Fatmanonice
Banned via Warnings
I guess we have different definitions of what a combo is too. If that's the case, I'll get off my soapbox in that regard because it'll basically come down to a debate that won't go anywhere.
For the Ice Climbers, you need to think of them as a whole when it comes to the series. If you don't look at the mechanics of Melee and Brawl, the Ice Climbers had a lot of improvements in Brawl. Their specials became better, Nana's AI became somewhat better and they became harder to seperate overall, Nana actually has the ability to save herself thanks to the belay attack being given tether properties, it became easier for them to do chain grabs, etc. As I said before, the nerfs come into play when you look at Brawl's mechanics like with how the change severally hurt Captain Falcon.
Another example is Samus. In Brawl her missles are better and her tether recovery and zair are much more reliable, but, for whatever reason, they reduced the knockback for her smash attacks thus making her KO potential even worse. She's a character that, even if Brawl had Melee's mechanics, would have become worse overall. Another character is Link. All in all, Link is better than he was in Melee except for his normal recovery. In a game where being able to recovery and have a dependable offstage game iis such a big deal, this is why Link got such a kick in the nuts when it came to the tierlist. I see Ness being in the same boat too. He was improved in pretty much every regard but got royally screwed over by his recovery. Many characters like Zelda and Mario got screwed over by the defensive properties of Brawl which I'll talk about in a bit.
I decided to go through all three Smash games last night to refresh myself on the differences between all of them. For Melee, they things that stood out to me the most is how terrible the "defense system" is. In comparison to Brawl, the shields are not that reliable and neither is side stepping. Somehow, rolling in Melee is even worse than it is in Brawl and just about everyone's reminded me of Yoshi and Samus's in Brawl. Recovering is harder in general, so is shield grabbing, and so is power shielding. When you get knocked in the air, there isn't that much you can do either. You can DI (which I would say is harder in Melee), fast fall in hopes of beating your opponent to the ground (where you can tech which I'd say is easier than in Brawl), try to outpriortize their attack (as anyone could tell you, not the easiest thing to do depending on who you're playing), or aerial dodge (which you can only do once and it leaves you in a state of free fall).
Looking at all of this, I can somewhat understand why Sakurai did some of the things that he did with Brawl. He gave the game much more defense options which is why Brawl kind of grinds a gear with the competitive types. Throw in characters where little effort was taken to balance them (mainly Metaknight) and tactics that seem to have been neglected out of sheer laziness (pretty all the infinities aside from the Ice Climbers and long chain grabs like King Dedede's and Falco's against a lot of the cast) and it becomes even more apparent why Brawl has the problem it does. It a sense, Brawl's biggest problem is having a hard time countering defensive (or should I say overly defensive) tactics. For example, getting rid of the reflective properties of power shielding was a stupid idea. Things like Pit's arrows, Falco's lazers, and Diddy's bananas wouldn't be anywhere as annoying as they are now if they had simply kept that property.
I'd love to go more into this but I'm about to be kicked out the library so I'll have to check back probably tomorrow to respond and perhaps say a little more on the matter.
*Arrives at his Grandma's house*
Now I'm exploiting my grandmother for a proper internet connection! I'm such a louse!
Anyways, these defensive properties royally screwed over a large percentage of the returning Melee cast. As said before, Link got screwed over for having a piss-poor recovery in a game where it's fairly easy to recover for a majority of the cast. Mario got screwed over by how easy it is to dodge things in the air in Brawl. Captain Falcon and Ganondorf both got screwed for the same reasons as Mario and Link but also because of their lack of good approches and Brawl's mechanics making it very hard for them to counter camping and zoning.
Sakurai had the right idea but he went way too far with it. Like I said before, he got rid of the reflective properties of power shielding thus giving a good number of characters very little to counter projectile zoning. He made aerial dodging easier but at the expense of taking out most aerial combos in the process. (Again, see Mario.) He made shield grabbing easier but had some characters have **** chain grabs and infinites. Looking at it like this, it's almost like Sakurai said "hey, let's make Smash Bros more defensive" proceeded to add the mechanics in the game but then didn't really bother to check how this would effect the game as a whole and, given his schedule, it's understandable. It's estimated that probably about 65% of the development time went into the SSE and another 15% into the online features which leaves a mere 20% for everything else. Throw in the characters, stages, music, items, unlockables, etc and you're probably left with a goofy small fraction for the amount of time spent testing the balance of things.
Sakurai had tunnel vision if anything. He said he wanted to make Brawl stand out from the other Smash Bros games because of its single player mode (while Miyamoto supposedly said to focus on the vs-mode; given how people complain about Miyamoto being too "casual" too, this is pretty ironic, eh?). The online features, without a doubt, also had more of his attention than the balance of the game. From how the online turned out, I'm guessing that because he couldn't go for quality (which he pretty said he really wouldn't be able to from the get-go given the Wii's online capabilities and how hard it would be to put a game like Smash Bros online), he was going to go for quantity instead.
I was mad about how Brawl turned out for a little while but I quickly got over it. It has its flaws but its still a solid title. The people who essentially claim that just looking at the box gives them AIDs really need to get over themselves because, in the grand scheme of gaming, calling it a bad game is more about expressing how disgruntled you are for not getting what you wanted instead of how the game actually turned out. Having played games like Sonic Heros, Megaman X6, Star Fox Assault, and Resident Evil Code Veronica I can further say that Brawl is by no means a bad game. Disappointing? Not very much to me anymore but I can reasonably understand why some people are still left with a bad taste in their mouth. If anything, I'm oddly glad that they had the mistakes in Brawl so that there's a much bigger chance they won't appear in SSB4. For example, they got their feet wet with online play so, in SSB4, they'll actually have more of an idea of what works and what doesn't work. Tripping will more than likely be gone, probably more focus will be put back on the vs-mode, and a lot of the pointless extras like the masterpieces will be omitted. Sakurai tried to go in a new direction with Smash Bros and overshot the target. I don't not believe that "ZoMg SaCkGeRpIe HaTs KoMpEeTeVeE gUmRs!!!1!1!LOLWTFBBQOBGYN!" and "purposely" made Brawl the way that it was to "sabatoge" any attempts to make Smash Bros competitive but instead, like I've said many times, was simply trying to get Brawl a different feel from the other games in the franchise, put too much focus in the wrong things after doing so, and ended up with Brawl being as unbalanced as it is.
. Practically most of his debates are offtopic too lol.
