I'm going to tackle some of the arguments made lately. Also, sorry for not being around... I've had a lot of personal stuff to deal with.
1) Brawl doesn't have advanced tactics.
Errr... how do you know, exactly? Do you know when Melee started turning into the game we know and love? The combo-ful tech-crazy game of high speed and crazy tricks?
I'll bet you guys plenty of money that it didn't happen one month after the game was out. We didn't know jack about the game then, and I bet there's plenty of unexplored territory left in Brawl. Advanced tactics basically means: "tricks that separate pros from beginners." Right now, we are ALL beginners. So of course we don't have any. Does that mean we shouldn't look?
2) Airdodging and low hit stun defeats combos.
Welcome to mindgames. If you know your opponent is going to airdodge out of your "combo," then you WAIT FOR HIM TO AIRDODGE AND HIT HIM IN THE LAG. How much simpler could it get? The opponent is being predictable and you're not exploiting it? I thought you guys played to win.
But what if he doesn't airdodge? Then trick him into attacking at the wrong moment and punish. After all, there are no "safe approaches," so you shouldn't have a problem baiting a response and hitting them for it.
Except there are safe approaches. They derive from learning which moves are safe at what distance and height and et cetera against certain characters. I can spam certain attacks against Lucas' shield all day if I space it just right. MK's d-tilt, for example. Mix it up with f-tilts, and I can trick my friend's Lucas into getting hit, possibly landing a trip or the multi-hitting f-tilt, both of which put him at a strategic disadvantage.
If anything, I'm mad at Brawl because so much stuff has very little lag. Zamus doing d-tilt jab, d-tilt jab against my shield is frustrating as all hell. Glide cancels into d-smashes or rolls create almost unpunishable approaches for people like MK and Pit. Snake's grenade drops from shield let him play a stupidly effective turtling game that's very hard to get around.
People are complaining that landing hits can lead to being hit back because the opponent recovers before you do. Remember crouch canceling? The thing that made you take less stun so you could
hit the opponent back because you recovered first?
3) Melee takes more skill.
Again, I'm perplexed. More skill in which areas? Of course there's a higher threshhold at the moment; we have a month of Brawl development compared to the six and a half years of Melee knowledge. But there are more characters, more kinds of techniques, and things have changed. I'm excited to learn about the ridiculous number of character matchups, I'm excited to see which tactics dominate the metagame, and I want to see how far Brawl goes.
Also... more skill is a silly term to use, since the amount of skill you need is relative to the game, and relative to the opponents you play. If I play Melee against kindergarteners and win all the time, it takes less skill than it does to beat Azen. I bet winning Brawl matches against a bunch of new players (which we all are) doesn't take as much skill as being good at Melee took.
I will concede that certain elements have been changed to reduce the precision necessary. But like I said before, technical barriers do not create depth.
Here is why: you will assume at a certain level of play that your opponent will not make technical mistakes. You will assume that he knows how to sweetspot, L-cancel, SHFFL, waveshine, shieldgrab effectively, whatever. When your opponent makes a mistake and you capitalize on it, you didn't cause them to make that mistake. You were given a free shot through luck.
Since you act on the assumption that mistakes won't be made, sometimes you will be rewarded and sometimes you won't. That's not deep. You haven't changed your mindset or altered your predictions or strategies. You just got lucky that your opponent messed up. Being lucky is not the same as depth.
Galt has asserted that shaping your strategy around whether or not you will L-cancel creates depth, and I have to disagree. You will practice optimal strategies and will play to the best of your ability. You will never choose not to L-cancel if you're in a situation where you could have (rare exceptions being things like platform cancels and auto-cancels on B moves, which are
better so they have no real bearing here.) Nobody will willingly choose an inferior option, so there is no strategic choices made. When you play with *risk*, you are essentially gambling. Sometimes you get it, sometimes you don't... oh, oops, I died. Maybe that won't happen next time.
That's not depth. That's just luck.
I will agree that a certain technical barrier is fine, because it rewards practice and study and understanding of the game, but Melee was ridiculously hard to play technically. Does it need to be that hard to be as deep and interesting?
If anything, simpler technical performance means you will need more game knowledge. I don't know if certain moves can punish others in Melee, because I really don't know if I'm going as fast or moving as precisely as I could be. In Brawl, with those elements reduced, you will have to legitimately know if something is punishable, yes or no. If even a button masher can beat you to the punch because of the buffer system, you should learn not to press that situation.
Here is my bet: you guys have become used to the way Melee was played. You played it over and over again, spent countless hours practicing to learn its nuances and all the technical tricks and ins and outs that it took to give you the edge. You are still playing Brawl with a Melee mindset. You want to combo, and you want to move super fast and you want to have crazy character specific techniques and whatever, and you don't have it. Things are slower. In a lot of regards, things are easier.
But if you think we've reached its peak within a month of its release, you're sorely mistaken. Even counting the time from the Japanese release (when significantly fewer people were playing and discovering things), we have not had nearly enough time to cover all the ground there is to cover. You should be relishing the chance to develop the metagame in a way you want it to go, and be a top contender.
4) Throws are useless.
Wrong. Throws work with the current DR system to give a strong advantage to the thrower. Every grab hit you use reduces your damage reduction on other moves, meaning that at middle percents you will grab more to refresh your knockback on KO moves. Grabs also beat shields, which most hits don't do. They also can push the opponent into a strategically inferior position--even if your advantage isn't immediately apparent in terms of percent deficit.
5) Sakurai himself said that Brawl isn't meant to be competitive.
This is another one for Galt: please refer to your own argument where you said that to the competitive player, the designer's intent is unimportant. Even if he tried to make it non-competitive, the tournament scene doesn't care, and can still make it that way if we want. Right now, it's shaping up to be quite competitive, at least in the eyes of people who haven't given up on it.
6) Dashdancing is gone.
I'm kind of sad about that too, to be honest. It was an interesting way of controlling space and mixing up your approach. But you can instead use crawling, walking, the precise pivots and the increased air control to create a similar effect. I happily do this with the characters who have more air-control--Wario and Squirtle, for example--to bait responses or to play a tight spacing game. It's not the same, but I'm not playing Brawl so that I can play Melee.
With all that said, I am fine with people just not liking Brawl. Finding its system to be too slow, or not liking certain physics changes and just
preferring Melee is cool. There are a lot of things I like more about Melee, and I'm still happy to play Melee as I am to play Brawl. I will go to either tournament when one is nearby. But some people--particularly you, Galt--will have to make a better case if you're going to talk about Brawl being bad "objectively." Half of your argument is "it's self evident, and if you don't see it, you suck."
In fact, you said this elsewhere:
Galt said:
Good players already know Brawl is terrible, and bad players aren't qualified to judge, so a discussion is mostly pointless on that front.
Rhetorically, that's a great argument. Practically, it's fairly unsound; I think Brawl is good, and you may recall me winning Texas tournaments and placing highly in tournaments elsewhere--with and without the IC's infinite that I know you dislike so much. Please explain this peculiar discrepancy to me.
