I'm loving it, there are a few things I miss from Melee but that's much more than I expected from the series after 4.
But now I'm in that space of worrying that they could make it worse (or better) with patches, please no premature nerfs or 'anti competitive' changes
Where I'm coming from:
Been going to Melee tournaments consistently since 2005. Top 12 in my State in 2015. Adult life keeps me away from the scene these days. I still spectate major and local events.
Tried Brawl comp for a year or two and hated it.
Project M is Melee with cheese. I enjoy it but don't take it seriously even though I've won quite a few PM locals.
Tried Smash 4 comp for year hated it less than Brawl but not by much.
I don't enjoy the lack of options I'm given in Brawl,Smash 4 and I feel the same way about this game.
I really didn't enjoy the single player in Ultimate, felt too repetitive. Most of my casual friends feel the same way.
Unlocking characters was a drag and took me 40 hours.
expected some story but there really wasn't any
Casuals will love this game. Smash 4 players will love this game (most of them are ex-brawl players or people that never got into the Melee scene) Some Melee players will dabble in it but in a year or two drop it.
I've been excited for every new smash and I always give them time. Plan to do the same for this game. I don't need a Smash to have Melee physics to enjoy it, but I just don't feel like post Melee Smash games have enough depth to keep me interested in the long run. Sure there's 75 characters but most match-ups feel too similar to me. Characters with shit recovery are easier to edgeguard now. Bad characters from 4 staying bad. Spectated some Ultimate tournaments since the game came out it just seems really repetitive to me.
Watch a Melee match from 2003 and compare it to today and the difference is night and day. The game has so much depth that people are still finding ways to improve in 2018. The tier list is constantly changing (Yoshi was bottom tier, considered non-viable for MORE THAN 10 YEARS) I main a low tier in Melee and I don't feel limited by my character. I excel against the best characters in the game. Those who complain about Fox dominance in Melee usually aren't involved in the Melee scene. At most Melee events I go through 30 or 40 Foxes before I find one that gives me trouble. The character gives you more options but doesn't automatically give you an unfair advantage. A Jigglypuff user is the current champ of Melee, only 13 of the top 50 in the world main Fox, only three use Puff. While some characters are objectively better, you never see an unskilled user get further than he should due to their character choice.
Yet almost all Brawl players I've met complained about Metaknight (in his own tier for the entirety of Brawl's life) and most Smash 4 players are sick of Bayo. Once the meta was established for these games it hardly deviated. Brawl and Smash 4 showed very little growth in comparison to Melee. The major changes from year 1 to this year in Smash 4 were due to balance patches. It's not about the speed, it's the depth. Brawl players moved onto Smash 4 because they reached the limits of progress. And Smash 4 players are doing the same with Ultimate, they're bored. There isn't something wrong with Melee players because they refuse to "move on". Melee is the gift that keeps on giving, we'll stop playing it when it stops surprising us. When a game gives you more options, there will always be more depth. Currently I feel like Ultimate has 75 characters doing the same exact thing.Hope I'm wrong. I hope they find all kinds of cool tricks to open the game up. If Ultimate gives us even half the depth of Melee I'm all in.
TLDR: I'm a Melee Vet. Disappointed but cautiously optimistic.. Melee>64>PM>Ultimate>Smash 4>Brawl IMO
I can't get past the movement. Ultimate is fun, but my favorite part of Melee is how fluid it is, how much control you have over your character, and how good it feels to just move around a stage. Input lag aside, Ultimate is just okay. It doesn't feel actively bad to play (hello, Brawl) but it's still light years from Melee.
Brawl was an overreaction to the growing competitive Melee scene that Sakurai didn't feel fit his vision of the series. Eventually Melee surged back in popularity with competitive players in response, and Smash 4 didn't really do much to try to win that crowd back over. So competitive Smash is split between Melee and the new game.
Game journalists simply don't have a firm grasp of competitive games nor do they have the resources to dig in. Whatever you think of Smash and whether it's a fighting game or not, it can be played competitively by people. Some people care more about it than others and that's completely fine.
It's why I never put too much stock into reviews of fighting games, (real-time) strategy games or even games like Pokemon. They'll write about the presentation, story, gameplay, pacing etc. Not depth.
This video includes misinformation, as the following suggests that 83% of the time the input lag between wireless Pro controller and Gamecube controller registers on the exact frame, which was tested with actual hardware setups.
How does it contain misinformation? The video I posted literally has a chart showing that all control methods are very close to each other and had less than a frame's worth of difference between the pro controller and GameCube controller. How does that disagree with the suggestion that "83% of the time the input lag between wireless Pro controller and Gamecube controller registers on the exact frame"?
Can someone actually answer my question from the other day? People are saying the original video is full of misinformation but the only discrepancy I see is that the Button 2 pixel shows the Pro controller as being slightly slower while the other video shows the two reacting typically on the same frame. Which is not incongruous with the information in the first video. The first video shows all the controllers as being very close in lag time and less than a frame difference between the GC Controller and the Pro Controller.
When you consider that when the button is pressed is likely not going to be exactly at the start of the 16.66ms timeframe of a single frame and that the average difference is just a few ms it lines up with them both responding on the same frame more often. Than not. I don't see the conflict in that information.
All that said,the amount of difference between the two controllers doesn't account for the amount of difference between Smash Ultimate and the other games in the series.
Sorry if someone did already addres this and I missed it, but I don't recall ever getting an alert. Though the Watch and Alert function of the site seem to be jacked up right now.
Smash Bros. Ultimate is a huge game with insane amounts of content and I'd say the best one since the Brawl "reboot" to the series. But it still is really, really far away from Melee / Project M in terms of tight and competitive gameplay.
Nintendo just doesn't care about it. They are focusing in content and variety instead of balance and competitive gameplay. Sakurai's words.
No. They won't return to Melee's gameplay ever again. But I recommend you Project M, a Brawl mod that many people considers the best Smash game for competitive gameplay. It tries to get the best of both worlds, Melee's gampeplay and Brawl's content, and it fixes lots of bugs from Melee and balances every character. They stopped development at version 3.6, but it's the most balanced Smash ever made.
They even include classic skins and new gameplay mechanics. For example, Samus (my lovely main) now can transform in Morphball and you can attack with the turbo attack she had in Prime. Also, you can switch between fire cannon and ice cannon, making fire better to increase % and ice better to deal a killing blow.
I felt that Smash 4 would have been the best Smash had it had actual single player content that weren't just dumb mini games.
The only thing holding back Smash Ultimate from being better than Melee is FUCKING. HOME. RUN. CONTEST.
Brawl is the only game I didn't like. The single player was a big let down (Ultimate fixed this by making every event super quick) as it had zero replayability like Melee's Adventure Mode did, and holy shit was it SLLLOOOOWWW. I mean, good god. I usually do not complain about speed in Smash games since I don't care that much, but it was so slow it completely killed multiplayer for me.
Pretty certain I could beat all of the World of Light and Melee Adventure Mode 20 times over by the time Brawl characters finish jumping.
