YMMV / Battle Realms

• Awesome Music: The Dragon theme, for starters.
• Breather Level: Acquiring the Necromancer. The only things to fight are his Spirit Warriors and Zombies coming down from his throne, which can be rushed past anyway. Having Shinja ascend up the hill is all that's necessary.
• Complete Monster:
  • Zymeth is the leader of the Lotus clan and a power-hungry wizard. Relying on the dirtiest tricks in the book, Zymeth rose in power through lying, cheating, and murder. Eventually receiving recognition from the tyrannical Lord Oja, Zymeth tried to single-handedly eliminate him and his clan by tricking all of them into entering ships which would drain the life of everyone inhabiting them. The discovery of this deception led to a war between Oja's Serpent Clan and Zymeth's Lotus Clan, which in turn caused a chain of events which lead to the Wolf and Dragon Clan rising up and joining this raging conflict, resulting in countless deaths. When Kenji Oja was able to conquer the majority of the land and was about to crush Zymeth's Lotus Clan, Zymeth made a deal with the ancient evil Nightvol for the Serpent's Orb to gain tremendous power. In battle, Zymeth cares very little of his comrades as his powers can decimate anyone in his way, including any nearby allies. To him, anyone is expendable as long as he gets what he wants, which is to be the most powerful.
  • Provincial Lord Budo has garnered the reputation among the bandit-filled and bloodthirsty Serpent Clan as one of the most evil figures in the group. Always having the highest harvest among the provincial lord, Budo's methods were so inhumane that even the leaders of the Serpent Clan find him despicable. Using his henchmen and his whip to keep his slaves in check, he doesn't hesitate to execute anyone for the smallest mistake, such as not having enough rice for the quota, or even wiping sweat of their brow. Due to his fearful tactics, Budo was put in charge of the mining industry, where he treated all of his workers like animals. His actions were so bad that they drove Grayback to form a rebellion and create the Wolf Clan in order to free his people. Even when recruited back to the Serpent Clan by Kenji in the campaign, Budo only does it for women and the fame.
• Game-Breaker: Several battle gears and passives are this.
  • Dragon Clan:
    • The Kabuki Warrior's Flash Powder will annoy any enemy. What makes it annoying is that it blinds them and weakens their resistance within an area of effect. It can boost your yang points and obliterate your enemies quickly. It's not surprising that Kabuki Warriors are considered top priority targets. Their only real drawback is that you must command the Kabuki Warrior to approach the enemy to use its Battle Gear.
    • The Samurai's passive ability, Seppuku, is pretty devastating. You will become wary of them quickly when they come en masse and devastate your army by dying. The only way to prevent any damage from their passive ability is to use the Staff Adept's Dark Canopy.
    • Otomo's passive ability is Battle Leader. As long as he is attacking enemies, allied units will be filled with stamina, allowing them to use Battle Gear. It can be synergized with Issyl's Battle Gear, Haste, to make him become a nigh-endless stamina filler!
  • Serpent Clan:
    • The Swordsman's Mugging is a pain in the ass. It permanently erases any enemy Battle Gear and also has an AOE effect. It is more painful against Wolf units with Shale Armor or Lotus units. It doesn't work on Zen Masters, though.
    • The Crossbowman's Weakness Bolt. It weakens their resistance and with good micromanagement skill for your Crossbowmen, they're pretty much nigh-unstoppable killing machines.
    • The Ronin's Blood Bond. What it does is transfer damage they take to another allied unit they bond to. Situational, right? Well, Bond them to a unit with a hefty HP bar (say, a Hero Unit like Kenji), and keep Fan Geishas nearby to patch him up, and you have yourself a near-invincible army (near-since they could still take damage regardless, so it's best to have a few Fan Geisha on standby around them as well).
  • Lotus Clan:
    • The Staff Adept's Dark Canopy allows them and others to be unaffected by any missiles, but the Game-Breaking aspect of this Battle Gear is that most types of non-physical damage are also nullified by this ability, and it can be learned as soon as you get a Lotus Brother, making an army supported by Adepts a force to be reckoned with.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Inexplicably or surprisingly quite popular in the Philippines. Following the profileration of PC network gaming shops in the early 2000s, it arose as an alternative to Warcraft III and Red Alert 2 through sheer word of mouth (considering that unlike the others, which were part of popular game franchises, it was an original title). The Asian-inspired setting surely added to playerbase appeal, besides the novelty of the setting compared to its peers, since the Philippines is a Southeast Asian country. For instance, the main resources being rice and water, with rice farming being shown, makes it easily relatable since rice is the staple food over there.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • A bug in the original release allowed the player to destroy enemy buildings with the Demolish command, which was only supposed to work on the player's buildings. It was fixed in the expansion.
  • Before it was eventually patched out, a Swordsman with the "Mugging" Battle Gear gave them an edge against enemy Zen Masters by robbing them of their BGs, severely limiting their combat capabilities until they die and respawn from a Keep.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: A plot about the heir to a powerful family which protected a mystical stone, journeys across a world based on a Asian cultures, gathering allies and facing off against a rival faction for the fate of the land, after the return of a malevolent dark entity which has caused a continent-wide disaster, preceded Raya and the Last Dragon by two decades. Furthering the coincidence, both protagonists wear bamboo hats, as well as meet dragons, at some point in their stories.
• It Was His Sled: Poor Otomo. Due to plot reasons, he does not survive through any of the Dragon or Serpent campaigns.
• Replacement Scrappy: Kazan, when Otomo is killed in the Dragon route.
• Squick:
  • The entire second tier of Lotus units: To wit, they are the Diseased One, who has knowingly infected himself with plague and coughs it onto enemies with the help of a respirator, the Unclean One, whose body produces toxic mucus that he flings with a lacrosse stick, and the Infested One, who attacks by throwing fistfuls of maggots that he pulls from his bloated, rotting body.
  • The Geisha certainly counts. In the early 1600s, geisha were mostly known in Japanese culture as prostitutes. This, combined with the Art of the "Massage" technique (or more unsubtly, the "Art of Love" if you're playing as the Serpents) you can research, suggests that the geisha are having sex with your soldiers mid-battle. That isn't the squick part. The squick part is that you can heal wolves and horses and even undead summoned by the Necromancer this way too.
• That One Level: Serpentholm. You have to fight both the Lotus and Wolf clans, and finding a suitable location for a base is not easy.
  • The second Serpentholm stage is even more notable for being frustratingly Nintendo Hard. For starters, your starting place in inconveniently placed between flanks of 2 enemy bases on both sides, and the water source is far from your base. As you fend off the oncoming enemies, chances are you are still recovering your troops when the other clan's allied troops come charging in to raze your camp.
  • At least Serpentholm allows you to construct a base, the defense of The Swan's Pool, on the other hand...