Sandbox / Authors Saving Throw Archive

aka: Alley Oop AST Archive

Possible Moves/Replacements

• Character Rerailment
• Culturally Sensitive Adaptation
• Improved Second Attempt
• Salvaged Gameplay Mechanic
• Salvaged Story
• Polished Port
• Remade and Improved
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel
• Win Back the Crowd

YMMV/Infinity Train Blossoming Trail

• Has it's own page

YMMV/Schaffrillas Productions

• Author's Saving Throw: For those worried that his shift to reviewing things meant he would give up on YouTube Poops entirely, his second channel is currently being used to post new YTPs, including continuations to his popular "Sharkslayer" series and a new "Revenge of the Senate".

YMMV/Himouto Umaru Chan

• Author's Saving Throw: Many fans who followed the manga for its unique take on a sibling relationship were not pleased when it began to focus more and more on Umaru's social life rather than Umaru and Taihei at home (in particular, there was a span of about thirty chapters where the Doma house was not shown at all). With several detractors even claiming the Genre Shift into a Four-Girl Ensemble is to the series' detriment. Thankfully, the author seems to have noticed the criticism and has worked more Umaru and Taihei chapters in between the social ones.

YMMV/Worlds End Harem Fantasia

• Author's Saving Throw: One of the more common reader/viewer complaints with the original World's End Harem is the arguably failed attempt at Genre-Busting: it essentially tried to be both a raunchy borderline-hentai sex comedy and a serious dystopian science fiction story at the same time, and accomplished this by using two different main characters with mostly unrelated storylines (at least until until they finally merged in a Halfway Plot Switch). The result was that the "Truman Show" Plot centered on Shota Doi felt like a distraction from the main Myth Arc with Reito Mizuhara (or vice versa). Fantasia, though more conventional, is much more focused and incorporates the even heavier ecchi content into a single main character's Myth Arc, serving as an example of why sometimes Harem Genre Tropes Are Not Bad.

YMMV/The Bureau X Com Declassified

• Author's Saving Throw: After the not-so positive reaction to the FPS reboot, finally announcing and focusing their marketing much more heavily on a strategy game that's faithful to the original style by Firaxis Games (with many of the staff that worked on the originals at Microprose in the dev team) seems to be this. It helps that the FPS was delayed into 2013, and it was Retconned to be set in the past of the XCOM universe, derailing its status as a Continuity Reboot.

YMMV/Infinity Train Blossomverse

• Has it own page.

YMMV/Hey Arnold

• Author's Saving Throw: Iggy being re-Demoted to Extra after "Arnold Betrays Iggy", mainly to erase said episode from memory.

YMMV/Black Christmas 2019

• Author's Saving Throw: Ever since Blumhouse became a major player in 2010, people had grown increasingly riled about their total lack of female horror directors, which Jason Blum made even worse by saying that he couldn't find any. This film sees Sophia Takal become the studio's first for a wide-release theatrical film. Previous to her, there were two low-profile indie pickups, and a few in the studio's Hulu anthology film series Into the Dark, including Takal herself (New Year, New You).

YMMV/Pretty Cure

YMMV/Doki Doki Precure

• Author's Saving Throw: After the previous season consisted almost entirely of Filler episodes, Doki Doki's entire season is practically relevant to the plot.

YMMV/Happiness Charge Pretty Cure

• Author's Saving Throw: The Hawaiian Precure being redesigned in order to give them both darker skin tones.

YMMV/Hugtto! Pretty Cure

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • The beloved and characteristic hand-to-hand combat has returned, after being removed in the previous season due to Executive Meddling.
  • An interview with Naito Keisuke reveals that Masato's logic wasn't a result of having a Straw Misogynist for the sake of having one, but was because his mindset was based off the values he learned growing up in his society, and thus had no way of following what he think was right. Him transforming into an Oshimaida and getting purified didn't teach him the "right" way to think, but gave him enough insight to learn how to think and feel for himself.
  • After many fans gave KiraKira★Pretty Cure à la Mode flak for denying Pikario the official title of a Cure, Hugtto gives us the first ever male Cure in the franchise: Cure Infini.
  • Many a Pretty Cure series ended with at least one fan-favorite never getting to become a Cure. How does Hugtto rectify this? Turn everyone into a Cure.
  • Following Cure Echo's questionable exclusion from All-Star Memories, Episode 37 gave her an exclusive splash screen cameo to show that she wasn't entirely forgotten.

YMMV/Tropical-Rouge! Pretty Cure

• Author's Saving Throw: After The Movie for Healin' Good♡Pretty Cure made the Yes! Pretty Cure 5 GoGo! cast into Advertised Extras, the Tropical-Rouge! movie makes the Heartcatch Cures into almost secondary protagonists by giving them nearly as much screentime as the Tropical-Rouge! cast.

YMMV/Grandmaster Of Demonic Cultivation Mo Dao Zu Shi

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • The second season of the donghua received some criticism due to its short length, which cramped up some crucial parts of the story such as Wei Wuxian's downfall as the Yiling Patriarch, which is one of the most important plot points of the novel. Season 3 went back to the more generous 12 episodes (shorter than Season 1's 15-episode run but longer than Season 2's eight-episode run).
  • Many viewers felt that Wen Yuan's appearance in the donghua was woefully short. This is rectified in the Lighter and Softer spin-off, where he plays a bigger role in the episodes that focus on Wei Wuxian's life as the Yiling Patriarch.

Trivia/Spider Man (Franchise)

• Has it own page.

YMMV/My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic

• Has it own page

YMMV/Suicide Squad (2016)

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • Judging from this movie's trailers, the film seems to be lighter in tone to Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, even if it is dark comedy. In particular, the posters regularly utilize an eye-catching neon pink and blue color scheme, possibly as a reaction to criticism of Man of Steel's washed-out color scheme.
  • Ever since the divisive reaction to the Joker's tattooed appearance in the first trailer, every subsequent trailer has been careful to show him with a fully covered torso (wearing a vest, a tuxedo, a purple jacket, etc.), as if to assure fans that his tattoos won't be visible for the entire movie. Moreso, his infamous "Damaged" tattoo isn't displayed too heavily due to a lot of his scenes being shot in dimly-lit settings.
  • Similarly, there were complaints about Harley's redesign being too sexualized or different than her 90s harlequin outfit. There is a scene with Harley in her traditional harlequin outfit with the Joker, and she squees in delight when the suit is returned to her by Waller, even if she ends up wearing her redesigned outfit.
  • Toward the beginning of the film, we see Harley Quinn being saved from drowning by Batman, who actively works to save her life, before arresting her, and later takes Deadshot in alive, and even announces himself (rather than just ambush the villain, as he'd normally do) because Deadshot was out with his daughter and Batman didn't want to traumatize her, which seems to address the complaint about this version of Batman supposedly killing people, and also gives fans a glimpse of a more classical and moral Batman who turns criminals in.

YMMV/Pokémon

Trading Card Game

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • In the Western TCG, some cards that would otherwise fetch very high prices are sometimes released as easily-obtainable promos, especially if they depict popular Pokémon. This happened with three sought-after Pokémon-EX from the Black & White era: Mewtwo-EX, Darkrai-EX and Rayquaza-EX. The Full Art versions of Charizard-GX and Zoroark-GX were given their own promo boxes preemptively, since those two cards would otherwise boast inflated values on the secondary market (Charizard-GX for its collector value, Zoroark-GX for its playability).
  • Charizard had long been infamous in the TCG for being Awesome, but Impractical, with its cards simply having big damage/HP numbers printed on them and little to no competitive value. In 2019, Reshiram & Charizard-GX proved to be a genuinely useful and competitive deck, likely due to much better balancing, and 2020's Charizard VMAX and Vivid Voltage's Leon-themed Charizard started heading down that route as well.

YMMV/Nintendo Wars

• Author's Saving Throw: Ranks in the original Advance Wars 1 campaign were significantly more obtuse than later games, with your score being represented by vague bars instead of a numerical value, making it hard to tell what the margin between ranks was. Re-Boot Camp now displays your exact point score for AW1's campaign missions, and has it follow the same "out of 300" system as Black Hole Rising and Dual Strike for consistency.

YMMV/Monster High

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • After a large amount of fandom backlash of the They Changed It, Now It Sucks! variety, the creators really stressed that Welcome To Monster High wasn't a reboot, but a prequel. They even retconned in the subtitle "The Origin Story" to the movie's name. (This was later ignored when it became clear that yes, it was a reboot.)
  • The reboot has given some molded body detailing to characters who were lacking. Several bits of the dolls also have been made sturdier so little children don't break them as easily or lose parts.
    • Abbey and Clawdeen receive some fur detailing, details which felt missing on them. Clawdeen's always been stated to have lots of hair, and people were upset at the implication that shaving her body hair was required for her to be beautiful. Abbey's fur seemed especially needed after her cousin Mari's introduction made cold-weather Abbey seem lacking in detail.
    • Cleo got some new detailing as well, with molded wrappings on her body akin to the Create-A-Monster mummy. This definitely helps her seem monstrous, as she was the most mundane character before. Her gold-streaked brown hair has also been achieved with golden blonde highlights rather than tinsel, which many people disliked for behaving in a different way to the hair and making it more difficult to style.
    • Lagoona's fins have been made more secure, with the leg fins having a stronger connection. She also has some scales molded on her limbs while she didn't before.
    • Venus finally got some molded plant detailing on her body, much like Honey's.
    • Toralei gets her black cat nose, rather than the unpainted one of before.
    • While some people are opposed to the main cast's new faces, many agree that Draculaura's bright smile and wide eyes are much better suited to her sweet and cute personality.
    • The reboot dolls' bodies have been bulked up (male and female) and are sturdier, as are their elbow and hand pegs, which makes them less prone to breaking and tones down the alarming skinniness that many have complained about.
    • On the whole, the reboot outfits are much more modest and more suitable for high school and teenagers in that age group.
  • The post-reboot "I Love Fashion" dolls include four outfits instead of three and a stand.
  • Many fans are pleased with Moanica for being a recurring villain who doesn't just change her ideologies because someone gives her a talking-to, unlike some other easily-converted antagonists.
  • This is invoked with the Monster Family line, which was in response to kids wanting to know more about the cast's everyday lives and families.
  • And, of course, the most important change to be made: Lagoona's eyebrows finally match her hair.

YMMV/The Legend of Zelda

Across media

• Author's Saving Throw: From Skyward Sword onwards there's the "Hero Mode". A higher-difficulty mode where enemies inflict double damage and there are no healing items such as hearts, meaning the player has no choice but to rely on healing potions only. The trend was continued in "Breath of the Wild", which couldn't exactly use the exact same features due to the severe shake up to the 3D Zelda structure. Instead, this high difficulty mode changes enemy tiers and placements, and more noteworthy, makes enemies recover health with time if the player doesn't constantly hit them. These modes were obviously created for veteran fans and skilled players who considered the franchise had become way too easy since the N64 games, to the point where it was detrimental to the experience for them.

YMMV/The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • Aiming a bow is much more intuitive in this game than its predecessor. Here, you just line the tip of the arrow up with your target, rather than the tip of the blue marking on the bow.
  • While Tatl serves the same function as Navi, she's viewed as less annoying due to the less grating sounds she makes and more fleshed-out personality.
  • A criticism of the Ocarina of Time remake, released almost four years prior, was that it didn't really offer anything new or different than its original outside a few patched up mechanics. The Majora's Mask remake, while still largely following the structure of the original, offers various changes to the gameplay to create a similar but not exactly identical experience. Here are some specific improvements made over the original:
    • The 3DS remake removed Tatl chiding Link for not knowing enemies from Ocarina of Time, which many players found irritating.
    • The 3DS version also replaces the Suspend Save feature with the ability to make a permanent save, which alleviates the frustration of the time loop mechanic. This save feature can also now be activated on the very first three day cycle.
    • Guide Dang It! was one of the most common criticisms of the game. The 3DS version includes a Sheikah Stone near the Mask Salesman which you can interact with without any special means. It contains little videos telling how to beat every event of the main quest, plus pictures of every Heart Piece and Stray Fairy in the whole game. The Bombers will also tell you about most side-quests in the game, and they're added to your Notebook as "Rumored events".
    • The Bomber's Notebook was vastly improved. In the original, Link just earns "Happy Stickers" for whenever he completes a sidequest. All these stickers did was signify that the quest was completed. The remake adds new functionalities to make the notebook more useful: it lists each sidequest that you are either currently doing or have completed, provide hints via the aforementioned "Rumored events", and even has the option to set alarms for sidequests that take place during a specific time of the day.

YMMV/The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • The Morpheel fight feels like an apology for the oft-criticized battle against Morpha in Ocarina of Time, due to their very close similarities, and even though it's a very easy boss, it executes the idea much better. Morpha was disliked for being simultaneously too difficult to target and too easy to stunlock, with the former being caused by janky Hookshot timing that made pulling out its nucleus a chore, and the latter by letting you back the nucleus into a corner of the room to get extra hits on it. Morpheel is the same basic concept, making you pull a traveling sphere out of some tentacles, but the Clawshot is much better at grabbing the eye as long as it's targeted, and the eye is recalled after you get in a hit, with a large enough room that you can't isolate it. The boss also has a second phase, possibly to make up for the lack of variety in Morpha's fight.
  • The HD remaster alleviates a few issues present in both the Gamecube and Wii versions:
    • The remaster incorporates both versions of the game world, so this way people more familiar with one version can play the map they're most familiar with (with the Gamecube map being the one for the main game mode, and the Wii map for the harder Hero Mode).
    • The Wolf Link mechanic received some criticism for being slow and clunky as you had to literally pause and talk to Midna in order to change forms. The remaster rectifies this by having you simply press a button, allowing you to change forms on the fly.
    • Rupees don't constantly remind you what value they are every time you pick up any other than a green. On top of that, rupees in chests don't get put back if you have too many (something that greatly annoyed completionists and forced you to use Magic Armor if you wanted to drain the rupees without leaving).
    • While finding Poes is still a tedious task, the remaster introduced the Ghost Lantern to signal if there's a Poe present in an area and the map now lists the Poes you have discovered, making the Poe sidequest a little less painful.
    • The overworld map now contains more information to help you find points of interest, such as horse and hawk grass, the place you started the game at, the aforementioned discovered Poes, and so on.
    • The inclusion of a harder difficulty, titled "Hero Mode", was this to players who felt the game was too easy.
    • When it was revealed the Ganondorf Amiibo's main function in the HD remaster is that it makes enemies hit harder, people worried that this meant Hero Mode was only accessible via owning said Amiibo. Nintendo later confirmed this to not be the case, and Hero Mode does not require Amiibo in order to play. In fact, the two can actually stack with each other, making you take quadruple damage.

YMMV/The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker

• Author's Saving Throw: The HD remaster made a lot of changes to address some major complaints about the original, mostly in regards to its Padding.
  • The Swift Sail allows for significantly faster sailing and negates the need to change the wind's direction. It's also made available near the beginning of the game via the auction, where it's easily obtainable if you've been saving up Rupees.
  • The infamous Triforce Shard quest was cut down so only 3 of the 8 pieces require deciphering Treasure Charts. The rest are now collected directly from where you originally found their Charts.
  • The Nintendo Gallery sidequest has been heavily streamlined. First, you can receive the Deluxe Picto Box as early as the first trip to Windfall Island, which cuts out a step from the original that was padding and allows you to get a head start on collecting pictos. Secondly, the game now notifies you when a picto is considered valid for a figurine turn-in, removing a lot of potential frustration from the picture-taking process (especially for enemies that only spawn once, like bosses). Finally, you can now hold 12 pictos and turn all of them (plus any Tingle Bottle pictures you may have found) in to Carlov each day, further cutting down on wasted time.
  • The Forest Water sidequest was notoriously difficult in the original. You're given 20 minutes to water dying trees scattered across eight islands, all while having to deal with Gyorgs and Seahats along the way and being held back by the moderately slow sailing speed. The HD Remaster adds ten minutes to the timer, which makes for a much easier and less painful time when combined with the Swift Sail.
  • The addition of Hero Mode adds a much-welcomed hard mode to a game often considered fairly easy.

YMMV/The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

• Author's Saving Throw: Some Zelda games (mostly later 3D games) are criticized by some for being too linear and having tedious exploration. ALBW addresses these concerns in several ways: by allowing the Hyrule and Lorule dungeons to be completed in almost any order, by providing a convenient transportation system early on with Irene and the weather vanes, and by allowing most items to be used early on through Ravio's rentals.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • Thanks to complaints over the lack of dual audio options, Nintendo eventually released a multi-language option for free that enables players to choose any combination out of the game's 9 different dubs (including Japanese) and 10 languages for menus and subtitles. (Wii U players must download a separate but free Voice Pack from the eShop to use this option.)
  • Many players were let down by the fact that the Champions' backstories had so little attention given to them. "The Champions' Ballad" DLC is designed to give the Champions A Day in the Limelight.
  • Blessing shrines and combat trials are generally disliked due to being the same. Of the sixteen shrines added in "The Champions' Ballad" DLC, none are blessing shrines and only one is a combat trial, and the latter shakes things up by being much larger and more involved than any other combat trial, as well as playing completely differently due to the unique conditions you're under at the time. The rest are unique puzzle shrines.
  • In the vanilla game, once a Divine Beast has been appeased, you can never see that Blight again in that save file, which makes 100% Completion of the Hyrule Compendium more difficult than it should be. With "The Champions' Ballad" DLC, you have the opportunity to have a rematch with each one as a "Phantom Ganon", giving you more opportunities to take a picture for the compendium.

YMMV/Hyrule Warriors

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • Particularly in the west, the fanbase's reaction to Skull Kid not being included as a playable character in the Majora's Mask DLC pack, while Tingle was included instead, has been laid to rest now that Skull Kid finally gets his playable debut in Hyrule Warriors Legends.
  • The lack of any major representative from 2D or handheld entries was criticized, with the roster leaning towards the 3D console entries. Three of the later post-release DLC packs for the game involved A Link Between Worlds, Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks, and perhaps most surprisingly, Link's Awakening, with the latter pack introducing Marin, a fan-favorite character who hasn't shown up in the franchise again in just over twenty years(!) (though her Expy, Malon, has become a mainstay).
  • The chapter "The Demon Lord's Plan" in Legends has plenty of mini-Imprisoned that the player can destroy with ease, making up for how difficult it otherwise is to obtain materials from the thing.
  • Definitive Edition for Switch. Many fans of the Wii U version were dismayed that Legends had content and features that were simply unavailable for Wii U (and while the game is technically playable on the standard 3DS, it runs so poorly that a New 3DS is basically a requirement), while those who got Legends missed out on the Boss Mode, which helped greatly with material grinding (and even the New 3DS couldn't quite match up to the Wii U version even with the graphical downgrade, having a lower on-screen character count). Definitive Edition is on the most powerful hardware of the three and has all of the content and features of both versions - it even has the portability of Legends, alongside the co-op features of the Wii U version.
  • Definitive Edition revamps how the Damage Taken score is calculated, now being based on the percentage of your character's health rather than a fixed number of HP. This provides a lot more incentive to get extra heart containers, whereas in previous versions of the game, outside of the Heart Power ability introduced in Legends (which increases your attack power based on the number of Hearts you have), they were almost meaningless in the harder Adventure Maps, as a single hit from an enemy could do enough damage to easily sink your A Rank even outside of "All Attacks are Devastating!" and "Don't Get Hit!" missions. This revamp retroactively also makes said maps a bit more lenient in their rank requirements.
  • In previous versions of Hyrule Warriors, getting an A-Rank on most Adventure Mode battles had a fixed set of requirements (except when some scores weren't counted), but weren't always adjusted to suit the difficulty of certain squares (on the easiest squares, you'd have trouble getting 1,200 KOs without grinding off keeps, and on harder ones, quickly taking enough damage to sink your A-Rank). In addition to Damage Taken now being calculated off the percentage of your health, Definitive Edition has also adjusted the Adventure Mode A-Rank requirements based on the colors of the squares, making it so that not only do you just need 1,000 KOs on the easiest squares, the harder squares allow you to lose more than 100% of your health. The latter effectively makes "All Attacks Are Devastating!" and "Don't Get Hit!" missions a little more forgiving.

YMMV/Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • A number of fans were miffed that, in Breath of the Wild, a sizeable meat of the overall story was already done, and given out in scattered parts. This game takes place in the very time period of said parts, and shows the story of the Battle of Calamity. Only for it to be an alternate timeline where the heroes actually win.
  • Many fans were disappointed that Ganon in Breath of the Wild was depicted as a mindless Generic Doomsday Villain and has no active presence in the game save for the Blood Moon events and the Blight Ganons. This game rectifies this problem by having Ganon actively communicate to his minions Astor and Kohga in preparation for his return, showing the cunning he was known for as the Gerudo King Ganondorf.
  • The final battle against Calamity Ganon also seems to be in response to the lukewarm reception of the Calamity Ganon/Dark Beast Ganon boss fight from Breath of the Wild. Rather than transforming into a half-dead, deformed spider monstrosity or an oversized boar, Calamity Ganon now assumes the form of a giant male Gerudo made of Malice and Guardian pieces, and starts off as nigh-invulnerable despite the combined strength of the Champions and their allies.
  • The Blight Ganons all possess new looks that are more colorful and visually distinct from one another, likely addressing complaints that the Blights as Breath of the Wild's dungeon bosses all felt too similar.
  • While by no means hated, some fans of Breath of the Wild felt a number of the songs were "too mellow" for an action-adventure game. Age of Calamity provides an exciting soundtrack (including remixes of Breath of the Wild's soundtrack) that fits perfectly with the action-packed gameplay. An example of a calming song from a Breath of the Wild cutscene being remixed into a battle theme for the latter half of a late-game mission.
  • One irritating mechanic of the first Hyrule Warriors was that timers would still count down even during seconds-long special attack or weakpoint smash animations, which sometimes results in kills not counting if the timer hits zero during the attack or time necessary to getting a high rank being wasted. Age of Calamity remedies this by freezing the timer during those attack animations and doing away with the ABC/SBA mission ranking altogether.
  • You have to wait for the boss to do a certain attack in order to make the weakpoint gauge visible in the first Hyrule Warriors. In this game, you don't have to wait for it. Many things like environmental damage, rods, bomb rune, certain combos, and hitting the enemy's head can trigger the weakpoint gauge to appear, allowing for a faster engagement.
  • The "Guardian of Remembrance" DLC gives additional story missions that gives greater insights to characters fans felt were underutilized, especially Sooga. It also resolves potential continuity errors with "Creating A Champion" by revealing that Terrako had actually traveled much earlier in the timeline but was knocked offline by Harbinger Ganon for an unspecific amount of time, allowing Ganon to alter timeline events before the first Chapter begins. Fans also get to see more of Revali's softer side, especially in his scenes with Teba's son Tulin.

YMMV/Mean Girls

• Author's Saving Throw: While she is too prideful to talk it over, Janis does admit to Damian that she too did bad things, likely referring to Cady calling out on her for pressuring her to be a spy for the Plastics.

YMMV/Mega Man Legends

• Author's Saving Throw: Capcom re-releasing all three games in the Legends subseries on PSN seems to be an attempt at this after all the negative publicity, or possibly to gauge the public's interest in the third game by tracking sales.

YMMV/Mega Man Zero 2

• Author's Saving Throw: With Zero 2, the developers took the opportunity to smooth out some of the issues from the first game:
  • You can find two sub-tanks out in levels, meaning you can maintain a higher rank by not having to use cyber-elves to get them, while still having a safety net to make mistakes.
  • Extra lives are more common, can be farmed reliably if you know where they are, and you can no longer fail missions if you run out of lives, as continuing sends you back to the beginning of the stage instead.
  • E-Crystal requirements for Cyber-Elves are generally much lower, meaning it doesn't take anywhere near as much grinding to use them.

YMMV/Twisted Wonderland

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • For players who skipped the Rhythmic tutorials and did badly, a later update enabled a short tutorial screen to be displayed when the Rhythmics are paused. In addition, going to the main Rhythmic page will show a demo mode for each stage and difficulty so that players can have an idea of how the beatmap works.
  • The English localization has several:
    • Choosing Diasomnia starters is viable right since release. In the Japanese game, they are only released 2 months after the game was launched.
    • Some features that are initially locked until some months after the release are made available in the English localization, such as Exams.
  • The Fairy Gala event rerun in 2022 has changed the originally controversial theme of "Exotic" for the Fairy Gala in the story to "Fabulous". This removes the Unfortunate Implications from the original run where it seems that Kalim and Leona are picked to infiltrate the Gala because of their skin tone and instead changes it so that the two were picked because the other Dorm leaders couldn't be bothered to volunteer and threw Kalim and Leona under the bus.

YMMV/Spongebob Squarepants

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • "Treats!" sort of feels like an apology letter for SpongeBob's behavior in "A Pal For Gary". The episode shows that SpongeBob will literally go around the world to make Gary happy.
  • Many fans see "Plankton's Pet" as a big Throw the Dog a Bone moment for Plankton after "Plankton's Regular" and "One Coarse Meal". Likewise, "Enchanted Tiki Dreams" is one for Squidward.
  • Season 9 in general is (mostly) considered an improvement over Seasons 6-8, mainly because the writers have made the characters closer to their Season 1-3 selves.
  • Seasons 9B and 10, when Stephen Hillenburg returned, have also gotten fans back, considering many fans hold in account that the show was good when he was involved.
  • After suffering from They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character for about a decade, Seasons 9B-12 have Bubble Bass as a more prominent supporting character. He gets minor roles in "Bulletin Board", "Larry the Floor Manager", "Krabby Patty Creature Feature", and major roles in "Squid Noir," "Moving Bubble Bass," and "Swamp Mates."
  • Patrick becomes a true friend towards SpongeBob in Season 9 and onwards, like in Seasons 1-3 (with a few exceptions), while Seasons 6-8 had fans asking for SpongeBob to just ditch Patrick.
  • After the fan backlash to "Summer Job" ignoring Mr. Krabs' and Mrs. Puff's romantic relationship in "Krusty Love", the Season 10 premiere "Whirly Brains" revealed the two have been dating for years, seemingly rendering "Summer Job" non-canon.
  • After fans expressed disappointment that Pearl didn't even get mentioned in "Girls' Night Out" despite the episode focusing on the other major female characters (Sandy, Mrs. Puff, and Karen), "A Cabin in the Kelp" has Pearl become a member of the Gal Pals.
  • Post second movie seasons' use of lavish expressive and fluid animation after years of stiff and stilted, almost Family Guy-esque animation from s6-9A was a breath of fresh air for many fans (even if this change still had its detractors.)
  • Post second movie seasons' stories and comedy. After years of safe and boring plots which tried a bit too hard to emulate style of earlier seasons and comedy which was unfunny and predictable with fair dose of gross-out and toilet humor, more trippy and surreal storytelling and comedy nowadays is seen as welcomed change. Not everyone is fans of this style, but the show feels fresher than ever, somehow pulling off many interesting ideas pretty late into the show's run.
  • "Gary's New Toy" can be considered one to "Dumped" due to following the same general idea of "Gary ignores SpongeBob to hang out with someone/something else", but executing it much better due to a better buildup of Gary leaving SpongeBob, and he apologizes of his own volition in the end.

YMMV/Shrek 2

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • At the end of the previous movie, Fiona permanently turned into an ogre, when at the time, she had been expecting to regain her human form. While she quickly realized she was perfectly happy to be an ogre and marry Shrek, this film had her turn down an opportunity to become human again, thus truly establishing that being an ogre is her preferred form.
  • Fiona also wound up undergoing Badass Decay at the end of the first film where she went from kicking serious ass to being subdued by the guards ^note Shrek was as well, but he got to fight back a bit, which Fiona didn't. Although to be fair, she and Shrek were outnumbered by the guards. and having a blade pulled on her by Farquaad. Here, we get to see her Action Girl traits on display once again, and the this film's climax doesn't have her as a Damsel in Distress who needs to be rescued from physical danger, with her peril coming from manipulation and magic. Emphasizing this is how she clearly outclasses Prince Charming as a fighter.

YMMV/Shrek Forever After

• Author's Saving Throw
  • The video game gives us more time to explore the alternate universe and allows Shrek to make amends with Fiona when he gets home, unlike the movie.
  • Those that hated Artie, Merlin and the princesses will be pleased to see that they are neither seen nor referenced in the entire movie, even though Shrek and Fiona's triplets are featured.
  • For anyone who thinks Prince Charming should have married Fiona and who see Shrek as an interloper, this film proves that, even without Shrek's intervention, Prince Charming was doomed to fail from the start.

YMMV/Assassin’s Creed

The first game

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • After the disastrous launch and technical issues of Unity, Ubisoft realized that the annual releases were starting to bring the series down. The next game was much better received, and Ubisoft decided to not release a new game in 2016, so that they could plan the future of the series and allow the next game more development time. Time will tell if it will work, although it did work the last time.
    • And the throw seems to have worked. Origins has had such a positive overall reception that they've even decided to give smaller delays to a couple other games.
  • Ubisoft announced in Summer 2022 that they would shut down the servers for II, Brotherhood, Revelations, and III on September 1st of that year. This would result in the end of not only the online multiplayer and its associated DLC, but also the single-player DLC such as The Da Vinci Disappearance and The Tyranny of King Washington^note the single-player DLC requires being connected to the online servers as an anti-piracy measure. While the eventual shutdown of the multiplayer servers was expected and only affected fans who’ve actually played and enjoyed the multiplayer, all fans were aghast that they would lose paid content even if it was still available in remasters, leading to calls for boycotts against Ubisoft. A day before the shutdowns we’re supposed to occur, Ubisoft relented by delaying the shutdown by a month and announcing patch updates that would make the single-player DLC content usable without an online connection.

YMMV/Assassin’s Creed III

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • The game is set to get a remastered edition as well, and it'll supposedly have "improved gameplay mechanics" and "ergonomics", implying that it'll be more than a simple graphics upgrade. If the previous AC remasters are any indication, there will likely be large graphical upgrades and improved performance, the latter being something the original had problems with on last-gen consoles. The remaster ended up not only looking and running better than the original, some annoyances were removed or changed^note In particular, the stealth mechanic. The remastered version brought back the low-profile dual assassination with the hidden blade that the original removed for unknown reason. Additionally, Haytham and Connor can now whisper in bushes and bales of hay rather than only from corners, a mechanic from Black Flag and Rogue.

YMMV/Assassin’s Creed Rogue

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • A very unintentional example after the Unity launch. Rogue's well-received story and characters meant many fans got at least one good Assassin's Creed game in 2014 (although critics preferred Unity).
  • Rogue did many small but welcome adjustments to the collectibles system that was a huge pain in Black Flag. Uncharted collectibles are now much fewer in numbers, and picking them up is more entertaining because many require a nice bit of freerunning to get to instead of just lying around in the open. The rowboats that return Shay to his ship are more numerous, especially in areas with freezing water where swimming is ill-advised. Shanties move much slower and are thus less annoying to chase down. Luck-based Abstergo challenges were removed entirely.
  • The rerelease of the Rebel Collection on Nintendo Switch would help remedy the lack of a Wii U release for Nintendo followers.

YMMV/Assassin’s Creed: Unity

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • After Unity's disastrous launch, Ubisoft have made the Dead Kings expansion free for all players, and people who had previously purchased the now-defunct Season Pass, will get a new Ubisoft game for free.
  • Players responded negatively to the use of Initiates and a tie-in app to unlock certain chests. Later patches removed those requirements, allowing any player to access them.
  • For players who didn't pick up the game when it was new (or had written it off due to the various launch issues), the one-week free giveaway of the game in Uplay in April 2019 due to the Notre Dame fire won the game some new fans.

YMMV/Assassin’s Creed Syndicate

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • After criticisms that the usual "Collect the items to get a special outfit" outfit in Unity was lackluster, being a cosmetic skin only, Syndicate has an armour that knocks off twenty percent of all damage.

YMMV/Assassin’s Creed Origins

• Given the last few games had been Christmas Rushed, and following their reception, Ubisoft decided to give this one more time in the oven than the others, even if it meant it wouldn't come out in 2016. So far, critic and fan reception have been fairly positive.
  • So positive, in fact, that they've decided to also give smaller delays to Far Cry 5 and The Crew 2, as well as a bigger delay for an unnamed third game.

YMMV/Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • The first patch of 2019 added in the option to adjust the notoriously aggressive enemy level scaling. It can't be turned off entirely, but the lowest setting is 4 levels below the player; at that point enemies are much easier and a much lower threat, without being COMPLETE pushovers, so the player gets to feel their increase in power, but the combat never gets so easy that it becomes dull.
  • The second episode of "Legacy of the First Blade" ends with a forced heterosexual pairing between Natakas/Neema and the Eagle Bearer. In concession to outcry from LGBTQ players, a kiss scene in the ending montage was removed. Dialogue is also slightly retooled across episode 2 and 3 to be more intentionally romantic or non-romantic: certain options now have a love interest's heart icon, while others are flat statements about maintaining the divine bloodline.
  • A two-for-one with the addition of the "A Friend Worth Dying For" quest chain: The final reward is the Hero Sword, a weapon which was seen during the E3 2018 gameplay demo (but was not available in the game when it was released). The engraving which the sword unlocks increases the damage done by the Critical Assassination skill, which goes some way towards addressing complaints that the game makes it difficult for the player to assassinate important / elite characters.
  • Another two-for-one with the Vacation DLC released in 2021. The DLC explains how Kassandra will spend the time between Ancient Greece and her meeting Layla: finding Isu artifacts to keep them away from human hands. The DLC also bumps up difficulty by many notches in its latter part, by having the Isu artifact drain away the power within the Spear of Leonidas.

YMMV/Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • The game's narrative director has confirmed that both player characters are canon, averting Schrödinger's Player Character. This is after criticism that Kassandra in Odyssey was chosen as the "canon" main character by the novelization, despite confirmation that two-thirds of those playing chose to play as Alexios. The explanation for this is that Eivor is canonically the female Sage of Odin (who was male), making Female Eivor the canon protagonist for the main game and the expansions set during the Viking Age time period, while Male Eivor (who is actually Odin) is the canon protagonist for Asgard sequences and Dawn of Ragnarök expansion.
  • The return of the Hidden Blade also counts, as well as the return of the Hidden Ones and the Order of the Ancients, after they were (mostly) absent from Assassin's Creed: Odyssey.
  • After complaints that Odyssey was too big with too many sidequests required to level up, Valhalla's level-up system is far more forgiving. While the XP points required to level up in Odyssey increase exponentially with every level and only gives you one skill point, Valhalla requires the same amount of XP points for every level and gives two skill points for every time you level up. By the time you're ready to progress to the next region for the story, you should be leveled up enough that the Beef Gate isn't a problem after completing a single World Event, if you needed to complete any at all.
  • Odyssey was criticized for downplaying the traditional stealth elements of the series, making it more of an RPG stat that meant players often found themselves only taking off a third of an enemy's life bar from a sneak attack. Valhalla returns to the classic formula where a stealth attack from the back is a guaranteed kill on non-bosses/non-unique characters.
    • Another bone thrown to fans of the classic series is a confirmed option for stealth where Eivor can assassinate targets with a stealth attack, regardless of their level. However, this is undermined by the many designated boss fights where Eivor must enter combat.
    • Also, the options menu outright includes an option to set whether to have the classic formula or the "intended formula", of having Elite Mooks able to shrug off kills. Though it tells you this isn't how the game is intended, it shows directly a bone being thrown at fans of the earlier games.
  • Returning after an absence in Odyssey is the White Room, with it being confirmed that all thirty of the main targets in-game have their own White Room cinematics.
  • The modern day segment gives some insight on how exactly Juno managed to postpone the 2012 apocalypse. The Grey - aka the storage where her mind was held - connects to Isu tech around the world, which according to this game can contribute to potential world-ending disasters if left unchecked. Essentially, all Juno may have had to do was adjust some values on the power consumption of Isu tech elsewhere on the planet.
  • The Bayek Legendary Skin was originally only available to those who watched the BossLogic announcement livestream on Twitch with their Ubisoft Connect accounts linked to their Twitch accounts. On December 14, Ubisoft made the skin available for players as a claimable reward as a Christmas gift, and in January 2021, it was made a regular unlockable for 100 units.
  • While the design itself is decent, the Hidden Ones Armor was criticized for being a garish green color instead of white and red. To promote Ubisoft Forward, Basim’s more traditionally colored Hidden Ones outfit was made available for free on Ubisoft Connect in June, 2021.
  • As discussed under Scrappy Mechanic, the game's stealth mechanics have gotten a lot of flak due to their apparent glitchiness, to the point where many just didn't bother with them. A patch in December 2021 fixed several of the more obnoxious issues (guards sometimes seeing through obstacles, the detection meter filling instantly, etc), making stealth a more reliable option for players.

YMMV/Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3 DS and Wii U

• Author's Saving Throw: Rosalina, Samus, Pac-Man, Mewtwo, and Cloud have all been depicted in controversial ways some time after their debut (Rosalina due to her third voice actress, Laura Faye Smith, making her sound more like Peach and nothing like her original melancholic self; Samus due to her drastic personality change in Metroid: Other M; Pac-Man due to the polarizing Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures (notably, Sakurai himself also claimed he wouldn't have included him if this was his requested appearance by Namco), Mewtwo due to the first version of Its anime portrayal being initially thought as replaced by the Pokemon's appearance in Pokémon: Genesect and the Legend Awakened; and Cloud due to slowly being flanderized into a wangsty, overly mopey Emo Teen stereotype who dwelled too much in his past from Advent Children onward). Fortunately, this game depicts all five characters akin to their early appearances; Rosalina has her second voice actress (Kerri Kane), Samus has her old voice clips and personality across her two forms^note although she still mostly uses her Other M designs, so this particular case is only half-way for some people, but some people also appreciate the attempt to make the best of a bad situation by giving Zero Suit Samus jet heels, Pac-Man has his original design and represents retro Namco games in general, Mewtwo is based on Pokémon: The First Movie like in Melee, albeit with a new voice actor (which has still been well-received), and Cloud is headstrong and dwells on his Inferiority Superiority Complex just like during the early game of Final Fantasy VII.

YMMV/Sonic the Hedgehog

YMMV/Sonic X

• Author's Saving Throw: Season 3 has quite a few:
  • In the first two seasons, Chris was hated for him stealing screentime from the other Sonic characters and not being useful to the group. Come Season 3 and he's not only more useful to the group, he's also had his on screen presence reduced.
  • The complaint of Sonic being an Invincible Hero that makes scrap of robots in seconds, resulting in the conflict being devoid of tension and weight. In this season he's put up against foes that actually give him a run for his money.
  • With Chris getting relegated to a secondary role, Tails is able to get increased screentime and development as well as a budding relationship with the plot-critical Cosmo.

YMMV/Sonic the Hedgehog 2006

• Author's Saving Throw: A bizarre case in that after the game was released, Sega effectively denied the developers any leeway for patching the game and trying to fix its bugs, in an attempt to wash their hands of the whole affair. In the paid Downloadable Content of the Team Attack Amigo pack, however, they secretly inserted some minor patches into the game to slip this past both the Executive Meddling, and then-limitations on patches instated by Microsoft for Xbox games. It doesn't really fix the game in significant ways, but there was an attempt at least.

YMMV/Sonic Generations

• Author's Saving Throw: The finale of the game established once and for all, in-canon, that Dr. Eggman's real name is still Dr. Ivo Robotnik, intended to curb the fandom debates about which of them was his real name or not. The good doctor humorously notes this when addressed as his real name by Tails, saying "Nobody calls me that anymore."

YMMV/Sonic Boom

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • One of the complaints against Shattered Crystal was the fact that Sticks replaced Amy as the fourth playable character. Fire & Ice rectifies this by having both Amy and Sticks playable.
  • Many have assumed delaying Fire & Ice itself was an effort to give the game more development time to ensure it doesn't suffer the same fate as its predecessors. Although it got better reviews than Shattered Crystal, few reviewers rated it any higher than So Okay, It's Average.

YMMV/Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric

• Author's Saving Throw: A 1 GB patch was released for the game in all regions in January 2015 that addressed many glitches. The "infinite jump" glitch with Knuckles is gone, more barriers were added to level geometry to prevent players from falling out of the game world, and numerous smaller bugs relating to graphics were fixed as well. The framerate was also made smoother, along with the lighting and shadows getting a small bump in quality to better match up with the game's debut trailer.

YMMV/Sonic Forces

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • When Super Sonic was first announced, he was intended to be released as a $1.99 piece of Downloadable Content, which was met with backlash, since the game was charging for content that was part of the base game in previous Sonic entries. Following this announcement, SEGA ultimately scrapped the price tag, and Super Sonic was released for free instead.
  • In response to complaints about several entries like Colors, Generations, and Lost World focusing entirely on Sonic to the point of demoting his friends to NPCs, Forces both features a customizable avatar character who goes through their own story arc separate from Sonic himself and brings back Shadow as a playable DLC character.

YMMV/Super Mario Bros

• Author's Saving Throw: The Nintendo Switch era seems intent on fixing the problems that plagued the 3DS and Wii U era. All accusations of a lack of creativity were banished with Super Mario Odyssey, the RPGs got a bone thrown at them with Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle having tight, well thought out and new gameplay plus a focus on humour the RPGs are known for while Mario Tennis Aces avoided the problems Ultra Smash faced with new assets, gameplay and a story mode.

YMMV/Mario Party

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • Island Tour seems to be a compromise between the mechanics of Mario Party 9 and those of the games made before it.
  • amiibo Party in 10 for those who want the classic Mario Party style back.
  • Star Rush throws out the car mechanic completely and returns to the "star collecting" mechanic like the classic Mario Party titles; while the gameplay in Toad Scramble remains different from the main modes in previous Mario Party games, the mode Balloon Bash is the closest thing to the classic Mario Party mode. Super Mario Party, the first console Mario Party since 10, also ditches the car, as does Island Tour to a much lesser extent (while vehicles are still a prominent feature in gameplay, each character moves individually, similar to the older titles).
  • Games starting with Star Rush heavily cut down on luck-based elements and Comeback Mechanics, focusing on strategic play instead.
  • While Super Mario Party still has a four-player cooperative mode in the form of River Survival, the mode is completely skill-based, players are in control at all times, and cooperation is heavily emphasized. This is in contrast to how the overly luck-dependent and possibly rigged car prevented much real choice in cooperating or competing, although how much skill River Survival entails lies entirely in the player's ability to complete each minigame within the time limit.
  • After being seemingly abandoned for two years, Nintendo suddenly released an update to Super Mario Party that enables full online multiplayer for the Party, Partner, and Free Play modes. Later, Superstars would launch with online play from the start.
  • Many players didn't like seeing Donkey Kong removed as a playable character starting in 5. His eventual return to playability in the 10 was met with open arms. And luckily it seems to have stuck, with DK being playable in all of the following installments (barring Top 100) as well.
  • After The Top 100 was widely lambasted for having only a single board map, Superstars, another game featuring 100 classic minigames, was announced to have five boards taken from the Nintendo 64 games. Superstars also supports traditional button controls with a Pro Controller, something that Super lacked.
  • Peach's Birthday Cake is redesigned in Superstars to lessen some of its punishing aspects that the first game's boards were notorious for. The Flower Lottery you're forced to pay 10 coins to play has been moved to where the two splitting paths on the board converge instead of where they intitially split which in turn removes the chance to lose coins from Bowser before reaching the Star Space, a new event space lets players skip the lottery if they land on it, and Bowser's section now serves as a risky shortcut for players who end up on it, letting them avoid Piranha Plants and cut across most of the board for another Star if they can spare the cost of Bowser's item. Piranha Plants are also easier to use, since it's possible to set up smaller ones that only steal coins at a much lower cost.
  • The "Tug of War" minigame is infamously known for requiring to use the palm of the hand to turn the joystick to be granted a victory. As a result, many people contracted blisters. Superstars adds a warning telling player that this is uncessary and dangerous to do so. However, many fans felt like removing the minigame entirely was the true solution.

YMMV/Mario Party 5

• Author's Saving Throw: The Battle Mini-Game mechanics for some. Instead of landing on a space that forces you to play mini-games that can wager more coins than what you have, they have a small chance of occurring at the end of a turn in Party Mode.

YMMV/Mario Tennis

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • A "Classic Tennis" mode, with the ability to turn off Chance and Jump Shots, was featured in Ultra Smash, which relieved fans who didn't like the game's connections to Open and missed the gameplay from the 64 and GameCube installments.
  • Aces brings back the Story/RPG Mode that's been missing since the Game Boy titles, relieving concerns of a lack of content after Ultra Smash didn't bring much new to the table.
  • Mario Tennis Aces surprisingly perfects some things that Paper Mario Color Splash struggled with a few years prior. For one, enemies are friendly NPCs from the very beginning of Story Mode alongside the Toads. It's also made very clear several of them, such as the Spike racquet builder, are locals to the Kingdom of Bask with no allegiance to Bowser, unlike how there was always something "weird" about enemy or even non-Toad NPCs in Color Splash^note Most Color Splash enemy NPCs have speech bubbles above them but not the Toads; only one enemy NPC relegated to a sidequest is even hinted to live on Prism Island proper, while the rest all work for Bowser; the Shy Guys of Vortex Island lived in an alternate dimension rather than the main dimension; Yoshis only appear as circus animals in one stage despite being well known to thrive on islands in other games. Finally, Lucien is explicitly sentient and possesses Wario, Waluigi and Luigi for most of the game before settling on Bowser, rather than making a "mystery" out of Bowser being possessed across several flashbacks while acting wishywashy about his possessor's nature.

YMMV/Sly 2: Band of Thieves

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • This game does away with the one hit kills and lucky charms in favor of a more traditional health bar.
  • The first game caught some flack from players who felt that for a stealth platforming game, the stealth part was underutilized. This game puts more emphasis on sneaking up on enemies and trying to pickpocket them and go undetected.
  • There are fewer vaults that are limited to one each episode instead of several per episode.

YMMV/Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time

• Author's Saving Throw: Carmelita's voice was criticized in both the second and third games for not attempting to give her a Latina accent, something that’s been part of the character since the beginning. For this game they brought said accent back.

YMMV/Fire Emblem Three Houses and YMMV/Fire Emblem Warriors Three Hopes

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • The game has mostly done away with Avatar-sexuals, characters who have no supports or connections to anyone besides the avatar character^note Some characters have one or two other supports; for example, Flora from Fates could support with her sister Felicia as well as the Avatar. Nearly every single character, even the adult characters you can recruit, have supports with multiple others and have multiple potential endings. On the other end of the scale, not everyone has endings with everyone within their house, much less with every single other unit, so the paired endings they do have tend to feel more personalized and less cookie cutter. And interestingly, not every male/female ending is even romantic. The only truly Avatar-sexual characters in the game after all the patches and DLC are Rhea, a non-playable character (who thus can't get support points with other units) who's only available during the Silver Snow route, Sothis, for very obvious reasons, but just has an S support rank. Likewise, Anna, who previously was an Avatar-sexual in Awakening (barring a comical set of supports with Tiki) and Fates, doesn't have any supports after she was implemented and that any gift-giving or tea-partying don't actually increase relationship values, but rather restore her motivation or grant her stat bonuses.
  • Another major criticism of Fates was that its attempt at moral complexity is completely botched in favor of labeling Hoshido as good and Nohr as evil, with Nohr being ruled by an Obviously Evil king, and Hoshido always having the moral high ground, with anything morally ambiguous for the latter being either quickly glossed over^note Azura being kidnapped by Hoshidan Shinobi and facing extreme prejudice growing up in Hoshido or hand-waved away^note Ryoma threatening to let a sick Elise die if the Avatar doesn't defect to Hoshido, the Avatar completely lets this slide, even in Revelation. Three Houses has no good or evil side, everyone ends up doing morally ambiguous things at one point or another, and any villainous members don't reflect the faction as a whole. The only exception is "those who slither in the dark", a group that everyone hates, including the more morally-grey characters, and even then, Three Houses doesn't make any pretenses that they're meant to be sympathetic, besides some vague explanations of their origins that aren't even relevant justifications during the time of the conflict.
  • Awakening and Fates put a lot of emphasis on romance, particularly the heterosexual kind. Gameplay benefits tied to marriage, such as units and paralogues, effectively punish the audience for playing Robin or Corrin as gay or asexual or choosing not to romantically pair as many characters up as possible. Gay options are perhaps less improved than they could be, but in any case, marriage in Three Houses has precisely no effect on gameplay: Byleth simply chooses a unit with A-rank support to S-rank before the final battle. You can easily choose to be with no one in the end, and even shut down flirting with your character in cutscenes (and said flirting only happens with characters who are explicitly 20 or older, addressing another issue complained about from Fates).
  • Quite a few critics and reviewers have noticed the high quantity of world-building in Three Houses, after the lack of setting lore was commonly cited as a weakness of the writing for Fates (one infamous example among fans is that Fates is the only game in the entire franchise to not have a full world map, and the only one in the main series to lack even a name for its world).
  • Some mechanics and themes from Fates that did receive praise (Personal skills, classes affecting stat growths, more customizability for characters) also returned and were refined in this game.
  • The base game Gay Options received some criticism on both the laziness and But Not Too Gay fronts for omitting Byleth from the S-support CGs. Meanwhile, the CG art for the two post-release Gay Options, Jeritza and Yuri, show Byleth clearly visible for either gender. In addition, Jeritza and Yuri are both male, helping to even off the significant imbalance in which Male Byleth only had one Gay Option to Female Byleth's five. The specific character designs of the newly added male options, namely a queer-coded trickster with a ruthless streak but a good heart and a guilt-ridden knight-berserker struggling with mental illness, could also be considered an Author's Saving Throw regarding criticism how Claude and Dimitri are not romanceable for male characters despite plentiful Ship Tease.
  • One complaint that some had was that paired endings are based on who has the highest support values. So for instance, if you want Ferdinand and Dorothea to be paired for the ending, but also get an A rank support between Ferdinand and Edelgard and for whatever reason Ferdinand and Edelgard end the game having a higher support value than Ferdinand and Dorothea (perhaps due to both frequently fighting together in the front lines, since both are naturally melee fighters while Dorothea is a long-ranged mage), you'll get the former pair's ending. This basically means that the only sure way on the initial release to confirm what endings you will get is to leave all other A rank supports that aren't with Byleth unfinished. With the release of Cindered Shadows, there is one character who lets you pair up characters as soul mates, essentially meaning that as long as they get their A rank support, they are guaranteed to end up together in the ending, allowing you to safely complete all other A rank supports.

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • Continuing on the Avatar, many fans are glad that unlike how the story heavily revolves around two of the more polarizing ones (Corrin and Byleth), Shez has less involvement overall as a more supporting role to the main lord, not unlike Robin.
  • Non-pre-rendered cutscenes, such as supports, now use a modeled 3D environment instead of a panoramic image as the background. This was subject to Special Effect Failure in the original Three Houses.
  • Certain character traits that were noted to be either annoying or hateable in the original are toned down for this game. To name a few, Bernadetta's anxiety is not used as much for comedy^note Notably, her starting supports all start with her already acquainted with the other unit unlike in Three Houses, and three out of her five as of the demo no longer end with her assuming the worst and running away much like many of her C supports did originally, Felix is less of a Jerkass, Leonie talks about Jeralt less often, and Raphael is less fixated on meat and muscles to the exclusion of all else.
  • For Rhea fans who were disappointed that she was never playable in the original game, the fact that she’s a playable character with a unique character class in Three Hopes was a welcome development. The fact that she’s a New Game Plus exclusive slightly soured it for those who wanted her playable within the main campaign, but even so, a lot of fans were just happy to be able to use her at all.
  • A common criticism of the four routes in the base game was the sheer high amount of recycled or reused content between them. Each route in this game is more distinctly unique, with only one shared mission before the respective plots begin. This also allows each region to be given more focus.
  • Another common complaint in the original was how shafted male magic users were, lacking a proper Master magic class due to the Gremory being female-locked. Three Hopes takes the Dark Bishop and upgrades it from an offshoot advanced class into a Master class, letting it serve as the male counterpart to the Gremory.
  • A comparatively minor complaint, but some fans were disappointed that the warriors from Duscur in Dedue's paralogue, while having darker skin on the in-game models, used the same fair-skinned portraits as the rest of the NPCs. Here all of the generic Duscur characters seen in Azure Gleam have been given their own set of character art.
  • In Three Houses, swords and subsequently sword-based classes were workable, but not necessarily great. That means you either had to be like Felix or Catherine, who benefit greatly from swords, or like Byleth, whose weapon, the Sword of the Creator, is just that good that they need swords to benefit. In Three Hopes not only are classes weapon locked (though that is an area of contention), sword-based classes are quite good at fluid combos. Shez's unique classes are easy to use, allowing Shez to act as both crowd control and as a duelist, and in addition, anyone venturing through the Thief class-line can act as such as well.
  • A common issue some people had with Three Houses was that Garreg Mach Monastery was rather large for a Hub Level, and often took some time to do all the tasks, especially since entering different areas sometimes required loading ^note The large ground level, the two second level areas, the timeskip-only third floor, plus Abyss in DLC. Many also felt disappointed that the war phase still used the monastery instead of some kind of base camp, similar to what appeared in chapter 12 of Crimson Flower. In this game, the Hub Level is such a base camp and is much more compact than Garreg Mach, making it take much less time to talk to everyone and use the activity and training points.

YMMV/Moon Knight 2022

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • While Phase 4 of the MCU has overall gotten a pretty positive reception, one of the recurring criticisms from more casual audiences and critics has been on the sheer number of cameos from previous MCU properties, to the point of encouraging Continuity Lockout. As if in acknowledgement of this, Moon Knight is the first Disney+ series to not contain any cameos from previous MCU works while still being recognizably set in the same world as the other series and films, helping provide more of an entry point to new potential fans without having them worry that much about being needlessly confused from being left Locked Out of the Loop.
  • Similarly, a common criticism of Marlene and a significant reason for her controversial reputation within comics fandom is that her favoritism towards Steven and the way she discusses Marc's DID with him, while Fair for Its Day, could frequently come off as ableist to modern viewers. Here, Layla is depicted as being immediately sympathetic to Marc/Steven's DID, with any initial hostility having all to do with misunderstandings resulting from Marc's communication issues. In fact, when Steven tells her of Marc's plan to essentially undergo Death of Personality so that he can front exclusively for her benefit, Layla is horrified.

YMMV/Avengers Endgame

• Ebony Maw was the most popular member of the Children of Thanos in Infinity War, and fans weren't happy when he was the first to be killed off quite early into the movie. Here, Ebony Maw undoubtedly has the largest role out of the four members, assisting Thanos in analyzing 2014 Nebula's memories, and briefly battling Black Panther in the final battle. He also lasts all the way to the end, and only dying when he gets dusted by Tony using the Infinity Gauntlet Mark III.
• invoked While the reinvention of Thanos into a Tragic Villain in Infinity War was given significant praise by both critics and audiences, one criticism that slowly rose between the release of that film and this one was that too much Adaptational Sympathy was given to the Mad Titan, to the point where it felt uncomfortably close to the film almost endorsing Thanos' status as the Villain Protagonist, and by proxy, his outright genocidal ambitions. In Endgame, virtually the first entire act of the movie is dedicated to showing how the Decimation left the entire universe a Crapsack World Half Empty where it's only through the constant struggle of heroes like the Avengers that civilization itself hasn't collapsed, and the film's Final Boss — the 2014 Variant of Thanos — is Truer to the Text of the original comics in that it's clearly conveyed that he's a Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist who is a fundamentally selfish and deluded Omnicidal Maniac that would rather wipe out all life in existence than admit that he's wrong. In short, both the film's exceptionally depressing first act and the "older" version of Thanos' mass-extinction Evil Plan throw cold water on Thanos' Misaimed Fandom by firmly identifying him as a complex but ultimately irredeemable monster whose desire for a utopia is founded on Insane Troll Logic.
• Many fans of Captain America were angered by the fact that he did very little in Infinity War and his plotline took less prominence behind Tony's, Thor's, and Thanos's stories. This movie gives him a much bigger role in the plot, with equal importance to Tony (if not more so), and several of his scenes in this film are considered some of the best in the entire MCU. The very last shot of the film is even a close-up on him and Peggy Carter finally getting that dance they talked about.
• Speaking of Peggy, Captain America: Civil War received some flak for what many fans considered to be an undignified close to the story of Peggy Carter, especially coming so soon after Agent Carter was cancelled. Now this movie pulls a Cosmic Retcon by returning Steve Rogers to the past and turning this movie instead into the Fully Absorbed Finale.
• On a similar note, after years of chagrined Marvel TV fans bitterly lamenting that despite the "it's all connected" message that was pushed in the early days of the MCU, none of the TV characters ever actually got to show up in the movies. Here, an aging Edwin Jarvis shows up in the flesh as Howard Stark's driver, to the no-doubt delight of many Agent Carter fans.
• There was much criticism about Thor: The Dark World giving Frigga very little screentime before killing her off, especially given that she was portrayed by an actress of Rene Russo's caliber. This film gave Frigga a Small Role, Big Impact to help Thor process his grief and frame her death to be a knowingly Heroic Sacrifice.
• Some fans criticized the portrayal of Wakanda in Infinity War, particularly the fact that the entire Wakandan army seemed to be composed of a few hundred foot soldiers and approximately half a dozen vehicles. This time around, the Wakandan army stretches beyond the horizon and includes an entire fleet of aircraft and vehicles.
• Another minor one but Tony's Bleeding Edge Armor, while generally well-liked for how awesome it is, is criticized for being a little too non-mechanical, making it come off as fake. His suit-up scene, while awesome, also comes off as too flowing. Tony's Mark 85 fixes these criticisms by having a more substantial suit that suits up in layers (the nanotech first creates a base, then the red and gold pieces form segments that snap into place) with the all-important faceplate lift.
• Scott playing a very important role in coming up with a plan to reverse Thanos wiping out half of life and having as much screen time and importance as the original Avengers seems to be an apology for not having Ant-Man be one of the founding members like in the comics (albeit with Scott taking over Hank Pym's role), as well as his absence in Infinity War.
• Iron Man 3 was criticized for totally bungling the idea of an empowered Pepper not once but twice, first when she wore Tony's armor for all of five minutes during the fake Mandarin's attack on his house, and secondly when she got Extremis superpowers in the climax that were removed a scene later. This movie finally gives the MCU's first leading lady the honor she deserves by letting her suit up in full Rescue armor during the final battle, and even fighting by her husband's side.
• Some fans were disappointed that none of the characters's individual themes from their solo movies, apart from Black Panther (2018), were present in Infinity War. Here, all the characters get a few bars of their character themes during their moments to shine, but especially the themes for Doctor Strange, Ant-Man, Captain Marvel, and Captain America.
• Fans of the X-Men have long been disappointed with the MCU's version of Scarlet Witch thanks to her displaying only a small fraction of the awe-inspiring might she unleashes in the comics. She's in this movie for less than ten minutes, but in her epic vengeful confrontation against Thanos, suffice to say she makes up for her previous showings in a very big way.
• Many fans were disappointed that Hulk was rarely present in Infinity War, only appearing during the prologue where he gets soundly beaten by Thanos and when Bruce tries to Hulk Out only for Hulk to pop out for a second to say "No!". Here, not only have Banner and Hulk merged and thus, Banner is primarily in control of Hulk's body, but during the Time Heist, we get to see The Avengers (2012)-era Hulk.

YMMV/Final Fantasy XV

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • The Armiger system got some flak for being underwhelming as Noctis' Limit Break; it didn't last very long, didn't do much damage, and just had nowhere near the power or visual spectacle the trailers for the game hyped. The Royal Edition added a new accessory, "Founder King's Sigil", acquired after getting all 13 Royal Arms, and equipping it changes the Armiger to Armiger Unleashed. Armiger Unleashed lasts much longer, lets Noctis break the damage limit, gives him a huge power boost including access to unique combo finishers that require proper timing to use (mitigating combat devolving into Button Mashing, another criticism of the gameplay), and he can use powerful Tech attacks, with the strongest, "Legacy of the Lucii", being a devestating Storm of Blades combo that ends with Noctis doing a Victory Pose. Armiger Unleashed still isn't up to the levels of power Noctis exhibits during the famous Leviathan sequence, but it's much, much closer to it, and to what the trailers hyped, than the original Armiger, and much more worthy of being Noctis' Limit Break skill.
  • One of the much-lamented changes from Versus XIII was the removal of character switching in the main storyline. This was finally implemented in Patch 1.20.
  • People who missed out on one or both of the DLC festivals (either missing the Moogle Chocobo one, which meant you didn't get the golden egg or missed the Assassin's Festival for playing and redeeming the egg for the extra costumes) were excited when in Patch 1.29 that Square allowed you the Master Assassin (Alair) Robes from Assassin's Creed that you could only get through those DLCs and in a specific manner Spider-Man (PS4) style, particularly PC players, who never got to experience either festivals due to both ending before the PC port of the game was released.

YMMV/Marvel Vs Capcom 3

• Author's Saving Throw: Fans weren't happy when, after the game went out of print, Jill and Shuma-Gorath became completely unavailable to download from that point forward. Fortunately, the downloadable re-release on PS4/Xbox One/Steam brought back those characters without the need to purchase any extra DLC.

YMMV/Marvel Vs Capcom Infinite

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • After the fiascos that had heavily torn the Mega Man fanbase apart over the years,^note Such as the complaints about the lack of any variant of Mega Man representing the Mega Man franchise in the previous game (Tron Bonne and Zero being the only representatives), as well as the controversial decision to include "Bad Box Art" Mega Man as a Joke Character in Street Fighter X Tekken, all in the wake of the cancellation of widely-anticipated games such as Mega Man Legends 3 and Mega Man Universe. Mega Man X was the very first character shown in the trailer, and thus announced for the game. Not long after that, the main villain was revealed to be a Fusion Dance of Marvel's Ultron and Mega Man X's Sigma, and Zero was announced as a returning character.
  • The official PlayStation blog for the game specified that it would have "a variety of exciting and accessible single player modes," no doubt alleviating any fears that the game would be catered significantly towards professional players and released with little-to-no single player content, like what initially happened with Street Fighter V.
  • After Marvel vs. Capcom 3 was criticized for failing to deliver on its promise of a "robust," fully-fledged story despite being released at a time where multiple fighters preceding it or put out around the same period had moved beyond Excuse Plots, Infinite's development team stressed that the game would have an extensive and immersive cinematic Story Mode.
  • This IGN interview with Bill Rosemann of Marvel Games, noted that Marvel licensed games, Infinite included, would not be required to tie in to the comics or the Marvel Cinematic Universe and would have the freedom to create their own storyline. Not only did this mean the story mode of Infinite wouldn't fall into the same trap of copying the movies that Avengers Assemble did, but in terms of the roster, it also meant that non-MCU characters were more likely, possibly including characters affected by the then-rumored Fox ban. This promise technically came true because (as of the game's launch) Nova had not yet appeared in any MCU-associated productions (though the Nova Corps itself had); furthermore, Dormammu and Thor don't have their MCU designs.
  • After the widely negative response to the E3 2017 trailer over the uneven quality of the character models (Chun-Li's in particular had been universally criticized, especially in regards to her unnatural-looking face), Yoshinori Ono promised that the graphics would be tweaked before the release of the game. Sure enough, come the Full Story trailer, the most glaring example of bad design (Chun-Li's face) was fixed.
  • Earlier trailers were criticized for the muted color palette in contrast to the colorful comic book style of Marvel vs. Capcom 3. Come the E3 2017 trailers, all the characters were noticeably brighter and more vibrant.
  • Marvel Super Heroes's Reality Gem received some flak for mostly just giving you some elemental projectiles. ^note And making Blackheart an Invisible Man for a while. Here, Fire, Ice, Lightning is still the Reality Stone's main gimmick, but now it's taken up to eleven as an all-out Field Power Effect and More Dakka — to the point where some even see it as a Game-Breaker.
  • The auto-combo feature was contested by fans who considered them a case of They Changed It, Now It Sucks! (though optional auto modes had been in Capcom games since X-Men: Children of the Atom if not earlier). In an E3 livestream, it was noted that there would be an option to turn them off. Regardless, the auto-combo feature is really just there to introduce newer players, as it doesn't even give the most effective combos.
  • After Dead Rising 4 upset fans of the Dead Rising series for changing Frank West's voice actor and personality, among other things, Frank returns here with his original persona and is once again voiced by T.J. Rotolo.
  • Black Widow and the female Monster Hunter becoming DLC characters may be this to those who complained about the lack of females on the roster, though Widow also added more fuel to the fire for those complaining about Marvel's half focusing almost exclusively on the MCU.
  • After the Marvel side was criticized for not reusing any of the characters' older themes, the credits themes were revealed to be remixes of Captain America and Spider-Man's classic themes.

YMMV/Devil Survivor

• Author's Saving Throw: After years of skill inheritance being randomized during demon fusion, leading to annoyed gamers having to save scum or repeatedly cancel and reroll to get the exact skills they want, this game finally allows the player to choose exactly what skills they want to pass on from the "parent" demons to the "child" demon. Nearly all subsequent games in the franchise^note the original DS release of Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey and the iOS release of Shin Megami Tensei I don't have it include this feature, including the rereleases of Persona 4 and Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne, neither of which had this feature in their original releases.

YMMV/Persona serie

Trivia.Persona 5

• Has it own page

Persona 4: Arena Ultimax

• Author's Saving Throw
  • Don't like the use of "Time to Make History" replacing "The Fog" as the Instant Kill theme? You can switch it back in the options menu.

Persona 4: Dancing All Night

• Author's Saving Throw: Those who didn't like the moments where the Investigation Team would jab or getting a little too angry with each other were happy to see them complimenting each other in various dance duets. Notably, Yosuke and Chie genuinely have fun with each other whenever they're paired in a dance, which came as a relief to fans tired of Chie getting physical and Yosuke getting mean spirited in their base game interactions, with many fans having interpreted their duet for Pursuing My True Self as outright Ship Tease.

Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • Thanks to Schrödinger's Player Character, the female protagonist from Persona 3 Portable has been entirely absent from further adaptations and sequels to the game. Her appearance here is her first appearance since the release of Portable. To drive the point further, promo art of the game and her "I'm him and he's me" quote imply that her home universe is an alternate reality to that of the S.E.E.S. cast. For extra points, she is confirmed to play a major role in the story.
  • The first game having two routes had a somewhat mixed reception from fans, either because they felt it padded out the game or because of disagreements on which was the canon route, which wasn't helped by the fact that the Persona 4 cast was pushed as being the game's default path. Having to play both routes for the full experience made for quite a bit of tedium as a result. The fact that this game only has one route and a clear focus on the Phantom Thieves effectively removes both issues to allow for a more streamlined storytelling and gameplay experience.
  • A few gameplay issues in the previous game have been streamlined or re-worked:
    • The ability to switch out the protagonists instead of always being required to have at least one in the party allows for more freedom.
    • All-Out Attacks are no longer triggered randomly depending on how many characters are boosted. They now work like they do in the main Persona games: weaknesses are guaranteed to knock down enemies and an All-Out Attack is available when all enemies are downed. Boost instead powers up certain attacks, like Smirk in Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse, as well as allowing Boosted members to act first.
    • You no longer need to pay for healing, you are instead fully healed upon returning to the lobby. This doesn't make the game much easier, but it does help you save money.
    • You now get to choose which skills to overwrite when a party member's main Persona learns new ones, unlike the previous game which would replace Boring, but Practical low-cost skills with Awesome, yet Impractical higher-tier versions automatically.
    • Not only do a lot of characters here have more SP than before, several bosses now have weaknesses(even if they can't be knocked down) and many magic skills are cheaper to use, mitigating the issues with casters in the previous game.
    • The unique skills of each character's Personas are now far less gimmicky than the previous installment.

Persona 5: The Animation

• Author's Saving Throw: A number of Headscratchers or questionable bits of characterization were altered for the anime:
  • In the game, the Phantom Thieves meet with Nakanohara in the Underground Walkway, face-to-face. The anime makes it an anonymous meeting that starts and ends with a Stealth Hi/Bye, while Ann and Ryuji listen in on the conversation.
    • Somewhat similarly, during the Medjed arc, the Phantom Thieves meet in the relative^note Although there are security cameras, which was why they decided not to open Kaneshiro's briefcase there privacy of the karaoke place, where they'd once met to talk about the Kaneshiro investigation, as opposed to discussing their activities as Phantom Thieves in the accessway. The same goes for the meeting in which Futaba proposes stealing data from Sae's laptop, although the Phantom Thieves who go to Shujin meet up with Yusuke and Futaba in the accessway.
  • Yusuke no longer blackmails Ann into being a nude model for him, which was originally considered both inappropriate following Kamoshida's sexual extortion plot-line, and also weirdly out of character for him. Instead, he simply orders the three out of the atelier when he gets fed up with their accusations toward Madarame, and is apparently convinced to let Ann return when she offers to pose nude.
  • The scene where Ren and Morgana leave Ryuji in the hands of the Shibuya Creatures has been altered. Instead of being OOC and leaving him to get taken away, they are forced to leave by a text from Ohya or else they wouldn't get the info on Kaneshiro, making it more understandable for having to leave Ryuji behind.
  • If anyone is worried about Tsukasa, Eiko's so-called boyfriend getting away with his crimes like in the game, don't worry. In the anime, the Phantom Thieves get to take out his Shadow in Mementos and change his heart.
  • In the game, the trip to Hawaii was criticized by some fans as senseless Padding as the Phantom Thieves don't really do anything there, something that the group lampshades.^note Granted, during the trip, Haru and Big Bang Burger are introduced, and it's shown that the Phantom Thieves are internationally famous. Meanwhile, back home, Futaba works on Sae's data, Morgana's issues of inadequacy worsen as a result of sitting around with nothing to do, and the principal is killed while the Thieves are out of the country. The anime shows them engaging in different activities together while in Hawaii, such as playing beach volleyball and surfing, although Ryuji still comments on how they're spending a lot of time on their phones, just like in Japan. Royal follows the anime's example by adding a few additional scenes, including the part in the anime when Haru walks in on Kawakami as she's trying out swimsuits, as well as a new scene with Kasumi on the last day.
  • In the game, when Morgana has a falling out with the Phantom Thieves, Ryuji is forced to apologize to him for being the insensitive one, giving a very half-assed apology, which made him Unintentionally Sympathetic in the dynamic between him and Morgana. In the anime, no one blames Ryuji for the debacle, and he genuinely apologizes to Morgana, saying that the word "useless" was merely a slip of the tongue.
    • Furthermore, the reconciliation between Morgana and the other Phantom Thieves proves to be more natural and sensible than that in the game. Ryuji shows more concern over Morgana after Sugimura abuses him, even borrowing a first aid kit to use on Morgana. Ryuji also says in a more assuring way that Morgana is the Thieves' friend, and is never useless, before he apologizes. On the other end, Morgana also sincerely apologizes for his decision to leave the Phantom Thieves. However, the anime also removes a scene in which Morgana not only refuses to betray the Thieves to Shadow Okumura (who hadn't been aware of their reconciliation), but also saves his friends from the trap, earning himself congratulations from Ryuji and Futaba.
  • One of the complaints about the antagonists was that Kunikazu Okumura ended up looking too much like an Unintentionally Unsympathetic character. Thanks to Adaptation Distillation and some additional scenes, the anime could convey the intended feeling that Okumura was supposed to be a bit more sympathetic.
  • In "Dark Sun..." after Ryuji survives his Heroic Sacrifice, whereas in the game the girls of the group beat the shit out of him for making fun of their crying over his apparent death, here, the group merely shouts at him while crying about how worried he had them, prompting his favourite line "For Real" in disbelief in the dub, followed by a cut to credits.
  • In "Stars and Ours", while Akechi's fate remains as ambiguous as ever, his voice can be heard by Ren encouraging him not to give up against Yaldabaoth, at least clarifying what he would have wanted him and the rest of the Thieves to do.

YMMV/Shin Megami Tensei Strange Journey

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • This game and the IV duology faced criticism for a Neutral bias at the cost of painting both Law and Chaos as irredeemably evil, to the point where the Law and Chaos endings in Apocalypse were early bad endings. The Law Ending and Chaos Endings of this game in particular consist of the most logical, extreme conclusions of these ideologies put in action, to a point that they look like Downer Endings instead of real ones. Redux shows that all three original endings lead to the downfall of humanity, and the new endings not only all give humanity a happy ending, but Law and Chaos involve Zelenin or Jimenez getting jolted out of their extremism and regaining their faith in humanity. All while Neutral gets a more bitter tone by showing that humanity will require a higher existence to make sure things are kept in check.
  • A major one that applies to the whole series: The new Law ending is widely considered the best Law ending in the franchise and is a viable choice next to Neutral and Chaos. While the final villains are still Law-aligned, Zelenin helps you in fighting them and replaces God as the central figure, with the actual God on New Game Plus seemingly content to leave humanity alone as long as the world is lawful. Rather than removing free will, Zelenin only removes anger and hostility, with disagreements solved by discussion and peaceful arguments rather than violent conflicts.

YMMV/Resident Evil

Resident Evil 3: Nemesis

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • Carlos was redesigned to look more intimidating and grizzled due to criticisms his original clean-cut baby face design didn't really match up with a hardened mercenary.
  • One of the criticisms of Resident Evil 2 (Remake) was how frail Leon and Claire were, as they could be downed with only 3-4 attacks from zombies. Jill, being more experienced than the two, can take comparatively more damage.
  • Another criticism of 2 (Remake) was that the new soundtrack was vastly inferior to the original, with the only real standouts being Hunk and Tofu's themes. The music in 3 (remake) draws heavily from the original, while still remixing and revising the songs to better capture the spirit of the new game.
  • Though not a particularly big criticism, the knife from the previous game breaking after so many uses was considered annoying by some since the knife proved to be helpful in saving ammunition^note The game provides the option of unlocking a knife with infinite durability, though this required a lot of Guide Dang It!. Here, the knife was confirmed to be indestructible, giving the player the opportunity of a knife-only playthrough if they choose on the first try. Even the developers tried and did it during development. This is compensated, however, by the fact that the knife in this game does comparatively less damage.
  • Following complaints about the inventory screen being brought up every time an item got picked up in the previous game, now you only see it the first time you pick an item of a certain kind. Every subsequent item of the same kind you pick up is automatically put in your inventory without bringing up the screen.
  • One of the biggest criticisms of the original is the fact that players had to rely on crafting gunpowder to make ammunition, which not only required a crafting tool to make (meaning having to manage inventory more often) but pickup locations were randomized with each playthrough. In the remake, the crafting tool is still present but is not needed to create ammunition from gunpowder anymore. Instead, the crafting tool is now a purchasable item from the in-game shop that can increase how much ammunition the player receives. Additionally, gunpowder is simplified for easier mixing, and there are also far more regular ammo pickups as well.
  • Dodging is much easier to pull off in the remake. In the original, dodging required pressing the aim button right before an enemy was about to attack, but this was very inconsistent as it was not guaranteed to work (or worse, it'll lock you in to an animation that just makes it easier for enemies to hit you). In the remake, dodging can be done at any time with a mere press of a button, and includes a bullet time mechanic when timed perfectly.
  • Nemesis is a bit easier to deal with compared to Mr. X. While Nemesis is a lot faster and stronger than X, it doesn't take much ammo to slow him down and his attacks can be easily dodged. The downtown section is also littered with power generators and explosive barrels; the shock from the former being able to stun Nemesis and give you an opening, and the blast from the latter downing him immediately. Adding to this, save for the first couple of encounters with him, all of the other ones are scripted, since a major complaint about Mr. X was that he kept randomly showing up when players were exploring or hunting for a particular item, forcing them to temporarily abandon their goal to escape.
  • Unlike RE2 remake, you don't have to unlock certain weapons on harder difficulties. Infinite ammo weapons are instead unlocked in the in-game shop. While you are ranked at the end of your playthrough, you don't need to beat Hardcore with the best rank for an Infinite Rocket Launcher. All that's really required is the points you accumulated from clearing in-game challenges. This also means that, unlike in its predecessor, Speed Running (a form of challenge that often hinges just as much on luck as it does skill) is no longer mandatory to obtain the vast majority of unlockables. ^note You will, however, need to beat the game on the hardest difficulties and complete a speedrun in order to get everything, since the only way to afford all unlockables is to clear all challenges. Players unconcerned with 100% Completion or unable to clear those last few challenges already have plenty of Game-Breaker options available even without the Infinite Launcher.
  • Many fans were upset when the timeline would settle for Nicholai's escape being canon in the original game, as this meant he was a complete Karma Houdini. He finally gets some more comeuppance this time around in the end, though his actual fate is left ambiguous.
  • In the original, the Dead Factory conveniently having an alarm system that goes off when the U.S. army should ever launch a nuclear missile at the city was seen as a bit of an Ass Pull by many players. The remake changes this to a more plausible television announcement instead.

Resident Evil: Gun Survivor

• Author's Saving Throw: The Guncon controls for Survivor and Dead Aim were notoriously clunky in their own right, and aiming a reticle with a controller isn't any better. Dead Aim amended this by allowing for native USB mouse support. Slap one in and you can control the reticle in aiming mode easily, allowing for smooth movement with one hand and efficient shooting with the other.

Resident Evil 5

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • The promotional material for the game gave off incredibly high amounts of Unfortunate Implications, especially with the imagery of White Male Lead Chris Redfield going through swathes of savages in Darkest Africa. Accordingly, there was a considerable backlash and accusations of racism. In the actual game, Chris is one of two heroes alongside the black Sheva Alomar (who admittedly is quite light-skinned), and this Darkest Africa is not the whole game. The actual story of the game itself ends up mitigating the Darkest Africa implications because it makes it clear very early on that the Majini you're gunning down are as much victims of the outbreak as the heroes, being infected with horrific Puppeteer Parasites and driven to madness against their will. The journal of a young boy you find in the swamplands only drives the point home, as he watches his tribe completely fall apart due to Tricell's machinations before succumbing to the infection himself, making what would be shallow and crass stereotypes into yet another reason to loathe Wesker. This note even mentions that all the tribal clothing and makeup was not the usual everyday wear for them, with the writer even mentioning that dressing as their ancestors wasn't something they did often, the opposite of most other portrayals of native Africans in undeveloped areas.
  • Capcom responded to the vitriol surrounding Action Commands by making them optional in later releases of the game, such as the triple collection for the Nintendo Switch. While they still exist mid-gameplay, like having to dodge Ndesu's attacks or rescue your partner from grapples, the player is no longer obliged to wigglestick their way through cutscenes, lest they meet an untimely, rank-damaging demise.

Resident Evil: Revelations

• Author's Saving Throw: Having partners be immortal and only able to use one weapon is this for Resident Evil 5's much hated partner system. By having the partner be unable to die, the main character has someone to talk to besides an earpiece, and who can react to things without having to have it relayed and be secondhand. As for being able to use one weapon, it means the game is balanced around the fact that you have one and a half characters, rather than two that can use any weapon in the game, but one being controlled by a dumb AI.

Resident Evil 6

• Author's Saving Throw: Ada's campaign was originally meant to be singleplayer-only, but many players complained that it was the only one they couldn't enjoy with friends. Capcom then added in the generic Agent to fight by her side.

Resident Evil: Revelations 2

• Author's Saving Throw: After the negative reception of the lack of local co-op on PC, resulting in a fan patch to enable the feature unoffically, Capcom decides to make the co-op feature official after all on the next day.

Resident Evil 7: Biohazard

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • Although debates are still going on about it (albeit not nearly as much since the game's release), the return to the foreboding, unsettling nature of "survival horror" that defined the earlier Resident Evil installments prior to Resident Evil 4 is what many longtime series fans have been clamoring for.
  • The game has no quick time events, after 5 and 6 abused them to the point of being annoying.
  • Due to the lack of any sort of combat in early marketing, fans were worried that the game might be taking a page too many from the likes of Outlast and Amnesia by being just as combatless as said games. Their worries were eventually assuaged as the game does indeed feature combat (both firearm-wise and melee-wise, but mostly the former) and the classic herbs health system.
  • The existence of mossy, zombie like monsters which regenerate in the house relieved fans who were worried that the franchise's signature usage of bizarre mutant creatures would be replaced entirely by visually normal humans with Implacable Man features.
  • End of Zoe resolves the Broken Base described below and finally give Zoe a deserved Happy Ending thanks to the combined efforts of Joe and Umbrella, with Ethan checking up on her as soon as possible via phone after informing the soldiers of her condition.
  • A very common complaint was the lack of a proper final boss, with the fight between Ethan and Eveline coming off as rather lackluster to some. Not a Hero and End of Zoe gives us fairly epic, and proper fights with Lucas and the Swamp Man, respectively.

Resident Evil Village

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • Ethan is a lot more emotive than he originally was in his debut game, after complaints that his intended characterization as an everyman and stranger to the situation instead came across as him being too casual about many of the horrors he witnessed.
  • Chris is back to his more recognizable physique and face after the previous game slimmed him down, with so many fans thinking he was someone else (HUNK being a popular guess) that Capcom even had to clarify following 7's release that Chris was the character in question.
  • A criticism of 7 is that, outside the ending and the corresponding DLCs, the main story has little-to-no connection to past entries in the franchise, with only bits and pieces of the lore even referenced.^note Specifically, Alyssa Ashcroft and her article, a book by Clive R. O'Brian, a picture of the Arklay Mountains in 1992, the Racoon City incident, and Wesker's H.C.F collaborations with the Connections. Here, the game fully uses the lore and has major ties, bringing in the BSAA, Ozwell E. Spencer and The Reveal that he was inspired by Mother Miranda's study of the Megamycete.
  • 7 was also criticized for having a limited selection of enemies with the only foes being the Bakers and variations of the Molded. Village has a wider variety of enemies with their own unique designs.
  • 7's final boss was criticized for being primarily a Cutscene Boss. Village's final boss is definitely a more involved and dramatic affair.
  • For fans who disliked the return to the first-person perspective after Resident Evil 2 (Remake) and Resident Evil 3 (Remake), the Gold Edition adds in a third-person mode in the style of those games. In addition, the "Shadows of Rose" DLC is only in third-person, in contrast to the rest of the game.

Resident Evil: Afterlife (The Film)

• Author's Saving Throw: The writers made a few attempts to rein in their more absurd twists and turns, such as removing Alice's story-breaking superpowers and clone army, and downplaying the ludicrous, virally-induced desertification from the previous film. They also recast Wesker and made him much more similar to his video game version.

YMMV/Raya And The Last Dragon

• Author's Saving Throw: Sisu's concept design that was revealed along with the film at D23 earned criticism for invoking Pink Is Feminine —- her final version would tone it down, making her wholly blue with minor purple streaks in her mane instead.

YMMV/Shin Megami Tensei III Nocturne

• Author's Saving Throw: The remaster led to a lot of complaints about both poor performance and barely any changes beyond voice acting and visuals. Atlus not only promised to fix the performance issues, but patched the game to add one of the most requested features that wasn't added at launch: the ability to choose skills demons will inherit in fusion.
  • One of the biggest problems with the True Demon Ending is that it requires the recruiting of Dante. On paper, this is not an issue- Dante is point for point one of the best demons in the game and is a welcome addition to any party thanks to his incredible damage output. The problem comes from the fact that the True Final Boss requires piercing damage in order to be taken down within a decent time frame... and Dante lacks any way to pierce his physical damage. In the later releases which swapped Dante for Raidou, this was remedied by giving Raidou a skill that causes his physical damage to automatically pierce, which ultimately left Dante in the dust. The HD Remaster finally remedies this by also giving Dante a pierce skill, allowing him to be brought along to the final boss effectively.
  • A common issue in the original, to the point of being a meme, was the boss fight against Mot and his tendency to spam Beast Eye several times to give himself more Press Turns, on top of using Makakaja to boost his magic before attacking with Megidolaon; sometimes without even giving the player their turn. But in the HD Remaster, Mot's AI was changed so that he very rarely uses Beast Eye in any given fight, making the fight much more fair.
  • Another source of complaint was the Junk Shop Manikin being a very offensive gay stereotype. While it may have been acceptable at the time, it comes off as harmful and offensive today. The Manikin would speak as though he's flirting with the Demi-Fiend, even calling him a "cute little boy" and "hot stuff". But when talking with the Manikin, he'll become offended at the idea that the Demi-Fiend thinks he's "queer". In the HD Remaster, the Junk Shop Manikin's behavior and speech was changed to a more friendly and outgoing personality.

Original: "...Don't tell me... You think I'm queer, too!? ...Yeesh!"

HD Remaster: "...Don't tell me... You were just window-shopping!? ...Sheesh!"

YMMV/Mega Man Maker

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • Due to the Winamp extension crashing the game and resetting the music volume when a track started, WreckingPrograms replaced it with the Chiptune Player by Mick @ GamePhase.
  • Twice, and interestingly enough, largely for the same reason.
    • Initially, the game only contained content from the first 6 Mega Man games on NES, leaving fans of Mega Man 7 & 8 feeling left out. This only got worse when enemies from Mega Man 9 (specifically, Caricarry and Petit Devil) were discovered in the game's files, with many worrying that this game would enforce the controversial Fanon Discontinuity of skipping 7 & 8 and going straight to 9, despite WreckingPrograms repeatedly denying this.^note The real reason they were in the game is because Wrecking originally wanted them to be in version 1.0, but found them difficult to program at the time, so decided to leave them in thinking nobody would find them. The enemies being discovered right at the point when people started to voice their concerns was just really bad timing. These worries were finally put to rest with the 1.4 content update, which added a lot of content from Mega Man 7, including re-worked sprites & music tracks to be as close to the SNES original as possible.
    • Once WreckingPrograms & Luigi1000 begain announcing content from Mega Man 9, some fans were once again worried that the game would enforce Fanon Discontinuity of 8. But this time it got worse because it wasn't just the Dummied Out enemies being officially added in the game; Concrete Man, as well as several enemies, assets, and special weapons were being added. It didn't help that the developers seemed to be very proud of the fact that they were adding content from 9 while glossing over the fact that fans of 8 were being completely left out, and that all fans of 7 had to look forward to were a few new tile sets. However, with the announcement of Flame Sword being added in 1.5, along with plenty of content from Mega Man 8, fans were very happy to see that the game will also be represented. This was even lampshaded in the announcement.
    WreckingPrograms: You've waited long enough, now it's time for a surprise reveal! You can look forward to Flame Sword, Bunby Tank DX, new aesthetics and many more features from Mega Man's dive into the 32-Bit era in Version 1.5! You didn't really think we would skip over Mega Man 8, did you?
  • Due to the possibility of getting overly frustrating or no longer compatible levels, in 1.5 skipping a level was modified to not cost a life unless the player is in danger.
  • In 1.5, some night backgrounds obtained new variants without a moon for aesthetic reasons.
  • After 1.6.0 had some problem with griefers sabotaging levels and filling the chat with profanity, the game obtained a ban function in 1.6.2.
  • The Wily Challenge was criticized over its tendency to send users poor-quality levels and repeated levels in the same run. The server administrators confirmed that as a part of optimizing the server, the levels in the Wily Challenge could now be sorted by difficulty and quality.
    • Additionally skipping levels no longer deduces a life from you unless your health is low.

YMMV/Miss Kobayashis Dragon Maid

• Author's Saving Throw: In the anime Ilulu is drawn to look somewhat older than she appears in the manga, to alleviate some of the Squick factor that comes from sexualizing such a young-looking character.

YMMV.Bayonetta 2

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • At E3 2014, it was announced that an updated version of the original game would be included with both physical and digital editions of Bayonetta 2, allowing Nintendo owners to experience both installments.
  • Every costume in the game comes with an alternate version that uses Bayonetta's old hairstyle.
  • Owners of the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 version of the first game who may have been unamused with the first game being packaged with this one no longer have to worry, since newer copies come without it. Of course, the drawback is that those who missed out the first couple of times may be unhappy with losing another chance, though both games are on the Nintendo eShop.
  • One of the criticisms of the original game was that Chapter 14's Best Boss Ever comes after a lengthy Space Harrier homage. If you wanted to fight the boss, you'd have to trudge through the arcade section, and if you wanted to just play the arcade section, a tough normal-controls fight followed it. Bayonetta 2 more cleanly divides its fights, with each Duel Boss against the Masked Lumen being given their own dedicated chapter.
  • A common criticism of the first game was the frequency of rather unforgiving quick-time events. The sequel addresses by this by not only having fewer of these events (almost all happening in boss fights), but making the reaction time and failure penalties for these much more forgiving.

YMMV/Uzumaki

• Author's Saving Throw: For the anime adaptation. A previous Junji Ito-based anthology anime, the Junji Ito Collection, was criticized for poorly adapting his distinctively detailed art style and losing a lot of its scariness in the process. Possibly as a response to these criticisms, the Uzumaki adaptation seems to be a nearly straight one-to-one translation from the manga, including being Deliberately Monochrome.

YMMV/A Court Of Thorns And Roses

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • The series has been criticized for the lack of diversity (the majority of the main cast are white and straight), which is what presumably prompted Maas to make Mor bisexual with a preference for women (in a rather problematic way) and Lucien more dark-skinned as Helion's son, even though the latter had been described in previous books as pale-skinned.
  • Maas arguably handles diversity better than previous entries with the introduction of Emerie as a supporting protagonist in A Court of Silver Flames: she's an Ambiguously Brown Illyrian woman (most fanart depicts her as dark-skinned) who is strongly hinted to be attracted to women given her flustered reaction to Mor.

YMMV/One Step From Eden

• Author's Saving Throw: The Evil Hostages effect, while intended to add scarcity and challenge, mildly derailed progression by rendering the Rescue Badge and Merit Badge useless because it originally made all hostages enemies. A later update altered their encounter rate, making normal hostages appear alongside them, making the aforementioned artifacts useful again, while adding some level of paranoia for players that actively rescue hostages.

YMMV/Blood C The Last Mind

• Author's Saving Throw: The play expanded the storylines which were not explained or shown in the TV series and the movie such as Fumito's other experiments and Saya's past. It also expanded the roles of Yuka Amino and Tadayoshi.

YMMV/Horimiya

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • In the original webcomic and OVA, the student council was more malicious. Remi messes up the calculations on the student council worksheets and throws them away. While flirting with Sengoku, she makes Sengoku promise to protect her from anything. When Sakura calls out Hori, she forcefully drags her out to the middle of the hallway just to scold her in front of everyone. After Miyamura reveals Remi is at fault, none of the student council members apologize. All these actions make the student council look like bullies, so some adjustments were made in Horimiya. Instead of what happened in the original version, Remi accidentally loses the sheets when she bumps into Miyamura and the scene where Sakura drags Hori out was removed. In the anime adaptation of Horimiya, the conversation Remi has with Sengoku at the vending machines was cut too, and after Miyamura reveals Remi's mistake, all of the student council members apologize.
  • The anime ironically enough seemed to have taken the below complaint in Eight Deadly Words to heart as the majority of the focus of the anime is on Hori and Miyamura's romance to the point where many of the aforementioned slice of life chapters and a number of characters gets adapted out. Unfortunately, it had the side effect of the ambivalent sentiment regarding the supporting cast growing lower, as the anime still includes pivotal scenes for them but they now lack the buildup and context to make the audience empathize with them.

YMMV/Xenoblade Chronicles

Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna ~ The Golden Country

Author's Saving Throw: As Xenoblade Chronicles 2 had many questionably-implemented features that made it a Contested Sequel, Torna seeks to improve on that game's flaws while building on its strengths.

• The English voice acting is much smoother and fitting due to having proper voice direction this time around. The Hong Kong Dub moments are also fewer and further between, and more in line with a standard English-dubbed foreign animated work.
• The combat system eschews the much-despised gacha mechanic in favor of a fixed party composition. This also avoids shuffling blades around to pass field skill checks, another hated mechanic in the first game.
• Blade Combos are much easier to achieve than with the cryptic and dodgy system from the base game, where a single elemental orb would take a very long time to create. Now, elemental orbs don't depend on Blade Combos, and can instead be used to create them separately during battle, and a single special will add an orb to the opponent, as opposed to just the last special used in the combo. In fact, it can act as a first step to properly learn the base game's more complex Blade Combos.
• Torna lets you re-view previous tutorials from the menu, a feature the main game was heavily criticized for lacking.

Xenoblade Chronicles 3

• Pre-release trailers for 3 emphasized the return of customizable gear after one of the more heavily criticized aspects of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 was its lack of it, along with base designs that were also considered bizarre enough to be in sore need of it (unless one bought the costume DLC). The trailers also highlighted the ability to use Fashion Gear from Xenoblade Chronicles 1 Definitive Edition for those who concerned that the best classes would be locked to ugly costumes or vice versa.
• This game introduces a great deal of Anti-Frustration Features aimed at addressing various fan criticisms of past games' battle systems. Chief among them is the ability to freely switch between characters mid-battle, resolving issues with Artificial Stupidity and the viability of the break-topple-etc combo system; this had been one of the most common complaints dating all the way back to the very first release of XB1. Other updates include quick-dash options to address the limited mobility issues in 2, plus specific arrow indicators on the UI to better notify positional attacks (particularly since several classes are built around that mechanic).
• Field Skills have been significantly revamped from 2, where they were originally tied to Blades, and thus put players at the mercy of the much-loathed gacha system, which could force particularly unlucky players to grind for hours or even days to get the right Blades and Affinity levels with them just to progress past certain areas, and even at best involved a lot of tedious rotating of team Blades. This time exploration-based Field Skills are handled in a Metroidvania-esque fashion and unlock for the whole party after completing specific plot or sidequest missions, and non-essential field skills are straightforwardly unlocked by leveling up regional Affinity via completion of sidequests.
• Relatedly, a common criticism of 2's gameplay was the absurd amounts of time many players would have to spend in the game's labyrinthine menus fiddling around with equipment, Blades, and Affinity Charts, especially since rotating them for Field Skills would reset their equips. 3 streamlines menus significantly, and while the fiddling issue isn't completely gone due to the game's tendency to auto-equip suboptimal gear the first time a character uses a Class, whatever Arts or gear you've manually equipped to their loadout will be remembered upon switching out and back in, saving on a great deal of tedium.
• One of the most heavily lambasted aspects of the English localization of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 was that it was a blatant Hong Kong Dub with poor lip sync; while the problem also existed in XC1 and Torna, it was far more noticeable in the base game of XC2 due to the rushed voice direction. A comparison of the Japanese and English Direct trailers showed that the cutscenes took great care to match the lip sync in Xenoblade Chronicles 3 to both respective dubs to avoid a repeat of the same situation, and sure enough, in the final game, all dialogue is properly synced to both audio tracks (even including field dialogue).
• The tutorials for Xenoblade Chronicles 2 are Never Live It Down levels of terrible for a multitude of reasons, between being simultaneously too frequent and too simplistic to properly explain the game's complex game mechanics, to being completely Lost Forever after their first viewing, to in some cases being so poor as to actively misleading players. They're so notoriously bad that players who dislike 2 have often blamed them as one of the reasons they quit. 3 on the other hand tries to make up for this by making it so that all of its tutorials are permanently archived and complete with practice training missions to let players practice the mechanics any time to make sure they get the hang of it. 3 also provides detailed tutorials for just about every mechanic introduced in the early game. While a lot of fans feel that the game perhaps overcorrected with the tutorials and leads to a Slow-Paced Beginning, it's overall still considered a step up from the last game.
• The Collectopaedia from 1 and X returns after its absence from 2 and Torna was sorely lamented, and while fans still miss the lack of world-building item descriptions for loot and collectables, this time the Collectopaedia is tied to cards on individual NPCs instead of regions, essentially serving as a more interesting and significantly streamlined replacement of previous games' 20 Bear Asses Fetch Quests. Moreover, they give players the option to bypass the grinding by using easily-found Nopon Coins.
• Affinity charts are back, but now with the Anti-Frustration Features of having NPCs now display a special icon and be marked differently on the map if they haven't been talked to yet or if they have new dialogue, to address players' frequent gripes about how the Affinity Chart was a Guide Dang It! to fill out and update.
• Item orbs are back, but this time they will tell you what type of items are inside ahead of time as you approach them. You can also just buy some of them in bulk at Colony Plants if you're in particular need of certain items, to cut down on the infamously laborious grinding for rare orb drops by having to canvas the entire map for them and waiting for them to respawn. Also, any item orbs you run into in the middle of a battle are automatically picked up to further reduce tedium.
• While searching for monster materials still counts as a Scrappy Mechanic, there are meals that help the player reap more of them from each fight, as well as shiny enemies yielding more of said materials, mitigating the search ever so slightly.
• The news that players could initiate combat in deep water was met with much approval, given that swimming enemies were notoriously Goddamn Bats in past games, since they would often aggro players from afar with no way to retaliate unless you were at the very shallow edge of the water. Worse, swimming enemies had a tendency to move out of range of players, forcing them to have to swim back out to aggro them and start the battle all over again. In the case of small characters like Riki, water monsters would often be treated as out-of-range even in puddle-deep water, leaving you down entire party members for no good reason. In addition, this game has a jump function in deeper water that lets the party climb back onto any solid ground that is low enough without needing it to be a gentle incline.
• The metagame for past Xenoblade entries frequently favored hard-hitting offense and evasion-based tanking, with healing-centric characters often becoming regarded as useless Low Tier Letdowns past the early game. X acknowledged that by dispensing with dedicated healers altogether, though that came with its own issues. In an effort to overcome this persistent balance issue, 3 made it so that Healer classes are the only ones who can revive fallen party members, and revived characters start with very little restored health, incentivizing players to continue utilizing healers into the latter parts of the game. The game also lacks the Crit-Heal mechanic that largely invalidated Healers, and Healing is determined by a separate stat to prevent players from just running an entire party of Attackers and Defenders equipped with healing-based Fusion Arts as a Cheese Strategy. In fact, Healers have been rebalanced significantly enough that several of the game's best classes are Healers.
• Relatedly, it no longer costs Party Gauge levels to revive allies, so you don't have to worry about using a Chain Attack too soon and getting wiped out in retaliation if the enemy survived, as was all too common in 1 and 2.

YMMV/Demons Souls

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • Regarding the 2020 remake by BluepointGames, many fans of the original game were disappointed at the game's various visual differences, such as the lighting in the Tower Knight's arena, and the head designs of the Fluted set and Flamelurker boss. The second trailer for the game released in September 2020 showed that these design choices were altered to be closer to the original game, assuaging fans' fears.
  • The remake also makes many quality of life changes that make the game far smoother than the original game. One notable example is the changes to inventory, as now you can chose to store items while in the field, which saves time spent on trips to Stockpile Thomas and helps the flow of levels that need to be done in one take, barring the odd shortcut that can be opened. Another is that you no longer need to go back to the Nexus whenever you want to warp, and can now warp between checkpoints.
  • The remake tweaks difficulty in several ways. Bosses are no longer as exploitable, you'll have to finish them off with good old fashioned skill instead of sniping them with magic through the fog gate. Healing herbs also have their equip loads and carry limits adjusted in an attempt to make the second half of the game harder by preventing the player from having hundreds of healing items at the same time, as was possible in the original.

YMMV/Twin Cobra

• Author's Saving Throw: Twin Cobra is disliked by score-focused players due to the Final Boss being infinitely milkable. The Kyūkyoku Tiger Heli version now applies a 90-second time limit to this boss to prevent that.

YMMV/Boneworks

• Author's Saving Throw: Various patches over time have fixed some issues players had with the game when it came out. The big one being the addition of frequent checkpoints across the levels to fix the Checkpoint Starvation found in the launch version, but other small things such as being able to swap which side of the player's body the bullet belt is on (a must for left-handed players). The addition of further post-game content has also given the Underused Game Mechanics some usage outside the tutorials, though they still don't appear in the main campaign.

YMMV/The Boy On The Bridge

• Author's Saving Throw: The ending does a lot to avert the Inferred Holocaust feelings of the first book, due to revealing that humans living high enough in the mountains are safe from the spores Melanie released, and she wants to peacefully coexist with them.

YMMV/Daymare 1998

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • Invader Studios mentioned that they've been releasing patch updates to correct errors/bugs that are present after the game was released.
  • The addition of "Modern Take" mode, which includes the feature to skip puzzles and playing One Bullet Clips straight, helps with pacing for casual players.

YMMV/Halo Last Light

• Author's Saving Throw: An infamous Catalog post on Halo Waypoint claimed that Team Saber had apparently been Killed Offscreen. In Last Light, Ash, Olivia, and Mark all live, but Admiral Osman declares they'll be listed as KIA in hopes of avoiding a political scandal should any word get out about Saber Team's "Smoothers" difficulties this mission.
  Note: The YMMV of this one was cut and can only be found in the Wayback machine

YMMV/Lore Olympus

• Author's Saving Throw: With how quickly everyone picks up on Hades and Persephone's attraction and how quickly the pair are attracted to each other, the pair decide to put the brakes on anything happening (particularly due to Hades choosing to try and make his relationship with Minthe work) in lieu of being friends and getting to know each other better. This fails utterly as Hades promptly keeps flirting with Persephone.
  • As discussed below, one of the biggest complaints regarding the series was the massive age gap between Hades and Persephone. After the events of Persephone's trial, there is a ten-year Time Skip with Persephone now being 30. As such, while there is still an age gap, Persephone is now unambiguously an adult, making their romance from here a bit more reasonable.

YMMV/Paper Mario The Origami King

• Author's Saving Throw: Origami King makes even more of an effort to clean up the criticisms of the previous modern Paper Mario games.
  • Unlike Sticker Star and Color Splash, there are more original characters with both actual names and unique designs beyond the helper (Olivia). This point is especially impressive, as an interview released before the game revealed the restrictions were even worse than previously thought.
  • Partners make a return after their absence in Sticker Star and a heavily-limited version of them in Color Splash. Even though they're temporary and their attacks are automated, their unique interactions with Olivia and other characters and their assistance in battle help to liven up each area. Bobby, Kamek, and Bowser Jr. in particular have been very well-received.
  • The basic Jump and Hammer attacks are now infinite use like the classic games. While the stronger variants are limited, a single piece of such can now be used multiple times before consumption.
  • The battle UI has been greatly improved from Color Splash's clunky version, and generally feels more on par with the first two Paper Mario games. Instead of flicking through a long menu to choose attacks, painting them, and then flicking them again, you instead simply choose your targets and your weapons, and attack. This makes battles much snappier and more satisfying.
  • Players can now see the damage Mario deals on enemies again numerically to allow for more accurate attack choices, after Color Splash bizarrely removed this basic feature for an unreliable and vague color-draining bar for the enemies.
  • The nature of the circle ring system essentially allows Mario to choose targets on his turn in battle again to some extent, as the previous two games took the feature away for ultimately misguided reasons.
  • While battles still provide only Coins and Confetti, Money for Nothing is finally averted after the last two entries failed to do so — with long-term coin investments like the expensive Accessories or the Royalty Pass, and stronger weapons having durability instead of being one-time use, battling to earn coins for better weapons and accessories is encouraged, and it never feels like a waste.
  • Bosses no longer require Things, especially as most of them technically are Things themselves. This time, all boss weaknesses are in the fight itself, with no easy-to-miss items required beforehand. It also doubles as a Catharsis Factor, allowing players frustrated with the Things system to finally get revenge.
  • After two Paper Mario games in a row of Bowser being the main villain in a spin-off series known for introducing new villains, Origami King addresses this with the titular character, King Olly.
  • Unlike the game shows of the previous two games, the bonus round of Shy Guys Finish Last is optional, merely rewarding a Collectible Treasure and trophy rather than a mandatory item for a boss.

YMMV/Sailor Moon Crystal

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • The CG effects used in season 1 and 2's transformation sequences was heavily criticized by fans as ugly and jarring. Season 3 featured hand drawn transformation sequences that took many cues from the original 90s anime transformations.
  • The lead art director for the 90s anime has been hired to direct the art team on the Dead Moon Circus movie after general criticisms about the art style used in Crystal.
  • Season 3 onwards seem to have begun to take cues from the original Anime in terms of characterization and humor, likely to appease criticisms people have about that in the earlier seasons.

YMMV/Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines 2

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • Many of the returning Disciplines that had been made Low-Tier Letdown in the first game have been confirmed to improve in order to better match their power and usefulness from the Tabletop game:
    • The Auspex Discipline was infamously reduced to underwhelming near-useless abilities aside from a small Wits and Perception bonus that was a pain to use properly due to the game's interface. This game apparently made a point of retooling it, adding back the beloved Astral Projection from the tabletop game, along with Vein-o-Vision and captions allowing you to see what's important gameplay-wise in your surrounding.
    • Presence, which had similarly been decried for being reduced to a not very dramatic buff in combat plus bonus dialogue options if you installed the patch, will now be much more powerful, allowing you to freeze and move entire crowds around you, along with dialogues options without the need for a patch.

YMMV/Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles 1

• Author's Saving Throw: The Updated Re-release is divisive with its controversial decisions, especially concerning multiplayer, but it does contain some definite improvements:
  • In single-player, Mog can still get tired but now it is much more infrequent.
  • Even with all of its issues, not having to get four Gameboy Advances and four cables already makes the multiplayer vastly better in the eyes of many gamers.
  • The addition of more voice acting helps add life to the originally quiet cutscenes.
  • The addition of the Storage Moogle is a godsend, making the originally cumbersome and tedious inventory management in the game streamlined and simple. You can also, if you have multiple characters in your caravan, get them advanced armor and weapons early so they can hop right into second cycles to get them up to speed quicker.
  • The ability to accumulate items like a traditional final fantasy storage list as opposed to a finite inventory makes food more useful and removes the strain of having to throw out various scrolls, items, and equipment.
  • Sigils that indicate a spell being cast are now shown in the spell markers, and a spell timer appears for spell fusions, showing when players need to cast their spells to power up the spell fusion - two extremely handy things for a multiplayer experience where the other players can't see or hear you.
  • Despite the controversy of the multiplayer decisions, one great thing about it is that you can potentially play earlier cycles with other players which helps develop lower leveled/weaker characters when your main game has progressed well into cycle 3 and beyond with other characters, averting Can't Catch Up with the newer members of your caravan.

YMMV/Mercedes Martinez

• Author's Saving Throw: At the climax of a blood feud with Shelly Martinez, the final match, rather than being a vicious brawl, was a rather bland (except for some botches) standard match. Apparently fighting family was just too contrary to Mercedes's upbringing.

YMMV/The Parent Trap 1998

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • The relationship between the parents in the Hayley Mills version seems a little abusive by modern standards. In the remake, the parents both make mentions of having stupid tempers when they were younger - but they've clearly matured and they talk through their issues a bit more rationally.
  • Hayley Mills's American accent is just about passable in the original. The remake makes one of the twins British, and Lindsay Lohan's accent is much better; she later recalled meeting actual British people who were surprised that she was American.
  • Some viewers of the original are a little shocked at the drastic haircut that Sharon has to get - from just past her shoulders to completely short. The remake lessens it to Annie just having her hair cut from elbow length to shoulder length.

YMMV/Helluva Boss

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • Stolas was initially depicted as a Depraved Bisexual who made advances of an incredibly uncomfortable degree that Blitzo obviously didn't want. Later depictions of Stolas change this so that while still ultimately clingy and overly graphic about sex, Blitzo and Stolas are on much better terms; while Blitzo may not be entirely fine with their arrangement, he's no less fine with it than any of the other sketchy things he's willing to do for money. It's a bit of a relief for fans who were getting tired of the influx of openly LGBT+ characters being portrayed in a negative light with their advances... or at the very least, those who weren't anxious for a repeat of Angel and Valentino. "Loo Loo Land" did even more for him through fleshing out his character beyond his sexual desires for Blitzo, and showcasing his relationship with his daughter Octavia. And while Stolas was also portrayed as flawed in that episode, his troubles and flaws had nothing to do with his sexuality, and he was kept sympathetic by showing how much he wants to be a better father to Octavia. "Truth Seekers" and "OZZIE'S" also examine the more questionable aspects of his relationship with Blitzo in a non-comedic manner, more explicitly making clear that the unequal power dynamic between the two is a legitimate issue, and the latter episode even ending with Blitzo rejecting Stolas' attempts to make their relationship deeper specifically because of how he's treated the imp.
  • Popular with Furries aside, Loona was shown to be a pretty unlikable Jerkass and terrible at her job in the pilot. Later episodes would have various attempts to rectify that.
    • The first episode paints Loona as more of a Sour Supporter. She can do her job well, but she's so sullen and apathetic that she just doesn't want to try.
    • "Spring Broken" sheds more light on her relationship with Blitzo and how it came to be, along with giving her moments where she shows a softer side and displays how she can be just as capable on a job as the imps, even showing how she can potentially be more competent than them. It also in general gives her A Day in the Limelight, as she was Out of Focus for the past two episodes, which was another notable complaint.
    • "Truth Seekers" shows Loona in action while being very good at it, showing that she is more than just a Ms. Fanservice.
  • Early on, Millie was shown to be a Glass Cannon and ran the risk of being a Faux Action Girl. In "Spring Broken", she showed how tough she can be when she killed a giant fish all on her own.
    • Episode 5 would finally get Millie focus and firmly stop her characterization as a Satellite Character to Moxxie, fleshing out her character and past, as well as getting her to have many interactions about something other than her husband.
  • Some fans started to feel that, while the Rogues Gallery are fun to watch, the villains themselves are a bit too interchangeable with one another. The basic formula seems to be that the antagonist of the week is psychotic, bigoted towards imps, hates Blitzo, or some combination of the three. They are eventually subdued by the end of the episode, rinse and repeat. Episode 5 spices things up with the introduction of Striker, who is considerably more unique than what we’ve seen so far. He has an enmity with someone other than Blitzo (Moxxie), almost manipulated Blitzo into joining his side, and gets away unscathed near the end while still being in a position to continue his orders from Stella, who hired him to kill her promiscuous husband.
  • People concerned that the show would suffer from Status Quo Is God as the episodes never cleanly led into each other were very pleased with Episode 6, which has Blitzo having a truth-serum addled epiphany, softening his heart towards Moxxie and even returning Stolas' affections to his delight, ticking off some Character Development for them. It also ended with a very genuine risk of a Broken Masquerade that could have long-lasting repercussions to Earth, Heaven and Hell.
  • Those who feared that the more memorable villains would be one-shots were happy to see Verosika and Fizzarolli making cameos in Episode 6, followed by returning directly in Episode 7.

YMMV/Hazbin Hotel

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • The pilot received criticism for having red be extremely predominant in the color pallet. In the "Addict" video, a more varied pallet is used.
  • Addict, which stars Angel Dust, addresses many of the criticisms regarding his portrayal in the pilot. The video reveals a great deal more about his character, showing that his asshole persona is mostly a front to hide his severe emotional pain from others, as well as the fact he is abused and even raped by his pimp Valentino. Although he still has his critics, many of his detractors have since warmed up to him and want Charlie and company to get him away from Valentino as soon as possible.

YMMV/Ctrl Alt Del

• Author's Saving Throw: "Endings...And Beginnings" is one, after the backlash that arose following "...Will", the intended Grand Finale of the on-going Ethan storyline.

YMMV/My Dress Up Darling

• Author's Saving Throw: One criticism leveled at the series is that it seems to follow an old idea about cosplay that one shouldn't try to cosplay characters that don't suit your body. However, Chapter 79 points out that no matter how close you look, you'll likely never be a 1:1 for the character you're trying to cosplay. Whether it's due to them being a real person with a real body cosplaying a fictional character, the differences between gender in crossplay, or by simple virtue of a character and a person having vastly different body types or heights. But no matter how different one looks by a character, all you can really do is have as much enjoyment as you can in the attempt, and don't make yourself miserable for the differences if it's a character you really love.

YMMV/The Trials Of Apollo

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • A slight one for a goof in the first book of the franchise: but Apollo's comment about having a kid with a mortal man offers an explanation on why Grover would suggest Percy was the kid of Sally and the goddess Nemesis.
    • Although, it's not like Homosexual Reproduction is outside the realm of possibility for gods. Percy has a half-brother conceived from such a relationship. It had simply not been confirmed to be the case in the Riordanverse yet.
  • The Burning Maze answers a question which people had probably been asking since the first Percy Jackson series, which was how come the demigods always still fight with ancient, traditional weapons like bows and swords and never more modern weapons like guns or hand grenades. Apollo answers this, saying the only weapons that would be useful for battling a monster have to be magical in nature (so you'd be worse off fighting with a normal mortal gun rather than something like a celestial bronze sword), and bullets and grenades are all single use, which isn't useful for a demigod fight.
    "Note: This one has been rewritten as No-Sell"
  • The references to other series in the verse with Ra, Frey, and Annabeth being in Boston for family reasons are appreciated by those who felt like Heroes, Kane Chronicles and Gods of Asgard felt disconnected from each other.
  • Artemis's reaction to her brother regaining his godhood. Many fans were pleased at her showing affection to her brother and showing that she does not hate men and is capable of platonic friendship with males.
  • The Burning Maze could be considered by some who took issue with Jason and Piper getting romantic after being falsely led to believe they had already been so. This is implied to be part of why Jason and Piper have broken up by the events of the third book.
  • In The Tower of Nero, Reyna chides Leo for addressing Calypso as mamacita during The Hidden Oracle after fan complaints of sexism, among other things.

YMMV/Grand Theft Auto IV The Ballad Of Gay Tony

• Author's Saving Throw: One of the chief criticisms of GTA IV was its relentlessly bleak and nihilistic tone, which made it very difficult for players to get invested. While The Ballad of Gay Tony is still pretty serious compared to the 3D-era games, it's not nearly as grim as IV.

YMMV/Tokimeki Memorial Girls Side

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • Kohai characters of previous games are criticized for looking younger than their intended age. Nina, this game's kohai, looks more mature and closer to his intended age.
  • Unlike the girls of previous games who usually served as an obstacle for the heroine to get a guy's confession, both Miyo and Karen have no interest in the guys of this game, are supporting and playing a pivotal role in Bambi's love life as her "info man" and stylist respectively, making their frienship more real this time.

YMMV/Daddy Long Legs (The books)

• Author's Saving Throw: Since the musical version reveals the truth about Jervis sponsoring Judy right away, this allows for his side of the story to be seen; the show very wisely has him acknowledge how awkward his arrangement with Judy has become and the guilt he feels — "Am I just fostering her education/Or reading someone else's mail?" — and, after his disastrous attempt to get her to go along with his wishes on how she spends her summer vacation, he fully understands that he needs to back right off and let her make her own way in life. He's also far more shy and retiring than in the book, thus explaining why he never managed to reveal the truth to Judy.

YMMV/Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 The Black Order

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • The X-Men and the Fantastic Four ^note via downloadable content finally show up alongside the greater Marvel universe in a video game again, after spending the better part of the 2010s being left out of various adaptations due to an embargo which infamously affected certain games like LEGO Marvel Super Heroes 2 and Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite, stemming from the characters' film rights being owned by Fox in that duration. In game, the X-Men have just as much of a presence as the Avengers, allowing both teams to shine through without either side being overshadowed, and the Fantastic Four are the stars of their own DLC story.
  • The higher comic book influences compared to past games like LEGO Marvel's Avengers and Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite and even the (then) upcoming Avengers project being very MCU-influenced was another plus, featuring characters and designs from aspects of the comics that haven't been put in the MCU. While there are some MCU elements, like Nick Fury being visually based on Samuel L. Jackson and some roster choices being inspired by it, the fact that the MCU is not the only influence and the game is more akin to a distilled world like Spider-Man (PS4) or even the pre-Infinite Marvel vs. Capcom games is seen as a good sign for those who were sick of Marvel games being forced to be MCU plugs. This was made even more apparent when it was confirmed to be inspired by comic book stories, some like the classic The Infinity Gauntlet, recent hits like The Avengers (Jonathan Hickman) and Spider-Verse, as well as deep cuts like Daredevil: Shadowland and Inhumans by Paul Jenkins, not to mention stories one wouldn't expect like Uncanny X-Force and Kurt Busiek's Ultron Unlimited storyline.
  • Quite a few comic news sites had repeatedly brought up Cyclops and his absence every time a new character was revealed, with increasing levels of frustration and disappointment that he was seemingly absent from the base game (which ultimately turned out to be correct, although he was in the game as an NPC). So the announcement at SDCC 2019 that he and Colossus (who was also an NPC in the base game) would be free DLC made available one month after the game's release became a welcomed reveal.
  • Anyone unhappy about Scarlet Witch being retconned to not being a mutant in the comics will be happy to see that a Sentinel explicitly registers her as a mutant along with the X-Men.
• Character Rerailment: This game fixes the Winter Solder's character after his appearance in the original Ultimate Alliance. There, he had recovered all his memories but was working with the villains anyway. Here, he's an ally to the heroes like in the source material. To be fair to the first game though, it was made shortly after Bucky had been reintroduced in the comics and was still a more morally ambiguous character, so Raven Software likely didn't have too much to base off his character for it. It's mentioned that he was working undercover with AIM.

YMMV/Flowers In The Attic (The TV movie)

• Author's Saving Throw: For those who find Chris being impossible to sympathize with after he rapes Cathy, the TV movie changes it to consensual sex.

YMMV/Peter And The Starcatchers

• Author's Saving Throw: The tribe that lives on Neverland has NOT aged well in the slightest, even if it was Fair for Its Day. Barrie and Pearson decided to make the tribe a Polynesian tribe who know (and distrust) English due to a member having been enslaved.

YMMV/Robin War

• Author's Saving Throw: Jim and Dick's conversation acknowledges that Jim does feel uncomfortable about the presence of untrained teenage vigilantes running around. It also provides a reason why Jim would reluctantly accept their existence.

YMMV/Your Lie In April

• Author's Saving Throw: The live-action movie tones down some of the manga's more controversial aspects, like Kousei's Amusing Injuries despite his past as a child abuse victim. In particular Saki's infamous beating where she made him bleed was toned down to just her slapping him, which, while still questionable, was much more forgivable.

YMMV/Aftermath Of The Games

• Author's Saving Throw: The third pony chapter and the first Interlude chapter in Integration firmly establishes that Twilight really did have no choice but to retgone the adult Starlight. And Twilight's shown to have severe doubts about her decision and feels as if she had murdered the original Starlight, despite everypony in the know about filly Starlight's true origins assuring her that she did what was needed to save Equestria and managed to give a villian another chance at life. Also, even though the Mane Six's friendship is saved and Equestria isn't in a Bad Future, there's still a lot of ramifications that came from Twilight changing the timeline.

YMMV/Sonic X

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • Within the Archie comic line, many see the Lighter and Softer direction as this in relation to the main comic going through its biggest Audience-Alienating Era. The main thing was that at the time, the main comic had devolved into Love Triangle drama at least once an issue, and stories that had potential to be decent not living up to said potential, while the Sonic X comics, while not without their research faults, were closer to what people actually wanted out of a Sonic comic, with the action, adventure and humor expected out of the franchise at this point. Said Audience-Alienating Era didn't last, however, and one could argue this paved the way for a better future for the main comic.
  • Within the Sonic X franchise itself, the comic is noted for circumventing some of the flaws of its animated counterpart, namely by downplaying the formulaic storylines like making Eggman the center limelight near the end of the series for example, moderating Chris' role in favor of making Sonic and Tails the center limelight like they should have been in the first place since Chris is not the titular protagonist, undoing a lot of the Flanderization that befallen the later episodes of the anime like Amy's Yandere traits, and adding even more Mythology Gags to the games themselves. In addition in spite of using the English dub as basis, it generally has more witty, less Narm writing that's more consistent with the Japanese renditions.

YMMV/A Midsummer Nights Dream

• Author's Saving Throw: Played with in the epilogue, which coyly "apologizes" to anyone who didn't like the play. This was more or less formula for the period, and shows again in The Tempest, among other places.
  Reason: YMMV examples can't be playing with

YMMV/The Shield

• Author's Saving Throw: Pretty much the bulk of seasons six and seven are spent with various saving throws being tossed to bring Shane away from the abyss of fan hatred after he killed Lem. Also, when they redubbed dialogue into one episode clarifying that Shane's black mistress was of legal age, after network executives freaked out over the notion of one of the show's main characters having sex with an underaged girl. Also, Dutch's killing a stray cat is semi-balanced out by him adopting a stray kitten, which is never mentioned again. Averted with the murder of Terry Crowley, as the show was able to resist retroactively making Terry a monster of some kind to make his death at Vic's hands justifiable.

YMMV/Haunted Castle

• Author's Saving Throw: The PS4 rerelease of the game does away with the infamous three continue limit of the original arcade release and gives the player infinite continues while also allowing one to play the game in its original, easier Japanese version.

YMMV/Castlevania: Circle of the Moon

• Author's Saving Throw: The Castlevania Advance Collection version alleviates some of the game's bigger Scrappy Mechanics:
  • The dearth of save points has been alleviated by the introduction of save states. There is also the option to rewind the last few seconds of the game, in case you make any major mistakes (like dying or being sent back a ways due to a missed jump).
  • There is now an optional gadget that informs you if an enemy you're attacking has a chance to drop a DSS card, eliminating the Guide Dang It! nature of having to figure out which enemies to farm for cards. The addition of save states and rewinds also allows you to use Save Scumming to make sure the rare cards actually drop.
  • Every single DSS card combination has its effects explained in the Encyclopedia feature. All of the combination explanations are unlocked from the get go.

YMMV/Castlevania (2017)

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • One minor complaint about Season 1 is the lack of recognizable music from the games, given Castlevania has several tracks that are deemed iconic. In the penultimate episode of Season 2, our heroes storm Dracula's castle with an orchestral remix of the popular track Bloody Tears.

  • Isaac's depiction in Curse of Darkness was an extremely problematic example of a gay character. Not only was he a maniac eager to aid in the slaughter of mankind,^note His entire motivation was to resurrect Dracula so he can return to doing so, and the game's inciting incident is quite ironically him framing Hector's wife for witchcraft and getting her burnt at the stake while Hector is away as retaliation for Hector betraying Dracula a rare example of a scantily clad male character but done so more for Fan Disservice reasons, a borderline Combat Sadomasochist, and the way the game made his sexuality explicit was by having him kiss Trevor on the cheek as he stabbed him. This version of Isaac's sexuality is handled much more subtly and not in any way linked to his siding against mankind, he has a much more sympathetic backstory, lacks the original character's abominable costume, and his motivation for siding with Dracula is much more sympathetic than "I'm an Ax-Crazy psychopath." His Race Lift also adds solid diversity to the cast, helped by Adetokumboh M'Cormack's excellent and soulful performance.
  • After Season 2's Automaton Horses never reacted to any level of violence near them (not even their owners getting butchered or eaten alive by huge night monsters or brigands right on top of them), Season 3 opens with Sypha and Trevor's horses getting spooked during their fight with night creatures.

YMMV/Indie Pogo

• Author's Saving Throw: The Heavy Metal update allows players to turn off the automatic jumping, so those who prefer traditional Platform Fighters can now feel more at home with this game.

YMMV/Postal Brain Damaged

• Author's Saving Throw: When the demo was released on Steam Next Fext 2021, the biggest sticking point of "Straight Outta Suburbia", the very first level, was the largely identical interiors of almost every house in the level, which many felt made the already large level too cumbersome to explore. In the final game, many of these houses were boarded or locked up to prevent the player from exploring largely unnecessary areas, and some of the houses that remained were given distinct hallmarks (one house has a lot of toilets and toilet paper, another house has a lot of cats, while yet another has dead Sims in it) to make them easier to recognize.

YMMV/Dusk

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • While the sword was powerful, there wasn't really anything that made it distinct or made it better than any of the other weapons. When New Blood showed off footage for Episode 3, they showed that they reworked it with the ability to block and deflect (albeit at the cost of morale, unlike the sickles), and also makes it more of a stealth weapon, giving it more uniqueness and utility. To further sweeten the deal, the new mechanics for the sword were implemented even before Episode 3 was out.
  • The bosses of Episodes 1 and 2 were criticized due to being rather easy, and some of them come off as souped-up versions of normal enemies (especially Mama, who becomes a regular enemy after the level that spotlights her). Episode 3 upped its game with its final two, with Jakob being considered a cool take on the Mirror Match concept, due to applying FPS meta techniques, and Nyarlathotep for being a much more conventional "giant monster" boss.

YMMV/Ben 10 Omniverse

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • This series was an attempt to reconcile the conflicting styles of the original Ben 10 series by Man of Action and the two sequels by Dwayne McDuffie and Glen Murakami. Fans disagree on whether they succeeded or not.

YMMV/Tiger King

• Author's Saving Throw: A minor, but still prominent complaint about the series was that it never showed John Findlay's teeth implants. The retrospective eighth episode shows him with his new fully-toothed mouth. The episode also makes a point of using Saff's preferred pronouns, and the closed captions were updated to better reflect them (sans when the characters misgender him within the documentary itself).

YMMV/Cookie Run

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • For the longest time, obtaining Magic Candy ingredients was a chore if you got the cookie after the event or ran out of ingredients from the trials, resulting in players having to spend gems and magic dust to obtain them. January 2021's update now has higher chances of players getting item pouches that contain the Magic Candy Ingredients for Cookies who have their own Trials (in other words, you can get them for Dark Choco, Milk and Purple Yam but not Herb, Moon Rabbit or Tiger Lily just yet). This also includes the Magic Candies for Moonlight, Fire Spirit, Sea Fairy, Dark Enchantress, and Wind Archer too.
  • Want to get some Rainbow Cubes, Gems, or Coins with the cookie in your lobby? For the longest time you needed a certain cookie to obtain one of the three and would have to search online to figure it out and then swap them out if they weren't your current Lobby Cookie. In early 2021, this was changed so that you can have any cookie in the lobby and choose your reward.
  • The Season 6 update bought about a bevy of unwelcome changes (see Contested Sequel below) that massively bought down the gameplay experience for fans, particularly those who don’t spend any money at all on the game, to the point where some threatened to delete their accounts and actual trucks displaying messages to Devsisters were parked outside their headquarters. Devsisters finally responded and rolled back some of the more controversial choices in July 2021. These changes included prohibiting the use of Invocation Cards in just about every competitive mode, reducing the minimum cookie level needed to use cards from 15 to 12, and making it so that a Cookie's skill starts at the beginning of a run again.
  • In the Season 6 rehaul, the UI was derided for making things more complicated. The December 2021 update reverted the UI to the initial interface, but with additional buttons on the top for easier navigation, with with announcement video even mentioning the return was due to fan feedback.
  • The Grand Champion League was only for the highest skilled players or those who were willing to fork over 3000 gems to enter. The February 2022 update now reduces it to those who have 10,000 trophies.
  • Speaking of Magic Candies, upgrading them for Common, Rare and Epic Cookies still tended to be a chore to do since it requires gathering materials in their Cookie Trials (which was only made worse by the removal of bonus missions), which can take a long time, and upgrading Magic Candies only had a chance to succeed. However, the March 2022 Update removed the probability of the success and failure of upgrading Magic Candies, which made upgrading them much easier than before with or without bonus missions.

YMMV/Voez

• Author's Saving Throw: After the initial release put off some potential players by not being playable in TV mode, a later update was introduced that allows the game to be played in TV mode with a physical controller.

YMMV/Kingdom Hearts

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • After three infamously No Export for You "Final Mix" versions that were Japan-only, the 1.5 and 2.5 PS3 ports of the series included the Final Mix versions of I, II, and Birth By Sleep. International fans that had been left out of all their extra content over the years can now enjoy it looking better than ever.
  • The series has long been criticized for its entries being spread over multiple consoles from both Nintendo and Sony, making it a bit tricky to keep up. The 1.5+2.5 release for the PS4, in tandem with the 2.8 release that remasters 3D, means the entire series sans Days and Re:coded and χ are playable on a single console.^note And if you really want to play them, it isn't much of a hassle, as Days and Re:Coded are both on the same handheld, the Nintendo DS, and χ is available to anyone with an Android or iOS smartphone. Unfortunately, this was still the case for Xbox players who were going to be jumping into the series with III at launch until the other games were finally ported to the system a year later.
    • The announcement of Kingdom Hearts — The Story So Far -, which compiles the previous two PS4 compilations into a single bundle for only $40, really speaks to Square Enix's desire to ensure that everyone can be caught up in time for III... as long as you have a PS4. Thankfully, this mega-compilation has been announced for the Xbox One for a 2020 release, so Xbox owners will still be able to be in the loop.
  • The Days adaption in 1.5 Remix was criticized for its awkward cuts between fight scenes and for not including scenes from the Disney worlds. The adaption of coded in 2.5 Remix does include scenes for fights and the Disney worlds making the cuts much less jarring and telling the story more coherently. When 1.5 Remix was put on PS4, a scene for Roxas fighting Xion was added.
  • The Disney elements have been The Artifact since Days, but there has been some effort to avoid this starting from coded. Donald and Goofy return to being party members for Kingdom Hearts III and a scene added to the storyline of coded during 2.5 Remix has Maleficent making a connection between the Datascape and the Book of Prophecies from chi, adding context to her appearance in 3D and reversing the Villain Decay she has gone through. Additionally, the Disney worlds are back to having a story reason for getting visited, with Disney characters having more interactions with the KH-original characters.
  • Going beyond just the Kingdom Hearts series, the portrayal of the main trio of Disney characters—Donald Duck, Goofy and Mickey Mouse—could be considered a response to some of the most common complaints about those characters over the last few decades. For many animated fans, the trio were basically glorified corporate mascots with little personality, which wasn't helped by the fact that they never really had definitive backstories or occupations. The original Kingdom Hearts made sure to rectify that, portraying Mickey as a monarch, Donald as his Court Mage, and Goofy as his Captain of the Guard. And while their backstories still aren't terribly detailed, Kingdom Hearts II still makes an effort to give Mickey an actual character arc by showing the beginnings of his feud with Pete and introducing us to his childhood mentor, Yen Sid.
  • In a similar fashion to main Disney Trio, the princesses of their respective movies are much less polarized in this series than they are in the controversial Disney Princess line, in which they are criticized for receiving gratuitous amounts Chickification in their merchandise, characterization that is heavily exaggerated with Sequelitis, and goals that come off as problematic or sexist in this day in age. Kingdom Hearts manages to respect the original source material by portraying the princesses with personalities similar to that of the original film, and in some examples like Ariel or Mulan, having them Took a Level in Badass by giving them the ability to use magic.
  • Birth by Sleep and Dream Drop Distance were notorious for having poorly designed secret bosses that had A.I. Roulette and forced players to spam invincibility frames and cheap tactics to win. 0.2's secret boss hinted at a return to reactive boss design that Kingdom Hearts I and II had. III continued this trend by designing bosses to be more easily defeatable, especially the humanoid bosses, since they properly stagger and have revenge value, as opposed to having a mix of super armor, no staggering, and can randomly break out of your combos for no reason.
  • The New Game Plus for III is a considerable improvement over the ones in 0.2 and Dream Drop Distance. Though it's not perfect, you can now take your Keyblades into a new save file, which fixes the problem DDD and Birth By Sleep had where you get the Ultima Weapon as a reward for defeating certain super bosses, but have no more enemies to use them on or story sequences to use them in which, on top of the secret bosses' poor fight designs, rendering them as not worth it for many players.
  • The free update that came with the Re:Mind DLC of III made significant improvements on the base game, modifying certain awkward or badly lighted cutscenes so they have more impact. It also add some post-game content, such as new attack abilities unlocked after beating the game once (and transferring over to any new playthrough) and the return of the classic Keyblades Oathkeeper and Oblivion.
  • After 3 years of fans being confused why the HD collections weren't coming to Xbox like III was, Square finally announced that the older games would finally be hitting the console in 2020 at X019. The port of the first game even has an improvement over the PS4 port, in that you can now skip the opening cutscene of it on Xbox. However, Fruitball is now glitched where, when Aqua spikes the fruit, it goes straight down to the ground rather than away in the direction Aqua's facing for some reason. Unfortunately, it's digital-only due to the PS4 DLC added to 1.5 + 2.5 made it over 50GB and, as a result, couldn't fit on to a regular Blu-Ray disc like the PS4 port.

YMMV/Saint Seiya Legend Of Sanctuary

• Author's Saving Throw: One of the very few praises the movie gets is making the main characters older by three years, as one of the main complains about the original version was the Improbable Age (Seiya, Saori and Shun were only 13 years old).

YMMV/Super Mario Maker

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • One of the more criticized aspects in reviews that came out prior to the public release was the nine day time limit for unlocking new building material sets. Having heard this, Nintendo released a patch on launch day that caused tool packs to unlock early after placing around 500 objects in the Maker after triggering the "delivery notice" and using all available object types, which could greatly decrease the time to unlock everything to only a few hours.
  • Many early reviews also criticized the lack of mid-level checkpoints and "tiered" Power Ups (e.g. a ? block that spawns a Mushroom for small Mario and a Fire Flower for Super Mario). Both of these were added into the game in the November 4, 2015 update.
  • Fans were unhappy the underwater softlock Game-Breaking Bug was ignored for so long, but the December 2015 update fixed it.
  • The first batch of Pokémon Mystery Suits didn't have unique sounds effects or music. When the Kanto starters were revealed, they were shown to have them.
  • After nearly a year of fans complaining, Nintendo finally released an update that allowed you to comment on a level on the Level Cleared screen without automatically starring it.

YMMV/Super Mario Maker 2

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • From the first trailer alone, it already fixes most of the issues that critics had with the first game, including but not limited to: slopes, new enemies, new environments, new UI, and a new theme based on Super Mario 3D World.
  • The May Direct showed a lot more improvements over the first game, like finally being able to tag map types and filter them online, vertical sub-areas, the ability to customize how auto-scrolling works and add rising water to levels, as well as On and Off switch blocks and several new themes.
  • There were originally no plans to allow multiplayer with friends, only randoms, leading to a lot of fan backlash. At E3 2019, it was announced that online multiplayer with friends was going to be added to the game.
  • Before, only 32 courses could be uploaded online. That number was later upgraded to 64, and once again to 100.
  • Letters that can easily be mistaken for numbers are no longer allowed in level codes, making them much easier to put in. In addition, level codes themselves are much shorter, with only nine characters to input (3 x 3) instead of the first game's sixteen characters (4 x 4).
  • The version 1.1.0 update introduced on October 1, 2019 fixes a lot of problems in the game:
    • One feature it adds is the option to play with one’s friends in Multiplayer Versus and Multiplayer Co-op modes, as well as letting you select courses you've saved in Coursebot and levels uploaded in Course World.
    • You can now play Multiplayer Co-op and Versus in local play as well. In addition, the host system no longer needs to be connected to the internet.
    • In the possibility of an unstable connection before the match starts, the match will be cancelled in order to somewhat alleviate the infamous lag issue.
    • When everyone chooses the "Let's start over!" option in Multiplayer Co-op, the time will reset as well.
    • When someone places Builder Boxes over a warp point, players will now be able to break them by simply using the warps.
    • Also, you are now able to use button controls to create courses in handheld mode.
  • The Master Sword powerup being added is largely seen as a compromise for removing the Mystery Mushroom. Many players hope that more items from other games will follow.
  • When November passed with no major content updates, fans were starting to lose hope for the game. Come December 2nd, the 2.0.0 update was announced featuring Pokeys and Spikes, two heavily requested enemies, an official series of speedrun courses, and Link as a playable character.
  • One of the disliked mechanics about the first Super Mario Maker was the time-based gate behind unlocking parts, where the player needed to wait a day after fulfilling the requirement to unlock more. While the first game already patched a quicker way to unlock parts, 2 took it a step further and removed the gate completely, giving the player free use of every course element right from the start aside from the special unlockable ones.
  • The 3.0.0 update brings along several additions which flesh out more differences between the styles, including:
    • Two elements from Super Mario Bros. 2, both for the Super Mario Bros. game style: A Mushroom that changes your character to behave like they were straight from the game^note Ability to pick up and throw enemies and objects, as well as stand on top of most of the former ones, this also means you cannot Goomba Stomp them, and a key that when picked up, summons Phanto to chase you. This also means Toadette has official SMB2 sprites, and she and the other three have SMB2 sprites for swimming as well as sliding down the flagpole. Much like the Superball Flower and the Master Sword, it brings back music from the original game, including beloved tracks like Overworld and Ending.
    • The Frog Suit from Super Mario Bros. 3, which makes underwater levels and nighttime castle levels more enjoyable for those who usually aren't into those themes.
    • The balloon power up from Super Mario World, tweaked so it's more user friendly.
    • The Super Acorn from New Super Mario Bros. U, the game's signature power-up that was initially left out in favour of New Super Mario Bros. Wii's Propeller Mushroom.
    • The seven Koopalings make their debut in the four 2D themes (meaning they finally have an official sprite in the Super Mario Bros. style), which not only increases the total number of boss enemies to twelve (the others being Bowser, his Meowser form, Bowser Jr., Boom Boom and Pom Pom), but also greatly expands the possibilities for unique boss battles. The addition of the Mechakoopas and their debuting subspecies was also welcomed.
    • Several additions that greatly improved the Super Mario 3D World style for those who found it too limited in comparison to the standard styles due to several factors.^note A smaller selection of enemies and lack of a proper Power-Up Mount - no Yoshi, Clown Cars or Lakitu clouds here, just the Koopa Car. Further, numerous Boring, but Practical gadgets necessary for building complex levels and neat tricks were also omitted - no tracks, Munchers or even the brand-new ON/OFF blocks, which proved amazingly versatile tools in the other styles. Even note blocks were left out, meaning no music-based levels. Namely, it introduced the Boomerang Suit (a great alternative to the Fire Flower, as the Cat Suit and Builder Suit only allow melee strikes to attack), five exclusive hats which provide new actions and concepts (alternative attack methods, a stealth function, and horizontal or vertical flight), and ON/OFF blocks were finally included as well. The addition of ON/OFF trampolines further cemented the usefulness of the switches, with them now being at their most versatile in the 3D World style (as they now change the state of five different course parts here, compared to the three in the other styles). These changes have not only opened up the level variety of 3D World courses, but finally allowed the style to distinguish itself with its own strengths rather than limitations.
    • And last but certainly not least, the ability to create full worlds, up to 8 worlds and 40 courses!

YMMV/Espgaluda

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • The first Espgaluda was basically made in response to criticsm that CAVE's previous two games, DoDonPachi dai ou jou and Ketsui, were too difficult for beginners. It has considerably more gentle patterns and the Kakusei mechanic allows players to slow down bullets for further assistance.
  • The first game is criticized for an untold mechanic with the final phase of the Final Boss, wherein using your Guard Barrier to attack them will heal them! In the second game, this is downgraded to its final boss merely raising a shield every time you fire your Guard Barrier (or any other time you gain invincibility).

YMMV/Esp Ra De

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • The Arcade Plus mode in Psi fixes a few complaints about the game, most notably nerfing how Power Shot awards points during boss fights, as well as shortening the timers on those bosses, resulting in a better metagame that isn't "stall bosses for 5 minutes each". It also adds a True Final Boss as traditional of newer CAVE games, something that the original game doesn't have.
  • The original version of the game just uses the same boss theme, "Raging Deicide", for every boss, even the Final Boss, which can feel a little anticlimatic. The Psi Updated Re-release has a remix soundtrack that, among other things, gives every boss a unique remix of "Raging Deicide". Ms. Garra's remix by Atomic sounds absolutely bombastic and fitting of the final challenge of the game (except in the Psi-exclusive modes, where Alice Master comes next).

YMMV/Contra Points

• Author's Saving Throw: In basically every single video since "Opulence", Natalie has mentioned non-binary people in a positive light at some point, to make it clear that she doesn't actually hold the kind of transmedicalist views she got accused of due to that video.(See Overshadowed by Controversy below)

YMMV/Designated Survivor

• Author's Saving Throw: The long-vacant vice-presidency is finally addressed in "In The Dark" in Season 2, when new character Ellenor Darby, the mayor of Washington, D.C., is introduced and impresses Kirkman with her handling of a major power outage crisis.

YMMV/Magical Girl Friendship Squad

• Author's Saving Throw: The redesigns of the main characters probably came from criticisms about the designs from the original shorts.

YMMV/Devil May Cry 5

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • For those who were put off by DmC entirely and feared that the classic continuity would be shelved and Left Hanging, this game serves to bring back the characters, lore and style from the original games everyone knows and loves.
  • Following the updated series timeline, 5 directly continuing the story after 4 is this for fans who grew weary of the classic games dancing around with prequels and interquels.
  • The game used to have Denuvo when it was newly released, but Capcom patched that out after players raised concerns about performance issues and framerate drops.
  • Several criticisms from DMC4 were alleviated or completely resolved in this game.
    • For some fans, one of the major criticisms of 4 was that Nero just wasn't as fun to play as because his moveset is relatively simple compared to Dante, who had dozens of options to deal with every situation thanks to having three weapons, three guns, and five styles to utilize at once, which he could rapidly swap in between by just pressing a button. This time around, Nero's been given a lot more variety in his moveset with the Devil Breaker, which can be outfitted to serve multiple varied roles, from a grappling hook to a time-stopping device. The result is that while Nero isn't fundamentally different from how he played in the previous game, whatever Devil Breaker the player brings with them into combat will significantly influence how he plays.
    • Conversely, Dante almost had too much stuff in 4. His ability to switch between Styles at the press of a button rendered him extremely overpowered, especially since the developers didn't design enough new enemies for him to fight against because of time constraints. As a result, Nero's slower enemies in 4 were no match for a seasoned Dante player. And because Dante had so many weapons, there was also a large technical learning curve to playing him that put him head and shoulders above the other playable characters. Here, Dante has several new features that make him balanced, such as the ability to pick how many Devil Arms and Guns you're bringing into a mission, enemies made specifically for him to take down, and other gameplay tweaks, all while not sacrificing the huge freedom of being able to instantly change Styles essential to his combo structure.
    • The constant backtracking between levels often made playing 4 confusing. 5 as a result is much more streamlined, and even has a command^note pressing down on the left control stick that points the player to where they have to go next.
    • The Troubled Production of 4 caused many of its boss fights to be recycled at several points in the same playthrough, which made them feel stale because there's little to no variation on the next repeated fights. On the other hand, 5 has more unique boss fights, and most of the repeated bosses have additional gimmicks the next time they are fought, or are only fought twice in the same playthrough.
    • The Proud Soul currency system in 4 was divisive, but criticisms mention how the player could only get them and buy upgrades at the end of a mission. 5 returned to the standard Red Orb method of the older games such as 3, allowing the player to buy upgrades during a mission. This is also seen as a response to the Money for Nothing issue that plagued 4 and DmC which use a different currency to purchase moves, but downplayed the value of Red Orbs depending on the player's skill. Here, advanced players no longer worry about Red Orbs becoming "useless" in the end-game, thanks to Dante's Dr. Faust Devil Arm that weaponizes the currency into powerful moves.
    • The end-mission ranking system in 4 is considered a Scrappy Mechanic because you have to juggle between finishing the level as quickly as possible and scrounging around to collect as many Red Orbs as possible if you want to get the S Rank. 5 no longer tracks completion time for its mission ranking system, allowing the player to explore the stage at their own leisure without worrying about their Mission Rank dropping.
    • After Credo's death in 4, Kyrie and Nero didn't even mention or remember him in that game's ending. This was rather jarring for some fans. 5 however reveals that Credo's death is Nero's My Greatest Failure moment, serving as a catalyst for him unlocking his Devil Trigger and motivation to stop Dante and Vergil from killing each other.
    • Dante spent all of 4 being a Showy Invincible Hero and basically treated everything as a joke. For some fans, that game is where Dante encapsulates the "Wacky Woohoo Pizza Man" nickname given to him for the worse. 5 however, takes a step back to his characterization in 1 and 3 where Dante is still cocky and disrespectful to most of his enemies, but knows when to take dire situations seriously. This game even opens with Urizen scoring a decisive victory against him, prompting an Oh, Crap! moment from Dante. In particular, his resolution of his half-demon heritage gives a new Sad Clown interpretation of Dante's behavior, and his attitude towards Vergil shows Dante being bloodthirsty in a completely new way - while spinning his familiar sarcasm and humor into a lot more venomous manner towards his recently revived twin.
    • Lady was changed from an appropriately moody teenager with a slight tomboyish Catholic Schoolgirl-esque moe look (due to purple spandex shorts and her 'skirt' being made of ammo for her guns) in the third game to... just another busty woman with a Navel-Deep Neckline and flawless skin, having her dress less modestly than Trish in the fourth game. Her minimal role in the fourth game's story didn't help either, so fans were surprised at her DMC4 role focusing more on Fanservice appeal. Fortunately, this is rectified in DMC5 where her proportions and clothing style return to what they originally were in the third game.
  • Longtime fans who were disappointed when it seemed as if the game would take place entirely in urban environments were pleased when the TGS 2018 trailer revealed more bizarre locales that make the game to really feel more like the classic Devil May Cry games.
  • After the ice-cold reception to Dante's initial theme, which was retained in his TGS 2018 trailer (albeit with the vocals toned down), the actual gameplay footage for Dante shows "Devil Trigger" playing during his combat (in the English version, while the Japanese version still had "Subhuman" audible). It was re-recorded with Michael Barr (of Volumes fame) now providing the vocals, giving them a more Death Metal sheen rather than Eddie Hermida's nigh-incomprehensible screams. The brief glimpse of the new version in the VGA trailer got warmer reactions than the original. Even those who remain completely unmoved regarding the song voiced gratitude that an action was taken at least, even if it wasn't the outcome they desired.
  • After it was announced that you could buy Red Orbs via microtransactions, many fans were worried that the game would be balanced in a way that makes progression difficult without spending extra real world money. It was thankfully not long before it was clarified that the player still earns plenty of orbs through normal play, the system being implemented is roughly identical in description to how it was done with 4:SE. One Redditor even went as far to break down the balance changes between 4 and 4:SE to show the difference between both releases.
  • After the announcement of the Special Edition, the jubilance at all the new features were quickly replaced by concern that the only way to play the new content is to own a PS5 or an Xbox Series X. The day afterwards, Capcom stated that playable Vergil would be coming as DLC to the Xbox One, PS4 and PC ports as a paid content pack. That said, there's still a Broken Base because Turbo Mode and Legendary Dark Knight mode won't be a part of the DLC.

YMMV/Twilight

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • Fans were happy to hear that the film adaptation of Breaking Dawn, unlike the book, would actually have a final battle. Even though it turns out that the film has it both ways, and the battle was All Just A Vision.
  • The character of Siobhan seems intended to address many criticisms of Meyer's female characters. Siobhan is tall and muscular, moreso than adjacent men, and also career-driven and self-satisfied, not desiring a husband and also capable of running her father's blacksmithing forge from age 17. She is explicitly the leading member of her coven, and her vampiric history began with a revenge story against the man who turned her. Unfortunately, Meyer goes back on this by saddling her with Liam, a mate who is noted to be taller than her (no minor feat), and having her turn a starving child to sate her own sick curiosity about vampire powers while assuring Liam the kid would always come second to him in her attentions. Das_Mervin was extraordinarily disgusted by this.
  • One of the reasons Stephenie Meyer wrote Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined was to try and make the point that Bella wasn't seemingly weak and passive because she was a girl, but because she was a human surrounded by supernaturals.

YMMV/Acts Of Vengeance

• Author's Saving Throw: Many readers and even some at Marvel felt like it was out-of-character for Magneto, a Holocaust survivor, to actively work with Red Skull of all people. The Captain America solo title rectifies this by revealing that Magneto only joined to get close to the Skull and deliver some sweet payback for his crimes. And boy was it satisfying.

YMMV/La Mulana 2

• Author's Saving Throw: Version 1.1.1.2 fixed some bugs and buffed some of the easiest bosses in the game, making them harder to beat, including Mother/The 9th Child, who is now more challenging than her original counterpart in the first game. Unfortunately this patch came with several glitches, but most of them were fixed in Version 1.2.2.2.
  • Version 1.4.4.2 and beyond polished the game and fixed more issues, fixed some translation errors, added new graphical effects, replaced and added new sound effects and added cloud saving (only in the Steam version). But the biggest, major improvement is in Surtr's boss fight: the bottomless pit was replaced with a pool of lava, reducing the boss' brutal difficulty drastically.

YMMV/Star Wars The Rise Of Kylo Ren

• Author's Saving Throw: The comic begins to flesh out Ben Solo's fall to the dark side; this was only vaguely explained in the movies and resulted in some viewers feeling his motivations were underdeveloped.

YMMV/Dragon Quest Builders 2

• Author's Saving Throw: One of the complaints about the initial release of the game was having only one save file per profile. The v1.7.0 release on August 20, 2019 rectified that by adding 2 more save slots per profile.

YMMV/Hulk And The Agents Of SMASH

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • After numerous fan complaints, the writers suddenly have She-Hulk mention she has a law degree in "The Big Green Mile".
  • After spending the second half of Season 1 and the first half of Season 2 being reduced to a Butt-Monkey Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain whose Super-Intelligence had become an Informed Ability at best, the Leader finally starts getting serious again in "Homecoming" onward.

YMMV/Heathers

• Author's Saving Throw: The West End production went for a couple.
  • Kurt and Ram's Villain Song was changed from the comedic "Blue" to the sinister "You're Welcome" to address criticisms of playing implied rapists for laughs.
  • The final scene adds an explicit Heel–Face Turn for Heather D, mitigating complaints about her Adaptational Villainy. Many local productions also choose to do this.

YMMV/Fate Stay Night Heavens Feel

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • Shirou falling in love with Sakura was rather rushed in the original novel. He just suddenly finds Sakura super hot and within a short time, he's so in love with her, that he's willing to throw his ideals away to protect her. It comes across less as Shirou awakening to a Childhood Friend Romance he just never noticed, but instead having a switch go off by the writers to make him fall for Sakura. The films heavily focus on their backstory in an effort to specifically avert this.
  • Byakuya Matou was portrayed in the novel as a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing who pretended to care about Shinji only to cut all ties with him after he found out the truths of the family. The manga adaptation of Heaven's Feel shows Shinji's backstory from a neutral point of view (while in the novel it was told from Shinji's point of view); revealing that, while distant, Byakuya did care about Shinji at some point, or at least wanted him to have a normal life away from magecraft.

YMMV/Exit The Gungeon

• Author's Saving Throw: The "Hello To Arms" update added in Arsenal Mode, which allows you to collect proper guns to use while still dealing with your normal gun.

YMMV/Halo Infinite

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • When it became clear that Xbox Series X/S supply chains would be compromised due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, and scalpers were making it extremely difficult for gamers to get a console, Microsoft basically told 343 Industries to take a year to get everything right, since fans were negatively vocal about the previews (and it would line up with the 20th Anniversary of the Xbox console and Halo: Combat Evolved anyway). It also gave the team time to improve the Xbox One version, avoiding the possible issues a game like Cyberpunk 2077 suffered.
  • Part of the reason Cortana's Face–Heel Turn in Halo 5: Guardians was so disputed is that it undid the emotional impact of her death in Halo 4. In this game, Cortana is given another chance to perform a Heroic Sacrifice by destroying a part of Installation 07 to prevent the Banished from using it to their own ends, earning her a Dying as Yourself moment with the Chief.
    This one was rewritten as Salvaged Story
  • Infinite, at least the campaign, as a whole can be seen as this for the Halo series after 343 took over; as the principle of being a Soft Reboot allowed them to take fan critiques and general criticism of the prior game with its story, art direction, and gameplay all considered and taken into account to bring it in line with the acclaim of the original trilogy that Bungie made while attempting new directions with familiar mechanics. The result winds up being a nearly perfect marriage of both philosophies from the Bungie-era and the 343-era of the Halo series that feels the best of both worlds and, generally, is agreed that it comes the closest to the acclaim of the original series to date in regards to the newer instalments.
  • The Skimmers were intended to be this to past flying enemies, like the Drones and the Promethean Watchers, which tended to be Goddamned Bats that were more annoying than fun to fight due to their erratic flight paths making them difficult to hit. The Skimmers' hoverpacks and Glass Cannon nature largely afford them the positives of flying enemies, but they are indeed much easier to shoot thanks to having more predictable movements, as they were functionally more like Sentinels.
  • While a more minor example, the UNSC Pelican dropships have been redesigned to more resemble their pre-Halo 4 appearance, as opposed to their more rounded, twin-cockpit design as seen in 4 and 5, which had irritated a good number of players.
  • After Guardian’s multiplayer caught criticism for its freemium-esque in-game monetization despite being a full price game, this game at least makes the microtransaction model more justified by having the multiplayer be free-to-play.

YMMV/We Never Learn

• Author's Saving Throw: As detailed under Base-Breaking Character, plenty of people in the fanbase weren't too happy knowing that Takemoto won the harem, until Chapter 150 revealed that she's the first...out of five routes, meaning that every girl is getting their own ending!

YMMV/Macross Delta

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • Towards the franchise's infamous legal issues. Five years prior to the April 2021 settlement between Big West, Studio Nue and Harmony Gold regarding the international release of the Macross franchise, the Japanese Blu-rays of Delta already came with English subtitles.
    • And over the legal issues themselves, that seemingly wouldn't see Big West reach a settlement in anyone's lifetime? In 2021, THEY DID. Big West, Studio Nue and Harmony Gold sat down and the global copyright and distribution rights finally are where they belong... With Big West.
  • The movie, to many audiences addressed some problems with the original TV series. There's a lot less clutter, the Love Triangle is toned down while Mirage is reduced to a well accepted support character, the Windemere drama is shortened, and it focuses mainly on Walkure, which drew the most attention from Delta fans during the broadcasting. Whether or not these fixes worked is up to opinion.
  • Zettai Live introduces the concept of rival songstresses for Walkure, something people felt was lacking in the show. The film also brings back Maximilian Jenius and puts a little more focus on Mirage's development. And it also gives more insight on the possible true identity of Lady M by outright confirming Megaroad-01 is still intact but trapped in a dimensional fault, and Lady M is definitely residing on it.

YMMV/Care Bears Welcome To Care A Lot

• Author's Saving Throw: After his demotion to extra in Adventures in Care-A-Lot was met with great ire from longtime fans of the series, Tenderheart has returned to being the leader of the Care Bears.

YMMV/DNF Duel

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • The "Online Modes" trailer revealed that the game's Ranked Match system uses a quick matching system as opposed to ArcSys's infamous online interactive lobbies, alleviating concerns about the lobbies being forced like they are in Guilty Gear -STRIVE-.
  • Complaints about the game's universal defensive moves were addressed in the second beta and further improved upon with the official release. Rolls were given improved recovery time, speed, and distance, making them actually viable as an approach or getaway move. Guard Cancels also were given the ability to destroy projectiles, making them more useful against moves that lock down opponents like the Inquisitor's Burning Wheel.

YMMV/Sonic The Hedgehog Triple Trouble 16 Bit

• Author's Saving Throw: For people who are used to moving about with the left hand WASD setup and performing special moves with the right hand, the keyboard controls could be hard to handle as they were stuck on the arrow keys for movement, the A key for jumping, and the S key to switch characters. 1.0.6 update solves this problem as it includes key bindings and custom controller support.

YMMV/The Invisible Man 2020

• Author's Saving Throw: Prior movies in the Dark Universe were criticized for trying to cash in on the MCU. The Invisible Man rectifies this not only by being a standalone horror movie first, but also by updating the source material in an appropriate manner.

YMMV/The Punisher Welcome Back Frank

• Author's Saving Throw: After fans reacted negatively to the changes made in The Punisher: Purgatory, this story undid in its opening issue by having Frank once again a human, mafia-hunting anti-hero.

YMMV/Watchmen 2019

• Author's Saving Throw: The usage of the "alien psychic squid" in the miniseries' universe like in the original comic instead of a more pragmatic and less absurd choice (i.e., the sabotaged clean-energy plants which pinned the blame on Doctor Manhattan in the film adaptation) seems to have been in part motivated to soothe those who were still angry over that major facet of the ending being changed in the comic's film adaptation.

YMMV/Uncanny X Men 2018

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • Marvel seems to have learned from the complaints about its predecessor, Avengers: No Surrender's length, as Disassembled arc is only 10 issues long, as opposed to a whopping 16.
  • The book attempted one by addressing complaints about characters from New X-Men being Demoted to Extra. Most of the fans of these characters considers these efforts being spit in the eye and told to be grateful.
  • Annual #1 is a Saving Throw towards Cyclops, acknowledging his lackluster death from the Terrigen Mists and resetting him to his pre-House of M characterization. Kid Cable even admits he brought him back from the dead because he couldn't let his dad die so pointlessly, echoing many complaints from fans not about Cycylops dying, but about how he died.
    Cable: You're...you're their leader. Their hope. For you to die on your knees from a damned infection? From mist? That's not the way it should have gone down. I couldn't let that be the end.
  • With the mixed reception to Psylocke going back to being Caucasian, Revanche has a role in Rosenberg's run — she also wears a modified version of the "ninja bathing suit" Psylocke costume that was popularised by Psylocke while in her Asian form.

YMMV/Three Hundred Sixty Five Days

• Author's Saving Throw: As problematic as the movie is, it actually tones down some of the book's questionable content, especially in regards to Massimo's portrayal. Notable examples include removing Massimo threatening to kill Martin and actually murdering one of Laura's abusive exes for trying to date rape her, and changes to the pregnancy plotline (in the movie Laura gets pregnant by Massimo accidentally, while in the book it's revealed Massimo had been intentionally trying to impregnate her without consulting her to make it more difficult for her to leave him).

YMMV/Extra Credits

• Author's Saving Throw: Years after their defense of Revenue-Enhancing Devices tarnished their reputation, an episode examining the history of how games monetize took a much dimmer view of lootboxes, directly referencing the earlier episode under a different creative team and saying that it naively assumed this monetization method would be used responsibly and temperantly, before directly admitting it was not.

YMMV/Don Pachi

• Author's Saving Throw: Version 1.0 and 1.5 of DaiFukkatsu are often criticized for the auto-bomb mechanic, which trivializes survival and cannot be turned off. Subsequent revisions of the game, as well as SaiDaiOuJou, make efforts to make auto-bomb not so overpowered:
  • DaiFukkatsu BLACK LABEL allows the player to turn it off, and rewards players who disable auto-bomb by having bombs double as Hyper stocks (and using a Hyper allows two cancels instead of one: one cancel when entering Hyper, and another when exiting it, which can be manually done before the gauge runs out).
  • DaiFukkatsu Ver. 1.51 slaps on a penalty of one additional bomb stock used when auto-bombing, if using Strong Style. Bombing also becomes an integral part of scoring, so manual bombing is encouraged over automatic since manual bombs last longer.
  • SaiDaiOuJou has the option to turn it off as well. And when it's on, auto-bombing removes the player's whole bomb stock.
  • The Xbox 360 Arrange Mode in SaiDaiOuJou Kan has auto-bomb, but it costs 2,000 energy to use, as opposed to 1,500 for a manual bomb (in other words, it costs 25% less energy to manual bomb).

YMMV/Dies Irae

• Author's Saving Throw: To make up for the release gap between versions of this game, a one-off 200-page artbook are always given to players who bought the previous version.

YMMV/Percy Jackson And The Olympians

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • Some were a little disturbed that Sally resorted to murdering Gabe by petrifying him instead of just divorcing him, by Percy's suggestion no-less. In the movie, Gabe is instead petrified by his own stupidity because he ignored a sign warning him not to open the fridge, which was storing Medusa's head. Even Rick Riordan, who notoriously loathed the movies, thought the change was funny.
  • While making Tyson look more like a normal kid undermines the drama surrounding him being a "monster" significantly, it also makes Percy look less like an idiot for not realizing that something was off about him.
  • The second film attempts to address the complaints about all of Annabeth's adaptation changes; now she has blonde hair, and Clarisse also features as a character.

YMMV/Tyranny

• Author's Saving Throw: The fact that the player character cannot remain loyal to Kyros in the ending was highly divisive. Eventually, Obsidian patched in dialogue options where your character expresses a wish to do so and an ending where you swear fealty to Kyros.

YMMV/Tetris

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • Many players were disappointed that there was initially no specific message for winning a match in Tetris 99. A later update added a "TETRIS MAXIMUS!" ("TETO 1" in the Japanese version) screen for doing so.
  • An update in 2021 for Tetris 99 allows you to unlock skins from past Tetris Maximus events for 30 Tetris Tickets each, providing an option for those who missed any of these events or couldn't reach the 100 points necessary to unlock them. Prior to this, each Tetris Maximus skin was available only for a weekend,^note Exceptions are the ones themed on Luigi's Mansion 3, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and Xenoblade Chronicles 2, which were available for two two-day periods and once missed, was gone for good.

YMMV/Frostpunk

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • Update 1.3.3 adds the Large Resource Depot, which holds four times as many resources as a regular resource depot. Though it takes quite some researching to obtain, it becomes invaluable in the late game due to how many resources are accumulated by that time.
  • The Last Autumn has a law that allows you to instate night shifts, in exchange for having the workplaces require double their normal amount of workers in order to perform both day and night shifts. You also lose the ability to use extended shifts.

YMMV/Azure Striker Gunvolt

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • The dialogue cut from the original release of the first game was added back to the game in the Version 1.03 update, the Steam release, and the Striker Pack Compilation Re-release. The catch being that the Version 1.03 update only exists in America as of late; PAL region players are losing patience over the delay on the update in their region.
  • The newest update for the PC version of Gunvolt released on May 2018 which made it more akin to the Nintendo Switch version's Striker Pack by adding some of its features, as well as bumping the frame-rate from 30 to 60 and getting rid of the second screen.

YMMV/Azure Striker Gunvolt 2

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • One of the main complaints about the first game was that the weapon selection felt too limited; while you ultimately have seven different guns, a good chunk of them are more or less useless for most situations and you'll end up only using two or three of them. This is not only because most of the shots of the other guns are somewhat clunky, but because max Tags and Dart Leaders are linked, many of the other guns aren't usable for score attacking (the whole point of the game) due to not being able to get high Tags (Dullahan, Technos), being difficult or otherwise niche to Tag with (Orochi), or some combination of the two (Mizuchi). The sequel does make an attempt to fix the problem with Tags by creating a new "Clip" equipment category that determines the maximum number of Tags and removing Tag limits from Darts, allowing the aforementioned weapons to see significantly improved usage due to not being hampered by poor Tag limits. Some of the clunkiness still remains, but the game attempts to create a greater number of situations where niche guns are favorable to offset it.
  • Zonda ended up becoming a One-Scene Wonder and Ensemble Dark Horse in the first game due to their fantastically flamboyant persona and enthralling character, so many fans were disappointed when Bait-and-Switch Boss took effect and they were offed early, resulting in Zonda becoming a prime example of They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character. The sequel fixes this by not only revealing that the Zonda killed in the first game was Actually a Doombot, but promotes Zonda to Big Bad and has you fighting them not once, but twice, and as the Final Boss, to boot.

YMMV/Luminous Avengeri X 2

• Author's Saving Throw: The considerable spike in difficulty from the standard mode of the game to Hard Mode is a point of contention with the game, not helped by the fact that beating the game in Hard Mode is required to achieve the true ending. This was remedied in a v1.4.0 update of the game, which adds an Assist Mode option that grants the player 200 lives, enables Healing, and allows Medley to be activated.

YMMV/Yakuza 2

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • After the mixed reception of the soundtrack for the first Kiwami, to the point where many preferred the original PS2 soundtrack over it, the songs returning from the original game^note "Push Me Under Water", "Outlaw's Lullaby", "Bad Fortune, Not Bad", and "A Scattered Eternal Moment" are either much more faithful to the originals or considered an improvement on them. While the rest of the soundtrack is different, fans were pleased that these ones returned and got a worthy updated treatment.
  • Kiwami 2 also saw numerous gameplay improvements and quality of life changes to its combat. The most notable of which are the re-additions of ground and wall Heat Actions that were previously absent in 6 on top of balancing the combat out by not making Extreme Heat Mode available from the start, as it instead requires a substory to unlock it first. The improved inventory system as well as the overhaul of how restaurants work is also carried over from 6 as well.
  • Gameplay-wise, the overhaul of the Clan Wars from 6 was much appreciated: while the first iteration wasn't bad by any stretch, it boiled down to 'summon all your best guys, sit back and watch them either tear through the enemy lines or lose', with the non-named mooks not getting any real usage. Majima Construction flips the formula on its head by making you the defender instead of the attacker, doing away with the faceless goons you can summon entirely and giving their classes to the major characters, and making it so the player has to be more involved moving their guys around as the situation changes. These minor changes make for a solid, addictive Tower Defense minigame.

YMMV/Atop The Fourth Wall

• Author's Saving Throw: There seem to be many of these. If enough people complain about a perceived plot hole or just that something wasn't addressed, it will most likely be addressed in the next storyline-related episode.
  • After various comments pointed out that Linkara never saw the outside of Vyce's ship, yet instantly recognized it, the next episode has Pollo note this, then Linkara asks who else would have a ship with a giant V on it.
  • In the commentary of "Pokemon: The Electric Tale of Pikachu", Lewis admits to having pulled one with why Missingno was afraid of Lord Vyce, aware that didn't track with how he built it up as an unstoppable universe-devouring Lovecraftian demon. He came up with the idea that Vyce's attacks were able to hurt it, but — according to Missingno, at least — couldn't kill it, but it found being able to be hurt at all such a blow to the ego that it hid out in our dimension so Linkara would defeat Vyce. It was NOT afraid of Vyce; just sufficiently annoyed with him.
  • The very end of the Real Ghostbusters in Ghostbusters II review features Jaeris, visiting Linkara via portal, returning the mobile emitter he'd stolen during the Gunslinger arc, thus tying up the loose end left from the Aborted Arc of him planning to use it against his then-enemy.
  • During the Sleepwalker arc, Linkara's friends come across as a little too unsympathetic to Linkara starting to cross lines they're uncomfortable with, treating it as baseless paranoia when there is an actual and obvious threat that's driving him to such extreme measures. This gets addressed when they meet 90's Kid again and call him out on working with Vyce, pointing out that they left Linkara because of how far he was going, but 90's Kid is hardly any better for what he's done. On top of that, 90's Kid himself reveals why he was working with Vyce and the real reason for Linkara's behavior.
  • His decision to shift storyline segments to being purely at the end of his reviews post credits can be seen as this. Prior reviews, especially earlier ones, had a tendency to be placed in areas that segued into reviews, sometimes at the front end, during the review itself, and so on. While this could be interesting at times, it could also come off as very distracting, since the video would be shuffling back and forth between review and skit, thus making people who only wanted to see one or the other have to muddle their way through both to find the parts they were interested in. With all storyline segments placed at the end nowadays, people could easily skip to the end of the review to see storyline segments without having to watch the entire review, or vice versa.

Authors Saving Throw/Project Sekai

Project SEKAI has many elements that don't necessarily go over well with fans, but Sega and Colorful Palette are quick to address many of these issues with an Author's Saving Throw.

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• When the game was first announced, quite a few Vocaloid fans were turned off by the inclusion of the original characters, feeling they took the spotlight away from the Vocaloid cast and labeled the game as a BanG Dream! Expy with VOCALOID and Virtual Singers being used as a marketing ploy. However, once the game came out, the characters' storylines and the genuine attention to the experiences of being a VOCALOID fan (especially with characters like Ichika) as well as the different roles the Virtual Singers themselves played won some of the initial detractors over. That said, the Original Generation taking up a disproportionate amount of screentime ended up being a problem that's been constantly addressed by Word of God regardless.
• Initially the fanbase was disappointed that Vocal tickets for songs are hard to get aside from leveling Character Ranks. Starting from 'Period of Nocturne', a Vocal Ticket Exchange Ticket item was added to the event store.
• The 1.6.0 Update revamped the Challenge LIVE rewards, now with a stamp progression that gives 20 crystals per day and after playing consecutively for 7 days, a choice of 100 crystals or 20 to 100 of rare materials needed to raise your cards or buy outfits.
• The "Secret Distance" event introduced an increase to the amount of Crystals and Live Boost items obtainable from the event shop, which carried over to all future events.
• It's speculated that Len's sudden appearance in MORE MORE JUMP!'s Stage Sekai during the event Happy Lovely Everyday! might be a result of the fandom complaints of unfair treatment born from theories that the male Virtual Singers could or would not appear in Sekai born from the feelings of female unit members. Some validity was added to this when Word of God went on to reassure the player base that Len and KAITO would appear in all Sekai in a Project Sekai FAQ released some time after the aforementioned event went live.
• Project Message vol. 10 addressed some grievances the fans expressed such as Luka, MEIKO and KAITO significantly lacking song implementations in the game whether it be SEKAI versions or original songs in comparison to Miku, Len, and Rin. Word of God explained that their lack of songs was due to a delay and that they planned to implement one song for each character by the time of the game's 1.5 anniversary. They also plan to have at least two songs sung by each Virtual Singer per year, with one being the SEKAI version and the other the Virtual Singer version. Whether this solves the sound balance issue depends on the person.
• They also addressed the lack of Virtual Singer Another Vocals compared to the original characters as being due to tight production times leading to delays. To rectify this, they plan to strengthen their production system and request the help of Vocaloid producers to quicken the pace of Another Vocals and Virtual Singer versions after the game's 1.5 anniversary to match that of the original characters'.
• Inconsistent writing in stories was similarly addressed by Word of God after frequent complaints, with Word of God offering the solution of hiring staff to check the text to make sure it's consistent with previous events.
• The game's 1.5 anniversary released the first ever event that is Virtual Singer focused since game launch, with the event Gacha featuring four out of six of the Virtual Singers (Miku, Len, Luka, KAITO) as limited 4*'s and the shop cards beings MEIKO and Rin. This comes after the long-held complaints of how Out of Focus the Virtual Singers are compared to the Original Generation, despite the game being advertised as being Vocaloid-based. It's unknown if this event was for only for a special occasion, and thusly only a one-time thing, or whether there will be other ones like it, but fans were pleased about the Virtual Singers getting actual focus outside of their card side stories for once nonetheless.
• The current slated plan is for COLORFUL STAGE! to catch up to Project SEKAI by Summer 2022. This is accomplished by releasing songs much sooner, giving events shorter time frames, reducing the time gap between events, and occasionally shuffling around events (even though they are intended to be viewed in release order). This plan shifted later down the line to being exactly 1 year behind JP by Summer 2022.
• The ridiculous amount of Spotlight-Stealing Squad in regards to 3DMVs eventually became a topic on the Project Message blog, where due to logistical issues with commissioned songs and a strong desire to respect the original Virtual Singer used in the song in most cases (such exceptions including "BURIKI NO DANCE", "Ifuudoudou" and songs originally produced in non-Piapro software), characters like KAITO, Luka, and MEIKO have had extremely few 3DMV starring roles. The dev team's plan, in this case, is to feature the VIRTUAL SINGERS in 3-4 3DMV's for newly written songs by March of 2023. However, they expect that fixing the balance with SEKAI versions of songs will take longer to solve due to the desire to "respect" the original image of the song, though they are considering adding new SEKAI versions of songs featuring a different Virtual Singer, such as "Roki", after strongly considering which character fits the image of the song. Once again, whether this fixes the issue for fans has yet to be seen, as some reacted to this news rather negatively due to the implication that the imbalance for SEKAI versions will be perpetuated.
• Later Leo/need commissioned songs, including "Tera Tera" and "Voices", started giving the center character more lines, possibly in response to complaints about Ichika hogging most of the song due to her "lead singer" position.
  • Also applies to the other Virtual Singers as of "Ryuusei no Pulse", as Miku is now less likely to take a focus Virtual Singers spot in an event song.
• For fans that worried that the members of the cast would continue to repeat the same year indefinitely without making progress in their storylines and lives, it was revealed during the Second Anniversary live stream that everyone in the units would move up a grade during the game's Third Anniversary, essentially following the same story progression formula as BanG Dream! Girls Band Party! and at a similar pace to them.

• Wondershow's 2nd Anniversary live stream addressed complaints about the amount of 2DMV's BAD DOGS have gotten compared to Vivid's. While they don't give a direct answer as to the reason this is, instead chalking it up to "adult reasons", they promised that Vivids will get at least one 2DMV before the end of 2022 and that they're gradually working to resolve the issue.
• Following the backlash to Revival my Dream not making it into the EN server, the COLORFUL STAGE developers announced that they have no plans to remove any future events at the moment.
• As mentioned above, the second-anniversary live stream announced that the characters would be "promoted" during the game's third anniversary. This announcement was met with equal measures of joy, confusion, fear, anger, and speculation, as fans assumed it meant that a new cast of characters would be introduced to fill in the gaps left by the character moving up a grade. In October 2022's live stream, however, after being asked about new characters, Kondo cleared this up, saying that while they do plan to introduce new characters eventually to make getting into the game easier for new players and to keep the world from getting "stale" after running for too long, it won't be for a long while, as they still have stories that they want to tell with the current cast as the focus. While some fans rejoiced at this answer or understood while they came to this conclusion, it wasn't a "saving throw" for others, who were disappointed.

YMMV/Puyo Puyo

• Author's Saving Throw:
  • Shin Madou Monogatari was allegedly a sizeable base-breaker in its heyday, which is almost certainly the reason why the plot points from Arle no Bouken and Pocket Puyo Puyo~n that would have related to the timeline were dropped in development. The former was even accounted for as an "unreleased" story on the timeline, making the intentions obvious.
  • BOX can be seen as an attempt to Win Back the Crowd after producing the controversial Yo~n and questionable spin-offs. Not only does it contain arcade faithful ports of of the first two arcade games, but it also contains a surprisingly extensive Quest Mode and a special Rally Mode where you can potentially face any opponent with any rule between the first arcade game and Yo~n. Though it was in vain since it would be the last Puyo Puyo game involving Compile, and also one of the last games Compile produced in general.
  • Sega's Retool could be considered an attempt to breathe new life into the series following Compile's flooding of the market.
  • There's a minor example in the changes to Fever mode in 20th Anniversary, which involved not only returning to the ruleset version used in the first two Fever games, but also made chaining power in Fever weaker, causing an Unstable Equilibrium.
  • Big Bang mode from Puyo Puyo Tetris can be considered an improved version of 15th and 20th's Endless Fever modes, as matches become significantly shorter — the life bar is, at worst, slowly taking damage if players don't create the same amount of nuisance. Compare it with Endless Fever narrowing down to waiting for one player failing to match puyos, which can take a very long time given the prebuilt Fever chains.
  • Tsu, often considered the most iconic entry in the series, has gradually been getting some Western exposure. The Genesis/Megadrive version was released at last on both the American and European Wii Virtual Console, later on the original Arcade version was released as part of Sega 3D Classics Collection for the 3DS and as part of the SEGA AGES line on the Nintendo Switch, and the Super Famicom version was made available as part of the Nintendo Switch Online's SNES game service as its first import title. None of them were altered from the Japanese versions (if to a fault, since the game's text is left untranslated).
  • For Sonic Mania, there's a partial remake of Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine... as one of the bosses, and it's been adored by the Sonic fanbase for its originality and gameplay.
  • Puyo Puyo Champions likewise likewise addresses several issues fans had with Puyo Puyo Tetris and prior games:
    • Prior to the release of Puyo Puyo Champions, the game was commonly criticized for its lacking content compared to past games, causing people to express reluctance to purchase it for its original 1999 yen asking price. SEGA, likely in response to this criticism, heavily discounted the game at launch till late November to only 500 yen. The much more cheap price has won back several people that were on the fence when the game was initially announced. The Western releases have a retail price of 9.99 USD, which is still better than the initial price in Japan.
    • One of the most common complaints from newcomers is the rather high skill floor, particularly compared to Tetris. While Puyo Puyo Tetris does offer a tutorial, it only teaches basic fundamentals and a few simple patterns, with no way to bridge the gap between "I know the basics" and "I can play competitively". Champions introduced the Lesson Mode update with a far more extensive tutorial to remedy this.
    • Another winning point for Champions coming to the West is that Western players haven't gotten a pure Puyo game in a while, particularly one that uses the much-vaunted Tsu rules and has netplay; Puyo Tetris lacks segregated rankings for the different play styles and modes, forcing Puyo players to bear the imbalance that comes with inevitably fighting Tetris players online unless they use community-run lobbies that agree not to use Tetris. Champions remedies this issue by being strictly a Puyo game with the two most commonly-used rulesets in competitive play.
    • When Puyo Puyo Tetris's PC version was released, it included the option to play using Japanese voices while keeping the rest of the game in English. While this by itself already pleased people who weren't satisfied with the English dub, there was some disappointment at the fact the console versions were not updated to include this dual audio option as well. This issue is remedied with the release of Champions, which has dual audio in all English versions.
    • The August 26th update brought upon a couple of much-welcome features: Spectator Mode, making online tournaments viable; and color-blind settings, which is incredibly vital to a color-matching game. It also includes two new characters, Rafisol and Paprisu, breaking the 24-character cap for the first time in the series (if we don't count the Skill Battle characters in Chronicle).

Trivia/Fuuka

• Author's Saving Throw: Averting Fuuka's infamous death by truck in the anime was intended to be one. Whether it works or not is a different subject of debate.