YMMV / Rabi-Ribi

• Breather Boss:
  • The Chapter 7 endboss in System Interior II is surprisingly easy, considering the Platform Hell that comes before it. It's not an actual character with a level or even a Life Meter, just a network security system that throws some pretty uninteresting bullet patterns at Erina while she floats up and down constantly; all you have to do is Hold the Line until the "boss" "fight" ends. It can still get you killed on higher difficulties if you're not careful, but it's certainly easier and shorter than the previous two bosses before it — one of which copies your Badge abilities and the other of which has six lifebars that are each about as long as those of other bosses — and especially the True Final Boss that comes in the next chapter.
  • Lilith's second phase is surprisingly forgiving, especially compared to her first phase, for various reasons. First, you need to initiate her second phase yourself, which means you can save your game and warp back to Rabi Ribi Town to buy more items before fighting her. Secondly, you fight her in an air battle reminiscent of a shoot-em-up game which gives you free movement range. Thirdly, Erina's hitbox is noticeably smaller, with most bullets going right through her. Finally, you get Lilli and Pixie supporting you with bullets that home in on Lilith, which means you don't even need to properly position yourself to damage her (although lining her up with your own charged shots will greatly increase the damage dealt to her).
• Demonic Spiders:
  • The nerds/otaku in the Warp Destination/Outside World. They respawn infinitely, are hard to stagger, have flash attacks that come out instantly and are hard to dodge with their wide areas of effect, deal high damage, are one of the few enemies that never give health when defeated, and are ugly as hell. And then, after their encounter, you have to deal with Illusion Alius, who may or may not gain a huge advantage on you depending on how much damage you took from the aforementioned enemies.
  • While enemies with Status Infliction Attacks are annoying in general, the green/purple UPRPRC members who can inflict Poison are extremely dangerous due to how fast the debuff in question drains your HP at, especially on higher difficulties. On Hard and above, taking a single blow from one without the Tough Skin badge equipped will basically eat up your entire health bar, leaving you prey for other enemies if you can't heal yourself.
  • The red flowers commonly found in the Volcanic Caverns. Unlike their yellow and blue cousins, they use hitscan horizontal laser beams that deal abnormally high damage for a basic enemy, to the point where they can tear off about half your health bar on higher difficulties and outright one-tap if you don't have HP upgrades. Fortunately, they die very quickly, but they also tend to be placed in locations where they have a line of fire with you and you don't have one with them, and said line of fire will usually aimed specifically to catch you off guard, like aimed right at a room's entrance.
  • The green flowers in the Windy Ravine fire a randomized spray of arcing, wall-clipping bullets upwards, which are hard to avoid due to their sheer density and the wind currents in the level. Since it's an endgame area, they also have lots of health and damage, making them extremely difficult to handle without spamming invincibility frames.
• Difficulty Spike: The game is already Nintendo Hard to begin with, but the difficulty curve sharpens starting on Chapter 6 with the post-game dungeons, with enemies that can kill you in three or even two hits depending on your current difficulty level. Having to beat four of the hardest bosses in a row in the last level while sometimes not even getting any kind of healing in between (& never getting to restock your items) is so hard that you'd probably have a better chance starting a new file on the next difficulty & getting stuck at the same part than you would of beating that part on whatever difficulty you're already on.
• Funny Moments: Erina's first encounter with Ribbon results in a boss fight due to Ribbon being afraid that Erina wants to eat her. The Optional Boss encounter with Ribbon starts with the exact same premise, only this time after winning, it's implied that Erina actually does eat Ribbon.
• Game-Breaker:
  • From Chapter 6 onward, shelling out 25k EN to Miru will get you every temporary buff in the game. Do this right before a boss fight and steamroll right over them...unless you're on Hell/BEX or doing some of the strongest endgame encounters, upon which they become almost required.
  • The Erina and Ribbon badges, which are only gotten after beating the True Final Boss in Chapter 8. On top of providing a wide array of general buffs (10% damage reduction and +20% item effectiveness for the former, and -15% MP usage for the latter), one lets you continue Erina's hammer twirl for as long as you have SP to fuel it, and another lets you spam charge attacks after only one charge as long as you have mana. Both are incredibly powerful techniques (the first one is especially good for stunlocking enemies while Ribbon boost attacks them.)
  • The Cyber Flower, which continues Boost Attacks until both your Boost and Mana meters are drained. Pick up enough mana upgrades, and this means you can trigger a Boost Attack that lasts even longer than a Max Boost Attack with only half the Boost Meter. Naturally, you only get this in Chapter 7, just before the True Final Boss. If you do some difficult sequence breaking in the System Interior, you can actually get this as early as Chapter 3.
  • The Chaos Rod's boost effect has Ribbon fire rapid shotgun-spreads of exploding orbs that Curse. Normally pretty standard, but planting Ribbon right on top of an enemy and activating the Boost deals an obscene amount of damage, ripping through most bosses in seconds. It helps that a lot of bosses love to hover at just the right height for Ribbon to sit on top of while using said Boost if you position yourself right under them before you do it. Rita and Saya are two examples of bosses who are particularly vulnerable to this, and it's particularly useful to skip through Pillar's Desperation Attack, or even skip most of SP Rita's fight if done perfectly.
  • If you take the time to do some exploration and sequence breaking, Rainbow magic powered up with enough Easter Eggs has the potential to turn many bosses into a joke. At the cost of your entire MP bar and an inconsequential amount of EN considering the ease with which it can be farmed, you can fire a shot that deals more damage in one hit than most other shots can do in a full barrage, which also heals you for a decent amount of health to boot. Combined with a fully upgraded Sliding Powder (causes the next strong attack after sliding into an enemy to deal double damage) and Green Magic (charges MP when landing basic shots), you can repeatedly spam attacks that deal well upwards of 10k damage each, tearing entire chunks off of even SP bosses while vaporizing almost anything else. In fact, it's a common conjecture that Irisu in Wonderland, one of the strongest SP bosses, steals most of your EN at the start of the fight specifically to make it harder to just repeatedly nuke her with the Rainbow Egg.
  • In the Artbook DLC, it becomes very clear why Cicini was never implemented as a playable character in the main game. Since her attacks don't use SP, she can spam them indefinitely. And while she's immobile while firing her gun on the ground, her "double jump" is her jetpack, which can fly indefinitely, and she fires homing lasers in the air. 90% of her Boss Rush can be cleared simply by staying in the air and spamming homing beams. There are very few attacks that can legitimately hit her up there, and those that can can often be avoided with the Bunny Amulet. It's only when facing Rumi or Irisu that Cicini runs up against an actual challenge.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Most flying enemies fall into this category due to the difficulty of hitting them, especially if you don't have any of the aerial mobility upgrades or a homing/wide magic type yet. While the bee enemies in the starting areas at least dive-bomb you to give you a chance to fight back, the ranged card-symbol fairies and especially the blue bees in the Icy Summit (who hover at the very top of the screen and rain fire on you) aren't as kind.
    • Worse still are the flying enemies that use homing attacks, since their shots tend to have scary tracking abilities and unlike in boss fights, the terrain may not permit you to dodge them effectively.
• Goddamned Boss
  • The second fight with Ashuri in the Golden Riverbank certainly counts. Most bosses gain a Defense Boost+ buff that makes them Nigh-Invulnerable when they reach a certain threshold of health. Once they reach this point, they go into their signature attack, and the Defense Boost+ buff vanishes. Ashuri does not roll this way. She gets the Defense Boost+ and then stalls as long as she can before doing her signature attack, and then keeps the buff until the entire attack is complete. Basically, she spends a very long time with the Defense Boost+ buff on top of her being incredibly mobile and jumpy before she gets the buff, making the entire fight a gigantic time waster. On higher difficulty levels, the first fight with Ashuri also counts for the same reasons. This is lampshaded in the achievement for getting Saya first, which itself calls Ashuri a time-waster.
  • The twin bears Nieve and Nixie. Both bosses have the same issues. They can slap you with the freeze debuff, which deals damage to you if you use your hammer or other SP using attacks. Most annoyingly, however, they jump around a lot, making it difficult to hit with ranged attacks as well as maximizing the chance of them randomly slapping you for contact damage if you haven't gotten Pure Love yet. Also, they use their attacks at a height that doesn't stop the combo meter, unlike most bosses, which requires you to use the Cashback badge or seeking attacks to maintain a combo, or risk jumping up and getting hit by their attacks.
  • Seana in her first fight is just as jumpy as Ashuri or the bear twins, and has the added advantage of being fought underwater where your movement is impaired, or outright neutered if you haven't picked up the Water Orb first. It doesn't help that she can often shrug off hitstun if attacked when moving, spends most of her time floating and thus hard to hit, and uses attacks that make it so you have to maneuver while floating, leaving you at the mercy of the water physics.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Astral Chain would later introduce another Final Boss named Noah with multiple forms, whose defeat is required to unlock a slew of Post-End Game Content, and who is encountered on the roof of a hospital.
• Les Yay: Now has its own page.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: The game is praised as a brutally difficult Metroidvania with nearly unmatched nonlinearity and fleshed-out combat, while the story is generally considered an Excuse Plot at best and the cutscenes are sometimes preferred to be skipped altogether, particularly for those uncomfortable with the extreme amounts of Fanservice and Stripperiffic characters the game repeatedly shows front and center.
• Porting Disaster: The Vita version is clearly a watered down port with some problems. First off, many graphical effects were removed, such as the dialogue borders and the zoom-in effect from boss fights. The game no longer shows the map when you're standing below a save point. Stutter is present during dialogue and sometimes during gameplay. Some graphical effects can also cause slowdown, such as when the Stone Stele is used and every time the screen is covered in a white flash. And for some unknown reason, the developers decided to apply a high quality filter in this port, causing the game to look ugly and graphically inconsistent in the process. This is very noticeable in areas full of characters and enemies, such as Rabi Ribi Beach, where some characters pop out while others looks blurry. And there's no way to change back to the original style in this port.
• Scrappy Weapon:
  • The Chaos Rod's Charged Attack releases speed-reducing circles upon hitting an enemy, and unfortunately they do not have Damage Discrimination, leaving you likely to get killed. The attack seldom sees use outside of specific cheese strategies (as the self-slow also extends invulnerability frames), or against Glitched Syaro Returns, who in her purple mode only takes damage from the Chaos Rod.
  • The Hammer Roll item is tricky to use and is likely to be used by mistake, potentially sending you rolling to your doom since it can't be cancelled without an Amulet charge. However, a patch gave Hammer Roll a new combo with the rising attack that lets you cancel it, gives Erina a boost in her MP and SP recovery and allowed it (like other items) to be turned off.
  • The Nature Orb increases damage reduction when below a certain HP percentage...except that both the threshold and the reduction are on the low side even when upgraded, which makes it not very noticeable in practice. The real problem is that although it doesn't affect your combat that much, it will still cause bosses to level up.
  • Zig-zagged with the Egg Launcher. It appears right next to the standard projectile weapon on the list, and it's at the edge so it's harder to accidentally switch to it...except that its icon looks similar to the shot type beside it. On one hand, it's really strong if you have all the Easter Eggs, and is a staple in many of the strategies for the hardest bosses in the game - on the other, if you fire one charged shot with it, you lose all of your MP. Even after a patch allowed the player to turn off items, this still can't be removed from the Ring Menu because it does not occupy space in the item list.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • In certain menus (such as the save game menu and the pause menu), pressing the Boost button not only un-pauses the game, it immediately triggers a Boost if one is ready, yet in some other menus (such as Miriam's shop), pressing Boost simply exits the menu without using a Boost. This is mostly a problem for those using XInput controllers (such as Xbox 360 and Xbox One controllers) with the default control scheme, as someone who uses such a controller may be used to the idea of "A confirms and B cancels or goes back" in menus, press the B button (also the Boost button) to exit a menu, only to see Ribbon throw away half of the Boost meter or all of it. On the plus side, if you can unlearn pressing B to exit the pause menu, pressing Start will un-pause with no side effect. This is even more of a non-issue in the Switch version, where B can still be used to exit the menu but will not trigger a Boost since Boost is mapped to A by default (due to Nintendo's reversed face button naming convention).
  • The Numb debuff is considered one of the most infuriating debuffs to be inflicted with due to it completely stalling your movement for a split second at frequent intervals, essentially the biggest movement impairment outside of being outright Stunned (which is used for a single attack in the game). It doesn't seem like much, but it basically takes away all but the bare minimum of control you have over Erina while being borderline random with how it paralyzes you, often leading to you taking easily avoidable hits, which is why it's a godsend that it rarely appears in any boss fights. The Top Form badge lets you No-Sell it, but it costs a whopping 8 PP to equip, which is often better used on other badges with greater effects. The Unstable debuff used by Alius IV, which causes random changes in player speed, is reviled for a similar reason.
• Spiritual Adaptation:
  • This is the closest thing to a 2D NieR, although significantly Lighter and Softer than NieR.
  • The all-female cast, Bullet Hell elements (complete with special Desperation Attacks,) and similar character designs (the most obvious one being Erina looking like Reisen with different-colored eyes and a Playboy Bunny outfit) have led to more than a few observations that this is basically a Touhou Project fangame with the Serial Numbers Filed Off.
• Surprise Difficulty: On the surface, it's a cute platform game with Little Bit Beastly folk and some Fanservice. Should be an easy game, right? Well, at least on any difficulty above Casual, no. Welcome to Platform Bullet Hell!
• Suspiciously Similar Song: "The Truth Never Spoken", the theme for Noah phase 1 and Miriam, has a striking resemblence to "L2 (ver. B)", the way they build up in particular (Lonely Piano Piece before turning into trance). Given that the former track is composed by 3R2, who also produces tracks for Rhythm Games including Cytus, this may not be entirely coincidental.
• That One Achievement:
  • Any of the Dodge Master achievements (which require you to pull off a No-Damage Run against each of the non-DLC bosses, which have to be at least level 50 for them to count), but especially Noah, since you have to kill her first and second form without getting hit twice, Rumi due to her six health bars and Attack Reflector, and Irisu due to the sheer length of her fight along with it having fixed phases. Notably Noah+, Noah's final form which has its own seperate Dodge Master achievement, is relatively easier. Worse, the bosses' attacks are not always telegraphed well and are semi-randomized in order^note ...outside of Miru, Miriam, and Irisu, who use entirely fixed patterns, meaning that the achievement borders on being luck-based at times. The easier fights can sometimes be bursted down before they have a chance to fight back using a Glass Cannon build,^note They'll still have a good amount of health from the Level Scaling, since they'll be level 50 at minimum and you'll almost certainly be refighting them in the postgame with a bunch of upgrades under your belt; however, earlier bosses still tend to have lower HP, not to mention a full DPS build is often still capable of outpacing the scaling. but not so much for the later ones. Fortunately, the game will give you some leeway against bosses starting from Miru onward, allowing you to take at least 1-3 hits before failing the achievement. But then again...
  • "Were those instant kill?", which requires you to beat the entire game without touching a single spike. There are a lot of spikes in the game, and many of them are located in very painful locations. Worse still, the achievement counts postgame, so you'll have to do System Interior II and the Floating Library essentially flawlessly.
  • "Actually, Erina is the one who reaches the eggs...", an achievement for getting 20 Easter Eggs with 0% items. Not only are most the Easter Eggs completely inaccessible in 0%, but the few that aren't are often so obscure and/or difficult to obtain without any items that they're ridiculously hard to pull off even if you look up a guide.
  • In general, the achievements for 100% item completion and Easter Eggs can be this since a lot of them are incredibly well hidden, with a few being nigh impossible to find without the use of a guide. This is especially true for the Order DLC, as some of the Windy Ravine eggs and the Wind Blessing are just as well hidden and border on Permanently Missable Content since they're only available during the boss fight and/or Escape Sequence before becoming totally inaccessible afterwards. At that point, the only way to get them is to completely clear the DLC, then defeat Irisu to reset it and redo the whole map.
  • "Ms. Fox cannot air dash". On paper, it seems simple, with it just requiring you to get the Air Dash upgrade before ever fighting Kotri. What the game doesn't tell you is that the only way to skip past Blue Kotri and make it to the Air Dash is through the Halloween Graveyard, and the nature of the achievement means you'll probably have to do it underleveled as avoiding Kotri entirely heavily restricts how much of the map you can explore. Acquiring the maximum number of movement upgrades possible with the given restrictions and knowing hidden techs is key.
  • A number of the achievments that have to do with the BNA Special bosses^note SP Rita, Syaro, Miru, and Irisu are particularly grueling:
    • Taking them down at any level is no easy feat, but there are achievements that need you to defeat each of them at Level 500 or above. At this level, every one of their attacks will deal high damage regardless of difficulty, and they'll have enough health to drag on the fight for well over 15 minutes each, maximizing your chances of slipping up and taking massive damage for your mistake.
    • "Wait for the backdoor...", which requires you to defeat SP Syaro with only blue (and rainbow) magic equipped. Syaro's entire gimmick is that she's a Barrier Change Boss who is only vulnerable to one type of magic at any given time, with her vulnerabilities cycling throughout the fight. With only 1-2 types of magic, it effectively makes her invincible the vast majority of the fight, forcing you to survive her attacks while squeezing in as much damage as you can during the tiny windows of vulnerability Syaro gives you.
    • "Another Layer of Nightmare", which requires you to defeat SP Miru on Extreme+. Not only is it not even explained how to fight a BNA boss on Extreme+^note Using a Cocoa bomb while the game is asking you to choose left (normal) or right (hard) difficulty will set the difficulty to Extreme, and doing this just as the difficulty is "locked in" at the end of the sequence will trigger Extreme+), while triggering an Extreme BNA boss is required for another achievement (which does give you a vague hint on how to do it), Another Layer of Nightmare actually needs you to beat SP Miru in this state, who is already considered That One Boss even without the inflated stats and stacking buffs Extreme+ gives her.
• That One Attack:
  • Any of the Illusion Aliuses' hammer combos, as detailed below.
  • Illusion Alius III's counterattack. She has a vicious counter attack that can take out half your health at the very least if you melee attack her while she has "..." above her head. The problem is that her battle is very fast paced so that it's unlikely you'll noticed it, and she can do this even if she's stunned. A very careful approach and hit-and-run tactic is needed to avoid her counterattack.
  • Although most of her attacks are fairly intuitive, Rita has a particularly dangerous attack where she summons two pillars of light that move back and forth in tandem, periodically switching between harmful and harmless states. The beams move very quickly (making them hard to track) and have slightly awkward timings with when they're safe to pass through, giving you only one real way of dodging them without invincibility frames. ^note Starting further from her when the beams first appear, then moving close to her when they fade for the first time, and moving a bit further out each time they change direction. This is specific enough that it's usually more worth it to try and i-frame through it, but Rita is usually fought at a stage of the game where you don't have your Bunny Amulet yet, forcing you to learn the motions or eat nearly unavoidable damage. To add insult to injury, she gains bonus defense during the attack.
  • About halfway through her fight, Cicini will start using an attack where she flashes either red or blue before jumping and spinning a laser beam around her. The attack hits everywhere around her except in front of her (red) or behind her (blue), but the game gives very little indication of what to do to avoid it until you've gotten hit by it or outright died to it enough times to get a closer look at the beam itself. Even once you figure out the trick, your vertical mobility is still fairly limited at the point in time that you're recommended to take on Cicini, meaning it's fairly easy to mistime the jump and get hit anyways.
  • One of Lilith's attacks has her throwing hearts at Erina that have strong tracking capabilities after flying for a while. If any of them hit Erina, they stun her. Lilith then walks up to Erina and the screen fades to black while Lilith does...something to her, hitting her three times for 69 points of damage each. What makes it That One Attack is that it is one of the very few attacks in the entire game that isn't scaled to your level; it will do 207 damage total to you no matter what. In a low percent run, save for the fact that it can't actually kill you, this essentially puts your attempt to an instant halt unless you somehow don't get hit for the rest of the fight.
  • Irisu's opening attack is a sequential barrage of screen-spanning shockwaves that inflict some absolutely brutal debuffs, the last of which is Instant Death (see below). It's hard to see coming unless you know about it beforehand, cannot be dodged, will basically result in an instant loss if you get hit, and essentially needs you to fire all of your Bunny Amulet charges and possibly a well-timed Super Carrot to avoid all of them. On Normal and above, the first wave will inflict Mortality, which removes your Mercy Invincibility and guarantees that all the other rings will hit you too, Bunny Amulet be damned.
  • Irisu and some of the SP bosses can also put a debuff on you called Instant Death, which causes the next attack that hits you to do 4444 damage. There are a few ways to get it, the most notable way being to do over 300 damage with one hit when she has the "300 Revenge" status. Did you accidentally Bunny Strike her? Cue the super-slowed-down music!
  • The Superboss Poor Cat Cocoa inflicts Mortality whenever she hits you, which strips you of all your invincibility frames for its duration - in a game where using i-frames is one of the main ways of avoiding attacks. It thankfully lowers the damage of incoming attacks to 15, but when you're getting hit once per frame, direct contact from nearly anything will still tear off half your health at the very least. This debuff is the reason why Poor Cat Cocoa is considered That One Boss, especially since unlike the (thankfully scarce) other sources of Mortality, Cocoa inflicts it on every attack rather than a specific, notable attack.
• That One Boss: Most of the bosses in this game are much harder than the platforming segments, but to name some outstanding examples:
  • Illusion Alius II comes soon after Chapter 3 begins and is hard primarily for two reasons: 1. It comes immediately after a Mini-Boss battle with the two flash-shooting nerds followed by a squad of more nerds who have less HP but are just as deadly, and with no heal points during this entire ordeal. 2. Unlike its previous iteration, this boss now has access to some of your more advanced techniques, including the hammer combo. In a game where most of the bosses like to hang back and fire bullet hell at you, this chick just straight up bum rushes you with obscenely damaging melee strikes, and can combo you with her hammer for an obscene amount of damage (at least 200 HP if it all connects; you'll probably have around 250-300 HP depending on how many HP upgrades you've bought and found, for reference), which also stunlocks you and is liable to be a One-Hit Kill on the higher difficulties. Making matters worse is that she breaks out of staggers very quickly and her attacks all come out extremely quickly with effectively no telegraph, forcing you to play safe or risk Illusion Alius breaking out of your attack chain and immediately tearing you a new one; in particular is her version of the Air Dash, which is lightning fast, used multiple times in succession, spans the length of the screen, and has an annoying tendency to be used out of nowhere. You'll either need to be very good at not getting hit, or have to reload to your last non-automatic save and do the whole barrage again without getting hit so as to maximize HP for this fight. Did we mention that every single one of her attacks slaps you with a debuff that reduces your attack and defense? After you beat her, you'll have to fight the mirror Ribbon, and it really says something when that's the much easier half of the battle.
  • Illusion Alius III, who comes soon after Chapter 4 begins, also qualifies for much the same reasons; she has all all of the same tactics the previous version used, but now has higher stats and an even bigger moveset to mess with you, including her own version of the Bunny Amulet and a Counter-Attack that can instantly end you if you attack her at a bad time. To make matters worse, before you can even get to her you have to deal with a much longer sequence full of nerds, including two Mini-Boss battles with groups of them. Fortunately you do get to heal some health in the interim during the pre-fight with Noah, but it isn't much, and it relies on you not getting hit by her too! Have fun!
  • Illusion Alius IV, the last boss encountered during the Boss Rush in Forgotten Cave II. While she doesn't gain any extra moves and you have a full arsenal by now, she has another trick up on her sleeve. Her attacks can cause Unstable, a status effect that will increase or decrease your speed at complete random, making controlling yourself almost nigh-impossible. She will then take advantage of your current state to hit you with her hammer for around 500+ damage (While your HP should be at around 1000).
  • Pandora from the Golden Pyramid deserves a mention for using a wide variety of attacks that generally require some more unorthodox thinking to get around (especially her super attack, which is almost entirely memorization-based) , as well as spending most of her battle in the air, forcing you to rely mostly on Ribbon's ranged attacks. The real key to beating her is micromanaging your SP meter so that you can hit her with Erina's hammer combos during the brief time she's on the ground. Add in the fact that she's the boss of That One Level, and that leaving her chamber to grab more items will force you to retrace your steps through a long corridor filled with searchlights you have to wait to pass over on the return journey, and you have the perfect recipe for That One Boss. Not to mention, there's an Illusion Pandora in the bottom of the Pyramid that guards the Chaos Rod, who has higher stats, even more unconventionally difficult attacks, and the ability to put up a chaos field at low health that slows you to a crawl when you're anywhere within a generous radius, making it borderline impossible to finish her with melee attacks. Good luck fighting her, you will need it.
  • Syaro is encountered in the System Interior unlocked in Chapter 3, and like all other enemies in the area, she is immune to melee attacks, forcing you to use your weaker ranged attacks or specials to damage her. On the offense, she packs three types of strongly homing missiles that can take a while to get used to, a surprisingly fast Wave-Motion Gun that can catch you off guard if you're not watching her carefully, and several attacks where she outright goes invincible to bombard you.
  • Miru for the exact opposite reason as Syaro. You're without Ribbon for this fight, meaning you'll have to resort to melee attacks. And she is not a boss you want to stay close to. She also has a nice little buff throughout the fight called "Bunny Lover", which cuts all damage you do to her in half. While she does get a defense debuff after a certain point in the fight, she also gets damage buffs as you deal damage to her, and she's already quite powerful to begin with.
    • In a Minimalist Run, you can simply rely on Ribbon for damage for most bosses, and the Ribbon fight herself is literally an automatic win (her HP will automatically deplete). No such mercy when fighting Miru exists, however, as the fight still disables Ribbon's attacks and offers absolutely nothing to make the fight easier (other than a low boss level in the standard level-up mode that applies to all other bosses) on a no-hammer run. Hope you have a lot of patience and proficiency with Super Carrots! And if you're fighting with no items, you're in even more trouble because your only method of attack is the Bunny Amulet, which is also your only method of defense. ^note Fortunately, Miru takes noticably increased damage from the Bunny Amulet in a no items run compared to the other bosses, especially if you hit her during the first instant of the fight when her Damage Reduction isn't active yet.
  • Miriam is the only boss that actively punishes you for completion (beyond the normal Level Scaling), as nearly every power-up you own adds to her list of very difficult moves, and she copies the effects of nearly every badge you have equipped, letting her buff herself to high heaven if you came into the fight with your strongest badge setup; defensive badges in particular will let her stack obscene amounts of damage reduction and HP buffs (especially Armored, which makes her Immune to Flinching), greatly prolonging an already dangerous fight. Even carrying food (besides the Golden Carrot), Cocoa Bombs and EN is a bad idea, because she can even use those against you.^note She can consume food items to heal for moderate amounts of HP and use Cocoa Bombs as a screen-wide nuke, and her Soul Heart attack steals all your EN and lasts longer the more that was stolen.
  • Irisu not only loves to spam you with lethal debuffs from the get-go (see That One Attack above), but will also gradually buff herself to high heaven with Damage Reduction, Life Drain, Mana Drain, and even an Attack Reflector as she loses health. Combined with her titanic health bar, lack of clear openings to deal damage, and the fact that she's invulnerable for a good portion of the fight, she'll easily drag out the fight for a significant amount of time, turning her into a Marathon Boss. And considering that her attacks are all very complex and somewhat unorthodox, are some of the hardest attacks to avoid in the game, and all deal massive amounts of damage, it's not a fight you want to drag out. Worse still, when you take her out, she'll heal to full and force you into a brutal endurance phase where you have to dodge for several minutes as she slowly burns her health away to fire a series of incredibly dense patterns that can easily overwhelm a player, especially if they weren't expecting it. Die at any point during this fight, and it's all the way back to the start with you.
  • While Saya is rather easy to beat, her 'Pillar' form in Is The Order a DLC is not. Her wind based attacks are much harder to dodge, come out far faster, and hit much harder, on top of many of them requiring unorthodox thinking and use of the 4 pillars on the map to avoid. On top of this, her Limit Break lasts much longer, and trying to use recovery items during the fight just pisses her off. She is basically a Special boss, but unlike them, she's mandatory to beat to advance the story.
  • The fairy duo Lilli and Pixie from the Order DLC are a Dual Boss notable for spending the whole fight airborne, forcing you to use your weaker magic attacks or risk getting hit to sneak in a few aerial attacks or Super Carrots. Unlike Syaro and Miru (two bosses who harshly restrict your offensive options) or even Noah's second form (who is the only other completely airborne boss), they each have a massive amount of HP and no moments where their defenses are dropped, meaning that they won't go down quickly no matter how you face them. Offensively, they use some of the most complex coordinated Bullet Hell in the entire game, a lot of which inflicts high damage and multiple painful debuffs, as well as certain aerial phases forcing you to manage awkward airborne movement while still dodging. Put all of this together, and you get an incredibly painful encounter that is both highly unforgiving and drags out for an absurdly long time. The only saving grace of the fight is that they'll periodically spawn enemies that heal you when you beat them, although they themselves are also liable to do some cheap damage if you aren't careful.
• That One Level:
  • The Natural Aquarium. To start, it's entirely underwater, meaning that without the Water Orb, you'll move like you're in syrup. Even with the orb, gravity is still greatly reduced underwater, making you liable to be hit by attacks and enemies that wouldn't be a problem on land. Furthermore, several areas are dark areas, thus necessitating the Light Orb. And finally, your biggest threat here isn't the enemies, but the Spikes of Doom and wandering blue orbs that deal enough damage for a One-Hit Kill if you haven't been grinding HP Up items.
  • Chapter 5 requires you to fight two bosses in a row, Miru and Noah, and the latter has three forms. Thankfully the game provides auto-saves and healing between bosses and forms, but your buffs are certain to run out before the first boss is defeated, and you'll likely be short on or out of items for the second.
  • The Hall Of Memories, which forces you into a lengthy gauntlet consisting of a mishmash of every level in the game, alongside degraded versions of every boss in the game. Even with a fraction of their moveset and lower HP, every illusion boss is still absolutely brutal due to the sheer amount of damage they do in this level (easily reaching triple digits even on moderate difficulties), and the fact that they're surrounded by rank and file enemies that also do a ton of damage makes the boss patterns harder to dodge. In fact, it's outright recommended to just try and skip past them to take minimal damage.
  • The Floating Library is a Platform Hell absolutely riddled with spikes that deal One-Hit Kill amounts of damage, and can only be navigated through a series of difficult platforming challenges that require incredibly precise jumping and mastery of every movement tech in your arsenal to complete - and whatever rooms that don't have platforming will be staffed by crystal enemies that fire volumes of bullets and deal massive damage. To make matters worse, there are several items hidden here that require you to brave even tougher platforming than the rest of the Library. And the kicker is that since the Library is the last area before Irisu (and unlike the areas preceding every other postgame boss, there's no Warp Stone right before the boss), there's a fair chance that whatever buffs and/or items you tried to bring will expire by the time you get through the spike mazes unless you've mastered the layout, and even then it'll burn off precious time from their duration. And woe betide you if you're doing a no spike run.
  • The Windy Ravine in the DLC-exclusive Chapter 9 is a veritable maze of obstacles and enemies that are very difficult to avoid and deal extremely large amounts of damage. The true problem, however, lies in its wind gimmick that significantly impairs your horizontal movement, making it incredibly easy to get blown into obstacles or outright launched off the map. In addition to the difficult movement challenges present, there are two tough-as-nails mandatory bosses residing in the area, Pillar Saya and the Fairy Duo, followed by an Escape Sequence which not only changes the layout and enforces a time limit that gets incredibly tight on higher difficulties, but intensifies the wind.
  • The deepest part of the Hall of Memories in the final chapter of Is the Order a DLC?. It's bad enough that the area is loaded with spikes, lasers, and traps, some of which require some unconventional thinking to get around. But the worst part of the area is that you lose the Bunny Amulet as soon as you enter! And you won't get it back until just before you reach the final boss, forcing you to get through all the puzzles and the miniboss encounters following them without the help of the Amulet's invincibility.
• Ugly Cute: The Meaty Bones in Plurkwood, headless dogs that shoot out bones from their open necks. They also hop around in the most surprisingly adorable way, and when brought to town, Keke Bunny keeps a small group of them in tow as pets.
• The Woobie: Irisu. Turns out that all she ever wanted in life was a bunny to care for, which set the whole plot with the UPRPRC in motion. Instead, she indirectly unleashed a whole slew of violence on the otherwise peaceful Rabi-Rabi Island when her members inevitably went out of control. During their battle, Erina feels sorry for her, but the two make up afterward.
  • Aruraune. She went out to the more secluded area of the Starting Forest to kill herself, only to get transformed into a plant girl and rooted to the spot so she can't leave, causing her to become desperately lonely enough to cry out that she's being attacked in the hope of somebody coming to see her.
  • As funny as Saya's utter lack of presence is, it's hard not to feel sorry for her with how desperate she is to be noticed.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The UPRPRC headquarters, despite being the home base of the antagonistic faction, receives a surprisingly negligible amount of attention. Erina visits it once in the main game, where it serves to introduce a few new enemy types, give a few hidden items, and provide a path to get the Rabi Slippers...and you never have a reason to visit it again, further watering down what little relevance the UPRPRC has to the plot. ^note The player can even skip it entirely if they use hidden techs to grab the Slippers from outside the base. Erina does visit it again in the postgame to meet Irisu when she reveals herself as the UPRPRC founder, but no new gameplay sections are introduced, with the entire sequence being more of a glorified cutscene.

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