YMMV / Okage: Shadow King

• Awesome Music: The Music for the Vampire Evil King battle is by far one of the best songs in the whole game (it was also used during Rosalyn's Big Damn Heroes moment.)
• Breather Level:
  • The full version of Madril's Sewer, done after the Teen Idol Evil King. TIEK has one of the highest boss HP in the game, and the dungeon she was in had difficult, hard-hitting enemies. Madril's Sewer, on the other hand, has enemies you could defeat at level 14 with skilled handling, and you'll likely steamroll them when you pass through in the 30s. It also has no boss at the end. Too bad it's right before the Wham Episode.
  • Despite the boss in the Big Tree Hole being a huge Difficulty Spike, the dungeon itself is considerably simpler than the previous dungeon, the Escapeless Abyss. While the Abyss had you travel up and down the floors and backtrack to areas as you unlock them, the Big Tree Hole is mostly linear with the only gimmick being the fake walls you can walk through.
• Cult Classic: The game gained a lot of fans in Japan, and they still stand strongly even after 15 years.
• Difficulty Spike:
  • You can get by the Sewer Evil King without much problem just through random encounters on the way to Madril. Once Rosalyn and Kisling join the party and you enter the Rumile Plains to Rashelo, enemy encounters take a jump in difficulty and you'll be spending a bit of time grinding just to prep for encounters in the Aquatic Ruins, not to mention just to keep Ari alive.
  • The second jump comes at the Addashi Desert. The previous bosses might be a piece of cake, but the Desert leads up to the back-to-back boss battles with Epros and the Vampire Evil King, as well as being one of the largest overworld areas.
• Game-Breaker: Overdrive. It's Ari's first technique, but Overdrive has three useful functions.
  • First, using Overdrive gives you access to the Burst command, the only attack that will target every enemy on the field as a neutral attack (thus it won't have its damage cut for any reason) and hits upwards of 80% of the time. Any other magic ability or group-target attack forces you to select one enemy type, but Burst hits all enemies regardless of grouping.
  • Second and third, just using Overdrive by itself boosts attack power and immediately places the character first in the order... and Ari can apply it to anyone. The result is you can have Ari Overdrive and apply the boost to Ari, who gets next the immediate next turn, only to Overdrive and apply the boost to a second character, who can use their immediate next turn to either heal Ari for the HP it used up as a physical skill or just hit hard now. This means you can start dealing triple-digit damage way earlier than the game's level system would let you, making bosses go down in half the time.
  • The major downside of Overdrive is that, as a physical skill, it takes off a whopping 15% of Ari's HP every time it's used. Most other physical skills use only 5 to 10% of the character's HP, and so you have to use it when you know Ari won't be in immediate danger after using it. But once the party is healed up, you now have multiple members who can hit like a freight train quite above their level.
• Heartwarming Moments: Rosalyn's Compatibility Quest ending. Everyone else is either awkward, of little note, or in some cases outright strange. Rosalyn's, however, has a subtle melancholic yet uplifting tone, and can be interpreted as either a love confession or extremely close Fire-Forged Friends. Arguably, this one or Marlene's are the one the game wants you to take; while the others can get some pretty neat items, either Rosalyn's or Marlene's ending is the most fleshed-out.
• Ho Yay: Plentiful, and not simply because this game has a relationship meter in which Ari isn't limited by gender:
  • Stan is very...possessive of Ari, and some of the dialogue options you're given with him are downright cute.
  • Rosalyn and Annie can seem awfully close, though they have only one scene together.
• Moral Event Horizon: Beiloune "kills" the Marlene doll you've been traveling with... which apparently has gotten enough of a personality to actually be in pain and call to Ari and his party for help. It clearly does not want to die, yet Beiloune cuts her down without second thought simply because she's not the real Marlene. Then he threatens to kill Ari should he try and get in his away again. And that's not including the whole Classification reveal, where some characters like Rosalyn and Stan would have fought to the death simply as entertainment and an adventure for Marlene.
• Nightmare Fuel: Ari steps on a button in the back of the sewer. Almost everyone he's ever known suddenly forgets he even existed, including his own family, and the four party members who were standing right in front of him. For a light and comedic game, it's a surprisingly tense gut-punch to the player.
• One True Pairing: Ari and Marlene in Japan.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • If an ally is not in your party, they don't get experience at all. Considering many bosses give enough EXP to gain 2 or more levels at one time, not to mention certain enemy encounters doing it themselves, this can lead to certain members becoming neglected and falling behind at a rate that is difficult to keep them alive in harder areas.
  • Dungeons can have large areas and rooms that can make the layout deceptively simple. Deep Grave Pit, for example, is just 8 large rooms. But the game's dungeon map only shows you walls that extend from floor to ceiling and separate the rooms, and not things like the canals, which means a room can have a sprawling and complicated progression of pathways the map does not show. Taken to extremes in the World Library, where the shelving units can make individual rooms take as long as a floor of the Deep Grave Pit as you try to figure out how to get to a room you should be able to reach but is blocked by a bookcase.
• Ship Tease: Everywhere. Stan being oddly possessive of Ari, Rosalyn kissing Ari after she had just been declared a "friend", Rosalyn and Annie getting along really well together, and Kisling outright admitting he has a crush on Rosalyn are just a few examples. The in-game relationship meter allows Ari to get along best with whoever you want.
• Tear Jerker: Marlene talking to Beiloune after Ari was effectively wiped from existence in the back of the Madril sewer. Beiloune is trying to convince Marlene her current adventure is fun, but Marlene is still clinging on to a vague memory of Ari and company and wants to go back to that one. Underscored by the music-box theme and Marlene doing her frequent penitent / scared / exhausted reaction, and especially considering that everyone else is so consumed in their Classification roles that they can't think of it.
• That One Attack: There are enemies with "Snatch x" moves that you will grow to hate. What they do is end the fight early by stealing your money and denying you experience for any enemies you may have defeated already. These can steal up to 100,000 of your money and potentially make you go from rich to broke from just one unlucky turn.
• That One Boss:
  • Big Bull and Linda are the two bosses where the game takes off the gloves and starts really punishing you. Not because of the boss' themselves, but because of their flunkies. Big Bull's enemy companions are fond of inflicting a defense down status-effect which makes Big Bull himself hit harder, and Linda's companions love repeatedly poisoning you. Note that in this game repeated infliction of a status effect makes the condition worse, so one round might mean a level 2 or 3 status effect on one or two characters that absolutely drains you before the boss themself has a single hit in.
  • Epros. He's the only enemy in the game completely immune to physical attacks, and this isn't told to you until JUST BEFORE you fight him, and in vague terms no less. God forbid you have Big Bull in your party unless you've leveled him up enough to get Flame... but thank God he's got only 870 HP (Big Bull and Linda, fought before him, have over 2200 HP each).
  • It's notable that people keep complaining how the Vampire Evil King is harder than the final boss.
• That One Level:
  • Go ahead, get through the entirety of the Escapeless Abyss without swearing at the screen. I'll wait. No, no, put that strategy guide away. You're on your own for this one.
  • Deep Grave Pit wouldn't be so bad if each floor wasn't one big room. The game's map doesn't remove canals, so you're stuck wandering each floor trying to get through the maze of canals without any guides if you're even going in the right direction. There's also 9 floors, meaning you have to do this 9 times and kill 36 urns to progress.
  • The Library also counts. It's just about impossible to find your way through it without breaking down and consulting a map.
• That One Sidequest: Finding all 32 Tiny Gears. The maps are huge, and each one has 8 gears, often hidden away in the most obscure places on the map. None of them are marked, and you have to be standing over them before Ari notices them. Even with a guide, if you've been through an area before, it can be difficult finding out which ones you have or have not gotten. It gets you the strongest weapon in the game, the "Gear Sword", so it's well worth it. You don't have to find all of them for the sword, thankfully, but getting 30 is still no easy task, especially in large areas like the Pospos Snowfield or the Addashi Desert. You do need to get all to get the rest of the "Turtle and the Pebble" story, though.

---