So yeah, I've been doing some pondering latley, and something that has come up alot over the past few years whenever the "Brawl vs Melee" debate comes up. Specifically this one complaint I see time and time again:
"Brawl sucks because it doesnt have combos" and/or "Melee has combos, so it's much deeper".
I never really thought much of it before, as I saw it as more of a thng of preferance (as there -are- combos in Brawl, just not as spectacular as they apparently are in melee). But now that I've given it some thought, why exactly do combos "make" a fighter?
In my opinion, a combo is simply a prolonged string of hits, be it a tilt lock or a continuous string of different moves you managed to get together. But there is a limit to almost all combos: the engine. The game's engine, specifically the physics engine, is what allows characters to pull off these strings, based on how characters get hit and get knocked around/etc (depending on the game) and become vulnerable enough to be hit again before they recover.
Right away this should raise a red flag about the way most "true fighters" work. Based on the way combos happen, to me it seems as if you arent really fighting your opponent, but rather the engine as you attempt to follow up your inputs on your "dummy", since that guy is locked in hitstun/whatever, and cant really do **** until the combo cannot be continued/he dies/etc. How is that a "fighting" game when you are barely going toe to toe with your adversary? Sure, there is fighting at the start, but thats all to set up that key move that usually starts up that string, and then **** ensues. Thats fighting your opponent for 10% of the match, then the actual game the other 90% as you follow up the physics until you cant...then go back to square one of hitting that set-up.
I got into fighters for the competition, not to show off how well I can abuse a game engine. Which leads me to another thing that irks me about combo-centric fighters: inevitabley, the "combo-*****" characters are the bar-none best choices. By that, I mean that in any given fighter, 9/10 times the best character is the fast little guy who can zip around, and hit you once and begin a stupidly good chain of attacks that cause massive damage, then either zip out and restart that till you die, or whatever else is benifical in that game. Again, in my opinion these characters arent even designed to be "good" usually. By design, they are usually balanced out by being very frail with either low weight/health, or frailty to combos themselves. However, that is horribly off-set by the fact that these are the characters that abuse the physics the best, so in turn they -are- the best as the best players are the ones that can abuse the egine best with the best abuser of the engine from the roster.
Not to start this debate again, but look at the top tier in Melee and Brawl. In melee, the combo-centric one of the two, the top characters consist of the characters that abuse the game's engine the best, and all have essentially the same playstyle with slight variation: Fox and Falco are the silly-fast traditional combo-whores, Shiek is similar, but with less "tricks" and more "shennanigans" (aka CGs and locks, etc), Marth is similar to them, but slightly slower (however he makes up for this with just sheer range), and Jiggs is a unique case in that she has the silly combos like Fox/Falco/Shiek do (as well as a great finisher) as well as the excellent gimping power Marth has (just without the range). However, all these can be kinda clumped into "rushdown", aka the fighting game archetype I described above as the little guy who can zip in, do a ton of damage/etc in a combo, and be relativley safe as long as they reliably land the first hit.
Now lets look at the top 5 in Brawl, which is regarded as having very little combo-centric properties. We have MK, who ironically seems to be built for the role of the combo-*****, but is best for a whole other slew of reasons (mainly that everythign he does is safe and that he has the best options for like everything), Snake is a slow and strong fighter with stage control elements and an ability to tank damage like nobody else can. Right away that deviates from the "standard" in that a top-tier isnt a super-fast combo character (that isnt broken...arguably). Diddy is a whole other can of worms as he is essentially one big mindgame as his banannas force situations which he takes advantage of, Falco this time around plays out like more of a ranged fighter who has some combos, but then mainly punishes with his epic laser, and finally the ICs have a totally unique 2in1 style, as well as a terrifying grab-focus.
Looking at the two we have Melee with it's best characters as I've described: 5 "combo-whores" who are excellent at abusing the physics moreso than the other fighters, and Brawl with a comparitivley much more varied top tier with 5 different-enough playstyles (esp with Snake) to get a comparison here.
Don't get me wrong, combos can be fun as hell to do/watch, and Brawl has a bunch of issues in it's own right to offset what I've said about Melee. It's just that from what I've experienced, combo-based fighters kinda suck the spirit out of fighting games, especially those with varied rosters, as they only provide buffers for the players to weed out before they find the combo-whores of the game and **** with them. I mean, would Snake even be this good if Brawl kept melee's physics, or he would just be more combo-fodder for Fox?
