La-Mulana/YMMV


 * Anticlimax Boss: The boss of Hell Temple, The Boss. Not that he's particularly easy, but Hell Temple is so nightmarishly hard that this guy's a cakewalk in comparison.
 * Awesome but Impractical: The pistol, the ammo of which costs 500 coins and can kill six of the bosses in at most one clip.
 * Awesome Music: Whether it's the 8-bit chiptunes, the MIDI files, or the regular music, you're bound to find something you like.
 * Base Breaker: The Wii Ware cancellation.
 * Big Lipped Alligator Moment: The encounter with Yomar is...strange, to say the least.
 * Crowning Moment of Funny: If you're not bawling over, you're most likely laughing your ass off.
 * Crowning Music of Awesome: Pretty much the entire damned soundtrack.
 * Made even nicer is that nearly every track has a chip-tune (SSCC option), MIDI (SC88 option), or the arranged soundtrack by GR3 Project. Chances are you'll find at least one version of each song you'll like.
 * Demonic Spiders: Averted in later stages, but played straight early in the game, where if you don't have the Waterproof/Heatproof Cases, anything that can knock you into water or lava is a Demonic Spider.
 * Erratically moving Podobo ripoffs in the Inferno Cavern, I'm looking at you.
 * Water Reaper Surprise Fish from the Spring in the Sky is probably another candidate, considering that its spawn points are tough to see and it only jumps out at you when you're nearby. If it hits you, there's a good chance you'll end up in the water.
 * Tougens- large, red, turtle-like creatures that fire hadokens at you when they face you. They're impossible to avoid damage from, let alone kill, until you get the Silver Shield. And they always seem to be found in tight spots where they can't be jumped over.
 * Ear Worm: The Hell Temple music. It's fully capable of causing Vietnam-like flashbacks.
 * Ensemble Darkhorse: CATBAAAAAALLLLLLL!!
 * Fan Disservice: Two words and a symbol:
 * According to the ESRB write-up for the remake,
 * Fan Nickname: "Catball," for the cat-like enemy that rides on its ball, and the notorious "Surprise Fish", which are fish that jump out of waterfalls unexpectedly.
 * Freud Was Right: Spring of the Sky, map A-4. Look at the background murals, and notice that there are two legs, and something between them. Though this is desquickified by background information, as Uonin (this species of fish-men) have the habit of carrying an iron air tank in their crotch. It's still as suggestive, though...
 * Germans Love David Hasselhoff: If the number of comments on the official blog are any indication, the game has a larger English-speaking (and Spanish-speaking) fanbase than it has Japanese. And the PC original is a tribute to the MSX, whose fanbase was mainly centered in Japan. Oh, the irony.
 * Goddamned Bats: Pretty much everything. Of course, the bats themselves are particularly annoying, especially when they blend in with the background. Which they do much more often than you'd think, as a surprising number of areas in the game have blue backgrounds, including Hell Temple. This may have been deliberate. But almost everything eventually becomes a goddamned bat.
 * The Water Is Blue; the bats are blue; the bats can fly underwater. ARGH!
 * Goddamned Boss: Several minibosses have the tendency to knock the player off the screen, causing to restart the battle. Others are just hard to hit.
 * Tiamat, who among other things spawns Goddamned Bats - which don't even give any experience for healing. She's only saved from That One Boss status (even by La-Mulana standards) by there being an easy (by the aforementioned standards) strategy to beat her.
 * Bahamut also qualifies, as half the time when he jumps out of the water he will use an attack that is 100% unavoidable if you don't jump into the water (which hurts you whether you have the Scalesphere or not). Even if you come prepared with a lot of life jewels and the body armor, he can still be a pain in the ass to fight.
 * The problem with Bahamut isn't so much the monster itself as that boat is damn hard to control. Once you get the hang of the boat, Bahamut is fairly simple.
 * Good Bad Bugs: In the Endless Corridor it's possible to jump through the ceiling of the main floor and appear in the bottom floor. This allows players to bypass the floor with all the block puzzles.
 * Guide Dang It: The game is full of them, but without a doubt the worst is the route to Hell Temple, a convoluted sequence with many steps, each of which is itself a massive Guide Dang It. Screwing up any of these steps can reset the sequence to the beginning, except for the (at least) one that can make Hell Temple permanently inaccessible. Of course, preventing the player from going into Hell Temple can be seen as an act of mercy.
 * One could argue the game invokes this trope as part of its game design. It heavily discourages brute-forcing your way through, as almost every puzzle in the game has a non-intuitive solution that would be very difficult to work out via trial and error, thus requiring the use of a "guide". The game just provides said "guide" for you in the form of the tablets (and the manual of course). Not to mention that attacking everything to try and open a route forward will very likely get you killed, because some things shock you with massively damaging lightning if hit.
 * The stupid in the Confusion Gate has made several players completely stuck.
 * The Collapsing Lair sequence in the end of the Wiiware remake. How the hell was anyone supposed to figure out to  to get out of the collapsing ruins, especially with a tight time limit causing major panic, and no warping allowed?
 * Good luck defeating Mother without looking at a guide or being really good at understanding cryptic hints.
 * Hell Is That Noise: The "trap activated" sound, meaning that something bad is about to happen.
 * What happens in the Wii version of the Confusion Gate/Gate of Illusion when you enter it for the first time and remove it's Uncanny Atmosphere.
 * Hilarious in Hindsight: Consider Xelpud's comments about the NES. Now La Mulana is about to be released on its distant descendant, the Wii.
 * Lemeza is an expy of Indiana Jones. One of the items that must be collected: a crystal skull.
 * Internet Backdraft: Nicalis announced via Joystiq that the NA/EU versions of the WiiWare remake had been cancelled. Rage in 5...
 * It Was His Sled: The Treasure Which Must Not Be Seen.
 * Most Wonderful Sound: The shell horn upon solving a puzzle. Especially satisfying since so many are massive GuideDangIts.
 * Nightmare Fuel: The sacrificial pit of Shu in the Confusion Gate, where a seemingly endless line of virgins fall down a tall pit to their death on the spikes below. Their blood is dripped onto the miniboss Shu, who regenerates HP whenever a drop of blood drips onto him. Somehow, the corny 8-bit graphics do not make this any less shocking and disturbing, and the creepy music (which by now has been drilling itself into your head for an hour or more) doesn't help matters, either.
 * The Confusion Gate is filled with large head-statues which look entirely too happy. The aforementioned sacrificial pit has several of them.
 * 's third form,
 * The background in the Temple of the Moonlight has demonic faces woven into walls made out of red vines or tentacles.
 * Tiamat. She has a very creepy distorted facial expression when doing a certain attack and another one after losing a certain amount of health, and if she kills you, this Slasher Smile tends to be the last thing you see before the Game Over screen...
 * Scrappy Weapon: The keyblade.
 * That One Boss: Several. The final boss counts, given that you have to fight a five-form boss, with a final dungeon beforehand, with said dungeon also including a boss of its own. In addition, almost every boss has a weakness to a particular weapon or subweapon; if you haven't got said item yet, it's almost guaranteed to be a tough fight.
 * Tiamat is a nightmarish fight. As you're attacking the symbols around the room, she'll spawn Goddamned Bats, as well as whipping you with her tail (which is nigh-unavoidable and knocks off a lot of health) or attack with Prehensile Hair (which is also difficult to dodge, but at least is telegraphed well in advance). Without the Castlevania/Mahjong Wizard ROM combo or all the Life Jewels, it's almost unbeatable.
 * Bahamut also proves to be a huge Jerkass of a boss. If he decides you're going into the water, you're going into the water, and it's made all the worse when you consider the water hurts you whether you have the Scalesphere or not and it can be very difficult to get back onto your little boat at times. Half the fight is just trying not to get wet.
 * Viy presents a challenge of great difficulty. The scrolling screen, eye beams, and tentacles makes his fight a nightmare.
 * Viy is only made worse in the Wiiware remake. Many of the boss fights in this version are quite different from their PC predecessors (Tiamat in particular is like a completely new boss fight). Viy, on the other hand, remains mostly the same as before, and this is not a good thing...
 * Well, Viy's eyelashes/tentacles now stretch up to the player, making them easier to strike. On the other hand, Viy now attacks almost instantly after opening its eye.
 * Palenque spams attacks everywhere and is difficult to go through the spaces in the pillars in time. If you hit him, you lose almost half your health. In addition, he's got a tiny hitbox, and being an Unexpected Shmup Level, that makes things...difficult.
 * Sakit is the second boss in the game, and many new players find him to be a brick wall of a boss. For starters, he's immune to subweapons and only capable of being hit at certain times (namely, after his Rocket Punch). His other attacks can be quite hard to dodge and are lethal if you don't have a few Life Jewels. If you found the knife before taking him on, he's a reasonable challenge, but the starter whip is so slow and weak you'll be chipping away at his health for a while if you only have it.
 * Baphomet, in the original game, was a pretty big joke that could be taken out easily with a few bombs. In the remake, she's a nightmarish marathon consisting of two forms and a great many hard to avoid lightning bolts. She's considered by some to be the second hardest boss in the remake, behind only the Mother herself.
 * That One Level: Tower of the Goddess. Make one slip when climbing the tower, and get sent back to the bottom. Just adding a safety guard at the bottom left/right corners would help a lot.
 * That One Puzzle: Several qualify. The mantras, for one thing.
 * The puzzle on the second level of the Infinite Corridor. Not only does the lantern arrangement require you to know the La-Mulana numbering system (which is only vaguely hinted at in game; there's no indication anywhere those symbols are anything other than eye candy), but even if you know the answer (2012, it's in the manual), the game's not guaranteed to acknowledge it. You can solve the puzzle all you want, but the third level will only open up when the game feels like it.
 * The confusion gate puzzle where you have to destroy all five pots at once. Possible, but if you miss, you need to wait 3 minutes before trying again.
 * Almost every late-game puzzle can be this if you don't have certain items. Doing the block puzzles in the Endless Corridor without the glove is nightmarish.
 * Waiting for that ****ing lizard to walk in front of the light.
 * That jumping puzzle for the Life Jewel in the Dimensional Corridor.
 * Woolseyism: There is no MSX game with the name Castlevania. The game was released in Europe (though not North America) under the name Vampire Killer, but translator Ian Kelley calls it Castlevania in-game because it's a more recognizable name. Uranai Sensation got renamed to Diviner Sensation to make more sense to non-Japanese speakers.
 * You Fail Physics Forever: A pushable block will stay stable even when it's half off a platform. The kicker?

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