Shadow Hearts/YMMV
- Abandon Shipping: Happens to every single Yuri/Karin shipper after they complete Covenant. (Long story short, thanks to time travel, she's his mother.) Well, "every single" may be giving shippers too much credit.
- Angel/Devil Shipping: This is played up a lot for Alice/Yuri shipping, both in canon and fanon.
- Badass Decay: Happens to Albert Simon in Covenant
- Crazy Awesome: Joachim. Vampire? Check! Superhero? Check! Professional Wrestler? And check!
- Crowning Music of Awesome: Soundtracks by Yoshitaka Hirota, with Yasunori Mitsuda guest-composing a few tracks on the first two games for extra added flavor. Since Hirota is almost unquestionably a disciple of Akira Yamaoka and Mitsuda needs no introduction, Shadow Hearts' soundtrack manages to be both epic and skin-crawlingly creepy at the same time.
- Special mentions go to Demon's Gig from Shadow Hearts, and Hardcore to the Brain.
- Draco in Leather Pants: Lady and Killer in From The New World. Lady is mostly excused by her status as a Tragic Monster. Killer however, who is as his name implies a psychotic, remorseless serial killer has no such excuse.
- Well, to most fans, Killer does look like Yuri in a way.
- Ending Fatigue: Doing the end-of-game sidequests can sap your enthusiasm if you spend too long on it.
- Fetish Fuel: In Covenant, Cordelia's first six outfits range from cute to spicy. The next two are leather bondage and a revealing raccoon suit. The last one is an Alice costume, complete with Panty Shot while casting Advent.
- Funny Aneurysm Moment: Margarete. This is Mata Hari we're talking about. Covenant is set in 1915. Anyone else remember what happened to the real one near the end of WWI? For those who don't know, the French executed her for spying.
- Game Breaker: If used properly, Lucia's Aromatherapy ability can make the game *much* easier with the only drawback being it will effect everybody but her. her successor, Ricardo, is also pretty good, too.
- Combos can become this way. They're optional but still powerful if utilized properly in Covenant but in From the new world? You can see several videos of people literally racking up the bonus damage from using the huge-flashy-and-practical-abilities-that-inflict-lots-of-hits and taking out a sizable chunk of the boss's HP.
- Hell Is That Noise: Quite a few, both in exploration and combat. In the first game, you walk on blood and corpses quite often, producing a disgusting wet noise with every step. And the music for some areas would include screams, hysterical laughter and strange pants. Then the monsters come along and assault your ears with their weird moaning, nauseating squishy noises or gut-wrenching screams.
- Moral Dissonance: Yuri beats the living hell out of a mortally ill villain whose plans he has just completely and irrevocably ruined, while the villain's grandson looks on helplessly, having already been shoved to the ground.
- The reasoning is that the Foreign Minister is the man responsible for the attempted invasion of China, making him indirectly responsible for the deaths of Yuri's parents, since Dehuai specifically targeted Ben Hyuga's family as revenge for him thwarting the first Demon's Gate Invocation as an agent of the Japanese government. More importantly, the Minster's pleading to spare his grandson mirrors the actions of Yuri's mother shortly before she was killed trying to protect her son. This explains why the Minister is the only villain in the series who actually manages to get to Yuri, causing him to go crazy and then break down in tears.
- Unfortunately, if you didn't play the first Shadow Hearts game, this is one of those moments that would have you conused as hell.
- From the New World ends in willful fratricide. Which the party angsts about for all of 10 minutes. Which leads to the cutscene where mass murderer Killer says, in a moment full of irony, "You're not a very good brother, are you?" Though by that point Lady/Grace was a soulless monster intent on destroying the world, and it was clear that killing her was their only option. Hell, one could even consider it a Mercy Kill.
- The reasoning is that the Foreign Minister is the man responsible for the attempted invasion of China, making him indirectly responsible for the deaths of Yuri's parents, since Dehuai specifically targeted Ben Hyuga's family as revenge for him thwarting the first Demon's Gate Invocation as an agent of the Japanese government. More importantly, the Minster's pleading to spare his grandson mirrors the actions of Yuri's mother shortly before she was killed trying to protect her son. This explains why the Minister is the only villain in the series who actually manages to get to Yuri, causing him to go crazy and then break down in tears.
- Needs More Love: The first game was a quiet gem with the misfortune of being released 3 weeks before Final Fantasy X in Japan and just 1 week before in the US, getting crushed by its massive publicity.
- Arguably averted for Europe who had to wait over half a year for Final Fantasy X to be released, Shadow Hearts was a welcome distraction for many while they waited.
- Nightmare Fuel: The Doll House sidequests, particularly the one in the first SH. Also, the Boss Room in the optional dungeon Kowloon Fortress is just...*shudder*
- More to the point: you know how most RPG series use kind of goofy-looking cutesy monsters as enemies? This one uses skinned corpses. For Mooks. And they're the least disturbing thing about it!
- The enemy bios in the Library are quite unnvering. There's a particular enemy in Covenant that's described as devouring a pregnant woman and absorbing her into itself and the person trapped inside is screaming constantly.
- Near all the monsters in Koudelka and the original Shadow Hearts are just...fucked up. Case in point: One of the first monsters you encounter in Shadow Hearts is a giant spider that- according to its bio- injects corrosive venom into the anus of its prey, and then devours its melting insides. One of the first monsters.
- More examples include the Armdog, an upside-down dog standing on a human arm..."The ghost of a postman who ate all the dogs in town". Or Sin, a scrawny naked woman standing on her arms, holding a pike with her toes which goes through a brain - "a mistake of God which seeks revenge against its creator". Or Guinea Pig, again a naked woman - with no head, that attacks you by splitting its whole body between her legs to bite you. Or the snail-girls in Zhaoyang village, with an absolutely horrible scream - "the ghost of a girl who was burned alive. She is very lonely, but don't get to friendly with her". For Covenant, we get male Fan Disservice in the form of a masculine lower body, gliding on its abdomen and legs in the air, which hits you with a huge phallic lump of flesh hanging from its crotch and bites you with mouths in the crook of its knees. And that's not even going into the bosses...
- Li Li of Dalian is bound to give a few players a nasty shock due to her grotesque appearance on her Character Portrait.
- Poke the Poodle: This troper has a closet full of role-playing games wherein the Big Bad tries to conquer or destroy the world, so he has always found Masaji Kato's plan to turn back time a mere 100 years very reasonable by comparison.
- Replacement Scrappy: Johnny from From the New World. As far as some fans are concerned, he's not Yuri.
- Scrappy Mechanic: To do anything, you need to press the action button at the right time at least three times. Anything. This includes attacking, spell casting, using an item, searching a place for an item that's right in sight. And would you believe this very same mechanic somehow wasn't horrible in the sequels?
- Hildegarde's Calorie Meter in From the New World is an utter bitch to work without expending rare, irreplaceable items.
- Shipping: In the story for Covenant, Yuri was clearly making a comeback, with a new love interest, Karin. Backlash from fans demanded he get back together with Alice. Fans got their wish, but not in the way they expected.
- Squick: Kato creating Ouka as a Replacement Goldfish for his dead love interest. It gets even more disturbing when Raiden and Hien discuss, in a cutscene, about Kato and Ouka wanting to have a baby together.
- How about Karin's creepy infatuation with the inhuman Amon?
- Or, more obviously, with her son!
- Her attraction to him isn't especially squicky until it's revealed that she is stalking him through time itself to be with him as a child. Assuming she retains her memories after the time travel (debatable), that's one messed-up family.
- Or, more obviously, with her son!
- How about Karin's creepy infatuation with the inhuman Amon?
- Tastes Like Diabetes / Historical Hero Upgrade: Anastasia in Covenant, and well aware of it.
- That One Boss: Shadow Hearts 1, Fox Face. Or any of the four killer bosses that pop up after you beat him.
- Uncanny Valley: Averted because of the stylized characters (Rasputin looks like a cartoon villain), but in Covenant, there's the "Miracle" scene in which, for once, the Uncanny Valley turns out to be more funny than creepy, because Yuri tries to make a sad face...but it looks so ridiculous some people who would have cried at that scene suddenly found themselves stifling back laughter. This has become a very minor meme in itself.
- Viewer Gender Confusion: Mao in From the New World, namely due to the Cross-Dressing Voices in the English version. In the Japanese version of From the New World, Mao is voiced by Kujira, who is definitely a woman. She sounds very similar to Orochimaru, though.
- Villain Decay: Nicholai "I Want to Defeat You" Conrad.
- Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Kato from Covenant, after having his love die in his arms for the second time, he decides to destroy the present world by erasing the last hundred years and changing history to a better course.