YMMV / Uncommon Time

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Alto is portrayed as heroic for overcoming her abuse and directing her hatred against her abusers... but does she really stop there? It's easy to see her behavior towards her ensemble members, especially Teagan, as controlling and cultish. She frequently uses her inarticulateness as an excuse to hoard information (such as the entire reason for coming to Harmonia in the first place) and force others to accept her decisions when they don't have the knowledge to make better ones. When she recruits her ensemble members she assures them they can leave whenever they want, but when they take that offer after things really get dire she wheedles them into coming back into the fold. This is particularly notable with Teagan: she hates Teagan, the rest of the ensemble hates Teagan, Teagan hates them and just wants to be left alone, she knows this enmity is what made the World Tuning fail... but when Teagan tries to run away, she beats her to bloody pulp and forces her to stick around while constantly dragging her through the mud, with no justification but her "intuition". It's very easy to see her as continuing the cycle of abuse against her friends, and overcompensating for never getting anything her way by insisting that everything has to go her way, or else.
  • Alto's relationship with Aubrey can also be seen as abusive: Alto routinely violates Aubrey's boundaries and privacy, but whenever Aubrey objects, Alto just laughs about how cute they are when they're embarrassed. Given we later learn Aubrey suffers from crippling depression and an inability to assert themself, this is unlikely to change...
  • Teagan is portrayed as totally in the wrong for her Jerkass behavior towards Alto and the others, but it's very easy to see this as a two-way street. Meirin and Alto give as good as they get, often behind Teagan's back, and the narrative is so committed to using Teagan as The Chew Toy (even after she repents and makes a genuine effort to be nicer) that it's hard not to feel sorry for her. How much of her behavior is inherent badness and how much of it is her being scraped raw by having her (actually quite reasonable) objections ignored and dismissed all the time?
• Ending Fatigue: Everything after Alto's Vision Quest is an incredibly dull and tedious Fetch Quest that provides no new information and ends in an incredibly boring Giant Space Flea from Nowhere Final Boss. It's easy to lose interest.
• Fridge Logic: During Movement 2, Alto tells Meirin that the World Tuning couldn't have failed due to their performance mistakes alone, and that Teagan knew this and was just being mean for no reason. Except... Teagan knows absolutely nothing about the World Tuning except what Alto told her, and in fact believed the whole thing was a myth until she saw the spirits. How could she have known that?
  • In fairness, we don't explicitly know the details of what Alto has told Teagan about the World Tuning.
• Narm:
  • Ending VI, which can come off as too contrived and over-the-top to be tragic. After failing to save Saki, Meirin has another breakdown, blaming herself for his death. Alto decides that Meirin should be left alone, and the player must control her doing so. When Alto returns after speaking with Aubrey, Meirin has killed herself and is lying in a pool of blood that is twice as wide and three times as long as her sprite. In addition, this event takes place in a normally populated town but is mysteriously empty of any inhabitants for no apparent reason. Regardless of what was intended by this choice, it can just come off as a flimsy excuse for no one to interfere in Meirin's suicide.
  • Arietta calling Altair "my ♥ honey" in speech. It's implied in the developer's room that the name's supposed to be at least somewhat silly, but the heart symbol pushes it into this trope.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: The Distortion could have been a really poignant confrontation if it was used to represent all the hatred and insecurities among the party that led to the failure of the first World Tuning and forced them to overcome that, proving that they've experienced true Character Development. Instead it's just a very boring, very generic blob monster.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: During the construction of the Metronome Tower, a number of magical and natural disasters were triggered that killed tons of people, including Aubrey's parents. Aubrey resents Arietta for this, but is told that this is irrational and unreasonable because it was just a natural reaction to the construction and not directly Arietta's fault. Except that during Arietta's Uncommon Time, we learn that the disasters were caused because Arietta hated the world and subconsciously wanted everyone to die... simply because her status as a half-breed made her personally unhappy. That's a pretty petty reason to destroy the world over, so Arietta kind of is responsible for all the deaths.
  • Arietta's displeasure with her quarter-human status comes more from the fact that she almost certainly is the result of war rape, and even if she does hate the world she does regret the destruction she causes. Whether or not this is enough to make her sympathetic depends on the player.
• Values Dissonance: The age of majority is 16 in this world, so it's portrayed as totally fine for Meirin to start hitting brothels the moment she turns 16. Given that many countries and provinces in Real Life set the age of consent higher than that, this can look very strange (and potentially disturbing) to a lot of players.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: It's easy to think Saki is a woman at first, given his long hair and feminine clothes. This is apparently an issue In-Universe, as he says he's frequently mistaken for a woman during the Hot Springs Episode.

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