By "stand on their own", I think he meant "be able to attract a good amount of enthusiasts of said character" rather than "being competitively viable".
Im pretty sure what he means when he says, "something average isn't fun", he means that if everyone is balanced to be the same character with the same strengths and weaknesses, then you might as well be playing fox dittos final destination every tournament and every game.
@@sauce5097 Steve relies on resource management and has the worst jump height in the game. Even so, Project M showcased how Overturned characters can be fun.
He may have been referring more to StreetFighter 1 where both characters were the same balance wise AND move set wise. When I game becomes too simple like that then the game becomes boring
@@user-be3qc7re9o Irrelevant. Jump height issues are negated by block building, and the same ability allows him to create walls for camping, which pretty much nullifies any problem he might have trying to gather materials.
Considering the matchmaking is literally meant to match you against players of your skill level to keep you at 50% win rate, that win rate stat effectively means nothing in terms of characters balance.
I think it’s worth mentioning that a 47% win rate as an aggregate of all Quickplay worldwide is kind of wild. That is a HUGE sample size, so that 3% below 50% is definitely statistically significant and means that character is quite a bit worse (online at least) than the ones near 51.5%
@@xjgal7702 You're missing my point. The matchmaking matches you against better people if you win, or worse people if you lose, to keep you close to a 50% win rate no matter which character you are playing. So their stats of 47%-51.5% only show that their matchmaking system is doing its job, not that the characters are balanced.
@@MerryBlind my additional point being, even with the quickplay system attempting to match you with a 50/50 opponent, on average, some characters are worse in that situation. Meaning DK or whoever at ALL levels online is less likely to win even AFTER the system tries to give you an even match.
That does make sense. There should be someone who’s the best and someone who’s the worst. The only problem is making Low and Bottom Tiers feel like incomplete characters.
I feel loke Sakurai wasn't even talking about competitive and mostly just giving a game design lesson about character archetypes and uniqueness makes a game more fun than being 100% balanced or the same would be mediocre or boring. That's what I see in this video anyways because he's showing a lot of free for all matches on stages with hazards.
For 2:20 I feel like if you put the best player of each character and make them 1v1 play a set against each other, the ganon would not end up last but maybe close ish yes everyone decided he’s the worst character
Character balance is a joke in this game. You want to play a real fighting game go to street fighter/KOF tekken Nintendo gives 0 fucks about online community
I think Sakurai makes good points here, having each character lean heavily into what their strengths should be, and also keeping in leaning heavily into what their weaknesses are supposed to be. But obviously, some characters like Aegis, ROB, and Min-min are way too overtuned and some characters like Sephiroth seem like the only balanced dlc character as he's way too undertuned as his weaknesses kinda outweigh or go against what is supposed to be his strengths (wing comes out at late percents, but he's usually too light to make use of his come back mechanic, while Steve gets diamond for Free becuz he can teleport his crafting box near his revival platform) If he wants to keep every character with high high strengths and low low weaknesses, where is ROB's weaknesses? Where is the weakness of Cloud and Aegis built in? What? They have to recover? 🙀😱 EVERY CHARACTER HAS TO RECOVER!! and characters like Ganondor and dr mario and Belmonts have way worse recoveries than characters like cloud and aegis who have amazing strengths in every area; it makes no sense Min min, she is supposed to have the best range, better than Seph or Byleth overall- but she has this AMAZING up smash out of shield that also reflects projectiles (where's Seph's good OoS option outside of footstool?) And, Min min is from the game ARMS but you cant even hit her arms! But you cant hit Mewtwo's tail! Who is lighter than bowser and DK, but they get intangible ity on their limbs when they swing their tilts, Mewtwo tail doenst get intangible when he does tilt attacks. Yoshi and Charizard are way overtuned as their tail hitboxes are not a part of their hurtboxes, they get swords for tails and they are both very heavy Somehow Yoshi has the best air speed while being super heavy, when that should be Jigglypuffs thing as she's one of the lightest in the game and all her many weaknesses GnW is a good example of another of tge games lightest characters but cuz of his up b and properties of his other moves, he has one of the most safest neutrals on the game and the get out of jail free card with a combo interupting frame 3 INVINCIBLE up b that DOESN'T leave him in a blinky free fall state after- he gets to whatever aerial or special he likes after The game is topsy turvy, Sakurai can talk balance when Seph has an actual decent oos option like min min, mewtwo gets intangible tail like the heavy Charizard and Yoshi, and tops like aegis and rob have actual real weaknesses built into them. I still think the game is quite balanced as weve seen Japanese DKs and Toon Links slaughter our best American players, but it's still very clear the design philosophy he speaks of in this video has not been applied fairly to each character. It's only really clear to those of us who compete and have spent a substantial amount of time on this game. Some characters are just built privileged, while some have a good amount of strengths and flaws, and some are just left behind carbon copies stil from smash 4 who dont work too well in this game, while a few are straight up gutted (why cant ganondorf of all characters, a heavy whose one of his main strengths supposed to be survivalbility, go into blink free fall animation after his side b, but pretty much every other character can jump after their side b in the air?) A new character like incineroar is clearly built from the ground up to be better than a character like ganondorf
I agree with Sakurai that every character should have clear stengths/weaknesses and different play styles. ...What I dont get is why did he make characters that fall into this like Byleth, Zelda or Puff but then proceeds to make such insanely privilaged charaters like ROB, Steve, GnW or Sonic who have almost no weaknesses to offset all their stengths.
They did try to balance it. But the insane amount of possible rulesets and results make it impossible to pin point the issue unless you focus solely on top level.
ROB is a big body who gets combo’d easily, game and watch is a lightweight who can get killed early, sonic has a limited melee range so he can potentially get out-ranged by zoners and spacers, and Steve has no weaknesses he’s just broken lmao. Now you can read that and say “but they’re clearly top tiers so their weaknesses don’t matter as much as other characters” and to that I’d say I agree, but that doesn’t mean the weaknesses aren’t designed into the character (with the exception of Steve).
Why do you have a problem with them taking data from online battles? Tournament play is literally such a small percentage of the player base it doesnt make sense to pull it from there. They make money from casual players who buy their game and characters, those people will be playing online, not in tournaments
When it comes to the meta in the game, taking 2 million gsp battles of little Timmy playing for fun doesn’t determine how good each character is. At a casual level tier lists do not matter whatsoever. By gathering data at such a mass scale where most of these players don’t have an idea of what they are doing doesn’t provide anything to every character is equally as good.
@@noun_a79 yes I know, what im saying is that they arent balancing the game for competitive play, Sakurai makes it clear they are looking to make a fun experience and not stress too hard about making everyone perfectly balanced
@@noun_a79 I think the disagreement toward balancing simply comes from the fact that the competitive players deem their ruleset and levels to be "THE WAY" to play smash while Nintendo sees it as "A WAY" to play smash.
@@BlzOmega47-ud2kv Definitely. Nintendo is a traditional company and will likely never see the way tournament players see smash, which is usually the only way they enjoy the game. From Sakurai’s viewpoint in this video he is entirely correct because he views the game as a party game.
They do have weaknesses. The issue is just that some of their biggest weaknesses apply to the VAST majority of results when you take every single possible match online into account, not the ways the upper echelon of players work around them. Sonic has the excuse that the best Sonic player only started to consistently dominate tournaments after patches were done. Steve has the worst jump height, bad mobility, and resource management is key to his gameplan, with only a handful of top reps. GnW has bad mobility and no combos, but his kit works around that. And again, he wasn't absolutely dominating. R.O.B has every single heavyweight weakness, and wasn't winning tournaments, but he has insane tools and an amazing recovery. Another issue is player mindset. Japan has more varied players, with results completely foreign to us. Toon Link, Yoshi, Banjo, DK, and several others all have a chance at winning, and Japanese players don't really get a monetary incentive on home turf, so they do it for the sake of loving the game and wanting to improve. NA players are more willing to complain about how bad their character is, and how broken other characters are, but don't put in the same amount of effort to grind out match ups. That's why some NA players do so poorly against JP. Because they don't grind as much, against all of the weird mid tier match ups or obscure low tiers.
By "stand on their own", I think he meant "be able to attract a good amount of enthusiasts of said character" rather than "being competitively viable".
Im pretty sure what he means when he says, "something average isn't fun", he means that if everyone is balanced to be the same character with the same strengths and weaknesses, then you might as well be playing fox dittos final destination every tournament and every game.
Ok but where are Steve's weakness. Overturned characters aren't fun either
@@sauce5097
Steve relies on resource management and has the worst jump height in the game.
Even so, Project M showcased how Overturned characters can be fun.
He may have been referring more to StreetFighter 1 where both characters were the same balance wise AND move set wise. When I game becomes too simple like that then the game becomes boring
@@user-be3qc7re9o Irrelevant. Jump height issues are negated by block building, and the same ability allows him to create walls for camping, which pretty much nullifies any problem he might have trying to gather materials.
Considering the matchmaking is literally meant to match you against players of your skill level to keep you at 50% win rate, that win rate stat effectively means nothing in terms of characters balance.
I think it’s worth mentioning that a 47% win rate as an aggregate of all Quickplay worldwide is kind of wild. That is a HUGE sample size, so that 3% below 50% is definitely statistically significant and means that character is quite a bit worse (online at least) than the ones near 51.5%
@@xjgal7702 You're missing my point. The matchmaking matches you against better people if you win, or worse people if you lose, to keep you close to a 50% win rate no matter which character you are playing. So their stats of 47%-51.5% only show that their matchmaking system is doing its job, not that the characters are balanced.
@@MerryBlind oh I agree with you there, I just wanted to point out something that stuck out to me. Probably should have made that clear haha
@@MerryBlind my additional point being, even with the quickplay system attempting to match you with a 50/50 opponent, on average, some characters are worse in that situation. Meaning DK or whoever at ALL levels online is less likely to win even AFTER the system tries to give you an even match.
@@xjgal7702 Yeah you’re right that a difference of 4-5% is actually significant considering how large the sample size must be.
Well, to be fair, if everyone was balanced the huge upsets everyone gets hyped about would be boring. At least that’s my opinion.
That does make sense. There should be someone who’s the best and someone who’s the worst. The only problem is making Low and Bottom Tiers feel like incomplete characters.
I mean jejajeja's Kirby's has been doing pretty well recently... Maybe Sakurai secretly buffed Kirby???😅😅😅
I feel loke Sakurai wasn't even talking about competitive and mostly just giving a game design lesson about character archetypes and uniqueness makes a game more fun than being 100% balanced or the same would be mediocre or boring. That's what I see in this video anyways because he's showing a lot of free for all matches on stages with hazards.
u cant convince me that wifi aegis doesnt have higher than a 60% average winrate in elite smash 😭
For 2:20 I feel like if you put the best player of each character and make them 1v1 play a set against each other, the ganon would not end up last but maybe close ish yes everyone decided he’s the worst character
Lol if u just believe in yourself had me rolling
Character balance is a joke in this game. You want to play a real fighting game go to street fighter/KOF tekken
Nintendo gives 0 fucks about online community
5:35 Tbf, Acola lost to Ganon all the time back when Higachan dominate the wifi scene. These is like 2~3 years ago .
I think Sakurai makes good points here, having each character lean heavily into what their strengths should be, and also keeping in leaning heavily into what their weaknesses are supposed to be.
But obviously, some characters like Aegis, ROB, and Min-min are way too overtuned and some characters like Sephiroth seem like the only balanced dlc character as he's way too undertuned as his weaknesses kinda outweigh or go against what is supposed to be his strengths (wing comes out at late percents, but he's usually too light to make use of his come back mechanic, while Steve gets diamond for Free becuz he can teleport his crafting box near his revival platform)
If he wants to keep every character with high high strengths and low low weaknesses, where is ROB's weaknesses?
Where is the weakness of Cloud and Aegis built in? What? They have to recover? 🙀😱 EVERY CHARACTER HAS TO RECOVER!! and characters like Ganondor and dr mario and Belmonts have way worse recoveries than characters like cloud and aegis who have amazing strengths in every area; it makes no sense
Min min, she is supposed to have the best range, better than Seph or Byleth overall- but she has this AMAZING up smash out of shield that also reflects projectiles (where's Seph's good OoS option outside of footstool?) And, Min min is from the game ARMS but you cant even hit her arms! But you cant hit Mewtwo's tail! Who is lighter than bowser and DK, but they get intangible ity on their limbs when they swing their tilts, Mewtwo tail doenst get intangible when he does tilt attacks.
Yoshi and Charizard are way overtuned as their tail hitboxes are not a part of their hurtboxes, they get swords for tails and they are both very heavy
Somehow Yoshi has the best air speed while being super heavy, when that should be Jigglypuffs thing as she's one of the lightest in the game and all her many weaknesses
GnW is a good example of another of tge games lightest characters but cuz of his up b and properties of his other moves, he has one of the most safest neutrals on the game and the get out of jail free card with a combo interupting frame 3 INVINCIBLE up b that DOESN'T leave him in a blinky free fall state after- he gets to whatever aerial or special he likes after
The game is topsy turvy, Sakurai can talk balance when Seph has an actual decent oos option like min min, mewtwo gets intangible tail like the heavy Charizard and Yoshi, and tops like aegis and rob have actual real weaknesses built into them.
I still think the game is quite balanced as weve seen Japanese DKs and Toon Links slaughter our best American players, but it's still very clear the design philosophy he speaks of in this video has not been applied fairly to each character.
It's only really clear to those of us who compete and have spent a substantial amount of time on this game.
Some characters are just built privileged, while some have a good amount of strengths and flaws, and some are just left behind carbon copies stil from smash 4 who dont work too well in this game, while a few are straight up gutted (why cant ganondorf of all characters, a heavy whose one of his main strengths supposed to be survivalbility, go into blink free fall animation after his side b, but pretty much every other character can jump after their side b in the air?)
A new character like incineroar is clearly built from the ground up to be better than a character like ganondorf
This sounds much more like salt than anything. There's way too much clear anger here and it's way too long to not be from salt
All that text just for it to be ass
I agree with Sakurai that every character should have clear stengths/weaknesses and different play styles.
...What I dont get is why did he make characters that fall into this like Byleth, Zelda or Puff but then proceeds to make such insanely privilaged charaters like ROB, Steve, GnW or Sonic who have almost no weaknesses to offset all their stengths.
They did try to balance it. But the insane amount of possible rulesets and results make it impossible to pin point the issue unless you focus solely on top level.
ROB is a big body who gets combo’d easily, game and watch is a lightweight who can get killed early, sonic has a limited melee range so he can potentially get out-ranged by zoners and spacers, and Steve has no weaknesses he’s just broken lmao. Now you can read that and say “but they’re clearly top tiers so their weaknesses don’t matter as much as other characters” and to that I’d say I agree, but that doesn’t mean the weaknesses aren’t designed into the character (with the exception of Steve).
Was munching on a tootsie pop stick so I had to watch some riddles (goofy tradition) Edit: just finished it 🙃
Basically the game is balanced around average skill levels so it will never be balanced at high levels.
i can change the future
Why do you have a problem with them taking data from online battles? Tournament play is literally such a small percentage of the player base it doesnt make sense to pull it from there. They make money from casual players who buy their game and characters, those people will be playing online, not in tournaments
When it comes to the meta in the game, taking 2 million gsp battles of little Timmy playing for fun doesn’t determine how good each character is. At a casual level tier lists do not matter whatsoever. By gathering data at such a mass scale where most of these players don’t have an idea of what they are doing doesn’t provide anything to every character is equally as good.
@@noun_a79 yes I know, what im saying is that they arent balancing the game for competitive play, Sakurai makes it clear they are looking to make a fun experience and not stress too hard about making everyone perfectly balanced
@@Ryniano Oh, that’s what you meant
@@noun_a79 I think the disagreement toward balancing simply comes from the fact that the competitive players deem their ruleset and levels to be "THE WAY" to play smash while Nintendo sees it as "A WAY" to play smash.
@@BlzOmega47-ud2kv Definitely. Nintendo is a traditional company and will likely never see the way tournament players see smash, which is usually the only way they enjoy the game. From Sakurai’s viewpoint in this video he is entirely correct because he views the game as a party game.
GSP > PGR
wait whats the name of his ending song its such a bop
mewmore remix of marvelvscapcom2 clocktower
For Free Interlude - Kendrick Lamar
@@Doc27901 tysm!!!
@@Doc27901😂😂😂😂. Love that song and the album
@@Doc27901 oh... that was NOT IT
Sakurais videos are all really good/ or like very entertaining
They do have weaknesses. The issue is just that some of their biggest weaknesses apply to the VAST majority of results when you take every single possible match online into account, not the ways the upper echelon of players work around them.
Sonic has the excuse that the best Sonic player only started to consistently dominate tournaments after patches were done.
Steve has the worst jump height, bad mobility, and resource management is key to his gameplan, with only a handful of top reps.
GnW has bad mobility and no combos, but his kit works around that. And again, he wasn't absolutely dominating.
R.O.B has every single heavyweight weakness, and wasn't winning tournaments, but he has insane tools and an amazing recovery.
Another issue is player mindset. Japan has more varied players, with results completely foreign to us. Toon Link, Yoshi, Banjo, DK, and several others all have a chance at winning, and Japanese players don't really get a monetary incentive on home turf, so they do it for the sake of loving the game and wanting to improve. NA players are more willing to complain about how bad their character is, and how broken other characters are, but don't put in the same amount of effort to grind out match ups. That's why some NA players do so poorly against JP. Because they don't grind as much, against all of the weird mid tier match ups or obscure low tiers.
As a casual player wanting to consider a more serious playing competitively yes there are many of us who watch pro smash players.
I know we reference CORE-A a lot, these philosophies have been a foundational since forever.
Please do a video on the new ofiicial tier list
Have y'all heard of sillintor
First
No views 1 like bro fell off
no views in 12 seconds, bro fell off