Smash Bros. Ultimate: Min Min Makes Byleth Even Less Unique
The next wave of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate DLC has finally dropped, starting with Min Min from ARMS, and the character only makes Byleth from the previous pack feel even more redundant. Fans of the Super Smash Bros. games have come to love characters like Marth and Ike over the years, but recent installments of Smash have incorporated so many Fire Emblem characters that the franchise is now tied with Pokémon when it comes to the number of characters playable in the game.
Fire Emblem as a series got its second wind on the Nintendo 3DS with Fire Emblem: Awakening, and Nintendo wanted to capitalize on this newfound success. Ever since Super Smash Bros. on Wii U and 3DS, Nintendo has dedicated an enormous amount of the roster to its strategy RPG series. Out of all the DLC for those games, two of the characters were from Fire Emblem, and even Ultimate featured a brand new Fire Emblem character in the form of Chrom. The main complaint from fans isn't just that there are so many Fire Emblem characters in Smash, but that most of them play very similar to Marth, focusing on swift movements and keeping opponents away with a blade.
Byleth, the main protagonist of Fire Emblem: Three Houses on the Switch, is perhaps the most unique of the Fire Emblem fighters. Instead of just using a sword he uses a long-range lance, an extremely hard-hitting axe, and a bow. The main gimmick to his playstyle is that he has insanely good range on most of his attacks, and his goal is to keep his opponents away from him at all times. When Byleth was first released, many Smash players were upset by his inclusion based on his home series alone, but players were at least relieved to see that he played differently from the other Fire Emblem characters.
However, AMRS' Min Min accomplishes the exact same thing while giving representation to a series that didn't even have a single playable fighter before the second DLC pack. Just like Fire Emblem's Byleth, she has a massive amount of range on her attacks, and she even has the option to change out her gloves to an electric ball, which hits very hard, just like Byleth. Both characters have the same basic recovery move, which is a grappling hook that grabs the ledge. Both characters also excel against characters like Ganondorf or Donkey Kong who have trouble approaching zoners and struggle against rush down characters like Wolf and Joker, who have an easy time getting in their foe's face and applying pressure.
In essence, both characters fill the same niche role of using very long-range attacks to keep enemies away, but Min Min stands out considerably more than Byleth because she comes from a series that had very little representation, and Byleth even aesthetically looks similar to the rest of the Fire Emblem cast. Min Min proves that Byleth ultimately serves little purpose in the game other than advertising the latest installment of Fire Emblem, because the developers were able to incorporate the same basic ideas into another character who was more deserving of a spot on the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate roster.