Planescape: Torment/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Anticlimax Boss: After reaching the Fortress of Regrets, opening the Bronze Sphere, and discovering both your true name and the source of your torment, thereby achieving emotional catharsis, you get to fight the Big Bad. While you can defeat him with words if you have high enough wisdom, intelligence, or charisma, or if you get the Blade of the Immortal, he isn't all that impressive of an enemy in physical combat either, except if you're really high level. Also, resurrecting Vhailor and telling him the truth of your identity will make him an unbeatable killing machine that drops the boss with relatively few hits.
  • Complete Monster: The Practical Incarnation. Even an evil-aligned Nameless One will be disgusted by his actions.
  • Crosses the Line Twice: Having Martha conduct an autopsy on you while you're still alive is pretty dumb, and then the game goes on to describe the procedure in squirm inducing detail before The Nameless One finally passes out.
  • Crowning Music of Awesome: The Recurring Riff, and by extension, most of the battle music and the background music for The Very Definitely Final Dungeon.
  • Cult Classic: Essentially doomed to this, given that about seven months after this game came out, a sequel to a much simpler and more popular game came out.
    • It didn't help that combat, Diablo II's bread and butter, tended to feel like an afterthought in this game.
  • Epileptic Trees:
    • The plot itself can give birth to umpteen, but in-game dialogue mentions an all-time great: that the Lady Of Pain, mysterious and godlike ruler of Sigil, who can banish lawbreakers to endless, eternal mazes (or just kill them by casting a shadow made of thousands of magical blades) for crimes like murder, treason or daring to worship her, is actually six giant squirrels wearing a cloak, a ring of levitation and an illusion spell.
    • A popular fan one is that the Nameless One's original incarnation is Zerthimon. Despite the fact that the Nameless One appears as a human male, albeit covered in scars (not only on screen, but characters who bring up the Nameless One's appearance also describe him this way), and the game's creators have outright said that, while they don't *know* who he was, they do *know* who he was not, and he was not Zerthimon.
    • The guy sending the Symbol of Torment spell? It's the DM.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: Yeah, yeah, we know that "Vrischika" is Sanskrit for "scorpion"... but is there anyone who isn't going to think of Homestuck when they read that these days?
  • Magnificent Bastard: The Practical Incarnation. Holy crap the Practical Incarnation.
  • Memetic Mutation: "Updated my journal". An average playthrough will have this sound play several hundred times, and the phrase has become an in-joke between fans. Most of the Nameless One's barks have also attained minor in-joke status.
  • Moral Event Horizon:
    • There's a chance it will be crossed in the story's narrative. You have several opportunities to cross it yourself. Some past incarnations (especially the Practical Incarnation, and apparently your first incarnation) crossed it already.
    • Your first incarnation did not merely cross the horizon. He ran past it screaming, scissors in hand, baby entrails dripping from his open mouth, dead puppy wrapped uncomfortably around his genitalia, and killing everything in his in his path in such horrible ways that they envy the dead puppy. The first incarnation was not a nice person. A thousand lifetimes of saintly penance would not be enough to make up for whatever he did. He's the good-aligned incarnation. And he's the one warning you.
    • The Practical Incarnation made Deionarra love him so her soul will be bound to him in death and force her to help him if he ever returns. It was his backup plan should he die in the Fortress of Regrets, which he did.
    • You can cross it yourself in multiple ways, though particularly, shoving Morte or Annah into the Pillar of Skulls.
      • Unless you pull Morte back out afterwards. It's still pretty twisted, but not a Moral Event Horizon... especially since you suffer for it.
  • Nightmare Fuel: Don't let the general quirkiness fool you, there are a lot of highly disturbing things in this game; enough that this trope requires its own page.
  • One-Scene Wonder: This game has more than a few, among them the following: Ravel Puzzlewell, meeting the incarnations, and, of course, the Transcendent One. In fact, one might argue that very few generic characters are particularly forgettable.
  • Player Punch: Hoo boy, yes. In particular, trying to play one of the evil paths is akin to facing down an Olympic boxer with lead weights tied onto your extremities. If the player is not a Complete Monster, of course.
    • If the Nameless One joins the faction of the Sensates, he gains access to their private sensorium. Within is a sensory stone entitled 'Longing'. In it are Deionarra's experiences, days before her death. And as the Nameless One, you experience both sides of the conversation (it being with the past incarnation Deionarra loved), and come to *know* its horror, especially as a good character. It is not so much a Player Punch as the Lady's Shadow of Player Punches. In the same private sensorium, you find a trap from the Paranoid Incarnation and the experience of being tortured by Ravel Puzzlewell with some interactivity. 'Longing' manages to be the worst of the three, by far.
    • Also, when navigating the Fortress of Regrets, you have to watch as each of your scattered party members are approached by the Transcendent One. They all die. And there's nothing you can do to stop it.
  • Squick: The game gets really vivid and detailed in describing what happens when you pluck out your own eyeball and replace it with a magical prosthetic. Or when you bite off your own finger and use your Healing Factor to graft another to the stump. Or when you ask a woman who prepares dead bodies to cut you open and rummage around in your guts for magical items left by previous incarnations. Also, two words: "baby oil".
  • That One Level:
    • The Rubikon Dungeon Construct. While completely avoidable, essentially a Bonus Dungeon, if you want to find Nordom or kill the Evil Wizard, you have to set it to 'Hard' difficulty and go through it... and it is basically 62 instances of the same room copied over and over and over, with one to three pain-in-the-ass constructs which are completely identical from room to room. After the cuteness factor wears off, you can be forgiven for just going on a mad dash through the thing without stopping to fight.
    • Curst, which plays out exactly like it would in a normal RPG. It should come as no surprise that this segment of the game was made by a completely different team (though the dialogue was still written by Avellone's team), who obviously didn't "get it".
  • True Art Is Angsty: Though it has at least an equal share of humor, it owes the critical respect it receives from tackling existential issues on personal and macroversal levels.
  • The Woobie: Many, many characters in this story.
    • Heck, practically most of your party, including-but-not-limited-to the Nameless One.
    • Special mention should be made of Deionarra, who could be the page image for this trope.