Wild Arms 1/YMMV

• Alas, Poor Villain: Lady Harken
• Bittersweet Ending: The demons are defeated, but Asgard sacrifices himself to save the party from the destruction of The Very Definitely Final Dungeon. Also, while it's stated Filgaia will eventually recover, it'll definitely be a long, slow process. Oh, and Arctica is still in shambles.
• Complete Monster: Let's be honest here, Alhazad is the most depraved villain in the game besides Mother.
• Crowning Music of Awesome: The remake has too many to list, but three that stand out are "War Demon" (Boomerang's theme), "Destruction of All Creation" (Mother's theme) and "Windward Birds" (Zeik Tuvai's theme)
  • the overworld theme "Lone Bird in the Shire" - made twice as cool after realizing that its also a Shout-Out to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (specifically, the very suitably epic "The Ecstasy of Gold" by none other than Ennio Morricone)
  • The Opening theme: Into the Wilderness is one of this troper's favorite songs of ALL TIME. So Amazing.
  • The Remake Alter Code F has some awesome songs as well. Adlehyde Castle Town and Puzzle are two of the best.
  • Adlehyde Castle from the original
• Ensemble Darkhorse: Boomerang. So much.
• Game Breaker: In the remake, Rudy gets his Gatling Raid cartridge a little more than 1/3 into the game. Use with 18 bullets and every non-optional boss in the game goes down in one turn. Combine with Lock-On Active and its auto reload for pure bullet spam.
  • This method is practically a requirement for beating the optional end-game bosses without running out of resources in every battle.
    • By putting Great Booster on Rudy, casting Offense Zone on the battlefield, and Fragile on the enemy, it's easily possible for Rudy to do over 100,000 damage with Lock-On (even more with Lock-On Plus). The only other one who comes close is Jack under the same conditions with Accelerator + Laser Silhouette and the most I've seen that do is 75,000. Most battles don't last long enough to set up both of those guys for that much damage.
  • Play through the game until the Volcannon Trap mission, which is when Jane temporarily joins you. Go fight Rat Monkeys at the beginning areas and have her steal MP Repair skills from them. Not only do they sell for a whopping 999,999 gella (ONE will pretty much take care of your money problems for the whole game, even including the 600,000 gella required to completely rebuild Adlehyde), but the skill itself restores MP as you walk, which is insanely helpful for characters like Jack, who has very little MP and very expensive special attacks (until they're leveled up anyway).
• Iron Woobie: Bartholomew. In both versions he survives a plane crash that he was forced into flying against his will and also survives a shipwreck. The latter is much worse in the remake.
• Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Rudy! Wild Arms 5 even pokes fun at this by having a sidequest where you resolve a love quadrilateral between him, Jane, Cecilia, and Mariel.
• Moral Event Horizon: Alhazad turning an entire town's population (save one blind girl) into monsters, and attempting to do the same thing to Jane's town. Keep in mind that the majority of her town's population are orphaned children.
• Nightmare Fuel: Pretty much anything involving Mother. A fleshy pulsating thing, she's an Omnicidal Maniac who wanders the cosmos consuming countless star systems (making her a proto-Jenova). By far the creepiest scene with her is when Zeikfried is teleported to the destroyed Photosphere as the result of falling into a black hole. only to find the veiny, slug-like remnance of Mother that proceeds to rear up and consume him while cooing about how much she loves him, accompanied by sickening crunching noises.
  • Not to mention Alhazad's true form. Or his special "Demon Seed" parasite that painfully turns living things into monsters. Made worse in Alter Code F. In the original, we only see a dog transform from the Demon Seed, and its instantaneous. Here though, we get to see the Wanderer who was helping Jane's town scream and convulse in pain before finally transforming. Brr...
• Player Punch: The revelation of Lady Harken's true identity.
• Tear Jerker: The backstory of the Maxwell family that Magdalen tells in the remake.
• They Just Didn't Care: Many have accused the localization of the remake to be an example.
• The Untwist: It becomes obvious that Jack is Garrett long before the "big reveal" actually happens.
• The Woobie: You have no soul if you don't want to just give Mariel a hug when she looks out of her door at the party when they first meet her in ACF.
  • Same goes for her portrait when she becomes a temporary party member.
• Woolseyism: "Holmcross" is just about the only translation error very few people have a problem with (it was originally "Homunculus"), possibly because it sounds badass.