But there’s what’s built into the characters and there’s what the level design asks them to do. Smash Bros. only has a few Final Destination-style levels, and most of them are big spaces with multiple levels and unique gimmicks. The Zelda II Temple is beloved and doesn’t have an analogue in a Street Fighter-descended fighting game.
I think the game as most people play it is closer to Power Stone than Marvel Vs Capcom. Even being able to turn away from opponents gives it a radically different feeling of movement much closer to a platformer. Based on how the team has built the game since Melee and what they invest dev time in, shipping dozens and dozens of levels that aren’t shaped like Final Destination, that’s the core of the game.
My impression of things was that Sakurai reacted negatively to Melee’s popularity as a competitive game pretty early (wavedashing being a specific example), before what a gnarled-claw situation the control scheme really became well-known. They’ve made plenty of decisions since then to make me feel like they’re intentionally aiming for what Busted is talking about, as opposed to developing it as a tournament game.
ETA: And to be clear, I don’t think that’s a mistake! Like, at all.
i also find regular fighting games a lot easier to play than smash. i always feel like i’m in complete control of my character, which i don’t feel in smash.
smash is simultaneously an accessible party brawler and an inscrutable tendongrinder of a 1v1 fighting game. they’re not mutually exclusive
tho like i wouldn’t play 1v1 halo because that similarly excises half of what makes halo fun to me (team dynamics, vehicle nonsense) but hey there’s probably a bunch of sweaty fiends doing it rn and more power to them
incidentally, I think a big reason the Smash Bros. clones fail is because they don’t invest enough in the party game. They get the character licenses for starting appeal but they don’t follow through on wild & wacky & exciting happening in the first ten minutes; they’re made by people who love Smash Bros. enough that they’ve lost sight of the broader appeal.
Nintendo is singularly good at understanding games as toys and knowing how to make them exciting to kids as an object to explore.
I’ve played Smash (64 I think? on the Wii VC) for a grand total of 5 hours and my general impression of the game was cheerful chaos where I had no idea what was really going on or why, nor did it seem I was particularly meant to. The mechanics were so strange and unpredictable that (at my level of understanding) there was the functional equivalent of RNG going on most of the time.
I suppose just as Mario Party has a lot of RNG, the obscurity of Smash mechanics means it can function as a good party game, at least as long as nobody attending the party has Studied The Blade. Although instead I was playing it 1v1 at home versus another adult beginner so it was just mildly fun & mildly frustrating instead, and although I didn’t actively dislike it, I also decided it wasn’t the right fighting game for me.
smash 64 is a joyful game to me, pretty pure and intending to tap into the childlike wonderment of playing with figurines.
also it has the most fun air neutral because everyone floats and there are lots of easy touch of death combos lol
very competitively nonchalant even when playing to win. it still has z cancelling but the rest of the game is appropriately easy, at least compared to melee
i still love melee but i hate it
and yeah the stage designs are absolutely a huge draw, i just wish it was more fun to actually move around in them. it’s like, you hit your opponent once and then you have to run all the way back over to them. put me in a sumo ring or something. the ringouts in VF and soulcalibur are the best at this.
Having attended (two years or so ago) a “Smash Tournament” held by a friend’s husband where everyone had a solid basic grasp of the game but nobody was a True Doom Smash Head, was a genuinely great time. Everybody had just about the same level of skill in terms of execution so it became much more about head games and trying to outmaneuver each other.
The worst way to play Smash is 1v1 against a guy who takes Smash seriously but isn’t good at it, and gets actually mad at you for spamming ranged attacks against him when you’re playing a ranged character.
Every 1v1 game has that guy. The slang “scrub” can generically mean any bad player or sore loser, but David Sirlin popularized a more specific definition which is almost exactly that type: Introducing...the Scrub — Sirlin.Net — Game Design
