Xiado said:
I never got Meta Knight being OP. He has priority and speed but very little range and power, not that hard to deal with when playing as most characters.
I'm not a big Smash player, but it's sort of like the issues with Ken, Ryu, and Sagat in Street Fighter. The amount of power their moves and stats give them is disproportionate to the difficulty of pulling those things off. Your basic fireball or "hyper" is a very versatile tool that can be used in a lot of differant ways even if it's not the strongest move in the game, ditto for the dragon punches, especially for the amount of effort it takes to pull off. Your basic down, forward, punch movement is incredibly easy to master and involves far less inputs and timing that the techniques needed by most characters to counter things done with it.
Once you get to a certain level of play, you begin to lose touch with how things are for most players, and how complicated some of the things your doing by reflex are, as well as how long it took to get into the mindset of
thinking a couple of moves ahead on exchanges and combos. You have to be pretty bloody good for any kind of a "tier" list to even remotely apply to you, as what can be done by each character in absolute terms in no way involves how easy that is to learn to pull off reliably.
For most players, at a typical level of play, a character like Metaknight is overwhelming because he's so bloody easy to use compared to what works to counter him (even if the people doing it don't realize it) as a result he pretty much stomps all over tons of players. It's right up there with almost everyone playing a shoto (or sagat) online, or at least when a new Street Fighter game goes online and the population hasn't reduced itself down to a more dedicated base of serious players.
I've oftentimes felt that fighting gamers/brawlers need to be better balanced with more consideration for number of inputs to power of a given move, combo, etc. To be honest I've always felt a lot of the problem with fighting games, and part of what holds them back from being taken more seriously in a competitive sense is that too many of them involve "newbie" characters designed to be very easily playable and a bit of an equalizer for that reason, either that or involve moves and movesets that have been grandfathered in because "they have always been that way" rather than being balanced more against the realities of the game.... and this is coming from someone who pretty much blows chips at fighting games. I'm just saying I understand, and even empathize with the problem. Not every issue I speak on nessicarly benefits me or my personal level/style of play.
I've played very, very, little of the whole "smash" thing but from what little I've tinkered with and seen, yeah, Metaknight probably needs to go, or be rebalanced. But then again as you might guess, I feel the same way about a few extremely iconic Street Fighter characters as well, which many would call heresy. Your basic fireballs should be there in Street Fighter for example, but should require a more complicated set of inputs and more mastery to use than they do now given their power level (in terms of versatility, as opposed to raw damage).
