YMMV / Altered Beast (1988)

• Awesome Music: The soundtrack is short, but sweet. A Brazilian band even made an entire album with metal versions of it!
  • The original arcade version is even better.
• Demonic Spiders: Any enemy that takes advantage of your lack of Mercy Invincibility to lock you into a Cycle of Hurting (like the ogres or basilisks.)
• Game-Breaker: The dragon form can fly all around the screen and its secondary attack is an area-of-effect barrier of lightning. Also, when just a normal centurion, the jump kick will destroy almost everything in quick order.
  • All of the beast forms are incredibly powerful, and make mincemeat of anything that's not a boss, OHKO-ing with at least one of their attacks.
• Ho Yay: Not only features muscular men, the poses some of them do are suspicious.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: A common contemporary complaint (then again, 5 levels are enough for an arcade, or at least were in 1988).
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "WISE FWOM YOUW GWAVE!"
  • "WELCOME TO YOUR DOOM!"
  • POWERRR, UP.
• Narm:
  • The beginning of the game, with Zeus commanding the hero to Rise from Your Grave, complete with actual voice samples, was impressive when the game came out, but nowadays, it's considered unintentionally funny due to the audio compression giving him Elmuh Fudd Syndwome.
  • In Stage 3, you have the ability to transform into a giant bear, which sounds appropriately badass until the transformation actually happens, and the main character looks more like a human-sized teddy bear than anything grizzly. And the standing pose for the bear form looks like he's in a kung-fu stance, which is either this trope, Narm Charm, or awesome.
• Nightmare Retardant: All the transformations of Neff. Including a weird flesh monster who throws his head at you, an eye-composed thing, a literal dragon-snail (too much snail) and a crocodile-jewel thing. His last form is a Rhino-man.
• Nintendo Hard: The arcade version and its ports. Especially some of the ports, which give only three lives, no healing items, no extra lives, no Mercy Invincibility, and no continues.
• Polished Port: The Sega Genesis port is a near-perfect conversion of the arcade original, only differing in having slightly less detailed graphics, lower sound quality, slightly altered level layouts and AI behavior, and lacking the sprite scaling effects of the arcade original^note (which the Genesis actually could have done without too much trouble, and were likely only removed so as not to make people feel ripped off by the still-popular System 16 arcade board). It's pretty much the only reason why this game is nowadays considered a cult-classic.
• Popular with Furries: Thanks to the werebeasts' presence being completely naked and sporting heroic builds.
• Porting Disaster: Pretty much every port of the original arcade game, with one obvious exception:
  • The Master System port is usually seen as the worst incarnation of the game; it attempts to cram the gameplay and graphics of the Genesis port into a much less advanced system, and looks and plays terribly as a result. For some odd reason, there's also no music at all in the boss battles.
  • Most of the home computers ports suffer from muddy graphics and bad play control, though the Amiga version at least can boast an awesome remixed soundtrack.
  • The NES (yes, NES) port is easily the worst-looking version of the game, with most of the graphics being in varying shades of green and purple-pink, which makes it look like an early PC game. This port does at least include more levels than any other version of the game, but it doesn't help much.
  • The TurboGrafx-16 port is very close to the arcade original, but is sadly let down by being sluggish at points, clunky controls, and somewhat inconsistent hit detection.
    • Even worse is the PC Engine CD-ROM² port, plagued by the same issues as the previous port. On top of that, it cannot run on the System Cards 2.0 and 3.0 requiring the obsolete 1.0 card to function properly. It does have a new intro comprised of stills of artwork from the game set to narration and the original arcade music, which is the only thing that qualifies it as being on a CD, as all the rest of the music is simply the same chiptunes as the previous port.
• Signature Song: The first level theme.
• That One Boss: The Final Boss may be... well, the final boss, but he's also a severe ramp-up in difficulty to the other boss fights, thanks to his tendency to charge you and knock you into a corner, where he'll take advantage of your lack of Mercy Invincibility to completely annihilate you without giving you a chance to escape. Without proper tactics, he'll burn through your lives and stack of quarters. He is quite beatable if you know how, but you still need practice and good timing to do it, and are unlikely to work it out on your own.

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