YMMV / Folklore

• Awesome Music: The entire soundtrack was performed and recorded live, composed by four well-known composers (including Kenji Kawai and Shinji Hosoe), from the mysterious intro to the absolutely epic orchestral ending. This game would not have its atmosphere and drama without tracks like these.
• Cult Classic: Although now an obscure entry of its console's early library, Folklore stands out with its nightmarish atmosphere and surprisingly emotional story mixed with its (though Waggle-infested) Action-Mons gameplay. When one brings up a discussion on hidden gems of the seventh generation, Folklore does occasionally crop up- and for good reason.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Hawks in Warcadia, with their tendency to start a charge attack offscreen and plowing into you before you know one's in motion, knocking you down.
  • Nearly everything in the Hellrealm is this or a Demonic Spider, appropriately enough, but the batlike folks that dwell there are by far the most annoying thing in the game to fight. It doesn't help that two particularly hard bosses summon them two at a time to help fight you.
• Goddamned Boss: Brigantia is not a powerful boss; in fact, compared to most of the unforgiving boss fights the game throws at you, it's remarkably weak. What Brigantia's battle is, however, is INCREDIBLY time-consuming. The boss will only stand and fight for a little while as you slice off one segment of its body after another; most of the fight will be spent waiting for the damn thing to pop out of a hole and hang around long enough to get a few hits in instead of hiding out of reach and throwing one wave of bombs after another at you or simply swimming right from one hole to the next. To make matters worse, you can only target his head, making it that much more difficult to hit the vulnerable parts at the end of his body.
• Heartwarming Moments: The ending. While Keats seems to just sort of dismiss Ellen to focus on his "work", you can see in her eyes and smile that she knows how much both love each other. Also, the fact that Keats so easily accepts being a Halflife, just because he knows Ellen created him because she NEEDED him.
• Iron Woobie: Ellen, for all the emotional trauma she goes through across the course of the game feels no anger at her circumstances, and is never kept down for long.
• Moment of Awesome: Keats gets quite a few, but Ellen can be surprisingly strong when she needs to be.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • There's a variety of very creepy scenes and places in this game, but the standout example is Ellen's Mysterious Protector Scarecrow absorbing all the fear in the world and transforming into a horrible Eldritch Abomination. Honorable mention goes to Fleshrum, a Folklore that appears as a room made out of human flesh and body parts.
  • The description of some folks are often very unsettling.
• Tear Jerker: Many, this is a very emotional game.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Suzette may appear somewhat androgynous, which (some speculate) is why her crazy mother occasionally confused her for her older brother. However, within the story itself, it's a bit more likely that this was more a result of Sanity Slippage.
• Waggle: Due to being a relatively early PS3 title, it made ample use of the relatively new Sixaxis motion control built into the gamepad, requiring the player to tilt it side to side, wiggle it, and jerk it toward them to simulate trapping folk with a lasso.