This is a really old thread... but be reasonable by what is meant by "Masahiro Sakurai personally decides and programs every piece of frame data in the game." I'm not convinced that he actually came up with all those various numbers; it would seem more like he personally inspected everything and approved it... which is very reasonable. If I were in his shoes, I'd be personally deciding every piece of frame data too in the sense that I'd never let anything in the game without my explicit approval.
Anyway, the complaints about brawl's balance are seriously ridiculous. I don't care how big your team is or how much time you take; things, even obvious things, are going to slip through the cracks. It's really mind boggling that so many people are so indignant over King Dedede's chaingrab; did anyone have this sort of response to Sheik's chaingrab in melee? Where are the topics saying "melee sucks, Sheik's down throw is obviously going to chain against a lot of characters, how did they miss this?" We don't ask because it's not really reasonable; things get missed, other things are the product of late in development changes with unexpected consequences.
For that matter, a lot of the questions you guys like to pose about brawl could be asked about melee. For instance, in melee, how could any competent game designer possibly look at Jigglypuff and Kirby, the two floatiest of characters, side by side and possibly conclude they were equal? What do you figure they intended Mewtwo to be able to do in combat at all? When they were designing the shields, did they even bother to look at what they gave to DK and Mr. Game & Watch? They didn't even test all the interactions; look at how buggy Mr. Game & Watch really is. They didn't test what happens if you max out the power of Oil Panic, and they didn't test how Bowser's down throw interacts with him (and Jigglypuff). Mr. Game & Watch can't even L-cancel all of his aerials! They obviously INTENTIONALLY made Pichu garbage; where is the outrage? There are all sorts of random things we could point out about melee. Did they not notice that Roy's up special was an instant kill move on the super light characters on Green Greens? Speaking of Roy, what were they thinking? He's total garbage, and no rational person could look at him next to Marth and think he is worth anything. Look at the Ice Climbers; did they not consider the painfully obvious question of what happens if Nana keeps hitting someone Popo has grabbed to extend the grab? Look at some of the stalls the exist in the game; did they not consider what Peach could do with her Peach Bomber on walls or what Jigglypuff could do with rising Pound? Some of the balance choices throughout are just baffling; what could have possibly inspired them to give Marth more grab range than Yoshi? Did they really think Ness's yoyos were functional attacks? If Zelda is supposed to be the half of Zelda/Sheik that kills, why does Sheik have that crazy forward aerial? The fact that Peach's down smash got past any tester is just mind boggling.
I'm sure someone is really angry after reading that, but you'd miss the point. It's perfectly reasonable all of those things are in melee. Do you want to know the real reason they're there? Melee was made with a limited timetable with closed development probably with a group of testers who weren't all that good at the game and certainly weren't even focusing on the mode we consider the competitive standard. The final product wasn't looked at for the whole development time; radically different things were good/bad in development, and the things that turned out to actually be the major hurdles to balance were probably not even on the radar. Balance wasn't even the only concern; when they made new characters like Sheik, a lot of their goal was to make them fun as well as functional. Sheik is very fun for a lot of players regardless of the horrible things she does to the game's balance. History even shows that fighting games that have this kind of development inevitably always have lots of broken stuff and various things that leave most players scratching their heads; it's just how it is. You should more be thankful that the game wasn't plagued by systematic flaws like smash 64 was with its shieldstun and blockstun and that it didn't have any bugs that ruined the game at a high level.
So, that's how it is with the game we pretty uncontroversially like (melee). Why do people refuse to see that brawl is the same way? There's stupid stuff in it, and some of the design decisions are simply baffling. And do you know what it means? It means nothing. Sakurai is still competent, and he wasn't biased. The game is honestly a legitimately good game, and there is honestly a lot to enjoy. In fact, isn't it a good sign that your favorite low tier who isn't going to be winning still has attributes that make you want to play as him? Would you prefer low tiers (who exist regardless, by the way) to be massive pieces of garbage that are only good for laughing at? Trying to tell someone their character sucks is already just about the most controversial thing you can do on smashboards; Sakurai definitely succeeded in the balance in the sense that in almost every if not every character he put enough positive qualities for there to be people who would want to take that character to a high level. Seriously, Sakurai didn't do a bad job, and what we got for a game should not have been surprising to us. I think a lot of people who are convinced that brawl sucks really were just expecting something impossible, something way better than we got with melee or smash 64 or that you'll ever get from a fighting game that is single major release no patch.
