The SpongeBob Movie Game / YMMV

Awesome Music: Just like in BFBB, the soundtrack was well received. Now has its own page.
Best Boss Ever: The fight against King Neptune. It even has the awesome "Goofy Goober Rock" playing as its Background Music during the final phase.
Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Chapters 5 and 6 in the PC version count as this, considering they play little to no part to the plot and aren't brought up again.
Catharsis Factor: Admit it. Tossing enemies or objects over incredibly large distances at other enemies and objects with Patrick's upgraded Throw attack is really satisfying. It certainly helps take a bit of the frustration off from That One Level Shell City, Dead Ahead given that the entire level's gimmick is throwing things.
Contested Sequel: While both this game and Battle for Bikini Bottom are well-loved by fans, how this game stacks up to its direct predecessor is a matter of debate. It depends on the player's preference between this game's linear, action-based gameplay or Battle for Bikini Bottom's open-world collect-a-thon style.
Demonic Spiders: The MERVs in Welcome to Planktopolis... Minions. Unlike the ones found in Shell City, Dead Ahead, which are more or less Goddamned Bats because they can only harm you if you get too close, the Planktopolis MERVs are even more dangerous. Not only are they more durable, but they can also fire rockets at you when you're within range of their sights. These rockets can break up into smaller ones and rain down on you from above, exploding on impact so even if they don't hit you directly, their blast wave will if you're too close one of them. The rockets have deceptively large hitboxes which makes reflecting them with your Spin Attack a very risky move without taking a hit yourself, so the only way to safely take out these enemies is with the Sonic Wave^note. To make matters worse, this type of MERV can be encountered as early as the Now That We're Men Combat Arena Challenge, five levels before its initial encounter. Combined with a horde of Foggers and Poppers attacking you at the same time, the inclusion of the MERV makes the challenge into a massive Difficulty Spike. The worst example is at the end of Welcome to Planktopolis... Minions, where a whole swarm of them will fire rockets at you as you're crossing a series of sinking platforms above a lake of lava, which combined with several Poppers attacking you as well, makes the entire area nothing short of mind-shatteringly difficult.
Fake Difficulty: Part of what makes the ring challenges so punishingly difficult is the fact you are only shown the location of one ring at a time, making it impossible to predict where the next one will appear, or sometimes, making it straight up impossible to get to the next one if you weren't already moving in the correct direction ahead of time. On top of this, the challenges are long (about 3-5 minutes depending on the level) and have no checkpoints whatsoever, so missing even a single ring at any point means having to start the entire level all over again from the beginning. Needless to say, you will NOT be completing these without a bunch of patience and trial-and-error, and they will be the cause of many broken controllers.
Fan Nickname: The game's official name is just The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie. To distinguish it from the movie itself, fans and This Very Wiki just call it "The SpongeBob Movie Game", while the SpongeBob speedrunning community usually calls it "TSSM", an acronym they don't save for the movie itself (the game's speedrun.com page also uses this).
Game-Breaker: SpongeBob's Sonic Wave Guitar. When fully upgraded, it can one-shot most enemies except for the MERV and also gains a lock-on homing attack. However, you only get this move near the end of the game in Welcome to Planktopolis... Minions, and while using it, the camera shifts to the Sonic Wave projectile for five seconds, leaving SpongeBob wide open to enemies with ranged attacks. The Sonic Wave only becomes a true Game Breaker if a cheat code is used to gain all of SpongeBob's and Patrick's moves at the beginning of the game.
Genius Bonus:
- Most of the levels and sidequests get either no-frills or punny names, but how many kids would know what "Three Meter Island" references?
- The MERV enemy, whose name is a pun referencing their homing missles.
Goddamned Bats:
- The earlier version of the MERV encountered in Shell City, Dead Ahead named the "Mini-MERV". They're not as dangerous as their Planktopolis counterparts because they lack the rockets, but they will block your path constantly, and approaching them is not a good idea because of their lasers. They need to be taken out with the Throw attack in order to proceed.
- The Flingers. While they're not too terribly difficult to deal with on their own, they can become a nuisance if they're backed up by a mob of enemies, or are found over large platforming segments. The goo they spit out lingers on the ground for a few seconds, affecting your traction if you touch it, and making platforming and combat more cumbersome.
- The Foggers easily become this in large groups. This is most prominent in the Combat Arena Challenges, especially in the second and third ones where, unlike the usual versions, they unleash their burp attack faster and are more durable.
Good Bad Bugs:
- Much like Battle For Bikini Bottom, this game is loaded with them, as this speedrun shows. It may even be more broken than Battle For Bikini Bottom.
- In the final boss, a broken plank on the floor behind Krabs leaves you safe from Neptune's attacks.
Hilarious in Hindsight: In the ending cutscene, the Narrator ponders a followup to the film. Eleven years later, we got The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water:
Narrator: We must stop and wonder, how long until the sequel? It depends on the box office.
It's Short, So It Sucks!: One of the very few criticisms of the game is its short length.
Mainstream Obscurity: The game sold pretty decently when it came out with a whopping 2 million units, and reviews for it were fairly positive as well, albeit many considering it to be slightly inferior to Battle for Bikini Bottom. That's probably the most you're gonna be hearing of this game from the Mainstream public, as even to this day hardly anyone talks about this game all too much and discussions about its predecessor Battle for Bikini Bottom vastly overshadow it in every circle.
Nausea Fuel:
- During the level where SpongeBob and Patrick are in the trench of monsters, there are some areas where you have to go into the mouths of wall monsters. There's yellow mucus, stomach acid, villi, and everything.
- And one instance has SpongeBob sliding down the wall monster's throat using his own tongue like a snowboard.
- All the garbage (which includes toilets filled with murky, green water) in Shell City, Dead Ahead.
Nintendo Hard: The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie Game is often considered the most difficult SpongeBob game out of all of them. THQ and Heavy Iron Studios really went the extra mile in making the levels and challenges harder this time around, managing to make the difficulty level surpass even that of Battle for Bikini Bottom. Some notable examples include going for 100% Completion, the Final Boss, and the most infamous part of this game, "Welcome to Planktopolis...MINIONS".
No Problem with Licensed Games: Thanks in no small part to the home console games being based on Battle for Bikini Bottom. While it's a tad bit glitchy due to being rushed to make it in time for the movie, it's still a surprisingly solid platformer. The verdict is out on the GBA and PC versions, however, as they're nowhere near as well-loved as the home console versions.
Porting Disaster:
- The PlayStation 3 digital port of this game was plagued with a lot of issues, due to the fact that it was a direct port of the PlayStation 2 version with no proper optimization updates to make it run on next-gen hardware. Issues included blurry graphics, severe audio desynchronization, and button lag that made the gameplay downright unresponsive at times. Overall, it was a very flawed port, and the game was eventually taken down from the PlayStation Store.
- While it's nowhere near as bad as the PlayStation 3 port, the Nintendo GameCube version is notable for having inconsistent framerates that can go from 60 fps on one stage to 30 fps on another, many missing visual effects and background details, and far more bugs than the other versions.
Scrappy Mechanic:
- One of the most common criticisms about this game is that Mindy will not grant Spongebob and Patrick abilities they need to progress until they collect a certain number of Goofy Goober tokens to unlock them. This means the player will be constantly forced to backtrack and replay levels to get more tokens, which will more often than not be the extra challenges in the driving and slide levels. If that wasn't enough, said levels are also decently long (about 4-5 minutes each), the player is only able to complete each objective one at a time (necessitating 4 playthroughs of the level at best), and some of the missions, particularly the ring challenges, are Nintendo Hard. So this comes across more as padding than anything else and completely breaks the pace by shoehorning in a collect-a-thon style into a linear movie-based game.
- While the upgrade system is fine enough, there are a few issues with it. Namely, just figuring out that there's even one in the first place is an issue since the only indication in-game that there is one comes in the form of a single textbox that immediately disappears in a fraction of a second (on the Nintendo GameCube version at least), meaning new players don't even get a chance to read it. Not only that, but some upgrades (namely Spongebob's spin and Patrick's ground pound) are required for progression later in the game, which the game never indicates. This means if you upgrade other abilities, you can accidentally make some of the later levels Unintentionally Unwinnable, not helped by the game's use of Anti-Grinding preventing you from getting the correct upgrade needed to progress.
Self-Imposed Challenge: Some people try to do a "No Upgrades Run", where they attempt to play through the game with no upgrades at all. The game is already Nintendo Hard, but trying to beat it with no upgrades makes it Harder Than Hard.
So Bad, It's Good: The infamous slideshow-esque cutscenes that transition some levels. This is due to their abuse of Windows Movie Maker transitions, the incredibly stilted dialogue and narration, and a few of them (most notably the last cutscene) having either oddly drawn versions of the characters or stock images of the characters. Thankfully, these cutscenes are comedic, so the tone they were going for isn't ruined, but it's still bizarre seeing them alongside the fully animated in-game cutscenes. ^note
Surprise Difficulty: Given that it's a licensed-based game based on SpongeBob SquarePants, most people are going to brush it off as a simplistic cartoony platformer for kids... then be completely caught off guard at the Nintendo Hard nature of the later levels (Planktopolis in particular), bonus challenges, and final boss.
Suspiciously Similar Song: The final boss track sounds a lot like the instrumentals for "Rock You Like A Hurricane" by Scorpions.
That One Boss:
- Even by Final Boss standards, the fight against King Neptune can be aggravatingly difficult. For starters, he cannot be harmed directly, and any attack attempts will be blocked and knocked away, even at close range. The only way to damage him is to flip each table around the Krusty Krab II, and then hide behind the frozen Mr. Krabs to redirect his laser attack back at him, stunning him for an opportunity to lay a hit on him with the Sonic Wave. The difficulty increases exponentially for every third of his health lost. In the second phase, he changes his attack pattern into an area-of-effect energy beam that's even more difficult to jump over than his previous flamethrower attack, and in the final phase he breaks the floor and calls for two Flinger enemies to help him out. The last leg of this fight will really test your skills and patience to the breaking point.
- For the GBA version, the Cyclops is this. Not only do you need to pay attention to the rising thermometer on the side of the screen, which will result in instant death if it gets too high, but you also need to watch for his grab-attack, which can easily kill you instantly (you can wiggle out of it, but it will cost you a lot of time). You must constantly Ground Pound the fire alarm switch to keep the thermometer down while trying to avoid his hands and waiting for an opportunity to attack his head, which is damn near impossible thanks to the Ground Pound leaving you vulnerable to being caught by his hands.
That One Level:
- Shell City, Dead Ahead is considered to be a wake-up call for many players. Located near the game's half-way mark, it requires the player to master Patrick at his fullest in one of the most lengthy and wide-open levels in the whole game. The level heavily features some complex platforming segments which sometimes requires some very risky jumps to cross over large gaps.^note Some segments even involve picking up objects and throwing them to solve puzzles, with some of them putting you in waves of enemies that need to be exploited for this. There's one section where you need to carry a Throw Fruit or Steel Safe across a slippery surface with steam erupting from the cracks, which is far harder than it sounds. It doesn't help that the MERV enemies make their debut in this level and require the player to use ranged attacks to beat them. Keep in mind that Patrick's move set is mostly close-range attacks, and his one ranged attack involves getting closer to take them out. If his throwing ability isn't upgraded to cover a great distance, this level will be a pain to beat.
- Then there's Welcome to Planktopolis... Minions. One of the last levels before the final boss, this level is an absolute nightmare. It is filled to the brim with spike traps, electrical beams, and lava pits at every corner, and the enemies encountered in this level will definitely give you a hard time. The enemies range from waves of elite Foggers swarming you to the aforementioned MERV enemies that now fire missiles that break up into smaller ones. The platforming segments require some intensive skill to pass through, and mastering SpongeBob's wall jump ability is critical for beating this level, as you'll encounter many wall-jumping segments. Finally, there's Plankton's Riddle: a puzzle located very late in the level that will put your survival skills to the ultimate test. Unless you're a long-time player who knows what to do, each wrong button pressed will bring you closer to death by raising the lava level, destroying certain platforms, and adding even more MERV enemies to face.
- Many of the optional bonus levels that consist of Patrick jumping on platforms while being timed, rolling SpongeBob as a ball to the end of complicated platforms, or fighting groups of enemies at the same time. The ones you find later on in the game are especially hard, some people even rage quitting after losing the level many times.
- In the GBA version, the levels of World 5: Shell City feature a frustrating mechanic that makes even the standard time limit look like nothing. In those levels, there's a thermometer on the side of the screen that is constantly rising, and the only way to keep it down is to Ground Pound each fire alarm switch you find. If you fail to activate even one of these switches, the thermometer will get too high and instantly kill SpongeBob and Patrick. It doesn't help that these levels are filled with obstacles that can slow you down, ranging from spikes to falling hooks, so these levels have you in a constant and strict speed run that must be near flawless to beat. It also doesn't help that the boss of this world also runs on this same mechanic.
That One Sidequest:
- Pretty much all of the ring challenges in the driving levels, thanks to both the very loose driving mechanics and the very short time that the rings are available. The ones in "No Weenie Parking Anytime" and "Drive of the Knucklehead McSpazitron" take the cake because of the former's length and in the case of the latter, if you mess up once, you've failed the whole level and must start over.
  - The ring challenges in the slide levels are even worse as you have even less time to react, and unlike the driving levels, you can't reverse to try and correct mistakes. 'Rub a Dub Dub Slip Slide in the Tub" is particularly bad because of the level's overall length, very devious placement of rings that pretty much require trial-and-error, and extremely tricky jumps near the end that will force you to restart the whole level from the beginning if you fail. And it's the first slide level in the game.
- All of the Macho Time Challenges are brutal to beat. If you thought the Ring Challenges were bad, these ones are the hardest in the whole game. You are required to know every shortcut in the level and make use of the Nitro boosts you are given to make it to the end. Most of the time, you will fail. And if you succeed, it's guaranteed that you'll have literally a second or two left to spare. Thankfully beating them means you can go back and beat your own time, allowing you to take as long as you like with no repercussions.
- The Macho Time Challenge in Rock Slide can be a real pain to beat if you don't know how to exploit shortcuts efficiently. Being the longest slide track in the game combined with a short 4:10 time limit, You need to know which shortcuts to use as some will bypass large sections of the slide entirely.
- Although not as brutal as Rock Slide with no requirements for major sequence breaking, the Macho Time Challenge on Drive of the Knucklehead-McSpazitron has really tight timing. Even if you take the two major shortcuts on the track, you're liable to only beat the time by two to three seconds at the most, especially as the timer doesn't actually stop until you reach the Krusty Krab, and not immediately when you reach the final jump.
- The third and final Sonic Wave Challenge in Shell City, Dead Ahead. Unlike the previous two challenges where the rings follow a linear path back to the beginning of the level, the rings here instead loop around a wide open area, meaning you'll never know where they will pop up. This is made even more difficult by the fact that some rings require you to make some aggravatingly sharp turns with the hard-to-steer controls of the Sonic Wave. Not helping is the fact that the challenge is very long, so if you miss a ring, you'll have to go through the whole course all over again. Oh, and don't be fooled when you reach the target thinking you can just hit it by the side, because you'll need to make one more final loop before you can actually hit it to finish the challenge.
- The third and final Bungee Challenge in Welcome to Planktopolis... Minions. Let's just say that you will not get out of this one without taking a lot of damage and dying a lot, even when upgraded to maximum health. The intersecting paths of the targets that you need to hit and the electrical beams that you need to avoid makes it very easy to mess up and get electrocuted, so timing is absolutely crucial here (especially during the last segment).
- Finding all the hidden treasure chests is very hard due to many of them either being hidden in cryptic places or requiring the player to perform highly specific tasks unprompted. Special mention goes to the one in Three Thousand Miles to Shell City where you have to destroy a group of crates in a specific order^note, and the one in Shell City, Dead Ahead where you just have to know to hit three toasters hidden in the scenery of the level.
Underused Game Mechanic:
- In every platform level, there is the ability to switch between SpongeBob and Patrick... which can only be accessed at the end of every level, typically to use them in a couple sidequests one of them can only do to get Tokens.
- After the level it's introduced in, Spongebob's Bash is only required for a single passage in "Welcome to Planktopolis... Minions". Otherwise, it's only good for clearing out Flingers, which players are much more likely to do using his upgraded Karate Spin.
- Freezy Fruit. In Battle for Bikini Bottom, Freezy Fruit was mainly used to collect some of Patrick's lost socks, extra shiny objects, and golden spatulas in a few cases. In this game, Freezy Fruit is used for a grand total of two tasks (one of which requires backtracking to a previous level), then never again.
Values Dissonance: The final driving level in the home console version is named Drive of the Knucklehead-McSpazitron, after a line in the movie. While this went by without issue in the US, among UK audiences it can raise eyebrows thanks to "spaz" being a highly offensive ableist slur over there.

YMMV / The SpongeBob Movie Game

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