Dave the Diver / YMMV

Aluminum Christmas Trees:
- "Hot Pepper Tuna" sounds at first like it was just a fake rap song made specifically for the game to stick with the constant sushi theme that runs throughout it. But it's actually a real song made years before the game was made.
- Duff's favorite Anime, Stra Stella, is also real, though it is in a different medium; it is based off the now defunct mobile game "Master of Eternity", which was published by Mintrocket's parent company Nexon. Leahs is one of the starting units in that game, and the song that plays during Duff's Dream Sequence is the game's intro music.
Anvilicious: The Sea Blue subplot is very unsubtle in its messaging that smaller businesses and single divers don't contribute all that heavily to overfishing and harming sea life, but that large corporations do.
Awesome Bosses: Seriously, the boss fights in this otherwise peaceful and relaxing fishing simulator did not need to be this unbelievably high-octane and badass, but it is so great that they are. From the amazing 3D models and higher-quality animation to some pretty genuine Surprise Difficulty with some of them, each and every one is a treat to fight and defeating them all makes you wish the game had ten or twenty more.
Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
- In the middle of the story, for seemingly no reason, the player is forced into a dream Duff is having about being at a Virtual Celebrity concert which doubles as a Rhythm Game. The only reason this scene seems to transpire is so that there is any justification at all for unlocking the "Leahs RUN!" phone minigame, and it's literally never addressed again.
- Randomly in the Glacial Area, there's a chance for an event to trigger of a Bowhead Whale swimming past Dave. Normally this would seem to be an event keying the player in to look for a photo spot or a side quest, but no such thing happens, making it confusing as to why it even happens.
Common Knowledge: It's frequently claimed that the game is an indie game due to having a pixel-art artstyle, when it was made by a subsidiary of a massive Korean game publisher. Even the game's director has had to dissuade this misconception. This came to a head when the game was nominated for "Best Independent Game" at the 2023 Game Awards, leading to waves of confusion from fans.
Friendly Fandoms: There's a good overlap with fans of DREDGE, given both games' nature of trawling the ocean —in both contexts— for various types of fish^note to make profit to get upgrades to make a bigger profit, all the while trying to solve a mystery of the ocean they operate in. Both games also have contrasting tones, with Dave the Diver being much more lighthearted compared to DREDGE's Cosmic Horror Story. And then, a DREDGE crossover collaboration DLC was announced for the game, making the fandom connections even greater.
Demonic Spiders: For some, the Shortfin Mako can be this. Whilst most sharks tend to swim towards you slowly, making it easier to evade their charge attacks, the Mako swims just fast enough to catch up and damage you if it does so much as tap you. Unless you have an underwater scooter, it can be very tough to get away from. Not helped by the fact that unlike most other sharks, it has a tendency to keep pursuing you no matter how far you get away from it.
Goddamned Bats:
- Small hostile fish like Lionfish can be a nightmare. While they do measly damage, they're hard to hit due to their size and LOVE to give chase, which can make you take multiple hits before you get enough distance to harpoon them. If there's two or more, harpooning them is very risky cause one of them can attack you while you try to harpoon the other one, doing damage and making you drop the harpoon, which means the one you were just harpooning is free to contribute to the pain. Some of them, like Longspine Squirrelfish, move in schools; while one of them is nowhere near a threat, twenty of them can shred you into chum with the quickness. And since hey can stun you, they can straight-up get you killed when they attack you while you have something like a Longnose Sawshark on your tail.
- Tuna. Yes, friggin' tuna. Tuna travel in groups of three or more, are insanely fast AND hardy, and will plow into you like no one's business. Unless you have a gun that can paralyze them or put them to sleep, being able to take one of them down is most definitely a challenge.
Goddamned Boss: The Truck Hermit Crab can only be damaged by dropping the Exploding Barrels it digs up onto its truck shell — they don't explode on hitting the crab. Dave needs to pick up the barrels that only spawn after the boss hits the ground with its claw, swim above it at a reduced speed due to the barrel's weight, then drop it on the shell. What makes this an irritating prospect is that the boss' claw attacks either cover a huge area (especially the upward claw swipe) and/or cause debris to be flung up/rain down, and if any attacks hit Dave when he has a barrel, the barrel explodes, forcing you to pick up another. While you can stun the boss for a short while by shooting its eyes, the period is so short to the point where it'll likely resume its attacks just as you're trying to swim over its head. This all makes for a fight that isn't so difficult but can become very long.
Scrappy Mechanic: Serving cocktails. They're unquestionably the drink that takes the longest amount of time to prepare and requires a fair bit of precision depending on the mixture and the shape of the glass, meaning cocktail orders have a habit of slowing down your serving efficiency, especially since even employees with the Drink Serving ability can't prepare them, only Dave. This only gets worse if several people order cocktails at once, as it all but guarantees that somebody's going to get fed up and leave and deny you of that perfect 5 Artisan's Flames.
That One Achievement:
- "Leadership", which requires you to train an employee to Level 20. Not only will the game's story be long over before you can do such a thing, it costs hundreds of thousands of your hard-earned sushi money to do so, as the later employee training costs skyrocket exponentially. Hopefully you'll be able to get this one while doing other postgame activities alongside it.
- "God Of Lightning", earned for completing the deceptively simple task of killing a fish with Mjöllnir. The only problem with this is that Mjöllnir has a relatively low spawn rate and can spawn in several places around the Glacial Area (including inside the Glacial Caves), requiring you to either comb the map on every dive you make into the area or camp a specific spot over and over until you finally get the weapon.
That One Boss: A lot of players have trouble with Klaus the Great White Shark, to judge by Steam comments. He's big, fast, turns surprisingly quickly, and leaves little room to maneuver. He even sports a ranged whirlpool projectile attack that's initially easy to dodge, but when he Turns Red the whirlpools zigzag when they move, covering a deceptively wide area. While he's much easier with the Sniper Rifle, he is absolutely no pushover and probably the hardest of the Optional Bosses. Klaus used to be easily encountered as a possible first Optional Boss when you don't even realize that those exist and when your equipment is likely to be weak, but fortunately he now appears only after both the Truck Hermit Crab and Mantis Shrimp are defeated.
That One Sidequest:
- Completing Dave's Marinca collection by collecting every fish in the game is notorious for being this, as it means you have to seek out all the possible Photo Spots (some of which randomly appear in certain parts of the map) in addition to a number of particular Last Lousy Points, including the Ruby Seadragon^note, the Young Anomalocaris^note, several Shallows fish^note, etc. and on top of all this, it's capped off with a fight against the Superboss Lusca, who is about as if not more difficult than the hardest bosses in the game.
- Fully completing the Ecowatcher ranking requires you to collect 20 Bear Asses over thirty times, with some of the items you need to collect either very rarely spawning or being found in remote corners of the map.
Underused Game Mechanic: Tiger Sharks have a unique riposte attack you can perform on them by escaping their Grapple Move which does extremely high damage. The only other time this comes up in gameplay is during a single Press X to Not Die moment during the Giant Gadon battle, which is disappointing as it's a fun way of getting some high-risk damage in on dangerous targets if you're trying to kill them.

YMMV / Dave the Diver

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