YMMV / Path to Nowhere

• Alternate Character Interpretation: The end of Floral Unfurl and Shalom's interrogation call into question a few things about the character.
  • Does she see others as tools to be used against Paradeisos, or is she genuine about her sentiments even if she keeps her actual method secret? On the one hand, she brainwashes Christina and Rahu and attempts to do the same to Coquelic. On the other, given her actual motivation, it's possible she never lied to them. Despite looking like Shalom abandoned her once she had outlived her use, Christina is allowed to leave without having her mind tampered with after once she helps Shalom finds the Garden, which ultimately allows her to be more skeptical and begin pursuing truth and justice without Shalom's manipulation. Rahu is put in a position where she is able to gather sympathetic allies who are victimized by the same sort of people who sacrificed her squad.
  • Despite knowing how she manipulated them, are Rahu's and Christina's positive feelings toward her a result of being brainwashed, or do they genuinely like or are sympathetic toward her? Christina herself wonders this, but a later evaluation by Paradeisos suggests that Christina's mind was not fully controlled, which further calls Shalom's motive into question and suggests that at least some of Christina's feelings toward Shalom are genuine.
• Awesome Art: The backdrop of cutscenes are drawn beautifully and vibrantly. The Sinners themselves are drawn in a semi-realistic style that is just gorgeous.
• Broken Base: The Sound-Effect Bleep when a character swears. Some players don't mind it since it's such a small detail and creates a comedic dissonance when characters like Hella speak or it's a effort at censorship that just doesn't make sense in a game with so many dark themes already.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Labyrinth is generally considered the best core-breaker in the game for single cores, and she's given to you for free at the start of the game. This is because her ultimate resets if she manages to put any enemy into a corebroken state, allowing her to spam her ultimate indefinitely for all enemies on the map. As a B-rank, her duplicates are easy to get even with minimum spins of the gacha and she requires less resources to raise.
  • Hecate is no slouch, either. With her exclusive crimebrand unlocked, her ultimate summons a spirit that can break two cores at once and stay on the field to do damage, essentially allowing you to have two units for the cost of one. While you can only get Hecate dupes from the main story, this isn't much of a problem considering her base kit is already so packed.
  • Che can only be obtained from the gacha, but he is only a B-rank sinner on top of being an effective core breaker. His ultimate recharges extremely quickly, allowing him to break many cores in a short timeframe.
  • For players who manage to acquire NOX (which is rather simple, the only requirement being completing a number of timed objectives in the beginner's event), once they properly level her there are few reasons to ever not bring her to a map. She is the best Sinner in the game for the purpose of clearing mobs and does amazing damage. Once you acquire her Exclusive Crimebrand, her ultimate allows her to do burst damage, break one core of all enemies in range, and become progressively tankier while her ult is active.
  • When it comes to the Chief's abilities, of which there are seven at time of writing, most people will always choose Empower (with some exceptions, such as maps that encourage the use of a specific ability to manipulate the environment). This is because Empower charges a Sinner's Energy, which allows them to use their Ultimate more often or when the player needs them to. This makes Empower the most flexible ability, allowing it to fill in any job the player needs it to so long that at least one Sinner is able to do that job.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Ariel is very popular for her healing capabilities, her helpful yet clumsy nature, and her tragic backstory.
  • Cinnabar gets a lot of love from lesbian and yuri fans due to her short hair giving her a handsome appearance. Helps that she's one of the nicer sinners.
  • Summer has many fans who love her Genki Girl nature and scientific prowess.
  • Countess Chelsea currently does not have any role whatsoever in the main story or events. Despite this, her openly flirtatious behavior toward the Chief, her incredibly attractive design and her often outrageous action garnered a great many fans.
  • 036 is rather popular for an unplayable character who only appears in the early chapters for being a rare prominent male character in the story and for being a ruthless but consistently honest and loyal ally who sacrifices his life to save the Chief, making for a memorable moment for many players.
• Evil Is Cool: Shalom, being among the most ruthless and manipulative character in the game, and is so successful at what she does that it's hard to not admire her craft and style. The Rain Burst and Flora Unfurl event show how she more or less outplay all parties involved, including Rahu, Christina, Coquelic and Paradeisos itself, among others.
• Fandom Rivalry: One with Goddess of Victory: NIKKE, due to both being gacha games that released at approximately the same time. Fans of Path to Nowhere argue that the better monetisation schemes and less buggy release makes it the superior game. Meanwhile, NIKKE fans who enjoy the game are tired of hearing Path to Nowhere fans praising their game, even on threads that do not warrant it. Expect any threads talking about Path to Nowhere's revenue to be filled with comments bringing up NIKKE's as an argument, and for any threads discussing NIKKE's bugs to be loaded with comparisons to Path to Nowhere's current state.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Cinnabar is often called "Cinnabae" by the fanbase for being both attractive and unfailingly chivalrous and friendly.
  • Serpent is occasionally nicknamed as "Snake" or "Snek".
• LGBT Fanbase: The inclusion of many tough and hardened female criminals appealed heavily to lesbian and bisexual women. A vast majority of Chief x Sinner fanart and fanfiction involves lesbian pairings.
  • Zoya is an incredibly popular character with lesbians for her butch look and ship tease with both the Chief and Bai Yi.
  • Cinnabar's attractive and androgynous look as well as her princely demeanor makes her very popular with women. Appropriately, she admits to have received many confessions from women in-universe too, and she is possibly a lesbian woman herself, given that her dialogue is more intimate with a Female Chief compared to a Male one.
  • Tetra and Pricilla, the Robber Rabbit & Fox duo, are the only Sinners who share their video introduction, in which Tetra explicitly states it's "romantic" that she's leaving everything to Pricilla. Their Exclusive Crimebrands also feature each other.
  • Lots of fans love Iron and Anne's moments together, being head doctor and head nurse of SALVA. Iron calling Anne "her head nurse" and Anne kicking a medical magazine under a couch that slandered Iron's name. Not to mention, Anne is shown in Iron's Exclusive Crimeband, a scene of the first time they met. It's no wonder fans enjoy shipping these two.
  • Shalom's and Rahu's interactions are dripping with romantic undertone, regardless of how genuine it is on Shalom's part. Christina too, to a lesser extent, who outright says she "still has feelings" for Shalom after discovering how she had been manipulated.
  • On the other hand, Demon is very popular with gay men for his brooding personality and attractively hunky body.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • Summer is considered one of the worst launch S-rank sinners who needs duplicates so she can unlock her maximum potential. Her main problem is her start-up time in dealing damage is slow, and by then, the fight is usually over.
  • Crache might be worse overall. Her damage and core-breaking utility doesn't even outmatch Labyrinth, a free B-rank unit, and as an S-rank she needs many more resources to get going. Unlike Summer, even her dupes don't help her particularly much.
  • While popular for her attractive design and interesting writing, Stargazer is often considered rather subpar in gameplay for her relatively low damage output compared to her peers for someone with not much utility in her kit either. This is because in order to make full use of her ultimate called Land of Dreams, she first needs to summon two Victory Stars on the field in order to inflict 60/70/80% of self-attack magic damage to self and all the Victory Stars in the nine-square area every second for 8 seconds. The first problem with this is waiting for her to summon two Victory Stars and by the time she does that, the fight will be halfway over. The second problem is keeping herself and two Victory Stars alive long enough to activate her ultimate as both are Glass Cannon that can't survive long without healing support. Given how Victory Stars have to be positioned to make use of nine-square area damage to maximum, it can be hard to position Victory Stars safely for maximum effectiveness if players do not plan accordingly. To make matters worse, her banner was immediately followed by Eirene's, a Sinner of the same class who was widely considered the best magical DPS at the time.
  • Despite characters like Cinnabar and Demon being very popular, the Endura class is often considered to be not worthwhile due to the fact that their damage output is substantially lower and the Fury class can fill the tank role just as well, especially when combined with a Crimebrand that lets them block two enemies.
• Magnificent Bastard: Shalom. Through both the Rain Burst and Floral Unfurl events, She plays simultaneous games of chess with the Underground, the Garden, Paradeisos, Rahu, Christina and Coquelic and pretty much come out on top with all her goals achieved. She made two people who came after her for revenge her subordinates. She baited an attack from the Garden and use them to eliminate Underground elements. She fakes a massacre on the garden to provoke an attack from Coquelic, very nearly successfully brainwashing her if not for Christina's intervention. She successfully avoids being "decommissioned" and replaced, effectively putting the HUSH unit on ice. She manages to slip Rahu into Paradeisos, which will provide valuable knowledge and connections to the Chief through Rahu's interrogation in the future. Even her seemingly failed attempt on the Chief's life achieves the intended purpose of putting them out of reach of both the Underground and Paradeisos.
• Memetic Mutation: Path to Nowhere has spawned its fair share of memes.
  • Touching Zoya's abs. ^Explanation Zoya has very prominent abdominal muscles, which led to jokes about the MBCC letting other sinners touch them as a source of motivation.
  • You forced me to do this! ^Explanation EMP says this during her ultimate, which caught flack due to how often players heard it and its shrill-sounding nature. Used generally as a joke amongst the community whenever something unpleasant comes up.
  • Coquelic is a limited unit. ^Explanation After it is announced that Coquelic would be removed from all future banners for currently undisclosed reason a few months after her debut, players joke that alongside Deren and Shalom, Coquelic is a limited sinner since at least Chinese players would not be able to get her after her banner. At time of writing, it is unclear what will happen to her in the global version of the game, and many players essentially treat her banner as limited alongside Shalom's due to her uncertain fate going forward.
• Narm: You're asked to name the Chief at the start of the game, however because that name also serves as a unique identifier to other players, it can't be a name that another player is already using, which means common first names are out the window for most players and a lot of players end up using common Internet username conventions (numbers, decorative letters, etc) to name the Chief. This gets awkward when dialogue refers to the Chief by name, such as when a Sinner has a friendly and heartwarming conversation with you...and they refer to you as "XxAlicexX" or "Bob12345" or whatever.
• Viewer Gender Confusion:
  • Many players thought Cinnabar was male thanks to her short hair and relatively flat chest.
  • Che has occasionally been mistaken for female thanks to his long ponytail. His Chinese voice also sounds more feminine than other languages.
  • Some players have confused Tetra for a pretty man.
• The Woobie:
  • When we first meet her, Hecate is almost completely emotionless and just does what you ask because you're the new Chief. It implies that something happened to her in the past. Her mirage is an absolute Tear Jerker as well.
  • Even before she became a sinner, Ariel didn't have the best life. Her father is abusive towards her even before he learnt she became a sinner, didn't even care that she had gone missing, and even attempts to shoot his own daughter after finding out.
  • Anne was born in the Syndicate slums, had to take care of herself and her ill parents who died nine years ago because her family couldn't afford the medical treatment, probably at a young age. But who knows how she managed to get into one of the best medical schools, Banyan Medical College, which some students find people from Syndicate revolting and hoodlums, managing to get a nurse degree through self-study and a job at a first-line Eastside Hospital. Unforunately the Syndican-Eastside isolation zone she volunteered in to help years ago turned out to be a A Mania outbreak that the FAC sealed off to prevent contamination allowing 89 people except Anne as the sole survivior because she became a Sinner, to die. To hit it further, she promised the patients there that they will be fine giving them hope till they died anyway, Paige's death was the one who hit Anne the most as the girl was very close to the nurse. So Anne seeing the Grey-Haired girl die must've reminded Anne of Paige (because they were close in age) meaning she's just seeing Paige die again in a way.