The Sad Story of Kirby In Smash

quick question for you who's the most iconic character in the super smash brothers series you may say it's mario the quintessential video game protagonist who always gets headline billing you might argue the title should go to fox the de facto mascot of melee and one of the game's most consistently threatening fighters or captain falcon the eternal fan favorite who packs in several of the series most beloved moves and at this point is more associated with super smash brothers than the f-zero franchise he originated from which is just a little bit sad for my money though that title has to go to kirby the adorable pink puffball who serves as the gentlest possible introduction to the game's core mechanics the inhale the down air the stone the flight kirby's unique entertaining yet highly forgiving nature has made him an incredible place for many people to start their smash journeys with he was such a welcoming yet competent addition all the way back in the very first smash game and then got pile driven into the ground with the strength of a thousand suns two decades later and he's still licking those wounds let's talk about why [Applause] [Music] this video is brought to you by surfsharkvpn protect your online data from being tracked targeted and god knows what else with a robust virtual private network packed with features that are safe useful and even just maybe a little bit fun you want data encryption even on public wi-fi you got it unlimited device installations on a single subscription i don't know why they allow that but done better netflix offerings than just your own countries canadian here believe me i feel that and not a problem for surfsharkvpn's regional servers the internet is global why should your streaming service options be local get yourself a slick 83 percent discount plus three additional months absolutely free on high quality no log vpn coverage with promo code mock rock link in the description so kirby hasn't exactly had the best track record as a competitive character but that doesn't mean he's been lost from the start in the original super smash brothers on the nintendo 64 kirby was quickly figured out to be one of the game's best characters a title that he still holds to this day behind only pikachu arguably the most consistently strong character in the series history and the only one that can do this in a game where most of the cast has to deal with this only two years later though the world got its sequel melee and [Music] oh oh dear [Music] now in brawl he did see some improvement moving from absolute bottom tier to more of the lower mid-range area although that was also the game where these guys existed so being anywhere outside of the top 10 and even sometimes in it was a pretty rough life smash 4 brought about a couple of interesting developments as kirby was one of the characters first proposed to have a reasonable match up against sheik who was a dominant character for a good chunk of the game's life but still ultimately proved to be an extremely niche character usually placed in low tier or even with the most optimistic perspectives essentially never rising outside of the lower mids and once again the competition ended up being pretty stiff and after that we arrive at ultimate the most recent smash game and one which has once again not been especially kind to the little guy now thankfully ultimate is probably the best balance smash game overall certainly in comparison to its roster size so even the lowest characters have some reasonable tools which is good because kirby usually sits among them again rarely having an argument made for him outside of lower mid tier at absolute best so that's the what now let's talk about the why why after such a strong debut has kirby struggled so hard to make an impact as soon as players start taking the game more seriously well the best place to start is probably with his core traits these are extremely important to massive hero sakurai the game's creator who takes meticulous care to match the feel of characters in the smash series to how they feel at home most of the time yep can't have a mock rock video without complaining about ganondorf that's why the ice climbers jump so weakly donkey kong is surprisingly quick and why ridley almost didn't make it in the cost of sacrificing his size and flying was considered to be a very heavy one if we look at how kirby plays in his own titles we notice a few things he's small not terribly fast on the ground even slower in the air of course being compensated with multiple jumps and he's very simple and if we look at how he plays in smash we see exactly those traits he plays very similarly across both series and considering the same man created them both and smash seems to borrow a decent amount of mechanics from the kirby games it would actually be surprising if that wasn't the case no matter what else he has across games those will remain so if kirby's gonna be stuck with these particular traits is that a good or a bad thing being small is a mixed bag it makes kirby much harder to land a hit on than bigger characters especially when combined with his exceptionally low crouch which has gotten him past all sorts of bad situations over the years on the flip side though it also means that a lot of characters have much longer reach than him which makes it harder for him to land hits in return this is compounded severely by his subpar mobility meaning that if an opponent is determined not to get hit by kirby or at least control the pace of the match it's generally pretty easy for them to do weak mobility is an outrageously bad handicap in the smash titles it's hard to overstate just how much this harms a character and it also means that his multiple jumps are hindered quite a bit because of how little distance he can travel with each one these jumps are again a theoretical trade-off for going burst movement in exchange for additional versatility but that versatility is cut down so much by his poor air movement that i'd say it becomes more of a detriment his simple design that doesn't say too much about his viability we've got good simple characters good complex characters bad simple characters and bad complex characters you can make an argument that good simple characters are the ones most worth putting the time into because you can get them up to speed the fastest and they're harder to make mistakes with particularly if you play multiple characters but in the grand scheme of things i'd still call complexity relatively neutral for character viability overall though if we take a look at his chord traits and factor in how poorly some of them synergize with his poor mobility i'd say that kirby is coming into each game primed to be weak but of course we know that's not inevitable because he's been great before no matter how bad a character's core may be it's always possible to make up for it with a good enough moves that being the slowest character in the game doesn't mean anything if you can just nuke the entire stage kirby may not have access to a nuke well okay at least not in smash 64 but he did get up tilt which was about as close to that as you could reasonably ask for it was incredibly fast locked people into shield brake setups off a single hit juggled exceptionally well and didn't have to worry about that stubby range thing because it's hitbox looked like this yeah that's far and away kirby's best move in smash 64 and one of the more notorious attacks in the entire series but his kit was absolutely packed with these kinds of strong useful surprisingly large moves to draw from which more than compensated for his built-in weaknesses he was so good in fact that the developers decided to tone him down in melee and in what's become something of a recurring story in the world of smash massively overcompensated his solid attacks almost entirely driven into the ground his good throws they could now bizarrely be mashed out of myth throw the new side special that every character got coming into melee samus got her missiles mario his cape captain falcon has raptor boost and kirby kirby got hammer don't use hammer this sadly was to be the kirby model that the series stuck with much more so than his smash 64 iteration of course some of his more egregious issues were fixed the throw mashing disappeared hammer was changed to have at least some purpose and a lot of his close combat tools were changed to be generally fine and in the best cases even quite good but never enough to make up for how difficult it is to actually get them over to your opponent now a lot of them actually aren't too far off the mark personally i'd make up tilt combo until later percents down tilt combo reliably rather than being random make up air a bit faster danner have less landing leg up throw kill earlier but they're in the ballpark and do perform the role of very obvious intuitive attacks which do exactly what you'd expect perfect for the beginner friendly character kirby is designed to be they still need some work but my bigger issue with kirby throughout the years into the modern day is how his special moves play out first off let's talk about hammer while it's true just awfulness has been dialed back from the melee days it's still quite a bad move that rarely sees use in any serious match and i might also add is just kind of boring kirby has one of the widest move pools of any character in smash and while i'd honestly argue that way more of those moves should have worked their way into his kit rather than all the generic punches and kicks he is supposed to be very simple so i guess we can let that one slide there are fan versions of kirby that take this kind of approach and they're interesting but also clearly coming at the character with a very different philosophy at the very least though special moves are where you're generally supposed to be able to go a bit crazy with characters kits but in kirby's case hammer is just kind of a smack it's a big smack but smacking people is most of what kirby does to begin with so it's really not adding that much to him even disregarding how bad an attack it is which is a lot to disregard stone and final cutter on the other hand i think are better inclusions but they're also inexplicably weak for a long time i just assumed that they were trying to match the feel of the kirby series but when i went back to play the kirby games for my last video about him they turned out to be way more responsive than i was expecting now stone is a very popular move in casual gameplay and the way it's used competitively doesn't lean that much on speed so while i do think it could have a bit of startup shaved off in a way that slightly helps its viability without becoming too annoying on a casual level i don't think this one is the end of the world and honestly if i were speaking purely from a competitive perspective i'd say that stone should just be replaced entirely it's realistically never going to be a great move but it's stone i'm not doing that final cutter on the other hand oh boy this move was also made slower than it appears in the kirby series much much much slower in fact and i truly don't understand why the end result is one of the weakest recovery moves weakest projectile moves and weakest close combat up specials on a character that absolutely did not need this kind of drawback added to him final cutter closer to how it appears in kirby would be a very solid up special out of shield something that many characters can already access and in fact because kirby is designed as a close range brawler he'd be a better candidate for this type of attack than many of the fighters that already have one smash 4 essentially did this with its custom moves with his uppercutter trading the landing hitbox and projectile for a much faster startup and i've gotta say it made kirby feel much more complete as a character not overwhelming or unfair and in fact i think letting him keep some aspect of the descending portion would have been totally fine but it really did greatly improve kirby in a reasonably fair manner that directly played into his simple close quarters brawler design i'd personally consider this to be a no-brainer fairly improving his viability and increasing his canonical faithfulness in a single change but of course if we're gonna discuss anything about kirby we have to discuss as inhale this is a conceptually brilliant attack kirby is the beginner character of beginner characters i really can't think of one in any game genre that does such a good job welcoming newcomers without being boring and the ability to sample the entire roster's move list is such a key part of this and yet from a competitive perspective it's kind of underwhelming so first the elephant in the room is copy abilities there's no way these things are ever going to be perfectly useful in every match up the copy ability can be great awful or anywhere in between you manage to grab some fire arrows suddenly you're a whole lot harder to run away from you snag monado arts you're a godlike being who can tear through everything in his path kirby has a gun terrifying on the other side you probably don't ever want warlock punch for anything but a funny highlight moment and of course there are varying degrees of effectiveness anywhere in between this aspect of inhale for the record is not a problem and in fact it's an inevitable part of the move but let's talk about the actual inhale command grabs or special moves which go through shields in the same way grabs do are usually pretty good based on that attribute alone but apart from that inherent strength inhale is pretty meh its speed is quite respectable for this type of move and its range is okay although significantly hindered by being attached to such a slow character but what really kills inhale is just how vulnerable kirby is if he misses here are a few attacks less risky to go for than inhale ganondorf's flame choke lucario's force palm incinerator's lowland whip me brawler's suplex and diddy kong's monkey flip while kirby's inhale is a bit faster to start up than all of these moves it's also significantly laggier and its range doesn't even begin to compare when we look at other command grabs with more comparable range but also typically attached to faster characters this discrepancy becomes if anything even worse out of every character on the entire roster kirby is the one i'd most like to see incentivized to use their command grab as often as possible because inhale is such a unique interesting and entertaining move however the best way to incentivize using a move is to give it a very good risk reward ratio and as established inhale's risk is quite high it's reward sure in some matchups it's good but in many others it's passable at best compared to the consistently high reward most command grabs tend to bring to the table low risk and high reward is the gold standard to aspire to and inhale is just not providing that for the record yes this is taking the notorious kirby side into account it's cute it's funny in some previous games it could be somewhat rough to try and get around but because the modern titles have limited how much invincibility you can get on the ledge it's a rare sight to actually see someone go for in a serious match nowadays smash has always been in a weird spot as a competitive series at times aligning with and fighting against that label to varying degrees but even taking this into account i still think kirby has had a pretty rough go of things even an ultimate a game that absolutely considers competitive gameplay with a ridiculous amount of the roster being reasonably viable kirby is still saddled with burdens i'd call flat out unnecessary and it's a shame as mentioned kirby is the gateway character he's what turned a lot of people into lifelong fans of the series me included i've talked before about my earliest smash memories playing melee at a friend's house hovering above everyone on temple and trying to land on them with stone although i didn't actually know you could choose which special move came out at the time so it was more hovering above everyone and hoping i was lucky enough to get the stone and i was still perfectly happy to do so a lot of people have similar stories and jumping from that into the competitive world and hearing that kirby has almost no presence and that a lot of the presents he does have often excludes his most iconic tools for a more casual audience can be pretty disheartening now of course it's not the developer's job to promote smash tournaments and realistically smash has far more casual fans than die hard competitors but i'm always of the opinion that if you can make a change that will please one side of the fanbase and not harm the other it's almost always a good change to make kirby isn't the single most mistreated character in the series there are worse fates than being stuck in what's arguably lower mid-tier for the latter half of your life but i think his story is sad because there's no character more worthy of being powerful nor is there a character where making them powerful would be more impactful to the game's most invested players there are a ton of opportunities to do that with kirby and let's hope that one day they come true because i for one am tired of this destroyer of gods losing to every new bit of spiky-haired anime nonsense that waltz is in including the ones that also destroy gods which i guess is actually a lot of them damn it japan thanks for watching everyone and let me know your thoughts on kirby liking and commenting on this video increases how much youtube shares it so if you think it deserves that much appreciated there's a video on ultimate's most overrated moves above some anime nonsense discussion on my second channel below and patrons youtube members and twitch subscribe stuff like early videos and access to my discord server later people

Channel: MockRock

Views: 264,864

Keywords: Smash Ultimate, alpharad, Nintendo, little z, super smash bros ultimate, smash bros ultimate, tier list, esam, hungrybox, ssbu, alpharad deluxe, Nintendo Switch, Gameplay, nairo smash, nintendo memes, nintendo, smash ultimate tier list, smash ultimate tournament, smash ultimate best attacks, smash ultimate best moves, super smash bros ultimate best moves, super smash bros ultimate worst moves, sora smash, sora smash bros, kirby smash, kirby smash ultimate, kirby super smash bros

Id: IFoYdp7L0kw

Length: 16min 32sec (992 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 28 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/wonderrade]

Glad he brought up how nice kirby's custom up-b was in smash 4. The loss of that move has been absolutely tragic. Also agreed on hammer being underwhelming, would be thrilled to see it go.

[u/MuppetKing1]

I'm not even really talking about buffs, but I'd really like to see Kirby get a rework. Not just because there's a lot of different things they can do with the character (though there is), but I'll be honest, I've really come to dislike Kirby's design in Ultimate, or more specifically, the counterplay it encourages.

Playing Kirby casually is fun! Mashing the B button, smash attacks, and hitting like a truck is all good. You know what isn't fun? Watching a Kirby get circle camped in a 17 minute long best of 3 set.

I'm not blaming Sharp for doing that, to be clear; that is optimally how you beat Kirby after all. But my problem is the fact that that is how you optimally beat Kirby in the first place. Making Kirby slow horizontally is fine, but also making him vertically move at the speed of molasses not only makes this sort of counterplay consistently effective against him, it also goes against how Kirby plays in his own games as - like how MockRock pointed out - he had no problem reaching such heights almost instantly with things like Final Cutter in his own series.

And thematically speaking... that's such a lame weakness to have, especially on someone as powerful as Kirby. I can deal with Kirby being outranged or juggled/edgeguarded as weaknesses, but imagining one of the canonically strongest beings in Smash Ultimate losing fights simply because he can't stop people from hopping between platforms leaves me a special kind of miffed lol.

[u/bringerofjustus]

If Kirby were released as DLC today, he would have such an absurdly different movepool it wouldn't even be funny.

My controversial rework of the character would be changing the copy ability to always ensure it gets a character's signature ability, rather than necessarily their neutral B. e.g. absorbing Diddy would make sense to give banana rather than popgun. Obviously it'd add some weird minutia to knowing what move you get on absorbing, but there are so many specific characters who give a nearly useless move. Kirby shouldn't get a redundant inhale from Dedede when absorbing him could give gordo instead.

[u/MillennialDan]

There is no sadder tale than Link's smash career. Heck, that's the case for most of the Zelda cast. Smash has never been kind to them.