“Super Smash Bros Melee” and “Super Smash Bros Brawl” are two installments in the “Super Smash Bros” series, in fact “Melee” is the second installment and “Brawl” is the third, and most recent, installment. Now most people might think something along the lines of “how can two games in the same series be different outside of content?” but the truth is the games are extremely different, epically for the dedicated hardcore community of the series. But before we get into that let’s talk about what “Super Smash Bros” is. They are one of the biggest and most popular crossover games created. “Super Smash Bros” is a platform fighting game full of Nintendo characters ranging with characters from “Super Mario”, “Legend of Zelda”, “Pokemon”, or less known games such as “Fire Emblem” or “Earthbound”, or even two third party games “Sonic the Hedgehog” and “Metal Gear Solid”. Now within the hardcore community for the game series there is much controversy between the two games. This essay will be going over what makes the two games so different and why there is a split within their fan bases.
“Super Smash Bros Melee” is considered the pinnacle of the series by many and is the fastest game in the series. There are many factors contributing to the games speed with the most obvious and biggest reason being the game’s engine. The game’s physics also help quite a bit to, characters fall quite fast. But there are also smaller things that help make the game faster like hit-stun which allows for combos and strings or being able to reduce landing lag from aerial attacks by half. “Melee” is just a fast paced game that makes it an overall better experience for many people to watch as well.
“Super Smash Bros Melee” is highly valued for its, what the hardcore community calls it, tech skill which is accomplished through, again what the hard core community call it, advance techniques. Advance techniques are a series of button executions to execute a action. There a plethora of them in “Melee”. It was stated before that you can halve the lag of aerials attacks when you land, this is known as Lag-Cancel and is done by pressing one of the shield/dodge buttons or the grab button right before you land onto the ground. There are also techniques like Wavedashing, which is done by pressing the jump button then the shield/dodge button, then tilting the control stick left or right diagonally and it makes you slide across the ground while staying in the idle position so you can perform anything while moving, Dash Dancing, This is constantly staying in the dash animation and going back and forth and is done by pushing the control stick back and forth, right and left, repeatedly, Power Shielding, this is down by shielding right before a attack will hit you to reduce shield stun and react faster and it also reflects projectiles, Crouch Canceling, there are 2 forms of this; one is crouching right when an attack hits and not take an hitstun and react immediately and the other is crouching while running/dashing and be able to follow into any other form of attack., and many more techniques that would take up to much room to talk about.
It’s safe to say that “Super Smash Bros Melee” can be played on a higher level. Within the hardcore community there are tournaments that get held and can boast quite the attendance. Just at the beginning of this year there was a national tournament known as Apex 2014 that held “Melee” and was the second largest “Melee” tournament to be held clocking 629 entrants, EVO 2013 was the largest have an entrance size of 696 entrants and it should be noted that the “Melee” community raised nearly 95000$ for breast cancer to get into EVO 2013 but that isn’t all Melee was the first of three games to break the record of most watched fighting games clocking at 134000 views and is currently the second most watched fighting game ever but there is still more to EVO 2013 for Taylor Hicks, the winner of the fith season for American Idol, entered the tournament as well. It is definitely safe to say the “Super Smash Bros Melee” is one of the most competitive fighting games out there.
“Super Smash Bros Brawl” is a much slower game in general. Characters fall a lot slower making the game more “floaty, the new mechanic known as random tripping, while a character is running there is a random chance you will trip, and another new mechanic known as Hitstun Cancel which allows plays to cancel their hitstun by either air-dodging or performing an aerial attack. Many Melee player, understandably, didn’t like these changes. Despite that the game still got a strong following anyways. It’s a hard game to enjoy watching though unless you understand the deeper parts of the game.
“Super Smash Bros Brawl” gets harped on a lot for its “lack” of tech skill. It might not be as technically demanding as “Melee” and many of “Melee” famous techniques might have been removed or made useless but it got new techniques in the process and there are still quite a few of them. “Brawl” introduced the Buffering mechanic, which is seen in many other fighting games, which allows you to perform a move right when another move is finishing and has a wide variety of uses, there is also the Dash Attack Canceled Up Smash which allows you to cancel a dash attack into a up smash and while performing a up smash you will slide across the ground, it is only usable through certain characters though and has limited uses, pivot grabs which is done by turning around while running and pressing the grab button almost as instantly and takes off a lot of lag of your normal grab, the Reverse Aireial Rush, which is done similar to a pivot grab but when turn around you want to jump instead and perform a backwards aerial attack, and various other techniques. So while it may be understandable while “Melee” players are disappointed with the tech skill of “Brawl” it still exists and is still prominent.
Despite the “Melee” players who dislike playing Brawl on a high level it is still perfectly viable despite not being as big as “Melee”. “Brawl’s” biggest tournament, Apex 2012, was 400 entrants which is still pretty sizable for a video game. A big reason for the stunt of tournaments for Brawl is just players being disappointed in it. But despite that the competitive scene still came to be and still lives.
To conclude, both games are from the same series but are extremely different. “Melee” is a much faster paced game with a lot of techskill. “Brawl” is a slower paced game with less techskill but still quite a bit. Both are game are undoubtedly competitive but it’s understandable to see why “Melee” is bigger and why many “Melee” players were disappointed with Brawl.