- Awesome Music: Uses new arrangements of some of the best music of platform gaming. Too bad you rarely get to hear more than the first few measures.
- Better as a Let's Play: The average player has close to zero chance of successfully completing the game, and it quickly becomes tedious trying and making next to no progress. Watching an expert's Let's Play thus offers two benefits: you actually get to see past the first few screens, and you get amusing Angrish over the soundtrack.
- Breather Boss: The Dragon Devil is a very simple boss once you master the jumping at the beginning and ending. Of course, it's still difficult, but it's far from being the hardest boss.
- Crosses the Line Twice: The game is so insanely over-the-top difficult that you will change your reaction to dying repeatedly in the same spot from annoyance to cursing to laughing. It's the only way to handle a game like this.note
- Gateway Series:
- Its selection of Awesome Music allows exposure for more obscure titles such as Bionic Commando, E.V.O.: Search for Eden, and Monty on the Run.
- Alternatively, it's many players' introduction to Platform Hell games, particularly non-ROM Hack games of the genre.
- Germans Love David Hasselhoff: This game is much more popular in Japan than in its home country of the United States. In fact, there are many Japan-made fangames, such as I Wanna be the GB, I Wanna Be the World and it's sequel I Wanna Be the Galaxy, I Wanna Be the Love Trap, and the I Wanna Kill the Kamilia trilogy. Videos of this game are popular on Nico Nico Douga, the Japanese counterpart to YouTube, and get much more views there than on YouTube. Also, many Japanese players have recorded themselves playing the game on Impossible (no verified full clear run has been made without autofire, however, with the exception of two which are both hosted on YouTube).
- Goddamned Bats: Most of the enemies. Strangely enough, the bats are probably the only things in the game that actually don't kill you upon touch.
- Goddamned Boss: The Koopa Clown Car. There are three different pilots (Bowser, Wart and Dr. Wily), and you need to beat all three in a row. Bowser and Wart are long, yet incredibly easy, and the real fight is against Wily. However, every time you die to Wily, you need to do the whole thing all over.
- Good Bad Bugs: Some bugs that benefit the player were actually kept in the game.
- Maybe not a bug, but during the second stage of the clown car fight with Wart it ends with him landing and you having to shoot a big bullet bill and blow it up before it kills you. However, if you're not that good at rapid fire you can go behind where the car lands and avoid it entirely. Wait around for about ten seconds, and the 3rd stage will begin.
- What may very well be the most game-breaking "bug" is the fake save point on Impossible. Killing it makes a perfectly usable save point appear for exactly one frame on the screen. Killing it while having a bullet exactly where the save point would appear allows you to save the game. In particular, this is the only way to save your game on Impossible mode, which otherwise subjects you to extreme Checkpoint Starvation.
- Some bugs allow so much sequence breaking that people have completed the entire game in 18 minutes.
- In the Tetris room, it's actually possible to jump through some of the pieces. However, the jumps are quite difficult to time, so it's not really that useful.
- In the fight with Kraidgief, it's possible to avoid the entire fight by repeatedly pressing the 'K' key until he dies.
- Hilarious in Hindsight:
- Dracula turning into a Waddle Doo is this as of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, as Kirby can now fight Dracula.
- "It's dangerous to go alone! Take this. ... You jumped into a sword. You retard!" In 2014, a man ended up in serious condition after being stabbed with a replica Legend of Zelda Master Sword... that he walked into to see whether or not it was a real blade.
- The above part is made even funnier when in the HD Remaster of Mobile Suit Gundam SEED (released in 2012), when Nicol Amalfi's death was changed by having him run into Kira Yamato's sword, as opposed to Kira killing Nicol in self defense in the original.
- Inferred Holocaust: The Kid's grandfather was killed by The Kid's father to be The Guy. The Kid's father was killed by The Kid to be The Guy. Take a guess what might happen to The Kid when he has a son. Doubles as Big, Screwed-Up Family.
- Memetic Mutation:
- GAME OVER - PRESS 'R' TO TRY AGAIN note
- Those are not apples. They're really more like giant cherries. Canonically, they are known as "Delicious Fruit". note
- YOU JUMPED INTO A SWORD, YOU RETARD! note
- Please stop Let's Playing I Wanna Be The Guy.note
- Misaimed Fandom: The game was intended as a parody of Platform Hell games and the nostalgia for how hard older video games were (which was often a result of cheap difficulty tricks or archaic game design), not a genuine challenge—the creator didnt even intend for modes like Impossible to be completed. This didn't stop people from unapologetically loving the game in spite of hard it was (or even because of how hard it is) and see beating the game as a legitimate challenge, including on Impossible.
- Nightmare Fuel:
- When an apple hits you or fall on a spike, you turn into an explosion of blood.
- The Kraidgief is basically Zangief Meets Kraid, his skin is green like the Hulk and he makes some weird roar noises.
- This artwork.
- Nintendo Hard: Ironically, in order to make the game beatable, you have infinite lives and there are even save points. This is an almost unprecedented level of accommodation in the sidescrolling genre, but it's justified since, well, it really would be (almost) impossible without them (which is indeed exactly what Impossible mode does). To put this in perspective, Mike Tyson, one of the most difficult final bosses in video game history, is probably the easiest boss in IWBTG.
- Once Original, Now Common: While I Wanna Be The Guy firmly held as a classic of online Platform Hell games, it's a common joke among IWBTG fans that IWBTG is ironically not even the best IWBTG. On top of being rather buggy and unreliable, many of its own fangames have been seen as eclipsing it in terms of quality (such modern favorites include I Wanna Be The Boshy, I Wanna Kill the Kamilia, I Wanna Run The Marathon, and Not Another Needle Game), usually by toning down the Trial-and-Error Gameplay and arbitrarily exhausting design elements, very rarely sacrificing the expected masochistic difficulty.
- Paranoia Fuel: Like any good Platform Hell game, the game is built upon subverting your expectations of 2D platformer games, from fruits that are lethal upon contact and try to hit you to sections of ground that suddenly spring traps upon you. Be ready to assume that anything and everything you see will try to kill you.
- Pop-Cultural Osmosis: Here's a little experiment. Look up Guilty Gear Isuka tracks "Home Sweet Grave" and "Might Is Right But Tight" (especially the latter one) on YouTube, and count how many comments are IWBTG-related.
- Signature Song: "Might is Right But Tight", for the extremely common context it plays in.
- So Bad, It's Good: The level design shoots for this, in all its Fake Difficulty glory.
- Special Effect Failure: The fake error message in the Castle of the Guy is kind of hard to fall for if you aren't running Windows XP in a default theme with your system language set to English. At the time of release, this wouldn't have been a particularly likely issue, but with Windows XP being officially depreciated as of 2015, the probability of the error message blending as intended is now approximately zero.
- That One Boss: While all of them are plenty hard, Dracula takes the cake as a result of being the only boss without a set pattern.
GAME OVER - CLICK HERE TO TRY AGAIN
