- Complete Monster: Count Sandwich is bar the worst one in the game. Unlike Bruno, Sandwich has no excuse for his many, many acts - including raising one child as an assassin that's poisonous to the touch, casually ordering his club members to be killed if they showed fear, and a long history of kidnappings, torture, rape, and murder that he gets away with because he's a rich and powerful noble. He also abuses his power against anyone who doesn't pay his extortions or otherwise crosses him onto the list of inquisitors, leaving them to be hunted down, tortured, and executed as witches or alchemists.
- Bruno. He is a sadistic, manipulative bastard who systematically lords his hold on the king to both the Princess and court, abuses his power, tortures, drugs, and sexually assault multiple people. Then it's revealed he purposely sabotaged the war effort and all of his actions was aimed at destroying Hardland in revenge for what happened to him, reveling in the suffering he causes in the routes where he gets to enact his revenge, not caring about that he will make other children suffer like he did. He's so unsettling that Mephistopheles refuses to deal with him.
- Funny Moments: For a game that is mostly horror, there's quite a few funny bits:
- Germant shows his Hot-Blooded side at one version of the Inventor's festival when he runs into his rival, with shiny glasses as they argue over whose invention (A tea serving doll or a surveillance owl that's a clear Shout-Out to Clash of the Titans, with the CG showing a chibi version of Georik folding his arms across his chest as Mikhail shrugs helplessly.
- In the other version, Germant invites Georik to join him on his flying machine, then casually mentions he never tested landing in it, Georik being very understandably pissed and terrified at it. When they do land safely, every other contestant in the inventor's contest withdrew their entry.
- When the item he needed was swapped at the last minute at the tournament, Georik schemed to get it via burglary and Lillith immediately has a plan, a plan Georik loudly objects to, and Germant was too gleeful to help with:
- Said plan was for him to go to the royal ball dressed as a woman, with a unique sprite showing exactly how thrilled he is about it, and how poorly the dress hides the fact that he is a very tall, and very broad-shouldered man, yet at the ball, "She" is gossiped about as if she's a mysterious beauty.
- Mikhail falls in Love at First Sight upon seeing the mysteriously tall and elegant woman, forcing them to dance, and later tries to woo her, never once suspecting she was his best friend that he's currently on the outs with, or that the royal treasury was being robbed right out from under his nose.
- Germans Love David Hasselhoff: While largely unknown in Japan and is more of a cult classic among older American BL fans due to be best of the BL games that got a localization at the time, it actually has a very strong Russian fanbase, with the majority of fan media being created by Russians.
- Guide Dang It!: This game has 23 endings, and some endings are unobtainable once the player clears Mikhail's Ending 1 (Crown of Kether), so if they want to 100% the game Note, they will need to save frequently, and have a chart handy on how to answer Mephistopheles' questionnaire to get the endings in the right order.
- Jerkass Woobie: Dashwood. On the one hand, he's a blackmailer, a smuggler who deals in illicit goods (including corpses), and a member of the Hellfire Club. On the other hand, he's just a go-between for Count Sandwich, an utter wackjob who adopted him as a child, groomed him to be what he is and who keeps him on a VERY short leash into adulthood. It's hard to say how much control the unfortunate man had in his own life.
- Georik, he's basically a Villain Protagonist and Sociopathic Hero, but god he had it hard: His parents died while he was away at college, and discovered that his baby sister was left all alone for who knows how long. It's mention that they had distant relatives try to cheat them out of their inheritance, only to discover his father had put the entire family deeply in debt to a Complete Monster, then he had to move away from his best friends to the countryside for Lillith's health - and that's before the start of the game. then it was discovered he died from an illness, his sister sold her soul to resurrect him, then they were betrayed by their servant which resulted in Lillith's execution as witch, and forced into a deal with the devil, and into going deep into alchemy which is a capital crime in Hardland and depending on route can deal with the any or all of the following: alienating his one of his childhood best friend due to an unexpected allergy to communion, being raped by Sandwich and the rest of the club as part of an initiation rite, discovers his father had murdered his mother and faked his death only to die in Sandwich's custody, Lillith suffering from suicidal depression, and dies in almost every ending, and in bad ends where he doesn't, he's either possessed, or suffers a Death of Personality.
- Bruno surprisingly enough, though whether it saves him from being a Hate Sink is debateable As a child, his family was killed by Hardland's soldiers, and he was forced to eat their corpses to survive, he eventually ends up being Timothy's apprentice, and made an elixir of life that wasn't perfect, granting him long life but his body is slowly rotting away
- Moral Event Horizon: Bruno did a lot of asshole things, but he could still be seen as a fun if Manipulative Bastard. Until what he did to St. Germant and Sylvia.
- Count Sandwich. That is all.
- Georik, when he hits it depends on who you asked and what route one follows. is it when he razes the village, killing all of them for trying to murder his sister? Is it when he kills the otherwise innocent innkeeper to keep Lillith a secret if he decides to kill the bandits, but generally everyone agrees his treatment of the homunculus and his callus way of killing it is the lowest he sinks to.
- Narm: Some of the CGs - particularly the alchemy CGs - has some wonky art, giving some characters almost a fishy look or looking like they ran right into a brick wall. The US version's attempt to censor some of the more gory scenes was also widely mocked for how ineffective it is.
- Narm Charm: While the premise may make one think of The Brain That Wouldn't Die, the game makes sure you become invested in Lillith's well-being so that her condition ends up invoking pity rather than laughter.
- Nightmare Fuel: buckets of it, even with the feeble censorship the official English release gave, there's many horrifying bits:
- The events leading to Lillith being decapitated: Her oldest brother went away to the capital on business, leaving her with the kindly caretaker, when suddenly a bunch of hooded strangers breaks into her home, and carries her to the town square, where everyone her brother had treated, and everyone she knows is calling for her death, and Sebastian reveals that he always hated and feared the Zaberisks, believing them to be devils and was the one who called the inquisitors.
- The scene Georik witnesses when spying on the hellfire club was desaturated, given a pulsing light and other effects in the English version has can't hide the details: women forced to dance on hot coals, gutted bodies hanging in the back, and a man kneeling - screaming as the skin on his forearms are peeled open with hot pokers sticking into his muscles. And it's implied by Dashwood's blase attitude that this torture show wasn't unusual for the Hellfire club.
- "A Quiet Corrison": failure to even do the start of research results in Georik neglecting Lillith, as she becomes infected with... something was quietly killing her, and in the CG, her eyes had completely rotted away, leaving empty eye sockets. Unfortunately due to an early bug, this was the only ending players could get until it was patched
- The homunculus' death. She was kept just long enough until she was the same physical age as Lillith, she's held down, pathetically crying out "I'm sorry" (The only words she knows and only learned on accident) as Georik saws her head off, not even bothering to sedate her beforehand.
- Germant is involved with a few: due to the drugs and abuse Bruno subjected him to, in his bad end he's revealed to have developed a split personality that's a woman-hating serial killer, who kills Lillith if Georik relented and let him take her home. In other routes he's made a compliant, mindless assistant as Bruno cuts a bit of skin off of Georik
- Sylvie's bad end. she gets to marry the man she loves, but he's at the time possessed by Lucifer, and it cuts to her having died giving birth to their child, who is clearly inhuman, and even with it darkened as a censorship attempt, it's clear that most of her abdomen is just gone with entrails spilling out and her face contorted into an expression of sheer agony.
- Strangled by the Red String: Ruthberg's ending/route can come across as this. Especially given that he is not given enough character development, and is only a Ship Tease once when you visit his shop. Combine with the fact that he tries to kill you with a kiss after channeling session to talk to Dashwood, which come practically out of nowhere, and it gives the impression that he only got a route because the developers realised that they didn't have one for him.
- WTH, Costuming Department?: Okay, but what the hell is Count Sandwich even wearing.
- The Woobie: Dashwood.
- Lillith also. Quite a bit of awful things happened to one little girl who just wanted to live a happy life with her brother.
- Germant, so many bad things happen to him.
- Mephistopheles. He may be a literal devil, but he's a Love Martyr for Lucifer who is shown to have shades of being a bastard boyfriend and its shown he genuinely grows to love Georik instead of just seeing him as a means of getting Lucifer back, showing grief and regret when Georik's personality dies.
- Sylvie. Poor girl watches as a manipulative monster gets his claws into her father, her crush completely ignores her affections, then she finds out she's engaged to the same bastard who is driving her kingdom to ruin. She also suffers a truly horrific Death by Childbirth if she actually gets to be with the man she loves.
- The Homunculus. Dear god, Georik brings the poor thing to life to create a body for Lillith, and it's fully sentient. The only words it learns are "I'm sorry." You Monster!.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/YMMV/AnimamundiDarkAlchemist
Go To
