Aside from Karate champ. I was thinking that there has yet to be a perfectly balanced fighting game, where there isn’t a god-tier character that rapes everyone, or a garbage character that people use either for the lolz or because they like a challenge.
I can’t think of a single game. In Super Turbo you have O. Sagat and O.Ken that are godly, aside from those two the game is relatively balanced (resulting in a lot of counter-picking). Then there’s Garou which comes pretty close but Kevin and Jenet’s block strings put them in god-tier status, and when Kevin has super ready he can touch of death you, or get like 80% damage or something pretty easily. In 3rd Strike Chun and Yun’s SA3 break the game. KOF 98 and 98 UM might just come the closest, no one is truly god tier, then again that’s debatable, some would say Iori or Krause or S tier, and others would disagree.
Then there’s Marvel VS Capcom 2 which the black people tell me is really balanced, I’ve never gone to tournaments because I’m afraid of getting mugged and being called a vanilla face, but the black people on the internet have assured me that’s balanced.
MvC2 is far from balanced, you have 4-so playable characters and a couple of assist characters with a shitload of completely unplayable characters. The only argument for the game being balanced is “Ignore every bad character”, but you could use that logic in pretty much every game and say that every game is “balanced” (like Third Strike).
Of course the game is perfectly fine with just these characters (don’t hurt me).
I believe a more important point is that character diversity and henceforth complexity/depth of matchups is just as important (or even more so) than overall balance.
Case in point, MvSF versus MvC2. The former is considered by many as the most balanced Versus game, but it’s also considered to be the most boring, especially compared to MvC2 which makes up for it’s seeming lack of overall balance by having a deep system and interesting match ups in the top tier.
O.Sagat is not the god of ST. He loses to most of the top tier. People who don’t understand the game see a lot of tiger shots and think he’s broken but that’s not true. And O.Ken is just an OK character, I dunno how could anyone think he’s godly or something.
The only way to make a perfectly balanced fighting game would be to make a game where every character has an identical moveset, stamina, and speed. Otherwise one character will always have some form of advantage over the other, no matter how minuscule.
Dead or Alive 4 is by a long shot for the time being. Without charge moves, every character being able to attack from every direction, good grabs and counter system, the characters become very closely balanced but each with different speed or power.
SSF4 can’t even make a balanced roster without fucking up characters and that also includes charge moves.
Right…balance just means that there are no completely one-sided matchups, and that out of any possible matchups, there are no situations where a player might as well just walk away before the match even starts when he’s playing someone of the same skill, just because of the character he picked compared to his opponent’s character.