YMMV / Enter the Arena... As Your Avatar!

• Angst? What Angst?: Often a Necessary Weasel to keep the focus on the action even when people die.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: Any moderately popular character with a secret identity/transformation. Every player knows it, but the characters generally have no reasonable way to until they dramatically unveil it.
• Catharsis Factor: After all the crap he's put everyone through, including forcing friends and family to fight each other AND turning the Arena into a warzone, Galeem gets quite a satisfying beatdown from the assembled cast.
  • Katre and Troa are two of Bolded1's most notorious villains. Even after their plot-mandated defeats, they were being used in attempts to get them killed off or utilized as pawns to dispose of other villains. But when Thor and Loki's plan went awry, and Set freed them from their power-restraining shackles, who's the first person they picked a fight with? Saitama. Seeing one man stand his ground against two (three!) characters who could send whole teams of opposing characters flying in their own times simultaneously and very nearly turn the tables on them can certainly be satisfying.

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  • Glitchtrap's demise in their boss fight can be seen as this, considering who they're the Virtual Ghost of, and in their game they never truly face any comeuppance for their actions. Here, they get physically AND verbally torn to shreds by the assembled cast, one of whom is even the first soul he ever murdered, loses their power to the ghosts of all their victims, and just like before, they're Dragged Off to Hell. All this means that, aside from timeline shenanigans, they're Deader Than Dead.
  • Hazama, who's easily one of the vilest villains to ever terrorize the Arena, finally gets his long-overdue and incredibly satisfying comeuppance by way of Fu's timeline shenanigans.
• Nightmare Fuel: Starting here, Hazama shows his true colors. Beware of major Deemo spoilers. The Girl's behavior afterwards makes it even worse...
  The Girl: "I want to remember this taste so that way, when I rip his flesh from his bone... I can smile in glee..."
  • Spiralblock Peak introduces The Flood to the Arena, in all its squicky glory. Nightmare Retardant is in effect, as it can't infect avatars because it would be cheap if it could. Becomes a Moment of Awesome when Kirby and Darius combine powers to kill the Gravemind.

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  • A several-months-long plot initiated by KiriK happens in the spinoff Arena. The plot is a direct adaptation of World of Light, and what does that mean? Everyone dies at the beginning.^note Slightly mitigated because unlike in Smash, there's a lot more than one survivor, but DevilPsyco still threw all but four or five characters of his entire roster to the metaphorical lions.
  • Here, two kids from Five Nights at Freddy's get into a fight - Charlotte Emily, formerly the ghost possessing the Marionette/Lefty until she was revived, and Andrew Afton, the ghost possessing Golden Freddy. Andrew hates Charlie for getting her life back despite the other animatronics being stuck in their states, and so in their fight in which Charlie is just trying to calm Andrew down, he keeps trying to brutally kill her, and when she finally gets him to submit, it's only by an Emergency Transformation into Nightmarionne, which would've destroyed Andrew's soul had the overpowered Erma not stepped in. Though the fight was between traumatized kids and the scale was extremely low, the stakes were as high as they could possibly be.

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• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: There were some who didn't like the more story-driven, more Continuity Lockout prone spinoff, especially since it far overtook the official v5 in terms of popularity. However, their complaints may not be totally accurate considering even in the previous version of the Arena, only a handful of frequenters ever cared about the story, including one or two who ended up complaining about it later.