Are Fighting Games Better When They're Slightly Unbalanced?

There are few development challenges quite like maintaining the roster of a fighting game, particularly in modern games, where that usually means dozens of characters, each expected to feel like their own distinct fighter. The problem comes from the way variance makes things more interesting but also makes balancing more challenging, particularly when you then have not just overall power concerns to keep in mind but also the exponentially growing number of individual fighter-vs-fighter matchups that could occur.

The extent to which a developer prioritizes balance is one of the most important choices in development, and gamers exist on both sides of the balance vs. imbalance debate. Here’s why imbalance in fighting games is beloved by some and fought against by others.

The Case For Unbalanced Fighting Games

For many fighting game enthusiasts, a little bit of imbalance is the key to a great game. It provides the flavor that keeps the game exciting even over extended periods of combat throughout a game’s several-year release cycle. The top benefits of a game with an unbalanced roster are:

• Choose Your Own Difficulty: One of the first benefits to a game with some variance in character strength will be one very familiar to fans of traditional sports games, and that’s the ability to adjust your difficulty by adjusting who you play as. The same way you may try to handicap yourself against a less-experienced friend by playing as the Jets against their Seahawks, uneven fighter strength lets you manage your difficulty. If you’re struggling, you can try a switch to a stronger fighter, while an added challenge is as simple as picking an off-meta option.
• Characters Feel Unique: The best fighting games have casts of characters who all feel unique and fully realized, with each feeling different to play as in ways that align with their established personalities. Even in series where palate swaps were once common, modern evolutions have sought to distinguish similar characters. These differences can make balancing challenging; however, this often means that a bit of tolerance for imbalance can be useful in creating interesting and well-defined characters.
• Unique Character Interactions Can Be Fun: Imbalance can also lead to fun situations in the meta when these unique character builds interact. A situation where a generally strong fighter also matches up terribly with a character generally considered less powerful creates interesting strategy when playing. On the one hand, you’re less likely to run into the less-powerful character due to their perceived weakness, but by playing the fighter with a big hole, you run the risk of being punished by a “lesser” fighter should an opponent show up ready to throw down with them.

The Case Against Unbalanced Fighting Games

Image: Bandai Namco

Unfortunately, not everything that comes out of keeping a roster that has some variance in overall power is positive. There are drawbacks, and while these tend to be more noticeable and harmful when they are for extreme levels of imbalance, you may find them off-putting even when the differences are smaller:

• Dominant Characters Make Ranked a Slog: Interesting character interactions between unique fighters with distinct styles is great, but if your game is not balanced enough to generate a broad fighter selection base, you’ll never get to the see them. When a pool of fighters has clear strong and weak characters, then the game will grow more and more homogenized as you get more and more serious in your competition. Online modes and tournaments can easily become very repetitive if the fighter pool is significantly reduced due to only a few fighters being serious threats in a match of evenly-skilled players.
• The Potential For Unstoppable OP: The danger when trying to create characters that feel vastly different in a fighting game is that one can get substantially out of hand, particularly after the public gets its hands on the game. No matter how much internal testing a developer does, the cumulative hours gamers will put in will dwarf it, which means there is ample opportunity for gamers to discover a way to use a unique character that turns a little imbalance into a game-breaking power gap.
• Matches Can Feel Identical: In a game where keeping every fighter as balanced as possible is a top priority, it can have the effect of fights feeling too similar, as if who you pick doesn’t drastically change how things play out. This can make the game ultimately feel less fun in the long term, as things begin to feel too routine. There’s a reason why, with fighting games moving into the modern gaming world, the use of new fighter drops became standard practice. Injecting new characters refreshes the game by creating new challenges to play against, and a game with too much sameness between its fighters loses out on this benefit.

Where do you fall on the issue of imbalance in fighting games? Do you prefer the fun and variety that comes with fighters who aren’t always perfectly matched, or do you prioritize character equity first, with a fighting game’s mechanics having to be strong enough to still allow for an interesting multiplayer scene?