YMMV / The Shell

• Alas, Poor Scrappy: Mizuhara Touko. Even her mother becomes sympathetic after that.
• Awesome Music:
  • The opening themes of both games, "Ruri no Tori" and "Tsuki no Uro" respectively, are very beautiful, with a brilliant vocal performance by Shimotsuki Haruka.
  • "Rengoku no Hitsuji", a haunting and evocative piece from the soundtrack of the second game.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: The True end’s attitude seems to imply that it’s supposed to be considered at least bittersweet like True Ends usually are, but think about it. Mizuhara, Tojiko, Orihime and Toko are all dead and Reiji is alone. With closure, yes, but alone. And Shinji got away.
• Fetish Retardant: A lot of the H-scenes can come across as ridiculous instead of erotic or romantic, as most of them include things like perspective angles that make the characters' positions look anatomically improbable, extremely over-the-top moaning from whoever the female character is in the scene, and an inconsistent narration style that keeps alternating between colloquialisms / "dirty" words and clinical-sounding terminology in a jarring way.
• Funny Moments: Reiji getting Tsuzuriko's name right for once, only for her to launch into her "Don't call me Tojiko!" catchphrase anyway before realizing a bit too late that he didn't actually call her that this time.
• Nausea Fuel: In the first game, what happens to Yui's remains and the missing body parts of Kusaka's other victims is incredibly disgusting. Kusaka, who has been keeping Yui's rotting body in his house the whole time, stitches the other victims' limbs to Yui's torso because he seriously believes that he could revive her like that. Then, one of the Perspective Flip passages describes Kusaka having sex with the composite corpse of his victims. There are also two CGs where the composite corpse can actually be seen, showing that it is half decomposed and crawling with maggots.
• Nightmare Fuel: The murders in both games are beyond brutal, with the victims' bodies being grotesquely mutilated.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The H-scenes being unskippable on a first playthrough is an aspect of the gameplay that gets on some players' nerves.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Natsume is supposed to be a Lovable Sex Maniac comic relief character, but thanks to her constant in-your-face sexual behaviour towards other people (including her brother) who are clearly not comfortable with it and the fact that, in her H-scene, Reiji's consent is dubious at best and flat-out nonexistent at worst, she can easily come across as infuriating instead of funny and likeable.

---