Blake Force (me):
I didn't want a rehash of Melee either, I wanted a new game. There's plenty of ways that Brawl could have (and has) been made into a much better game. There's a difference between changing the gameplay and making it worse than the previous titles. Sakurai's planning for Brawl was self-defeating. He tried to take a game that was already liked by casuals and competitive alike and removed the competitive players out of the picture. He tried to take a genre that by its nature was competitive and seeked to make it uncompetitive.
As a result, he ended up creating a game whose problems could only be overlooked by those who weren't big fans of the series, this is a big issue. Those who wanted to play Smash consistently and expected a level of improvement simply wouldn't have it in this game. Allowing players to grow more skilled with experience is a big part in both satisfaction and replayability, Sakurai unfortunately didn't realize that this was the most important feature in replay value.
This is not true, Brawl Minus is in fact a CASUAL pandering mod that makes the game more like Sakurai's intentions and less like its execution. It's one of the few mods that is widely accepted as being superior to the original game (even by Melee players). Despite its casual pandering, the game has far more depth than the original game, and is widely considered to even be better in casual play.
A fighting game at its core is meant to be competitive. It is ideally meant to be a challenge where the more skilled player wins, the only thing Smash did differently was allowed luck to play a factor. The fact that Sakurai tried to deviate from these core concepts is precisely why Brawl is such a terrible game.
Brawl Minus focused on things that would take people's mind off of the competition (and the seriousness of it) rather than basing the whole game around avoiding it. It's perfectly possible to allow a game to be competitive, have a skilled player win, and not get so worked up over it.
Brawl Minus' unpredictability is in the control of the players, and it always is in the favour of the players, meaning when a new player does witness something unexpected they aren't frustrated by it, while techniques such as prat falling (tripping) are the bad kind of random factors that frustrate players because the game decided to take away their victory in a way that many would consider undeserved.
Also Brawl Minus has both balanced characters and balanced mechanics, the game is much more enjoyable when you need to rely on your variety of defensive techniques rather than use them as a crutch. In Brawl Minus, players who do well are likely to feel a greater sense of satisfaction when they manage to succeed. Everytime they avoid an attack they can feel satisfied knowing that they've dodged something dangerous, and everytime a player succeeds in attacking their opponent they feel a sense of pride and a sense of encouragement to continue attacking for a combo. This leads to greater satisfaction.
In Brawl's case it does everything it can to try and punish players, which in turn leads to players becoming frustrated and wanting to leave the game. This is most prominent with the poor character balance, tripping, and the lack of hitstun.
Everytime a player is punished in a video game, he or she must have an understanding of why he or she has been punished. In Brawl there is no such reasoning, tripping can happen at any moment, you can get hurt by trying to attack, and you can get utterly dominated even when you're using all of your character options effectively.
If the skinner box principle is to be believed, then Brawl basically wants you to stand around and defend everything that comes your way, and not take advantage of everything that is given to you.
This is why every competitive player always seems to be fighting the game, it's analogous to trying to swim against a current, and in someways even literally. The game's defensive nature, loads of random factors, and the lack of hitstun is basically the game telling you to stop trying to take matters into your own hands.
Here's what GigaRaver (another poster) had to say about this
Clearly it is not Sakurai's vision, nor does Sakurai exercise the foresight to envision even close to the level of play that the Smash games reach.
...Okay, maybe he has some foresight, but that's before any game-changing exploits are discovered.
HOWEVER... I'm sure we all know inside that Smash is not designed to cater to people who are gonna analyze every little bit and practice with the intention of succeeding over everyone else. Smash is designed for good times. This is clear.
The problem arises when the definition of "a good time" is interpreted in a strict manner and the game's direction veers way too far into molding the core of the game around a strict interpretation. This is the issue people have with Brawl; It strictly controls elements of the core game so that it can't veer away from the strict rules enforced by the creator. Any attempt to do so is met with counteractive results.
Heck... the very fact that the game Restricts is something I have a huge beef with. What I loved about Melee was the sheer amount of options available, not just in the menus and within each character, but through a core game that was extremely loose and liberal yet very easily controlled and open-ended. It's exactly this that allowed maximum enjoyment for both casuals and competitive players AND the semi-competitive players who enjoyed both worlds in varying amounts.
Brawl is not Melee in this manner, and that's a big problem. Forget the competitive-specific aspects of Melee.
> Brawl is not loose. Defensive, campy play reigns supreme. Makes an offense-loving player like me very frustrated.
> Brawl is not liberal. The sheer amount of randomness placed on the game actually restricts imaginative play and thus hinders casual play. Anybody up for 20 rounds of Stand Still and Taunt? :D
> Brawl is not easily controlled. While customizable controls IS great, the actual controlling of the character feels less tight than Melee. Constant move buffering doesn't help either. NOR DOES TRIPPING!!
> Brawl is not nearly as open-ended. Anybody remember how fun Melee Break the Targets was? Oh the stages, the records, the extra rules.... Anybody remember how fun Brawl BtT was? Five stages. Yay. Now how about online?
Personally, I do not think Brawl is a bad game. It's a good game for sure. But it's the worst of the three in my eyes, and it needs not a new direction as much as it needs guidance from somebody who doesn't take the saying "It's not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game" and tries turning it into an actual video game.
"And while I still prefer Brawl both in terms of content and gameplay style, the medium ground is what we're looking for. Am I in the ballpark here?"
Pretty much. And I can name just one area that would drastically push the game towards that coveted middle ground: Actually viable characters.
The days of a tier list that ranges from "Extremely Good" to "Extremely Poor" needs to come to an end. There's a reason Blake Force brings up Brawl Minus, and it greatly has to do with the characters. They were edited and re-designed with "near-brokenness" in mind, but another way to put it is to make as many abilities on a character exciting, unique and and worth using as possible. The design philosophy revolved greatly around "If everyone is broken, nobody is".
The result is a roster full of characters players want to mess with just to see what crazy stuff there is AND more viable options so that no character ends up left behind, unable to catch up, or far outpacing anyone else. It's a solid mixture of depth and fun. Most importantly though, the characters are really the life-blood of the game. The player experiences the game through the players. However many or few modes there are, the game can only become better when the player's provided many options.
Brawl falters here in a big way by failing to address proper character viability. We have overbearing characters like Meta Knight and characters with inexplicable odd advantages such as Snake's HUGE hitboxes. We do have some generally fun and solid characters like Diddy and Olimar and Lucario. And then we have characters like Ganondorf who has to work sooo hard to just to keep pace with other characters.
I understand the idea is to just have fun, but the lack of attention-to-detail towards characters and their options is more of a hindrance to fun than anything. If your preferred character is solid all around or has overwhelmingly good options, lucky you. Unfortunately for the other people, the game ultimately becomes biased towards players with the better characters. Sakurai wanted results to falter, but the characters are the life-blood of the game, and unless the game plays itself for the player (and it almost does at times...), the players will still retain control over their destiny. If the player decides to seek anything other than "pure mindless fun", of which the game clearly isn't designed for, they may end up relying on faulty options.
HURGH... that's a lot. But what I'm getting at is that Brawl could have been a LOT better for both sides of the fan base simply by concentrating on making sure every character had enough viable options. Results would be less predictable this way.