YMMVs for individual games
- Adaptation Displacement: The NES port is far more well known than the game it was ported from at this point.
- Americans Hate Tingle: While many Americans think fondly of the game due to striking a balance between a creepy atmosphere and humorous dialogue (especially with the death messages), a clumsy translation which changes the game to first person narration for the Japanese port makes it a common target for Worst Game Ever lists due to the hero's dialogue coming across as either pompously Narmy, or very bland. Detailed in this article
. - Anti-Climax Boss: Sure, it's a challenge to find the pieces of the weapon to defeat the Big Bad, but once you get it, and enter the final room, it's just a matter of using the weapon in the right place, just that one action.
- Awesome Music: A musical score was made for the NES port of the game, because having NES games without music just isn't done. Fortunately, this music is awesome. It will get into your head, especially the death tune.
- The remake team (which includes some of the staff of the original Shadowgate) knew this, and made sure to license the NES music, remixing it.
- It is also true for Shadowgate 64, just listen to this solemn and mystical Cathedral theme
- First Installment Wins: It's hard to find anyone favorably comparing Beyond or 64 to the original.
- Funny Moment: See Narm below. "Death lurks below, waiting to catch you."
- Macekre: The Japanese localization is infamous in Japan due to how generic and cheesy the narration and dialogue became. It also forgot to include a few important characters such as Lakmir.
- Narm: The Japanese language version changes the narration from second-person to first-person perspective, which includes the death scenes. That sounds pretty visceral and scary on paper, but as this example shows, the results are much, much funnier than you'd think:English: With a loud roar, the wolf pounces on you, taking your life!! The wolfs [sic] powerful jaws rip your throat out!!Japanese: Agghh!! The woman transformed instantly into a wild, ferocious wolf. It’s angry!! It’s attacking!! Ahhh!! I’m done for!! Arrghh!! The wolf’s fangs glint in the light, and at that instant, I became the werewolf’s latest meal.
- Nightmare Fuel: See the series page here.
- Polished Port: The NES port was much improved in many areas over the Macintosh original, adding more color to its monochrome graphics, along with better dialogue, and ditching many of the more frustrating aspects of the original. The subsequent Game Boy Color port polished things even further, mostly by improving the artwork and fixing a couple of glitches from the NES version.
- Take That, Scrappy!: One can only assume enough Kickstarter backers/play testers begged for a way to shut up Yorick that the remake's developers allowed you to do just that: If you give him a good smack when he mouths off, he'll stay quiet for the rest of the game.
- Woolseyism: Most of the additional language versions included on the GBC release were word-for-word translations of the original English version. The German version on the other hand was an entirely new translation, that added some additional humor to the game. It also turned the otherwise-useless "Speak" action into a hint to get past the troll the second time; when you try speaking to him he replies "verschwinden sie", which contextually means "go away", the same same thing that he says in English, but can also be read as "disappear", cluing you in that you're supposed to use the Humana spell.
