YMMV / Quest for Glory IV

• Awesome Music: The soundtrack is overall more somber than in previous games, lending itself to some pretty awesomely moody tracks like Erana's and the Rusalka's themes.
  • On December 5, 2015, Aubrey Hodges released high-quality mixes of the entire score, including many tracks missing from previous soundtrack releases. As an added bonus, the new released contains not just rereleases of the game audio, but a "second disc" with over 70% of the soundtrack remastered using sampled and live recordings of real instruments.
• Complete Monster: Ad Avis returns, and is turned into a vampire by his mentor Katrina and intends to summon a monstrous Eldritch Abomination to plunge the world into eternal night and chaos. Betraying Katrina, Ad Avis also intends to torture The Hero to death while trying to bring about the apocalypse to satisfy his own ego.
• Demonic Spiders: Wraiths. Just being near one drains your health without magical protection, and they constantly fling projectiles at you even when not in active combat. If you have magic spells of your own, you can easily stunlock them to death on the combat screen, but without it you'll need well-timed jumps and ducks get anywhere close to them.
  • Necrotaurs are also fond of standing on the other side of the screen and then rushing you. You can hit them before they reach you, but the timing is deceptively tricky, and they'll take a huge chunk of your health if you fail (especially if they start tossing you around afterwards.)
  • Wyverns have the most long-lasting poison in the game, combined with another annoying projectile attack.
    • Subverted however if you can make it to Erana's Garden. Drinking from the pond will instantly cure the poison.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: The three villagers at the inn are pretty popular, especially in the voice-acted version, where it's clear that the VAs are having a lot of fun doing goofy impressions and ad-libbing their lines.
• Fridge Brilliance: When the Hero flirts with Katrina and tries to touch or kiss her during their "dates," she demurely tells him that while very interested, she feels that if she were to do so she would be unable to control herself with him. At first it sounds like she's just playing coy or hard to get. Then you learn what she really is, and suddenly it sounds a lot more like she doesn't want to lose control and bite you. This is especially significant when you overhear Katrina tell Ad Avis she doesn't want you as a puppet, but to genuinely love her by your own free will.
  • One would at first assume Baba Yaga returning was solely for continuity and nostalgia reasons. Until you realize that Mordavia is a Russian based land with many Russian folklore characters. Baba Yaga is one, if not the most famous Russian folklore character period. There was no way they could leave her out.
• Game-Breaker: Spamming flame darts is a great way to win most fights by stun-locking the enemy and keeping them at a distance, so long as you have the MP to keep up the assault.
• Goddamned Bats: Badders are tricky to hit, attack in groups, and can poison you (though not for very long.)
• Good Bad Bugs: Early versions of the floppy version had an interesting one. Finish the game and immediately restart the game with another class. You'll find yourself in the Dark One's cave with all rituals nearly completed and the same inventory as your other character, since all game flags have not been properly reset. It's just a matter of climbing/levitating your way to the Big Bad, completing the last ritual and finishing the game again.
  • Whenever you fight, your stamina will slowly regenerate itself. However, because of the speed cycle bug, your stamina will instantly refill! This makes training your skills very easy. Train climbing until exhausting, then find a monster, restore your stamina, kill the monster. Rinse and repeat 'til your skill is maxed out. Rinse and repeat with the next skill.
  • If you move far enough forward while fighting a Vorpal Bunny, you can push it into a corner where it gets stuck, unable to move or attack until you damage it. You can then back up out of range and practice your combat skills for as long as you want without worrying about dying or killing the bunny early.
• Narm: If you're playing the voiced version of the game, be sure to ask the fortuneteller her name the first time you meet her. Apparently her normal voice actress either couldn't or wouldn't record all of her lines.
  • You can also hear the other actress when you end conversations with Magda. The exact line is, "Journey safely, Hero." And again when you ask her about wraiths.
• Nightmare Fuel: Being the Darkest and Edgiest game in the series certainly lends it to a lot of creepy imagery and scenes. Hell, you even start off the game in a cave full of giant skeletons, walking on huge spinal cords and finding out that the rest of the cave is as close to a Womb Level as you can get without actually being made out of flesh and blood.
  • Seeing the Rusalka's true form is...pretty jarring, to say the least, and you have to embrace and kiss her. Nobody ever said being a Paladin was glamorous.
  • Chernovys and the Pit Horror, the remnants of the Dark One cultists that have since been transformed into Lovecraftian horrors (the Pit Horror is barely even recognizable as human anymore.)
  • The vision of the Dark One awakening you see before getting the blood ritual scroll. If you fail to defeat Ad Avis after the summoning ritual is complete, the exact same thing happens for real.
• Obvious Beta: The original floppy release was this. The game was infamous for numerous crashes, events not triggered properly, glitches and animation mistakes. After patching and a CD release, the game was still buggy with the notorious Error 52 becoming a meme.
• Superlative Dubbing: The CD-ROM voice-acted version was made 2 years after King's Quest VI, when Sierra learned their lesson from the previous game about hiring voice actors with actual talent instead of just using Sierra staff to do the job. It may not be anything special nowadays, but it was still phenomenal back in its day.
• Tear Jerker: Has its own page.
• The Scrappy: The Gnome jester/comedian Punny Bones wasn't a big hit with the fans. Probably why he didn't appear in the fifth game, despite saying that he was headed to Silmaria, the setting of game five. He's referenced a couple of times though, once under a table, and once by Gnome Ann, who was smitten with him.
  • Ironically, his interactions and comebacks with the townspeople were often funnier before you restore his sense of humor.
• The Woobie: Lots. You can't even throw a rock in Mordavia without hitting someone with a tragic backstory.