Another thing is, more competitive does not necessarily mean more fun. I have more fun playing Brawl, personally. I like the characters better, and I think there are less broken ones. Melee was too much about falco/fox/marth/shiek. I played falco in Melee a lot. In Brawl I play Mr. Game and Watch, Peach, Ike and often other characters too, and have more fun playing them. In fact, I think there is more potential in Brawl to be pretty great with nearly every character, whereas in Melee I thought that was harder to do.
I definitely agree that fun is subjective, and we all enjoy our own brands of fun. I personally like the characters better in Melee, simply because they have a more unique feel to them. The fact that all characters, even those with multiple jumps, are subject to the same physics in Brawl makes it feel bland to me. I mean, I think Bowser
should fall faster than Kirby, ya know?
I played all the time with half the cast of Melee, there really wasn't a character I didn't like playing as. Well... maybe Luigi... so floaty (no wonder I don't like Brawl). I messed around with Falco and Marth but only seriously played with Fox as far as top tier goes, and most of my other chars are low tier. I looove love love mewtwo, his movement and abilities are so strange and unique, and most people barely ever play against a Mewtwo. You'd be surprised how technical he can be. Pichu rocks too, I like him a lot more than Melee pika. Anyways, my reminiscing about the lovely cast of Melee is a digression...
I hold the opposite opinion of yours, I think each character in Melee has more potential. There's just so many ways to outmaneuver, outthink, and work around an opponent, and you can always use speed to your advantage (even with Bowser). I always played with a crew who would play with every character, against any character, so I really grew to appreciate the skills of each one. We didn't worry so much about the tourney scene, so we didn't pigeonhole ourselves to the top tier characters... and thus we eventually made our mid to low tier characters tourney level. I just feel that there's a bigger divide between the 'tiers' in Brawl... in Melee, a great Pichu will almost always beat a good fox, but I don't see a great Ganon beating a good MK in Brawl... there's just too many limitations, there's less choices...
It's like Melee is an open source program... it allows for innovation. Innovation in Brawl rarely leads to good things, you need to stick to the plan. All the good Brawl matches I've seen are basically simple strategies applied over and over and over. In Melee matches I can see the minds of the players, there's a lot more going on.
Wow, I need to keep my posts shorter. But in essence, that's why I find Melee to be more fun, and more competitive. It's so much more open and engages more of your mind. With my crew, it was great to play a crazy fast paced game where anything could happen at anytime... sooo many times we woke up other people in the house at 4am yelling about something ridiculous that happened in the game. Once I got in the Smash groove, I could even look away from the screen for 5 seconds and still know what I was doing and continue with my plan... maybe I haven't played enough Brawl, but I just haven't found a rhythm in the characters like I did in Melee... and I think it's because the rhythms are too slow.
It's been shown that rhythms around 60 bpm or above 120 bpm elevate consciousness... I've never made this connection before, but maybe that's the issue. Melee makes me feel high when I'm in the groove, and I know the bpm is well above 120 (just try and wavedash back and forth for a full minute and count the beats). I always felt Melee was about rhythm (feels like turntablism to me). I don't know where the Brawl rhythm falls, but I'd imagine it's between 60 and 120, leaving your consciousness in the normal plane (and thus explaining why I can't find it
)
That might sound a bit crazy but I believe it.
BB out.
