Shovel Knight/YMMV

• Anticlimax Boss: The two stages of the fight against The Enchantress are not exceptionally challenging, and you are healed in between rounds.
  • Tinker Knight is particularly anticlimactic. Well, until the second stage of his fight, when he comes at you piloting a giant death machine.
• Breather Boss: Because King Knight and Specter Knight don't gain any new moves during their rematches, they're relatively simple compared to the other members of the Order.
• Crazy Awesome: Plague Knight. Hyper, erratic and psychotic, this guy will make you feel like an all-powerful psycho while playing as him in Plague of Shadows.
• Demonic Spiders: The Green Propeller mooks (appropriately named Hover Meanies) introduced in Propeller Knight's stage. They LOVE to push you into Bottomless Pits every time they appear and these enemies are rather fast and difficult to deal with since you'll have to watch your footing while dealing with them. As if that's not enough, they might even push you back far enough that once you do kill them, you'll advance and find they've just respawned again. They will make you rage in the Tower of Fate.
• Genius Bonus: The Order of No Quarter's name might sound silly, but "No Quarter" is a real term; it basically means no mercy.
• Hype Backlash: With how many people praising the game as a great throwback to old NES games, it was only a matter of time before there were people who felt this way about the game.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • A rather minor gripe all things considered, but on the Xbox and Playstation ports of the Plague of Shadows expansion, players need to pause the game and open the menu every single time they wish to change their bombs or abilities, which can grow extremely tiresome after awhile.
  • Using a cheat code locks the save file it is on out of any feats, including Butt Mode and relatively useless cheats such as changing the color of Shovel Knight's armor. While not that big of a concern, it can be seen as annoying and unneeded to prevent achievements when the player is likely just having some fun.
  • In the New Game+ of Specter of Torment, Darkness and Will are fused into one bar, but it naturally drains down, and using Curios still drains it. Combine that with less checkpoints and the Will Skull being outright deactivated, and life just got a whole lot harder.
• Ships That Pass in the Night:
  • Propeller/Specter Knight has a minor following despite only two real conversations shown between them.
  • Generally, any No Quarter ship applies to this due to knowing little to no details about their dynamic with one another.
  • Propeller Knight/Phantom Striker has no canonical backing or evidence whatsoever, but it's gaining a growing fandom.
• Spiritual Licensee: To Mega Man and Super Mario Bros. Given that Shovel Knight is an 8-bit love letter to those games, it's not surprising to see why.
• That One Achievement:
  • Perfect Platformer and Impossible, the first requires you not fall even once in a Bottomless Pit, the later not to die once. Thankfully, the game doesn't record your deaths if you simply leave the stage to the world map.
  • Hurry Up! which requires the player to finish the game within 1h 30m, screw up a few times and you might as well restart the entire game again. Even returning to the map can become problematic since every time you do so the game will add few seconds to the total time which will accumulate if you restart one too many times. Some of the stress can be reduced with liberal abuse of the save game copy tool.
  • Dirt Poor. It requires you to get absolutely no gold during a run through a member of the Order of No Quarter which is harder than it sounds. You may inadvertently pick anything worth a single gold after breaking blocks of dirt or killing an enemy and there are several stages where getting this feat is impossible as there are gold worth gems right in places where you must pass.
  • True Shovelry. To earn it you must beat all levels not getting any relic at all, which means absolutely no recovery other than food, no cheesing out victories with Phase Locket and no sequence breaking with Propeller Dagger.
  • Penny Pincher is even worse. It requires you to spend no money at all. This means, in addition to the hardships from True Shovelry, you can't buy armor or shovel upgrades, and you can never have more than seven hearts of health. Luckily in New Game+, if you bought virtually everything in the original file, you can complete it again without these issues present.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Gall's "Kiss of Death", along with his design being rather androgynous, left people thinking he was female until Word of God clarified Gall was male.
• Woolseyism: In the Japanese release, the Alchemy Coin was changed from a golden coin with Japanese text on it to a form of Japanese coin (one with a hole in the middle).