YMMV / Valiant Hearts

• Awesome Music:
  • Accurate period music aside, the soundtrack is beautiful as well haunting.
  • Freddie's theme, "Escape the Apocalypse". You know there's a Moment of Awesome coming when you start hearing it.
• Funny Moments: The driving sections, each one backed up by Mickey Mousing obstacles and hazards... set to classical music.
  • The hint system humorously depicts a French messenger pigeon as wearing an Adrien helmet (even while the French soldiers are still wearing kepis). That's not the real funny part - that's in using the hint system in the game's first chapter, then getting to the start of the second chapter and seeing the pigeons actually all wearing Adrien helmets like that in true gameplay.
• Heartwarming Moments: There's tons of it, proving that hope can shine even in the darkest of places. Whether you're Emile helping various people while Reims is being bombed (finding a couple's lost daughter and rescuing various people), seeing Karl interact with his family, or watching Emile and Karl be reunited at Neuve-Chapelle, or helping German soldiers (one saved by Emile in a mine, convinces his comrades to let Emile go).
  • Karl putting a gas mask on Walt. Or, for that matter, the fact that the Germans even have a gas mask for dogs.
  • The fact that in the end, only Emile dies. While it's tragic and beyond depressing to realize he ended his life by being shot by his own countrymen, it's calming to know that Karl, Anna, Walt, Freddie, and a few others definitely survive; Given the original implications of a "Everybody Dies" Ending from the marketing.
• Inferred Holocaust: The part in which Anna is traversing Belgium shows the Germans gassing the city (a civilian population) and involves Anna having to save several civilians from certain doom... and this actually downplays the German atrocities in Belgium. There's a reason historians refer to the events as "The Rape of Belgium".
• Nightmare Fuel: Oooh boy, this game does not hold back in showing why War Is Hell... Emile's commanding officer's Sanity Slippage. By the end, he's a screeching, barely coherent madman mindlessly sending hundreds of innocent people to their deaths for a cause he knows is lost. Only his death at Emile's hand ends the madness, death and destruction. Before Emile comes to hit him with his shovel, he's had to proceed taking cover behind piles of corpses.
• Spiritual Licensee:
  • Finally! The War Horse video game you never knew you wanted, only the horse is now a dog.
  • Alternatively, the ligne clair art-style and light-hearted adventure-story feel of the early-game make it the best Tintin game there never was.
  • Thirdly, an adaptation of Charley's War in French's perspective.

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