YMMV / Helltaker

The Video Game

• Adorkable: Despite being a hardened protagonist, Helltaker treats gathering a harem of cute demon girls as Serious Business, grinning and fist-pumping whenever he succeeds at charming one of them at the end of each level. And he loves making chocolate crepes!
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Given how little Helltaker seems to care that his mission was functionally a failure, it's easy to get the idea his view of a "harem" is a circle of close friends or roommates rather than a romantic circle devoted to one person, meaning he actually did get what he wanted in the end, and possibly made Azazel more accepting of her sexuality.
• Awesome Music: Mittsies provides all of the music for this game, and all of the tracks are awesome.
  • "Vitality", the main gameplay theme. Little wonder everyone dances to its beat.
  • "Apropos", the main menu theme. It provides a very dark, foreboding undercurrent (rather appropriate for Beelzebub), and to show the Helltaker's determination.
  • "Epitomize", Judgement's theme. The dark beats and heavy bass really scream, "ignite the sin machine!"
  • "Luminescent", the theme for the game's ending where the Helltaker talks to his harem. It provides a fitting backdrop to the equally silly ending.
  • "Alchemy", the theme for the levels of Examtaker. It really sets the stage of Loremaster's vision of Hell being remarkably different from before.
  • "Titanium", the song for the Final Boss of Examtaker. The dark thumping beats provide a brisk backdrop to the Brutal Bonus Level that is this boss fight.
• Draco in Leather Pants: The entire cast got hit with this when the game came out. Most of the harem are shown to be willing to horribly murder the Helltaker for being a slight annoyance at worst, and are either shown or implied to be regularly causing mischief, damage and other crazy (and illegal, considering the arrival of the Police in the Normal ending) antics during their stay with him. Meanwhile, the Helltaker's quest from start to finish was entirely for his own selfish desires. Despite this, they are often portrayed as Not Evil, Just Misunderstood, a bad case of Tsundere at worst in fanart, or outright heroic.
• Fanon: Many fans believe the officer angel from the Non-Standard Game Over is Archangel Michael.
• Fanon Welding: The Friendly Fandoms between this game and DOOM gave rise to humorous idea of Helltaker and Doomguy/Doomslayer being relatives of some sort, with them being either father and son or brothers. Most of this crossover deals with the hilarity of how they have completely opposite views on dealing with demons, with Doomguy usually showing up pissed that his own flesh-and-blood would "lay" with morally bankrupt demons instead of slaying them.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • With the fandom of Doki Doki Literature Club! since this and Helltaker are free-to-play games featuring a harem of cute Animesque girls. It's easy to come across a crossover fanart of these two.
  • Also, DOOM, mostly because of the crossover of extra manly men entering Hell to slay demons, for differing definitions of the word "slay."
  • Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss, being series about loveable demons in Hell, have a not insignificant amount of fandom overlap with Helltaker.
  • Shin Megami Tensei fans have a good-natured relationship with the Helltaker fandom because of the humorously similar plot of collecting demons.
• Genius Bonus:
  • In the Apocryphal Book of Enoch, Azazel is one of the fallen angels who married humans, fitting for the only angel in the game who joined the Helltaker's harem. However, given the implications from both the game and Vanripper that Azazel is only interested in the Demons, this interpretation still fits, as the fallen Watchers were described as "sons of God" who fell for "daughters of Man."
    • Taken further in Examtaker, which sees her taking over Hell and running it like a laboratory for her research, which ties in with the Apocryphal interpretation of Azazel as someone who provided pre-deluge man with forbidden sciences against God's will.
  • Minor, but Beelzebub's animation with the tissue actually resembles how flies◊ clean themselves; wiping their hands, then their head.
  • The Abyssal Prisoner's "This is the best day of my life" reaction to being offered pancakes fits with some interpretations of the demon in Christian theology, which equates Beelzebub with the sin of gluttony.
  • The lapel pin Lucifer wears with her business outfit is the Sigil of Lucifer. It's not just an accessory, it's also a name tag.
  • In the Examtaker DLC, the loading screen is branded with a certain sigil associated with Azazel, providing a hint as to the Loremaster's true identity.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
  • A considerable Japanese fanbase developed rather quickly, likely due to all the Cute Monster Girls. Lucifer, Modeus, Justice, and Cerberus even get their own◊ Nendoroids!
  • This game also became massively popular in South Korea as well, and there are already several fan dubbings (including one done by professional Korean voice actors, featuring the Korean voice actress of Rey) and even fan animations and fan parodies (including political cartoons) created by Korean artists.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: This fan theory about Azazel became increasingly funny in the run-up to the Examtaker DLC.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: One of the few complaints people have about the game is that it's very short, able to be completed in its entirety in a single sitting. The game can be completed in twenty minutes if you know what you're doing, and it's possible to get all of the achievements in under an hour. The game being free helps mitigate this somewhat, but it's still very short.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • A Party Parrot parody quickly surfaced from the dancing demon sprites.
  • Helltaker's uncanny resemblance to Kazuma Kiryu from the Like a Dragon series led to several crossover jokes of how "This is what would happen to Kiryu if he learned what sex is." Though, considering the implications in the game, it's possible it's just plain old Kiryu.
  • Cerberus quickly got mixed up with a bunch of dog/wolf memes like Awoo, Gyate Gyate, and the Cone of Shame.
  • GLORIOUS SUCCESS^ExplanationThis message appears after completing the last level and upon getting the secret ending, complete with sparkly-eyes dancing skeletons. It took off as a reference to this game, especially its mountains of fan art.
  • Jokes about Helltaker changing his plans and becoming a Heaventaker instead (by assembling a harem of angels instead) in Azazel's ending got bandied around by some fans.
• Moe:
  • The Japanese side of the fandom quickly brought out Lucifer's moe-like points — according to the Party Parrot parody, Lucy's real moe is the combination of her long-suffering ("crybaby") CEO status with her cute newlywed housewife (plus apron) appeal in the ending.
  • Cerberus, a trio of adorable Little Bit Beastly demon girls with the personality of a rambunctious puppy.
  • Modeus, the nymphomaniac who's somewhat naive views of romance come from reading erotic literature. I guess you can call her, Moe-deus.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • While the art-style is cutesy and most actions happen through text, the various descriptions of the "bad endings" can be terrifying if thought about. So many gruesome descriptions of death and mutilation happening to Helltaker, whether it's neck-snapping, sledgehammer knee-capping, blood-bursting throat-slashing and more.
  • The implications laid during the events of Examtaker are pretty disturbing. From Azazel becoming the Mad Scientist Loremaster who conquered Hell and lost her arms in the process, to the implied sheer number of gruesome demon-human hybrids if Subject 667's name is any indication.
• Recurring Fanon Character: Amazingly enough for a character who was never intended to be part of the story in the first place, Generic the Template Demon, who as her name suggests was the baseline design that every other demon girl's appearance was developed using, got an impressively high amount of popularity once the concept bible page featuring her was released, mainly since her design is rather unique among the girls because she's so basic. Plenty of fanart has been made about her, usually going the route of being The Generic Girl as befitting her name.
• Retroactive Recognition: After Mittsies got a massive Colbert Bump from having their music used for this game, a plethora of gamers looked back on their music catalogue and found themselves experiencing memories of 2012 and beyond, involving a decent number of... NSFW fan-games for My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic that Mittsies themself made to go with said music.
• That One Level:
  • Level IX has become notorious for its difficulty for players. Despite having no enemies or spikes, you must follow an exact pattern of steps so as to not run out of them and having to start all over again or, more likely, get hopelessly stuck and have to start all over again.
  • The part after that, however, is flat out Nintendo Hard. With the other levels, you can at least cheat and look up the solution to the puzzle, but this level is a straight-up boss fight requiring fast reflexes and a lot of patience.
  • Pretty much the entirety of Examtaker is seen as much more challenging than the base game, with level 5 and the Final Boss being exceptionally frustrating.

The Webcomic

• Memetic Mutation:
  • Modeus' shocked face at being told that porn isn't real became a popular reaction image pretty quickly.
  • The disbelieving expression that Justice makes at being told the same thing as Modeus also became a reaction meme.
• Popular with Furries: While there was already notable interest in the game due to the Little Bit Beastly Cerberus and some of the artist's previous work, the reveal in the comics that the demons are capable of shapeshifting into furry forms (such as Lucifer turning into a goat-girl◊) brought the fandom around full force, with Lucifer's aforementioned case getting the brunt of the fanart. The fact that Lucifer herself outright references furries is the cherry on top of this whole thing.
• Recurring Fanon Character: Ever since she was revealed to exist, Baphomet the goat-fetishist demon became a very popular O.C. Stand-in for fan-content. But what really solidified her fandom status was when Pixiv artist Grizz made a series of comics that were so close to Vanripper's comics in artstyle and writing that their version of the character became the permanent unofficial design for all fanart of her going forwards.

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