The Battle Cats (Video Game)

It's a game about CATS. What would you expect?

Amongst all the global issues, civil wars, financial crises, terrorism, a brand new threat appears...
"The Battle Cats"
We found it too hard to fight back...because... these Cats...are too cute.

— The game's introduction

The Battle Cats (にゃんこ大戦争, Nyanko Daisensou) is a Tower Defence game released by PONOS Corporation in 2014, with a 3DS port in 2016. In spite of the Excuse Plot above, the game stars a group of mutant Cats trying to take over the world — a feat accomplished by going over to each country in the world and conquering it, fighting off Doges and a variety of other creatures in a tug-of-war style Tower Defence battle. After amassing enough power, the Cats start to expand their ambitions — from merely taking over the world, to defending it from an Alien invasion, to taking over the universe, a realm of devils, or time itself...

Got all that? Good.

Despite the seeming simplicity, The Battle Cats has quite a lot of complexity. There are 10 Normal Cats, the Special Cats, and many, many Rare, Super Rare, and Uber and Legend Rare Cats. There's over 800 Cats to choose from, some of them costing Cat Food, and hundreds upon hundreds of stages to test their strength on.

The game has seen 2 ports made to Nintendo consoles. The first being on the Nintendo 3DS under the title The Battle Cats POP! and a Nintendo Switch port titled The Battle Cats Unite!.

In its lifetime, spin-offs have been made for it. These include, among others, Battle Cats Rangers (an Idle Game spin-off), Go! Go! Pogo Cat (an Endless Running Game starring Pogo Cat), and The Burgle Cats (a Stealth-Based Game).

Not to be confused with the medieval fantasy Battlecats.

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The troping begins!

The Battle Cats Tropes A-D

Abandoned Laboratory: Laboratory of Relics, the final sub-chapter of Stories of Legend, is an ancient lab with doorways that have been boarded up, Relic Doge specimens and a Lost Superweapon, and is where most of the Colossus enemies were created.
Absurdly High Level Cap: Most Cats generally cap at level 30 and can have their level increased up to 50 (60 for Ubers) using Catseyes. However, all Cats from the Rare Capsule can have their levels increased with duplicates, up to +80 for Rares or +70 for Super/Uber Rares, which leads to potential 3-digit levels in a game where 30-40 is sufficient for most stages, but requires so many duplicates that it's outright infeasible to get them that high (especially for Uber Rares). Interestingly, despite being a step above Ubers, Legend Rares play with this trope, as they only cap at 50+9.
Absurdly Low Level Cap:
- Normal Cats' standard levels stop at 20, and certain event Special Cats are stuck at level 1. Since they can't get further upgrades from XP, the only way to evolve them is with + levels obtained through duplicates.
- Metal Cat maxes out at level 20 and can't receive + levels.
Accidental Time Travel: During the Stories of Legend ending, someone accidentally sits on the Cat Army time machine's button, sending the Cats to ancient times.
Achievement System: 9.0 introduced Meow Medals, which essentially act as this trope. They serve as trophies, and their only real use is unlocking the last few formation slots.
Adaptational Attractiveness: Shin Godzilla was originally covered in rough, disorderly scales, a disfigured head and open wounds, which this game's version replaces with smooth scales, a relatively standard reptile head and cleaner scars, making him look more in line with other Godzillas.
Adaptational Badass: The Japanese versions of Empire of Cats and The Aku Realms have the Cat Army just take over Japan. The international version boosts this to the Cats taking over all of Earth and the Moon, with Japan being the seventh stage visited. The Japanese Cat Army would eventually conquer the world proper with Into the Future taking place across the entire planet and Moon 900 years into the future.
Adaptation Expansion: With new enemies, abilities, restrictions and music, Cats of the Cosmos brings significantly more to the table than its predecessor from The Battle Cats POP!, Interstellar Invasion.
Ad Reward:
- Once your energy drops too low, you'll get a prompt above the energy tab that, when tapped on, offers you to watch an ad to recover energy equal to 20% of your max energy capacity. This can only be used once every 6 hours.
- In the GAMATOTO screen, an item bag may appear. When tapped on, you're offered to watch an ad to get +1 of a Catseye of any type (except Legend Catseyes), Base Material of any type, or Cat Food, though the latter 2 rewards are very underwhelming considering that you'll need a lot more than that in order to get some use out of them. If you're lucky with the Cat Shrine's Fortunes however, it can temporarily be upgraded to a Great Fortune, which, while still only giving you only 1 of said item, gives you more worthwhile rewards, which include all Catseye types (including the Legend Catseyes), Leaderships (An energy refill item), Rich Cats, and Treasure Radars. As well as the +1 Cat Food too, for some reason.
- On the screen where you can purchase Cat Food with real money, there's an option in it that lets you watch an ad for +1 Cat Food. Notably, before 11.2, this didn't have a limit as to how many of these ads you could watch in a single day, meaning that you could get hundreds of Cat Food just by watching hours of ads, though with the arrival of version 11.2, this has since been given a limit of 5 of these ads per day.^note
- Upon clearing any event stage that's meant to drop tons of XP, such as XP Colosseum and XP Megablitz, you're given an offer to double the XP gained by watching an ad. This doesn't affect the bonus XP gained through the stage's Random Drop mechanic, however.
- Upon losing a stage, you're given the option to watch an ad to Continue the current fight, which sends all enemies back to their base with all the damage you managed to inflict upon them still present, fully maxing out your Worker Cat, Cat Cannon charge, and Wallet, and fully recovering all Cat units out of cooldown. Considering that you're normally supposed to spend 30 Cat Food to do this, this offer is actually very powerful in the right stage. Its limitations are that you can only take the offer once every 8 hours and it doesn't work on stages with a "No Continues" restriction.
- Once per day, you're able to roll a Lucky Ticket Capsule after watching an ad. Perfect for when you want to try and get the Li'l Cats, but no Lucky Ticket farming stages are present.
- In the Item Shop, you can watch an ad to gain 10,000 XP. Not all that useful outside very early-game considering you can gain more than that by playing stages normally.
Airborne Mook: Floating is one of the first and most common enemy types introduced. Unlike in most tower defense games, Floating enemies don't have any unique mechanics or properties other than being affected by Cats' anti-Floating abilities.
The Alcoholic: A few Cats can be seen drinking, but Adult Cat takes the cake for biggest drunk. It gets so bad that his later forms replace the bottle with an IV stand and his True Form has him jailed for his own good.
Alien Invasion: The premise of Into the Future. In the far future, aliens have invaded the world, so the Cats must take it back from them. Cats of the Cosmos is an inversion: the Cats are the ones invading the solar system, and then they invade various alien worlds.
Alpha Bitch: Celeboodle is a literal example, being a haughty poodle. Turns into a Stealth Pun when you realize what a female dog is called.
Female college student who enjoys chit-chat with her girls every afternoon at high end cafés. Her friends secretly hate her.
Allegedly Free Game: While the game already offers you enough Cat units for free to complete the main stages, Uber Rare and Legend Rare Cats are usually hard to come by, even if you have the cash, unless you're smart with how you spend your Cat Food. Thankfully, you can trade in 5 Cat Base upgrade orbs from the Cat Ticket gacha that you can no longer use to upgrade the Cat Base (i.e when the power they upgrade is at +10) for one Rare Ticket, for use at the Rare Capsule gacha. There are also points in the game where you automatically obtain Platinum Tickets for your hard work, which guarantee an Uber Rare Cat.
Ambiguous Time Period:
- Stories of Legend takes place at least 20 years into the past.
- Uncanny Legends is set in ancient times, but how ancient is open to interpretation.
Amplifier Artifact: Treasures, obtained from Empire of Cats, Into the Future, and Cats of the Cosmos, will confer various buffs the more of them you have and the quality of your collection.
- Treasures from EoC raise basic attributes of your units, such as Cat recharge time, money generation, and base stats. The game expects you to grab all of these as fast as you can - in fact, the "baseline" values for all game statistics assume that you've got all of these Treasures maxed out.
- "Fruit"-type Treasures from ItF and CotC play this more straight, each increasing the effectiveness of Elemental Rock–Paper–Scissors against their respective type. Debuffers will inflict statuses for a longer duration, knockback will push enemies farther back, and stat-based abilities like Massive Damage, Strong Against, or Resistant will have their multipliers improved.
- The "Crystal"-type Treasures from ItF and CotC reduce the passive stat multiplier present on the Aliens and Starred Aliens respectively, and are effectively required to beat the respective chapters and later Legend Stages without being walled by Aliens with absurdly inflated stats.
- The Mystery Mask, only present in Cats of the Cosmos, serves exactly one purpose: to weaken the passive 1100% stat magnification of the Final Boss.
And Then John Was a Zombie: Some units who research and help the Cats fight the Aku become Aku themselves, including Aku Researcher and Empress Cat.
Animal Theme Naming:
- LeMurr, Loris and Tarsiriel are named after different primates, though all three enemies are tarsiers.
- The Behemoth Culling maps are named after breeds of cat, those being the Singapura (Hidden Forest of Gapra), Abyssinian^note(Ashvini Desert) and Norwegian Forest Cat (Jinfore Volcano).
Animation Bump: The movement and attacks of the Uber Rare Cats and the Crazed Cats are noticeably more fluid than the Normal Cats. Crazed Lizard Cat's description hangs a lampshade on this, with the only difference from the original Lizard Cat apparently being that he "supports High Definition".
Animesque: The majority of the more human-like units are this.
Anti-Air:
- Many Cats have abilities that only affect Floating enemies, ranging from Status Effects to stat boosts.
- When upgraded, the Slow Beam Foundation for the Cat Base reduces the damage Cats take from Floating enemies.
Anti-Climax: The second-to-last stage of Stories of Legend, Unkept Promises, is nothing but a short, barren stage with a 9,999,999 health enemy base and a single, unbuffed Doge once the base reaches 1% health... as well as a torrent of heavily buffed Doges from all points of the game should the player take more than 200 seconds to win. The boss that comes after puts up slightly more of a fight.
Anti-Entrenchment Mook: Enemies with the Wave Attack ability will create a piercing energy wave that travels along the ground, which can snipe long-ranged Cats hiding behind a stream of meatshields. These enemies have to be handled either by using Cats immune to or blocking the Waves, or by foregoing defensive play and rushing them down.
Anti-Frustration Features:
- Once your Cat Base is fully upgraded, you can trade in 5 Cat Base upgrade orbs from the Cat Capsule for one Rare Ticket, for use at the Rare Capsule. Combined with the stages that drop regular Cat Tickets, and it's easy to get a decent collection of gacha Cats without spending a cent.
- The strength magnification from crown levels drops over time in Stories of Legend and Uncanny Legends, to prevent enemies from becoming too unbearably strong.
- There's an in-game calendar that shows when most event stages are on for the coming week.
- If you accidentally enter the wrong level, you can go back to the map and get a refund on the energy you spent - as long as you quit within 10 seconds of gameplay.
Anti-Structure: Units and enemies with the Base Destroyer ability deal quadruple damage to the opposing side's base.
April Fools:
- This was initially subverted by PONOS; in 2017, PONOS released a fake news article that claimed to have discovered an "Awakened Gene" in the Li'l Cats that would let them evolve like the other Special Cats. However, the article wasn't a joke, and their (much more useful) True Forms were added to the game a short time after.
- A more conventional example happened in 2018, where an ad on the title screen lead to a fake news website announcing a rhythm game titled "School Cat Club Idol Heart Live Plus!" It also featured an ad for the movie 'Your Cat's Name' and some fake news headlines such as:
  - BREAKING: GAMATOTO released from intensive care following Catamin overdose.
  - Popular DogeTuber "T. Bun-Bun" under fire after anti-Hippoe comments.
  - A Forbidden Romance?! Actress Cat & Beefcake Cat CAUGHT!
- Another fake news article was released in 2022, though only in Japanese. It claims to report on a new Battle Cats theme park at "Nyanko Universal Japan", with attractions like a real-life 6-hour GAMATOTO Expedition, "Nyanko Burgers" made by domestic Cats, and a real-life version of the game where you have to pay real money to deploy your units. The website also features several fake banner ads, including one which serves as a Take That! to the infamous Hero Wars ads.
Arbitrary Headcount Limit: You're limited to 50 (sometimes fewer) Cats on the field at once, and the enemies have a variable, usually-smaller limit. Some stages limit the headcount to just 20, 15, 10, 5, 2, and even 1 Cat on the field at a time. You can also only bring ten cats to a stage at one time, but some stages limit it to just the first five slots.
Arbitrary Weapon Range: Any Cat or enemy with the Long Distance ability has increased reach in exchange for not being able to attack anything too close to it. The exact sizes of their ranges, areas of effect, and blind spots vary wildly.
Arc Number:
- 222 (as well as other permutations of 2s) is used as the name of Killer Cat's original unlock stage (The 222 Incident), the number on Prisoner Cat's uniform, and as the HP of some stages' enemy bases, as well as on subtler things like the amount of damage Hermit Cat and Codename: Red Riding do per hit, and the amount of money dropped by Spacefish Jones and the aforementioned Hermit Cat. This is because the number 2 is pronounced "ni" in Japanese and that's similar (enough) to "nyan", which is the Japanese onomatopoeia for the sound a Cat makes (instead of "meow"). This is why February 22 (2/22) is recognized as Cat Day in Japan.
- 48 tends to show up in areas related to the main story, often with a hidden or separate 49th member. There are 48 stages in every single story chapter, with Cats of the Cosmos Chapter 3 having a 49th in Filibuster Obstructa's stage. There are 48 full Stories of Legend sub-chapters, with a 49th, Laboratory of Relics appearing once all the others are complete; this is the same for Uncanny Legends, with 48 sub-chapters followed by a 49th in Sacred Forest. The number is associated in particular with Teacher Bun Bun: in addition to him serving as the Final Boss of Empire of Cats and Mecha-Bun being Stories of Legend's Final Boss, Mecha-Bun reappears on Floor 48 of the Heavenly and Infernal Towers.
Armored, but Frail:
- Metal enemies have low HP compared to most other enemies, but only take 1 damage from most attacks. The main way to beat the stronger ones is to use a Critical Hit to pierce through their defense, which will more often than not kill them instantly. Metal Cat works the same way.
- Some Starred Aliens have Barriers that require a tremendously strong hit to break, but are very fragile without them. Examples include Le'Solar, Corporal Weyland, and Ribbo, but the most extreme is UltraBaaBaa, who has very low HP, but a Barrier so strong nothing but the most absurdly boosted Uber attacks (or Barrier Breaker units) can break it.
- Some Cats with the Resistant ability are very tanky against the enemies that they target, but go down quickly against other enemies that can get around their armor. Examples include Haniwa Cat for Traitless, Gas Mask Cat for Black, and Fiend Cat for Aku and Angel with Talents.
- Certain Aku enemies have Shields, which are a health-based version of Barriers that scale with magnifications. On some Aku like Miz Devil, they have a decently strong Shield that blocks a hit from directly killing them, but go down near instantly otherwise. Even some of the stronger ones like Fallen Bear and Midnite D. follow this pattern, having extremely tough Shields but comparatively low HP, especially considering their knockback counts.
Arrange Mode:
- The Otherworld Colosseums are special events that revolve around this trope, imposing special rules that go beyond what the game normally uses in stages like Cats of the Cosmos, which often force you to adopt a completely different playstyle. These rulesets include Trust Fund (start with 50,000 cents, but can't earn any more), Cooldown Equality (all unit cooldowns are fixed at 16 seconds), One Coin (sets all costs to 500), Super Rare Sale (halves cooldown and cost of all Super Rares), and more.
- Certain Advent Stages, upon clearing them for the first time, have an optional mode that you can play that's referred to as an Abyssal Stage. Said mode has you facing off against the same stage you just beat, but every clear of said stage will lock out all of the Cats used for that specific clear in future attempts, with your main goal being to get as many clears as possible so that you can get all of its rewards (which includes the incredibly rare and valuable Dark Catseyes).
Art Evolution:
- Cats of the Cosmos and many of the later event stages have noticeably more detailed backgrounds than the older stages.
- Most of the first characters in the game are handdrawn, but PONOS started to over time use rigs.
The Artifact:
- Challenge Battle is a relic from the game's very first incarnation on Japanese mobile phones, Ganso! Nyanko Daisensou. Originally, it served as a sort of Bonus Dungeon once you defeated The Face, who was the Final Boss at the time, and it was the hardest stage in the game, with two unique enemies. However, after the game made the jump to iOS devices, it started to feel out of place; Empire of Cats got two additional harder chapters, but there weren't two new Challenge Battles for them, and it only got worse once Stories of Legend and other content started to be added. It was even removed from the game entirely for a short period of time, before being moved to the Legend Stages menu as the only stage of its kind. The Catclaw Dojo serves as a Spiritual Successor to it.
- Certain event stages such as Crazed, Cyclone and Advent Stages have a word in parentheses next to the name of the stage itself that describes their overall difficulty (e.g. Oncoming Storm (Insane), No Plan A (Deadly), The Pure Land (Merciless), etc.). This is a holdover from when a stage's difficulty was only indicated by Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels, which could also be found on the in-game information of a sub-chapter/event. However, these were phased out in favor of the stars that indicated the difficulty of a stage/stages in a map, but the Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels that were already in a stage's name wasn't removed at all and are still used today for stages released after the star system was introduced despite having no real reason to anymore.
Artificial Stupidity: The Cat CPU doesn't know how to do much outside of spawn random units it has enough money for. It'll sometimes save up for a big unit, but stop meatshielding to do so, so the big unit it just spawned will be at high risk of dying immediately. It also doesn't understand that the Cat Cannon can make Cats with a long attack animation miss. However, since Computers Are Fast, it can spam Cats much faster than a human can, making it well suited for situations that provide healthy amounts of money and moreso demand a continuous spam of disposable units rather than timing.
Artistic License – Biology: Ginger Snache is a snake whose lovely red locks inspired a thesis on reptilian hair care.
Art-Style Clash: Most of the units in the game, both player and enemy, share a similar simplistic and cartoony style, but Uber and Legend Rare Cats can range from highly-detailed humans and beasts to Super-Deformed chibis to the Pokémon-esque Elemental Pixies even when sticking to the game's original content. When the Crossover events are included, anything from Retraux pixel-art to lineless styles to even 3D animation is fair game.
Attack Reflector: Using a Surge Attack against units with the Counter-Surge ability will cause them to fire back with a Surge of their own. However, this doesn't actually make the unit immune to Surge, as they can only counter if it damaged them.
Attention Whore:
- Sir Seal dyed himself red to get more attention. The same reason is why Sir Metal Seal became a cyborg.
- Implied with Red Riding Mina. It's stated in her description that she joined the Cat Army because doing so would boost her popularity.
Awesome, but Impractical:
- Pulling a powerful Uber Rare early on may seem like a huge boon, and fielding one that early in the game is a win condition for a lot of stages regardless of their actual type effectiveness... if you can actually deploy them. With Uber Rares having extreme XP requirements to level and massive deployment costs at a point in time where XP is scarce and cash generation is extremely weak, chances are you won't be able to make good use of them even if you have them. Additionally, many Glass Cannon Ubers will die quickly from the player's Research stat not being high enough to protect them with a flow of meatshields, some with an Arbitrary Minimum Range can end up useless if you can't keep enemies off them (because of the aforementioned cooldown issue and lack of crowd control), and some are so expensive that it's physically impossible to deploy them until you've gained a lot of wallet upgrades. The only exceptions to this are Ubers like the first forms of the Ultra Souls or most Uberfest units (who are cheap spammable attackers), which are instead a Disk One Nuke.
- At first glance, Lasvoss seems to be a Cat worthy of the Game-Breaker status thanks to his high damage output, immunity to all status effects and waves, and having Strengthen and Savage Blow, which can boost his already high damage to insane levels, but he has certain weaknesses that can make him frustrating to use. These include a slow attack rate and attack animation (which could make him miss), bad survivability due to low range and HP, and a high cost. Even with the potentially sky-high damage he can inflict thanks to the combined forces of his other abilities, it's a hassle to set up as his Strengthen only activates once he's at death's door, meaning it's hard to even keep him alive, and his Savage Blow only has a 30% chance of happening, which does not bode well for him because of his slow attack rate. His True Form and Talents don't really fix the "impractical" part aside from giving him more HP and speed, but increase the "awesome" to make him more worth using.
- Filibuster Cat X seems to have some use due to his unique role as a long ranged Traitless freezer, but he's heavily held back by his long attack animation which, more often than not, makes him miss his targets and even if he does, the freeze duration isn't long enough to compensate for how frequently he misses. This, combined with the fact that Cats like Glass Cat and Lone Cat & Kitten, both of which also inflict debuffs vs. Traitless, usually leave more of an impact in battle, means that you're not going to use this guy much, if at all. His True Form Metafilibuster, which adds Relic as an additional target, shares problems for similar reasons, as he's unlocked after you complete the Relic-heavy Uncanny Legends. He fortunately gets a sizable Attack Buff and Massive Damage as Talents, turning him into a decent, albeit situational nuker.
- Freshman Cat Jobs, introduced as part of the Reinforcements set of Super Rares, has an awesome-looking ability: a single hit from him will weaken any enemy to just 1% of its original strength. While making an enemy do Scratch Damage sounds awesome and overpowered, the Cat himself has extremely low HP and attack, moves at a glacially slow pace, and takes an extremely long time to recharge — and, without specific CatCombos in effect, the Weaken won't last until his next attack, giving the weakened enemy time to break through the Cats in front of it. There are some situations where he's useful, but generally, he's better used for his Experience Booster CatCombo. His True Form alleviates this, boosting his speed, giving him Survive, and allowing him to create Surges.
- A few Talents end up being more trouble than they're worth.
  - One of Skelecat's Talents serves to greatly reduce his recharge time, allowing him to be spawned nearly as often as a meatshield. This sounds useful to make up for Skelecat's low stats, but his cost can't be lowered, so spamming him leads to a rapid loss of money.
  - Dancer Cat has a Talent that lets him create Surge Attacks, which sounds useful due to his high attack power. However, the Surge has a low activation chance of 20% and spawns quite a far distance away from Dancer, so it usually won't have much of an effect and will sometimes miss the enemy Dancer is targeting. It can also turn dangerous if used on a stage with Counter-Surge enemies, essentially giving them a 20% chance of a lethal counterattack every time Dancer attacks.
  - One of Cameraman Cat's Talents gives her a 2% Critical Hit chance. It sounds useful on paper due to Cameraman's high attack for an anti-Metal unit and lack of Crippling Overspecialization, but the low activation chance makes it pretty unreliable. When it works, though, there's nothing quite like seeing stacked Cameramen unleash a Critical Hit and instantly kill a horde of Metal enemies. The Talent also becomes much more practical with CatCombos to boost Critical Hit rates, which can potentially increase the chance to as high as 6%.
  - Mola King, known primarily as one of the worst Ubers in the game for a long time, gained Talents in Update 12.5 that let it create level 5 Mini-Surges to increase its effective DPS tremendously and give it an 80% dodge chance against all attacks. While this has the potential to turn it into a fun Lethal Joke Character with great damage output over a long range and the ability to wall attacks for a long time with some luck, the NP investment is massive in order to reach this point, and even the final product is rather reliant on luck in order to reach peak performance, as failing to dodge will still result in a One-Hit Kill from all but the absolute weakest of peons.
- Cat God's miracles, while very powerful and being able to turn the tides of battle, require Cat Food to use. Cat Food that could have been saved up and rolled in the gacha to get new units, which is much more worth it than spending it for some short-term gain. Outside of his free Baby Boom when you activate him for the first time, most don't bother with him. In fact, they're completely unavailable outside of Empire of Cats, Into the Future, and Cats of the Cosmos, so you can't even use them against the Legend Stages (Stories of Legend, events, etc.) that actually make up the vast majority of the game's content.
- The Talent Orbs that directly affect the Strong Against, Massive Damage, and Resistant abilities are more powerful than the standard stat-boosting Orbs and, unlike the attack stat Orb, their boost scales with a unit's level instead of being a small flat buff. Unfortunately, farming for these things efficiently requires you to face off against certain Colossus bosses, which are are hard to kill that Ubers or certain late-game units are needed to make the grind bearable. Their insane strength means that getting these Orbs in the first place, let alone upgrading them to max rank, is only really doable by players in the late to end-game, where they most likely have the units and power necessary to make the grind a breeze.
- Many Ultra Forms and Ultra Talents are absurdly powerful, but the incredible cost of actually getting them (namely 15 Dark Catseyes, plus all the EXP to get the Uber to Level 60, then the materials or NP to unlock their Ultra Form or Talents) make a lot of them enormously overkill and not worth the effort, particularly units that "merely" get better at what they already did. Just one example is Bora's Ultra Form, which buffs its attributes to the point of turning it into a nigh-absolute counter for the entire Alien trait...on a unit that already dominates almost all Alien matchups in the game even in its True Form.
Badass Adorable: A lot of the Cats are quite cute-looking, yet they are strong enough to take over the entire world, the future, the past, and the universe.
Bad Future: Into the Future takes place on the heels of an Alien Invasion in 29XX. Many of the stages have an Urban Ruins background, and the intro lists some of the invasion's consequences:
Their revenge on the humans who ignored them took many forms:
Sinking Japan… Psychic activity… Mind-control implants… Floating cities… Reality television… Unspeakable probing…
Bears Are Bad News: While Teacher Bear, Ursamajor, Cadaver Bear and Fallen Bear may qualify, Assassin Bear definitely does so.
Beef Gate:
- Unstarred Aliens and Starred Aliens have a passive magnification of 700% and 1600% respectively, which can only be lowered by collecting Treasures from Into the Future and Cats of the Cosmos, until both are reduced to 100% after collecting them all. In said chapters, this will generally lead to a linear decrease in difficulty as the Aliens at the start of a chapter are extremely ferocious, but will get weaker as you progress and collect the Treasures, but each chapter generally has a point when the game assumes you've collected all available Treasures, and sends out Aliens that are so powerful that it's extremely difficult to clear them out if you haven't done some farming first. Even if you haven't cleared out Into the Future or Cats of the Cosmos, certain Legend Stages have Aliens with massive magnifications balanced around maxed anti-Alien Treasures from all of the chapters, which will stack multiplicatively with any leftover magnification and make them nigh-impossible to beat if you haven't collected them all yet, which is the game's way of telling you to stop and go finish ItF/CotC before coming back.
- A particularly notable example is Ashvini Desert from the Behemoth Culling maps, which can be accessed upon completing Chapter 1 of Into the Future, but can be downright impossible to get past Badlands Area 4 if you haven't finished all 3 chapters. This is due to the boss of the stage, Crustaceous Scissorex, who is already a big threat all on his own, but without all six anti-Alien Treasures from Into the Future, his already high base stats become monstrous, to the point where they will far exceed the toughest of late-game bosses.^note It's clear that you're supposed to get the aforementioned Treasures at max before even having a chance at beating the boss.
- Although you can get through Cats of the Cosmos without picking up the 3 Treasures that comprise the Mystery Mask, you'll generally be unable to clear The Big Bang without going back and at least mostly completing it, as the Mask serves to lower the passive 1100% strength magnification on the Final Boss, which makes the stage nearly unbeatable otherwise. Each chapter also has its own Mystery Mask, so this has to be repeated three times.
- The first stage of Uncanny Legends, An Ancient Curse, is the one to introduce Relic enemies. At this point in the game, you're unlikely to have any units which specifically target Relics, making the Relic Bun-Bun boss much too hard to handle. This is the game's way of telling you to go and farm Elder Catfruit to acquire units which can handle Relic enemies, like the True Forms of the SoL Legend units or Figure Skating Cats. Once you have a few of these units, An Ancient Curse is much more manageable.
- Although mainly appearing in The Aku Realms, some stages will have an Aku Altar present, which heavily caps your units' levels if you haven't cleared out most, if not all of The Aku Realms first to raise the cap or remove it altogether. Unlike The Aku Realms, these late-game stages are not balanced around lower-level units, making them effectively impossible if you haven't completely beaten The Aku Realms. In particular is Chapter 39 of Uncanny Legends, Imminent Disaster, which is composed of a single stage that only exists to check if you've managed to disable the Aku Altars already.^note
- The Aku Realms themselves are practically an entire subworld of small versions of these. You can technically do any level as early as you want (barring the last one) if it happens to be one of the ones selected for that rotation, but good luck beating them before you've taken out enough earlier stages to raise your level cap.
- The penultimate sub-chapter of Uncanny Legends, Humanity Catified, has a "midpoint" after the Boss Rush against the UL Legend Cats in Atonement for Sin, where Mining Epic becomes available and the UL Legends' True Forms become unlocked, all of which are incredibly strong against Relics and/or Behemoths. Given that the last three stages have an extremely powerful Relic/Behemoth boss backed by Behemoths of equal or greater strength, this is the game's way of telling you to pause your progress and figure out how to farm Mining Epic (which in itself needs strong anti-Behemoth measures) before coming back with stronger Legends to stand more of a fighting chance.
Bilingual Bonus: At first glance, the runic-looking characters that appears in certain Aku-related content may appear random, but it's actually upside-down Japanese characters. Flipping them right-side up reveals interesting messages.
- The message found on Evil Aku Researcher's sign says something along the lines of "the door to the Demon World will be opened by Cat Queen", Cat Queen being the Japanese version's name for what the English version calls Empress Cat.
- The message found on Aku Cyclone is almost a word-for-word Shout-Out to the poem "Ame ni mo Makezu", with the only difference being the addition of a line at the beginning of the poem that translates to "A Devil who is".
- The background of the name of an uncleared stage in The Aku Realms has the runic-looking characters as part of it. Managing to translate it reveals that it says "Steals energy from another world. The Devil Base seals levels", referencing what the Aku Altars do to your Cats and their role in The Aku Realms' story.
Bishōnen Line: Bahamut Cat's first form looks like a rather bestial dragon, while his second form looks a lot more menacing and monstrous. But when he finally evolves into Awakened Bahamut Cat, he turns into a sleek humanoid with only a few draconian traits left.
Bizarro Elements:
- Enemies have traits, which determine elements of their design, general stats and abilities. These include Traitless, Red, Floating, Black, Metal, Angel, Alien, Zombie, Starred Alien, Relic, Aku and "special" types Colossus, Behemoth and Sage. Many Cats have abilities that target only specific traits, while the latter three aren't targeted by any such abilities and instead have respective "Slayer" abilities on certain Cats to improve their effectiveness against the targeted type.
- Parodied by Cat God/Final Boss Giga-God until version 13.3. Before the Enemy Guide was reworked, enemies' traits were listed next to their names in parentheses, and Cat God/Final Boss Giga-God's entries had "(Cool Dude)", which was never an actual enemy type. Both of them were actually traitless enemies.
Bland-Name Product: Sniper the Deadeye bought all of his equipment secondhand off of "Daveslist".
"Blind Idiot" Translation: The game's first English translation was extremely poor in quality, with such errors like UFO Cat being able to "attack enemies in a lump" or Madame Sumo's gender changing mid-sentence. Fortunately, the current English translation is a lot better, though a lot of the early Cats and enemies still have spotty translated descriptions.
Blood Knight: Axe Cat is described as a "combat maniac".
Blue-and-Orange Morality: The Cats' morality position are hardline vague, even if the official materials portray them as the heroes of the game. Given their morality being alien to the enemy species (who are Always Chaotic Evil anyway), and their desire to be Galactic Conquerors, they can come off as a Villain Protagonist to some players.
Body Horror:
- The Nekolugas evolve into gigantic, vaguely Cat-like monstrosities with horribly deformed and disproportionate body parts.
- When Squire Rel and Sir Rel attack, their mouth opens up to halfway down their body.
Bonus Dungeon: Upon completing Chapter 3 of Empire of Cats and completing a specific series of event stages^note, you will unlock The Aku Realms, an extra "chapter" of Empire of Cats that's filled with dangerous enemies and difficult levels that's way beyond the difficulty level of a standard Empire of Cats chapter. Beating Unleashing the Cats is also required to further progress in Uncanny Legends, as you won't unlock sub-chapter 39 until you beat it.
Bootstrapped Leitmotif: Teacher Bun Bun is associated with "Lunar Battle," with remixes of the theme playing in the fights with Mecha-Bun and Relic Bun-Bun. Ironically, the initial fight with Bun Bun lacks this theme, while it plays on the Moon stage where he is fought once he appears it's replaced with "Naniwa no Koibito".
Boring, but Practical:
- All cheap Cats end up in this degree. While there are some area-cleaning bosses that can stop a blob wave of stronger Cats in a few blows, anything cheap as a regular Cat can put certain bosses hanging until you build back enough forces to eventually push them.
- Salon Cat doesn't have any abilities (besides Weaken Immunity in her True Form) but has decently strong Area Attacks and is spammable. You can easily make a huge stack of her and deal a ton of damage to a lot of enemies. This also applies to Figure Skater Cats, though less so as they're more expensive and harder to stack, albeit instead gaining a niche as an anti-Relic backliner in True Form.
- CatCombos will give your Cats small bonuses to their stats or abilities when in use. Their effects aren't particularly flashy, generally just boosting a stat by 10-20% or increasing the effectiveness of an ability by a little bit, and they often require bringing weak or even outright useless Cats to the battle. However, the small boost given by a combo can make the difference between a Cat surviving a hit from an enemy vs. dying, or managing to Stun Lock an enemy vs. still giving it some time to move. Research Combos are an especially notable example. They reduce the cooldown on Cats by a little less than a second per level, down to the cap of 2 seconds; it may not seem like much, but it can greatly amplify the effectiveness of the cheap and spammable units in your lineup.
Boss in Mook Clothing:
- The second awakening stage for Ninja Cat, Way of the Ninja (Insane), has Flying Ninja Cat supported by Doges. You might expect these Doges to be as easy as usual, but they're buffed to 3000 times their usual power level, effectively turning each Doge into an additional boss enemy alongside Flying Ninja Cat.
- Some of the Behemoth enemies, such as Crustaceous Scissorex and Pterowl Hazuku, have incredibly high stats for regular enemies, even bordering on Advent Boss levels at times.
- Playing on higher crown difficulties can turn certain enemies into this by inflating their stats. This especially applies to Uncanny Legends, as the boost from crown difficulties shoots back up to 150% for level 2 and 200% for level 3 at the beginning; even in the very first level, playing on 3-crown will confront you with Relic Doges with 150,000 HP and 24,000 damage.
Boss Rush:
- The Stories of Legend stages Kugel Schreiber and Atrocious Deco feature nothing but a collection of previously introduced bosses. For the first, it's THE SLOTH, two R.Osts, Dober P.D, a 1% Ms. Sign, and Assassin Bear, while in the second, it's Berserkory, Razorback, Bun Bun Symbiote, and a tag team of Boraphim and Angelic Sleipnir.
  - Later on in Uncanny Legends, Hall of the Four Kings is a remake of Kugel Schreiber, replacing the bosses with harder variants encountered later on: THE SLOTH with Elder Sloth, R.Ost with M. Ost, and Dober P.D with Saint Dober.
- The Legend Ends has Twilight Zephyr, featuring a boss rush of 9 bosses. Featured are Master A., Kory, Metal One Horn, Director Kurosawah, Bore, Camelle, R.Ost, Boraphim, and Teacher Bun Bun.
- The Uncanny Legends chapter Spacetime Distortion is a boss rush for the Legend bosses from Stories of Legend, with Aku Doges added to each stage. Strangely, while the Mooks in each stage are strengthened as you'd expect, the bosses themselves are no stronger than before. The final stage then has you fight all of them at once.
- The first 5 stages of the second-to-last sub-chapter of Uncanny Legends, Humanity Catified, has you facing off against the Legend bosses of Uncanny Legends once again. Of those 5 stages, the first 4 has you facing them off once again with different enemy compositions and support and the final, 5th stage has you facing them all at once.
- Clan of the Maniacs features two boss rushes against all 9 Crazed Cats at once, with both stages in the event handling it differently^note. Also, the Tornado and Awakened Carnival events are boss rushes against the Cyclones and Special Cat True Forms, respectively.
- Super Smash Families has you fighting the Malevolent Cats at once, albeit divided across the two stages. The first stage has you fight Eraser, Macho Legs, Island, and King Dragon, while the second has you fight Mohawk, Dark, Lion, Flying, and Jamiera.
Bottomless Magazines: Cats and enemies that use a projectile to attack will never run out, no matter how many times they attack. Some, like Adult Cat, are shown pulling a new projectile out of nowhere after attacking.
Boxing Kangaroo: Kang Roo and all of her non-event-exclusive variants have a boxing theme related to them which is shown through either their design ^note or their descriptions ^note.
Break Meter: Dealing enough damage to a unit will knock it back, effectively staggering it and pushing back its advance for a few seconds;^note every unit in the game has an assigned number of knockbacks, with their thresholds evenly distributed across their HP (eg. a unit with 5 knockbacks will get knocked back with every 20% of HP lost). However, some units only have one knockback, making them Immune to Flinching instead. The game sometimes refers to the amount of damage needed to knockback a unit as their "stamina", furthering the comparison.
Bribing Your Way to Victory:
- Paying Cat Food (represented as offering it to The Cat God) can have him perform powerful miracles. However, this ability is disabled in all Legend Stages (as The Cat God is only 20 years old, and they take place before his birth), as well as when fighting The Cat God himself.
- In addition to the Allegedly Free Game aspects mentioned earlier, some stages let you pay Cat Food to keep playing if the enemies destroy your base. However, this is disabled on most of the game's hardest stages.
Brutal Bonus Level:
- Clan of the Maniacs appears after clearing out the Crazed Cats and only really exists for the challenge, but the challenge it does provide is hellish as you're attempting to beat 2 stages where you fight against one of every Crazed Cat. The first stage has them come out one at a time at certain intervals, the second has them all come out at the same time.
- Super Smash Families builds on the same principle, unlocked after clearing the Malevolent Cats (which themselves are only unlocked after going pretty far into the Aku Realms), and pits you against some of the Malevolent Cats plus some peons per stage. ^note Both stages are considered to be some of, if not the hardest stages in the game and are two of the few stages in the game that are considered Brutal difficulty.
Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit": Every single unit on the player's side falls under the "Cat" umbrella in English, even blatantly non-feline units like the majority of Collab Cats and Uber Rare Cats. This isn't the case in the Japanese version, where they are generally called "Characters" or "Friendly Characters", with enemies being "Enemy Characters".
Cap:
- At the maximum Worker Cat level of 8 and with all Treasures, the maximum amount of money the player can keep in reserve is 16,500. Worker Cat Max Up Combos can increase it past this value.
- The fastest speed at which a Cat can recharge is 2 seconds, and Research Combos can't lower the cooldown beyond this point.
- The maximum amount of EXP you can have is 99,999,999.
Cap Raiser: To upgrade any non-normal unit beyond level 30, you need Catseyes. These come in six different varieties: Special, Rare, Super Rare, Uber Rare, Legend, and Dark. The first four can only be used on Cats of that particular rarity, while Legend Catseyes can be used on any rarity but Normal. Dark Catseyes are primarily used to upgrade Uber Rares past level 50 and up to level 60, but they can be used in place of other Catseyes as well.
Captain Ersatz: Kalisa's design is based off Hatsune Miku, complete with uniform and giant twintails. Amusingly, since Hatsune Miku herself was later added to the game, this also counts as Expy Coexistence.
Cats Are Mean: The plot of the game is that Cats are taking over the world. As the player controls these Cats, they can come off as the Villain Protagonist to some.
Chainsaw Good: Lumbercat wields one of these. He attacks extremely fast and can freeze and permakill Zombie enemies, but his chainsaw deals surprisingly low damage.
Character in the Logo: The Cat seen on the game's title logo is True Superfeline, as seen in the 10th anniversary video for the Japanese version, though before then, it wasn't representing any in-game unit in particular.
Character Select Forcing:
- Certain stages, such as most Cats of the Cosmos stages or Cyclone/Advent Boss rematches, will restrict which rarities of Cats you can deploy, forcing you to use only the ones that aren't banned. The most common restriction is Specials and Rares only, found in all 4-crown Legend Stages, along with the Li'l Cats' awakening stages. Note that this only means you can't deploy the Cats; banned Cats can still be put in the lineup to activate Cat Combos.
- The Castle & Dragon collab and a few seasonal events have stages that only allow Cats from the event, which generally isn't even enough to fill all 10 slots.
Closest Thing We Got: The early Legend Cats are designed to fill the niches that Ubers would usually fill on a team, but at a lower level of power. Bahamut Cat and Ururun Wolf fill the backliner role, Li'l Nyandam and Red Riding Mina can hit long-ranged enemies in exchange for low DPS, and Miyamoku Musashi is a ranged unit who's immune to waves. This isn't the case for later-added Legend units and the True Forms of some older ones, however, which are much closer to the power level of Ubers overall.
Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Enemies tend to come in a variety of traits. Said traits are represented with icons that have a specific color as its background and, barring Floating, the color is usually seen on the enemy itself. The colors are White (Traitless), Red, Black, Light Green (Floating), Grey (Metal), Yellow (Angel), Cyan (Alien), Purple (Zombie), Dark Green (Relic), and Dark Blue (Aku).
Contractual Boss Immunity: Any enemy internally designated a "boss" by the stage is immune to being pushed behind their base.
Com Mons:
- Normal Cat duplicates can be easily obtained by playing the Cat Capsule with silver Cat Tickets, which are more common than the gold ones. They're mostly weaker than Rare Capsule units even in their True Forms, but can still pull their weight at high levels.
- Among units from the Rare Capsule, Rare Cats are the most common to roll, making them easy to level up. However, many of them are surprisingly powerful throughout the game due to their quick cooldowns and low costs, making up for their lower stats compared to Super Rares and Uber and Legend Rares.
The Computer Is a Lying Bastard: The game isn't always entirely honest with its descriptions. A few examples:
- Bronze Cat is described as a "great defensive Cat with ridiculous health and very decent attack power." It has mediocre-at-best HP and low damage, which doesn't matter as it cannot deal Critical Hits and is used to knockback Metal enemies.
- Within the unit descriptions for the Galaxy Gals in the Rare Capsule, Kuu is described as having "high damage with fast attack speed", even though she attacks much slower than most Ubers do. Coppermine is also described the same way; her attack speed is fast, but she has poor attack for an Uber.
- Thunder God Zeus is said by the game to be strong vs. Angels, but he's actually resistant to them, so no extra damage.
- Angelic Beast Rajakong's description mentions how he uses Waves and Surges to beat down evil poachers, when in-game he only uses Omni Strikes and Wave Attacks. He is, however, immune to both Waves and Surges.
Cool, but Inefficient: Mega Cat, the Evolved Form of Cabaret Cat. Its attack animation is long, flashy, and has it fire a laser which creates a massive, awesome-looking explosion upon contact with the ground. Unfortunately, it's far too weak to be of any use; its health is low enough that it'll die in one hit from nearly any attack, its attack barely deals Scratch Damage to most late-game enemies, it moves and attacks extremely slowly, and it takes an eternity to recharge. It's actually more useful in its Normal Form as a meatshield.
Cooldown Manipulation: Research CatCombos, when activated, will reduce the cooldown time on all Cats by a small set amount. This can't be lower than 2 seconds.
Cosmetic Award: Any Meow Medal that you've obtained doesn't do anything other than to look pretty. Their only use is unlocking extra formation slots.
Crippling Overspecialization:
- Most Cats that specialize in dealing Critical Hits are notoriously weak against non-Metal enemies, as they're meant to target the raw health pools of Armored, but Frail Metal enemies while dealing double damage. This even extends to most Critical Hit Ubers.
- Zig-Zagged by the special Ubers from the "Busters" banners. They can usually effortlessly crush any enemy that they target; some, like Strike Unit R.E.I. or Sakura Sonic, are lackluster in terms of general use, while others, such as Pai-Pai and Goddess of Light Sirius, are more well-rounded.
- Ubers that only hit enemies with specific traits, like Takeda Shingen or Warlock & Pierre. They can destroy most enemies that they target, but are helpless against anything else.
- Some of Ototo's custom Cat Cannons, like the Waterblast or Holy Blast Cannons, fall under this. They can devastate Metal and Zombie enemies, respectively, but are completely useless against anything else.
- On the enemy side, most enemies who use Toxic attacks can rip through Cats like they're nothing, but if they happen to be Cursed, their danger level is massively decreased thanks to Toxic making a huge part of their damage. A very good example of this is Big Peng Z; normally, he can easily shred anything in front of him thanks to his quick attack rate and 50% Toxic damage with each strike, but if he's Cursed, his DPS is downright pathetic.
Critical Hit: There are two abilities that act as this trope:
- A number of Cats and, in much rarer cases, certain enemies have a chance to do what is called a Critical Hit, indicated by a sound effect and yellow stars flying out of their target. Crits deal doubled damage and are the only thing capable of piercing the defences of Metal Enemies.
- In 8.8 a new ability called Savage Blow was introduced, indicated by red stars flying out and a distinct sound effect. It essentially is the same ability as Critical Attack except the damage multiplier is 3x ^note instead of a Critical Attack's 2x but it doesn't deal full damage against Metals.
Critical Hit Class: A number of Cats, such as Space Cat, Cat ornado, and Jurassic Cat, have low damage but fast attacks designed to proc their Crits at a very high rate. These Cats are almost essential for taking on stronger Metal enemies. A similar category includes Cats who have very slow attacks or take a long time between attacks, but are guaranteed to land a Critical when they hit, suck as Cheerleader Cat and Sunny Neneko.
Critical Existence Failure: Besides flinching at health thresholds, any unit can keep fighting without any loss in combat efficiency or visible damage no matter how damaged they are, and some will even grow stronger as they take damage. However, the moment that last hit point is gone, they'll instantly kick the bucket.
Critical Status Buff: Some Cats and enemies, among which include the Uber Rare Togelan Pasalan and enemy Ursamajor, have the ability to survive a lethal strike with 1 HP, but get their attack massively boosted when they reach that threshold.
Crossover Combo Villain: Some Crossover event stages contain enemy variants inspired by the other property, such as the Demon Slayer collab having Doge, Gory and Teacher Bear variants based on the demons.
Crossover Cosmology: In addition to the game's original deities, there are gods and other figures from Japanese Mythology, Greek Mythology, Egyptian Mythology, Hindu Mythology, Norse Mythology^note and Judeo-Christian mythology.
Crutch Character: Several.
- Axe Cat has better stats and faster attack speed than the Basic Cat, is strong against Red enemies, and is still cheap and fast to produce. However, later on, stronger enemies will be able to overpower it easily, and its higher cost than the Basic Cat makes Zerg Rush tactics using it difficult, making it a Master of None. Its True Form, Dark Cat, does nothing to fix these issues.
- Gross Cat zig-zags this depending on what point of the game you're in. Early in the game, he's an important unit, being your longest-ranged Cat after Lizard. After Empire of Cats, he starts to fall off in use due to having weak stats and being overshadowed by other ranged attackers. His True Form, Macho Leg Cat, is then much more useful due to his doubled stats and being strong against Alien enemies. However, while he shines in Into the Future and Cats of the Cosmos, he starts to become less useful later in Stories of Legend due to stronger mid-ranged attackers being available. He can still remain effective on some late-game stages where his cheap, disposable nature and bulk come in handy, however.
- Titan Cat, a textbook Mighty Glacier with a reasonable price and cooldown meant to hold on the front that is virtually immovable. Titan Cats are meant to teach players to stock up on powerful, expensive units and eventually become obsolete when unit slots have already been filled with similar roles. His True Form, Jamiera Cat, stays useful for longer, but is rarely worthwhile past the early-game due to the stage design not favoring tank units.
- Ninja Cat is essentially a stronger version of Axe Cat — she has low cost, is spammable, has fast attack speed, and is strong against Red enemies, letting her rip most of Empire of Cats to shreds and help out greatly when collecting Treasures. Later on, however even those overbuffed Mooks will have no problem easily defeating a Flying Ninja Cat, and she suffers from Axe Cat's same problem of not having a real role in battle. She only becomes useful again once her Talents are unlocked, and even then, she doesn't sweep whole stages anymore. An event-exclusive variant of her, Blue Shinobi, falls into this trope even harder — it has slightly higher stats than the original Ninja did, but no True Form or Talents, making it completely unusable past the early-game.
- Cats In A Box are fast, powerful, and have an Area Attack. They will carry you through Empire of Cats right up until Teacher Bun Bun, and help with farming Treasures. After that, their utility vanishes, and their True Form doesn't help much at all... at least until its Talents are unlocked.
- Boogie Cat is an example of a crutch meatshield. Early in the game, he's one of the most important Special Cats to buy, since he's a third meatshield you can use alongside the Basic Cat and Tank Cat, and he's especially useful against Teacher Bun Bun. However, once other meatshields like Crazed Cat and Tank start to be obtained, Boogie Cat stops being as useful due to his poor movement speed. He only becomes very useful again much later in the game, after Gato Amigo's Talent for Surge immunity is unlocked.
- Trash Cat is intended as a crutch anti-Zombie unit. It's possible to unlock very early in the game when its event is available, and for how early you can get it, it has very high attack power against Zombies, making it helpful at taking out event stages with Zombie enemies and Zombie Outbreaks in Empire of Cats. However, once you unlock stronger anti-Zombie units and start encountering stronger Zombies in turn, Trash Cat's very low HP becomes more of a noticeable weakness.
- Among the Legends, Valkyrie Cat is the first one you'll get, and she's a big help against Teacher Bun Bun and early Stories of Legend. Later on, however, she pales in comparison to both the other Legends and most Uber Rares. While her True Form is a noticeable improvement, it's ultimately not enough to give her more than niche use later on. Her Talents dramatically improve her performance in late-game stages, but are burdened by a heavy NP cost.
- One of the more infamous ones is Salon Cat. Early in the game, she's essentially a straight upgrade to Gross Cat, being a ranged attacker with a powerful Area Attack and fast cooldown — and, unlike most gacha Rares, she's powerful even in her Evolved Form, Paris Cat, and thus useful straight away. Many stages early in the game give lots of money, offsetting her high cost, and have no Long Distance enemies to snipe her and exploit her poor HP. However, after a certain point in the game, Paris's weaknesses of low HP and cost-efficiency start to catch up with her, and other mid-ranged attackers such as Drama, Seafarer, and Pizza become more effective choices. Her True Form, Cyborg Cat, is far from useless in the late-game, though, being helpful to own for difficult 4-crown stages where she's one of the most effective options available.
- Space Cat is one of the more accessible Critter units early-game, being the drop from Red Cyclone, which is one of the easiest Cyclones to beat. For early Metal-focused stages like The Crazed Fish, his good standing range lets him stack up to take out Metal enemies, and his low stats and Crit chance aren't such a big deal. However, as Metal enemies get stronger and other, stronger and more consistent Crit units become available, Space Cat falls out of use almost completely, even in True Form.
- Many tanker Ubers, such as Cat Machine, Guardian Gamereon, and Hades the Punisher, end up like this. In the story chapters and Stories of Legend, they provide a great defense against most enemies, even ones they don't target, and can hit back hard. They're also adept at taking out long-ranged backline enemies, like Camelle and Master A., which can otherwise be annoying to face. However, tankers struggle to find their place in Uncanny Legends and other later stages, as most levels send out huge amounts of high-DPS enemies that almost no Cat can tank for a meaningful amount of time. Longer-ranged Glass Cannon units can take out these enemies without having to get in close; meanwhile, rushers can close in on backline enemies and kill them faster than tankers, with less risk of dying before they can do their job.
- Among the Uber Rares, one notable example is Togeluga, who also combines this with Magikarp Power due to only being useful in his True Form, Shishilan Pasalan. He's a backline attacker with 100 knockbacks, allowing him to reposition out of danger very easily; he can hit hard enough when strengthened to kill most enemies in Stories of Legend in only a few hits; and he's immune to Waves, which are a big threat in the mid-game. However, in Uncanny Legends, Shishilan's performance starts to fall off; levels start favoring rushers and snipers instead of backliners, Long Distance and Surge enemies can snipe him to interrupt his long attack animation, other options for Wave-immune attackers become available, and increasingly strong enemies can kill him in a few hits, negating his advantage of excellent survivability. While Shishilan is still usable in the late-game, other backliner Ubers are generally more effective.
- In terms of Talent Orbs, the "Boost Stories of Legend" Orbs provide hefty buffs to both HP and attack, capping out at an extremely impressive 50% buff to both stats when S Rank… but, as the name implies, it only works in Stories of Legend, not Event Stages or the successors to SoL; once you beat 4-crown SoL, the Orb becomes completely useless.
Cultural Translation: The in-game currency used during battle changes from yen to cents (English), yuan (Taiwanese) or won (Korean) depending on the version. Beyond that, many, many other aspects of Japanese culture are replaced with more recognizable ones in the localizations, primarily in names and descriptions; a few examples from the English version include:
- Divine Myrica enjoying cheap cheeseburgers instead of gyūdon.
- Harbinger Cat chanting "Abura Cadaver!" instead of being dispelled by "Ajara ka mokuren tekerettsu no pa" (a spell from the rakugo story "Shinigami").
- Zroco and Zollow trying to cross the River Styx instead of the Sanzu River.
- Forest Playground's 4th stage being named Marble Swamp instead of Bottomless Ohajiki Swamp.
Cute Kitten: The Li'l Cats are tiny, adorable versions of the Normal Cats.
Dark Is Not Evil: The members of the Dark Heroes Uber Set revolve around stealth, espionage, subterfuge and nightmares, but are ultimately on the Cats' side. One of their first members, Catman, is even inspired by Batman himself.
Dark World: In The Aku Realms, the Cats conquer hellish versions of Earth and the Moon.
Death of a Thousand Cuts: Cow Cat and his Crazed and Brainwashed forms have low attack power, but hit and move three times faster than your regular Cat. Later, several other Cats can dish out hits at an even faster pace, such as Catornado.
Defeat Means Friendship: Ururun Wolf's description shows that she joined the Cat Army because they defeated her. This trope also applies to the other bosses from main Legend Stages, as they'll join the Cat Army after being defeated... generally at a 3% chance. The enemy awakened Special Cats and monthly/seasonal Rare Cats work the same way, though with better drop rates in the first stage (the second stage is guaranteed). The Crazed/Manic Cats and the Heavenly/Infernal Tower bosses are a guaranteed drop.
Deflector Shields:
- Barriers are used by some of the Starred Aliens. They block all damage (and the secondary effects from attacks) while deployed, and must be broken by damaging them past a certain threshold with a single hit. They range in strength, from General GreGory's 6,000 to Le'Solar's 40,000, but special mention must go to Youcan and UltraBaaBaa with a Barrier strength of 266,000. Certain units have a chance when they hit to break Barriers instantly, regardless of the Barrier's strength.
- Certain Aku enemies have Aku Shields which absorb a certain amount of damage before breaking, essentially working as a boost to the enemy’s maximum HP, and regenerate whenever they get knocked back. Like with Barriers, some Cats have a chance to instantly tear through Aku Shields in a single hit.
Degraded Boss: Very much so. Nearly every boss enemy will show up later demoted to a standard support enemy. One of the best examples would be Teacher Bun Bun: one shows up as the boss of the Moon in Empire of Cats Chapter 3, but later on, he and his variants become fairly common as beefy Elite Mooks. This is taken to the next level in the Zero Legends saga, where even supposedly-unique Final Bosses as well as formerly event-only Optional Bosses such as the Cyclones and Advent Bosses end up becoming recurring enemies.
Descriptiveville: Singularityville, the 46th Stories of Legend sub-chapter.
Difficult, but Awesome:
- Long-range Cats like Lizard Cat and his variants can be a chore to build up due to their long cooldown, high cost, and general inability to fend for themselves. However, if you can stack enough of them them with cheaper and/or more durable Cats to defend them, they will be able to deliver stunning amounts of damage from a range where only a few enemies can hope to harm them.
- Certain Glass Cannon Cats, such as Slime Cat and Supercar Cat, have short range and pitiful health, but a devastating attack which also carries useful abilities. It takes practice to consistently time them into the range of enemies, allowing them to perform their attacks without dying, but the payoff is worth it — Slime creates a Wave which strikes a large portion of the battlefield for heavy damage, while Supercar is guaranteed to knockback a targeted traited enemy and, if applicable, shatter its Barrier or Aku Shield. The "difficult" part is somewhat abolished by Slime's True Form, Jelly Dumpling Cat, which has faster movement speed and longer range to make it easier to time, although it'll still die to a stiff breeze if you're careless.
- "Chaining", which involves using a rusher unit (typically Awakened Bahamut or Idi:N) to nuke enemies with low enough stamina that they'll be knocked back from a single blow, then timing a fast meatshield into range to instantly trigger their attack once they recover (or a crowd-control unit to hold them in place), stalling them just long enough for your rusher to attack again and knock them back further, repeated ad infinitum - effectively producing a Cycle of Hurting that lasts until your target is dead. This is much harder to pull off in practice than it is on paper, and failure to hold off the enemy at even one "link" in the chain can result in your rusher being instantly killed, while sending out too many meatshields will also get your rusher killed if the enemy catches your rusher with a stray attack meant for a meatshield or an Omni Strike. Done correctly, this can 100-to-0 priority targets way earlier than a level expects you to, and is especially good for stages that send a chainable enemy early and then heavy backup shortly after.
Diminishing Returns for Balance:
- After a Cat reaches a specific level threshold, all stat gains from level ups from that point onward will be halved. There can be more than one of these thresholds at once, though it only goes up to two at most, and their effects stack with one another (i.e. stats gained from each level can be reduced to a fourth at most) How many of these thresholds are there and what levels specifically will the stats reduction start taking effect mainly depends on the rarity of the unit, barring specific outliers.^note
- In a strange inversion of this trope, Gacha Cat has their stat gain per level up increase by a multiplier of 3 starting at level 20, then having this multiplier increase by 3 every 10 levels reached.
Dire Beast: Most Behemoth enemies are monstrous, primal-looking variants of the standard enemies, with much higher stats and new abilities.
Disc-One Final Boss: Mecha-Bun appears to be the final boss of the game as a whole at first, as it appears in the 49th Stories of Legend sub-chapter which is a Boss-Only Level. However, beating it leads immediately into the Uncanny Legends, revealing that the Legend Stages still aren't over.
Disc-One Final Dungeon:
- The Moon in Empire of Cats Chapter 1 was the final stage besides Challenge Battle in the original mobile phone version of the game, but became this as soon as it was re-released on iOS with new content. The game initially doesn't say that you're only in Chapter 1, and most of your Cats will be level 10 by this point as you fight against a bizarre, non-animal boss with epic music, followed by an ending scroll in which the Cats successfully overrun the world... after which the game reveals that Chapter 2 has been unlocked.
- There are two back-to-back examples in Legend Stages. The menu initially shows nothing past Stories of Legend sub-chapter 48, The Legend Ends, which has a climactic Boss Rush in stage 7 followed by an 8th and final stage that costs a colossal 800 energy. Said stage is named Unkept Promises, lampshading that The Legend Ends isn't the end, and there's a hidden 49th sub-chapter up next: Laboratory of Relics. While this Boss-Only Level is the end of Stories of Legend, going back to Legend Stages after the ending scroll shows that Uncanny Legends has been unlocked, revealing that SoL is only the first set of Legend Stages.
Disc-One Nuke:
- If obtained early, certain Crazed Cats can prove to be a dominating force in the early-game, due to having the stats of level 40 Normal Cats and additional strong abilities at a point when enemies really can't handle that. Crazed Fish Cat is a notable example — its boss stage is fairly easy to complete, and it can rip apart early stages with its high stats and cheap cost, especially Red enemies. They balance out later in the game as enemies get stronger, though most of them remain highly effective.
- Cameraman Cat, the True Form of Mer-Cat, is ridiculously strong for a Rare Cat and a massive improvement over her Normal Form. You can evolve her quite early in the game, without any of the rarer types of Catfruit needed. She has a short time between attacks, good HP and DPS vs. Floating, and Area Attack, making the Shy Boys and Bun Buns common in the early-game a lot less threatening. Even outside of her anti-Floating niche, Cameraman still deals a surprisingly decent amount of damage against everything else, especially if stacked, which is easy to do with her quick recharge. She also has great survivability thanks to her decent range, which allows her to outrange enemies that are spawned in groups or any Close-Range Combatant and even if she gets hit, she has a chance to survive a lethal strike, thus keeping her alive for longer and potentially saving your stack. Her Talents are also very strong: one of them, at max level, can make her Last Chance Hitpoint guaranteed. Another can give her the chance to do a Critical Attack; while it has only a 2% chance of happening, a huge stack of them can potentially heavily cripple or kill groups of Metal enemies without any problem. Cameraman's sheer power balances out as you progress through the game, though she remains a powerful choice, especially in 4-crown stages.
- Courier Cat is the first Ancient Egg unit you're likely to unlock. You can get its egg, Ancient Egg: N101, as soon as you clear 5 Behemoth Culling stages for the first time, which doesn't take long to do, and it only takes 5 of the relatively common Purple and Red B. Stones to hatch. Once hatched, it's insanely powerful for that early in the game, it deals massive damage to Red enemies with a fast cooldown, and its Long Distance attacks help it work as a generalist on top of that, even later on. It is fantastic for countering short-to-midranged Reds like Sir Seal, Ginger Snache, and Capy.
- While most Ubers are Awesome, but Impractical early-game due to their high deploy costs, the Ultra Souls fall firmly into this, due to being as cheap as most Rare Cats in their Normal Forms while being much stronger.
A Dog Named "Dog": Quite a few characters qualify: Cat, Sir Seal, Teacher Bear, THE SLOTH, Mr. Mole... This was more prevalent in the first English version, which had names like Elephant and Rhinoceros.
Does This Remind You of Anything?: The Cerberus Kids' description states that they sold their souls by clicking on an Aku spam email, and that they used to be low-level Red enemies, but are now successful entrepreneurs investing in Evil. It makes the Aku come across like a multi-level marketing scheme.
Dual Boss:
- Certain floors of the Heavenly Tower makes you face off against two Advent Bosses at the same time with little to no prep time and only mildly threatening support, such as Floors 44, 45, and 46 where you face Hannya + Cruel Angel Clionel, Queen B with 3 Bakoos and Daboo of the Dead paired with King Wahwah.
- Death Angel Z-Onel is unique among the Advent Bosses because there are two of her in her first two stages, one spawning at the beginning of the stage and another appearing shortly after. Averted in Z-Onel's third stage, With Sympathy, where instead three Z-Onels appear one after the another.
- Ghost King Finale, the last stage of Invasion of the Swamplord, sends out both Kappy Kawano and Kappy Jr., with the latter coming out after a delay of nearly a minute after hitting the base.
Dub-Induced Plot Hole:
- The English Empire of Cats intro introduces the developer of the "new weapon" that is the Battle Cats, which would eventually conflict with the existence of ancient Cats like Primordial Cat and the Ancient Eggs. While the Japanese version of the intro does say the Cat Army "suddenly appeared" amid other crises in Japan, that doesn't entirely rule out the possibility of the Cats existing prior to EoC, and their developer is an invention of the English version.
- The goal of Stories of Legend is to find the Legend Cats before they were sealed, but who sealed them is left out of the English version. In Japanese, they were sealed by "a certain organization," presumably the same one from enemy Mecha-Bun's description and the Stories of Legend ending.
- In the English version, Cala Maria is described as a religious vision sent by The Cat God, despite debuting in Stories of Legend, which takes place before he was born. However, Cala Maria and The Cat God are never mentioned together in Japanese.
- The English Stories of Legend ending speaks of "Cats dressed like Bōsōzoku biker gangs or members of idol groups with number IDs" found by the Cat Army after entering Uncanny Legends, despite these only dating back to the mid-1900s and UL being set during ancient times. The Japanese version presents these as examples of how the Cat Army vaguely knew they hadn't gone as far back in time as planned in SoL, not UL, which makes much more sense given how SoL could take place any moment before The Cat God's birth (he was born some time in 1989-2019, the Heisei era).
- Partway through the English Into the Future intro, the narrator says they've been "an alien from space all along," which can easily be taken to mean they are the same person who narrated Empire of Cats, even though ItF's narrator is unfamiliar with the Cat Army. In the Japanese version, ItF's narrator is transparent about being one of the invaders from the start rather than it being a twist, making it clear that this alien is different from EoC's narrator.
- Le'Behemoth has a Non-Indicative Name in English, as he isn't a Behemoth enemy. The reason he's not is that the Behemoth type's name is different in Japanese, translating to "Super-Beast".
- Dark Emperor Santa gaining the Aku trait in version 11.2 confused many players of the English version only due to a Dub Name Change - his Japanese name is Akuma Ō Santa (meaning "Devil King Santa") and Akuma ("Devil") is the Aku trait's Japanese name.
- Conversely, Akuma from the Street Fighter collab was never updated with the Aku trait. After all, Akuma's Japanese name is Gouki.
- The New Year's Eve Easter Egg intro with True Superfeline can come off as a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment in the English version. Why New Year's Eve? Why does the screen turn red at the end? The answer to both of these questions is in the Japanese Empire of Cats intro, which starts with "New Year's Eve, [current year]. The Japanese archipelago is stained with blood."
- All Colossus Gauntlet bosses are stated to have been made using the top-secret technology of the Laboratory of Relics in Japanese. Almost all of their English descriptions change this to "a secret lab," which wouldn't be confusing if not for Gigahaniwan's description saying "ancient lab" instead, potentially giving the impression that there are two Colossus-creating labs.
- Sage of Life Dr. Nova is a researcher who came to the ancient world to create a perfect lifeform to surpass humanity (heavily implied to be Idi:Ne in her own description) and became a wreck of their former self, losing their ego to a Sage crystal they were studying. In English, this was mistranslated into "The result of an ancient scientist's work to create a super-being to surpass humanity," creating a Canon Foreigner of a mysterious scientist that made Dr. Nova, who ends up gaining Idi:Ne's role of a would-be successor to humanity in this translation. The last line of their description also became "their ego was consumed by a strange crystal" with no mention that they were studying the crystal, making it sound like they were randomly affected by the crystal out of nowhere.
- Cats of the Cosmos Chapter 3's Zombie Outbreaks contain Sir Rel, who had never been seen outside of the past (i.e. Uncanny/Zero Legends, event stages) until then. While this is unexplained in English, the Japanese version mentions a time machine in Sir Rel's description.
- Most Cats from the Demon Slayer collab aren't any more effective against Aku, the demon-themed trait, despite being members of the Demon Slayer Corps. This is because the "demons" from Demon Slayer are actually Oni, a type of Yōkai with some different characteristics from more "conventional" demons such as the Aku.
Duel Boss: The Duel Stages Challenge only lets you send out one Cat at once to fend off a single enemy at a time. It's not a straight example, however, as more enemies come once the first one is killed, and you can spawn another Cat if your first one dies. The later Tag Arena stages work similarly, but let both you and the enemy send out two units at once.

The Battle Cats Tropes E-H

Early-Bird Boss:
- The first Hippoe, encountered in Japan, can be something of a threat for first-time players. All the enemies up to this point have been different flavors of The Goomba, but Hippoe has much more HP, hits way harder, and has an Area Attack. Since you only have 4 available Cats at this point, of which only Gross Cat can safely attack the boss, taking Hippoe down before it gets to your base might be tough. Of course, after this level, you'll get stronger ranged attackers which make it easy to kill all future Hippoes.
- The first encounter with Casaurian Ahirujo in Woodlands Area 4. A literal Early Bird Boss, it's intended to be the first boss-level Behemoth enemy encountered, and can easily shred through meatshields with its powerful strikes, especially if it lands a Savage Blow. Once this level is beaten, you'll be able to get Courier Cat, which hard-counters Ahirujo to an absolutely cruel degree and effectively reduces it to being a free source of money in later encounters.
Early-Bird Cameo:
- Before he became playable in version 5.8, Killer Cat appeared in designs of other units like Dark PPT48 and Red Riding Mina, as well as in Metal Slug Defense during its collab with The Battle Cats. Killer Gross Cat also made an early appearance in Metal Slug Defense, albeit with shorter legs.
- Before version 11.5 added full-fledged Behemoth enemies and Ancient Eggs, Empress' Excavation 1 was added in 11.4, serving as an early appearance for Wild Doge and Ancient Egg: N001, which didn't yet have a True Form.
- True Superfeline is a retroactive example. It's the Cat in the logo, meaning that it's technically been in the game for its entire existence. As a more conventional example, it showed up in a promotional video before being added to the game proper in version 12.0.
- Relic Doge can be seen inside a container in Eldritch Forces' background before debuting as an enemy in An Ancient Curse.
Early-Installment Weirdness:
- The first two traits introduced, Red and Floating, have their first introduced enemy be Pigge and Mooth respectively, and any Red or Floating Doge variants are limited to a select few stages. For every other trait, the most common enemy is a variant of Doge, which will also be the first (or one of the first) enemies of that trait.
- Crazed Bahamut Cat is simply the Evolved Form of Bahamut Cat, whereas every other "Crazed" unit (even the collab-exclusive Crazed Princess Punt and Crazed Yuki) is a separate unit from the original.
- Stories of Legend sub-chapters 11 (Neverending Cat Story), 12 (Castle of Fish) and 14 (The Scratching Post) are 1:1 remakes of sub-chapters 2 (Passion Land), 3 (Glucosamine Desert) and 5 (Risqué Terrain), respectively, just with higher strength magnifications. As of version 3.4, these stages are redundant next to 2- and 3-crown difficulties, which follow the same formula of making already-cleared stages harder by buffing enemies without changing anything else.
- The second monthly event, Loving Labour, only has 6 stages, whereas the other major monthly events have 8 stages. While the first monthly event, Autumn = Sports Day!, used to have 3 stages, it quickly got an expanded version with 8 stages (and the original 3-stage version was never even released outside of Japan), but Loving Labour didn't get the same treatment, leaving it abnormally short. The old Autumn = Sports Day! was also the only monthly event to have no new enemies, but the new one introduced Pigge Back.
- Shadow Gao's description says "non-attribute" instead of Traitless, whose name hadn't been set in stone when he was released.
Easter Egg:
- Flower Cat has an obscure method of unlocking: you must open and close the right sliding door on the Cat Base menu repeatedly. If you hear a meow when opening the door, you're doing it right.
- The method for unlocking his True Form is even more obscure. After beating Chapter 3 of Into The Future, Flower Cat Awakens appears on the 2nd and 22nd of every month for 2 minutes at 2:22 PM. To compensate for this, the stage's enemies are incredibly easy.
Easy Levels, Hard Bosses: Most of the regular stages in Empire of Cats are easy, while the Moon stages put up more of a fight. This doesn't apply to the rest of the game, however.
Edible Bludgeon:
- Jurassic Cat Sitter attacks by whacking a nearby enemy with a shank of meat attached to a fork.
- Bakery Cat uses a croissant as a Battle Boomerang. His Evolved Form, Boomerang Cat, ditches the croissant for a real boomerang, but his True Form, Fried Chicken Cat, returns to using food as a weapon, this time a chicken wing.
- Marching Kory, a Valentine's event-exclusive variant of Kory, uses a chocolate-dipped cracker stick as a club.
Edible Theme Naming: All stages of Patisserie Parklands, as well as most stages of Candy Paradise^note, have food-related names.
Eldritch Abomination: The Nekolugas. They're so otherworldly that the game doesn't even know whether to call them Cats or not.
Elite Tweak: While leveling up your units through the use of either XP or duplicate characters from the gacha tends to be the main method of making units stronger, at some point, you're going to reach a point where you'll hit a limit on the benefits this provides, either through reaching the highest possible level cap for levels gained through XP or the levels getting hit with Diminishing Returns for Balance to the point where they're practically Empty Levels. As a result, there have been extra methods of increasing a unit's power introduced over the years.
- One of these mechanics is Talents (assuming that the chosen unit has Talents that they can access), which has a few parts to it.
  - The main part of the Talents mechanic is the Talent upgrades themselves. These consist of a set of 5 options, with very specific exceptions, that can be unlocked and upgraded for your unit with the use of NP, a currency that you get by converting units obtained from the gacha to it, with rarer units giving out more NP. Out of these 5 options, 3 of them focus on giving the unit new abilities as well as resistances to certain abilities, the latter being exclusive to this mechanic, while the other 2 are a boost to a unit's attack and HP, though once again there are a select few exceptions.
  - The more minor part of Talents is the Talent Orbs. Every unit with access to Talents can also equip one Talent Orb of your choice which grants them a stat boost (whether by boosting their base stats or by making their abilities stronger) to the enemy type indicated by the Orbs. These Orbs can also be upgraded by fusing Orbs of the same target trait and rank.
  - Version 12.1 introduced an extension to this mechanic known as Ultra Talents. Exclusive to Uber Rares and more post-game aligned, Ultra Talents requires the unit to be level 60 to even access its benefits, which is an extremely time and resource-intensive process; even discounting the boatload of XP and Uber Rare Catseyes needed, leveling an Uber from level 50 to 60 also takes 15 Dark Catseyes, which mainly drop from endgame content and in very small quantities. Actually doing so will give the unit an additional set of Talent Upgrades of a variable amount, with some also gaining an extra Talent Orb slot. In exchange for their price, Ultra Talents tend to be much stronger than standard Talents, and in some cases can outright change a unit's archetype.
- Another mechanic that fulfills this purpose is Ultra Forms, a 4th form that's even stronger than a unit's True Form. Like Ultra Talents before it, it's exclusive to Uber Rares, is more post-game aligned, and even shares the same level 60 requirement it does, with the only real difference setting it apart being that gaining its benefits requires you to have the necessary evolution materials to evolve the unit, similar to unlocking a True Form.
- By themselves, the Resist [Ability] Talents are alright at best, only granting their wielder a resistance against a targeted ability. They tend to perform worse than their Immune counterparts, which not only prevents the user from being affected by the ability at all, in terms of NP cost, they also cost less despite having a better effect. However, there is a way of turning the Resist into an Immunity through the help of certain Talent Orbs. Certain Orbs grant the user a resistance to an ability when equipped and the resistance gained from the Orbs stacks additively to the Resist [Ability] Talents. This means that if you manage to get a cumulative resist percentage to 100% (usually done through using an S-Rank Orb and a max level Resist [Ability] Talent), they now function as if they were an immunity. Pretty nice to have, if you can get past the heavy time requirement for it due to how infrequently the events where you can get Resist [Ability] Orbs appear.
Energy Weapon:
- Certain Cats and enemies have the ability to fire Wave Attacks when they hit a target, doing extra damage to everything caught in the blast by firing blue and purple shockwaves respectively. Naturally, enemy Waves go much farther than Cat ones. Other Cats and enemies also only have a chance to do the Waves with each hit, turning fights into luck-based missions. Some units will instead create Mini-Waves, which are much weaker, but travel faster.
- Other Cats and enemies, later on in the game, can perform a non-moving variation of Wave Attacks called Surges. These linger for a period of time, damaging everything caught in them repeatedly. Like Wave Attacks, some enemies only have a chance to create Surges, but there's a double helping of RNG with them —Surges also have a random zone disjointed from the unit in which they'll spawn.
- Much later, a combination of both Waves and Surges called Explosions can be used by Cats and enemies. They consist of a blast disjointed from the unit that creates them, similar to Surges, but extend into a three-way blast similar to Waves that reach both forward and backward.
Equipment Upgrade: Talent Orbs come in five ranks (weakest to strongest: D, C, B, A, and S), and higher-rank Orbs can be obtained by merging two identical Orbs of a lower rank.
Evil vs. Evil: The plot of Into the Future in a nutshell; when alien invaders attempt to conquer Earth, the cats step up to save the world from the invaders, albeit for purely selfish reasons.
Fake Ultimate Mook:
- Many of the Cyclones end up as this trope. Cyclones have high health and typically boast extreme DPS that destroys anything they touch. However, their short range and extreme vulnerability to status effects makes most of them much less threatening than they look, at least in their initial stages.
- CyberFace, first seen in the stage Steel Visage, looks absolutely unbeatable at first glance, as it moves extremely fast, has a 99999 damage Area Attack, deals quadruple damage to the Cat Base due to its Base Destroyer ability, and has a 90% chance to fire a level 8 Wave when its attack connects, in addition to having the Metal trait that makes it take only 1 damage from any attack. The catch? It has only 299 HP, meaning that, while you can't necessarily perform a Death of a Thousand Cuts like you could with most Metals, a single Critical Hit from nearly anything will do it in.
- Teacher Cybear, appearing in the stage Forged to Kill, is probably the worst of them all. He has 600 range, takes only 1 damage when attacked, attacks twice a second, and deals 999,999 damage per swing ^{Fun Fact}... but he also has single-target attacks and merely 50 health, meaning a Zerg Rush of nothing but meatshields can do him in.
- Subverted during the 11th Anniversary, as King Doge, essentially a Doge version of The Cat God, is easy to defeat despite his Metal trait, menacing appearance and name. Essentially, he can be watered down into a free Platinum Ticket when you consider Catnip Challenges. He also reappears as Possessed King Doge, who actually puts up a good fight, so did they send in a fake ultimate mook and actually make him as ultimate as he seems later?
Fantastic Fruits and Vegetables:
- The Fruit Treasures boost the efficacy of certain special abilities against certain types of enemies. Like all Treasures, it's necessary to max them out to get their full effects.
- Along with Behemoth Stones, one of the two types of materials used to unlock True Forms and Ultra Forms is Catfruit, which comes in several varieties obtained from different sources.
Fantasy Creep: While there have been some bizarre "Cats" and enemies since the start, the amount and variety of fantasy elements has skyrocketed over years of updates, with gods and supernatural creatures joining the ranks of both the Cat Army and their enemies.
Fantasy Kitchen Sink: There are Civilized Animals, Funny Animals, Mix-and-Match Critters, Planimals, Anthropomorphic Food, Animate Inanimate Objects, Flying Faces, humans with Cat ears, valkyries, Lost Superweapons, Eldritch Abominations, dragons, ninjas, samurai, zombies, demons, angels, ghosts, Yōkai, shinigami, curses, genies, gorgons, mermaids, witches, espers, nymphs, Magical Girls, Magic Knights, Fighting Spirits, Cute Monster Girls, mummies, pixies, vampires, Fossil Revival, brainwashing, Time Travel, mutants, superheroes, supervillains, aliens, cyborgs, giant robots, extra-dimensional beings, superpowered historical figures, a Dark World called The Aku Realms, and figures from several different religions and folktales who coexist with original deities.
Fighting Clown: Among the many units you can use, a large number of them have rather strange methods of attack, and many of those are still very effective units despite this. Examples include Dancer Cat attacking with sweet dance moves, Rocker Cat headbanging to use his hair as a whip, Salaryman Cat performing a dogeza^note, Pizza Cat slamming down a stack of giant pizzas and nomming on a slice, the list goes on.
Fighting Your God: The Cat Army fights The Cat God at the end of each Cats of the Cosmos chapter.
Floating Continent: The penultimate stage of Into the Future is the Floating Continent, a Level in the Clouds with an assortment of Angels and Aliens, including the Pre-Final Boss of each ItF chapter, Nimoy Bore. On the world map, it resembles Laputa from Castle in the Sky.
Flying Seafood Special: Several aquatic enemies are shown to levitate. Justified for Angels and Aliens like Sunfish Jones, Cli-One and Calamary, but unexplained for Lophiiformes Angaburu, a Zombie/Floating/Behemoth anglerfish with no apparent reason for being able to float. The units and enemies from the Survive! Mola mola! collab event also fly, with the exception of the Crab unit.
Foreshadowing: The sub-chapter before Sage of Logic Newton is named Newtown Trench.
Foul Waterfowl: The Duche line of enemies are antagonistic ducks. While Duche himself is fairly inoffensive, his variants, such as Zuche and Casaurian Ahirujo, can be a lot more imposing.
Fragile Speedster: Several examples.
- Among the Normal Cats, Cow Cat moves and attacks the fastest, but has poor endurance and per-hit damage.
- Capsule Cat has the second-fastest movement speed of any Cat in the game, and does a decent amount of damage per hit, but has just 1 HP.
- Express Cat is a cross between this and Glass Cannon. It rushes forward and delivers a single big hit to the first enemy it meets, synergizing well with its Money Multiplier ability, but doesn't live long enough.
- Brollow is among the fastest enemies in the game, and delivers a devastating hit whenever they reaches a target, but has low HP and endurance. However, unlike Express Cat, he's not Immune to Flinching, and can immediately attack again when knocked back unless caught with an extremely damaging attack.
Freemium Timer:
- Playing a stage costs energy. In the non-Special stages, energy costs are lower the easier and earlier the level is. If you run out of energy, you can either pay Cat Food to restore it all, claim a rank-up reward, or just wait a few hours to get more.
- GAMATOTO is a Cat you can send out an expeditions for rewards. You can choose to have him adventure for 1, 3, or 6 real-time hours, and he returns with more rewards depending on how long he was adventuring. He can be sped up using Catamins to make him come back faster.
- Ototo can use materials collected from beating stages to construct custom Cat Bases. Every step in the building process takes 12 real-time hours to complete, but his team can be sped up using Catamins.
Friendly Enemy: Even if the Doge and Cat Armies clash in the world and beyond, Doge is still thoughtful enough to give Cat birthday gifts.
Game-Breaking Bug:
- A now-fixed glitch in the 5.10 update caused the Plasma Crystals from Into the Future Chapters 2 and 3 to have no effect, effectively tripling the strength of already difficult enemies.
- The 10.2 update introduced A Colossal Valentine's,, a set of 20 increasingly difficult stages featuring Marching Kory and Chocolate Doge, a new enemy which produces Mini-Waves and is immune to freeze. However, the 14th stage out of 20 accidentally had the Chocolate Doges boosted to six times their intended strength level, making them almost impossible to defeat without specific Ubers. The 10.2.1 update, fortunately, fixed this.
Gameplay and Story Integration: Well, as much as one can call it a "story" anways:
- The Cat God's miracles can be used on all non-Outbreak stages in Cats of the Cosmos, with the exception of The Big Bang, as The Cat God himself is the boss of the level.
- The in-game reason why The Cat God isn't present in Stories of Legend is that The Cat God is actually 20 years old, and Stories of Legend takes place before he was even born, not that it stops you from fielding him as a Cat unit if you have him unlocked. The same applies for Uncanny Legends (which takes place even further in the past), and Zero Legends (which is entirely divorced from the flow of space-time, and which also features him as an enemy in one stage).
Gameplay and Story Segregation:
- Characters' descriptions tend to treat them more as individuals rather than species, oftentimes having very specific backstories, and the fact that you can deploy or fight hundreds if not thousands of them is never explained.
- Rarely do any of the canonically overpowered characters demonstrate the level of power their descriptions ascribe to them. Even Physical Gods, Reality Warpers and Superweapons usually aren't that much stronger than more mundane units: The Chaos Moon, an ancient weapon that almost destroyed the galaxy, deals less damage than an unevolved Mighty Drednot (a wooden ship that fires an arrow) and has less health than Baby Cat.
Gameplay Automation: Using two Cat CPUs on a stage you've already beaten will let you automatically complete it without having to actually play it. Of course, you still need the required energy for the stage and you can only skip ten times per day.
Giant Mook:
- Super Metal Hippoe is a bigger, much stronger version of the regular Metal Hippoe. Metal Hippoe has just 80 health and weak attacks, while Super Metal Hippoe has at least 8000 health, decent damage and a 100% chance to knockback Cats. Unusually, he's not Immune to Flinching due to having 24 knockbacks, and is much faster than the original, though slower to attack. St. Pigge the 2nd is a similar example, being bigger, stronger, and faster than Pigge.
- In event stages, giant versions of enemies themed after the event sometimes appear. Examples include Easter Duche and Easter B.B. Bunny for Easter, Count Owlbrow for Halloween, and Christmas D. for Christmas.
- Most Colossus enemies are, as the name implies, gigantic versions of existing enemies empowered by genome editing and a black orb in their bodies.
Gimmick Level: The game has quite a few.
- In Cats of the Cosmos, Broton reverses the game's usual Health/Damage Asymmetry, making you deploy a few strong Cats against a Zerg Rush of weak enemies.
- Littering Coast has just one Wall Doge that's buffed up to 6000%. To make things more challenging, Assassin Bears are spawned at intervals. However, the intervals are long enough for the Cat Cannon to recharge, and that being said, these Assassin Bears are frail and can easily be picked off by Wave Attacks.
- Throne of Phone sends out nothing but three Brollows... buffed up to insane levels.
- The sub-chapter Grotesque Gallery has tons of them. Cubist Crimes sends out an endless stream of insanely buffed Brollows if the weak enemy base is damaged without inflicting a One-Hit Kill. Surrealist Sins has nothing but a powerful Doge Base... and an Assassin Bear on a time limit. Gouache Ghouls requires you to fill up the enemy limit with Ms. Signs, or face a Hopeless Boss Fight against an endless army of strong Angels.
- Some Uncanny Legends and Zero Legends sub-chapters have a gimmick shared by all of their stages. To name a few: every stage in In The Sleeping Forest has a Doge Base, every stage in Theatre of Fear spams enemies of a single trait supported by a cursing Doge Base, and all stages in DNA Plantation Zerg Rush with enemies that usually appear by themselves.
Glass Cannon: Again, several.
- Most long-ranged Cats in general, even Uber Rares and Legend Rares, are this trope. While they can put out tons of damage from a good distance when protected well, they'll die in just a few hits from most late-game enemies without proper protection. One of the biggest examples is Kalisa, an impromptu Uber Rare void-sword bearer, who moves fast and does great damage. However, it only takes a few hits from most enemies to put her down quickly.
- Bird Cat is one of the most fragile of the Normal Cats, but compensates with high attack and quick attack speed. Its range is too low for the task, though.
- When compared to other anti-Red options, Swordsman Cat is this. A lack of resistance means that he takes the full brunt of any Red attacks, but his massive damage to Red enemies lets him rip them apart, especially as Elemental Duelist Cat.
- Supercar Cat is essentially a version of Express Cat that trades speed for more damage, but is even more fragile than Express while packing a bigger punch, with the added bonus of knocking back a traited enemy and demolishing their Barrier or Aku Shield.
- Slime Cat has one of the most pathetic health pools of any Cat, but delivers devastating Wave Attacks with every hit. Supercar Cat works similarly, but in exchange for not creating a Wave, its attack deals twice the damage and can rip right through Barriers and Aku Shields.
- On the enemy side, Two Can, Tackey, and Hackey can all do incredible damage, but have far less health relative to their attack than most other enemies.
The Goomba: Doge is the first and most basic enemy in the game, and shows up a lot early on. He has such low stats that even a level 1 Basic Cat can defeat him one-on-one, and has no special abilities. Doge has a lot of variants, and they tend to serve as the easiest and most basic representative of their trait — though, later Doge variants like Metal Doge, Wild Doge and Dogenstein can still be very annoying to face.
Guest Fighter:
- On occasion, the player can earn "Cats" from other games and media. The English version includes 'Mr. Ninja' (by PONOS), Survive! Mola mola!, Metal Slug Defense, Mario Kart (to celebrate the launch of 'The Battle Cats POP!' on the Nintendo 3DS, 'Touch Detective Neo Mushroom Garden', Crash Fever, Pikotaro (who even made a Cat-themed remix of "PPAP"), and PowerPro Baseball, Mentori, Neon Genesis Evangelion (more specifically, Rebuild of Evangelion), Pokopang, Betakkuma, Fate:/stay night: Heaven's Feel, Puella Magi Madoka Magica The Movie: Rebellion (originally appeared in the Japanese version featuring the original anime]), Shakurel Planet, Street Fighter, and Vocaloid, among many others.
- The Japanese version includes the ones above and some not available to English players, include the Japanese rock band Kishidan and Gudetama.
- Version 6.0 introduced the Uber Rare set "Girls and Monsters," containing characters from the now-cancelled PONOS game 'GirlsMons.', as well as Kyosaka Nanaho from the also-cancelled PONOS game, Kyoutou Project.
- The Colossus Busters set features Goddess of Light Sirius, also from 'GirlsMons.'
Guide Dang It!:
- The strength magnification system, which essentially serves as a method of averting Villain Forgot to Level Grind. In every level where they appear, the stats of an enemy are set to a percentage of those of their first appearance.^note Nowhere in the game is this told to players, which gets especially Egregious when late-game Gimmick Levels feature weak enemies under a truly massive strength magnification, which may lead the player to underestimate them until it is too late.
- While most event stages have the times they appear at listed in-game, the Wicked Cat stages don't have this information shown to the player. Each one is only on for an hour each day, and which hour it is changes every day of the week. Some other stages, like Growing Strange, are also kept secret by the game, at least until you unlock them.
Handicap Mission: Restriction Stages impose various handicaps on the player. These include limiting the amount of cats being deployed at one time, only being able to use cats of certain rarities, being able to only deploy from the first row, and preventing the player from deploying cats above or below a certain cost.
Hard Levels, Easy Bosses: Cats of the Cosmos Chapter 3 has some mercilessly hard stages, especially near the end, that require you to have as many Treasures as possible and strong anti-Aliens. However, the final bosses of the chapter put up much less of a fight by comparison.
Hard Mode Filler: With the exception of the Moon, the stages in Empire of Cats are the same for all 3 chapters, but the enemies are stronger. This is averted by Into the Future and Cats of the Cosmos, which have slight differences between the chapters for each stage.
Hard Mode Perks: Higher crown difficulties in Legend Stages can drop more materials at a time.
Harmless Enemy: The two varieties of Fireworks Guys show up frequently in event stages, but have only 1 HP and never attack.
Health/Damage Asymmetry: Both Played Straight and somewhat Played With. Enemies tend to have a lot more raw health than Cats,^note but although Cats tend to do more damage and have the advantage of Elemental Rock–Paper–Scissors, enemies usually aren't that far behind, with many tougher ones being able to soak up dozens to hundreds of attacks while killing most Cats in seconds. The difference lies in the number of units each side can have fielded, as you can deploy many more Cats than there are enemies and can do so endlessly as long as you have money, balancing out the inherent difference in stats as the damage an enemy does to your force as a whole is much less than you do to theirs.
Helpful Mook:
- Ms. Sign will show up if the player takes too long to beat most levels, but does nothing of importance besides taking up a slot in the enemy limit. Because Ms. Signs are infinite on most levels, she serves to break stalemates, lowering the number of actual enemies on the field and letting your Cats break through. It's even possible to completely clog the enemy limit with Ms. Signs, then cheese the level. Though on some levels, Ms. Sign serves as a warning for Assassin Bear.
- Angel Fanboy is a variant that breaks the fourth wall, showing up in a few stages with Angels to tell you that, despite the fact that some Angels appear to be floating, they're immune to anti-Floating abilities.
- Weak Empire of Cats enemies like Mooth and Kang Roo are occasionally spawned in late-game stages. Utterly outmatched by your Cats, they serve to provide a cash boost, as they drop much more money than most other enemies of the same strength. Casaurian Ahirujo fills a similar role in some Behemoth-heavy stages.
- Gardeneel Bros. will warp your Cats forward when they hit, letting them get behind enemy lines. While this can be harmful on some stages, such as CotC 3 Andromeda^note and Glass Slippers,^note it can also let your Cats destroy the enemy base without having to get past the support enemies. The stage Stars in the Tumbler practically requires this strategy to beat. Subverted with Mesocosmocyclone; while they also warp Cats forward, their role as a Lightning Bruiser makes the ability less of a benefit to you and more of a way to rush to your base and crush it with their attacks.
Hitbox Dissonance: Plenty of examples, both with Cats and enemies.
- Bahamut Cat's attack range is the same in both his Normal and Evolved Forms, even though the Evolved Form creates a much larger explosion in his attack animation. Essentially, the half of the dark explosion nearest to Crazed Bahamut nukes enemies for extreme damage, and the other half does nothing.
- Dom Cat and Executioner appear to attack four times per attack animation, but only their first three hits damage enemies; the last does nothing. Dark Lazer doesn't have this issue.
- Many Uber Rares, most notably Windy and Jizo's Moving Castle, have attack animations that reach much farther than their actual attack range.
- Despite only reaching to the same range as the original Teacher Bear's claw slash, Assassin Bear's attack has 800 range and hits farther than it would seem.
- Dark Emperor Nyandam's hitbox is quite a bit in front of his throne as he has less range, so Cats will appear to attack the dark spirits in front of him. Notably, some of his variants fix this issue, which can look strange if he's paired with one of them.
- One of the most notorious examples is Master A., whose attack seems to reach a good deal past the end of his tongue.
- Camelle's bite attack only reaches a moderate distance in front of him, but can hit Cats about twice as far away as it looks like it should.
- R.Ost appears to peck twice during his attack animation, but only attacks once.
- Wave Attacks go farther than the sprites do. This is present when Cats use them, but much more noticeable for enemies, which have longer reach than Cats' Waves.
- The explosion from Tackey's spike ball goes a lot farther than the animation would suggest.
Holiday Mashup: Certain event stages (primarily million downloads celebration, Tower and Total War stages) bring together enemies from many different monthly or seasonal events. For example, Event All-Stars Grand Jubilee! - Megaton Blast contains Summer Festival, Cultural Festival, Christmas and Winter event enemies.
Holiday Mode: Should you play the game at any time during New Year's Eve, the intro that plays upon starting the game will have additional details that weren't normally present before, most notably the True Superfeline that appears partway through that slowly gets closer to your screen before your screen fades to red.
Hopeless Boss Fight: Alien enemies in the later chapters, as well as The Cat God in all three of his forms, start off incredibly powerful and must be weakened by collecting Treasures. If you have fewer Treasures than expected for that point in the game, this trope will result, as the Aliens will be far too powerful to defeat by normal means.
Humanoid Abomination: The Pasalans are vaguely humanoid, but have incredibly disfigured and disproportionate body parts.

The Battle Cats Tropes I-M

Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: Stages are rated, from easiest to hardest, as Easy, Medium, Hard, Veteran, Expert, Insane, Deadly, Merciless, and Brutal. A later update would give them additional, numerical difficulty designations ranging from 1★ to 12★.
I Don't Like the Sound of That Place: Outside of the main story chapters, this game is full of these: Serial Killer Jungle, Villains Jungle, Swamp of Sacrifice, Revenant Road, Apocalypse Temple, No Hope Ranch, Endless Dead Zone, Roads of Torment, Famine Village, Hell's Crater, Truth's Devouring Maw, Dimension of Despair, Forbidden Archives, Sinister Wasteland, Demon's Park, Village of Sacrifice, etc.
Improvised Weapon: Several Cats and enemies use ordinary objects or tools as weapons. These include, but are not limited to:
- Pastry Cat strikes foes with a giant whisk, with the whipped cream potentially slowing them down.
- Dark Lazer uses a fluorescent bulb shaped like a lightsaber for rapid attacks.
- Adult Cat specializes this in all his forms. His base form chucks a bottle to attack, his Evolved Form Sick Cat uses an IV stand, and its True Form Prisoner Cat tosses a shovel much farther.
- Cat Kart R throws a tin of Cat Food to attack.
- Weightlifter Cat crushes foes with a barbell, while its Evolved Form Ring Girl Cat uses a sign instead. Meanwhile, the True Form Pizza Cat uses a stack of pizzas for the same purpose.
- Bakery Cat throws a croissant like a boomerang to attack. His Evolved Form Boomerang Cat uses a real boomerang, but his True Form Fried Chicken Cat returns to using food as a weapon, this time throwing a fried chicken leg.
- Neko Rin pulls out an orange from a shopping bag and throws it at enemies.
Indescribable Object: Downplayed by the Evolved Forms of the Nekolugas. While their descriptions do give some idea of what they can do on the battlefield, the narrator is clearly dumbfounded just looking at them and their Body Horror, and can't write anything else about them.
Unknown Cat: God, I don't know if this is a Cat anymore. Seriously, I give up. Knockbacks enemies. (Area Atk.)
Interface Spoiler: When version 7.0 was released and ended Stories of Legend, it also added the Relic trait to the Cat Guide and Upgrade Menu, leaving one to wonder when and where Relics would appear, since none were fought in the last Stories of Legend sub-chapter, which was ostensibly the end of Legend Stages or even the game. Sure enough, beating SoL unlocks another campaign called Uncanny Legends, where Relics make their debut.
In-Universe Game Clock: The Japanese version has a very minor example: the system clock determines the years on which Empire of Cats (New Year's Eve, current year), Into the Future (current year + 900), Cats of the Cosmos (New Year's Day, current year) begin, rather than using Year X like the English version.
Ironic Name: The stage Blue Ocean takes place in a barren desert.
Item Farming:
- Regular Cat Tickets, used to play the normal Cat Capsule, can be farmed in special stages that feature Metal enemies. The easier ones feature Metal Hippoes as the main enemies, while the harder ones feature Fake Ultimate Mooks like Teacher Cybear and CyberFace. They double as a Peninsula of Power Leveling, as Normal Cats can be leveled using duplicates from these tickets.
- Catfruits and their seeds, which are needed to unlock the True Forms of Cats from the gacha and some others, must be farmed from stages that reappear every week; each color corresponds with one enemy type that will be found on their farming maps, with higher difficulty stages being more likely to give you a full fruit instead of a seed. Some more powerful Cats need rainbow-coloured Epic Catfruit to evolve, which can be obtained from rarer event stages or as a Rare Random Drop from the weekly stages; a later update also added Epic Catfruit Seeds, which are actually rarer than the full fruits and are locked behind Growing Epic, which only appears after entering Uncanny Legends. The rarer Elder Catfruit is needed to evolve Legends and anti-Relic Cats; it can only be farmed from Growing Strange. The dark blue Aku Catfruit can only be farmed from Growing Evil and only drops its seeds, requiring five to make a full fruit. The rarest of all Catfruit is the Golden Catfruit, which can only be obtained from the Cat Shrine or the Infernal Tower.
- Another type of evolution material, Behemoth Stones, can be farmed in either specific Behemoth Culling stages, which appear at specific times, or the Hunter's Map Enigmas, which appear randomly from certain Enigmas. There are also Epic Behemoth Stones, which have their own dedicated stage to get them, and Behemoth Gems, which you get by fusing 10 of a Behemoth Stone of the same type together.
Job-Stealing Robot: Mini White Cyclone is having a hard time finding a place to work due to the boom in robot vacuum cleaners.
Joke Character: Again, several examples.
- Killer Cat, a black and red variant of the regular Cat introduced in the Day of the Cat event, has the exact same stats as the regular Cat, but has the highest cost of any unit in the game, at a staggering $7500 in most stages! At least he's cheap to upgrade for easy User Rank points, and has a few useful CatCombos. However, his True Form, Radical Cat, is a massive improvement: he gains a huge HP boost, has his cost lowered to $900 with a 6-second recharge, and becomes strong vs. Floating with Behemoth Slayer, making him a usable counter to Pterowl Hazuku in particular. Both Killer Tank Cat and Killer Gross Cat function identically to Killer Cat, though with slightly more HP or much more range, respectively.
- Gummy Cat, which is one of the only Cats that can only be accessed by paying real money, also counts. Not only does it have 1000 knockbacks, making it get Blown Across the Room by the slightest bit of damage, but it deals 1 HP of damage per attack. It can't even Zerg Rush effectively, due to its higher cost and slower recharge speed than most meatshields. So much for Bribing Your Way to Victory. It also has a True Form, but one which doesn't do much for it, unlike Killer Cat's.
- Cabaret Cat starts out as a more expensive clone of the Basic Cat, but its description promises that "You won't believe your eyes when it evolves at level 10". Indeed, once it reaches level 10, it evolves into Mega Cat, which looks far more visually impressive, and attacks by charging up and firing a laser which creates a gigantic explosion... and has less DPS than its already-pitiful Normal Form.
Kaizo Trap: Some stages will still try to finish you off, even when the base is being broken down.
- The Challenge Battle sends out one last Assassin Bear when the base is on its last legs, which can turn the tide of battle if you don't have your Cat Cannon ready.
- Lovechild Lane sends out a huge horde of Zang Roos when the base is hit. Even if you managed to take down the One Horn and stall out the Zamelle and Mr. Moles, they can still finish you off if you can't destroy the base fast enough.
- Draconian, the stage to unlock Manic King Dragon Cat, initially sends just three of them as the main bosses. However, if the base is damaged after a certain amount of time, more of them will come.
Karma Houdini: At no point, over the course of the game's Excuse Plot, do the Cats receive any punishment for all of the mayhem they cause. This also applies to their creator.
Keystone Army: If the enemy base is destroyed, you automatically win and every enemy instantly dies. This trope works both ways, though. Watch out for those Zombies, Long Distance enemies, and Warping!
Killer Gorilla:
- Gory, one of the enemies introduced in Empire of Cats, is a gorilla who attacks by slamming the ground for area damage. Later on, he has variants for most of the traits in the game.
- Great Ape Luza, a gigantic masked gorilla-like Relic, is fought in the final four stages of Uncanny Legends. For the last stage, it transforms into Zero Luza, an even bigger and stronger version of itself with a broken mask. Defeating him rewards you with Ancient Egg: N000, which eventually hatches into a friendly Luza.
Kill It with Water: Metal enemies take heavy damage from the Waterblast Cannon, which corrodes them with a spray of salt water. This means that Metal Snache is the only Snache variant which actually is weak to water.
King Mook:
- The Colossus enemies that appear in Gauntlet stages are gigantic, super-powerful versions of common enemies. For example, Baron Seal is an upgraded Sir Seal with dramatically higher stats and new abilities.
- The Fireworks Gang is a giant version of the Fireworks Guys that appears as a boss. While the original Fireworks Guys were of no threat whatsoever, their giant version is much more powerful, with rapid, hard-hitting attacks that can create Mini-Surges.
Lady Not-Appearing-in-This-Game: Subverted. See that Valkyrie Cat, with long slender legs, big wings and an awesome spear? You can actually get her, and early in the game, no less!
Last Chance Hit Point:
- Some Cats and enemies can survive a lethal hit with one hit point. This is represented during battle by a flashing icon of a muscleman. While useful against slow attacking opponents, it doesn't offer much defense.
- If a Cat unit hits the enemy base before it spawns its boss due to HP loss but the blow would destroy the base, it'll be set at 1 HP. This generally happens when bringing an overpowered army to an easier stage.
Last Ditch Move: Equipping a Death Mini-Surge Talent Orb on a unit makes it so that every second spawn of the unit has the ability to fire a Mini-Surge upon death, with higher ranks increasing the surge's damage.
Late Character Syndrome: Superfeline is an anti-Relic Cat obtainable as soon as you've cleared Cats of the Cosmos Chapter 3, which will generally be around the start of the Relic-heavy Uncanny Legends or even earlier, theoretically giving it a good use as soon as it's obtained. However, like the other Normal Cats, Superfeline can only level up to level 20 without benefit of + levels obtained through using duplicates — and, while the other Normals evolve at level 20+10, Superfeline doesn't evolve until level 20+80, on top of needing a much higher User Rank to go past level 20+9. ^note If it was obtained earlier, then Superfeline would have the opportunity to get to a higher level in time for the start of Uncanny Legends; however, as is, it's likely to be underpowered without heavy Cat Ticket grinding to level it up.
Lethal Joke Character:
- Stone Cat, a Rare Cat unlocked by beating Evil Emperor Cat. It looks unassuming, its description is unflattering (calling it "surprisingly fragile, both emotionally and physically"), and all it seems to do when spawned is ram into an enemy for weak damage, then shatter apart. However, the game neglects to mention its absurdly high HP, and because its hitbox lingers for a little while after it attacks, it's a useful meatshield that's great at holding on to the front line after a powerful enemy has attacked, and only gets better when paired with CatCombos to improve research speed.
- Million-Dollar Cat appears to be a Promotional Powerless Piece of Garbage at first, like most other event-exclusive Special Cats. While it has decent range and a 100% Critical chance, its pathetically weak attack power will barely tickle most Metal enemies, let alone anything else, and it's also slow to attack and recharge. However, while its attack is feeble, at higher levels, it's just strong enough to kill some of the frailer Metal enemies, like CyberFace and Koronium, in one hit, making it a viable option for sucker-punching these enemies while they're vulnerable. Its fast attack startup also makes it surprisingly good at sniping Metal peons in the way of your other Cats.
Level in the Clouds: Many stages have the Cats battling on Solid Clouds. These often have Angel or Floating enemies.
Level One Music Represents: "World Invasion" (also known as Battle Theme #1 in the community) is played in a couple of the very early stages when starting off, before you encounter the other battle themes. If its appearances in the visiting side of many collaboration events and the few remixes in a few collaboration events are any indication, it has since become the de facto theme of this game.
Living Whirlwind: The Cyclones, as their names would imply, are living cyclones with a single eye.
Lord British Postulate:
- Some stages are designed to make the player lose if they take too long or fail to obey a specific gimmick, usually by triggering a Hopeless Boss Fight with a strong Assassin Bear or another enemy. However, some of these are possible to defeat. For example, in Merciless Onslaught, a 4000% Assassin Bear comes out if one of the One Horns dies, but it's possible to freeze him with the Thunderbolt Cannon for just long enough to kill him.
- Enemies that use a Suicide Attack, such as Elder Flame Doron, are designed to be unkillable through normal means — in the case of Doron, he has over 2 million HP, only stays on the field for a short period of time, and his attack weakens Cats to 1% damage. However, through use of high-damage units like Lasvoss Reborn and Idi:N2, paired with careful timing of Sniper the Cat to reset his attack animation, it's possible to kill the enemy Doron.
Lost in Translation:
- The CatCombo "Biohazard", containing Zombie Cat and Mr., appears to have a random name in the English version. However, "Biohazard" is the Japanese name of the Resident Evil franchise, which makes much more sense to be the namesake of a Combo which has a zombie and a gun-toting figure.
- Li'l Nyandam's Normal and Evolved Forms have Punny Names in the Japanese version, but they're not kept in translation. The Normal Form is ko nyandamu (Child Nyandam), while the Evolved Form is neko nyandamu (Cat Nyandam).
- An example happens with the description of Idi:Re. The English version describes her as a "Paleobacterial Lifeform", which makes no sense. The Japanese version instead states "Paleobacteria detected", which makes the point that she is very old, and perhaps much older than most other Relics.
Lost Technology: Mecha-Bun is an ancient superweapon, and its enemy version is described as an "artifact of an ancient empire which once ruled the Earth". Relic Bun-Bun and Golem Sunfish are also stated to be so.
Low-Level Advantage:
- Leveling up Cost Down Talents can make Cats unusable in stages that only allow Cats above a specific cost.
- At lower levels, some Cats will just be knocked back or killed by Everlord Wanwan's third hit instead of being Warped for a minute.
Macross Missile Massacre: Possible to do if you stack up a lot of Hacker Cats. The enemy Sunfish Jones can do this as his primary means of attack.
Magic Knight: Swordsman Cat, one of the Rare set, and his Evolved Forms Sword Master Cat and Elemental Duelist Cat.
Magikarp Power: The game is jam-packed with units like this.
- All of the Ancient Eggs qualify. They start out as pathetically weak units, and have to be hatched using Behemoth Stones farmed from daily stages. Once they hatch, they become proper Cats and often gain the Behemoth Slayer ability, and some of them, such as Courier Cat, Mushroom Cat, and Hitman Cat, prove to be very powerful to justify the expense.
- Many of the purchasable Special Cats became examples of this when update 10.0 hit and gave them Talents, dramatically boosting their poor stats and granting some of them powerful new abilities. Some of the biggest changes are:
  - Ninja Cat, while she can allow you to steamroll most of Empire of Cats, quickly becomes overshadowed by other units after that. Her Talents instead turn her into a strong Dodge-focused meatshield vs. Red and Black enemies, giving her a much more solid niche. She's now much more helpful than she was before in the late-game, if only against Reds and Blacks.
  - In a similar vein, Cats in a Box goes from being a Crutch Character to a legitimate powerhouse with its Talents. Heavy Assault C.A.T. becomes a powerful anti-Black rusher that can deal tons of damage to them for a reasonable price.
  - Bondage Cat is a strong contender for the status of worst Cat in the entire game before Talents, but becomes a tough anti-Red Stone Wall with them, especially with his ability to dodge Red attacks and occasionally freeze them.
  - Dom Cat is rather useless in her Normal Form, and can easily be replaced by other Cats that are more effective vs. Red. Her True Form, Dark Lazer, has much faster attack speed and is strong against both Red and Black, but is still fairly weak... and then her Talents boost her even more into a monstrously powerful (albeit fragile) attacker that can decimate enemies with Waves.
  - Actress Cat starts off as an extremely weak ranged attacker that has a strictly better version in Salon Cat, and her True Form, Beefcake Cat, barely helps. However, Beefcake Cat's Talents let him massively boost his stats, gain the Strengthen ability to boost his attack even higher, and No-Sell Surges. Now, Beefcake Cat is just as good as Cyborg Cat when fully invested in, if not better.
- Flower Cat has extremely low stats and a very low chance to freeze Black enemies. Once he becomes Bombercat, he gains a 100% freeze chance and Area Attack, letting him permanently freeze most Black enemies.
- While the Li'l Cats are just worse versions of the Basic Cats in their Normal Forms, their True Forms fall squarely into this. While they may have lower stats than their larger counterparts, they compensate with unique abilities such as Li'l Lion's Wave Attack immunity or Li'l Eraser's Freeze immunity. They eventually gained Talents, allowing them to stand out even more than their Normal counterparts and even outshine them in some cases, such as Li'l King Dragon gaining a niche as a Surge-immune backliner with piercing thanks to it's Mini-Wave.
- Among the Legends, Red Riding Mina is easily among the weakest unevolved, due to her low HP and damage along with not having an ability other than Long Distance. However, her True Form gives her a massive stat boost, greatly increases the Splash Damage range on her attack, and gives her the ability to weaken Relics, turning Mina into a great choice for a long-ranged attacker.
- Bishop Cat and Monk Cat are nearly useless, mostly thanks to their poor range (only outranging Shy Boy and some of the Cyclones), low HP, and single-target attacks. Their True Form, Sanzo Cat, has more range, HP and Area Attack, making it extremely effective at stalling short-ranged Floating enemies, and it can be just as good against Angels with its Talents unlocked.
- Archer Cat and Cupid Cat are both extremely weak anti-Floating attackers that deal barely any damage and can't take a hit in return. Their True Form, however, is Cataur, which massively boosts their HP, attack, range, and movement speed. Not only is Cataur a great choice to take down Floating enemies, but with some Talent upgrades, he can rip apart Zombie enemies as well.
- Cat Gunslinger is a variant that turns into a Gyarados not through his True Form, but through Talents. Initially, he's a weak, slow-attacking unit with a low chance to slow Black enemies, and his True Form, Rodeo Cat, doesn't help much at all. However, through Talents, he gains the ability to slow Relic enemies as well, along with gaining the ability to shrug off Curses faster. Since Relics are stronger than Blacks and have fewer units that can effectively fend them off, Rodeo Cat is now a great option to stall dangerous Relic enemies, especially Primeval Cyclone.
- Mer-Cat, along with her Evolved Form Commando Cat, has low health, slow movement, short range, and is notable only for her surprisingly high attack power. Cameraman Cat, her True Form, gains increased health, range, speed, and an Area Attack, cementing her as a very powerful spammable attacker.
- Killer Cat starts out as a Joke Character, having the same stats as the Basic Cat for 100 times the price, and requires 3 of every type of single-color Behemoth Stone to evolve, including the rare yellow ones. When he evolves into Radical Cat, he gets a huge boost to HP and attack, his cost drops to a much more manageable 900 with a 6-second recharge, he becomes strong against Floating enemies, and he even gains Behemoth Slayer, making him especially good against Pterowl Hazuku.
- Adult Cat has very short range, low health, mediocre attack power, and is expensive for what he is. His True Form, Prisoner Cat, despite gaining a minimum range and a slower recharge speed, has much longer range, making him much more useful.
- Food Stall Cat is a melee attacker which deals massive damage to Angel enemies, but its generally low stats make it outclassed by other options past the early-game. Its True Form, Cafeteria Cat, is only accessible post-Stories of Legend and locked behind an awakening stage, but it's worth it — the unit's attack power more than triples alongside boosts to its HP, range, and speed, and it even gains the ability to curse Angels as well.
- Several of the units dropped from Merciless Advent Stages are awful in their base forms, but get a big power spike when fully evolved.
  - Cossack Cat starts out as an anti-Relic melee attacker with high DPS, akin to what Swordsman Cat is vs. Reds, but is crippled by his lack of compatibility against most Relic enemies save Oldhorn, while he also lacks the stats to be useful as a general attacker. His True Form, Royal Guard Cat, gains a big spike in both HP and DPS alongside a boost to range and speed, and gains several powerful new abilities such as anti-Alien targeting and Wave immunity, making him exponentially more powerful and usable.
  - Rugby Cat has Long Distance attacks and Wave immunity, but its awful stats mean he can't do much with those abilities, even when facing the Black enemies he's strong against, and cause him to be less efficient than other options for handling these enemies. His True Form, Gridiron Cat, gets some decent stat boosts, but also unlocks an entirely new niche: he now targets Aku enemies and is immune to Surges as well, and given that anti-Aku and -Surge options are in very short supply for 4-crown stages, this gives him a good niche in those stages and even outside of them on occasion.
  - Phantom Cat is a Long Distance Area Attacker with massive damage against Angel enemies, but his atrocious stats mean that, by the point he's available, said Angel enemies are liable to One-Hit Kill it and take barely more damage from its attacks than they do from generic Long Distance attackers like Housewife Cat. Once he evolves into Bubble Cat, his damage nearly triples alongside gaining a faster cooldown and a new target type in Floating, vastly improving his performance while also expanding his niche.
  - Bakery Cat specializes in Cursing Angel, Alien, and Zombie enemies, which is already highly situational due to a shaky selection of viable targets for the ability, but the Cat's low stats and unwieldy single-target attack make him even less useful. Once he evolves into Fried Chicken Cat, in addition to a big boost to his low HP and a good-sized boost to standing range to make his attack more accurate, he gets Area Attacks to have a better shot at hitting the right enemy, even making he viable as a general attacker for 4-crown stages. He also gains the ability to Curse Relics, which are some of the most desirable targets for a unit with Curse to have, while being immune to their own Curses in return. All this combined elevates Bakery Cat from one of the worst Advent drops in the game to a powerful, if situational, attacker and crowd-control unit.
- Apple Cat and its Evolved Form Face Cat are rather weak due to their single-target attacks, even though they have a high chance to freeze Reds. Their True Form, iCat, has Area Attack and boosts the freeze rate to 100%, letting it Stun Lock most short-ranged Red enemies.
- Nerd Cat has low health and a single-target attack, but insane range; however, he also has a very unwieldy Arbitrary Weapon Range. His Evolved Form, Hacker Cat, has an Area Attack and an easier-to-deal-with minimum range, but is still fairly weak... and then, when he evolves into Cyberpunk Cat, he becomes able to stall enemies very effectively when stacked, especially with his Talents.
- Gloomy Neneko starts out as a Promotional Powerless Piece of Garbage, like most of the other Neneko variants: she's a weak anti-Metal attacker (which translates to Crippling Overspecialization) with a glacially slow recharge. While her True Form doesn't improve her anti-Metal performance, it gives her the ability to nullify Wave Attacks from a range where she won't get hit by most Wave enemies, turning her into one of the most powerful anti-Wave units in the game.
- Freshman Cat Jobs is normally an Awesome, but Impractical unit despite his powerful weaken ability, due to his exceptionally slow movement, pathetic stats, and long recharge time. However, his True Form, Headmaster Cat Jobs, grants him some significant boosts. The increased movement speed and Last Chance Hit Point are great to boost his usability and survivability, but what really pushes him over the edge is his Surge Attack. It requires some luck to use effectively, as it can spawn in a massive range and only lasts for a short time, but any enemy hit by it will be weakened so much as to be almost completely harmless. While he still has flaws, his True Form represents a massive improvement over the original.
- The Nekolugas are extremely weak, slow, and expensive in their Normal Forms. Upon growing to level 10, they suddenly gain massively increased stats and powerful special abilities.
- Zig-zagged by the Ultra Souls set of Uber Rares. They're pretty weak in their Normal Forms, having to Zerg Rush to be of any use. Their Evolved and True Forms are much stronger, becoming heavy attackers. However, in a case where the Magikarp can sometimes be more powerful than the Gyarados, the Normal Forms can be useful on certain stages due to their low cost and fast production speed. In particular, Kasa Jizo is considered more useful in Normal Form. The Elemental Pixies and Uberfest Ubers zig-zag this trope in the same way, but are generally better to use in their Evolved Forms.
- Subverted by Cabaret Cat. At first, it seems like a weaker, more expensive clone of the Basic Cat, but leveling it up to level 10 will make it evolve into Mega Cat. It's now a gigantic, godlike Cat which attacks by charging up and firing a laser, which makes the ground explode into a giant Sphere of Destruction... and it's so weak, and attacks so slowly, that its DPS is actually lower than its first form's.
- Aku Researcher, while not a terrible unit by any means, is a Crutch Character of a Shield Piercer, with a rather small chance to both break Shields (15%) and deal Critical Hits (6%), coupled with a rather slow attack rate. His True Form, Cat Researcher, more than doubles his attack speed, meaning that his low chance to trigger his effects doesn't matter nearly as much, as well as giving him much faster movement speed to get into the fray and thus start attacking much faster.
Mega Dungeon: In the Underground Labyrinth event, the Cats descend an abyss with 99 floors chosen semi-randomly from a pool of stages, followed by a Final Boss fight against Grand Mage Mimon on the 100th floor, The Deepest Depths B100F. After each battle, random Cats used will be trapped, becoming unusable for the rest of the run (though each victory has a chance to free a trapped Cat).
Mercy Invincibility: Both Cats and enemies are invulnerable to damage while launched backwards from a knockback, whether from sheer damage or from the ability.
Mid-Season Upgrade: All Cats in their Evolved Form at level 10 are these. These will eventually be succeeded by their True Form and Ultra Form.
Mighty Glacier: Again, several.
- Titan Cat is slow to move and attack, and is the most expensive of the original Normal Cats. However, he compensates with his huge HP and attack, along with being Immune to Flinching.
- The first two final bosses of Empire of Cats, The Face and Dark Emperor Nyandam, are some of the slowest enemies in the game, but have high HP, and their strong, long-ranged attacks are veritable One Hit Kills on most Cats at that point in the game.
- While a lot of Uber and Legend Rare Cats fall into this, the unquestioned champion would be the Iron Legion's Legend Rare, Mighty Kristul Muu. In addition to its massive stats and good range, it dishes out 5x damage to Zombie enemies while taking 1/4th the damage in return, and can completely nullify Wave Attacks. However, in addition to its slow attack speed, it moves the slowest of any character in the game, tying with Prof. Cat Jobs and The Face, to the point where the Slow status only halves its speed.
Mini-Dungeon: The Empress' Research event stages are mini-dungeons leading up to The Aku Realms. At first, they appear to serve as just an optional early-game source of Cat Food and introduction to Aku enemies, but clearing them is ultimately what unlocks The Aku Realms in the first place.
Mini-Mook:
- Doge, Teacher Bun Bun and Bore have Li'l versions of themselves in Li'l Doge, Li'l Bun Bun, and Li'l Bore and Bore Jr., respectively. Li'l Doge can dodge attacks, Li'l Bun Bun has much higher speed than the original, Li'l Bore is a weak event enemy made for New Year's 2019, and Bore Jr. is a Traitless Glass Cannon with Mini-Waves.
- Several of the Cyclones have Li'l variants that serve as powerful Mooks.
- Great Angel Chibinel is a miniature version of Cruel Angel Clionel. He has much lower stats and shorter range, but can also weaken Cats.
Mirror Match: Any Cat who also appears as an enemy can be freely used against said enemy. This can be taken to exaggerated levels in stages with multiple enemy Cats; for instance, it's possible to summon an army of Gato Amigos to defend against the army of Gato Amigos in Boogie Awakens!, or pit the nine Crazed Normal Cats against the nine Crazed Normal Cats in Clan of the Maniacs.
Missing Secret:
- Cats from collab events have empty slots in the Cat Guide displayed, even if they're inaccessible or unlikely to ever be accessible again.
- The Cat Filter allows you to search for Cats with Warp, Warp Resistant or Improved Knockback, which yields no results since no Cat has these abilities. Multiple enemies also have Immune to Warp, whose description in the Enemy Guide says, "Cat Unit Warp abilities do not affect this enemy," despite there being no such thing as Cat Unit Warp abilities.
- The enemy bases in the default title screen are from the Japanese version of Empire of Cats, which only has the Cats conquer Japan. They become Missing Secrets in the international versions, which changes Empire of Cats to cover many more countries and the Moon and thus never uses most of the Japan-themed bases in any stage, yet still shows them in the title screen.
- On the far right side of Into the Future's title screen is a freighter-like enemy base which doesn't appear in any stage.
Mix-and-Match Critters. A good amount of Cats you can unlock fall into this. Cow Cats, Bird Cats, Fish Cats, Lizard Cats...
Mood Whiplash: Quite a few Cats tend to not evolve in a logical way, leading to some cases of this.
- Mer-Cat is an obvious parody of Ariel from The Little Mermaid (1989), being a mermaid that went onto land to seek a prince… and then her Evolved Form has her join the military after her prince was kidnapped by terrorists.
- Vengeful Cat, the Cat obtained from the Ghostly Houseguests event, is the floating top half of a Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl (albeit with a Cat face), but evolves into… a Cat on a cloud who attacks via Groucho glasses on a string.
- Sports Day Cat, gotten from the Autumn = Sports Day! event, is a trio of Basic Cats carrying a Tank Cat… which evolves into the Basic Cats kidnapping the Tank Cat.
Monster Compendium: The Enemy Guide is a list of all opponents you've defeated, each one having a ridiculous bit of text describing them. Since it was added very early on in the game's life and hasn't been updated the way that the Cat Guide was, it's just a long list with one enemy after the other, but thankfully the scroll bar at the top can be used to quickly get to the section a given enemy is located in.
Multi-Slot Character: Some units have seasonal variants, which take up a separate slot in the Cat guide. Some of them are just clones of the original with a new target type, but others have different abilities from the original.
Mundane Utility: Time Traveller Cat often uses its time machine to time-slip into the movie theater for free. In the Japanese version, it instead uses it to spy on women in the bath.

The Battle Cats Tropes N-R

Narrator All Along: While the narrator of Cats of the Cosmos is initially ambiguous like most of the other chapters' narrators, the ending reveals him to be The Cat God himself.
NEET: Sea Maiden Ruri from the "Girls and Monsters" Uber Rare set is described as one of these.
A mermaid NEET from the mystic seas. Dreams of cute boys who'd risk drowning to save her.
Negative Ability:
- The Target Only ability restricts Cats to only harming specific enemy types and the enemy base. It's present on units like Takeda Shingen and Warlock and Pierre, who have very high stats with the ability to balance them out.
- The Long Distance ability is normally beneficial, allowing a Cat or enemy to hit past its attack range in exchange for having a minimum range. However, some units with Long Distance have a blind spot for their attack while having no piercing range, turning the ability into a purely negative one. Similarly, Omni Strike generally allows a unit to hit past its attack range with no blind spot, but Baby Garu's version of it gives him no extra piercing range while not hitting as far behind him as normal attacks do.
Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Most enemies have two types at most, but there are some that go farther. Johnnyleon is a Red/Alien/Zombie chameleon, and Lophiiformes Angaburu is a Zombie/Floating/Behemoth anglerfish.
Noob Cave: Empire of Cats is the first, easiest and simplest campaign in the game. Most Cats unlocked and enemies encountered in EoC have no abilities, all 3 Chapters have the same level design up until the final stage, and almost all stages can be brute-forced with enough upgrades and Treasures, even the Final Boss fights of Chapters 1 and 2. Only Chapter 3's Final Boss is a significant challenge.
No Fair Cheating: Normally, you can close the window of the game in a stage and the game will let you continue from the beginning at no cost. Trying to do this in a No Continues stage simply boots you back to the intro, forcing you to retry the stage while spending energy in the process.
Non-Elemental:
- While Traitless is a full-fledged enemy type with its own counters, most enemy bases don't have any type. Since they have no trait yet also aren't considered Traitless, most abilities won't affect them, even those that supposedly target all enemy types. The only exception is the Finale Base from the Evangelion collab, which is Metal.
- The Madoka Magica and Evangelion collabs have a downplayed version in Witch enemies and EVA Angel enemies, respectively, which work like bases in that they aren't traited nor Traitless. However, certain units from their respective collabs have the Witch Killer or EVA Angel Killer abilities, greatly increasing their health and damage against the collab types.
Non-Indicative Difficulty:
- Some stages are rated as a different difficulty from what they actually are, though this is usually unintentional. Until an update fixed it, Dogsville (home of Everlord Wanwan, and one of the hardest Advent Stages in the game) was rated Insane, not Merciless like the other stages of its difficulty. On the other hand, Revenge of the Wormhole is quite a bit easier than its Merciless difficulty would suggest, while Steel Visage and Forged to Kill are home to nothing but Fake Ultimate Mooks, and thus much easier than most Deadly stages. This was later rectified when the star system for ranking stage difficulty was added; while Steel Visage is still technically Deadly, it's rated as being much easier than most other Deadly stages.
- Even with the addition of stars to indicate a stage's difficulty, some stages still fall under this. For example, No Plan A (home of Cruel Angel Clionel) is rated 8 stars in difficulty, but is significantly harder than some other special boss stages rated 9 stars, such as Honey Trap and Bombergirl.
- Although 4-crown difficulty for early sub-chapters boosts enemies' strength magnifications to 3x, the buff steadily decreases until enemies in 4-crown and 1-crown have the exact same stats. Even with the Special/Rare only restriction, this results in some 4-crown stages being easier than the 2- and 3-crown versions you have to beat before them, where the buffed enemies make more of a difference than limiting you to two rarities that still have many Game-Breakers.
No Plot? No Problem!: Even the Excuse Plot that's thrown at you each time you start the game barely counts as a plot at all.
No-Sell:
- Many characters have the ability to nullify specific status effects. This also extends to certain special attacks like Waves, Surges, or Explosions.
- Starred Aliens with their Barriers up will take no damage from weak attacks, nor can they be affected by debuffs. The latter trait is shared by Aku enemies with their Shields up, though in their case the shield will eventually break when it's damaged enough but regenerates every time the enemy gets knocked back.
- The Dodge Attack ability, introduced in Version 8.10. This ability gives a unit a chance at gaining temporary invincibility to a certain trait of enemy for a limited time when hit by that color. The unit is still vulnerable from damage coming from the traits that the ability doesn't target, even if the invincibility kicks in. A few enemies can also make use of it, except it can trigger on any attack and make them totally invincible for the duration.
- All Sage enemies are downplayed, where they reduce debuff duration and knockback distance by 70%, unless they came from a Sage Slayer.
Nostalgia Level:
- Warrior's Dawn has the exact same schematics as Empire of Cats Chapter 3's Moon, but the enemies are far stronger.
- The Noble Tribe is a clone of Empire of Cats's Japan stage, but everything is jacked up to an insanely high level of strength.
- Cricket Ideology is Empire of Cats Chapter 1's Moon remade with more advanced enemy variants.
Numerical Hard: Most Legend Stages sub-chapters and some events have a 2-crown mode which makes all enemies 1.1x to 1.5x stronger, and a 3-crown mode which further increases the buff to 1.2x-2x. Downplayed and eventually averted by 4-crown mode, which can crank the buff even higher (1x-3x), but also only permit the use of Special and Rare Cats, enforcing different strategies. These magnifications drop as you progress further up to a point where you won't have to face something like a 600% R.Ost in Cloned Farmers, and 4-crown stages stop increasing enemy stats entirely.
Odd Job Gods: The Cat God is hungry, but feed him right and he'll give your Cats a huge advantage. In Cats of the Cosmos, he also appears as the final boss in each chapter. He can also join the battle as Cat God the Great.
Oh, Crap!: Many units, from both sides, have a reaction like this when they get knocked back.
Old Save Bonus: Completing missions in the various spin-offs such as Go! Go! Pogo Cat! will unlock rewards in the main game, including cat food and rare tickets.
Ominous Latin Chanting: Before version 10.7, Cyclone and Advent Stages, as well as some of the Crazed/Manic Stages, employed a variation of Carmina Burana ~ O Fortuna as their boss music. It would also play when summoning The Cat God to perform a miracle.
One-Hit-Point Wonder:
- Capsule Cat is very fast, but has only 1 HP at level 1. As he levels up, he can gain up to 27 HP... which is still so little that all but the absolute weakest of enemies will One-Hit Kill it.
- Baby Mola, from the Survive! Mola mola! collab event, has just 1 HP to start with, and that doesn't improve much as it levels up. Mola King's HP isn't that much better.
- The two varieties of Fireworks Guys have only 1 HP.
One-Steve Limit: Averted by Cat Bros, which is the name of two units: a Special Cat that was introduced through serial codes and later obtainable from the For the Fans event, and a Rare Cat obtained from the The Battle Cats Unite! event.
One-Time Dungeon:
- Zombie Outbreaks can only be beaten once, then they're gone for good.
- The Invasion Stages for Filibuster Obstructa, Lord of Ruin Jagando, Idi:Re, Idi:Ne, and Sage of Life Dr. Nova can only be cleared once per game.
- The stages which unlock additional levels in Hidden Forest of Gapra, Ashvini Desert, and Jinfore Volcano can only be cleared once.
- Unleashing the Cats, the stage that unlocks Aku-related content such as The Aku Realms once beaten, disappears permanently after clearing it.
- Downplayed by stages that have a "One Clear Only" condition, such as Facing Danger and Merciless XP!, which can only be cleared once every time they come around, but will eventually return after a few days.
One-Winged Angel:
- The final stage of Uncanny Legends, Revival of Origin, has you facing off against Zero Luza, a bigger and much stronger version of Great Ape Luza, the boss that you faced off against in the last 3 stages before it.
- The first stage of Cabaret Cat's awakening stage, Crescendo (Veteran), creates this effect by having the regular Mega Cat spawn immediately, then Mega Cat EX spawn on base hit, giving the impression that Mega Cat transformed into a stronger form after being defeated.
- Lasvoss's Evolved Form, Ultimate Lasvoss, is described as his final form for the final confrontation with the heroes. His set of abilities plays into the trope by giving him a Last Chance Hit Point and an attack boost at 1% HP, so he becomes much more dangerous when on his last legs.
Optional Boss: The Cyclones and Advent Bosses aren't required to be fought, but can grant unique reward Cats upon their completion.
Our Time Machine Is Different:
- In the intro to Stories of Legend, the Cats create a time machine by taking over nuclear power plants everywhere and feeding all the world's power into one place.
- The Time Machine Treasure from Into the Future is a flying car, while Time Traveller Cat rides a white lookalike of Doraemon's time machine.
Overly Long Fighting Animation: Filibuster Cat's trademark is taking forever to charge up his attack. The allied version already has an annoyingly-long attack animation which takes 12 seconds to complete, making him liable to miss enemies. However, it's the boss version which takes the cake: he takes 40 seconds to complete his attack, and the only way to beat him is to prevent him from ever landing a hit by interrupting him within those 40 seconds.
Oxymoronic Being: The Li'l Cats are tiny, adorable versions of the Basic Cats. One of said Basic Cats is the Titan Cat. So, one of the Li'l Cats is a Li'l Titan Cat, which is barely taller than the Basic Cat.
Peninsula of Power Leveling:
- On weekends, the aptly-named Weekend Stage appears, which lets you play it on different difficulty levels to gain large amounts of XP as a reward. More rarely, other stages like XP Colosseum and Merciless XP! appear, which are even harder, but give out even greater payouts of XP. All of them feature large amounts of Black enemies as the main threats, with the exception of XP Bonanza!, in which Aku enemies are the main threats this time.
- Appearing only on the weekends is "The Proving Grounds", whose 1st and 2nd stages all give out a lot of XP if you're able to clear all of the battles in them. Completely beating the 1st stage gives you 750,000 XP, while the 2nd gives you a whopping 2.1 million XP. Meanwhile, the 3rd stage is slightly different as while it doesn't give XP, it does give out Catseyes, which are used to break the level limit of a unit and thus make them even stronger. Completely beating the 3rd stage gives you, in total, an assortment of 10 Catseyes of any type, which can include Legend Catseyes. The only catch to this is that it's only playable once every Saturday and Sunday, meaning that you'll have to wait until the next weekend if you want to play the event again.
Percent Damage Attack:
- The Waterblast Cannon deals damage to Metal enemies based on a percent of their current health, ignoring their Metal trait. The Holy Blast Cannon also inflicts damage to Zombies equal to a percent of their maximum health, which significantly increases if it unearths a burrowed Zombie.
- Enemies with the Toxic ability deal bonus damage equal to a percent of the target's maximum health on attack.
- Units with the Metal Killer ability deal damage equal to a percentage of a Metal enemy's current HP with every strike.
Permanently Missable Content: Certain Enigma Stages will no longer appear after reaching a particular Enigma Level, even if you had never gotten to find or play them (e.g. Hunter's Map I is replaced by Hunter's Map II at Enigma Level 4).
Piñata Enemy: Certain enemies don't pose much of a threat to your Cats, but drop a lot of money when killed, so when they show up, it's the perfect opportunity to send out some powerful Cats or level up your Worker Cat. Examples include Mooth and Kang Roo in levels past Empire of Cats, Celeboodle in Legend Stages, and Mistress Celeboodle in Into the Future and other Alien-focused stages. Casaurian Ahirujo starts out as an Early-Bird Boss, but gets demoted to a moneybag enemy once you unlock Courier Cat.
Play Every Day: Every time you start the game for the first time in a day, you earn a Cat Ticket that can be used to earn upgrades for the Normal Cats and passive boosts. In addition, you can also earn other rewards for starting up during events. Also, to maximize the value of sending GAMATOTO on expeditions, you have to check back at every 1, 3, or 6 hours, depending on how long you send him on an expedition, though he can be sped up with Catamins.
Player Headquarters: The Cat Base. Buying upgrades with materials allows some minor customization, as well as the ability to use different types of Cat Cannons. These types include a Cannon with slight knockback and damage, a beam that slows enemies, a lightning bolt that stops enemies, a shield that blocks enemies, a salt water Cannon that damages Metal enemies based on their current health, a holy Cannon that unburies, freezes and damages Zombies based on their max health, a Cannon that fully knocks back enemies and breaks Barriers in an area, and a beam that Curses every enemy on the field.
Post-Final Level: The 49th and last sub-chapters of Stories of Legend and Uncanny Legends consist of a single Boss-Only Level, whereas the 48th sub-chapters have a variety of challenges spread out over 8 stages.
Power Equals Rarity: Zig-Zagged. While Uber (and Legend Rare) Cats are pretty powerful in and of themselves, whether it be in their stats and/or ability quality, it's surprisingly common for Super Rares, Rares, and even some non-Gacha Cats to perform just as well as, if not better than, an Uber. There are a multitude of reasons why, from spammability allowing you to recover them fast, having their abilities be of good quality to the point where it can match up to an Uber at times, having high stats, or a combination of these reasons. It also helps that some have various roles and niches that can't be replicated by an Uber,^note though the reverse does apply for a select few. This is played straight by the Ubers from Uberfest and Epicfest, however, which are both among the rarest and the most powerful units in the game.
Power Limiter: The Aku Altars limit the max level cap of your units, greatly limiting their strength. It also disables + levels, meaning that only levels gained through XP count. Thankfully, you can increase this level cap by completing stages in The Aku Realms, while + levels can only be restored by completing everything The Aku Realms has to offer.
Power Nullifier: The Curse debuff, primarily used by Relic enemies, disables the victim's special abilities that target traits. This includes things like buffs against specified traits (eg. Strong Against, Resistant, Massive Damage, Dodge Attack), debuffs against specified traits (including, ironically, Curse itself), or even the Target Only ability (which will result in the unit only attacking the enemy base). When applied to enemies, it just disables all their abilities that inflict debuffs (as well as Dodge Attack and Toxic), as Cats have no traits to target.
Power-Up: There are 6 varieties in total, which can be equipped before battle starts. Five of them can be collected from event stages that appear every week.
- Speed Up: The most common one, which simply doubles the speed of battle.
- Treasure Radar: The rarest one, and the only one that can't be farmed from daily stages. Beating a stage with it in effect guarantees that the level will drop its Superior Treasure. If a stage has no treasure, then it will guarantee the rarest drop from the stage, useful for the levels that have Legend Cats that drop at a 3% rate.
- Rich Cat: Causes the Worker Cat to start battle at its maximum level.
- Cat CPU: Automatically sends out Cats and controls the Cat Cannon and Worker Cat. Unfortunately, it's vulnerable to Artificial Stupidity. Alternatively, you can also use 2 of them at once in order to skip any stages that you've already have a clear on (up to 10 times a day), making farming things much more convenient, with the exception of a select few stages ^{These being}.
- Cats Jobs: Boosts the amount of XP dropped by the stage.
- Sniper the Cat: Stays behind the Cat Base and shoots at the closest enemy every 10 seconds, dealing moderate damage and weak knockback.
Power-Up Letdown: Certain Cats have True Forms or Talents that fail to improve them enough to be useful. Some of the worst offenders are:
- In general, most Cats that get status resistances through their Talents suffer from this, though less so for Resist Curse. Enemies that use Slow are fairly rare, and the two most relevant ones either do high damage alongside the slow (Professor A.), or slow for such a long time that the resistance doesn't do much (Croakley). Resist Freeze is only really useful against Henry; while he's a dangerous enemy, it's still a very situational Talent. Resist Weaken doesn't often matter, since Weaken is a rare ability on enemies, and many of the enemies that have it attack fast enough to perma-weaken their targets. Resist Knockback, while it can be helpful on melee Cats to let them hold on to the front lines, is actively detrimental on longer-ranged units by reducing their ability to reposition against enemies with knockback. Not helping matters is that all status resistance Talents cost more NP than their immunity counterparts, making it even more unlikely that players will decide to unlock them.
- Most of the purchasable Special Cats and monthly Rare Cats' True Forms have this problem, because they don't get the Boring, but Practical doubled stats that the Normal Cats do. To add insult to injury, their True Forms are also harder to get. Among them, some of the most disappointing are:
  - Ninja Cat's True Form, Flying Ninja Cat, reduces her cost slightly... while decreasing her movement speed, and granting no other changes. However, her Talents are quite a bit better, letting her boost her movement speed higher than it was before and dodge attacks.
  - Samurai Cat's True Form, Pastry Cat, is one of the worst; all he gets is a very small (10%) chance to slow enemies for 2 seconds. He later got a double helping of this when the purchasable Special Cats got Talents; while some others got extremely powerful upgrades, Pastry Cat got nothing of value.
  - Sports Day Cat's True Form, Rampage Cats, does nothing to improve its poor stats or high price for a meatshield, instead boosting its range and granting it Warp immunity... while decreasing its attack speed.
- While most of Chill Cat's Talents are useful enough, especially Cost Down, his Knockback Talent falls into this. Because enemies get Mercy Invincibility when knocked back and will move out of Chill Cat's range, the Talent reduces the DPS of stacked Chill Cats significantly, which is not good considering that Chill Cat is a mid-ranged Glass Cannon. The upgrade is seen as situational at best, and actively harmful at worst.
- One of Elemental Duelist Cat's Talents is the ability to target Angel enemies as well as Red ones. Gaining a new target trait is usually a very valuable upgrade, but it's much less useful than it seems at first glance; not only do most threatening Angels outrange Elemental Duelist, but they're also harder to keep from attacking or pushing forward than Red enemies are, so he'll usually only land one or two hits at most.
- Downplayed with Bronze Cat's True Form, Quizmaster Cat. While it boosts its knockback chance to 30% and gives it more range, it comes at the cost of decreasing its attack speed, reducing its knockback rate vs. Metals.
- Ectoweight Cat and The Kitty of Liberty both gain the ability to knockback Alien enemies through their Talents. However, this ability is worse than useless in most stages with Aliens, as they tend to be accompanied by long-ranged enemies that will demolish your Cats if the frontline enemies get knocked back. Ectoweight's other Talents attempt to make him into an attacker, but completely fail due to his pathetic base attack power, while The Kitty of Liberty's do nothing to improve his paper-thin defences outside of giving him a little extra HP.
- Paladin Cat's Talents do nothing to improve its Critical Hit chance, instead giving it a weak freeze and the Zombie Killer ability, when it's not even an anti-Zombie unit.
- Megidora has a pretty decent set of Talents, giving him occasional Wave Attacks to spread damage and status effects around the field. What falls under this, however, is his Ultra Talents, unlocked at level 60. Other mediocre Ubers such as Kuu and Akira get amazing ultra Talents that reinvent them and make them much more viable. What does Megidora get? He can... target Metal and Relic enemies, when these types have lots of other, more effective options for controlling them. He can also have his cost reduced down to 4200... which is still a fairly average price for the type of Uber he is.
- Mighty Thermae D-Lux's True Form, Subterra Sentinels, gives it nothing except a nearly useless 10% boost to its total attack stat. Since it hits 3 times per attack animation for low damage, the boost is almost imperceptible. Fortunately, said True Form unlocks access to Talents which are much more powerful.
- Many of The Almighties' True Forms qualify, due to their small improvements and extremely minor visual changes, but most of them have Talents to improve their fate. Radiant Aphrodite, however, gets it the worst; all her True Form grants is a small boost to HP, and her Talents only grant a weak slow and some fairly useless status resistances.
- Nobiluga's True Form, Mystican Pasalan, does nothing to fix its poor DPS or survivability, instead greatly reducing its recharge time (which is still fairly long) and halving its price.
- Considering how much of a Luck-Based Mission it is to get the necessary Gold Catfruit, it's disappointing that Cat God the Great's True Form only grants the Extra Money ability and... 1% more HP.
- All units from the Castle & Dragon collab get minuscule buffs when they achieve their True Forms, to the point where some are effectively purely cosmetic. The only exception is Li'l Clops Cat, which was added much later than the rest — it gets a 20% chance of landing a Savage Blow in exchange for slower attack speed, giving it a good-sized boost to its DPS.
- The biggest example is arguably Hikakin, a unit from the collab with the YouTuber of the same name. He is the only unit to not have any change to stats or abilities in True Form, making it cosmetic and nothing else.
Pre-Final Boss: Before each Into the Future Chapter's Final Boss fight on the Moon, you'll have to defeat Nimoy Bore on the Floating Continent.
Premium Currency: Cat Food serves as the paid currency; while you get 30 Cat Food whenever you clear a sub-chapter or event for the first time, and it's become more abundant throughout the game's history, it's much faster to buy it. It's used to play the Rare Capsule, purchase some Special Cats, and buy battle items and XP.
Promoted to Playable:
- The Rich Cat, Cat Jobs, and Sniper the Cat items all have images to go with them, featuring a stressed-out scowling cat, a professor cat, and a Cat in a balloon with a gun, respectively. While they started out as just images, later on, all of them were made into usable units as the Reinforcements set of Super Rares.
- The Grandon Mining Corps started out as a part of Subterra Sentinels's attack animation, where mining machines erupt out of the ground in a plume of lava to attack. Like the Reinforcements, all of the mining machines were later made into limited Super Rares.
- Aku Researcher is a playable counterpart of Angel Fanboy.
- Gacha Cat is a playable version of, of all things, the Rare Capsule machine.
- True Superfeline is a playable version of the Cat on the game's logo.
Promotional Powerless Piece of Garbage:
- Most of the Ubers from seasonal events, like Xmas Gals or Halloween Gals, are drastically inferior to the originals. They're often based off of the Normal Forms of Ubers that are weak in their Normal Forms and only become worth using in True Form. Many of them also have no True Forms, so they're stuck at their weaker level of power, and even the ones with them tend to remain underwhelming. Only a few, like Tropical Kalisa and Bunny & Canard, are considered very viable; meanwhile, some (Lilith Cat, Santa Kuu, all of Coppermine's variants, Summerluga and Betrothed Balaluga) are considered to be among the worst in the entire game.
- Many Cats from collab events, especially the older ones, are extremely weak. The most infamous examples are the Merc Storia, Survive! Mola mola!, and PPAP collabs, where all but a few of the units are completely unviable. Fortunately, later events, like the ones for Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Live Powerful Pro Baseball, and Fate/stay night, bucked the trend, having legitimately great Ubers and regular Cats alike to unlock.
- Several Cats were first made available from real-life promotions with gachapon machines, like Capsule Cat and Squish Ball Cat. However, none of them are very useful in combat.
Pumpkin Peril: Pumpkin Sodom is a Halloween-themed variant of the ancient Cat dragon Sodom. It was sealed away in a pumpkin patch, but the seal is broken on Halloween, and it's given life by the spirits of the dead.
Punny Name:
- Quite a few of the enemy names fall under this, usually being a pun on the enemy's actual species: to list just a few, there's Kang Roo, Gory, Squire Rel, Mooth, LeMurr, Dagshund, Otta-smack-u, Bore, Rain D., Owl brow, Camelle, H. Nah (Hy-ee Nah), R.Ost (Rich Ost), Darkmadillo...
- In the Japanese version, Necromancer Cat, the Evolved Form of Shaman Cat, is "Neko Ramansā" (say it fast.)
- While there are tons of stages with a Pun-Based Title of some type or another, the March "Bears be Bare" set of event stages takes the cake. Every single stage name there is a bear-based pun, with stage names like "Bear Grills", "Bees With Ears", and "Can't Bear Anymore". The later-introduced "Bears be Back" set doesn't let up on the puns, either, with names like "2 Much 2 Bear" and "What We Do In The Woods".
Puppeteer Parasite: The THATs that serve as the antagonists of Into the Future latch onto regular enemies, transforming them into Alien versions. It's not a straight example, however, as their victims remain autonomous.
Purposely Overpowered: Most of the Ubers from Uberfest and Epicfest have much higher stats and more powerful abilities than your average Uber. The Legend Rares subvert this, however, as they're not actually that much more powerful than most Ubers despite being monumentally rarer.
Puzzle Boss:
- The Stories of Legend stage Last Gang sends out Dark Emperor Nyandam at an absurdly high power level for that point in the game, with Assassin Bears coming if you take too long to win — and they start spawning far sooner than you can kill Nyandam. The solution? Enemies are intangible when knocked back, so a unit that can knockback Red enemies, like Bean Cats or Pirate Cat, can let your other Cats clip through Nyandam and take out the base. Later on, Merciless Onslaught does pretty much the same thing, except replacing the Nyandam with a trio of One Horns.
- A later Stories of Legend stage, Gouache Ghouls, sends out one weak Angelic Gory and Angel Fanboy at the start, but sends a huge torrent of overbuffed Angels when the base is hit. The solution is to not kill the Angelic Gory until you can stall him long enough for Ms. Signs to spawn and fill the enemy's Arbitrary Headcount Limit, preventing those Angels from spawning.
Race Against the Clock: Certain stages behave this way, where if the enemy base isn't destroyed in a certain time, a wave of highly buffed enemies will overwhelm you.
Rainbow Pimp Gear: Version 12.2 gave the Foundations and Styles of the Cat Cannons that you build from Ototo an effect on gameplay, where previously they only served as a stepping stones for you to get the ability to build the Cannon that they belong to, by giving them the ability to reduce the amount of damage a specific trait deals to Cats by a set percentage (for the Foundations) and reducing the damage/durations of a specific enemy ability, such as Waves, Slow, or Freeze, by a percentage (for Styles). This means that one could end up choosing the most optimal Foundation and Style for a specific stage which, combined with the specific type of Cannon they plan to bring, can make the Cat Base look like a mish-mash of random parts that barely have any design coherence to them, if at all.
Random Drop Booster:
- The Treasure Radar Power-Up guarantees that a level will drop its superior Treasure. Outside of the story chapters, it instead guarantees the rarest random drop from the stage.
- Treasure Festivals are time-limited events which tend to occur during special celebrations, as well as at certain times each day. While active, they greatly boost the odds that affected levels will drop a Treasure.
Random Effect Spell: Certain Cats and enemies, such as the Legend Rare Emperor Cat and enemy Haniwanwan, give this impression by having a small chance to inflict several different status effects on the target. Their attacks will almost always inflict a status effect, but which ones are random.
Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs: Delinquent Cat summons a spirit to pummel his enemies, just like his inspiration.
Rare Random Drop: Most main Legend Stages have a 1% chance to grant a random, minor item though a treasure radar can guarantee it. In addition, most stages that have unlockable Legend Cats drop them at a 3% rate, though a treasure radar will guarantee the drop.
Really Seven Hundred Years Old: Subverted. The Cat God is only in his 20s despite being a deity. This makes him unusable in Legend Stages, which take place before his birth.
Recurring Boss: Many of the bosses you defeat will return as bosses in a later stage under a greater strength magnification.
Refining Resources:
- The main source of Elder Catfruit is the event map Growing Strange, whose Continuation Stages have a 99% chance to drop Elder Catfruit Seeds and a 1% chance for an Elder Catfruit. Five seeds make one fruit and a certain number of fruits are needed for a True Form.
- Aku Catfruit Seeds are dropped from the event map Growing Evil. You need five Aku Catfruit Seeds to make one Aku Catfruit, and you often need three Aku Catfruits for a particular unit's True Form. Unlike other Catfruit, where whole fruits can drop from their Groing stages, Growing Evil only drops seeds.
- Behemoth Stones are dropped from particular event and Enigma Stages. Ten can be merged into one Behemoth Gem and certain units require Behemoth Gems of a certain color to evolve.
- Materials drop at random from certain stages. Materials Z are obtained from fusing five regular materials, and Materials Z are needed to upgrade the Foundation and Style of the Cat Base to provide protection against certain effects or enemies. Most Materials Z can also be obtained from Zero Legends, except for Ammonite Z which needs to be refined.
Religious and Mythological Theme Naming: Each stage of Parthenon is named after a character from Greek mythology. There's the Altar of Zeus, Sword of Achilles, Road of Eros, Dawn of Gaia, Gates of Aphrodite and finally the Labyrinth of Hades.
Remixed Level:
- Zombie Outbreaks and Invasion Stages temporarily alter stages that have already been cleared, generally featuring Zombie enemies (in Outbreaks), a True Final Boss (in certain chapters/sub-chapters' Invasions), or simply an alternate set of enemies (in anniversary events' Invasions) and a different background. These may play completely unlike the original, especially Invasions, which are more or less entirely different stages.
- Some Uncanny Legends stages are similar to earlier ones in Stories of Legend, but with different, tougher enemies, and they usually have a name that references the inspiration. For example, Deadly Weapons is a clone of Fluffy Dark Weapon, but the Doge Darks and Shy Boys are far stronger and more numerous, and it adds in a Henry.
Replay Mode: The Opening/Ending Scrolls can be replayed from the settings in the main menu.
Ridiculously Cute Critter: Li'l Cats, because they're, well, little.
Rule of Three: There are three trilogies of main story chapters, three sets of main Legend Stages, and three fights with Great Ape Luza before the finale of Uncanny Legends.
Running Gag:
- In Snache and its variants' descriptions, they almost always mention that they're weak against water, but that this information has nothing to do with the game content. Ironically, the only Snache variant which actually is weak to water, Metal Snache, lacks a description mentioning this fact.
- Most of Master A.'s variants mention that they have no dating experience.
- In Camelle and his variants' descriptions, they don't seem to know how camel biology works. Camelle's description claims that his special ability is to close his nostrils, even though all camels can do that (his description states that he didn't know that because he has no friends). Alpacky's Japanese description has her mistake her spitting defense for allergies, and Zamelle died due to hump removal Surgery Gone Horribly Wrong, not knowing that camel humps are very important for them to survive.
- Whether an enemy has the Floating trait or not doesn't always match with whether it's actually floating, and some enemies have descriptions which hang a lampshade on this fact. Owlbrow complains about being treated as a Floating enemy even though he's walking, while the descriptions of CyberFace, Metal Cyclone, and Idi:Re have hand wave-y justifications for why they're not Floating enemies.
"Running Out of Time" Warning: Some levels will force you to win before a time limit elapses, or else Assassin Bears will appear and quickly defeat your army. When you're getting close to the time limit, Ms. Sign will appear, holding a sign that says, "Too slow!! Try harder next time!!"

The Battle Cats Tropes S-Z

Scratch Damage Enemy: All Metal enemies take only 1 damage from most attacks. The weaker ones have so little HP that they can be killed via the Death of a Thousand Cuts, but for the stronger ones, defeating them is nearly impossible unless you use their Achilles Heels in both Critical Hits and Metal Killers.
Sealed Evil in a Can: The premise of Stories of Legend is that the "legendary Cats" were sealed away long ago, and the present-day Cats are trying to free them. Even then, their methods of doing this can be interpreted in Blue-and-Orange Morality.
Serial Escalation:
- The Mighty Kat-A-Pult's evolved forms go from CAT-6 Siege Engine to CAT-8 Behemoth and finally, CAT-10 Gigapult.
- The Mighty Bomburr's evolved froms go from NEK-0 Sky Fortress to NEK-02 Air Citadel to NEK-03 Cloud Emperor.
Set Bonus:
- The CatCombo system rewards you for bringing all of the Cats in a set by aiding you in battle.
- This is also the case for the Treasures. Each Treasure requires a set of one or more "lesser" Treasures from different stages in the main chapters to activate. Each lesser Treasure has three qualities: Inferior, Normal, and Superior. Collecting all lesser Treasures in a particular big Treasure activates said big Treasure. To fully reap the benefits of the Treasures, all the lesser Treasures have to be Superior.
Shout-Out: Has its own page here.
Shout-Out Theme Naming:
- All three Reinforcements' Evolved Forms are anime/manga references, even down to their Japanese names. Prof. Cat Jobs' Japanese name is Dr. Okamenomizu, Rich Cat Sr.'s is Nekobon's Papa, and Sniper the Heavy's is Negolgo.
- Every Tackey variant's Japanese name and description references a baseball manga or player. Tackey's Japanese name is Tatchan, Hackey's is Hiuma, Ackey's is Devil Katsuya, and Ange Lackey's is Ange Ruth.
- Some sub-chapters and events have a different reference for each stage, such as Bazaar of the Pirate King's stages being named after movies (Stylist Mononoke, Stand By Motel, Aven-Jazz Cafe, Retreat of the Living Dead, Titanic Steakhouse, Inn-Dependence Day).
Shows Damage: All units have a specific amount of times they can be knocked back (knockbacks) before dying. Because each one occurs when the unit loses a certain percentage of health (e.g. 2 knockbacks mean that it will get knocked back at 50% and 0% HP), the more times something has been knocked back, the closer it is to death.
Sibling Team:
- Cat Bros, Gardeneel Bros. and Cerberus Kids are groups of brothers who fight together.
- Kory, Berserkory and Koronium invoke this in the stage Three Evil Brothers, where they are the only enemies present.
Similar Objects, Similar Description:
- The Nekolugas share similar descriptions in their Normal and Evolved Forms, with the description first wondering if it's even a cat, then being surprised by the unit's sudden transformation.
  Tecoluga: Not sure if this is a Cat... There's just something about those arms...
  Asiluga: Not sure if this is a Cat... There's just something about those legs...
  Tesalan Pasalan: Are you kidding me?! Seems like this one does massive damage (sometimes Critical) to just one enemy.
  Asilan Pasalan: Unbelievable, just unbelievable. Seems like this one slows all enemies in range.
- Almost All Colossus Gauntlet bosses' descriptions mention that they were created in a secret lab through unethical genome editing, and that their lethality increases with each battle, with only a short blurb describing their abilities. The exception is for Gigahaniwan, which was excavated instead of created, with no mention of its increasing lethality.
Situational Sword:
- Most units that specialize in handling specific traits are ineffective against all other traits besides their targets, meaning that virtually all trait-targeting units that can't moonlight as generalists are this. Even so, units with the "Attacks Only" ability stand out the most - their stats tend to be far superior to that of nearly any other units of their archetype, but they physically can't attack or harm anything besides their targeted traits or the enemy base.^note
- Out of all the Talent Orbs listed under the Ability category, two of the most situational are the Colossus Slayer and Boost Stories of Legend Orbs. The Colossus Slayer Orb grants every second unit spawned the Colossus Slayer ability, which also means that this only makes a difference against Colossus-type enemies, and the Boost Stories of Legend orb grants the unit an attack and defense buff when used in Stories of Legend.
Splash Damage Abuse: Many abilities allow their users to attack farther than the range they start attacking at. The mechanics for how they do so differ for each ability.
- Waves and Mini-Waves create a moving shockwave on enemy hit that travels a fixed distance away from their user depending on their level (each level adding one blast to the Wave), dealing damage to anything that crosses their path, while inheriting any on-hit abilities from their users. They do become ineffective against units with Wave Immunity and deal less damage to units with Resist Wave, while a unit with Wave Shield can completely stop any Wave they touch. The differences between the two are that the damage of a Wave Attack is the same as the attack that created it, while Mini-Waves only deal 20% of their user's damage in exchange for moving faster.
- Surges and Mini-Surges spawn a lingering energy pillar at a random point within a set area that differs from unit to unit. Like Waves, they deal the same amount of damage as the attack that created them and inherit any on-hit effects, but can only damage enemies in the small area they take up. In exchange, they linger for a period of time determined by their level, allowing them to hit enemies that wander into them, and some of them can also hit more than once (the level of a Surge being how many times it can hit), making them deal more total damage than the initial hit. Like Waves, the damage they deal can be ignored if a unit has Surge Immunity as one of their abilities, while Counter-Surge doesn't grant immunity to them but instead automatically retaliates with a Surge of equal level (but still inheriting their damage and abilities) when the user is hit by one. Mini-Surge acts the same as its normal counterpart, except it deals only 20% of the user's damage.
- Long Distance allows the unit to attack a designated area in front of them rather than their attack just extending from themselves,^note effectively letting them hit farther than the range they start attacking at in exchange for having a blind spot where their attacks will miss. Meanwhile, Omni Strikes function similarly to Long Distance except they don't have a blind spot and can even hit behind themselves, in exchange for generally having a shorter reach; this notably gives them "piercing" range which lets them advance faster, since they can clear larger areas of enemies while only stopping to attack when very close.^note
- The 13.7 update added Explosions, which act as a sort of intermediate between Waves and Surges. They spawn at a fixed point relative to the user when they land an attack, and produce a sequential three-part blast that expands outwards, greatly expanding their attack area while letting them hit targets multiple times if they remain in the blast zones. However, each successive blast deals less damage than the main one, reducing to 70% damage for the second set, and 40% for the third. They're considered separate from Waves and Surges, requiring Explosion Immunity to shrug them off.
Speedrun Reward: Certain stages have timed score rewards that give you a one-time reward if you manage to get or surpass the indicated score. Said score is determined by how fast you clear the stage; the faster the clear, the higher the score that you get.
Stalked by the Bell: Certain stages (you're expected to figure out which ones) will send hordes of hyperbuffed enemies, usually Assassin Bears, if the player takes too long to win.
Star-Making Role: In-universe, Awakened Musashi got his in a Show Within a Show called "Karma Police" by teaming up with the spirit possessing him.
Static Stun Gun: The Thunderbolt Cannon can freeze any non-immune enemy with an electric blast.
Status Effects: Some characters can inflict these on their opponents. Examples include:
- Weaken: Lowers attack power for a while. Indicated by a sword with a blue arrow pointing down.
- Freeze: Prevents movement or attacking. Indicated by a stopwatch.
- Slow: Drastically lowers movement speed (technically by reducing it to 0.5). Indicated by a running stick man with a starburst outline around it.
- Knockback: Knocks back the afflicted unit. It also interrupts attack animations, making it useful against units with a long attack animation.
- Warp: Introduced in 6.5 and (currently) only used by enemies. Acts as a stronger version of knockback that knocks Cats further and temporarily removes them from the field. 8.3 introduced enemies that use Warp to move Cats closer.
- Curse: Introduced in 7.0 and, before 9.5, was only used by Relic enemies. Prevents units from using abilities which directly target enemy traits, such as inflicting status effects, or are dependent on them to function, such as Dodge. Against enemies, it instead disables all of their status inflictions. Indicated by a flame icon with color that depends on who uses it (green for enemies, yellow for Cats).
- Toxic: Introduced in 9.2 and (currently) only used by enemies. Deals damage equal to a percent of the target's max HP in addition to dealing damage like normal. Indicated by purple smoke emanating from the target.
Stone Wall: Yet again, several examples.
- One of the first Cats unlocked is Tank Cat, which has high HP for its low cost and fast recharge, but deals Scratch Damage when it attacks. Along with its faster Crazed variant, it's one of the most Boring, but Practical Cats.
- Rocker Cat and Wushu Cat have less raw HP than Tank Cat, but resist Angel and Zombie enemies, respectively, making them even better options in those cases.
- Curling Cat can only attack once, but has tremendously high HP and can No-Sell most status effects. It's meant to engage enemies and act as a stationary wall.
- Metal Cat is a variant that works best against Mighty Glacier enemies. Despite his low HP, he takes Scratch Damage from non-Critical attacks. However, he's extremely weak offensively.
- Sushi Cat and Kotatsu Cat have low attack, but are massively resilient against Red and Floating enemies, respectively, thanks to their high HP and ability to weaken their respective enemy types.
Stripperific: A number of the female, Animesque characters have this going on, most infamously the Galaxy Gals. Some "Cats" from the "Girls and Monsters" Uber Rare set also fall into this category.
Strong Enemies, Low Rewards: Assassin Bear is incredibly fast, attacks over three times a second for immense DPS from long range, and is usually spawned as a punishment for taking too long. Should you manage to kill an Assassin Bear, whether via sniping him with the Cat Cannon or with other ranged and piercing attacks, he drops 4 money — in a game where the basic Cat costs 75 money in most stages, and most Uber Rare Cats cost 4500 money or more.
Stronger Than They Look: The physical appearance of an enemy usually has little to no bearing on how tough they are or how hard they can hit you, which can lead to some absurd situations where a unit that appears frail and/or unassuming takes enough firepower to white out the screen without even flinching, or that same unit one-shots an opponent several times their size. Some of the most extreme examples are the enemy counterparts of the Crazed Cats — the enemy Crazed Cat is no bigger than the Basic Cat on your side, but won't even flinch from attacks like a giant burst of dark energy from Bahamut.
Stun Lock:
- Certain Cats with the freeze ability can freeze enemies for 100% of their attack cycle, either naturally or with the aid of freeze CatCombos.
- On the enemy side, Henry almost does this, letting Cats move for only one frame out of his attack cycle while they're caught in his particle beam. CTO Seal, meanwhile, can perform this for real, permanently freezing the Cats in its range until they're knocked out of it.
Suicide Attack: Certain Cats, such as Glass Cat and Elder Mask Doron, will leave the battlefield after attacking once. These Cats apply a status effect for a long period of time to their targeted enemies. Stone Cat is a rare example of a Stone Wall that uses this sort of attack: it has incredibly high HP, but kills itself shortly after attacking, blocking enemies off for a small amount of time.
Summon Magic: Certain Cats have the ability to Conjure a spirit, which attacks once, then disappears. Their attacks tend to deal heavy damage and inflict various effects, including some that the unit can't inflict normally.
Super Not-Drowning Skills: Since underwater stages work the same as any other stage, this trope applies to every Cat and enemy by default.
Superpowered Evil Side:
- All of the Normal Cats, as well as Moneko, have one in the form of the Crazed Cats. You get them from beating their respective stages.
- The unique Uber Rares offered in the Epicfest set are dark versions of the Uberfest ubers, with higher stats and abilities that generally focus on targeting traitless enemies. Not that their Uberfest counterparts were weak, mind you.
Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Windy wields the vacuum cannon. According to her Ultra Form's description, her hair sometimes gets sucked into it considering it's, well, a vacuum.
Suspicious Video-Game Generosity:
- Some stages, like the Crazed Lizard Cat's stage and floors 37 and 49 of the Heavenly Tower, will send out weak enemies with a very high money drop like Mooth and Kang Roo to fill up your wallet, before sending out some much more threatening enemies.
- The last stages in the lead-up to the final Uncanny Legends stage drop a total of 6 Platinum Shards, giving you a chance for another Uber Rare before having to fight Zero Luza.
Sweeping Laser Explosion:
- The Cat Army's Limit Break with the Cat Cannon has their base firing a small laser across the entire screen that is followed up with chain of energy explosions. Holy Blast is similar, but the explosions are instead bursts of holy energy.
- Golem Sunfish attacks by firing a laser at the ground, leaving an energy trail which erupts into three blasts.
Taking You with Me: Some Aku enemies will attempt to invoke this by creating a Surge Attack after they die, themed as their soul casting a spell before flying off.
Theme Naming: Many sub-chapters and events, as well as certain enemies' variants, follow a particular theme for their names. These can include bioactive compounds (Glucosamine Desert), art movements (Grotesque Gallery), types of literature (Booklet Islands), and more.
Thinly-Veiled Dub Country Change: Iriomote Island is replaced by the Moon in international versions of Empire of Cats, yet still has a tree labeled "EMBRACE THE WILDERNESS" as its enemy base, which makes sense for the jungles of Iriomote, less so for the Moon. Averted in The Battle Cats POP!, which gives the Moon a more appropriate base with the Lunar Module Eagle, an astronaut and an American flag.
This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman:
- The Uncanny Legends stage Ashen Rain has three Metal Hippoes, but spawns Assassin Bears if you kill any of them. To win, you have to knockback the Metal Hippoes using Bronze Cat, and this is the only stage where he's needed.
- The Arena of Destiny rewards bonus points if an ability (i.e. Knockback) is activated, rewarding more if the unit who activated it targets less traits. As such, a common strategy is to use weak, spammable units to activate their respective abilities against the tankiest and/or most-spammed enemies. One such example is Sagat Cat (who is Strong Against Floating) finding use in the Strong vs. Arena of Destiny, as his quick recharge time and weak stats lets him exploit the Brollows and Bun Buns for points.
Timed Mission:
- All Into the Future stages, along with some event stages, have a variant of this. While you won't lose if you take too long, the stage will hand out progressively better rewards for clearing it within lower amounts of time.
- The main Catclaw Dojo stages are timed, with the objective being to get as many points as you can within the time limit.
Time to Unlock More True Potential:
- Instead of unlocking their True Forms by defeating them in Awakening stages, the True Forms of gacha Cats, Ancient Eggs and the Legends must be unlocked with Catfruit/Behemoth Stone and XP after reaching level 30.
- Catseyes are a somewhat literal version. Using them on a Cat at its level limit will boost the limit by 1 up to a new maximum.
- Paying NP, accessed by trading in Cats from Rare Capsules, allows some Cats to unlock new abilities.
Time Travel: The Cats travel Into the Future in the second set of story chapters and into the past in Legend Stages.
Troperiffic: This game doesn't shy away from Anime stereotyping and explicit theme-genre expositions, which are written in Event maps and Cat descriptions alike.
True Final Boss:
- After beating Cats of the Cosmos Chapter 3, a random stage in that chapter will let you battle against Filibuster Obstructa, a Starred Alien/Floating enemy with tons of knockbacks and an extremely long attack animation. Which is good because if he gets a single attack off, your base is toast, no matter where he is. Defeating him will unlock Filibuster Cat X.
- After clearing every Stories of Legend stage on every difficulty level, Eldritch Forces will be invaded by the mysterious Idi:Re, who can be fought to unlock her as a Special Cat.
  - Similarly, beating Uncanny Legends on the first difficulty will allow you to fight a horde of Idi:Ne in the stage The Face of God to unlock Idi:N's True Form, and clearing every stage on all four difficulties unlocks an Invasion Stage featuring Sage of Life Dr. Nova, who can also be fought to be unlocked as a playable unit.
- After defeating Mamon for the second time in The Aku Realms' version of the Moon, Mount Aku will be invaded by Lord of Ruin Jagando, the real final boss of the chapter.
Turned Against Their Masters: Revival of Origin Invasion, the True Final Boss stage of Uncanny Legends, is designed to invoke this. The previous Invasion in The Face of God unlocks the True Form of Idi:N, granting her Sage Slayer and insane damage vs. Relics to become a perfect counter to Sage of Life Dr. Nova, who is implied to have created Idi.
Turns Red: Several characters have the ability to increase their attack power by a certain amount when their health drops below a certain percentage, making them much more dangerous when harmed sufficiently.
Underground Monkey: Almost every regular enemy has at least one variant encountered later in the game, usually with a different typing. Depending on the enemy, these variants can range from slightly tougher or even easier Elite Mooks to massively upgraded Bosses In Mook Clothing or King Mooks. Variants of Doge are often used to introduce a new trait; for example, Doge Dark is the first Black enemy encountered in Stories of Legend, Relic Doge is the first Relic enemy fought in Uncanny Legends, and Aku Doge is the first Aku enemy to show up in event stages.
Unique Enemy: Enemies from special event stages tend to appear just once or twice. This also applies to most newly-introduced enemies, at least for a while. There are also a few straighter examples:
- Angel Fanboy appears just once in the entirety of Stories of Legend, in Gouache Ghouls, and also shows up in a scant few event stages. He's The Artifact from when Divine Cyclone was released, serving to remind the player that Angel enemies are immune to anti-Floating status effects.
- While the Ecto Gang (Ghost Doge, Ghost Snache, and Ghost Baa Baa) show up in quite a few event stages, they only appear once in Stories of Legend, in The Haunted 1LDK. They do spawn infinitely in that stage, though, so they're not a straight example.
- Li'l Bore and Doges dressed as other animals generally only show up in a single stage each, made to commemorate the new year with its own Zodiac animal. Li'l Bore would later show up again in the final stage of Most Defeated 2020 and the Infernal Tower.
Uniqueness Rule: Any Cat with the Conjure ability cannot have more than one instance of itself alive at a time. Stragely, the only exceptions are Otherworld Colosseum stages with the "Plus One: Uber" rule.
Upgraded Boss: The Manic Cats are upgraded versions of the Crazed Cat bosses, with higher stats and stronger support enemies. Beating them unlocks the True Forms of the Crazed Cats.
Useless Useful Spell: Curse is this, to some degree. When inflicted on an enemy, it disables their ability to do Status Effects (including Curse), Dodge Attack, and Toxic Attack. The problem is that most enemies are threatening because of their raw stats and even among the ones that do have the abilities listed above, some of their abilities are just there and removing them doesn't make them any less dangerous. This limits Curse to being useful on a fairly small pool of enemies, such as Henry, Croakley, Mr. Mole, Loris, and Angelic Sleipnir. While being able to disable the effects of such threatening enemies is still very useful, most of the time, it just does nothing. What's more, while the Purposely Overpowered Kasli the Bane can make great use of it due to her incredibly high uptime and wide attack area, most of the other users are either too unwieldy (such as Bakery Cat), are hampered by their target traits (such as Komori or Brainwashed Cow), or leave periods of time where enemies are un-cursed (such as Papaluga or the Curseblast Cannon), leaving you at the mercy of their effects until they're cursed again. As usual, however, while Curse isn't as useful in your hands, it's a menace in the hands of the enemies as you have a lot more effect users, some even relying on them, than your enemies.
Vanilla Unit:
- Most of the Normal Cats have no special abilities in their base forms, and Mohawk Cat, Eraser Cat, Lion Cat, and King Dragon Cat don't even get any in their True Forms. A few units from other rarities, such as Bahamut Cat, also lack special abilities and rely purely on their stats to be effective.
- Every enemy in Empire of Cats lacks a special ability.
Varying Tactics Boss: At the end of each Cats of the Cosmos Chapter, The Cat God is fought in a new form with different stats and abilities.
The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: Zig-zagged in Stories of Legend. Sub-chapter 47 is named Ends of the Earth and has stages like Valley of the End, Final Tower and Apocalypse Temple, but the menu shows that there's still a 48th sub-chapter after it: The Legend Ends. As lampshaded by the name of the 8th stage, Unkept Promises, SoL doesn't actually end in The Legend Ends, but in Laboratory of Relics, a hidden 49th sub-chapter unlocked afterwards.
Villain Forgot to Level Grind: Averted for the most part; enemies in later stages have their stats boosted, so they remain threatening even as you obtain more powerful Cats. It’s played straight a few times, though: many of the reappearing bosses in the Heavenly and Infernal Towers are no stronger than before, most of the Cyclones and Advent Bosses have the same stats in their revenge stages, and the Legend bosses have the same stats as before when refought in Spacetime Distortion.
Villain Opening Scene: The intro to The Aku Realms consists of Dark Priest Mamon introducing himself, explaining his Evil Plan and discovering the intruding Cats.
The Voice: The narrators of Empire of Cats, Into the Future and Legend Stages are never seen, which stands out because Cats of the Cosmos and The Aku Realms are narrated by fightable characters.
Waddling Head:
- The Basic Cats, as well as their Doge enemy counterparts, are just heads with legs.
- Dashing Face and Dead Donny Dash are variants of The Face which run on two short legs instead of floating.
Wake-Up Call Boss: The fight against Teacher Bun Bun in the Moon stage of Empire of Cats Chapter 3 is when the game stops messing around. Bun Bun isn't a Mighty Glacier like the first two Moon bosses, but a melee Lightning Bruiser, and his support enemies are much tougher. Not only does the boss require more strategy to defeat than just mindlessly spamming Cats, but it's almost impossible to win without having collected most or all of the Treasures.
Warm-Up Boss:
- The first two Moon stages in Empire of Cats feature The Face and Dark Emperor Nyandam, which both serve as this trope. While they may have devastating long-ranged attacks, they're among the slowest enemies in the game, and their support is fairly weak. Both of them are defeated with tactics that are commonly used later in the game — The Face is a simple exercise in stacking up and protecting long-ranged units to wear him down, while Nyandam just requires a bit of basic meatshielding and use of anti-Red Cats.
- Among the Cyclones, Red and Black Cyclone share this status — fittingly, as they were the first two to be added. While Red Cyclone has enormous DPS, its HP is surprisingly low — not to mention, its short range and slow movement make it easy to Stun Lock, given how many anti-Red and -Floating Cats there are. Meanwhile, Black Cyclone has poor damage per hit, comes with weaker support than the other Cyclones, and is extremely easy to knock around. They mostly serve to introduce the concept of the Cyclones as enemies that you need status effects to defeat.
- Among the Crazed Cats, the very first one (the basic Crazed Cat) has no special abilities besides having a ton of HP and DPS, and his support enemies (Le'boins and Teacher Bears) are fairly easy to dispatch and give a lot of money on death. He's hard to defeat without having all the Empire of Cats Treasures and owning Bahamut Cat or an Uber which can fill his role, so it's just ensuring you have the Cats and levels you need to take on the rest of the Crazed Cat bosses. Manic Mohawk Cat, his True Form, does pretty much the same thing, as the stage plays out very similarly, just with stronger enemies. It does have Master A. as a supporting enemy, so it's testing to see if you have units that can snipe an enemy which outranges Bahamut and Ururun.
Weapon of X-Slaying:
- Enemies have various types (Traitless, Red, Floating, Black, Metal, Angel, Alien, Zombie, Relic, Aku), and most Cats have one or more specialties that make them more effective vs. a specific type of enemy. In addition to inflicting Status Effects, these include Massive Damage (3~4x damage dealt), Insane Damage (5~6x damage dealt), Resistant (1/4~1/5 damage taken), Insanely Tough (1/6~1/7 damage taken), or Strong Against (deals 1.5~1.8x damage and takes 1/2~2/5 damage). Using the right Cats for the job is essential later in the game, when traited enemies begin appearing much more and become so powerful that simply brute-forcing them becomes less viable.
- Cats with the Colossus Slayer, Behemoth Slayer, and Sage Slayer abilities are much more effective at fighting Colossus, Behemoth, and Sage enemies, respectively.
What Happened to the Mouse?: Some early-game enemies that could never be threatening again without massive buffs have virtually no presence later in the game. The most extreme examples are Teacher Bear, Hyppoh and Helmut Krabbe, who only appear in one Uncanny Legends stage each.
Wind Is Green:
- The Floating trait is represented with a green color, though none of the enemies with it are actually green (except for Relic/Floating enemies).
- Windy, who uses wind to attack her enemies, has green as a main part of her color scheme. Furthermore, the blast she sends out has a green tint to it.
- Aer is a wind pixie and is colored green.
Winged Soul Flies Off at Death: When killed, most Cats and enemies have a winged soul fly up into the sky from where they died. Most of them get a swirly generic soul, but Moneko, Neneko, and their variants have a more traditional version, where a winged spirit version of the character flies away. Some Aku enemies have a more demonic-looking soul, which casts one final Surge Attack before flying off.
- Averted with Legend Rares, who break down into floating prismatic crystals, as well as certain units from collaboration events. ^note
Wolfpack Boss: A lot of later stages will have you ganged up on by several boss-tier enemies at the same time, with a few examples below:
- Instead of having a single strong boss or a Zerg Rush of weaker enemies, the Crazed Lizard Cat's boss stage, Mammals?, sends out three of them. Each of them isn't quite powerful enough to be a threat by himself, but they can use their long-ranged attacks to wear down your Cats from a safe distance. Manic King Dragon's stage Draconian works the same way (albeit with extra Manic King Dragons appearing if you hit the base), as does Malevolent King Dragon's Spitting Death. Li'l King Dragon's Tiny Tail instead has eight of them, but they don't come out all at once.
- Primitive Souls, instead of having a single threatening enemy like the rest of the Legend stages, has three Dogumarus sent out at intervals. Each Dogumaru is weaker than you'd expect for a Legend boss, but is still more than capable of wreaking havoc when paired with the support enemies.
- The Face of God plays with the concept by having 7 Elder Flame Dorons that are sent out at regular intervals. Each Doron will self-destruct when he attacks to produce a long-lasting Surge, turning him from a boss into an intermittent disruption for the other enemies in the stage.
  - The Face of God's Invasion Stage, however, features an assault of 27 Idi:Nes that spawn sporadically, as well as Galactic Overseer Nyandam to top it off.
- Hell's All-Stars is the final stage of Spacetime Distortion, a Boss Rush for the main bosses from Stories of Legend. It sends out all five of said bosses in succession — Ururun Wolf is likely to go down early in the fight, but that still leaves you fighting Li'l Nyandam, Codename: Red Riding, Inumusha, and Mecha-Bun at the same time.
- Heavenly Tower Floor 42 has you facing off against multiple Cyclone bosses at the same time (specifically the Red, White, Black, Divine, Zyclone, and Cosmic) after some time has passed. The Infernal Tower replaces the Divine Cyclone and Zyclone with the stronger Aku and Primeval Cyclones.
Word Salad Title: Some of the Stories of Legend, Uncanny Legends and Zero Legends stages' names make little sense, such as "Revolving-door Floats" and "Mermaid Sauce". Even the ones that do make sense rarely actually have anything to do with the stage itself. The original Japanese names more often follow a Theme Naming scheme per chapter, and some are puns or Shout-Outs that were Lost in Translation, but can still be somewhat nonsensical.
World Shapes: Some of the fictional stars and planets in the later Cats of the Cosmos stages have rather unusual shapes, such as Vegeta's head (Sighter's Star), a mushroom (Ababwa), a kettle (Soba IV) and a gorilla's head (Gorigori).
X-Ray Sparks: One particular Cat Combo called "Struck by Lightning" references this trope. It involves Thundia and Skelecat. The former is stated to love cartoons, so she may be trying to invoke this.
Year X: Into the Future and Cats of the Cosmos begin in the years 29XX and 20XX, respectively.
You Can't Thwart Stage One: Even after defeating him twice, the Cats fail to stop Mamon from reviving Lord of Ruin Jagando in The Aku Realms.
Zero-Effort Boss:
- Flower Cat Awakens! has the easiest stage in the game. Not only does it have no boss version of the True Form you're about to unlock, but the enemies die in one hit and never attack. The real challenge is actually finding it.
- Anniversary celebrations for the game have a giant birthday cake carried by Doges. It doesn't put up a fight at all, and beating it drops free Cat Food and other rewards.
- The Mystery Package event stage sends out nothing but Package Doge, which doesn't move, attacks incredibly slowly for 1 damage per hit, and has only 100 HP, though it's Metal. Beating it drops either 100,000 XP or a set of powerups.
Zombie Apocalypse: Zombie enemies, which can first be encountered in Outbreak stages after beating Empire of Cats Chapter 1, have the ability to burrow under your units and can revive after being killed. The amount of times they can burrow and revive depends on the specific unit.

Examples from The Battle Cats POP!

Adaptational Wimp:
- The maximum level for Cats is 20, and only the Normal Cats have True Forms, so most of them are much weaker than in the mobile game.
- Many of the enemies from Stories of Legend are much less powerful here, to make up for the fact that the player is weaker as well. Some of the biggest examples are:
  - Master A.: in addition to a drop in stats, he lost a lot of range, making him far less threatening than in the mobile game.
  - Teacher Bun Bun is a brutal Wake-Up Call Boss in the original, in large part due to his non-stop attacks that will One-Hit Kill most Cats at that point in the game. Here, not only are his stats weaker, but his time between attacks is much longer, making it easy to overwhelm him. Note, however, that this only applies to the original; J.K Bun Bun and Bun Bun Black have lost nothing.
Adapted Out:
- The only Uber sets that appear are the Dynamites, the Vajiras, the Galaxy Gals, the Dragon Emperors, and the Ultra Souls, with Nekoluga as an added bonus. All the others are gone, even ones that were in the mobile game in 2016. Among said sets, only the first 5 Ubers to be added to each are present, so Nurse Cat, Kenshin, Kalisa, Dioramos, and Kachi-Kachi are gone.
- Alien enemies don't appear.
- There are no Legend Stages, so several enemies from there get left out.
Anti-Frustration Features:
- To make up for Cat Food being non-purchasable, you get 1 every time you clear a stage for the first time, with duplicate Treasures also giving some out.
- XP is much cheaper to buy with Cat Food, because there's no easy way to farm it like in the mobile game.
- Treasure Radars only cost 3 Cat Food instead of 45, so it's much easier to get any Treasures you're missing.
Arbitrary Headcount Limit: The game has one in the form of the Will bar. Said bar starts out full but lowers for every Cat spawned in the field, with each Cat having a different number that affects how much they drain out the bar. Once the Will bar is empty, you won't be able to spawn a new unit until a unit dies, which replenishes the bar by how much they drained it.
The Artifact:
- Despite having no microtransactions (being a paid-for game), the game still has an energy system and Cat Food, which were both incentives to spend real money in the original.
- The presence of Valkyrie Cat, Bahamut, and Ururun Wolf. In the mobile game, Ubers are harder to come by, so they (and the other Legends) serve to help out players with bad luck or who don't want to spend real money. In POP!, however, Ubers are much easier to get in large quantities, so they serve little purpose. Valkyrie, already a Crutch Character in the mobile game, has little reason to be used here, and Bahamut and Ururun Wolf are only obtained when there are no stages left to use them on.
Bragging Rights Reward: Once you beat the last story chapter of the game, you get Bahamut Cat the first time you beat the final stage and Ururun Wolf if you decide to challenge the stage again, though you only have a 3% chance of getting them, with both of them fulfilling the role of traditional backliner units. Thing is, by the time you get them, there are no more stages to challenge left to use them on.
Camera Abuse: There's a chance that, when Cats or enemies die, they get launched in front of the screen shortly before sliding down the screen, temporarily blocking your view of the battlefield in the process.
Compressed Adaptation: Enemies from Empire of Cats, Stories of Legend, and some event stages are put into 3 new chapters, so many changes are made to accomodate them. Notably, the Cyclones just appear as regular bosses instead of getting their own unique stages, monthly event enemies Chief Peng and Dark Emperor Santa show up, and the final boss is a tag team of J.K Bun Bun and Bun Bun Black, followed by Ururun Wolf.
Demoted to Extra: The Crazed Cats had their own unique stages to unlock them in the mobile game, but are just regular gacha Cats here. The same applies to the unlockable Rare Cats, the Bean Cats, Moneko, and Flower Cat.
Early-Bird Cameo: The stages from Cats of the Cosmos appeared here before they did in the mobile game, though with completely different enemies.
Infinity +1 Sword: The Crazed Cats, which are massively powerful compared to everything else in the game, can only be obtained from gachas when near the end of the last chapter.
Player Vs Player: One of the new features is the ability to take your Cats to do battle with other players.
A Twinkle in the Sky: Sometimes when a Cat or enemy dies, they get launched far into the background and disappear in a yellow star twinkle.

The Battle Cats

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The Battle Cats

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