A fighter starts as one sentence

Before anyone animates a jab, someone has to choose the character. In Super Smash Bros. that choice is the hard one, because the pool is effectively endless and every addition changes what the roster claims to be. A fighter who is only a move list will play, and will not be memorable. A fighter who is one sentence, played out through every move, will.

The sentence has to survive the other sentences already on the select screen. If the newcomer's whole identity is a tool someone else already owns, you have doubled a costume. The design work after the sentence is translation: a jump, a recovery, a special, each one allowed only if it sounds like that sentence and not like a vacant slot that needed filling.

Before anyone designs a single punch, someone has to choose the character. That choice is the first and probably the hardest design decision in Super Smash Bros., because the pool of candidates is effectively unlimited and every addition changes what the roster looks like it stands for.

Consider the company the cast keeps. Pikachu, Mega Man, the Wii Fit Trainer, and the blocky builder from Minecraft all throw hands on the same platform. It is hard to name another crossover that stretches that far.

Five games, six consoles, decades of releases, and a long tail of downloadable additions have produced 89 fighters drawn from roughly 40 franchises and dozens of studios. None of them are cameos or reskins. Each is a full fighting-game character with its own animation set, moveset, strengths, weaknesses, and small nods to the series it came from.

So the problem stacks up in layers. The fighter has to be recognizable to people who love the original game. The fighter also has to make sense inside Smash's shared grammar of jumps, smashes, and specials. And once they land on the roster, they have to occupy a spot in a competitive ecosystem where nobody gets to win every matchup for free.

Roughly eight major steps take a fighter from idea to release, and selection is the first of them. With thousands of heroes, villains, mascots, curiosities, and historical stand-ins available, a handful of pressures narrow the field.

Popularity is the obvious one. Masahiro Sakurai was already collecting fan suggestions for a sequel in 1999, only months after the Nintendo 64 original. Bowser, Peach, Ganondorf, and Mewtwo all polled well, and all four turned up in Super Smash Bros. Melee. Later ballots pointed the way to Wolf, Bayonetta, and Sora.

Recognition also has to travel. A character can be adored in one country and a total unknown somewhere else, and candidates have been passed over because the games behind them never registered widely outside Japan. Smash doubles as a museum of the medium, so the roster carries franchises, systems, eras, and odd hardware footnotes. Ice Climbers cover the Famicom years. Mr. Game & Watch stands in for Nintendo's earliest handhelds. R.O.B. represents one very specific chunk of NES plastic.

Franchise balance is a real constraint too. Wario was cut from Melee in part because the Mario side of the roster was already crowded. That restraint has relaxed since, most visibly with the run of Fire Emblem representatives, but the underlying tension never goes away.

Then there is production reality. Nintendo may want a fighter timed to an upcoming release. Budget, schedule, modeling work, and technical limits all push some candidates up and others down. Wolf was cheaper to build than Krystal because he could sit on Fox McCloud's existing structure. Ganondorf made it into Melee partly because the team could borrow Captain Falcon's animations and a model from a GameCube tech demo.

Clones, alternatives, and echo fighters exist for exactly that reason. Pair a fresh character model with a rig and moveset that already work and the roster grows without a full fighter's worth of labor. The result is less novel, but it can still serve popularity, representation, and the schedule in one move.

The last gate is permission. The original creator or rights holder has to say yes, which has gotten much easier as the series has grown. Sakurai had to work to talk the Pokemon Company into lending Pikachu and Jigglypuff to the first game. By Brawl, developers were volunteering: Yuji Naka and Hideo Kojima asked personally for Sonic and Snake.

Of everything on that list, one factor can veto the rest, and it is theme. Sakurai weighs whether a character brings something genuinely new to the roster more heavily than fame, history, or convenience.

What counts as new is a characteristic, ability, attack, or structure that separates this fighter from the others. It can be sweeping: two characters controlled as one, a fighter who transforms mid-match, a fighter who rewrites the stage. It can also be narrow: storing a projectile for later, commanding different colored Pikmin, winning almost entirely through grabs and counters.

To keep that distinction sharp, Sakurai compresses each fighter into a single line describing what they add. The design documents show the results. Rosalina and Luma are the "Puppet Fighter." Meta Knight is the "Pointed Sword Dancer." Snake is the "Heavy Weapons Specialist." Duck Hunt is "Third-party Cover Fire."

When the only line you can write is "dude with sword," something has gone wrong. That is why Chrom did not originally make the cut as a full fighter while Sakurai was picking a Fire Emblem: Awakening representative. Chrom offered little that Marth and Ike were not already covering. Robin came with magic tomes, a sword that breaks, and attacks with limited uses. "Sword and Magic, Limited-Use Attacks" is a far more useful sentence.

Everything downstream orbits that sentence. It does not settle the balance, animation, or art problems on its own, but it names the thing that has to survive every compromise those problems force. Skip it and you can ship a famous character who still feels like someone else with a new coat of paint.

With the theme fixed, the next question is how the character should feel to move. That feeling comes almost entirely from parameters: run speed, traction, jump height, gravity, air control, how far the body flies when it gets hit, and dozens more.

Tuned one way, those numbers produce something slow and immovable. Tuned another, something nimble and hard to pin down, or something that behaves strangely once it leaves the ground. They can also nod back at the source material. Mario and Sonic carry jump heights and run speeds that roughly rhyme with how they move in their own series.

A literal port never works. Match Bowser to his behavior as a Mario boss and he would be too slow and too heavy to play. Accuracy is not the target. A version truthful enough to convince you, and functional enough to fight with, is.

Stats alone can carve out real distance between fighters before a single move is written. Incineroar anchors one end of the speed range and Sonic the other. Jigglypuff's floaty jump feels nothing like Falco's. The roster starts to read as a roster the moment each body feels different in your hands.

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Every Smash fighter shares the same inputs, and that shared scheme is what makes the translation job possible. Approachability was a founding goal, so nobody gets bespoke fighting-game motions for their roster slot. The constraint is also the reason the game can host such wildly different characters without becoming unlearnable.

Inside that formula the room is enormous. Two smash attacks can differ in damage, knockback, range, area of effect, startup, recovery, and status effects. Specials can become projectiles, counters, traps, charge attacks, command grabs, random RPG rolls, copied abilities, stat changes, vehicles, tools, or something with no category at all.

A lot of it comes straight out of the source. Kazuya and Terry carry their fighting-game identities almost intact. Mega Man cites robot master powers. Diddy Kong gets peanut popguns. Mario brings the water sprayer from Super Mario Sunshine.

Faithfulness still has to bend. Robin uses dark magic. Ness and Lucas use PK Starstorm. Snake jumps, which is not a thing he does in Metal Gear Solid. Captain Falcon and Fox needed hand-to-hand work invented for them, because their home games put them in vehicles rather than platform brawls. The reflector shield and the Falcon Punch are Smash's inventions, and they are what make those two characters function here.

Speed forces its own rewrites. A Tekken attack that reads as fast in Tekken can crawl inside Smash, where the quickest moves come out in a fraction of the time. Translation is never transcription. It is finding the version of the character that reads correctly under a different set of rules.

Balance in Smash does not mean making everyone equal. Sakurai is fine with a deliberately underpowered fighter, and Pichu in Melee is the standing example, because winning with one carries its own kind of style. The line he holds is that no character should run the table without answers existing.

The easy fix would be to shave down every advantage until the numbers even out. He mostly refuses, because a roster smoothed that way goes flat. Soften every big move, normalize every odd trait, and the fighters start bleeding into each other.

The alternative is to lean into a strength and attach an obvious cost. Ganondorf hits like a truck and pays for it with speed and range. Mewtwo gets power and fast tools but is light and easy to launch. Link's projectiles are strong while his walk and jump are not. Simon's whip reaches absurdly far, and whiffing it leaves him hanging out to dry.

Hundreds of parameters exist to build those tradeoffs. Banjo and Kazooie's Wonderwing is a devastating charge attack limited to a few uses per stock. Charizard's Flare Blitz launches hard and hurts Charizard on the way through. Any move can be made stronger by giving it a longer wind-up, a longer recovery, a smaller hitbox, a finite resource, or a penalty that only arrives when it misses.

The transferable lesson is that power does not have to be reduced to be balanced. It has to be made specific, visible, and expensive.

Animation is not decoration on top of the balance work. It is how players read the balance work in real time, which is why a single fighter can take about a year to produce.

The volume is the first surprise. Beyond attacks and specials, the character has to walk, run, jump, take damage, grab opponents, grab ledges, taunt, celebrate, and pull off a Final Smash.

Sakurai begins with a master list of every animation required plus written direction for how the character should move through each one. Illustrations, screenshots from the original games, and poseable reference figures all help communicate the stance or motion the team is after.

The load-bearing parts are the key poses. Four of them carry an attack: idle, wind-up, attack, and follow-through. Idle establishes the stance. Wind-up warns that something is coming. Attack is the damage. Follow-through shows the character stuck recovering.

Each pose has to be both dynamic and informative. The wind-up tells the attacking player what they just committed to and tells the opponent what to expect. The attack pose can hang on screen during hit-stop, so it has to sell the impact. The follow-through has to look vulnerable. Squash, stretch, exaggeration, and rig distortion are all fair game, as long as clarity survives them.

Clarity is non-negotiable because Smash is fast, cluttered, and often seen from a camera that has pulled way back. The silhouette has to land instantly. No move can expect players to read subtle body language while particles, items, platforms, and three other fighters are in motion.

Feel pulls against smoothness here. The wind-up frequently snaps into place on the first frame after the button press, which looks abrupt but makes the game feel immediate. Transitions get sped through rather than gently interpolated so a kick lands sharper. King Dedede's hammer takes its time because the swing has to sell its weight. Zero Suit Samus's neutral jab nearly skips the wind-up, because instant speed is the entire point of it.

Frame data closes the loop back to balance. Startup and recovery are not animation trivia. They are tunable numbers that decide how strong, risky, punishable, and responsive a fighter ends up being.

The visual job is to make a character from somewhere else look like they were always from here. Lifting a model out of another game does not accomplish that. Setting aside deliberate outliers like Mr. Game & Watch and Steve, Smash wants the whole cast to feel native to one place.

Import every official design untouched and the roster falls apart visually. Realistic humans, cartoon mascots, tiny creatures, giant monsters, old sprites, modern models, arcade art, and anime heroes would sit side by side with no shared language between them.

A few techniques do the unifying. Loud color gets desaturated so it stops fighting with subtler designs. Proportions get adjusted so Ridley, Olimar, and everyone in between land inside a workable size range. Simple characters pick up extra surface detail while realistic ones shed fussy detail, until the whole cast sits at a comparable level of complexity.

Hence the pockets, straps, and little widgets on Olimar's suit, and the rounded teeth and toenails on Donkey Kong. Nobody is chasing realism. They are chasing cohesion.

None of it is allowed to betray the character underneath, though. Ness keeps his simple, toy-like eyes. Pokemon read as plastic models rather than fur and scales. Sakurai has said he did not want to betray the original creators, a conviction shaped in part by his own discomfort at seeing certain depictions of Kirby.

Choosing which version of a character to draw from is its own decision. Pac-Man exists as a pixel circle, as arcade cabinet art, as cartoons from several eras, and in a few genuinely bizarre forms. Smash reaches back toward the original sketches. Mega Man uses his NES-era look while Sonic uses a modern one.

Some characters have no modern reference to reach for. Before Brawl, Pit from Kid Icarus existed as a small NES sprite, a manual illustration, and an unusual animated version. So the team studied Link, another NES-born hero who had been redrawn across generations, asked what Pit would look like on a comparable path, and designed forward from that imagined history.

A finished fighter still has to be introduced, and in Smash the introduction is a design artifact in its own right. The format traces back to a production setback.

Brawl commissioned expensive CGI for its Subspace Emissary mode, and much of it leaked online before release. Sakurai stopped putting cinematics of that kind inside the games afterward and redirected the technique outward, using it to announce new fighters instead.

As with most of Smash, it starts with him. He writes the beats, then works with a studio through storyboards, rough previz, and finished production. The aim shifts trailer to trailer. Some are engineered as misdirection, opening as though they are about something else entirely. Others exist purely for the hype and the instant of recognition.

Outside forces still get a say. Ridley's reveal had to be dialed back after an early version played too intense. The Minecraft reveal had to give Steve and Alex equal footing, per guidance from Microsoft. Even a celebration is shaped by tone, brand, audience, and approval.

One fighter makes all eight steps visible at once, and it is Little Mac from Punch-Out!!

Selection first: he stands for a meaningful stretch of Nintendo's arcade history. His theme writes itself as a super-offensive, up-close brawler with a Power Meter nobody else has. His stats back that up with outstanding ground speed, which lets him close distance and stay lethal in the pocket.

Boxing supplies the moveset. The balance comes from the gap between those punches and everything he does in the air, where a weak jump, poor recovery, and bad aerials leave him exposed. On the ground he is terrifying. Off it he is a problem waiting to happen.

His animations run short and snappy so the punches hit with force. The visual design leans on the Wii game with extra detail added to seat him alongside the rest of the cast. His reveal trailer went with a comic book style, which suited the character and kept production within reach.

History, theme, stats, moves, tradeoffs, animation, visual adaptation, presentation: every stage pointing at one idea a player can read in a second.

One more constraint shapes the roster from the outside, and it is the age rating. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate carries an A from Japan's CERO board, meaning all ages, which is a strict target for a game importing characters from series rated far higher.

Holding that rating cost some designs and attacks. Mythra's outfit gained tights and a fuller shirt. Snake carries no knives or guns. A King of Fighters stage assembles a crowd of famous brawlers and leaves Mai out of it. On Wii U, repeated revisions to models for female characters, Palutena among them, put real pressure on the schedule.

That is the whole shape of the thing. A crossover does not just import characters, it imports everything attached to them: audience expectations, ratings boards, brand rules, animation readability, roster balance, visual cohesion, and the need for one design language across all of it. Honoring a character's legacy through visuals, movement, attacks, and references while keeping them balanced and coherent inside Smash is a narrow path to walk.

Almost nobody reading this will have to fit 89 famous characters into one fighting game. The method still transfers. Name the theme before you sweat the details. Make strengths strong enough to be worth using. Attach weaknesses a player can see coming. Treat animation timing as a balance tool. Adapt the visual style without losing the identity underneath. And check all of it the only way it can be checked, which is by getting the build running and playing it.

In the Flockbay app, write the sentence first and then ask for four moves that could only belong to that sentence. Play a mirror match against a second fighter with a different sentence. If you cannot tell who is who with the names hidden, the sentences never reached the buttons.

A fighting game template and the AI fighting game maker will offer you a generic kit. Delete any move that would fit both sentences.