YMMV / Knights in the Nightmare

• Anti-Climax Boss: Piche goes down in 1 or 2 hi skill attack, and can't be helped that they give you Frabela and Amalgun/Ulrich to fight her with, who are rather ridiculously high level for the stage they appear in; even if you did not recruit anyone, you can pull it off. Note that this is only on Easy mode. On the higher difficulty levels, her ability to heal herself practically makes her That One Boss.
• Awesome Music: Maria's theme music.
• Complete Monster: In one of the darkest entries of the Dept. Heaven series, two dark villains stand out:
  • Yelma is a witch hired by Cardinal Capehorn to summon the demon lord Zolgonark. After Prince Nordich plans on killing Capehorn, she accidentally turns him into werewolf when trying to kill him and laughts at his misery, ruining the peace negotiations between humans and Tiamats. She creates a cursed armor and gives him to a Royal General, corrupting him into a cruel and hateful soldier while also dooming him to perpetual pain; forces the King's wife into helping her; giving his corpse to get the powers of the Arbitrator for herself; and turns the chief of the Mehse into a lich. Breaking the last barrier protecting the Tiamat homeland, Yelma dooms the race to their extinction. After the barrier protecting the King's body is break, Yelma takes it and betrays Zolgonark, intending to rule the world in his place, before being killed for him. A sadistic witch, Yelma was willing to betray and kill everyone trying to know the truth regarding of their affiliation, enjoying their misery.
  • Zolgonark is the King of the Underworld intending to Take Over the World. Summoned by Yelma and Cardinal Capehorn, he also convinced the angel Marietta into doing a contract with him before spitting her into two beings, one heroic and other evil. Zolgonark summons the The Legions of Hell to invade Aventheim, killing everything in their way in multiple massacres, going to the extreme of even causing the extinction of the Tiamat race. After Capehorn didn't deliver information about how the King's Soul was in his way to his castle, Zolgonark kidnaps his grandaughter and transforms her into a monster in perpetual pain as punishment.
• Demonic Spiders: Dragons and hellhounds. The former can turn your already tough Bullet Hell into a much worse scenario, the latter can attack your knights and make them lose vit by quite a large chunk.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: The Witch, a nameless Mook made to be mowed down by everyone, is surprisingly popular in Pixiv community due to her cuteness and her unique outfit.
• Fanon Discontinuity: In what is becoming a running gag on LiveJournal, part of the fandom has refused to acknowledge Atlus' translations of character and place names. May be justified, as Sting published official romanizations long before Atlus' announcement that it would localize the game.
• Fridge Logic: ...Why doesn't Alier have wings like every other Tiamat?
• Game-Breaker:
  • Marietta's staff and the dark feather item can turn Maria into this in Maria's route. It's actually better to call her Boss Breaker, since you get her back in Scene 28 then lose her after Scene 30 for the rest of the game until the final two Scenes. That's a grand total of 5 Scenes of Game-Breaker power, 4 of which are Boss Fights. A single EX-Skill can chop off an enormous portion of a Boss's health bar.
  • Mellia has the White Feathers item in her own.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Any number of fights that quickly devolve into a mad dash to avoid dozens of projectiles that will blast your Wisp into oblivion.
  • Gremlins are rather easy to kill, but they are hated much due to the Interface Screw they cause.
• Goddamned Boss: Nearly every boss that isn't That One Boss, due to one reason or another (usually their special abilities). Examples include Dotaurus (very hard to stop his Hound summon), Scoppio (because you're running on a timer to find a certain plot-important item with a boss who can destroy it breathing down your neck), Leonil (because he cheats by having multiple weapons, and thus multiple bullet attacks), Viena (because this boss has powerful attacks and moves a lot]], Sachitto (because the area is VERY restrictive on both your movement and attack)... Fortunately, a lot of these don't quite reach That One Boss because they may have low health (proportional to how far in the game you are; a boss with not even 20000 HP 3/5 of the way through? Yikes) or bullet attacks that are not too hard to dodge.
• Heartwarming Moments: The cutscene right before Meria and the Wisp enter the castle. Awww.
  • Many of the battle music as well. Each bosses also have their own Villain Song.
• Inferred Holocaust: Surprisingly enough, inverted — while we only see Wilmgard and Algiery reunited in the best endings, those darn side materials have it that almost everyone was fine; the knights never died in the first place, after all. Only the characters who were explicitly killed stay dead.
• Jerkass Woobie: Yes, Meria's a bossy, violent nutcase. It's also implied that she's got some serious issues underneath all of that.
• Les Yay: Alier and Sacchito.
  • At the very least, Johanna and Diora (from the Second Order of Knights) form a Pseudo-Romantic Friendship. Considering they're both well beyond the age at which such things are typical, it's probably more. Particularly apparent if Johanna is transsouled into Diora.
  Johanna: "I'd be happy to become a part of you, Diora...."
• Moe:
  • Vienya. So moe you died. "Endless Cute", indeed.
  • Primea, Piche, several of the young female knights, and even Maria and Mellia.
  • To a lesser extent, the Witch mook has an adorable appearance and outfit.
• Moral Event Horizon: ASGARD. If Yggdra Union wasn't enough to convince the player that this place is full of jerks, this game should do it.
  • Also, frigging Yelma.
• Player Punch: The dialogues during trans-soul can become this. Also, Piche.
  • You can also try to be nice by transsouling them to one of their friends or loved ones, you will get a different dialogue than if you do to someone they don't know too well.
    • And sometimes that just makes it worse, like listening to Gudrun mourning her surrogate father having sacrificed himself for her.
  • The Narrator occasionally wonders aloud at how far you're willing to go to get the Whisp's body back, like after the fight with Vienna and Moja.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The enemies' built in Healing Factor can make the already Nintendo Hard game rocket up to and beyond hair-pullingly difficult in the harder difficulties, as enemies will a lot of life and thus recover lots of HP very quickly. Taken up to eleven with Superboss Scoppio and Final Boss Melad Margus; the former has one of the highest HP counts in the game on Normal and appears as ????? on Hard and up, and the latter is even worse. And Zolgonark's built in Healing Healing Factor Factor...
  • Say what you will about how broken Maria is, but with Ancardia, she can only attack with Hi-Skills. Granted, EVERY skill will become a Hi-Skill, but she has only 7.77 Vit and each Hi-Skill uses 1.00 Vit, which means that, with Ancardia on, you can only do any real damage with her 7 times before you have to stop or she dies, which forces you to Retry a stage. On any difficulty other than Nightmare, this is passable as retrying will only invalidate your scoring performance for this stage and destroy any weapon you had in your inventory in that turn. Never mind using Ex-Skills. And she loses all the loyalty you had accumulated on her before picking up Ancardia!
• Self-Imposed Challenge: The most popular are "Get all the knights" and "continually New Game Plus from Easy Mode to Nightmare Mode without ever using Transoul".
• Tear Jerker: The fates of Algiery and Piche. Some of the other knights' deaths can qualify, as well.
• That One Boss: Gunther, who can one-hit-kill any one of your characters. If Maria/Mellia happens to get hit by that attack, it's instant gameover.
  • The second-to-last boss, Zolgonark, is immensely annoying due to his built-in regeneration stat, which lets him recover thousands of HP at a time as long as the head that has that stat is alive. We sure hope you've powered up Maria/Mellia for this one.
  • Also, freaking Marietta.
  • Melad Margus, the Final Boss. Why? It has the highest HP count in the whole game (even more than the Superboss, whose health count was already an exaggeration by that point), it has devastating attacks that will kill your timer in the blink of an eye, it can move pretty fast, the stage is even MORE restrictive than Sachitto's and it's attack cycles are so short that, if it uses its second bullet, it can use another attack before the previous attacks is even done. Even repeating Bullet II just once can be devastating, as it leaves you unable to do anything but dodge the mess of random bullets that it causes. Not even the super-high level Maria/Mellia will be of much use because of the stage design. The only way this fight can be made less annoying is if you're playing on the red path and found both Ancardia and the Dark Feathers, in which case Maria's EX-Skills will do a HUGE part of the work for you.
• Viewer Gender Confusion:
  • Thanks to Generic Cuteness, for some you can only identify some of the knight's gender by their voices. A few characters: Crozeph, Sacchito, Werner, and Darshan.
  • Though all classes save the Lance Knight (which Crozeph and Darshan happen to be) are gender-especific. This means all Duelists, Hermits and Priestesses are female, and all Warriors (one of which is Werner), Archers and Wizards are male. Lance Knights are the only class where you'll find both men and women. Interestingly, the Archer class was first planned to be female-exclusive, but since the designers wanted to keep a gender balance, it was changed to male-only after the Hermit class was decided to be a female class.
• Wangst: Yes, Algiery, we know you have every reason to mope. Please do something other than mope once in a while.
• The Woobie: Maria. Watch her beat herself up over and over for what Marietta did, and see how long it takes before you want to cuddle her and make it all go away. Let's have a show of hands for how many people got just a little misty-eyed when she posted that tweet about wanting to be loved.