YMMV / Gauntlet

• Awesome Music:
  • The Sega Genesis installment, Gauntlet 4, has a soundtrack scored by Hitoshi Sakimoto and Masaharu Iwata. Their involvement with the game also happens to be a very late moment of fan rejoicing with people discovering the game through emulation.
  • The Desecrated Temple, especially the N64 version.
  • The Castle Courtyard from Legends.
• Crazy Is Cool: The jester in Dark Legacy throws bombs for his ranged attacks, which is cool enough. But for melee attacks, he does cartwheels and even sends heavy objects dropping down from the sky on his enemies. His turbo attacks include "Sonic Boom" where he produces a pair of giant White Gloves to perform a Shockwave Clap, and "Hammer Time" where he slams a giant boxing glove with a mallet propelling the glove forward and wrecking any damageable targets in its path.
• Ending Aversion: 4 ends with a particularly cruel Morton's Fork where either the player takes the opportunity to become eternally young and is then turned into a dragon until the next person comes, or doesn't, and is directly called out for not doing so.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: As far as Dark Legacy is concerned, the Jester is very well liked by fans due to his personality as well as the examples in the above trope.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Sumner in Dark Legacy, who has max stats in all areas. Though the difficulty in unlocking him makes him largely a Bragging Rights Reward.
  • Whenever the Archer gains certain power-ups, all her arrow shots using Double Bow and BFG are imbued with that property. Now, give her BFG with a 5-way Shot and Super Shot and she'll be a one-woman siege machine who can kill bosses within seconds.
• Memetic Mutation: "Wizard Needs Food Badly".
  • "So-and-so has shot the food!"
  • Use MAGIC to kill DEATH!
  • Use keys to open doors and chests!
• Nightmare Fuel: Legends/Dark Legacy has quite a number of these compared to the rest of the series.
  • In the It's a Wonderful Failure Game Over cutscene, Sumner is frantically reading from his tome when suddenly, a wall of fire erupts from behind him and Skorne’s giant arm grabs Sumner and yanks him into the Desecrated Temple; all while he lets out a long terrified shriek.
  • The Dream World's aptly titled Nightmare level is pretty much the literal take on this.
  • The Shadow Wraith, the Dream World's boss, is this too.
  • Special mention goes to the Lich, who is the Guardian of the Forsaken Province and, if we're going in order of availability, the first boss. He breaks out of his tomb, unimpales his head from the shaft of the axe that was likely used to behead him, places it on his neck with icky bone-cracking noises, then grabs his axe and laughs. During the fight, he occasionally taunts the heroes by whispering "Come here..." in a sinister tone. The guy has exposed flesh and bone, and can spit out bloody chunks that spawn maggots. While the fight is easy (especially if you have the Book of Protection, and that's not even counting the levels you would have gained by the time you acquire it), this colossus is perhaps the most memorable boss in the game for this trope.
  • The Mausoleum contains coffins with living people inside. These people are screaming and pounding for dear life without stopping, and there's nothing you can do to help.
  • The Haunted Grounds theme between the dreadful piano notes and One-Woman Wail, and the creepy girl giggling sounds effects and later screaming...
    • Speaking of music, the slow, hopeless theme of the ghost Town is bad enough, but once you reach the tavern, a creepy, much more desperate piano tune begins to play when you step into the building.
• Obvious Beta: Seven Sorrows. All the touted new features were left on the cutting room floor.
• Spiritual Successor: According to Word of God, Gauntlet was the spiritual successor to Dandy.
  • Monolith Productions' Get Medieval.
  • Lilith the Necromancer is one for the Sorceress from Dark Legacy, as both are black, female spellcasters with white hair, use wands as a weapon, and have undead-summoning abilities (Lilith is a necromancer, while the Sorceress has a Limit Break that summons skeletons and hails from the zombie-infested Forsaken Province realm).
• Tough Act to Follow: Legends/Dark Legacy set the bar pretty high. Later games would often be compared unfavorably to them due to the former having more features such as new characters and power-ups.

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