YMMV / Brütal Legend

• Alternative Joke Interpretation: Doviculus tells Eddie to "grow pair as big as [Eddie's] mother's." He's either accidentally implying that Eddie's mom had testicles or noting how she had a great rack. Either way, Eddie is understandably grossed out.
• Angst? What Angst?: Eddie is surprisingly blasé about suddenly dying and being transported to the hellish Age of Metal to fight demons and zombies. In fact, he seems to prefer it: When Lita suggests that he could look for a way to get back home on top of saving the world, Eddie openly scoffs and brushes it off. And considering how miserable he was in the modern age and what he had to put up with...
• Anvilicious: The game bashes the audience over the head with it's views on what genres are "metal" and what genres aren't, driving its point home at the start by presenting the "Second Wave of American Tween Melodic Rap Metalcore" band Kabbage Boy, who perform a song said in-universe to be awful and not "real metal", and then get their heads blown off.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: A video game about Jack Black using The Power of Rock at liberal levels to do everything. Additionally, the RTS quality of the game apparently felt this way for EA (and formerly Vivendi), which led to them marketing it as an action game. Given that the game has suffered a lot of criticism not just for the stage battles, but for the mechanics of said stage battles, they may not have been entirely wrong.
• Awesome Music: Inevitable considering the soundtrack consists of 107 tracks of original work, remixes of various metal songs, or actual album compositions.
  • The game starts out with Black Sabbath's "Children of the Grave" in a low-volume riff until Riggs picks up the axe...
  • Fighting the giant Metal Queen spider to Brocas Helm's "Cry of the Banshee" is considered one of the most memorable moments in the game. The song (and band) were impossible to find anywhere, until their popularity exploded from this game. Soon after, the Brocas Helm album Defender of the Crown became available for digital download on iTunes.
  • Ozzy Osbourne's "Mr. Crowley" when Ophelia jumps into the Sea of Black Tears
  • The Final Boss theme is the iconic "Painkiller" by Judas Priest.
  • The instrumental metal soundtrack by LucasArts / Double Fine mainstay Peter McConnell is very cool, even if you're probably not listening to it.
• Best Level Ever: Brütal Legend fans love the Metal Spider lair dearly.
  • "It's Raining Death": Hot off the heels of Tim Curry- er, Doviculus's introduction (and Lars's death), the demon army unleashes a barrage that has Lionwhyte's palace crumbling around you, and the monstrous enemies rush in to surround and kill you. Sounds like hell. But then Eddie hops into The Deuce, the soundtrack cranks up DragonForce's "Through The Fire And Flames", and you race through the collapsing castle at top speed on a route that pushes your driving skills just enough to be challenging without being insanely hard (once you figure out where you need to turn). It's easily one of the most awesome- and fun- levels of the game.
• Broken Base: There are loyal fans who love all of Double Fine's work, fans who feel betrayed that it's a multiplayer focused Action/RTS and not a Dynasty Warriors-esque brawler, and fans of just the multiplayer. There are also fans who loved the single player so much that the multiplayer focus did not deter them.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: The multiplayer has a handful of infamous exploits. During release, players would "Baron Spam," creating over a dozen Fire Barons and wiping out opponents in a short amount of time, driving away frustrated players. Double Fine responded by making several nerfs to Ironheade, which was very effective...until players started cheating the leaderboards by consistently disconnecting if they started losing or simply if they got matched up with someone who beat them in the past. Then there's Car Spam, Soul Kisser Spam, Grave Digger Spam, Infinite Combos, or players just trying to collect achievements.
• Complete Monster: Emperor Doviculus, the sadomasochistic creator and leader of the Tainted Coil, enslaved humanity long before the game started, and led the world into a hellish domain. Letting Lionwhyte take charge of the human race and leading them to a society ruled by a dictatorship of which he approves, Doviculus continues building up his own army of demons that he himself created in order to oppose anyone against him. When Lionwhyte fails to stop the revolution of Eddie Riggs and dies, Doviculus murders Lars, who showed himself after Doviculus sensed the presence of the band of heroes. With a cold-blooded murder on his hands, Doviculus unleashes destruction around the area to eliminate the surviving members of Lionwhyte's army and attempts to murder Eddie's. After showing his tremendous power and taking over as the primary villain, Doviculus sends a doppelganger version of Ophelia, a woman who was abandoned by Eddie and his team, to take vengeance on them. After that final duel against Ophelia, Doviculus kills the doppelganger and challenges Eddie to a battle to the Death in his throne room, where Doviculus exhibits his callousness towards his minions as he tortures and kills them to be used as attacks against Eddie, despite them being his children.
• Cult Classic: However, Tim Schafer expressed the fact that he is very sick of his games stopping at this status.
• Dead Horse Genre: Given that this is a game about Metal, there's sure to be plenty of ribbing of unpopular music styles - such as the Hair Metal-themed villain group (despite the fact there are multiple hair metal songs on the soundtrack). Subverted because this is a game set in a world without critics to badmouth any specific genre. Any Metal in this game, that is not said to be awful in game, is an affectionate nod to its genre. Rob Halford even said, "[Lionwhyte] is a cross-section of everything I know and love in Heavy Metal music.".
• Difficulty Spike: Even if you get only the basics of Stage Battles, you can do fine on Normal difficulty. Playing on Brütal, though, is just what the name implies. The enemy general will often spam infantry whose only function is to Zerg Rush anything in sight, as well as use units one stage level ahead of your current one, while you beat yourself up trying to find free Fan Geysers just to raise your fan intake and not run out of army at a critical moment. Especially terrible when you're fighting Drowning Doom troops, who are stubbornly resilient (add to that the Bride's inherent ability to slow you down and the vehicles).
• Disappointing Last Level: While the actual quality of the game stays high throughout, after Lionwhyte's palace, the story moves at an almost uncontrollably fast pace. The only stage battle with the Tainted Coil is basically them sharing a boss fight with the Drowning Doom. See Cosmic Deadline.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The Guardian of Metal, voiced by Ozzy Osbourne. His role is one of the most praised; he's just the Shopkeeper.
  • Lars is a fairly popular character among the fandom, despite being killed off half-way through, yet he manages to rival even main character Eddie in popularity.
  • Mangus is well liked as well.
  • Although he was well liked already, the Killmaster has received some attention, after the death of Lemmy Kilmister.
  • A Band example. But as mentioned above in Awesome Music, the band Brocas Helm has become one of the more recognized bands off of the soundtrack.
• Event-Obscuring Camera:
  • The camera in the first boss battle automatically adjusts to give an excellent view of the boss and its attacks, at the cost of twisting your control plane around at odd angles.
  • When passing by side missions, the camera insists on showing them to you.
  • In the cannoneer side missions, when the cannon is fired, the game wants to make sure you see every badass explosion.
• Evil Is Cool: Having Tim Curry play a BDSM demon-lord with a multi-necked magic electric guitar is just too cool for words. Getting to play as him in the multiplayer certainly helps.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Sacrifice 2 or Ozzcraft.
  • "LOL RTS", used by those who disliked the RTS element.
  • "Nuke Solo" are the Facemelter, Shadow Blast, and Curse solos, which are short range explosions that insta-kill weaker mooks.
  • "Buzzsaw" is a near infinite combo "AAAX * roll forward* , repeat." It can be avoided.
  • To make a "Caravan" means to build a group of Headsplitters.
    • Eddie actually uses this term the same way in an escort mission.
  • The "Wall of Death" is a full Drowning Doom army, with every debuffer available, and lots of Broods.
• Faux Symbolism:
  • Pentagrams as objective markers.
  • Doviculus' opening his chest and displaying his heart, complete with a thorny crown around it.
• Game-Breaker: The Heat Seeker makes Death Rack side-missions almost too easy.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • Due to some flaw in the shape of the sickle-wraith's hitbox, running over it with the deuce causes the vehicle to flip upwards several meters, sometimes even doing a barrel-roll.
  • The Hero Unit blocking protects from many attacks, and even damage from being on fire, being poisoned, or even drowning. If you held the block button under the Hazardous Water for a long time, you would never drown. This is a widely accepted online strategy because there are plenty of attacks designated as unblockable.
• He's Just Hiding: Some of the Razor Girls imply that Lionwhyte is still alive and some fans have latched onto that.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Depending on when you find and unlock the Legends, some dialogue takes on greater meaning - for example, the Guardian of Metal's little poem contains the elements that Ormagöden exploded into.
  • Bobby Kotick claimed Brütal Legend was not a good game. It's a Spiritual Successor to an Activision game called Battlezone.
  • Tim Schafer played Alan Wake and tweeted in two posts:
    Tim Schafer: Holy crap. Did I just defend a rock stage from a inky-shadowy army using pyrotechnics and light... in Alan Wake? I need to immediately travel back in time and base a whole game on this!
  • Tenacious D's 2012 Roadie could basically be about Eddie.
• Hype Aversion: Electronic Arts and Tim Schafer each advertised very different things on this game. In many videos, Schafer talked almost exclusively on the multiplayer aspect, because it's the part he worked on the most, and was the point of the whole game (the single player world and story were created after the multiplayer was finished). EA on the other hand advertised the presence of Jack Black, and hyped the game up immensely without actually talking about the gameplay. Players who went exclusively by the hype and the single player demo did not take the Unexpected Gameplay Change well. Double Fine did not enjoy the marketing push at all. EA completely and intentionally hid the gameplay that Schafer wanted players to see the most.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: A common criticism from players who aren't interested in the multiplayer. The single player campaign was intended to be about twice as long as it ended up being, but Double Fine had to leave out a lot of the things they wanted to include due to time and budget constraints.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Achievement whores aren't very well liked by the online community. Tim Schafer met one who asked him to lose intentionally to boost achievements. He wasn't amused.
  Tim Schafer: "surrender plz? surrender plz??? This is what I go online for? To have some kid tell me "surrender plz" at my own game?"
• Last Lousy Point: All the collectibles, really, but especially the Bound Dragons. There are 120 all over the map, and you have to find most of them for the stat bonuses they unlock to be worth much. That requires the player to stop the game cold and spend hours cruising the map looking in every nook and cranny for them (and good luck with that, with most of the map having weird colors and lighting). It also falls into Bragging Rights Reward, since by the time you've opened up the whole map the campaign will be almost over.
• Memetic Molester: Doviculus. Guess it comes with being voiced by Tim Curry and being the lord of a BDSM-themed demonic army.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • DECAPITATIOOOOOOON!!!^ExplanationEddie shouts this after seemingly beheading the first boss in the game. He later screams this for an ungodly amount of time after beheading the final boss. As a result, it's pretty common to find this used for any scene in any other medium where a character loses their head.
  • POSITIVE ATTITUDE! ^ExplanationThe capitalism-skewering setup of Lionwhyte's army is rife with phrases that can be used to mock middle-management and corporate behavior, such as this one.
  • IS [insert band] IN THIS GAME?^ExplanationDue to the sheer number of different bands represented in the game's tracklist, several of them fairly obscure even among metalheads, it became a trend for a time to ask (sincerely or otherwise) if someone's favorite band made the cut, even after the full tracklist was discovered.
  • Beard Beard Action Beard!^ExplanationThe Achievement/Trophy title for making out with Ophelia with one of the DLC outfits equipped. Quickly became a way to describe anyone with a badass beard.
  • Kinda sexy, though, in a weird way.^ExplanationEddie's thoughts on the Battle Nun. You can imagine just how many characters people have described with this.
• Misblamed: Tim Schafer and Double Fine get all the flack for the Misaimed Marketing when it was Electronic Arts' fault.
• Most Wonderful Sound: In both single player and multiplayer, the guitar solos are excellent and your units react with hilariously joyful comments.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The Summon Flag. Like a Rally Point in Starcraft, a special guitar solo creates a rally point that you can set on the ground for allies, or keep on your back so fresh units will come to you. But losing track of this flag is an easy way to cost you a match, even for the pros.
• Shallow Parody: The Second Wave of American Tween Melodic Rap Metalcore band Kabbage Boy is meant to be a spoof of Nu Metal stereotypes present in the bands of the genre (Wangsty lyrics, DJ scratching, pseudo-gangsta outfits, random rapping). However, even back in 2009, it's pretty obvious that the developers (especially Tim Schafer) didn't bother to deeply explore the genre and just shallowly mocked its common clichès instead (it also works in a few stereotypical Boy Band tropes, like choreographed dancing and lyrics about relationships). And the fact those trends were long out of fashion by the time the game came out help to make the parody in question a bit outdated.
• So Bad, It's Good: It is difficult to deny the whimsical charm of the song "Girlfriend." It mixes corny, god-awful pop lyrics with douchey singers, fake rapping, surprisingly decent guitars, a painfully forced chorus, and even a long monotone breakup poem where you can clearly tell that the person reading the poem is Chewing the Scenery to death and having a lot of fun doing it. Eddie's reaction: "I can fix anything...except THAT."
• Tainted by the Preview: Tim Schafer talked about nothing but the stage battles and the multiplayer. Electronic Arts talked about nothing but the story, Jack Black, and the single player, and nothing about the gameplay. The demo was only the first five minutes of the whole game. Guess whose message got to players. (Hint: Not the guy who made the game.)
• That One Attack: The Buzzsaw, a pseudo-infinite combo discovered after Double Fine's big balance patch. It can allow one player to endlessly wail on the other, scoring an easy kill and undermining the idea that the combat is about combining Buffs with Double Teams, rather than lone combos. A source of frustration of casual players.
• That One Level: "Dry Ice, Wet Graves" on Brütal difficulty is by far the hardest mission in the game. Trying to hold off the Drowning Doom long enough for you to build your army means that you can't afford to waste a single moment when it comes to building units and securing fan geysers.