Do you want broken weapons/ abilities in the game?

You could do these threads with polls for ease of collecting data on it.

Me personally, I like strong options, but not per se broken ones.

I hate broken options unless they're acquired at the end of the game or as a reward for completion/bonus modes.

The red minotaur soul was truly broken only with the Chaos Ring and that worked fine.

Order of Ecclesia had the death ring/nitesco union combo but both were late game things and the ring added a risk that doesn't completely balance the benefits but makes it not 100% broken.

But Symphony is a terrible example of balancing. Even taking the Crissaegrim out of the picture, there are many options so incredibly stronger than everything else (cough cough shield rod) that it kills the weapon variety and it undermines the creativity in the special moves. Symphony has abysmal balancing and I really hate that part of it.

So I'm fine with such options im the very late game but balancing is important. Some shards here were way too powerful. Even just the Vepar shards does high damage for a completely affordable cost and it covers 85% of the screen. It's overpowered. Don't have very powerful stuff so early in the game.

This here. At least in subsequent games you didn't simply stumble upon OP weapons and techniques like in Sotn. I'm not overly worried about balancing for Rotn if IGA and co. continue trends from previous Vania installments.

The "Claimh Solais" from Aria of Sorrow seemed just right in my opinion. It was very powerful with a wide arc but was balanced by being somewhat slow and you needed to find a secret area to claim it.

Fought with Alucard set first. Then obliterated Dracula with the Crissaegrims once, then Alucard shield several times. Good thing it got nurfed in later games. Still broken with succubus soul in Aria of sorrow.

Shield Rod and Power of the Sire/Duplicator (like tricks)! YES, PLEASE!!!

I would like to see broken items that are only acquired through inversely proportional means.

"Wow! That item attacks all enemies on screen at once? How get, bro!?"

"Ah, it was nothing, just had to beat the game at level 1 without being hit or saving the game."

see heres the thing, i love all the op combos, and most of these are in the late game so thats fine (shield rod is i think the earliest and it has uses outside alucard shield), and duplicator/ring of varda is entirely a ng+ item, getting fist and mirror mail in sotn can be done early if you defeat a very powerful enemy and know the trick to get in the room (op super early game but its not gamebreaking), claimh is very well hidden and the rpg is a bossrush reward
the shard system has way more potential to be early game breaking by upgrading a couple choice shards and farming said shard to 9 (why id suggest the team move shard delevelling from a lvl 9 only option to its own button, that gives the individual player more agency on their difficulty)

the greatest thing i think about difficulty in IGAvanias is a large portion of that difficulty is choosable by the player through their actions, you dont get an op weapon and are then forced to use it, you can beat every IGA game naked using the weakest weapon, if we were to get a no xp item early in the game that would give us one more way to tailor that difficulty

It was slow in Dawn of Sorrow, but certainly not in Aria of Sorrow. That's a huge reason as to why it was so good.