I once heard a school of thought described as the SNK philosophy of game balance (as contrasted to the capcom approach) – “Balance is boring”.
Making characters perfectly balanced, strips them of makes them mechanically interesting. Instead make every character overpowered in their ideal situation. Since these “ideal situations” are not going to be uniformly distributed, some characters are going to be stronger overall.
Don’t mitigate this imbalance by making characters less interesting. If a character’s ideal scenario doesn’t happen enough, build into the design space more opportunities for the archetype to survive. If a character’s ideal situation is arising too often, build more counters to that character into the design space.
Eleafy (nature elephant) is a great example of this – Eleafy’s power scales the longer a battle drags on. In the 2nd chapter the most important boss fights all last many rounds, towards the end of which Eleafy would overrun the large boss encounters in chapter 2.
To solve this we could take away Eleafy’s most interesting mechanics so he wasn’t overpowered in chapter 2 – but this wasn’t fun.
Instead we further enhanced Eleafy’s (e)ntanlgment mechanic, giving him more powerful options that scale as battles continue. Let Eleafy completely dominate standard fights that last for 4 or more rounds.
However to stop Eleafy completely dominating the chapter 2 bosses we built counters into their move sets. One in 5 boss moves now holds the addendum “remove all debuffs from self”. This still allows Eleafy to stack damage against these bosses – however if Eleafy waits too long to use his most powerful combos Eleafy might miss the opportunity all together.
Ta-da eleafy much stronger in chapter 1, has very unique feel, but not the same threat to just stomp the chapter 2 bosses.