So I'm getting ready for work, checking my phone to see what new videos are available on YouTube. Being a huge fan of Super Smash Bros. and playing Ultimate on a regular basis, I often get recommended Ultimate videos. Even though I hadn't had a cup of coffee yet, I still had to raise eyebrows over ZeRo's video titled "Byleth Is The Worst Smash DLC Character, apparently..." The video isn't really click-baity and I found myself agree with a lot of the points ZeRo brought up. It is a very good vid, but if you don't wanna watch a fifteen minute video, to summarize, well, you see the title of this blog post? Yeah, that.
Anyone that messes around Byleth even for a short period of time will notice two key things: they are slow and the moves they use have a lot of lag. The trade off for those two negatives is that Byleth hits like a truck. Byleth's Down B will break even the healthiest of shields and can kill early. If that weren't enough, Byleth's neutral B is a shield breaker that can reach opponents across the other side of the screen. Every single character in Ultimate has pros and cons. You've got some members in the pro community only looking at the cons.
What makes me roll my eyes about the "Byleth sucks" talk is that such claims are being made when the character has only been out for a week. "B-but, a pro player said they suck!" Yeah, and? They may know the game better than a lot of us mere mortals but that doesn't mean they don't make mistakes. Pro player or not, saying a character sucks when said character's meta is still being discovered is really freaking dumb.
I'd like to point out that there is an aspect of playing Ultimate that the pro "Byleth sucks" crowd isn't taking into account: there's more than one way to play this game. Free-for-alls, stage hazards, items are all a part of Smash's makeup and the competitive crowd's refusal to view the game outside of the bubble they've created for it isn't going to make those ways of playing go away.
Part of me thinks the "Byleth sucks" mentality is in effect is due to them being another Fire Emblem rep. I guess it doesn't matter that Byleth is the most unique rep from the series and that Three Houses has been a very well received game. Byleth is a Fire Emblem rep so we gotta hate 'em. We have so many reps from the Mario games because those games are insanely popular. Same with the number of Pokemon characters in Ultimate and now Fire Emblem is a huge deal for Nintendo, hence the large number of reps from that series. Haters are just gonna have to deal.
As I said above, the meta for Byleth is still being worked out. For crying out loud, Ultimate is only a year old and is going to have long, healthy life ahead of it, no matter how you choose to play. I'd love to wake up to world where casual Smash play is acknowledged by more pro players and people would stop taking pro players word as if it were the gospel. Yeah, reality is often disappointing.
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