YMMV / King's Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder!

• Annoying Video Game Helper: Cedric the Owl. It should noted that the only time he does anything even remotely useful in the game is when he takes a shot from Mordack meant for Graham during the finale. It's not even a Heroic Sacrifice, he just accidentally flies in the way of the shot while trying yet again to hide behind Graham.
• Awesome Music: The game may be known for some of its poorer tunes, but it's hard to deny the Harpy Island theme is well-composed and manages to be both relaxing and inspiring.
• Can't Un-Hear It: Josh Mandel as Graham.
• Condemned by History: This game was huge in the early to mid nineties, getting positive reviews and winning many awards, and not undeservedly so — at the time, an adventure game with its level of exploration and immersion, as well as high-quality graphics, story cutscenes, and voice acting was genuinely impressive. Unfortunately, while lots of people have fond memories of it, it hasn't aged well to most, as people are more likely to criticize it for its nonsensical puzzles that often cause the game to become Unwinnable for overly convoluted reasons if you fail to solve them (or even notice they exist at all), poor voice acting in the CD-ROM version (provided by people from around the office), and annoying characters (most infamously, Cedric the Owl). Even King's Quest fans often tell newcomers to avoid this installment.
• Damsel Scrappy: Cedric is a nuisance and one couldn't care less about his fate (except for the fact that if he dies before the final battle, the game becomes unwinnable).
• Designated Villain: The bakers' cat. He was just hunting down a rat to feed himself when Graham threw an old boot at him.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The bear. Retsupurae keep calling for it to return during their MST of the game, and no wonder — the damn ursine punches out Graham!
  • Josh Mandel, being the only halfway decent voice actor in the game, to the point that he was brought back to voice Graham in VI and even the Fan Remakes.
• Fan Nickname: King Graham is called "King Swayze" by Paw Dugan because of his in-game portrait's similarity to the late great film actor Patrick Swayze, and especially his role in Roadhouse 1989.
• Fridge Brilliance: Mordack only wanted the Royals, so it makes sense that he probably waited for a specific holiday in which everyone in the castle got the day off (probably a festival in town), leaving only the Royal Family inside. If it was a holiday, it would explain why Graham was taking a walk instead doing of his royal duties.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • There's a scene in the 2006 remake of The Wicker Man where Edward dresses up as a bear and punches someone.
  • The infamous encounter with the innkeeper in which his goon rubs you out, and ties you up is reminiscent of the "gimp" scene from Pulp Fiction. Only this one came out first.
• Memetic Badass: The bear that punches out Graham and the POOOOOIsonous snake which manages to take up half of the game just by sitting on a random road.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The POOOOOIsonous snake.
  • The fact that the game was made on an one million dollar budget is frequently brought up to snark on the game, mainly because they didn't seem to spend it on the voice cast (who were, indeed, people recruited from around the office).
  • The town theme.
• Narm: Nearly every spoken line in the game. That or Dull Surprise.
  Cedric: No, Graham, don't!
  (Graham lets out a hilarious scream as he falls to his death.)
  Narrator: Uh oh. That last step was a doozy.
• Once Original, Now Common: It's difficult to overstate how big of a deal King's Quest V was at the time of release, marking a paradigm shift in Adventure Games by way of its point-and-click system, colorful and detailed graphics, and robust sound, including voice acting in the CD-ROM version, making it one of the first "talkie" games. Nowadays, however, with technology becoming far more advanced and such practices being more common-practice, this tidbit is usually seen as just a curiosity.
• Porting Disaster: You can't say the NES version wasn't ambitious, but it was a far cry from what Jaleco accomplished with Maniac Mansion or Kemco with their MacVenture ports on the same platform, though there is a large difference in game scopes that had to be compressed for the NES cartridges (one floppy for those games versus ten for KQV) and a more advanced color palette that had to be accounted for. At least it minimizes or removes some of the Unwinnable features, like giving you a second chance to save the mouse from the cat. Nevertheless, it still ends up looking ugly and brown, had an extremely clunky attempt to adapt the mouse/icon control scheme of the original version to an NES controller, plus having to deal with a long Password Save system instead of battery backup can get frustrating.
• Questionable Casting: The CD-ROM version of the game was voiced by Sierra employees, with varying degrees of success. Sierra learned their lesson, and pioneered the concept of Hollywood actors voicing computer games. (That being said, developer Josh Mandel was good enough to reprise the role for VI (where his character has one line), and Mandel has been gracious enough to lend his voice to the Fan Remakes.)
• The Scrappy:
  • Cedric the Owl. He gives useless information, he leaves when anything dangerous happens, he slows down the action (you have to wait for him to land on something and then speak before moving on every screen), his voice is high pitched and ridiculous, the only time he gives useful advice is after you can do anything about it. He's so reviled that, in an Easter Egg of the VGA Fan Remake of King's Quest II, an old King Graham runs after the owl with his sword ready to strike. And in Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist, an official game released by Sierra, you see him wandering in the desert, and later find vultures picking at his bones.
  • For extra humor, Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers turns him into a target that you're able to hit and score 50 points from in Ms. Astro Chicken.
  • And by the time Graham reaches Mordack's island, he's audibly becoming annoyed with Cedric. It doesn't help that Cedric begs Graham to go back, never mind that they have no way to return at all.
• So Bad, It's Good: The voice acting. The cast comprises primarily of random Sierra developers without much acting experience, and most of it ranges from passable (as personally embarrassed as he is at his performance here, Josh Mandel nevertheless became the definitive voice of King Graham) to outright laughable.
• That One Level: The desert (although the mountain path and the dungeon maze are pretty bad, too).
• That One Puzzle:
  • The desert. It's a load of Trial-and-Error Gameplay in which you must map out the oases, and it is likely you avoid it early on, never mind it is one of the first areas you must explore in the game.
  • Probably the most infamous is the Mouse puzzle, which has gone down in history as one of the biggest "Screw You" moments in gaming. At one point in the game, you randomly see a cat run after and catch a mouse in the foreground. If you don't throw something at the cat and save the mouse in a matter of seconds, then you end up setting yourself up with a Nonstandard Game Over many hours later in the game when you find yourself tied up in a basement without you being any the wiser.
  • Mordack's castle is full of these, but the most prominent is the weird blue alien thing and the piece of moldy cheese. You actually have to let yourself be caught by the alien thing and thrown in prison, where you then have to notice a tiny rat crawling into a barely noticeable hole and get a piece of moldy cheese from it, which you need for a later puzzle that gives you absolutely no indication that it's the right thing to use. Also, Cassima only comes to rescue you from your cell once, so this is your only chance to get it. Not to mention you have to find a way to incapacitate the blue alien thing next time it appears, or else it'll toss you in prison a second time for a game over. (You can win without incapacitating the monster, but doing so will prevent gaining the item to get past Manannan, so you'd have to be lucky and avoid either of them showing up.)
• Unfortunate Character Design: Graham's character was designed in 16 color EGA for the earlier games. This is retained in the VGA game, and looks rather odd.
• Values Dissonance: "Hoo, watch out for the Gypsies, Graham; I don't trust them!" Cedric's line outside of the fortune teller's wagon would be considered extremely racist if this game was released today. The blow is softened a bit by having the fortune teller be pretty nice (even giving Graham a protective amulet for free when he only paid to have his fortune told, and later leaving behind a tambourine that is needed to get rid of the infamous poiiisonous snake), but merely using the word "Gypsy" would make a lot people angry, let alone claiming they're untrustworthy people.

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