YMMV / Fortune Street

• Fridge Brilliance: Luigi seems uncharacteristically bold and confident in the Wii game. But then, not even he could be scared of anything in a simple board game, and he's sometimes portrayed as being good with money and gambling. (His intro quote for The Ghost Ship has him reacting as expected, showing that his cowardice hasn't been forgotten.)
• Game-Breaker:
  • Assuming you can get a long enough chain of shops, you can make shops with goods worth more than the average win condition!
  • The Dominating computer style (Highly-strung + Zealot) gives you a high chance of victory.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Fortune Street is considered the weakest entry of the series in Japan, but was very well-received overseas. It helps that it happened to be the first, and so far only, entry released outside Japan, meaning those overseas didn’t have anything to compare it to unlike Japanese players.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • If you build a tax office in the Wii game, Yoshi, the same character who would later gain a joke reputation on the internet as a serial tax evader, may request if he can be tax-exempt when you do if he's in play. Note that Yoshi is the only character who does this.
  • Despite featuring characters from Dragon Quest, Super Mario Bros. and Final Fantasy, the latter two franchises never appeared in the same installment as one another. Years later, all three franchises appeared alongside each other in another crossover.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Many players are drawn to Fortune Street simply because it features Mario characters talking in full sentences.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Put it in H/8!" when rolling a 7 or 8, courtesy of The Runaway Guys and how the 7 especially looks like an H on the die.
  • "A tax office, eh? That's a nice, legal way to STEAL our money, Joof!"◊ This line from Waluigi was popularized by PeanutButterGamer and Space Hamster's PB & Jeff series, where Waluigi says it during a playthrough on the Isle Delfino board.
• Unexpected Character: The final unlockable character in the Wii version is Patty, the woman who helps you organize your party in Dragon Quest IX. It makes sense in hindsight; who would be more skilled than her at business-related matters?
• Values Dissonance: The series encourages insider trading as a viable strategy. In real life, insider trading is illegal in many countries (including Japan, where the series originated ^note although the Japanese policy against it is comparatively lax).
• Vindicated by History: Initial reviews of Fortune Street were pretty middling, even in the West, where it was the first and only installment released over there. However, more recent opinions on it are very positive, between the fun gameplay of the game and the surprisingly interesting character dialogue—no doubt due to receiving a Colbert Bump from popular lets players. Especially compared to its contemporaries in the party game genre, Fortune Street was able to stand the test of time.

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