Welcome all to the second installment of Super Smash Fighter! This week, we’ll be examining the similarities and differences in defensive options between Super Smash Bros. Melee and traditional fighting games.
Melee and Street Fighter: Defense
Let’s begin with by examining the basics of defense in the Street Fighter series. In Street Fighter, your main method of defense is blocking, and there are two ways you can do so: You can block high, and you can block low. Blocking high will block all high and mid-height attacks, which means it will block most grounded normals, aerials, and overheads. Blocking low will block all attacks that hit low and mid-height, which means it will block most grounded normals and crouching attacks/sweeps. You cannot block in the air, making your character defenseless if you jump, making jumping very risky.
Now let’s move onto Melee. Melee’s iconic method of defense is the shield: A bubble that surrounds your character and shrinks as it’s hit. As your shield shrinks, you’re more vulnerable, as it covers less of you. To compliment this mechanic, you can tilt your shield in any direction to cover more of one spot while leaving other spots uncovered. Along with just shielding, you can also roll or spotdodge. Doing so will make you invincible for a short period and help you escape pressure.
There are also some mechanics that both games share, the main one being blockstun (shield stun, in Melee). Basically, every attack will apply a few frames of blockstun to a blocking/shielding character. During these frames, they cannot do anything to adjust themselves or punish.
Punishing
Speaking of punishing, let’s cover what one can do out of blocking and shielding. After a standard a block in Street Fighter, you’re left with a neutral stance, meaning you can do pretty much anything. However, if you’re opponent is applying pressure, you’re generally either left to keep blocking or use a fast attack to counter.
Melee is a whole other beast when it comes to your options out of a shield, however. When you’re in shield, you can perform an aforementioned roll or spotdodge, but you can also jump or grab (and drop through a platform, assuming you’re on one). When you jump, you’re put into jump squat frames, which allow you to cancel your jump animation into an Up-Smash, Up-B, or grab before you leave the ground. If you chose not to cancel your jump squat, you can also wavedash, jump away or jump onto a platform, among other options. Most of the time however, your best option is to short hop and perform your fastest aerial, wavedash away or to simply grab.
Delving a little deeper into Street Fighter, there are defensive options that are simply counterattacks. The most prominent example of this are anti-airs, which are certain moves made to beat out aerial approaches. These can be anything from a standing normal to Ryu’s famous Shoryuken, and they stuff out most, if not all aerial approaches. Aside from anti-airs, counter attacks can be any move that beats out an attack from an approaching opponent, or simply hits them before or after their attack’s hitbox is out.
Although there are no specific anti-airs in Melee, there’s several equivalents. For starters, most disjointed moves, such as Marth’s forward smash, will beat out most aerials if spaced properly. Then, in terms of basic counter attacks, Melee’s freedom of movement allow for tons of different counters. Simply wavedashing back away from an approach introduces tons of options, depending on your character. Dash dancing can open the same sort of opportunities, just by dashing away from a punish and dashing back in.
Crossups and Mixups
Bouncing back to Street Fighter, there’s even more depth added to defense when you analyze mixups and crossups. Let’s start by talking about what exactly a crossup is. Since you block in Street Fighter by holding back, if your opponent gets behind you, “back” is now “forward”. For example, if I’m blocking an aerial approach, I start holding back. Let’s say I didn’t evaluate the spacing of the aerial enough, and my opponent ends up jumping behind me. Since my opponent is behind me, my direction changes, and I’m no longer holding back, meaning they can punish me with any attack (assuming I don’t react in time).
One of the most prominent methods of crossing up your opponent is to jump over them, like in the example I just went over, but to throw out an aerial that hits slightly behind your character, so you can hit your opponent as you cross them up.
Now there are mixups. Like I mentioned before, high and low blocking both exist, but they will only block attacks that hit their respective heights. Part of defense in Street Fighter is reading which height your opponent will attack from. For example, if an opponent approaches with an aerial, they will hit high, so you block high, but now that they’re on the ground, you expect them to hit low, since grounded low attacks are fast, and you’re probably still blocking high. So naturally, you block their low attack. An opponent can also mix you up by attacking with a slow overhead after landing, which is risky, but if they read your low block, can be a huge payoff. They could also simply grab you.
These mechanics add another layer of depth to defense in Street Fighter, and most of these mechanics were adopted by most other traditional fighters. However, Melee also has its own depth in these areas. Like I mentioned before, as your shield size decreases, your forced to tilt your shield to cover more of your body. Even though it doesn’t seem that important, not tilting your shield can lead to a lost stock if you’re not careful. For example, a Falco can whittle down your shield from far away with lasers, then approach with a laser to a down tilt. If you don’t tilt your shield down to block your feet, that down tilt can easily take your stock at high percents, and at low percents lead into a combo.
There’s also the introduction of light shielding. When you light shield, your shield is much larger; However, you take much more knockback and your shield shrinks much faster. This can be used instead of shield tilting in some scenarios. There’s also unique shield pressure that can lead into a grab, such as a shine grab. In these cases, you have to be aware of the possibility of something like a shine grab and be prepared to roll, as it's usually your best option in that scenario.
Conclusion
Although these comparisons can be drawn, the basics between Street Fighter and Melee in terms of defense are quite different. There is a reason I constructed this week’s topic to only those two games. If we were to talk about other fighters like Marvel Vs. Capcom, Skullgirls, Guilty Gear and Blazblue, which have their own specific mechanics, we could be here for days, as the differences add up. There are still commonalities, such as push blocking being somewhat similar to shield DI, or perfect shielding being similar to Just Blocks/Instant Blocks, but we’ll save those for another time.
In its most basic form, defense can be broken down into the classic rock paper scissors of “Attack Block Grab”, but past that, there’s much more in both Melee and the traditional fighter. These mechanics, some intended, some defined by the way the meta evolved in different games, can be seen in most fighting games, and to some extent, Smash.
See you all next week!
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