YMMV / Rising Tides

• Base-Breaking Character: Charlie does have her fans, who chalk up her zeal to being a teenager. Others dislike her for being very whiny, having an It's All About Me attitude, her blatant hypocrisy, and her willingness to skip school, and eventually break the law.
• Designated Hero:
  • Charlie. While she's definitely against a villainous individual, Charlie's willingness to break into an office with no plan or any idea of what to even look for makes it hard to root for her. Not helping is the fact that she is a Soapbox Sadie, with many detractors arguing that she sounds like a Wikipedia article. Even worse, the player is required to side with her for everything. In fact, some consider her to be a designated protagonist while Harriet is the deuteragonist, as Harriet is only helping Charlie with her plans, and at the end of the day, she's the one who deserves most of the credit.
  • Harriet herself has her moments. At one point, she declares that if a business cannot adapt to green initiatives, then they deserve to fail.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Bound to happen when one picks a clear side on a complicated issue, but Charlie is supposed to come off as a zealous but likable eco-crusader. However, a lot of her plans lack practical implication of her ideas, such as a vague "we'll give loans to small businesses" to cover the upfront costs, when Charlie doesn't seem to be aware that loans need to be repaid, and if the businesses in town are already suffering, making them take on higher costs isn't going to be helpful. Further, Charlie isn't very good at following ecological science, as when the fish die-off happens, Charlie immediately runs to climate change as the cause, completely ignoring the need to run important scientific tests such as checking the oxygen levels of water, the ocean salinity, algal blooms, toxicology reports from the fish, and so on.