Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 239: Super Smash Bros.

Episode Date: August 12, 2019

If you like Smash Bros., you'll be angry about this episode! Jeremy, Chris, Ben, and Benj gather to discuss the classic influences that define Smash Bros. Ultimate, but they get sidetracked and turn what was supposed to be a quick series overview into a full, rambling, off-the-cuff episode that veers wildly beyond what they had prepped and researched for. Whoops!

Hey folks, this is Bob interrupting your Retronauts podcast for a special announcement. Jeremy and I will be at this year's Pax West event for three separate panels, so if you've never seen us live before, now is your chance. So in chronological order, the first panel will be Saturday, August 31st, at 12.30 p.m. in the Sasquatch Theater, and that will be the cromulent world of fictional Simpsons games. That will be a Talking Simpsons panel all about all of the fake video games within the world of the Simpsons. Then on Monday, Retronauts will be closing out the show with two back-to-back panels, both in the Raven Theater. The first one will be at 3 o'clock p.m., and that will be Super Metroid versus Castlevania Symphony of the Night, which is pretty self-explanatory. The next one will be at 4.30 p.m. And it's titled the Dreamcast, We'll be celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Dreamcast on this panel, and it's also the 10th anniversary of the Retronauts Pax panel from 2009. Again, that is Saturday, August 35. first at 12.30 p.m. in the Sasquatch

theater that is the Talking Simpsons panel. And then on Monday, September 2nd, there'll be two back-to-back panels in the Raven Theater for Retronauts, starting at 3 o'clock p.m. And we hope to see you there. This week in Retronauts, Fox only No Items Final Destination. Hi, everyone. I am Jeremy Parrish, and this is an episode of Retronauts.

It's going to be amazing. I think I can't make it amazing because we're talking about a subject I actually do not care about. But I'm here to tell me why I should care deeply and passionately about this topic. We have cool guys in the room. including Ben Elgin, Ben Edwards, Chris Sims. Wow, you guys just went with that, huh? All right, yes, we are talking about Super Smash Brothers. We'll probably do another episode on Super Smash Brothers someday, because like I said, I am very disengaged from this topic.

And it's one of those things that anytime someone finds out about this, they're like, but you love Nintendo games, and you love these characters, and you enjoy fighting games, and all of these things are true. and yet for some reason, Smash Brothers just has never clicked for me. But it has definitely clicked for Chris Sims, and he is going to provide a, I think, a rousing defense,

an apology for Smash Brothers that will change my mind forever. And the theme of this episode is not really so much necessarily all about Smash Brothers, but it is about the classic roots of Super Smash Brothers Ultimate, similar to some of the other classic Roots episodes we've done such as Sonic Mania, Super Mario Odyssey, The Legend of Zelda, Breath of the Wild.

Yes, basically I'll switch games, deal with it. Yeah, that's what we're going to be talking about. So we are going to go through the history of Smash Brothers, but then Chris is going to walk us through all the crazy referential stuff in Smash Brothers Ultimate. I don't know if he realizes this, but that's what he's going to do. It's going to be exciting and fun. So news to me, but I'm excited about it. I told you about this in advance.

You don't know that part. I said many things in emails. I said you guys are going to be picking up my slack here, and none of you responded. So that is why you should read my emails. What's email? It is like a smoke signal, but with more spam. Anyway, so Super Smash Bros.

Let's talk a little bit about what this series is. It's a fighting game with Nintendo characters. Well, that's it. Okay, thanks everyone. That's it. That's the entire franchise. Nailed it. I mean, it kind of takes the, what is Sega's kind of all-star

fighting game that they had. It's called Sega's All-Star Fighting. No, it's Fighter's Megamix. So it kind of takes the Fighter Megamix concept, which debuted a little bit before Smash Brothers and says, what if we took this and instead of making it about Sega characters, what if we did it about Nintendo characters?

I feel like there were probably some fighting games that did this crossover thing before this. I mean, you definitely had the Capcom fighters. I mean, you had crossovers between different fighting games, but that's that's sort of a much easier concept to run with. Right. None of these characters were in fighting games before.

I have a memory of thinking about the early 90s in the Street Fighter 2. Yes. Yes. It was in Gatlinburg. I don't take a drink on that one. I mean, that's your Hayanko alien. It's all good. So in the Street Fighter 2 era and Mortal Kombat era, I remember thinking,

boy, wouldn't it be silly if, you know, how is Nintendo going to respond to this fighting game craze. Wouldn't it be ridiculous and dumb if they made a fighting game with Mario in it and whatever? And I'm pretty sure somebody made a spoof game on the PC or something called Mario Combat that was like a play on Mortal Kombat with Mario and Princess Peach and stuff like that. I want to say there was a bootleg Famicom game that was basically like a Mario fighting game that they like, they hacked a Turtles fighting game or something. I could I would be imagining this. No, I think that's what I remember.

Definitely a homebrew boost on this concept before it actually happened. A pirate. A pirate Famicom Cart or something like that. Just sort of, you know, a joke. And so when Smash Brothers actually, Super Smash Brothers actually came out, I was like, whoa, they actually did it. This is crazy. You know, but they had their own, you know, play on it,

their own angle of the controls and stuff, which made it neat. Yeah, I mean, I think the idea of like, hey, what if Mario did a thing that is inappropriate? Wouldn't that be funny? is basically, like, sort of entry-level idiot humor that every teenager has, like, I've made those jokes before, and then you turn, you know, like 15 and you grow out of it. Or you don't, in which case, it's very sad. But, yeah, like, you know, the idea of Mario and Zelda characters being violent and horrible. Bloody. Yeah, exactly, like Mortal Kombat-ish. Like ripping a spine out.

Exactly. Like, ha, ha, ha. Wouldn't that be funny? It's so inappropriate. So Nintendo was like, well, we could do a fighting game, but it wouldn't be like that. Yeah, it's the galaxy brain version of that idea is what if they were all in a fighting game, but they were doing everything they usually do. Like, everything they did is completely appropriate to the characters. Although then they just kind of totally ran with the, like, inappropriate version for like the ad for the game, with the characters. The ad for, for melee, right?

Where they were in the costumes? Yeah, the characters in the costumes who just like turn around and start punching each other and, like, beating the crap out of each other on the lawn. Like, yeah. As someone who wrote, co-wrote an entire graphic novel about dudes beating up dudes and mascot costumes. That is one of my favorite ads of all time. I mean, that wasn't a Nintendo Japan ad. It was in a way, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, so, you know, you have some of those folks in advertising and marketing. I know. I'm working there. But basically, Nintendo said, you know,

we could do a fighting game with these characters. It could be, you know, the sort of fighting game equivalent of Mario Kart, which was a huge success for us, or Mario's tennis. But they expanded the roster, so it wasn't just Mario. That was kind of like the obvious, like Mario Brawler or something. So we're Mario Brawlers. There you go. But they didn't do that. They said, let's open up the roster and, you know, bring in lots of different franchises. And I think part of that is because the first game was developed by Hal Labs and directed by Masahiro Sakurai. And Hal Labs was a longtime business partner of Nintendo. We all know howl, right? We love them. We know them. They were kind of in a bad,

place in the late 80s, early 90s, and their finances were very shaky. And it wasn't until a guy named Masahiro Sakurai created a little fellow named Kirby that Hal kind of got back onto the straight and narrow and became, you know, like a respected Nintendo second party just working for Nintendo, working with Nintendo. Nintendo co-owns Kirby or maybe owns entirely, I don't know. But basically, like, this was the guy who got tagged to work with, with Smash Brothers. And this was, you know, I think Iwada, Satorio Wada was still president of Hal at this point. So, you know, a very close relationship. But Sakurai got put in charge of the fighting game.

And so naturally he was like, my little guy that I love so much, Kirby, he's going to be in here. And it just blossomed from there. I don't know that that's actually... This is why all the Smash games are secretly Kirby games. They are. I mean, when you, you know, with the, uh, the, the, the hero of lighter, whatever, trailers for Smash Bros. Ultimate, who was, you know, kind of like the one character to survive those little storylines. It was Kirby. There is a bias here in favor of

Kirby, and that's okay, because Kirby's great and Sakurai is great. And, you know, having these characters in Smash Brothers beyond the Mario universe really expanded the scope of what I can be, to the point that now you have, you know, like characters who have never appeared on a Nintendo system before, like Joker from Persona 5, which is a PlayStation 4 exclusive. exclusive game. Cloud Strife, which is a, you know, was on Final Fantasy 7 and Final Fantasy Tactics and all the Final Fantasy 7 compilation games that were also PlayStation exclusive. I mean, technically Final Fantasy 7 is on Switch now, but come on. Like he was, he was in Smash Brothers for about five years before that happened. So they're just like, you know, we'll get all

the cool characters in here. We have to make up the square of something. That wasn't meant to be a monologue. I was trying to open the floor to discussion, but maybe I currently... I think that's kind of... Well, we all want to talk about something different. I was just going to say about Kirby is that he, can't he absorb the other powers of the other characters

and perform their moves and stuff? So he's like a blank slate. It's a great, like, sort of venue for him. But you also see that whole DNA and in a lot of the extra modes, which often end up looking a lot like Kirby games. Yeah, subspace emissary has a lot of, like, a lot of levels that are very reminiscent of Kirby levels in a very fun way, I think. Do you actually fight Whispy Woods at some point in subspace emissary?

I think you do. Okay. I know there's a Whispy Wood stage where it's part of the background. Yeah. And the wind blows. Do you use, like, you know, Falcon Punch to kill Whispy Wood? I don't remember, but I kind of feel like, yes. Someone's yelling at their phone right now.

But, uh, it's too bad. We can't hear you. Tough luck. Send us an angry message on the DMs. I think. I don't know what subspace emissary is. Can you explain it? Yeah, it's the single player mode in brawl.

Okay. That's the only game I haven't played. Which is, it's essentially a sort of hybrid of Smash Brothers where you're like on the fighting stages, but there's also like, not necessarily platformers because it's not like there's any challenge to getting through the stages, but there's, you know, levels to go through. It's a side-scrolling. Yeah, it's a little side-scrolling adventure that kind of connects everything, which I think is a testament to the design of the game that it all translates pretty well to the side-scrolling adventure. sort of design. And that I think is why it also works so well when you have stages that

the moving stages, whether it's, you know, something like, what's the F-0-01 that is in melee? Big Blue? Mut City, I don't know. You know, there's the stages that are very dynamic and they change and they move through things. Rainbow Cruz is one of those. And

I love that that adds a platforming element that so many of those characters feel at home in, you know, especially, obviously Mario. And so being able to adapt that to a different style, I think the first time I saw that was in a Guilty Gear game, actually, where one of the ridiculously named Guilty Gear names, I think it was the one on PSP, had like a weird single player, like, uh, mode, like final fight style of brawler mode. Yeah, there's a lot of other fighting games that have done these single player adventures. Like even, you know, in Tekken, you have these tech and force things. But I think most fighting games, you end up, you end up mostly relegated to be. basically being kind of a slow-moving brawler because that's what you can do with the standard

fighting game moveset. Whereas with Smash, one of the things that I think differentiates is there's, there's just so many movement options built into it that there's a lot more you can do with the characters in something other than just a single-screen fighting stage context. Yeah, although at some point they had to just start making things up because once you start getting the Fire Emblem Sword Bros in there, it's like these are guys who move around a little grid and they stand in place and they, like, jump forward and slash someone in a cutscene. But that's it. That's all they do.

So they just kind of made up, you know, what these characters do in combat whole cloth. Well, I think the archetypical example of that is Captain Falcon, right? Because you never see him. He is a guy who appears on the back of the box of the original zero. Yeah, he's a car in those games. And yet they were able to take the design and translate a lot of stuff to the character. that really makes sense. And a lot of it comes down to, I think, figuring out what the essence of the character is.

Who's the, the, uh, Satoshi Tegeri, the Pokemon designer? Yep. When he did that interview on Game Center CX and he talked about like starting with a verb. So like, uh, uh, the one that was flip, what is that one? Quinti, Quinti. Oh, yeah, yeah, Quinty. Yeah, um, Mendel Palace. Yeah, like that started out as flip and Pokemon kind of

sort of does trade. And so I think they apply the same thing to these characters where Captain Falcon is fast. And so all of his stuff is built around being fast. Even, you know, the Falcon Punch, which takes a really long time, is about moving forward. So I think it's a really incredible feat of design when you see characters like that, like Marth and Roy and all those characters, where you do kind of figure out what the essence is of a character. And then you play Fire Elim and you're very disappointed. Well, you know, I think kind of getting back to what you said earlier, where you know, Galaxy Brain is like, let's put all these characters in the game and just let them keep, you know, their trademark moves and their actual mechanics. And I think that's, that's kind of what

makes this interesting because before this, you know, in crossover fighters, you had, you know, like Marvel or, you know, X-Men versus Street Fighter or whatever, where they kind of just had to say, like, what makes sense, you know, for Wolverine or for Magneto and tried to make those characters work within the Street Fighter, you know, combat set up. And, you know, Street Fighter, Darkstalkers, crossovers, those work okay because those characters use the same control methods. They had to fudge it a little more for, you know, for the S&K and Capcom crossovers because S&K uses like a four-button combo or control system versus six.

So to make these characters kind of work and make sense together, they had to, you know, kind of smooth some things over. Whereas with Smash Brothers, they're just like, whatever the hell. And the way they do that, which I think is pretty clever, is to basically give each character a two-button interface. You have your main action button, and then you have the modifier button or like the special attack button. That's pretty much it.

Brilliant. Yeah. Like every character, it doesn't matter if it's, you know, Pikachu or Simon Belmont uses the same control inputs setup, no matter what kind of game they originally started out in. It is so simple and so accessible. And I think that's one of the brilliant pieces of Smash Bros. Design is that it's kind of inherently a game for kids, especially at the start. I mean, you know, they're toys in the context of the game.

And making it so that like, okay, this button punches, this button does something special. And just applying the directional inputs to that makes that game so easy to learn. It's like the classic easy to learn, difficult to master. It's my favorite fighting game. interface. It's my favorite fighting game control setup ever. And don't at me on that because it is the best. He is the underscore ISB on Twitter. No, uh, no underscore on Twitter. Or yeah, underscore on Twitter on that website. He is the ISB at Twitter on Twitter.

But yeah, like, and I think it really shows how good that interface is when you get to the point that we have an ultimate of you having characters like Ryu, where he shows up and there's a interesting combined interface for him. where you can hit B and do a Hidokin. But if you do the quarter circle and hit B, it's a stronger Hidokin, because that's, like, the more true to the character form of that move. But he is very playable with just the very simple two-button interface, and a lot of the characters are like that, where they get to be modified by things from their own game,

but they still play by the rules of Smash Brothers, because the rules of Smash Brothers are so simple that you can apply them to virtually anyone. And it's very clear that, like, one of the main directives, I'm sure, from Nintendo making this game is, you know, they wanted this game to be able to be played by Nintendo fans. Yeah. Like, in general, people who had never touched a fighting game. And so, yeah, it's just, it's one of the fastest to get into fighting games that exists. You don't have to be familiar with, like, the tropes of the genre in order to play it. Yeah, it's funny because the big Nintendo exclusive fighting series before Smash Brothers was Killer Instinct, which is basically the,

opposite where you have that ridiculous dial a combo system where it's like if you know you know like how these different commands relate to each other you can segue from one command into the other and basically create an infinite string but it's it's really sort of arcane and not really that like it's not really at that point you're not really playing the game it's almost like you know some simple memorization and you know those infinite combos don't exactly like wipe out a character They aren't that much more effective than just, you know, hitting a few times. But this is the opposite of that. It's like you don't need to know complex commands.

You just need to know, you know, the two buttons and kind of the context of what your character is going to do in a situation. So, you know, as you play, you kind of get the feel of like, oh, well, you know, if I'm in this situation, Peach is going to do this. But if I'm over here, then she's going to do that. If you're playing as, if you're playing Street Fighter with someone and you're playing a character, if you've never played it as before, you can't figure out everything they do just by, like, in 10 seconds. You have to, like, look up the command list.

If you're playing Smash Brothers with a friend and you've never played as Donkey Kong before, you can be like, hey, give me 10 seconds, and you hit four different combinations of buttons, direction and beat, and you learn basically everything they can do. There's a deeper complexity to it, which is why it's so popular with the e-sports crowd,

but it's so simple to get into. Also, I think Orchid should be in Smash. Absolutely not. We're going to tell you a tiny Killer Instinct story, which is that you remember those X-Ban modems? I may have told you the story already. You haven't. I think this is the first time we've ever mentioned Killer Instinct on a podcast. Really?

Okay. Probably not, but I want to pretend. The X-Ban modem was a dial-up modem set up for the Super Nintendo and the Genesis where you could plug it in and play games over the modem against other people. And I did that. Killer Instinct was one of the few games I had that support. did that. And I plugged in Killer Instinct, subscribed to the service, got on. And the first fight was like, super mega awesome combo. And I just got totally obliterated with no chance,

you know, because there's some guy who knew every, memorized everything. And the same second match like that. And that's, that's all it was. It was absolutely no fun whatsoever. Yeah, like the Killer Instinct story, absolutely no fun whatsoever. Yeah, exactly. It's a terrible game. You know, I don't want to downplay like the technique that can go into these other games. But there's almost no other fighting game that doesn't have at least some element of memorization for getting into it, just in terms of, you know, knowing what moves are available and what different combinations for different characters can actually do things. So yeah, it's a big break from sort of what had previously been going on in the genre that really opened it up.

Well, I think it's significant that this game launched, the first Super Smash Brothers for N64 launched in 1999, because a year before that, what game did Nintendo launch as their big title? it was The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time. And what did Ocarina of Time do that really kind of revolutionized how Zelda played? It turned the A button into a contextual action button. And they took that concept from Zelda and said, you know, we can turn this idea of contextual action into something bigger that works for more than just like, is this where I attack or is it where I put away my sword or is it where I jump? And that becomes like sort of the jumping off point for most of the actions in Smashblin. You know, I'm going to be able to be.

Another really brilliant thing about the control setup is that it is perfectly balanced between possibility and limitations. In the everybody, you know, the regular attack button, everybody punches, everybody kicks. That's their thing. But the other one basically gives you four things that you can do. There's the up, down, the side to side, and the button without a direction. And that's enough that you can kind of fit in everything Mario can do. You get fireballs. You get the big block-breaking punch.

You get the Cape. Flood, for some reason, has stuck around to 2019. But, you know, that applies very well to a character like Link or Samus, who very, you know, because of their roots on a classic system, have a very limited number of things they can do. If you're Link, and you get a boomerang, a bomb, a bow and arrow, and a shield, like, that's all you need. Like, that's, you, you understand Link and how he works. But the hook shot, man. The hook shot, isn't that. I'm there with you, Ben.

But there's also this idea of, you know, for instance, Peach. Peach is not a very playable character in a lot of games. She's a pity. Yeah, I agree. I actually like Super Princess Peach a lot. But, you know, Super Princess Peach, Mario RPG. That's kind of it. Super Mario Brothers 2.

Super Mario Bros. 3D World. She floats. She's the best character. 3D World. You've never played 3D World? No, I've never played 3D World. Oh, man, it's great. Have you seriously never played it?

No, I'm sure if they never played it. You need to play it. Okay. Do you have a Wii? Play it right now. There you go. Set it up for him right now. We got to get him.

But almost all of those, she plays the same as everyone else except floatier. Yeah. Which she doesn't, you know, she's got a float. So it's not difficult to come up with four things for Peach to do that feel appropriate. And you end up getting stuff like the parasol, which is from Super Princess Peach. And then making a toad saccharacterial. sacrifice his life for her, which is, like, great. Actually, didn't she have the parasol and fry pan in Mario RPG?

She had the frying pan. Did she have the frying pan? I know she had the frying pan. Did she have the parisole as well? I don't believe. Maybe not. Maybe it was just the fry pan. I don't remember. Yeah, there's a lot of things that it's, it's this perfect number of things that each character can do to evoke whether it's a larger context or to evoke who they are as a character.

Like, I'd like to point out something about the design, too, before we move on something else, which is that I think this game, the Super Smash Bros. Series is much more accessible because of the control scheme you're talking about. But there's also this random element that's like Mario Kart where they drop items on the board, you know, and someone could grab one of those

and pick it up and suddenly become more powerful, right, and sort of even things out. And then there's a random smash symbol that hovers around for some reason. The final smash that was introduced in, uh... Well, there's one of the... It's like a sheechy, but it's different. And people bounce.

off of it or something and like knocks them around in the first game. Oh, you're going to the bumper. Yeah, the pinball bumper. Yeah. Yeah, just all kinds of weird. It's a reference to pinball, but we're not to that part of the podcast yet. But yeah, I mean, all that stuff sort of takes it from the realm. So one of the, one of the brilliant things about Smash is it sort of spans all the way from people who want

a fairly pure fighting game to being a party game. Yeah, that's where like it's just chaos and anything can happen. It's the opposite of killer instinct. Anyone can play it and still have fun like a kid and an adult and with different skill levels. Yeah, and it's always been, you know, most of the games, it's very customizable as to, you know, how, how much you

want to slide between, like, ordering chaos when you're playing this. And I think it just makes it, it makes it better, more accessible to a lot of different situations, a lot of different social scenes. Is there, is there an option to play true neutral? I don't know. What would the settings for true neutral be? It's probably going to be one of the sword bros. Yeah, I think it is inherently a party game, right? Like, It was made for four players because that's how many ports the 64 had. But it's like Mario Kart. It's like Mario Party if it was a fighting game.

And there is that unpredictability to it, unless you are on Final Destination with no items, the boring way to play it. Speaking of party games, this last story I have is that it was a four-player game, you know, and it's always been, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, because Nintendo 64 had four player connectors. Control boards, yeah. On it, so I remember when this came out, I was just about to go into college, and my friend was already in college, and I would visit him in the dorms at NC State,

and everyone would be playing Smash Brothers. It was like the game at the time, and there were four people sitting around playing it. It was a raucous party game. I mean, it was really fun, and they were obsessed with it. It's why the GameCube had a hand. handle. Like, it's the only reason the GameCube had a handle. Bring it to the lounge. Yeah. Yeah.

So the one other thing we haven't talked about in terms of the design of this series is that it's, it doesn't, like the victory condition is not the same as in other fighting games. The goal is not to pummel someone until they run out of stamina and fall over dead. It is to knock them off the stage three times or to be knocked off the stage the fewest number of times in a chaotic four player match. the you're basically it's like the last man standing much like some of the Mario Party modes yeah it's basically it came across as this is you know

Nintendo's desire to be family friendly that you're not actually killing these beloved characters you're just making them explode you're like launching them into the stratosphere and they die and they don't but but you know you don't you know you don't want people getting this is not mortal combat you're not beheading everyone

anyone I didn't think about that that they didn't want to kill the character I always thought that that was, I just assumed that that was a big reason behind that mechanic. No, I think you're right. But I have played a lot of pro wrestling games in my time. Other than Smash Brothers, honestly, probably the most time I have spent on a game was maybe like WrestleMania 2000, which you know, you can tell when I didn't have a job. And the difficulty in making a pro wrestling game as opposed to a fighting game is that it's tough to capture the ebb and flow of a pro. wrestling match because per wrestling isn't actually combat. It's storytelling. The Smash

Brothers combat system and the way the percentages work and the way, you know, getting blasted off the stage works allows for that kind of storytelling in that you can have, you can be at 300% and have a heroic comeback. Now I need you to explain what the percentage is. I have no idea. What? I think it's a measure of how far you will go. Like there is a standard unit of how far you'll go.

And you will go if you get, you know, smashed it full strength, and it's like, you'll go 40% of that, 50% or 300% of that. Yeah, so it's a weight to your knockback, basically. But I have never been, like, it's a number in the higher it gets, the worse it is. No one's ever explained that to me. And so whenever I go to demos and stuff and play Smash Brothers, I'm like, I think I'm okay, but my number's really high and I don't know what's going to happen. Am I going to die now?

You're just much easier to knock around at that point. But you can knock someone off the stage who has zero percent, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, theoretically. Yeah, yeah. If they do something really dumb. I feel like, you know, it's just, I feel like, you know, And, yeah, the 100% may be kind of arbitrary.

I feel like it's probably just placed where, you know, if a character's at 100%, then a well-placed smash attack is going to knock them really far. Yeah. And, you know, if there are more than that, then it's going to be extra easy to knock them out. And if they're less than that, it's going to be difficult. What's the difference between an attack and a smash attack? You smash the control stick. Again, it's like very verb-based.

You take, like, if you press forward and you punch, you do a punch in a direction. If you tilt it really hard, It probably doesn't have to be really hard. They are game controllers. But if you do it at the same time, which is kind of inherently more intense motion, you can do a smash attack, and you can charge up those smash attacks.

So you do get these kind of fundamentally different versions, not just of the special attacks, but of the regular, like, melee attacks, where things get stronger. So I've been playing it wrong the whole time. You're saying the faster you move the stick while you punch, the harder it is. If you move it simultaneously.

Sheesh. Man, that's why. they call a smash brother. Yeah, that's why they call it. I don't know who the smash brothers are. I guess it's the hands. I think it's everyone is a brother in the brotherhood of smashing. True.

Yeah. Well, I don't know. In Japan, it's called Daironto Smash Brothers, which means big brawl, basically. Big Brawl smash brothers. So the brothers like to smash and they've got big brawls. I don't know. I think it's supposed to be the hands or actually the title characters. Because they are canonically brothers.

Are they? I believe so. Mario and Luigi. Actually, it was Luigi in the first one? Luigi was not the first one. I didn't think so. Luigi Eurasia. Luigi Eurasia goes all the way back.

He appears in the story, though. I saw Luigi. I don't know if he can play as him, but I just played through the, you know, the easiest single player scenario of the first Super Smash Brothers yesterday. And, uh, um, Seth. I would say that's a trap. It's a trap. That's my fighting tier.

If we are just completely forgetting Luigi, it would probably just be true to the character anyway. But wait, I'm telling a story. I was totally struck. I mean, maybe I should save this. Are we going to talk about each game one at a time? A bit. We're not going to go super in depth. I was struck by the fact that it does start out as a story with these guys as toys on a table and there's a hand controlling them and stuff.

And I'd sort of forgotten that. After all these games have progressed, they make it really serious and really, you know, it's not just like, oh, they're just a bunch of toys that people are playing with. Yeah, I think they've gotten rid of that whole, like, toy metaphor. The frame story, yeah. I think that was their excuse for putting all these characters together. Yeah, it was. It was.

The toy box, yeah. Mario's not really punching Pikachu. They're just toys, and there's an evil hand who's making his toys fight. So at the very end of the story mode, the, like, you, the toy you're playing as gets, or another toy, I can't remember just gets dropped down on the table. And that's the end of the game. That's how, that's how it was. And that was how amoebo was invented.

And it sort of blows you. I mean, they're amibos. They are amoebo. They are exactly amyboes. Fighting amyboes. Then I put this in the notes. Subspace Emissary and World of Light, which is the single player, the weirdly sprawling single player campaign and Ultimate, are very weirdly dark. Like, subspace emissary.

That's Maserosso-Ros. Yeah, it's not right. The whole Kirby series, if you actually look into the mythos of that, people have been over the past couple of years. is like really digging apart, like taking apart the Kirby franchise and saying, like, what is this story actually saying? And it turns out it's like all these, you know, cosmic abominations that are trying to destroy reality and Kirby eats them. You end up fighting Eldridge gods all the time.

Yeah, totally. That is like, I mean, that is absolutely what World of Life is. There's a crying tree that's dropping apples on me. And now I'm fighting God. So it makes, it makes sense that, you know, you've got that happening in World of Life. What's the really weird guy who shows up in Ultimate? Because I've never played a Kirby game with him. and he's terrifying.

I mean, that's all Kirby bosses. He's like a weird jester head. Oh, oh, yeah. I forgot his name, but I know the one you're talking about. Yeah, it's one of the Eldred Scots that's also in a jester cap for some reason. I was like, I was playing through classic mode on Ultimate and that dude showed up in Marks? Marks. Yeah, okay.

And I was like, what game is this terrifying monstrosity from? Because he's genuinely scary. I want to say Dreamland 3, but I could be wrong. I'm not sure. But, yeah, one of those. There's a, speaking of terrifying things in Smash Brothers, there's a stage in the Wii U smash brothers with this. I can't remember if it's supposed to be the, the Wario, I don't know, it's a stage where you're like in a room and there's a table and there's a virtual boy on the side and this shadowy one comes through. Oh, it's the Warrior Wear stage where you have to not get caught by your mom.

Yeah, and so the shadowy woman comes through and if she sees you, she shoots out laser beam, red laser beam eyes at you. And that used to scare the crap out of my kids. It sounds like she's related to the King of All Cosmosis. It's terrifying in its own way because it's just surprising. So there's, yeah, there's some dark little things thrown in there. meanest portions You might be the ingredient I see

Don't let yourself be fooled by her innocent and meaner You'd better be afraid of the great One of the things that I find interesting about the evolution

of the Smash Brother series is the way it's incorporated more and more franchises into it. We kind of touched on this earlier, but when you look back at the original

N64 Smash Brothers, you kind of see how much smaller than Nintendo Pantheon of characters, at least like the international recognizable character

Pantheon was in 1999, because you just have, what, like, six or seven franchises here, Super Mario Brothers Donkey Kong, the Legend of Zelda, Star Fox, F-Zero, Pokemon, Metroid, and Kirby. That's seven franchises represented by 12 characters. And I was actually going to say, like, I wonder, you know, if they were really kind of just reaching for things. Because, you know, you have the obvious choices, like you have your Mario and your Link and your Pikachu and your Donkey Kong. And then you've got things like we were just talking about, like, Captain Falcon, who was never actually even a character barely before.

Well, yeah, but at the same time, F0 was kind of a thing for them. You know, there was F0X for in 64. And in Japan, you have the 64D expansions. And a couple of years later, they started making F0 games for Game Boy Advance. And there was one on GameCube. So that was a viable franchise. It's like a cross-promotional tool. Star Fox 64 had just come out like in the year before, two years before.

And Pokemon was really new at that time. Yeah. Kind of. I mean, it was actually three years old in Japan by that point. So, yeah, like, it had already kind of exploded and was just entering the international market. So it was very smart of them to say, let's get a couple of these guys in there. Although there's also the way to say where you have, I mean, Pikachu, which is an obvious choice. It's a face of the franchise.

And then you have jiggly puff. But of course. Why jiggly puff? I think someone just wanted to like. Fan favorite from the cartoon? Yeah. Yeah. Also, like, canonically the most violent in the cartoon at the time.

Right. But also at the same time, it's like, well, that character kind of looks just like, Kirby. They're round and pink. It didn't have to do as much work on the model. I guess. I just wonder if some developer just really wanted to kill some characters by sleeping at them, and that's why Jigley. I mean, keep in mind that Hal did, and Iwada

specifically did do some programming work on Pokemon Red and Blue to bring those games to the U.S. and also on golden silver. So you know, it's possible that there was just, you know, some affection within Hal. They were like, you know, we're going to pick some Pokemon characters.

Let's go with obviously the mascot. but also, you know, just the one that we like the most. I don't know how much of it was motivated by, again, this being a game that kids can play. Like, what's the cutest one? Well, the one that is like five circles and two of them are giant eyes. Yeah, I mean, you would think, like, why not go with the starters or something, but they... Yeah, they wouldn't come in until much later. Yeah, yeah.

Like, it took years. That was in brawl, yeah. Yeah. We got the starters, finally. Well, in the intros, you can read through the character bios in the first Smash Brothers game, and they tell you what's, what games they've been in. And I was struck by Metroid, which is Metroid, Metroid, Metroid 2, Super Metroid. Yeah, like we, I wanted to see Samus in a, you know, Nintendo 64 games.

So this was it. This was the, yeah, this was a very dry spell for Metro. Yeah, it was. And that's interesting to me because the lack of, like, advance wars or fire emblem characters in Smash Brothers, the original. But the presence of Metroid says to me, like, they had their eyes on the international market. they were like, you know, we want to make this game that's going to appeal to Americans as well as Japanese gamers. And so they definitely included some characters that are much more popular here and left out the franchises that had not been localized before. Although there was, I was looking at, and again, you know, this is just from a wiki, so a grain of salt.

But apparently, Sakurai mentioned at one point that Marth had at some point, they had wanted to put him in the original Smash Brothers. But he just didn't make the cut for that one, came in in the next game instead. Yeah, and I bet that is because they had not localized a fire emblem game at that point. Do you think it's kind of like testing the waters to see, like, how excited people are about seeing Samus again? Like, obviously, they were going to make another Metroid game, but... I don't know. I feel like it was just, you know, like, if you look at a Nintendo crossover franchise action game, like she is the most action character aside from Link maybe, like the most appropriate for a game like this.

But I also wonder about, like, putting Martha Roy in melee, like, for an audience that, I mean, there's a lot of characters in melee that the audience has, the Western audience, at least, has no connection to. Who had any connection to ice climbers before? I mean, ice climbers at least have been released internationally. I like ice climber. But who cared about it? I knew ice climber, and I liked that game on the NES, but it was a rare and unusual game. I feel like we've jumped ahead to Smash Brothers Melee, which came out in 2001 for GameCube. So two years later, more than doubled the roster.

They added a bunch of other characters from the existing franchise as represented in the first game, but they added ice climbers, which was weird. They added Fire Emblem, which was interesting at the time, as opposed to boring now, because it was just like, who is this blue guy with a red cape and a sword? How intriguing. And now there are like 12 guys in blue outfits and red capes and swords. It's like, who are these guys? They do all play fairly differently. And some of them can turn into dragons. Sure.

Why not? But, you know, at the time, it was, I don't think the first Fire Emblem game was going to be localized until two years later, I want to say. They brought out Path of Radiance for GameCube, and they brought out the remake of the original Fire Emblem for Game Boy Advance. But I feel like this was a case where his popularity in the game, like, because Smash Brothers was so popular, and people were like, we want to know more about. Martha, they, they, you know, the Nintendo was like, yeah, let's, let's, you know, explore localizing these games finally. Keep in mind, too, that I believe it was melee that was the first one that starts with the paired down roster and then unlocks people as they go.

Well, yeah, the first game has some unlocked. I think it's, I think you start with eight in the first game and there's four that you unlock. You get Yoshi later. Yeah. And, you know, jiggly puff is an unlock. So everybody who's not like in that core, like Marth, is presented as like, you know, the, here comes a new challenger thing.

Also, the, the leap in quality between the 64 version and the GameCube version, like, there has not been a leap that, like, the leap from Baylay to Ultimate is not as big as the leap from Smash Brother Estimate. That's true. In terms of, like, visual quality. In terms of visual quality, honestly, like, in terms of gameplay as well. Well, I mean, you know, in terms of gameplay, like, once you get to something that works, you stick with it.

So that makes sense. Like, the first one is kind of rough. It's like Mega Man, you know? Mega Man one. it's kind of weird. They do some strange stuff that you didn't see in the later games but Mega Man 2 nailed it

and so that's what every Mega Man game since then has ever been. Yeah. I was struck by that too, Chris. I mean, just playing them back to back like the incredible leap and graphical quality between those two. It's just still blows my mind

because the melee one still looks really good. I mean, yeah. Like when you get the trophies and you can zoom in like super far like that used to be a thing like I was when melee came out I was unemployed. I was 19.

and so for about three months all I did was play Smash Bros. And my friend Brandon would come over and we would play for about four or five hours against each other. And I never got like good at Smash Brothers. I just got good at playing against Brandon. So like I can't like enter a competition

but I can still do pretty well against him. If the competition is a tournament against Brandon. Yeah. But I remember like when we would unlock a new trophy like we would always go in and look at it and it would be like bonkers us how far you could zoom in and how they had like you know classic mode Mario was very like you know animated style and then if you got you know melee Mario you could go in and see like

the texture on his jeans and how much that blew my mind as a kid yeah so in addition to ice climbers and fire emblem melee also introduced a character from earthbound and then introduced a character who didn't really exist mr game and watch who was kind of like a a spiritual representation of the entire game-and-watch LCD handheld line. All four of these are, or at least were at the time, extremely deep cuts. Like, Ice Climers was a nearly 20-year-old game that basically came and went and no one really remembered, but it was there. And then Fire Emblem had never been localized into the West.

Earthbound had been localized and quickly forgotten except by a small core of fans who became fan gamer. And then Game and Watch, like, you know, those were kind of universal, but this Mr. Game and Watch wasn't a character in the Game and Watches. And also, they hadn't made a Game and Watch unit in more than 20 years. I will correct you in that the Game and Watch, Mr. Game and Watch did appear in some of those as a, like, a silhouette and like, I mean, he was the generic, but he's just a generic guy. Yeah, it's just a generic guy. Like, he didn't have a name originally. He's kind of a composite character. They later used him as a logo for it or something. I can't remember.

But it was interesting because I think especially like ice climbers and game and watch showed that what they wanted to do with this series was not just Nintendo's current popular stuff but also bring in the retro things to just have more to pull from. When they did the Earthbound guy, it's NIST, right? And I was so excited. I thought, wow, they're recognizing Earthbound.

They're going to make a new Earthbound game and it's going to be awesome. And they did, and it was, and they didn't bring it here. Yeah. Yeah, I completely agree, Ben, that this is, like, This is, I think, where Smash Brothers kind of found its creative focus as not even necessarily like, hey, it's your favorite Nintendo characters, but more like, hey, here is an interactive museum of Nintendo history where all the favorite things that you've enjoyed through 40 years of Nintendo history beat the living shit out of each other.

It's an interactive death museum. And that's really interesting. So this is where that began, not only with the deep cut games, but also with the trophies, where, you know, things that were too esoteric to make it into the game, like even more esoteric than the ice climbers could still appear in the form of a trophy, like as a, hey, remember this, it's back in trophy form. And so you had stuff like Stanley the Bugman, who's never going to be in another video game ever, but he was there in Donkey Kong 3, the Donkey Kong game no one loves, and he's a trophy.

So they hadn't totally forgotten him, but they also were like, this is it, this is what you got. got the trophy of Stanley. Stop asking for a Donkey Kong three sequel. Hudson made a sequel. Stanley is off in outer space now. He's never coming back. Just stop. You also got the pokegaballs in melee, which I think paved the way for a, the kind of roster

we have an ultimate by giving you like a taste of what other characters could be. And also I think the pokegaballs were just generally really cool because they had stuff like, like new. You had a one in one hundred. A 1 in 151 chance of getting Mew, and Mew wouldn't do anything, but then you would get the Mew Trophy. So it was like, it was pretty cool. This is also where I got to the point where there's just, there's so much other stuff

accumulated around to this, or based around all the Nintendo nostalgia, that it becomes interesting, like in its own right as just an archive of Nintendo stuff, even independent of the fighting game it's connected to. Yeah. Yeah. Adventure mode. Yeah. Well, you've got the adventure mode.

But, I mean, so this is the point where I admit that I really haven't played that much of these games. I played, I think, a little, I played a little bit of brawl and melee on other people's systems. But I didn't actually, I was one of the guys that owned up through Super Nintendo and then had PlayStation. So I didn't own Nintendo's consoles, so I didn't have these at home. But I was really interested in the games just for, like, all the stuff they brought up out of Nintendo's vaults to, like, put back out in the world. And I remember, like, every time a new one would come out, especially in, like, the brawl and melee. era, I would like immediately download the soundtrack as there were all these cool remixes of stuff that you hadn't heard a while, being passed off to other composers, and, and it were just

awesome. And then, you know, look at the trophies of all these, like, cool new art of stuff that was pulled out of the archives and just hadn't had new material for it in years. And now here's all this new cool stuff. And so it's just like a whole other aspect of the games with a lot of appeal. Millet was also where the character design started to get really experimental, like ice climbers. Uh, you know, I kind of cloned on them a little bit earlier. Not just the design, but the mechanics. Yeah, the mechanics.

Like, there's an AI controlled half of that team. And, you know, the other one can get knocked out and you're still there. But your move set is now limited because all of their moves are built on having two characters. So that is really the start of doing stuff, like how Little Mac works, where he has the little meter that fills up and you can do a super upper cut or the inklings from Splatoon who function like you're playing Splatoon with a limited amount of ammo

or Alamar who I believe is in that too, right? He's in Malamara. He should have been Balls. Oh, is he in Brawl? I think, yeah. I gave you the four new franchise and they were not part of that.

I just remember playing a lot that's Olamar, who I do not care for. You mean in Smash or just in general? I mean, I've never played Pygman either. Oh, that. Okay, so speaking of Pickman, the other than the other notable thing, before we move on from Melee, And this actually may not, we may not make it to the ultimate references in here, because we're kind of going on. The other notable thing about melee is that it was the second and final game to make good, justifiable use of the GameCube controller.

The first being Pickman. It is the GameCube controller is the Pickman controller. But Smash Brothers also made use of the controller so remarkably well that the controller has greatly outlived. its life, like the life it should have existed. It should have gone away so long ago, but it's still here with us. They've created adapters for Wii U and for Switch to let you play Smash Brothers with a GameCube controller. They continue manufacturing new game controllers, GameCube controllers, nearly 20 years after the systems launch, just because people really want to play Smash Brothers with a GameCube controller. Because of the C-Stick. It's remarkable. Like that this, this, like,

There are so many better controllers on the market. You have so many better options. You have the pro-controller. You have the joy cons. They're better than the GameCub controller. But Smash Brothers just, I don't know, there's something about it that just clicks for that audience. Melee introduced the idea of using the C-stick as, this is good for you.

Yeah, I was about to say something. It's an instant smash. Like, you don't have to combine the buttons. You can just, like, you know, hit it with your right thumb, and you'll just do a quick smash attack. And you can also charge up with that. so it makes such a good use of that controller that I understand why people are sticking with it because it in a lot of ways feels like they sat down and rebuilt the game around that specific

controller like it has the grab button on top which can also shoot a hookshot it's got like all sorts of stuff that feels like it really works with that layout in a way that it doesn't you know, yes, the joycons are better, but the layout's different, and so it's not quite built for that. Like, a lot of the stuff has stayed, but, you know. Yeah. I've considered building a Smash Brothers joystick, because you know I build joysticks for fun at BXFoundry.com.

Anyway, so I, but. They're very high quality, too, and so affordable. Yeah, thank you. So there's, there are obviously problems with that because there's analog sticks involved. and a really good analog stick hasn't been available until recently that will work as well as a GameCube thumb controller thumb stick but there's a company there's like a guy who is making smash joysticks and it's really controversial because

you know does it introduce any advantages over the other players and stuff and they don't know whether to allow them in tournaments and things like that but there's such a huge loyalty to the GameCube pad I want to see a GameCube struggle stick. That would be amazing. Can I say one more really cool thing about melee? The level of detail is incredible. Like the stages from the 64 are fine.

You know, they're blocky and polygonal and small, but they're fine. Look at Onet in melee, and you can zoom out and move the camera around and see the baseball diamond. That there's no reason that should be there. It's only there if you take the time to like zoom. zoom out and turn the camera and you want to look at it. They have added detail that you're never going to see if you are just playing the game. And there's like, it's like that in every stage. It's really, really cool.

Like there's so much obvious love put into melee, which I think has continued on through the franchise as well. And Sakhar is an insane perfectionist. Yeah. I mean, it shows. It really shows. The one final thing I want to say about melee is that it's notable for having been basically a launch game.

I think it came out a couple of months after the GameCube in Japan, but it was there. I want to say day one for the American GameCube. Or if not, it was very soon after. It was before the end of the year. And, you know, the system launched in October, November. So, yeah, it was right there at the start. It was a huge system seller right from the beginning. You know, GameCube was not as big a success as the N64 or the Super NES or the NES, but like the sell-through, the, what do you call it,

the attachment rate for yeah I don't know my marketing terms even though I work in marketing what do you know the attach rate was extremely high and you know that that continued to just be a standard throughout the system's life and I feel like having been there you know basically from day one really did a lot for the game's popularity

and its pickup and you know it was just like something that was always there for people when they had a GameCube they had Smash Brothers I read I read that it was the highest selling game on that system. I don't know how many units it was and what percentage was. At least a dozen. Yeah. But there, yeah. So it's iconic for that. I mean

it is, I can't think of another GameCube game that would have been like more essential to own than that one. Like that is, it's the killer app of the GameCube. But you don't actually kill anybody. And and so many of GameCube games that were sort of like

core franchises were weird takes on it like double dash for Mario Cart, Mario Sunshine. I mean, you had Metroid Prime, which is extremely highly revered. But I do feel like that is more of a, not a niche game, but it does have a smaller audience than the sort of universal swing for the fences that Smash Brothers does. Was Sunshine a launch title? No. It was late 2002.

So it was a year after. So Mario didn't have flood in melee, did he? You're asking the wrong person. He could have as a sort of like. Hey, hey, check this out. Because Professor E. Gad, who gave Mario Flood, debuted in Luigi's Mansion, which was also at launch. Yeah, Luigi was kind of the substitute launch title for... GameCube had a lot of that weird stuff going on.

And that made it really interesting to me, and I liked it, but it didn't do so much for its sales. It's imbril. But I think that's another sign of, like, of it retroactively codifying the Ginkube era as, you know, it's the control. it's Mario with Flood still which is odd But yeah You could have had a helicopter hat Her a raccoon tail

A raccoon tail He doesn't You can get a raccoon tail There's a Super Leaf Is in Ultimate Anybody can get a raccoon tail Wow That's great

I need to play that So if you're in that audience I don't see bayonetta With raccoon ears and a raccoon tail There's a lot Congratulations Congratulations We're going to be able to be.

Okay. So I lied. I said this episode was going to be about Smash Brothers Ultimates. Retro roots, classic roots, franchise roots, that's not going to happen. We are just not going to have enough time for this episode. We ended up talking so long that it's not, there's no space for it. So instead, we're just going to keep talking about the history of Smash Brothers. This is actually the opposite of what I said this podcast was going to be. What can you do? Be cool.

I said, you fool. Oh, yes. I am a fool. I'm a foolish fool. All right. I don't think we've ever not talked significantly longer than we meant to on this podcast. That is true. At least we're staying on top.

that is true mostly yeah uh yes i see binge like i see i see calculating like how can i take us off topic i i see that look in your eyes can you link in everyone's like jeremy you're always so mean to binge on the podcast but no i'm sitting here watching watching his expression change and like the calculating the cunning on his face i'm like you guys don't understand it's so hard to keep him in check it's true i can verify he's a wild card yeah he's well man He's a, he's a loner, Dottie, a rebel. Anyway, so we move on to the year, what was it, like 2008? It was a hot minute, yeah.

Yeah, Super Smash Bros. Brawl. That's actually, that's a pretty long time to go between these games. You had another reason that melee is so well remembered it had a real long life. Yes, because there was a big gap. Yeah, I remember going to like Paxes and stuff in 2006, 2007 when the Wii was out. super smash brothers brawl was not so people were still obsessing over uh melee yeah and the we was backwards compatible with the game cube so you could still you could upgrade your system and still play it yeah you know once upon a time i had i had a dream that maybe i could get a job at

nintendo and um play smash brothers well see that's the thing as i like was chatting with some guys who work in treehouse and they were like oh yeah we play smash brothers all the time we like it's what we do it's how we kill time and i was like well okay i guess i'll stay i guess i'll stay at one-up.com. I'll stay in the press. If you still want a job of Nintendo, I can talk to my uncle. Oh, yeah? Does he work there? He works there, and he already has, like, the next Mario game. Whoa, like Super Mario Brothers Spive. And he says Batman's in it.

Oh, my God. Bowser, by any chance. Anyway, Super Smash Bros. Brawl was the first game not to be developed by how. In fact, it was co-developed by Bondi Namco of all things. That one's really weird. I don't know how that happened. I guess it was

like the Tekken team, maybe. Like some Tekken guys? want to say. Also, game arts who created the Lunar Games and other, like, Grandia, other RPGs such as that, as well as some shooters like Silfeid, like how did they get involved in this? And then finally, there's Sora Limited, which was Sakurai's kind of spin-off, like, division from Hal where basically Sora Limited means Sky and that was the company that created, he created basically to put together a Kid Acreus sequel.

but they also worked on this and hey wait what's that kid icarus is one of the new nintendo franchises introduced in smash brothers brawl what a coincidence along with pickman and sonic the hedgehog wait a minute that's not a nintendo franchise but i guess it is now huh yeah that's when uh that is when things changed it was yeah there's also wario land and not a franchise but rob the robot operating buddy became a playable character, but there was precedent for this. He was also a playable racer in Mario Kart DS. So at this point, Nintendo was like, here's the stupid robot we made that was only good for two games, one of which we didn't even bother to finish, and people still have these fond memories of him. This was a Nintendo was like,

we can weaponize and monetize nostalgia, even for bad things. And they did. It is very much nostalgia-driven, but I also kind of like that they acknowledged what, I mean, yes, Rob was a success in terms of, like, getting the NES into toy stores. But, like, nobody, like, nobody really liked playing the game with Rob because they were bad. Actually, actually, Jaira mite is really interesting and challenging when you play with Rob. Stack up, on the other hand, don't do that.

But I feel like they, a lot of companies, like, companies whose names rhyme with, like, maybe, I don't know, Konami, will, like, not acknowledge pieces of their history. we got a conjure collection and a new game what more do you want son you know what I want oh you know what I want switch yes okay it's coming but like HD remaster it's very easy to ignore like pieces of your history

that aren't as successful as Mario you know but we got Rob and they like went in and designed him and made him really cool like he's like a weird little weird little Terminator with laser eyes and would make you again much like the fire in the characters makes you think Rob can do a lot more than he could.

So is there a virtual boy item in Smash yet? Probably an item, yeah. Or I know there are some references. Telleroboxer has some references. Oh, that's true. Remember that there is the stage with the virtual boy sitting in the back. Yeah, yeah. So it has been acknowledged.

In the little like victory screen and melee, like there's a shelf that has all the Nintendo consoles. So the virtual boys in there. All right. All right. And the other new franchise appearing for the first time in Brawl was Metal Gear with Solid Snake. And this is, I think, where the series really started to embrace like the sort of, you know, the essential personality of some of these characters who existed outside the Nintendo world because they really played up all the ephemera around Snake. You had like, you know, you have Colonel Campbell calling in and there's like codec conversations and stuff. And the introduction videos. Like, honestly, the announcement teasers for Smash Brothers might be the best thing about the series. And I say that not to insult the games, but because the teaser introduction videos are all so good. Like, they really lean into the history and the nature and the, you know, the personality and just the general memes around all of these characters. It's really, really impressive.

Yeah. And they really did that for the first time with Snake, who was introduced in, like, you know, sneaking around in a box and calling, like, Colonel, what's going? on that kind of thing like there's a large fat man who smells like garlic what's going on um yeah it's just like because there's wario yep yeah and there's a room that like that confirmed for brawl was a meme for like two years yeah but yeah i mean as as again as someone who only occasionally actually plays the games yeah the every time there's a new game coming out i've watched all the character introductions because they're just fantastic so what year was brawl i want to say that was 2008 i did not write it down but it was um it was right around

the time that Metal Gear Solid 4 was coming out, and that was a Nintendo, oh, no, wait, it was a PlayStation 4, it was. So it was kind of weird to see Solid Snake on the, you know, in a Nintendo franchise extravaganza when his final adventure was coming out for PlayStation 3. Yeah. But that's just kind of how they did it. Like, Sonic was surprising, but only for like people of our generation. Right. Who have that hard divide in their heads.

Like Sonic had been on Nintendo. A lot of people who played Sonic Adventure for the first time on GameCube. Yeah. So Sonic made sense. Solid Snake was the, I'm sorry, what moment of character reveals for Smash Brothers. And sure, us old-timers remember Snake's revenge and Lieutenant Snake sneaking around in his orange outfit killing dudes in elevators, but we're kind of a minority. He'd been on Nintendo Systems, but it's also, but I think the other thing that threw you

about this is it was one of the first ones that was like a relatively realistic human character design to be in this. He's not a cartoon. Everybody flipped out about New Dong City. They forgot the solid snake is standing next to Mario. Yeah. So it was sort of the point at which, like, yeah, we can put any kind of character design in brawl and make it work. At the other end of the spectrum, you have Olamar, who is a guy who is two inches tall and controls tiny carrot men. And somehow they made that work with Solid Snake. How did that work in Solid Snake? I know you don't like Olimar. I don't care for playing as Olamar. He's just not one of my favorites. Snake's also really weird

because of how his attacks work. Like he does I mean he has like a like a RPG. He's got lots of like explosives and mines and things. He aims at the ground directly in front of him which I don't think you're supposed to do. I'm not I'm not in the military but I don't think you're supposed to shoot

an RPG at your feet. Have you ever heard of a rocket jump? Come on. It's like a standard tactic these days. Yeah he like he. They need to put Doom guy in one of these. Give it time. I would not be surprised. He's the last DLC character. Doom guy, Rips and Tears. Chainsaw.

Snake kind of fundamentally does play differently than a lot of the other characters, like even to the point of like, you know, his up, like recovery attack is, you know, him grabbing onto the little helicopter thing and it moves differently. Like a drone, basically? Like a, like the thing comes down from the top of the screen. Oh, oh, oh, like a grappling. Okay. Yeah. And, you know, he buries minds in the ground.

So it's very Oh, and also he like Chokes people out Which is very weird to see like when it's Pichu Like him just go to sleep It's upsetting in a lot of ways But he In a lot of ways he feels like he doesn't belong

But as you moved towards ultimate And through Smash 4 That made him belong Yeah like you know the You have characters like The Wow I'm really illiterate today you have characters like the Animal Crossing people

who also use indirect attacks like the villager drops pitfalls and stuff so he kind of paved the way for that and I feel like Olamar is kind of a riff on what you had with the ice climbers because he relies so much on the pickman as opposed to his own abilities like Olamar

doesn't do anything he has a whistle that's it that's all Olamar has at least in the pickman games so everything he does relies on the pickman themselves So he's, like, using them as his little projectile people, little carrot death squad. Yeah, and they all have, like, a different effect. Well, there's different colors of pigment. You have to, you have to pay attention to a lot of stuff with Alamar, which I'm not good at.

Well, I think the same thing you were talking about with some of the other characters of writing with very different mechanics. Like, they've come up with a bunch of ways to take the basic, like, you know, eight attacks that every character has to have because that's how Smash works and, like, just mix it up with things happen differently in different kinds. You know, based on which pickman you've got or based on like what the state of paint is around you or just, yeah, they've come up with it a lot of ways with these other characters to just sort of expand the realm of what you can do with that moves, that kind of move set. Yeah, I think Alamar is probably arguably the most complex character in Brawl because like things are not like when Peach pulls a turnip out of the ground, it's random, like what kind of turn up you're going to get. And the facial expression determines how much damage it's going to do.

But Alamars is a pattern as far as, you know, what Pickman he's plucking out of the ground in what order. So there's a lot of complexity in playing him, which probably mirrors the management of Pickman, the game I've never played. So that's... You've missed out on all the Pikmin games? Yeah, they didn't look fun to me. They're really good. I don't like RTS games that much, but Pickman makes it manageable and interesting and fun and cute. And also in Pikmin 3, the fruit juice you create at the end of each day looks so good.

Just, like, every time I play Pickman 3, I'm like, I need some fruit juice now. I need to mix some gin in with that. No, just straight juice, man. Why adulterate it? Like, sometimes you just got to keep your things pure. And the fruit juice in Pikmin 3, let me tell you what. I could write essays about the fruit juice in Pikmin 3. It's really, it looks amazing.

The most complexity I can handle is Starter Valley, which also makes me want fruit juice. Yeah. I couldn't get into Pikmin for some reason, but I think it's neat. I could. Uh, so. Uh, so. That's all technically related. The other big thing about brawl is that it introduced subspace emissary, but I feel like we've talked about that.

Do we have more to say about subspace emissary? It's kind of seen as the high watermark for the adventure mode theme concept of the Smash Brothers series. But I don't know if that's because it's the best or just because of nostalgia, like, oh, that's the thing that I liked and that's the only good one. Well, it moves it in a direction from being slightly less of a party game because playing, you know, playing against the AI and Smash Brothers is fun. But it's like fighting games are. only really at its true form when you're playing against another person. And so adding a more dedicated single player mode does, I think, shift it a little bit so that if you are alone, you can enjoy Smash Brothers a little more.

So then we move on to the Wii U and 3DS, Super Smash Brothers for Wii U and 3DS. The Fast and Furious of the Smash Bros franchise. Yes, there was no Dwayne Johnson in this one, but definitely some Vinds. diesel. This one, this one just, this is where they were just like, let's go for it, guys. So you have, you know, some obvious additions, I think, like Xenoblake Chronicles. That was a Nintendo first party titled co-developed by Monolith. Okay, sure. Animal Crossing, of course. But then you also have Final Fantasy 7, a series that would not appear on a Nintendo system for another five or six years, interesting. Bayoneta, who at the time was a PlayStation 360 exclusive and would only

become a Nintendo Pantheon character once Switch arrived. No, I guess she was on Wii U. Yeah. Yeah. And Aneta 2 was a Switch. But that came later. Yeah. Yeah. And Bayanetta 3 is going to be, no, was Bayonetta 2 a Wii exclusive? It was. Oh, maybe you're right. Yeah. When I was on Switch also. I have it. Then there's Duck Hunt, which is again them reaching into that sort of NES era. Here's something weird with a character who's just strange and bizarre

and then they threw in some MES because I guess it was on Wii and this was on Wii U so by that point Mies had kind of like become less interesting but they threw them in anyway and said what the hell well they had the um

they had the wireframe characters because melee had the like a hundred man melee mode and I remember playing that and like when the Wii came out being like oh this would be so much more entertaining if it was like me and my friends getting getting

murdered by Doggy Kong. Well, there you go. So that was, I think that was like a pretty logical step to bring in. The Wii Fit trainer, which was interesting, but I mean, I guess it's a way to get like yoga moms into your game. Because, I mean, we fit was a huge, huge success.

But it's really kind of the opposite of, you know, what you expect in a video game experience from Smash Brothers. I think at that point, they were just trying to throw some crazy wild cards of people that were just like, what the heck is going on? the whole point. At this point, it's very much a

what else can we do. Also, we fit trainers amazing, because she does not act like she's in a fighting game. No, she's just like exercising. Yeah, she's like doing down her facing dog and you fly off the screen. Yeah. It's fantastic.

And then finally, the character who I can't believe it took so long for him to come to the series, it took 15 years. But finally, Mega Man, of course. Why wouldn't they put Mega Man in this franchise? He started on in E.S. He is a character

kind of in the same vein as like Mario and Sammas like so obvious. And you know, because he's such a mutable character he's perfect for the kind of dynamic, constantly changing feel of Smash Brothers. Fifteen years it took them and they finally did it.

But at the same time, this is the first and maybe only Smash game to shed a character and it lost the ice climbers because the ice climbers were just too much for the poor little 3DS to handle. That was the Achilles heel of this game is that... Is that the reason?

Yeah. Yeah. Like, they designed it for Wii U, but they also had to make it work within the limitations of the 3DS, and this was before new 3DS. So it was just like standard 3DS, 3DS XL, and the ice climbers were just, they said, too much for the 3DS to handle, so... That's so weird. Yep.

That's why they went away. Am I having a false memory or is Pac-Man in this game? Pac-Man's in... Isn't Pac-Man in one of these things? Yeah, he is. He's an ultimate. missed him, yeah. He is in Flash 4. Oops, my mistake. Yeah. That's cool. I play his Pac-Man. That's why.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're right. He was announced around the same time as Mega Man. I think at A3 and 2014. When I... That's exactly when it happened. When they revealed Mega Man, that's when I was like, oh, oh, Castlevania's going to be in this. Like, Castlevania is eventually going to be in this. Also, Ryu was DLC for Smash 4. Oh, right. Yes, that's it. Yeah. That's right. They introduced Street Fighter. But that also makes sense because Street Fighter 2 was a huge occlusive for Super NES back in the day for like a year or two years.

So I can see that. Yeah. Anyway, but yeah, at this point, you have basically an industry crossover. And because Ryu has been in so many things, like you can play six degrees of separation with pretty much any video game franchise ever now. Yeah. Like you can connect Bayonetta to, I don't know. Spider-Man.

Yes, probably. Yeah, yeah, for sure. That's like two degrees. That's nothing. To Stanley the Buckman. That's also two degrees. Yeah. So, yeah, Ryu is the, reused the, the,

the grand unifying theory here. Smash 4 is fine. Like, it is weirdly, like, the expanded roster is kind of the big selling point of it. Like, it is probably the one I've played the least, even though I had it on both systems. And a thing that I wrote about it, because I ended up ranking all of the Smash Brothers games for a column that I wrote. And the thing I wrote about Smash 4 was that the good news was that it was a smash game you could take on a plane. And the bad news was it was the only smash game you could take on a plane. Like, you had to settle for that one.

It's fine. But I think the big deal here was the roster. Like the game play was... The shift to the Wii U game pad felt weird to me. But probably because I was holding it so much further apart. Yeah. Well, you could play it with the other controllers. Yeah, that's true.

Yeah. I play it with the pro controller sometimes. But, yeah, the roster is really fun. In fact, I have played this with my oldest daughter a lot, the one on the Wii, and it's something that we could use to sort of bond, and I could tell her about these characters and what games they were in. And it's a neat link between generations. So I like that about that game.

And this was the game that basically gave us Amoebo. I mean, they created Amoebo specifically for this game. Those launched in 2014 at the end of the year, just a little bit after Smash Brothers. And, yeah, so you can, I can't believe Amoe have been around for five years now. It's kind of, it's kind of wild. It's wild and wacky. But, yeah, it took them a long time to create Smash Brothers Brawl and Smash Brothers 4. But then Amir, what, three years later, four years later, they gave us Smash Brothers Ultimate,

which is the most recent game, is not even complete yet. They're still announcing and releasing DLC characters. I don't think we know the last three DLC characters, do we? They just announced Hero from Dragon Quest. Quest and at E3 and Banjo Cazui. Oh, right, yeah, yeah. So I guess there's like two characters left that we don't know.

All I know is that I have already paid for them. And I have no connection to Banjo Cazooey or Dragon Quest, so. Great. That's good. Dragon Quest would be cool to see. Yeah, I'd say. I'm annoyed that they didn't give us any female hero options because there are several Dragon Quest games where you can choose the gender of your parents.

Have they even rolled it out as alternate costumes? They haven't, but I mean, the hero is alternate costumes. So there's like the Dragon Quest, one, hero, Dragon Quest, two. Well, there's one, two, three, four. So theoretically, there's still room for four others in the... No, there's 11. There's eight. I think I've...

I want to say five and seven. So they're probably the one for six also. I hadn't seen that. Yeah, they're pretty much all in there. So, I mean, maybe they could do that. But I don't want to get sidetracked. It's just like, whenever I'd play a Dragon Quest and they're like, hey, you can be a female protagonist this time.

I'm like, yeah, let's do that because it'll be a change of pace. Yeah. And Smash Brothers needs better female representation. anyway. It's a sausage fest in there. Yeah, they didn't, you couldn't play as the female Pokemon trainer when the Pokemon trainer was originally introduced. That took until Ultimate to be able to, yeah,

their faultcasters for that now. But Smash Brothers Ultimate has a lot of characters. Yeah. It has almost 80. Once the the DLC has done. It brought back everything that was dropped in four. Right, which was ice climbers.

It also lost Pichu and Snake, didn't it? Oh, did it? Oh, did it? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. And Pokemon Trainer. And most of the game is, like, picking your character, right? Yes, I mean, choice paralysis is a real thing. Although, I will say that Smash Ultimate, at the very beginning, you just have the original roster from the N64 game.

So you have, what, eight, 12 characters at the very beginning? It's very small. Yeah, so you're playing with, like, the core Nintendo fighters. And as you play the different modes, as you achieve different things, It's like time-based or event-based or achievement-based. You unlock different characters. Some of it's kind of randomized. So if you're looking after a very specific character,

it can be very maddening to unlock them. But, you know, eventually you get this full-ass roster. There's also a multiple ways to unlock them. Right. And, yeah, and then the DLC characters, you just pay for them and you get them. Yeah. So, and, yeah, like, they just went crazy

with some of these character choices. I mean, I don't think they really added new franchises this time, aside from Dragon Quartz. Quest, you know, like the DLC stuff, Dragon Quest, persona, et cetera. But you do end up with, like, some really weird choices from the existing series, like Piranha Plant? How does that even work? I haven't tried Piranha Plant, but it's so bizarre that I'm fascinated by it.

Yeah, I didn't get that one, and I kind of, like, want to go in and get it because I've got everything else. But, like, that is really a, okay, sure, why not? Like, that is in the same sphere as Ice Climers for you. Like, yeah, this is what you want to do with your game. The Wii trainer. Except we did to get one new, one big new franchise. Oh, right.

The one Chris was waiting for. Yes, Castlevania. Yes. I forget that exists, just like Konami does. And technically, technically, Al-Qa-Card is in the game. With the Chrysigarum. He's an assist. Yeah, with the Chrysigram.

Yeah, and they look really good. Yeah, which is just, he's just there enough to make me mad. I did, I did demo the stage back at the press events for Smash Brothers, and I love how the stage kind of evolves and it's like Dracula's chamber and then like the weirwolf comes in and starts jumping around and you have to avoid the weirwolf for Mondo of blood like they just went Hogwild is a good

That should be what they call this Super Smash Brothers hog wild That's the next that's the next one coming out That's my question is if they keep going What are they going to put in the next one and how is it going to have 120 characters you know I mean there's Master Chief there's What's her face from

what's that game called Horizon Zero Dawn Like they just start putting in You know, Cratos I think Cratos is a legitimate Sony and Microsoft Actually, I'm joking about the Sony stuff But the Microsoft characters could show up

I mean I could see like Minecraft Steve I could see There was a BS Assassin's Creed game We could totally get an Assassin's Creed character Yeah What about the error from Zelda 2 The same error game

But I could see like Frills But I could see like Fritz's like frisk from Undertale or the guy gives to this I don't I think

I think they're probably going to stick with games but it would not surprise me at all if Spider-Man

showed up or Captain America or Batman like but at that point what's the

what's the point of it it's not really an Nintendo thing anymore it hasn't been an Nintendo

thing for a while like well you say that I mean ultimate is a really

really interesting tour through video game history in a lot of it is but then also you have like

the persona a five, so it's not going to be on Switch. I guess there's the Battle Royale thing they're doing the like the the Muso game based on persona, but that's not that's not persona. The thing that

I, two things that I really love about Ultimate. One, there are a million characters and generally speaking, they do feel distinct. One of the like only problems with melee was that Gannon Gannendorff was slow

Captain Falcon, you know? they reused a couple of of character movesets and such and just kind of tweaked other stats Ultimate has... They call those Echo fighters now, right? That's the new term.

Yeah, the new term in the universe is Echo, yeah, for the ones that are based on... I don't, like, I play the game. I don't pay attention to other people talking about it. But, like, all the Fire and Lim characters, I mean, there's a lot of characters who just have swords, but then there's also

the, I can't remember any of their names. There's the lady who turns into a dragon who's really cool. And there's the guy with the spellbook and the magic wand who does different stuff. Like, they have managed to group these characters into three really broad categories, which are the categories that you can make a me fighter of. There's the brawlers, the guns, and the swords. And within that, make them very different. Like, Little Mac is very different from Ryu is very different from Mario.

And those are all the, you know, fighting character. So we've gotten too many characters for just verbs. Now we have to have adverbs as well. Exactly. The other thing that I really love is the way that this game presents ideas through multiple levels of representation. Like if you go into the World of Light mode, you're getting spirits of other video game characters who aren't in the game. But you're getting them by, of course, fighting characters who are in the game. So they visually, or with power-ups or something, modify how those characters work in order to represent other characters.

And they do them a lot of times by themes. Like, you can go to Dracula's Castle, Emerald of Light, and you're fighting through Dracula's Castle. So everything you fight is representing an enemy from Castlevania. But the spirits are also in there. So you get the Reded Spirit from in there, which is, like, it's right. It's a red skeleton, right? The Red Dead is representing. the zombie because it's right in the opening

But it's a red skeleton. It works like a red skeleton. You kill it. It comes back. The skeleton is represented by Dry Bowser. But is that a skeleton or red skeleton? Because red skeletons in Castlevania are different than regular skeletons. That's true. But the zombies never stop either. They keep coming

out, but it's always a different one. Yeah. The ghosts, like the Castlevania ghost is the spirit of a boo, which is represented by a white Kirby. Nice. Which is really like to have so many levels. And it's all really clever. Like, I think it's

like the, you know, the Castlevania Hellhounds are Hound Doom, which is represented by Wolf from Star Fox. Like, it's really it's really cleverly done. And there's like so many stages. And so many of them that like, you know, there's a, there's a Zelda theme area. There's a

Castlevania theme area. There's, you know, a Mario theme area. There's so many weird things going on. You know, the spirit of Balrog is represented by Little Mac wearing American flag, trunks, which I think is very funny. Well, there you go. So we are actually out of time for this, if we're going to do another episode.

In that case, that means we need to wrap it up, which, again, turns me into a liar. We did not talk really, except for this here at the very end, the Ultimate, Smash Brothers Ultimate Retro References, Roots, whatever it's called. I'm sorry, everyone. I totally misled you. I got your hopes up. and then we dashed them cruelly against the rocks of reality. That was uncool of us, and I apologize.

So we'll make it up to you by doing a proper take on this subject someday. I feel like we do this a lot with episodes these days. We're like, we're going to do a thing, and then it's something else entirely, and we have to revisit it. Oh, well, that's what happens when we have the diarrhea of the mouth that we all suffer from. Yeah, it's really gross. That's right, without a net, without a script, and without a clue. Anyway, thank you, Chris Sims, especially, for bringing this passionate opinion about, passionate opinions about Smash Brothers to this episode.

Although, actually, I feel like, you know, even though it's not a series that I enjoy playing, I don't feel like this was a disrespectful or like, hey, let's take the piss out of this series kind of conversation. Like, I think we all respect the series, even if we don't necessarily, like, want to enjoy it. So that's good. I think that speaks pretty highly of the integrity of the, the, the work and the the care that they put into it and just the the sheer amount of content that is available in the smash brothers games i'm talking too much so guys tell us where we can find you on the great thing called the internet well jeremy as you as you already said i am on

that terrible website twitter is that the isb but you can find everything that i do at t h e dash isb com i play as incinerore mostly because he's a pro wrestling Pokemon which is like my two favorite things that's weird and i am on the greatest website of all time Twitter at Benj Edwards. Also, I am now shipping the BX-110 Super Nintendo joystick coming your way soon. Where can people find those if they want to buy them? BXFoundry.com. I might have a handful

left to sell if anybody wants one. And I am on the unavoidable website, Twitter, as K-I-R-I-N-N. You can find me there, and if I'm up to anything else, I'll say something. And you can find me at the fascistic website, Twitter as GameSpite. But you can also find Retronauts and myself at Retronauts.com. You can find this podcast on iTunes and other assorted podcatchers.

Look for Retronauts. That's like Astronauts, not like Retro Zero. Don't get it wrong. And also, you can support the show by going to patreon.com slash Retronauts. And for three tiny dollars a month, you can get this podcast in a high bitrate audio download quality a week before it goes out in the public feed. And sometimes we have ads on this show and you don't have to listen to ads if you subscribe through Patreon. So it's a pretty exciting value proposition. In any case, we're done talking about Smash Brothers. My

percentage is now at 300 and I am flying off the stage. I'm going to be able to be. Thank you.