Brütal Legend/YMMV

• Acceptable Lifestyle Targets: Boy Bands slaughtered? Emo Teen zombies? Bondage-slave demons? My word!
• And the Fandom Rejoiced: The Fire Baron Nerf saved a dying online community.
• Angst? What Angst?: Sparky is easily the most cheerful member of the Drowning Doom.
• Anvilicious: The Second Wave of American Tween Melodic Rap Metalcore band Kabbage Boy sounding awful and then getting their heads blown off.
  • Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped: Tim Schafer says he's overjoyed about the bands in the soundtrack getting exposure and creating new Heavy Metal fans. Which was exactly one of his goals.
• Awesome Music: Inevitable considering the soundtrack consists of 107 tracks of original work, remixes of various metal songs, or actual album compositions. Considering the game starts out with Children of the Grave in a low-volume riff until Riggs picks up the axe...
  • Fighting the giant Metal Queen spider to Brocas Helm's Cry of the Banshee is considered one of the most memorable moments in the game. The song (and band) were impossible to find anywhere, until their popularity exploded from this game. Soon after, the Brocas Helm album "Defender of the Crown" became available for digital download on iTunes.
  • Ozzy Osbourne's Mr. Crowley when Ophelia jumps into the Sea of Black Tears.
  • Most, if not all, of the set pieces involve Crowning Musical Moments Of Awesome.
• Best Level Ever: Brutal Legend fans and haters love the Metal Spider lair dearly.
• Broken Base: There are loyal fans who love all of Double Fine's work, fans who feel betrayed that it's a multiplayer focused Action/RTS and not a Dynasty Warriors esque brawler, and fans of just the multiplayer. There are also fans who loved the single player so much that the multiplayer focus did not deter them.
  • PC Players complain that Double Fine has abandoned them. Double Fine responded that they make games on the consoles that their publisher allows them to make. And Electronic Arts refuses to make games for the pirate infested waters of PC gaming.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: The multiplayer has a handful of infamous exploits. During release, players would "Baron Spam," creating over a dozen Fire Barons and wiping out opponents in a short amount of time, driving away frustrated players. Double Fine responded by making several nerfs to Ironheade, which was very effective...until players started cheating the leaderboards by consistently disconnecting if they started losing or simply if they got matched up with someone who beat them in the past. Then there's Car Spam, Soul Kisser Spam, Grave Digger Spam, Infinite Combos or players just trying to collect achievements.
• Complaining About Games You Don't Play: Tim Schafer says that those who ATTEMPTED multiplayer enjoyed the game the most, and that those who complain about the Stage Battles are merely spouting "Ruined FOREVER" over seven tutorial missions without ever touching multiplayer, and that reviews reflect it and remain high regardless.

Tim Schafer:: When we showed the game to EA, they were interested but wanted to test the concept. In focus tests, the stage battles rated high. What's interesting is the people in those groups aren't told anything about the game and have no expectations for it. One of the things you notice looking at Metacritic ratings is that the highest scores come from those who really enjoyed the stage battles, and when you get down to the critics who didn't like the stage battles those reviews often center around their expectations about what we were going to make, instead of looking at the stage battles for what they are in a fresh way.

• Complete Monster: Emperor Doviculus: "Oh, just a complete monster? I was hoping for a far viler, more disgusting trope than just that."
• Crazy Awesome: Tim Schafer.
  • Also, the game itself. It gives you achievements for throwing hedgehogs at an armored bear until it drops dead, jumping over a six-legged mammoth with your car, and riding a motorcycle boar across half the continent to drown it in the sea of killer black oil. It's just as fun as it sounds, trüly.
• Cult Classic: However, Tim Schafer expressed the fact that he is very sick of his games reaching this status.
• Dead Horse Music Genre:
  • Given that this is a game about Metal, there's sure to be plenty of ribbing of unpopular music styles... such as the Hair Metal-themed villain group.
  • Subverted because this is a game set in a world without critics to badmouth any specific genre. Any Metal in this game, that is not said to be awful in game, is an affectionate nod to its genre. Rob Halford even said, "[Lionwhyte] is a cross-section of everything I know and love in Heavy Metal music.".
• Disappointing Last Level: While the actual quality of the game stays high throughout, after Lionwhyte's palace, the story moves at an almost uncontrollably fast pace. See Cosmic Deadline.
• Ear Worm: Once you hear the commercial, you will never unhear it.
• Evil Is Cool: In universe, Eddie sure feels this way in the Temple of Ormagoden.
• Evil Is Sexy:
  • Tainted Coil.
  • Battle Nun. From the neck down, anyway...
• Fan Dumb: Tell a fan you thought Brutal Legend was short or was an RTS in disguise, expect a tongue lashing.
  • Don't EVER tell a fan you skipped the multiplayer, or ask them to help you cheat your way to achievements.
  • Taken to truly extreme levels with the multiplayer. As has been mentioned, the campaign mode is essentially a very long tutorial. Apparently, those who haven't played the multiplayer are "ungrateful greedy posers" for expecting the campaign mode of a game to be enjoyable as a standalone, when for any other game, it would be a requirement.
• Faux Symbolism: Pentagrams as objective markers.
  • Doviculus' opening his chest and displaying his heart, complete with a thorny crown around it.
• Fetish Fuel Station Attendant: Emperor Doviculus. Oh dear.
• Foe Yay: "Lita? You sound bitter! Why don't you come over to my place for a nice relaxing swim."
• Game Breaker: The Heat Seeker makes Death Rack side-missions almost too easy.
  • Multiplayer has too many to count. Before the balance patch, spamming Fire Barons was an instant winner. After the balance patch, Ironheade became the weakest, and players resorted to new things. An infinite combo with any character, spamming Grave Diggers and their Double Team, spamming Soul Kissers and using their suicide attack to wipe out the enemy army at an unfair ratio, summoning the player's car over and over, and the most community killing of them all, disconnecting while losing.
• Good Bad Bugs: Due to some flaw in the shape of the sickle-wraith's hitbox, running over it with the deuce causes the vehicle to flip upwards several meters, sometimes even doing a barrel-roll.
  • The Hero Unit blocking protects from many attacks, and even damage from being on fire, being poisoned, or even drowning. If you held the block button under the Hazardous Water for a long time, you would never drown. This is a widely accepted online strategy because there are plenty of attacks designated as unblockable.
• Hate Dumb: There is a Fan Nickname for backlash against the Stage Battles.
  • One player angry about the Stage Battles publicly messaged Tim Schafer on Twitter and called him a liar and accused him of falsely advertising the game as strictly action. Tim Schafer responded with his multiplayer reveal two months before release.
• Hype Aversion: Electronic Arts and Tim Schafer each advertised very different things on this game. In many videos, Tim Schafer talked almost exclusively on the multiplayer aspect, because it's the part he worked on the most, and was the point of the whole game (the single player world and story were created after the multiplayer was finished.) EA on the other hand advertised the presence of Jack Black, and hyped the game up immensely without actually talking about the gameplay. Players who went exclusively by the hype and the single player demo did not take the Unexpected Gameplay Change well. Double Fine did not enjoy the marketing push at all. EA completely and intentionally hid the gameplay that Tim Schafer wanted players to see the most.
• I Am Not Shazam:
  • Rob Halford does not voice Lars Halford. Rob Halford voices Lionwhyte and The Baron.
  • Lita Halford is not Lita Ford, who is in the game, but instead voices Rima.
• Internet Backdraft: The Stage Battles.
• It's Popular, Now It Sucks: Brocas Helm, due to their massive Colbert Bump from this game.
• It's Short, So It Sucks: A common criticism from players who aren't interested in the multiplayer.
• It Was His Sled: Ophelia leads the Drowning Doom.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Achievement whores are DESPISED by the online community.
  • Tim Schafer met one who asked him to lose intentionally to boost achievements. He was pissed.

Tim Schafer: "surrender plz? surrender plz??? This is what I go online for? To have some kid tell me "surrender plz" at my own game?"

• Les Yay: Try Double Teaming with Bride. She loves it.
• Lowest Common Denominator: EA's ENTIRE. MARKETING. CAMPAIGN.
• Memetic Mutation: DECAPITATION!!!
  • LOL RTS!
  • HELL YEAH!
  • POSITIVE ATTITUDE!
  • IS [insert band] IN THIS GAME?
  • Beard Beard Action Beard!
• Memetic Sex God. Doviculus. Voiced by Tim Curry.
• Misaimed Marketing: Vivendi disallowed all announcements of Real Time Strategy elements to the point that no marketing would ever use the phrase RTS ever. When they axed the game, Double Fine moved to EA, who did the same thing.
• Misblamed: Tim Schafer and Double Fine get all the flack for the Misaimed Marketing, when it was Electronic Arts fault.
• Most Wonderful Sound: In both single player and multiplayer, the guitar solos are excellent, and your units react with hilariously joyful comments.

Headbangers: "METAL!"
Grave Diggers: "That song makes me want to kill myself, in a good way!"

Battle Nun: "How does he do that?!"

Punishing Party: "Ah...that was incredible."

• Music to Invade Poland To: The Tainted Coil get Blitzkrieg by Deathstars.
• Needs More Love: Fans believe Electronic Arts Executive Meddling send this game out to die.
• Nightmare Retardant: The metal spider babies. Normally they're fairly creepy, but when you Earthshaker them off of Eddie, they die with the noise of popping popcorn.
• Player Punch: There's three of them all caused by the same character.
• Rockin In Hindsight: Depending on when you find and unlock the Legends, some dialogue takes on greater meaning; for example, the Guardian of Metals little poem contains the elements that Ormagodden exploded into.
  • Bobby Kotick claimed Brutal Legend was not a good game. It's a Spiritual Successor to an Activision game called Battlezone 1998.
  • Tim Schafer played Alan Wake and tweeted in two posts:

Tim Schafer: Holy crap. Did I just defend a rock stage from a inky-shadowy army using pyrotechnics and light... in Alan Wake? I need to immediately travel back in time and base a whole game on this!

• Scapegoat Creator: A number of people blame the game's rushed feeling towards the end on EA, based on their reputation for rushing games.
  • Fans blame EA for poor sales due to marketing Brutal Legend as a massive single player adventure instead of marketing the Stage Battles, regardless of the fact they were considered good in their focus tests. This is the one and only multiplayer commercial from EA. Not very convincing. No matter how much Tim Schafer tried to pour his heart out on the Stage Battles months before release, it was drowned out by EA's hype, and especially the single player demo.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The Summon Flag. Like a Rally Point in StarCraft, a special guitar solo creates a rally point that you can set on the ground for allies, or keep on your back so fresh units will come to you. But losing track of this flag is an easy way to cost you a match, even for the pros.
• So Bad It's Good: It is difficult to deny the whimsical charm of the song "Girlfriend".
• Tained By The Demo: Tim Schafer talked about nothing but the stage battles and the multiplayer. Electronic Arts talked about nothing but the story, Jack Black, and the single player, and nothing about the gameplay. The demo was only the first five minutes of the whole game. Guess whose message got to players (hint: not the guy who made the game).
• That One Attack: The Buzzsaw, a pseudo-infinite combo discovered after Double Fine's big balance patch. It can allow one player to endlessly wail on the other, scoring an easy kill and undermining the idea that the combat is about combining Buffs with Double Teams, rather than lone combos. A source of frustration of casual players.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks: The Guardian of Metal wasn't too keen on the state of things in the world around the time Eddie visits him which takes place in the past (for Eddie). I can hardly imagine how low his opinion would be of the time period that Eddie originally came from.
• Tier-Induced Scrappy:
  • Soul Kisser.
  • Pain Lifter. This unit has longer range than any other unit, and can be used to attack from anywhere.
  • Hate Cage, for being useless.
• Ugly Cute: Metal Beasts.