YMMV / Library of Ruina

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Angela's parting words with the Library's guests is "May you find your book in this place". Based on how almost no guest survived combat in the Library, could this actually mean "may you find the book you want in this place," or was it: "May you become one of our books in this place"?
  • Pertaining to the point above, when Michelle snitched to the Head, what did she tell the Head and how did they react? Did she tell the Head about researchers dying to Cogito experiments or insanity only for them to not take her statements seriously at all (since human experimentation was commonplace) until a Beholder saw that Lobotomy Corporation will soon create an AI that is about to destroy the City? Or did the Head just decide to invade using "Planned Rebellions" as an excuse but withheld their real reason for invasion anyway (which is out of fanatical racism, since the Seed of Light doesn't directly attack or threaten them)?
  • The WARP Train scenario, where W Corp traps its passengers in a horrible time-enclosed space where they are guaranteed to go insane and commit suicide or maim and kill other human beings. While it might seemingly be done out of complete malice, the conversation in the WARP Cleanup Agent's Page mention that they are not getting enough energy since L Corp's fall. Are the trains really working as intended, or was W Corp really forced to utilize TT2 protocol in that manner to make up for their energy crisis caused by L.Corp's absense?
  • Later on in the game, the Library itself displays cognizance, releasing guests or blocking their way out in ways that favor the Reverb Ensemble and driving Angela and Roland into an E.G.O. Meltdown. This produces several pressing questions: does Carmen's brain stem still have control over the happenings in the Library? Is she (or the Light that manifested from Ayin) behind the E.G.O. Meltdowns? And is Ayin, who has been dissolved into light (and denied emanation by Angela) actually using the Floor Realizations to make amends with her?
  • The Immigration Officer during Roland's flashback in Chesed's floor. When he was denying Roland access to the Nest under the premise that he was a Smoke War Veteran, did he actually mean it or he's just using an excuse to deny him, and he's actually doing so for the Enkephalin smuggling incident before?
  • Regarding Carmen with the added context in Library of Ruina:
    • Just how much of a saint Carmen is, especially during the late-game? All we hear about her is praise from the other Patron Librarians or Ayin himself (or one of his split egos), but if Hokma's advice to Angela were to be belived, then she's already a walking disaster who deliberately instigates events to bait people into being Distorted and (seemingly) killed (some of which were obviously nasty circumstance manipulations), not to mention assisting the Reverb Ensemble in getting new members. Is she actually the saint the Librarians kept insisting that she is, did something happen to her that caused her to just outright break, or was she far different from what people knew her as from the start?
    • Added to Carmen's sheer uncanniness is some of the Patron Librarian's description of her. Every single account about her hints at something extremely shady going on even before the events of Lobotomy Corporation. If her words post-Kether Realization were of anything to go by, then the Distortion Phenomenon was not a mere side effect of the White Nights and Dark Days, but something that was meant to happen from the beginning, and Angela cutting of Light prematurely only prevented the Distortions from spreading throughout the City. So did Carmen really spend decades planning and laying out the chain of events that would lead to the Library's creation—including her suicide? Or did she actually mean what she was saying , but Angela simply interfered with her plans?
  • Angela during the beginning of Impuritas Civitatis. She suddenly starts ranting about how the Library devours its guests to become stronger, and that she is going to get the freedom she want and let the Abnormalities roam free like her. In reality, the invitation idea was not hers to begin with, it was from Carmen, and what Angela originally wanted to do after the prequel's Golden Ending was to deactivate all the Sephirot and flee. The Floor Realizations also seemingly managed to, and were most likely intended to, coerce her into joining Carmen's side. So, did that idea also belong to Carmen (or Ayin, who is now functionally identical to his mentor)?
  • If his word to be taken at face value, was Jae-Heon actually capable of resurrecting the dead properly, and was moments away from doing such for his son? Was it just a vain attempt at putting his technician skills to use by creating a Replacement Goldfish of sorts, or was he in such a state of despair he genuinely believed it would work? Roland himself leans into the latter suggestions, but it's also entirely possible he singled him out during his Roaring Rampage of Revenge as the Black Silence because he thought Jae-Heon could've done something about Angelica's revival, only lashing out when he saw that Jae-Heon used up his resources elsewhere.
  • Elena's Freudian Excuse to Binah in the first Uninvited Guests reception, where she claims that she killed thousands because she simply cannot resist taking blood from people. However, according to a Bloodfiend elder in the tie-in novel The Distortion Detective, the Bloodfiends do not need to kill thousands for the sake of blood and in fact, they have ways to take blood from people non-lethally. So is her Freudian Excuse of Horror Hunger genuine, or she's just simply an insane serial killer using that as an excuse?
  • Is the entire game one long plan by Ayin to stop Carmen and apologize to Angela? The fact that he recognizes how cruel and immoral he was to his colleagues but seemingly doesn't extend that empathy to Angela is unusual, even for him. Binah also comments that Ayin worked in mysterious ways and had larger plans than anyone can realize, implying that despite Angela taking the light for herself, the game is still going according to Ayin's plans. Carmen also mentions at the end of the game that Ayin has become her enemy in some ways, and Angela's actions in releasing the light seems to have stopped a mass Distortion from overtaking the city. To that effect, it's possible that Ayin realized that Angela would never forgive him and that she has to develop as a person on her own, so the game could just be Ayin letting Angela take the reins and stop Carmen at the same time.
• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • Hokma's Realization. Despite both being a spectacle and Paradise Lost instakilling two of your Librarians, the fight against her is surprisingly pretty straightforward, and most of her attacks are pretty easily beatable. While the resistances of the Apostles are problematic, they're basically pushovers if you have even slightly above average decks.
  • The Black Silence, surprisingly. Despite being the Climax Boss of the game, unlike most other encounters in the Uninvited Guests endgame gauntlet who were mostly annoying hurdles or fickle Puzzle Bosses, he is the most straightforward of the bunch, consisting of a single, four-phase boss battle that lacks the nasty gimmicks seen in most of the bosses before (and after) him. For this reason, if any player wishes to test new builds, expect him to be to the guinea pig.
• Best Boss Ever:
  • Tiphereth Realization. Remember all of the hard Magical Girl fights? Now, you get to have a rematch with better pages and a proper team. But what really makes this fight is the fact that it's Roland who jumps off the deep end, leading to an amazingly thematic fight after learning more of Roland's backstory, culminating with the Nihil E.G.O., where you swap out your librarian with the Magical Girl abnormalities, who have amazingly powerful cards. While not the hardest fight, the emotions and theatrics involved make it one to remember.
  • Both the Upper Layer Floor Realizations serve as excellent showings for the two strongest Abnormalities from the last game. The emotional context of this being the climax of Character Development for both Roland and Angela respectively serves to make the fights even more memorable.
    • Binah Realization starts with rematches against some of the most popular abnormalities from the last game (Big Bird, Punishing Bird, and Judgement Bird) alongside cut-in illustrations of their backstories, before ending with the intense, visually stunning fight against Apocalypse Bird itself. Unlike all of the previous final Abnormalities in the Floor Realizations, where Roland/Angela just use their powers, the Apocalypse Bird is physically present as a Background Boss and can directly attack your Librarians under the boss' commands.
    • Hokma Realization, aka the WhiteNight Suppression. First you face down the 12 Apostles before Plague Doctor!Angela transforms into Paradise Lost, transforming two of your Librarians into Apostles at the very start of the phase. What follows next is a 3-on-5 brawl with the Apostles and Paradise Lost directly commanding WhiteNight to attack you. After all that, the boss still manages to stagger and kill all of the Librarians but Hokma, but when all hope seems lost, cue One Sin descending, giving Hokma its E.G.O. and basically one-shotting the fight. Furthermore, while the Floor of Religion has 3 other very tricky Abnormality fights that require specific decks or strategies, none of them will actually show up unlike in the other floors, negating the trouble of bringing specialized decks against them as well.
  • The reception of The Reverb Ensemble, a string of ten grueling battles, one for each of the floors, with before each battle is a dialogue scene between the Librarian and their opponent, full of Hannibal Lecture, Shut Up, Hannibal!, and Badass Boasts galore. All while to an amazing Variable Mix, culminating in the long overdue battle between Roland and Argalia.
  • The reception of the Black Silence, which is an intense, four phase match that serves as a Final Boss. Each phase brings a completely new mechanic to the table, from Roland transforming into an distorted Eldritch Abomination, becoming a Dual Boss alongside the spirit of Angelica, and especially the last phase where Roland starts using attacks and abilities based on all of the previous major battles in the game and the Keter floor Abnormalities, all set to Gone Angels in the background.
  • The reception of The Reverb Ensemble Distorted, which is a three phase fight that forces you to face off against the Reverb Ensemble in their One-Winged Angel forms, including Argalia and only accessible by clearing all nine Floor Realizations and winning the Black Silence reception. Made even better by the last cutscene, which has Argalia charge a Sphere of Destruction, only for Roland to slice it in half and then face him in direct, gameplay-wise combat before finishing off the Blue Sicko once and for all.
• Breather Boss:
  • While the phases of the Reverb Ensemble Reception run a wide range of difficulty, the easiest for most is Tanya/L'heure de Loup. Not so much because the boss is a weak opponent: Tanya is actually quite strong. But compared to the other phases, the fight lacks any form of gimmick or puzzle elements, with the boss' only strategy being to Attack! Attack! Attack!. Not to mention, she is largely outclassed by Gebura using the Red Mist's page, who can counter all of her strongest attacks with a little bit of planning. It can be a welcome break in the midst of the often rather complicated Ensemble fights.
  • Another straightforward fight in the Reverberation Ensemble's reception is Elena, the Blood Red Night. Despite being The Dreaded in Roland's heydays, the Blood Red Night doesn't do much other than powering up the Vermillion Cross, and even then Binah's Degraded Pillar card makes short work of his most dangerous attacks. None of them also have any remarkably dangerous passives.
  • The third tier of Star of the City contains three boss fights- Distorted Yan, E.G.O. Xiao, and the Purple Tear. While the first two are quite troublesome, the third is pretty easy. Iori's cards hit like a train and her stance change mechanic gives her some pretty powerful rolls, but you're given an overwhelming numbers advantage in fighting her and can bring three floors to the fight, making it an almost guarantee that you'll whittle her down eventually. Even though she jumps floors at half health, it's entirely possible for her to jump to another floor you have prepared anyways, and get whittled down even further. If you just fight her with your first floor, let her jump to your second floor, engage her with your third floor and then return to your first floor to finish her off, she'll almost certainly die. While not quite important, despite her having Shimmering, unlike most instances of foes with this passive she simply restores all light at the start of each turn and fills her hand with pages she is about to use (without setting all their costs to 0), so it's one of the few major encounters that can be screwed by Light Drain. All of this makes for the easiest of the three fights to engage with and sometimes an easier fight than the Red Mist before her, which is great since the Purple Tear reception gives an extremely strong key page (listed under Game-Breaker) and arguably the greatest collection of combat pages in the entire game bar the Hana Association.
• Breather Level:
  • The second Abnormality fight in the Floor of Religion, Price of Silence, is considered by many as an easier fight than the first Abnormality fight (see That One Level). While its gimmick revolves around being a Time-Limit Boss, all you need to do is to fight its minions while spending less than 30 seconds in the setup phase, and with the right cards and passive setup, you can easily turn the minion fights into 4-on-1 brawls. More notably, unlike most of Hokma's Abnormalities, you aren't required to build a specific team to deal with them, as a generalist deck with high damage per turn will be more than enough.
  • The final phases in the Hod, Tiphereth, and Chesed floor realizations are very easy compared to what came before. In Hod's case, this is because the Abnormalities are placed in the reverse order (so the hardest one is the first one and the Abnormalities further in are weaker), and unless you poorly time the beginning of your turn, the boss will roll extremely low values and is effectively harmless. In the case of Tiphereth and Chesed, both of their final phases are heavily scripted encounters which are hard to mess up as long as you play by their rules, with Chesed's even reviving any librarians that died in the previous phases in the fight.
  • The final battle of the Floor of Religion, WhiteNight is a fairly easy encounter, especially considering their infamous difficulty from the previous game. For a start you do not have to face the first three abnormalities of the floor, which would have made the encounter near-impossible due to each of those abnormalities requiring very specialized planning to get around their gimmicks, The Burrowing Heaven in particular. The first three legs of the fight are a straightforward fight against WhiteNight's twelve apostles who have no particularly threatening gimmicks aside from the fact that the first wave of them will all constantly target your lowest health librarian (which should be fine unless you get supremely unlucky with speed rolls). During this phase some of your librarians even get healed and buffed every turn. And the next phase against the boss itself is also simple as long as you take out, or at least heavily damage, the first two apostles in the first turn of the phase before two of your librarians get converted into guardian apostles. The final phase is completely scripted as well.
  • In Star of the City, the player is given four paths to take in any order they want. Most of them will have some nasty battles in store, and three of them end in fairly tough boss fights.^{Spoilers for layout}The leftmost one is two fights with the Thumb and one with the Index followed by Distorted Yan, the middle-left one is a Boss Bonanza consisting of the Church of Gears/Blue Reverberation, the Red Mist, and the Purple Tear, and the middle-right one is three fights with the Liu Association followed by the Climax Boss of E.G.O. Xiao. The last one, the far-right path, is generally easier by comparison, consisting of a single-wave fight with Nemo and the Cane Office (which consists of just three enemies) followed by two consecutive receptions of R Corp, the latter of which fight almost identically between their two fights and aren't too hard to take down, with the only caveat being how long the second fight is. To make matters better, clearing out the whole branch nets you Nikolai's page, one of the strongest pages one can get in Star of the City. Almost fittingly, this path is (somewhat) less narratively heavy than the others, with Cane Office even being somewhat comedic.
• Catharsis Factor: For those who got the true ending of Lobotomy Corporation and are still miffed that Angela basically ruined the player character's plans and best hope for the world, it can be satisfying to hear that her creation of the Library basically backfired on her, leaving her trapped there. In addition several of the Realization Boss Rush fights basically have you fight and beat up on Angela, while also learning her backstory.
  • Killing The Road Home before Scaredy Cat in their suppression leads to Scaredy Cat reverting back into its cowardly, docile form after The Road Home dies. For those who were frustrated with Scaredy Cat's damage immunity and propensity to stagger librarians before they can block The Road Home from reaching Home, being able to reduce Scaredy Cat to a cowering kitten that has all fatal resistances (and thus, will almost certainly be subject to There Is No Kill Like Overkill) will feel incredibly satisfying after all of the headaches Scaredy Cat will have caused during the suppression.
  • For those frustrated by Angela's general Never My Fault attitude and tendency to choose the most destructive options to resolve her perceived issues, Roland's huge "Reason You Suck" Speech to her during the Black Silence reception will probably feel like a massive vindication, especially when Angela actually takes the words to heart in the Golden Ending and grows as a character.
  • In general, redoing difficult story battles such as The Crying Children with more powerful decks and E.G.O cards that comes after them is very satisfying.
  • Selecting and keeping an E.G.O page as a surprise tool that will help you later, to drop it at the very end as your finisher. Especially if you manage to survive a difficult encounter.
• Character Tiers: It's generally accepted that Gebura, Chesed, Yesod and Keter make up the top tier, Binah, Hokma, Netzach and Hod make up the high tier, with Tiphereth and Malkuth sitting around the mid-tier. While none of the floors are particularly bad and each floor can clear pretty much every challenge in the game with the right decks, picking certain floors will make certain bosses and difficult encounters much easier.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • If one is not running a specialized deck like Smoke or Charge, they'll generally default to a Singleton deck. This is because the Singleton mechanic contains two of the best utility cards of the game: Will of the Prescript and Multi-Slash. Will of the Prescript is a 3-cost combat page which draws 3 cards on use if Singleton, ensuring that the player will almost never run out of cards. Meanwhile, Multi-Slash is a 1-cost combat page that restores 2 light and draws one page on use, being one of the few pages that functions as both light regen and page draw with very little drawback. It's also possible to run an "accented Singleton" deck that focuses on Burn or Bleed and still do pretty well, meaning there's pretty much no reason to run anything but Singleton unless your deck requires duplicate cards to function.
  • Meanwhile, for anyone who is using a Charge deck, they're almost guaranteed to have at least one Leap combat page in it. Leap is a cheap 1-cost combat page that spends 3 Charge to draw two pages, making it a very cost-efficient draw page.
  • Whenever one is using either the Red Mist's page or Myo's page, it is almost certain that they'll have the other key page attributed. This is because the Red Mist has the passive, The Strongest, which turns the lowest speed die value rolled each turn into a speed dice with a value of infinity. This, combined with Myo's passive, Myo's Prowess, which grants a +1 power up to max of +5 power for every 2 points of difference in speed die value, ensures that whoever is running these two passives in combination is guaranteed a '''+5''' power boost on all of their die rolls for at least one page.
    • In the reception against The Head, when Gebura shows up, she has a reskinned version of Myo's Prowess called Gebura's Prowess, which has the same effect, meaning this combo was intentional.
  • If there is any Library of Ruina playthrough, expect to see the Purple Tear's page used, and for a good reason; she has an incredibly versatile deck that opens all sorts of creative and complex builds thanks to her Stance System mechanic. You can do things like build up debuffs with Slashing stance and then switch to Pierce to finish enemies off, or defend against powerful strikes with with Guard stance and overpower them next turn with Blunt stance. Or, you could sit in Guard stance and spam people to death with Overcharge. While nominally an Awesome, yet Impractical page suited for Charge decks, Overcharge has three massive attack dice, a pretty meaty counter block dice, and gives ten Charge on use but puts a stack of Immobilize on your units, which stuns them for a turn. Since Guard stance nullifies all status debuffs, this includes Immobilize, which turns Overcharge from a massive risk into an easily-spammable trump card. Add some Energy Conversion for Light, maybe some Leaps for card draw and an Unlock for good measure, and you suddenly have a borderline impossible-to-overcome wall of damage that instantly wins almost any clash you put her against.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • Oswald, before his fight against Tiphereth, asked her to sniff each other's wrist with him and was heavily implied to go a bit too close to her for comfort. He's an oddball, sure, but mind you, Tiphereth resembles an teenager at best.
  • Greta constantly making remarks about cannibalism and the taste of human flesh before fighting Hod, which makes her look noticably uncomfortable. In a few times during that conversation she remarks that she wants to eat Hod as well. And one of her attacks can actually turn your Librarians into food for Greta to eat, Hod included.
• Designated Hero: Just like in Lobotomy Corporation, YOU are the game's Designated Hero, because you gradually become more villainous than any of the dangerous entities roaming the City in this game. By extension, the Sephirot, Angela and Roland included, were offenders of this trope. The whole objective of this game is to plunge the City into chaos under the whims of an unknown entity (presumably to be "the Light", which consists of Carmen and Ayin) by killing (actually putting them in a limbo state) all sorts of people arranging from Backstreet nobodies to influential personalities, who were all endearing Ensemble Dark Horses on their own regard. The Golden Ending does lift the Librarians out of this by having Angela develop from a Villain Protagonist to The Atoner, effectively reversing all of the damages the player has been culpable in throughout the story. In fact, the only people the main characters truly kill by the true ending is the Reverb Ensemble, which is filled with monstrous characters that have done much, much worse things than any of the Librarians.
• Difficulty Spike: Two notable ones.
  • Urban Plague is where the game takes off it's easy gloves, so-to-speak. Enemies begin hitting much harder and carry some downright devastating cards and attributed Key pages. Full-Stop Office introduces an entire new mechanic in Ranged Cards (which they put to very good use against you) while Gaze Office comes with a very powerful paralyzing strategy that debuffs you while buffing themselves at the same time. And then there's the Dawn Office, who hit incredibly hard and can drown you in Burn, not to mention Philip's Gathering Steam attribute that turns him into a nigh-unbeatable wall if you don't kill him quick enough. And all of this leads up to two brutal boss fights that close out the chapter: E.G.O. Philip and Tomerry. This is also where the Abnormality Fights go from relatively simple Puzzle Boss encounters to outright requiring you properly read their Key pages in order to understand how you're supposed to fight them. This is also where the Floor Realizations become unlocked.
  • The second is during Star of the City. Four paths open up at the beginning of the chapter, and each one brings a different breed of pain. From the first fight against Argalia, to the Liu Association, to the battles against the Index and the Purple Tear, there's almost no end to the tough fights that dot this chapter. And this isn't even getting into the boss fights: The Red Mist, Xiao, and Distorted Yan make the bosses in Urban Plague look like a complete joke. However, you receive several massive boosts in power with the according rise in threat level: Binah and Hokmah's floors become unlocked, the new cards you receive are downright devastating in the right build, and each floor solidifies its general playstyle into a force to be reckoned with... if you know how to build them properly, that is.
• Disc-One Nuke: Once you reach the Urban Plague chapter, if you do the left-most side to fight and manage to beat the Kurokumo Clan early, it can be a gamechanger: the Kurokumo Clan pages have decent stats and good passives that help out in building bleed decks, but the real good stuff is the cards, including Rules of the Backstreets, the earliest Draw card you can get. While it only has one attack dice, it allows you to draw an extra card on hit and is easily spammable due to being both a common card and costs 0 Light. Then there's Sharpened Blade, a 2-cost Card that boosts all that character's Slash dice power by 2 for that scene, which remains valuable even in the endgame with certain builds. You'll need them.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: While the game is by no means easy as a whole, some fans, especially those coming from Lobotomy Corporation don't like the relatively reduced difficulty the game has. While yes it does appeal to more people and might make the game less frustrating, it also has left such fans feeling that Project Moon can't be as creative with the difficulty as they were in their previous game.
• Early Game Hell: With a lack of proper pages, combat pages that hit hard, Abnormality pages, or Librarians per floor, it's common for those who play the game for the first time to really struggle up until likely Tiphereth is unlocked and there's a lot more freedom in team building and pages with enough HP to withstand strong hits. It's no wonder that in Early Access the general consensus was Netzach was the best floor for early game simply because his floor's fighting style revolves around staying alive.
• Ending Fatigue: One of the more common complaints about the game is how poorly paced the final chapter, Impuritas Civitatis, is. The endgame sequence alone could easily take up to 15 hours total. To be more specific, after the two receptions for the Hana Association, the endgame sequence begins with the reception of the Reverberation Ensemble. This reception, while unique for featuring a mechanic that requires the player to use every single floor of the Library, is also notoriously long due to being, in essence, 10 separate boss battles in succession. The enemies were no slouch, either and every one one of these enemies could have stats on par with Xiao, Yan or Iori. Following this reception, the player is immediately thrown into the reception of the Black Silence which is its own boss battle featuring 4 phases. Thankfully, this battle is actually the easiest of the five. If the player has fulfilled the conditions for the Golden Ending, they then need to complete the Floor of General Works realization, which, unlike all of the other realizations, features 5 separate battles instead of one battle with 5 phase. Despite the player not having to redo each previous Abnormality battle if they fail a later one in this realization, the bosses fought are extremely tanky and sometimes difficult enough to stall you for several hours straight. Even after the Floor of General Works realization is completed, the game is still not done, as it then transitions to the reception of the Reverb Ensemble Distorted which is a 3-act reception, although it's still easier than the five battles you fought before them. Finally, even after all of those battles are completed and the ending credits are played, the player still has one more reception to go through: the reception of the Head. Thankfully, this reception is much easier than the prior receptions and merely requires Roland, Gebura, and Binah to survive for a few turns before it ends. When all of this is settled, the players has gone through about 18 boss battles back-to-back without the ability to burn books or to initiate any other reception other than the end-game reception. The one saving grace about the endgame sequence is that the game is very generous with checkpoints, saving the player's progress after basically each battle of the end-game sequence, allowing the player to chip through the endgame sequence in small chunks at a time.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Many of them. The targets that you end up having to kill mostly have some fairly endearing personalities that you will actually feel sorry for killing them. In fact, some of them might be as popular as the librarians themselves.
  • Philip's tragic misadventures with the Library that cumulated up to him outright become a Distortion in the form of the Crying Children, in addition to him having multiple surprisingly difficult boss fights has earned him a fanbase.
  • Shi Association had also got a sizable fanbase due to Yujin's cool woman attitude and Tenma's adorable appearance, with them both getting a Les Yay treatment, more often than not. In terms of gameplay, they also more often than not contain one of the best Core Pages in the whole game, especially Yujin's.
  • Tomerry's horrifying and tragic origin and difficult boss fight has left enough of an impact on the fanbase to earn them a fair amount of fanart.
  • While the Reverberation Ensemble as a whole can basically be considered this, in continuation to the above, Jae-Heon/the Puppeteer and Elena/Blood-red Night are two characters that recieve plenty of attention and fanart. Their appealing designs and standout role in Love Town add further to their popularity, and their backstories cement this even further. Jae-Heon in particular has the added bonus of having the most tragic backstory of the whole group, giving him an additional Tragic Villain appeal.
  • Pluto's following is fairly sizable; not too unexpected for a gentlemanly and dapper skeleton with some of the most intrigue surrounding him out of all the characters in the game, much less amongst the Reverb Ensemble's ranks.
  • The Kurokomo Clan, namely Sayo due to her assets and attitude, shot up in popularity around their introduction. From an actual gameplay perspective, they were also responsible for having a deck of cards and pages that could produce a monstrous amount of bleed damage, cleaving through a good portion of the tough battles players faced such as the Queen of Hatred, who has Bleed damage as an Achilles' Heel. Even since the bleed nerf, the Kurokomo Clan still remains a favorite for some due to their designs and utility in their cards and passives.
  • The Cane Office in general is this with Martina and Bada, but Nemo in particular quickly rose in popularity for his design and comically selfish attitude, with his LED light face being the most striking thing for fanartists to play with. It helps that, compared to other chapters, the Cane Office has a somewhat more comedic tone with their interactions with Argalia and Pluto, alleviating the otherwise bleak Star of the City chapters a little.
  • From the Index, Yan and Gloria found a lot of popularity (not to say Esther and Hubert don't also have sizable fanbases) among fan artists for both of their appearances, Yan for being a Long-Haired Pretty Boy with a compelling story arc, and Gloria as a Mechanical Abomination with an endearingly cute and playful voice to clash against her blatant sadism. Yan's memorable transformation into a Distortion out of sheer despair has also won him a larger fanbase, much like Philip before him.
  • Xiao gets a lot of love for her heroic Determinator personality, her no-nonsense attitude coupled with her love for her husband Lowell and subsequent breakdown when he's booked, and her memorable boss fight where she actually manages to overcome the Distortion voice through sheer willpower and fully manifest her own E.G.O. suit, becoming one of the game's hardest and most spectacular bosses.
  • The 8 o'Clock Circus's newest recruits, Emma and Noah, got a lot of attention fast, for reasons similar to Tomerry (albeit, less overtly shocking and horrifying but still unsettling and quite heartwrenching eitherway) from before. In keeping with the comparisons as well, Oswald did well to establish himself beyond his design being a clear Call-Back to the previous game's Ordeals, which got boosted in his role of pushing Philip to the edge and making him become the Crying Children.
  • As far as Abnormalities go, Nosferatu absolutely qualifies. While his fight is very straightforward (and unremarkably easy compared the other Abnormalities in this floor), he's noticeably very attractive for a humanoid abnormality (at least before he transforms) and fanart of him popped up less than a day after his release, cementing him to be as popular as the likes of Queen of Hatred or Funeral of the Dead Butterflies.
  • Despite appearing in one early reception and then quickly being eclipsed in story relevance and power, Walter from Zwei Section 6 gets a lot of fan attention, getting entire mods and a lot of Block memes made after him and Zwei by association. This is likely to do with his book providing the building blocks for the game's first cheesily powerful strategy, as laid out under Game-Breaker.
  • Despite having minimal lines and only one cutscene to their name, the unnamed Bookhunter from Angelas bad ending gained a sizable fanbase for their design, role and surprisingly tragic way of dealing with Angela. It helps that they have a mod(beware of spoilers!).
  • In terms of General Receptions, the Blade Lineage have gotten a lot of love from the fans, Bamboo-Hatted Kim in particular thanks to having an amazing page that can still be used during endgame. It got to the point they got a much bigger role in the sequel following their ressurection after the events of Ruina.
• Epileptic Trees:
  • Many people believe that the Black Silence is actually Roland himself, based on implications that he was a more influential man than he claims to be, implied to be a Color Fixer himself wearing a Black Mask and having been decimated the Rumanos Cartel, matching both the descriptions of the in-game Thumb Cartel and the Gebura Realization. However, come Impuritas Civitatis, this particular theory ends up not being all that out there. In a confrontation with Olivier, it was outright confirmed that Roland is the Black Silence, and he even gets a new Key Page (and unique combat pages) to go with it.
    • Another idea was that Angelica was the Black Silence due to Olivier's wording when handing over "the gloves of the Black Silence" to Roland. When the artbook was released it confirmed that Angelica was the real Black Silence, with Roland taking her role and almost no one knowing it due to the mask's perception-blocking capabilities.
  • One of the weirdest, most unexplained parts of the game is the voice of a woman guiding the Reverb Ensemble or transforming people into Distortions, shown in the Crying Children or Argalia's confrontation against Iori. People do theorize Carmen was actually turning people into Distortions, but unlike the Black Silence, no concrete evidence can be proven otherwise, and the voice's identity is up to speculation. The 'voice' in the Library was brought up again in Xiao's reception, with Xiao describing the voice as being 'charming and otherworldly', which led many to believe that it was Carmen, as the description fits her. Cue the Keter Realization, and it turns out the voice is actually Carmen as expected.
  • Another element up to speculation is: who controls the Library? Who is commanding the Librarians? Players often speculate it's either Ayin or Carmen, who seemingly still had a hidden hand in affairs based on the Library's cognizance, and Roland or Angela has little control over its actions.
  • If the Librarian's description of Carmen were to be taken as granted, then she definitely isn't normal, and probably not even the saint the Librarians believe her to be. Standouts of the oddities include how everyone who met her personally are inevitably mesmerized and couldn't see anything but good about her and the fact that she appears to have a habit of wandering in dangerous Backstreets alone while seemingly devoid of protection. This leads to several theories that Carmen had a Singularity that protects her from being a prime target, Carmen was a defect from the Head, Carmen is capable of mind control, or even a Vampire in a similar vein as Nosferatu or Elena/Blood-Red Night (since all of them have red eyes). Based on how chillingly similar her history is compared to Plague Doctor and WhiteNight's descriptions back in Lobotomy Corporation (even having 12 Apostles!!)^spoilersAyin, Elijah, Gabriel, Michelle, Giovanni, Lisa, Kali, Daniel, Garion, Benjamin, Roland and Angela (the Heretic) - alternatively with Hod as the Heretic and Angela switched with Enoch, some go as far as to theorize that she is actually an Abnormality who will bring forth the end of all suffering by turning everyone into Abnormalities.
• Even Better Sequel: While the game has undergone a serious Genre Shift and it is thus difficult to assert Library of Ruina as a true sequel to Lobotomy Corporation, the game has been much better received than its predecessor.
• Evil Is Cool: For definition of "evil" with some of them, many of the denizens of the City some people can't help but enjoy, even the more amoral and insane ones. The Reverberation Ensemble's membership basically requires someone to be this trope.
• Fanfic Fuel: Since Distortion and E.G.O manifestation were revealed, several mods were created as what-if scenarios about other guests Distorting or gaining E.G.O of their own, such as Yan, Nemo, Isadora, Myo and even Roland himself. Two of the most popular what-if mods are based on Xiao and Philip, namely what would happen if Miris failed to get through Xiao, causing her to distort, and Phlip ended back up in the Dawn Office instead of the 8 O' Clock Circus, allowing him to fully manifest his E.G.O.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Certain circles have begun referring to "strategies" that forego planning and rely on brute force (or simply plans that boil down to attacking the enemy very hard) as "unga bunga"-ing it. This is most commonly associated with Yesod and Gebura's floors due to their emphasis on overwhelming enemies through massive stat stacking, helped by some of the infamous synergies between some of their pages and Abnormalities.
  • Like the Agents in the previous game, Librarians are affectionately referred by fans as "Nuggets", which is acknowledged by one of the Steam achievements.
  • "Myongest", used to refer to the extremely powerful synergy between "The Strongest" and "Myo's Prowess".
  • On Tiphereth's floor, combining Hate, Greed, Despair and Wrath to utilize Nix to devastating effect is a strategy nicknamed "Exodia Tiphereth", named after Exodia the Forbidden One.
  • Similarly, Binah uses another setup involving stacking three of the egg pages based off each Black Forest bird on one Librarian and then unleashing the effects of The Beast to change the battlefield, a strategy nicknamed Eggxodia or Birdxodia by fans.
  • Thanks to Hokma's floor lending itself very well to defense-oriented builds, mostly with pages provided by The Burrowing Heaven, setups that revolve around this playstyle are nicknamed Blockma.
  • The strategy of stacking Spores, Ashes, Barrier of Thorns and sometimes Loyalty is called 'Cactuskuth' as it relies on getting hit and dealing counterdamage.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Jae-heon/Elena or, or their true identities, the Puppeteer/Blood-red Night, primarily due to a lot of their shared screentime and interactions with each other, particularly in their debut at Love Town where they act as "parents" for its denizens. Being Reverb Ensemble members designated as the second and first violin respectively by Iori also helps.
• Game-Breaker: There are quite a few strategies that can absolutely break the game in half if you can properly set them up, though they alone might not be enough to win certain fights. These and the rest can be seen here.
• Genius Bonus:
  • The sentences at the start of each chapter are from a series of poems by Yun Dong-ju, a Chinese-born Korean poet. The last sentence from Foreword is also the last sentence in Angela's bad ending.
  • For the final Realization battle for the Floor of Art, Angela uses the Da Capo E.G.O for both the first phase and the final phase of the battle. In music, the phrase, "Da Capo" means to return to the beginning of a music piece.
• Good Bad Bugs: Throughout the game's entire lifespan, it's been possible to attack an opponent and stagger or damage them via the guaranteed damage or stagger that comes with certain pages and passives. Utilizing this allows for the complete bypassing of certain boss or Abnormality mechanics. Doing this is known well enough to be infamously known as "unga bunga"-ing levels.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • While the story of Lobotomy Corporation ends with Angela stopping the Seeds of Light for personal reasons and rebuilding the remains of L Corp as the Library, the outside world's fate is left uncertain. And it turns out that things go From Bad to Worse just because Angela halted L Corp's final product; Angela halting it midway merely results in people becoming insane and turning into Distortions, transforming the already horrid condition of the City into a worse hellhole than it can ever be. And not only that, the Library itself also becomes a series of Disaster Dominoes where Angela becomes The Unfettered who baits entities in the city to their deaths. Last but not least, the Library was also sometimes used by malicious personalities to throw opposition into their deaths.
    • As it turns out, what would happen if the Seed of Light was completed could be even worse; the Seed actually manifests E.G.O. or Distortions depending on how strong that person's will is (indicating that the Distortions are intended, not consequences on Angela's part). Based on how many textbook sociopaths are there in the City and the sheer destructive power of Distortions and E.G.O. (the Library is of the latter), this is also definitely not a pleasant sight if it ever gets pulled off. One can even be convinced that Angela was unintentionally saving the City from what would be unfettered chaos with her betrayal.
  • Releasing the guests from the Library might seem like a great outcome for most of them, but there were several exceptions. For example, the Library has booked two copies of R Corp's 4th pack and unless one of these were to kill the other, the Eye will certainly not be happy about this and might order Arbiters or Claws to kill all the involved personnel instantly. There's also Tomerry and Distorted Yan, who were both inexplicably sent back to the City...as monstrosities, nonetheless.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • During Tipereth's Floor Realization, Roland can be seen equipping the E.G.O. of the Magical Girls, a group of female Abnormalities, despite being a man himself, earning him a crossdresser in-joke by fans. It was eventually taken to logical extremes when he wears Ozma's E.G.O. in the Floor of Social Sciences realization, where his suit was decidedly feminine and he still manages to look pretty out of it. In Gebura's Floor Realization, his colleague from Charles' Office who tried to stop his rampage was called Astolfo.
  • For years, a meme video circulated jokingly proclaiming that the game is on the Nintendo Switch. Fast-forward to January 2024...and Project Moon officially announces porting the game to the Playstation 4...and the Nintendo Switch.
• Ho Yay:
  • From his second story cutscene, Hokma really adored and cherished Ayin. In the flashbacks cutscenes in some Floor Realizations, you can sense how supportive he was for Ayin's plans, up until Lobotomy Corporation's main plot rolls around, that is.
  • In the Les Yay spectrum, Binah really puts her eyes on Angela, even calling her 'darling' in a cutscene.
• I Knew It!:
  • Many players over the development of the game predicted that the Library was controlled by some consciousness, namely Carmen, and lo and behold the update that included the Hokma floor realization basically confirms that Carmen became the will behind the Library after she ascended into the Light with Ayin.
  • A Color Fixer known as the "Black Silence" had been mentioned ingame from time to time, and fans were sure that Roland was them due to his memories from the Floor Realizations matching up with the little info about them. Come Impuritas Civitatis on February 5th, 2021, it's confirmed that Roland was indeed the Black Silence, and even gets a power-up boost to confirm it.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Angela, as while she doesn't actively go out of her way to be mean to other people, she is often very abrasive to the Sephirot and incoming guests who either find her existence uncanny or don't speak with at least some manners. She also becomes very aggressive right before the Asiyah Meltdowns (although this is at least in part due to the Library's influence on her), and there's also the whole "luring people into the Library to turn them into books" thing all to satitate her selfish desires, as well. All of this is however a direct result of the torturous existence she underwent within Lobotomy Corp, and if she ever gets her way she doesn't even get the freedom she wants, instead aimlessly wrecking havoc for a while before she willingly gets slain and forgotten; by that point it's not difficult to feel sorry for her. Exactly how much this justifies her behavior is up to the player. She eventually grows out of this in the Golden Ending, realizing that her suffering is no excuse for inflicting the same upon others.
  • Jae-Heon got a particular spotlight shone upon him regarding this, especially out of all the Reverberation Ensemble members. He was a technician who, one day while working on the job, lost his son in an accident. He was fully prepared to accept the judgement of the parents of the children he used for his Puppet that would supposedly revive his son (and clarified he had nothing to do with them being dead, just that he found and used them afterwards), only for his labs to be attacked and destroyed by Roland, suffering from an outburst following Angelica's death. He had done nothing to anyone, but his attempt to bring back his cherished son was shot down by someone who wasn't even thinking straight nor even did anything to him. There, he vowed to make the world pay, becoming the Puppeteer and joining up with the Reverberation Ensemble. Even after the Love Town fiasco and obliging Argalia's orders to turn Angelica's corpse into a Puppet solely to spite Roland, it's still hard to not feel at least a little bit sympathetic, especially given the nature of the world and how nobody is truly innocent either.
• Love to Hate: While the Reverberation Ensemble are easily the most unquestionably vile characters in the story, they're also some of the most popular characters to come out of the game. A combination of their unapologetic evil, sheer coolness, and legitimate chemistry with each other in their Villainous Friendship make them some of the most enjoyable characters of the game. Their very well-executed Boss Rush and multiple excellent themes certainly help.
• Memetic Badass:
  • Finn and Pete are often played to the level of god-like Fixers capable of beating Colors or even numerous Claws and Arbiters despite in-game they are merely tutorial enemies who die in a few hits and story-wise they are losers who were one of the first few causalities of the Library.
  • Philip. It doesn't matter how many times you beat him, you cannot kill him completely, as he manages to book it out of there every single time, even if he's defeated with a Greater Split or Furioso. Not even being fully distorted weakens him!
  • Despite being a unimportant-to-the-plot General Reception, there are countless mods on the workshop chronicling the many jobs of our favorite Grade 1 Fixer Dong-Hwan, from a Patron Librarian to a Distortion to The Blue Reverbration, to countless others.
• Memetic Loser: Finn was this while the game was still updated. Since there wasn't any official training dummy during launch, whenever people unlocked new cards, they used poor old Finn to test them out. This would pass ever since the game completed it's storyline, the test dummy status being passed on to Black Silence Roland and Finn upgrading to Memetic Badass status.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • It's been popular among the community to call Roland a popcorn machine, thanks to Angela's colorful Implied Death Threat. Some people even decide to take Angela's words◊ to heart.
  • We don't talk about Love Town^ExplanationA snowcloned variant of the "We don't talk about Hod Suppression" meme from Lobotomy Corporation, it is a phrase that players tends to say when discussing about Love Town and the Tomerry fight due to its difficulty and horrifying story. Tellingly, as soon as the update adding Love Town was released, the Steam reviews for this game were flooded with that phrase.
  • Phillip NTR^ExplanationBefore the Dawn Office reception, Yuna suggests Salvador and Phillip that, once the Office takes care of the Library they will throw a celebration party in Salvador's House, something that Phillip doesn't react to well and would later lead him into becoming a monstrous Distortion. It's implied that he delusionally believed that Yuna was going to cheat with Salvador in front of his wife and children. This is often referred to as "Netorare", abbreviated as "NTR" in adult doujin circles, which features a woman cheating on a man in front of his wife and children or vice versa.
  • Blue Homeless Gang^ExplanationFollowing the reveal that the Reverb Ensemble's "base" is them camping outside the Library in tents, jokes about them being homeless bums soon arose. Argalia has even earned the nickname of "Blue Hobo"
  • Carmen's raptor legs^ExplanationAfter the Keter Realization, Carmen can be seen conversing with Angela before she fades into the Light. However, in her portrait, her right leg appears to be misplaced, presumably due to it being a rushed drawing.
  • Library of Ruina players can't read ^ExplanationNotable gimmicks or enemy behavior on boss or Abnormality fights in this game are explicitly noted on their passives to makes sure people won't go in blindfolded and get decimated or stalled indefinitely. However, the warnings are more often than not disregarded or glossed over by players, much to their frustration — usually, these "frustrating" situations could be avoided as long as the player reads all the text on the passive list and play accordingly by the rules. The irony of a book-centric game with "library" in the name attracting a notoriously illiterate playerbase has not gone unnoticed.
    • Project Moon players can't read ^ExplanationWith Limbus Company following in the pattern of having heavily gimmick-based boss fights that are completely ignored by many players (perhaps to an even larger degree), it has been joked that the illiteracy extends to Project Moon fans as a whole.
  • 52 ^ExplanationIori is revealed to be 52 years old in the artbook similar to several characters such as Salvador or Oscar which were around the same range of age despite looking much older and were considered as old people in the City. The problem comes from Iori having a son who supposedly died 40 years before, making this more of a Squick moment that fans generally avoid discussing courtesy the unfortunate implications this statement creates.
  • Associating Roland with HamHamPangPang as his Trademark Favorite Food as well as making up Epileptic Trees about Roland's "secret relations" with it^Examplesuch as HamHamPangPang secretly being H Corp, or being something that sent Roland to the Library at the first place. is also a popular joke among the fanbase. Another is associating with his legs, photoshopping them onto his arms due to the theory that should Roland be faced on the Floor of Religion, the Blue Star's E.G.O. will be nothing but legs. The latter has been Jossed due to the combatant being Angela, and Blue Star's E.G.O. isn't fought against.
  • ENTER ^Explanation A meme that got popular on 4chan in particular, involving one of E.G.O Philip's cards whose image has him standing in front of a bright light, accompanied by the caption "ENTER". Other variations of this meme involve photoshopping E.G.O Philip and hide him away in random images. The meme would find a resurgence in 2024, in the wake of Limbus Company announcing an Identity based on Phillip.
  • Yesod Unga Bunga ^ExplanationYesod, the patron librarian of the Floor of Technological Sciences, has among the most straightforward gameplan out of any of the floors, with most pages centered around dealing huge amounts of blunt damage and stacking power buffs to do even more blunt damage. The irony that a supposed smart guy and patron of Technological Sciences resorts to the most basic strategy of hitting things until they die was not lost by the community, especially since Yesod's floor is possibly the strongest in the game as a result of it.
    • "We aren't cavemen! We have TECHNOLOGY!" ^ExplanationA reference to a Spongebob meme where Patrick says the above line while trying to use a computer to find a way to get the paint of of Mr. Krabs' first dollar bill, only to just bash the bill with the computer instead of actually using it. The comparisons to the Patron of Technological Sciences just beating all his enemies to death didn't go unnoticed.
  • The Difficulty Spike is vertical ^ExplanationA meme poking fun at the above-mentioned insane difficulty spikes, flooding Steam reviews about as much as "We don't talk about Love Town". Tomerry and the returning Queen of Hatred are the usual subjects.
  • "Boohoo, my wife is dead"^{Explanation(Spoilers!)}How most fans tend to describe Roland's situation, sometimes even trying to jokingly defend his actions by saying that his wife was dead, so it's okay. It minorly branched out to other characters in the same situation, like Xiao, Ayin, Outis, Heathcliff and most notably Ceroba.
• Moe: A lot of fans were swept off their feet by how cute Malkuth is in this game. Those same fans have even taken to calling her "Malcute". Hod is considered very much this as well.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Argalia crossed it before the Church of Gears reception where he's seen murdering a bunch of Outskirts squatters because he can't find intel from them. Even In-Universe, the Hana Association found his antics enough and outright fired him when he and his Ensemble slaughters their Section 1 and the Vermilion Cross.
  • Angela crosses it in her bad ending by booking Roland and killing all of her Sephirot because of their "ingratitude". The Sephirot even outright declare that she has definitely crossed the line from there.
  • Roland crosses it in his bad ending by killing Angela, not only killing the Librarians alongside her, but also anyone trapped within the Library (including an entire legacy of influential entities). No wonder the City’s denizens believe that his Undignified Death is well-deserved.
• Narm:
  • The worst aspects of the City itself, such as the WARP Trains, the Head, the Index etc. Make no mistake, they are played wholly for horror, but they are so outlandish, that it makes any discussion of these institutions prone to degenerating into memes and ridicule. It's simply very difficult to take something like a transport system that traps people in 2,000 year hellholes where they eat their own and restores them in one click of a button seriously.
  • While the game makes no ambiguity about the Reverb Ensemble being one of the most dreaded threats among the City and they had pushed lots of high ranking operatives to their deaths in some way or another, their base is just a series of tents camped next to the Library. It's just so ridiculous to see, that it became a meme on its own regard.
  • The fact that Jae-heon's son was killed by a steamroller of all things has become commonly mocked. It's supposed to be a serious event that destroyed Jae-heon's world, but since it's a steamroller of all things, it comes off more cartoony than anything.
  • Roland's Downer Ending, where he's seen having all sorts of weapons stabbed on his back and his body drifting alongside a gutter. It's supposed to be the depressingly indignant end of a legendary Fixer, but because of the way he dies, his corpse has often been compared to a hedgehog among all things and can be difficult to take seriously.
  • Argalia's distorted form, a human figure with a cloud as a head, is often compared to a cute sheep or bunny despite being the True Final Boss of the game.
• Never Live It Down:
  • As stated in Memetic Mutation, Roland answering Angela's interrogation by saying that he was just lost trying to go to HamHamPangPang was enough to characterize him with the sandwich cafe.
  • Netzach, Chesed and Binah were only known for one thing: their trademark favorite drinks, which is respectively beer, coffee and red tea.
  • Gebura's habit of smoking has caused her to be outright associated with cigarettes, with fans even making pictures of her being stuffed with cigarettes on her mouth.
  • Philip's tendency to run away in a disadvantage, something that outright gets him broken and destroyed by the City's more malicious entities, has been the stuff of joke for the fandom and pretty much the only thing he's been known for.
• One-Scene Wonder: The Arbiter that was responsible for disposing of you at the epilogue, Zena. Despite only appearing ONCE at the end of the game to expunge L Corp's nest to the Outskirts and not even receiving a proper fight, she's surprisingly popular because she's just as or more aesthetically pleasing than Binah/Garion and carries almost the same cryptically Affably Evil / Faux Affably Evil personality as said Garion in the prequel.
• Overshadowed by Awesome: Pretty much all Floors belong to Game-Breaker territory, but Tiphereth's Floor is perhaps the one that is too much of a double-edged sword for most. While it is a generally strong floor with a variety of useful affects much like Keter, it mostly focuses around managing Awesome, but Impractical Abnormality pages that both help and hinder the Librarians. Tiphereth also specializes in what's called "Tiphereth Exodia" by the community, wherein Tiphereth equips herself with the Greed, Hate, Despair and Wrath Abnormality pages before popping the Nix page, which nullifies the downsides of those four pages and turns whoever has all of them into a borderline invincible titan. Either method is effective in combat, but the difficulty of getting Tiphereth Exodia off and managing her Abnormality Pages in general makes her much tougher than most other floors in the game. All of the other floors have very powerful effects with no or few drawbacks, which makes Tiphereth stick out like a sore thumb.
  • Many of the earlier Floors also have Abormality page effects that don't scale in the long run, such as a one-time 10 stagger damage to enemies and 10 stagger recovery for allies, or +1 dice power at the cost of the max stagger limit being reduced by 50%.
• Ron the Death Eater:
  • Sometimes, fanart or short stories about the guests will feature the Sephirot or any other player avatars as such.
  • Carmen being this is not uncommon among fans, especially after she was revealed to be the Reverb Ensembles chief conductor and the main instigator of the Distortions. Usually, it's her being depicted as Face of an Angel, Mind of a Demon, playing Treacherous Advisor to Angela or just make her as if she's going to stab or kill someone.
• Rooting for the Empire: Because the player themselves quickly becomes an apocalyptic Eldritch Abomination that stops at literally nothing to get people killed (rather, placed into statis), many people had wished that some of the guests, such as Philip, Xiao or Yan, would actually win and get out safely because they would have been earned their victory otherwise, and they were popular characters of their own regard. In fact, although they're rare, there are fans who believed the Head would be an Anti-Hero compared to what the player themselves were doing.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Having to use up books to enter Receptions and losing them if you lose the fight can be a pain - if you've been particularly unlucky with fights (and haven't been quitting the game instead of game-overing) or have been unwise with your book burnings, you can even get into situations where in order to do a specific fight you need to re-do the previous one...which needs the books from the previous one, which needs the books from the previous one, and so on, and so on.
  • Shimmering is a common late-game enemy exclusive mechanic that grants most boss characters essentially unlimited Light and card draws. In theory this is to make the enemy both threatening for boss fights and also not have to run into Light or card drawing problems. In practice this makes the enemy throw their most powerful cards as much as they can get away with while making certain effects useless (mainly ones that take the enemy's Light, which are often unlocked at the stage of the game where every other powerful enemy starts possessing Shimmering).
• Signature Scene: The most well-known part of the game for most is the introductory cutscene for Love Town and the resulting boss fight against Tomerry, for the sheer unadulterated Nightmare Fuel at play.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The track that plays against The Crying Children, "And Then is Heard No More" have sections that end up sounding very similar to "Fear Not This Night" from Guild Wars 2.
• That One Achievement:
  • “Sending you here was worth my while,” which is achieved by letting Roland defeat Iori. The challenge? Keter is heavily outranked by every other floor by the time you unlock the Purple Tear's reception. While Iori deliberately takes away one of your 3 available floors by teleporting to another one while low on health, you basically have to let your second floor whittle her down to low health and then send Keter in, who will be leading with low emotion levels, low light, and no EGO pages. Fortunately, you can still get the achievement if you refight Iori later, at which point which Roland unlocks his Black Silence Key Page (and possibly the last Keter Abnormality Pages/EGO if you fully beat the game) and stands a better chance against Iori.
  • Arbitrating the Arbiter, simply because it doesn't give very many options. It's achieved by having nobody reach 0 HP during the Head reception, which can be rather difficult for a few reasons:
    • A few of Baral's pages have multiple dice that cannot be destroyed by Roland's Wheels Industry or Furioso, stopping him from neutralizing or weakening his multi-dice pages, and many of his attacks immediately deal damage when winning clashes versus Binah's ranged pages, preventing her from using Pillar to neutralize Serum W and his other high-power dice with its anti-recycle effect. Meanwhile, most of Zena's pages cause them and the pages they clash with to be unaffected by dice power effects, and a few of her dice prevent any dice that win against them from recycling, which somewhat soft-counters Gebura's focus on high amounts of dice power boosts.
    • Both bosses have much higher rolls than normal (for example, Baral's Serum W is an almost unbeatable 30-30 Slash attack, while Zena's Shockwave is a 27-30 Summmation Mass Attack that is very difficult for Binah in particular to outroll), even higher than the Distorted Ensemble preceding them. Some attacks require specific pages and/or good luck to counter, and at times may require careful redirection to minimize damage taken.
    • Only 3 librarians are available with set decks and passives (granted, they are Black Silence Roland, Red Mist Gebura and Binah, with Gebura having a reskinned Myo's Prowess and Binah being undegraded), and no Abnormality Pages are provided. Roland also starts the fight with a Weariness passive that gives him 25% less HP and lowered rolls, putting you at a disadvantage right out of the gate.
• That One Attack:
  • "Triangle Sounds Better!", Tomerry's Charged Attack. While it takes a turn to charge up, during which the boss is vulnerable, if you fail to stop it its rolls are high enough to almost guarantee a kill on your Librarians. And whenever they charge it up, Tomerry uses it twice, likely taking out two party members in an instant.
  • In general, most mass attacks are this if you haven't thoroughly prepared for them. They always play first (unless you bring your own mass attack) and many of them have very high rolls that virtually mandate using a lot of light to match them, and failing to outroll them will often result in multiple Librarians taking significant damage and secondary effects while also having their dice or pages destroyed, leaving them wide open to anything they would have normally been supposed to clash with. While you eventually get mass attacks of your own and can use them just as well as the enemy did, pretty much every major boss starting from Star of the City will be packing at least one, mandating that all of your Librarians have something that can stop them consistently.
  • While "Greater Split: Horizontal", The Red Mist's unique mass attack page, is quite useful when you get to use it, when used against you it's easily this. It's a mass attack page with an abnormally high roll even for a mass-summation (28-42 to be exact), especially considering the number of buffs The Red Mist inevitably stacks up before using it. In short, there is basically no way to stop the massive amount of damage it lands on your whole party, particularly since she has a tendency to use it the moment she manifests her E.G.O. in the second phase: it's not at all rare for every single Librarian on a floor to instantly end up staggered or dead when it's used. Just to top it off, it also inflicts heavy bleed, to finish you off if you somehow survive. The only recompense is that it costs a huge amount of Light and the Red Mist doesn't have Shimmering, leaving the boss vulnerable if you manage to weather it.
  • "Distorted Blade", from Distorted Yan's battle. By itself, it may be just a summation mass attack with a higher than average roll with the additional ability to inflict Erosion. What makes the mass attack particularly annoying, however, is that after the Distorted Yan's first phase, they will proceed to spam this mass attack every other turn; this can very rapidly cause your party to use up all of their resources simply trying to defend against this mass attack. In addition, since this boss has Shimmering, there's no way for the player to stop the mass attack from going off in the first place unlike with "Great Split: Horizontal" as noted above.
  • "Peace For All", from the Twilight phase of Binah Realization is quite infamous. It's not anything particularly dangerous on its own: just a mass attack with a fixed (somewhat low) roll. But what makes it this is that the boss positively spams it, often using it twice in a single turn on top of the boss's other mass attacks. Because of the mechanics of how mass attacks work, this can very rapidly blunt your offense and chew through your Librarians' health.
• That One Boss: See here.
• That One Level: Regular or Abnormality battles don't pull any punches either, like boss battles in Library of Ruina. Again, problems here usually arise during your first confrontation with them. If you have a good understanding of how they work, or during your subsequent rematches against them, you would have better keypages to make them easier to deal with.
  • Dawn Office is a relatively infamous fight at the stage of the game it is in. The encounter is a regular battle consisting of three enemies — Yuna, Phillip and Salvador. This itself is nothing short of the ordinary, but they are a lot stronger compared to the rest of Urban Plague 1. Namely, when Phillip goes to emotion 1, he will permanently gain 2 power to everything, indicating that if you do not beat him as quick as possible his attacks will rip you apart with relative ease. Then, there's also Salvador, who has Crack of Dawn, an extremely powerful attack for this stage of the game with a whopping 7-14 roll - not even most lategame enemies roll anywhere this high, and in this stage of the game he will deal severe damage to at least one of your Librarians. The only good thing about him is he doesn't do anything else remarkable. Last but not least, while Yuna doesn't do anything remarkable by herself, she has Lone Fixer, which means that if you kill her last, she will constantly get 3 power and decimate you. Their pages are also extremely heavy on Burn and will chip away at your librarians' health if the fight drags.
  • The fight against the Queen of Hatred requires you to carefully balance dealing damage to her with allowing her to win clashes and successfully deal damage to you. The problem is that her attacks are very strong for the stage of the game (including her fight introducing what is likely the first mass attack you'll see) and she can mark Librarians to force Weak resistances onto them, making letting her hit you very likely to kill you outright; however, failure to do so will result in her fully healing and transforming into her much stronger snake form, making things go From Bad to Worse. The fact that it's the Floor of Natural Science's first Abnormality also means you're going in with only 3 Librarians, no Abnormality Pages and heavily capped Emotion. This fight alone is considered to be one of the game's biggest Difficulty Spikes, and many a player has gotten hard-stuck on the fight or given up altogether.
  • The Little Red Riding Hooded Mercenary fight doesn't seem too hard at first, as while the boss has high HP and resistance to all forms of stagger damage, Red Riding Hood also assists you in the fight. However as it turns out the Red Riding Hood doesn't help much against the Wolf and can easily mess up clashes that she is supposed to win - in fact, after a certain point in the fight, she becomes less than useless as she'll start attacking indiscriminately with mass attacks, which will whittle down your Librarians and eat up dice while almost never actually harming the Wolf itself. She's also very fragile and the Wolf will very quickly take her down if you let it attack her, which will result in a Non-Standard Game Over. You also have to make sure to allow her to get the final blow, else she will fully heal herself, permanently enrage and turn on you, which can be easy to mess up if you're in a rush to end the battle. Unlike when she was against the Wolf, she will decimate you in this form. Arguably the worst part of all this however is the fact that this is the first fight out of Gebura's abnormality battles, which means that you have to do all this with a maximum of four light per librarian, and no buffs from Abnormality Pages.
    • This is also considered the hardest section among the fights in Gebura's floor realization, because Roland as Red is a lot weaker compared to the actual Abnormality fight, and the Wolf is much stronger. The only good thing is that by this stage of the game, you can kill the Wolf and then finish Roland off, assuming if you can keep Roland alive before the Wolf dies. Thankfully, Roland is buffed in an update, allowing him to actually damage the Wolf.
    • The fight against Servant of Wrath in Floor of Natural Sciences follows a similar gimmick of letting it deliver the final blow to the enemy, but it is much easier to manage as you fight it with four librarians and with Abnormality pages, the Servant is a very formidable combatant on its own unlike Red, and with a later update, you can no longer kill the Hermit by mistake. However, the Hermit's kit is tailor-made to kill the Servant, and since you can't manually bring her HP to under 30 - if you try to do so, she'll just revive with half HP - you need to plan this fight out very meticulously.
  • The Burrowing Heaven, the first Abnormality fight on the Floor of Religion. First off, you cannot fight The Burrowing Heaven itself before taking down its minions. This doesn't seem hard until you attack them. All of the minions have cards with mostly defensive and evade dices that will block and evade your librarians' attacks, coupled with their passives significantly weakening offensive dice the more you attack them. To make matters worse, their cards also has counter dices that will require you to have decks with defense-based cards, such as those of the Cane Office. In short, you have to stagger them by winning clashes just to be able to deal damage, most likely with block dice of your own since they cripple offensive dice and take doubled stagger from deflects. The Burrowing Heaven itself is no slouch either, with hard-hitting high-dice single attacks that will outnumber your librarians AND inflict high amount of Bleed on them. And if you fail to stagger it, it will generate more minions that you have to kill before attacking it again. Needless to say, this fight takes a lot of time and patience to beat, as well as trial-and-error in setting up your decks. Mercifully, you do not fight it again in the Realization of Floor of Religion as the floor realization is more of an extended abnormality battle.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring:
  • While most guests in this game are genuinely likeable, well-fleshed out characters, it's actually really difficult for players to expect them to have anything resembling a happy ending after they show up in the Library, when murdering these hapless folk within the Library is your main objective in this game.
    • However this particular point is eventually counteracted late in the game by the revelation that the guests are Not Quite Dead, with Angela proceeding to revive them in full in the Golden Ending.
  • The in-game City is a literal Crapsack World where corrupt corporations aren't simply powered by monetary matters but also human suffering, blood and carnage and can't even make rational business decisions (Most noticeable during the WARP Trains — HOW in the hell would trapping a bunch of people in a train for thousands of years until they start maiming each other out of insanity be more economically efficient than just placing them in cryogenic stasis?), and people in general (especially the youth) are just nihilistic and have nothing to believe in bar having better living standards than some street goon or hapless serf, to the point that they are willing to kill other human beings, tackle dangerous entities or even sometimes joining the mafia just to get themselves some cash to pay for a higher standard of living and expensive taxes. With the only Hope Spot, the Seed of Light in Lobotomy Corporation, having been sabotaged by Angela at the end, it's very difficult to expect any sort of positivity coming from the in-game conflicts. The fact that it ends with a positive and uplifting Golden Ending if you complete all the Floor Realizations is a genuine surprise.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Due to almost everyone wearing sharply-dressed suits or being robotic abominations, unless you either hear it out right or listen to their voices, you'll be hard pressed to know whether one character is a male or female.
  • Names are not an end to all either, since there are male characters with traditionally feminine names like Esther, and quite a number of female characters with traditionally masculine names like Pierre, Nikolai, Harold, Yujin and Tenma.
  • It was generally agreed upon that Noah in the 8 o'Clock Circus act was female, due to the fact that his compatriot Emma was male despite his feminine name, no pronouns were used for him in the story segment, and his hairstyle of a ponytail and long side-swept bangs usually being reserved for female characters. Then the update voicing Urban Nightmare was released, and his voice is decidedly masculine.
  • It's especially obvious when it comes to nearly identical looking mechanical/inorganic characters, such as Mi of the Smiling Face members, who looked nearly identical with the other Smiling Faces (inhuman-looking monks in red robes with silver smiling face masks, albeit much more gangly and inhuman by comparison) but had the voice of a young woman. Another is Gloria the Index Proxy, who resembles a tall, mechanical abomination but has a young girl's voice that is higher-pitched than Hod.
  • Yan probably takes the cake, considering his long haired hairstyle and his effeminate voice.
• The Woobie: A LOT of City residents take this cake. The game makes no reservation about showing you the hardships of all the fixers and other entities in the City, only to go into the meat grinder that is the Library.