YMMV / Majesty

• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Of the mutually exclusive faction choices, one is generally considered as obviously preferable by a large chunk of players.
  • From among the mutually exclusive temples, Dauros/Agrela are usually chosen, simply because of Paladins, and the cheaper heal/resurrection spells are a perk. Fervus/Krypta can provide powerful map control, with their hordes of summoned and charmed beasts/undead respectively, but it takes more setup than simply massing the single strongest hero class in the game.
  • Dwarves are usually chosen over elves and gnomes because they provide ballista towers (see their Game-Breaker entry for details). Gnomes are a more situational choice, since they aren't helpful in combating monsters (unless until their Magikarp Power kicks in), but can be mandatory on the absolute hardest settings for simply keeping your town alive through early game. As for elves, their economic bonus can bankroll endless spell spam, but their downsides need to be managed.
• Crazy Is Cool: Fervus and his cultists. For some context: cultists fight by throwing knives, and get faster as they level up. They also eventually gain the ability to turn into hellbears. Yes, this means your kingdom can eventually be defended by giant knife-throwing bears who can charm wild bears into supporting them.
• Demonic Spiders: Dragons, ice dragons, greater medusae, rock golems, wendigo, and yetis all count. Ironically, the giant spiders in the game only count as Goddamned Bats.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Cultists, with their useful abilities and zany tendencies, are one of the most popular heroes.
• First Installment Wins: By a very wide margin. You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who's even played anything beyond The Northern Expansion, and even harder pressed to find someone who enjoyed the sequels more.
• Fridge Brilliance: At first, having to research things like healing potions at marketplaces seems like a case of Fridge Logic, especially if you have more than one. But you're actually not discovering new knowledge, you're averting Easy Logistics, as "research" in this case probably means things like setting up supply chains and such.
• Fridge Logic: How do you poison a rock golem? Or any undead creature, for that matter?
• Game-Breaker:
  • Ballista towers. They're tougher than guardhouses, are capable of dealing actual damage with their bolts, don't increase in cost like guardhouses do, and also don't require research to get working. It's practically necessary to form a perimeter of these in harder maps, and is one of the reasons why you'll want to choose dwarves nine times out of ten. The towers were Nerfed in the sequel, with flavor text of the new dwarven towers even lampshading this, saying about how in old times, dwarven ballista were considered the most cost-effective means of defending a kingdom.
  • Paladins border on this. They have the strongest combination of damage, durability and speed of all hero classes (some outshine them in one of the aspects, but they're usually also heavily penalized in the others), and a decent behavior patterns that have them diligently and efficiently hunting down threats to the town.
  • Elves can be this if you know how to handle their Lounges (and Gambling Halls). If you put a bounty on your own lounges and take them off the repair cycle, the Elves' biggest downsides can be removed for a couple hundred gold (which you won't have any shortage of, thanks to their income bonuses).
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Trolls, who can regenerate, spawn from nowhere and have a tendency to attack your most valuable and fragile buildings, stealing your gold, wiping out your guards and hitting heavy with high resistance to boot.
  • Medusae are this for wizards, as they have the highest magical resistance of normal monsters (90%), making them Nigh-Invulnerable to any spells. Incidentally, this means you can't use direct damage spells against them, either.
  • Taken to a frustrating degree in the sequel. Goddamn sewer rats and ratmen who relentlessly attack peasant houses, and should just one of your heroes die, a graveyard will appear, and before long, your kingdom will be plagued by undead zombie warriors. Oh, and you still have to complete the quest you're on, despite these annoyances. You practically have to build towers near those sewer entrances and graveyards to keep them from disrupting your economy.
  • In the original, strangleweeds and giant spiders. They do little damage, but their poisonous attacks spell death for any neophyte hero lacking healing potions.
    • The original game also has swarms of goblins, which, whilst their melee and archer units aren't particularly dangerous, even in numbers and to most low level heroes (though the expansion pack does give them a more powerful melee unit that operates like a fast, gimped minotaur), their PRIESTS (which cast magical swarms of stinging insects) are another matter, well able to run-up severe damage on most hero types if they are not killed quickly due to most heroes having 0 magic resistance in single player (in multi-player there is a minimum resistance of 30 on all heroes). In large numbers, they border on Demonic Spiders.
• Memetic Mutation: "Three cheers for Fervus!"
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • "I...am...A CHAMPION!" See Magikarp Power on the main page.
  • Apart from the above, all heroes will proclaim some class-appropriate line (e.g. the Paladin's "I AM ENLIGHTENED!") across the entire map when they reach level 10. This is always excellent to hear, because it means that they're equal to most dangers and you can stop hovering over them with temple spells when they take them on. Particularly if it's a wizard or one of your other fragile heroes.
• Narm: The Warriors and the Wizards ("I'm MELTING!")
  • The Healers are an Aversion. A lot of their lines are actually very serious. This can make for some rather disturbing Mood Whiplash after hearing the other heroes' ridiculous voice clips.
• Nightmare Fuel: In addition to being a rather disturbing Body Horror, the Abomination can literally be this for your heroes; two of the spells it casts make heroes flee in terror, and in the ending blurb, your advisor says that the heroes who fought it suffer from nightmares and hallucinations.
  • In "Free the Slaves," the sound from the Slave Pits and Slave Crosses is a bloodcurdling scream. Compared to the voice clips, it comes completely out of left field and might be a Jump Scare if you're not expecting it.
• Tear Jerker: Some of the heroes' death lines are hammy with a touch of Gallows Humor. Others are just heartrending. Viz:
  Paladin: Evil... has won....
  Warrior: My service—ends!
  Ranger: I join the wild spirits....
  Gnome: But I'm just... a gnome....
• That One Attack: The Paralyze spell. It deals very large amounts of damage and immobilizes heroes for long periods of time. It is spammable. Combine this with the fact that most heroes have zero magical resistance, and anyone who gets hit by this is dead meat.
  • The Magma Bomb spell is perhaps a more typical example, though one you're less likely to see, as it's only used by bosses. Each casting sends out three projectiles that deal the most damage out of any spell in the game. This is one of the reasons the black phantoms are so dangerous (see below).
• That One Boss:
  • Vendral is a dragon turned up to eleven in power and ability. He can't even be defeated for the first two of his attacks in his quest. Gold Edition makes his quest even harder by changing his second attack from 7.5 to 5 days in.
  • The black phantoms are Those Three Bosses. They're lightning fast, immune to magic, and spam devastating spells at any hero foolish enough to come near them (both of which are That One Attack). Oh, and you have to deal with three at once. Ballista towers are the only effective way to deal with them. Fortunately, you don't have to actually fight them except in "The Day of Reckoning."
• That One Quest:
  • "Tomb of the Dragon King" from the original release is a less extreme example. Dragons usually show up as lone threats or in small groups, so having them turn up as entire recurring waves of enemies every so often – and moreover, continue to do so again and again until you complete the mission – is a major challenge. Walls of Wizard Towers, Ballista Towers, and even Guardhouses in a pinch are basically a requirement, and if you choose to use Gnomes instead of Dwarves just for their rebuilding abilities, you can't even use the Ballista Towers.
  • "Legendary Heroes," dear gods, "Legendary Heroes." In many ways, it's actually more difficult than the Master quests it unlocks; sure, they're difficult, but they don't have a time limit, don't throw brick walls in your face constantly, and aren't filled to the brim with Fake Difficulty.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Pretty much the majority of players who loved the first Majesty will be this way towards Majesty 2. This is mostly caused by certain gameplay elements being dumbed down, the monsters having no characters, and the art style and humor. And one shouldn't start on how a bright idea it was to add elements from normal RTS games.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Elves in the original. Masculine faces and haircuts, very feminine voices and a sprite that appears to be pantsless.