unless you’re talking about melee. it’s definitely the highest entry barrier smash game and that’s why I don’t like it. it isn’t even fun unless you start to master all the obscure borderline glitch movement techniques and shit. like… I think that’s cool or whatever but it makes it incredibly obnoxious in practice.
the worst thing about high level smash play is dash dancing. it looks stupid as fuck and feels like terrorism.
and idk I still cannot reliably execute quarter circle moves, let alone half circle or full circle. I have spent my entire adult life trying and I can’t and it feels so good to just press B
barrier to entry in melee is not being able to press the B button, barrier to entry is beating an opponent who knows that pressing the B button can be one of the worst possible things for many characters in melee to do besides running offscreen
and I think half circle inputs are a hate crime, but there are these characters in “literally every other fighting game” that don’t use motion inputs, they use charge inputs or directional combinations, like back to forward, or down to up, or just holding a button down for a certain amount of time
and it’s like, yeah, all of these games will punish you for using special moves at the wrong time, but I’m not defining barrier to entry as the ability to do special moves, that is a very small part of actually knowing how to move around and beat an opponent.
analog movement controls are just straight up harder.
and let’s say we’re talking about someone who’s completely unable to do any sort of special move in Street Fighter, someone who can only mash buttons, they still have at least 12 possible normal moves to press on the ground, if not more, and these are still just good and applicable, and it’s straight up easier to press one of your six buttons to get a reliable, safe normal, compared to having your entire normal moveset tied to unreliable tilt controls. It’s highly likely to just get the wrong move in smash, like accidentally getting a smash attack, or just facing the wrong way, or accidentally jumping because you meant to get an up tilt
I think yes absolutely this happens in a lot of games now and I feel like Twitch creates this kind of environment in both directions. On one end there’s the people worried they can’t have fun with SimCity 4 if they’re not using all the strats their favourite pro SimCity 4 streamer uses, but also stream monsters are no longer just a FGC concept and people absolutely get chewed out by chat for not laying down residential zones optimally or for designing rollercoasters wrong in RCT2.
honestly i just hate the metagames of Smash. i don’t like the sensation of trying to safely land back on the stage while people camp the edges. just a total nightmare.
in 2D fighters, you get hit, you can get back into fighting in less than a second or two. in Smash, i feel like the majority of the match is just spent floating around
Games are all about constraining the experience to the correct thing to do and doing it every time. I must spread the good word on my favourite Twitch chat.
I remember first trying sf2 in the mall arcade in the early 90s and being surprised at how accessible it felt. Just blocking and doing normals and jumping around.
Granted, those were the days when I would be amazed at seeing people pull off fireballs and dragon punches at will. I knew there was higher level play available, but I could still pose somewhat of a threat with the basics.
Oh yeah this part is super interesting to me and pretty deep. Unlike rest of the game, the possibility space is very constrained but it’s still rare that a character can absolutely cover every option, so it’s very read-based and there’s often some pretty juicy risk-reward going on too.
I mean it’s essentially the Melee version of corner pressure but it feels very analog and dynamic.
It’s a flawed game for sure – some matchups are really one-sided at certain skill levels and there’s some really degenerate shit you can do. I definitely flip back and forth on it. I had way more fun playing with a similarly-skilled friend than I ever did playing online.
The only fighting game I ever got really into was Smash 64. I played Link and mostly used the whirlwind move Up + B (huge damage, great range, but large recovery time) and I less frequently used some sword slashes. I could beat 3 lvl 9 CPU
Playing this way felt good while playing the same way is horrible in regular fighting games, since position and movement are much more important in Smash
I later learned that Link wasn’t that high on the tier lists and in any case absolutely wasn’t praised for his big dumb whirlwind move. I thought that all the tier lists were WRONG and never got into a fighting game including Smash again
I guess sales figures tell the tale here but this is not my anecdotal experience. The device in my house that sits unused is the Switch and my 8 year old played more Troy Total War than Mario Odyssey