YMMV / BLACKSOULS

• Awesome Music: For a game made in part with bought assets and royalty-free tracks for music? Not only are the soundtracks perfectly handpicked to fit the grimmified fairy tale aesthetic, but they are genuine bangers all-around. Some of the most powerful and emotional scenes that have the community in tears are only as powerful as they are due to the emotional tracks accompanying them.
• Cheese Strategy: Any Guns that you equipped will turn your standard Break into Gun Break skill (think of Bloodborne's Visceral Attack), which is put on cooldown after use, but does not take a turn. With the Rabbit's Pocketwatch, a consumable you can get from Node that refreshes your cooldowns, considering the fact using most consumables does not end your turn means you can spam Pocketwatches and fire the skill continuously, with whatever you're fighting not even getting the chance to use their turn. Notably, since hunter class start with Silver Pistol equipped, this also mean that you can use this combo as soon as you gain access to Library Dream, which is easy to do as you can use Black Ash to teleport you to Library Dream at no cost since you don't have any held souls for it to be consumes at the start of game anyway.
• Cliché Storm: In a good way! BLACK SOULS makes its identity and ultilizes a lot of narrative points and characters taken from widely explored fairy tales, and twists them and rips them apart, creating something new, but many of the things observed are still rooted in those good old, well-known tales that set the basis for more modern writing and literature.
  • Characters like Mary Sue for example, are extremely meta in the sense she does represent exactly what a Mary Sue is, but that is done so purposefully it makes her one of the highlights of the series both through her actions and layered personality through her façade.
• Even Better Sequel: BLACK SOULS II is regarded by many as the greater game and a great improvement— it is by far the more popular of the two, a sign it has likely performed much better, and has greater documentation and more coverage. It is objectively larger, has more content, more characters and events, and offers a greater challenge as well. Several characters return from the previous games and the sequel ties together everything, even Red Hood's Woods (earlier game of the same universe).
  • If that wasn't enough, the game received 3 DLC— DLC 1 called GOD OF THE DEEP OCEAN adding a new area, a boss and a covenant, DLC 2 OLD KING OF THE CHESS adding an entire side dimension with an infinite sprawling floor-based maze with invaluable late-game loot and an off-branch of the story through Mabel, and DLC 3, CROWN OF THE LION AND UNICORN, an entire separate, massive world of excruciating difficulty with the final exclusive ending of the game that ties the narrative up to that point together.
• Friendly Fandoms: With Koishi Komeiji's Heart-Throbbing Adventure, surprisingly enough, due to both of them focusing on incredibly dark themes and insanity. It also helped that the creator of Black Souls also did a fan work on Touhou as well.
• Game-Breaker:
  • In I, The Dusk Crown Rings double your magic at the cost of also doubling the mana costs for all spells. With a max level player, this allows them to barely reach the cap of 19998 Magic, enough to one-shot a lot of bosses with Heavy Soul Discharge. This of course, assumes you have all 4 rings equipped at once, but this also drives up the mana costs up a massive hike... Unless you equip a Sorcerer's Staff+10, which makes every spell free to cast, and you can potentially get a non-maxed Sorcerer's Staff if you pick the Sorcerer background.
  • II:
    • Any equipment that grants an bonus action. The reason is that, by the endgame, using equipment that inflates your stats becomes less viable due to the enemy having multiple actions and/or being damage sponges, on top of the various gimmicks they have, so to mitigate this, after reaching the recommended stats for a certain area, having bonus actions to quickly get buffs and unleashing powerful attacks in a span of a single turn allows the player to defeat their enemies within the minimal amount of turns. Furthermore, thanks to a quirk with the RPG Maker VX engine, the stats for each bonus action are calculated separately, meaning that having four Black Rabbit Rings means in practice you get four bonus actions, since Black Rabbit Rings guarantee a bonus action if they are equipped. Other equipment is the Andor Sword at +5, which is mostly equipped at the beginning of most fights due to it also granting a bonus action when maxed out, the Two-Faced Buckler, and Mystery of Night Sky ^note Which is basically the player wearing Mabel's panties. It Makes Just as Much Sense in Context. have a chance of granting an bonus action, and finally, two of the Covenants in the game have a chance of granting a bonus action, such as Duchess Margaret, which guarantees a bonus action at the expense of a 50% speed debuff when maxed out, and Kuti, who grants a 50% chance of a bonus action in exchange for granting a extra hit, with the caveat that it will cost a lot of souls to max out the Covenant.
    • All of the Chaos Dungeon-exclusive spells. Remembers how extremely powerful all your companions' Ultimate Skills are, but wished that you could obtain them yourself? No problem! After defeating the Old King of the Chess (which is no easy feat, to say the least), the drop rate from non-hostile flying books will shift more towards those exclusive spells, which are incredibly powerful. Examples include Chaos Blast, which erases 25% of all enemies' HP and applies the Burn debuff to them, Black Wave reduces 15% of all enemies' HP and applies the Frail debuff to them, Royal Tea is essentially an Omnibless on steroids, Holy Banner increases both Defense and Magic Defense along with 30% HP regen, Catherine's Wheel deals 2 unavoidable attacks to 4 random enemies and applies the Bleed debuff, and Quick Dance is a long-lasting Dodge buff. Most damningly of all, Black Slash deals 4 incredibly huge amounts of damage, and it's also unavoidable to boot. The weakest one is Awakening, since while it does drastically increase your Magic Attack, it also reduces your Attack to 0%, but it grants a bonus action to compensate. Having all these is a must-have to survive DLC 3.
    • God's Angels is one of the best endgame weapons. For starters, every time an successful attack is made with this weapon, it grants a buff that increases the player's damage. Already good enough as it is, but if the max amount of buffs for this weapon is reached, then it instead turns the normal attack into a 8-hit massively damaging slash. Combined with the strategy above and a lot of DLC 3 enemies can be shredded apart.
• Goddamned Boss: Unis. To the point a good chunk of the community despises her. Her fight is often credited as the most painful, but not because she has a lot of health or hits particularly hard, but because of her absurd Speed stat and attack dodging chance, dodging past most if not all of your attacks. The intended strategy to defeat her is to inflict her with the Fear debuff, which will make her easier to hit, but inflicting that... requires you to hit her.
• Iconic Sequel Outfit: Red Hood's loss of her traditional dress design under her namesake hood that gets replaced with the arguably much more... "in-line" design for an H-Game that just consists of her wearing nothing but a black bikini and thong with leather linings beneath the cape.
• The Inverse Law of Fandom Levity: BLACK SOULS is a dark H-Game, featuring loads of conventional gorn, Body Horror, Sanity Slippage, and just about anything played for drama, with the plot being described as an unholy combination of Dark Souls, Bloodborne, The Song of Saya, Fear & Hunger, and Touhou. In spite of this, some of the subject matter is used by the fandom for absolute Black Comedy, playing many of the situations for laughs such as the player character going after anyone who even remotely looks like Alice and even put them in more lighthearted situations.
• Love to Hate: Mary Sue/Leaf. Her actions are despicable and horrific, but you can't help but enjoy how over-the-top and laughable it is.
• Magic Franchise Word: Mainly through the name of "Alice", played up by the community nearly as a Brown Note word of utter insanity of sorts that has spread to the point a lot of unrelated media linked, associated, or inspired by the fairy tale of Alice in Wonderland will have BLACK SOULS fans uttering their desires to "go to Alice" in comments and descriptions. The same applies to the other more popular main characters like Red Hood and Grimm.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • I'M GAINING SEN^ExplanationAn audio meme based on the scene where the player ends up traversing to the Moon when trying to view it through a telescope and ends up seeing Azathoth instead, causing him to call the Cheshire Cat for help and invoking his inner Lovecraft when she doesn't. Expect this to be uttered when a BLACK SOULS reference is made somewhere.
  • Haachama Beheading BGM^ExplanationThe stream lore involving Haachama from hololive (mostly in regards to Haato being decapitated and Haachama's head replacing it) uses the same royalty-free music as the Old King's Shadow Mirrors phase. (Un)fortunately, because of this, when fans tried to search up the BGM for that, they ended up encountering more search results for BLACK SOULS II rather than the original song due to how BLACK SOULS is better known compared to a royalty-free song. This resulting in some fans, jokingly or not, claimed that they were introduced to the series by Haachama. It helps that both Haachama and BLACK SOULS involve eldritch entities.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: The first game was somewhat difficult, but can be steamrolled with enough grinding. The second game, however, is much more difficult compared to the first, with enemies ready to completely trounce you if you're not careful. Furthermore, there exists DLC content that is much harder compared to the vanilla content, with Crown of the Lion and the Unicorn agreed to be one of the hardest areas in BLACK SOULS II.
• Signature Scene: The moon scene is considered by many to be the most memorable parts of II, given that it basically involves Azathoth manhandling the player, all while bizarre music plays in the background.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: BLACK SOULS II mechanically and artistically came with a multitude of improvements, such as an interactive overworld map, the allowing the usage of items freely during turns, faster running, an expanded inventory with sorting and more customization options, the addition of backstabbing enemies, the rebalancing by giving skills cooldown, and the general inclusion of more side content and special game modes, more weapons and gear, a bigger map, a higher count of H-Scenes and even more characters and more Endings. The list goes on.
• That One Attack: In DLC 3 of II, anything that inflicts the Dislegging status effect. This is because on top reducing Speed to 1, it cuts your defense by a whopping 99%, pretty much spelling your death if you get inflicted with this status effect. The only way to avoid this entirely is to either dodge or block the enemies' attacks, but Lorde, Prince of Hell, in his final battle, is guaranteed to go first and if the player is unlucky, he might inflict a cut ankle on before they could even act.