YMMV / Mischief Makers

• Anti-Climax Boss: Imposing as he may be, the final boss Emperor Leo doesn't attack too often, he can't take many hits, and he stays in one area. The fight with the combined Beastector mechs makes up for it, though.
• Ass Pull: The Beastector turning out to have originally been human. It has no bearing on the overall plot and comes up at the literal end of the game. The only hint to it prior is Merco mentioning Earth as one of the Empire's targets after his boss fight with Marina.
• Awesome Music: The game has an outstanding soundtrack, but the best of the best definitely goes to the boss themes.
• Best Boss Ever: Pretty much every boss in the game is insanely memorable, but an especially stand-out one is Cerberus Alpha, the first Beastector boss. A High-Speed Battle against an Ax-Crazy jackal-man riding a giant robot motorcycle that turns into a dog, while you ride on a cat to catch and throw all of his attacks back at him, which includes missiles and a Wave-Motion Gun. You can even jump on his missiles and ride around on them, creating a Robot Girl, on an alien cat, on a missile.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • In one early example, Teran sprouts into the giant, destructive "Blockman". In this form, he can smash obstacles and enemies with ease. It's only mentioned again as a reason to leave at the end of the game.
  • Other levels begin with Marina riding a missile, an ostrich, and a giant bee, with no explanation given.
  • Yet another level has you retrieving the King's tricycle for him while avoiding an advancing geyser. The tricycle is never brought up again outside that level.
• Cult Classic: The game didn't do spectacular when it was originally released, but those who did play it generally speak fondly of it. See what happened to the Nerd below.
• Funny Moments: Theo pretending to die to prank Marina just before the Final Boss. After he reveals it was a joke, Marina gets so angry that she hurls him back to Clancer from space.
• He Panned It, Now He Sucks!:
  • Preemptively happened with The Angry Video Game Nerd. Once he was briefly shown with a Mischief Makers cartridge in his hands and was subsequently bombarded with mail saying that he shouldn't even think of doing a review.
  • AntDude looked at the game in an episode covering obscure Nintendo 64 platformers and thought it was just decent, which resulted in similar backlash.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The main gimmick of the Emperor's battle of dealing with negative words which later turn into positive words is similar to one of the phases of one of the final bosses in Undertale.
• Most Wonderful Sound: Collecting a gold gem results in a VERY satisfying fanfare.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Everything on the planet Clancer has the same twisted frozen face. Everything. This is made even worse if you consider the fact that said face resembles a haniwa.
  • Inner Struggle, where Emperor Leo takes on the form of a creepy monolith with various markings on it. The actual battle has some rather haunting music, with word bubbles floating up containing words of negative emotion like "Dire" and "Anger", all while a large flame-like fog fills the area whilst changing colors, and additional monoliths float in the back. Should you not know that you can use the word bubbles to attack Emperor Leo, it comes off greatly like a Hopeless Boss Fight.
• Sacred Cow: Criticizing the game is bound to get you eviscerated on some sites. Best seen in the fandom's reaction to The Angry Video Game Nerd's former intro, where he's shown glaring down at a copy of the game as though he's about to bash it; he never intended on reviewing the game, and promised to keep it that way.
• That One Boss:
  • Both Lunar and Merco are fast and aggressive in their mechs, but the real challenge is defeating each without taking damage. These are often described as the hardest Gold Gems to collect in the game. Thankfully, Lunar's battle has a Good Bad Bug that locks him out of advancing beyond his second phase and Merco's gets progressively easier.
  • Migen Brawl, while not hard on its own, happens to be one of the hardest boss battles to get the Gold Gem on simply because it's the longest boss battle in the game and a single mistake requires starting the whole thing over.
• That One Sidequest:
  • Acquiring all the Gold Gems, especially the one from the Beastector mechs. While several Gold Gems are easy enough to obtain, usually only requiring the player to explore the levels thoroughly and/or pay attention to NPC dialogue for clues, any Gold Gems obtained from Boss Battles require a No-Damage Run, as mentioned above.
  • In a roundabout example, the Gold Gem for Hot Rush (2-4) is an example because it's a major Red Herring. As explained by Nitro Rad, while the level's layout implies that the player needs to race to grab the friendly Clancers and throw them to safety before the platforms underneath explode and drop the Clancers to their doom, with the last NPC at the end of the stage requiring a lot of precision and timing to get right, this isn't necessary at all. Instead, players need to wait for the red platforms above a single Clanball to detonate, fall down and grab it, and then shake the Clanball before continuing onward, causing a new Clanball to spawn at the end which contains the Yellow Gem.
  • Clearing the 100m world record in 3-10 (a time under 11 seconds), which is required for one of the Gold Gems. It's easy to mess up by either getting a false start or not being quick enough on the trigger finger, and you need to mash the D-pad, not the C buttons, in order to dash quickly enough to clear the event in time — something the game doesn't tell you.
  • Getting an S ranking in every level, which entails clearing the levels in a ludicrously low amount of time. To wit, it's common for runners at Games Done Quick to miss an S-Rank here or there during their runs of the game, to the point of them occasionally being Luck-Based Missions (the on-rails levels generally speaking).
• Vindicated by History: Much like Yoshi's Story, Mischief Makers was criticised on its initial release for what was seen as an outdated 2½D style instead of the fully 3D style that was then becoming ubiquitous in platform games, before being seen as an unsung classic of the Nintendo 64 library years later, when it became apparent how poorly many of the system's 3D platformers had aged.

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