The Next Smash Revolution: Custom Fighter System

[Lord_Brand]

So, the large number of FE reps in Smash has caused some consternation among the Smash fanbase. Some are also dissatisfied with the particular choices, especially in the recent case of Byleth. Many probably have a FE character they'd love to see added into Smash, but lament the fact they aren't nearly popular enough to make a slot.

Well now I have a possible solution to all those problems: the customizable Fire Emblem Fighter!

1. Select your fighter's build and gender from six options - Small Male, Small Female, Medium Male, Medium Female, Large Male, or Large Female.
2. Select a range of characters in your designated build and gender range, taken from across the FE series.
3. Select whether your fighter is Armored or Unarmored. This will affect their weight and mobility.
4. Select your fighter's outfit, from either the Armored or Unarmored pools.
5. Assign weapons to your fighter's moveset slots, or choose from presets. You can specialize in one weapon, mix two or more together, or even use a little of everything. The weapon assigned to the neutral attack slot is your fighter's Primary Weapon, which will affect their nonattack poses and animations such as standing, crouching, running, and jumping. The weapon categories are Sword, Dagger, Greatsword, Axe, Lance, Brawl, Bow, Anima Magic, Light Magic, and Dark Magic.
6. Give your Fighter setup a name, and save it to your list.
7. Select the Fire Emblem Fighter slot on the Smash roster, and select the setup you wish to play.

Using this customizable system, you can create virtually any character from the FE series. Now instead of representing a handful of FE lords, you can represent virtually the entire FE series' worth of heroes and villains in one single slot.

UPDATE: I've realized customizable fighters in Smash have potential beyond just FE reps. Allow me to introduce the Custom Fighter System, which lets you create your dream fighter. Different Custom Fighters have different customization criteria such as build, gender, species, armor, and weapons. You can save your custom fighters to a list, effectively adding your own creations to the roster. Here's a list of prospective Custom Fighter templates:

• Mushrooman (stylized humans from the Super Mario and Wario series)
• Toad
• Koopa (includes Troopas, Bros, Magikoopas, Koopalings, and Koopa King/Queen)
• Kong
• Kremling
• Hyrulean (Hylian, Sheikah, Gerudo, Twili, Sword Spirit, Demon Lord)
• Goron
• Zora
• Rito
• Metroid Hunter
• Space Pirate
• Dreamlander
• Yoshi
• Star Fox Pilot
• Pokemon Trainer
• Eaglelander
• Fire Emblem Unit
• Sonician (characters in Sonic the Hedgehog's style)
• World Video Boxer
• Robot Master (also covers Reploids and ZX-era Humanoids)
• Villager (covers animal villagers as well as humans)
• Paclander
• Street Fighter
• Final Fantasy Warrior
• Castlevania Hero
• Dragon Quest Warrior
• King of Fighters
• Sequin Lander
• Bandicoot
• Dragon

Edited January 19, 2020 by Lord_Brand

[Fabulously Olivier]

Why just FE? Honestly, this sort of thing could be a good replacement for Miis in a Smash 6. 

 

And like.. if Soul Calibur, the Diet Mt. Dew of fighting game franchises can have a robust character builder, why not Smash?

[Flere210]

Just remove the clones and put a spear and axe user in the next smash(that use ONLY a spear and ONLY an axe. Not half assing anymore please). Cheap and simple.

[Lord_Brand]

On 1/18/2020 at 2:35 PM, Etheus said:

Why just FE? Honestly, this sort of thing could be a good replacement for Miis in a Smash 6.

And like.. if Soul Calibur, the Diet Mt. Dew of fighting game franchises can have a robust character builder, why not Smash?

FE is unique among Nintendo series for featuring a diverse cast of distinct characters with interchangeable attributes, particularly in Awakening and onward. But sure, if we can get a customizable FE Fighter, then we should also be able to get, say, customizable Toads, Zoras, etc. Maybe that can be Smash 6's big draw: Create Your Dream Fighters. Since they were willing to put in effort for Mii costumes in Smash 4 and Ultimate, I see no reason why we can't have, say, customizable Mario, Link, Samus, etc. Different fighter categories can have different customization options: a custom Star Fox Pilot can have species in addition to gender and build. Now Krystal can be repped as a female fox pilot.

Or say you want your favorite Kong or Kremling in Smash. Now thanks to the Custom Fighter System, you can create your favorite Kong or Kremling fighter and give them an appropriate moveset using elements from the DKC series, like cutlasses or cannons. A Zelda CF can use all the various weapons, items, and magic seen in the Zelda series.

A CFS might just be the shot in the arm Smash needs to make the sixth game stand out. I'm changing this topic's title to promote the Custom Fighter System.

Edited January 20, 2020 by Lord_Brand

[Dragoncat]

This is a nice idea! Would mounts be too OP? Like what if I want to make Jill or Kieran or Marcia? Ashnard? I imagine the mount would come in during the final smash or like Wario's motorcycle?

Also, shapeshifters? Say I want Panne or Myrrh.

Edited January 18, 2020 by Dragoncat

[Fabulously Olivier]

54 minutes ago, Flere210 said:

Just remove the clones and put a spear and axe user in the next smash(that use ONLY a spear and ONLY an axe. Not half assing anymore please). Cheap and simple.

My approach:

 

Sword set - this is Marth's moveset. If custom specials are a thing, add shockwave, aether, rush, and others as options. If not available, replace Dolphin Slash with Aether and Shield Breaker with Rush. Marth's alts would be Roy, Ike, Chrom, Lucina, and Lyn.

 

Triangle set - this is Byleth's set. Byleth's alts would be female Byleth, Edelgard, Dimitri, Claude, and Rhea.

 

Mage set - this is Robin's set. Remove Levin Sword and increase spell variety. Alts would be female Robin, Celica, Micaiah, Lilina, Linde, and Lewyn. It would be important to just accept all of these characters using versatile magic types.

 

Lance set - this set would involve a lance and would alternative between infantry and cavalry. It would default to Ephraim, but also include others. 

 

Axe set - this set would involve an axe and would alternate between infantry and wyvern. It would default to Minerva, but also include others.

 

 

And unless Smash's roster is greatly expanded overall, I don't see a need to have much more than that. Though I'd consider Dagger to be the next priority, followed by Bow. 

[Lord_Brand]

Mounts are tricky to work into Smash, but I imagine Final Smashes would work. Star Fox and F-Zero use their signature vehicles for Final Smashes, after all. Specials could work too, I can picture a horse trampling and burying oponents. If the rider gets hit too hard, they'll be knocked off the horse. Of course they can dismount by jumping. And like the motorcycle, the horse could stick around for a bit, allowing their rider to remount.

Shapeshifters are tricky. I imagine they would probably work like Corrin, shifting parts of their body to attack.

[NinjaMonkey]

4 hours ago, Lord_Brand said:

So, the large number of FE reps in Smash has caused some consternation among the Smash fanbase.

Implementing a custom FE character builder doesn't solve this particular problem, in fact it exacerbates it. I'll tell you what will solve this though, characters getting cut, starting with all three of the Marth clones.

[Jotari]

I'd rather see a return of custom specials.

[Perkilator]

24 minutes ago, Jotari said:

I'd rather see a return of custom specials.

I second that, preferably as tweaked movesets for the Echo Fighters. I even made a list of that, actually:

Dark Samus

Neutral B: Dense Charge Shot

Side B: Turbo Missile

Up B: Screw Rush

 

Daisy

Neutral B: Sleepy Toad

Side B: Flower Bomber

 

Lucina

Neutral B: Dashing Assault

Side B: Heavy Blade

Up B: Dolphin Jump

Down B: Iai Counter

 

Chrom

Neutral B: Tempest

Side B: Unyielding Blade

Down B: Effortless Blade

 

Dark Pit

Up B: Wings of Icarus (taken from Pit’s old recovery from Brawl)

Down B: Amplifying Orbitars

[Lord_Brand]

1 hour ago, NinjaMonkey said:

Implementing a custom FE character builder doesn't solve this particular problem, in fact it exacerbates it. I'll tell you what will solve this though, characters getting cut, starting with all three of the Marth clones.

How does it exacerbate it, especially if other series get custom fighters too? The idea's expanded so that virtually every fighter is rolled into a custom fighter category, Fire Emblem Unit being one of them.

46 minutes ago, Jotari said:

I'd rather see a return of custom specials.

Why not have both? The Custom Fighter System allows you to tweak not just specials but melee attacks too.

Folks, the Custom Fighter System has huge potential for Smash. Thanks to the modular nature of the CFS, everyone's favorite characters can get in, with the moveset you want.

Edited January 19, 2020 by Lord_Brand

[Jotari]

14 minutes ago, Lord_Brand said:

How does it exacerbate it, especially if other series get custom fighters too? The idea's expanded so that virtually every fighter is rolled into a custom fighter category, Fire Emblem Unit being one of them.

Why not have both? The Custom Fighter System allows you to tweak not just specials but melee attacks too.

Folks, the Custom Fighter System has huge potential for Smash. Thanks to the modular nature of the CFS, everyone's favorite characters can get in, with the moveset you want.

I think Custom Fighters can work in other games, but not Smash Bros. If there was a Fire Emblem fighting game then hell yeah. But in Smash Bros. the characters are too unique in body shape. Pickachu's movements and attacks can't simply be ported over to a different model and look natural. I'd maybe like to see some more customization for the regular attacks of Miis, as that's somewhere where it would work. And definitely a full scale ability to customize the look of each character (Mirror Shield Link please), but creating a custom character doesn't seem like it'd work for Smash in my eyes.

Plus giving every fighter unique custom specials that are balanced against each other would already be a massive tonne of work. Maybe an unreasonable amount of work. Custom Specials were dropped for a reason, and that was probably the work effort required to make them properly (though they're decision to make them acquired by RNG in Smash 4 probably didn't help matters on people's reaction to them).

Edited January 19, 2020 by Jotari

[Lord_Brand]

I think I need to elaborate on how the CFS would work. After you choose the necessary attributes for your Custom Fighter - Build, Species, Gender, etc. - and choose their appearance, you're able to choose their moveset. Fighters of a given template are able to choose from a common pool of moves, possibly limited by criteria like build and armor. Echo Fighters like Daisy and Ken would be examples of template modification; Peach and Daisy would both be Medium-size Female Mushroomans using a similar pool of moves. Samus and Dark Samus are both Metroid Hunters, SImon and Richter are Castlevania Heroes, etc.

So, let's say you wanted to create a Link and a Zelda that both use a Magic Rod as their Standard Special. You create two Medium Hyrulean Hylians, one male, one female, and select the Magic Rod in lieu of the Hylian Bow or Nayru's Love. You don't have to worry about balancing Link's Magic Rod against Zelda's, because they're the same move. The focus of balance shifts from entire movesets to individual moves.

For another example, you could create World Video Boxer fighters for Glass Joe, Von Kaiser, and Piston Hondo. They all have access to the same move pool as Little Mac for customization purposes. Robot Masters can be designed to look like, say, Guts Man or Quick Man, or you can go the Reploid route and recreate X, Zero, and Axl. They all have access to Mega Man's Metal Blade, Crash Bomber, Rush Coil, and Leaf Shield.

As for Pokemon, you'd customize your Trainer - the options cover many of the Trainers from the Pokemon series, including Gym Leaders and Champions - and then choose your Pokemon team, from 1 to 3. Instead of Squirtle, Ivysaur, and Charizard always being the three you use, you could use, say, Pikachu, Greninja, and Incineroar. Or any of a number of Pokemon added to the playable Pokemon pool.

That's what I mean about how each template has its own customization options - no two templates will necessarily be 1:1. Fire Emblem Units can wear Armor, most other CFs can't. Star Fox Pilots have you choose their species, most other CFs are fixed species such as Kong and Kremling. And some criteria change from fighter to fighter; the Fire Emblem Units use small, medium, and large builds, but other CFs might not use those same exact build categories, and if they do they'll look different.

So it comes down to balancing the stats and move pool, rather than each individual fighter. You could create a Stanley who plays like Mario, or a Chunky Kong who plays like DK. You can also tweak their movesets, like by choosing Bugsprayer as Stanley's neutral special, or Pineapple Launcher as Chunky's.

Way I see it, while this means that, yes, there are a ton of FE characters in Smash, there are now also a ton of Zelda characters, a ton of Mario characters, a ton of DK characters...just a ton of characters in general. All recreated using the modular Custom Fighter System. With CFS, your dream Smash roster can finally be realized.

Edited January 19, 2020 by Lord_Brand

[Jotari]

39 minutes ago, Lord_Brand said:

I think I need to elaborate on how the CFS would work. After you choose the necessary attributes for your Custom Fighter - Build, Species, Gender, etc. - and choose their appearance, you're able to choose their moveset. Fighters of a given template are able to choose from a common pool of moves, possibly limited by criteria like build and armor. Echo Fighters like Daisy and Ken would be examples of template modification; Peach and Daisy would both be Medium-size Female Mushroomans using a similar pool of moves. Samus and Dark Samus are both Metroid Hunters, SImon and Richter are Castlevania Heroes, etc.

So, let's say you wanted to create a Link and a Zelda that both use a Magic Rod as their Standard Special. You create two Medium Hyrulean Hylians, one male, one female, and select the Magic Rod in lieu of the Hylian Bow or Nayru's Love. You don't have to worry about balancing Link's Magic Rod against Zelda's, because they're the same move. The focus of balance shifts from entire movesets to individual moves.

For another example, you could create World Video Boxer fighters for Glass Joe, Von Kaiser, and Piston Hondo. They all have access to the same move pool as Little Mac for customization purposes. Robot Masters can be designed to look like, say, Guts Man or Quick Man, or you can go the Reploid route and recreate X, Zero, and Axl. They all have access to Mega Man's Metal Blade, Crash Bomber, Rush Coil, and Leaf Shield.

As for Pokemon, you'd customize your Trainer - the options cover many of the Trainers from the Pokemon series, including Gym Leaders and Champions - and then choose your Pokemon team, from 1 to 3. Instead of Squirtle, Ivysaur, and Charizard always being the three you use, you could use, say, Pikachu, Greninja, and Incineroar. Or any of a number of Pokemon added to the playable Pokemon pool.

That's what I mean about how each template has its own customization options - no two templates will necessarily be 1:1. Fire Emblem Units can wear Armor, most other CFs can't. Star Fox Pilots have you choose their species, most other CFs are fixed species such as Kong and Kremling. And some criteria change from fighter to fighter; the Fire Emblem Units use small, medium, and large builds, but other CFs might not use those same exact build categories, and if they do they'll look different.

So it comes down to balancing the stats and move pool, rather than each individual fighter. You could create a Stanley who plays like Mario, or a Chunky Kong who plays like DK. You can also tweak their movesets, like by choosing Bugsprayer as Stanley's neutral special, or Pineapple Launcher as Chunky's.

Way I see it, while this means that, yes, there are a ton of FE characters in Smash, there are now also a ton of Zelda characters, a ton of Mario characters, a ton of DK characters...just a ton of characters in general. All recreated using the modular Custom Fighter System. With CFS, your dream Smash roster can finally be realized.

My dream roster has Saki on it, and I doubt they'd make any template specifically targeted towards him beyond the Mii fighters that already do much of what you're asking for.

[Lord_Brand]

They could always have a miscellaneous Human template.

[Lightcosmo]

11 hours ago, NinjaMonkey said:

Implementing a custom FE character builder doesn't solve this particular problem, in fact it exacerbates it. I'll tell you what will solve this though, characters getting cut, starting with all three of the Marth clones.

I just played Smash U, and I played Lucina, then Roy right after, and I can guarantee you that they do not play the same way at all. They are fine the way they are. And cutting would be pointless from a business PoV and for the sake of fans. Why cut characters when they already put in so much development time on them? That would be a waste, and cutting some of the most popular characters? For sure not a smart decision by the developers. Sure, they could fix things, but they did a fine job of making them feel different, more so than Peach and Daisy, that's for sure.

They are already fun to play characters in my opinion.

[Lord_Brand]

And with CFS, you can roll them all into one metaslot, so now instead of Fire Emblem characters taking up 6-8 slots on the roster, they only take up one. You also get access to fan favorites like Lyn and Hector, and you can customize them to reflect how later FE titles allow characters to spread out beyond their core class, like by making Chrom a Cavalier with a Horsemanship forward special.

[Dragoncat]

23 hours ago, Lord_Brand said:

• Mushrooman (stylized humans from the Super Mario and Wario series)
• Toad
• Koopa (includes Troopas, Bros, Magikoopas, Koopalings, and Koopa King/Queen)
• Kong
• Kremling
• Hyrulean (Hylian, Sheikah, Gerudo, Twili, Sword Spirit, Demon Lord)
• Goron
• Zora
• Rito
• Metroid Hunter
• Space Pirate
• Dreamlander
• Yoshi
• Star Fox Pilot
• Pokemon Trainer
• Eaglelander
• Fire Emblem Unit
• Sonician (characters in Sonic the Hedgehog's style)
• World Video Boxer
• Robot Master (also covers Reploids and ZX-era Humanoids)
• Villager (covers animal villagers as well as humans)
• Paclander
• Street Fighter
• Final Fantasy Warrior
• Castlevania Hero
• Dragon Quest Warrior
• King of Fighters
• Sequin Lander
• Bandicoot
• Dragon

I love the idea of Crash and Spyro in here. But you forgot Shulk and his world here. You could make humans/homs with a bunch of the other stuff, and entia and gormotti just need feathers and cat ears. Machina can use a robot maker, although they're not cartoony like Mega Man robots. Nopon can probably use the Sonic maker or the Villager maker? Eh. I guess it's covered.

But this brings up that you'd be better off making the categories things like:

Humanoid

Anthro Mammal, Bird, Reptile

Robot Mammal, Bird, Reptile, Humanoid

Non Anthro Mammal, Bird, Reptile

Etc. Then you pick features like ear types or wings or tails for the humanoids, weapons and armor, all that.

[Ertrick36]

On 1/18/2020 at 3:35 PM, Etheus said:

And like.. if Soul Calibur, the Diet Mt. Dew of fighting game franchises can have a robust character builder, why not Smash?

Probably because SC is the Diet Mountain Dew of fighting games and Smash isn't, lmao.

 

I do like the innovation behind the OP's idea.  People too often make simplistic suggestions like "remove this, add that".  I think all such choices will do anymore is get people pissed off.  Like, people ask for Dixie Kong or Geno, yet if they were to get in people would say "why are they adding a character that hasn't been relevant for 20-30 years?"  They add Waluigi, it'd be "oh, now they're caving into the memes".  They add literally any FE character, any Mario character, or any Pokemon character, it'll be "bloated roster".  At the same time, any character cut will illicit some negative reaction.  If cutting the frickin' Ice Climbers - characters that people probably didn't even know before Smash came out - would cause a stink in the Smash fandom, I guarantee the same would happen if a character like Lucina was cut, echo fighter or not.

They've been at this for over 20 years now, and they've only just now barely started changing how to include characters as fighters.  Up until 4, it's always been "just add another character to the roster".  Now it's "call them echo fighters" with a mix of "alternate costumes?" which ultimately doesn't accomplish a whole lot at this stage.  With this game's appeal being so strongly geared in its roster, it's insane they haven't really found a way to bloat up the roster in an easy and sensible way.

 

Plus, if they change how they implement new representation, maybe I wouldn't hear any more pointless cries to cut characters.  I've always found such arguments to be stupid.

[Jotari]

28 minutes ago, Ertrick36 said:

Probably because SC is the Diet Mountain Dew of fighting games and Smash isn't, lmao.

 

I do like the innovation behind the OP's idea.  People too often make simplistic suggestions like "remove this, add that".  I think all such choices will do anymore is get people pissed off.  Like, people ask for Dixie Kong or Geno, yet if they were to get in people would say "why are they adding a character that hasn't been relevant for 20-30 years?"  They add Waluigi, it'd be "oh, now they're caving into the memes".  They add literally any FE character, any Mario character, or any Pokemon character, it'll be "bloated roster".  At the same time, any character cut will illicit some negative reaction.  If cutting the frickin' Ice Climbers - characters that people probably didn't even know before Smash came out - would cause a stink in the Smash fandom, I guarantee the same would happen if a character like Lucina was cut, echo fighter or not.

They've been at this for over 20 years now, and they've only just now barely started changing how to include characters as fighters.  Up until 4, it's always been "just add another character to the roster".  Now it's "call them echo fighters" with a mix of "alternate costumes?" which ultimately doesn't accomplish a whole lot at this stage.  With this game's appeal being so strongly geared in its roster, it's insane they haven't really found a way to bloat up the roster in an easy and sensible way.

 

Plus, if they change how they implement new representation, maybe I wouldn't hear any more pointless cries to cut characters.  I've always found such arguments to be stupid.

Unless character creation replaces the roster entirely, people will complain about characters being cut.

[Lord_Brand]

9 hours ago, Dragoncat said:

I love the idea of Crash and Spyro in here. But you forgot Shulk and his world here. You could make humans/homs with a bunch of the other stuff, and entia and gormotti just need feathers and cat ears. Machina can use a robot maker, although they're not cartoony like Mega Man robots. Nopon can probably use the Sonic maker or the Villager maker? Eh. I guess it's covered.

But this brings up that you'd be better off making the categories things like:

Humanoid

Anthro Mammal, Bird, Reptile

Robot Mammal, Bird, Reptile, Humanoid

Non Anthro Mammal, Bird, Reptile

Etc. Then you pick features like ear types or wings or tails for the humanoids, weapons and armor, all that.

I knew I should have added Drivers. Maybe Blades & Drivers, so we could get Rex & Pyra in there.

General categories could in theory work, yes, especially for humans. But then what would the roster look like? I mean, I guess you could have your usual preset characters like Mario and Link, and then a few metaslots for Custom Fighters. I just figure that breaking the templates down by series makes it far easier to manage the wildly different character builds and movepools. Mario-style humans will look very different from Street Fighters or Metal Gear Agents.

There are a few characters that cause some snags, like Mr. Game & Watch, Ice Climbers, R.O.B., and Duck Hunt. They either come from series with few or no games (MG&W being the exception), have narrow parameters (how do you customize R.O.B. aside from paint jobs?), low character count to provide customization material (again, barring potentially MG&W, and even then he transforms into different characters as part of his shtick), and basically just don't feel compelling from a customization standpoint. And of course there's the question of the Mii Fighters. The CFS does the job they're designed to do only much better, so what purpose do they have left? In a system that offers tons of customization options, these are among the few fighters I would seriously consider cutting or demoting into ATs.

Edited January 20, 2020 by Lord_Brand

[Dragoncat]

6 hours ago, Lord_Brand said:

I knew I should have added Drivers. Maybe Blades & Drivers, so we could get Rex & Pyra in there.

Yeah, but would this work for the races? Human/homs, entia, gormotti...haven't played 2 yet.

6 hours ago, Lord_Brand said:

Mario-style humans will look very different from Street Fighters or Metal Gear Agents.

This is a point, maybe there can be a height/bulk slider? To make a Mario character, make them very short.

[NinjaMonkey]

12 minutes ago, Dragoncat said:

To make a Mario character, make them very short.

Thing is, Rosalina is canonically 7 feet tall. So, no.

Edited January 20, 2020 by NinjaMonkey

[Anacybele]

Seeing as the Mii Fighters are basically this already in some form, I say no.

[Dragoncat]

Just now, NinjaMonkey said:

Thing is, Rosalina is canonically 7 feet tall.

OOF. Forgot about her.

Well, then I guess, Mario characters have more cartoony moves? Idk how this would work honestly.