YMMV / Goodbye Volcano High

• Adorkable: Naomi. An adorable, timid bookworm girl with poor public speaking skills, her awkward interactions with the other characters made her endearing to audiences. Boosting her popularity as the game progresses is the revelation that she's in love with Fang and is the secret admirer that's been helping Fang out throughout the game.
• Angst Aversion: A common criticism by the game's detractors. Since the game ends with the very heavy implication that everyone will die no matter what you do, why even bother?
• Applicability: The game's themes and tone are strongly reminiscent of growing up in a period of climate change and COVID-19, but the strong focus on a queer-majority cast also brings in mind queer teens about to leave school and enter a world that's hostile to them. 2023, the year that the game released, had seen a wave of anti-LGBT legislation across the United States.
• Award Snub: Both it and Venba were considered the most popular choices for the "Games for Impact" award at the 2023 Game Awards, but both lost to Tchia.
• Awesome Art: The hand-drawn background art is acclaimed, with its level of detail making it similar to those of popular anime. The developers have said one of the background artists previously worked on Your Name, and it shows.
• Awesome Music: One of the game's strongest aspects is its original soundtrack, composed by Dabu and performed by both musician Brigitte Naggar (of Common Holly) and Lachlan Watson (Fang's voice artist).
  • Constellations, the first track revealed for the game, is a dreamy, heartfelt, yet somber call to action for the listener to be honest about their feelings towards the people they love before time is up. According to Dabu, it was the first song finished for the game and sets the game's overall melancholy tone. An acoustic version, Constellations Unplugged, plays over the game's end credits.
  • Reunion, which was first revealed in the Story Trailer, and plays during episode 2 and the very end of episode 8, is regarded as one of the most memorable tracks.
• Breather Level: The "Legends & Lore" segments provide the player a break from the anxieties surrounding Fang's friendship drama and the asteroid panic. The first two sessions are lighthearted and humorous moments of escapism for both player and the characters. This stops being the case at the end of the second session, as Reed's anxieties about the asteroid start influencing the sessions, causing the story to take a Cerebus Syndrome turn.
• Broken Base: The narrative choice to have Fang's mother openly deadname and misgender them, with no options to censor or mute it, was controversial for the game's LGBT audience. While the developers have stated the reason for doing so was to reflect the realities that queer people in the real world struggle with, there are some that insist the point could have been made without revealing the deadname.
• Canon Fodder: The game leaves many loose ends open for fans to speculate on, including references to events from the characters' childhoods, various Noodle Incidents, characters that are mentioned but never seen (Reed's older brother Orson, Naomi and Trish's parents, etc.), and worldbuilding elements such as names of books, films, or television shows.
• Critical Dissonance: The game was well-liked by critics and its targeted LGBT audience; it has maintains a score of over 80 on MetaCritic, scored a 5/5 from Eurogamer, and received a number of awards and nominations, including at the 2023 Game Awards, the GLAAD Media Awards, and the BAFTA Games Awards. Meanwhile, reactions from general gamers were either mixed or negative, with some YouTube personalities ranking it as one of the worst games of 2023.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Swamp Babies. In canon, they're a popular local band with a dismissive attitude towards Worm Drama. In fanon, the rivalry is toned down and they're even shown as friends with Fang and their companions.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Of the secondary characters, Sage quickly became one of the most popular characters thanks to his adorable design, cheerful personality, and his emotional scene with Fang in episode four discussing his struggles with gender transitioning.
  • Despite his small screen time, Nick of Swamp Babies became popular due to his unique design, his brief interaction with Worm Drama, and lots of Viewer Gender Confusion.
  • "Smoker Dino", the stoned dinosaur Fang encounters in episodes 2 and 3, got their own fans thanks to their unique voice and humorous dialog.
• Fan Nickname:
  • The stoned dinosaur Fang keeps encountering is sometimes nicknamed "Reeve" based on their misremembering of Reed's name in episode 2.
  • The asteroid is nicknamed "Carlos" in the official Discord.
• Fan-Preferred Cut Content: Leo, one of the three characters made for the game's early "Dating Sim" concept and was cut as the game was refocused into a cinematic narrative game, became popular among fans after concept art was revealed during the May 2023 development Q&A stream. Lots of fanart reintegrates him into the main cast, while fanfiction speculates on why he's absent from the main game.
• Fanart at First Sight: Despite the reveal trailer's poor reception, Fang garnered a fair amount of fanart due to their memorable character design.
• Fandom Heresy: It's considered bad form among fans to question or dismiss Fang's nonbinary gender, and even worse to praise Snoot Game.
• Fandom-Specific Plot: The most common form of fanfic is exploring what the characters' lives would be like if the asteroid didn't hit.
• Foe Yay Shipping: Fang and Nick, leaders of rival bands Worm Drama and Swamp Babies respectively, are sometimes paired together.
• Genius Bonus: The parasaurolophus's head crest made it excellent at hearing and amplifying sounds, and may have been used in courtship. This helps explains why Naomi, a parasaurolophus, falls in love with Fang, an incredibly talented musician.
• He's Just Hiding: Given that the asteroid is never shown hitting the planet, some fans insist on the possibility that it didn't hit and the dinosaurs survived.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In episode 2, Naser tells Fang he needs to rewrite his school assembly speech because he themed it around "making an impact," which now seems in poor taste due to the asteroid news. Months after the game came out, it was nominated for the "Games for Impact" award at the 2023 Game Awards.
• I Knew It!: Once the "secret admirer" plot was revealed in the second demo, many people were quick to guess correctly that it was Naomi due to her being the only one of the seven major characters not in Fang's contact list.
• LGBT Fanbase: Given the game's main cast is almost entirely some flavor of LGBT, it's no surprise that there's a large LGBT following. Fang, being a non-binary main character and player character, is a particularly celebrated aspect.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Photoshopping human hair onto photographs of dolphins or leaving them unedited and passing them off as screenshots of this game was popular when the game was first revealed, due to the Unintentional Uncanny Valley effect of the character designs.
  • "Let's change the subject."^Explanation A reaction image of Fang looking at their phone with the "Let's change the subject." choice underneath them became a popular reaction image for conversations.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: It's almost impossible to discuss the game without also mentioning Snoot Game, the parody game released by Cavemanon to spite Goodbye Volcano High before it had even come out. Comparing the two games, especially regarding their portrayals of LGBT characters, became inevitable once Goodbye Volcano High was Saved from Development Hell.
• Portmanteau Couple Name: Fang and Naomi together are called Faomi.
• Rainbow Lens: Naser struggling under the pressure from his parents to be the "normal" child of the family (compared to his nonbinary older sibling Fang) has been read by some fans as Naser trying to pretend to be cishet for his parents' sake while trying to figure out his queer identity.
• Self-Fanservice: Fanart tends to give the feminine characters more voluptuous proportions, and Fang is often drawn with more exposed midriff.
• Signature Scene:
  • The burning of the yearbook, first shown at the game's opening and being seen in full at the end of episode 7.
  • The episode 4 scene of Fang and Sage privately talking about their gender transitions and their loved ones' reactions.
  • Naomi's emotional breakdown in episode 7.
• Tainted by the Preview:
  • Most viewers did not respond positively to the teaser trailer released during the PlayStation 5 reveal stream, on the account of the animation and dinosaur-inspired character designs which they heavily disliked. The complete lack of gameplay and the fact that the trailer was being shown alongside more high-profile titles like Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Resident Evil Village probably didn't help matters.
  • People were tainted by the news that the game's lead writer would be Kate Gray, a Kotaku journalist whose articles have attracted controversy in the past due to her writings about pornographic content, in particular an article that discussed pornography using models from Harry Potter games, which used the likenesses of real people at points they were underage (though the article has since been edited with an apology). The backlash over this got so bad that she eventually left the project and was replaced by a new writing team to rewrite her characters and story.
• Tear Jerker: Fang and Naser's breakdown when they realize their parents won't be able to make it back and they'll probably never see them in person again.
• That One Achievement:
  • "Friends of Mine" (talk to everyone at the bonfire) and "Different Kind of Album" (unlock all 32 photos) are by far the hardest achievements to complete, each with less than a 1% completion rate on Steam. The reason being is that both achievements cannot be completed in a single run of the game; the player cannot talk to all seven characters at the bonfire in a single playthrough, and the conditions to unlock some late-game photographs can cause another to become unavailable in the same run. And with the game being Only One Save File that always autosaves, this means the player needs at least three runs of the entire game, start to finish, to complete the two achievements. If a Golden Ending path exists — where one can see all photos and interactions in a single run — it has not yet been documented.
  • Two of the L&L achievements, "Critical Hit" (roll a natural 20) and "Critical Miss" (roll a natural 1) are purely random, with a 1 in 20 chance of happening any time the player rolls the dice. However, these achievements' difficulty can be subverted by rolling a die and, if it doesn't land on the right number, quitting to the main menu and trying again, as the autosave only occurs at the end of the L&L session.
  • "Worms Forever", the achievement for seeing both of Trish's bonus scenes. The first one is easy and can be unlocked during episode 1. The other is far more difficult: side with Trish at every opportunity the game provides to have her affinity as high as possible. There's extremely little room for error, and almost every other character's affinity will get sidelined in the process. This scene also has two exclusive photos, making it a requirement for the "Different Kind of Album" achievement described above. The difficulty was lowered in patch 1.06, allowing for much more leeway than before.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: A lot of the negative response to the initial trailer's character designs was that they looked closer to recolored humans with dolphin snouts glued on, than the dinosaur people they were intended to be.
• Viewer Gender Confusion:
  • Nick from Swamp Babies. The game follows Queer Character, Queer Actor as a general rule for the main cast, and Nick is voiced by a woman despite having he/him pronouns. He also wears baggy clothing that obscure his figure. This has lead to speculation that, more than just a case of Cross-Dressing Voices, Nick is AFAB and either a trans man or genderfluid.
  • The main protagonist Fang is non-binary. But their feminine appearance in the game, alongside their depiction in the controversial parody visual novel Snoot Game as ultimately a confused cishet woman, has led many players to perceive them as a girl.

---