Angst? What Angst?: Remember all those Flunkies he had following him around? Ever wonder what happened to them? According to Word of God, they were slaughtered to a man over the course of Chapter 1. And Milanor doesn't bat an eyelid.
"Blind Idiot" Translation/Woolseyism: Atlus' localization of the game strays from the original script in a number of places. The translators owned up to changing one of Durant's lines in the tutorials because they felt it was an Out-of-Character Moment; some lines, such as Yggdra's "Solving swords with problems?" at the end of Chapter 8, do not exist in the Japanese script at all; the entirety of Gulcasa's characterization was altered, his diction made more formalized and haughty than in Japanese and a lot of his Pet the Dog moments (such as his marked reluctance to fight Elena in Chapter 5) removed. A number of the translations, such as Gulcasa's title ("Entei", or "Blazing Emperor") and the name of the war between the Royal Army and Asgard ("Shinkaisensou") were changed ("Emperor of Carnage") or just flat-out wrong ("Ragnarok"), creating a number of plot holes. Compare both language versions of any battlefield's dialogue and they probably won't match up too well. In all fairness to the English localization team, the schedule Atlus set up for the GBA localization left them very little time and the interface required a lot of heavy editing, as a lot of images required editing to replace the Japanese text with English, so they were most likely very rushed with production. However, most of the mistakes remain in the PSP version. Some people are very unhappy with this. Other fans could care less.
Die for Our Ship: Every now and then the Ship-to-Ship Combat between Milanor/Yggdra fans and Milanor/Kylier ones gets ugly. With Milanor/Elena also being fairly popular, Kylier seems to get this treatment the most often.
Gulcasa and Nessiah, who by themselves can slaughter the player's full Union and do it with ease.
Yggdra becomes one after her Awesome Moment of Crowning, which allows her to use the incredibly busted Crusade and maxes out both her Gen and Attack. Her Luck is still awful, but it's hardly important as long as you don't let her deal the killing blow to someone with an item you want.
Milanor's statisticsnote he reaches Game Breaking power before you even get halfway into the game. His attack stat is absurdly high and it only takes two points in Tech and Gen to insure that he'll max them out at level 20 and if you got enough points for his gen, he'll be at 6/6/6/6 faster than any other character (since Milanor is base 20, the other characters are base 18 with the exception of Yggdra who is also base 20 and Roswell and Cruz who are base 17). If you have been playing the game correctly, you would have tried to make sure to divide the MVP points so that Milanor DOES NOT turn into a gamebreaker early because if he does, you'll be wasting points on a single character while everyone else is stuck levelling up. Oftentimes, by the time you actually start using the strong items on Milanor, the stat boosts do not even matter anymore because he has no more stats left to boost. ensure that if he's leveled up diligently enough, he can become one as well.
Provided you use a few stat boosting items on her to maximize her early small star gain, Mistel absolutely murders everything. The primary reason being that her weapon is a scythe.
For cards, four of them stand out. Gravity Chaos for inflicting the insanely powerful curse, Shield Barrier for complete immunity to all card attacks not named Genocide, Bloody Claw for assassinating the enemy leader (and providing a bonus to morale damage if they're saved for last), and Crusade for instantly killing anything it's used on.
Pamela's obsession with Nietzsche, which is the entire reason you recruit her.
Inferred Holocaust: The best (A) ending, though this is only apparent if you've played the other games and realize exactly who Nessiah was trying to kill with his atrocities.
Jerkass Woobie: Leon. Big emphasis on jerkass, since you only learn about him thanks to his much nicer sister.
Memetic Badass: For whatever reason, Monica is this in the Japanese fandom. As in Monica, the character you encounter in chapter five that has stats that are weak for chapter one.
Memetic Mutation: From one particular what-were-they-thinking change to the English script, Japan gives us あいいえええええぇぇぇ.
COME NEAR ME, AND I'LL KILL YOU!
"The phrase 'come near me and I'll kill you' is a little misleading. You might think that as long as you don't come near me you won't get killed, but even if you stay away, I'll still kill you!" —Mai Nakahara, ad-libbing in character about 寄らば、斬ります！ in the radio segment of the same name
"How about attacking at night?"
Japan seems to be of the opinion that the English translation of the game is laughable. (Most English-speaking fans agree.) Their favorite line to make fun of is the way that every female scream is changed from your standard "AAAAAAAAA" to "Aiiieeeeee!", most famously in the scene where Yggdra is fired upon by Eudy. Just about every fan site in existence has made some crack at it, and on Pixiv, there are several pictures of Yggdra that are either titled or captioned "あいいいいえええええぇぇぇ".
Also, TOUCH ME AND I'LL CUT YOU (or, in the English version, "Come near me and I shall strike you down"), a fan favorite of Yggdra's lines from early in the game. Sting Entertainment is well aware that it's a fan favorite, and it's used much more often in Yggdra Unison; the online radio show hosted by Yggdra and Kylier's voice actresses even had a segment named after the line.
Moe: Yggdra, Nietzsche, Pamela, Emilia, Nessiah, and #367. Just to name a few.
Player Punch: Battlefield 33 exists solely for the purpose of rubbing the player's nose in the events of Battlefield 10. And then there's Battlefield 46.
Scrappy Mechanic: Cutscenes "eating" cards by removing your turn after you choose a card, forcing you to choose a new card.
The amount of time it takes to unlock core concepts like unions and skills. Instead of one per map to ease you into it, there are multiple maps between unlocking new mechanics.
You're unable to control allied units in combat. This means no card skills and no passive/aggressive modes, which means they will lose easy fights.
That One Boss: Gulcasa, who practically requires you either use Gravity Chaos (which is thankfully obtained before fighting him the first time) to curse him, a sufficiently leveled Rosary who can take advantage of the brief period his attacks are fire element, Mistel, or Crusade. Nothing else is consistently viable.
That One Sidequest: Mjollnir. Also, the Glittering Ash and Good Luck Charm.
Viewer Gender Confusion: Nessiah and the generic Necromancer units were widely (and now infamously) mistaken for women on one of the boards. This led to much amusement and Stupid Sexy Flanders, although none of the in-game characters have trouble telling that the characters in question are male.
