I meant to do this after six months, but September just kind of blew by!
I remember back in April, when Brawl had been released in Japan and only a few people in the States had pirated versions of it. This was when the "Brawl not being competitive" controversy really flared up, and back then the center of the storm was The Tunes Official Crew Thread, where Scar took on any challengers to prove that Brawl was not a tournament game. Back then, I said this:
http://www.smashboards.com/showpost.php?p=4245943&postcount=2356
But in retrospect, even that admission and the essay that went along with it may have been premature. So here I am, after the initial six month grace period that I requested, about to share my thoughts regarding Brawl again, and I would encourage other people to do the same. PLEASE do not reduce this thread to a flamefest; I want an open discussion of how people view this game at this point. If you think that Brawl sucks, or that it's wonderful, that's fine, but I also want to know why. Think of this as the short answer section of a test: it doesn't have to be an essay-length response, but one sentence is definitely not going to cut it.
Also, I do not want people coming in here multi-quoting and picking apart someone else's post in an attempt to prove them (and the people who think like them) wrong, nor do I want people coming in simply to co-sign on something that someone else said. The goal of this thread is to share your thoughts on the current state of Brawl, not your thoughts on what other people think of Brawl.
Mods, I request that you be vigilant in policing this thread. I know it's a topic that almost begs for flames and attack posts, but I'm really interested to see how community attitude has evolved up to this point.
-------------------------------------------
After that essay that I wrote about Brawl, I continued to play the game feverishly, because I was convinced that even though it was inferior to Melee, it was the future of our community. Basically, I believed that a worse, but newer version of Smash would have a better ability to draw in new players than the better, but older version of it. So I put Melee to the side for a few months, and tried to do my part to ensure the continued growth of our community.
But it wasn't that easy. Brawl wouldn't let me just have fun. The normal things that people complained about were still issues (lack of hit-stun, no l-canceling, etc.), but I started to notice that the problems in Brawl weren't just competitive, but structural in nature. That is, Brawl wasn't a bad game because it eschewed a competitive philosophy, but Brawl was a bad game because of shortcomings in design, programming and philosophy. Playing against laser-locking Falcos, chaingrabbing Dedede's, utilting Snakes and b-spamming Metaknights showed me that the game was broken from a practical standpoint.
When a character can get caught in an infinite by simply being grab-released, that is poor programming and game-testing. I would argue that it was unreasonable for the developers of Melee to forsee the invention of the wobbling technique in the tournament community metagame (in fact, it took years to be invented and shot it's inventor, an otherwise skilled player anyway, to national prominence overnight). By the same token, it is reasonable that they should have forseen D3's infinite on stages like Pokemon Stadium, Shadow Moses and the death combo on Mario Circuit and Bridge of Eldin. D3's chaingrab was discovered by the Japanese players the first time they got their hands on it. Once again, chalk that up to bad design and testing.
Pokemon Trainer is the personification of the game's poor design philosophy. Here we have a character that is three in one: Charizard, Ivysaur, and Squirtle. The catch? You can't use either of these three for more than two minutes without all but forfeiting the match due to the significant handicap they suffer from. A friend of mine described that design choice this way: "Sakurai doesn't want you to play the game the way you want to; he wants you to play the game the way he wants you to." Even from a non-competitive standpoint, this was a baffling decision on the developer's part: why include a fan-favorite like Squirtle, when it's almost literally impossible to win as Squirtle? With Pichu, the only analagous example, you could at least refrain from using the moves that caused him damage. No such luck with Pokemon Trainer. If you can't finish the job in two minutes, tough cookies.
Even now, the problems continue to present themselves. The "Ban Metaknight" movement is gaining steam, and whether or not it's a legitimate reaction to Metaknight is irrelevant. The idea that a character can be banned in a Smash game has been firmly planted in the community, and now that is something that we must come to terms with because of the precedent that this sets (the same could have been said about wobbling as well, and I think that it would have been a valid point back then as well). I've always been philosophically opposed to bans unless they are absolutely necessary to facilitate tournament play. For example, I understand why Hyrule Temple must be banned, as it would be literally impossible to conclude a tournament match on it in a timely fashion, if ever. However, with anything short of that, I have the attitude, "Let the metagame take care of it". That, and there must be a sufficient body of evidence, both factual and anecdotal, to support such a ban.
Which brings us back to the tricky issue of Metaknight. I am of the opinion that there simply isn't enough metagame in Brawl to overcome the myriad advantages that Metaknight possesses. People have been saying all along that it's too early in Brawl to tell, and that we need to give the metagame time to develop in the same way that Melee's did. That is far from accurate though. Melee's metagame developed in bits and pieces initially, due to the lack of a centralized and focused effort. Brawl has been picked apart and dissected by the best minds the Smash community has to offer since before day one, and the best we've come up with is mortar sliding and glide tossing. That's not a knock on the community, but a knock on the game that the community has relegated itself to.
Not only is their anecdotal support for a Metaknight ban, but the factual data exists as well. On Ankoku's last published rankings list, Metaknight had a tier all to himself. Some might point out that this shows the metagame is evolving, as Snake used to dominate the list. But his reign was short-lived, and it has been Metaknight, far and away, ever since. Some have suggested that the list itself hinders metagame development, and their may be a small ounce of truth to that. But that leads to a "chicken and egg" scenario: Did Metaknights flourish, pushing him to the top of the list, or did being at the top of the list result in Metaknight flourishing? A compilation of tournament data has no effect on what is possible within the confines of the game itself, so we must accept the former as truth. But in any case, it's irrelevant. Whatever the reasons, Metaknight trounces everyone. As I've said already, I am idealistically opposed to the idea of a ban, but from every practical evaluation, I think I could stomach one in this case.
I could go on and on, but the bottom line is this: it seems that as these few months have passed, the problems in Brawl have simply seemed to proliferate, from M2K's "Ban Ledgestalling" thread (which, no matter what anyone tries to pretend otherwise, is primarily directed at Brawl), to the growing community that is hacking Brawl. But to me at least, there's an even more basic problem. Brawl just isn't a fun game. The person I play games with the most is my wife, and she stopped playing Brawl altogether months ago. Sure, I could go online and play with other people, but the person I enjoy gaming with the most found the game boring, and not even worth playing in a non-competitive sense. I totally agreed with her, but still I pushed on, hoping something would come along that would make my purchase worthwhile.
The straw that broke the camel's back came about two weeks ago. I was playing online with a friend who's pretty good, and we split our matches 50-50. He didn't do anything gay or stupid, he just beat me legitimately with good play. And every time I lost I was furious. Not because I was thinking, "I'm better than this guy, I should be beating him!" But because that's the nature of Brawl: it's only fun when you win. I've always done more losing than winning when it comes to Smash tournaments, whether it be Melee or Brawl, but I always had fun at Melee tournaments regardless. The atmosphere and mood in Brawl tournaments is totally different to me: everyone is on edge because they don't know when something ridiculous and stupid is going to happen that's going to cost them a stock, or a match. Losing is fine, it happens to everyone. But Brawl had managed to suck the fun out of losing, which I didn't really think was possible. So I traded it in two weeks ago. I played it with a friend on Thursday (it was his copy), and playing the game only reinforced to me that I'd made the right decision.
So where am I after six months of Brawl? I'm proud to report that I'm Brawl-free at this point. I may go to a Brawl tournament at some point in the future, but that will only be to prove a point: You don't even need to play the game to be okay at it. Maybe I'll be wrong, but somehow, I don't think I will be. Don't think I'm happy though, because as I see it, the Smash community is in a lose-lose situation. We either push ahead with a competitively inferior game, or we put ourselves to the impossible task of convincing new tournament players to take up a game that is almost seven years old. Those are both pretty crappy options.
I remember back in April, when Brawl had been released in Japan and only a few people in the States had pirated versions of it. This was when the "Brawl not being competitive" controversy really flared up, and back then the center of the storm was The Tunes Official Crew Thread, where Scar took on any challengers to prove that Brawl was not a tournament game. Back then, I said this:
Of course, it didn't take me six months to come to a conclusion about Brawl's competitive value:You're right, the game engine is different, and things have been changed/removed. And you have played the game, which makes your opinion more valid than mine since I have not. You could be right, and Brawl is totally unfit for tournament play. All I'm saying is that it is way too early to make a definitive judgment, up or down. Each side either says, "Brawl is the greatest thing ever" or "Brawl is the worst thing ever". How can the small group of people who have played the game make either determination before the rest of us get a chance?
Give it some time, that's all I ask. If it sucks in six months, then you were right, and I will admit so.
http://www.smashboards.com/showpost.php?p=4245943&postcount=2356
But in retrospect, even that admission and the essay that went along with it may have been premature. So here I am, after the initial six month grace period that I requested, about to share my thoughts regarding Brawl again, and I would encourage other people to do the same. PLEASE do not reduce this thread to a flamefest; I want an open discussion of how people view this game at this point. If you think that Brawl sucks, or that it's wonderful, that's fine, but I also want to know why. Think of this as the short answer section of a test: it doesn't have to be an essay-length response, but one sentence is definitely not going to cut it.
Also, I do not want people coming in here multi-quoting and picking apart someone else's post in an attempt to prove them (and the people who think like them) wrong, nor do I want people coming in simply to co-sign on something that someone else said. The goal of this thread is to share your thoughts on the current state of Brawl, not your thoughts on what other people think of Brawl.
Mods, I request that you be vigilant in policing this thread. I know it's a topic that almost begs for flames and attack posts, but I'm really interested to see how community attitude has evolved up to this point.
-------------------------------------------
After that essay that I wrote about Brawl, I continued to play the game feverishly, because I was convinced that even though it was inferior to Melee, it was the future of our community. Basically, I believed that a worse, but newer version of Smash would have a better ability to draw in new players than the better, but older version of it. So I put Melee to the side for a few months, and tried to do my part to ensure the continued growth of our community.
But it wasn't that easy. Brawl wouldn't let me just have fun. The normal things that people complained about were still issues (lack of hit-stun, no l-canceling, etc.), but I started to notice that the problems in Brawl weren't just competitive, but structural in nature. That is, Brawl wasn't a bad game because it eschewed a competitive philosophy, but Brawl was a bad game because of shortcomings in design, programming and philosophy. Playing against laser-locking Falcos, chaingrabbing Dedede's, utilting Snakes and b-spamming Metaknights showed me that the game was broken from a practical standpoint.
When a character can get caught in an infinite by simply being grab-released, that is poor programming and game-testing. I would argue that it was unreasonable for the developers of Melee to forsee the invention of the wobbling technique in the tournament community metagame (in fact, it took years to be invented and shot it's inventor, an otherwise skilled player anyway, to national prominence overnight). By the same token, it is reasonable that they should have forseen D3's infinite on stages like Pokemon Stadium, Shadow Moses and the death combo on Mario Circuit and Bridge of Eldin. D3's chaingrab was discovered by the Japanese players the first time they got their hands on it. Once again, chalk that up to bad design and testing.
Pokemon Trainer is the personification of the game's poor design philosophy. Here we have a character that is three in one: Charizard, Ivysaur, and Squirtle. The catch? You can't use either of these three for more than two minutes without all but forfeiting the match due to the significant handicap they suffer from. A friend of mine described that design choice this way: "Sakurai doesn't want you to play the game the way you want to; he wants you to play the game the way he wants you to." Even from a non-competitive standpoint, this was a baffling decision on the developer's part: why include a fan-favorite like Squirtle, when it's almost literally impossible to win as Squirtle? With Pichu, the only analagous example, you could at least refrain from using the moves that caused him damage. No such luck with Pokemon Trainer. If you can't finish the job in two minutes, tough cookies.
Even now, the problems continue to present themselves. The "Ban Metaknight" movement is gaining steam, and whether or not it's a legitimate reaction to Metaknight is irrelevant. The idea that a character can be banned in a Smash game has been firmly planted in the community, and now that is something that we must come to terms with because of the precedent that this sets (the same could have been said about wobbling as well, and I think that it would have been a valid point back then as well). I've always been philosophically opposed to bans unless they are absolutely necessary to facilitate tournament play. For example, I understand why Hyrule Temple must be banned, as it would be literally impossible to conclude a tournament match on it in a timely fashion, if ever. However, with anything short of that, I have the attitude, "Let the metagame take care of it". That, and there must be a sufficient body of evidence, both factual and anecdotal, to support such a ban.
Which brings us back to the tricky issue of Metaknight. I am of the opinion that there simply isn't enough metagame in Brawl to overcome the myriad advantages that Metaknight possesses. People have been saying all along that it's too early in Brawl to tell, and that we need to give the metagame time to develop in the same way that Melee's did. That is far from accurate though. Melee's metagame developed in bits and pieces initially, due to the lack of a centralized and focused effort. Brawl has been picked apart and dissected by the best minds the Smash community has to offer since before day one, and the best we've come up with is mortar sliding and glide tossing. That's not a knock on the community, but a knock on the game that the community has relegated itself to.
Not only is their anecdotal support for a Metaknight ban, but the factual data exists as well. On Ankoku's last published rankings list, Metaknight had a tier all to himself. Some might point out that this shows the metagame is evolving, as Snake used to dominate the list. But his reign was short-lived, and it has been Metaknight, far and away, ever since. Some have suggested that the list itself hinders metagame development, and their may be a small ounce of truth to that. But that leads to a "chicken and egg" scenario: Did Metaknights flourish, pushing him to the top of the list, or did being at the top of the list result in Metaknight flourishing? A compilation of tournament data has no effect on what is possible within the confines of the game itself, so we must accept the former as truth. But in any case, it's irrelevant. Whatever the reasons, Metaknight trounces everyone. As I've said already, I am idealistically opposed to the idea of a ban, but from every practical evaluation, I think I could stomach one in this case.
I could go on and on, but the bottom line is this: it seems that as these few months have passed, the problems in Brawl have simply seemed to proliferate, from M2K's "Ban Ledgestalling" thread (which, no matter what anyone tries to pretend otherwise, is primarily directed at Brawl), to the growing community that is hacking Brawl. But to me at least, there's an even more basic problem. Brawl just isn't a fun game. The person I play games with the most is my wife, and she stopped playing Brawl altogether months ago. Sure, I could go online and play with other people, but the person I enjoy gaming with the most found the game boring, and not even worth playing in a non-competitive sense. I totally agreed with her, but still I pushed on, hoping something would come along that would make my purchase worthwhile.
The straw that broke the camel's back came about two weeks ago. I was playing online with a friend who's pretty good, and we split our matches 50-50. He didn't do anything gay or stupid, he just beat me legitimately with good play. And every time I lost I was furious. Not because I was thinking, "I'm better than this guy, I should be beating him!" But because that's the nature of Brawl: it's only fun when you win. I've always done more losing than winning when it comes to Smash tournaments, whether it be Melee or Brawl, but I always had fun at Melee tournaments regardless. The atmosphere and mood in Brawl tournaments is totally different to me: everyone is on edge because they don't know when something ridiculous and stupid is going to happen that's going to cost them a stock, or a match. Losing is fine, it happens to everyone. But Brawl had managed to suck the fun out of losing, which I didn't really think was possible. So I traded it in two weeks ago. I played it with a friend on Thursday (it was his copy), and playing the game only reinforced to me that I'd made the right decision.
So where am I after six months of Brawl? I'm proud to report that I'm Brawl-free at this point. I may go to a Brawl tournament at some point in the future, but that will only be to prove a point: You don't even need to play the game to be okay at it. Maybe I'll be wrong, but somehow, I don't think I will be. Don't think I'm happy though, because as I see it, the Smash community is in a lose-lose situation. We either push ahead with a competitively inferior game, or we put ourselves to the impossible task of convincing new tournament players to take up a game that is almost seven years old. Those are both pretty crappy options.