YMMV / Puzzle & Dragons

• Awesome Music: Featuring RPG soundtrack veteran Kenji Ito.
  • The music for technical dungeons and technical dungeon bosses. In the OST, it's called "A New Journey" and "Orb Festival", respectively.
  • Tracks 06 and 07, which are the Multiplayer Dungeon themes. Their titles are officially "Holding Hands" and "Unite The Force".
  • There's also the remix of the Normal Dungeon BGM in the Groove Coaster collab.
  • The Christmas dungeon theme.
  • The Halloween dungeon theme.
  • The Final Fantasy collaboration music. Both of them. The boss stage is "Fight The Fanatics".
    • When the FF collab was renewed, the mid-stage music received a revamp to a remix of the FF battle music
  • And then there's Hexazeon Descended! the theme for the level of the same name, a tense, dramatic sounding piece with techno elements, with bits and pieces of "Walking Through the Towers" and "Departure" thrown in for good measure.
• Better Off Sold: The three flavors of PreDRA, Baby, Elemental, Normal and Grand, can be sold for 100, 300, 1,000 and 10,000 Monster Points, respectively. The elemental ones can also function as impromptu Skill Level Up material for certain GFE monsters (e.g Wood PreDRAs are farmable from Hall of Gift Dragons and share the same skill as Fujin.) This is even lampshaded by the normal and Grand PreDRA sitting in sacks of MP. There's also the "Six Year TAMADRA", an event reward that, while it looks flashy, is just a normal TAMADRA (albeit one that gives off 6 million EXP.) However, it's one that can be sold for six times as much as the Grand PreDRA. "Gold TAMADRA" also have no use whatsoever except to be sold for ten million Coins and ten thousand Monster Points a pop.
  • And then comes the "King Diamond Dragon": a newer member of the Jewel Dragon family whose XP value comes out at a paltry 110 thousand. Where it really shines is its sale price of 100 million gold, even twice as much as the "King Gold Dragon". Since they're obtainable from first-clear Mythical dungeons and a rare Limited dungeon wherein you can meet and beat twelve in a row, these guys will get you rich quick.
• Breather Level: After the absolute hell that was the first version of "Blackgate Prison", the collaboration after that (the Hello Kitty collab) is quite a walk in the park. Even Hello Kitty World Joker is quite an easy boss for Kingdom difficulty (same as Legend).
• Broken Base:
  • It's guaranteed that at least some fans won't be happy to hear changes made to some monsters, be it evolutions, change in leader skills and others. The issue around Keeper of the Sacred Texts Metatron's leader skill was the worst yet.
  • The whole issue around the Juggler from FFCD Collab started a wildfire on the Internet. Due to its absurdness (see Game-Breaker below) players basically divided into two camps: Nerfing it and not nerfing it. Those of former camp consider it too overpowered for a "relatively" easy way to achieve 49× ATK multiplier (others who can do so are Ra, Anubis, double Myr, and Kushinadahime), and those of the latter camp think that GungHo may violate the law for changing it, and a perfect Juggler team is leaning towards Awesome, but Impractical. The reaction of Hata Keisuke (the representative of Square Enix over the Collab and the designer of the Purposely Overpowered Juggler) and GungHo declaring not nerfing the Juggler doesn't help things.
  • Which is better, the original mobile PAD or the 3DS games? Fans of the 3DS games enjoy not having to deal with Bribing Your Way to Victory elements that are common of mobage, but mobile players enjoy the various collabs and top-tier monsters that the 3DS games don't have.
  • Co-op mode. The mobile PAD game introduced dungeons that you can play with another player. The Broken Base runs into Americans Hate Tingle with many non-Japanese players seeing it as One Game for the Price of Two - since the game is less ubiquitous outside Japan, it's much more difficult to find someone else with a PAD account with a synergistic team. (Most people end up relying on third party apps) It's mitigated by the fact that most dungeons are available for single player. However, the game rewards two players by halving the cost and dungeons are still scaled for two-players (making beating them alone much much harder).
  • Myr's name change in the English version. See They Changed It, Now It Sucks!
• Brutal Bonus Level: The Ultimate Arena unlocked after clearing Paradise of Holy Beasts. 21 floors consisting of bosses and a Kali on the 20th, of which it boast 30 million HP, a first turn status reduction shield and the skillset to wipe out most teams when her HP is above 65% and below 30%. And keep in mind that most teams rarely hit 10 million in one shot. The reward: a single py (a 100% chance skill up monster) of whichever color pops up on floor 21. And teams could still farm it efficiently enough to have it taken from permanently available to a Descended dungeon while the even harder Ultimate Arena 2 takes its place. Arena 2 gives all enemies a 40% HP/ATK boost, adds an extra floor with PreDRAs (monsters that exist to be sold for Monster Points), changes and moves a few bosses, and makes the last floor three pys of one.
  • With the update to version 9.1 in Japan, Ultimate Arena was revamped such that Arena 1 and Arena 2 are subdungeons of a greater Ultimate Arena dungeon, and Arena 3 was added. Arena 3 boasts a further attack and HP boost for all monsters, and on the floor before Kali they've added 1 of the 5 Radar Dragons which may not even drop if you manage to beat it and move onto Kali. The dungeon also costs 198 Stamina, meaning the devs expect players can only clear it in co-op mode.
  • On top of 3 Ultimate Arenas, there's also Ultimate Descended Rush: 5 floors of randomly assigned Descended Dungeon bosses with at least 6 times more HP and 3 times more damage than the standard Descended Dungeons. For example, Seraphis, the newest Descended boss at the time of the version 9.1 update, has 8.7 million HP in the Mythical level of his descended dungeon, and 57 million HP in Ultimate Descended Rush. On top of that, this dungeon is one of the few levels where you can find one of the evolution materials for Seraphis. The others are Machine Hera and Machine Zeus.
  • Assuming you get past the Arenas, a whole new hell awaits you, with even stronger sets of dungeons such as Illusory World of Carnage, Sanctuary of the Gods, and Dimension of the Mystic, just to name a few. Hope you got top-tier leads, subs, and even equips!
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Ask any players for suggestions of effective dungeon-breaking teams. Most of them will suggest Egyptian Gods, such as Ra or Anubis with their high multipliers for equally high requirements, Chinese Celestials, such as Meimei, Leilan or Karin, who have easy to use Leader Skills and have actives supporting them, Hero Gods, MP shop dragons, "heart cross" leaders such as Myr, or whatever defines the current meta. High stamina costs for top-tier dungeons, and the fact that a game over leaves you with squat, don't help things. Downplayed a bit though, as choices are diversified enough.
  • In Super Mario Bros. Edition, there are virtually no players who don't complete the rest of the original eight worlds without using Boo Mario and Boo Luigi, due to giving a 6.25 multiplier on a 3-chain or more when both are in the same party.
• Demonic Spiders: Fully evolved Chimeras and Demons in any Descent Dungeons. High health, low attack cooldown, extremely powerful attacks, higher than average defense and the ability to bind your monsters can ruin your team's day. In some dungeons, dealing with them is even more troublesome than the dungeon boss itself. On a lesser level, even first evolution Demons can be annoying to deal with due to their tendency to bind your monsters at an unusually high rate. Fully evolved Carbuncles are also in this category due to their high health, powerful attack, and their ability to heal.
  • Regarding Chimeras and Demons, Chimeras are much more of a problem than Demons. While both do have high health and powerful attacks, the Chimeras can and will use "Double Strike" at any time, ruining your day much more quickly. At least with the Demons, they only use "Evil Slash" when they're at below 30% HP. Chimeras, in general, hit a hell of a lot harder than Demons, and they're a lot harder to take down than Demons. On the offhand, Chimeras take as much time to attack as the Carbuncles (2 turns max) whereas Demons can attack immediately (save for an extended cooldown on the floor's start).
  • Gears are a mixture between this and Goddamned Bats. The stupid piles of scrap metal have high defense and double their ATK permanently after only one turn. They also appear frequently as foot soldiers for machinery based levels, such as Deus Ex Descended or Ninth Dragon Caller, which, are already PLENTY damn hard in their own right. Oh, and did we mention that they spam Bind and Orb change moves a lot? So that skill you were about to use to burst through, or that Heart cross you were about to make? Forget it.
  • Masks with their extremely high attack and defense. Very few attacks can break the defense and end up doing 1 damage all the time and masks do 9999 damage per attack. Made worse because several dungeons will have entire levels that are nothing but masks, so if you don't kill most of them then, you better hope that they bind your monsters instead. Otherwise, you will die. Most teams will usually have a poison or defense bypassing skill dedicated to getting past the level. Which can be annoying because it takes away from a orb changing or attack boosting skill that is more useful for the rest of the dungeon.
  • Pys. Same as Masks, but instead of 9999 damage every 5 turns they deal 3821 every turn and have 6 million defense. God help you if you happen to face more than two without a defense bypasser, which is likely to happen in Lv. 5 challenge dungeons. PreDRAs are very similar with an almost impregnable 10 million defense, enough HP to take at least 5 turns to kill without breaking said defense, and dealing over 20,000 damage per turn. Then there are the tans, 11 million defense and hits for over 11k damage per turn.
  • Red Caps, especially their evolved form, Red-Eyed Ghost, Red Cap. Normal Red Caps start out with a 10 turn 4 combo absorb while Red-Eye Ghost Pre-empt with a Skill cooldown delay. What makes them bad is their first attack is always a 80% HP Cut which can cause you to die if you don't have any damage resistance or kill the other monsters before they attack you.
  • Enemy Anubisises in Z will use "Banish to Hell" for a fixed 44,444 damage if you don't kill it in the 4-6 turns it gives you. It's not a "high DEF, low HP" monster like the masks and Pys, so DEF-reducing skills are effectively useless. You can't survive it with a resolve effect either, so whether you beat them or not is largely a matter of having good chaining skills, a lot of ATK, and praying that the RNG will conveniently drop extensions to those chains. Hera has a similar move that she begins using at low HP, but only does half the damage; fairly survivable for later-game teams. However, if the fight happens to drag on for long enough, Hera will use "Banish to Hell".
  • In the Super Mario Bros. version, the Buzzy Beetles and their relatives. They're fairly strong, can raise their entire team's defense, are quite sturdy, and can inflict Bind on Light or Dark teammates. Light Bind from the Bony Beetle line is especially troublesome because for much of the game, the only characters that can cure Bind are the Para-Beetle and the Heavy Para-Beetle, who are Light type themselves.
  • Also from the Mario edition is anything that has the "First Strike" skill (like Flame Chomps and Fire Bros.). This means they can hit you as soon as they enter battle which can be a death sentence if you are low on health.
• Difficulty Spike:
  • In the original game:
    • For regular dungeons, "King of the Underworld" can easily kill you if you don't have strong enough monsters, especially for the boss. "King of the Gods" of "Starlight Sanctuary" is another spike for many.^note The reason being that the Zeus here has over 5 Million HP and attacks each turn for 25k, more than most teams have by the time they get there.
    • For technical dungeons, the second conditional dungeon, "Tower of the Windy Woods", had a significant spike because you will need to have all six monsters have Wood as a main Attribute with some other attribute as its secondary. All of the dungeons in those series of conditionals won't have that colored orb appearing on the game boards unless you have skills designed to generate these orbs. And, if you're not lucky, you'll be dealing with Elite Mooks (NOT Divine masks, in this case) whose defense is so insanely high compared to the damage that you can deliver. A subsequent update in Japan made it so that, for these conditional dungeons, sub-Attribute (and sub-Type) also count towards the requirements, and this is no longer the case as of version 8.1, as the trio of elemental conditional dungeons were changed such that it was now a 5×4 board with no recovery orbs instead.
    • For descended dungeons, "Hera Descended" was considered an increase in difficulty because this is the easiest of all descended dungeons until it became permanently available. Her permanent dungeon, "Divine Queen's Sleepless Castle", is still a good benchmark for determining if you're strong enough to challenge Descended dungeons. It tells you something when "Divine Queen" is the lowest level in the first "Descended Challenge" and her exclusive "Hera Challenge".
    • On the "Challenge Dungeons", while levels 1-3 are a cakewalk, level 4 starts hitting you hard with late bloomer dragons and they don't let up from there, especially when they have hard-to-kill, hard-hitting skill-up "-py" monsters on level 5.
  • In Super Mario Bros. Edition, World 3 is where the game gets really tough, particularly at Morton's castle.
  • In Z, Area 6, the Avalon Area, is going to be very hard to beat if your monsters are not at least level 50. Hell, for the Castle, it is seriously recommended that you have at least level 60 for most of your monsters. And it goes up from there.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Archdemon Astaroth's doll, Cauchemar, has gotten so popular that he has his own descended dungeon. On a similar note, the Zeus doll shown in "Holy Night Santa Claus, Hera" seems to be developing its own fanbase.
• Fan Nickname: Quite a few exist already: Blue Odin or BOdin for "Odin, the War Deity", Red Sonia/Ronia for "Red Dragon Caller, Sonia", and the One True God for "Hell Jackal Deity, Anubis", for starters.
• First Installment Wins: The original mobile game is the best-known installment of the game in the West, with the two spinoff games that did get localized (the two 3DS games Z and Super Mario Bros. Edition) being largely forgotten.
• Fridge Brilliance: In the Super Mario Bros. edition, why is Rosalina unlocked in Special World 2? Because World 2 is the only world where the map screen uses music from Super Mario Galaxy, Slime Spring Galaxy in 2 to be precise.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Early on, "Seraph of Dawn, Lucifer" was considered to render many of the descents rather easy because of his Morning Star. This is a very impressive 300,000 damage (600,000 on anything light-based)...except your HP plummet to 1 in the process. If you have a decent recovery, though, and/or someone to change one element to heal blocks, this is easy to recover from. Especially if you have (Dark) Ceres or Amaterasu for their full HP recovery skills. And to top it all off, his evolved version has a 2× multiplier on the HP and RCV of all dark or part-dark party members. This might not sound as impressive as 300k damage, but when you have two of these guys it is not rare to see parties with over 40k health and recovery so fast that even the toughest dungeons could barely scratch them. Takes up to eleven with its Ultimate Evolution, "Rebel Seraph Lucifer" (yes, even "rebel seraph lucifer", the Chibi and Christmas REM exclusive monster), which enhances Dark monsters' ATK power while retaining said HP and RCV bonus, throwing Grind teams' problem of lacking attack power out of the window. Using Morning Star have less downsides as of newer updates, since it also randomly generates 3 heart orbs for recovery. Even on full-poison orb boards. GungHo seemed to have finally nerfed the skill when together with the release of his PAD Academy counterpart, that instead of dealing 300k base damage, his damage would be determined by his ATK stat times 200......Which means a Rebel Seraph Lucifer with +99 on ATK can deal 400K damage with the Morning Star. Downplayed anyways with newer bosses ranging in the millions of HP and/or giving them multiple/massive attack moves, making spike/combo leader skills and TPA/row awakens a much more effective boss strategy. Even with the subsequent presence of the (rare seasonal) Student Council President, Lucifer, which ups the base ATK by +400, along with other nuke monsters that also cover other elements (see: Kefka, who packs a 250× multiplier; the 200× fire based Kagato and the cheap, farmable Ishikawa Goemon, though the latter suffers from weak stats and awakenings; and the 300,000 damage water based Shinji & Kaworu Unit 13 chief among them, as well as Awoken Machine Noah, who only halves your HP in return for Prism Burst's nuke being weaker, at 100×, but she gets much stronger as she does so, having multiple >50% HP awakenings and a leader skill that gives everyone a 7× on top of that at less than half health), the nuke has been relegated to a turtling (side-)strategy, given their extreme cooldowns.
  • Due to the presence of Power Creep, some former game breakers fall by the wayside a bit, though GH will occasionally throw some bones to balance things a bit. "Dark Angel Metatron" was one of the bigger Game Breakers. Being an Attacker, her ATK power was already pretty high, which get buffed off the roof by her Leader Skill: 4× ATK multiplier for Attackers when the health drops below 80% (which is pretty much equal to "just take a hit"). Combined with her Active Skill to enhance dark orbs and provide a 35% shield (formerly exclusive to the uevo; the original form enhanced both light and dark) with a brief 5 turn cooldown, a proper DA Metatron team can easily deal millions of damage while providing a barrier against enemy attacks. Oh and her Awoken Skills as "Hand of the Dark God, Metatron"? Increased Dark damage (via dark row clears, 10% increase in damage per awakening, additive), Skill Boost, Resist Bind, two of each. So one pretty much guarantees they'll pull their foes into a world of pain even when their enemies bind all their teammates. Dark Angel Metatron's Ultimate Evolution, "Arbiter of Judgement, Metatron", is even more broken, as her Leader Skill can now accommodate GODS. Yes, she has the same awakenings as before, plus she gets another skill boost awakening and a skill bind resist to help reach the magic 5 count for total immunity. With many teams having many skill boost awakenings, the skill is almost guaranteed to be ready at the start of the dungeon and the skill can be recharged very quickly. In the presence of progressively stronger monsters, Arbiter was given 1.5× HP AND ATK for Dark monsters in the team by default, meaning a double Ultimate Dark Metatron team can easily have 50,000+ HP. What's more the HP conditional received an amendment: 3× at <80% HP and 4× at <50% HP, which of course become 4.5× and 6× respectively for a single Metatron. With a double Dark Metatron team, that those stats become 9× ATK at <80% HP and 16× at <50% HP, which by default become 20.25× and 36×. It may not be enough to contend with the likes of Kaede, but with smart HP management and a well constructed team, an Ult. DMeta team can wreck a lot of postgame content.
    • As of November of 2018, DMeta is back in the meta, with a Mega Awakening (a special evolutionary level for GFE cards that provides the optimal form of the monster's awakenings, stats, active and leader skill and makes the card's sprite animated, only obtainable with a Diamond Dragon Fruit) and that taps into the similarly meta 7c awakenings. So long as they are under 80% health, a double-Dmeta god-team will have 4x HP, 44% damage reduction and a whopping 225x ATK multiplier so long as they hit 7 comboes, which is then further boosted by the aforementioned combo awakenings where Dmeta herself will have a 900x multiplier. Since the various attack multipliers have separate conditions, DMeta teams allow great damage control, and her active skill actually reduces her health by 20% AND sets up a light-dark bicolor board perfect for hitting the required number of comboes.
  • The trio of Dragon Callers/Sonias are no stranger to this entry due to their active skills, all variants of Draco Summoning Circle (able to change all the orbs into that two particular colours of their attributes), 2.5× ATK and RCV for their particular type of monsters (Devil, Physical and Dragon teams respectively, all are pretty well-developed already), general ease of usage (it's fairly easy to make a few rows of red/purple combos as compared to the conditions needed for Kirin or Ra or any of the Chinese gods), making Sonia teams come up with formidable attack power and recovery potential which even exceed the aforementioned Lucifer teams. That said, if they can't kill their foe before they strike, the problem of low health (in comparison) will kick in and costs you plenty of stamina. The presence of Power Creep has led them to fall behind other leaders who have stronger multipliers.
    • While Red Sonia is still behind the power curve, both the Blue and the Green versions have received tremendous boosts with their Mega Awakened forms, giving dragon teams 1.5X in all stats, with a 25% damage reduction and an extra 5x ATK when matching their main color and dark. This allows them to form extremely resilient teams that can employ some of the best monsters in the game, and their 7-combo and L-unlock awakenings can compensate for the less than stellar 56x ATK multiplier.
    • On the matter of the Sonias, Ney is like a supercharged Sonia. While she lacks the stat boosts the original 3 have for her Leader Skill, she gets an 8x multiplier when her attributes matched, as well as a souped up version of Draco Summoning Circle called Draco Nesting Circle. It heals 40% of your max health as well as adding Hearts to the mix. Her awakenings are just as good, and what's more, she comes in 5 flavors, including Light and Dark, compared to the originals' Fire, Water and Wood!
  • It should be noted, though, the makers have acknowledged the presence of Game Breakers, and try to tweak Descend Dungeons (since they're all Technical) so that some broken teams become unwinnable without extensive strategy (mostly in forms of Preemptive Strikes/Heal), team building and/or playing skills, though they still work wonders in normal dungeons. Take "Athena Descended!" as example, the first stage is a boss who deals 99999 damage after 4 turns, an amount that very few Lucifer teams can reach, and barring DA Metatron teams from going on; newer Bosses also introduce Combo Absorb skills which make sure that Sonias' active skill aren't "instant win" buttons. And then Bosses may now even have High Damage Absorb^note absorb damage above a certain number per attribute, per monster; the Awoken Sopdet with a 200K HDA actually stalled many; confirmed to absorb nukes and gravities and Resolve^note always survive your team's attack when their HP is more than a certain level; something nasty usually follows OR they may fully resurrect as part of their passive skill, meaning that when and how to kill them actually requires some thinking and skill.
    • Dungeons being released in response to game breakers is part of the reason why they are so controversial. Attempts to re-balance the game by releasing harder dungeons and stronger monsters inevitably leads to Power Creep as those changes often make other monsters and teams obsolete. What makes this frustrating is that due to the slow granting of free stones (in NA) and the RNG and Bribing Your Way to Victory nature of the REM, players are heavily encouraged to spend money to get viable teams to keep up with the metagame. It's also extremely frustrating to take all the effort to build a powerful team (getting subs, skilling up monsters, +eggs) only for it to become obsolete a few months later. This is especially true with new dungeons such as the Sanctuary of the Gods' and Dimension of the Mystic's dungeon sets, as well as the new floors like Cobalt Conqueror for the Colosseums, making other content like Illusory World of Carnage, which had been releasing its own wave of might dungeons, feel weak by comparison.
  • Late February 2015 saw a new Final Fantasy Crystal Defenders collaboration creature—Juggler. The problem: His leader skill, Catch, which multiplies ATK by 7 (i.e. 49 if the leader and ally are both Jugglers) if you simply make two Heal Orb matches. At first it's leaning on Difficult, but Awesome, and then some players use 4 Pandoras as teammates to punch through Legend Plus Dungeons like nothing, followed by advanced players using weaker monsters to do the same, and then the crowd realized how broken the Juggler team can become. Many players are hoping GungHo will flat-out ignore Juggler as a blip or outlier when designing new creatures and descents.
    • With all the fanbase hate towards Juggler (which was reasonable), the monster still had some serious problems when it comes to play: pitiful HP, depends on the quality of the teammates to run it effectively, and (as of newer updates to other monsters) it has no control over its ATK multiplier, either 7× or nothing; which means it's 100% screwed when facing certain enemies' absorb skill (see above). Still a Scrappy by all means, but (in the metagame) it's still balanced in the long run.
    • The outrage over Juggler was apparently balanced by 4 new Godfest exclusives (Zuo, Ilm, Gadius, and Typhon) and the Awoken Indian and Awoken Egyptian Gods. Also Dark Sun Deity, Ra, and Pure Light Sun Deity, Ra got adjusted Awoken Skills and Leader Skills. In addition, The Last General of Nanto/Yuria from Fist of the North Star comes a Juggler-style and a Indian God 2-style leader skill that's harder to use than Gadius or Juggler, but has a lot more potential than either.
  • Green Earth Wind Dragon Caller, Kaede took what was a pretty decent leader skill - up to 4× with 2+ wood combos and a 50% shield when 5 heal orbs are matched in a cross (+) pattern - and stacked 2× to the heart cross condition, resulting in a leader who can reach 7×/8× AND put up a 50% damage reduction, changing the whole game overnight. (That's 49/64× AND 75% damage reduction with dual leads, by the way.) What's more, the heart cross condition carries over to successive floors if you beat a floor with it activated as long as you don't run into any particular preemptives. The active is a Wood/Heart generator with a low cooldown and cooldown reduction, making a "system" made of multiples very possible. Unfortunately, Kaede is one of the rarer pulls, being a 6* base Godfest exclusive, and 3 are recommended. In other words, good luck. Another weakness: no bind immunity awakens, though the achievement badge system can help fix that. (Said badge requires scoring in the top 20% in a tournament, one of the hardest to pull off, so again, good luck.) Or, of course, one can throw in a bind clearer.
  • Ilm was already monstrous due to, as with with Sonia, having excellent synergy with her Grimoire Sphere (same as Sonia, except it's Fire and Light orbs and deals a bit of damage) and leader skill (3.5x ATK when you make at least two of ether fire or light and one of the other, 6x with two light and two fire). And then she received her Ultimate leader evo in Maniacal Phantom Demon, which altogether dropped this to only 4x to attack with just 3 combos of two and one fire and/or light, but in exchange gave her 2.5 to attack and Recovery if she reaches four combos overall. with two this gives her a 100x attack, 6.25x RCV WITH JUST FOUR COMBOS. this is balanced out though by having trouble with Damage Void and Absorb skills.
  • Oddly enough, the snow globe dragons. Why is that under this category? At Level 50, when fused, guarantees that the recipient gets at least 2 million EXP. If you're lucky, get a SUPER!! on that, and the recipient gets 4 million EXP, enough to max level the monster. Once GungHo discovered how gamebreaking this became, they made those dragons and eggs harder to obtain. In the first edition of the Christmas Collaboration, those dropped way too often. You can still get two or three per month via the Monthly Quest dungeons' Intermediate level, as well as their less potent Li'l Snow Globe forms on Beginner. And make no mistake, they DO still drop sometimes on Christmas. However, you'll still need to budget them, as you need 5 of them for one Super Snow Globe Dragon, which is the only way to Limit Break monsters, raising their level Cap and allowing them to perform a Super Awakening/+297 Awakening.
  • Illusionless Time Dragonbound Myr/Miru/Mille, while mediocre on her own, has a 7x attack multiplier & reduces damage taken by 50% for leader skill, which activates whenever 5 heart orbs are being lined in a cross shape, despite having barely 80 Cost ^note compared to her ultimate evolved counterpart, which is 99, and her revo, which is 110.. It may seem to be impractical and difficult to line up the heart orbs, until you realize Moon Phase generates several heart orbs and allows you to move the orbs freely in a set amount of time. Mix this with a 7x6 board unit from a friend, it makes lining up the heart orbs a cakewalk. A full light element team with secondary elements for fire, water, wood and dark damage output will rack up the total light damage output and combos. And in case the damage output isn't enough, the 7x attack and 50% defense multiplier DOES stack with another Myr, in other words: 14x damage & 50%^2 defense multiplier, effectively shredding incoming damage to zero. As long as you have Light and Heart orbs on the board ^note which can be achieved by using Maeda Keiji (randomizes all orbs and speeds up active skills), Reincarnated Parvati (turns water orbs into heart orbs and buff heart and wood orbs), Awoken Astraea (turns all orbs into Fire, Water, Light and Heart and has a quick skill charge to boot) or Sniper at Rest Myr (turns orbs other than water into heart orbs randomly and allows you to move them freely for 7 seconds), you can virtually wipe out everything over and over again with a full-light double-Myr team. But wait, there's more! Unlike other, similar Leader Skills, the buff doesn't wear off until you get hit by an enemy preemptive, and it carries forward upon sweep! Meaning that not only can you reach an effective 196x multiplier and reduce 250% of incoming damage, you can KEEP IT, at least, until an enemy preemptives you and temporarily stuns your reign of terror, but by that point you'll probably have at least 5 Heart Orbs stocked up. The whole thing is like Za Warudo, but somehow more powerful. Pray that your enemy doesn't absorb or resist Light element...
    • Her evolved counterparts, Star Cutting Time Dragonbound Myr and Playful Time Dragonbound Myr, along with Sniper at Rest Myr, have a whopping 7.7x attack multiplier, while their costs are higher than Illusionless Myr, are more effective on nuking your enemies effortlessly. Reincarnated Myr loses the .7 at the end of the multiplier, but has better awakenings, including 2 L-Boosts, 2 TPA awakenings, is unbindable, has better stats, has a really cool Unit Skill Voice, and can be limit broken. However, you'll have to put in a lot of work to get access to those two forms, as seen below. The latter doesn't even require any evolution and can be used as Assist Monster, all you need to do is to pull her from the Summer Holiday unit pack or buy her from the Monster Point Shop during the Summer Holiday event.
  • Due to (formerly) newer content such as Titania Descended the highest difficulty 3-player descend rush having an increased emphasis on dealing absurdly high amounts of damage and reaching high combo counts, along with the introduction of the follow-up attack awakening (a Game-Breaker in its own right) that also needs 5 hearts, but arranged in a different formation (a column instead of a cross) Heart-cross leads such as Kaede and Myr have started veering towards Awesome, but Impractical as a new set of game-breakers emerge. The most notable of these new generation of Game Breakers is Bloodbath Diablos from the Monster Hunter collab. Firstly, he has the highest weighted stat total of any monster in the entire game up as of 28th of August 2017 (tied with the collab's other top gacha prize, Amatsu). Secondly, his leader skill gives you a 7x6 board regardless of the dungeon you're running, including 5x4 dungeons. Thirdly, he gives you a formidable 8.5x multiplier and a 25% damage reduction shield when you hit 8 combos while leading with him, an activation requirement that compliments his 7x6 board perfectly. Lastly, you don't even need to have a Bloodbath Diablos of your own to take advantage of his game-breaking abilities as you only need to one half of your leader pair to be a Bloodbath Diablos to get his 7x6 board ability. This means you can lead with another combo leads such as the reincarnated forms of Anubis and Kushinadahime and pair with a Bloodbath Diablos friend lead for the 7x6 board and a higher damage multiplier than pairing Diablos x Diablos. To add the icing to the top of this very angry cake, he's unbindable as well. This monster is just as powerful (and pissed) as it is in Generations Ultimate.
  • The other major game-breaking lead hailing from 2017 is the 6-star Godfest Exclusive, Yog-Sothoth. While he doesn't provide a 7x6 board like Bloodbath Diablos does, he doesn't really need to either. Firstly, he gets a 6x multtiplier if your HP is 80% or higher. Yes, you're seeing that right, when paired with another Yog, he gets a 36x multiplier capable of sweeping most older dungeons with incredible ease just for sitting at or near full health. Of course, this alone doesn't make him broken, so what does? The answer: 'he gets an additional 3x attack multiplier for hitting 2 light combos.' This means that when paired with himself, Yog-Sothoth can reach a damage multiplier of 324x just for making two light combos. If that wasn't enough, making two light combos also gives Yog the same 25% damage shield that Bloodbath Diablos has, making it easier to keep your health above 80%. In the event your health does go below 80% (probably due to a preemptive attack of some kind), then Overflowing Knowledge has you covered by healing you for 40% of your maximum HP while making a Light+Heart bicolour board. Even if you can't heal, Yog still has an innate 2.5x multiplier when below 80% health, which means he still provides a respectable 56.25x attack multiplier when hitting 2 light combos, even when in his weakened state. Finally, he is unbindable, just like Bloodbath Diablos and many of the other game-breaking leads that have been introduced after Ra Dragon's debut.
    • In late 2018, Yog got an ultimate awakening, so that if the team is under 80% health, they also give 3x Recovery, at which point a dual-Yog team can heal to full HP from a single heart-match.
  • In Super Mario Bros. Edition, Boo Mario and Boo Luigi. They're powerful enough on their own, multiplying your combo's power by 2.5× if you combo 3 or more Attributes (which isn't difficult at all), but if you use them together, that power boost jumps to a staggering 6.25×, and since a minimum of a 3-combo is needed to do this, the chances of an enemy that isn't a boss surviving a combo from these two is very low. Even better, they're available relatively early (after beating World 4-Tower), so the rest of the game can become a breeze if these two are used.
  • The 2018 summer event gave us Barbara & Julie (one card featuring two characters), who became a new meta overnight. They have a defense-breaking active that also unlocks orbs and creates a fire/water bicolor board, give a flat 2xHP 4xATK bonus to water and fire cards, and an additional 3xATK when fire and water attack at once. On top of all that, they have 6 of the most common Killer Awakenings, with the ability to take God, Devil and Balanced killer Latents. Because of this, they are almost always guaranteed to hit 3x personal damage against anything, 9x if they have dual typing, and if decked out with God Killer Latents, they will have a personal multiplier of 91x! Since most of the biggest bosses are either Dragons, Gods, Devils or a combination of those three, it is not uncommon to see a single B&J hit in the hundreds of millions. And like many examples on this page, Voiding Mist not only gives them the orb colors they need, but it breaks defense, too!
  • The new Extreme Rare Monster Carnival, in a similar vein to the Snow Globe Dragons. Why? It features ONLY monsters from descended dungeons, as in, the ones you need to exchange for [Size][Attribute] Gems and [Monster's] Gems to reincarnate. Stockpile enough Pal Points and roll as much as you can before it ends, and you'll be set for all sorts of evolutionary gems. As an added bonus, it has the five Spirit Numens in it, so you can potentially get a ten star monster from an Annihilation dunge on FOR FREE.
  • Awoken Vajrabhairava could be one of these.Same goes for his Light cousin, Awoken Vajryaksa, who has much the same skill, stats, awakenings, and leader skill, the only difference being that he substitutes one Extend Time awakening for Vajrabhairava's one Two-Pronged Attack. They use a 100x nuke skill every turn as a leader, the highest of the game as of now (compared to some others with a similar leader skill such as Kagutsuchi's 40x,) making them prime fodder for cheesing old dungeons (i.e the normal and early Technical dungeons, evo and enhance dungeons, etc.) However, their unmatched farming capability isn't where they become broken. That belongs to the OTHER part of their Leader Skills: multiplies attack by 6 when making a meager two Dark or Light combos and reduces damage. With two Vajrabhairavas or Vajrayaksas (or one of each, though that requires four matches, 2 light and 2 dark) as leaders, you can potentially deal damage in the millions every turn, as it jumps up to a whopping 36x multiplier. And after activating Mantra Reckoning or Mantra Blessing, which conveniently creates six Dark or Light orbs for you, it becomes a 72x multiplier. (6^2 x 2.) He's also rather viable in multiplayer, as he has 2 Multi Boost awakenings, which give him an extra 2.25x to everything.
    • On that note, a leader combo of Roche's evolved form and Vaj can put out some jaw dropping power. Roche has 4 >50% HP awakenings (provided you have a spare Super Snow Globe Dragon, lots of Plus Points and a bit of luck handy for the fourth one) which means that she turns VERY red and gains a 16x ATK boost with all of them combined at less than half HP. Her leader skill gives her a flat 4x ATK boost for Wood and Dark cards (she's Dark) kicking that up to 64x at less than half HP. Add 2 more Dark matches with Vaj's skill, which multiplies that by six, 384x combo. And while Vaj's skill is active, which gives Dark monsters double ATK for 2 turns, congratulations. Roche just hit a personal multiplier of seven hundred and sixty eight. FOR MATCHING SIX ORBS WHILE AT HALF HP. And that's not even taking into account Enhanced orbs and if you match four, activating Vaj's Two-Prongs. You now have a Glass Cannon build that doesn't even need to get dangerously low on HP like some other cards (see the first entry) and can shred dungeons into pieces like nothing, provided you have a combo voider (Roche has attribute absorb void) and healer for the tougher ones. Slap whatever assist you like onto either to boost ATK even further...Not even funny anymore. Unfortunately, Roche requires the rather obtusely gained (not to mention tough to beat) Diamond Dragon Fruit for her evolution, but her normal form is no slouch either, what with all the Two Pronged Attacks and the power to back them up.
  • Great Witch of the Stone Fists, Zela/Zera is a prime example of a sub that is a Game Breaker. Firstly, she has 3 of the much-coveted 7-combo awakenings, allowing her to deal tremendous amounts of damage to all but the bulkiest of enemies consistently. Secondly, she has the Bonus Attack (also known as FUA) awakening, giving her an essential utility awakening on top of her damage awakenings. Thirdly, she can acquire Void Damage Pierce (VDP for short) as a super awakening, allowing her damage to go through damage void shields, being buffed by a further 2.5x as it does so. Even with all of these extra-powerful awakenings, she still has enough awakening spots to be unbindable with a skill bind resist. Finally, there is her active skill, Howling Storm. Howling Storm is a bicolor green+heart board change that not only unlocks all locked orbs before changing the board, but also adds two extra combos to your total combo count for a single turn, trivializing the process of making a 7 combo board with a 3x3 box of green orbs to activate her VDP awakening with. Unsurprisingly, Zela is a staple sub on some of the strongest leaders in the game, including Komasan S, Kamen Rider BLACK RX, Yoh Asakura (who, incidentally, can also be made into a game-breakingly strong equip that is perfect for Zela) and even a Hello Kitty card that cosplays Zela herself.
  • Crimson Dracoblader of the Flame Twist, Akine, may not be as flashy as other leaders such as Myr or Yog-Sothoth, but when she has the right buddies, boy, does she get results. Her leader skill powers up attacks when any Orb attribute is matched with Heal. Any Orb. But several other monsters have similar leader skills, so what's the big deal? Well, those other monsters don't give a maximum multiplier of 20x. When combined with one of said aimilar monsters, such as, say, Set, who already has a 7-combo awakening, your team can consistently reach absurdly high multiplier counts, pretty much just for matching Heal Orbs. As an added bonus, all of her Super Awakenings provide complete immunity to one hazard! Her only real drawback is that she's incredibly slow, with a max level skill cooldown of 25 turns, but she has a Skill Charge awakening to rectify that, pairing especially nicely with the mayhem her Leader Skill can unleash with all 5 attributes.
  • Just in time for another game of Gung-Ho's featuring Gratuitous/Highly-Visible Ninja comes Phantom Ninja, Jiraiya, who is a serious contender for Zela/Zera's title of the game's best Wood sub. He's like a "greatest hits" of the game's best Wood Monsters rolled into one card. He has an Awakening spread of 7-Combo ATK Up, Void Damage Pierce, L-Boost AND two Bind Resists that most other monsters would kill for. Oh, and that bit about him being the best parts of some of the best Wood monsters in the game? That's Not Hyperbole; his Skill allows him to shapeshift into a plethora of Wood cards, mimicking their skills! He can protect and heal as Odin, function as an offensive buffer as Freyja, counter Orb Movement debuffs as Rex, you name it. You'd expect an amazing skill like this to come with some awful drawback dragging it down, right? Nope! The skill has a meager turn count of 3 at max level. He almost makes his Wood/Fire Ultimate Evolution seem like a Power Up Letdown, but the latter at least retains some specters of his former glory with his Super Awakenings, which are the same ones that made his unevolved form so powerful.
  • All of the new cards included in the Star-twined Fairies egg machine are pretty good, but one stands above them all; the Dahlia Starflower Sprout. Like several cards before it, her gimmick is that she gains more power and improves her Leader Skill as the battle goes on by transforming using her skill. While the somewhat underwhelming double RCV and 7x6 board in her first form may make this seem like a Power Up Letdown since it takes a while to warm up...with enough Skill Boost or Skill Boost+ awakenings, you can partially bypass this gimmick and transform the Sprout right off the bat. When this happens, her power skyrockets as her leader skill changes from a pathetic double RCU bonus to a 1.6x HP and RCU boost for Light cards, a 16x multiplier for 8 combos or higher, and two combos and damage reduction for making a cross of Light Orbs, making the combo requirement quite easy to attain, especially with the 7x6 board size. Then she reaches full strength at the third and final form, Dazzling Dahlia Starfairy, Phyllis, which improves all her previous forms even further by kicking the multiplier up to 18x, improving her team's health by 1.8x, and adding three combos per cross of Light Orbs Both of the final two forms also have several Cross Attack+ awakenings, meaning they can reach six-digits before multipliers. While this is phenomenal on its own, she gets really bonkers when paired with herself. How, you ask? Well, two Phyllises give your team a 324x multiplier and seven combos for matching one Light Orb cross in their final forms. One. The end result is a team that's not only extremely tanky, but can also steamroll dungeons with ease. Oh, and when she reaches her final form, she bypasses Damage Void for 3 turns, meaning most bosses can be completely and utterly atomized without any hassle. As a bonus, this means it's entirely possible to melt even the toughest foes in the game with a couple of dinky little flowers.
  • As of this writing, during February of 2022, 5 powerful leads, as well as a few straggling others, are currently on top of the game's meta. These are the five Watch Vehicles, very powerful monsters with a three stages of forms, similar to how the Star-twined Fairies, but obtainable in a more generic way as they are Godfest Exclusives. The first two are Royal Oak, a blue submarine that focuses on matching 5 Water orbs in an L shape (though many have used him with matching rows of 6 Water orbs for a time because L matches didn't deal that much damage), Nautilus, a green submarine with a playstyle of matching 6 Wood orbs in a row (And is often paired with a seasonal two-stage transforming card, being the Christmas version of a Godfest Exclusive named Menoa), Sea Wolf, a red & blue submarine that based its gameplay on matching 7 or more combos,Daytona, a racing car that fought by matching 4 Light orbs in a row or a column, and Blackbird, a fighter jet whose activation conditions for his leader skill is just matching 2 or more Dark combos. Though they are at the top, there's still other powerful leads, such as Saphira, whose gimmick is matching 3x3 Orb boxes of Light and/or Dark orbs, and Sakuya (yes, that Sakuya) in an extremely powerful, one-per-account and obtainable-through-story-mode version of herself, who uses multiple colors of Orb matches to deal a ton of damage, and being a non-transforming lead, she can take up a Double Damage Cap Latent (the original damage cap is about 2.14b damage) to just shred enemies to bits.
• High-Tier Scrappy: The "heart cross" meta in led by Kaede, Ronove, Gremory and Myr has come to dominate the tier lists, much to the chagrin of many who wish for more diversity, as new high end dungeons have typically been created with the top tier of the meta in mind. That's not the worst of it; only Myr (and if you're talking about her original light release and not her summer Water or MP shop Fire variants) is farmable, and the other three are Godfest exclusives, are 6* at base with the exception of Ronove, and are heavily reliant on other 6* base GFEs to create optimal teams. The 6* base Kaede is infamous for the "system team" that relies on owning 3 or 4, and Ronove, despite starting out at 5*, is even more reliant on 6* GFEs including Dark Kali.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Before the Super Mario Bros. edition was released, there was a Mario & Sonic fanfic that at one point showed the heroes going through the Toxic Forest, where they encountered Petey Piranha. The author himself admitted that he made Petey the "boss" of the Toxic Forest because most of the forest levels in the first two New Super Mario Bros. games have unique Piranha Plant enemies. This game brings back the forest levels, and lo and behold, there was Petey Piranha waiting for you as a boss.
  • For a long time, fans and detractors called this game Puzzle and Waifus due to the sheer number of female characters. It's even more hilarious when GungHo announced the June Bride collaboration which features, you guessed it, female characters in bridal outfits (while not neglecting the guys as well).
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: PADZ can come off as tediously easy for series veterans. Fortunately, after the credits roll the challenge picks up considerably.
• Last Lousy Point: If you're trying to upgrade Hades to Awoken Hades, you might as well not do it because one of the material monsters required is Gaia. Many users are unwilling to attempt her dungeon since it's a cost restricted Conditional Descended dungeon.
  • Awoken Gods are mostly these in general, since some of the material monsters (mostly Mythical tier only monsters such as the tricolor Zeuses) are pretty hard to acquire by their own standards. Mostly because Awoken Venus requires Awoken Hera-Sowilo and Awoken Sandalphon, monsters that are relatively easier to acquire than any of the Zeuses. Still, all of those gods also require Elemental Jewels, which can't be farmed reliably.
  • These issues have been ameliorated in JP 8.0, and the corresponding US update. There is now an urgent dungeon for "Rare Characters", making several skill leveling monsters more readily available and the boss is always going to be one of the Chinese Goddesses that may drop a Jewel. And a Descended Carnival urgent dungeon was also added, making several Descended Bosses available, including ones that were previously in restricted entry dungeons such as Gaia and even Draggie. Of course, the difficulty of each round is Legend, which also means it's less likely that they will drop at all.
  • Restricted dungeons were eliminated in early 2016, and were replaced with Enhanced dungeons, making all monsters have 1.5× stats so long as they matched the requirement. Gaia is God Enhanced, Draggie is Attacker Enhanced, Tengu is Balanced Enhanced. And none of the dungeons had enemy HP or damage adjustments.
  • Out of the Awoken gods to be released Awoken Andromeda stands out as being particularly difficult to acquire. While Threedia is a relatively easy monster to acquire (he's in a fairly easy mid-game permanent dungeon) and evolve (he only needs standard evo mats and a Super King Emerald dragon, which can now be acquired at any point during a Thursday), her other evo mat, the evolved form of Mion, falls sqaurely into this.
    • Firstly, Mion is a relatively new descended boss with a variety of hazards including a 6 combo shield, a sub-boss with resolve and a skill bind, so unprepared teams may struggle to even reach her.
    • Secondly, Mion herself pretty much qualifies as That One Boss, especially for more inexperienced players who do not bring a time extension active to help beat her through her combo shield on the second turn of the fight.
    • Thirdly, after acquiring Mion, you realize you also need to evolve her. Unlike most earlier descend bosses that just use regular evo mats, Mion needs two bosses of her own to be evolved. Which bosses, you ask? The first one is U Evo Gaia, who is thankfully not a problem to acquire any more, but her second evo mat is evolved Ilsix.
    • To put this into perspective, Ilsix is a That One Boss in his own right, his dungeon requires you to beat Apex Starling, who is another That One Boss with a damage absorb shield, before you can even reach Ilsix himself, and when you finally beat Ilsix, you realize he needs two descended bosses of his own (Zeus Mercury, who should be a cakewalk if you managed to beat Mion and Ilsix already and U Evo Hera-Is) before you can evolve him.
    • In other words, in order to evolve Andromeda to her Awoken form, you need to acquire and evolve Mion, Threedia, Gaia, Ilsix, Hera-Is and Zeus Mercury. Finally, between Gaia, Hera-Is and Andromeda herself, you need five blue jewels and three green jewels on top of all the bosses and standard evo mats before you can finally evolve your Andromeda to her Awoken form. However, this is trivial compared to what is required to evolve Ragnarok Dragon and the other MP Dragons to their newest forms, where every single one of their five evoution materials tends to be a Last Lousy Point in its own right but that is for another day.
  • As stated above, you will feel a new level of pain trying to evolve the MP Dragons' Super Ultimate Evos:
    • First off, the five God Dragons require their attribute's Radar God Dragon. These are tedious to get but not frustrating in JP due to PAD Radar app, but everywhere else they're Guerrilla descended dungeons that only come down for a hour, and are hard as hell as all of the boss floors will have a high damage void.
    • Ra Dragon and Tsukiyomi Dragon were especially hit hard on this, as they require Awoken Machine Zeus and Awoken Machine Hera, respectfully, which are from Annihilation level techinical dungeons originally designed to be cleared in multiplayer, and Machine Zeus' has No RCV. Both also needed Loving Heavenly Deities, Zeus and Hera. Almighty God, Ra Dragon in total needed four Zeuses: two in his light Ult evo and Two in his Dark Ult evo to evolve Zeus and Hera and as part of its own Evo mats. What's more, both of the Awoken Machines needed a copy of Dark Mech General Hysferzen and Light Mech General Sherospada, which each required the ultimate evolutions of the RGB Mech Generals + two Gold Keepers to ultimate evolve into from their prior forms. Each of the RGB Mech Generals needed 3 Gold Keepers to ultimate evolve into. All of this, at 3 * 3 per RGB + 2 = 11 for each Light or Dark Mech General, or 22 for the aforementioned Machine Zeus or Hera, or other monsters that required both.
    • Fortunately, the new Evolution Gem system has taken a great deal of grief out of the whole process, first by saving inventory space since they, as with other evolution mats, are counted in single stacks, and more importantly, by replacing all but the highest level evolutions with standard gems as requirements that can be acquired in exchange for dungeon loot, or more quickly via the Shortcut to Evolution dungeon. All those standard Zeus and Hera ultimate evolutions you needed for Loving Heavenly Deities Zeus & Hera? They've been replaced by Large Light/Dark Gems. The RGB Mech Generals needed for Sherospada and Hysferzen? No more farming those eyesores. And that's just for starters.
  • Remember how Myr is perhaps one of the best cards in the game? Well, you WILL have to work your ass off to get access to said raw power:
    • Her first evolution requires Nordis, which is an easy-ish task, but her second evolution is where this trope starts to kick in full throttle. Four of the Gems (Verche, Athena, Zeus + Hera, Sandalphon) one can obtain with no sweat, but there's one outlier here: Elia. Elia is one of two monsters that only has a single dungeon, the other being Grisar. No descends, no MP shop, no Monster Exchange, nothing. The only reason you'd know they exist is the fact that their Gems are in the Exchange. One has to go through the Mythical+ variant of Ultimate God Rush to square off with her, or get her from the Rare Monster Carnival PEM, which is a very impressive feat in itself. OF course, there is ANOTHER way to get her, but it's much more unpredictable; Grisar and Elia sometimes appear in certain Light and Dark based dungeons, but can only be encountered during constantly shifting windows of time, and even then, they have to invade the descend. Like a Diamond Dragon Fruit, but much worse. And then there's her Reincarnation after that:
    • First off, one needs a Diamond Dragon Fruit and a Tri-God Mask. The first, you can snag with a little luck from Cave of Dreaming, even if it's taxing on your Stamina, your patience, and your sanity. The second? Not so much. Either you grind and grind and then grind some more to try and complete the Maniac challenges that give you one, or you go through hell with the top tiers of the Monthly Challenge dungeons.
    • Next ingredient is Spirit Numen of Light, Keela's Gem, which is a very confusing level in itself, what with your leader being flung all about, status effects all over, and the boss toting a 15 million damage void. Either that, or pray you have enough Rainbow Medals to buy Keela's Gem.
    • And on the matter of Myr, her Fire counterpart, Burning Time Dragonbound Myr, is all of this, save for needing a Fire Jewel instead of a Light one, and needing Borma as opposed to Keela, but you have to buy her for 3/4 million Monster Points. And her stats and LS are borderline useless in her first form.
  • Haku is a relatively easy monster to evolve, just the standard evo mats, a few Gems for the uvo, then five Masks for the revo. But then there's Haku's Super Reincarnation, which requires you to:
    • sacrifice one of your Rainbow Medals for a Rainbow Medal's Gem. While this may seem beneficial at first, because as mentioned before, Gems stack, meaning you don't have to perform card tango to keep the precious medals, you can't get the medals back, nor can you exchange Medal Gems for monsters that would normally require Rainbow Medals, such as a Spirit Numen's gem.
    • beat Qilin and evolve her. Remember Hexazeon? And how he required certain mats that dropped in his dungeon, but he was still very good in his basic form? Yeah, that concept is back with a vengeance. Not only does Qilin require her flunky to evolve, but a crapton of Descended Gems, the aforementioned Tri-God Mask, and not one, but TWO Diamond Dragon Fruits (one for the uvo and one for the revo!) And the Reincarnated form is the only one that can be exchanged for the Gem!
    • And then Haku needs another Diamond Dragon Fruit and Tri-God Mask, tallying to a grand total of four fruits and two masks. You're gonna cry. And to top it all off, she's not even that good, only toting a 3.5x multiplier when her types are matched. At least she looks cool, though.
  • In general, old God cards that were bestowed Super Reincarnations are always a pain in the ass to evolve. The recipe is always as follows: Rainbow Medal's Gem, [Monster from a Annihilation level dungeon released at the same time as the Super Revo]'s Gem, Tri-God Mask, Diamond Dragon Fruit, Jewel of [card's primary element.] Qilin stands out because she requires another Tri-God Mask to be exchanged for her Gem, but the other Annihilation monster Gems can require MORE Annihilation-level Gems to be used for the Super Revo, such as Eris, a material for Venus's Super Revo, requiring Magic Dracosnake of the Evilfangs, Zahhak's gem to evolve, and thus, be traded for her Gem.
  • Equip forms of many monsters, as well as many evolutions to some GFE, both modern and old, need very specific drops and Gems to make them. Among the worst offenders being the equips for some Mega Awoken and Super Reincarnated monsters, as well as some Godfest Exclusives, a few of which need you to play extremely hard content to get them, and some might not even drop on your first try. Needless to say, the grind to even get Gems for monsters like Valkyrie - Ciel's U Evolutions have made some players, even hardcore ones, quit because of a surging power level.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • In General:
    • The chime made when a + egg drops.
    • The sound of getting Great! or Super! during fusion. Oddly enough, the equivalent result in Z, a Super or Mega Fusion, doesn't come with a special SFX.
    • The sound of skill-ups and awakenings.
    • The sound of a gold egg or diamond egg dropped from the REM (unless it's something unwanted).
  • In the dungeons:
    • The jingle SFX of a row of orbs cleared (if you have a monster with the appropriate awakening), plus...
    • The sound of your monsters healing from a bind after clearing a whole row of heart orbs.
    • The clang SFX of a "two pronged attack" when it's purposefully done.
    • The clang SFX of an attribute boost when you match a cross or L of five orbs if the leader skill grants such a power.
• Narm: Zeus is supposed to be the Almighty God in the PAD universe. However, thanks to his voice acting in Z, he doesn't even sound close to being Almighty.
• Nintendo Hard: How apropos of the Super Mario Bros. Edition. Many have noted the vastly higher difficulty of the enemies, even in comparison to PADZ. This is mitigated somewhat by the better leader monsters the game gives you.
• OTP: Traditionally, it was with GROdin and Amaterasu.^note GROdin's Leader Skill reduced damage by 80% while you were at full health, while Amaterasu's Leader Skill Auto-Healed you for 5x her Recovery whenever you matched orbs, allowing you to tank hits. Until GrOdin got his Ultimate Evolution.^note Which gave him four Auto-heal Awaken Skills, thus giving him 2000 HP auto-heal each turn. Amaterasu then got her most useful Ultimate Evolution, "Dancing Flame", and they never got back, according to Fanon. Which then led to Amaterasu getting her Reincarnation, making her Healing Factor abilities twice as powerful to compensate for the loss of GROdin.
  • Add to more irony is that Awoken Amaterasu is Light/Wood, opposite of GROdin's Wood/Light, and also has a Leader Skill that relies on maintaining full health, on top of an even more powerful Auto-heal.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
  • Gaia, with her ultimate form. See her entry under The Scrappy.
  • Co-op mode, as globally applied awakenings (skill boosts, skill bind resists, etc.) were made cumulative between both teams, stamina costs were halved, and both players are awarded monster points equivalent to stamina spent for beating a dungeon, making MP shop items more affordable. Plus, some monsters have stat boost leader skills and/or awakenings for some nice "farming team" options.
  • Both Fenrirs got a split ult evolution that gives one of their forms a much more easier LS by turning the condition to Jammer combos instead of linked jammers, making it far more easier to activate their ATK boosts.
• The Scrappy: Gaia gets plenty of hate for being a very useless God-type monster while at the same time dropping primarily in her own very restrictive descended dungeon. She's less of a scrappy in the Descended dungeon "Ultimate God Rush", where she has a chance to drop on the 1st round.
  • A couple of updates have made her dungeon worse. Now that she is a crucial part of an ultimate evolution, players can no longer avoid her dungeon. The spirit jewel event where a Chinese God can invade is a death sentence in her dungeon as the Gods aren't scaled to fit her difficulty. With a weak low cost team, taking down a 1 million HP monster that one-shots you almost every time is impossible. Later, GungHo removed Gaia's dungeon from the spirit jewel invade events, but it's still not enough to save her from Scrappydom.
    • In 2016, every other Cost, Rarity, and Type restricted dungeon was changed in such that they each had a different Enhanced feature instead (a 1.5× multiplier to every stat). Gaia Descended is now a God Enhanced dungeon. Enemy stats in these dungeons weren't scaled up, making them much easier.
  • The Juggler from the FFCD Collab is slowly becoming this, but part of the reason is that the Crystal Defenders creatures aren't designed by GungHo, but by Square Enix, and GungHo is apparently contract-bound to accept the critters as-is. And Hata Keisuke was intentionally trying to make Juggler as strong as possible without breaking the game; some think he may well have underestimated himself.
  • The Machine Zeus Descended! is this trope incarnate crossing with That One Boss and That One Level. You have to go through 10 floors of Annihilation-class levels without any Healing Orbs, while enemies can hit you from 20K or above per level; then you come to Machine Zeus himself who has almost 50 Million HP, 7-combo absorb AND Pre-emptive Status Immunity, and at one point he even uses a 2 million damage absorb skill. It's commonly accepted that one can throw stones to get past him, but the level designs are so stupid that, during its first appearance in a regular live stream event through Nico Nico Douga, the event itself receive a negative rating of record-high 78.5%. Only then Yamamoto admitted the problem with the dungeon and promised to fix it.
    • With the introduction of various monsters with Machine Killer Awoken Skills as well as Skill Inheritence, the dungeon is slightly easier such that people can reliably run it solo.
  • Fenrir. One of the Godfest Exclusive monsters. Has as much power as Awoken Anubis, except it requires jammers. The Scrappydom comes less from the actual card and more from the metagame. Players reacted very poorly towards adding Jammer powers towards the metagame. So much so that he's the lowest rated card out of all the Godfest exclusives. Contrast this with Hel and Linthia, both who require poison and mortal poison orbs for a power boost and are Descended bosses, both of them rate higher than Fenrir.
    • Although the reason for this is quite simple. Whereas Hel and Linthia requires 6 or 3 connected poison orbs, and Linthia also needs 4 attribute matches to fully use her, they're still reasonable and doable on a normal board. Fenrir requires 9 (10 before a patch) connected jammers on top of five attribute matches in order to use it's full potential, which requires aboard that also has exactly three of each attribute orb, something that isn't easy to set up. Both Hel and Linthia also have active skills that let them use their full power right away in addation to a good pool of subs that also have active skills that make poison orbs, while Fenrir's Active skill doesn't produce as much, might prevent you from getting enough color matches, 1 turn skyfall isn't enough, and subs with jammer creation are ether situational and/or don't produce enough jammers.
  • While Awoken/Reincarnated Lakshmi is a relatively popular off-meta lead for her cute looks and uncommon playstyle, she can fall into this in when facing her as an enemy.
    • In her A2/A3 incarnation, while she is normally a Puzzle Boss who makes match jammers in order to not die until she gets bored and defeats herself. However if you encounter her with a Jammer from a previous floor on your board already, she will kill you if you can't clear it. The problem? when you first encounter Lakshmi, she binds your awakenings, then throws a skill bind at you while your SBR awakenings are disabled, meaning that if you forget to remove the Jammers before you enter the floor where she can be encountered, you basically lose on the spot
    • Her Alt. Arena incarnation, on the other hand, automatically performs a full board change when you encounter her, removing any unlocked Jammers and greatly reducing your chances of dying simply from forgetting to clear jammers. Unfortunately, the increased difficulty of the other floors makes Alr. Awoken Lakshmi a Scrappy for an entirely different reason. The attack she uses on herself *makes all shield effects count down by one.* This basically means that even if you manage to activate a leader skill-based a shield (a extremely common feature in Alt. Arena-viable leaders that lack a HP multiplier), this "attack" nullifies it. This wouldn't be a problem, except there's a one-in-three chance of encountering Ibaraki-doji, who has a massive 53,000 damage pre-emptive attack, on the following floor. Even with all the Power Creep Puzzle and Dragons has undergone over the years, it is still extremely difficult (though technically possible with a highly specialized team composition) for a team without a HP multiplier to have enough base HP to survive such a large hit without a shield, which is exactly what the the Lakshmi-Ibaraki combination basically requires you to do.
  • Ask anyone who regularly play Ultimate Arena, and most will tell you Awoken Sopdet is they one they absolutely loathe to see. In order to fight through Kalis (in either form) in the second-to-last level, most players will bring up their most destructive party to One-Hit Kill her......Until Sopdet pops up with her 200K damage absorb which will stall most of these parties. Unless you have inherited Fujin or other who have "ignore damage absorb" skill and charged long enough for them to work, this can only result in one way. Oh, and good luck finding her at any point in Ultimate Descended Rush.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • In Z, branching paths are simple enough: have more cleared orbs of a particular element than other elements to take the path you want. In Super Mario Bros. Edition, alternate paths for unlocking side levels require clearing Orbs that are not natrually available in a given stage (such as clearing Dark orbs in a stage that only has Fire, Wood, and Water Orbs). You're supposed to use Orb-changing skills to get into these otherwise-inaccessible paths, but there are several catches. Skills only charge up when you're faced with enemies and attack, so you can't just make useless matches repeatedly at forks to charge up Skills. While you're trying to charge your Skills up, you may end up accidentally setting off a huge chain that kills all of the enemies, forcing you to advance, and these sorts of forks often show up after only one or two waves, so it's likely the Skill you need to change Orbs won't be ready when you arrive at the fork. You can use weak teammates to avoid accidentally curbstomping enemy waves, but you'll likely have a hard time finishing the level even if you manage to take the alternate path. In short, unlocking side levels is less of an exercise in bringing in the right Skills and more of an excercise in sheer patience and Fake Difficulty.
  • In the 3DS games, PuzzFriends can only be added via local wireless—as in, consciously connecting with another player's 3DS. This is the only way to keep someone's Tamer/Player Card and Helper monster permanently, as StreetPass Helpers and their associated cards disappear upon use. You can't, for example, add people just by being on each other's 3DS friends lists. This is a problem if you don't have a lot of local friends who play these games—which will probably be the case if you live outside of Japan—as you'll be stuck with your own Helpers and Adventurers. Fortunately, PuzzFriends are not strictly needed to complete either game, but it helps a little to have an Infinity +1 Helper available to use from time to time instead of only once.
  • Feeding monsters for skillups, which are subject to low (roughly 10% baseline) odds.
  • Combo absorption status, especially when the monster also has a skill to change orbs into others, making it harder to get the needed amount of matches, as well as potentially healing the monster by a large amount.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike:
  • Enemies in Super Mario Bros. Edition hit much harder than they do in PADZ to the point where grinding levels and lives is an absolute necessity.
  • Since Z is full retail, you cannot Bribe Your Way to Victory. Which means the game requires a lot more time to skill up. Plus, skill management and orb manipulation becomes a lot more important, since you have a skill meter instead of skill levels. Also, for bonus dungeons via runes and relics, there is a definite spike in difficulty if you compare it to the original game. So much so that a Master level in this game is equivalent to a Legend level in the original game. While PADZ "Legendary" can be considered PAD "Mythical"," PADZ "Mythical", though much harder than the original's standard Mythical dungeons^* Standard, as in, no rotating skills or multiple skill sets used in one turn. Basically any non-conditional dungeon that came out before Zeus & Hera., is not considered equivalent to "Legend Plus".
• "Stop Having Fun" Guys: As of normal video games, they also exist in P&D fandom, mostly regarding team-building or player skills.
• That One Attack:
  • Frenzied Blows in the Mario version. In Z, it’s called Flurry of Blows. Depending on who uses it, it can take out anywhere from a huge chunk of your health to all of it. And later on in the game, monsters will begin using Ultra Flurry of Blows, a much more powerful attack that could likely take you down if you're weak enough.
  • Preemptive attacks (aka First Strike in Super Mario Bros. Edition), in which the user attacks you as soon as they appear. It is entirely possible to be dead before you get a turn on a particular wave because of it. This is especially bad on Heartless Courses, where you don't get any Heart Orbs to heal, causing the damage from First Strikes to build up over time; because of this combination, World 8-12 in Super Mario Bros. Edition pretty much requires a source of healing from your monster skills or else you'll probably keel over by the time you get to the boss.
  • If you don't block the Skill Bind, that can become That One Attack later. If you are skill bound and then you face a monster that would normally Skill Bind your team as a pre-emptive, then that monster may switch the preemptive to another attack that will kill you. See here. Worse? This isn't always documented in the wikis or guides.
    • Even worse is if the monsters in the lead positions are bound, or your whole team is bound, at which point your team's leader skills are completely nullified. If you are dependent on using a monster with a leader skill that multiplies your total HP stat, and your leader gets bound, your total HP drops down to a minimum amount in comparison. Against a boss enemy with attacks that deal 5 (and as of 2022, 6-7) digit numbers of damage per turn, that basically guarantees an INSTANT DEATH SENTENCE.
  • Gravity attacks, especially for teams that don't have enough RCV to heal up before the next attack, but especially if said attack is followed by another normal attack. Then you have bosses like Zaerog who has a 100% HP Cut that will kill you unless you have damage resistance, and Machine Hera who has a 1000% HP cut if you don't kill her if she's near death.
  • Speaking of Zaerog, Zaerog Infinity's first form in his Descend Dungeon has an attack that delivers a One-Hit Kill if you can't make 6 combos or above, and the second time when he uses it, it locks down your movement into 1 second. Pray that you have a unit with active skill that delays his movement for 1 move to cancel out the effect or Myr's active skill to force your movement into 7 seconds. Fortunately, he only uses this twice and resorts to blackening your orbs afterward.
  • Generally speaking, most bosses, upon being reduced to miniscule amounts of HP, will give you exactly one turn (and Super Reincarnated Raphael in Shura 3 when you first get to him before they absolutely massacre you afterward.
  • And speaking of One-Hit Kill attacks, Anubisis in Z can and will use Banish to Hell, which deals 44444 damage, if you don’t defeat it in time.
  • Ell-Heal from Z, used by a couple of enemies, can be EXTREMELY annoying if you don't one-shot your opponent. While the regular Heal heals at least thirty percent, Ell-Heal restores a total sixty percent. Keep in mind, the enemy usually uses this when they hit a third of their health, meaning if you don't annihilate the rest of their health bar when they're low, they're going to heal to full health, wasting all the time you spent battling their health away.
• That One Achievement:
  • Getting the Mass Attack awoken badge. Why is that here? One of the requirements is to clear one multiplayer dungeon. And given how there's a lack of multiplayer infrastructure (outside JP), it's almost impossible to complete the task needed for it.
  • That's only the tip of the iceberg. There are at least resources here and there for finding other players (the discord server app most notable among them), but the hardest achievement badges happen to be two of the more useful ones for anti-bind awakening starved leaders: 100% bind resist and 50% skill bind resist, both of which require top 20% and 10% tournament placement, respectively, among other stringent requirements.
• That One Boss:
  • Hades, the last boss of Tomb of the Saint - Deep, is notable early on in that he has 1000 DEF and you have 6 turns to take him down before he nukes you for 66667 damage and anything you have at that point isn't likely to help you tank it ^note besides any combination of Resist, Resolve (see Last Chance Hit Point entry on the main page), Amaterasu Ohkami (recovers HP equal to 5× her RCV after matching orbs) and Odin (When HP is full, reduces all damage received by 80%, his Ultimate form gives him four heal awakenings). Unless you use two Lucifers and/or Genie, and/or, if you're lucky to pull it in the PEM, Keeper of Gold^note As long as his skill isn't currently rotated, that is. He is one of several evolution material monsters whose skills will get rotated in a regular basis., or if you are skilful enough to get Myr from her Descended Dungeon, a full-light double-Myr team^note 14x damage & 50%^2 defense multiplier, which can tear through Hades' defense with the sheer damage and kill him in one hit.
  • For collaborations, AO!The Joker is quite a brutal boss, even on his Master level. Very high HP, has so many poison skills and has really hard hitting attacks.
  • Zeus in "King of the Gods" and Endless Corridors is also this, considering his HP is even higher than that of his (now closed^note It's actually been made permanently available as "Technical Dungeon" under the name "The Omniscient, Omnipotent Creator") descend dungeon and that he hits for 25 thousand HP per turn. A lot of super high level teams nowadays can make short work of him.
  • Z has the boss battle of the final floor of the Epimenides Labyrinth in the Avalon region, which pits you against two Anubisises. Both of them give you 4-5 turns before they act, and if you run out of turns, one of them will use Banish to Hell to inflict 44444 damage, which at this point is an instant Game Over. If you're lucky, Enigma will simply use a Forced Heart Drop, but if both Anubisises are still alive at this point, it may as well not matter.
  • Vishnu in the Challenge Dungeons has several million HP, absorbs single hits that cross the million HP threshold, and hits incredibly hard to boot.
• That One Level:
  • The first incarnation of Blackgate Prison had only The Joker boss floor mentioned above, which on Master and Legend left many players in tears. The current version is a lot more manageable since you have time to charge skills before him and Power Creep has caught up.
  • For a more "disliked" example, those cost restricted conditional dungeons. Players absolutely HATE those descends for both being cost restrictive and the prize not being worth it (Draggie and Gaia being star examples). Xuanzang, although hated for being another cost-restrictive dungeon, is actually pretty decent for a boss drop, at least before his dungeon was moved to a regular Descended Dungeon.
    • Related to that are Type restricted dungeons. As to why both are disliked - these types of dungeons impose arbitrary limits on what kind of monsters can be used. Since players often focus on a leveling one or two teams (often based on a type or color), it's very possible that a player simply doesn't have a team that can pass a restricted dungeon. And it's a lot of work to create and level up a team just to pass a single dungeon. Both of these condition variations are largely removed in the JP version and replaced with giving certain types of monster 1.5× to all stats.
  • Any Heartless / "No Heal Orbs" / No RCV dungeon, where heart orbs never appear. Not only does it make healing difficult, it cripples "Heart Cross" teams with insufficient leader skill level upgrades. You'd better take your highest HP monsters and hope you can scrape by, bring out monsters with Auto Heal Awakened Skill^note such as Light Izanami, which has 3 Auto Heal Awakened Skills by default (or manually attach them with Potential Awakening Tamadras, up to 5 slots), or having monsters that can switch out or spawn heart orbs.
  • For Z, the Master Level in Dragon Colosseum: Fixed Challenge. While "Fixed" challenges are supposed to test orb manipulation skills, this can quickly turn into a test of patience. In order to get an S or S+ ranking^note at least 22,500 points for the former; 25k+ points for the latter, you need to both clear the whole dungeon with 3:20 or more left on the clock and average at least 5 combos. Which doesn't sound so bad, except you're stuck using a double Ra team, so it's either 12.25× ATK multiplier or nothing. Thanks to the Random Number God, you may not get to start the dungeon with a board with all five match-able elements. One mismatch can royally screw up your score.
  • Also in Z (that is, if you actually manage to get the Relic to access the stage), the Hellgate Relic counts as this. First, you battle two Zabgons and one Berserker. Second, you face a Berserk and a special Highlander. What's so special about this Highlander, you may ask? Well, if you weren’t able to finish it off in one hit and instead leave it at 25% HP or lower, it will use Banish to Hell, which it isn’t even SUPPOSED to use in normal circumstances, and One-Hit Kill you. And after you finally make it past everything in the stage, you come up to the Hellgate... and its defense is so high that it’s nigh-impossible to defeat by regular means! Every turn in a nutshell is just, "1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1". So how does one defeat Hellgate? It’s a Wood-attribute enemy, so you would think to bring in a full Fire-attribute team to counteract its defense... but then the Zabgons will just spam Fire Attribute Bind - L like no tomorrow. Try to take down the Zabgons first? The Berserker will deal heavy damage if you give it the chance to attack. What’s that? You want to use the Skill Meter to defeat Hellgate? The Berserk is always happy to decrease your skill points with Mega Skill Break. Even for an endgame level, this level is HARD.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Myr's English name change. For over five years Dragonbound Miru (in JP) was localized to Myr for English-speaking audiences. That got changed on June 22, 2021 to Mille. Supposedly, that change was because the card was originally named after the Swiss watch brand "Richard Mille", which would actually fit the gimmick better. Many people prefer the old localization name. However, the katakana for the card(s) is ミル, which is pronounced mi-ru, and Myr is agreed to be the best localization. If GungHo JP wanted it to be named after Richard Mille in the first place, they should have used ミーレ which is pronounced "mii-le", which is closer to the French pronounciation.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Playable character wise at least in relation to Z. At the main story's finale, you discover that Syrup is actually the Divine Skydragon of Life, and he challenges Enigma's true form alongside you. So, for that moment and from the rest of the game, you'd expect Zerclea to be unlocked for your team, right? Wrong, he's never accessible in the main game, and restricted entirely to a DLC relic which nowadays is no longer obtainable by legal means. So, in case you wanted to have Syrup feel like a closer member of your party and have him help you in battle, tough luck.
  • Many of the higher-tier monsters in the Super Mario Bros. Edition are simply classic Mario mooks paired with different Mario mooks. For example, one would think that Whomps and Bob-ombs could evolve into Whomp King or King Bob-omb. Nope! Instead there's Whomp & Boos and Bob-omb & Lakitu respectively.
• Underused Game Mechanic: An unusual platform-wide example of this: The game does not hide the device's status bar (which includes important info like time, battery remaining, and (on Android) notifications), something that is very rarely seen in mobile games.
• Unexpected Character: In the Devil May Cry collab event, all of major players came swinging in including Dante, Vergil, Nero, Trish, Lady, Lucia, Matier, Nico, Kyrie-wait a minute, Lucia and Matier?! That's right, the two major figures from the infamous Devil May Cry 2 made it in.
• Woolseyism: "Awoken Dancing Queen, Hera-Ur" is actually one. Her Japanese name is "Awoken Hera-Ur ↑↑" (the double up arrows are apparently read "Age Age"), which doesn't translate at all for cultural reasons. So GungHo decided to name her after a popular song from a certain Swedish quartet.

---