Su­per Smash Broth­ers Ul­ti­mate: The Byleth Con­tro­versy

MISHAWAKA – Fans of the pop­u­lar Nin­tendo fight­ing game, Su­per Smash Broth­ers Ul­ti­mate, are di­vided on their opin­ions of the newly re­leased down­load­able char­ac­ter. 

On Jan. 16, Masahiro Saku­rai, the game’s Lead De­vel­oper, gave a video pre­sen­ta­tion to in­tro­duce the new fighter. The new in­clu­sion to the game’s ros­ter, cur­rently fea­tur­ing over sev­enty char­ac­ters in to­tal, is Byleth from Fire Em­blem: Three Houses. What makes Byleth’s in­clu­sion so con­tro­ver­sial, how­ever, is the fact that Byleth is the eighth char­ac­ter from the Fire Em­blem fran­chise to be in­cluded in the game. 

Many fans feel that Smash Bros. has be­come over­sat­u­rated with these Fire Em­blem char­ac­ters – “swordies” as they have been not-so-af­fec­tion­ately ti­tled – and that most of them have fight­ing styles too sim­i­lar to war­rant in­clud­ing new ones. This sen­ti­ment was ex­pressed at the end of the pre­vi­ous ti­tle’s de­vel­op­ment cy­cle when one of the last char­ac­ters to be in­cluded was yet an­other Fire Em­blem char­ac­ter, Cor­rin. What made the dis­ap­point­ment at Cor­rin’s in­clu­sion un­der­stand­able was that Cor­rin’s game, Fire Em­blem: Fates, had­n’t even re­leased in the United States yet. 

This is an­other rea­son the in­clu­sion of Fire Em­blem char­ac­ters up­sets many fans; their se­ries was­n’t that pop­u­lar out­side of Japan un­til re­cently. The best-sell­ing game in the se­ries, Fire Em­blem: Awak­en­ing sold 1.9 mil­lion copies, and it has been around since 2012. While 1.9 mil­lion copies is not any­thing to sneeze at, and worse-sell­ing game char­ac­ters have had rep­re­sen­ta­tion in Smash, fans feel Fire Em­blem is­n’t nearly pop­u­lar enough to war­rant tak­ing up 10% of the avail­able char­ac­ters in Ul­ti­mate. 

How­ever, these crit­i­cisms don’t nec­es­sar­ily hold up in Byleth’s case. Fire Em­blem: Three Houses is the best-sell­ing game in the se­ries, by far. Sell­ing at least two mil­lion copies since its re­lease in 2018, no other Fire Em­blem game can hold a can­dle to its pop­u­lar­ity. Thus, this in­stance is­n’t com­pa­ra­ble to the con­fu­sion and ques­tions of “who’s this” that met Cor­rin’s re­lease in early 2016. 

Fur­ther­more, in terms of play style, Byleth is dif­fer­ent from most “swordies”; in­stead of giv­ing Byleth the main weapon of Three Houses, the de­vel­op­ers have in­cluded Fire Em­blem’s me­chanic of let­ting the pro­tag­o­nist wield any type of weapon in Byleth’s ar­se­nal. Spears, bows, and axes are all in­cor­po­rated in this one fighter, cor­re­spond­ing to di­rec­tional in­puts. Byleth is­n’t just “an­other swordie” lazily thrown into the game. 

Re­gard­less of the ef­fort put in by Saku­rai and his team, they still ac­knowl­edged that this in­clu­sion might up­set some fans of the se­ries. They even in­cluded a line in Byleth’s re­veal cin­e­matic pok­ing fun at the num­ber of sword­fight­ers in Ul­ti­mate. Un­for­tu­nately, this was re­ceived not as the at­tempt at self-dep­re­cat­ing hu­mor it was and more as salt in the wound for fans who wanted some­thing dif­fer­ent. 

At the end of the day, Byleth is com­ing to Smash Ul­ti­mate, whether peo­ple are happy about it or not. In light of that, fans should be more ap­pre­cia­tive for all of the work the de­vel­op­ers put in. It’s okay to be dis­ap­pointed, and it’s okay to be ex­cited, but what’s most im­por­tant is to re­mem­ber that it is just a game, and no one is forc­ing any­one to buy it or play it.