Adorkable: Hilde in the 4komas is portrayed as someone who has difficulty learning the aspects of the game and frequently trying to gain the approval of her former apprentice.
Is Replacer Bishop a Death Seeker who felt untold pain from abandoning Yoo Mina in her moment of need or was she actually masking a secret crush on Mina by calling it her brother's? If the latter is true, how much did a reluctance to confess and the death of her brother contribute to her anguish, and did her brother play along with being her target of deflection to the point where he'd give his life for his sister's happiness?
There are two ways to interpret Lyudmila after "End of the Maze": a survivor of the Administration Failure who retained her identity as a Shadow, or a near-identical Shadow who carries on her original's legacy by rescuing the Maze Division who knew their commander in life? Her Counter Case seems to support the latter, as she feels obligated to internalize the last recordings of her basis.
Like Lyudmila, interpreting Revenant after "Goodbye Tanaberin" is an exercise for the reader: the "dominant" identity after Maestra Nequitia fused with Leah Schneider can equally be defined as the former, the latter, or a third existence who inherited the memories of both.
Xiao Lin tends to be divisive due to her overabundance of skins and her overcentralizing place in the PVP meta.
You either like Minato for being a Stock Shōnen Hero in the Counterside universe, or you dislike him for being a standard static shonen character in a world of more interesting characters.
Whether Zlong Games or Nexon is a better publisher. While Zlong Games' handle of the SEA region had been relatively positive at the start, many are now complaining that the poor communication with their PR team, haphazard banner picks often leading to several weeks of no new content, a lack of promotional codes, and Invisible Advertising are not justifiable. The JP server's debut got a large spotlight with dedicated streams, advertising, and big-name seiyuus, but many feel that the pacing has become uneven and rushed. The fact it's region-locked to JP-only is also a sore spot for some. Unsurprisingly, when Studiobside announced that they would handle the Global server by themselves without any publishers, many cheered the decision, with the most negative opinions being ones of healthy skepticism on whether bside is really equipped to do this and truly, properly understands what they're getting themselves into, even if their hearts are in the right place.
Changes were made in Strategy Gauntlet in order to make it more exciting and challenging. These changes have been seen as either a necessary breath of fresh air to a dull PVP mode, or a completely unnecessary change that is actively detrimental to players' weekly Quartz income.
Studiobside confirming that they want to try to catch up and sync Global and the KR server. One side will say it's good as it means you're not waiting for a long period to get your favorite characters. Others have said that the accelerated speed makes it almost impossible to reasonably get all the units you'd want without spending money or getting incredibly lucky, especially if the banners are very close together.
The nature of the hololive crossover being exclusively skins with voicelines. Some people find it okay, saying that it's better for the game in the long run considering, that it's an exclusive crossover and will age better compared to the Guilty Gear collab where Millia turned out to be such a Lightning Bruiser that the game warped around her. Others claim that there was too much hype designed around some skins since it looks lazy to not have their necessary units readily available (the worst offender is Takanashi Kiara needing Awakened Yuna, whose banner ended one week into the collab event), and argue that each region has already been exclusive at the time of writing. A third group feel slightly burned since the lack of prerelease info about the collab made them skip the very appealing banners and associated rewards that preceded it.
While certain updates would cause some fractures in the fanbase, the New Origin update easily caused one of, if not the largest one, as it changed many of the game's mechanics and UI in one fell swoop. As a result, many players felt that the game had changed too drastically or not in a meaningful way. Not helped was the lead developer stepping down from his position, citing health reasons and interests in other works or IPs, but many believe that it was also in response to the heavily controversial update.
Almost everyone will recommend picking Gleipnir over Abraham. While Abraham provides a Healing Factor for Mechs, Gleipnir provides a substantial attack buff to Counters, which will take up a majority of your management.
When the topic of a player's first SSR ship comes up, the answer is almost unanimously Enterprise. Because Enterprise grants useful stat bonuses for Mechs and Counters and has two fairly strong abilities, it's often recommended heavily due to being helpful for almost every team and situation.
For your guaranteed SSR draw, most people would suggest Nanahara Chifuyu or Kyle Wong. In the JP beta, Gaeun was added to the draw, making her a very strong candidate as well.
In terms of most equipment, most people would suggest using cooldown reduction or attack speed on offensive characters, and HP/DEF sets on defensive sets. Bonus points if the offensive gear are Maze and the defensive gear is a Hummingbird weapon (or high-grade Inhibitor weapon), Maze armor, and Gordias accessories.
During the beginning of the SEA debut, many F2Ps were taught "The Big Three" which were the awakened versions of Hilde, Yuna Springfield, and Seo Yoon. These three were considered the optimal pick for later challenging maps and a good start for the expensive Classified Contracts. However due to changes in the design,note SEA version released the content "backwards" or in reverse of the release date of the original KR timeline; A. Yuna was also released very early into the game, months prior to other banners released at her debut. many have chosen to addendum it with replacing A. Hilde with A. Sooyeon.
Enemy Rhinos are frequently decried as one of the worst enemies to face, as they show up in Episodes when the difficulty ramps up. Not helped as they're not ever shown on the map for ship combat, meaning their appearance can be a surprise.
The reworked Dives feature Fragment of Truth enemies (the blobs with multiple mouths, sharing a model with Edel's minions) starting at around the late-20s to the early- to mid-30s, which stun units of their corresponding class upon death for quite a long duration. Because these enemies can come as Rangers, Supporters, or Strikers, all three of those classes become nigh-unusable in those Dive levels since they'll just get perma-stunned, restricting players to Snipers and Defenders only for dealing with them and making auto-battle a liability.
Of the main cast, Shiyoon became a fan favorite for his design, great character potential, and amusing dialogue, with many wanting him to get an Awakening. That wish was granted with the release of Episode 7, where he's a major focus. He also constantly tops as the most popular male in polling.
Gaeun is really well-loved due to her Moe personality, her loyalty to the CEO, and her high gameplay utility in dealing with Defenders, stunning enemies with her Special, and handling both Ground and Air units effectively with her Ultimate.
Chulsoo Kim is an average Defender, but the fanbase see him as amusing due to a combination of his Gonk artstyle, his incredibly mundane story, and his moves all being based on old video games and powered by disdain for his job. The announcement of his Rearm was a welcome surprise.
A number of fans cite Orca's side plot as the point where they truly got into the game's story and setting due to her tragic nature and her surprisingly poignant Character Development arc, and having a particularly kickassleitmotif doesn't hurt either. She was naturally given a Rearm, making her much more useful all around. The love for Orca and her Side Story also extends to Eddie Fisher, her Parental Substitutewhose death is the first real Tear Jerker moment for a lot of players and cements him as being Too Cool to Live.
When "End of the Maze" was first released in the KR server, the Maze Division originally died in a Last Dance in the climax. Their overwhelming popularity with the playerbase convinced bside to rewrite the event so that their only casualty was Valeriy. Alex in particular an instant favorite out of the very well-received event. It led to her being the most popular character in the game for some time.
Ecclesia became instantly popular even before she was released in the Korean server, with dozen of fanarts popping up. It helps that she was (correctly) guessed to be the real identity of Mors.
The various antagonists of both the Six Wings and Replacer Syndicate are all very attractive.
The Elysium Philharmonic is a group of bizarre people who are Shadows of another world possessing multiple ways of Brainwashing via Mental Printing while simultaneously believing that humans are beneath them. They are also an Amazon Brigade full of StripperifficMusical Assassins.
Fanfic Fuel: The wide open setting gives plenty of room for creating your own faction or imagining The Unmasqued World in the wake of the Old Administration falling.
Fan Nickname: The shorter subtitles of some events tend to be used more than their awkward-sounding official names:
"Academy Field Day" instead of "A Wish that You Don't Know"
"New Semester" instead of "Last blooming days on the campus"
"Sweet Promotion" instead of "World's most delicious and horrifying chocolate"
"Year-End Party" instead of "Killer of the Holy Night"
Game-Breaker: Skill Haste. With a Set Bonus granting 30% and various substats that can be changed and boosted, you can shave precious seconds off the cooldowns of non-Fury Specials and Ultimates (e.g., 50% Skill Haste shaves 20 seconds from a full-minute Ultimate). The only thing stopping most players from achieving this is the materials and RNG required to get Skill Haste on said gear. The fact that Yang Harim grants a huge amount of it as a buff is what keeps her in the absolute top tier of PvE content to this day and made her a PvP queen for a long while (only being dethroned once Na Yubin and various buff removers started popping up).
Goddamned Bats: Suppressors and Hounds are common enemies, but what makes them annoying to deal with are (1) their fast deployment putting early pressure on your first units, (2) their ability to deflect hits from your main target, and (3) their high HP being boosted even higher in Harder Than Hard modes like Challenge Mode and Shadow Palace.
Good Bad Bugs: When the Global server was officially released, players noticed that Episode 1 Act 3-4 ("Wolvesbane") cost zero Eternium. Combined with the quality-of-life Skip option for full-cleared stages, this allowed newbies to, with enough diligence, max out Loyalty on their entire roster (bypassing the heavy costs of gaining Loyalty from Salary Negotiation) and easily gain Special Ship Schematics from the victory-related Achievements Missions (which cap at 270,000 victories) by Skipping 1-3-4 a whole 99 times per run. An update eventually patched 1-3-4 with an Eternium cost (with accounts that didn't take advantage of the exploit given some compensation as an unofficial apology).
Hilarious in Hindsight: The CEO has more than a few similiarities to the Doctor from Arknights. A recent event in the latter adds one more to the list: both created and named a "daughter" (Sigma and Kal'tsit, respectively).
Incest Yay Shipping: It's not uncommon to find art of the Nanahara sisters being paired together.
Iron Woobie: Once you learn Gerard Curian's full backstory in "The Iron Knight", you will definitely think his eponymous title is apropos. To sum it all up: David Rashford was the Sole Survivor of the 1st Musketeer Division of Nordnavik, his wife died before he could return to her (and was implied to have suffered the shame of being the wife of a "traitor"), he missed out on his daughter's formative years, he and his old comrades have apparently been seen as traitors to Nordnavik for the past 20 years, he watched his new comrades in the Border Guards (including children) pass away from their Corruption sickness, and "Hanna Anderson" and a revived Medius kill even more of his new comrades and desecrate the body of the man who gave his life to save him, the real Gerard Curian. The event's epilogue implies a few things: the 1st Musketeer Division has been exonerated, Vivian has reported the Holy Relic as lost (since pulling it out of David's heart would almost certainly kill him), David continues to call himself Curian as part of his oath to protect the Holy Relic indefinitely, and David and Vivian are aware that they're father and daughter but have decided to keep it secret.
After the update that changed the recruitment style and upgrading process, any of the G.A.P. trophies count since all units now have max stats and don't need to be upgraded.
The little chibi characters acquired from either achievements with Awakened characters or the Merit Shop don't do anything and take up space in your management, but you can place them in your lobby for your amusement. An update fortunately moved them to their own tab to separate them from your playable roster.
Seo's insistence on becoming Mina's rival and constant teasing of Mina (followed by Mina's flustered responses) led to a number of fans pairing them up. It gained fuel when Seo leaves Xiao Lin in charge of ALT Squad so she could "run off" with Mina in Episode 7 (actually to help her on the CEO's orders, but still).
"Frozen Corridors", an event centered on Regina's Character Development, has also been seen as a Platonic Writing, Romantic Reading of her bond with Edel, not helped by their scenes' Double Entendres. The event title screen doesn't help either, depicting Edel embracing Regina while the two hold hands and gaze into each other's eyes.
While the Nanahara sisters have been shipped before, it skyrocketed after "Ethereal Moon Splitter" thanks to Chifuyu's angst of To Be Lawful or Good between the Alliance and Chinatsu. The fact that Sanae, her own mentor, refers to her as her sister's "beloved" doesn't help either.
"Creed of the Yaksa" is centered on Ciel's quest to find an opponent who's stronger than her, after which they'll be married according to the tradition of her Black East sect, and she finds that person in Yen Xing Lanchester. It might be just a matter of responsibility for Yen (who doesn't feel ready to duel Ciel until she's learned enough at the Counter Academy), but Ciel's feelings for her have a romantic subtext, especially since Yen becomes the first person Ciel calls by name.
Love to Hate: Wilbur Whateley isn't even playable and isn't a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but he remains one of the most popular antagonists specifically because of how grounded yet despicable he is. While most of the main antagonists are working toward some sort of universal agenda, Wilbur stands out for being a relatively mundane self-centered, backstabbing scumbag whose actions resulted in the tragic deaths of two likeable characters, making him all the more loathsome on a personal level.
Memetic Loser: Due to her low stats for her high cost, Lee Jisoo tends to be made the butt of many jokes.
Super Steak: Rarenote An early achievement rewards a steak that initially could be given to your unit to increase their stats. When the game removed the Implant system, it instead can be used for Credits. Most people keep it instead as a trophy.
THE WORLD HAS BEEN DENIED STEAK.note The Global client launched with a huge number of quality-of-life improvements compared to earlier versions of the game, and one of these included the removal of stat-up items like the steak. This means that it's impossible for Global players to get the steak at all, and thus they were, well, denied steak.
"1200 Won woman/I'll be your friend for a dollar."note Shin Jia is given as an extra bonus to your first microtransaction in the store. Due to her I Just Want to Have Friends attitude and social awkwardness (she even leads off with awkwardly asking you to be her friend in her recruitment animation), and since the cheapest transaction is 1200 Won/99 cents, it sometimes gets interpreted as her agreeing to be your friend for giving her any sort of attention or money.
Pog Shipnote People have pointed out that Lake Superior's frontside looks similar to the famous Twitch emote.
Na Yubin evasion too good.note Na Yubin is a very common opponent in Gauntlets due to being a strong Defender with very useful passives and abilities. However, because of his Difficult, but Awesome behavior, his winrate usually fluctuates so he frequently avoids getting bans, much to certain players' chagrin. It also extends to his younger version on SEA, who despite being in the Collection page alongside the rest of the Old Administration didn't get a rate-up banner or was even playable until seven months later, which has led players to joke that his evasion has him "dodging the gacha".
Hilde: Pro UD.note One of the most common loading comics at Global launch was the one offering some advice for how the World Map mission system works. The final panel gag is Hilde only managing to get a standard success on a mission and looking very pleased about it, complete with what's supposed to be a big yellow "PROUD" in all caps above her head. However, because of how it's formatted - there's a big gap between PRO and UD in order to fit Hilde's head in - to many native Anglophones, it looks like the comic is saying Hilde is a "PRO UD", as in a "pro/expert 'UD'", which led to a lot of folks trying to figure out what the heck a "UD" was supposed to be before getting the joke. Because Hilde in those comics is portrayed as a bit of a doofus, however, her proclaiming herself a "PRO UD" with "UD" not meaning anything actually somehow works even better than the intended reading, and thus "PRO UD" caught on as a descriptor for Hilde in her... less proud moments, both in gag comics and in the story proper.
Arcueid on vacation.note People have made a point about how Fione's Hot Spring skin made her look like Arcueid Brunsted, and how she's hiding from being put in Fate/Grand Order. Has since become a Discredited Meme after Arceuid was added during FGO's 7th anniversary.
Nanomachines, son!note Chulsoo Kim is often compared by Western players to Senator Armstrong due to their similar appearances. With Armstrong being the Fountain of Memes he is, players quickly appropriated his memes for use with Chulsoo as well and began to joke that Armstrong would be his Rearm (which particularly gained traction when a Chulsoo Rearm was actually announced).
Narm Charm: Many of the ships in the game are named after places in the American Midwest. While some aren't too weirdly named (Lake Superior), it can be hard to take other names more seriously (New Ohio, New Detroit). Americans find it a bit easier to take individually, but so many ship names being from the Great Lakes area led to some amusement and joking if Studiobside is actually secretly headquartered in Wisconsin or the like.
Not Badass Enough for Fans: Hirose Aki and Lee Minseo tend to get the short end of the stick in a lot of their appearances due to their more mundane actions in the story compared to the other characters' intense scenes. Their reputation in-universe as moochers accepting Administration funding without actively mining Eternium or hunting C.O.s plays a big part.
Player Punch: Don't deploy Eddie in his Children's Day skin if you have any humanity in you. If he dies in the field, then his daughter watches him die!
Polished Port: The Steam client of the Global server has even more settings than the Mobile version and arguably overall runs more smoothly. The only downside is the lack of daily freebies (Eternium, gear space, and unit space) for watching ads (since the Mobile version involves the Google/iOS app store it's downloaded from). Fortunately, you can get the ad freebies on Mobile and then swap to Steam without issue.
Questionable Casting: While many players approve of the voice actors that the JP server brought in, some have issue with certain characters voiced differently. The two most egregious ones are Jake Walker and Shin Jia; their JP voices sound much higher-pitched than their KR counterparts, which some players consider immersion-breaking.
The Elite Tweak on gear is entirely RNG-based with no guarantee or pity to fall back on, meaning it's entirely possible to spend your entire stock of Binaries with no changes.
Weather mechanics on maps. While some only seal your Ultimates on certain characters, the worst is easily Blizzard: it lowers your Attack Speed and movement speed by 50%, making certain time limits almost a Luck-Based Mission.
In PVP, certain team-wide buffs were given out during the seasons to incentivize taking advantage of certain characters. What happened instead was the competitive balance being broken; characters that were optimized for the season became near Game-Breaker and either ended matches in an instant (if offensively boosted) or dragged them on longer than necessary (if defensively boosted). Eventually these buffs were removed from PVP.
The "Today's Deals" tab in the Shop can sometimes sell the blue Employment Contracts for 150 Quartz apiece, but rolling a non-Awakened banner without any Employment Contracts on hand already costs 150 Quartz per roll. If that Contract in the Shop isn't also discounted, it's basically a sale trap.
Self-Fanservice: Fanart tends to emphasize the curves or attractiveness of certain characters.
Take That, Scrappy!: Those who dislike Minato may enjoy Lenore calling him insignificant and roughing him up in the climax of "Ethereal Moon Splitter".
That One Boss: Altergressive Seo Yoon in Episode 5, Mission 3-2. Combine her monstrous damage output with her ability to leave behind high-health walls to distract your units, while frequently also ignoring your units to attack your ship directly (often shredding it before you can even react if it's below Level 50), and you've got a recipe for frustration.
Fusion Cores are needed to perform Limit Fusion on units, raising their level cap from 100 to 110 and also giving appropriate stat bonuses (of particular note is that level 110 is required for both Rearming a unit and unlocking a unit's Alternium Reactor). They're also very hard to earn or craft for how many you need, with 15 required to fully limit-break an SR unit and 75 for an SSR, forcing careful triage by players to avoid maxing out weak units at the detriment of more effective ones. This cost used to be circumventable with dupes of characters before the New Origin update, after which the perceived value of all the farmable SRs and SSRs took a hit.
Set Binaries are used for modifying set bonuses on gear, which is more or less required for optimizing end-game equipment for your units. In addition to being very rare to get, the lack of a pity mechanic on rerolling set bonuses means you go through far more of them than you have to almost all the time.
The New Origin update nerfed Dive rewards by removing loot for finding Artifacts and defeating the boss and making the Dive clear loot smaller. Combined with Dives on the World Map no longer having the option to Sweep to the Dive boss and all Dives taking much longer to complete, the general consensus at that time was that they're better off ignored. Studiobside acknowledged the criticism and promised to adjust the rewards, and they seem to have made good on it over the next few weeks: the ability to sweep Map Dives was re-added, finding Artifacts and defeating the boss gave loot again, and Dives in general were made much shorter.
Related to this was New Origin's rework of the ammo and Artifact systems. The ammo system that kept a ship from being used more than twice per Dive without an ammo refill node was changed to all ships suffering HP decay (via an Artifact from the outset that got more severe in deeper Levels) that penalized defensive play; this made the timer irrelevant in the deepest Dive Levels since even a fresh ship would die long before those three minutes were up. The Artifacts that used to be entirely beneficial also had ones with trade-offs added to the pool, which meant Auto-clear squads can be unlucky enough to pick an Artifact that actively endangers them. Five weeks later, all negative Artifact effects (including the HP decay one) were removed, so a strong enough Squad 1 can now Auto a Dive on their own without running into an anti-synergistic Artifact.
Also from the New Origin update, the battle UI got an overhaul, which included changing several pieces of the interface (such as friendly health bars and the game speed/auto battle buttons) from colored to white. In addition to just not looking as good as the old version to a lot of players, what made this particularly obnoxious was that barriers were now displayed as a very bright cyan that made them very hard to distinguish from health on friendly units. After much backlash against the new UI, bside reverted the color changes only a week later.
New Origin's rework of Shadow Palace was another change that was criticized. Originally, entering the mode required Quantum Coordinate Crystals that were given at a rate of 1 per day, and after clearing the requisite battles you would receive currency to buy molds for Spectral Gear among other things. However, the update made Shadow Palace become part of the Dimensional Trimming mode, which costs Eternium to enter instead (and thus cuts into the Eternium you can use for other things), and the Shadow Palace shop was removed in favor of the battles dropping Spectral Gear materials directly... at such a low rate that it costs unreasonable amounts of Eternium to get one piece (whereas a single Palace entry in the old system can earn you multiple pieces). Additionally, the removal of the Shadow Palace shop meant that currency from the mode could no longer be used to buy the rare and valuable Set Binaries. Fortunately, five weeks later bside made it entirely separate from Dimension Trimming, reverted it to the old version (while adding a Skip option), and brought its shop back.
To get songs, you need to get fulfill a requirement before you can play it in the Sound Test. The problem is that you are not told what the requirement is until after you have achieved the requirement.
Tough Act to Follow: "End of the Maze" (for single events) and the Horizon Finance storyline ("Bottom of the Shade" and "For the Uncrying", for arcs spanning multiple events) are considered to have set the bar for future events.
While many weren't surprised at how fast Episode 6 came out in Global, the What If? skins debuting alongside it was another story, seeing as they weren't yet available in SEA or JP.
While it was known that the Global version was going to get an exclusive crossover, most had assumed that it was going to be something like Blue Archive or an anime that might have some similarities like how JP had Code Geass. Very few were expecting the entirety of HoloMyth, especially when bside had previously contracted Nijisanji and VShojo for advertisements.
Visual Effects of Awesome: The game has very stunning fluid motions in its cut-ins and Live2D animations.
The entirety of Horizon Finance, especially considering how tragic their storyline is. Dash is a girl taken in as collateral from her gambling-addicted Abusive Parents who worked her to the bone to get more money to gamble away, Rita grew up in a shady mob environment with no one to trust, and they're both betrayed by Wilbur Whateley and abandoned to fend for themselves in the Counterside. Rita is eventually forced to become Ministra in a vain attempt to save Dash, only for the Demonic Possession in her to take over, and she painfully "reassembles" Dash into the tortured Spira. Mina defeating them in Episode 1 was more of a Mercy Kill than anything at that point. Horizon herself earns a lot of woobie points with the implication that she suffers some degree of Survivor Guilt with the knowledge that her only two employees are not coming back, under the belief that she failed to protect them. Dash may have been taken in by ruthless loan sharks, but damn if their storyline didn't start the waterworks for them.
Sky Layfield's Counter abilities make her imperceptible to almost everyone and the few that do notice her forget about her shortly after, and she has no control over the effect, making her very lonely and depressed as a result until she met Kaci. Her Side Story "Academy Field Day" does give her a happy ending, but even so it's not hard to find her huggable because of what she went through.
, the main theme. Also got remixed