YMMV / Richman

A-M

• Alternative Character Interpretation: In Miyamoto's ending in 6 Expansion, he successfully defeats Ninja, and it's revealed that he gave some money to a Ninja that desperately needs some and tell him to delibrately lose against him. Some players think that Miyamoto is generally trying to help Ninja and form a friendly relationship while others think that Miyamoto is simply bribing him and wants nothing but Ninja's defeat.
  • By 10, they are officially set to be friendly rivals, although Miyamoto would still boast that Ninja is his biggest rival without eleborating the friendship part.
• Americans Hate Tingle: Many players outside of China do agree that the games after 5 are better than 5, but dislike them as much as 5 or even more so because these games were produced in Mainland China, and would hate how these games feel less "Taiwanese" (even though 4 already takes a more international approach than 2 and 3) and more "Mainland Chinese". When 10 was announced, it received a lot of negative reception because of the mainland accents.
• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • As the final boss of 8 's story mode, Princess Sarah has the same starting assets and cards as every other opponent, instead of having twice the starting assets of other players or having a car and a super unique card like she does as her playable counterpart, making her battle no different than a one-on-one game with any other character (other than the epic music that plays during her battle). Her AI is not any better than other characters, either.
  • Similarly, the final battle with King Octopus in 10 is not too much different from a regular two-on-two game other than a lenient time limit. His two unique cards are also not very threatening or dangerous, nor can he reliably get them.
• Audience-Alienating Era: The series since 5 could be considered as this. 5 was met was heavy controversy due to the completely revamp of game mechanics, removing a lot of features in 3 and 4, causing players to become upset. Although it was sold fairly well, the series see a downfall from this game. While 6, 7 and 8 still see some positive reviews for being fine in their own ways, they were generally seen as being inferior to 3 and 4. The series' revival after the discountination in 2016 didn't improve either: the games are still largely identical to 4 while removing some fan-favorite features like coupons and character endings, and the only actual "improvements" were character talents and the mechanisms in 11. The post-revival era is often viewed as being even worse than the post-4 era, to the extent that it could also be viewed as this to the post-4 era, even causing the latter to receiving more recongization and approval than before.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Miyamoto. Some players like him for being a funny person, others find him too loud and also quite incompetent compared to Ninja. Nevertheless, he ranked 3rd in an official poll, just behind Candy and Wu Mhi.
  • Some player think that Kimchi is actually a good replacement of Miyamoto, also being a fighter aiming to become stronger but more competent than Miyamoto, while others think that she is a Replacement Scrappy and dislike how she acts selfish in 8's Story Mode.
• Broken Base: Some players (mainly dedicated fans of 4) don't like how in most games there are a lot of path splits and would prefer maps without them like those in 4, while others like the randomness brought by path splits, and think that 4 having simple maps is a step back from 3.
• Common Knowledge:
  • Some people might mistake 4 Fun as the mobile remake of 4. It's merely a mobile spinoff with most of 4's voicelines, special building and cards; a lot of core features like hiring special agents from hospital and jail, as well as owning a company by buying stocks, are absent. Anyone who's actually played 4 will probably get pissed if you insist that 4 Fun is that classic masterpiece or its worthy remake.
  • Some people may mistake 7 Expansion as the actual 7 and claim that 7 has terrible graphics like 6 and 8. The original 7 actually has decent graphics that is better than 6 and its expansion.
• Critical Backlash:
  • Most prominent example is the most controversial 5, as while many would hate on it for completely changing the mechanics, others find this game very interesting and would recognize it because of its unique mechanics like character skills and the ability to stun players by bumping into them.
  • 10 and 11 also got some people defending them because they are still decent as a party game alone, and have better balancing than 4 where characters who have collected a chest can easily dominate an entire run, especially in 11 where things are balanced out even more.
• Critic-Proof: Despite being viewed as a mediocre game at best by many (if not most) players, 10 sold very well, with over 1 million copies sold by the end of 2021.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • In 10, you will almost be guaranteed to find one or more from Wumela, Odd Bioguy or Salonbus in an online match unless the talents are off. Wumela can easily get more cards than other opponents thanks to her talents, and Odd Bioguy and Salonbus are resistant to various status effects, making them less vulnerable to crowd control.
  • In 11, Salonbus and Candy are almost must-haves for almost every mode both offline and online because of their abilities being incredibly useful. Salonbus will get a turtle card upon leaving shop and can get a banana peel when using the turtle card on himself, making his mobility very controllable (and unlike 10 's Wu Mhi, his turtle duration isn't reduced). Candy is also buffed from 10 in that all the cards she buys are sold at significantly reduced prices, and she also gets a free card instead of having to buy the 4th one, making her very powerful too. Also, during player battles, all the cards she buys are hidden from opponents instead of just the extra card.
• Contested Sequel: Is 4 really better than 3? Some people think that 4 is very casual and family-friendly, with a lot of gimmicks to explore, and the graphics are cute, while others think that 3 is better because it's more balanced, requires thinking and it also has better 2D graphics.
• Creator's Pet: Happens to Salonbus and Miss Money (at least her modern design, since her design in 2 and 3 seems to be a fan favorite); while the developers put a lot of attention to them and often promote them to be one of the core veterans (along with Xiaomei, October, Ninja and Baby King), they are far less popular than other veteran characters like Candy and Miyamoto. Salonbus in particular was ranked the last place in a fan popularity poll.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Some chance cards across the series are especially infamous. To wit:
    • "Sell off all cards and items", complete with the nonchalant voiceover of this line by the same VA of Wu Mhi in 4. Unless you have God of Fortune or Angel blocking it, good luck try to enter the shop again (or even survive if you are not the leading character). It returns in 7 but is somehow less threatening because it's already hard to accumulate cards in 7 to begin with. It's replaced with throwing cards away in 10 and 11 but still extremely frustrating.
    • If you have a car or motorbike, one of the chance cards will be replaced with losing them.
    • Any chance that sends you to the jail for 9 days in 4. Especially if you have God of Misfortune or Devil which doubles it to 18 days. Good thing is that if something just so happens to have your character hospitalized or abducted, it'll be reduced to 3 days for the respective event.
    • The news where you pay a huge amount of cash to hire an alien robot to send all opponents to hospital for a few turns in 10 and 11. And we mean it when we say "a huge amount of cash". Worse? It can happen if opponents are already in hospital which means you'll just waste money for nothing. Being on the receiving end of being sent to hospital is, like you've experienced from similar news from earlier games, not going to be pretty either.
    • 11 added another news that is similar to the one above, but probably worse: Have all opponents pay a fairly huge amount of money, but make all your team members sleepwalk for 1 day. There is no way to prevent the sleepwalk effect unless you happen to not be on the field or are playing as Daniel (which sees very little use outside of King Octopus runs). Being on either end of this news will hurt.
  • The God of Misfortune, especially the great one. When possessed, he'll delete two or half of your cards (though thankfully he won't do this to your items in 3 and 4, so if you have remote dice you can still visit the shop to get more cards), and he outright prevents you from buying properties, let alone upgrading them. He is nerfed in 10 and 11 so you can at least successfully buy new properties but not upgrade them. On the other hand, he gradually deletes your cards in 11 in Brawl Mode, making you pretty much defenseless.
  • The God of Confusion before 11. He debuts in 7, and forces a character to sleepwalk for the duration of his possession, and you also can't cancel it with any card, making it much worse than a sleepwalking card. Naturally, since you're sleepwalking, you can't use a send away card either, and have to pray that you miss all the hazards. He is nerfed in 11 so you still retain your consciousness and can make some basic but important decisions like upgrading house, using passive cards or choosing how many dices when driving.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • If you manage to have enough chain stores, their rents will be very serious.
  • 11 has cards that can be crafted (called "synergizes" in-game) by having 5 of the same type of a cards that serve as very powerful versions of these cards. While obtaining them can be hard (especially for Calamity since Monster card is somewhat rare), the effects can be very powerful. Calamity in particular can eliminate almost any form of threat the opponents have made and make them almost helpless with tier 0 or 1 properties.
  • Figuring out how to invest in stock markets with and without Red/Black cards can be difficult, but successfully doing so can net you great wealth. It's even more important back in 2 and 3, and one of the hidden characters in 7 basically requires you to do some investments as the game tends to end when you have 1 million total asset otherwise.
• Difficulty Spike: Most Landlords in 11 are not very difficult until Hard Mode, where they get a very powerful ability, usually one that synergizes very well with their abilities in Easy and Normal Mode which aren't very powerful on their own, such as King Octopus begin spamming his map-wide Take Aways, and Sherry getting Audits and Missiles from her good god cycle since Easy Mode. Also, all landlords have a lot of chain stores and hotels and possible shopping centers on Hard Mode, all of which are nukes, comparing to Normal Mode with only a few buildings, effectively making hard Landlord runs Early Game Hell.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Some players like to pretend that the series ended in 4 with none of the future installments ever existed. Others would think that 8 was truly the end of the series as Yao claimed.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Ninja is known to have a girlfriend in his ending in 7, but some players like shipping him with Aya instead.
• Franchise Original Sin:
  • A lot of complaints on 11 is about how there are too many path splits and the map being too big and people who criticize them would prefer to play 4; what these people fail to realize is that maps that are large and complex has already existed in as early as 2, where there aren't even as many ways to affect a character's movements. To simply put, most games besides the base game of 4 and 6 do feature such kinds of maps and none of these games allow you to choose where to go at path splits (with 8 not even allowing you to choose directions even if you land on the path split despite 7 allows you to do so)
  • Some players don't like how 10 and 11 change some of the characters' tones and/or some of their lines and take these changes very seriously. These things actually happen in nearly every installment and there were no criticism about these changes before (unless the character's voice itself sounds drastically different or aren't voiced in foreign languages when supposed to; see They Changed It, Now It Sucks! entry below).
• Game-Breaker:
  • 4's treasure chests give 500 coupons when collected. Get one, enter a shop and you are definitely going to have a really easy time. Be wary of chance spots though, as the "Sell all cards and items" card can ruin everything for you unless you happen to go to the shop again.
  • 7 Expansion's Hibernation Card. If a character happens to step on a property and is put to sleep, they'll be charged rents every turn, unlike in other games. Hibernation Card in this game is basically a death sentence to anyone who steps on your most powerful properties, and no cards can counter it!
  • 8's treasure chests give 250 coupons and are somewhat rarer and harder to get. However, the memory game can achieve a similar effect. Since the game will give you extra points (specifically, they are powers of 2, with the index being the concusive treasures of the same type you find) besides the treasures themselves, you can easily get five to six hundreds of coupons by digging up 11 coins (though sometimes the game will spawn only 8 coins instead, but in this case you can still net 200+ coupons). And since these games are in fixed spots, you can farm coupons quickly with the right set of cards. Even better is that in some maps this minigame is very close to a shop which means you can potentially start a cycle of overpowering (though this depends on luck, as there is no guarantee that the shop will spawn dice, turn back or road blocks this time). Just make sure that you always reserve some controlling cards in case the game suddenly decides to move you away from the spot!
  • Related to above, it also gives the most powerful Lord of Lands card if you get 100 coupons or more in the minigame in the original Traditional Chinese version! This function was removed in the Steam re-release, but the point above still stands.
  • For the large properties in 10, you will want to build a Securities Center and an Oil Center and destroy the opponents' because these two facilities are broken. Securities Center drains all opponents' deposit every turn (unless they can't move, but they will want to deal with your Securities Center as soon as they can again), and Oil Center causes opponent to lose large sums of money when they basically use or lose money, even from buying properties! They get understandably removed or nerfed in 11, with Oil Center now being Energy Center that only induces penalty for buying cards.
• Goddamned Boss: Update 1.0.9 of 11 brings Silence, whose abilities are entirely aimed at interfering with the players' card strategies, even those just used to defend themselves from the Early Game Hell. She is not only immune to all cards that target her (besides Teleportation, which is rare), can make many cards void, but also restricts the players into using one card per turn! She doesn't deal extra damage to the players or punish any of their playstyles (in fact, actively trying to hospitalize her might be better, because her abilities would be temporarily disabled there), but having your cards severely restricted is annoying.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • In 4, after stealing a car from an opponent who is sleepwalking and is driving their only car before going to sleepwalk, the opponent will end up with 255 cars!
  • In 4 expansion's Star map, one can use a teleporter to move someone onto certain planets or constellations, which aren't part of the map. The character will then walk out of bounds for a while not reducing the step count before returning to the track normally.
  • In 7, the wheel that appears when someone is being charged at a shopping center or a hotel stops almost instantly after clicking, and more bizarrely, can be stopped manually even if it's not the player character that is using it. You can use this to your advantage, almost always costing mininum rents when stepping on opponents' facilities and causing opponents to pay maximum rents when they step on yours!
  • In 7 's expansion, if you go to the bank and apply for a loan, then withdraw all money and pay back the loan without any deposit, your deposit will become a negative value for some reason (while your cash, which has been reduced as a result of paying the loan, should be your actual assets now). Deposit any amount of money and you will end up with 99999999 cash in deposit!
  • In 11, if you start a landlord run with the talent option turned off, the landlord will have their abilities as normal...until you reset the game, then you'll find that King Octopus will stop generating Take Aways, Dr. Y will no longer counterattack your allies. In general, the landlords lose their abilities as well. Which one is intended is not clear, though.
  • Also in 11, if you skip the animations too quickly, the AI might fail to react to what they have done, such as taking cards from a character that is supposed to be hospitalized by them, or wasting a artifice card on them for nothing (although the character will still say the dialogue for being set up). This can be used to your advantage.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Coolva rides on a missile and jump down from it when entering the stage before Borsalino does a similar badass trick.
  • Wumela's movie in 8 is called "Monster vs. Villains".
  • In the discontinued 9, Miyamoto was changed from a samurai (wannabe) to a ninja, much to everyone's surprise. His story mode in 10 begins with him misusing Ninja's skills and teleporting himself to King Octopus' space station!
  • 11 did some changes to avoid Chinese censorship, such as referring thieves as monkeys, changing a gambler's name, and removing various mentions of harming people or commiting crimes... and that's the international version we're talking about. So how does the official Chinese version look like? Well, the monkey that appears on the Take Away card is replaced with a "drawing a random card" image, all kinds of explosives are changed into magic spells, hospitals and jails are removed so that there is no injuries or crimes in the world, and that gambler didn't make it into this version either, meaning that the original changes were All for Nothing.
• Hype Backlash: Some players think 4 really isn't as good as how everyone makes it out to be. Mostly, they think 4 is just a slight improvement over 3 while having also removed a lot of mechanics, and the 3D graphics are inferior to the 2D pixel art styles.
• Iconic Sequel Outfit: Many characters have different appearances from their debut which ends up becoming their more iconic appearances:
  • Xiaomei's Qipao with a yellow cloud at the collar isn't fixed until 6's expansion and has been there since then.
  • Candy since 7 has straight, long twintails compared to curvy ones in 4 and 6, and wears a Sailor Fuku with long sleeves.
  • Miss Money since 4 has purple hair and dress.
  • Salonbus since 4 wears fully in white and is fat.
  • John Joe wears dark brown cowboy outfit and has turquoise hair since 4, although the discontinued Richman Universe Online reverts his design back to that of 2's.
  • Wumela in her debut doesn't have a pink headband with white flower patterns or orange sneakers, which are things that has never changed since her redesign in 7.
  • Daniel keeps his cap since 4.
  • Big Gamester wears in dark brown and a shade since 7.
• I Knew It!: When the trailer of the WeGame version of 11 was dropped, some players immidiately noticed that Daniel, October, Ninja and Miyamoto all do not have voice clips shown in the video. When they notice that every single English word was removed (such as the "On Sale" and "Go") as well, they guess that these characters will not have their Gratuitous Foreign Language and talk in Chinese as well. It turns out to be correct, though given how the Chinese censorship has been known to completely ban any foreign language before, this is not too surprising to begin with.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!:
  • Literally most games after 4 (besides 5 and 6, with the former being a prime example of They Changed It, Now It Sucks! instead) would be criticized for being the same as 4 or 3. However, 8 and 11 were criticized the most for being similar to 7 and 10 respectively.
  • Some players feel that the roster in later titles are mostly all twelve characters appeared in 4 along with Big Gamester and Wumela become too repetitive, and wish that more returning and new characters can also come.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • Wu Mhi's second talent in 10 that reduces the duration of turtle status means that it won't help her. Actually, this is one of the few actually detrimental talents. While she has received a third talent to obtain turtle card upon exiting the shop and starting the game, it doesn't help too much either. It also doesn't help that in this game, many of her iconic lines like "I wish you a long life like it!" have been changed, which makes some players who like her design disappointed.
  • King Octopus as a playable character has underwhelming talents. He gets a Turn Back card when getting out of the jail or using Sleepwalking card, which does not form any practical combos. He can get his own cards as a playable character too, but they're extremely niche, if not completely useless.
  • Miss Money in 11. Her immunity to beggars and dogs are pretty much useless because beggars won't appear until very late, and dogs can be ignored by bikes and cars anyways. Her immunity to Audit and Take Away is also very limited as she must be possessed by a god or a bomb for it to work.
• Memetic Badass:
  • Baby King, due to her reputation of being extremely cunning (despite her AI not being that smart after all, in fact she defaults to withdrawing most cash, causing her to be vulnerable to the Average cards), and her ending shows her casually bombing people. Some players would go as far as claim that she is the final boss of 4.
  • Lin Yue'ru in 7. In addition to her unlocking method being the most difficult one out of all 4 secret characters, some players find her hard to deal with when she's a CPU character, so they imagine her to be the most powerful and feared character there.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Baby King is a girl. ^note  Due to Baby King being a baby with few hair, many players can't tell her gender until the sorcerer in the magic house cast an effect to all female characters. This has become a well-known secret in the game's fanbase.
  • Wu Mhi didn't commit any crime! ^note  Her dialogue when getting jailed in most games. It is so popular that whenever you check a discussion board about Richman, you will almost always see this.
  • Sell off all items and cards. ^note  An infamous chance card in 4 that has the potential of making an even leading character who has a lot of cards and items to get into prolonged disadvantage, as without any cards, the character would not only be totally defenseless, there is also no guarantee that they can enter the shop again without the help of any cards and items.
  • Do you want to summon the Grim Reaper to avenge you? ^note  A famous line in 4 said by the sorceress in the magic house. When there're at least three players with at least two of them controlled by humans, if one of them surrendered, the sorceress will ask this and the player can choose who should face their worst nightmare.
  • Daniel can finally speak Chinese. ^note  Before the WeGame version of 11, Daniel is the only character who hasn't been speaking in Chinese in any of the games, while October, Ninja, Miyamoto and Baby King have all spoken Chinese at least once. Since the WeGame version of 11 changes his voice into Chinese as well, this is the first time he speaks Chinese ever.
• Moe: Wu Mhi. She is very popular in the fanbase since her debut just for how cute she is. Her VA, Chen Huiping, does a really good job in portraying a energetic and cheerful native child.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The Defeat Catchphrase of a character when they finally get bankrupt after a long fight where they have probably dodged your carefully set traps. 11 's Hard Mode landlords in particular might be even more satisfying considering how hard they are.
  Dr. Y: Treat my laboratory better!
  King Octopus: What a big joke!
  Bear: How could I lose?
  Yuan: How come?
  Silence: No!
  Sherry: It's god's falling!
  • The sound effect and/or voice line that plays when your character gets possessed by a good god. Especially the God of Lands which will allow you to take away the opponents' lands for free.

N-Z

• Nintendo Hard: 2 and 3 don't have difficulty settings, and they are not easy to beat unless the player is familiar with all items and cards, as well as how stock market works. Especially the case in 2 where you start the single player mode with a disadvantage to other characters in the first few levels, you always move with 2 dices, and there aren't many cards either.
• Only the Creator Does It Right: Some players only like the games before 4 because they were created by the former Softstar divisions, Crazy Boys.
• Power Up Letdown: Wu Mhi's second talent in 10. It reduces the duration of turtle status on her for two turns regardless of source. While intended to prevent her from being used on turtle by other players, it massively hinders her potential of using turtle cards to grab many tiles at once. It's more useful on Brawl Mode since moving one step every turn is rarely useful there.
• Sacred Cow: 2, 3 and 4 to an extent. There are almost no criticism of these games even though they do have flaws like having subpar balancing and exploitable programming, and many players would go as far as praising only these games while denying other games. 4 did get some criticism for adapting cartoon styles and using 3D models instead of 2D pixel arts, but is highly praised nonetheless. In fact, every time when the series gets a new game, most people would comment on why doesn't Softstar release a remastered, uncensored version of 4 with Internet connection, up to the similar interface and gameplay.
• The Scrappy:
  • Some players do not like Baby King from 4 not only because of annoying experiences with her bombing the players' houses, but also how she was potrayed as a dangerous baby, thinking that she is nothing but annoying and dangerous. Her design was softened in future games as she would either be villainous because of other influences, or does not have malicious intentions towards others at all.
  • Salonbus is not very popular despite being one of the series' veterans because of his obsession with Miss Money despite the fact it's clear that Miss Money does not like him. It doesn't help that many of his dialogues shows that he isn't the nicest person either. In fact, in a popularity poll of the 6 starter characters in 10, he was in the last place.
  • Miss Money after 3 is not much better than Salonbus. Other than the famous "my stocking are broken" line, she is simply seen as a snooty and selfish lady, and without the beauty back in 2 and 3 either (though some players also dislike her "cunning" designs to begin with).
  • Big Gamester, because of his villain-like appearance and his nature, is not very well-received among the fanbase either.
  • Princess Sarah is often disliked for being snooty and incompetent, especially after 8.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The large properties' cards from 7. The players have to own one in order to build a specific special building at their large properties in addition to the cash required to do so, and each of them takes one card slot.
  • Events in 8 happen completely randomly instead of happening to the player who stands on chance/new spots. It involves a lot of luck and can often screw a player that is fine without warning, and most of them cannot be prevented or defended from at all.
  • The replacement of the example above is quiz tiles that can either award you or punish you depending on your performance. While the idea seems fine, the real problem is that a lot of questions are completely irrelevant to Richman, instead requiring knowledge of other franchise from Softstar like Sword and Fairy series. Considering how the genre of these games are totally different from Richman, players of Richman are not very likely to all know the answers about these games and it would truly be an unforseen disaster if they receive harsh punishments (like losing all cards) simply for not knowing something that isn't even from Richman.
  • The Pirate Barrel game from 8 is similar to the Bomb game from 7 but executed terribly. It forces three players to fight against one, with the chance of winning altering drastically depending on the players, and it has very long and unskippable animations. While Bomb from 7 would also force a player to go to hospital and it cannot be defended against, the process were much faster and the chance for anyone to be hospitalized is equal. This minigame actually received so much hate that players have shared methods to mod the game to remove this minigame.
• Self-Imposed Challenge:
  • Trying to beat any of the game without building houses manually, buying cards, or in 2 and 3, buying and sellings stock markets.
  • Trying to beat a landlord 11 with fewer than 4 characters, using unconventional characters combos, or set different teams for each characters.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: From the perspective of playing against CPUs:
  • 2 is Nintendo Hard because it can be a bit too dependent on RNG because of a lack of methods of controlling movements and directions. 3 introduced a lot of cards to affect one's movements so it'll be easier to buy a whole street.
  • 4 is a massive difficulty drop from 3. While many changes are being made, the most prominent example is treasure chest, which give a whopping 500 coupons when collected. Get one, enter the shop and begin dominating your opponents (better if you are the owner of the shop stocks, in which the shop will also give you a free card, which you can either use or sell for coupons if you find it useless). The devs have actually acknowledged that this game was made easy because they decide to make it a more single-player focused game as a result of being unable to make online features.
  • 8 is also much easier than 7 thanks to the introduction of new cards like "Lord of Lands" card which gets you all properties on a street for free, and obtaining it is as easy as playing a game of memory and get good results. CPU on the other hand will never get these even on hardest difficulties. ^note This is only possible on the original Traditional Chinese version. The Steam re-release CHT version removed it.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: 7 is the hardest game since 3, having very large maps with more expensive land prices, so not only is entering the shop much harder, it's also easier to run out of cash. Without Save Scumming, the danger of going bankrupt from poor luck even if you take everything under consideration exists. Not to mention how the AI in this game really enjoys attacking you while ignoring other characters. In fact, it's almost impossible to unlock one of the secret characters without investing in stocks as it requires the player to have 5 million total assets, which requires excessive market investments.
• Sequelitis: Some players think that the series is on a constant decline since 4 (or at some point after that if 6 is better that 5).
• So Okay, It's Average: Most games after 4 are viewed as this by many players: While they are not necessarily bad, they are not as outstanding as 3 or 4 either.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • Bear's hard mode appearance has a TV-like screen for his head and his character potraits has the head emote, but his model won't reflect this, as the face is always the neutral expression. This is especially hilarious when he's put to sleep as his "eyes" are wide open.
  • On Courtyard Above Clouds, if a character on the southern island is put to sleep or under the turtle status, the blue Z's and the turtle icon can be found... at the bottom of the island far below where the players are.
  • The effects mentioned above can also be misplaced on Candy Fight.
• Surprise Difficulty: 8's quiz tile not only includes questions based on this franchise, but also a lot of other Softstar titles. The questions can be hard for any players who are not familiar with most of the other games Softstar created.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • Passionate Summer Night from 4 expansion has a few notes (linked with timeline) that sound like they're from In the Hall of the Mountain King. It's hard to not notice it.
• That One Attack:
  • The missile. If you happen to approach an opponent with it in a car or a motorbike, say goodbye to it (as well as a level of your house caught in the radius, or all of them in 7). Using them against the CPUs is satisfying but it's definitely not the other way around. In 4 it can target anywhere on the screen but luckily the CPUs don't seem to know too well how to use it.
  • The Monster card in 3 and 4 can target any house in your vision. If your opponent happens to grab one, expect your max level hotel or shopping center to be destroyed unless you are lucky enough to stop them before they can even get close to your house. It's nerfed in later games so that it can either only be used on the tile you're standing, or downgrade all houses in a street by 1 level. If you think this is bad enough, though...
  • Introduce the Devil card from the same game. Like Monster card, it can target any street in your vision. The effect? Completely destroys all houses on an entire street. And it's purchasable in the shop. It's very telling that this card never appears in any future games (besides Online where it works like the post-10 monster card).
  • 7's nuclear missile qualifies not because of its effect (which is the same since 4), but because of the fact that nuclear missile can be obtained anywhere from shops, card tiles to random card drops from God of Fortune! You can often get a nuclear missile launched at you and your high-leveled properties when you least expect it.
• That One Boss:
  • King Octopus on Hard Mode in 11 is infamous for being incredibly difficult, as not only does he start with a lot of properties that can nuke the players at the start of the game (same as every landlord), all three of his abilities make it even harder to counter this. Being unable to use Snatch Card on him means that there is no way to stop him from using a dangerous card unless he happens to be struck by bad RNG, getting Sleepwalking Card every time anyone gets our of hospital or jail means that the said thing, even if happening to himself, is dangerous; and worst of all, he can get a Snatch Card every time he uses a card! Which means that the player will often have no reliable cards to defend against him until his inventory is clogged up with cards he won't actively use. He is widely agreed to be the hardest Landlord prior to the addition of Ludwig.
  • Yuan on Hard Mode gets a very obnoxious ability that steals some money from you when you lose money, including buying cards, lotteries and being drained money from God of Wealth. The money stolen is based on her deposit which means that she can easily become more lethal as her deposit increases from her abilities and incomes. Unless you get a good start where you can destroy her nukes with cards in the first few days and/or stun lock her, it's very easy to die to her money stealing ability, if you have barely survived her nukes.
  • Sherry gets a audit (which now drains 30% of your current cash) and a missile every time she gets a good god, which is part of her ability. Automatically getting good gods from the map is dangerous enough (especially if the god in question is God of Fortune, Angel or God of Properties), she can and will also shoot missiles at the player whenever possible until the players have got a handful of houses for her to target (since AI will also fire missiles at houses). This, combined with the cash loss from audit, makes the Early Game Hell of hard landlords all the even worse. Even if you get a good start and survive to the point that she can't nuke you anymore and you have occupied most of the properties, she tends to either avoid your buildings or keep getting God of Wealth to drag on the fight. Think beating her on Brawl Mode will be easier? Her missiles will melt your characters just as quickly after she gets a few of them.
• That One Level:
  • Taipei (or Richman City) in 2 is the largest map in 2 with quite a few loops. Combined with the game's Nintendo Hard nature, some strategy guides have actually suggested forgo buying some lands in streets too hard to reach often to save up cash.
  • Mainland in 3 is, well, Taipei's equivalent in 3.
  • Big Gamester's Story Mode in 8 is significantly more difficult than other characters'. Instead of getting the ability to skip stages or some other prilivages, he starts with a debt of 150k at the beginning of Round 1 (he does start with the Gamester Card which can forcibly buy all cards from an opponent, but it doesn't help too much). If he doesn't pay the debt or have enough money to pay the debt by the end, he will lose. Due to the game's flawed AI (which makes the game very easy otherwise because opponents are not very smart even on hardest difficulty, but here, it's purely detrimental because opponents go bankrupts too quickly and they will never get themselves full of useful cards or reserve them in their deck for too long), many players actually have to try to actively farm money through different methods like stocks so they can pay the debt before the opponents go backrupt.
  • Sleepless Town in 11 is considered the hardest map because of its complexity. Sometimes half of the maps' facilities other than spots with cash gain and loss will be shut down, and you can't get around this by using Button. There are also unconventional teleport spots and worse, the ends of the teleportation are located at a path split to as many as 3 directions. The map is also incredibly large with a lot of path splits.
  • Mechanical Maze is a close second because of the complexity of the mechanics on the map. It's very possible to get stuck in one place.
• That One Sidequest: Puzzle pieces in 8 can be tedious to gather. Some of them require extremely difficult specific methods to unlock, such as buying all properties on a specific street or getting exactly 18 moves in a turn, and they will take a long time even if you backup your savefile to do them. And this is not to get into the fact that there were no official guides anywhere about how to get these puzzle pieces; without looking up a guide made by players, figuring out and collecting the puzzle pieces can be almost impossible.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • 5 tries to bring innovation by completely changing the game's mechanic into active-time, and removed a lot of features in 4. This game received the most backlash out of all Richman games, and many people refuse to play games starting from 5 as a result. While 6 and 7 kept both turn-based mode and active-time mode and handling both decently, it was removed for good starting from 8, also causing backlash from people who enjoyed the active-time mode.
  • The base game of 6 and 8 made everyone speak Chinese Mandarin, including characters who originally speak other languages, such as Baby King who only babbles, or Miyamoto who speaks Japanese. Much of the fanbase found this change unacceptable. Probably because of the backlash, 6 Expansion and 10 would voice characters in different languages again. The WeGame version of 11 also made everyone speak Chinese and gets similar reactions from many players, but other Chinese players who own the international version on Steam or Nintendo Switch can play the uncensored version with different languages and don't care anyways.
  • Related to above, sudden changes in character voices and dialogues tend to have poor reception even if they're in the same language. An example includes how Wu Mhi suddenly sounds more mature in 6.
  • Most modes in 10 and 11 other than offline free mode do not have stock market, which has been a staple of the series, has also upset the fanbase, especially since a lot of 10 's criticism is around the lack of stock market, making 11 getting even more backlash because of it.
  • A lot of fan-favorite elements in this franchise get removed, such as coupons, endings and stories, and to some extent, active time mode. Nearly all of their removals are met with backlash, and it doesn't help that the devs have stated that these features are removed because they want to make the game more fast-paced and fitting the modern gaming era, and some fans are outraged because they think they are removing what's exactly making the series great.
  • A lot of players don't like changes that are made to avoid censorship, such as the maps not being named after real-life locations or some changes in character dialogues or names. Most notably, there were a lot of negative reviews about the steam version of 4 solely because of the "map names". The fact that many of these players are from Taiwan and dislike the fact that the developers have moved to China since 6 probably doesn't help.
  • Many players express their unsatisfication of the artstyles of later installments, claiming they aren't as good as those in 4.
    • Some players, mainly fans of 2 and 3, also think that the artstyle of 4 isn't as good as those of 2 and 3's and think that the change from the more realistic style to the "cuter" artstyle is a bad thing. There were particularly a lot of complaints about how Xiaomei was made from a 18-year-old anime-like Ms Fan Service lady to a 9-year-old girl.
• Tough Act to Follow: 3 and 4 are considered the best games in the entire series and no game afterwards have inherited all their advantages when improving.
• Underused Game Mechanic: Nearly every game has some.
  • 3 has the casino from 2 which isn't used again in future games. There is also a Credit Card tool, and a mysterious girl NPC who can exchange cash with coupons. There are also special properties that can be "owned" by a character by owning its stock, and when anyone other than the user enters it, they'll be penaltized in various ways. and Energy Center and Water Center that ultilizes something similar to stocks but can't be sold once bought. The former only returned in 4 (where you can now buy stocks anywhere rather than having to enter the building yourself) and the latter only appeared in 8. Also, the large properties in this game can be stolen by other players unless you build a building on it.
  • 4 has some too, including the four gangsters that can be hired by spending coupons at a hospital or a jail, a trade board for trading items (although the CPUs would never use them), Grim Reaper, as well as individual AI personalities (which will decide how aggressive they will be to other characters). There is even a trading board for trading items and cards, although CPUs would never use them.
  • 5 has Character Skills, which can be unlocked as the character levels up as they move on the map. They act like rechargable cards. Also in this game, running into a character will knock them out and bump forward or backwards, which is adjusted in 6 that the character will only be bumped, and absent since 7.
  • 6 has a lot of new features as well. Most notably, the ability to raise and use Mini-Gods by feeding them cards, as well as merging properties into large ones. There is even a setting for the frequency of each cards for customized games! 6 expansion also has bonds that can be bought when entering certain tiles, as well as bringing the coupon exchange from 3 back, this time in the shop.
  • 7 has an NPC that can try to predict the stock market's conditions for the player, which can be used to the player's advantage or just hinder the opponents. Buildings on large properties also require cards to build, although this is a rather controversial mechanic.
  • 8 has "Places of Interests" which can be built after 10 investments are made, with the last character investing in it owning it. It will give a benefit to the owner and a disadvantage to other characters. Also some interesting cards like Swap and Seal never make a return.
• Unpopular Popular Character: Wumela is an inverted example. She is set to be very popular in Richman world, even attracting October, who usually only likes traditional operas; in the fan base, while she isn't hated per se, she is one of the least popular veterans, ranking the second last place after John Joe in a returning veteran poll in 10 (although Salonbus, Miss Money and Big Gamester might be even worse as they are outright disliked by the fanbase, they aren't included in this poll). One of the reasons may be she makes her debut after 4 which causes her to not get enough recognization, or that her design is too similar to Princess Sarah.
• Viewer Gender Confusion:
  • Baby King is officially a she, but since she’s a baby with few hair, it is hard to tell at first glance.
  • Igloo from 8 is a boy despite looking and sounding like a girl. The game even admits this by making him say that he doesn't want to be mistaken as a girl in the game.
  Igloo: I need a ward for BOYS!
  • Eleven from 11 can be mistaken as a male as well because of her gender-neutral designs and outfits.
• Vindicated by History: The games from 5 to 8 got more recognizations than at release after 10 and 11, as many players consider them to be better (or at least made with better efforts) than the latter two games.