Smash Bros. has always been about bringing together characters from all kinds of games and having a blast, you know, fighting each other. Some of the games represented in Smash are RPGs, and turn-based RPGs at that. Translating that kind of gameplay to a real-time fighting game sounds hard, but Smash has already done it with characters from Pokémon, Fire Emblem, Persona, and even Final Fantasy. These characters have always fit well in the massive Smash roster. However, last month, Dragon Quest (another turn-based RPG) got some Smash representation, and the translation was nothing like that of other RPG characters already in the game.
The Dragon Quest Hero – who we will call Hero for brevity – is probably the most faithful translation of an RPG character into a fighting game, but that means he’s complicated and arguably imbalanced. In RPGs (like Fire Emblem, Pokémon, and Dragon Quest) your attacks have a random chance of dealing extra damage – a critical hit. Hero is the only character in Smash who can now do that, and those hits deal a lot of damage. This kind of random chance in a fighting game isn’t necessarily new, given Mr. Game & Watch’s randomized hammer attack, but on this kind of scale mixed with Hero’s other abilities, it makes critical hits incredibly powerful.
Hero is one of the only characters in Smash (other than Robin and maybe Inkling) that has to manage his spells, but has many, many spells of different abilities to make up for it. Hero has the ability to heal, recover from virtually anywhere, freeze you, put you to sleep, instantly kill you, activate a temporary counter, be the fastest character, and more. These spells can be chosen in a drop-down menu, which is unique to Hero. These elements of the character are incredibly faithful to the actual Dragon Quest games but don’t necessarily play well with the other characters who are more straightforward but less subject to the whims of random chance and mana points.
