Some big news was announced recently for Super Smash Bros Ultimate for the Nintendo Switch. As of January 16, 2020, 3 things were announced. The first piece of content that was announced was a new fighter. At first, people thought the character “Dante” from the Devil May Cry series was going to be in the game. People thought this because of a tweet that the Devil May Cry official twitter posted, stating that something special would happen on January 16th, which was coincidentally the same day that the Super Smash Brothers Ultimate, “Fighter Pass 1” Character #5 would be announced. But, instead it was just some content for a Devil May Cry game.
As it turned out, the character that happened to join the battle was Byleth, a character from the game Fire Emblem 3 House, that was released in the summer of 2019. People didn’t exactly like this decision, due to there being an obscene amount of Fire Emblem characters already existing in the game, and there are, (a bit of research later) 8 already existing Fire Emblem characters that are in Smash! That is a huge amount because the most iconic video game franchise to exist, Mario, and even that series has 14 characters, which is understandable, but also not too big placed next to the Fire Emblem characters.
Anyway, Byleth has some very unique moves compared to the other Fire Emblem characters. It uses four main weapons: The Sword of the Creator (a Sword), Areadbhar (a Lance), Failnaught (a Bow and Arrow), and Aymr (an Axe). These weapons were used in the game Fire Emblem 3 House, and are considered to be Relic weapons. They also have a very good recovery move which can possibly be argued to be the best in the game. The next big thing that was announced was a new Mii costume based on the red cup we all know, Cuphead (also, the Cuphead costume comes with the boss music for Cagney Carnation, Floral Fury.) This is basically just a skin for the Mii Fighter character in the game already. There were also a few more Mii Fighters announced. One of them was Megaman.EXE From Megaman Battle Network, and X from Megaman X. There was also a costume based off of the Rabbids from, well Rabbids. The final one there was a character named Altaïr from Assassin's Creed. Honestly, the only costume anyone really is going to buy is probably Cuphead because his game is one of the most popular of his genre.
Lasty, as of the January Direct, Masahiro Sakurai announced that they have started work on the second Fighter Pass, which consists of six new characters that will be announced in the coming months, after Byleth releases. After buying the second Fighter Pass, players will also be awarded with a Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Guardian Mii Costume that corresponds with the two link costumes. Another thing to touch on, is that the Stream that Byleth was announced on was actually very disliked, due to people being very, very salty about another fire emblem character being added, 80 thousand dislikes to be exact.
Understandably, this is a bad 5th DLC fighter for the roster. Although many people, like us writing this, argue that it was actually for an understandable reason. Seeing as how badly this was taken by the fanbase, it would actually be worse if they released a better character, like Rayman (from its self-titled game) for example, for the 5th fighter of this pass, and added Byleth as the 1st of the next pass. Many people wouldn’t buy the second one, and worse maybe not buy the other ones that are to come. And what's more, more dlc is due to come out for FE: Three Houses, so it as a fighter Byleth is good publicity.
Although Byleth was unliked as the choice for the 5th DlC character, their play style is really good for people who like playing sword fighters. They aren’t a great character for magic or psi (Lucas, Ness), but they are a nice change for mainly sword fighters. Overall, Byleth was a pretty good addition to Smash, although his reception was not great.
-Noah Nosrati '21, Aren Oshagan '21, Shahan Oshagan ‘21
Comments