I'm talking about Bowser more so than DK in this post
when you're using Sheik and you hard read or hard punish your opponent at 60% only to get close to nothing out of it.
What's the problem with this? It's hard enough to find actual drawbacks in Sheik's design, but this is one of them, and it's fine. Heavies getting big conversions off of hard reads and the mobile/light hitters not is just one of the trade offs between the two archetypes.
When we're talking about bad character design due to disproportionate risk/reward, Bowser's is, "bad," compared to what? Sheik's entire gameplan was
and still is, "No punish window." The whole character is built on the grounds of extreme safety on practically everything with almost no actual opportunity to punish anything ever. Sheik might still have the most disproportionate risk/reward in the game, and that isn't changed by Sheik getting little off of hard reads. This scenario applies to several characters around Sheik in the higher tiers as well. On the other end of things, there's Jigglypuff, who has subpar reward but is forced to commit to unsafe approaches all the time. Or Dedede, who can play somewhat safe, but struggles to kill and gets wrecked in disadvantage. These scenarios apply to many characters in the lower ends of the tier list, and there are many characters in between who I would argue have disproportionate risk/reward in one direction or another: Wario, Lucario, Roy, Luigi, Little Mac, Falco, etc.
Bowser's grab looked at in a vacuum (i.e. the frame data), is low risk high reward, but in context of the character as a whole, if it really is bad design, then what is it, "bad," compared to? He's a grappler with strong single hits that kills early with many different moves, but has an awful disadvantage state. In other words, he is total high risk high reward, and his grab confirm doesn't make me think otherwise, it just confirms the idea further.
A character with big weaknesses will be
bad unless they have seemingly extreme reward to balance them, and the strengths looked at outside the context of the weaknesses (or the character's other strengths) appear to overcentralize the character. I would say Bowser's weaknesses do justify his grab confirm. But on the other hand, when I just talk about Bowser's grab confirm, it ignores every other early kill option he has. When I was watching LordMix yesterday, I legitimately forgot about the grab confirm most of the time he was playing. Not only in the context of his weaknesses, but in the context of his strengths, Bowser's grab confirm makes sense. It is just one more heavy hitting option on a character that has been known since release for early kill options.
It doesn't overcentralize Bowser or force him to rely on grab, "more than half the time." Like others have said, LordMix's play style proved otherwise, considering he used at one point or another all of Bowser's moves except for fsmash, dsmash, and oddly enough, dtilt and utilt, if I remember correctly. He got the uthrow uair twice across the total of ten stocks he played against Ally, one uthrow bair for damage racking, and that was it. He went to game 5 with Ally, and threw him probably less than ten times, with a total of three conversions off of throws, which compared to Ally's number of throws, damage off of throws, and let alone, number of usmash kills, is miniscule. The match did
not center around Bowser's uthrow uair.
This seems to at least partially stem from grab's massive stigma. Not Bowser's grab, just grabs. Despite Bowser having multiple early kill options, the fact that he can now get them off of grab is reminiscent of Diddy and Luigi. If you look at Bowser's grab reward independently, and then look at the grab reward of Diddy and Luigi independently, it could seem silly. But again, it can't be looked at independently because of course the heavy strengths of Bowser independent of his heavy weaknesses will look overtuned. We can go all the way back to release to see this. Bowser's weaknesses were not well known at the time, and practically everyone thought he was the best character in the game. It's unfair to look at Bowser of all characters strengths in a vacuum, and then say, "effect on the meta," when Bowser will never have the same effect on the meta as Luigi did, and Bowser's gameplan does not center around his grab in the same way that Luigi's did.
