YMMV / Disney Dreamlight Valley

• Adorkable: Being a game full of Disney characters, nearly every character qualifies, though Goofy, Anna, Ariel, Mirabel, and Rapunzel in particular stand out.
• Annoying Video Game Helper: Gardening companions are a double-edged sword. While they're arguably the most useful companions in the game due to the number of additional crops they can harvest, they have a tendency to get in the way of players while they're working, which can cause players to miss out on golden harvests. The April 2023 update seems to have improved things, though.
• Awesome Moments: The home stretch of Vanellope's final quest is essentially a handcrafted dungeon run. You're smashing down cardboard doors and monsters with your pickaxe, the monsters actually have loot drops, and a side path even has a couple fire monsters that can only be defeated with the watering can. Young she may be, but Vanellope already has potential to be a great game designer or dungeon master.
• Awesome Music: It's a Disney game, with instrumental versions of their many classic songs playing in the background to enhance the Sweet Dreams Fuel.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • As soon as people started realizing that pumpkins have the greatest return on investment they started dedicating every possible space into farming land for pumpkins and ignoring every other activity, to the point people have started jokingly referring to the game as a "Pumpkin Farm Simulator", including the dev team. By the end of 2022, more than 500 million pumpkins were harvested by players.
  • Berry Salads are the most popular meal to make for energy, due to their only required ingredients being very common and easy to find (one blueberry, one raspberry and one gooseberry) and their extremely high energy gain (about 2000 energy, which is comparable to the 5-star meals).
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • People who play Dreamlight Valley also tend to be Animal Crossing players due to both games being life sims.
  • There's also a good deal of overlap with the Kingdom Hearts fanbase since both games feature crossovers with Disney characters and similarities between the Forgetting and the Heartless attacks.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Of all the roles you can assign your villagers, the Gardener role is the most useful by far. Whenever you harvest a vegetable and you're paired with a Gardener, they have a chance of providing an additional vegetable, and the chance increases depending on both the villager's level and how many other villagers have the Gardener role. With enough Gardeners, you can essentially harvest twice as many vegetables as you normally should, making earning money and food for recipes a complete cakewalk.
  • As for profitable items, there's pumpkin puffs (pumpkin + cheese + egg). Even with you having to buy eggs and cheese from Remy's (and most likely charcoal from Kristoff), it's still the most profitable item you can quickly get a huge stockpile of. It is the way to get the most profit out of every pumpkin. A couple hundred can sell for a couple hundred thousand. The only downside is how tedious it can get to cook them all one at a time, plus pumpkins only being sold in the Forgotten Lands. The ancient cookers made from Timebending on Eternity Isle does help, but not only do you have to buy the A Rift in Time expansion to even get the ability to Timebend, it also costs Mist to use the cooker.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • The various bridges being blocked off by giant mushrooms, bones, or other barricades is supposed to limit where you can go in any given area until you complete a sidequest associated with it... or you can just revive the area's wishing well and relocate it past the barricades using the game's furniture arranger, then warp back to the main one in the valley's plaza (or just save and quit the game entirely). It's difficult to know whether this was intentional or not.
  • During the game's early launch, the characters' sitting animations at Chez Remy's could sometimes become glitched and result in characters sitting inside tables, sitting at weird angles, or laying flat on or inside the floor, resulting in peculiar scenes running the gamut from hilariously weird-looking◊ to downright morbid.
  • In a more minor yet amusing example, when the second content update was released, the game added boba teas… that had massive oversized cup models.◊ In fact, when Gameloft released a hotfix that fixed the size of the cups to more manageable sizes, quite a few players expressed disappointment at the cups shrinking back down to "normal" size and stated they wanted their big, gallon-sized boba tea cups back.
  • A certain hammock, despite being labeled as a red hammock, would change color from red to blue depending on how close the player was to it. Jokes about Flora and Merryweather fighting over making things pink or blue again ensued.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • I swear if Scrooge keeps having that lamp... ^ExplanationScrooge's selection is a bit limited in the early access and fans have noted that the Blue Pearly Table Lamp in particular shows up a lot.
  • L couches.^ExplanationScrooge has a large variety of L-shaped couches for sale in his shop, showing up with around the same frequency as the previously mentioned Blue Pearly Table Lamp, resulting in players frequently getting one or more L couches per shop reset.
  • Donald Duck's tantrums have led to memes about sending him to anger management classes. Gameloft even acknowledged how frequent his tantrums were and supposedly reduced them in the October 2022 update. (They instead got shorter but more frequent.)
• The Scrappy: While the characters themselves are still liked well enough outside of the context of DDLV, many players have expressed a dislike for Mother Gothel and Maui's respective portrayals in the game. Mother Gothel for being the same condescending and passive-aggressive villainess she was in Tangled (only with her rotten attitude now generally directed at the player instead of Rapunzel) and Maui's Character Exaggeration and Aesop Amnesia that caused his normally Awesome Ego to start coming off as genuinely obnoxious to some players (with his enormous size also causing him to get in the way of players at times). When an update enabled players to disable certain villagers from appearing in their villages, more than a few players stated that for them Gothel and Maui would be the first ones to go.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Stamina can be this. Most actions, like farming and fishing, cost stamina. There are two main ways of filling stamina. The first is returning to your house, which can take some time since sprinting only works if stamina is overflowing. The other is eating food, which, while effective, the crafting process only allows meals to be created one at a time, meaning it will take quite a bit to resupply. An update added the ability to regain stamina by sitting on furniture, but it refills slowly.
  • The time-gated nature of Stitch's unlock quest requires the player to wait ten days—with at least five days between the first two parts and another five days between the second and third—before he can be brought in. Though players can cheat the system by altering their clocks, this isn't recommended because doing so causes Game Breaking Bugs.
  • When a recipe has a flexible ingredient, the recipe autofill will select the cheapest ingredient available. This wasn't much of an issue until the unique festive fish were introduced. Because the festive fish have no monetary value, autofill will prioritize them. This meant many players hoping to keep them as mementos accidentally cooked them. This issue came up again in the 2023 Easter event, since the unique eggs can be used in place of the eggs Remy sells.
  • Once the Scramblecoin Quest in the Eternity Isle expansion is complete, characters will start gaining special balloons above their heads showing that they eagerly want to play the game with you and will follow you around to ask if you want to play. This bothered more than a few players who were either not interested in playing Scramblecoin at all or just didn't want their usual rounds in the game interrupted by characters constantly chasing after them. Thankfully, The Laugh Floor Update added the option of turning off Scramblecoin requests in the Settings menu (under Gameplay).
• Sweet Dreams Fuel: You get to live a mostly peaceful life in a magical valley where you can befriend your favorite Disney and Pixar characters, even the villains. And you don't have to worry about your tools breaking or using inventory unlike in Animal Crossing!
• That One Sidequest:
  • Many players have expressed frustration at Minnie Mouse's quest "Remembering Old Times", where she tasks you with collecting materials to rebuild the Valley's old clock tower. While most quests will require you to collect no more than 30 of a particular resource, this one requires 100 Stone, 100 Hardwood, 30 Iron Ingots, and 200 Clay. This was especially prevalent before Scar's arrival, as clay could only be obtained through digging random spots in the Glade of Trust, Sunlit Plateau, or Forgotten Lands until the Random Number God took pity on you and gave you a couple units. Thankfully, with Scar came the ability to destroy bones and obtain a lot of clay at once, and the third update added the ability for the bones to respawn. The game itself even acknowledges the mission's notoriety in a later mission with Minnie, where she sincerely apologizes for making you gather so much clay and even gives you some extra clay for your troubles.
  • Raising Ariel and Ursula's friendship level can be a pain in the ass due to both being water-based characters, which makes the players unable to abuse the "Hang Out" feature to raise their levels faster. In order to get both the level 10, the player will find themself in a loop of gifting them items, which takes some time. As well, both characters have a habit of teleporting to different bodies of water, which makes them more difficult to track down than the land-based characters even with the map feature. And worse off, Ursula needs to be at level 10 in order to unlock Eric, whose side quest is required to craft Ariel her Transformation Trinket, the trinket that grants her the ability to become a land-based character. While an update made getting Ursula to max friendship easier by adding her own land form, its hampered by the fact that it and the quest to unlock it is part of a Dream Bundle, thus locked behind a paywall (albeit, using Moonstones, which players can earn for free via blue chests and DreamSnaps).
  • Buzz’s four part alien search quest, due to bugs like one of the aliens spawning under the bed in Buzz’s camper where it can’t be found or just not showing up at all. The game developers had acknowledged this, and the May 2023 patch has largely fixed most of it.
  • Some of the rare critters are a bit cumbersome to tame due to their schedules (six hours on a specific day) not being conducive to those of the players (because of work, school, their sleeping schedules, etc.). In particular, the Red Fox and White Squirrel are widely regarded as the most difficult critters to unlock due to their schedules both being in the middle of the night or very early in the morning on a specific day (2am to 8am on Saturday mornings for the Red Fox, and 12am to 6am on Sunday mornings for the White Squirrel), a time when many players are asleep.
• Ugly Cute:
  • How did Gameloft manage to make the crocodiles from the Glade of Trust so freakin' adorable?!
  • Ditto the cobras in the deserts on Eternity Isle, which, despite being based on one of the most dangerous snakes in the world, look and act every bit as cuddly and precious as the other critters.
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • The characters' home realms are nice to look at and remain accessible after completion, but outside of the occasional quest requirement, there's little reason to return to them. There are no resources to collect nor areas where furniture can be placed.
    • Fixed with the Rift in Time Expansion. Timebending in the home realms can now net you Glimmer, an essential resource for crafting the fragment items at the timebending table.
  • Every day, each character will have three favorite items that you can gift them to level up your relationship with them. Once the relationship is maxed out, however, there's no further reward for fulfilling the requests, making the system useless.
• Unexpected Character:
  • Or rather "Unexpected Song". Not many people expected WALL•E's Leitmotif to be a version of "Put On Your Sunday Clothes" from Hello, Dolly!, which appears only in brief snippets in the original WALL•E movie. Especially considering the song is from a 20th Century Studios movie, which Disney has owned for even less time than they've owned Lucasfilm, Marvel, and The Muppets; all of which have yet to be integrated into the game.
  • Mother Gothel was a surprising inclusion. While a popular villain, fans didn't expect to see her get in due to her being a creepily realistic (compared to more fantastical, over-the-top villains like Scar, Ursula, or Gaston) Abusive Parent and Dreamlight Valley being a comparatively light-hearted game. Even more shockingly, Gothel made it into the game before Rapunzel (who wouldn't get added until the A Rift in Time expansion) or Flynn, the main protagonists of the movie.
  • Players were surprised when the highly-requested Mirabel Madrigal was announced to be added in the third content update, especially since she wasn't teased at all beforehand nor did Stephanie Beatriz's name show up in the voice cast portion of the credits prior to the "A Festival of Friendship" update.
  • While characters from Atlantis: The Lost Empire have yet to physically appear in the game, the recurring Atlantean background scenery in the game was a pleasant surprise to a lot of players due to the movie not usually being acknowledged in most Disney crossovers.
  • Oswald the Lucky Rabbit was probably not at the top of most peoples' predicted inclusions for the game, especially since the Disney company hadn't done very much with him in the 18 years between regaining the rights to him and his being added to Dreamlight Valley.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Reactions to the Forgetting part of the storyline, especially the Forgotten being depressed and the characters either not knowing how to help or deliberately making things worse, has gotten people wondering if the questline is something kids can handle. In response, the developers added a Content Warning in the July 2023 update.

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