To be fair, your average Wii owner really can’t handle the speed of Melee and all that click-clacking you have to do just to move around in that game. I’m glad that shit got removed.
I personally feel he took it too far in Brawl, but this new one seems to be finding a nice middle ground between casual accessibility and hardcore depth.
Now remember, Brawl sold somewhere around 10-12 million copies… There ain’t that many mofos on Smashboards, so all the tournament players are a drop in the bucket compared to the buying audience at large.
Nobody complained about Melee being to fast when it was out. All those ATs got discovered years later. SSBB had that wii install base period. And no matter the difficulty it would’ve sold that much.
Honestly, I wouldnt want to buy and support a game made by a guy like that. That one paragraph I quoted was equivalent to Ono saying “If you slow down the frame rate of SF4 you see my beautiful face on the characters during their supers and ultras.”
I didn’t think Melee was fast at all up until I discovered advanced techniques. Still thought it was fun.
Heck, at this point if I try playing it without ATs (aka as it was designed), the controls feel incredibly sluggish even compared to Brawl, at least in my opinion.
Lol let’s not start that argument. The team knew about wavedashing. Hell lcancels are just nerfed z cancels. They just didn’t know they can be taken to the level is at now
I wasn’t saying the game was better without ATs (quite the opposite), just that they allowed the game to be taken to a level beyond what the designers originally intended.
Regarding Sakurai treating some of the audience ‘like babies’: Honestly? He’s entitled to. Some of the people in the crowd he’s dealing with have major trouble playing games to begin with. I remember when the Wii was a new thing, and took mine to show various curious relatives. Invariably, “Put Wii Sports back in, this is too hard!” came up with at least someone at each stop; the concept of pushing even one button baffled some of them. Beyond that, you have people who think Ike is cheap due to the aforementioned f-smash; they have no concept of defense. There are even people who refuse to truly explore or learn a game beyond its utmost basic level (they might even have legit reasons for it, like simply not having the time to spend doing so; this is no different than someone buying a Game Boy as a ‘Tetris Machine’ to blow off steam on long trips back in the 90s).
The lowest common denominator in regard to Smash is very low… and as several of you have noted, very numerous. Purely from a business perspective, he’s right to be wary of things that might alienate this crowd.
I’m at peace with this. If the game has depth despite Sakurai coddling the lowest end of the playerbase (and he’s ‘business right’ to do so; it’s hard to fault it when they represent that much money)… we’ll find it. We’ll find our way to have a higher level of fun if it exists in Smash 4, and I am cautiously optimistic that it will indeed be there. I just wish he could take stronger steps to reach out to them and make them interested in learning, but for now I’m willing to enjoy the game differently from how the masses will. So long as everyone winds up happy in the end, that’s alright.
