YMMV / Psychic Force

• Aluminium Christmas Trees: You'd think Burn is just some "lol wacky Japanese Engrish" to make a cool anime styled American character. It's actually a cool anime styled nickname for the name Bernie or Bernard.
• Awesome Music: Both games have their own respective kickass soundtracks, especially the first game's BGMs for both Burn and Sonia. The opening songs for the PlayStation ports are also done by Hironobu Kageyama, one of JAM Project's founding members.
• Complete Monster:
  • Richard Wong is a coldly calculating man who treats people as nothing more than expendable pawns in his game of conquest, and is responsible, among other things, for turning Wendy's sister Chris into a combat cyborg devoted to him (or Keith), for capturing Patty and putting her into an And I Must Scream situation in order to create his ultimate weapon, and the worst would be capturing Emilio and transforms him from a Shrinking Violet into an Ax-Crazy psychopath. He is never given any reason for his actions besides a massive ego that makes him think the world should worship him like a god.
  • Gudeath is a gravity-controlling Social Darwinist Blood Knight whose only reason for joining Wong is because he likes murdering people, taking joy in destroying his victims' loved ones and prolonging their agony as much as possible, and being part of the Army gives him the chance to do that without consequences.
  • In the OVA, Richard Wong, like his game counterpart, is an evil Psychic who seeks ownership of the world. Serving as Keith Evan's chief advisor, Richard helps Keith start a war against humanity, assisting his battles and the creation of the Psychic country, Noah. Revealing himself as a selfish backstabber to his comrades, Wong decides to detonate the Psychic headquarters, willing to murder hundreds of rescued Psychics just to make an escape.
• Cult Classic: While not commercially successful at the time of its initial release, the series did manage to gain a strong cult fanbase.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Shiori. Although she's seen as the Damsel in Distress from within Genshin's story in Psychic Force 2012, it's highly implied that she was gonna take a much active role in the storyline after Genshin's death had the series continued. Aside from that, there's plenty of fan art of Shiori throughout the Internet, showing that she has plenty of fans who wants to see her as a playable character from within the next Psychic Force game.
• Even Better Sequel/Polished Port:
  • Psychic Force 2012 has a bigger roster of characters, further fleshed out the mechanics of the first game and introduced some new ones while being a balanced fighting game. When it came to the home ports' localization, Acclaim pretty much learned their lesson and spared everybody from the laughably bad English dubbing of the first game and stuck to the Japanese voices with subtitles instead.
  • Psychic Force 2, the PlayStation version of Psychic Force 2012, did suffer from a visual downgrade compared to the Dreamcast version, but it does have much more features and game modes to play around with, including a Psy-Expand mode where you can level-up the characters and give them custom movesets by using moves from the other characters. Psychic Force 2 even brings back Sonia, Brad, and Genma from the first game.
• Fridge Horror: Puzzle Taisen. Even when Psychic Force gets Lighter and Softer, it still takes place in a Fantastic Ghetto.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Psychic Force as a series is often considered to be "X-Men with more psychic powers and made to be an anime". Cue the Marvel Mangaverse after Psychic Force's run post 1999, which was a heavy hit or miss flop that superficially tried to recreate American superhero classics like Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, and even the titular X-Men themselves with an anime coating upon the rise of anime and manga in the late 1990s, but with absolutely none of the workings, writing, and appeal that got fans yearning for anime in the first place. And even with the fame of Capcom's Marvel vs. Capcom series, Psychic Force still reigns supreme as the "anime-styled X-Men series".
• Ho Yay: Burn spends 2010 obsessing about Keith; Keith spends 2012 sighing about Burn. In their endings they go all in for crying out each other's names and touchingly dying in each other's arms, the OVA has Keith turning dewy eyes to the camera and saying Burn's name breathlessly as the very first scene... It's no wonder they're one of the easier pairings to find doujinshi for (although Brad/Wong is surprisingly common, too).
• Rooting for the Empire: NOA gets a good proportion of fan-love and sympathy. Not really surprising for the faction analogous to Magneto, plus all of NOA's loyal members are sympathetic characters to some degree, and it doesn't help that Anti-NOA doesn't seem to have a competing plan to improve Psychiccers' lot aside of going "killing innocents are bad!", never mind that some of the 'innocents' really shunned and abused NOA's Psychiccers to the point they were driven to evil in the first place. The OVA in particular leaves Burn looking Lawful Stupid and Keith lounging comfortably in Straw Man Has A Point territory. Having the ladies to be Ms. Fanservice (and still sympathetic) also helps a lot, not to mention that Wong's Army proved to be even more evil and unsympathetic than they are.
• So Bad, It's Good: If the English voice-overs doesn't make you want to rip your ears out, you'll probably get a good laugh or two from how bad some of the characters' voices sound.
• Stoic Woobie: Gates. Despite being severely injured and losing both his wife and daughter after a Psychiccer attack, Gates was determined to get his revenge and turned himself into a cyborg in order to fulfill his personal mission of vengeance.
• Tear Jerker: The series pulls no punches when it comes to the bleakness of its own story. Most of the endings from both games tend to end on either a bitter or downer note, with the most notable examples being Burn's endings from both games, Wendy's ending from 2012, Keith's ending from 2012, Sonia's ending from the first game, Might's ending from 2012, Carlo's ending from 2012, Regina's ending from 2012, and Genshin's ending from 2012.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: And again, no one blames you when you thought Emilio was a hot girl. Unless you got the US version, and got to hear his... ugh... very horrible... voice...
• The Woobie:
  • It goes without saying that Emilio's life just sucks balls. He's a timid boy who's constantly bullied because of his freakishly powerful Psychiccer abilities and had no real friends until Burn and Wendy came into the picture and befriended him, thus giving him a small hope of happiness from within his personal hard life. He's in constant danger of his power running out of control and damaging anyone who goes near, and he'll blame himself for that. In 2012, it got worse: he got kidnapped by Wong and the Army, then brainwashed into a psychopathic version of himself that strikes at anyone he came across without mercy, all while his good self watches and constantly fought for dominance so he can make things right. And he fails at that too. In the OVA, this is escalated in showing that his parents think he was a mistake and try to kill him in his sleep, before he is forced to kill them as well.
  • Wendy as well. She looks like a really optimistic Plucky Girl, but she lost her sister and could have killed her by accident, which would seriously devastate her. By the time 2012 rolls in, Wendy is the only one from the Anti-NOA group around as Burn unexpectedly went missing while Emilio got kidnapped and brainwashed by Wong and the Army. All while looking for her friends, Wendy is showing considerable insecureness and could end up killing Emilio. Even if she succeeded in reuniting with Burn, she was already in fear of losing everything she held dear and could definitely use a hug.

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