Brawl will be superior to melee in every way and *gasp* Melee was meant to be a party game too. :O Those who deny this are, in a nutshell, ignorant.
Why are we guaranteed that Brawl will be superior to Melee in every way? This is just a foolish statement. It is very often the case that sequels are generally regarded as inferior to their predecessors, and even if about par or even better, often certain aspects aren't as good.
That's basically the argument here. No matter how good Brawl turns out to be of its own accord, it seems like it would have been better with wavedashing left in. Wavedashing brings all softs of options into the game that otherwise don't exist, as M2K, amongst others, has pointed out already in several threads. Even if we assume that WDing wouldn't be as important in Brawl as it is in Melee, like Gimpy and others have postulated, that doesn't mean that it would be worthless.
Unless WDing would somehow... just break Brawl in half with brokenness, which given the gameplay we've seen it's very hard to think that it would, then there seems to have been no
legitimate reason to remove it other than a preference for momentum-based airdodging to directional airdodging by the development team. Now, personally I'm of the opinion that direcitonal airdodging is probably a generally deeper tactic than this new momentum-based airdodge, being able to be used to recovery, movement stopping (WD down out of dash, for instance), triangle jumping, and etc. Even if this isn't the case, and it turns out that momentum airdodging is actually really cool and interesting, then I'd still hold that it doesn't outweigh the benefits of the old airdodge system AND the ability to WD, combined.
Everyone knows Brawl is a new game, with new mechanics, and new techs. That's totally irrelevant to the argument though, so why people keep harping on it is beyond me. The core of the argument is simply that the removal of the WD removes a host of options from Brawl, adversely affecting the game. Whether or not Brawl is better than Melee despite this
doesn't matter. It's simply saying "hey, it'd have been EVEN AWESOMER if WD was in there with all that other awesomeness, too."
As for L-cancelling, it was a mere technical barrier in the game. You always wanted to l-cancel. So, removing it doesn't lessen strategy in any way. Yes, it removes the punishment game from missed l-cancels. But, honestly, that was a very niche since good players so rarely miss l-cancels, and honestly, pure technicality doesn't make for an interesting multiplayer game. So, while it is a bit aggravating, and to some small extent effects the competitive game by no more possibility for missed l-cancels, the net effect is really very negligible. Removing it really does make a lot of sense and is justifiable, even if it's not everyone's personal preference; and in the end it doesn't matter that much anyways.
Other things that were added to the game, such as auto-sweetspotting, also seem to me to have dumbed down gameplay unnecessarily as well, not merely the removal of WD. Basically, it seems a case of confused game design. Why is Sakurai removing strategic elements of the game for no good reason? Before you yell at me, yes, probably we'll see a good reason for some of the changes eventually. But are you going to tell me with a straight face that all these changes are actually good? I doubt it. Sakurai seems to be too obsessed with his "vision" for the game and how it ought to be played to see that maybe, just maybe, some of the unintended features of previous games actually made the games better. I've seen this problem in other game designers as well. Most game designers simply are not competitive gamers, and so don't fully grasp the negative consequences of some of their changes. It seems like a good idea to them, since it fits into their framework of how they think the game should play, or it's just "cool," but they don't understand the full ramifications to high-end gameplay, often the result of changes that, to their mindset, are absolutely trivial.
I mean, just see the Brawl forum and you'll witness this in many of the random scrub posters. They simply don't grasp how a change they see as ridiculously minor could negatively impact the game in any meaningful way, and so think that players complaining about removal of the WD are simply *****ing because they are afraid of change. It's a matter of perspective. They just don't get that what they see as really minor has far-reaching consequences to high-end play. It's hard to grasp subtleties in any game when you're so far from that level of play yourself. And I think that's the problem we're now facing with Sakurai, and why we're seeing so many potentially disappointing changes. And this is why I think every development team needs a legitimate ridiculously skilled player on-staff in any competitive game, but now I'm going on a tangent.
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