YMMV / Mary Skelter

• Ass Pull:
  • The first game ends with a number of questionable story developments, as you can see below, but one that deserves special mention is the reveal that Snark is an alien and the Jail is a tool to recreate his home planet. It is completely out of place with the setting and narrative up to that point and, in a polar opposite from just about every other "twist" in the game, has absolutely no foreshadowing. Some like that it is a legitimately-surprising reveal, but those that dislike it feel as though it cheapens the entire story.
  • The Novel that comes in the Limited Edition does explain this somewhat in the very first page. While the specifics of the plan are a twist, though somewhat hinted with the Professor's musing about the need for a god, the Jail's nature as an invasive extraterrestrial entity is not. Lacking this does make it seem to come out of nowhere however.
  • The ending for Mary Skelter 2 pushes things regarding the Jail. Being able to fuse with a Jail egg to take its powers and become a godlike being capable of remaking a world? Out there, but in line with its established mimicry powerset. Being able to use a Jail egg to reset time? That's a stretch with no prior hinting. Otsuu offers some speculation on how it could do this, admitting along the way that it's only speculation with no proof. The Metropolitan Office Jail was formed after landing among a Tanabata festival, and so being made of countless wishes right from the start granted that Jail far greater levels of power.
• Breather Level: The City Streets in Mary Skelter 2. The first two floors retain the low leveled enemies from the beginning of the game, giving it only three floors where the enemies may pose a challenge. Each floor is also considerably smaller than the Downtown and Station Grounds before it and uses far less of the space given to it compared to the Graveyard after it, and compared to all of them doesn't require any backtracking among floors to open up more areas. Even its extra floor after defeating the Nightmare there is far simpler than any other area's, being a simple cross shaped set of narrow halls that branch out into a couple of small rooms that can easily be finished in a matter of minutes.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Unfortunately, the job balance is not very good. It seems that players inevitably gravitate toward running a Paladin to soak up damage, a support member as a healer and/or second source of items, and three teammates that are equipped to throw out party-wide attacks as early and often as possible.
  • The Paladin portion to this tactic was utterly destroyed in Mary Skelter 2 in an attempt to shake things up. While the first game you could set this up almost immediately into the Graveyard by switching Alice over for the 6 SP Cover skill, attempting to do so in the second game with Hameln you'll quickly be greeted by Cover's new 44 SP cost, nearly four times the amount of SP she'll naturally have access to and even overloading her on SP gear would only let you use it twice at most.
  • The party-wide attacks was also attempted to be dealt with by applying a wider variety of area type attacks and limiting party-wide hits to chant skills, Massacre skills, and the All Attack equipment skill. That last one proving to keep the complacency going, as many people will suggest Save Scumming until your physically oriented characters all have a piece of gear with it and to just hold onto it and spam it until stronger equipment with it comes up.
• Complete Monster: The Massacre Pink's master Yuuto Gatou has used the countless time loops to subject numerous women and children to experiments in the attempt to create more execution themed Massacre Pink. Gatou's only reason for trying to save Alice is because her death leads to a time loop that is keeping him from destroying the world. Learning about Mary and how she causes the loops, he has Guillotine attempt to assassinate her, Alice's safety no longer a concern to him. When elder Massacre Pink stop proving to be useful, Gatou uses the three of them to create a Nightmare that will hunt down Shira as well as prevent the Blood Team from stopping him. Defeated, the Guillotine portion of the Nightmare clings to life, drags herself to him, and begs him to save her, revealing that they're siblings, and Gatou kills her for it.
• Contested Sequel: The sequel has garnered sharply-contrasting opinions: some like the gameplay improvements and enjoy the story, while others think the game is too similar to the first outside of brand-new balance issues and are not happy about the abrupt endgame slaughter of the heroes and subsequent Reset Button Ending.
• Continuity Lockout: The final chapter of the first Mary Skelter is a complete mess without the context of Hikari no Arika or the Prologue compilation. While an arguably flawed idea on its own, it's even worse for fans outside of Japan; Hikari no Arika was never translated (save for the small portion that is included in the game itself) while the Prologue novel's translation was exclusive to the Limited Edition until after Mary Skelter 2 was released. Just to add insult to injury, both novels also spoil major portions of the main game.
• Demonic Spiders: Deus Machina in the remake. Originally just a step up from Butcher and no more or less challenging than anything else in the Jail Tower, the remake gives them nearly three times the health of anything else in the area, multiple attacks a turn like Nightmares, a full party heal for roughly a quarter of their health, and they generally come in groups of 4-5. Expect to see them in nearly every fight on the final floors, occasionally accompanied by Ralchikita and Ungod but most often just a full group of Deus Machina.
• Disappointing Last Level: The first game ends on a less-than-satisfactory note, with Chapter 9 in general having a number of issues:
  • A sudden, massive Difficulty Spike within the last couple of floors. A number of enemies gain party-wide Magic attacks, which are strong enough to threaten a Total Party Kill in Horror mode. To make matters worse, one of said enemies is of the Demonic Spider "Zombie" family.
  • A whirlwind of Ass Pulls and general bad writing, the most blatant of which include the second team that shows up for a handful of scenes before vanishing, the reveal that Snark is an alien invader, and Hikari reviving as the Angelic Girl. Bonus mention also goes to the interrogation that determines the ending that you get, which should have been a Moment of Awesome for Jack but instead features the Professor explaining away all of Jack's evidence and making him look way out of his depth before Haru mercifully ends it.
  • The True Final Boss fight is a multi-tiered battle like the one at the Temple. With fast fingers and a bit of luck, it's possible to beat the final boss while only facing a handful of its attacks. Outside of its ridiculously-strong "Felony" spell, which is just the aforementioned party-wide magic attacks cranked up to eleven, you can make an argument for the random encounters leading up to this final boss being significantly harder than the boss itself.
  • The Upper Tower is also a hideous, eye-searing hue of red.
• Esoteric Happy Ending:
  • The True Ending of the first game veers into this territory in light of its post-game ending, which strongly suggests that they'll be lifted out of the underground crater only to find more Jails on the surface.
  • Between the plot of Mary Skelter 2 and the extended version of the first game's True Ending in the remake this goes into a full blown Inferred Holocaust. Yes there are more Jails out there, no longer limited to a "What if?" styled story, with the characters openly speculating that the count isn't stopping at two. The possibility of Marchens and Nightmares being peaceful without Snark's influence is also shot with the inclusion of Nightmare Alice, an Omnicidal Maniac brought about by passing the Despair Event Horizon near a core. Not the hardest condition to meet in a Jail. All said, it's only a happy ending for the central cast. Humanity is very likely lost, outside of any Human-Marchen hybrids like the Blood Maidens and Mamoru's reincarnated group who need a Jail environment to survive.
  • Mary Skelter Finale confirms that much of the unhappy scenarios proposed above are true. Jack's opening narration reveals that the portions of Tokyo that were driven underground by the Jails had been reduced to a mere 100 people, and that's where people were being spared. No Inferred Holocaust here, humanity is indeed functionally extinct.
• Fridge Brilliance:
  • The girls have an affinity towards Jack because most of their stories have princes, who Jack is taking the place of in their minds. This is made explicit with Sleeping Beauty and to a lesser extent Cinderella, but likely applies to the others as well. Note that the characters whose stories don't prominently feature princes (Gretel and Hameln) or the princes are treated like crap by the protagonist (Kaguya) are generally less romantic toward Jack.
  • Alice's affection for Jack is intertwined with her logic-based Blood Libido, as she's convinced herself that she has no motive or logical reason for existing without him. This is likely what causes her uncharacteristically-irrational freakouts surrounding Jack, such as when Gretel teleports Jack away for a few minutes.
  • More Fridge Sadness than Brilliance, but Red Riding Hood's Pierrot class looks like a fairly typical clown-inspired costume, albeit with the exception of her having a teardrop under her eye. While at first it just looks like facepaint to fit in with the rest of her attire, it turns heartbreaking when you remember her confession that she killed Little Mermaid in self-defense prior to the game's events. In the real world, this tattoo's meaning has changed over time, but most commonly is seen as representing the wearer has killed someone, with the victim sometimes being a fellow prisoner in jail, or as a means to show grief over the death of a loved one. In Red Riding Hood's case, it's both.
  • Mary Skelter 2 plays up Alice's interest in tea parties. It makes perfect sense, as she is a mimic created by the Jail, that would likely be prone to over-emphasizing her fairy tale traits.
  • Of course it's Red Riding Hood who has a beloved (adoptive) family member secretly killed, and is being impersonated by the main villain.
• Fridge Horror:
  • In Mary Skelter 2, Thumbelina's Freak Out and attempted murder of Cinderella is unsettling enough in and of itself, but it was proven by Jack and Alice that the Jail can use a strong desire to turn people into Nightmares. How close was she to turning into one herself?
  • Speaking of Mary Skelter 2, there is Jack's cool new "Ripper Mode", which he gets access to after becoming a Nightmare. The prospect of a friendly Nightmare going nuts and attacking you is unsettling in and of itself, but then we get to the True Ending, where Jack uses a Jail core to create a copy of his original Blood Youth self to protect the Blood Team's Alice while he fuses with the original, now also a Nightmare, to become Nightmare Love. Now this doesn't seem too bad... until you remember that Jack's Marchen replica can do everything the real, Nightmare version could, meaning he too is capable of going all Jack the Ripper, implying that Jack was always at just as much of a risk of going berserk as the Blood Maidens.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Any AOE ability that hits for "multi" elemental damage. In this game's case, that guarantees hitting every enemy's weakness, causing massive damage and causing enough blood splatter to put everyone in Massacre Mode while the enemy will be lucky to even get a turn. With enough Blood Crystals, Thumbelina can change to her final job to learn this ability as soon as she joins.
  • For single targets, the Marshal Job's "Raging Rush" skill: a multi-hit attack that deals out full damage with each attack. With a high enough strength stat, any party member who uses this can easily dish out over 10,000 damage per use.
  • The Destroyer job in general completely trivializes much of the game, winning battles in a single turn if given enough agility and a decent AOE attack, and can be hitting bosses for upwards of tens of thousands of damage with some simple buffs.
  • The Logic job tampers with the effects of the Jail Roulette to the point of being able to outright kill anything with a little bit of luck. Jail Blessing Up adds an additional target to any effect specifying an exact number of targets and Jail Effect Up increases the effects gained. One possible effect is to hit a target for 3-10% of their maximum health. The Logic's passives mentioned can push that up to around 43-50% and allow it to pick two targets, including the same one twice resulting in an 86-100% loss in health.
  • Logic retains its game breaking status in the sequel and remake, and brings Otsuu's Star Gazer with it. Despite no longer being able to hit for 100%, the passives are able to stack, each character adding in one additional target and buff on relevant effects. All three characters together will ensure that five characters are always healed by healing effects, and will receive all possible buffs from any given buff result. The increase in targets also allows the Jail's roulette to more reliably shut down entire enemy groups with debuffs and ailments, even if and when the enemies in question would prove immune to direct attempts by characters to apply them.
• Genius Bonus: References to Japanese folktales The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter and Crane's Return of a Favor become this to Western gamers. In a case where this might not necessarily be a bad thing, the sequel uses a variation of a centuries-old spoiler that Western fans are a lot less likely to be familiar with.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • When you retreat from a preset encounter, you are pushed back a tile in the direction opposite of the one that you're facing. If you're in a pinch, you can enter the preset encounter icon backwards or to the side, retreat, and get pushed into one of the corridors that it's guarding.
  • Sleeping Beauty and Kaguya have three attacks that hit all enemies; Force Wave, Amber Red, and Gigantast. Force Wave, despite being "minor damage" compared to the other two's "damage", surpasses Amber Red at all ranks and is only just barely passed by Gigantast at the final rank and costs less than half of what either of the other two do allowing for unintended SP efficiency for their damage output.
  • Nightmares are able to spawn on the chains found in some labyrinths. They can not move from these spots, as the only way to move along them is through the balancing minigame, giving you the ability to safely escape without being chased.
  • The various Piece items used to modify the Jail's roulette can be put into storage, and then used from storage. Doing this fails to remove the Pieces from storage, unlike when used directly from your inventory, giving you effectively an infinite amount of them to heavily skew results toward even rare Piece results. This bug exists in each game that the mechanic has been present for.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Almost certainly intended in Mary Skelter 2. Scenes of the characters planning for the future, mending broken relationships, or finding new resolve are almost always accompanied by Tears of Heaven at some point in it, and all of these scenes are called back to in some way during the sudden True Ending.
  • The one time Tears of Heaven seemed to have been played in a hopeful manner during the new True End in the remake of Mary Skelter joins all the occasions of it from Mary Skelter 2 thanks to Finale. Mamoru's claim that because they've already hit rock bottom things can only get better is a notable point to the scene because things manage to get much worse, and almost immediately after.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Compile Heart has a reputation for the amount of Fanservice that they add to their games. Here, seeing a girl get Stripperific is bad, because that means that you're about to enter a world of hurt.
  • Mary Skelter 2 stars a character named Tsuu - "tsuu" being how the English word "two" is rendered in Japanese. If intentional, it wouldn't even be the first time that a Compile-branded company made a "tsuu = two" pun.
  • The Death end re;Quest costumes featured in Mary Skelter 2 serve to highlight the peculiar number of similarities between the two games, both being incredibly-depressing Compile Heart games released within close proximity of each other in Japan that are about two steps removed from being full-on Dueling Works. ^{Unmarked spoilers for both}Both games feature a basic escape plot, Alice Allusions, a central character being a clone, the Final Boss becoming an Omnicidal Maniac due to losing someone close to them, a near "Everybody Dies" Ending that is only averted by a Reset Button, and an attack on the fourth wall. Key differences include the fantasy-inspired setting of Mary Skelter versus the cyberspace setting of Death end re;Quest, dungeon-crawling gameplay of Mary Skelter versus the Neptunia-style gameplay of Death end re;Quest, and Mary Skelter 2 indulging in Fanservice while saving its violence for key points versus Death end re;Quest's constant disturbing violence paired with comparatively-minimal Fanservice.
  • Mary Skelter 2 was also predated by an earlier Compile Heart game in utilizing Time Travel. Though in that game's case, the time shenanigans happens at the mid-way point of the game.
• I Knew It!:
  • As soon as the Switch port of Mary Skelter 2 was announced for Japan, it was immediately speculated that this port would be localized in order to get around Sony's Fanservice crackdown. Sure enough, an English version was announced for North America and Europe a couple of months later.
  • The twist that Mary Skelter 2 is an alternate timeline rather than a direct sequel was guessed to some degree before the game even released, between the mere premise of the game and the developer's heavy insistence that people play 2 before the remake.
• Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition: Par for the course for Compile Heart and Idea Factory International.
  • The official translation of the first game's prologue novel was originally exclusive to the first game's Limited Edition, whereas the original version was eventually uploaded to the Japanese website where it can be accessed for free. Shortly after the release of Mary Skelter 2, the English version of the first game's novel was finally made available on the sequel's official website.
  • Mary Skelter 2's limited edition contains a visual novel spin-off. The spin-off in question is a Lighter and Softer High School AU that centers around Jack as he builds his harem of Blood Maidens.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Following rebalances to the classes in Mary Skelter 2, both it and Finale have clear cases of this due to the Game-Breaker aspects of Fighter and Scientist type characters going untouched while the rest were nerfed into oblivion or left in an average state.
  • Chant skills are generally accepted to be an absolute waste in Mary Skelter 2, as enemies will easily interrupt them before they can go off. This often leads to Little Mermaid and Thumbelina being removed from the main party in favor of stacking more Fighters and Scientists to simply destroy everything before a chant could ever manage to go off in the first place. Finale somewhat fixes this through DLC, as Thumbelina have access to First Strike type skills which allow her to start a fight chanting and end it before the enemies can act, however Hameln and Little Mermaid are only included because there's no options to replace them and are instead often relegated to support or picking off the last enemy with single target spells.
  • It is typically advised to never make use of Clara's party to fight Nightmares when it can be avoided, as the group lacks any proper Fighter type character and only a single character with Mass.Rage Rush which leads to excessively prolonged fights compared to either of the other teams. Even normal battles are notably more difficult for this team as they lack access to Wind's Edge or Water Attack to quickly kill multiple enemies at once.
• Most Wonderful Sound: Cinderella's Noblewoman's Laugh, especially with the Japanese voices, when she utilizes (and often kills enemies with) one of her skills.
• Never Live It Down:
  • The game was ported to Steam by Ghostlight, who ports several smaller scale anime-styled games to PC...including the controversial Mugen Souls. Cue a tiny subsection of gamers complaining about possible censorship, despite Ghostlight's ports being identical to their console counterparts and the fact that the only change in the handheld version of Mary Skelter was the "Genocide" to "Massacre" rename done by Idea Factory International themselves.
  • Mary Skelter 2 is doomed to be known as "that one game that Sony broke by forcing a minigame to be patched out."
• Obvious Judas:
  • A bit of a weird example in the first game where the Big Bad's true identity is painfully obvious, but the villain effectively dismantles The Hero's arguments when it comes time to make them confess; the player is required to confront them with several pieces of specific evidence (some of which are only available in certain chapters and can very easily be missed entirely) to get the best ending.
  • Played straight with the Big Bad of the Mary Skelter: Finale, Yuto Gato. There is a ton of Foreshadowing to his true nature and connection to Massacre Pink, Snark's brother Jabberwock is an obvious Red Herring, and he requires even less evidence to expose than Snark did. He even appears to be this In-Universe as well, since not only did Jack suspect him for a while, but he even outright accuses Gato of being Massacre Pink's master without any input from the player (unlike the previous two games where the player has to select which character is respectively the traitor to the Dawn and a Mimic to the Mysterious Nightmare).
• Player Punch: The sequel has an effective one by ending on Little Mermaid's novel death. Everything that the player tried to accomplish feels rather pointless, huh? Keep playing...
• Polished Port:
  • The PC port of the first game is pretty good and has light system requirements, as well as full keyboard and mouse support.
  • The Switch version of the first game's remake, while a slight graphical downgrade from the PS4 version, made notable adjustments to encounters. Specifically rare enemies required for sidequests will actually show up and one memo battle in the City Streets was made to no longer use Upper Jail Tower enemies. Otsuu and Little Mermaid's unique Character Skills were made to actually be unique. Otsuu gaining "Infatuation", a variant to Cinderella's "Proclamation", which makes anyone follow up on her attacks that hit weaknesses rather than the inverse, and Little Mermaid getting "Beloved", a variant to Red Riding Hood's "Bulwark", which provides even greater damage boosts when she's in danger, as opposed to just copying, word for word, Gretel and Cinderella's "Compassion" and "Proclamation" skills respectively as they do in the PS4 version.
• Porting Disaster: Censorship issues aside, the PC version of Mary Skelter 2 can be described by a single word: Broken. It's a barebones port with barely any graphical settings, audio issues, unstable framerate and it has a tendency of crashing at random moments. Ghostlight has been fixing these issues since launch, but the port still remains mostly unplayable thanks to the constant crashes.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: Mary Skelter Finale is mechanically little different from Mary Skelter 2. However, thanks to the much slower experience gains, fixed party arrangements that prevents stacking Jobs and skills that were Game Breakers, less easily abused Blood Farm Zones, and enemies that actually make use of magic to discourage the use of guns^*Guns give an massive attack boost at the cost of magical defenses, an utterly pointless trade off in Mary Skelter 2 but guaranteeing the gun user's death in Finale. the game is made far more difficult.
• Spiritual Successor: Compile Heart's Tokyo Clanpool shares several similarities with Mary Skelter, the primary difference being that Tokyo Clanpool's tone is significantly lighter. Of course, with Mary Skelter 2's release, this relationship is severely downplayed. Similarly the Mary Skelter series is itself one for Moero Chronicle and Moero Crystal, carrying over numerous mechanics and either expanding on them or trimming them down a bit. The inaccurate elemental tutorial is almost directly lifted from them, where that was indeed how things actually did function.
• Squick: The more... interesting ways that the blood theme comes into play arguably veers into this. For example, in the prequel novel, Red Riding Hood is given a cake for her tenth birthday. Sugar is very rare within the setting, so it is heavily implied that Miko sweetened her cake using Marchen blood.
• Tainted by the Preview: After Ghostlight announced the PC port of Mary Skelter 2, many began expressing their concerns on whether or not this version would be censored, considering Ghostlight's track records of censored ports. Much to the dismay of everyone, Ghostlight confirmed that the purification minigame was removed from the PC release. This caused a lot of backlash for those who waited for a PC port of the sequel for years, causing people to boycott the censored release in favor of emulating the Switch version. Not helping matters is the poor quality of the port, which was released in a very broken state at launch. Ghostlight later apologized and released a standalone patch on their own website to restore the purification minigame on both Steam and GOG.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • While the story of the first game is entertaining enough, the mystery that the game tries to set up is undermined by the Foreshadowing being as subtle as a falling anvil.
  • The sequel has what could have been an excellent endgame twist were it not botched on multiple levels, not the least of which is Compile Heart's decision to advertise the remake as an entry point for new fans yet place the ending of the narrative there, with no checks to prevent players from viewing the ending of the duology before playing the sequel. The only way to avoid both Continuity Lockout and creating Captain Obvious Reveals is to play the Vita or Steam version of the first game (or alternatively, the remake until the point that the Blood Team enters the Government Office), switch to the sequel, and return to the remake without reading any side material in-between. Including either game's prequel novel or, for that matter, This Very Wiki.
• Unexpected Character: The site for Mary Skelter Finale implied that there would be more than the six listed protagonists and speculation on it ranged from more members of the Dawn, Mamoru's group, or the Massacre Pink. Reilly and Elie, two completely normal human children, were the additional protagonists bringing along with them an Unexpected Gameplay Change where the game becomes a Survival Horror dungeon crawl due to their only offensive options being a limited supply of items.
• The Un-Twist:
  • The foreshadowing for the Professor being up to no good becomes so obvious, not even a third into the game, that you're probably guessing there's some kind of twist, right? Nope.
  • Toh being an amnesiac copy of Snark made by the Jail is painfully obvious when one considers the things he does know of himself apply to only that one person, despite the game's attempt to mislead you with Iron Maiden telling the group that "Snark is watching" to imply that he obviously couldn't be. The only real twist here is that Toh's not Snark's good Enemy Without, he's the one and only Snark. Idea Factory International's choice to rename him from Ju to Toh only serves to increase how obvious his true identity is.
• Vanilla Protagonist: Jack's compulsive drive to climb the beanst- uh, Jail Tower is interesting, but the lad himself is otherwise inoffensively bland. As mentioned above though, a bit of Fridge Brilliance does halfway justify him being an inexplicable Chick Magnet, as most of the girls in the story have a predisposition to see him as their fairy tale prince due to the stories and characters they subconsciously draw inspiration from.
• The Woobie: Quite a few, which is no suprise given the games overall premise.
  • Red Riding Hood has it rough, especially when taking the prequel novel into account. She deconstructs the Cool Big Sis trope, the implication being that she wants to be cute but feels like she has to appear strong for her sisters. (This itself being driven from having to kill a Blood Maiden who referred to her as a sister at the tender age of ten years old.) She becomes increasingly defensive of the senior members of the Dawn as the rest of the team becomes increasingly suspicious, culminating in a Heroic BSoD so intense that she starts losing control of her breathing. Near the end, the Big Bad tells her that she has outlived her usefulness, and in her ending she's left as a bundle of conflicted emotions.
  • Speaking of Mary Skelter 2, there's poor Alice. Getting separated from Jack at the start is bad enough, but then it's revealed that the Mysterious Nightmare is the real Alice, transformed into an Omnicidal Maniac due to believing she had killed Jack, and the one we were interacting with for most of the game was just a mimic. When she is killed by the Upper Tower Nightmare, all she can think about is whether, if she's a fake, her feelings are fake as well.
  • Thumbelina from Mary Skelter 2 doesn't have it any easier. Due to Cinderella (actually a mimic of Cinderella created by the Jail, but she doesn't know this at the time) killing Chiaki, she and her sisters took up his position as Hitsuka, and things were doing pretty well... until the Mysterious Nightmare arrived and destroyed the Liberated District. While they managed to avoid Blood Skelter, Thumbelina ended up becoming a Control Freak due to wanting to keep her sisters safe. That then proceeded to not help for shit, as Snow White and Sleeping Beauty then got into problems with the Nightmare of the Art Alley expressly because of Thumbelina's controlling tendencies. It honestly felt like no matter what she did, she wouldn't be able to keep them safe, so she simply relented and let them fight... but it doesn't stop there, as the moment that she sees Cinderella, she immediately tries to kill her, despite her being a literal child during the events of MS2. To make a long story short, Chiaki's death broke her, and she didn't even know just how broken she was.
  • Kaguya can also qualify for both games. Even before joining the Dawn, she was ostracized by the people of her village and thought of as a monster that's no better than the Marchen. This caused her to just kinda... stop giving a damn about people, even after joining the group meant to save them all. This isn't helped by the fact that she's one of the few people who knew of the Blood Maidens' status as Half-Human Hybrids, so in her eyes, all that she experienced because of her powers was entirely justified. After joining Dawn, she either A) submits to her laziness and nihilism entirely until Rapunzel breaks the truth out and they reconscile about it, or B) gets subjected to horrible experiments to the point where her laziness is forced out of her, just so she could be useful and not have to suffer through them anymore.
  • Overlapping with Jerkass Woobie are The Massacre Pink. At first glance, them being the main Arc Villain of Finale may come as irredeemable bitches, but to anyone who plays Finale for a second time or has read the prequel novel, they embody Tragic Villain to a T. By the end of it all, you just want to give them a big ol' hug.
  • Speaking of them, poor Pyre had it rough, more so than the others. It's a good thing she still has her Heroic Willpower and former humanity to pull a Heel–Face Turn very early on.