YMMV / Battletoads (2020)

• Awesome Animation: One thing that fans agreed on was that the animation for the characters does look pretty gorgeous and fluid.
• Awesome Music:
  • "Khaos Mountains 2.0": A rocking remix of the level 1 theme of Battlemaniacs.
  • "To the Queen!": Accompanying the first hover bikes level.
  • "Axeley": A great track to go with the boss of the same name.
  • "Turbo Tunnel": A fast-paced and exciting rock remix of the original "Turbo-Tunnel" theme.
  • "Space Toads": A fast-paced piece that perfectly meshes with the Bullet Hell shooter stages. This is actually a remix of "Surf City" in the original game.
  • "Emergency Stations": An appropriately high-tension orchestral piece when you're solving puzzles under a time limit.
  • "We Go High", "Reaching the Peak": In contrast to the rest of the tracks in the game, two serene pieces perfect for Pimple's puzzle-oriented levels in the mountains.
• Catharsis Factor: Restoring the Dark Queen's powers before the final battle with the Topians, and killing the Topians afterwards. Brutally satisfying after all the horrendous actions of the Topians, and for those who view them both as a Replacement Scrappy for usurping the Dark Queen.
• Contested Sequel: Compared to the original game, and to a lesser extent its four later instalments. One camp considers it a worthy reboot, with its Sequel Difficulty Drop being much needed, and its art and animation fantastic, while another camp is more critical, citing the Denser and Wackier tone, Bowdlerization of the Dark Queen's design, questionable art style choices, and the Sequel Difficulty Drop going against the entire point of the first game.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Kernels, the walking popcorn machines in the beat em up levels, which create a huge lightning explosion around themselves. In the third beat em up level their explosion will also shock the watery portions of the floor, severely limiting the player's mobility.
  • Charger Ships in the shmup levels, which shoot barrages of bullets that stop then home onto the player.
  • Side Crawler Ships, which move around the corners of the screen and shoot waves of bullets which cover almost the entire screen.
• Funny Moments:
  • Rash arguing that the Toads are not puppets, only for him to have a toy of himself shout "Buy our video game!!". In the actual game, this is switched out with an extended bit where the puppet spouts Topian propaganda.
  • After Rash announces over a hi-jacked Topian ship that the Toads are coming to take the new villains out, we get a glimpse of one Topian expressing his concern about the Toads' attack, but another says "Who'd wanna destroy you?! You've got the most amazing shape!".
  • The Dark Queen getting more and more aggravated as she keep losing at Toadshambo.
  • Zitz now summons a cybernetic frog head that burps.
  • The whole Jeff arc, where the 'Toads accidentally knock him out while arguing over whether they should let him talk to the only person in their group that he knows, carry on his diplomatic mission, and, after failing that, use him as a sled to escape back to the ship, where Dark Queen sides with the 'Toads and they toss Jeff into space.
  • The Dark Queen's tangent after being left behind
  BEEP! BEEP! GARBAGE BUTT BACKING UP!
  • The scene where Pimple finally snaps at Niquo is pure gold
  "AAAAHHHHH! MY NECKLACE! YOU WERE SO MEAN! YOU WERE SO MEAN! AAAAHHHHH!"
  • "We were a death cult anyway!"
• Goddamned Bats: Any of the ranged enemies have the potential to be huge annoyances, but special mention goes to the Maximums (the ice cream truck carriers), who constantly snipe the player from the corners and are especially aggravating when the player must also deal with Kernels.
• Replacement Scrappy: The Topians, who replace the Dark Queen as the Big Bad due to their generic, uninteresting designs. Their leaders UTO and PIA especially get this due to them coming off as two dimensional gay stereotypes during a time where those types of characters were becoming a Discredited Trope.
• Self-Fanservice: The Dark Queen's redesign has been criticized for making her completely unrecognizable from before, prompting several artists to attempt their own take on her in the game's new cartoonish style. These range from depicting her in her original outfit, depicting her in her new design but closer to the original art style, or giving her an outfit that resembles the original and completely covers her up to show that it was possible to tone down her sexiness while retaining her villainous and feminine traits. Of course, she's also gained some new fanart in her new outfit but with feminine curves and more skin showing.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: The 2020 reboot offers selectable difficulty settings, with the first two allowing invincibility after dying enough times in one section. Whether or not this is for the better is a point of contention.
• So Bad, It Was Better: One source of criticism the reboot has faced is that its more irreverent and self-aware tone sucks out some of the fun. The argument being that a big part of what made the original game entertaining is how it takes itself weirdly seriously despite the bizarre premise and goofy characters, so going the Self-Parody route feels like it's just explaining the joke.
• Tainted by the Preview: The E3 2019 trailer for the reboot was heavily criticized for its hand-drawn art direction and odd character designs, which many feel doesn't capture the look, the 90s attitude or the grittiness of the previous games (among other changes listed in They Changed It, Now It Sucks! below). The video has more than twice as many dislikes than likes on the official Xbox Youtube channel. Reception of the Gamescom 2019 demo has not fared any better, receiving similar like/dislike ratios, with many viewers criticizing the slow-paced gameplay and the animations.
• That One Level: The Bullet Hell shooter levels. Thankfully there are checkpoints and you have a dodge maneuver, but they're still quite difficult. Especially the final one where you play as Dark Queen.
  • The Emergency Stations! level. Hoo boy. Your job is to get the ship back online by solving a series of puzzles before time runs out. The screen contains numerous puzzles, and you can only work on one at a time. Any mistake takes away time. The problem is, the first few times you attempt it, you probably won't put together that the puzzle you have to work on corresponds to a symbol at the top of the screen, and they all use different control schemes so if you're not sure which puzzle you're currently on, you'll probably lose enough time that you won't be able to finish all the puzzles. And to make matters worse, there are multiple phases of this. It gets really nerve-wracking in the final phase when you have to solve seven puzzles in only a minute.
  • The puzzle platform levels in Act Three are also widely disliked for being incredibly boring and filled with confusing puzzles, "Reaching the Peak" is the worst of the three for having a ridiculous amount of spikes and annoying platforming and for having one section that requires backtracking to two different paths just to finish the level.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • The new reboot of the series showed a glimpse of the main villain, the Dark Queen, in their E3 2019 reveal trailer. Many, many fans of the Dark Queen's original design were beyond furious when her reboot design was shown off, mainly due to her Adaptational Modesty and Tamer and Chaster appearance ^note the Dark Queen's new appearance completely removes any signs of her skin showing, and is not nearly as curvaceous as the original (save for her Hartman Hips). Even disregarding that, the design by itself is regarded simply as being too plain and uninteresting compared to the original design and people who were still looking forward to the game weren't impressed by the art direction to the point of saying it looks like a cheap Flash game.
  • Most fans didn't cotton to the new character designs in general since the toads just look a bit off. Likely because of the new cartoony style.
• Win Back the Crowd: The new trailer released on July 31st warmed a lot of fans up to the reboot thanks to the gameplay looking better and varied, as well as the art style looking much more polished with better animation. Notably the likes for the new trailer's Youtube video far outnumber the dislikes, in contrast to the original release trailer where the dislikes far outnumbered the likes.

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