YMMV / RWBY: Amity Arena

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Is Neon Katt taunting the enemies to Draw Aggro, or are they simply Distracted by the Sexy?
• Crosses the Line Twice: Cinder's character tip comes out as extremely brutal, especially for fans who still aren't fully healed from Volume 3's ending. Bonus points if it happens before a match on Arena 6.
  "Oh, you brought friends? Cinder has an arrow for each of them."
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Lancers and Nevermores. They'll never kill a turret but unless you have a ranged character or an Ice Weiss ready, they can usually clean out entire swarms without taking a scratch due to being out of melee range.
  • Zwei and Cinder. Though they were purposely added to the game to combat Zerg Rush, seeing a carefully planned army being wiped out in a single blow is always grating.
  • Nolan. For a long time, he was the only 1-Aura fighter in the game and is a Rare drop that you're guaranteed to get when you start. His main weapon is the his taser rod, which hits a character with a Stun Lock that can instantly cancel a character's skill ability when their animation is in motion. This means characters like Ice Weiss and Alpha Beowulf, whose main focus is based around said skills, can are rendered useless around him. Surrounding him with gunners, Lancers or Baby Death Stalkers means that if he even touches an attacker once, they are defenseless enough for those other attackers to Zerg Rush them.
  • Rocket Yang is a nightmare to deal with, as her ranged splash damage can decimate entire lanes in lower arena ranks. As you get to higher ranks, she tapers off a bit, but the damage from her activated ability can still wreck an oncoming lane.
  • Emerald's duplicate ability allows you to basically double any unit within an area of her spawning, but the duplicates will always die in one hit. Alongside the obvious tactic of duplicate swarm units such as the White Fang Dropship, if Emerald duplicates Neo, that copy can still use Neo's backlash ability to great effect. While Emerald on her own isn't a stellar card, her ability can make many of the cards already on this list even worst as a consequence. For much of the first half of 2019, Emerald was a cornerstone unit for many meta decks due to how powerful she could make units such as Neo, Cinder and the Dropship.
  • Similarly, Pyrrha is an equal nightmare as her shield can even effectively wreck lanes as well, even with two nerfs specifically focused on weakening her. It wouldn't be so bad if only her special skill was amazing, but - as in the show - she truly is The Ace and excels in melee combat as well and deals huge damages in one-to-one combat.
  • Neon Katt is just as annoying in-game as she is when acting as a troll, derailing whole attack plans with her aggro + invincibility combo for a mere 2 Aura.
  • White Fang Barracks. When Neon was nerfed, they also buffed WFB by an insane amount, namely doubling it's spawn rate. Now it spawns *2* White Fang Gunners every 4.5 seconds (both gunners spawn together) leading to a card with ludicrous amounts of health being able to spawn at unfair rates. Needless to say, this card quickly became infamous, and even after a health nerf, this card is still incredibly oppressive to go against.
• Fridge Brilliance:
  • Zwei acts as a better version of Ribbon Blake by giving him an AOE attack upon landing. Of course Zwei's going to troll Blake.
  • Similarly, Junior is bested by both Biker Yang and Rocket Yang as a short-ranged explosion unit, which not only sounds delightfully canon but also Hilarious in Hindsight considering the Xiong Family's character quote.
    "HURRY, CLOSE THE DOOR! SHE'S COMING!"
• Game-Breaker:
  • Early in the game's lifespan, swarm decks, in particular the Baby Death Stalkers, were very powerful, with Jaune (a 3-Aura tank) being a useful distraction for turrets that could let the Baby Death Stalkers wreck shop on a turret. It was even possible to wipe out a turret in the opening seconds of the game if you drew both cards and the enemy didn't have an immediate anti-swarm card like Yatsuhashi or Weiss, and if you got very lucky that swarm would go on to wipe out the entire tower and win you the match. Later patches would eventually weaken a lot of the swarm cards to make them less overbearingly broken.
  • The Ursa Major is annoying at first but manageable. But once leveled up, this juggernaut is almost impossible to counter. It has so much HP that the only way to deal with it efficiently is to use your Zerg Rush units against it, and you can be sure that your opponent already has two or three AOE units to deal with that (Flynt, Cinder, ...). Even if you miraculously kill it before it can reach your turrets, you'll likely be empty ended and with no Aura left to deal with your opponent's next wave.
  • Ice Flower. Unlike the other Legendary cards, this one actually combines two card types - Sniper Ruby and Ice Weiss. Using Ice Flower's special uses both cards' deadly specials and can easy clear out entire rows in one shot. Even worse is that even if you don't have a special charged up, Ruby's bullets inflicts a Slow penalty.
  • Mutant Creeps were immediately received with dread from the playerbase due to being horribly broken. For two Aura you get two suicide bombers that can hurt towers for massive damage, are very fast and have Neon's old glitch of being able to push an Ursa towards the turret. To add insult to injury, their graphic is extremely small and difficult to see, making it difficult to know when to drop units to defend. Despite the fact that they have the same Passive Self Destruct ability as the spider mines... mutant creeps do not suffer from the lengthy animation delay of spider mines. They explode near-instantly when reaching a turret, often killing nearby defending units. And they cost 33% less than the spider mines.
  • Jinn. Even disregarding the Game-Breaking Bug below, the card is still heavily exploitable. As it costs only two aura, it's incredibly easy to stack. The cards Time Stands Still ability lasts 7 seconds with a cooldown of 13, so with 2 it's very possible to make the turrets and Tower completely and permanently invincible, completely removing the opponent's win condition, forcing a draw at best.
• Game-Breaking Bug:
  • The Apathy at launch had a duplication ability that had no limitations, allowing for players to mass-produce them and overswarm enemy players. However so many units would spawn that phones were often crashing from trying to handle the strain.
  • Jinn launched on Christmas 2019 with a bug that made it so if her ability was used on Raven or Partners in Crime during their transition animations, the units would become *invincible,* gain a speed boost and would zero in on structures. A hotfix had to be pushed out within a day, with the developers being forced to publically apologize for the poor state Jinn was launched in.
• Heartwarming Moments: The official Twitter account taking the time to congratulate Casey Lee Williams on releasing her first album with Ok Goodnight.
  • At one point, some old audio of Monty Oum's rendition of Ren was used for the game. The heartwarming part comes in when, following the release of said content, the staff gave all players free gems with a message that it's nice to hear Monty Oum's version of Ren again.
• High-Tier Scrappy
  • Zwei lands for a powerful AOE attack that can wipe out mobs and heavily damage anyone else around him. This can infuriate players as their amazing plan of bum-rushing certain people can end with just a "Zwei?" He was later nerfed: while his ability to wipe out swarms remains untouched, Zwei now has a longer spawn time and does less damage to turrets as of April 2019.
  • Cinder. Her method of attack is arrows. Lots and lots of arrows. Her special attack allows her to launch a large AOE attack which can wipe out entire teams without much trouble. And unlike most ranged units, Cinder lets the arrows fly as if they're going out of style. This means single units can melt easily under her barrage. To make matters worse, despite her clearly being an overpowered unit, the only nerf done to her with the Fall of Beacon update was just making her targeting a fraction slower, which repeated in April by making her targeting even slower and making her a more expensive unit to cost.
  • Neon Katt. For two Aura, she taunts, grabs aggro and is invincible, which can derail even the best laid plans. Even worse was that when a Neon got behind a unit before the April update, she could literally push it towards a tower/turret with ease, which led to the Ursa Major gaining a huge boost in the meta.
  • Iceflower was immediately received poorly by the fanbase due to the card's ability to wipe out anything and everything within range and a ludicrous health pool. The fact that it was a Legendary card added to the hate. While its health was significantly reduced in a later patch, making it easier to deal with, the card remains a nightmare for most players due to its insane amount of invincibility frames, which the developers have admitted to not planning to fix.
  • The September 2019 patch turned Pomegrenade into this by giving the unit I-frames throughout its active ability, making said ability unstoppable. That, combined with its massive range and damage, leads to safely dealing over 650 damage to a turret with no risk or drawback, and no way to intercept. Thus, Pomegrenade has become the icon of the reviled "chip meta" throughout the game. ^Note  using low-risk cards with active abilities to slowly attack turrets directly without consequence. Players began clamoring to remove the buff from the moment it came out, but still nothing's been done.
  • Jinn is a Legendary Card that costs a mere two aura. She is a structure capable of stopping time around a selected unit for 7 seconds. The main issue is that the cooldown is only 13 seconds, and the card's low cost makes it easy to stack. Two Jinns can make the Turrets and Tower completely and permanently untouchable, thereby removing the opponent's win condition. The fans reacted pooely and developers have promised a major reworking in a coming update.
• Les Yay: The card info for Checkmate (Weiss and Blake together) sounds romantic. It's similar to describing Star-Crossed Lovers.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • Ribbon Blake. Her big ability is the power to automatically spawn anywhere on the map, even beside a turret, which allows her to slip past enemy defenses. The problem with this is twofold; Blake's AI is set to target any enemies that come close besides the turret, meaning dropping anything near her will cause her to run for it and leave her wide open to get hit by the turret. Additionally, Nolan's low cost of just 1-Aura means he can immediately drop and inta-stun her, leaving the turret to wipe her fragile health bar right out.
  • Release Ilia might have been perhaps one of the worst cards in the game. Her entire skill (invisibility on spawn until she hits a target, then reactivate it after two seconds) is extremely situational and she doesn't do a lot of damage with her whip. Add in how her invisbility doesn't make her immune to area of effect attacks and within days of her release, the reviews were poor. However, come June's update, the buffs to Ilia pulled her right out.
  • The Griffon is supposed to be some sort of middle ground between the Lancers and the Nevermore, but ultimately comes out as a Master of None mostly due to its (though stronger than average) one-on-one combat when the other aerial units can deal with a lot of units at once. It lacks the formers' versatility and the latter's durability.
  • The White Fang Lieutenant is virtually useless. He's basically a more powerful Yatsuhashi without his signature Shockwave Stomp. Problems are: 1) Yatsuhashi is mainly used as a defensive unit in the first place and would mostly be useless without his drop skill as he is too slow to reach the enemy turrets before being taken down, more often than not by Zerg Rush units. The Lieutenant can deal ludicrous damage but only with one-on-one attacks, so the aforementioned Zerg Rushes are still efficient. 2) As a whopping 7 Aura, the Lieutenant is one of the most expensive units in the game and almost impossible to play under normal circumstances.
  • The Xiong Family is one of the worst Master of None in the game. They are so fragile that most skill will wipe them out instantly. The "two idiots" are so weak that they could be considered an Absurdly Ineffective Barricade, and even then Junior himself is clearly not as powerful as he looks, having less DPS than other "limited AOE" units like Nora or both Rocket and Biker Yang, all of them costing less than the Family's ridiculous 6 Aura. The March patch notes even admit that it's a bad unit, and eventually it got lowered to 5 Aura.
  • The Petra Gigas is another slow tank unit that costs once again way too much (6 Aura) compared to its actual usefulness. Its Taking You with Me mechanic sounds useful on paper, but since it only activates after 2 seconds (and that's after he received a 1 second buff) most units, even swarms, would have already safely run away from its blast radius. Even if it was hypothetically instantaneous, it's a function that most AOE units can equally do for half its cost. However, Petra Gigas would later get a major meta makeover, turning it from a revenge unit into an Action Bomb, the new goal being to escort it to the buildings where it will deal ridiculous damages when exploding.
  • The Albain Brothers. With no abilities or skills, this basic melee unit was tossed out by fans the moment it came out due to other melee cards being vastly superior.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Mercury's conspicuous absence from the villain roster at launch (which only had Roman and Emerald to represent the villains that weren't mooks), especially after Cinder and Neo joined via updates very quickly, caused his fans to semi-jokingly complain whenever a new character is added that isn't him. They finally got their wish when he was introduced with the February update.
  • A really dedicated Amity Arena Reddit user named The_Porterback started to flood the page with daily memes about his unconditional love for the White Fang Lieutenant (a character that is often considered a Low-Tier Letdown) and became a somewhat infamous figure on the subreddit. Might even be an Ascended Meme as the "Fall of Beacon Update" patch noted that "some players [are] really making this unit shine". (Considering that the official account retweeted some of his memes and videos playing the game, they most certainly did notice him.)
  • Prior to the April update, players quickly realized that Neon didn't phase through units during her run to the turret, but will instead push them forward at her high speed. This quickly led to a tactic involving the Ursa Major where Neon was spawned behind the Ursa to push it to the turret. This specific combination gained the name Disco Bear.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The crystalline sound playing when you get a crystal after a turret/tower is destroyed. Even if it is one of yours, that's how good it is.
  • The Baby Death Stalker Swarm's Kinetic Clicking when they drop one by one in a perfect circular pattern is so satisfying to hear (and see).
• No Problem with Licensed Games: As far as Mobile-based Allegedly Free Games goes, this one is not only pretty deep on a strategic level while still procuring a healthy dose of fanservice, but also genuinely user-friendly compared to other similar games, for examples allowing the players to play without restrictions even if they don't have keys, having a "For Fun" option to play without any risk of losing rank, and limiting advertisement to bonus content instead of including them in an intrusive way. Especially compared to RWBY's other video games (RWBY: Grimm Eclipse and the Deckbuilding Game) Amity Arena has received a modestly warm reception and a few players who do remember the game fondly since its shutdown.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The game's tier system. Unlike games such as Marvel Puzzle Quest or Power Rangers: Legacy Wars, players who lose matches and go below a threshold will automatically be shunted back to the previous tier. This means all of your hard work getting to the next tier can be rendered completely moot should you hit a string of bad luck, especially since loses take away a variable number of trophies and losing to a lower-ranked player means losing a ton of trophies. As an extra unintended consequence, players knocked to lower levels then become a nightmare for the locals of that arena due to being vastly overpowered.
    • A consequence to this is "Sandbagging", in which players intentionally lose matches to obtain the title "Sandbagger" (which requires you to lose ten matches in a row), then using your superior units to return to your previous ranking.
  • The lack of a "concede" option. Being a mobile game, it's reasonable to expect something might come up during a match. Or, you might find that the team you put together just isn't working and needs to be changed. If that happens, you're actually incapable of getting out of the match.
  • If you don't have the need or utility for a card, you can't recycle them into anything or freely exchange them with other players and they just stack up in your inventory. The only way to gain something out of them is to hope that someone ask for them in your Academy, and even then you only gain a handful of XP and Lien from it.
  • Matchmaking being based on trophies can lead to instances where players can fight against other players of two levels above them, which is nearly always a slaughter due to the higher-leveled player having vastly better cards. The system has also been shown to frequently put players in matches in arenas above their current trophy count, which can cause losses that take away dozens of trophies at once.
• Tear Jerker:
  • It was revealed that Patch 1.5 jumps ahead to the Haven saga (volumes 4-6). That makes Pyrrha's appearance in the PVE intro a lot more heartwrenching as by that point, she fell in the Battle of Beacon.
  • Some of the bios have proven to be quite gut-wrenching:
    • While he doesn't dwell on it, Fox grew up an orphan in Vacuo, a place that prioritizes strength and ones ability to take care of themselves, while blind. He found his true family in Team CFVY at least.
    • Velvet admits in her bio that she feels she's dead weight and dragging down her team, to say nothing of what the abuse she goes through as a Faunus does to her psyche.
    • Boundless Jaune (Jaune during the Mistral seasons) covers his depression and misery at Pyrrha's death until the statue scene from Volume 6 where she helps inspire him to move on.
    • Adam grew up a child slave in a Dust mine in Atlas, until one day he got branded with the Schnee Dust Corporation initials onto his eye. Joining the White Fang soon after, he adopts a Then Let Me Be Evil attitude, becoming determined to make humanity burn for what they did to him.
  • Meta-example: It was announced on Twitter that the game would be closing down on January 28, 2021.
• That One Side Quest: One of the original random missions requires you to destroy five towers. Since the rewards for this mission are usually quite high (either an Epic card or a handful of Premium Dust), it's a lucrative mission, but trying to complete it might take awhile as most battles usually end with just a turret down. Eventually, the developers decided to pare down the missions to avoid such long and difficult tasks.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: Overtime, it became increasingly clear just how unbalanced the game was, not helped by the developers buffing or nerfing random units on a whim with no rhyme or reason, with some Game Breakers like Neon Katt lasting for months before getting their overdue nerfs, and the dev's opting to introduce the new Legendary rarity cards over optimizing and fixing some of the more glaring issues (like the unfair matchmaking or shoddy rewards system) pretty much made it clear that they were more interested in going all in on the gacha aspects of the game. The game was shut down shortly after the third anniversary because of all this.

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