The Issues with Shulk’s Design

Theoretically, Shulk should be one of the coolest characters in smash history. His core mechanic, the “monado arts” allows him to change his attributes at will, a concept which is basically unique to him (outside of some smash 4 custom moves, but those are better left untouched). Shulk is able to dramatically alter his speed, knockback, damage, you know the deal.

In Smash 4, Shulk was widely (if not universally) considered to be one of the most complex, interesting, high skill-cap characters in the game due to the extremely large amount of applications that the monado arts held for him. But in Ultimate, Shulk is widely disliked for his monado arts, with many even going as far as to say that he is an unbalanced character in the current meta. But why is this? Other characters like Roy and Pokemon Trainer have had their strengths refined and increased, but they don’t receive nearly the same backlash from the general community that Shulk does. Well, I’d like to do a “deep dive” and examine why Shulk suffers from poor design in Ultimate and what makes him feel absurdly unfair and cheesy to fight against.

***Please note: “unfair” in this context does not refer to Shulk being broken compared to other characters. Most players, including myself, would not place him within the top 5 of the tier list as of patch 7.0.0. This is not a discussion of how good Shulk is, it’s a discussion of the nature of his design. Of course, that’ll bleed over into the discussion of viability a bit, but just know that how good Shulk is in the meta isn’t my focus.

As I implied before, monado arts are an incredibly cool idea for a fighting game in concept. They allow Shulk to buff himself in certain areas (let’s take smash art’s knockback increase as an example) at the cost of being nerfed in others (in this case, the lowered damage and higher knockback that SHULK takes). I don’t know about you, but that sounds incredibly fun and dynamic to me, because not only does Shulk’s style need to change based on the art he has active, but his opponent has to be aware and adapt as well.

I’d like to discuss individual arts, of course, but I think a more often overlooked problem is the way that Shulk goes about activating his arts, as it might be the most important change in his design from Smash 4 to Ultimate. Of course, the addition of the art “dial” or “wheel” allowed Shulk to switch arts with much more fluidity than before, adding a lot of freedom to his style. Shulk is now able to change arts several times within just a few seconds. This change reminds me a lot of how Pokemon Trainer’s switch (their core mechanic, of course) was changed from a laggy and committal animation into a short dodge-like change between Pokemon. It’s a change for PT that was lauded. But is it possible that in Shulk’s case, he was given TOO much freedom with his core mechanic? I would argue that is exactly the issue facing us here.

See, how I mentioned that Shulk is dynamic because of the strengths AND weaknesses that come as a package with each art? Well, these weaknesses actually become a lot less impactful when Shulk is able to cancel them and reactivate them with such little commitment or risk to them.

Let’s again consider an example with Shulk’s Smash Art: Shulk launches his opponent offstage at a high percent and activates Smash Art with the intention to ledge-trap his opponent. By activating Smash Art, Shulk has taken a risk that swings in his favor as he has decided to heighten his ability to take a stock while also facing the risk of taking higher knockback and potentially dying should he lose the favored interaction. Everything up to this point sounds perfectly fair for the interaction at hand.

Now, consider that Shulk’s opponent significantly outplays Shulk from their disadvantaged position and escapes the ledge-trap. Ideally, because Shulk lost an interaction which favored him, he should face the repercussions of his choice and “risk” to go into Smash Art. However, within fractions of a second Shulk deactivates Smash Art and goes into Shield Art, negating any potential of dying as a result of him being outplayed.

This is where I find the biggest issue with Shulk’s design and see it fit to label him as “falsely dynamic.” Because what happened in the context of this interaction is that Shulk’s opponent successfully played around the strengths of his Monado Art but was not rewarded with being able to exploit the weaknesses that SHOULD be present along with those strengths. What we see as a result of this in the metagame is that Shulk is frequently able to leverage extremely favorable interactions for him against his opponents without facing the repercussions that they should allow for.

This becomes especially problematic because Shulk is able to modify his monado arts during hitstun, a point at which no other character is normally able to “outplay” their opponent. This was actually possible in Smash 4, but it wasn’t really notable because of how long monado arts took to activate so I’ll leave that alone. In Ultimate, kill confirms, combos, and even multi-hit attacks no longer work on Shulk due to smash art and shield art modifying his knockback drastically. I would like to discuss here the most common argument made by Shulk players in defense of this mechanic: Just like any other option, arts can be baited out and sometimes punished, at least as Shulk must deal with the cooldown of his arts. This is absolutely true, but it does not make the option one that is balanced or fair for a fighting game character. Often in brawl it was perfectly feasible to bait out Meta Knight’s tornado and potentially punish it, but the risk reward for many characters was not viable in high level play as Shulk’s options remain open to continue playing neutral afterwards.

This mechanic that Shulk has basically forces his opponent to win neutral twice... in order to actually win neutral once. Needless to say, that’s really janky and in combination with the fact that Shulk can use his other arts to camp out his cooldown, many matchups and situations become so heavily weighted in Shulk’s favor that it eclipses any weakness he has in of his bad normal frame-data or a sometimes poor disadvantage state.

I wouldn’t like to touch on it for long because this is super subjective, but I also find that a lot of players really dislike the severity of the buffs given to Shulk by each monado art. In combination with the way that he’s able to eliminate risks from his gameplan, Shulk’s arts become impressively frustrating because of just how strong he becomes in whatever area he so chooses. Again, this is subjective, so take it as you will, but I thought that the degree to which Smash 4 buffed his abilities was much more appropriate.

Two points in defense of Shulk that I’m sure I’ll see in any to this essay are that “Shulk is hard so give him a break” and “Shulk’s frame data is bad so give him a break.” And to that I respond: “No.” Little Mac faces many more weaknesses than Shulk but that doesn’t mean that calling him poorly designed is off limits either. Many people, including Shulk mains, would not hesitate to make this point about another character, and they’re right to do so. So, to any Shulk players reading this: this is not an attack on you, you don’t need to get overly defensive because I’m aware that you all work very hard to master his techniques. I am simply pointing out that the techniques aren’t implemented into Ultimate well.

(Ironically, I actually see a lot of Shulk players express their dislike for Mr. Game and Watch, a character especially known for his up b, a strong reversal tool which can turn a normally disadvantageous situation... into an advantageous one... eerily parallel, isn’t it? But, I won’t harp on this as I just found that pretty funny.)

So, there you go - that’s my opinion on why Shulk is poorly designed in Smash Ultimate. It’s not like I made this essay because I hate playing against him or even that I find him to be the worst designed character in Ultimate, really, it’s far from that. He’s probably not even in my top 5 most poorly designed list. Honestly, Shulk’s design just leaves me disappointed because a premise as interesting as monado arts was handled so poorly. Anywho, see you later. Pce :v: