Omega
The Jim Jims
I apologize that neither I nor it seems anyone else have given this set commentary, as its pretty impressive for a first effort. Omega's disadvantage state is absolutely awful and unlike Ganondorf, you don't really give him the power to make up for it in his advantage state, rather a set of rather unique specials. The big one that stuck out to me for this is the Small Shield, as while I'm not usually a fan of limited "per stock" options having it as something of a get out of jail free card to compensate for his weaknesses is pretty cool, allowing Omega to get back to his solid neutral/advantage state if something goes wrong. You do have to be smart with when and how you use them, and you've written out in decent detail how all these moves cover each other's weaknesses. As far as other individual moves go, I'm actually a fan of Dair, it strikes me as a pretty skill intensive move that makes the process of just landing as Omega interesting, and that's not really a subject I even see covered in a lot of movesets.
My primary issue with this set is actually the Specials, 4 of which(counting Shield Special) are gated behind a "limited per stock" ammo mechanic. Omega has 3 separate ammo banks which clutter the UI, and if he runs out of any of the ammo sources he straight up cannot use those moves for the rest of the stock. Inkling and Robin, the main characters in the game who can "run out of ammo", are both capable of getting their ammo back at some point later in a stock, its not really very satisfying to just never have any chance to refuel. I mean even in Omega's home game, he can obviously scavenge more ammo or guns if he runs out, in Smash he just doesn't have that. This also slightly bothers me because the wall and explosives are honestly not even very strong moves on their own merits, especially not the wall. For how much its advertised as the set's core, it has very flimsy stamina and provides the extremely weak reward of "the high ground" for the resources invested in it. I'm not even really convinced by Omega's set that being on the high ground benefits him that much, if anything it might set him up to get juggled. The SCAR by comparison just seems weirdly frustrating to play against, basically just locking the foe down as long as you unload on them. The Small Shield is the only time I was actually convinced on the set doing per stock limited ammo banks, and it strikes me as especially baffling on the wall when its so weak.
Regardless, you're actually pretty good at designing melee combat, and I would encourage you to try again after this set. I'm a bit stingy with my votes and honestly I think a set like this with better specials is something I could ever give that kind of support too, which is very impressive for how early in your career you are.
Girimehkala
If you're going to call him the elephant, than so am I, makes this job a bit easier. Anyway, elephant here has a great Neutral Special in Beast Eye, a hard option to commit too that allows him to counteract his slowness by attacking twice at once, which is a downright incredible advantage. The amount of factors holding Beast Eye back prevent this mechanic from feeling nearly as overbearing as a lot of multi-attacking sets have in the past, though even beyond that you play things very carefully with not giving the elephant good combo options, to prevent him from just sentencing foes to a casual 0 to Death in Ultimate's combo-heavy engine. The set's melee in general feels pretty competently designed, the potential combinations the aerials make with Up Special all being interesting and the standards and smashes providing a number of satisfying ways to play off Beast Eye's capabilities. Honestly some of my favorite bits come in Up Special, Dair, and Dash Attack where the particular movement abilities of these attacks set up the ability to use a second attack at once from a unique positioning that attack could never have before. In spite of how incompetent he is as a "comboer", the Elephant actually feels quite viable overall while not actually being especially overpowered, which is impressive given he has a pretty different gameplan from most characters in the game.
My issue with the elephant comes from, and I know this sounds ridiculously nitpicky, how his power is distributed rather than how strong he is overall. 60 frames of lag to activate Beast Eye is genuinely pretty hard to activate and I feel there's a lot of matches where the Elephant will just never even get one off to ever become a competent threat. The reason I say he's probably still a competitive threat despite that is the absolutely ludicrous ledge game the elephant has, capped off by a really strong recovery, the extremely powerful counter wall, and the hands. The combination of the wall and hands locks down the opponent very hard into a situation that it feels like they'll never really come back from realistically if they're near a ledge, and it feels like with these tools if the foe gets pushed to a ledge they may as well just die. The combination of poison breath and Up Smash into what is basically an instant kill also feels like a bit much to me, it feels just a bit too easy for the elephant to cheese early kills with that. I'm also not really sure I agree with the principle behind the throws that create "alternatives to damage percent" with the weight loss and rage increase, at that point why not just give the elephant more options to deal damage?
If I were to make particular suggestions that I think should be looked at above all else, I think the wall's range absolutely needs to be nerfed, as fun as the option you described with it in FSmash sounds, there's a reason projectiles that strong and with that much range don't exist without more setup than the elephant has to do for that in Smash. It'd also make the ledge situation a fair bit less overbearing to deal with. If the wall, instant kills, and hands lose power though, I think the elephant should absolutely get some put back into Beast Eye, making it more practical to use in any given match. Cutting its lag by a considerable amount once his cheesier tools are weakened would make the set more interesting in my eyes, as it puts more focus on fully utilizing the powerful "combine two attacks" options the set has available without just a single one of them meaning the end for an opponent at 0%.
For the record, in spite of my complaints, I think the set is worth voting as is, and I'm very glad you made it. Its not everyday people who have been around for a long time make sets with experimental balance, and the Elephant pushing the extremes of slow and heavy is good ground to cover for future sets.
Rintaro/Kyouma
I don't think you need me to tell you what's wrong with this set, its pretty obvious from a quick glance. As cool as the concepts provided in the Specials are, the set puts in a pretty minimal amount into playing off them, and its not like enough detail is put in for it to be interesting melee on its own right. This was a 5k word set made for a character I don't think you were very convinced on the set potential of, but basically it meant I can't vote for this set despite it having my favorite concepts of any set you posted this contest.
That said, its a cool basis. The basic blaster pistol has a pretty fun effect if fully charged, not being a true stun but allowing Rintaro to put a lot of pressure on the opponent, sometimes in ways a normal stun of that length couldn't. It becomes a lot scarier when you consider that you can potentially make this shot recur via the ability to recur projectiles from an earlier point in time by storing them in the microwave and then going back in time to when those projectiles are out. The set also messes with the idea of a breakable weapon you can reset back to normal with this, which I thought was a very cool idea even if it wasn't used much. Honestly, given this guy's esoteric collection of gadgets, you probably could have done more with that than just the one breakable glowstick. My biggest problem with the set's core honestly is just, aside from it not being used well, the time travel mechanic is insanely underpowered. Having to commit to it for so much time to get a relatively minor effect on the actual match that only exists for some, admittedly situationally strong, interactions. If I had to make a suggestion, I'd allow Rintaro to attack while the move is charging and still have it get interrupted if he gets hit, a second button press activating the time travel. It'd make it a lot more viable to do things like fix the glowstick and get a good number of projectiles time traveling.
In any case, its cool stuff and I kinda hope the ideas here come back in another set. On a final note, the characterization of this guy who proclaims himself to be a god of technology when he's making these goofy, underwhelming inventions is pretty funny, the quotes serve to make this set more entertaining to read. Should we actually call him Rintaro Okabe or Hououin Kyouma? The set refers to him as the later but we're currently calling him the former into set list.
Misko
Of your non-Kilton sets, this is the one I ended up enjoying the most. The set's core concept of spreading fire to things being pretty much universally good is actually something I enjoy a lot, I know a lot of times when sets mess with fire in a similar way they kind of bog it down in "this is okay to set on fire, this isn't" and it makes the set feel a lot clunkier and less fun. Here, you want your torch on fire, you want your food on fire because that cooks it, you want your sword on fire when that mechanic kicks in, and even sometimes you want the fire to hit your barrels. Not all the time, mind you, the barrels are the one factor where actually controlling the fire matters, but that's good because having at least something to not want it spreading for means there's some strategy to the fire beyond "how do I spread this". If that sounds contradictory with the first point, its partially fine because you can always just not use the barrel if you don't want to worry about the risk it provides and its one element of many you can concern yourself with. I think one of my favorite things to do with the fire is combining it with the breakable spear you can get from the chest to try to land both a flaming and breaking spear on the opponent for a super powerful hitbox. The set gives Misko a surprising amount of options for "hard to set up but really strong payoff" scenarios, like the one with the arrow on Bair, that I happen to enjoy a lot while never reaching the point the whole set feels impractical.
I definitely have my complaints with the set, while it has some options to allow you to style on foes very hard and a centralizing core with the fire, the set kind of branches off in a ton of different directions. The torch, the chest items, whether you want your fire sword on or off, the lanterns, the bomb barrels that you specifically want to move around with the non-flammable spear, these things are generally decent material. I think juggling all of them at once is something the set is not equipped for, the torch in particular feels like something that should not have been trapped to only three moves to make Misko more predictable if he wants to chain hits with it, but not as hilariously predictable as he is right now when basically everything he does with the torch is the exact same. Doesn't give it much depth to its use too. There's also the arrow, which has a very cool application on Bair, but it feels a bit random to have a specific item that only gets its payoff on Bair for playstyle relevance. Its not handled as badly as I make it sound give you can just throw it, but it feels pretty bizarre. I'm not too fond of the obscuring smoke in general, for reasons I think I might've said in chat with Nabbit, it basically just makes a guessing game and takes out the foe's ability to play against you properly, even if its made a lot less annoying by its short duration.
At this point I'm just nitpicking, but I figure I'll talk about the treasure chest since some of the problems are easily fixable. The spear and arrow are pretty good, and I'm fine with the food items as another fire-based reward, but the apple and bird drumstick are absolute garbage as treasure chest rewards go. Needing to commit to two slashes to get 3% out of the bird drumstick is a comical amount of commitment for such a small heal, and the apple heals either
0.2% or 1,2%, which is such a laughable amount of healing it may as well not happen. I also kinda wish it just came from being hit by fire rather than a certain number of flame sword hits to flow a bit better with the set's other options, and for that matter, I think the treasure chest could afford to not be random chance based. I get the idea behind it flavor-wise, but it would be a lot less annoying to get screwed over by getting apples over the more interesting spear or arrow if you could just charge the move X amount to choose you result instead.
Still, this is a pretty fun read and I found it surprisingly never feels like all the nitpicks I've mentioned ever really break anything, they're just that. Nitpicks preventing the set from being deeper or as fun as it could be. It shows you clearly have a good idea of how to make interesting sets by now, just that there's work to be done on ironing out individual flaws.
Kamoshida
With a general decline in the amount of minions I've seen this contest, Kamoshida's take on them is really refreshing and good. The set starts out with a core concept of a rebounding projectile, slaves to play volleyball with your projectiles to keep them in play, and a spectacular finisher on Up Special where you launch all of them in an incredibly powerful state back onto the stage to create mass pandemonium. What really sold me on it though was the demons, with every single one of them having a good mechanic for influencing Kamoshida's projectile game. From the many targets the Pyro Jacks create, the kelpie's ability to store and redirect projectiles, the unique contribution of Andras' "time bomb"-like effect to your bullet hell and minion buffs, the Archangel's Vajra Blast walls, and Eligor's double targets and highly threatening presence all each provide a valuable, unique contribution that I feel minion sets that provide several minions often fail to do. Its a really strong core that makes a genre I often find myself getting bored of(projectile redirection) manage to feel fresh and enjoyable to read.
Honestly, the execution from that point on is one I rarely held issue with. Kamoshida plays off his volleyball and minions in very satisfying ways, definently getting into some very wacky interactions but they never feel too impractical or like they don't serve the set by adding an appopriate amount of depth. I think my actual favorite move might be the Up Throw of all things, because its a really exciting way to use all the volleyballs you have left on stage and seems like visually it would be exceptionally satisfying to pull off. Also really enjoyed the Forward Tilt's contributions to the projectile game, the Down Throw's ability to use all your projectile-related stuff on the foe, basically all the Smashes, Nair's ability to hook onto things to further your air game, there's a shocking number of standout moves in this set and they all honestly flow together pretty well. The set has a decent few options to remain practical too, so its not always delving into crazy things on every move and stays just grounded enough for all the fun its having. I even really like the characterization, fully showcasing how much of an abusive monster Kamoshida is on his minions and with some fun writing relating to his status as a teacher/coach. You probably specifically intended those goofy physics comments for me and I did enjoy them. If I were to complain about one thing, the set might be a bit overtuned right now given how many projectiles the set can have out at once based on setups that don't seem THAT hard at times, but it doesn't really feel downright unfair. Fantastic set, definitely up there with Ulrich for one of my favorites in the contest.
Copy X
An old man named Rool once said that MYM likes its versatility as variations on a theme. That old man is dead now, but he's right, I'm in MYM, and I do like variations on a theme for my versatility. Copy X makes the very smart decision as a weapon switch set to push the entire set towards a specific playstyle of projectile spam and pressure, but switching weapons allows him to take different angles on how he approaches that. This is the kind of thing I need to make a weapon switch not feel like its just creating a set where the options ultimately don't flow together, but the set's projectiles definently are easier to have multiples of out at a time if you're cycling through your options, and a lot of moves set up into or out of projectiles of another type better than their own. Its all simple stuff, sure, but with this as a basis the amount of options the set has stops being needless fluff and actually starts being proper depth, and the set delivers and impressive level of projectile-based play while not actually manipulating said projectiles much.
There were complaints leveled against the set's melee and non-weapon switch moves, and for the most part I don't find myself agreeing with them. The presence of Side Special as a scary presense out of any melee move and the slower projectiles setting up combos mean a lot of these simpler moves are honestly fine as they are, contributing plenty to the playstyle in spite of their simplicity. I will say that while the melee works fine, I do think the two more lackluster throws could've been developed a bit more than they were, they're fine as basic options but I think they stick out as not as good as the rest of the set. I'll also be honest, I don't think it quite makes the top tier of vote for the simple reason that no individual function this set had made me go "oh wow, that's really cool/has tons of depth" because of how basic the approach is. And that's fine, but it just means that I can't muster quite as much enthusiasm for it as I can some of the top tier sets, but this is a very solid moveset that everyone should read.
Bionichute
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