What does Melee have that makes it so great?

[MTKO]

A friend of mine plays brawl on occasion. He never plays melee and dislikes it, always saying brawl is better and so on. Completely subjective, but there's no arguing with him about it. I personally dislike brawl and have only played it a few times. Maybe if I gave it more of a chance I might like it, but melee is a game I like so much that I don't think I'd like to play both - at least for now.

So my question is: what aspects of melee make you want to play it more than Brawl (or other fighters)? And what do you think brawl lacks that make you think it's not as good?

I'd rather not have this be a big "Melee is the bestest thing ever since sliced bread! Brawl sux0rz!" thread. I just am curious what different people think of Melee and why they like ti so much. I guess for me it's the tech skill and the physics of the game. I really enjoy the challenge of learning new technical things in the game.

 

[The Star King]

I like the fast movement and offensive metagame. Brawl is too floaty and slow.

 

[finalcloud13]

Me too, it's fast and has many awesome combosss.

 

[DualCats]

One of my favourite aspects of melee is edge guarding. It was that and DI that attracted me to competitive melee in the first place.

 

[Teczer0]

I will say now that if this turns into Melee vs Brawl I will immediately close it.

You can talk about why you like melee but none of the brawl v melee thing.

 

[King Funk]

It's fun, fast and cool.

/thread

Someone should make a thread specifically made for people to let out their overbearing fanboyism scream out. Melee boards really get flooded too much with those kind of threads. It's not a bad thing though, it shows how people really like their game.

 

[MTKO]

I like the fast movement and offensive metagame. Brawl is too floaty and slow.

The floatyness in Brawl makes the game really not enjoyable for me. I think it may be because I'm so used to the feel of melee and it's really hard to adapt to that floaty stuff in Brawl.

 

[King Funk]

Good stuff Star King, you already ruined this thread.

 

[T.J.]

Too me it seems like no matter how good you get, you can still get better... Get me addicted =l
On top of that the physics are awsome fun for combos
lots of balanced chars too

Edit oh forgot to add in
Brawl has less extent of all that, but a ton more chars and a pretty fun 1p mode (first time you play it anyway D: )

 

[Elyssa Xey Hexen]

I play and enjoy both equally. Although, I started with brawl first and ended up playing melee more in the end.

I enjoy brawl because I can actually play longer than I could in melee. By this, I mean I remain in control of my character longer than I do in melee. In brawl, the DI angles are increased and airdodging makes it much easier to return to a neutral position. This means I am in control of my character sooner too.

In melee, all the mechanics work to keep one person in control and the other out of control. So when you get edgeguarded or comboed, you are no longer having fun being able to attack people. However, I enjoy melee because it is indeed more balanced in terms of strategies. Plus, I love the control over your character that you get in melee. Brawl movement involves using a lot of walking, single dashes, rolls or jumps. And it all feels rather blocky. Melee with its wavedashes, platform cancels, and easy pivoting gives you a ton of control over your character.

All in all, I like playing brawl for a more relaxed, calculating sort of game play. I like melee for its control and strength of punishers.

 

[Mooo]

I don't see why i would be wrong to say what i don't like about Brawl.
In Brawl, Characters all feel very similar, in Melee I really have a lot of diversity and the fast pace is more my style. Comboes and edgeguarding is something both games have, but I like Melee more becasue you have more combo opportunities and it's a little more requiring reaction than brawl is, and the techskill needed in Melee is also a factor that i like about it, because it makes me look cool in front of my friends.

fast pace, comboes, edgeguarding and the required reaction rates are really what sets this apart from other games for me, because such a nice distribution between thos is rare in most fighting games, and i don't really like fighting games with set comboes anyway..

 

[King Funk]

I was about to say that the post above was very nice, but then this other awful post just appeared right before my eyes.

 

[S l o X]

as opposed to other fighting games like tekken, i like the ridiculously fast APM and even though i want to main sheik, you still benefit from being fast and acting fast. combos and DI make things so much more interesting.

guys stop posting about brawl, tec will lock it as he has said.

 

[King Funk]

Yeah lock it imo it's hopeless. All the little fanboys are crawling into this thread. =p

Btw if I sound like a hater, don't worry, I'm not.

 

[Mooo]

stating why we would prefer melee over brawl is not melee vs. brawl, it's just stating preference on a reasonable level. noone accused brawl of sucking in this thread. the op was clearly brawl related in its questioning, so why not post about it? the only one not on topic is king funk right now.

 

[MasterShake]

In Melee, I feel like nearly any ground/platform situation has a counter. There's almost always something you can do to either get out of a combo, recover with a different option, DI differently, mix up your movement, etc...basically the freedom. Brawl/other fighting games feel limited in comparison.

 

[Melomaniacal]

Welcome to the Melee boards, where the mere utterance of the word "Brawl" is an offense great enough to have you killed. We can't allow for the risk of a Brawler name-searching "Brawl," finding us, and killing us all.

 

[King Funk]

Welcome to the Melee boards, where the mere utterance of the word "Brawl" is an offense great enough to have you killed. We can't allow for the risk of a Brawler name-searching "Brawl," finding us, and killing us all.

Killing you? As if one little dumb Brawl fanboy could go up against hundreds of even crazier Melee fanboys.

Melee is just for me one of the most fun games I ever experienced in my life competitively. Not much more I can say. What makes it great? The fact there's still a community behind it and that we still like the game nowadays.

I just hate it when we idolize a game like Melee that much but still without being able to transcend the need to compare it to other games.

But then this is smashboards. The real people are the ones that actually attend tournaments.

 

[Life]

We can't allow for the risk of a Brawler name-searching "Brawl," finding us, and killing us all.

I HAVE BEEN SUMMONED

lol

Insert my usual "Brawl is a better game, Melee is a better sport" spiel here. But it's all opinion anyway.

 

[Elyssa Xey Hexen]

Oh, yeah. Another thing I wanted to say. Platforms. While smash is already different in that its like king of the hill, it still has that unique depth of platforms. I wonder how games would be like if they added platforms. Other fighters like Blazblue already allow the option of an aerial jump or aerial recover. If you could add on platforms to this already, it would make the game very interesting.

 

[t3h Icy]

Melee has Mario, Link, Marth and Mewtwo in it. If you compare Melee to other games with all these characters, you'll notice that ALL games with them are amazing.

 

[Redact]

I like melee mostly because not only does it have the major aspects i enjoy, it is also lacking anything i dislike.

I enjoy:

Diverse character set (Of viable characters)
Offensive/pressure based gameplay (Playing defensive/run away is not very possible in this game IMO)
Unique and solid mechanics (Stages/DI/edge guarding)
Balanced metagame (I believe the higher end of the cast is balanced enough and varying enough, not all will agree with me here)
Combos that blow people up (I love my high damage/0 to death combos, so long as there's a fair way to get out or deal with them)



I do not enjoy:

Gimmicky mechanics (waggle, mini games, quick time events so on)
Comeback Mechanics (X-factor, Ultra, anything that helps players come back/gives them an advantage over the winning player)
Low tech skill ceiling (i love games that always have that extra level you feel you can push yourself to)
Non developing meta-game (I don't want to be seeing the same gameplay in matches 1 year after the game is released in comparison to 10 years after the game is released)
Bad controls (even though melee control isn't customizable, I wouldn't change anything)

 

[Zodiac]

Hmm, it is everything, it can be fast, slow, zero to death, turtle style. What other fighting games emphasize for one entire game melee has. But it has them all and it does just as good a job as the others do, in some ways it does better.

 

[Van.]

I like it because the more hours you put into it, the more fun it becomes. Not like many other games that "wear out" around the 20 hour mark. It rewards hard work.

 

[Veetaak]

I love melee because of all the hype it comes with and the sexy *** combos, wavedashing,DI,Edge guarding,SHFFL, platforms + I love the graphics of the game. =)

 

[Mizar]

The speed and freedom is amazing. Whenever I play Melee it feels like I can do anything I want, as opposed to an other game that feels like you're with one arm in a wheel chair.

 

[Jonas]

You can do whatever the hell you want in Melee.

 

[Jamb]

I prefer Melee over pretty much any other fighter because its just so free flowing and smooth. In traditional fighters, I feel extremely limited in the way I move (this could be due to inexperience) compared to Melee, where I can just be all over the place. Melee has so many subtle mechanics that just make it so damn fun to play.

 

[ArcNatural]

Tech chasing, edgegaurding, and character movement + the speed of the game makes melee for me. Most of the time I just run around because I love doing weird movement so much.

I just feel melee lucked out in how perfect the speed is, it really can't be understated. Just fast enough to make it require effort for the best players.

 

[LLDL]

Let's pretend that after all of these years, nobody really found out any advanced techniques and gameplay was still average. Melee still has the superior game movement engine of the series. Also, the attention to detail is amazing, probably the best on the entire console. That in itself is something that people overlook. There's no doubt in my mind that a little flag would go off in my head, that there was some serious degradation after Melee, even were I oblivious to any competitive play.

 

[Strong Badam]

I think the further the Project M Back Room delves into Melee's coding and mechanics in order to better understand what needs to be done in Project M, the more I appreciate how truly amazing this game is, and the more I doubt that this game was simply an accident. Let me elaborate with a few examples.

Most players believe that wavedashing was a glitch, exploit, or otherwise unintended aspect of Melee. Perhaps this was the case originally, but the fact that it's still in the game even after it was discovered in testing is evidence that the development team chose to embrace the mechanic and refine it into its final state rather than remove it. They intentionally added 10 frames of landing lag in the specific case of landing during an air dodge. Several aerials are able to be air dodged afterward with strict timing during a shorthop, such as Doc/Mario's bair or Marth's fair.
The dynamic landing detection also seems to me to have been implemented due to wavedashing, wavelanding, etc, or at least in part due to it. TopN Y being used as the bottom stage collision detection point on airborne frames 1-9 rather than the usual point to prevent platform drops and wavedashes from being wonky? Such a subtle mechanic that has such a huge effect on the gameplay...

The game is also very fluid rather than slippery and wavedashes aren't ridiculous length because character traction is doubled when grounded momentum is greater than your character's maximum walking speed. Where the hell did that idea come from? And yet, it's such a huge part of the fluidity of Melee.

It's obvious to me that Melee had a huge amount of work put into it as far as the mechanics and physics go, and this work was not for naught. There's a very good reason this game is still being played and the community continues to expand nearly 10 years and a sequel later.

 

[Twisted4000]

Brawl is a better game, period. The graphics, the music, the sounds, the extra characters, the better stages, a ton of minigames, and so on.

However...

In terms of actual battling (which the game is all about), Brawl is extremely floaty, slow, and too noob-friendly. There's a bunch of rigged characters, and I noticed the game mostly relies on the character you play as to win, not the skill of the player.

Now Melee... that's a game. It's ridiculously quick, there's more stun-time, l-canceling, and so on. The game relies mostly on the player's skill instead of the character you're playing as. It's so much easier to combo as well, since when you hit someone, they are stunned for a longer time. In Brawl, they just immediately become invincible and float away from the attacker, allowing them to easily recover without even trying.

 

[ryuu seika]

Three things:
-One, it's unique. It's a fighting game where health doesn't matter but as you take damage you fly further and further. It feels great to get to 200% and carry on and there's also a great sense of accomplishment when you kick your opponent all the way across the level.
-Two, it's Nintendo. It's all the greatest N64 stuff (minus DKR and Banjo Kazooie) in one game.
-Three, the most important reason of all, the reason why it's still great: Depth.
Unfortunately, I can't really explain "depth" in depth so I'll just leave things here.

 

[Jonas]

I just feel melee lucked out in how perfect the speed is, it really can't be understated. Just fast enough to make it require effort for the best players.

No way it "lucked out." It was designed by a competent game designer who knew what he was doing.
Sakurai may not no much about competition and character balance, but he obviously knows how to make a game accesible and fun to play. I believe he has spend a great deal of time with each character, fine tuning and balancing running speed, jumping hight, move animation etc etc to make them feel just right for the player, and the result is undeniable. Sure it might be a little awkward to go from a speedy character like Fox to a slow and heavy character like Ganondorf, it's easy to adapt if you give it a little time, and every character is really easy to pick up and play (unless, of course, you want to figure out EVERYTHING that character can do).

 

[Massive]

The game is also very fluid rather than slippery and wavedashes aren't ridiculous length because character traction is doubled when grounded momentum is greater than your character's maximum walking speed. Where the hell did that idea come from?

I suspect the traction was increased to prevent people from landing on their back and then sliding off the stage to their demise. Notice if you fall off a ledge while in the grounded state you usually enter a tumbling animation (wavedash backwards off a platform on battlefield for example). This would likely happen more frequently if you didn't get more traction while grounded.

Look at when you tech a landing and your momentum gets preserved. Your character stops for the standing animation (or roll) then slides (at high speed) in the direction they had momentum in. If the friction was still at standing levels every time you hit the ground you could launch people off non-ledgegrabbable platforms in terrifying fashion.

I'm also pretty sure this was grandfathered in from 64, but I may be wrong.

 

[stelzig]

^If you enter tumble animation when falling of a ledge from wavedashing then it is because you held down L/R and were shielding when sliding off. Pretty sure you don't just randomly enter the tumble animation when falling off a ledge...

 

[Bones0]

Most things have been said one way or another. I'll just add that I love the precision you have. One thing that annoys me in Brawl is my inability to adjust my spacing/timing so that something hits right where I want it, right when I want it to. At the top levels of Melee, it's incredible to see players doing things like spacing attacks on shields without getting grabbed or aiming attacks at parts of shields that are vulnerable to shield poke because this is all done with both players moving around at high speeds.

 

[Roneblaster]

the ceiling is just so high. i cant wait to see some1 who never messes up fox tech skill. it will be a glorious day in the history of video games.


ANYTHING IS POSSIBLEEEEEEEEE.

 

[rhan]

It has Young Link and Mewtwo.

 

[Orko]

A whole bunch of things.

The communities awesome, it has streamlined gameplay, all of the characters are likeable. But my #1 favorite thing in Melee is the competitive iceberg.

When you first sat down and that first game started, you weren't thinking about L-Cancelling, or Short Hopping, or any of that! You were just learning how to smash. And as you continue to develop, you learn all of these amazing techniques and strategies. Combos, predictions. The game just keeps unfolding itself in this crazy, crazy Escher-esque competitive meta.

And the best part is, it never gets boring. It never gets repetitive.

Or at least, not to me.