YMMV / Death Smiles

• Americans Hate Tingle: Or rather, Americans Hate DeathSmiles. They'll accept Bullet Hell gameplay just fine, but the Audience-Alienating Premise really hurt sales, due to Fanservice coupled with characters who are obviously under 18 being seen as "pedo bait".
• Audience-Alienating Premise: The controversial character designs did not go unnoticed, especially not in America. The back-of-the-box Tag Line really didn't help.
• Awesome Music:
  • The Limited Edition Arrange Tracks contains an epic arrange of Hades Castle. Epic yet so faithful to the original, you can even play that song on your console's hard drive before selecting the final stage, and the song will even finish when the stage is over. Improve your score with the Power of Rock!
  • Burning Halloween Town is great as well.
  • The first game's boss theme is a pretty catchy Gothic-dance tune primarily dominated with organ and guitar.
  • What theme could possibly be epic enough for a fight against something called "Tyrannosatan"? The game designers went with a variation on "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor". Probably not what anyone was expecting, but damn does it work!
  • The sequel is no slouch in the music department either. Christmas Boss themes never sounded so good.
• Broken Base:
  • The English localization of the first game's 360 port. Some English-speaking fans find it disgustingly bad, others are fine with it considering that most shmup players Play the Game, Skip the Story anyway, and still others just don't have a problem with it.
  • Also in that game, the initial removal of a lot of slowdown. Those who have played the Japanese version felt it really added a lot of Fake Difficulty, whole those who haven't didn't really notice or care. Most of the complaints died down when an update patch altered the slowdown back to Japanese version levels.
• Critical Dissonance: Most critics and the more hardcore Shmup crowd give the series very high scores with the likes of Ikaruga and Radiant Silvergun, praising the in-depth scoring system, a difficulty balance that isn't as harsh to newcomers that can be adjusted each level, and the appealing art design.
• Fridge Horror: Sakura and her family entered Gilverado by way of a car accident, making their home in the swamp. In the swamp stage, you see a wrecked van. It belonged to Jitterbug.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Sakura in Mega Black Label has two familiars, making guarding yourself against suicide bullets much easier. How she shoots is also incredibly busted, as she can aim in a full 360 as opposed to just left and right, easily trivializing the game if you know how to control her.
  • In 1.1 Arranged, Sakura's game-breaker status is challenged only by Follett thanks to getting additional control over her baby dragon familiar which happens to be the biggest damage-dealer in the game.
  • Sakura is no longer in Deathsmiles IIX, but there are two contenders for her place. First off, Lei has two familiars like she did, with all the accompanying advantages — although he's less broken, being weaker overall to compensate. Meanwhile, Supe's familiar is the ghost of Tyrannosatan, and she is as stupidly powerful as that suggests — she's not the best scorer, but if you just want to play an unstoppable juggernaut who hews a path of carnage through anything in her way, you can't beat her.
• High-Tier Scrappy: Rosa and Sakura are too good for some. In the base game, Rosa is a powerful character that isn't hampered by short range unlike Follett. Sakura, meanwhile, can aim in two directions at once, sweeping through waves of enemies with incredible efficiency.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!:
  • See Difficulty by Region example; it was enough that many players took up threads relevant to the game to rant about it for pages, some calling that particular version of the game an outright Porting Disaster. Amusingly, many of the people making this complaint are experienced players. Fortunately for these players, a patch fixed this several months later.
  • Unfortunately this also applies to the PC port, which is still plagued with some of the same issues with the original Xbox 360 version, as well as Mega Black Label being impossible to beat for the same reasons.
• Les Yay: Rosa is quite flirty towards Sakura.
  • Various pieces of art show the girls being a bit clingy with each other (like the cover, for one example)
• Low-Tier Letdown: Poor, poor Windia. Weakest character of the bunch by far, as her shot type underperforms in the DPS department.
• Macekre: While not to the same extent as Mobile Light Force, there are some very clear changes in the US localization. The characters now have outright horrible clichéd accents.
• Moe: In addition to her maid outfit, Follett has glasses, a timid personality, and absolutely no nose.
  • Greatly increased for all characters in the second game.
• Narm: Unlike Tyrannosatan above, the Big Bad is named Jitterbug.
• Nightmare Fuel: Rampant. You've got swathes of demonic entities causing chaos, ranging from a skeletal grim reaper, a gigantic head that explodes into a still-animating skull, and the final boss that is Tyrannosatan. Their designs can be rather chilling to look at.
• Polished Port: It seems City Connection learned their lesson with their previous ports with I & II for PS4, Xbox One and Switch. Not only does the port presents next to no input lag issues, it also fixes all the slowdown problems from the Xbox 360 and PC ports of the first game, being more accurate to its arcade releases. The compilation even adds a brand new story with the main protagonists of Gothic wa Mahou Otome as Downloadable Content.
• Porting Disaster: The original PC port. Despite being made in-house by Cave themselves and bringing all the content from the Xbox 360 version into the game, as well as bringing back the slowdown, the port still suffer from several issues, one of them being the aforementioned slowdown, which is downright inconsistent at times. It's even worse in Mega Black Label, where the slowdown doesn't exist, making all three modes next to impossible to beat without dying over and over. Fortunately, City Connection would come to the rescue with a much better port on the same platform, packaged with Deathsmiles II as well.
• The Scrappy: Rosa is dismissed by many fans as being slutty, a theory not helped by the fact that she quite blatantly flirts with Sakura. Her, like, ohmigod TOTALLY Valley Girl accent is not a hit in the West either. Also possibly a High-Tier Scrappy, second only to Sakura.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: If you're feeling masochistic, the Xbox 360 port allows you to fiddle with the difficulty settings, which includes increasing the difficulty and lowering your life count.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: The second game features more slowdown, a smaller hit-box, a more easily filled super meter, easier extends, a much simpler scoring system, easier to obtain Life-Up items and a much, MUCH easier route to the True Final Boss. Arrange Mode is also much easier; you don't have the ability to independently steer your familiar any more, but it can now eat ALL bullets (except large boss projectiles) instead of just suicide bullets.
• Tainted by the Preview: When the Deathsmiles I & II Compilation Rerelease was announced and it was revealed that City Connection was in charge of it, many players were skeptical due to City Connection's below-average track record with their Psikyo ports, which themselves were saddled with 7 frames of input lag. The skepticsm only worsened when City Connection released Saturn Tribute (consisting of Cotton 2, Cotton Boomerang, and Guardian Force) in the meantime and it was found to have 10 frames of input lag. All of these concerns seem to have died down when Deathsmiles I & II was released, the input response of which seems to be within most players' tolerances.
• That One Attack: Whroon's apple attacks, in the US version at least, as they're all very fast and quite dense.
• That One Boss: Bavaria, boss of the volcano level. He has multiple attack that fire a large amount of stuff from multiple directions, even on level 1 difficulty. In the US version, Whroon, the boss of the forest level, ascends to this, see That One Attack above.
• That One Level: C-2, the volcano, and B-1, the forest, largely due to the fact that they are heavily sped up in the US version.

• Toy Ship: Casper and Lei. In Lei's first ending in Deathsmiles IIX, Casper walks in on him while he is changing clothes. In Follet's first ending in Deathsmiles IIX, Casper hugs Lei from behind even though they are both naked in a hot spring.

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