YMMV / Game & Watch

• Ensemble Dark Horse: An unusual case of the main character getting this treatment. When the first three Gallery games were released, the updated versions of the games with Mario and friends were the main attraction. After Super Smash Bros. Melee, though, the Classic versions with Mr. Game & Watch got a lot more popular.
• Fridge Brilliance: Flat Zoners later being revealed to not have any sense of good or evil could be part of the reason why they're so dang careless.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Any game with "Chance Time". If you make it to 300 points without getting any misses, your points will be doubled until you do get a miss. This makes getting high scores in certain games fairly trivial.
  • In Oil Panic, you can get two kinds of misses but only three of one will end the game. For instance, if you fear you're about to get a third miss by causing a fire, you can dump oil outside and get a miss that way instead provided that you don't have two of those already.
  • In three other games, you can technically miss up to six times.
    • In Popeye, getting attacked by Bluto is a whole miss, but failing to catch food thrown by Olive is a half-miss.
    • In Mickey Mouse and Egg, eggs that fall when Minnie or the hen is watching count as a half-miss.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: For such an influential series, the fandom's pretty small, and this is usually the reason why, especially by modern standards.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The series of tones that play when misses are cleared. If you reach 300 points without a miss in some later games, the same sound plays to signify doubled point values until you get a miss.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Misses in Fire are represented by angels, implying that uncaught people did not survive the fall. The remakes changed this to the fallen person storming off in a huff with bandages as miss icons.
  • Fail to catch one of the skydivers in Parachute and he gets eaten by shark. The last segment in the sequence amplifies it with a close-up of his Oh, Crap! reaction.
  • Get too close to a tentacle in Octopus and your diver will be constricted until he disappears. For added horror, this is one of the rare games which use lives in place of misses. And unlike Fire, neither this nor Parachute were changed to be less grisly in the remakes.
• No Problem with Licensed Games: Snoopy Tennis and Popeye were very popular in their day, so it's a shame that they likely won't see a rerelease even if Gallery 5 ever comes along.
• Older Than They Think: While Mario Bros. is thought of as a spinoff of its arcade sibling, it's actually the older of the two by three months. Luigi's big break was helping his bro shelve bottles rather than pest control.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • In Game B of Parachute, some skydivers who fall on the rightmost path will get caught on a tree. When one is freed, he will drop faster to stay in line, forcing you to move all the way to the right to catch him.
  • A similar situation occurs in the widescreen version of Fire. In Game B, some people will jump from the third floor instead of the fourth, and they will fall faster to catch up with the rhythm of the game.
• Spiritual Sequel: Climber is basically a simpler sequel of Ice Climber.
• Values Dissonance: Nintendo did a lot of things here that they would probably never get away with now with the exception of rereleases.
  • Fire Attack features stereotypical Savage Indians as the antagonists, which is something that has become much less acceptable as time has gone by. Nintendo preemptively edited the feathers off of their heads in Game & Watch Gallery 4 to make them appear more like generic bandits. Later, when Nintendo tried to include an homage to the characters with one of Mr. Game & Watch's moves in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate they received complaints that it was racist, which prompted them to apologize and alter the move in a Day 1 patch for the game to match its Gallery 4 depiction.
  • In Oil Panic, one of the fire hazards is an ashtray with cigarette butts.
  • Mario's Bombs Away has Mario (yes, that Mario) fighting in The Vietnam War, with someone visibly smoking. This is available as an unlockable minigame in Gallery 4.

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