YMMV / Cartagra

• Awesome Music: The opening theme, "Rengoku", sung by Shimotsuki Haruka, an emotional and slightly melancholy song that fits the overall mood of the story very well. There is also a very well-made fan-made English version of the song, produced for the Let's Dub Project's Cartagra fandub project.
• Fetish Retardant: The sex scenes. Even putting aside the questionable anatomy, spontaneous lead-ins and the fact that a number of girls are underage in the Japanese release, what kills them is the rendering of the penises, which are always drawn to be both dispropionately large and an unpleasant shade of red that makes them look more like raw meat. The result is scenes that are more awkward and unpleasant rather than arousing.
• Jerkass Woobie: Yura. While she is a cult leader who happily orchestrated multiple murders, a number of which out of a psychotic obsession with Shugo, it's very hard not to sympathize with her, considering she was treated as a pariah by everyone around her and was sold by her own father into human experimentation, purely because she was born with an abnormal eye color.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Pretty much all the murders. Special mention goes however to Otoha, who has her head and limbs hacked off and has crow wings attached to her back, and Takako, who is stabbed multiple times before being left impaled on the school gate face first.
  • The bad endings, especially Takako's route.
• The Scrappy: Nana. First, there's her smartass atitude, since she never misses the chance to be snarky at Shugo and basically calls him dumb when he doesn't get what she's trying to say (even if it's not that obvious). Second, her incestuous obsession with Shugo, which goes up to eleven in one of the bad endings, where she rapes him after he was physically and mentally tortured by one of the serial killers. Third, she never pays for any of the morally questionable acts she does during the visual novel. And finally, the way she solves most of the mystery all by herself in the True Route, which feels like a Deus ex Machina of sorts.
• Squick: While Shugo's age is never stated, it's made quite clear that he's somewhere in his mid to late twenties. This makes it quite creepy that he can have sex with Hatsune and Takako, both of whom are teenage girls. Even if you disregard that, there's the little matter of Shugo mentioning multiple times to having had an active sex life with Yura, who must also have been in her teens at the time (when Shugo was at minimum nearing 20) and was also severely mentally unwell. The localization made it a point to never mention any specific ages and include a "no minors were harmed" disclaimer precisely to allay such reactions from a Western audience.
• The Un-Twist: Late in the game, it's revealed by Tokiko that Yura is actually Dead All Along, with the leader of Senri being her body double who murdered her and took her place. Thing is though, not only would this be an extremely underwhelming resolution to one of the game's central plot threads, but the game mentions multiple times that Yura and Kazuna are near identical in appearance. Consequently, the reveal in the epilogue that Yura is alive and pulled a Twin Switch with Kazuna is downright obvious.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Shigusa Tokiko. She's actually quite an interesting character, being the daughter of Senri's founder who was raised from birth in the cult, being manipulated into being an accomplice in Akao's murders out of a desire to find her father and suffering from a debilitating drug addiction. Thing is though that virtually all of this is detailed in a lengthy exposition dump given right before she's found dead. All of her screentime before then is meant to just make her look vaguely mysterious, and even after opening up to Shugo and his allies she doesn't get much time to develop as her own character.