YMMV / Need for Speed: Underground

• Anti-Climax Boss: Unlike Eddie from the first Underground, Caleb Reece doesn't put up a decent race in Underground 2 even in Hard difficulty, which makes him look too easy in comparison.
• Broken Base: To say the Underground games caused a noticeable fracture within the NFS fandom would be an understatement. Despite being very successful, they ticked off the older NFS fans who didn't buy into its Fast and Furious-inspired tuner culture aesthetics, and the cars' performance becoming divorced from Real Life counterparts with balancing and progression considerations becoming major factors in the cars' abilities.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • To Tony Hawk's Underground due to sharing the same title and its sequels within the same year.
  • With The Crew for being an open world racing game with car customization much like Underground 2.
• Good Bad Bugs: In the World Map of the Underground 2 Career, you normally don't get rewards for winning uncleared races, however you'll only need to restart once and win these races to receive money and rep.
• Game-Breaker: The 1995 Mazda RX-7 (FD). While it's unlocked later in "Underground" mode, it has an excellent handling, great top-speed, acceleration and good downforce which will help you to dominate the events while being able to go toe-to-toe against other high-tier cars as well the game's Rubberband AI even on "Hard" difficulty.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Underground was a huge hit in Brazil and in South East Asia, mainly because of night street races and car customization. Almost every PS2 owner in the country owned a copy (pirated or not) of the game. Easily one of the most popular titles during the 2000s along with Winning Eleven/PES, Counter-Strike and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The game also helped foreign black and hip hop/rap singers become popular in the country, like Snoop Dogg, Fat Joe and others.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The first game's soundtrack contains three songs performed by sex offenders: "Smashing the Gas" by Mystikal^note he sexually assaulted his hair stylist, "The Only" by Static-X^note Guitarist Tripp Eisen was jailed in 2005 after sleeping with underage fans of the band and "Ride" by Lostprophets.^note The frontman Ian Watkins was charged in 2012 for multiple sexual offenses and is currently serving his 35-year prison sentence. There's also a bonus vinyl car wrap based on the band, which aged like fine milk along with the Mystikal one, to say the least.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Outside of drag racing events, the 1998 Toyota Supra Mk. IV (A80) is considered to be the weakest due to its sluggish handling and poor downforce to the point its acceleration and speed isn't enough to compenaste when racing against other other cars including starters like the Peugeot 206 and Mazda MX-5/Miata even on less technical courses. Along with the 1999 Nissan Skyline GT-R V-Spec (R34)^note which is too grippy due to its four-wheel drive traction, it's also a poor choice for drifting due to its gear ratio being too long as maintaining a drift combo with it can be a chore to do so.
• Memetic Loser: Caleb Reece, the Final Boss of Underground 2, is perhaps best remembered for not being able to put up a decent final race, making him look too easy in comparison. It went to the point that when the final race against Lina Navarro, the Final Boss of Payback, was similarly criticized for being too easy, fans immediately began comparing her with Caleb... fans who remembered Caleb, that is. The fact that he hasn't gotten any nods in later games in comparison to other bosses from the "tuner" era of NFS (like Eddie, Razor, or Darius) hasn't helped matters, giving him a reputation of one of the most forgettable NFS bosses.^note In the latter case, part of it seems to be because of his car. While Eddie from Underground had his orange Skyline GT-R R34 emblazoned with the logo of the Eastsiders, Razor from Most Wanted had his black Gen. 5 Ford Mustang with a stylish flame vinyl, and Darius from Carbon had his red Audi Le Mans Quattro, Caleb had a Pontiac GTO that was pitch-black aside from his Reaper vinyl, which came off as comparatively less-ornate in the always-set-at-night Underground 2. Perhaps because of this, most references to Underground 2 in later games tend to use Rachel's Nissan 350Z instead, with its lively green-and-purple color pattern.
• Narm Charm: While both games' plots about fighting to be the best illegal street racer in the city are too much Serious Business for their own good, they still have their fans, however.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Star Ratings, which are increased by customising your car. While in Underground 1 it is only used for some optional unlockables and entering a few events (And after you're done with the event you're more than free to remove your customizations), in order to advance past certain parts in the Career Mode in Underground 2, you have to complete a time trial to reach a spot in the map to have your car published in a magazine, and said car needs to have a minimum Star Rating to be able to take it on. While forcing players to take on something that should not be mandatory in a game genre is already questionable by itself, it does not help that the late-game visual customization options, necessary for the later magazines, make the car look like a very blatant Rice Burner. Thankfully, subsequent games did away with the star rating, making customization completely optional.^note In Most Wanted and Carbon, customizing your car reduces its heat level, which is helpful for avoiding the cops, but doing extensive modifications isn't mandatory.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: Underground 2, for having difficulty options, in which "Easy" will nullify the Rubber-Band A.I., unlike the difficulty options of the first Underground.
• Sequel Displacement: These games were so popular that many gamers who grew up with these games (alongside Most Wanted (2005) and sometimes Carbon and even ProStreet) see them today as "classic" Need for Speed, even though there were six previous NFS installments released before Underground came to the scene.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • The Underground series is considered to be basically the unofficial video game adaptation of The Fast and the Furious (or the first two films at least), as both share plots heavily revolving around tuner car culture.
  • Though having no plot whatsoever, the online Motor City Online can be seen as Spiritual Predecessor to both Underground games (being released in 2001), albeit with vintage and classic American cars.
  • Both games later received one in the form of Need for Speed (2015), to the point some players nicknamed it "Underground 3". Hell, Eddie and Melissa even come back in that game's Eddie's Challenge DLC.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The instrumental tune that plays when the player selects their first car in the first Underground sounds very similar to "In Da Club" by 50 Cent.
• That One Achievement: Four Magazine covers in the first game require the player to beat the developers' best times and scores in each category. Magazine #22 is considered to be the hardest Magazine cover to obtain of those four. To obtain it, you need to beat the developers' score on any of the Drift tracks in Go Underground mode on Hard difficulty. What makes this difficult is that you need a fully tuned vehicle to even think about sniffing near the scores posted, and there are heavily limited opportunities to do so. Also, you need to be a wizard at handling your car to rack up high scores in the 4 lap window. This achievement was so difficult to obtain that not a lot of people knew that it existed outside of looking at a guide.
• That One Level:
  • Drag racing. It's often viewed as needlessly over-complicated, inbetween not shifting gears at just the right moment causing one to lose a lot of power, and unlike any other type of race, even the lightest crash causing one's car to get totaled or slowed down. It says something that after appearing again in the 2005 Most Wanted having the same problems (and even there several drag races were cut from the final game), afterwards drag racing would mainly be limited the games focused on legal track racing (ProStreet and Shift 2 Unleashed DLC), where as a result there was no traffic AI and in turn were much better received there.^note Outside of those games, drag races have appeared so far only in the 2015 game and Payback (and even in the 2015 game, it was as a DLC that didn't even affect the game's story mode).
  • Event #95, Kurt's Killer Ride, in the first Underground. It's important to know that this event takes place in the final stages of the game, where the player should already have a maxed-out vehicle. Because of that reason, the rubberband AI has a stronger effect on opponent cars. This combined with the fact that the race is a six-lap circuit in a technical track makes Kurt's Killer Ride a very difficult race.
  • Also Event #103, Enduro Street Circuit. It's about as hard as Kurt's Killer Ride for similar reasons, yet this time there's SEVEN laps instead of six, meaning more opportunities for you to make a critical error and let the extremely strong rubberband AI pass right by you. The only saving grace is there's no traffic, but too bad the AI racers also get this advantage.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Most of those who started playing NFS before Underground were disappointed by the extreme changes given by that game.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • Not just the typical kind from featuring the coolest cars of their time throughout the series' history, but Underground in particular is so painfully ingrained into early-to-mid 2000s with the tuner car culture with the bright neons, spinning rims, garish paint jobs, big sound systems in trunk, and whatnot, not to mention the awfully dated slang.
  • The original Underground had a song by Lostprophets in its soundtrack, something that would be flat-out inconceivable 10 years later due to the criminal charges against frontman Ian Watkins.^note Though admittedly, Forza Horizon had it way worse, having two songs from the band on its soundtrack and being released mere months before Watkins was charged.
  • Underground 2 also prominently features the Cingular brand name and logo for the SMS. The Cingular name was phased out in favor of AT&T in 2007, setting the game firmly before that period.
  • Hell, the mere fact that, for Rachel to communicate with the player, SMS is used in the first place (which Rachel explains to the player as a relatively newfangled thing). While SMS is still present to this day, by the 2010s/early 2020s she would've probably used WhatsApp or a similar messaging system (SMS nowadays generally only seen as a resort in case internet service is unavailable).