YMMV / SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom

Tropes for the original 2003 game

• Accidental Innuendo:
  • In the opening, Plankton's line "My good china!" as he's being dragged out of his lab by the robots is so muffled that it can be very easily misheard as "My vagina!"
  • Patrick's belly attack looks like he's attacking by humping the air.
  • This quote said by SpongeBob to Squidward (in reference to SpongeBob agreeing to find the King Jellyfish Jelly to tend Squidward's sting wounds) ends up sounding a bit more risqué than the writers intended it to.
  SpongeBob: Don't worry Squidward, I'll bring back that King Jellyfish Jelly for you to rub all over yourself!
• Awesome Boss: The Final Boss, SpongeBot SteelPants, in no small part thanks to being rather challenging, having a wide array of attacks, not to mention its Awesome Music, of course.
• Awesome Music: One aspect of the game that has received praise is its soundtrack. Not only is it faithful to the tone of the show, it results in tracks that are just plain cool. Now has its own page.
• Awesome Video Game Levels: Spongebob's Dream is highly regarded for its creative level design, surreal music and visuals, and high but fair difficulty. Sandy's Dream in particular is praised due to everything Sandy-related being in there, from crunchy nuts to Texas, as well as the boasting the biggest slide in the game.
• Breather Level:
  • Sand Mountain. Compared to the tricky puzzles of Rock Bottom and the Mermalair, it's a nice series of slides without much trouble.
  • While in no way easy, SpongeBob's Dream is much more enjoyable than either the Kelp Forest or the Flying Dutchman’s Graveyard.
    • Special mention goes to Patrick's Dream, which comes after Sandy, Squidward, and Mr. Krabs' Dreams (all of which are among the most difficult levels in the game). Since the previous dream worlds were so hard, Patrick's must be as well, right? Nope, all you do is walk up to Patrick and he simply hands you the golden spatula. The name of the task is even called "Here You Go". Even more so if you play the levels in the intended order, as this dream is the final level before the Final Boss.
  • The Kelp Caves in the Kelp Forest area can be considered this. Both areas its sandwiched between, the Kelp Swamp and Kelp Vines, are widely considered to be the most difficult sections in the game due to having extremely tight jumps, being difficult to navigate, and have oodles of pits to fall into. Kelp Caves, meanwhile, is much more puzzle-oriented with a large emphasis on using both Spongebob and Patrick's abilities together with minimal platforming and combat. Even the music is much slower and more relaxed, giving a well-deserved breather in an otherwise long and difficult level.
• Cheese Strategy: The "Krabby Patty Platforms" challenge in Mr. Krabs' Dream is intended to be a tough enemy gauntlet where players are expected to defeat robots in order to activate the titular platforms, climb up them to destroy the Duplicatotrons, and then finish off the lot to get a Golden Spatula. However, players found out that if they stood on two Floating Tikis conveniently placed just off the edge of the arena, they would be out of the robots' aggro range and be able to use SpongeBob's Cruise Bubble to snipe the Duplicatotrons and robots from a distance. This only works in the original game, however, as the remake gives the Duplicatotrons barriers that regenerate very quickly, so players are forced to beat the challenge the legitimate way.
• Critical Dissonance: The game's critical reviews upon release were average, with most brushing it off as with any other licensed game. However, fans enjoy its fluid gameplay and adherence to the show's style. As mentioned in Cult Classic and Vindicated by History, it's popular enough with its fans that it received an HD remake, which faced a similar reaction from critics.
• Cult Classic: Despite being a tie-in game, it's an exceptionally well-made platformer that was quite popular in its day, and retains a devoted fanbase to this very day, especially among the speedrunning community. It's so popular that it got an HD remake in 2020.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Sleepy Time: A security robot that is normally asleep, but should you step into his surrounding light without sneaking (only possible with SpongeBob), it will angrily awaken and use a homing laser to chew off your health in a hurry. You can't use the Bubble Bowl (it will deflect it with the laser), but you can use the Cruise Bubble or throw a Tiki as Patrick in a couple of cases. With Sandy, however, you need to be sure to slowly get close enough to use your lasso.
  • Slick: An enemy you meet late in the game and is easily the toughest enemy in the game. To begin with, he's protected by an oil shield, and even after that is destroyed, he needs three more hits to be taken down, not to mention that the shield will respawn after a few seconds. His penchant for spitting oil at you, which can impede your traction if it lands on the ground, only makes him more irritating. Thankfully, he only shows up in the last two levels.
  • Arf & Arf-Dawg: Another irritatingly tough mook, Arf is a cowboy robot that attacks from a long distance, sending exploding dog-robots at you. The only safe way to attack him is with the Bubble Bowl, as his dawgs will mow your health down well before you can reach him, and he takes more than one hit to take down (where he flies away to a new location per hit landed on him), and he will swing his doghouse at you if you get too close. While the cruise bubble can kill him in one hit, using it makes you an easy target for his dawgs. Like Slick, he thankfully only appears in two levels (Mermalair and Kelp Forest).
• Fan Nickname: The game is known to some as "BanjoBob KazooiePants 64" due to its gameplay resemblance to both games.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Zigzagged with the Cruise Bubble. Yes, it can deal impressive damage to pretty much anything from a fair distance away. Yes, you have infinite ammo for it. Yes, it trivializes the more annoying tikis like Whispers and Stones. But you get it at the tail end of the game^note  Sort of. If you focus on completing every level that's available before the Robo-Patrick boss in the Industrial Park, then sure, at that point you'll have only 3 levels and the Final Boss left. However, only 40 Golden Spatula's are required in order to get the Cruise Bubble. It's entirely possible to just beeline to the Industrial Park by completing only 4 Levels; plus any extra Golden Spatula's you find in Hub World, along with any you get from Patrick and Mr. Krabs. That way, you'll have the Cruise Bubble for 5 whole levels, i.e. more than half the game , and you'll be dealing with situations that don't just call for it but necessitate it while keeping you in danger through one way or another.
  • Sandy breaks the platforming wide open. Her glide can be used to skip massive amounts of the stage, making her a mainstay in the Speedrunning community.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Chuck, the flying shark-bot that launches water bombs at you. They have a good throwing distance and lead their shots well if you're moving (several other enemies in the game with similar projectiles do this too), and their attack causes literal Splash Damage plus enough knockback to send you flying off an edge. They're also usually placed in areas where they can easily knock you off of a ledge. Thankfully, they take one hit to die.
  • Bzzt-bots. They use a laser that auto-tracks you at midrange, turning from green to yellow to red, and if the bot is not killed or the line of sight broken once it becomes red, it hits you. This can even hit the player in the air or on elevated ground, and Bzzt-bots always tend to back away if the player gets near. Thankfully they only take one hit to die as well.
  • Tubelets. The bottom of these three guys sprays a flamethrower around them, forcing the player to hit them with Bubble Bowl or the Cruise Bubble. Every time you kill one or both of the two bottom guys, the top one will start spinning and cause a large self-destruct explosion... that regenerates all of them.
• Good Bad Bugs: Now has its own page.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • At the start of the game, SpongeBob only thinks the events of the plot came about because he wished for it. In Spongebob Squarepants The Cosmic Shake, SpongeBob genuinely is responsible for its plot, thanks to the overuse of wishes with magic bath soap.
  • One of the robots, Bomb-Bot, looks just like BB-8.
• Ho Yay: Played for Laughs with Robo-Plankton's outright stated romance with SpongeBot SteelPants, which amusingly happened around the same time that Moral Guardians were concerned that SpongeBob himself was homosexual.
  Robo-Plankton: No! You dolts have destroyed my beautiful bride! We were supposed to get married next week!
  Sandy: Did he say married?
  Robo-Plankton: I'll repair you, baby!
• Low-Tier Letdown: Patrick, in the "bad gameplay" way. While SpongeBob has a wide arsenal of versatile abilities to use and Sandy has excellent platforming abilities, Patrick is considered gimmicky due to his moveset being mostly focused on throwing things. His default attack (a belly bump) has a small range and hitbox, making it impractical to use, and Patrick is the only character to lack any jump assists like SpongeBob's spin stall and Sandy's lasso glide, which makes him a poor choice for platforming in general. His only useful ability is his Ground Pound attack; a Shockwave Stomp that insta-kills smaller robots and stuns larger ones (which makes the latter able to be picked up and thrown), but many players prefer to opt for the simple solution of just killing them while they're down. It doesn't help that most of the levels that Patrick's playable in either barely utilize his abilities much (most notably the Mermalair) or utilize them in the worst ways possible (like the Kelp Forest), which makes most players play as SpongeBob, who can clear obstacles where Patrick isn't needed. Rehydrated fixes this by giving Patrick's belly attack a larger hitbox and can be used in the air, which also gives him some forward momentum to help with platforming.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "I'd make myself a snack... BUT THERE'S NO TIME!"^ExplanationAn environmental line SpongeBob says when entering his kitchen for the first time. The fastest way to collect 50 shiny objects to leave the tutorial area takes the player through the kitchen, so this line will be heard in the first few seconds of nearly every speedrun of the game, where there really is no time.
    • "...BUT THERE'S NO PIE!"^ExplanationA mishearing of the second half of the above line.
  • 30!/Loud Skee-Ball^ExplanationA trick to rack up Shiny Objects quickly was discovered in mid-2019. It requires throwing a Stone Tiki into a skee-ball game as Patrick, then switching to SpongeBob and using his Bubble Bowl in such a way that it gets stuck and keeps triggering the skee-ball machine's prize of 30 Shiny Objects. Since scoring on the machine results in a message reading "30!" appearing on the screen and a train-like horn playing, this results in a loud stream and a good source of chat spam.
  • DON'T ASK QUESTIONS YOU AREN'T PREPARED TO HANDLE THE ANSWERS TO!^ExplanationMrs. Puff's response to SpongeBob asking why he has to collect the artworks in Rock Bottom. It's used as a response to, well, people who want to know the answer to odd questions.
  • "PRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWN!" ^ExplanationMermaid Man's reaction to realizing that his arch nemesis, Prawn, has escaped. Notable in that, while it is one of the smaller, more recent memes from the game, it was acknowledged officially by a trailer for Re-Hydrated, showing the cutscene in HD.
    • "Did someone call?"
  • The Ketchup Disc^ExplanationIn 2021, the Battle for Bikini Bottom speedrun community discovered that having game discs that were dirty, smudged, or scratched in certain places made a speedrunning technique called lag clipping easier. Lag clipping involves players rapidly pausing and unpausing the game in order to force the game to lag, enabling them to clip through certain geometry, and making the disc harder to read via smudging increases its propensity to lag. One player jokingly took this to the extreme by uploading a picture of his disc with ketchup applied to it, though he never actually played with his disc like this. This image quickly spread around the internet, along with exaggerated rumors that BFBB speedrunners were putting ketchup on their discs to get better times. Ultimately, due to the inconsistency of using dirty discs, along with concerns that players would be incentivized to permanently damage their discs in order to get faster times, the community opted to start using softmodding to install the game to the Xbox's internal hard drive instead of running it from the optical disc.
• Nightmare Retardant: Robo-Plankton, thanks to his goofy-looking grin, off-handedly stating that he and SpongeBob's robot double were going to get married, and getting into an argument with other Plankton robots in the game's ending.
• No Problem with Licensed Games: This game is frequently used as evidence that not all licensed games have to suck. Its follow-up games were all either positively received or, at worst, So Okay, It's Average. Its notability as being a beloved game of many people's childhoods was enough to net it a Video Game Remake decades later; an extreme rarity for a licensed game!
• Periphery Demographic: Due to the sheer amount of Good Bad Bugs that can skip huge portions of the game (see above), this game is ridiculously popular amongst the speedrunning community.
• Polished Port: The Xbox version of the game is considered to be superior to the GameCube and PS2 versions, due to having improved textures, effects, and draw distance, a more stable framerate, and Dolby Digital Audio support. It also has the shortest load times of the three versions, which makes it the preferred version for Speedrunning.
• Questionable Casting: In spite of the rest of the cast reprising their roles for the game, Mr. Krabs and Mermaid Man are given The Other Darrin treatment, and it's very obvious. This is slightly excusable: Clancy Brown and Ernest Borgnine are well-known Hollywood actors, and thus could’ve had a harder time getting their schedules cleared than the most of the SpongeBob voice cast, who are best (if not only) known as voice actors. At the very least, though, they could have found better sound-alikes. The fact that Clancy Brown appears in both the previous game and the next game makes his absence here even more noticeable.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Whenever you encounter a new type of robot, an introductory cutscene plays that shows you what they do. However, these cutscenes are specific to the level the robot first appears in and does not take into account the player is able to play each level in any order they wish provided they have enough golden spatulas. This means you can encounter robots before you've officially been introduced to them, and the introductory cutscenes will still play even if you've already seen that robot in a different level.
  • The spongeball powerup is disliked for its imprecise and awkward controls, disabling all of Spongebob's abilities while he's in the form, and having most of its appearances being awkwardly thrown into a small section of a level for the occasional puzzle or two.
• Solo-Character Run: A speedrunner by the name of ConkerHax spent an entire day figuring out how to reach the ending using only the main titular character. Considering you'd be missing out on a good chunk of the game and would have to give up some of the special abilities, it was no easy feat. The epic and exhausting saga was fully documented here.
• Spiritual Successor: In many ways, Battle for Bikini Bottom was seen as the spiritual successor for the 3D collect-a-thon platformers like Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie, and was able to hold this title for the genre for fourteen years until Super Mario Odyssey and A Hat in Time came along.
• Squick:
  • The playable characters (including Patrick and Sandy) using SpongeBob's underwear as health pick ups. Lampshaded by Sandy:
    Sandy: "Ewwwww, I can't believe I'm wearing SpongeBob's underwear!"
  • Collecting Patrick's socks, which is also lampshaded.
    SpongeBob: "P.U! Patrick really needs to do laundry!"
  • SpongeBob using his tongue to go surfing. Justified since it's a reference to the episode "Pre-Hibernation Week," but still...
  • In the Dream World, the truck of manure from Sandy's Dream returns as an obstacle, with flies buzzing around.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: When compared to its direct predecessor, Revenge of the Flying Dutchman. While Revenge of the Flying Dutchman wasn't a particularly horrible game, it wasn't exactly considered great, mostly due to it's So Okay, It's Average gameplay, repetitive nature (and music), mediocre graphics and level design, and relative shortness. Battle for Bikini Bottom takes most things about Revenge of the Flying Dutchman and improves almost every single one of them, with much better Mario 64/Banjo-esque gameplay, creative and varied levels based on locations seen in the show, being able to play as Patrick and Sandy along with SpongeBob, being much longer and involved (especially when going for 100% Completion), excellent music, some really cool boss battles (particularly the Final Boss) and more. Among the better SpongeBob licensed games, Battle for Bikini Bottom is often considered the best of all, and for very good reasons.
• That One Boss:
  • Robot Patrick, the boss of the second area, is a steep difficulty curve from Robot Sandy. In order to attack him, you must wait until he becomes dizzy and falls over after spinning around. During this time, he flings toxic goo all over the field, which is deceptively hard to dodge thanks to the goo having no set pattern of where it lands, on top of being difficult to see. His second phase involves using Sandy to spawn boxes to reach him, and it can be difficult to hit him since falling into the goo is an instant death, which forces you to start from the beginning of the phase. His third phase is the worst: you must hit him with the bubble bowl as the entire arena is flooded, making him too far out for Spongebob to hit. Problem is, his hitbox is extremely small, meaning you have to be incredibly precise with your aim, and the bubble bowl will immediately disappear if it touches the goo. On top of this, most of the time he'll fall over in front of one of the conveyor belts on the field, meaning you have to make a precise aim with the bubble bowl while on top of a moving platform that will drop you into goo if you take too long. Oh, and if you take too long to hit the boss? He'll get back up and you'll have to wait for him to go through his attack cycle again. Rehydrated makes the third phase easier by increasing his hitbox size and having the bubble bowl roll along the goo's surface rather than immediately disappearing in exchange for making the second phase more difficult.
  • The second phase of the final boss, mainly due to having no checkpoints whatsoever, meaning dying will send you all the way back to the beginning. On top of this, there's no health pickups anywhere, the enemies can easily knock Spongebob off of the small platforms, and Robo-Plankton can be aggravating to hit, giving him plenty of opportunities to knock down your limited health.
• That One Level:
  • Kelp Forest. The entire level is comprised of dimly lit areas, making it hard to see where you're going. Every section of the level has its own reason for difficulty/tediousness: the Swamp's sprawling islands and beanstalks have long and cryptic routes to take; the Cave's extensive use of both SpongeBob and Patrick in its puzzles, which means many long and menial trips back to the signpost at the beginning of the cave (even with the shortcut later on); and the Vine's difficult slide sections with sharp turns, tight jumps, and oodles of pits to fall in.
  • Rock Bottom is considered this to some, due to its confusing layout making it difficult to tell where to go at times, surprisingly difficult platforming and timing puzzles in the Museum and Trench of Advanced Darkness, and introducing Sleepy Time bots. It's also very long.
  • Some of the wall jumps in the Flying Dutchman's Graveyard can be very devious, not helped by the fact that wall jumping is rarely used outside of this level specifically so you don't get very many chances to practice with it. The worst offender is the rotating wall near the end of the level that has very tricky timing, and the Slick at the top can easily knock you off the platform and force you to do it again.
• That One Sidequest:
  • The freaking ball puzzle in the Mermalair. It involves quick timing and pinpoint precision using the Bubble Bowl, which is one of the toughest mechanics in the game to control with any precision.
  • Mermaid Man's time challenge in the Kelp Forest, if you don't use the Good Bad Bug above to skip it. You have to beat 1:41 on a slide that's very long and narrow, and with sharp turns that are difficult to navigate around. Precision is absolutely necessary here in order to just stay on the slide alone, and the addition of a Timed Mission makes it one of the most frustrating challenges of the whole game. Not to mention that because it's so easy to fall off this slide, the timer resets every time you die, meaning you'll have to talk to Mermaid Man again just to restart the challenge.^note  Even worse if you've already passed the checkpoint, since you'll have to finish the remainder of the slide and return to Mermaid Man via Teleport Box (or go back to the start of the mission from the pause menu).
  • Mr. Krabs' Dream in SpongeBob's Dream. You need to destroy hordes of enemies, which includes Tubelets and Slicks. Thanks to the combination of SpongeBob's rather inconsistent knockback by enemies (he could bounce back an inch one time and go flying off the map the next) and the fact that you're fighting in a small area and said enemies gang up on you, this dream can become very irritating.
  • Also in SpongeBob's Dream, Squidward's Dream. It is a very unforgiving and technical platforming Marathon Level in a game that is otherwise light on that kind of platforming. The SpongeBob's Dream hub area can also be considered That One Level for similar reasons, but not quite to the same extent.
  • While you only get a sock from this for your troubles, destroying all eight sandmen on the Flounder Hill slope in Sand Mountain certainly qualifies. You have to memorize all of their locations, as some of them are found on alternate paths that require going down the slide more than once, and there's even one particular sandman that is well-hidden. Worse, if you die at any point on the slide, the sandman count resets back to zero, so you'll have to destroy all of them in one life.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Patrick helps in the fight against Robo-Sandy and Sandy helps in the fight against Robo-Patrick, yet neither one of them helps in the fight against SpongeBot SteelPants.
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • Picking up and throwing robots, which Patrick can do by stunning them with a ground pound. Unfortunately, this only applies to larger robots, as smaller ones will simply be defeated by the shockwave, and of the robots than can be stunned, only Ham-mers and G-loves can actually be picked up and thrown. The ability itself is only required for two spatulas in Jellyfish Fields, and even then, they can be completed with Spongebob once he unlocks his new abilities later in the game. It's not even practical combat-wise as it's much easier to simply kill robots while they're down, not to mention the time it takes to pick them up makes it more likely you'll take damage from something else.
  • Similarly, there's also stacking objects on top of each other with Patrick's throw to reach high platforms. Since most things you can throw break upon hitting the ground, this pretty much just limits it to throw fruits (watermelons) and stone tikis. Even then, it's only used for one spot in a tutorial in Jellyfish Fields, and getting to the "Over the Moat" task in Goo Lagoon (the latter of which has multiple ways of getting to so stacking objects isn't even needed).
• Vindicated by History: At the time, it was seen as a pretty good platformer, but wasn't seen as a particularly memorable one in the face of other sixth-generation games like Super Mario Sunshine, Ratchet & Clank (2002), Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy and Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus. The fact that it's a licensed game from a kids' cartoon meant that it also had to overcome an image problem, and it went largely ignored by many 'serious' gamers. Then speedrunners discovered it and found all manner of Hidden Depths in its gameplay. Nowadays, while it hasn't exactly joined the ranks of the greatest platformers ever made, it is extraordinarily popular within the speedrunning scene to a greater degree than many of its more conventionally acclaimed contemporaries. Additionally, the game has been a heavy subject of burgeoning 2000's nostalgia, with SpongeBob fans who grew up playing Battle for Bikini Bottom when it was first released having since grown up, allowing them to share their fond memories of it. All of this has caused the game to get an HD remake in 2020.

Tropes for the 2020 Rehydrated remake

• Critical Dissonance: While fans praised Rehydrated as a competent remake of the original (enough for the developer behind Rehydrated to develop a sequel), gaming journalists were more tepid in response, with some even giving negative reviews. In general, there's a split of opinions as to whether the remake's faithfulness to the original is a point in its favor or a missed opportunity to update the game in the modern era; critical reviews generally tend toward the latter, while fans of the original lean toward the former and view critical opinions as too harsh.
• Game-Breaker: There's a Good Bad Bug Speedrunners use that can let you beat the game in under two minutes.
• Goddamned Bats: In stark contrast to Chuck, Tar-Tar has become this in the remake, as his tartar sauce flies much farther than it did previously and now homes in on the player to boot, which isn't helped by his knockback being much farther than it was in the original. This ensures that the player will almost certainly get knocked off the level if they encounter him on a cliff or a ledge (where Tar-Tar is usually encountered anyways).
• Harsher in Hindsight: This video explains that Purple Lamp was actually going to include the original cut Patrick's Dream level at some point in development, as the debug un-textured level can still be accessed by specific debug commands in the Unreal Engine. The level has the same geometry and layout as the original, but it eventually experienced the same fate as its original counterpart of being Dummied Out of the final release, with multiplayer mode only borrowing similar concepts of it. The cruel irony of the same level being cut twice has not gone unnoticed by fans.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Fans were disappointed with the lack of changes made to the game: there is no new single-player content, the music and voice acting are reused from the original game (ensuring Mr. Krabs still isn't voiced by Clancy Brown) and all new content is relegated to the lackluster Horde mode. The announcement of Cosmic Shake, an all new SpongeBob game by the developer seems to be in response of this.
• Polished Port:
  • The Nintendo Switch version became this over time. While the visual effects were cut down somewhat (most notably, foliage draw distance is shorter and shadows are more pixelated), the game otherwise looks and plays identically to the other versions, and portable play is also possible.
  • The Android/iOS version, handled by Handy Games, is a highly impressive effort to bring the game to mobile phones and tablets, and has been highly optimized as well. There's even a graphics setting menu, something that the PC port lacks for whatever reason.
  • Even the PC port itself, despite the lack of graphics settings^note though one could just edit the game's ini files to change them aside from resolution, belongs to this as well, due to it being surprisingly well-optimized, running at 60 frames per second even on older or weaker systems, which include budget graphics card like Nvidia Geforce GT 1030 and on-chip graphics card like Intel HD or AMD Radeon.
• Porting Disaster: The initial release of the Nintendo Switch version was seen as this, due to having several framerate issues, a rather low resolution, and severe texture streaming problems. Patches were released to address most, if not all, of these issues.
• Salvaged Gameplay Mechanic:
  • To rectify a common complaint from players about the boss fights in the original game being too sluggish and drawn out (especially for speedrunners where certain bosses don't have the debug skip tactic to fall back on), boss attack patterns in the remake have been sped up to make them go at a much quicker pace. This also has the side effect of giving them a genuine threat level that wasn't truly present in the original, especially with Robo-Sandy.
  • The SpongeBall power-up has been tweaked to go much faster, turn more sharply, and you can now jump with it, alleviating complaints of it being hard to control and impractical to use in the original game.
  • Dialogues are now entirely skippable, ensuring that speedrunners or those who just want to move on don't have to mash the X/A buttons over and over again to get to the end.
  • In the original game, the spike traps in Jellyfish Caves were notorious for popping out at random intervals with no warning and little time to react, leading to some cheap deaths for newer players. The remake fixes this by giving the spike traps a set pattern cycle that is easy to anticipate, and they telegraph their presence before popping out.
  • After the theater was criticized for replacing the original game's beloved concept art with in-game screenshots, a patch would replace said screenshots with brand-new, remake-exclusive concept art.
  • Kelp Cave isn't nearly as darkly lit in Rehydrated.
• Solo-Character Run: The aforementioned ConkerHax did the same challenge of beating the game with only SpongeBob. It admittedly wasn't as impressive this time around with some of the changes, but you can still see the documented run here.
• Special Effect Failure: The Gamescom demo build was from a pre-alpha build of the game, and it shows. The camera doesn't zoom in on the characters or pan to other items/locations during major conversation scenes in a level, and it's especially noticeable with SpongeBob talking to Squidward at the beginning of the Jellyfish Fields level (though this is somewhat excusable in that the demo is a pre-alpha build). This would be fixed before the final release.
• Surprise Difficulty: Your health no longer resets back to full whenever you switch characters or enter new areas, so any damage you take will be carried over regardless. This can make some parts surprisingly difficult if you come unprepared and forget to stock up on underwear, so health management has become more important.
• Tainted by the Preview: Following the remake's pre-alpha demo reveal at Gamescom 2019, the initial fan reception to it was... not too positive, to say the least. While there was praise for the updated graphics and creative design choices, a lot of complaints were directed at the slower-paced gameplay, different physics, the stiff and unpolished animations, the level lighting, and some missing features from the original game. Many fans who were initially excited for the remake soon became worried about the game's future and what it would mean for the SpongeBob franchise as a whole, with some also pointing out that rushing a pre-alpha demo for a convention when the game just barely started development was probably not a good idea. Fortunately, this response was turned around in the later days of Gamescom where the demo received vast improvements towards the animations and visuals, which alleviated some of the fears and disappointment from prior reactions (apparently, a faulty capture card caused the visuals to be over-saturated during the event, and later screenshots revealed that most of these issues had already been ironed out).
• That One Sidequest: Prior to the 1.03 patch, Mr. Krabs' spatulas were even more of a pain to get in the remake at launch due to the sharp increase of Shiny Objects to pay (instead of increasing by 500 per spatula, it was increased by 3,000). For comparison, his final Golden Spatula in the original game cost 7,500. In the remake, it cost 24,000. With the Skee-Ball Abuse speedrun strategy completely nullified in the remake, your only consistent way to speed up the grind was to use the old-school tiki stack destruction and reset method at specific spots (such as the top of the sandcastle in Goo Lagoon, the "Tikis Go Boom" stacks in Downtown, and the Stone Tiki wall just before the second toll clam in Jellyfish Fields), but even those have been made more tedious due to the longer load times on death, and the grind could take up to over an hour on average to get enough Shiny Objects to cover for all of his spatulas (a whopping 108,000 total is needed). The patch rectified this by returning the original game's price scaling of 500 per spatula.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Particularly among the speedrunning community, which is responsible for the original game's resurgence in popularity. SHiFT, a champion speedrunner, noted that the game seemed to block off certain shortcuts and force the player to go along the intended path too often. Irrelevant for most casual players, but a bit disappointing for others.
  • Fans who grinded shiny objects to complete the game were disappointed to find that the Movie Theater (which had originally shown concept art from the original game, including artwork of the scrapped "Robo-Squidward" boss) only showed simple snapshots of different locations in the game, which made it a very underwhelming reward in comparison. Fortunately, a later patch altered the theater so it now shows remake-exclusive concept art instead of the screenshots.
  • To quite a few, Robo-Patrick’s changes from boss mechanic to appearance. Robo-Patrick’s new design, while some people like it for its more mechanical design, loses its Nightmare Fuel charm, his spin animation is slower and sporadic, on top of him stopping the spin to quite glaringly hopping over to a spot on the field and his boss battle is easier.^note The ice cream has a red indicator showing where it lands and his ice breath doesn’t sweep. At the same time, when he gets dizzy, he goes to the centre of the arena, doing so by quite glaringly ceasing spinning and awkwardly hopping over to it in the same t-stance it did while spinning, instead of dropping where he stood, making hitting his back a pain to most. One benefit is the ice cream from Robo-Patrick’s spin attack are prone to reach the platforms more.
  • To a more minor but still prominent extent, a number of fans cried foul at the remake's version of Mrs. Puff's memetic line "don't ask questions you aren't prepared to handle the answers to." Specifically, her speaking animation is changed to make her look more confident than jittery, and the camera no longer zooms in on her during the line. These changes were criticized as detracting from the mood of the original, which played into the shiftier elements of Mrs. Puff's characterization.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: The long-awaited inclusion of Robo-Squidward garnered a less-than-satisfied reaction from fans due to the character being relegated to a mere set piece for Horde Mode. Rather than having a face-to-face confrontation with the boss, players simply fight off waves of enemies while Robo-Squidward squirms menacingly in the background. The fact that some players find this mode to be tedious and slow-paced (completion can take upwards of forty minutes) doesn’t help the situation.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Some fans think that multiplayer mode could've had the opportunity to tie up some loose ends regarding the original game's Cliffhanger ending (where Sandy mentions after SpongeBot and Robo-Plankton's defeat that robots are still running amok in Bikini Bottom and SpongeBob makes a harrowing speech to finish the job), with the potential of an epilogue plot involving Robo-Squidward taking control of the remaining robots. The set-up is there (including one of the islands being the defunct SpongeBot, and Robo-Plankton being a playable character helping out the others), but fans were disappointed to find out that multiplayer mode had no build-up, no plot, and no ending at all.
• Unexpected Character: Twofold for the horde mode:
  • While Squidward and Mr. Krabs were obvious picks, did anyone expect Gary the Snail to also be a playable character?
  • Robo Plankton, the Big Bad of the main game, is also a playable character despite the mode revolving around destroying his robots.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The developers took good advantage of Unreal Engine 4, and it definitely shows. The environments look as if they came straight from the show, everything is vibrant and colorful, and the character models are very expressive and have nice and fluid animation. The game overall looks beautiful, and it's clear the artists and modelers gave it their all.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: The robot doppelgangers' designs have been modified from the original to invoke this, with SpongeBot SteelPants getting it the worst, now having clear blue domes for eyes and a row of bottom teeth that look unsettling on SpongeBob's design.

Tropes for the original PC and GBA ports

• Cheese Strategy: In the "Hide Me Money" minigame on the original PC version, you're tasked with defeating pirate robots in boxing matches to obtain key items that they're guarding. The difficulty scales with each robot you defeat in order from Fly Weight (the easiest) > Feather Weight > Light Weight > Medium Weight > Heavy Weight (the hardest), but this only applies if you play through the level continuously in one sitting. If you leave the level, the difficulty will reset back to Fly Weight, and because the game auto-saves your item collection progress so you don't have to pick them up again once collected, this enables players to utilize a Save Scumming trick by fighting each robot on Fly Weight through successive drop-outs/drop-ins without scaling the difficulty, rinse and repeat. And once all key items have been collected, it's smooth sailing with the rest of the level's objective from there.
• Demographically Inappropriate Humour: One of Sandy's trivia questions asks what color her bikini is... and one option is "translucent".
• That One Level: In the original PC version, there's the dreaded switch portion in the Chum Bucket called the "Hall of Arms". There are dozens of combinations and you get no hints.

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