YMMV / Brandish

• Adaptation Displacement: Varik is much more well-known for appearing in The Halloween Hack than Brandish itself.
• Awesome Art:
  • The box and cover art for this series is truly something to behold. For the second game, Jun Suemi was brought on board, bringing with her striking, photorealistic scenes that wouldn't be out of place in Heroic and High Fantasy works like Conan the Barbarian — and her art became a mainstay for the next two installments as well as the Renewal versions of 1, 2, and 3. That beautiful main page image featuring Dela?◊ So good that, when Falcom remade Brandish on the PSP as The Dark Revenant in 2009, the Japanese release and its corresponding soundtrack simply reused Suemi's Renewal cover art from 14 years prior. It's not hard to see why, shortly after her tenure here, Suemi took over artist duties from the legendary Yoshitaka Amano on Guin Saga and was tapped by Koei to provide character designs and illustrations for their Zill O'll series of RPGs all the way up to its most recent entry in 2010.
  • The original SNES/Super Famicom release of the first game was nothing to scoff at either, with a vibrant, eye-catching cover courtesy of Nobuteru Yūki of Escaflowne fame. When localizing The Dark Revenant and plugging the series after its release, XSEED Games would frequently showcase Yūki's art.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: Due to the series' relatively short run in The '90s and a majority of the releases being Japan-only, there aren't too many people outside of the fan translation and romhack communities who are knowledgeable about the full narrative. The same cannot be said for antagonist-turned-leading lady Dela, who was featured on the cover of every game sans the fourth (where she doesn't appear) as well as the Brandish Piano Collection (where◊ she's Sitting Sexy on a Piano for... reasons), making her the most recognizable part of the series by far. She'd even show up as a Guest Fighter in Ys vs. Sora no Kiseki: Alternative Saga as the sole Brandish representative, arguably qualifying her for Iconic Character, Forgotten Title status within the Falcom library not unlike Morrigan Aensland. The other Ms. Fanservice characters also qualify; people might be able to recognize and name Umber and Mermelada on sight, but coming up with anything beyond their attractive designs is another story. This even seems to be the case in Japan; while pixiv Encyclopedia has pages for both the original trilogy (ブランディッシュ) and the fourth game (ブランディッシュVT), the former only mentions Ares, Dela, and Umber. On the other hand, the far more modest Claire from VT is the only Brandish character (as of this writing) to have their own entry there^note クレール(ブランディッシュ) and it's fairly extensive at that.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Numerous people have only found about these games through Toby Fox, either due to its protagonist's appearance in The Halloween Hack or because the final boss theme from Brandish 2 is essentially proto-Megalovania.
• Porting Disaster: The SNES version of Brandish is notorious for a terrible control scheme that many find to render the game unplayable — a result of trying and failing to map its original keyboard/mouse control scheme to the significantly more limited SNES controller.

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