What's the average size roster for a fighting game?

I read a review for the first Blazblue and the review made it seem like 12 was a small size. So what is the average size roster for a fighting game?

I'm not an expert on fighting games, but there's definitely a lot of fighting games with 20+ characters, so I suppose it would make sense saying that 12 is small.

Depends on the era. If you're talking all time then 12 is not so small because you'd have to include a lot of SNES/PS1 era games with 8 or so fighters (check out Ranking of Fighters for a lot of games with rosters in this range).

Modern fighting games generally have more, though. Killer Instinct launched with 6, but it was a very different model. I would say that these days most games have somewhere in the 20-25 range, but Street Fighter V didn't, so a smaller roster is definitely viable for a competitively balanced game.

always use SF3 and SFAlpha 1 as an example of small rosters, hence why the sequels were such a leap in comparison.

I'd probably say a good average for the purposes of reviews would be 16. Less is on the smaller side, more is over expectation. Though honestly, 16 feels somewhat small as well. I like games that hover more around 20ish just for that little extra bit of variaton.

Somewhere between 20-25, factoring only modern games in probably a little closer to 30.

It's a symptom of the iterative nature of the genre, combined with the absolute death of new IP in it for the past 15 years or so. For a long time every "new" fighting game was just an iteration on an existing roster and so people got used to games with 24+ characters. Beyond that, most Japanese fighting games lived in arcade for months or even years before their console release. They would often start with a handful of characters, then add and add and add so by the time the home version came out, the number of characters had doubled.

In my opinion, a roster size of 12-16 is perfectly acceptable, and even 8 if they're balanced and diverse. That said, if you were took look at recent first iterations across the genre, my guess is that the average floats somewhere between 16-20.

I would say 8 or 10, at least that's how it used to be. Anything more honestly just feels like over kill unless they are slight variations on the same characters. I used to be able to get good with multiple characters in a fighting game, now I can barely learn one so when they add too many i just end up not getting into the game as much.

It depends on whether it is a long running franchise or a brand new one. New fighting games rarely have more than 10-15. If it's a game that's been iterated upon several times it's not uncommon to see them go upwards of 30. However, if the game makes the jump to the next generation you'll often see large portions of the cast get left out, because they're not just rehashing identical assets.

Simply put, it all comes down to how much effort is involved in designing the roster. If they are basically just copy/pasting a character over from another game with minor tweaks then there is more room to work on brand new characters. The more work each character requires to implement the smaller the roster will be.

Modern fighting games(PS4, X1, PC) seem to sit between 20-30. Anything before 2010(late 360/PS3). I'm going to say they can go as high as 50-100. That being said, 12 does seem a bit light. Also, if there are only 12, there is a fair bit of concern that they will try and sell additional characters for $5 a pop. Which is something that Anime Fighting games tend to do a little too often.

It's not the size of the roster that counts, it's how different everyone feels.

Having multiple palette swapped clones does a game no favours.

There are other complicating factors you should take into account when judging the size of a roster, particularly character variety, character complexity, and game balance. If each character brings a deep and radically different gameplan to the table, and if the game is balanced well enough that few characters are unviable competitively, then there may be a far larger number of relevant matchups to learn and explore than if the game had a larger roster but was dominated by 3-4 characters who all played the same.

Most of my experience is with KI, which is in the former category: pretty much every slot on the character select screen has been treated as an opportunity to bring something completely new to the game, and because of the unconventional core systems (the combo system, etc) and just the general power level being well above something like a Street Fighter game leading to many characters being archetypal hybrids (i.e. being good at many different things), characters in KI tend to be very complex. The game balance is also notably good: you often see more than 8 different characters in a top 8, including at big events like Evo. As a result, a lot of top players and theorists are nervously tugging at their collars at the idea of a season 4, because there's already a staggering amount of matchup knowledge to keep on top of with the 25-character roster as is. It's running the risk of scaring newcomers off, really, which is a shame because KI had a lot of trouble on-boarding players earlier in its life when there was less to learn.

On the other hand, at 40+ characters, USFIV had plenty of tournament-viable characters at the end of its time in the limelight, but a lot of them were clones (how many shotos are there in that game?), and I think you'd find you could ignore a large part of the roster (even though the balance was good enough that a lot of counterpicking went on).