YMMV / Need for Speed: Carbon

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• Accidental Innuendo: One of Yumi's race dialogues has her say "Yes, yes, yes..." when the player is about to win a race. Let's just say that it sounds a tad too, er, passionate to be her just being excited for the player winning.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Due to scarcity of earning money in this game, most players tends to stick with Samson among all available crew members for the rest of the game because his crew bonus gives additional 10% of credit rewards for winning every races except for Rival Crew Challenge. Some also select Neville as a crew member for races that usually don't give out cash prizes, as his crew bonus of adding $200 to the prize money works even for those races.
• Contested Sequel: Carbon might be the first major example of this for a tuner-era Need for Speed game. Some fans love it, considering it good as if not even better than Most Wanted (2005), praising its night-time atmosphere, and considering its storyline a step into the right direction towards integrating it into the gameplay; while some others hate it, considering a disappointing sequel to Most Wanted, pointing out the disjointed feeling the game overall has ^note not helped by the behind-the-scenes videos in the Collector's Edition confirming many fans' assumptions that the game had many Deleted Scenes and criticizing the short runtime of its career mode, among other things. Some even Take a Third Option, stating that while it may have its shortcomings and may not be as good as Most Wanted (2005), it's still a good game in its own right, and Most Wanted (2005) became such a beloved game that any game following it would've been subject to Tough Act to Follow anyway.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Sal's introductory cutscene shows him being extremely nervous, and his bio video shows him constantly nodding, but no reason is given for the strange behaviour, plus he sounds normal and much more relaxed during races. Whether it's because of some disorder or he's just really nervous is left in the air.
• Difficulty Spike: Own the City has two — one where you reach Team Mega, where their cars are suddenly a whole deal faster than what you came across with the Syrens (despite them driving mostly the same cars as the latter crew). Then another that takes the form of the Krimson Crew - at that point all of the cars they drive are considerably faster (stock, at that) than anything you'll have up to that point.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Carter in Own the City, for his cheerful personality and being a stalwart ally throughout the story. As well as being a consistently reliable Wingman throughout the entire game.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: In Own the City, you basically get away with (literal) murder after having the guy who put out the hit on your brother arrested, and the guy who did the deed presumably taken out of the plot in some way. Sure, Mick was an abusive asshole to you and Sara (who you're also implied to hook up with in the ending), but seriously? Talk about a surprisingly dark twist.
• Fanfic Fuel: Given that this game A) Is a direct sequel to Most Wanted (2005), but doesn't quite explain what happened between the two games, such as how exactly Cross went from a police sergeant to a bounty hunter; B) Reveals some of the player's backstory before the events of Most Wanted, but not quite the immediate events leading to it (i.e. pretty much everything between them leaving Palmont City and arriving to Rockport, including how they got the BMW M3 GTR); and C) Ends with the player controlling all of Palmont City, many fans have come up with their own ideas to fill in the gaps.
• Fan-Preferred Cut Content: According to behind-the-scenes videos on the shooting of the cutscenes (which can be seen on the Collector's Edition), Nikki was supposed to challenge the player to a friendly race at the end of the game after defeating Darius, and some data miners even claimed to have found codes for a Canyon Duel against her Ford GT. Given that Nikki became one of the favorite characters from the game, many fans were disappointed that it didn't make it to the released game.
• Funny Moments:
  • If you can manage to get any of the Crew Bosses to crash their cars during a Canyon Duel, you're treated to some downright hilarious Oh, Crap! facial expressions from them! Wolf and Darius are particular highlights due to the former's delayed reaction while the latter has the most hysterical look of, "Are you kidding me right now?!"
  • When you're about to cross the finish line while leaving Darius in the dust during his first race, you're treated to a Rapid-Fire "No!" from him that's as amusing as as it is cathartic.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Grab either the Chevrolet Corvette Z06 or the Dodge Viper once you reach Tier 3, tune them correctly, and watch everything fly by in an absolute breeze. With both having decent handling for a muscle car, and god-tier acceleration that puts even Darius's Audi to shame, with Nikki's 50% Nitro boost you won't need to worry about picking back up from a crash again, as both cars have enough power to pick up if you miss a corner or a shortcut. The only difference between them is that the Corvette has slightly better handling (at the cost of slightly lesser acceleration), while with the Viper the opposite happens.
  • For those who own the Collector's Edition of Carbon, the Nissan 240SX (S13) is, no doubt, a literal Disk One Nuke (unlocked after beating every exclusive checkpoint event) even for a Tier 1 tuner. Compared to the starter cars such as the Mazda RX-8, it has a vastly superior handling and acceleration (which is par with the muscle cars). Fully upgrade it and you'll save a lot of money while making duels against Kenji, Angie and Wolf a breeze. However, the only drawback is its own mediocre top-speed which is prevalent in speedtrap events specially against the Tier 3 cars like the Chevrolet Corvette Z06. In hands of a skilled player (with a bit of luck), it can crush everything including Darius himself (if you're good enough)! On that note, the Jaguar XK outperforms the Aston Martin DB9 thanks to its nimble handling and better acceleration, and it's also a good choice for a Tier 2 car despite being much more expensive than the 240SX.^note The 240SX (S13) costs around twenty-thousand dollars to purchase meanwhile the XK costs eighty-thousand.
  • The Mitsubishi Lancer Evo IX is bar none the best Tier 3 Tuner in Carbon - just give it some upgrades^note Even then, it still starts off pretty strong with its already absurd handling. and you will hand Darius his ass on a silver platter with its precise handling (as can be expected of its class) paired with above-average top speed and excellent acceleration. The only downside is that you have to beat Kenji in a Canyon Duel to unlock it (in which Kenji himself is driving a Lancer Evo IX, as part of Stacked Deck), but once you do, you may as well shelve that 240SX. However, the Evo is always unlocked the same way regardless of which class you start with in the beginning, so if you happen to need something a little more precise and have some cash to burn, then look no further.
• Good Bad Bugs: The rather famous bus stop glitch is this since it lets the player go out of bounds and, if done correctly, drive in the void, allowing them to find and explore the canyons, San Juan and the drift course which are inaccessible in free roam.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: One of the criticisms leveled at Carbon is that, after Most Wanted (2005) featured an epic saga about the player having to defeat 14 of the members of the Blacklist to reach Blacklist #1, Razor, and then had to have one final chase against Sergeant Cross and the police, Carbon is about the player having to defeat three crews, then the defeated leaders join forces under Darius to pester the player for a while, then the player defeats Darius himself and, in Nikki's words, "that's it, you got it", you finished the game.
  • Averted with the PSP version of Own the City, however, which has a much longer playtime than the console versions and an overall better variety of events and crews.
• Magnificent Bastard: In Carbon, Darius is the leader of the notorious Stacked Deck street racing crew in Palmont City. Bailing the Player Character out, Darius has him race other crew leaders so he can take control of their territories and sells the player out to the bounty hunter, Nathan Cross, once he is of no use to him. It's been revealed that Darius caused the event that tarnished the player's reputation by tipping off the police of a street race the player was participating in, switched the money bag, and letting the player escape Palmont. When Darius learns that Nikki made a deal with Cross to free the player, he recruits the fallen crew leaders to Stacked Deck and has them race the player before racing him personally. With his cunning only matched by his racing skills, Darius nearly defeats the player on the track before accepting his defeat with grace merely telling the player to enjoy his victory while it last as there's always someone out there who's a little faster than him and eventually they're gonna catch up.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Pretty much everything that comes out of Darius's mouth, but him calling Cross "Crock" or "Crawl" seems to take the cake.
  • "Hey... guess who's back!" ^ExplanationWhat Cross exclaims when he reveals that he has returned in this game while chasing the player.
  • "I'M THE MONKEY!" ^ExplanationWhat Neville exclaims in exasperation after he asks if he can keep one of the two remaining cars ("the one with the sweet rims") after the player choses their starter car, and Nikki retorts that he should focus on keeping their gas tanks full, as this pretty much cemented him as the Butt-Monkey of the game, if not the entire franchise.
• Player Punch: In Most Wanted 2005 you were trying to get your BMW M3 GTR back. At the beginning of Carbon, it gets trashed.
• Polished Port: For some, the PSP version of Own the City in particular is one of the more underrated entries in the series, and in some cases, considered flat-out better than the console versions. Largely in part because of the much better plot when compared to the console game, the longer campaign, the bigger variety of crews (six to the console version's four, with each having two to three bosses to take down), and being able to listen to the game's licensed soundtrack unimpeded.^note  In the console versions, the licensed tracks would only ever play during Free Roam (which you can easily ignore), Checkpoint events, occasionally during Canyon Duels (particularly the second leg), or for some Challenge Series events.
• Porting Disaster: While the rest of the sixth-gen console and Wii versions of the game are for all intents and purposes the same game as the PC and seventh-gen releases except for relatively minor graphical downgrades and some features being changed (having a cap of four cars in a race instead of eight and a lack of facial motion capture cutscenes), the GameCube version in particular suffered the most, as it notoriously compressed the textures to a muddied, Vaseline-smeared mess due to storage limitations.
  • The Zeebo release of Own The City. Despite being based in the PlayStation Portable release, it suffers from terrible framerate and abysmal texture pop-in. All even with the models and textures used being lower quality than their PSP counterparts in order to accommodate the system.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • One of the first recruits for your crew is Sal Mustela, which is played by future Adam Jensen voice actor, Elias Toufexis.
  • Before they popularized mobile gaming, the mobile port of Carbon was developed by Rovio Mobile.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Unlike in previous game, replaying any race will only give you 500 credits or just 550 with a crew bonus. It's even worse when a shorter Rival Crew Challenge pays better with 1,000 credits than the regular race. Thankfully in Own The City, replaying any races gives you the same reward.
• That One Boss: Darius's car is an Audi Le Mans Quattro (Audi R8 concept car) which has all of the advantages that most of the other cars don't and requires the player to use almost perfect skills with a tier 3 car (likely a Porsche Carrera GT, a Dodge Viper SRT-10, a highly-tuned Nissan Skyline or a highly-tuned Mitsubishi Lancer Evo, etc.) that's very competitive. In fact, all the Boss Battles in Canyon Duels are this as they're scripted from ramming them off and easily catch you up in the second run.
• That One Sidequest: While Reward Cards in general are not required for the game's 100% Completion, a good chunk of the its content are unlocked through them. And the conditions for a few of those are way too headache inducing:
  • One of the requirements to unlock the Chevelle SS ("Career Mogul") is for the player to have a balance of one million credits in total in their current career. This wouldn't be a problem by itself, but as mentioned above, replaying previous races only awarded 500 credits for the player.^note And even if you have a fixer in your crew, only 50 credits would be added to said reward. This is very sadistic for those who only have their cash in five digits or below, as that would require them to grind for months in order to get the car. But even if the average player was able to save in-game-cash through the normal playthrough, the average endgame credits would still be balanced around 800k, meaning they would still have to grind the career for a while in order to unlock the vehicle.
  • While pursuits themselves can be considered this due to the big-numbered objectives, the two specific cards that involve the player accumulating 20k and 50k, respectively^note "20K Bill" for Mystic Autosculpt CF and "Wolfshead" for the Dump Truck in fines in total for pursuits in career free roam are pretty much a special case. First, the game itself doesn't really tell how to achieve those specific fines, and you only get to know how much you achieved in total is in the statistics menu. As it turns out, it involves exploiting the infraction system rather than bounty and cost to state. Second, unlike Most Wanted, the game doesn't display how many infractions you have achieved until the pursuit ends due it being Demoted to Extra. You have to remember this while collecting all the infractions that increases the total fines.^note Since the game reuses the pursuit system from Most Wanted, the infractions that are required carried over to this game. And third, you have to do this for every pursuit over and over again until you get the said number of fines required. Good luck!
  • In a lesser annonying objective, in order to unlock Cross' Corvette for quick race mode ("Iron Wall"), one of the stipulations is to win 20 defensive races. They aren't as frequent they seem to be in normal gameplay, and they stop happening once the player conquers all the races in career mode, basically meaning that one has to replay the already-checked races over and over again and leave some races incomplete in order to still trigger defensive races.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Many fans were dismayed that the fabled BMW M3 GTR never makes a reappearance in the game after being totaled in the intro (with some hoping that it could've made a reappearance later on just in time to face Darius).
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: Any 3D cinematics may fall into this. While the character models look pretty well detailed and having realistic facial animations even by 2006 standards, they tend to look off no matter how high or low the game's graphical settings are. Perhaps the worst of all is Angie, who looks way off when compared to her live-action actress.