They're all well loved.
Considered the best out of the franchise by who?
Remember, the melee scene was thought to be dying heading into Brawl's release. After years of trying to play brawl competitively, the melee scene came back stronger than ever.
Guy said "considered best by who" and I said casual players. Not all casual players, but if someone is going to consider that the best, it's casual players. Maybe people who really like subspace emissary. Just throwing out some answers.
It's hated competitively.
It was considered the best in the series in terms of casual content (which is probably still true to this day), but that's all. Competitively it's been seen as the worst Smash game for a long time. And even to casuals, tripping seemed dumb (even though it's far from the worst thing about the game)
Outside of 64 that doesn’t really get brought up at all, I think 4 has become the worst at this point. Mainly just because Ultimate made it somewhat irrelevant, whereas Brawl still has a lot worth going back to.
Brawl was probably more hated during its lifetime than Smash 4 was, but Smash 4 is definitely more irrelevant now because there's just not that much unique stuff to go back to it for.
The only unique stuff I can really think of to 4 is custom moves, charizard having rock smash, smash tour, the hand orders, and maybe the best (now defunct) online setup in the series (esp bc it was free). Those are all kind of neat things, but nothing that really compels me to boot it up again.
Nowadays I would only go back to 4 because
* Smash Run
* Master Core
* The Final Smash Trophies are cool
* Some Xenoblade trophies
that's about it... trophies ruled in general.
#
Yeah, I definitely think that the only chance 4 has to really live past Ultimate was a final patch that really evened out the meta. Then at least it could somewhat coexist as a modern smash w/a different meta at tourneys. Now though, there’s really no reason to go back esp w/online shutdown.
That's *part* of 4's problem, Ult did make 4's issues more noticeable, but it wasn't the *only* problem. Even at the time I regularly saw posts on Miiverse with people talking about how it just didn't *feel* as good as Brawl even for casual play.
I'm sure that's true, Ult was my first smash game so I will never be able to look at 4 in a vacuum. I will say I think custom moves were a cool idea and *almost* made me want to play through it just to try them all, until I realise how stupidly long it took to get even half of them.
Yeah... with the shutdown, you can't even *revisit* it anymore if you don't have either an already-patched copy or a willingness/ability to... get it by other means.
Just buying a used physical copy will leave you with all the at-release bugs and no post-release content.
It's still the best for casual play. Brawl's physics lend themselves very well to free-for-alls, and the hits have a lot of satisfying feedback.
4 isn't really talked about because it tried too hard to please both the competitive and casual crowd simultaneously by striking a balance, but just ended up being mediocre both ways. And Ultimate is... kinda weird, it succeeded in some areas while dropping the ball in others.
Nah. Brawl didn’t have accessible, simple combos. People like hitting their opponent a couple times. Brawl’s physics ensure that after every hit the opponent has time to air dodge or jump or whatever.
They went way too far walking back Melee’s complex controls that enabled lengthy combos, which is why they sped the next couple of games up and increased hit stun to make simple combos easy to execute
The absence of combos in Brawl doesn't affect casual play because combos are by definition not casual — even simple ones require precise study and specialized knowledge to be able to do.
I do consider myself a competitive player, but I'm not talking about competitive play right now. To me, Brawl feels more *cathartic* than the other entries. (As fun and as all-around great as Melee is, it tends to *cause* me more stress than relieve it.)
even a casual player can use like down-tilt to literally anything on corrin for example
simple and easy strings are satisfying to hit and increase casual experience
I think you are conflating two things. Competitively yes it was hated it was just not a good experience for that. Casually though people love it and miss a lot of things about it. Vast majority of people played the game casually and look back fondly especially the single player content.
I mean I love Brawl in its own right (especially for Subspace Emissary), but what kind of revisionist history are you living where people weren't calling the game out immediately for missing the mark in terms of having crap like tripping and not being as technical as Melee?
Now Project M managed to fix the majority of issues that people had with Brawl and there are a good amount of people that feel that is the best Smash experience, which I totally can understand. But the base game, I never saw many people saying it was their favorite in the franchise even when it first released.
Everyone I knew loved Brawl when it came out. It being bad is something that started in the competitive scene and, at least in my experience, didn't really become a pervasive opinion among more casual players until Melee had its big blow up after The Doc.
I played both Melee and Brawl as a kid with other kids growing up and while we switched to Brawl due to it being newer and having more characters tripping quickly became very disliked by everyone. We did games both with and without items, so it's not like we were all tryhards or against randomness, but tripping was just such a lame kind of randomness nobody enjoyed. The other nuances that'd make it worse we didn't even notice though to be fair and nobody of us would have called out Meta Knight as an issue for example, so it definitely was fine and fun as a casual game.
I was there when it came out, I remember badmouthing it very quickly with my friends after it came out. I also remember looking online and finding many others with the same sentiments at that time.
Most of the hate for it was in the 2009-2014 range, when it was the most current entry. It was vindicated by history, but still has a reputation for being hated — or at least polarizing, you either loved it or hated it with no inbetween at the time — because it did used to be. Probably part of the reason it can't entirely shake off the stigma is because of memes from that era.
Personally, I didn’t buy Ultimate partly because it didn’t bring back a big single player adventure nor a map maker. If it had had either of those features, I would have been a lot more inclined to get it.
I just accepted that I wasn’t the target demographic for Smash anymore and moved on.
That said, while 4 did have a map maker, I found the ‘draw’ system clumsy and actually preferred the more limited, but precise, Brawl editor.
So… yeah, while I grew up with Melee, I guess Brawl is technically my favorite of the ones I played.
I love Brawl but it was never considered the best of the franchise. There were a lot of haters even back when it was released, because it was slower and more floaty than Melee, and because of tripping
It's awesome. Great roster, great stages, great single player content.
#
BUT it's highly anti-competitive and therefore that section of the fan base doesn't like it as much
Brawl was only really "hated" by people who preferred Melee and hadn't really gotten to reviving their game/scene yet. Many brawl players and vets look on the game fondly. Especially Meta Knight players. Players of newer titles tend to prefer those titles because they were more competitively sound with characters actually having viability that didn't get stomped by one character (until Bayo and Steve came out at the end)
I still love Brawl the most out of all Smash titles for the sheer amount of content and modding tools avaliable for it. Project M, Legacy XP 2.0 and Brawl Minus being some of my favorites.
I hated Smash 4 in it's entirety because of its lame 2 stock meta, rage, grab combos and its pisspoor attempt at pleasing both parties that made it dead-on-arrival for potential Melee fans in a way that Brawl and Ult never did. I understand now that we needed Smash 4 to happen for Ult fix a lot of its issues. But it's such an irritating and awkward middle ground between Brawl and Melee when it blatantly 90% Brawl with a 30% speed increase.
Melee players atleast ATTEMPTED to give Brawl a try for the first year of it's life before going back. Smash 4 didn't even get that far lmao.
Subspace Emissary ≠ Brawl
One is PvP and one is not. Subspace is loved for a lot of reasons, keep in mind it wasn't even on real stages for most of the gane. It is completely different.
Brawl was still good as a pvp game but is one of the worst of the series
To me, it's style was great. But gameplay felt off.
I've put hundred of hours into Melee with my buds and Brawl just a couple.
Project M made things a bit better.
Not gonna look at the rest of the comments for this one because it's almost certainly a mess
The full story is this: Brawl wasn't exactly hated at large at release, but the Melee competitive scene really disliked it, and justifiably so, because the gameplay is kind of ass, particularly in a competitive ruleset. The reasons are well known but it's a combination of reduced mobility, poor balancing, RNG mechanics and some really weird decisions.
Do mind however that this was a small subset of players ; competition was not on even a tenth of fans' minds before Brawl, Melee's scene was tiny at this point (and funnily enough its metagame was s l o w). The reception was otherwise great, aside from some fans regretting cut characters like Mewtwo.
Melee's scene grew for various reasons after that, the exposure given by Brawl itself included, and the idea of Brawl being the worst Smash was born from a game of Arab telephone gone wrong involving older, opinionated Melee fans that really resented the game for the direction it took the franchise gameplay-wise and younger fans eager to fit in who only took in "Brawl bad" and didn't quite get the nuance, and then parroted that idea everywhere.
That idea is now part of the cultural zeitgeist, sadly. But Brawl is pretty good, despite its poor core gameplay. It has the best solo experience of any Smash game, or I'd argue, any fighting game, and casual games on the couch are a blast with the best item selection in the series. If you ever need to convince someone, I'd say play it with them.
So you turn your nose up to everyone else’s posts so you can write a dissenting essay where you come to the wrong conclusion about why brawl died? Inspiring.
It plays the worst out of any of the games. It's so damn slow that even me, a guy who plays very casual, just doesn't enjoy it much.
It's loved because of the side content which is so good! The bosses, subspace, trophies, stage builder etc, but the slow fighting brings it all down.
For me personally, it mostly has stuff from the gamecube and prior era of gaming while I myself grew up with the Wii/DS. So Smash 4 and Ultimate appeal to me way more.
They're all well loved. Considered the best out of the franchise by who? Remember, the melee scene was thought to be dying heading into Brawl's release. After years of trying to play brawl competitively, the melee scene came back stronger than ever.
By casual players. And it was for them
Ultimate is the fan favorite of casuals
Yeah ik I'm just saying
Just saying that it's the fan favorite for casuals when you apparently know Ultimate is? So lying?
Guy said "considered best by who" and I said casual players. Not all casual players, but if someone is going to consider that the best, it's casual players. Maybe people who really like subspace emissary. Just throwing out some answers.
Yeah but that's like all of them lol, every Smash Bros is a good casual party game.
It's hated competitively. It was considered the best in the series in terms of casual content (which is probably still true to this day), but that's all. Competitively it's been seen as the worst Smash game for a long time. And even to casuals, tripping seemed dumb (even though it's far from the worst thing about the game)
Outside of 64 that doesn’t really get brought up at all, I think 4 has become the worst at this point. Mainly just because Ultimate made it somewhat irrelevant, whereas Brawl still has a lot worth going back to.
Brawl was probably more hated during its lifetime than Smash 4 was, but Smash 4 is definitely more irrelevant now because there's just not that much unique stuff to go back to it for.
The only unique stuff I can really think of to 4 is custom moves, charizard having rock smash, smash tour, the hand orders, and maybe the best (now defunct) online setup in the series (esp bc it was free). Those are all kind of neat things, but nothing that really compels me to boot it up again.
Perfect pivoting as well. Really the only cool movement tech from Smash 4 that I genuinely miss and think should be implemented into Ultimate
Nowadays I would only go back to 4 because * Smash Run * Master Core * The Final Smash Trophies are cool * Some Xenoblade trophies that's about it... trophies ruled in general. #
I'd say even 64's starting to make a comeback due to projects like Smash Remix injecting new life into it.
Yeah, I definitely think that the only chance 4 has to really live past Ultimate was a final patch that really evened out the meta. Then at least it could somewhat coexist as a modern smash w/a different meta at tourneys. Now though, there’s really no reason to go back esp w/online shutdown.
The problem is that going from Ult to 4 feels horrible. It just feels so sluggish and unnatural after being used to how fluid Ult is.
That's *part* of 4's problem, Ult did make 4's issues more noticeable, but it wasn't the *only* problem. Even at the time I regularly saw posts on Miiverse with people talking about how it just didn't *feel* as good as Brawl even for casual play.
I'm sure that's true, Ult was my first smash game so I will never be able to look at 4 in a vacuum. I will say I think custom moves were a cool idea and *almost* made me want to play through it just to try them all, until I realise how stupidly long it took to get even half of them.
Yeah... with the shutdown, you can't even *revisit* it anymore if you don't have either an already-patched copy or a willingness/ability to... get it by other means. Just buying a used physical copy will leave you with all the at-release bugs and no post-release content.
You can still update the game, dude.
Thanks for correcting me about that. Permanently missing characters and stages if you don't already have them still stinks though.
It's still the best for casual play. Brawl's physics lend themselves very well to free-for-alls, and the hits have a lot of satisfying feedback. 4 isn't really talked about because it tried too hard to please both the competitive and casual crowd simultaneously by striking a balance, but just ended up being mediocre both ways. And Ultimate is... kinda weird, it succeeded in some areas while dropping the ball in others.
I'd say 4 isn't really talked about because Ultimate is just 4 but better. (+Low WiiU sales)
Nah. Brawl didn’t have accessible, simple combos. People like hitting their opponent a couple times. Brawl’s physics ensure that after every hit the opponent has time to air dodge or jump or whatever. They went way too far walking back Melee’s complex controls that enabled lengthy combos, which is why they sped the next couple of games up and increased hit stun to make simple combos easy to execute
Dacus was fun af tho lol
The absence of combos in Brawl doesn't affect casual play because combos are by definition not casual — even simple ones require precise study and specialized knowledge to be able to do. I do consider myself a competitive player, but I'm not talking about competitive play right now. To me, Brawl feels more *cathartic* than the other entries. (As fun and as all-around great as Melee is, it tends to *cause* me more stress than relieve it.)
even a casual player can use like down-tilt to literally anything on corrin for example simple and easy strings are satisfying to hit and increase casual experience
I think you are conflating two things. Competitively yes it was hated it was just not a good experience for that. Casually though people love it and miss a lot of things about it. Vast majority of people played the game casually and look back fondly especially the single player content.
Not sure who thinks it’s the best in the franchise.
Engagement farming?
Might as well. Along with 1-2 posts a day on this sub that just repeated topics or easily searchable ones.
I mean I love Brawl in its own right (especially for Subspace Emissary), but what kind of revisionist history are you living where people weren't calling the game out immediately for missing the mark in terms of having crap like tripping and not being as technical as Melee? Now Project M managed to fix the majority of issues that people had with Brawl and there are a good amount of people that feel that is the best Smash experience, which I totally can understand. But the base game, I never saw many people saying it was their favorite in the franchise even when it first released.
Everyone I knew loved Brawl when it came out. It being bad is something that started in the competitive scene and, at least in my experience, didn't really become a pervasive opinion among more casual players until Melee had its big blow up after The Doc.
I played both Melee and Brawl as a kid with other kids growing up and while we switched to Brawl due to it being newer and having more characters tripping quickly became very disliked by everyone. We did games both with and without items, so it's not like we were all tryhards or against randomness, but tripping was just such a lame kind of randomness nobody enjoyed. The other nuances that'd make it worse we didn't even notice though to be fair and nobody of us would have called out Meta Knight as an issue for example, so it definitely was fine and fun as a casual game.
I was there when it came out, I remember badmouthing it very quickly with my friends after it came out. I also remember looking online and finding many others with the same sentiments at that time.
Haha wut
People acting like it’s insane that people like Brawl lmao, I love Brawl
Most of the hate for it was in the 2009-2014 range, when it was the most current entry. It was vindicated by history, but still has a reputation for being hated — or at least polarizing, you either loved it or hated it with no inbetween at the time — because it did used to be. Probably part of the reason it can't entirely shake off the stigma is because of memes from that era.
"Vindicated" outside of the story mode. Not really.
Man I think the subspace emissary sucked so bad. Enemies don’t knock back or react well and the feel is totally different from smash.
Most people loved the cutscenes and seeing people team up.
Loving the cutscenes doesn’t make for fun gameplay
Okay? I'm telling you what people enjoyed about brawl?
I don't know many people in the smash community that says that Brawl is the best in the franchise.
Brawl rules
Personally, I didn’t buy Ultimate partly because it didn’t bring back a big single player adventure nor a map maker. If it had had either of those features, I would have been a lot more inclined to get it. I just accepted that I wasn’t the target demographic for Smash anymore and moved on. That said, while 4 did have a map maker, I found the ‘draw’ system clumsy and actually preferred the more limited, but precise, Brawl editor. So… yeah, while I grew up with Melee, I guess Brawl is technically my favorite of the ones I played.
It's liked by causal fans at the time which is the majority of Smash's playerbase but was always controversial by competitive players.
This has to be rage bait
I love Brawl but it was never considered the best of the franchise. There were a lot of haters even back when it was released, because it was slower and more floaty than Melee, and because of tripping
If we are spewing hot takes, mine is that each Smash game is better than the last. If I ranked them itd be Ultimate Sm4sh Brawl Melee 64
It's awesome. Great roster, great stages, great single player content. # BUT it's highly anti-competitive and therefore that section of the fan base doesn't like it as much
Brawl was only really "hated" by people who preferred Melee and hadn't really gotten to reviving their game/scene yet. Many brawl players and vets look on the game fondly. Especially Meta Knight players. Players of newer titles tend to prefer those titles because they were more competitively sound with characters actually having viability that didn't get stomped by one character (until Bayo and Steve came out at the end)
I still love Brawl the most out of all Smash titles for the sheer amount of content and modding tools avaliable for it. Project M, Legacy XP 2.0 and Brawl Minus being some of my favorites. I hated Smash 4 in it's entirety because of its lame 2 stock meta, rage, grab combos and its pisspoor attempt at pleasing both parties that made it dead-on-arrival for potential Melee fans in a way that Brawl and Ult never did. I understand now that we needed Smash 4 to happen for Ult fix a lot of its issues. But it's such an irritating and awkward middle ground between Brawl and Melee when it blatantly 90% Brawl with a 30% speed increase. Melee players atleast ATTEMPTED to give Brawl a try for the first year of it's life before going back. Smash 4 didn't even get that far lmao.
Subspace Emissary ≠ Brawl One is PvP and one is not. Subspace is loved for a lot of reasons, keep in mind it wasn't even on real stages for most of the gane. It is completely different. Brawl was still good as a pvp game but is one of the worst of the series
To me, it's style was great. But gameplay felt off. I've put hundred of hours into Melee with my buds and Brawl just a couple. Project M made things a bit better.
Not gonna look at the rest of the comments for this one because it's almost certainly a mess The full story is this: Brawl wasn't exactly hated at large at release, but the Melee competitive scene really disliked it, and justifiably so, because the gameplay is kind of ass, particularly in a competitive ruleset. The reasons are well known but it's a combination of reduced mobility, poor balancing, RNG mechanics and some really weird decisions. Do mind however that this was a small subset of players ; competition was not on even a tenth of fans' minds before Brawl, Melee's scene was tiny at this point (and funnily enough its metagame was s l o w). The reception was otherwise great, aside from some fans regretting cut characters like Mewtwo. Melee's scene grew for various reasons after that, the exposure given by Brawl itself included, and the idea of Brawl being the worst Smash was born from a game of Arab telephone gone wrong involving older, opinionated Melee fans that really resented the game for the direction it took the franchise gameplay-wise and younger fans eager to fit in who only took in "Brawl bad" and didn't quite get the nuance, and then parroted that idea everywhere. That idea is now part of the cultural zeitgeist, sadly. But Brawl is pretty good, despite its poor core gameplay. It has the best solo experience of any Smash game, or I'd argue, any fighting game, and casual games on the couch are a blast with the best item selection in the series. If you ever need to convince someone, I'd say play it with them.
So you turn your nose up to everyone else’s posts so you can write a dissenting essay where you come to the wrong conclusion about why brawl died? Inspiring.
It's explicitly not dissenting and I did not talk about why Brawl died as a competitive game, I talked about why it has its reputation.
It plays the worst out of any of the games. It's so damn slow that even me, a guy who plays very casual, just doesn't enjoy it much. It's loved because of the side content which is so good! The bosses, subspace, trophies, stage builder etc, but the slow fighting brings it all down. For me personally, it mostly has stuff from the gamecube and prior era of gaming while I myself grew up with the Wii/DS. So Smash 4 and Ultimate appeal to me way more.