User blog:MasterKnight/Celestial Fireworks imbalance callout



Recently, I covered ban list management on other sites and of note, I called out the Power known as Celestial Fireworks for being banworthy despite popular opinion believing otherwise. Unfortunately, too many people don't get why Celestial Fireworks is such a blatant problem, but I may as well go into detail instead of leaving it to a single portion of a blog post because I was already focused there on deconstructing those common ban lists.

Long story short: Celestial Fireworks is overcentralizing and is broken even without weapon modifiers to make every panic button use even more aggravating. For those interested in the details, that's why I'm here.

What is Celestial Fireworks?
Celestial Fireworks is basically a fireworks launch attack Power that doesn't deal a lot of damage, merely designed to be an entertainment Power like Fortune's Jukebox. It doesn't seem like it would be excessively powerful, but it also has a Casting Animation, and that means that it has a whopping 1.34 seconds of intangibility mixed with first action being possible to do after 0.7 seconds from the cast input and a Power use being allowed a further 0.3 seconds after.

Now the Casting Animation concept is consistent with certain other Powers, so why single out Celestial Fireworks for this? Simple: it has an overabundance of charge counts. Level 1 alone has 5 charges, which besides the Jump Powers is only matched by certain Powers at Level 4. With Level 1 being only 4 spaces with the Tetris Z shape, this is already indicative of how much Celestial Fireworks diminishes Power value with inflation, but it gets even worse. Celestial Fireworks at Level 2 has 10 charges, matched only by Sky Jump, which doesn't provide the Casting Animation. At that point, even costing a full row and column like Slip Shot does at Level 2 and above wouldn't matter, and Celestial Fireworks needs only 7 spaces for its Missing Corners Box, which doesn't contradict any singular Power, not even Pisces Heal at Level 4.

Just for the poop icing on the crud cake, the Power regeneration rates are also superlative. BOTH Levels provide ALL charges back, instantly, with a V300 weapon, although this would translate to a V100 weapon recovering 1.6 charges at L1 and 3.2 at L2. Either way, L1 recovers charges faster than any other Power except sky Jump above L2, and L2 recovers faster than THAT as well.

The big insult is that the fireworks itself has transcendent Shot Cancel, just to make sure you can't use your hard earned burst damage as a trapping move. Is Celestial Fireworks every bit as broken as I imply though? Well, why don't we go into detail on the effects that its usage has.

Counter Play? What's that?
It has been argued that Interference and Transparency are what's used to thwart Celestial Fireworks. This doesn't work as an argument. I had tried Interference in general for a spell and actually witnessed an opponent use Celestial Fireworks while clearly within the Interference beacon's field of influence, unable to move out of it, so obviously this option is out. Transparency is also farcical to consider, because it costs too much space on the Power Grid to even have reliability against the likes of Super Speed, which costs a full line to begin with. The ambush aspect is guaranteed to be hit a check on the bottom screen, and as soon as that happens, Celestial Fireworks gets used to stall out the Transparency, which doesn't have a long duration on each charge to begin with. Transparency just fails miserably to achieve results.

The problem is that Celestial Fireworks has NO unique Counter Play to call its own. The closest it has to any Counter Play is that it has a cooldown period where inputting for a successive Celestial Fireworks use requires 3 seconds after the start of the first cast, during nearly half of which the user is STILL intangible and they can chain it right into ANOTHER panic button like Warp or Jump Glide before they could be vulnerable again. The individual cooldown drawback isn't even unique either; the only Power with a Casting Animation that doesn't have as much is Darkness, which is significantly less cost effective achieving at best 5 charges for 8 spaces with the awkward Big U shape, or it could go for 4 charges for 7 spaces with the 4x4 L shape, which is still going to bother Slip Shot with a tempo Power. Any other attack Power is going to be kept active for at least as long.

It doesn't help that Celestial Fireworks is its own color of purple (insulting because purple is my own favorite color), so it won't lock out any other attack Powers while in use, meaning that it can chain into any of those as well, with their own Casting Animation intangibility. Although the efficiency would be dependent on the followup, the fact remains that it can effortlessly shut down any big push. I hope you weren't working with buff Powers up to and including the cost-effective likes of Counter and Paralyze Attack. If you were, you're getting stalled with nothing you can do about it.

The cooldown is only THEORETICALLY punishable; in practice, Celestial Fireworks makes it easy to hide flaws in panic button spam efforts, which brings me to my next point.

Stalling: The Power
Celestial Fireworks is capable of 10 charges by itself. This would result in at minimum of 14 seconds of intangibility, wouldn't seem so bad with the existence of Playing Dead and its ability to stall for 32 seconds....except Playing Dead L3 to have that much requires 12 spaces and can only divide that between 2 charges, and has shortcomings for its own stall. Celestial Fireworks, again, can divide that between 10 charges for only 7 spaces without much in the way of losing offense like Playing Dead does, and this is where Celestial Fireworks particularly becomes nasty to deal with. In particular, it aggravates the Energy Charge + Bumblebee setup, which would normally be tolerable to deal with despite the obvious synergy, as Bumblebee requires a full line speaking for itself at this point and Level 3 even having a 2x6 rectangle would make Energy Charge with Reflect Barrier contradict Homing Boost regardless of Levels. The problem? Well, how about when you you hit them with a successful Black Hole or Mega Laser and then watch the Celestial Fireworks get used after only the first auto-dodge, eliminating your entire attack right there. Congratulations. Your hard work in setting up a trap has taken out only one auto-dodge, 5 more to go before you can finally poke off the Energy Charge and you're dealing with at least 4 more charges of a potentially 4 space panic button Power.

There is nothing healthy in the gameplay about Celestial Fireworks. It may not be capable of brain dead melee rush attacks like Brief Invincibility is, but it doesn't have to be in order to be nothing but flagrant invitation to boring gameplay. By itself, needing to do repeat safe poking to get anywhere invites camping that wouldn't excite people, either playing OR watching. Of course, when you then delve into how Kid Icarus Uprising is also balancing around the Power system, you then realize how Celestial Fireworks destroys its depth as well, because the Powers again get stalled out and there's even further added emphasis in having to do safe pokes working within core mechanics that, while my opinion of them isn't as low as they had been years ago, doesn't change that unconditional flinching is still a problem and the tools to make that needed big push stop being influential. Evasion+ is problematic for that same reason while also being a passive trait, but Celestial Fireworks is practically a semi-passive ability with this same ugly effect.

With this in mind, it is actually possible to have TWENTY-EIGHT panic button charges on a single setup: 10 from Celestial Fireworks itself, 5 each from Jump Glide and Darkness, and 4 each from Interference and choice of Land Mine or Brief Invincibility. Only one charge of Interference needs to be coughed up to fit in Effect Recovery for status undoing as well. Now sure, the combined charge count with Jump Glide/Darkness/Interference/Brief Invincibility/Land Mine would still reach 22, still more than double that of Celestial Fireworks L2, but exclude Brief Invincibility as well for its own imbalances and the panic button cost effectiveness starts getting balanced: Super Speed, next in line, naturally requires a full line, and Angelic Missile and Warp at their higher Levels are simply too chunky to compliment Darkness's Level 4 shape of the big U well at all.

These are key points in why Celestial Fireworks can be twitched without penalty, and needless to say, they don't make the metagame healthy at all.

Possible replacements? Spoilers: they all "suck"
You might argue that something would take Celestial Fireworks' place in overcentralizing behaviors with panic buttons. What would?

Bumblebee is probably coming to mind as something that people already take issue with. The problem with Bumblebee? It's a high duration buff Power that requires a full line. If it's found to be active at all, it will immediately expose the user being unable to carry around leveled Slip Shot, and as soon as that happens, the opponent can get behind defilade and use it for stress relief. Reduced need to foxtrot would already be significant, but what particularly helps the opponent is that they can arrange their Grid Reading and general analytical management when they aren't being kept disrupted from cooking up countermeasures. That is why the line cost is such a big deal: a loss of useful siege ability for maintaining pressure. This doesn't even touch upon Bumblebee's forced clockwise movement around the attacker on the auto dodges, allowing the attacker to consider positioning to useful effect, or how Bumblebee won't activate in a state where Parry Dodging can't be done and thus isn't foolproof about protecting Energy Charge.

People's next guesses would be Interference and Darkness, as the next most cost-effective Casting Animation Powers, but neither would be as cost effective at max Level as Celestial Fireworks L1 is, and they would already have some reliance on higher Level scaling in the first place with only 1 space needed for each additional Level. The scaling reliance gets to the point where while Jump Glide/Super Speed/Land Mine/Heavenly Light/Darkness/Interference can in fact perfect fit, they still will cap at 23 charges, and Super Speed again innately requires a full line at all, and while its usage would likely be saved for last, the lack of Slip Shot at the very least would surely become suspected anyway.

Interference has the added bonus of needing to go through 15 seconds of its beacon being active, even not being an attack and locking attempts to use Powers which won't do anything about buffs such as Super Armor already being up to manage sieging ability, before Interference can be recasted, marginalizing its low cost right there. And that's another thing: Interference and Darkness don't have an attack with transcendent Shot Cancel and so cannot shut out a disruptive attack so instantly. Darkness can be recasted quickly, but even minimum Level reveals 5 spaces, making sure that Interference first results in chain attacking against it smoking out at least 8 spaces (already more than Celestial Fireworks L2, imagine that), and max Level Darkness actually requires 8 spaces for 5 charges in total, via a shape that likes to be annoying toward chunky Powers at that. Suddenly, you might realize that Counter, Black Hole, Jump Glide, and Effect Recovery are a bit slender. Either way, these Powers have actual drawbacks in comparison, and the combination of max level Interference and max level Darkness also requires 13 spaces total to have 1 less charge than Celestial Fireworks L2.

People could still flock to the Jump Powers. Let me stop you right there: Sky Jump having a ridiculous defense boost in duration at L4 doesn't even change the user still being in place to be whacked by the melee attacks at their end or even hit with a bait-bolstered shot calling out their cooldown, and the damage would still get through at all anyway, so that mitigates the 10 charges for 3-5 spaces. Rocket Jump wouldn't be much better off despite the attack having, again, transcendent Shot Cancel. This only brings up how panic buttons would be so much easier to deal with when they get scared out and the reason Celestial Fireworks is such a problem is because it invites too much demand of this idea for too little payoff. Rocket Jump has the key difference that it doesn't have intangibility carry over into cooldown so it can't avoid punishment reading its use in its quarter of a second landing lag.

Jump Glide is the only one of the 3 worth considering to be problematic, still having 5 charges for only 4 spaces. I use Jump Glide and I can tell you it's volatile, because it can be cumbersome to control and the user's descent being slow can actually have their trajectory predicted even with the liberal directional influence control. It provides a defense boost in duration, but it's never as high as Sky Jump L4's and it certainly won't change the option limiting. Most of the reason it could be problematic is because of, what else, weapon modifiers creating offensive power bloat. Without that, Jump Glide is even more susceptible to being scared off, and even with the high capacity of 5 charges still wouldn't suffocate semi-passive Powers used for offense setup.

Warp is another obnoxious Power to go into, because it's sickeningly versatile by being usable at any time with teleportation placement being random and the teleportation providing respawn intangibility for the duration of the Power lock. However, Warp has the issue that it needs 2 spaces per extra Level, mitigating its ability to scale, when it's still more cost effective at higher Levels with 1+L charges. Level 2 is the Missing Corners Box, the same as Celestial Fireworks L2, for only 3 charges, while Level 3 is the Massage Chair for 4 charges, and then Level 4 is the Castle Tower, which directly uses multiple center spaces without fail (this prevents mixing in Slip Shot with Angelic Missile, Energy Charge, or Homing Boost regardless of Levels), for its capacity of 5 charges. Angelic Missile has Level 4 cost one space less, but that ALSO prevents Slip Shot+Energy Charge and limits further panic button involvement with Slip Shot+Homing Boost to Interference L2 or one of the Jump Powers, with Homing Boost L2 not happening at all and Homing Boost L3 only allowing Sky Jump L1. These two Powers could be touchy, but far from invincible.

Super Speed, having 5 charges for 9 spaces with Level 4, has a full line cost at any Level. I don't even need to go into detail at this point why that would be enough. Its usage as panic button involvement would be too susceptible to counterstalling.

And as for Land Mine possibly being a problem? It needs the mine to go off before it can be recasted. Yeah the mine can be placed where it can't be outmaneuvered without shooting it, but the user can still be sieged, and Land Mine is treated as a blue attack Power so it and Interference conveniently block each other off further forcing Land Mine's to have to use another, inevitably more expensive panic button if the Land Mine's cooldown is successfully punished.

That covers all the possible replacements, and I have NOT forgotten about Aries Armor, Trade-Off, Playing Dead, OR Pisces Heal because those are too expensive and end up with their stalling ability being actually punishable. Simple fact is, Celestial Fireworks is simply too powerful as a panic button, and when Japanese players who ban ONLY Mega Laser for an indefinite intangibility glitch use it far more than those 4 allegedly banworthy Powers to the point where it leads to timeouts, you know you have a busted Power on your hands.

(And no, I did not forget about Brief Invincibility. It's busted too simply by inciting brain-dead gameplay without useful Counter Play. Celestial Fireworks is still the bigger concern.)

Potential counterarguments and why they have problems
Now people have come up with arguments on why Celestial Fireworks still somehow isn't the problem I have proven it to be. Well, let's look at those arguments.

"It's just you"
Let's humor this ad hominem for the sake of calling out how asinine it truly is. There are at least FIVE other people I know who do not like putting up with Celestial Fireworks any more than I do. None of them would be maining Skyscraper Club to begin with. They generally work with rapid fire attacks so they can actually chip off Bumblebee as well as opponents' HP in general. One of those people mentions coming from Fighting Game Communities as well, so they would have be less willing to deem ANYTHING a problem. If the problem was "just (me)", then nobody would agree, but this is anything but the case.

I have pioneered both Grid Reading and the Spin Shot technique. The latter demands physical labor you would not expect from the same Squishy Wizard typing this entire post out, never mind that said Squishy Wizard points out being a natural southpaw handling a game with already problematic controls biased in favor of right-handed people. Even the former involves needing to do analysis in the midst of heated combat that can all too easily disrupt as much, in a game designed to be fast-paced with the combat as well. This has nothing to do with me "sucking" at the game just because I call out accessibility issues with the weapon fusion system. People have taken MANY YEARS to get all 360 entries on the Treasure Hunt and some don't even do it without using Feathers. I call nonsense that I somehow "suck" at the game.

The V100 competitive Discord has banned Celestial Fireworks on the grounds of being the spammable panic button that I have been calling out as much. I can only provide my analysis for what deserves to be called out if you think I'm in control of that. Celestial Fireworks does many times over inflate weapon modifiers, not just Evasion+ despite that being a big offender, but it invites stallfests all on its own.

"Celestial Fireworks is balanced"
Interesting. And yet Japanese players, who are COMPLETELY adverse to banning anything but Mega Laser, which gets hit for a glitch comparable to Smash Bros. Brawl's Infinite Dimensional cape, use it at alarming frequency. They don't even bother hiding their usage of Celestial Fireworks to disrupt Grid Reading because they are given NO reason to even care to know what Grid Reading is in the first place. It shows up on EVERY setup listed here. Now yes, Bumblebee, Effect Recovery, and Warp is also on every setup and so is at least one of the Jump Powers, when I mentioned how Bumblebee and arguably Warp are better balanced than Celestial Fireworks, but the tournament allowed weapon modifiers with no restriction beyond making sure non-hacking replication could be possible, and that would mean they allowed Evasion+ AND the Speed+ modifiers to aggravate those two Powers.

This is overcentralizing. Celestial Fireworks is extremely capable of stalling out even the more passive buffs like Counter, at which point it undermines the Power system's depth. The Power system has Powers be activations that work as bursts of effectiveness to allow for big pushes, best exemplified by Super Armor being a way to combat the base unconditional flinching. Take that away and you go back to a combat system that looks like it was reliant on window dressing, and Celestial Fireworks does precisely that by involving an effect that could have you mistake it for an actual fighter move.

Funny thing: Palutena in Smash 4 has Celestial Fireworks available as a custom move. Why don't we go into detail about the next point to cover that better? ...actually, I have something better to cover first.

"Panic button spam could still happen"




It is true that certain setups can still manage to clear 15 panic button charges, and there wouldn't even be a need for Warp, Brief Invincibility, or any Powers that exploit casting animation intangibility. (Reflect Barrier has the casting animation but works regardless per its very concept instead of the casting animation.) However, Celestial Fireworks makes this FAR easier by a wide margin. Look at the charge counts again: the only other Powers below Darkness L4's 8 space cost to have 5 charges are the Jump Powers, and the panic button spam would want Jump Glide in the first place. Interference L3, meanwhile, is 5 spaces, and that's the best you're going to get. Banning Celestial Fireworks from play knocks the panic button spammer down no fewer than FIVE charges guaranteed, which is significant.

I point to the panic button charge counts because they're practically potential amounts, that can be yielded for other Powers such as Bumblebee. The initial setup I displayed in the starting pic has a charges per 6 spaces value of 4.83. Slip Shot L3 or Bumblebee L3 (both at 12 spaces) can have Jump Glide/Interference/Darkness/Effect Recovery with Celestial Fireworks L2 and it would result in 21 charges of panic buttons (3.5 CP6S), but Celestial Fireworks getting replaced by Land Mine would result in that value dropping to 15 (2.5 CP6S), and it's worth noting that the Level sum of Interference, Darkness, and Land Mine has to be 7 or less. Let's not forget that Land Mine and Interference block off each other when in use. (For some odd reason, Darkness doesn't get blocked off by either one despite being Interference's color.) Darkness L4 won't even allow Effect Recovery within the 7 Level sum because the Big U shape is simply too awkward against Land Mine's shapes to allow as much.

What about Super Speed? Well, it already contradicts leveled Slip Shot, and if Bumblebee is Level 3, even if Super Speed is Level 1, Darkness L3 can't even fit in at all and Darkness L4 has to be perpendicular to the Line Powers, limiting mix-in with Jump Glide to Super Speed being Level 2 (3 charges for 7 spaces), restricting Interference in general, and not even fitting anyway if Super Speed is Level 4. Darkness's Level 2 shape ends up having to put up with a narrow space that isn't exactly friendly to U shapes, so ultimately the charge count between the panic buttons caps at 15, take it or leave it. Even Heavenly Light, while permitting a perfect fit with Super Speed L4/Bumblebee L3/Interference L3/Jump Glide L1, still has the panic button charge capacity at 17. Celestial Fireworks by contrast still doesn't have to try to get the panic button charge count to 22, wasting only 1 space in the process. 30% extra efficiency is still a lot even considering that Bumblebee contradicts leveled Slip Shot immediately as a hallmark of a camping setup, particularly when the margin of outpacing tagging ability becomes MUCH wider.

There are probably better examples than what I am thinking, but this goes to show how Celestial Fireworks is more versatile than the other panic buttons in general simply because of its absurd charge count at Level 2.

"The intangibility is intentional"
A lot of developers' ideas are intentional. This doesn't mean they can't fail to be streamlined at the very least, and at the very worst disprove, to my frustration by the way, the notion that there are no bad ideas. Celestial Fireworks having over-the-top intangibility falls into the latter.

Since people would refer to this (timestamp 3:00 if that doesn't work), let's go into how that same video also has the tip that higher Value weapons regenerate Powers faster, a system inflated MANY Powers by making weapon modifiers even more overly powerful than they already would be when Aries Armor of all things can be spammed as a result, and yeah the formula for Power regeneration suggesting that it is meant to discourage V299 min-maxing but the way it is handled absolutely does anything but that, leaving me with my complaints about spammed Powers by repeat kamikazes.

Celestial Fireworks' intangibility is actually a byproduct of the Casting Animation having that same standard in general, with Mega Laser and Land Mine being the outliers on paper, except Celestial Fireworks also has its ridiculous charge count for its low costs that the developers didn't think about better. I am left wondering why one of about 60 Powers has this imbalance but when there's 108 weapon types the likes of Gemini Orbitars is the uncommon standout of being ridiculous when even Taurus Arm, while still over-the-top for its depth issues, is still effectively melee-locked when the Shot Cancel still hasn't exactly heard of terrain cover. Either way, if Sakurai had realized how far Celestial Fireworks would have gone, just take one look at how he's been addressing Wavedashing from Smash Bros. Brawl onward and realize that Celestial Fireworks would have been hit with the nerf bat almost as hard.

I'm snorting out my nose at how Celestial Fireworks was nerfed in Smash 4 so harshly, how it doesn't even have the intangibility last to when Palutena can do any followups, when the firework itself tries much more blatantly to be an anti-air move, except, you know, Palutena's Up Smash is FAR better about it, on a character people deem to be low tier. The insult is that people don't use Celestial Fireworks in Smash 4 not because of player choice, but because of that game's hard coding For Glory to ban Custom Moves entirely out of balance concerns.

Whether Celestial Fireworks having all its intangibility was intentional at the start, it's still a flagrant problem inviting complacency.

"The game is dead anyway"
Really. And whose fault is that? Telling people to "evolve or die" didn't do it any favors. Coming up with clan names like "Don't Cry Noob" only told players to put up with the counterintuitive fusion system. There just wasn't enough empathy toward players even if we ignore the accessibility issues. And the thing is, Super Smash Bros. Melee managed to get big and live to this very day despite being much older with blatant design and balance issues, taking circumstances invited by the quarantine to FINALLY bring it down. We could have had something going with Kid Icarus Uprising, but when the community wants to indulge in nastiness on permanent repeat, even trying to justify their usage of the insult "incel dot com" as sarcasm that they never clarified as such from the start, without even the excuse that THEY could be known for snarkiness, when they want to indulge in gross double standards, it was just asking for the community dying by the same sword that they lived by: it didn't evolve, and so it died.

There's also the point that recently, interest in Kid Icarus Uprising has been drummed up courtesy of Sakurai's own Tweet. This is on top of GameXPlain's relatively recent review of the game and Antdude's own review as well. With Zelda: Skyward Sword getting a remake, KIU getting a port or sequel is a very real possibility at this point. Calling out Celestial Fireworks for its flowchart involvement would be a very good start to display that we want to reward the mid-battle analysis of Grid Reading to promote methodical offense, and we want to reward the mastery expectancy of the Spin Shot technique to augment vision maintenance, weapon type comprehension, and nuanced aiming and mobility management in general. We do NOT want to reward something that allows for pressing a single button and using only 4 or 7 spaces on the Power Grid to shut down creative countermeasures altogether on ridiculously repeat occasion. (I would want Effect Recovery similarly reviewed for that too, but the upper statuses would have to be looked at first to discourage people from just packing Freeze Attack, and preferably the lower ones should be feasible to lab out alternative defenses against as well.)

As said before, where there's life, there's hope. Also, opportunity. Either way, it's best to make the most of this hope to make sure things improve.

"Why so serious?"
Again, this goes back to the "evolve or die" argument, this time bringing up the hypocrisy of Kid Icarus Uprising communities. They're the ones making the argument that Kid Icarus Uprising isn't worth taking seriously, after saying "evolve or die" and ESPECIALLY refusing to own up for as much. Of course, again, their hypocrisy isn't the only problem with this. These people want to brag about being "good" while doing some incredible gatekeeping to make sure nobody else can challenge their claims of things like how Bumblebee is imbalanced, not Evasion+, despite how Bumblebee actually introduces Counter Play where Evasion+ doesn't.

Particularly frustrating is when this argument is an excuse repeatedly used by people like RoahmMythril to at best promote stagnation in a society where improvement is clearly needed, and at worst tells people to shut up about being turned into glorified pi(n)atas, which again makes the argument myopic failure to remember the human, only proving why they would call ANYBODY they want to "100% a troll" without caring about their side of the story, a story that would make it clear that I'm simply wanting my points about things like promoting gameplay based interaction with the game's world and encouraging Back-To-Back Awesome to be heard, NOT blown out of proportion like what those people I complain about are doing.

Here's what happens with my maining Skyscraper Club: I made a choice to go with an archetype that has shown a bad track record in past games. Said archetype inevitably involves risk-reward with the simple adage of needing to hit for power to matter, but also with the benefit of being easy to learn, hard to master. It also suffers more than any other archetype when there's ease in turning people into glorified pi(n)atas as I just complained about. And guess what? Players don't find that fun, and ESPECIALLY not newbies or intermediate players. When I use Skyscraper Club, the other player still has their options that I can't lock down with regular attacks. Black Hole also has to worry about tag protection methods, either blocking the Black Hole's vacuum off or blunting the followup, or else I could be using it from the start every match and its 2 uses would barely score a single KO off of the 2 Forward/Side Shots. The people most likely to become helpless against Black Hole overstack Powers like Energy Charge and Slip Shot, in which case they live by the sword, they die by the sword. That is good.

What is NOT good is when Celestial Fireworks is "better balanced" even though methods to overcome it are so much fewer, when Black Hole, with only 2 charges for 6 spaces, has far more and Super Armor and Reflect Barrier definitely stick out like sore thumbs. Celestial Fireworks is also basically invincibility for all intents and purposes, and when it gets spammed, oh Palutena am I remembering that at least Playing Dead forces Energy Charge to be Level 1 to allow Slip Shot regardless of Levels. If people want me to "lighten up" particularly when Celestial Fireworks is meant to be a joke Power, show me that that attitude genuinely cares about the little guy instead of selling them snake oil.

"There's no depth anyway/Stop saying Powers are any better with accessibility"
I decided to lump these 2 arguments together just to get this over and done with. Lack of depth is an absurd claim to make about the Power system, and I went into detail here some time back. I didn't even think at the time how NOT using Super Armor or Counter is practically walking into the arena of unconditional flinching with one's head held up high, the same aspect of choice that I have emphasized from the start, but it does go to show that the Power system has depth that gets lost to Celestial Fireworks spam.

Of course, with accessibility, I will grant that Powers do have to be found, something a remake would need to streamline, but all it takes is one game file to have all Powers accessible with only collection needing to be done, no muss, no fuss. I have had my copy of the game the entire time Kid Icarus Uprising has been out with the same save file I made from the start and if I want to make a new Power setup, all I have to do is arrange the Power Grid shapes for my "lunch box" with this cute little puzzle and be amazed every time I manage the perfect fit. All I need there is the 3DS I'm playing the game on and a little brain power to determine active possibilities with the shapes I have to work with.

This is why I don't take the argument that weapons wouldn't require more grinding seriously. To this day, I haven't even collected every single base weapon type, to my annoyance with as much, despite having had the game for 9 years at this point and actively labbing things. Base weapons should be something I should be able to have out of the box especially after enough accomplishment with the game, never mind completing all 360 tiles on the Treasure Hunt without using a single Feather. Instead, when the V100 competitive community has to resort to uploading a save file just for people to reasonably have this, and then this goes into 3DS hacking anyway, this is already a problem, and the accessibility gets even worse with creating "dream" weapons as well. You have to use an online guide to have an idea of what you are working with, on top of how luck will determine what you would have to work with in the first place, naturally encouraging grinding to attenuate the luck in the first place. Please for the love of Palutena, I'd rather get to practising (sic) Grid Reading and the Spin Shot technique among any other potential innovations, instead of trying to imitate some spoiled rich snob which games shouldn't reward to begin with.

You want my honest opinion? I would be fine with weapon modifiers as another feature in the game if they were a lot tamer than what we currently have and more feasible to manage, instead of promoting min-maxing to further aggravate the accessibility issues. They would still be clich(e) involvement of passive boosts requiring no added input from the player, but at least Value has the goal of discouraging people from overstacking powerful modifiers. That is if the game doesn't allow Power spam from players who have higher Value first. As it stands regardless, look at that, few modifiers even cost more than 40 Value even at max Level and none of the ones that do are even involving speed stats, which coincidentally include the most broken modifiers in the game without fail.

Honestly, it's apparently too much to ask for to have people care about the Power system as a happy medium in the handling of punishment for taking hits at all. But what do I expect at this point.

Closing
I don't know who will listen to this. It's not like I get real responses to my other posts. I can, however, at least provide my input on a site that Sakurai may take a look at over the Defictionalization involved even if the Defictionalization is of a term in the localization different from the original Japanese version, which used the term "kami sama dot net" ("kami" being "God" and "sama" being an honorific) in its place. Even if this post doesn't have an effect by itself, it can at least hopefully set up a good foundation for improving player experience with fun factor from the kinetic gameplay that Celestial Fireworks is so intent on shutting out.