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Nightmare Fuel / Virtual-ON

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  • V-Crystals themselves. The Crystals empower the individual but at the same time can directly extract and temporarily store the soul of an individual inside it. Some of the subjects who recover from being unconscious may develop side effects which can range from psychological disorders to the victim becoming an empty husk. Now these same crystals are used to make the Discs for the V.Converters which are in every Virtuaroid produced. Now add to the fact that Shadowing is a phenomenon that stems from the mind's unconscious chaos interfacing with the V. Converter that corrupts the pilot and Virtuaroid into a berserker when the tech that dampens the phenomena weakens, and that 8 souls themselves were imprisoned in V-Crystals and were used to create the dampening field to restrain the Earth Crystal. The Over Technology itself is something that people should not be playing with.
    • Worse? These V-Crystals can evidently become sentient, living beings. Enter Ajim, a being that is apparently a V-Crystal that can grow its own physical body, has a will of its own, and can interact with the real world. No one knows exactly what this...thing is or even what its purpose is. No one even knows if it can even be classified as a Virtuaroid at all. But one thing is certain, it's incredibly powerful and will effortlessly remove anything that obstructs its mysterious objectives. It replaces Jaguarandi as the penalty boss in Oratorio Tangram, and unlike Jaguarandi it gives no warning whatsoever before it makes its presence known. Win too many matches by timeout, and this guy will just straight up interrupt your playthrough a la Akuma to challenge you, dropping down on top of your opponent and killing them instantly, even abruptly changing the music to his own theme. When it fights, Ajim is a full-on Reality Warper who can seemingly manifest what can only be described as virtual polygonal objects out of thin air within the real world, and it also has the unique ability to boost its own speed and attack power to levels far beyond what normal VRs are capable of.
  • Jaguarandi. Imagine this: you're playing Operation Moongate, and for whatever reason you decide to win by time overs against the CPU. All of a sudden, after defeating Bal-Bas-Bow, a big, blood-red WARNING sign flashes in your face and a loud fucking siren blares through your speakers. Next thing you know, you're in a weird space with a giant crystal in the middle of the arena. Then you see it: a mech suddenly materializes from out of thin air and starts growing. And it keeps growing, until by the time you realize that it now completely dwarfs your mech, the fight has already begun and you've suddenly bombarded with lasers and bombs.
    • Even worse is the lore behind it. Jaguarandi is actually a corrupted Raiden born when a horrible accident caused a child's consciousness to become trapped in the M.S.B.S., the very system that allows pilots (read: the players) to interface with the mechs. That's right: the very game you're playing right now can steal your soul. Then, by the time of FORCE, someone actually tried to capture this thing for scientific study. They not only failed, but also made Jaguarandi even worse. It completely took over the Guarayakha's programming, trapping the pilot inside with no escape, and then proceeded to mutate the mech's small frame into its iconic Raiden form, which crushed and killed the pilot as the circuitry was warped and transformed. A once mostly-benign glitch has now entered the real world and become a great threat.
    • Look very closely at its defeat animation in Operation Moongate. Unlike the other VRs, it doesn't collapse or fall the the ground while exploding. It stops completely and then shrinks into nonexistence like a deflating balloon.
  • The first two games actively encourage you to defeat the final bosses within the time limit. What happens if time runs out? Regardless of whether you would have won or lost, you get the bad ending: a blood-red "Mission Failed" screen that precedes The End of the World as We Know It. In Operation Moongate, the screen will start flashing red at the 10 second mark, and if time runs out then the Nirvana Moongate will collapse upon itself, killing you. In Oratorio Tangram, the consequences are MUCH worse: Tangram will activate its ultimate weapon and erase all of reality.
  • Specineff's Grim Reaper personification motif can be sorta scary, depending on coloring.
    • All There in the Manual states how the EVL binder, which is powered by the pilot's negative emotions, has side effects on the pilot's psyche. Recurring nightmares are the mild ones; the worst effected are Driven to Suicide. And then there's the stories about Specineff's "The End" model specifically, in which the EVL binder is set to the highest possible setting. These stories involve the pilots themselves going berserk along with the mech, and when everything is over, the pilots are found dead in the cockpit.
    • Dr. Yzerman's other projects like the Viper project and Kagekiyo lines are no slouch either. The entire Viper line is a walking nightmare for those who aren't good pilots; hand it to a wrong person, and this Transforming Mecha will actively try to kill you by forcing you into a crash, hence SLC (She's Lost Control). Kagekiyo's ROM being a plucked soul from a dead corpse of a warrior of the same name may also creep you out. And if that doesn't do it, then there's the stories about said warrior's soul manifesting within the mech itself, leading to it becoming self-aware and completely overriding your control over it so it can lash out in an Unstoppable Rage over the torture he has suffered by having his eternal rest disturbed.
    • LLN Plajiner's projects are also potential candidates. The original prototype Fei-Yen is also a walking Nightmare Fuel in which she fled due to being overpowered and Plajiner had to redo one with limited resources. Guarayakha being an emulation of Jaguarandi can be creepy too, given its Lethal Joke Character nature.
    • Speaking of Jaguarandi, the Operation Moongate had mentioned that during the development of Raiden series, a young boy's consciousness has been dropped into their programming accidentally, causing the project to wreak havoc and creating this malware. Fortunately, they managed to got the messes cleaned up, but it's still a bad mark. No wonder why Raiden projects were given a merger with VOK-series (later VOX-series) when still keeping their own lines.
  • The Game Over screen in MARZ is like it is ripped off from some Survival Horror games, with static red text (not bloody ones but still), and can be disturbing to those who used to have Game Over screens with green text (or colorful background in FORCE, if you ask).
  • Tangram in both Oratorio Tangram and MARZ. The sequences are less scarier in the latter but still. DYMN, the preparators behind it, is much scarier than you think. (Think Tangram as Princess Peach and DYMN as King Bowser)
  • Speaking of MARZ missions, the Chapter 6 missions where you have to collect the DYMN fragments before the whole universe collapses to nothing. Spectacular, Sega. You just let DYMN control Tangram and blow the game up.
    • What is even more disturbing is that this is what DYMN may have been trying to accomplish to begin with. The assassination of Tristram Refoe forced Lilin Plajiner's hand to grant it an Ego and allowed Tangram to be sent into Cyber Imaginary Space, the same place where Daimon resides. Even more disturbing that Tangram even has a consciousness and suffers shortly after becoming self-aware due to the developer's own paranoia of fearing that humans would abuse it. Way to go Lilin, chalk up ANOTHER tally on your record of failures. She literally allowed a very powerful computer to be able to be acquired by an aggregate collective of a Precursor civilization's grudges, and at the same time the same thing she hoped to protect suffers because of that boneheaded move.
  • Z-Gradt is a very intimidating mech that appears in Operation Moongate, The sheer size of it, combined with its Laser Cannon, is absolutely terrifying, as it flies into the arena. The Theme that plays with it, Crystal Doom, doesn't help matters either.
  • Even the lore behind some of the stages is the stuff of nightmares.
    • Raiden's stage in Oratorio Tangram, the Unholy Cathedral, is called that for a reason: because it's the closest to a singularity point at 0 Plant, the very Moongate from Operation Moongate itself, in which a portal to Cyber Imaginary Space was once formed. When the portal was opened, several researchers at the 0 Plant were sucked into it, and disappeared from existence forever. The surviving researchers from the incident were then assigned to guard it, in order to ensure that such a disaster could never be repeated again. And now you know why there's a Raiden guarding it. Much like the Moongate itself, the Raiden is designed as an absolute last line of defense towards anyone trying to harness the eldritch powers that lie beyond. Sure enough, when you defeat Raiden, you are able to access the portal which takes you directly to the area in Cyber Imaginary Space where Tangram exists.
    • One and Only, the stage where you fight Tangram. Final Boss, New Dimension at its finest. The 9th plant, the very superweapon that is so sought after by the warring corporations, is itself the very dimension in which you fight it. At first appearing as a completely black space, virtual lights and structures suddenly begin to flicker, revealing the gigantic Tangram. As the space now lights up, it gradually flickers between ever-shifting patterns and colors, with one constant being an eerie shade of blue. This is the true nature of Cyber Imaginary Space, a plane of existence where computation itself manifests and the laws of reality no longer apply.

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