YMMV / Goddess of Victory: NIKKE

• Alternative Character Interpretation: The commander of the Melee Squad is not treated in a favorable light, but a slightly more charitable interpretation of his actions posits that while he may not have cared all that much for the Melee Squad, it is likely that he was freakishly stressed out from being a normal human suddenly thrust into a war far beyond his pay grade and thus wanted the quickest and easiest way out, hence why he told Rose the truth about the United Forces of Humanity's intentions under the expectation that Rose could bail both him and herself out as quickly as possible.
• And You Thought It Would Fail: During its pre-release advertising cycle, the game was effectively the laughingstock of the larger gacha game community, with its extremely unabashed Sex Sells advertising and obvious Fanservice pandering that caused many people to write it off as a shallow "waifu" game cash grab. Its launch period was also very rough, with several elements clearly unpolished and riddled with glaring flaws and bugs. However, players were quick to note that developer response to negative feedback was rapid, and once many of the kinks and major issues had been ironed out, fans discovered that beyond the rampant Fanservice was a legitimately great game with good gameplay, extremely solid writing and characterization, and incredible music. Although the game remains niche outside of Asia, it has effectively taken off in its home regions and especially Japan, with the game managing to consistently go toe-to-to with some of the hottest gacha games on the market in terms of raw revenue alone within its first year, such as Honkai: Star Rail, Blue Archive, and Fate/Grand Order, and triggering a deluge of fan art and community content.
• Anti-Climax Boss: Hilariously, Indivilia is just as much of a pushover in gameplay as she is in the story. She largely does nothing interesting aside from a tail laser that has the potential to wipe out your team, and her threat level can be neutered by just destroying her breakable parts, which neutralizes virtually all of her dangerous attacks until she regenerates them. She has a second phase, but she activates it at such a low HP threshold that most players only hear the first 5 seconds of her phase 2 theme before she explodes and dies.
• Awesome Art: Fanservice aside, the game's animation quality is incredible, with virtually every element of a character's artwork painstakingly brought to life and fully animated.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Burningum. He is initially introduced into the story as a minor temporary antagonist, but his attitude and actions throughout Chapters 13 and 14 portray him as an Ark government sleazebag who is in it to climb the social ladder and indirectly result in one of the most heartbreaking scenes in the game's story, making him an easy target for the audience's ire. Some players, however, prefer to look at Burningum with a slightly less harsh stance, arguing that removed from the context of our viewpoint as Marian's Commander, he's mostly doing what he feels is right for the fight for the surface and that the sacrifice of a Nikke that could not only provide incredibly valuable technological progress for doing so but also may be a potential threat is a reasonable sacrifice to make. It's also pointed out that outside of Chapters 13/14, he's not an especially bad guy and that he's personally responsible for keeping the Admire afloat (both figuratively and literally). SEA You Again had fan opinions of Burningham improve after he allows the Admire to sortie to bail Counters and the Commander out of trouble when a Tyrant-class Kraken Rapture imprisons him on the island.
  • Dorothy. Much like Burningum, she's introduced in an antagonistic position (if seeming friendly and helpful initially), if only indirectly, lying to the protagonist team and trying to get them killed against a Rapture Heretic to protect her own team and settlement, with her plan only failing because her accompanying team and commander disagree and vote to reinforce the protagonists early and fight together. However, she was later given quite the heartbreaking backstory and Freudian Excuse in the OVER ZONE event, showing how she became like she is in the present and just how much trauma and suffering she's had to endure, making it easy to sympathise with her. Some players do indeed sympathise, hoping to help Heal the Cutie later in the story and get her to start moving on so she can live a healthier life. Other players still hate her for putting the protagonists at risk when they've done nothing to her in turn, arguing that her backstory explains her behaviour but doesn't justify how far she takes it. A third group goes full-on Rooting for the Empire, hoping Dorothy succeeds in her quest for revenge against The Ark and humanity, arguing that the modern-day Ark is still a crappy shithole full of Apathetic Citizens and many an Ungrateful Bastard who treat Nikkes like shit while Dorothy's Eden is far more egalitarian, wanting the protagonists to defect to it instead. Recently, Chapters 25 and 26 gave given momentum to the second group by showing off some more of Dorothy's nastier and more selfish side, having her constantly talking down to Neon and especially fan-favourite Anis and trying to convince Red Hood, temporarily returned in Rapi's body, to start Putting the Band Back Together and relive the old glory days despite her old squadmate telling her to stop living in the past, culminating in her attempting to destroy the injector that will turn Red Hood back into Rapi against Red's own wishes because she wants her squadmate back and doesn't care that Rapi has to die to make that happen. The fact that she also blows off Red Hood's suggestion to get what she wants in favour of continuing her revenge plans also doesn't make her look too sympathetic.
  • Oswald. Introduced in the OVER ZONE event, he had the honour of being Goddess Squad's Voice with an Internet Connection through the second half, offering support, guidance and even trying to guide them through cooking a Splendamin-based meal....before turning around and telling them that The Ark wasn't going to be letting them in after all, making him quite the easy figure to hate as the 'face' of The Ark and humanity's treachery and ungrateful attitude towards their saviours. However, he finally appeared in the flesh the RED ASH event's second half in a far nicer capacity, offering a hitchhiking Red Hood a ride to her destination, chatting amiably and even offering a salute and earnest thank you for Goddess Squad's efforts during the invasion, revealing himself to be quite the fanboy of the team. Some fans are still angry at him for stringing the team along and shutting them out, arguing that he should've tried to help them especially as a fan of theirs. Others are more sympathetic to him, arguing that Oswald is in a very tough situation and cannot meaningfully do anything to affect Goddess Squad's fate as just one man, no matter how he feels about them. A third group argues that a Perspective Flip of OVER ZONE is needed, showing the events from Oswald's perspective instead of Dorothy and Goddess Squad's to get a true idea of just what Oswald's situation was like on the other side, before they can make a judgement on his character.
  • The Commander has started to verge into this territory for some players. While many generally like his virtuous personality and loyalty to Nikkes, some players have noticed characterization inconsistencies with some events, with some players disliking how much of an Extreme Doormat he can be on every other occasion or his rather non-committal stance on "going the distance" with some of the girls despite the recipients being clearly open to the idea. There are also those who aren't too impressed with how he handled the aftermath of being shot and left for dead by Exotic, who bragged about some of their plan to betray The Ark in front of him. Which is to say, he told absolutely no one aside from Syuen (though to be completely fair, she IS Exotic's boss AND the one who holds their Explosive Leash) who predictably blows him off, allowing the traitorous team to continue operating and planning, eventually leading up the Rapture invasion of The Ark in Chapter 22 thanks to Exotic's sabotaged bomb. Critics have pointed out that he could've easily gone to Andersen, Ingrid or both, since they're both his backers now and have stakes, personal and professional, in the events at play. Andersen is obligated to investigate a potential terrorist threat as a Deputy Commander-In-Chief while Ingrid, after Syuen tried sabotaging the Heretic Fragment expedition in Chapter 11, would likely jump at the chance to pay Syuen back by exposing one of her Nikke teams as renegade using her own.
  • As of NEVERLAND, Belorta is either a sympathetic character or insufferably annoying depending on who you ask. On one hand, her main character trait is playing pranks, several of which are not so harmless and occasionally put herself or others in danger, not exactly helped by the fact that mentally she is still functionally a child and thus does not really understand boundaries. On the other hand, the fact that she died young and protected Mica to her very last breath as a human means that she has genuine justification for acting like a child, and despite her flaws she loves Mica dearly and treats her and everyone around her like family even if she has a weird way of expressing herself. The main conflict of the event being directly tied to her muddles matters significantly, as depending on the fan it is either her fault for insisting on doing something clearly dangerous or Ludmilla's fault for giving in to her guilt over her family's indirect and unwitting role in Belorta and Mica's deaths.
  • Yuni was initially popular, but her actions in Chapters 23/24 caused her fanbase to splinter. The main issue is whether her actions to comply herself with Crow's actions is justified or not. Defenders of her justify it as a rage against her superior Syuen's actions, which left her lover Mihara amnesiac and distant towards Yuni, causing her to side with Crow when it becomes clear that the old Mihara would not come back. Opponents of her, however, say the countless lives lost by her complicity in the terrorist attacks caused by Crow does not justify the means, especially when it almost resulted in the destruction of one of the last bastions of humanity, and pointed out that while Syuen rightfully needed to punished for her actions, this was going way too far.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: You'd probably hear more people talking about NIKKE as "that ass game" rather than its actual name. It doesn't help that the advertising absolutely knows it and leans as hard into Sex Sells as much as it possibly can. However, many players will attest that beyond the jiggles there is a legitimately fun experience with an enthralling setting, characters, and music.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Due to the nature of the story being almost entirely a cooking contest, almost all of the combat scenes in Re:Cipe With You is this.
• Breather Boss: Special Individual Interception bosses are either this or That One Boss:
  • Special Interception Chatterbox is significantly easier than the other bosses in the Special Interception rotation. He is extremely predictable, has a fairly low rate of attack and mainly dishes out single hit attacks that punch really hard. Centi can wall his attacks with relative ease because of barrier mechanics, allowing a decently raised team to wear him down to death without an overt fear of being one-shot. The only threatening attacks in his arsenal are his missiles, which are kinetic projectiles and can be shot down or blocked by cover, and his burning slam, which only happens if you end up breaking his head/core.
  • Special Interception Blacksmith as well. His pattern is to shoot at one target, launch some slow projectiles that can be destroyed easily and has two big weakspots that can be hurt for big damage. The only thing to look out for are tendrils that come out after its HP goes down a certain percent but are easily destroyable circles.
  • Special Interception Modernia, while a bit of a step up in difficulty compared to the previous two, is still leagues easier than Grave Digger and Alteisen Mk. VI. Her most dangerous attack (and opening move), a laser that stuns every Nikke hit for several seconds, is only used while her Core part is present. Her other attacks consist of basic shots that do manageable damage, and bombs that hang in the air before darting towards their targets, giving plenty of time to destroy them. As long as her two wings aren't destroyed after bursting down her Core, she will alternate between these two attacks for the entire fight.
• Broken Base:
  • The quality of the six month anniversary livestream was polarizing to say the least. Opinions vary on if the sent-in meme videos, animations, and Vtuber cameos were charming, an interesting attempt to pander to larger crowds, or complete garbage that feel more thrown in to make the game seem bigger than it actually was. Unsurprisingly, content in the 1st year anniversary was more focused on the game itself, and was more positively received.
  • Crow getting away consequence-free with various situations in which a character had a chance to put a bullet through her head throughout the events of the Rapture invasion of the Ark is debated upon to this day. The main contentious point is the confrontation between Crow and Diesel on the AZX, in which Diesel ultimately refuses to shoot Crow despite the latter killing Diesel's brother; detractors dislike the fact that it feels like a plot contrivance for Crow to survive unnecessarily long despite multiple characters having valid reasons for killing her prematurely and making the situation needlessly worse by letting her live, while defenders point out that many of these characters have moral standards when it comes to shooting a perceived equal even if they have every right to do so, and the fact that Crow is allowing herself to be put in these situations to force characters to break their moral code for revenge falls exactly in line with her motivations to spiritually break people.
    • Adding to the above is what Crow's ultimate fate should be. While the fandom universally accepts that she needs to be punished, debates range heavily on whether she should be executed or given a different treatment. Part of this stems from how little of her backstory is given, making it unclear why she is such a manipulative bitch and if there is anything redeemable about her.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • Vesti's fourth Attraction Episode has her finally being able to stand up to her old school bullies. While Nikkes are typically forbidden from harming humans knowingly, one of them makes the mistake of punching the Commander when he stands up for Vesti and demands they apologise for bullying her, allowing her to classify them as a threat to her superior's safety and beat them down in the guise of protecting the Commander.
  • Chatterbox has been a constant threat in the main storyline, pulling stunts like abducting the Commander, trying to trap and kill Counters during the facility raid, luring Nikkes to their doom to reproduce "Material H" and cruelly ripping away Counters' chance to reunite with Marian by infecting her brain directly with The Corruption, requiring her to be subject to complete Death of Personality via Mind-Reformat Death to cure her. This makes his Villainous Breakdown and destruction at the end of Chapter 13 VERY satisfying indeed, even if it doesn't stick.
  • Syuen, the Token Evil Teammate of the CEOs finally sees karma crashing down on her in Chapter 24 when she's first hospitalized thanks to the events of said chapter, and then told by Enikk herself that she's finally being punished for her many sins committed as CEO. She's punished by not only losing her job and status as a CEO, but also forced to become a Nikke, and assigned to the Counters squad, who've been her most favoured victims, afterwards. The icing on the cake is that her Engineered Heroics plan back in Chapter 18 only ensured that the memory wipe part of the process is NOT done on her, which meant she'll fully retain knowledge of why she's now a Nikke.
  • For players who don't like Dorothy, there's Red Hood's "Reason You Suck" Speech in Chapter 26, calling out how utterly naïve she is for believing she can just go back to the past by Putting the Band Back Together, how thoroughly she's strayed from her team's ideals and that there's a far easier way to get what she wants: drop her grudge against The Ark and move on to fight for humanity again like her teammates have.
  • The Second Affection mini-event gives us Marian. In the tutorial, she was killed by a Rapture called the Black Smith soon after being introduced to the player as an affectionate, caring, protective and loveable Decoy Protagonist. After being reborn as Modernia as shown in Chapter 6 and subsequently saved by the Counters in 13, she is handed into Crown's care to protect her from Central Government's curiosity. At some point, she spots a group of Raptures and goes out alone to protect Crown's castle; during the battle, among others, she single-handedly kills a Black Smith (even though it's not the same individual Rapture), all under player control!
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Sentries. They are tall tower-like Raptures that can't deal damage, but periodically shoot a chain at an ally that Stuns them for an aggravatingly long time. They also have a ton of health, making them annoying to take down and forcing you to focus on getting rid of them if you don't want to play with one less party member for 10 seconds. A particularly annoying That One Level EX Stage is a Defense Battle where the gimmick is that the game constantly spawns Sentries.
  • Driver Raptures are similar to Sentries in that they target one of your Nikkes and have a ton of health, but instead of stunning, they charge up a laser beam that is usually a One-Hit Kill, especially at higher combat power deficit values.
  • Orchestrions are Raptures armed with multiple-launch rocket systems. They are often numerous and have annoyingly large health pools, due to which, if they aren't taken care of in due time, they fire off so many missiles that the moment your Nikkes peek out of cover, they begin taking impermissible amounts of damage. Missiles can, theoretically, be "iframed"^note an advanced tactic making use of Nikke's projectile mechanic. Nikkes have two states: behind cover or firing; a projectile, once fired, is set to target the Nikke it's aimed at in either one of the two states; if a Nikke is being hit while in a state different from the one that was targeted, the damage to the Nikke will be completely negated. A projectile fired at a Nikke when she was behind cover will not harm her if it hits her while she's firing and vice versa. by timing the command for all Nikkes to hide behind cover intermittently, but it requires a lot of focus and badly dilutes their damage output.
  • Action Bomb Raptures are infrequent, but extremely frustrating when they appear. Their only attack is jumping at you and exploding, which kills them but also does massive damage, potentially enough to One-Hit Kill your characters or your cover. They're not the most tanky enemies out there but they tend to swarm in numbers such that you will need to focus your attention on them lest they go kersplat and knock your team over like bowling pins. Chapter 29 frustratingly adds a new variety that boasts optical camouflage, making it so that your Nikkes will not aim at them with Auto-Battle unless Crown is on your team.
  • Bronchus Raptures "release nerve gas", which is in-universe speak for "Area of Effect Armor-Piercing Attack". They are also huge damage sponges, making them priority #1 lest they chip away at your team until your girls keel over.
  • Chapter 22 onward introduces a small capsule-type Rapture that continuously inflicts the Silenced status to your entire party while it's active, which prevents allies from activating their Burst Skill and cannot be dispelled by debuff removal abilities. They are rather small so picking them out of a crowd can be challenging when they're actively impeding you and their threat level can shoot up dramatically when paired with other Raptures that cannot easily be beaten without your Burst.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: While the gameplay has its fans, the general consensus is that the gameplay is passable for a gacha game and isn't especially notable or difficult beyond certain endgame contents. Many players tout that the real draw is the story and characters, which tend to receive far more attention.
  • Can be taken more literally in that unless the player rerolls for an extremely powerful DPS unit at the beginning of the game, spends money or is lucky with their free pulls, the campaign progression will be so slow past a certain point that the player will be tempted to spoil themselves by watching story cutscenes elsewhere.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Dependent on who you have in your squad, any playable Nikke qualifies but if the poll held for the free costume during the half-year anniversasry is an indication: Modernia and Scarlet both have a million votes each while third place (Alice) didn't even reach half a million!
    • The bunnies and Viper get a lot of attention for being in a wholesome threesome with the Commander and Viper being a toxic, sexy and bossy seductress.
  • While he lacks the screen time that his equals have, Mustang is popular for being a caring CEO to his creations and for his positive energy with his hammy quotes.
  • Despite having relatively little plot relevance and almost never appearing in any of the advertising, Alice has rapidly climbed up the ranks to become one of the game's most popular characters, partly due to her super adorable (if not slightly delusional) personality and very attractive Sensual Spandex.
  • Helm, the game's first post-launch character, was met with positive attention on release, but she really got the attention of fan artists after a blabla chat where she discovers a microbikini and wears it (over her clothes, mind, not that the artists seem to care). She was also one of the first recipients of a skin in the form of her Chandelier outfit for the New Years 2023 event, which is still considered one of the best-designed skins in the game for how incredibly sexy it is.
  • Anachiro has been extraordinarily popular ever since her debut in Red Ash thanks to her extremely sexy design, unique powers, and canonical strength giving the Goddess Squad a run for their money. Fan art of her is a lot more common than usual for a non-playable character, and the main story subtly implies that she may not be truly dead, giving some players hope that she may get a playable version in the future as Cinderella. Needless to say, there was little surprise when she won the poll for Favorite NPC during the 1.5th Anniversary event.
  • Timi, the lion who accompanies Leona, became wildly popular as the Commander's newest friend as a result of his mutual assistance in Leona's bond story, where he repays the Commander for helping him 'become an adult' with another female lion by persuading Leona to sate her own desires by bedding the Commander. For a few days after Leona debuted as a playable character, Timi became a popular topic on the r/Nikkemobile subreddit.
  • Elegg has certainly made quite the impact on the playerbase, if the amount of fanart she had gotten before her release is any indication. Her slightly chubby appearance has granted her a lot of lewd attention, it seems.
• Epileptic Trees:
  • Much of the fanbase is aware that Andersen appears to know a lot more than he lets on. Aside from guarding secrets that even the Commander does not know of, he is unusually interested in the Pilgrims for a simple Ark government official and carries the same Rh X blood type as the Commander, which only he, the Commander, and the 1st Commander are known to have. Considering it hasn't been that long since the 1st Invasion such that humans from the era are still alive, it's theorized that Andersen may be related to the 1st Commander in some way, or may actually be the 1st Commander himself. The Red Ash event reveals that the 1st Commander not only resembles a younger Andersen but even has the exact same voice as him, further cementing the theory.
  • In Chapter 24, Poli mentions that even after contact with the Goddess Squad was lost, word of their achievements continued to spread for years due to the efforts of a single person, up until their death. Although this has caused the specific details of their exploits to become lost to time, the praise and adoration of the Goddess Squad's efforts for humanity were instilled within Ark society and have been memorialized in the form of Goddess statues scattered throughout the Ark. Certain context clues from the climax of OVER ZONE and revelations within Red Ash have lead some people to believe that the person responsible for this is Oswald, the man who ended up betraying the Goddess Squad at the end of the 1st Invasion.
  • It is strongly believed that the human girl Freesia that appears in Red Ash is the human pre-Nikke form of Rapi, considering that she has a unique sprite and name despite being an otherwise unimportant NPC and forms a connection with her hero Red Hood. A less popular alternative theory is that she is the human pre-Nikke form of Alice, given her pink rabbit-themed outfit, although fans of the former theory have pushed back against this version on the basis that the timeline does not make sense if that were the case. This was eventually Jossed in a Famitsu interview and epilogue of the Red Ash Event, where Hyungsuk Yoo explains that she is neither and will be expanded upon in future scenarios.
  • In Chapter 28, the Surface Exploration team encounters a masked woman carrying around a big coffin. While her identity has not been revealed as of the end of the chapter, some theories have made their rounds, one of them being that this woman is a resurrected Pinne, due to similarities in their hairstyles, as well as the masked woman's voice sounding like Emi Lo, who voices Pinne in the English dub.
• Fandom Rivalry: One with Path to Nowhere, due to both being gacha games that released at approximately the same time. Fans of Path to Nowhere argue that the better monetisation schemes and less buggy release makes it the superior game. Meanwhile, NIKKE fans who enjoy the game are tired of hearing Path to Nowhere fans praising their game, even on threads that do not warrant it. Expect any threads talking about revenue involving Path to Nowhere to be filled with comments bringing up NIKKE's as an argument, and for any threads discussing NIKKE's bugs to be loaded with comparisons to the current state of Path to Nowhere.
• Fan Nickname:
  • The game itself has been called "Call of Booty" by fans due to it being a fanservice-y shooter.
  • Fans have called Noise "Level 3 Petra" from Selen Tatsuki's stream of the game when she called her a leveled up Petra Gurin after she had gotten a new model which not only made her taller and have longer hair, but also have a bust increase.
  • Pepper working in the medical field has caused fans to call her "Dr. Pepper".
  • Laplace is sometimes called "anime Homelander". She is a self-proclaimed hero with a superiority complex, always believes she is in the right and displays mildly sociopathic behavior towards others on multiple occasions (although Laplace is genuinely heroic).
  • Drake has been called "DMT" due to the similarities with Towa Tokoyami: both girls declare they're evil (Drake is a supervillain, Towa is a devil) but are utterly the nicest girls around.
  • Sometimes, players called Privaty Hatsune Miku due to her identically similar twintail hairstyle, or go further due to her tsundere nature and call her "Hatsundere Miku".
  • "Cummander" or "Coommander" is a fairly popular nickname for either the Commander or the playerbase just for the heavily sexualized nature of the game and character designs. Another nickname used by fans, particularly in image boards, is "Shikikum" (derived from shikikan, the Japanese word for commander).
    • "Cuckmander" for Snowfield Oasis, referring to the Commander's extremely unusual aversion to romance or sex throughout the course of the story.
  • The Alteisen Mk. VI is often credited as the damn train for its high difficulty and likely one of the major boss fight that new players had encountered early in Chapter 2 and in Interception. The boss is also commonly named as Thomas Mk. VI.
  • Mast is called Houshou Marine with both of them being busty redhead women who share similar designs and are also associated with ships. The difference is Mast is part of the Ark military while Marine is a pirate/gamer.
  • Snow White: Innocent Days almost immediately picked up the nickname "Smol White" from English-speaking fans.
  • Scarlet's past version has been called Jetstream Scarlet due to having the same kind of look and Blood Knight attitude Sam has, as well as both being katana users. An announcement featuring a stylized picture of her old look resulted in the inevitable meme video being made.
  • Dorothy's Costume Gacha skin, "Nostalgia", is alternately referred to as "PTSD" since her Burst animation has several Freeze-Frame Bonus references to the events of OVER ZONE, all of which are tragic or horrifying.
  • Red Hood gained several in quick succession: first is "Yoko" due to her many similarities to the TTGL character. She also gained the nickname "MidHood" due to her damage output being underwhelming compared to other limited Pilgrim characters. One emergency patch later, this became "GodHood" as the patch skyrocketed her damage to make her damage potential even greater than Alice.
  • Ludmilla's Hot Spring variant is often called "Lewdmilla" due to her outfit being Hotter and Sexier than her first one.
  • Elegg has gotten "El Egg" as a play on her name in incorrect Spanish.^note Egg in Spanish is "El Huevo."
  • Nihilister has been called "Zentreya" due to her dragon motif and for being a Nikke, like how Zen is a cyborg.
  • Fate fans, in particular Fate/Grand Order, jokingly call Crown's Naked King power "AUO CAST OFF" due to her Kingliness and immense Golden power in that state making her resemble Gilgamesh, who has a similar power.
• Fanon: It's generally assumed that Crow's bond episodes and Outpost Events are non-canon, due to just how extremely different Crow is depicted in them compared to her canon self. Alternatively, some believe that [[spoiler:they take place after whatever she's subjected to following Chapter 24, which is generally presumed to include a mind-wipe. A third group posits that they happen between her appearance in "D Outsiders" and the main story, and are deliberate efforts to get the Commander to trust her..
• Game-Breaker:
  • Someone had clearly bungled the math on the first Coordinated Operation event exchange, as it offers a 10,000 Credit prize for 10 Broken Cores. For a perspective on how insanely cheap that is, a single run of Coordinated Operation awards 1200 Broken Cores at maximum rewards, which is easily doable given decent party comp. You can thus earn a maximum of 1,200,000 Credits per run, enough to completely buy out most of the Tactics Academy and still have funds left over. Unsurprisingly, this was fixed in the second Coordinated Operation event, which changed the Credits reward to a hard cap of 1,000,000 buyable Credits.
  • Scarlet is easily one of, if not the best offensive unit in the game, period; Her kit is perfectly designed for her to rapidly spit out monstrous amounts of damage, which only improves over the course of battle as she siphons her own HP to gain stat bonuses. Her only downsides are her low ammo capacity and long reload time, but these can be patched up with Overload gear, Harmony Cubes and stat-buffing teammates.
    • Her Black Shadow variant is also just as good; with the right build and teammates (i.e. the bunny twins), she gains Bottomless Magazines and can spam her sword strikes with no need to reload, which gives her more opportunity to unleash her powerful skills. Even better is that she doesn't need as much investment when it comes to overload gear.
  • Alice is infamous for being fairly mediocre at acquisition and being a massive resource hog, requiring incredibly heavy Skill investment and a full set of Overload gear with half-decent rolls to be good. If the player is both willing and lucky enough to get to that point, however, Alice is one of the most overpowered units in the entire game next to fellow resource hog Scarlet. She gets passive Pierce just for being at 80% HP or higher, and her Burst causes her DPS to become utterly monstrous, giving her an ATK and Hit Rate buff from her Skill 1 while causing her shots to charge to 350% Power near-instantly. Combine this with a bunch of Max Ammunition Capacity upgrades from her Overload gear and Reload Speed boosts from Admi and Harmony Cube and get ready to watch health bars get absolutely melted by the sheer force of her firepower.
  • Snow White is an even bigger resource hog than the above two; not only does she need good gear and Skill Levels, but she also needs a very particular team comp to work as outside of her Burst her kit is generally mediocre. If you do manage to meet all of those requirements, Snow White has the single most powerful Burst in the entire game, being the only character who can One-Hit Kill Special Interception bosses.
  • The Mighty Tools duo are essential, able to be splashed into virtually any team comp and fill very potent niches:
    • Liter, whose most potent ability is to reduce the Burst Skill cooldown of the entire party upon entering full burst, which at max power tops out at 3 seconds per activation. This alone would be enough for her to be considered "best in slot" for just about any team. The fact that she boasts a myriad of other useful skills on top of that — such as the ability to provide various party-wide buffs every time her Burst Skill is triggered (including a massive temporary buff to attack power), and the rare ability to periodically repair damaged cover — truly establishes her as one of the best, if not the best Burst I Nikke in the game.
    • Centi is the game's best defensive Burst II Nikke and one of the best Burst IIs overall. Her weapon is an individually-loaded rocket launcher, giving her an excellent Burst Gauge charge rate. Having a 20s Burst cooldown is a fantastic boon, and she uniquely has the ability to generate a temporary shield in front of the entire party with her Skill 2, while her Skill 1 gradually reduces the cooldown of Skill 2 over time — Shields in NIKKE have the unique property of always absorbing at least one hit of damage regardless of how much HP it has, which means Centi is able to drastically neuter the threat levels of bosses that focus on dealing massive single hits, such as Chatterbox.
  • Squad 777 from Tetra are absolutely powerhouses, even on their own they have great skills that assist in their specialties, to wit:
    • Blanc's Burst not only heals the party, but grants who ever has the lowest health Indomitability, which means they won't die for 10 seconds. So timed right, Blanc can prevent an ally from getting one-shot (outside of certain instant-kill mechanics), keeping them in the fight longer. But what it also does is that it causes all enemies to take more damage for the indomitability's duration, making it both a defensive and support burst rolled into one. Her first skill works similar to Centi's skill 2 in giving the party a shield, but it's not based on time, but rather shots fired, and Blanc uses an assault rifle with a reload speed of one second, so with enough fire rate she can keep that shield up almost perpetually. Lastly is her skill 2, which heals the party after Full Burst ends, which is great on it's own... but also has the property if Noir is on the field, that being reducing the cooldown for Blanc's Burst by 40 seconds, allowing the White Rabbit to keep everyone alive while also constantly making the enemy take more damage. And speaking of Noir...
    • Noir is an amazing offensive unit that pairs well in shotgun teams, as having both an individual reloaded shotgun and a reload speed of 0.7 seconds, granting her great Burst Gauge charge rate, but that's only the start. Her Burst grants her fellow shotgunners increased hit rate, which groups their shots better so they hit even farther away targets, and increases damage to interruption targets, meaning they can stop hard hitting attacks faster, and with Blanc in the squad, a second hit rate and interrupt damage buff is applied to the whole squad. Compared to that, her first skill isn't much, but still powerful in giving her a massive attack buff so long as she's above 70% health, but her skill 2 both increases the ammo capacity of the whole squad by 5 (great for every shotgun user but Pepper and Summer Anis), but also partially reloads them too when Full Burst starts, extending the offence of the squad for just a little longer before they have to reload. So with or without her sister, Noir is just an amazing damage support for shotgun teams.
  • Modernia was handcrafted to be the single most powerful mobbing character in the game. She wields a Machine Gun with terrifying accuracy, has Skills that power up her already absurd damage and hit rate, and her Burst is nothing short of appalling: a 5 second extension to Full Burst, giving the party more time to unload, and Modernia herself gets infinite ammo and transforms the crosshair into an Area of Effect that practically deletes anything that comes within range of her.
  • Anis: Sparkling Summer is an absolutely incredible support unit. Not only does her Skill 2 give herself fantastic damage output for a Support class and can be consistently spammed under the effects of her Burst when either paired with Privaty or reaching a sufficient Burst Level, her Skill 1 improves the viability of not only herself but also a slew of other powerful characters like Scarlet and Isabel by bolstering their ATK stat by a whopping 55.31% of her own ATK stat and boosting their reload speed by up to 45.28%, making her a top-class damage dealer and pushing Scarlet's output in particular to even more insane levels.
  • Jackal is more or less essential for PvP comps. If you don't have her and come up against someone who does, you've probably lost the fight before it even begins. This is due to a combination of her skills and absolutely massive Burst generation. A team with Jackal in it will almost always hit Burst first and that alone is often enough to decide the fight. Her S1 kicks in when she takes 10 hits and pretty much dooms the enemies highest HP Nikke to death by slapping them with both a damage taken multiplayer and a Attack stat nerf. Her S2 activates the second the fight starts and links the HP pools of herself and the two highest attack Nikkes on her team while also buffing their Defense and last 2 entire minutes. Her only lacking point is her Burst which gives a solid damage buff, but only to single target Burst 3s (more or less useless in PvP) and a moderately useful full team Defense Buff.
  • 2B is a Defender who is actually an Attacker unit in disguise. Her pivotal skill is her Skill 2, Cluster Bomb, which has a passive effect that gives her a persistent ATK boost that scales equal to 6.16% of her Max HP. This turns out to be the epitome of Boring, but Practical because HP bloat in NIKKE is incredibly high (the average endgame unit has at least 400k+ HP minimum) relative to ATK; combined with her natural Defender stats and her Skill 1 that passively gives her up to an additional 87.85% Max HP after 3 Full Bursts, 2B gains an absolutely absurd amount of free ATK and becomes a damage behemoth. Give her allies that ramp up Max HP even further like Noise and Mast and she goes next-level crazy, having DPS rivaling and even surpassing Pilgrims!
  • Dazzling Pearl duo, Tia and Naga, quickly became the meta pair for raids due to just how incredibly they play off each other. Tia's main gimmick is that her Skill 1 grants a unique ATK buff of up to 32.11% to the team and lowers the cooldown of her burst while her cover is repaired. Naga, meanwhile, compliments this with her Skill 1 repairing cover after twelve normal attacks, meaning that the uptime of Tia's Skill 1 is basically permanent. Naga's Skill 2 increases damage dealt against upwards to 40.07% after five normal attacks while also healing two allies with the lowest HP percentages. Tia's Skill 2 also helps with survivability by Taunting all enemies while recovering her cover and (during burst) some of her health lost. Their Bursts are things get utterly ridiculous: Tia's Burst grants her a powerful shield and a weaker shield to the team but also causes the burst to re-enter Burst 1, meaning that you can get another powerful buff, like Liter and Dorothey's Bursts, while greatly increasing survivability. Said shield also synergizes with Naga's Burst, which grants Pierce to Naga while increasing the team's ATK by up to 16.18%, but when granted a shield during the Burst, is also increases the team's ATK by up to 47.20%. All of these buffs that the pair grant let's the team shred raid bosses while greatly boosting survivability.
  • When Red Hood was first released, she was an acceptably strong unit, with great support effects, decent damage, and a unique Burst Skill that gives her unparalleled flexibility in team compositions. Then she got a Balance Buff that effectively doubled the damage on her Burst III, which ratcheted her up from "really good" to "disgustingly strong", becoming the absolute best damage dealer in the game. The kicker is that unlike other top tiers, she is insanely powerful right out of the box, with less reliance on Overload equipment compared to her peers.
  • Crown quickly became the "crown jewel" of the meta after her release as, despite being a Defender, she is also a incredibly potent Supporter in disguise. Her Skill 1 activates at Full Burst and increases the ATK of Nikkes that used their burst by up to 64.51% while increasing the DEF of those that didn't by up to 37.44%, but all Nikkes get a 44.35% boost to their reload speed, and this last for 15 seconds, meaning that it's downtime varies between little or none depending on team composition. Her Skill 2 gives her a unique buff called "Relax" that increases HP Potency, which increases healing that Crown gets from other units, after landing 43 hits and when she hits 20 stacks she heals herself, taunts all enemies, and gains Invulnerability for 5 seconds, which is a godsend for team sustain especially against bosses that summons adds. Her Burst increases the entire team's ATK by 36.24% while also granting a shield based off 10.45% of her Max HP and both of these buffs last for 15 seconds too and it stacks with her first Skill, meaning that the entire team will utterly shred the enemy while tanking some heavy damage thanks to the shield. She's so good that she managed to powercreep the aforementioned Squad 777 duo and rivals the Dazzling Pearl duo in the meta by herself.
• High-Tier Scrappy:
  • Due to a Good Bad Bug with her healing, Noise is a massive threat in Arena for the sole fact that she makes her team nigh-unkillable. Teams with Noise are able to heal off huge amounts of damage practically every second, and without the ability to stun her or somehow hit her faster than she can heal it's next to impossible to beat a team with her on it. This was fixed in a January 2023 patch, downgrading her into a merely decent heal support.
  • In the absence of pre-patch Noise, Emma and Diesel have taken her place as viable healers in Arena. Emma has a 5% chance of healing all party members for HP equal to a percentage to her max HP whenever she is attacked, while Diesel heals a percentage of her max HP whenever she is hit during Full Burst. This makes them powerful heal tanks and punishes unsuspecting players for running high DPS characters like Modernia while the rest of the team mows down their opponents.
  • Privaty is very powerful in Arena. Her Burst applies an Area of Effect stun effect that lasts 3 seconds, enough time for her team to wipe the floor with or otherwise cripple her opponents due to the Rocket-Tag Gameplay nature of PVP.
  • Above all else, Jackal is the undisputed queen of Arena. She has one of the fastest Burst Gauge generation rates in the game, making her virtually indispensable for getting your Burst before your opponent. Her Skill 2 also allows her to split up damage taken between herself and two allies with the highest ATK, granting her utterly bonkers synergy with certain allies such as healers to make them exponentially more potent.
  • Noah tends to get the short end of the stick in terms of general appeal. Her Troll tendencies can be a bit grating rather than humorous, and her use as a Defender rather than a DPS unit makes her difficult to build for anything other than PVP Arenas. But what really cements her in this status is the fact that, as of this writing, she's the only readily available Burst II Pilgrim, (the other being Nihilister whom you can only get after completing a special Liberation mission that's not only 50% longer than the normal ones, but also requires you to clear one of the starting Liberation units and reach Chapter 22.) meaning the chances of you getting an early Full Burst team of Pilgrims for Pilgrim Tower is entirely up to gacha RNG being merciful as not only does she come with the naturally low chance of being a Pilgrim, but she hasn't nor will likely ever get a rate-up banner on account of being a launch unit.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: The Chainsaw Man crossover characters only having Japanese voices regardless of the game's language setting was criticized by many fans for feeling out of place, especially given the warm reception of the anime adaptation's English Superlative Dubbing and that two of its voice actors, Suzie Yeung (Makima)^note who egregiously voices three Nikkes in the English dub, but not her own Chainsaw Man character, and Sarah Wiedenheft (Power), already voiced characters in NIKKE. This led many people to accuse the whole thing of being some sort of legal issue involving Crunchyroll, the distributors of the anime in Western territories. When the second crossover, NieR: Automata was added to the game, the characters were given proper English voices but not Korean ones. Furthermore, this has aged particularly poorly as the third crossover, Re:Zero gave the characters voices in all three languages, and, unlike NieR, is also based on an anime licensed by Crunchyroll outside of Asia.
• Jerkass Woobie: Dorothy in the modern day is a borderline evil Manipulative Bastard Anti-Hero who despises humans and wants revenge against the Ark, but considering she is possibly the single most tragic character in the entire game it's hard not to sympathize with her position. Forced to take up leadership of the Goddess Squad in the wake of the deaths of two of her closest friends, Dorothy was ill-equipped to keep the team from falling apart at the seams and was ready to give up. The only light in her life at the time was Pinne, a mass-produced Nikke who admired the Goddess Squad and became Dorothy's sole pillar of emotional support and her closest friend for whom she would become a better leader and person. That is, until Raptures took Pinne from her as well, forcing her to put her down by her own hand. The resulting mental breakdown critically damaged Dorothy's psyche, and when her attempt at suicide fails she begins to hallucinate Pinne as if she were still alive. This works until the completion of Operation: Ark Guardian, whereupon she and her allies realize that the humans they worked so hard to protect have locked them out of their final paradise and left them to die on the surface. The last illusion of Dorothy's life breaks, Pinne disappears after Dorothy finally accepts her death, and within the emptiness of her soul all that's left to fill it is despair, hatred, and fury at what was taken from her.
• Junk Rare: Abnormal Tier 9 equipment is considered the least useful equipment drop you can possibly get from Special Interception outside of being upgrade fodder as they are only usable on Crossover characters.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Players have admitted to switching to the JP voices solely because Mustang's JP VA is none other than DIO himself, who brings A LOT of ham to the role even beyond the other versions' VAs.
• Low-Tier Letdown: The Elysion faction is frequently held to be the weakest faction by a large degree, mostly due to the tendency to be SMGs or otherwise low and unimpactful skills, ironic considering they are military-based. For example of Elysion's less than stellar roster:
  • Poor Soline is considered the worst SSR in the game by a vast margin. On top of having an SMG, the weakest weapon class in the game, she has a bad kit that only functions situationally and gives rather poor boosts to her attack speed and Criticals, and her Burst is an extremely mediocre Burst III nuke that has to compete with much better nuke Bursts on much better characters. This isn't even getting into the fact that she had a Game-Breaking Bug at launch that caused her Burst to randomly target and instantly kill your own party members, making her even worse than the Rare-tier Nikkes because she threatens your team by simply existing.
    • Averted as of the current state of the game. Not only is her Burst III bug long since fixed, it does sizeable damage to singular and grouped targets, with Soline's overall offensive abilities having been buffed to make her a very potent DPS Nikke. Granted, placing her on a team that can keep her at max HP to utilize the huge boost to her damage output received from doing so is necessary to use her effectively.
  • Fighting for the spot of worst SSR is Eunhwa, also not held by the fact that in-game she's considered one of the best leaders and part of the most elite groups in Elysion. Her preferred weapon is a Sniper Rifle, which already is difficult to use due to the lower rate of fire not contributing much to Burst, meaning that her skills also come out less frequently. Her skills let her lower defense on the enemies, but are miniscule unless you give her full Skill upgrades, which could go on better characters.
  • Crow is another contender for worst SSR in the game due to how poor her kit is. She's a Defender that lowers the enemies attack when entering Full Burst but she lacks a Taunt skill to take advantage of said qualities. Her Burst damage is higher than her fellow Defenders but her offensive capabilities are held back by her weapon being a SMG. Overall, she's meant to be a Nikke that can deal a lot of damage while reducing damage the rest of the squad takes but she fails to excel in both areas and there's a plethora of units that can do a much better job in those areas.
  • While not quite as bad as other characters in this segment, Nihilister is an extremely underwhelming unit for the time it takes to get her. She is equipped with a sniper rifle, which already gives her pretty poor damage output, and unlike good sniper units she doesn't have a kit to make up for it, mostly getting a single-use Pierce and some mediocre bonus damage skills hampered by middling multipliers. Her Burst Skill is also equally as bad, having a barely-existent burst damage on top of a bad DoT effect and a pointless ammo cap increase. She seems to really only have been designed as slot filler for Pilgrim Tribe Tower, as she used to be the only Burst II Pilgrim in the game with a 20s cooldown until Crown was introduced, stripping her of the one niche she had.
  • While Pilgrims are designed to be SSRs among SSRs, this definitely cannot be said about Isabel, who's mostly agreed on to be the worst Pilgrim in the game, to the degree that some SRs are preferable to her. Her kit looks decent-ish on paper, with some self ATK/Crit rate/Crit damage buffs, an attack on five highest DEF enemies every 15 seconds (for comparison, a fellow DPS Brid attacks only one, if for slightly more damage and with 10 seconds of cooldown) and, if you stack Isabel's Marked Target skill, her Burst skill turns into an 800% ATK screen wipe that slaps whomever survives it with a massive 40% Damage Taken ↑ debuff ^notewhich, if you already have an ATK buffer, is better than a 40% ATK ↑ for allies since stacked ATK ↑ buffs are additive while ATK ↑, ATK Damage ↑ and Damage Taken ↑ are multiplicative between each other. However, not only is the Full Burst duration reduction controversial at best ^noteit allows faster burst skill rotations if you have enough skill cooldown reduction on your squad, but reduces the time window in which your squad can deal increased focused damage, but she is also crippled by being a shotgun user, which drastically limits her effective range and burst generation ability, her Skill 1 only applying the ATK buff on its third stack ^noteCrit Rate and Crit Damage are usually looked down upon due to the relatively small impact they make in the game's damage formula and, most damningly, said Skill 1 only stacking when Isabel's burst skill is used, due to which, Isabel being a Burst III unit with 40 seconds of cooldown, she will only reach her full potential 2 minutes into the battle, when most Story Stages are already over, and even boss battles only last for 3 minutes, which makes Isabel more or less a deadweight in most use cases.
  • Rosanna is a character who pretty much doesn't do anything. Her skill set is completely PVP focused, meaning she is functionally useless in all other content. As for PVP functionality, her kit revolves around dodging single-target attacks and disrupting opponents to rev up for her big Burst Skill. Unfortunately, any form of splash damage will remove her stealth buffs, rendering them almost completely useless when the entire PVP meta revolves around Rocket Launcher units, and as a Machine Gun unit her base Burst Gauge gain is relatively poor and doesn't synergieze well with PVP teams that bank on racing to get their Burst before their opponents.
  • Neon: Blue Ocean debuted as a very poor unit. To start, her skill II and burst both only deal addition damage against Fire elemental foes, rendering her dps pitiful against most enemies. Speaking of her burst skill, it causes her to change her weapon and dish out AOE attacks for seven seconds, but it also halves her damage output and is worse than what dedicated AOE attackers can do normally. This makes Neon a very selfish attacker that cannot deal that much damage and is severely overshadowed by much better options, even when fighting against fire bosses. To put this in perspective, her original SR version was able to out damage her Blue Ocean version. She was so undertuned that she received a buff less than a week after she was added, and the buff only pushed her to "barely usable in her niche" status.
• Memetic Loser:
  • As a faction, Elysion. Despite their purported in-universe reputation as the pillar of the Ark's military force and the strongest of the three manufacturers in terms of raw power, their gameplay representation falls a fair bit short of these claims. Not only do they have the fewest Nikkes out of any non-Pilgrim or Abnormal manufacturer in the game, they are also not very good, with none of their characters being considered particularly outstanding in any field except Privaty and some of them being egregiously bad, like Eunhwa.
  • Rapi is sometimes considered to be incredibly unlucky in that the target of her affections, the Commander, has already been seduced multiple times by other Nikkes (Yuni and Mihara, Maxwell, Ludmilla, Blanc and Noir, Emma, Rupee, Viper, Delta, Leona, Anis, D, Rosanna, Sakura, and potentially more have been confirmed to have had sex with the Commander). In particular, the line where she broadly implies being the Commander's wife to warn away Liveryn after she expresses interest in the Commander in-story during the Campaign was released at the same time that Killer Wife D was made playable (and therefore stole the position of being Commander's wife in that statement, unbeknownst to Rapi until D's Bond Story). This often contributes to her fan portrayal as being clingy to the Commander and jealous of the other Nikkes, often to unhinged levels.
  • As a result of multiple, persistant failures in her progression through the various stories in the main campaign and sidestories (from jobbing to Matis and Absolute, and getting flung away like a rag doll by Red Hood and Rapi, to getting repeatedly beat like a drum by Crown and trampled by Trombe, before finally being put down by a non-combat Nikke using a weapon fashioned from her own tail), Indivilia has become the biggest laughingstock of the Heretics in the fan community.
• Memetic Molester:
  • Maxwell of Matis Squad, due to several of her Advice conversations with the Commander, with one of them ending with her cutting off her musing by inviting him over to her place later, and especially the ending of her Affection Story (where she decides to experiment more closely with the Commander's ability to power up his Nikkes via growing closer with them, even though the Commander doesn't give consent), is generally agreed to be one of the Nikkes that actively manhandles the Commander to have their way with him by the fandom.
  • Rapunzel, thanks to her Extreme Libido and active fantasies over what she'd like to do to the Commander in one of her Affection Story episodes, also gets characterised as one of the more 'forward' Nikkes in fanon, despite her being very restrained and respecting of the Commander's boundaries in the game proper.
  • Isabel. As the resident violently possessive Yandere among the Nikke cast, it didn't take long for the fans to decide she would also have no respect for the Commander's boundaries when she's in the mood for her "darling". The fact that she does imprison him in her Affection Story to act out a romantic fantasy life only makes this depiction easier to go with, as does the way she sneaks into the sleeping Commander's bed to lick him (complete with slurping sounds in the transcript) during the epilogue of the First Anniversary mini-event in the Outpost, when the Pioneers and Inherit visit the Commander's room while he sleeps.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Lap of discipline.^ExplanationBased on an in-universe meme started by Anis, Neon and the Commander poking fun at a typo Rapi made on "lack of discipline".
  • Russian Roulette/PVP^ExplanationSoline had a Game-Breaking Bug at launch that caused her Burst to randomly kill your own allies, causing players to remark that Soline is playing Russian Roulette with her teammates.
  • Grave Digger Ouendan^ExplanationThe boss of Chapter 9, Grave Digger, has a lot of attack spots that need to be shot down immediately or the party suffers massive damage at best or a wipe at worst. The pace at how they spawn has made people call this boss an Ouendan level.
  • Bond increased by 50.^ExplanationAdvice chats have a chance to grant either +50 or +100 Bond depending on your answer. However, in many cases the correct answer is very much not as obvious as it looks and tends to have to do with the specific Nikke's personality, causing players much confusion when they pick seemingly straightforward answers and get not-straightforward responses.
  • Scarletless. ^ExplanationScarlet is a Game-Breaker and one of the most powerful single units in the game in terms of damage, but she's also a Pilgrim and thus extraordinarily rare even by SSR standards. It is not uncommon for players to reroll for her specifically because she's just that good. Players who have yet to pull her or failed to do so like to refer to themselves as "Scarletless" as a result. This meme also extends to other Nikkes the players haven't obtained for several months, especially meta ones, such as Drakeless or Literless.
  • NPC Jail.^ExplanationCharacters that show up as an Early-Bird Cameo in bond stories, events, or the main story can take a long, long time to be Promoted to Playable, leading to jokes at the expense of characters like Moran.
  • DORO / DORORONG.^ExplanationA chibi Nightmare Fuel version of Dorothy spliced into nearly everything as a reaction gif, much like Pepe the Frog. Originally spun off of a related Korean image board meme from the video game SoulWorker, it quickly caught on in the global internet space due to the efforts of the game's dedicated community and content creators.
    • PADORO ^ExplanationDORO eventually leaked into the NASU FGO fandom and mutated from contact with Padoru.
  • "Cummander." ^ExplanationWhile nothing is ever shown outright, more than a few Nikkes' Affection Stories end with the Counters Commander having sex with them after a confession and kiss, like Soda, "Bay Goddess" Mary, "Aquamarine" Helm, Rosanna, Blanc & Noir at the end of their event, etc. It didn't take long for the players to come up with a more appropriate description of a character who Really Gets Around, and expect at least one comment about it to pop up on some of the more risqué fan art of the game's characters. The Gratuitous Japanese counterpart is "Shikicum" which is a crude portmanteau of "shikikan (commander)" and "cum".
    • "Cuckmander" ^ExplanationA related nickname, formed during the 2023 Neverland Event by the fanbase as their way of describing the Commander's OOC behaviour throughout most of the story, in which he's depicted as hesitant to engage romantically with the Nikke cast (typically by pulling a "Just Joking" Justification at the last second, which some players said felt rather cruel coming from him) despite having no issue sweet-talking, dating and having sex with them in previously released content.
  • Continue the bloodline. ^ExplanationMuch like Chris Redfield and Silverash before him, Deputy Chief Andersen was eventually characterised by the fanbase as pressuring the Commander into having sex with another character and producing a child...except in his case, the fanbase took it even further than usual and had him doing it on behalf of a character he's not even related to, that being Cecil, Eden's resident tech wiz.
  • Depression^ExplanationOne of the highlights of the game is its surprisingly emotional and heavy writing for a game about ass and boobs, with many of the game's most memorable scenes and events being Tear Jerkers like Nya Nya Paradise, OVER ZONE and Outer Automata. As such, it has become standard for players to expect depressing or upsetting scenes at least every other event or update, with many players being more surprised when a scenario is completely lighthearted with no drawbacks.
  • Rapi's smile. ^ExplanationAs the resident stoic of Counters, it's quite rare to see Rapi emote. However, players soon found that When She Smiles it was well worth it, instantly labelling her happy expressions incredibly heartwarming to see and vowing to do anything to keep her happy or make her smile again, helped along by Rapi's popularity among the playerbase.
  • Wombforce not available YET ^ExplanationA meme crossing over from Girls' Frontline, while Nikke canonically can have sexual encounters, they are unable to get pregnant. Fans that overlapped both the Nikke and GFL communities joked about importing and modifying Wombforce modules to allow Nikkes to bear children, complete with jokes about getting either Cecil or Tetra Line to develop a version compatible with Nikke bodies.
  • Racist Drake ^ExplanationFrom an edit of the tweet announcing Drake's Villain Racer gacha skin, changing "racer" to "racist".
  • "Horny! ...Me too!" ^ExplanationA pair of matched fanart pieces of Rapunzel pointing at you and declaring you horny, before she admits to feeling the same way, that became pretty popular as a reaction image in the fandom.
  • Nihilister Burger ^{Chapter 24 spoiler}After Red Hood!Rapi stuffs Indivilia, Chatterbox and Nihilister into an elevator to be ejected from the Ark, Nihilister gets partially cannibalized by Indivilia and Chatterbox to accelerate their recovery after she's got on their nerves by arrogantly demanding requisite respect for playing the key role in resurrecting them.
  • Jokes about Crown stealing Naga away from Tia flooded the fanbase after it was discovered that a Crown/Naga team pairing actually does more damage than the intended Tia/Naga team since Crown boasts superior numbers to Tia while still being able to fulfill the activation conditions for Naga's Core damage boost.
• Memetic Psychopath:
  • Due to her being bullied by schoolmates in her old life, her nightmares in her bond conversations, and her unhinged Burst animation, a significant part of the fan community considers Vesti to be a potential school shooter.
  • "Unhinged Rapi", a comically out-of-character interpretation of Rapi by Japanese Twitter user "jinseimakegumi" that turns her into a violently possessive maniac who is willing to fight her teammates to the literal death to keep the Commander to herself, or, alternatively, shooting Neon in the head for the most minute of slights.
  • Dorothy, whose anger and hatred at the Ark Central Government via Oswald's perceived betrayal of Goddess Squad at the end of OVER ZONE is played up to unhinged levels, especially by way of the Doro meme.
• Moral Event Horizon: In Chapter 24, Commander has his gun trained on Crow, who urges him to kill her specifically so that he crosses it. Rapi saves him from doing so, for which he's really grateful.
• Narm: The "Eternal Memory" event is surprisingly serious and emotional, but it can be a little difficult to take Rupee seriously when she's dressed in a comically Stripperific holiday costume.
• Nightmare Fuel: Has its own page.
• Questionable Casting: While the game's English dub has been praised as surprisingly competent, criticism has been levied at Red Hood's English voice for sounding too cheery and upbeat compared to the other languages that give her a rougher tomboy voice, which causes a lot of serious scenes in Red Ash to lose impact due to the English voice actress being unable to inflect her voice to fit serious dialogue.
• Rooting for the Empire: In the wake of OVER ZONE, many fans have found themselves sympathizing with Dorothy. Some have taken it a step further and wish to see her succeed in getting her revenge on either Oswald, his descendants, or even the Ark as a whole, regardless of how many innocent people die in the process. It helps that even a century later, the Ark seems to have no shortage of humans like Syuen or Doban, who still treat Nikkes like garbage.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The way the gacha works in general for players with a sufficiently bad combination of non-paying, unlucky and late starter. There's no true pity system on the regular banner, which is the only way, save for unlikely reruns, to obtain Game-Breaker units like Red Hood, Modernia, Scarlet, Liter, Tia/Naga, Blanc/Noir and so on. Pulls on the regular banner award Silver Mileage tickets which allow you to buy whatever spare bodies of some of the characters that are currently available in the shop, which can only serve as dupes for the units you have already pulled and cannot substitute for pulling the first copy of the unit from the gacha proper. Pulling on the current rate-up banner awards you Gold Mileage tickets that you can only use to buy the character that is currently on the rate-up banner. Made worse by how sensitive late game content is to specific squads including specific units either due to high combat power deficits requiring nothing short of Game-Breaker characters to clear or specific bosses having mechanics that can only be reliably countered by specific units. In the worst case scenario, not even shelling out thousands of dollars might help you out of being Literless or (any other meta character that you don't have)-less!
  • The way the level cap works is that a Nikke gains +40 to their level cap for each Limit Break, up to a maximum of Limit Break 3 (Lv. 200) for SSR units. Synchro Device is designed in such a way that you need five SSR Nikkes at Limit Break 3 to continue level grinding past Level 160 (the max level cap for SR units). Like most gacha games, Limit Break can only be increased with Spare Bodies (AKA dupes), which can only be obtained from either the gacha or spending precious Coupons. Because of this, it's common for non-paying players or unlucky players to get stuck at Sync Lv. 160 for a very long time, slowing overall progress to a crawl as other ways of raising Combat Power are much slower and more resource intensive (Skills, Equipment, etc.), not helped that the climb from level 120 and beyond is where each level starts to be very demanding on your resources. Many jokes have been made about this mechanic, with many claiming that Lv. 160 is where "the free trial ends". While this mechanic has not been addressed directly, the developers have made a point of giving away free SSR characters with 3 additional Spare Bodies during certain events to alleviate some of the wait if you play during those events, and a later update changed the level cap system so that SR and R characters can go straight to their maximum level cap from the outset, making the early-game somewhat easier.
  • The Power Level stat scaling mechanic (which resembles the one implemented in Asphalt) is considered one of the worst gameplay mechanics ever implemented in a gacha game. The long short of it is that if you are even 1 point under the recommended Power Level for a battle, every single unit on your team takes a massive 25% stat penalty, which pushes almost any fight into "barely winnable" at best and "impossible" at worst. It's seen as a rather scummy way to enforce Forced Level-Grinding and locks players out of content much sooner than would otherwise normally occur had their stats not been scaled. The December 7th, 2022 update fixed this by making the scaling much less harsh.
  • Like most mobile games, the game has serial codes called "CD-Keys" that are given away every so often to commemorate events and such and can be entered in your account to claim free items. However, early on virtually all CD-Keys were usage limited rather than time limited, meaning that once a code hits a certain number of uses total across every player in the world, it ceases to function and can no longer be claimed by anyone else. This made CD-Keys rather frustrating since you effectively had to just know when they showed up and hoped you got in first before anyone else to guarantee a free prize. The distribution of usage limited keys eventually dropped substantially at some point and were largely replaced by time limited keys, mostly resolving this issue, although the occasional usage-limited key still pops up from time to time.
  • Molds are an item you can collect and exchange 50 of to get a character. They come in multiple varieties, including Mid-Quality, High-Quality, and Manufacturer Molds. Despite High-Quality and Manufacturer Molds being much more difficult to get than the purple Mid-Quality Molds, they don't come with a rarity guarantee and are subject to gacha rates, just slightly better odds than other ways to get characters, meaning it is entirely possible to save up for weeks only for them to amount to nothing because you lost a coin flip. Bizarrely, Manufacturer Molds are even worse than High-Quality Molds even though they are in limited distribution, as while High-Quality Molds can be purchased from the Shop and give a 60% chance to roll an SSR, Manufactuer Molds can only be obtained from Tribe Tower and not only have just a 50% chance to grant an SSR, but are the only Mold type that has a chance to give R rarity Nikkes.
  • Liberation is essentially a glorified Play Every Day mechanic, and there are unique SSR characters locked behind it that you can't get from the gacha. Unfortunately, the time it takes to earn a single character from this system is excruciatingly long (to the tune of several months), forcing players to log in very consistently lest they set back their acquisition date further. You can spend Gems to speed up the process, but as it costs 150 Gems for a full reset, and even more if you want gold missions, it will heavily cut into your natural Gem income unless you pay money. The icing on the cake is that in order to get Spare Bodies for them, you must use Union Raid Chips, which not only take a very long time to save up but are also used to buy upgrade materials for the Lost Sector Cubes, forcing you to sacrifice one or the other and wait even longer for whichever one you choose not to take. The only consolation is that the Liberation characters are typically below average in power and utility (save for Guilty, who is one of the best Burst IIs in the game), so the player isn't particularly pressured to expedite the process to keep up with meta.
  • The Luxury Bunny Gacha that released in tandem with May 2023's Bunny x 777 event was met with overwhelmingly negative reception. The long short of it is that it's a mini-gacha where the top prize is the Luxury Bunny skin for Rupee, which has the unique distinction of being the first skin to give a character completely new Lobby animations and a new chibi model with new poses. The catch is that this gacha is paid: It costs $2 to buy 1 ticket for it, and the gacha has 10 prizes on it, each only winnable once (the first roll is free). However, the Luxury Bunny skin doesn't start showing up until the fifth roll onwards, and for each roll you perform on the gacha the ticket cost per roll increases, starting from 1 ticket and going all the way up to 6. If you have the absolute worst possible luck the skin can cost upwards of $60! The other nine prizes on the gacha aren't even good, being a paltry handful of materials that can already be earned through the course of normal gameplay. Needless to say, the gacha was seen as a blatant ripoff even for the game's average skin price of $20 and fan backlash was immediate and immense. While the developers did acknowledge that there was a large amount of negative feedback towards the Costume Gacha mechanic, they've declined to do anything to reduce the overall cost of the gacha skins, with changes to the system mostly amounting to making the non-skin prizes actually decent.
  • In June 2023, Shift Up pushed a change to SP Arena that allows them to recalculate groups by pushing out inactive accounts (such as dud accounts from rerolling) and grouping active accounts with each other. This change makes it exponentially more difficult for free-to-play players to compete in SP Arena as they no longer have the ability to fall back on dead accounts to pad their ranking and forcing them to compete with whales who likely have a massive level, gear and character advantage. Many players were exceptionally pissed and felt that they were being cheated out of free Gem income solely to squeeze more money out of whales. The developers eventually acknowledged that the change had mostly negative repercussions and re-balanced Arena rewards to compensate for a sharp drop in total Gem payouts.
• Scrappy Weapon:
  • Submachine Guns are supposed have a higher fire rate compared to Assault Rifles at the expense of accuracy. In practice they serve little practical purpose in terms of damage, and most good SMG wielders are carried by their kits and not by their weapons.
  • Shotguns are similarly not that useful. They are the only close-range weapon and their pellet spread means that their damage output falls off substantially when fighting foes from farther away. They aren't nearly as weak as SMGs but dedicated Shotgun teams are rarely functional outside of Grave Digger comps and most good Shotgun users are again carried by their kits. They are notably the only weapon type to receive multiple dedicated supports, like Tove (who is amusingly an AR user) and Privaty: Unkind Maid, who help but don't fully fix the weapon's problems.
  • Machine Guns in PVP. Their piss-poor Burst generation rate means they struggle to contribute meaningfully when Arena meta revolves heavily around getting to your Burst before your opponent can.
• Signature Scene:
  • Marian being corrupted and killed off in the prologue, after being introduced as a devoted companion and quickly bonding with the Commander, with the Commander himself needing to put her down in the end.
  • Rapi kicking Syuen in the ribs in Chapter 5. Given that Syuen is a massively hateable Rich Bitch, Rapi delivering some steaming hot Laser-Guided Karma is incredibly cathartic.
  • Also, Anis's "government lapdog" scene in Chapter 14. Many players attest that this particular scene cemented Anis as one of their favorite characters in the game.
  • Marian's farewell scene in Chapter 14, considered one of the most heart-wrenching scenes in the entire game.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: One of the common criticisms of Snowfield Oasis is that many of the scenes are filled with Padding and several Bond cutscenes involve the narrative running circles around itself, to the point where any sense of a compelling story only begins to form halfway through. By the time the story resembles a cohesive plot there is little to no room for focus on the actual playable characters.
• Tainted by the Preview:
  • The announcement of the Re:Zero collaboration event was met with considerably more lukewarm response outside of Asia. While the series is extremely popular in Japan, players in the West (especially those acquainted with other gacha games) had at this point seen several dozen similar collabs with the series for other games, making its reveal significantly less exciting. Pre-release material also began to reveal several issues with the collab indicating an unusual lack of quality control, such as several instances of Off-Model, uninspired paid skins, a curious amount of suspiciously similar material to existing assets already used by other playable characters, and a conspicuous lack of Fanservice (in a game where Best Known for the Fanservice is the whole marketing schtick). This, in tandem with the collaboration being announced in extremely short notice up to its release, lead fans to believe that the collab appeared rushed and cash-grabby for no real reason, especially when compared to the lovingly-crafted NieR: Automata collab event.
  • The Second Affection mini-event introduced Marian in a new form. The announcement that this new form would be just a skin rather than a new playable appearance of this character has been met with an overwhelmingly negative response, since a lot of players thought it would have been much better if Modernia: Second Affection was a playable character, to demonstrate that her transformation wasn't just a visual makeover, but a sign of maturing mentally, as well as developing her power. To make matters even worse, this has also been announced to be a Gacha skin, locking it behind a paywall of up to $60!
• Tear Jerker: Has its own page.
• That One Boss:
  • Interception Grave Digger is egregiously frustrating to battle. The biggest reason is that it has a massive HP and speed boost over its non-Interception appearances, making breaking its Interruption Parts extremely challenging due to the way it bounces around the room avoiding your crosshairs. Character Select Forcing is in play due to the high amount of rapid spread damage needed to stop it from attacking, which essentially boils down to needing at least three good Shotgun users. Neve, an SR unit, is competent enough to fill one of those slots, but good luck if you haven't been lucky enough to get two other SSR Shotgun Attackers. Without a dedicated shotgun team, this boss becomes both an aim and a DPS check, as well as requiring careful timing of Full Bursts to ensure breaking at least every other interruption cycle except Phase 3, where the first interruption cycle must be broken no matter what, lest you suffer a Total Party Kill.
  • Bosses that essentially boil down to being DPS races can be rather challenging depending on the available team composition.
    • Special Interception Alteisen Mk. VI turns an otherwise average train fight into a painfully hard test of your burst damage capabilities. Not only is its HP cranked up but its damage is too, with its turrets and missile launchers being capable to blowing through pretty much every character in the game unless they have some sort of incredible defensive countermeasures. The best way to circumvent this is to just beat its guns before they can beat you, which is much easier said than done since they are very damage spongy and necessitates learning some precise timing windows and most likely playing on widescreen or PC to make the most of the extra screen real estate. It says something that Sakura appears to be an attempt to explicitly hard counter Alteisen, as she grants a massive damage resistance buff to all allies against Wind element Raptures, but ultimately fails in this department as her buff is massive, but relatively short-lived, all the while she's hogging a spot that could've been taken by an invaluable DPS/CDR buffer like Liter or a DPS carry.
    • Nihilister, the boss of Chapter 20, is a frantic fight to the finish against one of the tankiest bosses in the game. It doesn't hit very hard but packs an insane amount of HP and very few breakable parts to work with. The fight is essentially a test to see if your Sync Level, equipment and skills are up to par, as that 2:30 time limit is very limited for how much DPS you need to push the fight into 2nd phase in a reasonable amount of time. It gets significantly easier if you can get there, but it is entirely possible to still lose the fight as the boss's damage output and aggressiveness rises significantly at this point and you are likely worn down from 1st phase to make survivability shaky without a dedicated healer. Finally, even once you've put in the effort and accrued enough power to defeat her... you'll then have to face an even beefier version of her at the end of Chapter 22. Have fun.
  • Mother Whale, full stop. It's a Damage-Sponge Boss that frequently spawns adds, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Its special ability is that it has the ability to project a barrier that not only nullifies all damage while other enemies are on-screen, but also projects a defensive boon to all on-screen enemies that reduces all of the damage they take to Scratch Damage. This effect can be disabled by destroying its core, but Mother Whale also notoriously has some of the worst hurtboxes in the entire game and is incredibly hard to hit correctly even when it looks like you're shooting at the right spots. The end result is a boss fight that drags needlessly long, punishes far too many team compositions and is just generally unfun in the worst possible ways.
• That One Level: The Pilgrim Tower can be this when you're just starting out since access to Pilgrims is generally extremely luck-dependent and there are a severe lack of Burst II Pilgrims that can make Full Bursts an issue, but the upside is that most offensive Pilgrims are so heavily overtuned that they can solo a decent chunk of the Tower before bringing backup is required. The actual most difficult Tribe Tower is commonly considered to be the Elysion Tower, as a vast majority of the manufacturer's units are egregiously underpowered or are support units, making them a less than cohesive team for trying to beat large groups of enemies.
• Too Cool to Live
  • Red Hood. With just Rapi tapping her powers via Secret Body being enough for her to take on and demolish a Rapture Elite and two Heretics at once, practically trivialising most encounters, plus Red Hood herself being even more badass than that on top of personally friendly and having no intention to destroy The Ark, meaning she'd be a great ally to the team even if all she did was hang around in Rapi's head and offer advice as The Mentor, there was no way she was staying around long once she'd fully entered the story. Sure enough, she's there for all of two chapters before being Killed Off for Real....taking her powers and thus Rapi's Super Mode with her, keeping the story challenging going forward.
  • Marian!Modernia, though as of now, she's Put on a Bus rather than dead. In a month after a Mind-Reformat Death reducing her to the mental state of a newborn infant, she's already by far the strongest member of Counters thanks to an incomprehensible combination of powers beyond the best Ark could offer. She literally absorbs an explosion from a bomb in her hands that was supposed to be able to collapse an entire building, then proceeds to pull a ZA WARUDO on Perilous Siege who had Commander at a gunpoint. Given that she's being literally raised by the Counters, her loyalty to them would remain unwavering, and her sheer power would wipe out any adversity in most, if not all, of the missions they'd undertake. It doesn't exactly come as a surprise (if still utterly heartwrenching) that she remains with the protagonists for all of one chapter before they are forced to give her into the Pioneer squad's care, lest the Ark would never let them sleep at night until they have Marian on a dissection table for the technology inside her that Burningum thinks would advance Ark by a century.
• Underused Game Mechanic: The Outpost Buildings and Tactics Academy mechanics have been effectively abandoned since the game's launch and only serve as a Credit sink for less than a month of gameplay. This is especially odd in the case of the former since the game appears to have made room for a much more comprehensive system than its implementation implies.
• Unexpected Character:
  • The NieR: Automata Crossover event introduces the typical suspects common to most Automata crossovers with other games, including 2B, 9S, and A2, but Pascal, a major side character from NieR: Automata, was also introduced as a playable character, which is fairly atypical as most Automata crossovers tend to only feature the game's protagonists. This also makes him the first playable male, albeit only by technicality.
  • The Re:Zero event in March 2024 doubled as a Maid For You event, which came as a surprise to many players since Maid For You had recently received its second focus event in the February 2024 Perfect Maid event.
  • Indivilia spent most of the story up to Chapter 24 incomplete and in Ark custody. Nihilister ends up repairing her alongside Chatterbox, adding a new problem to the whole ordeal.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: This is a common complaint about Emma's design, as her head size to breast size ratio is pretty ridiculous and she has a rather unusual face design (common to her artist Hyulla's artwork) that makes her look just a little bit off. Rapi similarly suffered from this in her beta artwork, but was later redesigned by Kim Hyung-Tae to fix this.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • Anis. While she is far more empathetic and down to Earth than the below examples, Anis at times can come off as petty and immature to some players, giving her bratty attitude in situations such as her interactions with Eunhwa over a simple order and Liter's Bond Story where she refuses to clean her dorm room out of spite towards the older Nikke for simply trying to help her. It doesn't help that the times when Rapi supposedly had her memory wiped and Marian's Mind Rape from Chatterbox reduces to a infant/toddler mentally, Anis attempts to gaslight them into acknowledging her as their superior despite how important the two are meant to be to her, making her come across as heartless.
  • Yuni. The story tries to frame her as a victim of Syuen's actions, with her best friend Mihara being mind-wiped being especially traumatizing towards her and is portrayed as the reason why she's being manipulated by Crow. However, many players find that one completely inexcusable once she becomes complicit with Crow in bombing the Ark and allowing the Raptures to slaughter everyone there by tricking the citizens over there to leave the shelter by claiming it was unsafe.
  • Dorothy for portions of the fanbase. While the Flashback Episode to Goddess Squad's days, especially OVER ZONE, frame her very sympathetically with quite the Freudian Excuse for what she is in the present day, being betrayed and abandoned by The Ark after serving and protecting humanity loyally, there are players who don't think that excuses what she's trying to do in the name of Revenge (like using Counters as Cannon Fodder in their first encounter and joint operation against Nihilister), especially since all her surviving teammates in Pioneer have managed to move on and build relatively pleasant lives for themselves while Dorothy's stuck in the past and keeping herself miserable and angry. The reveal of her actual motive in Chapter 26 only made it worse, since it comes in the middle of Red Hood reaming Dorothy out for trying to force her to stay and still thinking she can go back to the past by Putting the Band Back Together again, while offering an easy solution to get the love she claims she wants: drop her grudge against The Ark and be humanity's protector again.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: The game's age rating of 13+ on some official app stores and distribution platforms (primarily the US, but also in England, Singapore and Canada) has been the target of much mockery and confusion by the game's playerbase as a large number of character designs are considered relatively risqué even by mobile game standards and the writing involves a lot of violence, death, occasional suicide, and implied sex/rape.
• The Woobie:
  • Poor N102 really needs a hug. Imagine having your memories wiped every single day of your life, being told that whatever is in your notebook defines who you are, and taking it at face value, without ever being aware of what's going on or what's happening to you. To drive home her woobieness, watch her expression when she reloads, as she has an expression of teary-eyed fear, because the first fight of every day is perceived as her first battle ever, a fact that has made a number of players stop fielding N102 in their combat squads so they don't put her through that kind of trauma every time her memory resets. It gets worse in "Eternal Memory": N102 is dependent on the daily memory wipes for her survival due to a Photographic Memory disorder that will kill her if left untreated, and her human mother Angelina is forced to work six part-time jobs every day to pay for the expensive procedure.
  • Marian can never have good things in life. First she is corrupted before the story even begins. Not long after, she guides Commander, possibly the first human to be nice to her in ages, to Mercy Kill her. Was turned into a Heretic, and not even a couple of minutes after being cleansed from the corruption in the wake of a climactic "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight, she gets put into a vegetative state, forcing Commander to approve her Mind-Reformat Death if he wants her to live at all. The new Marian, restored to Counters in the mental state of a newborn infant, doesn't get it much better. She's a complete blank slate who needs to re-learn even basic actions like speaking, while everyone in the Ark starts squabbling over and trying to steal her from Counters to pick her apart for her unique technology. And after finally starting to bond with Counters again? She's sent to the Pilgrims on the surface to keep her from the Ark's reach...all while begging and crying for Counters to please, please let her stay with them because she likes living with them. And as of Second Affection, just after she started to feel at home with the Pioneer, they have to leave her (in Crown's care) too! Really, the poor girl needs a lot of hugs after all that.