YMMV / World Heroes

• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Mudman, one of the few characters in the series to not be based on a historical figure. As a result, he made it into NeoGeo Battle Coliseum.
  • Janne/Jeanne also has her own share of fans as well, this being a factor that led to her status as a DLC character in SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy.
• Fair for Its Day: Mudman. He might be a stereotypical mystical native character, but the series itself makes it clear that he's a good guy who wields benevolent magic and that the god he worships is benevolent as well.
• Growing the Beard: The first game (and depending on who you ask, the next two) is infamous for its extremely terrible controls and general lack of originality. By the time Perfect rolled around, the series had found its own identity and carved out a niche for itself as a very enjoyable and surprisingly rewarding, if extremely goofy, fighting game.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • During World Heroes' heyday, Hanzou and Fuuma were considered a pair of Ryu and Ken knockoffs. Yet, Hanzou's Vacuum Cutter preceded Ryu's Shinkuu Tatsu Maki by at least a year and his Shin Koryuha^note World Heroes 2: Jet was released in '94. Whereas Ryu wouldn't gain the Shin Shoryuken until Street Fighter III which came out in '97 was ahead Ryu's Shin Shoryuken by three years!
  • The very last character that the series introduced was Son Gokuu in 1995's World Heroes Perfect, who's based on Sun Wukong. Then 26 years later in 2021, an anime titled SD Gundam World Heroes came out. And who's the main protagonist of that anime? Wukong Impulse Gundam!
• Narm Charm:
  • The series practically runs on this. To quote Muscle Power: "NUMBAH WOOOOHN!"
  • The dialogue in WH2 and Jet is brimming with Woolseyisms, with references ranging from reasonable (Captain Kidd: Hey! I can't give up here! Arrrgh, Jim-Boy!" to completely random (Erick: "I am a viking, and I am okay. I pillage all night, and I sleep all day!")
• Polished Port: Unlike other fighting games that suffered when converted to the Neo Geo CD, the series took the translation well. The game's comparatively modest MEG count made for reasonable loading times and the obligatory arranged soundtracks were very well done. Furthermore, 2 and Perfect received extra content: the former added the ability to play as Neo Dio through a cheat code, while the later added a mode that allowed the player to select bosses Son Goku and Neo Dio without having to input a cheat code to play as them, and added the ability to play as Zeus in VS mode.
• Porting Disaster: The Sega Genesis version of the first game suffered from such a Troubled Production that it's a surprise that it was made at all. The lead developer turned out to be a Con Man who scammed Sega Midwest out of a large sum of money that would have been invested in the port before disappearing, and an amateur programmer had to handle most of the work in a short amount of time. The result? Broken controls and physics, mediocre graphics and sounds, most of the soundtrack being cut (made even worse with a few of the music tracks left being played on the wrong stages), and a generic A Winner Is You ending instead of the character-specific ones from the original arcade version.
• The Scrappy: Rasputin's Camp Gay and Depraved Homosexual overtones makes him one of the least popular characters.
• Values Dissonance: One of the more contentious parts of the game amongst fans is its rather unflattering depictions of famous historical figures. Particulary bad examples included Rasputin, who showcased rather egregious Camp Gay stereotypes (particularly troubling considering Russia's current stance on LGBT+), and Mudman, a particularly problematic stereotype of a witch doctor.
• Vindicated by History: Well, sort of. Perfect was mostly dismissed by the competitive crowd as another Street Fighter clone and during the earlier days of the internet, the webmaster of the fighting game-centric website, The Fighter's Generation, gave the games and characters of the franchise low rating and expressed dislike towards the franchise in general in a scathing manner, so it kinda gave people a bad impression on World Heroes overall (as the site was the web hub for fighting game resources for the time). That lasted until two big-name players found footage of it on YouTube, got interested by the surprisingly modern mechanics it had and recorded theirs findings with the online multiplayer service Kaillera; and with the internet maturing, not only the Fighter's Generation site moved away from bashing, updated how it operated and gave fairer reviews (still not liking it, but delivered in a more polite manner, more or less considering the blatant bashing their Old Shame), more Street Fighter clones released during the time were discovered and World Heroes was considered as one of the more competently-made clones. Nowadays, people considered this franchise a Cult Classic and it also saw several ports into the modern consoles.
  • Not that it still doesn't have its fair share of problems. See Values Dissonance above.