Kellam, Destroyer of Worlds

I’m not entirely sure what to call this one. I’m going to avoid putting “Moveset” into the title because I don’t want you guys to think this is an actual “this could work in an official game” blog, but it’s not a joke moveset since I originally intended to post this like a normal one. As such, read this like it’s even more hypothetical than one of my casual blogs: it came from a full, perfectly useable draft, but this character is too disgusting to be actually considered a proper moveset. It’s more of a lesson to anyone getting into movesets or are refining their technique; don’t get too ambitious, because things can and will go horribly wrong.

Regardless, I’ve wanted to make another Fire Emblem rep for quite a while now, since the series can really offer some unique potential playstyles if you delve deeper than the endless hordes of anime swordfighters (I think readers familiar with my stuff expected this, given I’ve made 3 movesets for the games). In particular, Noire stuck out as a potential 3rd character to talk about (this was before Selkie was possible), but I can’t figure out unique archer attacks for the life of me, and making Tharja 2.0 is the last thing I want with the character.

So this ended up with the best choice coming from Kellam. I like him as a character and fighter in the source game, his moveset was POSSIBLE FOR ONCE, and on top of that it could present a unique blog opportunity. With a couple of hours to spend and nothing but my internet-less phone to keep myself occupied, I sat down and got to work on this. Here’s the end product.

KELLAM, DESTROYER OF WORLDS

The idea:

Part of the reason why Kellam turned into a neutron star was because of how I tried to design his kit, primarily how his matchup spread would look like. And my main goal here was to create a heavyweight who countered speedsters like Sheik or Sonic, but I’d do that without making him fast.

By itself, that idea is created to fail. I’ve ranted it before, but my problem with Smash lies in the fact that regardless of how they’re designed, heavyweights are straight-up inferior to speedy characters because they can’t land hits as easily, and when they DO land a hit, instead of being equivalent to 2-4 hits from their opponent, it actually ends up evening out or even being beneath a lightweight’s damage output, since a majority of their hits will chain into others regardless.

The reason why I’m pointing this out is because I didn’t design Kellam to outrun, overpower, or even outrange his opponent (primarily). Instead, I wanted to focus more on his class: the General, a unit designed with heavy defences first, and implement it into Smash. His mere presence should be enough to completely change the flow of battle, as the match’s tempo won’t be controlled by the opponent and instead entirely in your hands, forcing the opponent into following your lead or taking an axe/lance to the face for their trouble.

The stats:

Out of sheer writing habit, how about we act like we’re all creating Kellam together?

Being a heavyweight first and foremost, let’s design him around that. Being a General, he’ll move slowly (worst movement range in pretty much every game), and weigh a metric ton (guess). But at the same time, while his movement speed can probably match Robin and feel slow enough to warrant it, I feel like we should exaggerate the weight a little bit. At low percentages, he should barely budge from most attacks, and while Bowser definitely isn’t easy to move far, he still gets moved. So how about we up his weight factor a bit, given Bowser sits at a weaksauce 130, let’s say… around 165? That should help him feel like the immovable wall he’s always wanted to be, and opponents will have to actually put effort in for their kills.

Along with this, that heavy set of armour won’t be good for his legs, so we should probably keep him grounded most of the time. Who has the worst jump in the game? Jigglypuff? That feels right, let’s give ‘im her ground jumps, maybe compliment it with a single air jump equivalent to Kirby’s. And it also makes sense to make him fall like a rock, so we should give him a falling speed roughly around the same as Fox’s. As a result, Kellam is going to really feel difficult to kill, on top of his powerful gimmick…

The gimmick:

So you know how Kellam lugs around a giant shield? Well, it would be kind of stupid if we didn’t use it. But at the same time, reserving it for a move or two isn’t going to cut it. You’re not going to carry around what is essentially a curved slab of steel as tall as yourself just for the occasional shield bash. So what if Kellam constantly held it in front of himself as a defence, only moving it out of the way for certain attacks?

Essentially, it would act like a giant permanently invincible hurtbox, causing the bit of extra hitlag that invincibility normally causes and overall preventing most attacks from getting through. And to prevent bullshit, it’d block tether grabs, making sure characters like the Sami and Links can’t completely ignore it. To balance out the fact that projectiles are otherwise completely useless against him, we could throw in a threshold where projectiles or moves that are strong enough (let’s say 20% or more) cause Kellam to stagger a bit from the force, moving the shield to the foreground and leaving Kellam in a crumple-like state for a second or so. It’d work kind of like a REALLY quick to regenerate shield, where multiple people wailing on it in rapid succession or a single really strong hit would immediately break it, but unless your multi-hit move deals a lot of damage (and I mean a lot, like Yoshi’s D-Air a lot), the “health” regenerates fast enough to ignore it for the most part.

From here, we can work with this, easy peasy. We have how he moves around and can hold his ground, so all we need to do is bolster it with a fitting kit.

The standard moves:

The key note to is that we need to work around his idle stance having him hold his shield forwards, so any move has to be able to come out naturally and without causing too much unnecessary lag or weakness, but enough to keep the character balanced. Along with this, each move needs to serve it’s own purpose, and at best Kellam should have several moves of different timing to help confuse and mix up his opponents.

For example, Jab would be his safest and easiest to use tool, a simple poke with his spear, minimal startup and endlag without keeping the shield out of the way for too long. Forward Tilt would be a stronger poke requiring commitment, with longer range and higher power but naturally leaving you open for longer. To compliment these, Up Tilt would be an upwards axe swipe for snuffing aerial approaches, and Down Tilt could be like a tilt version of Dedede’s F-Smash, being an overhead swipe that covers a large quarter-circle above and in front of himself, rather powerful and surprisingly quick but leaving the axe dug into the ground a bit -> high endlag.

I also really like his critical hit animation where he twirls the lance around before thrusting it really hard forward, so that’d be his Forward Smash. To make it pop out, though, we could keep things interesting: while twirling the lance, he still keeps the shield up, so while the move takes a while to come out and has a truckload of endlag, you’re still mostly safe until the thrust comes out. Up Smash would probably be a copy of Ike’s as a giant half-circle of death (maybe requiring less commitment/with less power), and Down Smash would work best as a reference to Latch, being a quick and potent swipe that only hits behind you and being really good for catching rolls.

I’m not even sure if I need to go over the aerials, since they’d purposefully be shit and have very little application. Neutral Air could be Ike’s again but he’s using an axe (maybe stronger with more landing lag), Forward Air would be some sort of poke for when you’re trying to land, Back Air was listed as the generic strongarm swipe you all know me for (with the lance, it’d probably reach really far and land you some cheeky kills), Up Air could probably just be an upwards stab like a further reaching Link U-Air without the lasting hitbox (quick kill option), and Down Air really doesn’t matter much, it’d probably be some generic axe slam that spikes or something (being the most disrespectful motherhubbard in the world and killing yourself just to smack somebody while they’re trying to recover). The point here is that other than MAYBE F-Air, each would be really slow to end and have a lot of landing lag, mix that in a blender with his obscene falling speed and you’ll know the taste of two different types of shit mixed into one flavour.

The Specials:

Here’s where things are veeeeeeerrrry slightly more interesting than before. ittedly, Kellam probably has one of the blander sets of Specials out of my repertoire, but it should all compliment his gimmick so hopefully things turn out well in the end.

Coming up with Specials was hard after the first 2, so I had to go with a bit of a generic option for Neutral Special: a one-use projectile, specifically the Javelin (capitalized because that’s the name of the special MOVING ON).

It’d work pretty simply, Kellam takes a slight step back, classic double-sided brass javelin in hand, before slinging it forwards, probably at an arc. You could charge it to increase range and power, but it wouldn’t be stored and definitely can’t be cancelled by shielding. At the same time, until you step forward to throw it, the shield would still be up, so that’d be good (but since he’d be focusing his strength on throwing the javelin, the shield’s threshold would be significantly lower, maybe requiring 14-12% to stagger).

Overall, it wouldn’t be good in the neutral, but using it while your opponent is trying to land or throwing some cheeky javelins to snipe them during a recovery would work really well. Also, these things would be strong as hell, getting skewered by Corrin’s fingers might not do that much in the long run but I’m fairly certain eating one of these monsters wouldn’t be something you can easily brush off. It’d definitely be hard to land, and missing would leave you wide open, but securing a kill around 80% without charge wouldn’t be surprising.

Side Special, Shield Bash, was significantly more interesting to come up with and balance. If you can read, you already know what it would be; Kellam would wind back and thrust his shield straight forward, knocking opponents away. However, for various reasons, there’d be two different versions of the move, a strong and a weak bash. Tapping the button would be a quick shove with the shield, not pushing you forward much but letting you act again pretty quickly afterwards. It’d work by dealing damage and having a pseudo-windbox effect where it pushed the opponent backwards and maybe interrupted their run animation if they were dashing at you, but it wouldn’t cause them to flinch, so it’d essentially only reset the neutral while tacking on damage as a sort of warning. Holding the button, however, would cause the shield bash to lunge farther and deal sizeable knockback/more damage, in exchange for being laggier and leaving you open for longer (also lowering the stagger threshold by 4%). Both versions would help you maintain space and punish bad attempts to hit you, while probably not shattering the game’s balance.

Up Special isn’t, well, special. It’d basically just be a standard helicopter spin attack with the axe, probably strong as hell (how about YOU walk into an axe being spun fast enough for the wielder to gain ground) but gaining something like half of Dongcopter’s vertical height and almost immediately tiring Kellam out before falling. It’d be an obscenely powerful kill move and probably come out relatively fast, but the very high endlag and temporary removal of his shield’s protection wouldn’t make it an easy move to use in the neutral.

And finally, his Down B, “Defensive Stance”, allowing him to walk slowly backwards/forwards without turning around (since the draft was designed before Ultimate Ryu proved normal backwards walk was ok) while also increasing the stagger threshold to something like 35%, to truly keep your wall up. And to make sure the move has something else to warrant a single spot, you can press A for a quicker D-Tilt. yaaaaaaaeeeeeeeeeyyyyy

also I didn’t come up with a final smash haha whoops

The late general attributes section

So, with all of the pieces in place, Kellam should be an actually competent counter to some of the biggest contenders in the meta. The shield will prevent most grounded assault and really help you focus on warding them off from above, making the process easy for you. Attacking the shield means nothing when he can just shrug it off, and certain characters like Little Mac will be incredibly easy to beat… and you’ll have full control of the tempo… and any feeling of control will be sapped from the opponent as the game turns into multiple rock-paper-scissors matches…

where winning a match means you gain little ground… and losing means you eat a large amount of damage and have the neutral reset/die from his power…

oh no

and the realization

So, uh, Kellam is essentially just Bayonetta. No, he might not be toooooo broken (might), characters like Cloud are probably going to have a field day with him. BUT, since I need to explain basic concepts to validate this blog, the main problem comes from the fact that he just completely changes the game’s dynamics in exchange for his playstyle, as the opponent absolutely has to play a very specific way to do anything. Nobody likes telling them what to do, and Kellam forces them to listen or die. It’s not cool.

Besides, even though you might think Dedede VS Bayo is bad, Kellam would just completely invalidate a solid chunk of characters due to their strengths being completely useless against him, like the aforementioned Little Mac. I don’t think you guys are stupid, you can probably figure out why Kellam is completely busted, so having him in the game is a terrible idea.

Conclusion:

This blog is probably just a dumb joke that I’ve dragged out for way too long, but I want this to make a point. It’s almost certainly obvious what the point is, but it’s extremely important that if you want to make movesets, figure out whether your current project is getting too ambitious or too gimmicky, pull the plug. Start again, go back, find out if you can salvage the essence of the source material without making the same mistakes, and if you can’t, pick a new character. Overambition sucks.

But uh, if you enjoyed the shitty reverse-hypothetical blog made to use a stupid broken draft, maybe leave a comment telling me how much I’m abusing my “power”? Rep would be nice since I’m less than 600 points away from Lvl 15. And, uh, I hope you don’t let this influence your opinion of me, I have better in my past and probably better in my future.

On that dumb note, I wish you all a wonderful day. Or night, since that’s my joke. NO TOUCHIES