YMMV / Skul: The Hero Slayer

• Best Boss Ever: Most of the fights count, but special note goes to The First Hero, who boasts a staggering three phases when all of the other bosses have one or two. It's a drag-out fight to the death and if you have a sufficiently powerful build, it'll be an even fight the whole way through.
• Complete Monster: Emperor Alexander of Carleon is a genocidal racist and eugenicist, who is obsessed with maintaining the "purity" of humanity, and thus seeks nothing less than the complete extermination of the Demon race. To this end, Alexander conducts horrific experiments with Dark Quartz, sometimes on his own citizens and servants, to create Living Weapons to facilitate his plans. When the First Hero's young son accidentally stumbles upon one of these experiments, Alexander pitilessly has the boy killed and frames the Demon King for the murder, driving the First Hero mad with grief and making him all too willing to spearhead Carleon's invasion of the Demon Kingdom. After the invasion, Alexander has many of the captured Demons harvested to create a Chimera to serve as an "avatar" of Carleon's goddess, with his ultimate plan being to use the Demon King's blood to turn himself into a god-like entity who will obliterate the Demons. Following the First Hero's defeat at Skul's hands, Alexander retrieves his barely-alive body and uses his blood to create an army of Super-Soldier clones for a second attack on the Demon Kingdom. When Skul confronts Alexander, the latter mocks the First Hero for how easily manipulated he was, and after being defeated twice he attempts to destroy the entire Demon Castle and everyone in it with a Dark Quartz bomb, purely out of spite.
• Game-Breaker: The Berserker and Devil Berserker, if you level physical damage, attack speed, and bleed proc. Its berserk ability can churn out so much damage in such a short amount of time that it can kill the chimaera in less than five seconds.
  • The same applies to the Rock Star/Super Rock Star and magic damage. Given that the Rock Star's ability increases its magic damage as it attacks, this can quickly lead to enough damage to melt basically every enemy instantaneously with the right items.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: 1.4 Patch Notes gave a huge buff to many weaker Skulls, most notably Power Skulls (just as Ent Skull, Ghoul, Water Skull, Warrior or Yaksha) because of their slower gameplay. This patch note makes some of the skulls which from Low-Tier Letdown became much stronger.
• Tear Jerker: The First Hero's death. See the Woobie entry for more details.
• The Woobie: JESUS CHRIST, the First Hero. After losing his entire party on his first outing as an adventurer, he rises through the ranks as a top-tier adventurer, eventually slaying the Demon King. He sees the new one as different and tries to make peace, but when some creature posing as a soldier frames the young King for the death of his son, he goes mad with grief and declares war on the demons, not knowing his son returned to life as Skul. By the time Skul reaches him, he doesn't even recognize his own son and in desperation pushes his body to its absolute limit in a three phase boss battle where the final phase is him barely putting up a fight due to his exhaustion and injuries, and at the end of it all he dies, alone, thinking he failed Carleon and its people.

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