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  • Awesome Music:
  • Base-Breaking Character:
    • While popular on his own and used by multiple players, Raiden is also receiving flak simply because he's not Solid Snake.
    • Evil Cole. Some have complained about him being an extremely lazy or unimaginative addition similar to the complaints about Dark Pit or Dr. Mario in the Smash Bros. games, though others appreciate his moveset and the chance to use his dark persona rather than the canon one.
  • Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
    • Despite not technically being a Shoto, Kratos has quickly become the Shoto equivalent in PSASBR. Being as faithful as he is in his fighting style, the God of War gameplay runs the distinctive risk of being overpowered in a game like PSASBR.
    • A milder example is Nathan Drake. He's similar in some respects to Kratos (such as the AP values for their supers), but is looked at more favorably due to his more complex, but rewarding fighting style. Raiden is one as well, but one actually needs to know how to effectively combo with him and make up for having a shorter range and no long range options outside of items.
  • Cult Classic: Despite middling sales and critical reception, the game still retains a degree of popularity among PlayStation fans due to it being a Massive Multiplayer Crossover between several of their series. There also remains a decent amount of demand for a sequel, as rumors about a potential sequel or Spiritual Successor tend to crop up every year.
  • Difficulty Spike: The Combat Trials are innocent enough and most of them are reasonably doable with proper focus and application. Unfortunately, most of them are cut-and-pasted for the entire roster. This can be an issue depending on the character, since trials that are a breeze for one character can be horrific for another. The later trials can become surprisingly nightmarish on the easiest difficulty.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Fandom Rivalry: With Super Smash Bros. for obvious reasons.
  • Fridge Brilliance:
    • Big Daddy and Sackboy's rivalry might seem completely random, until you think about the philosophy behind the games they are from. Both characters are the consequence of a world only limited by the creativity of those who occupy it. The difference is that LittleBigPlanet fared much better than Rapture.
    • Ratchet has two cases of this:
      • The Constructo-Pistol has a brief pause between the second and third shot, with the third hitting harder then the first and second. If you look closely, you can see that Ratchet has the Charge Trigger equipped. That pause is Ratchet charging up the third shot.
      • The Plasma Striker gains 10 AP and causes minor flinching when you just press circle. However, by holding circle to aim the weapon, you'll gain 20 AP and cause higher flinching. What's the gimmick of the Plasma Striker? Aiming down the scope lets you hit the weak points of the enemy.
    • Spike thinking Parappa works for Specter may seem like a stretch, until you remember that Parappa is both an animal smart enough to talk and skate, and has a huge hat that could very well hide a helmet like the ones Pipo Monkeys wear. Obviously, that's not the case, but considering Spike's history with monkeys, it wouldn't be a stretch to think Parappa's appearance is setting off red flags in his head. On the other side, Parappa may not have really known Spike's name, he just called him that because of his hair.
  • Fridge Horror: One of Isaac's losing animations is him clutching his side in pain and dropping his weapon. Nothing too bad, right? Then you remember how much his home series loves dismemberment and blood. He could be trying to cover a pretty major injury.
  • Game-Breaker:
    • Evil Cole's Giga Punch has Super Armor, breaks through counter attacks, and leaves opponents in a crumple-state, making it the most infamous example of the widely-hated "kill-confirm." As a result, some Evil Cole players have shot up the leaderboards using this technique alone.
    • Kill-confirms in general are a hot-button issue. Some will tell you they ruin the meta-game by making Level 1 Supers less risky, others will say that certain characters (i.e. Heihachi) need them for how weak their Level 1's are. Using a kill-confirm is considered in some circles to be the dirtiest, most dishonorable tactic one can use.
    • The biggest example early on was without a doubt Sackboy. His attacks gave him a lot of AP, and his supers were very cheap — his level 3 super is among the best supers in the game, and it cost the same as the cutscene level 3 supers. Sackboy was quickly nerfed, with his most used attacks gaining less AP and his supers requiring more AP. In this case, Superbot themselves thought Sackboy was a Game-Breaker, and were already working on a patch before the game's release.
    • Isaac has two popular ones:
      • His detonator has good AP gain, can be followed up with combos or Supers, is indestructible online (due to netcode), hard to destroy anyway, and can cover Isaac better than most projectiles. It was later nerfed.
      • His Plasma Cutter Loop is this as well, although it takes a while to properly pull off. If mastered, it can help his combo ability by cancelling the final Plasma Cutter shot into another attack or looping it with another set of shots.
  • Gateway Series: Much like its inspiration, PlayStation All-Stars has introduced many obscure PlayStation franchises to the public. People who play this game due to more iconic characters like Kratos, Nathan Drake, Sackboy, and Ratchet & Clank will wonder who the heck PaRappa the Rapper, Fat Princess, Sir Daniel Fortesque, and Kat are.
  • High-Tier Scrappy:
    • Kat is considered the best character in the game, hands down. She excels in all types of play and her combo ability is unmatched. Potential runner-up would be, of all people, Isaac Clarke: his Plasma Cutter Loop aids his already surprisingly excellent gun combos, allowing him to fight from longer distances and keep space controlled. Raiden and Fat Princess are also in the running, due to the former's melee game and the latter's assists.
    • Kratos is a long-standing one for being a Lightning Bruiser by design (being a Jack of All Stats with Hack and Slash gameplay of his series rendered faithfully) and having several "kill confirm" options.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
    • Kratos appearing in Soulcalibur: Broken Destiny and Mortal Kombat 9note  and Cole MacGrath appearing in Street Fighter X Tekkennote  have become this.
    • Nathan Drake was supposed to be the Guest Fighter for Street Fighter X Tekken, but was taken out and replaced with Cole due to not having moves suited for the Street Fighter style of fighting. Now, Nate is included as one of the combatants, joining SFXT vets Heihachi, Cole, and Toro.
    • In the ending of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, Nathan Drake comments that his greatest fear is clowns. Cue this game putting him opposite Sweet Tooth, the resident Monster Clown of the PlayStation universe.
    • With the announcement of Polygon Man as the final boss, Kratos's inclusion in the game is now the subject of a quite odd and amusing coincidence. Many people have made the connection between Kratos and the Saturn's launch mascot campaign thing, so someone was bound to point out this little coincidence sooner or later.
    • The Robot Chicken sketch, while funny enough on its own, becomes hilarious taking into consideration Kratos and Nathan's conversation about getting beaten "by a burlap sack." Not weeks after the sketch was run, Sackboy was the first character announced to be getting a nerf.
    • The concept of video games invading each other (via Hostile Show Takeover in stages) suddenly becomes funny once you remember that a certain movie about video games did just that in its climaxnote . Both works came out in November 2012, and the movie barely predated the game. Some theaters with the FirstLook feature even played a commercial of PSASBR before WIR.
    • The February 12th patch changed Dante's character select picture from a cocky smirk to a disappointed frown. This change was made shortly after his game failed to meet Capcom's expected sales.
    • Heihachi appearing in this game, despite news that Namco Bandai was assisting Nintendo in developing the new Smash Bros. game. For some reason, Tekken characters are still highly requested by the Smash fanbase, despite a series veteran appearing in their rival Mascot Fighter. And if that wasn't enough, he was actually considered as a playable character according to Masahiro Sakurai. And then Ryu ended up as a playable character in Smash Bros. DLC... along with a Mii Brawler costume resembling Heihachi. And to further add insult to the injury, it turned out Heihachi banked on the wrong game to cross over with: Someone else from Tekken took that spot in Smash Bros... and it's his Antagonistic Offspring Kazuya, coming along with a Mii costume of the original Dante to boot.
    • Luigifan came up with an "Enhanced Final Smash system" for Super Smash Bros. Brawl on the GameFAQs forums which turned out to be remarkably similar to this game's Supers. Needless to say, when he brought it back for SSB4, he had to clarify that, no, he was not ripping this game off. And then Ultimate took the idea of using a (optional) meter for Final Smashes.
    • Cloud isn't in PlayStation All-Stars at all, despite the game he's a part of being one of the most iconic PS1 titles ever made, but he is in Smash 4 despite his home game not receiving a Nintendo release until the Nintendo Switch nearly a decade after this game. Relatedly, FFVII Big Bad Sephiroth would be added to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate as DLC in late 2020, and his pack includes music from the movie Advent Children, which was co-distributed by Sony.
    • The fact that the Persona series, one of the most successful franchises on PlayStation, has no characters here also becomes hilarious after Joker was included as DLC for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Doubly so since, similar to Cloud, the one appearance he had on a Nintendo console prior to this was in a crossover game of his own.
    • Being able to pit Dante, Raiden, and Kratos against each other, considering that their Dueling Games were released within months of each other. note 
    • The decision to include Good and Evil Cole as separate characters proved to be a controversial one, with some preferring a switching mechanic of some sort like Zelda and Sheik have in Super Smash Bros.. Cue the announcement that Super Smash Bros for 3DS/Wii U was dropping transformations and making them into separate characters.
    • This commercial in which a player apologizes to Kratos for a mistake and tells him "You remember what we did to Zeus that one time? Let's Finish this!" becomes a bit more humorous considering that Zeus later got to join the cast as a DLC character.
    • When Kat joined the cast, she indeed was going to be reprised by Sanae Kobayashi; hilariously enough, she actually voiced both the Ice Climbers and Allen Walker, who both appeared in Mascot Fighters in the same veinnote . There's also Akira Touya; even though he didn't appear in the same game as Allen, his series was included before it was scrapped in the sequel. The same went for Spike/Kakeru: Fujiko Takimoto was also the voice of Young Link, especially in Melee. However, Cole's Japanese voice, Keiji Fujiwara, was also the voice of Mewtwo in the fourth Smash game.
    • More than three years after this game was released, a few folks tried their hand in solving the rivalry between Ratchet & Clank and Jak & Daxter.
    • This would not be the last game to feature both Ratchet & Clank and Raiden.
    • With both Toro and a Pipo Monkey being patched into Super Bomberman R as PS4 exclusive characters, it seems Konami is trying to make an All-Stars sequel.
    • While less requested than Cloud, Kingdom Hearts debuted on the PlayStation 2, and since then most of its major games used to be PlayStation exclusives and it's hard to argue the biggest bulk of its fanbase don't use PlayStation systems, making Sora also a very wanted character. But also like Cloud, Sora would instead appear in Super Smash Bros. as the last DLC fighter for Ultimate.
    • Raiden and Heihachi are able to physically fight each other in this game. Then comes Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, where only this time they lose their physical forms and become spirits.
    • Apparently, Sackboy had dressed up as half of the roster before he crossed over with them in proper. note 
  • Hollywood Pudgy: Fat Princess, compared to the levels she could reach in her home game, anyway. Here she maxes out at the second level of chubbiness.
  • I Am Not Shazam:
    • She's almost universally referred to as Fat Princess, which is the name of her game. Her real name is Princess Plump. This may be intentional because she has the blue princess, Princess Muffintop, as an alternate color.
    • Most gaming news sites and even the developers frequently refer to him as "Sweet Tooth," while that is the name of his car, and Needles Kane is his name.
  • I Knew It!: Polygon Man is the final boss of the game. Ironically, he became a well-speculated boss for many fans because he was an obscure and mostly forgotten character that very few remembered (initially).
  • Just Here for Godzilla: Some just play because of a few characters in the game, such as Sly Cooper, Cole, and Ratchet & Clank.
  • Low-Tier Letdown: Sir Daniel has slow attack speed, and slow movement in general, making it hard for him to fight against his foes (especially in comparison to his home series where he is capable of dashing and attacking his enemies rather quickly).
  • Memetic Badass: ISAAC CLARKE. Badass Normal who fought Zeus, caught his lightning bolt in mid-air and won.
  • Mis-blamed:
    • The game's developer SuperBot Entertainment, for various points of contention that were not their fault to begin with, such as the utilization of Dante's reboot appearance over classic Dante (which was Capcom's decision), the inclusion of Evil Cole in a separate character slot apart from Good Cole (which was the decision of Sucker Punch, the developer of the inFAMOUS series), and Raiden's inclusion over Snake's (Word of God states that the decision to use Raiden was none other than Hideo Kojima's).
    • A very common discussion point is that characters who debuted on a PlayStation console such as Cloud, Sephiroth, and Sora were in Super Smash Bros. games but not this game. What they don't realize is that Super Smash Bros. 64 and Super Smash Bros. Melee also only featured characters directly owned by Nintendo, as they weren't willing to spend the extra money to license third party characters yet due to uncertainty of how popular the game would be. Final Fantasy VII and Kingdom Hearts are owned by Squaresoft. note 
  • Older Than They Think: Shrek SuperSlam was actually one of the very first Platform Fighter games to use the "super-move-to-score-points" mechanic, around ten years before this game was released.
  • The Scrappy:
    • Dante, again because he has his reboot appearance. The decision to include this Dante is Capcom's, not SuperBot's, which hasn't helped things.
    • On the day of his announcement, Zeus received a pretty noticeable backlash, either because they wanted someone else, think that God of War is overexposed in the game and want more franchises represented, or because they think Zeus doesn't even count as a video game character because he is a classic Greek mythology character.
  • Scrappy Mechanic: The game has been been derided as being both oversimplified and overcomplicated compared to Smash as well as most typical fighting games:
    • Overly Simple: The "Only supers can kill" mechanic tends to be the critics biggest point of contention. Missing a "super" in other games is a shame, but you can still pull through and win the old-fashioned way, whereas in this game it essentially means all your previous progress is wasted and it's back to square one. Even the people behind the game such as Sony President Shuhei Yoshida and Superbot Director Omar Kendall have admitted that it was a bad mechanic in hindsight, and that it would be absent in any future sequel.
    • Overly Complicated: The game has three attack buttons, but there's no basic consistency in what button does what kind of attack. E.G. Pressing Circle as Kratos fires a projectile directly in front of him, but doing the same as Jak requires you to press Side + Triangle.
  • So Okay, It's Average: This is the game's general reception as a whole: it manages to nail the series it actually managed to get in the game pretty well, but it's really light on content and has some odd roster choices, especially in comparison to its rival series.
  • Suspiciously Similar Song: The music composed for the third-party franchises (BioShock (with the exception of the "Elizabeth" remix from BioShock Infinite in the Stowaways stage), Tekken, Devil May Cry, Metal Gear, and Dead Space) are all original compositions inspired by tracks from said games.
  • Tainted by the Preview: The fact that you can only KO with the supers wasn't initially well-received by some in the previews, but opinion improved once gameplay footage and the demo started getting out. The lack of a kill display on-screen had a similar take; however, there's an option to turn them on if you want.
  • Take That, Scrappy!:
    • In the launch trailer highlighting the rivalries between the characters, Dante (who has a rivalry with Nariko) is unceremoniously flung from the screen by Heihachi (who has Toro as his rival), who proceeds to laugh about it. Notably, whilst not the only time someone is by attacked a character who isn't their rivalnote , it's the only time attention is drawn to it.
    • Patch 1.07 changed Dante's character portrait from a cocky smirk to a disappointed frown. Notably, this happened after his game failed to meet Capcom's sales projections.
  • Tear Jerker:
    • A happy one, though. All of Sackboy's story tells that he heads off not for power or monetary reward. He heard of worlds filled with destruction and goes off in trying to make them beautiful with the power of creation. Then we have his scenes with the Little Sister; at first, she asks "Mr. B" to 'unstuff' Sackboy, but then it shows the two playing together. The ending has him back in his world, and Stephen Fry narrates about how Sackboy is his happiest when people create and share with the world, topping it up with how LittleBigPlanet will always be home to everyone whose heart is full of imagination.
    • Big Daddy's story will shed some tears also. His Little Sister has found Sackboy and is cheerfully playing jump rope, and then she declares that Sackboy is her new best friend and she coldly tells Mr. B, "Go back to your underswampy!" Considering it's the Big Daddy's role to protect their Little Sisters, it's like telling him he's being replaced. And in the ending, we have the Little Sister's words.
      "Some friends stay and some friends go...some friends we never see again...But we keep going on and on, don't we, Mr. B?"
    • Parappa's losing animation. He thinks about how he let down Sunny Funny and bursts into tears. Parappa the Rapper crying is a sight no man should have to see.
    • Losing as Isaac Clarke implies that Isaac outright DIES. His default losing pose shows him getting sucked out of his spaceship and into space, and another one shows him lying motionless in space. Worst of all? The "results screen loss" pose for him is nothing but his helmet rotating in a circle. It hurts if you're the one who lost as Isaac, and even more if you're a Dead Space fan.
    • Spike's loss animation on the results screen shows him crying over his loss. It makes you wish you could just go in there and give him a hug.
    • One of Fat Princess' loss animations has her sobbing over the dead bodies of the villagers who accompanied her on her quest for cake.
    • One of Big Daddy's loss animations has the Little Sister sobbing over a presumably dead Big Daddy. And another one has her sobbing all alone with the Big Daddy nowhere in sight.
  • That One Level: Franzea, the stage mash-up of LocoRoco and Metal Gear, is seen by many to be a massive eyesore, as it's a very bright and colorful stage but with a "Metal Gear Ray attacking a city" replacing the sky background of the stage. The contrast between the two games leads to this stage getting more than a little bit of hate. It doesn't fare much better in gameplay either. Many players are annoyed at constant Gravity Screw and awkward terrain, which, while accurate to LocoRoco, aren't exactly ideal conditions for a fighting arena. The RAY that appears later on will also saturate the ground-level with randomized heavy artillery fire, making it one of the odd hazards to potentially cover an entire stage.
  • They Copied It, So It Sucks!:
    • Before the game was released, it was decried by some as a Super Smash Bros. rip-off, despite it having largely different mechanics, among some other differences.
    • On the flip side, there's also people who hate on it for not copying Super Smash Bros. enough.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
    • A crossover, fighting game that celebrates the Playstation company has a lot of potential when it comes to the fighters, but the problem is that the roster is lackluster with many iconic Playstation-related characters not being present, including Solid Snake and Cloud Strife, who are instead playable in the Nintendo fighting series Super Smash Bros..
    • The characters and their rivals. The rivals are only capable of interacting with each other, such as Nathan Drake and Sly Cooper, and Heihachi and Toro, instead of all of the fighters having a lot more screen time together.
  • Uncertain Audience: It's often believed that this was why the game didn't do very well. The gameplay ends up being oddly technical due to the focus on Combos, which alienates people who want a simple party game, but is also very gimmicky and unconventional due to the "only supers kill and supers only kill" mechanics, which alienates the hardcore crowd. The game's roster is a good case of a Demographic-Dissonant Crossover: about half the franchises involved are gritty M-rated ones, but the game itself is a cartoony Platform Fighter with tons of wacky concepts gelling seamlessly with the other half of it — it's rather baffling to see what is essentially a space Nazi with actual firearms be a playable character in a game where you can rack up damage by hitting your opponent with a fish. Even as a pure celebration of PlayStation history, many felt the roster was too heavy on Guest Fighters from non-Sony games, ironically making it seem like Sony didn't have much of their own history, while what third-parties were there were mostly promotions for upcoming games, such as DmC Dante and Big Daddy (with most of his accompanying material coming from the then-upcoming BioShock Infinite), instead of more historically significant characters known for being on PlayStation consoles, like Crash Bandicoot and Lara Croft, making it look like Sony barely had any third-party history either.
  • Unintentional Period Piece: The game is very much a product of the late PS3 era, when most of the represented franchises were in top form or had yet to see a release. The PS4 years saw most of them decline, get heavy redesigns, flop or reveal themselves as a Stillborn Franchise never managing to leave the PS3, making the game very dated in retrospect. Arguably the biggest example would be Dante, whose widely hated redesign would, outside of being an alternate skin in Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite and receiving homage palette swaps in the mainline Devil May Cry games, be completely abandoned after one game in favor of unrebooting the beloved original version. Later PlayStation megahits such as The Last of Us and Horizon Zero Dawn are also conspicuous by their absence.
  • Unexpected Character:
    • Parappa The Rapper. A character from an obscure (albeit one of the first) rhythm game as one of the first announced? It happened.
    • Due to his series being extremely obscure and nowhere near as popular as other first-party PS1 games, Sir Daniel's inclusion into the game really caught people by surprise.
    • Fat Princess' game was successful, but it was 3 1/2 years old by PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale's release-date and her role was the flag in the game's signature Capture the Flag style gameplay. Here, she takes matters into her own chubby hands.
    • Radec is this to an extent, as he represents Killzone's Helghast, who are frequently considered the face of the franchise and the main source of interest in the plot. Still, he died in the same game he was first featured in.
    • Toro is kind of an odd choice, seeing as how none of his games have been released outside Japan.
    • Big Daddy isn't exactly the first character to cross your mind for this game, especially since the game he originated from was originally an Xbox 360/PC exclusive title. Plus, like the Piranha Plants from Mario, Big Daddy is a generic enemy-type character, who isn't even playable until Bioshock 2 with the introduction of Subject Delta.
    • While the Starhawk series has been around since the early years of the original PlayStation, Emmett Graves' game was out for less than 6 months before his announcement and just over 6 months by the time he was released as DLC.
    • Zeus was a popular choice for a potential sequel, but few predicted that he would appear in the first game, due to the unofficial one-character-per-franchise rule, and God of War already being represented by Kratos.
    • The biggest one, however, is the Final Boss: Polygon Man — though only a few might recognize him.

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