YMMV / Captain N: The Game Master

• Adorkable:
  • In his home world, Kevin was seen as "that video game whiz" or "computer wimp" by his high school peers, despite his athletic capabilities. His messy room implies that he was very disorganized at home, and was regularly bullied by his old friend-turned-rival Mike Vincent. Even as Captain N, he's often shown bouts of clumsiness and rubs the back of his head when flustered or out of modesty. He does have a home computer in his room which by that point were associated with geeks and nerds. Not to mention that his mastery on most NES games implies that he plays video games much more actively than most of his peers. This is especially evident with many of his "personal" interactions with Princess Lana, especially during their first meeting. Judging by Duke's embarrassed reaction during that scene, this isn't the first time something like this has happened with Kevin.
    Lana: I'm Princess Lana. (Kevin looks at Lana, while the next scene shows a full pedestal shot of her)
    Kevin: I'm in love.. I-I mean, I'm Kevin.
  • Lana's brother Lyle is a much more obvious example, having more of a general appearance of a nerd on top of being both a square, fittingly enough, and being clumsy, incompetent, and insecure to the point where he believes he's an outcast within his own family.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Simon is something of a stealth Trickster Mentor that is trying to teach the rest of the team, especially Kevin, to be more functional. Simon seems to pull very sudden 180ºs from cowardly bumbling idiot to kicking serious butt. This is backed up by how competent he becomes in the episodes where he temporarily becomes a villain, and has no reason to hold back.
  • Kevin is something of a sociopath that doesn't miss his home, lets his competitiveness get the better of him, and zaps things to get attention, as "Having a Ball" shows. Let's not get started on his behavior in "The Fractured Fantasy of Captain N".
• Angst? What Angst?: Kevin is in a world full of people he doesn't know, his sole companion from his old world is his dog, he's cut off from all that is familiar, and he's being forced into war. Possibly falls under Rule of Funny, as the only time he had the opportunity to go back he stayed because his mom told him to do his homework and take out the trash. Could also be justified in that Kevin knows he's free to go back any time he really wants to, and time not passing means no one will wonder where he's been, not to mention that the people of this world genuinely need his help, and he might feel that he can't turn his back on them.
• Awesome Music:
  • Much of season 2's Background Music was composed by Michael Tavera, known for composing for other cartoons like Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM) and House of Mouse. A lot of is considered a major step-up from the first season's music which often reused music from The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!.
  • Mega Move from "The Feud Of Faxanadu", though it was abused when an instrumental version started replacing the copyrighted tracks for both this show's first season and The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3.
  • The short New Jack Swing song, Can You Feel The Heat? from "Quest For The Potion of Power".
  • Frustrated from "Germ Wars", the vocalist for this song is also responsible for the original pilot variation of Fastest Thing Alive as well as the unused Burning Way Past Cool.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • You either like Game Boy having his moments of snark and not being as clueless as the rest of the team, or you hate him for being a douche in his debut episode, which also had a large plothole regarding why Lana's father couldn't just come himself.
  • Simon Belmont is often decried for his whining, incompetence, snootiness, and borderline-In Name Only appearance, especially by Castlevania fans. However, he's also one of the few characters to show any kind of growth (warming up to Kevin over the course of the series), and his characterization is a lot more interesting than any of the other major cast members, primarily because he's more goofy and overtly flawed, which earns him a sector of fans that see him as one of the more redeeming aspects of the show (if you can get over him being called Simon Belmont, anyhow). There's even a school of thought that gives him some Alternate Character Interpretation of being a Stealth Mentor.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Simon asking King Hippo (who's Disguised in Drag) to dance with him in Having a Ball.
• Bile Fascination: Many watch the show just to see how spectacularly they screwed the characters up.
• Can't Un-Hear It: Mother Brain has never had voice lines in the games themselves, so fans of Metroid usually draw from Levi Stubbs' performance as the character, especially in parodies.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Mike, who only appeared one episode but was a major part of a very emotionally-driven one.
  • The show's take on Alucard only appeared in one episode, but proved to be one of the most memorable parts of the show due to how bizarre the changes in his character were. His notability only increased after Castlevania (2017) came out, with several fans jokingly comparing the two very different versions of Alucard.
• Friendly Fandoms: It should be a given that many fans of this series are either close to or overlap with fans of any of the Super Mario cartoons.
• Funny Moments:
  • In "Videolympics", Mother Brain's team training at the Punch-Out gym has a cameo from Glass Joe, who's knocked out by his own shadow.
  • In "Three Men and a Dragon", Kevin negotiates a purchase of medicinal herbs by trading his digital watch. Also, as a Funny Background Event, Simon can be seen hefting a battle axe over his head, only for the weight to drag him back down with a loud "Thud!"
  • In "The Invasion of the Paper Pedalers", Game Boy refers to some freshly-baked cookies as "edibles".
• Ham and Cheese: Levi Stubbs as Mother Brain. The show is worth watching just for his performance. This is probably the reason why she qualifies as an Ensemble Dark Horse.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • The first half of "The Videolympics" has the crew engage in a Training Montage as Kevin whips the N Team into shape set to James Brown's "I Got You" and ends with a sweet moment of Kevin and Duke just hugging.
  • The ending of second season's last episode, "Germ Wars", has Kevin waking up surrounded by the other N-Team members after they helped save and cure him from his infection. After Lana types in his "magic mantra" to wake him up, he tells the crew he had a dream that the N-Team was his family. It turns out, that the magic mantra was indeed, "family", which shows how much of a close bond he's developed with each member of the team within the course of the show's run.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: See here.
• Ho Yay: The Internet doesn't call this series Captain N: The Gay Master for nothing.
  • Kevin and Mike have shades. For the whole show it seems like King Hippo and Eggplant Wizard are an old bickering couple with some slight abuse issues. This is kind of helped by the fact when they go undercover one is dressed as a woman.
    • Hippo once threatens to "toss your salad" while Wiz is covering him in slippery salad oil so as to squeeze up a narrow pipe. It could be just a mistake on the writer's part, but one seriously wonders....
  • Kevin and Link, in the Zelda crossover episodes.
• I Am Not Shazam: Kid Icarus should actually be called Pit. As noted on the Trivia page, this wasn't a goof, this was ordered by Nintendo so they'd have to say the name of Pit's game over and over. This is also the reason that Mother Brain's home base of Planet Zebes was renamed Planet Metroid.
• Just Here for Godzilla: There are a select few people who watched this show just because they found out that Levi Stubbs (a.k.a. "the guy who voiced Audrey II") played Mother Brain.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Captain N: The Gay Master.
  • Like Donkey Kong Country, it was somewhat popular to mock this series after Simon Belmont was confirmed for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate in August of 2018.
  • Making comparisons between Castlevania characters as they appear in this show and the same characters as they appear in Castlevania (2017) has become popular, especially the two very different versions of Alucard.
• Narm Charm: This trope and the very premise of the show (kid gets warped into the world of video games and meets many NES characters) are arguably the only reason this show has the admittedly small following it does.
• Never Live It Down: Virtually nobody resembles their original video game selves. Nobody. And that's to say nothing of their characterizations, especially that of Simon Belmont.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • "Three Men and a Dragon" opens up with a white dragon protecting her baby from Dragon Lord and his brainwashed slaves. After swearing to protect her child from him, Dragon Lord brainwashes the mother on the spot, and she immediately turns and breaths fires at her baby who just barely escapes, her mother snarling at the other dragons to chase after her. And we learn that the baby, Puff, is now the only dragon that isn't brainwashed. It's sincerely disturbing to see Puff's mother go from swearing to protect her baby to immediately attacking her.
  • "Germ Wars" revolves around Kevin suffering from what is basically the Videoland equivalent of catching a cold, but it has a negative impact on him simply due to the fact that he isn't from Videoland and can't fight it off like the natives can. His infection quickly exhausts him and the manifestation of Kevin's life energy inside his body gets gradually more and more paralyzed, nearly killing him. This is especially terrifying in a post COVID-19 world.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Kevin was the first of many voiceover roles for Matt Hill, well known for voicing Ed in Ed, Edd n Eddy.
  • Before she did the likes of Ranma Saotome (female), Jean Grey and Blackarachnia, Venus Terzo got her first voice acting gig as Princess Lana.
  • Alessandro Juliani (L from Death Note) made his acting debut as Kid Icarus.
• The Scrappy: There are a few, given the show's generally subpar writing and laissez-faire approach to adapting the games it's based on, but even fans of the show aren't terribly fond of Mega Man and Kid Icarus due to their transparent kid-appeal designs and annoying verbal tics, Mega Man especially due to his grating voice and more blatant inaccuracy apparent even to those who may not be fans of his games.
• Seasonal Rot: Even among fans, the third and final season is the least regarded. The animation, especially the designs of most of the existing characters took a major step down and the running time was cut to eleven minutes so that it could be paired with Super Mario World. Additionally, everyone other than Kevin was used less often (in the case of Mother Brain, it was possibly expensive to have Levi Stubbs continue regularly voicing the character. As for Simon and Mega Man, it was most likely a result of Konami and Capcom, respectively, owning those characters and being entitled to royalties). The writing also suffered a lot, particularly in the devolution of Captain N's character. Previously Kevin had been a gamer who liked a challenge but mostly a decent guy who did the right thing in the end. The last season made him into a jealous asshole in several of its episodes.
• So Bad, It's Good: Hilariously so. A teenager enters the world of Nintendo games. Every character he meets - Simon Belmont, Mega Man, Pit (named Kid Icarus), is very unlike their in-game counterpart and has a terrible, exaggerated personality. Mega Man is short and green and says "Mega" in almost every sentence. Kid Icarus does the same by ending most of his sentences with the suffix "-icus". Simon Belmont wears goggles and acts like a vain ladies' man. And that's just the characters. The plots aren't particularly good either. Neither is the voice acting, as Mega Man has a really gravelly voice, and Princess Lana and Kevin sound bored most of the time. The Brazilian dub managed to get away with a lot, such as Simon sounding like he was constantly horny. It was Narm Charm at its best.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • The badly-drawn electrical current in the intro, which is followed by an Art Shift to ugly, monochrome CGI. Both of these were fixed in the later openings.
  • Speaking of the opening, you can see that the "spot" on the live-action version of Duke's face was drawn on with makeup instead of being a true birthmark.
  • The episode "How's Bayou?" wasn't quite finished when it first aired, and as a result, several shots were missing their backgrounds. Reruns of the episode had the backgrounds intact, but for some reason, the DVD set uses the original, unfinished version, as did the version on Jaroo (the "Hulu for kids' shows" site).
• Stock Footage Failure: Early on in "The Big Game" Lana crashes into Simon and they land on the couch. Two scenes show two separate cels lumped together of Lana and Simon on the couch in what was supposed to be one cel for each scene, resulting in there being two Simons and two Lanas in both scenes.
• Spiritual Adaptation: The show can arguably be this to Kidd Video due to their similar plots. It also helps that they were both animated by DiC.
• Squick:
  • The episode "Mr. and Mrs. Mother Brain". Simon ends up under the influence of a love arrow and falls for Mother Brain. Alright, that's bad enough, but later on, Mother Brain ends up falling in love with him. Okay, really gross, but then they become engaged and almost married, and somewhere in between those two events Simon imagines them having children! Granted, this is all fixed by the end of the episode, but still! Gah!
  • The next episode, "Simon the Ape-Man" has Simon accidently ripping off Donkey Kong's toenail. It's as uncomfortable as it sounds.
  • It's only for about a few seconds, but in "A Nightmare on Mother Brain Street", Princess Lana was shown having Mother Brain's face! Doubles as Nightmare Fuel, even in-universe.
  • In the comics, the clearly adult Samus is attracted to the clearly teenage Kevin.◊ Even worse, this goes entirely unremarked upon.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: Like with The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!, many episodes featured a montage of some sort with a cover song during the show's initial run. The songs were taken out during reruns and on the DVD, and a great many of them (including ones from its partner series, The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3) were replaced with an instrumental version of "The Feud Of Faxanadu"'s Mega Move song, which almost sounds like Michael Jackson's "Beat It".
• Tear Jerker:
  • The ending of "The Big Game" reveals that returning to the real world will make Kevin and Duke forget the time they spent in Videoland, as Lana claims that Kevin's high school peers will. The music that plays in the background, along with seeing Kevin's nervous but reassuring reaction to this news is oddly touching. This only makes what was supposed to be Kevin's return home in "Metroid Sweet Metroid" all the more emotional.
  • By the time of the episode "Germ Wars", Kevin acknowledges the N-Team as his "Videoland family" as he nearly succumbs to his infection.
  • "Three Men and a Dragon": It's subtle, but when the baby dragon Puff sees her brainwashed mother again after escaping her, Puff's first reaction is to cry out "Mama!" and race towards her, even though the last time Puff saw her mother, she tried to burn Puff alive.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • "Quest For The Potion of Power", "Once Upon A Time Machine", and "Having A Ball" show us what the series could have been like had Link and Zelda become permanent members of the N-Team instead of joining in either for assistance or for a special occasion. Unfortunately, they don't even get a chance to appear within the third season.
  • In Samus' case, it's even more irritating that she was relegated to the comics and is never so much as mentioned in the show despite the final boss from her debut game (Mother Brain) being the main villain.
  • Donkey Kong and Kongoland are pushed in the opening credits of the first season as heavily as Kid Icarus, Castlevania, Mega Man and Metroid. All the other worlds listed produce major recurring characters, but Donkey Kong? Of course not. He shows up seven times in the whole series and that's it, not even once during the third season. He's even cut entirely from the later intros.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • After the crossover episodes with The Legend of Zelda, there was a lot of hope for an episode featuring the Super Mario Bros. We never got one. It also doesn't help that the Super Mario Bros. game was mentioned in the first episode.
  • With Punch-Out's King Hippo as one of the main villains, you'd expect a Punch-Out episode or at least other characters from the game to appear. Nope! All you get is a one minute scene in one episode of King Hippo's world, featuring no other game characters (barring a brief cameo by Glass Joe) and that's it!
  • When you really get right down to it, this whole show is one big They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: A mega-crossover between videogames could have been brilliant if the writers actually bothered to research what games they were using. It's part of the reason that many claim that a reboot actually has potential to be an interesting show.
• Ugly Cute: For all its horror value, "Mr. and Mrs. Mother Brain" does give us the strangely adorable baby brains.
• Unexpected Character: More like unexpected episode(s). What NES games would you expect to see turned into 22 minute episodes? Ninja Gaiden? Double Dragon? Ghosts 'n Goblins? Nope! Instead we get episodes based on Puss N Boots Peros Great Adventure, Paperboy and friggin' Tetris. This makes a lot more sense when you factor in that the production team knew very little about the games they were adapting and barely did any research, seemingly just picking games that sounded appropriate for the plot they were using.
• Unintentional Period Piece: This show could have only been made at the height of the Nintendo Entertainment System's popularity and the tail-end of the 8-bit era, with its main character Kevin being an expert on the games released on the console and other characters as Simon Belmont, Mega Man, Kid Icarus, who's usually called Pit in those games, and a sentient Game Boy in the second season all being a part of the core cast, not to mention other period references, gaming or otherwise. The North American introduction of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System just two years later alone would have made this series' premise difficult to continue working with.
• Values Dissonance: Both the show and the comics saw adult characters try to romance the teenage Kevin and Lana (Samus in the former's case, Simon in the latter's). While it was already iffy back then, there's no way that would have flown if the show was made now, with adult/minor relationships being under more heavy scrutiny.
• The Woobie: Princess Lana, her father was banished to a Mirror Universe by Mother Brain, her brother moved to the world of Tetris after losing his self-confidence, and Mother Brain and her minions would eventually overrun the palace until Kevin showed up. Even afterwards, she deeply misses her father and has to deal with the stress of leading Videoland by herself, which is shown in "The Lost City of Kongoland" to be stressful and not as easy as it was for her father. Then there's also the possibility of Kevin, who she's grown close to, leaving Videoland forever with the chance of losing his memories of her.

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