Banned Characters in Fighting Games

band is a power word in fighting games is actually so strong that it's pretty rare for something to be straight up band and competitive play for the vast majority of fighting games while common fighting game mantras just learn just adapt figure out the matchup every now and then something crazy enough comes around that it actually warrants a band so today I want to specifically look at characters that have been banned from competitive play is what I would say so this is actually a pretty L discussed Topic in fighting G YouTube obviously characters getting banned is a huge deal for any game but to be honest there's an angle that basically no video really talks about it's actually what I want to talk about today so I want to talk about the different ways that characters can be banned in fighting games because if you think about it Banning something means you can't use something but there's different levels to this game so we're going to be looking at console exclusive characters glitch characters Boss characters or like upgraded characters soft Band characters temporarily ban characters which you have to get to that part to actually hear the difference between soft band and temporary band and then last but not least hard Band characters to begin we look at the console exclusive character as the name suggests these are characters that are banned because they're just not available on every single platform that the game is available on now if you would be like wow that s is really weird let me me explain once upon a time when online really sucked usually the arcade version of the game will come out first to incentivize people to buy the console version of the game they would usually add some extra modes and some exclusive characters to the console version of the game so this did a couple of things if you're a dedicated arcade player Not only would getting the console version give you unlimited practice time which is of course very valuable compared to spending anywhere between 50 cents to a doll or $150 per game assuming you're losing of course but you could also have new content in the forms of new characters new modes and more and if you've never played the game before a console exclusive character might incentivize you to actually buy the game by far the most well-known most discussed one would be Soul Cobra 2 console exclusive characters of which there were four Soul cover 2 had link on GameCube hiachi Tekken and spawn on Xbox along with a brand new character nekd on all consoles I actually remember getting so Alber to as a kid on GameCube of course right I'm a Nintendo kid and just be like okay lake is sick but who is this green guy and like why this dude is mad random but they're like advertising him and the funny thing is that apparently the characters are not like like really crazy or anything truly in the case of a console exclusive character the character being really good is not the issue in fact in the soul cover 2 example if you look up materialist real quick basically all these characters are not rated really highly but but that's the common example people use but it's a famous one right a lesser known one would be oboro bishamon from Vampire savior this character is an alternate version of the selectable bishamon but he's mastered his cursed armor and he's pretty much available exclusively on Console but there are actually a lot of versions of this game vampire Savor which is known as like dark starus 3 North America has many versions between like PSP and PS2 and all these versions but the thing is the main way you play this game in tournaments is definitely the arcade version there are some compromises like for example I played the game on Xbox 360 to practice when it came out in a special collector's edition with fight Kade available and good rollback now basically everyone plays on fight Kade or they play tournaments in person so the arcade version is basically the exclusive way that competitive players play the game which means oboro bishamon is also bad cuz you just can't get him and just like the sober 2 characters he's not that great like apparently normal bishan is better than aboro Bish so there you go now interestingly enough dark stalkers 3 vampire sa I'm just going to say VAP bro the vampire savior does have another ban character its name is Shadow and we're not talking about the Hedgehog Shadow is available in the arcade version but he takes the form of the previously defeated character so because of this he naturally Breaks the Rules of picking characters in finding games when you're playing like a two out of three set which is the winner can't switch characters so because of this reason he's banned as well so with this quick overview you might agree with me that like console exclusive characters are definitely the least egregious Band characters it's usually just reasons of you can't get them or they're non arcade or just like some silly rule makes it so that you shouldn't play the character so next we have to take a look at glitched characters these characters aren't even available via a secret code another way you can look at it is you can put on your gamer gloves and do some weird thing and then you can get access to the character and specifically a character that you're not supposed to be able to play secret characters are like Secrets right Easter eggs something to just reward you for playing a lot or doing some type of challenge but these characters are a little different so these are actually pretty uncommon in this list and I mean to be fair Band characters are also uncommon but back in my hometown of good old multi blood actess again you could unlock a couple of extra characters on a PS2 version one of them was a boss character archetype Earth who had a special version if you know that game that every character has three groups Crescent half and full moons you know melti Bloods about vampire SE roll so archetype Earth has a special one called eclipse moon but if you picked archetype Earth through random select you could actually pick Crescent Moon archetype Earth on PS2 which was not even finished so at the time a lot of us thought that H maybe they wanted to make archetype or for an actual character but it just did a finish in time which is pretty interesting cuz in the current version actress again K code she is a selectable character a full and complete selectable character a top tier one as well which St glove but this glitched version of her in the PS2 version there was nothing too crazy about her it's just like you can't select her normal way and she's literally not done so for that reason she was immediately banned the fun thing about Crescent Moon archetype Earth in PS2 version is that we would definitely try to pick her during button checks and stuff just to be silly by the way if you have any other examples of a character like this definitely let me know I did a decent Amel research to try to find other examples of this and I wrote one in my notes but when I looked for it again I couldn't find info on it so if you have any examples definitely feel free to share them in the comment sections below I I'm always super interested in this type of stuff honestly but with that let's move on to the next one so this one is definitely more common than glitched characters but unfortunately I feel like they just stopped doing this in fighting games which I think is actually kind of sad and this is the boss or upgraded character so if You' been on fighting game YouTube for a while or if you're just like a casual enjoyer of the genre you've probably watched Max a million dude's boss rage series and this is exactly the type of character we're talking about fighting game bosses were made to be overpowered they're designed to literally take money from you if you think about it if you're playing the game in arcade again it could cost anywhere between like 50 cents and maybe 100 150 cents te technically $150 per play as opposed to buying a console game where you're paying I want to say at the time like 50 to 60 bucks which now is probably like 90 to 100 bucks but we won't talk about that so from arcade perspective it's getting you off the machine so you can play again against this Challenge from the console perspective is there's this really hard challenge for you to overcome so whenever you could actually get access to these characters it's no surprise that they are actually pretty crazy and overtuned but again some Boss characters in fighting games are talked about all the time there's characters like third strike Gil who can resurrect himself or accent C Justice who's super fast two air dashes among a ton more Shenanigans but instead I want to spend time talking about the upgraded characters so if we go back and look at dur strike Gil and Justice these are not characters you can like hit really especially in our kids where uh upgraded characters these are different versions of characters you already have this is somewhat common in anime Fighters so sometimes it'll be either unlockable versions or secret version or they'll have a mode dedicated to this so Blaze wood for example has the unlimited characters some of them are kind of team which is funny considering they're upgraded so you have like unlimited ragma for example he has blood cane permanently so back in the day if you're playing blaz blue CF now you know this as is overdrive but this used to be just a super you could do the unlimited ragna just has blood cane forever so this means he just does more damage I think it changes his frame Advantage he heals more Health he and he also bombs BOS you bomos but besides that it's nothing that crazy other characters are just kind of weird right so my long time first meeting blaz was ly and I can't really describe unlimited ly to you she's really weird like she has like very weird properties on her moves and stuff she not really like moved into like simply an upgraded version of herself she feels more like a new character and then you have characters like unlimited Von hind who his special ability now is to back dash out of hit stun that is correct you cannot combo him anymore uh I I there is a restriction around it but the point is he could back dash out of hit stun he could back dash out of hit stun I think that is really crazy he can back dash out of hit stun I just want to make sure you understand what balcon hind can do my boy actually guilty your XX has a ton of these as well characters have multiple forms almost on some Dragon Ball Z [ __ ] so you have the normal characters which you see all the time selectable immediately then you of the ex characters so these are like modified versions of the characters and people used to say that like the EX version of the characters were like prototypes for like plus r or something I used to hear hear say about that like all the time so and then you have Shadow characters so this person character has infinite meter so in a game about being broken with meter this is pretty broken and then finally gold characters which to me are the boss version of the characters so since the standard of course is the normal characters the other three especially Shadow and gold characters are definitely banned anyways as we continue to go even further Beyond we move to soft Band characters and the first question we must ask is what is soft Banning and why is it done so a soft band to me implies one of two things so one would be the community just kind of agrees to not pick it even though you can but everyone would just give you the stink eye the classic example of this is OT and Super Street Fighter 2 this is a story from honestly one of the first stories I heard in fighting games when I started playing melty blood old sagot is banned in Japan so he's banned everywhere and of course at that time Japan was like the standard you would follow cuz everyone was getting different versions people would get different version at different time so you would try to emulate dark K version to the best of your ability and the thing is he's not even the best character it's more that he invalidates so many other characters with not that much effort we're saying effort to we're talking about spam Fireballs at dping when they JW a really simple game plan that just really screws up a lot of characters in the game and number two is it could imply a regional ban as in in Connecticut it's banned but in New York it's okay now you might be like okay you said old sagot was Bann in Japan so doesn't this fit as well if you did say that good that means you're still with me so yes but also kind of the big thing for a regional man is that you're straight up not allowed to play that character use that tactic Etc as oppos to Clos to the silent homie agreement that the previous time was there are a few characters I know that have gotten Regional bands over my years of played various fighting games it's actually somewhat common in Smash some of you might remember this thing this is a map for smash ultimate where a character named Steve not me by the way the final DLC of Smash ultimate is allowed to be played at in tournaments there's also discussions of Smash 4 re Banning Bayonetta which is a character I will really wonder place I'm really sad that I missed out on bayetta and even further back if you want to talk about brawl which a game I actually played competitively metanite which which usually tops off most broken character in Smash ever lists people actually debated on whether or not he should be banned because certain regions used him a lot more than other regions next we want to talk about the time limit bands so this is essentially when a character is up for discussion for a hard band and the community actually follows through on it while waiting for attached to Bast character as you can guess this is definitely a feature of modern fighting games as in the past pre patches you basically had to wait for a new arcade version which means waiting for a new console version of this day happen to you and honestly I do think this is one of the best things about patches when this type of thing happens while bayetta can kind of saunter into this group as well the most well-known one would probably be lab coat 21 from Dragon Ball Fighters I have seen many of thumbnail with Android 21 in a lab coat with laser eyes saying the most bad broken character Dragon Ball Fighters and funny enough I actually do take credit for this character being added to Dragon Ball Fighters so if you hate her you can thank me and if you really want to know why I take credit you should ask me sometime but the case of this character is actually pretty interesting and the reason why he won her band was her over representation in tournaments because of how high her character power was Dragon Ball Fighters was no stranger to High character dlc's actually people expected after a while for one of the DLC characters to be super busted compared to the rest of them and the tournament people really look at is combo breaker 2022 because the character was banned CEO 2022 and seven out of the eight players in top eight all used lab Cod 21 so this means that's more than the evil Japan L incident where six out of the eight players used lay top eight incl including the winner GT Goku from the same game where I looked through a bunch of tournaments from the Dragon Ball Fighter season 2 World Tour and the most I could find was generally five to six GT Goku players in multiple top eights and he got way more time available so he was playable for like a year before they nerfed him where labco didn't really have as much time and an oldie but a goodie the Apex tournament where there were five Menan nights in Brawl top eight now these are all really high numbers and hearing that lab Cod 21 had seven out of eight would be like man this character is another level but there's a little extra point about the game itself cuz it is a team game so it it is both a team game and it's drag ball Fighters and when and when people think a character is an easy answer they will definitely switch to it as seen with UI Goku being hyper represented during the dragon Warf Fighters 2020 national championships across all regions and GT Goku like I mentioned who had repeated appearances at five or six players playing the character in in top eights at a world class level and if you're talking about character over representation it seems that five to six is definitely the line where people are like dude what is going on so of course her having seven is crazy but then again it's also that game could probably be its own video to be honest but anyway it wasn't just how good people thought she was and how many people were playing her but specifically her character concept so every one of the high powerered DLC characters in Dragon Ball Fighters had a unique thing about them that characters didn't have so GT Goku had super high damage solo and really good mixup solo that while other characters had a taken away from them then you have of course Bardock who was just way faster than people easy access to mixup great level three at a time where again not many characters had these things Bardock specifically was so ridiculous that they gave his main special move to almost every single character in the game if you want to know how ridiculous as he was when the game came out UI Goku of course with his many many many defensive options while these are all good lab Cod 21 was a little special she super that reduces the opponent's damage by 21% until they die for the rest of the game so that's right permanently in a game where Grand finals with a reek could already take 50 plus minutes we're talking about like smash ultimate levels of time a super that slos the game out even more also hurts the tournament in general so it's like she breaks the fourth wall also so these two things together put her on a temporary band list until they ended up patching the game and again even though many people have discussed Andre 21's power they usually just talk about like what she does and not how the whole game has gone or like we looked at other cases of different characters so I really wanted to mention these things while talking about temporary bands and then last but not least the summit of Mount Olympus the hard Band characters now I mean it's pretty straightforward these are characters are just banned no no time limit no self B no one state not the other you just cannot play them the OG of course is Street Brother 2 Akuma I mean he's so OG that I used him in the thumbnail for my last band video on band tactics he's a sing a character that like people were just not designed to deal with this is another character too that's always mentioned in ban characters and fing game videos so instead of just harping on about how he had air Fireball and good damage instead I there's something I thought about while I was looking at people playing him and looking at the characters aside is it not interesting that Street Fighter 2 akumo is so broken that each Street Fighter game from De on has a mechanic to help you fight what he does do you think about it and what I'm talking about by the way is air fire B so for example you have third strike third strike lets you parry on the ground and in the air you can Parry projectiles AKA you can fight auma or Street Fighter 4 you can tank and attack with f six attack which means you could tank and air Fireball in Street figher 5 there's far far far far more projectile invisble things than ever before in a street figher game in Street fider 6 you get Parry back I guess but that kind of shows you how much impact that type of things have maybe it's coincidence maybe I'm being conspiracy LK but just just think about it open your third eye a little bit for this one another commonly rehearsed one is Pet Shop from Jojo's and usually when you look at these type of videos they'll talk about Pet Shop people found out Pet Shop was really stupid really quickly and then they'll mentioned that uh kaken I hope I said that correctly was a character that he took a very long time I mean a very long time to develop like more than a decade to develop but eventually people banned him as well it actually reminds me of Ancient K kokono can is a pretty broken game like the game is obviously it's just broken so like there's no bad characters but I just think about the dichotomy between like pet shop and Ken and Toki and Ray where Toki was like immediately people knew Toki was super broken it was way better than everybody and then as the game developed like oh wow like Ray is actually really crazy too and can like is at the same level sometimes it's just like nice to look at these things for a macro level or another way you could put it is that if Toki and Ray were in different games they would be banned up to you to wrap up though I want to Pi a character that doesn't really get talked about uh depending on what you're looking at you'll talk some people I will reference really obscure Fighters like the Power Rangers fighter at ianu and things like that that video is cool like I remember that being shared around when I was starting fighting games as well so I wanted to pick a nice intersection between like cool people talk about and a game that I would like to see like remade or re-released or modernized or something maybe someone is going to give me the side eye for wanting like a modern version of this game but uh sailor mood s we're going to talk about Sailor Uranus so from my research Sailor Uranus is banned from all tournaments I'm pretty sure and the main thing is that she has a dash that's instant so by my words teleport that is mostly Invincible SL Invincible goes full screen and if you're player two it's completely Invincible on wake up so you have a player side Advantage which is not that common and I made a video about this actually a while back so this is another example of that which when this player side specific stuff it is really FY and then she has an easy internet combo that works on everybody as well so the combination of multi Invincible Dash that goes full screen that's also reversal and easy infinite means all you're doing is going for this infinite it's like old sagot logic that we talked about before but she invalidates basically everybody and then in the mirror there's still a version that's better right cuz the player two version is better than player one so she stands Head and Shoulders Above the Rest of the cast literally I think baby as a St Scout and then also in her character power unlike ult God who has Pierce but yeah that's my look at B characters and finding games so I really wanted to have this different angle cuz uh this is definitely one of those fighting game YouTube fighting game videos but I really like talk about characters characters make fighting games for me and ideal with fighting game for me is that is like you you use the character to interact with the system not the other way around if that makes sense anyway let me know what you guys think as usual if you have any questions or comments definitely feel free to leave them in the comment section below like And subscribe if you guys feel like it and I'll see y'all next time peace out d

Channel: LordKnight

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Id: NjIzV0aFZSU

Length: 22min 11sec (1331 seconds)

Published: Thu May 09 2024