Death Smiles/YMMV

""Like, keep your cool, all right? Don't freak out on me.""
 * Audience-Alienating Premise: The controversial character designs did not go unnoticed, especially not in America.
 * Crowning Music of Awesome: The whole soundtrack is great, but this gets special mention. The Limited Edition Arrange Tracks contains an epic arrange of Hades Castle. Epic yet so faithful to the original, you can even play that song on your console's hard drive before selecting the final stage, and the song will even finish when the stage is over. Improve your score with the Power of Rock!
 * Burning Halloween Town is great as well.
 * The sequel is no slouch in the music department either. Christmas Boss themes never sounded so good.
 * Fan Dumb: Mainly amongst those who already own the Japanese version, thanks in part to Aksys's questionable-quality localization. Some say the game never should have been localized.
 * Freud Was Right: The blue and yellow suicide bullets in IIX that chase you are nicknamed sperm.
 * Fridge Horror: Sakura and her family entered Gilverado by way of a car accident, making their home in the swamp. In the swamp stage, you see a wrecked van. It belonged to Jitterbug.
 * Game Breaker: Sakura in Mega Black Label has two familiars, making guarding yourself against suicide bullets much easier.
 * In 1.1 Arranged, Sakura's game-breaker status is challenged only by Follett thanks to getting additional control over her baby dragon familiar which happens to be the biggest damage-dealer in the game.
 * Sakura is no longer in Deathsmiles IIX, but there are two contenders for her place. First off, Lei has two familiars like she did, with all the accompanying advantages -- although he's less broken, being weaker overall to compensate. Meanwhile, Supe's familiar is the ghost of Tyrannosatan, and she is as stupidly powerful as that suggests -- she's not the best scorer, but if you just want to play an unstoppable juggernaut who hews a path of carnage through anything in her way, you can't beat her.
 * It's Hard, So It Sucks: See Difficulty by Region example. Although this could have less to do with difficulty and more with porting accuracy, as slowdown tends to make or break a Cave port.
 * Les Yay: Rosa is quite flirty towards Sakura.
 * Various pieces of art show the girls being a bit clingy with each other (like the cover, for one example)
 * Macekre: While not to the same extent as Mobile Light Force, there are some very clear changes in the US localization. The characters now have outright horrible clichéd accents, and the controversy practically rivals that of a Jack Thompson lawsuit.
 * Actually not that controversial. While no one will deny that the translation is pretty lame, since story isn't a selling point of the game, it's not that big of a deal.


 * Moe: In addition to her maid outfit, Follett has glasses, a timid personality, and absolutely no nose.
 * Greatly increased for all characters in the second game.
 * Narm: Unlike Tyrannosatan above, the Big Bad is named Jitterbug.
 * Nightmare Fuel: Rampant.
 * The Scrappy: Rosa is dismissed by many fans as being slutty, a theory not helped by the fact that she quite blatantly flirts with Sakura. Her, like, ohmigod TOTALLY Valley Girl accent is not a hit in the West either. Also possibly a Tier-Induced Scrappy, second only to Sakura.
 * That One Attack: Whroon's apple attacks, in the US version at least, as they're all very fast and quite dense.
 * That One Boss: Bavaria, boss of the volcano level. He has multiple attack that fire a large amount of stuff from multiple directions, even on level 1 difficulty. In the US version, Whroon, the boss of the forest level, ascends to this, see That One Attack above.
 * That One Level: C-2, the volcano, and B-1, the forest, largely due to the fact that they are heavily sped up in the US version.
 * Tier-Induced Scrappy: Poor, poor Windia. Weakest character of the bunch by far.
 * And Rosa and Sakura are godly in contrast.
 * Toy Ship: