My Time at Portia / YMMV

Broken Base:
- The end result of a certain character's post-marriage side quest line. More specifically, Ginger's, which leads up to her death with no way to save her. Some praise it for taking the game in a direction that predecessors in the same genre are rarely willing to go ^note, while others are turned off by the fact that it exists in the game at all with no way to change how it ends, under the belief that it has no place for a game intended for escapism.
- In a later patch, the ability to prolong her life was added, via a reoccurring monthly sidequest, but there's no way to outright cure her.
Game-Breaker:
- The Fire-Powered Generator along with Conductive Wooden/Igneous Flooring, at least until once you unlock the factory. Once you have a pair of the generators and have your work area covered with said flooring (which are cheap to build), anything except the basic furnace can now be powered by a centralized wood power source. Even running the Electric Furnace, which requires expensive late-game Condensed Power Stones, poses no big deal as you can now run them off wooden fuel instead of needing to go ruin-diving for the otherwise rare power sources. The only catch is you may need to scale up with more generators if you need to run more devices at the same time— one generator is good for two devices running concurrently, and overloading the generators will cause production speed to suffer.
- Ability to have your buddy fighting for you. While most of them take out an enemy slower than the Player Character, will periodically suffer Non-Lethal K.O., and won't attack certain types of enemy at all, they allow you to gather as much loot and Experience Points as if you took it out yourself. To milk it for all it's worth, go to a dungeon (where a few hours in-universe means infinite seconds for you), lead him into a fight, and collect all the loots while minimizing your HP and SP drain. Even bosses aren't immune.
Player Punch:
- The chain of side quests for Ginger if you marry her. It takes an extensive amount of time to activate (more than what most people will likely devote to a single playthrough), but when it does, Ginger will pass away at the end of it. A Tear Jerker on its own, but the game even goes out of its way to give you a side quest to collect the ingredients for medicine that Dr. Xu hopes to alleviate her illness, only for said medicine to be ineffective. And let's not get started on her diary that you get afterwards... A later update makes it so you can prolong her life indefinitely, at the expense of wasting time on a monthly recurring quest.
- To a lesser extent if you marry Aadit, as they leave town during the main story and never return, leaving behind a letter saying they still love you but must leave for reasons. The other townsfolk give two opposing theories as to why they left, one being that they felt unsafe. The other one is what pushes it into this trope. It's possible that Aadit was the Rogue Knight, whose plans you personally foiled, all along, and much of his cowardly personality was a lie to hide his true strength. Even worse if this is why the player liked him, as it means the entire relationship was possibly built on a lie. While he claims to still love the builder in his letter, he DID choose to up and leave his husband/wife (and possibly children) behind, out of fear or the fact that said spouse trounced him and ruined his mission.
Porting Disaster: The console versions, the Switch version in particular. On top of the console versions being an earlier build of the game at the time, the Switch version is distinct in that many elements were taken out, presumably to make it run on the device, from missing sound clips to the removal of certain graphical details like individual blades of grass. It was also plagued by bad load times that did not exist in the PC version.
Scrappy Mechanic: There's no way knowing whichever Assembly Diagram the research center is working on, and it is determined the day the researching started.
Ugly Cute: The Hulu brothers are a group of portly brothers with huge noses and bad facial hair... who also happen to be some of the nicest and friendliest characters in the game, making them very endearing.
Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Lee being the local Minister for the Church of Light, a techno-phobic religion, almost always decries the use of any pre-apocalypse tech. While his reasons may be justified, a lot of the bigger projects Portia undergoes to prosper require said tech; at one point you are required to talk to Sister Nora, who knows a thing or two about propellers. Lee butts in and calls the project "corrupt", trying to play on Nora's feelings towards her family's company (which makes war tech) to dissuade her from helping you. What horrific, corrupt evil tech are you trying to make? A bomber plane? A nuclear sub? No, a wind farm to provide power to the new region of town. He is also the most outspoken advocate over destroying Ack, and is unsympathetic at the research center being robbed of its computer, actually trying to make the Civil Corps drop the case. Thankfully nobody in town listens to him, correctly reasoning that nobody in Portia is trying to build weapons of war and restart the apocalypse, they are just trying to make Portia a nicer place to live and establish a community with the other free cities. And that’s to say nothing about him sabotaging a robot the Research Center was attempting to restore, causing it to go amok and attempt to destroy the town.

YMMV / My Time at Portia

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