Resident Evil 4/YMMV

• Anticlimax Boss: After fighting Krauser with only Quick Time Events, U3, and Krauser again, Saddler isn't that hard, in retrospect.
• Broken Base/Contested Sequel: Some people think this game is too actiony and not atmospheric, and some think the previous Resident Evil games sacrificed fun and playability for said atmosphere. The full argument goes on and on.
• Non Sequitur Scene: There's a giant clockwork mechanical statue of Salazar in one of the castle chapters. Never explained or mentioned ever again. We can buy that Salazar has a big enough ego to build a statue of himself, but why build a giant clockwork statue that chases after people?? His ego is just that big.
• Crowning Music of Awesome:
  • Wesker and HUNK's Mercenaries themes.
  • Infiltration.
• Damsel Scrappy: Ashley Graham.
• Demonic Spiders: Dr Salvador, the Bella Sisters, Garradors, J.J., the Regenerators, the Iron Maiden... Basically, you need to be careful in this game.
• Ensemble Darkhorse:
  • Krauser, so much so that he made another appearance and got some more background in The Darkside Chronicles.
  • The Merchant. Aside from a number of catchphrases and the gameplay importance of him being a reoccurring Item Shop, we know nothing about him beyond face value.
  • Luis Sera to an extent.
  • Helicopter Mike, who helps Leon by shooting zombies from his helicopter.
• Epileptic Trees: There's a lot of WMGs regarding the identity of the Merchant.
• Evil Is Cool: You gotta admit, Saddler's true form is a pretty awesome design.
• Freud Was Right:
  • In Separate Ways, after Ada defeats Krauser, she says "That's a large "thing" (referring to his knife hand) you have there, but I don't like it when men play rough."
  • There's also Saddler's tentacle-wang.
• Fountain of Memes:
  • Leon.
  • THE MERCHANT.
• Game Breaker: The Punch-Packing Pistol. More than one in this game actually.
• Goddamned Bats: The Novistadors are not well-liked among the Resident Evil community. At least they kidnap Ashley so you don't have to look after her...
• Good Bad Bugs: Lots, though most of them were fixed for the PlayStation 2 and Nintendo Wii versions.
  • An exception is clipping, especially the knife through the hole in the door glitch. It was actually made better in the later releases by preventing you getting hit while using this glitch.
  • There's also the famous Ditman Glitch, which is especially useful for Speedrunning.
• Hell Is That Noise:
  • The Regenerator's rattling, hissing breathing.
  • Chainsaw revving.
• Ho Yay:
  • When Leon unties Luis -- "Little rough, don't you think?"
  • How Luis dies.
  • Krauser's dialogue in the Fortress Ruins. "That's what I'm talking about" just really sounds questionable, even in context.
  • Krauser's whole obsession with Leon.
  • As the battle in Fortress Ruins progresses, Krauser takes off more and more of his clothes and personal effects.
• Internet Backdraft: There was one in Spanish video game forums due to how blatantly the game plays the Spexico trope.
• It's Popular, Now It Sucks: The style change, while making the series more popular, has caused many fans of the series's original style to feel betrayed, cheated, and forgotten.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • MIKE!!!!
  • BITCH, THIS AIN'T A CUTSCENE! PRESS A! PRESS A!!
  • "MEEEEEEEEESTER KENNEDY!!!!"
    • ...AAAAAAAAAAAANDERSON!!!!
  • "You're [sic] right hand comes off?"
  • "You're small time!!"
  • "No thanks, 'bro'."
  • "Where's everyone going? Bingo?"
  • Pretty much anything the Merchant says.

"WHAT'RE YA BOIYIN'?"

• Most Annoying Sound: LEEEEEYOOOOOOOOOOONNNNNNNNN!! HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLP!
• Most Wonderful Sound: The soft clarinet music you hear in some saving rooms is incredibly relaxing, especially when you just went through a hellish survival sequence. This is pretty much the only music of the game that tells you "Don't worry, it's safe here".
• Older Than They Think: Quite a few new fans of the series don't seem to realize what the "4" in the game's title actually denotes.
• Porting Disaster: The PC version, which took a lot of patches to make it good.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: The knife was the most useless weapon in the series (save for showoff gamers). This game turns it into one of the most useful weapons, including making it the best way to take out Krauser.
  • Code: Veronica beat it to the punch.
• That One Level:
  • Level 4-1 certainly makes up for the Breather Levels that are 3-3 and 3-4. Proceeding properly (if you didn't backtrack to get the Broken Butterfly):
    • You have to retrieve the last piece of a puzzle key in a room with fire-breathing horse heads to unlock a door to progress further.
    • Then, you have to obtain 2 Grails to unlock a door, one of which is protected by 2 sets of 3 suits of armor with Plagas controlling them.
    • Then, after Ashley gets kidnapped (again), you have to survive an onslaught of flying insects.
    • Then, you have to head to a clock tower and get it running, while surviving flaming rocks catapulted at you, and the Zealots that swarm the tower inside and out. And when you leave the tower, you have to deal with another crowd (the leader of which has a freaking rocket launcher), then try to simply survive a locked room with TWO Heavy Duty Garradors (the other Zealots in the room are the LEAST of your worries!).
    • And, should you survive that, as well as a Press X to Not Die cutscene,^[1] the last thing to do is simply survive the encounter with Salazar's 'right hand' until the elevator shows up! Count on spending at LEAST an hour playing through this nightmare. The single hardest part of this level (if not the entire game) is between the start of the clock tower to surviving the cutscene, since there's no typewriters in between, and thus, no opportunities to save. In the Playstation 2 version, the programmers at least had the mercy to put a typewriter right after the clock tower, making the fight with the 2 Garradors much easier to prepare for.
  • The Castle Tower, especially on Professional Mode. When you get to the elevator, be prepared to have saved your ammo, because otherwise, prepare for much frustration. You're in a horribly enclosed space, and if as few as two enemies get on the elevator, it stops. That, along with several other reasons, makes it one of the most annoying parts of the game.
• Too Cool to Live: Luis Sera.
• Uncanny Valley
• Unfortunate Implications: Yahtzee turned many of the cries about Unfortunate Implications in Resident Evil 5 around to make some about this game, stating that nobody appeared to find any problem with Caucasian Americans shooting Caucasian Spanish people while saying stuff like "Aye-yi-yi".

1. ↑ although the button prompts are the same every time