The legendary Masahiro Sakurai is back with another look into the intricacies of game development on his YouTube channel and, of course, he's drawing from his wealth of Smash Bros. Ultimate anecdotes to make things clear.
Today's lesson is all about character balance and the need to stress their differences to make them equal. It's a concept that seems strange initially but, as Sakurai notes, "The more similar you make your fighter's abilities, the more they'll start to feel like the same character".
Instead of correcting an imbalance by lessening one fighter's strengths and weaknesses equally, Sakurai proposes a method in which you rely on their respective pros and cons to make things more fun. "Variety among things like fighters is the very lifeblood of the game," he notes "It's what keeps things fresh".
Of course, this is a delicate balancing act, and Sakurai struts his stuff by listing off all the different elements of an attack that need to be considered to keep things feeling fair in the arena — speed, duration, wind-up etc. It's one of the many things that makes Smash so fun to play, taking two characters with opposite play styles and throwing them against each other to see which comes out on top.
This method falls in line with Sakurai's statement earlier this year about every Smash fighter standing an equal chance of winning. It's all about the "Git Gud" mentality, it turns out.