With the rare exceptions of mods like Brawl Minus, very few developers design a fighting game trying to make it unbalanced. Broken characters make games unfun and with their extreme power levels or broken mechanics, they make matches boring to watch for everyone.
Whether a fighting game is excellent or is terrible, it is still capable of having characters that are downright busted when experts put them to use. Some still just stand above the rest as absolutely terrifying to see what they can do.
10 Ned Flanders - The Simpsons Wrestling
Ned Flanders likely resulted in many broken controllers. No one would claim Simpsons Wrestling was an amazing game but it came out during maximum Simpson's hype so many fans of the series owned it. Many controllers were broken after facing Ned Flanders who is one of the most difficult video game bosses of all time.
He not only has the power to resurrect, forcing players to pin him twice each round but can infinite combo characters as well. Stupid sexy Flanders...
9 Shark - Fighting Eyes
Fighting Eyes wasn't exactly a popular game on the PlayStation 1. It was only released in Japan by a record company no less, it was nothing special to look at, and the company that programmed it went on to never program another game. It's rumored only one-thousand copies were ever released. Oh, and some of the characters were terribly broken.
Several characters have infinities in the game but none are as wild as Shark's. He has two separate punching attacks that infinite combo with no difficult inputs and can even combo into each other. Imagine an opponent landing a single jab or overhead and knowing the match was over. It wasn't pretty.
8 Meta Knight - Brawl
It's almost hilarious how much of a meme Brawl Meta Knight is within the Smash community. His recovery was mind-bogglingly good and he didn't have a single disadvantaged matchup or even ones. In a game with tripping, he could stall in the air to avoid it. He is one of the reasons Brawl is known for being so campy — it was required to even hope to beat him.
The entire meta of Brawl revolved around how good characters could do against Meta Knight. Stages had to be banned to keep him legal. Entire rules had to be created to keep him legal. Some tournaments even chose to ban Meta Knight but for some reason, the community chose to bring him back. We can't fathom why.
7 Yoda - Soul Calibur IV
Yoda was introduced as a special character in Soul Calibur to help promote the release of The Force Awakens. Lightsabers in the franchise sounded amazing in theory but were disastrous in practice. Do, or do not there is no hitting Yoda.
His height made it impossible to hit him with any high attacks and he was completely immune to all other character's grabs except for one. Still, Yoda is a rare example of a character being broken but not actually being good. He was mechanically broken but his poor range and pathetic damage output put him at the bottom of every tier list.
6 Cinder - Killer Instinct 94
In an era where massive game patches are the norm, it's sometimes hard to remember how major changes to released games used to almost never happen. When Killer Instinct hit arcades in 1994 the arcade port contained a glitch that allowed players using Cinder to perform an infinite that wasn't just easy but incredibly boring to watch.
Rare had to send out people physically to manually patch each arcade version of the game — all 17,000 of them. With such a major investment to fix the error, it's obvious just how broken Cinder was before the patch.
5 Petshop - Jojo's Bizzare Adventure: Heritage For The Future
Sometimes it's fun to see characters in fighting games with unique mechanics. Just look at Minecraft Steve! In the case of Petshop trying new mechanics was a disaster. Petshop has incredible mobility, a minuscule hitbox, he can zone out characters, and can still string together nearly infinite combos to boot. Using Petshop is like playing a first-person shooter while the opponent is still playing a fighting game. He was banned from competitions for good reason.
4 Red Riding Hood - Shrek Super Slam
Shrek Super Slam might look like a silly movie tie-in game but much like Super Smash Bros. Melee, this game that looks simple on the surface has massive amounts of tech. Players can Shield Cancel, Crumpet Dash, Swooce, Onion Boost, and the list goes on.
In a game that is so broken that every character has an infinite, there is one character that is still so busted she was banned by the competitive community: Red Riding Hood. She has zero-to-death combos that can begin from across the entire screen and mindboggling numbers of movement options and combos. All other fighting game characters wish they could be Red Riding Hood.
3 Ivan Ooze - Power Rangers Fighting Edition
Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid has shown that fighting games for this classic television series can be excellent. This wasn't always the case. Ivan Ooze should not have been allowed to be selected. He has multiple moves the grant him invisibility, breaks the movement rules for the entire game, and has a projectile that breaks any other projectile in the game while homing in on the opponent.
He can't be thrown or even hit by any low attacks. Players can even move into spaces where the opponent cannot physically hit them. We can only hope no fighting game designers think that Ivan Ooze mechanics are a good idea ever again.
2 Ghoul - Overkill
Yes, there were fighting games for DOS! Overkill was released back in 1996 but is now abandonware today. That could possibly be because of just how broken some of the characters were in the game, mainly Ghoul.
If Ghoul punches the player, he can work into his infinite wall combo. If he grabs the player, he can infinite them anywhere on the screen. Anyone playing against a Ghoul player basically must flip a coin on every possible interaction to decide the entire match. He may be from a more obscure game but it's absolutely bonkers how broken Ghoul is.
1 Akuma - Super Street Fighter Turbo 2
Akuma may have been the first fighting game character banned in competitive fighting games and it's absolutely understandable why. Akuma was designed to be a difficult boss character so no thought was put into balancing him for the game. It wasn't that Akuma was just good — in the right hands he would be literally unstoppable.
His flying fireballs could zone out almost every character with no consequence and no one wanted the game to be Akuma dittos only. In America, he was fully banned from tournaments. In Japan, he received a soft ban where players had enough respect not to choose him to keep the game competitive and fun.