Castlevania II: Simon's Quest/YMMV

Anticlimax Boss: Dracula.
Awesome Music: Believe it or not, this was the first game to include "Bloody Tears", a tune associated with Castlevania up to the present day, in the score.
Critical Research Failure: Everyone in the world who has bashed this game (and even people on this very page!) uses Guide Dang It as the main (or one of the main) criticisms, but in actual fact there isn't one single puzzle in the entire game for which there isn't some kind of clue, however cryptically worded, from either the "scriptures" (hidden red books) or the townsfolk, whom the manual itself tells you are sometimes liars. Speaking of which, more often than not when they lie it's obvious due to their words being either a blatant joke or a reference to something that's impossible by the game's mechanics (finding a flame on top of trees, shouting in front of a church, etc.).
Crowning Moment of Funny: "TAKE MY DAUGHTER, PLEASE!!"
- Or the town of Aldra, where Simon isn't able to get from one side of the town to the other without getting hit on repeatedly by prostitutes. "I've been waiting for a good looking guy like you."
Crowning Music of Awesome: Bloody Tears, in its first instance as a Recurring Riff. (It had already been featured in Haunted Castle but this was its first time *recurring*.)
- What's really impressive about the music in this game is that the loops are quite short ("Bloody Tears" is a repeat of only thirty seconds; others are even shorter), but what's in those brief spaces is so good that not only is it not criticized as repetitive, it's downright beloved--the series' Crowning Music of Awesome page names almost every track.
Game Breaker: The Golden Knife. Although it's prohibitively expensive to use to just mow down everything in your path, it's powerful enough to render any enemy - including Dracula - harmless.
Memetic Mutation: WHAT A HORRIBLE NIGHT TO HAVE A CURSE.
Misblamed: The translation is not good, but see Infallible Babble.
Most Annoying Sound: By the end of the game, the beeping that accompanies dialogue is probably gonna be ingrained in your head--WHAT A HORRIBLE NIGHT TO HAVE A CURSE--in a bad way.
Scrappy Mechanic: There is no way to speed up the text box marking the change from day to night and back. And you'll be seeing it a lot.
Sequelitis: This video explains why Simon's Quest suffered from this in comparison to Castlevania. (It even uses the trope name in its title!)
Snark Bait: The Angry Video Game Nerd's first ever reviewed game, and was revisited later by the Nerd.