YMMV / Boktai

• Audience-Alienating Premise: The gimmick of these games is that the cartridges have UV sensors built into them, and you're supposed to play in real-life sunlight so the solar power can be used to power the main player character's in-game weapon. The idea of a game that penalizes you for playing at night or during bad weather or forces you to endure overly hot weather didn't appeal to many people, leading to the games' Acclaimed Flop status and the third game getting No Export for You.
• Best Boss Ever:
  • Sabata in Boktai 1 and Boktai 3. He can Flash Step to avoid your head-on attacks, so in order to deal any actual damage you need to outflank him, turning the battle into a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse. Made better with how Django's movement upgrades in Boktai 3 make the battle much more high speed than their encounter in the first game.
  • Both battles with the Vampire Ringo in Boktai 2. You team up with Sabata to battle him, and both instances of the battle involve him using a set of attacks that require both brothers to support each other in order to prevail.
  • In Lunar Knights, Climax Boss Dumas serves a significant challenge as he keeps the players constantly on their toes with his erratic movement, can parry your own Trances to reduce their effectiveness so that the player needs to do most of the fighting without relying on them.
• Friendly Fandoms: There is a good amount of overlap between the Boktai and Mega Man Battle Network fandoms, doubtless a result of the mess of crossover content in both series.
• Game-Breaker:
  • In Shin Bokura no Taiyou, the Vampire Django trance (one of your two Limit Breaks in the game) possesses a homing bite attack that can drain life and stun enemies as long as you're latched on and mashing the B button (as opposed to Sol Django, who requires more careful timing of button presses to make the most of). This works on various bosses and can be used to destroy Hresvelgr in no time as soon as he's vulnerable. The Burning Headband accessory also doubles the rate at which you build up your Trance gauge, letting you exploit the powers of either Trance more often, and allowing you to tear through the Arena for good ranks.
  • The Trances of both Aaron and Lucian in Lunar Knights, which work in similar ways, can also qualify due to their boss-pulverizing firepower. No effort was made to try and balance out Trances from being overwhelmingly powerful, aside from Duke Dumas requiring you to mash a bit harder to get through his defenses.
• Genius Bonus: The Theme Naming of the series cast is a litany of references.
  • Many heroes and allies are named for famous characters, actors, and miscellaneous contributors to the Spaghetti Western genre.
  • There are several references to Norse Mythology that will go unnoticed to some players. The Immortals from the second game are named after the four stags of Yggdrasil, while the three final bosses are the children of Loki.
  • The vampires of Lunar Knights are named for literary authors.
• Memetic Mutation: Because the games heavily advise playing them in broad daylight, the first game quickly became dubbed "the only game that can give you cancer".
• The Scrappy: Trinity in Shinbok. He spends the entire game following Django around for flimsy reasons, inadvertently causing chaos as he goes and forcing Django to bail him out. He is near universally reviled within the fandom.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The heavily advertised solar sensor ended up making for a frustrating experience while playing the first three games: Real life sunlight is absolutely required at several points in each title, making certain sections (most notably the Piledriver battles after each boss) completely unplayable at night or in cloudy days. Granted, players later found that the solar sensor considered a black light an acceptable substitute. However, the requirement of light in the first place was considered by many to be more trouble than it was worth.
  • Lunar Knights has Casket Rocket Laplace. While it picks up steam later on with more attack options as you get more Terrennials, the very first instance of the mini-game offers only Nero and is a slog to get through. Not aided by the fact that the ship can only move and attack via the touchpad, making dodging the Schrodinger's attacks all the more frustrating, particularly with the speed of its machine-gun.
• Spoiled by the Format: The original game doesn't end after killing the Count. Given how early in the game the fight is, that's no surprise.
• That One Sidequest: Obtaining the "Infinite Battery" in the first game requires the player to have the Luna Emblem, which is acquired after the player collects the other six emblems. The Dark and Sol emblems are earned by beating the game and restoring the Solar Tree, respectively; while a third, random emblem is awarded from entering the Azure Sky Tower for the first time. The remaining three can only be obtained if other players share them with you, but only the emblem that they acquired from the Tower in that save file can be shared. After that, you need to reach the 99th floor of the Azure Sky Tower, which is initially 12 floors long, but adds 3 additional ones for every subsequent visit; meaning the dungeon must be completed 29 times, for a total of 1665 floors. Finally, at the last floor, you need to beat the Silvery White Knight, the toughest boss in the game, to get the Infinite Battery.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: The Lunar Knights writers must've really thought they were adding deep moral ambiguity to the ending when trying to recontextualize the vampires ruling over the planet as being Necessarily Evil to keep the Immortals away from the planet. Thing is, the vampires still committed a long string of atrocities, including but not limited to enslaving, kidnapping, hunting, eating, and experimenting on humanity, and that does not go away because the game suddenly starts insisting there are even worse villains waiting in the wings and that vampire lives are precious, too.
• Viewer Gender Confusion:
  • Sabata is male, but his appearance and voice (especially his laugh) can come off feminine.
  • Ratatosk is even worse: despite having long hair, being Pretty in Mink, and having a very feminine laugh, Ratatosk is actually male. Adding to this confusion to international players is that Ratatosk appeared in the Japanese-only Boktai 3.
• Waggle:
  • If you live in a basement or something you're going to have to waste a lot of time setting up lamps in order to play the game properly. Even then, you may want to apply sunscreen. Lots of sunscreen.
  • ROMs for computer emulators get around the distinct lack of a sunlight sensor (or the inability of your average computer to go out in the sun on a reliable basis) by being modified with a script that allows you to manually choose how much sunlight the game thinks its nonexistent sensor is getting (though some emulators have solar-sensor buttons built-in). This sadly turns the Sun Bank and all of the Astro/Star weapons^note which use the Sun Bank for their energy, not Django's own ENE bar into complete and utter Game Breakers, though.
  • Lunar Knights has a shoot-em-up mode after every boss fight. It would be a fun gameplay change, if not for having to both control the ship and fire at enemies using the touchscreen and stylus.
• Watch It for the Meme: A lot of people on the internet probably remember this series for an animation done for NiN10Doh!: To the 64th Power (though the animation does have quite a few inaccuracies).

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