I forgot to pay attention the power-levels. It's quite embarrassing really

It's not you can literally be killed with in seconds off one combo you have to know what approach to take as the situation unfolds, also never use any Swordsman against the Belmonts.

Yeah, that's how you feel in the first few unlocks. But it becomes hard quickly. Although it's also based on personal playstyle. 

I've personally been destroyed by Ridley, Jigglypuff, and Isabelle a few times. 

You still have the option to challenge again the fighters you failed to unlock, by doing so you can choose the fighter you want to use. Since there’s no real unlock conditions and you can rematch the fighters, I do think that Ultimate is more accessible.

Agreed. I lost more than one challenger battle.

Also, World of Light is the most unbalanced thing I've seen in quite some time. Even on normal difficulty, there are some spirit battles that are just plain unfair. And I'm not talking late game, this happened in the first 2-4 hours. Fighting two characters at the same time while they heal gradually? A stamina battle where your oponent doubles your stamina and has an assist trophy kicking your butt? And I could keep going, there are tons of these...

I agree on WOL's balance some of the fights are just plain stupid I hate ones where some assist trophy is causing problems like the one with Sonic and that lava lamp blob or what ever it is, it's bad enough dealing with Sonic's campy style but you have that thing moving all over the place doing 30-40% damage per hit.

Sonic with the Rayman spirit will haunt me forever...

I haven't even touched World of Light yet. I wanted to get the complete roster first. Just been having smash battles and going through classic.

I have no issue with the difficulty myself, I mean I'm glad there is challenge. But, I really wanted to refer this game to my older brother who has finally come back to Nintendo (hasn't owned a Nintendo console since 64). I feel like the difficulty in unlocking the full roster would turn him off. I'm sure there are other casual players who would be frustrated. That is all I was trying to get at.

i think its just you. sure, it took a bit longer this time around with the 63 characters that you need to unlock, but the difficulty felt around the same. some i was able to KO in under 20 seconds, but others did admittedly put up a fight. however, i was able to unlock all of them, only needing to rematch about 8 - 10 of them.

but you are correct in your assumption - Melee was and still is one of the most precise fighting games ever made, but it done on accident due to low development time. people fell in love with its quick gameplay and broken mechanics, so Brawl was made to slow down and soften the gameplay to make it more accessible to new players. Smash 4 was then meant to fall somewhere in the middle to unite both casual and competitive fans under one roof, but it didnt quite work. so the purpose of Ultimate was meant to truly unite all fans by bringing back all the fighters and fine-tuning the game to work for any play style. so yes, it is geared more towards the competitive crowd, and as a result it can be more difficult.

Now that I think about it, World of Light requires you to unlock all the characters again aside from Kirby. And since the fighters you unlock in World of Light unlock in the base game, but not the other way around, there's actually very little incentive to not just go through WoL. :/