YMMV / VA-11 HALL-A

• Adorkable: Jill likes to give a "voice" to her pet cat when she's bored at her apartment (which is all the time). She accidentally does it out of habit when she invites her boss over for drinks.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Jill being considerate towards Donovan who is openly arrogant and chauvinistic could be seen as trying to avoid the wrath and defamation from the head of a news enterprise.
• Awesome Music: The soundtrack is large and varied in style and tone, taking plenty of influence not just from 90s video game soundtracks, but also from retrofuturistic Synthwave and Vaporwave, further selling the game's Cassette Futurism aesthetic.
• Base-Breaking Character: Dorothy has a preteen appearance (although she's mentally and chronologically 24) and among the cast is easily the most vulgar and open about her sex life. This has made some players and reviewers uncomfortable, especially as she frequently invokes paedophilia themes (usually for humor), and matters aren't really helped by the fact that if player takes the "Too Much Information" response towards her anecdotes, it causes her to instead go on lengthy defensive rants where she accuses Jill of being a "prude". Other people either don't have a problem with it or think that it's funny.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Dorothy won second place in the 2017 popularity contest by a large amount, losing only to Jill (who won by a landslide). This happened again in the 2019 popularity contest, where Jill was again in first place. Though women tended to prefer Dana, she was still a close third even in that category.
• Fan Nickname: Whenever streamers from hololive get to *Kira* Miki, their first reaction to her looks, as well as her catchphrase, is one to fellow idol Hoshimachi Suisei.
• Friendly Fandoms: Thanks to Steam's "Long Story Short" bundle, fans of Monster Prom, Homestuck and Coffee Talk soon came into the fandom, with them prompting others to try their games and make crossovers out of it.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Is notably very big in Japan, to the point where physical copies for the PS Vita were printed and a bar actually served drinks from the game.
• Harsher in Hindsight: VA-11 HALL-A contains some references to YIIK: A Post-Modern RPG, including a character cosplaying as Vella, which hasn't aged well with the latter game's less-than-stellar reception after its release. YIIK returned the favor with a cameo of Jill, which didn't make it any better as that Jill doesn't act like the one in VA-11 HALL-A in the slightest. Granted, this was back when YIIK was still in development, so Sukeban Games wasn't aware of how much backlash the final project would end up with.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • Getting the Good Ending where Jill and Gaby manage to come to terms with Lenore's death while drinking a toast to her memory, finally allowing Jill to move on. The last still also implies she and Dana are now a couple as they prepare to take a vacation together.
  • Virgilio's endings: Virgilio, no longer Obfuscating Stupidity, opens up a curry stand and reveals definitively to Jill that he was the White Knight who saved Sei and Stella (who later join Jill for lunch) from a corrupt superior when they were children.
  • After Gaby breaks the news of Lenore's death and Jill's unwitting role in it to her, she falls into a guilt-racked depression. Dorothy spends an entire night at Jill's home to help her calm down with Platonic Prostitution, only charging a single soda for it. Usually, Dorothy charges a premium price for such a service, but she willingly throws away a lucrative night's earnings after seeing how much her friend was hurting. Sei and Stella also throw in a personal heart-to-heart talk with her to try to guide her through her pain and convince her to try to reconcile with Gaby.
• LGBT Fanbase: Considering the sheer number of LGBT characters in the game, and with how accepted homosexuality is in Glitch City, it's no surprise that a number of LGBT gamers are fans of this story.
• Memetic Mutation: "Optional" karmotrine is basically the game giving the player the green light to make it as alcoholic as they want, turning a regular drink into a pseudo-Gargle Blaster.
• Self-Fanservice: A number of fan artists tend to ignore all the dialogue surrounding Jill's lack of chest and draw her as a much more voluptuous woman.
• Tear Jerker: The revelation of Lenore's death is a hard scene to sit through. It comes out of nowhere in what seems like a normal shift (to the point that the background music stops playing as soon as Gaby states what happened to Lenore), and both Jill and Gaby are broken up about it, yelling at each other and shifting the blame between them. Made worse by the clear grief Jill goes through in the following days, pelting herself for being such a "piece of shit" and not apologizing to Lenore for their nasty breakup, and only letting up on herself after a talk with Sei and Stella at the bar and a night of cuddling with Dorothy.

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