I believe Imbalances/cheapnes causes it to be less competitive and rather cheap. I know alot of people who agree to me on that. Brawl can be played at a high level.
Alright fine; let's say "imbalanced = less competitive." What fighting game is LEFT that doesn't have some semblance of imbalance? NONE. I know it can be depressing and discouraging, but to my knowledge, not a single fighting game exists that has "perfect balance" - in other words, every fighting game has certain matchups between certain characters that tend to favor one character. That's just an unfortunate fact of life that all players have to accept. Are you saying that there are NO matchups in Brawl that "favor" one character? I'm sure you can think of examples in which one character in Brawl would have a distinct advantage VS another character (i.e. "imbalance" in the game).
And yes, Brawl can be played at a "high level", meaning that you can play the game well after mastering a given character's moveset and knowing when to use which move, when to defend, when to attack, etc. BUT - Melee can be played at an even higher level, as of right now. Brawl may somehow rise to match Melee's competitive greatness, but I (and many others) would REALLY be surprised if that even came close to happening.
You want to string combos and do techniques and be onthe offensive usually. This game is more of a defensive game which to me doesn't cause alot of problems or any kind of imbalance. You disagree with this.
Combos and other "offensive techniques" add depth to the game - that's my point. The fact that Brawl revolves so heavily around defensive action REMOVES many options for the player...for example, why risk attacking your opponent and harassing their shield if they can just sit back and grab you as soon as you make the attempt? Because there's no L-canceling, it's much harder for players to use aerial attacks "safely" because their opponents can just grab them while they're suffering attack lag after landing. True, some characters have lower lag than others (and those with lower lag are probably going to be the "high-tier" characters as well...), but for the most part, ALL characters are vulnerable to a "shield + grab" pattern that's going to get quite boring after a while. I'm not saying that the only safe option in Brawl is to sit back, shield, and grab (although a lot of times, it IS the safest option); I'm saying that it's too easy to play defensively and "camp" your opponent. That just makes games last really long and slows down the pace of the match. Players wouldn't have to think nearly as fast because they'd spend so much of the time just watching each other fly around though the air, recover, and then start the process over again.
I also disagree that taking out Wavedashing made it more competitive. It caused more imbalanced than anything which may be why it was removed. Then again i am a person of fair game and do notlike a handful of charactersdominating tourneys.
Wavedashing was one of the LEAST important advanced techniques from Melee; things like L-canceling, shuffling, short-hopping, teching, and DI were much more important. Wavedashing was just a spacing technique that allowed your character to "dash" around while maintaining a standing animation and thus allowed him/her to attack quickly out of it. It also had value as a mindgame tactic. However, as I said before, it was not nearly as important as other techniques...that said, removing wavedashing from Brawl didn't have that big of an effect. In my opinion, the removal of L-canceling had a much greater impact.
I like alot of variety of characters doing well then a selected few. There are alot of ppl like me who didn't like Melee's cheapness,(Marth,Fox,Falco,Shiek) I play other fighting games as well but melee is really a cheap game and developers seem to agree with me and added better recovery and nerf and buff when needed(Zelda,Sheik a good example of that)
I agree - it would ALWAYS be better for ALL the characters in a game to be doing "equally well" in tournaments, but as I said before, the fighting game that's perfectly balanced has not been created yet. I'm pretty sure that other competitive fighting games (Street Fighter, for example) are dominated by a select group of characters rather than the whole character roster. People eventually figure out who the "stronger" characters are, and then naturally those characters are used a lot more than the "weaker" characters and thus they win more tournaments.
Also keep in mind that there are plenty of Melee players who mastered "low-tier" characters and thrashed butt with them despite the odds they were playing against. You can find videos on YouTube of many different low-tier Melee characters (Ness, Bowser, Mewtwo, etc.) BEATING the high-tier characters (Fox, Sheik, Falco, Peach, Marth, etc.), so it can and does happen. Tournaments, however, do tend to be dominated by higher-tier characters, and while that's unfortunate, that's just the nature of the game. If you want a challenge and really want to put your skills to the test, you should try playing low-tier characters and seeing if you can get good enough to beat a decent high-tier player. I play low tiers on Melee and I love it - it's a nice challenge and you learn a lot.
My other prediction is that the amount of people who play brawl competitive will outnumber the people who play Melee competitively as more people get into brawl as it is easier. EVO has brawl and it looks to stay and be the norm. The forum is very active for brawl. Alot of people like the game despite what others say.
I'm sure that more people will probably play Brawl IN GENERAL than will play Melee, but as for competitive play...for some reason, I doubt that there will be as many people that seriously commit themselves to tournament-level play on Brawl as on Melee. I think that Melee already has an extremely strong, well-established tournament scene, and it will be hard for Brawl to override that because the Melee players will keep right on playing. Brawl players will probably enjoy playing online more rather than in hardcore tournaments (where Melee players are and will be).
only problem is puffer is you are assuming alot of thus as fact. What you say may not be true.
Well, I'm doing my best not to assume anything. I'm just saying what I think about Brawl as it compares to Melee; I guess you could say I'm making "educated guesses" as to what will happen in the future for both games. Once again, I stress that I'm not trying to bash Brawl into dust here...my original purpose for this thread was only to verify that the Melee tournament scene would not be "overridden" by Brawl as easily as other threads were implying. Based on what I've seen and played of both games, my guess is that Melee will always have a more hardcore, competitive tournament scene than Brawl will. Brawl may get more players PLAYING it, both for fun and for competition, but I think Melee will always have the strongest, most tightly-nit tournament community.
