Virtual On/YMMV

• Anticlimax Boss: Tangram in MARZ's story mode.
• Awesome Music: Lots and lots, even those in the ill-received MARZ!!! Among the most notable ones are the first theme of Temjin and the victory song in Force.
  • Takenobu Mitsuyoshi, composer and singer of many of Sega's most famous arcade tunes, performed a vocal version of the song "Conquista Ciela" from Force and MARZ. And it is glorious.
• Fanon Discontinuity: MARZ is widely shunned by fans of the series' previous installments due to being an Oddball in the Series.
• Game Breaker: Fei-Yen, in the hands of a remotely skilled player (in the original) is near-unbeatable (especially after her Gold Shift).
  • Viper II's Homing Beam can be fired at point-blank range in Close Combat mode (when long-range weapons are not supposed to work). Considering it's massively overpowered and, well, homing this can do a lot of damage.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The sound of Temjin preparing to fire a Wave Motion Gun in Oratorio Tangram.
• Sequelitis: Virtual-On Force was seen as a step down for getting rid of the intense speed that made Oratorio Tangram so popular. MARZ was heavily criticized for changing the play style into a single player mission-based campaign, long loading times and the localization quality, making it infamous as the series' Franchise Killer.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: "From the Moon To Me", originally an unused song for Fei-Yen, is pretty much the Sailor Moon theme song in Virtual-On form, not surprising seeing that Fei-Yen herself is an Expy of Sailor Moon. Not heard in the game, the song would still be released on the first game's soundtrack albums, was remixed as Fei-Yen's theme for the official CyberNet Rhapsody audio drama, and was finally implemented in the Sega AGES version of the first game for the Bonus Boss, the long lost original Fei-Yen.
• That One Boss: The massive mech Jaguarandi ever since Operation Moongate. In MARZ, you not only have to deal with him, but if you do well enough in the stages leading up to him, you'll have to fight two Jaguarandis at once.
  • While Jaguarandi is an immense pain in Force, the final battle with Ajim and Guerlain is quite possibly one of the most ruthless boss fights in the series, especially coupled with Force's more sluggish controls.
  • In MARZ, there's also the one encounter with the White Knight.
  • Deconstructed and parodied in Operation Moongate if you choose to continue after getting beaten into a pulp. Jaguarandi's armour has halved by then, and to boot, he shrinks to half his size. If you still can't beat him, and continue again, this repeats. Ad infinitum until he's so small, he's practically invisible and one hit will kill him.
• That One Level: Operation Moongate's Bonus Boss level with Fei-Yen from the Japan-only Sega Ages PlayStation 2 port. She runs and runs and runs while firing, and you end up dying because you took more damage than she did and the time ran out.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks: MARZ focus on single-player gameplay and using the degraded mechanics of Force.
  • Force changed the formula into making teams of two fight against each other, which excited players until it was revealed that it came at the cost of the intense speed that made Oratorio Tangram so popular.