YMMV / Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria

• Better Off Sold: Certain items are available only if you sell the right amounts of this to vendors. Plus, what you get depends on what you break off of enemies. While the "trash" items do give stat boosts when equipped, they tend to be non-runic (and thus don't contribute to the linked-equipment boosts), and the items you can get by selling them tend to be powerful weapons and accessories, although some of them are still worth using as accessories since they give large stat multipliers.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The combination of the Blue Gale bow (guarantees every hit will be critical) and the Dismantle skill (critical hits break whatever body part they hit). It doesn't work on bosses, but for most encounters, it allows an archer to tear through the enemy, killing them in a few hits regardless of their defense and the archer's attack power.
  • The game also includes a few deliberate Game-Breaker weapons, provided you overleveled a few plot-important characters before the points where they leave the party. Of course, the levels they need would have broken the game anyway, so this is possibly just the game's way of compensating you by providing your remaining characters with another way to break the game.
  • The "First Aid + Metabolizer (or Ring of Healing) + Survival + Lifeforce Blessing" combo allows any character to became near invincible. The first two allows you to recovery half of the damage inflicted by an enemy attack, the Survival skill makes a character survive a otherwise fatal attack with 1 HP and the Lifeforce Blessing Sealstone doubles healing, and therefore allows you to recover the same amount of damage received by an attack.
• Love to Hate: Lezard Valeth is considered by many as one of the best parts of the game, for his brilliant scheming taking the role of Big Bad from Odin and his sheer lunacy with the lengths he's willing to go to have Lenneth all for himself. His insanity also makes Lezard's an incredibly entertaining Large Ham once his true nature is revealed in the latter half of the game.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Lezard kills the Valkyries.
  • Anybody familiar with the original game knew Odin was a Jerkass, but this game revealed that he had a plan to use Bahms' soul as replacement for the Dragon Orb to prevent Migard's destruction, but opted out of it and decided to allow Migard to be destroyed just remove any knowledge of the Sovereign Rite outside of Asgard. Even Freya is shaken up by this.
  • Walter was already abhorrent in the original game, but the sequel makes him even more vile revealing he also conducted many cruel human experiments and he had always intended to use Dipan as a sacrificial pawn for his own desires of godhood.
• Nightmare Fuel: If the player loses the final battle, the incumbent god Lezard Valeth decides to give them a truly harrowing divine punishment.
  Lezard: I will not slay you. From now and forever, no matter how much you entreat me, how pitifully you lament, you shall not die! (...) I grant you the rights accorded to the enemy of the gods. You will live from now and forever, in an endless cycle of rebirth, condemned in each life to be hated, feared, scorned, punished, and obliterated. (...) Always with the screech of insects buzzing within your skull, ants gnawing at your eyeballs, forever and ever!
• One-Scene Wonder: The True Valkyrie doesn't appear until the very end of the game, but she definitely leaves a mark.
• Padding: The backtracking between Dipan and the Forest of Spirits after the Wham Episode of Chapter 4 really only serves to adjust you to a party emptied of all story characters but Alicia and Rufus, as there's a fair chance you'll need to train up some Einherjar to recoup their losses.
• Ship Tease: Between Alicia and Rufus. The manga adaptation makes it more explicit. In the end, Rufus does not get the girl.
• The Un Twist: The game makes no attempt to hide that Leone is Hrist in disguise.
• The Woobie: Alicia. She is eighteen when the game starts, and she endures Silmeria's spirit who has spoken to her since birth, and can take over Alicia's body at her leisure. She was banished from her home by her own father and lived alone in a castle. This is before the game even starts. During the game she watches her father banish her again; gets betrayed by a woman she trusted; watches her father get executed; watches her best friend painfully turned into an undead horror that hates her; finds her mother committed suicide; has the spirit that she was cooperating with ripped forcefully from her body; turned into an undead horror; watches the man she loves nearly burn to death; then watches his body get usurped by someone else that also betrayed her; then finally merges with the Valkyries only to die at the end. Alicia is in the running for one of worst lives in gaming history.

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