Battle Cats - Li’l Axe Awakens! - Tiny Chopper (Deadly)

First off, even though this stage is relatively easy, it becomes incredibly difficult if you don’t have Ramen at least at level 40. My Ramen is level 40 and it barely holds off Li’l Dark. Speaking of Li’l Dark, it has considerably more damage than Crazed Axe but slightly less HP. As for the stage, instead of Red enemies being the primary peon trait, the stage instead uses Angels, spawning Heavenly Hippoes, Gabriels, and Angelic Gories as frontline threats with Sunfish Jones being the backliner. The stage is pretty straightforward: use Ramen and Haniwa to tank, Courier to take care of frontline threats, and LKD and Legends to deal damage to Li’l Dark. Be careful to not push too far forward as Sunfish Jones can easily deal major damage to your stack. Not much else to it.

As a unit, Li’l Dark functions similarly to Axe Cat, but its target changes from Red to Angel. This would be an interesting option… if Ramen didn’t already exist as a Rare cat. Axe variants can’t catch a break. With talents, Li’l Dark gains the Aku target, 50% Surge Resist, and a 20% chance to Freeze for 2 seconds. Aku enemies are much too aggressive for Li’l Dark to effectively stall them through tanking, so that’s out the window. Also, Aku enemies have Shields that prevent the Freeze proc, so that’s useless too, right? Not quite actually. While Li’l Dark is by no means consistent, he is fully spammable, meaning that if one Li’l Dark procs, chances are they will permafreeze. While incredibly difficult to utilize, you can actually pull off some shenanigans to cheese would-be threats such as Jagando if you manage to set it up properly. So while the talents are not that useful, they actually do have niche use, making Li’l Dark instantly better than any other Axe variant. Finally, some semblance of an Axe variant W… at the cost of way more NP than you’d like to spend. Oh well at least it’s something.