I wanted to try a new daily Smash roster creation thing – Smash Bros. Rivals! Each hero will get a corresponding villain, and each villain will get a corresponding hero. So to start – who would Cloud’s rival be?

Hey everyone, I had an idea for a sort of roster creation challenge and I wanted to give it a go here. A few years back I had an idea of a Smash game where the gimmick is that the fighters were paired up by rivalry – every heroic fighter had a corresponding villainous counterpart.

I thought it might be fun to try making a version of the Smash Ultimate roster, but where each hero in the game has a corresponding villain and each villain a corresponding hero. I plan to do one post every day, generally between 3pm and 4pm UK time, although it may sometimes be later if I forget. I will decide the winner based on which comment has the highest upvotes in the post by the time I make the next post. The character I cover each day will be randomly generated.

There are going to be some rules to this:

1. The rivalry can be in the form of a villain, antagonist, rival, enemy, obstacle etc. just as long as you can justify it and people agree.

2. For characters who are villainous, for example Ridley, then the rivalry will instead be a heroic character.

3. If characters are ambiguous or have filled the roles of both hero and villain during their history, such as King Dedede, then you can nominate their rival for either the villain or hero category as long as you can justify it – if this is the case, please make it clear (I have already filled the current characters in the chart in the places I think they best fit but this isn't set in stone and I'll alter it as it becomes relevant)

4. The rival MUST be from a game in the same franchise or at least have some significant link to the franchise.

5. I am not going to be too picky on the definition of "character" – concepts or inanimate objects can be chosen as long as there aren't any better examples and you can make a strong enough case for it.

6. The aim is to have a rival specific to the character we are talking about – not just an opportunity to add a villain that just happens to be from the same franchise, although this isn't a hard rule and obviously some characters don't have a character that is specific enough to be the rival so random villains may end up being the play but try to keep the suggestion as relevant to the character as you can.

7. Rivals CANNOT be characters already on the roster – yes, obviously Bowser is the most logical rival for Mario and vice versa, but each of them will have a separate rival. This just forces us to be a little creative, which I think will end up being more fun.

8. I will allow variants of characters that are already in the Ultimate roster, but those aren't ideal because it kinda kills variety if we just put five Ganon variants on the roster.

9. Characters don't necessarily have to come from videogames – if you wanna suggest Ash from Pokemon or Mario's Dad, go for it.

10. Physical factors of how the character would work in a fighting game aren't important here – this is more about the characters in concept than actually thinking about them being in a fighting game.

11. No downvoting. It's not necessary.

12. If there is a tie, I will cast my own vote as the tiebreaker – I will otherwise not be voting (including on my own suggestions)

A couple of character specific rules I need to go over:

1. I will not be lumping smaller or retro franchises together – that's right, we're absolutely finding a rival for Duck Hunt (I already have an idea for that actually)

2. Mii Fighters are a weird classification, but I'm counting them as the Mii series rather than the Smash series as they appear to be in game, firstly because they are considered to be part of the Mii series on the Smash website and secondly because there really aren't any interesting rivals you can give them for the Smash series, but there are from the Mii series. I'll also be leaving the three Mii fighter classes as separate.

Today's character is Cloud! Obviously his most logical villain, Sephiroth, is already in the game, so the question is – who would be second choice here?