Just got this yesterday and played for the 1st time. So far a pretty fun game, I played for about 40 minutes and am just trying to get the hang of everything. What are some of the best characters people like to use? So far I have just tried Mario and Kirby. just curious what other people like to use
Balancing is extremely good in Smash Bros games, generally, there's no "best character" (though the hardcore guys tend to separate them into tiers).
Mario, Luigi, and Kirby are probably the most newbie-friendly characters. I personally greatly prefer Luigi to Mario. Luigi's neutral and back air attacks have ridiculously broad ranges, his up B on the ground is absolutely nasty if you are touching the other player when you use it (great for someone who roll a lot like me), and you can use his forward-B for recovery quite well.
My best character is Peach. She's very good, but be warned that she is extremely hard to get the hang of.
Shiek...don't get me started. She was my second-best character in Melee, but she's absolutely horrible now. However, Zelda has been vastly improved to the point of being ridiculously good in comparison.
Pikachu and Pit are the "cheapest" characters in the sense that both have moves that can be very easily spammed (Pikachu's down-B and down-Smash, Pit's forward B), and Pit essentially cannot die through suicide or falling since he can jump like four times then glide THEN fly with up-B. But I've got pretty good at learning counters to all of the spammable moves to take out the noobs.
MetaKnight is fun.
My top characters are probably:
Peach
Ike
Marth
Toon Link
Luigi
Snake
Pit
MetaKnight
Note that I consider Marth to be a better character than Ike but I have all kinds of cheap tricks I use with him. Marth's also probably a superior character to Peach but I've developed some absolutely vicious Peach strategies that I don't want to give up- though I'm saddened by the inability of Peach to aggressively edgeguard (nothing is more fun than chasing an opponent off a cliff to force them down).
Snake I'm slowly improving on. I love playing him. Toon Link is great but I need more practice.