How will a previously maligned community deal with a new iteration of the Smash Bros. series?
It is generally agreed upon that the competitive nature of Super Smash Bros. is a beautiful accident. There is no doubt the games are primarily intended for 4 player, free for all, item flinging casual fun. You can’t help looking at the cartoony graphics and the colourful roster of classic characters and think that the series must be meant as party games. Yet within the Smash Bros. series there have always been hints at something a little deeper. The first game in the series, for the N64, had something called Z-cancelling where if the Z button was pressed during a certain period then all lag after a character performed a non-special aerial move would be removed. This feature, once mastered, allowed players to effortlessly chain hits into one another. This is just one example of many techniques that made Super Smash Bros. have complexity that defied it’s simple, cartoony appearance.
With the next installment of the series, things got even crazier. Super Smash Bros Melee for the Nintendo Gamecube was something of a phenomenon as far as competitive gaming was concerned. Melee was and still is: fast, technical and requires a large amount of inputs to play at the highest level. Perhaps the easiest way to demonstrate this is with this video. The game is so unexpectedly suited for competitive play it has been featured at the Evolution series alongside titles like Street Fighter and Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom. The game featured a version of Z-cancelling (now L-canceling) and many other techniques such as the infamous wavedashing and wavelanding. The presence of these techniques have courted much controversy in the past, indeed the easiest way to start a video game flame war on the interest is probably to incite an argument over the existence of wavedashing.
Whilst the technique is not particularly difficult to perform and is near useless unless you know how to use it, it has become a scapegoat for those against the competitive side of Smash Bros. Arguments on whether wavedashing is a ‘glitch’ or not still rage today, some 13 years after the game’s North American release. This meant that the competitive Smash Bros. community was shunned by casual players of the same games, as well as by the players of the more traditional fighting games like Street Fighter.
Super Smash Bros. Brawl then proceeded to split the already maligned community in two. The game did away with many of the deeper elements that were previously contained in the Smash Bros. series. This was a deliberate decision by creator Masahiro Sakurai, who would later reflect that Melee was just “too difficult”. He sought to increase the accessibility of the series and in doing so created a hostile relationship between himself and the competitive community. Many blamed Sakurai for Brawl’s tripping mechanic, calling it a deliberate attempt to sabotage competitive Smash Bros.
However with the new game, Nintendo seem to have finally realised the potential that utilising the competitive market might be a good idea. They are beginning to embrace the competitive community. This started with the E3 Smash Invitational, where top players were invited to play the new Smash Bros. game under quasi-tournament settings. Furthermore Nintendo actually sponsored Evolution 2014, which featured Super Smash Bros. Melee in its line-up. Now Nintendo are hosting another tournament for the 3DS version of the game at the San Diego Comic Con, the whole event is being streamed from their Twitch page. Like the Smash Invitational, later parts of the tournament will be played 1 vs 1 with no items, in obvious pandering to the competitive community. How will this continue going forward? What happens if the community react negatively to the new game like they did with Brawl? Will Nintendo keep hosting and sponsoring tournament? The relationship between Nintendo and the competitive Smash Bros. community could either be mutually beneficially or disastrous for both parties. The only thing to do is wait and see.
