I would like to preface this post by saying: If this is a topic or area of discussion that has already been widely covered, then I do apologize. I am new to smash and the overall community, and there are only so many hours in the day to read old posts before you decide to go out on a limb and make one of your own. In this post I am going to attempt to talk about some high-brow bull****, while sounding the least pretentious as possible, a task I do not think I am up for. Also, a lot of what I am going to say is probably not quantifiable or testable, but I still think it has merit and may connect with others who feel similarly, but may have never realized it. Second, I would like to take a few short moments to give a bit of background about myself so you fine folks can understand a little better where all of this is coming from.
I have played other fighting games before, but for me, there always seemed to be something missing. I would get frustrated with trying to execute very specific combos, with tiny windows of opportunity, double quarter circles, and all that jazz. Not that those mechanics are bad in any way, they just didn't necessarily appeal to me at the time. I also tend to be someone who enjoys learning about a game, specifically competitive ones, more than actually playing it. I love StarCraft, and by that I mean, I love watching StarCraft and thinking about its strategies and nuances. It's not a game I enjoy playing very much. The way your hands need to move, and the rhythm of the game, is off-putting for me. A game can be as balanced or competitive as humanly possible, but for me, if I don't enjoy the kinetic experience of the mechanics themselves, I lose interest.
I discovered Melee and the smash community after watching the wonderful "Smash Brothers" documentary last summer. before that, my only real experience with smash as a game series was playing 64 with my friends back in the day. When I heard someone call Melee a "sandbox fighting game" I was immediately intrigued. Here is a game that is approaching the idea of a competitive fighter from a completely different angle. The idea that you could get a kill without even needing to do damage, simply by outwitting your opponent and forcing them to make mistakes, blew my mind. Before the documentary, I had never thought about smash as a game played 1 vs 1. So, after discovering Project M, getting that going on my Wii, and then later getting both it and Melee working on Dolphin, I found myself playing smash several hours a day and dedicating time to actually learning all the mechanics I had heard about, such as wavedashing and l-cancelling. Mind you, I still immensely suck, but something different was happening. I realized after about two months that, unlike the other competitive games I had tried to get into, I wasn't getting bored or losing interest. And here is where I would like to take a moment to talk about execution barriers.
From a game design perspective, I understand why execution barriers can be a bad thing. They can make your game unnecessarily hard and unintuitive, and difficult for new players to get into. But i'm not going to talk about them from a game perspective, specifically games as marketable products needing to be sold. I want to get outside of that concept for a minute and look at game design from the basis of athletic sports.
Many sports, such as basketball, have rules or mechanics that don't inherently add any extra value other than making things more difficult. Dribbling is a great example of this because it's not even an option. You have to dribble or the referee will literally stop the game and penalize you for it. Dribbling adds complexity but no depth. And yet I don't think anyone would disagree that its a good thing to have dribbling in basketball. You could totally make a game where you are allowed to walk around with the ball, hand it to your teammate until someone tries to put it in the hoop and score. Why don't they do this? Why don't they make the hoop 5 foot high and let everyone be able to dunk? Because playing that way wouldn't be fun. Humans love to do things for no other reason than because, just to say we did it. Why climb Mount Everest? There's nothing up there. When you get to the top you just walk back down. The journey up there is what's so exhilarating. Also, I heard the view's not bad. Basketball is more fun because of the complexity added to it. It's not JUST about who wins or who loses, and making sure its fair. It's also about trying to push ourselves to see how far our human capabilities can go. People who watch basketball as a competitive sport know this. Inherently, subconsciously, we know that competition is more fun when it's difficult. It's more interesting for the viewer when we know that not everyone can compete at that level. If they could, it would be pointless. People might still play basketball, but there would be no NBA.
Because Melee puts a much greater emphasis on the physics engine and how you move within the space of the game, the advanced techniques and hidden mechanics are, I feel, much more akin to physical sports than other fighting games. Learning to do a wavedash is like... learning to do a crossover in basketball. Most of smash is not about getting a hit confirm and then executing a precisely timed and memorized combo. The combos in smash are constantly changing, due to gravity, weight, knockback and tons of other factors. The way you and your opponent dance around each other, utilizing every little trick and nuance to try and get the advantage, is more like a Wimbledon match than a chess game. As such, the advanced techniques within the game work around this. They are generally small things that can be used whenever the player deems necessary. This makes the rhythm and pacing of the game much different than other fighters. Even from a visual perspective, Melee is interesting to watch. The speed and the way the players maneuver around the stage is enthralling. This is while I feel I am still as interested in playing and learning about Melee as the day I picked it up. And I think a lot of this would have been lost if Melee had been developed from the beginning as a competitive fighting game. Other fighting games feel so sterile and calculated, at least to me. Which is an unfortunate catch-22, because it means a game like Melee will likely never happen again.
I promise you, this long rambling post is going somewhere.
Now lets take a minute to explore this idea from a purely subjective standpoint. I am going to try and make this analogy as simple as possible for people who don't have any music theory knowledge. To me, Melee is like jazz. Jazz has a feel and rhythm unlike any other kind of music. It's complicated, and deep, often extremely fast, there are tons of subtleties, and there is simply nothing else like it. But unfortunately, a lot of people find it difficult to understand and really get into jazz, due to its sometimes obtuse nature. Now imagine if there was one person who invented jazz, and this person owned jazz as an idea and thing, and one day he came along and said "Hey! I've made a new jazz and I think its better because it appeals to a lot more people." And when you start listening to this new music, you realize its not jazz at all. Everything that made it jazz was taken out. All the sour notes, augmented chords and time signature changes are gone. It's still music, but it's not jazz.
This to me is the ultimate difference between Melee and the newer games. They simply don't feel the same to play. The same as classic rock doesn't sound like jazz, Brawl and Smash 4 don't FEEL the same to play as Melee does. Yes you're doing the same things, namely trying to knock your opponent off the stage, but the way you go about achieving that goal is almost entirely different. That's not to say classic rock is better or worse than jazz. It's just not the same. Nobody tries to make the argument that classic rock is what jazz should be or what jazz was intended to be. It's simply accepted that while they are both genres of music, they are not meant to be the same thing. If you're a guitar player, you know that playing jazz or classical music feels different than playing a modern pop song, not even considering how they actually sound. (I would like to reiterate here, I am not trying to make this an argument about what music is good or bad, I am simply using these as examples for their extreme differences.) Without all of the AT's, nuances, and oddities, you have a game that is slower, and less kinetically engaging, like jazz with all the jazz taken out. It doesn't feel as good in my fingers to play the other Smash games. Which I am betting is how a jazz player would feel if he was forced to play a four chord song, as awesome as that four chord song may very well be.
Alright.... so now I am going to attempt to bring all of these things together into a nice summary. here it goes...
Sometimes it's more enjoyable to do something complicated than to do something simple. Even if it doesn't add any inherent depth, it feels better because you know you've achieved something great. You've pushed yourself to the limit to reach your goal, whatever it may be. Viewers of traditional sports and e-sports alike enjoy watching people trying to do something complicated and difficult in competitive environments. The abstract nature of Melee, and its unique engine and mechanics, makes it feel unlike any other fighting game out there... like jazz, a beast all its own. When you strip all the weirdness and obscurity out of jazz its not jazz anymore. So you will never convince jazz players to move on to something that isn't jazz, Even if maybe this new music is more streamlined or broadly appealing to a wider audience. These two concepts, execution barriers and abstract creativity, make Melee the unique and beautiful competitive art form that we have come to know and love.
TL;DR: Melee is two basketball players with saxophones trying to dunk on each other while playing sick jazz solos.
edit: thanks to which ever kind person linked this on reddit. seems to be generating a lot of discussion. i would like to take a quick moment to address some of the counter points to the dribbling analogy.
i went with said analogy partially because basketball is one of the few physical sports i know much of anything about. and of course there probably isn't going to be a direct 1 to 1 relationship within the comparison because we are dealing with two fundamentally different activities. but i'd like to clarify my perspective on the dribbling analogy and why i chose to use it. my main point, or at least the one i attempted to make, was that dribbling does not offer any depth or options for the person who is dribbling, as far as movement and getting around the court goes. it simply makes the game harder for them. again, i don't know a lot about basketball, so if there is actually a situation where dribbling would be better for you than simply getting to run around holding the ball, i would like to hear it. it does however, as someone correctly pointed out, give the opponent opportunities that would not otherwise be there, such as stealing. in this way it does add depth to the game. which is, i think, akin to dropping an l-cancel and giving your opponent an opening to attack you.
i do agree that taking dribbling out of basketball would fundamentally change the game where as having auto l-cancelling would not. however, this i feel is only true because of the physical nature of basketball. if we had auto-dribbling basketballs the game would be fundamentally the same but technically easier. in fact, brawl is a great example of what it would be like if l-cancelling was taken out of the game and not replaced by anything. we got a game with the same amount, or more, not sure which, of landing lag but no longer any options to counteract it. which is exactly what would happen to basketball if dribbling was removed and not replaced by another movement option. at the core, it would be a lot slower.
also, i do get that i generalized other fighting games a great deal. i don't play them much and as such don't understand them as deeply as many others even in this sub do, i'm sure. i know there is so much more that goes into them other than combos. my point was mainly to try and describe why Melee appealed to me more, and a lot of that has to do with the dynamics of the physics engine and movement within the game. it is this variation and fluidity of movement that has made me interested in the game.
from what i am aware, and i could be totally off on this, combo timings and those sorts of things don't change based on the amount of damage you have taken in other fighting games. the same i believe goes for things like dashing, as in, you can control your dashing momentum and variation much more in Melee, at least from what i have experienced playing other FGs. this precise control over your character's movement is what i enjoy so much. again, as i stated in the post, this is not to say that other fighting games are bad, simply that Melee appealed to me more than other games did. i like the open-ended nature that exists within Melee. this post was meant to give my personal perspective and not try to make a defined argument as to the objective "betterness" or lack there of, compared to other fighters.
anyway, these are just my thoughts on the discussions that have been developing. thanks to everyone who has given their feedback and input. it's greatly appreciated.
I have played other fighting games before, but for me, there always seemed to be something missing. I would get frustrated with trying to execute very specific combos, with tiny windows of opportunity, double quarter circles, and all that jazz. Not that those mechanics are bad in any way, they just didn't necessarily appeal to me at the time. I also tend to be someone who enjoys learning about a game, specifically competitive ones, more than actually playing it. I love StarCraft, and by that I mean, I love watching StarCraft and thinking about its strategies and nuances. It's not a game I enjoy playing very much. The way your hands need to move, and the rhythm of the game, is off-putting for me. A game can be as balanced or competitive as humanly possible, but for me, if I don't enjoy the kinetic experience of the mechanics themselves, I lose interest.
I discovered Melee and the smash community after watching the wonderful "Smash Brothers" documentary last summer. before that, my only real experience with smash as a game series was playing 64 with my friends back in the day. When I heard someone call Melee a "sandbox fighting game" I was immediately intrigued. Here is a game that is approaching the idea of a competitive fighter from a completely different angle. The idea that you could get a kill without even needing to do damage, simply by outwitting your opponent and forcing them to make mistakes, blew my mind. Before the documentary, I had never thought about smash as a game played 1 vs 1. So, after discovering Project M, getting that going on my Wii, and then later getting both it and Melee working on Dolphin, I found myself playing smash several hours a day and dedicating time to actually learning all the mechanics I had heard about, such as wavedashing and l-cancelling. Mind you, I still immensely suck, but something different was happening. I realized after about two months that, unlike the other competitive games I had tried to get into, I wasn't getting bored or losing interest. And here is where I would like to take a moment to talk about execution barriers.
From a game design perspective, I understand why execution barriers can be a bad thing. They can make your game unnecessarily hard and unintuitive, and difficult for new players to get into. But i'm not going to talk about them from a game perspective, specifically games as marketable products needing to be sold. I want to get outside of that concept for a minute and look at game design from the basis of athletic sports.
Many sports, such as basketball, have rules or mechanics that don't inherently add any extra value other than making things more difficult. Dribbling is a great example of this because it's not even an option. You have to dribble or the referee will literally stop the game and penalize you for it. Dribbling adds complexity but no depth. And yet I don't think anyone would disagree that its a good thing to have dribbling in basketball. You could totally make a game where you are allowed to walk around with the ball, hand it to your teammate until someone tries to put it in the hoop and score. Why don't they do this? Why don't they make the hoop 5 foot high and let everyone be able to dunk? Because playing that way wouldn't be fun. Humans love to do things for no other reason than because, just to say we did it. Why climb Mount Everest? There's nothing up there. When you get to the top you just walk back down. The journey up there is what's so exhilarating. Also, I heard the view's not bad. Basketball is more fun because of the complexity added to it. It's not JUST about who wins or who loses, and making sure its fair. It's also about trying to push ourselves to see how far our human capabilities can go. People who watch basketball as a competitive sport know this. Inherently, subconsciously, we know that competition is more fun when it's difficult. It's more interesting for the viewer when we know that not everyone can compete at that level. If they could, it would be pointless. People might still play basketball, but there would be no NBA.
Because Melee puts a much greater emphasis on the physics engine and how you move within the space of the game, the advanced techniques and hidden mechanics are, I feel, much more akin to physical sports than other fighting games. Learning to do a wavedash is like... learning to do a crossover in basketball. Most of smash is not about getting a hit confirm and then executing a precisely timed and memorized combo. The combos in smash are constantly changing, due to gravity, weight, knockback and tons of other factors. The way you and your opponent dance around each other, utilizing every little trick and nuance to try and get the advantage, is more like a Wimbledon match than a chess game. As such, the advanced techniques within the game work around this. They are generally small things that can be used whenever the player deems necessary. This makes the rhythm and pacing of the game much different than other fighters. Even from a visual perspective, Melee is interesting to watch. The speed and the way the players maneuver around the stage is enthralling. This is while I feel I am still as interested in playing and learning about Melee as the day I picked it up. And I think a lot of this would have been lost if Melee had been developed from the beginning as a competitive fighting game. Other fighting games feel so sterile and calculated, at least to me. Which is an unfortunate catch-22, because it means a game like Melee will likely never happen again.
I promise you, this long rambling post is going somewhere.
Now lets take a minute to explore this idea from a purely subjective standpoint. I am going to try and make this analogy as simple as possible for people who don't have any music theory knowledge. To me, Melee is like jazz. Jazz has a feel and rhythm unlike any other kind of music. It's complicated, and deep, often extremely fast, there are tons of subtleties, and there is simply nothing else like it. But unfortunately, a lot of people find it difficult to understand and really get into jazz, due to its sometimes obtuse nature. Now imagine if there was one person who invented jazz, and this person owned jazz as an idea and thing, and one day he came along and said "Hey! I've made a new jazz and I think its better because it appeals to a lot more people." And when you start listening to this new music, you realize its not jazz at all. Everything that made it jazz was taken out. All the sour notes, augmented chords and time signature changes are gone. It's still music, but it's not jazz.
This to me is the ultimate difference between Melee and the newer games. They simply don't feel the same to play. The same as classic rock doesn't sound like jazz, Brawl and Smash 4 don't FEEL the same to play as Melee does. Yes you're doing the same things, namely trying to knock your opponent off the stage, but the way you go about achieving that goal is almost entirely different. That's not to say classic rock is better or worse than jazz. It's just not the same. Nobody tries to make the argument that classic rock is what jazz should be or what jazz was intended to be. It's simply accepted that while they are both genres of music, they are not meant to be the same thing. If you're a guitar player, you know that playing jazz or classical music feels different than playing a modern pop song, not even considering how they actually sound. (I would like to reiterate here, I am not trying to make this an argument about what music is good or bad, I am simply using these as examples for their extreme differences.) Without all of the AT's, nuances, and oddities, you have a game that is slower, and less kinetically engaging, like jazz with all the jazz taken out. It doesn't feel as good in my fingers to play the other Smash games. Which I am betting is how a jazz player would feel if he was forced to play a four chord song, as awesome as that four chord song may very well be.
Alright.... so now I am going to attempt to bring all of these things together into a nice summary. here it goes...
Sometimes it's more enjoyable to do something complicated than to do something simple. Even if it doesn't add any inherent depth, it feels better because you know you've achieved something great. You've pushed yourself to the limit to reach your goal, whatever it may be. Viewers of traditional sports and e-sports alike enjoy watching people trying to do something complicated and difficult in competitive environments. The abstract nature of Melee, and its unique engine and mechanics, makes it feel unlike any other fighting game out there... like jazz, a beast all its own. When you strip all the weirdness and obscurity out of jazz its not jazz anymore. So you will never convince jazz players to move on to something that isn't jazz, Even if maybe this new music is more streamlined or broadly appealing to a wider audience. These two concepts, execution barriers and abstract creativity, make Melee the unique and beautiful competitive art form that we have come to know and love.
TL;DR: Melee is two basketball players with saxophones trying to dunk on each other while playing sick jazz solos.
edit: thanks to which ever kind person linked this on reddit. seems to be generating a lot of discussion. i would like to take a quick moment to address some of the counter points to the dribbling analogy.
i went with said analogy partially because basketball is one of the few physical sports i know much of anything about. and of course there probably isn't going to be a direct 1 to 1 relationship within the comparison because we are dealing with two fundamentally different activities. but i'd like to clarify my perspective on the dribbling analogy and why i chose to use it. my main point, or at least the one i attempted to make, was that dribbling does not offer any depth or options for the person who is dribbling, as far as movement and getting around the court goes. it simply makes the game harder for them. again, i don't know a lot about basketball, so if there is actually a situation where dribbling would be better for you than simply getting to run around holding the ball, i would like to hear it. it does however, as someone correctly pointed out, give the opponent opportunities that would not otherwise be there, such as stealing. in this way it does add depth to the game. which is, i think, akin to dropping an l-cancel and giving your opponent an opening to attack you.
i do agree that taking dribbling out of basketball would fundamentally change the game where as having auto l-cancelling would not. however, this i feel is only true because of the physical nature of basketball. if we had auto-dribbling basketballs the game would be fundamentally the same but technically easier. in fact, brawl is a great example of what it would be like if l-cancelling was taken out of the game and not replaced by anything. we got a game with the same amount, or more, not sure which, of landing lag but no longer any options to counteract it. which is exactly what would happen to basketball if dribbling was removed and not replaced by another movement option. at the core, it would be a lot slower.
also, i do get that i generalized other fighting games a great deal. i don't play them much and as such don't understand them as deeply as many others even in this sub do, i'm sure. i know there is so much more that goes into them other than combos. my point was mainly to try and describe why Melee appealed to me more, and a lot of that has to do with the dynamics of the physics engine and movement within the game. it is this variation and fluidity of movement that has made me interested in the game.
from what i am aware, and i could be totally off on this, combo timings and those sorts of things don't change based on the amount of damage you have taken in other fighting games. the same i believe goes for things like dashing, as in, you can control your dashing momentum and variation much more in Melee, at least from what i have experienced playing other FGs. this precise control over your character's movement is what i enjoy so much. again, as i stated in the post, this is not to say that other fighting games are bad, simply that Melee appealed to me more than other games did. i like the open-ended nature that exists within Melee. this post was meant to give my personal perspective and not try to make a defined argument as to the objective "betterness" or lack there of, compared to other fighters.
anyway, these are just my thoughts on the discussions that have been developing. thanks to everyone who has given their feedback and input. it's greatly appreciated.
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