A Question Of Balance

You can't give it up,

In February 2006, I participated in an eighty person Super Smash Bothers Melee tournament held by the Boston University gaming club. It was a lot of fun; I made it to the semi-finals before being outplayed by a Shiek. However, it greatly saddened me greatly that 80% of the characters represented were Marth, Samus, Fox, Falco or Shiek. At the time I lost, my Roy was the only non-top-tier character present.

Now, granted, SSBM is not the most involved fighting game out there, but what was HAL thinking when they made Bowser? Was it their intent to make Young Link a completely inferior character? Is there any reason to play Pichu?

Obviously balancing fighters is difficult, especially with a roster of 25. Intrepid players will always find glitches (wave dashing) that break the game in unexpected ways. However, when you see characters so bad that playing them means you don't stand a chance in high level play, you have to wonder what the developer was doing.

To deal with this, fighting games are retooled, tweaked, and re-released frequently. Guilty Gear X2 has no fewer than 5 versions so far (Midnight Carnival, # Reload Blue, # Reload Red, Slash and Accent Core). This enables a better balance to be acheived; for example Anji Mito went from bottom tier in Reload to entirely playable in Slash, while game breaking Eddie got completely nerfed.

This habit of constant revision annoys some people who would prefer true sequels rather than variations on the game they have been playing for a while. To some extent, they have a point, but I prefer a balanced experience to tons of new, untested content. Hopefully with the inclusion of hard drives in next gen consoles, developers will release patches to fighting games, rather than forcing us to buy new discs.

At any rate, this post is very unfocused and I'm not really sure what I'm writing about. What do you think? How important is a fully balanced character roster? If not very, how many top-tier fighters does one need to make a tournament playable game? Other thoughts?

Triumph or die!,
Akuma