hi yes play melty

Disclaimer: This post looks at Super Smash Bros. for Wii U & 3DS as a competitive game, and my thesis is “Smash 4 is a bad fighting game”. This is not a criticism of Smash 4 as a whole, only that particular aspect of it. Casual Smash is a different game entirely, and I’ll admit I had fun with the first… a hundred hours or so of Smash 4. If you’ve never cared about a competitive scene of any video game, this text is prooooooooobably not for you. In short, this is stupid nerd stuff.

Now… Smash 4 is a bad fighting game.

This is something I wanted to write for a long time. Simply put, I was always annoyed that the discourse around Smash 4 was rarely ever constructive. Whenever Smash 4’s viability as a fun competitive game is brought up, the discussion rarely ever focuses on the actual core of the gameplay. Instead, people either discuss character balance and endlessly circlejerk about the top tiers or draw comparisons to Melee, at which point no one can be saved, as even the mere mention of Melee is a siren call for the “you’re just too close-minded” style of ad hominem from both sides. Whenever the actual gameplay is talked about, almost nobody is ever convincing.

“Run up shield too strong.” “No movement options.” “Recovery too easy.” “There’s a lot of characters and matchups to explore.” “It’s more balanced than [Game].” “It doesn’t have [bad mechanic] from [other smash game].” Even if I agree with some of these arguments, the criticism is shallow and consists of loosely connected sentences that don’t draw a clear picture of the game.

So that’s what I want to do here. I want to analyze Smash 4 in a more systemized, organized way so that maybe, just maybe, our future discourse on past and future Smash games would be more sensible and we would be less willing to accept mediocrity.
By the way, I've also contacted /u/NPPraxis to give me feedback on this text. He's far more knowledgable than me on the subject of Brawl, which is a game I bring up far more than I should considering I never played it, which is why this post will have segments of the feedback post he sent me.

These are the core principles of this work:

-I will be focusing on the core gameplay loop of Smash 4. This means that I will talk mostly about the moment-to-moment interactions that occur in most matchups. I will inherently be reductive in that approach, so character matchups will be blurred out and become less relevant in that reductionism. There are a lot of things that influence a competitive game outside of just core gameplay, such as the cast, character balance, netcode, lack of a real training mode, input lag, graphics, sound design and so on, but these things will not be my main focus.

-I would love to minimize the amount of comparisons I make to other games, especially Melee, but holy shit, that is impossible. “Minimizing comparisons” was one of my core principles when I started writing. Soon enough, though, it really became harder and harder to contextualize Smash 4’s advantage state without comparing it to Melee/Brawl. What I think I was trying to say is: “I’m going to minimize the amount of comparisons of quality”. So, I still think that I carried out that principle, in that, I don’t proclaim Smash 4 is bad because it doesn’t copy Brawl/Melee mechanics(I don’t know shit about 64 so I’m not gonna talk about it), but because it has less options and depth due to it making a stupid change to a system Melee/Brawl had. While this is generally a good way to study games, I would be lying if I said this method didn’t have a personal motivation behind it. I don’t want to be accused of being a Melee elitist, a Smash 4 hater or Brawl elitist(lol), not because I care about my image, but because there are quite a few people in this community that will simply not listen to reason when they get to decide the person they’re not agreeing with is just stuck up because they play [video_game], as ironic as that sounds. I want the highest amount of people to read this post as it is, without an imagined context or bias. Besides, I’m not really part of the Smash community anymore. I’m a Melty Blood elitist.

Anyways…

The States

Both Smash and traditional fighting games can have a ton of different situations, but generally, you can divide every kind of situation into distinct categories, or states as I call them. If I were to divide Melty Blood, the anime fighting game I know most and, in my opinion, the deepest traditional fighting game made yet, into states, it would look like this:

Neutral

Block Pressure/Defense

Combo/Teching

Okizeme/Wakeup

This is what a Smash game looks like in comparison:

Neutral

Block Pressure/Defense

Combo

Techchase

Edgeguard/Recovery

Juggling

((Sidenote: I consider “Disadvantaged Neutral”, the state when you’re cornered, in the air with no air options or on a platform a separate state. There isn’t much I can say about disadvantaged neutral that has much to do with Smash 4, so I omitted it from both tables.))

Smash gets rid of okizeme completely, but it compensates for that by adding states that are completely unique only to it: Edgeguard and Juggling. Not only does Smash add these unique situations to the formula, but it also adds an incredible amount of depth to the Combo state. Hitstun interactivity is not totally unique to Smash- the aforementioned Melty Blood has Reduce, Guilty Gear has Burst, and… uh….. Skullgirls exists… In terms of depth though, Smash’s DI/SDI system by itself blows every other game away.

What makes Smash unique is the fact that these disadvantage states aren’t hierarchical. In a Guilty Gear or Street Fighter game, pressuring someone is preferred to being in neutral, but playing okizeme is even better, but what you’d REALLY rather do is put the opponent in hitstun. Neutral < Pressure < Okizeme < Hit. When researching combos, you are going to look for the ones that do a hard knockdown first. If two combos do the same damage, but one of them is hard knockdown and the other one is a reset to neutral or a small amount of + frames to do basic block pressure, the hard knockdown will be done 100% of the time.

In Smash, the disadvantage states generally don’t have a hierarchy and can be equal to one another.

“Should I combo into this move and get a techchase situation, or should I use this to juggle them afterwards?”

While certain matchups have obvious states that are preferable to others, the fact that the combo system and DI creates mixups after basically every hit will still create meaningful choices between advantage states, even for the defender.

“Should I DI into the stage so that I don’t get edgeguarded, or should I DI out so that he couldn’t potentially extend his combo?” hit => hit OR edgeguard

Disadvantage states can turn into each other depending on the circumstance.

“Will I tech backwards and get edgeguarded, no tech and get tech chased again or tech forward and be comboed into a juggle?” techchase => Edgeguard OR techchase OR Juggle

“I was hit by a strong vertical move, but I survived; should I fastfall now and be potentially antiaired or double jump and be in a worse juggle situation later?” juggle => hit OR juggle => juggle

This is a huge part of why I love Smash. I can’t speak for literally every fighting game ever made, I barely played Tekken or Soul Calibur, and +R/Arcana seem interesting, so let’s just say that Smash as a whole has the most intricate advantage state of all fighting games.. that I played.

I was referring to Smash as the entire series being a singular entity since all the games are similar in that regard. Now talking about Smash neutral is a harder topic. Every entry's neutral is radically different. There are a few common traits, though. Every game allows for a ridiculous amount of aerial control through drifting. Platforms change what it means to control the stage, as sometimes even the dead centre of the stage is not the most advantageous place to be in. Ground movement has a bigger focus on dashing over walking, which is faster, which means that footsies happen across larger distances and require a lot of quick burst movement.

This is my thesis:

Smash 4 takes all of the things that make Smash unique and fucks it all up by making them more boring, less deep and somehow more complex and obtuse.

Juggling

Well, almost all of them.

The juggling game is somewhat well preserved from Brawl. Brawl was very focused on juggling, but due to the hitstun cancel changes it doesn’t happen as often in Smash 4.

In 64 and Melee, there were three things that created interactivity in juggling: double jumps, platforms and drifting.

A common 50/50 game that is played in Melee is the mixup between double jumping and landing with a fastfall, generally with an aerial. To beat landing, the aggressor can use a juggling move like an upair, getting them a hit and either killing, repeating the situation or setting up an edgeguard. The aggressor can overshoot his aerial with his own double jump to beat double jumping, but this can’t happen in every single situation due to fall speed differences of both players, so commonly the mixup to upair juggle is using a platform to stay elevated or landing without doing an aerial then jumping, or doing a late double jump to accomplish roughly the same thing. This doesn’t directly beat double jumping, as you don’t get a hit, but now the opponent has to play Juggling again with a higher disadvantage, as they now lost access to their jump.

They don’t have to lose this situation guaranteed, because there is another layer to Juggling that can also let you evade the abovementioned guessing game entirely- drifting. By drifting, you can evade the opponent’s attack and you win by resetting to neutral rather than getting a direct hit. Depending on the character, this can range from being a 50/50 to being stupid such as when you play against a Puff.

Brawl/S4 added yet another layer of mixups with airdodging. It can function as a double jump function in layer 1, and even if the opponent made you foolishly double jump, then read your drift as you were descending, they still have to play a 50/50 mixup between airdodging and landing. Technically, on characters with higher air speed, it’s a 4-way mixup, as you can do the complete opposite and guess their airdodge/noairdodge habits, but miss completely because they were on the wrong side of the stage. This is especially visible in games that have Mario in them, since he can 4-way people even if the opponent’s character is known to be a great juggler.

Brawl had a few quirks that made juggling more interesting than Smash 4,lagless airdodging for example, but, I can’t be too harsh on Smash 4. After all, Brawl had you spending more time in juggling because everyone had very low fastfall speed values(S4 fall speed is actually similar to Brawl's, fastfalling makes the actual difference) and hitstun cancelling in general created a lot of juggling situations where they probably shouldn’t have been.

This is definitely the weakest part of the post. I actually wrote this section last because I was really unsure of what exactly to say and how to make a great comparison to past games to show that Smash 4's juggling system is technically deeper than Melee. With that said, here's Praxis's comment on it:
This is interesting and I'm trying to figure out if I agree or disagree. Juggling in Brawl is very different, but it's still juggling. Brawl has a lot more"frame traps" and option coverage. See, as you know, characters can cancel hitstun early with attacks and airdodges. But, because of Brawl's over-the-top-defensive options - most projectiles autocancel, the best shield in Smash(Smash 4's shield release but less shieldstun) and more liberal autocancels means you can hit someone, then take a position where your defensive options cover all of their escapes.
Here's a quick example of a Brawl frame trap. After Marth fthrows Metaknight, he does a shorthop at the edge of fair range and doesn't attack until he has reached the peak of his jump. He puts MK in a position where he can hit him if he does nothing, he'll outrange MK if MK fairs, and he can fastfall autocancel fair if MK airdodges- all the options are covered. Yeah, these exists in Smash 4, but because airdodging and autocancels tend to be way better you see it a lot in Brawl.
Another common thing to do in that situation is run up and shield- if MK fairs, you shieldgrab or up-B (remember, Brawl has almost no shieldstun), if he airdodges, you regrab. Here's a similar example of the same situation repeated twice.
However, I think I overall agree with the assessment that it doesn't happen as often as in Smash 4- in Brawl, juggles are less common because unless there's a really good frame trap it's usually preferable to reset to disadvantaged neutral (partially because of the aforementioned defensive options). Hit the person, take an option trap if you can get it, or take a position to best pressure where they are going to end up if you can't.
This is especially important because projectiles are so good. If Falco can hit you and then put you in the worst possible position to deal with his short hop double laser, he'll go right back to lasering you instead of taking a risk to give you another hit.
"Brawl had a few quirks that made juggling more interesting than Smash 4, lagless airdodging for example"
I'm not sure I agree with this. I think the airdodge was a net negative to juggling. It gave the juggled player too many options so it was often better to take a better position instead of following up on the juggle.

What I am going to be rough on is.. the airdodge. It’d all be well and good if airdodging and the mechanics around it didn’t bring a LOT more harm than good to the game.

Combo system(+ a smudge about techchasing)

Hitstun cancelling is the single worst mechanic in any Smash game ever.

There’s this misconception floating around that claims that Brawl and Smash 4 have less hitstun than Melee. All three games share the same 0.4 multiplier of hitstun frames per knockback unit. Brawl/Sm4sh have less damaging and diverse combos because all characters have the ability to cancel hitstun prematurely with basically every kind of action you would want to do after hitstun anyways.

The practical difference between hitstun cancelling and just having less hitstun is the fact that hitstun cancel frames are too stable. In Melee, once you get hit by an attack that deals 45 frames of hitstun, you can only do an action once you go through all 45 frames of hitstun. At 55 frames, you can act after 55 frames. Etcetera. Smash 4 is more complex. The earliest point you can cancel hitstun that would put you in tumble with an airdodge is frame 41. The earliest point for attack hitstun canceling is frame 46. If you get hit by an attack that deals 45 frames of hitstun, you can cancel it after 40f/45f. At 50 frames of hitstun, you STILL cancel after 40f/45f. At 58, same thing- there is practically no difference between attacks with different hitstun values after 40 frames because it’s gonna be cancelled at the same times anyways.
NPPraxis says:

I actually want to add something subtle that I think people miss. Brawl and Smash 4's lower gravity contributes to the feeling of 'less hitstun'.
Think about it- in Melee, most characters when launched up are still in hitstun after they reach the peak. They break out of hitstun during the descent or around the peak.
But floaties break out while still rising, because they don't decelerate enough. See: Jigglypuff, Samus.
And because of that, they feel hard to combo, because they are still moving away from you as they break out, and because they can't DI to a position to tech since they break out of hitstun before impacting a platform.
Why is this problematic? The root of the problem isn’t just that stability, it’s also the fact that airdodging and attack/jumping have a gap between them. The fact that airdodge, a move that makes you invincible from frame 2 to 4 depending on character, can be done 5 frames before you can cancel into ANYTHING ELSE is the perfect environment for creating a game full of 50/50s. True 50/50s are the least interactive mindgames possible. With coinflips, the only way to go down is disallow interactivity completely and make success inherently guaranteed. And people don’t really like 50/50s…

Even if they’re not actually 50/50s.

The game does have a mechanic that delays the hitstun cancel window the more knockback an attack deals. It’s called.. uhhh…… I’ll call it hitstun cancel window shift. For now. However, it only starts kicking in after 58 frames of knockback. Not only is that way too late for most relevant combo ranges as I’ll demonstrate now, for a couple of frames, it exacerbates the 50/50 issue and makes the coinflip stronger.

Let’s take a practical and rather realistic situation. Fox is playing versus Marth, a midfaller with middling weight. Fox is at 50%. Fox uses a dash attack, a great combo starter at mid percents. In this case, he’s used it twice already- it takes up the spots 5 and 8 on the staling queue. Just like always. (If you think the staling and rage pollute the results too much, no worries- they cancel each other out, so the numbers are near identical to the same situation with Fox at 0% and a fresh dash attack.)

So, when do hitstun cancel frames finally start to shift away from 40f/45f?

128%.

This is the earliest percent at which the hitstun cancel window shift mechanic takes effect. Of course, since 45f is the higher value, jump/attack canceling changes first. Airdodge will follow soon after, right?

A whole 14%, 2 frames of hitstun and 4f of attack/jump later, and airdodge doesn’t budge.

After using a generic Fox combo starter, airdodge hitstun canceling does not change up until 143%. I mean… holy shit.

Mario Dthrow vs Marth hitstun cancel window shift- 181/%198%.

Mario Dthrow vs Fox- 134%/150%.

DK Cargo Uthrow vs Fox- 105%/121%.

DK Cargo Uthrow vs Kirby- 147%/164%.

DK Cargo Uthrow vs Pit- 156%/174%.

Peach Dthrow vs Megaman- 170%/191%.

Let’s look at stronger moves and see if those percents happen to be within their combo range or not:

Peach Nair vs Shulk- 99%/107%.

Peach Nair vs Rosalina- 87%/95%

Cloud Uair vs Shulk- 93%/103%.

Cloud Uair vs Rosalina- 84%/93%.

Meta Knight Dash Attack vs Peach- 102%/117%.

Those are not combo percentages. They’re not even in kill confirm ranges. Wouldn't it be fair to say this?

The hitstun cancel window shift mechanic does not affect the combo system in any significant way.

What this mechanic is good for is surviving attacks. It’s likely meant to be an overkill tactic to prevent Brawl’s rampant momentum canceling metagame from ever coming back. In Brawl, the hitstun cancel frames for airdodging and jump/attacking were 13 and 25 respectively. That’s nuts. It obviously not only affected the combo game, but killing as well. No matter what kind of knockback you incurred, at frame 25, many characters were able to use moves that cancelled either their horizontal or vertical momentum completely to survive possibly up to 200%. So, for this game, they not only delayed the hitstun cancel windows drastically and brought them closer together, but also made it so that the 40/45f timer did not start at all until your current launch speed was slow enough, which resulted in the window shift for higher knockback moves.

I think we can all agree Sakurai doesn’t know what overkill means. You learn those words by contrast, after all.

Hitstun canceling breeds 50/50s out of so many situations that it obliterates other types of mixups. For example, tech chasing is quite rare in Smash 4. Not only does Smash 4 have limiting dash mechanics, which I’ll talk about in the Neutral section, there’s barely a reason to go for them. The game lets you coinflip after every hit post 40%, and that’s if you don’t get something guaranteed instead, so why would you set up your combo game around tech chases? In the first place, spikes are mostly extremely laggy, and a lot of characters are way too floaty to even reach the ground fast enough. You can’t even play a 1/4 from a read in this situation. Platform movement is awful- forget wavelanding, laserlanding or NIL, you cannot even platform cancel or autoland like you could in Brawl.

Did you know, by the way, that in some cases, hitstun canceling not only produces a great environment for the bare minimum for interactivity that are 50/50s, but manages to remove interactivity completely as if the mechanic doesn’t even exist?

You do this by..

Aaaaaaaaauuuuuuuuuuhhh..

Well the proper term for

The community forcetablished term for- doing that is

FRAME TRAPPING.

You have no idea how much I fucking hate this name.

I’m gonna hold my contempt for everything right now to explain it in case you’re too un-interneted to watch the video. Fraaaaa… “frame traps” are sequences of moves in which the hitbox of your second move is delayed to a point at which it appears on the first, maybe second or third frame after their 45 frames of jumpattack canceling. Since double jumps generally don’t travel far enough to avoid the hitbox and aerials don’t come out fast enough to beat it out and DPs don’t exist, there is no reason not to do a “”frame trap”” if you have a choice between it and a guaranteed follow-up, provided the delay actually helps with beating out the parallel airdodge option as well.

I mean, there’s not much else for me to go into. BSD themselves admit that it turns 50/50 situations into guaranteed ones.

My opening statement called out hitstun cancelling as the worst mechanic ever, which it is, but wouldn’t Smash 4 be even worse if it didn’t have it? I mean, airdodge traps already gave a pretty good idea as to what a hitstuncancel-less Sm4sh would look like. All those situations wouldn’t even be 50/50s anymore, they’d just be guaranteed. It would have even less variety. How did we arrive at such a bleak world? How come Melee and even Brawl are different?

Well it’s because Smash 4 fucked up DI too.

This all started with Super Smash Brothers, only for the 3DS.

In the Brawl-to-S4 transition, SDI didn’t make it out quite the same. SDI was a big part of the Brawl meta, and most people even say it replaced regular DI. In Sm4sh, its effectiveness overall was cut down, and many moves now have special SDI multipliers that change SDI distance per input if the designer wanted those moves to be less or more inescapable.
NPPraxis:

DI mattered a lot less in Brawl because people could get out of stuff anyway and Brawl had a system where weak hits were unaffected by DI. SDI became so powerful that you could use it to teleport out of non-tumble hits that would otherwise be guaranteed, but you could chase the SDI. It was interesting.

Smash 4's DI system is IMHO the worst change, but I see your logic for it being hitstun cancelling.

DI was carried over from Brawl. However, it too was directly nerfed, as perpendicular stick angling had less of an impact on your trajectory. This time, the replacement became Vectoring.

Instead of changing your angle of knockback without altering your actual KB distance like DI, Vectoring just straight up changes your knockback. The name is self-explanatory- the direction you hold on the joystick adds a vector to your knockback trajectory, so if you want to change the angle of your flight path, go ahead, but it’s much better to hold your joystick 180 degrees opposite of your knockback so you could cancel some of it with your vector.

Well, I’m sorta lying. While that was how vectoring was used, technically speaking, what vectoring actually does is affect your initial launch speed, which is why today(since around 2017 from what I can gather) it’s referred to by handsome people as LSI. This post by Ruben explains how that works:

https://ssbworld.com/blog/27/launch-speed-influence

I’m gonna use the concept and name of Vectoring in this post since it’s easier to explain, plus the differences between LSI and a hypothetical vector system aren’t that big.

Vectoring was pretty darn strong, so much so that it was responsible for this:

Vectoring had more character development in the manga.

Thus it was promptly patched. Whether or not Wectoring had a direct involvement in the vectoring change, I don’t know, but it seems likely: after all, you had to vector Up in order to Wector, and the Vectoring patch removed vertical vectoring completely. Repeat after me, there’s no such thing as overkill. Should a designer change a central mechanic that defines the combo system just to fix one silly lookin’ bug? Who fucking knows, they did it anyways.

So, you nerf SDI because apparently some casuals and one time stand Melee players didn’t like how strong it was in Brawl, and you nerf DI in order to put a spotlight on your newer, stronger mechanic. So now that Vectoring is nerfed… everything sucks?

Now we’re left with a system that has nothing. Everything is at its weakest, and you have very little influence over your hitstun arc. There are no game-defining DI mixups anymore. It became so bad that what few DI mixups remained sometimes had their own name: “DI Traps”.

Yeah, whatever, at least it has DI in the name.

This video actually perfectly demonstrates a common theme with the Sm4sh DI system. Most of the time, it’s not even a mixup, you can react/OS quite a few things in the video to do the best DI possible and just, make it guaranteed. In too many situations, there’s an optimal way to DI. No climax, no mixup, no meaning.

In way too many kill situations, all you have to do is DI left/right and hope for the best. In way too many combo situations, all you need to do is DI away and hope for the best.

What makes this even worse is the fact that the way you DI in the latest system is too simple. When they nerfed Vectoring, they let regular DI be relevant again, but they still kept Vectoring for horizontal knockback, and it’s still slightly better than DI. So what this means is, in order to survive a vertical kill move like a Fox Usmash or Mewtwo Uthrow, you use regular DI and hold either left or right. And in order to survive horizontal attacks, you use horizontal Vectoring and vector at a 180 angle of the knockback, so you either press left or right. I think I see a pattern.

There are corner cases. Straight diagonal angle moves(Luigi/Doc Usmash) require a combination of DI and Vectoring, so you DI down and away or down/in. More horizontal angle will need similar treatment if you’re on a high platform so that you could DI to the very corner of the blastzone.

Most of the time, you only ever need to hold 2 directions to DI, and if you count in all the edge cases, there’s about five angles. Five angles is kind of a joke. In past games, you need to use the entire joystick to DI things effectively because of how simple the mechanic is- all you’re doing is changing your knockback angle to change your trajectory to a more favorable one. Since there’s all sorts of angles you can be sent at depending on position and percentage, there’s all sorts of angles you can use for optimal DI. Smash 4 decided to put another system on top of what already worked, made itself more complex, and yet somehow it managed to remove depth and player choice.

That is the second worst thing you can do as a game designer.

The game does have SDI mixups. Impressive ones, actually. Sprawling trees of combos full of meaningful decisions, resets, high damage conversions with the ability to kill off a couple reads… It’s not a story a Diddy would tell you. Oh, but what am I saying? It’s all well and gone. After all, it would be uncouth for me to mention the witch.

Anyways, let’s suppose we do take out hitstun canceling and revert the broken DI system back to normal.

But that’s not what most people are complaining about, right? What most people think is the problem whenever they play Smash 4 is frame data. Everyone’s attacks just feel too slow to connect, people constantly fall out of my combos, so it has GOT to be the character data… right?

Perhaps. See, I have this problem with critical thinking and design analysis that no doubt bugs you about yourself too. Contrary to popular belief, I like people. In fact, I’m very susceptible to giving everything the benefit of the doubt. There is a trick I’ve learned from Mark Rosewater, head designer of Magic: The Gathering, however, that can nullify this effect. Not make me a cynical untrustworthy ass, but just, nullify it. All I need to do is remember that-

56:48 - Your audience is great at recognizing problems and bad at solving them.

At the end of the day, Smash 4 is not my game. I didn’t make it. So could it be that I wrongly identified the devil, the “worst mechanic”, and perhaps if you revert back to the Melee hitstun system, things won’t get better, because everyone is too slow, or because everyone’s floatyness and midfallerness still manages to reduce the potential hitstun arcs?

Don’t ask me. We didn’t get that potential of Smash 4.

Potential powers are meaningless. What you see is what you get.

Edgeguarding

So, the combo system is a mess that fails to capitalize on the inherent potential of the Smash formula. What about that other thing only Smash is famous for: offstage gameplay?

this doesn’t count

It sucks.

If you didn’t notice, it’s not really my style to just call things out as bad or say that they suck right off the bat. It’s best if I call a mechanic or an amalgamation of mechanics “too complex” or “devoid of depth”, cause that sounds more objective even if it isn’t, obviously, but the main point of that wording is to mostly rid my reasoning of judgement or rating.

I mean, I don’t have to do that, and I’ll be honest, I’m holding back a lot of hilariously venomous contempt that would fit a Discord chat more than a long-ass 14k word writeup, but for some reason, people actually get offended. My Smash Ultimate gameplay notes post on Reddit had one too many people being actually mad at me for throwing shade at Smash 4 in a tiny end section of the post that I specifically labelled as Personal Thoughts. Uhh… what?

When it comes to edgeguarding though, I think we, even including the most avid Smash 4 fans, can all agree-

Everyone hates this.

Why?

To sum it up, it’s way too easy to get back to the ledge.

Let me scroll through the list on why that is the case…

Okay, magnet hands. Those kinda suck. You don’t really need to put in effort to snap to the ledge as long as you’re roughly 2 kilometers away from the ledge.

Everyone’s recovery is way too good. Most of the cast has a great recovery, and an abnormal amount has a recovery that can go far. The whole cast is either a floaty, a middling midfaller or Fox, which helps maintain horizontal distance(unless you’re Fox), and everyone’s recovery moves cover a lot of horizontal and/or vertical distance. Having a recovery like that means you can come back from near death many, many times when you’re being edgeguarded, as if the whole state doesn’t matter and the only thing that does is percentage and your kill ranges.

Not too many characters have good spikes that fit edgeguarding. This means you’ll fall back on using other tools, which makes the survivability issue even worse since spikes are good at killing early and all. This also means that sometimes it’s simply not possible to stuff out certain Up Bs due to their superior hitbox, which doesn’t feel great to admit when you’re supposedly the one with an advantage.

Uh, trumping is pretty bad. It has a great synergy with magnet hands- as long as you can recover low and sweetspot the ledge, 99% of the time, you’re safe.

What else.. ah yes, the airdodge helps out too. As if it hadn’t ruined enough things in this game.

To be honest, this is really not that interesting to tear apart. It’s just that bad. And boring. I guess I could sprout up a couple blows about 2framing, but nah, I’m too bored, I’ll make leffen do it for me instead.

https://twitter.com/TSM_Leffen/status/1015736324995866624

yeah i uhh agree with every worddddd

What’s more interesting about edgeguarding is not the fact that it’s a tragedy, but that which it used to stand for and what it came to be replaced by, which is something you can't do when you look at mechanics in isolation.

Edgeguarding was replaced by ledgetrapping. Ledgetrapping is the act of sitting there on the stage and beating the opponent’s ledge getup options. And it’s shallow. On the ledge, you essentially have six options. Jump, Aerial, Attack, Normal Getup, Roll, Wait. It’s quite easy to cover three or more of these options, especially if you play a top tier. In extremely fucked cases like Diddy Kong, the aggressor can cover every single getup option, and the only thing the defender can do is wait, which can be beaten out by trumping, which in turn doesn’t just beat waiting, but the unbufferable options (Jump/NormalGetup) as well.

There are two beautiful things that a proper edgeguard system has that ledgetrapping doesn’t. Aggressor’s Risk and… let’s call that thing skill.

Aggressor’s risk is self-explanatory. Going down under to edgeguard carries inherent risk because you generally need to go offstage to slap someone who’s already offstage. Perhaps the defender’s options might not be so great, but if the aggressor screws up, he can die at any percent. In ledgetrapping, the worst you can get is an aerial and an Attack getup option that will never kill. Otherwise, you are generally under the same/no risk if you mess up and let them Normal Getup, Jump, Roll or wait. Another thing to mention is the reward- it feels just like edgeguarding puff, cause you’re not getting anything more than a repeat of the situation or a kill, leading to slower matches that are also boring if you consider the next factor.

Ledgetrapping does not test either player for their skill in timing or spacing like edgeguarding does. There is no such thing as a spacing mindgame here- perhaps it might take something to technically perform the aggressor ledgetrapping sequences, but the defender does not need to space himself in any way because all he has to do is press a button to play this situation. There is no such thing as reading someone’s spacing or direction and responding with your own to win. The timing skill required to pull off Waiting is so minuscule that I’m struggling to call it a skill.

Ledgetrapping is a mechanic that was made to be more and more abusable as the game progressed due to its simplicity. Unfortunately, this is the kind of meta development that only makes the game worse. You’re making an advantage state that requires very little skill on both sides with rather abstract choices and a bland, stagnant risk/reward ratio even more boring by making aggressor options cover even more defender options, disabling some of them entirely, thus making it closer and closer to binary. Dabuz even expressed that he would like to have ledge option invincibility buffed because of what the game was becoming. Again, I’d quote MaRo here if I didn’t already and admit that dabuz excellently identified the problem.

This mindless selection of choices goes against everything Smash is good for compared to traditional fighters. It’s not a good replacement for edgeguarding, and it’s way too shallow to even resemble something like an okizeme game. Things that are unique to Smash become less unique and less appreciated. Do keep in mind, though- Smash being this way isn’t an upgrade to traditional fighters, it’s a sidegrade. Smash has more of a focus on its unique advantage states than traditional fighters, and in exchange it started to focus less on the other games’ strengths. What are those strengths?

Block Pressure

I won’t talk about okizeme because it’s not in Smash in any way besides vain comparisons to ledge options. So let’s talk about block pressure.

So, remember frame trapping? The BSD video? Let's go back to that.

This is the stupidest naming decision ever made right behind [historical joke here]. See, fighting games have this thing called blocking that lets you not get hit by a lot of moves in exchange for suffering through blockstun, which can be used to pressure you continuously. Smash also has blocking, except it’s called shielding for whatever reason.

In most fighting games, you have very different ways to escape block pressure to reset to neutral or start a hit/pressure situation, but the one all of them share is mashing. Mashing, or abare if you’re a weeb, means using attacks to escape pressure. I know, that sounds totally alien to you Smash players, but stick with me.

Frame traps in fighting games are a sequence of moves that beat mashing. This is achieved by creating a tiny blockstun gap between moves, around 2-5 frames, that is just big enough to let people mash, but small enough so that their moves doesn’t actually come out and gets stuffed by the aggressor’s attack. This can be achieved by certain chains being natural frame traps with natural gaps or by delays between two moves if your game is good enough to have those.

So why give a Smash hitstun cancel abuse concept the same name as a fighting game concept that involves pressure?

1. It was a pre-established term. “Frame traps” were prominent in Brawl. I mean they kinda had to be

2. There are no counter hits in Smash

3. Frame traps are non-existent in Smash

To that I say:

1. Yes, you’re introducing the concept to a new audience. Yes, using a different term can confuse current Smash 4 players and Brawl players.

… So just call it an airdodge trap. It’s a good name! A Smash 4 player doesn’t know what the hell you’re explaining anyways and will be fine with any name, and a Brawl player can already figure out that “airdodge trap” most likely refers to what he knew as “frame trap” because for once, the term actually explains what the root of the technique is.

2. This one is just stupid

3. By saying frame traps don’t exist in Smash, you are almost directly implying that Smash, as a whole, has literally no shield pressure. Literally.

From the way you phrased your counterhit mention, you are implying that you think that only mashing attacks can be frametrapped. That is wrong. Any number of things can be frametrapped in fighting games. Attacks, jumps, throws, even parries or dodges, if they have some startup to them like Marth’s Counter. In Melty Blood, if you can’t frame trap jumps or at least use air unblockable moves to antijump people quickly after only a few frames of air time, go back to the drawing board, cause you don't have a pressure game. And those are jumps, they don’t put the opponent in counter hit state!

So what’s up with that loaded opening statement? Block pressure in fighting games can be very deep and complex, but if you strip away dps, dodges, corners, backdashes, pushblock, highs and lows, meter management, crossups and all that jazz, what you’re left with is the basic mixup that you can see traces of in any game. It’s a 50/50 game between two aggressor actions, Frametrapping/Extending Pressure, and two defender actions, Mashing/Blocking.

Stagger = Frametrapping, don’t ask me why, anime players are dumb and weird

Extending beats blocking. Extending pressure is the act of leaving in a large gap in a block string in order to get closer to the enemy and/or achieve game-specific goals such as resetting cancel options or increasing your advantage on block. This way, you win by getting to play the pressure game again with a higher numerical advantage. Waiting for your move's recovery to end, then dashing up with a 2P is a classic pressure extender. In a way, throws are pressure extenders that have more risk(no hitboxes, can't stuff out jump startup) and more reward(direct damage).

Blocking beats frame traps. If they’re gonna frame trap nothing, they’ll be pushed back naturally without gaining anything and/or lose out in game-specific ways such as losing a resource, going minus on block or losing cancel options.

Frame traps beat mashing. A fake gap will ensure that the mash option will be stuffed before startup gets to transition into active frames.

Mashing beats extending. A long gap means it’s easy to escape the situation either by jumping away or hitting the enemy for being foolish enough to trust you not to mash.

There are a lot, A LOT of things that make pressure more complicated. For instance, dragon punches bypass this mindgame entirely, backdashes either escape this mindgame or get stuffed by one/both options due to character and game specifics, and some pressure extenders such as Instant Airdashes can beat certain mashing options like low attacks. But these are the fundamentals without which block pressure cannot exist. Unless you play Arcana Heart

Frame traps are a core part of block pressure. Smash has block pressure. Therefore Smash has frame traps.

That is to say, Smash has unique block pressure. It doesn’t have viable cancels, meaning it’s much harder to create delay frame traps and natural frame traps are, well, have fun finding those, but it is compensated by the fact that sitting in block kinda sucks.

In traditional FGs, there is technically no such thing as sitting in block. To block, all you have to do is hold back, and there is no such thing as coming out of block either, so all of your responses out of block will be frame 1 no matter what you choose. In Smash, blocking has a button. If you release the block button, you are forced to “drop your shield” and go through shield release lag. Without shield release lag, you can’t dash or do any grounded move. To bypass it, all you can do is jump, roll, spot dodge and shield grab. You can’t directly challenge opponents out of block if you want to do it quickly, because aerials require you to go through jumpsquat first and shieldgrabs are generally around frame 7 or 8, so the best thing you can do is simply move out of the way. These two unique factors sort of compensate for each other, but ultimately because of these things Smash isn’t as focused on block pressure as it does on its combo systems. Being safe on shield is a much bigger deal than it is in other games because in other games, the real question is “but how do I pressure after that”.

I’m sure you know of a couple of Smash situations in which this mixup takes place, though. Melee Fox is famous for his “shine pressure”, but what makes him truly impressive as a whole is his aerials. The most common thing Foxes do after a blocked shine is either a SHFFL Nair or a delayed Nair that is initiated at its peak. The interaction happens right after the shine: A SHFFL Nair is a frame trap that beats actions done after shine and a delay Nair is an extender that lets him do a shine on block again and reset the mixup.

Smash 4 Sheik, while not as powerful, is able to do similar things. People often do an Ftilt after a Fair done close to the ground to frame trap shieldgrabs.

Peaches often do Nairs after float Dairs. Slower OOS aerials/faster aerials with slow jumpsquats and shield grabs done in preparation for a fastfall grab get frame trapped.

While a ZSS Nair is minus, fucking, thirty million frames because of how often she stales it, she’s still capable of making her approaches safe against shieldgrabs by using her frame 1 jab.

Technically speaking, delay jabs, moves like Link Fsmash with a possible 2 or 3 after its name(like, Jab1;Jab2;Jab3) or stuff like Marth’s Side B are cancels and can be used to frame trap.

Of course, these aren’t really common enough situations and they don’t apply to every character. In fact, Smash pressure is very much based on evasion, a roll would just dumpster all of those decisions and people in turn pressure to beat out these kinds of options more consistently above others.

Now that I think about it, why didn’t Beefy Smash Doods come up with their own silly name for airdodge traps that nobody would ever use? It would actually be fitting here. It’s like they make it a point to come up with the worst names possible.

Smash has a weak pressure game and it compensated for that by being strong in its unique combo system, juggling and edgeguarding. So now that Smash 4 de-emphasized two of the most important unique states of its own series, does it compensate for that initial compensation by being stronger in block pressure?

Are you fucking kidding me?

The shield button isn’t a block button. It’s a “win against certain moves; RESET DIRECTLY TO NEUTRAL: Do not pass go. Do not collect 200$ against other moves” button.

Honestly, blocking in any other non-64 game isn’t all that different. Blocking in most traditional fighters is rarely meant to beat specific moves, rather, it’s meant as a tool that lets you stay safe. Frequently you’ll encounter situations in which your opponent has 7 different options he has to win neutral, and you could press different buttons to win neutral yourself, but each of your option only covers one or two options of his, and if you guess wrong, you’re getting hit. You can try to press something and win 2 out of 7 times and horribly lose 5/7 times, or, you could do the safe option and block. You’re staying safe in all 7 situations, but you’re not exactly “winning” by covering this many options, because all 7 options lead to the opponent getting pressure or resetting to neutral. It’s potentially better than having a 71% chance of failure, but whether or not you actually do that is up to your personal playstyle.

Smash blocking is kind of like a really good button in that example, because it’s made to beat normals entirely instead of keeping up some sort of status quo. This is why moves being safe on shield is a way bigger deal in Smash than in 2D fighters- in those games, the REAL question isn’t even “can I start pressure after that”, it’s HOW can I start pressure after that. Oh, my fafnir is like -1 on block after an IB? Okay, that sucks, but I’m still not getting punished if I’m not in point blank range, what kind of game can I play after that with my backdash, low profile 2D, throw invuln jump into IAD and other normals to eventually win and get pressure as a reward? WHAT DO YOU MEAN GO BACK TO NEUTRAL?!

do I look like I know what a neutral is

As I’ve said before, you have limited and slower options out of block. This is why being -3 in Smash is actually an advantage. That’s the same number as the lowest possible jumpsquat and lowest possible roll startup, and it’s way less than shield grabs and shield release. Their slow responses balance out your minuses. Combine this with blockstun being generally lower(it’s kinda dumb to compare games with blocking mechanics being this different, but you can compare it with stuff like jump-ins done close to the ground, which generally go around +8 in traditional fighters), and you get a pressure game based around evasion with rolls and jumps rather than abare(or mashing if you’re a gringo) and invincible hitboxes, IF you get pressure. Otherwise, yeah, it makes sense that being safe on block is great to have, pressure is a luxury.

However, Smash 4 went a bit TOO FAR in that direction. Now, the shieldstun in Smash 4 is actually the highest it’s ever been in Smash. It’s [attack damage]x0.58 + 2 frames. By comparison, Melee was (dmg + 4.45) / 2.235, or dmg x 0.447 + 2.25f to use a similar format. All decimals are rounded down. I used to believe some bullshit about how Melee had more shieldstun on low-to-medium damage moves, probably because I didn’t notice that +2f a long time ago and didn’t bother to check afterwards, so lemme bolden the next sentence to amend for my past blatant misinformation:

Smash 4 shieldstun is equal to or higher than Melee shieldstun on every damage value.

They’re the same up until 6%, and before 13%, the difference is a frame. Also, projectiles have a 0.29x formula, because this game is literally Street Fighter V.

Shield is much more of a “lol fuck normals” button because a lot of characters in this game have quite a bit of endlag on basically everything. This makes aerials in particular punishable on block if you didn’t do them the very frame before you land, and if you’re playing a low tier, glhf you’re getting punished anyways. This along with more restrictive auto cancel timings makes it so that there really isn’t much of a point in mixing up your aerial timings. If only one thing works, why bother doing anything else? That one thing might not even work, by the way, cause everyone in this game is floaty, so going through an entire super reactable jump arc without mixups becomes even more painful. Why even bother pressuring? This kind of design of landing lag along with autocancel frames permeates the game, and it makes a lot of air normals seem.. one-note. It makes a lot of characters seem one-note, really. If your aerial has 10 frames of landing lag, it’s probably godlike, so it’s no surprise fastfall Uairs as Falcon and ZSS are seen so often in high level play, considering those have only 9 frames of lag.

Smash 4 also has better out of shield options to make the endlag situation even worse. A few months ago, /u/WonderSabreur made a post comparing defensive options of Smash 4 and Melee:

https://www.reddit.com/r/smashbros/comments/8ttz0k/melee_has_much_better_defensive_options_than/

And, I agree with the overall message entirely, but there are a few things that prevent me from making a sweeping hot take and applying that message to all parts of the game.

The main reason is, there’s a distinction between defense/aggression in advantage state and in neutral. The reason this post was written as if it was a dissonant revelation is because many people associate Smash 4’s neutral as being defensive, but don’t make that specification when talking about the game in general. If I tried to argue that Smash 4’s defensive options in disadvantage are too good, I would basically undermine everything I’ve written up until now.

The nitpick reason is shield release. People say that melee’s OOS options are richer than S4’s due to the movement options you have there and use wavedash OOS as an example of something you can’t do in Smash 4, but it’s not the best one.

Wavedash OOS frames are airdodge lag(10 frames) + jumpsquat(at least 3 frames), meaning wavedash OOS takes up at least 13 frames before you can act. You do this instead of releasing your shield and doing an attack or dashing is because you have 15 frames of shield release lag. (By the way, people call doing this “dropping your shield” a lot. I use this term too, but when writing shit like this, it’s really hard to describe this action as a noun, cause “shield drop” is a different thing entirely. So, it’s shield release.)

In Smash 4, it’s 8. Eight. ZSS releasing shield and doing jab is a 9f response. Mario’s jab OOS is 10f. Dashing out of shield post shield release is an actual thing you can do to replace wavedash OOS. Sure, with characters like Marth, if you align a Sm4sh dash OOS and wavedash OOS and look at the results at frame 13, wavedash OOS will be further away from the initial position(I don’t actually have a way to test this because I’m temporarily using a potato, someone do this for me pls), but the difference doesn’t matter as much as being able to act at least 5 frames earlier.

Is Smash 4’s shielding more defensive than Melee’s? Yes and no. It’s much less relevant in disadvantage situations, but it is defensive in the way it affects neutral.

This shouldn’t have been a huge problem. After all, if you want strong block pressure situations, then just play Melty Blood(please actually do that). Smash simply isn’t the game for this stuff. Smash is a game about interactive combos and interactive stages. Smash is a game that is great because it’s great at its own mechanics.

Smash = Fighting game - (block pressure + okizeme) + combos + edgeguarding + juggling

Uh wait, were we talking about Smash 4?

Smash 4 = Smash - (edgeguarding + combos)

Wait, shit. Smash 4 just killed off its own mechanics that made Smash Bros great. SUDDENLY, the things that all Smash games don’t really bother with started to hurt more and be more apparent. Now that Smash 4 lost a huge part of its Smash identity, things outside that identity start to feel even more restricting, and that ice cream just doesn’t taste as good.

So what do we still have left?

Neutral

This is the hardest part of the document to write. I’ve lost quite a bit of sleep writing everything before this point and maniacally rushed through the nights trying to do as much research as possible to get stupid tiny details right. With this, though, I had to take a breather. This last dance is simply too big.

Neutral is the most complex and fun thing about fighting games. There’s quite nothing like the primal satisfaction you get from bulldozing through someone’s block and breaking them for escaping at the wrong time like a fucking gorilla or continuously comboing someone by reading and calling out their DI, tech and jump habits, but without getting that initial hit in neutral, it doesn’t feel as invigorating. It’s not deserved.

And wow, that was a lot of words for things that don’t matter. REALLY, if a game’s neutral is good, then I personally don’t care if its disadvantage state is shallow and revolves around suffocatingly dominant 50/50 vortexes that aren’t fun on either side. After all, Leffen is putting up with DBFZ to this day

Smash 4 didn’t just shift its focus away from engaging advantage state. I wouldn’t have written this post if S4 just did that and made neutral at least something unique.

But no. Smash 4’s problems as a game come from the very core of its design. If something’s bad, it likely affects the entire game.

The first example of Sm4sh being broken to the bone was discussed just now, actually. All of block pressure’s problems seep into neutral as well. Shield is designed to invalidate pressure to transition directly either into Hit or Neutral, yes, but the issue of landing lag, autocancelling frames and endlag in general creates a similar problem: Different characters use their good moves in very similar ways, and there aren’t many ways you can use these moves.

1. Action

The landing lag design ensures that the best way to use an aerial is to do it close to the ground and force yourself to go through as little lag as possible. Many characters can get punished on block/whiff by doing even that. Doing aerials high means you’re adding the lag of falling down to landing lag. That applies to every game, even anime games, but lower landing lag doesn’t just make the option of near ground aerials stronger, but makes other options and other altitudes more viable as well, which promotes variety.

Increasing aerial timing variety also increases adds a layer of depth through fastfalling. Fastfalling also has a lot of variety since you can do it at any point when you’re descending and you can do it independently of your aerial timing. That means you can choose to increase your air time in exchange for more control over your drift. For example, you can do options that would change your spacing on whiff, and, if blocked, would become crossups…

Or fadeback aerials.

There would be a Crush tweet here about personally being offended over people trying to shield grab his fadeback nairs but he deleted his twitter

Having more landing lag encourages you to ignore that as well, because you want to minimize your air time before landing lag since you have no other options. A crossup or fadeback aerial is much less effective if you’re too slow to not even get punished for it let alone punish their reaction yourself. So, in S4, you fastfall as soon as you can, even if you’re emptyhopping, because the lack of high aerials in the metagame means no fastfall empty hops don’t have anything to mixup against.

Another way to promote aerial timing variety is autocancels. Brawl in particular has a lot of great autocancel windows, which, despite AC lag being a mechanic that you only interact with once you land, makes Brawl neutral happen in the air much more often than the ground. The reason Brawl autocancels are great is their leniency. They allow you to do more than just short hop and do an immediate aerial without fastfalling. The autocancels start at an earlier time than the overall short hop air time, meaning you can mix up you aerial timing and fastfall timing.

If they do exist, most Smash 4 autocancels… last as long as short hop air time and only let you do a short hop aerial immediately without fastfalling. Look at the frame data for stuff like Ike Fair/Bair, Cloud Nair/Bair, Falcon Nair, Puff Nair, Marth Fair, Mewtwo Fair, Samus Bair etc etc etc and you’ll see that these important aerial pokes barely have 5 frames above air time. Characters that have Brawl-like AC windows are an exception rather than the norm(Falcon/Mario/Peach/Fox Bair;Ness everything; Sheik Fair has an 11 frame window LMAO), and they generally become viable because of that. For just the price of their jumpsquat frames, they get to not play Smash 4. It feels like the landing lag and autocancel frames were intentionally designed to provide as little interactivity as possible. At the very least, you can’t make up those autocancel frames without knowing the exact frame count of each afflicted character’s shorthop air time.

The fact that everything has so much lag that has you shorthopping through very specific hoops to avoid is… okay. It’s not bad or good, it’s just… okay. Lukewarm. This is fine for now. Just like edgeguarding being bad, it’s not exactly the worst thing in the world when viewed in a vacuum, separated from other concepts. But we don’t live in a world of absolute zero.

2. Movement vs. Action

Movement in fighting games exists to accomplish two main goals: Approaching and whiff punishing. Smash 4’s movement system is bad at doing both.

In basically every fighting game, you may have a shit ton of gimmicks and specific moves made to beat other specific moves or timings, but you can represent a lot of neutral interactions by imagining it as a Rock Paper Scissors game of Poking,Moving Forward/Approaching and Whiff Punishing.

Poking is attacking to threaten the space you’re controlling. Ryu crouch medium/heavy kick, Diddy Fair, Sol 2S or Ganon down tilt are moves that are generally used as pokes. Pokes beat moving forward.

Whiff punishing is the act of forcing an opponent’s poke to whiff by moving away from that attack’s danger zone, then punishing the whiff. Walking back and forth, dashdancing, shorthopping backwards or pressing Slayer’s Dandy Step button is whiff punishing. Whiff punishing beats pokes.

Moving forward or approaching is self-explanatory. Running, wavedashing forwards or yougettheidea is moving forwards. Moving forwards beats whiff punishing, because to whiff punish, the opponent needs to back away, meaning they lose by giving up stage control.

Movement is used in approaching and whiff punishing. As I’ve said before, moves having more lag than necessary in a vacuum isn’t that bad. If anything, it encourages and teaches whiff punishing, exceeeeeeept in Smash 4, you can’t do that. Smash 4’s movement system is limited to the point that you can’t whiff punish effectively or approach with those same laggy moves, which means that the bad parts of having a stilted poking game aren’t compensated for at all.

In terms of movement, and, many many other things actually, Smash 4 did nothing but remove options from players of previous games while somehow still managing to make the underlying mechanics more complex.

Where do I even start..? Let’s try dashing.

Barring the overly dreaded tripping mechanic, dashing is a carryover from Brawl and it’s a bad mechanic because it’s made to be more complex than Melee dashing.

Yes, it’s more complex.
You can enter 2 states after Dashing in Melee: Dash and Run.

You enter Run after your character’s dash length frames are over. For example, Marth and Falcon, Melee’s most potent dashdancers, have 15 dash length frames. In order to refresh your dash back to 15, you can dash the opposite way, at which point you can repeat that process again and again, constantly changing your spacing, and that is called dashdancing. You can also go through a tiny bit of dashbrake(is that what it’s called?) lag at the end of your Dash animation to foxtrot and refresh your dash while still moving forward.

If you don’t cancel your dash, you’re in the Run state, and running fucking sucks. if you try to dash backward, you’ll enter Skid, which is probably the worst animation in the game besides being hit, and your real options are jump(meaning wavedash), shield, dash attack and crouch(meaning run cancel normals).

That’s 2 states. While technically Brawl/S4 also have 2 states after pressing forward, pragmatically, Dash by itself is splintered into two different sections with different abilities. First, for the first 6 frames, you enter the Brawl DashDance frames of the dash. Those work exactly like Melee Dashes, but because you have only 6 frames to do that, you cannot use these frames to accurately change your spacing at all, hence they’re Brawl DashDance frames. I’m not sure if it overlaps with Brawl DD frames or if it’s a separate window, but for the first few frames of your dash, if you press R, you will roll instead of shielding. After Brawl DD frames, you are in a second Dash state that play out for the rest of your dash(and by the way, smash 4 characters have higher dash lengths). This state is kind of like a Run, meaning you’ll Skid if you try to dash backwards, but you can’t shield, and at the end of it you can foxtrot again, potentially using Brawl DD frames to dash backwards and use “extended dashdancing”. And finally, you enter Run.

Smash 4’s dash mechanics are more complex due to being made of more parts, yet provide you with less options.

So if you want to excuse Smash 4 movement by saying that it’s simpler and better for not deterring new players with complexity, you fucking can’t, because Melee dashdancing is much simpler to understand and more deep because of it. There is no winning here- the dash mechanics both increase the skill floor by making you learn things like extended dashdancing and pivoting and MASSIVELY decrease the skill ceiling. Everyone loses.

Smash 4 dashing not… being Melee(I’m sorry) results in a terrible whiff punish game. Walking.. okay, I know, walking exists, but it just doesn’t cut it in any game. Really polarizing acceleration values and the fact that your walk speed resets when you walk backwards means it’s not that great for precise spacing. It’s actually worse than most characters’ air speed accelerations, which I’ll talk about later.

Smash 4 also lacks burst movement. In Melee, that was wavedashing- for at least 13 frames, you can’t act, but once you go through jumpsquat and airdodge lag, you go into Standing, the best animation state in the game, while still retaining wavedash momentum. In Brawl… it at least had DACUS. Brawl had a different focus on air game, so whenever you were on the ground, it was for burst movement. Smash 4 removed that.

3. Action vs movement

This is why disjoints are powerful. Disjoints and big boxes rule the game in general. With nerfed whiff punishing AND the ability to do fadeback poking with aerials, it’s no wonder.

It’s a bit of a hasty conclusion, though. How about we go through some examples? After all, I keep citing anime games as my traditional FG mentions, and those infamously have really stupid hitboxes.

Guilty Gear.

Everyone has disjoints. If you don’t have disjoints, then even having a hardblockable 50/50 mixup won’t save you from being low tier.

But everyone also has universal counterplay against pokes.

While walking is as good as or maybe even better than Street Fighter, just like Smash, it’s not very relevant if you’re not playing against/as Potemkin because interactions happen at greater distances due to everyone’s forward speed and range being much bigger. However, everyone not only has a Run that they can cancel with normals for free, but they can also use Faultless Defense Break, which completely stops their forward momentum, pulls back their hurtbox and lets them start walking backwards immediately without any lag, which makes it great for faking approaches and whiff punishing.

Everyone except Potemkin can Instant Airdash. This means you can just go above certain pokes and even projectiles at the right spacing. Don't worry about Pot too much, he has his gimmicks.

Everyone has a 6P, or forward + punch. 6Ps are moves that have upper body invincibility. This means that they’ll go through mid pokes clean. The game even teaches you this in one of the Missions. They will obviously lose to low pokes, but those can be beaten with jumping and the aforementioned IAD as well as a fuckton of other things that are matchup specific.

Melty Blood.

Try googling “melty blood hitboxes”. You’ll see pages and pages of pure, uncensored clowning. A fair bit of them are disjointed, but once you play Melty Blood, you’ll realize that they are exceptions and a lot of even the better moves subscribe to the Street Fighter school of attack design and have a big fat hurtbox around them.

C-Kohaku’s jB is one of the best pokes in neutral and C-Nero’s entire air game relies on BIOHAZARDO and they manage to be great despite being covered in hurtboxes.

Furthermore, Melty Blood in general is pretty different. It’s one of the most unique fighting games neutral-wise, even if we take Smash into account. Melty Blood is a game that is very heavily focused on air neutral, and it fulfills that focus by letting everyone use both an airdash and double jump in the same jump arc as well as mostly lacking grounded anti-air moves, meaning that if you want engage someone constantly jumping into the air and you don’t know what to do about it, Guilty Gear instincts won’t help you here, as you have to go up into the air yourself and interact with people there.

UNIst.

Now I don’t like this game and I consider it a fun kusoge at most, but I really can’t not use it as an example. It’s THE stupid hitbox game, and while I have trouble with how they implemented it, the designers still made sure to give people multiple ways to beat their stupid pokes.

Runs are ridiculous. They are FAST, and coupled with the great walk speeds and quick runbrake animations, you can do honest whiff punishment to at least enter a spacing at which bigger pokes become less viable and both players will mixup their close range tools, with you having stage control.

Dashblock. By running with 6A+B and pressing back on the next frame, you can run forward for about 1/1.5 character heights whilst blocking throughout the entire animation starting from frame 2. Your momentum will be halted once you actually do block something, but the fact that you can cover this much distance and stay safe means a lot considering not even Phonon can do mixups on fullscreen.

Instead of real airdashing, UNIst has Assault. Assaults are a bit interesting- they have a similar function to IAD when done on the ground, but they don’t have a set spacing. Instead, the distance of your Assault jump is determined by how far away the opponent is, with the maximum jump distance being around half the screen.

What I’m trying to say is, other games can have disjoints and big hitboxes that are more ridiculous than anything you’ve seen in Smash, but these games end up good(or at least passable in UNIst’s case) because they give players multiple ways to beat them.

Smash 4 lacks both real whiff punishment tools and game-specific tools against it…

Except Shield.

Okay, I went this far without mentioning run up shield. How many points do I get?

Run up shield is one of the common arguments being used against Smash 4 when lack of good movement or overcentralizing options are mentioned, and it’s a bit of a meme at this point. It might have been really good on launch and pre shieldstun patch, but I think it’s a stereotype today considering that more moves are safe due to patches and players becoming better at spacing and grab combos over time. It’s powerful, for sure, cause it’s kind of like UNIst dashblocking- you get to approach and potentially gain stage control while staying safe, except, this is Smash 4, so instead of just staying safe, you also sometimes get to win neutral.

Movement wise, though, run up shield today simply isn’t good enough. To beat Smash 4 pokes on the ground, you need good burst movement, and run up shield simply takes too many frames for the distance it travels to be properly called burst movement like wavedashing or Ultimate run cancelling. In this game, that stuff is character specific- Meta Knight, Samus, Falcon have dash attacks that can be safe at certain distances since they cross up shields, and Sonic everything. Characters like ZSS, Sheik, Lucario, Yoshi etc etc etc have unsafe burst movement. Some just have nothing.

To repel descending/autocancelling pokes, you have to either already be close to your opponent and beat it out before startup(good luck), or you have to do the same thing as them- shorthop, wait until you’re at the peak of your jump, then look. This is the real whiff punish game of Smash 4. You’re not whiff punishing horizontally, you’re trying to invalidate the horizontal aspect of their pokes by putting yourself in a similar position. As much as I sing praises to drifting in the beginning of this section, and in general, this is where drifting is at its best, and it blows. Drift-based footsies games in shorthop distance can be precise, as in, you can control where you land very succinctly, but you have to do that during the entire jump arc. You can’t do precise left-and-right movement in a single jump arc like you can do with 2D FG walking.

This is because of air acceleration. In order to drift forwards or backwards, you have to hold left or right to do that, and every frame of holding a direction, your speed gradually builds up. If you want to change your mind, you have to hold the opposite direction, wait until your “vector” cancels out your forward momentum, then resets to 0 speed, and then builds up speed again in the opposite direction. By controlling your left/right vectors, you can control your exact landing position pretty well, but you can’t suddenly change your mind unless you’re the actual devil and you have 5 jumps and a ton of air speed. In other words, air acceleration makes drifting a commitment. That’s basically the same as creating a Smash game in which you can’t dash and your only movement option is wavedash. though that game exists already it’s called Melee Mewtwo

Whiff punishing still exists under this system, but let’s face it, this is objectively less deep than the fully precise nature of a traditional fighting game or dashdancing. It’s binary.

Most people here would expect me to say that Smash 4 has no ground game. That’s not true. Paradoxically, I consider the shorthop space to be a part of ground game, because it is a space that can be controlled well from a grounded position and entering that space from the ground takes very little time. Even if you don’t agree with that, saying that Smash 4 has no ground game isn’t just hyperbole, it’s straight up untrue.

Smash 4 has tons of ground game because staying on the ground is a good way to challenge the drift mixups, probably by shielding, and you can also Shield, because this is Smash 4 so why not. People like to point to bad movement options as evidence of a lack of a ground game, but what ends up happening is, the ground neutral game is more crucial than ever, and the various flaws with movement and the lack of things just make it more shallow. And as I’ve mentioned before, those flawed mechanics are bad for the game in every way, as they both increase the game’s complexity and reduce its depth.

So, here’s another assumption you can make about me. “this pretentious guy that thinks he can look smart by bringing up REAL fighting games is saying that, Sm4sh would be better off with dashdancing and wavedashing and all that ‘deep’ neutral game stuff? Here’s my 50/50- Waaaaah you’re wrong melee sucks!!!! VS. Waaaah yeah just bring back melee!!!“

Yes, I do think that, I really do think that removing everything Smash 4 did to make itself complex would make it a better game, but it’s more complicated than that.

For example, I would NOT say something like that about Brawl.

You can call Brawl a disaster, a spit in the face to Smash players, the retarded evil twin of Melee, but you can’t deny that it’s different. Brawl has made a lot of terrible decisions, but it just so happens that the game managed to be a completely different game and not just a direct downgrade through these design choices.

Hitstun cancelling is… wrong. There are so many things awful about it that I’d need to write another 15k word document to describe it, but you can’t deny that it changed how hits flow into advantage state. Firstly, since you do so little damage without combos, adaptation is that much harder and consistency is rewarded that much more. This doesn’t make for a fun game to watch, especially when people get to 180% before they’re killed, but it does provide a much subtler variance between advantage states. Since hitstun gets cancelled very early, there’s more variety to how disadvantaged you can be after a hit. You don’t just have hard Juggling or Edgeguarding states, you have softer advantages that still provide the opponent with a lot of options. Advantage state is a lot more segmented. Momentum cancelling gives you more options out of hitstun than just [airdodge] VS [literally anything else] compared to Sm4sh, as different moves cancel horizontal, vertical knockback or both. For instance, the aptly named stall-and-drop aerials like Tink’s Dair can cancel all vertical momentum and potentially get himself in a better position than if he airdodged, but the disadvantages are obvious- it takes quite a bit of time to get down to the ground and you’re going through a bunch of landing lag on block/whiff.

Brawl neutral happens a lot more in the air than it does in Melee. A lot of characters have buffed air speeds and really good autocancels, but what incentivizes air combat even more is zoning. Quite a few characters have great projectile games. Some of them are even well designed like Snake, ZSS and Diddy. Zoning in FGs is done to either hit the opponent or to force them to majorly change their movement, and the focus on projectiles for most top tier characters accomplishes just that, and thus the battle is taken to the air. Other mechanics that forced an emphasis on air neutral include edge cancelling, platform cancels, B reversing/wavebouncing, lagless landing w/ airdodges(I think this is a good mechanic fuk u) and glidiiiiiing.

Brawl is a mess, but it, through a series of both removals and additions shifted its focus from intense footsies-style neutral of Melee to a focus on air neutral that wasn’t ever seen before. Maybe this wasn’t intentional, but it really doesn’t matter. What you see is what you get.

Perhaps Smash 4 is a better game than Brawl, but let’s make something very clear-

All Smash 4 ever did was remove things.

It may have removed bad stuff like the stupid early hitstun cancel windows, tripping, ledgestalling, chaingrabbing etc etc etc, but that’s all it did to become better. It never added any of its own good mechanics that genuinely made the neutral game or disadvantage state more fun to play. It’s made progress on accessibility(?), graphics and character balance, but remember, this post is about the core gameplay. I care little about anything else, and chances are, if you’re a competitive player, the same goes for you, cause after about 10 hours with the game, the core gameplay made up these tiny details is gonna be 90% of your experience with the game.

Smash 4 cut, cut and cut. As if it was trying to avoid giving you Brawl PTSD, it tried to destroy as much as it could of Brawl’s horribleness, but it was also successful in destroying what made Brawl truly special. Through that, the focus shifted.. back to.. ground movement.. again? Except, remember. Smash 4 did nothing but remove. It didn’t play to its new focus and add mechanics that would make this new game more fun, as if it was blind and didn’t actually know where it was going.

So you end up with a game that doesn’t acknowledge its own focus.

Adjusting mechanics to introduce as much complexity and as little depth as possible is one of the worst things you can do as a designer. Second worst, actually. Imagine Dwarf Fortress, with its clunky UI and its cliff-like learning curve, but without the world building, history generation and freeform exploration. Imagine Xenoblade that makes it necessary to use all of its mechanics but doesn’t actually allow you to customise yourself freely. Imagine Team Fortress 2’s classes, but without their individuality and heart. That’s what Smash 4 is to me. A chasm of potential buried behind contrivances. The walls may be made of jelly and cheesecake, but you’re just one ant. Hopelessly eating away at tiny chunks for years and years, five centimeters per second is a dazzling, dreamlike pace, not reality.

The worst thing a game can have is lack of focus. Complexity vs depth is a concept that’s largely tied to fun, but a piece of media can be great without relying on fun. All you have to do is be engaging. You can make an interesting game by doing “objectively” bad decisions that contradict elegant game design if there’s actually a point to it all. Perhaps that doesn’t apply as well to competitive games, cause come on, what kind of narrative are you even trying to push in a fighting game, but perhaps there’s merit to being an interesting fighting game above a well polished boring one, or as Japanese developers put it, omoshiroi.

But you can’t be interesting if you’re just throwing shit at the wall. It doesn’t matter how intentional it is. Focus is king.

Sm4sh never even realised its own focus and it never progressed beyond the bare minimum.

Whether you look at Smash 4 as an uninspired part of a grander series or you observe it is as a standalone experience, made to be enjoyed as is…

This is why Smash 4 is a bad fighting game.

Epilogue

please keep in mind that this is all my opinion and it’s all subjective and it’s okay if youlikesmash4anddontlikeotherstuffs subscribe to my patrecloud at patreon.com/notdamare

Smash 4 as a phenomena was great. We had a rough start, but eventually Smash 4 managed to up the standards and benefit the Smash community as a whole. We had a lot of great tournaments and advancements in tournament organizing and streaming. I myself started taking fighting game theory more seriously when I was still playing Smash 4, and it gave me a competitive drive that I sadly still can’t quite get rid off.

But the game is shit. With that said, I've got a few other things to declare:

1. blah blah blah subjective. There are a few things I didn’t mention that really can’t be categorised as good or bad that can make Smash 4 appealing to you, for instance, the roster and the amount of game knowledge you have to amass to understand to win matchups. I fucking loathe games that make you scour obsessively through matchup information, to me, it’s just busywork that throws knowledge checks at you just to torture you, but if someone says this fits them, I have absolutely nothing to say back to them. You might like ledgetrapping for the same reasons I hate them- medium and uncontrasted risk/reward might feel rewarding for some people because of its perpetual nature.

2. While I did do my research on the game while writing this, I haven’t actually played Smash 4 in a consistent manner for over 1.5 years. I don’t even have the copy of the game anymore, I made it a prize for second place at a melty blood side event. The winner of my Smash 4 copy then money matched me for the ownership of the disk. He lost, so he had to keep the copy :)

3. There are a lot of things I didn’t mention. I mean holy hell, this might not seem much to you while you’re reading this, but from my perspective this thing is fucking giant since I spent so much time on it. Not only did I limit myself to just the core gameplay of the game and cut myself off from talking about the abysmal training mode and character balance(tl;dr I don’t give a shit), but I also limited myself even further by making myself focus on the central point of the write-up, which is “Smash 4 is a bad fighting game because of my vague concept of focus”, and it STILL turned out to be an overgrown Joy mutant.

This post is not meant to be some sort of ridiculously powerful chuuni-style final stake in Smash 4’s coffin. I made it because I had something to say, not because I had something to do. I made this post because I wanted to increase the quality of our discourse on Smash.

I genuinely believe that if this post actually gets popular, it may be picked apart and destroyed, but it will increase the quality of our discussion on fighting game design. Because frankly, you’re all too lazy. Instead of analysing what truly could have gone wrong with the game, you instead shift blame on community issues or things that actually affect your gameplay less than you think it does, and when you actually do talk design, you can’t help yourself, you make broad hot take generalizations and you put yourself in camps that for some reason HAVE to fight.
So, I don’t care if I’m dead wrong about everything.
I’m fine with playing the villain as long as someone is passionate enough to object and dig deeper into this subject.

Fight me.

See my C-Hisui at CEOtaku. (one of them at least)

Shoutouts

feet niggas

the Ys 8 soundtrack

/u/NPPraxis

JimJamFlimFlam

the plantation worker that supplied me with the 500 cups of tea I drink every day

fwara

hi yes play melty

воскресенье, 26 сентября 2021 г.

Project Tension- an open source Megaman Zero style game project made in Godot Engine

воскресенье, 3 ноября 2019 г.

Broken levee: an open source "engine" for Smash clones

вторник, 4 декабря 2018 г.

Smash 4 is a bad fighting game.

воскресенье, 26 сентября 2021 г.