YMMV / Magical Vacation

• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • Biek Fowler in Starsign is built up as a challenging opponent, and his No-Holds-Barred Beatdown signature attack looks flashy, but he's relatively easy to defeat. It doesn't take much damage to defeat him, especially if you have a Light hero who can exploit his Dark element.
  • The third fight with Master Chard. His first fight is a nasty Wake-Up Call Boss and his second fight is still tough, but the third time around, he hasn't changed much from his previous encounters — his Dazzle Darts attack does pitiful damage to the whole party, and while his Kick of Darkness is stronger, he has relatively low HP and will go down after a few turns of strong attacks, especially if your hero is Light-element. He can unleash a devastating full-party attack if he lines up all 5 planets with Celestial Swap, but considering how easy it is to throw a wrench in his plans by casting Celestial Swap yourself, it's highly Awesome, but Impractical. To top it all off, he doesn't even have any flunkies like he did in his second fight on Cassia, so your party can focus all their efforts on blasting him until he dies.
  • The Superboss on floor 20 of the Glissini Caves, Umbra, isn't much to write home about, being a stronger Palette Swap version of the original Final Boss, but with no second form. This would already make it pretty disappointing, but it also comes 5 floors after another Superboss, the Cybersaurus, which is a contender for the hardest fight in the game. A party that can make it past that isn't likely to have much trouble with Umbra.
• Awesome Music: The soundtrack to Magical Starsign is very majestic, featuring colorful, almost orchestric melodies that are befitting of a fantasy RPG with a deep story.
• Cult Classic: There are very little people who have ever even heard of these games (Magical Vacation may be excusable due to only ever being released in Japan). However, they have developed a small following over the years (Magical Starsign especially).
• Demonic Spiders: The space police on your second visit to Erd. The Pirate Otters and most of the mooks in Gren if you decide to go there before you go to Puffoon.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Mokka. For starters, out of the whole cast, he's the only one to have a trophy in Super Smash Bros. Brawl.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Pretty much everyone would prefer to believe that the ending to Starsign turned out differently. Specifically the Where Are They Now epilogue. Not only does it have Miss Madeline, the person you were trying to save for the entire game, die, but it also has several characters go against the development and arcs they experienced throughout the game, such as Pico and Sorbet not continuing their relationship.
• Sequel Displacement: Because Magical Vacation was never released outside of Japan and its overall obscurity, many gamers believed Magical Starsign was a standalone game. It doesn't help that there are little-to-no references to the events of the previous game.
• That One Boss:
  • Lt. Mugwort can use Briar Patch and Dancing Baby for massive damage, and has a huge amount of health relative to the other bosses you've faced at that time. He's also the first boss to have access to Celestial Swap (and before you have it, at that), so he can easily move planet Gren into position and power up, then use his remaining MP to nuke your party with Briar Patch and potentially One-Hit Kill Lassi. Once he's out of MP, he can still hit your entire party with Jungle Coaster, a powerful physical attack which does similar amounts of damage.
  • The Holy Sapling. It can either hit a single character for immense damage with Unripe Fruit, or use its other spells to hit the entire party hard. Pico can do massive damage to it, but every time it's hit with a fire attack, it summons a Leafwich, which complicates things.
  • In Vacation, within the Abyssal Realm, there's Equillikrew. As the final stand before the final dungeon, he lives up to his title of 2nd Strongest Enigma with his horde of powerful enigmas, each housing a nasty round of dark spells to whittle players down. And if they weren't bad enough, Equillikrew himself can still tear through teams with the strongest dark spell, forcing players to grind around 10 or so levels up from where they normally are at by that point to survive.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Chai is explicitly a male, but also has high pitched battle cries and the sound he makes when he's talking is the tone usually reserved for either females or young kids. What makes this more confusing is that there's no visible difference between male and female Salamanders other than things like hair and clothing. So the only evidence Chai is male is that he dresses like a male.
• Waggle: The button controls for Starsign are slower and at times nonexistent compared to the touchscreen controls, which to their credit are well-implemented.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Don't let the saccharine art-style, characters, and fantasy elements fool you, Magical Starsign is a pretty dark game. With lots of Nightmare Fuel courtesy of some of the enemies you encounter, gummies that are made out of humans, and the whole "Shadra butterfly monster eating the sun and creating a new one" story arc near the end of the game.