Is Lucina designed by Sakurai to be outclassed by Marth for an underdog hype while still viable?

[Feryn Hyrk]

First of all hello ppl from Lucina's board, my first topic here. I'm really passionate about Lucina playing like everyone of you so don't get this topic as some trolling or anything.

So, we all now how the lack of Marth's tipper, in the end of the day, it's not really beneficial. Now my main point is last patch 1.0.4, I know Marth only had it's counter bug fixed right? So they think he is fine as it is... now Lucina had the counter bug fixed AND a change to her jab's knockback, wich I thought it was a buff to make the two hits combo better but ppl said it was a nerf.

So she was nerfed even though she was already inferior... made me think that Sakurai WANTS her to not be fully balanced. We all know this happened clearly before with Pichu even though Pichu was unbalanced by A LOT, the idea could carry on to a lightly degree maybe...

So, do you guys agrred with me? Do you think Lucina won't be buffed because her idea was to be outclassed by Marth while still viable, making winning with her more satisfying and hype? Maybe to imitate to an extent the hype of playing a low tier in Melee's tournament.... like and underdog but not much?

 

[CommanderRin]

I doubt Roy was designed to be inferior to Marth, it just happened to be that way.

Same think with Lucina, though we have to understand that she was much more raw %damage and knockback.
And this allows us to space much more diversely.

Don't complain that are girl is "worse", complain that we aren't good enough to make her shine!

 

[Feryn Hyrk]

I doubt Roy was designed to be inferior to Marth, it just happened to be that way.

Same think with Lucina, though we have to understand that she was much more raw %damage and knockback.
And this allows us to space much more diversely.

Don't complain that are girl is "worse", complain that we aren't good enough to make her shine!

It's more because not only it started that way but even after a balance patch nothing was done to give her and advantage.

I don't know if it is a complaint either, it's not like I'll stop playing her anyway, but rather a discussion about Sakurai's intention with her... so we know what to expect about patches.

Also, there is a much broader problem that can be related to this... characters that are clone-like suffer from a problem that one cannot be freely buffed to be better, it still has to mantain the initial different characteristic from its clone/semiclone. What this means is that as long we have Toon Link, Link will probably never be really fast. That is not an absolute problem, it's just Sakurai's style anyway... he could make the difference between then by using different itens from the Zelda franchise... but I think you got the point...

But to be fair, this Link-TL, Falcon-Gnondorf, Pit-Darkpit (Arrows->faster/knockback vs damage %) Mario-DrM Fox-Falco (this one is more close though) it's kind of different about the way he aproached Marth and Lucina.

I just hope that if he wants to really balance them to differentiate each other he goes through a different route without nerfing their power and speed.

 

[TeaTwoTime]

Perfect balance has never been Sakurai's primary intention. Basically, Lucina offers a slightly different playstyle to Marth that punishes bad spacing less but also rewards perfect spacing less - basically, this means that lower level players may have more success with her, but that at high level play she is inferior to Marth because very good spacing is required. Her optimal playstyle is also Marth's optimal playstyle, which involves using your range to its fullest extent, and she just can't provide the power that Marth can when that optimal play is achieved.

I don't think the intention was to make her outclassed, as such; the focus would have been the trade-off of making her easier to use, but with less overall potential. Nothing wrong with this as far as I can see.

 

[Wintropy]

I picked her up because I always wanted to play Marth but found him to be too tricky to master for my liking.

I doubt Sakurai meant anything profound by it, he just wanted to make her a character that's easier to play and still rewarding to get to used to~

 

[Daybreak]

Whether she is better than Marth is not important, Sakurai doesn't focus on making a clone character inferior.

Lucina is like how Knuckles is to Sonic. She's the brute force that dances out of danger, while Marth is all about the crits. From what I have seen they have very different play-styles.

 

[Locuan]

Hey there everyone. This thread is pretty much speculation. No one will be able to truly know what the game designers true intentions where when creating the characters for the game. It would only be answered by asking the designers themselves. However, as for the differences between Marth and Lucina, they are clearly stated in this thread. Please refer to that thread in order to view their differences. Before the thread derails into a Marth vs. Lucina topic I will go ahead and lock this.