YMMV / Arcana Heart

• Adorkable: Outside battle, Weiß's a complete, adorable klutz who knows nothing about social life.
• Badass Decay: Lieselotte. In the original Arcana Heart, she's a bonafide Enfant Terrible assassin. Afterwards, she began to mellow out as a Jerkass Woobie.
• Broken Base: There are some Fighting Game veterans that have a cold reception to the series just because it has an all-girls cast filled with Fanservice and Stripperific characters. Being an animesque series too hasn't help matters in this regard. Others, however, consider this criticism to be hypocritical due to other fighting games having similar characters.
• Cliché Storm: The entire series could be considered this, with a ninja girl with dog ears, a water-powered catgirl, a roller skating demon girl, a female Chinese android, mikos with large breasts, you name it.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Konoha's short physique helps her avoid many attacks, but she has a pretty short range.
  • Elsa. Depending on Arcana selection, she has several infinite combos in Arcana Heart 3.
• Genius Bonus: Akane's Arcana is named after the fennec, a type of fox with prominently large ears. Knowing that, check out her ears under that do-rag.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The April Fools' crossover involving BlazBlue is all the more amusing because Heart was announced for BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle.
• Ho Yay: Most of the girls have something for another:
  • The constant subtext (and later almost flat-out text) between Heart and Saki.
  • Mei-Fang seems to have shades of this with her creator. In her Arcana Heart 3 ending, it seems to be more than just shades.
  • Mildred and Fiona. One of the mid game scenes in the original game has Mildred holding Fiona in a rather, intimate looking way with her hand on Fiona's cheek and her face right next to Mildred's breasts. In Fiona's bad ending, Mildred is truly hurt by Fiona's betrayal.
  • Particularly notable with Clarice, in that there is no such thing as subtext regarding her fixation with Elsa.
  • Konoha’s primary goal life seems to be gain attention from Kamui. At times their relationship resembles a pet and owner, given Konoha's desire to being petted like a dog and have her belly rubbed. However, since Konoha is only interested in those things if it's from Kamui, coupled with her ending in 3, it appears closer to romantic feelings on her part.
  • Scharlachrot and Weiß. The latter's main goal is trying to find the former, the latter goes berserk in arcade mode at the thought of the former not being able to find her. In arcade story modes where Weiß does come for her, Scharlachrot goes berserk because she wasn't exclusively thinking about her. Even when she's free from her brainwashing, Scharlachrot is still a Clingy Jealous Girl around Weiß as she's the only connection she has to the world.
• I Knew It!: Zenia Valov is Lieselotte Achenbach's older sister.
• Memetic Badass: Parace is widely hailed as one of the most brutal and difficult fighting game bosses ever.
• Moe: The first fully Moe fighting game franchise.
• Porting Disaster: The PlayStation 2 version of Suggoi! Arcana Heart 2 suffers from slowdown, frame rate drop, and downgraded graphics and sprites.
• Quirky Work: All. Moe. Fighting. Game. The fact that it actually stands on its own merits is notable.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: The first game was a pretty good game, while the console version of the second game was a Porting Disaster. The third game, however, blows both of its predecessors out of the water big time.
• That One Attack: For the boss fight against Scharlachrot in 3, Giant Cannon - Dingfelder. It's a near-instantaneous, projectile attack that travels almost the full length of the screen and can shave a third of your life bar off if not blocked, and is almost guaranteed to send you to the corner. Worse still, blocking it triggers a guard crush, meaning no matter what happens, you have to avoid it unless you want to let Scharlachrot start comboing you. You can avoid it by jumping (but only if you're close enough. The projectile will eventually explode, giving it the ability to hit you in the air), but it doesn't help much when boss Scharlachrot goes into permanent Extend Force mode in the second round, meaning she can bait you into avoiding and set you up for her Anti-Air Arcana Blaze. Oh, and it's possible for Scharlachrot to combo Dingfelder into both her Arcana Blaze and even itself, which leads to some absolutely massive damage.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Raise your hand if you think that had it not been her name and the fact that this is an all-girls fighting game series, you might pass up Dorothy as a cute little boy.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Little Girls?: The series features an all-female cast, and some of the cover and promo art would not be out of place for a cheerleader game, Dating Sim, or Visual Novel. In actuality, it's a fighting game franchise that rivals Guilty Gear and BlazBlue in complexity and SNK in difficulty.
• The Woobie:
  • Every time Fiona loses, she ends up crying and pleading for the opponent to stay away from Mildred.
  • Poor, poor Yoriko. Her backstory is that she has an interest in the occult, and one day she and Lilica tried to summon a demon servant for her. But things went wrong, as Lilica decided to pull a prank, and redrew the summoning circle they made, unintentionally summoning a Demon Lord named "Michelangelo". Ever since then, Mike has been constantly dragging her to hell and back against her will, leaving her sleep-deprived for days on end (not to mention wasting her money on an exorbitant amount of pastries without her consent). To make things even worse, the aforementioned summoning also caused her to be in a seemingly inescapable contract with Mike, so now she can't get rid of him. While Mike does most if not all of the heavy work in her attacks, Yoriko meanwhile is shown being constantly frightened in her sprites and never smiling, implying that Mike is using her as a Meat Puppet as she's powerless to fight back. Knowing this, playing as or even fighting against her is extremely hard to sit through, because she's suffering either way.

---