Kichikuou Rance/YMMV

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• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Rick is available almost immediately, has offensive and defensive capabilities to rival Rance himself, and comes with a special attack and 800 troops right out of the box. Since Rance will have his hands full fending off Fiend attacks for most of the game, Rick tends to be a go-to commander for offensive battles.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Nagi, Lia, Camilla, Rick, Kayblis, Barres, and La Hawzel all placed in the Western popularity poll, but not in the Japanese one. Nagi is especially noticeable, being the fifth most popular character in the West. To a lesser extent, Rance, Shizuka, Gandhi, Silky, and Hornet placed in both rankings, but placed higher in the Western ranking.
• Moral Event Horizon: In the Archfiend ending, Rance enslaves humanity and breeds them like cattle, something that makes his canonical actions seem tame in comparison.
• Player Punch:
  • If you take too long to capture Volgo Z and free Sill from prison, she will be tortured to death, leading to one of the few moments in the series where Rance actually sheds tears. Given that the whole reason Rance became king of Leazas in the first place was to get revenge on Helman and rescue Sill, it's hard not to feel bad for him. This can also lead to the Archfiend ending, where all of humanity becomes the target of Rance's vengeance.
  • The Zeth chapter is full of these. Firstly, if Rance has already fought on the week that Shizuka's duel with Ragarl occurs, she will be raped and killed (By the same man who killed her parents, no less!), then used as an ingredient for the Flash. But while Shizuka's fate can be avoided, the Flash itself cannot. You will need to sacrifice a commander to the Flash, as you cannot attack Zeth Palace until after it happens, it will only be set off if you deploy at least two units after it's finished, and Miki is the only commander who can survive it, leaving one unavoidable death. It's not uncommon for experienced players to either buy a generic mercenary unit from Pluepet or wait until this point to recruit Mars the Great specifically so they can sacrifice him.
• That One Boss: Nobunaga, the de facto ruler of Nippon, is often considered the hardest boss in the game, especially for how early he can appear. To start with, he's a Fiend, meaning Rance and Kentaro are the only non-Fiends who can hurt him. He also has over 2,000 troops shielding him, an absurd amount for that point in the game, and the small size of the battlefield means it will almost certainly take at least two battles to whittle them down. And forget about luring him into a bigger city; he'll only die if you capture his home base of Osaka, and after you attack Osaka for the first time, Nobunaga will send a pair of assassins who will start killing your commanders the following week. In other words, if you want to capture Osaka without losing any commanders, you'll have to do it in a single week, and allocating too many of your own units toward this task leaves you wide open for attack from the Monster Army and possibly Helman or Zeth, potentially costing you precious weeks in your conquest. Your only real solace is that conquering Nippon is technically optional unless you're going for the Golden Ending, but that's a big technicality; Nippon will immediately declare war on you once you capture Portugal, and you can't reach Wargod City without going through Portugal, meaning you miss out on recruiting Merim, who is invaluable for dungeon dives.
• That One Sidequest:
  • Recruiting Aristoles Calm involves ignoring any and all combat with the Helman 2nd Army, turning down the alliance with the Patton Faction (which is not only ridiculous because it gives you four very strong units, but also because Patton is one of the main characters of the entire series) and then agreeing to accept the aid of Convert Tax, Aristoles' self-admittedly shifty scumbag of a second in command who is no longer working with him at the time.
  • Recruiting Galtia requires doing the seemingly innocuous and time-consuming Martina Curry cook-off sidequest, then allowing Galtia to capture no fewer than four of your cities.
  • Recruiting Cafe Artful. Chances are, you won't get her unless you use a guide, and even then it's incredibly infuriating. You first need to find the Lady Caravan in one of your conquered territories, while this doesn't seem so bad initially, the caravan will randomly appear in any of your territories, meaning you'll have to go through the tedious task of checking all of them until finally finding it. Then you need to do that two more times, while also having the item given to you by British (whose location on the map is very easy to miss) and information from Ho-Raga (Which costs a search point and requires you to sacrifice all of the soldiers from one of a set of Bishonen commanders, all of whom are very good units). Even the walkthrough complains about how random and tedious the entire ordeal is.
• Tough Act to Follow: The game ensured that AliceSoft would thrive for years to come, but ironically it put the Rance series on a six-year hiatus that ended with a total Continuity Reboot, because they simply didn't know how they could top it. It wasn't until 2018's Rance X: Showdown that Kichikuou was dethroned as the best-selling game in the series, and that was after it became freeware.