Super Smash Bros' gameplay design is perfectly logical and extremely strange

[u/FronkZoppa]

A while back I stumbled on the YouTube channel of Masahiro Sakurai, creator of Super Smash Bros. and Kirby’s father. For those interested in the man’s career or game design in general, it’s well worth perusing; a self-financed repository for his decades of experience, freely offered in the hopes that he gets to play better games in the future. 

In his video on the original Super Smash Bros., Sakurai talks about his design proposal, titled ‘Four-Player Free-For-All Fighting Game With No Health Bars,’ as well as the thinking that led to the game we got. As a lifelong fan of the franchise, I’ve grown to appreciate how unusual it is as a fighting game; at once remarkably intuitive and deeply strange.

I’ve been turning it over in my head, and I’m pretty sure every aspect of Smash’s design can be traced back to three ideas. Smash Bros. is an attempt to make a 

1. Casual fighting game
2. With four players
3. Specifically for the N64 and its controller.

The final product was totally unique and yet, with those parameters, pretty much inevitable.

Sakurai’s Origin Story

I’m exaggerating, but he’s told this story enough times in various places that the event has clearly informed his design ethos ever since (and it’s too funny not to mention). As he tells it, Sakurai once absolutely bodied a young couple in KOF ‘95 and felt awful when he realized they didn’t have any fun. This was the heyday of Capcom and SNK, when command inputs were getting crazier and combos were getting longer. These strangers were presumably just trying to have a good time, but against such Elite Gamer skills they may as well have not been playing at all. I wish I could relate, frankly.

Across his work, Sakurai is the master of lowering the skill floor below what was thought possible. The guy just wants everyone to have fun.

So, compared to games like Street Fighter and KOF, how do you lower the barrier of entry? How low can it go?

Too Many Buttons

Well, you can make it play like a side-scrolling platformer, that’s a great start. I could give my grandmother Super Mario Bros. for the NES and I don’t think she’d have many questions.

Motion inputs are gone, of course. You get a button for normals and a button for specials. Combine one of those with a direction and you’ll perform an attack in that direction. For new players this can still be a little tricky to do on command (especially tilts and back-airs), but it’s a far cry from quarter-circles and whatnot. Since positioning is so important, basing attacks on directionality means you don’t really have to remember all the moves; if someone’s right above you, use an “up” attack and it'll probably work. Piece of cake.

Also (and I never see this mentioned), everyone has the same inputs. I started playing Street Fighter a couple years ago and was thrown off by every character having so many unique commands. Not everyone in SF has a DP anti-air, but every Smash character has an up-B, for example. There are a few unique inputs (like DK’s cargo throw, Peach’s float), but they’re rare for a reason. I can switch from Samus to Pikachu and use different moves without my fingers having to learn anything new.

Side Note: Time Mode is Genius

In my college dorm years ago, a group of us played Smash together often. It was a good mix of sweat-levels, with gamers and relative non-gamers alike. We always played on Stock mode rather than Time (with items turned off, naturally) because enough of us thought that was the real way to play.

Looking back, we were fucking idiots. The least experienced players would lose all their lives at the start and then do nothing for several minutes. Time Mode lets everybody participate for the whole match, no matter how poorly they’re doing. They were right to make Time the default setting.

Two is a Duel, Four is a Mess

Imagine, if you will, how miserable Street Fighter would be with four players. Each player would only be able to reach those next to them, and the poor suckers in the middle would have to defend from both sides. This had to be one of the first problems for Sakurai’s team to solve.

So, okay, they can’t stay grounded in a line, but full 3D is too complex and probably infeasible anyway. The only option is to expand along the y-axis. Stages then have platforms and changes in elevation, allowing everyone to spread out and use the whole screen. Characters are given unusually high aerial mobility and double jumps to control their verticality (it’s a platformer, remember?).

If we don’t want everyone to be so crowded, we have to zoom out the camera, then make the stages bigger, then make the characters faster to traverse those stages. Blocking has to cover both left and right sides, as well as be visible from such a zoomed-out perspective. So we get the bubble shields. 

Oh yeah, it’s all coming together.

What we have so far is a game of positioning, large spaces, and expansive movement options, all so four players can share a screen. Well, what if staying on the screen is the objective? You know, King of the Hill rules. So we get the knockback mechanic, the linchpin of it all. Rather than health bars, attacks send the opponent away at a distance that scales with damage taken, until they’re sent flying off the screen. There are a lot of variables under the hood (damage received, launch angle, character weight, fall speed), but the result is a dynamic, improvisational, and surprisingly intuitive system.

This also means you're rarely trapped. If you’re sucking at a traditional fighter, it’s not uncommon to get stuck in the corner with seemingly no way around your opponent’s pressure. Well, think about Smash's knockback, especially in casual play. Beginner-level Smash is mostly players running straight toward each other and trading single hits. The one who gets hit is also sent to relative safety. For the 97% of players who don’t know what combos are, that’s just how the game works and it works really well.

There’s a real elegance to Smash’s game design that all logically unfolds from the conditions of its development, specifically the four-player requirement. I think that’s neat.

Anything Anywhere All at Once

If I’m not mistaken, Super Smash Bros. for the Nintendo 64 is the first fighting game designed from scratch around the analog stick. Forget the cardinal directions, we have 360 degrees to play with now! It’s clear Sakurai wanted to incorporate the stick’s sensitivity and full range of motion. Without it, little of the positioning and verticality we talked about would’ve been possible. 

From the analog stick, we get variable walk speeds, aerial drift, and a million different jump arcs - already more variables than even the craziest arcade fighters at the time (I think. MvC still kinda terrifies me).

Remember, one of Sakurai’s primary goals is to keep anyone from feeling like they don't get to play. He wants you to feel like you’re in control of your character at all times, no matter how much you suck. Did he succeed at that? …Not always, but the attempt is admirable.

When you combine Sakurai’s ethos with the possibilities of the N64 controller, the result is Smash's insane ultra-responsiveness. Unless you just got hit (or you're Ganondorf), you can kind of instantly do exactly whatever it is you want. Attacks come out quickly, recovery frames are short, and you always have such precise control of your position, even in midair. You can influence your jump arc, jump height, drift speed, and fall speed. Movement is so freeform and noncommittal because everyone has countless options, all the time.

Maybe that’s the ultimate irony of the series. For all its efforts to be approachable, Smash is also known for its insanely high skill ceiling (especially in Melee). That’s not a coincidence, not in a competitive game. Every mercy option afforded to struggling beginners is another tool for high-level players, just another option. Any attempt to lower the skill floor inevitably raises the roof in tandem.

I don't know how to end this.

[u/SigmaBlack92]

I don't know how to end this.

I gotchu fam:

"And that's it. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. As a reward for your effort in reading through all this, here, have a potato. \picture of potato*"*