Tropes from the game can be found here. Tropes from the movie can be found here. The following tropes are shared between both.
- Adaptation Displacement: The video game is more popular than the movie.
- Anti-Climax Boss:
- Victor. In the film, Clank shoots the Thundersmack above Victor's head, creating a thunderstorm. Just as he and Clank are about to fight, it starts to rain, and he rusts so badly that he's rendered immobile. In the game, Clank activates the Phoenix's fire suppression system, which has the same effect on Victor.
- The heroes never fight Drek personally, since Dr. Nefarious turned him into a sheep before they even had a chance to face him.
- Ass Pull: Before it's destroyed by the Deplanetizer, Novalis somehow managed to get its entire population evacuated in time.
- Broken Base: The game received generally positive reviews from critics and general non-fan audiences, but reception by fans of the series was generally much more mixed, with it either being amazing, or an insult to the original game and an obvious downgrade.
- Character Rerailment: After multiple games that flanderized Qwark into being completely incompetent and useless, this game has Qwark back to his cunning and ego-driven characterization.
- Cliché Storm: A nobody on a quiet planet wants to become a famous superhero, and along the way, he gets a sidekick, trains to be a hero, has his dreams shattered when one of the heroes he worships betrays the team, but later come back, convinces the hero who betrayed him to realize what he did was wrong, and then they team up and save the universe. Also the Big Bad has a weapon that destroys planets, one of the lesser antagonists usurps him, and he later suffers a Disney Villain Death (although it's only temporary). It got to a point where the Sequel Hook stated "Oh, like you didn't see this coming."
- Complete Monster: Dr. Nefarious is a much darker character than in the original series. Starting off as Drek's engineer, Nefarious built the Deplanetizer that allowed Drek to destroy planets and use their land masses to build his new world. After the pair destroy Novalis and five other planets, Nefarious betrays Drek and takes over his operation, intending to destroy Umbris, a volatile planet which could set off a chain reaction and destroy the entire solar system. When he hears that Ratchet and Clank are thwarting the attempt to destroy Umbris, Nefarious goes to stop them himself and ensure Umbris's destruction, despite knowing he'd die too.
- Ensemble Dark Horse: Out of all the new and reimagined characters in the movie and its tie-in game, Elaris has gotten the most fanart and attention, despite her role as the Mission Control / Voice with an Internet Connection rendering her the Galactic Ranger with the smallest amount of screentime - to the point where her Holocard in the game depicts her using a still from the movie instead of a solo character model, since she only physically appears in cutscenes and never in gameplay. It helps that the other two Canon Foreigner Rangers are fairly flat characters thanks to their main traits being a love of combat, while Elaris has a friendly personality paired with a sleek design and an implied dynamic with Clank. Some even enjoy pairing her with Dr. Nefarious given their similar traits, and the fact that she became the one who creates weapons, gadgets and plans for the Rangers after Nefarious quit.
- Fridge Brilliance: Why is Ratchet so nice in the 2016 reimagining compared to the original game? Consider how Ratchet now has a Parental Substitute in Grim, meaning he never had to face the hardships of Veldin alone and thus he grew up with a more optimistic outlook on life compared to the original continuity.
- It's the Same, Now It Sucks!:
- Most of the level design for the game reimagining is borrowed from the original game. If you still have the general layout of the original game's levels in your brain, you can probably cruise through the game and find many of the secrets without even getting the Map-o-matic.
- One of the biggest complaints about the film is how little it changes from the game, which actually came out a couple weeks earlier, giving people who already played through it little reason to bother with the film when they already played it at home.
- Narm:
- For the video game, the fully-animated cutscenes and most of the clips from the movie are very high quality and look, move and sound great. The automated cutscenes, on the other hand, look good, but acting and writing wise are painfully corny and stilted in their animation. This becomes much more obvious when you compare them side by side to in-game cutscenes from the original game—compare the conversation you have with Skidd McMarx on Aridia in the first game with the ones in the 2016 reimagining, and the difference in script and body language expression is day and night. Or heck, with the game's opening cutscene!
- Novalis getting everyone evacuated in spite of its destruction is either an amusing way of keeping the story from getting too dark while still resting on the fact that billions are rendered homeless by a major threat, or a cheap story cop-out that completely deflates the film's drama.
- So Okay, It's Average: The story of the movie and its video game adaptation is usually seen as this. It's a Cliché Storm with a rushed plot, but it still tried to respect the franchise as a whole with references to various games, voice actors reprising their roles from the games and other minor quirks that casual gamers and general audiences could find appealing (or at least with a passing grade).
- They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
- The decision to not bring back any of the music from the original game (mainly out of belief that including it would create Soundtrack Dissonance due to the reimagining having a very different tone from the original) into the game reimagining has not been met with the best reception from fans. The reaction was so strong that some fans regularly flat out mute the new soundtrack and play the old one over it.
- In the original game, Chairman Drek was one of the few menacing villains who actually seemed like he knew what he was doing. Cue the movie adaptation, and now Chairman Drek has been reduced to a goofy bumbler who just so happens to be a threat. This has rubbed some of the fans the wrong way. Granted, the change is partly because Dr. Nefarious ends up being the true Big Bad, but it still could have been handled better.
- In France, fans were disappointed to learn that the original voice actors from the games were not contacted, and outraged when it was made clear that a lot of the main characters were going to be voiced by popular french YouTubers with barely any cinematic experience as a publicity stunt. Ratchet being voiced by Squeezie, in particular, made many fans very angry.
- People who played the original don't seem to like Ratchet starting with a completely different personality, since that cuts out most of the character development that he and Clank had.
- While generally muted, there was some disappointment at the absence of many of the original planets, especially the originally plot-significant Orxon and Gorda City ruins.
- In the original, Clank was created by a seemingly-deliberate malfunction, and has a touching moment with the responsible assembly-line control computer late in the game. In the new story, the malfunction was due to a lightning bolt, and "Clank's Mom" is nowhere to be seen.
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
- Drek's death by Deplanetizer. Had they left his fate uncertain, he could have been used to replace Qwark's role in a possible Ratchet 2 film adaption. Capture and/or kill Fizzwidget, take his place and exact revenge to the galaxy with bloodthirsty pets, making him a dangerous villain again.
- A lot of fans who felt Ratchet's character and redemption arc in the first game was good in concept but lacking in execution hoped that the remake would do a much improved version of it, keeping his character development but making him less mean and unsympathetic. Instead, the reboot simply scraps that entire character arc and makes Ratchet into a wide-eyed Adorkable nerd who barely even resembles the post-Character Development version of the character from later games, let alone Ratchet from the first game. That doesn't mean he doesn't have a character arc, but the original game's arc for him is considered far superior.
- Visual Effects of Awesome:
- The game is easily the best looking one in the series (until Rift Apart came along). It says a lot that the in-game graphics are almost as good as modern films from Pixar.
- The animators clearly put a lot of effort into making the movie as detailed and visually appealing as the games on which it's based. Even reviewers who hated the movie acknowledged that Rainmaker Entertainment really outdid themselves, especially on a budget of only $20 million.
