Shades of Resonance: Disappointment and Regret - Memory Log #50

Super Smash Bros. Melee

I had become obsessed with Super Smash Bros. I was playing it on a daily basis, usually for ours on end, and I was spending every moment of my available leisure time Charge Shotting and Falcon Punching fools to oblivion. I saw any downtime as a perfect opportunity not to socialize or plan for my future, no, but to mix it up with Nintendo's cast of happy-go-lucky gaming icons atop Hyrule Castle or within the Mushroom Kingdom's nostalgia-inducing confines.

I simply couldn't get enough of the game's multiplayer action. It was endlessly addicting!

And all the while, I couldn't stop dreaming about what a larger-scale Smash Bros. sequel would be like. "Who would be in it?" I constantly wondered in an excited manner. "And just how wide in scope could it possibly get?"

At all times, my mind was filled with thoughts about duking it out with video-game characters from across the spectrum--characters from both Nintendo's roster and the rosters of equally beloved third-party developers like Capcom, Konami and Tecmo. I kept thinking about all of the new stages that could be introduced and all of the classic locations that the characters could visit in a true story mode.

That was the power of Super Smash Bros. It was a game that dared me to dream about the possibilities. It strove to stir my imagination in a grand way and convince me of its amazing potential, and it succeeded wildly in that effort--so much so that I came to feel that wondering about where the series could go next was an essential part of the Smash Bros. experience.

And wonder I did. Before long, in fact, I became consumed with the idea of a Super Smash Bros. sequel. And I was sure that one was in development. "Nintendo has to be working on a sequel," I thought, "because doing so is the biggest no-brainer ever! A Smash Bros. sequel powered by next-generation hardware has the potential to be one of the most successful video games in history!"

But still, I knew that I wasn't going to be fully confident in my assertion until I saw some proof that Nintendo was actually working on a Smash Bros. sequel. So I continuously looked for it: In between Smash Bros. sessions, I headed over to Yahoo! and typed in every permutation of "Smash Bros.," "GameCube" and "sequel," and otherwise I exhaustively scoured the Internet in search of any rumor, realistic- or fanciful-sounding, that pointed to the existence of the Smash Bros. sequel that I'd long been dreaming of.

Somewhere, I was certain, there had to be an insider who was spilling legitimate information. So I ran searches and followed links to the most obscure forums on the Internet with the hope that I'd come across such a person. In that time, I unquestioningly took the word of every forum-goer who claimed to know of Nintendo's development activities. I chose to believe every person who revealed facts like, say, "Nintendo is collaborating with its partners to bring Mega Man, Simon Belmont, Ryu Hayabusa, and many others to its unfathomably expansive Smash Bros. follow-up!"

Most embarrassingly, I sent a desperate-sounding email to IGN's editors asking them if they'd heard anything about a Smash Bros. sequel coming to the GameCube. I don't recall what phrasing I used, but I'm pretty certain that it wasn't anything more intelligent than "IF U HAVE INFORMATION, PLEASE TELL ME. OK. THANKS. BYE!"

That's how badly I desired information.

My memory tells me that these searches went on for multiple years when in reality it was barely two. Because that's how it was back then: The Internet was a smaller place, there were very few authoritative sources of information, and legitimate news flowed at a much slower pace. So when you were brimming with anticipation for news about an upcoming video game (especially one that was hypothetical), it seemed to take forever for it to finally arrive!

None of the "leaks" or rumors that I discovered during that period were ever substantiated, of course, but that didn't bother me. I didn't mind having my emotions toyed with, no. To me, it was all part of the fun! In fact, as I had in the past, I considered all of the build-up and pre-release activity to be vital pieces of my memories of the sequel in question!

But after following so many false leads and having my hopes shattered again and again, I was invigorated when, unexpectedly, I came across news that Nintendo was prepared to show something Smash Bros.-related at a yearly trade show called "E3," which I'd never heard about. Really, I didn't know what such an event entailed or how I could go about viewing it.

In lieu of actually doing some research on the matter, I spent the next few days making the rounds of the usual enthusiast sites (IGN, GameSpot, GameSpy, and the like) and continuously clicking my browser's refresh button with the hope that news about a Smash Bros. sequel would suddenly appear and confirm its existence. And one day, it actually happened: The news that I'd long been waiting for finally appeared!

It came to me in the form of a single image.

The image depicted Captain Falcon throwing a Falcon Kick into Link, Sheik charging into them from the left, and Fox firing a blaster shot into the fray. The four characters were fighting on a platform that was comprised of rope-tied logs and in what I was certain was a Donkey Kong Country-themed stage. (This image would be burned into my memory for all time.)

I don't remember what day it was or which site I was browsing at the time, sadly, but I definitely recall how ecstatic I was as I pored over and examined every part of the image. I mean, this was what I'd been waiting for since 1999! Here it was right in front of me. The image wasn't a photoshop or an April Fool's prank, no. It was very real. And it served to deliver some of the best gaming news I'd ever heard: A Super Smash Bros. sequel was on its way!

Its name, I learned, was Super Smash Bros. Melee, and unlike its predecessor, it was being treated a huge deal from the opening moment. From what I ascertained, it was going to be a showpiece title for Nintendo's powerful next-generation console, the GameCube. "And how 'bout that!" I thought. "Super Smash Bros. has apparently performed so exceptionally well that Nintendo is trusting its sequel to be the primary mover of the company's new console, which is usually a role reserved for Mario games! Not bad for a criminally underbudgeted mascot-fighter whose localization team didn't believe in its ability to achieve 'hit' status!"

In the weeks that followed, I devoted many hours to blissfully poring over every screenshot and preview that IGN and its contemporaries were making available. I lustfully watched and re-watched every low-quality live-feed video I could find. And I hit up every message board in existence looking for attendee impressions. Nothing could satiate my hunger. I kept on wanting more.

In that period, I started counting the days until Melee's release. I absolutely couldn't wait for it to hit stores and become truly real!

I was so excited for Melee, which was scheduled to be a launch title, that I resolved to buy a GameCube on day one. This is significant to note because otherwise I wasn't terribly interested in the console. Not for the usual reason, no--because I was afraid of change and what it meant for my current favorite console--but because by then, the magic was gone. New console releases simply didn't seem like a big deal to me anymore.

At the time, I struggled to pinpoint the reason why. It might have been, I thought, that I no longer viewed a graphical jump, alone, as a compelling-enough selling point for a console. Or perhaps it was the case that console launches were a lot like Christmas seasons in that they were becoming less special to me as I was growing older. I couldn't say for sure.

Whatever the case, I simply wasn't feeling the hype for the GameCube (or any of the competing consoles, for that matter).

Also, I was pretty cold on Luigi's Mansion and the rest of the GameCube launch lineup, which I felt was seriously lacking for heavy-hitting games. Certainly Nintendo wasn't offering anything close to the caliber of Super Mario Bros., Super Mario 64, or any of its other game-changing launch titles.

The company's lack of a revolutionary-feeling, generation-defining launch title was glaring to me. The absence of such a game led me to believe that Nintendo had fallen way behind schedule and wouldn't be able to provide a string of system-selling software for several months. So I wasn't going to be buying the GameCube for the reason that I usually bought new Nintendo systems (interest in technology-defining Mario games, customer loyalty, and such), no. I was going to be buying it for one reason and one reason only.

As Melee's release neared, I decided to stop following all media coverage because I wanted for there to remain an element of mystery to the game. Mainly, I was hoping to avoid having its unlockable content spoiled for me. "Why now allow myself to be surprised when Pit and Wario finally make their grand entrances?" I thought to myself. "Because surely Nintendo's not going to snub them a second time!"

But it was only about a week before I abandoned that stance and gave into temptation. I just couldn't help it! Though, I didn't feel as though my reneging was a big deal because I concluded that there was no real harm in skimming over message-board posts that at worst would only spoil information about newly added items or music tracks. "That kind of stuff is trivial," I thought.

Though, that's when I made a really bad mistake and read through a "leaked roster" post that was made on the recently founded Smash World Forums. I did so because my attitude was that these "leaks" were usually fabricated by attention-seekers and over-enthused wishful-thinkers, so it probably wouldn't hurt to humor the post's creator and entertain his brand of silliness. In this instance, however, the moderators were able able to verify that the leaker's source was legitimate and that the names we were seeing did indeed comprise the game's full roster.

And man was I pissed about what I'd just read!

Not only had Pit and Wario not been selected to appear in Melee; they'd been disrespectfully snubbed in favor of additional Pokemon characters whose series were already overrepresented, no-name characters like Marth and Roy, wholly redundant clone characters like Dr. Mario and Young Link, and, inexplicably, Mr. Game & Watch, who wasn't even a real character! I mean, seriously: He was nothing more than an amalgamation of still frames taken from a bunch of LCD handheld games that starred their own characters and had no obvious connection to each other!

"Why do we need second forms of Mario and Link when Nintendo's roster is filled to the brim was so many wonderfully unique characters?!" I wondered in frustration. "And what the hell could they possibly do with a character taken from a primitive Game & Watch handheld?!"

It all seemed like such a waste.

And even in instances when I came across actually intriguing information, I wound up feeling disappointed by the time I was done reading it. Its impact would, inevitably, be diminished by an accompanying qualifier. It was, for instance, huge news to me that Ganondorf was going to be a playable character. However, my excitement-level for that news dropped considerably when I learned that he would not be the magically imbued spell-caster that I knew from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time but instead a largely indistinct "Captain Falcon clone."

"WHY?!" I shouted in perplexment. "What sense does that make?! There's almost zero commonality between the two characters!"

I was angry with a lot of the news that I was reading but certainly not devastated by it. Because for however much I disagreed with some of Nintendo's roster choices, I was still fine with the game's overall content and believed that it was enough to make Melee the next-level Smash Bros. sequel that I was hoping for. I was still very much looking forward to its release. That's why I made it the top entry on my Christmas list for that year.

Still, though, I couldn't deny that my enthusiasm for the game had been somewhat diminished.

And the way that events unfolded from there certainly didn't help the situation. I'm talking specifically about the incident that occurred on Christmas Eve.

So without being encouraged to do so, my cousins from New Jersey brought their copy of Melee over to my house and invited me to play it with them. I really didn't want to play it because I desired to experience it for myself on Christmas morning in a more-personal setting, which had always been my tradition, but because I felt that it would have been impolite to decline their offer, I decided to play it with them at least for a little while.

I was worried because I still feared spoilers. I just had a feeling that there was more to the roster than what I'd learned and that the game contained big-name characters whose presence was somehow kept secrets. I didn't want to know about them beforehand; I wanted to discover them for myself. So I decided that the best solution to limiting my exposure to spoiler material was to look off the right side while we were on the character-select screen and view it only with my peripheral vision. "If I squint as hard as I can and train my eyes on familiar-shaped and -colored mugshots," I thought, "I can avoid seeing the unknown secret characters!"

In the early moments, my eyes located the unmistakable profile of Captain Falcon, who was positioned near the screen's upper-right corner, which just happened to be where I putting most of my focus. So I hastily selected him and then looked away completely until the match began.

My plan was to set the match's tone and establish my presence in the same way that I always had when I was playing as Captain Falcon in Super Smash Bros. Basically I was going to start the match by immediately charging toward the nearest opponent and hitting him or her with a vicious shoulder tackle!

And this was the series of events that occurred: The match began. I smashed the analog stick forward to run. And, in a completely unexpected fashion, Falcon zipped across the screen at what I could only describe as light speed and promptly plummeted off the stage like a sack of wet bricks. It happened so fast that I couldn't do anything to stop it.

"Oh dear," I thought to myself as my heart dropped. "Something is seriously wrong here."

Going in, my expectation was that Melee was, despite its introducing a few new techniques, going to be mechanically identical to Super Smash Bros. But it turned out not to be. It played similarly, yeah, yet it was clearly a much different game.

And honestly, I didn't know how to feel about what I was experiencing. My mind was all over the place. Still, though, I did my best to focus on the action, live in the moment, and enjoy my time with my cousins.

We played for about a half hour or so before they called us over for dinner.

As I was eating my dinner, I continued to reflect upon my time with Melee. My mood was somber. There were so many negative thoughts running through my mind. The same concerns kept surfacing over and over again: I felt that the game moved way too fast, even when I was using a slow character like Donkey Kong. I thought that the controls were sloppy and that it was a bad look for the characters to be slipping and sliding all over the place. And it seemed to me that the stages were just so cramped; most of them were far smaller in scale than Super Smash Bros.'s, and their blast lines ("KO borders," as they're otherwise known) were placed way too close their edges, which led to anticlimactic-feeling deaths and all-too-abbreviated matches.

The more I ruminated over my experience, the worst I felt about the game. And by the time the night was over, my hype for Melee had completely dissolved.

That wasn't at all how I wanted things to be, so I spent the rest of the a.m. hours desperately trying to convince myself that my disappointment was unjustified and that it was unfair for me to base any of my harsh criticisms on what was likely just a single poor sampling.

While I laid there in bed that night, I continued to re-frame this sentiment and do what I could to hold on to my narrowing sliver of anticipation. Though, while I was doing this, I couldn't help but feel that my efforts were fruitless.

But even though my spirits were low, they didn't prevent me from being overcome with feelings of excitement as I unwrapped my brand-new copy of Super Smash Bros. Melee that Christmas Day. Because it was, after all, always exciting to get new games on Christmas. Nothing could prevent such feelings from emerging.

And in fact, my best memory of Melee and my main source of nostalgia for it was formed on that glorious Christmas morning, when I played it in a personal setting. I remember how I was absolutely blown away by the game's scope and production. When I got the chance to intently focus on its intro and menu screens, I was able to see that it had been afforded the type of budget that an all-encompassing mascot-mashup truly deserved. "Maybe I was wrong about this game," I thought in that moment.

I was extremely impressed by what Melee was exhibiting. Its energy was highly exuberant and irresistible! Its presentation was amazingly enchanting! Its graphics were stunning! Its soundtrack was godly! And its character animation was top-tier and some of the best I'd ever seen in a video game!

I loved new stages like the supersized Hyrule Temple, with its numerous pillared structures and cavernous underside, and Brinstar Depths, whose central platform would rotate whenever it was viciously struck by the stage's frightening visitor: the enormous Kraid, who looked just like he did in Super Metroid! They were truly next-level stages and the type that I was hoping to see in a next-generation Smash Bros. game.

Also, I marveled over the flexibility of the game's engine. I was enthralled with how character shared the same move inputs but were still able to exhibit unique maneuvers and attributes: Peach could float, as she was known to do in Super Mario Bros. 2. The spike-shoed Ice Climbers, who fought as a pair, didn't slide on icy surfaces. The lumbering, projectile-hurling Zelda could transform into the speedy, physical Sheik and vice versa. Donkey Kong could carry opponents around after grabbing them. And other characters, too, had moves and abilities that seemed to defy and even break the rules.

And I felt that wall-jumping and tether recoveries were very cool new additions, and I appreciated how they were implemented in a faithful manner (Mario could wall-jump, but rightfully Luigi couldn't because he had never displayed such an ability).

I was delighted about the result of these customizations: There was no feeling of uniformity among the cast when logically there should have been at least a bit of redundancy (as there was in, say, Mortal Kombat, whose fighters were also bound by a shared-input system). Every character was wholly unique.

"In terms of artistry and technical achievement," I thought to myself as I was making these observations, "Hal Labs has really outdone itself here!"

Melee was as much an experience as it was a game. There was so much to see, so much to do, and so much to discover! And I was almost overwhelmed by all of the content that it was throwing at me.

Of greatest significance to me was that there were so many characters to unlock! I greatly enjoyed undertaking the challenges for unlocking them even though I wasn't thrilled about most of the selections that were made. I had a lot of fun, also, in immediately appraising them in Training Mode, where I was able to test out each of their moves and abilities and attempt to pinpoint their origins (the games from which they derived)!

The only character who managed to elude me for a long time was Mewtwo, whose unlocking required you to fight 700 versus matches or total 20 hours of play in VS. Mode. I didn't believe that I was capable of doing either of those on my own, so what I did, instead, was resort to plugging in three controllers and letting the game run for four or five hours while I watched a basketball game on a different TV input.

You gotta do what you gotta do, I guess.

And you know what? History repeated itself: As I experimented with all of the unlockable characters that I'd previously dismissed, I came to see the wisdom in their inclusion. My impression of Mr. Game & Watch, in particular, symbolized how I viewed the new additions: I felt that Mr. Game & Watch--with his imaginative, cleverly animated attacks and authentic movements (his every frame of animation was borrowed from a Game & Watch game and creatively repurposed)--was an ingeniously designed character, and I loved what he brought to the game! He immediately became one of my favorites and joined Captain Falcon, Ganondorf and Falco on my list of mains.

Fire Emblem star Marth, whose games I'd never heard of (because they never left Japan), also turned out to be a cool new addition. I felt that he brought a notably distinct style of sword-fighting to the game and thus easily distinguished himself from his fellow sword-fighter Link.

Like Ness and Captain Falcon before them, these types of characters, I was happy to say, epitomized what the Super Smash Bros. series was truly all about. Their inclusion showed that the series' creators had great respect for Nintendo's history--for both the well-known and obscure parts of it--and were eager to create a game that joyously celebrated it.

"So clearly I'm a fool for once again doubting Sakurai and his crew's judgment!" I thought to myself. "These are terrific character choices!"

In fact, I couldn't imagine a future Smash Bros. game that didn't include them! "They'd better be in all games going forward!" I adamantly insisted.

And I didn't even mind that Dr. Mario, Falco, Ganondorf, Roy, Young Link and Pichu were "clones"? Because from what I'd learned, they weren't even included in the original plans. They were thrown in during the final months of development, at a time when Hal was ahead of schedule and looking for ways to add some extra content to its game. Since I knew that to be the case, I felt as though it would have been silly for me to complain about content that otherwise wouldn't have been there.

So I considered the clones to be great bonus content, and I was thankful to Hal for including them. I appreciated the company's extra effort.

But for as much as I was blown away by Melee's presentation, music and visuals, I still wasn't particularly fond of some of the tweaks that had been made to its fighting engine. All of my original criticisms proved to be founded: The action moved too quickly to the point of being out of control. The movement controls were kinda sloppy, and resultantly characters would slip and slide all over the place, and otherwise there were too many instances in which characters would fail to complete attacks from standard jump height because they fell to the ground too quickly (there wasn't enough time for attack animations to complete). Most of the stages were too small to contain the action of four-player free-for-alls. And the blast lines were placed so closely to stages' edges that characters could be KOed at ridiculously low percentages.

And then there was the matter of the game losing sense of two of its important elements: the epic aerial exchanges and the intense edge-guard battles, whose respective impacts were greatly diminished by the newly added air-dodge maneuver, which served to discourage such engagements. You no longer had to fight in the air to recover or protect yourself; you could instead avoid aerial combat entirely and keep the action strictly ground-based, and that's what CPU and human characters tended to do.

And that sucked because aerial combat was one of the best parts of the original Super Smash Bros. It was one of the elements that made the action so much fun. And now it was mostly gone.

For all of these reasons, Melee's multiplayer mode simply wasn't as fun or as addicting as its predecessor's, even when I played it with human players. So I really didn't spend a whole lot of time playing multiplayer matches.

Instead I entertained myself by attempting to setting records in Target Test mode and taking on fan-made challenges like the Hyrule Jump, which tasked you with completing a jump from Hyrule Temple's upper-right edge down to the small circular platform at the temple's base. How accomplished you were depended upon how many characters with which you could complete the jump.

And, well, I was able to complete it with almost all of them!

So that kind of stuff was really fun.

I also liked the new Adventure mode. I felt that it provided me, as a single player, some much-needed variety of gameplay and that it employed the game's mechanics and in fun and interesting ways. (At the same time, I also felt that they could have done so much more with it.)

But I was tremendously disappointed that Hal decided to drop the Board the Platforms mini-game and replace it with the Home-Rune Contest, which simply wasn't as fun. I would have happily traded one for the other. Also, even though I liked the Target Test stages, I felt that they were inferior to Super Smash Bros.'s. They weren't as well-designed; they were a bit scattershot, and they didn't test the characters' abilities to the extent that the original game did.

So overall, I considered the single-player experience to be a step down. I didn't see the Adventure mode as anything more than a fun diversion, and I didn't find its mini-games to be as interesting or as engaging as the original's.

Melee, to its credit, was able to provide me many months of entertainment, but ultimately it proved to lack the longevity of its predecessor. After a while, I simply grew bored with its action, and when I played it, I usually did so in a detached manner. Because, as I knew, I was playing it only for the sake of justifying all of the time and energy that I spent dreaming about and anticipating it.

In order to get a truly satisfying Smash Bros. fix, I had to return to the original, whose action was more in line with what I expected from the series. (When I first returned to it, though, its action felt so slow to me that I was worried that my N64 had broken. But eventually I realized that it was actually moving at its correct speed and that it only felt slow to me because I'd become acclimated to Melee's lightning-fast action and I'd forgotten just how slow the original was in comparison.)

For a while, I devoted an equal amount of time to both games, but eventually I started to return to the original at a much greater frequency. And over the years, I returned to Melee less and less until inevitably I stopped playing it completely.

From then on, I derived entertainment from it strictly by watching other people play it. Mostly, I watched videos in which Smash Bros. pros like Ken, Isai and Mew2King fought each other in tournament matches. And I got a lot of enjoyment out of doing so. Watching them masterfully string together combos and engage each other in intense fast-paced combat was great fun.

I continued to follow the tournament scene despite the fact that I found all of the talk about tiers, tournaments and "advanced techniques" to be a huge turnoff. To me, the dialogue that formed around those topics only served to suck the joy out of the Smash Bros. forums that I was frequently visiting and turn each of them into something repellent.

But, really, that's a whole other story.

And that was my relationship with Super Smash Bros. Melee. It was a game that captured me with its immense sense of scope but ultimately lacked the substance necessary to keep me glued. It was amazing in every way except for the one that mattered most to me.

Quite simply, it wasn't the Super Smash Bros. sequel that I wanted it to be. And no matter how hard I tried, I simply couldn't reconcile its differences with the expectations that I had for it.

I desperately wanted to love the game, but it just wouldn't let. Instead it seemed to determined to push me away.

Reflecting upon the matter now, I don't think that it's a coincidence that my opinion of Melee parallels how I was feeling about consoles at the time. I felt that they were moving away from me with their increasing focus on complexity and super-slick graphics. I longed for the simplicity of past eras. I lamented the loss of the old values. And I regretted how I took for granted a time when homogeneity wasn't the rule and each console was the creature of its own wonderfully divergent technology.

I was hoping that the GameCube would carry the old consoles' flag and keep their spirit alive, but sadly, it had no inclination to do so. Rather, it only sought to conform.

It was the same deal with Melee, which showed little desire to adhere to its predecessor's sense of accessibility. It had its own ambitions, none of which seemed very promising to me. So I slowly drifted away from it.

In the end, that's what Melee represents to me: the beginning of the end for me as a console guy. I see it as one of the games that greatly diminished my interest in the scene and made me wonder if there was a future for me as a video-game enthusiast (because at the time, the portable-gaming scene wasn't blowing me away either).

And I wish that weren't the case. It sucks that it is.

So unfortunately, Hal's latest had broken my heart. But what could I do? I wasn't going to cry about it. I wasn't going to make childish threats or protest by feigning disinterest in the idea of future Smash Bros. entries. Because honestly, I had no reason to do so. I was, after all, still a huge fan of the Smash Bros. series, which appealed to me in multiple ways (its games were fun to play, watch and think about). I still had every reason to be devoted to it.

A single entry's falling short of my expectations wasn't going to make me fall out of love with Smash Bros., no. It wasn't going to stop me from believing that bigger and better things were in store for this incredibly alluring series.

Nothing, I knew, was going to discourage me from continuing to dream about all of the amazing possibilities.