The balance issue lies in the fact that you can play Brawl, but you can't be good with worse characters solely through the idea of mechanics, but rather through an overall approach and playstyle.
In Melee, I can destroy my friends that casually play simply because my mechanics are far and away much greater than theirs (I'd hope so too, after all this time). In Brawl, if I play a generally bad, aggressive, or some sort of mindless playstyle, it's much more apparent against those that would or should be worse than "I" am. Not to say these styles don't work (though afaik, they rarely do), but you can't have an unfavorable style in conjunction with overwhelming mechanics that you've developed over a long period of time.
This is not to argue melee doesn't work the same way, it's just that in order for it to be apparent, the mechanical skill gap must be similar amongst the players, then the one with the unfavorable or stupid play will be shown to be stomped in a much more exaggerated manner when compared to Brawl (and less exaggerated when compared to 64).
This is to say, Brawl is much easier to pick up and play overall. It is a much less demanding game, a much more character nuance specific game, and (I say this with as little animosity and poor context as possible) much more of a party game. This fits Nintendo's current trend in their games lately. Not to imply Melee is the ultimate sumo fighter game. Melee, as a general game, is much easier to pick up then the likes of Guilty Gear, Street Fighter, MvC, and whatever else is obscure and I don't know of. The general idea of how a smash game is played is so astonishingly simple, that's why I ever was drawn towards them. Smash 64 is a great game and amplifies all mistakes made in the others as getting hit basically leads to dying.
Anyway, Sheik doesn't invalidate a lot of the cast. Dthrow chains are dumb, but if the Sheik is bad you can still win. Sheik should win most of those match-ups even without the chain throw, really. Looking at the match-up charts basically shows the communities indifference towards the whole lower spectrum as it's just assumed they perform poorly against higher tiers (as is the general case).
Brawl's balance revolves around stupidly specific single maneuvers. The ones that come to mind are how Ness, Lucas, and Wario can be abused. The next example would be Dedede's incredibly easy chain throw on so many characters with Brawl's improved/made "better" grab pummels. Even with Meta Knight removed, many of the characters that aren't
good can perform well just by being the stupid wild card match-up that no one knows. This is part of the reason I kept Olimar for so long and would pull him out whenever my other characters/I started to play like trash. With a larger cast, there's less exposure to certain parts of it that lead to an ignorance of how they play entirely, only to be surprised by it. This doesn't exactly work in Melee, to a point, if your mechanics are already decent and better than that player's. The biggest surprise factor that I've found to come with using underground (so to speak) characters is the lack of knowing where to DI certain moves to avoid the combo you actually have never seen before as they perform it on you. Another would be to know their approaches in order to react; however, if their approach is poorly framed and haphazard, good mechanics and general competitive knowledge still give you the edge if theirs are lacking. Looking at Taj and Axe, they both have amazing mechanics and overall game knowledge. Taj plays a great Marth and Axe plays a Falco that I'd argue is better than his Pikachu.
Mewtwo is a pain to play against because approaching him is somewhat difficult. He doesn't suffer from "******** shield syndrome" like some characters in the lower tiers and his grab combos and chases are actually really good. Camping him can be difficult seeing as shadow ball is actually pretty damn good (since Jeff brought up my opinions on that).
I don't know that anyone ever actually considers me a contender, but I really feel I know what I'm talking about in terms of game theory and general ideas of melee. I find it to be a matter of, "Do as I say, not as I do. Unless of course I did what I said and it was totally ****ing sweet did you see that? LOL, but yeah, that's what I was talking about." If Melee were a much more serious and bigger esport, I think I'd actually make a decent coach just because I know stupid specifics about the game for many useless things and I like showing people stuff so they can feel good about it upon proper execution.
keeper said:
Gage, you call people and things ugly all the time, I hardly consider that very accepting.
Sutherlin is accepting once you realize about half of what they say is IRL trolling.
The Melee community is full of *******s. Every community is, but a lot of the melee one isn't very newb friendly (not noob, though I don't know we are there either). This could potentially deal with what I considered above with the brawl skillgap?