SNK is back in a big way with one of their major franchises, Samurai Shodown, coming out with successful revival. Like all fighting games, there’s always the issue of balance between fighters. In the era of live services, there’s always various balance patches and tweaks, too, and striking a perfect balance may be impossible. But one person not too concerned about that? Samurai Shodown‘s Director, who finds the whole idea kind of boring.
In an interview with Kotaku, Nobuyuki Kuroki said that having a perfectly balanced roster was basically impossible, but even if it wasn’t, it would be boring. Every character has their own quirks and personality in how they play, so trying to make them all perfectly balanced would make the experience an overall flat one.
“I feel that if you make everything too flat in a game like Samurai Shodown, it’s going to be boring,” Kuroki explained via an interpreter. “There is a lot of character personality, even among how weak or strong they are. There’s going to be some balancing, but we’re never going to make it completely flat.”
Samurai Shodown is available now for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, with Switch and PC versions due out in Q4 2019. You can get a look at the game’s upcoming fighters, balanced or otherwise, for this year and the upcoming one through here, as well as the game’s invasion of another popular fighting franchise.