Smash Community and Nintendo: A Very Tenuous Relationship
Back in 1999, Nintendo advertised a crossover sensation unlike anything before, featuring characters from all over Nintendo’s line of franchises. Directed by Masahiro Sakurai and developed by HAL laboratory, secondary Nintendo developer and creator of the Kirby franchise, Super Smash Brothers (“Smash” as it’s more commonly known) released to critical acclaim and is now one of the most globally known video game franchises, largely because it’s composed of many other globally known franchises in a prodigious mashup of nearly unimaginable scale. The recent release of Super Smash Bros Ultimate for the Nintendo Switch features over 70 playable characters representing over 30 different franchises, many of which are among the most iconic in video game history. As a series of games, it started as a celebration of Nintendo’s rich timeline of characters and titles, and in it’s more recent releases the scope has expanded, reaching out to other milestone video game series: Sonic the Hedgehog, Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy, Street Fighter, Bayonetta, Castlevania, and in the near future Persona: Shin Megami Tensei. Honestly, there’s no telling what the future brings.
Also, because it’s a hot topic, I’m gonna plant my feet in the dirt early: Smash is a fighting game franchise that just happens to also exist as a collection of decent party games. I would also argue that, as fighting games go, Smash has the absolute lowest barrier of entry for novice players and is probably one of the easiest in the genre for newer players to notice/feel a sense of overall improvement, while also sporting one of the highest skill ceilings among all fighting games at the highest level (with Melee’s highest level sometimes requiring 7+ button inputs per second). I would also say that as fighting game communities go, Smash exhibits more overall immaturity and close-mindedness than almost any other that I’ve experienced. That’s not to say the Smash community is terrible, and truth be told I actually have tremendous respect for the Melee community for reasons I’ll talk about later, but between people boo-ing at EVO’s Smash 4 Grand Finals and the overwhelming presence of entitlement since Smash 4’s DLC releases, plus brand loyalty often bordering on unhealthy elitism in regards to other fighting game communities, I often describe Smash as “a game I really love playing, but usually not with Smash players.”
And if you play any Smash title competitively, I actually say good on you. I’ve been playing Guilty Gear since 2007 and have attended my share of tournaments in random apartments, hotel venues, university rec rooms, and even once out of a storage garage. I know that playing fighting games competitively takes tremendous passion, but can be amazingly rewarding, especially with the right community. So please, keep doing your thing and strive always to elevate both your game and your scene.
Smash does have one unusual attribute that separates it from many other fighting game mainstays, however. It’s one of the only competitive games that doesn’t receive support from its parent company, Nintendo. The monolithic video game company has made great strides in recent times to support content creators and streamers, but historically Nintendo has been more impeding towards competitive growth than helpful, and that kind of makes sense as Sakurai never intended for Smash to become a serious game. Since it’s earliest days, the heavy lifting of Smash as a competitive title has been in the hands of the community, a role to which they continually flex serious muscle. So today, I’d like to take a look at the history of Smash, and how the crafted experience and expectation has been so different between its creator and community.
Competitive or Casual - What’s the difference?
Let’s start by distinguishing between casual and competitive play, because there’s actually a surprising amount of overlap and a few false preconceptions that might surprise you. For example, not everyone plays a game 100% seriously all the time, but almost nobody plays a game specifically to lose. Even in a casual environment, everyone is generally trying to win. On the other hand, some people enter tournaments not with the expectation that they can reach grand finals, but rather because they enjoy playing the game with stakes attached and revel in the social experience . So what’s the actual distinction?
The biggest difference between casual and competitive play is the factor of intent. Playing a game with a casual mindset means passively enjoying the experience for what it is, and not necessarily trying to improve or change the nature of that experience, even though that tends to happen automatically through continuous play. Playing a game with a competitive mindset means actively making efforts to improve your ability, understanding or technique, either on your own or with other people, and experimenting to find your optimal method of play. And, crucially, I think players can switch between these styles of play, especially when playing with different groups of people.
For example, my group of friends is not terribly competitive when it comes to fighting games, which is fine. They’re all competitive about other things, but fighting games not so much. That being said, I still enjoy playing fighting games with them, and Smash is definitely one of the easiest to break out since it supports more than two players at a time and sports that low barrier to entry I mentioned. So, for everyone’s sake, I approach the game more casually with that group of friends. I know other people that I can be competitive with, but I understand and adjust based on the community I’m surrounded with, or even the circumstances, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.
Crucially though, there’s nothing wrong or unusual with either style of play, and unfortunately I’ve found parts of the Smash community to have a bad habit of forgetting that…on both sides. Plenty of competitive players use the term “filthy casual” as a way of punching down at the casual playerbase, whereas the famous phrase “No Items, Fox only, Final Destination” was coined by non-competitive players as way to generalize and punch down at those who took the game seriously. I don’t observe this kind of behavior as much in other parts of the fighting game community (a lot of other games are usually just happy to have more players, a problem Smash likely doesn’t have) and honestly it’s all pretty unnecessary. At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter why you play the game so long as you’re having a good time; it just so happens that a good time means different things to different people, and I think our communities get better when we embrace those differences and set good examples.
And if your wondering why I’m specifically drawing attention to the divide between casual and competitive players, it’s because Smash as a series paints two very different pictures: Sakurai’s casual core design, and the community’s competitive approach.
Rethinking the fighting game genre - Smash (64)
These days, Smash is largely associated with its competitive crowd and tournaments, but at its heart the game was constructed for the casual player. Super Smash Bros (aka Smash (64)) stands in the pantheon of exceptional 4-player Nintendo 64 titles like Goldeneye, Star Fox 64, and minigame collections like Mario Party and Pokemon Stadium. Smash (64) was one of those games you either owned, or frequently rented from a Blockbuster or Hollywood Video (google it) to go with a birthday party or sleepover. Everyone was good at it and everyone was bad at it, the game was stupid and unfair and awesome. And, even though most people stuck to basic smash, the game also featured an arcade mode and a few extra fun challenge formats like “break the targets” and “board the platforms”. This was a game that was fun, frantic and incredibly playful, and back in 1999 it’s exactly what almost every Nintendo fan wanted.
Yet, behind its playful veneer, Smash (64) is one of the most creative games of its time, completely rethinking the fighting game genre. We have a game that replaces health bars with knockback percentages, builds the gameplay around free movement and oddly leveled platforming, and even allows up to 4 simultaneous players. Even 20 years later, there are so few games that really challenged the fighting game format in such an unusual and unique way; there’s definitely merit to be held for Smash (64) for its absurd creativity and its accessibility for people that weren’t normally into this genre. For all its silliness, Smash (64) really was in a class by itself.
Normally this is where I would start talking about competitive Smash (64), but regrettably there isn’t much to say. This game was only around for about 2 years before Melee became the definitive Smash experience, making Smash (64) obsolete for nearly the entire competitive community. Tournament standard rules finalized to 5-stock with only one legal stage: Dream Land. In it’s current state, the community and tournament scene for Smash (64) is very small, but its also quite intimate and generally welcoming to newer players, and I think the fact that people still play the game at all 20 years later is testament to how impacting this game was. While the presence of competitive play is minor, Smash (64) is uniquely the only game in the series that exhibits combo contests at events like Super Smash Con.
The Smash (64) combo contest really took off as recently as 2016, with each player having 2 minutes to execute the coolest “0-to-death” combo they can, and people come up with some pretty crazy stuff. These contests I feel represent all the best qualities of Smash (64) - Playful, exciting, experimental, and incredibly nuanced. I also feel they set the trend for what ultimately keeps Smash exciting in the twilight years: the passion and ingenuity of the Smash community, and for no game is that more true than Melee.
No Help, Community only, Final Destination - Melee
When Super Smash Bros. Melee came out only two years later, it brought a completely new image to the game, changing the attitude from something playful and goofy to something epic and intense. Still, even though it’s one of the two main avenues of competitive Smash, Melee is absolutely loaded with Sakurai’s casual core design. It doesn’t get talked about much, but it’s amazing just how much content Melee was packing for having been through so little overall development: Adventure Mode, Classic Mode, Multi-Man Melee, Homerun Contest, Event Mode, All-Star Mode and more than double the number of characters and stages, all in high(er) definition. There were also numerous mechanical additions, like directional air dodge and standing dodge, side specials, perfect shielding, directional grab, item catching, chargeable smash attacks, and new modes like Stamina and Coin Battle. Not to mention everything was faster, crazier and significantly more explosive. Smash (64) was a super fun game, but one look at Melee and it’s not hard to understand why it immediately replaced Smash (64) as the new game of choice for both casual and competitive players.
As hyperbolic as it sounds, Melee really was the start of everything to follow, but the competitive experience we’re more familiar with today was actually crafted just as much by the community as the creators. First, just looking at the base mechanics makes it pretty clear that Melee was inherently designed for more precise play. There was a much greater focus on the speed and response of the game, and so much more control was given to the player for things like dodging, grabbing and overall positioning. The heart of Melee is expression, a game that encouraged players to be creative and free, and that enhancement of expression is a feature that competitive players are naturally drawn towards. Also crucially important was that Melee was the first game to introduce timed stock matches and the first hazard-free stages of the series: Battlefield and Final Destination. Combine the inclusion of fair stages with a roster expansion of more than double the cast of characters, and you’ve got yourself all the makings of a competitive landscape, and it was in this landscape that the community elevated the game to a whole new level.
Within the first year of release, players discovered an unusual technique called “wave-dashing.” Sakurai was aware of the technique during the development stage of the game, but associated it more as a fun gimmick created through a physics exploit rather than anything he intended, but also didn’t think it would cause too much of an impact. Hindsight being 20/20 here, I feel pretty bad for Sakurai since wave-dashing would ultimately be the ghost that painted his entire development process going into Brawl (more on that later). Suffice to say, wave-dashing entirely changed the way people played the game at a high level, and critically it was a game function both ultimately discovered and implemented almost entirely by the community. I associate wave-dashing’s institution as a core mechanic of Melee as the moment the game transformed from being “for the people” to becoming “for the people, by the people.”
Historically within the context of fighting games, Melee is unlike anything else. I mean, the game is really good, but it takes a lot more than being “really good” for a fighting game to still be so remarkably active 18 years later. I mean, there are still small passionate scenes for games like Street Fighter 2: Turbo and Street Fighter 3: Third Strike, and for some other niche classic titles like Melty Blood: Current Code and Guilty Gear AC+R, but Melee’s scene always feels massive by comparison. The community size is one of many reasons why despite its age, Melee still rests as a main stage game at Evolution Fighting Championship (EVO for short) every year since 2013. So what’s the reason for its success? Well, there’s several.
First, Melee was a really good game, and built with all the right pieces to create a solid competitive experience. Second, a huge chunk of what defined Melee’s mechanics and ideas were community-driven, as they ultimately established such important thresholds as wave-dashing, dash-dancing and others. Third, the impact of the community, and especially the personalities that went on to shape it, were crucial for giving Melee’s community a real sense of personality as this grass-roots scrapper of a scene*. Fourth, the followup game, Brawl, was an absolute disappointment and fractured the Melee scene, after which the community rallied together through events like “Revival of Melee” and really solidified Melee as “the true Smash experience” (and also featured what was at the time one of the most watched matches of Melee ever on early Youtube). Finally, EVO 2013 opened up a spot on its main stage for whichever game could raise the most money for charity, and after a grueling battle with the Skullgirls community, Melee managed to show the world its unbelievable passion, and the momentum generated there has been enough to keep the game going strong for the last 6 years.
18 years later, this is still the kind of hype and excitement Melee is able to generate.
*There’s way more to this than I’m really qualified to talk about, so I highly recommend watching The Smash Brothers, a documentary about the players that defined competitive Melee throughout its early years. There’s some graphic language, but it’s still fascinating and highlights an interesting aspect of gaming culture that sometimes gets overlooked.
And what has Nintendo given back to this incredible community in that 18 years of time? One cease and desist letter to EVO, asking them not to stream the Melee matches. Luckily, they rescinded it within the day, but it still represents the general attitude Nintendo has towards their more hardcore communities (an attitude that has luckily been improving recently), and it also showcases the absolute tenacity that has come to define the Melee community. I don’t always agree with the mentality of Smash players and do think maybe they can be a bit too passionate about their game, but I really have nothing but respect for this grass-roots community that strived to be more and succeeded against all odds.
Whose game is it anyway? - Brawl, and Project M
Talking about Super Smash Bros. Brawl is a bit complicated. In Sakurai’s eyes, Melee had developed a really specialized and dedicated competitive scene, one that (in Sakurai’s eyes) defined itself through exploiting game mechanics to create a completely unintended method of play, but also developed a culture that seemed rather aggressive and overly serious. Sakurai was not a particular fan of these developments as they were generally antithetical to what he thought Smash was. There’s a mountain of fascinating push and pull involved in the lifespan of Brawl, but for now let’s focus on scaling the front side, which belongs to Sakurai.
Brawl was first previewed at E3 2006, two years prior to the game’s release, and the trailer completely blew everyone away. Unlike the transition from Smash (64) to Melee which was a short two years, Melee to Brawl took another seven. By 2006 the Smash community was ecstatic at the announcement of a new game with new content, and in terms of the “new,” Brawl did not disappoint. Aside from adding in another 13 characters (including a few non-Nintendo inclusions like Sonic the Hedgehog and Solid Snake) and a whole bunch of new stages, Brawl also introduced selectable music per stage (and a ludicrous soundtrack of 258 tracks), a stage creator, and included emulators of mostly classic NES and SNES games to showcase character origins (albeit short timed emulators for those games). There were also some mechanical adjustments, like the removal of directional air dodge (mostly to prevent wave-dashing) and the implementation of random ground tripping to encourage more aerial focus, as well as one of the most exciting new additions to the game: Final Smashes, limited super moves that characters could perform to absolutely annihilate the competition. Of course, there was one addition to Brawl that is still hailed as one of the greatest inclusions in a Smash game even up to this point: The Subspace Emissary.
The successor of Melee’s Adventure Mode, “The Subspace Emissary” is a massive 1-2 player adventure with tons of cutscenes, combat platforming, a good story (given the circumstances), and is overall the most definitive cooperative gameplay experience Smash has ever fashioned. And truthfully, if Brawl was only judged on the quality of The Subspace Emissary, I would put it neck and neck with the whole of Melee. To this day, I haven’t seen a better single player inclusion in a Smash game; it’s abundantly clear that most of the game’s development was allocated into polishing The Subspace Emissary into the ideal Smash experience for the casual player.
Over half of the opening movie is footage from Subspace Emissary alone.
Regrettably, Subspace Emissary was destined to be the single flower at the top of a huge cactus. Competitive Brawl was an absolute mess throughout its lifespan and is now non-existent, at least in its standard form (more on that later).
I think Sakurai’s intentions were somewhat misled. On the outside, he was clearly saying “I don’t want Smash to be a competitive game,” but most of his issues with Melee’s scene had to do with the metagame being completely wrapped around exploits, especially wave-dashing. If Melee had managed to reach its current state without the existence of wave-dashing, I really wonder what Brawl would’ve become. It’s a shame, because regardless of what Sakurai was thinking, his intent was crystal clear: Smash is not a competitive game, so I will prevent you from playing it that way.
Random tripping was the big one (when walking or running on the ground, there’s a random chance your character will stumble and slip) but there were a number of other “feel bad” adjustments. When you did a running jump, you immediately lost all momentum. Dash dancing was heavily restricted due to tripping and the game simply not allowing a faster input, removing some control. Characters auto-grabbed ledges both on ascent and descent, making ledge guarding much less interactive. The worst among the small things was random input delay on moves, completely out of the player’s control. These and many other bizarre changes fashioned Brawl as much stiffer and overly restrictive compared to its precursor. All the work that went into making Subspace Emissary into an excellent experience probably should’ve gone into polishing the core gameplay, random tripping or otherwise.
To make matters worse, Brawl had a balance problem, which is to say one balance problem. A lot of people complained about the overwhelming power of Fox in Melee, but Fox was still a character that people could generally interact with (most of the time). Brawl had Meta Knight, a character that was universally so powerful that he completely warped the entire competitive format. His movement, priority, kill confirms and recovery were all absolutely incontestable, and from the start of the game to today he’s been the undisputed strongest fighter. He didn’t have the advantage of being a complicated puzzle that a few talented players needed to solve, but rather started off strong and just kept getting stronger, to the point where it wasn’t unheard of for tournaments to just outright ban him. It’s not entirely uncommon for a fighting game to have one or two outstanding powerful characters, but it’s rarely so bad that the community considers outright banning, and whenever that happens it not only fractures the competitive scene but it gives the entire community a bad public image.
Still, a format was developed — 3 stocks, 8 minutes and roughly 10 legal stages — and Brawl was fairly active for a couple years, but it’s incredibly telling that the two games that ultimately replaced it were Melee, thanks partly to the “Revival of Melee” event, and also Brawl…with a twist.
Brawl may not have been a popular choice in the competitive community, but it was extremely popular with the modding community. Even considering Smash 4 and Ultimate, Brawl is still the most aggressively modded entry in the series. Brawl actually saw several modded environments like Brawl+ and the subsequent mock mod Brawl- before landing firmly on Project M, and while all of them had different ideas and goals, they all had a couple things in common: No random tripping, saved momentum, re-enabled dash dancing. It’s not odd that community driven projects would start by re-implementing the community’s original discoveries.
The main design goal behind Project M was to recreate the Melee experience using the characters and assets of Brawl. They wanted to reintroduce all the delicious exploits of Melee and (literally) bring it back up to speed, while also adding other changes to help elevate low-tier characters back into a competitive position. While the project originally started as a way to basically recreate the Melee engine within Brawl, it eventually got severely ambitious and started adding all kinds of new content and alternate costumes, and was set to start adding entirely new characters to the game before ceasing production.
In it’s initial stages, I generally disliked Project M. I felt Brawl had made a number of character changes that I actually loved; little things like Falco throwing his reflector like a boomerang and Mario’s tornado spin replaced with his water shooter from Super Mario Sunshine added some flavor and distinction between characters, but some of the first changes Project M brought forth were the removal of basically anything new to Brawl from the mod, including small nuances like these. On many occasions I’ve said “if all you’re doing is remaking Melee, just play Melee instead,” but I think as time went on Project M became a lot more than just “Melee but different,” and I can’t deny that Project M was ultimately a labor of community love. Even after the end of its development, the mod has found more of a welcome home in the competitive community than Brawl ever did. As of now, this is probably the only version of Brawl that people still play. In a peculiar act of history repeating itself, Brawl’s longevity, like Melee’s, was ultimately driven through the community’s efforts.
For Everyone and No one - Smash for the WiiU/3DS
The first announcement of a new Smash game appeared at E3 2013, roughly six years after Brawl had come out. Brawl hadn’t set a fantastic pace for the competitive community for which Melee was still the main proving grounds, but within the initial announcements of Smash 4, something unusual happened: Sakurai yielded.
See, his initial stance on competitive play was that it was antithetical to the design of the game, a negative stance largely burned into his mind from what became of Melee, and his expression of that viewpoint was Brawl. After Brawl still managed to garner a competitive scene, and attracted more attention from its modded versions than the official release, I want to think that Sakurai probably discovered the futility in actively fighting with the community. With Smash 4, Sakurai’s stance completely changed: instead of loathing the competitive scene, his new statement is that he understood its necessity and wouldn’t try to fight it any further.
This is the only game in the series where I don’t see a need to differentiate much between the casual and competitive sides of the game, because Smash 4 was the only one in the series where there really wasn’t much of a difference. Smash 4 was truly designed for everyone…sort of.
Smash 4’s addition of characters and complementary stages were pretty binary; most newcomers were either decidedly very recent (Robin, Shulk, Rosalina and Luma, Greninja, Wii Fit Trainer) or especially classic (Little Mac, Duck Hunt, Mega Man, Pac Man). Smash 4 also contained a number of “firsts” in the series. This was the first game to expand the player count up to 8 players, the first game to offer customizable special moves for characters, the first game to introduce the “rage” mechanic (the higher your percentage, the more damage you do), the first game to have separate releases on multiple consoles (3DS and WiiU), and crucially the first game to evolve and change over time via patches and DLC.
Also, Smash 4 was the first game officially designed to be played competitively, and really showed that with the implemented online play, with “For Fun” being designed as the normal Smash experience and “For Glory” specifically allowing people to duel 1v1, though only on Final Destination. Yes, Melee definitely had all the tools and makings of a competitive game, but Smash 4 was intentionally designed to support it, and actively modified over time to improve it. Top tier characters were nerfed, lots of other characters were buffed, and throughout the next few years a total of eight additional characters were added to the roster. With a renewed focus on competitive play, the tournamant scene immediately expanded to include it. Melee was still an extremely active game by this point, but Smash 4 very quickly developed a scene to match it, with Project M retreating under the rafters a bit.
Because Smash 4 released during the time of social media and Youtube culture, the competitive grind was significantly accelerated. We now live in a very strange time for fighting games, where combos, tricks, strategies and the testing of ideas happen in a fraction of the normal time. Comparatively, a lot of how Melee developed was through message boards and word of mouth, which means that these ideas were slow to develop and spread, which actually makes the two games very interesting to compare. It took a few years for Melee’s meta to really develop and solidify into what we now recognize, which means it took a long time for certain characters to have their potential unlocked (Jigglypuff, Ice Climbers, and Yoshi to name a few), but this also means the game was able to develop said metagame in a more natural fashion. Smash 4’s entire meta was basically cracked in about 2 months, and it didn’t take long for people to figure out how busted characters like Diddy Kong and Sheik were (at least initially). While it’s remarkable just how much data and testing the community was able to crunch in such a short time, it unfortunately lead to Smash 4 basically being “solved” about 2-3 months in, which made future prospects a little shaky. The inclusion of DLC characters and patches were able to keep things fresh throughout the game’s lifespan, but in a less than ideal fashion.
What’s especially unfortunate is that the DLC characters were strong. Like, really strong. Mewtwo, Roy and Ryu all caused quite a stir, and Cloud was decreed overpowered for a period. Still, none of them could even hold a candle to Bayonetta.
DLC characters being overly strong isn’t actively a problem, but it can create a pretty negative “pay to win” vibe within the community, and the sad truth is that the two strongest characters in the game by a fair margin are both DLC characters (Cloud and Bayonetta). And, to borrow a page from Brawl with Meta Knight, Smash 4 is the second game in the series in which tournament organizers were seriously considering banning the best character. All these negative feelings culminated into the link at the start: Bayonetta mirror match finals at last year’s EVO, in which the players were booed for their character choice. Real classy, Smash Community.
Discussions of game balance aside, I do think there was a much more insidious problem to Smash 4 that never gets talked about much: a lack of identity. I think if you look back through the catalog of Smash games, every title in the series has something to help define it: Smash (64) was revolutionary and different as the kickoff for the franchise and is still kept around by love from the community, Melee led to the birth of one of the most fascinating competitive scenes in video gaming ever, and Brawl is probably one of the most iconic for giving both the best and worst experiences within the series (Subspace Emissary and Random Tripping, respectively) and for also being the subject of endless hacks and mods that further highlighted the community’s involvement. When I think about what really defines Smash 4, it’s just being a pretty good game in the series…and not having a proper name. With the release of Ultimate, I can’t think of a single reason to ever go back to Smash 4, but that’s not something I can say about any other installment.
The heart of this, I feel, is that Smash 4 was bizarrely without particular intent or audience. Sakurai made this game to appease everyone, but who got really excited about it? It may sound strange, but the most excited I saw most people get for Smash 4 were from the character reveal trailers, and at the occasional tournaments when fringe low tiers emerged from the shadows. The casual audience got a game that that can have more players, I suppose, but there was basically nothing else for them. As for the competitive crowd, what they got was basically fine tuned Brawl. At the end of the day, Smash 4 feels like a game that was made for everyone, yet really not made for anyone…not even Sakurai.
Ultimate has been out for about a month now, and it’s amazing just how fast Smash 4 basically died on its arrival. Smash (64) still has its combo contests, Melee is as alive as its been for years, and Project M still has enough nuance to keep a small audience, but Smash 4, despite being pretty fantastic, was also completely replaceable.
Inspired - A batch of spiritual successors
Not included in this image: several dozen Flash games.
So, I guess when you’re one of the biggest things in video gaming, lots of people try to recreate the magic that made you into a success. Unfortunately, most of them failed to do so, for one reason or another, but there are a couple success stories strewn about.
Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale was one of the few of these that actually came out before Smash 4, and switched the format up by replacing percentage not with health but with a Super Gauge. Landing hits in PSBR built up meter, and only Super moves could actually score kills on players, with the strength of your super depending on how many gauges you spent (between 1 and 3). The character lineup featured famous(ish) characters from across the vast plethora of Playstation games over the years, like Jak and Daxter, Ratchet and Clank, Kratos from God of War, and…surprisingly not Crash Bandicoot or Spyro? The gameplay itself was extremely stiff, wonky and somewhat unsatisfying, but I think there were a few good ideas hiding in the weeds. Regrettably, not much about the game is all that remarkable and it ultimately failed to impress audiences.
Icons: Combat Arena was intended to be spiritual successor to Melee specifically (the company behind was even called “Wavedash Games,” and unsurprisingly was made by people behind Project M), with most of its cast designed to replicate the more popular picks from that game’s competitive scene. That means you have your Fox/Falco character, your Marth character, your Sheik character, your Captain Falcon character and so on. There are a couple more nuanced, original characters, but they are unfortunately the display of fresh and original ideas is at an all time low. In fact, the actual game mechanics are basically straight out of Melee as well, leaving no room for new ideas in the gameplay loop. I don’t doubt that Icons is probably a decent game, and has the ability to develop further and get better, but right now it’s basically just Melee where you can only pick a few top tier characters.
Brawlhalla and Brawlout are…games, of a sort. Brawlhalla approaches the game with “what if items were the main point of the game” and then made that game basically the entire game. You pick up weapons and it changes your character’s moveset, but unfortunately doesn’t distinguish them much from other characters because weapons are the decider of movesets for the most part. I played it with a friend and wasn’t terribly impressed, but I suppose it’s a unique enough approach to the formula. As for Brawlout, similar to Icons, there’s nothing especially unique about the game. It kinda just plays like watered down Smash. I suppose also the aesthetics of Icons and Brawlout work pretty well for their respective titles.
There are also a bunch of Flash games, too many to mention and most not worth such, but what it worth noting is the impact of Smash. In a lot of ways, the simple twist on a well-known genre combined with an especially colorful style really allowed Smash (64) to stand out from the crowd, and the series manages to hold such a high ground because most of the imitators haven’t really cracked the formula for what makes “the platform fighter” so great. But, I do think there were two games that got it just right.
Slap City
Ludocity is a company made of like six people, roughly, and in 2017 they decided to make a small indie game inspired by Smash (64) using characters from their other small indie games. That game is Slap City, and it’s friggin’ hilarious.
Slap City functions pretty similarly to Melee, but looks and feels like Smash (64). The game embodies the best qualities of Smash (64): it’s playful, silly, fun and explosive, and is such stupid beautiful fun with friends. It’s also surprisingly robust, full of intricate mechanics and rewarding 1v1 gameplay. Slap City is incredibly comfortable with its identity as a messy enjoyable…well, slap-fest, and I think that it will continue to impress through its goofy, yet polished, presentation. It’s also embarrassingly inexpensive at only $10, and as a source of entertainment it’s definitely worth it.
Rivals of Aether
If Slap City is inspired by Smash (64), Rivals of Aether might be the greatest spiritual successor to Melee ever made. Developed by Dan Fornace (creator of the small but charming Super Smash Land), Rivals creates an experience that is awfully similar, yet incredibly nuanced to Melee and Smash in general, making a few big changes to the core gameplay that really set it apart from every other game of this type.
Almost everything else I listed or talked about is basically “Smash, but different.” By comparison, Rivals is so visually and mechanically distinct that it feels like its in a league all its own. Shielding and grabs gone, replaced with a risky parry button, ledge grabbing completely removed but now characters can perform one wall jump to reset their aerial options, every character has unique mechanics to empower their particular style of play (Zetterburn’s fire status, Elliana’s heat gauge, Orcane’s puddle, etc.), all paired with a beautiful pixel-art aesthetic loaded with strong design and visual clarity. Not to mention the game actually has a lot to offer to the casual player, with optional “Aether” variants of stages that have hazards, a well-built Story mode, cooperative Abyss mode, and some of the most extensive and practical tutorials for a platform fighter I’ve ever seen.
It also helps that the community is wonderfully friendly, and tournaments see regular visits by Dan Fornace himself, showing a strong connect between the community and creator. And, it’s magically only $15, which I think is a steal for strong the content is. Rivals is excellent on so many levels, I honestly put it right up there with Melee and Ultimate for the overall best in its genre, and definitely the best when it comes to creating an identity for itself that isn’t just “Smash”.
In the string of imitations and inspirations, there have been some good attempts by the indie scene to recapture (or just flat out capture) the magic that drives Smash, the last of which (Rivals) I think exceeds it. However, the lack of a solid AAA title to compete means that Smash basically remains uncontested, and as they go into the 5th entry, it was nearly assured that everyone would once again lose their mind over the character reveals, mode reveals, and all-together news that was Ultimate.
Yet, despite giving the community just about everything, there was still an undercurrent of dissatisfaction…
But they still wanted more - Ultimate
Super Smash Bros Ultimate was released in December 2018, or by this article’s publication a little over a month ago. With some characters swapping in and out over the course of the last few entries, Ultimate’s tagline and claim to fame was “everyone is here.” And it was true, every single character from every Smash game until now made it in the game, and they somehow added more characters, like Simon Belmont from Castlevania, King K. Rool from Donkey Kong Country, and Inkling from Nintendo’s recent killer franchise Splatoon. When totaled, the game has 87 characters on launch, with at least six more as DLC, the only two confirmed so far are Piranha Plant from the Mario series, and Joker from Persona 5 (a game that isn’t even on a Nintendo system).
On top of this, Ultimate painted the series with a thick coat of possibility. Almost the entire game has been overhauled, with launch properties and speeds being completely reworked for a snappier experience, and the ability to perform immediate tilts and smash attacks out of dashes create a new type of control that not even Melee features. Directional air dodging made a surprise comeback, though this time without the scare of wave-dashing. Probably the two most unusual changes come in the form of added recovery for repeated dodges, and the switching of perfect shield from a timed shield to a timed shield drop (now performs the perfect shield when you let go at the right time, instead of pressing at the right time, making the maneuver more offensively oriented and risky). There were more broad changes as well, like the inclusion of “echo fighters” — a term that basically means clone fighter, but somehow didn’t make fans upset — as well as final smash meters to allow weaker final smashes to be charged up over time in a consistent manner, allowing for more competitive options. Ultimate is a game imbued with freedom for the players and feels like it rewards time and practice.
Also, casual players rejoice, Smash got another “Subspace Emissary” length adventure mode with “World of Light.” It’s…decidedly not Subspace Emissary, but it was a lot of fun and visually vibrant, and is basically just loaded with gaming Easter Eggs. Plus, the Classic Mode has much more flavor and variety for individual characters thanks to all the bosses they added to the game via World of Light. And speaking of amazing time sinks, the Spirit Board is a really easy way to just lose hours at a time. Given that Smash 4 had basically nothing for the casual player, it’s refreshing to see Ultimate go just a bit back to its casual roots, if only a little.
There’s not too much talk about on the competitive side since the game isn’t even two months old, but there are some interesting weeds sprouting up in the game’s infancy. Sakurai made a truly admirable attempt to create a more interesting tournament experience by having a toggle for stage hazards, and the inclusion of “every character ever” to not only instigate prodigious character variety but also to guarantee that everyone’s characters would be included. Plus, an interesting feature that only the competitive community could take advantage of is that all damage in the game is amplified by 20% during 1v1 matches assuming items are turned off. Also, taking a lesson from Smash 4 with the reskinnable Final Destination, a similar process was also done for Battlefield, the next most popular stage.
For all these efforts, however, the competitive community has been approaching Ultimate ultra conservatively, which is actually quite disheartening to watch. Despite the intense variety on display, I rarely see more than a handful of characters really being experimented with, and tournament rulesets only seem to allow about five total stages: Final Destination, Battlefield, Smashville, and two different Pokemon Stadiums. So, basically, Smash 4’s stage selection plus one. Hopefully things will pick up in the future, but I’m legitimately shocked at how safe the community is being right off the bat, especially with the plethora of interesting stages, options and characters at their disposal. With Ultimate, we see the most unusual reversal of roles: Sakurai does mad experiments, and the community plays it safe.
But playing it safe certainly hasn’t stopped the community from being active. As mentioned earlier, Ultimate has all but annihilated Smash 4 off the map, and tournaments have been ultra frequent, almost to the point of absurdity. The community is excited to play Smash again, and Ultimate is that perfect combination of just different and comprehensive enough to recreate the excitement that keeps people coming back again and again.
So it’s staggering to me that the community is still complaining…
I was given the original Super Smash Bros and a Nintendo 64 as a gift for my 10th birthday. I was so explosive with excitement I could’ve been launched during a New Year’s celebration. For the next year at least, that was one of the only games I played with my friends. I enjoyed playing everyone, but I played a ton of Kirby since I grew up with a ton of his games and thought he was awesome. It's almost crazy to think I’ve been playing Kirby in a fighting game for almost 20 years now.
Which is all a very long winded way of saying I’ve been playing Smash since the beginning, and I’ve played them all. The insight I attempt to offer today is not blind; I’ve seen and played this game with all types of audiences, and I want to say with all types of people. I’ve played casually and competitively, and observed both sides. But more recently, I’ve taken closer stock of Sakurai himself. From all this, I’ve come away with a couple takeaways.
First, there’s always been an underlying disconnect between Sakurai and the Smash Community, at least for everything after Smash (64). Sakurai makes Melee to enhance the Smash experience for everyone, but the competitive community took it to a level of seriousness he found unnerving and antithetical to the design of the game. He responds with Brawl, which has merit in some facets of its design, but is rejected so vehemently by the community that they proceed to disassemble it for parts and rebuild it into Project M. Smash 4 was Sakurai’s attempt to play nice with the community. He’s still not especially fond of the competitive aspect of the game, but starts to understand its necessity. For the most part, the Smash Community was on board with Sakurai’s changes to the game and his general intent, but unfortunately the casual playerbase suffered greatly as the game was no longer for them.
This is all sort of leading to my second point as we find ourselves at Ultimate, a game in which Sakurai has made (as far as I’m concerned) the perfect Smash game, not in that its flawless but in that it manages to appease and support all sides. There are serious enhancements and well considered features for both the casual and competitive sides of the community, everything they could reasonably ask for all in one package. So what’s the community’s current response?
“Why won’t you put in Waluigi? Also, we want Sans and Papyrus from Undertale. When do we get Goku and Saitama? We want more.”
(Second point — The Smash Community is ridiculously entitled.)
Here’s a funny story: Did you know that Bayonetta was never originally intended to be in Smash 4? For the last DLC character, Nintendo decided to open up the “Smash Bros Fighter Ballot,” allowing the community to submit their choice for what the final DLC character should be. There were no doubt lots of trolly picks, plus a lot of unreasonable anime and cartoon requests, but I can’t say all that with specificity since the official results were never released. I just know that, at the time, my submission was for “Inkling” because it made a lot of sense (Splatoon was one of Nintendo’s biggest new franchises and you already own the rights, lots of potential with “ink” mechanic, fairly iconic design, not a lot of “gunner” characters in the game, etc.). The only results that were revealed in any context were for the winner: Bayonetta was apparently the most requested character in Europe, and within the top 5 picks of North America. On top of that, the ability to secure Bayonetta’s rights and include her in the game was probably more feasible than other picks.
Why is that story funny? Because Bayonetta, apparently the most requested (at the time) character in Smash, the one the community was begging for, is also the one the community complained the most about. Meta Knight was probably a bigger overall problem to Brawl than Bayo was to Smash 4, but the community was horrendously vocal about how much they despised her. I’m not linking that EVO article a third time, point is the one time the community could ask for something and Nintendo was guaranteed to listen, the only response they could come up with was absolutely vitriolic. This is why we can’t have nice things.
Here’s a much shorter story: when I was 10, I thought eight was a lot of characters, but finding out there were four unlockables blew my dang head open. Ultimate currently has 78 characters, and I’ve heard people say on multiple occasions now “there’s too many to choose from.” The cast is so gargantuan, it’s bordering on ludicrous, almost inhibitive for the player. It doesn’t happen often, but “feature-creep” is a thing games can suffer from, and I think Smash is starting to feel it. I know we have six DLC characters (minimum) on the way, and I’m excited to see who they pick, but truthfully I think there’s enough. We have enough.
I know this all sounds a little mean-spirited, but the truth is that Ultimate is a great game. It’s really impressive as a Smash game, as a fighting game, and as a party game. I think it’s worth taking a step back and maybe starting to appreciate Smash for all the things that is and all the things that it has become, instead of focusing on the few things that it isn’t. I would love to see the 10 year old kid that gets this game for their birthday, never having played a Smash game in their life, and just watching them lose their mind as the character select screen slowly expands all the way from 8 to 78.
As we rapidly approach the 20th anniversary of Smash (it’s two days from now, can you believe it), I hope maybe you’ve enjoyed this trip down memory lane and realize that we have a lot to be thankful for. The fact that Smash even exists is still hard to believe, and there’s still so little in gaming culture that matches its sheer level of ambition and scope. It reinvented a genre, and set a new expectation for what mash-up games can be, and it was all built for the sake of having fun.
So whether you’re playing “99 stock, Pokeballs only” with a bunch of friends, or prepping your sick Kirby tech for Grand Finals someday, I hope you enjoy it. And remember, the best things about Smash aren’t what’s missing, it’s what we already have.
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Also, one last shout out to The Smash Brothers, one of the most unusual topics
for a documentary I got to see this year.
Hats off to the production team and the Melee community for keeping it real.
