I might be wrong, but I feel like part of the reason as to why Brawl is so defensive is not exactly because the combo system is gone from melee, but exactly BECAUSE some punishes are so good that you are pretty much unable to do "anything" unsafe Not only talking about chaingrabs, but being offstage against Marth, MK, ZSS and even DDD are some of the worst disadvantage states you can be in. Great video and as someone that never lost their love for brawl, I'm happy that the game is having a bit of a renaissance
Really great video! Between this video and what Brawlternative has put out, I've found myself super invested in learning about Brawl history since it's what got me into Smash, and later competing in later games. Great stuff!!
holy fucking shit somebody actually shits on smash 4 instead of just saying "dlc bad" i feel so good rn. you have no idea how fucking vindicated i feel right now, i feel so seen. idegaf abt brawl i finally have someone who actually broke down the problems with that goddamn game.
Brawl was the last game where Yoshi was my main. I liked the double jump cancelling mechanic as well as the pivot grabs. Sheik was a ton of fun too, with techs like DACUS and run-off Vanish.
I'm a little confused by the juxtaposition of calling chainthrows "not inherently bad" while claiming that Smash 4's combo game is cookie-cutter. They both seem to be very standardized methods of getting damage off. Even if you argue that Brawl's mechanics allow for characters to use a wider variety of their tools to maintain their advantage state, i find the difference in tone between the two a little jarring. Those chaingrabs might not be present in every matchup, but circumstantially it sounds like they would encourage a lot of non-interaction just to avoid. I do agree on the overall perspective on s4 and how the game didn't do enough to make bad positions actually bad. A lot of characters are undeniably centered around trying to get "their thing", but I don't find that to be as bad as was made out in the video, nor the characters to be as one-dimensional as you claim they are. I don't have personal competitive perspective on Brawl, but in talking with an OG top level player of it they did seem to detest it in comparison to Ult or even Smash 4, games they were also an extreme top player in. Anecdotal at best, but another perspective I have to consider. Also, I find the SDI nerf to be justified given that S4 probably wanted their jabs and multihits to work lol. Ult further improved on this by adding some more stuff like grounding jab hitstun but I can't say that weak SDI was an issue before Bayonetta released. Overall, I think you had a lot of very strong points to bring up about Brawl, especially saying that it's "more fun to play than it is to watch", which feels like a much more significant point to raise against public perception than it was made out to be. I just feel that smash 4, especially when claiming it's the worse game, was being judged with different standards/connotations out the gate, and the video would be better off if it wasn't as significantly mentioned.
Brawls chaingrabs were almost always matchup specific and I did point out examples like Pikachu and Dedede as being bad. But chaingrabs are surprisingly nowhere to be seen in the top 10 outside of Falco, and to a lesser extent Marth. Neither one of them needed it to rack up damage; they had other options and that's the point. Their "thing" isn't enough to centralize the gameplay. They have great aerials, good damage on individuals hits, and they can ledge guard very well. They could use the threat of the chain throw to influence your options. Try racking up damage with individual hits in smash 4. Sheik will get a nice 4% off her fair. I really don't see how smash 4 was judged unfairly. These are problems that even former smash 4 players are pointing out now that the game is in the past. And most Brawl top players were in the camp that it was the better game.
(on mobile so different account) Fair points on chaingrabs. It’s not that I feel like Smash 4 was judged unfairly, it more just felt like its name was mentioned negatively out the gate. If you feel like it’s worse than Brawl, I get that, especially after watching the video. You have very compelling points about Brawl and its mechanics - but s4’s mentioning doesn’t feel relative, it feels competitive, and i’m not sure if i jive with that. With how well you justify brawl’s existence and gameplay on its own, it feels almost unnecessary I’m about to go to bed so im not gonna go super in depth for now, i can say more over not YT comments if you’d like. Don’t get it twisted tho this is still a good video
It was really important to bring up Smash 4 since one of the most common criticisms of Brawl surrounds its character balance; Smash 4 is a case study in how a game can be more balanced but also *worse.* If there was one thing I had to say it's this: Brawl demonstrates that a game can still be great even with poorly balanced characters. I was very active in the Smash 4 scene in 2015-18 and it was a VERY common talking point that Smash 4 was a superior game to Brawl thanks to its balance (often spurred by questions over whether Bayonetta was ban worthy; one argument was that Smash 4 low tiers are "better" than Brawl so there is no need to ban Bayonetta, which ignored the fact *all* of the Smash 4 cast was just worse and more limited than the Brawl cast).
19:43 This Smash Game is where I met the Meta Knight and how he became my favorite fictional character of all time, especially his gameplay mechanic in Smash Brawl.
This video explains all the problems I have with Tr4sh so well. Thank you for putting my thoughts and observations to words so perfectly. Excellent video 👏
This was a pretty great video on shedding some light on how forgotten the depth of Brawl has become and how misinformed the general community is about the game. I for one am also someone who shares the opinion that Smash 4 is a worse competitive game than Brawl (personally, I think it’s the worst competitively in the series). All of the cool unique tech present in Brawl was stripped when making Smash 4 and Ultimate leaving every character to play nearly identically with little room for character expression, Smash 4 being the worst offender. I will say while I do agree that MK certainly hurts the game significantly from a balance perspective to the point where the community made the wrong choices of banning stages to the point where ICs became the clear other top contender, I don’t think even with MK banned and other unorthodox counterpick stages available that ICs would not have been a problem. Barring a few character specific matchups (like Dedede vs DK, Marth vs Ness/Lucas, Pika vs Fox, etc), Brawl has a notoriously weak punish game leading to pressing advantage needing to substitute reads and option coverage in place of guaranteed confirms, especially at mid and high percents. The general gameplan of get low percent combo into additional reads for more damage is what leads Brawl to have even more depth. Sure other games have read-based gameplay and reward guessing correctly, but often the reward for one read is so immense that you only need one or two to close out a stock. This leaves Brawl in the unique position where reads are primarily for tacking on extra damage before returning back to neutral, something that only further adds to the complexity of Brawl’s neutral game. The issue with ICs is that they completely subvert this entire idea similar to the way MK completely subverts Brawl’s disadvantage. The punish game of ICs is quite frankly not Brawl. And grabs being so strong in Brawl, especially due to the lower shield stun, means that even on the more unorthodox stages, ICs are still a problem which was demonstrated by players like Vinnie back in the day when a lot of those stages were legal. While ICs mobility is bad, especially in the air, the looming threat of grab is so strong to the point where you still need to respect the option even on those stages. Personally, I think the best option would be to ban both characters, but I would be willing to compromise on something like the recent stage or handicap clauses that have been proposed as a way to mitigate the effectiveness of both characters by not allowing them to counterpick certain stages or forcing them to self handicap by starting at a higher percent as a way of nerfing them through ruleset. This would allow the return of other more interesting counterpick stages that have been traditionally banned because MK was such a dominant threat on them. In fact, I will attribute MK directly to the current mindset of most Ultimate players that refuse to consider anything besides the 7-9 hazards off stages (with half of them being nearly identical in layout to one another) is bad. This only further led to the one-dimensionality causing the game to progressively become more stale over time whereas games like Melee with its variety of stages have likely contributed to the game’s continued popularity. All of this said, I’m really hoping that Brawl can make a comeback and the wider Smash community sees what a broken masterpiece of a game it is and gives it another shot on the spotlight, especially with the interest the game has started to gather more recently.
There's a very real debate regarding how the meta would have turned out in the long term with an MK ban + longer stage list. But I don't entirely agree with the sentiment that Brawl has a "weak punish game." Compared to combos and tech chases on fast fallers in Melee, sure, but Brawl's characters on the whole have really good frame data and especially autocancels that characters with stage control can apply pressure to disadvantaged opponents quite well. You can look at my clip of Fox vs a level 9 CPU Marth: when Marth is above Fox his options are limited to air dodge, his down aerial that has high ending lag, and jumping. If Marth burns his jump he could get knocked offstage where his mediocre horizontal recovery could leave him dead, so he really is limited to his air dodge for the most part. Fox can throw out his up tilt, nair, up air, bair fast enough to basically trap Marth in this disadvantage. The offstage game in Brawl is also much more dangerous for the recovering player than later titles, especially for characters with bad recoveries (includes Ice Climbers). Also Mr.R's Marth really demonstrates how crazy Brawl's punish game can be, will always recommend those videos to showcase how far the game could be pushed.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 I’m aware of the ability to press your advantage and that certain characters really excel at that. And yes, I’m aware that dodges in general having a decent amount of lag to them makes it easier to keep people in disadvantage. But most of the advantage state continuation is built off of aggressive reads or option coverage compared to other games where instead you would have guaranteed follow ups. This is especially true at lower percents where you’re just starting to get into tumble hitstun allowing the additional option to hitstun cancel with dodges or attacks, and you’re left in a position fairly close to the opponent to the point where they need a read to continue advantage. In other games, there is no read. You just continue your advantage via a combo. While a game like Melee has a very strong punish game full of depth due to needing to react to DI for combo follow ups, tech chases, and being able to cover the limited options the opponent has in disadvantage, Brawl also has a ton of depth to its punish game but on the complete opposite end of the spectrum. Opponents have significantly more options to escape disadvantage via hitstun cancelling and stronger SDI, as well as the same DI options Melee has which leads the attacker to need to predict or attempt to cover as many of those options as possible. My point is that Brawl has by far the weakest punish game compared to the other Smash games, but it still has a ton of depth for the exact opposite reason as Melee. The depth of Melee’s punish game comes from how my options the attacker has to continue their advantage while reacting to the defender’s options while Brawl’s punish game depth comes from how many options the defender has to escape disadvantage while the attacker uses reads and option coverage to press their advantage further.
How is 4 a worse competitive game? Especially with Brawl's speed and well...balance. (especially worst competitively either). They don't play identical...like how does Diddy Kong play identical to R.O.B and does that unique tech really matter in Brawl when it's dominated by MK anyways? Same with Ultimate. Both have character expression, like you can play Jigglypuff either defensively or offensively and either can work really.
@Jdudec367 say the word "balance" one more time. Smash 6 should be a coin flip game; it's literally the most balanced as everyone will have a 50% chance of winning.
I think brawl at top level is really fun to analize, but if you aren't playing at top level and enter tournament after tournament, the game gets exhausting from getting little reward from neutral, losing to cheese because brawl is pretty janky and has a lot of broken strats, and having to deal with mk players spamming their broken frame data. I'm a melee player, but i believe behind a lot of brawl's bullshit, the competitive meta is unique, beautiful, and mad respect to the top level brawl players for sticking to this game.
I don't think that MK is that difficult to deal with at lower levels of play, he's so common that the counterplay is generally well known (people know which moves can beat out Tornado, for example); really it's the campiness of Diddy, Falco, Snake, and Olimar that "ruin the fun" way more than MK at that level of play. Meta Knight at least has to close the distance to do his thing and personally I find losing to him less frustrating than the others even if he is technically a much better character. It's only at top level play that MK really became grotesque since those players *know* how to use *all* of his tools (basically every one of his moves minus jab).
Sm4sh combo game is one of those things where it's so much cooler when people optimize it and push the characters to their max, but not many characters had that happen very much, because there were so many easier combos. Sm4sh imo is when people were the most lazy in competitive compared to every other smash game. Almost no one used really any of the advanced movement tech, or advanced combos, it's actually baffling. People took the easy, simple options, which made the game look way simpler and lamer than it actually was. But at the same time, I completely get why people didn't push: because it wasn't necessary. I do agree heavily tho with Brawl being hella underrated as a competitive game. It has a lot of interesting nuanced and some awesome characters that just got overshadowed by Meta Knight
Eh, i wouldn't be so quick to pin it on Smash 4 players being "lazy", especially when almost all of the top Smash 4 players had been top Brawl players. Did they all just collectively agree to play the game suboptimally? I don't think so. They resorted to the same cookie-cutter 2-hit combos because those were *reliable* and in competitive play, if you have two roughly equally rewarding options, you should generally be picking the one that carries less risk. Mario is going to do his down throw, up tilt a bunch of times, then up air, because that gives him 48% for free. Why shouldn't you go for that? Especially when DI and SDI are almost useless, giving the defending player 0 chance of escaping. Just imagine if every Brawl character had Falco's down throw chain, easy 45%, they would use it every single time. If you're playing to win it does not matter if a combo is more "flashy" if it means it's worse. You kinda answered your own criticism by pointing out "there were so many easier combos." Exactly. Go watch Mr. R play Brawl as Marth and then watch him play Smash 4 as Sheik and you can see just how much more variety there is to his Brawl Marth punishes: he has to account for DI, SDI, will the opponent air dodge or attack out of hitstun, and so on, but his Smash 4 Sheik is so much more bland because he has his flowchart combos at his disposal where he can get an almost free 60% from throw -> f tilts -> up tilt -> fair string -> down b. People were more inventive in Brawl precisely because the game demanded it if you wanted to avoid constantly resetting to neutral. Smash 4's system virtually kills off any creativity, there is almost 0 interaction in its punish game.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 I mean, that's why I said it makes sense that people didn't push for optimal combo games, because the simpler ones are more reliable for tournament play. I really think people would find Sm4sh Kirby cool if people actually tried to push the optimization, he has one of the most interestingly nuanced combo games and advantage state in that game, and people rarely got to see it. Also, thinking about it now, it feels like the crutch of the argument for Brawl being more interesting is because it is lacking a serious combo game, therefore people have to supplement with diverse read and option coverage, when this is a thing in every smash game. It's forced upon you in Brawl, sure, but you can do equally interesting option coverage in every game if you stretch and alter the combos to force potential openings to frame trap and mixup to get more reward. People do that creative free flow stuff in Melee and Ultimate, you can do this in Sm4sh too. People push to do really optimal stuff in Melee and Ultimate, too, how come we didn't see it as much in Sm4sh? It would take the same kinds of creativity, wouldn't it? Like literally, after Ultimate, lots of people tried new combos from that game in Sm4sh and they WORKED. Sure, things take time to be found, that's a given, and often new lenses lead to newer inventions, but I think it shows the power of going into a game with predetermined assumptions of how it plays affecting how we ultimately end up perceiving and playing it ourselves. It very well may have less depth than Brawl or Ultimate or what have you, but I feel for people to say it doesn't allow or reward for creative advantage states feels to me like a lack of willing to push and think outside the box. 🤷♂️ Lazy was a strong term, but I think you feel what I mean by lazy.
Melee's punish game is very different from Brawl because of the way fast fallers like Fox and Falco can DI onto platforms, the game is very, very tech chase heavy (less so on Final Destination). Brawl due to its falling speed is a much more aerial focused game, there's a much stronger emphasis on aerial spacing / anti air spacing because the goal is to stay just close enough to punish but not so close that you get hit by their own defensive aerial. This is enabled by very good frame data and hitboxes that also have very wide auto cancel windows; a character in advantage can throw out attacks faster because they can "skip" the rest of an aerial attack by landing and being able to act sooner; eg. Falco landing on frame 25 of his down air and being able to throw out jab, f tilt, up smash, or another short hop aerial, whereas he has nearly 30 frames of ending lag on his down air otherwise. Falco in advantage is able to attack much faster than Falco in disadvantage, in some cases characters can throw out moves faster than they could in Melee with L canceling (since that only halves the landing lag instead of skipping it entirely). Smash 4 is just as floaty as Brawl but the way they butchered aerial attacks significantly reduces the level of pressure most characters can apply (and so neutral resets are much easier). Sheik's dominance for much of the game's lifespan was directly a result of her being a "Brawl" character in Smash 4, able to throw out attacks so fast that she could cover defensive options much better than others. Smash 4's DI system is also awful in this regard because it's as simple as "hold up and away at low % to escape combos" and "hold right/left at kill percent"; this is why the meta was full of ladder combos & hoo-hahs. ZSS, Sheik, Diddy, Luigi, DK, Bowser, MK, Mario, and of course the Witch. There's no escaping how restrictive the combo/punish game is. I'm sure in the 4 years that people played the game they would have cracked something different, but the only significant development I can think of is Falcon taking advantage of footstool for his down aerial combos. Watch high level Diddy play in 2016 and then in 2018 and you'll be hard pressed to find any meaningful difference.
Even Meta Knight dittos are a pretty entertaining watch (assuming you don't do to many in a row). Sometimes it's just fun to watch two people go absolutely insane with it.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 A lot of characters had different kinds of development with their advantage state and combo games, like Pikachu, Greninja, Fox. The game is more of a grounded game than an aerial one, since moves aren't as spammable. Perfect Pivots were something that people did not take advantage of, they had so many different competitive implications that people just didn't play with, and I have no idea why. A lot of characters had useful perfect pivots, too, so that's not much of an excuse. The movement in general was quite interesting and complex with how foxtrot movement worked, with it being based on how quickly and how long you flicked the stick determining how fast it was and the distance, and on top of perfect pivots, these two allowed for strong micro movement and ground control. I also personally don't get the argument revolving around combos being more difficult to escape. That's kind of... what is typical for a fighting game? And SDI is also an option stil, which I know people say doesn't help, but it really does. SDI-ing along with normal DI to significantly strengthen your directions is super useful. It's not as strong as the previous games, but it's still usable. Combos are more difficult to deal with, and I don't see how that's a problem. A lot of characters had footstool combos and more nuanced combo routes and advantage states. The characters I've mentioned come to mind, as well as the Links, Mario, Peach, Ryu, the list goes on. The ladder combos and throw into kills are extremely overrated in how impactful they were, not as many characters had ladders as people like to make out. Throw into kills also is not a problem whatsoever, it's a staple of the series besides Brawl. Every game has and will continue to have powerful throw into kill move stuff. The only ones that were truly character defining were Bowser, Donkey Kong, and Diddy Kong, and also kinda Game and Watch but to a lesser extent. Someone being able to kill off a throw is a given. Ladder combos being powerful is true, but SDI impact them more than horizontal combos, and leaves them to have more counterplay in that regard. They also were not as prevalent in what characters had them. ZSS, Mario, Rosa, Meta Knight. That's really about it. I can't think of anyone else. So how are these a problem, when they're only applicable to a few characters? So many other characters have more interesting advantage states, but the more basic characters (which have their own certainly not basic things) get overly criticized and held against the game. I feel like people are more apt to dislike the game because of its legacy, and the few worse aspects. Just like how people did that to Brawl.
I don't have much experience with competitive Smash, but as someone who's playing more "traditional" 2D fighting games it's insane how much this speaks to me. Old games tend to be unbalanced yes but also weirdly fun and experimental to a degree that some still have healthy playerbase 10 to 20 years later (Street Fighter 3rd Strike, Guilty Gear Accent Core Plus R to quote those I touched). Fighting game developpers are just terrified of making top tiers these days, forgetting that a top tier is also what's best at showing what can be done in the game. Nowadays characters shy away from features that make them unique.
I've thought this from the beginning. I will always think Melee is the best one, but I will always be down to play Brawl. Unlike Smash 4, which I found limiting and frustrating.
This is a good video, nice to see some positive brawl content. One thing I will say is that I don't think the meta is soley based around meta knight. While yes he is a very large factor, there is so much more. Fox for example does relatively well vs MK, but it would be hard to win a major with him since he has such terrible matchups against Icies, Pikachu, and sheik. A lot characters that struggle a lot vs mk have at least one other similarly bad matchup. For example, ROB also struggles a lot vs King Dedede and Falco. Donkey Kong has the terrible matchup with king dedede, which is worse than his mk matchup. Peach struggles a lot against mk but also has a terrible time vs snake. The only characters that reallly don't have any comparable matchups are characters like toon link, pit, and maybe a few others. Most of the top 10 does ok vs mk, and that matchup is the most important, but even with him banned most mid tiers would still be mid tiers. I also wouldn't call hitstun cancelling a bad mechanic, it makes the game different but that's ok. However whether you like it or not is completly subjective. Other than that kind of stuff, great video, really cool to see a well thought out video essay about the strengths of brawl! If you make more brawl content I'll be here to watch it. I shared this in Brawl Central (the main brawl discord) and reception there has been very positive as well. Glad again to see this!
Thanks for the good response. Frankly I don't agree on your point regarding, Meta Knight, because he has the potential to stall matches and run away with a lead because of his Up air and ledge invincibility. The fact that TO's had to implement a ledge grab limit speaks volumes to just how much he broke the game. Meta Knight is the only character who is more difficult to fight when he's *offstage* than onstage. In order for MK to not be broken you have to rely on a specific rule to address the issue or count on the MK player to be a good sport and make the fight "fair". There is nothing that Fox or Wolf or any other character minus a few can do to force him out of that spot. If there is no ledge grab rule and the MK player is patient and has no sense of "honor" then you are screwed (and gives more of incentive to play MK). Meta Knight certainly does not technically invalidate the cast but that is not really a point I was arguing any way; and in any case the tournament results really point to his combination of being far too easy to pickup (compared to the other top tiers who are more technical) and having far too good a matchup spread.
It's a shame about Brawl. In isolation it's a reasonable and fun platform fighter - in a different world and under different circumstances it would probably have greater recognition. Like you have touched on, one doesn't have to look far to notice it. Brawl occupied the unfortunate space of being a direct sequel to one of the most wonderfully fluid, free-form, expressive, aggressively orientated platform fighters. Being a more defensive game with a very centralised meta-game, it was doomed to the judgement it received. Fan projects such as Project M demonstrated the potential in Brawls engine, but I would posit that with a highly specified rule set (and if allowed, very minor engine changes), much more fun events could be held. If you watched positive/assertive players/characters in vanilla brawl, the relative speed and fluidity feasible of even the engine is still apparent, especially with item characters (the Nairo/ADHD set shown in your video is a good example): - One or two stock matches to reduce game length (some defensive players and match ups kept the game and set length too long to be enjoyable for viewer and player alike.) - Some arbitrary character roster restriction events - some with MK, some with MK/IC banned, others with say "no high tiers." Any one of these may allow for more expression, and without MK there may be room for some discussion of additional stage options as well as opening up additional characters for play. Having MK banned only some of the time also allows the enjoyment of seeing that characters individual fluidity without it being omnipresent and banal. - I would still argue for an ocarina code to disable random tripping. You say that it is infrequent enough to be significant, but I would return that despite this its presence alone disincentivises some players, and no competitor would have to be concerned about the looming dread of losing to an uncontrollable external factor. - Remove Pokémon Trainer's stamina and move effective damage functions as was done in later installments. If we (those forming the rules for any competitive smash game) are already playing a children's party game with a highly specified rule set, banning some options (strategies, stages, characters, etc) as we see fit in order to ensure relative competitive integrity, perhaps I can sneak in this change too :). I realise that I have mirrored much of what you have mentioned in your video, but these are mainly my thoughts responding to the premise, before hearing what it is you had to say. You are also correct regarding footage. It was just very uncommon for some kid playing smash to possess the technology to record and upload game play. It was just an additional expense people couldn't warrant purchasing, and another knowledge barrier to entry. Technology has certainly changed to better suit the sharing footage. You almost can't get away from it now. To leave you with at least one original thought that praises Brawl, it's perhaps the last entry in the franchise that will feature interesting tech. Or in other words, fun game engine exploits. This is another reason why Smash 4 and ultimate have less expression and appeal. Modern technology allows for such things to be considered unintentional bugs, patching and removing out some of the fun and player individuality. Like other aspects of Brawl, it has less of these than melee, but more than its sequels, but still enough to make the game play more dynamic and increase complexity. The obvious ones that come to mind are glide tossing, dacus, platform cancelling, that instant air toss thing, etc. Anyway, nice video. Bye.
Great video, I didn't expect to sit and watch it for 49 minutes. It'd be interesting to see what Brawl would be like without hitstun cancelling I completely agree about Smash 4 btw, that game is basically just Ultimate but worse in every way Brawl is also the best casual game in the series IMO, it has by far the best sound effects, great graphics (that don't look too cartoony), extremely fun items (which is in part due to the previous two things) including a wide array of hysterically fun final smashes which were completely stripped of their identities in Smash 4 and particularly Smash Ultimate. And the Subspace Emissary ofc
ult is by far my favorite smash game, but brawl is a thing of beauty. will always have a soft spot for it because it was my first competitive game ever. (tho i was exclusively online and rlly bad 😅) QAC was genuinely one of my favorite game mechanics in anything ever. been trying to get the ult scene as of recent to try out brawl, and most love it.
@@rangermike5571 i played it for 5 years and i still prefer ult. i just think the characters are cooler and i’m not rlly interested in movement like that. i’ve became bored of it
Brawl has this thing called single player content, hope nintendo gives it a try sometime No joke though there's plenty to love (and hate) about the game
Brawl is so misunderstood, but I’m thankful it’s able to somewhat escape from the darkness of misconceptions and false information after so many years, in today’s age. Brawl is as cool as Melee is with their depth and player expressions. Looking back at Smfoursh Wii U,… (inhales) hoo boy, did that game not age well. How it manages to screw up so many aspects from the previous titles (ex: neutral, sound design, single-player content, etc.) is beyond me. Good thing I haven’t actually played this version of Smfoursh myself, and had only recently known about its flaws through informative videos like this one. I only played the 3DS version of Smfoursh btw. I’m thinking about playing Melee, considering how goofy and hilarious it is as a spectator sport, and how technical it is to play it. I’ve played Brawl, Smfoursh 3DS, and Ultimate; but I’ve never played Melee or 64.
I mean...as someone who geninely did play Smash 4 Wii U ...I don't see how you claim Brawl is misunderstood yet then say Smash 4 Wii U aged badly when while yeah it lacks in single player content...other then that it is mostly (aside from classic mode too) superior to Brawl and I don't see it's sound design is bad either. Like I mean...maybe try it some time? It even has some unique content too (both good and bad).
Smash 4s sound design is awful in comparison to Brawl. Wtf Smash 4 aged badly because it has nothing in it that's worth going back. Brawl has a better DI system, SDI, much better zoning games, actually fleshed out characters, widespread autocancelling, edgeguarding was still viable against non MK characters. Smash 4 gutted all of that and gave us...rage, in return.
I loved Brawl so much. I went to and won tournaments for it and played it for its whole lifespan. Mainly played MK but I loved playing many characters. Smash 4 I played for like a year and dropped that shit so fast. Every charcter was just down throw combos it was so fucking bland. Brawl every character felt unique. And then Bayo came out and just 0-death'd you out of nowhere. That's another thing too that wasn't mentioned in this video. MK despite being so extremely good did not have any 0-deaths and very rarely gimped you at low percents compared to Fox or Bayo who Fox can kill you at 0 with 1 shine and Bayo can aerial combo you to death easily. Even tho MK was dominate in almost every aspect he still let you fight him head to head. You just had to best him legit.
i would rather play/watch meta knight vs anyone over any match in sm4sh, but i would rather play/watch any sm4sh match over any other characters in brawl
yea L cancelling generally means you will always be falling with aerial attacks, whereas the generous autocancels in Brawl give more flexibility to aerial timing
I will always maintain that if comp Brawl ran a 2 stock or even 1 stock BO5/BO7 format instead of 3 stocks, it would have been FAR more fondly remembered. Wonderful video, thank you for explaining with detail and tact what I've never been able to. I was a little too young and toxic (despite being 19 lmao) to rly articulate all the ways Smash 4 didn't rly do it for me and felt comparatively soulless. Also glad u pushed back on the "If MK got banned Icies would rule just as bad!" bit
I rly feel like if we played on a modded version of Brawl that just removed tripping, instituted hard ledge grab limits and nerfed MK's nado landing recovery whilst also switching to a 2 stock 6 min meta the game would be so fucking mint. We can still commit to 2 stock... There is still time...
@bucketspree4952 Honestly, 1 stock was a really solid format. There are a few tournaments from back in the day that played it and some of them still have footage up so I def recommend checking them out sometime!
Super Smash Brothers Brawl: MK Against Humanity Edit: But yeah, I miss DI proper. It hurts me, especially when I see the zero to deaths in ultimate. Perhaps with move staling, have damage stale at brawl's rate, but have knockback stale much less hard?
Other thing, I think that the fact that brawl and melee had less hitlag (or hitstop) was really important for making their respectively broken projectiles a lot more manageable, while also making shield pressure more viable.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 It would be nice. It honestly strikes me as a really strange thing to change from melee in the first place. I also think that returning power shield reflection would be really good for characters like Ganon, but it might hurt the weaker projectile users too much.
Despite Ultimate’s relatively good polish and balance, it still has its issues that I hope are addressed if they decide to remake the game. I really wish that shield grabbing, parrying, dash grabbing, crouch canceling, and dash shielding were better options. It would solve 99% of the gameplay problems with Ultimate. I don’t think a character as insanely simplistic as Ultimate Game & Watch should ever be allowed to exist.
This is a great video, altho gonestly THE thing about Brawl that I'm most curious about hasn't gotten any videos made about it yet from anyone. That's the sheer DIFFERENCE between Tier Placements of some characters from the Official American Brawl Tier List vs the Official Japanese Brawl Tier List. ESPECIALLY Fox & Pikachu. Granted within' my limted experience with actually playing Brawl competitively, I mained Fox & Falco, and tbh? Fox to me did *not* feel like someone as low as "Mid Tier" like I had heard from so many people? But I also understand my own experience with the game *competitely* is limited to just playing 1 vs 1's with my Cousin, who mained ROB. That being said tho, can anyone explain why on the Official Japanese Tier List, Fox is as High as being ranked 7th? And Pikachu on the otherhand, THE character that ESAM gasses up as being BUSTED in Brawl, is ranked as low as 22nd? Almost *20* spots lower than how high ESAM thinks Brawl Pikachu is (iirc he thinks Pika is 4th best). I feel like "it's a different country" cannot be the only answer. Are there things they found that American's *didn't* find?
Falco has arguably the best projectile in the game as well as a really easy damage racking option in his down throw. His back and down air are also really easy, long lasting pokes. Fox's Blaster is worse at forcing approaches due to the lack of stun. On the whole his moveset is better than Falco (better tilts, better kill moves, longer recovery) but Fox critically has a *much* harder time avoiding grabs and infinites than Falco, so his matchups against Pikachu and Sheik are much worse, whereas Falco has a much better zoning game that needs to be broken before he takes damage. Pikachu is indeed overrated; his tools are limited to quick attack and his down throw, his moveset on the whole has really bad hitboxes and also high landing lag on his aerials if he doesn't autocancel them. Kill moves are also a problem since forward and down smash are multi hits that can be SDI'ed. Similar to Sheik in that regard who has a few one sided matchups against higher tiered characters while struggling against the rest.
@dishonorable_daimyo1498 I see, so based on what you had to say, Japan's general perceptionnof Brawl Pikachu as a whole was outright more accurate than America's? Essentially meaning Pika just got *hard carried* by ESAM himself being an absolute beast, while also happening to have a ton of faith in his character. While conversely, Fox is indeed an actual good character, High or Top Tier, it doesn't really matter. He's still good. Just that he's good for different reasons from why Falco is good. I will say, even with my limited experience, I did get the idea that Falco was clearly a better zoner than Fox due to his lasers actually having stun, and therefore also being able to even True Combo out of them. I will say tho, within' that time? I found quite a few things intriguing that honestly have me somewhat interestsd in actually playing Brawl more often if I could figure out a way to do it. 1. Brawl's engine is so float that it makes this the only game in the series whers Fox actually has Short Hop *Triple* Laser, with the 3rd Laser always being Silent every time. 2. The floaty engine making it the only game in the series barring 64 (rip Fox's old Fair which was also several characters old Fairs that all became Diddy's Fair in Brawl) where Fox's Fair could autocancel in a short hop (tho I'm not sure *exactly* how good that even would be for Fox). 3. I noticed that Brawl Fox's Dair while largely being the same move as 64 & Melee? Unlike those games, every hit *isn't* Set Knockback, but rather has actual knockback growth as %'s get higher, leading to Dair -> Up Smash being a real Kill Confirm at high enough %, albeit it risky cause you'd wanna land as FEW hits of the Dair as possible to limit the chance of SDI'ing out the combo. 4. Obviously the move is nowhere near as *busted* as it was in Melee (tho I do know in 64 it's also very good), but Shine to me in felt like "there's no way this move is actually *outright awful* right?" Obviously Shield Pressure with it is gone, and yes it hits on Frame 3 instead of 1, but it also still has Full Body Intangibilty starting on Frame 1 and ending Frame 4. The move objectivrly still has a use in Disadvantage through this alone, plus the fact it stalls him in the air means the move HAS to be useful for Momentum Cancelling right? Not only that, idk if my logic is sound or not, but I don't REALLY think the floaty engine alone suddenly means *no one* can be Edge Guarded reliably _ever_? People around me who've talked about how bad Brawl is have brought this up, but actually playing it through Competitive lense for the first time, even while limited, has me questioning if that's truly the case. Of course I don't think it's completely busted or anything like that, but given it's Intangibility, it stalling Fox in the Air, on top of the seemingly LACK of End Lag in general that the move has even without being able to Jump Cancel it? Smash 4 & Ultimate Fox Shine's both have WAY more End Lag than Brawl Fox Shine does... there's no way this move could be completely useless for Edge Guarding in any capacity right? Even if the move on it's own isn't enough to gimp someone, we're talking about Edge Guarding. A sequence could or couldn't involve Shine as part of an entire sequence, or Fox Nair, or Bair, or Dair, all depending on the %, match up, and most notably opportunity right? It's fine if more than one move can be useful to do so, and even better if those moves compliment each other. I'd been told by Brawl haters that Fox Shine is utter garbage in Brawl, but tbh... I find this a little hard to believe. 5. Speaking of Bair, man finding out that Smash 4 was NOT the first game to have Fox's Bair no longer be a Frame 4 lingering attack, and instead become a Frame 9 move with an incredibly generous Auto Cancel Window, on top of being his absolute strongest Horizontally sending Aerial? And to top it all off, sending at a disgustingly low Semi-Spike Angle (altho I imagine given Brawl having Melee's DI system, survival DI against the move has more room for creativity)? I honestly think that *little bit of time* may have been enough tk cause Brawl Fox to become my favorite Fox to play as within' the scope of Brawl up to Ultimate... am I crazy for saying this?
nah. smash 64 is worse, imo. in competitive 64, only 1 map is now considered playable, and the neutral in it is literally endless bait camping because the progress is made exclusively in its strong combo game. tripping and brawl MK are enough to make it worse than every other smash game, but besides those things i think it was fun due to the air mobility. the balance below MK was great. snake, rob, wario, diddy, falco, olimar, ICs, zero suit, DDD were viable.
overstating the role that tripping played in Brawl's meta. Meanwhile people are ok with Smash 4 rage that has characters dying at 60% to a grab aerial 2 hit even if they outplayed the neutral most of the match.
I will definitely say that out of the five Smash games, Smash 4 is my least favorite. It feels awfully slow compared to even Brawl (though I'm a stinky MK main in that game so that's partly the reason but even when I mained Mario early on it still felt faster), it is mechanically distorted (getting rid of certain mechanics and making new issues out of those tweaks, or overtuning things such as rage), and even if you are a more casual player than myself, there really isn't any appealing content besides maybe custom moves, but those take a SUPER LONG TIME to grind, and I just ended up downloading a 100% save instead, and a lot of those feel super uninspired anyways. Either use the base "medium" move, use the move that's fast with low knockback and damage / best recovery with no hitbox, or use a slower, more knockback / higher damage move that if it's a recovery tool, is cut down. That is a big pattern with these moves. I mainly play SSBU and a fangame, SSF2, more seriously but I will come back to the other games time to time, except with SSB4, I never find myself doing that. It feels quite stale, slow, and lacks the uniqueness that other Smash games have from each other.
All three of the Nintendo developed smash games are broken and beautiful in their own ways. Brawl was my first smash game and even if it's not my favorites I'm still glad to see it getting the respect it deserves.
I will die on the hill of Brawl being the best game in the series in terms of content solo and group. It’s just not a good competitive game, Which is ok.
You didn't really "cover" tripping. You just downplayed it and gave the chance of it happening as if that changes how negatively impactful it was on a match. People have lost tournament matches/sets (not recorded) due to it occurring. I personally have tripped into an IC player who proceeded to chaingrab me to my death. The fact that it has a chance of happening at all shifted the meta
I spent two minutes or so explaining why its effects on the meta have been overblown. Especially when people stupidly claim (probably cuz they never played it) that tripping is why people walked in Brawl in favor of running, when that was not the case, they walked because they wanted to retain access to their full moveset. It *could* have an outsized effect on the outcome of a match, but it *usually* did not. "The fact that it has a chance of happening at all shifted the meta" is just gross disinformation. More people have lost games to rage related jank in Smash 4 than was ever the case with tripping in Brawl.
I never really cared for brawl competitively but i will say its better than smash 4 purely because of all the little tech and shit you could do in brawl. Cape gliding, wave bouncing, and zap jumps were so fun among many other neat things you could do.
As someone who's been saying Brawl was better than SSB4 since summer 2015, this is validating. SSB4 sterilized the cast and made every character boring af. Brawl was a beautiful janky mess where almost every character was interesting. And the gutted DI system alone was a game-ruiner!
the craziest thing was seeing people actually actively cheer what they were doing in Smash 4 every time they ripped something out of the game. Like people were actively encouraging making the game even worse
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 And then those same people immediately changed the narrative to "SSB4 bad" as soon as Ultimate dropped :P I love every Smash game for different reasons (yes, even 4), but Brawl is my favorite as a whole. It's not quite as good competitively as Melee, but it's still a decent game and the sheer amount of high effort content on that Wii disc is kind of staggering. I'm just glad that people like you are helping others understand what made Brawl so great!
I competed in Brawl. It's better than both Ultimate and Smash 4, in some ways. Ultimate is probably the most fun but also the most frustrating. I just miss things being less safe to throw out mindlessly, there was a certain mental game in Brawl that's no longer there.
Certain characters always had moves that they could just throw out mindlessly in earlier Smash games and they usually wound up being among the best characters. Most of Meta Knight’s moveset in Brawl fell under this. Same with many of the Big 5’s moves in Melee. The devs began to realize a huge part of the reason why the earlier Smash games were horribly unbalanced was because the characters who had safe moves to throw out were good and those who didn’t were bad. Starting a bit in Smash 4, but especially in Ultimate, the devs began buffing characters by giving them safe tools to throw out. It’s a reason why Ultimate’s aerial landing lag is so low and why many moves are non-committal. Smash has always had very powerful, non-committal moves. They just were only on the good characters. Now, even the “bad” characters have something you have to watch out for, even if your character is better. If you go back to having moves be less safe, all that’s going to do is make it so the handful of characters who retain those safe options run the meta and everyone else really isn’t worth picking. Rather than limit lag, I think Smash should instead make changes to its engine to allow you to have more control over your character and allow you to use moves in more creative ways like in Melee.
This is not really the case. Some characters did have particularly bad movesets (Brawl Ivysaur, Melee Kirby) but on the whole it was a character's ability to press advantage / escape from disadvantage that determined viability. I will use the example of Brawl Sheik as she was a lower mid tier / low tier character that had a solid moveset with low lag moves, neutral and back aerial really versatile aerial options, down throw worked really well for setting up follow ups due to said low lag moves, a solid highly damaging projectile. In another Smash game she would have been a really good character; hell, Smash 4 Sheik is so much worse than Brawl Sheik (lower damage output, worse hitboxes) and yet Smash 4 Sheik was top tier in her title. Why? Stale move negation. Brawl's extreme stale move negation (moves that could kill at 120% fresh would not kill until past 200% or more if staled enough) disproportionately hurt lower tier characters since they had a tendency to rely on their only kill moves to rack damage / space. Sheik's viable and semi-viable KO options (up smash, up air, back air) were gutted by stale move negation. Mario is another Brawl character who has fast moves and decent mobility that gets shafted by a lack of KO power. Even discounting his problems with Dedede. On the other end of the spectrum, characters like Fox and Wolf who had great neutral, combo setups, and kill moves were knocked down a peg by having awful disadvantaged states that Pikachu, Falco, Sheik could heavily exploit. In Brawl's metagame, viability was primarily determined by 1) does you character have a variety of kill moves? 2) are they vulnerable to any particular chain throws or grab release jank? Projectiles were important and so were combo setups but some characters had only one (Snake had really good projectiles but not much in the way of conventional combos, Marth lacks a projectile but has plenty of follow up options) but almost all the viable characters had reliable kill moves / setups and passable or good disadvantage states (Falco was the only top 10 character to be particularly susceptible to locks and chain throws). If you fixed stale move negation in Brawl it would solve a large chunk of the balance problems (Sheik can no longer combo F tilt to 100% on fast fallers, same with Pikachu down throw; Sheik, Mario, Luigi, and other low and mid tier characters would have an easier time KO'ing). The issue with most non viable characters in Brawl is *not* a lack of safe hitboxes.
Does anyone know the difference between (USA) Revision 1 vs Rev 2 versions of smash brawl? I been enjoying the game a lot recently and i cant really find any info on this. Are there any gameplay tweaks that they made? The only thing that might be different is that rev1 might have a typo for one of the trophy descriptions, but im not sure if thats the case. Im getting a bit into watching the competitive scene and i want to know the differences between rev 1 and 2 to see which id rather play and to just know some of the history of the versions that i cant find clear answers online. Thank you in advance.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 ty for the reply! Just to be precise, is it the wii remote caution screen or something else? I noticed that the rev 2 had very very slightly smaller file size (around 300 bytes less) so that would make sense. I just thought there might have been some other difference in gameplay because I thought I heard you say something about a patch in the gameplay. Ty again!
i was most likely referring to patching in Smash 4, don't recall stating that regarding Brawl and in any case there were never any balance changes to Brawl following its launch. The change is to the wii remote caution screen upon launching the game.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 Ohh ok I got brawl and 4 mixed up when patching was mentioned 😅 thank you for the help. The video was great btw, I haven't seen this take on competitive brawl before and it's refreshing. Interested in hearing more about brawl in the future if you make more vids on the topic.
Oh god. Is this a good game? Also, I would like to mention that, even if someone were to disagree with every point in the video, it is still aesthetically the absolute peak of the series.
This video is great at showing the fun and technical aspects of Brawl, but one thing that kinda bothers me honestly is the fact that you're comparing it to Smash 4 at all. Someone else brought this up as being unfair to Smash 4 but my opinion is that Brawl CAN'T be compared to Smash 4 and vice versa. The way both games are designed it all comes down to preference, because Smash 4's mechanical changes were a direct response to what people didn't like about Brawl's. Smash 4 isn't gonna be Brawl, and it didn't have to. It's whole purpose was to tear Brawl away from it. We know they wanted Brawl DNA out before the release of Smash 4 Wii U, because pre-1.0.4 Smash 4 was an absolute trip of a game that I really wish they had kept the way it was, it's something that I've never forgotten and I constantly bring up to friends. DACUS, Jab Cancelling, among other things were still there. I would've loved if they kept these things, but they obviously wanted that GONE by the Wii U release, which unfortunately, it was I love Brawl, even more than Melee, a game I've played for more than half my life, but I prefer Smash 4 more as it does away with a lot of things I feel are archaic design choices retained from Melee to Brawl, and did away with a lot of Brawl cheese, ledgehogging, chain throwing, infinite jab locking, incredibly short hitstun cancelling, and tripping, mechanics that range from slightly annoying to things I absolutely despise. But there's also the things I like, DACUS, autocancelling, grounded and platform movement, *Falco*. They're fun to play with and abuse, and competitive Brawl generally being played with a code that turns tripping off is sooooo fun, but some of these things made things a lot slower. Even for me, someone who's played Melee for 13 years and still going, the lack of ledgehogging and chain grabbing are things that already make it a more fun game for me, especially because mid and low tiers were ESPECIALLY abused by these things, made worse by the fact that I play Ness, a low tier, and getting constantly screamed at for hating these and to just "pick a different character" completely misses the point. I can play Fox, a really fun character for me, but I'm still ledgehogged, I'm still chaingrabbed, playing a different character isn't gonna take that away, it only makes things slightly "easier". Characters in Smash 4 can be a bit low to the ground, but they aren't as one dimensional as you say, it also allows me to jump between characters after some warmup if I want a change of gameplay, and plus there are plenty of movement options that let you move around with your character any way you like. Being able to hit what I want consistently also feels good. You may not think the things I bring up are archaic or cheesy or annoying like I do, and that's fine, and I think that adds to it that it's all preference. There's a reason why people argue Smash 4 is better at all is because some of these changes people like, and just because a game is more technical and "objectively" more fluid doesn't mean it's exactly the better game, it just makes it a technically more dynamic game, and the way I say this sounds like I'm saying Brawl is worse, but I think they're equally fun games, it's just a preference thing. Smash 4 is its whole own can of worms and I feel comparing it is not necessarily unfair, just, not exactly possible given how the game is. It's a simpler game, and I like that, not because I don't like skill or tech or anything, again I've played Melee for years upon years so tech is pretty much ingrained in my bones at this point, it just makes thing more consistent and fun. Plus, it is still classic Smash at it's core (unlike Ultimate), it retains most things that make Smash what it is, so I'm not completely thrown off when going between 64, Melee or Brawl, 64 being my absolute favorite game in the series. The way you speak whenever you talk about it feels like you're trying to make Smash 4 sound a LOT worse than it actually is, it seems you're trying to make it look bad, when the reality is it's just..a different game.
Smash 4 players spent years dunking on Brawl in an effort to prop up their own game, yet for some reason there needs to be this weird rule that the reverse is unacceptable. Part of me feels it’s only because the comparison is favorable to Brawl. I know this better than most since I was among the most active in forum discussions regarding the Smash 4 tier list; I spent a lot of time arguing against the incessant crying for nerfs to top tier characters making some of the same arguments that I put forth in this video here. The most common response was a halfhearted “at least it doesn’t have Brawl Meta Knight.” The comparison to Smash 4 is merited because that game is the one that suffers from the issues that Brawl gets wrongly accused of: a stilted combo game and uninteresting neutral. Smash 4 shows that there is more to combos than a simple solution of “more hitstun”; Brawl had almost no hitstun but it still maintained a fluid follow up game thanks to great frame data, unspammable air dodges, a functioning and usable DI and SDI system. Smash 4 is ironically exactly the kind of game that people *think* Brawl is, and that’s indeed an issue that is worth addressing. Smash 4 was marketed as “the middle of the road game, more competitive than Brawl but less than Melee” and it absolutely needs to be assessed on how (if) it improves the gameplay over Brawl. Which it very much did not as explained in the video. This is not a matter of personal preference, otherwise there would be no point of writing this essay; I could have just said “I like Brawl more than Smash 4” and left it at that. But it’s not about personal preference. It’s about showcasing how Sakurai despite his best intentions to casualize Smash with Brawl still managed to give us a solid (if deeply flawed) competitive experience; and despite his supposed intention to “correct Brawl’s mistakes” with Smash 4, ended up creating the worst competitive experience in the series. You are also overstating the effectiveness of edge hogging. Edge hogging was not about securing stocks primarily; it was about limiting recovery options and forcing the recovering player onstage. And there was still plenty of interaction: the recovering player could change up the timings on their recovery, save or burn their double jump, recover high and onto a platform, fastfall or no fastfall. Even in Melee, Falco had a LOT of options for getting back onstage (different angles, side b shorten). Even moreso this applies to floatier Brawl: stocks are not commonly taken through edge hogging, the “cheese” is just a way to extend the edgeguard and deal more damage. This is far better than the everyone-recovers-for-free Smash 4 where all you can really do is just spam neutral aerial at the ledge to cover their getup options (the one good thing is that characters don’t get invincibility on regrab). Don’t get me started on the insane magnet hands in 4. And hard disagree on your point about Fox’s recovery being “slightly easier”. No, no, no, Fox has plenty of options to mix up his recovery. Of the top 10 Melee characters only Peach and Jigglypuff have him beat and only then in horizontal recovery. On the topic of chainthrowing: again largely overstated. Of the top 20 or so in Brawl, the only characters with relevant chain throws are Falco, Marth, IC’s, Pikachu, and Dedede. Dedede’s throw works on a subset of the cast but he is very easily counterpicked due to his awful mobility and poor zoning game. And most top tiers are not vulnerable to his chain throw. Marth’s chain throw works at very low percentages (and his throw does 4%). Pikachu’s death throw works on like 4 characters, the rest can escape once they enter tumble. Falco and IC’s are the only viable characters with universally-applicable chain throws, and Falco isn’t even that reliant on it anyway since he can rack up damage fine with blaster, DACUS, down and back air. I will give the IC’s point to you since there is no way to get out it unless they drop the combo but even then their dominance was enabled by their bad stages being banned thanks to Meta Knight; I maintain that the game would have been fine if they banned MK and kept the stages. Character diversity/jumping: you can jump between different characters in Smash 4 precisely because there is so little to them. There were people in Smash 4 competing with up to 5 mains because of how easy the vast majority of the cast was to learn. If I wanted to “change things up” in Brawl I can already do that without switching characters: Brawl Falco can switch between being a super campy lame zoner and a devastating brawler. Snake can box you in with his tilts and jab or play at long range. In Smash 4 almost every character has “the one gameplan” that they can’t deviate from because of how limited their options are. Sheik was one of the few characters who could alter her playstyle between combos and camping with needles (before they gutted needles so she just became another Smash 4 character). “Just because a game is more fluid doesn’t mean it’s exactly a better game, it just makes it a technically more dynamic game…I think they’re equally fun games.” Fun is not a quantifiable metric so I won’t bother debating that. But the rest of that quote comes off as “I am disagreeing with your evidence”. Based on everything documented in the video, it is not only objectively wrong but argumentatively irresponsible to not state that Brawl has superior competitive merit to Smash 4. Smash 4 is more polished, it is better balanced. And I do think the buffering system is less clunky, which definitely makes the game “feel better” to a beginner. But the interactions between two characters are substantially and objectively less interesting; they have fewer tools to play with and logically that results in stilted, incredibly repetitive gameplay and almost non existent expression for players. After doing all the research for this video it would be actually stupid for me to water down my criticism and just say “it’s just a different game,” which is the one trend infecting analysis videos I hate the most because it always, always comes off as intellectually dishonest, like the writer is too afraid to express his own opinion.
I appreciate this video a lot, like with any nuanced, intelligent discussion of Brawl. However, I do find it ironic that the video is dedicated to shattering the reductive talking points parroted about Brawl, yet spends a lot of its time doing the same exact thing to Smash For. Regardless, I learned some interesting new facts and still enjoyed the video.
Game ripped out the actually good parts of Brawl, the interesting zoning games, the aerial game, the inability to spam air dodge out of juggles, stronger DI and SDI. It's sterile and stilted as hell with most characters having an obvious 1-2-3 game plan that they can hardly deviate from.
Incredible video thus far (about 30 minutes in) id be interested to see your take on the other games not really talked about. Love your nuance My personal ranking (This is literally only talking about competitive) 1.Melee 2.Brawl 3.64 4.Smash 4 5.Ultimate
Ultimate has a really good air game and run cancelling into attacks is neat. Grabs and shields are just really, really bad and the knockback physics really mess up punish games past low percents. Character design is overall better than Smash 4 but still a long way from Brawl's depth. Don't know much about 64 other than it seems to have a similar issue to Smash 4 in that neutral is stilted and the combo game is very repetitive due to a lack of DI. Melee is really good all around though it arguably has the worst balance outside of the top tiers, thanks to the game being rushed (DK losing his giant punch charge if hit out of an Up B, Game and Watch not being able to L cancel all his aerials and also his awful shield). Brawl's low tiers were really bad but they weren't outright unfinished in the way that Melee's low tiers were. Melee takes spot 1, followed by Brawl. 64 and Ultimate are somewhere in the middle but for sure Smash 4 is dead last.
@dishonorable_daimyo1498 tbh I get smash 4 being dead last. I personally simply like the feeling of smash 4 more and perfect pivoting (Plus smash 4 was where i personally competed and i have a ton of good memories with the game, so im definitely biased), ult just feels really stiff. From an objective design standpoint, ult is definitely better I'm not gonna argue LOL. Smash 64 there is more nuance to the combo game than people give it credit for since SDI is really strong, definitely more depth than 4 because 4 is literally copy paste combos with very few combos being position based. I also think the neutral in 64 is fine, but I know people don't feel the same. I get what you mean but I think melees low tiers are more interesting than brawls. I think all the quirks to the low tiers give them personality (specifically G&W shield, I think it works really well with his design since he does have a lot of strong offensive tools and a killer combo game, as well as good kill set ups, also nice movement to add on. However he has the worst defense in the game since he's a literal 2d piece of paper). Brawls low tiers are still cool I just prefer melees for sure even if they are unfinished. I like Bowser honestly because he's so shit it's kinda funny and he has like 1 or 2 really strong tools, Mewtwo is really technical, Ness is kinda saucy, and Young Link is really dynamic. I also generally think the actual balance of Brawl from top to bottom is significantly more jarring than melee.
"Brawl bad because its not Melee"-Average melee fanboy who is obsessed with competitive play and tournaments. Thats genuinely the only reason why people like that don't like brawl. Just because it isnt as broken as melee. The game has an amazing single player option. Multiplayer is fun with buddies on the couch. There are so many controller types you can use and that main intro theme is so bad ass
I think you pretty dramatically understate Brawl's balance issues and their impact on the game. Obviously, the game is unbalanced. Even past the runaway top 2, there's chasms of power between characters that you can pretty cleanly split the roster into equal thirds that play remotely fair games against each other. But that alone isn't even the important part - you could make similar comparisons to the roster to that of Melee or 64 on paper. The bigger issue is that character power in Brawl tends to be entirely divorced from universal mechanics. High hitstun and wavedashing meant that any character in Melee could cook at least a little bit in the right situation. Smash 4 and Ult are similar to Brawl, but both are much better balanced, so aside from basically just Ganondorf in both games, everybody in the cast can reasonably pull out wins in high stakes games. Brawl's bad characters get nothing. They are often completely devoid of competitive potential, and they are extremely reliant on their character specific jank to be fun in any capacity unlike the 64 / melee low tiers. And because character specific traits are so much more important than universal mechanics, bad matchups can be absolutely brutal. Again ignoring MK and Icies, the bottom And none of that is to mention Dedede. He doesn't really impact high level play that negatively, so I guess that's why he isn't addressed, but he is rat poison to the mere thought of enjoying the game for ~60% of the roster while having one of the most braindead punish games in the franchise.
I already agreed that Smash 4 has better balance than Brawl in the video, and as I said in the video people have attached way too much emphasis to balancing characters at the expense of interesting gameplay. And on the matter of Brawl’s characters, yeah there were a few really bad matchups such as Dedede vs several characters, Wolf vs anyone with a chain throw, Marth vs the PK kids. But you know, the PK kids would have still been pretty bad if you removed Marth from the equation, and if you removed Dedede then DK would still have issues with Meta Knight and zoners (zoners who make up the majority of the top tier). Dedede is a really easy character to play but in turn he is also really easy to counterpick: his zoning game sucks and again zoners make up the majority of the top tier, whom he loses to with the possible exception of Snake. Dedede is more of a “nuisance” than a “threat” and people figured this out in…like, 2010. He’s a bad meme in the same way that people have severely overstated how much tripping destroyed the meta. Since you brought up Melee, it’s interesting how you fail to bring up Sheik who is almost an exact analogue to Dedede in Brawl: she loses to characters above her but obliterates a decent chunk of the mid and low tiers (coincidentally with a chainthrow). Melee is better balanced than Brawl among its top tiers, but is arguably just as bad in the mid and lower tiers if not worse, part of it being characters are unfinished. Roy’s awful hitboxes, Game and Watch’s terrible shield and his inability to L cancel 3 of his aerials; DK for some reason losing his giant punch charge if you hit him out of his Up b; Pichu self damaging in addition to being the lightest character (and just because it’s an intentional joke character doesn’t excuse this); Kirby doesn’t even have a functioning grab and throw game. Brawl’s lower tiers including Ganondorf may be bad competitively but they are not unfinished. “Brawl’s bad characters get nothing,” at this point I can’t even tell if you’ve been involved in the game competitively. Ganondorf has a viable tech in his thunderstomping; he can combo down air into itself or simply use it to pressure and throw out another option immediately after autocancelling it. Not to mention a pretty good command grab that cannot be teched unlike in Smash 4. He is objectively a better character than Melee Kirby with those attributes alone. Brawl Sheik is also a low tier with some really good options, even beyond just spamming F tilt. One of the best DACUS in the game, really good frame data that allows her to box in her opponent in disadvantage; the only thing letting her down is that her best KO options are staled because of how much she uses them to rack damage (she can get around 30% off the two hits of up smash). Donkey Kong has some of the largest hitboxes in the game (F tilt can beat MK tornado), decent movement; he’s extremely unlucky in that he is the perfect weight class and hurtbox size to get infinite by Dedede. Mario and Luigi also have excellent frame data and good air games; Luigi is let down by issues landing and his low traction making it tough to punish out of shield. Mario just has sub par killing power. Jigglypuff retains a strong air game from Melee; this is a case of a character being let down by Brawl’s environment where edgeguarding is less about gimping and more about racking damage. So she still dies early but now her opponent lasts much longer. Brawl’s low tiers may not have been viable but to state that they had no positive attributes is either uninformed or deliberately trying to paint the game in a worse light. In most cases they are let down by poor kill power or one particularly bad matchup, which isn’t substantially different from the low tiers in Melee. Smash 4’s low tiers are only better in a relative sense since they gutted top tiers and gutted them even further in two years of patching, and their go-to method for “fixing” a bad character was to slap a combo throw on them. The ONLY two characters in Brawl who are divorced from universal mechanics are precisely the two best ones: MK and the Climbers. Hitstun cancelling isn’t a get out of jail free card like you imply: most top and high tiers can easily cover defensive options. Snake can stuff out most aerials with his tilts and up smash (not to mention covering the rest of the stage with explosives) and he can DACUS to cover landings; Falco can autocancel his back and down air, and can throw lasers out while drifting forward or backward; Fox can combine his up tilt with aerials to trap you in a cycle; Diddy has his AC fair, back air, and 2 bananas; Wolf has back air and a really good DACUS. All of these are really fast options that can cover dodges and aerials. It’s almost like you didn’t watch the video or just skipped through it. I spent several minutes deconstructing why Smash 4 is a less interesting game despite being better balanced and you come here writing a text wall on why Smash 4 is better because it’s more balanced. How do you know if a game is good competitively? If the better player wins consistently. Smash 4 had random people maining low tiers taking sets off top players thanks to rage and other related jank; this is not exciting. And it’s not like those low tiers ever won a major (Mewtwo doesn’t count since he was buffed to hell by the devs).
I'm just here for the Smash 4 slander, I honestly cannot believe people dropped Brawl for downthrow upair simulator. The nicest thing I can say about Smash 4 is that it has the most accurate name in the series; it lived for 4 years (which was 4 years too many) and there are only 4 people left on the planet that would willingly play that slop over any other smash game.
Imo the reason why people say smash 4 sucks is that it has nothing of value over Ultimate. Ultimate just obsoletes Sm4sh in every way. Brawl only survives because of nostalgia and modding (so you can make it a better game). Melee is very deep and technical, while Smash 64 is the most like traditional fighters, being arguably the most balanced title. At least Brawl had good singleplayer (arguably the best of Smash's sp) but Smash 4 was better than Brawl competitvely (for a while), so everyone jumped ship.
"brawl only survives because of nostalgia and modding (so you can make it a better game)" this is nonsense. Did you watch the video? Brawl is the only Smash game to have truly intricate zoning games and an aerial focused neutral, compared to the more ground based neutral in Melee, 4, and Ultimate. Brawl Snake, Olimar, Diddy are simply a type of character that do not exist in other Smash games, not even in Melee. It's not fun to watch especially for people who are not into Brawl, but it's *different* and sets itself apart from the other games. It's great that Brawl is so heavily moddable but it has the unfortunate byproduct of covering up the virtues of the base game. Smash 4 was never better than Brawl in a competitive sense, it only had a competitive scene for as long as it was the "new game" which in all likelihood is going to happen to Ultimate whenever the sequel drops. Brawl still has a small dedicated scene, though, while Smash 4 almost completely lacks one. To say that Brawl is liked more for nostalgia is completely ignoring the legitimate merit that the game still has after all these years.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 to say melee has a ground neutral is nonsense. more than half of your attacks are aerials in that game. Brawl only had an "aerial neutral" because everyone was stupid floaty and to avoid tripping (spam dair as mk against ICs and see who wins). While i will say that brawl has the least lame zoning (melee and 64 have almost no zoning, with the exception of melee Falco), most of the time spent in the air is to zone out (read: lame out) the opponent all to avoid dashing, which in the video you mention as a very committal option, because you can trip. Nintendo tried to stop competitive Smash with Brawl, and it didn't work. Brawl has some cool things (if glides were balanced that'd be great), but if i got my 7 y/o brother to pick MK while I pick Ganon, i would lose every time, while if we swap, i instantly win. Brawl has some anti-competitive mechanics added in by Nintendo on purpose. Smash 4 was only good competitively until DLC, then people started leaving for Brawl/Melee/64 even, until Ultimate came out. Ultimate will probably end up like Smash 4 (read: MINING AWAY), but that doesn't mean it wasn't good competitively at a point in time. Brawl just wasn't. It's different and that's OK, but doesn't really work in a competitive environment. Melee for example is the definition of competitve Smash these days and it's so fun to watch. In Brawl you can bet your house on Marth in Marth vs Ness and become a millionaire.
Because of the way L cancelling works Melee's short hop game is predominantly centered around falling with delayed aerial attacks in order to have the greatest advantage on shield & to reduce air time. Characters like Sheik and Marth who had some good autocancels didn't really use them that much since they would have to throw out the aerial early in the short hop and would opt to delay + L cancel. Brawl has much more variation in aerial timings, and full hop aerials are also more common in neutral, which is what I mean when I say it's the most aerial focused game of the series. Not to mention that Melee had a much greater focus on grounded neutral due to wavedashing and dash dancing and the ability to crouch from run.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 brawl has more variation in aerial timings because they can be spammed. Just becsuse Melee hsd some gorunded movement options that weren't committal doesn't mean it's bad. You can hardly move in Brawl without either tripping or getting hit and having to use your double-jump. Glides were also stupid OP.
"you can hardly move in brawl without either tripping" LMAO. I addressed this fallacy at the very start of the video, tripping was such a non issue in the majority of matches. People need to stop basing their opinions on Reddit slop and highlight reels before they comment on games they have no experience in. Once again: people walked and jumped in Brawl because 1) characters had really good zoning games 2) running was too committal since jabs and tilts were such an integral part of most playstyles. "Glides were stupid OP" which makes it sound like every character had access to it. There was only one character in the game who could make extensive use of it and that's because he had a plethora of other options to mix and match with glides: Meta Knight's glide was so good because he had two methods of starting it and his jump-based glide (not Shuttle Loop) didn't render him helpless if he had jumps left, meaning he could end the glide and hit you with an aerial, dodge, or even Up b for another glide. Pit and Charizard both had access to gliding but neither could take advantage of it as much as MK did due to their overall worse attributes (fewer jumps and worse aerial attacks). "brawl has more variation in aerial timings because they can be spammed." and...? Yes, characters used aerial attacks much more in Brawl because they were faster and had favorable hitbox placements + higher shield pushback than later games meaning that defending characters often couldn't punish out of shield even if they technically were at a frame advantage. There is too much disinfo in this comment to unpack even though I addressed it in the video.
Even though Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the better game, Super Smash Bros. For Nintendo 3DS and Wii U mustn't be overlooked for all the things it does right
I came in to say that's it's definitely an overcorrection to say that smash 4 is inferior. But this depth of analysis is impressive. And yes I miss neutral b cancel, now that you mention it.
There is plenty of misinformation in this video. "[Brawl] Top tier characters have low landing lag on their aerials across the board with generous autocancel aerials" "...Sm4sh, where landing lag was increased across the board and autocancel frames were made useless, excluding a few specific instances" Straight up lies. There were some characters who got increased landing lag on their best neutral tools, like Marth. However, landing lag remained relatively the same on average, possibly slightly less than in Brawl. It's just that many of Brawl's top tiers had really low landing lag on their moves and crazy autocancel windows on a lot of moves. Btw, there are some moves that got increased landing lag in Sm4sh, like DK's Nair, but got a way better autocancel window to compensate. The decreased safety of moves is a bit awkward to talk about, since Sm4sh's aerials were safer on shield when not autocancelled. Brawl had an extremely low amount of shieldstun on its moves, and while Sm4sh's wasn't that high either, it was a few more frames on most moves. I know most characters were doing autocancelled aerials in Brawl, but this is one of the factors that made chaingrabbing so potent on most of Brawl's cast. If you did not have good autocancel windows in Brawl, you were even more vulnerable to OoS options than characters were in 4. You also say that Sm4sh's landing lag on their airdodges were higher than in Brawl's, which isn't true at all. Brawl's airdodges had very little lag upon landing (I can't find the exact frame data here), while Sm4sh's airdodges had a whopping 21 frames of landing lag. I know you *actually* meant end lag for the airdodges, and only mistakenly said landing lag. But this is a pretty important distinction, and I'd honestly argue that Brawl's airdodges are designed worse than in Sm4sh due to how much they aid in landing. Sm4sh's airdodges are always playing with fire due to how easily you can get punished for an airdodge read. About Sm4sh having 2 stocks vs Brawl's 3 stocks, isn't this because of how many characters have extremely strong chaingrab combos and very consistent kill confirms in Brawl, and how edgeguarding was more potent in a game with ledgehogging? I don't feel like the reasons you gave earlier on in the video as to why Sm4sh had 2 stocks had anything to do with why that game had 2 stocks. About DI, while I hate the Sm4sh change of cutting the DI angle from 18 to 9 degrees, it's not like it was a very relevant aspect of Brawl. It was important for survival DI, but combo DI was probably less relevant in Brawl than in Sm4sh due to most of the game's combos being pre-tumble. I'd almost argue that limiting the DI angle in Brawl would've been better as to reduce people's ability to just DI towards the ground, and press airdodge to escape the combo. I'd definitely argue that the "no DI during tumble" change was far more harmful to the health of combos in the series, since we've seen how stupid the combos can get in Brawl and Ultimate when people are put into inescapable situations because of it. Melee's combos are better off due to the lack of all of these changes in mechanics, and it's why Melee has both a crazy combo game without having many guaranteed combo routes. Cookie-cutter combos have been an issue since Brawl, and talking about Sm4sh's combo system as if it's uniquely cookie cutter doesn't really make sense. Sm4sh's unique issues in its combos come from them giving everyone a Dthrow confirm, which makes it a character design issue. Btw, I'm no expert on Brawl, but I do have a question about walking. All of the reasons you gave as to why people walked in Brawl also applied to Sm4sh, but I definitely see people walking more often in Brawl. If not to prevent tripping, why is that? It always came off as people playing a lot more cautiously around the opponent's win conditions in Brawl to me. Not important, but while Ultimate's hitstun cancelling system still exists, but is not really a relevant factor in the game due to hitstun acceleration. Most of the time, hitstun is already over before you hit that 45 frame window, because the player in hitstun is running on a, you could say, "faster gamespeed" while in hitstun. This is why 50/50 kill confirms existed in Sm4sh, where you had to guess between airdodge or jump, but not in Ultimate.
Forgot to actually mention the "straight up lies" thing. Autocancels were immensely useful in Sm4sh, if for sure less massively important than in Brawl. Like Brawl, many heavier-designed characters didn't have good autocancel windows, which was a part of their issue. And also like Brawl, the characters who did have good autocancel windows used them quite a bit in both their combos and in spacing. You won't find that many examples of characters whose aerials autocancel immediately once the hitbox is out, which is something that was relegated to, like, Cloud Dair and DK Nair. But you do find aerials that are significant in part due to their autocancel windows across the entire cast. Pick a random character on kuroganehammer, and you'll probably find a good autocancel window on an important poking aerial.
Fox had the landing lag on his forward and down air massively increased (the latter nearly doubled). Kirby had his back air landing lag nearly doubled, his up air went from 9 -> 12 frames (a 33% jump); with little compensation on his other aerials (on top of worse autocancels). Falco’s down air was already mentioned, but his neutral air went from 9 to 15 frames. Ike’s neutral air went from 12 to 14 (and the autocancel went 67 to 64 frames LOL). Peach’s back air went from 9 to 18 frames, her up air went from 9 to 12, down air from 9 to 13. ZSS back air from 9 to 11. Yoshi neutral air went from 9 to 11, his back air landing lag was nearly doubled (and the AC was made worse). ROB’s forward air has 25% more landing lag; his back air from 12 to 22. Both Mario’s up and back air went from 10 to 12 frames (again, if 2 frames seems negligible remember that this is a 20% increase). Luigi: neutral air went from 10 to 14, back air from 12 to 16, down air from 12 to 20. Pit’s forward air went from 15 to 20, same with back air; he did receive compensation on his other 3 aerials , but it’s still a hefty 24 frames. Link’s grab air went from no lag at all to 8 frames; they reduced the lag on his up air but it’s still at 23 frames. Wario’s back air got reduced lag (from 30 to 27 frames lol), but his neutral and up air got 20-30% more. Ness’s forward air went from 12 to 20 with a worse AC; back air went from 12 to 17. For some reason they added 2 frames of lag to Charizard’s back air when it was already at 22. It gets even better: Knee Smash already had 22 frames and they upped that 30; Falcon’s neutral air went from 9 to 12. Sonic neutral air: 12 to 16, his forward air went from 30 to 26 (lol), back air has THREE Times the lag AND it AC’s later; they did improve the AC of up air but that was at the expense at hitbox duration. Also his down air didn’t have enough lag at 30, so they added another 8 (and AC’s later). You already mentioned Marth. Ganondorf is one of the only characters to actually get a significant reduction across the board. That’s about 18 characters that I went through the trouble of checking on, half the Brawl veterans. At first I was charitable to your criticism but the numbers don’t lie: Smash 4 does not have the “same” landing lag of Brawl and it most certainly does not have “slightly less”. At this point I would consider not responding to the rest of the comment since it’s very obviously bent on propping up Smash 4 even when the facts do not line up. Smash 4 gutted AC frames, increased landing lag, and in the cases where it does reduce landing lag, it’s cases like a move going from 30 to 24 frames (still wildly unsafe to throw out). But let’s continue. People walked and jumped and generally played more “slowly” in Brawl partly because top tiers had really good zoning games. Smash 4 largely got rid of that, funneling its characters into close range games where they resorted to extended dash dancing (because aerial approaches were crap as well). “This is one of the factors that made chaingrabbing so potent in Brawl.” I already completely discredited the idea that Brawl has worse landing lag than 4, but this whole chaingrabbing thing is more misinformation (not unlike TRIPPING where people try to make you believe that TRIPPING is what killed the scene). Of all the viable characters (top 20) there are ONLY two who have chainthrows that work on the whole cast: Falco and the Climbers. Dedede’s works on like 8 characters (most are mid or low tier anyway) and he’s easy to counterpick. Pikachu’s death chain works on 4 characters. “If you did not have good autocancel windows in brawl…” yea well it’s a good thing most characters do. I’m not interested in talking about your fantasy version of the game from an alternate universe. The truth is even some of the worst characters in Brawl have usable aerial pokes. Brawl’s air dodges are not worse than 4 (and FYI I think Ultimate’s system is better than both). Brawl’s higher ending lag meant that you could not escape disadvantage as easily as you could in Smash 4 at higher percents (excluding the characters with high percent 50/50’s but they weren’t that many after the patching). Smash 4’s opting to go for higher landing lag is such a pointless feature because vertical combos are king anyway so what is the point in trying to bait the opponent into an unsafe air dodge to the ground when you could just get guaranteed damage out of a throw combo. I kept track of Smash 4 majors for years and the air dodge landing lag rarely factored into people’s gameplay. But the ability to spam consecutive air dodges was heavily taken advantage of. 2 stocks vs 3 stocks: no. As mentioned above chain throws were not a factor outside of Falco and IC’s and in Falco’s case he needed to start at a specific position and percent to land his down air at the ledge and even then most characters could recover (Wolf is an exception because of his 60 frame meteor cancel window). The majority of matches I featured involved MK, Olimar, ZSS, Snake, who very much did not have chain throws and even then Brawl is at best slightly slower than Smash 4 on a stock for stock basis. People honestly need to stop treating Brawl as though every match is just chain throw 0 deaths back and forth, it just exposes how little they know about the game. Melee arguably has just as much chain throw crap (Marth on spacies, Fox up throw on fastfallers, Sheik’s down throw on 1/3 of the cast, Ganon’s up throw, Pikachu up throw on fastfallers). Brawl’s DI was indeed survival centric and not much use in avoiding follow ups but it did have the best SDI in the series which could be used on nun tumble moves. Part of why multihits were quite bad overall. Smash 4 has even less interaction at lower percents since you just get autocomboed (and spamming rapid jab at the ledge since even with good SDI it covers all options and gives a nice 10%). Down throw up air esque combos and kill confirms in Smash 4 were not really a character design problem, but a DI problem. A lot of the vertical autocombos in that game could have been escaped if they didn’t remove nearly all interaction from them.
Someone in the Brawl community described competitive Brawl in a very amusing way, calling it "Evil 3rd Strike". 3rd Strike is a game which is highly praised by people who have never played the game but it is less liked by the people who actually play it. Brawl on the other hand is the opposite where people who have never played the game hate on it while the people who actually play it love the game.
Smash 4 is more unbalanced then brawl. The only reason bayo isn't picked as much as meta knight is because she is behind a paywall. She is more broken then meta knight.
Not entirely true. Her positive attributes pale in comparison; even with the threat of witch time in neutral, this still falls under *reactive* options; she simply does not have anything to pressure players offensively in the way that Meta Knight could short hop fair, d tilt poke, tornado. She is also one of the few viable characters to not get reliable setups off a grab; compared to Brawl MK she relies much more on the opposing character throwing out unsafe options in neutral/falling for bait. Play defensively against MK? Mach Tornado destroys shields + his normals have such high disjoint that even if he's technically negative on shield he can throw out another normal thanks to his frame data or Shuttle Loop which grants invincibility on start up. Play offensively against MK? He has the best defensive option in the game in the form of Shuttle Loop. By far Meta Knight's worst aspect from a balance perspective is how he almost completely subverts the game's disadvantage state: he has so, so many escape options in his air dodge, jumps, down air (or really all of his aerials), and once again, aerial Shuttle Loop that happens to be a really strong semi spike that can cause pretty horrendous reversals on the character who just won the neutral. To put this into better perspective: Meta Knight is among the few top/high tier characters that lacks a reliable damage combo (such as Falco's down throw) and a reliable kill setup, and also completely lacks a projectile (a tool that pretty much defines Brawl). If a Brawl character lacks all 3 of these qualities they are almost always relegated to the lower tiers; in some cases characters that lack in just 1/2 of these areas end up being non viable, Sheik being the best example, possessing really solid damage setups in f tilt, up smash, and a solid projectile that also deals good damage, yet she's pretty severely let down by the fact that her only KO options are frequently staled. Meta Knight's slipperiness in disadvantage is such a valuable asset that even in matchups where he doesn't entirely dominate the neutral (Falco, Diddy), those characters can still end up struggling to get any mileage out of their neutral wins; in some cases the calculus ends up favoring Meta Knight as guessing wrong can lead to the other character getting knocked offstage, a pretty dire spot to be in. Heads I win, tails you lose. This is why it's not uncommon for non MK players playing vs MK to just not apply much pressure to him in disadvantage: it's arguably better to just maintain stage control with projectiles and focus on guaranteed combos rather than trying to guess what he will opt for among his defensive options. Also: I doubt the Bayonetta paywall is even relevant, as much as I hate DLC, 6 dollars is not a steep cost for most people, especially considering its paywalling the best character in the game. And when we consider the fact that every tournament is going to provide access to the full roster, the paywall is even less of a factor in curbing her usage. The main reason people did not opt for Bayonetta as much as Brawl Meta Knight is she simply was not that much more powerful relative to the rest of the cast in Smash 4. People who try to insist Smash 4 Bayonetta was anywhere near as good as Brawl MK, let alone better, are completely underestimating how centralizing the latter was during Brawl's lifespan from the very beginning in 2008.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 Comment is a bit long so I'll focus on the most important part. The tournament gives access to the full roster yes, but before the tournament you practice with a roster that is likely not gonna have all the dlc characters unlocked (for the average comp player). Doesn't really matter if 6 dollars is not that expensive or not, it's still paywalled meaning that less people will pick her (even if she is the best character at that game). That's just a fact. That's not rocket science. This factor will limit how many people you will see pick her compared to if she was a free character like meta knight. "She was not that much more powerful relative to the rest of the cast in smash 4." Smash 4 Evo bayonetta ditto is all I'm gonna say. The reality is that bayo was much more broken then you remembered. She was the character to pick for singles (1v1) , while cloud (another dlc character) was the character to pick for doubles (2v2). Smash 4 was a complete mess with how pay to win it was and it feels like you are downplaying it like crazy.
Is the 6 dollar paywall a factor in determining her overall usage rate? Yes, technically. But seeing the lengths that players will go to drop money on cosmetics in modern games it's ludicrous to suggest that of all the reasons Bayonetta was not as dominant as Brawl MK, the paywall is the big one. It's not, and it's not at all a significant factor in curbing her viability or representation, it's pure cope. People *will* spend that extra sum of money especially if it unlocks the best character. I already listed all the positive qualities of Meta Knight as a character where he far exceeds Bayonetta (dominance in neutral). You cherrypicked that infamous Bayonetta ditto as if that compares to virtually every MK-legal Brawl top 8 where it was not extraordinary to see half the players maining Meta Knight. Compare the amount of money won by MK versus the next most successful character and you'll see how stark the divide was. Completely misinformed on the history.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 It's funny you mention the microtransaction part in modern games because only a small percentage of the playerbase buys a lot of cosmetics in those games. These types of players are categorized as "whales". Yes, there are people that goes to that length but are limited in number of players that do that, which futher strenghtens my point about how many use it is gonna be limited because of the paywall aspect. It's about accessability. It's not hope (replace the "h" with a "c"), it's reality, especially considering the fact that some smash players who goes to the tournaments have to take flights to tournaments multiple times which can discourage futher money spending such as spending money on dlc characters depending on if they come from a middle class or a lower class or etc (even if you win a tournament, you don't get much money like you do with giant esport games, so that's another obsticle). "it was not extraordinary to see half the players maining Meta Knight" Again going back to why bayo pick rate is not as high as the meta knight pick rate, it's the factor I've already adressed which you just can't grasp the simple concept of. So it's not cherry picking, your argument on the last paragraph just falls flat when you don't neglect important factors at play.
VERY BAD arguments. I love Brawl more than you and THAT'S NOT HOW I will defend this game. I'll answer in a video soon. I'll be a bit offensive because this video is revolting. Pardon me in advance. We could be friends, you know.
Melee players just have a chip on their shoulder and are sad that they don’t play any games besides the game that cripples your hands. Smash 4 is the worst one easy.
LMAO. People come to the Smash scene after the Melee doc and act like they know everything about Brawl, talking crap about the game and regurgitating the same talking points about tripping and "balance", never having played the game. Whereas Brawl was a bigger game than Melee from 2008-2011 and what's more is that top Brawl players who moved to Smash 4 have generally remarked that Brawl was the superior game. But, no, *I'm* the one revising history. Lol.
"I think Smash Brawl is underrated, anyway here's why I think Sm4sh is the worst-" th-cam.com/channels/8PWwD0izZ6akpGkpMiNj7A.htmlcommunity?lb=UgkxaGtzzttGV2Nba_BAjBHcGYh34VRCW_g8
@@Formula_Zero_EX First off, I thought this was a Melee thing, most SSBB players were also SSB4 players anyway so I think they would like both Secondly, if that were true, it makes more sense given that SSB4 really is just a beta version of SSBU, so people would like Sm4sh more when Ultimate didn't exist. Third... this simple comment is giving me horrid flashbacks. Horrid flashbacks of when I was a Sonic fan. People would say this ALL THE TIME about Sonic Unleashed, and I don't even think people hated the game that much when it came out And then when Sonic Colors was a thing people also said everyone loved it, but I only remember it being thought of as an 8\10 game at best. Because Sonic Colors had basically forgone storytelling for the sake of gameplay, and Unleashed had slightly more effort put into it, every single person used this as a scapegoat for how "Sonic will never be the same", because Unleashed was the last (mainline) Sonic game with a serious story until Frontiers came out, and Sonic Colors was the start of the "meta" era (terrible name btw), with people claiming that the series became too "meta" and "joke ridden" The worst part is, I like both games too. But I couldn't say I like Colors because the people criticizing it always had the smartest attitude possible, so if I wanted to say I liked the game, I couldn't because Unleashed had more "depth", and I can't just admit I like it because I don't care about the story. If I wanted to say I liked Unleashed, I wouldn't be defending Colors and I felt like I wasn't giving a "bold" stance on it. Literally the same thing can be said right here, right now. If I wanted to admit I like Sm4sh (which I do), since this guy talks way smarter than me I can't just admit I like the amount of stupid kill confirms and combos because that has "no real competitive value", and I would struggle to defend it. If I wanted to admit I like Brawl (which I also do), I would be siding with the same opinions as the people watching this, which I most certainly do not think are that extreme. I just got into the Smash community because going to tournaments was basically the only cool thing I've done, and I'm already being reminded of the worst corners of the internet that I have had to tread through. this is why nobody plays fighting games.
"If I wanted to admit I like Sm4sh (which I do), since this guy talks way smarter than me I can't just admit I like the amount of stupid kill confirms and combos because that has "no real competitive value", and I would struggle to defend it." That's only a problem if you can't reasonably separate your personal preference from an objective assessment. You can like a game and at the same time acknowledge that it's terrible competitively. The same way I personally prefer Brawl over Melee but will acknowledge that Melee is the superior game competitively. It's only Smash Bros. players who think "I like X game" and "X game is bad/worse" are mutually exclusive arguments; they are not. There is a reason I went through the effort to explain and back up my points: to prove an argument beyond stating my personal preference. Yea people will disagree or say you can't like X or Y and you'll feel stupid for talking sometimes, but so what, that's part of having a discussion.
I might be wrong, but I feel like part of the reason as to why Brawl is so defensive is not exactly because the combo system is gone from melee, but exactly BECAUSE some punishes are so good that you are pretty much unable to do "anything" unsafe
Not only talking about chaingrabs, but being offstage against Marth, MK, ZSS and even DDD are some of the worst disadvantage states you can be in.
Great video and as someone that never lost their love for brawl, I'm happy that the game is having a bit of a renaissance
I mean it’s in the top 5 smash games of all time
that could be either a compliment or an insult depending on if you consider Smash Wii U and 3DS separate entries lol
Really great video! Between this video and what Brawlternative has put out, I've found myself super invested in learning about Brawl history since it's what got me into Smash, and later competing in later games. Great stuff!!
Your IC section at the end, *chefs kiss*
As one of those remaining competitive brawle players, you deserve 1000 Assist Trophies for this video essay
What good are those trophies if they are against the rules?
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 legalize assist trophies
Thank you for the vid, many of us (in the brawl community) are enjoying it
Ban MK, ban ICs, and boom. Brawl is an awesome game. I loved it back in the day, I wish it was given more of a shot.
holy fucking shit somebody actually shits on smash 4 instead of just saying "dlc bad" i feel so good rn. you have no idea how fucking vindicated i feel right now, i feel so seen. idegaf abt brawl i finally have someone who actually broke down the problems with that goddamn game.
B-b-b-but...it's so perfectly balanced
Brawl was the last game where Yoshi was my main. I liked the double jump cancelling mechanic as well as the pivot grabs. Sheik was a ton of fun too, with techs like DACUS and run-off Vanish.
great work!! this covered so many aspects of brawl that I wish I knew how to verbalize, but were often just vibes to me lol
Brawl is the most underrated Smash
I have no idea what you are saying but I’ll like and comment for reach
Thanks helly
I'm a little confused by the juxtaposition of calling chainthrows "not inherently bad" while claiming that Smash 4's combo game is cookie-cutter. They both seem to be very standardized methods of getting damage off. Even if you argue that Brawl's mechanics allow for characters to use a wider variety of their tools to maintain their advantage state, i find the difference in tone between the two a little jarring. Those chaingrabs might not be present in every matchup, but circumstantially it sounds like they would encourage a lot of non-interaction just to avoid.
I do agree on the overall perspective on s4 and how the game didn't do enough to make bad positions actually bad. A lot of characters are undeniably centered around trying to get "their thing", but I don't find that to be as bad as was made out in the video, nor the characters to be as one-dimensional as you claim they are. I don't have personal competitive perspective on Brawl, but in talking with an OG top level player of it they did seem to detest it in comparison to Ult or even Smash 4, games they were also an extreme top player in. Anecdotal at best, but another perspective I have to consider.
Also, I find the SDI nerf to be justified given that S4 probably wanted their jabs and multihits to work lol. Ult further improved on this by adding some more stuff like grounding jab hitstun but I can't say that weak SDI was an issue before Bayonetta released.
Overall, I think you had a lot of very strong points to bring up about Brawl, especially saying that it's "more fun to play than it is to watch", which feels like a much more significant point to raise against public perception than it was made out to be. I just feel that smash 4, especially when claiming it's the worse game, was being judged with different standards/connotations out the gate, and the video would be better off if it wasn't as significantly mentioned.
Brawls chaingrabs were almost always matchup specific and I did point out examples like Pikachu and Dedede as being bad.
But chaingrabs are surprisingly nowhere to be seen in the top 10 outside of Falco, and to a lesser extent Marth. Neither one of them needed it to rack up damage; they had other options and that's the point. Their "thing" isn't enough to centralize the gameplay. They have great aerials, good damage on individuals hits, and they can ledge guard very well. They could use the threat of the chain throw to influence your options. Try racking up damage with individual hits in smash 4. Sheik will get a nice 4% off her fair.
I really don't see how smash 4 was judged unfairly. These are problems that even former smash 4 players are pointing out now that the game is in the past. And most Brawl top players were in the camp that it was the better game.
(on mobile so different account)
Fair points on chaingrabs. It’s not that I feel like Smash 4 was judged unfairly, it more just felt like its name was mentioned negatively out the gate.
If you feel like it’s worse than Brawl, I get that, especially after watching the video. You have very compelling points about Brawl and its mechanics - but s4’s mentioning doesn’t feel relative, it feels competitive, and i’m not sure if i jive with that. With how well you justify brawl’s existence and gameplay on its own, it feels almost unnecessary
I’m about to go to bed so im not gonna go super in depth for now, i can say more over not YT comments if you’d like. Don’t get it twisted tho this is still a good video
It was really important to bring up Smash 4 since one of the most common criticisms of Brawl surrounds its character balance; Smash 4 is a case study in how a game can be more balanced but also *worse.* If there was one thing I had to say it's this: Brawl demonstrates that a game can still be great even with poorly balanced characters. I was very active in the Smash 4 scene in 2015-18 and it was a VERY common talking point that Smash 4 was a superior game to Brawl thanks to its balance (often spurred by questions over whether Bayonetta was ban worthy; one argument was that Smash 4 low tiers are "better" than Brawl so there is no need to ban Bayonetta, which ignored the fact *all* of the Smash 4 cast was just worse and more limited than the Brawl cast).
19:43 This Smash Game is where I met the Meta Knight and how he became my favorite fictional character of all time, especially his gameplay mechanic in Smash Brawl.
32:42
Huh, I guess some of my "SDI sucks" footage was used.
youre still around AND you saw my video
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 It was brought to my attention that a piece of my footage was used. Otherwise I would never have seen this video.
This video explains all the problems I have with Tr4sh so well. Thank you for putting my thoughts and observations to words so perfectly. Excellent video 👏
This was a pretty great video on shedding some light on how forgotten the depth of Brawl has become and how misinformed the general community is about the game. I for one am also someone who shares the opinion that Smash 4 is a worse competitive game than Brawl (personally, I think it’s the worst competitively in the series). All of the cool unique tech present in Brawl was stripped when making Smash 4 and Ultimate leaving every character to play nearly identically with little room for character expression, Smash 4 being the worst offender.
I will say while I do agree that MK certainly hurts the game significantly from a balance perspective to the point where the community made the wrong choices of banning stages to the point where ICs became the clear other top contender, I don’t think even with MK banned and other unorthodox counterpick stages available that ICs would not have been a problem. Barring a few character specific matchups (like Dedede vs DK, Marth vs Ness/Lucas, Pika vs Fox, etc), Brawl has a notoriously weak punish game leading to pressing advantage needing to substitute reads and option coverage in place of guaranteed confirms, especially at mid and high percents. The general gameplan of get low percent combo into additional reads for more damage is what leads Brawl to have even more depth. Sure other games have read-based gameplay and reward guessing correctly, but often the reward for one read is so immense that you only need one or two to close out a stock. This leaves Brawl in the unique position where reads are primarily for tacking on extra damage before returning back to neutral, something that only further adds to the complexity of Brawl’s neutral game. The issue with ICs is that they completely subvert this entire idea similar to the way MK completely subverts Brawl’s disadvantage. The punish game of ICs is quite frankly not Brawl. And grabs being so strong in Brawl, especially due to the lower shield stun, means that even on the more unorthodox stages, ICs are still a problem which was demonstrated by players like Vinnie back in the day when a lot of those stages were legal. While ICs mobility is bad, especially in the air, the looming threat of grab is so strong to the point where you still need to respect the option even on those stages.
Personally, I think the best option would be to ban both characters, but I would be willing to compromise on something like the recent stage or handicap clauses that have been proposed as a way to mitigate the effectiveness of both characters by not allowing them to counterpick certain stages or forcing them to self handicap by starting at a higher percent as a way of nerfing them through ruleset. This would allow the return of other more interesting counterpick stages that have been traditionally banned because MK was such a dominant threat on them. In fact, I will attribute MK directly to the current mindset of most Ultimate players that refuse to consider anything besides the 7-9 hazards off stages (with half of them being nearly identical in layout to one another) is bad. This only further led to the one-dimensionality causing the game to progressively become more stale over time whereas games like Melee with its variety of stages have likely contributed to the game’s continued popularity.
All of this said, I’m really hoping that Brawl can make a comeback and the wider Smash community sees what a broken masterpiece of a game it is and gives it another shot on the spotlight, especially with the interest the game has started to gather more recently.
There's a very real debate regarding how the meta would have turned out in the long term with an MK ban + longer stage list.
But I don't entirely agree with the sentiment that Brawl has a "weak punish game." Compared to combos and tech chases on fast fallers in Melee, sure, but Brawl's characters on the whole have really good frame data and especially autocancels that characters with stage control can apply pressure to disadvantaged opponents quite well. You can look at my clip of Fox vs a level 9 CPU Marth: when Marth is above Fox his options are limited to air dodge, his down aerial that has high ending lag, and jumping. If Marth burns his jump he could get knocked offstage where his mediocre horizontal recovery could leave him dead, so he really is limited to his air dodge for the most part. Fox can throw out his up tilt, nair, up air, bair fast enough to basically trap Marth in this disadvantage.
The offstage game in Brawl is also much more dangerous for the recovering player than later titles, especially for characters with bad recoveries (includes Ice Climbers).
Also Mr.R's Marth really demonstrates how crazy Brawl's punish game can be, will always recommend those videos to showcase how far the game could be pushed.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 I’m aware of the ability to press your advantage and that certain characters really excel at that. And yes, I’m aware that dodges in general having a decent amount of lag to them makes it easier to keep people in disadvantage. But most of the advantage state continuation is built off of aggressive reads or option coverage compared to other games where instead you would have guaranteed follow ups. This is especially true at lower percents where you’re just starting to get into tumble hitstun allowing the additional option to hitstun cancel with dodges or attacks, and you’re left in a position fairly close to the opponent to the point where they need a read to continue advantage. In other games, there is no read. You just continue your advantage via a combo. While a game like Melee has a very strong punish game full of depth due to needing to react to DI for combo follow ups, tech chases, and being able to cover the limited options the opponent has in disadvantage, Brawl also has a ton of depth to its punish game but on the complete opposite end of the spectrum. Opponents have significantly more options to escape disadvantage via hitstun cancelling and stronger SDI, as well as the same DI options Melee has which leads the attacker to need to predict or attempt to cover as many of those options as possible. My point is that Brawl has by far the weakest punish game compared to the other Smash games, but it still has a ton of depth for the exact opposite reason as Melee. The depth of Melee’s punish game comes from how my options the attacker has to continue their advantage while reacting to the defender’s options while Brawl’s punish game depth comes from how many options the defender has to escape disadvantage while the attacker uses reads and option coverage to press their advantage further.
How is 4 a worse competitive game? Especially with Brawl's speed and well...balance. (especially worst competitively either). They don't play identical...like how does Diddy Kong play identical to R.O.B and does that unique tech really matter in Brawl when it's dominated by MK anyways? Same with Ultimate. Both have character expression, like you can play Jigglypuff either defensively or offensively and either can work really.
@Jdudec367 say the word "balance" one more time.
Smash 6 should be a coin flip game; it's literally the most balanced as everyone will have a 50% chance of winning.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 balance...(is refering to balancing things on a weight now)
I'd love to see a video where you go over ultimate's game design and creative decisions regarding it in isolation!!
I think brawl at top level is really fun to analize, but if you aren't playing at top level and enter tournament after tournament, the game gets exhausting from getting little reward from neutral, losing to cheese because brawl is pretty janky and has a lot of broken strats, and having to deal with mk players spamming their broken frame data. I'm a melee player, but i believe behind a lot of brawl's bullshit, the competitive meta is unique, beautiful, and mad respect to the top level brawl players for sticking to this game.
I don't think that MK is that difficult to deal with at lower levels of play, he's so common that the counterplay is generally well known (people know which moves can beat out Tornado, for example); really it's the campiness of Diddy, Falco, Snake, and Olimar that "ruin the fun" way more than MK at that level of play. Meta Knight at least has to close the distance to do his thing and personally I find losing to him less frustrating than the others even if he is technically a much better character.
It's only at top level play that MK really became grotesque since those players *know* how to use *all* of his tools (basically every one of his moves minus jab).
Perfect analysis. Wow
thanks my dude
as a melee player, i still love brawl, more than ultimate, the neutral game is super fun
Sm4sh combo game is one of those things where it's so much cooler when people optimize it and push the characters to their max, but not many characters had that happen very much, because there were so many easier combos. Sm4sh imo is when people were the most lazy in competitive compared to every other smash game. Almost no one used really any of the advanced movement tech, or advanced combos, it's actually baffling. People took the easy, simple options, which made the game look way simpler and lamer than it actually was. But at the same time, I completely get why people didn't push: because it wasn't necessary.
I do agree heavily tho with Brawl being hella underrated as a competitive game. It has a lot of interesting nuanced and some awesome characters that just got overshadowed by Meta Knight
Eh, i wouldn't be so quick to pin it on Smash 4 players being "lazy", especially when almost all of the top Smash 4 players had been top Brawl players. Did they all just collectively agree to play the game suboptimally? I don't think so. They resorted to the same cookie-cutter 2-hit combos because those were *reliable* and in competitive play, if you have two roughly equally rewarding options, you should generally be picking the one that carries less risk.
Mario is going to do his down throw, up tilt a bunch of times, then up air, because that gives him 48% for free. Why shouldn't you go for that? Especially when DI and SDI are almost useless, giving the defending player 0 chance of escaping. Just imagine if every Brawl character had Falco's down throw chain, easy 45%, they would use it every single time. If you're playing to win it does not matter if a combo is more "flashy" if it means it's worse.
You kinda answered your own criticism by pointing out "there were so many easier combos." Exactly. Go watch Mr. R play Brawl as Marth and then watch him play Smash 4 as Sheik and you can see just how much more variety there is to his Brawl Marth punishes: he has to account for DI, SDI, will the opponent air dodge or attack out of hitstun, and so on, but his Smash 4 Sheik is so much more bland because he has his flowchart combos at his disposal where he can get an almost free 60% from throw -> f tilts -> up tilt -> fair string -> down b. People were more inventive in Brawl precisely because the game demanded it if you wanted to avoid constantly resetting to neutral. Smash 4's system virtually kills off any creativity, there is almost 0 interaction in its punish game.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 I mean, that's why I said it makes sense that people didn't push for optimal combo games, because the simpler ones are more reliable for tournament play. I really think people would find Sm4sh Kirby cool if people actually tried to push the optimization, he has one of the most interestingly nuanced combo games and advantage state in that game, and people rarely got to see it.
Also, thinking about it now, it feels like the crutch of the argument for Brawl being more interesting is because it is lacking a serious combo game, therefore people have to supplement with diverse read and option coverage, when this is a thing in every smash game. It's forced upon you in Brawl, sure, but you can do equally interesting option coverage in every game if you stretch and alter the combos to force potential openings to frame trap and mixup to get more reward. People do that creative free flow stuff in Melee and Ultimate, you can do this in Sm4sh too. People push to do really optimal stuff in Melee and Ultimate, too, how come we didn't see it as much in Sm4sh? It would take the same kinds of creativity, wouldn't it? Like literally, after Ultimate, lots of people tried new combos from that game in Sm4sh and they WORKED. Sure, things take time to be found, that's a given, and often new lenses lead to newer inventions, but I think it shows the power of going into a game with predetermined assumptions of how it plays affecting how we ultimately end up perceiving and playing it ourselves. It very well may have less depth than Brawl or Ultimate or what have you, but I feel for people to say it doesn't allow or reward for creative advantage states feels to me like a lack of willing to push and think outside the box. 🤷♂️ Lazy was a strong term, but I think you feel what I mean by lazy.
Melee's punish game is very different from Brawl because of the way fast fallers like Fox and Falco can DI onto platforms, the game is very, very tech chase heavy (less so on Final Destination). Brawl due to its falling speed is a much more aerial focused game, there's a much stronger emphasis on aerial spacing / anti air spacing because the goal is to stay just close enough to punish but not so close that you get hit by their own defensive aerial. This is enabled by very good frame data and hitboxes that also have very wide auto cancel windows; a character in advantage can throw out attacks faster because they can "skip" the rest of an aerial attack by landing and being able to act sooner; eg. Falco landing on frame 25 of his down air and being able to throw out jab, f tilt, up smash, or another short hop aerial, whereas he has nearly 30 frames of ending lag on his down air otherwise. Falco in advantage is able to attack much faster than Falco in disadvantage, in some cases characters can throw out moves faster than they could in Melee with L canceling (since that only halves the landing lag instead of skipping it entirely).
Smash 4 is just as floaty as Brawl but the way they butchered aerial attacks significantly reduces the level of pressure most characters can apply (and so neutral resets are much easier). Sheik's dominance for much of the game's lifespan was directly a result of her being a "Brawl" character in Smash 4, able to throw out attacks so fast that she could cover defensive options much better than others.
Smash 4's DI system is also awful in this regard because it's as simple as "hold up and away at low % to escape combos" and "hold right/left at kill percent"; this is why the meta was full of ladder combos & hoo-hahs. ZSS, Sheik, Diddy, Luigi, DK, Bowser, MK, Mario, and of course the Witch. There's no escaping how restrictive the combo/punish game is. I'm sure in the 4 years that people played the game they would have cracked something different, but the only significant development I can think of is Falcon taking advantage of footstool for his down aerial combos. Watch high level Diddy play in 2016 and then in 2018 and you'll be hard pressed to find any meaningful difference.
Even Meta Knight dittos are a pretty entertaining watch (assuming you don't do to many in a row). Sometimes it's just fun to watch two people go absolutely insane with it.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 A lot of characters had different kinds of development with their advantage state and combo games, like Pikachu, Greninja, Fox. The game is more of a grounded game than an aerial one, since moves aren't as spammable. Perfect Pivots were something that people did not take advantage of, they had so many different competitive implications that people just didn't play with, and I have no idea why. A lot of characters had useful perfect pivots, too, so that's not much of an excuse. The movement in general was quite interesting and complex with how foxtrot movement worked, with it being based on how quickly and how long you flicked the stick determining how fast it was and the distance, and on top of perfect pivots, these two allowed for strong micro movement and ground control.
I also personally don't get the argument revolving around combos being more difficult to escape. That's kind of... what is typical for a fighting game? And SDI is also an option stil, which I know people say doesn't help, but it really does. SDI-ing along with normal DI to significantly strengthen your directions is super useful. It's not as strong as the previous games, but it's still usable. Combos are more difficult to deal with, and I don't see how that's a problem. A lot of characters had footstool combos and more nuanced combo routes and advantage states. The characters I've mentioned come to mind, as well as the Links, Mario, Peach, Ryu, the list goes on.
The ladder combos and throw into kills are extremely overrated in how impactful they were, not as many characters had ladders as people like to make out. Throw into kills also is not a problem whatsoever, it's a staple of the series besides Brawl. Every game has and will continue to have powerful throw into kill move stuff. The only ones that were truly character defining were Bowser, Donkey Kong, and Diddy Kong, and also kinda Game and Watch but to a lesser extent. Someone being able to kill off a throw is a given.
Ladder combos being powerful is true, but SDI impact them more than horizontal combos, and leaves them to have more counterplay in that regard. They also were not as prevalent in what characters had them. ZSS, Mario, Rosa, Meta Knight. That's really about it. I can't think of anyone else. So how are these a problem, when they're only applicable to a few characters? So many other characters have more interesting advantage states, but the more basic characters (which have their own certainly not basic things) get overly criticized and held against the game.
I feel like people are more apt to dislike the game because of its legacy, and the few worse aspects. Just like how people did that to Brawl.
Thank you so much for this video
Brawl has a special spot in my heart because it was the last game my brothers and I played together before life got in the way of things.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 Much respect, I can already tell this video is gonna mean a lot to many of us Brawlers left out there
I don't have much experience with competitive Smash, but as someone who's playing more "traditional" 2D fighting games it's insane how much this speaks to me. Old games tend to be unbalanced yes but also weirdly fun and experimental to a degree that some still have healthy playerbase 10 to 20 years later (Street Fighter 3rd Strike, Guilty Gear Accent Core Plus R to quote those I touched).
Fighting game developpers are just terrified of making top tiers these days, forgetting that a top tier is also what's best at showing what can be done in the game. Nowadays characters shy away from features that make them unique.
I've thought this from the beginning. I will always think Melee is the best one, but I will always be down to play Brawl. Unlike Smash 4, which I found limiting and frustrating.
This is a good video, nice to see some positive brawl content.
One thing I will say is that I don't think the meta is soley based around meta knight. While yes he is a very large factor, there is so much more. Fox for example does relatively well vs MK, but it would be hard to win a major with him since he has such terrible matchups against Icies, Pikachu, and sheik. A lot characters that struggle a lot vs mk have at least one other similarly bad matchup. For example, ROB also struggles a lot vs King Dedede and Falco. Donkey Kong has the terrible matchup with king dedede, which is worse than his mk matchup. Peach struggles a lot against mk but also has a terrible time vs snake. The only characters that reallly don't have any comparable matchups are characters like toon link, pit, and maybe a few others. Most of the top 10 does ok vs mk, and that matchup is the most important, but even with him banned most mid tiers would still be mid tiers.
I also wouldn't call hitstun cancelling a bad mechanic, it makes the game different but that's ok. However whether you like it or not is completly subjective.
Other than that kind of stuff, great video, really cool to see a well thought out video essay about the strengths of brawl! If you make more brawl content I'll be here to watch it. I shared this in Brawl Central (the main brawl discord) and reception there has been very positive as well. Glad again to see this!
Thanks for the good response.
Frankly I don't agree on your point regarding, Meta Knight, because he has the potential to stall matches and run away with a lead because of his Up air and ledge invincibility. The fact that TO's had to implement a ledge grab limit speaks volumes to just how much he broke the game. Meta Knight is the only character who is more difficult to fight when he's *offstage* than onstage. In order for MK to not be broken you have to rely on a specific rule to address the issue or count on the MK player to be a good sport and make the fight "fair". There is nothing that Fox or Wolf or any other character minus a few can do to force him out of that spot. If there is no ledge grab rule and the MK player is patient and has no sense of "honor" then you are screwed (and gives more of incentive to play MK).
Meta Knight certainly does not technically invalidate the cast but that is not really a point I was arguing any way; and in any case the tournament results really point to his combination of being far too easy to pickup (compared to the other top tiers who are more technical) and having far too good a matchup spread.
absolutely amazing video watched the whole thing
Finally someone gets it!!
you sound like "my smash corner"
well made dude
It's a shame about Brawl. In isolation it's a reasonable and fun platform fighter - in a different world and under different circumstances it would probably have greater recognition.
Like you have touched on, one doesn't have to look far to notice it. Brawl occupied the unfortunate space of being a direct sequel to one of the most wonderfully fluid, free-form, expressive, aggressively orientated platform fighters. Being a more defensive game with a very centralised meta-game, it was doomed to the judgement it received.
Fan projects such as Project M demonstrated the potential in Brawls engine, but I would posit that with a highly specified rule set (and if allowed, very minor engine changes), much more fun events could be held. If you watched positive/assertive players/characters in vanilla brawl, the relative speed and fluidity feasible of even the engine is still apparent, especially with item characters (the Nairo/ADHD set shown in your video is a good example):
- One or two stock matches to reduce game length (some defensive players and match ups kept the game and set length too long to be enjoyable for viewer and player alike.)
- Some arbitrary character roster restriction events - some with MK, some with MK/IC banned, others with say "no high tiers." Any one of these may allow for more expression, and without MK there may be room for some discussion of additional stage options as well as opening up additional characters for play. Having MK banned only some of the time also allows the enjoyment of seeing that characters individual fluidity without it being omnipresent and banal.
- I would still argue for an ocarina code to disable random tripping. You say that it is infrequent enough to be significant, but I would return that despite this its presence alone disincentivises some players, and no competitor would have to be concerned about the looming dread of losing to an uncontrollable external factor.
- Remove Pokémon Trainer's stamina and move effective damage functions as was done in later installments. If we (those forming the rules for any competitive smash game) are already playing a children's party game with a highly specified rule set, banning some options (strategies, stages, characters, etc) as we see fit in order to ensure relative competitive integrity, perhaps I can sneak in this change too :).
I realise that I have mirrored much of what you have mentioned in your video, but these are mainly my thoughts responding to the premise, before hearing what it is you had to say. You are also correct regarding footage. It was just very uncommon for some kid playing smash to possess the technology to record and upload game play. It was just an additional expense people couldn't warrant purchasing, and another knowledge barrier to entry. Technology has certainly changed to better suit the sharing footage. You almost can't get away from it now.
To leave you with at least one original thought that praises Brawl, it's perhaps the last entry in the franchise that will feature interesting tech. Or in other words, fun game engine exploits. This is another reason why Smash 4 and ultimate have less expression and appeal. Modern technology allows for such things to be considered unintentional bugs, patching and removing out some of the fun and player individuality. Like other aspects of Brawl, it has less of these than melee, but more than its sequels, but still enough to make the game play more dynamic and increase complexity. The obvious ones that come to mind are glide tossing, dacus, platform cancelling, that instant air toss thing, etc.
Anyway, nice video. Bye.
Great video, I didn't expect to sit and watch it for 49 minutes. It'd be interesting to see what Brawl would be like without hitstun cancelling
I completely agree about Smash 4 btw, that game is basically just Ultimate but worse in every way
Brawl is also the best casual game in the series IMO, it has by far the best sound effects, great graphics (that don't look too cartoony), extremely fun items (which is in part due to the previous two things) including a wide array of hysterically fun final smashes which were completely stripped of their identities in Smash 4 and particularly Smash Ultimate. And the Subspace Emissary ofc
Finally someone with logic.
ult is by far my favorite smash game, but brawl is a thing of beauty. will always have a soft spot for it because it was my first competitive game ever. (tho i was exclusively online and rlly bad 😅) QAC was genuinely one of my favorite game mechanics in anything ever. been trying to get the ult scene as of recent to try out brawl, and most love it.
You haven’t played melee enough if ult is your favorite
@@rangermike5571 i played it for 5 years and i still prefer ult. i just think the characters are cooler and i’m not rlly interested in movement like that. i’ve became bored of it
Brawl Marth is probably my favorite character ever put in a smash game.
Double f throw is always pretty slick , hes the only character who can make a chain throw look elegant
Brawl has this thing called single player content, hope nintendo gives it a try sometime
No joke though there's plenty to love (and hate) about the game
Brawl is so misunderstood, but I’m thankful it’s able to somewhat escape from the darkness of misconceptions and false information after so many years, in today’s age. Brawl is as cool as Melee is with their depth and player expressions.
Looking back at Smfoursh Wii U,… (inhales) hoo boy, did that game not age well. How it manages to screw up so many aspects from the previous titles (ex: neutral, sound design, single-player content, etc.) is beyond me. Good thing I haven’t actually played this version of Smfoursh myself, and had only recently known about its flaws through informative videos like this one. I only played the 3DS version of Smfoursh btw.
I’m thinking about playing Melee, considering how goofy and hilarious it is as a spectator sport, and how technical it is to play it. I’ve played Brawl, Smfoursh 3DS, and Ultimate; but I’ve never played Melee or 64.
I mean...as someone who geninely did play Smash 4 Wii U ...I don't see how you claim Brawl is misunderstood yet then say Smash 4 Wii U aged badly when while yeah it lacks in single player content...other then that it is mostly (aside from classic mode too) superior to Brawl and I don't see it's sound design is bad either. Like I mean...maybe try it some time? It even has some unique content too (both good and bad).
Smash 4s sound design is awful in comparison to Brawl. Wtf
Smash 4 aged badly because it has nothing in it that's worth going back.
Brawl has a better DI system, SDI, much better zoning games, actually fleshed out characters, widespread autocancelling, edgeguarding was still viable against non MK characters.
Smash 4 gutted all of that and gave us...rage, in return.
I loved Brawl so much. I went to and won tournaments for it and played it for its whole lifespan. Mainly played MK but I loved playing many characters. Smash 4 I played for like a year and dropped that shit so fast. Every charcter was just down throw combos it was so fucking bland. Brawl every character felt unique. And then Bayo came out and just 0-death'd you out of nowhere. That's another thing too that wasn't mentioned in this video. MK despite being so extremely good did not have any 0-deaths and very rarely gimped you at low percents compared to Fox or Bayo who Fox can kill you at 0 with 1 shine and Bayo can aerial combo you to death easily. Even tho MK was dominate in almost every aspect he still let you fight him head to head. You just had to best him legit.
i would rather play/watch meta knight vs anyone over any match in sm4sh, but i would rather play/watch any sm4sh match over any other characters in brawl
Fantastic video. I still think Smash 4 feels way better and Brawl will never _not_ be my least favorite Smash game.
Autocancelling is so much more interesting and organic than L/Z-cancelling
yea L cancelling generally means you will always be falling with aerial attacks, whereas the generous autocancels in Brawl give more flexibility to aerial timing
I play this game more than any other smash game atp
After seeing the mess of a game like multiversus I don’t complain anymore
I will always maintain that if comp Brawl ran a 2 stock or even 1 stock BO5/BO7 format instead of 3 stocks, it would have been FAR more fondly remembered.
Wonderful video, thank you for explaining with detail and tact what I've never been able to. I was a little too young and toxic (despite being 19 lmao) to rly articulate all the ways Smash 4 didn't rly do it for me and felt comparatively soulless.
Also glad u pushed back on the "If MK got banned Icies would rule just as bad!" bit
I rly feel like if we played on a modded version of Brawl that just removed tripping, instituted hard ledge grab limits and nerfed MK's nado landing recovery whilst also switching to a 2 stock 6 min meta the game would be so fucking mint.
We can still commit to 2 stock... There is still time...
honestly 1 or 2 stock B05/B07 sounds very interesting, but then again I'm a sucker for alternative formats lol
@bucketspree4952 Honestly, 1 stock was a really solid format. There are a few tournaments from back in the day that played it and some of them still have footage up so I def recommend checking them out sometime!
Super Smash Brothers Brawl: MK Against Humanity
Edit: But yeah, I miss DI proper. It hurts me, especially when I see the zero to deaths in ultimate. Perhaps with move staling, have damage stale at brawl's rate, but have knockback stale much less hard?
Other thing, I think that the fact that brawl and melee had less hitlag (or hitstop) was really important for making their respectively broken projectiles a lot more manageable, while also making shield pressure more viable.
Make it possible to DI non tumble as it was in Melee.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 It would be nice. It honestly strikes me as a really strange thing to change from melee in the first place. I also think that returning power shield reflection would be really good for characters like Ganon, but it might hurt the weaker projectile users too much.
Despite Ultimate’s relatively good polish and balance, it still has its issues that I hope are addressed if they decide to remake the game. I really wish that shield grabbing, parrying, dash grabbing, crouch canceling, and dash shielding were better options. It would solve 99% of the gameplay problems with Ultimate. I don’t think a character as insanely simplistic as Ultimate Game & Watch should ever be allowed to exist.
This is a great video, altho gonestly THE thing about Brawl that I'm most curious about hasn't gotten any videos made about it yet from anyone.
That's the sheer DIFFERENCE between Tier Placements of some characters from the Official American Brawl Tier List vs the Official Japanese Brawl Tier List. ESPECIALLY Fox & Pikachu.
Granted within' my limted experience with actually playing Brawl competitively, I mained Fox & Falco, and tbh? Fox to me did *not* feel like someone as low as "Mid Tier" like I had heard from so many people? But I also understand my own experience with the game *competitely* is limited to just playing 1 vs 1's with my Cousin, who mained ROB.
That being said tho, can anyone explain why on the Official Japanese Tier List, Fox is as High as being ranked 7th? And Pikachu on the otherhand, THE character that ESAM gasses up as being BUSTED in Brawl, is ranked as low as 22nd? Almost *20* spots lower than how high ESAM thinks Brawl Pikachu is (iirc he thinks Pika is 4th best).
I feel like "it's a different country" cannot be the only answer. Are there things they found that American's *didn't* find?
Falco has arguably the best projectile in the game as well as a really easy damage racking option in his down throw. His back and down air are also really easy, long lasting pokes.
Fox's Blaster is worse at forcing approaches due to the lack of stun. On the whole his moveset is better than Falco (better tilts, better kill moves, longer recovery) but Fox critically has a *much* harder time avoiding grabs and infinites than Falco, so his matchups against Pikachu and Sheik are much worse, whereas Falco has a much better zoning game that needs to be broken before he takes damage.
Pikachu is indeed overrated; his tools are limited to quick attack and his down throw, his moveset on the whole has really bad hitboxes and also high landing lag on his aerials if he doesn't autocancel them. Kill moves are also a problem since forward and down smash are multi hits that can be SDI'ed.
Similar to Sheik in that regard who has a few one sided matchups against higher tiered characters while struggling against the rest.
@dishonorable_daimyo1498 I see, so based on what you had to say, Japan's general perceptionnof Brawl Pikachu as a whole was outright more accurate than America's? Essentially meaning Pika just got *hard carried* by ESAM himself being an absolute beast, while also happening to have a ton of faith in his character.
While conversely, Fox is indeed an actual good character, High or Top Tier, it doesn't really matter. He's still good. Just that he's good for different reasons from why Falco is good. I will say, even with my limited experience, I did get the idea that Falco was clearly a better zoner than Fox due to his lasers actually having stun, and therefore also being able to even True Combo out of them.
I will say tho, within' that time? I found quite a few things intriguing that honestly have me somewhat interestsd in actually playing Brawl more often if I could figure out a way to do it.
1. Brawl's engine is so float that it makes this the only game in the series whers Fox actually has Short Hop *Triple* Laser, with the 3rd Laser always being Silent every time.
2. The floaty engine making it the only game in the series barring 64 (rip Fox's old Fair which was also several characters old Fairs that all became Diddy's Fair in Brawl) where Fox's Fair could autocancel in a short hop (tho I'm not sure *exactly* how good that even would be for Fox).
3. I noticed that Brawl Fox's Dair while largely being the same move as 64 & Melee? Unlike those games, every hit *isn't* Set Knockback, but rather has actual knockback growth as %'s get higher, leading to Dair -> Up Smash being a real Kill Confirm at high enough %, albeit it risky cause you'd wanna land as FEW hits of the Dair as possible to limit the chance of SDI'ing out the combo.
4. Obviously the move is nowhere near as *busted* as it was in Melee (tho I do know in 64 it's also very good), but Shine to me in felt like "there's no way this move is actually *outright awful* right?" Obviously Shield Pressure with it is gone, and yes it hits on Frame 3 instead of 1, but it also still has Full Body Intangibilty starting on Frame 1 and ending Frame 4. The move objectivrly still has a use in Disadvantage through this alone, plus the fact it stalls him in the air means the move HAS to be useful for Momentum Cancelling right? Not only that, idk if my logic is sound or not, but I don't REALLY think the floaty engine alone suddenly means *no one* can be Edge Guarded reliably _ever_? People around me who've talked about how bad Brawl is have brought this up, but actually playing it through Competitive lense for the first time, even while limited, has me questioning if that's truly the case. Of course I don't think it's completely busted or anything like that, but given it's Intangibility, it stalling Fox in the Air, on top of the seemingly LACK of End Lag in general that the move has even without being able to Jump Cancel it? Smash 4 & Ultimate Fox Shine's both have WAY more End Lag than Brawl Fox Shine does... there's no way this move could be completely useless for Edge Guarding in any capacity right? Even if the move on it's own isn't enough to gimp someone, we're talking about Edge Guarding. A sequence could or couldn't involve Shine as part of an entire sequence, or Fox Nair, or Bair, or Dair, all depending on the %, match up, and most notably opportunity right? It's fine if more than one move can be useful to do so, and even better if those moves compliment each other. I'd been told by Brawl haters that Fox Shine is utter garbage in Brawl, but tbh... I find this a little hard to believe.
5. Speaking of Bair, man finding out that Smash 4 was NOT the first game to have Fox's Bair no longer be a Frame 4 lingering attack, and instead become a Frame 9 move with an incredibly generous Auto Cancel Window, on top of being his absolute strongest Horizontally sending Aerial? And to top it all off, sending at a disgustingly low Semi-Spike Angle (altho I imagine given Brawl having Melee's DI system, survival DI against the move has more room for creativity)?
I honestly think that *little bit of time* may have been enough tk cause Brawl Fox to become my favorite Fox to play as within' the scope of Brawl up to Ultimate... am I crazy for saying this?
nah. smash 64 is worse, imo. in competitive 64, only 1 map is now considered playable, and the neutral in it is literally endless bait camping because the progress is made exclusively in its strong combo game. tripping and brawl MK are enough to make it worse than every other smash game, but besides those things i think it was fun due to the air mobility. the balance below MK was great. snake, rob, wario, diddy, falco, olimar, ICs, zero suit, DDD were viable.
overstating the role that tripping played in Brawl's meta. Meanwhile people are ok with Smash 4 rage that has characters dying at 60% to a grab aerial 2 hit even if they outplayed the neutral most of the match.
I will definitely say that out of the five Smash games, Smash 4 is my least favorite. It feels awfully slow compared to even Brawl (though I'm a stinky MK main in that game so that's partly the reason but even when I mained Mario early on it still felt faster), it is mechanically distorted (getting rid of certain mechanics and making new issues out of those tweaks, or overtuning things such as rage), and even if you are a more casual player than myself, there really isn't any appealing content besides maybe custom moves, but those take a SUPER LONG TIME to grind, and I just ended up downloading a 100% save instead, and a lot of those feel super uninspired anyways. Either use the base "medium" move, use the move that's fast with low knockback and damage / best recovery with no hitbox, or use a slower, more knockback / higher damage move that if it's a recovery tool, is cut down. That is a big pattern with these moves.
I mainly play SSBU and a fangame, SSF2, more seriously but I will come back to the other games time to time, except with SSB4, I never find myself doing that. It feels quite stale, slow, and lacks the uniqueness that other Smash games have from each other.
Brawl also had by far the best sound design of the series along with introducing some of the best soundtracks.
All three of the Nintendo developed smash games are broken and beautiful in their own ways. Brawl was my first smash game and even if it's not my favorites I'm still glad to see it getting the respect it deserves.
I will die on the hill of Brawl being the best game in the series in terms of content solo and group. It’s just not a good competitive game, Which is ok.
Brawl is a good competitive game, though. Some glaring issues but really good strengths.
You didn't really "cover" tripping. You just downplayed it and gave the chance of it happening as if that changes how negatively impactful it was on a match. People have lost tournament matches/sets (not recorded) due to it occurring. I personally have tripped into an IC player who proceeded to chaingrab me to my death. The fact that it has a chance of happening at all shifted the meta
I spent two minutes or so explaining why its effects on the meta have been overblown. Especially when people stupidly claim (probably cuz they never played it) that tripping is why people walked in Brawl in favor of running, when that was not the case, they walked because they wanted to retain access to their full moveset.
It *could* have an outsized effect on the outcome of a match, but it *usually* did not. "The fact that it has a chance of happening at all shifted the meta" is just gross disinformation.
More people have lost games to rage related jank in Smash 4 than was ever the case with tripping in Brawl.
you know what? I Prefer brawl over melee any day since I Main Yoshi
I never really cared for brawl competitively but i will say its better than smash 4 purely because of all the little tech and shit you could do in brawl. Cape gliding, wave bouncing, and zap jumps were so fun among many other neat things you could do.
As someone who's been saying Brawl was better than SSB4 since summer 2015, this is validating. SSB4 sterilized the cast and made every character boring af. Brawl was a beautiful janky mess where almost every character was interesting. And the gutted DI system alone was a game-ruiner!
the craziest thing was seeing people actually actively cheer what they were doing in Smash 4 every time they ripped something out of the game. Like people were actively encouraging making the game even worse
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 And then those same people immediately changed the narrative to "SSB4 bad" as soon as Ultimate dropped :P
I love every Smash game for different reasons (yes, even 4), but Brawl is my favorite as a whole. It's not quite as good competitively as Melee, but it's still a decent game and the sheer amount of high effort content on that Wii disc is kind of staggering. I'm just glad that people like you are helping others understand what made Brawl so great!
Well it was better than tr4sh because sm4sh had inescapable ladder and instant death combos.
So what I'm seeing here is that if we were to ban Ice Climbers and Meta Knight, this game would be perfectly serviceable
True on Meta Knight, but I'm of the opinion that IC's wouldn't be that bad if you could counterpick to platform heavy stages.
Smash 4 is just straight up not a very good game, and (besides the portability of the 3ds) has no reason to play it today
I competed in Brawl. It's better than both Ultimate and Smash 4, in some ways. Ultimate is probably the most fun but also the most frustrating. I just miss things being less safe to throw out mindlessly, there was a certain mental game in Brawl that's no longer there.
Certain characters always had moves that they could just throw out mindlessly in earlier Smash games and they usually wound up being among the best characters. Most of Meta Knight’s moveset in Brawl fell under this. Same with many of the Big 5’s moves in Melee. The devs began to realize a huge part of the reason why the earlier Smash games were horribly unbalanced was because the characters who had safe moves to throw out were good and those who didn’t were bad. Starting a bit in Smash 4, but especially in Ultimate, the devs began buffing characters by giving them safe tools to throw out. It’s a reason why Ultimate’s aerial landing lag is so low and why many moves are non-committal. Smash has always had very powerful, non-committal moves. They just were only on the good characters. Now, even the “bad” characters have something you have to watch out for, even if your character is better. If you go back to having moves be less safe, all that’s going to do is make it so the handful of characters who retain those safe options run the meta and everyone else really isn’t worth picking. Rather than limit lag, I think Smash should instead make changes to its engine to allow you to have more control over your character and allow you to use moves in more creative ways like in Melee.
This is not really the case. Some characters did have particularly bad movesets (Brawl Ivysaur, Melee Kirby) but on the whole it was a character's ability to press advantage / escape from disadvantage that determined viability.
I will use the example of Brawl Sheik as she was a lower mid tier / low tier character that had a solid moveset with low lag moves, neutral and back aerial really versatile aerial options, down throw worked really well for setting up follow ups due to said low lag moves, a solid highly damaging projectile. In another Smash game she would have been a really good character; hell, Smash 4 Sheik is so much worse than Brawl Sheik (lower damage output, worse hitboxes) and yet Smash 4 Sheik was top tier in her title. Why? Stale move negation.
Brawl's extreme stale move negation (moves that could kill at 120% fresh would not kill until past 200% or more if staled enough) disproportionately hurt lower tier characters since they had a tendency to rely on their only kill moves to rack damage / space. Sheik's viable and semi-viable KO options (up smash, up air, back air) were gutted by stale move negation.
Mario is another Brawl character who has fast moves and decent mobility that gets shafted by a lack of KO power. Even discounting his problems with Dedede.
On the other end of the spectrum, characters like Fox and Wolf who had great neutral, combo setups, and kill moves were knocked down a peg by having awful disadvantaged states that Pikachu, Falco, Sheik could heavily exploit.
In Brawl's metagame, viability was primarily determined by 1) does you character have a variety of kill moves? 2) are they vulnerable to any particular chain throws or grab release jank?
Projectiles were important and so were combo setups but some characters had only one (Snake had really good projectiles but not much in the way of conventional combos, Marth lacks a projectile but has plenty of follow up options) but almost all the viable characters had reliable kill moves / setups and passable or good disadvantage states (Falco was the only top 10 character to be particularly susceptible to locks and chain throws).
If you fixed stale move negation in Brawl it would solve a large chunk of the balance problems (Sheik can no longer combo F tilt to 100% on fast fallers, same with Pikachu down throw; Sheik, Mario, Luigi, and other low and mid tier characters would have an easier time KO'ing). The issue with most non viable characters in Brawl is *not* a lack of safe hitboxes.
Does anyone know the difference between (USA) Revision 1 vs Rev 2 versions of smash brawl? I been enjoying the game a lot recently and i cant really find any info on this. Are there any gameplay tweaks that they made? The only thing that might be different is that rev1 might have a typo for one of the trophy descriptions, but im not sure if thats the case. Im getting a bit into watching the competitive scene and i want to know the differences between rev 1 and 2 to see which id rather play and to just know some of the history of the versions that i cant find clear answers online. Thank you in advance.
seems like it only made a change to the warning screen on loading the game
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 ty for the reply! Just to be precise, is it the wii remote caution screen or something else? I noticed that the rev 2 had very very slightly smaller file size (around 300 bytes less) so that would make sense. I just thought there might have been some other difference in gameplay because I thought I heard you say something about a patch in the gameplay. Ty again!
i was most likely referring to patching in Smash 4, don't recall stating that regarding Brawl and in any case there were never any balance changes to Brawl following its launch.
The change is to the wii remote caution screen upon launching the game.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 Ohh ok I got brawl and 4 mixed up when patching was mentioned 😅 thank you for the help. The video was great btw, I haven't seen this take on competitive brawl before and it's refreshing. Interested in hearing more about brawl in the future if you make more vids on the topic.
Oh god. Is this a good game?
Also, I would like to mention that, even if someone were to disagree with every point in the video, it is still aesthetically the absolute peak of the series.
This video is great at showing the fun and technical aspects of Brawl, but one thing that kinda bothers me honestly is the fact that you're comparing it to Smash 4 at all. Someone else brought this up as being unfair to Smash 4 but my opinion is that Brawl CAN'T be compared to Smash 4 and vice versa. The way both games are designed it all comes down to preference, because Smash 4's mechanical changes were a direct response to what people didn't like about Brawl's. Smash 4 isn't gonna be Brawl, and it didn't have to. It's whole purpose was to tear Brawl away from it. We know they wanted Brawl DNA out before the release of Smash 4 Wii U, because pre-1.0.4 Smash 4 was an absolute trip of a game that I really wish they had kept the way it was, it's something that I've never forgotten and I constantly bring up to friends. DACUS, Jab Cancelling, among other things were still there. I would've loved if they kept these things, but they obviously wanted that GONE by the Wii U release, which unfortunately, it was
I love Brawl, even more than Melee, a game I've played for more than half my life, but I prefer Smash 4 more as it does away with a lot of things I feel are archaic design choices retained from Melee to Brawl, and did away with a lot of Brawl cheese, ledgehogging, chain throwing, infinite jab locking, incredibly short hitstun cancelling, and tripping, mechanics that range from slightly annoying to things I absolutely despise. But there's also the things I like, DACUS, autocancelling, grounded and platform movement, *Falco*. They're fun to play with and abuse, and competitive Brawl generally being played with a code that turns tripping off is sooooo fun, but some of these things made things a lot slower. Even for me, someone who's played Melee for 13 years and still going, the lack of ledgehogging and chain grabbing are things that already make it a more fun game for me, especially because mid and low tiers were ESPECIALLY abused by these things, made worse by the fact that I play Ness, a low tier, and getting constantly screamed at for hating these and to just "pick a different character" completely misses the point. I can play Fox, a really fun character for me, but I'm still ledgehogged, I'm still chaingrabbed, playing a different character isn't gonna take that away, it only makes things slightly "easier".
Characters in Smash 4 can be a bit low to the ground, but they aren't as one dimensional as you say, it also allows me to jump between characters after some warmup if I want a change of gameplay, and plus there are plenty of movement options that let you move around with your character any way you like. Being able to hit what I want consistently also feels good. You may not think the things I bring up are archaic or cheesy or annoying like I do, and that's fine, and I think that adds to it that it's all preference. There's a reason why people argue Smash 4 is better at all is because some of these changes people like, and just because a game is more technical and "objectively" more fluid doesn't mean it's exactly the better game, it just makes it a technically more dynamic game, and the way I say this sounds like I'm saying Brawl is worse, but I think they're equally fun games, it's just a preference thing. Smash 4 is its whole own can of worms and I feel comparing it is not necessarily unfair, just, not exactly possible given how the game is. It's a simpler game, and I like that, not because I don't like skill or tech or anything, again I've played Melee for years upon years so tech is pretty much ingrained in my bones at this point, it just makes thing more consistent and fun. Plus, it is still classic Smash at it's core (unlike Ultimate), it retains most things that make Smash what it is, so I'm not completely thrown off when going between 64, Melee or Brawl, 64 being my absolute favorite game in the series. The way you speak whenever you talk about it feels like you're trying to make Smash 4 sound a LOT worse than it actually is, it seems you're trying to make it look bad, when the reality is it's just..a different game.
Smash 4 players spent years dunking on Brawl in an effort to prop up their own game, yet for some reason there needs to be this weird rule that the reverse is unacceptable. Part of me feels it’s only because the comparison is favorable to Brawl.
I know this better than most since I was among the most active in forum discussions regarding the Smash 4 tier list; I spent a lot of time arguing against the incessant crying for nerfs to top tier characters making some of the same arguments that I put forth in this video here. The most common response was a halfhearted “at least it doesn’t have Brawl Meta Knight.”
The comparison to Smash 4 is merited because that game is the one that suffers from the issues that Brawl gets wrongly accused of: a stilted combo game and uninteresting neutral. Smash 4 shows that there is more to combos than a simple solution of “more hitstun”; Brawl had almost no hitstun but it still maintained a fluid follow up game thanks to great frame data, unspammable air dodges, a functioning and usable DI and SDI system.
Smash 4 is ironically exactly the kind of game that people *think* Brawl is, and that’s indeed an issue that is worth addressing. Smash 4 was marketed as “the middle of the road game, more competitive than Brawl but less than Melee” and it absolutely needs to be assessed on how (if) it improves the gameplay over Brawl.
Which it very much did not as explained in the video. This is not a matter of personal preference, otherwise there would be no point of writing this essay; I could have just said “I like Brawl more than Smash 4” and left it at that.
But it’s not about personal preference. It’s about showcasing how Sakurai despite his best intentions to casualize Smash with Brawl still managed to give us a solid (if deeply flawed) competitive experience; and despite his supposed intention to “correct Brawl’s mistakes” with Smash 4, ended up creating the worst competitive experience in the series.
You are also overstating the effectiveness of edge hogging. Edge hogging was not about securing stocks primarily; it was about limiting recovery options and forcing the recovering player onstage. And there was still plenty of interaction: the recovering player could change up the timings on their recovery, save or burn their double jump, recover high and onto a platform, fastfall or no fastfall. Even in Melee, Falco had a LOT of options for getting back onstage (different angles, side b shorten). Even moreso this applies to floatier Brawl: stocks are not commonly taken through edge hogging, the “cheese” is just a way to extend the edgeguard and deal more damage.
This is far better than the everyone-recovers-for-free Smash 4 where all you can really do is just spam neutral aerial at the ledge to cover their getup options (the one good thing is that characters don’t get invincibility on regrab). Don’t get me started on the insane magnet hands in 4.
And hard disagree on your point about Fox’s recovery being “slightly easier”. No, no, no, Fox has plenty of options to mix up his recovery. Of the top 10 Melee characters only Peach and Jigglypuff have him beat and only then in horizontal recovery.
On the topic of chainthrowing: again largely overstated. Of the top 20 or so in Brawl, the only characters with relevant chain throws are Falco, Marth, IC’s, Pikachu, and Dedede. Dedede’s throw works on a subset of the cast but he is very easily counterpicked due to his awful mobility and poor zoning game. And most top tiers are not vulnerable to his chain throw.
Marth’s chain throw works at very low percentages (and his throw does 4%). Pikachu’s death throw works on like 4 characters, the rest can escape once they enter tumble. Falco and IC’s are the only viable characters with universally-applicable chain throws, and Falco isn’t even that reliant on it anyway since he can rack up damage fine with blaster, DACUS, down and back air.
I will give the IC’s point to you since there is no way to get out it unless they drop the combo but even then their dominance was enabled by their bad stages being banned thanks to Meta Knight; I maintain that the game would have been fine if they banned MK and kept the stages.
Character diversity/jumping: you can jump between different characters in Smash 4 precisely because there is so little to them. There were people in Smash 4 competing with up to 5 mains because of how easy the vast majority of the cast was to learn. If I wanted to “change things up” in Brawl I can already do that without switching characters: Brawl Falco can switch between being a super campy lame zoner and a devastating brawler. Snake can box you in with his tilts and jab or play at long range. In Smash 4 almost every character has “the one gameplan” that they can’t deviate from because of how limited their options are. Sheik was one of the few characters who could alter her playstyle between combos and camping with needles (before they gutted needles so she just became another Smash 4 character).
“Just because a game is more fluid doesn’t mean it’s exactly a better game, it just makes it a technically more dynamic game…I think they’re equally fun games.”
Fun is not a quantifiable metric so I won’t bother debating that. But the rest of that quote comes off as “I am disagreeing with your evidence”. Based on everything documented in the video, it is not only objectively wrong but argumentatively irresponsible to not state that Brawl has superior competitive merit to Smash 4.
Smash 4 is more polished, it is better balanced. And I do think the buffering system is less clunky, which definitely makes the game “feel better” to a beginner. But the interactions between two characters are substantially and objectively less interesting; they have fewer tools to play with and logically that results in stilted, incredibly repetitive gameplay and almost non existent expression for players. After doing all the research for this video it would be actually stupid for me to water down my criticism and just say “it’s just a different game,” which is the one trend infecting analysis videos I hate the most because it always, always comes off as intellectually dishonest, like the writer is too afraid to express his own opinion.
I appreciate this video a lot, like with any nuanced, intelligent discussion of Brawl. However, I do find it ironic that the video is dedicated to shattering the reductive talking points parroted about Brawl, yet spends a lot of its time doing the same exact thing to Smash For. Regardless, I learned some interesting new facts and still enjoyed the video.
Game ripped out the actually good parts of Brawl, the interesting zoning games, the aerial game, the inability to spam air dodge out of juggles, stronger DI and SDI.
It's sterile and stilted as hell with most characters having an obvious 1-2-3 game plan that they can hardly deviate from.
Incredible video thus far (about 30 minutes in) id be interested to see your take on the other games not really talked about. Love your nuance
My personal ranking (This is literally only talking about competitive)
1.Melee
2.Brawl
3.64
4.Smash 4
5.Ultimate
Ultimate has a really good air game and run cancelling into attacks is neat. Grabs and shields are just really, really bad and the knockback physics really mess up punish games past low percents. Character design is overall better than Smash 4 but still a long way from Brawl's depth.
Don't know much about 64 other than it seems to have a similar issue to Smash 4 in that neutral is stilted and the combo game is very repetitive due to a lack of DI. Melee is really good all around though it arguably has the worst balance outside of the top tiers, thanks to the game being rushed (DK losing his giant punch charge if hit out of an Up B, Game and Watch not being able to L cancel all his aerials and also his awful shield). Brawl's low tiers were really bad but they weren't outright unfinished in the way that Melee's low tiers were.
Melee takes spot 1, followed by Brawl. 64 and Ultimate are somewhere in the middle but for sure Smash 4 is dead last.
@dishonorable_daimyo1498 tbh I get smash 4 being dead last. I personally simply like the feeling of smash 4 more and perfect pivoting (Plus smash 4 was where i personally competed and i have a ton of good memories with the game, so im definitely biased), ult just feels really stiff. From an objective design standpoint, ult is definitely better I'm not gonna argue LOL.
Smash 64 there is more nuance to the combo game than people give it credit for since SDI is really strong, definitely more depth than 4 because 4 is literally copy paste combos with very few combos being position based. I also think the neutral in 64 is fine, but I know people don't feel the same.
I get what you mean but I think melees low tiers are more interesting than brawls. I think all the quirks to the low tiers give them personality (specifically G&W shield, I think it works really well with his design since he does have a lot of strong offensive tools and a killer combo game, as well as good kill set ups, also nice movement to add on. However he has the worst defense in the game since he's a literal 2d piece of paper). Brawls low tiers are still cool I just prefer melees for sure even if they are unfinished. I like Bowser honestly because he's so shit it's kinda funny and he has like 1 or 2 really strong tools, Mewtwo is really technical, Ness is kinda saucy, and Young Link is really dynamic. I also generally think the actual balance of Brawl from top to bottom is significantly more jarring than melee.
"Brawl bad because its not Melee"-Average melee fanboy who is obsessed with competitive play and tournaments.
Thats genuinely the only reason why people like that don't like brawl. Just because it isnt as broken as melee. The game has an amazing single player option. Multiplayer is fun with buddies on the couch. There are so many controller types you can use and that main intro theme is so bad ass
Ah we’re now at the point where ultimate players throw smash 4 under the bus and pretend ultimate is better than brawl.
I think you pretty dramatically understate Brawl's balance issues and their impact on the game.
Obviously, the game is unbalanced. Even past the runaway top 2, there's chasms of power between characters that you can pretty cleanly split the roster into equal thirds that play remotely fair games against each other.
But that alone isn't even the important part - you could make similar comparisons to the roster to that of Melee or 64 on paper.
The bigger issue is that character power in Brawl tends to be entirely divorced from universal mechanics. High hitstun and wavedashing meant that any character in Melee could cook at least a little bit in the right situation. Smash 4 and Ult are similar to Brawl, but both are much better balanced, so aside from basically just Ganondorf in both games, everybody in the cast can reasonably pull out wins in high stakes games.
Brawl's bad characters get nothing. They are often completely devoid of competitive potential, and they are extremely reliant on their character specific jank to be fun in any capacity unlike the 64 / melee low tiers. And because character specific traits are so much more important than universal mechanics, bad matchups can be absolutely brutal. Again ignoring MK and Icies, the bottom
And none of that is to mention Dedede. He doesn't really impact high level play that negatively, so I guess that's why he isn't addressed, but he is rat poison to the mere thought of enjoying the game for ~60% of the roster while having one of the most braindead punish games in the franchise.
I already agreed that Smash 4 has better balance than Brawl in the video, and as I said in the video people have attached way too much emphasis to balancing characters at the expense of interesting gameplay.
And on the matter of Brawl’s characters, yeah there were a few really bad matchups such as Dedede vs several characters, Wolf vs anyone with a chain throw, Marth vs the PK kids. But you know, the PK kids would have still been pretty bad if you removed Marth from the equation, and if you removed Dedede then DK would still have issues with Meta Knight and zoners (zoners who make up the majority of the top tier). Dedede is a really easy character to play but in turn he is also really easy to counterpick: his zoning game sucks and again zoners make up the majority of the top tier, whom he loses to with the possible exception of Snake. Dedede is more of a “nuisance” than a “threat” and people figured this out in…like, 2010. He’s a bad meme in the same way that people have severely overstated how much tripping destroyed the meta.
Since you brought up Melee, it’s interesting how you fail to bring up Sheik who is almost an exact analogue to Dedede in Brawl: she loses to characters above her but obliterates a decent chunk of the mid and low tiers (coincidentally with a chainthrow). Melee is better balanced than Brawl among its top tiers, but is arguably just as bad in the mid and lower tiers if not worse, part of it being characters are unfinished. Roy’s awful hitboxes, Game and Watch’s terrible shield and his inability to L cancel 3 of his aerials; DK for some reason losing his giant punch charge if you hit him out of his Up b; Pichu self damaging in addition to being the lightest character (and just because it’s an intentional joke character doesn’t excuse this); Kirby doesn’t even have a functioning grab and throw game. Brawl’s lower tiers including Ganondorf may be bad competitively but they are not unfinished.
“Brawl’s bad characters get nothing,” at this point I can’t even tell if you’ve been involved in the game competitively. Ganondorf has a viable tech in his thunderstomping; he can combo down air into itself or simply use it to pressure and throw out another option immediately after autocancelling it. Not to mention a pretty good command grab that cannot be teched unlike in Smash 4. He is objectively a better character than Melee Kirby with those attributes alone.
Brawl Sheik is also a low tier with some really good options, even beyond just spamming F tilt. One of the best DACUS in the game, really good frame data that allows her to box in her opponent in disadvantage; the only thing letting her down is that her best KO options are staled because of how much she uses them to rack damage (she can get around 30% off the two hits of up smash).
Donkey Kong has some of the largest hitboxes in the game (F tilt can beat MK tornado), decent movement; he’s extremely unlucky in that he is the perfect weight class and hurtbox size to get infinite by Dedede.
Mario and Luigi also have excellent frame data and good air games; Luigi is let down by issues landing and his low traction making it tough to punish out of shield. Mario just has sub par killing power.
Jigglypuff retains a strong air game from Melee; this is a case of a character being let down by Brawl’s environment where edgeguarding is less about gimping and more about racking damage. So she still dies early but now her opponent lasts much longer.
Brawl’s low tiers may not have been viable but to state that they had no positive attributes is either uninformed or deliberately trying to paint the game in a worse light. In most cases they are let down by poor kill power or one particularly bad matchup, which isn’t substantially different from the low tiers in Melee. Smash 4’s low tiers are only better in a relative sense since they gutted top tiers and gutted them even further in two years of patching, and their go-to method for “fixing” a bad character was to slap a combo throw on them.
The ONLY two characters in Brawl who are divorced from universal mechanics are precisely the two best ones: MK and the Climbers. Hitstun cancelling isn’t a get out of jail free card like you imply: most top and high tiers can easily cover defensive options. Snake can stuff out most aerials with his tilts and up smash (not to mention covering the rest of the stage with explosives) and he can DACUS to cover landings; Falco can autocancel his back and down air, and can throw lasers out while drifting forward or backward; Fox can combine his up tilt with aerials to trap you in a cycle; Diddy has his AC fair, back air, and 2 bananas; Wolf has back air and a really good DACUS. All of these are really fast options that can cover dodges and aerials.
It’s almost like you didn’t watch the video or just skipped through it. I spent several minutes deconstructing why Smash 4 is a less interesting game despite being better balanced and you come here writing a text wall on why Smash 4 is better because it’s more balanced. How do you know if a game is good competitively? If the better player wins consistently. Smash 4 had random people maining low tiers taking sets off top players thanks to rage and other related jank; this is not exciting. And it’s not like those low tiers ever won a major (Mewtwo doesn’t count since he was buffed to hell by the devs).
I'm just here for the Smash 4 slander, I honestly cannot believe people dropped Brawl for downthrow upair simulator. The nicest thing I can say about Smash 4 is that it has the most accurate name in the series; it lived for 4 years (which was 4 years too many) and there are only 4 people left on the planet that would willingly play that slop over any other smash game.
But it doesn't have tripping!!!
Imo the reason why people say smash 4 sucks is that it has nothing of value over Ultimate. Ultimate just obsoletes Sm4sh in every way. Brawl only survives because of nostalgia and modding (so you can make it a better game). Melee is very deep and technical, while Smash 64 is the most like traditional fighters, being arguably the most balanced title.
At least Brawl had good singleplayer (arguably the best of Smash's sp) but Smash 4 was better than Brawl competitvely (for a while), so everyone jumped ship.
"brawl only survives because of nostalgia and modding (so you can make it a better game)" this is nonsense. Did you watch the video?
Brawl is the only Smash game to have truly intricate zoning games and an aerial focused neutral, compared to the more ground based neutral in Melee, 4, and Ultimate. Brawl Snake, Olimar, Diddy are simply a type of character that do not exist in other Smash games, not even in Melee. It's not fun to watch especially for people who are not into Brawl, but it's *different* and sets itself apart from the other games.
It's great that Brawl is so heavily moddable but it has the unfortunate byproduct of covering up the virtues of the base game.
Smash 4 was never better than Brawl in a competitive sense, it only had a competitive scene for as long as it was the "new game" which in all likelihood is going to happen to Ultimate whenever the sequel drops. Brawl still has a small dedicated scene, though, while Smash 4 almost completely lacks one.
To say that Brawl is liked more for nostalgia is completely ignoring the legitimate merit that the game still has after all these years.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 to say melee has a ground neutral is nonsense. more than half of your attacks are aerials in that game. Brawl only had an "aerial neutral" because everyone was stupid floaty and to avoid tripping (spam dair as mk against ICs and see who wins).
While i will say that brawl has the least lame zoning (melee and 64 have almost no zoning, with the exception of melee Falco), most of the time spent in the air is to zone out (read: lame out) the opponent all to avoid dashing, which in the video you mention as a very committal option, because you can trip.
Nintendo tried to stop competitive Smash with Brawl, and it didn't work. Brawl has some cool things (if glides were balanced that'd be great), but if i got my 7 y/o brother to pick MK while I pick Ganon, i would lose every time, while if we swap, i instantly win.
Brawl has some anti-competitive mechanics added in by Nintendo on purpose. Smash 4 was only good competitively until DLC, then people started leaving for Brawl/Melee/64 even, until Ultimate came out. Ultimate will probably end up like Smash 4 (read: MINING AWAY), but that doesn't mean it wasn't good competitively at a point in time. Brawl just wasn't. It's different and that's OK, but doesn't really work in a competitive environment. Melee for example is the definition of competitve Smash these days and it's so fun to watch. In Brawl you can bet your house on Marth in Marth vs Ness and become a millionaire.
Because of the way L cancelling works Melee's short hop game is predominantly centered around falling with delayed aerial attacks in order to have the greatest advantage on shield & to reduce air time. Characters like Sheik and Marth who had some good autocancels didn't really use them that much since they would have to throw out the aerial early in the short hop and would opt to delay + L cancel.
Brawl has much more variation in aerial timings, and full hop aerials are also more common in neutral, which is what I mean when I say it's the most aerial focused game of the series.
Not to mention that Melee had a much greater focus on grounded neutral due to wavedashing and dash dancing and the ability to crouch from run.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 brawl has more variation in aerial timings because they can be spammed. Just becsuse Melee hsd some gorunded movement options that weren't committal doesn't mean it's bad. You can hardly move in Brawl without either tripping or getting hit and having to use your double-jump. Glides were also stupid OP.
"you can hardly move in brawl without either tripping" LMAO. I addressed this fallacy at the very start of the video, tripping was such a non issue in the majority of matches. People need to stop basing their opinions on Reddit slop and highlight reels before they comment on games they have no experience in. Once again: people walked and jumped in Brawl because 1) characters had really good zoning games 2) running was too committal since jabs and tilts were such an integral part of most playstyles.
"Glides were stupid OP" which makes it sound like every character had access to it. There was only one character in the game who could make extensive use of it and that's because he had a plethora of other options to mix and match with glides: Meta Knight's glide was so good because he had two methods of starting it and his jump-based glide (not Shuttle Loop) didn't render him helpless if he had jumps left, meaning he could end the glide and hit you with an aerial, dodge, or even Up b for another glide. Pit and Charizard both had access to gliding but neither could take advantage of it as much as MK did due to their overall worse attributes (fewer jumps and worse aerial attacks).
"brawl has more variation in aerial timings because they can be spammed." and...? Yes, characters used aerial attacks much more in Brawl because they were faster and had favorable hitbox placements + higher shield pushback than later games meaning that defending characters often couldn't punish out of shield even if they technically were at a frame advantage.
There is too much disinfo in this comment to unpack even though I addressed it in the video.
Even though Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the better game, Super Smash Bros. For Nintendo 3DS and Wii U mustn't be overlooked for all the things it does right
Smash ultimate is not better then Brawl (unless you are talking competitively speaking). Smash 4 and Smash ult are p2w garbage games.
I came in to say that's it's definitely an overcorrection to say that smash 4 is inferior. But this depth of analysis is impressive. And yes I miss neutral b cancel, now that you mention it.
There is plenty of misinformation in this video.
"[Brawl] Top tier characters have low landing lag on their aerials across the board with generous autocancel aerials"
"...Sm4sh, where landing lag was increased across the board and autocancel frames were made useless, excluding a few specific instances"
Straight up lies. There were some characters who got increased landing lag on their best neutral tools, like Marth. However, landing lag remained relatively the same on average, possibly slightly less than in Brawl. It's just that many of Brawl's top tiers had really low landing lag on their moves and crazy autocancel windows on a lot of moves. Btw, there are some moves that got increased landing lag in Sm4sh, like DK's Nair, but got a way better autocancel window to compensate.
The decreased safety of moves is a bit awkward to talk about, since Sm4sh's aerials were safer on shield when not autocancelled. Brawl had an extremely low amount of shieldstun on its moves, and while Sm4sh's wasn't that high either, it was a few more frames on most moves. I know most characters were doing autocancelled aerials in Brawl, but this is one of the factors that made chaingrabbing so potent on most of Brawl's cast. If you did not have good autocancel windows in Brawl, you were even more vulnerable to OoS options than characters were in 4.
You also say that Sm4sh's landing lag on their airdodges were higher than in Brawl's, which isn't true at all. Brawl's airdodges had very little lag upon landing (I can't find the exact frame data here), while Sm4sh's airdodges had a whopping 21 frames of landing lag. I know you *actually* meant end lag for the airdodges, and only mistakenly said landing lag. But this is a pretty important distinction, and I'd honestly argue that Brawl's airdodges are designed worse than in Sm4sh due to how much they aid in landing. Sm4sh's airdodges are always playing with fire due to how easily you can get punished for an airdodge read.
About Sm4sh having 2 stocks vs Brawl's 3 stocks, isn't this because of how many characters have extremely strong chaingrab combos and very consistent kill confirms in Brawl, and how edgeguarding was more potent in a game with ledgehogging? I don't feel like the reasons you gave earlier on in the video as to why Sm4sh had 2 stocks had anything to do with why that game had 2 stocks.
About DI, while I hate the Sm4sh change of cutting the DI angle from 18 to 9 degrees, it's not like it was a very relevant aspect of Brawl. It was important for survival DI, but combo DI was probably less relevant in Brawl than in Sm4sh due to most of the game's combos being pre-tumble. I'd almost argue that limiting the DI angle in Brawl would've been better as to reduce people's ability to just DI towards the ground, and press airdodge to escape the combo. I'd definitely argue that the "no DI during tumble" change was far more harmful to the health of combos in the series, since we've seen how stupid the combos can get in Brawl and Ultimate when people are put into inescapable situations because of it. Melee's combos are better off due to the lack of all of these changes in mechanics, and it's why Melee has both a crazy combo game without having many guaranteed combo routes. Cookie-cutter combos have been an issue since Brawl, and talking about Sm4sh's combo system as if it's uniquely cookie cutter doesn't really make sense. Sm4sh's unique issues in its combos come from them giving everyone a Dthrow confirm, which makes it a character design issue.
Btw, I'm no expert on Brawl, but I do have a question about walking. All of the reasons you gave as to why people walked in Brawl also applied to Sm4sh, but I definitely see people walking more often in Brawl. If not to prevent tripping, why is that? It always came off as people playing a lot more cautiously around the opponent's win conditions in Brawl to me.
Not important, but while Ultimate's hitstun cancelling system still exists, but is not really a relevant factor in the game due to hitstun acceleration. Most of the time, hitstun is already over before you hit that 45 frame window, because the player in hitstun is running on a, you could say, "faster gamespeed" while in hitstun. This is why 50/50 kill confirms existed in Sm4sh, where you had to guess between airdodge or jump, but not in Ultimate.
Forgot to actually mention the "straight up lies" thing. Autocancels were immensely useful in Sm4sh, if for sure less massively important than in Brawl. Like Brawl, many heavier-designed characters didn't have good autocancel windows, which was a part of their issue. And also like Brawl, the characters who did have good autocancel windows used them quite a bit in both their combos and in spacing. You won't find that many examples of characters whose aerials autocancel immediately once the hitbox is out, which is something that was relegated to, like, Cloud Dair and DK Nair. But you do find aerials that are significant in part due to their autocancel windows across the entire cast. Pick a random character on kuroganehammer, and you'll probably find a good autocancel window on an important poking aerial.
Fox had the landing lag on his forward and down air massively increased (the latter nearly doubled). Kirby had his back air landing lag nearly doubled, his up air went from 9 -> 12 frames (a 33% jump); with little compensation on his other aerials (on top of worse autocancels). Falco’s down air was already mentioned, but his neutral air went from 9 to 15 frames. Ike’s neutral air went from 12 to 14 (and the autocancel went 67 to 64 frames LOL). Peach’s back air went from 9 to 18 frames, her up air went from 9 to 12, down air from 9 to 13. ZSS back air from 9 to 11. Yoshi neutral air went from 9 to 11, his back air landing lag was nearly doubled (and the AC was made worse). ROB’s forward air has 25% more landing lag; his back air from 12 to 22. Both Mario’s up and back air went from 10 to 12 frames (again, if 2 frames seems negligible remember that this is a 20% increase). Luigi: neutral air went from 10 to 14, back air from 12 to 16, down air from 12 to 20. Pit’s forward air went from 15 to 20, same with back air; he did receive compensation on his other 3 aerials , but it’s still a hefty 24 frames. Link’s grab air went from no lag at all to 8 frames; they reduced the lag on his up air but it’s still at 23 frames. Wario’s back air got reduced lag (from 30 to 27 frames lol), but his neutral and up air got 20-30% more. Ness’s forward air went from 12 to 20 with a worse AC; back air went from 12 to 17. For some reason they added 2 frames of lag to Charizard’s back air when it was already at 22. It gets even better: Knee Smash already had 22 frames and they upped that 30; Falcon’s neutral air went from 9 to 12. Sonic neutral air: 12 to 16, his forward air went from 30 to 26 (lol), back air has THREE Times the lag AND it AC’s later; they did improve the AC of up air but that was at the expense at hitbox duration. Also his down air didn’t have enough lag at 30, so they added another 8 (and AC’s later). You already mentioned Marth.
Ganondorf is one of the only characters to actually get a significant reduction across the board.
That’s about 18 characters that I went through the trouble of checking on, half the Brawl veterans.
At first I was charitable to your criticism but the numbers don’t lie: Smash 4 does not have the “same” landing lag of Brawl and it most certainly does not have “slightly less”. At this point I would consider not responding to the rest of the comment since it’s very obviously bent on propping up Smash 4 even when the facts do not line up.
Smash 4 gutted AC frames, increased landing lag, and in the cases where it does reduce landing lag, it’s cases like a move going from 30 to 24 frames (still wildly unsafe to throw out).
But let’s continue.
People walked and jumped and generally played more “slowly” in Brawl partly because top tiers had really good zoning games. Smash 4 largely got rid of that, funneling its characters into close range games where they resorted to extended dash dancing (because aerial approaches were crap as well).
“This is one of the factors that made chaingrabbing so potent in Brawl.”
I already completely discredited the idea that Brawl has worse landing lag than 4, but this whole chaingrabbing thing is more misinformation (not unlike TRIPPING where people try to make you believe that TRIPPING is what killed the scene). Of all the viable characters (top 20) there are ONLY two who have chainthrows that work on the whole cast: Falco and the Climbers. Dedede’s works on like 8 characters (most are mid or low tier anyway) and he’s easy to counterpick. Pikachu’s death chain works on 4 characters.
“If you did not have good autocancel windows in brawl…” yea well it’s a good thing most characters do. I’m not interested in talking about your fantasy version of the game from an alternate universe. The truth is even some of the worst characters in Brawl have usable aerial pokes.
Brawl’s air dodges are not worse than 4 (and FYI I think Ultimate’s system is better than both). Brawl’s higher ending lag meant that you could not escape disadvantage as easily as you could in Smash 4 at higher percents (excluding the characters with high percent 50/50’s but they weren’t that many after the patching). Smash 4’s opting to go for higher landing lag is such a pointless feature because vertical combos are king anyway so what is the point in trying to bait the opponent into an unsafe air dodge to the ground when you could just get guaranteed damage out of a throw combo. I kept track of Smash 4 majors for years and the air dodge landing lag rarely factored into people’s gameplay. But the ability to spam consecutive air dodges was heavily taken advantage of.
2 stocks vs 3 stocks: no. As mentioned above chain throws were not a factor outside of Falco and IC’s and in Falco’s case he needed to start at a specific position and percent to land his down air at the ledge and even then most characters could recover (Wolf is an exception because of his 60 frame meteor cancel window). The majority of matches I featured involved MK, Olimar, ZSS, Snake, who very much did not have chain throws and even then Brawl is at best slightly slower than Smash 4 on a stock for stock basis. People honestly need to stop treating Brawl as though every match is just chain throw 0 deaths back and forth, it just exposes how little they know about the game. Melee arguably has just as much chain throw crap (Marth on spacies, Fox up throw on fastfallers, Sheik’s down throw on 1/3 of the cast, Ganon’s up throw, Pikachu up throw on fastfallers).
Brawl’s DI was indeed survival centric and not much use in avoiding follow ups but it did have the best SDI in the series which could be used on nun tumble moves. Part of why multihits were quite bad overall. Smash 4 has even less interaction at lower percents since you just get autocomboed (and spamming rapid jab at the ledge since even with good SDI it covers all options and gives a nice 10%). Down throw up air esque combos and kill confirms in Smash 4 were not really a character design problem, but a DI problem. A lot of the vertical autocombos in that game could have been escaped if they didn’t remove nearly all interaction from them.
They should've banned meta knight early.
12:37
People who call it the worst one haven't played Melee.
many of them haven't played Brawl, either
Someone in the Brawl community described competitive Brawl in a very amusing way, calling it "Evil 3rd Strike". 3rd Strike is a game which is highly praised by people who have never played the game but it is less liked by the people who actually play it. Brawl on the other hand is the opposite where people who have never played the game hate on it while the people who actually play it love the game.
we can gas brawl but hating on melee you just have nostalgia and got bullied online
@@goku-cg4rh I played melee first, shits ass, overrated AF.
Amongdrip died to Marth fsmash at 0%.
Smash 4 is more unbalanced then brawl. The only reason bayo isn't picked as much as meta knight is because she is behind a paywall. She is more broken then meta knight.
Not entirely true. Her positive attributes pale in comparison; even with the threat of witch time in neutral, this still falls under *reactive* options; she simply does not have anything to pressure players offensively in the way that Meta Knight could short hop fair, d tilt poke, tornado. She is also one of the few viable characters to not get reliable setups off a grab; compared to Brawl MK she relies much more on the opposing character throwing out unsafe options in neutral/falling for bait.
Play defensively against MK? Mach Tornado destroys shields + his normals have such high disjoint that even if he's technically negative on shield he can throw out another normal thanks to his frame data or Shuttle Loop which grants invincibility on start up. Play offensively against MK? He has the best defensive option in the game in the form of Shuttle Loop.
By far Meta Knight's worst aspect from a balance perspective is how he almost completely subverts the game's disadvantage state: he has so, so many escape options in his air dodge, jumps, down air (or really all of his aerials), and once again, aerial Shuttle Loop that happens to be a really strong semi spike that can cause pretty horrendous reversals on the character who just won the neutral.
To put this into better perspective: Meta Knight is among the few top/high tier characters that lacks a reliable damage combo (such as Falco's down throw) and a reliable kill setup, and also completely lacks a projectile (a tool that pretty much defines Brawl). If a Brawl character lacks all 3 of these qualities they are almost always relegated to the lower tiers; in some cases characters that lack in just 1/2 of these areas end up being non viable, Sheik being the best example, possessing really solid damage setups in f tilt, up smash, and a solid projectile that also deals good damage, yet she's pretty severely let down by the fact that her only KO options are frequently staled.
Meta Knight's slipperiness in disadvantage is such a valuable asset that even in matchups where he doesn't entirely dominate the neutral (Falco, Diddy), those characters can still end up struggling to get any mileage out of their neutral wins; in some cases the calculus ends up favoring Meta Knight as guessing wrong can lead to the other character getting knocked offstage, a pretty dire spot to be in.
Heads I win, tails you lose. This is why it's not uncommon for non MK players playing vs MK to just not apply much pressure to him in disadvantage: it's arguably better to just maintain stage control with projectiles and focus on guaranteed combos rather than trying to guess what he will opt for among his defensive options.
Also: I doubt the Bayonetta paywall is even relevant, as much as I hate DLC, 6 dollars is not a steep cost for most people, especially considering its paywalling the best character in the game. And when we consider the fact that every tournament is going to provide access to the full roster, the paywall is even less of a factor in curbing her usage.
The main reason people did not opt for Bayonetta as much as Brawl Meta Knight is she simply was not that much more powerful relative to the rest of the cast in Smash 4.
People who try to insist Smash 4 Bayonetta was anywhere near as good as Brawl MK, let alone better, are completely underestimating how centralizing the latter was during Brawl's lifespan from the very beginning in 2008.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 Comment is a bit long so I'll focus on the most important part. The tournament gives access to the full roster yes, but before the tournament you practice with a roster that is likely not gonna have all the dlc characters unlocked (for the average comp player). Doesn't really matter if 6 dollars is not that expensive or not, it's still paywalled meaning that less people will pick her (even if she is the best character at that game). That's just a fact. That's not rocket science. This factor will limit how many people you will see pick her compared to if she was a free character like meta knight.
"She was not that much more powerful relative to the rest of the cast in smash 4." Smash 4 Evo bayonetta ditto is all I'm gonna say. The reality is that bayo was much more broken then you remembered. She was the character to pick for singles (1v1) , while cloud (another dlc character) was the character to pick for doubles (2v2). Smash 4 was a complete mess with how pay to win it was and it feels like you are downplaying it like crazy.
Is the 6 dollar paywall a factor in determining her overall usage rate? Yes, technically. But seeing the lengths that players will go to drop money on cosmetics in modern games it's ludicrous to suggest that of all the reasons Bayonetta was not as dominant as Brawl MK, the paywall is the big one. It's not, and it's not at all a significant factor in curbing her viability or representation, it's pure cope. People *will* spend that extra sum of money especially if it unlocks the best character.
I already listed all the positive qualities of Meta Knight as a character where he far exceeds Bayonetta (dominance in neutral).
You cherrypicked that infamous Bayonetta ditto as if that compares to virtually every MK-legal Brawl top 8 where it was not extraordinary to see half the players maining Meta Knight. Compare the amount of money won by MK versus the next most successful character and you'll see how stark the divide was.
Completely misinformed on the history.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 It's funny you mention the microtransaction part in modern games because only a small percentage of the playerbase buys a lot of cosmetics in those games. These types of players are categorized as "whales". Yes, there are people that goes to that length but are limited in number of players that do that, which futher strenghtens my point about how many use it is gonna be limited because of the paywall aspect. It's about accessability. It's not hope (replace the "h" with a "c"), it's reality, especially considering the fact that some smash players who goes to the tournaments have to take flights to tournaments multiple times which can discourage futher money spending such as spending money on dlc characters depending on if they come from a middle class or a lower class or etc (even if you win a tournament, you don't get much money like you do with giant esport games, so that's another obsticle).
"it was not extraordinary to see half the players maining Meta Knight" Again going back to why bayo pick rate is not as high as the meta knight pick rate, it's the factor I've already adressed which you just can't grasp the simple concept of. So it's not cherry picking, your argument on the last paragraph just falls flat when you don't neglect important factors at play.
@@dishonorable_daimyo1498 You will have to sort by newest to see my comment response.
Can’t wait for people to start calling sm4sh a masterpiece in five years
yup, all 3 of those fans
Not as bad def not as good as Smash 4
lol k
VERY BAD arguments.
I love Brawl more than you and THAT'S NOT HOW I will defend this game.
I'll answer in a video soon. I'll be a bit offensive because this video is revolting.
Pardon me in advance.
We could be friends, you know.
uh huh...
@dishonorable_daimyo1498 not sure how you were supposed to respond to this LMFAO
Melee players just have a chip on their shoulder and are sad that they don’t play any games besides the game that cripples your hands. Smash 4 is the worst one easy.
this is revisionist propaganda
LMAO.
People come to the Smash scene after the Melee doc and act like they know everything about Brawl, talking crap about the game and regurgitating the same talking points about tripping and "balance", never having played the game.
Whereas Brawl was a bigger game than Melee from 2008-2011 and what's more is that top Brawl players who moved to Smash 4 have generally remarked that Brawl was the superior game.
But, no, *I'm* the one revising history. Lol.
No I think it still worse than all the other smash games
"I think Smash Brawl is underrated, anyway here's why I think Sm4sh is the worst-"
th-cam.com/channels/8PWwD0izZ6akpGkpMiNj7A.htmlcommunity?lb=UgkxaGtzzttGV2Nba_BAjBHcGYh34VRCW_g8
The same thing can be said vice versa back when Smash 4 was recent.
@@Formula_Zero_EX
First off, I thought this was a Melee thing, most SSBB players were also SSB4 players anyway so I think they would like both
Secondly, if that were true, it makes more sense given that SSB4 really is just a beta version of SSBU, so people would like Sm4sh more when Ultimate didn't exist.
Third... this simple comment is giving me horrid flashbacks.
Horrid flashbacks of when I was a Sonic fan.
People would say this ALL THE TIME about Sonic Unleashed, and I don't even think people hated the game that much when it came out
And then when Sonic Colors was a thing people also said everyone loved it, but I only remember it being thought of as an 8\10 game at best.
Because Sonic Colors had basically forgone storytelling for the sake of gameplay, and Unleashed had slightly more effort put into it, every single person used this as a scapegoat for how "Sonic will never be the same", because Unleashed was the last (mainline) Sonic game with a serious story until Frontiers came out, and Sonic Colors was the start of the "meta" era (terrible name btw), with people claiming that the series became too "meta" and "joke ridden"
The worst part is, I like both games too. But I couldn't say I like Colors because the people criticizing it always had the smartest attitude possible, so if I wanted to say I liked the game, I couldn't because Unleashed had more "depth", and I can't just admit I like it because I don't care about the story.
If I wanted to say I liked Unleashed, I wouldn't be defending Colors and I felt like I wasn't giving a "bold" stance on it.
Literally the same thing can be said right here, right now.
If I wanted to admit I like Sm4sh (which I do), since this guy talks way smarter than me I can't just admit I like the amount of stupid kill confirms and combos because that has "no real competitive value", and I would struggle to defend it.
If I wanted to admit I like Brawl (which I also do), I would be siding with the same opinions as the people watching this, which I most certainly do not think are that extreme.
I just got into the Smash community because going to tournaments was basically the only cool thing I've done, and I'm already being reminded of the worst corners of the internet that I have had to tread through.
this is why nobody plays fighting games.
@@iceclimberswereamistake Oh God, thanks for reminding me of the “MeTa ErA sOnIc” nonsense the internet uses to dunk on the franchise more.
"If I wanted to admit I like Sm4sh (which I do), since this guy talks way smarter than me I can't just admit I like the amount of stupid kill confirms and combos because that has "no real competitive value", and I would struggle to defend it."
That's only a problem if you can't reasonably separate your personal preference from an objective assessment. You can like a game and at the same time acknowledge that it's terrible competitively. The same way I personally prefer Brawl over Melee but will acknowledge that Melee is the superior game competitively.
It's only Smash Bros. players who think "I like X game" and "X game is bad/worse" are mutually exclusive arguments; they are not. There is a reason I went through the effort to explain and back up my points: to prove an argument beyond stating my personal preference. Yea people will disagree or say you can't like X or Y and you'll feel stupid for talking sometimes, but so what, that's part of having a discussion.
The only reason i dont like brawl is that puff is bottem tier,and pm cannt fix 🥲