Why Is Smash Melee The King Of Platform Fighting Games? 

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Say about Brawl's gameplay what you want, but it has the best single player mode of any Smash title. The Subspace Emissary was legendary, and every few years I rewatch all the cutscenes as a movie haha.

I think the points made about lacking options for casual play hit the mark. It's hard to grow a new player based when you catter to a hardcore audience. Most people don't pick up a game wanting to play it competivly, people play for fun and if they really enjoy the game they make start playing competivly

The thing is, you want to have a huge pool of casuals to feed into your competitive environment, you're not going to pull someone who has over 10k hours on a game with another similar game that they have zero attachment to, even if your game is technically superior, but you if you can get a lot of casuals to git-gud in your game you can make your own "pro" players.

If there's one thing Sakurai has made clear, he REALLY knows how to make good animation!

One of the reasons additions like new stages hasn't "stuck" is the omnipresent threat of Nintendo. We can truly never know if mods would be popular given the current paradigm.

They have absolutely patched basketball to nerf too-tall people before. There's been a lot of rule changes in basketball accordingly over the decades.

The missing ingredient is always the casual play with this genre. Too many devs skip it.

11:55 "You're not gonna patch basketball to put a height limit on centers." I think this is a bad example bc while basketball may not have a height limit, but it certainly has been "patched" over the years. Dribbling legality and 3-point line come to mind. Same is true of other sports. American football and the forward pass. Soccer and goal line tech being integrated. Baseball and mound height or glove size. These are some I can think of off the top of my head, but there are rule changes in all sorts of sports in all sorts of leagues at all sorts of levels EVERY YEAR.

I honestly think it’s INSANE how even 22 years later the “meta” for melee hasn’t been figured out. We have characters like yoshi , a character that was perceived as one of the bottom tiers winning major events. Even characters like DK, another character who’s was seen as s low tier has been seeing a renounce in the past year or 2.

The sub-genre has yet to come out of its "doom clone" phase where everything is immediately compared to Smash. There needs to be a goldeneye and halo so the industry can move forward.

Even as just a casual fgc fan the crispness and quality of smash just looks so much more pleasing than any other platform fighter. It's like the umvc3 of platform fighters Edit: bingo bongo is my new main

The only game that got even close to capturing the heart of Melee was Rivals of Aether. Rivals had depth in every character as much as Melee does, and the mechanics just clicked, but most important of all: it had developer passion. I, and many others, are very excited for Rivals 2

How has NO ONE mentioned Slap City? It does everything this vid recommends -- a completely unique experience that's focused mostly on silly, stupid fun, but with really fun movement and deep tech if you want to get competitive. It's not the most popular game, but I think it's carved a significant niche!

Joshman nailed it when talking about learning to move. Melee has no buffer system so it just feels weird and hard but the reward to learning scale is just perfect. Meaning you are constantly getting dopamine as you learn to walk, then recover off stage, wavedash, l cancel, jump cancel, etc... Also sound design is massive. NASB is good but the sound design sucks and it ruins it. However if a new platform fighter as good as melee came out, id swap simply to get away from dealing with Nintendo and their constant BS

As much as Sakurai gets flack from Melee players, he really is a game design genius and a major contributor as to why other platform fighter IPs can't replicate Melee's secret sauce.

Chucking pokeballs at eachother is truly peak competition.

Though it's most likely not going to dethrone Smash (But tbh, I don't think it should try to), I do think NASB 2 has enough of a hook with it's rogue-like campaign and MUCH more revised gameplay. Again, still not reaching smash's heights, but it's a LOT better than how NASB 1 was, so I feel cobfident for them.

RUSHDOWN REVOLT is CRIMINALLY underrated. Playerbase needs some gas.

I do think that trying to emulate Melee in its entirety is a detriment to growth, but another issue I also see a lot is people interpreting games that *don't* do this as attempts to emulate Melee, and dismissing the game entirely by saying something like "not everything needs to be Melee" or "just play Melee". It serves as a sign of ignorance, where people don't care to acknowledge the original concepts the game *does* try to accomplish while blending in the old options that they took from the Smash series as inspiration. If new entries put more effort in their marketing to highlight their new ideas and gameplay aspects, instead of making "yeah, we have wavedashing! look at how fast it is! this move is a shine! remember shine?" as constant of a headline as it is, people will be more inclined to accept it as something truly unique. Rivals seems to do a good job of this, if I could name one.

Joshman was probably talking about the sound of when fox specifically hits a shine (falco also), because the game adds a lot of bass to the sound when it hits. It really shakes the whole venue when it's amplified

ngl, this video should just be , why melee is king? since you dont talk about why smash is king: content. just feels like melee propaganda than smash bros as a whole. Edit: Wow, they edited the title to make it more sense.

so glad to hear about rivals input from this interview. honestly an underrated gem that deserves more attention and is a great alternative platform fighter to smash

Melee was really lightning in a bottle. We're probably never getting another game like it

Not a fan of how the title implies that the video will be about smash as a whole but then you only talk about melee

This video encapsulates exactly how I've felt about the modern day platform fighter genre for a while. Never really could put my finger on why I and many others always came back to smash at the end of the day but this vid def put my feelings into words, very well made video

I think it would have been a more interesting conversation if you included pros from other platform fighters. If you only ask Melee players which game is the best, they're obviously going to say Melee.

Ip recognition. That's why in any other platform they describe the character rather than saying the character's name. I still call Rano "The poison frog guy"

I agree that Platform Fighters need more content for "casual" players, but I think focusing on stages and items is falling for the same trap of "recreating Melee," only from the party game side. Why should I pick a game with 20 items, 10 stages and a few songs when Ultimate is right there with over 100 items, stages and iconic songs spanning from multiple games? The workload needed on the dev side to even match Ultimate's content would exclude everyone but the largest companies. If SF6 has taught me anything, its that "casual" does not mean "uninvested." We blanket those outside the competitive side of a fighting game under the term "casual," but the truth is they're are many different types of video game player; pvp is just one of many ways a player engages with a game. SF6 had a character creator for people who like making their OCs in games, extended backstory and interactions with the playable roster - for the people who actually into Street Fighter lore - and an online battle mode that encouraged you to grind your created character like an mmo. Now granted, expecting small teams to compete with Capcom isn't a reasonable ask either, but I think the takeaway is that any team making a platform fighter (or any competitive game for that matter) should be asking what other type of player can their game appeal to. With that framework in mind, I disagree with the notion that Rivals of Aether's Workshop mode "doesn't count" as a core part of RoA's "casual" appeal. Think about how broad the appeal a custom character creator introduces: for players, there is near infinite amount of new content to try. For creatives, there is a whole new avenue of creative expression: make your own in-universe RoA character, your OCs, or your favorite FG character in a platform fighter. Rivals Workshop was the best side mode I have ever seen an Indie Platform Fighter introduce. An honorable mention goes to Slap City's Adventure Mode

I feel like it'll be easier for new platform fighters to pull the ultimate players tbh. Consider trying to hook people who are stuck with Steve and Sonic, shitty online, and have played their game for 5 years max vs getting people who have put their blood sweat and tears into running tournaments from their basements since 2001

Multiversus doesnt need to replace smash bros. Always room for more platform fighters. Just gotta hope the relaunch in a few months is worth the wait. If it's fun and polished, people will play

This may be crazy but after playing melee for so long the only other competitive game that has really hooked me in that way has been rocket league. There is so much complexity while also being such a simple concept

Project M is the only game that I would put in the same conversation as Melee for greatest platform fighter. And even then, even if Nintendo hadn't killed it, it lacked a certain je ne sais quoi that Melee has.

Maybe all the other developers of platform fighters should pay more attention to sakurai's youtube channel and see the importance of the conscientious he put into his games.

It’s crazy how there will be no other platformer like smash even after 15+ years

Here, I was expecting to hear more calls of "Just STOP making platform fighters altogether! Nothing can ever come close to Smash! This is the ONLY series we need here! The rest are all just dumb clones and rip-offs!" Nice to hear that people aren't just outright dismissive of the non-Smash platform fighters and were willing to at least give them a chance.

Watched the video wanting to see what Smash pros from across the franchise had to say about the competition to get a wide view on perceptions and opinions. Got only what Melee players think instead. Should've expected it based on this channel's content but seems massively shortsighted to only ask part of the community and feels extremely click-baity to upload it as "Why Smash is King". At least use a Melee Mario render for the thumbnail next time lmao Edit: Video title changed. Thank god.

08:04 i love how they added the sacred combo as a mechanic lol

It sounds like first and foremost, ip is important for attracting players. Then, fun casual modes to hold the attention of said players. Finally, good mechanics keep players hooked for a long time. And DO NOT skimp out on the animation, sound design, and art design when making the game. Just try to make a good game from the start and polish the hell out of it as to not have it in a perpetual state of early access/public beta testing.

subspace emissary could have been a standalone game and it would still be my favorite game of all time

SC II is what comes to mind for me. I know the FGC & fighting games in general have gone far beyond anything Soul Calibur 2 ever did, but for a kid growing up in the suburbs in the 00s SCII's story, music, animation, and combo style were amazing. Even without any sort of items or really goofy game modes, my brothers and I had a blast learning new combos, playing footsies, throwing each other off ledges, and trying out wacky character builds. If someone asked me to boot up SCII for a few rounds today I would. I think one of the big advantages games had 20 years ago is the free to play, pre-access, half finished, paid dlc, patches every few weeks game model hadn't been rolled out yet. You went to the store, bought a game, and it was either good or it wasn't. Obviously as the gaming industry has become more indie oriented and less studio based newer developers need direct feedback on their games, but I feel that on the whole the "early access" and "games as a service" models have been hurting the longevity of games.

Surprised there wasn’t a Pm/+ shoutout when discussing trying to innovate with Melee magic

Smash is in another level. I played all, except for Melee, and love the series. Sure, played others games, like Rivals of Aether (looking forward for Rivals 2), Jump Ultimate Stars (it should have a new game) and want to try NASB 2, but none of them is more appealing than just pick Smash again and playd a quick match online.

Since Fraymakers just released Fishbunjin, I think that game does need better sound design for hits, most hits feel flat, which contrasts Fishbunjins unique sounds when hitting sweetspots on his moves (which is taken right from Slap City) and feel way better. Honestly the sound design is a very important part of a lot of games, not just platform fighters, that goes overlooked a lot

Y'all need to get out of your bubble, and talk to analysts outside the Smash community, not just Meleeheads or peeps who grew up with Melee. Smash is considered the best platform fighter (in general, not just cuz of the melee community) because it has recognizable video game characters (which the smaller-but-tighter games don't have) fighting other video game characters in a mechanics framework that just works better (which the bigger-but-looser games don't have) than all the other alternatives. Yeah, the game still needs to be good, but the bulk of money and recognition isn't about how technical the game is. Its about having your favorite characters fight each other in one of the simplest control schemes in fighting games. That's why Smash can drop everything Meleeheads love about Melee (wave dashing, L-canceling, etc etc) and still sell better and better with each game consecutively. It's King DESPITE the pro community, not BECAUSE of it. That's how Smash can have a scandal like the 2020 sex abuse thing, and not lose any momentum. Because no one outside the smash community had even heard about it. That's how small the community is vs how popular the games are with casuals. As is, this vid is mostly waxing lyrical without actually getting to the point, because Smash isn't (and never has been) just Melee. And you're not going to get the actual answer without considering that maybe the pro/Melee community is a niche that is best ignored if you actually want to compete with Smash, and not just cater to people who would rather keep getting whacked by Nintendo than do anything else.

Not only is it the strong IPs, but without a doubt to me it's the *feel* of Smash. Multiversus, Nick AllStar, Rivals, so many games that have cool characters but none of them to me come even close to the feel of smash. It just plays so smooth, and everything else feels janky in their movement. I cant really explain it well, but Smash just feels smoother compared to any other platform fighter I have tried (Rivals still slaps though, and the mods are god tier)

The reason is and always will be that Smash at is core is an extremely casual party game that's incredibly easy to pick up and play and has massive brand recognition and I think folk don't think about the later too much. Smash started as a crossover between Nintendo franchises and evolved into a massive videogame industry event it's essentially _Videogames the videogame_ and you can see that in the hype roster reveal trailers caused even back in Brawl. The reason games like Nick brawl or Multiversus don't reach half the hype is because their characters *are not videogame characters* Also doesn't help that the competition usually lacks polish, talking mainly about Nick brawl and Multiversus but those games downright look ugly, animations are stiff, lack "selling" and the sound effects are subpar.

I feel like Slap City goes unseen in most aspects of platform fighter conversions

Melee is undoubtedly the best competitive game ever made. No other game has the staying power of melee. I suck at competitive smash, but absolutely love to watch it at high level. I've mained Falcon in every smash game, and never had landing a knee felt as good as in melee.

Multiversus is gone right now, but that's a fighting game I felt was super approachable. Great for new players, while clearly having a high skill ceiling.

You should defo talk about the masterpiece of a competitive game that is Omega Strikers, if you never did before. It's deadass one of the best games of the year but sadly nobody's talking about it on RU-vid and that led to game to threaten its company's live atm. It really got everything : it's the most original game that came out these last years, the game's anime art direction looks insane, the level of commitment and implication of the dev team is something I've never seen before and the soundtrack is straight up incredible. Now the game ain't the perfect but I think one of the best way to prevent this game from closure would be first to talk about it. I hope more esport content creators will get to talk about the game

An adequate budget, good game feel anime platform fighter is the only thing I can see really giving smash a run for its money. Specially if it's not tethered to the Jump franchise, but rather all anime and manga. We could have Ichigo fighting Guts from berserk, but also doraemon and astroboy fighting Thorfinn

I think Rivals is the best balance of mechanics in terms of depth vs accessibility. You can learn it in 5 minutes but it takes years to master.

11:56 they patch basektball more often then you think. they have new rules and regulations added every fews years sometimes they are drastic too like moving the 3 point line back or changing what is and what is not a foul

11:55 funily enough, that happened in south america in the 90s, a country organized a tournament where the height limit was 195cm, and they didn't win XD

title should instead be called "Why Melee* is King" . I think there's more mention to Nasb than any mention of Ultimate, or any other smash game besides Melee.

I'd personally be more inclined to say it's mostly cuz western Nintendo fans tend to have a default disgust at the idea of playing other games. That stereotype has persisted for years as opposed to Japanese gamers whom always loved Digimon while westerners are quick to dismiss Digimon in favor of Pokemon despite Pokemon taking many of its ideas from Dragon Quest games.

I think a big factor is that that smash is a gaming roster. It is so cool to see characters like Mario, Kirby, inkling or even Steve feel like they are plucked out of their game is really cool. Bugs Bunny and SpongeBob are cool and iconic but their random stuff is not as satisfying as play with actual video games characters. Then you have characters like shaggy, who has so little going for him as a fighting game concept that he is literally a meme like he is in some fan game. Second, smash feels official. It feels like it was made with love. Nick all stars feels souless and despite the polish of WBs game, having what feels like a near infinite roster of characters from a giant conglomerate could not feel more like I am playing an advertisement. I am sure there were some developers that put their heart into that game but that is going to be hard to convey

There's certain games that hit a sweet spot in terms of easy to learn/hard to master. Melee, Rocket League, Chess, Mordhau etc. those are the games that always have the die hard communities that stand by their game.

Look we get it you like melee but you can't just neglect ultimate like that

>Why Smash is King Because it's Smash. So many other franchises have tried to take Nintendo's mantle, but they've all failed. It's not because their gameplay is bad. It's not because their graphics aren't good. Not because of its story mode or singleplayer content. Not even the netcode. Nintendo is just such a large company, to the point where the "too big to fail" mindset comes into play *literally everywhere.* They could ban everyone from playing games they haven't been selling for longer than 1 year, and no one would care. Smash is just such a ridiculously large game with so many characters and a massive company backing it to the point where even if it sucks, people will buy it. That's the Nintendo mindset. The closest I've seen someone get to Nintendo's throne in the platform fighter department is Rivals of Aether, and even that was solely because of workshop content, something that Nintendo could never do.

The ad at 10:28 made me think Jhon Wick was added to Tekken lmao

at this point melee players have become so ingrained in their ways that I don't think anything could ever topple the game, the majority of melee players will stick with their game no matter how good any future games are. I'm a massive rivals fan but many of the people that have bounced off the game or not even tried it criticize the differences it has compared to smash (the lack of grabs and shields, the complicated walljump mechanics, the smaller roster, the pixel art artstyle) but if it was the same as smash why would you ever play it? This is part of why I'm skeptical about rivals 2, I feel they're making the game too similar to melee to the point many people would rather just play melee, the number 1 selling point for rivals has always been really mechanically good character designs but for the general public mechanically interesting characters just can't compete against the titanic IPs smash wields.

Definitely the sounds and the speed. Sliding around at the speed of sound, watching characters be slapped around with random, dumb shit, and execute that satisfying kill move with a nice, meaty, thump or smack (knee or sheik fair).

Smash cant be dethroned for the same reason all the souls like games cant dethrone FROM software souls games.

I love when people reveal how British they are by using the phrase "streets ahead" and other idioms casually.

*First-mover advantage* - Wikipedia Reality is obviously more complicated than just this one single factor, but also, though… Am I wrong?

Melee is amazing--watching it is such a treat. Some things could be improved though. Some unnecessary technical barriers like L-cancelling could be removed and that would make things so much better

16:56 Project M jumpscare. It really is a shame that this video really turns a blind eye to it, because all these smashers and the voice over are talking around its existence, refusing the elephant in the room, even when bashing Nintendo- they still fear it.

no one i know is interested in casual/simple fighting games. The more mechanically dense, the more folks are going to play. That’s why people love Melee, even if they started on Smash 4, or Ult. As far as single player stuff goes… idk. I don’t really engage with that stuff, I’m just interested in playing against other people in fighting games, and learning match-ups and mechanics. It’s rewarding

I'm actually really curious about what the current player count of Ultimate is now? I've never really heard much about the game after the final character reveal.

I think it really is a mix of the subtle/and not so subtle animation effects, the sound effects and soundtracks and the way the game just feels. The feedback you get when hitting someone or being hit. It's really hard to describe, but most other platform fighters lack it. The movement in SSBM feels amazing and responsive as well, but I feel like that is easier to replicate. I think in regards to the feedback that the player gets from interacting, this is found in other traditional fighters and even beat em' ups. Sakurai's love for fighting games really shines through in this regard because he was sure to make a "digital" hit feel tangible to the player. I think that's the major thing other devs lack because they are trying to mimic or replicate Super Smash Bros. whereas Sakurai was trying to mimic traditional fighting games and revolutionize them.

I love smash and play it still sometimes!

I was attending some locals on smash ultimate until they released steve who's infuriating to play against, he can just put a wall and force you to approach while making obnoxious noises and charging his filthy win condition, he can do stuff so easily it isnt' even funny and do stuff no other character can like negating about half of the cast's recovery with a block on ledge or resetting his own ledge invincibility. With the limited tech and movement in smash ultimate contesting that is extremely difficult

Early rushrev for all its flaws was my favorite fighting game of all time, its such shame that it fumbled so much

i mean basketball and football have had patches lol just not as often and balancing games is always tricky especially fighters imo.

The focus on melee muddled the actual reasons platform fighters that aren't smash fail. Melee pros are by far the worst audience to center this discussion around and the people you interviewed even hint at this. You should have looked at all the other smash games and interviewed people from those scenes. Interviewing people that aren't involved in any of these competitive scenes would have been a good idea as well.

The other platform fighters are getting better and unique. Keep going devs. Rivals 2 looks FIRE. We should support these games to grow this genre. I love melee but its been 20 years and this genre is still small? cmon now, theres so much room here. I dont see any of theses a threat to melee neither, I see it as a genre growth imo.

Amazing video, loved the format

10:50 He says that like patches are universally bad. Patches can also fix things like brawl metal knight

I stan coin launcher.

at 4 minutes when hes talking about the feeling of hitting a knee with the camera and screen shake why did you zoom in in a way that makes marth not visible and disable screen shake

Smash has a level of quality in visuals that still hasn't been replicated. Characters land better, run better, dodge better than any platform fighter. It's just different right now

I came here just to find out about other platform fighters and I'm upset there's no list in the description.

I can appreciate how far and how technical melee players have taken the game, but man does it feel clunky as hell to play. Edit:spelling

Basketball is such a bad example, basketball experiences rule changes both in the game and in the surrounding leagues that play it the effect how the game is played.

people pretending that multiversus was a beta test just because the studio backtracked and said so after they ruined it with amateurish patches is funny. they were selling all kinds of in-game currency and battle passes and even said it was no longer in beta in the 1.0 patch where they screwed up all the balancing accidentally buffing strong characters.

casual first then let this game slowly grow competitive by the people also the casual aspect or overall the game should be replayable

The problem with trying to recreate melee is that melee’s 20ish year old competitive scene was a freak accident and it can be hard to recreate accidents. I might just be yappin’ tho.

Im sad rivals 2 is trying to be more like smash, when the lack of shielding and ledge made rivals this utterly unique, hyper-aggressive and hyper-mobile game thats utterly unique.

22:35 Akshon! Stop trying to make “streets ahead” happen. It won’t. What does it even mean?!

Melee is sick and all and I love this almost mini-documentary of a video... But man, that Chibi-Robo BGM slaps

When is your NASB2 review coming out?

I think the correct goal is to find a niche. For me, Rivals found a niche that I like so that is the game I play, and I think Nickelodeon Allstars Brawl 2 is doing something similar so I hope they do well too. I could easily see (unfortunately) Rivals essentially being the Skullgirls of the alternate smash games where there is just it... and like Brawlhalla I guess but that game is weird everyone is basically jigglypuff to each their own but I am not interested.

Modded/updated versions of melee don’t stick because of Nintendo. They get shutdown after some time and most players don’t want to seriously invest in a version with an expiration date.

People look at the success of Melee and how people keeps going back but ignore why people can still go back to Brawl and Smash 3DS but not to Smash Wii U, and that's because they forget the time when they were newbies to their games and played with everything, not only 1v1. Also, the crossover is so unnecessary, like yeah I loved playing as Kirby and Link but "those guys Samus and Olimar sure are fun to play too", and I guess that's the reason why I really liked Rivals of Aether and Flash Party, despite being original characters they are just as lovable and fun to play, thing I can't say about Multiversus roster.

I'm very cynical to most Smash-inspired games because as the video says, they're trying to be Melee, or they have too much focus on the competitive scene or something. It took me a while to warm up to Rivals of Aether because I assumed it was going to be rather Melee-like in its gameplay, but I did warm up to its much more unique approach to the genre. Meanwhile, I did not - and do not - see the appeal of Nick All-Stars when it feels like it's trying so hard to be Melee and they put in characters, but do not think about what traits and moves would fit them.

also its with any video game dont copy one by one a game do something that is for what is really unique and memorable for all players

King of controversies

Im so glad the video titled "smash is king" only focused on melee