Sakurai: players “gave up on Melee because it’s too technical", won't focus too much on competitive

[Brainfreeze]

There's nothing more frustrating on ResetEra than coming into threads like this with people who clearly no little-to-nothing about the subject (in this case, competitive Melee) but speaking confidently about the subject as if they know better.

Competitive Melee doesn't require "broken controllers" or "exploits" to work, it's fun and competitive because of its core design, which allows for fluid movement, while featuring strong offensive and defensive options that keeps the game constantly engaging for both players. This game is already adding back in directional air dodging, new mechanics like dash-canceling, and is making old tactics easier, like short-hop aerial. Was any casual player who watched the E3 direct actually mad or upset when they saw these things talked about in the gameplay section? Or are some people just mad over what you assume this game would look like if it was more competitive? Because, spoilers, it's basically just more stuff like they showed in that direct.

I respect Sakurai a lot, and I enjoy every Smash game, but there's a lot of misinformation that goes around here about Melee and it can be very frustrating. Melee design and Smash Ultimate design are not at odds with each other, there's just artificial boundaries added to keep Ultimate from reaching the depth that Melee has, and they could easily be removed without alienating a single casual player. Online play isn't excuse, they should just make a good online that properly divides players (like, you know, literally every online competitive game ever made).

I'm going to play and enjoy Ultimate, but it's a shame that, despite all the advances we've seen, there's still a part of Sakurai that seems to resent Melee players and wants to keep future games from satisfying people who enjoy fighting games.

 

[Deleted member 27471]

Because Smash without items on actually has an extreme amount of competitive depth underlying it, and items/random stage hazard makes it less about skill and more about pure luck. Also, there are no character restrictions; even the infamous Meta Knight "ban" didn't take.

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From the little I played back in the day aren't items random, making it equal to all players. A good player can use and or avoid item usedfrom other players if they're good enough. This makes it sound that they want it to be more of a known variable, and not someone who is getting trounced to pick up an item last minute allowing for an advantage.

Edit

Sounds like people pretty much said this. I guess thsys understandable, I was just thinking that could be part of the competition just as much as randomness is part of battle royale.

 

[TheEchosOfTheCyborg]

Has there EVER been a case of advanced techniques "ruining" fighting games for casuals?

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Yep, it's one of the reasons Capcom gives for why Street Fighter 3 struggled so much back in the day: https://www.eventhubs.com/news/2015...we-were-making-game-was-too-hard-people-play/

Same with the 3D era Mortal Kombat games, it's why the moved back to the more simpler move sets for MK9 and the series sky rocketed in resurrected success with both 9, X and the Injustice games.

 

[LightEntite]

Sounds much more interesting than regular boxing

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maybe

except it's no longer boxing

 

[not_swift]

Sounds much more interesting than regular boxing

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Items don't promote interesting competitive play, but they are sure are fun when I play smash with my friends. I love the craziest stages, with items on.

 

[J_ToSaveTheDay]

100% agree. I love spectating Melee competitive because of the high skill ceiling, but I almost exclusively play the latest Smash when I actually want to go boot a game up and start playing.

Anecdotal, but my friends and I generally love to play Smash together, and none of us have touched Melee since the lead-up to Brawl.

I still admire and respect the dedication of the Melee competitive base, but I do feel like the sales figures of Brawl and 4 indicate that the vast majority of Smash enthusiasts have moved on, and I'd argue that I've personally always been satisfied with the move. Things like Brawl's prat falls were annoying and questionable, but they didn't bother me enough to make me opt back for Melee over it, and I moved onto 4 full time after that came out, too.

 

[Edge]

Whenever we play they remove items, restrict what charecters we could be and restrict the maps. It makes the game completely unfun.

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Unpopular opinion, but I don't understand it either, where is the fun with playing without items or on the awful Omega stages? God I hate it when people only want to play on Omega stages, it's so boring.

 

[tapedeck]

I don't think players moved on because melee was too technical. I think they moved on because the new game had more characters, more stages, etc, etc and because, you know, it was the newest game. The same reason most newer games in a series get more play than the older games.

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Came to post this.

The bottom line is Smash 5 could have every single advanced mechanic Melee does (and even more) and no casual players would know the difference..but advanced players would..they'd get the best of both worlds, new game with the competitive play they want.

There is absolutely zero downside to making Melee's depth available in Smash 5..and I don't even care about Melee.

 

[sibarraz]

Why is that Melee can lead you to have tendinitis?

 

[Spinluck]

Sakurai's disdain for the competitive scene is well known at this point, I think you can safely say.

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Disdain? Where?

 

[PlanetSmasher]

Came to post this.

The bottom line is Smash 5 could have every single advanced mechanic Melee does (and even more) and no casual players would know the difference..but advanced players would..they'd get the best of both worlds, new game with the competitive play they want.

There is absolutely zero downside to making Melee's depth available in Smash 5..and I don't even care about Melee.

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Casual players would still run into and get completely obliterated by people doing shit like wavedashing online and have no idea how to counter it. That breaks the fun factor of the game if 33% of the time you run into someone who's functionally invincible and can just destroy you.

 

[Dark Knight]

After high school I got to an age where I started preferring fun in my fighting games compared to hardcore competition and rivalry, so I agree. That's why Brawl was my favorite.

 

[Patapuf]

YUP. This is the core issue. Snaking ruined MKDS because the people who could do it completely and utterly obliterated the people who couldn't and it shattered the game balance and made the game pointless to even play online.

Unintended glitch mechanics should never define or dominate a game's core gameplay loop. Mercifully we live in an age of patches and fixes nowadays.

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Never is a strong word. Tons of glitches resulted in awesome mechanics (for example: Rocket jumps) while others didn't. It's really up to the dev to determine what is what.

 

[ShinobiBk]

He can focus on the competitive scene when they've proven they're capable of basic human hygiene. Unfortunately, anyone who's been to some local tourneys can tell you they haven't. As such their opinion as adults can't be taken too seriously.


In reality, the percentage of people who play Smash competitive is much smaller in comparison to other fighters. This is a game that literally sells multiples of just every other fighting game and yet the competitive numbers are still not the biggest

 

[NotLiquid]

From the little I played back in the day aren't items random, making it equal to all players. A good player can use and or avoid item usedfrom other players if they're good enough. This makes it sound that they want it to be more of a known variable, and not someone who is getting trounced to pick up an item last minute allowing for an advantage.

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The rate at which they pop up is random, where they appear is random, and what item appears is random.

Imagine you're at EVO grand finals and you have a 120% lead on your opponent. Suddenly thanks to RNG a Gust Bellows spawns right next to your opponent, and this happens.



It's fun in a casual environment, but if you're playing competitively? That would be terrible.

 

[Deleted member 24907]

Sakurai's disdain for the competitive scene is well known at this point, I think you can safely say.

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Not at the present, no. I think he had open disdain for it during the Brawl days but he's definitely come around to the idea of being aware of the competitive scene. Hell, he was at the Smash Ultimate invitational this E3 and was watching the tournament-level players go at it.

 

[Rutger]

I'm just amused or annoyed (depending on the mood) when some competitive players (not all) act like the games are and should be designed for them first and foremost, and anything that's removed is a crime against the series or something. If you're going to have, say, wavedashing in the game, it definitely shouldn't be implemented in a way that a) requires ridiculous levels of dexterity, b) could potentially give you some health problems, c) makes you incapable of standing toe-to-toe with other skilled players unless you master it. Again, just like snaking in MK DS.

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The reality is that people want to see more games like the ones they enjoy.
This isn't unique to Smash/competitive games, it's not strange for someone to want more games like Super Metroid and less like Other M, of course that's an extreme example but the idea is similar.

Any Melee player worth listening to isn't going to tell you not to enjoy your game, but if there's a chance for a new game naturally they will want something more like what they love.

 

[Lady Bow]

Why is that Melee can lead you to have tendinitis?

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It pretty much comes down to the Gamecube controller being unergonimc as fuck for your hands and high level Fox/Falco play requiring a huge amount of inputs in a short amount of time, moment to moment. I've never heard of a Melee Samus or Ganondorf player getting tendinitis, just Fox players mainly.

 

[RLCC14]

That's no reason to get rid of running momentum. Smash can appeal to all audiences pretty much equally without any hard compromises in gameplay.

 

[tapedeck]

Casual players would still run into and get completely obliterated by people doing shit like wavedashing online and have no idea how to counter it. That breaks the fun factor of the game if 33% of the time you run into someone who's functionally invincible and can just destroy you.

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Welcome to every competitive online game ever.

Don't like it, play casual matches online or with friends who don't care about wavedashing..90% of people playing Smash online won't be using advanced tech anyhow.

 

[Mark1]

It's consideration for the non competitive audience, the biggestom one, not disdain for the other.

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This.

Sakurai does not dislike the competitive scene, he just prefers to have future Smash games be more accessible all the while still engaging for more hardcore players.

Melee got way too competitive over the years, it is almost impossible to catch up these days. Brawl flew in the exact opposite direction and was too casual focused.

I did not know people were experiencing tendonitis playing Melee though. That is not good

 

[PlanetSmasher]

Welcome to every competitive online game ever.

Don't like it, play casual matches online or with friends who don't care about wavedashing..90% of people playing Smash online won't be using advanced tech anyhow.

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There's a difference between "people who are better than you" and "people who are quite literally breaking the core mechanics of the game to give themselves a competitive advantage".

Snaking was a glitch people exploited to give themselves an even wider skill gap between themselves and casual players. Wavedashing is the same shit.

 

[Shiranui93]

I've never seen anyone complaining that Melee was too technical, too fast or too difficult back in the day. Everyone loved it. Why did they move away from Melee-gameplay in the first place?

Hell, just give us an option to switch between the intended Smash 5 and Melee-gameplay and everyone's happy.

 

[VariantX]

Came to post this.

The bottom line is Smash 5 could have every single advanced mechanic Melee does (and even more) and no casual players would know the difference..but advanced players would..they'd get the best of both worlds, new game with the competitive play they want.

There is absolutely zero downside to making Melee's depth available in Smash 5..and I don't even care about Melee.

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If there were no online..yes. But there is online, and it would make casuals not even want to touch online.

 

[Spinluck]

I mean let's be honest. The competitive Smash scene is like if you had competitive Charades. Can you make it competitive? Yes, but at the end of the day it's a party game that a bunch of kids stripped down to turn into a "fighter" and constantly try to tell people it's a legit part of the FGC. Then the creator comes every few years to remind people it's not a competitive fighting game and people get upset. I once had a guy I know get upset and threaten to fight me because I told him Sakurai said his game is not a fighting game. The guy said Sakurai is an idiot and doesn't know what he's talking about. When we've gotten to the point that people are literally ignoring what the creator of the game says to fit their devices, we've gone too far.

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Well the games are fighters, but I agree with Sakurai. From a designers standpoint it makes sense. People just refuse to detach themselves emotionally from Melee and admit a lot of it was by accident. Brawl was still to me a step in the wrong direction and a huge FU, but things are looking great with Ultimate.

I feel like Sakurai has been trying to find the perfect middle ground since Melee, and I hope he nails it. Every Smash has been fun for me to learn except maybe Brawl BC I peaked to quickly in that game and it hilariously unbalanced.

 

[linko9]

Kind of a weird argument. On the one hand, he says he doesn't think too much about the competitive scene. But then his justification for not making the game too "technical" is that people in the competitive scene got tendonitis. Which is it? Obviously no one who's not at that high level is going to be bothered by "highly technical" stuff that they won't even know about, and they certainly won't be getting tendonitis.

 

[Lady Bow]

There's a difference between "people who are better than you" and "people who are quite literally breaking the core mechanics of the game to give themselves a competitive advantage".

Snaking was a glitch people exploited to give themselves an even wider skill gap between themselves and casual players. Wavedashing is the same shit.

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You realize that wavedashing isn't that hard to pull off right? Jumping, tapping the shield button, and holding in the right direction isn't that difficult. Once you learn it it's like riding a bike and it adds so much to your options. If anything, if they did add wavedashing back to Smash Ultimate, they would make it even easier to pull off. Similar what they did to short-hopping. I don't see your argument here.

 

[Renna Hazel]

There's a difference between "people who are better than you" and "people who are quite literally breaking the core mechanics of the game to give themselves a competitive advantage".

Snaking was a glitch people exploited to give themselves an even wider skill gap between themselves and casual players. Wavedashing is the same shit.

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Snaking is definitely not a glitch. It's doing an intended mechanic over and over...that's not in any way a glitch. You can call it cheap or whatever, but don't call it a glitch.

Also a simple ranked mode would solve this problem online. Arms and Splatoon have them. Both can be played at a highly competitive level and enjoyed by anyone else at the same time.

 

[PlanetSmasher]

You realize that wavedashing isn't that hard to pull off right? Jumping, tapping the shield button, and holding in the right direction isn't that hard. Once you learn it it's like riding a bike and it adds so much to your options. If anything, if they did add wavedashing back to Smash Ultimate, they would make it even easier to pull off. Similar what they did to short-hopping. I don't see your argument here.

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Holding a direction while shielding in the air isn't wavedashing, that's directional air dodging. Wavedashing is the shit where you have to short hop, then air dodge down into the ground and then flick the control stick in a direction over and over and over again to exploit the extended i-frames.

Nothing's wrong with directional air-dodging, but shit like wavedashing where you have to constantly repeat the same action over and over and over again just to remain competitive with other players interferes with the flow of the gameplay. It shouldn't exist, either. That's why it's never come back.

 

[Chaosblade]

Going to say he's not looking at it right. Again.

Melee is the only Smash game to remain popular following it's successors release. 64 has a much smaller active following, Brawl is completely dead, and Smash 4 is going to fall to the side in favor of Ultimate. If anything it's the only one players haven't given up on.

Anecdotal, but even casually Melee was the only official Smash game I played for more than a matter of months and put aside.

That said, I think even many Melee players would agree that some things could stand to be simplified. But Brawl went way way too far and now Smash 4 and Ultimate are very slowly taking steps back in the right direction.

Holding a direction while shielding in the air isn't wavedashing, that's directional air dodging. Wavedashing is the shit where you have to short hop, then air dodge down into the ground and then flick the control stick in a direction over and over and over again to exploit the extended i-frames.

Nothing's wrong with directional air-dodging, but shit like wavedashing where you have to constantly repeat the same action over and over and over again just to remain competitive with other players interferes with the flow of the gameplay. It shouldn't exist, either. That's why it's never come back.

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Wat. That isn't a remotely accurate description of wavedashing. A clean wavedash has no invincible frames. It's used for positioning and microspacing, with exceptions like Luigi or Ice Climbers that have long wavedashes that are faster that normal dashing for burst movement.

 

[mutantmagnet]

Right. I'm not saying the games shouldn't have technical depth. Just like something can be too competition-focused, it can also be too accessibility-focused. Brawl definitely exhibited some of those signs with the random tripping.

I'm just amused or annoyed (depending on the mood) when some competitive players (not all) act like the games are and should be designed for them first and foremost, and anything that's removed is a crime against the series or something. If you're going to have, say, wavedashing in the game, it definitely shouldn't be implemented in a way that a) requires ridiculous levels of dexterity, b) could potentially give you some health problems, c) makes you incapable of standing toe-to-toe with other skilled players unless you master it. Again, just like snaking in MK DS.

And the games are a multiplayer celebration of Nintendo games where cute characters from completely different games hit each other in the face. It's definitely not a zero-sum game where appealing to one side is automatically detrimental to the other side's enjoyment of the game, but if you're going to have a primary focus, it should absolutely be the average players, not the competitive players. Because the former make up at least 90% of the userbase, and are the reason why the series sold well (and continues to sell well) in the first place. I doubt Sakurai wishes death upon competitive players, but he probably just means that the game design of Smash Bros. shouldn't prioritize competitive players because they're a secondary audience.

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Competetive players should be ignored when their demands are tied to a specific character or gear. When it comes to system level changes it is worth hearing them.


Step back for a minute and look back at some of the best singleplayer games.

Some of them at some point reach an execution barrier that a new player could never overcome even when given the right powerups. Certain actions are simply too mechanically demanding which the early game trains you for.

The existence of an execution barrier like wave canceling doesn't make the low skill floor irrelevant. It is a fundamental feature in any game that broadens your fun in mastering and exploring new options.


With systems changes everyone is equally affected but with character or gear changes you are at risk of alienating those who don't use it.


As a side note, This push towards GAAS is basically a dumbed down method of addressing the whole how do I as developer satiate my consumers one more game fix. Developers are now relying on raw content to address this.

It is a shame because various game glitches and purposefully made game mechanics do address this. Specifically for melee players they got that with wave dashing and L canceling respectively.

With just those 2 melee has endured as a consistently high playing base.

 

[Kyzon Xin]

Being a mostly competitive player, I don't feel that advanced techniques hurt the casual crowd. Wavedashing for example is great at high level play for movement and spacing. It's much less important in a casual area with items thrown in.

Having a skill gap isn't necessarily a problem as those who okay the game competitively will mostly play with each other where they can fully make use of all of the game's mechanics. Whereas, those who play casually will mostly play with each other and probably not use those mechanics, but if they wanna learn how to use them properly, they have a goal they can shoot for if they want to.

Most competitive smashers started off playing casually.

 

[NANA]

Random tripping making a comeback? Hells yeah!

 

[Lwill]

I just remember bringing brawl to my friends when it came out, all of which are the pure definition of casual fans, and all of them feeling disappointed in how the game felt compared to melee. Don't get me wrong, we still played a lot of Brawl, but everyone knew something felt off.

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True. Brawl went too far with significantly slowing downvthe tempo. I didn't play it nearly as much as Melee. SSB4 was better, and I'm very optimist for Ultimate. It seems to be shaping up to be the best one in hitting that balance.

 

[Gunstar Legend]

After high school I got to an age where I started preferring fun in my fighting games compared to hardcore competition and rivalry, so I agree. That's why Brawl was my favorite.

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We still have competitive gaming =/= fun posts in 2018? lol

The only reason people play video games are for fun or for money, and less than 1% of the competitive scene actually turns a profit off of playing these games.

 

[Eidan]

To read this thread, you'd think Sakurai has done absolutely nothing to cater to those who enjoy competitive Smash.

Melee fans love Melee. And they will always have it. Sakurai is absolutely right to not let Melee purists dictate the direction of the series.

 

[Rutger]

Holding a direction while shielding in the air isn't wavedashing, that's directional air dodging. Wavedashing is the shit where you have to short hop, then air dodge down into the ground and then flick the control stick in a direction over and over and over again to exploit the extended i-frames.

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Uh...
Wavedashing is not that. You don't have to flick the control stick and it doesn't give i-frames when you land.

It's just a movement tool.

 

[ElectricBlanketFire]

Good thing they spent 50,000 years explaining the minutiae of the changes during E3 then.

 

[Devil]

100% agree. I love spectating Melee competitive because of the high skill ceiling, but I almost exclusively play the latest Smash when I actually want to go boot a game up and start playing.

Anecdotal, but my friends and I generally love to play Smash together, and none of us have touched Melee since the lead-up to Brawl.

I still admire and respect the dedication of the Melee competitive base, but I do feel like the sales figures of Brawl and 4 indicate that the vast majority of Smash enthusiasts have moved on, and I'd argue that I've personally always been satisfied with the move. Things like Brawl's prat falls were annoying and questionable, but they didn't bother me enough to make me opt back for Melee over it, and I moved onto 4 full time after that came out, too.

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That's not what any of this is about, though?

Of course the majority of people lose interest and drop a 5 year old game and wait for the sequel. But how many of your friends stopped playing Melee earlier than usual for the sole reason that its gameplay was too hard to grasp? That's the point he is making and has been making for years, that Melee back in the days alienated normal people. Which is absolutely wrong because the vast majority of people never even noticed the high skill ceiling Melee could reach and didn't need to because they had fun anyway. While at the same time across your street there were probably people who played it competitively and had just as much fun. Both sides were happy.

Melee has never been this casual-unfriendly hardcore monster it is made out to be by people who project their current feelings for Melee onto that game which released in 2001. Sakurai's whole argument is NOT about how sad he is that casual players don't play Melee anymore today, 18 years later. He says it was "too technical" even back then for them too enjoy, which is false. He is using that false argument to tell people why the new game shouldn't have a higher skill ceiling.

This get's even funnier if you look at how Smash progressed since Brawl. His developers must ignore him, cause Smash 4 had much better competitive options than Brawl and now Ultimate looks like it's adressing a lot of the criticism which came from the competitive scene, too. Except for the "everyone is back" stuff, most of this year's E3 showcase dealt with improved movement options, speed, offense/defense balancing, a new Battlefield option for stages, stagehazard toggle etc. Which makes it easier for me to ignore such statements but I'm still afraid Sakurai will add some arbitrary "Ranked matches are Final Destination only, ain't that what you like?" bullshit.

 

[Dark Knight]

We still have competitive gaming =/= fun posts in 2018? lol

The only reason people play video games are for fun or for money, and less than 1% of the competitive scene actually turns a profit off of playing these games.

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I... wasn't speaking to anyone else's experience. I was just saying how I felt about Melee/Brawl at the time...

 

[Aprikurt]

None of my friends own a Switch. They won't play Smash regularly. But when they play it with me in December, I know I'll have a good chance of losing a few matches. It's really not fun as someone playing a party game to consistently get your ass handed to you.

 

[PlanetSmasher]

Uh...
Wavedashing is not that. You don't have to flick the control stick and it doesn't give i-frames when you land.

It's just a movement tool.

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Unless the definition of the term has changed since I played Melee, that's what I remember it as. The stupid "jump but only a tiny amount and then air dodge directly into the ground and then dodge again in a direction" shit was hammered into my brain so damn much over the years that I just got sick of even hearing about it.

 

[thistooshallpass]

Yep, it's one of the reasons Capcom gives for why Street Fighter 3 struggled so much back in the day: https://www.eventhubs.com/news/2015...we-were-making-game-was-too-hard-people-play/

Same with the 3D era Mortal Kombat games, it's why the moved back to the more simpler move sets for MK9 and the series sky rocketed in resurrected success with both 9, X and the Injustice games.

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Marketing's been around before any of us existed. How did they not realize in the 1990's that the more accessible a product is the more customers you can sell to? We've literally known this for hundreds of years, you could actually find books from the 1800s that teaches you this concept. And 200 yrs later Capcom just starts to figure it out, lol.

 

[Anth0ny]

"Melee is so fucking hardcore that you might get hurt playing it. Only bad mother fuckers play melee"

- Sakurai 2018

 

[Renna Hazel]

To read this thread, you'd think Sakurai has done absolutely nothing to cater to those who enjoy competitive Smash.

Melee fans love Melee. And they will always have it. Sakurai is absolutely right to not let Melee purists dictate the direction of the series.

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Yeah, I'm no professional player but I think the more competitive style of play is the most fun way to play. We have Battlefield and FD modes included for every stage, as well as a hazard toggle. Directional air dodging returning is also a big thing to me. As a competitive player, I'm pretty happy with how much we're being catered to.

 

[Leafhopper]

You can play game competitively just as you can play any game casually.

Not sure why this is so hard for people to understand.

 

[Lady Bow]

Holding a direction while shielding in the air isn't wavedashing, that's directional air dodging.

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That's exactly what it is. You just described the inputs for directional air dodging into the ground. No short hops required. Also wavedashing is back in Ultimate. It's just not viable since it has so much lag.

Wat. That isn't a remotely accurate description of wavedashing. A clean wavedash has no invincible frames. It's used for positioning and microspacing, with exceptions like Luigi or Ice Climbers that have long wavedashes that are faster that normal dashing for burst movement.

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[The Fabled Englishman]

There's a difference between "people who are better than you" and "people who are quite literally breaking the core mechanics of the game to give themselves a competitive advantage".

Snaking was a glitch people exploited to give themselves an even wider skill gap between themselves and casual players. Wavedashing is the same shit.

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I have a fundamental problem with the idea that unintended gameplay mechanics and exploits are always a net negative influence on a game - especially when they result in interesting emergent behaviours among players. Strafe jumping in Quake and numerous mechanics in DotA that emerged because of eccentricities or limitations of the Warcraft 3 engine (e.g. stacking and pulling) contributed positively to the depth and longevity of both games/series. Chivalry is another game that a lot of people complain about because of the numerous ways that the tracer swing system could be manipulated but those same 'exploits' also made the game incredibly fun to play competitively against skilled players (albeit relentlessly punishing for casual players).

Without the unintended mechanics, Smash would never have taken off as a competitive fighter nor retained a dedicated community for so many years. The core game mechanics simply aren't complex enough to warrant serious dedication.

 

[Wamb0wneD]

Wow, I actually agree with him.

All of my friends act like Smash is some ultra advanced fighter. Whenever we play they remove items, restrict what charecters we could be and restrict the maps. It makes the game completely unfun.

The game has fucking Dr. Mario beating up Solid Snake while also fighting Mr. Game & Watch and the Wii Fit trainer. I want to play and have a laugh, not get super competitive.

Nobody plays Mario Kart like that so idk why people insist that's how Smash needs to play.

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That's... not what he's saying. He's actually saying Melee is an ultra advanced fighter and that it's too advanced for it's own good and it's player's good. He literally says it's too techincal lol. And if you payed any attention to the updates on the new game you'd realize he listened to people who played 4 competitive.

The good thing about Smash is you can "play fun and have a laugh" and play competitive as well. The game doesn't have to be exclusively about one or the other. Nobody is stopping you to play with items and stage hazards on, I don't get why you want to stop people turning these things off.

 

[Hero]

Ah yes, all the "Sakurai doesn't know shit" people are starting to post here. Because their anecdotal evidence is worth more than all the research data Sakurai has available to him.