YMMV / TearRing Saga

• Broken Base: One arose over the second fan translation. Initially praised for not being the "Blind Idiot" Translation the original patch was, it was later found out that the second patch was more of a fan-localization than translation, and it had re-written a few plot points in a way that, its translator believed, improved the plot. The controversy wasn't so much that these changes happened, it was that the translator kept quiet about them on purpose, knowing how controversial localization changes are in the Fire Emblem fandom. This, combined with the game's obscurity, meant many fans weren't aware these plot points were changed. Eventually the translator came forward and apologised for the lack of transparency and said that people have all right to criticise his changes if they want to, and that he regrets making some of the changes in hindsight, which alleviated most of the tension.
• Cult Classic: Barely anybody has played it, but the few that did have nothing but praises for it. Especially the sequel, Berwick Saga, which had even less players but even harder praises.
• Epileptic Trees: While some of the game's ties to Fire Emblem back when it was Emblem Saga are well-known and confirmed, many fans speculate that Hagar was originally intended to be Jake, due to his almost identical class, appearance and personality, and the borderline Easter Egg nature of his recruitment.
• Fandom Rivalry: It's common for fans of this game to dislike Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade. As seen under Hilarious in Hindsight below, this game has a few plot points that are suspiciously similar to the seventh Fire Emblem, leading some of its detractors to claim this game is "FE7 done right" and to suspect that Kaga originally came up with these plot points and later entries copied from notes he left behind. (Though currently unproven, this theory is very prevalent among fans of Kaga's games.)
• Game-Breaker:
  • Narron, thanks to his Elite skill and his excellent promotion to Gold Knight, is almost guaranteed to become a powerhouse if you train him. Not bad for one of the first units you recruit.
  • Zeek is, quite frankly, completely insane. He has everything a unit could possibly want: a horse, great bases, great growths, no terrain penalties, and he even has the bonus of being immune to having cursed weapons backfire on him. He only has one flaw: he betrays you midway through the game.
  • Shigen's personal sword, Dullahan, revives him with full HP whenever he gets killed. This is not a one-time thing, in fact, it can actually happen multiple times in the same turn, and the only downside is him losing his attacks in that combat. Basically, as long as the sword lasts he's immortal, and in a game with Permadeath that's a really big deal. You can afford to be a lot more reckless with him than you would with anyone else, hell, he functions as a pretty effective meatshield in a pinch. Just be careful not to use the sword too much early on.
  • Renee has better bases and growths than any other healer in the game, enough Mastery to use any staff, and can use the Exorcise staff to instantly kill a number of monsters equal to her Magic (which is 16 at base). But what really lets her break the game is her personal staff - Warp, which can transport a unit to any traversable square on the map. Pair her up with Plum and her Dance skill, and it's possible to get one-turn clears on every single map on Holmes' route from Chapter 30 onwards.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • The Opus/Ahriman/Mogall (depending on which translation you're going by) monsters take this up to eleven. They're weak, and have reasonably low HP, but decent Speed and a 'weapon' with 0 weight, meaning they're pretty hard to double and they double you surprisingly often. They can fly, so weak characters in the rear aren't safe, and they're probably going to get doubled too. But what's the worst thing about them? They multiply. Leave even a few alive and they'll become a massive swarm in the space of a few turns. Their King Mook form can even spawn more (up to 4 per turn, which can still divide the turn they're spawned!). And you have to go through an entire chapter filled with them.
  • The Thief Sword toting Myrmidons in Map 26B. Anyone they so much as scratch loses one of their weapons. Forever. They can't steal *-ranked weapons, but equipping one won't stop them from cleaning out everything else in your inventory.
  • Map 26A's gimmick is invisible enemies you can't target on the Player Phase, and they're all around the three hallways you have to pass through. You can technically kill them with counterattacks, but most of them use siege weapons, long-range tomes, or Arbalests (4 range crossbow) which makes that very, very unlikely. Frustratingly, one of the villages gives the player a Longbow as an example of the kind of weapon that's able to fire back. Given that it's 3-range and most of the enemies have 4 or more, it won't help much.
• Good Bad Bugs: By killing off Krishna before the end of Chapter 29, then reviving her with the Darkruon in the Tower of Morse, the game will forget to flag the event where she temporarily leaves and must be re-recruited in the tower. (Which normally starts after Chapter 29) This means you can enter the tower again, have Shigen talk to her on Floor 5, and recruit a second Krishna. Since both are treated as the same unit, any items in the new Krishna's inventory will be copied to the other one, letting you endlessly duplicate items.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Many aspects of this game ended up scarily similar to those of later Fire Emblem games, despite predating them by several years.
  • The world map, monsters and other influences from Fire Emblem Gaiden. (Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, Fire Emblem: Awakening, Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia)
  • A Big Bad who seems like a Generic Doomsday Villain at first but turns out to have a tragic backstory involving a dragon wife. (Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade)
  • A "Black Knight" class. (Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, though the one here was mounted)
  • An item that raises the level cap. (Fire Emblem Fates)
  • Full map-based PvP. (Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon)
  • A bow-wielding main character. (Fire Emblem: Three Houses)
  • From a story standpoint, Miradona and Kalbazan's backstory heavily resembles Sothis and Nemesis' from Fire Emblem: Three Houses. A tribal leader drinks the blood of a sleeping dragon goddess despite warnings, becomes all-powerful and almost conquers the world before being defeated by an alliance of one of the world's leaders and one who shares the blood of the goddess. Meanwhile the goddess regrets her role in all this and only wants to sleep.
• Lost in Medias Res: The first arc is fairly straightforward, but after that the story starts introducing waves after waves of characters, countries and organizations who all struggle to get enough screen time, and soon it can become rather difficult to remember who is whose nephew's fiancée's disciple, especially since the playable cast is split into two parties.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • Luca. Not only does he suffer from all the typical problems of the Gordin Archetype (early-game archer) in Fire Emblem, but he's one of Count Marlon's options. That means he's not only bad, but you have to go out of your way to choose him over Narron or Lee, and even getting him as your second Marlon pick loses you the fairly strong Lionel. Even more depressingly, one of his only redeeming aspects is triggering an event that allows Raquel to kill humans. Said event kills Luca!
  • Maerhen has low stats and his burglar skill lowers the stats of nearby allies. The only positive thing about him is his ability to steal items after killing an enemy.
  • Krishna is even worse, joining mid-game with atrocious base stats (worse than Julia, who joined over 10 chapters earlier) and growths, and her only redeeming aspect is the Steal skill, which unlike Maerchen's Mug isn't guaranteed to work. (And actually runs off her Skill and Speed stats, which, like all her stats, are bad)
  • Lina has a 10% Movement growth and a high enough movement base to keep up with promoted foot units even while dismounted and unpromoted. The problem? She's an Est with a 10% Strength growth, and horrible base Mastery. Moving far isn't going to help when you do Scratch Damage to everything, even if trained.
  • The Artilleryman/Wood Shooter class in general is considered the worst in the game, with 3 movement that never improves, being locked to bows, and being weak to anti-armor weapons to boot. They have the niche of being able to use Ballistas... at the cost of being unable to move for the rest of the chapter if they attack with one. It's only made Not Completely Useless by being very strong in arenas, and ballistas having a few very situational uses in one or two maps. Of the two playable ones, Tom joins early with terrible growths, while Hagar has decent growths and Paragon but this isn't nearly enough to make up for his class, and he joins incredibly late and requires you to spend 10 turns in Chapter 34.
• Memetic Badass: Billford is notorious for being an Armor Knight with actual movement growth. Because of this, they often tend to praise him as an absolute Game-Breaker, and is often cited as a shining example of an armored unit done right.
• Memetic Mutation: The "Blind Idiot" Translation has its fans, turning its rendition of Holmes into a Fountain of Memes.
• Praising Shows You Don't Watch: While this game is held in high regard by fans of the Kaga-era Fire Emblem games, the number of people who've actually played it is still very low.
• Serial Numbers Filed Off: This is a Fire Emblem game for all intents and purposes outside of the name, largely because series creator Shouzou Kaga was deliberately aping his old work. There was actually going to be direct Fire Emblem references (the Working Title was literally Emblem Saga and several Fire Emblem elements were directly name dropped) before Tirnanog started to get legal pressure from Nintendo, and they got sued over the game being too similar even after removing the more overt ones.
• Squick: An infamous event sees Plum, who is only around 15, drugged with spiked milk and abducted by heavily-implied sex traffickers, and placed in a Go-Go Enslavement outfit the next time we see her. She's rescued, and returns to your army in the ever-useful Dancer class. This event is the only way to get a Dancer in this game, meaning the player is essentially rewarded for letting this all happen. (Even outside gameplay, Plum's happiest epilogue requires her to go through this event) Worse still is that a later event reveals he's still pulling the same scheme, with either Juni or Lyria (as young or even younger than Plum) falling for it depending on your choices, leading to an event mostly Played for Laughs. And the slaver gets away with nothing more than a minor beating. These events have turned several Fire Emblem fans away from playing the game entirely and have negatively affected Kaga's reputation in some circles.
• Strangled by the Red String:
  • Holmes and Katri can come off this way, as their romance isn't really developed until the game's third act (and starts with Holmes having an over-dramatic Love Epiphany out of nowhere despite being constantly annoyed by her until then), and earlier on Katri had Ship Tease with Xeno.
  • If you fulfil the conditions to reunite Plum with her father in the epilogue, Bartz isn't the one to rescue her from enslavement, and don't get Leonie's ending with Mitz, Bartz will suddenly declare his love for Leonie despite them never interacting before.
• That One Level:
  • Chapter 16 isn't difficult, per se, just obnoxiously and tediously long. The map is swarming with Opuses/Ahrimans/Mogalls, which can and will multiply repeatedly; the diverse terrain largely serves to slow everyone without Frontier Fighter/Frontiersman down, especially the large swamp in the northern part of the map (which, by the way, damages units); mounted units are forced to dismount because it's an indoor map, meaning no flying units; the boss can spawn four more Mogalls that can divide as soon as they spawn and has an item that revives it upon defeat; some passages are invisible; and the objective is to open all the chests, including three in out-of-the-way rooms accessed through the invisible passages and one in the middle of the swamp, meaning a wiggly path through the level. In short, an increasingly obscene number of enemies, an enemy-spawning boss you have to kill twice, disadvantageous terrain, and a strange, not-entirely-clear objective. Experienced, intentionally overprepared players can take almost an hour to finish this nightmare of a map; unprepared first-time players can take over three hours to finish it.
  • The B version of Chapter 26 not only is harder to unlock, but is also far more difficult than the A variant. Between the Thief Sword Myrmidons mentioned above, being sniped by archers and mages from a room you can't see into (and therefore can't counterattack), prisoners who turn out to be enemies in disguise, the normally Breather Boss having an overpowered Swordmaster bodyguard, and one of your characters being forced to work for the enemy... as a generic Shadow Lancer, so you can easily kill him by accident if you aren't paying very close attention to the enemy stats. (This character retains their level and skills while disguised, but with no name or portrait)
  • Chapter 32 has you starting inside a swamp that covers over half the map, which you need to slowly trudge through while dealing with teleporting Witch reinforcements every turn (who can easily pick off units weakened by the swamp) and an enemy with the Earthquake spell (magical damage to your entire party every 5 turns). This is one map that nearly every walkthrough recommends cheesing with the Warp Staff, just to save you the headache.
  • Chapter 34, full stop. Two words: INFINITE REINFORCEMENTS. You can prevent enemy reinforcements by taking control of strongholds. You will take a lot of time getting to the last enemy spawn point. What does this point spawn? Tanks. This chapter will make you hate them.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: A lot of players feel that Sennet's offscreen revolution within the Empire (that eventually leads to the Emperor being killed and a peace treaty with Runan's army) would have made for a more interesting second route than Holmes', which mostly amounts to Filler that occasionally intersects with the main war. Some speculate that Kaga was planning on making a separate game to tell his story.
• Underused Game Mechanic: Similar to Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War, weapons track their own kill counts and gain +1 Crit per kill at a certain threshold. Unique to this game is that once a weapon reaches 100 kills, it will randomly gain either a blue or red star next to its name. A blue star is cosmetic, but a red star weapon becomes "cursed" and functions like a Devil weapon. There are several churches and similar facilities that can remove the curse for a fee. The chance of this ever coming up in a playthrough is extremely low, as you'll likely never come close to 100 kills on a single weapon without a ton of grinding and repair items.

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