Dragon Quest IV/YMMV
- Broken Base: Fans who remember the original straight-forward NES translation were generally disappointed with changes made in the remake's localization: the addition of 'regionalism' which brought ridiculous broken accents in the dialogue, and the changing of most names of people and places to make cultural references or bad puns. But plenty of new players enjoyed them and found the humor charming.
- Complete Monster: Aamon.
- Ensemble Darkhorse:
- Psaro, who gets his Heel Face Turn moment in the DS remake; Alena, who has a manga feature her as a main character and a game loosely based on her and her two helpers; and Torneko, who has his own series of Mysterious Dungeon games. Every main character except the hero and Borya has appeared at least once in the Itadaki Street series.
- Alena in general is considered practically the poster girl of the Dragon Quest series. It helps she's a Badass Princess who not only dresses conservatively, but is also a Bare-Fisted Monk who will easily dole out the most physical damage as a character in the party.
- Kiryl in particular tends to get quite a bit more fan art then you'd expect, and as such appears pretty often in spinoffs. Healie also goes from being a Guest Star Party Member (albeit the first playable monster one ever) to being one of the most reoccurring characters in the series.
- Psaro, who gets his Heel Face Turn moment in the DS remake; Alena, who has a manga feature her as a main character and a game loosely based on her and her two helpers; and Torneko, who has his own series of Mysterious Dungeon games. Every main character except the hero and Borya has appeared at least once in the Itadaki Street series.
- Fetish Fuel Station Attendant: Maya.
- Game Breaker:
- The Prayer Ring. One of the cheapest items in the Casino is, well, one of the "cheapest" items in the game, giving you literally infinite MP (praying outside of battle recharges MP for free), and thus infinite grinding with only the occasional break to save the game.
- Psaro. The ability to equip cursed items without penalties is just the start of it. He is so powerful and his spells so useful there is no reason not to have him in the party at all times.
- In the NES version of the game, the Sword of Lethargy. On a successful attack, it has a chance to put enemies to sleep, and bosses are not immune to this effect.
- Chapter 3 can be this... depending on how much you take advantage of the valuable items the enemies tend to drop. The casino in question happens to open up near the end, where being a merchant would be most useful. The game tries to compinsate by raising the price of the tokens but due to the high amounts of money you can make, it doesn't matter.
- Les Yay:
- Elisa/Celia gets some fun dialogue in the beginning of Chapter 5 if you choose to play as the Heroine Sofia.
- In Femiscyra/Gardenbur, the elderly priest thinks Sofia is jealous of his being the only functioning man in the whole queendom, and asks if she or one of the other female characters is one of those 'modern women'.
- Moral Event Horizon: Aamon murdering Rose, thus ensuring that Psaro the Manslayer crosses the Despair Event Horizon and goes along with his plan to destroy humanity.
- The Scrappy: Maya tends to be universally favored over Borya as the party's mage both in terms of spell casting and personality. Borya also makes the least amount of appearances of the entire cast in the spinoff games.
- Scrappy Mechanic: In the NES game, in the Hero's chapter (i.e. the main story segment), the combat actions of everyone in the party except the Hero are controlled by the game's A.I., with the player only getting to select vague "tactics". Unfortunately, this often resulted in a huge amount of Artificial Stupidity, such as your healer wasting all their MP trying to repeatedly cast instant death spells on enemies that were immune to them, rather than, you know, healing your party. Fortunately, the DS rerelease included an option for more traditional manual control.
- Squick: Psaro's growth of limbs and a second head/face is pretty icky in the NES game, but is just gross looking in the DS game. In a good way. Made even cooler as the DS version shows this from multiple angles. It really shows just how "not right" his transformation is.
- That One Boss:
- Estark in all versions, Foo Yung and Chow Mein in the remakes.
- Keeleon (NES name)/The Marquis de Leon (DS name) in all versions and Balzack in the remakes have always given veteran players trouble.
- Viewer Gender Confusion: Thanks to a Manual Misprint in the instruction booklet for the NES version, it was believed that Panon is a female; yet when you do meet Panon (and talk to some villagers) in the game itself, the comedian is actually a man! But with the sprite for the Panon character in the NES version, it was hard to make out if he is a man or not. The Nintendo DS and PS1 versions thankfully cleared up the confusion by making better sprites for the character and renaming him as "Tom Foolery".