Wow! There Are 89 Fighters In Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

[Bartmanhomer]

Wow. I know there were a lot of fighters in Super Smash Bros. but I didn't know it was that many fighters in that game. I'm glad that they added new fighters in the game but at the same time, I also feel that 89 fighters are enough that Nintendo doesn't need to continue adding more fighters. So what does everyone else think of this thread? I'll love to hear your thoughts and opinions about it.

[Jurai]

I think 89 is a fine number, considering Gamefreak can't get all 900 some Pokémon in a single game for some reason.

[Dienekes]

89 characters, something around 20 patches. And they still can't stop my boy Ganondorf from free-falling after side-b or just giving him any recovery at all.

Sort of kidding.

Anyway, love the game. 89 characters is quite a lot and some of the choices I'm less interested in. But I don't think there's going to be a lot more going forward. We'll likely see characters cycled out. The Daisy's Kid Link's that sort of stuff will be dropped to make way for new characters. I believe that was what was said all the way back when Ultimate was announced. They were trying to do all the old characters plus some new ones, but that was not going to be how they were designing the games in the future. This was just a special case.

[Jurai]

89 characters, something around 20 patches. And they still can't stop my boy Ganondorf from free-falling after side-b or just giving him any recovery at all.

Sort of kidding.

Then Captain Falcon would get the same buff, and nobody'd be able to stop the Knee of Justice.

[SerTabris]

The main thing I found when I was looking through that whole list was that even counting it pretty generously, the gender ratio is terrible. It's only about 1/4 women, and that's counting things like all versions of a character (so three of them are Samus) and counting everyone who's gender-selectable (like Robin and Corrin, though oddly not Hero despite that being present in both DQ3 and DQ4). Admittedly, quite a bit of this is more of a result of flaws in games of earlier eras they're drawing from, but it's still not something I enjoy. Particularly when of the default roster, there's only one woman available (Samus).

[PhantomFox]

I would extend that to say it's mostly a product of the industry in general regardless of time, though yes, it's getting better. I don't feel like Sakurai and Co. are operating with any kind of bias in that regard. In terms of Nintendo female main characters, it's mostly covered. Dixie, Toadette, and Krystal perhaps, but they're not the biggest names in their franchise.

[DaedalusMkV]

The main thing I found when I was looking through that whole list was that even counting it pretty generously, the gender ratio is terrible. It's only about 1/4 women, and that's counting things like all versions of a character (so three of them are Samus) and counting everyone who's gender-selectable (like Robin and Corrin, though oddly not Hero despite that being present in both DQ3 and DQ4). Admittedly, quite a bit of this is more of a result of flaws in games of earlier eras they're drawing from, but it's still not something I enjoy. Particularly when of the default roster, there's only one woman available (Samus).

Interested, I looked into this myself. At the current count, there are 29 characters in Smash Ultimate which can be, always are or in some way contain someone female (counting Kazooie, of course, and all three Mii classes but discounting all Pokemon and only counting Pyra and Mythra as a single character). By comparison, there are 59 characters which can be counted as male by the same category, though there's a great deal more ambiguity there. On the female side you've really only got Kazooie for the ambiguous ones, while on the male side I've included Game and Watch, Ridley, Pac-Man and Mega-Man despite three of those being inherently genderless and one being Ridley. I didn't count Kirby and Meta-knight, since they're non-gendered in Japanese (and, frankly, are puff balls that reproduce asexually), but did count Dedede as male. Non-gendered characters (and this time I'm including the robots as non-gendered) and characters that can be either (or always contain both) represent 31 of the 81 entries, which is... Actually pretty impressive, really. Definitely a bit of an imbalance between male and female characters, because they're weighted towards iconics and not necessarily trying to be diverse, but I rate it much more diverse than that initial 1/4 figure implies. Once you remove the characters who don't count it's less than two-to-one in favour of men to women, and while it could be better it could also be much worse. It also gets a lot better if you only count human (or close enough) characters, since that obliterates almost a third of the male cast while only removing Kazooie and Isabel on the female side. Realize that the average Smash player just ignores male Robin, Corrin and Byleth's existence (seriously, I have seen male Corrin booed at tourneys) and count Pyra and Mythra as two characters and you can get it darn close to 1 to 1, though I'll admit that by that point I'm cherry-picking.

Now, back in the original Super Smash Bros, before Melee added a few iconic females (and Brawl brought in a bunch) and it was just Samus? Yeah, they definitely weren't doing anything to promote gender equality with that one.

... Also, the thread title is wrong. There are 82 fighters in Smash Ultimate, and that's counting Pyra and Mythra as separate. You only get 89 if you count all the gender-swappables twice, and even that doesn't work because Villager and the Miis bring it up to 93, and the Miis frankly could count dozens of times if you want to get that nitpicky. 16 of those 82 are Pokemon, Duck Hunt, robots and non-gendered entities, so females actually represent 30 (Pyra and Mythra messing things up again) out of 66 entries with actual genders. That's... really not bad at all. Admittedly, we add up to a lot more than 100%, but 46% of gendered entries being in some way female is pretty good representation by media standards.

Maybe it's all a trick of perspective, though. I certainly acknowledge that I might be biased in this analysis.

[SerTabris]

I'd say that's mostly reasonable, but I wouldn't count Pac-Man or Mega Man as genderless. Even if the original arcade Pac-Man isn't gendered beyond the name, just the creation of Ms. Pac-Man and the small story scenes in it negate that, as it's clearly showing more-or-less standard 'normative straight relationship' stuff. The various versions of Mega Man are consistently identified as male in dialogue too in multiple ways (such as Proto Man and Mega Man being 'brothers'); I think he might have had a woman as his VA at one point, but that's pretty common for boys in anime. The only time that I can recall "Mega Man" not being gendered is in Mega Man ZX and ZX Advent, where it's a more general term and applied to female characters like Aile, but this one is pretty much just the original series' version. (Plus, having grown up on TNG-era Star Trek, robots being viewed as inherently genderless seems very strange to me.)

Generally, I'd say that gender is something I'm considering for this in terms of identification, not any sort of physical or reproductive claim (as that's generally not relevant and would be more sex than gender anyway). I was going to say that reproduction didn't have anything to do with any of the games represented in SSBU, but I know there are two exceptions to that (Fire Emblem Awakening and Fire Emblem Fates). I'd be very surprised if there were any more though.

[DaedalusMkV]

I'd say that's mostly reasonable, but I wouldn't count Pac-Man or Mega Man as genderless. Even if the original arcade Pac-Man isn't gendered beyond the name, just the creation of Ms. Pac-Man and the small story scenes in it negate that, as it's clearly showing more-or-less standard 'normative straight relationship' stuff. The various versions of Mega Man are consistently identified as male in dialogue too in multiple ways (such as Proto Man and Mega Man being 'brothers'); I think he might have had a woman as his VA at one point, but that's pretty common for boys in anime. The only time that I can recall "Mega Man" not being gendered is in Mega Man ZX and ZX Advent, where it's a more general term and applied to female characters like Aile, but this one is pretty much just the original series' version. (Plus, having grown up on TNG-era Star Trek, robots being viewed as inherently genderless seems very strange to me.)

Generally, I'd say that gender is something I'm considering for this in terms of identification, not any sort of physical or reproductive claim (as that's generally not relevant and would be more sex than gender anyway). I was going to say that reproduction didn't have anything to do with any of the games represented in SSBU, but I know there are two exceptions to that (Fire Emblem Awakening and Fire Emblem Fates). I'd be very surprised if there were any more though.

Certainly true in Pac-Man's case, I will admit. Pie chart with eyes or not, he's very much presented as Masculine, to the point of having a Mrs Pac-Man and a couple of Pac-kids in some versions.

As far as Mega-man... I've always felt it anthropocentric to ascribe human gender identities to nonhuman entities, and especially to artificial intelligences. It's one thing if Mega-man clearly identified as male or something like that, but as far as I can tell it's all Doctor Light assigning genders to his robot creations purely based on appearance rather than any other factor. He gets referred to as male, but does that term really make sense to apply to him when he has no human sexual characteristics and seemingly no romantic drive (at least in the games I've played)? Discounting BattleNet/StarForce Mega-man, of course, who is a personality clone of a human male and should be treated as such (plus, unlike the robots in the original series NAVIs clearly have something akin to human sexuality, judging by how hard Mega-Man and Roll flirt in the later games). Just a personal bugbear, really, and I concede that it's probably more fair to call Mega-man male than not considering the games do. But I still feel like the average sapient AI is probably going to insist on not going anywhere near the quicksand pit that is human gender identity and sexuality, and we shouldn't feel the need to force them to do so. And a lot of people refer to ROB with masculine pronouns. It's a non-gendered robot, and I will die on that hill.

Mr. Data, of course, is a bit of a different story, being an android clearly modelled on and attempting to emulate a human male. He wants to be male. A big part of Data's character arc is his choice to embrace being an artificial human rather than an inorganic being. That said, if his preferences were different I'd advocate strongly for the opposite.

Either way, another thought has occurred to me. Upon further review, Minecraft Steve is the only character in all of Smash who is human and ethnically neither Caucasian or Japanese. Now that's some lacking diversity!

[CircleOfTheRock]

(seriously, I have seen male Corrin booed at tourneys)

that’s mildly hilarious