This talk about training modes and labbing things out reminds me of the proliferation of so-called “practice hacks” in some speedrunning communities, which add in training-mode-like features to facilitate practicing stuff. I’ve seen people streaming Super Metroid with those hacks spending like 20-30 minutes just grinding out their movement in a single room trying to get their frame count as low as possible. It’s like watching somebody play a completely different game at that point — like, you’d think they were playing a masocore platformer with how often they were respawning.
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Honestly that owns. Every game should have really granular training modes imo.
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I know I’ve shared this great Core A video before but it is very applicable to this discussion
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you sure? unless you’re playing at like high intermediate levels or above you can just spam projectiles as richter and get away with a lot, especially if you develop a sense of how to position yourself effectively. eventually you get to a point where you realize that their tilt attacks are critical for maintaining spacing but you can still do so much before you even get there.
and besides I don’t consider being able to win consistently a benchmark for barrier to entry… it’s more about feeling some sense of meaningful agency even if you do lose. this isn’t even strictly about “casual” play, as in my experience if you can easily just jump in and have fun, then you have great footing to learn more advanced techniques. many (but not all) of the core strategies of high level play are things that beginner players can intuit, because the basic movement mechanics are familiar to anyone who has at least played a few 2D platformers.
there is always this feeling of the so-called “meta” being this wild west frontier even years after the latest release. I never feel like I’m without hope playing a more experienced player, there’s always this sense of wiggle room and just maybe I can outwit them if I try something different, and I never feel like I’m out of options for mixing up my strategy.
and with most other “trad” fighting games I feel like I can never even get to a point where I can think about higher level strategy because I can’t figure how to perform basic actions, and sometimes even movement is just kind of confusing. smash bros does a decent job of removing basic obstacles like this, and you still experience this sense of freedom at casual and intermediate levels of play, even against expert opponents.
plenty of people itt have expressed feeling this way about smash and on either side have pretty reasonably settled on the idea that it seems to be where you started out & what kinesthetic expectations you have that determines which of these systems read as intuitive or responsive
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In party mode sure, Belmonts can press some buttons and feel apart of the action. But in the frame work of playing against another player that at least has a history of playing Smash at any level I feel like Belmont is on of the characters where R-Stick Tilts are necessary. Being able to fade back and tilt opposite of your walk direction is to strong to leave on the table and 80% of Belmonts game is using tilts and F/Biars and using projectiles in concert. That said I’m one of the try hards that played just enough of WoL to unlock my mains and grind to Elite Smash.
Smash Brothers is the Super Bowl Commercial YouTube Compilation of video games
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this morning while we played Mario Kart as part of our near-daily morning ritual, i asked alicia if she considers smash accessible.
for the record, she mostly despises smash and would much rather play a soul calibur game. she plays a fair amount of games with me but almost never on her own, animal crossing and mobile games being massive exceptions. also we almost always tie over four races in Mario Kart after years of playing like, 4-5 times a week. she’s no slouch, is what i’m saying, but video games are not Her Thing necessarily
she basically said that smash is no good for button bashing - just hitting the buttons semi-randomly is never fun. soul calibur on the other hand always has something happening if you’re just mashing buttons, and you can choose to do attacks more purposefully just by hitting a button as well.
my interpretation of this is two things:
- Smash only has two meaningful buttons for attacking, and you have to purposefully combine them with directional input to make stuff happen. This is antithetical to the way that my wife likes to play video games, which is mostly “murder my opponent through sheer force of will”. i think the other games better reflect her intentions, which she communicates through many forceful button inputs combined with occasional deeply purposeful actions
- The movement options mean that even if you ARE smashing buttons, you’re likely not in the right area to even strike your opponent, so not only does it look shitty, it’s totally meaningless
i kind of envision smash as having a higher barrier to entry but much more room for low-to-moderately skilled players to engage with each other. it’s just that being a low-skill player means something different in smash
more traditional fighting games have a lower barrier for entry, but the room to engage is much smaller. just knowing like, 3 combos is enough to beat most low-skill players. but making cool shit happen on the screen is much easier, especially for someone who doesn’t want to combine inputs purposefully.
basically:
HIT BUTTON FEEL GOOD
HIT BUTTON FEEL BAD
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for the record i’d almost always pick smash over soul calibur though
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One of the most eye-opening fighting game guides I’ve seen was one for BlazBlue Central Fiction where the main point was that you only need to know about 4 combos to “play the game”:
- a grounded combo
- an air combo
- a combo into super
- maybe a throw combo
and as long as each of them deals ~20% damage, you only need to successfully connect 5 times to kill your opponent.
This is the kind of thing that probably seems incredibly stupid and obvious for anyone who plays a lot of fighting games, but so much content targeting beginners is overwhelming to the point of backfiring and making the barrier to entry seem more daunting than it really is.
The rest of the game is improving your defense, exploring your character’s drive/gimmick, becoming more familiar with universal systems and how they interact, and optimizing combos to slowly crank up the damage output. A lot of that is stuff you just get a feel for by playing games against people and sucking for a while, but you can get surprisingly far with just that.
Being slapped in the face with something that obvious was a wake up call to me that i had been approaching these games all wrong and I have been having a ton of fun with BlazBlue recently (and will be playing again against my rival tomorrow morning and I’m super excited!)
(I do have a lot to say about why I love the BlazBlue C-series’ design philosophy so much but I don’t have the time to go into it today. Would like to write an essay about it eventually.)
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For the record and just to offer this perspective, I find the control schemes of both Smash and traditional 2d (and also 3d though this thread hasn’t gone there yet really) fighters completely incomprehensible and have no attraction to any of these games on any level other than art and music (which makes Smash repulsive to me, natch). Anyone calling any of the controls for any of these games “intuitive” is doing so from inside a cocoon of years of accreted training and familiarity.
By comparison I have an equivalent preternatural talent with FPS games and acknowledge that the same criticism applies there. And genres without control barriers (strategy games, RPGs) have information barriers instead. Videogames in general have very high barriers to entry, and the exceptions are just that. I’ve been playing these damn things for 30 years and I’m still not that good at them really.
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thinking rn about how demoralizing it is for new smash players to die because you lost track of your character and accidentally walked/jumped off the stage
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bro I was 10 years old when I first played Street Fighter Alpha on a Playstation controller and I figured out how to do a Hadouken by looking at the manual and just doing it wtf
all game controllers are unintuitive, they are all tanks piloted by a series of levers and buttons, we will never get intuitive controls until full neural interlink becomes the standard
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no please no!!!
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I’m of the opinion that 2D fighting games are among the most intuitive games to play. You move your joystick in a direction and the guy moves in that direction. You press a button and you do an attack. There’s no platforming, minimal manipulation of physical space, it is you and one other person locked into a cage match until one of you is dead. The absolute hardest part is maintaining a long combo, which isn’t even that necessary, and which most games either try to teach you explicitly (combo tutorials) or automate out (autocombos, generous combo windows)
Does that mean they aren’t hard to learn? No, of course not. But the amount of stuff you have to “keep track of” in your average Street Fighter is orders less than Smash, or the average FPS/RTS. I think that, plus the arcade spirit, is why they have such crossover appeal among demographics.
This is also my main problem with Smash. The constant platforming/jumping/ledging/shielding/dashing melange that makes up neutral play in Smash is so much more complicated than the footsies of your average fighter, and a significant barrier to higher-level play (and also why people in this thread describe it as a “tendongrinder” lol)
It is true that people tend to favor what they fall into first, but I actually played a lot of Smash before I ever touched a 2D fighter, and yet I much prefer 2D fighters. I think there’s definitely an argument to be made that Smash’s higher-level play is deeply inaccessible. I’d rather play without all the platforming and do a quarter-circle (or even a 360!) than have 20 independent neutral options I have to be considering at all times.
All this said, I agree that Smash is more accessible for mostly different reasons than the core mechanics. It’s a party game! It has actual onboarding for casual players to get them invested! Most 2D fighters give you some lackluster singleplayer modes where you play against bots that are either too easy or too hard, a few training modes, and versus. That’s one area I really wish traditional fighters would invest more into, because right now most people assume (rightly) that they simply have to jump into versus and take their lumps, which is a pretty high ego barrier for most people to hurdle.
I’d be interested to see how much churn there is in the competitive modes or tournaments of recent Smash games, because my expectation is that it’s pretty high, outside of a few staple players.
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people need to play more Virtua Fighter.
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the real fighting game is just getting into a fight with a person in real life
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next-gen action
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this is kind of unlocking a few more thoughts on smash for me
I think that an analogy that works (for me, anyway) between smash and 2D fighters is the difference between what rocket league is described as and what rocket league is actually similar in practice - the pitch is that it’s soccer with cars, but it feels much more similar to hockey because of the way the momentum of the cars and the physics of the ball interact. so instead of being able to control possession of the ball the way soccer players do, a “play” on the ball involves committing your entire presence on the field to hitting it
smash feels really similar to me - attacking someone isn’t so much using the range of your abilities to dictate space as it is committing your position on the screen to some manner of potential attack possibility should the enemy neglect to move out of the way correctly
the dynamic that I really like in smash is that receiving damage is also an active experience as opposed to most 2D fighters where microengagements are won or lost and the loser has to hold that L until they recover from whatever damage/stun state they were put into, but with smash the act of being hit still gives the player enough agency to influence things away from the worst possible outcome via DI or teching or waiting for a reversal. it’s not like it’s a good thing to be hit all the time, but I feel like a lot of the knowledge I gained from having played so long (as opposed to people who started playing melee later) is a more comprehensive sense of how to get hit and how and when I can respond to that
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If you took Children if the Atom and iterated on it enough you could conceivably end up with Smash 64.
Edit:
I guess what I’m saying is that 2D fighters are platform fighters with really jank platforming to fit “the fighteryness” of it all. The direction that CotA and anime fighters go from SF2 really push in the direction back to more dynamic platforming like smash.
This explains why absolute beginners to games don’t get excited about Smash, but people with any knowledge of platformers do.
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