Ass Pull: Deathborn and Don Genie being alternate identities of Black Shadow. Not only does it come with little-to-no foreshadowing, it outright contradicts earlier episodes that showed the trio as separate characters, including one that showed them conversing with each other in the same room.
Awesome Music: The Meaning of Truth, the anime's opening theme by HIRO-X, is considered one of the best things to come from this anime. The fact that it plays during the legendary Falcon Punch scene certainly helps.
Broken Base: How much one likes this anime seems to be inversely proportional to how much one played the games. Many who started with and/or grew up playing the games tend to despise it for its sheer lack of faithfulness to the source material, while those who were introduced to the series via the anime tend to be more forgiving.
Complete Monster: Black Shadow is the ruler of Dark Million, and the always grinningchessmaster behind every single bad event in the series. Black Shadow, atop facilitating general terrorism and abusing underlings as a course of habit, has gone to every length imaginable to prevent Ryu Suzaku from stopping him. Black Shadow creates the deranged criminal Zoda and sends him off to homicidal rampages—at one point powering up Zoda to annihilate all of Mute City—and kidnaps Ryu's girlfriend Haruka to brainwash her into his pet assassin, Miss Killer, trying to use her to kill her own boyfriend. Black Shadow carbonizes Miss Killer when she finally breaks free of Black Shadow's spell, and gleefully torments Ryu with her petrified body. Black Shadow, in the finale, reveals his glorious dream that his every waking moment has been dedicated to: Using his Dark Matter Reactor, Black Shadow throws the entire galaxy into death and destruction, to precede him creating a new Big Bang to annihilate the old universe and create a new one of pure evil on top of it.
Designated Villain: Octoman's treatment in the anime is downright painful. While the majority of Adaptational Villainy among the cast was gratuitous and forced, Octoman was written in a way that he simply couldn't be a villain without completely rewriting his character... which they didn't, changing nothing about him other than making him a crook. True, he is portrayed as a Justified Criminal and gets a Throw the Dog a Bone episode, but this just raises the question of why they bothered with the Adaptational Villainy at all and makes his punching bag moments (down to making him the butt of the series' final joke) seem even less justified, especially when you consider that Leon (who was completely rewritten to the point of being In Name Only) was also made a Justified Criminal and isn't demonized for it at all.
Ensemble Dark Horse: Samurai Goroh. An interesting example in that, while he was already a popular character in the games, the anime decided to do away with his more buffoonish traits and Butt-Monkey status, reinventing Goroh as a more competent but ultimately good-naturedLovable Rogue who serves as mentor figure to Ryu and credibly demonstrates why he'd be seen as The Rival to Falcon in the source material. Throw in a younger, more attractive redesign and a gorgeous Femme Fatale for a wife in Lisa Brilliant, and it's not a stretch to say that this depiction of Goroh helped bolster his game counterpart's reputation much like Smash did for Falcon.
Foe Yay Shipping: Ryu has so much of this with both Zoda and Miss Killer. So much. To twist the knife further, it's later revealed that Miss Killer's true identity is that of Misaki Haruka: his girlfriend from the past who was alsoput into cold sleep.
Game-Breaker: GP Legend's Recursive Adaptation game does not make some sort of obvious effort (such as the escort UFO in the original or spontaneous combustion in GX) to block you from taking massive shortcuts. Making the right jumps will allow you to cut off much more of a given course than the developers intended you to.
Harsher in Hindsight: The ever-memetic final scene of the series where Captain Falcon performs a Heroic Sacrifice and Ryu Suzaku takes up his mantle hurts even more when you realize the low ratings for the series and its tie-in games really did kill Captain Falcon and killed the franchise as a whole.
One major plot in the anime involves a masked man and a guy named Suzaku (surnamed in this case) which ends with the death of the masked man and the guy named Suzaku becoming the next masked man in his place. Sound familiar?
Magnificent Bastard: Black Shadow is the bombastically evil mastermind behind Dark Million, and a character ten times as devious and stylish as his video game counterpart. Black Shadow manipulates virtually all the conflict across 50 episodes in his scheme to obtain the Reactor Mights and use them to create a universe of evil, a dream Black Shadow has dedicated himself to fulfilling with every inch of his being. Black Shadow plays heroes and allies alike as pawns while rarely ever getting up from his seat, and nearly curbstomping the heroes every time he does finally step in directly. Black Shadow's manipulations even stretch 150 years in the past, having directly arranged for the creation of both his Co-Dragons and even numerous fail-safes to stop Ryu Suzaku from stopping him. Black Shadow has planned for every failure in advance, always ready with an Evil Laugh and a wicked grin for every apparent setback, and remains in total control of the series up until Captain Falcon is forced to perform a galaxy-shattering Heroic Sacrifice to stop him.
Mainstream Obscurity: We all know about the anime's Falcon Punch scene, but very few have actually watched the show.
Black Shadow's last words (provided in Japanese by the one and only Norio Wakamoto): "Watashiwashinan! SHINAN ZOOOOO!!!" Translation Simply put, "I will not die!", though the hammy nature of Black Shadow's Villainous Breakdown leads to translators making his final words more long-winded and/or flowery. (ex. "I will not die... NOR WILL MY DREAM!" or "I will not die... YOU WILL!") Also of note is that the line is frequently mispelled as "Watashi wa shinen! SHINENZU!"
And of course, the Falcon Punch itself. Even outside of Smash, there's a reason as to why Captain Falcon is considered a Memetic Badass.
To top it all off, the scene is lacking enough context so Captain Falcon punching Black Shadow into an explosion instead looks like Captain Falcon punching Black Shadow so hard it causes the explosion.
Barack Obama in Vietnam! Explanation A peculiar mondegreen from the anime's OP that cropped up years after the initial surge of interest caused by the Falcon Punch scene. The second-to-last line of the refrain to "The Meaning of Truth" is "Mada kotae wa mienai!" ("I still can't see the answer!"), but it ended up sounding like "Barack Obama in Vietnam!" to a lot of English speakers.
Mis-blamed: 4Kids is often scapegoated as having caused the anime's failure (and by extension causing the F-Zero franchise's limbo) via sloppy scheduling and poor promotion, when in reality they actually promoted the series fairly heavily in the beginning. The anime had already crashed and burned in both Japan and the US; all 4Kids really did was abandon a ship that was clearly sinking.
Moral Event Horizon: Black Shadow's screwing with and (temporary) offing of Miss Killer is sadistic and twisted considering how devoted she was to him (even if she was brainwashed to do so). The later reveal of his master plan, a complete wipe of all life in the universe in order to bring about a new universe of pure evil, almost comes across as less heinous by comparison.
Generally the anime was considered too edgy for kids (as it's about undercover vigilantes fighting crime and the criminals are cold-blooded murderers) but the character and story flow was considered too childish for adults.
It didn't fare well with Nintendo fans either: The more hardcore ones ended up hating it for playing too loose with the source material, but F-Zero's relative obscurity as a Nintendo franchise meant the fans who would have forgiven the changes usually passed it up in favor of Kirby: Right Back at Ya! and Pokémon. This was aggravated by the anime and its tie-in game being released in the same year as F-Zero GX, making them look cheap and lackluster in comparison.
Watch It for the Meme: A number of people consider the famous Falcon Punch scene to be the only reason to watch this series.
YMMV tropes for the video game adaptation:
Awesome Art: The Lightning environment, which debuted in F-Zero GX, makes its pseudo-3D debut here, and between the lightning flash special effects and the grille-based track textures, it's one of the coolest-looking track environments in this game.
Critical Backlash: This game had the misfortune of being released very shortly after the critically-acclaimed F-Zero GX and as a result being written off as a third-rate spinoff, not helped by its association with the anime which was not very well-received. Coupled with the similarly poor sales of its sequel F-Zero Climax, both games are regarded as Franchise Killers. However, there are many people who nonetheless enjoy this game for refining many elements of the pseudo-3D F-Zero games and for being more beginner-friendly than F-Zero (1990) and F-Zero: Maximum Velocity with its smoother controls and more lenient mechanics (such as abolishing the Safe Rank system).
Gameplay Derailment: This game's lack of an anti-cheat UFO means that players can achieve otherwise-unattainable lap times by taking jumping super-shortcuts without consequence.
