>>55931316Because the word balance has different meanings to different people. Some interpret it to mean "every character has a roughly even chance to win A RANDOM matchup" and others interpret it to mean "every character has a roughly even chance to win EVERY matchup." Take Rock, Paper, Scissors. It's balanced in the first definition, but unbalanced in the second. Rock will ALWAYS lose to Paper so you could say that it's unbalanced, but if you took a random selections of 1000 Rocks, Papers, and Scissors, and put Rock against each one, it'd have about a 1/3rd win rate, 1/3rd tie rate, and 1/3rd lose rate, which you could say is balanced. Being a skill based game, this kind of balance doesn't even really come into play anyways outside of the top 50 or so players worldwide. If you and your friend play it largely doesn't matter what characters you pick; the person with better fundamentals will win more often than not just by getting reads right, knowing when and how to punish, knowing how to edge guard, etc. At the top level of play, however, Smash approaches a Rock, Paper, Scissors type of balance. Certain characters just have better tools to deal with certain other characters; stuff like "grab into X is a kill confirm on Y character if they're at Z%." But every character has things like that so in that regard we could call the game balanced.
