YMMV / Kid Icarus

• Adorkable:
  • Pit. You better believe it! His love for Nintendo video games, fanatical loyalty to Palutena, and general goofiness make him endearing.
  • She may be an elegant goddess, but Palutena has a lovable, trollish Genki Girl personality and behaves similarly to many geek girls in real life. Best demonstrated and taken up to eleven in Palutena's Revolting Dinner, where she's probably at her cutest!
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Pit's Brawl incarnation was often portrayed in fanfiction as a pure, submissive, weak, kind, holy and innocent being (in other words, like one of the common stereotypes of angels.) To be fair, this was before Uprising was released and developed his personalty, this didn't turn out to be too off (it's way less off than how characters often get treated in Smash Bros. fan works), and Brawl gave few hints of his or any other of its characters personalities. All the fandom that paid attention knew of Pit at the time was the implication that he was overconfident or possibly even arrogant, and a hidden conversation Snake has with Otacon that says he's far stronger and older than he looks.
• Broken Base: Was the series better before or after Uprising was released? This debate mostly started when people started accusing Masahiro Sakurai of putting too much Kid Icarus content in the fourth Smash Bros.
• Cult Classic: The first two games, while not very well-known until Smash Bros. Brawl, have a small but devoted following. A few fans strongly prefer the original games, and resent the direction the series went in after Sakurai revived it; fittingly, the fan-made Project M features Pit's classic looks (his cartoonish retro design with more adult-like proportions) as an alternate costume.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Eggplant Wizards in both the first two games. They are encountered in pairs, with each one taking ten arrows (or two mallets) to kill, and will fire eggplants randomly in high or low arcs. A single hit from them turns Pit into an eggplant, which disables his attacks. The only way to reverse this is to find a nurse, which might take a ton of backtracking. And then the hospital only cures the eggplant curse; since it doesn't replenish Pit's HP (including the damage taken from the curse itself), it's likely that the player will then have to backtrack even more to find a hot spring.
  • If you thought the Snowman would be a Glass Cannon because it's made of ice, think again. It's a surprisingly beefy enemy that takes ten arrows to kill, putting it on equal footing with the Eggplant Wizard. While it can't turn Pit into an eggplant, it does fire snowballs across the screen. Stage 2-3 loves forcing Pit to fight them while standing atop moving platforms over a lake of lava.
• Memetic Loser: Pre-Brawl Pit is mocked by some fans for being a weak protagonist in a hellishly Nintendo Hard game. His original look — being a dorky-looking cherub with a tiny bow and arrows — and appearances on Captain N: The Game Master were particularly frequent things to make fun of him for.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Eggplant Wizards, probably the most iconic enemy in the series, with one serving as Kid Icarus's Arch-Enemy in Captain N. They not only returned for Uprising but received an even quirkier successor, the Tempura Wizards.
  • Palutena was a textbook example between the releases of Brawl and Uprising. While she only played a very minor role in Brawl, her new design was popular enough that she got a pretty healthy amount of fanart and cosplay even before her first voiced appearance in the latter - though she hadn't quite caught up to Pit himself until the fourth Smash game, at which point she had become a much more prominent character.
• Fan Nickname: "Man Icarus" for the unrealized third sequel concepts by Factor 5, in which Pit was to be cursed for thousands of years for a crime and becomes a fallen angel, resembling a typical adult male Western game protagonist.
• Fandom Rivalry: With its own sister series Metroid, oddly enough. First for Metroid and its sequel overshadowing Kid Icarus and its own sequel. Then for accusations of Sakurai heavily favoring Kid Icarus content over Metroid content in Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U, making former non-combatant Palutena playable, giving Dark Pit (a Palette Swap) his own character slot, and Phosphora and Magnus both being Assist Trophies while not adding any Metroid newcomers such as fan-favorite villains Ridley or Dark Samus.^note herself more different from her template than Dark Pit This is reversed in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, with Ridley and Dark Samus arriving as newcomers with no new Kid Icarus rep to be found; Magnus was even demoted to Spirit.
• Fandom-Specific Plot: One idea that gets commonly toyed around with among the fandom is Pit succeeding Palutena as the God of Light.
• I Am Not Shazam:
  • His name is Pit, after Cupid, not Kid Icarus. (No thanks to Captain N: The Game Master or The Irate Gamer.) Incredibly, a Jakks Pacific Nintendo action figure listing◊ (full of typos) also labels Pit as "Kid Icarus"... long after the release of Uprising, and using a picture of his Figma based on that game.
  • It should be noted that this was started by Nintendo themselves, not third-parties, as the character was indeed referred to as "Kid Icarus" on the back of the NES box. It's possible that Pit's name was intended to be changed in translation, or the writer simply made a mistake. Of Myths And Monsters calls him "Pit, the original Kid Icarus," in an effort to reconcile the two names.
  • Lampshaded in Samus' Palutena's Guidance conversation in Super Smash Bros.:
    Viridi: Oh, look. There's Metroid.
    Pit: That's not a Metroid! That's Samus!
    Palutena: Just like Link isn't named Zelda.
    Viridi: And like Pit's name isn't Icarus!
    Pit: OK, this joke has officially run its course.
• My Real Daddy: While Masahiro Sakurai had no involvement with the first two games, he was responsible for the series' revival and boost in popularity thanks to the introduction of Pit in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, as well as spearheading the subsequent production of a third game in the franchise. Uprising would firmly establish the quirky personalities of Pit and Palutena while greatly expanding the world and cast of characters, resulting in fans coming to associate him with the Kid Icarus franchise more than anyone else.
• Nintendo Hard:
  • Like difficulty curves? Then you'll love the new "difficulty cliff"! It starts out extremely difficult, but out of nowhere it becomes easy. World 1 is the hardest in the game. It is Hell, after all.
  • For some, the last dungeon (3-4) might be a brain-wreckingly difficult.
  • Its difficulty is alleviated in the 3D Classics-port, which seems to be mainly based on the Japanese version, and thus has a save-feature (comparable to The Legend of Zelda), meaning you can just reload your savestate on the latest level reached. Additionally, you can choose between two control modes, "CUSTOM" and "ORIGINAL". ORIGINAL has Pit maneuver like in his NES-title; CUSTOM, on the other hand, gives him much smoother run- and jump-physics, a faster shooting-frequency, being able to jump while aiming up, and being able to slow his descent like in Of Myths and Monsters. Believe it or not, this makes the game much more accessible and manageable.
• Quirky Work: Probably the strangest rendition of Classical Mythology ever conceived. Then Pit's Brawl appearance gave an illusion of Zelda-like semi-normalcy to the uninitiated... only to be completely shattered in Uprising where the quirkiness levels were cranked up to eleven.
• Sequel Displacement: As far as the character designs go, the redesigns of Pit, Palutena, and Medusa introduced in Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Uprising are more widely-recognized and well-liked than their original designs.
• Stuck in Their Shadow: The existence of Metroid probably played a part in keeping another sequel from being made until Uprising.

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