Palutena

Palutena (パルテナ, Palutena) is a playable character in Super Smash Bros. All Stars. She was confirmed alongside the Mii Fighters and Pac-Man during E8 2018 on August 23rd, 2014. She is voiced in Japanese by Aya Hisakawa, who reprises her role from Kid Icarus: Uprising, and in English by Brandy Kopp, who replaced Ali Hillis due to availability conflicts.

Palutena is currently ranked 42th out of 58 on the tier list, placing her in the E tier and making her the second highest ranking low-tier character. Palutena has good mobility overall, which is especially evident on the ground due to her fast walking and dashing speeds and high traction. She possesses a useful set of aerial attacks, with her back aerial being in particular very useful due to its invincibility, her forward aerial being an impressive combo tool, neutral aerial being a great pressure option and up aerial being infamous for garnering early KOs with rage. Her moveset also grants her a good combo game thanks to her jab cancel, aerials and down throw, the latter of which is further supplemented by her impressive grab range and excellent pummel. Lastly, most of her grounded moves possess respectable power, most notably her smash attacks.

However, Palutena's weaknesses are quite glaring: she has very sluggish frame data in relation to her power, especially on her grounded moves, which gives her a predictable neutral game and an almost nonexistent approach on the ground. Her KOing ability is also unimpressive despite her smash attacks' high power, since her KOing options are difficult to land, due to their slow startup and ending lag, or hard-to-land hitboxes. Her special moves also have poor synergy with her moveset and, in some cases, low utility overall, with her Counter being a great example. Her tall size, below average weight, and high gravity also make her susceptible to combos, juggles and KOs. She does gain significant benefits from custom special moves that remedy her approaching issues and bolster her mobility, damage racking ability, and combo game, but since most tournaments disallow customs, she cannot make use of those advantages to improve her playstyle in the current metagame.

As a result of these factors, Palutena's representation and results in non-local tournaments are rather poor. Despite this, she still has some dedicated players to her credit, such as TLTC, Iceninja, and Prince Ramen, with the latter of the three scoring a major upset at CEO 2016 by defeating ZeRo 2-0 in pools. Additionally, her tournament results and representation have slowly improved since then.