Recently, a new character for Super Smash Bros Ultimate has come out. Their name is Byleth from Fire Emblem: Three Houses and can be considered the most controversial DLC Fighter so far. Byleth’s release video is by far the most disliked Smash video for a character release. Many people complain that “Another Fire Emblem character?” combined with their own complaints. They blame the character for being boring and how no one wanted them. To understand why people complain about another Fire Emblem character instead of another Pokemon character, some backstory is necessary.
First of all, prior to Byleth’s announcement, the characters that came from the first character pack were all third party characters (meaning they were not Nintendo characters). For example, Banjo and Kazooie came from Microsoft and Joker came from Atlus. As a result, the majority of the Smash community expected the next DLC character to be from a non-Nintendo game. Although they expected a DLC character to be a third party character, Nintendo has never stated that it would be a third party DLC character. This created some disappointment among the playerbase,
Players have always had a dislike towards Fire Emblem characters in Super Smash Bros. Even in Super Smash Bros Melee, most of the Smash community did not know who they were. The introduction of the characters in Smash was done as nothing more than an attempt to introduce the series to the west. This would be further exemplified in the previous game, Super Smash Bros for the Wii U and 3DS, as it introduced Corrin as a DLC character before their game even came out. Another issue with Super Smash Bros Ultimate is that there are 3 characters coming from the same game with 2 of them being echo fighters from other characters. In other words, a large percentage of the Fire Emblem cast are not even unique fighters.
One reason for the large amount of character representation for Fire Emblem comes from popular Youtuber Alpharad. He brings up a comparison of character, stage, and item representation in Smash. He says “Fire Emblem is a game about characters … Legend of Zelda is a game about items and using those items for your advantage, therefore there is a ton of item representation in Smash.” He essentially claims that as the game is about characters, there is character representation in Smash. This is a fair point that people rarely look at, especially in the competitive scene as items are not allowed to be used.
My thoughts on some people’s actions. In response to this character, some people have made death threats and that is just immature. In response to these, the Fire Emblem fanbase edited the “Hoes Mad” meme to include the character instead. I thought that those who were mad, were overreacting and should not have been so mad.
To those who think that the entirety of the Smash community was mad, that is simply not true. Many fans were happy that their favorite character got in and that a majority of people were neutral to the entire event. It just happened that this time, more people were vocal and extreme about their opinion.
FutureGamingPro 