YMMV / Disney Sorcerer's Arena

• Breather Level: Tower 4 is generally regarded as easier than its predecessor, Tower 3. Reasons include lack of tough enemies, relatively easy bosses, and the combination of Downtown and Wilds, which gives the player plenty of useful characters to use. These include, but are not limited to, Kristoff, Dr. Faciler, Sven, Hiro, Big Bad Wolf, Scar, Syndrome, and Merida.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Overall the game does a good job avoiding this, but there is still some examples:
  • The combination of Aladdin and Jasmine is well-liked for how well they can outlast the enemy. They are both able to put a buff on themselves that is guaranteed to let them dodge one attack, Jasmine can summon Rajah who is an extra target that automatically taunts, and their stats and abilities are further enhanced when both are out together.
  • Shan Yu is one of the most popular characters in the game due to his decent stats, highly punishing attacks, synergy with the aforementioned Aladdin and Jasmine, alongside Sorcerer Mickey, Jafar, and Anna, and being farmable from very early on.
  • The Big Bad Wolf is very popular due to being able to deal tremendous amounts of damage with all of his attacks, though this is balanced out by him being easy to kill.
  • Mor’Du is another popular villain due to his durability, ability to stun, counter enemy attacks, and surprisingly good damage output for a tank.
  • Before his nerf, Hiro was everywhere due to how easily he could stack up buffs on his teammates. Even after his nerf, he is still considered an excellent character with his ability to heal and make the entire team avoid attacks. He later had to be nerfed again so that he only produces shields for the team while only giving himself evasion.
  • Hercules is known as one of the more broken characters, mainly due to the fact that if someone gains extra Turn Meter, the opposing side's Hercules has a good chance of attacking that character. When he also gains Protect, incoming damage is reduced, and he'll gain 20% Turn Meter when Protect is consumed. Each time an ability targets him while he has Protect, he'll gain 1 Heroism, and when he reaches 5, he will gain Invincibility, Guaranteed Critical, and cleanse all Harmful Effects. If played correctly, he can possibly kill the entire team at once with his Strength of the Gods ability, which WILL Stun on a Critical Strike. It got so bad that the next Legendary, Wreck-It Ralph, had to have a few abilities that when upgraded and geared up, could get rid of Hercules quickly.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • While both of the Hero’s Duty enemies, the marines and cybugs, can deal great amounts of damage with their abilities, the marine is probably the worse of the two. The cybug is at least a Glass Cannon that can be taken out before it has a chance to attack, the marine though is a Mighty Glacier who can take some hits and can even stun with his attack.
  • The Kakamora can either put you to sleep with a blowdart or hit you with a ridiculously powerful spear.
  • The Mermaids can deal high damage and inflict the Charm debuff.
  • Kristoff's trolls are surprisingly bulky and can overwhelm your team if Kristoff can summon enough of them.
• Difficulty Spike: Tower 3 is a massive difficulty spike from Towers 1 and 2. The most common reasons are the general lack of Oceanic characters (only Jack Sparrow and Ariel are worth using and can be farmed, Captain Hook and Tinker Bell are horrible, and Cobra Bubbles, Gantu, and Davy Jones take time to farm), a heavy dose of incredibly tough enemies, and aggravating bosses. When you beat this Tower, you will cheer.
• Fandom Rivalry: A mild one with fellow Disney mobile game Disney Heroes: Battle Mode. Some Heroes players criticize Arena for lacking the story, character interactions, and variety of game modes found in Heroes, while some Arena players criticize Heroes for having simpler and less involved gameplay, less obscure character picks than Arena,^note At first; Heroes has since picked up the slack as it has continuously added more and more characters, while Arena has mostly stuck to adding more familiar characters as it takes longer to add new ones to that game, since it uses 3D models instead of 2D Flash/Toon Boom-style puppets too high and ever-increasing level caps that take forever to grind to get to, and too many different resources to manage and earn by comparison.
• Goddamned Bats: Any enemy that can taunt, they rarely hit hard but being forced to attack a tank instead of a frailer but more dangerous target can throw a wrench into your strategy. The Incan Guards are perhaps the worst as whilst most tanky enemies are slow, they are fairly fast and have a good chance of getting their taunt off before you can hurt any other enemies.
• High-Tier Scrappy:
  • Fairy Slumber is a spell that quickly became one of the most hated. The ability to inflict Sleep on at most five characters will definitely take a toll on your team, and it only gets worse with its upgrades, being able to reduce up to 40% turn meter alongside the aforementioned Sleep debuff!
  • Hiro was subject to a fair amount of criticism for how easy it was to plug and play him into ANY team in the game, even those outside his Hero, Downtown, and Tech categories, due to how powerful a support he was. He was eventually nerfed, which drew further controversy from those who had spent money to get him early on only for him to be nerfed mere months later, a situation shared in the same patch by Maui. Even after that, Hiro is still an incredible character to use, and with the other Big Hero 6 characters, he may even be better then before.
  • On the weak spectrum is Jasmine. When paired with Aladdin she is a force to be reckoned with thanks to the buffs they give each other, but when on a team without Aladdin Jasmine is considerably weaker with the only contribution she can really make being summoning Rajah to distract the enemy.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Tinker Bell is seen as the worst character in the game, and for good reason. She deals pitiful damage, her shields aren’t very useful, her cleansing only works on herself, and has bad stats all across the board.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The slow-mo effect for Duke Caboom looks cool, but takes too long to get through and quickly becomes tiring. Even worse, speeding up the gameplay does not speed up the effect.
  • The turn limit in the games' PvP modes is not well-liked in Sorcerer's Trial, since it encourages extremely boring defending team compositions that tank out all the damage thrown at them until time runs out instead of putting up a fight.
• Unexpected Character: Glu Mobile did not limit themselves to only the most recent or most successful/iconic Disney and Pixar characters; there's a good amount of representation for Disney's more obscure works and characters in the game.
  • Some of the obscure works that have playable characters in the game include The Three Little Pigs (The Big Bad Wolf), Robin Hood (1973) (the title character and the Sheriff of Nottingham, the latter of whom being more unexpected), and even The Black Cauldron (The Horned King).
  • Some of the more famous and/or recent works also have some unexpected playable character choices; who ever wanted to play as Jangles the Clown or Chunk?
  • Disney Television Animation has some good representation here; while there are a couple of safe choices such as Scrooge McDuck and Darkwing Duck (both of whom are under Mickey and Friends), having the Rescue Rangers (initially just Monterey Jack with Zipper at launch, but they were later joined by Chip, Dale, and Gadget Hackwrench) and Demona, Goliath, and David Xanatos (the first of whom was also available at launch) be playable here is certainly welcome. But at least some of them were previously available in games such as Disney Emoji Blitz. No, the real shocker is the presence of the Infinity-Sided Die spell-it’s too obscure for the casual player, but for fans, it hints at some big things to come...
  • While Stitch was unsurprisingly the first playable Lilo & Stitch character in the game,^note although his in-game model having his antennae and back spines exposed but not his lower pair of arms—by default—is a rather interesting design choice and the Lilo & Stitch update adding Captain Gantu is a somewhat expected though welcome choice, the same update adding Cobra Bubbles was quite a surprise. Additionally, one of Stitch's "cousins" appears as a spell, but instead of a better-known and more popular experiment such as Angel (X-624), Reuben (X-625), or Sparky (X-221), Glu instead went with Zap (X-603), an experiment who only had a few brief scenes in Lilo & Stitch: The Series and made minor cameos in Leroy & Stitch and the Stitch! anime.
  • While the game's Beauty and the Beast update added all the main characters to the game (Gaston being the sole exception as he was in the game from the start), players were not expecting to also see Belle's father Maurice added as well.
  • Among the Hercules characters added to the game, Hermes was added as one of the playable characters; the last time he was prominently involved in a video game was Disney's Animated Storybook: Hercules in 1997 (as that game's guide alongside its narrators Calliope and Thalia).
  • For "Player Appreciation Week" in 2021, Glu gave players Winnie the Pooh-themed Talismans, including Gopher and Lumpy, despite them being all but ditched at the end of the DTV era.
  • The inclusion of Jungle Cruise characters is also this, as no one was expecting characters from that movie, of all things, to be added via tie-in.

---