YMMV / Action Taimanin

• Awesome Music:
  • The opening theme, Stay Alive, is a metal track that fits perfectly with Taimanin's hardcore ninja action.
  • Bonding B is a sentimental piece that plays during certain Intimacy Events which amplifies emotional moments in both heartwarming and tearjerker scenarios.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Emily Simmons is designed for ease of use above everything else, and her skillset includes an auto-attack (which can be further powered up by another skill that launches missiles automatically while she's firing), plenty of healing, and even potentially an automatic dodge on one of her weapons that had several copies once distributed for free. Her long-range playstyle and low-damage rapid-fire attack style makes qualifying for stars pretty easy in normal game modes, makes farming materials effortless (just start the mission and let her finish it without you touching anything) and while there are stronger PVP characters she's one of the most popular choices in the game for a reason, since her attacks don't miss and can open up on characters from the first second the match begins, meaning any team with a chance of success against an equally-powered-up team has to at least have some kind of plan for dealing with her. She does have some major weaknesses (notably, she has few reliable answers for enemy bosses with strong defenses that can heavily punish her Gradual Grinder offense), but they tend to be enemies that're a headache for everyone else too.
• Continuity Lockout: Generally avoided, as the game being its own Alternate Universe has enough differences to be explained, most characters get a quick introduction, and the story is relatively light, but there are still some here and there:
  • Anything relating to the Masked Taimanin's true identity is left unexplained by the game, and require knowledge of the rest of the franchise to know, such as why she and Oboro look so similar.
  • The event the demons fought in Chapter 20 refer to when explaining why they are after Sora is shown in full only in her Playable Intimacy scene, namely, that Sora's Traumatic Superpower Awakening was against a powerful demon she disintegrated, and that demon had collegues/underlings.
  • The existence of clones of Murasaki and Yukikaze that are fought in chapter 21 was foreshadowed by three things: that Oboro is a clone of the Masked Taimanin, that Momochi's successor was heavily implied to have a mad scientist make him an army of Taimanin clones, and that an evil clone of Rin was created and fought the original at some point. The first is only known if one is familiar with the rest of the franchise, the second was revealed in a temporary event, and the third only if one got the relevant supporter's Intimacy scene.
  • Lina's Playable Intimacy scene introduces two characters (Lilith and Sevira) as Lina's friends, but unless one played the corresponding chapter of RPGX, they will have no idea who they are. Sevira was Lina's former mistress and the one who inspired her to swordfight, a Rich Bitch who Took A Levelin Kindness
  • Shisui Amamiya's Playable Intimacy description on how she came to be a Cute Ghost Girl was left very vague, describing her as coming from a similar but different world. She is actually from the "Battle Arena" timeline where she 'died' along with a mix of her Wave Art, Black's reality warping powers, and Battle Arena's Kotaro's Evil Eye which has led her displaced in the timeline with Taimanin RPG expanding that storyline further.
• Creepy Awesome: The King of the Death Wraiths is a colossal armored skeleton and one of the most powerful demons of the Taimanin lore. The fact that it sides with the good guys after acknowledging their sheer willpower earned them his respect and became the third party in the fight between Astaroth and Edwin Black.
• Evil Is Cool: Any of the villainesses that were originally bosses in the story mode that ended up being Promoted to Playable. Special mention goes to Astaroth, Felicia, Ingrid, and Spinel who are the only playable characters who aren't technically Taimanins^note Oboro, on the other hand, is a Taimanin that went rogue. that also have their own unique set of weapons and costumes.
• Fan Nickname:
  • With her similar appearance and her usage of bunnies made of fire, quite a few people refer to Astaroth as Jessica Rabbit.
  • Sakuya Uchiha/Sasuke Igawa for Sakuya Igawa. Since Sakuya Igawa's character, her growing envy of her fox-themed best friend being more powerful than she, and Sakuya taking demonic drugs to try and level the gap are very reminiscent of Sasuke's character arc in the pre-timeskip part of Naruto.
• Funny Moments: Now has its own page.
• Game-Breaker: Invulnerability is just as powerful as you'd expect being completely immune to all damage and status effects to be, it tends to last a fairly long time, and it's appropriately restricted. One of dual knife SR weapons causes enemies to gain a 25-50% chance of dropping special items that make the user invulnerable for 10 seconds, which has its own issues, mostly that it only works when she's got enemies to farm them from. Yuno Fujibayashi's active skill offers fourteen seconds of invulnerability while fully upgraded, but she comes with a passive that causes basic attacks to ravenously consume the player's Particle meter. Amamiya Shisui offers a massive sixteen seconds of invulnerability on top of a cleanse and a once-per-battle revive, but she's restricted to the Mileage shop where only the most devoted long-time players or the most extravagant whales will get to even one of her. And then, there's Kuonji R. Spica. Fourteen seconds of invulnerability, just like Yuno, but unlike Yuno her passive (boosting melee critical rate and ranged critical damage) is at worst situational for some characters rather than actively detrimental, and unlike Shisui she's in the general pool and the rotation shop, meaning players always have a chance of getting her and can potentially try to pull her from a restricted pool on the regular.
• Goddamned Boss:
  • The hideously mutated Mobster Boss is a pretty standard big smashy boss... if a character is strong enough to wipe the second half of their health bar out with a strong attack and/or a lucky crit all at once. If not, they briefly become invincible while changing into their second phase, where they regularly regain gigantic chunks of health every minute or so, potentially undoing all the player's progress even if they're keeping the pressure up. Mercifully, this regeneration will eventually fade out for the rest of the fight, so mechanically it isn't that much of a Difficulty Spike, but it still means that they're much more of a pain to kill than they really should be, especially if the player is gunning for a star that requires beating them within a timelimit or without taking too many hits.
  • Lilim probably isn't going to outright kill you; her overall damage is pretty low for a boss. But most of Lilim's projectile attacks either track the player and last forever or cover a huge area, so dodging is rough. She often applies an Interface Screw debuff or knockup, and she's invincible while channeling some of her attacks, so even if she's not particularly durable in terms of raw stats she's still making fighting her a pain in the neck. And she's often fought as part of a Dual Boss or as a miniboss partway through a level, so even if she's not killing you directly, she's still engineering situations in which you die by either leaving you vulnerable to her partner or by just grinding away at your health and resources partway through a mission. Admittedly, being an annoying pain in the neck without being a direct threat is aggressively in character.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In Taimanin Yukikaze, Shiranui goes missing and ends up being captured and brainwashed into fighting her own daughter. In Chapter 21, Yukikaze and Murasaki went missing only to turn up seemingly brainwashed into attacking UFS soldiers, made even harder if one goes through Chapter 21 playing as Shiranui to go and find her daughter. Even worse, the Yukikaze the player fights in Chapter 21 is technically a clone, but the real one is still missing, regardless.
• Heartwarming Moments: Now has its own page.
• Memetic Badass:
  • Of all the higher demons in the game, The King of the Death Wraiths along with his boss fight in Chapter 17 is basically facing an undead version of Yujiro Hanma. It also helps that he's able to fight on par with Astaroth and Edwin Black, to the point of powering through the vampire king's gravity powers.
  • Kotaro Fuuma himself ends up getting this reputation by befriending an undead equivalent of Cthulhu and defeating the king of vampires and his criminal empire, especially from an in-universe perspective even when he's only a POV character. To the point other demons that operate independently from Nomad would try to hunt him down in during event sidequests.
  • Of all the playable characters, Emily Simmons is considered one of the most overpowered and most used in the game. It helps if her Zero System, Homing Missiles, and Healing Field are equipped in her skill set, allowing her to unleash More Dakka in autofire mode.
• Memetic Troll: Lilim and Minasaki, as they are in Battle Arena and RPGX, have a knack for causing problems to other characters from an in-universe perspective, including Fuuma. This even comes to a head in the Sold! Mayhem at the Auction event where the player gets to fight both of them, and replaying the event in Hard Difficulty only makes them harder to beat as if they enjoy riling the player up.
• Nightmare Fuel: Now has its own page.
• Realism-Induced Horror: Sakuya Igawa's character arc exploring her abuse of demonic substance to get ahead out of envy towards her partner Sora, pressure to live up to her relative Asagi's legendary accomplishments and Sakuya's own Inferiority Superiority Complex is nothing new even in real life. The extremes people such as athletes will go to take shortcuts by using performance enhancing drugs unaware of the detrimental side effects, or aware but willing to pay the price because they feel they need to be better. Made even worse that she is still underage.
• Special Effect Failure: The CG for the Playable Lapis Intimacy scene is particularly jarring for not corresponding to the surroundign context, as not only does it uses AI, despite the scene taking palce in a forest, the drawign itself shows them in a modern building surrounded by men in formalwear.
• That One Attack:
  • In general, attacks that spawn wherever the player is currently standing are often difficult to dodge since the timings can be very strict, but if such attacks are also Launcher Moves, they can easily ensure they never have the chance to hit the ground again if enough aggressive enemies are aroundo to keep them in the air.
  • Queen Arachnea, the boss of the "Spider Queen" VR mission, has one attack that makes her a particular pain to fight: starting from the moment the fight starts she will, every 25 seconds, rain down poison in a huge area in front of her. Not only is the area not quite matching the visuals (you are wholly safe behind her but very few areas in front of her will let you avoid being hit), but being hit by this attack inflicts a huge Poison debuff on anyone hit by it, easily removing more than half of a character's health over its duration. and the attack is not telegraphed by any sound of visual cues; unless your eyes are fixated on the timer, you will be completely taken by surprise when a fifth of your healthbar suddenly disappears, and then when it happens again 25 seconds later.
• That One Boss:
  • The Armored Walker Tempest is a gigantic Difficulty Spike compared to multiple bosses before and after it. While a Stationary Boss like its predecessor, it ups the ante with tons more high-damage, high-knockback attacks, including two rotating lasers that require constant dodging, tons of upgraded exosuit enemies (themselves armed with drones that auto-attack for a long time), and a second phase that forces the player to stay within a very narrow box around the walker or take heavy damage from high-knockback explosives that can easily chain stun an unlucky player from full health to dead. Oh, and did we mention that a lot of its attacks are high-knockback yet, meaning the player can easily be blasted into the death zone?
  • Hebiko hits like a truck in her boss fights, many of her skills apply downright dangerous status effects like Interface Screw or heavy slows that prevent dodging her other attacks, and her second phase's ridiculous defense buff that scales inverse to her HP means the absolute best way to deal with her is to break her armor and/or try to time a hard-hitting move for when the second half of her HP bar is close and pray for a lucky crit.
  • Yuphie and Sophie are a huge pain in the neck. The twins' gimmick is that Sophie is a fast melee harassment unit while Yuphie is a ranged mage who regularly teleports away and after a brief channel restores positively gigantic chunks of both twins' health if the player can't get to her and break her armor in time. Ideally, the player will whittle them both down and wipe them both out with an Ultimate or other area attack, but if one dies the other powers up. Sophie "just" gets a huge damage and speed boost, but Yuphie gets such a big defense buff that breaking her armor before she heals can become quite a tall order, enough that even with good defensive play the fight can simply be Unwinnable by Mistake for underpowered players. This is not easy in the regular Event Hard Mode battle. It is borderline impossible in the Bonus Battles, where all enemy health and defenses are boosted.
  • The boss fight with Yukikaze and Murasaki is a nightmare in Hard Mode for Chapter 21 that catches ill-prepared players off-guard. Even worse, Murasaki can drain an entire half of the player's HP, not helped by Yukikaze's homing shots and debuffs from both of them that makes the whole boss fight feel at home in an Arena Tower boss battle.
• That One Level:
  • Most Secret Quests aren't that hard, comparable to a Hard Event Quest final mission. The rooftop Boss Rush against waves and waves of fellow Taimanin, on the other hand, is absolutely brutal. Enemies have as much health and Super Armor as comparable Brutal Bonus Level bosses, there are no Mooks so building meter is hard, and all of the enemies have some combination of high damage, strong tracking, heavy defenses, annoying status effects, and a Super Mode second phase that they're immune to all damage during their transformation into.
  • Arena Tower floors that have you fight three Taimanin at once. When fought as bosses, Taimanin characters are tougher, faster and stronger than ever, and all these bonuses are incresed further by being Arena Tower bosses. Fighting three at the same time without dying while still doing enough damage to defeat them before the timer runs out is insanely difficult, as you will need to constantly spam dodge and have very few opportunities to attack without eating tons of damage in return. Invulnerability on at least one character is all but required to complete even the earliest of those floors.
  • No one likes fighting in stages that reuse Main Quest Section 15's map for one simple reason: the electrified floors. They can completely ruin an underleveled character's day, and even powered-up characters can have their stage bonuses lost to chip damage from fighting annoying or powerful enemies in a place where floating damage zones are randomly whizzing around.
  • The 35 floor of the Arena Tower sees the player fight a Tempest-type enemy. That is to say, a stationary gigantic robot that summons enemies, fires lasers, and has a deadly rotating laser attack. Like all Arena Tower enemies, his health pool, damage resistance and damage dealt are massively increased, and the rotating laser and additional enemies mean the player needs to constantly dodge, which limit their opportunities to attack. And the boss is on a time lmit. It is considered the moment the Arena Tower stops being nice to the player.

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