You know, I get Animal Crossing Bells that nowadays we all recognize Ike and Marth as having entirely different playstyles, but as a player who started out occasionally playing Brawl in my buddy’s house, I had a whole lot of difficulty telling apart Marth out of Ike. Together with Byleth, even casuals could tell them apart thanks to their powerful bow, lance, Warlock Punch-like down special, and alts, but as a total casual, the only thing I remembered about Ike and Marth from utilizing them at Subspace was that one of these felt stronger and a bit more fun.

Even though Ike is not a Marth clone, I believe that it can be hard for total casuals who have only played with them once to pronounce what makes them different. I believe Sakurai realized this, which is why he chose to go with Robin since the new FE rep for Smash 4 instead of Chrom and not one of those non-echo FE personalities have depended entirely on sword moves since then.

The change to older Ike in Smash4 also helped to differentiate him Marth. I really don’t know why they made young Ike the default option in Ultimate (although I like his youthful design better).

Forum-style is honestly better in some ways. I truly despise how smash info is currently distributed in various twitter threads in which you have to follow the ideal amount of individuals to even get and then you can’t read or get decent longform discussion. Searching for older info on twitter is also a huge pain in the ass.

I was about when the Brawl dojo was a thing and recall a great deal of the negativity from Brawl’s hayday. The largest turnaround for me has always been Subspace, it was widely loathed back in the day but today it seems hot. I guess people who were kids playing Brawl have all animal crossing items new horizons grown up and are looking back at it lovingly.