I hadn't touched KIU or any of the Kid Icarus games until, well, the past couple of days. When I first read about Dark Pit's story on Divinipedia and that other Kid Icarus Wiki, stuff like this jumped out at me:
Dark Pit's most notable trait is his independent streak. As the Mirror of Truth was destroyed before the process could be complete, Dark Pit becomes a neutral character, refusing to side with any of the gods. This is shown when he defies Pandora, and flat out refuses Medusa's offer for an alliance. In Chapter 22: Scorched Feathers, he even openly calls out the gods for their selfishness, claiming that they are no better than humans as their wars throw the world off balance.
It really made me feel like this was a deep character. But after seeing the events unfold, I clearly expected far too much. I don't think his role was significant enough to warrant his own theme and I think the idea of ark Pit being a doppleganger and the darkness inside Pit was so unexplored that Dark Pit may as well have been a regular antagonistic character with no relation to Pit at all. It's like the dark angel Brawl skin for Pit was so popular that they felt like they had to make a game about it, but when they actually started making the game, they ditched the idea halfway through. I mean jeez, so many implications in Chapter 6 were just straight up never explored or hinted at ever again. It's pretty disappointing that Pit and Dark Pit didn't parallel each other much in the way Sonic and Shadow paralelled each other in Sonic Adventure 2.
Having said that, my love for Dark Pit as well as most people's, I assume, comes from his Smash 4 character. His Smash 4 character has inferior voice acting to his KIU iteration, but as a character, he's superior to Pit. Pit is... well, just not that interesting in Smash 4. He's a better character in KIU (and also has inferior voice acting in Smash 4) and he's extremely annoying and dumb in Palutena's Guidence, instead of entertainingly awkward and confident. Even his taunts are lame.
Dark Pit is so much more confident and cool even though he's an inferior character without customs. Smash 4 Dark Pit is a dream scenario for DP fans. I mean, look at those quotes!
- "Where's your goddess now?"
- "Can't help but feel sorry for you!"
- "Nice try."
I mean, he seems so antagonistic in Smash 4, far from what hewas in KIU. But if you combine some of those elements of KIU.. stuff like a true realization of the passage I quoted above, and fun stuff like this:
Man, you can just imagine what an awesome game KIU should've been. Overall, I'm not impressed with the game as a whole. And I'm even less impressed with the way they wasted a potential great character in favor of re-hashes of characters that have already been beaten in previous games once or twice. There's hardly a character in the game who's less impactful than Dark Pit. They should've gone the FFXV route and just took Dark Pit out of the game like Square did with Stella if they didn't have a role for him. But yeah, his Smash 4 incarnation is much better.
And regarding Nairo, I think it's a bit silly that everyone thinks he uses Dark Pit because of a theme--largely, no reason at all. He's a top level player. He's not inconveniencing himself for no reason. I'm sure there's an actual reason why he chooses Dark Pit. Might be because of the Electroarm and if he feels like he can kill better off stage than he can vertically with the Upperdash.