On the topic of overpowered characters, I would like to share an opinion that will most likely recieve a lot of backlash, but I'm curious what others have to say/do they agree...
TBH, I love the creativity of the P:M team in terms of the directions they took each character; no one feels homogenized.
Yet at the same time, some of the design choices feel like they were made with "no balls". I'm obviously not trying to insult, but when I say they were made with "no balls", I'm talking about the fact it seems like some of these characters were made with the thought process of "what would make a perfect character?" instead of something that actually should have been "whats the
bare minimum for a melee character to be as viable as say... C. Falcon or ICs?"
What I mean is that even though the top tiers are allegedly being used as viability models, it doesn't really seem like actual character concept is being applied. To elaborate, the "viability model" seem to strictly pertain to whether the character is able to compete with Fox/Falco/Shiek/Jiggs. IMO,
it is bad to just go by that because your character design is completely unrestricted.
You see, most of the top and high tiers have weaknesses almost as well defined as their strengths. For instance, if I asked you: What are Fox's strengths and what are his weaknesses? Most people would say that he is fast, powerful, and has ridiculous amounts of options but is easily combo'd/gimped, chaingrabbed, and has technical consistency barriers. The strengths and weaknesses of Falco, Jiggs, Marth, Peach, C. Falcon, ICs, Ganon, Doc, and Samus are all just as easy to pinpoint. This is because these weaknesses are significant to their playstyles... in fact, so significant... they are
counterbalances.
Yet when I watch a recent video such as this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woFlo3Sh8AU
I have great difficulty attempting to determine ROB's statistical weaknesses let alone an obvious counterbalance. He seems to have great aerials, solid aerial mobility, great grabs, platform ranged AND spammable tilts, decent WD, excellent projectiles for both offense and defense, excellent edge guarding, good recovery. The only thing I can think of is that he is a big target, which doesn't offset his game because it gives him the extra range, and is difficult to take advantage of by the opponent because he has such quick mobility options and projectiles to keep the opponent out. There is nothing definitive that holds ROB back.
Here is another match:
http://www.youtube.com/user/JCaesar007#p/u/18/LPAE0ROQnt4
Again, I'm watching it trying to determine Zelda's major counterbalance. I notice she has an excellent ability to cover a lot of her mistakes, projectiles (useful for stage control and defense), powerful fair/bair, quick dsmash, powerful utilt, effective high percent KO set ups, good recovery, and amazingly powerful throws. What are her weaknesses? Thats she is light and has poor air and dash speed? (Even though they are both offset by teleport). Just like ROB, what weaknesses are there are trivial and drowned out by free reigning strengths.
When I see how characters like ROB and Zelda are coming along, I feel like they were designed with a mentality like: "How do we make ROB/Zelda viable? How about we just make EVERYTHING pretty darn good?"
We all know that isn't true, though, since thought was clearly put into making each character looks and feel different (props to P:M team), but the lack of restrictions and counterbalances in their playstyle is bad because half of learning your character is compensating for weaknesses and emphasizing on the strengths. If there are no weaknesses to compensate for, then the character stops feeling like a melee character, is that much easier to play, and it ruins the playability of other characters.
Take UMvC3 for example, low execution characters with little to no counterbalances like Wesker and Wolverine ruin the playability of other characters because they don't take devotion in order to compensate for those kinds of issues, whereas high execution characters like C. Viper do not.
*However, I guess my main point is: is that you gotta have balls with these character designs. Think along the lines of C. Falcon, the character has quite a few weaknesses, he has a bad recovery (even though he just keeps coming back like the terminator), has no projectile, and is easy to combo/overall bad defensive options. However, through hard pressing, you can use his amazing DD, his powerful aerials, and his very supplementary throw game to win. He proves to us that it actually takes a lot less to be viable than you think. But if Captain Falcon as we know him didn't exist and he was somehow as sucky as Zelda was in Melee, I feel like you guys would've made sure he had an improved grab range, better OoS, given him the ability to air dodge out of Up-b, made side-b JC'able, etc.
What I find most ironic, is that in retrospect, Sonic and Snake from Demo 1 were actually almost genius design in both being unique feel and folllowing the rules of every character's definitive weaknesses counterbalancing their strengths. Snake had the amazing stage control but poor close range control and gimpable recovery, while Sonic had amazing mobility in every respect, but had a lot of trouble killing which made him very enduring (though bair should've been a bit stronger)
Everyone hated on these character's flaws and didn't give them a chance, myself included, and I guess its because we were all spoiled by the fact they could be changed. I now realize that their design choices actually had balls and I really appreciate that you guys believed that they were ready for public release because they definitely met the criteria of counterbalancing. I suppose I should be disappointed in myself as a member of the community that drove you guys to feel these characters had to recieve changes (particularly Snake)
Now though, the design choices confuse me. You've proved that you can give characters great and unique strengths, lets see 'dem weaknesses
