Keep your tropes close to your heart...
- Awesome Music: The theatre music is really befitting and astounding.
- Broken Base: The Little Goody Two Shoes Ending. A well-deserved happy ending, or a forced Reset Button?
- Catharsis Factor: The true ending is bleak, but with a hint of optimism. While Enjel is dead and her family long gone, Goldia manages to accept all parts of herself and wakes up back in the real world. The curse is still going on, but as long as she has Elise's pocket mirror, she'll be protected. Not the best odds, but after years of suffering, Goldia shows contentment and expresses the first bit of hope in ages.
- Cliché Storm: A possible criticism of the game is that it hits basically every possible trope you could expect from a rpg horror game: little girl trapped in a dream world, amnesia, finding more about herself, fake cutesy atmosphere, chases and so on. However, critics and viewers tend to emphasize Pocket Mirror's characterization and aesthetics over the originality of its plot.
- Complete Monster (includes Little Goody Two Shoes prequel): Demon Lord Ozzy, the Strange Boy, is a sadistic entity that grants wishes to girls for a terrible price. Demanding their dearest loved one, Ozzy serves them as dinner at his banquet and turns their soul, as well as the wisher's, into Golden Maidens to serve him forever. Ozzy has ensnared at least 25 girls this way, including Grandma Holle. Disguising himself as the goat Flocke, Ozzy uses Rozenmarine to set Elise up to endure his trials and sacrifice either Rozenmarine, Freya, or Lebkuchen to him while making Elise watch, killing Elise herself if she tries to save them. In the timeline canon to Pocket Mirror, Ozzy claims Rozenmarine and traps Elise in a loveless marriage with Count Roman die Heilige, corrupting the two into becoming Abusive Parents towards their children Goldia and Henri, then turning Henri into his servant while trapping Goldia in a dream world with her split personalities—and creating one of his own, Enjel—to torment them. In the "Witching Hour" ending, Ozzy forces Goldia to watch as he kills her alters one-by-one before taking Goldia's soul, while in the "Shattered Delusions" ending, he gets both Goldia and Enjel killed and turns the latter into a Golden Maiden.
- Fan Nickname:
- Harsher in Hindsight:
- After Elise dies, Roman falls into despair, becoming a depressed alcoholic in his final moments. This shows how devoted he's to his dead wife. Come Little Goody Two Shoes, when it's revealed he was magically forced to love and marry Elise. Worse? She's a lesbian and doesn't love him back.
- The green brooch Elise always wears? It was a Tragic Keepsake from Grandma Holle, her adoptive mother.
- Heartwarming in Hindsight: The eponymous pocket mirror? It was a parting gift from Lebkuchen to Elise.
- It Was His Sled: The protagonist's name is Goldia and Fleta, Lisette and Harpae are a case of Literal Split Personality.
- Jerks Are Worse Than Villains: The Big Bad, the Strange Boy, is a wicked and manipulative demon who eats girls and loves psychological torment, only driven by his love of human suffering, and he personally killed Elise’s girlfriend in front of her and ruined her life among other things, but his theatricality and humor help make him more of a Love to Hate villain. Most of the Arc Villains, his pawns, are also well-liked for their sympathetic qualities, even the overtly Ax-Crazy Lisette. The one exception is Princess Fleta, who despite having the same Freudian Excuse as the other antagonist girls and potentially doing a Heel–Face Turn, is outright despised by much of the fandom for being a Spoiled Brat and Sore Loser with a Hair-Trigger Temper and bad attitude towards the heroine G, her supposed friend.
- Love to Hate: The Strange Boy, the Big Bad, is a despicable demon with a twisted sense of humor and love of psychological torment. He is responsible for all the suffering that G, Elise, and their friends and family go through across both games, he enslaves girls into becoming his Golden Maidens, and he calls the female cast munters. He is also a Laughably Evil, cheeky, and very theatrical villain, so fans of the series love him for being such an entertainingly loathsome foe.
- Moral Event Horizon: Elise crossed this in her deal with the Strange Boy to sacrifice her children in exchange for riches. Even though she regretted it later, the damage was already done.
- Nightmare Retardant: The Strange Boy's first theatre show is interrupted by the screaming of guests in the other room. Normally unnerving, especially given what you see when you investigate it, but the screaming also has a Howie Long scream mixed in.
- Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: If you got annoyed by Goldia's submissive behavior, chances are you'll forgive her by the end of Chapter 4.
- The Scrappy: Princess Fleta is generally despised by fans for being a spoiled brat who constantly torments G for no reason and always ending up a Karma Houdini regardless of what she does. Doesn't help that G and Eggliette always forgive her for her misdeeds.
- That One Achievement: "Pumpkin Charmer" requires you to hunt down every last Pumpkin Charm. They're all hidden across the game in unlikely locations and the game likes to forbid you from backtracking, making missed Charms Permanently Missable Content until a New Game Plus. Hope you have a guide handy!
- That One Boss: Listette tends to be this whenever she shows up.
- When you've finished Fleta's area, you next enter a world of mirrors and starts off with a chase scene. What makes this hard to clear is that there are momentary Interface Screw's which would make Lisette catch you. Then you reach an area with dark corners where you had to depend on sound to escape and then a group of Lisette's pop up trying to chase you. The worst part? You can barely outrun them — if you react a second too late they will catch you. It's so bad that many players resort to finding a guide.
- Her fight near the end of her chapter is just as confusing; she chases you down a corridor, after which you have to figure out which of three directions to leave in; straight down is a trap, and left and right appear to trap you with several Lisettes unless you realize you have to run away from the Lisettes in your direction, then when they appear in the opposite direction, run back to the exit.
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Henri. It's stated he's Goldia's brother and he looks like the Strange Boy, hinting a connection between the two. Unfortunately this is never developed and he only serves to give backstory to Goldia. This is rectified in GoldenerTraum which expands on what happened to him, revealing in a new ending that he became the Strange Boy's servant.
- Unpopular Popular Character: While Lisette is regularly mistreated by almost everyone, she is nevertheless the most pitiful of Goldia's personalities, representing her mental illness.
- The Woobie:
- Goldia. You can't help but feel sorry for everything that happens to her: her mother sold her soul to a demon in exchange for riches. Once the poor girl found out about it she reacted badly and her sanity starting to deteriorate as the years went by, knowing the demon will come to take her once she came of age. Eventually he comes for her and she wakes up in a nightmarish world, amnesiac and her old personality divided into three. There, Fleta constantly disrespects her, Lisette wants her dead, even the nice Harpae treats her like crap at times. After going through many difficulties, she regains her memories and wakes up in the real world....only to find she's in a mental hospital, her parents are dead and Henri is gone. Even though she takes this gracefully and has accepted herself, her ending feels bleak.
- Enjel also counts as one, since the demon boy created her just to screw the protagonist over and only uses her as a slave designated to carry out his schemes.
