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I think fighting games can be imbalanced inherently upon the role of the character.
There seems to be a general balance/trend in character creation that small fast characters will have fast safe options but die easy and kill slowly while big fat characters have slower moves and are less safe but kill faster and die slower. Inherently, I believe fighting games will favor the faster safer characters as top level play pushes them to play more perfectly. For many and probably most, faster characters are probably more fun to play as which helps increase the amount of people trying to advance that particular character's metagame. Balance is also a thing that we look at relevant to top level, but the game designer's thought probably isn't capable or even concerned with the level that we judge balance. I think there is also this trend/balance in that big fat chars are easier to play and better and low levels but as skill gradually goes up fighting games in general favor faster chars who are hard because of their need to make very few mistakes and play with tighter execution windows. Because of inherent character roles in fighting game which intentionally design balance around harder,easier, faster, bulkier, and other attributes which absolutely do not scale and are not intended to scale with skill, I don't think fighting games will ever have good balance by design. I didnt really factor in depth/complexity of the game itself, but less complex games can be more balanced because the differences in characters are less extreme. I believe the general thought of smash64 balance revolves around that every character has amazing punish games which removes depth and character roles for the most part making balance being heavily centered around which char can better get that first hit in neutral.
I also don't know what the true definition of balance would be and what explicitly constitutes viable or not and I dont think many people give a very technical definition of a game being balanced. Context also matters a lot in judging balance. I think through varying perspectives and definitions, a lot of the smash games have their own ways of being considered balanced.
Also I think the mental aspect is something worth noting. That slow character idea only works with peach and samus really and they are very safe but what they bring to the table mentally is if You land a move on them and don't trade it takes more hits and time and they have an unnoticed edge on adapting with the spare time they have to think and take account all the details. And more so with samus they can reach into their pocket of gimmicks and find an answer often.
Sadly most slow people like bowser when hit they get no edge because he basically gets locked into a never winning juggle or just barely set to off balance to change the pace.
This has been coming up a lot lately over here, and again the best term I have heard to describe it is "beautiful accident". Melee has almost perfect balance. The best fox player could play the best DK player and lose if they had never learned how to deal with that particular opponent as DK before. The variety of ways to play makes it ultra-balanced, and if you think I am wrong you completely have the right to think that but that is just one opinion.
Melee is not balanced at all. It's played competitively more than the other Smash games because it's faster paced than the other Smash games, not because it's more balanced.
Melee, by the way, is such a unique game with such unique characters that a full roster cast balance would be absurd to even consider (and it wasn't intended at launch, this is a party game, not an esports franchise title!. When you have a lot of characters and you want all of them to be viable against every other fighter you have to give up uniqueness. We saw this with WOW pvp through the ages, you can have a unique range of different MMO classes with radically different movement options and skillets, but this will always come at this expense of balance; frost mage vs warrior being literally a 100-0 matchup in a duel, beast mastery hunters absolutely tearing through warlocks, who in turn had an absurd matchup against any type of Mage.
Look at WOW pvp today, largely balanced around duels and small scale arena matches. Characters all have argely the same moveset, self heals, blinks, etc.
Nah anything can be overcome to a point. Maybe not bowser vs m2k sheik but You can still do things.
Just the skill creep is so high and while marth has a higher skill ceiling then say bowser it's just marth can play more.
Dding depth as far as raw movement has equal depth for everyone for the most part, but marth can use it more often and if a bowser main had that level of spacing and dd poker he'd get a few more whiffs or approaches but where marth should dd bowser doesn't always have that option. So it's used much much less
This is the question that should be asked if we really desire to debate this - without the common ground of a common definition this debate will go nowhere, because one person will say "this game is unbalanced because of x reason" and another will say "this game is balanced for y reason" but both will fail because you'll be arguing apples and oranges - "balanced" is not the opposite of "unbalanced" because "balance" means anything from the number of viable characters to the disproportionate gap between a top tier character and the rest of the cast. These are two very different things with two very different definitions.
Here is my verbose definition up front, it covers most of the details: "Balance" is a word best-used when referring to the individual ease of skill to reward ratios for any given character and the proportionate, relative discrepancy of those ratios when compared to the ease of skill to reward ratios of the rest of the cast, in both the casts' individual own capabilities, and the casts' individual abilities to be able to deal with the rest of the cast - all relative to the fundamental structure of the game. Additionally, a good, balanced game is also one that allows the player to explore the various options within that game's mechanics with relative ease as a difficulty curve proportionate to the power (ease of skill to reward ratio) of those options.
Now, I wouldn't say that to anyone except a designer, except even then I would rather say it as a series of questions ("Does your best character have an ability that counters every other character? Does he have something that easily counters most characters? Does this ability allow him to capitalize in large forms or small forms?"), but simplified I would put it as this: Is your top character broken? Do your top characters not allow the other top characters to win fairly equally? Then you have an unbalanced game.
Side note: There's an important second part here that acts a check to the first part. Imagine we had a game where one character has infinite shines, another character travels at warp speed, and one can stun the rest of the cast for 5 seconds and deal 200% damage with a knockback blow. Well, clearly, everyone's on the same page here: yeah, these characters are "broken" when compared to normal characters, but since all the characters have relatively similar beast abilities, they are "balanced" in their own regard. However, this game may not also be "fun," though, since there's the little effort to getting a big reward: we perfectly space then get a kill, the game is over soon. So the characters must be balanced to the game, and also the characters to each other.
Basically, my argument is that it doesn't matter if 20 or even 100 characters aren't "viable", as long as a core sect of characters are roughly equal in terms of power. Now you may make the argument that the top 6 are unbalanced as compared to the rest of the game, but that does not make the game unbalanced, only a certain section of the game (and in that case, it would be the lower end of the game which is under-balanced, not the top end being over-balanced, because we can see from evidence it's the upper levels of gameplay that make this game interesting and that also seem balanced). And so I make a distinction from "game" to "portions of the game that are not equal," and I use "balance" to refer to the "top-end" or ceiling of the game, rather than to describe the low-end or less-coordinated parts or aspects of the game.
I see it as the number of tournament viable characters divided by the number of the whole cast. In Melee's case, it would be 8/26. And it's also about how good/bad the best and worst characters are to each other. The closer the cast is to being as effective as each other, the better
To rephrase what I said above: There are two ways to look at balance, and solely looking at the number of viable characters in a game is not one of them.
So let's look where defining "balance" as a ratio between the number of viable characters divided by the number of unviable characters falls short. Say I take Smash 64, with whatever balance it has for 12 characters, and then I add in a bunch of under-powered fighting-polygon characters who are floaty, can't combo, and die easily - but they are selectable characters!
Obviously, the "balance" of the game suddenly goes down as the number of unviable characters goes up, but what does that tell me about the game? Nothing! When "balance" is used to refer to a game I've often seen it used as a negative or positive thing to describe how the best parts of the game relate to each other, which more along the lines of your second definition.
So let's take for example Starcraft, often heralded as one of the most balanced competitive games ever. What makes Starcraft balanced is that each of the 3 selectable races had a near-equal shot at winning against any other race. That's it. It wasn't that Protoss was wildly worse than Zerg or Terran or that Protoss and Terran were equally matched with each other while Zerg had an advantage against one and a disadvantage against the other (maybe slightly but not enough to consistently justify saying one was over the other). What this means, however, is two things: 1. That the races were near-equivalent to each other in all possible matchups, and 2. That no race came out on top as dominating all games against another race, because then that aspect would be described as unbalanced.
Let's now relate that to Smash. In Brawl, Meta Knight is by far the best, and most others are bad. But can we call that unbalance for opposite reasons that we can call Starcraft balanced? No, because here, balance DOES exist, it just exists outside of Meta Knight, and outside of the bottom cast - we can take a defined slice of the upper-middle part of the cast and call that 'balanced'. So what can be said about Brawl? Some of the cast is balanced to itself; but Meta Knight is "broken," for two reasons, that he requires an extreme amount of ease to play effectively (the effort--reward ratio is unbalanced compared to the rest of the cast's effort-reward ratios), and that he consistently outperforms and outplays all other characters in the game, with almost no counters (he is unbalanced when compared with the rest of the cast).
Let's now relate that to Fox in Melee: Fox is widely regarded as the best character (for good reason). But what makes Fox so good? And what makes others so bad? Does Fox require an extreme amount of ease to play him effectively? I'll say for the most part, not really, no - he requires a dedicated amount of game knowledge and game skill to perform effectively - here, tech skill doesn't reward you with game performance because bad Foxes will get crushed by anyone who plays the game correctly. Same goes for Falcos, and Falcons, and Marths, and pretty much anyone else in this game (except, maybe, Sheik).
The "problem" with Fox is not that he will consistently outperform or outplay - now, I'm going to make an important caveat here - other characters outside of the top 50-100 people in the world at this game.
What I'm saying is that the people who you see dominating with Fox or Falco are people who have been playing this game for 5-10 years and have been consistently at the top of their scene. But go to any local scene that doesn't have a top 32 or top 50 player in it and play their best Fox, their best Falco, their best any-character with any character you have in the game: the game will be determined by the better player. This is just a fact of the gam, Melee has always been like that, and unless you have very high skill, may very well be constantly like that. Ka-master was a Luigi player who was the top of the WA PR scene for a long time until he finally moved, better than Silent Wolf, better than Bladewise at the time (both arguablytop32 players).
What you guys aren't realizing is that the character diversity is Melee is greater than you think it is. You think it's only the "top 6", but you have to realize you're viewing that in a lens of the top 8 players in the world! You think maybe it's also because those guys are smart, and they dedicate thousands of hours to mastering their character? So we take a lens of the upper-competitive players of the game but not the top-most percentile of the players of the game and you'll see a more diverse range of ICs, Docs, Ganons, DKs, and the occasionally Luigi, in addition to Fox, Falco, Falcon, Sheik, Marth, Jiggs, Peach. I mean look at Qerb, a GAME & WATCH player who ranked 13th last year on a list with M2k, Hax, The Moon, and DJ Nintendo (fox+samus+bowser main!) on it! The problem with viewing the game as unbalanced is not within the characters themselves but that you're viewing it in the context of the same 50-100 people who are consistently top players and have been playing this game and their characters for the last 10 years, who are dominating their charts with the top 6, which is who they're good at. But just taking a quick look at some of the regional power rankings for the last year and I'm seeing V3ctorman at 6th with Yoshi under Axe, Forward, and Tai. Washington has a Samus at 5th and a Falcon at 3rd underneath SIlent Wolf and Bladewise. I mean apparently Minnesota has a guy who mains KIRBY the most awful character in the game at 4TH on the PR. Clearly the cast is more diverse than you're giving it credit for but aside from the individual differences of the characters I think the problem at large lies with looking at Mang0 and Armada and M2K and PPMD and thinking "wow, the same falco/marth/jiggs/peach/fox matchups are being played over and over again, clearly this game only favors the top 6", which seems true but you're also looking at the top of the top minds at the game: Mang0 or Armada could destroy anyone else with any character in the game - M2K does it on the daily.
Now, I just said two things which could seem to contradict each other but they do not, I submit. I said that we are looking at the game through the lens of the top players, not necessarily the most experienced players, because then I tried to name players who are dedicated specialists of their characters but who may not necessarily be "top" players, but they are still dominating with their character. If I had named only HugS/Samus at 7th and Eddy Mexico/Luigi at 8th on the Socal list, or if I had looked to Axe's top 8 Evo '14 placement with Pikachu as another example, my argument may have gone another way. Still, what about that top 8? What if only the top 6 characters will reign the top 8 placements as some of you seem to think? To that, I really find that I can look at Axe bringing Pikachu and Plup bringing Samus to top 8 positions, top players vs. top players, skill vs skill. If there is a detriment or discrepancy to the matchup, it doesn't lie (solely) with the characters they are playing. That said, I still think Axe and such is a testament (and perhaps more recently aMSa) to good players bringing lower-tier characters higher through skilled play, because the fact still stands that someone is having Pikachu leak through the ranks and ranks of Fox/Falco/Falcon/Sheik/Marth/Peach/Jiggs players and placing 8 at a top tier tournament. Yoshi, fallen since '04, was brought back to semi-relevance with aMSa and Plup still brought Samus as a top 8 placement amidst an ocean of Foxes and Falcos. Again these are smart players vs smart players, not just weak characters vs strong characters. I mean not to pick on Silent Wolf but he's widely been regarded as the most technical Fox player for several years now and that does not make him a consistent top 8 player like someone like Mang0, who is a much better player, however you slice it. But maybe Plup is just that much smarter.
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So really, this game is not unbalanced in the sense that the top 6 are miles above the rest - if they were, then we would be seeing solely top 6 characters in the top 8 placements, because they would be so overpowered they would dominate about every scene. We are finding however top tier players dominating their respective scenes with their dedicated characters, and really only within the top 50 +- 50 players in the world, which is less than 1/10 of 1% of people who play this game with any competitive interest (attending tournaments, reading online, etc.)
As someone who plays traditional FG's, Melee is definitely in the upper-end of unbalanced games. Truthfully, Melee is a kusoge, it's just a really good kusoge. In most FG's that people actually care about, losing at the character screen is rare, not common for half the goddamn cast. Usually nearly every character is useable--yeah some characters are clearly better and some are just plain ***, but you can still win.
Melee's top-tiers dominate the metagame in a way that most FG's would find utterly alien.
Are you sure about the game being lost at the character select screen?
Here are the top 25 placings at Evo 2014.
SF4
23 different characters played. You're right, this game is very, very well balanced it seems.
MvC3
Since you have to pick 3 characters at a time I'll just look at the pick frequencies of the top 4-picked characters:
Dr. Doom - 14
Vergil - 10
Zero - 10
Magneto/Dante/Nova tied with 4
and compared to SSBM
Fox - 12
Marth - 5
Peach - 4
Sheik-ICs tied with 3
Melee appears to just as if not more diverse than MvC3 here.
SSBM
14 different characters played.
Killer Instinct
8 different characters played.
BlazBlue
14 different characters played.
The rest of the games didn't have more than top 8 or top 13 placings, but look at this:
Melee still saw 9 different characters played in the top 8 at Evo.
Your argument simply has little to no evidence to back it up (not saying it's necessarily wrong, but I just don't understand the sentiment), unless you can point to me a specific game with specific, representative placings, and then maybe an argument on why this game matters to you or others, because from what I'm seeing here Melee is doing pretty alright in the top levels, and as a completely different game too, aside from the very longstanding SF series, the IV series coming out several years after Melee's release.
Furthermore, Melee would still be Melee even if it didn't have Jiggs or Marth or Sheik or Young Link or Mewtwo. Simply increasing the number of viable characters in a game does not make it a "good" or "better" game, just as having a number of unviable characters in a game does not make it a "bad game."
And as compared to a different (yet somewhat similar) game
Melee's balance is pretty darn good in the scheme of things. The fact that amazing players like Axe and aMSa are getting the results their skills deserve is really what it's all about.
As I agree above, I think this is a deserved point. I'm going to take a look at Melee's top player character diversity, make some comments, and then because I still dislike analyzing in a vacuum, I'm going to roughly compare it to the diversity of characters picked in another game, League of Legends, on the basis that League, like Melee, caters to a large and diverse fanbase, League having over 67 million active players, but it also having the benefit of having the stats of billions of games. As well, League is a game which undergoes routine patching/balancing and seems to take pride in the phrase, "strategic diversity," so we'll see how Melee stacks up. As well, I think League plays like a team-based fighting game more than anything, with quick cooldown abilities and solo and team-based skirmishes--with objectives in mind--being the heart of the game.
[Note: I'm not counting LCS or Pro teams as they play arguably a different game since they are sponsored to practice as a team to specifically fight set teams of other sponsored, practicing players, highly different than the "solo queue" ladder which I think is more similar to the singles tournament bracket. Instead, I'm counting "Challenger" players, a group which does include the pros and where is the pros come from, but is an unstructured format without sole sponsorships or player representations (i.e. being able to practice all day as part of their career).]
Out of a population of over 10 million ranked League accounts, there are about 1700 Challenger accounts. I will do this two ways, first equating these as the Top 100 50 (I can only find tournament data for the top 50) Melee players, which I think is generous since League has far more many players (see note below), and then by taking the percentage of Challenger accounts and converting that to a number of Melee players who would statistically be considered "Challenger." I'm also going to go conservative on the League number due to individuals having multiple Challenger accounts and such and say that the number of players is even smaller and round that 1700 number down by an arbitrary 200 (roughly 10% of the Challenger accounts) to make it 1500.
So 1500/10,000,000=.00015% of League players are Challengers.
For the first Melee calculation I'm also going to use both 150,000 and 250,000 as the number of Melee players, since I'm not entirely sure of the range but I know it's at least 150,000 and probably no higher than really 250,000.
Top 50/150,000=.00033%, Top 50/250,000=.0002%. So for the first equation the Top 50 Melee players are between .00033% and .0002% of the player base, roughly 1.3-2x as many Top players as there are Challenger players.
For the second calculation, we apply the .00015% of players as qualifying as "Challenger" to the pool of Melee players, giving us .00015(150,000)=22.5 and .00015(250,000)=37.5, or a range of 23-38 players (which is 1.3-2x less than the last number, accordingly). Thus, I will look at the tournament placings closest to the numbers 25, 38, and 50.
I'm not going to compare Melee doubles to League 5s because Melee was balanced more for singles as League is balanced more for teams. I'll look at the top 49 each of Apex 2014 and Evo 2014 results for the Top 50, and then only the top 25 and 33 results for the Challenger ratio numbers (23-38 players).
Since Melee has a cast of 26 and League has a cast of 123 (currently), we can set a threshold where we multiple everything by 5 to compensate our comparisons since League has 5x the cast to balance. While not terrible, however, let's consider that League forces 10 characters per match to be represented with no duplicates, with 6 unavailable (banned) characters, while Melee only forces at least 1 character type choice to be made (it allows duplicates), forcing league to have 5x more character diversity per match than Melee by default, although Melee can have 2x as much single character pick percent. While this second statistic (2x pick percent) only favors the strength of Melee's diversity more (since we have the option to play duplicates yet we choose not to), the fact that League forces 5x more characters to be played each match seems to balance out the 5x increase in League's cast. However, since League either has 5x more characters than Melee (10 characters compared to 2 characters) or 10x more characters than Melee per match (10 characters compared to 1 character), depending on whether a mirror match was played, League forces 10/117 or 8.5% of its characters to be played each match 100% of the time while Melee only forces 1/26 or 38% of its character pool to be played per match, which has a probability of happening half the time, while there's a chance that it plays 2/26 or 7.7% of its character pool the other 50% of the time (which is roughly the same percentage as League's 8.5% since the casts are roughly 5x different than each other in size). On average, League sees 1.5x more of its cast than Melee does by default, cast-sizes accounted for.
(Now, the rate at which Fox is picked is fairly disproportionate to the rest of the cast, but imagine if Smash didn't allow dittos to be played, interestingly.)
Oh wait, I already did it above, look at me.
Illuminerti.
I will do a comparison of Challenger(1) x MeleeType(2) x MeleeRange(2) , giving 2 different sets of 2 results which I will sort with their respective tournament results (3 kinds), to finally compare with a possible 1.5x adjustment multiplier found above, and... just skip to the bottom if you wish.
Top 50
Apex: 16 different characters, 16/26=62% of the cast.
Evo: 15 different characters, 15/26=58% of the cast.
Average=60% of the cast showing top 50 placings over two major national tourneys.
Top 33
Apex: 16 different characters, 14/26=62% of the cast.
Evo: 14 different characters, 14/26=54% of the cast.
Average=58% of the cast showing top 33 placings.
Top 25
Apex: 13 different characters, 13/26=50% of the cast.
Evo: 13 different characters, 13/26=50% of the cast.
Average=50% of the cast showing top 25 placings.
Frequency% Top 50 Apex
n=71, %
fox 19 entrants, =27% of total 71 entrants
jiggs 4,6
peach 5,7
falco 10,14
marth 8,11
sheik 7,10
pika 1,1
ylink 1,1
ics 2,3
samus 5,7
falcon 4,6
yoshi 2,3
doc 1,1
ganon 1,1
bowser 1,1
Frequency% Top 33 Apex n=54
fox 18,33
jiggs 4,7
peach 4,7
falco 5,9
marth 6,11
sheik 5,9
pika 1,2
ylink 1,2
ics 2,4
samus 2,4
falcon 1,2
yoshi 2,4
doc 1,2
ganon 1,2
bowser 1,2
Frequency% Top 25 Apex n=41
fox 14,34
jiggs 3,7
peach 2,5
falco 3,7
marth 6,15
sheik 5,12
pika 1,2
ylink 1,2
ics 1,2
samus 2,5
yoshi 1,2
doc 1,2
ganon 1,2
Frequency% Top 50 Evo
n=70
fox 19,27
jiggs 2,3
peach 6,9
falco 7,10
marth 8,11
sheik 8,11
pika 2,3
ylink 2,3
ics 3,4
samus 4,5
falcon 5,7
yoshi 1,1
luigi 1,1
ganon 1,1
doc 1,1
Frequency% Top 33 Evo
n=54
fox 16,30
jiggs 1,2
peach 4,7
falco 5,9
marth 8,15
sheik 6,11
pika 1,2
ylink 2,4
ics 3,6
samus 3,6
falcon 2,4
yoshi 1,2
luigi 1,2
ganon 1,2
Frequency% Top 25 Evo
n=37
fox 12,32
jiggs 1,3
peach 4,11
falco 2,5
marth 5,14
sheik 3,8
pika 1,3
ylink 1,3
ics 3,8
samus 1,3
falcon 2,5
yoshi 1,3
luigi 1,3
ROUNDED DOWN (the numbers here indicate slightly fewer entrants than the actual number of attendants, also causing the percents to be higher, so while there may be 1 jiggs and 1 yoshi entrant on average the jiggs is represented as 4% of the characters selected while the yoshi only represents 2%, because i'm averaging appearances and percentages separately so the numbers will add up to more than 100% which is fine)
Top 50 Averages
n=15
char n,%
fox=19 entrants on average, makes up 27% of the total character representation
jiggs 3,4
peach 5,8
falco 8,12
marth 8,11
sheik 7,10
pika 1,1
ylink 1,1
ics 2,3
samus 4,6
falcon 4,6
yoshi 1,1
doc 1,1
ganon 1,1
bowser 1,1 total%=93
Top 33 Averages
n=16
fox 17,31
jiggs 2,4
peach 4,7
falco 5,9
marth 7,12
sheik 5,10
pika 1,2
ylink 1,3
ics 2,5
samus 2,5
falcon 1,3
yoshi 1,3
doc 1,2
ganon 1,2
bowser 1,2
luigi 1,2
total%=102
Top 25 Averages
n=15
fox 13,33
jiggs 1,4
peach 3,8
falco 2,6
marth 5,14
sheik 4,10
pika 1,2
ylink 1,2
ics 1,3
samus 1,4
falcon 2,5
yoshi 1,2
luigi 1,3
doc 1,2
ganon 1,2 total%=100
Summary:
As we can see, from Top 50 to Top 25, Fox generally keeps the same proportion of play at around 30% pickrate, only decreasing linearly as the divisions get smaller. Jiggs, Peach, Sheik, and the rest of the cast generally keep the same proportions, with some slight droppage in upper tier characters (Samus). The most notable discrepancies are the drop in Falco play from 12% to 6% and the increase magnification of Marth representation from 11% to 14%. More or less standard behavior for the strong, consistent characters. Therefore, going by similar reasoning should be suitable for League character pickrates.
__
I went by most popular League characters because in League, popularity is usually dictated by who's strongest at the moment. Also see note immediately above. I then tallied pickrates until I reached 100%, which should most accurately segment the most-popular of the most-picked characters. Here is a snapshot of a single continuous month of ranked gameplay by Challenger-level players.
Popular League Characters
n=36
highest picked=4300 matches, 7.63%
lowest picked=800 matches, 1.41% Total=101%
Conclusion
Melee sees 60% of its cast on average inside and outside what could be considered a "Challenger" level (the top .00015% of ranked players) bracket of play (merely 25 players vs 50+ players), whereas League's Challenger bracket (around 1500 players) only sees around 31% of its character pool played on average. As well, the bottom selection of League's most popular/best characters are still not picked as much as Melee's bottom-pick characters after adjusting for League's cast size, which means that Melee's lower-end picks are seen as more viable than League's lower-end picks.
tin other words
Melee can see 2x the same character pick rate as League and yet still have 2x the character diversity in League, while League already sees a relative 1.5x more of its cast per match on average/statistically speaking. (This basically means Melee has 2-3x more character diversity than League when comparing the same echelon [Challenger] of play.) I feel confident I could look up pro player results now and find similar if not worse diversity.
Tires Don Exits
This is mostly a note on tiers, and while it's not directly related to balance, I had something to say, I'll keep it short.
Another thing I find kinda sad is that it seems that everyone is agreeing that there may be an infinite skill cap on all characters.
Yet every time I suggest that Melee doesn't need a tier list (which is slowly becoming apparent to me), people say that there's a divide between good and bad characters.
Both are true, if you are a robot. But you have to realize that tiers are non-linear, there is no perfect "progression" from worst to best, and that there are objectively better characters based on their effort-reward ratios and the abilities to capitalize on the fundamental structure of the game. I'll give you an example.
Let's take Ganon, and Fox. I'll assert that the structure behind Melee is what defines its meta, in this case, there are two skills that all characters should strive to capitalize on or beat in order to win: agility, and the option to punish (out of that agility).
So Fox does that perfectly. He can bait, he maneuvers, he gets in where you don't want him, and he can punish out of shield, or with shines, or because of his shear maneuverability. These are the elements needed to win at Melee, and you'll see that most of the other characters tend to line up on this spectrum with varying degrees of specialty, Sheik with speed and force, Marth and Falco with combos and zoning, or what have you, but each of those characters is agile and has the option to punish out of almost anywhere.
Now take Ganon, he doesn't do this. Instead, Ganon tries to counter that structure by shear power and tankiness. But soon enough we see that Ganon is limited by two things, the fact that the game doesn't revolve around an HP-type mechanism for KOing, and the fact that over time, Fox will eventually outdamage Ganon's if Fox can dodge him long enough by being to outmaneuver Ganon into a ledge KO, or however the Ganon-Fox matchup plays out - I think you get the idea.
Samus is someone else, and I know I talk about her a lot but she's a bit special in this context as she wants to break the meta but always finds herself limited. Samus is a great counter to the agility/punish structure because she's kind of anti-that - suddenly, Fox's approaches are made a but more awkward by Samus' tanky yet floatiness, she's like a floating sandbag in the air that can recover quickly, and then her abilities can combo Fox right back and even edgeguard just as well or perhaps better than Fox can edgeguard her. In addition, she has oddball moves like a ranged grab which is more a detriment than a benefit but it can home-in, and she can traverse FD or PS in 1s, in addition to her highly-variable recovery. She has some great defensive options too, but she doesn't really kill off the agility-punish game, instead more so pushing a baiting-punish game, if I may roughly describe it.
So what does this mean about the tier list? It means that the tier list, although roughly linear in Melee, does have characters who tend to stray from the 'structure' of the game (increase their percent, then ko through attack or ledgeguard) or act counters to another, but that there are also objectively better-than-other characters, although that progression may not be linear either.
You might like this note.
M2K made an interesting post last year where he discusses the undiscovered potential characters of Project: M who just aren't played a lot: that just because we see pros doing well with characters they are good at doesn't mean that the other characters are just plain bad.
I didn't even want to vote on the CT tier list because not only do i not trust any of their uneducated opinions, but as much experience as I have from fighting so many people and traveling everywhere, I don't fully trust my own either.
In Melee, I remember Mang0 said something along these lines: "Fox just allows me to play how I want to." His character is just extremely capable, not necessarily "the best".
TL;DR
Melee is as diverse if not more diverse than the other games out there; as well, within the top 25 and 50 players of the game we can find 50-60% of the cast being played, and we find that the power of those top characters drops off quickly as we move away from the upper echelons of skilled players. Still, within the top echelons of players, a good portion of the lower cast is underpowered, and although this does not affect the "balance" of the top characters as compared to themselves, the top characters are not found to be strictly overpowered, either.
Final note: These findings don't go against, say, M2K's tier list of 'characters that matter': Falco > Fox > Puff > Sheik > Marth > Peach > ICs > Falcon > Doc > Pikachu > Luigi. I mean he may very well be right - Samus is a 'bad' character when you look at her in the context of the game, and maybe the only reason she ever got so high is because the guy who played her is insanely smart and knows his opponents (I'm sure having a top-pro player mentor helps as well). Human error and inconsistencies still exist, and brackets aren't perfect: it'll be something before DJ Nintendo gets to pull out Bowser in the top 32 again, but prove me wrong.
Here Is my verbose definition up front, it covers most of the details: "Balance" is a word best-used when referring to the individual ease of skill to reward ratios for any given character and the proportionate, relative discrepancy of those ratios when compared to the ease of skill to reward ratios of the rest of the cast, in both the casts' individual own capabilities, and the casts' individual abilities to be able to deal with the rest of the cast - all relative to the fundamental structure of the game. Additionally, a good, balanced game is also one that allows the player to explore the various options within that game's mechanics with relative ease as a difficulty curve proportionate to the power (ease of skill to reward ratio) of those options.
I would not say its the most balanced per say.... Its more like the most competitive and engaging due to the overall speed of the game being the fastest with a meta that is finely polished. The only thing that comes close to speed and skill right now is project m, but that still being worked on, and is in its infancy compared to melee.
Melee still saw 9 different characters played in the top 8 at Evo.
Your argument simply has little to no evidence to back it up (not saying it's necessarily wrong, but I just don't understand the sentiment), unless you can point to me a specific game with specific, representative placings, and then maybe an argument on why this game matters to you or others, because from what I'm seeing here Melee is doing pretty alright in the top levels, and as a completely different game too, aside from the very longstanding SF series, the IV series coming out several years after Melee's release.
Furthermore, Melee would still be Melee even if it didn't have Jiggs or Marth or Sheik or Young Link or Mewtwo. Simply increasing the number of viable characters in a game does not make it a "good" or "better" game, just as having a number of unviable characters in a game does not make it a "bad game."
First of all, going off of just the most popular games is a bad idea. SF4 isn't a very good game and is mostly propped up by its immense popularity. MVC3 is a shallow charicature of its predecessor and which is so stupid that no one, not even its players, take it seriously. Killer Instinct is just...did you REALLY have to bring that terrible game up? lol NO ONE gives a damn about that awful kusoge outside of people playing it for the money.
There are way more fighting games than those, such as Arcana Heart 3, which is so damn balanced that amongst its 24-character cast that many players list characters in only three tiers: S, A, and B. And they may be obscure but who cares if they're better anyway.
Moving on from that: 9 characters sounds impressive...but there are 25 characters in Melee. Many of these characters have unwinnable matchups against the top tiers. That is practically the definition of unbalance. And many of these characters do not see any play anywhere outside of random low-tier heroes. This is because the gap between the low-tiers and the high-tiers is so immense--the amount of options low-tiers have are extremely small, and the high tiers can often shut down these middling options for free with barely any work. A lot of their designs are inherently degenerate and poorly-made: Fox and Falco basically don't have any weaknesses and have moves which clearly weren't considered in context of each other ("hey, let's give Fox a one-frame reversal which spikes in midair and can be jump-cancelled! No one will ever abuse this!"), Shiek's frame data is just plain stupid, and Marth's tipper mechanics over-reward the player for something they should already be doing in the first place (and I'm saying this as a Marth main).
What do the low-tiers have? Nothing. Their movesets are also poorly-designed, but in the opposite way: they just plain suck. It's clear HAL and Sakurai barely did any sort of 1v1 testing on hazard-less stages with no items, because it should have been obvious that, say, Zelda or Kirby are just plain awful in nearly every way.
it's only due to sheer chance that the top tiers manage to be relatively well-balanced amongst themselves. This is the difference between Melee and many other FG's: the low-tiers in most FG's still have a chance to win. They will have to put in work, but they wont find themselves utterly shut down by every other character unless they're unusually horrible.
To provide an example: in Guilty Gear XRD, one of the best players in Japan (the region with the highest level of play) is FAB. He mains Potemkin and only Potemkin. He considers Pot to be the worst character in the game (that might have changed with a patch, but he thought this when the game launched). Despite this, FAB is one of the best XRD players in Japan and he has a very high win rate even against the top-tiers. You're not gonna see that in Melee. You wont see a Kirby main manage to maintain a high win rate against Fox's, Shieks, and Marths. It just wont happen. Kirby does not merely have bad tools, he does not have tools at all.
And you may disagree, but I believe that game with more viable characters but the same amount of depth is superior. More characters means more variety, more unique playstyles (want to play a slow and lumbering but high-power character who kills very early and takes forever to die in Melee? Oh wait, you can't), and places an emphasis on knowing each character and matchups. In addition, the increased width also leads to increased depth, because there's more matchups and characters to flesh out. Melee players like to counter this by saying "but less width means more time meant exploring the matchups which do matter" but this is complete BS. Every matchup can be broken-down in depth unless it's like 90-10 or 100-0 and a balanced game wouldn't have more than a tiny amount of those anyway. More matchups = more depth.
First of all, going off of just the most popular games is a bad idea. SF4 isn't a very good game and is mostly propped up by its immense popularity. MVC3 is a shallow charicature of its predecessor and which is so stupid that no one, not even its players, take it seriously. Killer Instinct is just...did you REALLY have to bring that terrible game up? lol NO ONE gives a damn about that awful kusoge outside of people playing it for the money.
There are way more fighting games than those, such as Arcana Heart 3, which is so damn balanced that amongst its 24-character cast that many players list characters in only three tiers: S, A, and B. And they may be obscure but who cares if they're better anyway.
Moving on from that: 9 characters sounds impressive...but there are 25 characters in Melee. Many of these characters have unwinnable matchups against the top tiers. That is practically the definition of unbalance. And many of these characters do not see any play anywhere outside of random low-tier heroes. This is because the gap between the low-tiers and the high-tiers is so immense--the amount of options low-tiers have are extremely small, and the high tiers can often shut down these middling options for free with barely any work. A lot of their designs are inherently degenerate and poorly-made: Fox and Falco basically don't have any weaknesses and have moves which clearly weren't considered in context of each other ("hey, let's give Fox a one-frame reversal which spikes in midair and can be jump-cancelled! No one will ever abuse this!"), Shiek's frame data is just plain stupid, and Marth's tipper mechanics over-reward the player for something they should already be doing in the first place (and I'm saying this as a Marth main).
What do the low-tiers have? Nothing. Their movesets are also poorly-designed, but in the opposite way: they just plain suck. It's clear HAL and Sakurai barely did any sort of 1v1 testing on hazard-less stages with no items, because it should have been obvious that, say, Zelda or Kirby are just plain awful in nearly every way.
it's only due to sheer chance that the top tiers manage to be relatively well-balanced amongst themselves. This is the difference between Melee and many other FG's: the low-tiers in most FG's still have a chance to win. They will have to put in work, but they wont find themselves utterly shut down by every other character unless they're unusually horrible.
To provide an example: in Guilty Gear XRD, one of the best players in Japan (the region with the highest level of play) is FAB. He mains Potemkin and only Potemkin. He considers Pot to be the worst character in the game (that might have changed with a patch, but he thought this when the game launched). Despite this, FAB is one of the best XRD players in Japan and he has a very high win rate even against the top-tiers. You're not gonna see that in Melee. You wont see a Kirby main manage to maintain a high win rate against Fox's, Shieks, and Marths. It just wont happen. Kirby does not merely have bad tools, he does not have tools at all.
And you may disagree, but I believe that game with more viable characters but the same amount of depth is superior. More characters means more variety, more unique playstyles (want to play a slow and lumbering but high-power character who kills very early and takes forever to die in Melee? Oh wait, you can't), and places an emphasis on knowing each character and matchups. In addition, the increased width also leads to increased depth, because there's more matchups and characters to flesh out. Melee players like to counter this by saying "but less width means more time meant exploring the matchups which do matter" but this is complete BS. Every matchup can be broken-down in depth unless it's like 90-10 or 100-0 and a balanced game wouldn't have more than a tiny amount of those anyway. More matchups = more depth.
Not looking for an argument but the statement "Kirby does not merely have bad tools, he does not have tools at all." is pretty much 100% untrue. He actually does have some respectable attributes and powerful moves. I'm listing these but there is also evidence of Mooninite and Tripe R taking sets off high tier high ranked players with Kirby (Mango beat Lucky with Kirby, and there are many other stream examples):
-Uair is extremely powerful (20% more KB and Velocity than Shiek's), Bair is 25% more powerful than Jigglypuff's. Both have good range and KO faster than most mid-low tiers Uairs and Bairs.
- Last hit Fair also kills faster than a lot of mid-low tiers fairs
- Dair is also a multi-hit meteor smash
-Dsmash has early top KO off the top and the same outer hitbox as Fox's Dsmash (powerful down and away angle)
- Usmash sweetspot next to Kirby is as powerful as fox's Upsmash (angle is not as good though)
- Dthrow > jab reset > charged smash pretty much guaranteed with missed tech
-Can duck a LOT of attacks (incl. most jabs), Spacie lasers/other projectiles, and most grabs
-Tilts are all amazing
-Can gimp early with multi-jumps and Fairs/Dairs/Bairs
-Has a great roll to make up for his slower movement
-Great air and spot dodge
-Hard to combo
-Great shield
Bowser is an example of a character with the least amount of tools, no tools at all once you know the matchup (and he can get comboed and shield poked too easily). Kirby gets undeserved last place, only reason he gets such low placement is just based on movement and combo ability (which is obviously bad)
I like how a person can say that a not even half a year released game which already shows a growing gap between the bad and the high tier characters is called "more balanced" than a game which is available for ~14 years where still a huge amount of characters (I.e. ~8) are viable with an even bigger amount of characters being able to hold their ground with a skilled player controlling them.
Imo: Now talking towards the majority of melee players, its most of the time not the fault of the character used which prevents the player to succeed but instead the players basic understanding or skill which does it.
And you may disagree, but I believe that game with more viable characters but the same amount of depth is superior. More characters means more variety, more unique playstyles (want to play a slow and lumbering but high-power character who kills very early and takes forever to die in Melee? Oh wait, you can't), and places an emphasis on knowing each character and matchups. In addition, the increased width also leads to increased depth, because there's more matchups and characters to flesh out. Melee players like to counter this by saying "but less width means more time meant exploring the matchups which do matter" but this is complete BS. Every matchup can be broken-down in depth unless it's like 90-10 or 100-0 and a balanced game wouldn't have more than a tiny amount of those anyway. More matchups = more depth.
More matchups isn't more depth. Watching people flounder in unfamiliar matchups and having potentially very chaotic matchup charts (too much weird RPS happening at character select - this isn't guaranteed to happen, but is more likely to happen with more matchups) is not exactly interesting.
If you play one matchup at maximum depth, and then go an play another matchup at maximum depth, assuming depth is the same in either game and in each matchup, the depth is the exact same. More stuff to explore and learn in a game doesn't mean it is more deep. Breadth and depth of gameplay have similar requirements for learning, but depth is what keeps the experience interesting and long-lasting.
I think "too many characters" is an issue no one seems to think about. What if there were 1 million characters? No one would know all the matchups for sooooo long. It would be stupid. What if there was an equivalent amount of learning necessary for 5 characters due to the depth of the game? I think that would be a lot more interesting for people playing the game.
You talk about play styles as though "slow and lumbering but high-power character who kills very early and takes forever to die" is a play style. That is more like hard limitations set by the character design. A character like that, to me, sounds like you can't do what you want to be doing, unless it is exactly "slow and lumbering but high-power character who kills very early and takes forever to die". The many play styles in melee are like sword-fighting styles. They're all quick killing methods and no one in a samurai-style sword fight is going to be tanking hits from swords, but people will fight vastly differently. It really is an art. That is what you get in melee. You don't need to add 50 characters to fit in all these different niches. The best part, as well, is that with less characters, you are more free to switch style mid-match. You can do whatever you want. You can be so creative. You don't have to just stick with your character's style, you make your own.
More matchups isn't more depth. Watching people flounder in unfamiliar matchups and having potentially very chaotic matchup charts (too much weird RPS happening at character select - this isn't guaranteed to happen, but is more likely to happen with more matchups) is not exactly interesting.
There's a lot of presumputious statements in there I could dissect but I want to focus on how you reach the wrong conclusion.
You maylay players like to act like learning MU's is this SUPER HARD AND GRUELING endeveour and uh yeah no it's not. If you don't know your MU's that's your fault, and you get bodied. Stop making excuses for laziness.
If you play one matchup at maximum depth, and then go an play another matchup at maximum depth, assuming depth is the same in either game and in each matchup, the depth is the exact same. More stuff to explore and learn in a game doesn't mean it is more deep.
I think "too many characters" is an issue no one seems to think about. What if there were 1 million characters? No one would know all the matchups for sooooo long. It would be stupid. What if there was an equivalent amount of learning necessary for 5 characters due to the depth of the game? I think that would be a lot more interesting for people playing the game.
Except no game has a million goddamn characters you hyperbolic twit. Learning how to fight 20-30 characters is NOT THAT DIFFICULT. If you are willing to put in the time to know the game, you have the time and drive to know the characters. A game like Melee, with multiple characters, should place an emphasis on knowing ALL of the cast, not just your character.
You talk about play styles as though "slow and lumbering but high-power character who kills very early and takes forever to die" is a play style. That is more like hard limitations set by the character design. A character like that, to me, sounds like you can't do what you want to be doing, unless it is exactly "slow and lumbering but high-power character who kills very early and takes forever to die". The many play styles in melee are like sword-fighting styles. They're all quick killing methods and no one in a samurai-style sword fight is going to be tanking hits from swords, but people will fight vastly differently. It really is an art. That is what you get in melee. You don't need to add 50 characters to fit in all these different niches. The best part, as well, is that with less characters, you are more free to switch style mid-match. You can do whatever you want. You can be so creative. You don't have to just stick with your character's style, you make your own.
I'm going to ignore the circlejerk near the end and focus on the beginning. Characters have limitations (unless their name is "Fox" or "Falco"). A competitive game is about using your character's strengths and dealing with their weaknesses. News flash: a character limits your playstyle. No one is going to play rushdown Peach or Falcon. There are plenty of character archetypes which aren't supported by the top tiers of Melee at all. Tanky slow characters? Zoners who rack up damage with keepaway before getting and fishing for a kill move? Trappers who lay down traps and force their opponents to move a certain way (projectiles are a weak form of this)? Characters who are weak but cause massive shield damage so they go for shield break combos?
oh wait, you'd probably just call those "gimmicks" like any salty maylay player who got bopped in PM kappa
Maylay players already whine about floaties for the crime of being different. Maylay supports exactly one playstyle: aggressive and fast rushdown. Which is nice. But not good for anyone who doesn't want to play aggressive and fast rushdown. Well, I mean, you can play Peach or Puff, but then you have to deal with salty players mad that non-floaties exist.
But whatevs, bro, keep on getting bodied as Young Link in Maylay www
Melee balanced? What a joke, haha. xD
You see there are 5 gods, then there's a decent gap between #5-8 then #8-12 are kinda meh, then the rest are why even bother in most cases. There are a lot of good fighting games that're unbalanced though, like Super Turbo (Claw all day everyday) and Guilty Gear XX Slash (Ky's godlike katame and Johnny's ridiculous coins), but I would love Melee to be more balanced since it would make the game a lot more interesting in my opinion.
Btw Smash 4 is a pretty balanced Smash game afaik, but it's like a completely different game then again. All smash games feel completely different from one another imo, mechanics wise.
There's a lot of presumputious statements in there I could dissect but I want to focus on how you reach the wrong conclusion.
You maylay players like to act like learning MU's is this SUPER HARD AND GRUELING endeveour and uh yeah no it's not. If you don't know your MU's that's your fault, and you get bodied. Stop making excuses for laziness.
>more stuff to explore doesn't mean more depth
lolmaylayplayers
Except no game has a million goddamn characters you hyperbolic twit. Learning how to fight 20-30 characters is NOT THAT DIFFICULT. If you are willing to put in the time to know the game, you have the time and drive to know the characters. A game like Melee, with multiple characters, should place an emphasis on knowing ALL of the cast, not just your character.
I'm going to ignore the circlejerk near the end and focus on the beginning. Characters have limitations (unless their name is "Fox" or "Falco"). A competitive game is about using your character's strengths and dealing with their weaknesses. News flash: a character limits your playstyle. No one is going to play rushdown Peach or Falcon. There are plenty of character archetypes which aren't supported by the top tiers of Melee at all. Tanky slow characters? Zoners who rack up damage with keepaway before getting and fishing for a kill move? Trappers who lay down traps and force their opponents to move a certain way (projectiles are a weak form of this)? Characters who are weak but cause massive shield damage so they go for shield break combos?
oh wait, you'd probably just call those "gimmicks" like any salty maylay player who got bopped in PM kappa
Maylay players already whine about floaties for the crime of being different. Maylay supports exactly one playstyle: aggressive and fast rushdown. Which is nice. But not good for anyone who doesn't want to play aggressive and fast rushdown. Well, I mean, you can play Peach or Puff, but then you have to deal with salty players mad that non-floaties exist.
But whatevs, bro, keep on getting bodied as Young Link in Maylay www
You maylay players like to act like learning MU's is this SUPER HARD AND GRUELING endeveour and uh yeah no it's not. If you don't know your MU's that's your fault, and you get bodied. Stop making excuses for laziness.
I'm not saying it's particularly hard, I am trying to say that it is not interesting once a match starts. If the characters are unique enough to be very different from each other, then they will have to have more and more attributes that limit how they can be played. It is also pretty boring to watch horribly imbalanced specific matchups. Character counterpicks are not interesting. These aren't guaranteed to be present in a larger cast, but they are definitely more likely to be.
What I mean is that it isn't always more depth if there is more to explore - more stuff to learn on its own does not mean the game is deeper. I don't think I need to go deep into this, but look at something like Skyrim. The map's freaking huuuuuge. There are tons of characters and small little story lines. And yet, I couldn't care less about almost any of them. None of them really relate to each other.
Except no game has a million goddamn characters you hyperbolic twit. Learning how to fight 20-30 characters is NOT THAT DIFFICULT. If you are willing to put in the time to know the game, you have the time and drive to know the characters. A game like Melee, with multiple characters, should place an emphasis on knowing ALL of the cast, not just your character.
Lol I must admit I've never been called a "hyperbolic twit" before.
Why should it place an emphasis on knowing all of the cast? Why can't it be about knowing how to play the game well? I can assure you that people know more than just their own character in melee. Obviously they probably wouldn't be super experts on the Ness matchup, but players that are good know how to play as / against the top 10-15 characters or more with a very deep level of understanding (probably a good chunk less for 'playing as', but still).
I'm going to ignore the circlejerk near the end and focus on the beginning. Characters have limitations (unless their name is "Fox" or "Falco"). A competitive game is about using your character's strengths and dealing with their weaknesses. News flash: a character limits your playstyle. No one is going to play rushdown Peach or Falcon. There are plenty of character archetypes which aren't supported by the top tiers of Melee at all. Tanky slow characters? Zoners who rack up damage with keepaway before getting and fishing for a kill move? Trappers who lay down traps and force their opponents to move a certain way (projectiles are a weak form of this)? Characters who are weak but cause massive shield damage so they go for shield break combos?
oh wait, you'd probably just call those "gimmicks" like any salty maylay player who got bopped in PM kappa
Why can't a competitive game be about using your OWN strengths and dealing with your OWN weaknesses?
I'd argue that characters in melee all have aspects of zoning, simply because there is so much emphasis on position and stage control. I still think "tanky slow" character is not a play style. I think a tanky slow character would promote defensive options. You could try Captain Falcon if you want this effect, or play a more defensive oriented marth. Samus is a lot like a chip damage and fish for a kill move character and several players have pushed her far into brackets at major tournaments. Your idea of "trappers" is already encapsulated within the overall zoning play style of melee (maybe not to the extent you want). As a Link main, this is how it often feels. Your last one with "weak except against shields" would probably just not work in melee. You don't need to shield in melee as much as in traditional fighting games, and crouch cancelling might just destroy the character.
For me, the issue with PM is that they put in so many random character-specific techniques that I don't think are necessary. Why does Link have such a ridiculous aerial glide toss? What's up with Lucas mega up-smash? WTF is Lucario? Why can Ike jump out of his side-b? While fox and falco can jump out of their shine, there is barely any other character-specific techniques in melee that are so extreme. They seemed to just tack these on to every character in PM.
While the strongest characters in melee may seem a little bland, they can do pretty much anything. They are still unique enough to be interesting when compared to each other, but they are also all so capable of doing things that you can do whatever you want with them. That is why they are so fun. I also believe that the distance from the top tiers to the mid tiers is not as massive as people make it out to be (I suppose it depends on the tier list being used).
Maylay players already whine about floaties for the crime of being different. Maylay supports exactly one playstyle: aggressive and fast rushdown. Which is nice. But not good for anyone who doesn't want to play aggressive and fast rushdown. Well, I mean, you can play Peach or Puff, but then you have to deal with salty players mad that non-floaties exist.
But whatevs, bro, keep on getting bodied as Young Link in Maylay www
I have the master sword, bro. I am big Link. If you want to talk about whining and ********, let's look at you, the marth main who ******* about spacies. I main Link and I still play melee (not even PM where he got buffed massively).
People ******** about floaty characters is just some group of bad players. I am not sure how large that group is (might even be majority lol), but, honestly, they are just being scrubs. Players that are actually good at this game and have a good understanding of it do not complain about these things. Regardless, the reason they complain is not that they are different, but that they are "easy" and "boring". It really is pretty frustrating to get killed by up-throw rest and Peach's down smash when your tech skill is inconsistent enough to make safe options unsafe. A lot of lower level players get obsessed with the technical aspect and speed of melee and assume floaties are easy and boring because they are technically easier and they are slower.
"aggressive and fast rushdown"
I know why people think the game is all this, but it really isn't. Honestly, this type of comment only comes from people who don't understand the game well. The game is fast, yes, and pretty much at all times, for certain (most?) characters, but it is not all aggression. Melee is honestly more skewed towards defensive play, imo. It is about getting your character in a spot where you can abuse your defensive options with the mixup of being able to do an attack that will hit faster than reaction plus defense will block / evade / beat it. Rather than just directly fighting your opponent (attack, block, grab), there is a huge emphasis on control of the match. The game seems aggressive because control is so important that you must actively contest it. If you give your opponent too much room to move around, they will just be all over you and you will just lose.
Also lol:
"Maylay supports exactly one playstyle: aggressive and fast rushdown"
"No one is going to play rushdown Peach or Falcon"
At first I thought it was the biggest BS in the world, but when I heard a guy say he didn't like PM because it was too balanced, he brought up a good point. I still don't agree with him by looking at PM's current state, but he claimed that making every character good by buffing an existing moveset while retaining the strengths of already good characters as in PM would eventually lead to a bunch of characters being good off of gimmicks, which would lead into a bad and less nuanced neutral game. I disagree that PM has reached that level, but it is also why I think Melee's state of (im)balance is a non-issue to the game's appeal and viability as a competitive game.
While this game is quite unbalanced, it does have something. There is no character without a flaw (like MK in Brawl) and there is no character without a pro.
Cons of Top 14 (S & A tier)
Fox - despite having the ability to end any stock with one hit, Fox's stock can end very easily with one hit, also very easy to chaingrab
Falco - Same as Fox yet exacerbated by inferior recovery and slower movement
Sheik - Poor recovery, has trouble KOing from center stage without tipper usmash
Marth - Cannot KO opponents at higher percents well, all true combos disappear and KO moves from stray hits are unreliable in neutral, has this problem against floaties at any percent
Jigglypuff - sucks on the ground, dies extremely early
Peach - sucks on the ground even more
C. Falcon - lack of projectile leads to a lack of approaches, bad recovery often means he is dead before he can land one hit
Ice Climbers - severely nerfed without Nana
Doc - Bad recovery, bad range
Pikachu - has trouble racking up damage quick unless you have Axe's movement.
Samus - Poor mobility in general without super wavedash, bad laggy grab
Ganon - Falcon's problems but also dreadfully slow
Luigi - recovery, while kind of long, can be edgeguarded on reaction, lacks good approaches
Mario - poor recovery, over-reliant on fsmash to kill
Pros of 15-26 (B & F tier)
Young Link - Good ability to control stage with projectiles, good mobility
Link - same as YL w/o mobility
DK - good Up-B OoS, Good combos, hindered only by size and vertical recovery
Yoshi - parrying, ECE, good combos, likely not low tier anymore
Zelda - Lightning kicks
Roy - quite mobile, f-smash is strong and comparatively easy to sweetspot, flare blade is good for edgegaurding, fast SHFFL
Mewtwo - Shadow Ball is a good projectile, fantastic recovery, DJC combos, great kill throws
Mr. Game & Watch - high recovery, good KO power, see Qerb
Ness - great DJC combos, F-smash, yo-yo glitch, back throw
Bowser - Up-B OoS, Koopa Klaw back throw, great kill power
Pichu - solid finisher in f-smash, good combo ability, amazing dash dance and mobilty, and, oddly, most actionable frames on a ledge dash
Kirby - fast u-tilt and d-tilt, aerials have good edgeguarding ability (Fence of Pain), Kirbycide
The game is far from balanced, but no one is broken of useless.
While this game is quite unbalanced, it does have something. There is no character without a flaw (like MK in Brawl) and there is no character without a pro.
I think "easily coverable flaw" is a more appropriate statement. Brawl MK is at least light, but overly safe, ranged moves render that moot. Pre-1.0.6 Smash U Diddy seems closer to flawless, but even then the same applies.
I think "easily coverable flaw" is a more appropriate statement. Brawl MK is at least light, but overly safe, ranged moves render that moot. Pre-1.0.6 Smash U Diddy seems closer to flawless, but even then the same applies.
By attributes, Diddy seemed more broken. But, unlike MK, Diddy had some more even or close to even matchups. Trust me Pika-MK isn't even, though it is MK's "worst" matchup.
I'm not saying it's particularly hard, I am trying to say that it is not interesting once a match starts. If the characters are unique enough to be very different from each other, then they will have to have more and more attributes that limit how they can be played. It is also pretty boring to watch horribly imbalanced specific matchups. Character counterpicks are not interesting. These aren't guaranteed to be present in a larger cast, but they are definitely more likely to be.
There's a lot of presumptuous statements in this. All characters, no matter what, limit your playstyle--Falcon in Melee, for instance, is heavily based on bait-and-punish. No one is going to play Falcon as a get-in-their-face rushdown character because they'll get stomped. No one is going to play a Fox and not use the shine or blaster.
Why should it place an emphasis on knowing all of the cast? Why can't it be about knowing how to play the game well? I can assure you that people know more than just their own character in melee. Obviously they probably wouldn't be super experts on the Ness matchup, but players that are good know how to play as / against the top 10-15 characters or more with a very deep level of understanding (probably a good chunk less for 'playing as', but still).
You (and other Melee players) often act like knowing the cast and knowing the game are two fundamentally separate things. Is there really something so wrong with a game stressing both?
Why can't a competitive game be about using your OWN strengths and dealing with your OWN weaknesses?
If that's all you care about then go take up boxing, goddamn. There's a reason fighting games have multiple characters. If all that mattered was skill then they'd just have one character but they don't, so clearly multiple characters matter in some kind of way.
For me, the issue with PM is that they put in so many random character-specific techniques that I don't think are necessary. Why does Link have such a ridiculous aerial glide toss? What's up with Lucas mega up-smash? WTF is Lucario? Why can Ike jump out of his side-b? While fox and falco can jump out of their shine, there is barely any other character-specific techniques in melee that are so extreme. They seemed to just tack these on to every character in PM.
Because...it makes characters interesting? Most fighting games have that kind of variation amongst their cast, where several characters play in a completely different way compared to the rest. Melee is strange for NOT doing such. Lucario's PM moveset not only makes him a completely unique character but also homages the fact that he's a fighting type by giving him elements of a traditional fighter. Link has an amazing glide toss (I'd barely call that a "gimmick" by the way) because he uses his own items a lot.
I think we just have two different viewpoints on this. I value character uniqueness, you value the ability of a character to be played in many different ways. But it's not like P:M laser-points you into one playstyle depending on who you pick anyway. You still have the nearly untouched (for better or for worse) Melee top tiers and several characters who are mostly gimmick-less.
"aggressive and fast rushdown"
I know why people think the game is all this, but it really isn't. Honestly, this type of comment only comes from people who don't understand the game well. The game is fast, yes, and pretty much at all times, for certain (most?) characters, but it is not all aggression. Melee is honestly more skewed towards defensive play, imo. It is about getting your character in a spot where you can abuse your defensive options with the mixup of being able to do an attack that will hit faster than reaction plus defense will block / evade / beat it. Rather than just directly fighting your opponent (attack, block, grab), there is a huge emphasis on control of the match. The game seems aggressive because control is so important that you must actively contest it. If you give your opponent too much room to move around, they will just be all over you and you will just lose.
Yes, that's why we play Smash at all: the unique style of play it gives. But Melee is still a very aggressive game, you can't deny that. Even when on the defensive players still are moving around and vying for stage control. Even when they're off the stage, the game is still very dynamic, with the recover trying to get back and the edge-guarder trying to keep them off. People just don't stop moving in Melee, and the stocks go by incredibly fast since combos are common and gravity is incredibly high compared to Brawl/Sm4sh. And the intended defensive options suck--spot-dodging and rolling are incredibly situational and usually useless, airdodging is used 99% of the time to wavedash, and shielding is pretty much a last-resort option.[/quote]
Not everyone in the game is balanced as some may put, but the top characters played are quite balanced in terms of high level gameplay. Spacies have specific combos used against them, Marth is floaty, Jiggs gets knocked around, I could go on with a lot of the cast. On top of the top characters being very good, they also play, look, and feel very different from each other from the standpoint of someone who knows how to play. That's where I see the variety.
The game isn't perfect. No, I don't care for a balanced cast of 60 characters. In all honesty, can you really think this game could have a 25 viable AND distinctly varied cast? There's a limit to how different and useful characters can be, I mean this game has like 2 attack buttons. I will say like the variety of the current top cast as well as SOME traits from the lower ones.
And that is why I would say its the most competitively balanced Smash game.
And the intended defensive options suck--spot-dodging and rolling are incredibly situational and usually useless, airdodging is used 99% of the time to wavedash, and shielding is pretty much a last-resort option.
I agreed with some stuff and disagreed with some stuff in your post, but I'm going to bed soon, so I'll just highlight this point as the one I disagreed with the most. The defensive options don't suck, they just have to be used with thought and care (unlike how they are used in Sm4sh).
Spotdodge is the best way to bait and avoid a grab, then punish appropriately. Roll is used for spacing when invinvability frames are needed, but can be punished fairly easily if used at an inopportune time. It can also be buffered to get out of shield pressure. The reason Air Dodge is used as a WD 99% of the time is because that's how you preform an essensial tech in the game, so I wouldn't count that against airdodge as a defensive option. It isn't used as much as the Sm4sh/Brawl Air Dodge because you are helpless after using it, something I like because you get easily punished for using it mindlessly. Also, shielding is EXTREMELY useful and if you watch a competitive Melee match and look for times when someone shielding, you'll be surprised at how much it is utilized in any level of competitive play.
I agree that the defensive options in Melee aren't as good as they are in Sm4sh, but I would rather watch a fast-paced match where both players are thinking about a few dozen things a second that they could get punished for if they screw up versus a slow match where the game forgives them if they mess up three of the four things a second going through their heads.
