YMMV / Nefarious

• Adorkable: Princess Mayapple has her moments in the webcomic, taking Foxglove's mocking offer for a group hug completely seriously and trying to prevent an international incident between Ariella and Foxglove by distracting them with ''cake, so much tasty cake.''
• Awesome Music:
  • The final boss theme, This is Your End.
  • Song of Sukochi, which features some nice vocal work from Sarah Toranto.
  • Thorax Waltz
  • Academia
• Best Boss Ever: If you can get past the Unexpected Gameplay Change, most of the bosses are super fun. The best have got to be Dash the Bee and Becky in the Doom Howitzer.
• Breather Level: Heartless Abyss comes in between Sukochi and Adept Co., two stages with a lot of hazards and tough enemies. Heartless Abyss, meanwhile, has almost no enemies at all, and most of anything else that can harm you are stationary and visible well ahead of time. Despite having no checkpoints, Crow's submarine can take a LOT more hits than Crow himself, and there is also no boss in this stage.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: The general opinion seems to be that the story is rather funny, with quirky characters and a lot of self-aware lampshading of common villain and hero dynamics, with Crow himself being a good example of a Card-Carrying Villain who enjoys every second of it. The gameplay, on the other hand, leaves much to be desired. The controls are rather loose and slippery, hitboxes can be wonky at times and the reverse boss fights can be extremely finicky due to the Unexpected Gameplay Change. More than a few people who enjoy the premise of the game and the artwork by Gashi-Gashi have admitted to never actually playing it. This is probably why the official sequel went for a comic format.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Walk Droid from Dr. Cackle's Lab, thanks to his cheery demeanor. Even Crow is distraught when Cackle destroys Walk Droid, and this is enough to cause Mayapple to nearly kill Cackle.
• Evil Is Cool: Well, yeah, the game wouldn't be all-too fun otherwise.
• Funny Moments: Tephra grabbing Crow (causing him to squeak like a toy) and then flinging him right into her brother's room. Crow then decides to take her brother because he's close enough to qualify for Tephra.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Mack in the webcomic. He's lost his job, his girlfriend and all passion for his superhero calling after Crow defeated him and Mayapple became Macro City's Hero Knight instead of him. The first time he shows up in Trouble in Paradise he's a broken down wreck who only cares about destroying Crow. That doesn't justify him treating Foxglove like crap and completely shirking his hero duties just to fight Crow, but with x99 lives revealing how broken inside he really is, it's a little bit more understandable and he actually apologizes to Foxglove in that story for how he acted.
  • Princess Foxglove. She's working a thankless job as the leader of a backwater kingdom with subjects that hate her for modernizing it and has to manage some Dirty Business to keep it afloat. And even that isn't enough, as It Came Fom The Wa-verse reveals that while the rich do much better after she allied with Emperor Hacken Slash, the poor are still in a bad place. It finally culminates in her deciding she's had enough of being treated like dirt and becoming a villain - only to die on an exploding space station after a brief Hope Spot in the form of Astroknight Mack (who ends up dying alongside her). However, things seem to improve for her in x99 lives, as she actually gets an apology from Mack and they manage to convince Sword to revive her with him.
  • Crow himself has shades of this during flashbacks seen in High School Crucible. After Buzzard's world domination plan ended, Crow was taken into custody and shipped off for higher education, separated from the other Buzzardlings. He was looked down upon for being a former villain, and was ridiculed by other students.
• Nightmare Fuel: x99 Lives page 15 after Foxglove figures out what Sword's plan is, it erases her and subjects Mack to Mind Rape using creepy copies of people he knows with elongated faces like his and weird eyes.
• Spiritual Adaptation: A story starts with the Villain Protagonist fighting his Hero Antagonist, and ends when The Bad Guy Wins. Said Villain Protagonist has an affable relationship with a Damsel in Distress associated with his nemesis, their nemesis gives up on fighting them, and, through said relationship, and after a Final Boss against someone who used to be associated with said Villain Protagonist in some way, said Villain Protagonist makes a Heel–Face Turn. It's basically Megamind: The Video Game.
• That One Boss:
  • Dash the Bee. Don't underestimate this Totally Radical nightmare. He has a jump attack that can take off a third of your vehicle's health, possess a hard-to-avoid (if thankfully weak) ranged attacks, and places pillars that impede your progress. It doesn't help that the boss vehicle for this battle, the Death Pod, relies on Wreaking Havok to damage Dash, which can make knocking his health bar down difficult as the damage depends on the force the ball is swung with. However, Dash can be stunned by knocking down a pillar that he's standing on, leaving him open for a powerful swing. The rematch against him in Bramble Flats is a bit more difficult due to the smaller arena.
  • The Final Boss, for both routes.
    • Crow activating the device has you battle Hyper Mack while confined to a small pod with one laser. The first two phases have Mack flying around tossing sword beams at you and it's really hard to hit him, but luckily these phases are unloseable and losing all of your health merely moves you onto the next phase. The final phase is the most difficult; not only does losing here mean you restart, but Mack also invokes Touhou-level Bullet Hell on you with several different attack patterns, and all of them cover the screen in some form or fashion. And he's a tiny target that constantly moves.
    • The Golden Ending forces you to fight Becky on the other side of the doomsday device, as Princess Mayapple instead of Crow. Just hitting Becky is difficult enough since you need to kick the police-bots into Becky's pod while dodging her laser fire at the same time, and god help you once she starts moving... The final phase has Becky take the Doom Howitzer into space, where the timing for kicking the robots into Becky becomes very strict. It doesn't help that Becky's lasers get an upgrade and become more difficult to dodge.
• That One Level:
  • The platforming it takes to refuel Princess Farrah Day will make you want to destroy the world, as long as that stage is the first to go!
  • The penultimate stage, Bramble Flats. It's a very long level with several harsh platforming challenges. It ends in a battle against both Dash the Bee and Guryon, one after the other. Be thankful you didn't have to fight the other bosses as well!

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