The Walking Dead (video game)/YMMV

• Season 1
• 400 Days
• Season 2
• Michonne
• Season 3
• Season 4

YMMV for the series in general

• Alternative Character Interpretation: It's really hard to peg down someone's personality when it's heavily affected by your choices. Pops up every season, for several characters.
• Awesome Music: See here for the complete list.
• Awesomeness Withdrawal:
  • By far the most agreed upon complaint towards this game is the long wait for the next episode to be released. Telltale Games explained that this is the reason they're releasing Season 2 of The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us at the same time; the latter will help quell impatience for the former.
  • Season 3 has unfortunately brought this trope back, since Telltale didn't have any new releases until their Guardians of the Galaxy game released in April 2017, despite the first two episodes of The Walking Dead getting released back in December.
• Base-Breaker: Notable in that the majority (though not all) of the characters listed with this (see respective seasons' YMMV pages for specific examples) are Base Breakers by design. It makes your decisions that much harder when it's time to help or abandon them.
• Broken Base:
  • The Walking Dead: Michonne Mini-Series got this. Some people are happy for more Walking Dead by TTG, and others just wanted season 3 to come out already.
  • The finale of A New Frontier ending with Clementine not only having not yet found AJ but also with the final scene being a "Clementine's story will continue...", while most players are happy she's back in her deserved protagonist role, there are also fans that feel her character was an unneeded addition to a story that didn't require her, that she contributed very little to A New Frontier plot, that she lacked a proper conclusion and that she's being used by the developers to make fans buy the next games.
• Crosses the Line Twice: The achievements tend to go straight through the field of Black Comedy and into this trope. Notable examples include "Too Much Salt Will Kill You" from Season 1 Episode 2 and "Chain Gang" from 400 Days.
• Crossover Ship:
  • Sometimes romantic, sometimes not, but on Archive of Our Own at least it's popular to have Clementine meet Ellie. Sort of becomes Fridge Logic as The Walking Dead and The Last Of Us taking place in the same universe would make Clementine 14 years older than Ellie.
  • There is also quite a vocal minority of fans hoping that Clementine would get together with Carl from the main series.
• Depending on the Writer: In the later two seasons, Clementine varies wildly from directly referring to herself as A.J.'s mother in some episodes; and at other times becoming angry if a character assumes that about their relationship, seeing no need to label their bond but making it clear that he's not "her kid".
• Fanfic Fuel: There have been a pretty good amount of stories about other alternative paths that the story could've gone to that are mainly used to spare certain characters. Of course given the fact that the game's main selling point is the fact that you can alter the course of the game's story by the decisions you make one could say that its only inevitable that fans would do alternate paths that Telltale didn't use.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Fans have been calling Molly a female Ezio.
  • The whole video game series itself is called The Walking Feel by many fans.
• Fanon Discontinuity:
  • The third season was the lowest-received by the fanbase, due in part to revolving around a new cast of characters and designating Clementine to a supporting role. As none of said characters appear again (and, outside of setting up that AJ and Clem were split up), many fans have decided to simply ignore the third season as canon. The fourth season was much better-received, though even so, some fans prefer to consider the ending(s) of Season 2 as the "true" endings of the series.
  • The Clementine Lives comic and the The Walking Dead: Clementine series that followed have received little more than vitriol from fans of the game, who accuse it of pulling a blatant Happy Ending Override, completely misunderstanding who Clementine is as a character by showing her abandoning AJ and her other loved ones at Ericson's to seek her happiness elsewhere, and thus refuse to accept it as part of the games' canon — Skybound's statement that it is be damned. That Clem gets a new female love interest, Ricca, was also poorly received — especially by those who'd paired her with Violet. Upon its release, the comic was heavily criticised for poor attempts at fanservice and writing, and the art-style of the comic being hard to make out, with many people stating that everyone looks the same. Another commonplace criticism is that the author admitted the comic story was always viewed from her own point, making it a blatant self-insert fiction. This has gotten even more backlash as of the second book where Ricca has sex with Clementine (how?), having some not great implications.
• First Installment Wins: Season One is by and large considered the best in the continuity—and indeed the most popular, especially after snagging the title of "Game of the Year" at the Spike Video Game Awards. Following seasons steadily declined in popularity, with similar criticisms across the installments: less developed characters, railroading player choices, etc. For reference, Season One's Metacritic score is 92 at this time, whereas the following seasons score 80, 73, and 78, respectively.
• Franchise Original Sin:
  • The episodes were sometimes criticised for featuring less gameplay than story, though there was enough interactivity between the environment and characters for it to not be considered a problem. Season 2 is even more story-heavy than Season 1, though without the same level of interactivity between the environments and especially the characters.
  • Certain parts of Season 1 received complaints of Railroading, particularly character deaths that were prevented earlier only to happen later anyway, but were also argued as shocking and progressed the narrative. Season 2 contains this as well, but barely gives the characters spared any dialogue and kills them off almost casually.
• Genius Bonus:
  • At the beginning of the game, the police radio uses several police code words. Those familiar with terms will learn more about the outbreak and how it starts.
  • The Steam achievements for Season 2, Episode 5 are all lines of poetry relevant to the scene. This can sometimes let you guess what's about to happen, as with Kindly Stop For Me, which is from Emily Dickinson's poem "Because I could not stop for Death".
• Harsher in Hindsight: Season Four's subtitle, The Final Season, became this after the closure of Telltale Games. It really would be their final season.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In Long Road Ahead, Duck pretends to be Robin and designates Lee as his own personal Batman. Three years later, Lee's voice actor would play Lucius Fox, another ally of Batman.
    • Now made even better since Telltale has confirmed they're working on a Batman game. Doubly so because in that game, Dave Fennoy voices Lucius again.
  • The first season finished the same year as Bioshock Infinite and The Last of Us, both games of which revolve around a character acting as a father figure to a companion character. In Season 3 (if she was alone at the end of Season 2), Clementine has lost one of her fingers (or part of one), much like Elizabeth had.
• I Knew It!: Because of Lily's inclusion in the story generator, many fans predicted that she'll return in The Final Season. Later, the trailer for Suffer the Children confirms it.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks:
  • Besides Season 1, all seasons (including Michonne spin-off) always have the protagonists dealing with human dictators as major threats. And even in Season 1, there was one in Crawford, but they and their community are already undead by the time the heroes got there.
  • Some of the lukewarm reaction to the Michonne episodes seems to be rooted in the complaint that the series doesn't really do anything new, both in regards to Telltale and to The Walking Dead Game in general.
• It Was His Sled:
  • Lee Everett's death is no longer secret anymore since the gaming community has listed his death in many Saddest Moments in Videogame History lists. It doesn't help that the sequels bring up his fate a lot.
  • Kenny survives the Season 1 finale and reappears in Season 2, Episode 2.
• Memetic Mutation: Plenty.
  • Hershel Greene's "GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!" became somewhat well-known due to being used a lot in Super Mario 64 Bloopers made by an Aussie boy, Supermarioglitchy4.
  • Lee is "urban."
  • Clementine's line "but I'm little" is heart-wrenching in context, but plenty of players have since used it tongue in cheek as excuse why they can't do some everyday tasks.
  • Boat God. A title for Kenny. Which is both used by his fans as a silly way to show how much they love him, and by his detractors in a derogatory, to show how overrated he is.
  • Kenny's legendary stache. Gets upgraded to legendary beard in season two.
  • Scumbag Lee/Edgy Clementine/Eviltine/Scumbag Javier^Explanation
  • Calling Clementine anything along the lines of "The Greatest Child In Video Game History" because of her being universally loved by everyone who has played the game as well as averting many hated video game tropes that apply to children.
  • Having been locked in the shed due to being mistaken for a Zombie Infectee due to her dog bite, Clementine's reaction when the cabin survivors open the door to find her standing over the body of a walker has become something of the season's defining moment. "I'm still. not, bitten!"
  • In season 2, Kenny's loss of his eye has made him been compared to another bearded, one-eyed man...
  • To a lesser extent, Carver having a fetish for berries.
  • Same can also be said with Matthew and peanut butter.
  • Thanks to Season 2 Episode 5 coming out around the time of the trend for celebrities to dump buckets of ice water on their heads to raise awareness for ALS, some fans joke that Luke took his ALS Challenge too far.
  • Thanks to this video, Kenny is now God.
  • "Clementine's story will continue..." has skyrocketed as a joke about how Telltale is intentionally setting up a Sequel Hook to get gamers to purchase her next game.
  • This exchange, should Lee run out of dialogue options with Ben on the train but talks to him anyway. Lee: "Hey, Ben." Ben: (standing straighter, hopeful) "Hey." Lee: "See ya." Ben: (depressed) "Yeah."
  • An exchange that Clem has with a straggler in the Jane ending of Season 2 became popular on TikTok. For one reason or another... Randy: "You sure you wanna do this, little girl? I mean, what if we're dangerous?" Clem: "What if I am?"
  • Tell him off/"KATE'S GONNA LEAVE YOUR ASS!": Often seen as the most misleading choice in the entire game, it occurs during the season 3, episode 2 flashback at the start.
  • Also a minor one, but in The Final Season, Violet and chicken nuggets.
  • Violet saying "gang gang" has begun to crop up on Tumblr, for some reason.
  • Pretty much many player's, in particular, female player's reaction to seeing James unmasked.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • Hearing Becca's baby take its first breath after several tense seconds of uncertainty.
  • To some, Clementine's voice.
• Never Live It Down: One for just about every major character, but just to name a few...
  • Kenny's fixation on getting a boat, and his killing of Larry with a salt lick.
  • In a dramatic case both in-universe and out, Ben indirectly getting Katjaa, Duck, Brie, Chuck, and Carley/Doug killed is held against him to this day.
  • Carley somehow not being able to put batteries in a radio, which is also mentioned in-universe.
  • In quite possibly the most dramatic case of all time, Clementine going off on her own, leading to Lee getting bitten and eventually dying, is something that some fans will never let go. This is acknowledged in-universe, as Clementine sees it as her own My Greatest Failure moment.
• No Export for You: For about a month, gamers in Ireland and New Zealand were waiting for Season 2's first episode. This was odd, since not only are both countries moderately important in gaming (both were among the first 13 countries to be confirmed to have the Xbox One on launch), it's also a downloadable game, meaning it'd be easier to release than on disc.
• Only the Creator Does It Right:
  • The creative leads for Season 1 left Telltale Games sometime after it was complete, which resulted in some of this trope due to Season 2 having different writers who didn't seem to have as much of a grasp on the pre-established characters carried over from Season 1.
  • Skybound's official adaptation of Clementine into the Walking Dead comics with the "Clementine Lives" story Skybound X, marketed as a canon continuation of the games' story, was universally met with dismay and anger by fans of the games due to it having Clem abandon AJ and the peaceful life at Ericson's she'd fought so hard for to go off on a solo adventure; with several fans lamenting Skybound having picked up where Telltale left off.
• Porting Disaster:
  • An unusual example of downloaded-to-disc disaster. The retail disc version suffers from crippling lag and glitches, rendering basic gameplay difficult to get through or comprehend, and makes the quick-time events just about impossible to complete.
  • The Mac OS X version also occasionally suffers from wrongly-programmed quick-time events where the Q key only works if an external control device is bound to it.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: Averted. The fact that its first season won several GOTY awards is good evidence of this.
• The Scrappy: From the Clementine Lives comic series, Ricca is easily the most hated character in the adaption. She's considered to be a far inferior love-interest to fan-favorites Louis and Violet, and even fellow scrappy Gabe, due to her incredibly bland personality in the first book and insanely selfish behavior in the second. Not helping is that some fans felt she looked too similar to author Tillie Walden, making Ricca come off as a self-insert.
• Seasonal Rot:
  • Season 2 was less well-received than Season 1, due to factors such as the gameplay and choices becoming much more linear, the new cast not being as interesting as the first and prone to constantly shifting characterisation, and the dark tone having gotten out of control.
  • Season 3 (A New Frontier) was even less well-received with a main character that many see as a Replacement Scrappy, a cast of underdeveloped and uninteresting characters, short episodes, a perceived lack of quality in the writing and a large amount of Romantic Plot Tumor choking the narrative.
  • Averted with Season 4 (The Final Season), with this season being received at least as well as Season 2.
• Shock Fatigue: Anyone Can Die in these games, and they're not afraid to remind you of it: most episodes will kill off multiple named characters, and even if you get to choose to save one, the one you choose will often end up dying shortly afterwards anyway. One common criticism is that this can lead to the deaths feeling less like emotional Player Punch moments and more like attempts at cheap shock value, with the result that some players have trouble getting attached to anyone knowing that they're probably not going to stick around too long. This gets addressed in The Final Season, where forced deaths are less common, and any character you can save can potentially be kept alive until the end (albeit with some survivors being mutually exclusive).
• Shocking Moments:
  • The worst ones have to be Larry trying to kill you, Kenny killing Larry, Lilly killing Carley/Doug, Lee getting bitten (And later dying) and Clementine being forced to sew her wound. Omid is also killed off in the very first scene of Season 2. Continues further with Sam attacking Clem in episode 1, the arrival of Carver in episode 2 (and him finding Sarah's photo), meeting with Kenny, Carver killing Reggie and beating the hell out of Kenny, Carlos dying, Sarah running away, and Sarita getting herself bitten. Clem also has the choice to chop of her arm, which obviously doesn't go over well.
  • Several in Amid the Ruins, such as Sarah's sudden and inevitable death, Nick possibly returning as a walker, Kenny's outburst at Clementine, and Rebecca reanimating. The ending is probably the worst in any Episode, including Episode 5 of Season 1. The scene turns to black just as gunfire goes everywhere, leaving it ambiguous as to who died and who did not.
  • No Going Back is full of these. Luke will suddenly drown/freeze to death, Arvo shoots Clementine, and at the end Kenny and/or Jane will die.
  • Season 3 includes Mariana's death, David being revealed as a New Frontier leader, and any reveals during the scenes between David running off with Gabe and the epilogue.
  • Season 4 includes AJ killing Marlon, Lilly's comeback, Minerva revealing she killed her twin sister Sophie, and Lilly (determinately) killing James. The final episode had Clem getting bitten and then her showing up alive, her bitten leg having been amputated by AJ with an axe.
• Signature Scene:
  • Season 1, Episode 1's final choice. Do you rescue Carley or Doug?
  • And of course the infamous, "This is going to hurt", if Lee has his bitten arm amputated.
  • Clementine having to decide whether or not to kill Lee or let him turn, already considered to be one of the biggest gaming Tear Jerkers of the decade, if not of all time.
  • Season 2 is also well-known overall for its ending, where you have to choose between Kenny and/or Jane dying.
  • Season 3 allows players to channel their inner Negan by having Javi killing Badger with a baseball bat.
  • Season 4 has the scene at the end of episode 3 of telling AJ to shoot Lilly, or spare her life.
    • Earlier in the episode, the dream sequence featuring a young Clementine talking to Lee.
  • Quite a few in episode 4. Ranging from AJ shooting Tenn, or sparing him, Clementine getting bitten, the choice of killing or leaving Clementine, and Clementine being revealed to be alive and well.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • In an Anyone Can Die story like this, with flawed but mostly sympathetic characters, this was almost inevitable, with Carley as easily the biggest case of this. Other characters, like Doug, Duck, Katjaa and Mark can count as well.
  • Arvo and by extension the rest of his group can also count for being killed off too early, with many pointing out that Arvo was reduced to a plot device to show how unhinged Kenny had become and that the player was not allowed to interact with him so he would stay paranoid at Clementine and shoot her. His reasoning for hiding the bag of medicine in the first place was never explained either.
  • How some players feel regarding Luke. He seemed to be built up as a major character: his personal talk with Clementine in Episode 1, rivalry with Kenny, and coming back to save the group in Episode 3 in a Big Damn Heroes moment had many hoping that he would be (somewhat) a very major character. It didn't exactly help that he was heavily featured in the promotion images of episodes 2 and 4. And unfortunately, he's replaced by Jane in his rivalry in Kenny, and dies halfway through episode 5.
  • Some players feel that Christa as of Season 2 have been casually tossed aside immediately after just the first episode when a group of random bandits attack the two and causing them to split up permanently, with Clementine never finding Christa again. The players also seem to raise the issue that Christa's single-handedly raising Clementine on her own for eighteen months after the death of her unborn child and her boyfriend is also casually glossed over in favour of Clementine moving on to a new group as soon as possible, which just so happens to also contain a no-nonsense pregnant woman.
  • It gets worse in Season 3 as Clementine makes absolutely no mention of her whatsoever in any of her playable flashback sequences in A New Frontier. Kenny and Jane are at least shown on-screen for a few minutes interacting with Clementine, even if they are anti-climatically killed off at the end of their scenes to help explain why Clementine remains alone in A New Frontier. Christa has no such luck, as her relationship and parenting with Clementine within the eighteen month time-skip is never explored, and Clementine appears to have presumably forgotten about her completely.
  • Season 3 has Mariana. Echoing Clem from season 1, she's a goodhearted kid who knows how to listen, knows when to hide, gets along with everyone and is just a general bright person. She's unceremoniously capped near the end of episode 1.
  • Joan from A New Frontier. A promising adversary, with a "for the good of the community" motive behind her... until the closing of episode 4, where she devolves from complex villain, to full-on cackling madwoman.
  • Originally, Eleanor was supposed to be Joan's daughter. Not only would this somewhat justify her betrayal of Javi and his group, accidental or not (depending on the player's actions), but this would also make Eleanor herself quite a complex character, but sadly this didn't make to the final game.
  • A big reason why the cast of A New Frontier are disliked is because there is absolutely no time for deep Character Development for them compared to previous characters like Lee, Kenny, Clementine, or even Michonne. Many complaints about the third instalment revolve around how the story isn't as enjoyable than when the game series started is because it has not provided reasons to care for the player's fellow survivors on account of speeding through the conflict and making them all one-note flat characters who'll eventually die.
  • Lilly re-appears in the second episode of The Final Season as the leader of her chapter of The Delta, determined to kidnap the Ericson kids and use them as soldiers in a war against another group of survivors. Lilly quickly sets herself up as a great threat: kidnapping, torturing, killing, and (in Minnie's case) brainwashing them when they don't comply. But if you tell AJ not to kill her, she simply leaves within the first ten minutes of the final episode, with only one final bitter talk between her and Clem.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Aside from Bonnie, there's no interaction you can partake in with the other characters of the 400 DLC in Episode 3 of Season 2. There's no commentary about their own personal stories, how life under Carver has changed them, nor if they still wanted to find their friends/family; it just makes the DLC feel like a total waste. They also fail to compensate for this afterwards, as none of the characters (again, aside from Bonnie) appear in Episodes 4 or 5.
  • Season 1 Episode 4 makes a clear point about how Crawford's full of sociopathic humans, but by the time you get into it, they're all dead. Downplayed, however, due to 400 Days and Season 2 having introduced dystopian settlements with policies similar to how Crawford was described.
  • Some people felt like Season Three should have been more focused on the aftermath of the multiple endings for the second season in which it was only addressed in one flashback cutscene where if you saved Jane or stick with Kenny, they both get anti-climatically killed off in that cutscene.
  • The title cards for Season 2's Episode 3 and 4 clearly show that something else was planned for those episodes since nothing in them had anything to do with the final version.
  • A common criticism lobbed at the games is that they don't take advantage of the choose-your-own-adventure format — "The game adapts to the choices you make" is kind of generous. This is related to having bare-minimum interactions with the 400 Days characters, Jane or Kenny getting killed and rendering the Season 2 multiple endings moot, saving a character only for them to die later, etc. One that was particularly jarring and almost lazy was the choice of whether or not to rob Arvo in Season 2. If you rob him, his group comes back for revenge. If you don't rob him, Jane will, and the group comes back for revenge.
• Tough Act to Follow:
  • Telltale has admitted that they expect this in the case of Season 2, as the end of Season 1 really leaves high expectations.
  • And it's unfortunately come true with a lot of fans, who say the supporting characters are less interesting, and the attempts to offset this with even more of an Anyone Can Die mentality.
  • Season 3 A New Frontier got this even worse. Even those who didn't like Season 2 as much as 1 tend to say that 2 is still a much better sequel than 3.
  • The Michonne miniseries has been getting a lot of flak for basically being a Filler Arc while Telltale is still working on fan-favourite Clementine's Season 3 story arc. Since the story following Michonne is a standalone game, not many fans have a desire to give it a try.
• Toy Ship: A fairly minor case as there is a small but somewhat growing fanbase for Duck/Clementine the two token kids of the group. While the kids only interacted with each other in a few scenes but they are on mostly platonic terms so it's not really implausible. That said its one of the reasons why certain fans wished that Duck was one of the surviving characters as it would've been interesting to see an older Duck and Clem in Season 2.
  • Also Clementine/Sarah is quite popular, due to the close (potential) friendship the two girls have.
  • And now Clementine/Gabe in Season 3, complete with an in-universe Ship Tease.
• Win Back the Crowd: A criticism that Season 2 got a little of, and Season 3 got a lot of, was that the characters were not very likeable at all. In the latter's case, three of the most pivotal characters (Kate, Gabe, and David) have pre-existing relationships with Javi that the game pushes you to upkeep, and several characters make very irrational decisions for the sake of drama alone. This crosses over with Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy, as many players feel that Telltale kills off characters at random for the sake of shock factor, so it's hard to get attached to the characters when you're fairly certain they're done for. Season 4 garnered plenty of praise for making virtually all of the young survivors likeable. Marlon, Louis, and Violet in particular have many fans for their unique personalities and empathetic qualities.
• Woobie Species: The game series does a surprisingly heart-wrenching job at reminding gamers that the walkers were all once ordinary people before growing into monsters.

---

Back to The Walking Dead (video game)