Bad Characters Are Just Bad

Brawl Ganondorf, the worst character I ever had the displeasure of maining

Not to sound like a total boomer but back in my day, gamers weren’t afraid to state the plainly obvious.

We were presented with Super Smash Bros. Brawl’s Ganondorf with his mobility that was like a dumpster on ice skates, his lack of any real gap-closers making him extremely susceptible to camping, his lack of killing potential beyond extremely slow and unsafe tools, horrible recovery. If you can think of a bad character trait, Ganondorf has it. You know what we collectively said?

“Yeah, Ganon is shit.”

And 18 years since then (Good grief), that’s still true! Ganon is marginally better as a character since then be it through updating his moveset a smidge or in the greater context of the game being ever so slightly kinder to him but the fact remains that Ganon is a simply bad character. Beyond character loyalty or the sheer pride in beating somebody with a bottom-tier character, there’s no good reason to pick him over anybody else on the roster.

However, I’d say in the past decade or so, this mentality of simply calling a spade a spade has dissipated in exchange for a strange, unrealistic competitive egalitarianism. When you ask any of the prominent top players or video essayists in competitive fighting games about the viability or lack thereof of lesser-played characters, they’ll more often than not start to act like they got asked a life-or-death question, sweat beading down their foreheads, a red laser appearing over their forehead with the fastest trigger finger in the West getting the drop on him. They buckle down, they breathe heavily over their PowerPoint remote and they utter the least offensive option possible.

“A-a-any c-c-character can m-m-make it!”

And we all smile, nod our heads and feel great about this crowd-pleasing response. There’s nothing explicitly harmful here. We love our characters and if you don’t, what are you doing with your time? We want to succeed and we want to succeed with the method we enjoy the most if possible. It feels good to hear.

The problem is in the argument itself. It is not only untrue and ahistorical, it is actively harmful to the audience and the game. It further invests the playerbase in a lie that all characters at the very least at their level are created equal and the only reason they haven’t succeeded is because they haven’t worked hard enough (Huh, where have I heard that before?). Not only that, it freezes any further investigation as to why a character is or isn’t viable, it freezes any attempt to remedy the situation while developer support still exists through voicing concerns under the guise of empirical evidence just being whining about something that isn’t fixable.

So how do we understand and thus defeat this mentality?

It Isn’t 1998 Anymore

Any good bad argument has a nugget of truth tucked away in there. Thankfully for this particularly pervasive one, this doesn’t just have a rhetorically sound notion but an immutable, monolithic truth that no amount of arguing can detour around.

The origin of this bad argument date back to the ’90s when fighting games were still in their larval state. There’s two huge points to be made. For one, the term for fighting game back then was as loose as “Two people throwing punches and kicks under a 2D backdrop”. Many complaints about older fighting games such as Street Fighter II and Tekken 3 are that they don’t adhere to more modern balancing sensibilities given their massive tier parities and frame data/move properties that don’t make sense within the context of the roster and….of course they don’t! None of the modern fighting game infrastructure existed. There was no examples to follow as to how to balance a fighting game, the Internet was in its infancy, tournaments were more or less local arcade affairs. It was a very much “Make it up as we went along” situation for both players and developers, a truly Wild West era.

With that being said, if there was an incredibly overpowered thing discovered in one of these things, there wasn’t an easy solution for developers. They could update some arcade boards but there was no way to ensure it’d reach every cabinet, not to mention how costly it’d be to do that after launch. The most efficient way to go about fixing stuff was to simply release an update as an entirely new game. Super Street Fighter II for instance would be seen as a new season of SF6 or Tekken. Naturally if you were an at-home consumer, you’d have to buy a whole new game which compared to what we have now is very anti-consumer. What used to be a $60+ purchase is now merely patch notes on some website and a few hundred megabytes.

Our methods of distribution have changed dramatically but alas, our mentality hasn’t changed with it. In spite of the obvious era of the Internet, patches that can come out within a day and a playerbase that can instantly receive them and the fact that every other genre in the book has adapted to this, there’s still this odd conservative contingent in the FGC that will simply respond with shit like “Get over it” or “Skill issue” rather than engaging with the topic at hand. Its an enabling of flaws in spite of the fact that we’ve moved past the age of games being an unchanging obelisk.

I don’t even recall this mentality being stronger than the “Pick a top tier” mentality of ‘09ers and prior. Why? Because the old FGC weren’t afraid to acknowledge the fact that lying to the community by saying that you can succeed at a top level with straight up unviable characters was thereby wasting their time and actively harming the longterm perception of the game. Its toxic positivity to look a hundred Ganon mains dead in the eyes and tell them that they can win EVO with him just because a random top player picked him for one round of one set to win a tournament. You are sentencing them to hundreds of hours of meaningless, joyless grinding chasing a pipe dream.

I’ll be the first to tell you that if you don’t enjoy a game in its current state in spite of its flaws, you need to move on with your life. Your time and your wrists aren’t forever. However, there’s plenty of reason to critically engage with a game beyond the platitudes. For one, your discourse may eventually result in change. Its a small chance but with enough support, it could very well happen and if it truly is a good idea, it’s worth fighting for. The second is that even if your critiques are wrong, it could further not only your but other people’s perspective on the metagame.

In short, this enabling mentality fucking sucks. You can dress it up in a toxic teenager ‘Git gud’ or some dipshit with a webcam ‘Anybody can succeed if you grind hard enough!’ toxic positivity way, it simply doesn’t hold to empirical evidence of character tournament usage/win statistics nor basic competitive game design philosophy (E.g all characters can’t be the same, therefore there needs to be better and worse characters).

Bad And Obsolescence

Now I think there’s a big enough distinction between bad characters and obsolete characters that its worth talking about. Both suck, both could be more and both will be defended by the most sycophantic braindead members of the community that somehow, someway have a platform but their awfulness requires different solutions.

Sometimes due to circumstances in the meta, its not unheard of for a character to be both bad and obsolete. They’re completely unrewarding to play (So even if they were the best in the game, it simply wouldn’t be fun) and outclassed in their archetypes, this goes for many Mishimas from around Tekken 6 like Kazuya or Heihachi versus Bob fulfilling the same purpose but with a far lower barrier for entry and more often than not more rewarding.

But let’s go back to Smash. Bad characters are best described as characters that fundamentally suck. Their abilities don’t gel with the game’s meta, they have poorly thought-out design and they’re simply antithetical to competitive viability.

Like I started this article, take Ganon for instance. Ganondorf is everything the Ultimate meta is not. He’s slow, he’s fairly predictable in approaching, he relies on getting in on the opponent and reeking havoc, he doesn’t have zoning options, his combos are more like 2-hit tech chases or confirms rather than multi-hit guaranteed 0-deaths, every single thing he does carries a huge amount of risk if he’s read, shielded or out-maneuvered. He’s Captain Falcon’s kit slapped on top of a slow body which goes entirely against Falcon’s design to begin with and the most change we’ve had in over 20 years is giving him Smash attacks with bigger range.

On paper, Ganon’s design philosophy is that he trades everything for raw killpower (Which doesn’t even work out in the meta but we’ll get there). He can theoretically kill you in 2–4 hits if he reads you right so therefore, we can only expect that the smartest players will rise to the top using him.

As decades of Smash history has utterly curbstomped character optimists time and again, that expectation is wrong. Walk with me for a thought experiment, let’s say we all sit around and figure out how to make Ganon viable without breaking everything down and starting from scratch. Okay, so lets take the one strength he has and crank it to max volume. Killpower. Fuck it, from now on, Ganon’s Smash attacks won’t kill at 40–60%, they’ll kill anywhere on the stage guaranteed at 0. That sword is now a guillotine. We have taken this archetype as far as it’ll go…..

…..and it’ll still suck. It’ll be better but it still won’t be a viable strategy especially when compared to the rest of the meta. He’ll still be slow, he’ll still be clunky, he’ll still have a huge hitbox, he’ll still be useless against zoners. Worst of all, he’ll still be a worse option for 0-deathing people than so much of the meta. Steve, Kazuya, Luigi, ROB, Wario, Peach are all known for insane kill combos that can start as soon as 0%. The difference is that all of those options are quicker and safer to start than our theoretical 0% Smash attacks. Not only that, they typically have extra layers than Ganon as characters (Steve and Wario force you to play the game by their rules and Kazuya doesn’t have to play your game at all via wavedash) to respect their 0-deaths. The best thing about Ganondorf in Smash is that you don’t have to play Ganondorf to do Ganondorf things. Any argument for an execution barrier in Ganondorf’s moves versus a zero-to-death staple combo isn’t taking into account that people who aren’t committed to perfecting their execution for their character of choice simply aren’t going to be top players to begin with.

You haven’t made a good character by simply changing a percentile here or there, you’ve made a gimmick. Ganon will continue to suck no matter how strong his kit is because his kit isn’t good to begin with. In order to fix bad characters, you need to get down to the ground level and uproot the foundation. Ganondorf along with bad characters like him need a whole remodel lest their meme reputation is all they rise up to.

Obsolete characters are a different bag though again not entirely divorced. In essence, these characters are good on paper, conductive to the meta but suffer either because a character gets a very similar or better reward for less effort or power creep as newcomers take up more advanced roles that outclass the older character. Both of these are a reality of a series growing its roster and evolving but also amendable through attention and buffs.

Marth in Ultimate is the most relevant example. He has a rock solid meat-and-potatoes kit with defined strengths and weaknesses while also having the tipper mechanic that rewards skillful spacing. However, nobody picks Marth for any reason beyond character loyalty. Lucina is practically the exact same character except without a tipper mechanic in exchange for ever so slightly lower optimal damage output. That’s just it though, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze compared to the much easier alternative. This is all without even talking about the myriad of viable swordies in Ult like Roy or Aegis.

Now this, you actually can solve through changing their numeric balance or in more extreme cases adjusting their moveset to keep up with the changing gameplay. However, when you do the latter there’s always the looming danger of losing the character’s original identity in the process and thus alienating the fans that have played them through thick and thin. Look at Tekken 8 Jack for example. Jack has been viable from Tekken 6 & 7 as a character with great range, great lows and the strongest grappling game after the Kings and Marduk.

What do they do for 8? He’s a stance rushdown character. Sure, he’s been viable but I don’t think it’d be unfair to say that he’s a completely different character to his previous iterations. Characters need viability but they also need a concrete identity, a vision for design. Slapping Steve’s kit and attributes over Ganon would certainly make Ganon viable but it would lack a distinct playstyle which results in him being obsolete to characters doing the same thing but with a smaller hitbox.

So with both of these, the end result is the same. You get an objectively bad character that people waste their time on because they either don’t know better or out of character loyalty. It doesn’t meet their design potential and is an Achilles’ heel for both playstyle diversity and enjoyment. Call a spade a spade. A bad character is simply one that isn’t conductive to the meta.

Conclusion

To end this rant, I’m not trying to make a utilitarian argument for character design like say the designers of Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite who argued that the X-Men and Fantastic Four characters like Magneto or Dr. Doom weren’t necessary to the roster as several characters served their same function.

Characters are not functions. I don’t know any 7 year old that fell in love with a fighting game because of a frame 3 jab or being the 3rd best zoner in the game or some semantic bullshit. They fell in love with the aesthetic, with how the characters look, with their stories and them being able to do cool shit!

So when you objectify characters as something that HAS to stay the way it is, that it can’t evolve into something greater because “That’s how the game was made” in this day and age, you effectively close off a new generation from appreciating them in the long run. That’s against retaining players.

I have been conscious of every Nintendo generation since the GameCube and I have followed competitive Smash since the early 2010s. I am now closer to my 30s than the start of my 20s. The only consistent factor in all of that is Ganondorf in Smash Bros. sucks ass. At a certain point, after so long of nothing changing despite everything evolving, I have to concede that it really does feel like a fact of life akin to death and taxes.

But that’s not the way things are supposed to be, infact I’d go so far as to say that fighting game discourse now is worse than it was back then. We have shifted from the vibes of “XYZ characters suck ass and they aren’t even worth your time to play, don’t bother” to a teen sports movie vibe of “Anybody can win if they try hard enough!”. Its braindead.

100% objectivity in fighting game design sucks as seen in the MvCI example but this vibes-based dialogue about things objectively provable through statistics, character usage, etc is some even worse bullshit. You’d think that in the era of instantaneous patches and being able to exchange videos and livestreams globally that with it, our discourse would evolve. We’ve only managed to sell the same rhetoric that was sensible due to a lack of online patches/congregation in new, shinier packaging except now, it doesn’t make sense.

There is no two ways about it. Until you really sit down, address the elephants in the room and look at characters by their merits rather than through the lens of the player in the absolute wildest possible scenarios, nothing is going to change. We’ve grown detached to how the game works in all the worst ways, we’ve bought into the “Just one more bracket and I’ll win” shtick that gambling addicts fall into. Something has to change.

But I don’t think it will. With every new game, the new generation replaces the old. A new generation of stupid teenagers with nothing better to do but believe that they can make it onto the big stage and sometimes, you’ll find one of the old gens whose best years were a decade ago (If they even had that going for them) hucking some teen sport movie rhetoric to sell them on a quick fix to getting up there. Its fucking embarrassing that in spite of how much we know and are able to discover through new tools and communication, the best we can do is fairy tale tropes. That’s the apex of millions of people’s toil and grinding. We aren’t even able to objectify why a character is good or bad, it has to be some fucking goulash that hey, if you take a random sip of it, you might get caviar! You might also get salmonella, find out for yourself!

I’m sure I’ll hear all about it with the new Smash, how this one guy beat somebody with Ganon 2 months into the meta long before optimal defense and zoning has been uncovered, how that’s definitive proof that anybody can make it. But it won’t hold up over time, just like that one Dedede win in 4, just like Ganon with somebody who shall go nameless 3 months into Ult. See, unlike the oldheads I criticize, I’m more than happy to admit that I’m nobody and over the hill when it comes to these games. At the same given though, I’ve seen it all and I’m more than willing to call spades spades. I ain’t backing down, Ganon sucks and if you play him expecting to win Super Smash Con, you’re a goddamn idiot. I might be a pessimist but I’m not a defeatist, I think things can be way better if we take a serious look at balance.

Ganon has always been bad and as long as the idiot hucksters are in charge, he always will be. The big question is how long are we going to sit here and pretend that this is the way things always have to be?

In short, when you look at a competitive game especially one you plan to sink serious time into, look at your character objectively. Is this what you’re comfortable anchoring yourself to? If not, explain to others why. You might learn more than you expect and if you’re right, you might wind up changing it but things will only change if you put the gears in motion.