A part of me wondered if he was talking about the overwhelming nature of fighting games for new players, where even short combos looked impressive and difficult to execute (even if they were basic bread-n-butter stuff from an intermediate player), and where those new players would have no idea how to engage veteran players to the point of being completely nuked while having no idea what to do. So, maybe not necessarily ToD combos or long UMvC3 combos, but just a series of combos that would humble new players away from the cabinet. Nobody likes being "free" in a public arcade.
There was an old story about Sakurai completely destroying someone at an arcade (KOF). When he looked to see who his opponent was, it was a couple who obviously didn't know what they were doing, so they left in frustration. This led Sakurai into wanting his game to be easy for beginners.
He didn't exactly succeed. Smash is literally just as hard to play as a KOF or Tekken if you're playing against someone who knows what to actually do. I don't know why everyone went into "PRAISE GOD SAKURAI GENIUS" mode for something that I don't think fixed anything. Every fighting game is easy "for beginners". Every fighting game is hard when those beginners play non-beginners.
@@THENAMEISQUICKMAN you can get your friend to play smash at a party and everyone will get it. Get your friends to play street fighters and it will pass an hour before the first hadouken is thrown
@@THENAMEISQUICKMAN I mean, isn't that just any game that has players making decisions? Yeah people who practice smash are better than the ones you just started, but you can say the same thing about poker, mario party, and racing games. It's not necessarily about being easier to master, it's more about having a game that universally easier to have fun in
Cause if your opponent is better than you in KoF, then there's just better than you and are that much more likely to win, smash has more variables such as items and stage variation which don't invalidate that legacy skill, but it gives the new players more opportunities to do things behind get their butt kicked
I think for combos, I think Sakurai meant an "Experienced Player vs a new player" scenario. Even short combos might make a new player feel helpless against an experienced player because for a new player, "there is nothing I can do aside watch my character get beaten", and I think Sakurai wanted make the player feel less helpless and more "in control" of the situation.
As someone who doesn’t really play fighting games or Smash that often at all, I definitely feel like I can go into Smash and still get one stock off on a friend who’s good at the game, or at least get a good amount of hits in. Don’t really feel like that in fighting games a lot of the time
Can confirm. I was like seven years old when I was playing Brawl with my cousins, and though I didn't understand what was going on on the screen I _felt_ what was going on on the screen. And the fact that I got hit harder every time gave me more time to react to things as my character came back to the stage. Then I tried Ultra Street Fighter IV on a whim at some party I was invited to and was frozen in confusion at what was happening in my hands.
That's how I interpreted that. While the helplessness of the player hit by a combo was highlighted, there was no mention of a TOD and the implication is most likely unintentional. As someone who enjoyed games like Tekken 3 with poor to average skill, I get the feeling of not getting to play the game against a good player. I would call it "cheating", though I was just a little kid back then. Regarding edgeguarding in Smash, the disadvantaged player is still in control of their movement to an extent. Even if the player is equally helpless in that scenario, it's like you said, they feel more in control and less helpless. Nevertheless, the intent behind Smash's design doesn't have to reflect the end product. The important thing is that all these developments lead to the creation of Super Smash Bros., its sequels and games like it.
Which still doesn't make sense because he was talking about smash 64, the one game in the series where you can do nothing to prevent getting combo'd to death
@NataliaNeeSama You hit the nail on the head so hard, this comment should be pinned for anyone to see it. To add on it, it's funny how Max, being an expert in fighting games is clearly looking for a game that actually had ToD or modern lengthy combos back in the 1999 era. He is speaking from experience and knowledge. But then he proceeded to say an uninformed opinion that "Smash is already like this, it has combos" but this time he is seeing it as a fan, not an expert, and I get it if he played a top player he wouldnt want to play anymore because he would feel he can't do anything. AND THATS JUST THE THING. A noob vs against any pro will feel powerless and think he couldn't do anything. Hell, you can even experience this powerlessness if you go online, try a character you have never played before and fight against your own rank players. It's not that hard to comprehend. Smash HAS combos, but only in the definition of the word. It's more like "interactions". And even if somebody edgeguard you, like he said, you have 5 stocks. So no, it's not the same as combo where you get reset into a 50-50, if you get hit you get stun and suddenly the round is over. Having said that, Smash it's the premiere fighting based game where the powerless mentality is minimized and the fun of playing is enhanced.
Even what is more interesting is that he has even MORE insight reserved for talks and conferences. Like he is only giving the basics and it is blowing people's minds, which is great so people can have more insight into this philosophy of game design and development.
and sad majority of those who take his party game too serious (ok i get competitive nature and all but still) won't care nor have desire to make games or how their made is so so so sad. You don't know aspects of games just by playing them omg!
Speaking as both a Smash Player, and Traditional Fighting Game Player (GG, P4A, DBFZ, SF, SC, MvC, etc), AND as an actual competitive IRL martial artist, Sakurai is referring to something **very** specific when he talks about this. I should also mention that I am a professional Japanese translator, and I originally watched this video without the English subtitling, so I wasn't even aware there was a controversy until I saw this video. *TL:DR=* The subs do slightly misrepresent what Sakurai is conveying here. He's talking about engagement and interactivity of raw gameplay. NOT strategy or ToD combos. He essentially didn't like that combos in fighting games (of any length) was essentially a single-player game and he aimed to fix that with Smash. The below essentially explains this in detail. Even back in the time when combos were relatively short for those games, they still largely shared a quality that is near universal in the modern day of games built around executing combos of any length. What I am referring to (and what Sakurai is alluding to) is the fact that once neutral is won, and the "hit" occurs that starts the combo, the game essentially becomes a single player experience until it is either finished or dropped, meaning that essentially for the length of the interaction, the player receiving the combo effectively just had their controller unplugged. Even if you have to stay mentally aware of the situation, as the combo'd player, to be ready for the next interaction, that still is essentially a disengagement with active gameplay because you're not able to do anything to directly influence what is happening beyond incidental prescribed 'break' mechanics such as Bursts or KI's Combo Breaker. Sakurai's answer to this in Smash was implementing defensive mechanics such as DI, SDI, Crouch Cancelling, and Vectoring, not to mention mitigated hitstun and various defensive maneuvers designed to make stringing together multiple hits fundamentally significantly difficult in the first place. While doing this didn't fundamentally get rid of combos in Smash altogether, it redefined the entire concept of what it means to execute a combo from a gameplay perspective. Since combos in most games, regardless of length, was essentially a single-player experience when they're actively happening, Sakurai aimed to make them a *multiplayer* experience. You don't get to put the controller down or turn your brain off when you're getting hit like you can in other fighting games. In fact, "going limp" in Smash just makes your opponent able to combo you even harder and longer, and escaping the situation with a little damage as possible or with the best positioning possible becomes a point of engagement, or vector of interaction for the other player, as opposed to simply waiting (or mashing the recovery button) until you can tech while your opponent preforms Beethoven's 5th on your face. Even to this day as I juggle playing smash vs other traditional fighters, the mental state that goes into just starting a session of those games are completely different. Due to the fact that in Smash, in order to win, you need to be actively engaged in the gameplay essentially constantly, winning or losing, combo'ing or being combo'd, to multiple layers of abstraction (having to account for significantly numerous dimensions of information), I actually usually make the decision to play *traditional* fighting games like GG or SFV when I want to turn my brain off. The DPS (Decisions Per Second) I find myself having to make to win a game of GGST or BBTag doesn't even **begin** to compare to the amount that goes into a similar game of Smash. This is all to preface that I think the English subs lose a little bit of what Sakurai is actually saying. He specifically uses the word 駆け引き (kake-hiki), which was translated in the Subs as "Strategy", but in truth, especially accounting for the other ways he's used this word in this video and in previous videos, he is *actually* using this word to mean "Engagement". He's talking about the ability to interact with what is happening. When he says 駆け引きがない (kake-hiki ga nai), he's not saying "there is no strategy involved" (though it can certainly be implied contextually), he is more explicitly saying "there is no interaction to be had" in this situation. Playing Smash involving a higher DPS than most other fighting games comparatively was not only intentionally by design, but also very specifically what Sakurai was trying to "fix" about the fighting game experience in the first place. He was trying to increase the baseline 駆け引き in **all** aspects of the gameplay. Lastly, I brought up being an IRL martial artist here too only to mention that Sakurai, by doing this, speaking from experience, made Smash Bros as a fighting game more closely realistic to *ACTUAL* fighting than almost any other fighting game ever made. You don't just stop and let the combo happen when you get hit IRL, you don't just allow yourself to be moved in the way your opponent wants you to when you're being pressured. Every interaction in IRL fighting is a dialogue of engagement, not a monologue; with you constantly having to be aware of what your opponent is doing and how they're hitting you or taking your hits, unlike with traditional fighting games where that only really happens in neutral or in-between setplay engagements. It is a full body engagement with an insane DPS (Decisions Per Minute) for every little thing that happens, whether it be deciding whether you will take the punch coming for your face on the left cheek or on the jaw, deciding if you want to eat a kick head-on or roll your body with the impact, deciding when your legs buckle whether you want to fall forward, on your face, on your side or on your ass. Each of these interactions and decisions make a difference in the course of a fight, and Smash, in my experience as an IRL fighter, mirrors more closely to that than anything else by FAR. When I take a f-tilt to the face, I now have to decide whether I DI away to gain distance, or DI in to stay close or possibly juke a DI-away read, whether I air-dodge immediately and risk ground lag, or jump away an lose stage control. When I hit my opponent with a D-Tilt, I have to pay attention at what direction they DI'd, how far they flew, and how they affected their knockback in and gauge what move can potentially hit them next, how this affects my frame advantage, or if it is even a good idea to attempt continuing the combo string in the first place and opt to do something else. With traditional fighters, once you get the hit confirm, barring situations where Bursts or Combo Breakers are on the table, it is simply just execute as rehearsed, with *no* further consideration or deliberation needed. Thank you so much for reading this impromptu thesis. My sincere apologies this comment was so huge.
Nah. No apologies necessary as this was very informative, from someone who played standard FG as a kid and felt the technical barrier was too high, but played Smash and got to enjoy the nuances without the skill barrier getting in the way.
Hm, yes. Smash is closer to a fighting game than traditional fighting games, despite always being reffered to as a party game. It is using the same strategy as literally ANY other PvP game. If anything, a traditional fighting game might be less of a fighting game than even a FPS game, because of lack of combat dialogue.
I think you nailed it. It's not about Infinites nor TOD's, it's about any combo leading to a (short) moment of non-interactive gameplay. Added to that, a seasoned player has to hit (and combo) you 3 times to win, while the new guy has to hit you 10 times to win (not knowing combos).
The difference in Smash vs fighting games at the time that Sakurai was trying to explain is that even if you're playing against someone far better than you in Smash, you don't lose the ability to control your character (usually) like what happens in other fighting games. There is a massive difference in feeling when you playing a game that you cannot win vs one that you don't know how to win. It's like losing to a boss during a cutscene instead of just making the boss really tough to defeat. One way you never had a chance, but the other way offers the illusion of freedom, which is good game design.
@keil scott Yeah, but that's a very hardcore perspective on what makes a game worth playing. It isn't a "wrong" perspective, but there's more than one perspective on what the "point" of fighting games are. Some people want to take things very seriously but a lot people just want to jump in and have some fun with friends. They don't want to play a multiplayer game by themselves, studying the game to improve. And that was especially true in the arcade era when Smash Bros. was developed. They definitely don't want studying to be required for the game to feel good to play. And that's a valid perspective too, one that Smash Bros. tried to cater to. Its fine if that doesn't work for everyone, but its still good design.
@@microblast3700 yes but who was really figuring that out back in the day your average person at that time especially was playing free for all with items cause that's how the game came out.
@@princemwamba5230 This. The game was made with this design principle. It wasn't meant to reach that level of competitiveness. Of course all of that to say that that doesn't mean "combos" in fighting games are inherently bad. Just that Sakurai used that as a jumping-off-point to create something different.
I feel like everyone is so dumb about this situation. Sakurai is just talking about the fact that you can't really interact with your opponent while being combo'ed. He added the different power of launches and DI in smash to counter that and make it a bit more complicated for the one doing combos, that's it. That's all there is.
funny how people are getting outraged at his explanation of why he made smash the way he did, and its not like he's NOT a fan of older fighting games himself. what the hell are you guys getting angry for? last time i checked people were angry he was doing videos about game development at all because they just wanted him to keep making more smash content. insanity.
I saw him not talking about infinite combos or one hit to death. When i tried to get into fg, the arcade, the guys who had been playing longer could always get in close, perform a combo. Get out and repeat until i died. With me never getting in a hit. That is what he is talking about.
Thinking back to my earliest days playing fighting games, and comparing to how I as a much more experienced player try to deal with newer players now, I think this hits the nail on the head. Combos back then might not have been as super long as they are now, but they were certainly long enough to be disorienting. If you're entering a new game, all your attempts at doing anything being immediately getting countered resulting in combo after combo, it can make the player feel like the game is designed with an inherent lack of strategic options offered to the user, or make it seem like getting to the point of being able to employ strategy is extremely difficult when it usually isn't. (meanwhile, one of the most important skills to learn if you want to be the guy who introduces a new player to a fighting game isn't just how to hold back, but how to fight - even if you win - such that the opposing player doesn't come away from the experience feeling as though nothing they do matters, which is a death knell for newbie fighting game interest) That experience clearly didn't deter many of the fighting game pros around today in their earliest days, but it did still exist and Sakurai seems to have observed it enough to want to try to avoid it (though as noted, players still find a way). Sakurai's response is an interesting choice, but it's one that's understandable. It's the same idea that went into - like - Divekick, except Divekick was partly embracing so as to make fun of it while Sakurai was going out of his way to attempt to circumvent it.
^yup, and it's not even top players, but intermediate ones. but being max something of a hight intermediate/near top, of course he would think sakurai is talking about actual tops against "initates" rather than intermediates against people who don't even know how to do a shoryuken.
haha i bought guilty gear bc of max and most of the lobbies i was in was exactly this, just practiced bread and butter combos i had no idea how to get out of. same thing happens to me in DBZF
i think sakurai's point is after the starter move connects, there are no interactions with the player until the combo is over. combos taking longer and dealing more damage over the history of fighting games without even any bandaid solution like a burst or combo breaker would make it feel so it's more about knowing the combos rather than the other skills categorized under "game sense" like footsies, reads and such.
100% this. Even in Max talking about being edge-guarded, you're still playing the game, trying to jump back on or counter attack etc. When Sakurai talks about the push and pull he is clearly talking about both players actively playing and fighting to the end, which longer combos (and concepts like 50/50s and Oki where a newer player feels like they can't even move) remove/subtract that push & pull from games as time went on and how he wanted the antithesis of that for his game.
or about specials. also i feel like sakurai and max are talking about different kinds of "beginner", like sakurai is talking about someone who's withing their first 5 matches ever at playing a game and max is talking about someone who "just now started to understand he may or may not like fighting games"(which by then yu will at least have figured out how to do i.e a shoryuken) the second type of beginner wouldn't really care about how muh simpler the controls are in smash bros, but the first ABSOLUTELY will, especially as in mid-air they can still move and keep the illussion of control during the opponent's combo.
This is why i love Games like Soul calubur and For honor. The combos are shorter, which means it becomes much more about the neutral game. Getting combo'ed to death is just not fun for me. i much more love the mind games aspect.
@@Jerome616 you have definitely never played soul calibur 6 at high level then. The game is purely about fishing for lethal hits and doing 1-3 touch of death combos. It's so bad on the combo emphasis that fundamentals are secondary to combo game. I quit playing it because. I miss the old days of soul calibur.
@@Selnathorn I don't think the passion will ever burn out, but his body started burning out during Smash's development. I'm more worried about this man working himself to death.
@@Visual217 In fairness, I think a big reason why Sakurai took a step back from video game development and started working on these videos was *because* he was getting burned out. While these videos are by no means low effort, I have a hard time imagining that this is more stressful for him than leading freaking Smash Ultimate development for nearly a full decade.
As someone who could barely play fighting games at that time and had friends and family members who did and were pretty good at it, Sakurai describes exactly how I felt, regardless if that was really the case or not. I just couldn't do anything and just got comboed to death. That made me hate on the entire genre for many years.
I’d blame the people you play with rather then the genre itself. Whenever I would be laying a beat down and the person was new, I would offer to show them what’s what
This reminds me of a user on twitter that dropped cool art tricks pretty often and got bullied off of the platform for… no reason. Like seriously. They harmlessly shared their knowledge and art tutorials and people projected that they were trying to force the “right way” to draw when really they were handing out free education for fundamentals.
I can assume that the person either did a male/female body tutorial and got flamed for drawing the female body as supermodel skinny. OR did skin tone tutorial and made a darker skinned person ashy. As much as I find these kinds of drawing tips to be cringe. The artists who take the time to make them don't deserve to be shamed off the platform.
@@apexknight9356 not that at all; the artist was a japanese person, and they just mentioned that drawing "hairy lines" (i.e. drawing a line with multiple short strokes instead of one long, confident one) makes the art look amateur-ish. and those amateurs took offense to being called amateurs, and used art of _professionals_ as examples as to why these _amateurs_ werent doing anything wrong lmao the artist is now doing better on pixiv fanbox, which is similar to patreon, but it's such a shame that free art education is now paid because of some twitter artists who can't handle the fact that skill and technique still exist in art, not just creativity
I love how, at 09:00 of the video, Max recognizes the context that King of Fighters provides for this entire discussion. Earlier, he was sitting there thinking of Third Strike and MvC, and even Killer Instinct. The moment KoF is brought up, it's like Max's brain expanded with the sudden understanding it carried.
Except he doesn't ever seem to understand it, he continues as if Sakurai is talking about chaining hits together when he *isn't*, COMPLETELY IGNORING both Toby's translation *and* the visuals made by SAKURAI HIMSELF AT 12:54, making it clear he's talking about **input** combos!
@@NuiYabuko far as I'm aware, while that is the case on professional projects, Toby has been learning Japanese while working with Nintendo, and this lead to him being the one doing the translating on Sakurai's personal project.
I believe Sakurai is referencing how 3 interactions with a decent combo wins games. Not referencing exactly against combo length, but how interactions are limited in hit stun. 🤔
I can tell you from experience, growing up, if you didn't know the game and you showed up at the arcade, it felt like you barely moved and were being comboed all over the screen. Of course, they weren't real endless combos but they felt that way to a layman. In particular, I remember feeling this way with Tekken and Marvel vs Capcom.
In fact, I remember an acquaintance back then that would watch combo videos online back when internet wasn't common. All he did was memorize one or two effective combos and use them over and over and it felt like you couldn't move. This same acquaintance didn't really regularly win before this time.
@@BloodlessWolf yup. i used to figure out combos on my own before the internet was as easily accessible as it is now, and i used to destroy people lol. Now it seems like that aspect of skill is irrelevant since people who can create their own combos, post them online now. so everybody knows them.
people that know how to play may just say shit like "well thats why you should learn and practice for months" but the point is new people are just not gonna touch that game again, and thats why fighting games will never have that big of a playerbase
@@sangan3202 the thing is, majority of people are lazy and dumb now a days. That's why hard games don't last anymore. Like arena shooters, RTS games, 4x games, and just strategy games In general hardly exist anymore. It's quite a surprise that fighting games have even lasted this long tbh
@@sonic-bb lol no most fighting games anyone can beat the Hardest CPU the moment you fight a player all the training you did become null as they TOD you. Just because the game doesnt count the number of hits as a combo its still a TOD as they juggle you.
Why the hell are people mad at one of the rare few game developers that actually cares about it's playerbase and games they are responsible for smh... Sakurai always did his best to make Smash the best he could and to try and please everyone despite Nintendo's obvious interference from time to time.
I feel like it's because the people think their way is the right way when it comes to developing games. If they don't get what they want, they get mad. If a developer works on a game that would appeal to everyone, the "fans" feel like their being abandoned. It's a lose lose situation.
Yeah the Smash competitive community is idiotic especially the Meele side, Meele players broke the game by making it competitive something that Sakurai never intended to do but theh did it.
@@ChunkSchuldinga tell that to the melee community they did this to themselves especially since the roster when it comes to the meta it always the same. Smash is one those games that it kinda of nightmare to balance because of it foundations and Sakurai unwiling to change it,at least with Mutltiversus it took the foundations that Smash made and made for competitive.
I remember as a kid getting completely wiped out in Pokemon because I didn't understand how to team build. for a while, I hated it. But now I have a deep apretiation for it. Especially after getting into it and taking the time to learn. I like that Sakurai admitted that the game he made was so everyone can play. Hardcore Smash players might be mad, but I like that he made a game that I can play and not worry about being hard into the game to understand.
I think Sakurai knows exactly what he's talking about. For a "standard" fighting game, if you see your opponent do something with a combo or certain series of inputs, without having it explicitly spelled out to you it would take some time to figure out what they even did, especially as a new player. Sakurai instead made a game with simplified inputs so that even with characters having all these moves, any of them can be executed by a new player, and while combos do still exist, and an amazing player can still destroy someone new, the new person in your average match will still feel like they're actually able to play and interact without just getting beaten into a wall. The percent system specifically makes it so that the closer you are to death, the further you are away after a hit from your opponent so they can't juggle you as quickly. There will always be a divide between new and more experienced players, but the goal was to make it less brutal for a new person to at least play the game in the first place. To address the specific quote of "As more fighting games became more combo-focused, the less room there was for strategy" I interpret Sakurai as saying that it devalues strategy as a skill on it's own. If it's a match between two players who know the game and the combos, then obviously there is a ton of strategy involved, but I think some people heard this and thought he was saying that combo-focused games don't take strategy. He simply means that strategy really doesn't matter when one player is newer to the game and doesn't know combos and inputs are not intuitive (unless you already have a lot of legacy skill from other fighting games).
Another angle to consider for the "combo > strategy" thing is that when combos happen in fighting games, depending on the balance, in games with hard focus one could argue that strategy ends up taking second place to combos because for combos to happen you pretty much need the enemy usually to be out of control of their character. If the player is good and the combos are emphasized, even if you are not getting ToD'ed you are still pretty much in a situation where one hit connects and you are getting like 50%HP off and you hope it doesn't happens a second time. So it's like you have strategy but it kinda jumps off a bridge for a combo, then it comes back and you have to hope it doesn't happens again. As you said, smash works around this by making sure the knockback increase puts distance between both players. Even though obviously the worse player will still lose and likely get stomped, at least they get some more control and can go back to the "strategy" aspect quicker and try to get some hits and the lower combo time, at least when talking about the average or good players rather than pros, means players can quickly go back to smashing each other and moving around fast along the arena.
@@christophergarcia9022 Thinking about it more even I think this is why Sakurai tried to backpedal so hard after Melee, because he probably saw things like wavedashing as exactly what he didn't want for Smash, as that can be seen as something that is essentially a fighting game input command that places an immediate divide between newer and experienced players. It's not that Sakurai hates standard fighting games or complex combos either, which I think some people think from his comments, he just doesn't want that as the standard for Smash.
It's funny to me that he had that thought back then, when later games like Blazblue came out and there were plenty of players who didn't even know basic fighting game fundamentals, but they were frequently combo heavy. Which bugged me at the time, because it felt like certain characters required very little thinking compared to others, and while the later Blazblue games teach the player a lot better, combos are still far more focused upon. Ultimate Marvel Vs Capcom 3 is where it all came ahead to me, where most of those games became Hokuto No Ken, and everything is tod. On the flipside, Smash tried to be different, but the same thing happened, because people with such approaches to playing fighting games, will always try to do this. They'll always find a way to break games, because that's just how they play games.
@@Xcopyz Even if you are super competitive, a lot of it goes out the window in a free for all with max items. Its just chaos mode. Its rare for a 2d fighter to include anything other than 1v1 duels.
I legit can’t wait for his Melee video because it’ll be interesting to hear his take on the systems developed in the game and his intentions for it vs. what they’ve become now with the Melee community’s influence.
@Lemzo he's already said before that it was to keep the game beginner friendly with an aspect of luck even with items off. Brawl was intended to be everything that melee was not.
@@regionaltyrann4325 1. Because it gives new and beginner players a chance against a really good fox and captain falcon ... 2. Casual players turn off items all the time. So I really don't see why this question was asked
@@regionaltyrann4325 1. Fox and captain falcon still ended up being 2 of the best characters in brawl regardless. The minimal hitstun managed to work in their favor. Especially for fox's up tilt. I'm not saying the tripping was a good idea. But I see why they did it. It gives casuals a chance to escape and fight back. 2. Lol yeah everyone was annoyed with tripping. That's why it was removed.
"everyone" is not mad at Sakurai, Twitter is mad at him because Twitter loves to take short clips out of context and get pissed off at things that aren't being said, that's kind of their thing
Cause Twitter users who have never worked on games or have anything to do with the game industry genuinely think they know more about video games then him lmao
"Combos in most fighting games are button-button-super" I distinctly remember getting my ass handed to me in Tekken 3 when others would get in the first hit and I'd have to sit there standing and watching while they input their 24 button combo and then kick me on the ground a few more times for good measure.
Max addresses this as he goes and unlocks more memories of 1999. There's a point in the video where he wraps his head around competitive and how it breaks games open regardless of design. Once he does, he runs with it. He just rambles like this all the time so you get used to it hahaha
I'm a long-time Tekken player starting back from 2, so I've seen some people who were juggle-reliant. It really stopped being much of a game when it was basically who can get the other person off their feet first and keep them airborne longest. Like there was so much more nuance to Tekken starting in 3 and going forward but you'd have some people whose mindsets were IF I DON'T KNOW HOW TO JUGGLE TO DEATH I DON'T KNOW HOW TO PLAY. Or yknow, the occasional King player that was like "If I can't combo throw into rolling death cradle every time, idk how to play an actual match".
Smash isn't your typical fighter so expectations on skills and combos are different. It's like trying to compare Killer Instinct to a fighter like Power Stone
The game Sakurai's talking about is Kof, he actually has a video on RUclips where he talks about being in an arcade and playing against a young couple who thought it was all gonna be fun n games until he totally obliterated them. They were embarrassed and befuddled by the whole experience. That huge skill gap between him and casual players is what inspired smash.
"combo" in a japanese context refers to combinations of buttons, not a sequence of hits. He was commenting on how you needed to know complex special inputs to compete instead of having a good strategy.
That’s understandable. I play Tekken as much as Smash and knowing the difference/difficulty between special inputs to strategy is a huge one to a lot, not too much for me because I can strategize at a high level plus do combos like it’s first nature with special inputs.
@@Lazypackmule and yet he also mentioned geese's and hoahmaru's specials having crazy button inputs requirements that just simply wouldn't be doabe for someone who's on their first or second round of the game(whereas you can likley do everything by your 3rd match at most of smash)
So you’re saying people don’t bother thinking about cultural differences and unique meanings for terms in JP games? Wow. It’s like people are lazy and generally stupid or something.
So, I wanted to ask "Am I the only person who actually understood what Sakurai was talking about?", but the reality is a lot of people just don't care and want to tear down people more successful than they are.
thats the "competitive" community for you. Bunch of try hards. Also Max is wrong TOD exist in all the games he listed. Just because there is a 1 second gap in between the 12 super combos it doesnt mean they dont get juggled for the next 12 super combo.
Also there is some element of "fighting back" when you're being combo'd in DI, as you observed, but also in non-true combos because your decisions as soon as a combo ends can mean you get chained into another combo or escape. As for recovery, even characters that have poor recoveries, you can mix up your options, change your timing, etc, as ways of getting around an edgeguard. You don't just sit there and take it--you still get to play the game!
Yes, the combo arguement is about this. How little agency does the person on the receiving end has. Which in a lot of cases are none and have to wait until their opponent is done with it.
I’m pretty sure he was talking about casual play when he was talking about folks just not able to play while they lose. A novice who knows how to do combos will just do one combo after another vs the novice who doesn’t know how to defend against starters. Meanwhile in Smash, if you just got combo’d by somebody, you are now across the map and if you can manage to hit the ground, neutral has been restored. WAAAAAAAAAAAAY easier to get to that point in Smash vs a traditional 2d fighter.
The problem here it's Max is thinking on actual infinities, but you have to remember on those times by just knowing how to pressure and understand 50,50, your opponent will not move until his death
@@gabrielandriel8960 I grew up in the 90's and never once played against any one who could use hadouken or shoryuken in streetfighter. On the other hand, everyone I knew could utilize the full move-set of any character in smash.
I think what he was trying to say was that games around that time favored pressure. if you get pushed into a corner in fighting games, it was hard to fight out of it unless you reached a certain skill level. the gap between a novice and a average player was huge back in the day and if you were highly skilled, forget it, playing against them was a wash.
Max. C’mon. Touch of death was totally a thing in 2000. I remember being an 18 yr old on holiday in Japan, walking into an arcade and getting infinite’d 3 times in 3 matches with 3 different characters in XvSF. I think we forget how bloodthirsty the JP arcade scene was at that time.
I don't think he was literally talking about TODs just that it feels like you're unable to do anything because of being stuck watching the opponent do their combo before being able to do anything again. And even without TODs there were combos that could take off the majority of your health. So 2 or 3 would still kill you even if 1 didn't.
Just goes to show the two type of people that exists. 1- Just watches wholesome content and enjoys. 2- looks for anything that can be frowned upon and do so.
I’ve always loved fighting games growing up, but because of Super Smash Bros., and my strong desire to get better at Super Smash Bros. Melee, it lead to me a realm of wanting to improve in fighting games I never thought I would before. Strings, mix ups, frame links, mind games, spacing, everything. And the places I’ve gone and people I’ve met because of that love, I’ll never forget I love Sakurai Thank you for everything
Rushdown Revolt would give you a lot to rip into sir think if Smash Bros decided to chug 400 pounds Anime Fighter juice an have a dedicated team who knows the FGC personally fear movement fear it lol
Yeah, I don't think Sakurai is necessarily talking about literal "touch of death" combos literally either. I think he refers to games with that generally had long, high damage combos, which when landed during a match would result in the comboed player being beaten or almost beaten. Including ToD combos, but not only so.
Love Sakurai, plus his RUclips vids he has been doing has been real fun to watch, love seeing the behind the scenes of the games he has worked on, and info about games in general. Smash 64 is probably my most favourite vid yet looking forward to the rest of them. ❤
The problem is that everyone on the internet including Max here(I was thinking he was getting at the end) they default their thinking to 1vs1 no itens final destination and what sakurai say its true for casuals when playing with everything on against my friends combos is the last thing we care about and we just have fun meanwhile in other fighting games when you were hit by someone that can do a big combo and you lost most of your health you feel like shit and that is why me and my friends play smash almost every weekend but play a normal fighting game with focus on combos 1 time a year if it is a new version of SF.
Even with the stage hazards and items competitive skill developed for the tournament rule set up doesn't completely go away. A person that knows Luigi's zero to death can still pull it off with 4 players, items on, etc.
@@andrebaxter4023 How many hits off the combo can you get when there's a 3rd player lobbing bombs at you because you are, for a moment, not really moving?
@@andrebaxter4023 Yes but like that is the 5% of people that play smash in the world for the majority they can at least do something with the hammer or final smash while if I call my friend to play a SF or Guilty Gear I just beat them up and im shit in those games too.
@@Appletank8 Or a 4th player who just grabbed the Smash Ball and is about to press the Special button on both of you, while the screen is scrolling away, forcing you to either continue your combo and die offscreen together with your target or disengage.
Samurai’s talk about combos may not necessarily be about ToD’s, maybe he means a situation like where two reasonable combos will kill a character and a newbie just loses two interactions one after the other (say they get combod into a hard knockdown then immediately get combod again on waking up) and is dead right away.
Sakurai is right though, every second you're getting comboed is a second you're not doing anything. Can you imagine in other genres of games if you're getting attacked, you can only take it and not be able to do anything? e.g. If you get Zerg Rushed in Starcraft, and all you can do is wait for the entire attack to end before you can do anything? The longer the combos, the less the other side gets to play, simple as that.
that is also why i used to hate turnbased rpgs tbh (took a damn while to figure out the mindset one needs to have about "turns" to start enjoying them)
@@Copperhell144 wha kind of argument is that? It's not like you're guaranteed to die if you get in a combo at low hp, there's a... I dunno, 0.1% chance that your opponent might get a heart attack and stop midcombo! Jokes aside, it really isn't that comparable as they are two different kinds of player states and cs is a team game too(meaning that in spectator mode you can, sometimes, also help out your team or already start to plan out the next match)
@@iota-09 I have no idea what you are trying to convey with your first paragraph. I don't see different kinds of player states here. One is a player state where you're "not allowed to play the game". The other is a player state where you're "not allowed to play the game". Nobody ever wants 0 respawn seconds in MOBA's and CS and yet somehow everyone feels entitled to be able to do something about being combo'd, and complain about how "they might as well let their controller down" even though that technically applies more to MOBA's and CS because fighting game combos can at least have resets that demand your attention to block even as you're getting hit.
@@Copperhell144 I feel like it'd be more accurate to say that one is a state where you're temporarily removed from the game, and the other is a state where you are still technically in the game, you just can't do anything. When you die in CS, you're out of that round. Removed from play. When you get combo'd in a fighter, you technically haven't been removed from play, but the game doesn't give you any agency until you're no longer being hit. No one expects to be able to do things when they're dead. But getting combo'd isn't being dead, and yet usually you can't do anything. And just to be clear, I'm not even saying that's bad design or anything, I just don't the comparison between dying in CS or a MOBA and getting combo'd in a fighting game makes sense. One is a very clear and defined failure state, the other is not.
Ok when they got to the part where sakurai came up with percentage based damage. I think that had to be one of the single handedly greatest ideas for a fighting game. Combos in sakurai's day weren't the same as hours. So where he created percentage based, he created a pure situational fighting game. Obviously the games intent at launch wasn't to be some high level fighter, he played with a fun concept and it soared.
I'm a competitive-minded Smash player getting into fighting games (recently started SamSho and Tekken 7), so I'm really starting to appreciate the unique challenges that both offer. It makes no sense to say one is harder than the other, it just needs to be about enjoying yourself. And I think Sakurai hit the golden ratio of how many people get to enjoy his game, from the new to the experienced
14:12 I think that's why the default was Time over Stocks, because you can fall off theoretically infinitely, but you're always able to play until the timer runs out.
I think you're right about it being a translation thing, Max. I heard somebody say that what he actually said was not "strategy," but the same exact term he had been using for the "push and pull" concept from recent videos: "There was no room for the same *push and pull*" or something to that effect.
I just checked, that is right. He is using the term for the "push and pull" concept, it's in the Japanese subtitles as well. It's kind of weird because the term was previously translated as "push and pull" *two times in the same video,* but for some reason, they went for simply "strategy" for that specific line.
I assume when the subtitles say "long combos leave little room for strategy" they mean "little room for counter-play" as the whole reason for the changes he implemented wasn't to remove combos, but to add a way to escape a combo with DI
The "can't play the game" analogy about getting edgeguarded as a new player doesn't really work because you CAN get around it maybe by doing something as simple as delaying an Up B, while in the traditional fighting game you LITERALLY can't play the game; even the best players in the world have to wait for the combo to end
Granted being good at playing mixup in any Smash game with recovering back to stage, particularly Melee, takes a lot of skill and familiarity with a character’s movement. At least there is that window of opportunity, but damn is there the learning curve to get there.
That’s why FGC types are getting their dander up. At a point, traditional fighting games become _absolutely_ exclusionary to newcomers, because there’s just no chance to better themselves in a community where the name of the game is obsessively pursuing that one loopable flowchart combo that is an easy key to victory. Even when you have Burst or counter mechanics, those only do so much to give tools to get out of just watching the screen while you literally can do nothing. To make matters worse, most if not all of these will cleanly put you in the corner, whereupon save for the one-off Burst some games will have, any attempt to escape, counter or otherwise vacate in a gamble with a 75% if getting tagged for the effort and then you’re right back into the same combo. Rinse and repeat. That’s what Sakurai’s talking about, and he absolutely isn’t wrong.
@@MagnificantSasquatch "name of the game is obsessively pursuing that one loopable flowchart combo that is an easy key to victory" A few characters in Smash Ult come to mind.
@@killercore007 A few characters in Smash Ult who will always ultimately be able to be DI'd out of, even if their string connects, that's the point. There's no corner traps here, you always have a fair and reasonable means of escape. It comes down to who has the better grasp of the mechanics or not. The only two guilty of breaking this are Brawl Meta Knight and Sm4sh Bayo for having combo options that were truly absolute in certain matchups, and we all know how heavy those nerfs came down.
15:45 I think it's less of what's ACTUALLY happening and a lot more of what it FEELS like is happening. If you're new to a game or don't know the combos, when someone hits you for half your life, even if it's a short combo, or does a long enough combo that you don't get to do anything for a period of time, even if you're not getting TOD'd it can really feel like you can't do anything and there's no way to win. Like I love combo heavy games like the general hyper fighter, but I can recognize that if someone is combo'ing you, it can feel like you're just sitting there waiting for your turn, or if you get outplayed and the opponent gets the oki setup and gets you and you've lost your turn have to sit there again.
13:25 coming from the perspective of the later smash games, recovery isn't so linear as to guarantee a death against an experienced player. you usually have mixups in timing and positioning, maybe you could go low/high or airdodge late/early, even little mac has something. all these options the person in advantage had to think about while commiting because even going for an edgeguard and failing could, at best, result in your advantage being wasted and, at worst, you dying yourself
As a man who cannot edgeguard to save my life in Smash, I feel this post. At least when getting edgeguarded you also have so many options to attempted a recover.
I think people forget that the core gameplay of Smash has always been the fun of chaos, it never started out as something very competitive, someone new to the game can have a good time in non-competitive games because the appeal is simply seeing how funny your favorite characters from nintendo are freaking fighting each other, bouncing around the stage, using pokeballs and wait for a charizard and see only a golden that splashes around and does nothing, or seeing your opponent almost win but just happened to step on a mine and get blown up into the sky.
As I said on the Sajam video covering this topic; one of the reasons why I loved Dead or Alive so much was there were so many more opportunities for interaction and actually pressing buttons that do something than other fighters because unless your feet were off the ground or you got crumpled you could always try to Parry/Counter in the middle of an opponent's combo (or Grab if you think they're gonna delay) and get out of it. Same thing in Smash where you get to spend so much more of the match actually DOING something. Also I think it's funny how Sakurai saw the pretzel motion in KoF and was just like "FUCK THAT NOISE".
Idk. I don’t like people be able to do things in the middle of my hits. Getting that hit feels less rewarding cause we still have to guess. I shouldn’t have to guess your the one getting hit.
@@WeaponExX because people not a doll but living person? Fight back when in danger is instinct. Overwhelming not fun if you want play fun between veteran and newcomer. The tension not there.
It's very funny. I actually had the exact same thought as Sakurai about how when you're in hit stun during a combo, you're essentially a sitting duck, and this is expasperated by how long a combo might be. I thought about how maybe the ability to do a "combo" breaker after initial stun recovery, if or when you guess right on your opponent's next button input might make fighting games even more interactive. There's been lots of time where I was stuck in a lengthy combo where I literally put down the controller just to wait for it to end, which is exactly the opposite you want in a high octane exciting match. That being said, I can't for the life of me play Smash competetively so it's not really my kind of solution for it, but it's amazing how I thought this was a novel idea when it was literally a main reason for why Smash became what it became already in 99.
I truly hope I live long enough to see people stop caring what small groups on Twitter think. "30 crazy people keep shouting at the sun, lets take their opinion seriously!"
Something that mainly comes to mind about the perspective of strategy/combos is also the question of 'how many tools to get out of being comboed' existed at that same time, i.e. once you're in the middle of being knocked around, are you in a position where you may as well take your hands off the joystick, etc. I think it's more of a standard now to have a couple forms of combo-breaker or tech'ing maneuver in some limited amounts compared to what I remember in the past.
I think the big thing is that the controls themselves are a much smaller hurdle. There's no vital controls locked behind your simple ability to input until you get to high level play, where you start to get jank like wavedashing.
I've been hearing people saying that Smash is not a fighting game. It's not a "Traditional" Fighting game. Heck! When I played Smash, I started to get used to like Fighting games after struggling with Tekken and MvC. Then when Smash Ultimate came out with Ryu, Ken, Terry, and Kazuya, I now know how to do Motion Inputs. That game brought me BACK to the Traditional Fighting Games. IMO, Smash Bros. is like the first stage of learning the genre. In short, Smash is a fighting game that can make you like Fighting Games. I hope you all understand this.
I was under the impression that Sakurai’s “difficult inputs” are referring to fighting game inputs. Yes, all fighting games will have a combo system, whether or not the devs wanted it, but they’re still complex. While Smash isn’t any different, I think he was talking about the specials. Neutral special, press one button, side special, hold left or right and press that button, up special, hold up and press the same button. Down special, hold down and press the button again Meanwhile, with some fighting games, you can get some decent ones like Ryu’s Hadoken, down, down forward, forward, punch or King’s Tornado Kick, half circle starting from King’s front and a special. Then you get Geese Howard’s raging storm who you gotta cook some pancakes by controlling your toes, bite down on a dog’s tail, turn your left arm 500 degrees to the front, have one eyeball watch a child while the other eyeball to watch a game of Pong and use your free foot to crush any spider that comes out of a hole one by one. Edit: and use your only free hand to disarm a bomb while an old lady repeatedly smacks the side of your head with her umbrella
Fam, raging storm is not that hard lol you are literally just sliding your stick back and forth essentially. I know it’s hard to wrap your head around sliding your stick halfway around, but it’s like doing a fireball motion except you keep going Annoying inputs are more stuff like Deadly Rave, rather than the pretzel inputs, which modern fighting games have started to leave behind. It’s only quarter circles, half circles or dp inputs nowadays
@@Ritsu362 I know. I just wanted to exaggerate on how it’s one of the most complex attacks in fighting game history. Or am I thinking of deadly rave? I know geese has a pretzel move, I just forgot what it was
@@daleketchup7434 deadly rave is the one that goes “press quarter circle-back, forward k+lightK, then, time it to geeses hits press, k,p,k,hksackakzk Deadly rave is pretty dumb lol the pretzel stick is raging storm but it’s honestly not that bad. If anything, dosing pretzel inputs in smash is dumb because of the switch’s joysticks. Doing Terrys power geyser is pain 🥲 I’m just being nitpicky, but I totally get your point
@@Ritsu362 dude i know this'll sound crazy if that's the opinion you have but... for someone who's 100% new to fighting games, it may take them 1 hour in training mode to figure out how to do hadouken and shoryukens, but only 10 or so minutes to understand all the inputs(definitely not all the systems) of smash bros. that's the kind of level of beginner sakurai was talking about.
Fighting games (similar to real fighting in a way) are about a set of basic principles like distance management, strategy, timing, and movement. When a match happens between two players who are equal in their input skills, it usually comes down to those principles and who can apply them better. I think this is what Sakurai was talking about. He wanted to create a game in which players could skip the input grinding phase and instead focus on strategizing and learning how to time things.
12:00 @ Bayonetta combos... worth remembering that this is a discussion on design decisions for the original smash bros, where characters have far fewer If any moves that combo reliably into each other in a significant way...
I don't see why people are mad at Sakurai. He's probably the most kindhearted and wholesome game developer I've ever seen. With the combos in Smash Bros do you have to hit them no but it's gonna take a longer time to win while the combos rank up the damage
Sakurai is specifically talking about KOF 98, where, according to an earlier interview… while dragon king/smash was in development, sakurai bodied a guy who was on a date SO HARD that he ended up leaving in shame.
I don’t think Sakurai was talking about TODs at all, I think it’s more about “turns until death” especially in some older fgs characters could die in 2-3 good combos, with things like % changing knockback and di both messing with that, hypothetically leading to more possible turns a player might have (this is obviously ignoring that smash 64 eventually developed into a TOD fest over the course of 20 years)
I do believe sakurai was talking about is that while you are hit by a combo, there is nothing to do to escape it or mitigate its damage (hence the name combo). In this exact point, only the skill of the attacker, to not drop the combo, matters. Touch of Deaths are the extreme of these cases, but there is a lot of middle ground that are still problematic depending on the game.
Some fighting games have 3-5 seconds long combos without supers, it can become tedious for a noob to be inside a combo again and again, feeling like they can't do anything but get juggled from side to side. In smash you are always playing, you can always counter attack and get out of a bad situation. Even when stuck in a stun lock you can always mash buttons and wiggle the stick to get out of it. You never feel like you are just a sandbag for half of the match.
All this salt over the first smash game is making me REALLY excited at how mad he's going to make Melee players feel on what he does or doesn't say about that game.
DI is by far one of the best additions to fighting games. Smash more than almost any other fighting game actually gives agency to the person being combo'd. There is something real about the idea that in traditional fighters, after the first attack lands, it's entirely on the one player to execute the combo or mess up. Some games do a little better with mechanics like bursting out but those almost always consume a meter or something so that it doesn't work for all combos. Smash, with the introduction of DI, actually provides a skill test for the player in disadvantage. There aren't many fully true combos, but there are tons of combos where if you can predict the opponents DI or tech you do have true followups. And, there are certainly characters in smash nowadays that violate that principle, between smash 4 Bayonetta, and ult Kazuya and to a lesser extent Steve, but they are the minority. But, you can also see that when these characters do exist, they are all relatively overpowered and overcentralizing compared to the rest of the cast; their existance warps the game in an unhealthy way because they are breaking one of the fundamental principles of the franchise, that being agency.
even ult kazuya is largely di and character dependent. the player on the receiving end can also mess with the kazuya by shifting the di line on ewgf. There is also counterplay outside of di, like stage positioning. for example, if you're positioned closer to the edge on a stage like hollow bastion, kazuya doesn't have as much stage to work with, and often has to cut the combo early.
@@Inabathtubuv Of course Kazuya has some counterplay, all of his combos are basically a string of 50/50's, especially with the DI line wiggle tactic. My point was just that the characters like him that have extremely long nearly-true combos and less, or at least less obvious counterplay tend to become overcentralizing and are almost always top tier because the risk reward on their combos is just so insane and most people, including top players, won't escape correctly every time. Kazuya is especially rough because if he does correctly guess your DI every time,, which is admittedly unlikely, and you aren't next to the ledge, he actually can just true zero-to-death you. At least Bayonetta combos could be escaped most of the time with really good SDI, and she had trouble killing at high %'s, which Kazuya definitely does not.
for what its worth, idk if I ever would have played fighting games if I didn't get a copy of smash 64 as a kid. the ability to pick up and play with your friends and do stuff that looked cool is what hooked into the fgc
10:12 Smash IS different. I didn't learn combos, setups, kill confirms, but I still managed to bring Samus K. Rool, Ganon, Bowser, Pyra to elite smash. And here is another story. One day my friend visited me, he NEVER played Smash (I have roughly 500 hours), and we played online team battles, and after 10-15 minutes of practice he's already became useful, and he himself dealt damage and even knocked out opponents.
As a person that had no experience with fighting games, whenever i tried them out, I'd always get my ass handed to me. Not due to combos, but due to not really understanding how fighting games work. I played smash for a good while due to just how much free it hands you during gameplay through stage gimmicks, items, different characters and etc. I started playing KOF at 99, but I was so discouraged from playing it due to skill level difference that I only managed to get by and have fun about 20 years later. So I think I understand Sakurai's point, though not really related to combos imo
“New game sucks, old game’s cooler” Well, that pretty much nails down FGC’s reaction to DNF Duel. I also find it very interesting how a good chunk of the FGC-who didn’t really care that much for Smash-suddenly get into a get into a huff when Sakurai makes a fairly solid point ‘bout combos in fighters. 😂
Yeah. I don't recall if it was KOF95 or 96, but he bodied a couple that just wanted to play casually and have fun, so he felt pretty bad for it as he clearly had more knowledge on how to play. And this is one of the reasons Smash was born.
The level of competitiveness since fighting games started has risen to unimaginable stages. The popularity of fighting games is like a seesaw. When first releases are out they Stay popular for a limited time. Games like grandblue vs and samsho 2019 got everyone excited but now their dead. It's going to happen every single game cause new ones pull them away from what they were. Love fighting games for fighting games. Good or bad. Ppl spend their careers to bring the next joy of competition. Bless all employees and the companies for keeping us entertained for decades and decades to come.
You gotta remember that he was in Japan at the time when they were way more advanced than the West in fighting games. The stuff happening in arcades in Japan and America at the time were 2 different worlds
The issue is that people who are deep into the fighting game community (myself included sometimes) often forget what it’s like to start a game. If you’ve never played the game before and your friend knows one combo, you’re gonna get hit by the one combo five times and then lose. If you know one combo but your friend knows three or four, they have more to capitalize on. The way it’s worded saying combos render your opponents skill irrelevant is weird but obviously combos are part of the skill so I think it’s something poorly worded that people on the internet too quickly took offense to just because they forgot what it was like to be new to a game
ther'es also the fact that some definiteons of "combo" can also include "combination of inputs" which would relate to what in the west we refer to as motions, which sakurai mentioned only once but which was clearly a very important part of his idea about making a game with a very low skill floor.
How I play Fighting games: Man that story on hard difficulty was fun lets go online. after 10 TOD matches: fuck this game. Repeat for every Fighting game for the last decade.
You're misinterpreting the "skill" part. He means that the person on the recieving end of the combo has their skill become irrelevant after the first hit of a combo has landed. It then becomes a passive experience until the opponent finishes/drops the combo. Thats all he's saying
It's exactly how max put it near in the colsing statemnts of the video. You get to change the rules of the game in smash. You're losing really quick? Make the game revolve around the time it takes for you to get killed instead of just pure combat. Turn the game into tag. It's really hard to do the same in most fighting games, due to really limited escape options.
Dude I'm glad you busted that myth. In Smash 64 especially you have to learn the zero to death combos to have any kind of decent chance, if anything the old games are more similar to those ztd fighting games. In melee its a bit more nuanced but at higher levels you're almost dead if not dead from a neutral opening
To me, Sakurai may have been talking about X-Men vs. Street Fighter (Arcade - 1996) also. I remember being a victim of multiple Infinite combos by the hands of characters like Sabretooth and Magneto.
tbh it's not even about infinite combos, if you're a complete newbie who doesn't even know how to do motions(which is most likely the kinda type of beginner sakurai was talking about) even if the combos you're facing only get you to 55% health, that still will be impossible to deal with as a beginner, because even if you do get a hit in, chances are you will barely do any substantial damage, while your opponent needs only to hit you with their combos 1-2 times more to win, and most importantly, during a smash combo you still get the illusion of control and even some actual control with being able to move in the air, recoveries, etc, but during a regular fighting game combo you literally cannotdo anything unless you have burst or something like that(and even that only gives you a limited amount of control)
I think he’s more talking about the consistency of combos so he made it so that you could only do them in certain situations because in traditional fighters (I’m assuming seen as I’m an outsider) your combos are just as effective at any point in the game
Constantly lies Constantly directs blame on others Has a large ego Thinks he's a celebrity Creates drama when its not necessary Wastes his company's money Treats IP like toys Don't be mad at Sakurai people.
16:18 The same can be said about arena fighters. So many people call them baby games until they can't beat me, then it's "unfair and broken", so I teach them what I did and they say it's "just too complicated with no depth" completely ignoring the depth of neutral and movement.
It's actually kind of crazy that smash is one of the only fighting games to implement a method to get out of combo's with DI ( directional influence). It be interesting to see other fighting games implement DI and smash di. This just add's more depth to smash in that not only do you have to use mixups in neutral but also during combo's. If you try to do the same combo over and over in melee not only will it not work at higher percents but also the other player can start di'ng in a way where they can get out so you have to mix them up and continue to adapt to what they're doing.
20:00 Dunno if you'd count ARMs since it's neither a traditional fighting game nor a series as of this writing, but that's sold pretty well for a new FG franchise last I checked
Hence the items in smash create room for crazy improvisation. Smash has always been developed as a party game for everyone to enjoy, not for competitive play. Not only that, the % changes the knockback, which changes how you need to approach the best combo.
Yep and like 99% of the people who bought Smash 64 got it to play as a party game and just wanted to mash and have fun. Unlike typical fighting games, you aren't going to get stuck in a corner getting pummeled and don't know what to do.
![My Feline Friend, Fukurashi [Grab Bag]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/EbkshNLpMwo/mqdefault.jpg)
Kof combos where nuts by 99, sakurai was a kof player. So his perspective has to be coming from that.
And then he made smash 4 Bayo and Kazuya. While I love everyone included in this conversation, they both have touch of death combos even if you DI
Stocks also exist in smash so you know you’ll have 3-4 chances per game to not get zero to deathed
Thank you, if I had scrolled down and the first comment would not have mentioned KOF, I would've flipped.
yup and it was very common to see game magazine promote combo tutorial like a tree branch with small picture and branching arrow.
A part of me wondered if he was talking about the overwhelming nature of fighting games for new players, where even short combos looked impressive and difficult to execute (even if they were basic bread-n-butter stuff from an intermediate player), and where those new players would have no idea how to engage veteran players to the point of being completely nuked while having no idea what to do.
So, maybe not necessarily ToD combos or long UMvC3 combos, but just a series of combos that would humble new players away from the cabinet. Nobody likes being "free" in a public arcade.
There was an old story about Sakurai completely destroying someone at an arcade (KOF). When he looked to see who his opponent was, it was a couple who obviously didn't know what they were doing, so they left in frustration. This led Sakurai into wanting his game to be easy for beginners.
He didn't exactly succeed. Smash is literally just as hard to play as a KOF or Tekken if you're playing against someone who knows what to actually do. I don't know why everyone went into "PRAISE GOD SAKURAI GENIUS" mode for something that I don't think fixed anything. Every fighting game is easy "for beginners". Every fighting game is hard when those beginners play non-beginners.
@@THENAMEISQUICKMAN Read your 2nd sentence slowly.
@@THENAMEISQUICKMAN you can get your friend to play smash at a party and everyone will get it.
Get your friends to play street fighters and it will pass an hour before the first hadouken is thrown
@@THENAMEISQUICKMAN I mean, isn't that just any game that has players making decisions? Yeah people who practice smash are better than the ones you just started, but you can say the same thing about poker, mario party, and racing games. It's not necessarily about being easier to master, it's more about having a game that universally easier to have fun in
Cause if your opponent is better than you in KoF, then there's just better than you and are that much more likely to win, smash has more variables such as items and stage variation which don't invalidate that legacy skill, but it gives the new players more opportunities to do things behind get their butt kicked
How dare the man who created smash bros tell you how he created smash bros
Yeah! What does he thinks he is!? The creator of five successful Smash Bros Games!?
He's gone too far!! He needs to be fired!
@Max⁺⓵⓺⓵⓪⓶⓷⓪⓽⓶⓷⓸ Reported your account :)
How dare he not only be flawed, but admit it as well! Shameful!
The audacity!
I think for combos, I think Sakurai meant an "Experienced Player vs a new player" scenario. Even short combos might make a new player feel helpless against an experienced player because for a new player, "there is nothing I can do aside watch my character get beaten", and I think Sakurai wanted make the player feel less helpless and more "in control" of the situation.
As someone who doesn’t really play fighting games or Smash that often at all, I definitely feel like I can go into Smash and still get one stock off on a friend who’s good at the game, or at least get a good amount of hits in. Don’t really feel like that in fighting games a lot of the time
Can confirm. I was like seven years old when I was playing Brawl with my cousins, and though I didn't understand what was going on on the screen I _felt_ what was going on on the screen. And the fact that I got hit harder every time gave me more time to react to things as my character came back to the stage. Then I tried Ultra Street Fighter IV on a whim at some party I was invited to and was frozen in confusion at what was happening in my hands.
That's how I interpreted that.
While the helplessness of the player hit by a combo was highlighted, there was no mention of a TOD and the implication is most likely unintentional. As someone who enjoyed games like Tekken 3 with poor to average skill, I get the feeling of not getting to play the game against a good player. I would call it "cheating", though I was just a little kid back then.
Regarding edgeguarding in Smash, the disadvantaged player is still in control of their movement to an extent. Even if the player is equally helpless in that scenario, it's like you said, they feel more in control and less helpless.
Nevertheless, the intent behind Smash's design doesn't have to reflect the end product. The important thing is that all these developments lead to the creation of Super Smash Bros., its sequels and games like it.
Which still doesn't make sense because he was talking about smash 64, the one game in the series where you can do nothing to prevent getting combo'd to death
@NataliaNeeSama You hit the nail on the head so hard, this comment should be pinned for anyone to see it.
To add on it, it's funny how Max, being an expert in fighting games is clearly looking for a game that actually had ToD or modern lengthy combos back in the 1999 era. He is speaking from experience and knowledge. But then he proceeded to say an uninformed opinion that "Smash is already like this, it has combos" but this time he is seeing it as a fan, not an expert, and I get it if he played a top player he wouldnt want to play anymore because he would feel he can't do anything. AND THATS JUST THE THING. A noob vs against any pro will feel powerless and think he couldn't do anything. Hell, you can even experience this powerlessness if you go online, try a character you have never played before and fight against your own rank players. It's not that hard to comprehend. Smash HAS combos, but only in the definition of the word. It's more like "interactions". And even if somebody edgeguard you, like he said, you have 5 stocks. So no, it's not the same as combo where you get reset into a 50-50, if you get hit you get stun and suddenly the round is over.
Having said that, Smash it's the premiere fighting based game where the powerless mentality is minimized and the fun of playing is enhanced.
The amount of wisdom sakurai is dropping for free is crazy.
And the fact that he doesn't even want ads during the videos is also crazy he's such an awesome human being
Even what is more interesting is that he has even MORE insight reserved for talks and conferences. Like he is only giving the basics and it is blowing people's minds, which is great so people can have more insight into this philosophy of game design and development.
@@shen-long9082 you're not a native english speaker? In that context "crazy" means something impressive
and sad majority of those who take his party game too serious (ok i get competitive nature and all but still) won't care nor have desire to make games or how their made is so so so sad.
You don't know aspects of games just by playing them omg!
@Max⁺⓵⓺⓵⓪⓶⓷⓪⓽⓶⓷⓸ fucking scam bot
Speaking as both a Smash Player, and Traditional Fighting Game Player (GG, P4A, DBFZ, SF, SC, MvC, etc), AND as an actual competitive IRL martial artist, Sakurai is referring to something **very** specific when he talks about this. I should also mention that I am a professional Japanese translator, and I originally watched this video without the English subtitling, so I wasn't even aware there was a controversy until I saw this video. *TL:DR=* The subs do slightly misrepresent what Sakurai is conveying here. He's talking about engagement and interactivity of raw gameplay. NOT strategy or ToD combos. He essentially didn't like that combos in fighting games (of any length) was essentially a single-player game and he aimed to fix that with Smash. The below essentially explains this in detail.
Even back in the time when combos were relatively short for those games, they still largely shared a quality that is near universal in the modern day of games built around executing combos of any length. What I am referring to (and what Sakurai is alluding to) is the fact that once neutral is won, and the "hit" occurs that starts the combo, the game essentially becomes a single player experience until it is either finished or dropped, meaning that essentially for the length of the interaction, the player receiving the combo effectively just had their controller unplugged.
Even if you have to stay mentally aware of the situation, as the combo'd player, to be ready for the next interaction, that still is essentially a disengagement with active gameplay because you're not able to do anything to directly influence what is happening beyond incidental prescribed 'break' mechanics such as Bursts or KI's Combo Breaker.
Sakurai's answer to this in Smash was implementing defensive mechanics such as DI, SDI, Crouch Cancelling, and Vectoring, not to mention mitigated hitstun and various defensive maneuvers designed to make stringing together multiple hits fundamentally significantly difficult in the first place. While doing this didn't fundamentally get rid of combos in Smash altogether, it redefined the entire concept of what it means to execute a combo from a gameplay perspective. Since combos in most games, regardless of length, was essentially a single-player experience when they're actively happening, Sakurai aimed to make them a *multiplayer* experience. You don't get to put the controller down or turn your brain off when you're getting hit like you can in other fighting games. In fact, "going limp" in Smash just makes your opponent able to combo you even harder and longer, and escaping the situation with a little damage as possible or with the best positioning possible becomes a point of engagement, or vector of interaction for the other player, as opposed to simply waiting (or mashing the recovery button) until you can tech while your opponent preforms Beethoven's 5th on your face.
Even to this day as I juggle playing smash vs other traditional fighters, the mental state that goes into just starting a session of those games are completely different. Due to the fact that in Smash, in order to win, you need to be actively engaged in the gameplay essentially constantly, winning or losing, combo'ing or being combo'd, to multiple layers of abstraction (having to account for significantly numerous dimensions of information), I actually usually make the decision to play *traditional* fighting games like GG or SFV when I want to turn my brain off. The DPS (Decisions Per Second) I find myself having to make to win a game of GGST or BBTag doesn't even **begin** to compare to the amount that goes into a similar game of Smash.
This is all to preface that I think the English subs lose a little bit of what Sakurai is actually saying. He specifically uses the word 駆け引き (kake-hiki), which was translated in the Subs as "Strategy", but in truth, especially accounting for the other ways he's used this word in this video and in previous videos, he is *actually* using this word to mean "Engagement". He's talking about the ability to interact with what is happening. When he says 駆け引きがない (kake-hiki ga nai), he's not saying "there is no strategy involved" (though it can certainly be implied contextually), he is more explicitly saying "there is no interaction to be had" in this situation. Playing Smash involving a higher DPS than most other fighting games comparatively was not only intentionally by design, but also very specifically what Sakurai was trying to "fix" about the fighting game experience in the first place. He was trying to increase the baseline 駆け引き in **all** aspects of the gameplay.
Lastly, I brought up being an IRL martial artist here too only to mention that Sakurai, by doing this, speaking from experience, made Smash Bros as a fighting game more closely realistic to *ACTUAL* fighting than almost any other fighting game ever made. You don't just stop and let the combo happen when you get hit IRL, you don't just allow yourself to be moved in the way your opponent wants you to when you're being pressured. Every interaction in IRL fighting is a dialogue of engagement, not a monologue; with you constantly having to be aware of what your opponent is doing and how they're hitting you or taking your hits, unlike with traditional fighting games where that only really happens in neutral or in-between setplay engagements. It is a full body engagement with an insane DPS (Decisions Per Minute) for every little thing that happens, whether it be deciding whether you will take the punch coming for your face on the left cheek or on the jaw, deciding if you want to eat a kick head-on or roll your body with the impact, deciding when your legs buckle whether you want to fall forward, on your face, on your side or on your ass. Each of these interactions and decisions make a difference in the course of a fight, and Smash, in my experience as an IRL fighter, mirrors more closely to that than anything else by FAR. When I take a f-tilt to the face, I now have to decide whether I DI away to gain distance, or DI in to stay close or possibly juke a DI-away read, whether I air-dodge immediately and risk ground lag, or jump away an lose stage control. When I hit my opponent with a D-Tilt, I have to pay attention at what direction they DI'd, how far they flew, and how they affected their knockback in and gauge what move can potentially hit them next, how this affects my frame advantage, or if it is even a good idea to attempt continuing the combo string in the first place and opt to do something else. With traditional fighters, once you get the hit confirm, barring situations where Bursts or Combo Breakers are on the table, it is simply just execute as rehearsed, with *no* further consideration or deliberation needed.
Thank you so much for reading this impromptu thesis. My sincere apologies this comment was so huge.
Nah. No apologies necessary as this was very informative, from someone who played standard FG as a kid and felt the technical barrier was too high, but played Smash and got to enjoy the nuances without the skill barrier getting in the way.
Excellent comment. Your interpretation is spot on.
Hm, yes. Smash is closer to a fighting game than traditional fighting games, despite always being reffered to as a party game.
It is using the same strategy as literally ANY other PvP game. If anything, a traditional fighting game might be less of a fighting game than even a FPS game, because of lack of combat dialogue.
Amazing comment!
I think you nailed it. It's not about Infinites nor TOD's, it's about any combo leading to a (short) moment of non-interactive gameplay. Added to that, a seasoned player has to hit (and combo) you 3 times to win, while the new guy has to hit you 10 times to win (not knowing combos).
The difference in Smash vs fighting games at the time that Sakurai was trying to explain is that even if you're playing against someone far better than you in Smash, you don't lose the ability to control your character (usually) like what happens in other fighting games. There is a massive difference in feeling when you playing a game that you cannot win vs one that you don't know how to win. It's like losing to a boss during a cutscene instead of just making the boss really tough to defeat. One way you never had a chance, but the other way offers the illusion of freedom, which is good game design.
Finally someone gets what he was trying to say.
@keil scott Yeah, but that's a very hardcore perspective on what makes a game worth playing. It isn't a "wrong" perspective, but there's more than one perspective on what the "point" of fighting games are. Some people want to take things very seriously but a lot people just want to jump in and have some fun with friends. They don't want to play a multiplayer game by themselves, studying the game to improve. And that was especially true in the arcade era when Smash Bros. was developed. They definitely don't want studying to be required for the game to feel good to play.
And that's a valid perspective too, one that Smash Bros. tried to cater to. Its fine if that doesn't work for everyone, but its still good design.
Remember that smash 64 has no air dodge and the entire cast has infinite juggle combos
@@microblast3700 yes but who was really figuring that out back in the day your average person at that time especially was playing free for all with items cause that's how the game came out.
@@princemwamba5230 This. The game was made with this design principle. It wasn't meant to reach that level of competitiveness.
Of course all of that to say that that doesn't mean "combos" in fighting games are inherently bad. Just that Sakurai used that as a jumping-off-point to create something different.
I feel like everyone is so dumb about this situation. Sakurai is just talking about the fact that you can't really interact with your opponent while being combo'ed. He added the different power of launches and DI in smash to counter that and make it a bit more complicated for the one doing combos, that's it. That's all there is.
Also input commands
@@FumanyuX ESPECIALLY input commands(and the fact you can move while in the air)
Exactly.
Just don't get hit 4head
funny how people are getting outraged at his explanation of why he made smash the way he did, and its not like he's NOT a fan of older fighting games himself. what the hell are you guys getting angry for?
last time i checked people were angry he was doing videos about game development at all because they just wanted him to keep making more smash content. insanity.
I saw him not talking about infinite combos or one hit to death. When i tried to get into fg, the arcade, the guys who had been playing longer could always get in close, perform a combo. Get out and repeat until i died. With me never getting in a hit. That is what he is talking about.
Thinking back to my earliest days playing fighting games, and comparing to how I as a much more experienced player try to deal with newer players now, I think this hits the nail on the head. Combos back then might not have been as super long as they are now, but they were certainly long enough to be disorienting. If you're entering a new game, all your attempts at doing anything being immediately getting countered resulting in combo after combo, it can make the player feel like the game is designed with an inherent lack of strategic options offered to the user, or make it seem like getting to the point of being able to employ strategy is extremely difficult when it usually isn't.
(meanwhile, one of the most important skills to learn if you want to be the guy who introduces a new player to a fighting game isn't just how to hold back, but how to fight - even if you win - such that the opposing player doesn't come away from the experience feeling as though nothing they do matters, which is a death knell for newbie fighting game interest)
That experience clearly didn't deter many of the fighting game pros around today in their earliest days, but it did still exist and Sakurai seems to have observed it enough to want to try to avoid it (though as noted, players still find a way). Sakurai's response is an interesting choice, but it's one that's understandable. It's the same idea that went into - like - Divekick, except Divekick was partly embracing so as to make fun of it while Sakurai was going out of his way to attempt to circumvent it.
^yup, and it's not even top players, but intermediate ones.
but being max something of a hight intermediate/near top, of course he would think sakurai is talking about actual tops against "initates" rather than intermediates against people who don't even know how to do a shoryuken.
haha i bought guilty gear bc of max and most of the lobbies i was in was exactly this, just practiced bread and butter combos i had no idea how to get out of. same thing happens to me in DBZF
i think sakurai's point is after the starter move connects, there are no interactions with the player until the combo is over. combos taking longer and dealing more damage over the history of fighting games without even any bandaid solution like a burst or combo breaker would make it feel so it's more about knowing the combos rather than the other skills categorized under "game sense" like footsies, reads and such.
100% this. Even in Max talking about being edge-guarded, you're still playing the game, trying to jump back on or counter attack etc. When Sakurai talks about the push and pull he is clearly talking about both players actively playing and fighting to the end, which longer combos (and concepts like 50/50s and Oki where a newer player feels like they can't even move) remove/subtract that push & pull from games as time went on and how he wanted the antithesis of that for his game.
or about specials.
also i feel like sakurai and max are talking about different kinds of "beginner", like sakurai is talking about someone who's withing their first 5 matches ever at playing a game and max is talking about someone who "just now started to understand he may or may not like fighting games"(which by then yu will at least have figured out how to do i.e a shoryuken)
the second type of beginner wouldn't really care about how muh simpler the controls are in smash bros, but the first ABSOLUTELY will, especially as in mid-air they can still move and keep the illussion of control during the opponent's combo.
This is why i love Games like Soul calubur and For honor. The combos are shorter, which means it becomes much more about the neutral game. Getting combo'ed to death is just not fun for me. i much more love the mind games aspect.
Bingo. There's literally no other way to interpret that statement. I dunno how so many people were able to get anything different from it.
@@Jerome616 you have definitely never played soul calibur 6 at high level then. The game is purely about fishing for lethal hits and doing 1-3 touch of death combos. It's so bad on the combo emphasis that fundamentals are secondary to combo game. I quit playing it because. I miss the old days of soul calibur.
Sakurai is clearly a man who is in a constant state of burning his passion, the man is a candle burning at 4 ends!
And I feel he is constantly dangerously close to having burn out. I admire his passion but also am worried about him
@Max⁺⓵⓺⓵⓪⓶⓷⓪⓽⓶⓷⓸ 🤖
@@Selnathorn I don't think the passion will ever burn out, but his body started burning out during Smash's development. I'm more worried about this man working himself to death.
his passion burns so brightly, im certain several people have been blinded by it
@@Visual217 In fairness, I think a big reason why Sakurai took a step back from video game development and started working on these videos was *because* he was getting burned out. While these videos are by no means low effort, I have a hard time imagining that this is more stressful for him than leading freaking Smash Ultimate development for nearly a full decade.
As someone who could barely play fighting games at that time and had friends and family members who did and were pretty good at it, Sakurai describes exactly how I felt, regardless if that was really the case or not. I just couldn't do anything and just got comboed to death. That made me hate on the entire genre for many years.
ditto
Exactly. I remember playing MvC2 with my cousin and I had no idea how anything worked. Fight starts.... Things happen..... You Lose.
Great stuff.
I’d blame the people you play with rather then the genre itself. Whenever I would be laying a beat down and the person was new, I would offer to show them what’s what
This reminds me of a user on twitter that dropped cool art tricks pretty often and got bullied off of the platform for… no reason.
Like seriously.
They harmlessly shared their knowledge and art tutorials and people projected that they were trying to force the “right way” to draw when really they were handing out free education for fundamentals.
That’s why I never use twitter
@@PlatinumMage Twitter is perfectly fine when you only fallow Clip account's an some lesser known artist hehe
I can assume that the person either did a male/female body tutorial and got flamed for drawing the female body as supermodel skinny. OR did skin tone tutorial and made a darker skinned person ashy.
As much as I find these kinds of drawing tips to be cringe. The artists who take the time to make them don't deserve to be shamed off the platform.
@@apexknight9356 not that at all; the artist was a japanese person, and they just mentioned that drawing "hairy lines" (i.e. drawing a line with multiple short strokes instead of one long, confident one) makes the art look amateur-ish. and those amateurs took offense to being called amateurs, and used art of _professionals_ as examples as to why these _amateurs_ werent doing anything wrong lmao
the artist is now doing better on pixiv fanbox, which is similar to patreon, but it's such a shame that free art education is now paid because of some twitter artists who can't handle the fact that skill and technique still exist in art, not just creativity
Yup sounds like twitter
I love how, at 09:00 of the video, Max recognizes the context that King of Fighters provides for this entire discussion. Earlier, he was sitting there thinking of Third Strike and MvC, and even Killer Instinct. The moment KoF is brought up, it's like Max's brain expanded with the sudden understanding it carried.
Except he doesn't ever seem to understand it, he continues as if Sakurai is talking about chaining hits together when he *isn't*, COMPLETELY IGNORING both Toby's translation *and* the visuals made by SAKURAI HIMSELF AT 12:54, making it clear he's talking about **input** combos!
@@lunalesombras1150 Toby? Like Toby Fox? He doesn't translate, 8-4* do.
*I think that's their name.
@@NuiYabuko far as I'm aware, while that is the case on professional projects, Toby has been learning Japanese while working with Nintendo, and this lead to him being the one doing the translating on Sakurai's personal project.
I believe Sakurai is referencing how 3 interactions with a decent combo wins games. Not referencing exactly against combo length, but how interactions are limited in hit stun. 🤔
Thinking about it in terms of TOD is extreme.
Yeah I didnt take it so literally his point still makes sense
@@ricorichardson5945 it kinda was the case though. Practically every KOF had TODs. Not intentional of course, but they had 'em
I believe he was referencing kof
@@abzeromusic 100% doubt. As he would reference popularity later. KoF (as max stated) was not taken well in Japan at the time.
I can tell you from experience, growing up, if you didn't know the game and you showed up at the arcade, it felt like you barely moved and were being comboed all over the screen. Of course, they weren't real endless combos but they felt that way to a layman. In particular, I remember feeling this way with Tekken and Marvel vs Capcom.
In fact, I remember an acquaintance back then that would watch combo videos online back when internet wasn't common. All he did was memorize one or two effective combos and use them over and over and it felt like you couldn't move. This same acquaintance didn't really regularly win before this time.
@@BloodlessWolf yup. i used to figure out combos on my own before the internet was as easily accessible as it is now, and i used to destroy people lol. Now it seems like that aspect of skill is irrelevant since people who can create their own combos, post them online now. so everybody knows them.
people that know how to play may just say shit like "well thats why you should learn and practice for months" but the point is new people are just not gonna touch that game again, and thats why fighting games will never have that big of a playerbase
@@sangan3202 the thing is, majority of people are lazy and dumb now a days. That's why hard games don't last anymore. Like arena shooters, RTS games, 4x games, and just strategy games In general hardly exist anymore. It's quite a surprise that fighting games have even lasted this long tbh
@@sonic-bb lol no most fighting games anyone can beat the Hardest CPU the moment you fight a player all the training you did become null as they TOD you. Just because the game doesnt count the number of hits as a combo its still a TOD as they juggle you.
I'm sick of people calling Twitter, "everyone".
Twitter is the darkness in everyone's hearts
@@rouge-ish324 you now got me thinking about a Twitter version of Persona's mementos
Recent events have shown to never take Twitter seriously.
@@rouge-ish324 A sentence right out of Kingdom Hearts lol
Yes, but even if large majority disagrees, if they don't use their voice it doesn't show or matter on the topic
Why the hell are people mad at one of the rare few game developers that actually cares about it's playerbase and games they are responsible for smh...
Sakurai always did his best to make Smash the best he could and to try and please everyone despite Nintendo's obvious interference from time to time.
Its just outrage culture doing its thing
I feel like it's because the people think their way is the right way when it comes to developing games. If they don't get what they want, they get mad. If a developer works on a game that would appeal to everyone, the "fans" feel like their being abandoned. It's a lose lose situation.
@keil scott agreed
Because Smash players are animals.
Twitter mentality spreading everywhere
How dare Sakurai make games accessible for a big audience to have fun with
Yeah the Smash competitive community is idiotic especially the Meele side, Meele players broke the game by making it competitive something that Sakurai never intended to do but theh did it.
@@zetamangads Imagine being unironically competitive at a cartoony party game.
@@ChunkSchuldinga tell that to the melee community they did this to themselves especially since the roster when it comes to the meta it always the same.
Smash is one those games that it kinda of nightmare to balance because of it foundations and Sakurai unwiling to change it,at least with Mutltiversus it took the foundations that Smash made and made for competitive.
@@zetamangads smash devs actually look at the big tournaments (including ones they make), and balance the game after
@@QuackImpala7321 but sakurai never intend to be like that
I remember as a kid getting completely wiped out in Pokemon because I didn't understand how to team build. for a while, I hated it. But now I have a deep apretiation for it. Especially after getting into it and taking the time to learn. I like that Sakurai admitted that the game he made was so everyone can play. Hardcore Smash players might be mad, but I like that he made a game that I can play and not worry about being hard into the game to understand.
even as a "hardcore Smash player" I appreciate this aspect of the design. I think the playerbase for this game is just incredibly whiny and bitchy
I think Sakurai knows exactly what he's talking about. For a "standard" fighting game, if you see your opponent do something with a combo or certain series of inputs, without having it explicitly spelled out to you it would take some time to figure out what they even did, especially as a new player. Sakurai instead made a game with simplified inputs so that even with characters having all these moves, any of them can be executed by a new player, and while combos do still exist, and an amazing player can still destroy someone new, the new person in your average match will still feel like they're actually able to play and interact without just getting beaten into a wall. The percent system specifically makes it so that the closer you are to death, the further you are away after a hit from your opponent so they can't juggle you as quickly. There will always be a divide between new and more experienced players, but the goal was to make it less brutal for a new person to at least play the game in the first place.
To address the specific quote of "As more fighting games became more combo-focused, the less room there was for strategy" I interpret Sakurai as saying that it devalues strategy as a skill on it's own. If it's a match between two players who know the game and the combos, then obviously there is a ton of strategy involved, but I think some people heard this and thought he was saying that combo-focused games don't take strategy. He simply means that strategy really doesn't matter when one player is newer to the game and doesn't know combos and inputs are not intuitive (unless you already have a lot of legacy skill from other fighting games).
Another angle to consider for the "combo > strategy" thing is that when combos happen in fighting games, depending on the balance, in games with hard focus one could argue that strategy ends up taking second place to combos because for combos to happen you pretty much need the enemy usually to be out of control of their character. If the player is good and the combos are emphasized, even if you are not getting ToD'ed you are still pretty much in a situation where one hit connects and you are getting like 50%HP off and you hope it doesn't happens a second time.
So it's like you have strategy but it kinda jumps off a bridge for a combo, then it comes back and you have to hope it doesn't happens again.
As you said, smash works around this by making sure the knockback increase puts distance between both players. Even though obviously the worse player will still lose and likely get stomped, at least they get some more control and can go back to the "strategy" aspect quicker and try to get some hits and the lower combo time, at least when talking about the average or good players rather than pros, means players can quickly go back to smashing each other and moving around fast along the arena.
@@christophergarcia9022 Thinking about it more even I think this is why Sakurai tried to backpedal so hard after Melee, because he probably saw things like wavedashing as exactly what he didn't want for Smash, as that can be seen as something that is essentially a fighting game input command that places an immediate divide between newer and experienced players. It's not that Sakurai hates standard fighting games or complex combos either, which I think some people think from his comments, he just doesn't want that as the standard for Smash.
*minecraft steve has entered the chat*
It's funny to me that he had that thought back then, when later games like Blazblue came out and there were plenty of players who didn't even know basic fighting game fundamentals, but they were frequently combo heavy. Which bugged me at the time, because it felt like certain characters required very little thinking compared to others, and while the later Blazblue games teach the player a lot better, combos are still far more focused upon. Ultimate Marvel Vs Capcom 3 is where it all came ahead to me, where most of those games became Hokuto No Ken, and everything is tod.
On the flipside, Smash tried to be different, but the same thing happened, because people with such approaches to playing fighting games, will always try to do this. They'll always find a way to break games, because that's just how they play games.
@@Xcopyz Even if you are super competitive, a lot of it goes out the window in a free for all with max items. Its just chaos mode. Its rare for a 2d fighter to include anything other than 1v1 duels.
I didn't know there was controversy for that Sakurai vid. It seemed rather harmless.
Yeah especially to anyone who’s familiar with sakurai and his outlook on smash
It was Smash Twitter like always. Smash Twitter is a giant shit hole.
@Max⁺⓵⓺⓵⓪⓶⓷⓪⓽⓶⓷⓸ Look here man. STOP SCAMMING PEOPLE. You're a scammer to get their money or their personal info or something.
same here. didn't expect for some controversy about the vid itself
I legit can’t wait for his Melee video because it’ll be interesting to hear his take on the systems developed in the game and his intentions for it vs. what they’ve become now with the Melee community’s influence.
@Lemzo he's already said before that it was to keep the game beginner friendly with an aspect of luck even with items off. Brawl was intended to be everything that melee was not.
@@regionaltyrann4325 1. Because it gives new and beginner players a chance against a really good fox and captain falcon ...
2. Casual players turn off items all the time. So I really don't see why this question was asked
@@regionaltyrann4325 1. Fox and captain falcon still ended up being 2 of the best characters in brawl regardless. The minimal hitstun managed to work in their favor. Especially for fox's up tilt. I'm not saying the tripping was a good idea. But I see why they did it. It gives casuals a chance to escape and fight back.
2. Lol yeah everyone was annoyed with tripping. That's why it was removed.
It should also be noted that in an earlier video, Sakurai defined 'strategy' as 'How you manage risks/get rewards.'
"everyone" is not mad at Sakurai, Twitter is mad at him because Twitter loves to take short clips out of context and get pissed off at things that aren't being said, that's kind of their thing
Not to mention the fact that it's Smash Twitter which is even worse than the average Twitter community.
I hate how Twitter is basically "everyone" to most people. People on Twitter literally have no lives.
people on twitter are raging lbgtq trans people what do you expect . they be crazy but get normalized but elon musk will change that soon .
@@general-thehero182 This comment was mentally painful to read, please be trolling.
@@general-thehero182 cool story bro but stay on topic we're talking about smash
Cause Twitter users who have never worked on games or have anything to do with the game industry genuinely think they know more about video games then him lmao
Facts.
"I play good games, so I know games" type energy. Not throwing shade, or anything...
Sometimes I wonder if they are worse than "game journalists" lmao
Twitter users usually dont do anything productive with their lives anyway
Twitter users are the salt of the earth
How can you seriously be mad at Sakurai? Also, is it just me or does he look way younger?
His sabbatical is doing wonders
He ages backwards
He de-ages
Where do I start?
He has a Lazarus pit at home
"Combos in most fighting games are button-button-super"
I distinctly remember getting my ass handed to me in Tekken 3 when others would get in the first hit and I'd have to sit there standing and watching while they input their 24 button combo and then kick me on the ground a few more times for good measure.
Max addresses this as he goes and unlocks more memories of 1999. There's a point in the video where he wraps his head around competitive and how it breaks games open regardless of design. Once he does, he runs with it. He just rambles like this all the time so you get used to it hahaha
I'm a long-time Tekken player starting back from 2, so I've seen some people who were juggle-reliant. It really stopped being much of a game when it was basically who can get the other person off their feet first and keep them airborne longest. Like there was so much more nuance to Tekken starting in 3 and going forward but you'd have some people whose mindsets were IF I DON'T KNOW HOW TO JUGGLE TO DEATH I DON'T KNOW HOW TO PLAY. Or yknow, the occasional King player that was like "If I can't combo throw into rolling death cradle every time, idk how to play an actual match".
T3 juggles really weren't that long. You're probably thinking of T6 with its bound system. Now those go on for years.
Button-Button-super is from 2d fighting games dude, T3 doesnt have super, u picked up this part and used the wrong game to counter the quote...
@@lazkennedy yeah,
julia, xiao, kuma-panda, wang have crazy juggle combos in tekken 3. (i dont remenber now others chars with insane juggle combos)
Smash isn't your typical fighter so expectations on skills and combos are different.
It's like trying to compare Killer Instinct to a fighter like Power Stone
The game Sakurai's talking about is Kof, he actually has a video on RUclips where he talks about being in an arcade and playing against a young couple who thought it was all gonna be fun n games until he totally obliterated them. They were embarrassed and befuddled by the whole experience. That huge skill gap between him and casual players is what inspired smash.
"combo" in a japanese context refers to combinations of buttons, not a sequence of hits. He was commenting on how you needed to know complex special inputs to compete instead of having a good strategy.
That’s understandable. I play Tekken as much as Smash and knowing the difference/difficulty between special inputs to strategy is a huge one to a lot, not too much for me because I can strategize at a high level plus do combos like it’s first nature with special inputs.
No he wasn't, hence his focus on the experience of the player on the opposing side
Context exists
@@Lazypackmule and yet he also mentioned geese's and hoahmaru's specials having crazy button inputs requirements that just simply wouldn't be doabe for someone who's on their first or second round of the game(whereas you can likley do everything by your 3rd match at most of smash)
So you’re saying people don’t bother thinking about cultural differences and unique meanings for terms in JP games? Wow. It’s like people are lazy and generally stupid or something.
Thats the only thing that makes sense with all the context. Thx for insight :P
So, I wanted to ask "Am I the only person who actually understood what Sakurai was talking about?", but the reality is a lot of people just don't care and want to tear down people more successful than they are.
thats the "competitive" community for you. Bunch of try hards. Also Max is wrong TOD exist in all the games he listed. Just because there is a 1 second gap in between the 12 super combos it doesnt mean they dont get juggled for the next 12 super combo.
@@snintendog also he completely forgot about the degenerate combos of marvel superheroes vs street fighter and X-Men vs street fighter.
Also there is some element of "fighting back" when you're being combo'd in DI, as you observed, but also in non-true combos because your decisions as soon as a combo ends can mean you get chained into another combo or escape.
As for recovery, even characters that have poor recoveries, you can mix up your options, change your timing, etc, as ways of getting around an edgeguard. You don't just sit there and take it--you still get to play the game!
Yes, the combo arguement is about this. How little agency does the person on the receiving end has. Which in a lot of cases are none and have to wait until their opponent is done with it.
I’m pretty sure he was talking about casual play when he was talking about folks just not able to play while they lose. A novice who knows how to do combos will just do one combo after another vs the novice who doesn’t know how to defend against starters. Meanwhile in Smash, if you just got combo’d by somebody, you are now across the map and if you can manage to hit the ground, neutral has been restored. WAAAAAAAAAAAAY easier to get to that point in Smash vs a traditional 2d fighter.
The problem here it's Max is thinking on actual infinities, but you have to remember on those times by just knowing how to pressure and understand 50,50, your opponent will not move until his death
Sure, but here is the thing, How is Smash 64 different?
In smash 64, understanding how to combo takes a completely different skill set than combining in traditional fighting game.
@@gabrielandriel8960 It's really not, but if we insist it is long enough we can all delude ourselves into it.
@@gabrielandriel8960 Nobody has been able to answer that. Smash is the same with regards to new players and experienced players.
@@gabrielandriel8960 I grew up in the 90's and never once played against any one who could use hadouken or shoryuken in streetfighter. On the other hand, everyone I knew could utilize the full move-set of any character in smash.
To discover that the man who created Smash was a competitive KOF player is amazing.
I think what he was trying to say was that games around that time favored pressure. if you get pushed into a corner in fighting games, it was hard to fight out of it unless you reached a certain skill level. the gap between a novice and a average player was huge back in the day and if you were highly skilled, forget it, playing against them was a wash.
Max. C’mon. Touch of death was totally a thing in 2000. I remember being an 18 yr old on holiday in Japan, walking into an arcade and getting infinite’d 3 times in 3 matches with 3 different characters in XvSF. I think we forget how bloodthirsty the JP arcade scene was at that time.
I don't think he was literally talking about TODs just that it feels like you're unable to do anything because of being stuck watching the opponent do their combo before being able to do anything again. And even without TODs there were combos that could take off the majority of your health. So 2 or 3 would still kill you even if 1 didn't.
Just goes to show the two type of people that exists. 1- Just watches wholesome content and enjoys. 2- looks for anything that can be frowned upon and do so.
I’ve always loved fighting games growing up, but because of Super Smash Bros., and my strong desire to get better at Super Smash Bros. Melee, it lead to me a realm of wanting to improve in fighting games I never thought I would before.
Strings, mix ups, frame links, mind games, spacing, everything.
And the places I’ve gone and people I’ve met because of that love, I’ll never forget
I love Sakurai
Thank you for everything
Rushdown Revolt would give you a lot to rip into sir
think if Smash Bros decided to chug 400 pounds Anime Fighter juice an have a dedicated team who knows the FGC personally fear movement fear it lol
Zenas, this is what it's about. Kudos.
Melee never dies.
I think Max is taking Sakurai too literally when he says "one combo death" in a fighting game.
Yeah, I don't think Sakurai is necessarily talking about literal "touch of death" combos literally either. I think he refers to games with that generally had long, high damage combos, which when landed during a match would result in the comboed player being beaten or almost beaten. Including ToD combos, but not only so.
Love Sakurai, plus his RUclips vids he has been doing has been real fun to watch, love seeing the behind the scenes of the games he has worked on, and info about games in general. Smash 64 is probably my most favourite vid yet looking forward to the rest of them. ❤
The problem is that everyone on the internet including Max here(I was thinking he was getting at the end) they default their thinking to 1vs1 no itens final destination and what sakurai say its true for casuals when playing with everything on against my friends combos is the last thing we care about and we just have fun meanwhile in other fighting games when you were hit by someone that can do a big combo and you lost most of your health you feel like shit and that is why me and my friends play smash almost every weekend but play a normal fighting game with focus on combos 1 time a year if it is a new version of SF.
Max throughout this video has only the mindset that EVERYONE wants to play on the ultra competitve field, which is simply not true at all.
Even with the stage hazards and items competitive skill developed for the tournament rule set up doesn't completely go away. A person that knows Luigi's zero to death can still pull it off with 4 players, items on, etc.
@@andrebaxter4023
How many hits off the combo can you get when there's a 3rd player lobbing bombs at you because you are, for a moment, not really moving?
@@andrebaxter4023 Yes but like that is the 5% of people that play smash in the world for the majority they can at least do something with the hammer or final smash while if I call my friend to play a SF or Guilty Gear I just beat them up and im shit in those games too.
@@Appletank8 Or a 4th player who just grabbed the Smash Ball and is about to press the Special button on both of you, while the screen is scrolling away, forcing you to either continue your combo and die offscreen together with your target or disengage.
Samurai’s talk about combos may not necessarily be about ToD’s, maybe he means a situation like where two reasonable combos will kill a character and a newbie just loses two interactions one after the other (say they get combod into a hard knockdown then immediately get combod again on waking up) and is dead right away.
Seeing Sakurai bring up Satoru Iwata made me go: “God I miss this man.”😔
Same.
Sakurai is right though, every second you're getting comboed is a second you're not doing anything. Can you imagine in other genres of games if you're getting attacked, you can only take it and not be able to do anything? e.g. If you get Zerg Rushed in Starcraft, and all you can do is wait for the entire attack to end before you can do anything?
The longer the combos, the less the other side gets to play, simple as that.
that is also why i used to hate turnbased rpgs tbh (took a damn while to figure out the mindset one needs to have about "turns" to start enjoying them)
You don't get to play in MOBA's or Counter-Strike for seconds after you die, but nobody ever complains about those for some reason.
@@Copperhell144 wha kind of argument is that? It's not like you're guaranteed to die if you get in a combo at low hp, there's a... I dunno, 0.1% chance that your opponent might get a heart attack and stop midcombo!
Jokes aside, it really isn't that comparable as they are two different kinds of player states and cs is a team game too(meaning that in spectator mode you can, sometimes, also help out your team or already start to plan out the next match)
@@iota-09 I have no idea what you are trying to convey with your first paragraph.
I don't see different kinds of player states here. One is a player state where you're "not allowed to play the game". The other is a player state where you're "not allowed to play the game". Nobody ever wants 0 respawn seconds in MOBA's and CS and yet somehow everyone feels entitled to be able to do something about being combo'd, and complain about how "they might as well let their controller down" even though that technically applies more to MOBA's and CS because fighting game combos can at least have resets that demand your attention to block even as you're getting hit.
@@Copperhell144 I feel like it'd be more accurate to say that one is a state where you're temporarily removed from the game, and the other is a state where you are still technically in the game, you just can't do anything. When you die in CS, you're out of that round. Removed from play. When you get combo'd in a fighter, you technically haven't been removed from play, but the game doesn't give you any agency until you're no longer being hit. No one expects to be able to do things when they're dead. But getting combo'd isn't being dead, and yet usually you can't do anything.
And just to be clear, I'm not even saying that's bad design or anything, I just don't the comparison between dying in CS or a MOBA and getting combo'd in a fighting game makes sense. One is a very clear and defined failure state, the other is not.
Ok when they got to the part where sakurai came up with percentage based damage. I think that had to be one of the single handedly greatest ideas for a fighting game. Combos in sakurai's day weren't the same as hours. So where he created percentage based, he created a pure situational fighting game. Obviously the games intent at launch wasn't to be some high level fighter, he played with a fun concept and it soared.
Personally I think that Sakurai’s idea of creating an antithesis to the fighting game genre at the time was brilliant.
I'm a competitive-minded Smash player getting into fighting games (recently started SamSho and Tekken 7), so I'm really starting to appreciate the unique challenges that both offer. It makes no sense to say one is harder than the other, it just needs to be about enjoying yourself. And I think Sakurai hit the golden ratio of how many people get to enjoy his game, from the new to the experienced
Right on dude.
"Never ask me for anything ever again"
@@creativeinvestor9195 these bots and scams are never going away, are they?
@@Yo_Gamer as long whomever making this or controlling this bots is alive then yeah
14:12
I think that's why the default was Time over Stocks, because you can fall off theoretically infinitely, but you're always able to play until the timer runs out.
I think you're right about it being a translation thing, Max. I heard somebody say that what he actually said was not "strategy," but the same exact term he had been using for the "push and pull" concept from recent videos: "There was no room for the same *push and pull*" or something to that effect.
I just checked, that is right. He is using the term for the "push and pull" concept, it's in the Japanese subtitles as well. It's kind of weird because the term was previously translated as "push and pull" *two times in the same video,* but for some reason, they went for simply "strategy" for that specific line.
I assume when the subtitles say "long combos leave little room for strategy" they mean "little room for counter-play" as the whole reason for the changes he implemented wasn't to remove combos, but to add a way to escape a combo with DI
The "can't play the game" analogy about getting edgeguarded as a new player doesn't really work because you CAN get around it maybe by doing something as simple as delaying an Up B, while in the traditional fighting game you LITERALLY can't play the game; even the best players in the world have to wait for the combo to end
Granted being good at playing mixup in any Smash game with recovering back to stage, particularly Melee, takes a lot of skill and familiarity with a character’s movement. At least there is that window of opportunity, but damn is there the learning curve to get there.
So much this.
That’s why FGC types are getting their dander up. At a point, traditional fighting games become _absolutely_ exclusionary to newcomers, because there’s just no chance to better themselves in a community where the name of the game is obsessively pursuing that one loopable flowchart combo that is an easy key to victory. Even when you have Burst or counter mechanics, those only do so much to give tools to get out of just watching the screen while you literally can do nothing.
To make matters worse, most if not all of these will cleanly put you in the corner, whereupon save for the one-off Burst some games will have, any attempt to escape, counter or otherwise vacate in a gamble with a 75% if getting tagged for the effort and then you’re right back into the same combo. Rinse and repeat. That’s what Sakurai’s talking about, and he absolutely isn’t wrong.
@@MagnificantSasquatch "name of the game is obsessively pursuing that one loopable flowchart combo that is an easy key to victory"
A few characters in Smash Ult come to mind.
@@killercore007 A few characters in Smash Ult who will always ultimately be able to be DI'd out of, even if their string connects, that's the point. There's no corner traps here, you always have a fair and reasonable means of escape. It comes down to who has the better grasp of the mechanics or not.
The only two guilty of breaking this are Brawl Meta Knight and Sm4sh Bayo for having combo options that were truly absolute in certain matchups, and we all know how heavy those nerfs came down.
Some of the later SF2 games had some awful RNG dizzy combos that can be easily cheesed. ToD combos did definitely exist on it.
I mean Sakurai is speaking facts
@Max⁺⓵⓺⓵⓪⓶⓷⓪⓽⓶⓷⓸ not real Max
Report bots with the little 3 dot icon. They’re everywhere :(
@@eliurban2374 got it
I didn’t realize how controversial this video was until I saw this on Max’s stream. I can’t wait to see how the community handles the Melee video.
15:45 I think it's less of what's ACTUALLY happening and a lot more of what it FEELS like is happening. If you're new to a game or don't know the combos, when someone hits you for half your life, even if it's a short combo, or does a long enough combo that you don't get to do anything for a period of time, even if you're not getting TOD'd it can really feel like you can't do anything and there's no way to win. Like I love combo heavy games like the general hyper fighter, but I can recognize that if someone is combo'ing you, it can feel like you're just sitting there waiting for your turn, or if you get outplayed and the opponent gets the oki setup and gets you and you've lost your turn have to sit there again.
13:25 coming from the perspective of the later smash games, recovery isn't so linear as to guarantee a death against an experienced player. you usually have mixups in timing and positioning, maybe you could go low/high or airdodge late/early, even little mac has something. all these options the person in advantage had to think about while commiting because even going for an edgeguard and failing could, at best, result in your advantage being wasted and, at worst, you dying yourself
As a man who cannot edgeguard to save my life in Smash, I feel this post. At least when getting edgeguarded you also have so many options to attempted a recover.
I think people forget that the core gameplay of Smash has always been the fun of chaos, it never started out as something very competitive, someone new to the game can have a good time in non-competitive games because the appeal is simply seeing how funny your favorite characters from nintendo are freaking fighting each other, bouncing around the stage, using pokeballs and wait for a charizard and see only a golden that splashes around and does nothing, or seeing your opponent almost win but just happened to step on a mine and get blown up into the sky.
As I said on the Sajam video covering this topic; one of the reasons why I loved Dead or Alive so much was there were so many more opportunities for interaction and actually pressing buttons that do something than other fighters because unless your feet were off the ground or you got crumpled you could always try to Parry/Counter in the middle of an opponent's combo (or Grab if you think they're gonna delay) and get out of it. Same thing in Smash where you get to spend so much more of the match actually DOING something.
Also I think it's funny how Sakurai saw the pretzel motion in KoF and was just like "FUCK THAT NOISE".
Idk. I don’t like people be able to do things in the middle of my hits. Getting that hit feels less rewarding cause we still have to guess. I shouldn’t have to guess your the one getting hit.
@@WeaponExX because people not a doll but living person? Fight back when in danger is instinct. Overwhelming not fun if you want play fun between veteran and newcomer. The tension not there.
Finally someone brings up DOA, the series never gets the respect it deserves
@@ashchisalleh1454 naw hold this combo.
It's very funny. I actually had the exact same thought as Sakurai about how when you're in hit stun during a combo, you're essentially a sitting duck, and this is expasperated by how long a combo might be. I thought about how maybe the ability to do a "combo" breaker after initial stun recovery, if or when you guess right on your opponent's next button input might make fighting games even more interactive. There's been lots of time where I was stuck in a lengthy combo where I literally put down the controller just to wait for it to end, which is exactly the opposite you want in a high octane exciting match. That being said, I can't for the life of me play Smash competetively so it's not really my kind of solution for it, but it's amazing how I thought this was a novel idea when it was literally a main reason for why Smash became what it became already in 99.
I truly hope I live long enough to see people stop caring what small groups on Twitter think. "30 crazy people keep shouting at the sun, lets take their opinion seriously!"
The unfortunate truth is that the small negative minority usually gets the most attention. People love drama.
*Why is Twitter mad a Sakurai?"
Something that mainly comes to mind about the perspective of strategy/combos is also the question of 'how many tools to get out of being comboed' existed at that same time, i.e. once you're in the middle of being knocked around, are you in a position where you may as well take your hands off the joystick, etc. I think it's more of a standard now to have a couple forms of combo-breaker or tech'ing maneuver in some limited amounts compared to what I remember in the past.
I think the big thing is that the controls themselves are a much smaller hurdle. There's no vital controls locked behind your simple ability to input until you get to high level play, where you start to get jank like wavedashing.
I've been hearing people saying that Smash is not a fighting game. It's not a "Traditional" Fighting game. Heck! When I played Smash, I started to get used to like Fighting games after struggling with Tekken and MvC. Then when Smash Ultimate came out with Ryu, Ken, Terry, and Kazuya, I now know how to do Motion Inputs. That game brought me BACK to the Traditional Fighting Games. IMO, Smash Bros. is like the first stage of learning the genre. In short, Smash is a fighting game that can make you like Fighting Games. I hope you all understand this.
I was under the impression that Sakurai’s “difficult inputs” are referring to fighting game inputs. Yes, all fighting games will have a combo system, whether or not the devs wanted it, but they’re still complex. While Smash isn’t any different, I think he was talking about the specials. Neutral special, press one button, side special, hold left or right and press that button, up special, hold up and press the same button. Down special, hold down and press the button again
Meanwhile, with some fighting games, you can get some decent ones like Ryu’s Hadoken, down, down forward, forward, punch or King’s Tornado Kick, half circle starting from King’s front and a special. Then you get Geese Howard’s raging storm who you gotta cook some pancakes by controlling your toes, bite down on a dog’s tail, turn your left arm 500 degrees to the front, have one eyeball watch a child while the other eyeball to watch a game of Pong and use your free foot to crush any spider that comes out of a hole one by one.
Edit: and use your only free hand to disarm a bomb while an old lady repeatedly smacks the side of your head with her umbrella
heck, my friends and I are just casula FG players and we all hate full circle motions of grapplers.
Fam, raging storm is not that hard lol you are literally just sliding your stick back and forth essentially. I know it’s hard to wrap your head around sliding your stick halfway around, but it’s like doing a fireball motion except you keep going
Annoying inputs are more stuff like Deadly Rave, rather than the pretzel inputs, which modern fighting games have started to leave behind. It’s only quarter circles, half circles or dp inputs nowadays
@@Ritsu362 I know. I just wanted to exaggerate on how it’s one of the most complex attacks in fighting game history. Or am I thinking of deadly rave? I know geese has a pretzel move, I just forgot what it was
@@daleketchup7434 deadly rave is the one that goes “press quarter circle-back, forward k+lightK, then, time it to geeses hits press, k,p,k,hksackakzk
Deadly rave is pretty dumb lol the pretzel stick is raging storm but it’s honestly not that bad. If anything, dosing pretzel inputs in smash is dumb because of the switch’s joysticks. Doing Terrys power geyser is pain 🥲
I’m just being nitpicky, but I totally get your point
@@Ritsu362 dude
i know this'll sound crazy if that's the opinion you have but... for someone who's 100% new to fighting games, it may take them 1 hour in training mode to figure out how to do hadouken and shoryukens, but only 10 or so minutes to understand all the inputs(definitely not all the systems) of smash bros.
that's the kind of level of beginner sakurai was talking about.
omg the "eyes unclouded by hate" was brilliant. tickled! 🤣
Fighting games (similar to real fighting in a way) are about a set of basic principles like distance management, strategy, timing, and movement. When a match happens between two players who are equal in their input skills, it usually comes down to those principles and who can apply them better. I think this is what Sakurai was talking about. He wanted to create a game in which players could skip the input grinding phase and instead focus on strategizing and learning how to time things.
12:00 @ Bayonetta combos...
worth remembering that this is a discussion on design decisions for the original smash bros, where characters have far fewer If any moves that combo reliably into each other in a significant way...
I don't see why people are mad at Sakurai. He's probably the most kindhearted and wholesome game developer I've ever seen. With the combos in Smash Bros do you have to hit them no but it's gonna take a longer time to win while the combos rank up the damage
Give me a break. The guy's a self absorbed fraud that lucked into the Smash Bros. director role & deflects blame on others.
Twitter. Always blame Twitter
@@backup368? Explain
@@backup368 oh shit, you got some sources for those claims?
People have a lot of free time.
Sakurai is specifically talking about KOF 98, where, according to an earlier interview…
while dragon king/smash was in development, sakurai bodied a guy who was on a date SO HARD that he ended up leaving in shame.
I don’t think Sakurai was talking about TODs at all, I think it’s more about “turns until death” especially in some older fgs characters could die in 2-3 good combos, with things like % changing knockback and di both messing with that, hypothetically leading to more possible turns a player might have (this is obviously ignoring that smash 64 eventually developed into a TOD fest over the course of 20 years)
Of course it’s entirely possible I’m wrong but that’s what I thought when I watched the video
I do believe sakurai was talking about is that while you are hit by a combo, there is nothing to do to escape it or mitigate its damage (hence the name combo). In this exact point, only the skill of the attacker, to not drop the combo, matters.
Touch of Deaths are the extreme of these cases, but there is a lot of middle ground that are still problematic depending on the game.
@Max⁺⓵⓺⓵⓪⓶⓷⓪⓽⓶⓷⓸ Go away, scam bot
Some fighting games have 3-5 seconds long combos without supers, it can become tedious for a noob to be inside a combo again and again, feeling like they can't do anything but get juggled from side to side. In smash you are always playing, you can always counter attack and get out of a bad situation. Even when stuck in a stun lock you can always mash buttons and wiggle the stick to get out of it. You never feel like you are just a sandbag for half of the match.
All this salt over the first smash game is making me REALLY excited at how mad he's going to make Melee players feel on what he does or doesn't say about that game.
DI is by far one of the best additions to fighting games. Smash more than almost any other fighting game actually gives agency to the person being combo'd. There is something real about the idea that in traditional fighters, after the first attack lands, it's entirely on the one player to execute the combo or mess up. Some games do a little better with mechanics like bursting out but those almost always consume a meter or something so that it doesn't work for all combos. Smash, with the introduction of DI, actually provides a skill test for the player in disadvantage. There aren't many fully true combos, but there are tons of combos where if you can predict the opponents DI or tech you do have true followups.
And, there are certainly characters in smash nowadays that violate that principle, between smash 4 Bayonetta, and ult Kazuya and to a lesser extent Steve, but they are the minority. But, you can also see that when these characters do exist, they are all relatively overpowered and overcentralizing compared to the rest of the cast; their existance warps the game in an unhealthy way because they are breaking one of the fundamental principles of the franchise, that being agency.
even ult kazuya is largely di and character dependent. the player on the receiving end can also mess with the kazuya by shifting the di line on ewgf. There is also counterplay outside of di, like stage positioning. for example, if you're positioned closer to the edge on a stage like hollow bastion, kazuya doesn't have as much stage to work with, and often has to cut the combo early.
@@Inabathtubuv Of course Kazuya has some counterplay, all of his combos are basically a string of 50/50's, especially with the DI line wiggle tactic. My point was just that the characters like him that have extremely long nearly-true combos and less, or at least less obvious counterplay tend to become overcentralizing and are almost always top tier because the risk reward on their combos is just so insane and most people, including top players, won't escape correctly every time.
Kazuya is especially rough because if he does correctly guess your DI every time,, which is admittedly unlikely, and you aren't next to the ledge, he actually can just true zero-to-death you. At least Bayonetta combos could be escaped most of the time with really good SDI, and she had trouble killing at high %'s, which Kazuya definitely does not.
for what its worth, idk if I ever would have played fighting games if I didn't get a copy of smash 64 as a kid. the ability to pick up and play with your friends and do stuff that looked cool is what hooked into the fgc
10:22 I’m fairly certain he figured out the hard way that he gave smash 64 too much hitstun. Sometimes people fuck up first try.
Love whenever Max calls the chat out for their behavior and puts them in their place.
Gigachad
10:12 Smash IS different. I didn't learn combos, setups, kill confirms, but I still managed to bring Samus K. Rool, Ganon, Bowser, Pyra to elite smash.
And here is another story. One day my friend visited me, he NEVER played Smash (I have roughly 500 hours), and we played online team battles, and after 10-15 minutes of practice he's already became useful, and he himself dealt damage and even knocked out opponents.
As a person that had no experience with fighting games, whenever i tried them out, I'd always get my ass handed to me. Not due to combos, but due to not really understanding how fighting games work.
I played smash for a good while due to just how much free it hands you during gameplay through stage gimmicks, items, different characters and etc.
I started playing KOF at 99, but I was so discouraged from playing it due to skill level difference that I only managed to get by and have fun about 20 years later.
So I think I understand Sakurai's point, though not really related to combos imo
“New game sucks, old game’s cooler”
Well, that pretty much nails down FGC’s reaction to DNF Duel.
I also find it very interesting how a good chunk of the FGC-who didn’t really care that much for Smash-suddenly get into a get into a huff when Sakurai makes a fairly solid point ‘bout combos in fighters. 😂
Apparently he wiped someone in KOF and felt really bad about it
Today was the day you got bodied.
For sakurai, it was a Wednesday.
Yeah. I don't recall if it was KOF95 or 96, but he bodied a couple that just wanted to play casually and have fun, so he felt pretty bad for it as he clearly had more knowledge on how to play. And this is one of the reasons Smash was born.
The level of competitiveness since fighting games started has risen to unimaginable stages. The popularity of fighting games is like a seesaw. When first releases are out they Stay popular for a limited time. Games like grandblue vs and samsho 2019 got everyone excited but now their dead. It's going to happen every single game cause new ones pull them away from what they were. Love fighting games for fighting games. Good or bad. Ppl spend their careers to bring the next joy of competition. Bless all employees and the companies for keeping us entertained for decades and decades to come.
There were Kizuna Encounter and Last Blade 2 that had long combos, and there was Street Fighter EX 2.
You gotta remember that he was in Japan at the time when they were way more advanced than the West in fighting games. The stuff happening in arcades in Japan and America at the time were 2 different worlds
The issue is that people who are deep into the fighting game community (myself included sometimes) often forget what it’s like to start a game. If you’ve never played the game before and your friend knows one combo, you’re gonna get hit by the one combo five times and then lose. If you know one combo but your friend knows three or four, they have more to capitalize on. The way it’s worded saying combos render your opponents skill irrelevant is weird but obviously combos are part of the skill so I think it’s something poorly worded that people on the internet too quickly took offense to just because they forgot what it was like to be new to a game
ther'es also the fact that some definiteons of "combo" can also include "combination of inputs" which would relate to what in the west we refer to as motions, which sakurai mentioned only once but which was clearly a very important part of his idea about making a game with a very low skill floor.
How I play Fighting games: Man that story on hard difficulty was fun lets go online.
after 10 TOD matches: fuck this game.
Repeat for every Fighting game for the last decade.
You're misinterpreting the "skill" part. He means that the person on the recieving end of the combo has their skill become irrelevant after the first hit of a combo has landed. It then becomes a passive experience until the opponent finishes/drops the combo. Thats all he's saying
It's exactly how max put it near in the colsing statemnts of the video. You get to change the rules of the game in smash. You're losing really quick? Make the game revolve around the time it takes for you to get killed instead of just pure combat. Turn the game into tag. It's really hard to do the same in most fighting games, due to really limited escape options.
Dude I'm glad you busted that myth. In Smash 64 especially you have to learn the zero to death combos to have any kind of decent chance, if anything the old games are more similar to those ztd fighting games. In melee its a bit more nuanced but at higher levels you're almost dead if not dead from a neutral opening
To me, Sakurai may have been talking about X-Men vs. Street Fighter (Arcade - 1996) also.
I remember being a victim of multiple Infinite combos by the hands of characters like Sabretooth and Magneto.
That happened to me in those 90s vs games. Made me stop playing vs games at the cades lol
tbh it's not even about infinite combos, if you're a complete newbie who doesn't even know how to do motions(which is most likely the kinda type of beginner sakurai was talking about) even if the combos you're facing only get you to 55% health, that still will be impossible to deal with as a beginner, because even if you do get a hit in, chances are you will barely do any substantial damage, while your opponent needs only to hit you with their combos 1-2 times more to win, and most importantly, during a smash combo you still get the illusion of control and even some actual control with being able to move in the air, recoveries, etc, but during a regular fighting game combo you literally cannotdo anything unless you have burst or something like that(and even that only gives you a limited amount of control)
I think he’s more talking about the consistency of combos so he made it so that you could only do them in certain situations because in traditional fighters (I’m assuming seen as I’m an outsider) your combos are just as effective at any point in the game
Don't be mad at Sakurai people
Constantly lies
Constantly directs blame on others
Has a large ego
Thinks he's a celebrity
Creates drama when its not necessary
Wastes his company's money
Treats IP like toys
Don't be mad at Sakurai people.
@@backup368 cry for me
@Brandon Gray That's funny. I had a good laugh at this reply.
@backup368 "That's funny. I had a good laugh at this reply."
Saturday Morning Cartoon villain energy.
@@jjayala5512 fr
Dude made a 50 minute long video trying to back up his claims about Sakurai being a "terrible person" like bro stop projecting
14:00 That's why DI it's a thing, so you can influence where you can get hit in a direction that will not kill you.
WHO DARES BEING MAD AS SUCH A COOL AND WONDERFUL PERSON ?!
Freaking twitter once again I bet ! This social media is such a cancer....
16:18 The same can be said about arena fighters. So many people call them baby games until they can't beat me, then it's "unfair and broken", so I teach them what I did and they say it's "just too complicated with no depth" completely ignoring the depth of neutral and movement.
It's actually kind of crazy that smash is one of the only fighting games to implement a method to get out of combo's with DI ( directional influence). It be interesting to see other fighting games implement DI and smash di. This just add's more depth to smash in that not only do you have to use mixups in neutral but also during combo's. If you try to do the same combo over and over in melee not only will it not work at higher percents but also the other player can start di'ng in a way where they can get out so you have to mix them up and continue to adapt to what they're doing.
Soulcalibur?
Soul caliber has air control, 2d games have combo breaker and burst. Those options have been a part of other fighting games for years
20:00 Dunno if you'd count ARMs since it's neither a traditional fighting game nor a series as of this writing, but that's sold pretty well for a new FG franchise last I checked
I think he's coming at it as the dude who made the best selling fighting game. Earned
Hence the items in smash create room for crazy improvisation. Smash has always been developed as a party game for everyone to enjoy, not for competitive play.
Not only that, the % changes the knockback, which changes how you need to approach the best combo.
Yep and like 99% of the people who bought Smash 64 got it to play as a party game and just wanted to mash and have fun. Unlike typical fighting games, you aren't going to get stuck in a corner getting pummeled and don't know what to do.