Suikoden V/YMMV

• Evil Is Cool: After the Face Heel Turn, Sialeeds goes from a passable yet vastly outclassed magician/long range fighter to... err, okay, so she doesn't get that much of a powerup, but she definitely didn't have that much HP when she was in the party nor could use her lame Wind Rune to restrain the whole party while she flees.
• Fetish Fuel Station Attendant: Jeane, to Holy Shit Quotient levels in this game.
• Game Breaker:
  • Magic Absorb Runes. In previous games, they were barely worth equipping, only restoring level 1 MP a portion of the time, as well as dropping the wearer's accuracy. In this game? They restore the lowest level of expended MP (which means they can recover level 4 MP if all your lower-level spells are full up), the effect works every time, and there's no accuracy lost. The only downside is that they can only be equipped to the right hand (which prevents people with Runes locked on that slot from using them, such as Viki and her locked Blinking Rune), but anyone that CAN use them effectively has infinite MP. And given how utterly broken magic can be...
  • Once you understand how to uses them in army battles, the Beavers prove to be quite lethal: it is entirely possible to sink 40-50% of the ships with the one beaver unit: that means that more than 6.000 trained soldiers where slaughtered by one hundred armed beavers: you don't mess with Falena's Beaver.
  • Zerase. She has a powerful rune that allows her to rain immense amounts of damage on the enemies, has enough magic to cast the more powerful spells an adequate number of times, joins automatically as part of the story, and comes pretty early too. To quote a rather amusing comment from a walkthrough: "If you equip her with a Magic Absorb Rune on her right hand and a Flowing Rune on her left, the game will basically just give up and let you win."
  • Richard can block, counter or dodge almost all physical attacks in the game. Don't bring him along if the boss mainly uses magic though, as he will most likely die. Give him a Firefly Rune, and you can breeze through most battles.
  • Georg Prime has great stats and starts out with a rune that increases his critical rate and gives him a small chance of instantly killing enemies. There's a reason the game significantly limits your ability to actually put him in your party.
  • Ernst's Beast Rune has his second skill where everyone gets an Unbalance status. It works 100% even at the Final Boss.
• Iron Woobie: At the start of the game, Lymsleia's ten. The stuff she goes through would usually Break the Cutie.
• Les Yay: Cathari is heavily implied to have been in a relationship with Lucretia at one point, and Lelei is implied to currently be in a relationship with her.
• Magnificent Bastard: Sialeeds managed to outwit everyone when it came to politics. When Gizel dies, he outright states that she's the only one who got exactly what she wanted. Boy, was he right.
• Memetic Badass: Georg Prime, the Chuck Norris of Suikoden universe.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Zahhak crosses it when he burns a town filled with Godwin sympathizers simply to provide a distraction to allow his army to escape.
  • Marscal Godwin crosses it when he orders Dolph to burn down Beaver Lodge.
  • Dolph crosses it when he stabs his Forgotten Childhood Friend Lyon with a poisoned knife that almost kills her.
  • Salum Barrows crosses it when it is revealed that the Lordlake Rebellion was sparked off by his building a dam near the town. When citizens staged a peaceful protest, his son panicked and ordered his garrison to attack. Salum took advantage of the chaos by slipping some of his agents into the crowd (now moving towards Sol-Falena to tell the Queen) and had them steal the Dawn Rune, framing Lordlake and Lord Rovere for the theft. This led to Queen Arshtat nuking Lordlake.
• Player Punch: So, so many. No Suikoden game is complete without them.
• The Scrappy: Roy has the traditional Star of Scrappies, Chizoku.
• That One Boss: The second duel, Chuck, is honestly the hardest in the game. Mainly due to the duels relying on you being able to read your opponent combined with him being The Stoic.
• That One Level:
  • The Deep Twilight Forest is loathed by players for being utterly baffling to get through: it constantly leads into dead ends, and circular paths that, if not careful, will lead you right out to where you started. The whole visit is punctuated by a high random encounter rate. It has treasures too, so god help you if you intend to search for them.
  • The Very Definitely Final Dungeon, where you have to split into three parties and constantly switch among them to advance through the dungeon. While it isn't as bad as the forest above, there is only one Save Point (which is at the entrance) and, after the three parties regroups, it is a Point of No Return. Also, leaving the dungeon means that the three bosses have to be defeated again.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Getting Roy's Heroic Sacrifice, the Crowning Moment of Awesome for the entire game, locks out the best ending, leading to the death of the girl he loves, and who he sees as he dies. "Wasted" doesn't begin to describe it; more like "machine-gunned it and left it in a ditch."
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Many players thought that the prince was a chick when they first saw the cover. It doesn't help that his clothes look like ones that women would usually wear.
• What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic: Depending on the culture, a rose tattoo symbolises anything from love and beauty, to connotations of being a prostitute... it's fair to say Nifsara probably falls somewhere in the middle....
• Win Back the Crowd: After the stylistic deviations of Suikoden III with its paired party system and its trinity sight, and Suikoden IV with its sea voyaging, lack of depth and shrunken parties, Suikoden V returns the series to a style of gameplay and storytelling much closer in style to the first two games. It seems to have mostly worked, as Suikoden V is the less divisive game since the first two entries.