Alternate Character Interpretation: The Grendels are a common target, often being seen as Ugly Cute and misunderstood. Often, they're manually bred or hand raised to be non-aggressive in order to match this portrayal.
The first instance was during the Usenet days, where there were many, many totally civil debates about whether torturing or neglecting Norns, considering the sophistication of their genomes, was cruel.
Upon details of 4/Online being revealed, the altered Norn designs, along with the Shee being revealed to be Rubber-Forehead Aliens, drew a lot of flak.
In all the games, it was a pretty common point of contention whether or not Grendels were Always Chaotic Evil and deserved every second of the most torturous, sadistic deaths one could possibly dish out, or misunderstoodWoobies who are too often a victim. To be fair, wild Grendels in Creatures 3 gladly killed norns for fun and fell into the former, while Grendels in the first two games — along with custom-engineered genetic lines in all games — could easily be integrated into Norn populations without much risk.
Cult Classic: Probably one of the biggest in all of gaming. The series remains mostly unknown, but its fanbase is thriving and making mods even after many years without a new game; fans even worked to reverse-engineer and recreate the online warp from DS.
Designated Hero: The Shee. The Shee. They jumped ship and abandoned their helpless creations to let them rot to near-extinction at the first sign of danger... twice.
Good Bad Bugs: As stated on that page, "wall-bonking" is bad but classic. Let us not forget, also, the first game's flying lemons.
The statue in Creatures 2 is rather impressive by itself. It's huge, depicts a Shee sitting on a throne, looks directly at the camera and has white jewels in place of the eyes, giving it an Empty Eyes effect. The scariest part comes when a creature approaches the statue. Its jewel eyes will turn purple, it'll play an ominous sound and will inflict fear upon the creature. The creature can literally die of fear if it stays too long near the statue.
The Cruel and Unusual Death of falling into the piranha pit in 3; it's supposed to be cartoony, with a Big Ball of Violence to cover things up, but the shredding noises and the fact that your fuzzy Norn (or Grendel, or Ettin) is being eaten and torn apart alive would make anyone cringe.
Porting Disaster: The PS1 ports infamously removed the series' trademark virtual genetics, making the games little more than bog-standard virtual pets.
Scrappy Mechanic: The power ups in C2 and C3/Docking Station, which unlock various useful tools and abilities, can only be activated by a creature and are scattered around the map, requiring sometimes extensive creature wrangling in areas containing dangerous plants to get. Creatures Labs eventually released a tool to activate them via script in an add-on for C2, and several third party mods exist to easily activate them in C3/DS.
Surprise Difficulty: One reason the series remains rather obscure. They have a lot of complicated information and deep gameplay for pet simulators; trying to wrap your head around everything going on and how to do things right can be too much for some people who just wanted to care for cute aliens.
Creatures Online as a whole received a lot of bile for changing many things, most notably for looking much more like a generic app game than any of the original trilogy.
◊ for Creatures Online drew some flak from fans for being less cartoony than the previous games.
