You know what I consider "Japanese art style"? Street Fighter. Warioware. Castlevania. Metroid. Star Fox. Animal Crossing. Sonic. Plenty more, many of them in Smash.
These are series that are Japanese in origin and actually bother to have an art style. The creators put in some sort of effort to differentiate themselves from other game series. You can't sit a character from Animal Crossing and Street Fighter side-by-side and claim they're from the same series, it's impossible. Their visual design is so strong that the Smash team has to make adjustments and take artistic liberties just to keep the cast's presence from becoming more jarring than Mugen sprite rips.
Meanwhile, in Fire Emblem:
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The above characters aren't playable in Smash Bros., but if they were the Smash team wouldn't have to change anything about them. They're generic.
They exhibit the same core issue you see from Marth, Lucina, Roy, Corrin, Robin and so on: these "characters" look like the same mannequin copy-pasted over and over. If you wanted to recreate these characters as Miis or put them in your Jerma rumble, all you'd have to do is make one central body+face, copy it 50 times and change the hair or costumes. The eyes are the same. The head shapes are the same. Same mouths, same noses, same skin tone. Even their bodies are the same hyper-idealistic "skinny and child-like" figure that anime-loving creeps are drawn to. And from what I can tell in Smash, they have the same personality as well.
It's not limited to visuals either. Fire Emblem has become a running gag in Smash for a reason. Every character added from the series plays exactly the same. Even if Ike and Marth have different swords, both will end up mashing forward-air and dash dancing the entire time. And this seems to be contagious since you see characters like Cloud doing it too. Hell, if I didn't tell you Cloud is from a totally different series you'd think he
was from Fire Emblem. Same with Palutena.
I mean, look at this garbage:
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You mean to tell me, 100% honestly, that you'd be able to tell me these characters
aren't from the same series if you were unfamiliar with Nintendo?
"But ps_," the fanboys cry, "You just cherry-picked those fifteen characters. There are plenty of Fire Emblem characters who don't look like boring anime!" And for once in their sad lives they would be right. There are examples of somewhat unique designs in the series, presumably because the game's director realized if they didn't let the art team do something different every now and then they'd kill themselves. But none of those designs are playable in Smash and they never will be.
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Where's this goofball? Why didn't he make it in?
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What about this big fat *****? Why can't we play as her? Surely she'd use different moves than Marth.
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Or what about this chad? I would play as this guy.
I guess modeling all of those above characters would take more time than simply copying assets from Marth or Lucina, though, and it'd take even longer to work out their movesets. So instead you get to enjoy this refreshing new edition from the Fire Emblem series, one that's making waves throughout the internet for reasons nobody with 2+ neurons can derive any reason from.
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Oh, what? He's not from Fire Emblem, despite being drawn in the
exact same art style? Could have fooled me!
I hate these **** series. "The game is Japanese, so it can pile in all the forgettable anime they want" is a platitude I'm tired of hearing. At this rate characters with actual effort put into their design will be a minority in Smash Bros., all so the team can make room to advertise this uninspired nonsense to western audiences. And there's droves, no,
armies of series sycophants who will excuse this drivel, then continue to ask for...
Who? Isaac? What's he from, some JRPG nobody played? Kind of a far cry from Ridley and K. Rool, don't you think?
tl;dr -
My thoughts on anime trash in Smash (and the people who advocate/excuse it):
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