YMMV / Riviera: The Promised Land

• Accidental Innuendo: That one cutscene image where Ursula awakened and repaired Ein's Diviner looks more like she's striking him in the crotch with a lightning bolt due to the position of Ein's weapon and Ursula's pose and expression.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: As Ledah doesn't have much emotional capacity, fans can only speculate what he would be like normally. Popular opinion portrays him as either a Keet or having a Sugar-and-Ice Personality.
• Ass Pull: Rose's ending, which is the canon one. Ein receives a wish-granting perfume from Cierra (who never mentioned having such a thing) and uses it on Rose to turn her into a human. Oddly, Ein is surprised that Rose is female, despite her name and voice.
• Complete Monster: Hector, debuting here, is responsible for much of the evil in the entire series, is the most active member of the Council of the Seven Magi, and by far the vilest. Secretly having caused the current demonic problems of Riviera to have an excuse to deploy his Grim Angels to activate the Retribution—a force that would destroy the entire land in case of crisis—and awaken Seth to fuse with her and become a god. To reach said goal, Hector sends his servant to gather the souls of the peaceful descendants of the demons in a genocide that leaves just a single survivor. When only two more souls are needed for Seth's resurrection, said servant willingly offers herself as a sacrifice alongside with the heroine that is closer to Ein. Sacrificing both, Hector mocks his deceased and totally loyal servant for her origins as an artificial Grim Angel before fusing with Seth and becoming Seth-Rah, aiming to destroy Riviera and rebuild it from the ashes. Shown as the creator of the artificial Grim Angels in painful experiments in side materials, Hector creates them in the thousands while erasing all records of the persons that they were. Utterly selfish, Hector stands out a extremely vile villain in such a lighthearted game.
• Epileptic Trees: Ein is the only known Grim Angel who isn't leucistic—a condition where a person has a significantly reduced amount of multiple types of pigment, giving them extremely pale skin and hair—(even Malice and Nessiah, who are artificial and wingless respectively, have leucism). No one knows why. There are some guesses.
  • There is a fan theory that the Zombie Dragon you fight to unlock Chapter 8 is actually the skeleton remains of Brongaa due to him never being successfully summoned in Yggdra Union.
• Fanon: Some fans invented birthdates for the characters, based on the release dates of the various ports of this game.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Slime-type enemies, who can cause damage to your equipment with all of their attacks. This turns into Game-Breaking Bug territory since it a) applies in practice mode and b) is incredibly awful when your equipment has single-digit use to begin with (and some equipment has a use of 1).
  • Bug-type enemies as well. They're not tough, but have a very high guard-rate, meaning that most of your attacks will miss, dragging on the battle.
• Goddamned Boss: The first boss you have to face, the Phoenix Aghart, isnt's particularly difficult or risky, and it's impossible to die at this point in the game - except that Ein probably WILL get knocked out since you haven't been able to raise his skills yet. And Ledah only uses fire, Aghart is a fire beastie... this one's gonna go on for a while, before the story even gets started.
• Macekre: Ein's Moment of Awesome speeches at the end of the game were heavily edited for the English version of the game in order to remove their controversial undertones.
• Memetic Molester: Hector. Depending on who you ask, his victims may include one or more of the following: Ein, Ledah, Malice, Seth, Nessiah, #367, Marietta (and her variants), Primea...
  • The Rule 34 on this subject often requires copious amounts of Brain Bleach. We are not kidding.
• Moe: Consider the genre. There's a lot of this to go around with the girls, but Ein in particular is adored, especially in Japan. "Ekukko" is the favored subject of a lot of fanboys' art pages...
  • If we only consider the core cast, the crown goes to Lina. Though Rose is a heavy contester.
• Player Punch: Ledah's eventual death. Hearing an emotionless man screaming in pain is an... interesting combination of Nightmare Fuel and Tear Jerker material.
  • The sacrifice of one of your party members, the one with most affection towards Ein, in the final chapter is a huge one.
• Tear Jerker: Ledah's death at the end of Chapter 6. Also watching Malice and the girl who likes Ein the most being sacrificed by Hector. Although the heroine gets better.
• That One Boss:
  • The Third Accursed, Archangel. Her Overdrive will most likely kill Ein in a single hit if he doesn't have enough status or protection and will cause good damage to the rest of the party and some of most annoying status effects. May the game have mercy on you if that affects the entire party. Oh, and she's all but immune to the Holy element, which is on most of your strongest weapons. Have fun!
  • Even with maximum possible levels, The Sage and The Fool in Chapter 4 can cause a lot of players headaches. Both have Rage and Overdrive skills that deals more damage than you can heal in one turn and playing too defensively can cost you the Rank S for these battles. If you're really unlucky the damage will be focused on a single character which will most likely down them before you even have a chance to heal up.
  • Hector can easily become one if you rely on one element or he picks one he is immune to most your party's attacks. The Overdrive attack can also apply status effects of their respective elements and will always deal heavy damage against Ein, who has weakness against all normal elements.
• That One Level: The Four Seasons Forest is infamous for causing player headaches. To wit: the forest requires you to walk in a specific sequence with changing seasons, but the whole thing is badly translated and thus even if you come up with the solution it still won't work. You'll almost inevitably have to consult a guide. Plus the whole area adds to your step counter, which means if you get lost, getting an S rank for speed is impossible and an A is at the least incredibly unlikely.
• That One Puzzle: The underground water ankh puzzle in Chapter 5, Mireno Cemetery, is confusing and almost granted to tank your S-Rank in your first playthrough.
• That One Sidequest:
  • Oh, so you want the only available non-drop Rosier in the game with multiple uses? S-Rank a Bomb Kid and never let any of them use their Overskills on you. (read: Suffer.)
  • Mention skipping stones to anybody who has played Riviera to completion, especially if they tried to play a high-score run. To quote one Let's Player:
    Didja Redo: Hey, Heinrich Himmler called. He wants to know if you're offering cruelty lessons.

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