Smashboards

Also would you consider Melee Fox an example of this archtype?

I feel like different players will have different answers depending on their own experiences.

In my case, we all know that Steve is considered a pretty good character in Ultimate but he does have a lot quirks that you have to practice and get good at in order to effectively use him.

For someone like me who has not put in such practice, he's one of my least effective characters. Especially his Up B. That thing is tricky to use for recovery.

I'd argue Melee Jigglypuff is the defining example of this - though admittedly, that's only because Melee Jigglypuff has a fundamentally different gameplay loop than a lot of other characters in the game, meaning people like HBox had to sink a lot of time into the character to get them recognised. After all, Melee is usually characterised by high speed and grounded play - Jigglypuff, on the other hand, is one of the slowest characters in the game but is best at aerial play.

Though, to perhaps an even greater extent... Yoshi from the same game is in a similar response - people have insisted for years that Yoshi is capable of winning a major, given his unique tools and techs (like his double jump techs or unique shield stuff) - but it took until 2022 for aMSa to use him to actually win a major (Big House 10), to the point where "Yoshi has potential" was a meme for well over a decade in the community.

Yeah Fox, Puff, and Yoshi are all good examples I can think of, I sorta like having a token member in my Platfighter cast that has a very different control scheme compared to others, but is also very powerful. My idea was that the character has one of the slowest walking speeds in the game and can't dash normally, rather having to boost incrementally forward, so basically a built-in wave dash. While in normal hands this gives the character spastic movement, in a trained player's hands you can move in ways no other character can. This combined with powerful close-ranged attacks makes them one of the strongest melee fighters in the game, however, they are again slow, they are heavy, and they lack a good projectile aside from a very slow flying explosive mine sort of like a slower, bigger Mega Man Danger Wrap. I wonder if that makes the upsides not that good compared to the downsides

I like the idea of removing their dash - you could perhaps play with different control schemes in some way if you wanted! One idea I think could be cool is something like a Morrigan-style dash which moves you upward when used - but I like this concept, the idea of a Danger Wrap type projectile is a lot of fun

Yeah since this fighter is also going to be my final boss in arcade mode, my logic is that while they aren't the level of the standard SNK Boss in terms of immediate power, with some skill you can gain some massive reward on par with those SNK Bosses