YMMV / Conker's Bad Fur Day

• Adorkable: Rodent is pretty coy and endearing.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • During “Uga Buga” Did Berri genuinely not recognize Conker when he was wearing his caveman hat? Or did she recognize Conker and only told Don Weaso she didn’t in order get back at Conker for blowing off their date? If the latter, why did Berri call Conker her boyfriend at the start of “Heist”? Did Berri forgive Conker after having some time to cool off, was it a Freudian Slip she saw no point in covering up, or did she see Conker as too valuable of an asset for their robbery to risk upsetting him?
  • Some fans have been mind boggling on why Von Kriplespac had to be the one to tell the Panther King that they needed a red squirrel. Did the professor figure that he needed the red squirrel for his table? Or did he only say that as a distraction from what he was REALLY working on: waiting for his experiment implanted within the Panther King's belly to burst out and kill him?
• Animation Age Ghetto: This was a factor in the game's commercial failure. Both Nintendo (and reportedly, even Rare) were worried that it would be mistaken for a kids' game because it looked so cute and "cartoonish". So they limited advertisement for it to nighttime TV and adult magazines, avoiding gaming magazines and websites. This backfired, and the game sold badly due to Invisible Advertising. Many retailers had similar concerns about the title and refused to sell it, further contributing to its poor sales.
• Awesome Music:
  • The reprise of "Conker the King" that plays at the very end. The chimes and heart-wrenching violins are incredibly haunting, and drive home the Downer Ending.
  • Rock Solid. Many YouTube comments express bewilderment that such a cool rave song was even possible using N64 hardware.
  • The theme of The Experiment, both the original and the remake versions, are epic-sounding and good for tense battles.
  • "The Old Chap", being filled to the brim with whimsy and mayhem, and being one of the only songs carried over from Twelve Tales: Conker 64. It just fits with him pissing all over the fire imps.
• Best Boss Ever: The Great Mighty Poo, not only for his catchy song and insanely audacious gimmick, but because it's a well designed, fun and creative boss fight.
• Better as a Let's Play: Some fans of the game have argued that the gameplay itself isn't particularly fun, and what makes the game work is its writing and characters, which leave a big impact the first time around, but don't on subsequent playthroughs. As a result, many have turned to let's players to gain an authentic first-time reaction to the game and relive the essence of a first experience again.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The game is filled with these, usually when it tries to Shout-Out another work:
  • The two Tediz surgeons holding a rather intellectual conversation about the game. It was originally going to be where they vivisect a squirrel.
  • The lever-pulling scene where a squirrel soldier gets electrocuted, only for him to be Not Quite Dead.
  • The little girl puppet acting like Pazuzu.
  • The laser room right before the Final Boss. Berri just deactivates them all, making it completely pointless.
• Broken Base:
  • Which version is better: the N64 or Xbox version? Fans of the original will point to the more creative multiplayer and less censored campaign. Fans of the remake however feel that the revamped Multiplayer is unfairly given flack and that the additional censorship is small potatoes compared to the improvements to control and difficulty balancing.
  • How well does the game's style of humour hold up? Some argue that today the humor hasn't really aged all that well with it coming off as more mean-spirited then funny, whereas others argue that the humor still holds up today better than the likes of other games from around the same time like Grand Theft Auto III.
• Common Knowledge:
  • Conker is usually referred as a Sir Swears-a-Lot. However, Conker barely swears in the game and the worst things he says is "Fellatio", "Bitch", and "Ass". It's a forgivable assumption to make, though, since this is still much stronger language than in Conker's earlier appearances. The narrator in the Games in 60 Seconds video for Rare Replay lampshades this.
    Narrator: Conker the squirrel: hard-drinking, money-grabbing, but never foul-mouthed.
  • A lot of Nintendo fans point to Conker's Bad Fur Day as being the first ever M-rated game published by Nintendo. Except, Nintendo never published this game. In North America, Rare published the game themselves while Nintendo of America helped distribute and market it. Meanwhile, Nintendo of Europe gave the publishing/distribution duties to THQ, and the game didn't release in Japan at all. The first M-rated game to be directly published by Nintendo is Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, which released a year later in all regions. So, Bad Fur Day is the first M-rated game distributed by Nintendo? That's not the case either, as that honour goes to Perfect Dark, which released a year prior (also in all regions).
  • The game wasn't even the first comedic M-rated Nintendo 64 game. South Park saw three games that released on the system in the years before Bad Fur Day's release, all of which featured plenty of the source material's Vulgar Humor.
  • Famously, the box features an extra-large "M" ESRB rating (as seen on the main page)... except not. That version of the box was never actually printed; the image floating around online is a mockup leaked by Nintendo of Canada before the game's release. All copies of the game ultimately had a regular-sized "M" on the box, as seen on Wikipedia. However, the Australian version does indeed feature an extra-large "M15+" rating.
• Critical Backlash: Over time, more fans have started to defend the Xbox remake, feeling that it has been unfairly judged on the simple basis of it having higher censorship, while ignoring the many improvements the game brings to control, visuals, and audio.
• Crosses the Line Twice: The whole game might as well count with its copious amounts of Vulgar Humour.
  • The Great Mighty Poo wants to put Conker's head into "his butt", and even sings a high note about it.
  • Franky being Driven to Suicide? Kind of sad. Ron mocking him for attempting suicide? Almost distasteful. The reveal that it's a Bungled Suicide because "he doesn't even got a neck"? Gut-busting.
  • Berri's death. She gets gunned down in cold blood, and then her body is sucked out of an airlock.
• Cult Classic: While the game got solid critical reviews, the game was a big sales flop for Rare due to a variety of factors. Despite this, the game gradually built up a solid reputation among gamers over time due to its creativity and tone, and is now considered an N64 classic. Conker himself even gained a prominent playable role in Microsoft's Project Spark because of the original game's popularity.
• Dancing Bear: Definitely not the first M-rated game on a Nintendo console, but this was the first one that was proud of the fact, revelling in its Beavis and Butt-Head levels of crassness.
• Demonic Spiders: While the Tediz are generally nuisances for the most part, the Bazooka-Toting Tediz at the end of "It's War" are by far the most dreadful enemies due to the fact that they surround you easily, and their missiles are a combination of fast, pinpoint accurate, and One-Hit Kill. The only way to get past them is to both be fast and strategic, which is easier said than done when factoring in the self-destruct countdown.
• Designated Villain: Bugger Lugs. Sure, he's attacking Conker, but only because Conker instigated him by refusing to leave his territory. Plus, he ends up getting killed by falling into diarrhetic water after a grate falls beneath him after Conker forces him to kill three cows, and unlike Marvin, he doesn't come back.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: For most people, the story and cutscenes are the biggest draw for this game. The gameplay is very linear and the fact that every chapter has a new gameplay genre and control scheme is not to everyone's tastes.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The Great Mighty Poo. Ties in with One-Scene Wonder since his appearance is brief, yet he's the most well known character in the game aside from Conker himself. He sings, in a marvelous voice, an aria (with three movements!) about how he's a giant poo. And it is awesome.
  • Some DA fans also consider Batula as this, as he has gained a small fanbase.
  • Gregg is also popular with the fans, because of his appearance and funny dialogues.
  • Rodent is one thanks to his cute look and the fact that in a world full of assholes, idiots, and morally dubious people, he's actually a sweet guy.
• Fanon Discontinuity: For a majority of fans, Conker's Pocket Tales never happened.
• Faux Symbolism: When the game begins and Conker gets drunk, he exits the bar and walks to the right (where his adventure will begin); in the stinger when he drinks away his depression and gets drunk once again, he exits the bar and walks to the left.
• Fridge Horror: It didn't matter if Conker took the wrong turn or successfully made it back home; everything would still be the same outcome. Had he made it home, the Panther King would still send his guards to find a red squirrel to replace his table leg, and by scouring the whole land, they'd eventually find Conker's house and inevitably try to bring him back to the Panther King. Even if that didn't happen, Berri would still end up being kidnapped by the Rockmen, and Conker, loving her as he does, would try to save her, eventually leading him to doing business with Don Weaso and Berri's eventual death.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • The zombies in the appropriately named "Zombies" section of Spooky. The openness of the mansion means that they're more likely to sneak up on you, and if you're carrying a key or some other object, you're defenseless other than frantically running away (and getting hit means having to retrieve back the key from the spot you first found it).
  • The villagers in "Count Batula", whose thrown stakes can get really annoying. Ironically, Conker is transformed into a literal Goddamned Bat for this section.
  • The Tediz aren't dangerous individually, but they will quickly become insufferable in large numbers.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The final level of the game recreates the famous Bank vault scene from The Matrix with Conker dressed as Neo and Berri dressed as Trinity. Berri's death in this game would unwittingly predict Trinity's fate in The Matrix Revolutions down to Trinity dying in her lover's arms.
  • Conker taking a chainsaw to the N64 logo can now be seen as rather dark foreshadowing to the well documented friction between Rare and Nintendo that led to the former being acquired by Microsoft.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The Nintendo 64 was often criticized as a "kiddy console" with Bad Fur Day being the exception that proved the rule. So when a remake was planned for the more mature Xbox dubbed Conker: Live and Uncut, people expected to see Conker's foul mouthed antics in all their uncensored glory. Cue Executive Meddling and the game being re-titled Conker: Live & Reloaded. The final product was an even more censored version of the N64 original. Some fans certainly enjoyed the irony.
  • Conker's obsession with money becomes rather funny in light of the game's low sales.
  • The Grim Reaper who's a Punch-Clock Villain and whose real name is Greg(g)? Seems as though Maxwell Atoms might've gotten some ideas...
  • The final boss is fought in a rocketship with a yellow mech suit and defeated by knocking it out and using its tail to throw it around à la Super Mario 64. This may sound familiar if you're a fan of LEGO games.
• Hype Backlash: As the game became more accessible through Rare Replay, the gameplay has come across more scrutiny; many criticized how much the game shifts genres and how clumsily it uses these genres, and its multiple difficulty spikes. The hoverboard sections are particular seen as both of these problems rearing their ugly heads. The story has also received criticism for its Random Events Plot that has trouble maintaining an identity, and it no longer has the novelty of being a crude game on a Nintendo platform (which itself stopped being a novelty after the days of the Nintendo 64). Some have also said that, by today's comedic standards, the game's humour is just plain juvenile and offensive rather than shockingly funny.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: The story in the remake received no new content beyond its updated visuals (and certain select things changed in the beginning Hangover chapter, slightly more enemies in certain chapters like patrolling spike imps in random locations and added possessed dolls in the Barn Boys and Spooky Chapters). Lampshaded by the Gargoyle after doing a No-Sell to getting hit by Conker's Frying Pan, explains that the designers changed the tutorial area a little bit to trick gamers into thinking the rest of the game would be different.
• Jerkass Woobie: Conker may be a greedy, sociopathic alcoholic who is willing to kill to get his way, but it's hard not to feel at least a little sorry for him by the end of the game when we find out that Berri, the one person he truly loved, was murdered by Don Weaso (and then he blew the only chance he had at bringing her back) and that he was forced into being the king of the land (which he didn't want the role of), both causing him to be depressed.
• Jerks Are Worse Than Villains: Most people agree that the Panther King and Professor Von Kriplespac are too enjoyable of characters to really be detested. Even Don Weaso is enjoyable. Then there's the Great Mighty Poo, who is outright impossible to hate since he has the game's most memorable boss fight. The catfish, who are only important during the "Bat's Tower" chapter, are viewed as detestable for making Conker go on a life threatening quest while only intending to reward him one dollar for his troubles. Most people agree that Conker has every right to just take the whole money while taking satisfaction in their deaths at the jaws of the dogfish.
• Mainstream Obscurity: Many gamers recognize the Great Mighty Poo song, even though the game itself only sold about thirty thousand units.
• Memetic Mutation: In late 2022, an edited clip of the scene where Conker confronts the Grim Reaper as the latter looks like if he was singing "Bad To the Bone" started to become popular among the internet.
• Mis-blamed: Nintendo received backlash for "Live and Reloaded" being more censored than the original. Nintendo had nothing to do with this - It was all Microsoft.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • If the Panther King didn't cross it when he ripped Professor Von Kriplespac's legs off (mainly because the reason for Ze Professor's disability is a Multiple-Choice Past), then he definitely crossed it when he ordered Don Weaso to gun down Berri for no good reason.
  • Professor Von Kriplespac crosses it when he orders his Tediz army to operate on helpless squirrels, including murdering a young, innocent girl and reanimating her as the Experiment.
  • Don Weaso crosses it when he forces Conker to drive the Uga Bugas to near-extinction by using a bomb to flood their domain with lava, all because, "they seem out of place in this ecosystem."
  • Some might argue that Conker himself crossed this by killing Bloopie the Baby Dinosaur. While the game forces you to do this to proceed, Conker shows no remorse for this action.
• Nausea Fuel: The entire "Sloprano" chapter; its whole gimmick is taking Toilet Humor to its utmost extreme. Besides being set around and inside a mountain covered to the brink with crap, one puzzle involves swimming through a room flooded with cow manure (which you made by tricking a trio of cows into drinking prune juice) and pushing a giant ball made by a dung beetle into a switch to access Bats Tower. And then there's its boss, The Great Mighty Poo, one of the most revolting abominations ever conceived for a video game — it's a giant mountain of singing poop that eats sweet corn and throws chunks of itself at you!
• Once Original, Now Common:
  • This game was one of the first to spend a good portion of its run time parodying and mocking (then) popular culture, with lots of movie and television send-ups. Nowadays, so many video games have focused on parody, sometimes parodying the exact same works as this game, that it might not seem so special anymore.
  • In the context of the Nintendo 64 and the other platformers Rare made for it, Conker was quite a shock, as many of the console's games were family-friendly and targeted at kids, which was something that Conker turned right on its head. In contrast, The Sixth Generation of Console Video Games, especially the Xbox, were much more targeted at older audiences, making the game less subversive in that context, and largely factored into the poor reception of the game's Xbox remake. Furthermore, the game's heavy use of Vulgar Humor makes it an embodiment of Animated Shock Comedy, which was very unique at the time and factored into its Cult Classic status, but works with this style of humor aren't so scarce anymore.
  • By modern standards, the voice acting is likely to be criticized for its low sound quality and how the game's director does most of the voices as opposed to a professional actor with an obvious end result. However, in 2001, it was pretty impressive for any game (especially on N64, where storage space on cartridges was at a premium, unlike the Playstation) to be fully voiced, particularly a Collect-a-Thon Platformer with attempts at wit and humor to boot, no matter the quality. The voice samples are better in the remake, without the compressed sound quality.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • The Sunflower from Barn Boys. Two guesses why.
  • Birdy is technically only present at the very start of the game to teach about Context Sensitive Buttons and then sell a manual to Conker a bit later, but it's undeniable that he does a good job in introducing the game's general crass tone and crazy cast thanks to being the very first thing players end up meeting.
• Padding: The wasp's second attempt at stealing Mrs. Bee's hive is just a slightly longer retread of one of the first subchapters in the game, and it adds absolutely nothing to the story.
• Polished Port:
  • The Xbox port, Conker: Live and Reloaded, beefs up the graphics considerably, rescores all of the music into a higher quality format, and includes almost all the voice samples from the original game without compression. The tradeoff is that all of the swearing was censored (in the original game, only the harshest swears like "Fuck" were censored) and is impossible to turn off, and it threw out the original multiplayer modes for a new one. How much those changes are seen as non-negotiable alterations to the games varies from fan-to-fan.
  • The Rare Replay version is a straight port of the original game, albeit a few edits to remove Nintendo references (removing the opening credits due to the Nintendo 64 Logo Joke, replacing "Nintendo Presents" with "Microsoft Studios Presents" in the opening cutscene, and changing the imagery for the button prompts). While the graphics aren't updated, they do look crisper than they do on the original Nintendo 64 hardware, as well as run better.
• Rated M for Money: This was Rare's intention with the game after the backlash of the original prototype.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Almost everyone hated the hoverboard racing.
• Sequel Displacement: This game displaced Conker's Pocket Tales. A lack of advertising and having a completely different tone from its successor made it easy to miss and many fans both old and new are unaware of its existence.
• Shocking Moments: Marvin's death. After eating too much cheese, he swells up, screaming in terror until he explodes, showering everything around him with blood and pieces of his body. His head even lands at Conker's feet! And then there's the final shot of his ribcage, tail still attached... before it farts one last time. He appears alive, well, and sewn back together in the ending, but imagine how painful that must've been...
• Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: The original game also includes a bunch of surprisingly fun multiplayer modes that are all available right out of the starting gate, and they are considered just as fun, if not more fun than the main game, and being an N64 game, it supports four players off the bat, but they can also be played alone with reasonably intelligent AI opponents. More than a few fans would argue the multiplayer has aged better than the single-player mode. In fact, when Live & Reloaded only included one of the modes and threw out the rest, it was considered a deal breaker for many fans of the original game.
• Signature Scene: Even people who haven't played the game know about the fight with the Great Mighty Poo, whose catchy song is considered the game's highlight.
• Special Effect Failure: As astonishing as the graphics and general presentation were considered to be at the time, there is a brief moment in a cutscene where Conker escapes from the Bullfish where he is clearly running on thin air. Since it's only visible for half a second, it's unlikely it was purposely put in for Rule of Funny. It was fixed in the Xbox remake.
• Spiritual Adaptation:
  • As ExoParadigmGamer's review points out, being a story about someone who seeks to return home, meets a colorful cast juxtaposed by The Everyman protagonist, involves an antagonist in a monarch that seeks to capture, and mutilate, the protagonist for selfish reasons, and ending in the protagonist learning to appreciate a mundane life, this is basically a raunchy, gory take on Alice in Wonderland.
  • Before The Stick of Truth came out in 2014, Conkers Bad Fur Day was considered by many to be a better South Park game than that show's actual licensed games at the time. It also helped that it was an extremely M-rated game that took the trappings of a genre seen as being for kids (a mascot platformer) and injected them with a ton of dark, disgusting, and often sexual and scatological humor.
  • As a game about Funny Animals in a cartoon universe who go on a journey filled with sex, drugs, and debauchery, it's also the best Fritz the Cat video game ever made.
  • Since the game is set in a brightly colored animated world with a lot of vulgar humor and shout-outs to popular movies and TV shows, it's a Spiritual Precursor to Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt. Both works even have a giant monster made out of feces.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: "Surf Punks", which plays while racing the punk cavemen on hoverboards, is very similar to Jin Kazama's theme.
• Tainted by the Preview: When it was announced that Twelve Tales was going to be retooled into Bad Fur Day, while the change was well-received by many, there were a considerable minority of players (not just Moral Guardian parents) who were disgusted with the changes and how a relatively chaste game was lost in the name of producing a game with edgy gross-out humor.
• That One Level:
  • The post-boss scene in Barn Boys called Frying Tonight where you have to focus both on swimming to high ground and cutting down live wires with throwing knives lest you get electrocuted while swimming. One of the wires you need to cut is located low down behind the first context-sensitive pad and is easy to miss.
  • Sunny Days (from the chapter Barn Boys) is one of the most frustrating parts of the game due to some serious Fake Difficulty. After having to backtrack back and forth all around the barn area to find all of the bees you need (one part involving some tricky platforming on the barn's water tower), you're treated to the challenge of having to use a sunflower's breasts as a springboard to reach the money on a ledge up above. The controls for this part are not only stiff, but completely unintuitive; you have to jump on her three times in a row in a certain way, and if you do it wrong, not only will Conker be unable to trigger his helicopter tail in mid jump and reach the money, he'll go sailing out of control through the air and take damage when he lands. Making matters worse is the terrible collision detection; you'll more often than not pass right through the sunflower's chest as you try to chain your jumps on it! All of this takes what should have been a ridiculously simple platforming gag and turns it into a needlessly exasperating mess of Trial-and-Error Gameplay.
  • Bats Tower has a couple segments that are a pain in the ass. The eponymous tower has very thin platforms that you have to slowly navigate (along with ropes that are tricky to grab due to the fixed camera angle), and you have to put up with bats hounding you along the way — you can use a flamethrower on them, but one slip up will knock you back to the ground level, forcing you to trek all the way back up. Later on, you have to trek through a dark underwater safe, which has a labyrinthine design that makes it easy to get lost and drown in. This is, by the way, the second chapter in the game.
  • U-Bend Blues (from the chapter Sloprano) can be pretty tough as well with its One-Hit Kill rotary fans, Rare themselves even lampshades this with the various Red Squirrel remains that are in pieces submerged under the water you swim in.
  • The latter half of the Spooky chapter, where Conker has to find three keys in a mansion full of zombies and bats, and bring them to the front door. While carrying the key he can't jump or use his shotgun, and he loses the key if he falls or gets attacked. What's worse: if you die, you have to find the first key all over again.
  • It's War. As you get further into it, it's incredibly hard not to die at least once when you have to shoot off a giant lock on a door with a bazooka since the game bombards you with tons of Tediz, then even further into the chapter you have to make it back to the boat on the beach while trying to avoid laser walls, the catch? There's a time limit in which you need to get back to the boat quick or the island blows up with you on it, doesn't help that you get a slow moving bazooka as your only weapon against the Tediz towards the point where you're reaching the end.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: In the changes department, a large amount of fans were unhappy about Live and Reloaded being heavily censored despite being rated Mature and replacing its much loved multiplayer with a new one.
• Uncertain Audience: To some extent — while the game revels in its vulgarity and is certain of its audience in that respect, it's still a platformer starring colorful Funny Animal characters, which naturally meant that it had niche appeal among older gamers at the time, even if it wasn't properly marketed on a level where it could have significantly succeeded.
• Unintentional Period Piece: An inevitable consequence of packing the game with so many pop culture references and parodies - The Matrix, Saving Private Ryan, even a nod to Eyes Wide Shut - is that this game just screams "late nineties". The "gross-out cartoon" styling, reminiscent of early-season South Park, also somewhat dates the work by today's standards.
• Vindicated by History: Live and Reloaded. At the time of release it was controversial with fans and widely criticized for its censoring of profanity despite being on a console targeting an older demographic compared to the Nintendo 64, as well as its newly changed multiplayer, with these two changes overshadowing most other things about it. While the stricter censoring is still seen as a point of criticism today, you'll generally find more people willing to acknowledge the positives of the remake, such as its great visuals, much improved controls, smoother framerate, difficulty rebalancing, and cleaner voice clips and audio. While there are those who still argue for the original being superior due to preferring certain aspects like its visual style and multiplayer, it's not uncommon now to see people saying that Live and Reloaded is their preferred version of the game.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Regarded by many to be the best looking Nintendo 64 game out there. Featuring dynamic shadowing, coloured lighting, large areas with a long draw distance (of which, many of the prerendered backgrounds end up being actual 3D areas for your to explore later in the game!), no distance fog, detailed facial animations, lip syncing, and individually rendered fingers on some characters. The graphics in this game are so good that it could pass off as a very early Sega Dreamcast or PlayStation 2 title. The Live and Reloaded remake is even prettier.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: The Panther King, due to his status as The Unfought and having little plot presence despite being the game's supposed Big Bad.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Some gullible parents bought the game for their kids on the assumption that it was another cutesy Rareware platformer due to the squirrel on the cover, despite Rareware's attempts to make it clear in advertising that it was not a game for children. The very first screen you see on booting up the game warns you about this too. The remake makes it justified due to its censored dialogue.
• The Woobie: The baby dinosaur. He's positively adorable and sees Conker as his parent, and in return for his loyalty he gets brutally crushed to death.

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