YMMV / Another Crab’s Treasure

• Accidental Aesop: Aside from the general Capitalism Is Bad messaging, the game's ending (possibly unintentionally) drives home a couple more stringent points about capitalism: getting rid of problematic individuals that support a corrupt system doesn't automatically make said system go away, and the most realistic way to make the best of things is through feasible acts of kindness and mutual aid towards others.
• Anvilicious: The game is very on-the-nose about its Capitalism Is Bad messaging, from its villains representing various aspects of the system to its use of puns such as "crabitalism" and Inkerton's name.
• Animation Age Ghetto: When Another Crab's Treasure was first announced, its explicit labeling as a Souls-like RPG confused some people due to its cartoony aesthetics, with some believing that it'd be a family-friendly, Nintendo-esque introduction to the genre. While the final game is more tame than most games of its type and contains accessibility options for an easier experience, its overall content and gameplay gear it towards teens and adults as its primary demographic. The game can certainly be enjoyed by kids (much moreso than Dark Souls) and has plenty to appeal to them, but has them as more of a Periphery Demographic and with content that may be inappropriate for their age range.
• Awesome Moments:
  • For all that the premise hammers home that the pollution has tainted the ocean and driven its denizens mad, Kril's continued slaying of polluted sea creatures with a fork he found deserves mention. Especially when going against bosses many times his own size.
  • Chitan may be a Blood Knight who's quick to jump to violence, but she protects the sea creatures of New Carcinia from Inkerton with her dual blades on Roland's barge and defeats him offscreen while Kril fights the isopod himself. When found later in the Abyssal Plains, she's standing next to the corpse of a spider crab, which would tower over her and shoots lasers.
  • Villainous points to Roland—he is not afraid to get his claws dirty, nor is he an easy fight. Especially since he casually shatters the glass of the pinball machine he and Kril are standing on, taking the fight into a place where his rolling attacks have an advantage.
    Roland: I'll send you down the drain myself, you little flatworm!
  • The final battle against Firth. By the finale, Kril is absolutely done with all this BS and Firth in particular. So when the little guy finally gets the Perfect Whorl away from Firth, he uses its power to lay the final smackdown on the blue jerk. The fact that Firth starts begging for mercy just piles on the schadenfreude.
• Awesome Music: The game's boss soundtrack. While many have the generic boss theme, special mention goes to Duchess Magista, Grovekeeper Topoda, Roland, and King Camtscha's themes along with the Praya Dubia's second phase.
• Catharsis Factor: Getting Kril’s shell back from that damn hustler Prawnathon. After dealing with ocean pollution, ferocious sea critters, various killers gone mad, an eldritch avatar of the dead, and Firth stealing the Perfect Whorl, Kril is just done with this all. So when the prawn refuses to give back Kril’s shell, a familiar prompt comes up: Attack. Satisfying only begins to describe getting to knock the shrimp’s block off after everything.
• Friendly Fandoms: While the game has attracted fans of FromSoftware's games and other Souls-like RPG games such as Lies of P, it has also attracted adult fans of SpongeBob SquarePants and Splatoon for its similar cartoony undersea aesthetic. Appropriately, the game acknowledges this crossover through its costume selections for Kril, which include both Solaire of Astora and Mr. Krabs. The game's overall themes are also similar to Splatoon, showing how human greed and capitalism have shaped the world for sea creatures.
• Game-Breaker: Bobbit Trap works on EVERYTHING, even the final boss. What makes it broken versus any other Adaptation is that, since it stuns, it gives you the time to get back the Umami Charges you spent using it. With a normal setup it only takes a few extra hits to get enough charges to use it again, and with the right setup of end-game powerups, it's entirely possible to just stunlock everything to death.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The game appears to have a widespread following upon Japanese audiences, being a common subject of let's plays amongst Japanese gamers.
• Moral Event Horizon: If Firth didn't cross it when he tells a downtrodden Kril to go jump into the mouth of the Apex Predator of the Drain to be "useful to somebody" for once, he definitely crosses it when he not only ignores Kril's pleas to help a mortally wounded Chitan, but drops the entirety of Trash Island onto New Carcina, ignoring the long-term harm he's doing to profit off the economic boon.
• Surprise Difficulty: The game appears to be a colorful, and cartoony underwater world akin to Spongebob Squarepants, but the combat is as brutal and unforgiving as Dark Souls.
• Tear Jerker:
  • In the Expired Grove, Nemma tells Kril that all the polluted crabs used to be "people." And that is made even more tragically clear in Flotsam Vale and Roland's production facility in Scuttleport, where a great number of polluted crabs are wielding corkscrews the same as the still-sapient crab workers, mindlessly drilling the garbage until they spot Kril and attack.
  • Voltai, the Accumulator may be trying to kill you while treating it as "playtime", but they're the power source of Roland's factory. Looking at the filthy chamber that operates as the power center and their prison, you can't help but pity the electric eel. Especially when they gleefully call Kril the best playmate ever at the halfway point of the battle, saying nobody else has "stayed awake" so long. Finishing them off is practically a Mercy Kill and they don't even hold it against Kril because they don't understand death.
    "Thanks for… playing with me…"
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Despite the game's colorful exterior and (obviously) being Lighter and Softer than the typical Souls-like RPG, it's rated Teen for "blood, violence, use of tobacco, language, and crude humor". Indeed, the game does contain dark themes and devolves into a Cosmic Horror Story, which isn't unheard of for family-friendly games, but it also contains a fair amount of swearing and adult situations (not to mention its overall difficulty), overall having roughly the same maturity level as Deltarune.

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