BYLETH HOUSES FAN BACKLASH

Super Smash Bros. is a video game series that has been going for a little over 21 years. With five games in the installment, each new game added new characters for players to use. However, the most recent added character has sparked some huge backlash within the Smash community.

On Jan. 16 there was a Super Smash Bros. announcement for the fifth and final character of the first DLC fighter’s pass. This character was the main player character from the “Fire Emblem Three Houses” game, Byleth.

Byleth has fast become the most hated character added to the game in the series’ entire lifespan. To give some perspective, we currently have the Wii Fit Trainer from Nintendo’s fitness game “Wii Fit” – not even she is as hated as Byleth, currently.

Byleth (a unisex character) seems to be a unique facet added to the entire roster, so why all the hate? It’s not because of the character itself, but rather because of the series it hails from. Although Fire Emblem Three Houses was a huge success of a game, Fire Emblem in general has a bad reputation in the Smash community. Fire Emblem currently has the third largest character representation in Super Smash Bros., so people are tired of seeing Fire Emblem characters in the game.

There has been a huge debate about whether this has been handled well, but are the community’s proposed solutions to the Byleth controversy any good?

One of the biggest suggestions by the Smash community is that Byleth should have been pushed back to be the first character of DLC fighter’s pass 2, so that everyone in the first fighter’s pass was a third-party character. Before jumping to this conclusion we should ask ourselves a question: “If Byleth was the first character of DLC fighter’s pass 2, would you be eager to buy it?”

The first character of the first fighter’s pass was Joker, from Persona 5, which sparked excitement and eagerness to buy the game and the fighter’s pass. From a business standpoint, it makes sense to end this pass with an underwhelming character so that Smash can start the next with an amazing character that will make players more eager to buy in.

With that in mind, is the hate Byleth is getting fair? Everyone has an opinion, which is reasonable, but we need to be able to respect each other’s opinions. The Smash community is supposed to be more like a family, rather than a war zone. Byleth gets hate because of all the other Fire Emblem characters. Marth, who is another Fire Emblem character in the game, has a bunch of “clone” characters.

This is where most of the hate is coming from. People have suggested that we get rid of some of the characters and keep only the unique ones in the game. This would leave us with Marth, Ike, Robin, Corrin, and Byleth. This seems like a good idea on paper, but again this would still make people upset.

A good portion of the community are saying that it’s okay to have an opinion on the matter, but we should enjoy the fact that we get this many new and original characters into the game, period.

 Byleth will be making her debut on Tuesday (Jan. 28) and will hopefully win the community over with her fun-looking gameplay, that we’ve always gotten from Nintendo.

Advocate Staff