27 — Body & Soul

Home of the infamous Gestalt, Decay — Dark and Alien spam with absurd DPS. Balanced around full Crystal treasures and Awakened Bahamut.

Half the stages are easy; the other half are some of the hardest content in the saga so far, and the wiki is explicit about the assumed loadout: all anti-Alien Crystal treasures plus Bahamut Cat's True Form, without which Cursed Blizzards and Sign of the Cat are nearly impossible.

The headline is Gestalt, Decay — the stage that has overwhelmed countless unprepared players with relentless Dark-and-Alien spam, demanding multiple spammable attackers rather than a few big sticks. Metabolic Syndrome runs a close second: three Alien bosses on a starvation cash budget. The lone debut is Mr. Mole, an extreme Long Distance attacker with deep health and knockback on hit — the first enemy whose attack pattern has a blind spot worth exploiting. (The stage names — Gestalt, Decay; Out of Despair; Love and Death — run a deliberate psychology-and-melancholy theme.)