YMMV / MultiVersus

• Awesome Art: The artstyle for the game is amazing, making all the characters that come from different mediums stand out while blending together for a seamless visual direction.
• Awesome Moments:
  • The cinematic trailer has Shaggy going Ultra Instinct — after Arya Stark sliced his pie-sandwich in half — and ends up punching Bugs Bunny in the face, before we have an awesome shot of Batman and Shaggy (with glowing eyes and a DBZ Saiyan aura) ready to brawl. And this is just after Arya Stark swats away a Batarang from the goddamn Batman himself.
  • The end of the trailer has Superman ready to intervene and then he meets up with the Iron Giant, who is ready to fight alongside his idol.
• Awesome Music: The stage themes take cues from the original source material's soundtracks while remixing them to make it their own.
  • The Batcave uses Danny Elfman's iconic theme from Batman (1989) and Batman: The Animated Series.
  • The Tree Fort is set to an instrumental remix of "Come Along With Me".
  • Sky Arena has a downright beautiful orchestral version of "We Are The Crystal Gems".
  • The Cromulons stage has a very catchy mashup of "Get Schwifty" and the main Rick and Morty theme.
    • The alternate theme for the stage also uses a funky techno remix of "Get Schwifty".
  • The Space Jam court, although currently only accessible through the lab, will have an epic rendition of the original Space Jam theme. By the time of the stage's release though, the Space Jam theme was edited out of the music but still turned out to be an amazing original composition.
• Awesomeness Withdrawal:
  • Every time the game's closed alphas and betas ended during its pre-release period, many players would get disappointed that they would have to wait until the next testing period to be able to play the game again. Things got particularly out of hand with the May 2022 Closed Alpha. Well before the test period was even able to conclude, players desperate to try the game would go to any website or Discord server with even a remote relation to MultiVersus to beg other players for extra download codes just so they could try the game ahead of the July 2022 release of the open beta. It eventually reached the point that at least one of the game's major subreddits placed a hard ban on posts solely begging for or selling codes due to them drowning out all other forms of discussion about the game, with the official Discord server being temporarily locked twice to curb it and other rule-breaking behavior.
  • Midway through following the release of Marvin the Martian and Westeros in Season 2, content for the game outside of events just plain stopped. While this would've been justified by the developers taking a break for the holiday season, players became more outraged as PFG's radio silence on the situation continued up until they announced that Season 2 would be extended to March 31st, causing much of the fanbase to declare it a dead game. Eventually however in March 2023, Tony Huynh would announce that the game would be going offline for the rest of the year in preparation for the full game's launch in 2024, explaining the silence - though this would result in further annoyance from fans who had already spent their money on Microtransactions or the various special editions for MultiVersus, with some questioning why the game still labeled itself as a "beta" if it allowed people to spend money as if it were a finished product.
• Broken Base:
  • Some players think the game focuses too much on aerial combat, perceiving it to be too floaty (which they say removes the need for skill) and feeling like every character plays like Jigglypuff in Super Smash Bros.. Other people have no problem with it and consider the notion that they don't have to time their aerial attacks as an Anti-Frustration Feature.
  • The beta roster has similarly split the fans, mainly due to its heavy focus on more obscure or Unexpected Characters. Some like all the various surprises to the roster, saying they're fun to play as and were fun surprise when they got revealed. Others were annoyed by less important characters getting in over characters who had actual fan demand behind them or should have been playable first (some of the more infamous examples of this include Taz and Marvin getting in before Daffy Duck, Black Adam being picked over far more iconic DC heroes such as the Flash or Green Lantern and Gremlins getting two fighters while several, arguably more iconic franchises not having any fighters yet)
• Catharsis Factor: Naturally, with the game having a giant roster from decades of Warner Bros. media, there's going to be one character who's bound to be someone's punching bag in training mode. However, a special mention goes to Jerry, who's a non-player character. Nothing's stopping a player controlled Tom from throwing him off the arena into the dark abyss below, and similar to Rosalina's Lumas in the Super Smash Bros. games, Jerry can get hurt and even die mid fight if he takes too much damage, leaving only his soul that floats away.
• Casual-Competitive Conflict: A common criticism of the game is that it takes itself too seriously for a platform fighter featuring Ultra Instinct Shaggy and LeBron James. There are no items (except in the Free-For-All mode, with no option to enable them in other modes), the stages have very simple gimmicks, and while the focus on tag team gameplay is praised for distinguishing the game from its inspiration, it also detracts from one-on-one matches by taking away what makes each character's moveset unique. All of this together causes some to believe that the game is trying too hard to appeal to the e-sports scene.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • In the game's pre-release period, Finn and Taz were far-and-away the most common characters seen in matches; Finn for his stacking speed boosts and versatile backpack mechanic, and Taz for his incredibly hard-hitting attacks (especially Taz-nado and its ludicrous amount of knock-back). After Taz's Taz-nado was nerfed, most players dropped him like a hot potato, leaving Finn as the most commonly seen character in matches.
  • Some characters have preferred Perk setups, with an exceedingly common perk setup for Shaggy in particular being his "One Last Zoinks" signature perk combined with the "Lumpy Space Punch", "Kryptonian Skin", and "Last Stand" perks (a setup that unsurprisingly compliments his neutral and side specials the best). Lampshaded in this Reddit post.
  • Due to initially being unlocked through the tutorial and being extremely easy to use, with powerful attacks that easily combo into each other and prominent super armor, Shaggy is an extremely popular choice to use online.
• Crack Ship: During the closed alpha period, people have begun shipping Finn with Garnet, thanks to a handful of memes and datamined dialogue that implies Finn having a crush on her, plus Garnet's datamined dialogue showing kindness and respect towards him. Made it even more hilarious when Ian Jones-Quartey (the creator of OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes, former director of Steven Universe, and the husband of Rebecca Sugar) drew fanart of the two together after being invited to the alpha. This occurs despite the fact that Garnet herself is a fusion of a lesbian couple who has canonically stated she's not looking for a relationship of her own.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • While also crossing a bit into Nightmare Fuel, Garnet's original losing animation as depicted in the closed alpha and closed beta involving her outright poofing as a result of her loss can step into this territory, contrasting hilariously with everyone else simply being upset in their losing animations. The open beta changed the losing animation to her meditating.
  • If Arya defeats an opponent, they will leave behind "Arya's Pie", an item that can be eaten to recover health at the cost of moving slower. Those who have watched Game of Thrones will realize what this is referencing, making the ability morbidly hilarious.
  • Morty's losing animation has him jump into a vat of fake acid, to which bones pop up before Morty assures his survival by poking his head out. However, to those unaware of the reference at hand, the animation of a teenager melting himself alive upon losing, at least before he reveals himself, is quite shocking.
  • Many voicelines of both Wonder Woman's and Superman's Black Lantern variants cruelly name-drop a bunch of dead characters, including Steve Trevor, Jonathan Kent, and Rose Quartz. The fact that they are talking about them in front of the characters^note Wonder Woman, Superman, Steven Universe who were related/in love with these departed doesn't help.
• Fan Nickname:
  • This game has been referred to by some fans as Cartoon Network: Punch Time Explosion 2, due to also being a Platform Fighter like that game was and the starting roster including characters from Cartoon Network (with the potential for more), as well as characters with shows that did air on the channel (such as Superman, Batman, Bugs Bunny, Shaggy, and Tom & Jerry).
  • The game has also been called MultiVersus of Madness due to the chaos that will arise from the characters involved.
• Fridge Brilliance:
  • Why are Batman and Shaggy teamed up in the cinematic trailer? Batman is a very untrusting person (best shown when he immediately believes Bugs and Arya are enemies), but he actually has teamed up with Mystery Inc. a few times in the past. This allows the crossover team aspect without feeling out of character. On the other end, it also explains why Shaggy jumped into his arms rather than fear him as he would most imposing figures, immediately asking Batman "What's going on?" instead of "Who are you?". Moreover, Shaggy is also shown to be a fan of the Dark Knight, having unique quotes if playing in the Batcave stage.
  • Harley finding Taz cute makes sense as she's known to have pet hyenas, which Taz likely reminds her of.
  • Marvin being antagonistic toward Wonder Woman and her Amazon sisters makes sense (aside from the fact that he's antagonistic to everyone), as he's fighting for Mars, which is also the Roman Name for Ares, the Olympian God of War and one of Diana's greatest foes.
  • Rick's grounded down attack makes use of the butts he created in a simulation in the Season Three premiere. MultiVersus presumably does not take place in a simulation In-Universe, making it questionable how he's able to do that... but Rick has demonstrated Medium Awareness plenty of times before, and out-of-universe, MultiVersus is a simulation... a videogame, and Rick presumably knows this.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • Surprisingly, despite the lack of a Nintendo Switch version, many Super Smash Bros. fans have been looking forward to MultiVersus. Most likely, the lack of a Fandom Rivalry is because MultiVersus hasn't been branded a "Smash killer", unlike Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl which got branded by this on release, despite the developers' requests for it not to be, as it hurt the game's image.
  • Many fans of Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl are also excited for MultiVersus, since both games involve a lot of famous cartoon characters duking it out and have a similar emphasis on unexpected characters (MultiVersus, albeit, avoiding snubbing of important protagonists and icons that All-Star Brawl has become infamous for) with fun and creative movesets. It helps that the two games are very different gameplay-wise — The former takes more from Super Smash Bros. Melee, while the latter is much more similar to Brawlhalla.
• Good Bad Bugs: Players eventually discovered that there is no actual limit to how big Reindog's fireballs can get as they expand before hitting the ground. Because of this, if one is continuously prevented from hitting the ground (such as by bouncing off the top of Jake using his house attack, for example), the fireball can grow positively enormous. It's only a graphical effect, though.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • One of the fanbase's major complaints with the game was the fact that Rick and Morty had reused voice clips rather than having Justin Roiland record new voice clips for the game. Warner Bros would later cut all ties with Roiland once allegations of his history of domestic abuse came to light, meaning if Rick and Morty ever DO get new voice clips, they would have to be supplied by their next voice actors, Ian Cardoni and Harry Beldan.
  • The description of the Big Bad for the game, a destructive force that sets its sights on all Warner Brothers IPs, is a description that also fits their CEO, David Zaslav.
• He Really Can Act: Some fans noted that Imari Williams' take on The Man in Black is an authentic-sounding imitation of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's own voice.
• Hype Backlash: The game had an astonishingly successful launch, with the massive crossover appeal, overall solid mechanics, and polished presentation attracting not just fans of their respective media, but from gamers of old and new. Unfortunately, this popularity started highlighting several flaws in the details, from awkward hitbox and priority wonk on several moves that took far longer to fix than expected, to shoddy netcode and frequent lag spikes, which quickly caused player numbers to fall off significantly (Steam's player numbers between July 2022 and October 2022 going from 153k simultaneous players to around 9k). Further backlash came from Warner Bros.' handling of the game, providing disconcertingly little support for further content and overall publicity to renew further interest, with many criticizing the handling of its public release as an "open beta" despite setting up in-game purchases with a presumed revenue stream (which would become inaccessible for months with no options for refunds).
• I Knew It!:
  • While most fans initially assumed that Gizmo and Stripe were a 2-in-1 fighter due to an oddly worded statement Tony Huynh said in an interview, insiders like AisulMV found evidence that they would be separate. Tony confirmed that this was indeed the case.
  • Some fans reasonably assumed that the Throne Room map (based on Game of Thrones) would be added alongside the launch of the game's first Christmas event, since both would be related to a Winter motif and initial teases by the game's staff.
• Memetic Loser: Keeping with his reputation in the region, players from Latin America have gleefully expressed their desire to beat up Steven Universe. Amusingly though, players have found that Steven is actually one of the harder characters to beat in the game.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Unofficial [X] Render^ExplanationFollowing both the game's reveal and the release of various render images for the confirmed characters and their classes, various fans have went through the Warner Bros. catalogue and created "unofficial" renders for every possible character with potential for getting in, alongside speculative classes for them
  • "Furry Wario" / Taz is Wario's fursona^ExplanationSmash Bros. players and fans noticed how many similarities Taz shares with Wario such as his proportions, characteristics, and mannerisms. As well as sharing a few similar moves like ground attacks, aerial attacks, and a bite special where he chews up an opponent to heal.
  • Walter White has become a surprisingly popular character suggestion on the official Reddit. Whether it's ironic appreciation or not depends on the person.
  • "Skill issue."^Explanation During Taz and Finn's dominance on the meta because of moves that were perceived as game-breaking SSSB!Meta Knight-esque instant-win buttons, players who played one or both of the characters this way would defend their play-style by claiming that other players just needed to learn how to fight around them, with the aforementioned phrase being the one most commonly thrown around. The phrase would go on to be used sarcastically and/or jokingly by other players in reaction to not only cheap KOs or even glitches in the game, but also any comedic real-life difficulties (especially ones that would be impossible to conquer).
  • "Hear/Here me out: (Character)"^ExplanationFor unexplained reasons, requests/suggestions for characters in the game were commonly phrased this way, followed by a picture of one or more characters, with little to no variation (and often not even as a joke) nor an explanation for why the character(s) would actually be a good addition to the game, leading to mockery from players who were sick of seeing the seemingly endless stream of low-effort "hear me out" posts.
  • Similarly to Walter White above, Eric André has been seen as a pretty valid character suggestion, due to the sheer absurdity he displays in his own series that would make him a natural fit for the game.
  • The "Fred Style" profile icon by itself is a meme, mainly due to it inexplicably being a Legendary icon that costs 50,000 coins (the most expensive non-Gleamium cosmetic in the game by far). This often brings in jokes about the sheer amount of grinding one person would have to do just to be able to "copy the Fred Style".
  • "My favorite Warner Bros. character: LeBron James"^ExplanationGiven that LeBron is a real-life person, the inclusion of his Space Jam: A New Legacy incarnation has led some to joke that the contract for the latter film essentially sold his likeness to Warner Bros. or that he has always been a Warner Bros. IP
  • When the game was first revealed, a legion of fans took to Discord that same day advocating for the inclusion of Tony Soprano, and the ruckus caused ironic and unironic requests for him to skyrocket.
• Moe:
  • Reindog's unveiling as a completely original fighter led to him gaining several fans, due to his adorable, exotic design and animalistic mannerisms.
  • Gizmo's already cute design has been adapted very well for his transition into 3D, with animations that help to reproduce his usual shenanigans, and he's given a faithful high-pitched voice courtesy of Daniel Ross.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The Iron Giant whispering "Superman..." to his idol.
  • Tom's Stock Scream whenever he gets rungout.
  • “Leave one wolf alive and the sheep are never safe.”
    • Why is it even more awesome in Multiverse? David Bradley is not the one saying it from the time Arya Stark is masquerading as Walder Frey. This time around, we’re finally hearing it from Maisie Williams herself.
• Narm Charm: The very idea of live-action characters being put in a platform fighter game is sure to get many raised eyebrows, talking about movesets or aspects of said characters will undoubtedly cause a few chuckles to come out of those who know about the game and those that don't, but how they're implemented in the game has quickly gotten them many fans.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Garnet's original match loss animation has her suddenly petrify, break apart, and poof.^note Based pretty much beat for beat on how Jasper had poofed her back in the show proper. For a Gem, being poofed isn't too far off from dying (and could result in a Death of Personality depending on how they are poofed). It's especially jarring as every other fighter's lose animation is them simply being upset. It was changed in the open beta to her simply meditating.
  • The Halloween-themed skins offered on October 12, 2022 are generally spooky-themed fun...except for the infamously zombified Black Lantern Superman and Wonder Woman. Any altruistic qualities and lightheartedness they express in their dialogue is gone (even the wisecracks), replaced with cold sadism, and they're more aggressive than normal.
• No Problem with Licensed Games: While not without criticism, the game quickly received critical acclaim for its solid gameplay and the attention of detail given to the characters' designs, animations, and interactions, oft regarded to be on par with that of the Super Smash Bros. series.
• Playalong Meme: Due to the nature of the game and Reindog's status as the only (current) character who is wholly original to the game, as well as his biography making references to a non-existent series, people jokingly talk favorably about his show, chastising anyone who hasn't heard of him and reminiscing about it under the guise of legitimate nostalgia, frequently conjuring up wild scenarios that happened in-series, akin to what people did with Morbius.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Unlike other games with a similar business model, the Free Rotation here is not guaranteed to include one fighter of each class, so if a daily quest requires you to win matches as a Mage/Ranged fighter (for example) and there isn't one in the Free Rotation, you might be forced to spend your hard-earned Gold (or Gleamium, or Founder's Pack Character Tokens) on a fighter you don't want, or use your free daily reroll on this quest specifically. Thankfully, this was addressed in the Season 1 patch, as now only Tank class characters are required for missions, since Wonder Woman is permanently unlocked for completing the tutorial.
  • Although all progress made with said characters is saved until they are permanently unlocked regardless, having no option to "pre-unlock" a character who is within Free Rotation (so they can be immediately be available to continue using after being rotated out) was quickly found to be an annoyance, especially for players who did not want to go through the trouble of building up and/or spending coins to re-unlock their favorite character(s) again, or did not want to have to wait until said characters were re-locked again to be able to purchase them. The characters having no indication on the character selection screen itself that they are only temporarily available^note (though they are listed on the game's newsfeed on the home screen, for the record) was another point of annoyance, and lead to players who were unaware of the system during the early days of the Open Beta receiving a nasty shock when they loaded up the game to find a character they had poured potentially hours of gameplay into having to be unlocked again. Season 1 would mark the free rotation characters, thankfully.
  • Unlike Smash, the game lacks any sort of hitbox priority system. This means that often times, a strong move will consistently lose out to a weak move. Combined with disjointed hitboxes, this makes moves like Finn's up-specials (see That One Attack below) very difficult to challenge and skews interactions towards fast-acting characters while making defensive buffs like armor and Wonder Woman's shield (which blocks exactly one hit) significantly weaker than one would expect.
  • For some bizarre reason, you can't have a free-for-all match with only three players; it has to be either two or four, so if you only have three players, you either have to leave someone out or add an CPU opponent. This has been widely mocked due to being a basic feature that almost every other Platform Fighter has without issue.
• Spiritual Successor: The closest we'll ever get to having a sequel to Cartoon Network: Punch Time Explosion, given the initial roster of characters sans Arya have appeared on the channel in some fashion.
• Tainted by the Preview:
  • The main concern people had upon the game's reveal was the trailer's mention that it'd be free-to-play, and the later confirmation that it'd include microtransactions. While this is understandable for the game's continuous update model, it raised concerns about its tournament viability, considering that it's a platform fighter aiming for a competitive crowd, and microtransactions usually lead to Bribing Your Way to Victory. The official outlets have remained fairly quiet on this matter, likely knowing that it's a contentious model among fighting game fans. However, the devs have confirmed that microtransactions will be merely for cosmetic items; characters, perks, and certain skins and emotes can all be unlocked simply by playing.
  • Fans were disappointed when Rick and Morty were revealed to speak through reused voice lines instead of having newly recorded dialogue like the rest of the cast, ensuring they can't have unique interactions with the rest of the roster and going against one of MultiVersus's core selling points (unique dialogue between characters), though there is plenty of evidence (such as them being The Voiceless in the non-English versions and them not having a corresponding announcer pack like every other character) to suggest that this is only temporary.
• That One Attack: Spinning attacks in this game always seem to make players rage the most.
  • It didn't take long for Taz's Taz-nado to become instantly infamous, due to its absurd knockback even through attack decay, lingering effect, annoyingly large hitbox, and being one of the few special moves to not have a cooldown, leading many Taz players to spam and abuse it to their heart's content. It's counterable and avoidable, sure, but you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who enjoys having to fight around it. It got so bad that the devs spared a tweet JUST to mention adjustments to Taz-nado, specifically,◊ which were followed up on with the patch that coincided with the beta opening to everyone, nerfing multiple aspects of the move. The patch notes did mention that the move was still meant to be a strong aspect of Taz's kit, with a rework that, notably, gives Taz-nado a cooldown to encourage players to use it when the time's right currently in the cards.
  • With Taz-nado nerfed, focus became more intensified on both of Finn's up specials, Backpack 'Em Up! and Soaring Backpack!, for many of the same reasons as Taz-nado. Being a multi-hit move with a good hitbox already makes the move alright on its own, but its final hit is seen as quite possibly one of the best kill moves in the game, to the point that landing it near the top of the screen is practically a guaranteed ring-out. It also doesn't have a cooldown, likely due to the loss of gold being intended to act as the move's downside... except Finn can easily get all that gold back by either picking it up again or just hitting opponents like usual, something that isn't hard to do given how fast he is. All this combined with Finn being a common sight in matchmaking makes these two moves despised by plenty of players. Season 1 nerfed several aspects of the move, including losing coins even on whiff.
  • The final hit Morty's side ground attack, Unresolved Anger Issues, when he swings Hammer Morty in front of himself, was already a fairly annoying move according to the community, One of Morty's Signature perks, which causes the move to spin around multiple times makes it even worse. With the move's large range, kill power, and its ability to rack up heavy damage quickly, it is not uncommon to see Morty players only using that one move for the entire match.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • After having every character immediately available for use or purchasable with only a small amount of coins in the closed betas, the open beta launching with the intended character unlock system in place (i.e. characters requiring coins to unlock and the Free Rotation system) left a number of players disappointed, especially since the coin costs for unlocking characters also went up considerably. Players had their criticisms with the way the Free Rotation system was implemented as well, as described in further detail under Scrappy Mechanic above.
  • On top of that, the rewards for finishing a match were reduced from the closed beta, meaning that you have to grind a lot of matches to get your coins up. Though you can get enough coins to unlock everyone by paying real money for the Founder's Pack or Gleamium, this wraps back around to the Bribing Your Way to Victory concern (especially for players looking to unlock every character for use online and not just their favorites).
• Unexpected Character:
  • Of all the properties and characters under Warner Bros. to pick from, no one would have expected Arya Stark to be a playable character, considering that not only is she not even from an animated medium, but her series is very non-kid friendly compared to the rest of the roster members seen in the first trailer.
  • Shaggy Rogers being playable wouldn't have been a massive surprise, if it weren't for him being specifically based on his Memetic Badass "Ultra Instinct Shaggy" incarnation rather than any canon version of him.
  • When the next Scooby-Doo! character to be confirmed as a playable character turned out to be Velma, many were surprised since she was confirmed before Scooby himself was and is not known for having much in the way of combat abilities in her source material (Shaggy at least had the Memetic Badass reputation to back him up). Tony Huynh has gone on the record saying on Twitter that Velma is his favorite character among the five members of Mystery Inc. and he thought it would be fun to give her a moveset based around collecting clues and sass.
  • While the roster caught everyone by surprise, the Big Bad of the game being The Nothing from The Never Ending Story was something no one expected, especially since this is the first time Warner Bros has referenced the franchise, let alone the first movie, in years.
  • The cinematic trailer revealed The Iron Giant himself as a playable character; despite the datamine, the giant seemed out of left field due to his sheer size, but he turned up as part of the roster anyway.^note Then again, Ridley got into Super Smash Bros. Ultimate despite being labeled "too big" in the past, so there was precedent. Unlike Ridley, he ended up being much bigger than the rest of the cast anyways while fully standing up, being at least two times as tall as his fellow fighters.
  • Although he's the fictionalized version of himself from a Warner Bros. movie, the idea of LeBron James, a real-life person, being a playable character is certainly something people wouldn't expect.
  • Gimzo and Stripe of Gremlins fame getting in caught many fans off guard as, while the film they hail from a classic, it's also far less mainstream than other picks had been.
  • Out of all the DC characters people could have guessed, who would have thought that Black Adam would have been one of the first picks?
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: The character designs have been consistently praised for managing to properly blend characters from different properties and media into an unique, coherent style... with the glaring exception of Steven Universe, whose model looks like a mishappen blob in the official cinematic trailer. Even the developers have tried addressing this, admitting that Steven is hard to translate to a 3D environment, with his model having undergone multiple tweaks from fan feedback, but the result can still be off-putting to some.
• Win Back the Crowd: While some people were cautious of the game upon its initial reveal, as described above, both the initial playtest and the closed beta were met with overwhelmingly positive reception for the gameplay and aesthetics from those who took part in it.

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