YMMV / Radiant Historia

• Abandon Shipping: A common reaction to Eruca being Stocke's sister.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Stocke constantly throws himself into extremely dangerous situations, and collapses and nearly dies several times. This can interpreted as him simply doing what he has to, but it can also come off as an unhealthy lack of regard for the value of his own life. This behavior being outright cultivated in order to prepare Stocke as Sacrifice certainly doesn't help him either.
• Americans Hate Tingle: Aht ranked second on the Japanese character poll, but elsewhere she's more of a Base-Breaking Character, with many fans finding her clinginess annoying.
• Anticlimax Boss: The fight against Standard History Rosch is very easy. Later subverted with Alternate History Rosch.
• Ass Pull:
  • Stocke and Eruca learning the Vanish technique, though, considering its source, both could have conceivably encountered it before.
  • Marco meeting a girl who looks exactly like his murdered New Old Flame in the epilogue. The Updated Re-release mitigates this by confirming they're sisters.
• Awesome Music:
  • The battle themes, Blue Radiance (Normal Battle), The Edge of Green (Boss Battle), and The Red Locus (Major Boss Battle).
  • The theme of Alistel, Mechanical Kingdom. It gives a huge Hollow Bastion vibe.
  • An Earnest Desire of Grey, the Final Boss theme. Easily the most epic theme in the entire game, and plays a huge part in the amazing atmosphere of the final battle.
  • Memories of the World, the theme for the penultimate and final dungeons. The last dungeon may be rather disappointing, but the music is definitely not.
  • Where the Wind and Feathers Return, aka the sad theme.
• Best Boss Ever: The Final Boss battle is incredibly epic and challenging, and one hell of a send off for an amazing game. It's a Marathon Boss with three phases (four if you count the previous battle against the Black Chronicle) with three different movesets for each one, and becomes fiercer and fiercer while you fight it, meaning that you really have to go all-out in this battle. All of this is set in Historia, with An Earnest Desire of Grey blaring in the background. The game itself was already awesome, but this battle takes it to the fullest, and it's especially satisfying after the slog that is the last dungeon.
• Disappointing Last Level: The Royal Hall. Considering it's right in the middle of some of the most emotionally-intense plot developments in the game, a long, boring, dialogue-free slog through tons of respawning, unavoidable, immobile enemies is probably not what you really want to be doing at that point.
• Ending Fatigue: Minor in the main story, but if you want to get the Golden Ending it becomes nightmarish. To get the Golden Ending, you have to do plot related sidequests, of course. To unlock some of those sidequests you have to have done another sidequest to obtain some items which lets you get some items needed to, you guessed it, get another sidequest. Some of these, if not all, are Guide Dang It!, take forever to do, or are just plain annoying. It really makes you want to just get on with it.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Field Martial Viola is a relatively minor character, but she's extremely popular regardless. She placed third in a character popularity poll.
  • Lieutenant General Raul somehow managed to come in fifth place on a character popularity poll, to the complete confusion of the developers.
• Fridge Horror: Eruca probably spends most of the game thinking she screwed something up when she brought Ernst back and the fact that he doesn't remember her is her fault. Making matters worse, she's not in the party when they learn the real reason, so at best she finds out after he disappears and spends several months thinking he's dead, and at worst she never finds out at all and he actually is dead.
• Game-Breaker: They require another party member to use a movement skill in order to be truly effective, but Aht's traps are among the most damaging abilities you have at your disposal since it will critically injure if not one-shot anything that lands on it. Taking the time and effort to unlock her most powerful trap abilities will completely trivialize most fights since they'll be doing the kind of damage you won't normally see unless you have an extremely high combo score.
• Goddamned Bats: The monsters in the sewer that look like tiny pigs made of jelly. They tend to leap out of nowhere and take you by surprise, and they can drain your health and MP.
• Ho Yay:
  • It doesn't take much work to see Kiel as having a bit of a crush on Stocke.
  • A lot of fans treat Dias and Selvan as very nearly an Official Couple; among other things, there's one sidequest where you find out they're meeting in a bedroom in a sleazy hotel.
• Magnificent Bastard: Heiss, wielder of the Black Chronicle, decided to plot the world's demise after growing cynical. A member of the Granorg's royal lineage, Heiss was meant to be sacrificed to stop the world's desertification, but after witnessing his brother, King Victor's tyranny and the dark side of people, Heiss ran from his duty, returning later to assassinate his brother to save his nephew Ernst from being sacrifice. Tired of the cycle of the ritual and the people squandering the peace given, Heiss determined to end the world, arranging events in history to its demise using the Black Chronicle, and his role as spymaster of Alister's Specint division while guiding Ernst, now called Stocke, as the wielder of the White Chronicle to join him. When Stocke decided to oppose him, Heiss attempted to put an end to the ritual for good by the destroying the Flux preventing it from being usable. In the end, when Stocke manage to prevail and show Heiss the beauty of the world, Heiss, as a last act of redemption, decided to stop Stocke from being sacrificed by offering his own life in his place, trusting Stocke to be the world's hope.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • In made-up bad endings and other meme material, particularly in HC Bailly's forums, Stocke is often portrayed as carrying the Idiot Ball throughout the entire game and failing to make any obvious conclusions, and the tendency of minor mistakes to cause the end of the world is humorously exaggerated.
  • The Japanese fanbase was quick to note some similarities in the motivations of Heiss, the Big Bad and one Akemi Homura. There is an unsettling amount of fanart of the former in the latter's outfit.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • When Queen Protea orders the city set ablaze in the second chapter of the Standard History, regardless of whoever gets caught in the inferno. They even allow their soldiers to kill Princess Eruca, her own (step)daughter.
  • Likewise, General Hugo in the Alternate History, who abuses his position as the mouth of the Prophet Noah so as to fulfill their fantasy of ruling the entire continent by using everyone beneath them as mere tools, sending them to their deaths while double-dealing with Selvan and Dias under the table to build a power base under the pretext of war. They even deliberately set Stocke and Rosch up to march to their deaths by leaking details of their missions so as to kill off potential threats to their plotting, and deliberately lied to the whole of Alistel long after the Prophet Noah died by putting false words into a dummy, so as to manipulate the entire country into doing whatever he pleased.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Imagine marching to war when all of a sudden, you feel sick and drained. The last thing you feel as your vision fails is a grainy sensation as you crumble into sand.
  • Quite a few of the bad endings are horrifying. Notable examples are Marco suddenly going insane, slaughtering the entire party except for Stocke, and then giving Stocke an absolutely chilling Hannibal Lecture about how its all his fault his girlfriend is dead before leaving him to die, and Aht going into full Yandere mode and trapping Stocke forever in a nightmarish dreamworld where they can spend eternity together.
• Player Punch:
  • Heiss killing Mimel in front of Marco.
  • The destruction of the Rosch Brigade in AH chapter 2. Even Stocke is upset that he cannot use the White Chronicle to alter History beyond what happened.
  • The game opens with Raynie and Marco butchered like animals while Stocke, utterly powerless to help them, is forced to watch. Right before being gutted himself.
  • The first dead end in Standard History Chapter 3. Either you kill Rosch or he kills Marco and Eruca. Getting to know said character though the Alternate History makes it worse. And you have to get to this point in order to continue the other timeline.
  • The entire city of Cygnus is wiped out in the Alternate History, likely just after you've got to know the people there in the other timeline. There's nothing you can do to stop this, just like the examples above.
  • Many of the bad endings involve almost everyone dying.
• Stoic Woobie
  • It isn't apparent until right near the end of the game, but Princess Eruca is going through some serious emotional torture for 90% of the story. Her brother, whose death she blames herself for, is back... and doesn't know who he is, doesn't remember her, and, initially, doesn't even trust her. Just looking at him brings up both tons of traumatic memories and boatloads of guilt, because he also doesn't know she might have to kill him again to stop the world from ending.
  • Stocke himself spends the entire game watching every single person he cares about die over and over, and that's only the start of a list of problems that bottoms out somewhere around the fact that he's probably going to have to give up his soul to prevent the end of the world, and his increasingly psychotic uncle would rather kill or imprison him than let that happen.
• Strangled by the Red String: Stocke and Raynie. While Raynie does some Hint Dropping early in, her Love Confession comes out of nowhere. The bizarre conditions from her Romance Sidequest don't help either. To make matters worse, Stocke doesn't show any interest her until then, in which he immediately reciprocates her feelings, to the point that he contemplates abandoning Saving the World to live with her. Then again, it's Raynie. Just look at her.
• That One Boss: This was developed by Atlus after all...
  • Any and all boss fights where you have to fight a giant spider. They have high attack power and love spamming the hell out of their area of effect ability. They also take up the entire battle grid, which renders movement abilities and Aht's traps completely useless.
  • The Thaumachine at the start of Chapter 4 in Alternate History. By itself it's not so much of a pain, but you also have to deal with the continually respawning Clockwork Thunder bombs that inflict loads of damage.
  • The Final Boss Apocrypha can be a real pain if you're not prepared enough. It's a Marathon Boss that can easily take over 30 minutes, and has 3 phases with different movesets each, on top of becoming more and more aggresive each time you "beat" it, on top of being a Sequential Boss preceded by the Black Chronicle, meaning that if you lose at any point of the final battle, you'll have to do it all over again as well as the preceding battle. As awesome as the fight is, it can drive players crazy if they aren't careful.
• That One Level:
  • The Granorg sewers are twisty, confusing, full of dead ends, and populated by horrible little critters that like to drop down from the ceiling and back-attack you.
  • The final dungeon. It's a long, straight path with lots of unavoidable, immobile, constantly respawning enemies (and you're missing the one party member who would be best at taking them out), no dialogue, and not enough save points, followed by a Boss Rush.
• That One Sidequest: Beating Master Vainqueur is absurdly difficult, even at high levels.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The 3DS remake's art direction is considered by some fans to be a departure from a relatively original style to "generic moe anime" and falling victim to homogenization within the JRPG genre. Eruca in particular has generated controversy with her new long hair. Somewhat alleviated by the news that the original character portraits are DLC, but the status and availability of said DLC is a mess in its own right.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Kiel has absolutely no presence in the Perfect Chronology content, so his survival in the base game's finale can feel seriously anticlimactic since the game never revisits the repercussions of Stocke saving him and the rest of Rosch's brigade.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Granted, it's only a single line early in the prologue, but Stocke implies Survivor Guilt over a past mission.

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