YMMV / Heaven's Vault

• Annoying Video Game Helper: Six helps you navigate on the rivers. It becomes annoying pretty fast if you otherwise check the map regularly and are well aware where you are.
• Crowning Moment of Heartwarming: Taking Yazi and Sya to Renaki, even after they stole your ship, potentially knocking you out to do so. When you part ways, Yazi comments that Aliya and Sya look like they could be sisters, to which Sya replies:
  [to Aliya] You saved my life. You are my sister.
• Funny Moments: On the Old Sculptor's Moon, Aliya finds an inscription on an overturned minecart. At first she thinks the symbols are like none she's ever seen before... but then Six reminds her that the cart is upside-down.
• Genius Bonus: There are Ancient texts, most notably the ones on the walls of the entrance of Heaven's Vault, that are not translated. If you want to know their meanings, you have to figure them out yourself. Or look up the words in a dictionary.
• Idiot Ball:
  • When Aliya encounters the ancient phrase for "Heaven's Vault", she for some reason looks at the second word, reads the ideogram sequence (verb)-go-above-above and decides that the best translation would be "vault", as in "(noun) secure chamber for treasure" and proceeds to spend the back half of the game wondering what might be found inside the Space Jump.
  • When exploring the wreckage of Renba's ship, enough conversation with Six will be enough for Aliya to speculate that Professor Myari is claiming to be the reincarnation of the First Emperor. Though this can be immediately followed by the conversation with Renba's "ghost"-in-Six in which he accuses Myari of not being who she claims to be, seemingly confirming this, Aliya spends almost the entire conversation trying to work out who she's talking to and only barely listens to what's actually being said.
• Narm:
  • Most characters including Aliya have some very over-the-top facial expressions, and there's rarely an actual correlation between them and what the character is saying/doing at that moment. Seeing Aliya angrily shouting while she's merely musing about the meaning of something feels... strange, to say the least.
  • Aliya's character design, while completely fine overall, still comes across as off-putting due to the red rashes on her hands and face. Her bruised hands can be justified by her profession as an archaeologist, but the ones in her face (specifically, her nose) make her look like she caught a really bad cold. Not even learning about her pulmonary disease can change much about that.
• Obvious Beta: The game shipped with wonky camera controls, a broken nav system and a plethora of bugs, the latter ranging from irritating but inconsequential (scenes with characters talking that weren't even there) to game-breaking (entire story arcs being impossible to complete or even unlock). To the devs' credit, most of these issues were quickly addressed in the weeks following the release.
• The Scrappy: Six may mean well, but its constant whining about Aliya's exploring (in other words, what most of the game is about) gets annoying fast... and it gets a hundred times worse once Enkei takes over and starts insulting you every chance she gets. The devs probably suspected how badly some players would react to this when they implemented the possibility to sell Six off to a shifty robot trader.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Sailing the rivers has been universally decried as tedious and boring by players and critics alike. Travelling to distant places can take up to ten minutes during which you can't do anything but steer left or right. The wonky nav system doesn't do the feature any favors, and the lack of a fast-travel system means you'll be spending at least half your play time sailing the same routes over and over again. Fortunately, this was (mostly) fixed with the first patch barely a week after the game's release.
• Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: The main plot of the game is to discover the past through visiting various moons and ultimately to find Heaven's Vault. However, easily the most interesting game mechanic is translating Ancient. Thus, you can spend the majority of your time sailing the rivers hunting for artifacts and bringing them back to Huang to help you in the translation.
• Stupidity Is the Only Option: The game forces this on you at a couple points, but the ending is probably the worst of them all. Since it turns out you can hopper back to Iox after all, there's no in-universe reason why you can't leave and come back, this time with as many people as possible and possible the entire population of the Nebula stored in foil — but no, your options are "everyone dies slowly" or "everyone dies quickly (except you and Six/Enkei)."
• Squick: Timor's constant attempts at Wife Husbandry are as disgusting to the player as they are to Aliya herself.
• Take That, Scrappy!: Finally getting rid of Six by selling it off can feel immensely satisfying.
• What Could Have Been: According to the devs' official blog, Tapi, Huang, Timor, and Oroi were considered as potential romances at some point in development.