Cytus II / YMMV - TV Tropes

Alternative Character Interpretation: A lot of Noah's true character is left up in the air until his final moments where he shows a genuine desire to repent and disgust towards his prior actions. While he has expressed a desire to repent throughout the story, he attempts to do so in some pretty atrocious ways such as robbing Kaori of her identity and then attempting to erase her memories all over again after confessing his crimes to her. It isn't made clear if him turning Kaori into Aroma's duplicate was simply him being obsessed with Aroma or if he genuinely wanted a second shot at actually being a real Parental Substitute after giving into his vices the first time.
Angst? What Angst?: Even after her memories come back, PAFF (who has both Aroma and Kaori's memories) doesn't even act antsy when she meets Noah again, despite the incredibly dubious circumstances of their reunion. All things considered, she's incredibly forgiving to an almost saint-like degree to the man who erased her original identity and attempted to rape the original Aroma.
Anti-Climax Boss:
- The Final Boss song of the main storyline, " ͟͝͞Ⅱ́̕", only has a rating of 14 on Chaos difficulty. For comparison, "V.", the previous boss song, is a Chaos 15, the highest rating possible. Most of its difficulty also comes simply from its sheer length, rather than actually having a challenging note pattern, and no individual section would feel out place in a Chaos 13 or even 12 song.
- In more a story-sense. Diego was built up throughout as a fairly major threat, only for him and many of his associates to be killed off by Xenon somewhat suddenly.
Broken Base: Rayark's DLC practices are heavily contested. Characters and Black Market packs are both priced at around $1 per songs: some players think it's a fair price compared to other games (for example, Rock Band set the standard for rhythm game song DLC at $2 each), especially considering how the base game costs only $1.99, while others feel that it's too expensive since all of the characters and packs together can cost over $100, and much of the game's story is locked behind these paywalls.
Catharsis Factor: After what he pulled on Joe and being a guilty party in Kaori's Trauma Conga Line, it's safe to say that Diego dying at the hands of Xenon was completely deserved.
Contested Sequel: Fans of Cytus II prefer it over the original Cytus for its aesthetic, fleshed out story, and increased difficulty, while detractors find the story to be too in the way, despise the excessive use of paid DLC, feel that the game resorts to Fake Difficulty for more difficult charts, and the tedious Level Grinding that one has to do to progress said story and unlock new songs.
Die for Our Ship: Cherry is viewed rather negatively by fans who ship Xenon with either ConneR or Neko. Of course, her actual death was met with a lot more mourning than applause. Interestingly enough, Hayato hasn't been nearly as negatively received despite his Ship Tease with Aroma. Most of the people who shipped Aroma with Neko just accepted that the ship was sunk.
Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: Depending on how many characters you have, Cytus II has a 40 to whopping 70-hour-long story, on par with Fate/stay night. It has 12 main characters^note with an additional five guest characters^noteMiku, Kizuna AI, Alice, Hans, and Kaf who are also nicely integrated into the story. As a result, the game is not for people expecting a "normal" rhythm game, as rhythm games in general tend to have a low or nonexistent Story-to-Gameplay Ratio. That isn't to say the gameplay is poor by any means; it is a huge improvement over its prequel with new game mechanics and four difficulty levels (plus one more once the story is finished).
Fandom Heresy: Saying "Cytus II should have less plot." will make every Cytus II fan hate your guts.
Harsher in Hindsight:
- A major plot point in Aroma's story is Aroma refusing to perform after collapsing on stage while trying to sing Gravity. Nikki Simmons, who sang a lot of songs for both PAFF and the Aroma DLC and is closely associated with Aroma's character in general within the fandom, would announce on August 5, 2019 that she would be taking a break from singing to explore other venues, feeling that she's plateaued as a singer. Fortunately, she returned the following year to sing an Image Song for the game No Straight Roads.
- Cherry was hit a bit by the Die for Our Ship crowd, with people disliking her character partially for her relationship with Xenon. Come the 2.6 update, they basically got their wish granted.
Hilarious in Hindsight: Fans have long since dreamt of Nikki Simmons voicing PAFF, the character she does several of the songs for. Come the announcement of the game No Straight Roads where she's voicing a character who happens to be an incredibly popular Idol Singer that performs in virtual space.
He's Just Hiding: Fans were very quick to point out ways Cherry could survive despite the 2.6 update very heavily suggesting she died of her wounds. She's confirmed dead in the 2.7 update, but the update after that suggests she's actually still alive in some capacity. The 3.0 update proceeds to exploit this, with Xenon meeting an illusion created by Vanessa in digital space to steer him into a trap.
Ho Yay:
- Quite a few fans have interpreted ConneR's rather coy interactions with Xenon in an almost flirtatious light. ConneR in general does seem to have a particularly keen interest in Xenon. Though Xenon is less than receptive of ConneR, it could also be seen as Xenon being a Tsundere. Funnily enough, ConneR casually drops to Joe that he's completely straight in the 3.0 update.
- There are a number of hints that Neko is into girls. Her first interaction with her friend Linda had Neko come up from behind Linda and hug her by the waist, not to mention she gushes on several occasions about how cute Linda is. The subtext is arguably even more pronounced with her interactions with Aroma. They become close friends incredibly fast after Neko lets her stay in her room. There's also the scene where Neko gets a look at Aroma's figure and says her boobs look amazing. Then there's the scene afterwards where Neko straight-up fondles said boobs.
- Despite Ivy describing her and Vanessa's relationship as being like sisters, their friendship borders on Pseudo-Romantic Friendship with how devoted they are to each other, Ivy especially considering the sheer planning she went through just to wake Vanessa up.
It Was His Sled: Good luck avoiding fan art of Xenon without his helmet or of Ivy and Vanessa together.
Memetic Mutation:
- JUST NEKO ^{Explanation (Spoilers)}
- #InConneRWeTrust^Explanation
- \PAFF/\PAFF/\PAFF/^Explanation
- #PrayForPAFF ^Explanation
- Cherry cries ^Explanation
- [X] is AEsir ^Explanation
Mis-blamed: A lot of players utterly loathe Nate for gunning down Ivy right when she was about to peacefully save Vanessa. In reality, Nate was the only member of the ARC raid party who attempted to negotiate with Ivy, sensing that there was more to her story than her being the source of the Architect invasion. The one responsible for gunning Ivy down was an unnamed agent accompanying him, who overruled his attempts because the higher-ups explicitly ordered them to destroy Ivy and not ask questions.
Moral Event Horizon:
- Many players completely lost sympathy for Noah after it was revealed that he sexually assaulted a 16-year-old Aroma. Even after it was further revealed that he passed out before he could go through with it, the intent was very clear, and his lack of repentance afterwards firmly cements that he attempted to cross the line.
- Kim already crossed it by performing dangerous experiments on infants, but he proceeds to careen over it even further when he leaves them all in the wastelands to die to The Virus after the experiments were deemed a failure. And he just keeps going after that.
The Scrappy: Nate, an agent working for ARC, is an interesting example. Players mostly regarded him with indifference when he was first introduced, but after gunning Ivy down right as she was about to peacefully save Vanessa, he quickly became very hated by the player-base to the point where many wish there was a way to kill him beforehand. Admittedly, the animosity is somewhat misplaced as he was actually the one member of the squad trying to negotiate with Ivy. It was really one of the trigger-happy agents accompanying him who opened fire on account of it being the command of the higher-ups.
Scrappy Mechanic:
- The CAPSO system allows players to win random prizes after playing enough songs. These include things like new songs, Glitch charts, and character skins. However, you can earn skins and charts for characters you haven't purchased yet (which makes them useless until you buy that character), there's a chance that you might earn no prize at all (even if you still have plenty of prizes left to unlock), and activating the CAPSO machine in the first place requires a microtransaction (in a game that's already criticized for having a lot of things to buy).
- Version 4.7 finally introduces Master Mode, where the sole scoring system is a harder variant of the accuracy-based TP system, and which has the "Master" judgement above C-Perfect. Unfortunately, it has two major problems:
  - Unlocking Master Mode for each songs requires you to grind for and spend CAPSO, forcing you to ration your CAPSO if you still have songs and charts left to unlock.
  - Master Mode is only available for Chaos and Glitch charts. Not skilled enough to play a song's Chaos chart, or otherwise just want to use Master Mode on an Easy or Hard chart? Too bad.
Shocking Moments:
- Probably one of the most depressing versions of this occurred in the 2.6 update of Crystal PuNK with the death of Cherry, one of the main characters. Needless to say, everyone was caught off guard.
- Version 4.0 (Vanessa Level 50) has The Reveal that the whole game is a dream of you, the player, while you're in a coma caused by the Ender virus.
Starboarding: PAFF x Neko was, and still is, a very popular ship, but when Hayato started getting more and more Ship Tease with PAFF, some shippers instead started to believe that Neko has an unrequited crush on PAFF, yet still supports PAFF and Hayato's relationship.
That One Level:
- "Space Alien" from Sagar's pack quickly became infamous for its build-up section, where the scan line slows to a crawl (making it harder to judge the song's rhythm) while the chart turns into a chaotic mess of tap and tap-drag notes which is very difficult to navigate, especially once the scan line starts to speed up again while the pattern becomes more complex and harder to follow. Despite its rating of Chaos 13, most players view it as harder than the majority of Chaos 14 songs, and even a few of the lower-end 15s.
- In a different way, the Crystal PuNK folder. At some point in the story you have to level them up to 25, and you start with a measly three songs, meaning that unless you invest in Black Market DLC packs to expand their songlist, you will be playing and hearing the same three songs over and over, and new songs are slowly drip-fed over the span of those 25 levels.
Unexpected Character: While players expected Vocaloid music to show up eventually, it's safe to say they weren't expecting Hatsune Miku to be a full-blown DLC character complete with her own story set in the Cytus II universe.
Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Noah is presented in the narrative as a conflicted individual attempting to redeem himself after giving into his vices. However, the fact that said crime was attempting to sexually assault a minor who saw him as a father figure, in addition to him erasing the identity of an innocent girl in his pursuit of redemption, caused him to come across as far more villainous to most of the fanbase. It also made it difficult for his desire to repent to be seen as sincere.
What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: The game was rated E10+ despite containing a lot of mature subject matter that is both implied and plainly shown, including Human Trafficking (strongly implied to be for sexual purposes), people getting brutally beaten and shot, strong language (some of which, such as "dick" and "retard", being completely uncensored), and offscreen sex scenes, one of which is non-consensual and involving a minor. Eventually, the game is re-rated to T on Google Play.
The Woobie: PAFF (real name Aroma White) is a Shrinking Violet with a traumatic past. On the day she was to make her debut as an Idol Singer, a car crash left her comatose for months and missing most of her memories after waking up. Things didn't get any easier after waking up, as she became subjected to vicious bullying in her own school, with a number of students accusing her of Faking Amnesia for the sake of publicity. She then began to go through an existential crisis as she began experiencing vague memories that contradicted what she was told about herself, leading her to questioning if she was the person she thought she was. As it turns out, she's actually a girl named Kaori Minamiya, who was kidnapped from her home by human traffickers and turned into the real Aroma White's replacement after a failure to resuscitate her from her coma. In the process, Kaori's memories and physical appearance were forcibly overwritten, effectively erasing her personal identity. Then there's the fact that the person responsible for this was her sister's husband, the man she viewed as a surrogate father-figure. Said man is also very heavily implied to have attempted to sexually assault the real Aroma, with the particular traumatic memory now in Kaori's head. Even without that additional twist, Aroma's life as a successful idol was hardly glamorous as she basically lived for her job, having her life and public image heavily controlled by her own sister no-less, who isolated her from her old friends and kept her from making new ones. Because of her sister, Neko ended up getting the wrong idea about Aroma, and proceeded to spend years talking badly about her in front of her infamously toxic fanbase. It's hard not to feel at least some sympathy for Aroma's plight.

YMMV / Cytus II

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