My Favorite Character Was Sheik

My favorite character was Sheik. Not Link—Sheik. The disguise, the speed, the way she could vanish mid-combo and materialize somewhere the opponent hadn’t processed yet. I was genuinely unbeatable with her, or at least that’s how I remember it, and the gap between the memory and the actual truth is probably large enough to park a truck in.

We played Super Smash Bros. on a CRT television in my room—four of us crammed onto the bed and floor, controllers distributed, someone always stuck with the third-party one with the mushy joystick. First on the N64, then on the GameCube, those sessions running until someone had to leave or until it became clear that one person was going to keep winning and the rest of us needed to stop volunteering. The game was a perfect machine for that specific kind of afternoon.

When Nintendo brought the series back for the 3DS in 2014, the roster had grown to over fifty characters—a museum of Nintendo history arranged in a fighting game, Pikachu and Zelda and Yoshi alongside characters I had to look up. The new amiibo function for the Wii U version let you load a physical figurine into the game and watch it develop its own fighting patterns through repeated matches, an AI that learned from what beat it. My childhood CRT-television afternoons had apparently been building toward small plastic figures with machine-learned combat habits.

Sheik was still in the roster. Still fast.