Kirby does have to work harder than any other character. Kirby's approach options are abysmal. Kirby players need to 'juke' opponents in order to land hits. Any other character in the game has an 'easy' way to hit opponents. Most F-Attacks have a built in dash, along with large hitboxes.
Kirby will lose to most F-Attacks, specials, or grabs by either range, hitbox, or priority when approaching. And if we do manage to land a hit our knockback at low percents is super high, meaning we are lucky to follow up at all. Coupled with our low damage, its just rough to build %.
SSB4 has a ton of shield and roll dodging with ground play. This would be good if Kirby couldn't be grabbed out of so many moves by other characters.
Air play is atrocious too. Our short jumps are really high, and fast - which limits our approach options even more. The animation lag on Dair, Air Dodging, and Nair are very painful too. This is exemplified with the short range Kirby has.
This all leads to Kirby being a character that requires a ton of mental reads, most matchup knowledge, and relying on the opponent to make mistakes or fall for the jukes.
I win with Kirby just fine, but I'm having to try so much harder than if I played Captain Falcon, ZSS, or even Link.
I feel as if Kirby is a character that was designed to have good air game, short range, fast animations, low damage, and low scaling knockback. Which would lead to combos if you're able to quickly follow up where the opponent moves, and counter their counters in the air. Yet, Sakurai comes off as anti-combo, and this really draws the question on Kirby.
The thing I don't get is why Kirby is so restrained while Jigglypuff, Diddy Kong, and even ZSS have singular traits that are much better than Kirbys, with no clear drawbacks to them. And even most characters have combos that they can pull off 80%+ of the time with skill. With Kirby any follow up hits past 35% feel like luck or misplay from the opponent.
Don't understand why nearly every character has very unique, clearly identifiable game play that is focused on in their balancing. Meanwhile Kirby's entire purpose seems to be restricted.
Kirby's knockback scaling should be reduced on regular attacks, and the overall slowness of Kirby should be looked into. Like, other characters do what Kirby does, just better, and faster. If you're very good with Kirby, chances are you'd perform much better with another character.
