Shroob
:
Falcon practically had no canon to go off of. All he had was the high-speed spirit of F-Zero, giving Sakurai near-carte blanche to do whatever he wanted so long as the high speed was represented. And at the time, there was no speedy, mid-heavy, projectile-less brawler juggling fast weak moves and strong slow moves.
On the other hand, if Lyn were to reflect the spirit of her origins in FE7 (middling Str, Spd-focused, kinda fragile), she would interfere with Marth's niche way too much. There's a reason that despite her immense popularity, she's still an Assist Trophy.
Oddball
:
Look, Greninja and Sheik are both ninjas. They have the same job in the Final Fantasy sense. No one can deny that. But it goes farther than that:
Ryu and Doc are close in moveset, but their themes are separate.
I'm fine with characters that share aesthetic but not function: Marth and Ike are blue-haired heroic swordsmen, but one's quick and skillful while the other is slow and strong. I also like characters that share function but not aesthetic as
Venus of the Desert Bloom
noted about Bayonetta and Sora. And I not just accept, but embrace clones, semi-clones, and echoes because any functional and aesthetic overlap that may happen is a result of saved development time.
It's when a character is built from the ground up just to result in having the same aesthetic/function combination as another character that it gets glaring.
CrusherMania1592
:
Like I said before, clones (including semi-clones and explicit echoes) are okay because they owe their existence to decreased development time. This includes Roy from Marth and Wolf from Fox.
Greninja is in a precarious position because he was made from the ground up and ended up intruding on Sheik's niche in terms of a combination of aesthetics and function. Palutena was
originally unique thanks to her having a Mii-like customs system, but since that system was cut, she's now in Zelda's niche in a similar way.
Perkilator
:
Frankly, I think Bandana Waddle Dee would intrude on Meta Knight's niche as a small-bodied weapon wielder with quick strikes. If there was no Meta Knight and just Byleth, things would be fine since Byleth uses many different weapons. But with Meta Knight, it results in glaring overlap.
WeirdChillFever
:
"Dark and sneaky aesthetic" is too broad of a category to lump Sheik and Joker together. Sheik is a no-frills ninja, while Joker brings in the JoJo-esque style of Persona 5 with him (Persona 5 being more JoJo-esque than any previous Persona actually), constantly striking poses and retaliating with his Persona for a beatdown when things look dire.
I can see what you mean in Sheik and Joker having similar moveset functions, though, but again, even discounting Joker's Persona gimmick, I'm fine with characters that share function but not aesthetic.
Jondolio
:
I apologize if it seems like I'm pushing my opinion as fact in this thread. People keep telling me I do that, and that's a problem that I've been trying to work on.
That said, I'm not afraid to back my opinions with more thorough reasoning or with other facts. Both are necessary for opinion writing in anything applicable.
I'm also still open to having my view changed; I just didn't feel like writing out "change my view" in the thread title this time.