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silveradept[This is part of a series on video games, their tropes, stories of playing games, and other related topics. If you have suggestions about where to take the series, please do say so in the comments. We have a lot of spaces to fill for this month.]
As a genre, starting with games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, the 2D and 3D fighting game space generally caters towards an audience that wants complexity of systems and a certain amount of game and metagame combination that makes adaptability and flexibility important things to add on top of complete memorization of the moveset available to a character and strategies for defeating other characters and playstyles. Players intend to build something akin to an invincible style that cannot be defeated by any other player, so long as their execution is correct, but the game is usually balanced in such a way that some characters will have movesets well-designed to defeat other characters, and that no playstyle becomes truly unbeatable. You can see this in the "tier" rankings of characters in fighting games, as the competitive and "hardcore" kind of audience determines which characters are best suited to the game they want to play. It usually involves calculations around speed, reach, power, and deception, as a significant part of playing the game is in getting your opponent to believe you are performing one strategy only to engage in one quite different, and also in reading your opponent correctly and countering their moves. Characters that use ambiguous or similar motions for different moves are praised for their ability to confuse opponents and allow for combo attacks if the first one lands. Characters that can also interrupt their own moves or cancel them into other moves if it looks like a combo is going to fail or be blocked are also prized.
Given that I really don't understand input delays, buffering moves, and how you're supposed to be able to perform difficult combinations from memory contextually, and much of the mechanics of how a game works at the competitive level, I mostly enjoy these games by myself, often in the mode where I can gain a certain amount of overpowering ability and thus not actually have to care that much about finesse technique to achieve my aims. In short, I'm terrible at these games and keep myself well away from the hypercompetitive community as much as possible, for everyone's sake.
And then came a game that, for all rights and purposes, shouldn't have worked at all. A mascot fighter between characters from various Nintendo franchises, set on stages from those same franchises, some of which have hazards of gimmicks that make battling on them more difficult than usual. And with objects from those franchises that can be picked up and used as part of the battle. And the moveset for each character is limited to normal attacks, special attacks, shielding/evading, and grapples/throws. And none of them require knowing sophisticated joystick movement to pull off. Instead, the normal attacks work on the principle of whether the joystick is not moving when the button is pressed, whether the joystick is tilted in a direction and a button pressed, or whether the joystick has been smashed in a direction and the button pushed (and held, as these moves are chargeable) Special attacks depend entirely on whether the joystick is pointed in a particular direction or not when the button is pressed. And the shield button shields unless the joystick is smashed in a direction, then the character performs a dodge. It's a reasonably simple, learnable system and it's using Nintendo characters. Presumably, the "hardcore" crowd would hate it. But they didn't hate Super Smash Brothers at all once they discovered there was an interesting system underneath its apparent simplicity.
Smash 64 was limited by the system itself, coming out near the end of the lifetime of the Nintendo 64. I played a pretty significant amount of it (poorly) in university, because dorm-mates and friends catty-corner played. And then played a significant amount of other fighters (very poorly), like Capcom vs. SNK 2 and Guilty Gear XX on Dreamcast, where it became pretty apparent that my play style, such that it is, is pretty predictable and involves a lot of mashing buttons instead of executing combinations. It meant that I was Berzerker, probably as much for the continual negative self-talk as much as it was for the playing style.
Smash matured pretty significantly for the GameCube offering, Melee. And was a lot faster than 64 has been, thanks to better graphics and a more powerful processor under the hood. For most of the competitive circuit, Melee was the perfect game and all others are inferior copies. Of course, they're playing it on their specific way when they say that. I had a blast with Melee playing all the other modes and ways of playing the game, because I like having lots of chaos and stage hazards to throw around and deal with as things go on. It makes the game feel fairer, in that someone who can demolish me with their "skill" often takes a Donkey Kong hammer to the face or gets caught between me and my Pokémon and takes a significant amount of damage and launch.
Ah, right, should mention that success in Smash Brothers isn't usually about inflicting enough damage that your opponent collapses in a knockout. You can play it that way (Stamina mode), but damage accumulation is only the first part of Smash victory. The actual way to win is to knock your opponents off the stage. The more damage they have accumulated, the easier it is to send them flying with a good attack, but pure damage itself is not an indicator of victory.
Melee also improved upon the single-player experience by engaging with Adventure mode, a series of stages where ones chosen character has to both navigate the stage and engage in various fights with other characters along the way. There were bonus games, like the home run contest, trying to figure out who had the power to send a sandbag flying after damaging it significantly, or target tests to help someone get familiar with all the ways a character could move and strike, or some trophy drops, and the mission mode that imposed other conditions on the battle (and, most memorably, ended with a battle of you against Mewtwo, Giga Bowser, and Giant Ganondorf at the most difficult AI level. There was a lot of cheese employed to get that particular victory.)
Smash was also replayable in a lot of ways through the Special Smash modes, where everyone could be turned invisible, made tiny, made huge, have a lot of starting damage, permanently accumulate damage over time, and so forth. If the regular game wasn't interesting enough, there were modifiers that could be engaged to make things even more fun. Or weird. While Melee only had specific modes, from Brawl on, individual modifiers could be turned on or off so as to allow for a customized Smash experience. Most other fighting games didn't have this kind of replay value, or they had other modes that were wrapping story between various fight sequences. And while the people around me mostly treated these extra modes as novelties or things to be avoided, I thought of them as ways to avoid boredom if you were playing only with the same group of people (or by yourself) and wanted something different to do.
After Melee had become the darling of the competitive scene (which, in turn, spawned "Fox Only, No Items, Final Destination" as the perceived pinnacle of perfection for competitive play), Brawl, for the Wii, took a beating from the competitive scene because it rebalanced things, took away the exploits that were considered absolutely essential to high-level play, and reminded all of the competitive players that fundamentally, Smash is a game that's meant to be played between people who are having fun and that a certain amount of randomness to the game (implemented by a function in every mode where a character might randomly trip and fall instead of performing certain actions like running) was going to be enforced so that games wouldn't necessarily be decided only by "skill", even if if most of them would be. Project M was created to reverse most of those changes and bring back the gameplay desired by the competitive scene, so we know how the demand to start having fun again went over.
And since I'm a scrub, of course, I liked the changes brought on in Brawl. The speed of battle slowed down significantly (unlike many game series, and especially the Marvel vs. Capcom series, where later entries in the series tend to speed things up), making it easier for me to follow the flow of action and react accordingly. And there were new characters, and a new single-player mode called The Subspace Emissary, where someone could unlock basically all of the characters in the game by playing the single-player mode all the way through (and then finishing the three bonus battles after the end), instead of unlocking each character after a set number of battles and then defeating them one-on-one, which was the usual way of doing it in Melee. Smash is very good about providing multiple ways of achieving unlocks of playable characters, and none of them are hidden behind "do this nearly impossible task on the hardest difficulty." They're not as good at avoiding hiding trophies or other achievements behind impossible tasks, but they don't restrict characters, at least.
Smash 4 for Wii U took out tripping, and didn't have a single-player mode as such, based on feedback that apparently people didn't like or play Subspace Emissary, which is surprising to me, but it was a solid serviceable game with lots of characters to play with, adding yet more canon imports into the games from their own universes. (Sonic and Solid Snake came in Brawl, Mega Man and Pac-Man in Smash for Wii U, and Cloud, Ryu, and Ken arrived in Ultimate. There are other characters available through DLC, but I'm not including them.) Since the Wii U itself was a very short-lived console, I didn't get as much experience with Smash 4 as I would have otherwise. And it's single-player options included challenge modes, like the missions from Melee, but that was about it. Nothing spectacular, but a lot of it good.
And then Ultimate released with the Switch, and the cast list for it is gargantuan, the game has been tuned and tweaked, lots of options are available, and there's a single-player story again, as well as Spirits to include as many game franchises as possible and provide new ways of playing and experiencing the game, in the single-player and the multiple-player mode. It's still the case that many of these improvements and features are ignored, but the people doing so are happy because they can quickly access stages that play either like the Battlefield or the Final Destination stages, even if they're visually distinct, and they can configure their default rules to their favorite forum of play. And all the rest of us can do the same, and save our own rules, so we don't have to fight with each other about where the rules are set. Smash Ultimate really does a good job of being a game that is about having fun and also letting the people who are going to be ultracompetitive about it set up their own sandbox to play in, apart from the rest of us who want to have a lot of fun with all the rest of the game.
While I'm not great at other games, Smash Brothers had always been deliberately designed to be accessible enough that I can feel like I'm doing well and putting on the cool moves without having to need frame prefect inputs on everything. And playing with the items on is really good and adds dimension to the fighting game that I can take advantage of and plan with. I'm still going to lose (a lot), because a significant amount of the people I play with disdain the idea of items or want to play without them or the stages that have been lovingly crafted to be interesting challenges to navigate on their own, but instead of it being "this is all the game is, and you're clearly pretty bad at it, so why bother to continue playing when it's not going to be fun?", I can know that they're limiting themselves to only a small portion of the game that is available for them, and that while I may only be middling-skill in their favored play space, I can be quite good when they're playing in mine.
Smash is the game that shouldn't work, if you play by the "hardcore" group's interpretation of what is good. But it is good, and it manages to be good for me as well as for them, and that's really hard to pull off.
As a genre, starting with games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, the 2D and 3D fighting game space generally caters towards an audience that wants complexity of systems and a certain amount of game and metagame combination that makes adaptability and flexibility important things to add on top of complete memorization of the moveset available to a character and strategies for defeating other characters and playstyles. Players intend to build something akin to an invincible style that cannot be defeated by any other player, so long as their execution is correct, but the game is usually balanced in such a way that some characters will have movesets well-designed to defeat other characters, and that no playstyle becomes truly unbeatable. You can see this in the "tier" rankings of characters in fighting games, as the competitive and "hardcore" kind of audience determines which characters are best suited to the game they want to play. It usually involves calculations around speed, reach, power, and deception, as a significant part of playing the game is in getting your opponent to believe you are performing one strategy only to engage in one quite different, and also in reading your opponent correctly and countering their moves. Characters that use ambiguous or similar motions for different moves are praised for their ability to confuse opponents and allow for combo attacks if the first one lands. Characters that can also interrupt their own moves or cancel them into other moves if it looks like a combo is going to fail or be blocked are also prized.
Given that I really don't understand input delays, buffering moves, and how you're supposed to be able to perform difficult combinations from memory contextually, and much of the mechanics of how a game works at the competitive level, I mostly enjoy these games by myself, often in the mode where I can gain a certain amount of overpowering ability and thus not actually have to care that much about finesse technique to achieve my aims. In short, I'm terrible at these games and keep myself well away from the hypercompetitive community as much as possible, for everyone's sake.
And then came a game that, for all rights and purposes, shouldn't have worked at all. A mascot fighter between characters from various Nintendo franchises, set on stages from those same franchises, some of which have hazards of gimmicks that make battling on them more difficult than usual. And with objects from those franchises that can be picked up and used as part of the battle. And the moveset for each character is limited to normal attacks, special attacks, shielding/evading, and grapples/throws. And none of them require knowing sophisticated joystick movement to pull off. Instead, the normal attacks work on the principle of whether the joystick is not moving when the button is pressed, whether the joystick is tilted in a direction and a button pressed, or whether the joystick has been smashed in a direction and the button pushed (and held, as these moves are chargeable) Special attacks depend entirely on whether the joystick is pointed in a particular direction or not when the button is pressed. And the shield button shields unless the joystick is smashed in a direction, then the character performs a dodge. It's a reasonably simple, learnable system and it's using Nintendo characters. Presumably, the "hardcore" crowd would hate it. But they didn't hate Super Smash Brothers at all once they discovered there was an interesting system underneath its apparent simplicity.
Smash 64 was limited by the system itself, coming out near the end of the lifetime of the Nintendo 64. I played a pretty significant amount of it (poorly) in university, because dorm-mates and friends catty-corner played. And then played a significant amount of other fighters (very poorly), like Capcom vs. SNK 2 and Guilty Gear XX on Dreamcast, where it became pretty apparent that my play style, such that it is, is pretty predictable and involves a lot of mashing buttons instead of executing combinations. It meant that I was Berzerker, probably as much for the continual negative self-talk as much as it was for the playing style.
Smash matured pretty significantly for the GameCube offering, Melee. And was a lot faster than 64 has been, thanks to better graphics and a more powerful processor under the hood. For most of the competitive circuit, Melee was the perfect game and all others are inferior copies. Of course, they're playing it on their specific way when they say that. I had a blast with Melee playing all the other modes and ways of playing the game, because I like having lots of chaos and stage hazards to throw around and deal with as things go on. It makes the game feel fairer, in that someone who can demolish me with their "skill" often takes a Donkey Kong hammer to the face or gets caught between me and my Pokémon and takes a significant amount of damage and launch.
Ah, right, should mention that success in Smash Brothers isn't usually about inflicting enough damage that your opponent collapses in a knockout. You can play it that way (Stamina mode), but damage accumulation is only the first part of Smash victory. The actual way to win is to knock your opponents off the stage. The more damage they have accumulated, the easier it is to send them flying with a good attack, but pure damage itself is not an indicator of victory.
Melee also improved upon the single-player experience by engaging with Adventure mode, a series of stages where ones chosen character has to both navigate the stage and engage in various fights with other characters along the way. There were bonus games, like the home run contest, trying to figure out who had the power to send a sandbag flying after damaging it significantly, or target tests to help someone get familiar with all the ways a character could move and strike, or some trophy drops, and the mission mode that imposed other conditions on the battle (and, most memorably, ended with a battle of you against Mewtwo, Giga Bowser, and Giant Ganondorf at the most difficult AI level. There was a lot of cheese employed to get that particular victory.)
Smash was also replayable in a lot of ways through the Special Smash modes, where everyone could be turned invisible, made tiny, made huge, have a lot of starting damage, permanently accumulate damage over time, and so forth. If the regular game wasn't interesting enough, there were modifiers that could be engaged to make things even more fun. Or weird. While Melee only had specific modes, from Brawl on, individual modifiers could be turned on or off so as to allow for a customized Smash experience. Most other fighting games didn't have this kind of replay value, or they had other modes that were wrapping story between various fight sequences. And while the people around me mostly treated these extra modes as novelties or things to be avoided, I thought of them as ways to avoid boredom if you were playing only with the same group of people (or by yourself) and wanted something different to do.
After Melee had become the darling of the competitive scene (which, in turn, spawned "Fox Only, No Items, Final Destination" as the perceived pinnacle of perfection for competitive play), Brawl, for the Wii, took a beating from the competitive scene because it rebalanced things, took away the exploits that were considered absolutely essential to high-level play, and reminded all of the competitive players that fundamentally, Smash is a game that's meant to be played between people who are having fun and that a certain amount of randomness to the game (implemented by a function in every mode where a character might randomly trip and fall instead of performing certain actions like running) was going to be enforced so that games wouldn't necessarily be decided only by "skill", even if if most of them would be. Project M was created to reverse most of those changes and bring back the gameplay desired by the competitive scene, so we know how the demand to start having fun again went over.
And since I'm a scrub, of course, I liked the changes brought on in Brawl. The speed of battle slowed down significantly (unlike many game series, and especially the Marvel vs. Capcom series, where later entries in the series tend to speed things up), making it easier for me to follow the flow of action and react accordingly. And there were new characters, and a new single-player mode called The Subspace Emissary, where someone could unlock basically all of the characters in the game by playing the single-player mode all the way through (and then finishing the three bonus battles after the end), instead of unlocking each character after a set number of battles and then defeating them one-on-one, which was the usual way of doing it in Melee. Smash is very good about providing multiple ways of achieving unlocks of playable characters, and none of them are hidden behind "do this nearly impossible task on the hardest difficulty." They're not as good at avoiding hiding trophies or other achievements behind impossible tasks, but they don't restrict characters, at least.
Smash 4 for Wii U took out tripping, and didn't have a single-player mode as such, based on feedback that apparently people didn't like or play Subspace Emissary, which is surprising to me, but it was a solid serviceable game with lots of characters to play with, adding yet more canon imports into the games from their own universes. (Sonic and Solid Snake came in Brawl, Mega Man and Pac-Man in Smash for Wii U, and Cloud, Ryu, and Ken arrived in Ultimate. There are other characters available through DLC, but I'm not including them.) Since the Wii U itself was a very short-lived console, I didn't get as much experience with Smash 4 as I would have otherwise. And it's single-player options included challenge modes, like the missions from Melee, but that was about it. Nothing spectacular, but a lot of it good.
And then Ultimate released with the Switch, and the cast list for it is gargantuan, the game has been tuned and tweaked, lots of options are available, and there's a single-player story again, as well as Spirits to include as many game franchises as possible and provide new ways of playing and experiencing the game, in the single-player and the multiple-player mode. It's still the case that many of these improvements and features are ignored, but the people doing so are happy because they can quickly access stages that play either like the Battlefield or the Final Destination stages, even if they're visually distinct, and they can configure their default rules to their favorite forum of play. And all the rest of us can do the same, and save our own rules, so we don't have to fight with each other about where the rules are set. Smash Ultimate really does a good job of being a game that is about having fun and also letting the people who are going to be ultracompetitive about it set up their own sandbox to play in, apart from the rest of us who want to have a lot of fun with all the rest of the game.
While I'm not great at other games, Smash Brothers had always been deliberately designed to be accessible enough that I can feel like I'm doing well and putting on the cool moves without having to need frame prefect inputs on everything. And playing with the items on is really good and adds dimension to the fighting game that I can take advantage of and plan with. I'm still going to lose (a lot), because a significant amount of the people I play with disdain the idea of items or want to play without them or the stages that have been lovingly crafted to be interesting challenges to navigate on their own, but instead of it being "this is all the game is, and you're clearly pretty bad at it, so why bother to continue playing when it's not going to be fun?", I can know that they're limiting themselves to only a small portion of the game that is available for them, and that while I may only be middling-skill in their favored play space, I can be quite good when they're playing in mine.
Smash is the game that shouldn't work, if you play by the "hardcore" group's interpretation of what is good. But it is good, and it manages to be good for me as well as for them, and that's really hard to pull off.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-19 05:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-19 03:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-20 03:59 am (UTC)But somehow I ended up playing a multiplayer battle arena type of game for a while. It was in testing, and there was a large chunk of time without any ranking system, so hardcore and casual players like me would get tossed together, which was an experience. But it was fun, and sometimes I even played pretty well. I don't think it was as accessible to all groups as something like Smash, but I thought it had elements that could have made the game more popular. It had development and advertising issues, though, so it eventually got shut down. Thank you for prompting a nostalgia trip :)
no subject
Date: 2019-12-20 04:11 am (UTC)Plus, I think I'm pretty rubbish at tower defense, and that's really the kind of game that MOBAs came out of, so.
Still, glad that you had a happy nostalgia event from these.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-20 04:26 am (UTC)I probably did not make the connection because I did not use a lot of strategy when I played (my poor teammates).
The RTS genre is a mystery to me.
Thanks again for the interesting post!
no subject
Date: 2019-12-20 03:18 pm (UTC)