YMMV / One Step From Eden

• Awesome Music: Violette's theme, Neverending Song. Long story short, the developer made the correct choice setting this as the theme of the music-based boss and the song used for the game's trailers.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: In a game where the amount of Ship Tease between any of the characters is next to non-existent, Saffron x Hazel and Shiso x Violette are generally accepted by fans given they have some history with each other, albeit only in either some of their boss dialogues or in the in-development character sheets.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Rock Cycle was a notoriously broken card on release. If cast on flow, then it would be returned to its user's deck immediately without needing to be shuffled... but like many other cards that had an on flow effect, Rock Cycle itself gave flow. With the correct modifiers to reduce its mana cost and a spot as the last card in one's deck to guarantee it's castable at all times, spamming Rock Cycle to kill bosses became notoriously easy. Patch 1.1, titled "Flow Rework" due to the fact that it nerfed Rock Cycle while buffing the Flow mechanic in general, increased its damage to 60 but made it so that it didn't give flow anymore, greatly decreasing its spammability.
  • The Shopkeeper, once unlocked as a playable character. Her unique starting artifact, the Beret ties her maximum health to her money. While it means you can’t easily go free-shopping with her (early on), her artifact lets her break the game in two ways. The first is that since her maximum health is always equal to her money, other artifacts, spells, pacts, and whatnot that she takes do not alter her health. While she can’t increase her maximum health from anything, she can still heal, and nothing will lower her life unless it also lowers her money. This allows her to pick up the “Lose X Max HP, gain Y [stat]” type of artifacts without fear of penalty and get potentially superbuffed by acquiring several of these. She also won’t lose max HP from other sources like the Life Sword spell. The second way that her Beret breaks the game is that she literally drops her own health as pickups when most sources, including poison damage her. This makes the Vaccine artifact work in her favor, giving her basically a free 160 healing per battle. While she’s not immune to being nuked down quickly, as long as the player picks her health-money back up before it disappears, she can survive a lot longer than the rest of the cast besides Reva. She normally starts with 400 money, i.e. 400 max HP, but the Hell 14 challenge that makes the player character’s max HP 1 by default makes her default money 100. She still starts with 1 HP, but after a few battles of not getting hit, she’ll be able to heal back up and not be a one hit point wonder. She also seems to earn money even faster than the other characters, making her penalty even more moot as the player progresses in a playthrough with her.
  • Getting doublecast Eternity Cannon with a reliable source of flow, with the Mother artifact being best, creates a very strong feedback loop. Since Eternity Cannon makes you constantly fire a bolt every second but consumes itself normally, it's helpful but not crazy. If you have Flow active when you use it, then it'll put another one in your deck so you can use it again. Doublecast means it'll put two copies in your deck so long as you have flow. If you have enough flow to fuel it, then it goes from a solid source of backup damage to a build for an all-consuming machine gun that only gets stronger.
  • Switchbait was insanely overtuned for any build that could use it well. It dealt damage of the spell in the other slot twice, so for example, with Ragnarok it dealt 700 damage in a straight line for just 2 mana. It just so happens that Solo Saffron starts with Ragnarok as her only spell, and the fact her starting artifact, Soul Food, increases Max HP, made her one of the easiest characters to beat Hell Pass 14 with. The earlier you found a Switchbait, the sooner you can steamroll the first few worlds. Switchbait was nerfed by cutting the damage in half.
• Goddamned Boss: Reva, true to her Stone Wall playstyle, is incredibly defensive during her boss fight. She can spend long periods of time defending herself from damage with shields, suddenly start reflecting your attacks right when you're prepared to unleash a barrage at her, and throw tricky-to-dodge Diag Beams and summon armor-wearing flunkies to draw away your attention lest you get shredded by their Sword Beams.
• Good Bad Bugs: The way Shield Throw normally works is to fire a projectile whose damage is equal to the amount of shield you had, at the risk of potentially losing all of it if you neither land the attack nor catch it when it rebounds. However, a previous version not only forgot to set your shield value to zero when you use it, but still gave you the extra shield when you caught the rebound. The result was that you would not only become ridiculously tanky if you take a couple of shield spells, but also deal damage even bosses would be afraid of.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Bullethell Gunner starts with terrible MP Regen, a minuscule 400 Max HP, and one mediocre 2-Mana spell (Bomb Toss), but his weapon is a no-cost spread shot that deals 10 damage per hit (15 with his starting artifact), which is quite hefty. While he's still rather good despite his flaws in the lower difficulties, once you start facing anything with Defense, his damage output is utterly crippled, and the lack of Atk Dmg boosters and Defense reduction effects make it extremely difficult to counter it. His crippling weakness to Defense was a major reason why weapons got buffed to ignore Defense.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Everyone's trying to get into Eden because there's free Wi-Fi.^ExplanationThanks to the game's seeming lack of plot and worldbuilding beyond getting into the eponymous Eden, many fans, especially on the game's Discord server, have taken it upon themselves to write various theories about the characters' motives and/or what is inside Eden. Often to a humorously ridiculous extent such as the aforementioned free Wi-Fi theory.
  • Hostages are not people.^ExplanationSome players have pointed out that killing hostages does not bar players from reaching the Pacifist ending, thus there's no repercussion for doing so (aside from slightly reducing the bosses' chance of sparing you after your defeat) even after saving them. Looking into the game's code reveals they are actually tagged as Structures, which means they can be healed with Hazel's wrench just like her turrets and other structures (using Hazel's Teardown loadout one-shots them to restore mana and increase spell power instead).'' Jokingly, this is used to justify why Serif in the Neutral ending goes after the player for killing any of the bosses, but not the helpless civilians.
• Nintendo Hard: There are multiple enemies throwing a nonstop barrage of spells at you. You have 16 tiles to dodge them on. Frequently all 16 tiles will be under attack, sometimes from multiple attacks at once.
• Spiritual Successor: To Mega Man Battle Network, which has a very similar combat system. So much so that the Battle Network speedrunning group took interest when it was in beta and included it in their marathons.
• That One Boss:
  • While all bosses get harder in later stages, the two that take the cake are Hazel and Reva. Reva is terrifying at tier 4, mostly because she's such a Stone Wall that there's no easy way to tear her down quickly, giving her constant diagonal beam spam plenty of time to kill you. And if they don't, then either her Attack Reflector or one of the Slasher Knights backing her up most likely will.
  • Hazel, meanwhile, is even worse, especially at later stages. She drops a lot of summons during her fight, placing turrets on her side and effectively locking down any sort of movement until you destroy the godforsaken things. Even worse are the flamethrowers, which she'll put on the top of your side's columns; their placement means that it's entirely possible to not have a method to deal with them effectively, since most spells won't hit your side of the field or don't attack from the rows above you, and she can place the flamethrowers on your back lane to prevent you from attacking the ones in front.
  • Shiso can be this for players who aren't good at dodging, even early on; Shiso hits extremely hard, and while his moves are the most telegraphed in the game, that doesn't help much if he can kill his target in two shots. The fact that he can not only add Jam to the player's deck, but force a Shuffle, make it worse.
  • If you're going for a certain ending, the Shopkeeper goes from a Skippable Boss to a required boss. She is easily only a step or two below the Final Boss in terms of difficulty, having a gargantuan HP pool for the tier (which still scales up with the tier), and her attacks are fast and commonly cover your entire field in one way or another.

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