Unconventionality/uniqueness is LITERALLY what Nickelodeon's golden era was about. Trying to turn this game into Smash with Nick characters runs completely counter to the entire point of Nickelodeon in the first place
Despite being a huge Nick fan growing up and being a big fan of Nicktoons video games, I fully wrote this game off as another Punchtime Explosion when it first leaked. Didn't stop me from making a roster prediction or two, but it was gonna be an "I'll definitely be getting this at some point", not, "This looks like the people making it actually cared, easy day 1 purchase" as soon as the actual trailer dropped
I know alot of y'all love trend hopping from platform fighter to platform fighter but NASB's shortcomings fall solely on high expectations and a fanbase full of unwillingness to accept that every platform fighter has to follow the design and rules of Smash to a T
But like, is it really even fair to call NASB a failure?
In about a year and a half-ish of dev time,
- NASB launched with 20 characters
- 20 stages
- (2 more of each being added a couple months later for free)
- soundtracks for each stage as well as a bunch of unique menu ones
- a functioning arcade mode at launch
- all the while at one point around launch being THE top selling game on Steam, above noteworthy decades history franchises like Battlefield
- all by a dev team of around 8-ish people (some of which didn't even work on NASB) across the world from Nick's HQ, with a debatably less than reliable publisher and countless petty restrictions from Viacom themselves
Not to mention pretty much every out there pick was FOUGHT FOR by the dev team to be included (Nigel, PTM, Lucy, Oblina, etc) ALL THE WHILE, most likely working on this game during the pandemic, only to go on and get nominated for best fighting game of the year it released, and it's release trailer creating almost unanimous online buzz and countless hysterical memes that brought pretty much the entire internet together in a time when we couldn't be further apart
In other words, I wish more people acknowledged this game as the living miracle it is instead of being down in the dumps over a handful of characters not making the cut
Edit: And of course the free update inclusions of voice acting with an on/off switch, rollback netcode online at launch, items, alt costumes. Shouldn't be a big deal but when Tekken is charging for frame data it's worth noting