YMMV / Left Alive

• Annoying Video Game Helper: The game's way of assisting you is warning of nearby enemies, which can happen a lot, and that's just one of the many annoyances that can be heard.
• Awesome Art: The game's art and character design, by Yoji Shinkawa of Metal Gear fame, is considered to be one of the game's few highlights.
• Author's Saving Throw: Zigzagged. After the game's release, an easier Casual Mode difficulty was released that fundamentally makes enemies less spongy and makes the game less utterly punishing. The problem is that the game was blatantly not balanced with it in mind, feeling like it threw the baby out with the bath water in terms of gutting any idea of challenge rather than actually fixing the numerous game design problems.
• Good Bad Bugs: You can destroy tanks with a police baton.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Videos of the game's notoriously poor AI quickly picked up steam around the Internet.
  • CAUTION: The enemy is approaching.
• Narm: The bad ending you get if you fail to save any civilians is so over-the-top with how grim it is that it's impossible to be shocked by it.
• Obvious Beta: Besides the AI bugs, the release version of the game is known for severe FPS dips during the Wanzer sections, and for frequent crashing due to memory leaks. Other glitches include textures failing to render completely and enemy squads falling through the environmental objects.
• Realism-Induced Horror: Olga's arc involves investigating missing persons throughout Novo Slava while a regional war is taking place in Eastern Europe. She (and the player) later stumbles onto a human trafficking scheme happening under the Garmoniyan military's watch.
• Scrappy Mechanic
  • The game is surprisingly Nintendo Hard despite how notoriously stupid the AI are, because your characters do peanuts for damage, have too few resources in ammunition and weaponry, and can't really save much of anyone despite the game pushing you to do it. Why? Because your characters are absolutely gimped in a first playthrough, so that you'll abandon most survivors and get your bad ending. Then you can spend earned skill points to improve characters on New Game Plus playthroughs, fight more competently, and save more citizens to work towards the Golden Ending. What seemed like some attempt by the developers to give the game replayability (even though you'll still go through all the same story scenes and areas in every single playthrough) absolutely destroyed all first impressions of the game and had it labeled as a dumpster fire as a result.
  • For a stealthy action-survival game, it turns out that there are no stealth takedowns. If you want to save resources, this means your only option is to clobber enemies with melee to death and alert everyone in the area, or navigate around them and avoid combat altogether. Did we mention that weapons can break and the only way to rescue most of the survivors is through forced combat or clearing the area ahead of time?
  • Hell, combat in general is a scrappy mechanic. Aim and recoil are atrocious, your weapons suck on your first playthrough as mentioned above, melee combat is absolutely clumsy and devolves into either slap fights or the practical solution of rolling into enemies and repeatedly doing ground finishers on them until they die, and numerous other problems. Why would this be listed here? Because for a game that tries so hard to steer you away from fighting due to what one can presume is intentionally bad and cumbersome mechanics and controls, enemies can inexplicably see you through walls at random and the story has various points of forced combat and "kill all enemies" wave survival moments that go against all of the very ideas the game are built around.
• Sequelitis: More like Spinoffitis. To the point that those who played both Front Mission: Evolved and this would consider Evolved far better despite its divisive Genre Shift, due to not only how this game seems to be terrible in many aspects, from writing to gameplay mechanics, but also user-hostile (as opposed to user-friendly). This is especially egregious considering that the selling point of this game, at least for Japanese players, is the fact this game was developed by Japanese studios, rather than being outsourced to a western studio like in the case of Evolved.
• Special Effects Failure:
  • Several of the vehicles in the game have their window textures missing.
  • Destroyed cars don't explode so much as "poof".
  • The illusion of a war-torn city is done simply by slapping fire textures everywhere, which are clearly doing no visible burn damage to the structures they're placed on. It's most apparent on crates, where, despite being made of wood, they look normal under the fire, and not charred and crackling like they should be.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: There's a highly detailed promotional artwork that shows five highly advanced robotic wolves with the title of the game in the center of the picture which seems to imply that they must have some sort of relevance to the story. But the robotic wolves are never seen in the game.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The entire premise of giving a pedestrian's view of trying to navigate and survive in the middle of a battlefield dominated by Humongous Mecha could lead to all sorts of awesome and fresh stealth gameplay. Sadly, this game makes very little use of that. The levels take place not during large-scale battles, but in recently occupied territories where the enemies are calmly patrolling around. The Wanzers themselves mainly just stand in place and cause an Instant Kill on the player if spotted.

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