of strong or versatile Units and being the only Element weak to itself and having no advantage against Fire, Water, or Wind, making Earth not particularly useful over picking out of the standard three. Later Unit releases propelled Earth to Jack of All Stats status with a good selection of balanced Units that are unresisted by other Elements.
  • Archer as a Class is almost universally disliked. A great deal of Archers are either gimmicky (rely on certain conditions/status to maximize damage) or are overly reliant on the Marking status, which isn't guaranteed to stick and has Weapon Symbols specifically dedicated to boosting Marking rate, taking away any other possible choices for the Weapon slot. Roxanne is among the least viable 5★s in the game next to Rosalinde for the "Marking reliance" reason, and outside of Tyrol^note Tyrol has Sleep afflict baked into her skillset instead of being chained to her Elemental Blast like Roxanne and doesn't rely on the Marking status, making her significantly better as a hybrid support unit many other Archers fare little better. EP2 Archers have slowly been making up for this deficit, with Lulutemia being an extremely powerful and high-tier Archer and Emma EX having her Marking abilities swapped out for powerful Lightning Bruiser effects.
  • Natural 3★ characters are typically considered weak compared to characters of higher natural rarity. Despite the ability for all characters to reach 6★ and Level 100, 3★ characters suffer from inherent stat disadvantages as a result of their natural rarity tier; a 3★ at Limit Break 4 has roughly similar stats to a natural 5★ with no Limit Break. As a result, the only 3★ characters considered strong enough to remain as a slightly-less-temporary asset are the ones who have support abilities unrelated to their stats, like Kampfer and Sasha.
• Memetic Mutation: Torbjorn, due to his funny faces. Some episodes of IDOLA Channel even have Popona referencing it.
• Pandering to the Base: Pretty much all of the PSO2 characters in the game exist exclusively to make players shell out money, as all of the characters that were added (except Seraphy, whose presence is meant to be a surprise) are the most popular characters in the game. They also work neatly into the plot since the game canonically has a way to Hand Wave their appearances and the setting already has strong ties to PSO2 anyways.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: The game's lack of any official translation makes it difficult for some overseas players to become invested in the plot, resulting in this effect.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
  • Mint was notorious for being hilariously bad and bizarrely common ever since she came out. Come July 2021, she got a substantial kit rework that, in addition to giving her huge stat inflation, also boosted the power notations on her Skills and gave her Elemental Blast to deal up to 150% more damage based on the Reverse Rush gauge. Combined with the Ursa Minor Unique Weapon existing by the time she got this buff, Mint immediately rose up from trash-tier to actually usable in PVE content.
  • Gustav also got buffed in the same update. Like many Archers, he was delegated to Low-Tier Letdown territory for being overly reliant on Burn status for damage, and was not considered a relevant unit in any way. While his reliance on Burn hasn't changed with the buff, the buff greatly inflated both his power notations as well as the damage bonuses he gains for hitting Burning enemies, with both Chaos and base also getting a 150% damage bonus on Elemental Blast like Mint. While he's still niche he's definitely swung around to being a heavy-hitter unit, and he's become increasingly common in Brigade Battle due to many players underestimating his post-buff damage output.
• Special Effects Failure: Lilimo's portrait is way too small for the game to handle, which results in odd placements for his picture on a variety of menus and cut-ins.
• Tainted by the Preview: The game was heavily derided upon its reveal due to a combination of factors, including a general stigma against mobile games, visual similarities to Fate/Grand Order leading fans to believe it would be a lazy attempt at Follow the Leader (proven false later on), and the game's reveal coming at the tail end of an Audience-Alienating Era for Phantasy Star Online 2, which many then-current and former players were bitter about the direction SEGA was heading for the game until they began to turn things around.
• Tear Jerker: If you didn't think Rosalinde's situation was bad enough, the Aries Knights are forced to fight Rosa's family and close allies corrupted by Erwin's Dark Falz power, with each of them perishing from their defeat. Barnabas gets a truly gut-wrenching death as Rosa cradles him in her arms during his last moments.
• That One Attack:
  • Farley has the dubious distinction of having an S1 tailor-made for Fluffy Lilimo/Sleepy Giselle: cheap (the cheapest S1 in the entire roster in fact, requiring a grand total of zero element to use), all-target, short-cooldown and packed with the ultimate "Super Fastest" priority to make sure not even Luther and Kibaki EX can stop this bomb. If you run into team opening with Farley in the lineup, chances are extremely high she's packing Fluffy Lilimo or Sleepy Giselle. We sure hope you have your own (faster) Farley or have Odette on the Chaos side handy to stop Farley's incoming wipe!
  • Rosalinde [Red Lion Empress] possesses the same [Overcounter] stance her New Year's version had. As a refresher, just poking her while this buff is active will prompt her to slam the entire team back with a huge flaming sword. Empress Rosa's [Overcounter] skill is better than the New Year version because it comes with a buff for the party (Defense in Base and Law, Attack in Chaos) and, more importantly, it lasts 2 turns instead of 1; meaning that this buff can be extended indefinitely. When paired up with Idol Stella, Stella NR (or both) and/or Summer Popona, suddenly you find that multi-target attacks are extremely unsafe because you will inevitably prompt Empress Rosa to slam your team multiple times for the Scratch Damage she's taking. For the cherry on top, if the Empress Rosa you're fighting is packing her Unique Weapon (only obtainable by fully limit-breaking a copy of Empress Rosa), her attacks will ignore your Defense buffs.
  • Scorpio Abyss has a Super Fastest single-target normal attack that removes Support Effects. Especially frustrating to deal with since it essentially invokes Character Select Forcing for Stella [New Resolve] and Anniversary Popona if you can't burst it down, and not only do you have to go through the trouble of reapplying buffs, but leaving a unit without debuff immunity for too long renders it susceptible to Scorpio's extremely deadly stacking debuff and/or Fatal Wound damage.
• That One Boss:
  • Gemini is considered one of the tougher bosses to deal with. Its base Element is Wind, which lacks counters due to the relative lack of strong Fire units compared to other Elements, and it sports numerous powerful self-buffs that can turn even a low rank Gemini into Lightning Bruiser that can wipe your party in one fell swoop with its Elemental Blast.
  • Zodiac Aries is also this, due to having the ability to build element incredibly easily, leading to an Aries with at least two water elements setting off her Elemental Blast very quickly. It also hits your whole party and deals a ton of damage; its not uncommon for an Aries to wipe half of your party or more with one Blast(if they're not taking some measure of defense, such as Law Reverse Rush or being wind-elemental, or both)—the result of which is Aries more or less building all the element for another Elemental Blast right on the next turn, swiftly leading to partial or even Total Party Kill.
  • Titan Eren is best described as "Leo but it can actually score kills". He sports a threatening 20% damage buff and can cast Regen on himself, the first Idola to do so, and the former can be combined with his devastating Elemental Blast, "Attack!", which, unlike Leo, rams the entire party for one massive hit of damage. Buff cleansing or top-of-the-line tanking/defense is a must when challenging a Titan.
  • For a non-Idola example, the mid-chapter battle against Astraea, Kyra, Totonotto and a random Elf Archer in Chapter 7 of the main story, which is full-on Fake Difficulty due to design. Since the former three are Boss versions of playable characters, each one of them is loaded with more HP than any two or even three of your characters at level 100 could hope to have put together; since they're enemies, they gain and build up element independently of each other, which means it's entirely possible for them to ALL use their Elemental Blasts in the same turn, one after the other; Finally, every single one of them has powerful Area of Effect attacks (Totonotto's Elemental Blast is particularly dangerous), two of them can put Dizzy on you (which allows you to miss with your attacks entirely, in game where Always Accurate Attack is the norm), those same two can heal their allies, Kyra can Provoke your party to focus on her, and Astraea has a party-wide normal attack that can Dizzy, a party-wide buff and heal combo skill, and her Elemental Blast heals her whole party as well as gives them the ability to withstand a lethal blow for a couple turns. Oh, and you have to mow down a couple of normal enemy waves before even getting to this encounter. It's less the presence of these factors (which have been encountered in some way before) and more the fact that all of them and at such a degree are in a single battle, making this one of the most lopsided encounters in the enemy's favor in the story, and the game as a whole. It's possible to cheese the encounter by having a unit with a Fatal Blow effect eliminate one or more of them, but the rates are unreliable, and the player may not have a unit with such an ability in the first place because of the gacha-based gameplay. You can't even cheese it by selecting an overpowered support character from another player because it's a story battle. Either a well-planned out strategy with a capable team is needed, or a team with enough sheer power to overcome their healing is needed. By the way, the recommended level for this encounter is around the 50s, so it's a lot of level grinding if you go the second route. Have fun!
• That One Level: "Walter's Warrior Way" Stage 4 is brutal. The fight consists of an 8 vs. 8 fight a la Arena where you fight a team of four Chaos units and four Law units with Reverse Rush between them, all with relevant Weapon Symbols and Soul Symbols equipped. The problem? They still follow PVE rules. This means they have the inflated PVE stats and have the individual Element gain/usage that PVE enemies do, putting you at a massive disadvantage because of the rules already favoring enemy offense/defense plus the addition of Reverse Rush and Symbols to the mix whereas most PVE fights never give them to enemies.
• The Scrappy: Mint has a bad habit of being stuffed into paid or promotional gacha banners with unsettling frequency, and her Low-Tier Letdown and Junk Rare statuses are very unhelpful to her cause.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • EPISODE 2 brought a significant change in the game's monetization loop for the worse: the supply of free Star Diamonds (SD) through play was significantly reduced (daily rewards were halved, Idola Battle removed the weekly 500SD reward completely, and Arena removed 200SD worth of rewards from the missions list), but the demand for Star Diamonds was significantly increased (with every new character banner only accepting Star Diamonds, and not also the free-pull tickets that you previously could use on any "standard" banner during Episode 1). The game also increased the delay for new characters being added to the general pool following their introduction. IDOLA "compensated" for this by upgrading the free daily pull (from the general pool) to a free daily 10-pull, and adding previously-limited "EX" characters to the general pool; however, most long-term players already had most of the units in the general pool, and many of those units suffered from severe Power Creep due to their age and the sheer power of the new Episode 2 characters. The ultimate effect of all this was to burn out the goodwill of a lot of long-term players, as many perceived SEGA to be ramping up the monetization due to sheer greed.
  • There were also notable changes to how new characters (introduced in Episode 2) were rendered in combat scenes, becoming 3D models (instead of 2D) and no longer changing their appearance after Fate Divergence. This was largely done to try and counteract bloat, as the growing size of the IDOLA app was starting to strain the storage space of most phones. This extended to each character only having one Elemental Blast animation (instead of three: one for each Fate Divergence version), and the animations themselves having their quality and length reduced: according to the producers, another reason for the downgrade was that so many players played the game with the "skip Elemental Blast animation" option selected, it was no longer considered an efficient use of budget.