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Experts have not yet identified why Nintendo went so damn hard on a children's funny haha punching game, and then spent the next 23 years regretting it.
@@user-be3qc7re9o l-canceling and wavedashing were entirely intentional mechanics, idk why people keep spouting this idea those were all mistakes lmao
Even if one is to say sakurai regrets melee, there was a clear design ethos he came into the game with that makes it what it is today, irrespective of the rushed development cycle
Jumping normals in fighting games also have variable frame data. Cammy's divekick hitting the shins of a character (safe) vs the head of a character (unsafe) is a notorious example.
This is such a strange video. All air normals have variable framedata as a natural result of the hit/blockstun being fixed. I can name examples of this exact thing in plenty of different fighting games, the problem is you're looking at street fighter. You need to look at titles with more focus on air movement. See Kof, Vs games or anime titles. Even in street fighter a character with a low jump like Dudley 3s needs to delay his air normals to not be punishable, but that game has a bit more complications since you have to worry about anti parry timings. That's not even to mention how many moves have variable frame data due to some amount of momentum or expanding hitbox leading to it hitting later into it's active frames. Rps-ing around IAD timings is an important part of neutral in airdashers. There are tons of unique things about the snash series to point out so I have no idea why you'd pick something so demonstrably universal?
Yeah, literally go to any fighting game wiki and look for a jumping move, you'll realize there's startup and active frames as expected but no recovery as it can be a dozen different variations based on height and crouching state lol
I’ll say there are situations in fighting games where a move can hit on a later active frame making it more plus, and sf6 specifically drive rush normals are 4 frames safer than non-drive rush normals. but the degree of variance is still obvious enough to react to where in melee the situations are much more ambiguous as to whether or not an aerial is punishable
I was thinking the same thing. All fighting games have this type of negative feedback loop to some extent. After you talk to a top player and watch some videos, you're aware that the spacing on M.Kick can make it safe, but you wouldn't intuitively know that without playing other fighting games like it. It's not an intuitive thing when you pick the game up, and most people won't be spacing it correctly at the lower level, so you'll still learn bad habits unless you're using other tools to learn what's proper or labbing a lot. Melee has a higher degree of variance than most fighting games for a NUMBER of reasons (Smash DI, DI, L-Cancelling, a 16 year old meta lol), but there are other fighting games where the top level minutia gets pretty difficult to sus out. Skullgirls is one of those that is incredibly difficult.
Totally agree 👍 I must say Than learning to play a new one, with all its quirks, characters and rules. It is extremely tiring and boring to do... At least go me 😅
You seem to be missing a critical variable in the falcon example. Land the move lower does give it better frame advantage but it also increases the functional startup of the move by an equivalent amount of frames. The long you wait to hit the move the more likely that the opponent will do something to to disrupt your plan. This highlights the value of conditioning.
I love his melee is just so fun/silly/wack to an extent that even without the character dependent shenanigans like how ICs and Luigi have so little traction that I think even a normal knee on shield isn’t shield grabbable since they get pushed back so much by it. I dunno, I might be wrong.
Melee forces you to treat it like a full time job to become a top player while providing the income of a side-hustle at best. Everyone who competes at the highest level and works full time outside the game has nothing but my utmost respect
The reason you don't see Peach players doing subfloat all the time is because it's a 1 frame window so it's basically impossible to do consistently because of polling I'm pretty sure
While I do admit this is another melee glaze video, I think it actually brought up some interesting things that I didn't think about when it comes to Melee vs other fighting games.
I'm going to be honest, stuff like this exists in so many fighting games it's definitely not unique to Melee. If anything this is more of an old/new fighting game comparison. Modern game design puts an emphasis on visual clarity and mechanical accessibility. Comparing SF6 to Third Strike or Guilty Gear Strive to +R will make you realize older games where just chock full of niche interactions and extremely difficult tech.
Even with the Falcon knee example noted, it's difficult to flatly call it "the most difficult." In Tekken, for example, the Mishimas all have a just frame move called Electric Wind God Fist (Kazuya has this in Ultimate, but they made it not a true just frame for Smash). After a hundred hours of practice, it can still be a struggle to do the move consistently. Then, on top of that, doing multiple EWGFs in a single combo is optimal. Yet you'll find venerable pro players of over a decade opting for easier combos in tournament, because the EWGF combos are too difficult to do reliably. If people who have won tens of thousands of dollars over years of competing still find something difficult, it's safe to say the game is difficult.
The same property you explained with jump attacks in melee literally apply to all fighting games. The lower you hit them, the more plus you are. In street fighter, you have to try to see how plus you are to maximize a punish(which also has no visual indication) Cammy dive kick is only plus if you hit your opponent as close to the ground as possible (aka the feet). The rest are minus as fuck. Making a whole video based on a false idea is kinda crazy and I would consider actually trying traditional fighters.
Seen a few comments like this, and I see what you’re saying, but I tried to establish early on in the video, yes this can apply to other games, but the difference is the frequency and efficacy. Jumping is a reactable mix that adds another layer to the neutral versus the entire neutral game in melee, obviously there will be some cases, but characters are jumping in melee significantly more often with significantly more depth to their airborne approaches, if that makes sense
@adust9996 also you are comparing Melee to literally the most GROUNDED FG series ever lol try looking at gameplay of melty blood actress again or mvc3 and tell me that the neutral isn't chaotic like Melee. He'll, even KOF neutral is based around short hops with hop CD, and simply sticking on the ground walking back and forth is heavily discouraged. I understand your trying to up Melee, but pls just try to be educated on the genre your criticizing
Honestly there is probably more jumping in melty blood then melee because movement is so damn good, arcana heart has Homing dash that makes neutral pretty air focused and as mentioned Kof is short hop heavy. This is ignoring much air time characters get in Vs games The thing that I think makes smash hard is that dropping shield costs frames. In pretty much every other game you are in full control as soon as block stun ends shield but in Smash in general it takes time to leave shield unless you use jump which has squat start up or shield options like roll and grab which is why grabbing or rolling is a bad habit many players have. It really changes the post block dynamic which then when you mix with L canceling and variable data on shield based on hit really changes how you have to think about defending.
correct me if im wrong but based on this comment i don't think you've played melee very much. i play a lot of fighting games, and granted i play peach in melee who this concept applies tenfold to, but stacking in shield tilt, L cancelling, fast fall timing, floating with peach or double jump cancelling with some characters... it really is not anywhere near the same degree. and this general concept is all over melee besides the aerial frame advantage thing. doing a specific thing with crazy execution completely changing the interaction applies to a ton of stuff in this game which is the primary point of the video
I'd argue that L-cancelling creates a much better example of a negative feedback loop, since you can't react to an opponent's failed L-cancel. At the beginning, you're playing against players who fail them all the time, so aerials are more punishable. Then at the top level, you're expecting players NOT to miss their cancels, and so you see players leaving punishes on the table.
you can absolutely react to a missed L-cancel. sure, it depends on the move, but a lot of aerials are very laggy and you can react to an opponent missing the cancel, especially if you have a very fast move like shine or jab. also, it's not just the L-cancel frames itself that you're able to punish, it's also your opponent's reaction time when realizing that they missed it and then the startup lag of whatever move they try to do next.
L canceling and crouch cancelling are hard to read, fundamentally flawed mechanics that ask too much from the player. Melee has a lot of artificial difficulty this way, you have to spend less time fighting your opponent and more time optimizing your inputs so they can't capitalize.
@@AYEANNI there's a lot that I hate about L-cancelling. But even if we accept all the arguments of its defenders (it adds depth by rewarding good timing, creates mixups on hit/shield/whiff, Shiek's needles, etc), L-cancelling doesn't have a lockout window, meaning there's nothing stopping you from mashing Z during hitlag/shieldlag to guarantee a successful L-cancel. As for CC, real crouch cancel (the kind where you actually crouch before the hit) is fine. ASDI down is way overpowered though.
@@AYEANNI No it is more so awareness to adapt that those are habits they're utilizing and play accordingly. Even if someone can spam quick aerials, they will still complain about peach downsmash if they don't think about timing their moves better or using a more appropriate option to not get hit by it.
@@AYEANNI I can see that perspective for L cancelling, but crouch cancelling? It's not artificial difficulty, its a unique mechanic that you should use sometimes and not use other times. It's beneficial in some situations and detrimental in others. It's just another tool that you can use to be better at the game. The reason melee has stuck around for so long is because it has virtually no skill ceiling, and you can always be getting better and improving. If you don't want to play a game that's extremely difficult in the way melee is, then that's fine, ultimate is perfectly good game to play. But you cant say that melee is asking too much from the player because it's difficult at a competitive level. That's the whole reason people play the game.
MvC2 and USF4 are definitely up there too. No input buffer, super tight, sometimes unorthodox execution, and USF4 having NO BUFFER ON REVERSAL BLOCKED NORMALS. WHY CAPCOM WHY???? JUST LET ME PUNISH WITH SWEEP WITHOUT NEEDED TO USE ALL MY BRAIN POWER
Marvel 2 sure, sf 4 ? I wouldn’t say sf4 is as hard as melee or marvel. Personally I’d rather capcom went back to 1 frame reversals like ST but I’m alone in that line of thinking
@@Shodan130 i just feel like 1 frame reversals add an unnecessary amount of inconsistency, especially in online play where things like input delay change constantly
@@TWO8W well most games now use rollback so the delay should be consistent if it allows the player to select the delay before the game starts. 1 frame reversals also can lead to deeper play due to pianoing, you can make reversals more consistent by pianoing strengths at the cost of getting a different dp strength to the one you wanted giving you essentially 6 frames instead of 1, but this can also work to balance some reversals. Dhalsim in ST is incredibly strong beating the majority of the cast but making his reversal a triple input means while he does get the benefit of teleporting to different places getting out for free even on block, it comes at the cost of only having 1 frame to do it with no option to piano for more consistentcy. A fair price considering how dominant he is in the neutral. 1 frame reversal windows mean reversals have to be deliberate rather than what happened a lot in sf4 where someone would mash between links and hope you dropped it and FADC if you even managed to bait it
@@Shodan130that’s a cool example but have you considered that sagat and ryu are also insanely dominant in st neutral Also I don’t think frame 1 reversal is only cool in the context of super turbo because nowadays there are far more defensive options and dp is not invincible unless you spend meter so if you try to mash raw dp you will get stuffed
@@Serenade3s yea for sure but for sagat his DP is slower and can be safe jumped universally really easily. not to mention it doesn't have as much i frames as say ryu's dp. ryu's dp is alot stronger in this regard and that's fine because ryu's neutral isn't as dominent as sims or O.sagats. for the other point all DP's requiring meter at the expense of opening the reversal window is fine. not my personal way of doing it but i think it's an upgrade from having meterless DP's you can mash out in a game with delayed netcode with 1 frame links lmao. my problem with more modern games is the fact that they made pressure wayy stronger and scarier. made alot of neutral tools like fireballs much weaker which lead SF5 for the majority of it's life and SF6 to be very bulldog sort of games. get in and enforce your mix at all costs..... personally i think crouch tech could of fixed alot of this but capcom wanted it gone so what else can we do lol.
Im not sure that i agree that this idea of having to make on the fly adjustments for specific edge case scenarios is particularly exclusive to Melee. In any fighting game, players have flowchart of movement, attack, and defense patterns that the other player needs to observe and understand in order to make adjustments for. The degree in which an interaction will punish a player for being wrong therefore influences the amount of "time" players get to recognize and make those adjustments. In Melee, this "time" might be the number of stocks that are set as the standard for a single game, and in street fighter, this might be the number of rounds in a match. More rounds/stocks translates to more time to recognize opponents play patterns and respond to it, but ultimately, every fighting game with sufficient difficulty has frequent unreactable (educated) guesses where you choose an option based off your understanding and intuition. If the ability to adjust wasnt something important to fighting game players, tournament rounds would be 1 stock 1 round 1 game sets. Melee is absolutely a technically demanding game at high levels, and is a contender for one of the most difficult- but ambiguous guessing scenarios aren't something exclusive to melee.
I don't think Melee is the hardest fighting game, it's just very weird compared to most due to not working with the same systems or breaking other ones. Even then i don't really think the difficulty of the game is worth anything, all that matters is that it's well designed and is fun, which melee is (whether the design aspect is intentional or not is different but it ends up being well designed for the most part)
L canceling stacks on to this, but at a lower skill level. I've formed some bad habits about what I can and can't shield grab from fighting players on unranked who don't l cancel consistently.
Great video good fgc ragebait, theres certainly alot of crossover and similar variable frame advantage/disadvantage. If anything this shows how similar melee and trad fighters are with the deepest mechanics, except the aerial combat/platforms/edgeguards introduce a whole nother dimension that traditional fighters dont have so one could argue that there is more depth. But what i like about traditional fighters over melee is they force you to scrap and you can't really camp as hard (well theres some exceptions but generally)
I love fighting games, I play Street Fighter, Dragon Ball and recently I'm into Guilty Gear. But damn, I can't stop watching Melee, movement looks so free and creative. But I won't even try to play it, it's just too much.
I would say safe knees are one of the few positive feedback loops that force falcons to hit them more consistently. Like I get what you were explaining but its not a good example imo. I would say half of all slippi falcons can land -1, 0 knees consistently
Your explanation about frame data in melee reminded me of a clip where leffen is trying to explain frame data to mango and he JUST DOESN'T GET IT. Like, intuitively he understands it, mango's falco dair on shield is a clear example of that, but the fact that the theory goes so way above his head will never not be funny
I think instead of negative feedback loop, you should call it variable frame data. This can be done in DBFZ by changing timing/spacing for moves Pretty sure there's examples of this in all fighting games. I think Melee falls on the level of difficulty of versus games and old Guilty Gear games, but although melee might be slower what sets it apart is the amount of controll you have after you get hit.
i don't think effective APM would change much in top level play, a ton of things in melee genuinely just require ridiculous inputs. APM measurements in melee are also divided between digital apm (buttons only) and APM in general (including joystick motions). a lot of joystick motions are extremely specific and precise and add a lot to the difficulty of the inputs, but it does inflate the number a ton just because of the way they're measured. eapm would probably be easy to measure by removing inputs that happen when the character isn't actionable though. digital apm numbers also will get inflated sometimes because of mashing out of grabs and things. just limitations of "apm" as a measurement in general but the fact of the matter, numbers aside, is that they do be pressing shit hella fast
@@ladyinwight Even removing actions when the character in lag in melee wouldn't tell the whole story as it would not count ASDI down while doing another action.
Just FYI, Peach doesn't need to do subfloats to get more than +1 aerials on shields. You can do a regular fc falling fair and get +4 pretty easily. Because of the long start-up time you can actually start it ridiculously high in the air. She can also get +3 with sh fc uair, but that is trickier since you need to time the float drop and fast fall just right.
@@equinox3861 correct, but she does need it to get a +4 nair on shield for some important breakpoints (if I’m doing my frame data math right), such as grabbing perfectly buffered rolls, and the best nair u can get without it is +2 iirc which can struggle with 3 frame jumps oos, and yes fair is super easy to get at least plus 3 , little harder for plus 4 because u also wanna time it to catch jump oos and the lowest fair is not always the best one, and up air is also pretty easy to get plus 3, but both have startup drawbacks compared to nair
Played DBFZ from 2019-2021, then switched to Melee as a Boxx Falcon until SF6 released. I think the highest I got was Bronze 3 ranked after 2 years in Melee. I could just not wrap my head around that game, Melee is undeniably the most difficult game I ever attempted. After 2 months of SF6 (this being my first Street Fighter) I hit Master rank. Melee is the hardest fighting game ever made hands down. After that is probably Tekken.
That's just the weirdos. Most of us think melee is extremely hard, awesome to watch, and cool as fuck to hear about. While I suck at Melee and barely play it, I love watching it.
This was always a weird debate, in retrospect. Like, Smash obviously prioritizes and even encourages "party" play, but clearly, there's more to it than that, right? After all, it isn't a board game, nor a kart racer, so what kind of "party" game series is it, exactly? We might find the answers to these questions by delving into its core gameplay, LOL.
@@megamillion5852 What I would say to an FGC fanboy : if this was meant to be that casual, why is there a training mode ? Why can we change the rules to removes items etc... ? Why did Nintendo allowed Smash at Evo during all these years ? Why is there balance patches ? BECAUSE IT IS ALSO MEANT AS A COMPETITIVE GAME (and that's the same for melee, L-Cancel and Wavedash are not glitches and Sakurai mentioned that they are advanced techniques ).
7:50 Smash bros as a whole should have tournament have preliminary friendlies. Where bassically it's 1 friendly match before scored matches for players to fairly get a chance to assess their opponent before getting heated about a loss.
Melee is the most technical fighting game of all time- I've played SF, KOF, Marvel, Skull girls, Undernight, DNF Duel, Ultimate, Brawl, Smash 4, N64, Nick ASB, Mortal Kombat, I can keep going...and none of them was as hard as melee- though KOF is pretty damn hard.
just with regards to your point about anti airs, blocking an aerial in a fighting game is more often than not just a prerequisite to a disadvantage state. part of anti airs is anticipation, same as melee. you do not have the leeway to physically escape aerial pressure in a traditional fighter as you might in a smash game. there are more interactions like this, because in fighting games there are counterhit states and other properties which will have tiny nuances allowing for otherwise impossible passages of play. these are often difficult to react to and experience is what allows you to capitalise on situations. i also feel like your falcon point is seen in traditional fighters as well. you do say that there are no discernible differences in real time between plus and minus knee, but fighting games have interactions like this too. even in dnf duel, a pretty easy fighting game, brawler’s 5b can be either neutral or plus on block depending on when he hits you and it’s impossible for the human eye to determine which part of the move he’s connected because the window is so tight. going for the wrong punish on the neural 5b can just… well lose you the round. it’s a similar feedback loop for the opposing side.
Loved the format of this video and get a lot of details you are presenting I play melee and also fighting games but there is a inconsistency in the types of attacks being compared you are comparing a grounded move in street fighter and aerial in melee in which these two types of attack aren't going to have same properties due one being a jumping attack to ground attack you cant speed ground advantage in melee unless of some weird circumstances in that sense melee is the same as cam medium kick however in street fighter you can change frame advantage of attacks just like you can in melee with aerials with jumping attack in street fighter and plenty of other fighting games so I can say this a credible argument since the main point you brought up isn't true but I maybe missed the point of the video and would love to talk more about it
But overall I agree with your point, ive said for a long time that melee as a game is bad at teaching you how to play melee. In that sense I think that's the double edged sword of the 'beautiful accident' alot of people describe melee as. As awesome as it is it has huge flaws for learning and improving. But maybe that poison (extra credit: perfect imbalance) is what makes it so alluring and enduring
I really think alot of melee players would be able to gel alot better with anime fighters. Grounded games like SF are just much more structured compared to anime games which sort of fall between melees sort of freeform nature and the more rigid, simple nature of non-anime fgs. Personally i fell off the melee train and really fell in love with guilty gear for the fast paced aerial combat and how momentum transfer felt so natural, just like in melee
Thanks sol Badguy. It seems like a lot of melee players really lack any sense of perspective about its place in the genre. Stuff like variable frame, data jump in is incredibly common, especially after an airdash.
Maybe in multiplayer melee was prebuffer but games at least as old as mike tyson's punch out had buffered inputs. Maybe the statement was meant for emphasis or just didn't know about that.
Sajam actually posted a pretty good video that goes into detail about the difficulty of older fighting games compared to newer titles. It talks about how a lot of times in older titles, you can count on an opponent dropping more often because the games had much more demanding executions, whereas a newer title will have more consistent damage being put out. It was from awhile ago but it should be something like old game vs new games or something
I dunno, i feel theres more to it. Melee isn't hard because of 1 execution check, but the amount of excutation checks there are. Where as tekken (many refer to as the hardest fighting game) is hard because of how much you need to know. It doesn't matter if you know that one of my moves is -4, you need to know the majority of my 100+ moveset and the different situations each one could put you in. In the same vain, it doesn't matter if you know the technical details of my character in melee if you can't do basic tech. So like Tekken is hard in the same way chess is hard. There's a lot to learn. Melee is hard in the same way F1 is hard. Simply exucuting what I want to do is difficult. Ofc they have both excution and knowledge checks, but to varrying degrees.
10 year melee vet and falcon main Extremely well explained on the knee on shield stuff. Very niche knowledge that should be talked about more when it comes to fast falling aerials on shield. Keep up the great work!
I play both Melee and a more traditional fighter and they both of their own difficulties and appeals. I fully agree with you that what makes Melee so hard is that the sky is the limit, players are constantly figuring out and learning new techs that can rewrite the rules of the game (e.g. they can make a Sheik move like a Fox if their tech skill is cracked enough), while more traditional fighters tend to have much more concrete RPS options. Melee is sick AF because of this and why we all love it. :)
I just wanna say a hard game isnt inherently an incredible game, melee is fun to watch and definitely good but just because its hard does not mean its better than every fighting game that ever came out after it. I believe the fun of gaming is how much variety there is, for some melee is their speed where for other people they prefer focusing on slow spaced gameplay and spacing of sf6. Though i love both sf6 and the smash franchise, just wanted to bring this point.
That's a good point, theres kind of a blessing/curse aspect to melee where, fortunately, the degree of difficulty makes it dope as hell but also creates a punishingly high barrier of entry that limits the amount of new players who will just play something else
Definitely, its why I feel some people sleep on some slower paced games like imo I feel if Brawl was less campy itd be interesting because theres still a lot of variety because SDI is still good and combos arent really guaranteed because of hitstun cancelling but Metaknight dittos are fun because of that. But despite me losing the grip on playing Melee these days due to work and socializing more and just being pretty crap at the game now I still come back to it because there still is mad variety of things I can do even if its a bit poorly done by my own execution. Rather much play something Im bad at with a ton of variety than half the modern fighters that come out these days where I feel like doing the optimal thing isnt as difficult and as a result its a lot more common to witness as a player or viewer.
Personally I feel the mvc franchise is harder. Anime fighter is general are so wacky and make you feel like you don’t know how to play fighting games sometimes. Tekken and Vitral fighter are contenders as well.
Traditional fighters have that it’s called a safe jump though there are setups so there is no execution barrier like in melee however I think comparing melee to street fighter which is the most ground based fighter doesn’t really help your point when games like kof exist which a large focus on the air
Great video! While I think Melee is a very hard fighting game with a high skill floor and an infinite skill ceiling, I don't think it's the hardest. In my mind, fighting games can be so complex and deep that they aren't able to be called "the hardest". The best example I can give is 3rd Strike or Marvel 2, the former being my favorite game ever created. All of your pressure, offense, defense, anything really is fake due to the existence of parry and red parry. This means there are tons of high level and really cool option selects, and it also means that every move you have to deal with can be countered with the right read or reaction, making the game infinitely replayable and giving it an infinite skill ceiling. Tying into the negative feedback loop, a perfect example of that can be found in X-Men Children of the Atom. In that game, every normal can be cancelled into a super jump, even on whiff, meaning frame data doesn't matter when it comes to blockstun. This not only makes it hard for new players to get used to the game flow and punishing, but some people actively call the game terrible because of this, and, because it's not very popular in terms of high level play, it's hard to show them what the game offers like Melee does with its high level gameplay. On top of this, every character has crazy bullshit you can't deal with like Cyclops' unblockable normals. If his j.2HP or j.MK hit on certain frames, you cant block them and he gets a full combo into death. While there are obvious setups into this like DP into j.MK in the corner vs a lot of the cast for an unblockable reset, a lot of new players will be air blocking, get hit by a random j.MK, die, then not know what happened because it's literally impossible to tell whether the move is unblockable. I love the video and the examples you brought up, and the fact that the title is very accurate, despite what some may think if they havent watched this video, is another big plus. Great video!
Hello EggrollFGC, it is nice to meet you! I think your comment was very insightful. I'm a up and coming twinkle star sprite, puyo puyo, and most importantly pro multiversus fans. Fighting games sometimes seem abit too easy on the surface, therefore boring, when I see them. You opened my eyes to the many choices of fighting games and now they are easy for me. I think I will apply all this to my next endeavor: superior solders on ps1. Thanks for the comments. And most importantly, Lets Go Justin!!! - quote from Daigo before he did the Iron man infinite on him but Justin came back with cyclops or at least that's what my friends told me. See you in street fighter 5 everyone!
I'd call it high-execution unreactable mixups, it's only a negative feedback loop because lower players don't even know they exist. Melee is unique in that it requires you to understand not just the moves and frame data but the game engine and physics to play at a high level.
dude if you knee then use Z for grab 1 frame early and get that light shield it sucks soooo bad im gonna start holding down the l cancel and mashing A instead
This just seems to boil down to there is more depth to using a move and understanding its situational options the better you get. Don't really relate to the premise that other games are as cut and dry and non-variable. The street fighter spacing of the move directly relates to the spacing/timing the move hits someone in smash as well. Could argue that there more/less variable follow up time due to that alone in the 2d fighter you referenced, while that ability to interact shifts based on the spacing the move was done relative to the shield/enemy character and the ground in Melee. Interesting points, just don't vibe with the overall premise/point you were selling.
7:35 I don't disagree with the point but "you can't punish nair on block" seems like a bad example to my noob brain. Surely THAT is a simple enough adaptation to make, maybe not mid game, but definitely mid set
37 year old here. Cut my teeth on Street fighter 2. Was at tournament level with SF2, Alpha 3, Soul Caliber, Tekken 5, Tekken 7, Soul Caliber 4, Killer Instinct, MK11, recently SF6 and of course Melee. Melee is the most difficult/complex one of them all by far. and it does that whilst also being the best of them.
Great video! I feel like melee, and other smash games for that matter, is the only game with a "Dynamic" frame data. Where as Street fighter frame data is Static and players play around a set of situations that are figured out and take the optimal outcome that USUALLY doesn't change, Melee' frame data is technically static as well but is so much dynamic because of not just spacing, but also aerials timings and basic mechanical factors like L-Cancel and shield stun (Which basically alters the set frame data by allowing you to move much earlier than normal, meaning that the +1 knee fundamentally happens because of this) These factors make 2 situations and their counterplays theoretically the same on paper, but way way different in practice. Makes melee even cooler if you ask me
Fighting games can have variable frame data, mostly for aerials, since depending on when it hits can change the advantage. Timing to make moves safer is a universal fighting game thing since obviously if you time it late it'll be safer, this occasionally applies to early timing as well. Furthermore games with 8 Way Airdashes can have similar nuance in the spacing game, IDK if you've ever seen Marvel (3 or 2) but you'll notice how crucial airdashes are for the airdash characters, i also think games like Marvel 3 have a weird similarity to smash due to the combination of high movement, low skill floor, very high skill ceiling with lots of stuff.
7:40 100% disagree smash is exactly like chess. While I agree smash bros is like that I think chess is the same way. btw I'm not a highly skilled chess player but I know about it strategically a bit. Chess is a hard game to learn cause that what you said is somewhat true you can play the game reactively but that is atypical. That strategy can work but often if the opponent is good enough you get baited or your move wasted time and you have to play catch up. as in chess there's never time to change strategy every move counts which is why opening are so important. There reason you can't change strategy is because you can only make one move at a time if the oppent is set up and you're not you bassically mashed and accidentally got off stage. In chess every move is equal to about 15 frames in smash bros. A lot can happen in that time but what matters is what can you do next turn. For this reason chess is also negative feedback but you can analize it better cause slower similar to watching replays in smash. chess is about simulteaneously positioning your pieces to attain control and disadvantage enemy positioning punishing bad plays. In smash bros this is stage control and spacing. When an enemy makes a bad play the other player capitalizes on that play. In smash bros we call this a combo. Chess to play well requires an understanding of your opponents position and options and detmine how to dismantle and anticipate their options and plays. You can never be 100% certain untill the play is made what the opponent might be thinking. This we call mind games. Both smash bros and chess are won by out planning and out performing the opponent. To regain neutral you must know how to escape combos. both games are played by not playing but out playing. The only difference is time. In smash you habe to think fast than in chess and therefore can make more mistakes to be combo'd by. In chess the game is slower pace so you can acess your game state bassicall every frame. And a game that resembles both simultaneously is Your only move is hustle.
This is how trying to learn broodwar is like. You need to study recent replays of pros. Period. (but the netplay experience is garbo) Vs games might be harder tho for other reasons. A true analysis will cover the average tightness of mechanics of different games. Marvel 2 and Marvel 3 should be compared tbh.
3:04 so being able to improve by trial and error? 5:45 vs melee is negative feedback loop because to improve you must know. If so then I would argue most smash games are the same way there is simply too much tech to know what's coming and anticipate it since smash is simply too fast to react by human means. The amount of techincal knowledge in smash is so high that not even amatuer locals players know what they're up against they can lose and by no fault of their own and fail to know why, thus johns and self blame. To play well is not to practice hard but to learn your opponent quickly winning I would argue is more reliant of how often you play that particular opponent and how well you can adapt to how they play.
OBVIOUSLY Melee is the hardest fighting game. People try to say Tekken is the hardest but nobody has exploded a tendon in their hand from high level Tekken play. You literally have to have TAS level execution as a human being to play Melee at the top level. I'll stick to traditional fighting games where my brain is actually allowed to catch up with the amount of stuff that's happening on screen.
@@BridgetGX true if you mean pure execution wise 3S isn't the hardest to just "do" stuff in, but if we're talking about Difficulty in terms of being good at the game at a competitive level 3S mind games is almost a completely different kind of game to any other SF. There's a reason why mosf ppl didn't consider it a "proper" SF game at first cause it doesn't really play like one at all. I still stand by MVC2 being the most executionally demanding game tho
CVs2 is hard not bc it's a good game imo but just cause it's completely broken like mvc and Melee. Typically older games will always be "harder" just cause all their glitches and bugs were never patched out... as well as not having any input buffers + stricter timing in general
Third strike and melee are comparable in terms of complexity because of the 3s parry making the game crazy volatile. You comparing sf6 to melee is unfair as that one is dumbed way down, same as smash ult is dumbed way down compared to melee.
I hate the 9 frames smash ultimate has because the game can't hold a consistent frame rate on and offline, made worse by visual lag and input lag often desync
Its perceived as "hard" because its old and mechanically (unintentionally) clunky. That doesnt make it the hardest fighting game, it just makes it old and clunky. And I played Melee competitively.
Hal laboratory makes Kirby games they don't make fighting games I'm pretty sure the team who worked on meele never made an actual fighting game other than Nintendo games
Experts have not yet identified why Nintendo went so damn hard on a children's funny haha punching game, and then spent the next 23 years regretting it.
Perhaps the short developement time of the game might have something to do
Because many mechanics and such were completely unintentional due to having a strict deadline of only 13 months.
@@user-be3qc7re9o l-canceling and wavedashing were entirely intentional mechanics, idk why people keep spouting this idea those were all mistakes lmao
Even if one is to say sakurai regrets melee, there was a clear design ethos he came into the game with that makes it what it is today, irrespective of the rushed development cycle
Why make such good game when people would buy every dlc for garbage game like tr4sh.
Jumping normals in fighting games also have variable frame data. Cammy's divekick hitting the shins of a character (safe) vs the head of a character (unsafe) is a notorious example.
This is such a strange video. All air normals have variable framedata as a natural result of the hit/blockstun being fixed. I can name examples of this exact thing in plenty of different fighting games, the problem is you're looking at street fighter. You need to look at titles with more focus on air movement. See Kof, Vs games or anime titles.
Even in street fighter a character with a low jump like Dudley 3s needs to delay his air normals to not be punishable, but that game has a bit more complications since you have to worry about anti parry timings.
That's not even to mention how many moves have variable frame data due to some amount of momentum or expanding hitbox leading to it hitting later into it's active frames. Rps-ing around IAD timings is an important part of neutral in airdashers.
There are tons of unique things about the snash series to point out so I have no idea why you'd pick something so demonstrably universal?
Yeah, literally go to any fighting game wiki and look for a jumping move, you'll realize there's startup and active frames as expected but no recovery as it can be a dozen different variations based on height and crouching state lol
I think it's because a lot of people who play primarily smash have a large blind spot when it comes to tradfighters.
I’ll say there are situations in fighting games where a move can hit on a later active frame making it more plus, and sf6 specifically drive rush normals are 4 frames safer than non-drive rush normals. but the degree of variance is still obvious enough to react to where in melee the situations are much more ambiguous as to whether or not an aerial is punishable
I was thinking the same thing. All fighting games have this type of negative feedback loop to some extent.
After you talk to a top player and watch some videos, you're aware that the spacing on M.Kick can make it safe, but you wouldn't intuitively know that without playing other fighting games like it.
It's not an intuitive thing when you pick the game up, and most people won't be spacing it correctly at the lower level, so you'll still learn bad habits unless you're using other tools to learn what's proper or labbing a lot.
Melee has a higher degree of variance than most fighting games for a NUMBER of reasons (Smash DI, DI, L-Cancelling, a 16 year old meta lol), but there are other fighting games where the top level minutia gets pretty difficult to sus out. Skullgirls is one of those that is incredibly difficult.
The hardest fighting game is the one you haven't played yet, but others have.
Totally agree 👍 I must say Than learning to play a new one, with all its quirks, characters and rules. It is extremely tiring and boring to do... At least go me 😅
This was just an excuse to watch Cammy footage
Don't need an excuse to watch the goat 😤
You seem to be missing a critical variable in the falcon example. Land the move lower does give it better frame advantage but it also increases the functional startup of the move by an equivalent amount of frames. The long you wait to hit the move the more likely that the opponent will do something to to disrupt your plan. This highlights the value of conditioning.
I love his melee is just so fun/silly/wack to an extent that even without the character dependent shenanigans like how ICs and Luigi have so little traction that I think even a normal knee on shield isn’t shield grabbable since they get pushed back so much by it. I dunno, I might be wrong.
Yeah a lot of moves can't be straight grab punished out of shield for ICs, you have to wavedash out of shield to grab almost everything
Melee forces you to treat it like a full time job to become a top player while providing the income of a side-hustle at best. Everyone who competes at the highest level and works full time outside the game has nothing but my utmost respect
That's just every old and beloved fighting game tbh. Marvel 2, 3rd Strike, Garou, Vampire Savior, Melee, etc
this applies to every game if anything some games arguably have it worse due to providing even less money.
The reason you don't see Peach players doing subfloat all the time is because it's a 1 frame window so it's basically impossible to do consistently because of polling I'm pretty sure
Wake up babe new Melee glazing video just dropped
all my homies love glazing melee
While I do admit this is another melee glaze video, I think it actually brought up some interesting things that I didn't think about when it comes to Melee vs other fighting games.
I'm going to be honest, stuff like this exists in so many fighting games it's definitely not unique to Melee.
If anything this is more of an old/new fighting game comparison. Modern game design puts an emphasis on visual clarity and mechanical accessibility. Comparing SF6 to Third Strike or Guilty Gear Strive to +R will make you realize older games where just chock full of niche interactions and extremely difficult tech.
Even with the Falcon knee example noted, it's difficult to flatly call it "the most difficult."
In Tekken, for example, the Mishimas all have a just frame move called Electric Wind God Fist (Kazuya has this in Ultimate, but they made it not a true just frame for Smash). After a hundred hours of practice, it can still be a struggle to do the move consistently. Then, on top of that, doing multiple EWGFs in a single combo is optimal. Yet you'll find venerable pro players of over a decade opting for easier combos in tournament, because the EWGF combos are too difficult to do reliably.
If people who have won tens of thousands of dollars over years of competing still find something difficult, it's safe to say the game is difficult.
The same property you explained with jump attacks in melee literally apply to all fighting games. The lower you hit them, the more plus you are. In street fighter, you have to try to see how plus you are to maximize a punish(which also has no visual indication)
Cammy dive kick is only plus if you hit your opponent as close to the ground as possible (aka the feet). The rest are minus as fuck.
Making a whole video based on a false idea is kinda crazy and I would consider actually trying traditional fighters.
Seen a few comments like this, and I see what you’re saying, but I tried to establish early on in the video, yes this can apply to other games, but the difference is the frequency and efficacy. Jumping is a reactable mix that adds another layer to the neutral versus the entire neutral game in melee, obviously there will be some cases, but characters are jumping in melee significantly more often with significantly more depth to their airborne approaches, if that makes sense
@adust9996 also you are comparing Melee to literally the most GROUNDED FG series ever lol try looking at gameplay of melty blood actress again or mvc3 and tell me that the neutral isn't chaotic like Melee. He'll, even KOF neutral is based around short hops with hop CD, and simply sticking on the ground walking back and forth is heavily discouraged. I understand your trying to up Melee, but pls just try to be educated on the genre your criticizing
Honestly there is probably more jumping in melty blood then melee because movement is so damn good, arcana heart has Homing dash that makes neutral pretty air focused and as mentioned Kof is short hop heavy. This is ignoring much air time characters get in Vs games
The thing that I think makes smash hard is that dropping shield costs frames.
In pretty much every other game you are in full control as soon as block stun ends shield but in Smash in general it takes time to leave shield unless you use jump which has squat start up or shield options like roll and grab which is why grabbing or rolling is a bad habit many players have. It really changes the post block dynamic which then when you mix with L canceling and variable data on shield based on hit really changes how you have to think about defending.
correct me if im wrong but based on this comment i don't think you've played melee very much. i play a lot of fighting games, and granted i play peach in melee who this concept applies tenfold to, but stacking in shield tilt, L cancelling, fast fall timing, floating with peach or double jump cancelling with some characters... it really is not anywhere near the same degree. and this general concept is all over melee besides the aerial frame advantage thing. doing a specific thing with crazy execution completely changing the interaction applies to a ton of stuff in this game which is the primary point of the video
Making a title like this to farm engagements from goons who won't even watch the video is such a power move
I'd argue that L-cancelling creates a much better example of a negative feedback loop, since you can't react to an opponent's failed L-cancel. At the beginning, you're playing against players who fail them all the time, so aerials are more punishable. Then at the top level, you're expecting players NOT to miss their cancels, and so you see players leaving punishes on the table.
you can absolutely react to a missed L-cancel. sure, it depends on the move, but a lot of aerials are very laggy and you can react to an opponent missing the cancel, especially if you have a very fast move like shine or jab. also, it's not just the L-cancel frames itself that you're able to punish, it's also your opponent's reaction time when realizing that they missed it and then the startup lag of whatever move they try to do next.
L canceling and crouch cancelling are hard to read, fundamentally flawed mechanics that ask too much from the player. Melee has a lot of artificial difficulty this way, you have to spend less time fighting your opponent and more time optimizing your inputs so they can't capitalize.
@@AYEANNI there's a lot that I hate about L-cancelling. But even if we accept all the arguments of its defenders (it adds depth by rewarding good timing, creates mixups on hit/shield/whiff, Shiek's needles, etc), L-cancelling doesn't have a lockout window, meaning there's nothing stopping you from mashing Z during hitlag/shieldlag to guarantee a successful L-cancel.
As for CC, real crouch cancel (the kind where you actually crouch before the hit) is fine. ASDI down is way overpowered though.
@@AYEANNI No it is more so awareness to adapt that those are habits they're utilizing and play accordingly. Even if someone can spam quick aerials, they will still complain about peach downsmash if they don't think about timing their moves better or using a more appropriate option to not get hit by it.
@@AYEANNI I can see that perspective for L cancelling, but crouch cancelling? It's not artificial difficulty, its a unique mechanic that you should use sometimes and not use other times. It's beneficial in some situations and detrimental in others. It's just another tool that you can use to be better at the game.
The reason melee has stuck around for so long is because it has virtually no skill ceiling, and you can always be getting better and improving. If you don't want to play a game that's extremely difficult in the way melee is, then that's fine, ultimate is perfectly good game to play. But you cant say that melee is asking too much from the player because it's difficult at a competitive level. That's the whole reason people play the game.
MvC2 and USF4 are definitely up there too. No input buffer, super tight, sometimes unorthodox execution, and USF4 having NO BUFFER ON REVERSAL BLOCKED NORMALS. WHY CAPCOM WHY???? JUST LET ME PUNISH WITH SWEEP WITHOUT NEEDED TO USE ALL MY BRAIN POWER
Marvel 2 sure, sf 4 ? I wouldn’t say sf4 is as hard as melee or marvel. Personally I’d rather capcom went back to 1 frame reversals like ST but I’m alone in that line of thinking
@@Shodan130 i just feel like 1 frame reversals add an unnecessary amount of inconsistency, especially in online play where things like input delay change constantly
@@TWO8W well most games now use rollback so the delay should be consistent if it allows the player to select the delay before the game starts. 1 frame reversals also can lead to deeper play due to pianoing, you can make reversals more consistent by pianoing strengths at the cost of getting a different dp strength to the one you wanted giving you essentially 6 frames instead of 1, but this can also work to balance some reversals. Dhalsim in ST is incredibly strong beating the majority of the cast but making his reversal a triple input means while he does get the benefit of teleporting to different places getting out for free even on block, it comes at the cost of only having 1 frame to do it with no option to piano for more consistentcy. A fair price considering how dominant he is in the neutral.
1 frame reversal windows mean reversals have to be deliberate rather than what happened a lot in sf4 where someone would mash between links and hope you dropped it and FADC if you even managed to bait it
@@Shodan130that’s a cool example but have you considered that sagat and ryu are also insanely dominant in st neutral
Also I don’t think frame 1 reversal is only cool in the context of super turbo because nowadays there are far more defensive options and dp is not invincible unless you spend meter so if you try to mash raw dp you will get stuffed
@@Serenade3s yea for sure but for sagat his DP is slower and can be safe jumped universally really easily. not to mention it doesn't have as much i frames as say ryu's dp. ryu's dp is alot stronger in this regard and that's fine because ryu's neutral isn't as dominent as sims or O.sagats. for the other point all DP's requiring meter at the expense of opening the reversal window is fine. not my personal way of doing it but i think it's an upgrade from having meterless DP's you can mash out in a game with delayed netcode with 1 frame links lmao. my problem with more modern games is the fact that they made pressure wayy stronger and scarier. made alot of neutral tools like fireballs much weaker which lead SF5 for the majority of it's life and SF6 to be very bulldog sort of games. get in and enforce your mix at all costs..... personally i think crouch tech could of fixed alot of this but capcom wanted it gone so what else can we do lol.
As a Tekken player, I can confirm that Melee secretly makes us feel like preschoolers. (Well, except for those of us who play Smash too.)
Im not sure that i agree that this idea of having to make on the fly adjustments for specific edge case scenarios is particularly exclusive to Melee.
In any fighting game, players have flowchart of movement, attack, and defense patterns that the other player needs to observe and understand in order to make adjustments for. The degree in which an interaction will punish a player for being wrong therefore influences the amount of "time" players get to recognize and make those adjustments. In Melee, this "time" might be the number of stocks that are set as the standard for a single game, and in street fighter, this might be the number of rounds in a match. More rounds/stocks translates to more time to recognize opponents play patterns and respond to it, but ultimately, every fighting game with sufficient difficulty has frequent unreactable (educated) guesses where you choose an option based off your understanding and intuition. If the ability to adjust wasnt something important to fighting game players, tournament rounds would be 1 stock 1 round 1 game sets.
Melee is absolutely a technically demanding game at high levels, and is a contender for one of the most difficult- but ambiguous guessing scenarios aren't something exclusive to melee.
I don't think Melee is the hardest fighting game, it's just very weird compared to most due to not working with the same systems or breaking other ones. Even then i don't really think the difficulty of the game is worth anything, all that matters is that it's well designed and is fun, which melee is (whether the design aspect is intentional or not is different but it ends up being well designed for the most part)
I enjoy Melee myself and I'd definitely give Tekken the king of most complex fighting games.
L canceling stacks on to this, but at a lower skill level. I've formed some bad habits about what I can and can't shield grab from fighting players on unranked who don't l cancel consistently.
i’ve never thought about this from the defensive perspective
Great video good fgc ragebait, theres certainly alot of crossover and similar variable frame advantage/disadvantage. If anything this shows how similar melee and trad fighters are with the deepest mechanics, except the aerial combat/platforms/edgeguards introduce a whole nother dimension that traditional fighters dont have so one could argue that there is more depth. But what i like about traditional fighters over melee is they force you to scrap and you can't really camp as hard (well theres some exceptions but generally)
I love fighting games, I play Street Fighter, Dragon Ball and recently I'm into Guilty Gear. But damn, I can't stop watching Melee, movement looks so free and creative. But I won't even try to play it, it's just too much.
These silver 2 foxes are NOT ready for my soon to be +1 knees
I would say safe knees are one of the few positive feedback loops that force falcons to hit them more consistently. Like I get what you were explaining but its not a good example imo. I would say half of all slippi falcons can land -1, 0 knees consistently
Your explanation about frame data in melee reminded me of a clip where leffen is trying to explain frame data to mango and he JUST DOESN'T GET IT. Like, intuitively he understands it, mango's falco dair on shield is a clear example of that, but the fact that the theory goes so way above his head will never not be funny
I think instead of negative feedback loop, you should call it variable frame data.
This can be done in DBFZ by changing timing/spacing for moves
Pretty sure there's examples of this in all fighting games.
I think Melee falls on the level of difficulty of versus games and old Guilty Gear games, but although melee might be slower what sets it apart is the amount of controll you have after you get hit.
Note about APM: it's not significant in measuring anything meaningful. EAPM or effective APM would be a better metric
i don't think effective APM would change much in top level play, a ton of things in melee genuinely just require ridiculous inputs. APM measurements in melee are also divided between digital apm (buttons only) and APM in general (including joystick motions). a lot of joystick motions are extremely specific and precise and add a lot to the difficulty of the inputs, but it does inflate the number a ton just because of the way they're measured. eapm would probably be easy to measure by removing inputs that happen when the character isn't actionable though. digital apm numbers also will get inflated sometimes because of mashing out of grabs and things.
just limitations of "apm" as a measurement in general but the fact of the matter, numbers aside, is that they do be pressing shit hella fast
@@ladyinwight Even removing actions when the character in lag in melee wouldn't tell the whole story as it would not count ASDI down while doing another action.
Just FYI, Peach doesn't need to do subfloats to get more than +1 aerials on shields. You can do a regular fc falling fair and get +4 pretty easily. Because of the long start-up time you can actually start it ridiculously high in the air. She can also get +3 with sh fc uair, but that is trickier since you need to time the float drop and fast fall just right.
@@equinox3861 correct, but she does need it to get a +4 nair on shield for some important breakpoints (if I’m doing my frame data math right), such as grabbing perfectly buffered rolls, and the best nair u can get without it is +2 iirc which can struggle with 3 frame jumps oos, and yes fair is super easy to get at least plus 3 , little harder for plus 4 because u also wanna time it to catch jump oos and the lowest fair is not always the best one, and up air is also pretty easy to get plus 3, but both have startup drawbacks compared to nair
The situation: Falcon Knee hits your shield. How do you respond?
Me: LETS GO GAMBLING.
The result: X X X. Aw Dang it.
Played DBFZ from 2019-2021, then switched to Melee as a Boxx Falcon until SF6 released. I think the highest I got was Bronze 3 ranked after 2 years in Melee. I could just not wrap my head around that game, Melee is undeniably the most difficult game I ever attempted. After 2 months of SF6 (this being my first Street Fighter) I hit Master rank.
Melee is the hardest fighting game ever made hands down. After that is probably Tekken.
This guy never played Mvc2.
Melee is just a hard is mvc2 literally: high skill ceilings crazy movement and advance combo and neutral
Melee is harder.
@@riffz6065 no
@@bzchoy Yes
@@riffz6065 how?
the FGC would have you believe it's not even a fighting game
That's just the weirdos. Most of us think melee is extremely hard, awesome to watch, and cool as fuck to hear about. While I suck at Melee and barely play it, I love watching it.
This was always a weird debate, in retrospect. Like, Smash obviously prioritizes and even encourages "party" play, but clearly, there's more to it than that, right? After all, it isn't a board game, nor a kart racer, so what kind of "party" game series is it, exactly? We might find the answers to these questions by delving into its core gameplay, LOL.
@@megamillion5852 Smash =/= Melee LOL only casuals think this
@@megamillion5852
What I would say to an FGC fanboy :
if this was meant to be that casual, why is there a training mode ? Why can we change the rules to removes items etc... ?
Why did Nintendo allowed Smash at Evo during all these years ?
Why is there balance patches ?
BECAUSE IT IS ALSO MEANT AS A COMPETITIVE GAME (and that's the same for melee, L-Cancel and Wavedash are not glitches and Sakurai mentioned that they are advanced techniques ).
@@rondoudoushiney3868 okay tbf, Nintendo has barely allowed it at Evo lol
7:50 Smash bros as a whole should have tournament have preliminary friendlies. Where bassically it's 1 friendly match before scored matches for players to fairly get a chance to assess their opponent before getting heated about a loss.
0:17 RELNO SPOTTED!!!!! one of the fastest and coolest fox players to ever do it
the Melee to Tekken 7 pipeline was easy for me. The Tekken 8 back to Melee pipeline was even easier
Marvel vs Capcom 2
Long Live Melee 😎
melee players glazing melee as the hardest game while that's the only game they play
I've played a lot of other games and dug into the mechanics of other traditional fighters. No 1v1 fighter is as deep and hard to master as melee
Melee is the most technical fighting game of all time- I've played SF, KOF, Marvel, Skull girls, Undernight, DNF Duel, Ultimate, Brawl, Smash 4, N64, Nick ASB, Mortal Kombat, I can keep going...and none of them was as hard as melee- though KOF is pretty damn hard.
Typical fgc noob response
just with regards to your point about anti airs, blocking an aerial in a fighting game is more often than not just a prerequisite to a disadvantage state. part of anti airs is anticipation, same as melee. you do not have the leeway to physically escape aerial pressure in a traditional fighter as you might in a smash game.
there are more interactions like this, because in fighting games there are counterhit states and other properties which will have tiny nuances allowing for otherwise impossible passages of play. these are often difficult to react to and experience is what allows you to capitalise on situations.
i also feel like your falcon point is seen in traditional fighters as well. you do say that there are no discernible differences in real time between plus and minus knee, but fighting games have interactions like this too. even in dnf duel, a pretty easy fighting game, brawler’s 5b can be either neutral or plus on block depending on when he hits you and it’s impossible for the human eye to determine which part of the move he’s connected because the window is so tight. going for the wrong punish on the neural 5b can just… well lose you the round. it’s a similar feedback loop for the opposing side.
Learned some shit in this video. Thanks bro
Loved the format of this video and get a lot of details you are presenting I play melee and also fighting games but there is a inconsistency in the types of attacks being compared you are comparing a grounded move in street fighter and aerial in melee in which these two types of attack aren't going to have same properties due one being a jumping attack to ground attack you cant speed ground advantage in melee unless of some weird circumstances in that sense melee is the same as cam medium kick however in street fighter you can change frame advantage of attacks just like you can in melee with aerials with jumping attack in street fighter and plenty of other fighting games so I can say this a credible argument since the main point you brought up isn't true but I maybe missed the point of the video and would love to talk more about it
But overall I agree with your point, ive said for a long time that melee as a game is bad at teaching you how to play melee. In that sense I think that's the double edged sword of the 'beautiful accident' alot of people describe melee as. As awesome as it is it has huge flaws for learning and improving. But maybe that poison (extra credit: perfect imbalance) is what makes it so alluring and enduring
Keep up the good work king!!
that vid was very entertaining. Melee is just such an deeply complicated game all things considered and one of its kind. melee`s sick
I really think alot of melee players would be able to gel alot better with anime fighters. Grounded games like SF are just much more structured compared to anime games which sort of fall between melees sort of freeform nature and the more rigid, simple nature of non-anime fgs. Personally i fell off the melee train and really fell in love with guilty gear for the fast paced aerial combat and how momentum transfer felt so natural, just like in melee
Thanks sol Badguy. It seems like a lot of melee players really lack any sense of perspective about its place in the genre. Stuff like variable frame, data jump in is incredibly common, especially after an airdash.
Have you played older GG or KOF games?
Maybe in multiplayer melee was prebuffer but games at least as old as mike tyson's punch out had buffered inputs. Maybe the statement was meant for emphasis or just didn't know about that.
Sajam actually posted a pretty good video that goes into detail about the difficulty of older fighting games compared to newer titles. It talks about how a lot of times in older titles, you can count on an opponent dropping more often because the games had much more demanding executions, whereas a newer title will have more consistent damage being put out. It was from awhile ago but it should be something like old game vs new games or something
REALLY good video mate.
really enjoying your content!
I dunno, i feel theres more to it. Melee isn't hard because of 1 execution check, but the amount of excutation checks there are. Where as tekken (many refer to as the hardest fighting game) is hard because of how much you need to know. It doesn't matter if you know that one of my moves is -4, you need to know the majority of my 100+ moveset and the different situations each one could put you in. In the same vain, it doesn't matter if you know the technical details of my character in melee if you can't do basic tech. So like Tekken is hard in the same way chess is hard. There's a lot to learn. Melee is hard in the same way F1 is hard. Simply exucuting what I want to do is difficult.
Ofc they have both excution and knowledge checks, but to varrying degrees.
10 year melee vet and falcon main
Extremely well explained on the knee on shield stuff. Very niche knowledge that should be talked about more when it comes to fast falling aerials on shield. Keep up the great work!
I play both Melee and a more traditional fighter and they both of their own difficulties and appeals. I fully agree with you that what makes Melee so hard is that the sky is the limit, players are constantly figuring out and learning new techs that can rewrite the rules of the game (e.g. they can make a Sheik move like a Fox if their tech skill is cracked enough), while more traditional fighters tend to have much more concrete RPS options. Melee is sick AF because of this and why we all love it. :)
I just wanna say a hard game isnt inherently an incredible game, melee is fun to watch and definitely good but just because its hard does not mean its better than every fighting game that ever came out after it. I believe the fun of gaming is how much variety there is, for some melee is their speed where for other people they prefer focusing on slow spaced gameplay and spacing of sf6.
Though i love both sf6 and the smash franchise, just wanted to bring this point.
That's a good point, theres kind of a blessing/curse aspect to melee where, fortunately, the degree of difficulty makes it dope as hell but also creates a punishingly high barrier of entry that limits the amount of new players who will just play something else
Definitely, its why I feel some people sleep on some slower paced games like imo I feel if Brawl was less campy itd be interesting because theres still a lot of variety because SDI is still good and combos arent really guaranteed because of hitstun cancelling but Metaknight dittos are fun because of that. But despite me losing the grip on playing Melee these days due to work and socializing more and just being pretty crap at the game now I still come back to it because there still is mad variety of things I can do even if its a bit poorly done by my own execution. Rather much play something Im bad at with a ton of variety than half the modern fighters that come out these days where I feel like doing the optimal thing isnt as difficult and as a result its a lot more common to witness as a player or viewer.
Personally I feel the mvc franchise is harder. Anime fighter is general are so wacky and make you feel like you don’t know how to play fighting games sometimes. Tekken and Vitral fighter are contenders as well.
Traditional fighters have that it’s called a safe jump though there are setups so there is no execution barrier like in melee however I think comparing melee to street fighter which is the most ground based fighter doesn’t really help your point when games like kof exist which a large focus on the air
This was an interesting video though I hope you make one comparing other situations between traditional fighting games and melee
Great video! While I think Melee is a very hard fighting game with a high skill floor and an infinite skill ceiling, I don't think it's the hardest. In my mind, fighting games can be so complex and deep that they aren't able to be called "the hardest". The best example I can give is 3rd Strike or Marvel 2, the former being my favorite game ever created. All of your pressure, offense, defense, anything really is fake due to the existence of parry and red parry. This means there are tons of high level and really cool option selects, and it also means that every move you have to deal with can be countered with the right read or reaction, making the game infinitely replayable and giving it an infinite skill ceiling. Tying into the negative feedback loop, a perfect example of that can be found in X-Men Children of the Atom. In that game, every normal can be cancelled into a super jump, even on whiff, meaning frame data doesn't matter when it comes to blockstun. This not only makes it hard for new players to get used to the game flow and punishing, but some people actively call the game terrible because of this, and, because it's not very popular in terms of high level play, it's hard to show them what the game offers like Melee does with its high level gameplay. On top of this, every character has crazy bullshit you can't deal with like Cyclops' unblockable normals. If his j.2HP or j.MK hit on certain frames, you cant block them and he gets a full combo into death. While there are obvious setups into this like DP into j.MK in the corner vs a lot of the cast for an unblockable reset, a lot of new players will be air blocking, get hit by a random j.MK, die, then not know what happened because it's literally impossible to tell whether the move is unblockable. I love the video and the examples you brought up, and the fact that the title is very accurate, despite what some may think if they havent watched this video, is another big plus. Great video!
Hello EggrollFGC, it is nice to meet you! I think your comment was very insightful. I'm a up and coming twinkle star sprite, puyo puyo, and most importantly pro multiversus fans. Fighting games sometimes seem abit too easy on the surface, therefore boring, when I see them. You opened my eyes to the many choices of fighting games and now they are easy for me. I think I will apply all this to my next endeavor: superior solders on ps1. Thanks for the comments. And most importantly, Lets Go Justin!!! - quote from Daigo before he did the Iron man infinite on him but Justin came back with cyclops or at least that's what my friends told me. See you in street fighter 5 everyone!
@@user-nj6dm1po8p Twinkle Star Sprites and Puyo Puyo mentioned!!!
@@user-nj6dm1po8p rsp why are you like this
Love me an outrageous bait title. Let's see how it goes.
me struggling to input backwards dp mid-combo after grinding said combo for around 10 hours
Great video!
they gonna cook u 4 this title but its pure factz
I'd call it high-execution unreactable mixups, it's only a negative feedback loop because lower players don't even know they exist. Melee is unique in that it requires you to understand not just the moves and frame data but the game engine and physics to play at a high level.
dude if you knee then use Z for grab 1 frame early and get that light shield it sucks soooo bad im gonna start holding down the l cancel and mashing A instead
Its not code spaghetti, its a melee tech...
Its just that concept that smash just has, it's easy to pick up but hard to master, especially at top level.
This just seems to boil down to there is more depth to using a move and understanding its situational options the better you get. Don't really relate to the premise that other games are as cut and dry and non-variable. The street fighter spacing of the move directly relates to the spacing/timing the move hits someone in smash as well.
Could argue that there more/less variable follow up time due to that alone in the 2d fighter you referenced, while that ability to interact shifts based on the spacing the move was done relative to the shield/enemy character and the ground in Melee.
Interesting points, just don't vibe with the overall premise/point you were selling.
7:35 I don't disagree with the point but "you can't punish nair on block" seems like a bad example to my noob brain. Surely THAT is a simple enough adaptation to make, maybe not mid game, but definitely mid set
Smash player 🚿🚿🚿
2002UM enters the chat
reacting to the title from a melee player this is not true.
37 year old here. Cut my teeth on Street fighter 2. Was at tournament level with SF2, Alpha 3, Soul Caliber, Tekken 5, Tekken 7, Soul Caliber 4, Killer Instinct, MK11, recently SF6 and of course Melee.
Melee is the most difficult/complex one of them all by far. and it does that whilst also being the best of them.
Holy fuck peach’s subfloat nair is PLUS FOUR?????????? My god
Nair fair and bair are all +4 I believe
Great video! I feel like melee, and other smash games for that matter, is the only game with a "Dynamic" frame data. Where as Street fighter frame data is Static and players play around a set of situations that are figured out and take the optimal outcome that USUALLY doesn't change, Melee' frame data is technically static as well but is so much dynamic because of not just spacing, but also aerials timings and basic mechanical factors like L-Cancel and shield stun (Which basically alters the set frame data by allowing you to move much earlier than normal, meaning that the +1 knee fundamentally happens because of this) These factors make 2 situations and their counterplays theoretically the same on paper, but way way different in practice. Makes melee even cooler if you ask me
I personally think L cancels are a blight on the game
Fighting games can have variable frame data, mostly for aerials, since depending on when it hits can change the advantage. Timing to make moves safer is a universal fighting game thing since obviously if you time it late it'll be safer, this occasionally applies to early timing as well. Furthermore games with 8 Way Airdashes can have similar nuance in the spacing game, IDK if you've ever seen Marvel (3 or 2) but you'll notice how crucial airdashes are for the airdash characters, i also think games like Marvel 3 have a weird similarity to smash due to the combination of high movement, low skill floor, very high skill ceiling with lots of stuff.
7:40 100% disagree smash is exactly like chess. While I agree smash bros is like that I think chess is the same way. btw I'm not a highly skilled chess player but I know about it strategically a bit. Chess is a hard game to learn cause that what you said is somewhat true you can play the game reactively but that is atypical. That strategy can work but often if the opponent is good enough you get baited or your move wasted time and you have to play catch up. as in chess there's never time to change strategy every move counts which is why opening are so important. There reason you can't change strategy is because you can only make one move at a time if the oppent is set up and you're not you bassically mashed and accidentally got off stage. In chess every move is equal to about 15 frames in smash bros. A lot can happen in that time but what matters is what can you do next turn. For this reason chess is also negative feedback but you can analize it better cause slower similar to watching replays in smash.
chess is about simulteaneously positioning your pieces to attain control and disadvantage enemy positioning punishing bad plays. In smash bros this is stage control and spacing. When an enemy makes a bad play the other player capitalizes on that play. In smash bros we call this a combo.
Chess to play well requires an understanding of your opponents position and options and detmine how to dismantle and anticipate their options and plays. You can never be 100% certain untill the play is made what the opponent might be thinking. This we call mind games.
Both smash bros and chess are won by out planning and out performing the opponent. To regain neutral you must know how to escape combos. both games are played by not playing but out playing.
The only difference is time. In smash you habe to think fast than in chess and therefore can make more mistakes to be combo'd by. In chess the game is slower pace so you can acess your game state bassicall every frame. And a game that resembles both simultaneously is Your only move is hustle.
sorry for my bad paragraph kerning I wrote this on phone
This is how trying to learn broodwar is like. You need to study recent replays of pros. Period. (but the netplay experience is garbo)
Vs games might be harder tho for other reasons. A true analysis will cover the average tightness of mechanics of different games. Marvel 2 and Marvel 3 should be compared tbh.
marriage is the hardest fighting game
lol sounds like you speak from experience
Boomer coded comment
Only if youre a noob
3:04 so being able to improve by trial and error?
5:45 vs melee is negative feedback loop because to improve you must know.
If so then I would argue most smash games are the same way there is simply too much tech to know what's coming and anticipate it since smash is simply too fast to react by human means. The amount of techincal knowledge in smash is so high that not even amatuer locals players know what they're up against they can lose and by no fault of their own and fail to know why, thus johns and self blame. To play well is not to practice hard but to learn your opponent quickly winning I would argue is more reliant of how often you play that particular opponent and how well you can adapt to how they play.
That goes without saying but this should be a wake up call for the FGC players who hate us (it probably won’t)
Good video
OBVIOUSLY Melee is the hardest fighting game. People try to say Tekken is the hardest but nobody has exploded a tendon in their hand from high level Tekken play. You literally have to have TAS level execution as a human being to play Melee at the top level. I'll stick to traditional fighting games where my brain is actually allowed to catch up with the amount of stuff that's happening on screen.
Mvc2 is objectively the hardest game, then Melee, then 3S and CVS2
@@ahadkhan3486 3S is actually fairly easy to get good at, in my opinion. USF4 is harder because of the amount of precise execution it requires
@@BridgetGX true if you mean pure execution wise 3S isn't the hardest to just "do" stuff in, but if we're talking about Difficulty in terms of being good at the game at a competitive level 3S mind games is almost a completely different kind of game to any other SF. There's a reason why mosf ppl didn't consider it a "proper" SF game at first cause it doesn't really play like one at all. I still stand by MVC2 being the most executionally demanding game tho
CVs2 is hard not bc it's a good game imo but just cause it's completely broken like mvc and Melee. Typically older games will always be "harder" just cause all their glitches and bugs were never patched out... as well as not having any input buffers + stricter timing in general
@@ahadkhan3486 I'm not sure if MVC2 is as crazy as Melee, but you do have to master very precise controls for sure and have your team comp on point
Dude 100% people adjust there counter play in melee. I’m t definitely happens a lot.
Third strike and melee are comparable in terms of complexity because of the 3s parry making the game crazy volatile. You comparing sf6 to melee is unfair as that one is dumbed way down, same as smash ult is dumbed way down compared to melee.
I hate the 9 frames smash ultimate has because the game can't hold a consistent frame rate on and offline, made worse by visual lag and input lag often desync
zantho is not safe
You're comparing Melee, to SF6 which is specifically geared toward newer players lol. Try USF4, KOF, Tekken, or maybe even Virtua Fighter.
Why does this image of Peach keep popping up
meleesona
I LOVE MY STREAMER RAHHHHHH
I guesss you wonder where I’ve beeeeen
You forgot about staling.
Doesn't melee have 3F buffer? I heard some melee channels say that
It has a three frame buffer only on tap jump double jump.
Hes too goated
Mvc2 shits on this in terms of difficulty
Its perceived as "hard" because its old and mechanically (unintentionally) clunky. That doesnt make it the hardest fighting game, it just makes it old and clunky. And I played Melee competitively.
yup
Hal laboratory makes Kirby games they don't make fighting games I'm pretty sure the team who worked on meele never made an actual fighting game other than Nintendo games
street fighter is the only fighting game
Easy and hard for master
How cute he thinks smash is a fighting game
yeah its a game made for children haha!
wait why’s everyone booing…
mf on abt this in 2024
A party game is the "best" fighting game😂 alr bro
Melee is not a fighting game. It’s a platformer brawler.