As I’ve gotten older, more mature and more experienced with the fighting game genre, I’ve managed to become pretty good at honestly assessing my feelings about particular games. This honesty really reached a strong point of development when I finally realised that I didn’t like BlazBlue Central Fiction all that much (you can read about that in my article “Learning to Love, to Learn and to Let Go”), and it’s come to carry forward into another game which I’ve had a fraught relationship with – Super Smash Bros. Melee1.
See, if there’s one thing that I absolutely cannot stand about Melee, it’s actually playing the damn thing. I’ve come to describe Melee as a game which doesn’t interpret your inputs so much as it transliterates them. It is a game which will give you exactly what you ask for, irrespective of whether or not you meant it.2 This basically means that in order for Melee to start feeling responsive and generally good to play, you have to get used to how it feels – you’ve gotta learn the language. And until you learn the language, playing Melee feels fucking awful. And the fact of the matter is that I’m not nearly passionate enough about the game to want to learn how to speak it3.
But I love literally everything else about Melee.
See, a big meme for a while was that Melee is a “solved game”. For the longest time, the game was defined by its “Five Gods”, and there wasn’t a whole lot of variance in high level tournament results.
But what’s come to truly define Melee in the current landscape is just how impossible it is to actually define it at all. For all of its (extremely numerous) faults, it’s a game whose systems are so open-ended that twenty goddamn years after its release, people are still finding new strategies and techniques, new ways to play the game. The era of the Five Gods is long over, and not because we’ve finally entered 20XX – the best player in the world right now is a Marth player named Zain, there are two rising stars in JMook and JFlex who are giving the world’s best players a run for their money with Sheik, Australia is making big moves thanks to the efforts of Joshman and a recently un-retired Spud, and Japanese hometown hero aMSa won The Big House 10, arguably the most stacked bracket in the game’s history, with fucking Yoshi.
What I love about Melee is just how much it has come to beat the “solved game” accusations, almost as if to spite the channer who brought it up in the first place. I don’t really mind not wanting to play it – not just because Project Plus is essentially the version of Melee that I like playing, but also because spectating and keeping up with the competition and the meta is a fulfilling enough experience on its own. There is so much space for both refinement and innovation, and every time that space becomes known, there’s always someone there to take up the challenge and push the game, its characters and its players even further, and even if I’m not in the thick of it myself, content creators like turndownforwalt and PGstats4 make it easy and entertaining to keep in touch with the Melee scene.
There may be, as Mang0 once said, “so much more Melee to be played”, but I won’t be playing it. And that’s okay.
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When I say “fraught”, I mean “the experience of getting my ass beat by netplay Falco on unranked was so frustrating that I nearly quit fighting games” ↩︎
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“My hovercraft is full of eels”, I say to myself every time I try to dash dance and just start spinning around in place instead ↩︎
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Especially when the Unranked Spacie Army keeps fucking talking over me ↩︎
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Panda Global may have the most insufferable sponsored players in the esports space, but for their Smash coverage, I do, unfortunately, gotta hand it to em ↩︎