YMMV / Prayer of the Faithless

• Anti-Climax Boss: Vanessa is described as the greatest warrior in Asala and the battle is split into multiple parts because both parties get worn out trying to defeat her. In practice, she only gets one action per round, which means it's easy for Mia's party to win simply by having Amalie Draw Aggro and use a counter stance. Aeyr's party is less defensively inclined, but can still beat her easily by having Luke inflict blindness on her. The final round is a one-on-one duel between Mia and Vanessa, but Mia has her own counter stance to rely on.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Soulfire Mend is one of the most used Soulfire abilities, since it allows Aeyr to heal without using up an item.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Counter stances. They completely negate an attack in addition to delivering a strong counter that ignores SP reduction, allowing them to provide offense and defense simultaneously. Their one weakness is that they are broken if hit by the wrong attack type (magical for Counter and physical for Reflect), but Mia's Viper Fang and Serra's Vision of Assault work on both, and most enemies only use one attack type anyway.
  • Aeyr's Soulfire Mend. For only a pittance of SP (about as much as a regular attack would cost), he can heal a character for as much as a first aid kit, allowing you to recover HP without expending limited items. This potentially trivializes the Resources Management Gameplay, making this humble healing spell Boring, but Practical.
  • Attack items ignore SP reduction and cost no SP to use, allowing you to penetrate enemies' defenses with impunity. Using them will likely let you kill an enemy outright on the first round, if not win the entire fight. The inventory limits you to carrying 10 of each, but the game hands them out like party favors and they don't cost very much.
• Magnificent Bastard: Aeyr Wilder, the Vanguard of Ruin, rejects the idea of the greater good after his Asalan countrymen turn on him for becoming a Revenant, instead prioritizing himself and his loved ones. During his journey to find his best friend Mia, Aeyr befriends Luke and Trill, influences them with his ideals, and survives encounters with the evil Revenant Gauron. When he learns that Mia is being held prisoner in the Vergio Empire, Aeyr kills Emperor Daigo in order to break her out, destabilizing the country in the process. Aeyr helps Mia overthrow Vanessa from Asala's throne, but due to their opposing ideologies and Mia's attempt to send him on a suicide mission for The Needs of the Many, Aeyr vows to dethrone her too and leave Asala without a leader. Rejecting Gauron's delusions of a Manna utopia, Aeyr steals the former's soul in order to gain control of Purgatory and spread red Fog, causing mass panic in Asala and luring Mia to his location. Aeyr then uses Mia as bait to distract Gauron's rampaging body so he can rescue his friends from Gauron's traps. After Aeyr teams up with Mia to destroy Gauron's body, the two engage in a deathmatch that tests their commitment to their personal creeds, all while still harboring respect for each other no matter the outcome.
• Nintendo Hard: Due to the game being in a post-apocalyptic setting, it's intentionally designed so that standard JRPG facilities like inns and shops are few and far between. Even normal encounters require the player to play carefully and efficiently in order to minimize damage and preserve resources, especially when they spam Miasma Charge to buff themselves up and enable their best skills. Sellable items aren't guaranteed to drop, which can make the resource management aspect of the game harder if the player is unlucky.
• That One Attack:
  • All Miasma enemies, including Manna, can use Miasma Charge to buff their stats while healing themselves slightly. While Amalie and later Aeyr have skills that can remove the buff, enemies have no cooldown on this skill and both anti-Miasma Charge skills are single-target, which means it's hard to deal with this buff if enemies use it at the same time or if they keep spamming it. Not helping matters is that the plot places Aeyr and Amalie in different parties after Junsunia's invasion of Asala.
  • While the player has some group SP damage options, some enemies have Devil's Pressure, which costs a decent chunk of their SP but depletes 100% of the party's SP. If the player can't identify which enemies use it and damage their SP first, they'll be put at a major resource disadvantage.