Games: Five Nights at Freddy's | Five Nights at Freddy's 2 | Five Nights at Freddy's 3 | Five Nights at Freddy's 4 | Five Nights at Freddy's World | Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location | Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator | Ultimate Custom Night | Five Nights At Freddys VR Help Wanted | Five Nights at Freddy's AR: Special Delivery | Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach
Novels: Five Nights at Freddy's: The Silver Eyes | Five Nights at Freddy's: The Twisted Ones | Five Nights at Freddy's: The Fourth Closet | Five Nights at Freddy's: Fazbear Frights
- Alas, Poor Scrappy: The fact that the new "Toy" versions of the old characters are going to be scrapped at the end of the game; not just deactivated, but completely destroyed. It just depends on your personal opinion of the re-designs whether you shed a tear or rejoice in their fate. Although the Puppet was revealed to be still around during the events of the first game, so the trustworthiness of the articles claiming as such are in question.
- Audience-Alienating Ending: After spending six whole nights trying to avoid terrifying animatronics, the game ends with Fritz (and the player) getting fired for tampering with the animatronics. Because of this, many fans were disappointed that all the jumpscares they got were All for Nothing.
- Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
- When you die, there's a chance that you'll be taken to one of several strange, pixellated mini-games. All but one of them are extremely relevant to the plot and are alluded to throughout this game and 3. The events that take place in, "Go Go Go!", however, are never mentioned again anywhere in the series, and many fans are confused as to whether or not it means that the murderer's body count was 11 instead of 6.
- A bare endoskeleton can appear in the Prize Corner and left vent. Though it can block other animatronics from entering said vent, you never encounter the endoskeleton otherwise, and its appearance is totally unexplained.
- The two Shadow animatronics, "RWQFSFASXC"/Shadow Bonnie and Shadow Freddy, can randomly appear, and staring at them for too long will cause the game to close down. Nothing in-game (nor in 3 where they reappear) alludes to just what these things may be.
- Common Knowledge:
- It has become a widely accepted "fact" that the way Balloon Boy disables your flashlight is taking out the batteries. This idea originates from Balloon Boy doing so in 5 AM at Freddy's: The Prequel, a fan animated short of the game made by Piemations. In the actual game, there's no evidence that this is true at all.
- While the function remains the same regardless of terminology, you are not wearing a mask, but an empty Freddy Fazbear head which wasn't meant to be a mask but a casing for an endoskeleton. Ultimate Custom Night does end up calling the item a mask due to many people calling it that.
- Contested Sequel: Some people find the game terrifying, enjoy the new additions to the gameplay, appreciate the higher difficulty level and more scares, and how it goes deeper into the company's past. Others consider that Scott should have stuck with the game's original release date so he could have had time to smooth out some rough edges, feel it's pretty much the same as the first except with minor tweaks that aren't enough to differentiate it, and think making the game harder was prioritized over making it scary.
- Creepy Cute: The living endoskeleton
that wanders around on rare occasions seems like it'd be a borderline case of Nightmare Fuel. However, its large eyes, puppy-mouth, and flattened ears are… disturbingly endearing. It helps that it doesn't actually attack you. - Demonic Spiders: Veteran players generally agree that Toy Bonnie is the most frustrating animatronic to deal with, especially in regards to 10/20 Mode. He is the only animatronic that combines hiding around in the vents with a lengthy animation as he inspects you with the mask on, which means that he not only locks you in place while the Puppet and Foxy are free to go about their business, he can also decide to take his sweet time starting that animation in the first place and waste even more time.
- Fanon: Although it's never been directly confirmed, most fans assume the spare animatronic head on Mangle was originally a parrot.
- Franchise Original Sin:
- This game is where the franchise's story got more focus and added depth via cryptic minigames, and subsequently solving it became just as much a challenge as the game itself. While this then-unique mystery element was applauded back then, a common criticism of later games is that the plot became too cryptic to the point of being almost completely incomprehensible, with several inconsistencies, few hard facts compared to the number of vague elements open for debate, a fair share of Voodoo Sharks and Ass Pulls, and fans simply giving up solving it out of frustration.
- The Withered animatronics (and Mangle) are the first set of animatronics to be heavily damaged and decrepit (though Foxy was rather worse for wear in the original). They were accepted for being a unique way to bring the first game's antagonists back, but a criticism some have of the animatronics from 3 and 4 is that their damage and exposed metal makes them look too much like generic horror monsters, as opposed to the charm of mundane Suck E. Cheese's animatronics that invoke the Uncanny Valley to be scary. While 3 and 4 were still well received, the sin was addressed in later games, as Sister Location, Pizzeria Simulator, and VR: Help Wanted introduce new animatronics that utilized the Uncanny Valley to an extent rivaling the classic and Toy animatronics (and even the later withered designs that Scott conceived were given details that still allowed them to fall into the valley, such as Scrap Baby's realistic-looking hair).
- The Toy animatronics' facial recognition systems and advanced technology compared to the originals helped to deceive the player into assuming the game wasn't a prequel, but it was also the first time overt and controversial science fiction themes were put into the story. After later installments in the franchise introduced more and more outlandish elements (such as illusion discsnote and whatever "remnant" is)note , on top of turning the Purple Guy into a cartoonish Mad Scientist, it's not hard to see the Toys as a sign of things to come.
- Genius Bonus:
- The game being a prequel was actually foreshadowed in the help wanted ad. Specifically, the hint is in the apparent fact that the advertised weekly-wage actually is a week's worth of minimum wage back in 1987.
- The music that keeps the Puppet mollified comes from "My Grandfather's Clock", specifically the chorus, which tells how the eponymous clock faithfully kept time for its owner's entire life and stopped when he died. Rather fitting, considering what happens if you don't keep the music box wound.
- Good Bad Bugs: The infamous Night 9001 glitch, in which none of the animatronics work. At all. Not even the Puppet! You can just literally stare at the wall and do nothing and survive the whole night.
- Heartwarming Moments: At first, it may seem depressing to see the old animatronics withering and decaying away from years of disrepair. Then you find out that this game isn't a sequel, but a prequel. It turns out that they won't be rotting away for long, and will return better than ever, giving the old animatronics a Throw the Dog a Bone moment.
- It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: A common critique for this game is that it feels too similar to the previous game, but just with more elements.
- Moment of Awesome:
- You know how badass Mike was in the first game? Well, Jeremy Fitzgerald far surpasses him in the second one. He has to deal with 10 animatronics now, while trying to wind a music box, conserve flashlight power, and be able to put on his mask fast enough when they get too near him. Oh, and the reason he has the mask? No doors! And he keeps on coming back, night after night! However, all this possibly earns him is a lobotomy-by-robot, but still, he was badass while he lasted.
- Out of the way, Jeremy. Fritz Smith is the new badass around here! He beat 10/20 Mode and got fired for it anyway!
- Porting Disaster: While not nearly as egregious as most examples of this trope, there are two major downgrades from the PC to iOS;
- The between night cutscenes have been removed, which added quite a bit of lore to the game in addition to what Phone Guy tells you.
- Perhaps worse than the last is the fact that Mangle does not make its radio/Internet static noises on iOS, which wouldn't be as much of an issue if it weren't the only way to tell if it's coming for you or is in the right side vent. Given that it cannot be fooled by the Freddy mask once it is hanging from your office ceiling, this problem can lead to some very cheap deaths that'd be easily avoidable.
- Both of these issues, as well as calls for more minor fixes such as a better frame rate on kill screens and the re-inclusion of the shifting characters on the title screen, has set the App Store review section for the game ablaze.
- Replacement Scrappy: Much of this died down once the game was released and the old bots were found to still be in the game, but several players were upset at Toy Bonnie and Mangle, seeing them as replacements of Bonnie and Foxy instead of additions to the cast (it didn't help that Bonnie's face was severely gutted in an attempted redesign in-universe).
- Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Mangle went from Replacement Scrappy for the most popular animatronic from the first game to The Woobie and one of the better-regarded bots as a whole.
- Sequel Difficulty Spike: The doors are gone, the animatronics can get you through the vents, there are more cameras, there are 6 more animatronics to worry about, and your main defense is a mask that will ward most of them off. As an example of this, Night 1 in this game is much harder compared to the first one, having three of the new animatronics active to hunt you and swiftly introducing your new worst enemy, the Puppet.
- That One Boss: The Custom Night brings back Golden Freddy, and he's the closest thing to a Final Boss this game can have. He's only here because of the fact the first time a video featuring him was uploaded, he charged into the office at 12 A.M.
- The Scrappy: Balloon Boy became this very quickly, to the point where Redditors called him "Fuckboy." This is less because of what he actually does, as his ability is usually praised for at least being unique, but more that they felt they didn't like that it made the game harder, and that because BB spams his loudest noise when he's inside the office — his laugh, making their slightly-extended-game-over even more unenjoyable. BB's Creepy Child Perpetual Smiler gimmick, for these people, was so effective that out of universe BB got more Memetic Psychopath status than his other companions.
- Stuck in Their Shadow: Poor Freddy was already a victim of this in the first game and its no different here. Having to share his game with Withered!Chica, Withered!Bonnie and EnsembleDarkHorses like Mangle and Foxy only helped them overshadow him even more.
- Ugly Cute: Much like Foxy in the first game, this is one of the reasons behind Mangle's popularity. A lot of people are very fond of its cute colours in combination with its appearance.
- Unpopular Popular Character: In-universe, Mangle is the greatest chew toy the pizzeria has ever seen — it's the replacement of another character who was also seen in-universe as quite popular according to Phone Guy and one of the minigames, is maimed and poorly rebuilt on a daily basis, and the staff have grown all but indifferent about maintaining it; but it happens to be one of the better received members of the toy generation animatronics. The only thing stopping it from being an Ensemble Dark Horse like Foxy is the fact that it's too much of a main character to count.
- Viewer Gender Confusion: Toy Bonnie's eye shadow makes him look extremely feminine, and Mangle is referred to as a guy by Phone Guy despite the Uncanny Valley Makeup. If you're going by the custom difficulty mode called "Ladies Night", they are male and female, respectively.
