Super Smash Bros. Ultimate - Challenger Pack 7: Byleth

My Saturday night crew always has that one person who refuses to pick anyone but sword fighters, and honestly, Challenger Pack 5 was made for them. Byleth from Fire Emblem: Three Houses arrives as the final fighter in Fighters Pass Vol. 1, and the reaction at launch was... complicated. The Smash community had just welcomed Joker, Terry Bogard, and Banjo-Kazooie into the roster with genuine excitement, so a fifth Fire Emblem representative, closing out a paid season pass, hit a sour note for a lot of people. Fair criticism. But spend an actual session with this character and the design logic clicks. What separates Byleth from the pile of other Fire Emblem sword fighters is the four Hero's Relics system. Each directional input maps to a completely different weapon: the Sword of the Creator (a whip-sword) for neutral and up attacks, the Areadbhar lance for side moves with a demanding tipper sweetspot, the Aymr axe for down inputs that can shred shields and grant super armor during the wind-up, and the Failnaught bow for the neutral special, which charges up to a fast projectile beam. In practice this means you are not playing a generic slasher. You are playing a spacing-based fighter where reading your opponent and committing to the right directional attack is the whole game. The back aerial with Areadbhar is a punish tool serious players will get mileage from, and the down special axe strike is basically the Falcon Punch of this kit: slow, telegraphed, capable of one-shotting a shield, and deeply satisfying when it lands. The honest caveat is that Byleth is genuinely slow. Sakurai himself noted the poor mobility at reveal, and that has not changed. Horizontal recovery is a real liability, grab range is poor, and most of the big punish moves have startup lag that experienced opponents will read and exploit. The tier list has Byleth sitting comfortably in mid-tier (roughly 51st out of 82), which is an interesting case: pro player MkLeo famously dominated offline tournaments with this character, but his results made up roughly two-thirds of all Byleth tournament placements at the time, which tells you a lot about the character ceiling versus skill floor gap. For casual couch play this mostly does not matter, but it does mean Byleth feels noticeably less forgiving than someone like Kirby or Pikachu when a new player picks them up. The pack itself bundles in the Garreg Mach Monastery stage, which cycles through four locations including the marketplace and cathedral, giving it more visual variety than a lot of Smash stages. The music selection is strong, pulling arrangements from Three Houses that hold up well in a fighting game context. Spirits from Three Houses are also included, with some enhanceable ones for players who dig that mode. For Smash regulars who do not own Fighters Pass Vol. 1, this is the weakest individual pickup of that set purely on the grounds of character novelty, but it is absolutely not a bad fighter, just one that demands patience and positional discipline over button-mashing aggression. For a party couch session the verdict is mixed. Byleth works fine in eight-player chaos but will frustrate new players who try to rush opponents down and keep getting punished on whiffed smash attacks. In a more focused two or four-player bracket night with people who actually want to lab a character, Byleth becomes a quietly compelling study in spacing-heavy fighting game fundamentals. Riley, Scout Team