Smash's Mario is a Weirdly Bad Beginner Character?

Febuary 25, 2026 - Published

This is a weird thought I've had on my mind for a while: despite being the face of Smash Bros., and Nintendo as a whole, Mario is a weirdly bad beginner character? In any other fighting game, you would expect the main character to be the one that's easy to pick up and play for beginners.

But think about it -- how many beginners do you see actually stick with Mario for a long period of time? Other characters like Kirby and Bowser tend to be a lot more popular. Despite that, Mario's moveset has been barely changed throughout the series. While this information mainly comes from the game I had the most experience with (Smash 4), most of the information should apply to every game, especially Brawl onwards.

What makes a good beginner character?

In my opinion, there are 2 types of fighting game characters that are good for beginners (of course, "beginner" referring to someone with single digit hours in the game). The first kind is the "easy wins" character. This character is like Bowser and Kirby where you can just spam big hard-hitting special moves and get results. Generally, these characters are pretty bad for actually learning the game because they create a "crutch" for the player to win without understanding why they're winning, but if the player isn't interested in learning the game, this is perfectly fine.

The second kind is the "training wheels" character. This character is like Ike or Lucina who have a very simple moveset that allows the player to focus on learning the game well in a fundamental way without having a large amount of external distractions. Generally, these characters are pretty bad for getting easy wins early on, but allow the player to become much better at the game if they invest enough of their time.

Characters can definitely fit in both categories -- in my opinion, Bowser in Smash 4 and Ultimate allows players to play a relatively fundamental playstyle while also getting easy wins. However, I feel that Mario fails at both of these goals.

Mario does not give easy wins

If you look at the characters that give easy wins (especially the ones popular in Free For Alls), they have a few attributes that are very common. These are attacks with big, hard-hitting hitboxes that are easy to input. Bowser has his Down B, Kirby has his hammer. Captain Falcon has his many special moves including Falcon Punch, and so does Ganon. Players getting into the game want to press buttons and get results.

Meanwhile, Mario is a combo-focused character that wants to attack the opponent with a lot of small, quick moves. His special moves are really underwhelming in a fight, with Up B only killing near the top and the rest of his special moves unable to kill outside situational position-sensitive setups, like using Cape to gimp certain recoveries. His normals aren't much better, with only his Smash Attacks being real kill moves (which like, every character has those as kill moves) other than his F-Air, which is a spike that has a very specific hitbox and timing, making it difficult for beginners.

It's also been my personal observation that beginners will often just point towards the opponent and attack them like that, giving you his F-Tilt, F-Air, Side B, and Dash Attack as his primary moves. These would be great on a character like Bowser, who gets a lot of big chunky buttons, but for Mario, you get: a stubby poke, a slow spike that's only helpful offstage, a reflector that's barely an attack, and a small-ranged attack that can neither combo nor kill. This is why most people would rather just move onto another character.

Mario does not teach you fundamentals

As the main character, Mario is an all-rounder who can deal with every situation. He has average weight and speed, and compensates for his low range with a projectile. That makes him the Ryu of this game who teaches the game well to newcomers through fundamentals, right? Well, no, somehow they messed up even that!

If we look at Mario's neutral, there are 2 moves that carry it. The first is Fireball, which was actually pretty awkward for me when learning competitive Smash. This is because grounded fireball locks you on the ground for about 50 frames -- for comparison, that's about as much as his F-Smash! Unlike F-Smash, it's incredibly weak, only dealing 5%. This is because Fireball is meant to be used in the air, where you can drift while using it. However, this is a skill check -- you have to jump in the air, usually forward or backwards, release the stick to neutral to Neutral B, then use the stick again to drift during the animation. This sounds minor, but it's a barrier to newer players, and even if done successfully, Fireball's usage is a lot more murky than other special attacks since it has no direct reward.

The second attack that carries Mario's neutral is B-Air, and this fares even worse. To use effectively in a match, you have to learn to Reverse Aerial Rush, which is an advanced technique that allows you to approach the opponent aerially with your back facing towards them. Mess it up, and a RAR B-Air becomes a running F-Air. While B-Air is a great neutral tool because it's quick, long-ranged, and provides good combo reward, F-Air is a slow attack that's much more unsafe and can leave you wide open. In other words, even Mario's neutral is reliant on advanced techniques and has a narrow margin of error for someone expected to be a beginner character.

This isn't even mentioning his combos. While most fighting games might expect you to learn how to perform a long combo fairly quickly, that's not the case for most platform fighters. This is because platform fighters have very variable combos due to the combo system, so stringing together large amounts of attacks is actually very difficult. This also happens to be Mario's goal. Most of his attacks are very ineffective when used by themselves (his B-Air does about half the damage as Bowser's), so he needs to compensate this by doing his famous strings of 5+ U-Airs and such, which require a lot of practice, dexterity, and quick reactions.

Combine that with other factors like how U-Smash is better when reversed (more advanced techniques) and how his specials, particularly Cape and FLUDD, are incredibly gimmicky (does not teach fundamentals), and you can probably see what I mean when I say that Mario is a weirdly bad beginner character.

So, what's Mario good for?

Mario might be a bad beginner character, but then what's he designed for? This is conjecture, but I think Mario is an excellent mid-level training wheels character.

Learning combos, RAR B-Air, and fading projectile movements are not particularly high level mechanics. They're just difficult for beginners, who have usually learned them by the time they begin entering the low-mid level of competitive Smash. Once you learn those things, Mario is actually an incredibly easy character to pick up, and an incredibly fun one, too. His attacks become intuitive, his combos come together naturally, and once you've learned how other characters function, the use-cases for Cape and FLUDD suddenly become much more obvious.

There's a good chance he's designed with Sakurai's classic "easy to pick up, hard to master" philosophy, and I think it's really neat that the recent games also reward players for mastering him by making his tier placement actually decent.

The "most beginner players hold forward and attack" was something that influenced DracoFighter a fair bit, and it was that thought that really bothered me about Mario's moveset, to be honest. It really settled in when I saw a friend's younger brother play Mario and spam F-Tilt, displaying probably the most awkward-looking Smash playstyle I've ever seen. 

I wouldn't be so quick as to say this is a display of bad design on Smash's part, but more of an interesting one. I think it'd be awesome if Mario's F-Tilt made him do a giant attack using his hammer from the RPG spinoffs, but I can also understand why they chose not to do that.

• Vecderg