YMMV / GameFAQs

• Broken Base:
  • Draven from League of Legends beating Link in the 2013 Character Battle was either a breath of fresh air or (supposedly) unfair rigging that prevented Link from rightfully holding the position. The suspicious site outage midway through the poll didn't help matters.
  • Undertale beating many popular games including The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in the 2015 Best. Game. Ever. contest thanks to Tumblr and Reddit rallies. It was either a breath of fresh air or unfair rigging via rallies.
• It's Popular, Now It Sucks!:
  • The Legend of Zelda is infamous for being the most popular game series on the site by a huge margin. Needless to say, this annoys those who are sick of Link winning every character popularity tournament, a Zelda game winning "Best Game of X" tournaments, etc., making such contests/tourneys extremely predictable. This reached its peak when The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask won a "Best Game of the Decade" award; while Majora's Mask is considered a very good game, its reviews don't quite hold up to many other games released during the '00s despite common fan opinions of its rivaling Ocarina of Time as the best game in the series.
  • Square Enix and Final Fantasy in particular earn this reputation. It helps that RPGs are a Guide Dang It! genre per design, and Final Fantasy VII provides both a Trope Codifier guide and most of the other contest winners (Cloud in one, Sephiroth in a villains contest, FF7 itself in the first iteration of "Best. Game. Ever."). Square's Chrono Trigger suffers from this to a lesser extent; while it's a relatively more obscure game and falls short of Zelda and Final Fantasy in contests, it still performs extraordinarily well and is treated as a Sacred Cow on the site, with Crono often running neck-and-neck with Mario in the Character Battles.
  • Bishōnen characters suffer from this to an extent. Zelda's protagonist Link and FF7's hero and villain Cloud and Sephiroth, collectively known as "Clinkeroth", are all bishonen characters lambasted for being the three best-performing characters in the site's character battles. However, while Zelda generally performs marginally better than Final Fantasy in contests, its antagonist Ganondorf, who is a manly and rugged older man, doesn't achieve the same level of success; he lost to Sephiroth in the aforementioned villains contest, and doesn't even crack the Top 10 in most cases.
  • Ever since Undertale began winning brackets in the 2015 "Best. Game. Ever." contest, it brought complete ire to many, as it beat Super Mario World and several other games that are considered Sacred Cows. It got to the point where it was mentioned by Kotaku. One of the follow-up polls had GameFAQs ask users if they were planning to buy Undertale since it won. The "No, and I refuse to ever buy it purely out of spite" choice came in second place with 24.71%.
  • Polls in general, contest-related and otherwise, are mocked by some users for having results that skew very heavily towards favoring games that were released in The '90s or the Turn of the Millennium, not counting joke votes and rallies.
  • Due to Broken Base and Fandom Rivalry, certain characters are despised on the Super Smash Bros. boards once they are added to the roster. Some examples includes Princess Daisy from the Super Mario Bros. series and Lucina from Fire Emblem: Awakening.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Saxon = Joke Account is probably the longest running. It started out on the Pro Wrestling: WWE board, where Saxon posted often-ridiculous predictions about upcoming events while claiming to be a WWE insider.^note A popular rumor was that the account actually belonged to Stevie Richards. These predictions almost invariably being wrong led to every post getting multiple "Saxon = Joke Account" replies. And the meme exploded when a "Saxon = Joke Account" sign was held up by a fan at Survivor Series 2003 and was seen on camera multiple times. When Saxon shifted from Pro Wrestling to Politics as his primary board, his posting style pretty much remained the same and thanks to several people being regulars on both of those boards, the meme came to Politics with him. And resulted in trolls in general coming to be known as joke accounts.
  • Hot Skitty-on-Wailord Action originated here.
  • The character battles are a big reason for the L block's popularity.
  • "X needs an ice cream monster" has become a bit of a catchphrase on the 3DS and Wii U boards, due to a rather infamous anti-Nintendo poster known for, among other things, his blind, seething hatred of Vanillish.
  • "Tails are beautiful" due to a strange gimmick poster on the Super Smash Bros. boards.
  • [This post was deleted at the request of a moderator or administrator] has become a common joke to put at the end of a post that ends abruptly (normally one that complains about the moderation or claims the poster is secretly evil/a troll/banned/etc.).
  • "Close your account" is a common response to Troll topics.
  • "Alvin is a mistake".^ExplanationThis originated from a series on the Smash Bros. boards where a poster created his own dream roster, which including many of his original characters, the first being Alvin.
  • "Sakurai puts a gun to your head" ^ExplanationOn the Smash Bros. boards, this has become a common format for "pick a fighter" threads, likely to decrease the number of responses saying "neither." Parodies of the format have also become very common.
• Once Original, Now Common: Back when the site came around in 1995, it was among the most revolutionary things to happen to gaming period. Prior to this site, you either needed to purchase a guide, consult an 800 number, have a subscription to a magazine, or know someone who studied the living heck out of a game if you wanted any kind of information. Similarly, prior to Reddit and social media like Tumblr, it was also one of the few ways you could connect with any fans or other players of a game outside of official or fan forums. Some of these walkthroughs were even better than most official guides, which had a tendency to be poorly constructed and/or based off of betas. These days, however, it is easier to look up a specific part on YouTube, a Reddit, or even a wiki - not to mention Steam offering access to community written guides directly connected to the game itself. The guides on those other, newer websites can also embed images and videos to better explain what to do, whereas GameFAQs remains text-only. As a result, the actual FAQ section of GameFAQs seems rather barren for more recent titles, with fewer people finding it worth the time to write a guide.

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