-You've heard this already, but there are very few real follow ups, setups or combos. No one has figured out a consistent 2 piece outside canned strings.
Falcon's Forward B is a good example: WHY does this move exist if following up with ANYTHING is impossible? You maybe get an Up Air at 0-10%. After that, your opponent is knocked so far that you can't even consider yourself on the offensive anymore, you're practically neutral with your opponent. It's a lunging launcher with no real purpose at this point. Same deal with ALL his throws.
The "moves decrease knockback with excessive use" mechanic could add a VERY deep combo system to Brawl. Some moves cannot be comboed out of until they've been spammed a couple times; likewise, some moves cannot kill after being overused. Also, character specific traits like Lucario's damage increase could interact with this mechanic to make combos much harder to master than a "5 minute walk from the epicenter".
-Very BASIC game play mechanics are either nerfed or GONE:
Light Shield/Analog Shield Physics: GONE
Power Shield: Seemingly GONE. If you timed your Shield presses correctly, you would get a new sound effect but no Parry or Projectile reflections (no game play effect). Maybe it changed somehow, but in the 2-3 days of my friends playing, no one has witnessed PS in effect. If an overpowered projectile develops you're ****ed.
OK, I can see how this decreases depth. Im not justifying his decision, but I think Sakurai just doesn't want to reward twitching. Analog shields are probably gone so that Wiimote users don't have any disadvantages (other than playing with a crap controller). I'm personally glad that he didn't remove the short hop for the sake of Wiimote users. Now that would SUCK.
Ledge Cancel: Obviously still in, but very limiting. You only can cancel with back/down on the Control Stick (so far), so doing attacks from the ledge is very hard. Furthermore, you have to wait 1/2 a second before letting go of the ledge meaning: no invincibility off the ledge or very few frames, if any.
Crouch Cancel: GONE.
Sure. Sakurai wants to make some forms of edgeguarding (jumping out from the stage with an aerial) superior to others (edgehog, bair, re-edgegrab or something.)
CC will be missed, but it seems that Sakurai removed many of the ground techs to focus on the air-to-air game.
DashDance: No mind game potential, so it's useless as you either have to do it REALLY fast (tiny direction changes) or VERY slowly over longer distances. The only consistent spacing tool right now is walking. Ground game felt hopeless in Brawl, but not just because of this. More on that later.
Applying Fox Trotting to other forms of movement seems less viable than I thought, but it just might require a **** ton of practice.
Different Falling Speeds: GONE. Everyone has a homogenized falling speed, meaning that the meta game inherently suffers.
DD: I'm not sure of all the Melee uses of DD, however, foxtrotting back and forth seems viable for similar purposes as it can be cancelled by C-stick smashes.
Falling speeds:It doesn't seem that way to me. It looks like Lucario/Samus falls slower than Fox/Falcon still. The difference isn't as pronounced, but it looks like it's still there.
-The alleged aerial game expansion remarks made by Sakurai at this point seem silly. There is little to nothing at this point that shows the general game play has gone more aerial (outside the characters that can fly/glide or jump multiple times). If anything, it's the opposite. I don't need to mention the obvious extraction of L-Cancel. The new Air Dodge does little to expand things at this point. It's a very long animation and after the second AD without touching the ground, you plummet downwards. You still suffer considerable lag after air dodging, so the only reason I can see Sak allowing multiple ADs at this point, is to allow one to come back to the stage after ADing off accidentally.
I think the aerial expansion Sakurai was trying to implement meant air-to-air combat, not attacking grounded opponents with aerials. This is evident in reduced falling speed, as well as the new air dodge and upB system, where you don't always go into fallspecial afterwards. The fall-after-AD#2 thing may be a noob-friendly measure to prevent juggles, as is done in other competitive fighting games.
-This game was made to be played with items. I believe this whole heartedly. The only character that could kill before 100% consistently was Ike, so he won most of the matches. Killing off the sides for most characters doesn't happen until closer to 200%. Characters are so floaty, they often make it back to the stage without using their second or third jumps, they simply Air Control towards the stage -- often even after being intercepted by an offstage attack. Brawl tournaments will never finish within a reasonable time frame at this pace. This game was not meant to be competitive.
That's 'cause people were spamming their kill moves like in Melee. You can't do that anymore. Almost all of Ike's moves are kill moves, so he doesn't have to spam one or two.
-Attempting Edge Guards at this point feels pointless with the auto sweet spot feature. This is why in vids, players seem so illogical when trying to edge guard. A character can sweet spot FROM ALMOST 2 CHARACTER LENGTHS AWAY.
Jump out after 'em. If they can get back easily, so can you. This is the same air-to-air combat I referenced earlier.
In one situation, I was playing a timed Stock match, Ike vs. Fox. After going up one stock, I started ******* around and started dropping beneath the stage and regrabbing the ledge with his Up B. Fox could do nothing. Not only was it hard to attack me because of the Auto Sweet spot, he couldn't Shine because of the Super Armor present all throughout Ike's Up B. I got the time down to 20 seconds before I accidentally killed myself.
There were illegal stalls in Melee (Peach wallbombing, Jiggly's rising pound). If this is legitimately an infinite stall, it will be banned.
-This was my the strangest problem with this game. The game, amazingly, seems to have control issues. I don't know if it's just the nature of the new system and there's a mechanic we're not aware of, flirting with us, so I can't say for sure -- but everyone found themselves turning the opposite direction or jumping randomly when generally playing. It was quite annoying, the controls just don't feel very tight. This may be us just not being very good yet, but it's something that I don't remember experiencing in the previous games. It happened most after landing an aerial or trying to DashDance and was completely ****ing over the ground game.
If you pay attention to the vids, you can actually see other players having the same problem. Like I said, it's probably some mechanic no one's pegged yet, but it really got in the way of things. The seemingly random Tripping mechanic really didn't help things either.
I dunno, maybe your Gamecube controllers are getting old
And I seriously doubt tripping is random. It seems like it happens when people try to dash during post-lag for something, like a smash or an aerial.
The philosophy governing the development of this game is clear to me: this is a party game with fighting game aesthetics. Glitches and techniques will likely develop (like any other type of game) but they'll all exist within a paradigm of severe restrictions.
This game reminds me so much of the transition from Halo1 to Halo 2, but just way more drastic. I predict high level play in the future will consist mostly of glitches that don't completely break the general game play (just like Halo 2). New school players will stick with it, old school players will likely opt out (such as myself).
Even though it's more party-oriented, I don't see why it can't be a fighting game with pretty good depth. The benefits and drawbacks of spamming attacks will go way over the head of the casual player.
I'll gladly eat these words with a healthy seasoning of dead particles from the hairy ****** of an AIDS infested concubine if I turn out to be totally wrong in the future.
I'll let you guys know when I get the game later.
-Kimosabae
Your impressions are very justifiable for a pro player who has an idea of what competitive Smash looks like. I understand you guys didn't want Melee 2.0, but I feel Brawl may be a deep fighter in its own right.
