YMMV / Tail Concerto

• Awesome Music: Even as the earliest entry in the series, this game still has its fair share of memorable (if short) tunes. See the series' general Awesome Music page for details.
• Breather Level: Despite being a Slippy-Slidey Ice World, Coolant falls into this since the area are spacious enough for the ice physics to not be an issue, the stage itself is only two small arenas, and you only visit there once as opposed to every other world where you visit them at least twice. You'll sigh with relief considering it comes right after That One Level.
• Difficulty Spike: The fairness rating takes a massive divebomb by the time you reach the Hidden Base stage, as you have to put up with enemies that are more mobile than you are, death traps that can stun-lock you to death, and bosses with much more demanding patterns and harsher damage outputs to punish you for screwing up. It doesn't get any easier from there-on, as with the exception of Coolant, the game gets tougher as you'll be locked in Zerg Rushes against lots of enemy mechs, encounter even more traps, and all this on top of the game's persistence of precise platforming in a mech that doesn't allow for easy mobility. And the less said about the final boss, the better.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Panta, thanks in combination of Small Name, Big Ego, his chibi design, as well as his ambiguous species and age making him ripe for all sorts of insane origins stories.
  • Princess Theria due to her shapely design and rather thrill-seeking personality.
  • Cyan too, if only for his Butt-Monkey status that shines whenever he is trying to "help".
• Harsher in Hindsight: The plot point about there having been a war between the dog- and cat-people in the past, and it resulting in cat-people being persecuted (which was likely a lie made up by Fool) becomes a lot more serious after seeing in Fuga: Melodies of Steel that— albeit in somewhere entirely different to Prairie— there really was a war involving a population of Caninu who wanted to subjugate the Felineko.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The Mechanical Lifeform that awakens at the end of the game is named the Iron Giant.
  • Regardless of which dub you listen to, Alicia is voiced by anime veterans who played a major role in Neon Genesis Evangelion (her English actress, Amanda Winn-Lee, voiced Rei Ayanami, while her Japanese actress, Yuko Miyamura, voiced Asuka Langley Soryu). Then came Solatorobo, the spiritual sequel to Tail Concerto, which has a story many agree to be one huge Whole-Plot Reference to Evangelion.
• Memetic Mutation: Cyan's infamous scream in Grimto.
• Popular with Furries: Just like the rest of the Little Tail Bronx series, what with it featuring a cast of anthropomorphic cats and dogs.
• Scrappy Mechanic: As mentioned on the main page, the dive maneuver is never explained at all in-game and is only given a passing mention in its manual. Combined with how easy it is to accidentally input its command, how fast and far it takes you as well as not being able to cancel out of the animation, and you have a defensive move that is more harmful than anything else, making you take a lot of unnecessary damage and deaths.
• Surprise Difficulty: The game is a cutesy adventure platformer with the controls being (mostly) easy to pick up and play, but the bosses are deceptively tough, despite their easy to learn patterns, and even the fairness takes a bit of a nosedive as the later batch of stages gives off the impression that the developers were making levels for a different game, requiring the flexibility that this game doesn't always give you.
• That One Attack:
  • The Cat Tank Mk-II you fight in Grimto isn't difficult, it's just tanky. That said, letting it get too close will cause it to attack you with a slam-slap attack that effortlessly deals a crap ton of damage. On Hard Mode, it's a One-Hit Kill.
  • As mentioned below, The Final Boss's laser attack and ram are disproportionally fast and deals a huge chunk of damage. What makes it more frustrating is that they are possible to avoid, it just requires using the extremely finicky dive maneuver that you'll most likely have no reason to use before or even know it exists.
• That One Boss: The Final Boss is easily the most difficult one in the game, but many of the reasons why it's the most difficult are cheap and some likely weren't intentional. For starters, it has a 2-hit laser attack that, if Waffle so much as grazes the first hit, will automatically connect with the second even if he doesn't appear to be nearly close enough to get hit by it. And the way it's aimed is inconsistent, as sometimes it will fire wherever Waffle is but other times it will fire where he's going to be, meaning you can fully anticipate the attack and move out of the way only to get hit anyway. Then there's its ramming attack, which tracks quickly to where Waffle is standing and is very fast, making it nigh-impossible to dodge unless you get lucky and therefore guaranteeing some damage unless you do get lucky or otherwise disrupt the attack by stunning the robot. And doing that requires you to actively plan out when you're going to stun the boss by counting the number of shots you need to do so, since if you interrupt it at the wrong time it will automatically do the ramming attack. And lastly, the boss is a Damage-Sponge Boss, effectively making it an endurance round where you have to learn every possible way to avoid taking damage, or else burn through your whistles at an alarming rate.
• That One Level: Talk to anyone who've played this game and they will tell you that the Abandoned Factory/Secret Base stage is the absolute worst out of all of the locations. Unlike the other stages that are more open-world and free roaming, this stage is a long, tightly designed, fast paced platforming level that looks like it would fit right at home in a Mega Man game, filled with all kinds of death traps and enemies that will reduce your health to nothing. Unfortunately, the controls were not built with this kind of level design in mind, as the Police Robo is too slippery even with the sensitivity set to its lowest setting and it has a bit of a delay to its inputs making the already difficult level harder than it needs to be (and as mentioned on the main page, no, the hover ability cannot be used to correct your jumps). It gets worse towards the end, where you're forced into a vertical climbing section filled with all of the precise platforming issues with a strict 5-minute Self-Destruct Mechanism stacked on top of it. Failure to reach the top in time is an instant death, and you have to restart the sequence from the bottom again assuming you have continues.
• Uncertain Audience: This is what Hiroshi Matsuyama believes as to what killed sales expectations for Tail Concerto, as it was considered too cutesy to be taken seriously by older audiences, but had a control scheme too complicated for younger players to grasp.