Valkyrie Profile/YMMV

• Complete Monster: Both Loki and Lezard Valeth qualify. As of Covenant Of The Plume, Gandar might also be a solid candidate.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Banshees have a good chance to appear early and can wipe out everyone (including your rear caster) with just a couple of their AOE attacks; good luck if you didn't get Nanami and her Dragonbane in the second chapter.
  • Mandragoras in the Forest of Spirits, which can wipe out even a well-prepared party with a single multi-hit AOE attack. And they come in groups. Most gameplay guides will advise the player to run away rather than fight-- and not without good reason.
  • The various Eye enemies (Evil Eye, Inferior Eye, etc.), who deal high damage, take a ton of hits to defeat, lack weaknesses, and can revive their fallen comrades. On Hard Mode and Asgard Hill in the A Ending, they regularly pop up in groups of two to three.
  • Many others appear in later dungeons, which is one reason you want to make good use of those "Slayer" weapons.
  • Hamsters. They randomly show up in place of Loki Shades in the Seraphic Gate, and will give you a violent phobia of cute furry things in short order.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Lezard, very much so.
• Ensemble Darkhorse: Arngrim. He's been in all three games so far. Given that he's pretty much a footsoldier in the grand scheme of things, that should tell you something.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: One of the things with the trope just above this one. Part of Lezard's DILP treatment involves ignoring the existence of Lucian, Lenneth's canon love interest, and focusing on the man who is a bit more obsessed with Lenneth in canon than fanon.
• Fashion Victim Villain: Odin's outfit is commonly described by fans as grey pajamas.
• Game Breaker:
  • The fully leveled skills "Guts" and "Auto Item" in combination make it almost impossible for the entire party to die, rendering other skills of the same type basically pointless. Add some Angel Curio's and you can survive anything long enough to win. This technique becomes necessary against Bloodbane and the Bonus Dungeon.
  • The "Reverie" skill can also boost both attack power and the amount of EXP gems you pick up by adding hits to the combo. Using it well can make most fights a lot easier, and level up your characters a lot faster as well. The best part, though? You can use both sets of game breakers together.
• Goddamn Bats: Any of the slime type enemies. They're generally no real threat to you, but they come in groups of two-to-three, and they're so small that most of your characters' attacks will go right over their heads, even more when they're knocked down, as will a good chunk of magic attacks, so they're tedious at best to fight.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: One of Freya's victory quotes is One day I must face Brahms.... It is possible to have both Freya and Brahms in your party in the Bonus Dungeon.
• Ho Yay: Arngrim and Lawfer. After Arngrim dies, Lawfer cannot bring himself to believe he had turned traitor and killed the princess. He ends up dying for that.
• Iron Woobie: Lenneth stumbles into this terribly during a Heroic BSOD and after.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • Loki, who uses Lucian as a scapegoat to conceal the theft of the Dragon Orb.
  • Lezard Valeth. His entire plan to "obtain" Lenneth involves him manipulating gods, mortals and demons.
• Narm: Grey's ICICLE DISASTER!
• Nightmare Fuel: Jelanda's transformation into a ghoul in the PSP rerelease is horrifying to watch, especially with her screaming for help the whole time.
• Porting Disaster: Well, not quite a disaster, but the original US release for the PlayStation had some notable improvements over the original Japanese version, generally streamlining the menu and organization of your characters and items. The PSP rerelease, however, was based on the Japanese version, and thus doesn't have the improvements from the US PlayStation original.
• Tear Jerker:
  • In case you haven't figured it out yet, the vast majority of the game involves your watching people die, very often brutally and tragically. This game isn't for the faint of heart.
  • Yumei's recruitment scene. As a guy on GameFAQs put it, "if you didn't cry the first time you saw it, you are one heartless individual."
  • Also Llewelyn's backstory may also make people shed Manly Tears.
  • The saddest story in the game may be Celia's, who, believe it or not, is one of the few named characters to live.
  • Oh, and shall we consider that this is quite literally one Tear Jerker after another. Let's see, we're watching a fourteen year old girl being turned into a demon, a woman watching her husband meet the same fate and having her spine cracked on her birthday (her husband isn't even recruitable, either, so they don't get to be Together in Death!), a songstress being beaten after being used as a tool by the army dying after meeting the one person who treated her as a human, watching an entire village having been petrified and shattered... wow. What a world.
  • Lenneth's anguished breakdown at Lucian's death after regaining her memories was quite difficult to watch compared to how composed and stoic she usually is.
• That One Boss:
  • The Beholder-like Hel Servants in the Dark Tower of Xervah, a Hard Mode-only dungeon. They are extremely durable, hit hard, and can bring each other back from the dead if you don't kill them off at the same time. Plus, you likely don't have any of the really good equipment at this point, since they can only be accessed if you have a certain item... and the Servants guard the first prerequisite to that item. They later reappear in several other dungeons as Demonic Spiders.
  • Any late-game boss that can perform the same Disc One Nuke Great Magic spells mages in your party can potentially learn is this if one doesn't have the proper items equipped. (And sometimes, even if one does have them equipped, they still are!)
  • The Wraith and Akhetamen are hard unless you have Holy Water of Mithra because they like to spam Gravity Blessing or Seraphic Law respectively every 2 turns. The latter also heals himself to full if you brought him to 20% HP, so you have to hit him a couple of times before tossing the Holy Water at him.
  • Bloodbane in particular is quite egregious. If you can beat him, you should have no problem with Surt, Fenrir, or Loki.
• That One Level:
  • Lezard Valeth's tower and the Tombs of Amenti are Hel for their sheer length.
  • The Celestial Castle. If you fall down in the outdoor area, you will be sent back to the world map, losing 2 periods. And did anyone mentioned that those chests on the platforms all have explosive traps on them? Also, get into a fight mid-jump, or while going across the chains, and you're in deep shit once the fight's over since you'll just fall straight down.
  • All of them pale before the Clockwork Mansion. It has a 5 by 5 maze, with every room but the one you are in and the one you left rotating every time you move between rooms. And each room has a different layout, as far as traversal is concerned. And there are no secrets or tricks to solve it. Hope you found a guide with the exact steps needed to solve the puzzle-- you'll need it!
• The Scrappy: Llewelyn's high voice and whiny attitude typically gets him sent off to Valhalla ASAP. It also doesn't help that his attacks aren't very accurate.
• Tier-Induced Scrappy:
  • About half the players hate Llewelyn because of how he is in-story; the other half hate his terrible attack power and tendency to miss. His only saving grace is that using his finisher guarantees the chance to use another finisher with a large combo attached to it - and there are other characters who can do it nearly as well.
  • Sorcerers/Sorceresses often fall into this but it's mostly because you only need one, and most people pick with Mystina or have picked their sorcerer far earlier in the game. This would be okay if the later chapters didn't throw a lot of them at you.
• The Woobie: As it's a game about people before their final moments, it has a few.
  • Celia. The last surviving member of a mercenary group that included three of your eventual Einherjar, and the only one still alive at the end of the game, and the last you see of her is her breaking down when the last one dies. Made worse by that recruitment scene looking, up until the death, that it is hers. By the end of it you want Lenneth to pop in and just give the poor girl a hug...or a stab in the stomach.
  • Jelanda ndergoes a painful Body Horror Involuntary Shapeshifting, all the while begging for help. Then she has to watch helplessly through her own eyes as her twisted form slaughters the very soldiers who came to save her. Finally, she is allowed the release of death at Arngrim and Lenneth's hands.
  • Shiho was born blind, forced to become a song maiden for her nation, abused by her military superiors and even her fellow townspeople, and to top it all off, she was killed right after meeting the one man who acknowledged her as a person and not just as a tool for battle.
• Woolseyism:
  • Most notably, the change of Ahly's name to Hrist; Hrist was a valkyrie in Norse mythology.
  • For whatever reason, Freya is named Frey in the Japanese version, which is the name of her brother, despite obviously being the Norse goddess of love and fertility. Strangely enough, there is a character named Frey, but it is a young girl named Frey who is the sister of Freya. She is named Freya in the Japanese version for some reason.