YMMV / Shining Force Gaiden Games

• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: It's hard to find players who don't use Claude throughout all four books of CD. Birdmen/Bird Battlers have an iffy reputation throughout the rest of the series since they're often saddled with poor stat growths to hold back the power of their flight, but Claude has fairly decent growths, and the small scope of each book means that it's easier to justify spending stat items on him. He also enjoys the lack of units who could surpass him like Kokichi from Shining Force or Peter from Shining Force II, with the only flying units in CD being Shriek (who is nearly identical to Claude but available much later and with worse potential) and the two Magic Creatures (who are mages in a game that doesn't favor them very strongly).
• Scrappy Mechanic: Being restricted to 12 specific characters in Book 4 of Shining Force CD. This not only means that players couldn't compose their own dream team to take on the toughest battle in the game (possibly the entire series, in part due to this mechanic), but that they're further obligated to use these units in previous books to prepare them for this battle, thus leading to less interesting and individualistic playthroughs. This mechanic makes even less sense given that the "battle" was All Just a Dream, and that having a seemingly random assortment of characters could be easily Hand Waved by these circumstances.
• That One Boss: Iom, from Shining Force Gaiden II: Sword of Hayja. Yes he's a Final Boss, but he has to be one of the hardest final bosses in the series. Dark Dragon and Zeon really have nothing on him. First off you have to contend with overpowered Mooks attacking you while you try to fight the insanely over-powered Iom, who not only are powerful enough to be bosses themselves (from the previous couple of battles at least) but infinitely regenerate after you defeat them^note There's a trick though. Place a character over the space where the mooks regenerate and they can't come back anymore.. Then there's Iom himself, who is invincible until attacked with the Sword of Hayja, and even after that his HP is about 300. His 'demon breath' will easily cost your character 30 HP (and by then most of your best characters will have between 40 and 50 HP), and he's quick enough to be able to do it twice in a row before your character has the chance to heal.