YMMV / Shin Megami Tensei if...

• Ensemble Dark Horse: Reiko is by far the most preferred of the partners. This makes sense, as she represents the Neutral route though her ending mysteriously has the Law theme playing after she comforts Hazama, which is also the most popular in the series (and also unlocks some extra content if followed, such as the Mindscape of Hazama).
• Epileptic Trees: On its own, the game doesn't really spawn any, as the whole thing is meant to be self-contained. Once it serves as the cornerstone for an entire Alternate Continuity, however, boy howdy. A ton of this centers around Hazama, such as the question of just how he got the power he did, since nobody else gained such power to shape the "Demon World" like he did just by entering. And he just meant to summon a demon at the start anyway, not suck the entire school to the other side... And where the hell is the actual leader of the Abyss in all this, anyway?...
  • Then there's the fact that the Demon Emperor seems to come out of Hazama in a manner visually reminiscent of a Persona in later titles... just a Shout-Out from a later title back to If, or?...
  • There's also the question of exactly how much of the game happens, or is, in Hazama's mind. The idea that everyone was transported there instead of the demon world makes some sense, considering that the ritual Hazama performed probably couldn't have given him the kind of power it did, as well as the fact that Lucifer is conspicuously absent. Though the whole point of the If, Devil Summoner and Persona timeline is the events of the first SMT not happening, meaning that there's probably a good reason behind the scenes why Lucifer and YHVH play no role in this game.
• Fan Nickname: Persona 0 for the game itself, because many of the concepts introduced in Shin Megami Tensei: if... would eventually be expanded upon in the original Persona, and Tamaki (the formerly anonymous main character of if...) even became a character in both the original Persona and the Persona 2 duology.
• Harsher in Hindsight: When one gets down to it, Hazama's story actually happens a lot in the real world sadly, where an abused student feels the need to become an abuser themselves and seek revenge on those who wronged them in violent ways. While Hazama may use demons, real world versions of him use knives and guns, with studies into school massacres and bullying being propelled just a few years after Hazama's villainy was used as a fantastical plot.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Quite a few people have gotten into this game just to see where the Persona series effectively began, both story- and gameplay-wise.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "'If?' If what?"
  • Calling the game Persona 0 is this given that the player character (who is confirmed to be female and named Tamaki Uchida) appears in the first two Persona games. A large joke at the game's expense is that it enjoys next to no popularity in the west, more so than the already obscure original Persona.
  • Akira's route is pretty much treated as the Devilman route due to it being one giant reference to the series, Akira himself even sharing the main protagonist's name.
  • The release of the translation patch gave more exposure to the actual dungeons of the game, and with this, the Domain of Sloth quickly shot up to being a meme for its ridiculously bad concept as a forced multi-hour grinding session.
• That One Boss: Vine, the boss of the Domain of Pride. Zionga and Mazionga deal far too much damage at that point in the game, and Elec-resistant armor for the protagonist isn't available until the following dungeon.
• That One Level:
  • The gimmick to the Domain of Sloth is that the students and faculty of Karukozaka High are being made to excavate something. You can help them out a little bit, but in the end you have to wait for a long number of full lunar cycles before you can find what you need to continue. Since you need to move around the dungeon to advance the lunar cycle and this triggers constant random encounters, this takes hours of pointless, directionless grinding. Many players stop here out of sheer boredom. To top it all off, it was originally going to be even worse: it was going to take 12 full lunar cycles instead of 6. In other words, this level is just the bane of lazy people. Or a sign of lazy game design.
  • Immediately after that, you have to go through the Domain of Envy (on Yumi and Reiko's routes), which combines everything people hate about Megaten dungeons in one sadistic package. Dark rooms where you can't see any of the walls! Pit traps! Conveyor belts dumping you into pit traps! Teleport mazes! One-way doors! Entire floors where you can't use the COMP, which means no checking the automap, summoning demons, or negotiating with enemy demons! And none of them are marked on the automap except the dark rooms! All of this would be bad enough by itself, but to top it all off, not only do you lose your partner at the beginning of this dungeon, you have to fight not one but two bosses, one of them without your partner. At least it's only six floors...
  • Players on Charlie's route don't get off easy either. Sure, they don't have to go through the Domain of Envy, but they do have to go through the Domain of Wrath. It features almost all the gimmicks from the Domain of Envy, but trades the no-COMP floors and dark spaces for fetch quests, worse teleport mazes, and lots and lots of damage floors.
• WTH, Costuming Department?: Those blue/green/white striped pants and skirts easily make If's school uniforms one of the tackiest in fiction.

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