When my brother and I were younger, my brother refused to play
Super Smash Brothers Melee with me at all because I would always beat him,
and he would always lose.
He would always argue that it is not fun because he always loses.
Because he wouldn't play, I had nobody to play against and thus had
no reason to play away. This resulted in Super Smash Bros Melee to
be put away in a box indefinitely.
I guess this is the type of attitude that Sakurai wanted to avoid.
(Thats right, he's not trying to "cater" to casual gamers"
-He's only trying to avoid situations like this, although he may have
went to the extreme...)
So the game got put away indefinitely... until I descovered
competitive Smash matches on Youtube and then the Smash
World Forums and advanced tecniques. Because of this new
competitive aspect, my brother and I dusted off Super Smash Brothers
Melee and started to play again and learn the new techniques.
I played fox after watching tournament videos of him and ShinedBlind.
My brother took up Marth because the best player in the world, Ken,
uses Marth. My brother even started to beat me in the majority of the
matches, but it was fun.
No doubt that some of this can be attributed to us being more mature
from growing up, but the competitive aspect definitely
had a large impact in saving our interest in Smash Bros.
Still, Sakurai's attitude and determination in eliminating as much of
the competitive aspect of Brawl will save situations like in my first statement,
but attempting to completely eliminate the competitive aspect is taking
it too far.
In Melee, I'm a casual player who plays competitively with my friends and I've
learned the advanced tecniques, although I've never been to a tournament. I
will (of course) stick to Brawl because Brawl is an upgrade to Melee in
graphics, etc. I won't think any less of Brawl than Melee (although tripping
is stupid) but I'm only posting in this topic because of the
importance this is to some people and I want to input my 2 cents.