YMMV / Death end re;Quest

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Ripuka, despite all of her bluster and claims to the contrary, cares on some level about fulfilling Iris's will. She appears after Iris has the means of destroying World's Odyssey and Arata's world, and despite flat-out stating that it would go against her purpose to let those worlds be obliterated wholesale, still fights the party to spite the one being that can thwart Iris at this point - you, the player. Alternatively, for an even crazier theory, she knows that you're the only one that can help the party subdue Iris and goads you into taking direct action.
• Anticlimax Boss: The True Final Boss is a cakewalk compared to full-powered Ripuka, whose sky-high defenses more than make up for her laughable HP.
• Ass Pull: Werner Glock saving the party members from dying by triggering Ending Engage goes against the conditions established since the beginning of the game and, much like everything else involving Werner Glock, isn't elaborated on in the slightest.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The entire scene that showcases how World's Odyssey averts No Periods, Period as it comes out of nowhere, wasn't even necessary as a means to segue into a monster encounter, and nothing related to it is ever brought up again.
• Demonic Spiders: The various rhino-like Martyrs are among the only non boss enemies to have Counter Actions, itself already a Scrappy Mechanic, and easily the most frequently occuring of them. Toward the end of the game they often show up in pairs of different varieties allowing them to lock out two of three attack types until they're dealt with.
• Difficulty Spike: There are two major ones. The first is when the player gains access to the Strain Area, as the enemies that follow are tougher and it takes a lot more fighting for the characters to level up. The second is Chapter 9, where enemies become even tougher, there are Field Bugs that can force a character to skip their turn, and the Sun-Moon-Star elements that could be safely ignored up to this point become very important.
• Disappointing Last Level: A number of players were not pleased with Chapters 10 and 11 of the first game, particularly the massive Gambit Pileup, characters being absent or having a bridge dropped on them, and unevenly-telegraphed reveals that have the feel of a Cosmic Deadline being involved.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: The general opinion is that the visual novel segments are much more interesting than the RPG gameplay, which is best described as a somewhat cumbersome mix of Neptunia and Mugen Souls that comes with the usual balance and budget issues that frequently plague Compile Heart's work.
• Fridge Horror:
  • This sets in when you realize that the Shop Fodder Beast Clan items are possibly the leftover belongings of now-deceased Beastmen. You're profiting off of them the same way that their killers did.
  • Ripuka is an Omnicidal Maniac, but the one person she really wants to end is you, the player. Keep in mind that the Ludens were eventually able to break into Arata's universe, and that Ripuka already has the ability to address you through the fourth wall...
  • The reveal that you are a tangible, plot-acknowledged force in Arata's world also puts a darker spin on 100% Completion, as that requires you to intentionally send characters to die, all of which happens in-universe regardless of your ability to reload the game.
• Fridge Logic:
  • In Chapter 4, the party comes upon a real-world photo in the game world, and the player is given the option of Shina peeking at it herself or sharing it with everyone. The player gets a Game Over if Shina peeks at it herself; the photo is a picture of Arata, and this revelation combined with Arata's "rash" response and Shina's wearyness prompts her to part ways with him due to how irritated she is at the whole ordeal. Somehow, choosing the other option doesn't have any of this happen despite the picture still being seen. It doesn't make any more sense in context, either.
  • Both Arata and Ripuka accuse you of trying to be a bystander instead of actively choosing a side. Except that, assuming that the "God of Death" title refers to your ability to subvert death by reloading the game, you have been helping Arata and the party the whole time.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Celica is ridiculously powerful, to the point where one wonders if it is intentional to avoid Cutscene Power to the Max for the scenes that involve her. Her Aster League skill in particular shreds through all manner of enemies.
  • Clea's "All Lives" skills, which heal everyone so long as her HP is at 100%. By far the most notable is "All Lives Restored", which also restores SP to everyone...more SP than it actually costs, making it free for most intents and purposes. It's not as powerful as Lily's Manafront (whose SP restoration is also more than the cost, assuming that Lily has more than 300 max SP), but still worth using as Clea is a better damage dealer than Lily.
• Genius Bonus: In computing, 65,535 is the largest that a 16-bit number can get; adding 1 to that number causes the number to loop back to zero and generally wreaks havoc on the program in question. So naturally, Arata degrading the world to its 65,536th iteration causes the process to break and leaves the world as a hodgepodge of Arata's world and World's Odyssey.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: This wouldn't be the last time that Jackie Lastra would dub a character named Iris whose death is a key part of the narrative.
• Narm: Celica's sword colliding with metal in cutscenes is a cartoonish "CLANG", likely ruining the mood of serious cutscenes, such as her being mind controlled and fighting Clea in her Glitched State after killing all the other party members except Shina in Chapter 10.
• Salvaged Story: The two DLC areas seem to be designed to address some possible shortcomings of the main story. Godot Ruins, the Phantom Abyss serves to give Clea a short story arc beyond her introduction in place of the Glitch arcs the other characters received as she was quickly tacked on to the last of those without one of her own. Landor Cave, the Uncharted Lands is just a lighthearted and goofy treasure hunt for a rumored legendary sword lead by Al, granting a short break from the constant suffering in the main story.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Counter Actions on enemies. Not only do they interrupt your turn, it makes certain characters that the enemies are countering useless against them. One enemy even counters items.
  • The character ending that plays after defeating the True Final Boss appears to be completely random on the first playthrough. This is especially irritating as Shina's ending is blatantly intended to be the Golden Ending.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Several characters either disappear or have a bridge dropped on them. For example, we don't even get to see how Detective Hizumi would react to seeing his daughter alive after being gone for months.
  • Levin and Nova of the Ludens, despite having interesting designs and at least a little bit of potential as characters, do so little that they could be removed from the game completely and it wouldn't change a single thing.
  • The mysteries surrounding Werner Glock aren't fully explored in the first game either, leaving him as an ambiguous, seemingly omnipotent entity. Death end re;Quest 2 addresses this by all but confirming that he is an Observer.
  • As noted above, almost none of the character endings involve much development or closure. Even in the case of Shina's ending it's less about her and more about Sumika for the first half of it, before ending in the abrupt meeting like the others'. The second half, which no other character got, quickly moves away from her and instead explains how the world itself managed to change.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: In general, the first game feels like it ran afoul of Compile Heart's infamously-tight budgets. It's telling that it is flat-out stated In-Universe that clearing World's Odyssey should take 50 hours, but it takes 10-20 hours less on a reasonably-sized run. Some also felt that resolving the game by involving the fourth wall and a Deus ex Machina, while interesting in its own right, was a bit of a cop-out instead of a satisfying conclusion.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: The sheer number of bad endings, paired up with rewards for seeing them, and the complete and utter lack of closure to any character ending that isn't Shina's leaves the game feeling closer to Torture Porn than a journey to save the people trapped in the game.