I don't understand why NA allows guest characters. Aren't we wasting time trying to train with them, learning their characters, and then losing it all in the next iteration? Doesn't France ban guest characters for this reason?
"But we are not France."
Does that even matter? I don't see the logic in it.
The following is just the opinions of a scrub who has never been in a single tournament, so you are free to dismiss it. However, I think it is
logical and therefore will be expressing my point somewhat emphatically. Please note that my following post is not in any way to be taken as hostile towards you; you simply bring up an interesting topic which I happen to feel strongly about.
There is no mathematically rigorous way to delineate exactly which qualities should cause a character to be banned. However, speaking in generalities,
the only reason any character should ever be banned are because they are unfair to use in a tournament setting.
- Tournaments are about competition. Competition is about seeing who can play the game the best. Determining who plays the best only works if everyone has equal access or opportunity to studying and/or employing the same tools, so characters limited to a single platform or limited edition or whatever are right out. On-topic, this means Dampierre is out until he becomes universally available/unlockable/downloadable/whatever.
- Simultaneously, one of the central conceits of a balanced fighting game is that players are free to pick a style (i.e., a character) whose strengths or play style are complementary to that of the player’s. In other words, a fighting game competition is assumed by the general public to offer a certain amount of choice and variety of approach. This feeds not only into the degree to which such a game is enjoyable to play (through richness of gameplay and presentation), but also to creating the opportunity to further stratify players based on skill due to the complexity of analyzing an entire roster, introducing matchup knowledge as one more necessary skill for success, for instance. To that end and others, overpowered characters — those whose inclusion breaks the general game strategy to the point that players are obligated to select them in order to compete — are also eligible for banning.
That’s it. Those are the only two cases in which banning makes sense. Equal opportunity of study, and preservation of the freedom to select between a variety of characters and still remain competitive.
Banning characters because they are not “native” to the Soul Calibur universe makes absolutely no sense whatsoever in my mind. In a
tournament setting (which is the only setting relevant to ban discussions), characters are largely reduced to their gameplay, and extraneous details such as context, design, history, background, etc. become secondary considerations (if cared about at all).
Whether a character is expected to return in a hypothetical future installment is completely irrelevant to banning. In a Soul Calibur V tournament, people will be playing SCV. Not SCIV, not SCVI, not any other game; SCV. Whatever the roster is in SCV, that’s what matters.
