YMMV / Reverse: 1999

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Especially thanks to the One Flew Over The Old House side-event, some fans like to depict Jessica as a highly possessive, mentally unstable, and violent Yandere for Blonney, with Jessica learning how to game the St. Pavlov Foundation's assessment of her danger level, and learning how to put up a convincing front to everyone else.
• Awesome Art: The character art and design for Reverse 1999 is widely praised for good reason. The water painting style are just....mesmerizing.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Thanks to the rarity system, the specializations of many characters, and the sheer spike in base stats and difficulty for endgame content like Limbo and later UTTU stages, there are some arcanists and strategies that are often seen as necessary, or just the least painful ways to clear this content.
  • If you need a top-tier Plant DPS team, good luck finding any guides that recommend anyone other than Jessica and Sotheby as the keystone members. Plant arcanists are heavily reliant on their ability to deal negative status effects, Jessica's damage becomes obscene with enough negative status effects on the enemy (her 2-3* incanations rivaling the output of ultimates), and Sotheby is a reliable poison-dealer and healer that compresses two key roles in one slot, saving resources and adding flexibility.
  • At some point in the gameplay, enemies just start dealing too much DPS for you to willingly go without a dedicated healer, and expect that healer to more often than not be Balloon Party. BP has a "% of health missing" heal that can save a floundering team, at 2* her healing incantation gives Counter that will help contribute much-needed damage to the team and help clear content faster to reach par number of turns, and she's relatively easier to get and build than stronger healers like Sotheby and Medicine Pocket.
  • The most common strategy in harder content is "DPS, lots of it," with one main DPS carry, a dedicated healer, and a support who more often than not boosts the damage numbers to obscene levels or improves survival for a few more turns till you can nuke the opposition. Defensive support characters like Ms. NewBabel are oftentimes overlooked except for niche strategies specifically using lower stars and underused arcanists as the fight dragging on longer is the worst thing you could want for efficiency and reward's sake.
  • Tooth Fairy is one of the meta healers across numerous strategies. Her Baby Teeth passive is incredibly useful for weakening the enemy with criticals, she has powerful and consistent healing, and one of the few arcanists who can use a team-wide Cleanse to remove nasty debuffs. Rarely is the good doctor ever found sitting out a battle, if the player and the strategists can help it.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: It's already been implied in the text that arcanists are all neurodivergent to some degree, thanks to the intersection of mental faculties and arcane powers, but discussions about this are most prominent with 37. She has both an extreme talent for and a hyper-fixation on math, the rest of her behavior can be quite strange, and her social skills are distinctly lacking. While on Apeiron, she is seen as a child prodigy and is highly valued and respected there, to everyone in the Suitcase and to the players, she appears to be on the Autism Spectrum.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: With a cast this diverse and numerous thanks to being a multicultural gacha game, it's inevitable that some characters who have minimal or no involvement with the stories develop a passionate fanbase regardless.
  • The biggest example is Door, an animate, sentient piece of shattered glass that was from a broken door, hence his name. He is but a pitiful 2* arcanist whose whole gimmick is to sacrifice himself to provide faster ultimates to the rest of the team, before a much better backliner replaces him. However, the sheer absurdity of even having a piece of talking, floating glass has endeared many fans to him.
  • Tennant has yet to find a role in the main story, but due to her unabashedly Butch Lesbian design with her sharp suit, her many out and proud moments of attraction to other women, and her deep, sultry English VA, she has quite the fanbase.
  • Tooth Fairy is incredibly popular, being a Creepy Good dentist with a sympathetic backstory involving racism and corruption in medical trials, her unique design with her orthodontic brace, and her English VA's soothing speaking voice and especially her singing. Some players attest that they were uninterested in trying to gamble with the gacha to acquire her, until they experienced the event and suddenly wanted to collect her for her own sake. It also definitely helps that Tooth Fairy is one of the best support/healer characters for Critical oriented teams.
  • Horropedia is quickly gaining a following, due to his Cloudcuckoolander tendencies, his nerdy passion for horror movies, and his simple but cute appearance.
  • Despite being a 4* character who is difficult to use in high-level, endgame content, Pavia has a massive following in the fanbase for his criminally good looks, his friendly and playful personality mixed with his violent psychotic behavior, and his tragic, sympathetic backstory as an abused, unwanted child who grew up to be taken advantage of by organized crime. It's notable that in a cast as incredibly large as this and how few skins they release each patch, Pavia has a paid skin by Patch 1.5, The Uluru Games. Gameplay-wise, he's also quite popular as a DPS who can punch surprisingly high above his rarity class, doing more reliable mass damage than some higher rarity DPS, and is cheaper and easier to acquire and upgrade, to boot.
  • You'll find no shortage of fans who are incredibly fond of A Knight, despite him being a pair of gauntlets, a cape, and a sword inhabited by the chivalrous spirit of a knight. There is an abundance of fanart hypothesizing what sort of dashing good looks A Knight if he is just an invisible man than a spirit possessing floating objects, but many don't even need the implication of an invisible humanoid body to fall for this knight's charming voice, honorable demeanor, and moments of levity and mischievousness.
• Friendly Fandoms: With Arknights. Plenty of Arknights fans are drawn to Reverse: 1999 due to the latter featuring prominent English dub like the former, both games having certain similarities in their lore and themes as well as certain gameplay elements, and having similarly diverse and numerous casts.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Bkornblume. She has burst damage that eclipses many 6* arcanists, but she’s only 5* so she’s easier to summon. Her AOE attack incantation does damage comparable to single target incantations and she has one of the most damaging, single target Ultimates in the game which is capable of preventing enemies from casting their ultimates or reducing their Moxie as a nice bonus. If you have Bkornblume in your party, you can steamroll through most of the story content.
  • Centurion is widely considered to be the best 6* and DPS specialist in the game, bar none. Her attack damage can reach ridiculous numbers as it's always boosted by a certain percentage of her Moxie, she has incantations that help give her bonus Moxie to keep the assault going, and she has both single-target and AOE damage, with her ultimate having a whopping 300% multiplier on top of hitting the entire enemy team. Tellingly, you can deploy her solo and she could very easily destroy the enemies outright before they have a chance to take her out.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Whilst the game is Chinese, it is far more popular in the West. No surprise given the sheer background diversity of the characters with exceptionally good English VAs.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • During the "Your Long-lost Friends" event in early 2024 (in the global server), if it had been a while since you last logged in, you would get treated to a cutscene of the characters missing Vertin and wondering where she is, only for her to arrive right then and announce she's back.
• Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Perhaps to no one's surprise as she's a charismatic gacha game protagonist who doesn't have a blank personality, Vertin has a number of romantic pairings, or is the most common connection of polyamorous relationships. For some examples:
  • Vertin x Schneider ("Verneider") is one of the most popular, thanks to their tumultuous, whirlwind, and incredibly romantic subtext-heavy relationship throughout the first 2 chapters. Not even Schneider being reversed has dampened the enthusiasm any, and fanart and fanfiction abound.
  • Vertin x Sonetto ("Vernetto") is a close runner-up, capitalizing on Sonetto's intense loyalty and affection for Vertin and having been childhood best friends. There's also Sonetto's numerous moments that could be taken as romantic attraction, such as the infamous "cheek kissing" line in the main screen.
  • Vertin x Regulus ("Reguvert") comes in third or another second, with how significant Regulus is as the very first arcanist Vertin had ever successfully saved with the Suitcase, and the entertaining contrast between their personalities.
  • Vertin x Sonetto x Matilda is seen as one way to resolve both Matilda's extremely heavily implied romantic crush on Sonetto while also not denying Sonetto's romantic feelings for Vertin.
• Les Yay: The game has a surprisingly large amount of content and characters that involve or could be taken as homosexual attraction and actions between women:
  • Tennant is a Butch Lesbian, dressed in traditionally manly clothing, and her Insight II art has her doing a Wall Pin of Love to another woman.
  • Schneider is implied to have kissed Vertin under an umbrella after the events of Chapter 2, not to mention her constantly calling Vertin "my lord" well before that and their... complicated relationship overall that can be read as an "Enemies to Lovers" story.
  • Sonetto has a strong admiration for Vertin that borders on romantic attraction, and even gets jealous when she witnesses Schneider kissing Vertin above. She is also quite eager to ask Vertin to help her practice the Italian practice of cheek kissing. Many were also quite quick to notice that in the end CG of A Nightmare at Green Lake, a sleeping Sonetto is leaning on Vertin and clutching her arm to snuggle up against it.
  • Necrologist implies that Vertin collects "Girls Sensual Parts" clippings, and not as part of her archival duties in preserving what she can out of doomed timelines.
  • Matilda's intense jealousy and obsession over Sonetto can be read as a rival not realizing her feelings go beyond a simple desire to overtake them and "win" the competition in her head. It does not help that she pays unusual attention to Sonetto's appearance, admiring how her hair has gotten longer and saying that she smells nice.
  • Even before the reveal of Blonney and Jessica's true relationship as estranged childhood friends, Blonney was quite intimately close with "Anne" despite only having met her that day. The CG of them sitting alone together on a couch and talking about how they rather like each other have been ripe ground for shipping, not to mention the ending showing Blonney and Jessica reconciling as they're leaning against each other asleep in the back of the car.
• LGBT Fanbase: Aside from the copious amounts of Les Yay mentioned above that attracted lesbian players and Yuri fans, the game also has gay players and Yaoi fans thanks to the attractive designs and unique personalities of the male characters (APPLe and A Knight being quite popular). The game also has explicitly non-binary characters, such as Medicine Pocket, who have attracted similarly gender-nonconforming players.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The Bri*ish Gacha Game^ExplanationDue to the sheer amount of British VAs voicing British characters despite the fact that the game has a wide and diverse range of cast from various nations, Reverse 1999 has garnered a reputation as THAT "British Gacha Game".
  • A Gacha Game directed by Christopher Nolan^ExplanationPopularised by Gigguk due to how cinematic the trailers are, especially when it comes to themes of time travel and dimensional breaking which is typical of most Christopher Nolan films.
  • Oranges.^{Explanation (Spoilers for Chapter 2)}Schneider dies at the end, traumatizing both players and Vertin alike. The game often represented Schneider with oranges, after her family's orange orchard, and there is even a psychube called "Loss" represented by an orange. As a result, some players post images of oranges to mourn Schneider, sometimes peeled, eaten, or being violently destroyed in some way.
  • "Vertin has a type."^ExplanationSonetto and Schneider have shown intense, homoerotic attraction to Vertin, and Schneider has even stolen a kiss from her at the end of Chapter 2. As both are also Italian or of Italian descent, players like to joke that Vertin has a thing for Italian women.
  • "So you have a mother!"^ExplanationThe Global Release Trailer has Regulus suddenly saying that line while Vertin is explaining the mystery with her Missing Mom. It would become one of her signature catchphrases as she says it again later in the story, this time to 37.
  • Vertin the Rizzkeeper^ExplanationBecause Vertin is a Magnetic Hero who singlehandedly convinces countless arcanists to join her side, and has a history of several other women ambiguously romantically falling for her, many joke that instead of Timekeeper, they should call her this, because of her boundless charisma, unfailing ability to bring anyone to her side, and make women fall for her.
• One True Pairing:
  • Rarely do you find anyone that doesn't ship Blonney x Jessica, also known as "Blossica." The rampant Les Yay in their A Nightmare At Green Lake cutscenes even when Jessica was still disguised as "Anne" aside, fans have only latched even harder for how the two are estranged childhood best friends now reunited, and Blonney has made very good on her promise to be a better friend to Jessica, referencing their renewed friendship in Blonney's voicelines and playing a prominent role in Jessica's side-event, One Flew Over The Old House.
  • Despite Schneider's death in Chapter 2 by reversal, fans have continued to ferociously ship her and Vertin, almost considering them a canon couple. This is only helped by how Schneider constantly shows up in official art and promotions hanging out with Vertin in some way, and of course, all the rampant homoerotic moments they have despite their short history with each other.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Of the two first anecdotes, "The Story of Oliver" is far more emotionally charged, delving deep into Oliver's backstory:
    • Oliver and A Knight initially have a tense one-sided relationship that reveals how Oliver is afraid of the fog, as he sees it as devouring everything within its grasp, from voices and wishes to his dreams of having a normal life and eventually his father's life, and is terrified that he will also die to it in the near future.
    • By the climax of the anecdote, A Knight activates their strongest attack to defeat the critters and places their hand on Oliver afterward, reminding him vividly how his father once saved him from the fog, bringing light and hope to him and understanding what it means to be a Fogwalker before venturing off to the fog and never return alive. Tears flow from Oliver's eyes as he looks up to A Knight, with the latter even saying the same words as they return to Vertin.
      Mr. Fogwalker/A Knight: "Oliver, let's go home."
• That One Level: The Tutorial levels teaching you about various game mechanics such as crowd control like pertification and silence, the importance of the casting order of different types of spell like Buffs and Attack spells, and target priority can be brutally difficult. All your characters are oftentimes weakened to the point that any attack will instantly kill them and automatically fail the level, the cards are always arranged and spawn in a predetermined order, and you have to figure out the one, exact order of cards to play and enemies to prioritize to win the round. A single mistake is all it takes to lose, which has led to many frustrated players going to YouTube and being thankful that someone has put up video walkthroughs showing the solutions.
• Subbing Versus Dubbing: In a unique exception for most Gacha Games. But whilst the JP VAs are pretty good, Reverse 1999 is widely regarded by many, to have one of the best EN VAs in the genre, as not only are the character accents authentic to the nationality they represent, but they provide a level of gravitas that typical EN VAs are often criticized for. Given how heavily set the game is in Europe and the West, a lot of fans actually recommend switching to the English dub for a more authentic experience. In a twist, it should be noted that in this case however, the English voices are the original ones, as even the Chinese voices were only added in a later patch during the original release in China.