All right! So, now I'm home and back from classes (no more for the rest of the day). NOOOOW I can give my full opinion on the roster (even though I haven't been known to show much care for it -- this is because I didn't want to get my expectations too high).
In general, the roster sort of surprised me in a lot of ways. I wasn't expecting
any fan favorites to get in (aka your Ridleys, your K. Rools, your Dixies, your whatever etc etc). I just expected to maybe get some possibly neat characters -- characters that only Sakurai could think to pick, really. That's how his roster choices have always seemed to be and Brawl was sort of the epitome of that. Fans have very little influence on who gets in and of the ones who
have gotten in solely on fans were characters like Mega Man and Sonic -- both of which were fully admitted to be in the game
because of fans.
That said, I am disappointed in one aspect of this roster: no Mewtwo. He's a fan favorite, yes, but I wasn't expecting
newcomer fan favorites to make it. Veteran fan favorites that were not in Brawl seemed likely to me -- it wasn't
that much of a stretch to think Mewtwo would get in seeing GameFreak repromoting Mewtwo and all that jazz for X/Y.
So, basically, I'm not disappointed with this roster at all. In fact, I think it's
better than what we got in Brawl. Why do I think this? I can explain it easily.
Many of the newcomers (excluding the two clones, Lucina and Dark Pit) take a page out of traditional fighting game characters. Rosalina & Luma fills the role of a puppet character, for example. This is really cool and important to notice because in every Smash game up to this point it never seemed like these characters were
properly designed. As in, the characters were just given moves that would
suit the character rather than the character being designed in-tandem with the moves. I'm not saying that every character in Smash isn't designed at all -- I mean, characters like Ice Climbers were designed a certain way for sure from their conceptualization. But some characters, like, just don't have this distinct feeling about them like some of these newcomers do.
Like, in the previous Smash games, there isn't really a character that was purposefully designed with projectiles in mind. Instead, you have characters that
have projectiles but they aren't a focus of the character. I guess that's more of what I mean -- the characters in Smash aren't always designed with a focus in mind. And in some ways, this is what's really beneficial to Smash because it means you can play a character any way you want to and that's been a big thing about why the series has taken off as a competitive title for a lot of people. BUT having the focus for a particular character is a great way to make them distinguishable from the other characters in the game and I feel that's what Smash has been missing with its newcomers until this game.
While Little Mac might seem like a typical newcomer he really isn't. He's purposefully designed to be a
ground-based fighter. That's his focus. Every other Smash character can play both on the air and on the ground but Little Mac actually has
terrible aerial moves -- they actually designed him that way. When I saw that, I was surprised because I didn't believe Sakurai when he said Little Mac would be weak in the air. I thought when he said that he only meant recovery-wise and that Mac would
at least have one decent aerial but from what we've seen since E3,
none of his aerials are good. This means every Little Mac, for the most part, will have to play with a focus on the ground game because that's his design -- he was designed to be a character that fights on the ground.
And that's just one example. I could go into how Robin is what a ranged character in Smash
should have been from the start or how Mega Man is going to have to control space with all his projectiles at his disposal (so in fighting game terms, probably a more zoning-based character in Smash) and how Shulk is a stance character which means every Shulk main is going to have to learn to use those stances to their advantage if they want to be good with him etc etc.
All the new characters, for the most part, are designed so well that it makes me want to try
all of them at least once. In Brawl, I don't think I tried every newcomer once when I unlocked them. I think I gravitated more towards who I liked or was interested in (in this case, Wolf, Wario, Diddy Kong, etc.) and I never tried someone like ROB because not only was the character not exciting but neither was the accompanying move set. (Didn't help that he wasn't designed around the move set he had like every other Smash newcomer in Brawl).
I just feel that this set of newcomers is more distinguishable than any of the other sets of newcomers and that's what makes the roster actually
exciting for me. It's a good roster not because of
who the characters are, but... because of
how they are designed and how they look like they'll play so far. Hell, Bowser Jr. is even exciting looking to play and I was initially not really interested in seeing him in the games -- but because of the clown car and his mech projectiles and stuff he looks like he'll be a very awesome and unique character in general.
That's pretty much what I think of the roster. Outside of that, I'm super pumped we got Doc specifically because of the Down B Tornado and drill kick Dair. Superior Mario is back.
