King's Quest V/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Ear Worm: The ants' song while searching for a needle in a haystack! Seriously, you Can't Unhear It!
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: The bear. Retsupurae keep calling for it to return during their MST of the game, and no wonder - the damn ursine punches out Graham!
  • Hell Is That Noise: The sound a mouse makes when gnawing at the ropes that hold Graham! Sounds a bit like a static blowtorch, but seriously, WTH?
  • Idiot Plot: The entire first half of the game is spent trying to solve a single puzzle-- find a way to get the snake out of the way of the mountain path. Seriously, Graham couldn't, I dunno, throw a stick at it? Throw a lute at it? Crush it with a sled? No, he absolutely has to get rid of it by shaking a tambourine at it? Seriously?
    • Actually, the snake was added later to prevent Sequence Breaking, though its crude, rough, quick fix. Still, you need a sceptor, a genie's magic lamp, a witch's gems, honey, and elf shoes to get a single fucking hammer!. And none of these actions give any indications that Graham even remebers his family's kidnapping. Retsupurae said it best, he could've solved the game in half the time if he just went to a supply store.
  • Memetic Mutation: The POOOOOIsonous snake.
  • Most Annoying Sound: Anything that comes out of Cedric's beak can make a player's ears bleed.
    • The town music is horrific. And, really, any voice belonging to a small animal, thanks to raising their voices eight octaves.
  • Narm: Nearly every spoken line in the game. That or Dull Surprise.
    • Cedric: OH NO GRAHAM! WATCH OUT!
    • (Graham lets out a hilarious scream as he falls to his death.)
    • Narrator: Uh oh. That last step was a doozy!
  • The Scrappy: Cedric. The. Owl. He gives useless information, he leaves when anything dangerous happens, he slows down the action (you have to wait for him to land on something and then speak before moving, on every screen), his voice is high-pitched and ridiculous, the only time he gives useful advice is after you can do anything about it, and he is so. Fucking. Annoying.
    • So much reviled that, in an Easter Egg of the VGA remake of King's Quest II, an old King Graham runs after the damn owl with his sword ready to strike. And in Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist, an official game released by Sierra, you see him wandering in the desert, and later find vultures picking at his bones.
    • Even in this game, by the time Graham reaches Mordack's island, he's audibly becoming annoyed with Cedric.
  • Scrappy Level: The desert (although the mountain path and the dungeon maze are pretty bad, too).
  • Seinfeld Is Unfunny: This game was huge in the mid-nineties, and lots of people have fond memories of it, but it really hasn't aged well.
  • Unfortunate Character Design: Graham's character was designed in 16-color EGA for the earlier games. This is retained in the VGA game, and looks rather odd.
  • What the Hell, Casting Agency?: Lampshaded in Paw's Let's Play. The CD-ROM version of the game was voiced by Sierra employees, with varying degrees of success. Sierra learned their lesson, and pioneered the concept of Hollywood actors voicing computer games. (That being said, developer Josh Mandel was good enough to stay as Graham for VI, and Mandel has been gracious enough to lend his voice to the Fan Remakes.)