Super Smash Bros. and the Festering Plague of Esports and the Internet

I came back. I came back with manners. Why, oh why, did I come back?

CONTENT WARNING!

This post contains sensitive material that may not be suitable for all readers. The material in question includes:

- Bad language
- Frightening imagery

No, We Need to Start Here
The Metaphor We Missed
So Happy Together?
Okay, Some Times Were Simple
In Mods We Trust
Autistic Man Yells at Cloud

No, We Need to Start Here

So, uh… a few years ago, my dad was on a forum devoted to British post-punk when, on a board relevant to either The Cure of the Psychedelic Furs, someone innocently preferred a past front man over a later one. What happened next, as he put it, was full-on harassment and demonization, as other users more or less told them to kill themselves and shamed them for being a terrible person. Over their honest opinion. On a fucking ’80s band. That few GenZers even know existed. So, what did my role model of a pa do? He commented “fuck you people” and signed off, never to return again.

He did the smart thing and didn’t come back. Just yesterday, I was far too forgiving. As someone who frequently goes back to old-school Super Smash Bros. for a mix of modding and nostalgia—ironically, after this incident, I feel more motivated to return to my favorites like Smash Remix for 64, TurboDX for Melee, and PMEX Remix for Brawl—I gave Remix’s recent successor, REX, a fair shot alongside some modding of my own. The goal with my eventual Reddit post on it, all said and done, was to express my feelings regarding the characters, stages, and technical aspects without coming off as judgy or ungrateful, which is unheard of in our modern society. What I posted and what I received will be available in the video below, but not without some cathartic Spaceballs or William Peter Blatty (the writer of The Exorcist) clips out of context.

What went wrong? That’s almost like asking “what’s scary?” or “what’s funny?”, but hopefully, I’m not alone in saying this was rather aggressive and personal for an analysis that ends the way it did. It didn’t end with, “I was completely let down by this sewage dump of a mod.” It ended with, “I don’t mean to offend anyone, and all the power to you if you enjoy it.” Plus a suggestion of getting outside and self-care that these incels clearly need to hear. As a RedLetterMedia connection because it’s fucking inevitable on this blog, I recall Jay explaining that 2016 Ghostbusters was bad, but it was the aggressive and accusatory discourse around it that killed any remaining shred of interest in Ghostbusters on his end. In fact, in no way was I saying REX is straight-up bad—I may very well switch between it and Remix for their differing features if it doesn’t take a fucking week to mod the right way (I’d play Remix for its more default Brawl-faithful classic mode structure and REX for its more varied classic mode structure, which pits you against new characters in new stages.) Still, and while I’ll continue to enjoy what Smash Bros. was, this kerfuffle was the nail in the coffin for me as far as the legacy of Smash Bros. goes—the magic of this series feels hollow today, as I’ll be explaining.

If I offend anyone a second time, I’m sorry. Just kidding, I don’t give a flying fuck into a rolling donut. No more Mr. Nice Guy this time.

The Metaphor We Missed

To make one thing clear out of the gate, I won’t try to philosophize a whacky Nintendo fighting game like it’s Plato’s Cave or something. This is just something I respect about it in retrospect, and there’s plenty more that makes, or made, this series special. See, when Smash 64 began, it was both the start of the game and the start of my history with the series—as mentioned in my Sonic post here, I was introduced to the N64 before I fell in love with the GameCube. See, you’d never be aware of this if you got into Smash Bros. with Ultimate, for example, but it all got off the ground not at Peach’s Castle, Hyrule, or Zebes, but in a child’s bedroom. Master Hand is seen pulling action figures of Nintendo characters out from a chest, setting them down on the desk by the window, and bringing the fight to life at the count of three. Of course, the game stays locked in its own reality from this point on… except for the end of every 1-player game, that is. In this case, a figure of the current fighter is dropped back onto the desk, and we follow the child’s perspective as they exit their room with a fade to white and the sound of a door closing. As anyone with a moderate IQ can deduce, the game’s goal was more or less to bring our childhood imaginations to life—in real life and in-universe.

Well… I mean… not like the live-action North American ad featuring “Happy Together” by The Turtles does. Remember when commercials used to have cultural notability?

Man… that right there, that aged like Canadian whiskey. This game also has an advantage in that it (a) gives Pikachu a less annoying voice compared to the rest of the series onward and (b) starts up with the longest drawn-out title drop in history… but it really doesn’t hold a candle to Melee. That title drop needs a ten-hour loop of just “MELEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!” On that note, Melee may feature trophies instead of figures, but it maintains the real world link from Smash 64 by opening with a child’s hand (nope, not Master or Crazy Hand!) launching Mario’s trophy onto the battlefield of their imagination, where he then comes to life. Moreover, the trophy hoard is the only one in the series to take place in a child’s playroom, as the player’s trophy collection is set on a coffee table while various Nintendo consoles and memorabilia are visible on the shelf behind it.

Now, for some added context, I often misconstrue my memories of Smash 64 with those of Melee, as I clearly recall fighting my cousins in Corteria—I recall this being on the N64 even though it was in space and titled Sector Z in that game. I played Melee far more than Smash 64, but I quickly transitioned over to Brawl by the time I was seven or eight, so my Melee memories are a little foggy. What I can recall, though, is being both put off and grossed out by the rockin’ Brinstar theme over the writhing “Brinstar Brain” in the background, as well as limping my way through Adventure Mode, and honestly, I’m pretty sure it was upon unlocking and trying out Brinstar Depths that I became too scared to play Melee any longer (even in hindsight, the theme for that one is incredibly tense and eerie, but then again, Frigate Orpheon in Brawl isn’t much better.) Of course, after the latest update of the Akaneia Build mod—the title refers to some Fire Emblem location that was going to act as a stage in Melee but never made it in—made a famous magazine hoax of Sonic and Tails as playable characters a reality, there will likely be this Melee-shaped cloud over my head for the rest of the foreseeable future.

Now, how about that Brawl, huh? Remember when I said in this post that Saints Row: The Third was where that series first jumped the bed and shit the shark as a means of blasphemously defending the reboot? Well, I still enjoy Brawl so long as it’s modded—Sonic must be Ryan Drummond and Shadow must be David Humphrey, as the former becomes a raving crackhead in his super form—but I can’t play the Subspace Emissary other than for exploration because (a) it’s rarely ever clear what’s happening other than these “shadow bugs” consume everything for the Ancient Minister; (b) there’s a futile attempt to mold something serious and edgy out of characters like Mr. Game & Watch and Petey Piranha; and (c) the imagination premise from its predecessors is completely abandoned. Other than, you know, no peek into reality, Master and Crazy Hand are literal puppets to Tabuu who, while cool visually, has no clear motivation other than consuming and rearranging everything that exists. The metaphor, if it’s even there, is incredibly scattered.

Smash 4 doesn’t have an Adventure Mode, meaning it’s streamlined enough that I don’t feel the need to complain about the lost metaphor. From what I’ve seen and heard of Ultimate, though—I used to play it with a friend and did research prior to this—it gives World of Light a “theme” as diluted and overused as the terms “power” and “core”, and that’s the divide between light and darkness. Yes, at its core, the Yin Yang refers to the metaphysical balance of good and evil, chaos and order, but do you really think that’s what they were thinking with World of Light? Do you really? No, it’s at the time I saw a goddamn army of Master Hands being summoned at the end that I realized the whole metaphor has pretty much collapsed in on itself. The only interpretation I can pull is that it represents the vast competitive play and esports community having taken over, which in and of itself is a frightening thought.

That’s a segue if I’ve ever seen one.

So Happy Together?

I mean… this is a fighting game. Why shouldn’t a fighting game be competitive? Well, with something like Mortal Kombat, I get it—all those exploding heads and hearts being ripped out would make for some questionable family memories—but Smash Bros. is Nintendo at heart, and Nintendo has consistently been a family entertainment group (I do, however, consider Metroid Prime their high point on an artistic level, and it sure as hell ain’t a family game.) Growing up, my family was never big on Smash Bros., but I did play it frequently with friends of mine from the special ed program at my elementary school, and I look back on these fun times as pure and wholesome. No anger. No blaming. No dumb lingo. The competitive nature of it brought us together, not split us up, as we never really considered it a sport so much as just an escape from whatever homework we had that week. Granted, I do fondly remember driving my cousin Ali half-insane by turning into Wario-Man on endless repeat during a vacation in Maine, but that never resulted in any lasting bitterness. I was saving that spite for my pal Mattie McCollough’s custom Melee-themed GameCube skin.

Wanna know the best part, though? Eighty fucking percent of the stages weren’t banned. I got into this on a previously linked post of mine, but the gist was that this shaves off the entire experience minus a twenty-percent sliver—just pick the stage and challenge each other to overcome its layout, and if you want one that’s flat and straightforward, others like Battlefield and Final Destination should suffice. Imagine trying to play King of the Mountain in Brinstar Depths by keeping up with the rotation! Of course, I’ve long associated esports with battle royale shooters like Fortnite and PUBG, but plenty of odder examples like Rocket League and Among Us abound. For me, it’s the feelings Smash Bros. restores that keep me coming back, and therefore, turning it into a sport with complicated rules and restrictions whittles it down to little more than a phallic measuring contest (lord knows that’s exacerbated by the overly clean, sterile aesthetic of the latest entries, especially compared to Melee‘s wonderfully mellow sci-fi theming.) If that wasn’t bad enough, when a more neutral response to my Reddit post explained that the developer of what we call “Doki-Doki Banana Chips” here was a top competitive player in the Smash Bros., scene? Yeah, that… that kinda did it for me.

Okay, Some Times Were Simple

That modding shebang is fun and all, but let’s think about aesthetics and pacing for a bit. It might be hard to communicate, but in my past spiels about Sonic, I tried explaining how important pacing is in everything, which was one of the many things the Sonic Adventure games got right—they’re fast-paced, but you can always tell what is happening, and that helps a lot during boss battles where you need to follow your opponents’ actions in order to strike back. Of course, when it comes to modern games like Shadow Generations, my complaint has been that the intensity of the action has been cranked up to the point of motion sickness because older, quainter, slower, and simpler games would bore current audiences, I guess. In the end, though, all it does is make those games look pathetic by comparison when all they did was respect the audience’s patience. And acid refluxes. On that note, it’s appropriate that I segue from Brawl to Smash 4 and Ultimate, as those titles were essentially a two-game escalation from high-octane to the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. As for Nintendo games in the past, a solid comparison to this is the direction of the Metroid series, which I’ve been fairly interested in as of late. While Metroid, Super Metroid, Zero Mission, and others are quaint and well-paced in and of themselves, the halfway point between this and the crazier modern era was Metroid Prime, in which the first-person perspective, grounded weight system, and reliance on atmosphere over thrills makes it the closest Nintendo has come to an Alien video game adaptation—and no, I was not thinking of the fact that both Samus and Ripley strip down from their spacesuits at the end when I started writing this.

This isn’t to say I hate Metroid Dread, for example, as I’ve only watched the full game, not played. In fact, the character and environmental design are all up-to-par with those of Prime, although I have started to realize how overused bird-related characters and symbols are due to how prolific they are in folklore. It carries over the side-scrolling gameplay from the classic games, and I’ll admit that most of the action isn’t nauseating—the Zero Laser launched on the Raven Beak… Kraid… abomination… hybrid… thing at the end is absurd, but there’s at least some escalation leading up to it. I’m not the only one to dump on Other M, but I’m probably more alone in the camp of disparaging the execution of the action. Given the Ellen Ripley comparison, in which case she’s the cold and assertive boss woman, I find the attempt to make Samus more mousy and submissive off-putting, which is worsened by (a) her inner monologues straight out of Max Payne 1 and 2, and (b) Federation soldiers like Anthony who feel less like the cast of Aliens and more like that of Event Horizon, which, minus Sam Neil, Lawerence Fishburne, and any of the female crew members, isn’t a compliment (on an unrelated note, Anthony has one of the most awkwardly executed deaths I’ve ever witnessed.) The reason I mention this game is that, other than the adequate pacing of the action most of the time, more than three quarters of the cutscenes progress in bullet time, often at nonsensical intervals. Yes, it slows down the timescale, but it also ups the intensity to an obnoxious level.

Then, there’s aesthetics, and they are linked to the pacing. In Metroid Prime, the visual effects are highly realistic, even when crossing over into Star Wars territory. This contributes to the pacing, which is regulated to be on the same level of intensity, but in Metroid Dread, moments like the final Zero Laser blast spiral out of control into chaos thanks to the style of the effects—said laser is, predictably on this blog, very anime-esque in a game and series that are relatively less stylized. Think of it as Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but only the freaky Judge Doom stuff, and with an epileptic camera shake throughout. At last, the Smash Bros. connection is that Ultimate constantly makes use of the pacing and cartoony visual effects that draw me away from crap like Shadow Generations, including Samus’s Zero Laser as it acts as her final smash. Yes, it was her final smash in Brawl, but the effect was realistic enough to suit the less saturated and more detailed art design (even the camera shake was toned down!) Just so I don’t create a double standard, though, I have the same problem with final smashes in Brawl like Link’s and Ike’s, as they’re also guilty of jumping the shark. Something else of note on this subject is that final smashes were planned for Smash 64 but never made the cut—many voice clips for them exist in the files but are left unused—but the fact that they were scrapped factors into the cute simplicity of the final product, and Brawl was the first entry to stray away from that. This is exactly why I’m a-okay with using a Gecko code I found to keep smash balls from loading in singleplayer modes whenever I play PMEX Remix.

In Mods We Trust

What do you do when you’ve seen everything there is to see in a game? You know, other than switching over to something more important? Well, as I said, I sort of disowned Melee once Brawl entered my life, which I can only assume was because Sonic was made playable in the latter title. Of course, as mentioned before, I can now play as both Sonic and Tails plus many other added characters in the former, but that’s not to say Melee has the best or most active modding scene out there (the Akaneia Build adds several Sonic trophies, though, and like the Shadow the Hedgehog mod for the same game, they really encapsulate the Sonic I knew and loved.) In fact, compared to the immense output of Brawl mods since 2008, it’s barely even existent. Granted, there’s always at least one or two massive expansion mods for all three of… let’s call them the original trilogy games, partly because they’re the ones I enjoy and partly because they followed a naming trend that was abandoned by Smash 4. For Smash 64, it’s obviously Smash Remix, which I’m pretty sure is the best known Smash Bros. mod available. Sure, much like that hellspawn Elizabeth from PMEX Remix and REX—she’s the one who shares the name of a Hungarian serial killer and, in REX, has a “Doki-Doki Banana Chips” alt as mentioned in my Reddit post—a prominent newcomer in this mod is Marina from some obscure platformer called Mischief Makers, yet she’s given a ton of attention despite having absolutely zero prior presence in Smash Bros. Regardless, and although I might still get decimated for having the gall to say fucking anything negative, the mod is a must for Smash 64, as not only does it introduce newcomers like Sonic, Conker, Bowser, and Dark Samus and a vast amount of stages and features—in a comforting twist of fate, Sonic happens to reuse Ryan Drummond’s voice—but one such newcomer, its associated stage, and even its own personalized HUD faithfully recreate Dragon King, the lost unlicensed prototype of this series.

Now, onto Melee, and if you expect me to say even a word about Animelee, you need a mental health professional. Again, Shadow was added to the game alongside Sonic and Tails, albeit as a separate mod that I’m pretty sure isn’t compatible with the latest Akaneia Build release. He was released in the, quote on quote, “Fearless Year of Shadow”, even though no one is ever truly fearless and anyone can only be expected to show courage, but it’s refreshing to see him styled in true 2001 fashion, voiced by David Humphrey, and sweet Mama Mary Magdalen, actually smile with warmth for a change! This was the guy who once shed a literal tear over his dead friend, in case that was too long ago to remember. In fact, all three Sonic characters added share their Dreamcast voices and personalities, with Tails’s trophy bio even pointing out that being different is okay. That right there hits hard, but I digress. Lucas and Wolf are also included in the Akaneia Build, and while they’re essentially just clones, others like Charizard and King Dedede are also present, even if I’m still secretly clamoring for Meta Knight. He’s who you’d call one of my mains, I guess. I don’t know, maybe. Even Daisy and Wario have entered the melee via TurboDX, although it’s likely not yet compatible with the new Akaneia Build.

Oh, I didn’t even mention the GameCube Realm stage, did I? Thank you, Akaneia, whatever you are. Add the debug stage with the Palo Alto coffeeshop background, and you’ll have officially transcended moddinghood.

Know what? On the subject of Brawl, I’m not bending at the will of my Reddit compadres. My goal is to be fair, so I will say that REX is the culmination of and, in a way, celebration of Brawl‘s bottomless modding rabbit hole… which PMEX Remix pretty much already was in its own right. So, even when one of my negatives was the amount of ancient stages included, they aren’t in any way bad—they’ve just come to show their age, especially compared to the unsurpassable quality of the other characters and stages. In any case, both mods are expansions of Project M, which I’ve never played on its own because it was more devoted to making the gameplay feel like Melee than it was to expanding the roster. This included replacing the godlike Brawl narrator with… guy. Maybe, they intended him to channel the Melee narrator, but… he really doesn’t. He doesn’t even share the reverb. As I’ve showcased here, I managed to restore the original Brawl narrator in Remix, but not in REX, so I instead opted to simply port REX stages over to Remix. This will likely go on to include others like the Melee debug stage as it’s difficult to load with TurboDX and the Akaneia Build. There was even a very impressive expansion called Smash Bros. 2 that converted Brawl into a version of Melee with third-party characters, but other than Sonic in the Akaneia Build matching his Sonic Adventure CGI model, the two major Melee mods have rendered this one more or less unnecessary.

Autistic Man Yells at Cloud

Now, venting about one shitty but short-term Reddit experience was only an incentive for me to write this post, considering I’ve had it planned for months, but my fine fellow smashers dwelled on specific parts of my original post so they could make the whole thing sound pettier than it was, so the same might as well happen here. Besides, the logical side of my brain says this is just the way of the internet, as I communicated at the very inception of this blog with some of the responses to the mods I’ve uploaded, but on the emotional side, these users’ wordage was so disgusted and visceral that I literally started to feel insecure—that is to say, “Maybe, I was being unfair after all.” It wasn’t straight-up trolling as much as it was people who seemed genuinely offended that I didn’t appreciate the hard work that went into the mod, although I am currently telling myself the same thing my family, my therapist, and anyone at my day program would tell me, in that I shouldn’t blame myself. I won’t lie that I spend the bulk of my time working on things in my room downstairs—we’re living in a loneliness epidemic, for God’s sake—but I have no desire to pretend to be someone I’m not online, as I’ve fully accepted the fact that I’m an over-passionate man-boy who naturally wouldn’t be most women’s first choice, and I get why that is. If I had a conversation about stuff like this, and I have in the past, I sure as hell wouldn’t harass others over their opinions (it’s guns out if they turn out to like HuniePop, though.) I even responded to the one neutral comment on my original post by thanking them for the added context, even if I did feel weird about an anime horror dating sim crossing paths with one of my favorite childhood games.

By the way, can I just say my only first-hand experience with Doki-Doki Banana Chips was a Gmod map in which I only planned on blowing the cast to bloody stains on the floor? What I found was a Lovecraftian occurrence where the cast turned out to have been behind the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster, to which I responded with a sigh and an eye-roll, and when a dark hallway ended with an underage girl screaming in my face, I just switched maps to a tropical resort and blew up the same characters to the tune of Nick Lowe. The end! If any of that’s in the actual game, then God help those who love it.

No. I’m serious. The end. Get out of here. Get the fuck out of my sight. I’ve got a self-care routine to follow. Tune back in when I’ve finished pretending a made-up game called Smash Bros. Ragnarok came out instead of Ultimate, which definitely isn’t out of bitterness for only introducing Mii Fighters after Brawl.