No, that’s what happens when you make everyone dumb in a badly balanced game. There is nothing saying that they can’t be relatively balanced while being strong. Skullgirls and GG prove this. The cast of SG is ridiculously strong all around. Even the “weak” characters are strong they just take more work to make strong.
The real problem with characters that are to strong across a cast is that they are almost always way to momentum based. Once something is blocked or hit you just kinda die from mixups and frame traps that never stop.
One way to try and balance that is low damage but that creates the timer problem and lack of comeback ability. If you are down to 15 or 20 seconds and your opponent has an 80% life lead… you can just drop the controller and that leads to very uninspired play.
Also, when you have a cast of weak characters it becomes easier to make a character to strong with certain moves.
Things like chuns iall, the meterless dp’s and mikas charged HK made these characters undeniably good and easier than the rest of the cast in season 1.
Chun could get meterless pressure on you and confirm it into damage and oki on hit or a fra e trap on block.
Meterless dp could allow people use no resources on defense and instead be able to blow all resources on offense via super like necalli and ryu, or on ex moves like cammy and ken.
Mikas charged HK got her in at plus frames from jump range and was a perfect mixup for dashes and jumps as it was exceptionally hard to keep track of all 3 options when all 3 has different answers.
But the point is that none of this stuff is to good on its own. In fact compared to older streetfighters this shit is mild. The problem starts when the rest of the cast is so weak that they have problems dealing with these options, yet don’t have anything as strong themselves to launch a counter offensive with.
Meterless reversals arent to good in a balanced game that isn’t homogenised to hell and back. But in a game that IS homogenised to hell and back and gives no great way to bait wakeup reversals besides block them at point blank range, something is wrong.
That problem has been addressed and for the better IMO, shit now I plan on maining one of these DP characters simply because his options compared to the rest of the cast are so OP… I’d rather be the one dishing out than receiving and I have no choice since my character got nerfed into the ground.
Tldr
Strength of cast has little to do with balance in a game. It has more to do with game tempo and momentum than anything else. Bad matchups in weak cast games are worse because you have fewer options to deal with things and create mindgames as the character in a bad matchup… but this is relative of course.
