can sonebody tell me if this just sounds like a poorly made rant?:

Clone characters are a brilliant idea in a crossover fighting game. Putting in a popular character while taking minimal development time is pure genius. However, I feel like the current way of handling them is going to cause problems in the long run, both for the fanbase and the characters themselves. Note, I think Smash Ultimate is shaping up to be one of the best video games of all time. I just want to vent my anger onto the single flaw this game had.

-I’ll start with the new name. Prior to Ultimate, clones had no official name, and were distinguised by a certain placement on the Character select screen (melee had them in the corners with slightly smaller icons, smash 4 put them in the clone corner of shame). However, the clones in melee had one thing that the clones in melee didn’t: the ones that came back got decloned, regardless of whether they came back in brawl of were cut and later returned. Dark Pit and Lucina did not, as far as most of us can tell (it could be argued that their blog posts imply it, but let’s not get too hopeful). Since the only non-decloned clones in the history of smash have this new label that nintendo is officially putting out, it seems like echo fighters may stick to being cloney. I’m aware that melee echoes didn’t get fully decloned either, and still aren’t, but at least they had a decloning

-Specifically about the characters, all of them except Dark Pit were decent choices to be in, but were likely too similar to another fighter to get in without backlash. Thus, renaming them to echo fighters may have actually been necessary. Howevr, unless I’m mistaken, the purpose of clones in non-crossover fighting games is to change certain properties of another character without wasting time on new animations. In Melee, that was the case for Young Link, Falco, and Pichu, while the other three received mininal particle changes. In fact, the bggest change was dr mario’s fireballs being pills. However, this seems to be the opposite in Ultimate. While obviously we don’t know the full extent of differences; Daisy, Dark Samus, and Richter all seem to be more focused on giving the characters different animations instead of different properties. Now, obviously, they could be even more different that Lucina and Dark Pit in 4, but these two are entirely separate beasts. Dark Pit barely even has a different model, and has marginal differences in 3 moves while literally wverything else stayed exactly he same. Lucina does have a different playstyle (I even main her because I hate the tipper mehanic). However, compare the Lucina vs Marth in 4 to Dr Mario vs Mario in Melee (because he’s obviously more different in 4). Even when dr mario and mario are in melee, you’ll see much more different results with melee doc than wii u lucina.

-Lastly, the lack of numbering is the biggest (and really the only one that can’t be remedied in the future). This puts the echo next to their base on the Character select screen. I don’t know about you, but Dark Samus was my favorite character in Smash 64. It looks ugly seeing her there. The melee veterans have it even worse, since they have 3 echoes splitting up their roster. I know that there is the option to stack them, but honestly, reducing some fighters’ icons to a tiny hexagon in the corner of only a few fighters looks even worse. This isn’t even including how it might affect the consistence of all star mode, event matches, and ehatever else Ultimate has to offer. The biggest offender to this treatment is how Lucina and Dark Pit actually counted as their own separate characters previously, even if they were just copied off of another. Reducing them to extensions of another character just feels wrong, and almost makes it feel like “Everyone is Here” is a lie due to how these two don’t count anymore. I know Charizard has a similar case, but here’s the thing: he started off that way, split off, then remerged when the rest of his team returned. Lucina and Dark Pit started off separately