YMMV / Vampire: The Masquerade – Redemption

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Christof's line after diablerising Vukodlak in a Bad Ending is a bit open to interpretation. Is he saying that he's finally embraced what he is and seeks to triumphantly reunite with his maker in the Sabbat? Or is the implication even more sinister, that he's going to continue his predecessor's work and wage war against her as well?
  Christof: Tell Ecaterina to expect a warm homecoming. Her childe has been reborn!
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: In the Nosferatu tunnels there's a NPC named Ilig, who doesn't attack you like all the others. All he does is stand there and say one cryptic line ("The path of Caine is the only escape, follow it, let it lead you...") There's no other way to interact with him, and the party members don't react to him at all.
• Breather Level:
  • After the frustrating Giovanni Warehouse, Orsi International seems like a cakewalk. Unlike the Demonic Spider-summoning, Frenzy-inducing Giovanni goons, your enemies are rather more straightforward Ventrue mooks, supported by harmless Szlachta and other (mostly) low level threats from the Dark Ages. A very catchy theme and an interesting, squicky locale also help alleviate any tedium.
  • Barring one or two puzzles and the ghoul alligators near the end, the Nosferatu sewers and the enemies therein (including the boss) are quite manageable.
• Complete Monster: Voivode Vukodlak was the most heretical grandchilde of the Tzimisce Antediluvian. A wicked would-be tyrant even by the standards of the Tzimisce, Vukodlak was sentenced to deep torpor by his own vile clan for his mad desire to diablerize the Antediluvians. Taking sadistic gratification in defiling innocence and purity, Vukodlak spends centuries torturing his own ghoul, forcing her to bind men and women to the walls of his masterpiece, a replica of the Cathedral of Flesh made of countless corpses. While superficially claiming to be saving the vampires from the Antediluvians, Vukodlak wants to usurp their place and rule a world where all vampires bow to him.
• Cult Classic: Not to the extent of its better known big sister, but the game still enjoys an enduring community and fan mods.
• Demonic Spiders: Many foes, including high level vampires, War Ghouls, Werewolves, Golems, Giant Cobra, Vohzd, Dark Hunters and Ghoul Alligators.

• Ensemble Dark Horse: Serena, the interesting but largely unexplored necromancer of your coterie in the Dark Ages. A popular mod has her evade her vaguely-alluded to demise and adds her back into the present day. Clearly noting her popularity, the Cults of the Blood Gods supplement for Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition eventually made her survival canon.
• Funny Moments: Several. On his first mission as a vampire, Christof is matched with Wilhelm to infiltrate the lair of a Cappodcian ally. They come across a mural depicting a "Cainite Heresey," that Caine not only didn't murder his brother Abel, but sacrificed him to God instead of all of his best farmed crops, and that this pleased God, and curse of vampirism is actually a blessing. When Christof asks if Wilhelm believes this Cainite Heresey, Wilhelm gives a remarkably deadpan reply:
  Wilhelm: If I am favored of the Lord, the angels have not seen fit to tell me of it.
  • While Storming the Castle at Vyserhad, you can come across some Premysl Revenants who recognize you and want to do you in:
    First Premysl: Christof, the slayer of Ahzra the Unliving!
    Second Premysl: Christof, destroyer of countless Premysls!
    Third Premysl: Christof, who raided the impregnable stronghold of the Tremere!
    Fourth Premysl: Perhaps we should flee?
    First Premysl: Nonsense, he's but a fledgling! Kill him!
• Fountain of Memes: Christof's flowery Shakespearean dialogue produces a lot of this.
• Game-Breaker: A few disciplines are so powerful that their exploitation makes the game very easy:
  • Theft of Vitae. Blood is supposed to be a precious resource that can only be regained by items or a slow feeding process. With a few points in it Theft of Vitae allows you to draw enough blood from any drainable creature to nearly max out at a distance, and blood drain can kill or disable some enemies. This is exactly as broken as it sounds. The skillset for it is rare but even one character with it can essentially become a mobile bloodbank for the rest.
    • This discipline can be used in conjunction with Awaken discipline to... farm infinite experience. Kill the enemy, revive him using Awaken, drain him with Theft of Vitae to replenish your blood and kill him again. Theft of Vitae allows you to repeat the process as many times as you want. The best part? It works with bosses, which obviously offer a lot of experience for killing. Not to mention Awaken ressurects the target with minimal health.
  • Prison of Ice freezes enemies for several seconds and works pretty much every time. Even the final boss can be frozen for most of the battle.
  • The highest level of Thaumaturgy has an unlimited range. You can use it to attack enemies outside their activation range, killing them while they stand idle.
  • With a high enough Manipulation stat, shopkeepers will buy back items for more than they sold them. Money is no longer a problem after that.
• Genius Bonus: The Stephansdom theme (which takes place in a giant clock) has a tempo of exactly 60 BPM
• Goddamned Bats: Wraiths have very little health but are very difficult to hit. The only reliable way to damage them is spells, and you are unable to draw blood from them, making them a major annoyance.
  • Tremere Homunculus Hoppers, especially in Arden's Chantry when you're at a fairly low level. They're not that tough, but they're fast, hard to hit and typically come in packs of three. Any nearby Tremere mages will then summon another one as well, so you'll often find yourself surrounded by six or more of the little sods and stuttering like mad while the mages throw fireballs at you.
• Good Bad Bugs: Sometimes, if you're standing in the right place, you can decapitate someone with enough force that their head will become lodged in a nearby wall.
  • When an enemy vampire uses Obfuscate, the player can no longer target them until they re-emerge. Your coterie sometimes ignores their stealth and is able to slay them before they can wail on you again, though.
• Heartwarming Moments: The high-Humanity ending.
• Jerkass Woobie: Libussa. While she does help Vukodlak, she doesn't really have a choice, as he tortured her to the point of madness, and seems to have blood-bonded her Also, the strategy guide outright says that her existence is "Merely an eternity of torment and defilement with no gleam of hope other than death.
• He's Just Hiding: Many believe — or hope — that Serena survived the Giovanni purge. This became canon in Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Had Christof paid attention to 'what' Anezka was telling him, a large chunk of the plot would not have happened.
• Large Ham: Almost everyone, although this is more due to the grandiose dialogue than overacting on their part.
• Love to Hate: Pink, who is more unpleasant than half the villains you face, but endlessly entertaining.
• Magnificent Bastard: Anezka, believe it or not. All the while Christof slept, she earned Vukodlak's trust, usurped Libussa... and then proceed to undermine Vukodlak's resurrection in every possible way from the inside. All this done by the shy nun in the beginning.
• Memetic Mutation: TO THE ABYSS WITH THEE!
• Moment of Awesome: Christof taking revenge on Orsi by tossing him into a vat of molten metal!!
• Moral Event Horizon: For the record, this is still a World of Darkness. There are plenty of MEH moments, both for characters Christof meets and for Christof himself, if you choose.
• Narm Charm: The grandiose dialogue in the Dark Ages is extremely over the top, but dripping with charm. Christof's Ham-to-Ham Combat with Starter Villain Ahzra is this trope incarnate. He mostly keeps it in the modern day too; most of the characters he meets do seem to find it oddly charming In-Universe.
• Nightmare Retardant: Your character portraits look damn silly when they're draining people of all their blood.
• Retroactive Recognition: Ecaterina was one of Mary Elizabeth McGlynn's first video game roles. She'd go on to become a major voice in the industry, among her future roles being the flesh-eating vampire occultist Pisha in Bloodlines.
• Squick: The game gets every last horrible foot of mileage out of making the Tzimisce the main bad guys. Not only are all Tzimisce you face horrible deformed monstrosities, but the Cathedral of Flesh is a horrible place, including treasure chests that obviously once were (and may still be) living beings. Worst of all, the "Hall of Memory," where Anezka recorded her thoughts on serving Vukodlak and sabotaging his resurrection: by creating eight heads of herself sculpted from flesh, connected to fleshy worms that sway as she recites her "journal entries." The squishy sound they make as the extend and retract just adds to the horror.
• Tear Jerker: Christof emerging into modern day London and instantly comprehending how much has changed and that the world he knew is long gone.

  Christof: "Now all my reason is thrown down. Surely my sleep hath made me mad. For if I am yet sane, then the world is become a lunatic asylum. Towers of glass loom over the tallest cathedral spires. Juggernauts of steel hurtle through the streets of London. The Roman roads, which once I walked as a young Crusader, are now fused into a single ribbon of black stone. And those roads are clogged with night-walking Londoners, heedless of the danger from the vampires among them. Are they so emboldened by the phantom torches which pierce the night and stab my eyes? Surely my world has died, and all I love lies buried with it."

• That One Attack: Drawing Out the Beast, which induces frenzy in the target and causes them to attack or feed on their allies. Many a reload will be caused by a cloistered enemy spamming this on your heavy hitters and sparking a civil war between your coterie.
• That One Boss: There are several.
  • Mercurio is quite a challenge: you fight him at the end of the first major dungeon after becoming a vampire, so your Disciplines are few, and your skills and equipment are weak. The problem, however, is Mercurio's poison cloud attack, which inflict continuous aggravated damage at a rate that can kill you in seconds, and doesn't affect him, so he can drop it on you when you're in melee with him. Combined with the fact that you're at the end of a dungeon and so running low on resources, and you only have two party members, it's not uncommon for Mercurio to stop your play dead until you figure out how to beat him^note If you can hit Mercurio hard enough, he'll be staggered and prevented from using his stronger abilities for a short time. The key is to hit him hard and frequently, which can be done with the Prothean disciplines.
  • Maqqabeh the Golem is the immediate next boss, and doesn't even have a dungeon to run through to power up. The biggest issue with the Golem is that he will hit you very hard, and you don't have any new armor to protect yourself. It also hits pretty fast, being technically unarmed, and when it does hit you, you're probably going flying, which means you'll be stuck in a recovery animation for several seconds, after which it can and likely will just hit you again until you're dead. Combined with not having any blood to drain, you're in a pretty bad place for this battle.
  • Vukodlak's first form is notable because he's perhaps the only enemy that can severely foil a player relying heavily on Theft of Vitae to cruise through the game. He's MORE dangerous at low blood because his spells don't do nearly as much raw damage as his goddamn claw attacks do, and once he's out of blood he claws nonstop.
• That One Level: The sewers under Prague and the Tremere lair in Golden Lane. Also the Lair of Luther the Black, mainly because it takes place during the day and you must navigate several areas in broad daylight. The Giovanni warehouse is also full of frustrating enemies who summon Demonic Spiders and spam a Discipline that induces frenzy.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Ecaterina, your sire, is a major character in the first half of the game but only acts off-screen after the Time Skip. She's still active in the modern nights, and is the one who sent Wilhelm to save you from "Pink", but although Christof makes peace with his mistress, they never reunite, especially since it turns out in the meantime, she and Wilhelm have actually joined the Sabbat for nebulous reasons.
  • Wilhelm himself, by virtue of his Late Character Syndrome in the modern nights, doesn't get much about his ever dwindling humanity after joining the Sabbat explored beyond lamenting it shortly before joining the party as the same old Wilhelm.
  • Also Archbishop Geza, who disappears from the story after Christof's Embrace. Christof might have been blinded to the archbishop's folly and corruption as a mortal, but this would've made him identifying these flaws as a vampire all the more poignant.
• The Woobie: Anezka and Christof are fundamentally noble people who are exposed to the very worst of the World of Darkness.