Knights in The Nightmare/YMMV


 * Alas, Poor Villain: . And his backstory does make him slightly sympathetic to the player.
 * Complete Monster: Yelma, dear God Yelma...
 * Crowning Music of Awesome: Maria's theme music.
 * Many of the battle music as well. Each bosses also have their own Villain Song.
 * Fanon Discontinuity: In what is becoming a running gag on LiveJournal, part of the fandom has refused to acknowledge Atlus' translations of character and place names. May be justified, as Sting published official romanizations long before Atlus' announcement that it would localize the game.
 * Game Breaker: can turn Maria into this in Maria's route.
 * It's actually better to call her Boss Breaker, since you get her back in Scene  then lose her after Scene   for the rest of the game until the final two Scenes. That's a grand total of 5 Scenes of Game Breaker power, 4 of which are Boss Fights. Not to mention that a single EX-Skill can chop off an enormous portion of a Boss's health bar.
 * Mellia has the White Feathers item in her own.
 * Goddamned Bats: Any number of fights that quickly devolve into a mad dash to avoid dozens of projectiles that will blast your Wisp into oblivion.
 * Demonic Spiders: Those dragons and hellhounds dammit. The former can turn your already tough Bullet Hell into a much worse scenario, the latter...well, they can attack your knights and make them lose vit by quite a large chunk. Those gremlins are rather easy to kill too, but they are hated much due to the Interface Screw they cause.
 * Goddamned Boss: Nearly every boss that isn't That One Boss, due to one reason or another (usually their special abilities). Examples include  (very hard to stop his Hound summon),   (because you're running on a timer to find a certain plot-important item with a boss who can destroy it breathing down your neck),   (because he cheats by having multiple weapons, and thus multiple bullet attacks),   (because this boss has powerful attacks and moves a lot]],   (because the area is VERY restrictive on both your movement and attack)... Fortunately, a lot of these don't quite reach That One Boss because they may have low health (proportional to how far in the game you are of course; a boss with not even 20000 HP 3/5 of the way through? Yikes) or bullet attacks that are not too hard to dodge.
 * Internet Backdraft: The name changes for the English version. Some can be justified by character space ("Staehelingum" to "Staehel"); others can't. Which are better--and even which should be used on a given page--is bound to cause arguments, as parties on both sides are slightly opinionated.
 * Moral Event Horizon: . If Yggdra Union wasn't enough to convince the player that this place is full of jerks, this game should do it.
 * Also, frigging Yelma.
 * Most Annoying Sound: You're pretty badass, Maria, but...please. Never. Speak. Again.
 * Player Punch: The dialogues during trans-soul can become this. Also,.
 * You can also try to be nice by transsouling them to one of their friends or loved ones, you will get a different dialogue than if you do to someone they don't know too well.
 * And sometimes that just makes it worse, like listening to Gudrun mourning her surrogate father having sacrificed himself for her.
 * The Narrator occasionally wonders aloud at how far you're willing to go to get the Whisp's body back, like after the fight with.
 * Scrappy Mechanic: The enemies' built in Healing Factor can make the already Nintendo Hard game rocket up to and beyond hair-pullingly difficult in the harder difficulties, as enemies will a lot of life and thus recover lots of HP very quickly. Taken Up to Eleven with Bonus Boss Scoppio and Final Boss ; the former has one of the highest HP counts in the game on Normal and appears as ????? on Hard and up, and the latter is even worse. And
 * Say what you will about how broken Maria is, but with Ancardia, she can only attack with Hi-Skills. Granted, EVERY skill will become a Hi-Skill, but she has only 7.77 Vit and each Hi-Skill uses 1.00 Vit, which means that, with Ancardia on, you can only do any real damage with her 7 times before you have to stop or she dies, which forces you to Retry a stage. On any difficulty other than Nightmare, this is passable as retrying will only invalidate your scoring performance for this stage and destroy any weapon you had in your inventory in that turn. Never mind using Ex-Skills. And she loses all the loyalty you had accumulated on her before picking up Ancardia!
 * As an addendum, from the same troper, this point IS rather moot if the player doesn't mind not getting scored. Though getting a Vit increase after getting Ancardia would have been very welcome, this limits her Game Breaker potential even more so as to create some balance. After all, if she had, say, even just 20.00 Vit, wouldn't we all eschew careful unit positioning in favor of repeatedly nuking the entire map? And besides, she DOES gain loyalty a lot faster because all you´re attacking with are normal attacks, Hi-Skills and Ex-Skills.
 * Tear Jerker:
 * That One Boss:, who can one-hit-kill any one of your characters. If Maria/Mellia happens to get hit by that attack, it's instant gameover.
 * The second-to-last boss,, is immensely annoying due to his built-in regeneration stat, which lets him recover thousands of HP at a time . We sure hope you've powered up Maria/Mellia for this one.
 * Also, freaking.
 * This troper would like to nominate, the Final Boss. Why? It has the highest HP count in the whole game (even more than the Bonus Boss, whose health count was already an exaggeration by that point), it has devastating attacks that will kill your timer in the blink of an eye, it can move pretty damn fast, the stage is even MORE restrictive than  's and it's attack cycles are so short that, if it uses its second bullet, it can use another attack before the previous attacks is even done. Even repeating Bullet II just once can be devastating, as it leaves you basically unable to do anything but dodge the mess of random bullets that it causes. Not even the super-high level Maria/Mellia will be of much use because of the stage design. The only way this fight can be made less annoying is if you're playing on the red path and found both  , in which case Maria's EX-Skills will do a HUGE part of the work for you.
 * Viewer Gender Confusion: thanks to Generic Cuteness, for some you can only identify some of the knight's gender by their voices. A few characters of note: Crozeph, Werner, and Darshan.
 * Keep in mind though, that all classes save the Lance Knight (which Crozeph and Darshan happen to be) are gender-especific. This means all Duelists, Hermits and Priestesses are female, and all Warriors (one of which is Werner), Archers and Wizards are male. Lance Knights are the only class where you'll find both men and women. Interestingly, the Archer class was first planned to be female-exclusive, but since the designers wanted to keep a gender balance, it was changed to male-only after the Hermit class was decided to be a female class.
 * Wangst: Yes, Algiery, we know you have every reason to mope. Please do something other than mope once in a while.
 * What an Idiot!: There's a reason some of the fans sum the game up with.
 * The Woobie: Nordich, Piche, and several of the knights qualify.
 * And Maria. Watch her beat herself up over and over for what Marietta did, and see how long it takes before you want to cuddle her and make it all go away. Let's have a show of hands for how many people got just a little misty-eyed when she posted that tweet about wanting to be loved.