People, you also also gotta realize, in Brawl, MK was the only character with more than one or 2 combos. he had glide attack into any aerial, up air spam, dtilt into ftilt, down throw into buffered ftilt if foe DI'd upwards, weak hit of ASL into ledge cancelled strong hit ASL, and weak hits of back air into ftilt/dtilt/SL/nair. All of these exist because Meta Jank has zilch lag on his moves.
This game is gonna be more balanced. It is likely that no single character will dominate the others(I mean look at all the MKs, Tyrant, Otori, Kakera, RAIN, Mew2King, ZeRo, Nairo, Maguro, etc), just one character who wins slightly more often than the others, but not all the time (meaning that one character will not have an abundance of players). But that means that moves will be laggier and more reasonable for balance purposes. This means that many characters will be very restricted in terms of combo potential, and the combo game will basically result in a two hits completely guaranteed, and a bunch of hits landed via hard DI/tech chase/edgeguard reads for the rest of the stock. The game still does not test both physical and mentl capabilities. Just mainly mental.
Nothing is wrong with defense in a NORMAL fighting game. But defense is a TERRIBLE thing to play by in SMash. Why? Because in normal fighters, you can actually poke through guards, and you're restrricted in movement. In Smash, you have full freedom of multiple jumps, fast and slow dashes, powerful projectiles, fast and slow air speeds, strong and weak air control (how efficiently you can change direction in the air, for example Wario and Jiggs are beast at this, Ganondorf is not), etc. In a game like Smash, it is completely (and it HAPPENS) possible to get a stock lead and run away for the duration of the match, and WIN by stock/percent lead. This doesn't happen in fighting games, because most fighters are highly restrictive in movement.
Secondly, even defensive fighters like USF4 and SF have combos, and when they do happen, they're big. They're not 2 hitters. They're 4-5-6-7 hitters. Offense is a thing in SF, its just that to get to that point, you have to poke your way in.
People also forget that Melee is very campy itself until someone makes contact. Back in the day Ken would DD camp until the opponent committed to a crap option, then he'd work his magic. Mango has DD camped Armada into doing a dash attack, which Mango then punished with the staple up throw up air as Fox. Isn't the number one problem for most Falcos aiming to become good bad laser spacing? Or same with Marth, not camping with good fluid movement thats tricky and confuses opponent and causes them to commit to a crap option?
