YMMV / Need for Speed: Most Wanted

For the 2012 game, click here.

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• Accidental Innuendo: When Cross is talking about wanting to take a closer look at the player's car at the start of the game, his (female) partner comments "I'd like to take a little peek under the hood", which, considering the quite sultry delivery on her actress's part, sounds more like an euphemism for something else.
• Anti-Climax Boss: Ronnie, #3 on the Blacklist and first of Razor's two Co-Dragons should be a difficult race, right? Not really: his AI can't keep driving straight, to the point where he is barely harder to defeat than Sonny.
• Broken Base:
  • The pursuits, more specifically the bounty system and its required milestones. Some were tolerant with the addition of the bounty system as it adds more challenge to the cop chase more than just simply escaping from the cops on your tail. Others weren't as pleasant, seeing it as a really cheap way to pad out the time spend, which is already long enough.
  • There were NFS fans before Black Box came in, and some of them still don't really like the game. Some of the classic fans see Most Wanted as when the series reached the point of no return to its exotic supercar racing roots (if Underground 2 hadn't done so already), while the other classic fans, who went to become longtime fans over the period, were happy with the return of exotics and cop chases after Underground games shunned them out.
• Common Knowledge: The iconic BMW M3 GTR is often referred as "Razor's car" by a good chunk of the fans, despite being clear from the prologue that he won it from the player in a race (worse, he won said race by sabotaging the car before the start, meaning that he basically stole it).
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: With Blacklist bonus markers, most players pick up performance parts markers first then use the rest on other prizes, because those are the only way for players to earn Junkman performance parts. Similarly, the visual and aftermarket markers are pointless and largely ignored because it's just free parts that you can unlock regularly.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Rhino SUVs. They attempt to hit you head-on at high heat levels (starting from 3), and if they do you're pretty much guaranteed to be swarmed by other police cars. Once that happens, you need to be very lucky to break out of the ensuing dogpile. They're also very quick and durable, meaning you'll have to think quickly to either evade them, or you'll risk your vehicle being impounded.
  • Any police car becomes this in 5-1-0 PSP port. They constantly ram you right in the middle of the race and try to make your car swerve off the road and lose control (which they almost always will), made worse by the police AI being downright brutal and blatantly unfair, so if you found yourself being blocked/swayed off to the side and are unable to push your way out with the select button, you are better off restarting the race. Oh, and you can't total them, either. Cops are fun for taking down other racers for you though if you get them in the right place.
  • The traffic itself becomes very frustrating to drive through because of how likely you are to collide with them while moving at high speed. Get ready to restart at least one event over just because some asshole in a civilian car deliberately got in your way and ruined everything.
• Difficulty Spike: This is quite amusingly present in an actual shape of a spike. The first Blacklist rivals you beat, Sonny (#15) and Taz (#14), are laughably easy to defeat. However, when you challenge Vic (#13), things start to get tough - fitting, as according to his Blacklist bio, he's occupied the #13 spot from not many people being able to beat him. Eventually, things become crazy with Earl (#9), who is considered to be the single hardest opponent to defeat in the game. However, afterwards the difficulty begins loosening up, and the later Blacklist members are much easier to defeat than the middle ones (albeit still tougher than the first two).
• Event-Obscuring Camera: When you make a jump, the camera will focus on your car's air moment while simultaneously slowing everything down^note Complete with a disk scratching noise!, and when you use a Pursuit Breaker, a similar camera view also shows the resulting damage and all the police cars being completely destroyed... only for you to realize that you couldn't see what's ahead of you, and you either crash into a wall, or worse, drive straight into a spike strip. Luckily, this can be turned off in the options menu.
• Fandom Rivalry: As this page has detailed, there's a rivalry between both Most Wanted games' fans.
• Funny Moments: The police dispatcher may randomly gives a short speech during your free roam.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The BMW M3 GTR manages to be one somehow. It is an otherwise average car that becomes irredeemably broken if Catch Up is enabled. Catch Up reduces all player's cars' performance upgrades to the weakest-tuned car; the BMW M3 GTR is labeled as a stock car by the game (and is, in fact, untunable), which means it has a Nitrous tank while every other car doesn't, and it's able to perform well despite lacking a forced induction, giving it a massive advantage.
  • Without Catch Up, the Porsche Carrera GT is the absolute strongest car in the game, with excellent top speed, acceleration and handling, whereas most cars are lacking in at least one of those three traits. It's practically impossible to defeat a Carrera GT without using another one, hence it's often banned in competitions. The second car that tends to be banned is, surprisingly, the Lotus Elise - it retains its trademark outstanding handling, but it can trust on its surprisingly good top speed and acceleration so that, if the Carrera GT is banned, then the Elise will be invincible.
  • If you can get it via the markers, Ming's Lamborghini Gallardo will have you set for the rest of the game. Excellent handling, great top speed and acceleration... all without having to drop a dime on upgrades (or use your Junkman markers).
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • At the highest heat level, the helicopter will sometimes swoop down in front of you, just barely over the road, to try to get you to stop. If it hits any cars (or semis) like this, they'll go flying into the air, while the helicopter won't budge. Also there's a rare chance the chopper may spawn right at the roadblock.
  • In the PC version, you can skip an entire Blacklist boss if you click on a very specific edge of the Continue button after defeating the current Blacklist's rival challenge.^note It's the top right corner, just outside of the actual box boundaries shown in-game. For whatever reason, if you do that, the game sends you to the marker selection of the next Blacklist on the list, effectively allowing you to complete two Blacklists at the cost of one.
  • In the PS2, Xbox, and GameCube versions, engaging a pursuit at Heat Level 4 or 5 would cause traffic to be completely removed due to hardware limitations; however, if you evade the pursuit and remain in free roam, the road will still remain completely free of traffic until you start a race or return to the safehouse. As such, you can easily clear Photo Tickets without worrying about traffic.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The infamous M3 GTR sure didn't have much luck in the game's storyline, but that's nothing when you read about BMW E46 owners in Real Life complaining about their M3's undercarriage subframes cracking up rather easily, making some think twice about getting an M3.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • So the fifteen best drivers are called the Blacklist, huh? Wonder if Red Reddington has ever been to Rockport.
  • One of the AI opponents in the game is named "Wolf". In the very next game, Need for Speed: Carbon, Wolf was the name of one of the game's antagonists. Looks like the player in Carbon wasn't the only one who spent some time in Rockport.
• Love to Hate: Razor and his two cohorts fits the bill as an unlikable cheesy bad guy in many street racing centered media, and it's really satisfying to kick their asses, especially if you managed to get their pink slips and use their car against each other.
• Memetic Loser:
  • Ho "Sonny" Seun, the 15th Blacklist racer. Even by the standards of the Warm-Up Boss, he is pathetically easy. If you are on a YouTube upload of his Leitmotif "Tao of the Machine", chances are good that you'll see someone either mocking him or exaggerating his ineffectuality by claiming that (for example) infants, cyclists and pedestrians could outrun him. That said, in the hands of a very skilled player (with help from Rubber-Band A.I.), Sonny's Golf is still capable of beating Razor in the M3 GTR without any upgrades, as proven by speedrunner KuruHS who made a video that shows that it is completely possible to do so.
  • Ronnie McCrea tends to get the short end of the stick by many players, thanks to no part of being an Anti-Climax Boss described above. Players even wonder how he managed to rise up to the top 3 in the first place other than being Razor's lackey and bootlicker.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • One of Razor's lines about betting "five grand — FIVE GRAND!" against the player character in one of the opening cutscenes is an inside joke at Giant Bomb that comes up whenever a NFS game is in the news.
  • "First I'm gonna take your ride, then I'm gonna take your girl," which Razor blurts out of nowhere after the player and Mia have a chat before a race, is almost always referenced when someone talks about the game just for its sheer Narm factor.
  • Cross's line after demanding every single police unit to pursue the player at the climax; specifically, after his partner asks him "Everyone?", him answering by Suddenly Shouting "EVERYONE!", has gotten so much mileage from the fandom, to the point that it's considered the best-known line in the entire franchise, and pretty much every time some other character in the franchise would ask "Everyone?" for whatever reason, it would greeted with it. It got to the point where the trailer for Heat would feature a cop saying "I said right now!", which is considered to be a (lesser) attempt at emulating it. (Ironically, the original scene in which it originated appears to have been a Shout-Out to a similar scene from The Professional.)
• Narm Charm: The game's story was, er... not that good in all honesty. However, thanks to the somewhat memorable characters and their very memorable lines in the cutscenes and audio clips, some fans would rather have the 2005's game's Excuse Plot over the lack of a plot in the 2012 game.
• Nintendo Hard:
  • Dear Lord, Earl's boss race. Rog even warns the player in his voice message that he's the only guy stopping you from getting into Downtown Rockport.
  • The whole game, to an extent, due to a very notable case of Rubber-Band A.I.. Compare the AI's time if you total your car in a drag race, to you completing the event.
  • The police can also be pretty difficult to evade, depending on your car's current Heat Level. Even if you're good at the game, they're unforgiving and at times, they also follow an unpredictable pattern. Worse still, if you fail to lose them, there's a good chance your vehicle will be impounded, and you'll get a Game Over. Good luck doing a "one car only" run early on in the game.
• Only the Creator Does It Right: The 2005 game by late EA Black Box^note Who were not even Need for Speed's original developer, thus also making My Real Daddy apply here. is highly-preferred over Criterion's game by many, not just fans, but critics.
• Porting Disaster: The Nintendo DS port, made by Sensory Sweep Studios, is regarded by many fans as the worst Need for Speed game ever made. It's based on the Game Boy Advance port (which is decent on its own) but manages to play even worse despite the DS's more powerful hardware. The graphics are pretty poor even by the standards of the DS, the driving physics are broken to the point that staying on course is a Herculean task, and the racer and police AI are even more prone to rubberbanding than in the console versions.
• Retroactive Recognition: Isabel "Izzy" Diaz, #12 on the Blacklist, is played by Milena Roucka, who would later become more famous as a professional wrestler in WWE under the name Rosa Mendes.
• Sacred Cow: Black Box's original was so sacred that it caused a massive backlash over Criterion's 2012 remake practically the moment it was announced simply because it didn't play anything like the 2005 game. That aside, it does get to the point that one shouldn't consider dissing the game's soundtrack.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: Most Wanted 2005 is less forgiving than its predecessor, Need for Speed: Underground 2. For example, AI opponents in races are much more likely to catch up, thanks to Rubber-Band A.I.. There's a lot more traffic on the roads, increasing your chances of crashing into them, losing time and causing the other racers to recover. The return of police chases also means that your cars now can also be impounded^note three impound strike markers causes you to lose the vehicle and the game ends if all of your cars are impounded.
• Song Association: The game was this for Celldweller ("Shapeshifter"), Bullet for My Valentine ("Hand of Blood") and Suni Clay ("In a Hood Near You"), among others. Also, a few Avenged Sevenfold fans would come play it for "Blinded in Chains".
• That One Boss: Earl. The man and his rubberbanding Mitsubishi Lancer Evo have frustrated many players who just wanted to finally unlock Downtown Rockport. His second race is especially tough as it's a Marathon Level Sprint with no traffic. This is a problem since most of your overtaking opportunities in the game are a result of opponents having to brake to avoid traffic and the sheer length means that even if he spins out anywhere in the first 80% he has enough time to rubberband back.
• That One Level:
  • Collecting bounties and milestones. While it's alright as part of the requirements for early Blacklist members, since you probably going to rack up a lot of bounty in a single pursuit, for later Blacklist members it slowly becomes harder and more tedious until you finally get to Blacklist #3, Ronnie, and you have to rack up to over half a million bounty per-pursuit, and that's just one of the many milestones you had to fulfill before you can challenge him. Even if you manage to curb-stomp him in his challenge, everything gets worse after that, with Razor himself requiring you to rack up 10 million bounty to face him.
  • Additionally, the Drag events are a huge nightmare to play, and it's all because of two things: the opponent AI and the traffic AI designed to literally screw you over. No wonder so many of the drag races got cut from the final game, didn't appear at all in the next game Carbon, and from then on would be gradually phased out from the franchise.^note After Carbon, drag racing would mainly appear in the games focused on legal track racing (ProStreet and in Shift 2 Unleashed as DLC), where as a result there was no traffic AI and in turn were much better received there, and outside of those games, it only appeared so far in the 2015 game and Payback (and even in the 2015 game, it was as a DLC that didn't even affect the game's story mode).
  • City Power is very frustrating because it has a lot of corners that are very difficult to cut even with the Speedbreaker and having shortcuts that have more risks than benefits. Worse, your opponents are good at navigating through the race track on their own, making the situation flat out unfair.
• That One Sidequest Challenge Series can be this. Earlier tollbooth challenges can be a breeze even with minor mistakes while later tollbooth challenges has tight time limits to the point that one single mistake and you must restart. And you must dealt with a lot of traffic that can easily crash into them and the high heat levels who appear in C6 Corvette police cars.
  • Milestone challenges can also apply the same thing. Earlier milestone challenges you must deal with basic Civic Cruisers requiring you do to easy tasks while later ones you must deal with C6 Corvette Federal Cruisers, a pair of SUV Heavys that ram you head-on, aggressive helicopters, roadblocks with spike strips that one hit kill the car in process and shorter backup incoming. And you must do hard tasks like avoiding ten spike strips and worst of all escaping the police after 15 and 30 minutes respectively while dealing the high heat level and aggressiveness of the police cars that can trap you leading to a bust. The last challenge that you must evade the police after 30 minutes can reach heat level six in which Undercover Federal Cruisers puts you in a massive hell.
  • The Black Edition includes a special challenge that is considered to be the ultimate challenge of the unmodded game. It puts the player in a vintage, challenge exclusive 1967 Chevrolet Camaro SS in an instant level 7 heat, and you have to go through the police chase until you can rack up 500,000 points worth of bounty, then evade the chase. There is no time limit... but you are in a muscle car with heavy steering, and you will be chased by Supercharged Heavy Rhino SUVs all the time.
• Win Back the Crowd: While some fans of pre-Underground NFS games were still turned off from the game still being clearly indebted to the tuner culture, some others were won over by the return of daytime setting, countryside areas, cop chases, and exotics.