YMMV / Suzerain

• Alternative Character Interpretation: As a game that deals heavily in Gray-and-Grey Morality, with characters that may behave differently depending on your actions, there's bound to be a lot of this.
  • Tarquin Soll, in and out of universe. Is he a national hero who created the best version of Sordland; a power-hungry dick who has stayed in power far too long; or a somewhat tragic figure who started with noble intentions but lost his way over the years?
  • Ewald Alphonso, particularly after Amendment offered him a lot more screentime. Is he an unqualified technocrat whose presidency is rightfully maligned for crashing and privatizing the economy, or is he a much more tragic figure who was taking Sordland in the right direction after the excesses of the Soll years, and could've succeeded had the USP not thrown him under the bus? Anton Rayne's presidency can be seen as an opportunity to either vindicate or condemn Alphonso's policies depending on your choices.
  • Monica Rayne. A principled and strong-willed woman who's not afraid to fight for a right cause? Or a toxic hypocrite who only cares about her own public image?
  • After Amendment gave his character a lot more nuance, Kesaro Kibener gained a lot of this. Is he still the same fascist hatemonger as before, just having become much better at putting on a façade of respectability? Or does his moderation of the National Front's extremists come from a genuinely principled place? To Take a Third Option, is he even a particularly committed nationalist in the first place, or is he drawn towards the ideology because its adherents prove to be the easiest to satisfy, and thus control?
• Anti-Climax Boss: As a reformist, getting the Supreme Court to consent to the new constitution. Various characters hype up the Supreme Court as the biggest barrier to constitutional reform, but in practice the court's centrist wing will get behind the reform as long as you acknowledge and pay lip service to the importance of judicial independence in your meeting with Justice Edmonds, giving you an easy majority to bypass the court's Old Guard. Getting enough factions in the Assembly to back the constitution happens before the Supreme Court, but in contrast is a much more delicate balancing act with many more points of failure.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Serge, who is the most beloved character in the game's growing fandom for being a total Nice Guy and being always kind and faithful to Rayne regardless of politics.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Throughout the game, Beatrice Livingstone uses multiple preposterous arguments to justify Rumburg's expansionist policies towards Sordland: spinning far-fetched historical narratives, painting Rumburg as a victim of circumstances forced into action, blaming Sordland for the region's instability while actively sponsoring paramilitary groups within Sordland. Two years after the game's release, Vladimir Putin and his pundits have used extremely simular rhetorics and tactics to justify Russia's invasion of Ukraine which has become the bloodiest conflict on European soil since the World Wars.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • Rayne's entire homelife can be very sweet if the player knows what they're doing. Anton and Monica can support each other's dreams and ambitions through any turmoil, Anton can maintain a close bond with his son Franc, and his little daughter Deana is a poster child for Children are Innocent. This President of Sordland surely doesn't have to stay Lonely at the Top.
  • Everything to do with Serge. Not only is this humble driver totally content with his life, his family and his job, he also never hesitates to admire and encourage his beloved President, even if Rayne himself questions his own decisions.
  • Both the funeral of Bernard Circas and the Aschraf Anniversary can become this if your pick the right words. In the face of chaos, violence and bigotry plaguing his country, the President can truly become a symbol of something people desperately need - unity, tolerance and hope.
  • The retirement of Deivid Wisci (your minister of foreign affairs) is both heartwarming and tear-provoking if you were close with him throughout the game. Your old teacher and friend expresses quiet pride in you, his former student, before wishing you the best of luck and leaving your cabinet - simply because he is too old to keep going.
• Memetic Mutation: The ending where Rumburg annexes Sordland with Rayne around to sign the treaty is memetic for the specific moment in which Queen Beatrace forces Rayne to kiss her feet in submission, with a screenshot of the text being jokingly brought up in response to fans of the game supporting Rumburg or monarchy more broadly.
• Narm: Monica's behaviour can get hilariously bizarre. She is a dedicated progressive feminist who can, however, marry an equally dedicated authoritarian nationalist (if you choose to roleplay Rayne as such) and stay by his side for 20 years. That is weird enough, but there is more. Somehow, 20 years of experience don't warn her that a man hell-bent on traditional values and ethnic supremacy might not want to support her cause of women's liberation and gender equality. Her shocked and offended reactions become kind of comical when you ask yourself how and why has she even put up with Rayne for so long.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Kesaro Kibener wasn't hated from a story perspective, but was largely seen as a one-note representation of an ultranationalist politician. Amendment was seen as giving him significantly more depth and nuance thanks to the expanded Bludish rights subplot, making him far more compelling as both an adversary and an uneasy ally depending on your choices.
• The Scrappy: You won't find many fans of Albin Clavin, owing to his hypocrisy regarding his shady dealings in spite of being the leader of the USP's reformist wing.
• Scrappy Mechanic: In the original version of the game, the "Economy" tracker on the HUD wasn't particularly well explained. Presented simply as a bar that fills up or drains in response to your decisions, the obvious way to interpret it is as a representation of the economy's overall strength, causing confusion when keeping it out of the red doesn't seem to improve Sordland's economic conditions, or why characters still talk about recession even though the bar could be completely full. In reality, the bar is meant to represent Sordland's in-the-moment economic growth, and keeping it high for a sustained period of time is meant to be how you eventually bring Sordland's economy back to health. The Amendment update addresses this by changing the bar into a line chart, making it more obvious that the tracker is representing gradual change over time.
• Signature Scene: In a weird way, Lucian passing on a message from the Archbishop of Deyr that reads "I bless the Raynes down in Anrica". It is such an hilariously bold and out of nowhere pop culture reference that the scene became probably the game's most screenshotted moment.
• That One Level: You absolutely need Supreme Court Justice Isabel Edmonds' support to pass any constitutional reforms. The thing is, winning it is dependent on a single dinner conversation with her that notoriously demands that you pick specifically correct answers for most prompts; if you or your constitution don't sit well with her, such as if you're a Malenyevist or pushing a dictatorial constitution, you more or less need to be correct with all of them, down to ordering the same thing as her (salad).
• That One Sidequest: Putting Tarquin Soll on trial. It requires to make two extremely polarizing constitutional amendments (revoke the Judges' immunity and abolish the Member of Honor status), which costs you the support of your party's majority and makes it trickier to turn the Supreme Court to your side. You also have to pick the right judge for the job, otherwise Soll will be absolved of all crimes. And even if you do succeed, it still comes with a cost, as parts of the populace now thinks you've destroyed their beloved republic, and the military becomes more eager to depose you in a coup.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The Amendment update naturally brings some of this, given that it aims to update the existing canon that had been solidified for around two years at this point.
  • Karl Grieser's portrait change. This is seen as understandable given that his original portrait was simply a lightly edited version of Ewald Alphonso's, but it is controversial among some who don't like his new look, or feel that Alphonso should've received a new portrait instead given that Grieser had much more screen time in the original game.
  • The Adaptational Villainy of Arcasia, who go from a warts-and-all but generally positive reflection of the United States to a hyper-libertarian dystopia where public services barely exist and politicians and corporations regularly hire PMC's to assassinate each other in the streets. A number of fans feel that the new information about the country goes too far in trying to make Arcasia more flawed, and that it is contrasted by United Contana seeming far too positive by comparison. The first post-Amendment patch notably adds a bit more story content to scale back this shift, toning down Arcasia's libertarianism and establishing that its current government faces opposition from a popular social-democratic party, while also adding some more detail about United Contana's press censorship and the possibility that its portrayal in-game comes from an Unreliable Narrator.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Lucian Galade during the sex scandal crisis. Him wiretapping Petr and exposing the whole affair is clearly meant to come out as highly unethical, as well as a clear power-grabbing move to usurp Petr's position as VP. However, seeing as Lucian points out blatant incompetence and negligence in Petr's behaviour, bother to back up and prove each and every one of his accusations and, oh yeah, reveals a freaking ENEMY SPY in the office who only got so far because of Petr's negligence... Yeah, let's just say that some players were immensely grateful for Lucian's "unethical" efforts.

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