YMMV / Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (NES)

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Since very little about the game is explained, a common fan theory is that the demons Hyde sees are actually the townspeople. A related theory is that they know Jekyll is Hyde, and that's why they attack him.
• Awesome Music:
  • The town theme, heard in Jekyll's stages, is insanely catchy. This fan remix is even better.
  • Hyde's theme is also very catchy, though you may not hear much of it in-game.
• Common Knowledge: The belief that the citizens of London are intentionally impeding Jekyll. Only Billy Pones and the Bomb Maniac are deliberately antagonistic. The other citizens are just going about their normal lives and Jekyll either gets caught in the crossfires or the citizens push him out of the way trying to escape the Bomb Maniac.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • The Bomb Maniacs are one of the biggest threats to Jekyll. The bombs have a very large hitbox, and sometimes the explosion will knock you back into it, taking off a lot of your life bar.
  • The Palmas in the World of Demons appear out of nowhere, often coming from behind Hyde, and their attacks spread out in a star-shaped pattern that's very difficult to dodge.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: As if actually reaching and witnessing this ending wasn't bad enough.
• Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory:
  • Parodied by The Angry Video Game Nerd, who analyzes the game and comes to the conclusion that it is one of the deepest and most finely-crafted games of all time, truly symbolizing the duality of human nature.
    AVGN: I think I get it. Why, it's the best game ever made. It's more than a game; it exposes the dual nature of the human spirit. The only way to win the game is to be Jekyll, but you wanna be Hyde so you can shoot shit. You see, it's a constant battle between good and evil, and Jekyll must stay farther along his path than Hyde. If Hyde gains the lead, then evil will triumph over good, and that's the true conflict to the human soul. And to deny the evil completely, would only force it to the subconscious mind, like a city broken into different social classes. People don't wanna step outside their own boundaries, like Jekyll wandering into the wrong section of town. He's unwelcome. Nevertheless, he must abide by his own good nature. No wonder the cane doesn't work. The game does not reward you for acting upon your malevolent intentions. It's a proposed guideline for a set of morality rules to be programmed through real life. It uses the Victorian era as a fundamentalist depiction of outward respectability and inward lust. It's a metaphor for social and geographical fragmentation. It eludes the Freud theory of repression, in which unacceptable desires or impulses are excluded from the conscious mind and left to operate on their own... in the unconscious. Or you could just say, THE GAME FUCKING SUCKS!
  • Incidentally, Bad Game Hall of Fame argues that part of AVGN's sarcastic interpretation was indeed what the game designers intended.
    In several ways, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is also a precursor to such games as Everybody's Gone to the Rapture and The Stanley Parable, where the focus of the design isn't necessarily on making the core gameplay “entertaining,” but rather to use mechanics as a means of conveying an intent. There are at least a dozen different, downright obvious ways that the Jekyll gameplay sections could have been changed to make the game more conventionally fun to play: Increasing his walk speed, making his cane a more viable defense, including more stress relievers and healing items, et cetera. But the design is deliberate, and the intent is clear: Playing as Jekyll isn't meant to be fun. This was a calculated decision by the developers for Jekyll to move as slowly as he does, as it also was for him to be completely defenseless. As such, there is the constant temptation to intentionally increase your stress in order to play as Hyde, breaking up the monotony and providing an outlet for players to release their pent-up aggression and frustration. And for those who foolishly strive for perfection in the Jekyll segments – who somehow manage to complete the game with minimal time spent as Hyde – their “reward” is the obvious lesser of the two endings.
• Nintendo Hard: Between the confusing, chaotic gameplay and the lack of a life or password system, this is one of the hardest games on the NES even after you know what to do.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: One of Joueur du Grenier's most hated games, and it's The Angry Video Game Nerd’s most hated game as well as what he deemed for nearly two decades to be the single worst NES game that he had ever played^note (until it was eventually surpassed by The Last Ninja, and even then the Nerd qualified it by pointing out that The Last Ninja at least had the excuse of being a Commodore 64 game ported to a system ill-equipped to handle it, whereas this game was designed for the NES from the outset). And he plays a lot of bad ones.
  • Almost twenty years later, the Nerd finally achieved what he couldn't do: play through the game with both endings viewed together.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The autoscrolling mechanics in Hyde's levels means if you turn into him early on, there's no way you can kill enough enemies in time to change back.
  • Hyde getting farther than Jekyll means they both die instantly, leading directly to the game over screen.
  • Jekyll's cane isn't useful for anything except killing bees.
• Special Effect Failure: The sound effects for the ticking of the Bomb Maniac's bombs sounds more like typing than ticking.
• The Woobie: All Jekyll wants to do is get to his wedding on time, but the entire town is out to kill him. To make matters worse, if Hyde gets farther along than Jekyll does, they both die.