YMMV / Tevi

• Breather Boss: Cyril is sandwiched between the sequence in Dreamer's Keep with Illusion Alius and Charon and the finale against Tahlia and the Revenance, and is generally more lenient than any of them. A lot of his patterns are relatively simple compared to even some of the bosses before him, he doesn't have that much health and staggers more easily due to giving himself High Velocity, and he lacks any real gimmicks, with his Shadow Armor being negated if you can just maintain a high combo rank, and his other mechanics like Backlash being ignorable if you continue to press the attack.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Almost any enemy that has some form of Taking You with Me will be this, as it essentially forces you to fight them at range or suffer unavoidable damage and knockback from when they explode. The earlier ones will just explode, but as the game progresses, they'll gain the ability to explode into bullets or bomblets, or worse, lingering stage hazards like fire, while others also have the ability to suck you in before exploding. Bonus points if you're forced to fight them in a cramped space on top of that.
  • The Palace of Ana Thema and certain other areas like Ulvosa are staffed by large Magitech golems that can take a beating and will spray complicated projectile patterns and lasers in every direction, which is bad enough alone, but can get really nasty if other enemies are also in the room. Furthermore, while attacking, some of them will reflect your bullets back at you, dealing damage proportional to the hit that triggered the effect; on higher difficulties, mistakenly hitting them with a charged attack can result in a huge chunk of Tevi's HP being ripped off in an instant, forcing you to only rely on melee attacks during the downtimes between their Bullet Hell.
  • The unicorns in the Evernight Garden have gigantic defenses and a powerful Healing Factor that, combined with the Sanctuary debuff that's inflicted on the initial trip to the Garden (which halves damage output and increases damage taken when attacking) makes them nigh unkillable. Offensively, they threaten with homing bolts and ricocheting lasers that deal heavy damage, as well as their large size letting them easily deal Collision Damage. The only caveat is that they're totally passive until attacked, but if you happen to graze one by accident, all you can do is hope to escape the room ASAP. There's also an achievement that requires you to kill a unicorn, but it can be more easily obtained on subsequent visits to the Evernight Garden where Tevi no longer has Sanctuary.
  • The sunglasses-wearing Elite Mooks in the Snowveil Golden Hands base use more difficult attacks, do a lot more damage, and have an invulnerable dodge roll which they'll spam with impunity, often using it seemingly out of nowhere to slip out of your combos and make themselves hard to pin down despite their relatively low health. On top of that, some of them can inflict Damage Over Time debuffs like Bleed or Poison.
  • The Smash Mook polar bears in Snowveil are initially passive until Tevi draws near or attacks, but will make you regret pissing them off. They're beefy bruisers with a lot of health, and their attacks can inflict massive wide-area damage as well as significant knockback, potentially hurling you into other enemies or hazards. They're also surprisingly fast for their bulk, letting them catch you off guard with a sudden lunge or spray of bullets.
  • The red crystals in the Sinner's Oath don't show up frequently, but can easily ruin the room when they do. They fire complex barrages of bullets and lasers in every direction, can generally pierce walls to make cover and distance irrelevant, and each one uses has a different pattern as to make them less predictable. Hits from them will deal massive damage and potential blowback along with the usual hitstun, which is not something that you want to let hit you while you traverse Platform Hell.
  • The final story area, the Phantasmic Palace, is staffed with elite knights that are the strongest normal enemies faced, to the point where each one can qualify as a Boss in Mook Clothing. The sword knights have a Healing Factor and the ability to create temporary duplicates, and in addition to their powerful slashing attacks, can catch you off guard with a sudden ground slam with a huge area of effect, or a repeated plunging attack that creates explosions of bullets. The archers are more nimble, able to teleport and leap around while bombarding Tevi with barrages of arrows, many of which have secondary effects like bounces, explosions, lasers, or odd curving trajectories. The shield knights are the tankiest of the bunch with a shield that blocks attacks, powerful thrusts and shockwaves, and the ability to periodically gain the Range Reflect buff, forcing you to engage them up close where their natural aura will also shred Tevi's defense. On top of this, all of them have a titanic amount of health and just as much damage while inflicting various debilitating debuffs, which makes dealing with individual ones a hassle, much less groups of them.
• Fridge Brilliance:
  • The boss theme "Aboulomania" only plays during the fights with Malphage and the Eidolon, the only two decayed spectres fought as bosses. Aboulomania is defined as a pathological indecisiveness to the point of torpor, but the root "aboule" literally means "without will" while "mania" refers to obsession, which can evoke not just their status as near mindless zombies consumed by decay, but also the way the Revenance, effectively decay given a consciousness, is obsessed with quashing the "chaos" of human existence and will, and seemingly wants to enforce an eternal stasis upon the world.
  • Queen Tahlia's primary motivation stems from her jealousy and spite towards her sister, her inability to let go of the past, and her wish to change the present to make up for the past, which is antithetical to the game's overarching themes of change and forging onwards. Unlike many of the bosses, which use a wider variety of fresh gimmicks and sparingly reuse patterns from the game's spiritual predecessor, Tahlia's fight is almost pure bullet hell in the vein of Rabi-Ribi, and almost all of her attacks are directly taken from said game.
• Game-Breaker: Due to the sheer number and diversity of the items and sigils, there's bound to be at least a few broken combinations.
  • You can carry up to 10 healing consumables with you, which if fully utilized can potentially grant you so much healing that even lategame bosses will be unable to beat through your wall of healing before they kick the bucket. In addition, the consumables later in the game also come with some absurd secondary effects or buffs, such as attack or defense boosts, MP charging, reducing the next hit to 1 damage, and more. The most infamous consumables are the Morose Wafflehouse's waffles with their Deja Vu buff, which will reset you to the moment of consumption when you die in a boss fight and give you a whole second chance - although the buff expires when a boss changes phases, you can carry up to five different waffles, effectively giving you anywhere between 1-4 extra chances on each boss phase, on top of Mia also selling the Muscle Memory sigil that gives you enormous stat boosts when it triggers.
  • You unlock Core Expansion fairly early on in the game, and it quickly becomes one of your strongest tools to tackle every fight afterwards. At the cost of 6 orbitar crystals, Celia or Sable summon a large shield that blocks the vast majority of projectile attacks, while launching a counterattack and potentially giving you buffs as well. Although you can only take so many crystals into a boss fight and they don't drop often in the actual fights, a single Core Expansion lasts long enough that it can completely neutralize a boss attack that you normally wouldn't have avoided while also giving you an ample window to counterattack, on top of the Core Expansion itself dealing potentially massive damage to the target along with whatever secondary effects they have, such as Sable-U's Hellfire or Celia-D's heals. What really makes it powerful is that you can also get lots of sigils that buff the Core Expansion, such as ones to extend its diameter or duration, ones to generate more crystals and reduce the cost of casting it, or ones to grant you more benefits while the shield is active, which can let you spam them to neutralize a good chunk of a boss fight. Even if you don't want to directly use the Expansions, the game provides sigils like Crystal Mirror or Bulletproof Pillar that let you directly consume crystals to neutralize bullets in a different way, or even Full Offense that completely ditches the shield for a huge attack speed buff.
  • Magic-focused builds in general have the potential to snap even the hardest of boss fights in half. This is due to the consistency of Celia and Sable's charged attacks (able to hit at any range and ignore dominant state), as well as the sheer number of MP buffing and cost reduction sigils/buffs you can stack at once, which more often than not let you spam charged attacks and pump out far more damage than the game expects you to have. All six shot types also have their own quirks that make them uniquely powerful and versatile, along with sigils to buff each individual type, which can stack with each other to make them downright devastating. Fully optimized builds are often able to eviscerate bosses in mere moments.
  • Out of all the MP badges, MP Quicken: Bloodlust is quite possibly the strongest sigil available, granting a whopping 600% increased MP regen if your health is between 66% and 33%, at the cost of constant HP drain. This is a stronger regeneration effect than most sigils and buffs can pull off combined, meaning that combining it with a few other sigils leads to absurd damage output that far outweighs the downside of the HP drain. The only real caveat is that you may have to spend some time purposely taking damage to get below the required threshold, but this is fairly easy to do if you just run into a few attacks, or just intentionally enter a fight half dead. Later in the game, you'll also unlock Voodoo's Mewmew Cookie, which deals exactly 44% of your max. HP as self damage while instantly charging 999 MP. What comes next is anyone's guess.
  • Survival from Rabi-Ribi returns as Perserverance, and unlike Survival, there are four such sigils which can stack with each other, some of which also provide a beefy heal when triggered just to make sure that you don't kick the bucket right after they take effect. Combine these with some sigils for healing and durability and you can survive for way longer than you should normally be able to.
  • Go Ballistic is a sigil which, upon Tevi gaining Martial Dexterity, also briefly gives her the Ballistic buff which causes her to randomly attack enemies in range at a massively boosted rate, while causing all of her melee moves to pierce dominance. Combined with Supersonic (grants Martial Dexterity upon using Soul Burst), you can wait for an opening, then use Soul Burst and watch as Tevi delivers a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown onto the target and erases a huge chunk of their health in the blink of an eye, dominance be damned. It's only really held back by Soul Burst taking a bit to charge up, but this can be alleviated using sigils that allow for more charged magic attacks or those that accelerate Soul Burst's cooldown.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Like the previous game, many flying enemies with ranged abilities can qualify as this. Special mention goes to the small Magitech drones that are found in some capacity in almost every area, as they generally have a way to have their attacks lock on to Tevi from anywhere on the screen.
  • In the Omphalos Laboratory, one particular enemy looks like a sort of spike-surrounded Roomba and travels along the floors slowly — but speeds up the moment Tevi stands on the same horizontal plane. That's right, it's the Gaboyall from Megaman and not only does it hurt just as much, it also has a massive amount of knockback to go with, and it's nearly invincible to boot.
  • The rabbits from Snowveil are extremely passive but can split into half on death, with some even being able to split an additional time. They also have an Allied Offensive buff which makes them take less damage the more of them are active on screen at once, meaning it can be an annoying waste of time to try and beat down all of them quickly. They also have an annoying tendency to spawn the split rabbits directly in your hitbox without enough time to melee them if you kill them up close, meaning that you'll often find yourself taking cheap damage which can really build up on higher difficulties.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • Sable's Core Expansion U inflicts up to 10 stacks of Hellfire, which is reduced proportionally to the number of unique statuses on a target. However, a bug existed where if enough buffs and debuffs were stacked on a target, the stack would be reduced to a negative number, causing it to underflow to 255 instead, which naturally would result in enough damage to melt most bosses out of existence. This would eventually become an Ascended Glitch as the developers found the strategy entertaining enough to keep in the game, albeit in an understandably nerfed state on higher difficulties.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: TEVI's gameplay is generally well received as an extensively made Metroidvania-platformer with an extremely satisfying combat system and a huge, vibrant world to explore. The plot on the other hand tends to be more controversial, due to a combination of its sheer length, abundance of JRPG cliches, and various pacing issues, although the characters and voice acting tend to receive more praise.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: Due to the large number of powerful tools Tevi starts to get later in the game, it's a common challenge among seasoned players to not use consumables, Core Expansion, or Soul Burst. More hardcore players may also stack all of the Arrange Modes that buff enemies and bosses in order to get an even more ferocious experience.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: The game's difficulty as a whole is considered more approachable than Rabi-Ribi, as while exploration tends to be harder due to the wider enemy variety and more unforgiving environments, bosses rely less on difficult Bullet Hell patterns in favor of other mechanics that are generally less intensive, the Break system helps to create openings to deal heavy damage to them, and submissive/dominant state make it harder to be taken off guard by attacks, especially since many of their attacks tend to be more intuitive in general. On top of this, Tevi gradually unlocks far more combat tools, mobility, and build options than Erina ever had (most notably far higher survivability), making her extremely powerful starting from as early as the midgame, while boss Level Scaling not being as potent as Rabi-Ribi makes it a lot easier to outscale them if you've done enough exploring. It is worth noting that a good chunk of Rabi-Ribi's more infamous difficulty lies in elements that don't have equivalents in TEVI just yet (like postgame, DLC, and Boss Rushes), so time will tell if TEVI also gets them.
• That One Attack:
  • Attacks that cause blowback or tremors in general. In the former case, you'll be tossed across the entire screen and potentially slammed into a wall for bonus damage, and be left both stunned and out of position, potentially costing you another hit if the pattern is still going. In the latter case, they're generally easy to avoid, but getting hit by a tremor will stun Tevi for a painfully long time, almost guaranteeing that the next attack will connect, even if you'd have easily avoided it otherwise. Fray is particularly infamous for the former, as most of her stronger attacks not only cause heavy blowback, but also inflict Violent Impact to amplify wall-slam damage.
  • Caprice has a particularly annoying attack in the racoon mines she'll throw around the arena, which persist indefinitely and will inflict Paralyze on hit, which can screw you over when fighting Caprice herself due to the regular stun and damage. The mines can be blown up using cross bombs, but this arguably makes things worse, as they'll instead turn into bouncing bullets that last for at least a minute and can't be destroyed, which will overlap with Caprice's patterns to hit you for cheap damage, or even nail you when you're stuck in place trying to punish Caprice. The plus side is Tevi can abuse Mercy Invincibility to set off the mines, since the debuff won't stack.
  • Lily has an attack where she barrages the ground with green explosives that create novas of smaller bullets which are effectively undodgeable normally. The only way to dodge it at that point in the game is to run towards Lily at a speed that isn't too slow as to be caught by the bullet clouds, but also isn't too fast as to run into the explosives she's firing.
  • Tybrious' attack where he locks onto Tevi and repeatedly dashes back and forth while trying to stab her. The dashes come out so fast that it will take the most precise of rapid jumping and quick-dropping to evade each one, and as a melee attack Core Expansion won't save you either. Alternatively, you can try and "parry" each hit by striking Tybrious mid-dash (as he is unable to do melee damage for a brief period after being hit while dashing), but the game never indicates you can even do this, as no boss before or even after Tybrious ever reuses the mechanic.
  • Fray has an attack that summons two large red orbs which roll along the edges of the room in opposite directions, which will fall from the ceiling every few revolutions to trip you up. The first time she does it, contact with the orbs will inflict massive damage and knockback, along with Violent Impact to slam you into the wall for more damage, but the attack is fairly simple regardless. Once she's low enough, however, the attack is upgraded, and the orbs now create explosions of bullets whenever striking the corners, which make it far harder to avoid the orbs with the air constantly saturated with slow projectiles. Core Expansion works against the secondary bullets, but the attack lasts long enough that it'll likely outlast the shield, and the attack forcing constant movement means you can either be nailed by a bullet that was outside the shield or still hit by one of the orbs, which can't be negated.
  • Memloch's Limit Break is the anima's own take on Subterranean Sun, summoning an enormous sun that takes up nearly a third of the room by itself, sucks Tevi in, and circles around the room while shooting rings of shots, forcing her to circle the room using the floating platforms. The first part isn't so bad, but it'll eventually start shooting rings of shots that explode into more bullets, cluttering up the screen and turning things into a nightmare with how little space you already have given the sun chasing you, on top of you also having to jump between the platforms and through the clouds of bullets. As the cherry on top, the sun explodes once the attack ends, sending a wave of homing orbs and a final explosion of super-fast bolts just to catch you off guard. You can't even burst Memloch down to stop him from doing it, as he'll just stop taking damage until the attack is completely finished.
  • Cyril's lunging grab comes out almost instantly and, if it connects, will lead to Tevi being football spiked into the earth for a heavy amount of damage. To make matters worse, once he's taken some damage, he can start using it multiple times in a row, along with shooting more recursive shots to catch you off guard even if you dodge all of them.
  • Tahlia's Limit Break will start by generating small spheres that Tevi must get into before everywhere not in those spheres is saturated with bullets. The first few aren't too bad, but the last couple will be in the air, making it easy to take a hit because you mistimed an air jump or jetpack. Then the real attack begins, with Tahlia generating a vortex that sucks in Tevi along with a storm of bullets, while also emitting more bullets and a repeated sweeping ray that forces Tevi into the air with her jetpack - making you fight against the suction, the bullets coming in, the bullets going out, and gravity itself at the same time. The attack also lasts long enough to easily outlast a Core Expansion, so you can't just put one down and solve everything either, especially since you'll still need to land to refuel your jetpack between lasers (which are not blocked by the shield), potentially forcing you to leave the radius outright. And not only does she gain massive damage reduction during the attack to make it near impossible to finish her while it's going, she also regenerates during it, which by the end of the attack will result in her completely refilling her health bar while slapping Tevi with a slew of debilitating debuffs for good measure.
• That One Boss:
  • Chapter 1 gives you three options to fight for your first Astral Gears: Caprice, Demon Barados, and Katu. Out of them, Katu tends to have the most dangerous patterns, and unlike the other two who are relatively straightforward, she's also a Wolfpack Boss against her and her three copies who can easily box in an earlygame player with their far-reaching melee attacks. Katu also takes less damage as long as her copies are alive, all but forcing you to kill all of them and significantly increasing her effective health despite having a whole less health bar than Caprice or Barados, which in turn increases your chances of getting hit by one of her many attacks, especially since killing all the clones will also let Katu start using her full moveset with impunity.
  • Lily is a Early-Bird Boss who can take unprepared players by surprise by showing up immediately following their first Astral Gear, and being considerably tougher than any of the bosses you can fight as your first. Players confident from her only having two health bars and the first one going down quickly are in for a nasty surprise, as her second bar not only has about three times more health than the first, but also comprises the vast majority of her actual moveset, which is far denser and complex than anything Chapter 1 has thrown at you before while being just as damaging, if not more.
  • Tybrious is much more agile than anything fought up to that point, deals massive damage with every hit, and will continue to buff his offense and speed further as he continues to take damage, with his most dangerous buff being Tempest of Blades, which further raises his damage and supplements his attacks with formations of Sacral Blades that can be very difficult to dodge if Tevi is caught in a bad spot. His attacks tend to come out extremely quickly and are sometimes unintuitive at first glance, and once Tempest of Blades is active, his Sacral Blades can overlap with his existing attacks in some extremely nasty ways to box you in and nail you for free hits. On top of that, his Limit Break in the final phase can not only box you in and tear you apart with alarming ease, but he also fully heals once it's finished, forcing you to take out his entire health bar again. The plus side is that High Velocity and Tempest of Blades weaken his break bar and defense, and Tybrious has no defensive buffs of his own, making it possible to severely punish any openings he leaves.
  • Memloch is a stark divergence from any of the bosses fought before or even after him, as he takes effectively no damage unless you attack his rings to deplete his Break bar, fully heals between phases to negate overdamage, and has an arsenal of very difficult moves which force you to maneuver around him and his Bullet Hell using small Temporary Platforms that he summons during his moves. The rings that serve as the main targets move around a lot and are also responsible for many of his attacks, which often makes them somewhat difficult to approach or line up attacks against while also dodging. Some of the later phases also have the floor covered in fire, dealing massive damage if you slip up while jumping between the platforms.
  • Vassago has an extreme amount of health for that stage of the game, is extremely resistant to juggling due to his massive weight, will regularly cast Lustrate to purge debuffs on himself, and has a wide arsenal of very tricky moves, some of which can also cause stuns or blowback. Over the course of the fight, he'll also gradually apply Woken Fury and Defense Down on both himself and Tevi, effectively increasing damage taken and dealt by both parties - he can mitigate it with his beefy health bar, but for you it can easily lead to Vassago tearing off a fat chunk of Tevi's health in a single blow. Once he's in the last stages of the fight, he'll even punish you for jumping, as his Underworld Tyrant buff will unleash a potential One-Hit Kill if Tevi leaves the ground ten times. On the plus side, his last health bar is a fake-out in his story battle, and Dahlia will provide Tevi with various healing buffs over the fight (including Fatal Instinct that lets her potentially survive Vassago's Underworld Tyrant): you'll need all the help you can get.
  • An infamous That One Boss from Rabi-Ribi, Illusion Alius, makes a return in this game. While she doesn't hit you with nasty debuffs (at first), she is extremely aggressive and takes full advantage of the new melee combat mechanics of this game. While each of her hits don't do a lot of damage, she chains them together just as well as you can and doesn't trigger Mercy Invincibility on most of them, meaning that one slip up can result in her hitting you with a combo that can shave off a good chunk of your life. However, it's in the final phase where things take a turn for the worst: most bosses have one Limit Break used in their final phase, but this one has three. Two of them are standard bullet hell attacks (one from Celia, one from Sable) that also disable one of your orbitars and your Core Expansion for the duration, and are separate from the boss herself to boot, meaning Alius can continue attacking as usual even while the attack is progressing. The third is her own version of Soul Burst which, if it connects, hits you with some nasty debuffs all at once, including Violent Impact (more damage taken on a wall slam), Trauma (reduced healing) and Sigil Nullification.
• That One Level
  • The Misty Maze on paper is a relatively non-threatening area with sparse enemies and hazards. Good luck navigating this maze, however, as it's a sprawling expanse of similar-looking rooms where the paths don't necessarily connect to the adjacent room on the map, meaning that every exit may lead anywhere from the next room to one on the other side of the zone, rendering your minimap useless. Sometimes, you can even go into one room, then go back the way you came and end up in somewhere completely different; other times, you'll think you've gotten the right path, only to be blocked by a wall that can only be broken from the other side. On your first trip there, you'll have a small hint in reaching the level boss Roleo by virtue of the trail of roses leading to him, but you're deprived of even that tiny advantage if you want to grab all the items (or worse, 100% the map), upon which you're almost certainly screwed without the use of a guide or a lot of trial and error. The Dreamer's Keep later in the game used to reuse this gimmick while adding in lots of enemies and spikes that can easily send you packing, four objectives that had to be found to activate a warp to the level boss, and a midboss in the form of the aforementioned Illusion Alius, but was also a lot smaller in return. It got to the point where both of them had to be nerfed in later patches: the Misty Maze now has an Aetherlift at the very bottom which permanently clears the fog when unlocked, allowing the area to be explored freely without the room-warping, while Dreamer's Keep was first given unique background walls to hint at the correct paths, then reworked entirely without the maze gimmick.
  • The Magma Pits, not just because of the annoying enemy types that populate the area (in particular ones which can scorch the ground or self-destruct), but the Calenture debuff which deals constant damage over time, gradually sapping away at your health along with everything else in the biome. The Magma Depths are even worse, as the enemies are more numerous, there are now multiple platforming sections riddled with spikes and Bottomless Pits, and Calenture is upgraded to Deep Calenture that does even more damage and gradually ramps up over time as you stay there, to the point where you'll often be scarfing down desserts on the fly just to stay alive. To add insult to injury, the Equilibrium Ring, which lets you resist temperature debuffs like Calenture, is in the Magma Depths.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: One of the biggest criticisms of the game relative to Rabi-Ribi is how the previous game's famously lenient Sequence Breaking is no longer present, with major movement upgrades and most boss fights being locked behind progression points, and exploration mostly rewarding players with more items instead of being able to walk into boss fights or progression points by accident. This is accepted as a Necessary Drawback for the game to have a coherent storyline as opposed to Rabi-Ribi's near absence of a serious narrative allowing for unrestricted sequence breaking, although whether or not the tradeoff was worth it is a point of debate. The Free Roam mode (which makes the progression nonlinear in a similar vein to Rabi-Ribi and restores its hidden techs) did little to rectify this, as the mode only becomes unlocked after the player's first clear, although it was somewhat rectified with a later update which removed this restriction, allowing players to do Free Roam on their first run (although the game explicitly warns against doing it).
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Several, mostly due to the rushed pacing of the ending act, to a point where some wonder if their stories were intentionally left open ended for the sake of DLC:
  • Greasetrap is supposedly one of Tevi's closest friends and one of the few links to her past, to the point where he's alongside Zema in the illusion Tahlia uses to tempt her, but not only does the game abruptly introduce him in a questline with no prior buildup, Caprice kills him at the end of that same questline, leaving his history with Tevi as an Informed Attribute. To a certain extent, Cyril's death is sometimes viewed as similarly wasteful, but Cyril at least has the benefit of being built up and foreshadowed beforehand, as well as having a more elaborate connection to Sable.
  • Charon is built up to be the strongest magician in Az and a schemer who wants to activate Elysium for an unknown purpose, having manipulated the Golden Hands and various other parties to achieve this. Furthermore, Dahlia notes that he isn't even from Az in the first place, setting up a potential hook for worldbuilding outside the continent the game takes place on. However, he is unceremoniously offed by Tahlia almost immediately following his battle, and even with the Phantasmic Palace and Sleeper's Wake having cutscenes to elaborate on his backstory and his relationship with Zema, his actual motivations for doing what he did remain unknown.
  • Dahlia gets built up as the Big Good for the entirety of the game's worldbuilding and story, and their actions are the reason for many of the game's events, which the game does give elaboration on. However, once the real Dahlia ends up being found, she doesn't actually end up playing a role after that despite being one of the most powerful and influential figures on Az, with her only pulling a Big Damn Heroes to save the heroes from the Revenance's collapsing alter-space, and then a passing mention in the epilogue about how she's trying to rebuild Az.
  • Memloch is supposed to be one of the most mysterious and powerful anima from the age of humans, has history with Dahlia along with being teased in the prologue, and is one of the only things that can truly purify Decay. When he's fought and defeated, turns out he's unable to leave the castle without royal magic, so he leaves Tevi with a Macguffin and disappears from the plot, only being mentioned in passing for the rest of the game.
  • Just who is Tasha and where are they now? The game tells us about how they were Tahlia and Charon's daughter who was abandoned after she served her purpose, who fled the palace prior to the Magitech Rebellion and gave birth to Tevi. However, it doesn't mention anything about the circumstances of Tevi's birth nor what happened to Tasha after, especially considering that Tasha seemingly abandoned Tevi in Ulvosa, but still gave Tevi her necklace and seemingly the Memory Box in the orphanage.
  • Almost everything about Voodoo is a complete mystery, despite them following Tevi for the entire game indicating that they play a more major role. Although they're in league with Vassago, they also seem to know much more than he does and claims to have watched over Az for far longer than one would expect, yet the game never elaborates on it. As for their role later in the game, they give Tevi a single-use bell that will let them warp back to Voodoo in the Phantasmic Palace, delivering it in a cryptic way that suggests its importance...and then turns out that the bell really is just a one-time escape rope, and it has no effect on the storyline outside of two changed lines of dialogue. They are seen in the credits doing something with Sable's body, suggesting that they'll be relevant in the future, but only time will tell.
  • The Revenance, much like Tahlia, comes out of nowhere with little to no foreshadowing as a twist villain. Unlike Tahlia, who does get some detail into her backstory and motives, Revenance is dispatched with just short of no elaboration on what they are and what they want, despite raising some interesting implications about the nature of decay as the antithesis of mana and change.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: One of the most common criticisms of the game's story is that it has a tendency to casually introduce potential plotlines, tease at elaborating on them, and then ultimately not resolve them. A few examples: the topic of Fantastic Racism between humans and beastkin is completely dropped following Frankie's fight and subsequent death, both Barados and Tybrious are ultimately free to continue their debauchery (although the latter's position is threatened by Celia at the end of the game), Sabrina's ultimate fate is left ambiguous (but ultimately grim) despite it being Sable's main goal, the main cities of the world are almost completely left behind after their respective focus chapters, and much of the history behind the royal family, Charon, and decay/alembics are left ambiguous despite their importance to the background lore. In fact, the main trio don't get as much backstory as one would expect either - the circumstances of Tevi's past and upbringing aren't elaborated on much, nothing is known about Celia prior to her service as a data collector, and Sable has no concrete origin story despite it being constantly teased throughout the game. Like the above, some of these may get more attention in future updates, but only time will tell.