YMMV / Castle Crashers

• Alternate Character Interpretation: The game seems to take place in the medieval times with some anarchonistic elements. As such, the game could be about a group of larpers going through an intense role-playing session, and the crazier elements such as the industrial castle and aliens are just the result of someone's imagination, or the GM opting to spice things up with a curveball or two.
• Awesome Music: Now has its own page.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The painter boss's entire existence as a character.
• Catharsis Factor: On Insane Mode's version of Desert, your final challenge is essentially what comes right before the alien ships that spawn aliens, provided you bring Hawkster with you. Why? Because the aliens will still die in one hit, which will cause Hawkster to bring you a lot of fruit, ensuring you will never die from that point on as long as you don't get overrun by the aliens. It's very rewarding considering how arduous the rest of the level is on Insane Mode.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Beefy enemies fall under this. They don't flinch from normal hits, they do tons of damage, they throw you everywhere, and they almost always appear with normal enemies. Also, Fire Demons. Nigh-immune to fire damage, lots of HP, and they love to spam magic.
  • The Stove Faces of Full Moon also count, as they're the strongest physical-fighting enemies in the game, and they come out en masse. Taken to extremes with beefy Stove Faces...
  • Desert beetles as well, especially when they show up in groups. Their burrowing attack is hard to dodge, blocking it doesn't always work, getting hit by it knocks you down, and it deals a lot more damage if you're already knocked down.
  • All of the above doubly applies to most enemies in the game under Insane Difficulty, especially if you're going at it alone.
• Fan Nickname: "Assfaces" or "assholes" for the Thieves and Icekimos due to their face obscuring hoods seemingly imploding.
• Funny Moments:
  • Some of the death animations for enemies can be quite funny, including the large beetles in the desert raising white flags as they sink, and the fish soldiers in the Flooded Temple turning into green steak on a plate.
  • The Painter boss fight. You face off against against a figure with a paint box for its head who speaks in a robotic voice and paints bizarre drawings of creatures that fight against you and puff into colored smoke if you touch them. It's as weird as it sounds.
  • The Stinger of the game: you finally get to kiss the Orange Princess, only for it to be revealed that it was a clown in disguise! Cue some wacky animation with this playing in the background.
• Game-Breaker: The Industrialist and the Fencer. Their splash attack is what is referred to as the "boss killer".
  • Hawkster. The game tells you he attacks enemies when they're knocked down. What it doesn't tell you is that he also has a chance to lift fruit off of dying enemies. Like, constantly. Makes Insane Mode way easier.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Literal bats, scorpions in the desert, and the Thieves all fit this trope. Stupid arrows.
    • A word of advice: they can view you in the same way, if you have a high enough speed stat.
  • Slimes on Insane. They take a very long time to kill, can be hard to hit, and hardly deal any damage, but can jump on you and prevent you from moving. Both the Insane and Normal variants can screw up the synchronization of an internet game when there's lag involved.
• Goddamned Boss:
  • The Corn Boss, which tends to go underground very often when low on health, annoying many players who fought him.
  • The Painter qualifies as well. All it does is endlessly summon suicide bombers far more durable than can be considered reasonable, then retreat in it's first phase, making it hard for even those who made a archer or mage build to deal with. If you decided to make a build that didn't level up magic or agility, your only option for beating him is to tank the hits and hit him when he comes down, or desperately plink away at the health bars with the tip of your weapon. Thankfully, his second phase is much easier.
  • The Ice King: "Get Back Here!" Boss + Ice Physics = "Whoever designed this boss should die!"
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • The boomerang glitch lets you grind levels way faster than with standard gameplay.
  • Removed with a patch, though still possible on unpatched versions.
  • If you stand in a certain spot when fighting Pipistrello, he never stops attacking you, which means he never takes flight or summons minions, and his attack is slow and blockable which lets the player get in a lot of hits. Abusing this is generally accepted as the only way to beat him solo on Insane.
• Harsher in Hindsight: There's a good chance the Orange Princess was alive throughout the game, though her face was obscured through coincidence. One of the pictures in the Painter's room has a picture of an orange dress with a knife/sword in it. This makes it possible that Tricky killed her late into the game and stole her clothes. This makes the scene where she cries in the Industrial Castle even worse, as it is one of the last times you see her. There's always the idea that, even though the Evil Wizard didn't kill her, he did intend to. Only makes it less dark by a small bit.
• I Am Not Shazam: Contrary to some players calling them as such, the four main knights are not called the Castle Crashers, and they're never referred to as such in the game or promotional materials. They're just simply called knights, especially when you can later unlock characters that are not knights.
• Polished Port:
  • The PC port, both the first time release (now isn't available anymore) and the remastered, is very well optimized and runs well even in older or cheaper computers, but the original, which now isn't available anymore, has some issues as detailed below.
  • The console remasters also have little to complain about. The remaster improves the graphics, runs well, tweaks/buffs some item stats to match the PC version and has all DLC. Even the price is low, only about 15$.
• Porting Disaster:
  • A very minor example, but despite the optimization, the first time release of the PC version has no keyboard button prompt, and you can't play two player by using controller and keyboard, forcing every hotseat player to use XBOX 360 (or compatible) gamepad.
  • The Remastered version not only rectify the issue by finally having keyboard prompts shown, but also allows non Xinput (XBOX 360) compatible gamepads to play the game. The Remastered version has all but replaced the first time release version.
• Squick: The idea of the King being playable sounds fine until one realizes it's possible for him to kiss the Princesses. Even if it's unclear whether he's their biological father or simply their caretakers, the idea of an old man kissing what appear to be some young women can be very off-putting for many players. Could also be Deliberate Values Dissonance given the game's medieval setting.
• Tear Jerker:
  • One point during the "Barbarian War" level has one NPC Grey Knight performing CPR on another.
  • The first boss fight against the Cyclops has him mourning the Conehead Groom's death, before attacking you in a tearful rage. Villainous as he is, you still killed his beloved son.
• That One Achievement: The Final Countdown, which requires surviving the "Back Off Barbarian" minigame (present only in Remastered versions of the game, where it replaces "All You Can Quaff" from the original) until at least 2 minutes and 30 seconds have passed. The enemies get very aggressive as time goes on, and controlling your character in this mode is surprisingly difficult.
• That One Boss:
  • The Catfish. While it may not be hard to avoid its attacks, every other boss lets you bring your friends back if they go down. It doesn't help that the boss is heavily armored unless it is momentarily stunned by the King's cannon, but the cannon has very precise and finicky aim.
  • The Necromancer. The boss himself is a bit tedious to beat, but before you fight him, he summons two huge hordes of random minions to ruin your day. Not only do they move very quickly around the room, but they are all able to spam you with magical attacks. Because there is so much happening on the screen at once, it is entirely possible to lose track of your own character. Oh, and the second wave includes three beefy enemies. Hope you brought enough potions...
  • The Troll boss becomes this in Insane Mode by the virtue of being both a Flunky Boss and a Damage-Sponge Boss. Not only is its health increased from 350 to 10500, its minions, whose health and damage are also drastically increased, can also gang up on you and stunlock you over and over again, leaving you with little to no breathing space. Unless you have some ranged magic attacks or good crowd control tactics to deal with its minions, the Troll can be a very difficult boss to defeat.
• That One Level: A few.
  • Tall Grass Field's only enemies are bears, which have annoying tornado magic, deal a lot of damage, and have quite a bit of health.
  • Lava World is one of the game's longest levels, having a lot of tough enemies and two bosses. The sock puppet dragon fight is buggy and has a lot to keep track of at once; you have to avoid the enemies, the bouncing boulder, the dragon's fire, and hit its chin.
  • Desert is long and has some very obnoxious enemies. The rolling beetles can go underground and attack you, and you can't hurt them while they're doing it. The enemies in the sinkholes that spit poison at you don't help. And neither do the Saracens later on, who have a sandstorm attack that works like the Bears' tornado attack.
    • All of these are quite literally taken up to eleven on Insane Mode, as there's very little room for error, especially when you have to fight multiple beetles and/or Mooks with how much damage they do and how the former essentially forces you to focus on either them or the mooks while avoiding the other. The kicker is that even if you bring Hawkster with you, the mooks are the only enemies that can have fruit picked up from them, which gives you very little opportunities to heal without using your potions. All of these make Desert one of the most dreaded levels in all of Insane Mode.
  • Full Moon is loaded with Stove Faces, which are some of the strongest enemies in the game; high health, high attack, and even some beefy ones as well!
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Despite the girly appearance and attacks, Tom Fulp confirmed that the Pink Knight is male.

---