Americans Hate Tingle: The collaboration event with Pikotaro was mostly just passively accepted in Japan, but was outright despised by English players. The collab event didn't have much to offer to begin with, featuring just two nearly useless units and one easy stage, and fairly poor rewards. Small and somewhat inconsequential collabs aren't exactly uncommon for the game, but what compounded issues was the timing of the event; while the English world was stuck with Pikotaro, the Japanese version instead got a Puella Magi Madoka Magica event, with far more useful cats to collect and challenging stages to play. While the Japanese version got collab events frequently, they were very rare in the English version, so fans were outraged that this was the collab event they chose to bring over. As such, there was a sizable backlash against the event — and tellingly, Pikotaro has never returned. Since then, most collab events that were once Japan-exclusive have made the jump to the English world.
Although the Cat God puts up a satisfying fight in his first encounter, his other two fights are much easier than you might expect.
Cat God (Cool Dude) has a 3-hit multihit attack — the first two hits are very weak, but inflict knockback and slow, while the last deals immense damage. However, since he knocks cats back with each attack, units like Maglev and Awakened Bahamut can rebound and hit him several times, dealing much more damage than usual and rapidly wearing down his health. His support is also weaker than in the first chapter — the Star Pengs and Shibalien Elites are still there, but the General GreGories are gone, replaced with Kid Tappas that won't take long to kill and Ribbos that do basically nothing. Cat God himself gets hard countered by Lone Cat and Kitten, obtained from Bakoo, as they knock back Cat God to restart his attack and has enough range to get close enough to start a Cycle of Hurting
Final Boss Giga-God himself may have a nearly One-Hit Kill attack, but before using it, he warps cats nearby with a long wave attack, which can actually save them from the dangerous final hit. While his support is fairly strong, consisting of Demonic Spiders like General GreGory and Mesocosmocyclone, it’s still not too tough — and since you need anti-Alien treasures at near maximum to even get to him, they’re bound to be near their minimum strength level. It’s likely that the player will build up a huge stack of damage-dealing cats and destroy him in a few minutes.
Despite being the final boss of Stories of Legend, Mecha-Bun is a surprisingly simple fight. While not exactly easy, it mostly just boils down to stacking Necro-Dancer Cats at the beginning, then trying to permafreeze the boss and rushing it down before it breaks free. A later update made Mecha-Bun even easier to beat by reducing the Splash Damage range on its attack, letting it be affected by Sanzo Cats and harmed by Cameraman Cats. For better or for worse, while technically not being a part of Stories of Legend, Relic Bun-Bun comes right after and provides much more of a challenge.
For who is supposed to be the final boss of The Aku Realms, High Priest Mamon is disappointingly easier than expected. While he does have higher stats than his Mount Aku appearance, even gaining the ability to deal an additional 15% of a unit's max HP as damage, he still has a hard time actually pushing due to how easy he still is to stall. His support is just as equally underwhelming; all of them are incredibly easy to kill with even the most threatening one, Ragin' Gory, being a mild challenge at best since if you've managed to get this far, you most likely have cats that can take him down with not too much trouble. About the only thing preventing this from making the end completely anti-climactic is the fact that Mamon isn't the final boss of the saga; a message that pops up after beating him tells you that, despite his defeat, he managed to summon the Lord of Ruin, leading you to take him on in a much more climactic and (satisfyingly) challenging end against the actual final boss.
Asking the community how good Cat God the Great is will get you a variety of answers, due to his unique stats and functionality. Some consider him to be a serviceable Legend, owing to his gigantic Splash Damage radius, two guaranteed knockbacks on everything in it, powerful final hit, and ability to exploit his Omnistrike to stand far from the enemy base. Others, however, consider him a bad unit or even one of the worst in the entire game, due to his fragile health and one knockback, mediocre standing range when not near the enemy base, and glacially slow attack speed and recharge time. It doesn’t help that his True Form is a Joke Item, adding basically nothing useful to him.
Another controversial unit is Dark Lazer with talents. Some players consider Dark Lazer to be one of the strongest melee and anti-Red cats in the game, with obscenely huge DPS, surprisingly good anti-Red tanking ability, and waves to spread damage around the field, kill peons, and even cheese a few stages. Others, however, consider her a bad investment of NP outside of a few situations, and point to weaknesses like her low survivability, slow speed, and cash-draining nature even with the cost down talent. Some players will recommend getting her talents as soon as you can, while others will recommend waiting until you reach UL, 4-crown SoL, or 4-crown UL, or to just not unlock them altogether.
Mola King. Is he a passable Uber Rare for his range and recharge time, or is he garbage for his bad health and damage? Fans are similarly split on his talents, which gave him buffs like an 80% chance to dodge attacks and a mini-surge that effectively doubles his DPS. Is he now a Lethal Joke Character, or is he still too weak to justify the NP investment?
Despite its difficulty, fans have grown to love Hermit Cat's boss stage, Floor 30. Without abusing specific Ubers to remove most of the stage's difficulty, it's a tough level that requires legitimate skill to defend your anti-wave attackers and handle the ever-growing amounts of Demonic Spiders the stage sends out as support, and you earn that victory in the end.
The final stage of Uncanny Legends, Revival of Origin, quickly became a fan-favorite. It has an awesome-looking boss in Zero Luza, who has a unique attack mechanic that lets him pierce past your frontlines and gain ground for the threatening support enemies. The stage is challenging, hitting you with waves of Sir Rels and Wild Doges while you try to outlast the Bore Jr. spawns and giving you little opportunity to gain ground, but it's not unfair — every enemy in the stage has a counter, and with some smart play and good timing, you can win without boosted units or broken ubers. It also gives you some freedom in how you want the fight to play out — you can play it safe and try to outlast Luza's support for a Victory by Endurance, or you can use hard-hitting cats to try and kill the boss before you get overwhelmed. Most fans are glad that Uncanny Legends came with such a great finale, after the underwhelming end that Stories of Legend got. The fact that Ape Lord Luza is a much better unit than the rather underwhelming Mecha-Bun certainly helps.
You have the option to sell duplicate cats rolled from the gacha for XP or NP (used to level up cats and unlock new abilities, respectively), or use them for an extra + level on the unit. While stat-based gacha units like Rocker Cat and Hip Hop Cat are worth using, support units tend to end up sold for NP — why would you care if your Sanzo Cat has 1 extra level's worth of HP and attack when you're only using it to slow floating and angel enemies?
Talent orbs provide such an imperceptible boost to a unit's stats that most players will cash them in for NP. Players will typically sell D-rank orbs straight away because they lose value upon being merged, and merge the rest up to S-rank orbs before selling them if they don't want the small boost.
The Uncanny Legends chapter Spacetime Distortion is a Boss Rush for the SoL Legends with buffed stats and added Aku Doges, and can be pretty troublesome, especially Mina's rematch stage and the final stage. Well, except for Inumusha's rematch stage, Multiplanar Studios, due to an odd case of Villain Forgot to Level Grind — while Inumusha's support and Doge Base are a lot stronger than before, they're not stronger by enough to fend off the ridiculously overpowered anti-Zombies the player will most likely have at this point. Cadaver BearCat in particular will annihilate everything in the stage save the Aku Doges with some support from wave blockers and Holy Blast, and can potentially kill Inumusha way earlier than you'd otherwise be able to.
Among the Cyclone stages, The Perfect Cyclone (fought in Red Sky At Morning) is among the easiest to defeat, despite being hyped up as a Category-5 hurricane that swallows up lesser cyclones. Cats with high HP can easily get into its blind spot and inflict severe damage on it, and it only comes with weak Doge Darks and Trolly Bloggers as backup. While the Trolly Bloggers can push your strong cats into the Cyclone's attack range, the Cat Cannon can easily dispatch them, and possibly interrupt the Cyclone long enough to sneak a Fragile Speedster into the eye of the storm. It's reduced to an utter joke if you happen to have a high-levelled Kotatsu Cat. Note, however, that this only applies to the initial stage — while Wrath of Red Sky is nearly as easy as the original, Revenge of Red Sky qualifies as the opposite trope.
After the first few hectic Crazed Cat stages, Head Shaker (Insane) comes across as a nice breather. Each individual Crazed Cow is rather weak, and although facing a Zerg Rush of them seems daunting, the fact that they all spawn bunched up together makes them vulnerable to strong area attacks. Fish Hell (Insane) is also a Breather Level, for similar reasons. However, while Manic Lion Cat is still fairly easy compared to the others, Manic Island Cat is much more of a challenge than Crazed Fish Cat.
While the Li'l Cat awakening stages for Cow and Fish are much harder than the Crazed ones, Li'l Gross Cat's (Tiny Creeper) is universally considered the easiest of the lot. The Li'l Macho Legs Cats are so weak, Awakened Bahamut can kill them all without taking any damage himself if attack CatCombos are in effect, easily beating the stage.
Queen's Coronation (Honey Trap) is still tough, but not as bad as some of the other advents. Queen B's support isn't as tough as the others; while THE SLOTH guards her blind spot well, the Kroxos aren't too bad, and there are plenty of good burst damage options to deal with the Brollows. At launch, it was still very hard, but it's suffered badly from Power Creep — strong rushers like Fishman Cat can easily get into Queen B's minimum range and deliver massive damage to her, and tankers like Zamboney Cat can keep THE SLOTH at bay. Her rematch stages are also easier than some of the others — Honey Drip's $3900 maximum cost is annoying, disallowing Awakened Bahamut and most Ubers that do well on the stage, but still allows the powerful Rares and Super Rares that destroy the stage, while Royal Jelly Hell is mostly just a test of your raw DPS against the Dark Otters and Cyberhorns. Finally, Honey Trap's appearance in The Queen & The Dead makes it by far the easiest of the advent continuation stages — not only is the stage just as easy as before, but most of the units that do well against Queen B can also help out against the considerably tougher Daboo of the Dead, negating the stage's gimmick of using one lineup to take on two radically different stages.
Deeply Dreaming (Bombergirl) can still be quite tough, but it's not nearly as bad as most of the others, and is usually considered one of the easiest advent stages. The Bores in the stage can be defeated easily by powerful anti-Red options like iCat, and Bakoo's low HP and stamina make it easy to trap her in a Cycle of Hurting, especially if the player brings powerful wave and Long Distance attackers. Like the Perfect Cyclone above, however, Bakoo puts up much more of a fight in her rematch stages, and also when fought alongside Queen B in the Heavenly Tower.
First Errand (Baby Fake) is perhaps even easier than Deeply Dreaming, despite its Merciless difficulty. Fittingly, the boss, Doremi, is a variation of Bakoo. The level's startoff has a limited amount of enemies, and the presence of Alpacky makes it easy to stall and build up as much money as you need. Then, when Doremi appears alongside Director Kurosawah when the base is hit, it's easy to lure her to your base, then use Awakened Bahamut to keep knocking her back before she can attack while rapidly wearing down her HP. The only real threat lies in the Trolly Bloggers and Mr. Angels wearing down your base before Doremi dies — a threat that can be nullified with base HP CatCombos and careful positioning of A. Bahamut.
After the tough stages (for early Stories of Legend) in Squishy Cave and Volkanos Volcano, the level design suddenly becomes much easier in Neverending Cat Story and Castle of Fish. Only one new enemy is introduced in the next 4 subchapters, and some stages are even harder clones of earlier ones. Things start to get more challenging and interesting again around the end of Parthenon.
Due to the way anti-Alien treasures work, subchapters released when not all of them were out yet are not balanced around having all of them. As such, if the player completed more of Into the Future or Cats of the Cosmos than expected at that point, Scars of War and Area 22, respectively, become far easier than their neighbouring subchapters. This also applies to the following subchapters for each, but not as much.
After you get past the Guide Dang It! of the sub-chapter, Grotesque Gallery is a rather pathetic challenge compared to IT Catacombs.
The Uncanny Legends subchapters Coup de Chat and Marine Ministry both mostly contain Gimmick Levels, just like the aforementioned Grotesque Gallery. Both of them are easy to clear once you know how the stages work. Coup de Chat comes right after Pararila Peninsula (containing Heron's Call), and comes before Cherry Isles, which has some fairly tough stages. Marine Ministry, meanwhile, comes right before The Devils' Academy, home to Lonely Goldfish and Bell Collector.
Floor 22 is a simple fight against a strong Flying Ninja Cat and a horde of Brollows. Strong anti-Floating cats, like Cameraman Cat and Sanzo Cat, easily trivialise the stage. It’s a nice breather after the hectic Floor 21, and before the decently tough Floor 23 and challenging Floor 24.
Floor 35 is fairly simple, simply spamming Crazed Fish Cats and Trolly Bloggers with occasional Dolphinas. It’s easy to overpower them all with strong area attackers like Cyborg Cat, and it overall puts up much less of a fight than the tag team of Ururun Wolf and Cosmic Cyclone on Floor 34, and the horde of Zombies with Crazed Lizards on Floor 36.
While all of the floors past 40 are brutal, Floor 42 is generally considered to be the least so. Taking on almost all of the Cyclones at once may seem like a daunting task, but the first three are pretty unthreatening due to their low HP and range, and Divine Cyclone can be rendered just as easy with Sanzo Cat’s talents unlocked, in particular allowing Sanzo to neutralize the entire first half of the rush by itself. The biggest threats are running out of money before killing Red or White Cyclone and Cosmic Cyclone sniping your status units, but both are fairly easy to play around. Take a breather, because Floor 43 is one of the most brutal levels in the game.
The Infernal Tower, similarly, has a few:
Floor 21 would normally be an example of the opposite trope — featuring even stronger Capies and Blitzens than before, a Hackey in the back to snipe approaching cats, and spammed Cerberus Kids to block off your status units. However, by this point in the game, the player will most likely have Courier Cat, which is fast enough to easily evade Hackey’s attacks and can easily destroy the Capies and Blitzens with its powerful attacks. With Courier in play, it goes from being one of the hardest Infernal Tower floors relative to where it appears to one of the easiest, and is refreshing after getting through Floor 20.
Floor 22 once again. The stage design is almost the same as before, with a Flying Ninja Cat and a horde of Brollows. The only major change is the addition of Miz Devils, which theoretically make it harder to prevent the other enemies from pushing, but mostly succeed in making it easier for Slime Cat to land hits and wipe out the Brollows.
Floor 38 sends out the Aku Cyclone near the start, but it's at 100%, when you'll have much stronger units and better shield piercers than you did when you first fought it. The Those Guys and Sir Seals give you good amounts of money, and the Relic Doges and Aku Doges aren't too tough, with the latter in particular being major Slime Cat bait. Primeval Cyclone does spawn after about 100 seconds, but that's plenty of time to either heavily damage Aku Cyclone or kill it outright, letting your anti-Relic units focus on their new opponent; Primeval Cyclone is also much faster than the Aku Cyclone, so even if both are still alive, you can fairly easily separate the two and focus them down one at a time. It comes in between the RNG-based Floor 37 and the tricky rematch with Mina on Floor 39, and is a welcome breather between those two and before the fight with Spiritual Yulala on Floor 40.
Floor 47 is a refreshing break compared to its infamously difficult Heavenly Tower version. The premise is still the same, with the Dual Boss of Crazed Moneko and Puffsley's Comet still being a genuine threat, but there's a suspicious lack of peon support, making the bosses considerably easier to handle. Most notably, the 4 overbuffed Tackeys are replaced with 2 normal-strength Ackeys which on average deal less damage, and if you can sneak a level 32+ Supercar Cat into their range, he can one-shot them to instantly remove them from the picture. The Owlbrows and Brollows have also been replaced with the comparatively more managable Miz Devil and Condemned Peng; while the latter's death surge can be threatening, there are only three that spawn far apart, and it's generally way easier to fill the hole left by the surge than deal with the Brollows, especially with something like Stone Cat.
The practice of seed tracking, where players feed their gacha rolls into a website to predict their future rolls, is very controversial within the fanbase. Arguments about whether it constitutes cheating in the first place abound, as do ones about whether it's justified. Pro-tracking players enjoy bypassing the Luck-Based Mission of getting the ubers they want, while anti-tracking players tend to see this as an unfair advantage, and stereotype trackers as skill-less players carried by overpowered ubers.
Radiant Aphrodite's Ultra Talents released in 13.2, which simply gave her the standard Attack Buff and a 2.4 second TBA reduction, quickly became a topic of debate between those who believe the roughly 50% DPS increase gained was enough to make a very strong unit even better and those who believe they were too little, too late for how much investment is needed after the waste of her regular Talents, and that she needed something more to avoid falling out of relevancy.
Character Tiers: The English community used to maintain one for all of the Uber and Legend Rares in the English Version, but it's since been replaced by the much more descriptive "Uber Description Project". The Japanese and Korean playerbases have their own tierlists, which can lead to some Ubers being better- or worse-regarded — notably, Kubiluga is considered a below-average Uber on the Japanese and English playerbases, but is ranked highly by most Korean players due to its great combo with Tank Cat and performance in the Catclaw Dojo.
Most players only spin the Rare Cat Capsule 11 times when there's a guaranteed event going on, to maximize their chances of getting an Uber. For Rare Tickets, most players will instead wait for Uberfest or other events with an increased Uber drop rate, for the same reason.
Due to its long range and ability to slow powerful enemies from a distance where they can't fight back, Cyberpunk Cat is one of the most commonly used Cats in the game on late-game stages.
Awakened Bahamut. Due to his insane speed, equally insane damage, and being able to be used on four star stages, expect to be having him on your lineups for a long time once you unlock him. After Awakened is unlocked, Crazed Bahamut sees comparatively little use thanks to his role as a backline nuker being replacable with various Ubers or Legends, while there are virtually no rushers that can perform on the level that A. Bahamut can.
If a player has extra space and is using a lineup that doesn't depend on "heavy" units, chances are they'll be using the Bony Bone + Biohazard Cat Combos, which due to their overlap provide two Research Up (Sm) buffs with only three slots, which is remarkably efficient for its cost. It shaves about 2 seconds off of recharge time, which doesn't sound like a lot, but can be a godsend when you need to field a lot of units in a short time.
Entering Into the Future right after Empire of Cats will generally be the first major wall you hit even in comparison to Teacher Bun Bun. While pretty much every enemy previously seen mostly relied on their stats to be threatening, Into the Future starts rapidly rolling out enemies that are not only stronger than anything before, but also introduce special abilities and more complex mechanics to trip you up. The enemy formations are also often designed to actively support each other more, and the Aliens' passive magnification making them 7 times stronger turns nearly all of them into Demonic Spiders that can easily overrun a team that isn't running at peak performance for that stage of the game. In addition, if for some reason you haven't been collecting your Treasures in Empire of Cats, Into the Future is where the game puts its foot down and makes it almost mandatory, as you'll stand no chance against the Aliens without the Power Nullifier Treasures that weaken their stats, especially in Chapter 2 and 3 where the Aliens will be further magnified.
Cats of the Cosmos, added in Version 6.5, is what Into the Future was to Empire of Cats to Into the Future. Instead of a passive 700% magnification, the Starred Aliens have a 1600% one, and most of them have either the Barrier or Warp abilities that can completely shut down a regular anti-Alien lineup if not prepared for in advance, on top of their glaring stats and other unconventional mechanics. However, what makes it truly harder is that almost every stage will have a restriction in place, ranging from reduced deployment limit, to nasty cost or rarity restrictions, to only letting you deploy from the first row, which greatly limits your options to deal with already difficult maps, and can outright wall you if your roster isn't developed enough to cover all these restrictions. Even if you farm the Crystal Treasures to neutralize the Starred Aliens (which now has five sets per chapter), the last few levels of each chapter are generally balanced around you having all of the available ones, with Starred Aliens magnified to a point where they can pose a massive threat even with all the Crystals, and become straight-up invincible if you're missing even one. The difficulty also ramps up extremely quickly across the three chapters, with the levels gleefully throwing out hordes of Demonic Spiders against your weakened lineup, and some enemies and magnifications normally only seen in later Stories of Legend.
Upon completing Stories of Legend, you are able to access Uncanny Legends, which has much more difficult level design, enemies with their stats cranked up the wazoo, and introduces the Relic enemies, which at the point you first encounter them have virtually no weaknesses and a deadly Power Nullifier that synergizes with other enemies. Even as you gradually get more powerful units and advance through the chapters, the difficulty doesn't let up, with the later stages also adding in beefed-up Aku, Behemoth, and Colossal enemies to ruin your day.
Out of all the Galaxy Gals, Kai is the most popular, due to her cute appearance and her role as an excellent anti-Floating tank.
The fat cat eating rice that appears on all of the Iron Legions' true forms is way more popular than you'd expect, for its hilarious design and tendency to get involved in a Funny Background Event.
Slime Cat quickly became very popular with the fanbase after its introduction, for its strangely cute design and surprisingly strong wave attack power. There's even a (mock) Broken Base about which form of it, Slime Cat or Jellycat, is cuter, with fans of one routinely saying that the other looks hideous.
Similarly, Stone Cat is liked by a large portion of the fanbase for its simple yet appealing design, and for being a Lethal Joke Character that's useful on many late-game stages.
Lasvoss of the Dynamites, despite his somewhat mixed performance in practical combat, sees a lot of popularity in the community due to his ridiculous attack power and ability to One-Hit Kill even the toughest bosses when everything lines up in his favor, making him prime material for gimmick clears or videos.
Cats that are only ever used for CatCombos due to their terrible stats, like Samurai Cat and Zombie Cat, are usually referred to as "combo slaves".
Cats that have been raised all the way to level 40 are referred to as "hypermaxed". Level 50 ones are sometimes called "ultramaxed".
Since there’s no real term for these kinds of stages, any stage that includes a unique boss (Clionel Ascendant, River Styx, Queen’s Coronation and Dead on Debut, to name a few) are referred to as Advent stages, with the bosses in them being referred to as Advent bosses.
While the official name for it is Chain Attack, most players refer to this ability as Multi Hit.
The event stages that pit the player against the same stage 20 times in a row with stronger enemies each time, like Baron Seal or Le'Grim, have no official name. The common name for them is Baron stages, named after the first set of them, but the Wiki instead calls them Gauntlet stages.
Cats that can both slow or freeze and knock back enemies at the same time are often said to suffer from "Mizli syndrome", after the most infamous user of the ability.
Hitman Cat is sometimes called "Mr. Stick" by fans, due to resembling him greatly.
The game as a whole is sometimes jokingly called as "funny cat game" or simply "cat game".
The creators of the gang are often jokingly referred to as "Pornos" due to the large quantity of attractive female characters, mainly when talking about a large majority of the Galaxy Gals.
If your cats are strong enough to handle the stage's enemies, then Crazed Tank Cat falls under this. With enough meatshields, it's not hard to prevent the boss from pushing while you hold off its support, but with 3.2 million HP and being fought so early in the game, it takes forever and a day to die.
Wrath of the Dreamer, the first of Bakoo's revenge stages, is far more annoying than her first appearance. Due to locking you into only using Rare cats, all of the strategies that worked the first time don't anymore, forcing you to weaken the Bore at the beginning, use Pirate Cat (preferably in their true form) to knock it back and hope for the best.
Floor 44 of the Heavenly Tower looks like it should be That One Level, since it sends out both Cruel Angel Clionel and Hannya at once, and the bosses cover each other's weaknesses well; Hannya can weaken and kill the cats trying to rush down Clionel, while Clionel snipes the anti-red tanks which normally counter Hannya. However, the bosses can't effectively push in the face of tanks like Roe and Green Shell, and although there are Doge Darks and Gory Blacks to shred through these tanks, rushers like Heavy Assault C.A.T. and Assassin BearCat are able to effectively kill them before they cause too much damage if timed well. The end result is a very tedious level where nothing much is happening, but you still have to pay just enough attention to make sure your rushers don't get hit by Clionel or Hannya before they can do their jobs. While there are only 6 Gory Blacks, the stage will never run out of Doge Darks, so it doesn't just roll over and let you win after a certain point, either.
Floor 20 of the Infernal Tower sends out awakened Special Cat enemies, like before, but the stage length is much shorter, and Prisoner Cat and Kite Cat make it harder to wear down Dancer Cat with ranged attackers like you could before. The safest strategy is to use Cyberpunk to keep the enemies under control while getting in cheap shots on Dancer with rushers until he dies, but this leads to very dull and prolonged gameplay for the whole level.
The force-close trick is more of an exploit than a glitch, but still very useful. If the app is closed for any reason during a battle, then the game will offer to let you restart your current battle for free, without consuming additional energy or power-ups. This would normally just be a good Anti-Frustration Feature, but the game offers this chance regardless of why the app was closed. A savvy player can use this to perform a form of Save Scumming, closing the battle when they’re about to lose and restarting until they win. Unfortunately, this trick doesn’t work on No Continues stages.
The energy glitch is a more notable example; changing the device time in certain ways can, on certain devices, trick the game into refilling your energy for free. Although it’s been patched for the most part, Leaderships can be used to refill your energy on demand, essentially giving it quasi-Ascended Glitch status.
Waves and surges can always hit all enemies, even if created by a unit that can only target a specific enemy type. This allows Neo Backhoe Cat to hit non-Metal enemies with its surge, and potentially get some extra money from any peons it manages to kill.
The Metal Killer ability was introduced with a bug that made it much more powerful than it should be. Normally, it would only deal a percentage of the current HP of the Metal, which made its effects weaker as they take more damage in order to prevent it from being too overpowered. However, if one manages to synchronize the attacks of multiple Metal Killers such that they attack at the exact same frame, the percentages add up together and cause the stack to deal more in one blow than if they did it individually. This led to situations where a stack of 9 Ultra Kaguyas were able to One-Hit Kill any Metal they hit, no matter how strong it was as their combined percentages added up to 108% of a Metal's HP.
High-Tier Scrappy: While some cats are disliked for being too weak, there are also a few that some players hate for being too strong and sucking all the challenge out of the game.
Among late-game players, Cyberpunk Cat is the first example of a cat hated for being too strong. Due to its ability to break stages wide open when stacked by permaslowing all the enemies from a safe distance, it's often the only option for beating endgame stages, especially starred UL, without resorting to Ubers. However, while Cyberpunk is powerful, it's also extremely Boring, but Practical, and clearing most stages with a stack of them usually takes a massive amount of time, both to stack them and to slowly chip away at the enemies. For this reason, guidemakers and other veteran players will often treat Cyberpunk as a weapon of last resort, using it only when a stage is pretty much impossible to clear Uberless by other means.
Courier Cat quickly became infamous upon release for being a Game-Breaker that's available very early in the game. It has seemingly the perfect set of traits to curb-stomp practically the entire early-game and mid-game: it has long distance attacks that early stages aren't balanced around the player having, has fairly quick attack speed and high DPS for its range and cheap cost, and deals massive damage to Red enemies, which are most threatening early on. It's not a Crutch Character, either, as while late-game stages can hold up better under its power, it still remains a viable choice on many UL stages. Late-game players dislike Courier for cheapening the game's progression — with it in play, certain challenging mid-game stages such as No Plan A and Realm of Carnage effectively don't exist anymore, since you can just spam Couriers for an easy win instead of using the strategy the stage is built around. Courier is also hated because late-game Behemoth stages are balanced around the player having it, resulting in the infamous 200% Wild Doges and stages that just spam such obscene amounts of high-HP Behemoths that even Courier can't handle them by itself.
This video has someone fighting a 100,000% magnified Hippoe and an 80,000% magnified Pigge they hacked into a level. Come version 6.7.0 and along with it the Stories of Legend sub-chapter “Beyond the Savannah,” and the third stage, The Noble Tribe, contains a Hippoe magnified by 120,000%.
Titan Cat is a giant, humanoid cat that's bulging with muscles in his later forms. Come Season 2, Chapter 2 of Fortnite and the "Meowscles" skin was introduced, an extremely muscular, humanoid cat who looks strikingly similar to Titan Cat, Black Bead Eyes and all (albeit calico.)
The short-lived PC port of Battle Cats featured an exclusive unit called Bun Bun Monger Prototype, which was a wooden Teacher Bun Bun mech that eventually became a fully robotic Bun Bun. Much later on, a far stronger, more detailed version of this unit reappeared as Mecha-Bun, serving as the Final Boss of and final collectible Cat from Stories of Legend.
Back in 2018, artwork of enemies themed after demons was posted to /r/battlecats. Much later on, the 10.8 update in 2021 added in Aku enemies, which are themed after demons. Outside of colour, Aku Doge and Aku Gory bear a surprising resemblance to the fan-made Demon Doge and Demonic Gory.
Improved Second Attempt: The fight with Filibuster Obstructa is seen as a complete letdown for being the final boss of Cats of the Cosmos, with the boss being very easy to stunlock and only coming with one support enemy at a time. When Metafilibuster, a harder version of this boss, was released, it got a generally warmer reception — Metafilibuster comes with stronger support enemies and can have two on the field at a time, presenting a much greater threat.
While cute, Neneko and her variants are very underwhelming considering how uncommon they are. All of them are slow, weak critical hitters with a glacial recharge time, and are generally worth less than the 15 NP you'd get from exchanging them. The only ones to have a little more value are the original Neneko (who has a useful attack combo with Moneko), Sunny Neneko (who has a 100% critical chance, which can be useful despite her other weaknesses), and Gloomy Neneko (whose True Form turns her into a ranged Wave Blocker, a unit archetype that's widely considered to be super strong, if not an outright Game-Breaker).
Cat Base Mini is a fairly uncommon Super Rare, since it's only found in the same pools that contain the aforementioned Neneko. Unfortunately, it's essentially a strictly worse version of Manic Macho Legs Cat, with pathetically weak attack power and a long recharge time. Unlike Neneko or some other limited Super Rares, it doesn't even have any good CatCombos to make up for it.
While the other Brainwashed Cats range from situational to great, Brainwashed Axe Cat is absolutely not worth the trouble of rolling it. It's a limited Super Rare on the Valentine's Day banner — which, while not as risky as some other seasonal banners, still has several mediocre-to-bad Ubers — and has unboosted drop rates, so you'll need to drop a lot of Cat Food or tickets to get it. Unfortunately, it has basically no redeeming qualities. Its HP is too low to serve as a good meatshield, its attack power is even weaker than the original Axe Cat's, and although it has the ability to Curse White enemies, this ability rarely comes into play, as by the time Brainwashed Axe can land a hit on the White enemies you'd want it to Curse, they're already exposed and will likely die soon anyway. This leaves it as a unit which is useful on basically no stages, and is almost worth less than the 15 NP you’d get from cashing it in. Even its True Form is of little use, as it only gains a health increase and the ability to create a level 1 mini-wave, on top of being locked behind clearing Mount Aku - by the time you're able to get your hands on it, you're incredibly likely to have units that do its job better.
If Brainwashed Axe Cat wasn't bad enough, however, Brainwashed Cow Cat somehow manages to be even worse. It's exclusive to the (currently) one-time June Bride event, and it gains the ability to Curse Black and Aku enemies. It sounds like a good deal with its ability to inflict the effect permanently as long as it's alive, but said targets happen to be some of the worst when it comes to Curse; almost no Black enemies have any threatening status effects (and the trait is infamously powercrept anyway), and most Aku enemies have big shields it can't break through with its terrible stats and Single Target. Its only possible redeeming quality is its higher speed compared to Lion Cat... but by the time you have Brainwashed Cow, you're very likely to already have Crazed Cow, which is even faster and has better stats, Area Attack, and combo usage. As with Brainwashed Axe Cat, its True Form contributes little - while less knockbacks and increased duration on its curses aren't bad on paper, Brainwashed Lion Cat's niche is still a very poor one, and as mentioned above the true form can only be obtained after effectively clearing the Aku Realms, leaving it with much less usage.
Gold Catfruit Seeds are some of the rarest items in the game, even moreso than the notoriously elusive Gold Catfruit: the only way to get them is by beating Masked Grandmaster Cat on Floor 30 of the Infernal Tower, and he only drops one per run of the Tower. Unfortunately, unlike said Gold Catfruit, almost all of the cats you can evolve with them, such as the aforementioned Neneko variants and Papaluga, barely gain anything from their evolutions and are just as useless as before.
Certain collab ubers are highly elusive due to being Temporary Online Content or just rarely occurring, but are next to useless in actual play. HUGE HERMIT is a good example — the Metal Slug Defense collab last occurred in 2017, so it's an extremely uncommon unit, but it's also one of the worst ubers in the game.
While Axe Cat's first and second forms at least have the excuse of being Crutch Characters, the true form, Dark Cat, has absolutely nothing going for it. Axe Cat's niche as a unit is being a spammable anti-red melee attacker, with much more attack than the basic cat in exchange for a much higher cost... but its attack power is still low even with the doubled stats it gets in true form, and because it still has 3 knockbacks, it does a poor job of holding on to the front lines. As a result, Dark Cat is a blatant Master of None: it has the build of both a meatshield and a melee attacker, but it's utterly overshadowed by Eraser Cat as a general meatshield and various other anti-red and melee units in its other niches. Axe Cat has several variants like the other normal cats, but they do next to nothing to fix its issues; Crazed Axe's higher DPS does nothing to make up for its other flaws, Li'l Axe is only marginally usable on a few Angel and Aku stages with its freeze talent, and Brainwashed Axe is covered in Junk Rare above. Dark Cat is notorious among the fandom for how bad it is, and players who have bad luck with the regular Cat Capsule often lament that they get too many Axe Cats and not enough of the normal cats that are actually usable.
Bird Cat and its evolutions have a well-earned reputation for being completely useless, on par with the aforementioned Dark Cat. In Empire of Cats, Bird Cat's niche is as your area-hitting Glass Cannon unit, with quick attacks for taking out waves of peons or damaging stronger stacked enemies. Unfortunately, this niche quickly becomes irrelevant outside of Empire of Cats, as you obtain longer-ranged cats which can do the same thing more efficiently. Enemies past Empire of Cats often have enough range to outrange Flying Cat, and can hit hard enough to quickly shred its low HP, putting the money spent on it to waste. Fortunately, unlike Axe Cat, Bird Cat's variants all have something to offer over the original, giving them valuable niches at certain points in the game, even if Power Creep has hit some of them hard.
Much the same still applies to the Monthly Rare Cats, which even evolve in the same way. Outside of CatCombos, the only one to see any real use is Prisoner Cat, whose long range and ability to be used in 4-crown stages makes up for his poor stats.
Several of the Legends are quite underwhelming:
As detailed on Awesome, but Impractical on the main page, Filibuster Cat X is among the worst of the Legend Cats, and is a disappointing reward for completing Cats of the Cosmos. Although its ability to freeze White enemies for a long time with each attack sounds powerful, its combination of an Overly Long Fighting Animation paired with slow attack speed, overall low stats and singular knockback, and surprisingly bad freeze uptime make it less than impressive in practice. Units like Glass Cat or Lone Cat and Kitten are much more efficient at the job Filibuster Cat X is supposed to do. Even a True Form wasn't enough to salvage its reputation - although it got stat buffs, a slight attack speed increase, and Relic targeting along with Surge/Curse immunity, it does little to nothing to address its weaknesses while trying to shoehorn it into niches with units that already do them better. To rub salt into the wound, Filibuster also inexplicably has one of the most expensive True Forms of any Legend Cat, further discouraging even trying to get it.
Li'l Nyandam is designed as a free super backliner unit — his stats are unimpressive, but with a whopping 551 range, he can theoretically wear down enemies from a safe distance, with his slow ability preventing them from pushing. The issue here is that his stats are atrocious; at level 30, he has about a quarter of the DPS of Bahamut and Ururun Wolf, so he'll take forever to do any meaningful damage, and his low HP and knockback count of 2 mean you don't have much room for error when using him. As for his slow ability, it only has a 30% chance of activating and slows enemies for 3 seconds out of his 14.53-second-long attack cycle, so forget about using it as your main source of crowd control. Li'l Nyandam is in an unfortunate spot where he was left behind by the game's meta — soon after his introduction, long distance enemies were added, and his 551 range means nothing when they can easily snipe him for heavy damage and interrupt his long attack animation, and that's ignoring the fact that LD units can perform his job much better and more consistently. His True Form is a decent improvement, beefing up his stats while increasing his attack speed and slow uptime, but it's not enough to give him a real niche in the late-game, unlike Mina.
Mecha-Bun is an example of a unit which tries to be two types of unit in one... and sucks at both. It's designed as both a melee tanker and rusher, having fairly high DPS with quick attack speed alongside good HP and only 2 knockbacks, and being strong against Relics to enhance both its HP and damage. However, its DPS is quite bad for its cost — it pales in comparison to specialized rushers like Awakened Bahamut and Idi:N2, the latter of which blows it out of the water against Relics, and it's unimpressive compared to even Super Rare rushers like Can Can and Fishman. Meanwhile, it's restricted to a point in the game where generalist tanks become much more shaky to use due to enemies hitting harder, so it can only tank Relic enemies semi-effectively, and it can easily fall victim to non-Relics on mixed stages. Most players will avoid using Mecha-Bun whenever they can get away with it, with it only being recommended to use on a few 4* Stories of Legend stages and 1* Primitive Souls — and even then, it's also a victim of Power Creep, with later-added units being able to tear apart the stages it'd otherwise find some use on.
Among the gacha Rares, one of the least-used is Tin Cat. Its ability to knock back Black enemies is a Useless Useful Spell, since most of them are easily knocked back anyway, and it's a single-target attacker with an ability against enemies that almost always come in huge hordes. Even discounting this, there are many, many cats that target Blacks and do a far better job of it, even on 4-star difficulty. Its Talents are also close to useless, especially the one for knockback immunity.
Among gacha Super Rares, the one nigh-universally considered the worst is Cat Toaster/Catophone, due to being outclassed in literally every situation you would want to use it in. If you need a Crowd Control unit for Angels, you have talented Sanzo and Juliet the Maiko. If you want an efficient Barrier Breaker, you already have Fencer Cat or Li'l Macho Legs. If you invest in Catophone's talents, you can also slow Aliens… but Corrupted Psychocat and Seafarer can do that and more without the need for NP investment. And it's not like Catophone has stats that would allow it to be a generalist, either.
Bodhisattva Cat/Tathagata Cat competes with the above Cat Toaster for the status of worst gacha Super Rare. Although its 40% slow chance and 30% weaken chance against Floating enemies from 300 range look solid at first glance, it's ruined by its ridiculously long 39.2 second cooldown, making it difficult to stack them or replace them if they die. There's also the issue of it being completely redundant next to the later-added Sanzo Cat, which is a Rare Cat, but does a much better job of stalling melee Floating enemies with its faster attack speed and much better cost and cooldown, and can also slow melee Angels as well. Tathagata's talents attempt to give it an edge over Sanzo through a boost to its movement speed and the duration of its status effects, but it's still horribly overshadowed even with them. And, just like Catophone, its stats are far too weak for it to be usable as a general midranger.
While all of the cats from Deadly advents are at least usable, several of the cats obtained from Merciless advents are disappointingly weak. Cossack Cat is only good against Oldhorns, not having enough speed, range, or HP to fight off any other Relics. Phantom Cat's stats are far too low to let it fend off the late-game Angel enemies it deals massive damage to, let alone anything else. Bakery Cat's ability to Curse Angels, Aliens, and Zombies isn't very useful most of the time, and even when it is, the unit's awkward range and inaccurate attacks make it extremely unwieldy to use. Pied Piper Cat is a very inconsistent Barrier Breaker and Aku weakener and Calligraphy Cat is a slightly better Cossack Cat. Rugby Cat and Medusa Cat also used to qualify, but their true forms make them much more usable.
For how tedious they are to obtain, several of the cats hatched from Ancient Eggs are rather disappointing, especially in comparison to the first Egg you'll likely get, Courier Cat.
Exorcist Cat can freeze Aku enemies, but has no shield piercing ability or surge immunity — bad abilities to lack, as it's unable to freeze shielded Akus or take their death surges. Even discounting that, it's a Master of None when it comes to crowd control: its freeze chance of 30% is too low for a fast freeze unit that helps you rush down Aku backliners, and its fast speed gives it poor survivability for a more conventional crowd-control unit. It's at least somewhat usable against THE FOLIVOREAN due to the enemy's slow attack speed and weak shield, but it's still not great.
Armored Firefly Cat simply suffers from being Overshadowed by Awesome by a galaxy of other options for anti-Red and Alien crowd control. Thaumaturge eclipses it in its role of weakening these enemies, and even on 4-crown difficulty, cats like Psychocat and Pirate Cat are more effective than it. It does have one very specific niche in the Bug Sumo events, where it can weaken the Ursamajor and Bore in the final events and help your Kabuto and Kuwagata Cats take hits, but that's it. Against Behemoth enemies, its HP is too low to tank and weaken Crustaceous Scissorex for long, while Casaurian Ahirujo is countered much more effectively by Courier Cat.
Surgeon Cat's ability to weaken Floating enemies with Long Distance attacks sounds powerful in a vacuum, but it's hopelessly overshadowed by Sanzo Cat when it comes to anti-Floating crowd control. It theoretically counters Pterowl Hazuku, being immune to surges and able to weaken it, but it's far more effective to just use rushers like Fishman Cat to kill it quickly instead of trying to weaken it. Outside of Pterowl, it's also far too weak to be useful as an anti-Behemoth attacker despite having Behemoth Slayer, and its survivability is poor due to having fast speed and only 1 knockback.
For a long time, Oda Nobunaga was among the worst Ubers in the game, to the point of reaching Memetic Loser status. While his ability was incredibly powerful — freezing Black enemies for a long time with each hit, enough to trap ones with few knockbacks in a Cycle of Hurting — it was negated by the fact that his other attributes were terrible. His survivability was extremely poor due to his moderate HP, poor range for an Uber, and only having one knockback, and his DPS was laughable compared to most Ubers considering these shortcomings. It got even worse when Bombercat was implemented, which could also permanently freeze Black enemies, but much more easily and reliably, while not being an Uber. While Nobunaga at his strongest (i.e. with Ultra Form and Normal Talents) still has some major issues, it's at least much better than he once was — having an anti-Aku role that's further supported by his Counter Surge ability, which leads into some useable niches, as well as much better HP and damage, an increase of his knock back count to 2 and lethal strike survival to improve his survivability, and the ability to No-Sell Curse to counter Blacks supported by Relics.
Sodom is another Uber considered to be extremely underwhelming in terms of power, even in his True Form. His stats point to him being intended as a ranged Mighty Glacier tank, with bulky HP and the ability to resist and knock back Floating enemies. The issue here is that Floating enemies can already be statused effectively by non-Uber options like Sanzo Cat, so Sodom's ability is completely redundant, and knockback is not a very desirable status to inflict on them most of the time. Even in situations where you'd want a tanky anti-Floating backliner, Sodom's stats are surprisingly bad — his DPS is well below average for his 390 range, his HP isn't enough to prevent him from getting shredded by strong melee enemies like Bun Buns, his 2 knockbacks give him deceptively poor survivability, he moves at a snail's pace and is thus vulnerable to LD enemies, missing an attack is quite harsh on his DPS due to his glacial attack speed, and he's one of the most expensive Ubers in the game, clocking in at a whopping $6450 to deploy. The end result is a mishmash of a unit which tries to be a tank, a support unit, a midranger, and a backliner, and flat-out fails at all of them. Sodom's talents attempt to give him late-game relevance by letting him target Relics and shrug off their curses, but knockback is very rarely useful against Relics due to the large amount of backliners the trait has, and they only start appearing at a point in the game where enemy DPS starts spiking, meaning even his high HP won't last long against them. In the end, Sodom is considered one of the worst units in the game, going beyond even other mediocre Dragon Emperors like Megidora and Kamukura, and is part of the reason why the Dragon Emperors set is considered risky to roll the gacha on.
Mizli, more specifically her Evolved/True forms, Marinmizu and Mizuririn. While having the ability to always Knockback and Slow down Aliens on every hit sounds nice, it’s actually terrible as many Alien-heavy stages utilise backliners; her abilities mean that she’ll push the Aliens deep into a backliner’s range, where in they’ll be able to kill any attackers that you may have out on the field or, given enough time, Marinmizu herself. While she does have her very rare moments where her ability set actually helps, she’s not seen in a very good light because of this on account of her potentially making stages harder than they should. What’s more, due to her status as a support unit, her generalist value is downright awful, being replaceable by your average generalist Uber, of which there are many.
For the same reason, basically every unit whose main selling point is that they knock back enemies aren’t as well received as others, even more so if they can Slow/Freeze enemies as that allows them to linger in a backliner's range and thus make accidentally leading your attacker stack to their deaths much easier. Exceptions are made for a select few, such as Kubiluga and Kasli the Scourge, because they knock back the backliners alongside the frontlines.
Despite their popularity, many of the Nekolugas (with the exception of Tecoluga and Togeluga) are quite weak for Ubers, due to their terrible survivability and recharge time. However, the ones that get it the worst are:
Nekoluga itself, despite being the flagship Uber of the set, is among the worst of them. Ultralan Pasalan is supposed to be a long-ranged support unit, able to occasionally deliver strong hits and use its knockback and freeze to keep the enemies at bay. However, its extremely slow attack speed makes this a lot less useful, as its status effects only hamper enemies for a few seconds out of its 19-second attack cycle, which means that it'll be doing nothing for most of its time on the field. Ultralan is further crippled by the standard Nekoluga weaknesses of low HP and one knockback alongside an extremely slow recharge speed, and its Talents barely help, with the freeze and attack boosts being the only somewhat worthwhile ones. It's also a victim of Power Creep, not only being the first Uber, but having gotten a True Form in the first update that introduced them; not only are its "strong" hits not that powerful against late-game enemies, but Cat God the Great, a free unit, can do most of what Ultralan does.
Nobiluga. He’s supposedly the ultimate sniper unit on account of him having very high piercing range (500, which few Long Distance Ubers have) which allows him to hit backliners with ease, having his attack reach up to 1000, allowing him to hit most, if not all, backliners in the game, and having immunities to Status Effects and Waves. The problem is that his stats just suck; his damage/DPS is bad even for his range, and his inner range (the area between the range where he starts to attack and where his blindspot starts) is minuscule, with even a slightly strong push from the enemies allowing them to get into his blindspot and having said blindspot be able to fit in a large variety of enemies. If the enemies do manage to push into his minimum range, he has almost no HP and no chances to reposition, so he's essentially dead as soon as they reach him. What’s more, his immunities can hurt him; his Knockback and Warp immunity means that he has no way of repositioning himself back to safety. And just to rub salt in the wound, his True Form doesn’t even try to fix his problems in the slightest, with it only halving his deploy cost and reducing his cooldown from 5 minutes to 3 minutes.
Papaluga is another incredibly underwhelming Uber, and is considered by many to be the single worst Uber in the game. While his ability to Curse all types of enemies sounds powerful when combined with his decent DPS and range, it can't make up for his shortcomings of terrible survivability, slow attack speed, having too short of a Curse time to permanently Curse his targets, and being too expensive and slow-recharging for what he is. Even if his Curse was reliable, Curse itself is a Useless Useful Spell because most enemies rely on their raw stats to be threatening, so even his ability can't compare to those of the other support Nekolugas'. The UDP guide sums it up well when it says that Papaluga "has all the weaknesses of a Nekoluga, but none of the strengths." To add insult to injury, not only does his True Form barely help, only adding a barely noticeable HP increase, slightly longer Curse duration, and Surge immunity, but it requires a Gold Catfruit Seed to evolve into, which is absolutely not worth it.
Furiluga manages to top even Papaluga in terms of how useless it is, but for the opposite reason: instead of having an ability that targets all enemy types but is relatively useless, Furiluga is only useful against Aku enemies with strong shields, and it's not even that good at its job. Its extremely slow attack speed prevents it from handling large amounts of Aku shields, and its fast attack animation makes it liable to miss its attacks if any peons are in the way. Also, shielded Aku enemies tend to be accompanied by ones that make surges when they die, which can bypass Furilan's massive standing range to exploit its pathetic health pool, and if it dies, it won't be off cooldown for a long time. It can also function as an anti-Barrier unit and a super-backline attacker, but it's completely useless and overshadowed in both of these roles. Unlike Papaluga, its True Form does at least try to improve it, giving it mini-surges that, Powerful, but Inaccurate as they are, at least help, and gives it immunity to Surges to help with its Anti-Aku role. At the very least, it gains an extremely efficient CatCombo with Cat Researcher, giving +2 Worker Cat levels for just 2 units.
Summerluga's Surge attacks can deliver massive damage to any enemies they hit... if they hit, since her Surge area is so wide that the Surge will usually spawn away from the enemies that it needs to hit. Discounting her Surge, Bikinilan Pasalan's stats are completely pathetic, being the same as Unknown Cat's (covered above) without the knockback ability that makes it even slightly worth using.
Many of the Ubers from collab events are quite weak, though there are several that are fairly strong. However, some of the weakest are:
Mola King, from the Survive! Mola mola! collab, is a divisive example. Some consider him to be marginally usable, due to his long range and fast recharge time, and believe that his Talents make him significantly better with such abilities as an 80% chance to dodge attacks from any enemy and a powerful DPS boost; other consider him one of the worst cats in the game, due to his glass health and poor DPS, and find his talents Awesome, but Impractical due to the high cost required to make him good. Either way, he's a Memetic Loser among the fanbase.
All of the Metal Slug Defense Ubers are terrible, due to being released early in the game's life and not having true forms for a long while, but the worst of them is HUGE HERMIT. Despite its high DPS, especially against Aliens, it's rendered useless by its poor HP for a tank Uber, slow speed, high cost for what it is, and very short range. It's also not immune to Warp and can't break Barriers, so it struggles to do anything against the starred Aliens that it's supposedly strong against. Not even its True Form was able to salvage it, only giving it a sub-par health boost, Warp Immunity, and an anti-Black target - a trait composed primarily of high-power pushers that shred even significantly bulkier tanks.
The Ubers from Street Fighter V are also mostly below average with the exception of Blanka, but Dhalsim and E. Honda are the weakest among them. Dhalsim has good HP, but bad range and DPS, along with low uptime on his Weaken, and he's not good at controlling White enemies due to his short range. Meanwhile, E. Honda's ability to knock back Angels isn't particularly useful, and he has poor DPS for a rusher, even when compared to some cats of lower rarity.
One of the most despised Ubers in the entire game is the Moon Operators, from the Neon Genesis Evangelion collaboration event. They're a variant of Princess Kaguya (herself already fairly weak as Ubers go), but with worse stats all around, no spammable first form, and target types that are either overcrowded (Red) or not suited for it (Zombie). While this would normally just be another bad Uber, what makes the Moon Operators so hated is that the set they're in is otherwise full of great Ubers that will serve you well throughout the entire game, turning them into an Undesirable Prize.
The first wave of Ubers from the Neon Genesis Evangelion collab were otherwise a marked aversion, with all of them save Moon Operators being powerful. However, the second wave, based off of the Angels instead of the heroes, wasn't so lucky, with only Night Oracle Rei and (less so) the 9th Angel being any good. The 4th Angel has terrible DPS for an Uber, even against the Black enemies it deals massive damage to, and its ability is both very niche and overshadowed by Pizza Cat. The 6th Angel is a Glass Cannon with terrible attack speed, and it mostly relies on luck to decimate Floating enemies like it's supposed to. The 10th Angel is far too weak for an anti-Angel attacker and has a weak freeze ability, overcompensating for its splash damage and (inaccurate) Surge. All of them also recharge at a terribly slow speed, which just makes their gimmicky abilities even riskier to use. Part of the reason they're so disliked is that their enemy counterparts are extremely strong, especially in Heralds of the End, so the Redemption Demotion is massive in scale.
High Lord Babel is considered to be the worst Legend Rare, and perhaps the only one to be outright bad. His HP and attack stats are both tremendously high, but everything else, from his cooldown to his attack animation and range, is mediocre or just straight-up bad. He also falls off hard in the late-game, where enemies of his target types become less relevant and stronger enemies can shred through even his giant HP more easily. Many Uber Rares are considered far more viable than he is, and he's a disappointing pull despite being one of the rarest units in the entire game.
Before being Rescued from the Scrappy Heap through Talents, Bondage Cat was widely mocked as the most weak and useless unit in the entire game. After the 10.0 update, Pastry Cat mostly supplanted it in this role, due to the fact that its talents don't help it in the slightest.
Eggy Cat gets a lot of mockery from the fanbase, due to being a nearly useless and overshadowed unit. Some of the mockery did die down when its true form came out, pulling it from being a Low-Tier Letdown to merely outclassed.
Doremi is commonly seen as the weakest Advent boss, due to how easy it is to cheese her stage. Before his stage was buffed, Evil Emperor Cat had a similar reputation.
Anytime terrible Ancient Egg units are mentioned, Surgeon Cat is very likely to get brought up. The Egg itself takes a hefty cost of Behemoth Stones to hatch, and the reward for using those stones is a painfully mediocre Weaken-based anti-Floating crowd-controller whose Long Distance attacks aren't enough to prevent it from being horribly outclassed by much easier-to-get competition such as Necro-dancer and Sanzo (the latter of whom already has a Talent giving it Weaken, meaning Surgeon doesn't even have that over it).
Saying that Archer Cat is the best Cat ever. Explanation Way before Rare Cat True Forms were a thing, Archer Cat was considered to be one of the worst cats in the game due to not being able to do his job as an anti-floating attacker well due to his very low stats. Because of this, people gave him the Memetic Badass treatment and joked that he is this unstoppable force that will net you a win the moment you spawn him. This also sometimes led new players who didn’t know about the joke into thinking that Archer Cat was something worth getting until the players clarified it for them. Nowadays, it's a Discredited Meme and any unironic mention of it will get you some mockery over using a dead meme, not to mention that his True Form and Talents turned him into a legitimately useful Cat.
Treating Kasa Jizo like the best Cat ever. Explanation Kasa Jizo is an Uber in the Ultra Souls set — and unlike Archer Cat, it lives up to the hype, being spammable, moderately cheap, and extremely powerful for its price, in addition to dealing massive damage to Black and Angel enemies. As such, Jizo has become a Memetic Badass, being hyped as being able to win any stage. There's even a copypasta about Kasa Jizo carrying a clueless new player through Empire of Cats. When the fan-made tier list dropped Jizo from SS-tier to S, complaining about it became a minor meme as well.
Treating Courier Cat like the best Cat ever. Explanation Similarly to Kasa Jizo above, Courier Cat is not an ironic example, being one of the most powerful no-gacha units in the game and a true Game-Breaker on red and behemoth stages. Due to how stupidly powerful it is for the first ancient egg unit obtained, fans often portray Courier as a mix of a Memetic Badass and Memetic Psychopath in videos such as this one. Courier gets depicted as an unstoppable force of nature which destroyed the game's balance and forced behemoth enemies to have absurd stats to be able to stand up to it.
Calling Hermit Cat "The Lorax", or saying that he destroys gacha. Explanation When the Heavenly Tower was first released, Floor 30, Hermit Cat's boss stage, was a massive Difficulty Spike compared to any prior stage, requiring either very good strategy and execution or very strong Uber Rares to have a chance at winning. In particular, beating the stage no-gacha was considered to be one of the hardest feats in the entire game. Hermit Cat was thus hyped up as a Memetic Badass, with the meme both comparing him to the Lorax in appearance and claiming that he would destroy gacha users. While Floor 30 has gotten significantly easier over time, the meme still remains.
"Almighties True Form when?"/"Almighties True Form never". ExplanationThe Almighties were among the few Uber sets that had no True Forms for any of them, even though sets released after them had True Forms for all of their members. Players had repeatedly questioned when they'd finally get a boost in power, to the point where it eventually became a meme. The meme finally died in the 9.10 update, when all of them got True Forms.
"Togeluga best waifu" Explanation Togeluga’s banner description mistakenly refers to the unit as a she. Combined with the games numerous attractive female characters, the players were quick to start calling Togeluga a waifu. May have become an Ascended Meme with the release of Summerluga.
"Moves fast, attacks fast, and spits acid." ExplanationA fan-made enemy called the Iguana was posted to /r/battlecats, which had extremely poor-quality artwork, and its stats were only described in vague terms. It reached meme status when it was shown off in Lucas IV's April Fools' Day video.
Showing Future Cat walking to the tune of the "Wide Putin Walking" meme. ExplanationFuture Cat's walking animation looks unusual enough to begin with, but it also nearly syncs up with the song and looks vaguely similar to Putin's walk from the video, creating an association between the two.
"Hard+++ is right. We are now in the meanest, hardest levels of the game, there is no going back now."ExplanationA line from Nurse Wuffa's widely-watched video guide on Crazed Cat, from back when the stage's difficulty was listed as "Hard+++" and not "Insane". It became popular to spam this phrase after later stages got added that put Crazed Cat to shame in terms of difficulty.
"Outclassed by Sanzo" Explanation When Version 11.6 first introduced Daliasan, since all everyone knew of him was his abilities at the time, XSkull, a prominent member of the Battle Cats community, immediately decried him with something to the effect of the above quote as Daliasan having Slow vs Floating and Angels was something shared by Sanzo, except that Sanzo is so good at his job that most other crowd controllers of his target traits are rendered redundant because of him and that the same will befall Daliasan. Once Daliasan's stats revealed him to be a Game-Breaker in the offense side of things while also having enough of an edge in the crowd control side of things that make him stand out from Sanzo's shadow, the quote was then repurposed to poke fun at the initial dismissal of Daliasan before eventually being used whenever a unit that has a crowd control role vs Floating and/or Angels is introduced in the game, whether or not they actually are as the quote says.
The noise of a Zombie enemy being Killed Off for Real by a Zombie Killer unit. It's a purifying bell sound that not only sounds pretty, but notifies you that the enemy is dead for good.
The sound of a Critical Hit going off, a melodic plink that is almost always accompanied by whatever Metal enemy you were fighting reeling from severe damage, if not being killed outright. Not as fun to hear when it’s R. Ost or Capy inflicting them on your cats, though.
The noise of a Savage Blow happening is a sharp whip-crack sound which fits perfectly with one of your cats unleashing a tremendously strong hit. Similarly to critical hits, though, they're less fun to listen to when it's Aku Gory dishing them out against you.
Treasures, more specifically getting the individual pieces to activate or upgrade a treasure. While the treasures themselves are super helpful and are required to get anywhere in the game, actually getting them is a slog; it’s completely random if you'll get a piece of the treasure set at all. There are cases where one has played the same stage for a long time only to get the Inferior rank of the piece (the most common treasure rarity you can get). While you can ignore some until you really need them (Anything related to the Cat Cannon, Cat Base health, or increased XP drops), some are so important These include Increasing your cats' attack and HP, increasing money production and max money capacity, reducing the cooldown between spawning a cat, reducing the stats of the Alien/Starred Alien type and boosting the effects of abilities against a specific trait that missing even one Superior in an all superior set can mean the difference between losing the stage and winning it. Fortunately, the 12.6 update made treasure farming a bit more bearable through the addition of golden CPUs, which can skip stages up to 10 times a day and make it faster to replay stages for treasures.
Lucas IV: [Treasure] is both the blessing and the curse of this game. Mostly the latter.
Z-Medals, obtained by clearing Zombified versions of Empire of Cats stages, are a unique case: they were intended to make treasures less annoying to get, but ended up becoming a Scrappy Mechanic themselves. On paper, the idea sounds nice — beat Zombies to get Z-Medals, and collect all the Z-Medals in a set to boost the treasure chances on the stages they affect. However, there are some serious issues with them. The Zombies appear in random stages, so it's unlikely that you'll get the full set of treasures needed to boost the treasure drop rate until you already have the treasures themselves. Also, considering that most Zombie enemies are massive Demonic Spiders, a new player without many treasures may be unable to defeat them and get the treasure for the infected stage — the exact opposite of the effect that they were supposed to have. About the only good thing about them is that they give 10 free Cat Food when first cleared and a +50 increase to your max energy should you clear all of the zombified versions of a story chapter's stages.
The Dodge ability on enemies, which the special Doges in the Miku Collab gave players a taste of. Unlike cat units whose dodges are limited to certain enemy types, an enemy with the Dodge skill can trigger it on any attack it takes. This means that there is no way to avoid possibly triggering the dodge and giving it total invulnerability for a few seconds, and if the player is unlucky they could potentially just trigger this dodge again and again, indefinitely. While the Miku Doges fall under Goddamned Bats due to them being just weak Mooks without their Dodge, the prospect of this ability being added to more dangerous enemies in the future is frightening, to say the least. As of version 11.5, this possibility has been reignited with the introduction of Lil Doge, which is basically a reskinned Miku Doge that is no longer limited to special event stages.
Similarly, the Surge ability on enemies. Enemies with Surge will create a giant wave attack a distance away from themselves every time they hit and the ability activates. However, unlike with shockwaves, the surge appears a random distance away from themselves, and enemies with the ability usually hit much harder than enemies with shockwaves. A single Surge in the wrong place can spell the end for any cats unlucky enough to be hit, and it's completely out of the player's control to stop it. Units that can No-Sell Surges are much rarer than ones with Wave protection, too — and even if they themselves don't die from the Surge, the meatshields surrounding them will, which could make them easy prey for other enemies. To make matters worse, some Aku enemies are guaranteed to perform a Surge when they die, meaning you can't even try to not let them land hits.
The "Baron/Gauntlet" stages that pit you against the same set of enemies over and over at increasing strength levels, like Baron Seal and Le’Grim, aren’t well-liked by the playerbase. In addition to being repetitive, the concept is seen as a dumbed-down Heavenly Tower — and, unless you’re packing strong Ubers or willing to stack max-talent Cyberpunks for a long time, good luck beating the final stages due to the ridiculous stat inflation that'll be present on every single enemy. To make matters worse, there’s a 30-minute cooldown after you win one of the stages, and before 10.7, the Baron boss maps needed you to do them 60 times instead of the current 20.
Talent Orbs. Getting one in the first place is no mean feat — you need to spend large quantities of energy in Stories of Legend to unlock an Enigma Stage (or farm the orb stages that occasionally appear in Isle of Hidden Treasure, which costs more energy than the regular Engima Stages in exchange for having a reliable schedule), and hope that it's one that drops Orbs instead of one for some other reward. There are 3 stages for each type of Orb, ranging in difficulty from "beatable by players around mid-SoL" to "extremely difficult even for endgame players". However, even the hardest stages have an extremely low probability to drop any sort of good Orb, so you'll need to play the stages many times and merge your weak Orbs into stronger ones. Even if you do have a high-rank Orb, their effects are quite underwhelming, with even the S-rank Orbs only giving 20% more HP or a flat boost of 5 times the unit's base attack stat in power against a single enemy type. While they're free to equip, removing one from a unit also costs NP.
Getting the NP needed to activate Talents falls into this. It's tedious to get large quantities of NP, as the only ways to get it are by exchanging cats rolled from the gacha or Orbs. The exchange rates on gacha cats are pretty bad: 1 NP for Normal and Special Cats, 5 for Rares, 15 for Super Rares, and 50 for Ubers, when most useful talents require anywhere from 100 to 200 NP to fully upgrade. Outside of exchanging items, there's no other way to farm NP, which makes cats that rely on their Talents to be effective more trouble than they're worth at times.
You'll have a tough time finding fans who have anything positive to say about Behemoth Stone farming. On paper, the concept is nice: Behemoth Culling stages (Hidden Forest of Gapra, Ashvini Desert, and Jinfore Volcano) appear at select times each day, and you can play them to get Behemoth Stones and hatch the Ancient Eggs. The problem is that getting the stones this way is entirely too slow. Even if you check in for all 3 stages each day, which might not be possible, you're still only getting 3 stones maximum — most likely of the common purple and red ones — when many of the eggs take dozens of stones of different colors to hatch. You can get additional stones by playing the Hunter's Map enigma stages, but this is a Luck-Based Mission, since they only have a 50% chance of dropping when you get an enigma stage. This all adds up to a lot of time spent playing the same few stages, well past the point when they become monotonous.
The HP for the Cat Base and enemy base used to be rendered underneath units, so certain cats (most notoriously Catellite, who's a meatshield and flies at the exact height of the cat base HP) could block it off when spawned. Fortunately, the 12.5 update made the base HP always render over units.
Scrappy Weapon: The Waterblast cannon for the Cat Base tends to go unused by the vast majority of players. It's an anti-Metal cannon which fires a blast of salt water, damaging Metal enemies by a percentage of their current HP — starting at 11% at level 1, and going up to a whopping 45% by level 30. The problem? Two words: Crippling Overspecialization. Base materials and helpers are often in short supply, and players will want to invest in other cannons with wider usage, like Iron Wall, Thunderbolt, and Holy Blast, before they even consider a cannon that only works on Metal enemies. Metals also aren't exactly in need of such a powerful weapon to be bearable, since there are plenty of strong non-uber options for damaging them and applying status effects, so it's also far less useful than the similarly-specialized Holy Blast. By the time a Waterblast is done charging, your critical hitters have likely already done far more damage to enemy Metals than the cannon would have, especially considering that most Metal enemies tend to not have a lot of health to begin with - even 45% of a lategame Metal's maximum HP will be only a few hundred to a few thousand HP that can easily be dealt in a few critical hits, with it only doing competitive damage to buffed Sir Metal Seals or the Metal Cyclone. The base's style is useful, giving resistance to surge attacks, but players will tend to avoid the actual cannon.
A popular challenge players give themselves is to do levels No Gacha, which means they cannot use any units which they got from the Rare Cat Capsule. Some players will instead only restrict Uber Rares and Legend Rares, as they tend to be Purposely Overpowered compared to the other units available.
Similarly, some players used to purposely leave their Normal Cats underlevelled until reaching specific points in the game, as they considered them to be broken at their maximum level. This became less popular as Power Creep happened, however, as it's now possible to progress through Stories of Legend without using Normals much at all.
Shocking Moments: Once version 12.2 dropped in the Japanese Version, the player base got to see what they can expect from a typical Zero Legends subchapter... and 3 of the 6 stages contained, in order of appearance, The Cat God (the Final Boss of the first Cats of the Cosmos chapter), White Cyclone (a event-stage only Optional Boss), and Hannya (an Advent Boss) respectively. Saying the player base was terrified and excited at the fact that they can expect all manners of enemies to appear, even certain event-exclusive Super Bosses, and the variety that this can provide for stages is an understatement.
Year-Round, obtained by clearing all of the Total War events. Not only does it take a long time (a year at minimum) to get, but the stages are no joke to beat, especially Dance of Winter.
A True Master, the medal for clearing Legend Quest, will require a lot of luck to get, as your cats will be randomly swapped out in each level. You'll need to beat lots of Stories of Legend chapters on different difficulty levels to have enough crowns to reach the end.
The One Percenter medals aren't difficult to obtain, just extremely tedious. To get the last one, you need to generate 200 million cents across all of your battles, which will take an eternity to do no matter what.
Yellow Behemoth Stones are needed to hatch several of the later Ancient Eggs, as well as awaken powerful units like Elder Beast Naala. However, getting them is much harder and more tedious than the other colors of regular Behemoth Stone: you either have to find them as a Rare Random Drop from Jinfore Volcano, which comes once per day and has the strongest enemies of the three Behemoth Culling stages, or play Hunter's Map III, an enigma stage only accessible after beating Primitive Souls in Uncanny Legends. Even then, unlike the other four colors, said stages will often only drop one at best (with even Hunter's Map IV only having a 30% chance to drop 2 without the continuation stage), and although most of the earlier Eggs thankfully don't need as many Yellows as the other colors, there's no such mercy if you want some of the most powerful ones, especially if they need full Yellow Behemoth Gems instead.
Epic Catfruit Seeds are primarily obtained through Growing Epic, a stage that only appears for 3 hours per day on weekends. However, the stage itself only gives a guaranteed Epic Fruit - the actual seed drops from the continuation stage, which only has a 40% chance of appearing, meaning that not only will the player have to prepare one lineup to tackle both stages, they aren't even guaranteed to get the seed even if they can do it, which is further compounded by the stage costing a hefty 350 energy per run. Aside from that, the only way to get them is by beating Floor 49 of the Heavenly Tower, or Floors 10 and 20 of the Infernal Tower, the latter two of which aren't even guaranteed to give you one. Fortunately, every unit that needs an Epic Seed to evolve only needs one...except for Lasvoss Reborn, who needs 10.
Dark Catseyes are the rarest Catseye variant and are needed to upgrade Uber Super Rares above level 50, and by extension are needed to unlock their Ultra Talents and Ultra Forms. However, these are some of the rarest items in the entire game and generally locked behind extremely painful ordeals: they drop individually from the highest floors of the Infernal Tower, certain levels of the Underground Labyrinth, the final stages of Baron Gauntlets, and the last 2 levels of the Relic/Aku Citadels, with the other sources either being unreliable (1% chance from the time-limited Catseye gacha) or unsustainable (bonus rewards from 11-draws on the Rare Capsule). How many does an Uber need to go from level 50 to 60? Fifteen. Needless to say, you'll need a lot of patience and grinding if you want to get a level 60 Uber, and the wait is even more painful for Ubers who are rescued or exponentially boosted by their Ultra Forms.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Many of the Crossovers in the game are quite small, and don't always use the potential of the other game's characters well. The Crash Fever collab event was widely criticized for only including three units (two of which are worthless), when Crash Fever itself included many more collectable cats and challenging stages to play. However, the biggest example is likely the collaboration event with Godzilla; despite the potential of including Godzilla and other Kaiju as strong enemies and collectable Ubers, all the collab event included was four gimmicky stages and one nearly useless Rare to collect.note The collaboration event is specifically with the Shin Godzilla incarnation, meaning that the appearance of other Kaiju from the Godzilla-verse is questionable since only Shin Godzilla appears in the movie. Not being able to even get him and the lack of content is still seen as a wasted opportunity, however.
They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The game's 10.7 update introduced a change to the difficulty system and the menu UI, as well as replacing O Fortuna due to copyrights. The opinions of the fandom were largely confused and negative, stating that the UI changes looked odd and unneeded and the new O Fortuna wasn't as fitting for the stages it appeared in.
Underused Game Mechanic: Although most players like the concept of Talents, where the player can spend NP to unlock new abilities for their cats, the mechanic's potential isn't fully realized. Some units, like the purchasable Special Cats, Dread Pirate Catley, or Rodeo Cat, get reinvented by their Talents, but these examples are relatively rare, with most units getting fairly straightforward buffs. Worse, while you'd expect Talents to be used as a balancing mechanic for weaker units, the reverse is more often true; strong units like Sanzo Cat, Can Can Cat, and Pizza Cat get incredible buffs that push them over the edge into being broken, while weaker units like Robocat, Tathagata Cat, and Ultra Delinquent Cat barely get anything useful. Perhaps the most hated Talents are the ones for status resistances or immunities, which are usually given to units that have no use for them and come across as filler.
Heavy Assault C.A.T. is a Mini-Mecha that walks on two mechanical legs... and it has a laser cannon mounted right between them. When it attacks◊, it fires a yellow laser at the ground, making it look like it's attacking foes with its super laser piss.
Aer◊, being a wind pixie, is surrounded by clouds and gusts of wind, which are tinted green. However, as this makes Aer a floating cloud of green gas, some fans have taken to calling him a "fart cloud".
Doom Engine Pandora◊ is supposed to be a (technically) mobile research lab, so it has a boxy white frame with one side cut out, allowing you to see the cats working inside. Unfortunately, this also makes the Legend Rare look like a giant 3D printer.
Hannya is officially female, but is usually referred to as male by players, due to being a variant of Shy Boy. Cameraman Cat is also sometimes referred to as male, due to her Gender-Blender Name.
What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Don't let the game's concept of cute cats taking over the world fool you. This game has quite a few characters that drink alcohol, make a reference to flashing people for their attacks, and look less like cats and more like almost naked humans. Just because it says "Cat" in the title and looks cute doesn't mean you should let your kids play it. Being a mobile phone game (a platform which tends to fall into this trope as well) doesn't help either.
Woolseyism: The Awakening stages for purchasable Special and monthly Rare Cats are just called "Road to [cat name] Evolution" in the Japanese version. The English version instead changes them to more creative names or puns on the unit's name, which gives them a bit more personality.
and, because Sniper the Cat attacked faster than him, Stun Lock him until he dies. Even with the increase of its minimum range, it’s still easy to beat; only one enemy comes out at a time, and even Bun Bun Symbiote and Bore are easily handled since, by this point, you probably have some cats that can beat them without any problem. At least it has a cool battle theme.
