Adaptation Displacement: The title claiming it's a Gaiden Game isn't a — or, well, it's only mostly a joke. Barkley Shut Up and Jam is a real game, though the creator admitted to being inspired entirely by the title and never having actually played it.
And then there's "Eternity," taken directly from Blue Dragon. It's sung by Ian Gillan of Deep Purple. The song's meta-info for the artist even says "jesus christ the guy from deep purple sang this." While it's somewhat divisive in Blue Dragon, since some people find the singing impossible to take seriously... in this game? A game where the player is already accepting ridiculous amounts of silliness? You've still got that absolutely epic music, but the arguable absurdity of the singing now only adds to the charm. It really says something that most of the comments on most videos on YouTube for the song are talking aboutthis game and not Blue Dragon.
Captain Obvious Reveal: The Ultimate Hellbane being Balthios, to the point of parody. If he gets a status effect on him in battle, it refers to him as Balthios. His character portrait is also the same, but in silhouette—and then there's the fact that he even has a portrait in the first place. To make it worse, they refer to Balthios as an octoroon in his introduction, and then not two scenes later, before he even leaves the building, one of the two words they use to describe The Ultimate Hellbane, a cloaked, mysterious figure that is a complete enigma, as an octoroon...
Common Knowledge: To this day, the game is coined as being an RPG Maker creation by various sources. While this is a bit true (It was in development on RPG Maker 2003 at the beginning), the final product was finished in Game Maker 6.1, not RPG Maker.
Cult Classic: Ruthlessly Parodied with the game presenting itself as a forgotten and poorly translated, but mechanically solid, RPG.
Demonic Spiders: Dread Refs appear as a miniboss in the first dungeon, and then as normal enemies later on. They can summon more Dread Refs, and also inflict foul on you, making you miss a turn. They also have a relatively strong, multi-hit attack.
Good Bad Bugs: While enemies don't typically respawn, it's possible to make them respawn by saving, quitting to the title screen, then loading the save file. Using this it's possible to grind for more money and experience.
Harsher in Hindsight: Ghost Dad, played by Bill Cosby, is a boss. Cosby's public perception has taken a sharp turn since 2014, when it came to public attention that Cosby has been accused of rape, sexual assault and harassment by numerous women.
The furries in the sewers refer to outsiders as "norms", which is disturbingly similar to the recent (started picking up steam in the mid-2010s) trend of people in various fandoms (furries in particular) calling outsiders "normies". Also, one of them had himself turned into Huckleberry Hound because of the connection he felt to the character; people who identify as preexisting fictional characters would come to make themselves known on Tumblr in the early 2010s, calling themselves "fictionkin".
There's mention near the end of a "loot crate" that contains different things every time you open it. Regardless of the intended reference, present-day players will more likely be reminded of LootCrate, a subscription service that ships customers boxes of random guff every month, or of the widely-mocked (if not outright raged against) trend of multiplayer games rewarding players with "loot boxes" containing possibly-useful but usually-worthless items and frequently cost real money to open. The former was founded in 2012, and the latter were first introduced in Team Fortress 2 in 2010.
Balthios being the octoroon great grandson of Lebron James in addition to the game's inclusion of Lebron James himself becomes this now there's a sequel to Space Jam (which is treated as canon to the game's backstory) starring Lebron James in the lead role.
In 2021, Piko re-released the two original versions of Barkley Shut Up and Jam 1 & 2 for Genesis, but to avoid paying any license to Charles Barkley's image, they replaced every photo of him with a poorly photoshopped shutterstock face, the same kind of Stylistic Suck editing you'd see in this game. To top it off? The game's name and protagonist got renamed to Joe Hoops, just like Barkley's son in here: Hoopz Barkley.
CHAOS DUNK, referring to why basketball is Serious Business in-universe.
Although the meme of combining the main Space Jam theme with other songs was around for years before Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden was released, the game popularized it, and any images that accompany a given mashup will almost invariably have Charles Barkley's face be poorly photoshopped into them in homage of the game.
Any time Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden is mentioned in any particular context, a disclaimer will usually be put at the top or near the beginning with wording along the lines of:
WARNING: THE (NOUN) YOU ARE ABOUT TO (VERB) IS CANON.
"I believe ghosts are like dogs and they just sort of do things arbitrarily."
Moral Event Horizon: Michael Jordan is pretty bad from the start, but he comes across as a Well-Intentioned Extremist, if one with an emphasis on theextremist, until you reach the church for the second time, Jordan's already fatally wounded Larry Bird, and he is threatening to kill Hoopz. And if it's not that, it's infecting Hoopz with Type 2 diabetes after your trek through the Spalding building.
Nightmare Fuel: By using horror tropes, the Sugar Caves manage to turn sugar, of all things, into a sinister hazard.
Scrappy Mechanic: The Truck Pump rants stop being funny after the fiftieth time you've had to sit through them. And by fast-fowarding through the rants you'll risk stumbling into the save menu and overwriting file 1 even if for some reason you didn't intend to. Although the Pump rants are hilarious stabs at otakus, they should have been placed somewhere other than the save points. Worst part is that you have to read this crap, because the last one quizzes the player about the rants done through the game (although you don't need to pass it).
This may be intentional, especially considering that the Truck Pump rants are Take Thats.
That One Level: It is laughably easy to die in the Sugar Caves. Get used to reading "The...the sugar...granules everywhere! Ugh!"
This Is Your Premise on Drugs: This is what happens when a 90's nostalgia trip overlaps with a psychedelic one. Unlike the usual hackneyed use of the term "psychedelic," where it's referring to art that's weird or unusual, the game genuinely has a psychedelic quality. It's not psychedelic in terms of the visuals, but rather in all the collective design elements. Every aspect of the game, from the sprites and story to the soundtrack, are drawn from wildly disparate sources. Besides plundering assets from a wide array of SNES titles, the premise of the game draws from 90's basketball, (and more specifically, as put by the creators, how it was exploited through "sci-fi basketball" of things like Space Jam, Shaq Fu and Michael Jordan: Chaos In Windy City) sports games, JRPG cliches, fantasy tabletop gaming, otaku culture, internet forum discourse, and many other areas of 90's and 2000's pop culture. It feels like a product of the state of mind that LSD puts you in, where you're making connections between abstract, seemingly unrelated ideas and dwelling on the complexity of the details in world around you. The game is a layered, absurdly-deep amalgamation of sports, pop culture, and video games that manages to be excellent satire while also staying charming, engaging, and hilarious all the way through.
is a real game, though the creator admitted to being inspired entirely by the title and never having actually played it.