JumpStart/YMMV

The Game Series

• Anticlimax Boss: Ms. Grunkle in the original 4th grade game. Time for an epic showdown...this is the teacher who kidnapped your classmates, turned them into monsters, and has been taunting you throughout the entire game. Literally all you do is hold out a wand and she flies away.
• Ear Worm: Jump, jump, jump start first grade!
  • AHH! It's back! It's back! Daggone it!
• Moral Event Horizon: Dr. X in Jump Start Adventures 5th Grade gets as close to Complete Monster territory as is possible in an Edutainment Game due to his plans for vengeance against a town that scorned his work involving bombing factories and putting lives at risk, including the life of the 10 year old girl who has to defuse all the bombs!
• Needs More Love: JumpStart Reading for Second Graders. Practically nothing can be found on this game, even though the storyline was really interesting, the characters were memorable, and the games were challenging.
• Nightmare Fuel: The original 4th grade game. You are a kid (implied to be a 4th grader, which is about eight to ten years old.) who came to class to find that it is now a nightmarish building looking much like something out of a Tim Burton movie or the Beetlejuice Animated Adaptation...and to find your class missing. You are then put onto a haunted island almost completely alone with only two people helping you and even then, they only tell you where to go next. And then you find out what happened to your classmates - they were all turned into monsters, and locked in Ms. Grunkle's attic. At any time, she will come by to taunt you, and her minions will jump out and ask you a question. You also have a candle in the corner and if it goes out, you'll be teleported to the labyrinth. Most kids have been Properly Paranoid to not let that happen, though, because the labyrinth can be quite hard to traverse (Being a first person maze, after all). Oh, and when you go to rescue the kids, your first four attempts you run into Ms. Grunkle who just teleports you to the labyrinth because she wants to have fun with you. Oh Crap. This is almost like a strange hybrid between Survival Horror and Edutainment Game!
• That One Level: That stupid, stupid crossword game in 5th Grade. Many people just brute-forced it because it'd show you the right words...and then later on, it doesn't. It doesn't help that it has no difficulty slider, and even then it's assumed the difficulty slider only shows you the right levels. So it takes forever to solve.
• They Just Didn't Care JumpStart Adventure Challenge.
• Villain Decay: Polly in JumpStart Typing. In her first appearance in Jump Start Adventures 3rd Grade: Mystery Mountain she was a bratty devil child and Diabolical Mastermind in the making who acts as the Big Bad for the whole game, sending robots back in time to mess with history and nearly destroys the entire world doing so. Then in JumpStart Typing she gets just uppity enough to cause the plot and afterwards is convinced to be good for the remainder of the game, teaming up with the robot she spent all of last game insulting and had even planned to have him destroy himself in order to pass her extra credit test question. It's obvious why they did this, though. Look up Jump Start Adventures 3rd Grade: Mystery Mountain on Amazon and witness the parent reviewers upset about Polly's attitude toward the player.
  • Huh, those parents really don't understand this whole "villain" concept, do they?
  • Alternatively this could be seen as Character Development after having been strictly disciplined by her father following the events of Mystery Mountain.

The Comic Strip

• Values Dissonance: Marcy has no problems referring to her adult stepbrothers ^[1]- some of whom have barely met her - as "her brothers", as if they grew up together. No one else seems to find it strange in the strip.

1. ↑ Marcy's mom married their next-door neighbor's dad, becoming step-siblings will all twelve of his sons.