Smash 4 at Apex felt like an exercise in not letting something be what it's truly supposed to be.
I feel like this is generally a hurdle you have to learn to deal with as an ongoing meta develops this early, but more than anything it felt like it was the first tourney where the meta of Smash 4 started to crack a bit more wide open, and for many players, as well as several characters, this felt especially made awkward on account of the Top 8 consisting of players who were, in essence, testing the waters due to many circumstances creating something that, on paper, should have been a fascinating thing to analyze.
This was especially true with certain match ups that ended up stalling on account of various factors surrounding both the options they adopt and the rulesets they ended up running with. The top 16 had to have one of the most diverse rosters to be expected from Smash tourneys. Sky and D1 made that incredibly clear right before we went headlong into the sets, and yet the most adrenaline-filled matches when things winded down consisted mostly of dittos. The sole exception to this if you ask me was 6WX vs MVD where the former's Sonic was finally adopted to a much more optimal and interesting degree that MVD had to answer to that with an offensively oriented counter-pick of his own in the form of Little Mac. Say what you want against that blue bugger, but you can't deny that his play was on point.
Maybe that's just a sign that old habits of Melee and Smash die hard, even when something is set up to theoretically be more interesting to witness (because really, if you have to glance at it merely from a surface level it's fair to argue that a great deal of "exciting" rounds in Melee, particularly the much anticipated Leffen vs Everyone fights at this Apex, consisted of Fox dittos). But we still learned a lot of things along the way in regards to the meta of certain characters. Abadongo's Pac-Man was possibly the biggest eye opener as bringing one of the game's greatest oddities into a public light and showing that there's still an entire meta of characters left to be unexplored. Even if campy, it was fascinating to witness simply on account of brand new things being made developed in front of us.
Granted, Dabuz managed to capitalize on that and, well, Dabuz is gonna Dabuz (even Bill Trinen of all people tweeted at him to use Rosa's DownB to counter Pac-Man with the absorbed projectiles and go on the offensive), but it was interesting to see the ways in which Rosalina was ready to counter Pac-Man to the most patient extents, which in turn created a sort of tango between the characters as round 3 saw Abadongo adopting a more offensive angle with Pac-Man, and the equal give-and-take of that felt like it was the impetus of what Smash 4 should have been able to provide considering the diversity surrounding it's Top 8. But it didn't commit to it, largely because it couldn't. A shaky ruleset that favored stalling, a questionable quarters best-of set up and the impending knowledge that everything surrounding the relatively slower end of it all (no thanks to Apex's schedule being immensely crippled by the awful venue circumstances) was holding back any real positive development that could have happened when the audience was more invested in historic smackdowns and salt mines that Melee would provide.
From a character and game play standpoint I felt like the Top 8 proved a number of things to me - it has many offensive angles to it that outclass Brawl (ZeRo, aMSa, MVD and 6WX proved this much), there's a plethora of unexplored facets in regards to characters that stands as cause for woeful unpreparedness and that even in spite of stigmas surrounding several characters like Sonic and Diddy, it's possible to teach an old dog new tricks. ZeRo's notoriety aside, he paid his dues with Diddy Kong. You can't possibly convince me that it wasn't amazing to see how far he took that character, because in spite of Diddy's scrubby exterior, that is not easy.
I hope EVO takes into account a lot of what worked and didn't work in Apex. Smash 4 is a game that needs to loosen up a little, both in terms of community lab time and organizing tournaments. Expect the unexpected, and let the potential for that flourish. The top 8 roster set a relatively optimistic precedent for the variety and general potential balance of the meta and now that needs to be capitalized on.
Final thought - a lot of people are ready to point out how only 2 Diddys managed to make it to the top 8, but I feel like little thought has actually gone into the why, beyond just ZeRo and M2K being really good Diddys. If the outcome of the top 8 is a telltale of anything I'd like to posit the thought that ideally, every player went into the tournament with a very vindicated assumption that everyone would jump onto the character most likely to win, and that a majority of players were actually prepared for this fact and most likely adopted their meta solely around the most optimal way to handle that threat, but little to nothing else. In essence, it feels like we basically looked for trees and ignored the entire forest for the last three-five months talking about Diddy, even though players like J. Miller had already set an example against that with a character like Luigi (which despite False being the only Luigi player in the top brackets, seemed to be the cause for a lot of players going with Luigi into the tournament and performing admirably against quite a few Diddys).
![[Deuce]](/data/avatars/l/34/34711.jpg?1423154415){kind=avatar}
is really underlooked and so is 
