Smash Director Claims Smash is Extremely Well-Balanced

As you probably know, Super Smash Brothers Ultimate is out, and people are really enjoying it: now more than ever, thanks to the release of the Piranha Plant, who is basically the internet’s waifu for the next five minutes. But if you can get past the memes, it turns out the game is also well-liked for being a very good fighting game. And according to a recent interview with Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu, it’s one of the most well-balanced ones. At least, according to director Masahiro Sakurai, who claims that no one single character in the roster has a win rate over 60%, or under 40%.

An example he lists specifically is King R. Rool. The crocodile antagonist of the Donkey King series has a reputation as being hard for newbies to deal with, but overall his win rate is 51.9%, while in Elite Smash specifically (the super-hardcore mode unlocked to people really good at the game), it’s actually 48.9%.

Another example is Ganondorf. Apparently ol’ Ganon is the most used character in Elite Smash, but his win rate is only 47.9%.

And while he wouldn’t say which characters these were, apparently the lowest win rate of the roster of 74 is 43.7%, while the highest is 56.8%.

They also had data on who the most-used and least-used characters are. Cloud is broadly the most commonly used character around the globe, and he’s picked 20 times more often than the lowest-picked character, who he wouldn’t say but is obviously Mr. Game and Watch.

Either way, he’s happy with how things are, and says that right now there doesn’t seem to be much reason to tune the game at all. Still, he suspects people would find that stressful, so they’ll still be putting out fine touches as the months go on.

Interesting little tidbits.