so why did no one really care for brawl as much as melee?

[emporornapoleon]

i stopped playing this series after melee, but i was under the impression that brawl never resonated with players as much and didn't have much of a competitive scene that still cares about it to this day. what happened with brawl?

[SkyDragon]

It was floatier,
there was random tripping when dashing, moves had more lag because you couldn't L-cancel,
the few moves that weren't laggy were overpowered like metaknight's down air and up air,
combos were scarce aside from stuff like metaknight uair uair uair or chain throws (ie down throw x10 with falco),
you could air dodge out of hit stun and live forever, and matches would devolve to spacing camp fests with safe moves that ended up in time outs a lot of the time.

Sorry for the run on sentence.

Anyway, there's a mod of it called project M that's pretty popular that makes it very similar to melee. Smash 4 and Smash Ultimate have had similar mods but they never gained P.M's popularity because the base game wasn't as crappy.

Happy new year!

[I REALLY HATE POKEMON!]

It was floatier,
there was random tripping when dashing, moves had more lag because you couldn't L-cancel,
the few moves that weren't laggy were overpowered like metaknight's down air and up air,
combos were scarce aside from stuff like metaknight uair uair uair or chain throws (ie down throw x10 with falco),
you could air dodge out of hit stun and live forever, and matches would devolve to spacing camp fests with safe moves that ended up in time outs a lot of the time.

Sorry for the run on sentence.

Anyway, there's a mod of it called project M that's pretty popular that makes it very similar to melee. Smash 4 and Smash Ultimate have had similar mods but they never gained P.M's popularity because the base game wasn't as crappy.

Happy new year!

You covered just about everything perfectly, also the online was almost unusable due to how laggy it was.

[CaptHayfever]

Short version from my perspective: All the glitch-based techs people used in Melee were removed.

And remember, "I'm-a Luigi, number one!"

[SkyDragon]

L-cancel and wavedash were intentional in melee.

L-cancel was N64 tech that got intentionally kept in a different engine, but nerfed to half the lag instead of removing all of it. You could make an argument it was a glitch if all the lag was removed, or a set number of frames, but a fraction like half has to be hard coded because there is 2 different get up animations for every aerial landing for l canceled and non lcanceled version, in n64 if you zcancel, you just get normal landing animation, in melee it's a different number of frames for every aerial move.

Wavedash frames you can see in debug menu as "landfallspecial". The melee techs were most likely in early alpha builds of brawl but got removed because sakurai wanted the game to be a more casual party game with no high skill ceiling easter eggs (a parallel would be snaking in mario kart, that was hard coded to be kept across many different game engines). I mean he put in random tripping.

[I REALLY HATE POKEMON!]

^ True. Also, I forget which, but at least one of those techniques (but possibly both) for either 64 or Melee were specifically mentioned on the official website, but it may only have been in Japanese. I distinctly remember someone settled a sebate about this misconception by linking to it, long ago.

[SkyDragon]

What's also funny is that smash 64 and melee both had short development cycles, in comparison, brawl's was very long. I get that some of the time went into implementing more single player modes like subspace emissary, stage builder, and online, but they didn't have to go out of their way to ruin the game. I think brawl would be better if they didn't take literal years in play testing tripping and making combos not work to promote "come back" mechanics akin to blue shell in Mario Kart where the person who counter attacks after getting hit can counter hit with a stronger move.

[I REALLY HATE POKEMON!]

I'll never understand why a game with so many customizable options for play didn't let you turn off tripping and/or feature normal/casual mode. Normal where it would play like Meleem and then be the mess Brawl was in casual. It would've saved them a lot of time and effort, and turned it into a real classic.

Nintendo seemed to have had such an averse reaction to Melee catching in as an eSport that they went so far in the other direction that it became a detriment to Brawl.

I understand wanting to balance the game for casuals, but it's a fake problem that never actually existed except in theory. Everybody loved Melee, casuals too. You never hear anybody complain about it except in the abstract.

[SkyDragon]

Developers and/or directors have blind spots sometimes. Items off completely wasn't an option in mario kart til like MK 8 or something, right?

Each iteration after brawl had a steady improvement in what brawl's "vision" was. Smash ultimate has a major flaw - very high input lag, but other than that, it's pretty decent, and popular competitively. Most people seem to like buffer frames at the expense of input lag, that exists in most fighting games. I don't personally agree with it, but I can't argue with what seems to work for most people in lowering the execution barrier.

[I REALLY HATE POKEMON!]

There's high input lag in SSBU? I always thought it feels off compared to Melee and even SSB4, maybe that's why? Or was that present in SSB4 too?

[SkyDragon]

It has the highest of all the smash games with an average of 98ms. Smash 64 and melee both have 59 (although melee does have a higher standard deviation, which can cause polling issues sometimes). Brawl is the 2nd highest (another reason people hate it), followed by smash 4. Smash 3ds is almost as fast as melee and smash 64 at 61ms.

Source:

[I REALLY HATE POKEMON!]

Hm, maybe that's why SSB3DS was my my second favorite. Interesting.