Super Smash Bros. Universe - Rumors, Speculation and Hype

[Naner]

No more stages that kill you. That's not fun.

Stages that kill you are extremely fun in small doses. The ideal is a balance between the ones that kill you and the ones that don't.

No more final smashes as they were. Instant-kills that ruin the flow of the match are not fun.

Final Smashes are great. The bigger problem is that some characters' F-Smashes were better than others'.

Assist trophies are just glorified pokeballs, and they really don't add much to the game.

They add as much as Poké-balls, but allowing for characters other than Pokémon. How doesn't a metroid or Andross add to the game?

The physics in Brawl sucks. I'm sick of moving around tanks that float like feathers.

At least the controls were responsive, contrary to Melee. The gravity could be a tad bit stronger, though.

No more air combat bullshit. It's stupid.

Air combat rocks.

No more chain-grabs.

No disagreements here.

[Luke Aran]

I want fully customizable characters- including animations and attacks. Also, I would like Wayne or someone from lost planet.....hardballers, anyone?

[Drana]

So, you want Brawl, but even worse?

Can they just make a Smash game that's not hella-unbalanced, like Brawl was?

No more stages that kill you. That's not fun.
No more final smashes as they were. Instant-kills that ruin the flow of the match are not fun.
Assist trophies are just glorified pokeballs, and they really don't add much to the game.
The physics in Brawl sucks. I'm sick of moving around tanks that float like feathers.
No more air combat bullshit. It's stupid.
No more chain-grabs.


I kinda went into the topic expecting to hear rumors of Smash 4. Disappointed.

Smash is a party game. It's supposed to be unrealistic and have fun shit like crazy stages that kill you. And as for balancing, people act like Brawl is the only game in the series that is horribly unbalanced. They all had characters that were head and shoulders above the rest: Fox, Falco, Sheik in Melee and Meta Knight, Snake in Brawl (I can't recall which characters that were considered broken in the original.) If you really can't stand final smashes and crazy stages thats why you have random stage selection and the ability to turn off certain items and the rate at which they appear.

[DarkMetroid]

As Darth Naner, I have to disagree with most stuff Emperor Ing said.

However, no more chaingrabs. Please.

@Luke Aran
No customizable characters. No.

[Luke Aran]

Why not? There could be a limit to things, but picking your character's weight class, animations, appearance and final smash would be awesome!

[Naner]

I think Miis for characters could've been interesting for Brawl. For a new game, though, I think they wouldn't fit.

[Emperor Ing]

Smash is a party game. It's supposed to be unrealistic and have fun shit like crazy stages that kill you. And as for balancing, people act like Brawl is the only game in the series that is horribly unbalanced. They all had characters that were head and shoulders above the rest: Fox, Falco, Sheik in Melee and Meta Knight, Snake in Brawl (I can't recall which characters that were considered broken in the original.) If you really can't stand final smashes and crazy stages thats why you have random stage selection and the ability to turn off certain items and the rate at which they appear.

Smash is a party game, but that doesn't mean it has to be a shitty fighting game too. Look at what Street Fighter IV did, where it simplified everything so that ANYONE could pick up and play it, lo and behold now it sucks pretty hard.


Every smash match, at the normal settings, just turns into "Wait for the right item to win"
It's like Mario Kart, though Mario Kart does it much worse.

it's supposed to have unskilled players stand a chance against more skilled ones? Yeah, way to suck the fun out the game where even if you get good at the game it doesn't matter because a shitty, shitty stage like Spear Pillar can kill you indiscriminately.

With Melee, even if you turned off all the items, it was still a blast because every character was responsive, fast, moved well, and their moves were fine-tuned and balanced.

If you turn off all the distractions in Brawl (shitty kill stages, final smashes, assist trophies, those stupid super hammers), you are left with a sluggish boring fighting engine, where the characters move like tanks, float like feathers, and some whose moves have no discernible disadvantage (Falco's down-grab, Meta-Knight's Tornado) which leads to constant spam fests of those same couple of characters and the same couple of moves, EVERY fight. Because an unskilled player, when such easy opportunities to win present itself to him/her, will have no reason to change his or her strategy. So it will always be a shitty fight with the same couple of characters using the same couple of moves, playing on shitty stages that can kill you (remember how in Melee, just about every stage was perfect? Yeah, about the only good stages in Brawl are the Melee ones, and even then, with the shitty new physics they are not as good anymore*), waiting for the "let's instantly win" items that unbalance the game out to hell.

The games are won more due to being random chances (like those cannon-balls on Pirate Ship, or the Lava-balls in Norfair, or the everything about Spear Pillar), and while that may be a little fun at first it gets grating when you actually want to play the game instead go OMG LOOK GUYZ I M PLAYIN As SONIC AGAINST MORAIO EPIC GFIGHT FNAL DESTINATION

Plus, even with items on Very Low, if you have Smash Balls on they will appear a good 50% of the time, and there's no way to change that ratio. Most of the final smashes were just plain shitty, and others were horrendously overpowered, like Sonic's. It's a terrible mechanic, and I don't know why they just couldn't do it like every other sane fighting game and have you build up a special meter, instead of a stupid item that floats around the screen and shows up WAY too often.


Like I said, even if you turn all the bullshit off, you have a shitty fighting game, that is fun for dicking around with Snake, or DeDeDe, or Sonic or something, but gets old real quickly. Most of my friends played Brawl religiously, until I picked up Street Fighter Alpha 2 for my Sega Saturn. They all switched to that, more or less, because, lo and behold, it's actually more fun to play a good, well-designed game than it is to play a fan-wank-fest like Brawl.

If you guys probably go back to melee, you won't like it because you are used to characters moving incredibly slow and dropping at the rate of a cotton ball. But once you get past that you'll realize that everything about Melee is better, even with the shitty clone characters like Pichu (which is totally worse than having Fox/Falco/Wolf right). In Melee, since air-combat was not emphasized, all the regular ground-combat moves could be tweaked to make a tight, well-knit game. In Brawl they just gave a couple of characters shitty glide attacks and lots of air-combat potential, whilst leaving a majority of the cast in the fucking dust as far as air combat goes. So the players with a heavy emphasis on air-combat have an advantage over those who don't, which throws things out of whack EVEN FURTHER.



*Oh wait, Smashville and Yoshi's Island were good stages. BECAUSE THEY WERE JUST PLAIN STAGES WITHOUT STUPID BULLSHIT THAT INTERRUPTED THE FIGHT.

[Drana]

@Emperor Ing

Nobody in their right mind is going to play to win/care about winning when items are on in ANY smash game, like you said it makes the matches unbalanced and can completley turn the tide of a match. Thats why items are used for just screwing around/having fun. If you want to play competitively thats when you turn off items and hazardous stages. And I for one did not find Brawl matches to be dull or spammy without unbalancing factors, but that may be because I can string attacks together pretty well and I fight decent players which makes the matches alot more fun and intense.

Also, Yoshi's Island and smashville were not the only good Brawl stages. You've got FD, Battlefield, Lylat Cruise, Halberd, Delfino Plaza, and Frigate Orpheon. I mean do you really want just a bunch of plain, flat, uninteresting stages? That would make the game just as dulll and shitty as you make Brawl out to be. And the hazards on some stages really aren't that hard to avoid. Take Halberd for example: The game clearly warns you about the bombs and lazers and you are given more than enough reaction time plus they don't even appear that frequently. If you're constantly getting hit by those than you must be paying absolutley no attention to whats happening during the match. Frigate Orpheon? Please, the stage is fine and all you have to do to avoid getting screwed over by the stage transformation is jump and stay in the air long enough, really not difficult at all. Not to mention there's a blaring, obvious alarm to warn you for when the switch is coming.

And yes having Fox, Falco, Wolf is alot better than having pichu who damages himself, useless. I'm sorry but if you seriously think that Wolf is just a clone/copy of Fox then you are mistaken. All of his moves have different animations and completley different properties, the only moves being similair are his special/b moves which are still also very different from each other. As for Falco, yeah he's similair, but he's less of a clone in Brawl than he was in Melee. In Melee, literally all of his moves had the same animations as Fox with only the properties being different.

I didn't find the game to be that sluggish and floaty compared to Melee. After playing the game for a few days the sluggishness felt almost non-existent, I really think you're overreacting and exaggerating how slow the game is. You obviously had a terrible experience with the game, which is fine, but this is the worst case of Brawl bitching I have ever seen.

[Naner]

Look at what Street Fighter IV did, where it simplified everything so that ANYONE could pick up and play it, lo and behold now it sucks pretty hard.

Unless you're possibly talking about Super Street Fighter IV 3D, this can only be a joke. The absolute worst part in Street Fighter is that, if you haven't played it for over ten years or so, you have absolutely no chance of doing anything whatsoever. Ultra combos aren't fun when only the computer-controlled characters can use them. Smash and Mortal Kombat got it right by making the ultimate moves doable by pressing B or R2+L2.

Melee had some pretty crappy stages on its own right. Kraid's Lair was bullshit. That Earthbound one that isn't Onett is, too. And the Ice Climbers one isn't all that much better than Rumble Falls. Plus the moves' timing wasn't intuitive. Don't forget the F-Zero stages. And it was terribly awkward to execute an attack right after rolling. And you normally died the moment you started falling in a hole in Mushroom Kingdom. Pichu sucks. Young Link sucks. Roy was good in a cheap fashion.

I can't stand games that you can't really play in your first try. If you think Brawl is too easy to pick up, it's because you haven't seen a new player in a while. I think it's the more balanced fighting game when it comes to pick-up time. Street Fighter keeps going down and down for me as I play more fighting games. Smash, Kombat, Tekken, Dead or Alive and even the vs. Capcom games are waaaay more fun. Playing Street Fighter feels like a chore.

[kronoridley]

@Emperor Ing I heavily disagree about SSF4. Anyone can PLAY it. Few can WIN at it (Something I can NOT say about SSBB)

Back on topic........

[Drana]

Melee had some pretty crappy stages on its own right. Kraid's Lair was bullshit. That Earthbound one that isn't Onett is, too. And the Ice Climbers one isn't all that much better than Rumble Falls. Plus the moves' timing wasn't intuitive. Don't forget the F-Zero stages. And it was terribly awkward to execute an attack right after rolling. And you normally died the moment you started falling in a hole in Mushroom Kingdom. Pichu sucks. Young Link sucks. Roy was good in a cheap fashion.

Thank you for saying this, I was just about to mention this before the whole thread goes way off topic. Big Blue? Way worse then Port Town Aero Dive. Rainbow Cruise? Half the time you're just trying to keep up with the stage, barely enough time to just get in some regular fighting, not as bad as say Rumble or Ice Climber, but it still sucks. Also, massive stages like Hyrule Temple suck too, it's a dream come true for those who like to camp the hell out of their opponents. And of course you have Onett, you can't even stay on the ground in that stage without worrying about oncoming cars.

[Death Recon]

i personally loved big blue. the battles felt really epic when you fought while going on moving platforms at a fast speed. however, you didn't have to "keep up" with the stage. if you fell you could still recover. i found that out the first time i played it. and the other F-Zero stage? do i even need to mention that?
so, i've voiced my opinion. there was something else i wanted to mention... oh yeah. LETS GET BACK ON TOPIC PEOPLE!!!!! emporer ing hates brawl. sucks for him. lets move on.
I think that dark samus has alot of potential as a playable character. i have alread started thinking out a moveset that takes advantage of her large arsenal of close and long range attacks.

[Drana]

i personally loved big blue. the battles felt really epic when you fought while going on moving platforms at a fast speed. however, you didn't have to "keep up" with the stage. if you fell you could still recover. i found that out the first time i played it. and the other F-Zero stage? do i even need to mention that?

I like Big Blue too, it's fun. Just pointing out that Melee has stages that can screw you over.

[Emperor Ing]

As a nice little BTW, Sakurai even admits that Melee is the tightest game in the series.

It's funny that people complain about Street Fighter, because Street Fighter and any Capcom fighter has roughly 5-6 different button combos for moves that every character uses. Same with, like, BlazBlue.

And games like BlazBlue and Street Fighter Alpha 2/3, or Street Fighter 2 Hyper Turbo HD Whatever, are lots of fun to play and balanced and shit like that.

Hell, I didn't even like Street Fighter until I bought a Sega Saturn. It's when I actually took the damn ten minutes to learn the moves is when I found out how well-crafted and tight the experience was (not SFIV- I think it actually took a huge downturn in quality from the excellent SFIII)



This frustration over brawl did not come from always playing shitty characters on shitty matches, it came after several years of thinking the game was pretty neat, but slowly realizing that all the bullshit they added into Brawl, especially when compared to Melee, just made it the worse game in every regard. You need items to make Brawl remotely fun, because of how "accessible" they made it (read: any loser can pick up the game and spam attacks and have a good chance of winning due to luck). You don't need to do that with melee.


I mean, sheesh, everyone complains about MarioKart Wii doing this shit to the extreme (like good luck staying in first-place at all in MK Wii), but to a lesser (but still annoying) degree, it happens in Brawl. But everyone is cool with that, I suppose. Let's just have nintendo dumb down the franchise so everyone can win!

Nobody in their right mind is going to play to win/care about winning when items are on in ANY smash game

When anyone plays, they care about winning. It's just that the shittier players will rely on hit-n-run tactics, and using whatever items show up to make the match win for them, and then gloat about their victories. When items are off, and they lose and lose, they don't want to play anymore, and because Smash Bros. Brawl has the way for people to win without ever changing their strategy (like Meta-Knight or Pit), there's no impetus to actually improve at the game. So you have to seek out "professional" players if you want to really play because your average joe is just chain-grabbing and tornado-spamming because they are strategies that work and don't need lots of skill to pull off. Accessibility indeed.

And while I admit I forgot about Delfino, Orpheon, and Halberd, but you really can't call FD and Battlefield "new" (they were in Melee) or particularly good, because they're flat and boring, and only have their stage music going for them.

Rumble Falls and Spear Pillar are just plain shit though. They're the epitome of the worst aspects of the Smash series, mainly the "wait for the stage to kill you" bullshit that was only slightly present and highly dulled in melee, and fucking EVERYWHERE in Brawl. I just don't see anything fun in trying to actually play against humans when the entire stage is distracting you from, you know, PLAYING AGAINST OTHER HUMANS. It's not "intense", or "fun", or "exciting;" "Annoying" would be a better word for it. I like stages that change around; I like dynamic environments. It's just that Brawl fucks this up so much of the time that it gets annoying and old, REALLY fast.

If you play Melee after playing Brawl, you'll feel like the characters fall like rocks. I noticed the same thing. But that's because air combat, which is unbalanced in Brawl, is nearly nonexistent in Melee. So you don't need characters that can stay up in the air for ages. Because that's not the focus. I am not saying that air combat in general is bad. What IS bad is how they implemented it in Brawl, giving preference to some characters over others, making some characters nigh-unplayable (like Ganondorf).


And ha, this is NOT some dismissible "Brawl bitching."

Melee is not the perfect fighter, but Brawl is much, much, much less so. I wouldn't say that if I didn't play the hell out of both games. Brawl is like Mario Kart Wii; yeah it's kind of fun to dick around, but if you actually want to have fun playing a game that doesn't punish you for no real reason, then pick up a BETTER game.

[Drana]

any loser can pick up the game and spam attacks and have a good chance of winning due to luck

This just isn't true. It may have been partly true when the game first came out, but people have adapted to much more complex strategies than spamming. I suggest watching some relatively recent matches and they don't even have to be pro players.

When anyone plays, they care about winning.

I just don't see this. I've never seen anybody take an item match in smash seriously, doesn't mean that it doesn't happen, but once again I'm just gonna say: items=fun, no items=competitive.


I've posted in this thread several times, but never added anything to the actual topic. For the next smash I would like the pause camera to not be so restricted in certain stages. I noticed this the most with Brawl where I couldn't zoom in nearly as close as I could in other stages, especially with Halberd where you could barely do anything with the pause camera. I would just install homebrew for unrestricted camera, but I really don't want to risk bricking my only Wii console.