just thought about this, genuinely don't remember why i thought it would be a good idea to post it and i don't see any better place to post it, so i might as well ask a question: what's your favorite story to tell about smash? mine is about melee, but obviously yours doesn't have to be. forgive any possible pretension; i'm just curious to know what kinds of games or stories keep people running back to the series that we're all here for. i don't really know why you'd be here if you didn't enjoy smash in one of its various incarnations, either official or fan-made.
as a mostly casual player with nowhere near enough time on his hands to play competitively, i think my story will probably be a lot less interesting than most of yours. when i was about eight, my cousins would come over anywhere from a couple times a week to a month, and we'd play a lot of melee together. we had this system where we would “call” characters—basically no one else was allowed to choose from the set that we “had”. as is to be expected from people who tell stories like this, i got the short end of the stick: i had ganondorf, captain falcon (who i absolutely HATED playing and hold a grudge against to this very day), kirby, bowser, and mewtwo. most of my time in training mode was spent with kirby since i liked his stone move even if, to my chagrin, characters could escape a couple of his throws. i played a lot against two cousins who were similar in age and one of older cousin who played fox. one time i was performing better than i normally was on corneria and finally the one who played fox and i were the only players still in the game. he was dominant among our group; being older, and possessing significantly more motor control than i (and the other two players) at that age, he usually only lost when we teamed up on him (hello uthrow uair, bane of my enjoyment of smash). anyway he's beating the hell out of me -- we usually played five-stock games, and i think at the relevant point in this tale he had three lives and i was at about 85% with two stocks left.
so, as you could expect from any reasonable eight-year-old this far down, i began to taunt him. not in-game taunts, the ones where your character does a little dance or gives a salute to the screen, real-life taunting. “AHHH all you do is the same attacks over and over. laser, up throw, up air. that's all you can do. try something else.” so he's busy trying to be creative at this point and ends up getting an upsmash kill. of course i mock him for it. “OH and upsmash too!!! do something interesting!” meanwhile, i'm trying to think of a strategy. and the only one i can possibly think of is spamming dash attack, down throw, and down smash. and that's all i do for the rest of the battle. for reasons still unbeknownst to me, he didn't know how to beat kirby's dash attack. he loses one stock. then another. soon enough we're even. i somehow win with one stock remaining with a climactic run-up up smash, at which point i start laughing and he leaves the room and furiously calls me a hypocrite. it stung, admittedly, but i can't stop laughing about it.
years later, i am still playing the game, but my cousins have mostly gone on with their lives, and i'm in the midst of doing the same. maybe i didn't tell it very well, but this is a story i can hardly think of without laughing. interestingly enough, i plan on becoming a fox main once i find my copy of melee in my room and start playing with people.
tl;dr – forced to play kirby as an eight-year-old against my ~20 y.o. cousin's fox, criticize him for spamming uthrow uair and lasers, beat him by being a hypocrite. gets even better when i'm basically going to do the same thing now that i'm a fox main