YMMV / Operator's Side

• Complete Monster: Joe Powers is the Evil Uncle of the heroine Rio, obsessed with taking the Philosopher's Stone for himself. Having killed his own brother and even Rio herself when she was a child before she was revived, Powers harvests his brother's brain to keep it frozen in a painful existence so it may manage a station for him. Attacking the space hotel to go after Rio again, Powers reveals he has horrifically mutated people into monsters with the Philosopher's Stone, including the Operator's lover Naomi. Upon being cornered, Powers even tries to drop the hotel onto Tokyo for nothing save spite and kicks.
• Game-Breaker: The Strafe combat command, which has Rio shoot random parts of the enemy, is the only break you get in combat for the game's shoddy-at-times voice recognition system.
• Good Bad Bugs: Voice commands can often seem to not trigger correctly even if you were to have great pronunciation, which fills the game with Fake Difficulty. Turns out that if you speak in Japanese Ranguage, as the game was originally intended for Japanese audiences, the game accepts it more readily.
• Memetic Loser: Rio is rather infamous among people who know/played the game, on account of being a Captain Obvious due to the games direction. She often gets treated as an idiot who has no idea what to do, and needs help doing basic things such as breathing.
• Moment of Awesome: After almost the entire game had Rio hold an Idiot Ball when it came to combat and puzzles, seeing her fill Joe's body with lead towards the end (on her own provocation no less) after he seemingly killed her is gratifying.
• Narm:
  • The English voice acting is definitely not this game's strong suit; Rio is stilted at times as is, but almost every other character in the game just comes off as comical or awkward. Especially Joe Powers, who is practically Chewing the Scenery with how evil he is and clearly relishing in it.
  • Rio has a rather bad habit of putting everything on hold to ask the operator random questions or bond with them, to the point of Mood Whiplash at certain points in the game as if she's suffering from Skewed Priorities. Just as well, her mood can flip on a dime, such as being wracked with angst over her Dark and Troubled Past and numerous deaths around her only to instantly calm herself down if the player says something like "Cheer up" for that specific scene.
  • Amidst the Tear Jerker scene listed below, Rio's father asks if the person he's talking to could find her daughter (oblivious to her identity), to tell her that her mother's alive after all these years and that he's set up a Swiss Bank Account for them to be able to live their lives happily. For some, this sort of thing coming out of nowhere can put a hamper on the moment, especially considering how the hell they managed to set that up in the first place.
  • Naomi's death on the other hand tries hard to be a Tear Jerker, but the fact that it unfolds almost immediately after the previous scene, and has a Heroic Sacrifice happen for seemingly no good reason besides more drama and an excuse for Naomi to not be between Rio and the player severely hinders its attempts. The fact that Naomi's voice is incredibly hard to make sense of due to heavy voice filters but Rio acts like they're supposed to be perfectly understandable doesn't help.
  • The reason why the space hotel was created in the first place was because the Big Bad was creating a Philosopher's Stone, which can apparently only consist of a uniform composition that is impossible in Earth's gravity. The fact that this Techno Babble leads to aliens (really people transformed by fake Philosopher Stones) that borders on mystical to the point that a handy Exposition Dump documentary narration treats curses as a perfectly scientific matter spirals into absolute ridiculousness. But then the game also never explains how the real Philosopher's Stone was made centuries ago in the first place!
• Scrappy Level: The warehouse. Not only do you need to figure out where the night vision is so Rio can go in there, but there back to back enemy encounters, in tight quarters.
• Scrappy Mechanic: In general, the game's premise is a disliked mechanic. Directing a character to do various tasks with your voice is a neat idea for a game, but the voice detection is awful, and Rio will constantly misunderstand, not hear, or refuse to do what is requested due to the technology and game's design not working as intended, causing the game to stop to a crawl as the player tries to do anything. Something as simple as "Pick up document" can take several minutes of trying multiple phrases and sentences just to get her to do it.
• So Bad, It's Good: Along with the "unique" control scheme, it's the redeemable feature of this game.
• Tear Jerker: For those that do get far enough into the story, Rio meeting her father as a Brain in a Jar and hooked into the station, unable to even determine that Rio wasn't a researcher at first and begging for a Mercy Kill after years of experiments and isolation. Combined with some genuinely good voice acting and his inability to realize Rio was his daughter as she utterly tears up and nearly breaks down, it's arguably one of the most memorable scenes in the game.
• The Un-Twist: Not that the story doesn't have notable plot twists, but it's more the fact that Rio has an excessive habit of pondering and reviewing info she and the player have come across and then stopping just short of an educated guess you're likely to complete, yet is still surprised every time. While the Brain in a Jar of her father and Joe Powers being the Big Bad appear with little to no fanfare as twists in their own right, almost everything involving the Philosopher's Stone and Naomi's fate gets extremely blatant and easy to see coming.
• Waggle: The game exists for the sole purpose of using the PS2 headset peripheral.

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