YMMV / Arcane – Online Mystery Serial

• Angst? What Angst?: In the sixth episode of season two, Ophelia has a vision where she travels to the past and meets her mother, something she apparently never had a chance to do in her waking life. Ophelia has no significant reaction to seeing her mother outside of mild confusion, and simply accepts the card her mother gives her and leaves without another word.
• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • Shub-Niggurath. Compared to the Guardian from the previous season, he's really easy. All you need to do is bind his wrists and neck when he's about swat and headbutt you, respectively.
  • The Guardian as well, arguably, at least in the final phase of the episode. While it can be difficult to navigate its labyrinth and then put together the clues gathered while it's constantly stalking you, once you empower the dagger it spends a generous amount of time just floating in circles before killing you, giving the player ample time to figure out the timing needed to attack it successfully. Even the challenge provided by mastering the timing doesn't fully make up for how visually silly the showdown looks.
• Awesome Music: Gilles Léveillé provides a beautiful score in The Miller Estate, especially in episode 4, though sadly most sites don't host the soundtrack. The second season's soundtrack also qualifies.
  • The credits theme of Season 1 is a standout, as is the track that plays during the final confrontation with the Guardian.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: In episode 5 of The Stone Circle, Gregor's voice actor is the same from The Miller Estate, then at one point, if you try to go in a certain direction before searching for the artifact Smith pointed out to him, he'll speak in the guttural voice of his new actor, then return to the old voice actor for the remainder of the episode. It is likely this episode was produced out of order and the line in question recorded later, as the episode also bizarrely reverts to the more simplistic saving method from early installments instead of the smoother version used from S2E3 onwards.
• Cult Classic: Like the other Sarbakan game release after they were bought out by Warner Bros., it was relatively unknown even at the time of its release, but has gained a minor fanbase.
• Moral Event Horizon: Alicia Blackwood, already The Chessmaster and a Manipulative Bitch, awakens and tries to enslave Shub-Niggurath, which wouldn't have ended well for the world if our heroes didn't bind him shortly after.
• Narm:
  • The voice acting in The Miller Estate is laughable, especially in the intro to episode 4.
  Gregor: (in a what-can-possibly-go-wrong tone) Hell's bells! I don't like the sound of that! (the rope holding the elevator rips) Whoooooaaaaa!
  • Also, who would want to keep framed photographs of the series' Big Bad?
  • It may be a little difficult to take the henchman you encounter in The Stone Circle episode 4 all that seriously when you find out his name is Brother Barnstable.
• Nightmare Fuel: Now has its own page.
• That One Boss: While arguably being an Anti-Climax Boss, the Guardian can be rather frustrating to kill. You're given a limited amount of time to to defeat it, and have to wait until it's at a certain position to strike it with the dagger, and you risk death if you keep missing.
• The Woobie:
  • Ophelia. She's granted psychic abilities in the womb as a result of her mother witnessing the summoning of Cthulhu, but said abilities prove to be a heavy and overpowering burden to her. It doesn't help that in the present, she's dismissed as senile and insane by her Jerkass nurse, although she does tend to play along with that assumption for her own amusement. However, she's also a bit of a Stoic Woobie, in that she barely ever shows any surprise about the various horrible things around her, except the occasional gasp or cry.
  • Ophelia's mother, who was driven insane after witnessing a tribe summon an Eldritch Abomination, and spent the rest of her days locked up in a mental institution. She makes a brief appearance in The Stone Circle's sixth episode, and you can tell that she's gone through horrible times.
  • To a lesser extent, Gregor, seeing how he's largely motivated by the grief of losing his wife due to her madness.