Vagrant Story/YMMV


 * Complete Monster: Romeo Guildenstern at first seems to be a deeply pious and righteous man, but as the game goes on, he is revealed as a ruthless, power hungry would-be tyrant who is a servant of darkness. The Foreshadowing begins when he slaps his lover hard enough to draw blood from her after a psychic link is in her head, and proceeds to display no concern for her after. He later murders her, a woman who genuinely loved him, as his sacrifice to the Dark. Once this is done, Guildenstern takes the power of the forbidden city, Lea Monde, intending to establish a bloody dictatorship as the world's eternal tyrant. Charismatic, calculating and utterly ruthless, Guildenstern is one of the greatest villains in Ivalice's history.
 * Crowning Music of Awesome: The ending theme.
 * And the opening!
 * And the Undercity West theme. It's seriously creepy.
 * The Limestone Quarry is badass too, and The Atrium is just plain tearjerkingly sad.
 * The Prologue theme "Climax of the Greyland Case", "Large Chapel", and "Ifrit".
 * Aw hell, the whole thing is a Crowning Soundtrack of Awesome. All the tracks are perfectly engineered to rouse the appropriate responses from your heartstrings. The panic and speed of the battle themes, the unease and haunting melancholy of each dungeon area and most importantly the way all the unique scene-specific pieces capture and enhance the feeling of that moment for you to live over again.
 * Evil Is Sexy: The CG intro depicts a Belly Dancer from folklore, Mullenkamp, which the cult is named after. And boy does she got some moves, mmmmm....
 * Whether or not she's 'evil' depends on how much of the Iocan church information on her you take as truth. Which, given the nature of the game...
 * Game Breaker: Absorb Damage. Absorb Magic. Raging Ache. Have fun. Want proof? Here's a guy finishing the game in under two hours.
 * Goddamned Bats: Aside from actual bats (which are easy to dispatch) the Imp and Gargoyle enemies are horrendously difficult to hit with anything but crossbows, wield high-level magic, and are tiny and fast.
 * Really? The Soul Kiss dagger (piercing weapon, high Light affinity if you whack enough zombies with it) seems to do the trick just fine. Also, Vulcan Lance.
 * Magnificent Bastard: Sydney
 * Nightmare Fuel: The enemies called "Quicksilver". You meet them in the Undercity, which is dark, damp and claustrophobic. Then you suddenly hear giggling and large dolls resembling children stumble towards you, holding knives. In fact, the in-game monster manual says that these dolls are possessed by the souls of dead children. If that is nothing to you, then the variety in the Iron Maiden sub dungeon will make you squeem.
 * Another enemy from the same area is Harpy, a big flightless bird that would look quite normal, if it wasn't for a giant human face protruding from it's chest.
 * You wouldn't think a big chicken with a face on its gut would be frightening, but IT WORKS. To make matters worse, daring to fight one could potentially end your game by turning you to stone, and your first Harpy fight is mandatory.
 * The Iron Maiden dungeon room names. Hint - they are not named after Heavy Metal bands. This pagecovers more than a few of them, try not to think too hard about the others.
 * The terrifying gleeful/insane expression on
 * What happens to Grissom is especially frightening.
 * Asura in Iron Maiden B3. All three of its faces look at you and has a very creepy laugh.
 * The final boss' final form.
 * Rescued From The Scrappy Mechanic Heap: Much of the game's atmosphere and mechanics originated in the RPG segment of Ehrgeiz, which was truly terrible. Vagrant Story makes something gorgeous out of them.
 * Scrappy Level: Did anyone enjoy the Snowfly Forest?
 * And then there's that bit where you're traversing a maze. Full of traps and Goddamn Bats. In the dark. With a time limit before the exit closes. Which results in being warped back to the starting point with several tough enemies spawning around Ashley that all require different tactics. And several of the rooms in the maze are trapped. Heavily. And the boss at the end of the maze is hard, and isn't even the very end of it. And you'll need to go through it twice or thrice for One Hundred Percent Completion.
 * Scrappy Mechanic: The Risk meter. As you attack and perform combos, your Risk increases. The higher it goes, the lower your accuracy, and the more damage you take from enemy attacks. Fights against later game enemies tend to send the Risk meter skyrocketing, and at 100 Risk even the slightest attack can one-shot you. There are items to lower your Risk, but it's still the game punishing you for doing too well.
 * On the plus side, you also recover more health with healing abilities/items when you have a higher Risk.
 * On the plusser side, a risk of 100 can set off a chain in which each consecutive chain attack does damage according to the number of chains you're, er, chaining. If you hit 20 times in a row with 100 risk, you do 20 damage, then 21, then 22, then 23... in a game where doing even 5 damage to a boss is an achievement, this comes in really handy at times.
 * The entire game is about managing risks. Take the RISK to lower your accuracy but heal faster and crit bigger? Take the risk to cast from HP and use Break Arts to exploit an enemy's elemental weakness better? If it's a Scrappy Mechanic to some players, that's probably because they're taking bigger risks than they're comfortable with.
 * And...let's just say you'd better hope you enjoy block puzzles. Fortunately you can turn them off after one playthrough.
 * Squick: One of the most horrifying scenes in any RPG, even if the worst part takes place off camera: after capturing Sydney in the Temple of Kiltia, Guildenstern.
 * They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Grissom's Came Back Wrong storyline is tragic and full of narrative potential. And lasts all of two scenes.
 * That One Boss: The final boss, for starters. All but a very few of your abilities will deal absolutely pitiful amounts of damage to him, and finding the ones that will work is very much a matter of Guide Dang It.
 * Visual Effects of Awesome: This was one of the last games ever made for the Playstation, and is clearly one of the best-looking. It's aged remarkably well, too.
 * Woolseyism: Vagrant Story is good evidence that this trope should be named after Alexander O. Smith, in whose capable hands the fairly mundane original script was turned into some of the best quasi-Shakespearean of our time. Oddly appropriate both to the setting as well as the overall mood of the game, the localization is pretty much touted as one of the best ever. It's true!