On the first two titles of the Super Smash Bros. franchise all of the available characters were originally from Nintendo, there we no third-party characters available, but this suddenly changed with the introduction of Solid Snake in Super Smash Bros. Brawl on the Nintendo Wii and this quickly escalated on the subsequent games after the positivity that this addition represented to the game.

In the last few months it has been remarkable the reception that Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (the latest of the saga) has obtained and this time it was taken more seriously the number of third-party characters available in the game, some of them being from classic and well-known franchises such as Pac-Man, Metal Gear Solid, Castlevania, Final Fantasy, Street Fighter and many others.

But this time it was the turn of Joker from Persona to make an appearance and we believe this third-party character addition is very special, most of the franchises we mentioned before belong to huge and renowned companies such as Konami, SEGA, CAPCOM, BANDAI NAMCO and Square Enix, but this time the opportunity was given to ATLUS, which is not a small company but definitely way more modest than the ones mentioned before.

And what’s the importance of this? It is already known that the Fighters Pass will deliver five characters and none of them being from Nintendo and the fact that they added Joker, whose franchise doesn’t carry the “prestige” that most of the time we see in the third-party sagas that appear on Super Smash Bros leaves the doors open for the possible addition of a character from an indie game.

After saying all this, we would like to share our first impressions on Joker, his playability, weaknesses and strengths. First things first: he is not the hardest character but still not an easy one, his style files like a combination of Zero Suit Zamus, Sheik, and others but with several new stuff. He’s also got a lot of potential for combo developing due to his quick moves and also of “edgeguard” potential mainly when he has Arsene.

He also feels very deep, like a lot will be possible soon with him, proof of this is the number of combos that have been developed in the very few days that have passed after his release. Joker is definitely above the average, he is (at the moment) an outstanding character, but what will define how good he is, will be the tendency of pro-players picking him through the tournaments.

Now his weaknesses: lightweight, Joker is very quick, but his quickness is proportional to his susceptibility to getting high damage from any attack, he can be easily killed when outside the stage and when he doesn’t have Arsene, but still, his speed helps him avoid attack, so he is kind of hard to hit. He also doesn’t have a lot of options when “out of shield”, meaning he doesn’t have good attacks after blocking one.

In summary, Joker is quick, with strong attacks and a lot of features to exploit and develop, but at the same time, he can be sent flying and get killed easily if the enemies know how to land attacks on him.