Def Jam Series / YMMV

Abridged Arena Array: A lot of competitive scene always pick cage matches with minimal to nonexistent crowd assistance, Club Murder and The Gauntlet in particular. Stages with minimal wall barrier or uses crowds as one is generally unfavorable due to how disadvantageous it can be. Similarly, no one picks 128 Subway Station and Red Hook Tire Co. because one Blazin' Move can end a match very quickly due to its nature.
Alternative Character Interpretation: Perhaps unintentionally, Fight for NY opens up the question of whether any of Crow's men were Forced into Evil, as the player character was. When Crow got tired of watching the PC beat up on all his fighters, he kidnapped the PC's girlfriend and forced the PC to start working for him. While the PC is fighting for Crow, he seems to keep up appearances that he has genuinely chosen to work for Crow, since there's no sign that anyone knows the truth and all the PC's friends react angrily to the betrayal. While Sticky's motivations for turning seem genuine, one has to wonder if anyone who left D-Mob's crew to join Crow (such as WC), or any of Crow's enforcers, such as Crack (who seems slightly reluctant to force you to go through with the last task Crow gives you and then becomes partners with your character in a post-story bonus tournament) and Magic (who holds you at gunpoint near the end, only to hand you his pistol and drop his flags), were put into a similar position.
Anti-Climax Boss: Normally, the final battle with Crow isn't a cakewalk, but you can bait him into cracking the window twice before returning the favor and toss him out of the arena in an instant.
Catharsis Factor: After spending the entire game being a smug bastard, killing Crow at the end of the game is this. Bonus points if you manage to throw him out the window.
Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
- In Create-a-Fighter career mode, expect to level up Upper Strength and Speed first, occasionally followed up by Lower Strength and Toughness, with rarely anyone maxes out Health. Upper Strength not only define your punch power, but it also increases your grapple attack damage, which important in a lot of Wrestling and Submission finishers. Lower Strength is not as often used but very useful to level up as it makes your Kickboxing clinch damage hit harder. Toughness governs your block and counter strength as well as knockback and stun resistance. You'll be fine with only 60 to 75 percent HP so you don't have to spend so much on it later on, but it's generally safe to spend some few points on HP until you reach that point.
- Most players commonly save up their development points to unlock new styles, as unlocking style always cost 2500 while upgrading your stats can get you piddly 50 to 5000 per 2 percent depending on your stat progression, as playing normally gives you more development points to get you to that point. Many also rarely or even never spent their development points on Blazin' finishers because the amount you need to unlock them all doesn't justify the price as the damage they dealt is based on your stats.
- Most players pick Wrestling or Kickboxing as their starter style and/or their second style, as grapples are one of the more consistent ways to KO your opponent to a finish. Streetfighting can be picked early on for easier finish but timing your haymaker windup is easier once you level your speed so best pick it as your second and/or third style, ditto with Submission. Almost no one start with Martial Arts because the timing you need to get for aerial attack is so thin and the area range where you can do it is almost nonexistent, especially in maps with crowds.
- In The Source Tag Team Tournament, most people pick Ice-T over Omar Epps because his A.I. is useful on locking down a single combatant you don't want to fight, while O.E.'s A.I. doesn't capitalize his strength as much has player-controlled O.E. could. People also pick Ice-T over O.E. because Ice-T is shown to be a good sport after you beat him in Club 357 before and bear no ill feelings towards you.
Complete Monster: Fight for NY & The Takeover prequel: The heartless Crow is the chief rival of the more honorable D-Mob, and his former right hand who assisted in fostering gang wars and murders to help D-Mob's role in taking over New York. Murdering the hero's mentor O.G., Crow later broke from D-Mob to start his own syndicate and returns to force D-Mob's protégé to betray his mentor and help Crow take over New York by holding Hero's girlfriend hostage—only to order her burned alive after. When Crow attempts to kill all the fighters and sends his own men to suicidal situations, he finally provokes abandonment from his remaining followers, only to try and murder Hero by honorlessly shooting him In the Back.
Contested Sequel: Icon is widely considered to be the worst entry in the series due to its heavy change in formula.
Even Better Sequel: Fight for NY took what was good about Vendetta and made it even better by adding a large amounts of characters, a gripping plot, and better gameplay.
High-Tier Scrappy:
- In the Fight for NY competitive scene, Speed is the One Stat to Rule Them All since it determines your attack speed and heavy attack windup frame, and is the reason why haymaker punches at high speed characters are surprisingly broken. Upper Strength is the second best stat as it determines not only your punch damage per hit, but also your grapple attack damage as well, which were a common way to deal damage in the game. As such, everyone with high speed tends to be very powerful regardless of their style, as even regular characters like Redman can easily dish out good enough damage and ramp up Blazin' meter faster than anyone else, allowing him to easily go for a Blazin' kill without having to time your flying attacks for KO's, barring few examples.
- Another stat that people tend to forgot about yet powerful in practice; Charisma. It governs how much Blazin' meter you get from hitting your opponent, which means maxing it out means your Blazin' meter goes up faster each punch, and you lost less meter when struck. This is the reason why characters like Redman and Snoop Dogg remained the strongest characters in the game, and some supposedly underrated characters like D-Mob ended up being on a high tier.
- Sticky Fingaz takes the High-Tier Scrappy to another level, as the combination of high speed, high damage, and having simple yet effective moveset all around, on top of being the only characters that can extend his combo range, which can't be countered and has generous hitstun, essentially making him the sole zoner of the entire game. He has the dubious honor for being the only character that's banned in every official tournaments, with only few characters have a slight advantage against him, and two of them are fellow titans like Snoop Dogg and Redman.
- Characters that uses Capoeria-style in combat like Sean Paul, Dan G, and Crazy Legs are feared by the playerbase because of their unpredictable kicks that's hard to read and punish. Because some of their kicking animation might be similar to a grab wind-up, they will caught you off-guard pretty often.
Love to Hate: Crow's a real shameless son of a bitch, but that won't stop him from gaining fans.
Low-Tier Letdown:
- On the other side of the spectrum, Jacob is seen as the de-facto worst character in the game, thanks to terrible mixup game and awkward statline that doesn't synergize well with his style. Even characters that was deemed to be awful before like D-Mob and Masa ended up getting salvaged by some players, with D-Mob being banned in some official events.
- Between his own unique but counterintuitive fighting style that doesn't capitalize his high speed enough, possessing the worst parry minus in the game, as well as having weak punch string/kicks, Flava Flav is considered by casual and pros as one of the weaker characters in the game, not the weakest but definitely the most disappointing. The problem lies with his Drunken Boxer style, known for sluggish yet powerful punches, but his upper/lower strength were mediocre at best, and since the punch strings are already slow and can easily be interrupted with simply blocking or perfectly timed parry. Flava Flav also has a handful of parry minus animation that tosses the enemy down to the ground instead of resetting them back to neutral state or inflict stun like most good parries are, since downing them allows the opponent to quickly recovern and punishes him back with impunity, leaving him both weak defensively.
- Choosing Martial Arts as your starting fighting style. The game is designed around the fact that every fighting style in the game is always viable regardless of where you are, where every knockout option can be potentially lethal, even the clunky haymaker from Streetfighting style can be downright lethal with enough investment. Martial Arts knockout style requires you to hit them with aerial attacks, which can be performed by running to a nearby wall/structure then pressing any normal attack button at the right moment and the right distance (you want it to be really close), and it's by far the fastest knockout method in the game bar none. Thing is, the aerial attack effectiveness is based on the venue you're fighting, and it's just so happens that there are only a handful of arena where you can perform it all around the arena (specifically the boxing/wrestling arena like Club 357 or the cage matches like the Club Murder), where most venues always have interactible crowds and very little room to perform them. This makes the style suboptimal to choose for the entire career mode unless you invested enough to grab another style beforehand.
- The reason why players tend to not to pick a secondary style if they start out with Kickboxing is that they will immediately lose access to their clinch punch move, which will be replaced with the secondary grapple move of your choice. This because the clinch punch can easily outdamage clinch kicks once you invest enough upper strength and speed into your character, as Ludacris (a pure Kickboxer with middling upper strength) can attest.
Most Wonderful Sound: The sound that plays when your Blazin' meter is filled, followed by your character letting out a battle cry.
Nightmare Fuel: The Afterhours theme for the Face Club in Vendetta goes for a sort of horror approach, in contrast to the usual licensed rap music. If nothing else, it's effective at creating an atmosphere.
Scrappy Mechanic:
- In Fight For NY, environmental attacks plays various animation in random order, dealing varying damage depending on how much hit was dealt. Almost all of them can be used to knockout your opponent, all except one, where you scrub your opponent's head back and forth, which not only deal the least amout of damage, it's also the only one that wouldn't guarantee a knockout even at Danger level health. The worst part? It's the one you'll more likely to trigger than any other animations, which can get annoying if you really just want to beat off your opponent quickly from red.
- Also from the same game, you can accidentally grab a nearby weapon when you're close to a crowd member that's holding one. In most cases, holding weapon is more detrimental than anything, since it's swing slower even at max speed character, and you can't chuck it to your opponent for some free hit, not to mention that your opponent can just counter your weapon swings immediately turning it into a stupid game of tug-of-war that will quickly wear down even veteran players.
- The crowds in Fight For NY themselves are a massive pain. Firstly, throwing your opponent into the crowds puts them in one out of three random scenarios; getting pushed back against the crowd, getting grabbed by the crowd, or getting grabbed by the crowd then having them smash their held weapon into the poor schmuck, only one of them can KO your opponent and you're less likely to get the second option to your opponent while they can seemingly pin you down with the crowd, which can get annoying after a while. Secondly, crowds cannot be used for aerial attacks, which greatly limit the room for Martial Artist to perform their knockout method. This is why maps with large crowd involvement like Foundation, The Limit, and really a lot of map in the game were highly unfavourable by the playerbase.
Suspiciously Similar Song: "Blazin' 10"^note sounds very similar to "Get Low".
That One Boss:
- Lot of players consider DMX in Vendetta to be one. Some even consider him to be harder than D-Mob, who's supposed to be the Final Boss. He's a Combat Pragmatist who counters like crazy and likes targeting your character's head in submissions.
- Fight for NY:
  - Plenty of players feel like this about Crack. Probably due to his tendency to spam Pedigrees all day long.
  - The two on two fight against Crack and Magic when Blaze starts the battle badly injured.
  - The inferno fight—the first you ever fight in the game— against Sticky could count due to the fact that: you're surrounded by a Ring of Fire that damages you every time you touch it; you're on a time limit to defeat Sticky and get out before the building collapses on you; there's falling burning wreckage to contend with; and of course, there's Sticky himself who really loves to fight dirty and will spam cheap shots like pushing you into the fire or making you run yourself into it.
  - The battle against Crow isn't a cakewalk, either, and isn't made any easier by the fact that you start off on the floor with a reduced life meter.
The Scrappy:
- Bless from Fight for NY is a verbal punching bag for many, especially for Matt McMuscles, who has a personal beef with him.
- Sticky from Fight for NY was meant to be a Hate Sink especially after his betrayal, but his (frankly) lack of charisma that his new boss had and weak arguments makes him come off as petty and unreasonable. Gameplay-wise, he's a pain in the ass to fight especially during his penultimate boss fight, having respectable statline that's really hard to dent and exploit the hell out of the arena you're fighting on, while player-controlled Sticky is another monster that players dread to fight and has been banned in all official tournaments outside of special tourney where only broken characters like Redman and Snoop Dogg were played, more on High-Tier Scrappy section above.
They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: A common complaint towards Icon on the grounds of how much the fighting engine has changed. Gone are the Blazin' Moves, the storyline, and the memorable characters.
Unintentional Period Piece: It should go without saying that these games were a product of their time. The rap game has changed exponentially since the 2000s, and the vast majority of rappers that were signed with Def Jam or another label at the time are no longer under them. It doesn't help that many of the rappers and celebrities are either one-hit wonders or once-famous people who have since disappeared. Joe Budden also retired from rapping in 2018 to further pursue his broadcasting career after a brief but successful stint with Everyday Struggle (with his last album, Rage & The Machine, having been released in October 2016), while Prodigy (one half of Mobb Deep), Baby Chris, and DMX are deceased.

YMMV / Def Jam Series

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