Movesets that are "Too Easy" - Daehy's Repetitive Ramblings

Yeah yeah I know all I talk about is movesets, maybe someday I’ll come up with something else to talk about.

This was supposed to be a “quick and dirty” blog that I’d think of and quickly put out as an easy extra blog to put out between the guide and my anniversary post, but I came up with this idea more than a few days ago and have been sitting on it for a lot longer than I would have preferred. There was also a completely different blog idea I proposed to Jose to make sure it’s safe for this Amino, and THAT was supposed to be posted instead of this at first, but as usual my motivation died a gruesome death before I could start working on that, so I guess we’re going with this one instead.

To clarify the title, I’ve been thinking about movesets that are “too easy” recently, and came up with enough things to say about them to make a maybe decent blog out of them.

I encourage people to avoid working on certain characters/stay away from certain genres to pull from (if you’re a regular, take a guess as to which one), and I have quite a few scrapped drafts that I COULD have turned into a blog but just lost interest due to the fighter concept not being interesting enough to read or write about… so since I only briefly talked about it in my guide, I feel like fully expanding the idea like I did with counters isn’t a terrible idea.

seriously though why do you guys like my ramblings they make zero sense

especially since it’s always about movesets, aren’t you guys going to get sick of this

”Too Easy” Movesets

I guess my non-fighter-concept blogs will just have artwork of a specific character filling it (Inari and Mad Hatter were combined due to both being my profile picture characters)… so I hope you’re in the mood for a lot of Selkie this time.

Next time probably won’t be Fire Emblem.

Probably.

Movesets should not be easy:

Movesets are weird if you look at them in a certain way. They’re like if you took a conversation with a friend about who you want in Smash and tried to turn it into an essay explaining how you think they’d play and why. You’re writing a document with the word count in the thousands on a niche inside a niche inside a niche, so all of your experience writing them will be useless in other fields, but hey, if you enjoy doing it there’s at least that.

they are serious business

Back to this dumb topic though, a key part of them always has and always will be your ability to take some random character from whatever game/anime you’re currently interested in, take a good long look at the things they can do in the source material, and convince somewhere between 1 to 120 (max) people on the internet that what you’ve come up with is not just a unique and interesting take on how they’d play/what they’d bring to Smash, but also a viable option that Sakurai himself could possibly use and please the fanbase with.

While anyone can take any character and talk about them in a way that is intriguing and fun to read (or the exact opposite) provided they know what they’re doing, exactly which character they pick still greatly matters – after all, a moveset isn’t just judging what you can come up with, it’s also judging what you can come up with based on a pool of concepts and ideas limited to the topic character and their games. And that’s where today’s problem comes in, because the work needed to make a kit based on them fluctuates between practically doing everything yourself to so easy a child can write about it like it was nothing… and it depends on what character you pick.

On one end of the spectrum, you have characters from genres so different from Smash you’re making up 90% of their kit from your own creativity and trying to connect an entire combat style to something completely unrelated to fighting, stuff like puzzle games, visual novels, casual games, non-combative horror games, etc.… I’ve seen a couple of Monika movesets based off of DDLC and apart from going off of the general theme of “oh she’s glitchy and messes with the game’s programming”, literally everything they write is just stuff they made up for her. It works and I’ve got nothing but respect for those, but at the same time they have close to nothing to work with and are forced to create a take on them entirely unique to the author.

There’s the middle ground composed of nearly everything else, so I can’t talk about that much, but most movesets I’ve seen fall into this category – it’s not a direct port and there’s usually some unique things that you have to create specifically for their moveset/mechanics you have to change in a noticeably distinct way to work in a fighting game, but the process isn’t too hard or author-dependant, and the source material available gives you plenty of room to work with + filling in any remaining blanks isn’t hard when you’ve got a good guideline based on all of the other things they have (i.e. if they’re a character who focuses on status effects, you can probably create some Smash-specific status effects/moves that cause them and be fine).

But I say nearly because on the opposite side of the scale, you have characters from games that are very similar to Smash, such as genres (traditional fighting games, platformers) or games that give characters distinct abilities and roles that are really easy to translate to this stupid game we somehow enjoy (stuff like MMOs come to mind).

If you’re making a moveset for a character falling into this latter category, you might notice that it’s almost like the blog writes itself at times – standards are either already available for you or so easy to come up with that it’s zero trouble coming up with the rest, when you start coming up with Specials you can quickly figure out Neutral, Side, and Down almost rapid-fire (sometimes Up Special doesn’t immediately pop out from the source material, sometimes it does like the others), and the playstyle is either a carbon copy of the one they have in the source material or so similar you barely need to change anything.

So… good movesets are a combination of both a character chosen (their source material, personality, playstyle, appeal…) and the author’s creativity writing a blog around them (how they describe them, what moves they go with, how they adapt the source material in general…) to create a fighter concept that is ideally as distinct from other characters/movesets and interesting to the reader as possible, correct? And you wouldn’t be wrong to assume movesets are better when the author puts as much thought into it as possible, right?

How interesting is it to read a blog where the author barely needed to do any work themselves other than just typing out the words on their screen?

The point I guess I’m trying to get across is that it’s fully possible to pick a character who is already so easy to port to Smash that it’s borderline not worth making the b the first place – I know for a fact that at some point in your career of reading random Amino blogs, one of them was something like a fighting game moveset where you went in knowing exactly what move from the source material would be used in the exact specific input the author gave it, ad infinitum until you’ve correctly and easily predicted the entire blog just by noticing what character was in the thumbnail.

Worst thing is, it’s fully possible to make those types of blogs interesting if you do it right, but so many movesets only cover the bare minimum of what a mediocre or even good moveset should have, and therefore you end up with blogs that just feel like copy-pastes of the source material with barely any effort put into them apart from writing some arbitrary subject-to-change damage numbers (rarely we’re even blessed with kill percentages)… and some of them end up getting featured, SOMEHOW, despite said lack of effort, rewarding the author and teaching them that yeah this sort of thing is fine and wanted.

If making a good moveset is like writing an exam, posting a blog about one of those kinds of characters (without fully expanding on them to the best of your ability) is like pulling out your phone and looking up the answers. In this case, you can’t be “caught” and penalized, but you aren’t being impressive. We can see you looking at your crotch, you aren’t subtle.

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This entire blog can pretty much be summed up by this overly long section, so my plan for the rest of the blog was to show off a few examples of “too easy” movesets and explain any additional issues I have with them. If you want a way to make them readable if you’re REALLY stubborn about the character you’ve picked, you can read my moveset guide or just look at other examples… but if you get what I’m talking about, is there really a good reward to gain from writing a blog about them?

How about we get the obvious out of the way and cover my favorite punching bag first – good ol’ traditional fighting games? You know they’re the perfect example.

Avenue Brawler

I think I have a love-hate relationship with these things or something, I bring them up constantly…

Traditional fighters are interesting examples to talk about because they’re already in Smash, and people love the three representatives we got. If you ever want to see how a fighting game character would work in Smash proper, they give you not just one but two different styles of working them in.

Ryu and Ken give you the basics; they auto-face the opponent during 1v1s almost exactly like how regular fighting games handle it (although they only turn around on the ground), they have extra jabs and tilts depending on whether you tap or hold the button (mimicking typical light + medium + heavy attacks), can cancel their standards into Specials and Specials into Final Smashes like the source, and can perform far stronger versions of their Specials by performing the command inputs that usually activate those moves (adding additional mechanical skill and again imitating the light-heavy system)… there are even a couple of additional quirks to them like their air acceleration being terrible (since in regular fighting games you can’t change directions once airborne). All stuff you know, but putting it all together actually makes how they were implemented sound cooler than usual. Additionally, since Ryu was in 4 which lacked the auto-turn, we also have an example of a fighting game character who doesn’t use that mechanic at all.

One final thing to mention regarding the two friends is that while they have their three most iconic Specials covering Neutral, Side, and Up, instead of choosing some random additional Special, Sakurai decided to include a universal attack from the most recent mainline game at the time of Ryu’s reveal/release, Street Fighter IV: the Focus Attack. And it fits great, since not only does it represent that game really well (both doing exactly what it’s supposed to do and even having the unique method of cancelling it available in Smash) but it also just suits the two really well… an example of a game-specific mechanic in Smash going really well.

Terry on the other hand spices things up and overall feels like a “sequel” of sorts to the shotos – he keeps all of their gimmicks apart from the light/heavy attacks but also comes with a Back Special which exploits both the auto-turn and command input gimmicks in the best way possible (and is designed well too – even in 1v1s where Forward B is only Side B, the command input for specifically Back B is always available), the ability to perform inputs for his original Super Attacks once a condition is met to act like infinite mini Final Smashes, and even a couple of unnecessary but cool extra gimmicks like a unique attack that can be done by cancelling his spotdodge. He still represents fighting games as a whole as well as his source series’ unique aspects, but he also packs some things that make him completely unique from the rest of the cast.

The fact that it’s easy to say that both series are represented EXTREMELY well says a lot about how well traditional fighters port to Smash; they took a bit to capitalize on it fully with Ult’s changes to Ryu and Terry as a whole, but when the only thing even remotely close to feeling out of place is Terry’s Super inputs (and even then that’s just because difficult inputs are rare to non-existent in Smash) and they’re super easy to get used to anyways when in the FG mentality… their inclusion fits Smash like a glove.

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ittedly that was quite a tangent, but there are a couple of things I want to highlight from that.

First, notice how pretty much all bases are covered, and apart from any mechanics very specific to a certain series being added for a respective fighter, almost every single universal mechanic goes untouched – we have examples of auto-turn both on and off + Back Special capitalizing on it, the light-to-heavy attack scale, command inputs not clashing with regular Special inputs, attack cancelling, even non-FS Supers working just fine. The only thing I can really think of that we haven’t received yet is a proper Super meter (since Terry just gets infinite free Supers once he’s past 100%), but even then, we already have the universal Final Smash meter as well as the other Super-style meters already in Smash like Limit, Arcene, and K.O. Punch.

Second, due to how fighting games work, there are extremely few moves or concepts between the three characters that are Smash-specific (i.e. only in Smash and not their home series). Pretty much every single jab, tilt, Smash Attack, Special, and Final Smash/Super that they have comes directly from the source in both animation and general function (their Down Tilts are low, fast poking tools that can often combo into something else if successful, a sentence true in both Smash and Street Fighter/King of Fighters), most of their aerials have direct comparisons (Back maybe has a uniquely tailored animation and Up-Air is probably the only one entirely unique, if at all), and at worst some of their throws are unique (even then, Pummel, F-Throw, B-Throw, and D-Throw are usually covered). This along with their mechanics being ported so perfectly results in all three fighters being contenders for possibly THE most faithfully reps in Smash, given that they are almost move-for-move and mechanic-for-mechanic representing their original appearances.

The Ramifications:

Now, what I’ve been trying to say about movesets. They aren’t like Smash, where once Sakurai gives us the new character we’re focusing on playing them, they’re on paper meaning that what the author writes about them is the focus.

If you were making a moveset for a fighting game character pre-Ryu’s announcement all the way back in like mid-2015, there would be some wiggle-room regarding exactly how you implemented them since there’d be no other characters like them – how would you deal with all of their light/medium/heavy inputs? What about command inputs; would you ignore them in favour of just doing regular Specials or include them in some way (and as a bonus, how would you incentivise using those inputs rather than just saying “oh you can do this to use X Special”)? What about auto-turning, would that be scrapped? The Final Smash meter wasn’t a thing back then, so what if they had a Super meter? Would said meter only work for Final Smashes, or would it be its own unique thing? And for characters like Ryu who have less than 4 unique Specials, what do you go with to fill in the blanks?

Before Terry came out but after Ultimate was discussed at E3 2018, there was one lingering question some big-brain individuals could have asked about auto-turn… now that the character almost always faces the opponent, could we split Side Special into two, creating Forward B and Back B? How would that work? And what would happen in free-for-alls, how would you use Back B then?

But then Terry came out and just covered all of the bases, even a couple that weren’t asked about. Fighting game characters without the more complex light/heavy system? Yeah he doesn’t have that on his standards and he’s fine without them, and in the opposite direction, his Side Special has four, I repeat FOUR different intensities compared to Ryu/Ken’s 2 (light and heavy regular input, light and heavy command input). A theoretical Back Special? Yeah they gave him one, it’s one of his other Specials, and all of the questions you might have regarding how it’d work are answered and implemented in-game. Supers? He doesn’t have a meter but he gets them once he’s past 100%, and instead of replacing any moves you can just do the classic inputs from his home game to use them, no hassle. Charge inputs? Yeah his Up B changes if you held downwards and flicked up before using it. Random extra things like dodge cancels and projectiles that only work on the ground? Those are covered too, why not.

The fact that all of these things are in Smash is good overall, because in practice these things are pretty cool and make for some unique fighters. But this greatly hampers the quality of any movesets made on them.

Fighting game movesets were already hard to make interesting to read back in the days of Smash 4 because anywhere between 95 to 100% of the work regarding how moves work is already done for you. You have pretty much all of the standards down pat since you can just use their various ground and aerial attacks for respective moves (quickest attack is their jab, slowest/strongest attacks are Smash Attacks, anything else is a tilt, dash attack, or aerial), and even if you’re short of a Special or two, just use whatever unique universal attack/gimmick your favorite game from the source series had. Ryu is a GREAT guideline to work off of.

And then Terry came out and just made everything even easier for you… Back Specials, non-FS Supers, different flavours of attacks… at this point, unless it’s completely unique to the specific fighting game you’re working with (something like charging Ki in DBFZ comes to mind), it’s been done already. You don’t need to ask yourself any of these questions anymore because they’re all answered for you. Just do it like how Sakurai did it.

And even if it is unique and hasn’t been done before, it’s almost certainly easy to port. Going off of the “Ki charge” idea, how would it and the respective Ki meter work? Ah whatever, just give charging Ki its own input (either Down Special if you’re lazy or something like Inkling’s Shield + B if you’re slightly less lazy), using Ki on Specials that it works with can be determined by tapping the button to not use it and holding to use it, if you want to implement Supers just do the Terry thing and have specific command inputs for them, yada yada you get the point.

Inherently, movesets for these sorts of characters almost universally suck because of all of these factors. When most movesetters out there aren’t able/willing (or both) to expand on their movesets and delve further into ideas like how fighters and their moves are affected in the transition, you end up with the blogs that are near-universally hated – each move is exactly the same as what it is in the source series with a damage number and maybe a kill% tacked on if you’re lucky, if you know what series they come from you already know exactly which moves they’re going to use, and the blog feels both ionless and effortless, one of the worst combinations possible.

It’s even worse when it’s characters from one of the two traditional fighter franchises already in Smash, such as Chun Li – if somebody tells you they’re going to make a Chun-Li moveset, provided you have even the most basic understanding of how she works in Street Fighter, you already know what moves they’re going to use (the obvious ones for obvious reasons), what they do (exactly what they do in the source series, if it combos it combos and if it finishes it finishes), what input the author put them in (Light Punch or Kick is going to be Jab, Chun-Li’s Kikoken thingy is almost certainly Neutral B, etc.), what gimmicks they’ll implement (all of the ones Ryu and Ken have, maybe with a hint of Terry here and there)… at that point, there’s no point in reading the blog.

And once there’s no point reading the blog… there’s no point in writing it in the first place.

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That’s about as full of an explanation as to why I hate fighting game movesets so much that I’ll ever give or be able to give. It’s not impossible to make them not bad (I’ll cover that later), but that event is so rare that, for once, I fully agree with the stereotype of movesets almost always being bland and terrible in the sole case of them.

However, traditional fighting games are not the only culprits – they are BY FAR the worst, but there are actually quite a few other genres that are similarly too easy to work with. If for whatever reason you’re still reading this, that’s what the rest of this blog will be; more examples.

also a bit of egotistical flexing but that’s not the point MOVING ON

Other examples that are too easy:

I’ll give you two examples, one relatively similar to fighting games but different enough to count, and one that comes from a genre not even represented in Smash yet. These sections might be a bit long, but they’ll get the point across, and I promise the second one will be smaller since you’ll have understood the point by then.

Fighting games are one genre that translates super easily, but what about beat-em-ups?

Streets of Rage – Floyd Irana

Pretty recently, my dad and I played through a game called Streets of Rage 4, you might have heard of it. It’s not entirely my cup of tea but it was a pretty solid game and could be fun with friends, so if you’re into that sort of game I’d recommend it. Point being, there was one character I really liked in it called Floyd Iraia (a heavyweight-style grappler who just wrecks everything), and I felt like he’d be a good example for this blog given how easy it’d be to make a moveset for him.

Seriously, let me just give you a basic kit for him right here right now, if anyone wanted it could be expanded upon into a full blog for an easy feature if they know what to add to it (literally just say how it’d work in Smash and you’d be golden).

You can easily tell how he plays just by watching him in videos or by playing the game yourself, but there’s also conveniently a bio page telling you everything about him just in case. Neat.

Floyd is a big heavy guy who hits hard – easy, he’d be a heavyweight. Specific stats are pretty obvious; he’s large (would probably rival characters like K. Rool in size) and doesn’t die easily (both decent stamina in the source game + his large size and bulky metallic arms tell me he’s quite heavy), he’s not fast in the slightest (in the game itself his top speed is pretty slow, and his attack speed is similar) and his jumps are whatever (jumps are not very good in the source series, have the same quality as Ryu/Ken where you can’t change your direction in mid-air, and I presume his air jump would be garbage). Finally, he falls like a rock (self-explanatory).

As for moves, standards are super easy since simply mashing the attack button makes him throw out a bajillion different attacks as part of a combo… if you take his regular combo in the source series you could probably dissect it and make an entire set of tilts + jab, dash attack, and Smash Attacks with possibly a couple of animations left over that you could translate into aerials (he’s even got a move specifically designed to quickly hit behind him… unique D-Tilt?), and he’s got a couple of air-unique moves that you could use to fill in the blanks there. And since Streets of Rage has a bunch of different ways to wreck people once you grab them, you could probably fill out his throws in one go without needing to think up any of your own (he can throw opponents around in either direction, clap them above him, slam them on the ground, or electrocute them as a pummel).

If there are somehow any blanks you don’t know how to fill in, you can just come up with some generic kicks or punches, since as long as you make them fit how he plays (slow but strong), it’ll work fine. Nobody’s going to mind as long as you make them sound cool.

With those out of the way, the Specials are not hard to cover.

Oh look, he’s got a bunch of in-game attacks that are directly called “Specials”, how convenient.

This one for example is his Defensive Special (“Thunder Sphere”, I think), an attack where he unleashes a large burst of electricity around him… in the source game, it’s a large attack that can be used as a finisher for a combo, or as a get-off-me tool to knock opponents away to give you some breathing room. Those aspects are easy to translate into Smash without changing anything, but since it also does a decent amount of damage in the source material, we can also make it a semi-decent kill move (so it’s good for finishing opponents either by itself or out of a combo). But it’s called “defensive” for a reason – during the startup and for a chunk of the attack’s duration, Floyd is completely invulnerable, allowing him to dodge and counterattack nearly anything in the game that isn’t an incredibly long-lasting hitbox. In exchange for all of this, since it’s really slow in his home game (both starting up, and leaving him wide open afterwards), we can do the same in Smash pretty easily; it’s good when you catch the opponent off-guard, but it’s very easy to punish if they see it coming and dodge or block it.

Oh, and finally, it (as well as most of his other Specials) has a unique gimmick where using it affects your health: you’ll automatically lose a set amount of health (a small but still significant part, off of memory I’d assume about 10% of it), but instead of being gone forever, the health lost will remain in your health bar but change to green. Green health can be slowly regained by attacking opponents, but the moment you get hit in any way, it’ll disappear properly and for good. This could be implemented pretty easily in Smash (i.e. each use makes you lose somewhere between 10-15%, hitting opponents before they hit you back can let you heal it, but once you get hit you properly take any damage you haven’t healed back + the damage and knockback from the offending hit)… just like how they are in the source series, they’re really good in various ways, but punishable if whiffed or avoided due to high startup and endlag, and in exchange for their power, sap health in a risky way.

And we can reuse this gimmick for most Specials, including the next one.

Floyd’s home game specifies Specials for a reason, since he has multiple. This one would be his Offensive Special, which I believe is named Magnetic Grab. As the name and above picture imply, it’s a grab; his hand extends pretty far (I’d say about the distance of a roll) and anyone who he snags is brought over to him. It carries the same downsides as Neutral B (self-damage, long frame data), but also packs very high reward for landing it. As for what the reward could be, there are a few options, with pretty much any of them working well.

One is to just make it act like a regular grab, where once he nabs you he can pummel you or throw you in any direction – this is balanced and unique from a regular tether grab because he always has access to his regular non-tether, which in comparison to this move is faster, has far less endlag, and DOESN’T sap his health, all for the same reward of landing it. But Side Special is still good because it goes really far, is a great way to punish people running or dodging away from you without chasing them, and isn’t that much slower startup-wise (only a few frames at most).

Another is to just give it a set followup – if you land it, you’ll always do a specific throw, perhaps one that deals a ton of damage and knockback but isn’t as good as your regular grab at lower percentages due to lacking any combo potential (this move is supposed to be a finisher in the source, after all). If you snag them in the air (this can also apply to all versions, btw), this can be either another “take you with me” last ditch move like Ganoncide, or can have a unique immediate throw without falling anywhere.

And finally, in the source series, you can walk around when you’ve grabbed people. It’d remain separate from DK’s cargo throw since you can’t jump while doing it (pressing the jump button simply activates a specific throw), nor can you throw them while airborne, both severely limiting how you can move around while doing it… but still, being able to grab somebody and walk over to the ledge before decking them with a strong throw is a really, really good option regardless.

Pick one of your preference, explain how it’s balanced, and boom: Side Special done.

Up Special is pretty easy, just take his Air Special (“Thunder Pounce”) and make it an Up B.

In the source, he hops slightly (lower than his regular jump, probably shorthop height or lower) before unleashing a ton of electricity at once (far smaller than Neutral B, but probably equal in strength, if not stronger), the blast of which is strong enough to launch him upwards a fair distance. Exactly how good of a recovery you want it to be is completely up to you – if you want it to be bad, you can keep it similar to the original distance (not much higher than his regular jump) or even make it smaller if you’d like, and if you want it to be better, you can just make it go higher. The animation is already there for you, all you need to do is tweak it in a sentence or two.

Hell, even the upsides and downsides are built-in for your convenience. Upsides? There’s a pretty strong hitbox underneath him once he pounces, it can either launch normally or spike if you want him to be disrespectful, either way you already know it’s going to kill. And if you want it to go high, it goes high and acts like a really good recovery, making him harder to kill. Downsides? He always has to hop upwards at first to initiate the bounce, and combining that with the lack of upwards hitboxes or armor, you’ve got a move that’s pretty easy to smack him out of when edgeguarding or gimping him, so regardless of how far it goes or how quick it is, he has a vulnerability to persistent attackers.

Done, moving on.

Oop, looks like we’re out of Specials. Time to slightly try, I guess.

Oh wait never mind he’s got a Super-style gimmick, let’s use that.

Alright so he’s got this thing called a “Star Move” where as long as he has a star, he can fire his giant laser beam for tons of damage out of practically anything. It’s a giant laser beam, which is pretty self-explanatory – lasts forever, deals a ton of damage, kills, and is a giant laser beam (it covers a ton of space), but it probably leaves you SUPER vulnerable if you miss or hit a blocking opponent (even if it deals a ton of shield damage, I doubt it’d break full shields), and optionally it could take a while to come out if it needs to be balanced further.

Exactly how he gets stars is one of the only things open to unique interpretation, but even then the game gives you a pretty basic system – stars are like items, if you find one and pick it up you’ll be able to use it later (you also start every level with one for free, at least in the lower/regular difficulties). So if you want to implement them in Smash, you can make them appear however you want. Perhaps they drop whenever you take a certain amount of stocks (two sounds good), that’s one suggestion. Really, any way you want them to appear will work as long as it’s relatively balanced and you can make it SOUND fair to the reader. It’s all on paper, after all.

Once you have all of that down, you can shit out a playstyle description EZPZ.

Oh, he’s a slow heavyweight grappler who deals a ton of damage, combos well and kills early, but deals self-damage and has a bunch of lag on key moves + lacks a projectile… I wonder if he’d be a high-risk-high-reward grappler-style fighter similar to Ganondorf or Incineroar, focusing on getting close to the opponent and racking up as much damage as possible, being able to throw off the opponent’s countermeasures with things like his invincible get-off-me explosion and lengthy command grab, and have a potent finisher in the form of his Down B to finish the stock the moment the opponent slips up even slightly… I wonder if his downsides would be his incredibly slow speed, high size, and lack of range forcing him to predictably approach the opponent, giving him a large weakness to fighters who can camp him out or otherwise outrange him, as well as against those who can exploit his abuseable Up B to gimp him early and easily…Oh wow, this is really difficult, I wonder how I’ll ever figure this out....

If you ever play Streets of Rage 4, you can easily confirm that what I just did was incredibly easy to anyone who knows that game even slightly. A couple of things have to be adapted to Smash in a unique way, but that’s it, only a couple of things like Mad Libs-ing any missing standards and screwing around with the balance of one or two specific Specials, really not anything difficult if you know what you’re doing or have any experience in this format.

I’m completely serious about this – take those moves and playstyle description, expand on them slightly (maybe specify what his specific standards are and what they individually do), put them in their own blog, and suddenly that’s a borderline free feature. It’d be easy, yet nobody can really say it’s technically not deserving of a feature (provided you include the basics of a good moveset).

Let’s take a look at a different character. Since you get what I’m talking about, the next section will be much quicker, I promise.

Overwatch – Ashe

This is kind of lumping every other example together, but the point of this is to highlight how it’s not just fighting games or genres similar to that who fall under this overarching problem.

Overwatch will be a good example, and one that I’m very familiar with. I have issues with the balancing which prevent me from enjoying myself while playing it, but I honestly love the game and would still be playing it as often as I could if said balancing issues weren’t a thing. In the past I’ve considered making movesets for a couple of heroes (namely Junkrat and Roadhog, who are equally my favorite characters from that game), but there was a third one I’ll always having a scrapped moveset for: Ashe.

Ashe is cool.

The problem with Overwatch movesets is that you’re already given everything you need to work with – characters have set roles they fill in teams which can translate really easily into Smash as playstyles (i.e. stuff like primary damage dealers being equal to glass cannons, defensive powerhouse characters being, well, defensive powerhouses, tanks being beefy heavyweights, and s being self-explanatory), they have distinct weapons that can easily function for multiple Specials/standards along with a personality and fighting style you can pull from to fill in the blanks, and on top of that they’ve got unique abilities and ultimates that are BEGGING to be turned into Specials and maybe Final Smashes.

I mentioned that I scrapped an Ashe moveset sometime in the past, and that wasn’t because I didn’t know what to do with her. Rather the opposite – because I knew exactly what to do with her for literally everything she did without much thought, and because everyone else will know what I’ll give her before even reading the blog (provided they know what Overwatch is), it’s kind of hard to feel motivated to write a blog that is THAT obvious and self-explanatory.

Playstyle? Eh, she’s an offense-oriented damage dealer who relies on her gun and dynamite pack to deal tons of damage when used efficiently. Due to her squishiness she can’t take opponents head-on without making every shot and ability-use count, so as long as you can either out-damage her or survive her barrage for long enough to kill her, you’ll consistently win encounters against her (since she for the most part can only focus on one target at a time, she’d also be really bad in scenarios where there’s multiple foes to deal with). As such, she’s an aggressively campy character who relies on killing you at range before you can kill her, and once you get close to her and throw her off, she’s easy pickings.

Stats? Low weight, human size, average speed, anything between decent to mediocre jumps depending on what you feel like in the moment, regular falling speed, done.

Standards? Bad overall, she’s supposed to be good at range and lackluster up-close. Give her generic punches or kicks or whatever, as long as you explain their purpose well nobody will care. Maybe make some of her key moves include her gun to give her multiple ways to shoot it (perhaps Up Smash for example fires it at a nice upwards angle, good for sniping), keeping it from only being restricted to her Neutral B.

Neutral B? Her rifle, of course. Oh hey, it has two firing modes… if you tap the button, she hip fires (not very accurate and pretty weak, but the wide spread and high firerate makes it easy to land chip damage), if you hold it, she’ll scope in and fire it properly (goes further and always fires in a straight line, stronger than usual, but also slower to fire and act again). Former is good for panicking while up close or just for tapping on some free damage as a last-resort, latter is better for range and your primary method of attack from range given how bullets are pretty much instantaneous. Make it unreflectable if you really want her to not be shut down by reflectors.

Forcing you to pay attention to how many bullets you have reloaded by possibly making you have to reload bullets every now and then is optional.

Side B? Dynamite. She throws the thing, it has a timer, eventually it goes boom and deals a lot of damage + kills early. It seems bad at first since it’s a time bomb, it doesn’t have a hitbox while flying through the air, and doesn’t explode until like roughly 4 whole seconds after you throw it, which is GARBAGE most of the time (plus the explosion isn’t that big, making it predictable and avoidable). But in the source game, shooting it with Ashe’s gun makes it explode whenever you want – either you can shoot it with any rifle move you have, or perhaps using Side B while the dynamite is already out causes her to scope in and automatically aim at and shoot it like holding Neutral B. Also, it has a cooldown period in the source game, so same thing in Smash; you can only throw one out every 8 seconds or so, however you want to balance it.

Laggy, not immediately helpful, and very punishable if the opponent avoids/ignores the pack and just smacks you out of it, but potentially really good at range or while edgeguarding/gimping. That and it just looks really, really cool. Holy shit does it look cool.

Up B? Her Coach Gun – she pulls out a shotgun and fires, flying upwards and away in the opposite direction. Obvious recovery that goes either decently far or acts as a really good one, with the added bonus that she’s firing a shotgun; in Overwatch, it deals low damage but high knockback… take a random guess what kind of move it’d be in Smash.

Only being able to use it once in the air before landing is downside enough (that and you have no protection while going upwards), but if you want to stay super faithful to the source series, you can make it only useable 6 seconds after the previous use, making her easier to edgeguard/gimp but allowing you to make it a better move if you feel like it.

Down B? Why not just use her ultimate where she summons her robot buddy/bodyguard/butler, B.O.B.?

How do you charge it? You take and deal damage, just like in the source material, just like Cloud’s Limit and Little Mac’s K.O. Punch. The exact specifics of how much it takes to charge can vary depending on how you want to balance it, but it probably takes a lot, and it probably disappears if you fuck up and die.

Without full charge, the move does nothing. But once you do have full charge, she yells out the iconic line you probably already know from the game/memes and B.O.B. hops down from the sky out of nowhere. Once he’s out, he charges forward, sending anyone unfortunate enough to be in his way flying sky-high, and once he reaches some arbitrary distance he stops in place and starts shooting people with his arm gun things for however long you feel it wouldn’t be overpowered for. Fitting of being an ultimate, he’s nearly impossible to stop (even if you can knock him away, I presume he’d be one of the heaviest characters in the game if not THE heaviest), and not only acting like a meatshield distraction for Ash to capitalize on, but also a pretty helpful Assist Trophy-like extra fighter to give you some additional firepower to overwhelm your foe.

Might be slightly difficult to balance, but not really – just make it hard to get and worth it to finally activate, but not so hard that it never appears/so easy it appears multiple times in every single match, and not so worth it that it’s a free win.

Also, imagine B.O.B. knocking you into the air before getting sniped by Ashe for the kill. Sexy.

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Aaaaaaaand that’s it. Flesh it out a bit, make it look nice with some formatting, throw in some extra artwork here and there… free feature.

But do you really care? Are we even trying if we that? Would you want to feature that blog?

You get the idea… if a character has too many easily-translateable things, while it’s not the end of the world, it can quickly make a blog far less interesting to read when there’s not much that the author can do to keep your interest when you already know what’s coming and they aren’t mixing it up very much.

There are other examples, stuff like platformers are also prime subjects of this (Kirby, Shovel Knight, and Hollow Knight comes to mind… have you ever read a moveset from one of those series that surprised or truly interested you if you weren’t already a fan of that series?), but I’ve already made this blog way too long as-is, so I won’t make you suffer through any more mini-movesets. Just try to keep an eye out for the warning signs – Specials practically falling into your lap, standards and playstyles writing themselves… watch out.

Wrap-up/Farewell

ittedly, a lot of this blog exaggerates things by focusing on the worst offenders, and I am overhyping these issues. Movesets inherently rely on taking source material and adapting it to Smash, and inevitably there will be some ideas that are just not difficult at all to port to everyone’s favorite crossover platform fighter. That by itself is not the issue – movesets that are relatively easy are not automatically worthless, nor are any movesets worthless. It’s just an issue when it’s TOO easy, when the effort to write it is so minimal you’re barely impressing anyone but the easiest to please readers out there.

If you’re just starting off in writing movesets or are just messing around and making these purely for fun, I’m not going to come for your head if you write about characters like these… if you’re just having fun and/or testing the waters, there’s nothing wrong with doing these. It’s good practice, and good fun if you enjoy this sort of thing.

But as for taking movesets more seriously, as well as aiming for a feature… I really have zero praise for anyone who tries to do something like this and expects their blog to be received well, for all of the reasons I’ve ranted about above. Certain characters are sometimes just creatively bankrupt, and without going out of your way to really expand on them, no matter how good you are at describing moves, the final product just won’t be that interesting. I’m not saying you can’t write these blogs, but I am saying that if you do, you shouldn’t expect much reward out of them.

There are a couple of examples of people taking a fighting game character and actually making a good moveset. Yuusha for example made a fighting game moveset right. But the thing is, that’s the exception – that’s somebody who has a GREAT understanding of movesets and put in a ton of effort to make it stand out, to delve into as many details as possible, and to truly show off his knowledge of both the source series and Smash, resulting in a blog filled to the brim of effort.

Most people don’t know how to do things like that, hence why the above is an exception; nearly every other FG moveset out there feels like an effortless copy-paste, and it’s sad. It’s really, really hard to go out of your way to include all of those aspects, thoughts, and details just for a fighting game moveset when you could have picked so many other characters and had a far easier time making a quality product for.

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Kind of an abrupt end, but at this point I’m mostly repeating myself.

I’m not sure if this’ll become a series or not, that title is mostly a joke but if I end up writing any blogs similar enough to reuse the joke I guess I’ll turn this into an on-and-off-again series of mine… and not all of them will be about movesets.

Most of them would be about movesets, but not all of them.

Regardless, thank you for taking the time to somehow reach the end of this blog, I applaud your patience. If this blog sucks doodoo please tell me, I honestly have no idea how it’ll be received or if it’s even good in the first place, so is always nice.

With that out of the way… I wish you all a wonderful day.

Or night. It’s pretty late at the time of posting this, but you might be reading it at a different time, I can’t tell.