Skullgirls/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • And the Fandom Rejoiced: Umbrella's finally on the roster!
  • Awesome Music: It's Michiru Yamane, so that's to be expected. For example...
  • Big in Japan
    • While the game is rising in popularity in its native US as more info comes out, so far, a lot of the fanart featured has been by Japanese artists, and Uno Makoto (designer for Witchblade) has even drawn fanart for Skullgirls. Reverge Labs has also noticed this: they plan to release a Japan-exclusive disc (due to Japan's dislike of DLC) after the first batch of DLC.
    • It's drawn the attention of Japanese fighting-game producers as well; Yoshinori Ono and Daisuke Ishiwatari are both on record as saying they're looking forward to the release of Skullgirls. (Ono even tweeted several photos of himself at the Skullgirls booth at New York Comic Con 2011.)
    • Mike Zaimont (director of the game) has also said he is hoping to get an arcade release for the game, with a Japan breakthrough in mind. Things are looking up for that: apparently the game can run on a Taito arcade board.
    • Following the game's US release, Microsoft Japan contacted Konami and Reverge Labs because they were overwhelmed by people calling in asking why it wasn't out in Japan yet. Wow.
  • Broken Base: Whle the game touts an infinite prevention system (to you know, prevent infinites), the game's combo system is free and open enough to allow skilled players to knock out other characters in a single combo. The core competitive players love this, the rest not so much.
    • The same applies to Mike Z's conservative approach to balance patches. Mike believes that you cannot make changes off a limited amount of play and prefers to let the game grow before he and the team make any balance changes. This obviously appeals to older fans and fighting game veterans. However, newer players, especially those new to the genre in general, are not so happy with this.
    • Some of the same newer players are also somewhat put off by the influences from Marvel vs. Capcom 2, specifically on the utility of the assists.
    • Double's Hornet Bomber Assist. Due to a mistake in the game's coding, it has a lot more invincibility frames than it should have, making countering it difficult. There are people already crying out for a nerf, and people who don't think the assist needs nerfing, and telling those people to learn to deal with it.
  • Complete Monster: According to the old plotlines, Samson would have been a bona-fide monster. He ate Filia's parents, mindwiped her, and would have been responsible for manipulating and corrupting her by turning her into the next Skullgirl as a tool for destroying the world. He is far less malicious in the final product however, and despite still being rather morally dubious and rough around the edges, he genuinely seems to care about Filia and had a former host name Delilah who he loved dearly.
    • The final product however has still given us quite a few notable nasties. Of note are Eliza, an immortal diva who reigned as a brutal Egyptian tyrant long ago and gleefully condemns several people to nightmarish fates that are far worse than death in her story mode, and Lorenzo Medici who is the head of the Medici Mafia and has overseen all sorts of fantastically vile crimes during his lifetime.
    • While not quite as bad as them, Black Dahlia and Brain Drain are also noteworthy: the former is Lorenzo Medici's personal attack dog who uses her station as a way to brutally murder countless people, while the latter is a sick, twisted mad scientist who conducts all sorts of horrific experiments on young girls that he enslaves against their will.
    • While he isn't in the game proper, the development team has made a concept for a playable evil Samson who is basically the time-displaced original concept for Samson, only even nastier than before. While he hasn't made his way into the series yet, he's one of many characters who might find themselves implemented in the series further down the road...
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: So far, Peacock seems to be drawing the most attention, probably by virtue of being the weirdest character -- which is quite an achievement, given what the other characters are like. This is most likely due to her spouting a bunch of familiar lines and her appearance and fighting style being based on old cartoons.
    • Squigly is also very popular among the burgeoning fanbase, and she wasn't even part of the default roster!
    • Minette, a character who was only seen in one picture in the Story Mode Trailer, and whose name was only revealed by Word of God, gained popularity shortly after the trailer went up.
    • Panzerfaust, a huge, muscular character with a tank for a fist, and whose name was also only revealed by Word of God, is growing in popularity as the possible first playable male character. He was previously part of another game concept by Alex Ahad, but shows up in the background of Parasoul's Story Mode in the same uniform as the rest of her soldiers. A popular YouTube voice actor, General Ivan, recorded some lines for him and sent them to Mike Z.
    • Big Bad was so popular pre-debut, he replaced Umbrella's (another ensemble darkhorse) place on the roster!
  • Estrogen Brigade: Despite the game having a mostly-female roster (or perhaps because of it), the game has a huge homo/bi/pan female audience. Not to say they're only here for the girls, Hello Beowulf~.
  • Fan Disservice: While there's an underlying theme of playful Fan Service running through a lot of the characters, there's an equal amount who totally turn it on its head. Sure there's busty gals in Form Fitting Wardrobes like Valentine and Cerebella, but then there's
  • Genius Bonus: One of Filia's supers is called "Gregor Samson" - after Gregor Samsa, the main character of the Franz Kafka story The Metamorphosis, who wakes up one morning to discover that he's turned into a giant cockroach-like insect creature.
    • The resident race of Fish People are called Dagonians and inhabit the district Little Innsmouth.
    • The Argus system gets its name from the myth of Argus Panoptes, the multieyed giant whose eyes, after his death, were taken by Hera to adorn the tail of the peacock.
    • Samson is a parasite that replaced Filia's hair (A hairasite?), and acts as the source of her strength. Now, who knows what was the source of Samson's strength in the bible? Anyone?
    • Everybody knows Peacock's mascot partner is named after Tex Avery. Less people notice the Avery Unit is named after his team of animators. Appropriately, it's her weapon system that warps reality into cartoon logic.
    • The Medici Mafia run the city of New Meridian and are the patrons of Cerebella's circus. During the Italian Renaissance, the House of Medici ran the city of Florence and were patrons of the arts, though with less horrifying crime.
    • Black egrets are actual birds that hunt by cupping their wings into makeshift umbrellas.
    • Cirque Du Soleil has an act named Vice Versa in which one person balances on top of another using remarkable physical strength.
    • Buer is a demon depicted as a lion's head with 5 bent goat legs like a spinning wheel. The Buer Drive is a spinning wheel made of bent blades. Painwheel's other synthetic parasite, the Gae Bolga, is named after CuChulainn's spear that expanded into 30 barbs when it entered a body. Since it's already in her body, it bursts out of her skin as multiple spikes.
  • Goddamned Boss: The Skullgirl herself. While Marie can take a lot of punishment and dish it out in spades, most of her attacks are easily avoided provided you play smart. When she's down to the last 10% or so of her health, however, she breaks apart into nothing more than a skull and some bones hovering around the Skull Heart. In this form, she is very hard to hit due to her tiny hitbox that floats out of the reach of most ground-based attacks, and zips back and forth across the arena to avoid you. All the while she's using all of the same attacks she was using in the previous two forms, with the skulls firing in greater numbers. While she's (arguably) not difficult enough to put her in SNK Boss level, she's still very, very irritating to fight.
  • Hollywood Pudgy: Filia is the "Fat" member of the cast weighing in at 142 pounds (24.4 BMI, 0.6 away from over weight).
  • Memetic Mutation: Republican Double
  • Misaimed Fandom:
    • Double is a gross abomination that can only be described as slime, tentacles and flesh; the ultimate Fan Disservice character. Hasn't stopped artist from making Rule 34 art of her. Though to be fair, her nun form is quite good-looking.
    • The girls' (and Beowulf) fanserviciness is a gender-flip of the typical roster of muscular men. This seems to have gone over the heads of people complaining about it/redesigning the cast to be more 'normal'.
  • Moe: Carol.
    • There's also Umbrella.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks: The June 2023 update, that removed imagery and scenes that Future Club deemed "problematic"(more exactly, cutscenes depicting police brutality, nazi-like imagery of an antagonistic faction, and several Panty Shots, and more). The review score of the Steam page turned from "positive" to "mixed", with a general perception that Revenge Labs engaged on Political Correctness Gone Mad by the fanbase.
  • Ugly Cute: MikeZ described Double as basically this in this video.
  • Unfortunate Implications: Peacock's bomb assists are now known as Lenny and George; the dev team decided that it wasn't worth the risk of trying to sell the game in Japan with those characters' original names intact -- Fat Man and Little Boy, the codenames for the nukes dropped on Japan in World War II.
  • The Woobie: Painwheel is shaping up to be this.
  • Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Bloody Marie, at least in Peacock's story. She has good intentions, but the Skull Heart is poisoning her desire to rid the world of evil (after Peacock stood up for her against slave traders) and the Skull Heart is transforming her into a monster. Peacock has to stop her.
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