YMMV / Eternal Champions

• Awesome Music:
  • Challenge from the Dark Side's soundtrack compared to the original, you just can't go wrong with The Senator's theme. Hail to the Chief, indeed!
  • Of all the battle themes, Blade's is probably the best remembered for being catchy.
  • MidKnight's theme from the second game also deserves a mention considering that it has been used frequently used as background music for reviews and retrospectives of the series (one example here).
• Crosses the Line Twice: Some of the death animations are so excessively over the top and violent that this is the only way they're not horrific. Dropping into a hidden trap door and getting eviscerated by saws, axes, and barbed wire? Abominable. Having it happen thrice in a row, to the point that only a skull completely void of flesh is left to smash on the ground in the end? Ridiculous.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: If the Senator ran in real life, he would win the popular vote by a landslide. From the first game, Larcen and Shadow were both popular enough to get their own (unfortunately terrible) spin-off games.
• Fandom Rivalry: Though on a minor scale, with Virtua Fighter due to Sega screwing over this series in order to avoid cannibalizing into their main fighting game franchise, cancelling a third installment as well as various planned adaptations.
• Game-Breaker: Trident in the first game. Plasma bolt + Spinning Trident = half your health gone in an INSTANT.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The Inner Strength gauge is supposed to be your resource for special moves, and allows for taunting the opponent to lower their own gauge in exchange for some of the user's own. The problem is that The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard, can taunt you as much as it wants to cripple your gauge, and then use whatever special moves it wants with impunity despite having their own as empty the whole time. This results in situations like the Final Boss making itself invulnerable whenever it pleases if it just feels like being a real bastard, and turns the single-player into a hellish slog.
• That One Boss:
  • The Eternal and Dark Champions. On top of that, losing to either of them yields an instant Game Over.
  • The Eternal Champion's shark form is the worst offender, despite the fact that the Dark Champion had an attack in most of his forms that made him invulnerable.