YMMV / The Phantom of the Opera (MazM)

• Anvilicious: Erik and Christine's relationship is not romantic. While the original never claimed it was a healthy relationship, the game makes sure to make Erik irredeemable and his relationship with Christine more demonstrably toxic from start to finish, even adding a new character to spell out that it's not Christine's "job" to help Erik get better. As a result, the Love Redeems ending of the original is outright stripped from the game and the story adds several scenes that explicitly make Erik into a textbook emotional abuser, but without adding many new plot details to justify them. Christine is also made more naive as a result; while in the original she had no illusions of curing Erik but simply pitied him alongside fearing him, this Christine believes she will show him the error of his ways even after learning about him kidnapping Melek only to be brutally proven wrong.
• Awesome Art: As a visual novel, one of the game's biggest draws, and its biggest source of praise, is its detailed and atmospheric artwork, from the character portraits to the full page illustrations that cap off each chapter.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: During Christine's and Hatim's "Reason You Suck" Speech towards Erik, it's suggested that he is wholly responsible for his own suffering, and Hatim suggests that no one would have treated him badly based on his appearance, and he was simply projecting what happened to him at the hands of the Shah. This is demonstrably false, as even before the Shah took him in, Erik was sold into slavery by his mother and then abused by his peers at the circus—events which he legitimately had no control over. So while this Erik certainly does a lot of vile things, it can thus be hard to be fully on board with the game's final condemnation of him, as it comes shortly after the player has just seen Erik's Tragic Backstory in full and seen how much worse it is than in the book.