Shovel Knight/YMMV


 * Anticlimax Boss: The Enchantress's second phase is a lot easier than the first, and isn't too terribly hard in general. She can no longer instantly kill you by dunking you into a bottomless pit, and her attacks are generally heavily telegraphed and easy to react to.
 * Breather Boss: Mole Knight and Tinker Knight are a lot easier than the second and third set of bosses they're a part of respectively.
 * Mole Knight, while about as mobile as Plague and Treasure Knight, lacks their spastic unpredictability and generally sticks to patterns that are easy to catch on to.
 * Tinker Knight, on the other hand, is practically a joke who runs around his room like a headless chicken while occasionally throwing wrenches at you, making him easy set-up fodder for your attacks. And that's assuming you don't just instantly beat him with the Mobile Gear as Shovel Knight..
 * King and Specter Knight are this during the rematches against the Order of No Quarter. Fitting, since they're the first bosses you go after and neither one is really all that difficult to deal with.
 * Crazy Awesome: Psychotic? Giggly? Obsessed with deadly chemicals and volatile bombs? Prone to abusing his lackeys for fun?! Plague Knight's a total nut, all right. But he's still a villain you'll love to hate, not to mention fun as hell to play as once you get a hang of his unconventional moveset.
 * Demonic Spiders: It wouldn't be a retro-styled platformer without ridiculously obnoxious enemies!
 * Hover Meanies, the green cloaked guys with propellers on their backs. They're only encountered in Platform Hell stages like Propeller Knight's airship and the Tower of Fate, and they revel in taking advantage of the hostile environment by blowing you straight into bottomless pits for an instant kill. Approaching them is incredibly dangerous thanks to the strong winds they whip up, and your ranged attacks won't do enough damage to kill them before they fly in and attack. You will learn to hate these guys with all your heart.
 * Goldarmors are the game's Sniper Joe equivalent, being Evil Counterpart mooks who fight similarly to you, but hide behind shields so you can't easily hurt them. When their shields aren't up, they're throwing out fast attacks so you can't safely get a hit in, and different-colored ones throw in their own level of bullshit into the mix: purple Goldarmors lob anchors upward to cut off aerial attacks, Green Goldarmors will crush you with sudden jump attacks, Red Goldarmors attack very quickly and relentlessly, and Silver Goldarmors? They combine the fighting styles of their Red and Green cousins. Have fun fighting these guys!
 * Genius Bonus: The Order of No Quarter's name isn't just a comical-sounding rhyme, "No Quarter" is a fancy term for "No Mercy". Fitting, since they're the Enchantress' ruthless enforcers.
 * Hype Backlash: With how many people praising the game as a great throwback to old Nintendo Entertainment System games, it was only a matter of time before there were people who felt this way about the game.
 * Scrappy Mechanic:
 * Even those who swear by Plague of Shadows aren't exactly fans of the whole "you have to pause the game and manually tinker with Plague Knight's current bomb loadout every single time you want to change tactics.
 * 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 Specter of Torment's New Game+ mode, you go from feeling like an unstoppable, slightly edgy Badass to a helpless cripple because that's exactly what happens to Spectre Knight. Less checkpoints, no Will Skull, Darkness and Will share the same perpetually draining bar that drains even faster when you use Curios... it feels less like a genuine challenge and more like Fake Difficulty for its own sake.
 * Ships That Pass in the Night: None of the ships between members of the Order of No Quarter dip have any canon standing due to their lack of interactions and conflicting personalities, yet they're popular all the same.
 * Spiritual Licensee: To Mega Man and the NES Ducktales game, with a hint of Super Mario Bros. 3 and Zelda II for good measure. Given that Shovel Knight is an 8-bit love letter to those games, it's not surprising in the least.
 * That One Achievement:
 * Perfect Platformer and Impossible. If you want the first, then you can't fall down a single Bottomless Pit in a game that turns into a nasty example of Platform Hell later on. As for Impossible? You can't die at all. Ever. You can get around this by simply exiting the stage if you die, but it's still a tedious exercise in frustration considering how long the stages are.
 * Hurry Up! tasks you with beating the game in one hour and thirty minutes. You can only screw up so many times before this kind of Self-Imposed Challenge becomes a lost cause and a waste of time.
 * Dirt Poor is hard for a different reason: you can't pick up any money while playing through a level. Not even a tiny speck worth 1G. No money means no money, and each level is jam-packed with treasure, some being genuinely impossible to beat this way due to their treasure placement. But even this one is reasonable compared to Penny Pincher, where you can't spend any money whatsoever, leaving you crippled and lacking in health, good armor, and shovel techniques.
 * True Shovelry is in a league of its own, because you have to beat the game without relics. You can't attack from a safe distance with your fire wand, you can't clear the screen of enemies with the horn, you can't slip past death spikes with the Phase Locket... none of it.
 * Viewer Gender Confusion: Fans initially mistook Gall for a lady thanks to his design and love of... well, making out with Spectre Knight for the sake of scientific research. But the developers confirmed that he was, indeed, a guy.
 * Woolseyism: In the Japanese release, the Alchemy Coin was turned into a more authentic piece of Japanese currency, ditching the Japanese text engraved on it with a hole in the center.