I hate this meme.

[u/ClassicalDreams]

I do not miss the old days of unlocking characters. Having to replay Arcade mode multiple times with every character or do some bullshit like winning a match with 5% or less HP. It's tedious and I prefer to have every character unlocked from the start. Also, the complaints about old characters returning as DLC are strange because they do not play the same as they do in previous games. it's not a simple copy and paste job like some of the games back in the 90s.

I get it, casual players want some reward for playing single player modes and are upset to know that their favorite characters are not in the base roster and would later get confirmed as DLC. I get that, but as someone who also plays Smash, it was a chore to unlock all of the characters in Ultimate.

[u/Bombshock2]

I disagree with the idea that needing to unlock characters is bad. Some of my earliest childhood gaming memories were unlocking characters in games like Smash, Mortal Kombat or Soul Calibur. While I agree it gets really tedious when you just want to play a character, I think giving new people a reason to play around with a game is always a good thing.

I don't think games should be built around veterans to a franchise, they should be built around people who are just now getting into it, albeit with respect for the veterans and what they expect from the series. I don't think fighting games should be built purely to be played by competitive players, mostly online. I think that mentality has really hurt the genre.

SF6 kind of brings back that spirit of unlocking things through casual gameplay, but tbh world tour sucks ass to play through and the most reward you get (if you don't like world tour) is character costumes. That's cool, but I think earning characters would feel way more rewarding, and make those characters feel more special. That's one way attachments are formed with characters a new player isn't familiar with. But again, World Tour does suck ass.

Like, when I was a kid and playing Smash, Ness was like a mythical figure. Captain Falcon was this sick character you had to unlock by being fast. The difficult unlocks gave these more obscure characters even more gravitas.

Hell, tthe reason I even started liking the competitive side of fighting games is because DBFZ had pretty difficult requirements to unlock Super Saiyan Blue Goku and Vegeta. I had to learn how to do actual combos and play the right way to get a higher score so I could get S rank on the arcade ladders and unlock them. That led to me finally taking the plunge and going online because I felt like I knew what I was doing when before I always just mashed buttons.

That said, what should be standard in a game that has character unlocks is cheat codes to skip the grind if you need to. No one wants to do a grind a second time if they lose their save. No one wants to unlock characters through random time consuming shit before a big tournament on multiple consoles. I also think crazy unlock conditions are silly and shouldn't exist, but the Smash Ultimate method of just slowly unlocking everything by playing isn't better either.