Yeah, I find it kinda hard to open characters. I lost for some. But I like this way. Force me to be better to open everyone.

But smash is not very welcome to newcomers. I see a lot of people playing smash for the first time complaining about they die a lot, not understanding anything.

Smash Ultimate, Moreso than any prior game in the series, is all about introducing newcomers to the basics of fighting games in general. That means Ultimate has more of an emphasis on learning moves, frame-data, spacing, combos etc. So it'll naturally be a bit more challenging to unlock all the characters than in the past, especially since only 8 are available at the start. Ultimate is a beginner's fighting game, much in the same vein as Pocket Rumble and Fantasy Strike, rather than something like Brawl.

There are videos on YT showing how to unlock them in under 2 hours easily.

I literally just did the exact same thing with the exact same fight lol.

WOL gets even more cheesy like the Charizard with permanent fire breathing essentially a permanent item.

In regards to the AI I think they've employed programming that reads inputs similar to older SNK games where the character has a scripted responses to your inputs which is why the cpu fights seem off.

Edit: I'm certain that input reading is employed as to test this when fighting Wolf he always preemptively went to the location of my teleport when edge guarding.

Don't have the game, but seen a lot of videos titled on Youtube stating "unlock all characters in like 90 minutes or something"

I would suggest watching one of those if you want to unlock them all easier/quicker.

I unlocked the Ashley legend spirit without a resistance to her reversing controls.... my love of the character meant I gritted teeth and done that maybe.... 30+ times to win the fight.

I was thinking the same as OP though when it came to the WoL basically that for younger players especially that game mode is going to be zero fun with all the micromanagement that it requests the player to do.

I'm happy as a pig in shit though. Loving every second and hard fought battle, but I've been playing this since the N64 and must have 4 digits of hours clocked up on the GC title.

The characters are indeed challenging after awhile. I got destroyed tons of times. Stupid Ridley beat me 5 times. I have been playing Smash all my life and even I get destroyed. Lucky for everyone the rematches are much easier and you can use any character you unlocked.

Thank god. I'm not the only one. Played Melee, Brawl and Wii U and I need to challenge many at least twice in Ultimate. Took me three tries to unlock Pit. I unlock most of them in classic mode while playing characters I'm not used to, isn't helpful at all.