Tier List Speculation

[Warzenschwein]

TIL there's a MK64 tier list...

smh at people taking nintendo party games seriously haha

 

[_Chrome]

I'll edit it to say Krunch in Diddy Kong Racing then, I don't care if he has better plane tricks he still sucks quite a bit.

 

[.alizarin]

I'm probably the only person here who dorsn't have a problem with Lucario and finds a character such as Marth more unintuitive to fight against then Lucario lmao.

i don't see how this even happens, even if you have to play against a marth without any prior experience, his moves make sense visually and show pretty clear holes in his game, he clearly has no efficient ways to get down safely, his combo weight is awful, his recovery is comparatively pretty linear (side-b isn't a move you would assume stalls him in the air, but you can clearly observe something like that in like one edgeguard scenario), he has an observably long dash dance, etc. i think the only thing unintuitive about him is his grab range, but EVEN THEN you can clearly see his arm extend a fair bit farther than most characters so it indicates a long grab. you could make an argument about dtilt iasa, but again, the move visually makes sense both in animation and trajectory. you could make an argument about dsmash too, but dsmash has limited utility and, again, getting hit by it in two scenarios (hilt and tip) tell you exactly what the move does

i don't see how you could think lucario is more intuitive to fight against regardless of context or familiarity with the character. you can't predict or infer anything about his moves based on his animation, the effects, hitlag, his character, or anything. his aura mechanic CANNOT be understood without studying it specifically, and his moves make no sense even in a situation where they whiff and you can see the animation. the information you gain from lucario whiffing a dash attack or any of his moves means nothing and tells you nothing and can only serve to mislead you about what his moves do when the move acts completely differently on hit or block and operate on a completely different system compared to every single character in the game

i know it's your opinion, but your opinion is just wrong

but that's just my opinion

 

[mimgrim]

Your exaggerating. You can infer plenty against Lucario during your first time playing. All it takes is getting hit once to know he can cancel his moves in some form and then only a couple more times to figure out they only a cancel out in a certaon order. And then you can see his hands glowing and can see them get dimmer or brighter so you know how it builds up and as soon as he uses up a portion of it they get dimmer and you know what they relate to. And thats about all the complexity there is as figuring out his gameplan and what to play and space around is pretty easy.

But it requires actually paying attention to what happens in your game, and that can be hard for some people.

 

[NWRL]

None of that is immediately noticeable since the animation cancelling is extremely clunky and just looks like Lucario is having a seizure in front of you.

 

[mimgrim]

I don't really agree but w/e.

This is a completely subjective matter anyways with no real room for actual objectiveness and is a pretty pointless discussion anyways and I have no idea why we are all taking it so seriously.

 

[Deleted member]

i think lucario is easier to figure out than marths dashdancing the first time you see someone good doing it

 

[PMS | LEVEL 100 MAGIKARP]

lucario: if you get hit by his stubby arms bad things happen

marth: well, he's not here right now but he'll be here shortly and so will his long sword but I'm not sure where exactly that sword will be or whether I can go above it or not or which way to DI his dthrow vs bthrow or how the hell to recover against dtilt or how to get down like I think I have to get in his face or camp really hard but I'm not sure how to do either

 

[Player -0]

idk.

If you come from street fighter it's like oh snap he's (Lucario) being street fighter except in the air

then you'd be like he's (Marth) going back and forth. wtf is this

 

[Life]

Marth: He has a sword. Stay away from the sword until I'm ready to attack.

 

[shairn]

This "honesty" discussion is basically "which character do I want to bother learning to play against". If you're playing a match that matters like some final and you -still- don't know how every character works idk how tf you got there. This talk is pointless.

 

[.alizarin]

i'm not exaggerating, his animations are unintuitive. it's clear that he's cancelling the moves, but it's not clear what's happening beyond that. it's not clear how to sdi his moves, it's not clear how to di his moves besides the finisher, etc. the aura mechanic for cancelling is just as bad. yes, you can tell that it must relate in someway to his cancelling, but this is just vague information that doesn't tell you how to play against this character besides "don't let him turn blue". this kind of vague understanding that "if he hits you enough times he turns into bizzaro world monster's inc mike with a jack hammer" isn't a helpful observation, and it's the best you'll get unless you go research how he works.

i come from a sf3 and light guilty gear background and it still bothers me. it's also not really a sensible comparison to make. the 2d fighters that i know of all have very distinct animations and it's very clear what each move is, even if you don't know its exact function. individual moves for pokes and whatnot have clear hitboxes (95% of the time), and links obviously mean you see the whole animation, and even chain combos almost always clearly show you WHAT happened and what move you got hit with because of a combination of hitstop and proper animation, both of which lucario lacks while at the same time seemingly having his design lifted from another game without maintaining the things that make that design understandable without excessive outside help or going into the lab, again, not to figure out how to beat him, but what is happening at all. i maintain that most of lucario's combos just look like the character is violently stuttering to do damage and it's just not helpful.

also, sf and other fighters aren't as physics dependent or interactive when in the middle of a punish as smash is so being able to tell what's happening in the middle of the combo is more important in this context. pm lucario is the only character that has ever existed in a smash game that works in this way, but even if every other character since forever was designed to chatter their teeth to do damage, it would still be lame. his unhealthy uniqueness is just more unhealthy.

i don't think there's anything unintuitive about marth besides the stuff i've mentioned, and i explained why that stuff isn't even that bad. for dash dancing, yeah, he's moving back and forth. and? if you're fighting someone really good at moving back and forth, it would be hard to beat, but that doesn't mean it's not clear what's happening. his dash dance shows where he is, where he turns around, what speed he's moving at, etc. you can tell he's using his dash as a tool, and you can tell how that tool works (in terms of movement, anyway. i see no reason why you would infer that you can shieldstop out of it, for example, but again, when it happens, you can tell), even if you don't understand the theory behind the way he's using it. with lucario, you can't tell exactly what the tool is because the move cancels itself before it does the recognizable part of the animation and has little hitlag and his arms and legs are stubby. to me, as someone who came from sf: from a theory perspective, dash dancing is just a really extreme version of walking back and forth in sf in a footsies scenario +some smash specific things, it's not that oppressive in terms of what's happening

EDIT: i also just want to say that your statement that you can tell what moves cancel into what and inferring the order based on that would only make sense if you were either previously aware of what the attack looks like on hit/block vs on whiff which just defeats the purpose since you know beforehand, or if the animations were consistent, which they arent

EDIT: oh wait a minute mike is the green one, sully is the blue one, ugh

 

[Soft Serve]

How is this even a discussion? the character litterally does this:

nothing about lucario is intuitive in how he works. You can sugar coat the working however you want, simplify lucario to "oh if you get close he does crazy things" while going into detail of marths dash dance game whatever.

but if you think that ^That^ recovery is intuitive to figure out how it works/how to deal with the first few times you see it happen, without any schemas of recoveries/how lucario works, why aren't you winning tournaments. I could litterally write a paper on how unintuitive dealing with lucario's recovery is alone

 

[NWRL]

This "honesty" discussion is basically "which character do I want to bother learning to play against". If you're playing a match that matters like some final and you -still- don't know how every character works idk how tf you got there. This talk is pointless.

It's a discussion about bad design, which this game has a LOT of, and why it's on an inevitable decline in players.

A shame too because I really loved this game but a lot of the design choices make me scratch my head.

 

[ThegreatVaporeon1]

How is this even a discussion? the character litterally does this:

nothing about lucario is intuitive in how he works. You can sugar coat the working however you want, simplify lucario to "oh if you get close he does crazy things" while going into detail of marths dash dance game whatever.

but if you think that ^That^ recovery is intuitive to figure out how it works/how to deal with the first few times you see it happen, without any schemas of recoveries/how lucario works, why aren't you winning tournaments. I could litterally write a paper on how unintuitive dealing with lucario's recovery is alone

I've been playing this game for 2 years now and I have no idea what that was. What even is this character? I don't think I've ever seen ipk do that.

 

[4tlas]

I've been playing this game for 2 years now and I have no idea what that was. What even is this character? I don't think I've ever seen ipk do that.

It seems like its similar to what causes AGT to work. Just as an airdodge accelerates you to start and then decelerates you at the end, so cancelling the ending by throwing an item keeps the momentum, Lucario's downB accelerates you at the beginning and decelerates you at the end, so he's cancelling the ending to keep the momentum. Couple that with his dair reducing his gravity...

That's my best guess. It seems bizarrely good, though. Its like how I jump then immediately Transform to drift really far in the air.

 

[Life]

Yeah, that's pretty much exactly what happens. Lucario cancels downB, spending an aura charge to drift forward at high speed with an aerial. His dair slows his falling a little bit. At the end he does a b-reverse, too.

I figured out that property of Lucario's downB literally the first time I saw somebody do it. "Oh, it does that? That's cool."

I think my standards for intuitive are not the same as yours. >.>

 

[Warzenschwein]

Whenever I see something like this I just think "good to know, let's just expect this when facing Lucario", where's da problem.

 

[GabPR]

Isn't smash as a whole unintuitive in and by itself? Basic techs like L-Canceling, wave dash, shield drops etc are all techs that you cant really hope to uncover by yourself unless someone else tells you "Oh, you just need to press L or R when you are about to land with an animation". But really though, how can you expect people to be able to infer that by looking at the screen? Melee has no visual effects on it whatsoever and you can only notice that the character is moving much faster, he is sliding off the ground or his animations are slightly faster and we have no idea why.

In its unintuitive desing though, we have a community that has been more than willing to help on getting the information across to help people understand this concepts better, and now that it is such common knowledge thanks to the people who spread it, we no longer look at it as unintuitive and just look at it as something basic.

Same thing can be same for lucario and other characters, he can be seen doing the cancels and such and you might not be able to figure it out unless someone can explain to you why he does the things he does. In a day and age we can just search whatever type of information we want with ease, is having an unintuitive character in an unintuitive game such a problem that it warrants a commotion?

 

[.alizarin]

long post ahead, i just really don't want to write my essay right now so im here instead:

you're right, those are unintuitive. but every new "system" or environment you're put into in games are unintuitive at a base-level in some regard. if games all operated solely under intuitions that we naturally make after being alive for awhile, we would only get games that introduce situations that can all be solved by some basic understanding of gravity or something mundane like that. every game would be jenga.

games can be unintuitive to a point, but the game's job (if it wants to be understood) is to either teach you or give you the tools to learn what its rules are and how they operate so that they become the basis for your reasoning in the game later. i saw a video somewhere that explained how the first level of the original mario bros was developed to consistently teach people to learn the basic rules of the game, despite those rules not being ever explicitly explained or being particularly logical.

jumping underneath a block to get an item out of it isn't intuitive, but the game kind of forced a situation where you would have to take that action at some point, and then the resulting steroid mushroom would slip out. then, something with the screen would keep you from scrolling and running away from the mushroom (in case you thought it was an enemy) and then you'd grab it and see that you've gotten taller. you could reason this out as a good thing, but even if you didn't, the next time you got hit, you would be able to tell that it lets you take extra hits. then, once you jump into a block and find a fireflower, your first reaction is to grab it because your assumption is that it's beneficial.

the action of jumping under the block was not intuitive, but the game is designed in such a way that lets you understand that its a rule and function of it. once you understand that it's a rule of this system, you build your further understanding of how to efficiently play it off of more of these basic rules. you don't even need a super controlled environment to teach like that to teach this stuff either

with smash, yes, things are unintuitive to a degree in terms of techniques and they aren't taught well in-game. why can you dash out of a dash? why is this dude sliding toward me? why is this guy blinking when he does an aerial on the ground? who the hell is marth? but this stuff is okay because after you get over the initial hump of the game not explaining anything because

1) they're consistently do-able with the rest of the cast
2) for more movement-oriented things, it's visually obvious that they aren't standard techniques like a dash or run (aka not l-cancelling)
3) they're "counterable" in a potentially intuitive way

4.edit) in terms of the game explaining itself with regards to these techs, i think for pm it's a bit less of a problem when these things are being put out there as features and not esoteric stuff like they were in melee, and again, you can visually observe these things happening in a detailed/outlined way that you can't with lucario

for 1 and 2: they're unintuitive at the surface but just become rules of the game later on which you can use to build your understanding on how to play it. but not just that, the point is that they're consistently applicable to the rest of the cast. that's when they become rules of the game as opposed to character specific quirks

just to explain 3: some random can learn all the tech he wants and slide across the universe and back and play against someone who doesn't and tech-master would still potentially lose. borp doesn't use advanced techniques, atlas doesn't use advanced techniques, so why is it that they can compete? cause they're just able reason-out and play around those things and take advantage of patterns and whatnot which don't even necessarily need those techs (yes, sheik is one of the characters that needs l-canceling the least, i know, don't post about that)

lucario is literally not 1, 2, or 3. he violates everything in ways that (most) other characters don't, which i've explained. his design just wasnt handled well. cast-diversity is only healthy to a point and in only certain directions before it just gets dumb

 

[Zach777]

I feel like that line of reasoning makes Lucario seem intuitive. Mashing buttons to attack someone will show you that Lucario has some sort of cancelling system. Once you figure that out, you will eventually figure out how it works. Lucario's system is set up so that it follows rules. Sure the rules for him don't apply to anyone else, but there are other characters that can say that about what they have.

Think ICs or Yoshi's stupid dj that armors in mid-air.

I think Lucario is fine personally. Think whatever you like of him.

 

[Deleted member]

cast-diversity is only healthy to a point and in only certain directions before it just gets dumb

man where were you in 2012

 

[Player -0]

idk

Difficult to deal with doesn't mean intuitive imo

As people have said Lucario cancels Down B and everyone knows Dair halts vertical momentum for a tad (less than Brawl) and goes wheeee.

Then B-Reverse because some moves are broken for anti juggles.

aka Pit's Shield.

 

[DrinkingFood]

I've been playing this game for 2 years now and I have no idea what that was. What even is this character? I don't think I've ever seen ipk do that.

that's what I said when I saw it for the first time a few days ago. Normally people really quickly jump on using broken recovery stuff right away because it's such a huge boon to your survival game, so I figured something as simple as this would be standard for good lucarios but I've never seen it before

 

[Bazkip]

DownB cancel in conjunction with dair stall is something I've seen before, but the multiple use of dair caught me by surprise. afaik PMDT made all the multi-use stall moves cap out at 1-2 effective uses, why is Lucario different? Does it decay at all? It's a normal rather than all other stalls with are specials moves, does that have anything to do with it?

 

[CORY]

he gets two max, since you have to burn a charge each time.

 

[Foo]

@TexasZssSalt

 

[nimigoha]

he gets two max, since you have to burn a charge each time.

Well Lucario can only use 1 Down B per airtime. In the gif he uses a Down B and then does 3 Dairs. So he burns a charge to do the first Dair and then he's just spamming Dair.

I'm believe his Dair stall doesn't decay. It's not that great to begin with anyway, very different situation from like Marth or Mario's Side B.

 

[CORY]

Well Lucario can only use 1 Down B per airtime. In the gif he uses a Down B and then does 3 Dairs. So he burns a charge to do the first Dair and then he's just spamming Dair.

I'm believe his Dair stall doesn't decay. It's not that great to begin with anyway, very different situation from like Marth or Mario's Side B.

Ah, good point, forgot the downb limit.

Unless something changed, dair's stall decayed previously so I don't know why it wouldn't currently.

 

[Boiko]

Ness is pretty okay.

 

[DMG]

Ness is broken

 

[Life]

fwiw Lucario does follow a set of rules very similar to the canceling rules in MvC and Skullgirls and probably some other random fighters I don't play: small and quick moves cancel into bigger moves cancel into special moves. They're just not a set of rules that have appeared in a platform fighter before.

 

[mimgrim]

fwiw Lucario does follow a set of rules very similar to the canceling rules in MvC and Skullgirls and probably some other random fighters I don't play: small and quick moves cancel into bigger moves cancel into special moves. They're just not a set of rules that have appeared in a platform fighter before.

This is why I'm always flabbergasted at Lucario being compared to Street Fighter so much.

 

[.alizarin]

I feel like that line of reasoning makes Lucario seem intuitive. Mashing buttons to attack someone will show you that Lucario has some sort of cancelling system. Once you figure that out, you will eventually figure out how it works. Lucario's system is set up so that it follows rules. Sure the rules for him don't apply to anyone else, but there are other characters that can say that about what they have.

Think ICs or Yoshi's stupid dj that armors in mid-air.

I think Lucario is fine personally. Think whatever you like of him.

fwiw Lucario does follow a set of rules very similar to the canceling rules in MvC and Skullgirls and probably some other random fighters I don't play: small and quick moves cancel into bigger moves cancel into special moves. They're just not a set of rules that have appeared in a platform fighter before.

i think these two posts still fundamentally miss the point i was trying to make. clearly lucario operates under a set of rules. literally everything in the game operates under some set of rules and, to my knowledge, every video game operates under set of rules. i think i made it pretty clear that it doesn't matter (to a point, be reasonable please) whether rules are unintuitive or not, but those rules have to fit within the established context of the game (aka not violate the already established rules, though there is some lee-way here for , i can go into it if someone really wants to know what i think about that for some reason, but ill skip it for now, im sure you can think of examples), they must be conveyed in a comprehensible way, and they must be "counter-able" in an intuitive way.

the problem i had was never that "lucario doesn't have rules" and/or they "aren't established" or something (that second one is directed at life, i assume that's the point you were trying to make with that post anyway), the problem is that lucario meets none of those sensible criteria.

i already stated why the comparison to other fighting games is a bad one to draw, aka you cant just lift a design style from a different type of game with different established rules and throw it into another one. lucario actually goes one step further into bad-design-lifting because, like i said many times before, the animations etc etc and cancelling etc etc etc etc etc etc aren't done in a way that made that system work in traditional fighters

also zach, yes, there are other characters with bad design choices, that doesn't make lucario okay lol, not really relevant. snake is bad too

 

[Life]

So is the quality of game design dependent on other examples of the same genre that came before? Would Lucario be "bad design" if he had also been in Melee and 64 along with several other characters with similar cancels?

 

[NWRL]

If those rules were established in those games, sure. But they weren't, and Lucario is the only character in PM that breaks the rules to this extent.

 

[.alizarin]

So is the quality of game design dependent on other examples of the same genre that came before? Would Lucario be "bad design" if he had also been in Melee and 64 along with several other characters with similar cancels?

the problem isn't limited to the context that it appears. his cancel mechanic doesn't fit smash and conflicts with the established format and rules that the game operates under, which is already pretty bad. the way it's conveyed is bad compared to traditional fighters too. then you can add on the part where his animations are poor and fail to consistently and accurately represent what his mechanic is and then it just gets ridiculous. you can add the stuff in with specific move properties interacting with the rest of his kit in a strange way afterward and it suddenly gets worse (that clip of lucario tap dancing across the sky to recover comes to mind).

i said earlier that even if other characters were designed this way or had some aspect of this in their moveset, it would still be bad. this is just cause it would only really "solve" the problem of context in the sense that he won't stand-out as much, but the issue there is where if you imagine a situation where other characters cancelled their animations in the same way lucario did, all you've effectively done is surround bad design with more bad design. the context fits better in the sense that you've created a paradoxical situation where the "intuition" becomes expecting the unintuitive to happen. all you've done at that point is move the problem back like 1 step.

the point of the mario example i used earlier was that once you establish that good things comes out of blocks with mushrooms and coins, your intuition afterward is to grab the fire flower when it pops out because you assume it would follow that trend. to do a somewhat weird analogy with that: if you hit that first block and you got (seemingly random, they operate under esoteric "rules") random sprites flying out of it and it killed you sometimes and powered you up on others, you don't have a clue what to expect the next time you hit blocks other than "weird stuff happens." that's not good lol

 

[DMG]

This thread is pretty trash now. Just waiting for Squirtle to win a National

 

[Soft Serve]

This thread is the most productive in discussion its been in a while. I'd much rather read about lucario and design philosophy than how marth suposidly isn't solo main-able, or how the last hit of squirtle up b isn't smash

 

[Life]

NWRL It seems odd to me to say "this is good design because someone else did it first."

What does that say about the design of the earliest games? Many of them made questionable decisions simply because they didn't have the benefit of hindsight like we do (look at any "classic game that didn't age well" such as the first Final Fantasy), decisions which were rightly rejected or at least modified by future games. Yet if acceptable game design is based in part on what other people have done before, doesn't that ultimately justify just about any type of design after it's been done once or twice?

Now clearly context does matter in some ways--oh hey alizarin posted again--I'm not saying it doesn't matter at all, but that it's hard to measure game design based on expectations from previous games, because not everyone has those expectations.

--------------------

.alizarin You keep saying a lot of words but all I'm hearing are "not smash" and "bad animations," where the latter is something that could be fixed without affecting gameplay at all and the former hinges on something very specific and, yes, subjective.

For me, when I sit down to play Melee, PM, ROA, or similar games, my expectations are as follows: there are a set of universal mechanics that all players and characters have access to; the characters will bring additional varying tools, from mundane stuff like different normals and movement speeds to bizarre stuff like Yoshi's double jump armor, Kirby's Inhale, and Pikachu's Thunder; and, given a set of rules exists that accommodates competitive play, you can win consistently by being better than the opponent.

(There are also a few things axiomatic to the subgenre, like "there is fighting on platforms," but I think I don't need to try to list those, eh?)

(Oh geez I just used the phrase "axiomatic to the subgenre." I really need to get out more.)

What I'm getting at is that Lucario can't violate your expectations if you don't go into the match with expectations Lucario can violate. (No kidding!) I don't expect any given Smash character to have a magic series, no, but when I realize within the first minute or two of play that Lucario does, suddenly I go into my next game against Lucario expecting to get magic series-ed all over. The anti-combo counterplay still applies to Lucario, he still has to deal with DI and SDI and varying combo properties the same any character does.

And you know what? I still feel like I'm playing PM. I'm doing all the things I'd do in any other PM matchup.

Granted, I might feel less like I'm playing PM if I'm the one piloting Lucario, since he controls weird; but then, I have forty other characters to choose from, so that's not really a big deal.

I'm trying to keep my word count down, so I'll leave it at that.

EDIT: Snipped a few more things out. Should be a better read now.