YMMV / Dark Seed II

• Anti-Climax Boss: The Behemoth. Aside from its underwhelming design, all it does is roar a couple of times and gets one-shotted by a ridiculously wimpy thrust from Mike.
• Awesome Music: The main theme is actually pretty good, keeping an eerie, haunting tone. This is hardly surprising being that it was composed by Mark Morgan, who later composed the music for Fallout and 2.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Late in the game, Mike gets interrogated by an FBI agent. The agent accuses him of being a killer, Mike punches him out after he angers Mike... and it never comes up again.
• Complete Monster: The Shapeshifter, aka Jack, Mike Dawson's Dark World counterpart, is a follower of the Ancients who participates in their plan to awaken the Behemoth to Kill All Humans. Murdering the members of the Other World cult—including Rita, Doc Larson, and Mayor Fleming—and decapitating them to power the Behemoth with their heads, the Shapeshifter frames Mike Dawson for the murders, before later killing Mike's therapist Dr. Sims and Mike himself.
• Contested Sequel: On one hand, Dark Seed II marks a number of improvements over the original: The puzzles aren't brutally obtuse as in the first game, the technology leap opens up for effective, creepy artworks from H. R. Giger, and the plot has clear direction thanks to giving more involved dialogue and characters. However, the expanded narrative comes with even sillier moments than before (most of which involves making Mike Dawson look clumsy and pathetic), and the ending just goes completely bonkers, which ruins much of the experience. So which one is better? You decide. Somewhat controversial in that both games had about the same critical reception at the time of release.
• Designated Hero: Even though Mike is probably suffering from mental trauma after the first game's events, he is still difficult to sympathize with. He comes off as being whiny, childish, and astonishingly incompetent in several situations. He also becomes more and more of a Jerkass as the game progresses (dialogue options can amplify this), and makes a few questionable decisions throughout the game.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Jack, for at least trying to help Mike unlike everybody else in town, who just treat him like shit for next to no reason. Also thanks to his affable, Fonzie-esque demeanor.
• Fair for Its Day: Although the majority of the cast's treatment of Mike's mental health hasn't aged well (see Values Dissonance below), the game's overall depiction of depression is actually quite tactful, and progressive, especially for the time. Special mention goes to the game specifically showing him struggling to get up in the morning, not having energy to do mundane tasks like shower, not liking music anymore, etc. which are all real symptoms of depression that even modern media still messes up occasionally.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Dark Seed II's plot twist is remarkably similar to a book released a year later and then made into a popular movie. The plot twist is so famous that just naming the work tells you what it is. It's Fight Club. Jack is, apparently, just Mike's subconscious, the cooler person he wishes he could be. Or something.
  • Apparently Gru in Despicable Me took Mike's advice on how to win at rigged carnival games, as they play out similarily.
• Jerkass Woobie: In a way, Mike himself, despite doing some really dumb things and being kind of a Jerkass. Everyone treats him like crap and belittles him, even his own mother. This is despite him having some serious psychological issues and being the prime suspect of a crime he didn't commit, the murder of a woman he was either dating or at least cared a lot about. He doesn't even get a happy ending, as Jack, his only friend/Dark World self/split personality/hallucination kills him by stabbing him in the back. The police end up blaming Mike for the murders that have been committed throughout town while the real killer, Jack/The Shapeshifter, goes free.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Just do a YouTube search for Mike Dawson and you will see many videos for the ring toss and unrelated Mike Dawson videos flooded with Dark Seed Retsupurae comments.
  • "It turned out to be Dark Seed. Oh no, not him."
  • TV Tropes, did you kill Rita?
    • What was your relationship with Rita?
  • Ehhh, ya missed, pal!
  • "Here Mike... this will explain everything. {SPLORT}
  • Oh no, not the hall of tropes again! The only way out of here is tropes!
  • I would bow, but I'm too embarrassed...
  • I don't think Ik and Uk are going to molest me anymore.
  • Everybody had sex with Rita. Except Mike Dawson.
• Narm: A lot of what happens (particularly the way it makes Mike dumber than a sack of hammers and afflicted with the worst luck in the known universe) feels less like Gigeresque horror and borders on Self-Parody.
  • The Behemoth in particular. With all the hype it gets about being able to destroy the world, you'd expect something more menacing than a giant snake with a skull for a head wearing a buzzsaw like a sombrero.
  • The Deranged Animation for the digitized characters, namely, when they are walking. Or talking. Or doing anything, really.
  • Mike using Dark World tools to cheat at carnival games. You know your horror game is in trouble when the first Despicable Me movie can use almost the exact same plot point as a gag fifteen years later.
  • The carnival is decorated with H. R. Giger artwork. Who would visit this carnival?!
  • Everything about the clown and his medicine. The clown won't step away from the ticket booth to get the medication he will literally die without, Mike can't get the ice chest open because there's an anvil on top of it, and when the clown dies, only Gargan seems to notice or care (and he gets over it almost immediately).
  • The reveal at the end (that Mike was unable to locate the Dark Portal because it was hidden behind an unlocked door in his house that he had never once in his entire life attempted to open, because his mother lied to him that it was locked) turns the whole story from badly-done horror into outright farce.
  • Oh no, not the hall of death again! The only way out of there is death!
• Porting Disaster: For some reason, a Japanese version was ported to the original Playstation, where it suffers from Loads and Loads of Loading and even worse animation, somehow. On the plus side, the voice acting is considered a step up from the original version, even if Mike's more serious and competent portrayal tends to amuse Western players for unintended reasons.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: Dark Seed was notoriously difficult, even by early adventure game standards, but II drops most of what made the first game challenging.
• So Bad, It's Good: Mike's dialogue and some other bizarre elements are good at eliciting laughter where the developers probably intended a different reaction.
• Special Effect Failure: Largely due to the original game's elaborate hand-drawn art being replaced with digital FMV art, failing to realise that FMV art has always looked like crap, which is why it didn't last.
• Ugly Cute: The Behemoth, especially when it's a baby.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: The human characters sometimes look and move like they came out of a Rankin/Bass stop motion movie, making them sometimes look even creepier than the aliens.
• Values Dissonance: The fact that Mike had a mental breakdown and everyone's response is to treat him like garbage makes more sense when you look into it from a 90s perspective. Mental healthcare was largely seen as quackery - and men in particular were heavily frowned upon for having emotions or any kind of mental health problem.
• Values Resonance: On the other hand, the way the game depicts Mike's depression, and him trying to get help for it is stunningly accurate, and progressive for the time, and is something even some modern media struggles to do as correctly.
• The Woobie: Goth, who is not only slowly and painfully dying, but also risks everything to help Mike out only to learn that he just did all that to help Mike win a children's carnival game (what Mike's actually trying to do is clear an obstruction in the Dark World, but he can't articulate this for whatever reason). Needless to say, he's understandably upset over this. And then he gets murdered by the Ancients for his troubles.