The RoseGarden reduces startup on all of Nero's moves. This opens up new followups and conversions while inside the zone.

However, the main gimmick Nero has is her DSpecial which activates 1 of 3 of her stances: Buster, Quick, and Arts. This is inspired by Nero's appearance in Fate/Grand Order, a mobile game where you save the world from destruction by summoning heroes known as Servants. Since it is her main gimmick, I would like Nero to weave these stances into her gameplans. She has two general gameplans in total.

Buster and Quick are supposed to work together in dealing damage and sealing KOs. One deals more damage, the other deals less.

Quick develops entities called Critical Stars, which in FGO deal devastating damage based on a x/10 percent chance, where x is the number of C. Stars allocated to a card. It is RNG based to an extent - if you have 50 total C. Stars, 10 stars are allocated to each card and each card has a 100% chance of landing a ciritcal hit.

I tried to mimic this in-game by generating C. stars in Quick, but to access them you would need to go into Buster. It makes sense, because Buster in FGO would be your go-to card for dealing damage. In Rivals of Aether, Nero would use the C. Stars in Buster to land KO's. This is why most of Nero's aerials are not designed to kill, they should kill on a Critical Hit.

Nero can also choose to develop meter in Arts instead. In FGO, at the cost of damage, you could develop more meter to unleash your ultimate attack, your Noble Phantasm, sooner. In Rivals of Aether, since Quick already reduces damage, I had Arts reduce overall movement.

Balancing the Noble Phantasm is a bit difficult. In traditional fighting games, a Super would do a static amount of damage and the opponent would live or die depending on how much health they have left. This is definitely not the case in a platform fighter. Although the NP does a lot of damage (3 hits dealing 10% each for 30% total), it should deal high knockback.

But it should also be flashy! Thus, I gave it a long startup animation. So to make it easier to confirm into, I used a detector that would freeze the opponent in place so the startup animation could fully play.

Further balancing for this move went from reducing the global detector to a straight line similar to Link's Final Smash in Brawl to making the detector only freeze the opponent if they are in hitstun. But the biggest problem with this freeze is "What if they are near the top?" Unfortunately, being able to confirm into the NP near the top is inevitable, someone will find a way. All I can do is reduce the knockback to make it kill later.

There's more I should go into regarding how I designed Nero's normals... but it's late! I'll do it later.