Super Smash Bros. Melee and the Traditional Fighter
Before we begin, I’d like to introduce a new column to Smashboards: Super Smash Fighter! Super Smash Fighter is a new series that will analyze the similarities and differences between the Super Smash Bros. series and traditional fighters. Super Smash Fighters will be published every Saturday.
Super Smash Bros. has always been a unique game. From its first installment on the Nintendo 64, Smash has shaped the “Platform Fighter” genre into what it is today. The second game in the series, Super Smash Bros. Melee, pushed this genre even further by introducing new mechanics and advanced tech through exploits that players are still discovering to this day. Thanks to these techniques and its dedicated player base, Melee has become one of the most popular fighting games to date, with the EVO 2016 grand finals peaking at over 200,000 viewers on Twitch, more than any other game at the event.
Now, something just doesn’t add up. What makes this nearly 15 year old party game so great? What underlying meta has developed that has made this game such a success in the competitive scene, for both the players and the viewers? What makes Melee, a game made for a casual audience, featuring characters like Mario, Donkey Kong, Kirby and Pikachu so suitable for competitive play, especially when put up against titans in the fighting game genre, such as Street Fighter V, Mortal Kombat X, Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 and Guilty Gear Xrd: Revelator?
The answer is simple: Melee is a fighting game, just like all of these. As much as people in the community joke, Melee isn’t just some party game, despite what the game’s marketing, Nintendo, and even the game’s creator tells you. The Melee community has molded the game into something more than that.
But what makes Melee a fighting game? How is it similar to the aforementioned fighting games that were also featured as main events at Evo? What underlying mechanics does this game have that makes it comparable to these fighting games? Well, enough questions. I think it’s about time we begin analyzing.
Let’s start by looking at the traditional fighter. Here’s a quick example of a HUD I hastily made that includes the bare minumum of most modern fighters:
At a first glance, you notice a few things on the HUD: There’s a health bar that depletes when a character is hit, a round counter under said health bar, a timer at the top that chooses the decides the winner if said health bar isn’t completely depleted, and usually, a meter at the bottom for each character that allows them to use EX moves, supers, cancels, etc…. Now, this won’t be the same for every game. Sometimes, a game won’t have meter, or other times, it’ll have more things going on with the HUD, such as a Burst Meter, X-Factor/Overdrive, or character specific things, but for the most part, traditional fighters follow a specific sort of template for their HUD.
Now let’s look at a standard platform fighter’s HUD. Here’s another quick example I made using examples like Smash and Rivals of Aether:
Assuming we’re looking at a singles match, there’s a lot less going on compared to most fighting game HUDs. In fact, Melee’s HUD is mostly just numbers: You have the percent of damage your character has taken, the time and each player’s stocks.
So far, we can draw one major comparison from this. In both Melee and the traditional fighter, in it’s simplest form, the goal of each player is to eliminate the other player’s health or stocks in a one on one scenario. Simple enough, but there’s a lot more comparison’s to be drawn from the actual gameplay. To start off, let’s talk about spacing.
Spacing is a fairly simple concept, but is incredibly important to any fighting game, including Smash. In its simplest form, “spacing” is the idea that, depending on a character’s location on screen, they might be in an advantageous position. A classic example of this is Fox on Final Destination in Melee:
In a scenario like this, where both characters are on the opposite side of the stage, Marth doesn’t have any way to hit Fox without approaching, but Fox can comfortably shoot lasers from where he is, meaning Fox has the advantage.
Traditional fighters have the same concept. Here’s an example from Street Figher V:
In this example, Necalli is too far away to hit Dhalsim, but Dhalsim’s long range normals allow him to hit Necalli and apply pressure from far away, giving him the advantage in this scenario.
Next, let’s take a look at dash dancing, footsies and baiting. An important part of spacing is to know both your and your opponent’s effective range. Once you understand that concept, you can stay within your range and out of your opponent’s. But, it’s not always that simple: What if your opponent simply has more range then you? At that point, you have a few options, but we’re going to focus on one for now: Baiting.
Baiting an opponent’s attack allows you to punish the end lag of that attack. One of the most effective ways of baiting is to just barely enter your opponent’s range in a situation where you can still escape easily. To any Melee player, the first thing that comes to mind here is dash dancing. Dash dancing is arguably the most effective way to do this in Melee, and you can find examples of this in almost every match between top players.
Here’s a quick example with Joseph "Mango" Marquez's Fox against Adan "Armada" Lindgren Peach at Genesis 2:
Mango dashes into Armada’s N-Air range, and then quickly dashes out. Realizing he’s too slow to punish Armada’s quick float canceled nair, Mango dashes into his range again to bait a dash attack, which he dashes away from and punishes by running up and grabbing, allowing him to take a stock.
In most traditional fighters, there’s a concept similar to dash dancing and baiting: Footsies. Footsies are essentially dash dancing, but without the “dash” part. In most fighting games, dashing is a huge commitment, and should really only be used to close space to punish something, or to quickly escape a setup with a back dash. So instead of dashing, once can simply move in and out of an opponent’s range.
Let’s take look at a quick example from Daigo Umehara and Lee "Infiltration" Seon-Woo's Street Fighter 4 match at EVO 2013:
In this example, Infiltration forces Daigo into the corner, leaving him with limited his options. From here, Infiltration moves back and forth, in and out of Daigo’s range to bait a crouching normal, which he punishes by using a Focus Attack to adjust his hurtbox, so that he is just out of Daigo’s range.
Spacing, however, goes much further than just dash dancing and footsies. In Smash, certain moves have certain hitboxes that are more rewarding to hit than the move’s other hitboxes. These are known as sweetspots: Some great examples of these are Marth’s tippers, Falcon’s F-Air and Zelda’s F-Air and B-Air. Sweetspots encourage characters to space themselves properly to get the most out of their punishes and combos.
Although sweetspots are harder to come by in fighting games, some characters are completely designed around them, and made to function at specific ranges. Some examples would be Dhalsim from the Street Fighter series, Amane from the Blazblue series and Glacius from the Killer Instinct series, just to name a few.
Most of you probably noticed that all the examples I came up with were, again, characters designed around functioning at a specific range. When you look at the examples I listed from Melee, although those characters are good in specific ranges, their most effective ranges tend to vary based on matchups and players. The reason for this is Melee’s much more dynamic movement. With the introduction of platforms and movement techniques, a character designed around one or two specific ranges generally wouldn’t be very good. These character’s work in fighting games because of the more constricted movement and simplicity of the “arena” characters fight in. Even games with faster movement, like Blazblue and Guilty Gear, still have the same basic format, which allows characters like this to exist and thrive in certain matchups.
Although there is a completely different set of tools in Smash and the traditional fighter, many fundamental mechanics, such as spacing, stay the same. These mechanics can be found in many other competitive games, but they are the most prevalent in games like Smash and other fighters due to the constricted, one on one nature of the game.
Remember to keep spacing. See you all next time!
