In your quest to stop the Old Gods from destroying Shiokawa, you'll come across a fair amount of tools that can greatly ease the difficulty.
All spoilers are unmarked!
Items
- The Katana, which is obtained through passing a difficult Perception check in the otherworld with a parasitic star, is Purposefully Overpowered. Whereas the strongest weapons barring gunshots deal six damage with a standard attack, the katana deals nine damage in a single blow, and for more damage and less action points than the powerful-but-slow shovel, while also not consuming ammo like a gun. If you manage to get one, you've practically beaten the game already. It can even save a Haru run when the Shiba's store is shut down and none of the other methods to get cigarettes are available. Good luck passing the Perception check though, as Otherworld events inflict a -3 modifier to all skill checks.
Spells
- Book of Gore gives you +3 Stamina and +3 Reason back at the cost of inflicting a random Injury. This seems like a fair trade-off until you really analyze it; the spell is not only reusable, but one of the precious few in the game that doesn't have some kind of scale-balancing resource cost (e.g. you can't spam other healing spells because they either cost more of the other kind of health to use or they deplete your maximum Stamina/Reason every time you use them). As such, Book of Gore gives you easy access to a "Get out of Jail Free" card any time you feel that your health is getting too low, and if you're at a point in a run where you're not that worried about Injuries you can use it to heal yourself back to full from the brink of death with virtually no cost. Not to mention that if you have the Funds, you can just remove the worst Injuries you get from using it with little issue.
- Ithotu Flame deals a whopping 8 damage at the cost of 1 Stamina, 1 Reason and 2% Doom. It's a very low cost for such a large amount of damagenote , and while it falls off in the later stages of the game when the Doom meter is really high (as you don't want to be spamming it then), if you manage to pick this spell up in the early game you can strategically use it to vaporize difficult bosses and achieve better endings, giving you tons of momentum early on.
Characters
- Ayaka is likely the strongest character in the game, despite a seemingly unimpressive start. She starts the game with an amulet that gives her two curses at the start of every mystery. While that doesn't seem great, her three exclusive perks provide her with massive boosts to her stats and combat speed for every curse she acquires, as well as lowering Doom based on the number of curses she has. This escalates to the point where she is able to prep three 17-damage attacks (which will kill just about everything in a single turn) and succeed on just about every skill check late into a run while canceling out the debuffs she gets from all the Curses, especially if she obtains extra Curses from events.
Perks/Abilities
- Mayhem, Miku's starting ability, lets Miku gain +1 to every stat roughly every 20 Doom. Given how easy it is to gain Doom, Miku can use this to her advantage to buff her stats late in a run. While her stats are the lowest out of any character to balance this, recruiting allies or leveling carefully can make up for this disadvantage, propelling Miku into a Master of All who hits like a truck and steamrolls over the Lighthouse stat checks.
- Toshiaki's unique spells can create a feedback loop where Shebbe's Surge can boost all stats (other than luck) to the point where the player will never fail a skill check, and he can use the extra experience gained to cast F'Thoth Flash to bring the Doom counter back down. It's especially useful during the lighthouse climb or during an Endless Mode run, where the "mystery" will never end and remove the effects of Shebbe's Surge. Also, Krookty's Kill is a very economical way of dealing with deadly bosses without taking damage to your dwindling stamina/reason.
- Kana's Always There perk sets their maximum Stamina and Reason to 8, and makes it so that they automatically revive from reaching 0 on either stat at the cost of raising Doom. It's an interesting mechanic to be sure... until you realize that since their maximum health will always be stuck at 8, this makes spells like Ghostly Spear and Mind Drain (deals high damage at the cost of maximum Stamina and Reason, respectively) completely and insanely powerful, dealing high damage with infinite casts (provided you didn't pick Ath-Yolazsth as the Old God anyway), guaranteeing that Kana wins every enemy encounter as soon as they learn the spell. Additionally, this makes the Scars backstory a no-brainer to pick, granting them permanent damage reduction without the drawbacks.