Alas, Poor Scrappy: Dan. He's a manipulative bossy jerk and some of his early dialogue veers almost into Kick the Dog territory, but then he possibly dies, and Iji completely breaks down upon losing her sole remaining family.
Anticlimax Boss: Invincible or otherwise, Iosa's second phase is a Rush Bossheavily in the player's favor, even on Ultimortal difficulty she can be reliably beaten in one cycle. Her first phase is almost as easy, as she insists on patrolling back and forth below platforms conveniently located for you to jump out of reach of her guns. If you're playing pacifist, then Ansaksie chipping in with her weapons against Iosa makes her go down even quicker.
Anticlimax Boss though it may be, Iosa the Invincible is incredibly satisfying to fight, especially on higher difficulties where it's harder to force her second phase to the wall.
Breather Level: Sector 6. Sector 5 is an extremely long slog through a couple of very large buildings, with crossfire everywhere, your Mission Control gone and very urgent music Seven Four. Sector 6 takes things slow and steady, with small groups of weak enemies separated by stretches where you can just saunter along and enjoy the atmosphere while Iji looks for Dan, with the same peaceful music as in Sector 1, Kinda Green, playing.
The Tasen in general, really. While there are a few good ones, they apparently contrast so much with the Komato that many, many fans make them out as almost saintly. While they aren't as vicious as the Komato, there's still the problem that they tried to wipe out life on Earth, and that's not touching on all their war crimes in the backstory - what they did to Iosa's planet stands out.
There's also a surprising amount of people who view Krotera as a Well-Intentioned Extremist doing whatever he needed to do to protect his people. You'd think that the game established well enough that he's a jingoistic tyrant with a 0% Approval Rating who chose to Alpha Strike Earth instead of making peace with the humans because he could.
Ansaksie can also be subject to this, although there's a bit of justification in that her more dickish actions are never mentioned in the game. The most dickish she gets in the actual game is her squadron attacking you in Deep Sector (which she immediately explains and apologizes for on a pacifist run) and being way too gleeful about Iosa's death in 1.7.
While it's rare, despite the fact that the game gives absolutely no reason to like him (and every reason not to), some players inexplicably love Asha, of all people.
Ensemble Dark Horse: Ansaksie is rather popular considering her limited screen-time.
Fountain of Memes: As seen below, the Scrambler provides tons of these.
The Null Driver is a literal example. Firing it will lead to random changes in crucial data, up to and including changing the size and shape of the level geometry. Fortunately, the changes aren't permanent. Also a straight example as well. Proper use of it allows you to fully level up all attributes by Sector 2. Which is why it's only unlocked once everything else is, and has to be reacquired every time you start the game.
It only lasts for thirty seconds, but Explosive Shotgun buff + Buster Gun (automatic shotgun) = Fully-Automatic, Unblockable, Instant-Hit Explosive Goodness.
The humble Plasma Cannon is no slouch, especially with high Attack. For just two Shocksplinter ammo, you can One-Hit Kill anything that isn't an Elite, Berserker, Annihilator, or boss, and it has penetration!
The Banana Gun is the only weapon whose projectiles are affected by gravity, which lets you deal punishment while being out of all harm's way.
The Massacre. Though it's only available when reaching the Final Boss with zero kills, it turns the difficulty into a complete joke with its screen-wide blasts that can deal several Elites worth of damage in a single shot. Even the cost of 50 Armor per shot is nothing compared to the sheer obliteration this thing does.
Komato Skysmashers, extremely mobile flying Turrets armed with Shocksplinters that are extremely difficult to land hits on. And like regular Turrets, they explode when they die. To quote the game creator, "No-one likes the Skysmashers."
Komato Assassins love to abuse their Teleport Spam and are effectively immune to projectiles, and have a tendency to teleport right in front of the player for their melee attack.
Heartwarming Moments: "Aw, just say it out loud, bro." However, you'll only get to see it if you save Dan and get all of the ribbons.
Love to Hate: Asha is just such a colossal asshole, but he also provides some of the best fights in the game, and finally taking him down is very satisfying (or alternatively denying him his rematch and watching him lose his mind.)
reallyjoel's Dad. After a Youtube user named "reallyjoel" posted a comment on Daniel Remar's own speedrun video saying that his dad could do better, there's been a running joke that reallyjoel's Dad is the best gamer in the world, and that there's a top-secret "reallyjoel's Dad" difficulty mode. Daniel said that reallyjoel's Dad played said difficulty and beat it so hard that it was wiped from existence. However, it's still in the game, and it's as impossible as they say.
Also, Yukabacera. When you reach Yukabacera in the game, you're quickly introduced to why he's treated as a legitimate threat: he moves like a greased squirrel on pop rocks, Mountain Dew and cocaine, and his attackshurt. The drop is worth it, though.
"I approach you friendly, and you are firing blue lettuce at me?"
"You promised me a pony! With missiles!"
"No missile pony for you."
Minimalist Run: Ultimortal, the highest difficulty, enforces this by removing all health pickups and limiting you to upgrading only your health, as well as by imposing a harsh time limit.
Asha holding Dan hostage and possibly even killing him depending on the player's actions is this both out and in-universe. Even on a pacifist run, Iji has no qualms about killing Asha after this point.
As of version 1.7, Iji herself can pass this if she gets over 300 kills and then chooses to kill Tor at the end. Kiron calls her out on murdering her only hope of aborting the Alpha Strike and saving Earth for the sake of revenge, tells her that Tor was testing her resolve, and orders the Alpha Strike to go ahead immediately.
If there's any proof that Iosa is truly irredeemable, it's the fact that if you spare her, she simply ambushes Iji after the Final Boss battle and kills her before trying to threaten Tor into going through with the Alpha Strike, and then killing him when she doesn't get her way.
Komato Beasts, which are former Komato turned into animalistic mutants.
Komato Annihilators are feared in and out of universe, for their incredible endurance, size, and firepower. Several Tasen logbooks go as far to say that fighting an Annihilator is pure suicide. Even the Komato themselves are afraid of them, after one killed its entire platoon of several hundred soldiers at the ship Ciretako in an attempt to raise its kill counter. You can actually invoke this yourself, activating an Annihilator to go nuts on its own allies as at least one trooper will start shouting "CIRETAKO" amidst the slaughter.
Certain scenes throughout the game will play a dark, droning soundtrack to set up that something very bad is about to happen, and usually in the latter half of the game this means someone is going to die. But nothing is quite as eerie as hearing that ambient noise amidst a hidden sector filled with teleporting Komato Assassins in the dark, or finding the final Tasen outpost on a non-Innocent run.. where Iosa got there first.
If you're on a murdering run, Iji herself. In the Pacifist run, she'll be hesitant, try to be nice when she isn't freaking out about something, and keep her head on straight, but in a violent run, she's downright bloodthirsty, hungering for revenge and practically basking in the slaughter she gets to commit upon the foes in her way. And, depending on your playstyle and how you work through the game, Iji can become a One-Cyborg Army that can go toe-to-toe with the strongest of both the Tasen and the Komato, even the Annihilators above, and win, causing everybody to be horrified at her mere existence of a being no one could've seen coming.
Signature Scene: The final battle against General Tor is easily the most famed and well remembered part of the game.
Iji can also be considered the spiritual predecessor to Undertale, as it uses What Measure Is a Mook? to deconstruct shoot-em-ups in much the same way the other game deconstructed RPGs.
That One Attack: The Tyrian Claw/Arch Devastator combo that Tor can throw out during his fight fills the screen with fast-moving projectiles, especially on harder difficulties.
Ugly Cute: Annihilators. Hell, there's an Annihilator plushie in the game.
Unintentionally Sympathetic: Violent Iji. The narrative tries to portray her as a hypocritical bloodthirsty mass murderer, but the problem is that she's in an active warzone surrounded by one faction of aliens whose policy is "wipe out all humans first, explain problems with space Nazis later" and one other faction whose policy is "glass Earth to wipe out the ashes and bones of the first guys", both of whom are trying to kill her on sight. With that in mind, it's very hard to see Iji's actions as anything but perfectly justified self-defense. She sometimes gets more kudos for her position if you see the Pacifist mode conversations. Aside from Vateilika, neither Tasen nor Komato will sit down and listen to a pacifist Iji. Elite Krotera tries to justify his disinterest in the remaining humans by arguing Tasen numbers despite glassing over 600 times that for the Tasen. And sparing Iosa will cause her to backstab Iji and attempt to activate the damn alpha strike herself when Tor won't do it (and subsequently kills him when it doesn't work). No wonder Iji goes violent, so few on the opposite side would listen and work with her anyways, and justify their actions with such flimsy reasoning, it's almost easier to fight back in self-defense.
Despite the game's message that "the enemy" are people too, many players found it a good deal easier to kill Komato than Tasen. It's not surprising that portraying a species whose hat is being genocidal Sociopathic Soldiers as sympathetic would be difficult, to say the least. Even Daniel Remar has remarked that he may have gone too far with how he portrayed them.
The Tasen themselves. The game attempts to paint them as just another victim of the Komato, but when that victimhood involves running away from them, glassing any planet that they find in order to live on it, as well as dragging any race they encounter into a war with the Komato, thus making their problems the problem of everyone else, and then proceed to defend themselves by claiming they suffered more, they tend to not look the most sympathetic.
Viewer Gender Confusion: Ansaksie is mistaken for a guy fairly often. Ironically, she was specifically made female to differentiate her from Asha. Also, many players thought Wak Torma (aka "PAIE") to be a guy from reading her diaries, since it's all just text logs with no voice for comparison and the number of times she refers to her girlfriend outweighs the number of references to her own gender.
The Woobie: Iji, and to a lesser extent, Wak Torma (the Tasen diary writer).
Tropes in the webcomic:
Anticlimax Boss: Played for Laughs. Vateilika tries to fight Iji at the ends of Sectors 3 and 6, but either way she isn't any more powerful than a regular Soldier. The first time, Iji just kicks her out the window, and the second time, she pushes her out the door.
At one point, during a discussion on how portal guns violate the law of conservation of energy, we cut to Dan watching Ron fall through an infinite portal loop while Kyubey freaks out in the foreground. No one acknowledges he's there, it's not brought up in the narration, and he's never mentioned again. Captain Lhurgoyf just included it as a one-off non sequitur joke.
Later, a command asks for something silly and unrelated to the plot to happen just because it's silly, which Captain Lhurgoyf renders as a monkey in a party hat, clown makeup, a tuxedo jacket, and a diaper juggling chainsaws on a unicycle while blowing a streamer in front of St. Basil's Cathedral. It even uses the Big-Lipped Alligator Moment icon from The Nostalgia Critic.
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