YMMV / StarTropics

• Accidental Innuendo: The parrot's hint for the organ is "Do me so far, do me".
• Awesome Music: The dungeon theme from the first game
• Breather Level:
  • In 1, the Ocean Passage dungeon in Chapter 3. It's full of the same ocean based monsters you fought in Chapter 2, only, now that you've got the Shooting Star you can blaze right through them. No puzzles either, unless you count raising the bridge to enter the dungeon in the first place.
  • Also in 1, the entirety of Chapter 4, unless you were playing before the Internet exploded in popularity and were completely stumped with the final puzzle. Coming after the massive difficulty spike of Chapter 3, it is impossible to die in this part, there are no dungeons, and the bulk of the level is solving a maze. The snag is that this is the level where you need to dip a physical, real life letter in water, but nowadays, you can easily find the solution online or, in Virtual Console releases, in the digital manual.
• Contested Sequel: StarTropics II was about time travel rather than messing around in the tropics and altered the control scheme, with some fans not taking well to the latter change especially; whilst other fans prefer the new controls and view the game as a whole to be more polished and enjoy the more varied locales.
• Cult Classic: Since neither game was released in Japan, they're not as well-known as most of Nintendo's output, but they still have a pretty dedicated fanbase, and Nintendo of America enjoys using the times it can get away with referencing the game in other localized products, not to mention consistent rereleases of the original.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Birdos - those ostriches with human skulls for head. They do a lot of damage, move quickly and are durable, but worst of all, in a game where previously keeping water between you and your enemy was a completely safe strategy, Birdos can jump across water to get at you.
  • Those freaking gas mask robot raygun alien things in the last two levels of the first game. Durable, damaging, long range attack... argh.
• Difficulty Spike: The biggest one is between levels 2 and 3. Level 3 is where fast moving monsters with unpredictable patterns become the norm - especially the skull-headed ostriches which actively chase you down, do a heart and a half worth of damage, and will jump over water to get at you. There are smaller difficulty spikes in level 6 (where the underground ruins begin) and level 7 (the alien spaceship), but those are both tougher versions of crap you've already dealt with.
• Ethnic Scrappy: Baboo. The developers refrained from giving him a goofy accent, but appearance wise he's practically a caricature of a native islander. Fat, wild hair, grass skirt...
• Fake Difficulty: The first game's requirement of having to jump on or between tiles deliberately turns several rooms that would ordinarily be straightforward, into huge time wasters. One room in Chapter 4's dungeon even exploits this by making the tiles start falling as you scramble to hop your way across to the opposite doorway.
• First Installment Wins: The first game is more well-loved than the second among fans. Not only did the second game change enough to be a Contested Sequel, but prior to the Virtual Console release of both games, there were some fans of the first game who didn't realize it even had a sequel.
• Fridge Logic: If Dr. J is such a good friend to the villagers of C-Island, why is his lab on the other side of a cave full of monsters from their village?
  • That cave wasn't always full of monsters. It's suggested that prior to Dr. Jones's kidnapping, it was just an ordinary cave with only tame creatures in it, and whatever kidnapped Dr. Jones also caused the monsters to appear in the cave.
• Friendly Fandoms: Shares one with the Mother series. Both are cult classics by Nintendo, take place in a modern setting, and features kids as the protagonists.
• Goddamned Bats: A lot, especially in the sequel which has numerous flying enemies, enemies invulnerable to frontal attacks, and especially the damn slimes that jump diagonally.
• Goddamned Boss: Several of them qualify from both games:
  • Octo the Huge likes to move away and spam ink shots instead of getting in melee range. The Snowman works to freeze him and leave him vulnerable to attacks, but it works best when he's in Yo-Yo range. You must also dodge his projectiles by jumping on platforms suspended in the water.
  • Giant Turboss is fought in a similar way to Octo the Huge. There's no Snowman item this time around, and it could take a while before it becomes in range.
  • The final boss, Alien Zoda has an annoying tendency to jump away from the player's attacks. It boils down to a Luck-Based Mission whether your attacks hit him or not. His projectile spam also makes it annoying to hit him.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The friendly aliens' species? Argonians.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: Granted it came out during a time when Nintendo Hard was the norm, but even then many feel the game is unnecessarily cruel at times and forces an annoyingly large amount of trial and error. Then of course there is the whole code fiasco listed below.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The explosion sounds when a boss is defeated followed by the victory theme. In this game, you earn them.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • If you get too greedy in the first treasure/potion room in the Island Tunnel, you'll end up drowning in a room full of water with bones and skulls floating in it. Even worse, according to the room itself, at least four different people have met their doom here.
  • The birds who have human skulls for heads are surprisingly disturbing, they feel like they would be more at home in a dark fantasy game.
• Nintendo Hard:
  • The last two chapters of the first game, full of aliens/robots/alien robots with rayguns and a small army of robotic bosses, including one that looks (and walks) bizarrely like a giant chicken. Extra points for the fact that the only way to kill this boss is to push it back against the wall—not once, but twice. And did I mention that taking the wrong teleporter (which you have no way of telling apart) could put you in a room FULL of enemies?
  • Level 8 of the first game is an odd aversion. During the section where Mike has to destroy the spaceship engine, there's a secret (but easy to find) room Mike can fall into with an infinitely respawning super-vitamin that restores his entire lifebar, so if he messes up he can just fall into a hole, get the vitamin and try again. Then after the engine is destroyed, there are a few screens full of infinitely respawning Zoda-spawn that are very generous when it comes to dropping life refilling items. Though the Zoda-spawn stop being as generous when you reach the final boss.
• Porting Disaster: When the first game was re-released on the Wii and Wii U Virtual Console, the code necessary to progress in the game (again, listed under Scrappy Mechanic below) was provided in their digital manuals. But the version provided on the later Nintendo Switch Online's service doesn't even have a provided manual like the Virtual Console releases did, leaving the player permanently stuck in the fourth chapter without resorting to an online guide.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The first game rather infamously has a point that you cannot pass until you enter a 3-digit code- a code that is only given to you in a letter that was attached to the game's instruction manual. There is no other hint in the game to tell you the code. These days you can just look up a walkthrough, but in the game's heyday your only options for getting further without the letter were to own the exact copy of Nintendo Power where it was given or to try every single one of the 1000 possible combinations until one works.
  • Respawning with only 3 hearts and having your weapon get weaker when you're low on health is not a good combination. Though to be fair, most of the time there are life refills near your respawn point.
  • Stars are basically useless after the first couple dungeons: They have a chance of appearing after you kill an enemy, but it is such a low chance you may go through an entire dungeon and never even see one them. And what do you get for collecting five stars? 1 heart.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: While some criticize the sequel due to the different control scheme (thanks to Damn You, Muscle Memory!), there are others who find the game easier to handle for many of the same reasons.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: Mostly due to the control scheme and combined with Damn You, Muscle Memory! if you've played the first raft-jumping sections are notable for their cruelty for the fact that you can walk right off the raft into the water / pit if you're not extremely careful when jumping.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The dungeon theme in the second game is pretty much "Moondance" by Van Morrison.
• That One Attack: Zoda-Y isn't particular difficult until he turns into his owl form, where his feather attack becomes an absolute nightmare to dodge (it doesn't help that it's also pushing you backwards into a nearby row of spikes at the same time and there might be bats to contend with if you haven't killed them all.) Needless to say, you'll probably be burning through most of your health potions in the Boss Rush on this segment alone.
• That One Boss:
  • Zoda-X at the end of the sequel's 4th chapter. You fight him on a floor that's solid conveyor belts sliding you everywhere and his primary attack is to completely circle you in four pillars of flame that deal massive damage due to the sequel's lack of Mercy Invincibility.
  • The Knight Rider, the boss of the first dungeon in chapter 8 of the sequel, is a major pain to fight. He moves quickly back and forth across the room while you're on a rapidly moving conveyor belt trying to shoot at him with limited range weapons.
  • The Dragon, which you have to jump to hit, can fly around blanketing the room in flames, and has to be fought under a time limit.
• That One Level:
  • Chapter Three runs you through a series of five consecutive dungeons with few healing items. The longest and most difficult of these is the Ghost Village, which includes rooms of invisible enemies and several false exits to further vex the player.
  • After leveling out a bit for a couple chapters following Ghost Village, the difficulty spikes once more in Chapter 7, with enemies suddenly dealing much more damage and able to hit you from a far greater range due to being equipped with ray guns and other such weaponry.
  • The first dungeon of Chapter 8 in the sequel. There may be a lot of health potions, but you'll sure as hell need all of them because there's no checkpoints, and it's the home of the Knight Rider (see That One Boss above.) Not to mention the section that sticks you on a fast-moving conveyor belt and forces you to speed your way through forks in the road to avoid running into giant spikes and get through fast enough before you have to take even more damage to get across expanding spiked floors.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The change to free 8-directional movement in Zoda's Revenge is the main reason it's a Contested Sequel; many fans of the original felt that its stiff and fixed movement, while hard to get used to, added a lot of nuance to the level design and combat, whereas the sequel plays too much like other top-down action games on the system.