That One Level / The Battle Cats

Don't be fooled by the game's looks, The Battle Cats has plenty of these kinds of levels.

Note: As the game is constantly getting updated with brand new content, take every single stage here with a grain of salt as it's likely that a newly-introduced unit/True Form/Talents/Mechanics/etc. can, at best, make a stage much easier to handle and, at worst, turn it into a complete joke, especially if said addition is something that's easily accessible by many players.

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In General

• In the Legend Stages section, there's the Crown/Level Difficulty system, which buffs up enemy magnifications of the Subchapter by a set multiplier. While you're not required to beat them to progress (except for unlocking Idi:N), challenging them can prove to be difficult as previously easy stages can suddenly pose a challenge due to how strong the enemies become, with some 3-crown stages being able to double or triple enemy stats around the board. It's even worse if a stage is already challenging without the buffed-up enemies, in which case, good luck beating them. While the magnification from Crowns drops over time in Stories of Legend to make things more fair, it shoots right back up to its initial value once the Uncanny Legends start, which can turn even easy stages into incredibly long, tough, and tedious affairs, and make harder ones into "stack Cyberpunk Cats or die".
• If they’re available to play in that difficulty, then Cat God help you if you decide to take any stages on in 4-crown difficulty, which restricts you to Special and Rare cats, greatly reducing your selection of cats and blocking cats that can make stages ridiculously easy to beat (iCat, Octopus Cat, Can Can Cat, etc.), meaning that you have to get creative with what you have, and, depending on the subchapter, can make the enemies stronger than 3-crown difficulty.^{For a quick explanation} Starting from the first Subchapter (The Legend Begins) all the way to the 14th Subchapter (The Scratching Post), the strength multiplier of 4-crown is 3x compared to 3-crown's 2x multiplier. The multiplier of 4-crown then becomes the exact same as the 3-crown multiplier in the following Subchapter and starts to become lower than even that at certain Subchapters after that, to the point where the multiplier disappears entirely by the 27th (Body and Soul), effectively making it 1-crown but with unit restrictions. Although Rares and Specials do eventually get some extremely powerful units to make this easier, a lot of them need significant investment or story progress to reach that point, so until then, you'll likely have a hard time dealing with 4-crown in the meantime.
• Stages with restrictions in general are usually a pain in the behind to beat, since they massively reduce your arsenal and force you to have an array of high-leveled cats in every rarity group. Restrictions that disallow Normals or Super Rares are especially damning, since they deprive you of your Basic and Crazed cats which are usually the best units you have for basic purposes, especially meatshielding.

Story Chapters

Empire of Cats

• Hippoe (Chapter 1 Japan) is easy for most players, but since it is so early in the game, newcomers may struggle with it. It has high health and damage and will shred your cats unless you effectively meatshield, which is very hard due to the horrible cooldowns early game. If a new player's strategy is to spam everything, they will likely lose on this stage.
• One of the only hard levels in Empire of Cats is Machu Picchu, which spawns endless Le'boins supported by a strong frontline of Jackie Pengs, Gories, Sir Seals, and Kang Roos. These enemies could normally be taken down by stacking Lizard Cats, but the Le'boins will crush them, forcing you to use other tactics.
• Chapter 3 Moon is this, as you go up against the dreaded Teacher Bun Bun. This level is a massive Difficulty Spike compared to the relatively tame Moons of the first two chapters: while The Face and Dark Emperor Nyandam followed a similar pattern of being a slow and tough Advancing Boss of Doom backed up by relatively easy peons, Bun Bun is instead a Lightning Bruiser with enormous health, One-Hit Kill area attacks and fast attack speed, forcing you to devise a new strategy for handling a relentless pusher and putting everything you've learned over the last three chapters to the test just to avoid being instantly flattened. He also comes with support from Kang Roos and Sir Seals to take hits for him, and Mooths to stack up behind him and punish advancing Cats once he gets knocked back.

Into the Future

• Into the Future has The Great Abyss representing a massive Difficulty Spike, as you fight the alien variant of the final boss of the respective Empire chapter, each of which has vastly increased stats on top of the inflated stats that all Aliens get, and brings several new tricks to the table compared to their original versions. Chances are, the first few times you do this, you will lose miserably.
• Later in ITF, we have Floating Continent. In addition to the spam of Angel enemies, if you don't know what you're doing or don't have enough Anti-Alien units or treasures, chances are you're going to get completely destroyed by Nimoy Bore. While it’s bad enough in the first two chapters, the third chapter’s Floating Continent has three Nimoy Bores.
• Chapter 2's Moon stage has the Corrupted Valkyrie, who boasts insane health, attack speed, and damage, in addition to having an area attack. This isn't even counting the magnification all Aliens get: even with all Chapter 1 and 2 Anti-Alien treasures, she still has over a million health and deals 21,000 damage per hit. Without them, she's nigh-impossible to beat. In addition, she's backed up by the same Aliens as before, except this time Scissoroo and Mistress Celeboodle join the fun. Oh, and she doubles her attack when she hits half health. Have fun!
• Then Chapter 3 tops it all off with Raging Bahamut. He has insane speed, staggering attack and health, and very rapid area attacks that come out almost instantly. Fortunately, he gets knocked around very easily. Unfortunately, all of his other stat values are so strong that he's still a nightmare despite this weakness - and is all but impossible to beat without all the treasures from all 3 chapters. Oh, and he's still backed up by a ton of aliens, including Alpacky if you take too long to take him out.

Cats of the Cosmos

• Moskandag's gimmick is the same in all three chapters: a strong frontline of Metal Hippoes protects a horde of Corporal Weylands, which will warp away and take down any critical attackers. Every chapter makes the Weylands and Metal Hippoes stronger and more numerous, while adding increasing amounts of strong Ginger Snaches to push and cause critical attacks to miss. If that wasn't bad enough, all three chapters prevent you from using Cats over $1200 here, which makes almost all Ubers and a large amount of strong anti-Metal and -Alien options unusable.
• Aguham leads off with just a few Metal Doges and Shibalien Elites... but when the base is hit, it sends Le'solar, some powerful Star Pengs, a Metal Hippoe, and more Shibalien Elites. This wouldn't normally be too bad, except the stage only lets you use Special Cats. While there are a few Special Cats that can deliver critical hits or keep the Aliens at bay, for the most part, you'll be relying on a team of Low Tier Letdowns to win. Chapter 2 swaps out the Metals for UltraBaaBaas, which can only be stopped by extremely unreliable Barrier breakers like Loincloth Cat or Li'l Macho Legs Cat. Chapter 3 brings back the Metals, but puts the Aliens under an insane buff, which may be too much for your weak meatshields to handle.
• Skelling is a level guaranteed to get on most players' nerves. All three chapters limit you to cats that cost $1200 or more, forcing you to build an army focused on a few powerful units, then hit you with enemies that counter this strategy very well. Chapter 1's is the easiest variant, but its startoff can be a lot to handle — a Star Peng near the beginning, backed up by Maawth and Shibalien Elite. Chapter 2's sends out another Star Peng with the boss wave of I.M. Phace and Corporal Weyland, which will rapidly warp away your small number of cats and push forward very quickly. Chapter 3's version of Skelling, however, is the real hair-puller: instead of just one Star Peng, there's four, and they come out fairly quickly with support from even more Weylands.
• Black Hole is one, fittingly for being the final level before The Big Bang. All three variants not only restrict you to only Special, Rare, and Uber and Legend Rare Cats, but restrict you to 10 on the field at once, severely limiting your options. Chapters 1 and 2 both rush you with Star Pengs, then send a Spacefish Jones when the base is hit. Chapter 1 supports it with Corporal Weylands and a swarm of Doge Darks and Metal Doges, which will push against your weakened forces hard. Chapter 2 swaps out the Metal Doges for a Ribbo, which will warp away anything that gets past the weaker frontline. Chapter 3's isn't as bad, as the two Axolotys are easier to handle than the Spacefish Jones, but it's still no slouch; the Doge Darks are replaced by strong Mesocosmocyclones, and there are few Special and Rare Cats that can effectively defeat them.
• Chapter 1 has The Cat God (Floating) as the Final Boss who is pretty slow, but has incredible health, devastating multi-stage attacks that will One-Hit Kill just about anything, and a range of 1,000 to hit almost any cat before it even approaches him. Throughout his whole fight, he will also spam almost all the types of Star-Aliens to plow through your units to let him advance and kill your backline. The worst part is that, even though he's plenty deadly himself, if you don't have all the treasures for him, he's 11 times stronger. You will practically need a 100% Mystery Mask, Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors, and copious anti-star-alien treasures and units to beat him.

The Aku Realms

• Mexico has quickly become one of the most infamous stages from the Aku Realms' first chapter. The stage rushes you with Gabriels at the beginning, which are annoying, but not too bad... but then, when the base is hit, it sends out a Sunfish Jones and five Fallen Bears, one every 10 seconds, along with another Zerg Rush of Gabriels. The Fallen Bears are slightly weaker than you'd expect for this point in the chapter, but they make up for this with numbers; not only can they rip apart almost anything in front of them, but getting Aku Researcher to break all of their shields is a tall order. Even if you have a high enough level cap to handle the stage, bad luck can still ruin your run if the Fallen Bears' shields take longer to break than usual, or if their death surges land in the wrong place at the wrong time.
• Hawaii is just as bad, fittingly for being the final stage before the Moon. The stage features a powerful Wicked Face backed up by almost every Aku enemy in the chapter, buffed up to incredible levels — the Aku Gories will shred through your frontline, the Condemned Pengs will support them from a longer range and use their death surges to blow a hole in your lines, and the powerful Fallen Bear will back them up and finish you off once you've been pushed back to your base. Like most of the harder Aku stages, Hawaii isn't just hard, but also a Luck-Based Mission — you'll be hoping that the Condemned Pengs don't do too much damage with their death surges, but also that your shield breakers can pierce the shields of Wicked Face and Fallen Bear before the enemies push forward.

Legend Stages

Stories of Legend

• Chubby B. Goode is Camelle’s debut level, and it supports him with a huge, endlessly-respawning stream of meatshields. It requires a completely different strategy from any level before it — luring Camelle, then attacking him with rushers or tanky Cats — and if your army is too weak to pull it off, expect to get stalled out. And, just in case you expect to stall out Camelle, it‘a a Time-Limit Boss as well, with endless Assassin Bears to enforce that time limit. Of course this might not be that difficult if you have wave, surge or LD units.
• Volcanic Defender rushes you with several Shy Boys at the beginning before sending Teacher Bun Bun at you shortly after. It's a brutally strong push for the start of the level where you likely don't have enough money for Ubers and heavy hitters, and if you can't kill the Shy Boys for money fast enough then Bun Bun will lay waste to your cats.
• Labyrinth of Hades, Bun Bun Black's debut level, is devilishly hard due to him being backed up by Kory. Individually they're not too much of a challenge, but together they cover each others' weaknesses alarmingly well, with Kory killing off heavy-hitters that would normally take out Bun Bun and the latter killing all your remaining meatshields, which are already being spammed less to stop Kory from spamming Shockwaves. The combination of the two is extremely hard to beat.
  • Then in Shadow Cosmopolis, we have Docking Massacre, which is basically Labyrinth 2.0, replacing the aformentioned Bun Bun Black and Kory with the much stronger Bun Bun Symbiote and Berserkory. The general strategy is to lure and cripple if not kill Bun Bun Symbiote, then finish off Berserkory.
• Beached Mammals starts off with several Shadow Boxer Ks, which is manageable... until you hit the base, and the unholy combo of Bun Bun Black, J.K. Bun Bun, and Bore come out at the same time. Like the stage above, they cover each others' weaknesses well, and the combination of types (Red, Red/Floating and Black/Floating) makes it impossible to focus on just one type weakness.
• Black Premonition consists of a huge, long-lasting rush of Black enemies, with Le’noir and Bun Bun Black serving as the bosses. What makes it unique is that there’s two boss waves — the first one has Le’noir, and the second, triggering after some enemies have been killed, has Bun Bun Black. The second wave can let the remaining enemies, backed up by Bun Bun, push through to your base. It was considered to be one of the hardest stages in the game at launch, enough so that it had to be Nerfed some time after its launch — and even with the nerf, it’s still by no means easy.
• Benzene Field is hard not necessarily because of the enemies, but because it is almost required to have some kind of knowledge of the level beforehand. In short: there are 9 Faces and 1 Rain D., and every time an enemy dies a Bore comes out of the base. This means that it is extremely easy to accidentally kill too many enemies at once and get overrun by Bores.
• Gestalt, Decay starts off with just a Scissoroo and a few weak Aliens... then rushes you with tons and tons of powered up Scissoroos and Kroxos once the base is hit. What's more, it's a Gimmick Level, too: the more Aliens you kill, the faster the Black enemies (including Shadow Boxer K. and Dark Otter) that serve as reinforcements will spawn. It's a brutal Wake-Up Call for most newer players, telling them that, no, they can't just rely on big, strong backline attackers to win stages for them.
• Learned to Love has Codename: Red Riding as the enemy boss, backed up by many Demonic Spiders such as Le'noir, Brollow, H. Nah, and Sunfish Jones. Red Riding herself has the longest range in the game, being able to snipe your base once she takes a few steps outside her own, albeit having a minimum range. It almost becomes a Timed Mission to kill her before she whittles your base down to nothing, something made hard by the Sunfish Jones blowing up anything that gets close to her. And if you don't feel like replaying the stage over and over again, get ready to use a Treasure Radar to bypass Mina's 3% drop chance...
• DNA & DHA starts off manageable, with just a few Two Cans... only to send out the terrifying quartet of Bun Bun Black, Le'noir, Two Can, and Tackey when the base is hit. The four Blacks cover each other's weaknesses very well; Bun Bun Black tanks damage, Le'noir takes down status units, Tackey kills ranged attackers, and Two Can creates openings for the others to advance with his powerful waves. Unless you found out how to get Bombercat, this level is among the hardest in Stories of Legend — and even with Bombercat, it's still no cakewalk, especially on 4* difficulty.
• Celestial Seas is a clone of Star Ocean, which was already fairly tough to begin with. This time, the Doge Darks are swapped out for Gabriels that retain the gimmick of getting steadily stronger over time, while the H. Nah is replaced by a Le'boin... a Le'boin that, while fairly fragile, can wipe out nearly any Cat in one shot. Like before, you have 266 seconds to beat the stage before the Gabriels start spawning with too much strength to defeat — and even before that limit, they're by no means pushovers.
• Beverly Hills Scoop features the insane combination of R. Osts and Tackeys, both at double strength, with a Zerg Rush of weak peons as support. The synergy between the enemies is incredibly good; the R. Osts push quickly, while the Tackeys snipe the ranged attackers fighting the R. Osts. Meanwhile, the flood of peons can block off single-target attackers, though it does also give a lot of free money as your Cats chip away at it.
• Swim Meet sends a huge rush of powered-up Aliens when the base is hit, including Le Murrs that can handily take down your meatshields with a few hits, Ursamajors to rip apart ranged attackers, and a few Calamarys to weaken anything that tries to fight back. Unless you're packing strong anti-Alien Ubers, expect to have a rough time.
• Procrastinator Parade, and to an extent the following level Grand Exhibition, are both hard for the same reason: an infinite spam of "peons" (read: Demonic Spiders) backed up by long-ranged heavy hitters. For the first, it's an infinite R. Ost rush backed by Camelle, and for the second, infinite Two Cans supported by Kurosawah.
• No Return Flights. Coming right after the above two, it starts off with just a few weak Otta-smack-u's... until the base is hit, at which point the unholy combination of Master A. and a huge horde of Rain D.s and Dolphinas is sent out, with more of the latter two being sent out every few seconds. The particular combination of enemies leaves almost no way for Cats to avoid getting shredded; Rain D. pushes through the frontline and covers Dolphina's blind spot, Dolphina snipes long ranged damage dealers that are trying to keep Rain D. at bay, and Master A. takes advantage of Rain D. and Dolphina's many knockbacks to punish anyone that tries to press the attack after pushing back the others. All three of them are also Traitless enemies, so things that can resist or hamper their assault are few and far between. The level used to be considered the single hardest stage in all of Stories of Legend, and although it's fallen victim to Power Creep nowadays, particularly due to the larger amount of anti-Traitless units available and Courier Cat being able to rush into the Traitless brawl and attack both Rain D. and Dolphina at once, it can still serve as a massive wall for a midgame player.
• Remember DNA & DHA from a few paragraphs ago? Well, Boiling Spring is the same concept, but swaps out the obnoxious Black enemies for even more annoying Red enemies. Instead of Two Cans at the start, there's Capies, and the enemy rush when the base is hit is now J.K. Bun Bun, a Capy, Professor A., and Berserkory. Unless you know how to block or negate Berserkory's wave attacks while taking him down quickly, get ready for a tough battle.
• Cubist Crimes in the chapter Grotesque Gallery. You're pretty much dead if you don't know exactly what's going to happen, since if you damage the base without killing it instantly or fail to destroy it within 60 seconds, you will lose to the endless stream of steroid Brollows that appear. Normally not too bad in Stories of Legend, but it's infamous as a Legend Quest level: because your lineup gets randomly swapped around, the stage becomes nothing more than a Luck-Based Mission as to whether or not the cats you need to beat it stay in your lineup, and it'll probably claim several crowns before you get lucky.
• Heaven’s Oasis is Winged Pigge’s debut level, and it doesn’t mess around. Once the base is hit, she comes out along with an R. Ost and a huge swarm of Doge Darks and Gabriels. In addition to pushing hard, the two bosses complement each other very well; R. Ost can use his knockbacks to lure your cats into Winged Pigge’s range, letting them get weakened and heavily damaged, making it easier for the enemies to push.
• A Moment of Serenity sends out an angelic boss squadron consisting of Sunfish Jones, Boraphim, Cala Maria, and Winged Pigge. The four Angels cover each other's weaknesses remarkably well, so you're likely toast unless you brought a copious amount of anti-Angel units.
• False Resurrection features all of the traitless long-distance enemies in SoL (Mr. Mole, Dolphina, Croakley, and Henry), which can hammer your units with both heavy damage and status effects from a stupidly long range while bypassing your meatshields. And if you thought that close-range units could easily solve this problem, then the Assassin Bears, Li'l Bun Buns, and Doge Base will make you reconsider that.
• Eldritch Forces - Invasion, a special variant of Eldritch Forces that only shows itself if you've cleared every single map in Stories of Legend at 4-crown difficulty. First of all, it has a Rares and Specials restriction, greatly limiting your arsenal. Second, it pits you against Idi:Re, a pure Relic traited enemy with a titanic amount of health, blazingly fast speed, and a far-reaching, surprisingly frequent omnistrike attack that deals 99,999 damage, enough to One-Hit Kill anything that doesn't have Metal or Survive traits^note It also Turns Red below half health and Curses units on hit, but both of these are mostly irrelevant since it'll instantly kill most units anyways unless weakened, and even then it still deals enough damage to one-shot most units. Thirdly, the boss' backup is no slouch either, with infinitely spawning Relic Doges, Heavenly Hippoes, Gory Blacks, and Imperator Saels constantly moving in to compound your strategy. With the restrictions, your cats that can deal with the array of threats are limited, and basically only true-form Legends or Master Uril will be able to consistently exploit the Relic-type Idi:Re's weaknesses. While Idi:Re gets knocked back a lot, this often works in its favor, making your lines push forward and leaving them helpless for the ensuing instant counterattack from the knockback resetting its attack animation.

Uncanny Legends

Being the successor to Stories of Legend, it’s to be expected that Uncanny Legends will be even harder than it. This is thanks to the Relics, who have extreme stats, and can stop cats from doing any anti-trait abilities thanks to their unique Curse ability.

• Its entry stage, An Ancient Curse, is ridiculously difficult. Relic Bun-Bun serves as the boss, and like his predecessor he has enormous health and attack speed. However, unlike Mecha-Bun, he is knocked back only half the amount of times and has even longer range from his Omnistrike ability (however, he only has half the attack power and is slower). The worst part about him comes from his Curse ability: he has the ability to completely negate anti-trait abilities (e.g. Slow, Stop, Knockback, Strong Against, Resistant, Attack Only) at a guaranteed rate if he attacks them. Worse still, he's a Relic enemy, meaning that at the point when you should encounter him for the first time, almost nothing is effective on him. As for his peons, he spams Relic Doges - obnoxiously powerful enemies that have obscenely high stats for basic minions, area attacks, and the same Curse ability and Relic typing as the boss.
• Palcaccio Waters is an upgraded version of Carpaccio Waters, which was already something of a Wake-Up Call Boss for Stories of Legend. This time, the Bore is far from the only threat — the boss comes with a huge, long-lasting rush of Angelic Gories, which will easily shred your meatshields and push deep towards your base. If that wasn't enough, there's more than one Bore this time, too!
• The start-off of Rutsborg Vortex isn’t too bad, having only Mooth and some weak Mooks. However, once the base is hit, you are assaulted with a powerful angel swarm consisting of Heveanly Hippoes, Angelic Gories and Angelic Sleipnirs. As if that wasn’t enough, Othom shows up as well acting as a dangerous support enemy who can deal a decent chunk of damage and can attack Cats ahead of his range meaning that the frontlines will be broken through much more quickly and, if you brought him, Curse more Ramen Cats, disabling his Resistance and allowing the angels to pummel him down. All of this, combined with the occasional Sir Rel and Relic Doge, makes the stage nearly impossible to beat without True Form Sol Legends and Slapstick Cats.
• Inspirational Mural starts off fairly easily, with just a Mooth and a few Sir Rels… but then, it sends an extremely strong J.K. Bun Bun after just 40 seconds, and an Othom to support him just 20 seconds later. While J.K. Bun Bun can usually be handled easily by status units, Othom can disable them and let him advance, and long-ranged Cats will be blocked off by Bun Bun while attempting to hit Othom. Since they come so early, you'll likely be strapped for cash, even if you get a Piñata Enemy like Mooth at the start.
• Panic Tower isn’t too bad since the Teacher Bears aren’t too tough and the Znaches are just an annoyance at worst. That is, if it weren’t for the 2 Cadaver Bears that are in the stage and not only that, they are now stats 3 times stronger than their Into the Future Outbreak appearances, meaning that they can tear apart your meatshields with ease before moving on to your ranged attackers. Furthermore, the Znaches can now pose a threat thanks to them since their burrows can cut off your meatshield line, allowing them to push forward even faster as well as taking out any ranged attackers unfortunate enough to get in his way.
• Heron's Call is especially jarring, considering that it comes after 5 fairly easy levels. When the base is hit, you'll need to hold off a nearly unstoppable onslaught, consisting of Cli-One, an Angelic Sleipnir, Angelic Gories, Heavenly Hippoes, and an M. Ost some time later, among assorted peons. While these enemies would be bad enough to begin with, the stage also gives you very little money aside from what you can save up at the beginning, so you'll need to take care not to run out while protecting your heavy hitters. Even once the M. Ost and rusher enemies are dead, you'll still need to take care of the Sleipnir and Cli-One, which can be tricky without Dragons and tank units.
• Raging Caldera, a remake of Flaming Caldera, is basically the same as its predecessor except the base barely needs to be damaged to make the boss show up, there are now six Kories in the base, each coming out in groups of 3 and the Kories are 6 times stronger.
• Primitive Souls is an absolute nightmare to beat. While the enemies themselves aren’t too bad, those being buffed up Dark Otters, Ginger Snaches, and the Mooths at the start, they become extremely dangerous with the presence of Dogumaru. He is a pure Relic enemy whose attack and health are moderate, if not weak, in comparison to other Demonic Spiders but has a fast attack rate, has an omni strike that reaches up to 700 range, and always curses on hit to compensate for it. He synergizes extremely well with the aforementioned enemies, with them killing the cats that Dogumaru damaged, allowing him to advance while he helps get rid of any area attackers that can normally kill them easily. This gets even worse when the two other Dogumarus get spawned and if all of them are still alive, then you have a near-unkillable force that can shred through your meatshields with little effort and allow every enemy to advance easily. This stage also has a chance to drop Dogumaru, but at the usual 3% chance, meaning that you’ll need a Treasure Radar if you don’t want to play through this stage again and again. And just to put the cherry on this pain sundae, this is a No Continues Stage meaning that you have to beat this in one go and that the Force-Close trick won’t work here. If you have units like Idi or good ubers, you might not struggle as much, but otherwise it can be a huge pain.
• Nautilus Tomb consists of a deadly synergy between a buffed-up Lord Gravey and 2 Mr. Moles. The former can easily kill most cats in one hit and, coupled with his fast attack rate, can make the moles advance while the latter can Knockback and kill most non-Uber cats that outrange Gravey and allows him to push really hard. Unless the moles are killed quickly, you can expect them to move towards your base very easily.
• Total Myopia starts off with a Relic Doge and Metal Doge spam, both of which are tough but aren’t too hard to deal with. However, once you hit the base, you are assaulted with metals such as Super Metal Hippoe and Sir Metal Seal, which is normal for many hard metal stages. What makes this different is that they’re supported by 3 Lorises, that slowly come one after the other, who can render any cat whose job is to inflict status effects useless and can deal decent damage against the critical attackers. Since the aforementioned metals mentioned push hard, getting your status effect cats cursed can turn the battle into a very difficult one.
• Lonely Goldfish contains Dagshunds and Celeboodles who spawn infinitely, buffed up to the point where each can take and deal a lot of damage on their own, but both of them are not spammed like crazy. What makes it difficult is the three Henries that appear in the stage, each of them being able to cripple your offensive force (freezes any oncoming attackers) and the meatshield spam that protects your attackers, allowing the aforementioned two enemies to push back against you very easily. Worse still, because of their numbers, the three Henries can slowly, but surely, destroy your base in minutes forcing to attack quickly lest they make you lose, which is difficult to do thanks to how hard-to-kill every enemy is.
• While the start-off of Bell Collector isn’t hard at all (only Gory Blacks, Owlbrows and Duches, all of which aren’t hard to kill), the boss wave is. For that part, it has 2 highly buffed Kories and a Youcan, all of which can push with ease thanks to their powerful waves, along with the previously mentioned enemies supporting them as well. Even using Wave Blockers might not be enough to net you a win since their regular attacks can easily kill any close-ranged Wave Blocker, thus allowing their waves to go mostly unblocked.
• Protein Cartel spams Gobbles like they're peons, then spawns a Hackey to support them after a short while. If the Gobbles are even a little desynced — which is easy to have happen, with Hackey picking off Cats from a distance — they can quickly push through your meatshield lines and advance. Since the Gobbles have RNG determining when they respawn, it can feel like a Luck-Based Mission whether you can stall them or not.
• Curry Comet, like the aforementioned No Return Flights, uses a Rain D. supported by Dolphinas to wreak havoc on your ranged Cats. However, instead of a Master A. and Otta-smack-us, there's Mr. Puffingtons, which will barrel into your frontlines to deliver devastating damage and, like Dolphina, evade most strong hits with their many knockbacks. If you can't pull off the precise timings needed to single out and kill Rain D. and then eliminate the Dolphinas before they destroy your base, get ready to hate this stage.
• Glass Slippers sends out a strong Cli-One and powerful Ursamajors fairly early on, with Gardeneel Bros. and R. Ost coming later on to support them. The level gives you very little money, so unless you can finish off the first Ursamajor early on, you're likely dead. While Gardeneel Bros. usually aren't that threatening, and are sometimes even Helpful Mooks, here, they're a nightmare; the level has a Doge Base that will fire if the Gardeneels warp any Cats close to it, which can annihilate your forces if you don't have any wave blockers on the field.
• The Belated Priest features nearly every regular enemy with the Slow ability — Imperator Saels at first, then Sunfish Jones, M. Ost, Croakley, and Professor A. when you hit the base, with Zomboes for support. Croakley will snipe your approaching cats with Slow, letting M. Ost push forward quickly without taking as much damage, and the Zomboes will do heavy damage to your helpless units. Meanwhile, the strong backliner enemies will punish you harshly for attempting to gain ground, which is already tricky when most of your cats are slowed. This level was even worse prior to the 11.5 update, which thankfully nerfed it by reducing the Zomboes on base hit from infinite to only 2.
• Cloned Farmers, similarly to Caliban's Keeper, sends out both R. Ost and Henry at the same time, and their synergy is just as good as before. However, like the rest of the stages in DNA Plantation, it also Zerg Rushes with an enemy that normally appears by itself... and here, the enemy chosen is Mr. Mer. 5 of them in total come with the bosses, and they'll use their heavy-hitting attacks to break through your frontline while wearing down backline cats with their mini-waves. They also have a lot of health. The stage is bad enough as is, but it's unbearable if you unlocked Octopus Cat's talent for freeze resist; instead of staying in the back and blocking the Mr. Mer waves, it'll rush forward and get decimated by R. Ost.
• Fishermen on Strike isn't too bad at first, since the first Mr. Puffington can be rushed down pretty easily, but then the Fallen Bears start coming. There's three of them in total, supported by Miz Devils and Celeboodles to take hits and throw off your timing, and in between the second and third, another Mr. Puffington appears. If you can't rush down the first two Fallen Bears — a task which more or less comes down to getting lucky with Aku Researcher procs — then the Puffington, backed up by any remaining Fallen Bears, will easily push to your base and destroy it.
• Fire Kingdom Dynamite is a punishing Marathon Level — over a long period of time, you'll have to contend with 5 Midnite D.'s, Dark Emperor Nyandam, and Director Kurosawah, with only occasional Doge Darks for money. The Midnite D.'s will abuse their shields and knockbacks to tank hits from your strong cats, then regenerate their defenses after losing a little health, and it's difficult to hit them hard enough to skip knockbacks when their shields are down. Meanwhile, Nyandam and Kurosawah will occasionally annihilate your frontlines and help the Midnite D. horde push — and, if you're managing to gain back ground, potentially kill all your backliners as well. If you're not gaining ground, though, it's only a matter of time before the enemies push all the way to your base.
• Beyond the Haze, featured in Behemoth’s Peak, is considered the hardest level of the sub chapter, and for good reasons. In this level, you have to face M. Ost as the main threat, with many, many Condemned Peng backing him up, with only occasional doge darks for money. The condemned Peng and M. Ost makes for an incredibly threatening combo, with M. Ost ridding you of your frontline, allowing the condemned Peng to push up, then letting them get killed to unleash death surges after death surges, completely wiping out your backline if you are lacking proper anti surge units, letting M. Ost to push and letting the cycle repeat.
• The penultimate stage of the entire Uncanny Legends saga, Birth of True Man of the Humanity Catified subchapter, can be an extreme wall to push past, with there being an argument that it's harder than the actual final level and Final Boss of Uncanny Legends. Its difficulty comes from what spawns upon base hit, which is a deadly duo of Great Ape Luza and Pterowl Hazuku, both of whom synergize with one another extremely well, with Luza crushing any cats that dare enter Hazuku's blindspot while Hazuku blasts away any cat approaching the two of them with high-damage, wide-hitting attacks. As a result, its extremely easy for them to blast away huge chunks of your cat army and advance with virtually no resistance. This also doesn't take into consideration their support, which consists of Wild Doges, Li'l Doges, and Relic Doges that will happily infiltrate any holes in your frontlines made by the main duo and Owlbrows that help Luza swat away any cat that gets too close to them^note  While you can stall out the starting peons pre-boss wave in order to reduce the difficulty of the boss wave itself, that requires you to empty out the Owlbrows and Relic Doges of the pre-boss wave, which takes a while to do and gets boring in repeated attempts.. You're not going to get past them that easily without the help of the True Forms of certain UL Legend units and even with them it's a challenge.

Zero Legends

• Adherence to Virtue, the finale of the Garden of Wilted Thoughts subchapter and the first major boss of Zero Legends, doesn't pull its punches. There are only two enemies on the stage, but one of them is the Sage of Mind Soractes, a through-and-through Lightning Bruiser with 4 million health, a rapid Omnistrike that can hit most mid-to-long ranged damage dealers, ungodly amounts of DPS with a 30% Freeze chance, and fast movement speed to let him close alarming distance with every opening he makes with his wide Omnistrike radius. Soractes pushes so hard that he can erase conventional meatshielding in seconds and plow through anything short of the most sturdy defense one can muster, and he also introduces the new Sage subtrait, which gives him massive resistance to statuses and knockback, making him nearly impossible to status stall even with Cyberpunk and Sniper. Soractes is part Floating so resistant tanks can hold him in place for a while, but that's where the other enemy comes into play, hyper-buffed Doge Darks sent in once every ten seconds, with enough attack power to crunch through your anti-Floating units or tanks, leaving an opening for Soractes to rip into you. Worst of all, the lack of enemies also translates to a severe lack of income, so if you aren't able to manage your cash well or consistently land Double Money attackers on the Doge Darks to harvest cash, Soractes will likely bleed you dry and cause a loss via attrition. You can't even stall early on to build up income, as Soractes will spawn by himself not even a minute after the level begins.

Event Stages

• Among the Crazed Cat stages:
  • Absolute Defence has plenty of the game's worst mid-game Demonic Spiders, like Gory and Owlbrow, buffed up to massive levels. The Crazed Tank Cat has incredible stats for that point in the game, very long range, and is Immune to Flinching. Plus its base destroyer trait allows it to easily One-Hit Kill your base should it get there. Even if you can withstand its offense, expect to take a long time slowly chipping it down to nothing.
  • Flappy Cat is among the most time-consuming stages in the game. Expect to take about half an hour to defeat the Crazed Bird Cat. The boss itself has high health, devastating attacks, and long range, and is backed up by Bores and Rain Ds. It's not nearly as difficult as it is time-consuming, though.
  • Crazy Cats sends out the Crazed Titan, which has enormous health and a devastating area attack, although he's pretty slow. However, instead of being That One Boss with extremely high stats, the Crazed Titan becomes a Goddamned Boss due to his 15% chance of doing an exceptionally deadly shockwave.
  • Looking for an even harder challenge? Try Clan of the Maniacs, which pits you against all 9 Crazed Cats at once. The first stage, The Wild Dance, has each Crazed Cat spawn at a certain time^note In order: Lizard, Gross, Cow, Fish, Cat, Axe, Titan, Tank, Bird, which can quickly overwhelm you if you can't kill the base before they come out. However, the second stage has all 9 spawn simultaneously at the 20-second mark, forcing you to hold off an unstoppable onslaught while you likely don't have enough money.
• The Awakening stages are of similar difficulty to the Crazed stages, and while most of them aren't too bad, there are a few troublesome ones:
  • Path of Kung-Fu introduces the Dancer Cat, which has a ton of health, a devastating area attack, and very long range, with fairly fast attack speed. While the first stage isn't too bad, the second one contains a buffed Dancer, along with Dark Otters, Angelic Gories, 2 Kories, and Bores.
  • Boxing Clever has the Heavy Assault C.A.T., which boasts very high HP, fast movement speed, and a long-ranged area attack that deals immense damage. It comes with heavy support from Gory Black and Dark Otter in its first stage, and in the second, there's two buffed Heavy Assault C.A.Ts, with additional Shadow Boxer Ks as support.
  • Mr.-ious Evolution has Hyper Mr. as its special enemy, and it has good HP, high DPS, and quick movement and attacks to make up for its many knockbacks. The Expert stage only has 3, with weak Doges and Wall Doges for support. The Insane stage, on the other hand, has unlimited 200% Hyper Mr.s when the base is hit, with Heavenly Hippoes, Angelic Gories, and stronger Wall Doges coming as well to help them break through your lines.
  • The Awakened Carnival stages are Boss Rushes for the awakened Cats, and although they're easier than the Tornado Carnivals, they still don't mess around. The first Awakened Carnival starts off easy, but releases a powerful Flying Ninja Cat backed up by Riceball Cats, a stack of Lollycats, and a Loincloth Cat when the base is hit, with Dark Lazer coming after some of them die. The second one has a fairly easy startoff as well, but will send out a powerful Beefcake Cat when the base is hit, backed up by Heavy Assault C.A.T. and Dancer Cat — with a second Beefcake Cat coming when one of the enemies finally dies.
  • Growing Up introduces the Prisoner Cat, which has huge amounts of HP and a fairly powerful Long Distance attack, albeit with a minimum range. The first stage is fairly easy, but the second can be a handful for level-appropriate players, featuring some rushes of Wall Doges and Angelic Gories, which will work together to guard the 3 Prisoner Cats and let them rain down their devastating attacks.
  • Dolled Up is among the hardest of the Monthly Cat awakening stages to beat. Its boss, Nyalladin, moves and attacks quickly along with being guaranteed to make a short wave attack with every hit. The first stage is, again, fairly easy, but the second sends out a 200% Nyalladin with support from tanky Duches, along with a few Owlbrows, Pigeon de Sables, and Trolly Bloggers. At this magnification, Nyalladin's waves can easily blast away most general backline attackers like Bahamut and Ururun and can do the same to your meatshield lines, allowing him and his support to advance with ease. Don't have any Wave Blockers or Wave Immunes with you? Then good luck trying to beat this stage.
• While most of the Cyclone stages aren't that bad, their rematch stages (2-stage maps where you unlock the true forms of their cat drops) are much harder.
  • Wrath of the Divine is a much tougher challenge than the base stage. Wrath of A-Cyclone restricts you to only using Rares, and there are very few Rares capable of debuffing a pure Angel like Divine Cyclone; the most reliable anti-Angel Rare, Ramen Cat, is a wall and not a debuffer, making it nearly useless against the Cyclone due to its overwhelming attack power. If you get past that, you'll have to fight three Divine Cyclones (one of which shows up seconds after the stage starts), along with backup from colorless Demonic Spiders like Rain D.s and a Camelle. Fortunately, if you have a Sanzo Cat with the Target Angels Talent, both stages become far easier due to its ability to consistently control Divine Cyclone at a cheap cost.
  • The Metal Cyclone isn't too bad at first, but Bitter Irony, its revenge stage, is a step up in difficulty. Wrath of Titanium restricts you to using cats that cost $750 or less. While this still leaves options like Catasaurus or the other Cyclone cats open, it deprives you of some of your most powerful options, like Catornado, Cheerleader Cat, or most anti-Metal Ubers. Revenge of Titanium takes it up a notch - while the more powerful Metal peons have vanished, they've been replaced with Black enemies to throw a wrench into your strategies, including infinite Assassin Bears that spawn on a timer, which prevents you from using the Waterblast cannon to take down the boss.
  • The Perfect Cyclone may have been a Breather Boss among the Cyclones, but its Awakening stage, Red Sky at Night, is one of the worst ones of them all. While the first stage is fairly trivial (Wrath of Red Sky limits you to only Super Rares, which includes Kotatsu Cat - a unit that utterly manhandles Perfect Cyclone's stage), Revenge of Red Sky is a nightmare, adding in a ton of strong Angels and making the Kotatsu spam strategy far worse without overleveled and Talented Octopus Cats. In particular, there's a buffed Angelic Sleipnir making sure that nothing gets into the eye of the storm, like in No Plan A - killing the Sleipnir while still under the Perfect Cyclone's pressure marks the difference between a victory and a one-sided defeat.
  • And for those who are looking for an even harder challenge, look no further than Tornado Carnival II. An even harder version of the first Tornado Carnival, with the Red, Black, White, and Divine Cyclones replaced with the much harder Metal, Perfect, and Cosmic Cyclones. Unlike the previous ones, each of them has vastly different weaknesses, forcing you to build a deck that can counter all three. And just to add insult to injury, the only reward for beating them is 3 measly Silver Tickets.
  • The Dead Keep Rolling, Zyclone's Awakening stage. Wrath of the Unholy is already a piece of work, forcing you to use units under $600, but the second stage is possibly the hardest of them all. Not only does Revenge of the Unholy make you fight three Zyclones, but it adds in Star-Alien minions, like Ribbo, Le'Solar, and UltraBaaBaa. Not only do the Star-Aliens make dealing with the Zyclones a lot harder, what with Ribbo warping your units, UltraBaaBaa blocking everything, and Le'Solar killing all your anti-Zombies, they are subjected to a ridiculous buff that makes the Aliens themselves extremely dangerous - and that's on top of the buff that Star-Aliens already have. It's almost mandatory to have all of the anti-Star-Alien treasures from all three chapters of Cats of the Cosmos, lest you want to be fighting a battle against an army of Nigh-Invulnerable Aliens. Oh, and in case you've forgotten, this is on top of the three Zyclones ripping through the field with impunity.
  • In case the first two were too easy, try Tornado Carnival III. While there are only two Cyclones this time, those two happen to be the Super Cosmic Cyclone and Zyclone. The two bosses cover each other's type weaknesses well, and dealing with both at once is incredibly difficult. The spam of Zoges and Shibalien Elites doesn't help, either. And the reward is, you guessed it, three measly silver tickets!
  • Primeval Cyclone, which is found in Typhoon Nemo (Charybdis’ Mouth), is downright unfair. While it doesn't have as much attack as the others, it's a pure Relic type boss (giving it very few exploitable weaknesses at the point that you first encounter it) that is also the fastest Cyclone in the game and is Immune to Flinching. What's more, like all Relics, it can Curse your Cats to disable generic anti-trait defenses, and in spite of its low attack power making it susceptible to Weaken, it counteracts this by tripling its damage when below half HP, making it much harder to handle. All this, combined with the Gory Blacks, Li’l Bun Buns and Sir Rels that come along with it, makes beating this Cyclone quite a difficult task.
    • Typhoon Nemo, Primeval Cyclone's revenge stage, kicks it up a notch. Creation's Gyre isn't so bad, since it's the same stage but with a $900 or less restriction, which still leaves most of the popular options for controlling and killing Primeval Cyclone, such as Talented Rodeo Cat, Professor Cat Jobs, Can Can, and even Modern Cat from the original stage. However, while Extinction's Vortex gives you time to save money before engaging the boss, this also makes it impossible to isolate and stall out the Cyclone like you could before. Primeval Cyclone itself comes out with a much stronger slew of support that will relentlessly push into your lines as you try to stall the Cyclone, including Chickful A., Angelic Sleipnir, and Corporal Weyland, the latter of which is particularly painful as he can warp or wipe out your stack of CC units that are keeping Primeval Cyclone at bay.
  • The Aku Cyclone from The Great Diablo (Wrath of Hell) may be slower and less damaging than the other Cyclones, but it offsets this with a titanic Shield that will be fully restored with every 25% of health lost, which effectively turns its health from a managable 1,666,666 to over 8 million if you can't land Shield Piercing attacks. More importantly, the shield grants total immunity to crowd control and debuffs while active, which means that for the majority of the fight, the only way to slow down its advance is to try and block it with bulky meatshields, throwing the usual Cyclone strategy out the window; your forces will also have to contend with hard-hitting Aku Gories and Ginger Snaches that will take Shield Piercing hits for the Cyclone and help it gain ground. What really makes it painful is that at the point you encounter it, you likely don't have many consistent Shield Piercers, with pretty much all non-Uber options besides Talented Li'l Macho Legs being locked behind a hefty sum of Behemoth Stones; Aku Researcher would perform well against it, but you need to beat Aku Cyclone to even get it in the first place. Fortunately, a well-raised Bellydancer Cat with the Target Aku Talent can greatly help in dealing with it.
    • Aku Cyclone returns with a vengeance in the Greatest Diablo. The first stage is fairly easy, as it merely restricts you to Rares and Ubers, with most of the strongest units for handling the stage being Rares already, such as the aforementioned Bellydancer and Cameraman, while the Aku Researcher you got from the initial stage can fairly easily crack Aku Cyclone's Shield. The second stage, Fury of Hell, is much harder, featuring a 200% Aku Cyclone backed up by far more ferocious Aku enemies to push through a defense that'd stall out a normal one, with Midnite Ds and Capies to constantly take hits from your Shield Piercers, and constant Condemned Pengs and Devil Wives that will use their death Surges to blow holes in your defense or wipe out Shield Piercers.
• Thought the Crazed stages were bad? Say hello to the Manic stages. Much, MUCH harder versions of the Crazed stages that also disable continues, where you may unlock the True Forms of the Crazed Cats. However, don't expect the game to just hand them over - these levels are some of the most notorious ones in the game for a reason...
  • Absolute Defence too easy for you? Try Vulcanizer, containing the Manic Eraser Cat. It has close on to 5 million health, and its attack power is through the roof. The Gories have been replaced with heavily buffed Gory Blacks, and the Duches with Capies, both of which will shred your front lines with relative ease.
  • Flappy Cat gets upgraded into an even worse Marathon Level through Forest Beasts, which brings in the Manic Flying Cat. It has an exceptionally deadly attack with extreme range, but it now has the health to back it up — and it's still Immune to Flinching, just like its weaker predecessor. To top it all off, the Rain D.s and Bores have been buffed up, with Bore interchanging with his alien counterpart. The only saving grace is that weak Mooths will occasionally spawn, serving to fill your cash reserves up if you're running low.
  • Fish Hell was a Breather Level among the crazed stages, due to the weakness of each Crazed Fish, but Ogre Island ratchets the difficulty right back up. The Manic Island Cat has stats far higher than the Crazed Fish Cat while coming in hordes just as huge, and it gives far less money upon death, to boot. The boss Super Metal Hippoe is replaced with Berserkory, which almost presents a Sadistic Choice: do you want your Cats to die from the horde of Manic Island Cats, or from Berserkory's punishing shockwaves? If you take too long to win, waves of Brollows will also start coming to punish your Cats even harder.
  • Draconian will push your stalling and money-management skills to the limit. Each Manic King Dragon Cat can put out a stunning amount of damage from very far away, and the Otta-smack-u's are even stronger than before while giving out just as little money, with Dark Otters added to the mix on top of that. If you can't manage the little money you're given, expect to get overwhelmed. And even if you've finally gotten rid of them, if you damage the base after taking too long to beat the stage, reinforcements come in the form of more Manic King Dragons, so be snappy about breaking down the enemy base!
  • Resident Feline is far worse (and far more luck-based) than the original Crazed Titan stage. The Manic Jamiera Cat has extreme health and attack power, good attack speed... and a 1-in-4 chance to do an extremely deadly shockwave. What's more, the Gory Blacks and Shadow Boxer K.'s have been powered up, too! Even if you're packing Cats that can negate waves, the boss is guaranteed to knock back whatever it hits. If it lands a hit on your wave blocker, it'll be rendered intangible for just long enough for the wave to devastate your front lines.
• Crazed Moneko, specifically her last stage (in THE MOON). Instead of one stage, Crazed Moneko has four, and the fourth level comes directly after the third (which is no walk in the park since it has both tough Zombies and a Sleipnir), so you need to make one layout that can handle two vastly different levels at once. Moneko herself is significantly watered down in the early stages, but in the final stage (where you actually unlock her), she has a colossal amount of HP and a devastatingly powerful multi-hit attack with a 50% crit rate. To make matters worse, Crazed Moneko is is guaranteed to fire a devastating shockwave if her third hit connects, which can crit for a lethal 40,000 damage to nearly your entire army. She will mow down your army unless you bring anti shockwave units, which are exceedingly rare. Oh, and buffed, respawning Bores, Cyberhorns, and Imperator Saels assist her as well.
• Similarly, most of the Li'l Cats Awaken Stages where you unlock the True Forms of the Li'l Cats. They're of a difficulty level a bit below the Manic Stages, but are made infinitely harder by the fact that they only permit Specials and Rares. Oh, and continues are disabled too.
  • Tiny Meows has the Li'l Mohawk Cat, which like its predecessor has ridiculous health, enormous DPS, and nonstop area attacks. The Teacher Bears aren't as magnified as in Deathhawk, but the Master As have been replaced by Professor As; they can do even higher damage at even longer range, all while being able to slow your units while the Li'l Mohawk shreds your frontline.
  • Tiny Will may be an exception, as it sends out the Li'l Eraser Cat, which for some reason has less HP than the Li'l Mohawk and even the original Crazed Tank. However, the difficulty of the original stage is still intact, as there are still buffed Gory Blacks and Owlbrows, and the Duches/Capys from before have been replaced with heavily buffed Dagshunds, not to mention that its reduced HP is less of a disadvantage due to your greatly limited team composition.
  • Tiny Chopper sends out the Li'l Dark Cat, which has the same HP, freezing effect and crushingly fast attack speed as its Manic counterpart, although it does a lot less damage. However, the Reds in the level are disposed of in favor of Angel enemies, including Sunfish Jones, who will blast apart anything that gets too close to him. Since anti-angel rares and specials are scarce, taking him and his Angelic army down with only Special/Rare cats can prove to be a problem.
  • Tiny Wings has the Li'l Flying Cat as the boss. While it has lower stats than Manic Flying Cat, it still has extremely high HP and devastating long-ranged attacks, which means you will spend a long time chipping this guy down to nothing. The Bores have been ditched in favor of extremely buffed One Horns, and the Mooths with Owlbrows, which will work together to slowly make mincemeat of your frontline while the boss devastates you with its laser attacks.
  • Tiny Fins constantly spams Li'l Island Cats, which have slightly lower attack than the Manic Island, but make up for that with slightly more health. A constant stream of them is extremely taxing on your limited meatshields, and that's not even getting into the buffed Super Metal Hippoe that will show up once you hit the base.
  • Tiny Tail sends out several Li'l King Dragon Cats which, while having significantly less health than even the normal Crazed Lizard, make up with it for much more powerful attacks, even stronger than the Manic King Dragon. In addition, while no reinforcements come when you hit the base, the level can stack up to 8 Li'l King Dragons compared to Draconian's 3. The stream of Otta-smack-u's is ditched in favor of swarms of Gabriels and Doge Darks which, although giving you far more cash, can shred your frontlines much more effictively.
  • And Tiny Fists might be the worst offender of them all. While the Li'l Jamiera Cat may have less damage than even the Crazed Titan, only the same HP as the Crazed Titan, and none of the knockback/slowing effects, it compensates for that with a 90% chance to fire a Level 7 Shockwave with each attack. Worse still, since it's a Calamity Stage, you are locked out of most cats that have immunity to shockwaves, the exceptions being Li'l Lion, Miyamoku Musashi, and Curling Cat, most of which require strenuous effort to get. While the support isn't as threatening, there are Trolly Bloggers thrown into the mix to catch you off guard.
• Pretty much all the Advent Stages are this. Tellingly, they were the first to be rated Deadly, or even Merciless. Worst of all, Cat food restarts and Save Scumming are disabled for these stages.
  • Clionel Ascendant (No Plan A), the first Angelic Advent Stage, is downright infamous for being this. The boss, Cruel Angel Clionel, has a minimum range... and that's its ONLY weakness. It has a lot of health, and its attack is fast, ludicrously powerful and extremely long ranged, as well as slowing anything that survives. Not to mention it comes with Angelic Gories, Trolly Bloggers and Angelic Sleipnirs, all of which are Demonic Spiders of the worst kind and pretty much exist to stop your units from entering Clionel's blind spot — the Sleipnirs are particularly notorious, since they cover its minimum range almost perfectly. You will need a lot of patience and careful strategizing if victory over Clionel is to be attained - even Uber Rares usually can't save you, unless they are meant to be disposable.
    • The game tops itself with Clionel Dominant, the Awakening stage for Catway. The first stage (New Testament) is a redo of No Plan A, but with a restriction of 5 units on the field at once. Considering how hard No Plan A was already, doing it with only 5 units on screen at once is a nightmare at best and impossible at worst. The second stage, A Cat Screaming Love, is a mixed bag - while the Sleipnirs and Angelic Gories are gone, they've been replaced with extremely buffed Heavenly Hippoes and Relic Doges. The Doges in particular are incredibly nasty - in addition to their high stats, they can curse your units, depriving them of the anti-Angel abilities and effectively making Clionel and the other minions immune to their special effects.
  • River Styx (Realm of Carnage), the first Red Advent Stage, is quite possibly one of the hardest ones. The boss, Hannya, has massive range, incredible attack power, relatively fast attack speed, weakens your cats to 1/4 of their attack power at a guaranteed rate to render her comparatively low HP (1,000,000) a non-issue, and is supported by lots of Ginger Snaches, Bores, and R. Osts. The R. Ost in particular is a real hair-puller - as a White enemy, it laughs in the face of the anti-Reds you likely brought to deal with Hannya and the Bores, and the units that usually counter it are liable to get destroyed by Hannya.
    • Hannya returns with a vengeance in the much harder River Acheron Stages. Wrath of Carnage has you redo Realm of Carnage, but without using any Rare or Super Rare units - which deprives you of nearly all the options used to defeat Hannya the first time around, and all but forces you to either abuse Ubers or use overleveled Normals/Specials. While the second stage, Revenge of Carnage, is considered to be slightly easier^note the infamous R.Osts are gone, and Hannya only comes out when the base is hit, making her easier to stall, it's still no slouch - Hannya now supports a legion of Zombie enemies, which will gleefully abuse the shorter stage length to burrow all the way to your base and rip through the units sent to fend off Hannya with impunity. Fortunately, however, Zombies are quite easy to deal with as the wide variety of disposable general attackers can shred them with ease.
  • Daboo of the Dead's rematch stage, Dead by Encore, is one of the hardest of them all. The first level, Prisoner’s Progress, is already a handful; it’s the original stage, already featuring the powerful and long-ranged Daboo with waves of Angel and Zombie support, but with no cats under $1200, heavily reducing your choice of non-Uber cats that make this stage bearable. The second, March to Death, can be best described as Bionic Seaweed with Daboo, featuring the boss supported by a legion of triple strength metal enemies. Normally, the metals by themselves aren’t too problematic, but since Daboo can easily one-hit kill most, if not all, anti-metals and critical attackers, they become a nightmare to kill since they No-Sell everything else. And said metals include two Super Metal Hippoes and a Sir Metal Seal, all of which push incredibly hard and are also extremely hard to kill thanks to their buffs and Daboo killing all of your crit hitters. You will need a ton of luck if you want to stand a chance at beating this stage.
  • King Wahwah's Revenge (N-1 Grand Prix), the first White Advent Stage, has the eponymous King Wahwah as the boss, who has rather low HP for an Advent Boss but a deadly, uber-long range multi-stage attack that is guaranteed to knock back anything it hits. As a typeless boss, there are very few units able to exploit it, and it comes backed up with hyper-buffed Doge and Kang Roo variants to mix things up. The kicker? The stage only allows Normals and Uber Rares, which greatly limits your choices of cats and makes an already hard stage even harder. Your only options are to hope that you have Ubers that you can use or use incredibly overleveled Normals.
    • Then comes King Wahwah’s Return, his rematch stage. The first stage, Revenge of N-1, might be easier thanks to restricting you to Super Rares rather than Normal/Uber, and some Super Rares hold powerful advantages over some of the enemy types in the stage. However, the second stage, Wrath of the Dogelord, is not. Instead of coming with a slow trickle of enemies, King Wahwah now comes with a massive Zerg Rush of peons, consisting of Those Guys, Trolly Bloggers, Mr. Angels, Ginger Snaches, Kroxos, and Brollows. This makes for a deadly cycle wherein the heavy spam of Mooks means that when Wahwah attacks, they’ll be able to push forward thanks to his knockback, which also allows Wahwah to move forward, repeating the cycle. While the spam dies down a little while after the Brollows spawn, chances are you'll be nearing defeat by that point. The only consistent way for this stage is to eradicate peons using Slime Cat's wave attack, but given how Slime comes from a difficult stage, it isn't effective until late game.
  • Blue Impact (Puffer Planet), the 2nd Alien advent, pits you against Puffsley's Comet. He's extremely fast and will ram the first target he reaches, dealing a colossal amount of damage in a deceptively wide area (~500-500, outranging many ranged attackers), while knocking back anything that survives. While he has to rest for a significant amount of time between attacks, getting knocked back will instantly reset his attack - and he has 400 knockbacks, which lets him attack at a disturbingly frequent rate. His 400 knockbacks also make him a lot harder to hit with slow-but-damaging attacks, which helps circumvent his HP, which is on the lower end of advent bosses (900,000, meaning he gets knocked back every time he takes a measly 2250 damage). Plus, he doesn't fight alone - he's supported by hyper-buffed Starred Aliens, including Star Pengs that will rip into your meatshields and Corporal Weylands/Project A's to harass you from range. Oh, and all of his peons can use Warp, which can potentially open a hole in your lines for Puffsley's Comet to rush through and wreak havoc.
  • With the surprising advent of alternative Advents, the first of these - Courts of Torment (The Pure Land), the Red/Black advent - proves to be an extreme challenge. The boss, Black Okame, is a variant of Hannya that has shorter range, less damage, and can't inflict Weaken. However, he compensates with over double the health, a doubled attack rate, an omnistrike that puts his effective range on par with his predecessor, and guaranteed knockback on his attacks. He can also No-Sell Freeze, so using things like Bombercat or iCat on him are out of the question, and additionally doesn't get knocked back until death, making him harder to push back without dedicated knockback or a Sniper Cat. And like any boss worth its salt, he comes with fierce reinforcements in the form of extremely buffed up Ginger Snaches, Doge Darks, and Gory Blacks, all of which are designed to rip through your defenses while Okame advances and takes potshots. His only weakness is his dual typing burdening him with many more type weaknesses - provided, of course, the units with type advantages over him are also able to outrange him or weather his brutal attacks.
  • The Old Queen (I'll Be Bug) is a piece of work. The boss of the level is Queen Mother V, a Relic/Floating variant of Queen B who has slightly higher damage, a slightly slower attack rate, and three more knockbacks. The kicker is that she trades in her Slow ability for the ability to Curse units for a whopping 111 seconds, essentially permanently disabling their special abilities if they get hit. Like Queen B, however, the main problem lies with her support units - the Relic Doges and Ginger Snaches can be a dangerous nuisance, and the One Horns can wall units sent to kill the Queen Mother. However, the most damning of them all are the double-strength Professor As that defend the boss' blind spot with constant, long-ranged attacks that rip through even tank units like wet tissue. Not only are these the strongest of any Professor As in the game, they have an infuriatingly high chance to slow units and render them unable to approach again before being torn apart. And if Queen Mother V or the Relic Doges curse your anti-Red units, then there's nothing that can save them from the Professors or the other peons.
  • Bottom of the Swamp (Flow Like the Stream) puts you against Kappy Jr., and what he lacks in range, he more then makes up for in other stats - packing 2 million HP, nearly 40k damage per hit, and a White typing that gives him few weaknesses. However, his true power is his ability to create a devastating Surge Attack if his hit connects, potentially wiping entire clusters of cats off the map at once. The worst part about this is that the Surge spawns at a random point within a range of 150-750, meaning that whether it kills off your frontliners or valuable backline DPS is entirely up to luck. His peons can also be a problem, being Those Guys, The Thrillerz, and Scissoroos, who tank for Kappy, cut off your meatshield line, and do big damage, respectively. The Thrillerz are the most annoying, due to grouping up units farther away than normal, causing them to be destroyed by Kappy's surge attack, letting him advance and allowing the cycle to start anew.
    • As if Kappy Jr. wasn't insane enough to begin with, his revenge stages in Top of the Bog are a step up in difficulty. Guided by Currents isn't so bad, since it's just the original stage, except it disables use of Super Rares and Specials, which doesn't matter all that much since most of the Cats useful on the stage are Rare, though some powerful non-Uber burst damage options are not allowed. However, the second stage, Water Conservancy, is far worse — Kappy comes with a constant stream of Relic Doges to hold onto the frontlines, and some Lorises to snipe anti-Surge attackers. The use of Curse makes it harder for anti-White Cats to work, and thus makes Kappy much more dangerous.
  • Wanwan's Glory (Dogsville), the home of Everlord Wanwan, is absolute hell, and far more dangerous than its original Insane difficulty would suggest. Wanwan himself is very much like a stronger, Star-Alien version of his predecessor King WahWah, being an ultra-long-range multihit attacker with decently high HP, high damage, and Omnistrike for bonus pushing power. However, what makes him so much worse is that if a cat gets hit with his third attack, he warps them for over a minute, basically preventing them from having an impact on the battle at all. Said third hit is very weak in comparison to his first two attacks, which allows it to warp even non-tanky meatshields with ease. What makes this worse? The battle only allows you to have 10 cats on the field at any one time and warped cats do count towards that limit, potentially leaving you a sitting duck if 10 cats have been warped. Trying to prevent him from warping via blocking it? Well, try doing that when Capy, Sir Rel, Relic Doge, Mistress Celeboodle, and Croconator are attacking you constantly - the Capies in particular are a problem, as the first one spawns so early that you may not have enough money to hold them off (never mind the cat limit and Wanwan's ability preventing proper meatshielding). It's possible to use his first two hits to kill any cats in his range before they get hit by his warping hit, but this stage can still be very tough, even with that trick.
  • Z-Onel Rises! (Last of the Dead) will make you miss No Plan A. The boss is Death Angel Z-Onel, who has a lot less HP and a bit less damage than Cruel Angel Clionel, but longer range and the ability to freeze cats. The problem arises with the fact that there are two of them - the Death Angels have an annoying tendency to cover each other's blind spots, creating a kill zone with no safe space to hide. Their strength is further exacerbated by the lethal peons - the double-strength Zuches in particular can burrow beneath your units, cutting off your forces and tearing into them with impunity before dying, reviving and repeating the process. However, the true killers are the 2,500% Star-Aliens that charge you at full force - hordes of Shibalien Elites to chip at your cats, groups of Star Pengs that are borderline immortal and can handily dismantle your units one by one, and two General GreGories to turn your defensive line into grated cheese. The icing on the cake is that if you don't use a Zombie Killer, the Z-Onels will revive with half health the instant after they die - even Daboo gave a small respite of 20 seconds.
• The Heavenly Tower starts off easy, but the later levels can get absolutely brutal, especially since floors 20+ disable continues. For example...
  • Floor 15 is the first major Difficulty Spike in the tower. Newer players may have a hard time fending off a Dober P.D. and buffed versions of the 3 enemies from the Old Guys About Town event.
  • Floor 24 spams all manner of buffed Black Enemies for a long period of time, culminating with Dark Lazer as the boss. Combined with the long-ranged support from Le'noir and Tackey, this stage becomes extremely difficult without anti-Black units or Ubers.
  • Floor 28 is a Metal fest, featuring every standard Metal in the game save for Metal Hippoe and Metal Cyclone under heavy buffs. Yes, that includes Super Metal Hippoe and Sir Metal Seal. While you would be tempted to bring a full team of critical hitters, the stack of Loincloth Cats in the back will dispose of any crit-hitters you send to kill the metals. Of course, there's the solution of using wave attackers.
  • All of this pales to the first unique-boss floor: Floor 30. There is very little support in this level (occasional Trolly Bloggers, Ginger Snaches and Doge Darks), but the main challenge is the boss Hermit Cat. He has 4 million health, a crushingly high total attack stat of 66,666, a 3-stage attack, which divides the attack stat by 3, and a guaranteed chance to make a level 5 shockwave with each of the 3 attacks. Worse, since he's typeless, he cannot be easily exploited by many cats, any shockwave immune units can and will be taken down by his normal attacks and his support can easily rush down the meatshields that try to stop Hermit Cat and rush you down if he does a wave attack. You will need copious shockwave-proof Ubers and/or immense concentration and strong anti-peon cats to defeat him, although this stage's saving grace is that you are guaranteed to get Hermit Cat if you beat it.
  • Floor 32 spawns TWO Crazed Tanks at the start of the level. If that's not enough, Rain D. is constantly spawned as well.
  • Floor 34 has a heavily buffed Ururun Wolf sent out at the start, but that's only the beginning, as after 30 seconds a 200% Cosmic Cyclone will be sent out as well. Keeping your anti-aliens alive can prove to be a major problem with Ururun herself delivering lethal long-ranged attacks constantly.
  • Were the Metal Cyclone and Zyclone not RNG-heavy enough for you? Well, fear not, because Floor 38 has you fight both of them at once. And yes, they're still backed up by peons in the form of Metal Doge and Zoge.
  • Floor 39 features a 200% Codename: Red Riding as the enemy boss, backed up by an Elder Sloth and a horde of Mr. Moles and Tackeys. It's almost obligatory to pin her to her base, or else she'll destroy your base in 5 hits maximum — and the constant barrage of Long Distance attacks doesn't make things any easier.
  • Floor 40 has you fight Masked Yulala as the boss. While he's nowhere as strong as Hermit Cat from Floor 30, he has crushingly fast area attacks, is guaranteed to warp your cats backwards upon a hit, and is insanely fast — fast enough to reach your base in about ten seconds flat. If you don't meatshield properly (which is very hard to do as you need near frame-perfect timing to pull it off) and use units with Warp Blocker, then Yulala will blitz your base and wreck it in a matter of seconds, and in addition to this it's a typeless and hard to exploit. The icing on the cake is that the base will periodically send out Gabriels and Mr. Angels: enemies designed to screw up your meatshielding and let Yulala advance. However, like before, this level's redeeming quality is that you are guaranteed to get Yulala as a unit once you beat him.
  • Floor 41 starts off with the Corrupted Valkyrie Cat after a short while, which isn't so bad, since she's unmagnified. But then, the Manic Lion Cats start coming, and things only escalate when Raging Bahamut Cat joins the fray. It's a brutally strong push for so early in the level.
  • Floor 43 sees the return of Inumusha. While he's missing his Doge Base this time around, he's swapped it out for a horde of powered-up Zombies, including Zang Roo and Dread Bore. If you want to pack your lineup with anti-Zombie units, the strong UltraBaaBaas and Corporal Weylands will throw a wrench in your plans, blocking off and Warping your attackers. Even with a high-level Holy Blast cannon, it's by no means easy.
  • Floor 45 sends out Queen B at the start, supported by three Bakoos sent out at intervals. Normally, close-ranged heavy-hitters would work well against Queen B, but here, they just trigger an attack from Bakoo, freezing a good chunk of the Cats on the field and letting the enemies advance. Again, the support is fairly minor (Squire Rel, Those Guys, Duche and Dagshund), but it doesn't need to be strong; the Mooks just need to take an attack that was meant for one of the bosses, letting them exploit the opening to defeat you.
  • Floor 47 has gained notoriety as possibly the hardest level in the entire game. It's another Dual Boss floor, but instead of two advents, it's Puffsley's Comet paired with Crazed Moneko. While Moneko can normally be dealt with using wave blockers and a stack of ranged attackers, tactics like that are suicidal against Puffsley, as he'll be knocked back and unleash devastating attacks on your units. The support is a force to be reckoned with by itself this time, too; the Owlbrows aren't too bad, but there are several waves of strong Brollows and obnoxiously powerful Tackeys. The worst part about the stage is that it's tiny - the stage length is so small that it only takes a one-second opening to send Puffsley, the main threat, hurtling into your base.
  • Floor 48 takes a break from the Dual Boss mania to send a horde of powered-up Metals at you, which normally wouldn't be so bad... especially since some of the more obnoxious Metals, like Sir Metal Seal, are missing. Unfortunately, this time, they're supported by Mecha-Bun, of all things. Good luck trying to land those elusive Critical Hits while he rips apart your attackers with his devastating Omnistrike punches. And if you want to kill Mecha-Bun first, you'll have to go through the metals and his gigantic amount of health.
  • Then, there is Floor 49. Remember Hermit Cat, or Mystic Mask Yulala? Remember how tough they were to beat individually? Well, Floor 49 has you take on both of them at once. Fortunately, they're the only real threats in the stage; their "support" consists of unbuffed Mooths and Kang Roos, which serve to hand the player money on a silver platter. Still, underestimating the two bosses is practically a death wish.
  • Floor 50 ups the ante even more. Master Uril is yet another colorless powerhouse with a colossal amount of HP, fast Omnistrike attacks that hit very hard and at a surprising range, along with the ability to Curse units. However, he also pulls out the dreaded Surge Attack skill, which allows him to instantly kill off scores of cats in an unpredictable manner while cursing them - plus, unlike Kappy Jr., Uril's Surge lasts long enough that it can catch out oncoming cats while hitting tankier ones more than once. His peon support is also difficult, consisting of Trolly Bloggers, Relic Doges and Sir Rels that will gleefully screw with your units while the boss kills them. Fortunately, his short engage range makes him highly susceptible to Status Effects, and much like Yulala or Hermit, there are consistent cheese strategies against him.
• Every stage in the Growing Strange series of levels is this. Fittingly, all of them have the Merciless difficulty. What makes these stages even harder is that after beating the entrance stage, you will get a random stage from 7, each one specializing in a different enemy type. As such, specializing a team isn't an option - you have to make an all-purpose lineup capable of handling the entry stage and any of the 7 stages after, which is easier said than done. The alternative is building a team that is specialized to handle only a few of the stages, but this comes at the cost of forfeiting those elusive Elder Catfruit Seeds if the random number god decided to give you one you weren't prepared for. In fact, these stages were so hard to make a general lineup for that, in version 8.0, all of them were made considerably easier (The exception being An Elder Secret, which was made easier back in version 7.5).
  • An Elder Secret is only the entry stage, but it already doesn't mess around. Players will have to contend with incredibly buffed enemies of all types, and a tag-team combo of a buffed Berserkory and Maawth as the bosses.
  • Color of Blood, the Red stage, rolls out an unholy combo of several Capies, Professor A., and Hackey serve as the bosses, each of which is freakishly tough in its own right. The three of them won't hesitate to combine their abilities to give your Cats one hell of a time trying to take them down, not helped by the constant spam of hyper-buffed Ginger Snaches.
  • Fear of Flying is often considered the easiest of the stages. Nonetheless, a horde of buffed Li'l Bun Buns and Brollows, compounded by an infinite swarm of Pigeon De Sables, can prove to be taxing on your defenses.
  • Hearts of Darkness sends out Razorback backed up by a ton of Black peons, including Tackeys. Razorback himself has a ton of health and can charge through your defenses very quickly, while his minions get rid of any stallers that could normally wall Razorback. Not to mention, the Tackeys will gleefully snipe all of your longer-ranged units, including Bombercats that would normally be Razorback's kryptonite.
  • Holy Wrath features numerous Winged Pigges, along with Cala Maria and a bunch of Chickful As. The Winged Pigges' weaken ability will make anything with less than 341 range useless, while using their immense bulk to wall your cats and allow Cala Maria/Chickful A to tear through your units with impunity.
  • Galactic Threat immediately sends out buffed Scissoroos that have incredibly high pushing power considering how little money you likely have at that point in the level. And when you hit the base, several Ursamajors and an Elder Sloth come out, which will blast through any defenses you can muster unless you have a sufficent amount of anti-Aliens capable of outranging those two.
  • Clash of Steel is a Metal gauntlet featuring Metal Doges and Metal One Horns, with Super Metal Hippoe and Sir Metal Seal serving as the boss. What makes it difficult is that all of these Metals are subjected to a 300% buff, making them able to plow through your forces with alarming speed and shrug off crits from even the most damaging crit-hitters in your arsenal, on top of the RNG-heavy nature of the Metals in general. The worst part is that out of all the enemy types present, Metal is most demanding of specialized teams which aren't really good anywhere else, meaning that if you've built your team to handle any or all of the other possible continuation stages, it may not be able to handle the buffed Metals, and vice versa.
  • Seas of Death isn't really anything to write home about, just featuring a huge rush of hyper-buffed Zombies and a Zamelle as the boss. Still, you'd have better brought at least a good Zombie Killer or you're toast. Luckily, Shigong trivializes this stage if you can fit him into your lineup.
• While most of the Enigma stages that let you unlock Talent Orbs aren't too bad, some of them are just plain unfair, especially considering how much they need to be played to get any sort of Orb worth using.
  • Holy Summit (Summit Shrine) sends Angelic Gories and Chickful As at you with a strong Sunfish Jones as support, giving you little time to build up money. It's fairly easy with a Rich Cat, but becomes insane without one.
  • Cosmic Frontier (Frontier Shrine) rushes you fast with UltraBaaBaas and an Imperator Sael, which are somewhat tough, but not that bad to deal with. But then, it sends out an incredibly powerful Bun Bun Symbiote after a short period of time, with further rushes of strong Aliens (including Star Pengs and Corporal Weylands) to back him up. Everything comes so fast that the player likely won't have enough money on hand to fend them off.
  • Necro Frontier (Frontier Shrine) is nearly as difficult as Zombie stages found in the Uncanny Legends. While it lets you stall for money at the beginning, merely sending out a Coffin Zoge and The Thrillerz, all bets are off when the base is hit — Lord Gravey and a huge horde of powered-up Zombies will charge you at full force, including Cadaver Bears to rip apart your backlines and Li'l Zyclones to prevent you from advancing while taking hits for the other Zombies.
• The Legend Quest is very infamous thanks to its status as a giant Luck-Based Mission. All the event consists of is a series of Stories of Legend stages that are randomly picked depending on what Level the player is in. ^{More specifically} The level will take any Stories of Legend stage between the base subchapter, indicated by the Level’s number, and its following subchapter. (e.g Level 1 will take a stage between Subchapter 1 and 2, Level 8 will take a stage between Subchapter 8 and 9, etc.) This wouldn’t be too bad, if it wasn’t for the fact that upon playing any stage, a random portion of your current lineup will get replaced by completely random cats. Worse still, it’s entirely possible that nearly all of your cats will get affected by this, giving you a difficult time at best, and at worst making the level Unwinnable by Design if you just don't have the right units to handle it, like a Metal-heavy stage with no crits or any gimmick level like those from Grotesque Gallery. Mercifully, as you play the same stage over and over, the portion of cats that will be randomised will become smaller and smaller, to the point where it will only change 2-0 cats in the lineup. You don’t want to constantly do this, however, as playing these stages require crowns, which are obtainable by beating crown/level difficulties in Stories of Legend. Every time you win or lose a stage, the required crowns increase by 1, up to a max of 5 crowns, and crowns will only recover if the next Legend Quest event rolls around. If you fail to beat every single stage it has and can’t get any more crowns, it’s game over for your run.
  • The Underground Labyrinth follows the same logic, with 100 escalating floors where a random selection of your lineup is permanently locked every time you beat a level, effectively forcing you to have a gigantic roster of cats you can use as fodder for the earlier levels, and enough well-raised cats that can actually take care of the harder stages with your rapidly dwindling roster. Furthermore, even if you lose a level, you'll get 2 of your cats locked out anyways, so if you can't beat each level in a single attempt, it actively lowers your chances of getting further in the gauntlet. If you want to clear the whole Labyrinth, you'll need upwards of 400 units that can be used, assuming that you clear each stage in one shot, as well as luck on whether or not important units get trapped despite preparation, how many units are trapped per floor, and how many rescues you get to save your trapped units.
• A lot of the Baron stages count due to being repeated battles with an extremely powerful boss backed up by equally strong peons, with each repeat causing the enemy magnifications to go up until they reach borderline impossible levels; although later updates shortened the number of stages from 60 to 20, the actually difficulty of the stages didn't go down at all. In particular, a few stand out among them:
  • From Baron Seal Strikes, the very last stage is the worst one of them all: the titular Baron Seal has 3,300,000 HP, deals 66,000 damage, attacks nearly every second, and can freeze your cats for three seconds and weaken then to half their original strength. His peons? They could be considered bosses and mini-bosses on their own; Shibalien Elites, Gabriels, Mistress Celeboodles, Star Pengs, Cala Maria, and Angelic Gories, all with magnifications that surpass even late-game standards, will hunt you down in your fight. And when we say that they can be considered as bosses on their own, we mean it. The Star Pengs and Shibalien Elites? 3000% magnification, and it just gets worse from there, with the Angelic Gories being at 600% and the Cala Maria being at 250%. You basically need huge amounts of Anti-Red, Angel and Alien Ubers just to stand a chance, with the only somewhat reliable no-Uber strategy being "Stack Cyberpunks in a way that their attacks leave no room for even a single frame of unslowed movement and hope that everything else goes well".
  • Mega Menace continues the trend of incredibly tough Baron stages. On Mighty Wings Lv. MAX features a Mega Mooth with 1.2 million HP and 20,000 damage — which may seem weak compared to the other Baron enemies, but becomes very dangerous when combined with his Omnistrike attacks and knockback. The real threats, however, are the support enemies — unlimited 600% Pigeon de Sables which can rip apart your Cats with their waves, a horde of 400% Brollows which can destroy almost anything not resistant to Floating in one shot, and 600% Zroco, Zigge, and Zory to cut off your meatshields and deliver punishing attacks. There's even a Professor A. guarding Mega Mooth at close range, like with Queen Mother V — except this time, Mega Mooth can still hit cats up close, making both of them even more annoying to take down.
  • Horrorpotamus, while simpler in stage design than the other stages, is almost impossible to beat with no Ubers. Cosmic Juggernaut Lv. MAX sends out Super Hyppoh fairly quickly — buffed up to have 2,520,000 HP and 45,000 damage per hit, which is made even worse by her quick attack rate and Omnistrike turning her into one of the strongest pushers in the entire game. However, the stage is made infinitely worse by the 400% Tackeys, the strongest in the game; there may be only 2 of them, but they hit hard enough to One-Hit Kill most non-Ubers and rip huge chunks out of the survivors. Close-ranged units that can evade Tackey's shots will end up getting killed by Super Hyppoh, instead. While the other enemies in the stage (Doge Darks, Celeboodles, Croconators, and Trolly Bloggers) aren't particularly threatening, they can still be annoying, push forward, and help the boss or the Tackeys get closer to your base.
• A lot of the Behemoth Culling stages qualify as this, due to containing large amounts of the namesake Behemoths, almost all of which qualify as Demonic Spiders or Boss in Mook Clothing. While Hidden Forest of Gapra may be a relative warmup level since it's meant for beginners, Ashvini Desert and Jinfore Volcano will make you work for those Behemoth Stones, which is not good since you'll need them to grab some powerful new cats, including Behemoth Slayers in the first place. A few standouts:
  • Burning Sands Area 6 is the first major wall in Ashvini Desert. Crustaceous Scissorex is back, but unlike its first appearance where it was relatively unprotected, it now comes with two extremely powerful Ursamajors, along with support from Wild Doge and General GreGory. The Ursamajors will protect Scissorex from incoming attacks as it crushes your units from afar, in particular completely shutting down the usage of Seafarer to permafreeze Scissorex, while Scissorex can obliterate any long-ranged units that would normally be used to take down the bears. Once either Ursamajor Turns Red, their extreme damage output will push through your meatshields and let Scissorex advance, which combined with the other pushers can quickly lead to you losing ground until Scissorex is in range to tear your base down. The only saving grace is that there are weak UltraBaaBaas which can be used to stack long distance units (or Waves to deal with Ursamajor specifically).
  • Oddity in the Desert II (Earthshaking Fist) is another Scissorex stage, this time supporting him with powerful pushers like Ragin' Gory, Wild Doge, and Shadow Boxer K. However, if you don't kill Scissorex in 100 seconds, Angelic Beast Rajakong will show up to ruin your day, letting Scissorex gain ground while taking cover behind Scissorex each time it gets knocked back. If you don't have Mushroom Cat to handle Rajakong, you've pretty much lost, encouraging you to simply beat down Scissorex as fast as possible, but this is harder than it sounds due to his backup and the difficulty of getting units up close to him.
  • Sandstorm Area 19 is the penultimate stage of Ashvini Desert, and doesn't pull its punches. It opens up with a Lophiiformes Angaburu with support from Wild Doges, Mr. Angel, and Gory, which is fairly manageable and lets you save up some money. However, once you hit the base, Darkjo will spawn alongside St. Dober, the latter of which is an incredible wall with extreme attack and defense, along with his wildly inconsistent Surges making it a borderline Luck-Based Mission whether or not he obliterates your lines. At the same time, the previous peons will start coming out in full force to support Dober and Darkjo's advance, with another Angaburu also appearing to cripple your entire frontline with his slowing Mini-Surges. If enough time passes, Crustaceous Scissorex will spawn alongside another Angaburu; woe betide you if you haven't severely injured or killed Darkjo and Dober at this point, as you won't be able to make it to Scissorex and stop it from destroying everyone that tries to resist the others.
  • Magma Tunnel Area 4 is the introduction stage of Pterowl Hazuku, with Hazuku's blindspot being protected by J.J. Jackrabbit and H. Nah, both of which are incredibly good at keeping cats in Hazuku's danger zone thanks to their powerful attacks and guaranteed knockback, leading to your entire team being obliterated by Hazuku's deadly attacks. The stage gives you time to rush down Hazuku and kill it before the others show up, but if your cats lack the speed and damage to take out Hazuku's gigantic health bar before his support starts rolling in, you may as well forfeit then and there.
  • Lava Caves Area 7 immediately opens up with Brollow and Wild Doge, the latter of which is buffed to 200% for the remainder of the Volcano stages, immediately ripping into your early defenses and potentially causing you to lose the level seconds after it began. If you can overpower them, the Brollows don't let up, being joined by Pigeon de Sable later on, and it gets worse when you hit the base and Hazuku appears again, this time protected by Ahirujo. Courier can vaporize Ahirujo while being in Hazuku's blind spot, but the stream of Brollows and Pigeons make this a daunting task, especially since Ahirujo will easily kill any Octopus Cats that you send to take the hits for Courier.
  • Lava Caves Area 10 starts off with a managable stream of Formicidean Ariants, Gabriels, and Mooths, up until you hit the base, where Rajakong will greet you along with more Ariants. Rajakong is relatively managable since his support isn't that threatening outside of potentially Ariant if you can't kill it quickly; however, if you don't kill him in about 70 seconds, Pterowl Hazuku will spawn and almost guarantee your loss, as it's nearly impossible to remain in Hazuku's blindspot while Rajakong is still pushing. Killing Rajakong in that short of a time is a daunting task given his almost 2 million HP and frequent knockbacks, and as long as Hazuku spawns before he's dead, it'll likely lead to the duo gaining at least some ground before Rajakong dies, upon which it can still lead to a loss if you can't overpower the other peons and handle Ariant while taking down Hazuku.
  • Peril in the Volcano II (Performant Thunderclap) doesn't give you time to upgrade your Worker Cat before Vermilingua Rangmaster appears with support from Chickful A., which is initially managable despite your low funds. This changes once more Aku support comes rolling in, featuring a second Rangmaster, groups of Condemned Peng to blow your units apart with their death Surges, and Fallen Bear to make holding the line nearly impossible, especially if you haven't killed off the initial duo to get some cash. Just to add insult to injury, Zoges and Zigges will start appearing later on to disrupt your lines, letting the Aku advance faster.
  • Infernal Crater Area 13 starts with a strong push from a horde of Znaches and Zories, which makes it harder to stall for cash since they pose a credible threat and need heavy force to bring down. If you get past that, Rangmaster and Rajakong serve as the bosses, with the two of them forming a brutally effective duo as Rangmaster can take down the Ramen Cats that normally counter Rajakong and hold its ground whenever Rajakong falters, while Rajakong tears apart anti-Aku meatshields and lends the slower Rangmaster its pushing power. The main strategy for the stage is to try to damage Rangmaster as much as possible during the initial push, then hold off Rajakong and pray your ranged DPS takes him out.
  • If you didn't clear out Uncanny Legends and get some Legend True Forms or Great Ape Luza yet, then Peril in the Volcano III (Cursed Flaming Party) is when the game puts its foot down. Ancient Magamojoe serves as the boss of the level, and if you can't beat through his towering 2.2 million HP in about 50 seconds (extremely difficult without UL True Forms or extremely strong anti-Relic Ubers), Infernal Pegasus Deonil will appear and, together with Magamojoe, likely obliterate everything on the map before doing the same with your base. However, if you do have UL True Forms, you can simply demolish Magamojoe before Deonil appears, and if you get past this, said UL True Forms will make the rest of the Volcano substantially easier.
• The vast majority of Heartbeat Catcademy stages are incredibly easy, being balanced around the early game to the point that even the latest stages can be beaten with no sweat. The same cannot be said for one of the "Weekend ~Another Confession~" levels, "I Don't See You That Way". This stage requires you to use the Heartbeat Catcademy units, heavily limiting the strategy you can use. This usually isn't too much of a problem, but once the base is hit this stage throws a 150% Bore at you, which will very quickly tear your weak units apart even through the defensive abilities of Chalkboard Eraser Cat and Principal Cat. There are only 2 strategies that really work when it comes to beating this; either pray for luck on Class Rep Cat's Slow ability and whittle it down with Secret Crush and/or Principal Cats, or grind lots of Love Letters to boost your units enough to survive.

Collaboration Stages

• Puella Magi Madoka Magica Collab
  • The original incarnation of The Stagebuilding Witch (Deadly). It featured Walpurgisnacht, which had 2.4 million HP, lethal area attacks that were guaranteed to score a Critical Hit (resulting in its attacks doing 80,000 damage each and also stopping Metal Cat stalling in its tracks), a colossal Omnistrike coupled with a low standing range to give it huge pushing power, Base Destroyer to ensure it'll One-Hit Kill your base if it reaches it, and the ability to No-Sell all waves and status effects. While Walpurgis was (and still is) the only enemy on the stage, it was still easy to slip up when stalling her, and Walpurgis could easily punish even the smallest timing mistake and advance. While, for reasons unknown, Walpurgisnacht has been nerfed to 10% strength on her stage ever since the second rerun of the collaboration event in the Japanese version, even being the version of it that the English version got when the collab event arrived over there, the late 2021 rerun of the collaboration making her stage a Baron event gave her back her original strength, and then some; at the 10th and final stage, her stats are magnified by a whopping 6x, giving even high-leveled Witch Killer Ubers with the "My Very Best Friend" Cat Combo a hard time surviving against it. This turns Walpurgis into a very tedious Marathon Boss, testing your ability to time Manic Lions and other rushers into her range without losing focus.
  • When the collab arrived the second time in the Japanese version, it also introduced a far stronger foe: Homulilly, faced in A Fake Mitakihara. In her Veteran stage, she's nerfed to 30% so she does rather low damage - but even in this state, she still has more HP than the Crazed Titan boss. And when faced at her strongest in The Nutcracker Witch (Merciless), you best hope you've got your game on. In that stage, Homulilly has 9 million HP, a powerful area attack with a low standing range and massive Omnistrike (letting her push incredibly quickly), total immunity to waves and status effects, Base Destroyer to turn your base to rubble in a few hits if she catches it in her huge range, and worst of all - a guaranteed chance to knock back and halve the attack power of anything it hits. Since 12,000 damage isn't a One-Hit Kill most of the time, her weaken massively cripples your units without killing them, and effectively doubles her health to give her 18 million HP. Even while using Witch Killers or even Magical Girl Ubers, cracking Homulilly is still liable to take a massive amount of time and effort, often taking between 10 minutes to half an hour assuming you don't die first. And as if Homulilly wasn't enough on her own, the level features hyper-buffed Ginger Snaches, Doge Darks, Pigeon de Sables, and Gabriels, which will rip through anything outside of things that resist them (which will likely be slaughtered by Homulilly), as well as handily kill off your Witch Killers. Things get even worse once the late 2021 rerun of the collaboration event came around, which gave her 2 new (technically) Brutal Bonus Levels that are simply the Merciless Stage, except everything is stronger. At the strongest of the 2 stages, the boss will be magnified by 150%, giving her 13.5 million base HP (ignoring her Weaken) and 18,000 damage while her support becomes even more threatening.
• Fate/Stay Night: Heaven's Feel Collab
  • King of Heroes (Deadly) has you up against Gilgamesh, who has 1.5 million health and uses rapid multi-hit area attacks with obscene standing range, even longer maximum range, a good 15k total damage over 3 hits, and no time between attacks. Since he has a colossal blind spot, it would normally be easy to enter it and hammer away at Gilgamesh, but that's what the swarms of Metal enemies (which include a Sir Metal Seal) are for. Not only do the Metals wall anybody that tries to get to Gilgamesh, they also push forward incredibly quickly, allowing Gilgamesh to advance. And that's when Gilgamesh himself becomes a problem - he'll gleefully rain hell on your units while they struggle to beat through the Metal swarm, and his area attacks are capable of killing off almost all critical hitters you send to take down the Metals in question. If he advances far enough, he'll even be able to snipe your base with impunity - and if you get to him, his eight knockbacks easily let him reposition behind his meatshields. And if you get him below half HP, his attack power doubles - woe betide you if the Sir Metal Seal is still alive at this point, because Gilgamesh will likely lay waste to whatever's on your field if not killed fast after he activates his strengthen.
  • Wreathed in Darkness is another Deadly stage which pits you against Saber Alter. Saber herself has a beefy health pool, decently damaging attacks that strike fast, a nearly nonstop attack rate, and a guaranteed chance to fire a Shockwave with every attack. Not only does this effectively double her damage against anything that doesn't resist or block waves, it also lets her tear through meatshields incredibly quickly and reach backline attackers that'd normally outrange her. Not helping is her fast movement speed allowing her to rush towards your base the second she gets an opening. And she's not alone - highly buffed Alien and Zombie enemies spawn in to assist her, the latter of which will burrow under your units and resurface later, cutting off your meat shields and letting Saber advance. Thankfully, Saber gets knocked back pretty easily.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion Collab
  • Refusal Type (Merciless), the second and final level of The 10th Angel Strikes. The stage pits you against The Tenth Angel, Zeruel, who packs 2.5 million HP and an ultra long-ranged attack that deals 150,000 damage per hit - enough to One-Hit Kill all but the bulkiest of units. To make matters worse, he doles out said attacks decently quickly and can No-Sell every debuff in the game, not to mention having the Wave Blocker trait to nullify your Cat Cannon. The icing on the cake is that it also spams hyper-buffed Doge variants and Gories to take care of anything you send to stall it. The stage is nigh-impossible unless you use the Cat Combo with Shinji and Kaworu to massively buff the Eva Angel Killer trait, allowing your Eva Angel Killer units to devastate Zeruel, but even then victory isn't guaranteed because of how strong the peons are.
  • And when the Collab rolled around another time, it blew Zeruel out of the water with a new Advent boss: Awakened Eva Unit-13. First found on It's Not Your Fault (Veteran), Unit 13 is nerfed to 15% power - and somehow still manages to be a piece of work. And when you fight it at full power on We'll Meet Again (Merciless)... you'd better be praying. At full strength, Unit 13 has 4 million HP, a surprisingly rapid area attack dealing 100,000 damage, an Omnistrike of -3600 to 1200, total immunity to status effects and waves, the ability to simultaneously freeze (for 5 seconds), knock back, and halve the attack of anything it hits (for a whopping 25 seconds) at a guaranteed rate, and the ability to double its attack power at 50% health - giving it the dubious honor of being the enemy with the most abilities. The stage is nearly impossible to beat without Eva Killers, and Unit 13 is so damn strong that the strategy that let players handle Zeruel very well is not a guaranteed win against this monster. It's impossible to outrange its attacks, its low standing range of 200 actually makes it push forward even faster (since it doesn't need to stop as much for incoming foes), its slew of status effects actually makes stalling worse for the player unless they have immune units (even then, most immune units either can't survive a hit from Unit-13 or aren't immune to all three statuses it inflicts), and its strengthen coupled with its status effects mean it can actually take on Eva Angel Killers while Shinji/Kaworu's Cat Combo is active (especially since none of them have any status immunities, letting Unit 13 cripple even the Eva Ubers). And to make matters even worse, it's not the only threat - highly buffed peons like B.B. Bunnies, Shibaliens and Trolly Bloggers are spammed to throw off your likely-already-fragile strategies. Unlike its home movie, nobody's here to incapacitate it this time, so good luck - you'll need it.
  • The 2021 appearance of the event introduced Heralds of the End, a set of 20 increasingly hard stages featuring the Angels — 6 with Sachiel, Ramiel, and Bardiel apiece, with Zeruel coming in between their sections. Although the first stages of most Barons are usually very easy, the first stages of this event are Goddamned Bosses to the core. To put things in perspective, WARNING Lv. 1, which otherwise has unbuffed enemies, sends out Sachiel with 2.4 million HP and 60,000 attack power — which isn't hard, due to its weak support and long attack animation, but just massively annoying to grind down without Angel killers and the Cat Combo with Shinji and Kaworu. Sachiel and Ramiel are both easy-yet-annoying in this manner, but Zeruel and Bardiel are where the game stops holding back. Zeruel's stages feature Metal enemies, much like the aforementioned March to Death, and although there are ways to take down the Metals more easily than that stage, Zeruel can still easily destroy your base if you're not using Metal Cat. Bardiel, meanwhile, appears in the final stage with 9 million HP and 270,000 attack, made even worse by its long-ranged attacks and weakening power. It's also backed up by massively boosted Gabriels, Ginger Snaches, and Angelic Gories at all stages.
• Street Fighter V Collab
  • After clearing four New Challenger stages, you will unlock an Advent stage where you can battle Akuma to unlock the Akuma Giraffe Cat. His first stage, Master of the Fist, isn't too bad - the boss is only at 7% power and his only backup are relatively weak White peons. However, the second stage, Sekia Goshoha, is rated Deadly for a reason. To start off, the stage liberally spams buffed Black enemies, all of which are capable of tearing through your units with alarming ease. Then you get into Akuma himself, who is a Black enemy with 1.2 million HP, a rapid attack with a long standing range and an even longer effective range (hitting up to 550 range, longer than Bahamut and most ranged attackers), and deals a ton of damage with each hit (54,000 damage divided over 3 multi-hits). Akuma's fast attacks, long range and omnistrike allow him to One-Hit Kill swaths of cats at once, kill ranged attackers from behind their protection and push towards the base alarmingly quickly. If you're not on top of your game, Akuma can easily push through your defensive line and spell a quick game over, especially if his minions appear at an inopportune time. Fortunately, his status as a Black enemy renders him vulnerable to Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors.

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