Indeed, down B having armour comes off as a strange decision at first glance. I feel like the idea behind the move is to give him a reasonably fast "get off me" tool that allows him to send people back to his own optimal range, but with how crazy the knockback is, I fear that it is much more likely to be used as an ultra cheese tool to score shinespike-like knockouts. Adding armour of any kind to that seems like a recipe for instant salt.

I'm hopeful that what we saw was simply an early build with unrefined knockback values. Thankfully, based on what Refurin told us, that seems to be the case. It would be unfortunate for such a cool character to center around cheese of this level rather than all of the interesting mechanics that make him so unique.

I never actually thought the knockback on his Down B was gonna stay the way it was, at first glance I thought it was either a bug or a unbalanced feature.

My only issue with luffy is that he has a huge move pool with different moves that could have worked for each attack but only like 6 of those moves made it into the characters moveset. They could have implemented some if his most used attacks at least into his moveset like Gum Gum Bazooka, or Whip. Whe only got Spear, Sickle, Gatling, Volcano, Pistol and Bell.

Also is it just me or does Luffy look a bit out of place with Goku, Ichigo and Naruto.

TBH, visually, I feel Luffy fits in better than the 3 OG anime characters. It could just be because his spriting is original though.

Down b should have reworked kb growth, and an upwards diagonal kb trajectory imo ...not sure how Cleods engine handles "wind boxes" or whatever but that should be fine.

His down smash and uptilt I believe can use more frames of animation.

And in general all tether recoveries should not have invincibility prior to the frame the characters get to the ledge.

Luffy''s fine though

Luffy's sprites aren't original, they're based off of One Piece Gigant Battle 2.

They still fit more with the game than the others anime guys.

Because One Piece Gigant Battle sprites are improved Jump Ultimate Stars sprites.

So uh, is Luffy perma-stunned if played on the Steel Diver stage? xD

I used to be in favor of Luffy but now I was hoping he wouldn't get in so ye.

This character looks annoying. I hope he can't rapidly use up-special. Cool gif though. Also, RIP Luigi.

He kinda looks like he plays like Ristar would.

Sooooooo, What do you guys think his Final smash is gonna be?

Probably/Hopefully another Final Form

this is why I'm worried about wind boxes lmao

come on now that's ridiculous

According to the EventHubs Tier list, Kratos is 2nd.
According to the IGN tier list (I didn't even know they made them) Kratos is 4th.
According to different fanmade tier lists, he's high tier.

That's not even what I meant by a travesty. His gameplay and design is just terrible and pretty tedious. His range was significantly bigger than almost every other character, his grapple meant easy punishes, the list goes on.

Just because Raiden, Cole and Kat are above him doesn't mean he was a well designed character.

That's how I know you don't know what you're talking about, you weren't around during the time Dabuz, Lizardheart, Omni and etc were around back when the game had a community willing to drive the meta. And generally majority of the players considered Kratos so high because people treated him like any other character; Trying to block and punish instead of slowly boxing your way in. Kratos was literally just a scrub killer in that game, no reliable hit confirm into Lvl 1's, AP gain was good but not anything outlandish and he had no good projectiles that majority of the cast had. Characters like Evil Cole and prepatch Issac could give him hell ez. Case closed until you actually educate yourself on that dead game.