ShiningCrusader
Smash Cadet
- Joined
- Oct 13, 2014
- Messages
- 52
Before I start I want you to know I don't want to start a flame war over what version of smash is best. The reason I'm writing this is to know if I'm the only one with this mindset, since I've felt kind of lonely lately when I voice my opinion about the latest Nintendo titles.
First, you probably need a slice of my biography to take me seriously when reading this. Smash-wise, I've been playing Smash64 since 1999 emulating it on my PC then moved on to Melee after I bought my first console soon after the launch of the GC. We all know how great Melee was, and the fact that I was in my youth years reinforced that. Then came Brawl and after the first hype my enjoyment for the game died quickly, partly to the fact that me and my friends at the time weren’t visiting each other much and the online simply wasn't up to par, especially when put side to side with Team Fortress 2, a game I had been playing since launch and I would keep playing for 4 more years afterward. Beside that, I have played a ton of old glories, more than the simple masterpieces you find today in Smash games, and now I'm spending much more time playing on my PC than every other console combined.
Now I'll break down for you all the various aspects that more or less put me off when thinking about buying Smash 4, but before that I must admit that when brawl turned up to be much more beginner-oriented than melee or 64 I couldn't wait the moment Nintendo released a true sequel to melee. Now I’m 27, that moment has arrived and I don't feel the urge to open my wallet in front of the cashier. Let's see what has changed:
1 - Character changes
Through each iteration of the series Sakurai added and removed characters according to his own vision of the game. This is totally fine since he's the designer of the game working on tight schedules, but sadly the changes go way deeper than that. One of the most glaring examples is Mario’s DownB in brawl and Smash 4. The FLUDD is among the most useless moves and replaced a move many people loved, which took inspiration from games like Super Mario World, Sunshine and, more recently, Galaxy. This is only a minor change, mind you, but almost every character had been re-worked and tweaked since Smash 64 leading to a roster that has characters only similar to what you used to play, often due to complete overhauls of the physics of the game. To point out another glaring difference, a friend once told me he had to play Falcon in Brawl in order to play something similar to what was Ganondorf in Melee, and being the huge Zelda fan he was, I could see how that was disappointing.
To make a comparison to another fighting game, Ryu from Street Fighter is still Ryu, from 1991 to 2014. He got sprites re-done, 3d models and animations tweaked, moves were added, but ultimately, he's the same character many grew to love. The same goes for other characters in fighting games, like Chun-li, Sol Badguy and Kyo Kusanagi. When this happened in other games the feedback was clear. Long-time players don't like brutal changes to the characters they grew to love and master (see the reception of Iori Yagami's moveset in King of Fighters XII).
When I saw what happened to my Melee mains in Brawl I was forced to learn new characters altogether and ultimately ended up maining Ike, at least in casual matches.
2 - Balance
Unfortunately, Sakurai has proven more than once of being unable to balance a roster of more than 30 characters. You should notice a hint of sarcasm here. It's a tough job and I don't blame him, but if we look at the facts, Melee and Brawl tier lists suggests a lot of characters are utterly useless while others can kill opponents with a sneeze (I’m looking at MK and few others here). As a result, online matches (and local matches, to some extent) were ridden with players using the same character over and over to the point you started wondering if the roster wasn't actually smaller than you remembered on the CSS.
Street Fighter makes a great example once again. It was pretty clear this year at EVO when I got bored of seeing Fox, Sheik and Jiggly after 20 minutes while the Street Fighter tournament was full of players trying their best with almost all characters in the roster.
Since Smash 4 is being developed for tournament players as well, I expect deep commitment from Nintendo on this matter, but until now, we haven't seen much when it comes to game updates and patches, even though both the WiiU and 3ds allow that.
3 - Smash is advertising
This is probably one of the saddest points i'm going to make. If you remember that famous Famitsu interview, "Characters from a series that has no future are rarely chosen". Two other quotes from the same interview about how Sakurai chooses characters are "We conduct a character popularity poll both domestically and internationally" and "We also research games that are currently being developed".
I can't help to notice the emphasis on the sales of future titles, which is completely out of place in a game that has several characters coming from franchises that haven't had a game in years, sometimes even a decade. The reality is that almost every player of Smash knows who are the characters and what game they're from while casual players, if they somehow end up buying a smash game over the latest popular game, will hardly feel interested in a game just by looking at a character (if the character isn't ZSS and the player isn't a horny teen, that is).
The great majority of smash players have seen and played most of Nintendo franchises but to give recognition only to newly-released titles with some newcomers makes it seem like they're forgetting why Nintendo is still big after all these years, and that's a solid legacy of franchises. Just off the top of my head, King K.Rool from DKC, Isaac from Golden Sun and the OCs from Advance Wars had their fair share of followers in the past. If we talk about third-party characters the list can grow even more with characters like Crono from Chrono Trigger and Simon Belmont from Castlevania. If Nintendo wants to appeal to long-time players it should bring out the legends of the past, not the newest talk of the towns like Robin, Wii Fit Trainer and Dark Pit.
4 - Consumers are content creators
This is a common problem for many eastern companies, considering players as mere consumers of a finished product. The truth is some of the most cunning players are creators too and Smash makes no difference. As soon as some players were presented the opportunity of changing the game to their liking, adding textures, models or tweaking the mechanics of the game altogether, they became active creators. To put it bluntly, projects like Brawl+, minus, balanced and Project M, gave a breath of life to a game deemed dead. Just browse the vault for five minutes and I'm sure you'll find something you'll want to run your old copy of Brawl for, whether it's just a new moveset for a character or a complete overhaul of the game's mechanics.
Is this just amateurish fiddling? Yes, for the most part. Is it without value? Absolutely not. Some of the best games in history are born from the work of spare-time game designers, acknowledged by people with tons of cash in their pockets and little time to think about new games. Examples include games like Counter Strike, Dota and Team Fortress. As you may have noticed, I mentioned three PC games. The reason is quite simple: console games are inherently harder to mod because the inner workings of the consoles are harder to access in the first place. In fact, modding of console games often begins after the games have been fully emulated (see rom hacking).
But with Brawl happened something on an entirely different level. Hackers managed to make the Wii do their bidding and soon after modding for Brawl was in the hands of common people like you and me, able to read a list of instructions without screwing up. I'm sure Nintendo realized this but chose not to act for the same reasons they've been telling us for years: fear of piracy, ease of use and creating a family-friendly game system. Instead, they made Mario Maker to make your own Mario levels. Something Lunar Magic and other softwares have been doing for years. The correct course of action, in this case, would have been hiring the people behind the wii hacking or Project M. Building a system that does not make smash modding obsolete but encourages it. Which brings us to...
5 - I already have Project M
i can honestly say that after I installed Project M I said to myself "Why wasn't Brawl already like this?". Even with the few modifications I made with a mod of my own, the changes of Project M are something that should have been in Brawl from the start. To name a few, Wario's moveset is remarkably better, Ike is a lot faster and Bowser and Ganondorf are extremely powerful instead of being walking sandbags. Headlines like Wired's "The Best Super Smash Bros. Isn’t Made by Nintendo" didn't manage to make Nintendo raise an eyebrow because, apparently, everything is back to Brawl's version of the characters. I must now ask a question to Nintendo: why should I pay 55€ to play something that plays like Brawl for the most part while I can already enjoy a game made specifically for me by other players like me? Add to that the fact that I now own a PC that can run Dolphin at 100% speed with improved graphics and you've got a recipe for the "who cares about your newest product" cake. Furthermore, Project M has already added Mewtwo and Roy back to the roster completely free of charge. Something Sakurai's team will only start to scratch next spring in a paid DLC (if we're lucky).
6 - The 3DS demo
That didn't impress me. I can't talk about the graphics of the game, obviously tied to the limited hardware, but the overall feeling of the characters and controls wasn't good. Comparing directly Mario and Link to their PM counterparts, Smash 4 feels still slow, just a bit faster than Brawl at this point, with low gravity and unresponsive controls. All of it masked by a sovrabundance of graphical effects that try to convey a speed that just isn't there, like a character surrounded by a shining spikes leaving a trail of dense smoke after being launched for the mere height of his double jump. The worst part is that beside the control scheme, the game will probably feel identical on WiiU.
7 - Nintendo games are becoming simpler
This is common to many other publishers and developers, mind you, but the focus here is Nintendo and the WiiU. As of today, I have bought Nintendoland, NSMBU, NSLU, Pikmin 3, SM3DW, Mario Kart 8, DKC Tropical Freeze, The Wonderful 101, Bayonetta 2 and Bayonetta, and to my surprise the games I have enjoyed the most are the ones developed by studios other than Nintendo's internal dev studios. It seems to me that Nintendo can still craft very pretty games but under the shiny painted hood of games like SM3DW and MK8 lies an engine that doesn't run faster than 20km/h because it would be too hard to handle for some players. You may object that I became too good at video games from too much time playing. While this is true to an extent, it fails to explain why I still find bramble levels in DKC2 very hard, and this happens in many other games that require perfect execution even though I perfectly know what to do (the Mothula boss from ALTTP, for example).
Don't kid yourself, Nintendo games ARE becoming easier and more forgiving and, unsurprisingly, this reflects badly on the WiiU userbase. If you remember the comments on Dark Souls 2's producer Takeshi Miyazoe about the possibility of DS2 hitting WiiU as well you know what I'm talking about. If not, you just need to know many dedicated players consider owning WiiU and PC the right choice for this generation of consoles. WiiU for Nintendo Games and PC for everything else. The problem is Nintendo games are becoming lackluster and despite the only type of player you can find on WiiU is a hardcore player Nintendo continues to make games for the whole family, like the Wii disappointment never happened.
I fear Smash 4 will suffer the same fate, held down by the shackles of "accessibility" and only supported as long as there's DLC to be sold.
And there you have it. My 7-points-long dilemma that will probably haunt me until the release when I'll probably decide if I should give it a chance (if retailers even bother making it playable at kiosks like it happened for Melee). The wall of text above should have put off most readers with a short attention span, but if you've reached this point congratulations for your patience and I hope you'll take your time crafting an equally in-depth response. This is the question I'm asking you then: do you think the recent changes in Nintendo's development strategies and attitude towards players have affected the quality of Smash 4 to its roots despite the incredible number of features included? If not, what is a selling point, in your opinion, that I should consider to buy Smash 4 for?
First, you probably need a slice of my biography to take me seriously when reading this. Smash-wise, I've been playing Smash64 since 1999 emulating it on my PC then moved on to Melee after I bought my first console soon after the launch of the GC. We all know how great Melee was, and the fact that I was in my youth years reinforced that. Then came Brawl and after the first hype my enjoyment for the game died quickly, partly to the fact that me and my friends at the time weren’t visiting each other much and the online simply wasn't up to par, especially when put side to side with Team Fortress 2, a game I had been playing since launch and I would keep playing for 4 more years afterward. Beside that, I have played a ton of old glories, more than the simple masterpieces you find today in Smash games, and now I'm spending much more time playing on my PC than every other console combined.
Now I'll break down for you all the various aspects that more or less put me off when thinking about buying Smash 4, but before that I must admit that when brawl turned up to be much more beginner-oriented than melee or 64 I couldn't wait the moment Nintendo released a true sequel to melee. Now I’m 27, that moment has arrived and I don't feel the urge to open my wallet in front of the cashier. Let's see what has changed:
1 - Character changes
Through each iteration of the series Sakurai added and removed characters according to his own vision of the game. This is totally fine since he's the designer of the game working on tight schedules, but sadly the changes go way deeper than that. One of the most glaring examples is Mario’s DownB in brawl and Smash 4. The FLUDD is among the most useless moves and replaced a move many people loved, which took inspiration from games like Super Mario World, Sunshine and, more recently, Galaxy. This is only a minor change, mind you, but almost every character had been re-worked and tweaked since Smash 64 leading to a roster that has characters only similar to what you used to play, often due to complete overhauls of the physics of the game. To point out another glaring difference, a friend once told me he had to play Falcon in Brawl in order to play something similar to what was Ganondorf in Melee, and being the huge Zelda fan he was, I could see how that was disappointing.
To make a comparison to another fighting game, Ryu from Street Fighter is still Ryu, from 1991 to 2014. He got sprites re-done, 3d models and animations tweaked, moves were added, but ultimately, he's the same character many grew to love. The same goes for other characters in fighting games, like Chun-li, Sol Badguy and Kyo Kusanagi. When this happened in other games the feedback was clear. Long-time players don't like brutal changes to the characters they grew to love and master (see the reception of Iori Yagami's moveset in King of Fighters XII).
When I saw what happened to my Melee mains in Brawl I was forced to learn new characters altogether and ultimately ended up maining Ike, at least in casual matches.
2 - Balance
Unfortunately, Sakurai has proven more than once of being unable to balance a roster of more than 30 characters. You should notice a hint of sarcasm here. It's a tough job and I don't blame him, but if we look at the facts, Melee and Brawl tier lists suggests a lot of characters are utterly useless while others can kill opponents with a sneeze (I’m looking at MK and few others here). As a result, online matches (and local matches, to some extent) were ridden with players using the same character over and over to the point you started wondering if the roster wasn't actually smaller than you remembered on the CSS.
Street Fighter makes a great example once again. It was pretty clear this year at EVO when I got bored of seeing Fox, Sheik and Jiggly after 20 minutes while the Street Fighter tournament was full of players trying their best with almost all characters in the roster.
Since Smash 4 is being developed for tournament players as well, I expect deep commitment from Nintendo on this matter, but until now, we haven't seen much when it comes to game updates and patches, even though both the WiiU and 3ds allow that.
3 - Smash is advertising
This is probably one of the saddest points i'm going to make. If you remember that famous Famitsu interview, "Characters from a series that has no future are rarely chosen". Two other quotes from the same interview about how Sakurai chooses characters are "We conduct a character popularity poll both domestically and internationally" and "We also research games that are currently being developed".
I can't help to notice the emphasis on the sales of future titles, which is completely out of place in a game that has several characters coming from franchises that haven't had a game in years, sometimes even a decade. The reality is that almost every player of Smash knows who are the characters and what game they're from while casual players, if they somehow end up buying a smash game over the latest popular game, will hardly feel interested in a game just by looking at a character (if the character isn't ZSS and the player isn't a horny teen, that is).
The great majority of smash players have seen and played most of Nintendo franchises but to give recognition only to newly-released titles with some newcomers makes it seem like they're forgetting why Nintendo is still big after all these years, and that's a solid legacy of franchises. Just off the top of my head, King K.Rool from DKC, Isaac from Golden Sun and the OCs from Advance Wars had their fair share of followers in the past. If we talk about third-party characters the list can grow even more with characters like Crono from Chrono Trigger and Simon Belmont from Castlevania. If Nintendo wants to appeal to long-time players it should bring out the legends of the past, not the newest talk of the towns like Robin, Wii Fit Trainer and Dark Pit.
4 - Consumers are content creators
This is a common problem for many eastern companies, considering players as mere consumers of a finished product. The truth is some of the most cunning players are creators too and Smash makes no difference. As soon as some players were presented the opportunity of changing the game to their liking, adding textures, models or tweaking the mechanics of the game altogether, they became active creators. To put it bluntly, projects like Brawl+, minus, balanced and Project M, gave a breath of life to a game deemed dead. Just browse the vault for five minutes and I'm sure you'll find something you'll want to run your old copy of Brawl for, whether it's just a new moveset for a character or a complete overhaul of the game's mechanics.
Is this just amateurish fiddling? Yes, for the most part. Is it without value? Absolutely not. Some of the best games in history are born from the work of spare-time game designers, acknowledged by people with tons of cash in their pockets and little time to think about new games. Examples include games like Counter Strike, Dota and Team Fortress. As you may have noticed, I mentioned three PC games. The reason is quite simple: console games are inherently harder to mod because the inner workings of the consoles are harder to access in the first place. In fact, modding of console games often begins after the games have been fully emulated (see rom hacking).
But with Brawl happened something on an entirely different level. Hackers managed to make the Wii do their bidding and soon after modding for Brawl was in the hands of common people like you and me, able to read a list of instructions without screwing up. I'm sure Nintendo realized this but chose not to act for the same reasons they've been telling us for years: fear of piracy, ease of use and creating a family-friendly game system. Instead, they made Mario Maker to make your own Mario levels. Something Lunar Magic and other softwares have been doing for years. The correct course of action, in this case, would have been hiring the people behind the wii hacking or Project M. Building a system that does not make smash modding obsolete but encourages it. Which brings us to...
5 - I already have Project M
i can honestly say that after I installed Project M I said to myself "Why wasn't Brawl already like this?". Even with the few modifications I made with a mod of my own, the changes of Project M are something that should have been in Brawl from the start. To name a few, Wario's moveset is remarkably better, Ike is a lot faster and Bowser and Ganondorf are extremely powerful instead of being walking sandbags. Headlines like Wired's "The Best Super Smash Bros. Isn’t Made by Nintendo" didn't manage to make Nintendo raise an eyebrow because, apparently, everything is back to Brawl's version of the characters. I must now ask a question to Nintendo: why should I pay 55€ to play something that plays like Brawl for the most part while I can already enjoy a game made specifically for me by other players like me? Add to that the fact that I now own a PC that can run Dolphin at 100% speed with improved graphics and you've got a recipe for the "who cares about your newest product" cake. Furthermore, Project M has already added Mewtwo and Roy back to the roster completely free of charge. Something Sakurai's team will only start to scratch next spring in a paid DLC (if we're lucky).
6 - The 3DS demo
That didn't impress me. I can't talk about the graphics of the game, obviously tied to the limited hardware, but the overall feeling of the characters and controls wasn't good. Comparing directly Mario and Link to their PM counterparts, Smash 4 feels still slow, just a bit faster than Brawl at this point, with low gravity and unresponsive controls. All of it masked by a sovrabundance of graphical effects that try to convey a speed that just isn't there, like a character surrounded by a shining spikes leaving a trail of dense smoke after being launched for the mere height of his double jump. The worst part is that beside the control scheme, the game will probably feel identical on WiiU.
7 - Nintendo games are becoming simpler
This is common to many other publishers and developers, mind you, but the focus here is Nintendo and the WiiU. As of today, I have bought Nintendoland, NSMBU, NSLU, Pikmin 3, SM3DW, Mario Kart 8, DKC Tropical Freeze, The Wonderful 101, Bayonetta 2 and Bayonetta, and to my surprise the games I have enjoyed the most are the ones developed by studios other than Nintendo's internal dev studios. It seems to me that Nintendo can still craft very pretty games but under the shiny painted hood of games like SM3DW and MK8 lies an engine that doesn't run faster than 20km/h because it would be too hard to handle for some players. You may object that I became too good at video games from too much time playing. While this is true to an extent, it fails to explain why I still find bramble levels in DKC2 very hard, and this happens in many other games that require perfect execution even though I perfectly know what to do (the Mothula boss from ALTTP, for example).
Don't kid yourself, Nintendo games ARE becoming easier and more forgiving and, unsurprisingly, this reflects badly on the WiiU userbase. If you remember the comments on Dark Souls 2's producer Takeshi Miyazoe about the possibility of DS2 hitting WiiU as well you know what I'm talking about. If not, you just need to know many dedicated players consider owning WiiU and PC the right choice for this generation of consoles. WiiU for Nintendo Games and PC for everything else. The problem is Nintendo games are becoming lackluster and despite the only type of player you can find on WiiU is a hardcore player Nintendo continues to make games for the whole family, like the Wii disappointment never happened.
I fear Smash 4 will suffer the same fate, held down by the shackles of "accessibility" and only supported as long as there's DLC to be sold.
And there you have it. My 7-points-long dilemma that will probably haunt me until the release when I'll probably decide if I should give it a chance (if retailers even bother making it playable at kiosks like it happened for Melee). The wall of text above should have put off most readers with a short attention span, but if you've reached this point congratulations for your patience and I hope you'll take your time crafting an equally in-depth response. This is the question I'm asking you then: do you think the recent changes in Nintendo's development strategies and attitude towards players have affected the quality of Smash 4 to its roots despite the incredible number of features included? If not, what is a selling point, in your opinion, that I should consider to buy Smash 4 for?
Last edited:
disagrees
