As many of you know, Super Smash Bros. is nintendo's flagship fighting game. It gets a lot of hate here, most of them saying that the game isn't even a real fighting game. I personally have hundreds of hours invested into super smash bros. brawl alone. I own SF IV(PS3), Virtua Fighter IV: Evolution(PS2), Marvel vs. Capcom 2(dreamcast) and have played soul calibur, soul calibur IV, tekken: DR to an extent. My reasons are as follows:
- Super Smash Bros. allows for more freedom in competitive play. That is, you can approach your opponent in many different ways.Where as most fighters only have a single jump without any platforms, SSB has a double jump for each character, along with different platforms for each stage. Jump at your opponent but see he is shielding? Jump back or over him to get the advantage. Also, with DI(Directional Influence) you're not screwed if you're not falling where you want to. (Think controlling your character in the air like in Super Mario Bros.) With other fighting games, in any given situation there is a certain move/technique you are supposed to perform. (ex- street fighter IV- character jumps at ryu? shoryuken or block, no other option other than to get hit.)
- Lack of stamina means kills can occur by playing risky. Instead of waiting for your opponent to hit a certain percentage, why not hit him off the edge and meteor smash him downwards? The answer is because those attacks have bad lag and whiffing is going to put you in a bad position. In any other game you must reduce his health. Want to kill someone who just died? Try extra hard to get a grab with a character like Falco and go for the chaingrab>dair strategy.
- More ATs(attack techniques). There are plenty of ATs in other games, but they are all general, (ex-focus attack dash cancel in SFIV) but in SSB there are many for each individual character. What's better yet, at smashboards.com, they're discovering more all the time. Did you know that if you use cape with mario right before you leave a platform, you'll glide off the stage? It's called the ACE, and only mario can use it. [Click to watch]
- Spacing game is more developed. In SSB your opponent at times can be close up, far away, above you or below you. Depending on where the other person is forces you to react in a way different than "he's far away so I'll use a projectile" or "he's up close so I'll try to start a combo". What also factors in is his percentage level. What simple combos there are in SSB are often based on how high this level is. If it's too high or too low some combos might not work. Also, you have the powershield. If you are taken by suprise you can press the shield button and if hit right before an attack you'll have less hit lag to work with.
- Other fighting games rely too much on button memorization and your right/wrong reaction to what happens. The fact is that button memorization will takes less skill than being able to space properly. Combine that with the many ATs and it Super Smash Bros. comes out on top.
*note that I was using super smash bros. brawl as an inferred example, melee uses more combos and even faster reaction(SHFFL with fox, anyone?), while the original 64 game plays more like brawl.
*If you don't have the skill to read and comprehend all that, you may be best to stay away from fighting games in general.
*no I'm not trolling.
2-10-08
no offense, and i really honestly dont mean to offense you. that gets used as a preface by a lot of people who are really trying to be offensive and dont have the balls to own up. so recognize that i mean this. but i dont think you understand what kind of games you are really levelling your criticisms at because, if you are really invested in smash games, the likelihood you are nearly so heavily invested in the other games you are talking about is very low by virtue of only having so much time to play games.
also i am assuming that youre referring to smash melee, not brawl. this is like i say an assumption that there is no point in not making, because brawl is a fun party game to play with my mom, girlfriend and niece, not a competitive fighting game. in the competitive context, brawl is garbage and im not going to bother discussing it because theres no point--you cant change my mind in that.
the notion that smash permits more freedom in competitive play is true in some regards and obviously false in others. my arguement hinges on that in most 'competitive' games of smash the game is played with incredibly limited settings--no items, only a few stages and so on--when the game could be so much more. why limit all the options? but that aside, theres some merit tot he creativity argument, but its hardly exclusive to smash--its just more obvious and visible. there are more dimensions to a level but that doesnt mean more depth of play. super turbo only has a single layer, single level of limited 2d playing space, but the mind games and spacing that take place within it far exceed those of melee imo. a lot of that is based on the fact the game is backed by a legacy of 15 years of competitive play, so strategies are so well-known, but even then there is room for change int he meta. over those years, the st tier lists and strategies have changed drastically.
theres also merit tot he stamina thing in brawl, but its so different from health bars--which entail their own enormous sets of strategies--i dont think there is a lot of point in comparison. just say theyre different. neither is really better than the other.
thge arguement of 'more techniques' is a strange one, because im not sure what you consider 'techniques'. if you mean moves, imo the more 'moves' there are, the worse a game is because it becomes a contest of context memorization and knowing all the moves inside out, studying movesets instead of just learning a smaller moveset and employing strategies. if you mean just... strategies, again, the idea that this is some exclusive thing to smash is objectively wrong. all fighting games have some level of emergent gameplay. some have the meta continue to shift with new discoveries for many, many years.
spacing is not more developed in smash than super turbo, let alone most fighting games. thats just plain untrue. the idea that its limited to 'far for projectile, close for combo' just shows you dont know what you are talking about. there are more dimensions and so on to consider in smash--in general, there is more space. but this doesnt necessarily mean spacing is more developed. you have to work such a small space so efficiently (again i reference st, mostly because i am most familiar with it) in other fighting games, the spacing game is beyond comparison. its far more developed, and precision is more important, which requires enormous concentration sometimes to get right.
anyway, button memorization and dial-a-combo silliness is present to some degree in pretty much all fighters, save like bushido blade, and even there, there were super-effective attack orders that provoked difficult blocks or position advantages. if you dont like it, whatever, but you cant argue its 'less of a skill', thats nonsensical. its a 'different' skill. personally, i dont really care for it, but there no point in denying it.
anyway, i see what youre saying, but imo you are looking at it the wrong way and come across as pretty uneducated about the other games out there in the fighting genre (i know you have played some others, but its like ive played killzone 2... you know, experimentally).
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