open/close all folders
General
- Awesome Ego: Dr. Fetus has quite the god complex on him, but considering his impressive feats in the game, can you pretty much blame him?
- Awesome Music: Pretty much the entire franchise is full of Awesome Music. See here.
- Cliché Storm: Hero has to save girl whose been kidnapped by evil villain. Though for the most part, it seems to border on being a parody of this storyline.
- Crosses the Line Twice: The games love to relish in Black Comedy. For starters, the first game features a male villain continuously inflicting violence on a female protagonist. While in normal cases that wouldn't be funny at all, the fact that said villain is a fetus in a jar in Dastardly Whiplash attire and said violence is comedic slapstick makes it downright hilarious.
- Cult Classic: While the game was popular to play when it was first released, the fandom itself is much smaller compared to other indie games and has noticeably diminished over time. However, even to this day the franchise still has its share of loyal fans.
- Hilarious in Hindsight: As one fan pointed out
, the titular Meat Boy bears a striking resemblance to Anger from Inside Out. - Evil Is Cool: Yes, Dr. Fetus is a dick for sure, but a lot of fans find him badass, funny, and full of personality, resulting in him being more popular than the two protagonists.
- Foe Yay Shipping: In addition to the game’s Official Couple, fans also tend to ship Dr. Fetus with Bandage Girl or Meat Boy.
- Friendly Fandoms: With other Edmund McMillen-born games such as The Binding of Isaac and The End Is Nigh. Chances are, if you're a Super Meat Boy fan, you also play or have played some of his other games.
- Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Downplayed. While the game still has a sizable playerbase in its birthplace of the U.S., it has fans from around the world, with the game selling pretty well in Canada and France and a large number of speedrunners being French.
- Growing the Beard: The gameplay of Super Meat Boy compared to the gameplay of the original flash game, as what started out as a rather poor-quality and slightly broken Newgrounds flash game ended up being retooled into one of the greatest platformers of all time.
- Love to Hate: Dr. Fetus.
- Memetic Badass: Tofu Boy, when not being The Chew Toy, has gotten this treatment from the Team Meat Discord server, mostly after his appearance and buff in Forever.
- Older Than They Think: Few people familiar with Super Meat Boy seem to know that it was originally a web game simply titled Meat Boy. As a result, most such people think the license's name is Super Meat Boy when it's just Meat Boy.
- Quirky Work: Stars an immortal skinless boy who looks like a hunk of meat and his girlfriend who's made of used bandages who gets kidnapped by an evil fetus in a jar wearing a monocle and tux, and at one point they befriend a sentient pile of said villain's feces, and these characters happen to live in a world where grounds can have faces on them. That's pretty much only scraping the surface.
- Scenery Porn: Both Super Meat Boy and Super Meat Boy Forever have pretty awesome background art. The former's scenery has a "retro-y" look to it while still managing to be stunning, while the latter's is very colorful and detailed. Also, take a look at this beautiful image◊ from one of the Super Meat World levels.
- Sequel Displacement: Ever since its release, Super Meat Boy has completely overshadowed its predecessor flash game, which many don't even know exists.
- Squick: Dr. Fetus defecating in front of Meat Boy in the original flash game. And that's not even getting into most of the alternate endings...
- Surprise Difficulty: A control-breakingly Nintendo Hard series of colorful games with an Ugly Cute to borderline cute artstyle.
- Unpopular Popular Character: Again, Dr. Fetus. Nobody may like him In-Universe, but the fandom definitely loves him.
- What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: You'd think with the cutesy style and simple plot of saving the girl would mean it's a kid-friendly game? Well the plethora of cartoonish gore and violence, disturbing imagery, hellish difficulty, and the fact that the Big Bad flips you off multiple times would like to have a word with you. Funny enough, there are actually children who play the game who are surprisingly just as good if not better than its adult players.
Super Meat Boy
- Breather Boss: Yes, even SMB has one. Larrie's Lament, the fifth boss, is the first to actually react to your position (you have to get them to jump into the arena's sawblades to win). However, by positioning Meat Boy very close to one of the lower sawblades, they will get killed instead of killing you. This makes them a complete cakewalk, especially considering SMB's normally horrendous difficulty.
- Demonic Spiders: The Maws. They are enemies who lock onto the player, are extremely fast, and when they hit a wall, break into nine smaller Maws. They aren't the most hated enemies in the game for no reason.
- Oobs are also considered very annoying, as they are large and fast flying enemies who chase you around, only stopping if you're far enough away from them.
- Everyone is Jesus in Purgatory: A few speculate the worlds to be symbolic of the stages meat goes through, from living animal to decayed remains.
- Game-Breaker: Steve. Just see for yourself.
- Some may consider The Kid to be this, because most levels are centered around only being able to do one jump.
- Tim might also qualify. Immediately accessible on PC via a cheat code, players can abuse Tim's time powers to hold themselves in mid air or go completely invincible until the action button is let go. Coupled with his decent jogging speed and above-average jump height, this makes levels with rising lava levels, scrolling sawblades and homing missiles significantly easier. Or you could use his powers the way they were intended to and fix up any jumping mistakes/bypass difficult back-tracking segments.
- Naija is this for tool-assisted speedruns. In addition to the bursts of speed provided by her dash, said dash is also somewhat glitchy, occasionally causing her to clip through walls. Naturally, this is exploited like crazy in a TAS.
- Heartwarming Moments: Meat Boy and Bandage Girl finally reuniting in the end, complete with a hug.
- Moment of Awesome: The player gets a small one after finally mastering the complex series of jumping, wall-clinging, and split-second timing to beat That One Level. That feeling of accomplishment is just awesome.
- Most Wonderful Sound:
- Nausea Fuel: The writhing piles of maggots in The Rapture.
- No Such Thing as Bad Publicity: The People for Ethical Treatment of Animals, upon being informed about this horrible game that (allegedly) promotes consumption of meat, responded by making their own parody game, Super Tofu Boy. Turns out Edmund McMillen was the one "warning" them about his own game using Sock Puppet accounts, and this was exactly what he wanted them to do, as it would lead to more people knowing about this game. Tofu Boy would also be added as a secret character, who makes the game nearly unplayable due to being so weak.
- Porting Disaster:
- Super Meat Boy for Mac OS X! No fullscreen mode, attempting to exit crashes the game, and entering a warp zone automatically quits the game. Team Meat did get around to patching the latter two problems over a week later, though.
- The PC version has its fair share of flaws as well, though luckily they're easily fixable. It insists on using a controller, yet a third-party program is required to play it with most controllers. In addition, there's no in-game option to turn off VSync, which may cause a lot of lag and unresponsive controls. Luckily, a mod exists to turn off VSync and cap the framerate at 60 FPS.
- Scrappy Mechanic: Limited lives in the Glitch levels. It makes sense in Warp Zones, as those are divided in three sub-levels and a game over makes you start over. Glitch levels, on the other hand, are only one area without check points, so the only difference from having infinite lives is that every 3 deaths, you're sent back to the map and have to wait through the loading screen again. It's a minor setback, but a very annoying one.
- Suspiciously Similar Song:
- The 2010 soundtrack has this in some of the world intros that parody other games.
- For all the different approaches it usually takes, the 2015 soundtrack's intro movie theme is very similar to the 2010 song it replaces, even down to the main riff. note Also, the jingle that plays when you complete an 8-bit or 4-color warp zone nearly uses the same notes in both soundtracks.
- That One Achievement: Steam PC version has an "Impossible Boy" achievement. To get it, you'll have to complete the whole Dark World of The Cotton Alley without dying. As if unlocking The Kid wasn't hard enough.
- That One Boss: The fourth boss, Little Horn, by nature of Trial-and-Error Gameplay. Its attacks follow a preset pattern, have very little telegraphing, and don't allow you a lot of time to react. Memorization is necessary if you don't want to contribute to the pile of corpses depicted in its intro cutscene.
- Dr. Fetus in The End; not because of difficulty, but because it's tedious. During the whole level, Dr. Fetus follows you with a bazooka that shoots homing missiles (that are somewhat easy to avoid most of the time). The real problem is that you have two contraptions full of circular saws both in front and behind of Meat Boy, they move slow as hell, and the one in front of you stops at certain points to make sure Dr. Fetus catches up to you. The level is already hard enough, and when you die, instead of running away upon respawning, you have to wait 4 seconds for the front saws to start moving, and even then you're stuck against Dr. Fetus (who is shooting at you) and two circular saws on the ground. When you die for the 50th time, all you want is to start running away and beat the level, but instead, you have to wait until the saws start moving, and they even block your way at several points during the course. This gimmick makes the whole fight more tedious than difficult, and is probably the reason many players broke their controllers.
- That One Level: You wanna be the guy? Well, good luck unlocking the Kid.
- Patience is extremely difficult, trapping you with 3 portals spawning Maws in a room that slowly unlocks. There is an Easy Level Trick to drastically cut down the dodging required, but it requires you to not get obliterated for long enough to get to a specific part of the stage.
- As far as retro warp zones go, Skyscraper is easily the worst. All three stages in the set are extremely long and home to some of the most brutal jumps in the whole game, and of course, since these are retro stages, three mistakes on one level means you have to start the whole gauntlet from scratch. It certainly doesn't help that going for the bandage in the second part requires you to trek all the way back to the entrance, effectively doubling the level's size.
- Puberty, one of the Teh Internets levels, is taken straight from The Kid's warp zone, except modified to use Meat Boy. Good luck.
- Omega is the last Light World level before Cotton Alley, and it's long, difficult, requires precision and speed, and will take even the best of players several lives.
- As far as worlds go, Rapture is full of horribly difficult levels that can cause hair-yanking in even a seasoned gamer. In terms of particular levels, The Flood is a particularly awful one. The main gimmick is that a tidal wave of maggots (ew) is chasing after you and you have to escape it. The problem being that you have to do it down a cramped tunnel that is also full of maggots. Some are moving and some are in the big piles which are basically spikes/fire/what have you. You have to be quick and precise, a single mistake means doing the whole thing over, made worse if you reach the end and accidentally hit a maggot and have to redo the whole thing.
- The Cotton Alley world. All of it. Made even worse by the cute dreamy music that plays during the whole thing. The worst offender, though, is probably Hopscotch, where you have to navigate between buzzsaws over a bottomless pit using a gravity wheel. The level is pretty short and doesn't look too hard at first glance; problem is, it's extremely hard to figure out how to position yourself over the wheel to avoid the saws, and you have little control over the amplitude of your up-and-down movements. In a game that lives and dies by its tight controls, a level where the controls are ostensibly not tight is frustrating indeed.
- They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Due to Danny Baranowsky's departure from Team Meat, a new soundtrack had to be made for the PlayStation and Switch ports. This caused quite a broken base, with some fans believing it's a breath of fresh air and others believing it's just plain worse.
- Ugly Cute: C.H.A.D., as a giant. He becomes full-fledged cute after he shrinks.
Super Meat Boy Forever
- Awesome Art:
- Despite Super Meat Boy Forever being divisive, there's no denying that the animation in the game is gorgeous.
- Its Spin-Off Tabletop Game Rival Rush also has some pretty nice-looking illustrations as they were drawn by a variety of talented artists.
- Heartwarming Moments: The final secret character for beating all the Dark World levels is simply called "Relationship Goals", and lets you play as Meat Boy and Bandage Girl at the same time. Their icon is the two peering through a heart-shaped hole as they fistbump.
- The ending of the final boss. As Dr. Fetus, the Omega Alpha, begins his final attack to crush Meat Boy and Bandage Girl, Nugget realizes that maybe if her pacifier helps her calm down when she's fussy, maybe it'll work for the doctor. The girl stands infront of a homicidally angry galactic cluster representing the person who smacked her around the entire game, and offers it something dear to her... and the move immediately pierces through the thick wall of hatred that Dr. Fetus has put up between him and the rest of the world and manages to not only anchor him back in reality, but provoke the first time he's ever seen smiling. Even after Nugget's parents justifiably whoop his ass thinking he's about to hurt her again, the moment he sees that he's kept a version of the pacifier his rage with them subsides long enough to wave goodbye to Nugget.
- The ending narration discusses Meat Boy and Bandage Girl's adventure through the world and, eventually, time itself to rescue their daughter Nugget, and points out that if you had warned them it would've been such a monumental, up-hill battle that involved fighting a god, they would've gladly done it without hesitation, because their daughter is always worth the trouble.
- Misblamed:
- Some people are fond of blaming Edmund McMillen for things related to this game in spite of him parting ways with Team Meat during the game's making.
- On the flip-side, some people assume Edmund had nothing to do with Forever whatsoever, and programmer/co-designer Tommy Refenes just sneakily made it an autorunner behind his back after getting the rights (to appeal to casual gamers and make a quick buck, of cour... oh, wait). He was fully involved in the game's prototype, which was magnitudes sloppier than the final game, and was just an attempt to break into the mobile market at the time.
- Moe: Nugget, Meat Boy and Bandage Girl’s adorable baby girl.
- To a lesser extent, Meat Boy and Bandage Girl themselves, as they gain cuter designs.
- Most Wonderful Sound: "SUPERRRR MEAT BOY FOREVERRRRR!!!" Just admit that it's great to hear him again.
- Older Than They Think: Forever being an indie autorunner was not taken kindly to, despite Canabalt and BIT.TRIP RUNNER being hailed as indie classics that did the same thing (and both were referenced in Super Meat Boy). Granted, those games weren't sequels following up a platformer designed around precise jumps and controls and the latter was still based around rhythm gameplay like the other BIT.TRIP games, as opposed to Forever removing the core aspects of the original (precise controls and short, tight and focused levels designed around said controls).
- Sequelitis: While Forever is not without its fans, it is widely accepted by players that it doesn't stand a chance against the original (see Tough Act to Follow below for more details).
- Scrappy Mechanic:
- A lot of people aren't fond of the "freeze" that happens when you punch enemies, mainly speedrunners.
- Any fan at a 45 degree angle. They're extremely finicky when the level requires you to get a precise angle off of them in order to pass. Not helping is the occasional awkwardness caused by your direction always remaining the same when they launch you backwards.
- They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: This is how many people feel about the game being an auto-runner. Many also despise the simplified controls, going from four buttons (left, right, run, jump) to just two (jump/punch, dive), and the controls therefore becoming significantly less tight.
- That One Boss: The boss of chapter 4, Dr.Fetus Has you constantly fighting a horde of clones while avoiding the buzzsaw in the middle. The sheer number of clones makes you very easy to get hit and die. This Isn't too bad if not for when Dr.Fetus's health goes down, Saws Started appear on the sides of the arena, forcing you to constantly carrying at least one Uppercut power not only for hitting Dr. Fetus, but just to survive.
- That One Level: The 3rd stage of 0xDEADBEEF, the secret world is a significantly harder version of chapter 3. Its the one of the only levels in the game with an extreme amount of backtracking (Suprising for an autorunner), required to hit certain switches that completely changes the chunks´ layout over and over again. This is ontop of the usual gimmicks of chapter three, which involves confusing pipes, backtracking with keys, laser hazards, and more. The final stage of the chapter chranks this up to level; you will be hitting those switches many times in a row, and its very easy to get disoriented despite Meat Boy always running in the game. Oh, and it has nearly every single gimmick from previous stages.
- Even though most of the game's difficulty comes from merely figuring out how each chunk works, it's not afraid to throw the brutal platforming challenges the first one is known for. The Dark Clinic has a few infamous setups in "Window Tapping" and "Prognosis Negative", such as certain chunks in the former, in which Meat Boy has to slide under saws above glass floors. It is all too easy to accidentally punch through the glass and fall into a bottomless pit, since Meat Boy's quickfall and down punch are the same move. In the later, a punch-switch chunk will involve a series of saws shooting past Meat Boy after he hits the switch. This requires back-to-back, frame-perfect jumps/slides to maneuver past the saws initially and after they stop moving.
- Tough Act to Follow: With its unpopular autorunner mechanic, lack of any indie star cameos, and the absence of the original director and composer, all coupled with the full decade of Development Hell the title underwent, it's no surprise the game made little impact on release compared to the tremendous success of its predecessor.
- Ugly Cute: Manic Manipulator, in his powerless form at least.
- Underused Game Mechanic: The punch-switches in the last level of the Clinic, which move elements back and forth when punched (usually saws, but fans as well), can move other punch-switches. This is only showcased in a single high-difficulty chunk that's unlikely to be seen.
- Viewer Gender Confusion: You'd be forgiven if you thought Nugget was a boy.
- Visual Effects of Awesome: The absolutely gorgeous cosmic visuals during the Alpha Omega boss fight.
