Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning/YMMV


 * Anticlimax Boss: Both mid-game boss Balor and Final Boss  pose little challange.
 * Anti-Villain: Arguably Maid of Windamere, at least in the telling with Fateless One as Sir Saggrel.
 * Designated Hero / Designated Villain: The principal players of the House of Ballads tale are in-universe examples. The Maid is sick and tired of her role as a villainous loser, while the "heroes" this time around ultimately don't live up to their roles. reveals himself to be a Dirty Coward when he realizes the Maid could actually win this time
 * Executive Meddling: When EA handled marketing for the game, they decided to not only release no advertisement for it outside of the demo and some trailers, but also had the genius to release it roughly a month before a certain upcoming juggernaut series entry. As a result, the game massively undersold, and both 38 Studios and Big Huge Games have gone under due to finances.
 * Fake Difficulty: Like most action games, getting hit just once in a Multi Mook Melee can lead to being stagger-locked for half your lifebar or more. Your only saving grace is the fact that you can use healing potions no matter what else is going on.
 * The game's auto-targeting system also leads to Interface Screw sometimes. The algorithm works by a combination of range ("What's nearest me?") and aggro ("What most recently hit me?") and has no option for locking in a target in case you want to pursue it.
 * Game Breaker: The mage's Meteor spell can instant kill everything in a large area that isn't highly resistant to fire. That pretty much means everything but trolls and Niskaru Lords become laughably easy.
 * As with most newer Western RPGs, liberal use of crafting, namely blacksmithing, takes any semblance of difficulty and pounds it into oblivion. Maxing out Black Smiting can be done hilariously early, especially if one chooses a race that gets a bonus to it. Load up on health and mana regenerating components/gems, grab the crappiest weapon and armor of the highest type you have access too, save scum a little to make sure you get the base crafting item out of them, mix it all together and you are wearing clothes and wielding swords that are twice as potent as even the strongest items you could possibly have access too, at less than a tenth of the cost of actually buying a piece of gear that would laughably be called comparable, and allowing you to sell the immensely valuable gear you'd normally want to wear. Enjoy virtually unlimited gold, health and mana.
 * Also "Reckoning mode" is essentially an "I win" button. It slows time and boosts your damage output to ludicrous levels, making any fight in the game laughably easy.
 * There's the scattershot ability, which when combined with other longbow abilities, all bleeding related abilities and the right armor can deal thousands of damage total, is more or less guaranteed to cause bleeding and potentially poisons the target too. ( Also, you can make poison propagate to other enemies and bleeding can randomly deal a lot of bonus damage. With this setup even the normally weak shadow weave ability ( which is supposed to enhance your attacks rather than actually being one ) can oneshot a prismere troll.
 * You can kill a Jottun with basic stealth. Or an entire army of them. Or kobolds, or anything else for that matter if it isn't a troll or niskaru. In fact, with the smokebomb ability you can backstab most humanoid bosses, killing them in a single hit.
 * Most enemies have a weapon type that just erases them from existence. Chakrams are useful against giant-type enemies, and Squishy Wizards go down with a few greatsword hits.
 * It's Easy, So It Sucks: A common complaint about the game; since the game is so combat-focused, most character builds are ridiculously overpowered, and whatever little challenge the game provides can be mitigated with potion-and-Reckoning abuse, most players can overlevel and breeze through the game before they know they've done so. It doesn't help that you have to actively try in order to avoid the Gamebreakers.
 * That One Boss: Mage type bosses like the Maid of Windemere, the Dark Empyrean, can be fairly challenging given their variety of powerful elemental ranged attacks, teleportation abilities, and constant summoning of mooks. Especially jarring given the relative ease of the game. Reckoning does make them considerably easier, but if you don't have a full Fate bar or a Fate potion ready, death is a real possibility.
 * Also extends to Boss in Mook Clothing like bog threshes or crudoks. Groups of sprite champions can also be a real handful if you're not prepared to instantly take them out. ( Sprites can use the same atacks as any nearby sprite champion, champions can use other champion's attacks as well. )