New Sakurai Interview.

UberMario said:

What could they really have done with it? I can't imagine guiding it any other way without completely changing it's attributes, though they could make it so that when you initiate PK Thunder, you can press a direction + B again to have the PKT be set on "auto-pilot" and hit you in the direction you press, that way it wouldn't interfere for people that prefer doing it "manually".

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While I'd save this for the SSB4 thread, I'll post it here.

There would be two versions of PK Thunder and it depends on how long you hold the B button. Do Up+B and immediately release B would do a weaker PK Thunder akin to Fox Fire but with one it. Hold it and you have the old version. The new one helps with Ness and Lucas' perpendicular recovery while the old one provides the zoning options and original strength.

Falco400 said:

As a game is it good? Sure, I'll give it that. But as a sequel to the past two games it fails to deliver in many areas and this is not just limited to a competitive level, it's also in the casual part. So it's not a "very good" Smash Bros game.

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like what? that's kinda vague. and while I accept the melee argument, I would also say it's much better than 64

UberMario said:

TBH Wavedashing wasn't that hard to do anyway, all you have to do is short hop and air dodge diagonally downwards. I didn't think it was coming back in Brawl anyway, and I'm surprsied "Dash-dancing" did. (Even if it was somewhat nerfed by tripping, it's still there)

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I don't feel like you can dashdance with the freedom that you could in SSBM or SSB64. Am I doing it wrong?

Melee's my least favorite, so I'm glad there won't be another one like it.

DarkShadow20 said:

Melee's my least favorite, so I'm glad there won't be another one like it.

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OH god

The wrath.

THE WRATH

*runs and hides*

KumaOso]2. The precision of the tether grabs. I'm glad this was fixed in Brawl.[/quote] The Melee wall grapple is infinitely more useful though. At the very least said:

Melee's my least favorite, so I'm glad there won't be another one like it.

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Could you actually post more than a completely unsupported remark like the rest of the posters in this thread?

Who cares
He's missing out on a masterpiece of a competitive game

While I sympathize with Sakurai's thoughts that he needed to make Brawl more accessible for casual players, that wasn't really necessary as Melee was still a great game for casual players. I remember playing Melee for years "competitively with friends" without even knowing what l-cancelling and wavedashing were. All we did was dash attack and smash (gooooood times).

I don't think anybody thought that melee wasn't good for casual players or anything. Yes, if a casual player went against a competitive player they would get killed, but that's true for 64 and Brawl too.

Wenbobular said:

I don't feel like you can dashdance with the freedom that you could in SSBM or SSB64. Am I doing it wrong?

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The timing is a bit different from personal experience, but it still can be done extremely fast:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPsxZlfcBpw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PscBUdZVnLM&feature=related

Like I said, the dramatic increase in tripping potential from dash dancing makes it less useful than it was in it's predecessors, that doesn't mean it is useless though.

This is kind of disappointing, basically it's saying that future Smash games will be geared towards casual play and lacking all the deep and frantic gameplay we loved from Melee. I hope Smash doesn't turn into the new Mario Kart (if it haven't done it already).

i think something folks are forgetting after reading this, is sakurai said brawl would be the LAST smash game, HE was working on, i remember reading that either on the smash site, or ign (i didn't feel like going through all 3 other pages so sue me if tis already been covered.)



either way, regardless there WILL be new smash games, even if we don't like the path the series is going down, until it stops printing money for nintendo, they will continue to make the games, regardless of whether or not sakurai is on board or not.

UberMario said:

The timing is a bit different from personal experience, but it still can be done extremely fast:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPsxZlfcBpw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PscBUdZVnLM&feature=related

Like I said, the dramatic increase in tripping potential from dash dancing makes it less useful than it was in it's predecessors, that doesn't mean it is useless though.

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Aren't you forced to do some stupidly tight dashdance akin to Sheik's in SSBM but worse?

In SSBM and SSB64 you could change directions at any point in your initial dash, which meant you could actually dash back and forth between 2 places as opposed to just turning around in place a bunch.

@_@

The response to this thread does not surprise me. Let me touch on some things

Smash Bros wont always be "competitive."
The games are competitive because people want them to be. Melee had a big competitive base because people wanted it. Whether or not a game is easy doesn't matter (although easier games tend to be more competitive. Starcraft vs many more complicated RTSs). There is nothing wrong with more people being able to play the game.

This game wasn't hard for casual players
Melee was more assessable than many fighters out there, but it still had some flaws. One was that if you faced backward, you couldn't grab a ledge. You could also reflect items with power shielding. Teching (Ukemi) was harder. Tether recoveries were harder and impractical, it was harder to grab items from a ledge (you had to dodge into it), and the game was less forgiving overall. Melee had a lot of flaws in the assessability area, something Brawl streamlined.

Brawl was only successful because of Melee
Play time
Sales data
(FUN FACT: Melee is the worst selling Smash Brothers game in Japan. You can see where Sakurai is coming from).

Honestly Nintendo not making another smash game would be a terrible loss in the potential they have in making money.

As much as people can dislike Brawl, it sold well, "selling well" translated to nintengrish means "make a sequel."

Wenbobular said:

Aren't you forced to do some stupidly tight dashdance akin to Sheik's in SSBM but worse?

In SSBM and SSB64 you could change directions at any point in your initial dash, which meant you could actually dash back and forth between 2 places as opposed to just turning around in place a bunch.

@_@

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I think that you have about half-a-second to turn around before the normal turning animation gets activated, bit I'd have to go back to check though.

SmashChu said:

Melee was more assessable than many fighters out there, but it still had some flaws. One was that if you faced backward, you couldn't grab a ledge. You could also reflect items with power shielding. Teching (Ukemi) was harder. Tether recoveries were harder and impractical, it was harder to grab items from a ledge (you had to dodge into it), and the game was less forgiving overall. Melee had a lot of flaws in the assessability area, something Brawl streamlined.

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These are not flaws, but gameplay decisions you didn't like.

SmashChu said:

One was that if you faced backward, you couldn't grab a ledge.

Tether recoveries were harder and impractical

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Ok first of all why does it make any sense that you can grab the ledge backward and second of all that's hardly something that makes Melee less accessible to ... anyone

2nd of all, what???? Aren't tether recoveries way better in Melee because you can't just edgehog them for the easy kill?

Excuse me if I'm like ... totally missing something, but what in the world

@UberMario - sounds pretty bleh haha

when I played smash casually (which was back in the day before melee on the 64) I had a blast with friends when we would die for stupid reasons, like not grabbing the ledge cause we were facing the wrong way, or when we would try to recover with links up-b and it would go nowhere. It was still fun, and so is melee on a casual level. my old roommates never got into melee competitively, and even they had fun playing with me.

"Don't go near Steve, he'll do something crazy and you'll die." "YES I got him!" (when I kill myself or get hit with a stupid item lol)

it is STILL fun to this day casually, even though I play it competitively.

The issue doesn't lie between casuals and "professionals", the issue is people want to play at a competitive level, but don't want to put in the work or are not willing to learn.

The attention span of the average game consumer these days is really low. People will play a game for 3 days and never touch it again.

Sakurai is making the game for those people.

SmashChu said:

The response to this thread does not surprise me. Let me touch on some things

Smash Bros wont always be "competitive."
The games are competitive because people want them to be. Melee had a big competitive base because people wanted it. Whether or not a game is easy doesn't matter (although easier games tend to be more competitive. Starcraft vs many more complicated RTSs). There is nothing wrong with more people being able to play the game.

This game wasn't hard for casual players
Melee was more assessable than many fighters out there, but it still had some flaws. One was that if you faced backward, you couldn't grab a ledge. You could also reflect items with power shielding. Teching (Ukemi) was harder. Tether recoveries were harder and impractical, it was harder to grab items from a ledge (you had to dodge into it), and the game was less forgiving overall. Melee had a lot of flaws in the assessability area, something Brawl streamlined.

Brawl was only successful because of Melee
Play time
Sales data
(FUN FACT: Melee is the worst selling Smash Brothers game in Japan. You can see where Sakurai is coming from).

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You're not really making sense to me here. Why won't Smash Bros. always be "competitive"? You're saying Melee had "flaws" in accessibility, but it wasn't hard for casual players? And isn't Brawl only being successful because of Melee the opposite of what you're usually preaching?

GenG said:

These are not flaws, but gameplay decisions you didn't like.

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Melee was more assessable than many fighters out there, but it still had some flaws.

Wenbobular said:

Ok first of all why does it make any sense that you can grab the ledge backward and second of all that's hardly something that makes Melee less accessible to ... anyone

2nd of all, what???? Aren't tether recoveries way better in Melee because you can't just edgehog them for the easy kill?

Excuse me if I'm like ... totally missing something, but what in the world

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1)The problem in Melee was that if you messed up the recovery, you'd face the wrong way and plummet to your death. This was frustrating as it was very easy to do and happened often. Even though it makes more sense in Melee, it was something that made the game harder.

2)Tether recoveries weren't great because you were better of just using your normal recovery most of the time. It also didn't lock on to ledges.

flyinfilipino said:

You're not really making sense to me here. Why won't Smash Bros. always be "competitive"? You're saying Melee had "flaws" in accessibility, but it wasn't hard for casual players? And isn't Brawl only being successful because of Melee the opposite of what you're usually preaching?

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1)You read it wont. Bold is what other people in the thread think
2)Notice that Melee was the worst selling of all of the games in Japan. Obviously, everything was not as OK as we thought
3)Not sure what your getting at, but I will say I never preached that Brawl was successful only because of Melee.

Everyone ignore SmashChu, he just likes to think his opinion = fact.

SmashChu said:

1)The problem in Melee was that if you messed up the recovery, you'd face the wrong way and plummet to your death. This was frustrating as it was very easy to do and happened often. Even though it makes more sense in Melee, it was something that made the game harder.

2)Tether recoveries weren't great because you were better of just using your normal recovery most of the time. It also didn't lock on to ledges.

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Sorry for misunderstanding your previous post.

But I didn't see anything wrong with the one directional recovery in Melee, really. If you messed up, you messed up. Also, as other people said, auto-tethers are a mixed blessing; on the one hand, it's easier to recover with them, but you're much more susceptible to edge hogging if it's your only option.

SmashChu said:

2)Tether recoveries weren't great because you were better of just using your normal recovery most of the time. It also didn't lock on to ledges.

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You were saying something about tether recoveries not being that great in Melee? The fact that it didn't lock onto ledges made it significantly more useful. Again, the grab box could be bigger to accommodate grabbing thin ledges, but otherwise they're so much better than Brawl's.

Tethers are easily worse in Brawl. Their intention is good, but they're unbelievably flawed because they're so pathetically easy to edgeguard which also means characters dependent on it (Ivysaur, ZSS, Olimar) get screwed on their recovery. And what goes to say that characters with both a recovery special and a tether in Brawl are better off using the former? In fact, Link and Samus in Brawl are better off using their recovery special over their tether except in certain circumstances.

Since Sakurai recognizes that Melee was geared towards the hardcore gamer audience, many of the things you are commenting on weren't made to be accesible to begin with.

Also, tether recoveries were more complex to use. They were not intended just for latching on the ledge, but as an aid or mixup to recovery. You also could use them in walls.

And I don't understand why a power shield that reflect things is a bad thing, when it's the least thing it should in exchange for the effort it takes mastering it. They had to make it difficult to pull off constantly to not to overshadow reflectors. It has more sense than in Brawl, where power shielding doesn't reflect.

Important statements above.

Sakurai does have a point in making the game accessible to players, new and old, and it's very important to cater to aesthetics in a videogame, but what's important is that he finds the right balance when creating the game.

And this is just personal opinion, but I'd take character balance over difficult to master controls any day. and I'm not just talking about 1v1s, where MK reigns supreme; I'm also talking about FFAs, where Ike(timed matches) or Falco(stock matches with items) is godlike.

It's just more competitive and probably more fun that way.

Sakurai should consider making Smash 4 with a similar premise to Brawl Minus. Easy to master controls, and everyone is lolomgwtf overpowered.

One of the main flaws in the fighting game genre is the fact a lot of them tend to cater to specific audiences and shut out everyone else.

Some of them aim for the hardcores too much and you'll see as those kinds of series go on, sales starts to decline as they ignore making the game easier to access.

Some of the newer ones like Blazblue have fixed this, but it is a problem for some series.

Falco400 said:

Everyone ignore SmashChu, he just likes to think his opinion = fact.

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I remember somebody said something like this before, but I never quite understood why until now.

@ John

That's an interesting point, that although sometimes we don't think about it, smash has tons and tons of different settings we don't use. Still, MK does dominate FFAs, and is just as annoying to casual gamers. I can say this with some certainty because I do play Brawl on a casual level.

Nobody really thought that Melee or 64 weren't inaccessible for casual gamers at all. There were tons of items in both games for those who wanted them, and in all 3 games you have 4 players, with ffa and team options.

In terms of making the controls "easy to master", for a casual gamer, the controls in all 3 games are equally easy to master. So simplifying the controls by taking away advanced techniques is meaningless. Casual players won't use them anyways, but it's nice to leave them in for competitive players who want them.

SmashChu, your responses are like ... comically terrible.

If you think that recovering the right way is hard ... if you seriously think that's hard you probably don't have the manual dexterity to play either of these games at a competitive level. Almost every character grabs the ledge backward in Melee if they sweetspot anyways. On top of that, almost every character has the ability to turn around during their up-b, so unless you're like ... recovering away from the stage ...

As for the tether argument, you're really just ... way off.

Smash's controls became very easy to learn when the buffering system was introduced to Brawl.

Also, I wasn't aware MK also dominated FFAs... haven't touched up on my FFA facts lately.

Gamedominator06 said:

Could you actually post more than a completely unsupported remark like the rest of the posters in this thread?

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Could you actually not be a complete *******? How was that not an unsupported remark? Sakurai said in that interview that we probably won't see another game like Melee, and I posted that I'm happy with that. I like Melee, it's just my least favorite. I found the other two to be much more fun to play.

John12346 said:

Smash's controls became very easy to learn when the buffering system was introduced to Brawl.

Also, I wasn't aware MK also dominated FFAs... haven't touched up on my FFA facts lately.

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Until you just posted that and I googled it, I never even knew buffering was in Brawl, lol.

I'm not sure if MK dominates "competitive FFAs" (I wonder how that would work), but in my casual experience he does.

Falco400 said:

Everyone ignore SmashChu, he just likes to think his opinion = fact.

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HERE COMES THE DEFENSE FORCE!

flyinfilipino said:

Sorry for misunderstanding your previous post.

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It's all good!

GenG said:

Since Sakurai recognizes that Melee was geared towards the hardcore gamer audience, many of the things you are commenting on weren't made to be accesible to begin with.

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I had created Smash Bros. to be my response to how hardcore-exclusive the fighting game genre had become over the years. But why did I target it so squarely toward people well-versed in videogames, then?

Sakurai admits he may have made a mistake with Melee.

Wenbobular said:

SmashChu, your responses are like ... comically terrible.

If you think that recovering the right way is hard ... if you seriously think that's hard you probably don't have the manual dexterity to play either of these games at a competitive level. Almost every character grabs the ledge backward in Melee if they sweetspot anyways. On top of that, almost every character has the ability to turn around during their up-b, so unless you're like ... recovering away from the stage ...

As for the tether argument, you're really just ... way off.

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Oh no,. I didn't have a problem with it. It was everyone I played against (I even won a local tournament by someone doing it). I saw it so often that I knew there was a problem.

Just how local was this tournament ... ¬_¬

SmashChu said:

1)One was that if you faced backward, you couldn't grab a ledge.
2)You could also reflect items with power shielding.
3)Teching (Ukemi) was harder.
4)Tether recoveries were harder and impractical
5)Melee had a lot of flaws in the assessability area, something Brawl streamlined.

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1) That's not a flaw. That's making some sense.
2) How in the hell is that a flaw? At all? Sounds like you're attacking it because it was in Melee and now in Brawl, instead of having any rational reason for it.
3) Teching was also more useful.
4) There are no words to describe how wrong you are. Tethers were much more useful overall, had greater utility, and made some sense. Not to mention they required more skill, and couldn't be countered by the simple act of hanging from the ledge.

SmashChu said:

Brawl was only successful because of Melee
Play time
Sales data
(FUN FACT: Melee is the worst selling Smash Brothers game in Japan. You can see where Sakurai is coming from).

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FUN FACT: The Gamecube sold one and a half million units less than the N64, and six million units less than the Wii. So far.

...Seriously. My brain still hurts trying to comprehend any rationale for complaining about power shield reflects.

At the very least, I'd hope that this interview would stop any personal attacks on him, after all he admits Melee is "the sharpest game of the series." And the casual audience really does make up almost all players, though nobody seems to acknowledge it.

I don't think he had to tone it down as much as he did, but despite the fact that casual players enjoyed the last game, it really is a lot more difficult for a casual player to control his character in Melee than Brawl.

Sakurai is really in the right here. At the end of the day, a game's competitive scene is largely a product of mass popularity, and as a developer, you really don't want to make your game niche.

He was even further right in that the easiest way to make the game more accessible while sacrificing as little as possible was taking an axe to the manual dexterity tests in the game. Removing the need to press a shield button after landing every non-G&W aerial and adding that buffer window really didn't hurt depth at all, but they greatly improved accessibility. Making the game as a whole slower was really not necessary beyond the obvious balance implication that the fastest characters are definitely not entitled to be automatically top tier, and I think on some level the development team just didn't give people enough credit for their ability to handle speed (stuff like Lucas/Ivysaur usmash are only useful moves if you don't give people credit at all). It's not really that bad though; Brawl's years of legitimate tournament success show us that it definitely plays out well.

A whole lot of smart design for competitive play went into all sorts of corners for the game (basically all original content adds such incredible diversity to the game), and Brawl really does work very well. The only real problems it has are a few too many "dumb" abuses like infinites and whatnot, ledge play being a bit too powerful, and a few characters who are a little off in balance. None of these issues can really be blamed on making the game accessible, and indeed all of them have counterparts in Melee. Sheik's chaingrab is really just as bad as anything in Brawl like DDD's chaingrab, there's ledge stalling in Melee it's just harder so fewer people bothered (though I don't think it's actually worse, just harder), and Melee has an even worse case of uselessly bad characters at the bottom of the tier list in exchange for having a more ambiguous top tier. The accessibility perhaps highlighted it; most people never really realized these issues in Melee. I mean, I think we all saw countless arguments about how great Roy was which really proved how many people just didn't get the game at all. Brawl was more accessible so even many of the lower skill players were picking up on stuff like Meta Knight being pretty good or being able to execute the stupid stuff that just totally ruins certain match-ups. The effect, of course, is much more widespread in terms of fall-out since when only the better players are picking up on poorly balanced and polished stuff and exploiting it, it kinda looks the same as them just being better than the other players which means the better players don't complain and the worse players do complain but basically are saying that being good at the game is cheap which is of course laughable. Maybe that means, perversely, that accessible games need to have higher standards than less accessible games in terms of balance and polish since more people will be affected by mistakes in those areas and the mistakes will be more obvious. It's an interesting case study.

I look forward to any Smash 4 in any case. I've been quite fond of Brawl, I support the design directions Sakurai chose, and I think he really does understand most of what is required to make an even better game.

The one thing they did improve on tethers is their zair's usefulness as an attack. Link's zair while shorter than his Melee one, does more damage and has some nice follow-ups.

But in terms of recovery, Melee tether's > Brawl tether, in that regard.

Also guys, lets tone down on the insults, from both sides.

@AA: I love your post. <3

I can almost feel the level of exhaustion in his words Sakurai felt after making melee...

I'm not one to theory craft on future development of smash since its any ones guess. They can do whatevea it takes to make it successful. And either learn or die trying to embody an idea that may not work.

The problem with Brawl was not so much with speed, but with options. Cutting out many options and simplifying others too much. It's like he intenteded the game to be played in a single, definite way, removing all that deviated from that idea, and that, from the point of view of a videogame, isn't a positive thing.

Smash 64 is as slow as Brawl, but despite its famous accesability, it still had compelling game mechanics.

Wenbobular said:

If you think that recovering the right way is hard ... if you seriously think that's hard you probably don't have the manual dexterity to play either of these games at a competitive level. Almost every character grabs the ledge backward in Melee if they sweetspot anyways.

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Why are people who are recovering inclined to turn away from the ledge in the first place?