This is purely my frustration with the game. I love Smash and am thankful, but damn if I don't get worked up a bit by some of the nuances this game has. Most of my problems are:
1) Stage builder is bad. It offers barely anything to work with, the touchscreen isn't perfect so you consistently end up making mistakes and you can't use it with 8 player smash. A good example of the difficulty using it is when you try to draw a line and it makes jagged imperfections you *swear* you didn't have any control over even with the grid enabled. It has barely any intuitive use. For god sakes, you can't even select structures and move them and there are no backdrops/walls! 'Buildings' you make are really just floating blocks with no connectivity. The textures available aren't enough, the objects aren't enough and when we have stages like Palutena's Temple and the weight limit in stage builder on what we can make is so shallow, it's really frustrating. So what if we cause some framerate dips with our levels? That's OUR problem. The limit for the amount you can put in a single level is way too small. All this DLC and not one f***ing update to Stage Builder? What!? Why even bother to include it if you're going to half-ass it that badly?
2) Items spawning too frequently even on Low setting. I swear, even on low, items spawn every few seconds. I don't like to use items because of this coupled with the fact that when there are too many items (especially pokeballs) in a match, it just devolves into a frenzy of Let's-all-race-to-that-item instead of an actual fighting match. That and smash balls spawn soooo frequently. I guess it's to make sure everyone has a chance to get one but if you can't get one, that should just be tough sh*t.
3) Item spawning ON TOP OF CPU. This is easily one of the biggest issues I have with this game and I see it echoed here a lot. I just played classic mode 8.0 tonight. Every single time an assist trophy, smash ball, starman, pokeball or health item dropped, it was directly overlapping a CPU. I don't mean nearby or overhead, I mean it actually spawned in the same space the CPU was occupying and always when I'm either doing really well or trying to recover with high damage. When the items spawn on top of the CPU, it's always slightly off the ground and they grab it the split second it pops into the level. As in, they grab it before it even hits the ground. The game is clearly giving itself an edge over the player.
One extreme example of this was when I got to the Mii fighter match. A starman (invincible star) spawned on top of one of the Mii's. He knocks me off stage, I recover. His star wears off. Not 5 seconds after it wears off, a second starman spawns on top of that SAME EXACT MII. It was so frustrating I had to pause in disbelief. Every match with items is like this. I have to turn them off, I just can't deal with the CPU giving itself more of an advantage.
4) CPU's at 9 being psychic and overly grabby. I don't enjoy 9's. I can beat a 9 if I'm trying really hard but that's not why I play Smash. I don't play it to be pissed off and have to try my absolute best just to survive in the game. It's not Dark Souls. I play 9's when I'm practicing. I play 8's when I want to relax and have fun. 9's are clearly just reacting to my inputs and at an inhuman speed. Worse, they mostly just grab and they do it with 100% accuracy. I could be jumping and they'd grab me just a centimeter before my character's feet touch the ground.
They shield up, wait for me to make a mistake and grab me. When you try to play at their game, it becomes a contest of you and the 9 dodging and rolling around each other and attempting to grab the other until someone screws up. It's not fun, it's annoying. To make it worse, they TEAM UP ON YOU! When you're fighting more than one CPU, they will stop fighting each other at random intervals and co-op your ass. That's like the devs said 'okay, we've made a conscious effort to turn the CPU into the most irritating thing we possibly can for the player to fight, what can we do to put the cherry on top? Oh, make them randomly team up!'
5) Amiibo's are way too hard at L50. Thought level 9's were annoying? Level an amiibo to 50. A level 50 amiibo is basically just a CPU if you could crank its difficulty up to 10. I tried to find more about this topic online but, for whatever reason, couldn't. I have a Zelda Amiibo. I've wiped it once because my 8 year old sister-in-law trained it to 50 by teaching it to fight like a sissy, running away, jumping constantly and using nothing but the ranged fireball attack Zelda has. Fighting that thing was one of the most annoying experiences of my life, gaming or otherwise. I beat it maybe twice ever and that was when I was at the top of my game.
I wiped it and attempted to retrain it properly. Still, overly difficult. I thought 9's were bad, this thing... it's more than psychic. It can time travel. Can't figure out any other explanation other than the Amiibo's are not given the same physical limitations CPU and players are and I really would question that 9's have some sort of advantage there anyway. I've seen these 9's and Amiibo's dodge and use abilities, or even come out of an animation, much faster than it would seem possible for a human player to do. Your character just can't move that fast, you have to play by the rules of the animation. If you're using an ability, you can't do anything til it finishes. Yet, I've seen this level 50 Amiibo move faster than that. I had to cheese it to beat it. It was cheap and made me feel like a ****.
6) Network latency problems.
7) Lack of side characters from big name franchises. Sonic. The End. What? No Tails even? Oh we get those goofy ass Mii costumes that look like Ukinojoe characters. Great... Megaman, no Protoman or Bass. Cloud, no Sephiroth when the two are basically a pair. Not even Tifa. Yet we get Pokemon and Fire Emblem galore. It's like I said before, the game is less Smash Bros and more 'Pokemon Vs Fire Emblem (and company).' I really feel like some creative misdirection happened here. Characters like Dark Pit, Rob and Game and Watch are in the game all of which are *arguably* uninteresting both from a mechanical and aesthetic view point, just bland and lame. When more could have been done, some dorky boring characters got in just for name sake.
Sure, there are a lot of cool characters. Zero Suit Samus being her own character, Villager, Megaman... but then you have some duds. Characters that you'd think a normal minded person would go 'That wouldn't be very interesting, next!' I'm sure some people like them, but they don't do it for me.
8) Mii Costumes are dumb. Some aren't. Some of the DLC ones are cool, I guess the vampire one is too. Then you have stupid items like the lion hat, chef hat, several crowns with really ill-fitting wigs attached, that one coral crown that is way too big and makes your face look like the front end of a bulldozer. So much wasted effort, so much lost potential. What good is a character creator if most of the choices look ridiculous or boring?
Here, without thinking too long, let me shoot off some quick examples right off the top of my head of better ideas: an actual normal ass crown with no stupid wigs glued to them, variations of space marine helmets, variations of megaman-esque costumes, different kinds of medieval armors, super hero outfits, variations of MORE Smash character outfits. But, no, we get to 'unlock' a swimming cap after clearing classic mode for the 100th time. COOL.
9) 8 player smash being forced down our throats. I get it, it's fun, it's new, it's innovative. I appreciate it. But it's unstable chaos. Whenever I'm in an 8 player (hell, 6+ player) smash, I can't tell what the f*** is going on. Between all the flashing graphics, the special moves going off, the dust kicking up, the players on top of each other and the sea of just random noise, I have no idea where I even am half the time let alone have a chance at beating 7 different level 9 CPU's! It's madness and it has NO place being such a consistent thing in Classic Mode. Ever do a 25 man (or 40 man) raid in WoW or play online with 3 other players in Diablo 3? How about Guild Wars 2 World vs World in a large zerg? There's too much going on and it becomes difficult to pay attention or differentiate one thing from another. The best strategy I've been able to apply here is to just avoid things til some of them kill each other and it gets a little easier, but remember that bit about CPU teaming up? 8 player smash isn't exempt from that. It happens there too. Good luck running from 7 different level 9 CPU's teaming up on you at the edge of the stage.
They basically walk at the exact same speed you can move sideways during a fall, so you're not likely going to be able to fall to safety and recover from that many bloodthirsty opponents.
If I see a Mario stage on the board and I am trying to unlock Mario custom moves, then that means I have a greater chance if I choose that level... but if it's an 8 player match... that means I'm going to be forced to put up with that horse sh*& to increase my odds of getting a Mario themed move. It's everywhere and it needs to be less of a 'LOOK WE HAVE 8 PLAYER MATCHES NOW' type thing and more of a 'hey we have 8 player matches now if you want' type thing.
10) Final boss in classic mode on 7 or higher. F*** that. It's annoying. I can't even land back on stage most of the time. There's about a full second of time you have to attack before the bosses do their next move and usually you end up using that time trying to either recover or prepare for the next move they make. It's unenjoyable and because unlockables are just handed to you, not worth it in ANY way. Let's say you actually got to the end boss and defeated all its forms. Well that just means you get to do the STAGE BOSS. You probably only have one life, high damage and sure, there's a recovery item but only the one. It turns into this f***fest of you trying not to touch just about anything except some of the ground and a few platforms. If you get hit and sent flying at all, the camera locks in place and the edge of the screen becomes the kill zone until you regain control of yourself. And that one weakspot on the far right of the stage... I've fallen off the screen just trying to locate that thing. There's no reason to do this other than to say 'well at least I did it'.
11) Unlockables given to you too easily/not enough stuff gated. I enjoyed Melee for the way it forced me to have to work for my characters and stages. I *loved* it. I felt like I really earned Mewtwo after playing X amount of hours even though when I ended up wiping my save and starting over I just cheesed it by leaving the game on all day. I liked that I had to find out how to unlock characters.
I liked that I chose not to look all of them up and just figure half of them out or unlock them organically. Now? Most of the game is just there. Okay. You took out any form of 'story' mode, you took out the unlockables (mostly) and just served the game to me bare on a plate. That's like a meal with no condiments or seasoning. Sure, it's a meal, but all the flare is gone. It's about the journey, not the destination. The journey sweetens the destination because you worked to get there, it's a reward. They took out the journey.
is the only character in this game who is badly represented. I get the fact that the devs wanted to add 3 bonus characters because they had time, but it's not excuse to represent a character this bad. He's a clone in his own universe, yes, but he had different weapons to go with him, a different style that could have been translated in Smash. Instead, it's just Pit with another Neutral B, Side B and F-Tilt. Even Dr.Mario had more differences in Melee than Dark Pit in Smash 4.
