YMMV / Swords and Sandals

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • In Baron Wolfgang’s Conquer the Realm ending, he falls to his death from a castle parapet while drunk. Considering he’s openly unenthusiastic and even somewhat conflicted about fighting his friends during the game mode itself, along with heavy alcohol consumptions’s known emotional effects, is it possible that he jumped to his death out of guilt at conquering and killing his friends, with the fall story coming about as a cover-up by the Free States?
  • Does Celen Helmguard really believe in his Doctrine of the Common Man, or is he simply a self-serving tyrant hiding behind claims of moral superiority? There’s evidence for both in the story and the lore, with Celen seeming to honestly believe that he’s doing the people of Brandor a favour through his doctrine while the narration seems to view him as the latter.
• Base-Breaking Character: Oh dear Suul, The Yeti Project. Purists of the series love him for being an extremely challenging boss who’s encountered in the early stages of the game, requiring you to put significant thought into how you fight him during and before the battle; others hate his guts for the exact same reason, viewing him as an overpowered SNK Boss that requires you to Min Max Magicka in order to beat him. Tellingly, the Swords and Sandals Classic Collection version of III includes an option to Nerf him before the battle, a change which the developer explicitly referred to as being long overdue.
• Creator Backlash: Oliver Joyce, the developer of the series, admitted that he didn’t particularly enjoy making Swords and Sandals IV: Tavern Quests and was very much at odds with its creation, considering it much lower quality than the rest of the series and more or less made in the name of commercial interest. He also admitted he probably should have labelled it an outright spinoff game rather than a numbered sequel.
• Good Bad Bugs: Pushing an enemy near the spike pits in II Redux triggers a looping animation of them staggering, which causes the game to endlessly re-roll their chance of falling until one gladiator moves. Since falling onto the spike pits means instant death, you can dispose of particularly troublesome opponents this way.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Spells in SaS III and IV automatically hit, and their damage is determined by your intellect stat. While this wouldn’t be too dangerous on its own, these games also introduced stat-boosting items that the player could equip. Grinding for gold then purchasing intellect-boosting items from the shops allows you to boost your intellect into the high double-digits in the early-middle game; this in turn causes you to deal hundreds to thousands of damage per spell while regenerating the mana cost within a couple turns. Coupled with the Gale spell, this tactic reduces most matches to a game of “cast gale – use offense spell (x2-3)– cast gale – repeat.”
  • Adventure random events in II Redux offer you a chance to increase a stat, with the stat depending on the specific adventure. Since you can skip time by going in and out of a shop, it’s entirely possible to grind your stats into the low hundreds by entering and leaving shops until an adventure pops up, completing the adventure, then repeating.
  • The Charisma, or as some fans like to call it, the Dragonborn build, is widely considered the most broken build in the original Flash version of SaS II. Watch it in action here. The gist of it is that since taunts can knock your opponents away and can do damage in this game, with said damage scaling with the Charisma skill, you can get through the entire game doing nothing but shouting your enemies to death. This allows you to do a massive amount of damage without needing weapons or even losing stamina, thus freeing your money up to buy only armor for protection on the off-chance your opponents manage to get a shot in. Unfortunately, since the modern patched (or bugged, depending on who you ask) version of the game, taunts now cost stamina and thus are no longer as potent.
• Hard Levels, Easy Bosses: SaS V's Dungeon Guardians don’t actually scale with the player’s level, whereas the enemies in the floors before them do and are much more numerous. The result of this is that a high-levelled player can struggle to get through the enemies before the Boss Battle, then easily best the boss.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • As noted under Game-Breaker, Spells in SaS III and IV automatically hit, meaning it was entirely possible for a Min-Maxing character to turn the game into a cakewalk where the only difficulties were managing your mana and grinding enough gold to get the right bits of equipment.
  • Elemental Resistance in the v1.0 Redux Editions of II and V. Every enemy has a level of “resistance” to the different offensive magic schools, which (pre-patch) manifested itself as a percentage chance to flatly ignore all damage from a spell. This made Wizards functionally nonviable, as their main weapon (spells) were now extremely unpredictable next to melee weapons, and the Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards problem of the series meant they simply could not rely on spamming spells to slowly wear the enemy down. This died down after it was adjusted to be a more reasonable percentage-based decrease of damage rather than a flat immunity to the spell.
• Shout-Out: If exploring a dungeon without a torch, Swords and Sandals V would originally drop Zork’s “It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a Grue,” line. This was edited in the re-release to reference “Grudars”, which the Dev himself confirmed as being a reference to Zork’s Grues.