Deplatform fighter
13 Likes
smash 6 should just be an xbox a switch and a playstation that fight each other
3 Likes
squid game should be a splatform fighter
1 Like
yeah idk smash bros is the only fighting game I can get into. the accessibility barrier in other fighting games is always too high. itās nice to have a fighting game where I can pick up and play any fighter and have a basic grasp of how to do everything with them off the bat. the combos are organic and intuitive and there are no button combinations to memorize or dial-a-combo bullshit.
all of the wacky chaos doesnāt seem to limit the capacity for extremely high level technical play either. I honestly donāt understand what people have against it.
also ultimate is better than melee Iām sorry
5 Likes
^ I completely agree with everything in this post, though Iāve also spent far too much time in dorm rooms circa 2007 watching interminable fox v. fox no items final destination matches where both players were wearing the exact same pair of cargo shorts to ever even want to think about Melee ever again.
15 Likes
melee is fucking worse than 64 they all are, none of these smash games have been good for competitive play. dogshit arbitrary execution requirements break your hands and wrists as a barrier to entry. melee players all brazenly acknowledge their fixed rung in the ladder because there is no theoretical skill ceiling for players and no chance of breaking personal barriers for improvement. itās a contest of whoās hurt themselves the most
extremely doubtful that anybody who says melee is easy and more intuitive than pretty much any 2D fighter actually wins
14 Likes
i feel like the only real difference between smash and any other fighter re: accessibility is that high level smash play isnāt as visually distinct from low-mid level play to the untrained eye, so people feel less insecure about being bad at smash because they donāt actually know what it entails
even just like consistently getting tilts when you want them requires more fine motor dexterity than any equivalent basic action in street fighter or w/e. smash is hard as fuck
17 Likes
i dunno i started fighting games with smash 64 so that probably informs a lot of what i think
that said coming from this side i donāt feel like the stuff in traditional 2d fighters is any less arbitrary than anything in smash, itās all various levels of arbitrary-ness based on the playersā relationship to what high level play is for that game - i could never get good enough at mvc2 to do magneto loops or sentinel unfly stuff, i never was able to get good enough at mvc3 to do tac infinites or even dante combos really, itās just super unintuitive to me even though I understand theoretically whatās going on
even spacing and footsies stuff in the less busy games like sf was rough, it literally just never clicked for me in practice like it did for my brother who played smash but didnāt seriously get into fighting games until like sf4 and umvc3
and like breaking personal barriers in smash games feels a lot more like skateboarding or even games like rocket league where the techniques being learned are very āanalogā in nature, in that a āsuccessfulā execution of a technique can look totally different for different people. to me, you can make a dp focus cancel ultra hadouken (look iām a boomer sorry) look cleaner, but itās generally conceived as a binary successful/unsuccessful whereas in smash thereās a lot more gray area there, so breakthroughs come kind of erratically and suddenly. like there was just some time during college where I just suddenly understood how to integrate wavedashing into my play and that was it, despite having practiced for a long time beforehand
so i guess smash is only āintuitiveā insofar as itās literally not made for structured high level play and actively invites people to play it in an unstructured way, which lets people decide how they want to engage with the systems at hand, but the big issue is that most of what anyone sees about smash is the structured high level stuff on youtube
but like, me and my brother used to just kill time by playing 2v2 teams against level 9 computers with a 40 stock count with all items on our favorite stages and i think it says a lot about smash that thatās a configuration theyāll even allow people to set up
10 Likes
I played Melee when it came out every weekend with a few friends for like 5 years, and played PM (Brawl with hacked in Melee physics) every Tuesday and Thursday with a friend between 2017-2019.
I think Melee is a pretty good game.
āno chance of breaking personal barriers for improvementā is hyperbole for sure. I steadily improved over those two most recent years (and also improved again when I started playing rollback Melee online). The friend I was playing with started with no experience at all, and he eventually started beating me more than I beat him. It does feel impenetrable at the start, depending on who youāre playing against.
The execution requirements suck, but there are definitely other 2D fighters with similarly high skill-ceilings. I wish PM had rollback, because PM has an option for auto L-canceling and that helps a lot. And almost all the tech in PM has bigger execution windows.
The community for it is absolute dogshit though yeah I wouldnāt really recommend anyone get into it. Itās a niche thing, like any other competitive fighting game.
1 Like
auto L cancelling is the one thing in melee that would unequivocally improve the experience for sure
4 Likes
I wonder if the twitch era has expanded the scope of the neuroses people have with fighting games where now someone who plays a mario for the first time gets frustrated bc they know theyāre not doing speedrun strats or something
like I donāt think any of these games are supposed to come with the baggage everyone seems to bring
14 Likes
I think this is mostly true but would also say this depends on what your background in other games is. Like I had a hell of a time learning how to consistently do like DP motions in Street Fighter (multiple hours and I still have to relearn it when I pick up a fighting game again) but I learned how to consistently tilt pretty quickly. I had played a lot of games that required stick dexterity before but Iād never touched a game that required the precise series of digital inputs that most traditional fighting games do.
2 Likes
i mean this is 100% my issue but with marvel
i only had fun with marvel once i realized that my execution is awful and i just wanted to play chris in mvc3, the man taking on literal gods and superheroes with Too Many Guns
1 Like
also yeah this is pretty accurate donāt play melee. a few melee pros switched to hitboxes which seem to be better for your hands but itās far from the norm and itās incredibly hard to switch because you lose basically 100% of your muscle memory and in some ways youāre playing a different game (certain tech is a lot easier with digital inputs but certain tech is way harder). took one of the pros a couple years before he was competitive again.
my hands used to hurt after playing melee a few days in a row but my friend showed me the grip he used for the L-button and that got rid of all the pain i was having. problem is iām pretty sure this will be different for each person and thereās not like good documentation within the community on the āsafeā ways to play melee.
just stop playing any game whenever you feel even a little pain. rest, and try again when your hands donāt hurt anymore.
in my experience when the pain gets worse each time you play after resting, youāre usually doing damage to your hands. if the pain lessens each time and eventually goes away, then it was likely muscle fatigue and youāre probably ok but iām not a doctor so donāt follow this advice.
you still want to stop even if itās muscle fatigue because youāll break form to avoid feeling the pain, which will hurt your hand in other ways.
8 Likes
I think this is it, and āis Smash approachableā is really two different conversations. Smash Bros. has a Mario Kart-like intro ramp and has much more for low-skill players to do and see and feel like they have agency over compared to traditional fighting games, which is to say, in the normal distribution of skill, 80% or more of players. Just being able to move freely in very different levels opens up a huge vein of play even if high-skill play compresses that away to optimal approach and engage tactics. Having 4 people going at a time allows low-skill players something to do while not engaging directly against the highest-skill player.
Just watch how Smash Bros. gets played at a party next to a traditional fighting game, and who plays it.
Is the barrier to high-level play rough and difficult? Sure, and like everyone says, itās something that only ever happened by accident and not even designed into the game. Theyāve fought against being a competitive game several times and even when they approached it with Ultimate it was half-hearted and confused, and Iām sure thatās because it was always a second-order priority that had to take a backseat to things like adding new characters and exciting the bulk audience.
5 Likes
Part of the āproblemā with Smash is that Nintendo, and Sakurai in particular, donāt really like competitive play and specifically really donāt like how Melee competitive play (which is the entire basis for Smash competitive play) turned out.
Not to excuse the Smash scene their toxicity; this ādad why do you hate meā issue feeds into this a lot.
6 Likes
Sakuraiās wariness of catering to the competitive crowd is less about him not wanting people to play these games at a high level, and more about him knowing that Melee has been giving hapless players tendonitis for 20 years by this point.
4 Likes
100000%
Smash is a wacky party game. Have a wacky party with it.
As someone who lost hand stuff partially to Melee, it is a great game, I love its radically different approach to damage and goals in fighting games. Any of the Smash games are fun to play with others (bar maybe Brawl).
The execution barrier is too high as others have said and it becomes a horribly tedious and culdesac-y mechanics abyss that really should just be rebuilt from the ground up to be a more human-friendly game. Iāll never play it again most likely but I played the shit out of its single-player modes and casually with friends when it was first out. Itās good shit.
6 Likes
I think my main issue is that every MVC and guilty gear all have the same movement options as smash, and MORE, while being more fluid and immediately responsive, all while still using digital 8-directions, they all have preservation of momentum just like smash, and yet none of those games make it so that your regular normal attacks are punishable on HIT just because you didnāt press the shoulder button to seal your single jumping attack in an envelope to be dumped into the shredder because your opponent happened to be crouching so they magically take less hitstun. capcomās marvel games since XMvSF literally have wavedashing. itās when you dash and then crouch, and you can act again. youāre immediately able to block and you preserve your momentum. there literally isnāt a movement option in smash that doesnāt have an analogue in other 2D fighting games except for the ones that specifically involve ledges, which brings me to the main issues I have with the core gameplay idea that happen to be a matter of taste.
Iāve played enough smash to know that it isnāt for me anymore, even though Iāve called myself a melee player, because thereās just nothing I get out of it that I canāt get from more accessible and easier games. If I want a game where I can scoot and slip around and do cool ground movement, I can play something else, and if I want fine air control like airdashing and superjumps, smash literally doesnāt have that. blah blah blah movement
and even something like KOF which doesnāt have midair adjustments still gives you like four different kinds of jumping and none of them require you to finely tilt the stick, or use a second stick, because if i want to get a specific attack I donāt have to worry about which direction my stick is going, or whether Iām fucking facing my opponent (terry/ryu/ken being in ultimate and auto-turning is the biggest confession that this is stupid), and I can just simply press the exact button for the attack I want and itāll come out and I wont be doomed for it
13 Likes