YMMV / Plok

• Accidental Innuendo: "I've been diddled again!"^note For context, this is one of the quips Plok makes at the end of one level when he finds out the flag he's looking for is not there.
• Awesome Music: This soundtrack is considered by many to be awesome, and the best thing about the game by defender and detractor alike. It was composed by Tim and Geoff Follin (who apparently made a career out of composing soundtracks much better than the games for which they were written, and mind that this was one of the good games). Highlights include Venge Thicket, Sleepy Dale, Cotton Island, Creepy Crag, and especially the boss theme, which sounds like it jumped straight out of Hotline Miami.
• Breather Level:
  • Plok Town is arguably the easiest level on Akrillic, and it comes between two difficult boss fights.
  • Plok's House. The only thing you need to do is squash a flea, before the dream.
• Funny Moments: Plok and his grandpappy's respective attempts to retrieve their flag and amulet results in them finding a lot of random junk at the goals on the islands they explore. Repeatedly.
• Goddamned Bats: Shprouts. These puzzle enemies look like walking beanbags with hair and eyes. When Plok damages them, they will jump up in pain and look as if they got "electrocuted". To defeat them for good, Plok must hit them while they're "electrocuted". The main problem is that they often jump out of your reach, do not stay "electrocuted" for long, and will return to normal quickly. And they tend to come in large groups. Even worse are "Shcuba Shield Shprouts". These guys have shields that make them immune to ANY frontal damage. To defeat these, Plok must jump first then launch his arm/leg out and hope it gets the Shprout from the back when the arm/leg returns. And you've got to do it TWICE in rapid succession. And sometimes you have to do it while you don't have your legs.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Many who choose to revisit Plok do so primarily for its legendary soundtrack.
• Memetic Mutation: Like mentioned above, jokes about how the boss theme sounds like something out of Hotline Miami are common.
• Memetic Psychopath: Some people like to joke about Plok being this, thanks to the fact that he commits genocide on every single flea in exsistence because they stole his flag.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Creepy Forest and the Flea Pit.
  • The Bobbins Bros - titanic monsters who roar and growl, have no face (instead simply a huge pair of lips and teeth) and spit toenails.
  • The Flea Queen is just as bad, being an ugly, barely feminine monster who constantly roars when she attacks.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Normally, SNES games that had no battery saves or password system could be beaten in less than one hour if you're good enough. Plok on its default difficulty can take up to 2 hours if you're a master at the game and even longer if you're a novice, which means you're going to be glued to the seat for a long time if you want to beat the thing.
• Squick: The Fleas. It's no wonder Plok hates them so much, because the ugly Flea Queen defecated immense amounts of eggs and bluish slime all over Akrillic in the short time he was gone.
• Surprise Difficulty: Who'd have thought that a game with such cutesy aesthetics and an all-around silly cast of both hero and villains would be one of the most notoriously difficult SNES games around? John and Ste Pickford themselves later apologized for making it so difficult.
  • Started out by picking "Child's Play" to get a feel for how the game works? Good call, always good to get an idea of what you're getting into. Probably had a bit of trouble getting to the end, didn't you? Well, you pick "Normal" next and... why can't you shoot the logs and rocks anymore? Why is everything like twice as fast now? Why are you suddenly (guaranteed to be) fighting bosses beyond the Bobbins Brothers? What is this Legacy Island place and why are you now fighting THREE Bobbins Brothers?! What have you done to deserve this?!
• Suspiciously Similar Song: To some players, the theme when collecting the Cowboy powerup sounds similar to Vega's stage theme in Street Fighter 2.
• That One Level: Plok is in general a pretty deceptively hard game, thanks in no small part to the lack of level checkpoints, battery saves, or a password system, along with some punishingly long levels in the late game coupled with a decidedly inconsistent difficulty curve, but there are a couple standout levels that really tend to push the wrong buttons of the players who make it to them, especially near the end.
  • Creepy Forest: In addition to numerous pits that you are in constant danger of falling into and having to regain all your lost progress, this level also features lots of tight corridors that are largely populated not only by the fleas that you have to beat in order to actually complete the level, but also by Budds that spawn numerous Budd Lites and basically turn the game into a bullet hell platformer for the time you're in them. Also, at numerous spots throughout the map you have to pass through doors that revolve constantly and have spikes on one side forcing you to time your passage through them with the utmost precision. This wouldn't be too terrible were it not for the fact that the doors speed up and slow down and also change the direction they spin each time. Essentially, this means that if you miss your window to pass through a door you have to wait for it to go through TWO cycles before you get another shot. Bear in mind, this can also happen while trapped in a tight corridor with roughly 10 million Budd Lites being spawned behind you and clogging the screen with projectiles. And if you fall into a pit with the last flea stuck in the area you just spent all that time getting to? Tough break kid, gotta go through all those doors and corridors again.
  • Gohome Cavern: Probably the single most notorious level in the game and without question the most tedious. To start, you have to kill one of the more annoying enemies that can only be hit in a certain manner to inflict damage and then hit in exactly the same way to finish it off. It drops an invincibility crystal you need to grab and jump on some spikes to progress whereupon Plok... loses his legs. The next section requires you to hit two targets that will literally steal your legs out from under you and you are forced to hop all the way to get them, down a series of steep inclines that force you to make pixel perfect maneuvers and jumps to avoid getting hit by spikes or enemies or falling into water pits. Along the way you have also have to dispatch two large groups of fleas that can easily swarm you and drain your health in no seconds flat. Once you actually MAKE it to your legs you don't even get the luxury of just continuing onward and instead have to retrace your steps all the way back to where you initially lost your legs and then? Time for the upper level, where you are forced to once again fight the same enemy you were put up against at the beginning of the level and do it multiple times in order to progress to the end of the stage, while not only dispatching more fleas but also avoiding the pits that can send you all the way back to the lower levels and force you to retrace all your steps again. And thanks to this game's notorious lack of checkpoints, if at any point you die and have to start the level over? Have fun getting your legs back again!
  • The Flea Pit: Where. To. Begin? First of all, The Flea Pit isn't just a single level, but EIGHT of them, and while the back half of the earlier levels are all tough, they at least still allowed you to play as Plok with the control scheme you've spent the whole game getting used to. The Flea Pit offers you no such luxury, and aside from the very beginning of each level where you have to do a little platforming to progress, you are then forced to pick up a present that, instead of giving you an awesome powerup that can shred through enemies with cathartic ease for a short but glorious while, NOW instead permanently saddles you with a vehicle that completely changes both how the game is played and how Plok is controlled on EVERY SINGLE LEVEL. The best part? None of the vehicles control even remotely the same way, and unless you made the effort to find the warps scattered throughout the game, you would be forced to figure out how they control right then and there, and the warps give you extremely limited practice you'll have likely LONG forgotten by the time you make it to the Flea Pit. Oh, and at this point in the game it's a reasonable assumption your lives are more precious than ever and you really don't have the time or resources to figure out a whole new control scheme for, again, EVERY SINGLE LEVEL. On top of ALL of this is the absolutely insane difficulty spike that complements the process, with new enemies you've never seen before coming at you from every which way and with little to no caution or warning. Also, while Creepy Forest and Gohome Cavern at the very least don't respawn the fleas you kill if you die, that ain't the case in these levels and you gotta deal with every last flea all over again if you lose a life.^* The ONLY mitigating factor to this is that none of the fleas in these levels are mandatory to kill, but given many of them now shoot projectiles and the rest are as annoying as ever you might as well just kill them to avoid anything that can drain your now more precious than ever health And if you somehow make it to the end to fight the Flea Queen? What, you thought you were gonna just get to play the game normally again? HAHA, NOPE! Enjoy being stuffed into a set of spring shoes that continuously bounce you up and down while you desperately try to get yourself between the copious projectiles that the Flea Queen vomits at you, in-between having to spray down the super-fleas that she literally spawns in between hits! The only good news to be had? That spray cuts down the super-fleas like a knife through butter, and you at least have a permanent checkpoint at the start of the Flea Pit... The VERY start...

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