~ Estimated Reading Time: 7 min ~
Y'know, it really moved me - when it finally set in that this is what the Smash Flash 2 guys had been up to. Those guys who made that lil game you played on your school computer as a kid? Just because you stopped thinking about them a long time ago doesn't mean they ever stopped growing. Now they've made something less like a time-and-place substitute, and more valuable on its own. Worth at least a third of the price of the game it was once copying notes from. It's refreshing to think about, really...witnessing the growth of the young artist peers that surround us is almost as beautiful as my sick welltaro clips
Smash-inspireds have been playing mix-and-match with injecting traditional fighting game mechanics for a while now, but what's compelling here is more the combination than the individual parts. Here we have air dashes, and a shield that only blocks your front, rather slowly deteriorating from hits to all sides. Immediately puts the image in your head of flying over someone's head to kick them from behind, but what surprised me is how natural those interactions come.
- Octodad has these harsh diagonal angles to all his tentacle attacks, having a similar learning curve to a Dhalsim or Axl Low. When you add air-dashing into that equation, you end up constantly making these committal-extreme callouts. You push your already long range even further, bursting halfway across the screen while the attacks themselves meet the other half.
- Commander Video has Captain Falcon-ish movement; he can jump really far horizontally, and sticks to the opponent easily. Has a thoughtful little gimmick of gaining a rainbow-trail powerup if he gets in a hit, while he loses it every time he's hit. It visualizes his advantage state, and rewards it with fancy tech chases - he can spend the power-up to cancel any of his fast specials into more movement.
- And Welltaro is just a beast of kit design - with his eight jumps being tied to an ammo resource you have to share with your attacks. Because of how he has a bunch of tiny jumps to chase people to the top of the screen, and also does damage by simply jumping above the opponent, he has this extremely vertical playstyle that literally shifts the angle of which you think about defense. Suddenly I'm precisely trying to weave myself into position to hit the back half of my opponent from above.
What all three of these guys have in common is playing towards a particular trajectory, a literal direction, which breathes life into the cross-up system. These aren't just good systems on paper, they are systems the game's cast is already playing well towards, despite the game only being in beta. Before most people have even had the time to find out what their play-style is, all of my best matches feel like I'm playing something that's had its balancing bounce off a competitive scene for a few years.
Assists are also neat! Giving you light control over more than one character, even in 1v1s, is a neat way to add more situations where you can overwhelm defense from both sides. They're balanced in that fun way in which you can only use them a few times per match, but make you feel like you've broken the game when perfectly taken advantage of. There's a VVVVVV one that makes you fall upwards for a while - kick someone into the sky, and use it to chase them to the ceiling for a kill. There's a I Wanna be the Guy one where you create a really slow moving apple that instantly kills you. Game rules
Seeing a lot of people bluntly dismiss the game on the terms that a character they wanted has been made an assist, but I'd hold off on whole disappointment. Your fav is probably a genuinely creative part of the core experience!
Where some confidence falls off is the character roster itself: two out of the six currently playable are 1:1 riffs pulled from existing platform fighters. The most recent character, Watcher (unfortunately not the 1000xresist one!), is like the quirkiest shit I've ever seen. She has this giant full-hop you can follow up with two tiny triple jumps; you make huge leaps in positioning at once, but are given the leeway to make these scarily subtle adjustments. But then she also has a stance change that turns her into a grounded fast-faller. She's flexible to go from dominating neutral on the ground, to tearing her opponent out of the sky. They are better than this - the devs are better than Orcane, they're better than Fishbunjin, and I'm surprised they didn't realize it themselves. It's also just kinda...lame, since a lot of the appeal of this sorta thing is how you adapt a character from a different format into a new context.
What I'm most disappointed though is that this isn't finding its audience, that morale is down. A lot of this comes down to the lack of content - something I think fighting games, more than other genres, still have a fickle relationship with. I'll always vouch that all you need to enjoy one is a friend at an equal skill level to you, but you first need a friend who owns it at all.
For a new IP, its toughest ask is establishing a base, and that requires a baseline of things to get comfortable with. You can start with buzzing matchmaking, but once the game gets too old for beginners to constantly occupy it, new players have to fall back on messing around in a wealth of singleplayer stuffs that won't roll them. The problem is that same content tends to hold very little for those who already have found their ways of having fun; when Street Fighter 6 came out, I was so excited to learn the game that I didn't play World Tour more than once (and when I did, I thought it was kiiiiinda lame). But for beginners, the genre can live or die on its knickknacks - and as a result, I often think the genre has a more superfluous relationship with the Raw Number Of Stuff than other modern games. It's why there are so many videos like SPARKING ZERO - EVERY GOKU VS VEGETA INTERACTION (4:37) 10M Views - they know that's the whole point for some. And this is a game that has very little of that "check all the references in bulk" crossover appeal. It's extremely difficult for a developer to know what to prioritize, let alone a small-scale indie team. Judging by the inactive matchmaking, zero singleplayer content, low playerbase triple-combo, it's fair to say that they didn't make the right one. But as someone who has luckily just happened to have friends who bought it, and am currently reaping the rewards of its investments in pure game mechanics, I'm naturally sympathetic.
My biggest issue with the game has been a perpetual memory leak causing slow-down if I don't restart the game frequently - this not being the most frequent complaint shows how little anyone has played of this. But this is the first time I've been there for what's becoming seen as a kickstarter scandal in real-time, and the shit donors get away with saying is kinda crazy to me? Gamers will give you enough to buy two sandwiches and a coffee, and they'll act like you've scammed them if your updates don't come out a pace worthy of their divine investment. weird
UMMMMMM so all I'm saying is that if you personally get excited at whatever crossover trailer for this comes next, check the kinda middling launch response to this game, and feel disappointed...don't be! There's lots of silver linings here, so let's talk about
~ THE CUSTOM CHARACTERS ~
Rivals' low res immediately captivated tons of talented artists to try their hand at making a character, and now we've ended up with a game with hundreds of beautiful characters made just for it. But with Fraymakers' expensive artstyle, it's scared away just about anyone from trying their hand to match it, leaving sprite-rippers to flock. The result is a game that, unlike what people initially coined Rivals custom content with, actually looks like Smash Bros. MUGEN. Because it is MUGEN; half of my time with this game has been spent playing as jojoban characters and DONALD. Charming in that perpetually dusty and crusty way. I'm out here playing an xx sol badguy sprite rip, hit a guy with wild throw, and killed em off the top with metalpipesfx.mp3 assist. There's magic here already