Animation Age Ghetto: The Xbox 360 primarily appealed to teens and adults with its mature games like Halo, thus it was dismissed as too childish by adults and largely overlooked by children.
Annoying Video Game Helper: You're likely to be overwhelmed by pop-ups early in the game; don't worry, it gets better.
Awesome Music: The game's soundtrack provided by Grant Kirkhope is very beautiful and relaxing. It's fun to listen to while walking outside on a peaceful day/night.
Interestingly, several of its songs are based off of Project Dream, a Banjo-Kazooie prototype.
Catharsis Factor: Professor Pester is one of the biggest threat to your garden as he targets one of your precious Piñatas every time he arrives unless you give him 500 chocolate coins. If you have a Limeoceros in your garden though, you can have that Piñata deal with him by straight up ramming into him and provide the satisfaction of rocketing him away.
Cult Classic: Despite being somewhat unknown nowadays, the games have a rather small but dedicated fanbase.
Demonic Spiders: Sour Crowlas are normally benign compared to other sours. However, if one comes into your garden and you have a sick piñata in there at the same time, smash it or scare it away fast. They're effectively mini versions of Dastardos when this happens.
Dastardos is surprisingly popular with fans of the game's human characters.
Doc Patchingo is popular too due to his good looks and adorable shyness.
Even Better Sequel: Trouble in Paradise, for introducing a greater variety of Piñatas to find, having an actual reason to catch all the Piñatas in the challenge system, and simply for having far more content than the first game.
Some Ruffians have brown-colored tattoos on their hands and feet. At first they seem to simply add to their nastiness, until you realize what Ruffians probably do to captured piñatas filled with chocolate.
The Wishing Well in Trouble In Paradise. Throw in 1000 Chocolate Coins, and you're guaranteed to receive several coins worth 2500 each in return. And the value of these coins can be increased by up to five times just by placing a cheap item in the garden.
In the first game, farming weeds, especially Venus Piñata Trap. The plants themselves have negative value, but the seeds and flowerheads can quite be valuable, and they produce many seeds. Keep them behind a fence or in a garden to themselves, to keep them from harming piñatas, and you have a virtual golden mine.
Farming Chilis is a fairly cost-efficient way to grind out as much money as you want. Each seed cost 22 coins, but they sell for a value of 400 when fully grown with red fertilizer. This makes for a huge net gain that can be done endlessly very easily for infinite coins.
All sour Piñatas; they spit poisonous candy in your garden, and they'll keep coming back until you're able to tame one.
Whirlms, requiring only a small patch of dirt or grass to settle in, are guaranteed to automatically join your garden every now and then. If you don't get rid of them, they'll be followed by Sparrowmints. Luckily, you can easily get rid of Whirlms if you have Fudgehogs visiting.
Any undesired Piñata qualifies. They might eat your fruit or hunt your resident piñatas in order to stabilize themselves, whether you like it or not. Said unwanted residents might also scare off or start fights with other Piñatas. The only solution is to brutally smash unwanted visitors with a shovel to keep said species away for a while. This is fixed in Trouble in Paradise, where you can set the Bouncer Board at the corner of the garden to repel a given Piñata from showing up at all, but only if you've already got the Master Romancer award for it. Fixed even better in Just for Fun gardens, where the only requirement is that you've had that piñata as a resident.
Good Bad Bugs: In the second game, it's possible to keep Professor Pester out of your garden by building a wall across the side where he normally comes in. Normally, he stops for a moment, makes a couple futile attempts to get past the wall, and then leaves. However, due to a bug, it's possible that he will get stuck there indefinitely, even if the wall is removed. He still makes idle noises, but it's definitely an improvement over him wreaking havoc.
Jerkass Woobie: Dastardos may be a jerk who kills sick piñatas, but he was taken from his family against his will and turned into a husk of his former self by Professor Pester. Not to mention no one knows who he actually is, so he'll probably be estranged from his family forever...
Every piñata in-game is not gendered and can be bred with another piñata regardless. But while the majority of species are more gender-neutral through their designs, there are some that lean more towards one gender. To name a few...
Moozipan, the cow piñata. All cows are female. "Male cows" are bulls. The eyelashes do not help at all.
Doenut, the doe (female deer) piñata. Although they all have long antlers, which are most commonly seen in males.
Roario, the lion piñata with a mane. (Only male lions have manes. Not females.)
Quackberry, the green duck piñata. (Only males have green feathers and yellow beaks. Females have duller colors.)
Flapyaks, the yak piñata. In real life, yaks don't look too different from each other gender-wise, but like the Moozipan above, all Flapyaks have utters that you can milk from. Though, Freddy Flapyak in the TV series has his udder flattened to basically have no teats.
Bispotti, the ladybug piñata. Emphasis on "lady" as it is easily the most blatantly feminine piñata in the series, and it's the very first one to come to your garden in the sequel.
When you look into Leafos' journal, her description for the Moozipan (a cow piñata) is very... suspicious. She refers to it as a "lovely piñata" with its big brown eyes and the way it swings its udders from side to side as it walks. So unless you have a dirty mind, you'll only think of it as just a simple quirk that Leafos has.
Pocket Paradise has the themes for the sour Piñatas and Dastardos. These themes sound like they came from a '90s slasher film. In a Viva Piñata game.
The aforementioned Sour Crowla◊. It has a massive, razor-sharp beak with jagged protrusions. Additionally, its maw is so huge you can see the organic, wet-looking back of its throat. In a game where all the animals are made of paper, it's quite jarring.
Player Punch: If you've grown close to one of your piñatas, maybe named it and dressed it, you might feel badly hurt if they get smashed.
Sequel Difficulty Drop: Pocket Paradise eliminates some of the Guide Dang It! elements of its console predecessors by having tutorials that explain some of the more obscure mechanics, such as tapping a Syrupent egg to get a Twingersnap.
Sequel Difficulty Spike: Trouble in Paradise is more difficult than the first for several reasons: useful items like Romance and Joy Candy are more expensive, several Piñatas have different, harder resident requirements and the Captain's Cutlass was nerfed to no longer keep Professor Pester away.
Squick: The game doesn't keep track of families, so not only is Brother–Sister Incest a possibility, but you can even mate Piñatas with their own parents or children. To be honest, there's so much inherently wrong with the game that there's even a VG Catscomic that sums it all up nicely.
Some of the requirements for making a piñata a resident can qualify. The Chippopotamus is particularly terrible. First, you need to have it visit by covering half of your garden with water and having 15 of each water plant, by itself severely limiting the player's building options. Then you need to add another 10% of water and feed it 10 of said water plants. Then there's the romancing requirements, which are borderline Noodle Implements. You need another 10% of water, a Candary Master Romancer award (which means you need to romance Candaries 5 (3 in Pocket Paradise) times before being able to romance a Chippopotamus once), have at least 1 Candary, and then feed the Chippopotamus four Birds of Paradise. At that point, you might as well use some Romance Candy, as it's just not worth the struggle.
Flutterscotches. The white ones aren't so bad, but there are nine other colors, each with their own Romancer and Master Romancer awards. Not helping matters is that all baby Flutterscotches hatch white regardless of parent color, so you have to evolve them individually for the latter. Plus, the flowers required to get some of them (particularly orange and brown) are unavailable until much further into the game.
A lot of Piñatas based on non-traditionally cute animals, such as Tafflies, Reddhotts, Cocoadiles, Shellybeans, Syrupents (and their off-shoots, the Twingersnap and the Fourheads), Whirlms, Crowlas, etc.
A lot of Sours count considering they're supposed to look menacing, especially the Shellybean, which looks like an evil Gary the Snail.
Uncertain Audience: Most teens and adults were turned off as it looked too kiddy, while many kids were turned off because the micromanagement was too complicated. Thus while it got moderate success and even an animated series, it failed Microsoft's intent of the game becoming their equivalent to Pokémon.
The Woobie: The Pigxie is despised by not only its parents, but also other piñatas! Not to mention that it looks malformed compared to other Piñatas. This gets averted in the show, however.
Tropes that apply to the animated series:
Angst? What Angst?: When Fergy took Langston’s job as the Piñata wrangler in one episode, he irresponsibly ejects Hudson from the candiosity meter completely out of spite. Hudson was understandably angry at the moment, but the next time we see him back in line, he's impatiently waiting for Fergy to manage the meter, seemingly forgetting what happened before.
Awesome Music: The opening theme songs in the show are quite catchy. Season 2's is arguably better with its more varied lyrics.
Cargo Ship: Fergy and his couch. There's even a frame of the two dancing in the meadow.
Cult Classic: The TV show is considered surprisingly good for being something done by 4Kids. (It probably helped that it wasn't exactly being translated from another language and subject to as much Bowdlerization as the usual 4Kids fare.)
Designated Villain: Langston Licktoad. He's indeed always trying to catch Fergy (and Paulie) and force them to go to parties where they'd be smashed up, but it's just his job. It's not like they won't be repaired when they get back to the island.
In "The Crush", Mabel Moozipan planned to go to the Dance of Romance with Ella Elephanilla.
Squick: "Wraisins of Wrath" has Paulie collecting some "raisins" that he bakes into pies that end up mysteriously flipping something about the behavior of the characters that eat it (Franklin becomes a compulsive liar, Ella ends up remembering everything, Les gains the abillity to talk, etc.). The catch? While Paulie is shown collecting the "raisins", it cuts to a pair of Chewnicorns sitting down and reading paper as one of them asks "Do you think that we should have told them that those weren't raisins?". The obvious implication here is that Paulie baked a pie out of Chewnicorn poop and a bunch of characters ate it.
Les is male, but is an adorable pinata who's pink all over and speaks high-pitched and incoherently. (However, the characters in-universe don't seem to have trouble seeing that he's male.) It's not until "Wrath of the Wrasins" where he can speak normally and has a deep male voice.
In "Mirror Schmirror", everything can also be said for Les' alternate universe self, Mor. Except he can talk normally and in an even deeper voice.
Fergy and Paulie in the animated series. After all, can you honestly blame them for not wanting to get beaten to a pulp?
Langston's not a bad guy and doesn't want to cause trouble, he's just trying to do his job and get a simple paycheck. Seeing as every Pinata (not counting Fergy and Paulie) sees it as an honor to go to parties, he believes he's doing a service, and if he doesn't get the two to comply, his bowl of fruit boss starts to question his wrangling skills, and could fire him at any time. Then there is the fact that he literally has no friends because of his "stick-in-the-mud" attitude
and Dastardos
