YMMV / Aveyond

• Awesome Music: The game might be nothing to write home about, but Aaron Walz's score for each installment is consistently beautiful. Special mention goes to "Flying on a Dragon", the song that plays when the main characters are, well, flying on the dragon.
• Cliché Storm: The plot of the Aveyond series tend to be rather generic, and most of their storylines can be surmised as follows: A young hero is chosen by the Oracle to stop a villain who, for unexplained reasons, wants to Take Over the World. They meet some useful allies here and there, and fights the Big Bad's minions to collect some Plot Coupons, and that's about it. Eventually subverted in the fourth installment, which seeks to break the formula by having a retired villain in his very late 20s (despite his looks, that's what his profile says) as the protagonist who is forced to become an unlikely hero after losing his dog to the mist queen (hence the subtitle Shadow of the Mist).
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: In Ahriman's Prophecy, the most common party set-up is Talia, Devin, Jack and Frederick. The former two are Required Party Members whom you can't drop no matter what. Jack is the only character capable of opening locked chests (which contains some of the best loots in the game), while Frederick's slime form is the best damage dealer (not to mention, his different forms allows him to have more versatile moves). The other two options, Alicia and Haydn, are generic melee fighters who offer little battle bonuses, which means that many players have no real reason to recruit either characters into the party.
• Contested Sequel: Aveyond 4 is lauded by some fans as a huge step-up from its prequels for breaking the Cliché Storm storyline the had been plaguing the game series, with better character developments and interactions. It is reviled by some others for being too different from the previous titles, and being far too in-jokey for more serious players.
• Crack Pairing: Amaranthian user daeva_agas ships Rhen/Agas from Aveyond 1 and Mel/Gyendal from Aveyond 3 and has spawned a number of fanarts surrounding those couple. Both pair soon gained some following from the website.
• Demonic Spiders: The Ginger Bears in Aveyond 4 are a nightmare to fight. They have attack moves that can not only hit the entire party at once but also hit them hard, with the chance of inflicting bleed on the party members. They also have a pretty good defense and HP, so they're really hard to kill. Despite being a lot harder to fight than most of the random monster encounters (even the ones from the final map), however, they only give 150XP and have pretty much no loot. Most players would rather evade these creatures, because engaging them in battle would simply be frustrating and pointless.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Te'ijal, an Optional Party Member from Aveyond 1. She's so popular that she was given a cameo in Aveyond 2, and was promoted to a central character in Aveyond 3.
  • The daevas from Aveyond 1. In the game, they barely said anything aside from delivering threats before the battle starts. Only two of them actually said anything substantial: Indra, who made the suggestion to turn Rhen to the dark side, and Agas, who really dislikes Dameon (for a good reason). Following the popularity of the fanfiction written by Amaranthia forum user Kaz, The Agas Saga, other forum users were inspired to develop their own versions of the daevas' character and background.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Given that Amanda admits that she likes pairing her characters in a more... unconventional ways, this is practically a given.
  • Most fans prefer Lars/Rhen rather than the canon pairing, Dameon/Rhen.
  • Also Edward/Mel. You can make this pairing happen in individual gameplay, but canon is Edward/Stella, while Mel marries a descendent of Lars who doesn't appear in the game
  • Non-canon Talia/Devin is also very popular, even though Devin officially ends up with Alicia, and Talia marries an unnamed Sun Priest. Like the above pairing, it's possible in individual gameplay.
• Game-Breaker: A bug in the initial release of Aveyond 3: Orbs of Magic allows the player to use the Death Scroll on Gyendal, instantly killing him. This was quickly rectified by giving Gyendal the standard Contractual Boss Immunity to the spell.
• Genius Bonus: A lot of the names of the main villains are derived from ancient mythologies,
  • The daevas from the first game are named after daevas (duh) from the Persian myth, except for Agas. The demon named Agas is originally a Drug (or Khord-Drug, depending on who you talk to), which ranked lower than the daevas.
  • Ahriman is the name of a Persian god of evil. Ishtar is the name of a Sumerian goddess of love and war.
  • Nox is a Roman goddess of night.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: Fans complained about how short the first chapter of Aveyond 3 despite the fact that it was just half of a game and the second chapter wasn't even released yet.
• Narm:
  • Several scenes throughout the series, especially anything with Ahriman in it:
    Ahriman: It shall be done. Show this paltry world the power of the daevas!
  • Gyendal isn't much better than Ahriman. And he repeats his "People of darkness, we have been oppressed by the light for too long. Let us band together and rise against the light!" speech with very similar wording in Lord of Twilight and The Darkthrop Prophecy.
    In LOT: Fellow vampires, the time has come to take the Overworld as our own. Too long have humans, our dinner, ruled that land.
    In TDP: Followers of darkness, too long have we been forced to live in the shadow of light. It is time for us to rise and rule the land above!
  • Aveyond 3's voice pack kicks it up a notch what with the uh..."acting". The stereotypical vampire accents don't help.
• Nightmare Fuel: Qetesh's appearance was quite jarring and was even projected in the magic mirror with an ominous red light around him. What's worse is that Hercules (whom you might recognize from the Aveyond orb series) is lead to believe that he's holy.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Galahad wasn't too popular in Aveyond 1, thanks to his Knight Templar and Holier Than Thou tendencies. He gained a lot of fans in Aveyond 3, where he has become a Knight in Sour Armor vampire Death Seeker.
• So Okay, It's Average: Most players would agree that the game is made well enough for people to be willing to pay for it. In terms of story and gameplay, though, they offer nothing new or groundbreaking (see also Cliché Storm), and outside the small number of passionate fans found in the Amaranth forum boards, the series is pretty much unknown.
• Sophomore Slump: Aveyond 2 is probably the least well received title in the Aveyond series, most likely due to the uninteresting protagonist, lazy facesets and a twist that doesn't make much sense. There are definitely far less fanarts and fanfiction for the second game than there are for the first and third.
• Strangled by the Red String: The Official Couple of the games often regarded as somewhat controversial, if not outright hated, and the lack of chemistry/interactions between the pair is commonly cited as the reason for their unpopularity. Most of the romantic interactions between the intended Love Interest are optional, and the characters involved in the pair tend to have a better-defined relationship with someone else (see Fan-Preferred Couple above).
  • In Ahriman's Prophecy, Devin takes the role of Talia's childhood friend and protector, and the two has the typical role of the male and female RPG protagonists. They are the only two characters who are actually relevant to the conflict, with all the other playable characters being an Optional Party Member, including Devin's eventual canon Love Interest, Alicia. To make things worse, Alicia is a rather difficult character to actually obtain (the player must complete an optional sidequest in Candar, else she would become Permanently Missable), and her stats are not actually very good (compared to Jack and Fredrick), so players have no real reason to recruit her, and the game can be completed without her involvement at all.
  • In Aveyond 1, Rhen's canon love interest is Dameon, but aside from the briefly flirting with her when they first met, he rarely says or does anything important throughout the whole journey (he flirts with her some more if you buy the manor in Sedona, but that's optional). In fact, an earlier build actually allows the party to avoid recruiting him altogether (although he would suddenly show up in the Final Boss battle anyway), making their status as the designated Official Couple even more bizarre. In any case, many players have complained that Rhen falling in love with him that she would be tempted to join the dark side alongside him feel very forced.
  • Aveyond 3 follows a similar pattern to AP, where Mel and Edward fill the standard roles of the male and female RPG protagonists, and their dynamics seem to be a perfect setup for a relationship, with Mel's status as a commoner, and Edward's desire to relinquish his royal duties. This is cemented by the fact that, in the third chapter, the "canon" prologue has Edward almost marrying Mel before the wedding was sabotaged by Lydia, impliying that the two were a couple. But by the end of the saga, Edward would canonically marry Stella, while Mel has an Offscreen Romance with someone who doesn't even appear in the game.
  • In Aveyond 4, fans were quite baffled that the Hi'beru and Phye are even included as Ingrid's potential Love Interests, because 1) Phye is only introduced in the last portion of the game and barely interacts with Ingrid outside of the designated "love points" scenes, and 2) Hi'beru has a much better chemistry with Rowen. Not to mention, it's quite an odd choice that Ingrid, who has a Single-Target Sexuality for Boyle, is the one who is given multiple Love Interest options instead of Boyle himself, who doesn't want to have anything to do with her and needs to find a True Love to be free from Ingrid's curse.
• That One Level: The Halaina dungeon from Aveyond 4 is a major cause of frustration for many players. Not only do you have to slog through the confusing layout of the maze (with no speed boost), you must complete numerous riddles and puzzles that requires you to go back and forth to the same room over and over again. Also, if you accidentally walked into a passage at the wrong time, you'd be given a lengthy dialogue event before being sent back to the previous room. It's particularly frustrating since this is a part of the game's main quest. It gets so bad that someone had to make an individual walkthrough for this specific level.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Prince Edward of Candar from Ahriman's Prophecy. He is Zorom's older brother whom the latter attempted to assassinate for a bid to the throne, and this failed attempt at his life is what led to the events of the game. Despite the importance of this backstory, neither Edward nor any of the citizens in Candar make any mention of this incident when the heroes visit the kingdom, and Edward merely serves as a generic Prince Charming for a Cinderella Plot side quest that has nothing to do with the main storyline.

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