YMMV / Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana

• Base-Breaking Character: Lita. Is she an intriguing and beautiful lead character with a compelling backstory or an annoying and cliche tsundere bitch who needs to shut up.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Veola makes a ring for Klein, unsubtly naming it the "Ring of Love." When Lita objects, Veola provides a new recipe "for Lita," which turns out to be poisonous pills she calls "Farewell, Love" - a note of pitch-black humor, already uncomfortable and which becomes much Harsher in Hindsight when you learn Lita actually once did want to kill herself, and Veola is planning to kill herself too. After Lita and Veola finally start to bond, Veola provides a new recipe for medicine that restores Lita's degenerating mana.
  Veola: "This time, 'feel a lot better' didn't imply dying in your sleep."
• Disappointing Last Level: Selk's Cry and Mull's Castle. Short and fairly linear for a final dungeon with no memorable moments either.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Veola, a shopkeeper in the first town you visit ends up having the complete and robust backstory of all the characters featured in the game. And she isn't even a playable character. She even got an special drama CD for herself (titled Atelier Veola - The Alchemist of Regalzine -), featuring characters from Atelier Iris 1 and 2. Sadly, it was a very rare Gust Shop-only preorder item, so No Export for You.
  • Alkavana Knights are also well-liked for their admiration and Undying Loyalty to Beggur, as well as their catchy boss music.
  • The Puni Brothers (Taro, Jiro and Kichi) also counts, and they even returns in Mana Khemia 2: Fall of Alchemy with a bigger role.
• Epileptic Trees: There is a theory about this game beginning life as "Atelier Veola" in the vein of its predecessors, with Veola as the player character and Klein and Lita as supporting characters. In an attempt to drive up sales (and produce something that could be exported to the US), however, Gust decided to retool the game into something a bit more "standard", and so promoted Klein and Lita to main characters, shuffled the old content off to the side, and produced what we have today.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: There are a good number of players who felt that Klein should have ended up with Veola rather than Lita.
• Game-Breaker: Using Alrin. His stats are all around great, particularly his strength. His skills are pretty strong, too, and he has the MP pool to spam them effectively; Double is one of the best single target attacks anyone has (and has a great chance at Skill Breaking enemies) and Bull's Eye is a contender for most powerful ability in the game, and even has defensive applications. All told, Arlin's presence just makes things easier.
• Narm: Most of the characters are so earnest that when something dramatic happens, it makes the characterization funny. Especially true of Klein, who sounds almost like his lips are pursed in angst whenever he meets adversity.
• Retroactive Recognition: Tetsuya Kakihara voices Klein as one of his earliest roles in 2004. He wouldn't get his most famous role until three years later.
• Surprise Difficulty: The game has very scarce and ineffective healing, and specially reviving, items aside from the ones Klein can learn to make. Combine that with some tough bosses, and even enemies, who can bring him down in a couple of turns and the game can get unnervingly difficult.
• That One Boss: Elder Virium and Prism are both regarded to be extremely difficult bosses as they can wipe out your entire party in a matter of turns if you are not careful.
• That One Attack:
  • Elder Virum's Tera Flame, deal very high damage to all characters and it has a nasty surprise of not being a two turns move like Flickering Flame.
  • Prism's Shutrel Edge, although it takes two turns, it's very hard to Skill Break it; it deals massive damage to all characters and Prism may act again essentially finishing off the job.
  • Quetzacoatl's Towznetskarz, it may Poison and Curse (disables HP recover) all characters. Hope it didn't affect Klein.
  • The final boss has three dangerous attacks: Ether Light (can inflict Poison, Curse, Paralyze and put everyone to Sleep), Reason's Requiem (knocks your characters HP in single digits and has a chance of knocking them down for a turn), and Elemental Extraction (deals moderate damage, but has a high chance of causing Instant Death and there is no defense against it).
• Toy Ship: Yach/Dia, the two kids from Havoc who are always seen together.

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